Problems with People (12 page)

Breakfast—he insisted his father eat breakfast and make every effort to time-zone adjust—was served by a Somali so conspicuously tall that his father, displaying his signature tactlessness, felt moved to tell her, “You could have blocked Michael Jordan.” After that, they ate from tiered plates while Erika Wolf, not touching her tea, explained that this hotel was in the Prussian style and very close to the Kurfürstendamm—“our
bleaker version of the Champs-Élysées”—and especially to the Kaiser Wilhelm Church—“actually,” she said, “two distinct churches, the one what remains of the old church, most prominently its damaged spire, the other the four buildings of the new church, which has over twenty thousand stained-glass inlays.”

His father, with food in his mouth, said, “Damaged how and when?”

“It was damaged in November of 1943, due to bombing.”

“Too bad they didn’t get the whole thing,” replied his father.

Erika Wolf didn’t answer. Instead she brought her hand to her mouth. After a while it moved to her throat, and then to her cheek, and then again to her mouth. The other hand joined it there.

They did, first, what they’d come to do—they made a tour of the Jewish quarter, where his father had lived in the thirties. Starting at the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, they followed Alte Schönhauser Strasse, Neue Schönhauser, and Rosenthaler Strasse, Erika Wolf judiciously providing facts and parceling out historical and architectural information. His father, a fast walker with a still-longish stride—someone who walked to get from A to B—seemed, on these streets, to shrink not just in stature but in irascibility. Zipped up tightly to the Adam’s apple in his parka, he listened like a schoolboy to their guide.

On Grosse Hamburger Strasse they came to the Jewish School, where Erika Wolf stopped to look above the portico at
head-to-head cherubs in sculptural relief and at a sign reading “Knabenschule der Jüdischen Gemeinde,” meaning, she told them, “Jewish Community School for Boys.”

His father craned his neck, scratched under his nostrils, pulled for a moment at the corners of his lips, and then, squinting, said, “This place I remember, exactly right here. This place is in my head.”

He pointed a forefinger at a dark bust over the doorway—pointed as if in admonishment. “That guy scared me good,” he said. “I didn’t want to walk under that guy. Maybe you know what I’m talking about. Goofy things. Bad luck. Superstitions.”

They looked for a while. Erika Wolf began to nod. “Yes,” she said. “I can see it.”

They went into the Alter Jüdischer Friedhof, no longer in use, for a long time not in use—in fact, all of the gravestones had been removed by the East Berlin Parks and Garden Department, so that now there was only what they were viewing together, a refurbished gravestone honoring Moses Mendelssohn and a sarcophagus filled with remains. There were, though, a number of
Stolpersteine
—“which translated directly means ‘stumbling blocks’ ”—small brass plaques set in among the cobblestones inscribed with the names of deported Berliners. While his father stood pondering Mendelssohn’s dates, he and Erika Wolf looked for
Stolpersteine
, When they were kneeling beside one, and out of his father’s hearing range, he said, softly, “I’m sorry to pry. Are you Jewish?”

“No.”

“Please don’t take him personally.”

“He has every right. I don’t blame your father.”

Her scarf was dangling so that its ends were on the cobblestones, and her black hair partly hid her face. At that moment, she reminded him of his daughter, who was a pediatric epidemiologist—living right now in Sierra Leone—or, rather, he understood that Erika was a daughter, too, the daughter of a German father and mother who were glad, always, to hear from her or, even better, to have her come home, their Erika who’d grown up to be a wonderful person, sensitive, smart, capable, caring; Erika whom they sometimes worried about, partly because of her melancholy, and partly, and simply, because she was their daughter and that was just what parents did—worry, automatically, even if they didn’t want to; worry no matter how they tried not to; worry endlessly, or longer than they needed to; worry until, gradually, the tables turned, and their children began worrying about them.

“He means well,” he told Erika. “He really, absolutely does.”

Erika trapped her hair behind her ears, the better, he thought, to sustain a professional appearance.
“Berlin,” she said, “is full of ghosts.”

Systematically, on foot, they covered the old Jewish quarter in the hope of finding on prompts for his father’s memory on a par with the entrance to the boys’ school. The Jewish quarter, though, was also the Scheunenviertel, a district dedicated to the shopping sensibilities of relatively young people with discretionary euros for Turkish throw pillows, cotton-hemp yoga pants, Swedish jeans, and whole-wheat apple strudel. In other words, the present obscured the past, and as they passed
through the courtyards and walked the winding lanes, his father looked primarily flabbergasted by the thoroughness of his lack of recognition. A number of old walls were now canvases for street artists interested in depicting robots and dinosaurs, or in spray-painting gaudy and colorful collages; all of that obstructed his father’s memory, as did substantial graffiti. Erika held out hope for the Neue Synagoge, and indeed his father recalled its golden dome and, inside, the height of its iron vaults, and sat for some time on a bench there, looking moved—blowing his nose, cleaning his glasses—but he could not remember anything else, and especially not the fire and pogrom of November 9, 1938. “We left before that,” he told Erika, when she’d translated the plaque at the front of the building. “We left, I think, August, before it happened.”

Erika put her hand over her mouth. His father moved his parka from one arm to the other. “August or maybe July,” he said. “In a train we went to the Polish border. From there to Warsaw, and from there, I don’t remember exactly, to Italy, to a ship, a steamship, a cruise ship, and we ended up in Shanghai, China—I know!—and that’s where we passed the entire war, and you know who was there? Michael Blumenthal was there, who was treasury secretary under Jimmy Carter, and this guy I definitely remember very well, even though he was older than me. A smart guy, super, top-notch, A-one, and now Michael Blumenthal, he’s somebody, he’s famous.”

He waited for Erika to say something about Shanghai, and when she didn’t, he added, “They still have Jews in China to this day. There’s this guy I know, Goldschag, he stayed, never left, but he also has a place in London.”

They moved on, but couldn’t find the house he’d lived in,
though he remembered that it had been on a narrow lane—a lane now maybe gone altogether. Later, he remembered throwing rocks in the Spree and, with more clarity, its high, noxious smell on a day when it was raining “like no tomorrow.” In the hope of inciting more such memories, they walked the riverside promenade from Monbijou Park to Tucholsky Strasse, where his father said, “There were two boys I knew that we used to play a game like kickball together, and I remember that one of them had this port-wine stain”—he patted his right cheek from his ear to his chin—“right here, all red, all inflamed,
huge
, and once, I teased him, I made fun of him a little, and the guy, he wouldn’t talk to me for
weeks
.”

His father wanted just ice cream for lunch, so Erika drove them in her clean, small sedan for gelato near the Berliner Grossmarkt. There they discussed their afternoon options, deciding, first, on the Otto Weidt Museum, which honored a blind businessman who’d saved Jews. After that they went to the Babelplatz to see the vault of empty bookcases entombed beneath cobbles but visible through glass. Then it was on to the Topography of Terror—on the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters—and finally, near dusk, to the memorial at Grunewald, with its “186 cast steel plates, each with the date of transport, the number of deportees, the point of departure, and the destination of Jews who were sent from here to the death camps.” Throughout all of this, whenever he had the chance—that is, when his father was out of hearing range—he asked their tour guide personal questions without, he hoped,
an invasive cast; he pressed her for basic biographical data, and when he had that, for its clarification: Erika was from Blankenese; where was that? What sort of industry was primary there? What sort of landscape—mountains, plains? Erika had gone to university in Freiburg—how was that? The classes and professors? Degrees in what, and when, and why? Her former work at the German Historical Museum—specifically what work, its nature and purpose? Not, though, do you live with somebody, or where do you live, or are you married or attached? “Do you enjoy your work as a tour guide?” was all right, but not “Why did you leave the museum?” or “What do you do with your free time?”

Gradually, Erika emerged as a person. Blankenese was a wealthy suburb of Hamburg, the epicenter of German banking. Her father was the founder of a real-estate company with international franchises and regional offices in Hong Kong and Los Angeles. Her mother worked for a company in the promotional-products market as a full-time consultant to customers. Erika had a brother in London studying international relations, and another in Heidelberg who was a media photographer. At Freiburg she’d studied comparative history of the modern age and library science. She’d come to Berlin for an internship at the historical museum, and also to take six terms of museum studies at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences. At first she’d been interested in the conservation of historical monuments, but in time she’d turned to collections care, and this was the sort of work she’d done until, of late, deciding on a different course—one she didn’t articulate, nor did he press her on it. But he did ask—he said he was curious—about the
government bureaucracy she’d mentioned that morning, the “Office of Property Issues.”

It was the Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues. This was the office whose purpose, she explained, was to provide restitution to victims of the Nazis, or compensation for their losses. Her work at the museum had been primarily concerned with “registering stolen cultural property”—specifically, works of art. She spent her time traveling paper trails in order to determine legitimate ownership of the artwork held in the museum’s collection, so that it might be returned to its rightful owners or, where there were none living—almost always the case—their heirs.

It was nearly dark and had gotten so frigid that his father had his hood over his head and his hands in his parka pockets. Yet still he moved down the railroad tracks, reading about deportations from Grunewald. Above him, on the platform, he and Erika kept watch like guardian angels. She’d wrapped her scarf from right to left across her throat and pulled on a pair of wool mittens. She was, he noticed, shivering a little. Her narrow shoulders were high and hunched. A feeling of tenderness came over him, to think that she was suffering from the cold.

The next morning, they went to Sachsenhausen beneath a pale and cloudless sky. He found Sachsenhausen queasily unbearable, and did and did not want to see the crematorium, the medical-postmortem table, the execution trench, the pathology block, or any of the rest of it; he didn’t want to look but
felt he must at the hill of gold teeth, the medical-crimes cellar, and Room 51 of Barrack RII, where children were—could it be?—tortured. Who tortured children? Who
could
torture children? The answer was in the T-building, formerly the staff building. Here were photographs of the people who’d done it. He looked at these alongside his father, who appeared, he thought, to have a stronger stomach for it all, which, he surmised, stemmed from his advanced years, but he couldn’t be sure that this was the reason; maybe he himself was just weak in the knees when it came to this grisly and unthinkable place’s communicating a truth he’d thought he’d known.

They drove toward Wannsee while his father, incensed, offered a familiar litany. “The last thing I’d do is buy anything German—not a car, nothing, not even a pencil, and if this guy next to me hadn’t popped for my ticket, I never would have flown on Lufthansa.” Next he told Erika that he hated Volkswagens, and that “when my wife, who’s gone, got me a Braun shaver, I traded it in for a Schick.” Also, when he watched the Olympics on television, he hoped all the Germans would come in “dead last,” and when he saw them on the news drinking beer at Oktoberfest, he gave his television the finger. Germany didn’t have any artists or writers because Germans lacked souls. Their so-called philosophers were fascist pigs. And they were such thorough dummkopfs they kicked out the Jews, who then went ahead and invented the bomb, “but in America,” said his father. “What idiots!”

Erika remained silent in the face of this harangue, as if she had steeled herself to it. Today she wore a different coat—long, belted, and double-breasted—and had captured her
hair in a loose ballerina bun, out of which splayed a spiral of loose ends; she drove, always, with two hands on the wheel and with her seat pulled close to the pedals. All of this made her look vulnerable somehow, and also, he thought, a little undernourished—Erika appeared, to his eyes, gray and frail, too small for her coat and overbundled for the weather, which at noon, as they passed through leafy forest, was sunny and fair, as if the world were blown clean—no sign, anywhere, of the impossible past, of a past that couldn’t really have happened.

At Wannsee they visited the villa above the lake where, as Erika explained—standing by the roses on the circular drive—“the Final Solution was planned, in 1942, by fifteen Germans, including Adolf Eichmann, who was only thirty-five at the time.”

“And do you know what became of Eichmann?” asked his father. “For eight years he was a free man in Argentina, until the Mossad threw him into the back of a car, and then they put that pig on the stand and hung him by the neck in Israel. And too bad they couldn’t hang him twice!”

They went in. They stood in the conference room—actually a dining room—where the plans had been hatched. The sun-room looked out onto yet more roses. The museum was divided into fourteen sections, and in each his father bent over display cases, zeroing in on the fine print intently for two hours and forty-five minutes.