Berlin Cantata (18 page)

“We turn this off now,” Petra at last says. Karen protests. Petra insists. “But he caught the man. Yes? Look.”

What grief! It was unbelievable. “But then he talks with Deedee about everything,” Karen says.

I of course had no idea who this Deedee was, though perhaps Miss Anholt did, coming from America.

Now I recall the conversation between these “sisters,” if you'll believe, as best I can.

“You know who I am?” Miss Anholt asks.

“From America?”

“Yes. I'm another sister.”

“Yes. With Petra.”

“I'm Holly.”

“I know.”

“I'm very happy you are my sister, Karen. I'm very happy to have a sister. You're my only one.”

“Petra's not your sister?”

“No. You're lucky. You have two sisters.”

I recall this conversation so well because I remember thinking, they speak exactly the same, it's a perfect match, the retarded one and the American.

Then Karen becomes weepy. I am not surprised, she is a weepy child, always, but Miss Anholt becomes upset to see this and reaches out towards her. Petra stops this at once, of course. No displays in her presence, please.

Of course she does not say this. Instead she says, to Miss Anholt, with as little respect as you can imagine, “You're not helping. She only cries because she misses the ending of her program.”

So up goes the sound again. The police are discussing things. Karen becomes happy again. And so this is how Miss Anholt's first visit with Karen came to an end.

On the way home, exactly as I feared, Miss Anholt proclaims that now she wishes Karen to come visit her at the Writers House. This proves exactly the point that I always make. You cannot do a good deed for someone. They always want more.

So it is all arranged. After much fuss about her cold and who knows what not, and again making the times precise and other difficulties, Petra drove Karen to our house.

Miss Anholt was well-prepared for this. In truth for days all she did was prepare. She even went so far to set the hammock between the trees by the lake. She bought cakes and wanted everything to be very nice. It was like she was the mother, even, or the grandmother. It was something I could understand, but also not understand. But I had no say. She didn't ask me. Miss Anholt of course lost her interest in me once I had introduced her to her sister.

I will say that when I saw Karen again, up on her feet and so on, I was almost surprised, I had almost forgotten, what a big girl she was. She was by inches taller than Miss Anholt. And why do I call her a girl when she was fifty years old, with all grey hair and the usual flab and such? Because she was, that's all.

Miss Anholt had sandwiches and cakes for her and lemonade and swung her in the hammock. This was all as planned, and I was quite impressed. Miss Anholt, I thought, must really love her sister. And she was quite a good organizer of such things. I had scarcely a role at all, although of course I washed all the dishes.

Even when they walked by the lake, Petra was always the chaperone. It seemed Petra didn't quite trust Miss Anholt, perhaps she feared at any second that Miss Anholt might run off with Karen. Though why this would have alarmed Petra, who always complained about Karen, I wouldn't know. At a certain time Miss Anholt proposed that they both take off their shoes and put their toes in the lake. Petra raised objections, of course, there was no towel, Karen would catch sick again, but then, as occasionally was possible with Petra, she relented. I was there at this point and observed something very interesting. Both Karen and Miss Anholt had very similar bunions. I believe Miss Anholt observed this as well.

Karen seemed to like wetting her toes, and she liked very much the hammock, when Miss Anholt pushed her high up and Karen screamed as if it was at a luna park.

HOLLY ANHOLT

Decision

NILS RECEDED FOR AWHILE
from my dreams. A fresh starlet assumed his prominence, though I never saw her face. Still, I knew it was Karen, by the lake, in the woods, at the market in the village. The faces were of old women in scarves, but behind them, calling me, living in the trees and marshes like a sprite, was a young girl, whispering things I could almost understand. And there was another character, too, in the trees, stalking the sprite, with a hideous, wizened face and foul red ass, a monkey of my mind. This devil would have raped and robbed her. I took him to be Heinz Schiessl.

Heinz Schiessl turned out not to look like this. He wore large square glasses that old people get as part of their bifocal package and that make everything else about a face look small. His shirt collar was too large for him. His neck was stringy, his little bit of hair was clipped neat and short, his glance was slightly vacant. I know all this because I finally demanded a meeting with him. What possessed me, all of that. I may have been possessed only by my fear. I'd had so much fear lately that it was growing intolerable, the way debt grows intolerable for some people until they throw up their hands and declare bankruptcy. I could have dealt with Schiessl as I'd dealt with him before, by phone and lawyers. But now by night he was stalking my sister. No way, sir. No way. Keep your filthy mitts off her. Have you no shame?

Though of course it was open to debate whose shame exactly I was thinking of when my mind thought such thoughts.

We met in Anja Mann's office. He was brought in by his son Richard, a man with a pinched-in nose who in all looked a little like a chipmunk and who I imagined could have been an accountant or minor civil servant. As I shook Heinz Schiessl's limp, arthritic hand, my own betrayed me with quiet trembling. I tried to remember what it was that desperation was supposed to breed. Invention? No, that was necessity. Maybe desperation just bred disaster. All I knew for certain was that if I was going to propose a second deal to the Schiessls, if I was going to be my father's daughter, fallen and redeemed as Nils said, I needed to be sure what I wanted out of it.

On the phone I had told Anja what that was: only Velden. She labored to dissuade me. Speculation in the Scheunenviertel was heating up. The city claim was close to the Oranienburgerstrasse. If I was only going to sell anyway, why not hold onto what was most valuable? It was then I told her that I was no longer thinking to sell. There'd been a couple seconds of telling silence on the phone after that.

She gave the Schiessls few details beyond my proposal. Heinz at first gave the impression of a Teutonic Sitting Bull, silent, stoic, inscrutable. Richard whispered in his ear a couple of times and still he sat there. I began to think he might be demented, but that wasn't actually the case. He may have been thinking about other things. He may have been thinking he was late for lunch. Who knew? But finally he was a stream of words, soft-spoken and a little high-pitched, and he asked his attorney Rosenthaler to translate, so that it would all be perfectly clear: “The city property is worth much more than the country property. We can't know at this time how much more. Are you sure you wish to do this?” When he finished speaking, he looked at me for perhaps the first and only time that day. It was an appraising look, steady and unafraid, but not a cruel one.

I duly nodded in answer to the question, the lawyers talked between themselves for quite a bit, and that was that, except that it wasn't quite that. The following day I received a call from the Schiessl son, inviting me for tea at the parents' house in Charlottenburg. He said his father had something to show me. I went because I couldn't think of a good enough reason not to.

It was a well-shaded stucco house in a quiet corner of Charlottenburg not far from the old Olympic Stadium. It turned out Heinz Schiessl was so pleased with the deal I'd made him that he wanted to thank me. We sat down for tea in the Schiessls' darkly furnished parlor, his invalid wife shuffling in as well with what I understood to be a nurse hovering. All of it felt a little like visiting a nursing home run by the Addams family. Grete. Grete was the wife's name.

“Bring the albums, Richard,” Schiessl senior presently commanded. Soon Richard was placing two frayed leather bound photo albums in front of me. One of them had the German word for memories written in a sentimental, slanty script across its moldering cover. What a remarkable feeling it was to turn those album pages, akin to coming back to dinner at a house one had lived in for years, that strangers now owned. Photos of
their
summer house,
their
rowboat,
their
bit of the lake, all dutifully, efficiently marked “1938” or “1939” or “1940” with sometimes the month as well. I wanted to snatch it all back, as if to correct a cosmic mistake. But of course it wasn't a cosmic mistake. People mugging, people with their arms around each other, people in short-sleeves and squinting for the brightness of the summer day. One of the Schiessls was riding a horse. And then the point of the exercise: a number of the photographs were of other summer visitors, people who owned houses on either side and at other points on the lake. “Don't get hopes up,” Heinz said. “I didn't know your parents. We dealt through lawyers. But perhaps others who summered there – who knows?” I began to take little mental notes, photograph by photograph, as the old man described whatever he remembered. We were near the end of the last album when he pointed to a photo of the far shore of the Moritzsee, where two houses were tucked into the trees. “This one,” he pointed to the larger of the two. “Jews also. Until 1940, at least.”

“Was that possible?” I asked.

“Before I entered the navy. They were there. Yes. Rosen.”

“Yes? Rosen?” I asked.

He was sure. As well, he had a strong memory and he knew quite a lot about the Rosens, their business, their wealth, their relatives. They had only daughters, two daughters, but the brother of Rosen had a son. Franz? Yes of course, Franz. But the photos were only of the girls. I admitted nothing about already knowing Franz, or knowing that his uncle had a place on the lake. For some reason I didn't want to deflate their gesture. I didn't want to disappoint them.

Both of the old Schiessls claimed to know nothing about my parents hiding in the woods, or being caught there, or being even in the vicinity. Heinz was away in the navy, he said. Grete never went out to the country without him. I can't say that I believed them, but I did believe that I would never get them to say anything different.

I spent another few minutes, thanked everyone, and left, feeling very well-behaved, like a girl you can take anywhere.

GERTRUDE BAUM

Trust

I WAS NOT PREPARED
for what came after Karen's visit, but I should have been. Miss Anholt didn't even tell me first, nor of course ask my judgment or if I would be aware of complications. No, I only heard it from her the next day. Miss Anholt had decided to give her claim to the Writers House to Karen. In a trust, if you please. Something to benefit Karen.

Now of course this was an act of generosity, so I could hardly point out to her that doing this would put Petra for sure in charge of the Writers House. No matter what they say, a “trust”, in the end Petra would control everything. So I had gone from bad to worse. Miss Anholt was bad enough. But you see this is what my mother always said that my big heart would get me. More trouble than I could dream of. What will happen to me now? What will happen to any of us now?

I had only one chip left to play. This had to do with the question Miss Anholt was so eager to know: who betrayed her parents? As I wrote previously, I knew this person. It was all part of the story that I heard many years ago and that others knew as well. But what good would it do me to tell Miss Anholt? Would she suddenly stop giving the Writers House to Karen, would she think, oh no, it is really Mrs. Baum who is more deserving and Mrs. Baum has nowhere to go after twenty-four years? Of course not. I had only myself to blame for this whole pathetic “sister” business that I had no business sticking my nose in in the first place. What could I expect, that Miss Anholt would tell Petra, “The Writers House goes to Karen but you must keep Mrs. Baum on forever, and Mrs. Kirchner and Giessen to boot, or I will be very displeased?” What a joke. Miss Anholt said some such thing, in all events, or anyway she told me this, that she had said to Petra that Mrs. Baum should stay on. But do you imagine Petra will pay attention? Don't make me laugh until I choke. I would not work for Petra anyway. That would be absurd.

No, I didn't tell Miss Anholt who betrayed her parents. I saw no reason. As you have seen, it is too easy to cause too much trouble. Nor will I tell any of you. It is a matter of principle. But I am not afraid to give you hints. Why not? A good story wishes to be told. You see, it was not a matter of hating the Jews or kowtowing to the authorities. It was a matter of envy. There was one who was envious of Miss Anholt's father, for having Ute's affection, siring her child, giving her money, even for the fact that Ute helped him in the woods. This man was not Ute's later husband, either, that blockhead Jürg. It was someone else. I will not tell you who. I cannot. But I will give you one further clue. When Miss Anholt came to Velden, he was still alive. There. I've said enough. Please do not remind me that I began by saying I would tell you everything. One thing for certain I've found is that people do not always mean precisely what they say.

HOLLY ANHOLT

Call

ONE DAY HE CALLED
. It was strange hearing his voice, after hearing it in my head for so long. The old story of living in shadows and coming out into the light. I listened to the little edges and burrs and almost didn't hear his words. I told him about Karen. It didn't surprise him. Nothing ever really surprised him. It was as though he had long ago decided that his life could not afford surprises, that it had enough on its plate with the already revealed.

I didn't want him to pity me. I wanted to make him laugh about something. So I said, “Why shouldn't Daddy have cast a few seeds like a proper lord of the manor?”