Berlin Cantata (4 page)

“Of course. What's going on?”

“Someone else is claiming your properties. A family whose name is Schiessl.”

Of course I'd never heard of them.

She continued: “The people claiming…I'm not sure how to present this to you, it's rather strange, really…I haven't had a case similar…They're the family to whom your father was forced to sell, when these properties were ‘aryanized'.”

“Nazis?”

“I believe so. Former Nazis.”

The words caught me by the throat. “I don't know that I want to walk into a room with former Nazis. Former Nazis, still secretly Nazis…”

“Well of course. I can represent you. That shouldn't be trouble. I'll go. I'll collect information. Then we'll talk.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” I said again. “I'll come. I'll be there.”

Hard for me to explain this quick reversal except as evidence of counterphobia, yet it had never been true before that I ran in the direction of my fear. I decided I was doing it for my mother. I imagined that she was brave, and that it was necessary that I be like her.

Another lawyer's office. Anja's had been bright, airy, designed, a show of contemporary relevance. This one was musty and indifferent, as if the law moved more slowly here, through a more humid atmosphere, a place where you'd expect a ceiling fan to be groaning. In the elevator she had said, “You need not say anything. Speak only with me,” a cue that could lead one beset with uneasiness but not wishing to be seen as weak to do pretty much exactly the opposite.

The other lawyer wore a sport jacket rather than a suit. He was thin with thinning white hair and close-set eyes and there was something androgynous in his manner. It's possible his handshake was too pleasant. I didn't like the fact that he wore a sport jacket instead of a suit. Was he not taking my case seriously? His name was Rosenthaler. Like Anja, his English was efficient, university-trained, although he had the habit of prefacing or concluding any utterance where it halfway fit with
ja
, as if this were the one word in German which I was sure to understand.

“Are the others coming?” Anja asked.

“The Schiessls? No. The Schiessls won't be here.” Rosenthaler's thin fingers picked briskly through his file. “My principals are eighty-seven and eighty-three respectively. Just let me get these things together. Let me explain the situation…”

He pulled out whatever documents he was looking for, three or four sheets of onion skin paper, then addressed me directly. “Our understanding, Miss Anholt, is you have filed your claim for these properties. The Schiessls have also filed their claim.”

It was a moment when I loved my lawyer's wince, as if it were exactly mine, as if for a moment we shared the same face. “With all due respect, the comparison is absurd. Between a Jew holding proper pre-war title and people who benefitted from a forced Nazi sale?”

“
Ja, ja,
of course,” Rosenthaler conceded. “But kindly examine this.” I recall the hushed sibilance of the onion skin sheets as he passed them across the conference room table. Anja took them and studied them for what seemed too long a time, her eyes with metronomic efficiency clicking up and down the pages. All I could make out was that the edges of the paper were brown, like a cake that had been baked too long. Finally: “Would you recognize your father's signature, Miss Anholt? Is this it?”

She turned the aged papers so that I could examine them. My eyes ignored the German text and went directly to the unevenly blue-inked name at the end of many dense paragraphs. There was something modest to my father's signature, it seemed almost too legible, with its broad strokes and full loops, as though good penmanship and good citizenship were thought by its author to be related, valued things. But I also imagined: it was a signature not difficult to forge. “It looks like it,” I said.

“Can you read the German?” she asked me.

“No.”

“Then I'll explain. This document purports to be a sale, agreed to between your father and the Schiessls, in which your father gives to the Schiessl family for four thousand five hundred dollars U.S. whatever rights he may have had in any of these properties. And it's dated 1947, years after the Nazis fell.”

I stumbled towards the obvious, feeling the beating of my blood. “So what does it mean?”

Attorney Rosenthaler was ready for that softball. “Please, let me explain why we're here. The Schiessls' claim has its own problem. They themselves were expropriated in 1948,
ja
, when East Germany was under direct Soviet occupation. But the new claims law provides compensation only for expropriations under the Nazis, until 1945, or after the East German government was instituted, from 1949.”

“So they have no rights to compensation at all.” Indignation came easily to Anja Mann, her cheeks flush, her voice low and sure. “Their claim's worth exactly nothing.”

But Rosenthaler mocked her words slyly: “Not exactly nothing, I wouldn't say.”

“They were expropriated by the wrong government in the wrong year. Yet they're willing to use this paper to prevent Miss Anholt from getting anything? That's quite astonishing.”

“Not astonishing at all. Why astonishing? Schiessls and Anholts concluded an arms-length transaction in 1947,
ja
? Mr Anholt gave up his rights freely… But what if this paper didn't exist?”

By then I may have been having one of those out-of-body conversational experiences where you look down from the ceiling and say “What's
she
doing here? Are they talking about
me
?” But Rosenthaler was eager now, his ingenuity ready to have its day. “The Schiessls have a proposal. Let us, in effect, tear up this paper. You pursue your claim, Miss Anholt. And if and when it's successful, you and the Schiessls split the proceeds.”

“I don't want anything to do with this.” I pushed my chair back, stumbled up, the way you're supposed to when you've finally had it with something. “No! I won't become partners with Nazis.”

In the elevator, Anja was a fount of mollifying words, comforting words, which despite the surprising warmth of her tone were a challenge for me to pay much attention to. I was too busy convincing myself I'd really been offended: “I don't believe it. I don't believe my father would do business with Nazis.”

But even then I was thinking of the onion skin paper, that you never see anymore. My father always had a big box of it. It was the only sort of paper he ever used. It went with his Remington typewriter, the box would come out whenever he typed a letter or a bill of sale, as much a part of the mystique of him as the Oldsmobiles he bought every other year, like clockwork, and proudly washed in the driveway every Saturday afternoon because that's what Americans did and he was an American now, even as the sweet, decayed scent of his German-language books, the Goethe and Schiller that must once have been his household gods, still lingered in his study.

At a loss, I met my friends Oksana and Nils at the old Café Charlie on the Friedrichstrasse near Nils' office. I will say exactly three things about Nils: one, he was a reporter; two, he was one of those tall, lanky types with a long head, kind of a bearded Viking marauder turned aggressively, prematurely gray; three, he'd gone out with a number of Jewish girls before me. You might say we were his specialty.

Confused, overcome with the sense that a naïve, Disney-drenched upbringing was surrounding me like fairy dust and obscuring the world as it really was, I laid out the facts as I understood them to my new friends. “I could file my claim, I could get everything and then these people, these
Nazis
, could come in and get everything from me.”

“What does Anja say?” Nils asked.

“Well she says they won't. They'll promise not to, because otherwise why would I even file a claim? They need to share with me. But I don't know. I don't know anything. Even if any of this is legitimate.”

“Did your father keep business records?” Oksana asked.

“That's what Anja suggested – to look, you mean?”

“I don't know,” Oksana said, “But if you want to be sure…”

If there were business records, they would have been in San Francisco. The left side of my brain made a disappointed calculus of my frequent flier miles while the rest of it wondered if I should at least be smoking a cigarette or ordering something other than tea, if I wanted them to think I was less a child. Nils sat crosswise in his chair, more facing Oksana than me, so in control of himself that I could barely stand it.

“You both think my father did it, don't you?”

“You make it sound like a crime,” Oksana said.

“Do you really think a nice Jewish man, three years out of Auschwitz, with a daughter dead, a wife traumatized, would make a deal with Nazis for money?”

But my words sounded rhetorical, as if I were rehearsing something, and I knew the chance I could come out wrong on this. After all, what was truly astonishing to me was not that my father would accept, but that such an offer had been made in the first place. Nazis making postwar deals with Jews? I had never imagined such a thing. But Daddy was a practical man. My mother said this so many times about him, usually in apologetic tones, as though “practical” were an antonym to spontaneous or joyful or easy.

Nils kept his silence awhile, having the habit which I've found to be not universal, particularly among European men, of wanting to be sure of something before he ventured in, then finally he said: “Probably the best thing your father ever did. It was what he could do to overcome humiliation. It was noble. It was hard. Your father was a saint.”

So, in the opinion of one individual who at the moment was way on my good side, my father was a saint. I tried to imagine my father humiliated, as though standing there with egg dripping down his face and onto his clothes. With nothing he could do about it; a fertile egg, a pinprick of blood. And then others, like Nils, recognizing my father's humiliation for what it was, not letting it go in secret, saying it, speaking it out loud.

One week later I was on a plane to San Francisco. I skipped the nostalgia tour of Walnut Creek and drove my rental directly to the U-Stor-It. There, in a chainlink locker the size of a jail cell, surrounded by boxes of my parents' possessions that howled accusations of neglect, I again opened their metal strongbox and found, underneath the camp photos and report cards, in a packet of documents held by string, a second original of the quitclaim document I had seen in Berlin. This time my father's watery, clear, childlike signature reminded me of him sitting in the back room of the office supply business he had built for twenty years behind a thick-legged oak desk that always seemed a size too big for him writing check after check out of a ledger checkbook. Never complaining. He didn't seem to have a huge amount of money, but just enough. Like the Henny Youngman joke, old Jewish man gets hit by a truck, he's lying in the gutter, ambulance on its way, the cop comes, balls up his jacket, puts it under the guy's head, asks, “Are you comfortable?” Jewish guy says, “I make a nice living, thank you.” And then he died, and I myself had just enough, a couple thousand extra a month, anyway, so that now I could do crazy, unscheduled things like quit a good job in Paris or go to a city where I knew no one and had never had a desire to be or fly halfway across the world to prove the obvious.

I browsed further, as a delaying tactic as much as anything, or a distraction from what I felt as a defeat. And soon I found, among copies of life insurance policies that had lapsed, and expired warranties, and letters from the Naturalization Service dated 1953 congratulating my parents on their American citizenship, an escrow agent's receipt for the down payment on our house in Walnut Creek. It was for the same sum the Schiessls paid him, four thousand five hundred dollars. The escrow payment was dated the seventh of October, 1947. The agreement with the Schiessls was from three weeks before. He had used the Schiessls' payment to buy the house that I grew up in.

The storage bin felt like my home then; or the place out of which I had hatched, a hermit's place, where I could sit all day in wan fluorescent light wondering if Jews had saints. I called Anja Mann in Berlin to tell her to make the deal with the old Nazis, my new partners.

Then one night after returning to Berlin I drove with Nils to the GDR countryside to try to find my parents' country house. I hadn't looked at my film in awhile, yet I felt I remembered enough of it that I would recognize the building. We got lost. The roads were terrible. Nils lost his temper in a childish way I found endearing then frightening then endearing again. At dawn or near dawn we found the hamlet of Velden am Moritzsee, though nothing said Velden and no sign announced the Moritzsee. There were inky patches of a lake through clearings in a dense wood, and unkempt stucco houses built back from the road or set down at odd angles to it, home to Trabants and chickens and multiple families. Each house I compared, in what felt like an act of desperate love, to the images that seemed teasing and fleeting in my mind. Not this, not that, like the mythical sculptor I chipped away at memories that were not even mine. I was so grateful when I saw it. It was as if it was still enough the same, as if it were allowing me to remember it. Rusted iron gates, like old retainers that could no longer be afforded and would be there until they died and then never be replaced, buckled at each extremity of a shallow scooped drive. The house itself stood back from the road perhaps twenty yards, among poplars and birch, hulking in the half-light, dark and colorless, its pitched roof like its neighborhood feminine and familiar, and at one end the telltale sunroom with its expanse of glass, raised, as the land sloped away, on an exposed concrete foundation embedded with stones the size of coconuts. A couple of bicycles lay in the grass. A cat scurried away.