Problems With People: Stories Page 9

  The Copper Room, though subject to a dress code, was not so precious that it couldn’t plate a roasted chicken, grilled filet of beef, or prime rib with mashed potatoes, which meant that the judge’s parents could eat inside their accustomed parameters. The judge ordered wine and encouraged appetizers and salads, and, after dinner, desserts, which they ate while the Jones Boys warmed up their act. Before long, the first couples took to the sprung floor. One in particular was entertainingly good, and, despite gimpiness and years, danced ballroom with flair and swing with joie de vivre. It was cheering, even moving, but it veered toward schmaltz when the Jones Boys began what their front man called a “Christmas waltz in the Viennese style. The grand old Austrian style. One, two, and a-waaaaay we go!” he boomed.

  Now the judge’s father leaned in, as his mother had done earlier. Looking a little parboiled from his half-hour in the pool and his glass of wine, he said, “Sinatra used to do this song. Irony is, it was written by Sammy Cahn.”

  “Sammy Cahn!” exclaimed the judge’s mother. “I’d completely forgotten about Sammy Cahn. ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen’—that was Sammy Cahn. It—”

  “Sure,” said the judge’s father. “The Andrews Sisters.” And now, off-key, he sang, over the Jones Boys:

  I’ve tried to explain, bei mir bist du schoen

  So kiss me, and say you understand.

  “That’s it!” the judge’s mother cried, then kissed him, hard—mwah!—on the cheek. “You’re sharp as a tack! And so, so handsome. Isn’t your father handsome?” They drank to each other, and when the Jones Boys moved on to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” got up and approximated dancing.

  “They’re awful,” the judge said, sitting back with his glass of port. “Look at them. They’re embarrassing.”

  “No,” replied his wife. “It’s really, really cute. I love that. Look at them! All of a sudden they’re having a good time! The hot spring’s got them in a good mood.”

  “I don’t get it,” said the judge. “I don’t get them at all.”

  “Don’t try,” said his wife, and slid her hand over his. “Let’s dance!”

  Krassavitseh

  At dusk they were delivered by a driver named Jürgen to the five-star luxury Brandenburger Hof at Eislebener Strasse 14. It was not so much this hotel’s location—near the Tiergarten and the Berlin University of the Arts—as it was its “exceptional service and taste” that had led the tour company to recommend it and then, on his approval, to reserve a double Comfort City room with twin beds and a sitting area. As soon as they were ensconced and organized—the geriatric toiletries arrayed by the bathroom sink—his father took hold of the remote control and tuned in CNN International. “Close enough,” his father remarked, and fluffed his pillow. “I know this person—Amanpour.” Then: “This is what the Krauts call sports? Nothing. I didn’t get the scores.”

  “Germany doesn’t own CNN, Dad.”

  “Can’t even get the score of a ball game!”

  “Okay, we’ll go online, then,” he said. “I can get you the Seattle Times.”

  “Puh.”

  But, at his father’s behest, he got the scores anyway and then read aloud the names above obituaries, so that his father would know if, back at home, someone he knew had passed away since they’d boarded their plane for this trip to Berlin, where his father had lived as a child.

  In the morning, they met their guide in the Brandenburger’s lounge—otherwise known as the Quadriga—which was open-air and rife with perfect plants. The guide was a woman in her mid- or late twenties who was waiting for them with her coat over her arm, looking, he thought, poised but under strain. His first impression was of this blue elegance—a woman with enough learning to be generally troubled, but with enough youth, also, to enjoy herself. She appeared urbane and professional in caste. Her expression, her mien, her manner, her carriage—all of it, frankly, was not what he’d expected. He’d rather thought that Jewish Tours of Berlin would send them someone of substantially greater years, but, then, at his age—fifty-eight—he was perennially surprised that twentysomething people were able to do the jobs they did; so why not a tour guide, along with all the rest? Besides, this one seemed mature enough, courteous, considerate, amenable, intelligent. Her name, she said, was Erika Wolf, and her work, until recently, she gave them to understand, was at Berlin’s German Historical Museum—“in walking distance of the Brandenburg Gate, eastward along Unter den Linden, which is a beautiful boulevard lined with lime trees”—though technically her employer had been the Federal Office for Central Services and Unresolved Property Issues. Erika Wolf had impeccable English with no hard edges or telltale Teutonic music. She wanted to know if they’d had their breakfast; if not, the hotel breakfast was very good. At this, his father opened his mouth. “Breakfast!” he said, looking at his watch. “For me, it’s already six-fifteen p.m. because of the nine-hour time difference.”

  His father had dressed, on this April morning, in khakis, a sweater vest, and a button-down chambray: the travel outfit he’d bought the month before, when the two of them went to a mall for clothes and to pick up a rolling carry-on with swivel wheels, AARP five-star recommended but, even better, on sale. He’d also put on his comfortable walking shoes—the ones with room for custom orthotic inserts—and carried the lightweight nylon hooded parka he swore by as the ticket when it rained. Was it going to rain today? he asked. In Berlin, as they were “kicking around”? Erika Wolf smoothly fielded this query by pointing out that, though April was not the city’s wettest month—that award went annually to June—one could never really be certain, and therefore it was a very good idea to have a raincoat such as his father was carrying. Or an umbrella, she added; there were three in her car.

  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 gu
y 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 s
o 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.