Kingdom of Twilight

by Steven Uhly

  The Sweden Pavilion was in the American sector of Berlin, and Anna had agreed to come if Peretz promised to fetch her people later. They’re all our people, Peretz had said, but Anna’s reply was, You say such things because you’ve no idea what it’s like not to know if anyone from your family is still alive. Once again Peretz had been defeated by Anna, he said nothing and then gave his promise, Yes, he would smuggle Ruth and the old man and the Abramowiczes and all the others from the room here via the secret routes and past the military checkpoints that were open to bribery, Yes, he would hide his jealousy from himself to prove to Anna that he was a good husband for her and that she could trust him.

  When Peretz came to the Sweden Pavilion the day after the birth and kissed his wife and held his son, everything was as he had intended, and yet he felt that he would have to rehearse his role. Like all fathers.

  40

  “You’re going to have to let her tell you the whole story,” Herr Weiss said after many cups of tea and a dozen handkerchiefs. He had his arm around Lisa, drawing her gently toward him. They had been sitting in a lengthy silence on his old sofa and Herr Weiss had waited before uttering these words until he gauged that Lisa was calm enough to hear them.

  She nodded and looked at him with vulnerability in her eyes. Herr Weiss cleared his throat, nodded to himself, went Hmm, hmm, and said, “There’s one thing I learned in the war. It’s not what you do that’s important, but why you do it.”

  “What do you mean?” Lisa said feebly, sniffing.

  “Hmm, what do I mean? Good question. Why did I say that to you? Hmm, hmm. I think I said it because I wanted to tell you that, well, erm, now listen. Do you know why I signed up for special operations?”

  Lisa shook her head. Herr Weiss leaned back. Images popped into his mind, old emotions broke free from locked dungeons, taking possession of him, he wanted to resist, but then thought it was only fair if he felt as bad as Lisa, and he pulled himself together and said, “My father thought his younger son was a weakling.” He nodded to himself, said, Oh well, he said, “My older brother was his favorite, my older sister was the model of a German girl as far as he was concerned. He was a committed Nazi. But he wasn’t a bad man. He had respect for the pastor, and people would come to him for advice. In fact he was the one who called the shots in our village.” Herr Weiss nodded to himself.

  “Only me, he couldn’t accept me as I was. He thought I clung too tightly to my mother’s apron strings.” He turned to Lisa. “You would have liked my mother! What a fine woman she was! And how she could play the piano! I just tinkle away, but her! She was a proper pianist.” He sighed.

  “She’d given up her career for my father and us children, and of course for me that was wonderful because I could hear her play almost every day at home. She’d often let me play too, and that’s how she taught me the piano without my realizing it.” He shook his head.

  “My father had great respect for her. I think he loved her very much, sometimes he would listen to her playing from the door.” Herr Weiss smiled.

  “He hated me playing piano on the other hand. I should be interested in technology, and I was. But because I always dismantled everything he thought I was just breaking things, so he took them away from me. Yet all I wanted to know was exactly how they’d been put together!” Herr Weiss had raised his voice and sat up straight, but now he sank back into the sofa.

  “He put me in the Hitler Youth. Where I very soon became everyone’s whipping boy. I wasn’t sporty or strong, and I wasn’t interested either. But back then it was the only thing that mattered. And if someone couldn’t keep up, the others would give him a good hiding.” Herr Weiss paused. The old emotions rampaged through his body like a pack of wolves, sinking their teeth into him from the inside and wounding him as if all these events had only just occurred. He took a deep breath.

  “I kept my head above water by playing the piano. Whenever there was a celebration or large gathering, people would sing songs. I could sing and accompany them all, and that was my niche, it’s where I survived, the others weren’t able to do what I could do. But it only helped a bit.” He paused again.

  “Then one day an officer came along and asked, Which of you is brave enough to volunteer for a special mission? My hour had come. I stepped forward and cried out, Tobias Weiss reporting, Sir!” Herr Weiss shouted his own name, startling Lisa initially, but then she laughed, which had been his intention.

  “And so, while under covering fire, I collected the body parts of dead soldiers on the battlefield. Why am I telling you this? Oh yes, what I wanted to say was that it only matters why you do something. Listen, the only reason I was brave was to avoid looking like a mummy’s boy and a weakling in front of the others. But that’s not real courage. That was just desperation.” He faltered. He ought not to have uttered that last word, for now he clenched up inside, his body became the jail of a single, powerful prisoner trying to get out, but with courage Herr Weiss fought the desperation inside him, and after a few minutes he had won the battle; in resignation the prisoner retreated, his body relaxed, Herr Weiss gave a sigh of relief. They sat beside each other, it was getting light outside, morning had arrived, they could sense it was going to be a hot day.

  “I’ve always suspected,” Lisa said after a while, “that she’s been trying to protect me from something awful. But this . . .” She broke off, the tears flowed again, a helpless sadness oozed through her like warm liquid. Once again Herr Weiss put his arm around her and drew her gently toward him.

  “Yes, well, hmm, I understand you,” he said. “She’s lied to you and told you stories. But she only did it to protect you. Look, she even sent her own daughter away to protect you. And you brought her into the house to help your grandmother. It’s lovely what the two of you have done for each other.”

  “But now I’ve nothing left!” Lisa said loudly. “Why didn’t she burn the letter or at least hide it properly so I’d never find it? It was left in an empty vase on the cupboard!”

  Herr Weiss looked nonplussed, he made a few sounds that signified nothing in particular.

  “Burn it? Hmm, hmm, you’ve got to forgive her, she . . . she couldn’t do that, I mean, it was from her husband. How could she do a thing like that? No, no, if you ask me I actually think it’s a good thing you found it.”

  Lisa shot a glance at Herr Weiss, shocked.

  “What’s good about it?”

  “Well, now you know the truth. That’s always good.”

  Lisa looked at Herr Weiss, her Uncle Tobi who was not her uncle, who was not even called Tobias Weiss, who had never told her his real name, as if the person he really was had died and Tobias Weiss had risen from the grave. Perhaps the real Tobias Weiss, the son of that Herr Weiss who had taken him out of the nunnery, was long dead and lay buried somewhere with no name on his gravestone.

  Suddenly Lisa had a fleeting sense of the truth as something unable to be expressed in words, but which was alive, like a shimmering ghost or an animal made out of light, which you could only glimpse out of the corner of your eye. By contrast, the truth of words seemed dead, like a butterfly pinned and placed in a little glass cabinet to display its beauty, with a precise description underneath in Latin and German, Sphinx ligustri, privet hawk-moth. That was the truth, the truth could be found in the apartment belonging to the parents of her friend Peter, dozens of times over, peacock butterfly, small tortoiseshell, scarce copper, many-plumed moth, Camberwell beauty. Peter’s father collected them and Peter was proud of the collection, Lisa had found it weird from the outset, all those dead creatures that were so beautiful when they fluttered in the sunlight from bloom to bloom, or which flittered around at night like stray ghosts. What was desirable about nailing them to wood with their wings extended like crucifixions? It left her baffled, but on her first visit to the Schultheisses’ apartment she kept quiet, taking a good look at all those poor little creatures and repeating their names, and this made Peter very happy, but she never went back again
, and moreover her love for Peter suddenly became an alien object she held in her hand without knowing exactly what to do with it.

  The truth. Silently she repeated the word that, at a stroke, had assumed a completely new meaning for her. The truth was that she was afraid of the truth of the words set in the letter of a dead man who was not her grandfather: in all probability she was a Jew. The truth was that she was afraid of Peter’s reaction to the truth of the words. The truth was that the truth of the words could kill the real truth. The truth was that she had nobody in the world. That was the truth.

  “But that’s utter nonsense!” Herr Weiss exclaimed softly when she said it to him and the tears were gushing from her eyes again.

  “You still have your grandmother, even if she’s not your real grandmother. Let her tell you the whole story and then the two of you can take it from there.” After a brief pause, he said coyly, “And you’ve still got your Tobi, don’t forget that, Lisa, do you hear me?”

  Lisa hugged him, kissed his forehead, cheeks; Herr Weiss was quite embarrassed. Then she stood up, smoothed down her skirt, gave him a tired, sad, calm smile, and left the apartment.

  Herr Weiss sat on his sofa for a long while, contemplating Lisa’s fate and wondering how much she knew of what had happened to the Jews. And he felt something that he felt only when he thought of his mother. He felt admiration for Lisa, who was facing up to these difficult things with such bravery, while remaining so intact, so undamaged.

  41

  The miracle occurred in mid-winter. If Peretz had kept his promise, he would have brought Anna’s people from Rykestrasse 57 to the Sweden Pavilion as quickly as possible, given that more and more Jews were coming in from eastern Europe and the place was becoming so cramped that Anna was worried at first, then furious, for Peretz was fobbing her off with promises that he failed to keep because, as he claimed, so many Jews suddenly wanted to come to Berlin, as if the Holocaust had been perpetrated by Poles or Russians rather than Germans, and as if the Germans were actually the Danes, who during the war had shipped their Jews across the Great Belt at night and in fog to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Nazis, no other people had done anything like this, if only there had been more Danish in the Germans, perhaps a similar miracle would have occurred, but this miracle had been rendered impossible by the course of history; but then this other miracle might never have happened if Mrs. Abramowicz had not still been sitting on the second floor of a reception center set up by the Jewish Community of Berlin, in Berlin-Mitte, Soviet sector, just staring at the wall with all her thoughts and emotions.

  One morning a thin man arrived, whose two children failed to recognize him when he gave them a passionate embrace, squeezing them to him, saying things in Polish and Yiddish with a few Hebrew verses thrown in, which were from the Torah and particularly appropriate right now as the man thanked his god for having found them.

  Then he went upstairs, for this scene had been played out on the street, where the two children, the boy with the Magallanes book, the girl holding the Dana doll, had been busy building a snowman. They walked up the stairs, or rather one of them walked, the other two were carried, the children still bemused, but that smell when he hugged them, and that voice, that intonation of words and phrases, that timbre, that manner of embrace, that love had made them realize blindly, as it were, Who else could this stranger be? They went up the stairs, the man was still strong or instantly strong again, he carried the two of them in his scrawny arms, the girl on the left, the boy on the right, all strain had vanished from his face, where now happiness resided, a sparkle that caused the many people he came across in this cramped house to stop and take notice of how he was carrying these two children, who had grown enormously since he was abducted, up the stairs as if they weighed nothing, as if he looked nowhere near as wretched as a Jew who had escaped by the skin of his teeth, who had then traveled back to Posen and found the neighbors in his apartment, they may have felt some embarrassment but had no intention of moving out, and in the night other people had come to him—he had found a space beneath the roof shot to pieces—they were soldiers of the Polish underground army, they had stuck their rifles under his nose and said, Clear off or we’ll shoot, and Mr. Abramowicz had understood that he had further to go, and he fled, not with Bricha, he had nobody, he was all alone, but he made it, for they told him, Go to Berlin, all the Jews are trying to get there, and he frowned and repeated the name of the city in disbelief, Berlin? What sort of divine irony this? But he had come and now they walked up the stairs, or rather one of them walked, the other two were carried, and reached the second floor, but rather than putting his children down, Mr. Abramowicz simply kept carrying them, as if the exhaustion of the past few years had suddenly transformed itself into great strength, and upstairs it was cramped, they could barely pass down the corridor, people had to get up from their beds, Mr. Abramowicz was no longer paying attention to anything, the happiness in his sunken face was so radiant that nobody said, Hey, would you mind not trampling on our mattresses with your dirty shoes! Only then did he put his children down, for there was his wife sitting and staring at the wall, but Mr. Abramowicz noticed none of this, he kneeled down and embraced his wife and said things that were for her ears only, in a tone of voice he assumed only when talking to her. And then the actual miracle occurred, the actual miracle was that Mrs. Abramowicz, before the old man’s eyes, before Ruth’s eyes and the eyes of the children and all the other people who were there, and these numbered many, turned her head to her husband and gazed at him and smiled.

  42

  On a snow-white day Peretz, Anna and Shimon drove in a limousine into the Soviet zone to the west of the city. They drove for an hour through the winter landscape. The sun was shining, it was a calm day. For the first time in his life Shimon saw wide fields, for the first time he saw a forest whose trees pointed their stiffened fingers into the sky, all of them white with snow and rime that coated even the smallest twigs.

  Shimon could barely see the pontoon bridge they crossed to get to the other side of the Havel, but it gave him an even clearer view of the destroyed iron bridge which stood beside it in the water. Shimon saw the soldiers at the checkpoints who spoke Russian to Peretz, who replied to them in Russian and showed his pass, issued by the American Military Authority in Berlin. But did Shimon see the beauty that the snow magicked into everything, into the rubble of Berlin, which looked like strange rock formations, into the trees, into the fields that had lain fallow for a whole summer because the farmers were dead, fallen at the border, massacred in the territorial army, or simply because the Allied invasion had made cultivation impossible? Did Shimon see the birds flying in the cold sky, gulls driven inland by hunger, along the rivers? Did Shimon marvel at the military training camp at Döberitz, which had been in use for fifty years and now housed hundreds of refugees, where had they come from, where would they go? Shimon lay in the arms of his young mother, his eyes dancing about, had someone had been watching him they might have noticed that the world plunged unchecked through these eyes into Shimon’s head, nothing escaped him, he questioned nothing, he understood nothing, because Shimon still existed beyond understanding and not understanding. Shimon saw the Olympic Village, where almost ten years previously a black man had slept and eaten, a black man who had run faster than all the white men, watched by people whose minds would not be changed by anything, irrespective of what happened. Now the final units of the Soviet Shock Army were withdrawing from the Wehrmacht’s largest field hospital, for that is what the Olympic Village had become during the war. Most of the buildings were already being used as a transit camp for refugees, where had they come from, where were they going to? Peretz did not know either.

  Taking the Berliner Strasse they approached their destination from the southeast. “Here,” Anna said, pointing to the place name. “There used to be another sign there as well.” She turned around and looked back at the sign. You’ve come home now, she thought all of a sudden. How d
oes it feel? But there was nothing to feel. It was if she had never been away. It was as if a part of her brain had kicked into life again, switched to “Journey home from the fishing pond along the Berliner Strasse,” and now Anna had arrived back in Nauen, a daily event in summer when it was hot and she and her friends cycled there to swim, in winter when they went ice skating. Now they arrived in the town itself. The trees lining the avenue had been felled, for firewood no doubt. But the houses looked unchanged. A few people crossed the street, instinctively Anna tried to recognize them.

  “What sort of sign?” Peretz asked, gazing at the houses on both sides, large, old houses with long roofs and pointed gables. He had never been west of Berlin before, had not been interested. But there was something fairytale-like about this white idyll and these medieval houses that both fascinated and incensed him. Why didn’t they bomb everything? he thought, meaning the Allies, They deserved it, he thought, meaning the Germans, all Germans. He was not thinking of Abba Kovner.