As the Pole counted out the grimy butts from a stash in an envelope, Jacob made a quick calculation and realized: The Pole was wrong. From ten butts, at three butts a smoke, he could make five smokes, worth twelve-fifty, not three worth seven-fifty. He ran the figures through his head once more to be sure.
He looked among the boots of the refugees until he found a butt in a gutter where nobody had spotted it. It was damp from the rain but would dry nicely. He sold one shirt, the thickest, for five dollars. He had his stake.
He bought ten butts from the Pole. He made the three smokes and sold them cheap, for two dollars each, on condition the buyer smoke the cigarette while he waited and give him the butt. He also kept the spare tenth butt. By selling three cigarettes for six dollars he had already made a dollar profit. But by collecting their three butts, he made another cigarette, which he sold for another two dollars, and kept that butt too, meaning he had his original tenth butt plus the final butt, making two. He borrowed a butt, so that he now had three, made yet another cigarette and sold it for another two bucks, paying the debt of the borrowed butt with the butt from the final cigarette sold. He doubled his five dollars to ten in fifteen minutes.
Jacob did that three times, making fifteen dollars’ profit in an hour, and bought another fine warm jacket for seven dollars. Walking away with his jacket collar up, and eight dollars in his pocket, he realized two things.
The market for cigarette butts was limited to people on the move. They used cash because they couldn’t carry anything. But Reichsmarks were almost worthless and dollars were limited. The real market was to barter among the German citizens whose rations were insufficient to live on—a thousand calories a day. Everyone was short on food except the American soldiers and the farmers who came into town to sell their produce.
And he also realized—these are small butts because they are small cigarettes. He should hang around the G.I.s; their butts would be longer. He could make longer cigarettes and charge more. And the G.I.s would all be looking for bargains and souvenirs, like watches and cameras, which he could get from the Germans in exchange for food.
He hurried to the Old Bridge but all the soldiers there were on duty. The side streets were full of G.I.s strolling but they were in twos and threes. What he needed was a large group of off-duty soldiers who smoked a lot. He looked up and saw Heidelberg Castle towering over the Old Town, and smiled. He took the narrow alley behind the Corn Market instead of the wider, winding road. It was shorter, but steeper, and soon he had to rest among the woods to catch his breath. He paused again at the big wooden gates by the lowest firing slits in the castle walls. For a dozen generations the town’s children and lovers had carved their names into the ancient oak until now the door looked like a giant medieval parchment. Each cut in the wood seemed to mark another year, like the rings in a tree. He searched for his initials. He read, “M and H, 1832.” A lover had written in 1742, “Humphrey Be Mine,” and here was one, “S2 How are You?” He trailed his fingers over the rough ridges and notches, touching time, looking for his own initials among the thousands of names and letters. If only it was so easy to retrieve the past.
His hand stopped and the hairs on his neck stood. He hadn’t found JK but here was MK 1937, deep and rough. Could this be Maxie?
Was this a sign?
“Don’t worry, Maxie,” Jacob murmured, his hand covering Maxie’s rough initials, as if stroking his knobbly shaved head, “I’ll find him.”
He looked at his new watch. Roman numerals, a white face with a thin band of gold. The Amis will love it. It was almost midday. He had another hour and a half to get to the Hotel Schwartzer Bock.
He hurried through the gates, over the empty moat, into the arched alleys, and entered the castle courtyard. Sure enough, as he had hoped, about thirty G.I.s were there, some gazing up at Heidelberg’s most ornate monument, the Renaissance Frederick building, full of weather-beaten statues and chipped friezes and a battered grandeur that suited the times.
Jacob went straight up to a U.S. sergeant who was staring at the crumbling bell tower, and waited at his shoulder. “It was struck by lightning. Twice. It burned down,” Jacob said to him in English.
“Shoulda bombed the whole place,” the American said, without turning around.
“Why didn’t you bomb Heidelberg?” Jacob asked. Everyone was asking the same question.
The soldier realized he was talking to a German and instinctively moved a step back.
“Why didn’t you bomb it? You bombed everywhere else,” Jacob said.
“Dunno. They say Eisenhower’s family came from around here. They also say Patton wanted his HQ here. Someone also said there was a deal that if the Krauts didn’t bomb Oxford, England, we wouldn’t bomb Heidelberg. Who knows? Above my rank.”
Jacob leaned down to pick up two cigarette butts. Much longer than at the bus station.
“Who are you?” the sergeant asked. No fraternization didn’t apply to registered tour guides.
Jacob told him.
“We were at Dachau,” the sergeant said. “Cleaning up. Never thought I’d see anything like it.”
A dozen soldiers gathered around, asking questions. Jacob didn’t want to talk about it. Not like this. Not like a circus exhibit. Each time a soldier dropped the end of his cigarette and rubbed it out with his foot, Jacob bent down and picked it up. “It’s money,” he said. “Want to see the biggest barrel of wine in the world?”
“No, thanks,” the sergeant said. Jacob looked up in surprise. The soldiers laughed. The sarge had kept them laughing right through France and most of Germany.
“Follow me,” Jacob said. He led them along a cobbled path around the terrace into a building, and down some steep steps past a gigantic barrel. “Holy cow,” a soldier said, “how much does that hold?”
“Oh, man, paradise,” said another, “where’s the tap?”
“This isn’t even it,” Jacob said, “follow me.” Down some more steps, around the corner, and there in a room of its own was what looked like a round house. “It holds a quarter of a million liters of wine.”
There were whoops of joy and doughboys slapped each other on the back and people swayed as if intoxicated and lifted their hands to their mouths to mime drunken antics, exactly as all tourists had done in all languages for centuries when face-to-face with the Great Tun.
“Okay,” the sergeant said. “We did D-Day, we fought through France, Germany—now at last I know why…”
A soldier tapped the barrel. “But it’s empty,” he said.
“Stop whining,” said another. “Geddit? Wining…”
“Forget about Berlin,” the sergeant went on. “We’ve arrived.”
“There was a dwarf called Perkeo,” Jacob called out. Every Heidelberger knew the story. “Long time ago. He got drunk every day for many years, nobody could drink like him. One day he drank a glass of water and died.”
The soldiers roared with laughter and pretended to be drunk, wrestling with each other.
On the way out the sergeant laid his arm around Jacob’s shoulders and staggered as if he needed support after a night’s drinking.
Back in the daylight the Americans wanted to pay Jacob for guiding them but he refused. At their insistence he grudgingly accepted ten dollars and the sergeant gave him two packs of Pall Mall too. When Jacob stretched out his arm to take them, one of the men said, “Hey, nice watch.”
“What? Oh, that,” Jacob said. “It’s a Longines. Familienerbstück. How do you say it in English? Family longtime treasure?”
A soldier said, “Rubber?” and they fell about laughing.
Another said, “Heirloom?”
“Yes, that’s it, it’s a family heirloom.”
“What do you want for it?”
“What have you got?”
* * *
At first the police and the mayor’s office hadn’t known how to handle Jacob Klein. A Heidelberger, a citizen, he had a right to an ID card. In both places people recog
nized him, but he didn’t have any papers to prove that he was he.
“Except that you know me, right?” Jacob said to the middle-aged official behind the desk in the police station, who was in charge of the paperwork after the Nazi police had fled.
“Yes, of course, you’re Solomon the Tailor’s son. You wrote down my measurements once. You must have been eight, nine years old.”
“So you can give me an ID card.”
“But you don’t have any papers to prove it? A birth certificate…”
Jacob interrupted. “Of course not, I told you, that’s what I need from you. Some papers. It’s all gone, stolen, burned, I don’t know what you all did with our possessions.”
“Please,” the official said. “We were not all like them. I personally was a social democrat.”
Once they had taken his fingerprints and given him his new ID card, he went back to the mayor’s office to be assigned a room with a German family. With the town overflowing with refugees, with twice as many people in Heidelberg as before the war, and with the best homes confiscated by the occupying American troops, every family with a spare room had to give it to a homeless German with an ID card. Some people had whole families living in their spare bedroom, sharing the kitchen and bathroom, which led to jealousy and even fistfights. The mayor’s office was besieged with complaints but the most bitter were directed at the former mayor, Dr. Neinhaus. A Nazi party member since 1932, his family still lived alone in their thirteen-room apartment, while everywhere else two families were forced to share two or three rooms.
So Jacob, fearing an angry outburst, was surprised by how kind the Braunschweigs at Lauerstrasse 13 were when he arrived with his accommodation form.
Frau Braunschweig, a thin lady who he never saw without an apron, gave him a towel and sheet. She brought him a cup of tea.
“Will any more of you be back?” she asked. “You know. Your people?”
The best thing about the room was that it had its own separate entrance directly from the street. It was a palace. For ten days he had been sharing a tiny room with other refugees, rotating, with six hours each to sleep in the bed. Here it was like a private studio, with a basin and a tiny bath and a small separate toilet in an alcove. It had a double bed, a low table, and a painted wooden cupboard with flower carvings around the edges and a mirror on the inside of one door. When he opened it, and saw all the shelves for clothes and the hangers for suits and shirts, he chuckled. He had one change of clothes.
On the sink he laid out his razor and cream, which with a toothbrush and paste had cost him five cigarette butts in the market.
Returning from the castle, he had unlocked his door and folded the thirty dollars he had been paid for his family heirloom, and the ten for guiding, into a square three centimeters by three centimeters. He pushed the almost empty cupboard back until its front legs came off the floor, laid the folded money on the ground and eased the cupboard down again until one leg covered the little wad of notes. After ten days in Heidelberg he had ninety-six dollars in singles, a fortune, hidden under the cupboard legs, distributed evenly so that the cupboard did not look lopsided.
Jacob stretched and hid the two packs of cigarettes on top of the cupboard. Lowering his arm, he caught himself in the mirror, and paused. Sad face.
He turned away. It made him uneasy to see himself.
As long as he didn’t have time to think, he was all right. For weeks now he had been merely following his own body, step by step, walking through Germany, and the same here in Heidelberg, doing whatever needed to be done, bit by bit, to earn some money, find a place to sleep, buy some food until he got a ration card, and the days followed each other, and the nights, disturbed and fitful as they were, assumed a pattern.
It was only when he caught himself in the mirror, or his reflection in a shop window, or saw himself somehow in the eyes of others, that this odd, fleeting sense came over him, that he wasn’t really here. That this shape, this vessel, this wearer of other people’s clothes wasn’t really him.
He didn’t see what was, he saw what was not.
What made him most uncomfortable was that he knew exactly what was missing. It was himself. His true soul. Only a part of him was here, like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces.
Where is the rest of you? You remnant. And why are you here? There’s nothing for you in this town.
He hurried away, down Hauptstrasse, and only twenty minutes later, when he took his seat in the little café down the street from the Hotel Schwartzer Bock, did he think: Oh no! Did I lock the door? He couldn’t remember. What if someone comes in, finds my money? But how would they?
Jacob decided not to worry. It was too late, and anyway, he probably did lock the door. Now he had other things on his plate.
From the small round table on the corner of Kirchstrasse and Bergheimerstrasse Jacob could see the pretentious carved oak door of the Schwartzer Bock hotel entrance, twenty meters away, as well as all the chairs and tables in front, and the wooden bench made of old tree branches beneath the window. So uncomfortable. Two days earlier when he had sat on it he had lasted less than a minute before moving to a real chair. The tables were covered in food-stained red-and-white checked tablecloths and even had a Schwartzer Bock menu propped between empty salt and pepper shakers. Jacob had had to laugh when he read the puny offerings. You got more to eat in an American field ration. And it was expensive too, ninety-nine Reichsmarks or nine dollars for a bowl of hot water with some boiled vegetable and half a potato they had the cheek to call Bauernsuppe, farm soup; followed by a mystery meatball that took all his power to chew through and seemed to be held together by low-grade sawdust; ending with a lump of pudding the size of a golf ball, a cup of ersatz coffee, and a thimbleful of colored alcohol already known as Schwindelcognac. Still, when he finished, the plate couldn’t have been cleaner if he had licked it.
But nine dollars. The thieves. The only good thing about the Seelers’ hotel was that one day, for sure, their son Hans would walk through the door.
And when Hans Seeler came home, Jacob would know.
Each day Jacob sat at this table just up the street. He wore a hat low over his brow and read a book. He looked at every person who entered and everyone who left. Sometimes he went into the hotel for a drink. He didn’t expect to see Hans Seeler, though it was possible. He went to sense any change in the attitude of his parents, the owners, Trudi and Wolfgang, or their dim-witted waiter, Adolf. He was looking for any sign that the camp guard had returned to the bosom of his family. Like the sudden arrival of men of Hans’s age, about thirty years old. Maybe they would be deep in conversation on the sofas, maybe they would celebrate in the hotel bar, maybe a steady flow of people would go upstairs without asking for a key. Maybe older people, the age of his parents, would suddenly arrive, congratulate the owners, and go upstairs in a group. For sure, when Hans Seeler came home, his family would gather to greet him, and where else but in the comfort, the Gemütlichkeit, of the family apartment on the top floor of their hotel.
Maybe, with all his arrogance, and God knows there was plenty of that, the Rat would just walk around freely. Why not? He’s at home here. Would he hide in plain sight like that, when it was well known the Americans were hunting down Nazi leaders?
Of course he would. First, he wasn’t a leader, just a sadistic camp guard, there must be thousands like him. Then, he had hidden among the survivors in the camp, hadn’t he? He’d seen him in the Laundry. It would be just like him to hide among the hunters, the Americans. Anyway, he’ll deny being an SS concentration camp guard. Who would admit it? He’ll say he’s just returned from the Russian front. That he was an ambulance driver in France. A prisoner of war in Italy. One thing he won’t say is the truth. The hardest person to find in Germany today is a former member of the Nazi party, let alone the SS.
He’ll be back, Jacob thought, his eyes scanning the street and the hotel entrance; and I’ll keep my word.
He didn’t know how, but—step
by step.
THIRTEEN
Heidelberg,
May 17, 1945
After several hours nursing a cup of coffee and reading old magazines, as evening fell, Jacob saw Adolf emerge from the hotel at the end of his shift. It seemed natural to follow him, which wasn’t hard; he shuffled as much as he walked and seemed to greet far more people than he could possibly know. He soon entered an apartment building with a tidy little garden where two boys were playing. He saluted them with his hat and walked up the stairs. A minute later Jacob approached the boys.
“That man, does he live here, the man who just went in?” he asked.
The smaller boy, about eight years old, said, “Adolf Schwimmer? Yes.”
“Thank you.”
That day Jacob had recognized seven people, been approached by a former client of his father’s, and spoken to two old schoolmates who had walked by separately. All three people he had spoken to said words to the effect of: “My God. I thought you were dead.” To each one he had responded: “I may as well be.” But the more he said it, the less he felt it. He did have something to live for.
As he walked along Hauptstrasse, a dream had come back to him, bits of it.
He was underwater, swaying with the current, like plankton. Tiny, helpless. With no control of his body, hanging in a void. That’s all he remembered, but now the dream took formal shape. He could sink, or he could rise to the surface. He could leave this town, to which he had always longed to return, but found there was nothing to return to. Or he could take control of his life again. But how? And what did it all mean? Give up? Take control? Just words. What does anything mean?
Why didn’t he die in the camp like everyone else? Always, the fight to live another day. But why? For this?
Yes. For this. This dream, this beautiful dream.
I’ll kill the rodent.
* * *
He was strolling now, registering the changes, trying to see how he fit in. Half the shops on the main street seemed to be bookshops, yet with a difference he spotted as soon as he scanned the windows. Again, he saw not what was there, but what was not. Mein Kampf. Where were all the stacks of Hitler’s tome in the windows, the rag that had dominated everyone’s life for a decade? Burned with him, he hoped.
Jacob's Oath: A Novel Page 11
