In the Full Light of the Sun

by Clare Clark

  Harald Baeck. Julius took a gulp of his watery coffee, swallowing his shame. ‘I’m not surprised,’ he said. ‘That man had a heart of stone.’

  That evening he sat for a long time in his study. What would life be, Vincent wrote to his brother, if we had no courage to attempt anything? Julius was weary of the blank wall, of the deep ache that it roused in him, but he could not keep himself from looking. The details of the painting pressed down on his memory: the feathered curl of Vincent’s unkempt beard, the green line down the length of his nose, the blue smudge of shadow under his eyes that matched exactly the frenzy of overlapping brushstrokes around his head. He had tried to hang the Seurat in its place. The nail was the right height for it, it would not have to be moved, but, though his fingers fumbled with the wire across its back, he could not do it. In the end he rang for Frau Lang and told her to take it away. She peered at it, bulging her eyes.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, it’s a nude, not the devil incarnate,’ he snapped at her and the housekeeper had picked up the painting and marched out of the room, her arms held stiffly out in front of her. As though it were a tray of faeces, Julius thought with a familiar surge of exasperation and remorse. When Frau Lang had first come to them he had pleaded with Luisa to let her go, but Luisa had only laughed.

  ‘You wouldn’t be so cruel,’ she teased. ‘Don’t you know she worships you?’

  He knew nothing of the sort, but over the years he had grown accustomed to her and her compendium of grimaces. She was short-tempered and small-minded and stubborn as a donkey but she knew his habits and his preferences. She understood, as Luisa would not, the importance of his work, the impossibility of distraction or interruption. She was reliable and she was loyal. After Luisa left, Julius had asked her if she wanted to go back to Munich but she shook her head.

  ‘My place is here,’ she said firmly. ‘With you.’

  According to Fräulein Grüber’s typed report, Harald Baeck lived in an apartment in Friedrichshain. He was not on the telephone. He was listed in the Berlin directory as an employee of the Siemens factory in Spandau.

  ‘A factory?’ Julius said doubtfully. ‘You’re sure he’s our man?’

  ‘I telephoned to check,’ Fräulein Grüber said. ‘He’s worked there for three years. He writes instruction manuals for electrical appliances.’

  A single ticket to Siemensstadt cost 150,000 marks. When Harald Baeck saw Julius standing beside the policeman at the turnstile he went grey. He turned and tried to force his way back through the throng of passengers, but it was leaving time and the crush was too great. Julius pressed a banknote into the policeman’s open palm. Then, pushing his way through the crowd, he put a hand on Baeck’s shoulder.

  ‘You and I need to talk,’ he said.

  They went to a bar near the station. Julius bought them both a brandy. Baeck drank his in a single swallow. Julius thought of The Brothers Karamazov, Mitya protesting to Rakitin, But if God does not exist, that means everything is permitted, and Rakitin’s laughing reply: Surely you know everything is permitted to the intelligent man? Julius did not believe in God. He believed in beauty and in the beautiful exalted struggle of the human spirit. Or he had, once.

  ‘I have a proposal for you,’ he said.

  Baeck did not protest. The next day, as agreed, he went to Böhm’s office and signed a statement admitting that he had had sexual relations with the respondent at her marital home on the night of 9 February 1923. Böhm told Julius that, except to confirm his name, Harald Baeck had not said a single word.

  Newspaper presses were requisitioned to print banknotes. There was talk of paper rationing, of walk-outs and strikes. Geisheim summoned Julius to a meeting at the Tribüne offices and told him he was cutting the number of pages, just till things improved. Julius did not protest. No one bought newspapers any more anyway. He walked home slowly, a headache like a hatband tightening around his skull. Frau Lang banged open the front door.

  ‘He just barged in,’ she hissed, taking Julius’s hat. ‘I told him you were out and he barged straight in like he owned the place.’

  Julius sighed. ‘What are you talking about? Who barged in?’

  ‘I’m afraid she means me.’ Rachmann stood in the doorway of the morning room. ‘I should have telephoned, I know, but I go back to Düsseldorf tomorrow and I wanted to say thank you. For all the kindness you’ve shown me. I wouldn’t have waited, only Fräulein Grüber said she thought you might—but of course if it’s inconvenient I quite understand. I’m not usually the barging-in type.’ He smiled at Julius and, despite his headache, Julius smiled back. There was something so fresh about the boy’s eagerness and his embarrassment, his inability to dissemble. Beside him Julius felt used up, shop-soiled.

  ‘Then I’m glad you made an exception this time,’ he said. ‘Some coffee, Frau Lang, if you please.’

  ‘Of course.’ Frau Lang smiled dutifully, but Julius saw how she narrowed her eyes at Rachmann as though he was an unruly guest of Luisa’s, liable to vomit on the stairs or make off with the silver.

  ‘And cake,’ Julius added pointedly. ‘We have cake, don’t we?’

  The cake was glossy and golden, topped with overlapping slices of apple. As Frau Lang deposited it without ceremony on the table, Rachmann’s eyes widened like a child’s. There was no cake in the bakeries in Berlin, not any more. Julius cut him a slice and watched as delicately, precisely, he ate every crumb.

  They talked about art. Rachmann was untutored but his passion was prodigious and unfeigned. It was in the port city of Haarlem, he told Julius, that he had fallen in love for the first time and twice over, with the portraits of Franz Hals and the smell of the sea. He had been eight years old.

  ‘Though I realise I shouldn’t admit to Hals,’ he added. ‘Not if I wish you to think well of me. I should lie and say it was Rembrandt.’

  Julius smiled. ‘Perhaps, but I should know that you were lying. Rembrandt is the greater artist, it’s true, but there is a darkness in his work, he shows us the shadow of mortality. Whereas with Hals it is all about life, vitality, the impetuosity of his brushwork like a burst of laughter. Naturally the child chooses Hals. It is a matter of key, Hals the treble and Rembrandt the bass.’

  ‘But that’s it,’ Rachmann said, laughing delightedly. ‘That’s it exactly.’

  Julius had not known until that afternoon that he could feel nostalgia for something that was yet to happen. That afternoon, for the first time, he saw his son sitting where Rachmann was sitting, his young face rapt, his mind bursting with the ideas that Julius had carefully planted and cultivated. He had toyed with the notion when the boy was first born, the collection of places and pieces that might best stimulate a child’s imagination and shape his aesthetic sensibilities. He took down the animal pictures Luisa had chosen for the nursery and hung in their place two Pissarro watercolours, a peasant woman in a blue apron and another woman braiding her hair.

  ‘Why do you even care?’ Luisa said, but he insisted. A child was a plastic creature after all, clay to be moulded. He would not allow his son to be coarsened by what was brutal and witless and ugly.

  What hope did the boy have now, holed up with Luisa’s parents in Munich? Together they would teach the child to be provincial in the Bavarian style, smothered by Bocklin reproductions and lederhosen and violent outdoor games. Julius had grown up with boys like that. He had despised them all.

  He was showing Rachmann van Gogh’s drawing of the girl in the striped jacket, the one Vincent had called La Mousmé, when Frau Lang knocked at the door. He had not realised it was so late. Rachmann put the drawing down reluctantly, as though he could hardly bear to let it go.

  ‘Barge in again soon, won’t you?’ Julius said as he bade him good night and it charmed him to see the pleasure in the young man’s face, his unconcealed delight. Julius was attending a concert at the Philharmonie that evening, he knew he should go upstairs to change, but he lingered in his study, one hand on the back of the chair Rachmann had sat
in. On the table the apple cake glistened, spilling buttery crumbs. Julius wished he had thought to give it to Rachmann to take with him. He should have had Frau Lang pack up a basket. He should have pressed money on him, should have slipped a note or two covertly into the pocket of his overcoat. A single dollar would have sustained him for weeks. Instead he had allowed the boy to leave empty-handed, Julius, who grew richer like Midas every day without touching anything at all.

  He went to see Böhm. A light snow was falling, the first of the winter. Shivering, Julius hailed a horse cab. Until recently horse cabs had been a relic. Now, suddenly, they were back. The cab was old and rickety, the horse hardly more than a skeleton, but Julius was glad of it. Berlin was no longer safe. Every day new rumours sent angry mobs spilling out into the streets: the government was stopping unemployment relief, farmers were stockpiling food, the sausage in the meat market was made from human flesh. They blamed the politicians, the shopkeepers, the Jews. As the grandson of a Jew who had converted to Protestantism thirty years before he was born, Julius knew how Jewishness could mark a man out—his disparagement of German art had long provoked more-or-less veiled slurs from his critics—but still it shocked him, the depth and violence of the hatred. In the Jewish quarter men in beards and high-crowned hats were routinely stripped of their clothes and beaten bloody.

  The fire in Böhm’s office was unlit, the room so cold that Julius could see his breath. He did not take off his coat. The lawyer apologised, the civil courts were still impossibly clogged, no date had been offered even for a directions hearing, but Julius had not come to discuss the divorce. He told Böhm he wished to make provision for his son, a capital sum to be held in trust until he came of age.

  ‘A financial settlement?’ Böhm said doubtfully. ‘Money?’

  Julius nodded. Almost no one used money in Berlin any more. The prices were meaningless—a single match for nine hundred million marks—and they changed six times a day; no one ever had enough. At the cinema near Böhm’s office the sign in the window of the ticket booth read Admission—two lumps of coal. Berlin’s most eminent doctors demanded their fees in food.

  ‘One thousand American dollars,’ Julius said. ‘I want him to be free.’

  ‘Then buy him a house. Buy him two houses. A tangible asset that will appreciate and generate an income.’

  ‘Steal from my comrades, you mean? I can’t do that. And anyway, why would I take such a risk? Do you know how fast the dollar is rising? They say tomorrow it will pass seven hundred milliard marks.’

  Böhm gave a choked little laugh. ‘With respect, Julius, your son is not yet a year old. You think this can go on until he is twenty-one?’

  The newspapers went on strike. On street corners the newsstands stood empty, shuttered against the cold. The headlines had been bleak for months, Julius could hardly bring himself to read them, but the words had imposed order, the chaos confined to paragraphs and columns. Without them the madness mushroomed, spreading like gas. Nobody knew what was happening. It’s not the end of the world, his father had barked when Julius wept over some trifle as a boy. It felt like it now.

  He was having breakfast when the telephone rang. Fräulein Grüber knocked on the dining-room door. It was Herr Böhm, she said, he said it was urgent. When Julius picked up the receiver Böhm’s voice was hoarse. He asked Julius if he was listening to the wireless. The Reichsbank had finally intervened in the foreign exchange markets. The new Rentenmark had been stabilised at 4.2 marks to the dollar. In a single stroke the bank had wiped twelve zeros off the exchange rate. No one could say if it would hold, but if it did, the inflation was over. When Böhm hung up Julius stood in the morning room, staring at the floor.

  ‘Is everything all right, sir?’ Fräulein Grüber asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looked down in confusion at the receiver in his hand, then handed it to Fräulein Grüber, who replaced it on its cradle.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you should sit down.’

  Julius shook his head. He could hardly believe it was possible. It seemed so simple, so improbable, like something from a fairy tale. A pen waved like a magic wand and, just like that, the madness was ended. If it held. He looked at the fire in the grate beside Fräulein Grüber’s desk, the coal glistening in the coal bucket. If it held he was no longer a rich man.

  He went out. He did not know what else to do. He walked to the canal, then west towards the zoo. On a November day just like this one, five years ago, Germany had signed the armistice that ended the war. It was very still. The grey buildings looked like paper cut-outs against the flat white sky and the canal was a strip of metal, reflecting the bare black branches of the trees. It was like a photograph, Julius thought, no colour anywhere, and he was filled with the sudden certainty that none of it was real, that he was a character in a film, walking towards a destiny that someone else had already written for him.

  He crossed the bridge. On the other side two men were walking towards him, deep in conversation. The taller of the two was talking intently, gesturing with his hands. The other looked like Rachmann. As they drew closer Julius saw that it was indeed Rachmann and, as he quickened his pace to meet him, Rachmann looked up and caught his eye. Julius smiled but Rachmann turned his head, muttering to his companion, who glanced at Julius before hurrying away down a side street. Rachmann waited until he was out of sight. Then, turning back to Julius, he held out his hands and smiled. ‘Herr Köhler-Schultz, what a pleasant surprise. You’ll excuse my brother, I hope. An urgent appointment, he couldn’t wait.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The two men stood side by side, looking down into the dark water of the canal. ‘It’s impossible not to remember, isn’t it?’ Rachmann said softly. ‘Another ending, five years ago?’

  Julius nodded. There was a lump in his throat. ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s strange, I was just thinking of you. But then I always think of you when I walk here.’

  Neither of them wanted to go back to work. They walked back along the canal towards Meierstrasse.

  ‘Is this the end?’ Rachmann asked. ‘Will it hold?’

  ‘Who knows? We can but hope.’ According to Böhm, the newly issued banknotes bore the word wertbeständig, constant value, as though anyone in Germany still believed in such a thing, and Julius felt a sudden giddy urge to laugh. ‘Hope means hoping when things are hopeless. Who said that? Not a German, certainly.’

  Rachmann grinned and the strange elation that had seized Julius grew stronger. ‘I think we should celebrate,’ he said. ‘Before the madness begins again.’

  At home he had Frau Lang bring up a bottle of the vintage Billecart-Salmon. No one had drunk champagne in the morning at Meierstrasse since Luisa left. The housekeeper set out the ice bucket and glasses in silence, and stalked from the room. Julius burst into laughter.

  ‘You’re a malign influence,’ he told Rachmann. ‘In Munich Frau Lang was a pillar of the Temperance Society.’

  ‘And here in Berlin?’

  ‘Does such a thing even exist in Berlin?’ Still laughing, Julius peeled the foil from the bottle and twisted the cork free. He poured two glasses and handed one to Rachmann. ‘A toast. To constant value, whatever that may be.’

  ‘To constant value. And to you, Herr Köhler-Schultz, for your faith in it.’

  ‘Please, call me Julius,’ Julius said, surprising himself.

  Rachmann smiled. ‘Matthias,’ he said. Leaning forward, he touched the rim of his glass to Julius’s. Matthias, Julius thought as he drank, the apostle chosen to replace the traitor Judas Iscariot, whose name meant gift from God.

  ‘Though I have to say,’ Matthias added teasingly, ‘mine seems the better end of the arrangement. Herr Köhler-Schultz is quite a mouthful.’

  Julius smiled. ‘My fault, I’m afraid. I was plain Köhler growing up. I took the Schultz when I left for university, in memory of my mother. My father was mortified, which was, I’m ashamed to admit, a large part of the point.�
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  ‘You were young when your mother died?’

  ‘As young as it is possible to be. She died in childbirth.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That is a heavy responsibility.’

  Julius was silent. How was it, he wondered, that a blacksmith’s son from Düsseldorf could see into the furthest corners of his heart?

  ‘My older brother’s wife died from puerperal fever,’ Matthias said. ‘It was during the blockades and there was no food, no medicine. The child lived. Erich loves him very much but there is still blame. All these years later he still cannot quite forgive.’

  Julius thought of his own father, an industrialist for whom the world was only ever a balance sheet, money in and money out. He had wanted Julius to be a mechanical engineer. ‘I suppose there will always be things for which our parents cannot forgive us. Which we will not forgive our children.’

  ‘Alas, I have no children to forgive,’ Matthias said. ‘But you do, I think?’

  ‘One. A son.’

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘Konstantin. His name is Konstantin.’

  ‘And are there things you cannot forgive Konstantin?’

  Julius thought of the photograph on his dressing table, his son’s dimpled hands and anxious expression. ‘Not yet. But then he’s not yet a year old. There’s still plenty of time.’

  Matthias smiled faintly, staring down into his glass. ‘Perhaps, though, we should not wish for our parents to forgive us. Perhaps it is the striving for their forgiveness that spurs us to live good lives.’ He hesitated. ‘I did not fight. In the war. I was called up in 1916, I joined my regiment, but I had a—I went to pieces. Battle shock, they called it. I can’t remember much of it. There was an offensive and then later a hospital. My father thinks I am a coward. He does not say so, but I know. He thinks—he thinks I failed him. That I failed our country. I carry that with me always. It is there always, driving me on. That perhaps if I can make him proud, I will make it up to him. That he will forgive me.’