“And then?” he asked, and stayed at home as though nothing had happened.
They came on the third day, on a Sunday. They did not say where they were taking him.
“You will see for yourself soon enough,” they said, and asked him, not impolitely, to hurry.
He gave his daughter a good-bye tweak on the arm and promised to bring something back.
“A doll,” she said, “with a baby carriage,” and as she watched him go, she clung to the faded hare her mother had sewn together from scraps of material.
He had seen the synagogues burning. Even in his sleep, he had heard the blazing cupola of the synagogue in Fasanenstraße collapse. In the middle of an ever-increasing crowd that had gathered around the building to stare in silence at the flames, he had thought of a sentence he had used to introduce the first publication of a contemporary dramatist, who had since become well-known. This is only a timid prologue, he had written; what follows will become history. A clumsy sentence, he thought, but very fitting.
He was taken to the police station and asked to take a seat. A drunken man was led in. Everybody knew him, and greeted him by name. He was singing a song about a merry baker.
“He used to be a baker,” the policeman explained, leading Bernstein to a cell. He lay down on the wooden bench and shut his eyes.
Half an hour later, two men came up to the iron bars and unlocked his cell door. They told him they were taking charge. He should get a move on, they were waiting for him in the car, he had once been a famous man. He smoothed down his jacket and followed. It was only in the car that he realized they were talking about him in the past tense.
The shards of glass that had still littered the pavements a few days before had been swept up. Only the boarded-up windows revealed something had happened here.
When they drew up in front of the community center they asked him if he were a good gymnast. He did not understand the question and looked at them.
“You’ll do a few gymnastic exercises now,” said one of the men, and opened the door, smiling. “It’s good for the health.”
He walked as though in a dream, stumbled down a low step he had not noticed, passed rosebushes, and entered the brightly lit hall. It all seemed unreal.
He was told to place both hands on a wooden table. He spread his legs and an SS man searched him for weapons.
“Nothing,” said the SS man, and went up to an elderly gentleman. He knew him by sight. He was called Recktenwald and worked for the same newspaper as he. Beneath his coat, he was wearing only pajamas and was freezing.
“A lovely bright blue,” said the SS man, and smiled at Recktenwald.
He was pushed forward. At another table a man took his watch, watch chain, and the change that he always carried in his pants pocket. When the SS man had counted the money and thrown it into a cash box, he looked at the watch.
“Gold?” asked the SS man.
He nodded. It had been a present from his father for his doctorate.
The SS man turned around and placed the watch in one of the four boxes on the table behind him. While the SS man was filling out a form, he looked at the labels on the boxes. He read: pocket watches — gold and gilded. Pocket watches — silver. Wristwatches — gold and gilded. Wristwatches — silver.
“Sign.”
The man who had confiscated his belongings held out a sheet of paper and a pen. He winced. Then he signed.
A line had formed in front of the third table. The foreman was asking a young man his name. The man said his name and was slapped.
“Name,” repeated the foreman.
The man protested this was the only name he had. The foreman gave a sign, and the young man was led away, sobbing softly.
When his turn came he had understood what was expected.
“Jew,” he answered to the foreman’s question, who nodded, satisfied, and to the question, “What sort?” “Jew Justus Bernstein.”
Then he gave his address.
He was taken to a smaller room, acting as conference room. The chairs had been placed against the wall, so that an empty space had been created in the middle. He joined the other ten men who had been arrested that night. The journalist Alfred Neumann, the publisher Siegfried Scholem, and a sociologist were among them.
“Get down,” came the command.
He got down on his knees.
“Crawl.”
He crept on all fours through the room, crawled the length of the room, went round in circles, and lay down as ordered, face down, arms stretched out. He was sweating.
A man approached him. He saw the points of his shoes. The brown leather was worn away and scratched in places. He wanted to protect his head with his hands, but lay motionless, shut his eyes, and waited for the kick. After a while, they were ordered back to the big room.
An officer came in and went from group to group. The way in which the others greeted him showed his superior rank. The officer walked up to him and looked at him for a long time. Then his face lit up.
“But I know you,” he said. “You are the …”
He said he was.
“How old are you?” the officer asked and nodded acknowledgment when he got the answer. “You are in good shape.”
He turned to the next man and prodded his belly with his thumb.
“Your belly has grown fat from the spoils of our Reich. We will be able to rid you of that lard. What is your profession?”
“Cantor,” the other man replied.
The officer laughed and turned to Bernstein.
“You are a music lover, I read that somewhere.”
“Yes,” he said. “I am a member of the Friends of Chorale Groups Society.”
The officer shook his head.
“Were. You were a member. Now you are nothing.” He turned back to the cantor.
“Then sing the aria from The Magic Flute for your brothers in faith, and sing yourself free.”
The cantor took a deep breath, and started to sing.
2.
Toward dawn, they were taken into the courtyard. They immediately clustered into small groups. They discussed what might happen. No one knew.
Someone reached a couple of bottles of milk and bread over the wall. He saw cracked hands, used to hard work.
He greedily gulped some down, and passed the bottle on. An elderly man whispered his name and address to the man over the wall.
“Tell Inge,” repeated the man, over and over, “she should take down the pictures. She should take down the picture in the bedroom. She should also take down the one in the living room. …”
He went over to the elderly man and tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”
They were led back into the room and ordered to lie down. He unbuttoned his jacket and crouched down. The elderly man crawled over, stopped in front of him, introduced himself, and asked what they could do.
“I don’t know any more than you,” he said. “They want to intimidate us, and then they’ll let us go.”
Maybe, he thought, maybe it’s even true, but he did not really believe it. He took off his jacket and balled it into a pillow. There was no point in speculating.
Just under an hour later they found themselves being led through a street full of gawking faces. A woman, who was dragging a short-haired sausage dog behind her, spat on the ground as he went by.
“Ugh,” she said. “Pack of Jews.”
At the side of the road were two trucks. While he was waiting to climb in, he glanced over at the houses opposite and saw a woman hanging covers over the balustrade. He thought of his wife and daughter, who had certainly not slept.
A few weeks earlier, they had talked about what they would do in an emergency. He had reckoned with his arrest, but had not imagined it would come so quickly. He had applied to emigrate, and thought he still had a few weeks at his disposal.
She is still at home, waiting for a sign. She is not with them. She ha
s certainly not stuck to our agreement. Oh, he thought, please let her already have gone, she’ll be in Holland tomorrow, and then they will be safe.
The driver looked sleepily down at the street. Gradually the sidewalk was emptying.
He sat next to the young man, who immediately grabbed hold of his jacket. He gently pried himself free, took his hand, and spoke softly to him. He had no idea what he was saying, but the words had a calming effect on him too.
They were taken to the Silesian railway station. He had hardly ever been in this area. He was seeing some of the streets for the first time. They stopped in a tunnel. They had to climb down.
“Hurry up, hurry up,” the SS men shouted at them.
They stood in a line and were counted.
“Eighty-three,” said an SS man, and tapped him on the chest: “Remember that.”
Several special carriages had been set aside for them, joined to the end of the train. It was a normal passenger train, the travelers were already seated and waiting. The train’s departure had been delayed because of them. On the platform a group of workers hurried past them. One of them had a large leather pouch clipped on to his belt. His breakfast is in there, he thought, and realized he was hungry.
He was placed next to two SS men, who were guarding the compartment. He listened to them. They were quietly talking about what would happen to the prisoners. One of them mentioned Dachau and Sachsenhausen. Yes, he thought, that will be it for sure., as he had already heard talk about them. The other one, who got out at the first station to fetch water, said something about the “expiatory sacrifice of Jewry.”
When they came to a standstill for several minutes between stations and were overtaken by an express train, he considered for a moment what would happen if he were simply to stand up. He imagined walking past the two guards, turning the handle, opening the door, and walking out.
Shot in mid-flight, he thought, or they would take my wife and child. Oh dear, he thought. If only they’ve already left, if only they’re already at the border. Let it be so, please. He dropped his hands into his lap and listened. Behind him a voice whispered:
“Guard, is the night almost over? Guard, is the night almost over? But even when morning comes, it will still be night.”
The Gold Coin
AS IS THE CASE WITH MOST COLLECTORS, Blumenfeld’s passionate desire to accumulate things was awakened in early youth. He could not remember when and why he began. His mother, now deceased, liked recounting that she had first noticed his collecting mania one spring morning. During her quarterly cleaning spree, she and the cleaning lady pushed his bed to one side and came across about fifty chocolate wrappers.
Blumenfeld was six then, a melancholic child prone to puppy fat and kept to a strict diet by his mother. To this day he could remember the jumble of joy and fear that filled him as soon as he drew near the fine foods store on the way home. He bought a chocolate-covered cream wafer there every day. He did not eat it immediately. He hid it between the exercise books in his schoolbag, so that the heady feeling increased through the afternoon, reaching its climax in the evening when his mother left the room and he took the first bite.
Was it fear of his mother coming across the chocolate wrappers in the trash can and stumbling upon his secret? Or did the placid child need the excitement the knowledge of his guilt occasioned, prolonged by smoothing out the gleaming, silver paper, folding it with his sleepy hands, and placing it behind the bed? The pile grew bigger and bigger and with it heightened his state of physical and mental tension.
His mother suspected this childhood episode had given his dormant collector’s zeal the kiss of life. Blumenfeld had never given much thought to whether he was interested in the chocolate-scented wrapper as an object in its own right, or only as evidence of his misdemeanor, but he did know that when he came home one afternoon to find his mother holding out the foil wrappers reproachfully, he had felt disappointment, mixed with relief. With that an abrupt stop was put to both the midnight snacks and the diet.
The subject of his rather famous collection came to Blumenfeld; he did not come to it. He was given it as a present on his twelfth birthday by his father’s youngest brother. Saddened that he was the only son not to have gone to college, taking over his father’s fur business instead, his uncle hoped with this Roman coin to awaken his little nephew’s interest for history. It was a subject in which young Blumenfeld had yet to achieve any satisfactory result, and without mastering it, so thought his mother and uncle, he would amount to nothing in educated circles.
Blumenfeld thanked him politely, and the coin with its detailed noble head of a glorious general covered with the green patina particularly coveted by experts was mislaid that very afternoon.
It was not until four years later that he was to come into contact with the future subject of his collection again. He was in a public library, because a girl from his class spent her afternoons there, and was leafing through an illustrated volume of coins, next to the dictionaries and encyclopedias by the entrance.
Blumenfeld had selected the book randomly and, as he was looking over to the table where the girl was sitting, he indifferently turned to the middle pages. Suddenly, his glance fell on a blown-up photograph of a well-conserved coin. It was made of silver and on it was the head of a bull, whose dark, flaming nostrils were strangely exciting to him.
That same day, Blumenfeld went to a shop that — along with stamps, seals, and medals — had two shelves of coins. He had not noticed it before, and bought a silver taler, reasonably priced, since it was widely available.
Within just a few months, Blumenfeld, whose zeal for collecting had now settled upon a suitable subject — beforehand he had hoarded anything and everything in his room, sometimes truly bizarre objects that he exchanged for others when they bored him — had put together a fine collection. He was advised by the shop owner, an experienced numismatist who was kind to the young man and spent many an hour with him in the back room.
Soon Blumenfeld was not content with the usual coins, and to the numerous silver talers and birds’ heads from Bavaria and Bohemia, rarities were added, with hippos, elephants, and lions that grinned at him with mouths of nickel, silver, or copper when he took them out in the evening to polish them or simply to hold them in his hands.
These coins were his pride and joy. Tracing an uneven surface with his finger, he thought he could feel the sweat of the artist hundreds of years ago, carrying out a prince’s or emperor’s order, and powerfully striking the hot metal with his hammer, to press the pattern in with the pressure of the blow.
Only the human hand could produce the irregularities that were the reason Blumenfeld collected the coins: the hand grew tired and struck with less strength at the end of the day. And he thought he could tell — he published his notion, hotly debated but never disproved, in a series of articles in the numismatics magazine — whether a coin had been crafted in the evening or in the early morning. The nighttime coins had technical deficiencies, deeply moving like the pallid, sickly skin of a young girl.
Only once did Blumenfeld almost allow himself to be led astray and to neglect his collection. He had by that time established himself as an expert on classical coins, although he also from time to time dipped into coins from other periods. He had met the lady in question — the confusion of feelings was occasioned by a woman — in a lawyer’s office to which he went to straighten out a question about his mother’s will. Blumenfeld had just turned thirty-four.
The lady was called Vicki Walter, recently divorced, had a shy smile and small tripping footsteps, and was employed as a secretary in the lawyer’s office. His first and last words to her were an apology.
It was actually an insignificant story: Blumenfeld had brushed against an inkpot with his stiff loden coat in passing, pouring its contents over the secretary’s desk. After some clumsy words of apology, which fortified the first impression he had made on the secretary — of being an untidy but likable person — he invited the yo
ung lady to dinner.
He was not attracted to her. Rather he felt duty bound, and did not cover up his mixed feelings when he met the secretary, who had immediately and wordlessly wiped away the signs of his absentmindedness with a sponge.
Although to start with he looked at his watch impatiently — Blumenfeld did not like to be robbed of time he could be spending with his coins — he had to admit, after meeting her three more times, that he liked the woman. As she seemed to like him too, the inevitable happened. And he could not help thinking at night, when she had left him and he lay a little longer in bed, that what the Greeks called fate was smiling on him, too.
In fact, the woman had entered his life like the churning waters of a flood after a storm, and had torn down all the protective walls Blumenfeld had carefully erected, believing he was content with his life.
Thereafter there was a feeling of emptiness. Blumenfeld did not pretend to love the woman. He had his carefully spent youth behind him, was standing at the threshold of a new chapter of his life, and contentedly looked forward to a peaceful future made complete through her presence.
The engagement date was set. Blumenfeld began unhurriedly looking around for a larger apartment. This was around the time he decided to catalog his collection, which had grown considerably from its modest beginnings.
Blumenfeld asked his prospective fiancee, experienced in such matters, to help him. They started one Sunday. Carefully he took the first little paper bag from the cupboard, opened it, and slid out a Roman coin of raw copper with the head of an emperor famous in the history books for his gluttony. He slowly raised it to the light, squinted at it, and stated in brief technical terms its period, country, denomination, and inscription. He took out the second coin when the data of the first were recorded and it was back in its little paper sack. And so they continued through the afternoon, taking just one short coffee break to relax.
Toward evening, an uneasy sensation started gnawing at Blumenfeld, almost imperceptible to begin with, invigorated as he was from seeing the coins, but gathering in strength the further they progressed. They had already filled about seventy cards, when he realized, while regarding a groschen, what had been irritating him: he had forgotten to mention the condition of the coins. Blumenfeld paused and explained to the woman that the work they had done thus far was incomplete.
The Inventory: A Novel Page 15
