Berlin Cantata (20 page)

But please observe how it brings me back to Miss Anholt. Do I hate Jews? I am not fond of Jews, on average. I would say that I share in the common prejudices, having had these inflamed, for certain, during the National Socialist period, then mooted by the subsequent revulsion, then allowed by the passage of time to slowly re-seed, so that once again I am all-in-all what might be called a typical, quiet anti-Semite, with a belief that Jews control too much and so on but with qualified support for the State of Israel, as all-in-all the best solution to the Jewish Question which I believe is fruitless for any truly rational man to deny. There. Have I blackened my name in certain circles sufficiently for one day? But those certain circles would of course never have heard of me anyway. I do not count. I am too little. Yet I grew quite fond of Miss Anholt. Her pleasant demeanor, her modesty, and so on, notwithstanding the oddness which I previously mentioned, and which was perhaps attributable to the oddness of the situation in which she found herself, the insecurity and unfamiliarity, even, perhaps, the morbidity. She may have imagined she was making a pact with the Devil. Ah yes, even with Goethe looking over her shoulder!

I should only have wished to get to know her better. I might have put her better at ease. We might have had interesting conversations. Only a dullard would see a contradiction here. If there were more Jews around, it's quite possible more would be my friends. Though I don't believe this is wise national policy, more Jews, more Turks, more everybody. It is simply the way things are. Victor's rules. Catastrophe. But you see, I am a fair-minded person. I have no wish to be irritating simply for irritation's sake. I seek a world such as I once had with Miss Anholt, of cooperation and shared interest. People looking past their grievances. This is what life is about.

PETRA LUESCHER

Gift

YOU DON
'
T IMAGINE
for a minute that Karen liked her fresh new sister better on account of this so-called “gift” of hers. Why should she? She had no need of it. She was perfectly well taken care of already. She had everything she needed. If she so much as spat, I cleaned up the spit. If she soiled her bed, I washed the sheets.

I am not impressed. I don't give a good goddamn. That woman can have all the money in the world and do whatever she wants with it and it would make no difference to me. Comes in here, acts like a big shot. Well of course. What a lot of garbage. Lording it over an imbecile, is that something a grown woman should be proud of? Of course Karen doesn't love her. Do you know who she loves? That idiot on television. The one I'm constantly spending postage so that she can collect more stupid photographs of him. That's what we're dealing with, that's what I'm up against. I've raised her my whole life. But who cares what I think anyway? The sister who has nothing. Well I'll tell you something, I don't have to have anything to know what's right. There are ways for people to behave, maybe they don't teach that in California but over here we're not impressed, even Karen. You know what she said to me? “Do I have to go see my sister again?” And not only that. “Is she really my sister?” She doesn't even believe this fairy tale. Ute was no virgin, you know. My mother danced around, to put it politely. Who knows? I'm not saying no, I'm simply saying we don't know who the father was for sure. What if Ute was only telling this Anholt things in order to get his money? That would be a good one, wouldn't it? Her moron daughter finally gets it. And Petra, what does Petra get, Petra whose own father was quick enough out the door, oh Petra can do the wash and shut up. Well not this time. Believe me. This time I'm getting something. It's only right. My whole life. My whole life, and what thanks have I got? Petra, turn the TV on. Petra, I can't hear the sound now. Petra this, Petra that, one thing after the other.

I'll say something else. I don't care if you like it or not. Karen wouldn't even step foot in that house. She's happy where she is. Who do these people think we are? We were getting along perfectly fine without them. I had to drag her even once. “Oh come on, Karen, let's go see, your very kind sister has invited us to her beautiful house on the lake with many rooms and wonderful things!”

“I hate my sister,” she said. Those were her very words. “I hate my sister.”

“That's not right,” I said to her. “To hate your sister. Why? Don't do such a thing.”

“Because you're my sister,” she said.

“But you can have more than one, you know.”

“I don't want more than one.”

There. So no one can accuse me of poisoning anyone's mind. I didn't poison Karen's mind. This was her opinion from the start. I was perfectly suitable. Those were my exact words. “That's not right, to hate your sister.”

It did no good. Even after the sister gave us everything, Karen still didn't wish to see her anymore. People say she's an imbecile, Karen, but certain things she can certainly see.

Nor will I tell you my exact plans for the place. If I sell it, I sell it, it's none of your goddamn business. If I want to go to Phuket, that's none of your business either. Are you going to accuse me of taking a vacation? I'll take any vacation I want to. No one can tell me I don't deserve a vacation. That's the problem. Everybody has an opinion. Everybody butts into other people's business. No one knows what really went on. No one knows how I've spent my life.

Karen is a sweet girl. She just wants to be left alone with her television. She thinks one day the idiot on the television, Hunter, his name is Hunter and he is also from California, is going to find her and marry her. Then her life will be complete.

People have many ideas why all this happened. I am referring to the so-called “gift.” One is that this woman had so much money she didn't know what else to do with it, it all meant nothing to her, it was like crumbs off her plate. Another is that people are always saying how we must be guilty about the Jews but I don't even know a Jew and this was the opposite exactly, the Jew felt guilty for coming in here and disturbing our lives the way she did. Another is that she was as big an imbecile as Karen. Another is that she was deeply touched and all of that, she loved her sister, all of that, she was so happy to find a sister, all of that. This last explanation I don't believe one bit. Who was she trying to kid?

HOLLY ANHOLT

Demonstration

SHE SAT ON A ROCK
with her sign on the muddy ground near her feet. A few people had flashlights but mostly it was dark. We were somewhere in the countryside, not far from the city, having arrived in motley cars strewn around like lumps of coal, darker than the night. Beyond us were the barracks of the asylum-seekers. We caught glimpses of their lives, men in underwear, women with wash, the stark, tinny light of a television. Curtains blew through open windows. It was a quiet moment on the new front that had opened, between the asylum-seekers and those who didn't want them in the country.

I suppose you would say we were there to keep the peace. Schoolteachers and lawyers and students and solid citizens, responding to Anja Mann's call: “We have to say to them: no. Now. Before it starts to flame up big. In particular, to show these Eastern police that there's a price also if they ignore the problem.” Though I wasn't there for such noble reasons. I was there because this was my lawyer's other life, which I'd managed to know about only as rumor, and I was curious, and felt a little bit obliged, like somebody who's been to somebody's house for dinner several times and has never asked to see the beautiful garden. Nor did I think Simona was there to be altruistic either. It was more a reflex with Simona. Tell her about a demonstration and she would come.

But on this cold night there was something more. Simona was lying in wait. She was like a beggar in the shadows. From her rock she watched Anja march here and there, checking lists, bucking up spirits, giving orders, courting the waning interest of the TV people – whatever might be done in the dead spots by the captain of an undertaking such as ours. In the darkness we could make out little, but Anja was so upright, with her top-knot of hair and prominent nose, as if some mad Prussian geneticist in search of civic courage had attempted a cross between a samurai and Charles de Gaulle, that the faintest shadow of her was unmistakable. When Anja disappeared altogether, Simona resembled a bored, disconsolate child, her chin resting in her hand or her foot making idle circles in the muddy dirt.

And then Anja would reappear, like a looming ocean liner out of an old movie's fog, and Simona would follow her with her eyes. Beseeching glances, knowing glances, helpless glances; a full repertory of pleading, to all of which Anja was immune. Though it was possible, as well, that she hadn't even noticed Simona sitting on that rock, or seen her name on the sign-in sheet. But I didn't believe it; Anja was too organized for that, too in control. She was one of those for whom survival must have meant scanning the horizon.

A conversation that never took place:

Forgive me, my queen, but I only wrote notes until 1983, I only wrote notes for two years and a half, I only pointed out your Zionist tendencies twice.

Forget it, my lowly subject, whose nose properly touches the ground, my slave, unworthy and pathetic, whom I wouldn't forgive in ten thousand lives, who is only telling me this now because it will come out anyway, who would still keep it secret if she could, who only got that place in the Writers Union house to write a fatuous, self-serving autobiography by ratting me out.

It never took place because Anja wouldn't allow it to. At last Simona got up from her rock and went over to where Anja was talking with others in a circle. She loitered at the periphery until there was room for her to elbow in, then stood in silent hope that her relentlessness would soon pay off. Others drifted away. “Anja…” Perhaps she got that far. I couldn't hear but I could see Anja turn away from the circle. Was it at the exact moment Simona spoke or caught her glance? Simona followed her and touched Anja's sleeve, a shadow puppet's gesture. Anja pulled her arm away.

Simona came back to her rock and her sign. Sometime before she had told me she was leaving Berlin for Jerusalem. Now wasn't that nice news, I had thought, but didn't say, afraid that if I showed any support for the idea, she might reconsider. She was gripping the handle of her sign with both hands now, as if it were her last friend, she and her sign taking on the world. But the cardboard part of it still dragged in the mud. “
Asyls
in! Nazis out!” Perhaps it was my mother's pity that I kept feeling for Simona; if you ask, you shall be forgiven, the world according to Doe. And why not, what was wrong with that, wasn't that the only way the world would ever work?

And Anja Mann, heroic leader of the old GDR dissidents, now left without much of a portfolio, rooting around for the next evil thing? What was wrong with her, that she couldn't forgive two years in jail, slanders, family suffering, psychiatric tortures, loss of health? I felt like a fool that night. I was confused and I hated to be confused. Simona had a few tears, as well. I hated her tears. It was some moments after she produced them that I went after Anja, not ostentatiously, but in Simona's plain sight, as if I were sick of hiding some stupid thing. We spoke for a minute or so. She thanked me for coming. When I arrived back in the shadows, Simona asked me, “So you know her?”

“Anja?”

“You know her quite well.”

“She's been my lawyer. With the claims.”

“I should have guessed,” Simona said. The words, of course, of a woman who's just discovered the identity of her husband's lover.

“Sorry,” I said.

But I offered no further explanation, nor did she ask for one.

A stalemate of little lies.

Later the skinheads came. From the back of the shelter we heard a window break and then shouting. We jumped up, grabbing our signs as though they were weapons. Our signs, our brave defense against the rock-throwers. We raced around to the back of the barracks and tried to form a line. It was all fairly chaotic and exciting and never seemed particularly dangerous. Inside the barracks men in t-shirts ran from window to window. Whoever had flashlights shone them into the woods, trying to catch glimpses of the attackers. There couldn't have been many. I caught glimpses of two or three, advancing or retreating, as shadowy as guerrillas. A couple more windows broke. The skins disappeared into the woods. Later I would learn that two of the boys from David's car workshop were among the attackers, but I saw none of their faces that night. Anja's demonstration made the evening news.

FRANZ ROSEN

List

Beerman, Felix, 1887–1915

Beerman, Siegfried, 1894–1916

Beerman, Walter, 1890–1915

Mayer, Isador, 1891–1918

Rosen, Hugo, 1886–1914

Rosen, Julius, 1881–1918

Rosen, Louis, 1888–1914

Rosen, Max, 1891–1915

Schlösser, Artur, 1897–1915

Schlösser, Ernst, 1882–1916

Silber, Willy, 1895–1916

ANJA MANN

Justice

IT WOULD BE UNETHICAL
for me to speak about the cases of any of my clients. In particular I wish to emphasize that my comments below in no way derive from the claim of Miss Holly Anholt. But if you only read the newspapers, you would hear of claims where the capitalist lottery is on full display, where distant relations receive windfalls of tens of millions, where institutions such as even state art museums acquiesce to flimsy claims, ostensibly because they fear adverse public relations if they fight, but more likely because they understand that an expensive private sale of the claimed painting would boost the value of their remaining holdings of the same artist beyond measure. A new class of greedy and sanctimonious lawyers, particularly in America, has been nourished as well, and this can never be a good thing.