Christopher's Ghosts (7 page)

“You were among the witnesses, Hubbard?”

“No, but Paul was.”

“I see,” O. G. said. “Stutzer didn’t arrest you on the spot, Lori?”

“No. But I don’t imagine he has forgotten.”

O. G. said, “No, probably not.”

“So what do you suggest about Paul?” Lori said to O. G.

“What I’ve been suggesting for a year even without knowing what you just told me,” O. G. said. “Leave the country. Now I would add, In the name of God. That may be all they want.”

“I don’t think so,” Lori said.

“Ah,” said O. G. He did not ask why she said what she had just said.

Hubbard was less discreet. “Why? Because you socked Stutzer?”

“That may be Stutzer’s motive, but it isn’t the reason,” Lori said. “They’re more serious than that. They’ll never let me go.”

“Why you, in particular?” Hubbard said.

“Because I am a German citizen who has helped Jews and what they call communists. Therefore I am a traitor. Who knows what they imagine you are.”

“They don’t have to do much imagining,” Hubbard said.

Lori said, “Paul is also involved. They may be lunatics, gentlemen, but I say it again, they’re serious.”

“Please don’t think I’m being facetious,” O. G. said. “But if they get any more serious you’ll all be in Dachau, Paul included. They don’t give a hang about age or nationality or anything else when they think they’re dealing with the enemies of the Reich.”

“Well, that’s what we are, aren’t we?” Lori said.

“Ssshhh,” O. G. said. There were things he did not wish to know, even if he already knew them.

Paul knew what was coming next—the plan to get him out of Germany. In his opinion no one, not even O. G., had the power or the guile to manage this. Besides that, he, Paul, would not agree to go. How could he leave his mother, how could he leave Rima? How could he save himself and leave them to their fate? He knew what that fate would be. The secret police would do to them what the Hitler Youth in the Tiergarten had done to him, but they would do it to the death. He had begun to see that these matters were very simple. Everyone talked about how serious the National Socialists were but as he walked along the corridors at No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, he had heard them laughing uproariously behind closed doors. They were like policemen everywhere. They enjoyed each other’s company. They were good fellows doing what had to be done. They liked talking over the day’s work. They thought that the people they arrested were funny, that their fates were comical, that their hopes of outwitting the secret police were laughable.

O. G. said, “As I’ve already suggested, I really do think, now more than ever, that Paul should go home with me. The
Bremen
sails for New York on the sixth of July.”

“That’s very soon,” Lori said.

“Let’s hope it’s soon enough,” O. G. replied. “They have enough on Paul right now to arrest him. They might do it just for the effect it would have on the two of you. Today might have been a rehearsal. It certainly was a message. Your son, alone in their hands—imagine. They’d really be in the driver’s seat.”

Paul said, “Excuse me, but do I have anything to say about this?”

“Of course you do, Paul,” O. G. said.

“I won’t go anywhere without my mother and father.”

“Then you should discuss the matter with them,” O. G. said. “You have until the fourth of July to talk it over, assuming the secret police don’t move sooner. Nobody’s going to abandon your parents. I couldn’t let that happen. I’ve made promises to the gods that I’d never let it happen. The idea is to get each of you out by the best available means. Then you can all get together at the Harbor and let the rest of the world go by.”

“How will you get them out after I’m gone if you’re in America, too?”

“The embassy won’t be closed while I’m away,” O. G. said. “Others can execute the plan. The plan is, first you, then them. Those fellows on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse will be looking for a party of three, so with any luck they’ll be looking the other way at the vital moment.”

“We hope,” said Hubbard.

“Can’t travel far in this world without hope,” O. G. said.

Or with it
, Paul thought. He looked into his mother’s eyes and saw that she agreed.

 4 

Lori went riding in the Tiergarten almost every day. She came back, most days, in time for lunch. Rima saw their opportunity when Paul told her about his family’s morning routine—Lori absent, Hubbard present in physical form but so completely elsewhere mentally that he might as well have been underwater. After their moments in the
darkness of the park they were desperate to be together. But they had no privacy and none seemed possible. They met as if by accident in shops and museums, but never in a place where they could touch.

Finally they tried the obvious—a cinema. But when they kissed, a watchful customer reported them to the management. They were ejected. The head usher—he wore a badge of office on his uniform—demanded their names and addresses so that their misconduct could be reported to the authorities. They told him nothing, but learned a lesson. Even if the secret police had not been watching Paul, even if Rima had not been the daughter of a Jew who had no rights, it would have been next to impossible for them to be together. The entire adult world was a vast secret police force charged with keeping an eye on young people. They met sometimes at night when walking the dogs, but this was furtive. It made them feel guilty. It was dangerous for Rima to be alone in a park, alone on darkened streets.

On the streetcar, Rima said, “Then you’re alone in the morning?”

“My father is home.”

“But oblivious. Do you have a back door?”

Paul said, “Yes. In the kitchen.”

“This door locks with a key?”

“With a bolt on the inside.”

“There’s a back stairway? You take the dog for its walks by the stairway?”

Paul nodded.

“So if someone forgot to bolt this bolt, on a typical morning a burglar could come up the stairs, sneak inside and tiptoe through the house and no one would be the wiser?”

Rima explained the plan. She too was free and unobserved in the early morning. Her father slept until noon—in fact he slept beyond noon. He slept whenever he was alone. This would have been an unimaginable weakness had he still been a German. But he was not. The theft of her father’s identity and property and career, the shock of suddenly ceasing to be the man he had striven all his life to be, had driven him into a stupor.

“It’s as if he’s already in the afterworld,” Rima said. “The world of
the living is still visible to him. He looks out the window and sees people going about their business. Every now and then he sees someone he knows on the street, but they don’t see him or hear him. If they do, if they used to be his friends, they don’t know him. He’s a phantom.”

All this Rima whispered to Paul as they stood together on a streetcar. No matter where they were, the two of them conversed in whispers. They told each other everything. They hardly knew each other, after all—glimpses in the Tiergarten, minutes in each other’s arms in the pitch-black night in the park, an hour in the church, a kiss in a cinema. Not only was Rima Paul’s first love, she was also his only friend. Otherwise, he lived in quarantine and so did she.

Now, however, Rima had a plan. They would be together, alone. “We will become each other,” Rima said. “We will have time. It will be wonderful.”

That word, as she spoke it in English, meant what it had originally meant, full of wonder. All of her words about love sounded as if she had just invented them. She would come early in the morning, Rima said, while it was still dark. The window of Paul’s bedroom overlooked the courtyard at the back of the building. If his mother was absent and his father was writing, he would turn on a light in his room, then go to the kitchen and unlock the door on the back stairway. Rima would run up the stairs, he would let her in, they would be together in his room until eleven o’clock. Then she would leave by the front entrance.

“You will be seen,” Paul said.

“It won’t matter,” Rima said. “I have a plan.”

By mistake or as a sign of their contempt for him—what harm could the former Professor Doctor Kaltenbach possibly do now that he was nothing but a Jew?—the authorities had left her father’s medical records with him. Rima had examined them. She had found the file of a rich German woman on whom her father had operated several years before.

“He saved her life, or anyway cured her pain,” Rima said. “Afterward, in her gratitude, she kissed every one of his fingers.”

“How do you know that?”

“You’re not the only one with a father who writes everything down.”

“So how does this affect the plan?”

“She lives in your building. Miss Hulda Wetzel.”

Paul knew the woman, had always known her. She lived in the apartment below the Christophers. She had been the companion to her sickly mother before the old woman finally died; now she was alone. She was deeply shy and nervous, never married. She had told Paul many times, but Lori never, how beautifully his mother played the piano, especially Liszt.

“Miss Wetzel is part of the plan?” Paul said.

“She is essential to it,” Rima replied. “Miss Wetzel has a dog, a Pomeranian. I have observed her walking the dog. Miss Wetzel doesn’t like poop. I will volunteer to walk her dog. She will be overjoyed. I will then have a reason to be on the back stairway.”

“What if she says no?”

“Why would she do that? I’ll tell her who I am—the daughter of the famous surgeon who saved her life.”

“Does she know what has happened to your father?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Miss Wetzel is a timid person. She may be frightened to be involved.”

“No, my darling. She’ll remember Papa as he used to be. As long as we leave her in innocence she’ll understand. Not everyone we ever knew is a hateful wretch.”

Paul longed to kiss this beautiful girl with the electric mind and the wide-open brown eyes in which he saw his reflection, but on the streetcar such behavior was strictly forbidden.

 5 

The plan did not work out exactly as Rima had designed it. Miss Wetzel wanted her snow-white Pomeranian, Blümchen, walked for an hour three times a day—at seven in the morning, at noon, and at dusk. She and Rima discussed this over cups of chocolate in Miss Wetzel’s apartment while the dog sat on Miss Wetzel’s lap and nibbled treats.

“How is your dear father?” Miss Wetzel asked.

“He is less active than he was.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that. So many people need his genius.”

Rima smiled, sipped her chocolate, and ate a butter cookie. She wanted to wander no farther down this path. They talked about the dog and the deal was struck. Rima would walk Blümchen three times a day, seven days a week, for a weekly fee of ten marks-fifty, or fifty pfennigs per walk, plus a Sunday bonus of one mark.

“That’s pretty good money,” Rima said to Paul, reporting the conversation as they walked through a museum. “We can buy Benny Goodman records and dance. Do you have a gramophone?”

“An American Victrola,” Paul said.

“Benny won’t disturb your father?”

“Nothing disturbs my father. The secret police may come and arrest us for listening to decadent music.”

“How will they know?”

Paul explained about the microphones in the walls. Rima’s eyes widened as they always did when she was told something interesting.

“Dear God, they do hate you,” she said. “What have you done to deserve this?”

Paul loved Rima, but he could not trust her or endanger her with a truthful answer to this particular question.

“It’s just one of those things,” he said.

“Ah, you Americans,” Rima said, snapping her fingers. “‘Just one of those things, baby.’ We’ll go on whispering.”

They were in a room full of classical sculptures. In a whisper Rima sang a bar of “And the Angels Sing.” Hearing Benny Goodman, they danced a few steps among the marble nudes. Rima’s English had become much more idiomatic since she had been speaking the language with Paul. She had learned it from books and from a succession of young English tutors who had been expelled from the country one after the other on morals charges. Her accent was a mixture of the accents of these tutors, Londonian in one part of a sentence, Etonian in the next, West Country in the third. This was because her ear was so keen. What she heard, she spoke. She sounded more like Paul every day.

Rima began her duties as a dog walker the following morning. Because the Tiergarten was close and because there were lots of other dogs there to keep Blümchen company, she walked in that direction. She set out, as her agreement with Miss Wetzel specified, at exactly seven in the morning. At that hour there were already a good many people in the streets. Some were dog walkers like Rima. Most were dressed for the day—men in suits and felt hats, women in frocks and sturdy shoes. There were few workmen in this neighborhood, but some whirred by on bicycles. Yesterday’s horse manure had been cleared during the night by Berlin’s efficient street-cleaning force so that Rima as she walked could smell flowering shrubs and trees rather than the overpowering scent of animal scat. She was lost in a daydream of Paul, imagining their first morning together in his room. She saw them dancing, talking, listening to music, dancing again. As she danced in her daydream she wore a sheet wrapped around her body, like a toga. She hummed as she dreamed, American songs that Paul had taught her—“Flat-Foot Floojee,” “Oh, Look at Me Now.”

She was inside the park before she knew it. She woke from her daydream on a path that ran between the bridle path and the sidewalk. Blümchen barked shrilly at everything and everyone. Long ago her breed had been large working dogs. The fact that Pomeranians had been bred down into lap dogs over many generations evidently had not registered on Blümchen’s brain. She thought that she was as large and ferocious as her ancestors. Though she was actually no bigger than a ball of yarn, she barked at the horses, at other dogs, she growled and showed her teeth. She yapped at squirrels and leaped against the leash, trying to chase them. Well-dressed matrons picked up their own small dogs and carried them safely away from this shaggy little bundle of noisy aggression.