The Best Thing for You (22 page)

Have one for me, the soldier called after him, and a moment later, in a starburst of wit: Have two! For the Herr Professor had confessed, as instructed, to being on his way to a pub far from his own neighbourhood, where no spy of his wife’s would report him. There was probably only a slim wedge of years between himself and the young soldier, but at the mention of a wife he saw the boy’s eyes deepen, as if in contemplation of a vast abyss. Deference, envy, awe: a wife! Beer, the Herr Professor guessed, was still his newest friend; women were probably a scuffle and sparkle and a handful of marks in a dim doorway. Wives were still distant as the sun. But he did not seem unhappy, the Herr Professor thought, raising a hand in world-weary benediction as he walked away, playing the role. Barracks life was probably more exciting, for the moment, than whatever the boy had left behind, school or some apprenticeship. The thought was not condescending. The Herr Professor was thankful for the extra start of years that had levered him into a profession, and then this wartime translation work, before the army could
fix him up with his own greatcoat and gun. He had loved his studies, loved the arcane logic of medieval law (his area of speciality), loved his sweet, sensible wife and the life they had embarked on together. It was that future life, and an urge to insure it, that had brought him to this neighbourhood with all the cash money he could reasonably muster and an address he had sworn not to write down.

The air, dark blue now, smelled of smoke, rank creamy garbage, and fried potatoes. So there was life hidden in these buildings after all, cautiously cooking in the innermost, window-less rooms. He was glad.

Weber, a voice said from somewhere quite close, though he saw no one.

He had arrived at what had once been a chemist’s shop, saw the three numbers inscribed in his memory realized in pale, unvarnished wood on the otherwise lacquered black door, ghostly absences where the ornate ironwork of the original fixtures had probably been pried away for scrap. The windows were nailed over with boards. He closed his eyes in sudden, immense fatigue. The voice spoke again from his feet.

Weber.

He looked down and saw through a grating in the brickwork the face of his former colleague.

I come, he said, and vanished with a jerk. The Herr Professor guessed he had been standing on a chair by the high basement window and had jumped off to scurry away, around and up, through the dark, to the door. He caught the metaphor and reproved himself. His former colleague had specialized in religious architectural history, wrote several books on the building of Gothic cathedrals, and had a particular fondness for gargoyles, which he delighted to sketch. On weekends he would ride his bicycle for miles to remote villages and monasteries,
looking for specimens like some frog-besotted botanist. Also he had a deep voice and liked Russian caviar.

Quickly, he said, opening the door.

The Herr Professor ascended the three steps to the threshold and felt another wave of fatigue. His former colleague was already at the back of the store, a dim impatient figure holding back a heavy curtain, trying to hurry him through the chaos: a smell of mildew and char and something cloyingly floral, a broken perfume bottle, perhaps. Cardboard advertising displays – lipstick, chocolate, foot powder, tonics – littered the ground underfoot. An apothecary’s counter had been picked clean, probably before the fire. Broken glass and rags still lay in a black-white drift of ashes someone had swept to one corner, and left. The Herr Professor had had time to see that his former colleague’s coat was dirty, and he had lost weight.

You weren’t followed?

The Herr Professor shrugged.

In the basement his former colleague introduced Herr Goldberg. They shook hands. The icons, wrapped in oilcloth and hidden in a butter crate, proved first rate: Saint John Chrysostom and a gaunt Saint Peter, both looking pinned, afflicted with gilt.

Only the two? the Herr Professor said, feeling inside his coat for his money.

The older man spread his small hands.

We sold the third last week, he said. I have, if you like –

The Herr Professor shook his head, not wanting to know.

For your wife, Herr Goldberg said, producing a tiny glass perfume bottle, clear, yet with a pink and blue gasoline sheen. The Herr Professor thought of his wife, of her fine hair and large hands, and the way she shaped the pillows, warm and plump as loaves on the bed each night. He had had to leave her behind, in
Tübingen, when war duty called him to Berlin. He had not seen her in some months.

Not expensive, the older man whispered.

There was a clay wine-cup, too, and a metronome by a famous designer. The Herr Professor began to bargain zestily, as if in a fever-dream, to drown out the voice of his conscience. There was a story he remembered from childhood, something about a boy in a chocolate shop, who glutted himself and ended poorly. His former colleague, who had resumed his watchful post on the chair by the high grated window, glanced back over his shoulder from time to time. The deep shadows near the ceiling seemed to cast his features in grimaces of leering approval, or disgust, or both.

How many of you are there? the Herr Professor asked finally.

Herr Goldberg had been watching him count bills off the roll.

Four.

Four, the Herr Professor said, reckoning the cost. Where will you go?

England.

And where do you live meanwhile?

The older man shrugged. But seeing the question had been posed without malice, he appeared to change his mind, and gestured for the Herr Professor to follow him. In the very rear of the basement he pulled aside a curtain strung up across an archway. In an alcove lay a woman on a cot, clearly a sickbed. Beside her sat a girl in her mid-twenties, thin and wan, dandling a small blond child on her knee.

My son is already in London, with a friend, Herr Goldberg said, letting the curtain fall back. We hope to join him there.

That evening the Herr Professor locked the door to his little apartment and imagined showing his wife his purchases, telling
her about Herr Goldberg and his family, in the basement of the burnt-out pharmacy. Long into the night he talked to her ghost, about what he could have done, should have done, whether to return the articles, whether to resell them on the black market (for surely a German could extract higher prices than a Jew) and return the money to the little family. She would know Goldberg’s department store from the advertisements in her sewing magazines. The Herr Professor told his absent wife he had liked Herr Goldberg, who throughout the transaction had showed great courtesy, dignity, and tact.

The curtains turned from black to grey; and, as he pushed himself up from the table with the extra effort of anticipation (after a sleepless night, a long day at the Ministry blackening his hands with newspaper clippings, trying to recall a vocabulary from his student days in England, coyly tucked in the landscape of his mind behind the looming hills of more recent experience, and frightened to still deeper cover by the approaching footsteps of his immediate superior, who had the authority to demote him from intelligence to infantry if his work turned slow or sloppy), his eye lit upon a tin of sardines on the counter next to the hot plate, and he remembered he had seen the same brand of sardines on the table in the alcove behind the curtain, a tiny detail from the Goldberg family tableau. And the knowledge that they had this in common, he and that poor family, a meal of sardines in the near future, warmed and comforted him; for in preserving himself was he not thereby preserving a part of them, too – a shred of shared humanity – if only in memory? The thought bore no great weight, was like a rickety wooden bridge across a roaring gorge fit for one man to cross once before it collapsed in splinters and shards. But it got the Herr Professor across the gap – narrow, but impossibly deep – between night and dawn (the curtains were rosy now), got him into a clean shirt and off
to the Ministry in good time, got him through a morning of exceptional industry and accomplishment (earning him a hand on the shoulder from his superior), got him all the way through to the end of the day, that anticipation of a meal he had eaten a hundred times before, yet never savoured with the proper gratitude and humility until now.

Now, Ulrike Weber said.

There was more to the story, she said, but at a certain point she had stopped listening. That her father had paid more than he could easily afford for the objects, and far more than their owner asked for them, did not interest her. That her father had liked the man and felt a kinship with him, equally, she disdained. He had profited off a Jew during the war, and that was the bridge that had broken under her father’s weight, the bridge she could not now cross.

She quit the piano, cut off her hair, and read the newspapers in her bedroom, holding her cigarette out the open window and tapping ash onto miniskirts and Beatles and that whole era, so juicy-ripe and dripping with fun. The sixties waned, and she went to university. Marxism and demonstrations, all that campus blather, did not entirely suit her either, though the fit was slightly better. She dated a series of angry young men and found herself to be angrier than any of them. But she was also terribly calm and pale and smart as a cliché, as a whip as a tack as a trap, and her classmates began to fear her a little, even before they had reason to.

One day, on the steps in front of the library, she was approached by anarchists.

Piss off, she said, because she was enjoying her cigarette and her book and the rare February sunshine, and because the
anarchists were two boys and a girl she vaguely recognized, sporadic, unwashed presences in her Chinese history class. The girl, a mousy creature with bum-length brown hair, a pot-addled stare, and a childish, piping voice, doggedly held hands with both boys, one arrayed tweedily, with a dirty football scarf and dirtier hair, the other – a loudmouth in class, soft-spoken here – clad more conventionally in denim.

Come to a party, they said.

Bored, she went. The anarchists lived in a newer house on the outskirts of town, with great maps of water damage on the stucco and a yard scorched by dog piss. She herself lived as she was accustomed since childhood, in a small, well-kept flat in the old town, within the keep of the old medieval walls. This was not Tübingen but another university town, half a day away. Secretly she was house-proud, and making her way up the front walk she felt an alloy of contempt and shame. She would hate to live here as much as the anarchists (this one that greeted her at the door, say, who smelled of onions and bolted the door behind her, locking her into a distinctly un-party-like gloom) would hate her flowers and first editions and
WMF
silverware. They might have a record or two in common, she thought (propelled up a dark staircase by a firm hand in the centre of her back), Janis Joplin, the Stones, but the area of overlap – the penumbra, as they called it in her semiotics seminar – ended there. In the time it took for her eyes to adjust to the black hall at the top of the stairs, and to discern a thin smear of light beneath a single door, she wondered if it was not childishness that made her covet pretty things, shame that made her hide them (she never invited friends or lovers over, never, telling herself her flat was her sanctuary), and her parents’ persistent, pernicious influence that made her so afraid of dirt and disorder, so reluctant to look chaos full in the face.

Weber, a voice said.

From the darkness she was pulled into a room of harsh fluorescence, the windows taped over with black cloth, where half a dozen people were at work with typewriters, paper and scissors, glue brushes, and a mimeograph machine. She shifted the bottle of wine she had brought from one hand to the other and caught the eye of the soft-spoken loudmouth, who acknowledged both her presence and her error with a wry eyebrow and a quirk of the lips. This was no party; she was being recruited.

At first she had trouble adjusting to the new lifestyle. Though they talked a fierce line, the group’s political activities seemed restricted to issuing a rather demented left of left newspaper, handed out free on street corners, and indulging in the occasional bout of shoplifting or public urination in the name of insurrection and free love. The loudmouth boy refused on principle to keep regular hours, even when fatigue made him puffy and petulant, like a child; he would rise throughout the night to work on articles, returning at dawn to flop heavily on the mattress they shared and ruin yet another hour’s sleep, snatched in his absence. He chided her for sleeping at night, all nine hours in a row; for eating three meals a day; for going to class; for her refusal to deface library books; and for her insistence on proper spelling and punctuation in the newspaper, which she had undertaken to copy-edit. She had also made herself the laughingstock of the house, somehow, by purchasing a bottle of iodine when she noticed several of the anarchists seemed to suffer from an inordinate number of cigarette burns on their hands and arms; she later learned this was a kind of game with them, the finer points of which she refused to allow them to explain.