Aftershock & Others (10 page)

“Where are you going?”

“A little trip I take every so often. I like to swing up through Saxony and Thuringia to see what the local Bolsheviks are up to—I have a membership in the German Communist Party, you know. I subscribe to
Rote Fahne
, listen to speeches by the
Zentrale,
and go to rallies. It’s very entertaining. But after I tire of that—Marxist rhetoric can be
so
boring—I head south to Munich to see what the other end of the political spectrum is doing. I’m also a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party down there and subscribe to their
Volkischer Beobachter
.”

“Never heard of them. How can they call themselves ‘National’ if they’re not nationally known?”

“Just as they can call themselves Socialists when they are stridently fascist. Although frankly I, for one, have difficulty discerning much difference between either end of the spectrum—they are distinguishable only by their paraphernalia and their rhetoric. The National Socialists—they call themselves Nazis—are a power in Munich and other parts of Bavaria, but no one pays too much attention to them up here. I must take you down there sometime to listen to one of their leaders. Herr Hitler is quite a personality. I’m sure our friend Freud would love to get him on the couch.”

“Hitler? Never heard of him, either.”

“You really should hear him speak sometime. Very entertaining.”

A few weeks later,
when Karl returned from the bank with the mortgage papers for his mother to sign, he spied something on the door post. He stopped and looked closer.

A mezuzah.

He took out his pocket knife and pried it off the wood, then went inside.

“Mother, what is this?” he said, dropping the object on the kitchen table.

She looked up at him with her large, brown, intelligent eyes. Her brunette hair was streaked with gray. She’d lost considerable weight immediately after Father’s death and had never regained it. She used to be lively and happy, with an easy smile that dimpled her high-colored cheeks. Now she was quiet and pale. She seemed to have shrunken, in body and spirit.

“You know very well what it is, Karl.”

“Yes, but haven’t I warned you about putting it outside?”

“It belongs outside.”

“Not in these times. Please, Mother. It’s not healthy.”

“You should be proud of being Jewish.”

“I’m not Jewish.”

They’d had this discussion hundreds of times lately, it seemed, but Mother just didn’t want to understand. His father, the colonel, had been Christian, his mother Jewish. Karl had decided to be neither. He was an atheist, a skeptic, a free-thinker, an intellectual. He was German by language and by place of birth, but he preferred to think of himself as an international man. Countries and national boundaries should be abolished, and someday soon would be.

“If your mother is Jewish,
you
are Jewish. You can’t escape that. I’m not afraid to tell the world I’m Jewish. I wasn’t so observant when your father was alive, but now that he’s gone…”

Her eyes filled with tears.

Karl sat down next to her and took her hands in his.

“Mother, listen. There’s a lot of anti-Jewish feeling out there these days. It will die down, I’m sure, but right now we live in an inordinately proud country that lost a war and wants to blame someone. Some of the most bitter people have chosen Jews as their scapegoats. So until the country gets back on an even keel, I think it’s prudent to keep a low profile.”

Her smile was wan. “You know best, dear.”

“Good.” He opened the folder he’d brought from the bank. “And now for some paperwork. These are the final mortgage papers, ready for signing.”

Mother squeezed his hands. “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?”

“Absolutely sure.”

Actually, now that the final papers were ready, he was having second thoughts.

Karl had arranged to borrow every last pfennig the bank would lend him against his mother’s estate. He remembered how uneasy he’d been at the covetous gleam in the bank officers’ eyes when he’d signed the papers. They sensed financial reverses, gambling debts, perhaps, a desperate need for cash that would inevitably lead to default and subsequent foreclosure on a prime piece of property. The bank president’s eyes had twinkled over his reading glasses; he’d all but rubbed his hands in anticipation.

Doubt and fear gripped Karl now as his mother’s pen hovered over the signature line. Was he being a fool? He was a bookseller and they were financiers. Who was he to presume to know more than men who spent every day dealing with money? He was acting on a whim, spurred on by a man he hardly knew.

But he steeled himself, remembering the research he’d done. He’d always been good at research. He knew how to ferret out information. He’d learned that Rudolf Haverstein, the Reichsbank’s president, had increased his orders of currency paper and was running the printing presses at full speed on overtime.

He watched in silence as his mother signed the mortgage papers.

He’d already taken out personal loans, using Mother’s jewelry as collateral. Counting the mortgage, he’d now accumulated 500 million marks. If he converted them immediately, he’d get 9,800 US dollars at today’s exchange rate. Ninety-eight hundred dollars for half a billion marks. It seemed absurd. He wondered who was madder—the Reichsbank or himself.

“To runaway inflation,” Ernst
Drexler said, clinking his glass of cloudy yellow against Karl’s clear glass of schnapps.

Karl sipped a little of his drink and said nothing. He and Ernst had retreated from the heat and glare of the late summer sun on the Romanisches Cafe’s sidewalk to the cooler, darker interior.

Noon on a Saturday and the Romanisches was nearly empty. But then, who could afford to eat out these days?

Only thieves and currency speculators.

Four months ago Karl hadn’t believed it possible, but for a while they had indeed had fun with inflation.

Now it was getting scary.

Less than four months after borrowing half a billion marks, his 9,800 US dollars were worth almost five trillion marks. Five
trillion
. The number was meaningless. He could barely imagine even a billion marks, and he controlled five thousand times that amount.

“I realized today,” Karl said softly, “that I can pay off all of my half-billion-mark debt with a single dollar bill.”

“Don’t do it,” Ernst said quickly.

“Why not? I’d like to be debt free.”

“You will be. Just wait.”

“Until when?”

“It won’t be long before the exchange rate will be billions of marks to the dollar. Won’t it be so much more entertaining to pay off the bankers with a single American coin?”

Karl stared at his glass. This game was no longer “entertaining.” People had lost all faith in the mark. And with good reason. Its value was plummeting. In a mere thirty days it had plunged from a million to the dollar to half a
billion
to the dollar. Numbers crowded the borders of the notes, ever-lengthening strings of ever more meaningless zeros. Despite running twenty-four hours a day, the Reichsbank presses could not keep up with the demand. Million-mark notes were now being over-stamped with
TEN MILLION
in large black letters. Workers had gone from getting paid twice a month to weekly, and now to daily. Some were demanding twice-daily pay so that they could run out on their lunch hour and spend their earnings before they lost their value.

“I’m frightened, Ernst.”

“Don’t worry. You’ve insulated yourself. You’ve got nothing to fear.”

“I’m frightened for our friends and neighbors. For Germany.”

“Oh, that.”

Karl didn’t understand how Ernst could be so cavalier about the misery steadily welling up around them like a rain-engorged river. It oppressed Karl. He felt guilty, almost ashamed of being safe and secure on his high ground of foreign currency. Ernst drained his absinthe and rose, his eyes bright.

“Let’s go for a walk, shall we? Let’s see what your friends and neighbors are up to on this fine day.”

Karl left his schnapps and followed him out into the street. They strolled along Budapesterstrasse until they came upon a bakery.

“Look,” Ernst said, pointing with his black cane. “A social gathering.”

Karl bristled at the sarcasm. The long line of drawn faces with anxious, hollow eyes—male, female, young, old—trailing out the door and along the sidewalk was hardly a social gathering. Lines for bread, meat, milk, any of the staples of life, had become so commonplace that they were taken for granted. The customers stood there with their paper bags, cloth sacks, and wicker baskets full of marks, shifting from one foot to the other, edging forward, staying close behind the person in front of them lest someone tried to cut into the line, constantly turning the count of their marks in their minds, hoping they’d find something left to buy when they reached the purchase counter, praying their money would not devalue too much before the price was rung up.

Karl had never stood in such a line. He didn’t have to. He needed only to call or send a note to a butcher or baker listing what he required and saying that he would be paying with American currency. Within minutes the merchant would come knocking with the order. He found no pleasure, no feeling of superiority in his ability to summon the necessities to his door, only relief that his mother would not be subject to the hunger and anxiety of these poor souls.

As Karl watched, a boy approached the center of the line where a young woman had placed a wicker basket full of marks on the sidewalk. As he passed her he bent and grabbed a handle on the basket, upended it, dumping out the marks. Then he sprinted away with the basket. The woman cried out but no one moved to stop him—no one wanted to lose his place in line.

Karl started to give chase but Ernst restrained him.

“Don’t bother. You’ll never catch him.”

Karl watched the young woman gather her scattered marks into her apron and resume her long wait in line, weeping. His heart broke for her.

“This has to stop. Someone has to do something about this.”

“Ah, yes,” Ernst said, nodding sagely. “But who?”

They walked on. As they approached a corner, Ernst suddenly raised his cane and pressed its shaft against Karl’s chest.

“Listen. What’s that noise?”

Up ahead at the intersection, traffic had stopped. Instead of the roar of internal combustion engines, Karl heard something else. Other sounds, softer, less rhythmic, swelled in the air. A chaotic tapping and a shuffling cacophony of scrapes and draggings, accompanied by a dystonic chorus of high-pitched squeaks and creaks.

And then they inched into view—the lame, the blind, the damaged, dismembered, demented, and disfigured tatterdemalions of two wars: The few remaining veterans of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—stooped, wizened figures in their seventies and eighties who had besieged Paris and proclaimed Wilhelm of Prussia as Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles—were leading the far larger body of pathetic survivors from the disastrous Great War, the War to End All Wars, the valiant men whose defeated leaders five years ago had abjectly agreed to impossible reparations in that same Hall of Mirrors.

Karl watched aghast as a young man with one arm passed within a few meters of him dragging a wheeled platform on which lay a limbless man, hardly more than a head with a torso. Neither was much older than he. The Grand Guignol parade was full of these fractions of men and their blind, deaf, limping, stumbling, hopping, staggering companions. Karl knew he might well be among them had he been born a year or two earlier.

Some carried signs begging, pleading, demanding higher pensions and disability allowances; they all looked worn and defeated, but mostly
hungry
. Here were the most pitiful victims of the runaway inflation.

Karl fell into line with them and pulled Ernst along.

“Really,” Ernst said, “this is hardly my idea of an entertaining afternoon.”

“We need to show them that they’re not alone, that we haven’t forgotten them. We need to show the government that we support them.”

“It will do no good,” Ernst said, grudgingly falling into step beside him. “It takes time for the government to authorize a pension increase. And even if it is approved, by the time it goes into effect, the increase will be meaningless.”

“This can’t go on! Someone has got to do something about this chaos!”

Ernst pointed ahead with his black cane. “There’s a suggestion.”

At the corner stood two brown-shirted men in paramilitary gear and caps. On their left upper arms were red bands emblazoned with a strange black twisted cross inside a white circle. Between them they held a banner:

COME TO US, COMRADES!

ADOLF HITLER WILL HELP YOU!

“Hitler,” Karl said slowly. “You mentioned him before, didn’t you?”

“Yes. The Austrian
Gefreiter
. He’ll be at that big fascist rally in Nuremberg tomorrow to commemorate something or other. I hope to get to hear him again. Marvelous speaker. Want to come along?”

Karl had heard about the rally—so had all the rest of Germany. Upward of two hundred thousand veterans and members of every right-wing
volkisch
paramilitary group in the country were expected in the Bavarian town to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War.

“I don’t think so. I don’t like big crowds. Especially a big crowd of fascists.”

“Some other time, then. I’ll call you when he’s going to address one of the beer hall meetings in Munich. He does that a lot. That way you’ll get the full impact of his speaking voice. Most entertaining.”

Adolf Hitler, Karl thought as he passed the brown-shirted men with the strange armbands. Could he be the man to save Germany?