by Louis Begley
She lived in Bremen with her aunt and uncle. Her aunt was her mother’s sister. She had been with them since her mother died, when she was a baby. That is what made her and me alike, two orphans, brother and sister souls. She thought her aunt liked Reinhard better than her husband. The apartment in Bremen was very small, nothing like this Jewish apartment in T. When Reinhard came to visit during her school vacations, he had to sleep with Erika in her bed, since there was no spare bed. Her aunt would get into their bed in the morning, as soon as the uncle went to work, and they would all joke together. The aunt would do anything to get close to Reinhard. My aunt was different, she and my grandmother were refined; they were ladies; one could learn from them every day. She didn’t care about Reinhard and my aunt; at least Tania wasn’t her mother’s sister. So far as she was concerned, it wasn’t our fault we were Jews. There used to be nice Jews in Bremen, like the ones Reinhard had worked for before he moved to Essen. Those Jews had gone to England. It was too bad we had not gone to England, although probably it didn’t matter. The German army would soon be there as well. She hoped Reinhard could keep us without getting into hot water.
We knew that she would have to go back to Bremen and report for her factory assignment. Production was more important now than studies; even Reinhard thought so. She planned to come back to see us in T. on her first holiday in the summer unless, by then, the war was over. In that case, Reinhard should return to his old job in Essen. They would not need a manager with his experience in a place like T. after the Russians had been beaten. She wondered where we would be once he left. That was a puzzle to which we could never find an answer, and whenever we talked about it, I could see that Erika did not really have much hope of Reinhard keeping us or of our being in some way a part of the future.
Erika’s impending departure created another puzzle, which Reinhard and Tania apparently had not anticipated. After she left, how would he explain the evidence of life in her apartment? Even if all three of us were to move to his apartment, which he did not wish because it was too small, what was he to do about his Polish cleaning woman, the supplies of food out of scale with a bachelor’s existence, voices that might be overheard? There were long consultations between him and Tania, usually in their room, but sometimes also with grandmother, while Erika and I played gin rummy. I was reading Treasure Island in Polish. Long John Silver’s pursuit of Jim terrified me. It was bound to end badly. Erika didn’t know the story; Reinhard was the only person in her family who liked books. We decided I would read aloud to her, trying to translate into German. I could skip hard and boring passages. That gave Erika another opportunity to work on my German, about which Reinhard seemed to care more and more. The consultations stalled. Reinhard asked Erika to stay until he sorted things out. She was glad to do it if it was not too long. She was happy in T.; we were nicer than her real family, but she didn’t want trouble.
When they finally did sort things out, no one was happy. Once again, we were breaking the promise that we would stay together, but it had to be. Reinhard decided that he would keep grandmother with him in T. He would be less lonely that way, and she was so quiet and needed so much rest that her presence would not be noticed. He would simply forbid the cleaning woman to open the door to her room: military secrets inside it. You peek, you are shot. When the woman was gone, grandmother could do as she liked; they would have their evening meal together. She would make zrazy and naleśniki for him, and they would have private feasts. But Tania and I were going to Lwów, where he had an apartment ready for us. We would use the Aryan papers grandfather had gotten for us. It was better than going to Warsaw because, if we were so near, he could be with us at least once a week. We would have to be careful about going out because there were people in Lwów who might recognize Tania. From that point of view only, Warsaw was preferable. When grandmother felt better, and we had gotten used to Lwów, she would join us. It was all temporary and had to be done immediately while Erika was still there, and Erika had to be in Bremen in less than a week. We did as he said. Just as the Germans were losing the battle of Moscow, we said good-bye to grandmother and left for Lwów.
TANIA and I began our life there in another former Jewish apartment, full of mirrors and carpets, which Reinhard had arranged to have unsealed. The mezuzah was still at the side of the front door. Most of the clothes of the previous owners were gone; otherwise, it was as if they had left very neatly, though in a hurry. Their name was inside book covers. They were not people Tania knew; she said that made it easier. I found a collection of lead soldiers and artillery pieces, better and more complete than the one I had in our old house in T. It must have belonged to an older boy. I decided that all these troops were the Wehrmacht and SS; they looked like winners. My old soldiers were more like the tattered Russian army that had let itself be chased from T. all the way to Moscow in six months.
Directly after “Lili Marleen,” Reinhard would turn off the radio. He and Tania would lie in bed talking and laughing for a while. My lamp was out, but I had trouble sleeping. Reinhard said it was natural; I went out so little. I would watch the thin wedge of light from their room on the floor and listen. I was jealous of Reinhard. It seemed to me that Tania had never been more beautiful. Her face was pensive and soft. She was wearing her hair very long. She said this was the style of her new hairdresser, Monsieur Guerre. Perhaps because it was so long, her hair seemed darker, the color of chestnuts after they have been polished in one’s hand. She had very few dresses and saved them for Reinhard’s visits. When we were alone in the apartment, she wore peignoirs and matching mules. She laughed that Reinhard was better at supplying lingerie than dresses or skirts: that was all right, she didn’t mind looking the kept woman with me. But, just to tease him, she invariably received him in a dress or skirt and sweater and took her time about changing into the lacy garments he preferred. She said this was all she could afford right then by way of a revolt of slaves. At last, their light would go out. I would lie in my bed quietly until they and I fell asleep.
We had no maid. One could not know how nosy she would be or what tales she might tell. Tania shopped for food first thing in the morning. She would hurry, to reduce the chances of being recognized and the time we were separated. We never went out with Reinhard; a German officer with a Polish woman and child would attract too much attention. As it was, Tania thought everyone in the building, beginning with the janitress, was giving her the evil eye, which she said was a very good thing: let them mutter about the German’s tart and her bastard, it will keep their minds off the Jewish question.
My walks with Tania were in the evening, progressively later as the days grew longer, for we did not want to go out before nightfall. We would stride rapidly down streets lit by sparse lamps and an occasional shop window. So long as the cold weather lasted, Tania was delighted. She claimed that these were perfect conditions. All our Aryan friends were at dinner or playing cards; no time to hunt the polluting Jew. The city belonged to the underworld, old and new. I suffered from her jokes. I thought they made us feel even lonelier. I didn’t like the thought of being a criminal. Besides, if we were criminals, like the pirates in Treasure Island, we should be getting some profit from it. But we didn’t; we were always afraid and nobody was afraid of us.
Spring came, and Tania and I were no longer solitary figures rushing and slipping on the frozen, dirty snow that nobody bothered to shovel off the sidewalks. We had to pay more attention. Tania’s technique for avoiding recognition changed. We were now to walk slowly and nonchalantly; that attracted the least attention. She would wear a toque with a little voilette. My feeling of shame during these expeditions was intense. Reinhard had gotten clothes for me at the Wehrmacht store. They were very new, a little too large, and had a shape that had nothing to do with my body. I thought I looked different from all other boys, like a funny box on two legs. My shoes, which laced over the ankles, were a separate center of shame. Somehow, there was a shortage of long shoelaces in T. and Lwów that even R
einhard could not overcome. As a result, I had to tie my shoes with laces that had been broken in many places and tied together, and I could either wear my shoes laced only to the middle, which I thought made me look like a beggar, or I could lace them to the top after a struggle with the hideous knots that took forever to push through the eyelets. I knew that everyone saw these knots; they showed I was an outcast.
Tania talked to me now a great deal, and not just about manners or to scold. She wanted me to understand about Reinhard. It was very important that I be affectionate when he came to see us. He was a good, simple man. He liked, above all, to have a good time, but he had got into a situation where the only good time he had was with her. She hoped she could make that be enough. When she began, it was just to make things easier in T.; she had not yet realized Reinhard would save us. Now she thought she loved him, probably as much as she had ever loved anybody. It was hard to make comparisons: she claimed she had always had a heart of stone except when it came to grandfather and me, and neither of us even knew she loved him. In the beginning of her life with my father and me in T., she had thought that she might get to love my father or anyway to make him fall in love, but she found that he measured everything out with an eyedropper—time, affection, money. He had been a perfect match for my mother who took after grandmother and had done nothing very right or very wrong in her short life. After a while, she, Tania, settled for being the perfect aunt, with only Bern sometimes there to remind her that one could have fun. But the war had opened for her an even grander career. She could be the perfect, selfless aunt who became a courtesan to save her little nephew, a sort of small-town, small-scale Esther.
We began to be more regular about lessons. Tania didn’t want me to go on making mistakes in German. It embarrassed her to have Reinhard correct me. We could not speak German on our walks, but we promised to speak nothing else at home, except when we were working on other subjects. Tania didn’t like arithmetic; she pretended she had forgotten the multiplication table. I could do the exercises in the book by myself and keep them for Reinhard to review. He was good at it, and it was good policy to have him explain things to me. She had also forgotten geography. But Tania knew and loved Polish literature and, especially, Polish poetry. She thought declamation was at the center of understanding; only if one spoke a poem could its value be revealed, and even then only if the verse was spoken well. She also believed that poetry had to be revisited often. Therefore, poems should be memorized. If one really knew a poem by heart, one could recite, barely moving one’s lips, like a priest reading his breviary, as one walked about, or got dressed, or waited to fall asleep. It would fill unused voids in one’s mind.
Tania especially admired Mickiewicz, for style and content. She decided we would read his medieval epic, Konrad Wallenrod; the subject was subversive, made for us. I soon saw why. Konrad has recently become the all-powerful master of the Teutonic Knights who have conquered all of East Prussia and are threatening the destruction and enslavement of pagan Lithuania. The time has come for a final onslaught against the Lithuanians. The knights are impatient and seemingly invincible; nothing can prevent the victory of the Germans and the cross. But Konrad, like us, is a fraud: his name is not Wallenrod; he is not German; he is Lithuanian. The knights kidnapped him when he was a child and brought him up as their own, and now he will betray them. He will so bungle the campaign that the Order will be mortally wounded, the knights humiliated, and Lithuania saved. Of course, some of the knights will puzzle out the truth and kill Konrad, but he will die happily, like Samson, because he has avenged his people.
Alas, the Wehrmacht radio was reporting nothing as threatening for the Reich. German troops had reached the Caucasus and entered Stalingrad. They were on the Volga. Africa was far away and irrelevant to Europe; each English success there seemed followed by a defeat. The Americans were bleeding to death on the atolls of the Pacific. Without any mention on the radio, the ghetto in Lwów had been emptied. Reinhard began to speak of concentration camps where people were meant to die. We wondered if we were the only Jews left in Lwów.
Reinhard was worried about my grandmother. Both he and she thought she had jaundice. She was very tired and very uncomfortable. All the remedies suggested by Tania, the repository of my father’s science, had been tried; a doctor was needed but Reinhard didn’t want to put himself in the hands of the Catholic surgeon in T. Perhaps, if grandmother improved even a little, he could bring her to Lwów. He was also worried about Bern. A personage he had never seen before—he did not even know if the man was a Jew or a Pole, perhaps just an agent provocateur—had come to the apartment with a message that Bern and his friends were in desperate need: Could he, Reinhard, help? He threw the man out, but the event could not be ignored. It could only mean that Bern had talked. If he had talked, that meant there were others who could talk in turn. If only he could emigrate to Palestine with us! This became his favorite joke.
That there were other Jews in Lwów became evident shortly afterward, during one of Tania’s and my evening walks. A man approached us and began talking very quickly, asking Tania not to be frightened and above all not to appear frightened. He had something of interest to relate. Tania’s face looked frozen and her grip on my hand tightened; we had been told that this was the usual approach of a street blackmailer of Jews. This man, however, pretended to be different. He knew Bern. He knew my father. He had often seen Tania in the past, although she did not remember him. He was himself a Jew, trying to survive in Lwów, like ourselves. Could Tania give him some money? God would reward her and her little nephew; he had Aryan papers that cost a fortune, he was paying his former janitor to hide his wife, there was almost nothing left. Unfortunately, his wife did not have the right look; she could not pass using Aryan papers. Tania said we had become poor as well, but she would do what she could. She would leave an envelope for him if he suggested a spot; it would be there tomorrow. They settled on the space behind a plaster figure in the entrance of the post office. Hertz—he asked us to call him by his real name—commended Tania for her prudence. Panna is right not to want to meet me, I could be followed; then all three of us birds would be caught in one net. But Panna must not worry that we will lose contact. I have noted where she and the precious boy reside.
We said good-bye. Tania turned the corner, and then another, until she found a street bench. We sat down. She put my hand on her breast to show me how hard her heart was beating. She said we were trapped; it did not matter that this man was a Jew. He reeked of vulgarity and swinishness. He would bleed us white and then sell us. We should immediately move to another apartment, perhaps out of Lwów, but she did not dare tell Reinhard. Coming on top of the messenger from Bern, it would be the last straw. She would give the man money, not too much but not too little. If she gave too little he would be back right away, and we had to play for time. She would put the envelope in the agreed place this very evening. She did not want him to be able to see her depositing it tomorrow; he might be waiting somewhere near the post office, hoping to show her to another bandit. She took me by the hand and walked home so fast that I almost had to run to keep up. Her night-table drawer was full of bank notes. She counted out a thin pile, then put some back, looked for an envelope and added some more money before licking the envelope sealed. We went to the post office at the same mad pace, but taking a roundabout route. Every once in a while, Tania would stop at a store window to look at something or to straighten her coat. I realized she was studying the street behind her. But we were not being followed.
After she had put the envelope behind the sculpture we went home, this time very slowly. We sat down in the kitchen. Tania made hot chocolate for both of us. She was crying. She said we were all alone; she could not telephone Reinhard, she could not telephone grandfather, there were three days to Saturday, when Reinhard would come, grandfather should not have left us all alone. Then she told me that the worst was that she herself had sunk morally to the level of the lowest of blackmailers; my grand
father would be ashamed of her. This man Hertz was surely just a poor Jew, trying to survive and to save his wife’s life. And she was so afraid, so degraded, that she had no trust left and no pity. It was she whom Hertz and every decent man should flee.
PITY is no stranger to hell. Hell brims over with self-pity. The case of the vulgar damned, outside the precincts of the enameled green, verde smalto, where congregate the biblical and intellectual elite, is clear-cut. They wail and gnash their teeth as they suffer the ghoulish punishments devised by supreme wisdom, somma sapienza, working hand in hand with primal love, primo amore. Sometimes they feel they have been entrapped: if only one had forborne from giving that last bit of evil counsel or had repented earlier, eternity would not be filled with the same unbearable pain, guaranteed to augment when, after the Last Judgment, the flesh shall be rejoined with the spirit. The self-pity of Dante and his Mantuan guide is more interesting.
Virgil, like his colleagues of the verde smalto, with slow-moving and grave eyes, con occhi tardi e gravi, resembles a Jew with technical qualifications indispensable to the Reich; no Barbariccia or other devil will sink a fork into his rump; not for him the cesspool of the Malebolge. Comparing his situation with that of the other damned, he might consider himself pretty lucky. But not in the least—at the mere thought of it he turns pale, tutto smorto; his problem is that he and his colleagues live without hope in desire, sanza speme vivemo in disio.
