The mayor had just unveiled the “Tomb of the Unknown Brain” in the name of the Führer. Councilmen laid wreaths, the crowds shouted, the air was alive with the patriotic bloodthirst of the repressed Huns, and now the mayor yelled to his flock, “Germans! You now no longer have to think and write poetry! For this you must thank your Führer, who now will think and write for you in a way that no human brain has ever thought possible to think and write, not even our former nation of poets and…”—“thinkers” was the word he was looking for, but instead I heard a dull thump at our apartment door. I was startled, but unsure whether that was because of what I had just written, or the noisy interruption from outside.
Was it some drunks? Spaniards don’t get drunk—with the exception of our sereno, who instead of guarding our house was at this moment squatting in some tavern on Atarazanas Square. Was it Nazi murderers? Those guys sneak around in their stocking feet, and in Spain they’ve been working most recently with chloroform and abductions. Was it the old lady upstairs? She has varicose veins, and sometimes she slips on the stairs and falls against our door. If it’s her, I’ll take her back up under the roof. But she’s not in the habit of nosing around in the nighttime. I figured it was the Huns who did the thumping, and so I just went on typing. Whoever conjures up ghosts must not recoil in their presence, even if they are poor old ghosts that have trouble moving.
The second thump was very much of this world, and had nothing whatever to do with my manuscript. I went to the door and undid the lock.
There came rolling into the apartment a man’s hat, whose price, quality, and circumstances of purchase were well known to me. Then came a flurry of letters, forms, and neatly typed documents—these items, too, familiar to me in every detail. Then Herr Silberstern lifted himself up from his second fall and staggered into the hall. I took a quick look down the stairwell, but heard and saw nothing. My first thought was: members of the German National Work Brigade were after the Jew. They intend to make him perish. He doesn’t want to perish, and so he’s come running to his legal advisor to dictate a letter of protest. I locked the door behind him.
Silberstern began a big harangue, his own kind of harangue, which was gibberish. It cost me a whole chapter of my novel, but it cost the Nazis the Jew’s entire fortune.
Adelfried had not sent the documents to his attorney. My suspicions and my allusions to the Jesuits had addled his toad-like brain: “Suppose he’s right, this pathetic poetizer who can’t even afford to buy a bed? What if what he’s telling me is true, that Germany has ceased to be a country governed by laws? It’s a little strange that my Aryan lawyer signs all his letters to me, a Jew, with ‘Heil Hitler!’ And are they really going to hang my Aryan lawyer for sending a Jew’s money abroad?”
At the very same hour when the Ciudad de Palma was plowing its way through the leaden swells of the Mare nostrum, carrying in its postal sack the useless load of his undispatched legal documents, our litigant was swimming in the arms of a personage charging 2.50 pesetas, from which he was able to knock off half a peseta using sweaty sign language. Having completed this double transaction, the brother of Privy Councilor Silberstern betook himself to the door of his legal advisor, who he knew would still be pounding away at his typewriter. He slipped and fell on the stairway but then, raising a finger and still trembling at the thought, he let me know that she would have done it for 1.50 if only he had been able to say a few words of broken Spanish. “How would you have handled the situation?”
“Which situation? The babe or the Third Reich?”
“Don’t make jokes! My fortune is at stake!”
Once again I expounded my economic theory, this time making it culminate in my general theory of private ownership. My recent coup in the Basel money market lifted my prestige, all the more since my new client knew the lady personally. But he added that I had badly underestimated the size of her bank account. Moving on, I mentioned that Count Kessler was likewise suing the Third Reich, that I was typing up his private documents, too, and that if Mr. Silberstern was willing to stick with me, he’d be on the right side of the law. This news had the effect of increasing my prestige still further, for although Silberstern didn’t know the Count personally, he was on intimate terms with the Count’s wine provisioner. He could name all the vintages that got poured at the Cranach Street residence in Weimar, whenever the intellectual elite of the world gathered there.
I asked my client to return the next day at 12 o’clock sharp, knowing that he would be here at half-past ten with the punctuality of all gossips. He arrived at half-past ten, and we discussed his urgent quarrel with the Reich. At the stroke of twelve a letter to his attorney was finished, telling him that as per a letter to be dispatched with the same post, the entire affair would be turned over to the Spanish National Bank in Madrid, allowing everything to be handled automatically, within the framework of German foreign-trade arrangements. We would await directives from Madrid, and had every intention of following them to the letter. Meanwhile we would also personally notify Dr. Köcher, the German Consul General in Barcelona.
It was a gigantic bluff. I figured that Silberstern’s attorney, whose head was on the line, would fall for it—and he did. This gave me time actually to alert the National Bank in Madrid, and there, too my hunches proved correct. While hundreds of people were being murdered every day in his concentration camps, when dealing with foreign countries the Führer had to be careful to don the accepted white shirt of the diplomat instead of his normal brown attire. Cardinals, hundred-meter sprinters, shipowners, opera singers, six-day cycle racers, magnates: all such leading personalities would get to see only the gleam of white. This charade placated people’s consciences. Foreign trade flourished as never before, and the world bowed down before the image of the Lord of the German Nation. And Silberstern, such was my thinking, ought to have his little profit from it.
His attorney in Frankfurt was now sitting between two stools. He sent expensive telegrams, which his client in Spain of course had to pay for. His Dr.Dr. brother had long since been silenced, his Privy Councilor title long since vaporized. Adelfried again got the jitters, and I heard myself saying, “Don’t give up! A Vigoleis can always find a way! Take dictation!”
For the first time in his life Herr Silberstern wrote down a text that was dictated to him. That is to say, it was still Vigoleis, but in this case he dictated a text to himself. Stern—beg your pardon, Silberstern—signed with a clammy hand. Va banque.
Some months later the Banco Nacional de Madrid informed Señor Don Alfredo Silberstern, Palma de Mallorca, Calle Cecilio Metello, that the Accounting Office of the Head Supervisor of the German Overseas Currency Management in Berlin had remitted the sum of…, in writing…, and that they awaited his further instructions.
Silberstern was now a millionaire—or more exactly, he had once again become a millionaire and, as such, a worthy member of the Silberstern clan with the Aryan first names. And I, Vigoleis, had once again demonstrated my prowess in dealing with millionaires. Who knew? Perhaps I was set to become the world’s most-wanted adversary of big capital, without ever having read a word of Marx! I shook my own hand, since Silberstern declined to do so. He took all the credit for himself—that, too, was a stellar trait of his. Vigoleis’ mission from now on was to remain in the service of this gentleman, who had just learned that justice could be justice after all. But I would no longer be his legal counsel. I would be his advisor in sexual affairs.
Silberstern detested me with a passion seldom encountered between human beings. It was my fault. If I had had the good sense, using the execrable mercantile German that twirled out of his thumbs, to present him with a bill—pardon, I mean a “debit notification”—for services rendered in the capacity of legal counsel in the case of Silberstern vs. Third Reich for fees outstanding amounting to the sum of 100,000 pesetas, he would have just rubbed his greedy hands, taken the envelope, and rapidly noted down how much below a 10% profit-share I should receive. He promised me 10
% of the dowry if I would arrange a marriage for him with a rich marrana, one of the baptized Jewesses from Silversmith Street in Palma: not more than 30 and not less than 3 × 100,000 duros. Pedro and I actually took some steps in this cattle-trading maneuver. But General Franco was against it.
Here’s what my gut was telling me: surely Silberstern would be accommodating to the tune of 10,000 pesetas, or maybe with just a single peseta that he has wangled, centimo by centimo, out of some Pilar. “Vigoleis is such a dolt and a nincompoop,” he’ll be thinking, “that he’ll consider it an honor to be working for me. And anyway, he can still learn. For example, our assault against the Third Reich! I’d like to meet anybody else who could pull that off like Adelfried, brother of Brunfried, both of us from the city of Würzburg! The German colony was astounded when the news of our legal coup made the rounds.”
For two whole years Vigoleis served this master, the guy who was Aryan in front, non-Aryan behind, and in the middle the island’s biggest putafex. He served him at dawn and at dusk, when the constellation was at zenith and again when it was below the horizon; during hours when even the most miserable slut has her bed all to herself, and always at the expense of his own work. Worse yet, and incomprehensible, was the fact that all of this affected an aspect of his existence that could have aroused the interest of Professor Többen in Münster: Beatrice’s nerves. My reader, for whom cloven personalities may well be the most inscrutable subject in the world, may well be asking himself here the same question I have pondered over time and again: why has Vigoleis always let himself be flattened like a noodle? Effi Briest’s father, in Fontane’s novel of the same name, would say, “Hmm… that would take us far afield.” God has his emissaries everywhere, and He prefers to utilize simple creatures in order to point out certain forces within His Creation, although in the world’s labyrinth of obfuscations and exaggerations this can lead to all kinds of false deductions. Would it be so very odd if He used Vigoleis to prove that an Aryan with a 2000-year-old Hunnish pedigree could, despite the long series of temptations, humiliations, extortions, and insults visited upon him by a constellation named Silberstern, avoid making him into an anti-Semite, no matter how often his friends and acquaintances made bets among themselves that he would turn out to be one? One of the bons mots to be heard on the island was that this Jew would turn Vigoleis into a Jew-baiter. But he never turned into one, and the person who was most amazed at this was the despicable Jew himself.
But was it truly gratitude, even if in microscopic form as Vigoleis liked to call it, that impelled Silberstern to do what he did when I told him that we were expecting company? A famous married couple would be arriving on the island: the Mengelbergs from Amsterdam, Carel and Rahel. We wanted to put them up at our place for a few days, after which they intended to move on with their rucksacks and their no less famous brother-in-law, the writer Helman. “They don’t have a bed?” asked Silberstern. No, I told him, they don’t have any money. They fled from Germany, where Carel had an important job at the Berlin Radio. But he also had Rahel, and the Nazis didn’t like that. A woman could, of course, have the name Rahel and still be an Aryan, I went on, just as he was a Jew despite his Adelfried. But as he well knew, the Nazis were such nitpickers about such things. In any case, the three…
“Just a minute,” said Adelfried. “Before you go on: are we talking about Willem Mengelberg, the conductor, the Concertgebouw?”—“Not exactly. The first names are different, the batons, the achievements, the fees, the attitudes—they’re all different. It’s the last name that’s identical: Mengelberg.”—“A son?”—“A nephew. His mother’s maiden name is Huflattich, and his wife, Rahel, is first harpist at the Berlin Opera.”—“You mean: used to be.”—“You’re right, used to be. Just as all of are used-to-be’s.”—“So you will swear to me that these people are genuine Mengelbergs?”—“I swear by all the Mengelbergs that they are the real McCoy.”
Upon hearing this, Silberstern immediately declared his willingness to lend Mr. Mengelberg and his wife the mattress given to him by the Nina who jilted him back in Cologne. I could come pick it up, load it on my back, and lay it down for the Mengelbergs in one of our unused rooms. If this was in fact the nephew of the truly famous Willem M. of Amsterdam—did I know whom that man slept with? First with… and then with… and especially with…? And as for Rahel, she was the daughter of Hindemith—if it’s the same one who was in the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra… Yes, he knew them all, all of them! Fine people, the whole lot! All of them distinguished musicians! And that’s why they could get to sleep on Nina’s mattress. Would the writer Helman be joining them? Is he distinguished, too? “Much more so, Herr Stern—pardon, Silberstern. He’s West Indian Rimbu aristocracy, hand-pulled with watermark.”
“I’m telling you, not only will I let these eminent people sleep on Nina’s mattress, they must sleep on it. They must, do you understand?”
I understood, and it seemed like gratitude. The human being in Silberstern was finally stirring, just as he himself had so often stirred on that mattress. I concluded that there must be something called compensatory bedroom justice.
It was already past midnight. As on p.612 above, the moon was wandering through the park of the beautiful daughters, where there was likewise a rustling, chirping, and fluttering of the coconut trees, the field mice, and the bats. The girls’ monthly laundry was a reminder of the transitoriness of the years, once again in this night of a million stars and a single Mr. Silver Star, gentleman and millionaire.
There was a dull thump at our door. But this time I wasn’t startled, because it was my own self, breaking down under the weight of the mattress. Bathed in sweat as if emerging from the sea, there I lay on the patamar. On top of me, at least fifty pounds of wool from contented Mallorquin sheep were redolent with lanolin, Nina, the brother of a Privy Councilor, plus the sine qua non of all mattresses.
“How come you smell so strange,” asked Beatrice as I lay down next to her on the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. “Where are you coming from?”
Unfortunately, Beatrice is one of those talented people who can tell whether a hard-boiled egg was laid in hay, straw, or into the farmer’s open hand.
“What you’re smelling is lanolin, Nina, the brother of a Privy Councilor, and what happens when people lie down on a mattress. When I take it back, it will have added further aromas: Carel, Rahel, Lou… Or should we let them have our heap of newspapers so we can sleep on a real bed for a change?”
Beatrice was already back asleep as I continued to ponder my special blend of aromas.
Next day, the famous people arrived. That night they slept on Nina’s wool, while the philanthropic mattress-provider was accommodated in some establishment costing two pesetas, and Nina was offering her delights to some sheikh on his camel-hair blanket, beneath the stars of Marrakesh.
Once Silberstern had converted his Hitlerian marks into pesetas, I told him that he could now afford a visit to the Casa Marguerita for one duro, tip included. The penny-pincher just laughed. I told him that now that he was again a millionaire he could afford a cardinal’s mistress in her boudoir all decorated in scarlet silk. I knew of one, I said, a randy cookie, at the moment on leave of absence. My miserly client smiled.
He smiled and twiddled his thumbs. He was not one of those moneybags who try to pretend that they are poorer than a churchmouse—an animal that, according to Iberian legend, feeds on the rancid oil in liturgical lamps. No, this nickel-nurser was proud of his millions, and prouder still of the clever ruse that had filched his fortune, a non-Aryan’s fortune, from the Nazis. I hastened to agree with him. Only someone of his stature could have pulled off a stunt like that one. It was further proof, I said, that there will always be a blind chicken around that can find some corn to peck. “But let’s get down to business,” I said. “What would you like me to do now?”
Well now, he said, he was approaching me on a rather delicate matter. Things were getting too expensive for him. If I was able, he said
, I should figure out how much life was costing him, despite his modest needs and despite careful scrimping. So he had started thinking that he ought to look around for something reliable—a woman. It must be somebody he could talk to about these matters, and so the only kind of woman he was thinking about was a German citizen—because of the language and because of his feelings about the homeland. He was, he said, still attached to his German fatherland—unlike me, the by now thoroughly cosmopolized Vigoleis—“Or let’s say I’ve been ‘cosmocratized.’” Whenever our conversations hit the subject of Germany, this scum-bag’s eyes went moist. His yearning for Würzburg was getting more and more intense. Whenever such strong emotions came to the fore, I told him that nostalgia was basically a question of money. I offered to buy him a rail ticket at “Viajes Marsans.”
He knew a woman in Cologne or near Cologne, up there in my own German bailiwick. She was Aryan, he said, very Aryan—that he could swear to. But unfortunately, she looked Jewish. Her father was hit by a train, and her mother was still alive. She was getting by with a modest pension supervised by General Director Dr. Dorpmüller—he meant the mother, not Nina. Somebody had set the rail switch the wrong way. Nina was a manniqueen—surely I knew what that was—in one of the finest department stores on Hohestrasse in Cologne, where Mayor Adenauer’s daughter was a regular customer. Everything was sewn by hand, and because of her non-Aryan looks Nina couldn’t work there any more, and he wanted to send for her, and what did I think of that? A dependable girl! And what a set of boobs! And legs! And she’s tall! And just think, she’s educated, too!
The Island of Second Sight Page 101
