Child of the Journey (12 page)

He paid for the sausages with a banknote and backed out of the door. That was twice in one morning that he had been loathe to expose his back, he thought. Suddenly he wished Hitler's war would come--almost a foregone conclusion these days. A battlefield where one could recognize the enemy might prove less dangerous than Berlin.

E
rich mounted Hawk and rode off, thinking about the girl, Bertel, about Miriam, about the woman beneath the table at Ananas. How different the world would be without women! Not better, but less...complicated.

Müller's comment came back to him.
We need a place without women. Where we can be ourselves.

With that in mind, Erich abruptly steered across traffic and headed for Friedrich Ebert Strasse. He usually avoided his home-street, especially now that his parents had returned to the apartment they had abandoned, and taken over the tobacco shop again. That thieves such as his parents could be gifted the business they had previously ransacked was indicative of the moral penury of the times. It sickened him--but whether because of the immorality or because he hated his father, he wasn't sure.

Today was Sunday, and his father had not yet opened the shop. Probably gone to Mass, now that he was wealthy; celebrating not the bread and wine, but the roast duckling and vintage sherry he and Erich's mother would later enjoy.

The idea Corporal Müller had given him overpowered Erich's scorn for everything the tobacco shop represented. He passed the place, its shades halfway down, the tall windows looking sleepy-eyed, and parked his bike next door, against the gold-plated guardrail above what was once Kaverne, Grand dame Rathenau's cabaret for the upper-crust. He looped Taurus' leash through the rail and descended the stairs. Like regressing into a past life, he thought, letting the cool, moist shadows invade him.

Shaking, he removed his lock picks, a memento from childhood, from the small leather pouch at the end of his key chain. He willed the shaking to stop, and was thankful, regardless of the trembling, when he was able to open the door.

He slipped in quickly, like a boy afraid the bogey man was coming, and shut the door quietly and firmly behind him. The basement nightclub awaited him at the bottom of the metal spiral stairs, dust dancing in the light streaming through the green, sidewalk-level windows.

The place smelled old and musty. Disused. The chairs were upended on the tables, and everything was covered with dusty muslin. He assumed, for lack of specific knowledge, that the ownership of the place had reverted to the furriers, upstairs, from whom the Grand dame had purchased it, though perhaps it belonged to Miriam and she did not know it. Had Goebbels confiscated all her property, or just the Grünewald estate? It was worth looking into.

He went slowly down the steps, the metal ringing, his eyes on the empty dance floor.
There
he--and Solomon--had first seen
her
, a sylph in white tights, form-fitting tunic, swirl of pale pink niñon. Her singing once again hummed in his ears, her subsequent can-can--with his first look at her leotarded thighs--danced before his eyes. She had been fifteen or sixteen then, probably the same age as the girl today at the butcher shop, he thought with a slight shame; he and Sol two years younger.
"Wenn der weisse Flieder wieder blüht,"
she had sung, with the voice of an angel. "When the white lilac blooms again."

Someone had stacked two sets of two tables each close to the dance floor and canopied the creation with a shawl, as though to form an archway through which dancers might pass. Kids, he thought; probably partying. He wondered if they had gotten in as he and Sol used to, with lock picks. They could not have come up through the ancient sewer that ran beneath the cabaret and the tobacco shop, because his father had welded the grate shut at the shop, and he assumed the padlock had been replaced at this end. Not that he was about to go down into the cellar to find out. The place held too many bitter memories.

His fingers, injured when the grate came down, throbbed. As though needing something physical to alleviate the memory, he pulled down the shawl.

Remembering when he had last seen it, that night of the cabaret's pre-opening celebration, he buried his face in the cloth. The effect of its scent, of Miriam's perfume even after all these years, was immediate: he was instantly aroused.

Her thighs, her armpits, the line of her jaw--each place her colognes and perfumes touched--had their separate scent which lingered with him long after it should have dissipated. Of the senses, his sense of smell and hearing were the keenest.

He put the shawl over his shoulder like a beach towel and ascended the stairs, thinking about how the place would make a wonderful club for soldiers stationed in Berlin. Where officers and enlisted could mingle and drink without the distraction of women and with only minimal talk of the Party and the Führer. He would have to find out who owned the place and get permission for such an establishment without inviting suspicion that he was seeking to rescue Rathenau assets. But stopping now and again on the stairs and drinking in the smell of the shawl, he vowed not only to attempt the endeavor, but to succeed.

As he reached the top of the stairs, barking began, then a frenzied growling.

Seized with fear for Taurus' safety, he slammed through the door, locked it, and raced up to the sidewalk, almost in one motion.

Gregor stood in the street, both hands on the pistol, which was aimed at the dog. The youth's eyes were engorged, the veins in his neck corded from anger. "She's a danger to the Reich," he said, not taking his gaze off the animal.

Gall rose from within Erich as though Satan's hand had reached into his intestines and squeezed, bringing forth his bitterest, most terrifying memory: Hitler forcing him to shoot Achilles, Taurus' mother, for chasing a prized peacock.

"Put the gun down," he said, "and I will forget you were ever here."

He would acquiesce to anything,
anything,
but knew better than to attempt to bargain with the young crazies the Hitler Youth attracted.

"Do you know what this bitch took from me?" The boy's voice was shrill. "Do you think I'll be able to perform my duties, once word gets out? The whole neighborhood will laugh! Bertel will never stop laughing!"

Erich moved forward so stealthily and smoothly the boy probably did not realize he was advancing. Years learning woodsman's skills and two months with Otto Braun, the German martial arts' expert who had fought alongside Mao Tse Tung, had taught him well.

"The next time you fuck your Bertel, your face will be in the pillow and you'll think she's coming," he said, seeking to dull the youth's mental edge. "But she'll just be laughing at you.
Laughing."

The boy swung the pistol, and fired.

But he was too late. Erich had already launched feet-first into a baseball slide. The bullet zinged over his head, knocked a shard of glass from a window, and then his right foot snapped up, connecting with the youth's groin. Years of training and a lifetime of anger went into the kick. Air whooshed from the boy's mouth. He dropped the gun, doubled over, and collapsed to his knees as he fought for breath.

Erich lifted himself up, calmly brushed off his pants--his knee was scraped and bleeding, but he pretended not to notice--and picked up the pistol. He unloaded it and, after holding a cartridge between forefinger and thumb, dropped the bullets down the sidewalk drain. They clinked as they hit. Lovely as church chimes, he thought.

He knelt beside the boy, clenched the youth's chin in his hand, and jerked the face his way. "Which do you want me to break first, your arms or your legs?" he asked, carefully modulating his voice. "Or would you rather I let Taurus loose so she can chew off your balls?"

The face, already bedsheet-white with shock, whitened still more.

"Answer me," Erich said, "or both Taurus
and
I will go to work on you. We're a team, you know."

The boy's tongue worked spastically, but no sound emerged.

Erich threw the pistol down the street. It hit asphalt with a clatter.

"You tell your girlfriend that the next time I stop for sausages, she better be ready for me. I'm going to have her every way I can think of. Right there in the sawdust, if I feel like it, with her butt propped up on a flank roast." He pressed an index finger against the youth's nose as though pushing a button. "You don't tell her that, I'm coming after you and..." A phrase occurred to him, part of a hit song the Georg Haarmann scandal had inspired.
"Mach ich Pökelfleisch aus dir,"
he paraphrased to the boy. "I'll make smoked meat out of you."
 

S
ol extracted a brown egg from his pocket. He held it up to the moonlight filtering through the cigar shop's plate-glass window and turned it this way and that, wondering at God's artistry for having made something so simple, so perfect. "If I sat on you long enough, would God turn you into a chicken?" he asked aloud.

The egg was the last of a dozen he had found in the sewer--together with cheese and bratwurst, a box of chocolates, candles, a pencil and notebook, and a supply of books--
his.

He patted his coat pocket. The biography of Isaac ben Solomon Luria, the mystic, was there, as always; he carried it around like a symbol of life, as if having it on his person ensured his survival.

Aside from the small supply of food, the sewer contained a canteen and two bottles filled with water, plus a bottle of cognac which, judging by the quality, had been lifted from the wine cellar of the estate. There was also a blanket, a pillow, and a box of first-aid items--including, to his initial amusement, a snake-bite kit. He had felt less amused when he realized the kit was probably meant to be used in the event of a bite by a sewer rat seeking food and warmth.

Cracking the egg, he lifted it to his mouth and sucked out the insides. It slid easily down his throat. He crunched the shell in the palm of his hand, looked around for somewhere to discard it, then put it in his pocket. "Bless you, Miriam Freund," he said, feeling a surge of energy.

One more night, Sol thought, looking around--one more long, damp night, and we will be out of here. For six days and nights he had lived a reverse existence. During the day, so as to make as little noise as possible, he slept. At night--like a vampire bat--he emerged from the sewer to wander around the basement and the deserted cabaret. Sometimes, like now, he came up to the shop, but mostly the memories here were too painful.

Once, a few hours before dawn, he actually had the temerity to go into the street. Hat pulled down low like that of an American film gangster, he wandered the streets. But he did not look enough like a derelict to fit in with the alleyway vagrants, and he was certainly not elegant enough to blend with the wealthy nightclub set; he was neither SS nor Wehrmacht, and the middle-class--scholars and merchants alike--were tucked safely in bed.

He pulled a pencil stub out of his pocket, licked the point, and crossed Saturday off his calendar. He had found the calendar that night, on the sidewalk, after watching the owners of the furrier shop above the cabaret throw what remained of their inventory into a beat-up lorry and leave as if the very devils of hell were chasing them. Doubtless they feared an SS witch-burning for their former Communist sympathies. The calendar had blown from the heap of litter they had left behind. From what he had seen in his brief wanderings, it was the same all over the city: piles of discarded belongings defied the image of flawless organization and a perfect society.

He stared at the picture of a leggy blonde in a white bathing suit. She stood on a balcony that overlooked Lake Geneva, leaning against the railing to support herself and displaying an ermine coat which hung casually from one of her tanned shoulders, its silk lining exposed. The Alps lay behind her.

FURS BY HELVETIA--SURROUND HER WITH SILVER LININGS

He imagined Miriam wearing the fur; imagined the two of them strolling together along the shore of the lake. He had found himself smiling. The sooner he could leave the claustrophobic atmosphere of the sewer forever, the better he would feel. He felt trapped down there, panicked, obsessed with ticking off the minutes, the seconds, till Sunday.
 

He ran a hand over his scraggly beard and grimaced at his image in the teak-framed mirror that had miraculously remained intact on the cigar-shop wall. His beard had grown in patches and was mottled underneath with scaly brown blemishes. He was gaunt and haggard. There was no heat during the night. Though he wore his coat all the time, he had developed a dry hacking cough which could well be symptomatic of TB or something equally deadly. Typhoid perhaps?

Angry at himself for being so morbid, he thrust the calendar and a fist into a pocket of his coat and surveyed the shop. The windows and door had been replaced or repaired, but the store still had a dark, oppressive quality that could not be explained away merely because the lights were off. The sewer held its terrors, but the shop depressed him--and in a large way that was worse, much worse, for in here he had known love and happiness and his father's bright eyes and bad jokes.

How much better, he thought, if
Die Zigarrenkiste
were still like the other Jewish shops he had passed on his night of wandering, the exterior walls grimed with swastikas and excrement. At least then it would still
belong.
To his people. And thus to him.