Child of the Light (40 page)

"Now let us forget all of this unpleasantness and watch a more pleasant form of entertainment." Goebbels gave a passing glance to the dead animal. "Come, everyone, the bolero is about to begin."

Erich knelt beside Achilles, stroking her warm fur. Taking Magda by the arm, Goebbels led the way to the largest of the three arenas. Only Perón remained near Erich.

In the center of the arena and raised a meter off the ground was a small circular stage surrounded by twenty chairs, their backs toward the stage. Male dancers in tuxedos and white ruffled shirts emerged from behind a screen and straddled each chair. An equal number of violinists took their places beneath a circle of flickering gaslights.

A circular curtain was raised from the middle of the arena. Curled on the floor under a single gaslight was Miriam Rathenau, sheathed in black tights and leotard.

Softly, slowly, Ravel's music began. She uncoiled languorously, her face expressionless. Erich thought her the most desirable creature he had ever seen. She stretched, swayed--and resumed the fetal position.

Almost imperceptibly the music increased in tempo and volume. This time when the woman stretched, she remained on her knees. The audience's breathing quickened and the circle of male dancers half-stood and inched their chairs toward the raised stage.

Stopped.

Sighed.

Miriam raised her head and slowly came to her feet as the tempo of the music picked up. He glanced at the audience, then up at Perón, who was smiling. Women eyed their partners who, in turn, ogled Miriam.

The male dancers removed their tuxedo jackets, threw them aside and inched their chairs forward. The music and the audience and the circle of male dancers were a moving articulation of lust. One dancer, kicking over his chair, climbed up onto the stage. Another followed, and another. The three of them crawled toward her as she turned, lifting her leg higher and higher until it seemed she would surely fall or split herself.

And then the music stopped and the gaslight, flickering one last time, went out.

"Brava!" a man called out. "More!"

After a long silence, the applause began. Despite Miriam's bravura performance, it was, at best, restrained.

Perón bent down close to Erich's ear. "You Germans are a strange breed," he whispered. "On the same night, in the same place, you execute your friend and then view this celebration of life. Neither time have you shown emotion. In Buenos Aires, both would move us to tears."

With the Games a thing of the past, Sol waited for the
Juden Unerwünscht
signs to go up again--like an expectant father waiting for the birth of a child he knows will be deformed. Every evening, before dinner, he went for a walk. Body throbbing with tension, he wandered Berlin, looking, listening, watching. Though he was accustomed to the noise and odor, tonight the city's sounds and smells assailed him as if the honking and engines and exhaust were somehow exaggerated. There seemed to be an undercurrent, an undefined heightening of the usual cacophony and stench, as if the city of which his family had been a part for eleven generations had become an enormous and unfamiliar factory producing machinery he neither recognized nor understood.

Something drove him out of the city. He had refused Erich's repeated offers to pay for a ticket to the Games, saying that if they disbanded the Oranienberg detention center before the Olympics, he would believe that the signs would stay down--that the worst was over. If that happened, he would buy as many tickets as his pockets could hold and hand them out to the Jews of Berlin. They would come to cheer, hold hands and sing
Deutschland über Alles.

Sweating profusely from the effort, he walked five kilometers to the Olympia Stadium, to see for himself that all was as surely gone as the Olympic village organizer and builder, Captain Wolfgang Fürstner. Replaced at the last moment as village commandant because he was Jewish, he had calmly put a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Still, the Games had been good for business. Foreign visitors bought marks at rates set especially low and, for the first time since Friedrich Weisser's beating, the shop made a nice profit.

Sol had avoided seeing the Games but there had been no avoiding the loudspeakers spread throughout the city. The triumphant cry of the predominantly German crowd calling out, "YESSA O-VENS! YESSA O-VENS!" rang in Solomon's ears as he watched the last of the dismantling process taking place at the stadium.

Though personally delighted by Jesse Owens' triumphs, Sol predicted they would bring nothing but trouble. Even a fool could tell that the Führer was livid over the American's victories. The world's cameras and journalists had recorded the festival of color and sound, the long blue banners showing the five Olympic rings, the red banners decorated with swastikas hung from poles fifteen meters high. The world pictured Berlin roped with evergreens and gold. Thanks to Movietone News, they had seen Hitler Youth bands, brown shirts and short pants scrupulously starched, move through Olympia Stadium's arch and onto the dull-red cinder track; they had heard snare drums rattling out marches and loudspeakers playing waltzes and quickstep marches. They had laughed at Hitler's heavy-handed architectural approximation of the grandeur of the Roman Coliseum, his unschooled vision of a new Berlin.

None of it meant anything. The truce was transient, the memories fleeting. Temporary--the operative word of the times.

The Games, the memories, the present--all vaguely moving shadows.

"O-VENS!"

"SIEG HEIL!"

"O-VENS!"

"SIEG HEIL!"

Head pounding, Solomon began the hike home. When his head and chest began to throb so hard that each step took his breath away, he left the Olympic Highway and hurried along the Konigsallee. Pain notwithstanding, he would be home in time for a whispered
Shabbat
Service around his mother's starched white linen tablecloth and candlesticks--his sister's most recent letter propped against them:
Mama's fine, I'm fine, when are you and Miriam coming so that you can be fine, too?

Near the Imperial Palace, he had to stop. The noise that spilled from adjacent alleys and avenues engulfed him. Deafened him. Buffeted him as if it were alive.

Then, reflected in a department store window, he saw the sign that had entered his subconscious and registered its effect on his body before his conscious mind could deal with it: JEWS NOT WELCOME.

Crowds surged around him, smiling and unnoticing. Cars growled and windows leered, tall buildings wavered--and the pain worsened.

He walked on, holding his chest.

Heart attack.
Twenty-eight years old, and about to drop dead.

By the time he reached Franzosische Strasse, his chest and throat felt constricted and an icy cold had enveloped him, bringing with it sweat and chills. The sidewalk seemed to roll beneath him, burning his feet.

It's really all gone, Sol thought desperately. The banners, the cheers, the drummers and athletes marching in revue, the doves and balloons and the promises of peace...the journalists, parroting Hitler's proclamation of a Golden Age not only for Germany but for the world.

The city had returned to normal.

A worker in a white painter's smock watched Sol curiously, then picked up a second sign. Expertly splaying out the edges with a yellow bristled brush, he slapped it up:

SHOP HERE! JEWS NOT ADMITTED!

WE GUARANTEE JEWISH FILTH

WON'T DEFILE THIS ESTABLISHMENT

The worker smiled and nodded, his face distorted like an image seen through a fish-eye lens. Sol took off his glasses and rapidly cleaned them. Sweat stung his eyes.

Around him, unconcerned, people moved at their normal pace.

He leaned against a brick wall that proclaimed DEATH TO ALL JEWS. The pain in his chest was a jackhammer. The city's noise roared in his ears like a animal. He made his way laboriously along the wall, sliding a hand along its rough surface. At the end of the wall he sank to his knees, teeth gritted in agony.

A white-haired shopkeeper dressed in the black robes of orthodoxy was taping a Jewish star on his shop window. "You all right?" He stepped away as though Sol were unclean.

"Must get home," Sol mumbled in Yiddish.

The man looked around furtively and then bent over Solomon. "Are you ill?" he asked anxiously. "In trouble? Get inside, man. Our enemies are everywhere."

Sol struggled to his feet. He stared at the
Mogen David
the man had pasted on the window; the Star of David bulged and receded as he struggled for breath and tried to focus.

"Why?" He pointed at it.

"Orders. They say they'll leave us in peace if we announce our heritage. So what if Gentiles don't buy from us, at least we'll keep our businesses."

"You believe that!"

"Please, be quiet!" Gathering his scissors and roll of tape, the shopkeeper withdrew into his store like a snail into its shell. When the door shut with a click, the city noise again became a carnivore--some ancient god escaped from back alleys.

Suddenly Solomon knew it for what it was.

Half running, half staggering, he reeled down the street, away from the beast of oncoming riot. His breaths came in gasps. His chest felt white-hot with pain. Auto horns roared in warning and people hurried, looking fearful as they made a path for a madman.

Father! Miriam!

Half an hour later Sol burst into the shop and slammed the door, its bell jangling. Clutching the accouterment cabinet, dripping sweat onto its glass, he fought for breath. His father was in the alcove of the basement stairs, holding the open curtain in his hand. He did not turn around.

"Make a star!" Sol cried. "Put it in the window. They're coming now! In the daylight! I can feel it!"

"What use is there in doing anything--now," Jacob muttered.

"I met another shopkeeper. He was--"

"Only two people besides our family knew that combination." Jacob's voice was low and hoarse. With a sweep of his hand, he indicated the open safe set in the alcove wall. It was empty.

Half a minute passed before Sol realized that they had been robbed and that he knew who had done it. Looking toward the ceiling friezes, he made a sound that was a mix of sobbing and laughter. "Should I summon the Weissers?" he asked sarcastically. "They really should be told."

Jacob wheeled around, his face contorted by fury. "Has my son learned so little? You won't find the Weissers home today. They've abandoned us! Taken what they could, sent away and squirreled away what they could, and abandoned us!"

Solomon heard a new sound inside his head. The wailing cry of a mourner. "I knew it!" he said. "I knew our families should have sat down together months ago and divided everything! One pfenning for you, one for us. One for you--"

"Stop it!"

"The Weissers could have had this case." Sol slapped the one that held the accouterments. "They would have liked that, don't you think? We could have had the one with the pipes. They could have taken the cigars, we the cigarettes. We would get Recha, they would get--"

Jacob raised his hand. "I said stop!" As if involuntarily, his hand continued its motion and he slapped Solomon across the cheek. He was staring, horrified, at his hand when Miriam dashed into the shop.

"Sol! I went upstairs to borrow some yeast from the Weissers. Their door is open and they're not home. I'm worried. There's some kind of commotion down near Leipzigerplatz. I heard someone say it's another food riot." She paused for breath and seemed to notice for the first time that something was amiss.

"I slapped my son, and for what?" Jacob said to no one in particular. "May God forgive me."

"It's not a food riot, Miriam." Sol put his hand on his father's should, his other on his cheek. "It's all right, Papa," he whispered. His chest still hurt, but it was a new hurt, one of loss more than of fear. Much more was gone than the four years' meager profits they had not dared place in the bank to be confiscated. So much more. The Weissers had been like second parents to him and Recha. Jacob and Friedrich had worked together for decades; Jacob gave Friedrich not only a start but a career.

What fundamental madness could cause this? The Nazis? Friedrich's beating? The Depression? All too simplistic.

Father and son looked at one another in terror as shouts and gunshots and sirens echoed from all directions. Then they watched from the door as a phalanx of Nazis moved toward them, striding up Friedrich Ebert Strasse with pistols and clubs and the trophies of rampage. A ruddy-faced Goliath, a swastika armband on one sleeve, a Red Cross armband on the other, marched at the apex of the mob. Whenever he signaled to the men and boys behind him, five or six would break off and enter shops. Sol could hear screams and shrieked prayers rise above the sounds of carnage.

"We must get a star up, Papa!" He scrambled for tape and scissors among the low drawers of the accouterment case.

Arms crossed, Miriam stood on the sidewalk, tears marking her cheeks. "They're destroying everything...all that is or might be Jewish."

"Even where there are stars?" Jacob held his glasses slightly away from his face in an effort to see farther.