Good People (12 page)

Frau Tschammer turned away without a word and departed. He listened to the click of her shoes. Once again she had learned that any provocation would end in defeat. With unconcealed amusement Carlson Mailer used to share Frau Tschammer's interpretation of his personality with him: ‘Thomas's method is beautiful and simple, as all truly great swindles are.' (Thomas assumed that Carlson had added
the last phrase. It was doubtful that Frau Tschammer would quote an American author.) ‘Every one of his actions,' she went on, ‘is justified by the Heiselbergian Ethics, which are infinitely elastic. Thomas Heiselberg is actually an assembly of traits, gestures, ideas and feelings that he puts together from here and there. He's a master at taking things from other people and making them his own. Even a marble bust that fascinates him is likely to contribute to the various expressions he glues onto his face. In the darkroom of his empty soul, he develops stolen negatives into charming pictures he persuades himself were always his.'

Thomas rinsed his face and combed his hair. The grey hollows under his eyes had grown deeper. Tomorrow he would see a doctor. He looked at his watch. It was after eleven. He made his way back into the hall, swearing to himself that he would shove aside anyone who stood between him and the meeting at the bar. But meanwhile the hall had filled with revellers. Voices rang out, shouted, laughed. Glasses clinked. The music swelled. Arms and bare shoulders touched him, mouths breathed smelly hot air in his face. Drums thundered, and then a voice was heard—Fritzsche's?—announcing a performance, and the throng turned towards the stage. Thomas was swept along with it. It seemed to him that he saw the square face of Christophe, from the Paris office, pressed against Fiske, who was being shoved, apparently for the first time in his life, and was looking around, bemused, at the people besieging him. His usual lordly expression had vanished.

Now Thomas noticed Schumacher elbowing two notables out of the way and approaching Fiske. Two slim women looked at him with disgust and protested. Schumacher stretched his hand towards the president of Milton, and Fiske wrapped it powerfully in both his hands. They stood close together, with a little hill of four hands between them, smiling and shouting polite phrases that no one could hear. When could you truly admire the power of a man like Fiske? When a sign of weakness becomes visible in him, and a struggle takes place in his soul, and you understand how determined he is not to give anything
away. Schumacher disappeared. Now Fiske was alone. Carlson hurried over to him, holding the hand of the woman from the patio. She had the diamond tiara in her other hand. Mailer grasped Fiske's shoulder. The three of them looked like frightened passengers on a rocking ship. Thomas took pleasure in their distress. He had worked it out. Under the cover of doing market research for Dresdener—and probably for a fat commission—Milton was messing with one of those deals to buy Jewish property at ridiculous prices.

An elbow struck his arm. Somebody has to put things in order here, and soon, he thought in alarm as he was pushed against the wall. Looking right and left, he saw only more bodies. A trumpet sounded on stage, and the drums beat a military march.

‘Somebody important has arrived,' a young woman told her curly-haired daughter, and her voice was full of the curiosity of people who enthuse over the obvious.

‘Pick up the girl!' Thomas shouted to her. ‘We might all get ourselves killed here.'

…

The first thing he sees when he wakes is the white wall. He smells the fresh paint. Although he took care to ventilate the room every day, with his first waking breath he sucked fumes into his lungs. He learned to plunge his nose between the sheets. Sometimes it seemed to him as if they had been painted, too.

For the past few weeks he'd been waking early, around five, which gave him a lot of free time before going to the office. He roamed the house in his bathrobe and looked out at the street, waiting to see old Wagner, who at exactly six would take a seat outside the café he once owned. They were both letting time pass. As a boy he would buy ice-cream from Wagner on credit, until his father forbade him to buy ‘without money', claiming that Jews seduce children into buying ice-cream before shoving the bill under their parents' noses. Last year Wagner had been forced to sell his café to a German who agreed to
employ him as the storeroom manager.

Every morning Thomas played the role of the man who lived here, hoping to stamp his ownership of the place onto the walls, but the barrier between the house and him only grew. Even when he did the most ordinary things—brushing his teeth, brewing tea, stretching out on the sofa—he had the overwhelming sense that he was doing something forbidden. Sometimes he crept from room to room in secret, lest he be caught. He had no idea who would convict him, or for what crime—illegal possession, being a trespasser benefiting from other people's misfortune. Every step that he took sounded loud and clumsy, and where was his mother's voice, calling him from the bedroom, ‘Thomas, how many times have I asked you to take off your shoes?' His breath blew ugly, petty life into a place that was supposed to contain memories alone.

No evidence of that night remained, except the broken window in her bedroom. The new furniture didn't remind one of the earlier furnishings, except for the replacement sofa in the parlour, which he had bought in the store where she had bought the old red sofa, after its cushions had been slashed with knives and its stuffing had been flung everywhere.

That night he returned home into a white cloud of feathers. He heard glass splinters grinding under his shoes. The windowpanes, china bowls, lamps, mirrors—almost nothing was intact after the visit by Hermann and his friends. Even the door hinges had been jimmied off. Wooden cabinets and dressers were smashed with hammers, the gas and electricity lines ripped out. At least a dozen jars of fruit preserves had been hurled against the bathroom wall, and flour mixed with soap powder and blood was strewn all over the sink and lavatory.

Frau Stein had been stabbed in every part of her body. She lay face down, her head cradled in her folded arm. He leaned down and turned her over. When he saw her face, coated with a layer of blood-soaked flour, he realised that after stabbing her they had smothered her in the sink with a mixture of flour and soap powder. She looked like a sad
clown in the circus. They hadn't even let her die with that stern expression of hers, well versed in suffering, that had always aroused people's respect. He gathered some feathers and covered her face with them.

Neighbours went up and down the stairs and stared into the apartment. Not one of them crossed the threshold except Clarissa Engelhardt, a student who lived with her parents on the first floor. She gathered up shards of glass from the floor and put them in a washbasin. A grey-haired, bespectacled man appeared in the doorway, coughed and wiped his nose with a handkerchief. He leaned over Frau Stein. Feathers clung to his clothes and his neck, and from time to time he brushed a dusty feather away from his face, where the wind, swirling through the room, had blown it.

‘I'm allergic to feathers,' apologised the doctor, who must have been summoned by the neighbours.

Thomas didn't know him. It was a good thing they hadn't called in Doctor Spengler, that romantic soul who became attached to his patients and mourned for them. Even the dying had to hear about the suffering of the poor souls who had been buried the previous week.

The doctor stepped to the window and shouted something, and soon two men came in, picked up Frau Stein's body and carried it outside. Only her high heels remained. Seeing them, Thomas remembered how she had crossed the city that morning to come here. She had doubtless walked for hours in those fine shoes that his mother had bought her for her fiftieth birthday, and in her best dress. Had she intended to ask for help? Jews were turning to everyone they knew. She had probably remembered that he worked for an American company. Maybe she had planned to coax his mother into asking for his help.

For the next half-hour he took care of Frau Stein's body, surveyed the damage and tried to work out what to do, but he didn't dare approach his mother's room. A voice in his head shouted that he was in danger—he would be asked to explain why a Jewish woman was in his house—and he knew he had to think things through. If he saw his mother now, he would lose any chance of remaining lucid.

Between his encounter with Hermann and his gang and climbing the steps to his house, he understood that his mother was no longer living. Any faint hope was snuffed out as soon as he crossed the threshold. He had never felt anything with so much certainty as the fact of her death. When he came home from school and knocked on the front door, he always knew by the sound of Frau Stein's heavy steps whether or not his mother was at home.

‘Where is Frau Heiselberg?' the doctor asked.

Thomas stared at the man who was streaked with feathers and flour. The doctor shook him and slapped him. His hands were damp. Thomas was afraid that the source of the dampness was Frau Stein's blood.

The doctor shook him again. ‘Where is Frau Heiselberg?'

He pointed down the dark corridor at the only door that remained in the house.

The doctor disappeared down the corridor, and in a few minutes emerged from the darkness. Thomas reached out and dusted away some feathers that clung to his lapel.

‘It's all right, Herr Heiselberg,' the doctor said.

He doesn't remember how he got to her room. Maybe they dragged him there. She lay on her bed in a nightgown, and pallor had already spread on her face. Her head rested on two pillows, her sculpted neck was slightly stretched, but it didn't violate her tranquil expression. She seemed to have gone to sleep. Her arms were crossed on her chest, and her lower body was covered by a sheet. He cautiously approached the corpse, struggling with the fear that he would be called upon to explain why he had invaded her room in the middle of the night. He shouldn't have left her with Frau Stein. His fingers crept along the sheet and touched her arm. They were even colder than her skin. He brought them to his lips and blew on them. Then he touched her arm, and let his fingers rest there. He didn't dare touch her face. The questions that Erika Gelber would ask him were already whirring in his mind: Did you kiss her goodbye? Were you afraid of her dead body?

At last he gave a wild shout, shook off his fear and in one movement he leaned down, kissed her forehead and straightened up. Then he retreated until his hand felt the doorhandle. He went out, shut the door and stood in the dark corridor. There he stood until dawn with his back to the closed door of her room.

In the morning he hired the services of Clarissa Engelhardt, and placed the reorganisation of the house in her hands. Plump Clarissa agreed to his proposal even before asking her parents' permission, ‘out of respect for Frau Heiselberg'. He moved into a hotel near the Milton offices. When he returned to the house two weeks later, not even a hint of that night remained, except for the space that yawned in his mother's room where the window had been. He had ordered Clarissa not to repair it, and she reluctantly obeyed.

No official contacted him regarding the events of that night. About a hundred acquaintances and the entire staff of Milton attended the funeral. Some clients also attended, as well as representatives of government offices, the Four Year Plan, the Berlin municipality, and the French and Italian embassies. Georg Weller, the fellow from the Foreign Office, and two SD agents who worked with Carlson Mailer also came. Rudolf Schumacher showed up with a telegram from Walther Funk, the Minister of Economic Affairs. Schumacher had doubtless managed to boast to him about his connections with Milton, Thomas thought irately. The man was an amateur. The way people like that got on was what Thomas's father called ‘wriggling through'.

The presence of people from the government alleviated his anxiety. It had apparently been decided to erase any memory of the incident. He heard that savage criticism in the foreign press of the attack on the Jews had irritated the government. Words like ‘unnecessary' and ‘stupid' were used openly amid claims that people had acted behind the Führer's back and betrayed the trust he had placed in them. Nevertheless, Weller, who called him up a few weeks after the funeral to find out how he was, told him that in December the Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop had been warmly received in Paris, that the French Foreign Minister had made anti-Jewish remarks and that everyone
understood that what happened that night was merely a temporary glitch. After all, very few Jews had been killed. Weller, who, to Thomas's surprise, knew all about the event in his house, did not believe any action would be taken against him: the Foreign Office would not allow anyone to harass a protégé of Jack Fiske. How many friends like Fiske did Germany still have in the United States?

The only surprise at the funeral was the absence of Elsa, his ex-wife—if it was possible for anything disgraceful she did to surprise him. But he had expected her to come, if only to part once and for all from the woman she had loathed so much; in his opinion, the years they had all lived under the same roof should have been enough to temper her loathing with some sadness. Her condolence letter reached the office a few weeks later, and it would have been hard to call it heartwarming. Still, they hadn't seen each other for more than ten years, and had scarcely written after she remarried. Now she gave her former husband some advice: ‘I hope that apart from your sadness this will be a day of liberation.'

‘If Friedrich Nietzsche and a Hollywood starlet sat next to Elsa in a café, she would turn her back on the philosopher,' his mother declared the day she met her. A few years later she boasted to Frau Stein that she and her son had got rid of their spouses at the same time.

None of the mourners mentioned that night. ‘What a cursed sickness,' one of the SD men said. Thomas silently agreed with him; his mother had died of her illness. No one had injured her. Of course the invasion of her house would have terrified her and hastened her death, but, to tell the truth, it also shortened her suffering.