Mendelssohn is on the Roof (6 page)

The nerve of the Elite Guard and the Municipal officials! They have no right to encroach on his jurisdiction. The Jews have been specially assigned to him. If he doesn’t call the Elite Guard on this little affair, soon they’ll be wanting a share of the spoils, or they’ll begin to confiscate things on their own authority. But this isn’t Poland. Here the Elite Guard doesn’t have that sort of power. After all, the Acting Reich Protector himself lives here and he won’t stand for any irregularities. He’ll give them hell, no matter what their rank.

But wait a minute. The Acting Reich Protector, why that’s where the original order comes from. The head of the Central Bureau had also been at the opening of the German House of Art and he had heard Heydrich’s speech. Afterwards someone, maybe it was Geschke from the Gestapo, had told him that the Acting Reich Protector had had a fit when he saw a statue of the Jewish composer Mendelssohn on the balustrade. That’s it – those imbeciles
from Municipal didn’t know what to do, so they turned for help to the Elite Guard. And it was easy to understand why they went to the Elite Guard and not to the Gestapo or his own branch. Because they were afraid that Heydrich might hear of it. Therefore this is not an important matter at all, just a stupid little thing. He’ll deal directly with the commander about it and won’t drag in anybody else. But he mustn’t let the Elite Guard get away with anything – he’ll rap their knuckles soundly for this. Still, it was gratifying to hear that the ‘learned Jew’ hadn’t managed to identify the statue. How could he identify it, when he was a Talmud scholar and hadn’t the foggiest idea about worldly subjects like music. It didn’t matter in the least that they beat him up. A few blows wouldn’t harm him.

The last entry in his daybook was a private matter: a present for his mother’s birthday. The head of the Central Bureau daydreamed for a moment. The image of a
white-haired
lady, the widow of a university professor, floated before his eyes. She lived in the small family home in a university town and took meticulous care of his father’s library, though it never occurred to her to look at a single book herself. Daily she dusted the desk and the armchair as if the old man were to return any moment. She wouldn’t allow any of the maids to touch a single object that he had ever laid a hand upon. Several times a day she looked at his portrait in the large gold frame hanging above the mantel. But she also took the same care of her son’s old toys and school notebooks. She pulled them out of the cabinet occasionally and leafed through them lovingly. The old lady lived in her memories, and her one and only hope was her son. She was better off than others in the Reich. The criminal pilots hadn’t reached her city yet, and she had
enough food, because he sent her weekly packages from the Protectorate.

He thought a great deal about what sort of present to send her. Then he remembered that his mother was very fond of old Meissen. All the cupboards and cabinets and shelves in her house were filled with figurines made of Meissen porcelain. He must find the most beautiful piece of all the confiscated Jewish property. Such a piece was surely to be found in the warehouse. The rich Jews had good taste sometimes. He gave the job of finding it to Fiedler, comparatively the most intelligent member of his staff. Once he had been an official in the Prague German Bank, and he came from a fairly wealthy family. He knew porcelain trademarks and was unlikely to bring him an imitation or a tasteless modern piece of junk. Better to wait until after office hours, but the head of the Central Bureau was too impatient. He looked forward to the gift and hoped Fiedler wouldn’t fail, hoped he’d bring him something really fine. He rang, and a few moments later Fiedler returned with a carefully wrapped package under his arm. He carried it gingerly, as if it were a holy relic.

‘What is it?’ the head of the Central Bureau asked eagerly.

‘It’s guaranteed genuine old Meissen. Very valuable Meissen.’

‘What does it represent?’

‘I’d rather not tell you. It’s a surprise.’

They unwrapped it with excitement, completely
disregarding
the wood shavings falling on the immaculate rug.

Finally a figurine came into view, actually a group of figures.

‘My God, how beautiful!’

‘It’s one of the most valuable pieces. Please observe that
it’s a group representing the Judgement of Paris. Only a very few of these were manufactured. They have one of them in the Meissen museum, but this one is better. The Prague Museum of Industrial Design has a large collection of Meissen china, but they don’t have this one. I looked up the literature. This group was commissioned directly by King Augustus, and the models for the three goddesses were Augustus’s three mistresses. It appears that there is one other in private ownership in England, but that one is probably a fake. This piece, however, is guaranteed to be genuine. I had it examined by an expert.’

‘Thank you. You’ve done an excellent job. This will be the most beautiful present for my mother’s birthday.’

The figures of the goddesses had the delicate beauty of rococo mistresses rather than the austere look of antiquities. The curves of their bodies were rounded, their hips slender, their breasts small. They stood there naked before Paris, first Aphrodite, behind her Pallas Athena, and then, last but not least, the more substantial Hera. And it was clear that Paris could offer the golden apple to one alone – the goddess born from the foam of the sea.

He gazed for a long time at the sculpted group, unable to tear his eyes away from it. Finally he said, ‘Have it carefully wrapped. I want you to guarantee that the gift will arrive in good order. You may request a special plane in my name.’

Fiedler placed the porcelain back in the box and walked to the door. The head of the Central Bureau followed him with his eyes, catching the last glints of the goddesses’ rosy limbs glistening in the shavings.

H
E HEARD THE VOICES, but he couldn’t see their faces. The voices were arguing fiercely about something, but he could catch only a few words: ‘I said it was an important scientific case, that the research has meaning for the Reich.’ ‘An order is an order. They won’t rescind it.’ ‘They turned me down at the German University.’

He knew they were talking about him. The time had come for the move from the hospital. He didn’t know where they would take him, but it didn’t interest him much. His days were numbered. There was no help for him, and all the experiments they were doing on him were only meant to prolong their research. Of course he couldn’t be entirely indifferent. This meant he’d lose touch with the world, even though the world was now limited to Jan alone. He knew he’d never see Adela and Greta again. But if Jan couldn’t visit him, he wouldn’t have any news of them.

He had met Jan Krulis in a cafe years ago. It was a
fashionable
cafe divided into three rooms. There was dancing in one, card games in another, while people sat around tables drinking black coffee in the third. Some of them were reading Rimbaud or Lautréamont or Breton. Others were puzzling over Freud, still others were inventing machines for living, as they used to call homes in those days. Different interest groups would always sit together at the same table, although some people circulated from table to table. There were also regulars at the cafe who did nothing and knew nothing. They attached themselves to one group or another,
always letting someone else pay for their coffee or borrowing twenty crowns they’d never pay back.

One day somebody introduced him to Jan – he no longer remembered who, but it certainly wasn’t an architect, because architects looked down on Jan Krulis. Krulis didn’t like their machines for living, those houses that looked like crates. Jan was usually silent during the passionate arguments that sometimes broke out at the cafe, and for that reason he was thought to be backward, a stodgy traditionalist, a man of the last century. Nobody could understand why he even came to the cafe at all. Perhaps he just came to read the foreign newspapers. Maybe he went there to keep warm, as many people did who couldn’t afford coal. He might never have become close to Jan, for he himself enjoyed those discussions about new art forms – for him they meant a breath of fresh air after a day at the clinic, where he witnessed so much human suffering, illness and decay. He needed to leave that world for a while and get into the world of colours, words and tones. But one day Jan let slip that he, too, was a canoeist.

Words reached him as if from a great distance. ‘They won’t give us an ambulance for transferring him.’ ‘So how can we move him?’ ‘By handcart.’ The voices grew sharp and angry. ‘That’s outrageous, Doctor. He’ll die on the way.’ ‘But what can we do? We have to follow orders. They won’t let us use an ambulance.’ ‘But he’ll catch cold crossing the entire city in a handcart. He’ll be dead before he gets there.’ ‘We don’t make the rules. There’s nothing we can do, Doctor.’ Then the voices grew silent and once again he was alone. Now he knew that they’d carry him by handcart, and that it would be a long journey. But it didn’t matter
to him. On the contrary, he looked forward to seeing the city again. He’d been lying in the hospital for two years now, and during that time he hadn’t been outside once. Now he’d see how the city had changed. He’d see its new subjugated face. He might even meet some of those foreigners now holding sway over the city, the ones who had issued the insane laws that caused him to be thrown out of the hospital and taken away in a handcart.

He loved the river and could listen to tales of it for hours. Perhaps it had something to do with his profession.
Sometimes
during night service in the emergency room he’d pull out a map of Czech waterways and plan trips along barely navigable rivers. He’d imagine himself paddling from one bank to the other, cautiously avoiding the shallows, keeping the boat from scraping and damaging its canvas bottom on rocks. These were trips he could never manage alone – they called for too much strength and endurance. He thought of buying a kayak. Though it was less
comfortable
, it would be easier to navigate by himself. But then he arranged to go on the trips together with Jan.

Nobody said goodbye to him when the two men came with stretcher and blankets. Obviously everybody was ashamed to see him thrown out of the hospital. Just as they were carrying him out of the door he caught a glimpse of the nurse taking down the identifying board and wiping off the chalked letters of his name.

It looked like a funeral procession. The men carried him carefully and he didn’t feel any jolts, perhaps because his body was immobilised. But when they went out into the courtyard where the cart was waiting for him, the cold,
sharp air struck him in the nostrils with such force that his head began to spin. Suddenly everything seemed
phantom-like
, even the trees in the park, bare on this autumn day. Everything seemed unreal, even the squeaking of the ungreased wheels of the cart, even the houses they passed, even the sky covered with clouds.

Then when they went out into the streets, it seemed to him that the city had become greyer somehow, that it had fallen into decay, that it was disintegrating, that
everything
was covered with dust and mould. Paper boxes and useless objects were displayed in the shop windows. People walking along the street were joyless and careworn. They seemed to be oppressed by a heavy weight. The city was under a spell, as if it had been enchanted by an evil magician, as if spectres and lifeless shades were moving about it. The children’s cries were oddly muffled – even they seemed afraid to disturb the deathly quiet.

The men with the cart avoided the main streets. The cart bounced along the broken cobblestones. At first the streets didn’t seem any different. Then he noticed the flags. They were hanging on flagpoles attached to houses with cracking stucco. They fluttered in the breeze, decorated with the enemy’s spider, and beside them waved other ones, red and white without the blue triangle. The men with the cart wore stars on their chest. He noticed that only now as they stopped at a crossing. They positioned themselves on either side of the handcart, probably checking to see if he was still alive. Only the yellow of those stars with their black scraggly letters shone brightly in the grey streets.

It wasn’t until later, long after he and Jan had paddled down several rivers together, long after they had bounced
around numerous freight cars carrying boats and people to faraway stations, long after they had camped on many deserted riverbanks, that he came to understand why Jan was called a traditionalist, and why his ideas were rejected by all the competition juries. Jan loved a city that followed an orderly plan, a city established as a seat of kings, a spreading city that contained palaces and hovels, grand merchants’ houses and blocks of tenements with fire escapes, a city surrounded by smoky suburbs filled with
shantytowns
, factory buildings and wastelands covered with briars and nettles. He championed this city; he wanted to keep the formless and monotonous machines for living from encroaching on it. Not that he rejected the new glass-
and-concrete
structures out of hand, but he wanted them to serve the city, not break in like intruders. He didn’t want the old palaces in its centre torn down, he didn’t want drab apartment houses and office buildings to disturb its rhythm, to dull the musical cries and sighs resounding from the heights of its hills to the depths of its slums.

In the name of the city he guarded every old house and fought against its destruction. He struggled to preserve the old arcaded palaces. Everyone laughed at him, because it was an era that said, ‘Tear down those old houses, get rid of all that junk, give people housing modules where they may gaze at painted ceilings rather than at paintings. Let them sit on cushions rather than chairs, let them fold up the couch and push it against the wall.’ He had nothing against housing modules measuring a little less than four square metres. But he was concerned with the gradual disfiguring and debasing of the city. Its silhouette, dating from the Middle Ages, was being ravished. Its gardens were being chopped up to make way for prefabricated houses.

Greta and Adela were hiding somewhere in this grey and humiliated city. As long as Jan was in the world they would not be abandoned. Jan would surely manage to find him. At the hospital they’d surely tell Jan where to find him. He must say farewell to him and thank him. But maybe they wouldn’t let Jan come to see him. Maybe he’d be shut away somewhere so that no one could get to him. Maybe they’d deny he was there, to avoid any unpleasantness, since he had only a few days left to live. But surely Jan would let nothing scare him off. He’d find his way to the Jewish hospital even if he had to put on a star to get there.

Suddenly the cart began to go faster. Both men quickly pushed it into a little passageway and hid themselves behind it. Something very strange must be happening in the street to frighten them so. Yes, death was parading by in the form of soldiers in foreign uniforms. At the head they carried horsetails. They were accompanied by fife and drum. They seemed to be setting forth on some marauding expedition, one that required an accompaniment of violent and clashing music. They seemed about to serve in some secret bloody rite known only to its participants. He had never seen such a parade. The people on the sidewalk tried to hide in doorways of houses and shops, to avoid saluting the flag with the death’s head. Only when the blaring music faded away in the distance did the two men wheel the cart out of the passageway. Only then did the sidewalks come to life again.

They considered Jan Krulis an eccentric, a man fixed in the past, because at architectural meetings he championed the city so fiercely. At first he had thought of Jan the same way, because everyone around was talking about bare walls,
white tiles, hygienic fixtures, piped-in music and built-in kitchens. Only after he climbed a hill with Jan one day and looked down at the city through Jan’s eyes, only after he saw the city rising and falling away, embracing the river with its quays and bridges, flowing with the current and against it, unshakable and indestructible, only then did he understand why Jan loved it so much.

The cart stopped in the old-city section directly in front of a new building that stood beside a rather old synagogue in the Eastern style. They had reached their destination. This must be the hospital. Some people hurried out of the building and took hold of the stretcher. Just before they carried him inside, he caught sight of people wearing stars who were carrying heavy boxes into the synagogue. One of the boxes fell from a moving wagon and its contents crashed noisily to the ground: toys – teddy bears, dolls in dresses, rocking horses, little rubber animals, little wooden dogs and cats. They scattered on the pavement and the moving men scooped them up. Some of the toys were shabby from years of use by childish hands. That was the last thing he saw in the city: pathetic spoils torn from the hands of children.

They placed him on a clean bed. They put up a chart with his name. Again there was nothing for him to do but look at the ceiling. But this hospital was more pleasant than the other. Everything was glistening and new. They must have fixed it up out of former apartments, and the little room in which he lay quite alone must once have been a bathroom. A doctor with a star on a white coat came up to him and spoke to him in a kindly, warm voice. He was grateful for the friendly words. He realised that in this hospital he was a patient, not a scientific object of study fought over by the
authorities. He knew that death would come to him more quietly and inconspicuously here, that it wouldn’t be
surrounded
by consultations and arguments.

No, the trip through the occupied city had not helped his condition, but still he had no regrets. He had seen Prague once again after two years. No matter that the city had been silenced and subjugated. In the end, nobody would ever conquer it. It would awaken one day to rejoicing and flags waving. He wouldn’t live to see that day, for the end was approaching. The Jewish hospital couldn’t keep him alive – they didn’t have the means to do it. But he would certainly die more comfortably among his own people. Breathing was difficult now, and he could barely speak. If only Jan would come before he lost the power of speech entirely. How would he communicate with him if he couldn’t speak and his hands were paralysed?

It was quiet there, high above the city. The neighbourhood they were strolling through had lost all signs of life. It should have been noisy, filled with sounds of singing and shouting as in old Parisian streets. People should have been sitting in outdoor cafes, sipping coffee or alcoholic beverages at the bar. But life seemed to have vanished, even though people must still live here, must still sit on balconies that were once arcades of palaces and look down on gardens hidden by house façades. They were under a spell. Life went on only behind thick impenetrable walls. Women did their laundry in metal tubs out in the
courtyard
, children ran around in the little gardens and picked fruit from the trees, men worked in little workshops. The streets and squares were silent and lifeless, as if plunged into an eternal sleep. Even the dogs that occasionally
appeared on the streets walked around gravely and didn’t bark. They crept around the cornerstones as if the silence oppressed them.

As they came down again to the city’s main streets, the noise overwhelmed them. Trolleys clattered and jangled by them. Car brakes screeched. Heavy lorries rumbled past. A stream of people crowded the pavements, stopped at the crossings and overflowed into the street. Newsboys shouted out the latest news, assailing them with murders, mine disasters and scandalous lawsuits. Their ears were further assaulted by the cries of hawkers selling lottery tickets and noisy flower vendors. Strains of strident music came pouring out of an open shop door. Here the city seemed to be squealing and writhing, as if stabbed by the neon lights and letters that appeared in bright rows announcing the results of a soccer match. The end of the city seemed at hand. Perhaps it wanted to have its last say in the screeching and clattering, the flood of lights and the provocative music.