Jacob's Oath (14 page)

Omri picked up the squirming, grunting woman and carried her from the jeep to a tree.
Yonni tied her hands behind her back and bound her with another rope to the trunk,
with loops around her throat, chest, arms, and legs. Ari took the hood from her head.
He left the rag in her mouth. She struggled against the ropes and blew through her
nose to clear hair from her nostrils. A high-pitched whine came from her mouth as
she tried to shout and plead through the gag.

“Lucky we tied her up,” Omri said. “She’s going mad.”

While Yonni looked out for chance strollers, Ari peered into her face, breathing on
her, and said quietly, in German, “I have something to ask you, please be quiet for
a moment.”

She slumped against the ropes, her head lolled forward, exhausted by the struggle.

“Frau Adler? Frau Sophie Adler?”

She looked up, a ray of hope entering her eyes. She nodded. Yes. She kept nodding,
and sounds emerged from her throat as she tried to talk. Yes, yes.

Ari said to her, “Although born Alberta Braun?”

Her head shook violently.

Yonni said, “You want to take the gag out of her mouth?”

“Not a chance,” Ari said, “they’ll hear her in Berlin.”

He took her by the chin and forced her to look into his eyes, and breathed into her
face, “Alberta Braun, Oberaufseherin, Third SS Panzer Division Totenkopf, Konzentrationslager
Mauthausen.”

Her jaw dropped so far that part of the sodden cloth gag slipped out and dangled like
the body of a snake. She shook her head and tried to talk. Since half the gag was
out of her mouth Ari could make out her garbled words. “Ich bin Mutter, Mutter, mein
Sohn!” I’m a mother, a mother, my son!

But centimeters from her face he said only, “Alberta Braun, you are a sadist and a
murderer. Do you speak English?”

She shook her head, her eyes wide with fear. Her body was trembling, straining against
the ropes. He said to her, “We are Jews.”

She went pale. She stopped struggling. She nodded, once, as if to herself.

They had sworn never to say these words in the German language. He took her by the
hair, pulled her head back, and whispered in her ear, in English, “In the name of
the Jewish people, I sentence you to death.”

Ari put his ear to her mouth to make out what she was trying to say through the gag.
It was muffled but clear, even in her terror. She kept saying, over and over, into
his ear: “Please look after my son.”

Ari took his knife and slit her throat. Within a minute Alberta Braun suffocated.
It was terrible to see.

As her body sagged and strained against the ropes, Yonni, staring into her still open
eyes, which were turning gray, like water over a stone, asked, “What did she say,
what was the last thing she said?”

“Nothing,” Ari said. “Nothing important.”

They untied her and dumped her body in the river.

TWELVE

Heidelberg,
May 17, 1945

Jacob sheltered from the rain under a shop awning, squeezed together with a dozen
other men, all hunched up in the cold. He pulled up the collar of the jacket he had
bought earlier in the market for eight cigarettes. One of the shivering men said,
“Good jacket, what do you want for it?”

“What have you got?”

“I’ve got a fever, that’s what I’ve got.”

“Where are you from?

“Alsace-Lorraine. French border. Prisoner of war.”

“You got anything to give for it?”

The man stretched out his arm. Jacob took his wrist and examined the watch. “Nice,”
he said. “Longines. Where did you get it?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Jacob took off his jacket and put on the watch.

When the rain stopped Jacob walked back to the old bus station, where hundreds of
refugees gathered each morning. It was the poor man’s black market. With his three
shirts on he wasn’t too cold—yet.

He needed to make some money for another jacket. He understood how, the first time
he saw a Pole selling ten cigarette butts for five dollars. The Pole was saying it
was a bargain. “You can make three smokes from ten butts and sell them for two dollar
fifty each. For five dollars you get three smokes worth seven-fifty!” Business was
brisk.

As the Pole counted out the grimy butts from a stash in an envelope, Jacob made a
quick calculation and realized: The Pole was wrong. From ten butts, at three butts
a smoke, he could make five smokes, worth twelve-fifty, not three worth seven-fifty.
He ran the figures through his head once more to be sure.

He looked among the boots of the refugees until he found a butt in a gutter where
nobody had spotted it. It was damp from the rain but would dry nicely. He sold one
shirt, the thickest, for five dollars. He had his stake.

He bought ten butts from the Pole. He made the three smokes and sold them cheap, for
two dollars each, on condition the buyer smoke the cigarette while he waited and give
him the butt. He also kept the spare tenth butt. By selling three cigarettes for six
dollars he had already made a dollar profit. But by collecting their three butts,
he made another cigarette, which he sold for another two dollars, and kept that butt
too, meaning he had his original tenth butt plus the final butt, making two. He borrowed
a butt, so that he now had three, made yet another cigarette and sold it for another
two bucks, paying the debt of the borrowed butt with the butt from the final cigarette
sold. He doubled his five dollars to ten in fifteen minutes.

Jacob did that three times, making fifteen dollars’ profit in an hour, and bought
another fine warm jacket for seven dollars. Walking away with his jacket collar up,
and eight dollars in his pocket, he realized two things.

The market for cigarette butts was limited to people on the move. They used cash because
they couldn’t carry anything. But Reichsmarks were almost worthless and dollars were
limited. The real market was to barter among the German citizens whose rations were
insufficient to live on—a thousand calories a day. Everyone was short on food except
the American soldiers and the farmers who came into town to sell their produce.

And he also realized—these are small butts because they are small cigarettes. He should
hang around the G.I.s; their butts would be longer. He could make longer cigarettes
and charge more. And the G.I.s would all be looking for bargains and souvenirs, like
watches and cameras, which he could get from the Germans in exchange for food.

He hurried to the Old Bridge but all the soldiers there were on duty. The side streets
were full of G.I.s strolling but they were in twos and threes. What he needed was
a large group of off-duty soldiers who smoked a lot. He looked up and saw Heidelberg
Castle towering over the Old Town, and smiled. He took the narrow alley behind the
Corn Market instead of the wider, winding road. It was shorter, but steeper, and soon
he had to rest among the woods to catch his breath. He paused again at the big wooden
gates by the lowest firing slits in the castle walls. For a dozen generations the
town’s children and lovers had carved their names into the ancient oak until now the
door looked like a giant medieval parchment. Each cut in the wood seemed to mark another
year, like the rings in a tree. He searched for his initials. He read, “M and H, 1832.”
A lover had written in 1742, “Humphrey Be Mine,” and here was one, “S2 How are You?”
He trailed his fingers over the rough ridges and notches, touching time, looking for
his own initials among the thousands of names and letters. If only it was so easy
to retrieve the past.

His hand stopped and the hairs on his neck stood. He hadn’t found JK but here was
MK 1937, deep and rough. Could this be Maxie?

Was this a sign?

“Don’t worry, Maxie,” Jacob murmured, his hand covering Maxie’s rough initials, as
if stroking his knobbly shaved head, “I’ll find him.”

He looked at his new watch. Roman numerals, a white face with a thin band of gold.
The Amis will love it. It was almost midday. He had another hour and a half to get
to the Hotel Schwartzer Bock.

He hurried through the gates, over the empty moat, into the arched alleys, and entered
the castle courtyard. Sure enough, as he had hoped, about thirty G.I.s were there,
some gazing up at Heidelberg’s most ornate monument, the Renaissance Frederick building,
full of weather-beaten statues and chipped friezes and a battered grandeur that suited
the times.

Jacob went straight up to a U.S. sergeant who was staring at the crumbling bell tower,
and waited at his shoulder. “It was struck by lightning. Twice. It burned down,” Jacob
said to him in English.

“Shoulda bombed the whole place,” the American said, without turning around.

“Why didn’t you bomb Heidelberg?” Jacob asked. Everyone was asking the same question.

The soldier realized he was talking to a German and instinctively moved a step back.

“Why didn’t you bomb it? You bombed everywhere else,” Jacob said.

“Dunno. They say Eisenhower’s family came from around here. They also say Patton wanted
his HQ here. Someone also said there was a deal that if the Krauts didn’t bomb Oxford,
England, we wouldn’t bomb Heidelberg. Who knows? Above my rank.”

Jacob leaned down to pick up two cigarette butts. Much longer than at the bus station.

“Who are you?” the sergeant asked. No fraternization didn’t apply to registered tour
guides.

Jacob told him.

“We were at Dachau,” the sergeant said. “Cleaning up. Never thought I’d see anything
like it.”

A dozen soldiers gathered around, asking questions. Jacob didn’t want to talk about
it. Not like this. Not like a circus exhibit. Each time a soldier dropped the end
of his cigarette and rubbed it out with his foot, Jacob bent down and picked it up.
“It’s money,” he said. “Want to see the biggest barrel of wine in the world?”

“No, thanks,” the sergeant said. Jacob looked up in surprise. The soldiers laughed.
The sarge had kept them laughing right through France and most of Germany.

“Follow me,” Jacob said. He led them along a cobbled path around the terrace into
a building, and down some steep steps past a gigantic barrel. “Holy cow,” a soldier
said, “how much does that hold?”

“Oh, man, paradise,” said another, “where’s the tap?”

“This isn’t even it,” Jacob said, “follow me.” Down some more steps, around the corner,
and there in a room of its own was what looked like a round house. “It holds a quarter
of a million liters of wine.”

There were whoops of joy and doughboys slapped each other on the back and people swayed
as if intoxicated and lifted their hands to their mouths to mime drunken antics, exactly
as all tourists had done in all languages for centuries when face-to-face with the
Great Tun.

“Okay,” the sergeant said. “We did D-Day, we fought through France, Germany—now at
last I know why…”

A soldier tapped the barrel. “But it’s empty,” he said.

“Stop whining,” said another. “Geddit? Wining…”

“Forget about Berlin,” the sergeant went on. “We’ve arrived.”

“There was a dwarf called Perkeo,” Jacob called out. Every Heidelberger knew the story.
“Long time ago. He got drunk every day for many years, nobody could drink like him.
One day he drank a glass of water and died.”

The soldiers roared with laughter and pretended to be drunk, wrestling with each other.

On the way out the sergeant laid his arm around Jacob’s shoulders and staggered as
if he needed support after a night’s drinking.

Back in the daylight the Americans wanted to pay Jacob for guiding them but he refused.
At their insistence he grudgingly accepted ten dollars and the sergeant gave him two
packs of Pall Mall too. When Jacob stretched out his arm to take them, one of the
men said, “Hey, nice watch.”

“What? Oh, that,” Jacob said. “It’s a Longines. Familienerbstück. How do you say it
in English? Family longtime treasure?”

A soldier said, “Rubber?” and they fell about laughing.

Another said, “Heirloom?”

“Yes, that’s it, it’s a family heirloom.”

“What do you want for it?”

“What have you got?”

*   *   *

At first the police and the mayor’s office hadn’t known how to handle Jacob Klein.
A Heidelberger, a citizen, he had a right to an ID card. In both places people recognized
him, but he didn’t have any papers to prove that he was he.

“Except that you know me, right?” Jacob said to the middle-aged official behind the
desk in the police station, who was in charge of the paperwork after the Nazi police
had fled.

“Yes, of course, you’re Solomon the Tailor’s son. You wrote down my measurements once.
You must have been eight, nine years old.”

“So you can give me an ID card.”

“But you don’t have any papers to prove it? A birth certificate…”

Jacob interrupted. “Of course not, I told you, that’s what I need from you. Some papers.
It’s all gone, stolen, burned, I don’t know what you all did with our possessions.”

“Please,” the official said. “We were not all like them. I personally was a social
democrat.”

Once they had taken his fingerprints and given him his new ID card, he went back to
the mayor’s office to be assigned a room with a German family. With the town overflowing
with refugees, with twice as many people in Heidelberg as before the war, and with
the best homes confiscated by the occupying American troops, every family with a spare
room had to give it to a homeless German with an ID card. Some people had whole families
living in their spare bedroom, sharing the kitchen and bathroom, which led to jealousy
and even fistfights. The mayor’s office was besieged with complaints but the most
bitter were directed at the former mayor, Dr. Neinhaus. A Nazi party member since
1932, his family still lived alone in their thirteen-room apartment, while everywhere
else two families were forced to share two or three rooms.

So Jacob, fearing an angry outburst, was surprised by how kind the Braunschweigs at
Lauerstrasse 13 were when he arrived with his accommodation form.