by Clare Clark
‘Everything all right?’ I ask but she doesn’t answer. She straightens out the creases in the bedspread, then reties her apron.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘I’ll put the potatoes on.’
Thursday 6 April
Dumier is late for his appointment. His mouth is split and swollen, he has a black eye. Immediately I think of Gregor Rachmann. Since yesterday I have seen him three times at least, except that each time, when I looked again, it wasn’t him. The bruise around Dumier’s eye is dark purple, smudged greenish round the edges.
‘Ouch,’ I say. ‘What happened?’
‘Wrong place, wrong time.’ He twists in his chair to look at the boxes stacked around my office, squinting a little to read the labels.
‘Someone attacked you?’
He shrugs. ‘People don’t like my face. I don’t suppose they like yours either.’
I am silent. I know how I look. I look Jewish in precisely the way that Joseph Goebbels looks Jewish, because I am short and dark and puny; but blond, blandly handsome Anton Dumier, surely he’s the archetype, the ideal Aryan Übermensch. Unless he’s a Communist? It’s not my concern, I’m not defending him in court, but I feel it still, the slither of ice down my back. The fear. When did I become so afraid?
‘So,’ I say. ‘Before we start, is there anything you want to ask?’
Dumier looks at me curiously. ‘The Rachmann trial, that was you?’
‘I defended Matthias Rachmann, yes. But I meant about your case.’
‘Small world. You should have won.’
I shrug, not sure whether he means it as a compliment or a rebuke. Everyone has an opinion about the Rachmann trial. It dominated the newspapers for weeks, the public fascination voracious and inexhaustible. Even now, a year later, people remember. Two days ago there was a cartoon in the newspaper, a drawing of an art gallery with van Gogh’s self-portrait with the bandaged ear on an easel in the window and a notice pasted on the glass: GERMANS, DEFEND YOURSELVES: BUY ONLY GERMAN VAN GOGHS! Pretty funny, I thought, especially if you’re not a Jew.
I take Dumier through Böhm’s contract. When I ask him if he understands that the contract is binding, that it takes no account of any change in circumstances in the future, he laughs bleakly.
‘Nothing’s going to change,’ he says.
I try a different tack. ‘Do you have a will?’
‘Do you mean legally or existentially?’
It’s a good joke. Perhaps there’s more to Anton Dumier than meets the eye. ‘I would urge you to be as open with me as possible,’ I say. ‘As your lawyer, I am bound by a duty of secrecy: anything you say is strictly confidential.’
‘And all the things we can’t say, what about those?’
He looks at me and I look back at him and the scab on his mouth is like a thick black stitch, sewing it shut. Then, pulling the contract towards him, he picks up my pen and signs.
Tuesday 11 April
We celebrate Passover with Erich and Erna Büttel and their sons. The boys laugh and shout and rag each other in their usual way but Gerda is very quiet. She barely touches her food. This morning she told me that this year there are no matzahs on display in any of the Jewish bakeries. They sell them secretly, sneaked out from under the counter like dirty photographs.
Thursday 13 April
I knew it was coming but it’s still a shock to see it in black and white. The German Bar Association is required to inform me that, as a non-Aryan and further to the ratification of the revised Law on the Admission to the Bar, my licence to practise has been revoked. There are too many of us, that’s the Nazi line, too many piglets at too small a trough. When there’s not enough to go around—and the truth is there isn’t and hasn’t been for years—the German people must come first.
Thank God, at least, for Hindenburg, who grasps that some of us are German at least as much as we are Jewish. His intervention has ensured that non-Aryans who fought in the war will be exempt. Those of us who are eligible are required to reapply in person. I will have to swear an oath of allegiance. Not to my country or its constitution, but to a political party who’ll be lucky still to be in power by Christmas. If they were not so frightening they would be preposterous, this brutish band of bigots who behave as though they are a cross between the Sicilian Mafia and the Boy Scouts.
I arrive early but already the queue snakes round the block. It is raining. I do not have an umbrella. I see Urschel, Böhm’s partner, ahead of me in the line. We wait for a long time. It is mid-afternoon before a man comes out of the building and tells us to come back on Monday.
Urschel and I walk together back along the river. When we pass a bar he stops. We need a drink, he says. I order a glass of beer, Urschel a large brandy. He downs it in a single swallow and asks for a second. Neither of us can think of much to say. I finish my beer. I have to go home, I tell him, my wife is expecting me. Urschel nods and gestures at the barman to top him up. I don’t know much about his private life but l do know he’s not married. I think perhaps he’s a homosexual. Poor bastard. The Campaign for a Clean Reich is gearing up and arrests are on the rise. Two weeks ago they picked up Hiller, Hirschfeld’s right-hand man at the Sex Institute, and sent him to the new concentration camp at Oranienburg.
Queer and Jewish and a legal aid lawyer in a city where Jews are now forbidden to act for the state. No wonder Urschel wants to get drunk.
Friday 14 April
I go into the office as usual. What else is there to do? I can’t stay at home with Gerda. I’ve had enough of her anxiety, the way her eyes dart to my face when she thinks I’m not looking. I’ve had enough of my own. It goes round and round in my head, the bills and our dwindling savings account and what happens when we can no longer pay the rent. I sit at my desk and move bits of paper until it is time to go home.
Saturday 15 April
You should have won. Anton Dumier’s words merge with the image of Gregor Rachmann smoking in the doorway to create one of those animated neon advertisements in my head, it repeats itself ceaselessly and I can’t make it stop. Am I to blame? Could we have won if I had only done things differently? Not everyone agreed with my approach. I argued about it with my old friend Ernst Liffmann before we went to trial.
‘People think criminal trials are a matter of plot, who did what when and to whom, but that’s just housekeeping,’ he said. ‘Criminal trials are all character.’
I disagreed. Coherence, I said, that’s what wins cases. The shaping of the jumble of the things we know for certain, the things we know and cannot prove, and the unknowable spaces in between, into a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, a story that makes sense.
What made sense to me with Rachmann was anger. Everything about it made me angry: the grasping dealers, the idiot police, the so-called experts who turned out to be as ignorant as everyone else. If Rachmann was guilty, his pictures not only had to be fakes, he had to have known they were fakes when he sold them. But how could he, when a dozen so-called experts assured him they were genuine? Rachmann never pretended to be a connoisseur. He paid for, and accepted, the assurances of others better qualified than himself. So why was it Rachmann who ended up in the dock and not the men whose defective judgement had put him there? For days in that dark courtroom I raged about scapegoats, about injustice, about the bitter unequal battle between the masters and the men. Anger is simpler than grief and I was very angry.
The experts were angry too. By the time the case finally came to court, and it took years, they all had scores to settle and reputations to salvage and not one of them was going down without a fight. With the exception of the mumbling Köhler-Schultz, they declaimed from the stand like evangelists competing for souls. They disagreed fervidly on everything. One man’s blatant forgeries sent another into raptures. The Stransky Self-Portrait that the Dutch expert Hendriksen declared van Gogh’s greatest masterpiece was, for Stemler of the Nationalgalerie, probably the worst painting he had ever seen. While even Rachmann conceded that so
me of the paintings he had sold were probably forgeries, no one could agree on which ones or how many. Even the ranks of technical experts, the paint analysers and the fingerprint people and the purveyors of all-seeing X-rays whose testimony I feared might prove our undoing, served up nothing but contradictions.
De Vries was the cherry on the cake. When the man who had started all this took the stand and solemnly informed the court he had changed his mind for a third time, that he now considered five of the Rachmann canvases to be genuine after all, I was certain we had it. So were the journalists. On the morning of the judgment, almost all of the newspapers called it for us. We were wrong. The judges agreed that some of Rachmann’s paintings were indeed van Goghs, though they didn’t say which, but Rachmann was convicted of fraud, thanks mostly to some very dodgy bookkeeping. His story about the Russian, while never disproved, was dismissed by the bench as entirely implausible.
And at appeal it happened all over again, in pretty much the same order and with stiffer penalties. Rachmann got nineteen months in prison, with an extra three hundred days to cover the thirty-thousand-mark fine he couldn’t pay. The sentence was harsh, unreasonably so, but by then the winds of change had become a hurricane and the judges were terrified, the world was breaking up around them. They made an example of Rachmann and he paid heavily. Until he settles his bills, so have I.
Did I misjudge the case? I didn’t think so then. There was a sour mood in Germany at that time, a sense of reckoning. Hard-working people had struggled for too long. A new age was dawning and the little man’s time had come. Rachmann’s best chance was for the court to see him as a victim, the stooge of a privileged elite intent on protecting their own. Besides which the judges were right, his story about the Russian was implausible. We had to create a distraction, to make it someone else’s fault.
I have changed my mind since then. I’ve come to think Ernst was right. The story I told the court was logical enough, but it forgot what every child with a picture book knows, that a good story needs more than a villain or twelve. It needs a hero.
Thursday 20 April
Today is the Führer’s birthday. They’re calling it the Day of the Nation. There are parades in the streets and rousing radio broadcasts and vast swastikas rippling from every lamppost and flagpole in Berlin. At the Criminal Court in Moabit proceedings were adjourned for two hours of singing and sycophancy for a leader who flagrantly flouts the rule of law.
Nothing sticks. That’s what we tell ourselves. If recent years have taught us anything it is that nothing sticks. Soon it will be another party making all the promises. Hitler’s strongest opponents have fled abroad, he cannot silence them there. The pendulum will swing. It must. Someone will make it swing. But who? When?
Tuesday 25 April
My readmission to the Bar is confirmed. I will no longer be listed in Berlin’s justice administration directory—a separate guide will be issued for non-Aryans—but I have my licence, I can still work. The relief is shameful and exquisite. My limbs prickle with it. I can’t stay in the office, I need air. In the courtyard a sharp breeze shakes the cherry tree, swirling the blossom into drifts of pink snow. I open a new pack of cigarettes and smoke one. I keep the card for the Büttel boy. It has the boxer Walter Neusel on it, the one they call the Blond Tiger. They used to print famous portraits smoking on the back of this brand, during the trial it amused people to buy me the van Gogh one, but it is all sportsmen now.
‘Down, me down!’ a piping voice cries out behind me and I turn to see Fräulein Eberhardt, a small boy wedged on one hip. She doesn’t see me. The boy squirms, kicking his heels against her. He’s at that solid, silky-haired stage, not a baby any more but not yet quite a child.
‘Down?’ she asks him. ‘You don’t want a horsey ride?’
‘Horsey!’ he crows and, hoisting him higher, she starts to gallop round the courtyard. The boy squeals with delight. As she rounds the cherry tree she sees me and smiles but she doesn’t slow down. The two of them complete another round of the courtyard before she staggers to a stop. They are both laughing.
‘Again, again!’ the boy cries and she hugs him closer and kisses his cheek. The ring is still on her left finger in the traditional way, she is not married yet. The boy clasps her neck, fitting himself against her, and stares at me. His eyes are dark and fierce, like hers.
‘Horses have to rest between races,’ she says. ‘This is Herr Berszacki, Ivo. He’s a friend of Anton’s.’
I smile. ‘Hello, Ivo,’ I say and, suddenly shy, he twists away from me, burying his face in Fräulein Eberhardt’s shoulder. ‘How old is he, your son?’
‘He’s three but he’s not mine. His mother is my oldest friend. When she—when it didn’t work out with Ivo’s father, they came to live with me.’
‘He’s a fine boy. She will stay in Berlin, I hope, your friend?’
She frowns at me. I’ve confused her.
‘When you’re married, I mean. She won’t move away?’
Fräulein Eberhardt turns her head, her lips brushing the boy’s forehead, and it’s like catching the smell of a long-forgotten perfume, something about the shape they make together twists my heart. I look down at the ground, at the brown-edged blossoms strewn about my feet.
‘She’ll stay with me,’ she says. ‘With us. They both will, it’s their home.’
I leave the two of them in the courtyard, a last horsey ride. As I cross the road towards the station I see a man at the newspaper kiosk and my stomach drops. Gregor Rachmann, I could swear it, only it isn’t him, it never is. I know that if I turn around the man will be someone else, someone who looks nothing like Rachmann, so I don’t turn around, I won’t let myself. I keep walking and my neck is stiff with not looking, with not being afraid.
Thursday 27 April
Every day brings more letters from clients who no longer require my services. Künel apologises, he hopes I appreciate the difficulty of his position. Hildebrand seems to think I am Jewish just to vex him. He returns my bill with VOID scrawled across it in red ink. I tear it up. My hands are shaking. This is the problem with not having enough work to do. Your anxieties loom over you like a bore at a party: I’m Impending Ruin, let’s talk about me. So I do what I would do at a party. I flee. I shove the letters in a drawer and I get up and I tear open boxes. I lay the Rachmann papers out on the floor. What, I ask myself, if I had made that trial about Rachmann the man? In that courtroom, surrounded as he was by braggers and blusterers of the first order, could I have made a hero of him?
He didn’t look like one. By then we Germans wanted heroes in the Aryan mould, muscled Blond Tigers with square jaws and manly eyebrows. Matthias Rachmann, as several newspapers cattily observed, looked like a girl. As Berliners fought pitched battles in the streets and kicked the last shreds of life from the limp-wristed Weimar experiment, no one was on the side of the queers and the dancers.
I should have remembered that Rachmann was a performer, that he knew how to hold an audience. On the last day of the trial, when the final arguments had been delivered, he rose and asked the bench if he might be permitted to say a few words. I was horrified, he had said nothing to me, but the judges acceded. Gravely he waited for silence. When at last he spoke you could have heard a fly blink.
‘The last four years have been the hardest of my life. My belief in many of the paintings I sold has been shaken, my faith in many of those I trusted to help and advise me shattered. But in the darkness a light still burns, a beacon to guide me. I gave my word of honour to a man of honour. If I was deceived, so was he. My trust in him remains absolute and true.’
For a moment no one moved, and in that moment I believed in him completely. Not in the shadow-puppet Russian prince but in Rachmann’s faith in him, whoever he was. For eleven days I had heard nothing but a cacophony of brass, trumpets thunderously blowing themselves. Then suddenly this, clear and pure like a single flute.
It changed nothing. How could it? It was too little, too late. A snatc
h of birdsong, sweet enough to give you pause, but brief and easily forgotten. If you want to make a melody stick, as any two-penny songster will tell you, you have to let all the instruments have it, then get them to repeat it over and over again, forwards and backwards and upside down until the damn thing hatches in your head, a maggot squirming ceaselessly in the folds of your brain.
Ernst Liffmann was right. I should have seen it coming. I should have kicked off the trial with that statement of Rachmann’s and built a bloody great symphony out of it. I should have listened to my client and not my own anger, the raging in my head that I stoked and stoked, louder and louder, so I wouldn’t hear the sound of my heart splitting in two.
Sunday 30 April
For days now I have been rolling an idea around in my mind like one of the coloured glass marbles my brother Stefan and I used to fight over as boys, looking at the patterns in it. A way to make some money, yes, but also to set the record straight, to settle the past more squarely on its axis.
When I first met Rachmann all I knew about van Gogh was what everyone knew, that he was a suicidal madman who cut off his own ear and never sold a single painting. It was Rachmann who told me that was rubbish, that in his last years van Gogh was widely admired, both by critics and by fellow artists who traded their work for his. He might have only sold one or two canvases but, for a man who had been painting for less than a decade, whose style broke every rule in the book, he was well on the way to success. It was Julius Köhler-Schultz who wrote the other story, the one everyone knows, and because we liked it better than the real one it stuck.
So this is my idea: why not do a Köhler-Schultz on Matthias Rachmann? Germany is floundering, drowning. We throw in our lot with one bungling government after another and each time, for our own protection, they push us further under. What better time, then, for the story of a man lit not by genius but by decency? A man who bore ignominy and imprisonment rather than betray his conscience, who chose to save not his skin but his soul. When we no longer believe in God, we need more than ever to believe in men.
