The Tenth Witness

by Leonard Rosen

  I looked at Schmidt, then to the others. Only Liesel’s eyes flashed as Magda clapped her hands. “Read the part where the old man with the billy-goat beard gets caught in the thorn bush. The good servant makes him dance by playing his magic fiddle and he gets all scraped. That one, Opa!”

  Anselm and Theresa were watching and smiling. I wondered what could possibly be happening as Schmidt read and came to the part Magda had requested. “‘When the Jew was fast among the thorns, the good servant’s humor so tempted him that he took up his fiddle and began to play.’ ”

  “His magic fiddle,” cried Magda. “The one that makes everyone dance!”

  “Yes,” said Schmidt, continuing: “‘In a moment the Jew’s legs began to move, and to jump into the air, and the more the servant fiddled the better went the dance. But the thorns tore his shabby coat for him, combed his beard, and pricked and plucked him all over the body. Oh dear, cried the Jew, what do I want with your fiddling? Leave the fiddle alone, master; I do not want to dance’.”

  Liesel set her drink down. “Uncle Viktor, please. It’s enough.”

  Schmidt stopped his reading. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “The story offends me. Please. The old Jew? Enough already. It’s a thick book. Find another story. As I remember it, the Jew gets hanged in the end mostly for being a Jew. Just stop.”

  Schmidt looked to his daughter then to Anselm for help. “Liesel, these are children’s stories. It’s the brothers Grimm, for goodness sake. This book—” he lifted it—“is a national treasure. It’s part of our heritage.”

  Liesel turned to her brother. “She’s your daughter. Tell him to stop. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “Magda, come. The rose bushes you and I planted last autumn are flowering.” Theresa stood, extending a hand. “Papa, put the book away for now. You can read later.”

  Schmidt looked at his goddaughter. “Well, that wasn’t very pleasant.”

  “Uncle Viktor, it’s stories like these that—not around me. Just stop it.”

  Anselm shrugged. “I don’t see the problem. It’s a fairy tale. And Viktor’s right. It is our history.”

  “Anselm, we live in Munich, for God’s sake! Do I need to spell it out? Magda’s five years old. Wait until she’s fifteen, when she can think for herself. Really, how could you, Viktor?”

  Uncle Franz, with greasy hands and chicken bits on his chin, was gnawing at a drumstick.

  “Liesel, our father read these same stories to us. That’s my copy of Grimm.”

  “I hated that story. You’re poisoning her.”

  They must have accepted me as Liesel’s boyfriend after all, arguing in the open as they were. Not that anyone asked my opinion. I walked behind Liesel and whispered a soft Bravo in her ear.

  Schmidt announced that he was suddenly tired and went into the house. Anselm looked at his watch. Liesel had ruined a perfectly good picnic, and I couldn’t wait to congratulate her in a more private setting. I was waiting for her signal that we should leave when Friedrich bolted off the terrace and cried: “One more dogfight. You’re the Spitfire. I’m the Stuka.”

  This time I was ready for him. Before he even finished his challenge, I cleared the porch and caught up. I grabbed his shoulder and he tumbled and spun, laughing, this time making sounds of a plane with a sputtering engine. This child knew how to lose with grace, which endeared him to me all the more. I was enjoying this last installment of our game a great deal when I hoisted him into the air and caught him.

  Friedrich laughed. “Again, do it again!”

  I threw him higher, and by the time I saw the dogs streaking towards me it was too late. Schmidt was inside the house when Albert and Hermann broke from the terrace and raced across the lawn. The child was mid-toss, airborne, and I had to choose: catch Friedrich and let the dogs attack, or face the dogs and let Friedrich fall.

  I caught the boy and shielded him with my body.

  Theresa saw it from the garden and began screaming. Anselm was up and running. Liesel shrieked. And Friedrich, who was so casual with these animals, knocking them about and riding them like ponies, cried as the Boerboels loosed their fury on me.

  I heard Schmidt shouting: “Hupt! Hupt!” But he was either too far off or the dogs, in their bloodlust, ignored him. I covered my head with one hand and reached into my pocket with the other, coming up with the T. The animals didn’t bark or growl. I felt their hot breath and their teeth, and I heard Liesel’s and Theresa’s screams and Anselm’s shouts. With one eye open, I saw a shoe, then a pant leg.

  “Albert! Hermann!! Hupt, goddamnit! Hupt!!”

  My hand and ankle burned.

  And then it stopped with one pained yelp followed by another. Schmidt had taken a fireplace poker from the house and beat each dog across the flank, once. “Hupt, hupt!”

  The dogs cowered, but I didn’t release my hold of Friedrich. I waited for Schmidt to leash his animals and yank on their choke collars, hauling them off. Beneath me, the boy wept.

  When I raised my head, I saw Theresa, Anselm, and Liesel. I rolled off Friedrich, who was shaken but otherwise unharmed. Theresa lifted her son and ran him into the house. Anselm knelt. “Are you okay? They must have thought you were attacking him. I’m so sorry, Henri. Viktor trained them to protect the family.”

  Liesel pushed her brother aside. “Tell me you’re okay!”

  I was, more or less. My first thought on realizing Albert and Hermann weren’t going to kill me was that I’d carried my father’s weapon for these twenty years and hadn’t used it. But I couldn’t have used the T and protected Friedrich at the same time. My hand and ankle hurt, but I could still move them. The Boerboels hadn’t crushed any bones, but I would be plenty sore.

  I examined my wounds and agreed that Liesel should call a doctor because a dog’s mouth is a cesspool for bacteria. The wounds would need cleaning, and I’d need antibiotics. Stitches, too, from the look of things. I slid the T into my pocket, but sensed something missing.

  Theresa appeared with clean dishtowels and a pitcher of water. Schmidt approached from the car park. “I locked them away. I’m sorry about this. They thought you were attacking Friedrich.”

  “Vater!” screamed Theresa. “I hate those animals.”

  I stared at Schmidt. It had all happened quickly, but from my crouch above the child I had seen Schmidt’s shoes and pants a full three, maybe four, seconds before I heard him beat the dogs and call them off.

  It has happened to me since, this strange warping of time in tense moments, when seconds stretch and minutes shrink. Who could tell how long Schmidt had stood there watching before acting? But of this I was sure: he had delayed.

  I reached into my pocket and couldn’t find Isaac’s medallion, which in my rapidly clouding frame of mind had become an urgent problem. My hand and ankle hurt like hell. Anselm, Theresa, and Schmidt were standing over me. Liesel, on her knees, was bathing my hand.

  “I lost something in all the commotion,” I said. I described the medallion and asked them to look. Everyone dropped to their hands and knees for the search, even Uncle Franz, who had shuffled over to investigate.

  “They wouldn’t have attacked unless they thought one of us was threatened,” said Schmidt. “I was very clear about this in their training. It’s the only explanation. Did he threaten the child?”

  “Vater, this is insulting! Search like the rest of us.”

  While the others looked for the medallion, Anselm knelt beside me. “Thank you. I saw you playing and knew he wanted to be tossed higher. I see how easy it is for Friedrich to be with you. We’re all fond of you, Henri. You let yourself be bitten to protect him.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll speak with my father-in-law about the dogs.”

  “I found something!” said Hofmann, spittle hanging off his lip.

  They gathered around me as I held out my good hand. But Franz didn’t place the medallion into my palm just yet. He examined it, first one side then the other. He hand
ed it to Schmidt and croaked: “Where did he get this?”

  In their eyes I saw a flash of recognition.

  twenty-three

  The good news: X-rays showed no broken bones. The bad: I took twenty-eight stitches in my hand and ankle and an IV bag of broad-spectrum antibiotics.

  “Boerboels?” the emergency room doctor said. “Never heard of them.”

  Liesel couldn’t watch me being sewn together and left for the waiting room.

  “I don’t know the breed, but judging from their bite dimensions and depth I’d say they’re bigger and likely stronger than Rottweilers. Good for you they missed the arteries. You’ll be sore, but that’s all.”

  I left the clinic with ointments, bandages, and a prescription for both antibiotics and a pain-killer. “Finish the erythromycin,” the doctor advised. She was a wafer-thin Asian woman who, even with heels, barely reached my chest. “You don’t want to know what can grow in you after a dog bite. And don’t be heroic. When the lidocaine wears off, this is going to hurt. Stay ahead of it, take the codeine, and take some time off.”

  Liesel looked worse than I did. Six hours after the attack, sitting in her apartment, she was brooding, drawn and worried, with dark half-moons under her eyes. I didn’t know she smoked; but she did then, one cigarette after the next, tapping her foot and rattling keys long after I made a point of putting Albert and Hermann behind me.

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t have good dog karma. Let it go.”

  “It’s not your fault, Henri. I could never understand why Viktor keeps those animals. They scare Theresa and me to death, but he insists on teaching Friedrich the art of canine obedience. I mean, really, what’s this about?” She ground her cigarette into a glass ashtray and lit another. “Friedrich is not Viktor’s son. I’ll speak to Anselm. Those Boerboels could kill the children.”

  Codeine is a marvelous drug. Nothing much hurt at that point and, realizing that my happily clouded mind wouldn’t function well for a few days, I suggested a trip to Terschelling. Liesel needed the break more than I did. The Uganda trip had rattled her, and she didn’t sound too confident about how she’d left matters with her brother. In the heat of the crisis, Anselm had pledged to take direct charge of improving working conditions at Kraus facilities worldwide.

  “He’s a profit-driven man,” she’d said. “But he’s a good man. He couldn’t possibly have seen what I saw and done nothing.” Still, speaking the words suggested she may have had doubts.

  Add that doubt to the shock of the dogs’ attack, and Liesel was needing a few days off. She drove as I drifted in and out of a medicated dreamland, listening to her stories about family hikes out on the Wadden flats at the end of each summer.

  “You’ll join us this year, Henri. It’s settled. In five weeks, your ankle and hand will be healed. Anselm will be the guide this year. We alternate, you know. It’s so much fun. We march out with the children, that’s the main thing—that they enjoy the trek, and march back. Everyone gets muddy and laughs. And,” she said, reaching for my knee, “I promise not to let you drown. Will you come? It’s the last Saturday of August.”

  Under the influence of codeine, I would have agreed to anything. I felt good enough, in fact, to extend an invitation of my own. I fumbled with my wallet and found a scrap of paper. “We need a map,” I said.

  “A map? I’ve driven from Munich to Harlingen a hundred times.”

  “But have you driven to Bruges?”

  She’d been home just a few days from Uganda, and I hadn’t said anything about my visit to the Zentral Stelle. So I told her. I said nothing, however, about Schmidt’s very strange visit to the lab.

  Liesel knew all about Isaac Kahane and what he meant to me. She said she’d never seen the name Zeligman, yet she took a keen interest when I suggested she had—on the affidavit for her father. “It was in the biography. He was the last one who signed, so he was at Drütte. If he knew Isaac from the war, they may have met there. But the man died before I could ask. That’s why I’m going to Bruges, to talk with his widow. Maybe she knows something.” I could see my visit to the Archive troubled her. I explained and explained again my motives. “I needed addresses for the other witnesses. That was all, Liesel.”

  Her hand dropped away from my knee.

  “You found files on my father?”

  “There was nothing about your father other than the affidavit. I had to request his file to find that. I found the addresses.”

  “It’s an archive of Nazi crimes, Henri.”

  She looked the way she had on Terschelling, when she pulled off the road to confess her “monsters” to me. Perhaps, that first day, she thought she could defeat them by naming them. But they hadn’t gone puff, in the air, and vanished.

  “You’re saying that Isaac was at Drütte, the camp at my father’s steel mill?”

  I nodded.

  “Of all the concentration camps? And you went searching for him, not Otto?”

  I nodded again.

  We drove on in silence.

  LIESEL’S TAKING her family to task for “The Jew Among the Thorns” had changed something for me. At the same time, I was amazed, and disappointed, that Anselm had defended it. Schmidt, I knew, was a lost cause. So pernicious was the tale that had Liesel found it as harmless, even endearing, as Schmidt had, I would have left her within a week. But she protested, strongly, and that protest was a beautiful thing. I found myself taking a step toward her, beyond infatuation. I was going to Bruges. With its canals and medieval center, it was a fine city, a romantic city. Why not take her?

  “Maybe Zeligman talked with his wife about my father,” she said. She seemed to have figured something out for herself and was suddenly enthusiastic about visiting the widow—at precisely the moment my last dose of codeine was wearing off and I was concluding the visit was a bad idea.

  We were on a ring road, somewhere west of Frankfurt.

  True, Zeligman might have spoken of Otto. But I warned her against expecting too much. “Survivors continue fighting the war,” I said. “I’m not sure it ever leaves them. The widow will still be bitter. And it’s complicated by the fact that Jacob was a slave laborer at your father’s mill. Even if Zeligman did stand up for Otto, the larger story of those years was a bad one.” I held her hand. “Come to Bruges, but why don’t you wait in a coffee shop while I visit the widow. I’ll only be an hour.”

  “After thirty years, you think she’d still be bitter?”

  I stared at her.

  “Okay, that was stupid. But I would still like to meet her.” She was determined. “I’ll shake her hand, at least. All the old ones are dying off. I won’t get to meet her husband, but I’ll be one step away. That’s closer than I’ve been. It would mean a great deal to meet these people and learn more about my father.”

  We agreed to rest up first at Löwenherz and visit Alec on the barge. He was reporting that the divers were hauling up more rusted steel and were taking bets on what it might be. We reached Harlingen late that night and rented a room, waiting for the morning tide and a trip to Terschelling by ferry.

  LÖWENHERZ, EMPTY, wasn’t the mausoleum I’d imagined. Liesel had called ahead and asked the staff to stock the refrigerator in her apartment and then leave for the week. We arrived at the east end of the island to a contrast of the powerful and delicate. The North Sea pounded the beach, and I felt its thunder in my bones. Winds gusted with a force that could have toppled children. Yet at the tide line, shore birds on matchstick legs skittered just beyond the sea foam, pecking for crabs. The dune grasses trembled, and the broad sky made me feel small and expanded all at once.

  We burrowed into Liesel’s apartment as we might have into a cave. On the second morning, we negotiated the stone jetty and sunbathed on the dock, nude. That evening, Liesel set up a makeshift dinner table in the ballroom and entertained me by skating on the parquet in her socks, as she had as a child. She threw open the doors, turned up the lights, and played Strauss on the stereo as she waltz
ed with an invisible partner who looked, she said, just like me—only one who danced better. By Friday I quit my cane and gave up the codeine for cabernet.

  I was on the mend.

  I had brought my copy of the biography to read, and Liesel hounded me for a reaction. She’d linger in the room as I read, pretending to read herself when in fact she was watching my facial expressions. If I set the book aside to stretch or nap, she’d sidle over and ask in a dozen ways what I thought. What do you think of the writing? It’s not too scholarly is it, with all the references? Does it tell a good story, Henri? It’s the story that matters most. Do you see Otto in it, the real Otto?

  How could I possibly know? When she pressed me, I pointed to the photos of her as a gangly kid and we laughed. She would point to photos of her father. “He never liked wearing suits. He’d come home from the mills and rip off his tie and jacket. Look at his hands, Henri. Big and rough. He grew up working with them, but he ended up wearing a suit in an office, signing papers. I think part of him regretted success because it took him off the shop floor. Do you think this comes across in the biography?”

  What I could say in good conscience was that I never appreciated before how men like Otto von Kraus played a role in rebuilding Europe. This was a real and significant contribution; and the biographer, A. Bieler, had documented Kraus’s heroic, postwar phase with care. But I couldn’t yet comment on the question that mattered most because the author had left gaping holes about Otto’s wartime service. Liesel pressed me for opinions until I realized that all her questions pointed to a single question, more the plea of a child than the sober assessment of an adult: Do you think my father was a good man?

  Ten witnesses had sworn he was; but I didn’t know, and I didn’t think that Bieler knew or had even pursued the issue. The main thing was that Liesel didn’t know, not really, though she spoke of her father with the reverence one reserves for saints and lesser gods.