The Passenger E-Book

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 364

Beschreibung

'Gripping' - Telegraph 'Brilliant' - Sunday Times 'Riveting' - Guardian The devastating rediscovered classic written from the horrors of Nazi Germany, as one Jewish man attempts to flee persecution in the wake of Kristallnacht BERLIN, NOVEMBER 1938. With storm troopers battering against his door, Otto Silbermann must flee out the back of his own home. He emerges onto streets thrumming with violence: it is Kristallnacht, and synagogues are being burnt, Jews rounded up and their businesses destroyed. Turned away from establishments he had long patronised, betrayed by friends and colleagues, Otto finds his life as a respected businessman has dissolved overnight. Desperately trying to conceal his Jewish identity, he takes train after train across Germany in a race to escape this homeland that is no longer home. Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Shot through with Hitckcockian tension, The Passenger is a blisteringly immediate story of flight and survival in Nazi Germany.

Leseprobe

‘There have been a number of great novels about the Second World War that have come to light again in recent times, most notably Suite Française and Alone in Berlin. I’m not sure that The Passenger might not be the greatest of them’

SUNDAY TIMES

‘By turns claustrophobic, dizzying and symbolic, The Passenger is a work with sufficient pace to be a thriller, yet possessed of enough nuance and psychological depth to be of real literary weight’

SPECTATOR

‘Filled with vivid characterisation, sharp dialogue and intensely observed scenes… an important historical work that vividly recreates the terror experienced by Jews in 1930s Germany’

FINANCIAL TIMES

‘Thriller-tense... Like Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, The Passenger is a rediscovered book, and not only shares its menacing claustrophobia but more than matches it for potency and profundity’

NEW STATESMAN

iii

THE PASSENGER

ULRICH ALEXANDER BOSCHWITZ

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY PHILIP BOEHM

WITH A PREFACE BY ANDRÉ ACIMAN AND AN AFTERWORD BY PETER GRAF

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

CONTENTS

Title PagePreface by André AcimanThe PassengerOneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNineTenElevenAfterword by Peter GrafAvailable and Coming Soon from Pushkin Press ClassicsAbout the AuthorCopyright

ix

PREFACE

André Aciman

Berlin, just after Kristallnacht: Nazis everywhere, Jews being hounded, picked up, beaten, and arrested, their stores ransacked and vandalized, every Jew in Greater Germany now terrorized. Not a shred of humanity or shame left in this wide country, except in scant, totally insignificant gestures—the occasional tap on the shoulder, No worries, you don’t look Jewish, or the unctuous but ultimately malevolent Would love to help, but under the circumstance, surely you understand. Everyone—even people you once thought were your friends and partners—will fleece you or rat on you, or both, and if you call them out as the barefaced rogues they are, they’ll only reply with the one infallible curse: Jew! You’ve become a swear word on two legs, and your only hope is that no one nearby heard it spoken, because informants and plainclothes policemen are stalking everywhere, in trains, hotels, street corners, cafés. Anyone who looks at you is dangerous, and if he looks twice, you know you’d xbetter scram; a third gaze can mean the unimaginable. You try to blend in but, as Otto Silbermann, the protagonist of this remarkable novel, realizes soon enough, you look most suspicious precisely when you’re trying not to.

This is 1938, and World War Two hasn’t erupted yet, but everyone knows it’s coming, and though no one has the merest foreboding that what’s about to happen will turn Europe into a slaughterhouse, Germany has already started its single-minded war against its Jews. The death camps haven’t been built but concentration camps are already fully operational. Yellow stars have yet to make their appearance, but it would help, says a waiter to Silbermann, if Jews were asked to wear a yellow band on their sleeve to make it easier to spot them. Meanwhile, the German bureaucratic machine leaves nothing to chance: your passport bears a loutish red J, your phone may be tapped, and even if you have “Aryan” looks, your name instantly identifies you as a Jew. With the dragnet closing in, you realize you’re trapped and have nowhere to go, and as for fleeing the country, well, you should have thought of that months earlier, now it’s too late. Germany won’t let you out, and other countries don’t want to let you in. In the words of novelist Ulrich Boschwitz, “For a Jew the entire Reich [has become] one big concentration camp.”

So you’re on the run, in a state of panic-stricken paralysis, holing up in a series of improvised but bungled hiding places. When you stop to catch your breath in some spot that seems safe enough for a fleeting few hours, the question inevitably comes back: why didn’t you flee when you could easily have done so? The answer couldn’t be more galling: because you thought things weren’t as bad as all that, xibecause you continue to believe that this foul phase can’t possibly last much longer, because you cling to the conviction that Germany is still a democracy, not a madhouse. In Silbermann’s words, we’re “in the middle of Europe, in the twentieth century!”—not some backwater where laws are the whims of the lawless. Surely this can’t be happening.

But of course it is, and Boschwitz mines the irony for nuggets of the darkest Kafkan humor, even as his not-exactly-lovable hero insists on living according to middle-class conventions that have long ceased to have any meaning.

When the storm troopers come knocking at his door, Otto Silbermann manages to slip out the back of his comfortable bourgeois home, leaving behind all of his belongings, while his Christian wife helps hasten his escape. He has a decent amount of cash, he knows his way around, he could even pull a few strings, and a number of people owe him favors. Besides, all this is bound to blow over soon: after all, he served on the front in the Great War, he dutifully pays his taxes, runs a respected business; in short, Otto Silbermann is a thoroughly upstanding citizen.

Of course, the fact that he doesn’t look Jewish helps. When he boards a train, he is the sort of traveler who gives every indication of knowing where he is headed. And his fellow passengers feel free to engage him in conversation. A man with a Nazi lapel pin suggests they play chess, a stenotypist whose leftist boyfriend served time in a concentration camp confides her problems, and the estranged wife of a lawyer is happy to flirt with him. He listens to disgruntled miners and regales lighthearted soldiers. And so we, too, xiimeet a cross section of the populace—“regular” Germans pursuing their everyday affairs, minding their own business, going about their lives with nary a care in the world.

While his looks succeed in deceiving others, over time he begins to see he may simply be deceiving himself. A traveling Aryan speeds ahead, but as Silbermann finds out, a Jew on the run hurtles and jostles his way about, follows one alleged escape route after the other, but is basically buffeted about by an evil wind, and—if he survives the storm, which so many will not—he will likely wind up years later in another kind of camp, for “displaced persons.” Meanwhile here in 1938, Otto Silbermann is already displaced. And so he travels from Berlin to Hamburg, from Hamburg back to Berlin, then from Berlin to Dortmund, Dortmund to Aachen, back to Dortmund, on to Küstrin, Dresden and eventually back to Berlin. With each frenetic trip—in first class, or second class, or third class—he ends up shedding one more of the delusions that had protected and prevented him from recognizing the inevitable. He can no longer pass for who he always thought he was: “The truth is I don’t have the right to be an ordinary human being.”

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (1915–1942) was born to an affluent and secularized family. Boschwitz’s Jewish father, who had converted to Christianity and married a Protestant woman, died just weeks before the birth of his son. In 1935, following the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, Ulrich and his mother escaped to Sweden, where the young man wrote and published his first novel, Menschen neben dem Leben (People Parallel to Life), under the pseudonym xiiiof John Grane. His sister had already emigrated to Palestine in 1933 and settled in a kibbutz. From Sweden, Boschwitz moved to Paris, where he studied awhile at the Sorbonne, before moving on to Luxembourg and then Belgium. In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the war, he joined his mother in England.

Deeply affected by the events of Kristallnacht, he worked feverishly on what would become The Passenger, finishing a first draft in barely four weeks. In England he was able to publish an early version of the novel, which was also brought out in France, though barely noticed in either country. As an official “enemy alien,” Boschwitz was interned following the outbreak of hostilities in a camp on the Isle of Man, along with thousands of other refugees from Germany and Austria, as well as a small number of actual Nazi sympathizers. As the war progressed, male refugees, along with newly captured prisoners of war, were shipped off to various British dominions. Boschwitz had the ill fortune to be deported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera. The passage was brutal, as the passengers were robbed and subjected to gross indignities regardless of whether they were Jewish refugees or Nazi sympathizers. In Australia the detainees were interned in a prison camp in New South Wales. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the authorities reclassified actual refugees as “friendly aliens” and so Ulrich Boschwitz was freed. With some trepidation he boarded the troopship MV Abosso bound for England, but that was torpedoed by a German submarine, and Boschwitz perished, along with 361 of his fellow travelers. He was twenty-seven years old.

In a last letter to his mother, Ulrich Boschwitz signaled his desire to overhaul the manuscript of The Passenger, xivnoting that she should expect to receive the first 109 pages of his reworked version from a fellow prisoner who was on his way to England. In the same letter he advised her that in the event of his death, she should undertake to have an experienced person of letters implement these changes. Alas, his revisions have never come to light.

But what did turn up, some seventy-plus years after his death, was Ulrich Boschwitz’s original German typescript, in an archive in Frankfurt, thanks to a tip from the author’s niece. With the support of Boschwitz’s family, and interpolating what he knew of the author’s wishes based on what he had communicated to his mother and others, the German publisher and editor Peter Graf revised the rediscovered typescript. And so the novel finally appeared in its original language in 2018, under the title Der Reisende, and was translated and acclaimed throughout the world. This translation by Philip Boehm is of that revised original.

Boschwitz has given us the first fictional depiction of Jewish life in Germany in the final months before the war, a keenly observed sociological snapshot as well as an insightful psychological portrait of the protagonist. The Passenger is a disabused, prophetic, and flawlessly penetrating glimpse of what, in retrospect, was to be the unavoidable outcome of the persecution of Jews under Hitler’s regime. Boschwitz’s tale of an individual scurrying from train station to train station across a homeland that is no longer home could not have been more prescient of the terror the Nazis would unleash on every Jew. The author’s own peregrinations from Germany to Sweden and on to France, Luxembourg, Belgium, England, and finally to Australia could not have failed to give him a firsthand feel for Silbermann’s own xvdesperate itinerary. What Boschwitz saw clearly enough was the utter despoliation of one’s identity, of one’s trust in the world, and ultimately of one’s very humanity: “They’ll slowly undress us first and then kill us, so our clothes won’t get bloody and our banknotes won’t get damaged. These days murder is performed economically.” How could he have known all this so early in the tragedy? Or, to turn the question around, how is it that so many can still claim never to have known what was done to the Jews in Hitler’s Europe?

xvii

THE PASSENGER

1

ONE

Becker stood up, stubbed his cigar in the ashtray, buttoned his jacket, and placed his right hand reassuringly on Silbermann’s shoulder. “So then take care, Otto. I think I’ll be back in Berlin by tomorrow. If something comes up, you can simply call me in Hamburg.”

Silbermann nodded. “Just do me one favor,” he said, “and don’t go gambling again. You’re too lucky in love to have luck in cards. Besides, you’ll end up losing … our money.”

Becker laughed, annoyed. “Why don’t you just say your money,” he asked. “Have I ever once …?”

“No no.” Silbermann quickly cut him off. “I’m only joking, you know that, but even so: you really are on the reckless side. If you start gambling again you won’t be so quick to stop, especially if you have all the cash from this check …”

Silbermann stopped in midsentence and went on calmly. “I have complete confidence in you. After all, you’re a 2reasonable fellow. Still, it’s a pity to lose a single mark at the game table. And even though it’s your money at stake, now that we’re business partners I’d feel just as bad if you lose as if it were my own.”

Becker’s kind, broad face, which for a moment had turned sour and furrowed, brightened.

“We don’t need to pretend, Otto,” he said, now at ease. “If I lose then of course it’s your money I’ll be losing, since I don’t have any.” He chuckled.

“We are partners,” Silbermann insisted.

“Of course,” said Becker, once again serious. “And so why are you talking to me as though I were still your employee?”

“Have I offended you?” asked Silbermann. His tone was part gentle irony and part mild fright.

“Nonsense,” Becker replied. “Old friends like us! Three years on the western front, twenty years working together, sticking together—you can’t offend me old fellow, at most just annoy me a little.”

He again placed his hand on Silbermann’s shoulder.

“Otto,” he declared in a forceful voice. “In these uncertain times, in this unclear world, there’s only one thing that can be relied on, and that is friendship, true, man-to-man friendship! And let me tell you, old boy, for me you are a man—a German man, not a Jew.”

“But I am a Jew,” said Silbermann, who knew Becker’s fondness for proclamations that had more pith than tact. He was afraid his new partner might go on expounding in his coarse-but-heartfelt way and so miss his train, but Becker was having one of his moments of feeling, and he wasn’t about to give up a single second of it.

“I’ll tell you something else,” Becker declared, ignoring 3the nervousness of his friend, to whom he had opened his heart more often than Silbermann would have wished. “I am a National Socialist. God knows I’ve never misled you about that. If you were a Jew like other Jews, a real Jew, in other words, then you might have kept me on as general manager, but you would never have made me your partner! And I’m not just the goy of record, either. I’ve never ever been that. I’m convinced there’s been some mistake and that you’re actually an Aryan. Marne, Yser, Somme, the two of us, man! So just let anyone try to tell me that you …”

Silbermann looked around for the waiter. “Gustav, you’re going to miss your train!” he interrupted.

“I couldn’t care less about the train.” Becker sat back down. “I’d like to have another beer with you,” he declared with some emotion.

Silbermann rapped his fist on the table. “Go ahead and have another then, for all I care, just drink it in the dining car,” he snapped. “I have a meeting to go to.”

Becker first let out an offended huff but then said, more compliantly, “As you like, Otto. If I were an anti-Semite I wouldn’t put up with that tone. Like you’re some lieutenant barking orders. The truth is I never put up with it! Not from anyone! Except you.”

He stood up again, took the briefcase off the table, and said, laughing, “And a man like that claims to be a Jew!” He shook his head with feigned amazement, nodded once more to Silbermann, and left the first-class waiting room.

Watching his friend leave, Silbermann was dismayed to notice he was weaving slightly and bumping into tables, with the same stiffly erect posture he always assumed when seriously drunk. 4

He’s not well suited to being a partner, thought Silbermann. He should have remained a manager. In that capacity he was reliable, quiet, and respectable, a very good colleague. But his newfound fortune doesn’t become him. If only he doesn’t wind up ruining the business. If only he doesn’t go gambling!

Silbermann wrinkled his forehead. “His good fortune has made him unfit,” he mumbled, annoyed.

The waiter Silbermann had been looking for earlier—without success—finally appeared.

“Are guests meant to wait for service here or for the trains?” asked Silbermann, his sharp tone expressing his disdain for anything that approached slovenliness or exuded an unfriendly air.

“I beg your pardon,” answered the waiter. “A gentleman in second class was complaining because he thought he was sitting across from a Jew. But it wasn’t a Jew at all, the man was from South America, and since I know a little Spanish I was called in to help.”

“I see.”

Silbermann got up. His mouth contracted into a line, and his gray eyes fixed the waiter with a severe look.

The waiter tried to smooth things over. “It really wasn’t a Jew,” he assured Silbermann. Evidently the waiter considered his guest to be a particularly staunch member of the party.

“I’m not interested in that. Has the train for Hamburg already left?”

The waiter glanced at the clock above the exit to the platforms. 5

“Seven twenty,” he thought out loud. “The train for Magdeburg is just leaving. Hamburg leaves at seven twenty-four. If you hurry you can still make it. I wish that some day I could go running to catch a train, but people like me …”

He brushed a few bread crumbs off the table with a napkin.

“The best would be,” he went on, picking up the previous subject, “if the Jews had to wear yellow bands on their arms. Then at least there wouldn’t be any confusion.”

Silbermann looked at him. “Are they really so terrible?” he asked quietly, regretting his words even as he spoke them.

The waiter looked at Silbermann as though he hadn’t understood him right. He was clearly surprised, but also unsuspecting, since Silbermann had none of the features that marked him as a Jew, according to the tenets of the racial scientists.

“The whole thing has nothing to do with me,” the man said at last, carefully. “Still, it would be good for the others. My brother-in-law for example looks a little Jewish, but of course he’s an Aryan, it’s only that he has to constantly explain and prove everything, over and over. That’s too much to ask of anyone.”

“Yes it is,” Silbermann agreed. Then he paid his tab and left.

Unbelievable, he thought, absolutely unbelievable.

After leaving the train station, he climbed into a taxi and headed home. The streets were full of people, many in uniform. Newsboys were hawking their papers, and Silbermann had the impression they were doing a brisk business. For a moment he considered buying one for himself but 6then decided against it, since he figured the news was bound to be bad, and almost certainly hostile, at least as far as he was concerned. He would undoubtedly be experiencing it all firsthand soon enough.

After a short ride the taxi pulled up in front of his building. Frau Friedrichs, the wife of the concierge, was lingering in the stairwell. She greeted him politely and Silbermann was somehow glad to see that her behavior remained unchanged. As he stepped onto the red plush runner and climbed the stairs, he once again had the sensation that his life was only half real. Recently such ruminations had become a habit.

I’m living as though I weren’t a Jew, he thought, somewhat incredulously. For the time being I’m simply a well-to-do citizen—under threat, it’s true, but as of yet unscathed. How is this possible? I live in a modern six-room apartment. People talk to me and treat me as though I were one of them. They act as if I’m the same person I used to be, the liars—it’s enough to give a man a guilty conscience. Whereas I’d like to show them a clearer picture of reality, namely that as of yesterday I’m something different because I am a Jew. And who did I used to be? No—who am I? What am I, really? A swear word on two legs, one that people mistake for something else!

I no longer have any rights, and it’s only out of propriety or habit that so many act as though I did. My entire existence is based solely on the faulty memory of people who essentially wish to destroy it. They just happen to have forgotten about me. I’ve been officially degraded, but the public debasement has yet to take place.

Frau Zänkel, the councilor’s widow, was just stepping 7out of her apartment. Silbermann doffed his hat and greeted her with a “Guten Tag, gnädige Frau.”

“How are you doing?” she asked kindly.

“I’m fine, by and large. And yourself?”

“Tolerably well. For an old lady.”

She held out her hand in parting.

“These must be difficult times for you,” she added, regretfully, “terrible times …”

Silbermann contented himself with an attentive little smile that was both cautious and thoughtful, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. “In essence we’ve been assigned a peculiar role,” he said at last.

“But they’re great times, too,” she consoled him. “There’s no doubt that you’re being treated unjustly, but that’s exactly why you need to be fair-minded and compassionate in your thinking.”

“Isn’t that a lot to ask, gnädige Frau? Besides, I don’t think at all anymore. I’ve given that up. It’s the best way to deal with everything.”

“They’ll never do anything to you,” she assured him, and banged the umbrella she was clenching in her right hand resolutely on a stair, as if to signal that she wouldn’t allow anyone to get too close to him. Then she gave him an encouraging nod and stepped on by.

As soon as he was back in his apartment, he asked the maid if Herr Findler was already there. She said he was, so Silbermann hastily took off his hat and coat and stepped into the study, where his visitor was waiting.

Theo Findler was examining a painting with clear disapproval. When he heard the door open, he quickly turned around and smiled at the man entering. 8

“Well?” he asked, knitting his brow as he always did when he spoke, thinking that the wrinkles added weight to his words. “How are you, my friend? I was afraid something might have happened to you. You never know … Have you given my last offer some more thought? How is your wife? I haven’t seen her at all today. So, Becker’s off to Hamburg.”

Findler took a deep breath, because he was only at the beginning of his monologue.

“Well you two sure are clever! A person could learn from you. Becker has a Jewish head on his shoulders. Ha ha, he’ll manage all right, he’ll manage. I’d have been happy to join in the business, but too late is too late, right? By the way, where did you dig up these awful pictures? I don’t understand how anyone could hang rubbish like that on their walls. No order to the things, you old culture-Bolshevik you. Now don’t go thinking that I’ll be raising my last offer even by just another thousand marks. Not on your life, I can’t do it.

“You think I’m a rich man, Silbermann. Everybody does. If only I knew where they came up with that idea. And here I’m having a hard time paying what I owe in taxes. Speaking of taxes, can’t you find me a clever bookkeeper or point me to someone? I mean I know my way around a little bit, but I don’t have time to take care of all that properly. These taxes, these goddamned taxes. Tell me, am I supposed to support the whole German Reich all by myself? Well?

“You’re not saying anything? What is it? Did you think things over? Are you going to take my offer? Your wife must have something against me. I see she’s kept herself completely out of sight. I don’t understand it. Is she upset with me because we didn’t say hello to you the other evening? But 9good grief, how could we have? The place was teeming with Nazis! Later my wife pestered me that we should have said hello. But I told her that Silbermann’s far too reasonable. He realizes I can’t compromise myself on his account. Well?

“So, Silbermann, out with it. Do you want to sell or don’t you?”

Findler seemed to have finished talking—in any case he was now looking expectantly at Silbermann. They sat down at the smokers’ table, but Findler must have moved too abruptly, since he winced and, with a concentrated expression, started rubbing his left hip.

“Ninety thousand,” Silbermann said, ignoring all the various questions and remarks he realized were mostly meant to throw him off guard. “Thirty thousand in cash, the rest secured by mortgage.”

Findler started up as if he’d been given an electric shock.

“You’ve got to be joking,” he shouted, sounding offended. “Listen, it’s high time we stopped all this dithering. Fifteen thousand on the table, you hear? What on earth—thirty thousand marks! You know, if I had thirty thousand marks lying around, I could think of better things to do than buy your place. Thirty thousand marks!”

“But consider the net income from rent. And since the sale price is already ridiculous, the least I have to have is a decent down payment. The building’s worth two hundred thousand marks, you’re buying it …”

“Worth, worth, worth,” Findler interrupted. “What do you think I’m worth? Except nobody would pay a thing for me. Nobody can pay what I’m worth, and nobody would even think of putting down just a thousand marks. I’m 10unsaleable. And so is your building. Ha ha ha, Silbermann, and I say it as a friend. I’m taking the shack off your hands, and if I don’t then the state will. And they won’t give you a lousy pfennig.”

The telephone rang in the next room. For a moment Silbermann wondered if he should answer it. Then he jumped up, excused himself, and left the study.

I’ll probably take what he’s offering, he thought as he picked up the receiver. After all, Findler’s still a relatively decent fellow.

“Hello, who is this?”

The long-distance operator answered. “Please hold the line, you have a call from Paris,” said a cool female voice.

Silbermann felt a flash of excitement and lit a cigarette. “Elfriede,” he called out in a low voice.

His wife, who had stayed in the salon just as he’d suspected, came in, quietly opening and closing the door behind her.

“Hello, Elfriede,” he said, covering the receiver with his hand. “I just arrived five minutes ago. Herr Findler is here. Won’t you go in and talk with him?”

She stepped close and they exchanged a fleeting kiss.

“It’s Eduard,” he whispered. “The call is coming at an awkward moment. Please go talk with Findler, otherwise he’ll listen in. It’s already practically a crime to telephone with Paris.”

“Tell Eduard hello from me,” she said. “I’d really like to say a few words to him myself.”

“That’s out of the question.” He warded her off. “The lines are all being tapped. And you’re too careless. You’d say something you shouldn’t.” 11

“I should at least be able to say hello to my own son.”

“I’m afraid you can’t. Please understand.”

She looked at him beseechingly. “Just a few words,” she said. “I’ll be careful.”

“The answer is no,” he said firmly. “Hello? Hello … Eduard? Hello Eduard …” He pointed imploringly at the door of the study.

She went.

“Listen,” Silbermann said, going back to the phone call. “Have you managed to arrange our permit?” He spoke very slowly, weighing each word before he uttered it.

“No,” Eduard answered on the other end. “It’s extremely difficult. You can’t count on getting it. I’m trying everything I can, but …”

Silbermann cleared his throat. He decided he had to be more forceful.

“That’s unacceptable. Either you’re making an effort or you aren’t! And I’m sure you realize the matter is of some importance. I don’t even know where to start with these lazy excuses.”

“You’re overestimating what I can do, father,” answered Eduard, upset. “Six months ago it would have been a lot easier. But you didn’t want to. And that’s not exactly my fault.”

“It’s not a question of who’s at fault,” Silbermann snapped back, fuming. “Your job is to see to the permits. And be so kind as to spare me your wisdom.”

“Listen, father,” Eduard said, indignantly. “You want me to get you the moon and the stars and you’re bawling me out because I haven’t delivered them!” Then he added, “But how are you both doing? How is Mother? Please 12give her my best. I would have been happy to speak with her.”

“Fix the permit and do it quickly,” Silbermann repeated sternly. “That’s all I’m asking! Your mother sends her best. Unfortunately she can’t talk with you right now.”

“I’ll get it done,” answered Eduard. “At least I’ll try everything I can.”

Silbermann placed the receiver back on the hook.

That’s the first time in my life I’ve wanted something from my son, he thought, disgruntled and disappointed. And I know for a fact he’s bound to fail! If I had a business friend in Paris, he’d be able to come up with the entry permits in a few days, but Eduard … I shouldn’t expect too much. He’s simply not accustomed to doing things for us. When someone’s used to you always being there for them it’s very hard for that person to switch roles. Eduard’s used to my helping him and now I’m asking him to help me. And he’s not well suited to his new part.

Then Silbermann shook his head, ashamed of his own ruminations. I’m being unfair, he thought, and what’s worse, I’m being sentimental.

He went back to the study.

“I was just explaining to your wife,” Findler said, by way of greeting, “that it’s very careless of you to keep going to the same old places. If you run into some acquaintance who isn’t kindly disposed toward you, you could wind up in a lot of trouble. Your wife is an Aryan, she can go anywhere she wants, but you … God knows I’m not approving of the circumstances that make such advice necessary, but I’m speaking with your own interest at heart. The best 13would be for you to stay home or with friends. Of course no one can tell by looking at you that you’re Jewish, but why tempt the devil? Incidentally what’s Sohnemann up to? He hotfooted it, and in the nick of time, too. Ha ha ha, funny times we’re living in, right?”

“Listen, Findler,” Silbermann began, “I’ll let you have the place for a down payment of twenty thousand marks, just so we can finally come to a deal.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. Why would you want to hoodwink your old Findler? Besides they’ll take whatever money you have at the border. For you I’d even chip in a few marks more than what the joint’s worth to me, but to pay extra just so it winds up in the state treasury—I have no interest in that.”

“For the moment I don’t have any intention of leaving Germany.”

“Well, children, do as you like. I really wish something better for you than the current circumstances. It’s Jewish blood that’s bringing the German people together. And I fail to see why my friend Silbermann of all people should wind up as glue. Running for your life, on the other hand—that I understand completely.”

“Don’t you think what’s happening to the Jews is a horrible crime?” asked Frau Silbermann, who was horror-stricken by Findler’s proclamation that “it’s Jewish blood that’s bringing the German people together,” and who still hadn’t given up searching for some moral in the events of the times.

“Of course,” Findler said dryly. “A lot of bad things happen in the world. And some good things as well. Today it’s this person, tomorrow that one. One person’s consumptive, 14another’s a Jew, and if they’re really unlucky they’re both at once. That’s the way it is. How much bad luck do you think I’ve had in my life? There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“I knew that you aren’t exactly the most tactful person, Herr Findler,” said Frau Silbermann, indignant, “but that you’re so cold inside and so …”—here she swallowed the word “brutal”—“indifferent, that is something new to me.”

Findler smiled, unmoved. “I love my wife and my little daughter. As far as the rest of humanity goes, everything is strictly business. There you have my entire relationship to my surroundings. I don’t love the Jews, I don’t hate the Jews. I am indifferent to them, though as capable businessmen I admire them. If an injustice is being done to them, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t surprise me, either. That’s the way of the world. When the time comes, some fail and go bankrupt while others prosper.”

“And if you were a Jew yourself?”

“But I’m not! I’ve given up racking my brain about what might be. I have enough to deal with what actually is.”

“So do you always think only about yourself? Are you incapable of sympathizing with the tragic plights of other people?”

“Who the devil worries about me when I have bad luck? Theo Findler doesn’t have anyone but Theo Findler. And those two have to stick together thick as thieves. Ha ha.”

“Yet you claim to love your wife and daughter.” Frau Silbermann was becoming more and more agitated. “I can’t believe that someone who’s so … bestially indifferent is capable of …”

“Hey, listen, that’s going too far. I have pretty thick skin and can stand a lot of joking, but I don’t like being insulted!” 15

Frau Silbermann stood up. “You will excuse me,” she said frostily to Findler. Then she left the room.

“Good God, you are a sensitive bunch.” Findler laughed. “My heavens! Well, honest people like myself have to put up with a lot. Back to business! So what’s the score? Well?”

The phone rang once again.

“Twenty thousand,” Silbermann insisted, “the rest secured by mortgage.”

The door opened, and Frau Silbermann asked her husband to step into the next room. She was apparently still agitated, and he did not appreciate the new disturbance. “Think about it,” he said to Findler as he left the room.

“What is it, Elfriede,” he asked his wife.

She pointed to the telephone. “Your sister’s on the line. Speak to her. She’ll explain everything …”

He reached for the receiver.

“Hilde?”

“Yes, yes?” his sister stammered, clearly upset. “Günther has been arrested!”

Silbermann was so surprised he didn’t know what to say. “How so?” he finally asked. “What happened?”

“Don’t you know—all Jews are being arrested.”

He pulled up a chair and sat down.

“Calm down please, Hilde,” he said. “There must be some mistake. Now tell me everything once more, nice and quietly …”

“There’s no time for that. I only called to warn you. Four men in our building were arrested. If I only knew what was happening to Günther.”

“But it can’t be! People don’t just go hauling off respectable citizens from their homes! They can’t do that!” 16

He was silent. Yes they can, he then thought, they can.

“Shall I come over?” he asked after a while. “Or do you want to come to our place?”

“No, I’m not leaving the apartment, I’m staying here. And you shouldn’t come, either. That won’t help anything. Good-bye, Otto.” She hung up.

Distraught, he looked at his wife.

“Elfriede,” he whispered, “they’re arresting all the Jews! Maybe it’s just a temporary scare tactic. In any case Günther has been arrested, but you already know that.”

Silbermann paused for a moment.

“What should we do? What do you think is best, Elfriede? Should I stay here? Maybe they’ll forget about me. I’ve never been seriously harassed before. If only Becker were here. He has a whole slew of party connections. He could intervene in an emergency. Of course if the arrests are coming from above, then he can’t do anything, either. And by the time he gets back from Hamburg I could have been beaten to death by mistake. Ach—nonsense! Nothing’s going to happen to me. In the worst case you’ll just ring up Becker and ask him to come back immediately.”

“Six months ago we still could have gotten out of Germany,” his wife said slowly. “We stayed on my account, because I couldn’t bear to leave my family behind. If something happens to you it will be my fault. You wanted to go, but I …”

“Ach.” He brushed aside her self-reproach. “It’s no one’s fault. Is someone who forgot to put on a bulletproof vest at the right moment to blame if he gets shot? That’s all nonsense. Besides, you were more for leaving than I was. If you’d had your way we would already be out of the country. You 17would have left your family more easily than I would have left my business. But it didn’t happen. And at this point the whys and wherefores don’t matter.”

He gave her a kiss, then went back to Herr Findler. He attempted to appear as calm and composed as before, but something in his face, some excessive tension, a smile that seemed forced, made the other man suspicious.

“What’s going on?” Findler asked. “Bad news?”

“Family matters,” said Silbermann, and sat back down at the table.

“I see,” said Findler, drawing the words out, his forehead more furrowed than usual. “Well, I’m sure it’s bad news, right? Family news is always bad. Believe me, I know.”

Silbermann opened the cigarette case that was lying on the table. “Shall we get back to business?” he asked as calmly as he could.

“Well,” Findler replied, “I’m really not so tempted. I’m not even sure if it’s still possible to buy property from Jews. No idea. If you had your way you’d flimflam me before I could count to three. Well?”

This constant “well,” which sounded so fat and smug, was gradually bringing Silbermann to the point of despair.

“Do you actually want to buy the building or just talk about buying it? What do you want to do?”

“Well,” said Findler as he stretched in his armchair. “I really wrenched my hip earlier. What do you say to that? Wouldn’t it be better if we waited to see what new regulations are coming? It’s too risky for me. I pay for a place and end up not getting it. The government has in mind all sorts of things for you Jews.”

“All right then fifteen thousand!” 18

“I don’t know, Silbermann, I really have no idea if I should or not. What say we wait a few weeks, and if nothing happens in the meantime I’ll still be able to buy the place. First I also have to speak with my lawyer, absolutely.”

“But ten minutes ago …”

“Since then I’ve started to have some doubts. I also don’t want you to have any trouble because you’re selling your home. But most of all I don’t want any trouble myself.”

“Just so we can finish this: I let you have the building for a down payment of fourteen thousand marks. But you have to agree now.”

“Is that so? Well … let’s talk about it again tomorrow. Fourteen thousand marks is a heap of money, that’s for sure! I’m not an ogre. I don’t want something for nothing. But I have to ask myself whether this place is really worth a fourteen thousand down payment. And of course you realize that the payment could only be made after the deed gets notarized and registered. And in case of any force majeure the whole transaction would be void. Fourteen thousand marks … Do you honestly believe I’m getting a bargain if we shake on it this evening and call it a deal?”

“You wanted to pay fifteen thousand marks and now you’re hesitating at fourteen?”

“I’m just thinking there are other deals I could make with the money, maybe better ones. You just always have to see for yourself where you are in life. Well?” He sighed contentedly.

Silbermann jumped up.

“Of course I can’t influence your decision,” he said impatiently. “But since I don’t have any more time I’d appreciate 19it if you could make up your mind right here and now. Otherwise please consider my offer as no longer valid. I don’t even know if you’re seriously interested in the purchase or not.”

“There’s no need to sound like that,” Findler replied testily. “I’ve always known that you Jews aren’t cut out for doing business, at least not with people who know what they’re doing, well …”

Silbermann saw how much Findler was enjoying this extortion—the man was even proud of it. Silbermann had a sharp response on his tongue, something to the effect that he, Silbermann, couldn’t compete with blackmailers and had no desire to, and that he was used to conducting business in a decent manner. Except there are times when the most simple-minded swindler has the edge over the most intelligent and decent person.

But he didn’t manage to spit out the uncivil thoughts that were bubbling up inside him or even to answer Findler more mildly—which would have been far more reasonable—because suddenly there was a wild ringing at the door. Without paying attention to his visitor’s bewildered face or excusing himself even with a single word, Silbermann hurried out of the room into the hall, where he met his wife.

“You have to leave,” she whispered, upset.

“No, no, I can’t leave you here alone!”

Not knowing what he should do, he headed toward the door. She stopped him.

“Nothing can happen to me if you’re not here,” she assured him, blocking his way. “Spend tonight in a hotel. Now be quick and go.” 20

He thought for a moment. The bell rang again and fists began pounding at the door.

“Open up, Jew, open up …” several overlapping voices bellowed. Silbermann’s jaw dropped. He fixed his eyes on the door.

“I’m getting my revolver,” he said, almost inaudibly. “I’ll shoot down the first one who breaks into my home! No one has the right to barge in like that.”

He started to pass his wife and head to the bedroom.

“We’ll see about that,” he said. “We’ll see about that …”

Fists again pounded the door and the bell was ringing shrilly.

“Well?” asked Findler, who had stepped into the hall when he heard the noise. “What’s happening here? That’s just great. If the brothers catch me here, in their excitement they might take me for a Jew and smash my teeth in.”

He ran his hand tenderly over his mouth.

“Don’t you have a back door?” he then asked Silbermann, who was standing there watching him, as though he were expecting help and advice. “And to hell with it, you can foist your damned building on somebody else,” he added.

“I’m getting my revolver,” Silbermann repeated mechanically, “and I’ll shoot the first one who breaks into my house!”

“Now there,” said Theo Findler, to calm him down. “Easy does it. Better you should go. I’ll talk to them. See that you get out through the back door. And I’ll take the place for ten thousand. Do we have a deal?”

“You are … All right, all right, it’s a deal.” 21

“So then get a move on! I need you alive so you can sign the deed.”

“Go, go,” his wife begged.

The doorbell rang again, and Silbermann wondered why no one was kicking in the door.

“And what will happen to my wife?” he asked helplessly.

“Just count on me,” said Findler, full of confidence. “I’ll take care of everything, but now see to it that you get out of here!”

“If anything happens to my wife … you won’t get the building.”

“Fine, fine,” Findler reassured him, “but if you don’t disappear, then you’ll be putting both your wife and me in danger!”