Good People (13 page)

He had not seen Hermann since. Sometimes the question gnawed at him: why had he done it? But, instead of letting it get to him, Thomas started planning how he could retaliate. He remembered that when they sold off Hermann's father's possessions or food stolen from hotels, Hermann was embarrassed and would complain about their damned country that forced him to act like a criminal so that his sisters wouldn't starve. Hermann never concealed his distaste for Thomas's practice of ‘swindling people' (though he didn't turn up his nose at the fruit
of the swindles), and the moment came when their friendship began to leach away. That didn't worry him: lots of boys swore fidelity to one another and got bored after a month. But even if Hermann now saw him as someone who had ‘sold his soul to the Americans' and nonsense like that, it was still hard to understand the hatred in his eyes or that he had violated a house where he had played as a boy.

One day Thomas decided there was no point in thinking about the kinks in Hermann's soul. Taking revenge on an SS officer might lead to his own destruction. Perhaps Hermann felt that they were even now and wouldn't see each other again. But Thomas had to keep an eye out: he wouldn't let Hermann take him by surprise again, make him stand in the street, trembling, humiliated and ignorant. Next time he would land the first blow.

He was still groggy after washing. Thomas stood in the bathroom and wiped his chest with a damp towel. He hung it up, dressed and went to light the fire. How unfortunate that the ugly Delft tiles around the fireplace had survived Hermann's visit. He glanced at his watch: in a moment Erika Gelber would ring the doorbell. Since November they had been meeting in the morning at his house. He sat on the new sofa. There was something that he wanted to bring up in their session: since his episode at the New Year's Eve party, he occasionally lost his sense of time. He would wake up and grope for memories of the previous evening. Was that a symptom of the illness that had attacked him? The doctors told him everything was fine, and to anyone who expressed concern at his appearance, he would say, ‘No, I'm not sick. I've had a check-up. Everything's okay,' but he was certain that an illness was incubating in his body: dissolving his muscles, trampling on his chest with its heels, tightening the black veils over his eyes.

The doorbell rang at exactly eight thirty. She stood before him with her face reddened by the cold, and, with the demanding casualness typical of her, said she hoped that the fire was lit and that the coffee was steaming the way she liked it.

‘Of course, Frau Gelber,' he answered, bowing like a servant and
leading her into the parlour. She sat in the armchair. He couldn't lie down here and stare at the ceiling the way he did in her clinic. That would seem affected. So he sprawled on the sofa, leaning on an elbow, and stared at the fire. The shutters were closed, and the flames cast a weak glow. After some small talk, Erika said, ‘We devoted the last two sessions to being an orphan. That's something we've spoken about quite a bit. In 1930, after your father's death, you came to me with a complaint about frightening attacks that left you feeling weak. Aside from that, as you told me with earnest amusement, you were curious about certain psychoanalytic ideas that had become fashionable.'

‘Let's be precise, Frau Gelber. I said that it was the fashionableness of those ideas that made me curious.'

‘I stand corrected,' said Erika, who looked surprised by his petty obstinacy. ‘You must remember that after two years of therapy I told you that your refusal to admit grief was nothing more than stubbornness. You answered—and here I am quoting my notes—“Frau Gelber, I didn't come to you for lessons in mourning. I give you my word as a gentleman, my father's death caused me dreadful suffering. But, in all sincerity, right now I'm less bothered by his death than by my own.”'

‘I can't explain things I don't remember,' he stated drily. ‘I also don't understand what you're driving at. Whose death troubles you now? My father's or my mother's?'

Erika was silent. He detested her silences. Recently he had become convinced that she wasn't happy with his answers.

‘What kind of woman was your mother?' she finally asked.

As if she didn't know, he thought. They'd been discussing her for years. ‘Imagine the proprietor of a superbly furnished and detailed hotel upon which time imposes its decrees. For example: it might be possible to clean the spots on the tablecloths, but you can't restore their whiteness, can you? All over the hotel, time eats away at its former glory, but the proprietor locks the doors, closes the shutters, sits in her empty office in her pretty dress and waits for the wind to blow it down. Imagine a sailor on the seven seas who hears that his city has changed unrecognisably. He decides not to go back, to remain on the high seas
with nothing but his nostalgia for the beautiful days he had at home, now lost.' He offered as many images as he could conjure up, and sweet warmth crept into him as they multiplied, as if he were sending bright balloons into a dark sky, performing a flamboyant dance against his petrified awareness of loss.

‘Thomas, for several sessions now you've only been talking about your mother in metaphors,' Erika complained. Her voice sounded imploring. ‘And they're all amazingly similar.'

Her coy tone struck him. He suddenly understood that Erika didn't say the first thing that came into her head, but replaced it with something different. He felt he could read the shifts in her thinking—a tiny manoeuvre, partially conscious, that might shatter years of trust.

She's trying to appease me, he thought, prevent me from getting angry. And it had been Erika's blunt candour that captured his heart when he started seeing her. She always demanded memories of things that had happened and scolded him every time he used the images he liked so much. For a long time he had sensed her weakness, but he still hoped that in their sessions they could ignore the noise of the outside world and keep things the way they used to be. In the past few months he had glimpsed stirrings of a change even in the way her body moved. Her gestures lacked the poise of a person who knows her place.

He was filled with disgust, apologised and rushed to the bathroom. He rinsed his burning face in cold water and considered whether to bring the matter up in the session. The problem was that, if he spoke about it with her now, she would revert to her earlier style in order to appease him. One thing was clear: it would never again be the way it was. For a long time he had been yearning for the hours they had had together, years ago: for the mournful light of the setting sun, lengthening the shadows of the cacti on the shelf; for her too-colourful dresses, all of them suspended on hangers in his memory; and for her attentive expression with its calm tolerance even of his worst deceptions.

He was a man who respected restraint, but Erika was the only soul for whom he felt a fondness that he couldn't restrain. Around her he
became childish, inventing affectionate nicknames for her that he only used to her after pretending they had come to him in his dreams. Damn it, for years he had been passing by shop windows and choosing presents for her.

‘Thomas?'

He took a breath and left the bathroom. ‘Sometimes it's hot here,' he cheerfully observed.

The session became buried in worthless verbiage. Most of the time he stared at the vase of crocuses that Clarissa had picked in Professor Bernheimer's abandoned garden.

When it was finished Erika smoothed her trousers and passed her fingers over the carnation on her lapel. He wondered whether he should tell her that in the Foreign Office they made fun of the English ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, calling him ‘the carnation with a man'. In the past few years, inspired by Thomas, she had stopped wearing those old-fashioned, unflattering dresses and decked herself out in a wardrobe that he called ‘more up-to-date': straight skirts almost to her ankles, buttoned blouses with sheer fabric and thin mesh, and hip-length jackets.

Erika told him she wanted to talk about something personal, and that of course he should stop her if he felt this would not be proper. He didn't know whether to stand up—he wanted to stand now, as he did in his office—but in the end he remained on the sofa, leaning on the armrest.

Erika repeated that perhaps the matter was inappropriate.

‘You've said that already, Frau Gelber.'

Erika added in a low voice—his comment had apparently weakened her resolve—that the times weren't appropriate either. Then she asked him directly if he could help her and her husband and their two children obtain visas to another country. Someone had informed on them to the Gestapo, and they were being constantly harassed.

In his heart he thanked her for not mentioning the children's names; at least she had spared them both that kitsch. She hadn't specifically mentioned the United States: a vain effort not to show that
the idea had occurred to her after hearing his stories about the negotiations with the Bamberburg Bank and Jack Fiske's connections in the State Department. Maybe he should offer her a job in Italy? A wicked thought poked its head up. If anyone was really capable of making a deal with the German government, it was Federico, the man who had gone to parties with the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano.

‘It's strange that you're asking me in particular, Frau Gelber,' he said. ‘After all, there are psychoanalytic societies in Europe and the United States, and they're filled with Jews. Can't they help you?'

Erika recounted in detail the tribulations she had undergone: in the early 1930s therapists in the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society wanted to help her emigrate to the United States, but she and her husband chose to remain in Germany. In the past year, when dozens of Jewish analysts from Austria joined the race for visas, she realised that her chances were slipping: the British Psychoanalytic Society refused to sponsor her and she had received no reply from New York. There were rumours that a movement against immigration was spreading among analysts in America, and a handful of friends in other countries, who had made generous efforts on her behalf, had achieved nothing.

‘I understand,' he nodded. ‘You're putting me in a delicate situation. We're talking about an illegal action.'

‘I'm sorry.'

He must have looked like the most sanctimonious person in the world. He was always tempted to make the worst impression possible at the beginning. When he came home from school with a good report, he used to inundate his mother with terrible stories about failures and fights, just so that he could see disappointment crease her forehead and her eyes close as though she wanted to sleep. Then, just as she was about to reproach him, he would pull out his report—indisputable proof that refuted his own testimony. Erika once asked him why he did it, and he answered that it still happened sometimes, for example, he once told Schumacher that Milton had been hired to consult for a euthanasia project. ‘We have to root out the degenerates, don't we?'

It simply amused him, he explained to her, that people, even your mother, would believe whatever you told them, if you made it sound credible, even if it didn't fit in with your personality and everything you'd ever done—the dopes would adjust whatever ideas they had about you to accommodate this new information. We are only silhouettes in the minds of others. ‘Don't be sad. Of course I'll help you,' he told Erika, and he rose from the sofa as a sign that the session was over. ‘If I succeed, it'll be because there's a law somewhere—or, rather, there is no law, and this fact can be used.'

The next morning he met with Carlson Mailer and Frau Tschammer in the office. They met once a week to discuss their negotiations with the Bamberburg Bank. It was clear that the governmental agencies were committed to the order to remove Jews from the economy. Wohlthat told Thomas that in fact the Bamberburg was the last remaining large Jewish bank not yet transferred to German hands. Before Schacht had been forced to resign as the Minister of Economics, he defended the Jews, but now the office of the Four Year Plan wanted everything resolved.

Frau Tschammer was in daily contact with people at the Dresdener bank. She reported that they were worried, because apparently the Deutsche Bank had already made an offer to the directors of Bamberburg regarding the countries that would take them in. Carlson Mailer, as was his wont recently, stared out into space, and said little.

After the meeting, Thomas went into Carlson's office and told him about a secret plan that he had been working on: he knew the therapist who was treating Blum, from the Bamberburg bank. ‘She has considerable influence on him,' he hinted, as though sharing a secret, and it would be a good idea to use her services to coax Blum to move in the right direction. In response Carlson leafed through a colourful magazine. That weak man had lost any desire to do anything, and was now an obstacle, Thomas thought.

‘If it's a matter of money,' Carlson rumbled, ‘do what you think best.'

‘It could be that other considerations are involved.'

‘So find some stunt for them, too.'

‘I'd like to talk about the essence of the deal,' Thomas insisted.

‘We've spoken about it enough.' Carlson lit his pipe and puffed smoke. ‘And with you every bar of soap has some essence.'

Thomas decided not to say another word. It was clear that all Mailer cared about negotiating was the price of a villa in Nice, overlooking the Promenade des Anglais.

Was Mailer contemptuous of him for promoting the Bamberburg deal? Maybe he would respect him more if he also sat in his office like a scarecrow, doing nothing? There was no point in behaving like a child learning for the first time that history is filled with bloodshed and war: the spirit of the time weaves deals like these, the Dresdener Bank was Milton's largest client, and that was the only important thing.

It was time for Plan B: he telephoned Jack Fiske in New York, presented his initiative and asked if it was possible to add Erika Gelber and her two children to the Bamberburg list.