Had I found another patient, I would most certainly have left Mrs. Kurzig to the hands of fate; my patience was wearing thin. But I didn’t find any other patient. So I turned on my charm with the granddaughter. After one arduous week, I gained her acceptance regarding the fate of her grandmother’s teeth, and three years later regarding her hand in marriage.
5.
But beforehand, although this was very unusual at the time, Klara and I moved in together. Klara had to give up her apartment since the owner, a greedy and in every other respect truly unpleasant person, had raised the rent. And I did not want to stay a subtenant any longer either. We decided to give it a shot.
Klara’s uncle, the opera singer Werner Kurzig, found us a three-room apartment in a house built at the turn of the century. A far dealer lived on the ground floor. The entire first floor was taken up by a dyeworks specializing in feather dusters. Then came the Brackmanns, a friendly family; the father was a teacher and I often played chess with him. After that came a gentleman who collected coins, and his sick mother, two other tenants whom I didn’t know, and finally, under the eaves, Klara and I.
We were good, quiet tenants. We said hello to the neighbors when we met them on the staircase, carried back the shopping of various exhausted housewives, and did not complain when the Brackmanns’ daughter trotted up and down the major and minor scales for a whole hour, martyring the piano because she had to familiarize herself with the celebrities of German music.
Nothing bothered us, made us restless, irritated us. We were the golden generation, the children of good fortune. We had experienced the war only through the veil of childhood that makes everything hazy: for us, it was limited to the waving of flags as the soldiers departed for battle, and later, when all was lost, to the telling of bad jokes, in which a completely stupid Jean or Jacques came out on top. Even the cripples, who populated the streets with their vendor’s trays, didn’t frighten us since we were used to the sight of them. We knew that these men had been mutilated in the war, but they did not act as a warning to us.
We were presumptuous enough to believe that the horror cabinet of war, the invalids, the hunger, the widows with their swollen eyes, had brought everyone to their senses once and for all. We believed in progress as in a new god; we believed that one can learn from one’s mistakes and that glorious days were coming our way.
We enthusiastically discussed the education of workers and the salvific function of art. We handed out pamphlets, wrote manifestos, and saw neither the coarseness nor the bitterness that was slowly crawling into people’s hearts.
Yes, we were presumptuous, because we considered ourselves untouchable, because we thought that luck was on our side. And had anyone said to me then that my life would be destroyed in less than three years, and that I would lose everything that was dear to me, I would have laughed in his face.
6.
We had been together scarcely four months when Otta called one morning. Something in the way she asked me if I was fine made me realize that something dreadful must have happened.
My father, who was brimming with good health, collapsed suddenly after dinner while he was in the sitting room reading one of the novels he selected from a Berlin publishing house every month. On coming back with the cup of tea that she always brewed for him after lunch, my mother found him sunk down in his chair and thought that he had dozed off. When she went up to him, however, to take the book out of his hand and to cover him up because he always felt the cold, she saw that his eyes were open.
My father died two days later of the aftereffects of a heart attack. He had not regained consciousness.
Charlotte took care of everything. She sent for Katherina and me, ordered the coffin, placed the death announcement — I had not managed to put together a decent text — and looked after my mother, who clung to Otta like a small child and allowed herself to be washed, dressed, and fed without resistance.
We set off immediately after the phone call. The train was packed and we had to sit next to a group of young men who were recounting their adventures with a certain Elizabeth. Klara watched me anxiously throughout the trip. She must have noticed in my face and bearing that I was close to losing control. She didn’t know — and I would never have told her, for I seemed a monster to myself — that it wasn’t the men’s laughter that disturbed me, nor their overexuberant jote de vivre, which was painted on their smooth faces and threatened to flood the compartment. What was tormenting me was that I couldn’t stop listening to their stories. In fact, I could not identify a trace, a shred, of mourning within myself. And I was consumed by an unspeakable fear. What would happen, what would my mother, Klara, Otta, think of me if I did not partake, if I remained unmoved, if I was incapable of any feeling? For everything drew me away from mourning: the men in the compartment, the brown and white cows we passed, the river, the poplar trees. I tried to imagine my father in the act of dying, but was always jolted back to life, which was taking its normal course all around me, and finally gave up.
When we arrived, I went to Father’s room immediately. The curtains were drawn as if he were still sleeping. The familiar smell of my parents, the light that shone through the heavy curtains and made the objects in the room seem red, and the bedside table with Father’s notebooks and half-empty glass of water still on it — no one had thought about getting rid of the beaker of fluid — all of it reminded me of my childhood Sunday ritual when I was three or four and my mother came to fetch me to creep up to the bed on tiptoes, and to wait there in the bed next to my father, who would pretend to be asleep until my mother came back with the breakfast tray, which she put down carefully on the little table. And as my mother was throwing open the curtains and then the window, my father would sit up and twirl me around in the air laughing, and I would cry out in joy and fear. I settled in between my parents in the bed. Cold morning air poured into the bedroom, and we ate freshly toasted bread, dripping with butter.
And all of a sudden I grasped the whole unjustness, the absolute indecency, of the situation I could not come to terms with and which was all the more awful because no matter how hard I tried I could not change it. I was going to lose my father. In several hours, strangers would enter our apartment, mutter tried-and-true words of condolence. Then they would wash him, dress him, and take him with them. And there was nothing I could do. I did not have anyone to lay the blame on for this monstrosity, no one against whom I could vent all my anger, to forget during a few moments of rage what could not be forgotten. I was losing my father and then I would lose my mother, and that is just the way it is, the most normal thing in the world. And although there is nothing more apparent than those words I had recited a hundred times, “dust to dust,” their whole meaning struck me then for the first time, and this comprehension finally tore me from my childhood years, from this well-fed and chubby-cheeked world that, like a chess board with black and white squares, was divided into good and evil and where good prevails, always prevails, and death is accepted merely as the final and toughest punishment for scoundrels rather than as the natural end of life.
And I understood that soon I would not see my father at all, that these were the last hours I could contemplate this familiar face, the small wrinkles etched under his eyes, the stern mouth. I took his hand. It struck me as so white and fragile and I kissed it and told him what he could not hear now and never would — I had, like all men, forgotten how to show my father tenderness — I told him I loved him.
And although the pain and the feeling of weakness remained, those hours spent with my father reconciled me to his death, for through the love that I felt for him and dared to experience at his deathbed, I absorbed him into me.
7.
How did I learn about Hitler’s election victory, through a radio report, in the paper, or was it the concierge who knocked at my door excitedly to tell me the glad tidings? I don’t know anymore. At that time, unbelievable though it may sound from today’s perspective, I lent it little importance. The Da
y of Potsdam, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the Day of Labor, the Day of German Gymnastics, what did these celebrations festooned with cheap firecrackers and gunfire, instigated by the brown rabble to intoxicate the people, have to do with me? They couldn’t impress me in the slightest with all that. I found all the fuss quite ridiculous. And now all of a sudden an entire people was throwing the right arm in the air whenever someone entered or exited a room — the homo germanicus would soon not only differ from other types of people in their discipline, but also in their overdeveloped right bicep — well, that did not astonish me either. And although I actually considered myself a perspicacious person and some acquaintances suddenly disappeared to who knows where, at first everything carried on as before.
I opened a bookstore in two small rooms covered in cobwebs in Große Hamburger Straße. That was in February, a few days after Parliament was dissolved. I was sure the location would bring me luck, because it was next to the building where my favorite author had spent his school years, and also near the old Jewish graveyard. Three months later I returned the shop, without kicking up a fuss, to the safekeeping of the spiders. In the name of stamping out lies, branding treachery, and keeping the German language pure, my entire stock had been burnt — with the exception of a rare volume of Japanese woodcuts and a book illustrated with watercolors of butterflies. And who on earth can run a bookshop with the brimstone butterfly or the Great Fox in its autumnal guise?
I found a position with the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden,* founded in June ‘33. It was a place where dismissed actors, directors, and musicians could find work. I worked for Alfred Spira, who was employed until ‘33 by the Stuttgart Regional Theater, and a little later by Dr. Walter Levie, a cultivated and very reserved man. Levie often spoke of a manuscript he had edited shortly before the Aryanization of his publishing house. Before it could go to press it was literally torn from his hands, for the employees of the so-called Jewish publishing houses, i.e., Ullstein, S. Fischer, Reiss, and Cassirer, were harassed by house searches, murder threats, and the regular confiscation of books and manuscripts.
Naturally this “spontaneous indignation about Jewish inflammatory writings” was nothing more than a well-thought-out ploy to push the owners into selling their publishing house.
Levie claimed that the novel was one of the most beautiful and important works of contemporary literature. The manuscript in question was the last of a then unknown writer, who had died several years earlier of consumption. Levie had received the manuscript from a Czech journalist, who was to become famous many years later for some letters written to her.
With the help of an influential friend, Levie tried to rescue the manuscript. Yet, although he received a stamp of permission from the responsible office, the novel was never returned. Via the publisher, Dr. Lehmann, he discovered several weeks later that the “nonsense of the eastern Jewish cultural Bolshevist” had been burned the day it was seized.
Levie often spoke about the novel — it became a kind of obsession — yet apart from a garbled rendition of the content he could not say much more than that it had 254 pages and twelve chapters and the hero died after just seventy pages.
I comforted myself — if it is at all possible to comfort oneself about such a loss, but we lost more than just our masterpieces at that time — I comforted myself with the thought that the author would certainly have liked that technical description of his final work. I thought of him then as I do now, in opposition to the current popular opinion among academic circles, as an author with unmatchable black humor.
8.
While Albert Spira and Walter Levie saw to the administration of the theater, I was entrusted with the publicity work. I helped out with editing the Monthly Rag, but my main job consisted in procuring permission for performances from Hinkel’s office, or, more precisely, from Cultural Minister for Special Papers Hinkel. Hinkel, after 1945 classified as “not significantly guilty,” had several editors working for him who, red pen in hand, read through any plays to be performed by Jews. As grotesque as it must seem to present-day eyes, not only were the dramas of Schiller and other plays of pure German spirit off-limits to Jewish directors, but Jewish actors were not allowed to pronounce certain words, like German, blond, or pure. I remember an exchange of letters I had that went on for ten days with one of Hinkel’s officials about a Molnar comedy and in particular the mediocre line “Farewell, blond and unfaithful briefcase,” the official eventually coming up with the inspired idea of replacing blond with fair.
We were just rehearsing The Merchant of Venice when I heard, I couldn’t say where, the news that Klara’s uncle, the opera singer Werner Kurzig, had been beaten up by a mob of SA men. He had become the object of their hatred for not hiding his homosexuality. Werner left the country that year. He offered to help us leave, too. He had friends in Paris and Amsterdam, who would have found work for me. We spent many sleepless nights in the kitchen, not knowing whether we should emigrate or not. We decided not to ran away like thieves. This was our country after all.
Klara started to complain of stomach cramps. She would also suddenly feel sick, especially in the evenings. I was worried, and although she had strictly forbidden me to do so, I called my university friend Johann Marburg, who told me to bring her around without delay.
9.
Johann was a gastroenterologist and his practice was above an electrical goods store that gave the impression its back room might contain radios from homes that had parted involuntarily with them.
My God, that was a grotesque situation. I was standing next to the receptionist of my friend, holding forth on chronic and acute gastritis with my freshly gathered knowledge garnered from an antiquarian medical dictionary. Next door Johann was examining my wife. I tried to pick up something of the proceedings inside, but could see only his white back through the half-open door. I sat down and smoked a cigarette. I must have been on my third already when I heard Johann tell my wife she could get dressed again. I got up. Johann opened the door and came over to me. He indicated I should follow him into the surgery. We sat down in silence. I wanted to hear the diagnosis, but didn’t dare ask. Johann looked at me for a long time, shook his head, and sighed. Then he took his prescription block out of the drawer, wrote something on it with a flourish, and, as I slumped down like a cold soufflé, handed it to me. I must have looked absolutely dismayed as I read my friend’s verdict: “Congratulations, you old ass.”
Johann burst into peals of laughter. Then he shook my hand, kissed my Klara, who was visibly moved, and invited us out for lunch.
10.
We celebrated our wedding with immediate family, and limited the celebrations after the ceremony in the town hall to a meal in a small restaurant.
To our mutual amazement — we’d been living together for almost three years before getting married — it was only in those months following the wedding that we really got to know each other. Without being able to pinpoint exactly when the change took place, I found myself adding warm milk and two sugars to my coffee in the mornings, and, as though the fact that I was now a married man had changed my taste buds, instead of the hot golden-brown fried potatoes that left a delicious fatty pool on the plate, which I dipped a slice of white bread into, I ate steamed chopped carrots and other vegetables whose existence I had deliberately overlooked in my youth.
And I wasn’t alone. Klara also put old habits to one side, adjusted to me, became my wife, so that every day that “thing,” for which there’s no suitable word in the language, grew between us: something that comes into being when you realize that the gestures of the other, how she pushes her hair out of her eyes or how he dabs his mouth with the napkin, have become familiar, when you notice from afar the other’s gait. Something that overcomes you, too, when torn from sleep, you feel the warm regular breathing body next to one, the sight of which calms the anxious heart so that its beat slows down until it’s at one with the other’s heart and melts into its pulsation.
11.
> Seven months after our wedding, David was born.
I remember his first smile. It took us by surprise one morning, when I was awkwardly changing his diaper. No one had told me how charming this first timid toothless smile would be.
I remember our first walk in the park — we were so proud — and all the little shirts, caps, and socks that suddenly appeared in our linen cupboard.
I’ve already mentioned the spectacular dismissal of Jewish journalists, musicians, and actors. Then came the “Jews Not Welcome” signs, on the benches in the park, in front of shops and restaurants, the distinguishing J in the passports, the smear propaganda in Oer Stürmer, the death threats, the exclusion of Jewish lawyers, and many other forms of harassment.
Yet nothing could compare to the Nuremberg Racial Laws in all their monstrosity and well-organized madness. On November 15, 1936, I was sentenced in the name of the German people to two years’ imprisonment at my own expense for breaking paragraphs one and five of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor: note the “at my own expense.”
For those who may have forgotten what this was all about: race defilement, of course. As a so-called full Jew, I had come up against the law protecting German blood and German honor by marrying on December 15, 1935, the German-blooded Klara Kurzig.
One rainy day I was arrested. Klara was just feeding David when the knock at the door came. He was emitting little noises of satisfaction, and fell asleep red-faced from the effort at her breast. One of the officials was wearing a light-colored trench coat, the other, who put the handcuffs on me as though I were some kind of dangerous criminal, had a curly mustache, outdated then. It lent him a certain respectability.
The Inventory: A Novel Page 13
