Dark Star (32 page)

NO OFFER OF FUTURE EXFILTRATION OR RESETTLEMENT IS TO
BE MADE.
DIRECTOR

7 November.

He arrived at the loft just after nine, a little out of breath, his face cold from the night air, carrying a bottle of expensive wine wrapped in paper. A different mood for Marta: hair carefully pinned up, red Bakelite earrings with lipstick to match, tight sweater and skirt. She gave him a leather case holding a pair of gold cuff links set with tiny citrines, a faded lemon color. His shirt had buttons, so she brought one of her own out of a bureau to show him what they looked like; he found them almost impossible to attach and fumbled grimly till she came to the rescue, grinning at his efforts. They drank the wine and ate cookies from a box with a paper doily in it. He turned the radio to a different station—light Viennese froth that drew a sneer from Marta—but he'd come to associate the serious German composers with the mood of the city and he didn't want that in his sanctuary. They talked, aimless and comfortable; she picked candied cherries off the tops of the cookies and put them in an ashtray. They would eat supper later, after they made love. But tonight they were in no hurry.

It had become, in just a few days, a love affair with rules of its own, a life of its own, a life that radiated from a bulbous old green sofa at its center, an affair with ups and downs, rough moments smoothed over, and unimportant, courteous lies. Something between adults. Marta, a working woman, a sophisticated Berliner with a life of her own, accepted him for what she thought he was: a
Soviet journalist who traveled constantly, a man to whom she was deeply, sexually, attracted, a man she'd encountered in the last days of girlhood who now loved her as a woman.

It was too bad they couldn't go out to restaurants or concerts, but the present reality was uncertain in that way and they agreed without discussion not to put themselves in a situation where unpleasantness might occur—life was too short for turmoil, it was best to float with the tide. Szara did not mention the Aesopic letter or the trip to Lisbon. He doubted she knew he'd written it. If she did, she'd also decided it would not bear discussion. They had negotiated a treaty, and now they lived by it.

The radio played “Barcarole” from
The Tales of Hoffman.
She sat on his lap. “This is pretty,” she said. “Two lovers on a boat, drifting along a canal.” He slipped a hand under her sweater; she closed her eyes, leaned her head on his shoulder and smiled. The song ended and an announcer, rattling a paper into the microphone, stated that a special bulletin from Dr. Joseph Goebbels would follow. “Oh, that hideous man!” Marta said.

Goebbels's delivery was professional, but the nasal whine of his personality was more than evident. As he read, from an editorial that would appear the following day in the
Völkischer Beobachter,
a kind of choked-off rage thickened his voice. This news, the tone implied, was well beyond shouting. Ernst Vom Rath, third secretary at the German embassy in Paris, had been shot and gravely wounded by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew named Hershl Grynszpan, a student whose parents had been deported from Germany to Poland, then held at the frontier town of Zbaszýn. Goebbels's point was clear: we try to help these people, by sending them away from a nation where they aren't wanted to a place where they will be more at home, and look what they do—they shoot German diplomats. And just how long shall we Germans be expected to put up with such outrages? The bulletin ended, a Strauss waltz followed. “This world,” said Marta sadly, closing her eyes again and wriggling to get comfortable. “We must be tender to one another,” she added, placing her warm hand over his.

•

10
November.

A German dearly loves his fish.
Making a show of being a journalist, Szara jotted down impressions on a pocket notepad.
Herring and whitebait,
he wrote.
Flounder and haddock.
After midnight, the stalls of the Koln Fischmarkt began to fill with the day's catch trucked in from the coast: glistening gray and pink eels on chipped ice, baskets of whelks and oysters trailing seaweed, crayfish floating in a lead tank filled with cloudy brine. The sawdust underfoot was wet with blood and sea water, and the air, even in the cold November night, was rank—
the iodine smell of tidal pools,
Szara wrote,
barrels of cast-off fishheads. Stray cats.
There were plenty of people around; vendors shouted snappy fish jokes at their customers—a bit of psychology: lively talk implied fresh seafood. Some local swells and their girlfriends, faces bright with drinking, were waltzing around with half a dripping mackerel. There was even a bewildered British tourist, asking questions in slow, loud English, puzzled that he couldn't get an answer.

The operative was precisely on time, a heavy man with eyebrows grown together and red cheeks, hair sheared off in a military cut. After the parol was completed, they walked silently to the car, a black Humboldt parked a little way down the Muhlendamm. The operative was an expert driver, and cautious, squaring blocks and ceaselessly crossing back over his own tracks to make sure they weren't followed. They worked their way west through the Grunewald and eventually turned north on the near bank of the Havel, following a succession of little roads to avoid police on the main highways. “I'm told to warn you there's some kind of trouble brewing,” the driver said.

“What kind of trouble? ”

“Aktionen.
Actions against the Jews. A monitoring unit at the embassy distributed a teleprinter message just as I was leaving; it was from Müller's office to all Gestapo headquarters. The timing was specified as ‘at very short notice.' You'll probably get in and out without difficulties—but don't dawdle.”

“The
treff
takes place in a synagogue.”

“I know where it takes place. The point is, there won't be anyone around, and it's best for your contact, who comes from the east
without going into the city. We got him in for Friday night services and he just didn't leave.”

The car slowed as they came to the outskirts of Wittenau. The street swung away from the Havel, and the sheds and low buildings of small industrial shops appeared on both sides. The driver pulled over and turned off the engine. The night was still, the air smelling faintly of coal smoke. The
apparat
had a genius, Szara thought, for finding such places; dead zones, nighttime deserts on the edges of cities.

“This is Prinzallee,” said the driver. “Up ahead of you, about fifty paces, is the start of Kleinerstrasse. Your synagogue is on the corner. What time do you have? ”

“Eight minutes after one.”

“It will take you only a minute to walk.”

Szara fidgeted in the front seat. A bird started up nearby, otherwise the silence was oppressive. “Does anybody live here? ” he asked.

“No more. It was a ghetto thirty years ago, then it turned into factories. Only the synagogue is left, and a few tenements with old Jews living in them—most of the young ones got out after '33.”

Szara kept looking at his watch.

“All right,” said the driver. “Don't close the car door—it's a noise everybody knows. And please keep it short.”

Szara climbed out. The bulb had been removed from the dome light, so the interior of the car remained dark. He walked close to a board fence on a dirt pathway that muffled his footsteps, but the night was so quiet he became conscious of his own breathing.

The synagogue was very old, a two-story wood frame structure with a sloping roof, built perhaps a century earlier for use as a workshop, possibly a carpentry workshop since it stood against the low shed of a neighboring lumberyard.

A sign in Hebrew above the door said Beth Midresh, which meant House of Worship. That told Szara that it was being used by immigrant Jews from Poland and Russia—all synagogues in the Pale were identified that way. In France they used the name of the street, while the wealthy Jews of Germany often named their synagogues after a leader in the community—the Adler synagogue, for instance. Those were grand and glorious temples, nothing like what
he approached. Seen in the light of a waning moon, the synagogue on Prinzallee might have stood in Cracow or Lodz, seemed to come from another time and place.

The impression held. The front door was unlocked, but the frame was warped and Szara had to pull hard to get it open. The interior took him back to Kishinev—the smell of sweat and urine in stale air, as though the windows were never opened. Behind the altar, above the double-doored ark that held the scrolls of the Torah, was a tiny lamp, the eternal light, and he could just make out two narrow aisles between rows of wooden chairs of several different styles. He took the aisle on the left and walked toward the front, the boards creaking softly under his feet. The door to one side of the altar was ajar; he gave it a gentle push and it swung open to reveal a man sitting slumped at a bare table. The room was narrow, perhaps serving at one time as a rabbi's study—there were empty book shelves built up one wall.

“Dr. Baumann,” he said.

Baumann looked up at him; his collapsed posture didn't change. “Yes,” he said in a low voice.

There was a chair directly across the table from Baumann's and Szara sat down. “You're not sick, are you?”

“Tired,” Baumann said. He meant the word in both senses: exhausted, and tired of life.

“We have to discuss a few things, quickly, and then we can leave. You have a way to get safely home?”

“Yes. It isn't a problem.”

Perhaps he had a driver waiting or was driving his own automobile, Szara didn't know. “We want to find out, first of all, if you've come under pressure from any of the Reichsministries. I don't mean having to hand in your passport, or any of the laws passed against the Jews in general, I mean you in particular. In other words, have you been singled out in any way, any way at all.”

Szara thought he saw the probe hit home. The room was dark, and the reaction was very brief, not much more than a pause, but it was there. Then Baumann shook his head impatiently, as though Szara was wasting his time with such foolish notions: this was not a question he wished to discuss. Instead, he leaned forward and
whispered urgently: “I'm going to accept your offer. Your offer to leave here, for my wife and I. The dog too, if it can be managed.”

“Of course,” Szara said.

“Soon. Maybe right away.”

“I have to ask …”

“We want to go to Amsterdam. It shouldn't be too hard; our friends say that the Dutch are letting us in, no questions asked. So the only difficulty is getting out of Germany. We'll take a suitcase and the little dog, nothing else, they can have it all, everything.”

“One thing we'll need to—” Szara stopped cold and leaned his head to one side.

Baumann sat up straight as though he'd been shocked. “My God,” he said.

“Is it singing?”

Baumann nodded.

Szara instinctively looked at his watch. “At one-thirty in the morning?”

“When they sing like that,” Baumann said, then paused, his voice fading into silence as he concentrated on the sound.

Szara remembered the parade on the Unter den Linden. These were the same voices, deep and vibrant. Both of them sat still as the sound grew louder, then Baumann stood suddenly. “They must not see us.” The beginning of panic was in his voice.

“Would we be better off out in the street?”

“They're coming here.
Here.”

Szara stood. He remembered the road into Wittenau—there was nothing there. By now the words of the song were plainly audible; it was something they sang in the Rathskellers as they drank their beer:
Wenn's Judenblut vom Messer spritzt / Dann geht's nochmal so gut, dann geht's nochmal so gut.
When Jewish blood squirts under the knives / Then all is well, then all is well. Baumann turned away from the door and the two men stared at each other, both frightened, uncertain what to do and, suddenly, perfect equals.

“Hide.” Baumann spoke the word in a broken whisper, the voice of a terrified child.

Szara fought for control of himself. He had been through pogroms before—in Kishinev and Odessa. They always attacked
the synagogue. “We're getting out,” he said. It was an order. Whatever else happened, he wasn't going to end his life in dumb shock like an animal that knows it's going to die. He walked quickly out of the narrow room and had taken two steps back up the aisle when one of the dark windows flanking the entry door suddenly brightened; a golden shadow flickered against it for a moment, then the glass came showering in on the floor. The men outside sent up a great cheer and, simultaneously, Baumann screamed. Szara spun and clapped his hand over the man's mouth; he felt saliva on his palm but held on tight until Baumann made a gesture that he could control himself. Behind them, the other window exploded. Szara leaned close to Baumann. “A stairway,” he whispered. “There must be a stairway.”

“Behind the curtain.”

They ran up three steps onto the altar. Szara heard the stubborn door squeak at the other end of the building just as Baumann threw the curtain aside and they disappeared behind the ark. There was no banister on the stairs, just steps braced against the wall. He raced up, Baumann behind him, and tried the door. On the other side of the curtain he could hear chairs being kicked around and the other windows being broken to a chorus of laughter and cheers. “Jews come out!” roared a drunken voice. Szara tore the door open with one hand and reached back for Baumann's sleeve with the other, pulling him into the upstairs room, then turning and kicking the door shut. The second story was unused—a pile of drapes, cob-webbed corners, broken chairs, the smell of old wood … and something else. Burning. He turned to look at Baumann; his mouth was wide open, gasping for air, and his hand was pressed against the middle of his chest. “No!” Szara said. Baumann looked at him strangely, then sank to his knees. Szara ran to the closest window, but there were torches below and dim shapes moving across the alley side of the synagogue. He crossed the room to a second window and saw that the upper story was just above the roof of the lumberyard shed. It was a very old window, tiny panes of glass in wooden strips, and had not been opened for years. He strained at it for a moment, then drew his foot back and kicked out the glass and the bracing, kicking again and again, savagely, even though he felt
the fabric of his trousers rip and saw blood droplets suddenly appear in the thick dust on the sill. When the opening was sufficiently wide, he ran to Baumann and took him under the armpits. “Get up,” he said. “Get up.”