Love by the Morning Star

by Laura L. Sullivan

  “I ought not to do it,” Hannah said aloud to herself as chaos erupted behind her. “I just can’t seem to help myself. It is a shame, really.”

  But she did not look at all sorry.

  Outside, Hannah leaned against the cabaret’s stone wall and tilted her head, taking in the hazy night sky, the lounging neon devil winking insouciantly out at Berlin from the garish sign for Die Höhle des Teufels. She was so lost in thought, she didn’t see the middle-aged man approaching, and started at his voice.

  “Staring at things that used to be, my pet?” he said. “Where is your imagination tonight? Nineteen twenty-eight? ’Twenty-nine? Come now, you’re too young for nostalgia.”

  Hannah, like a good many other Germans, was trapped in the past. No matter that the twenties had been times of desperation and poverty and rampant inflation, when a loaf of bread might cost ten marks one day and a million marks the next. It had also been an era of wild creativity and beauty, when no one cared about the price of bread because there was art to create, jazz to dance to, satires to perform, debaucheries such as the world has never known to invent. Hannah was a child of that world, born, literally, in her parents’ cabaret, learning to walk by hanging on to its gold velvet stage curtains. Her first solid food had been a banana from Josephine Baker’s famous skirt, and a visiting Ziegfeld had dandled her on his knee.

  Now, in November 1938, that free, inventive, tolerant spirit was gone, surviving in a few relics such as Der Teufel, or more likely, had fled, to Paris, to Russia, to the United States. Bread was cheap, but the golden age was over. Hitler was in charge, and there were plenty of people who liked it that way.

  “Good evening, Herr Alder,” Hannah said, her small, sweet face scrunching in irrepressible mirth. “Even babies feel nostalgic for the womb, I think. How nice to be toted around and never have to worry about a thing! Now there are battles and revolutions and invasions and horrible discrimination—and that’s just among the kitchen staff. Do you know, Chef actually dumped a flambé on top of the waiter Dieter’s head because he told a customer the cream therein would make her fat and so she sent it back? Luckily his hair pomade prevented him from catching alight, but still.”

  Alder took a hopeful breath, but he stood no chance against Hannah’s torrent of words. Unless she got the hiccups, she could go on for hours. “Perhaps in other places the wait staff does not make so free, but I like the way we do things, don’t you? One happy, outspoken family. Ah, but you asked where I was, you sly man. I was in 1929 for a moment. Do you remember that spring when all the ladies wore violets on their bosoms? They wilted so fast, and Benno and I made all our candy money scouring the parks for new blooms.” She sighed. For just a second, the strain of her life showed through the merriment of her face.

  “It was a good year, 1929,” Herr Alder slurred. “Much like the bottle of cognac I just consumed.”

  “You’re tipsy,” Hannah said with mock disapproval. Caspar Alder was almost an uncle to her, a friend of the family who had patronized Der Teufel since it opened. He did something in the government, she knew, though he talked with increasing sincerity of retiring soon.

  “I am not tipsy,” Herr Alder said, pounding the wall with his fist. His vague avuncular air slipped, revealing something hard beneath. “I am drunk. It is necessary to be drunk when you are about to burn the business of your dear friend, and then perhaps beat him in the streets.”

  “What do you mean?” Hannah asked, her eyes wide and luminous in the devilish neon gleam.

  His voice dropped. “It has started already, across town. There’s not much time. They were only waiting for an excuse.” He growled the words like a caged dog, and Hannah cringed, catching fear as if it were a fever, though she had no idea what he was talking about.

  “They planned it,” he went on. “They want it to look like a spontaneous uprising, but they planned it, weeks, months ago. I should have warned you sooner, but I lived in hope that mankind isn’t quite so foul as it seems to be.” He took a long swig from a pocket flask. “Get your parents, my little kitten. Go to a friend’s house—don’t tell me where—and hide until it passes. If it ever passes. Damn it, I should have made you leave! Damn your stubborn father and his art, his calling . . .”

  He dragged her, almost violently, back inside, and, bewildered, she followed him through the backstage corridors. He knew them well. He’d paid court to many nubile performers over the last seventeen years.

  Onstage, Waltraud dipped Otto . . . or was it the other way around? She was so nobly built, he so sveltely beautiful, that in the sensuous, sinuous stalking of the tango it was hard to tell who was who. Each was dressed in bifurcated drag, male on one side, female on the other, and as they danced their hips pressed close, their legs intertwined in a glorious pansexual blur. The Nazi Party inspectors had come to observe the pair but declined to censor them. A man who dressed as a woman because he enjoyed it was decadent and obscene. A man dressed as half a woman, they decided, was worth watching.

  Waltraud and Otto bowed and curtsied, then curtsied and bowed, and Benno, who doubled on the fog machine, made a great sulfurous swirl rise through the suddenly dimmed red lights. A violin off scene played a diabolical air, and Aaron Morgenstern appeared as if from the abyss.

  He was always the Devil, sometimes a caricature in crimson, though more often Lucifer in his less obvious guises as a sophisticated roué, handsome and irresistible, which closely resembled Aaron’s real self, or a jaded old man with a patriarchal beard, bent and weary with the sins of the world. He was the ancient tonight.

  “I’ve seen it all before,” he sang, waggling his eyebrows like a dirty old man at the park when young girls in pinafores arrive. “If there is nothing new under the sun, do you think you will find a novel sin in this, the Devil’s cave?” He stroked his beard and leered at the audience. Then he seemed to fix them with eyes as deep and black as chasms. “When you come into the Devil’s hole and enjoy yourself, aren’t you doing to him what he would like to do to you?” He broke character and laughed, a young rich baritone. “Bend over, Devil! We will give you a surprise, in the end!” he sang, and made a rude gesture that set everyone laughing—the closet Communist and the Jew on forged papers, the local head of the SS, who had sent someone to his death that morning (though his hands were so clean now) and his subordinate, who would soon commit suicide when he finally realized what he’d signed up for.

  All political reference had been banned from the German stage a year before, which had killed most cabaret. Aaron Morgenstern survived, in part because he cultivated many influential friends, but mostly because he could couch his bitter opinions in comedy so perfectly balanced that every side thought he was praising them and condemning their opponents. The SS man nodded and thought, Here is one Jew who knows his place, seeing in this Devil every enemy of the German state. The man with the forged Aryan papers knew the Devil was the Nazi Party, and delighted in seeing him bend over. Coming into Der Teufel, catching the coded secrets of Aaron’s diatribes, was the only way that he could fight. It helped him keep a seed of rebellion in his heart, one that might never sprout so long as he and his were safe, however tenuously, but all his life he could say that seed was there—that inside himself he fought, by listening to the Morgenstern Devil.

  “Get your father,” Herr Alder whispered as Aaron hobbled offstage in his old-man disguise. He was replaced by a plump Bavarian who played a molting bird, her strategically placed feathers falling off here and there, to the delight of the men in the audience.

  In the dressing room, Hannah saw her glorious mother in triptych in the hinged dressing mirror. “Am I late for my cue?” she asked her daughter in English as she smoothed the edge of her dark peekaboo waves. Born Caroline Curzon, she had come from England after the Great War and married Aaron when she was barely out of her teens, then adopted the stage name Cora Pearl Morgenstern.

  When Herr Alder came in she made a little moue, thinking only that her performance preparations were bei
ng disrupted, not her entire life. Hannah took her mother’s hand and they listened while Herr Alder drunkenly, incoherently explained.

  A Jewish boy in Paris had shot a German diplomat. Why, no one was sure. Was it a lovers’ quarrel? Was he angry that his family—Polish Jews living in Germany—had been deported? No one knew, but it was called a Jewish conspiracy and there had been orders . . . no, not orders, but official collusion, Nazi Party encouragement, to seek retaliation on all the Jews in Germany.

  “They are coming now,” Herr Alder said. “The SS and their minions, in plainclothes, and I have been ordered to . . . to not interfere. To not interfere in such a way that I might render all assistance necessary. Every Jewish business is to be vandalized, burned. The synagogues destroyed. Men arrested for the labor camps.” He went to take another gulp but, finding the flask empty, flung it across the room, where it crashed into Cora’s dressing table, smashing a crystal vial of scent. Though harsher smells would permeate the coming tragedy, Hannah would always recall that whiff of Sous Le Vent’s tarragon and iris, disturbingly tropical on that chill, cut-glass night.

  Hannah saw the tremor of terror cross her father’s face, but it passed almost at once. “You should take your turn onstage, old friend. You’re overreacting. You’ve been predicting doom since 1932.”

  “And it has been coming. Now it is here. They say they’ll destroy every Jewish business, imprison you, send you to Poland . . .”

  “We’ve lived with that threat for years,” Aaron Morgenstern said lightly. “They won’t touch me.”

  But Cora’s pale brow furrowed. “Maybe now it is time, love.”

  “It was time long ago!” Alder said. “When they cast your people out of the civil service, you said only, ‘Good thing I’m not a civil servant,’ and the Devil laughed. When they forbade your people to teach in the universities, you said, ‘Well, I’m no intellectual, what does it matter?’ Do you think because you can make a Gestapo brute chortle he won’t send you to Buchenwald? You’ll laugh your way to the grave, and take your family with you.”

  Aaron looked at his wife, her powdered porcelain face a deliberate mask of calm, and at his daughter, whose slight frame seemed to him now so terrifyingly fragile. But Der Teufel! Its bricks could endure anything, filled as they were with the goodwill of all the powerful men who had eaten and chuckled and grown tipsy within its walls in the two decades since its founding. He was host, he was jester, to the most powerful men of Berlin. He’d been safe so far. Surely his luck would last. About one thing he was adamant—he would not leave his cabaret. He had built it—not its walls, perhaps, but its reputation, its glamour—and it was his lifeblood.

  Still in costume, he stroked his beard, pulling the tip into a sharp point. “I won’t leave,” he said. “I’m a German. They’ll come to their senses eventually. But, Cora, I think you and Hannah should go back to England for a while.”

  “Hannah, yes,” Cora said, giving herself a little shake and turning away from them all to apply her lipstick with a slim golden brush. Anyone watching her would have thought her cold, indifferent, but this was the only way she knew to tackle her deepest troubles, to shoo them aside as if they were a cloud of summer gnats, and deal with the task at hand brusquely and efficiently. Hannah always thought of it as her mother’s Englishness, that ability to balance problems so that a scuffed shoe and an impending disaster were almost equally distasteful, but both were borne with aplomb.

  “But I have too much to do,” Cora went on. “Who will keep the Edelweiss Twins in line if I’m in England, eh? Who will remember that oysters must be ordered on Thursday, and langoustines on Friday?” She shrugged her bare shoulders, then dusted them with shimmering gold flakes. “No, it is ridiculous to think I’d leave. Our business would crumble without me here.”

  Hannah could see the pulse racing in the hollow of her mother’s throat, and knew she loved her husband too much ever to leave him voluntarily. The couple joined forces and turned on Hannah.

  “You, however, will go to my brother-in-law’s house. He will be perfectly happy to take you in,” Cora said, with far more confidence than she felt. “That should be easily arranged, no? Documents and such?”

  “I will see that it is done,” Alder said. “But, Cora, you must go too. You are an English citizen still, so you will have no trouble. Our government is most adamant that foreigners not be inconvenienced. You, Aaron, will be harder to place, but perhaps if you go first to France—”

  “I told you, I’m not going. This is my business and—”

  “Fool, what have I been telling you? The tide has turned, the deluge has come. There will be no more Jewish businesses. They are being confiscated, now, tonight, next week. It is the end for you. I’ll help you with money, but—”

  “They can’t do it!” Aaron shouted. “I own it free and clear. I don’t owe a cent to any man. They can’t steal the property of a German citizen!”

  Alder took his old friend by the shoulder. “The Jewish people are no longer citizens of Germany,” he said gently. “You are an undesirable.”

  Aaron could hear the muted cheers from the audience, officers positively glittering with medals and insignia, industrial giants in bespoke suits being insincerely adored by women their wives did not know about. All the power of Berlin trickled in through his door. They had toasted him. They had shaken his hand.

  “I am an undesirable,” he repeated, trying to make sense of it.

  “Der Teufel will be gone. Be smart and go first.”

  The greatest men, Hannah remembered reading somewhere, make the greatest decisions lightly. She saw something come over her father then, a strange mix of resignation and triumph. “As it happens,” the Devil said, “Der Teufel is no longer a Jewish business.” He brushed past his family and out of the dressing room, taking the stage just as the buxom Bavarian shed her final feather. “My friends,” he cried, “as the good lord gave plagues and pox to his most faithful Job, I, the Devil, must be a contrarian, and to my friends give gifts. Benno, come onstage, if you please.”

  Whoever is in charge of such things had been sparing with his blessings at the moment Benno was born. He had neither looks nor wit nor skill. He was not large or strong, he could not sing; in fact, he had a stammer, which on most occasions left him self-consciously mute. One gift only had he been given, a gift as simple as it is rare: the gift of pure goodness. He knew, unerringly, what was right, what was kind, what would make people happy, and he did it without fail. His goodness took no effort; there was no internal scale to be balanced. He hoped for no reward and feared no hell. He was not clever—in his final year of school before the teachers despaired of him, he was asked how he would equitably divide a half-pound loaf of bread among himself and two friends. He said he would go without and his two friends would each have a quarter pound, and neither threats of failure nor the switch could persuade him to change his answer. He had done odd jobs at Der Teufel ever since, supporting the grandmother who had raised him after his parents’ death.

  “Dear souls who are mine for this night, is there a lawyer in the house?” Aaron asked. There were several, and one, chivvied by his friends, gamely hopped up onto the low stage, thinking he’d be part of a burlesque. There was a quick, whispered consultation, and then Aaron called for paper and pen. “Riches are a curse in disguise, the camel through the needle’s eye and all that, so the crafty Devil gives away his wealth. Perhaps if I am a pauper, I can sneak into heaven behind the camel’s hump, eh?”

  Aaron bent over and invited the lawyer to use his back as a desk, while the audience, perplexed, waited for the punch line and poor Benno lingered in the shadowed wings, hoping he wasn’t really expected to do anything.

  “There!” Aaron shouted. “All perfectly legal now, save for the signatures. Come here, Benno, and make your X.”

  Benno pushed his wheat-colored hair away from his face and sheepishly came center stage. “Der Teufel is yours, my boy,” Aaron said, too softly for even the lawyer
to hear. “I hope you’ll let me stay on.” He smiled beneath his gray beard.

  Benno’s face fell. “N-no!” he gasped, but couldn’t get any more out. He didn’t know what it meant, but he didn’t want it. Then he looked into Aaron’s eyes, glistening bright, and though he didn’t understand what was happening in the least, suddenly he knew on which path goodness lay. He signed his name.

  “Witnesses!” Aaron called, shooing Benno out of the spotlight. “Champagne for everyone who puts his name as a witness on this deed of sale!”

  In the end there were thirty signatures crammed at the bottom of that document: the SS officer, a member of the Luftwaffe High Command, the richest hotelier in Berlin, the city’s most notorious madam. They did not know if it was avant-garde art or absurdist comedy, but the transfer was real, and Der Teufel belonged to simple Benno, who, after all, had one more gift, one of particular value in the years to come—he was Aryan.

  THEY CAME LATER THAT NIGHT when Hannah was onstage again, singing one of her sweetest love songs. As the young couple’s fingertips touched for the first time with poignant minor notes that boded ill for their future, the door was shoved open and a group of armed men stormed in. They weren’t in uniform, but most were party men or SA or SS members, and after their first bullhorn announcement that this Jewish-owned establishment was hereby shut down, were rather chagrined to be told by patrons who happened to be their superiors, Shut up, we’re enjoying our champagne. They smashed a window but were disheartened to learn that despite what they had been told, Der Teufel was no longer a Jewish cabaret. They checked a few papers, referred to their list, then summoned Aaron Morgenstern to join them for a conversation outside. Hannah tried to cling to him but he brushed past her without appearing to recognize her. None of the mob paid her the slightest attention. She was dressed once more in her blond wig and dirndl.

  They kicked her father to the gutter as she watched, while her mother dug her nails into her daughter’s arm, pulses of pain sending the silent coded message: Do nothing. By law you are Jewish too. Down the street, all through Berlin, worse was happening. Storefronts were smashed, inventory burned. A synagogue two blocks away was in flames, its relics plundered or destroyed. Dimly, Hannah saw someone surrounded, heard laughter, saw a ghoulish figure raise a sledgehammer. Old women were thrown out of their homes in their nightclothes, their teeth still in jars at their bedsides. Young men were rounded up for Dachau. A shot rang out. Another. And through it all, like the crackling of a wildfire, breaking glass.