Good People (15 page)

Both of them were looking at him now: Blum was waiting for an explanation of why he had been invited, and Erika for her signal to speak to Blum.

But perhaps they were demanding something more. What were they demanding? That he would take responsibility, curse the homeland, explain to them how it had all happened? Blum coughed, Erika said something to him in such a self-effacing tone that it didn't even sound like German. As if she were trying to curl up in his lap like a little girl.

Clarissa wasn't the only one in disguise tonight.

He decided to address them both together to strengthen the closeness between them: ‘Herr Blum, Frau Gelber,' he said, ‘I understand that these are difficult times for you. I don't believe that it's really possible to console someone whose world has changed so much for the worse. With all sincerity I'll tell you that even in the hard times that I have endured recently, like the horrible night a few weeks ago when, in this parlour, our devoted and beloved housekeeper, Hannah Stein, was cruelly murdered—even then I clung to the faith that Hegel was right, that in the end history and reason progress, despite the most dreadful events. Naturally, of course, being trapped in the moment, we cannot judge its future purpose, but sometimes what's rational
hides its highest qualities inside irrational mischief.'

‘That's small consolation, to see our suffering as a tool in the hand of reason.' Erika gave a twisted smile. She showed no surprise at the news of Frau Stein's death, and was entirely concentrated on Blum.

Blum nodded gloomily to show he'd heard her, but he was leaning away from Erika, revealing his reservations about being bound up in the same group as her. Unlike Erika, who was regarded as completely Jewish, Blum was defined by the regime as a
mischling
of the first degree. Blum had never seen himself as Jewish. His father had converted to Christianity after the war, and his mother came from a Protestant family in Heidelberg. Blum hoped to assimilate into the German nation. He was exempt from most restrictions, but he still complained that his senior position in a Jewish-owned bank was driving him into the bosom of Judaism and ‘all those Jewish organisations'.

‘I'm not a big expert in the irrational!' Blum hissed, and the creases on his forehead deepened and turned red like cuts. ‘I've worked in the bank for forty years. We built up an excellent institution from zero, an institution that has garnered nothing but praise, and now they're robbing us of it!'

The smile faded from Erika's face. Thomas gave Blum a warning look. How dumb could the man be, to shout nonsense like that at eight in the evening in a private home, in an apartment that SS people had recently destroyed?

‘Herr Blum, a little patience.' He couldn't restrain himself. ‘We've all taken a risk to get together here. It would be a shame to allow bitterness to lead us to a dead end.'

Blum fixed his eyes on his plate.

Clarissa appeared again and cleared the table. Now her movements were stiff, and her cheerfulness was gone. If the things she had heard here were not supposed to be said, she might tell her parents about the dinner, or her friends at the university, or the NSP, the National Socialist welfare organisation where she volunteered. But she wasn't the informing type. Thomas had already ascertained that.

‘Despite recent events, I expect, indeed I demand, that you regard
me as exactly the same friend I have always been to you,' Thomas declared solemnly.

‘Don't you like cutlets?' Blum said to Erika Gelber, staring at the meat on her plate.

‘If you want it, please.' She returned the cutlet to the platter.

‘We'll share it,' Blum concluded.

Before dessert Thomas offered Blum a cigar, and Erika saw her chance. She turned to Blum, and told him that she wanted to talk to him about something. Blum shrank into his chair. Erika told him that her husband had been arrested in November, had been detained in Buchenwald, and now he had been released. He had been ordered to emigrate without delay. Her two children, Max and Eva, had been expelled from school. They were sitting at home now, after some hooligans had forced Max to weed the football pitch with his teeth. They were being evicted from their apartment. They were looking feverishly for a country to take them but there was nowhere. No one was helping them.

Blum nodded from time to time, and puffed smoke. Thomas wondered whether he should leave them; after all, Blum had been in analysis with Erika, and maybe he was keeping his distance from her because there were three people in the room. In any event, Thomas was tired of hearing about their distress.

Blum peered down the hallway, as though expecting dessert. Really, where was Clarissa with the cake?

Erika said something about the United States, that because of the children there was no point waiting until things changed here. Blum nodded again, a sign that significant things had been said, and closed his eyes.

‘It's cold…' Thomas rubbed his hands together and hurried over to stoke the fire.

As its heat warmed them, he realised that Blum wouldn't help Erika. He couldn't understand how he hadn't admitted his failure earlier. Maybe Blum couldn't help. He had obligations to many people,
his partners would be likely to reject the idea and maybe—a hair-raising suspicion—they had already decided to sell to Deutsche Bank instead. One thing was clear: Blum wasn't going to help Erika.

The statement tormented him, yet he could not stop repeating it to himself, as though wanting to have his punishment at once. His head hurt, and he closed his eyes. A minute or ten passed. The wind howled outside, and he imagined it surrounding the house, ripping down the walls and the ceiling as though they were made of paper. When he shook off these visions, Erika was still talking to Blum in the same caressing tone, and Thomas was horrified: how could she not understand that all was lost? He apologised and announced that he had to check the dessert.

‘At such a late hour?' Blum said, looking at the front door.

‘We were supposed to have had, as it were, a cake,' Thomas said, babbling.

Where was Clarissa?

Erika gave him a pleading look not to leave her alone with Blum. But he couldn't stay and watch her clinging to a vain hope that he himself had planted in her. He gaped at a blank spot on the wall, announced that they would be serving dessert immediately and hurried out.

As he wandered among the rooms, half-listening to Erika's voice, he realised how fateful this struggle to get her out of Germany was for him: in part he was struggling to erase the things he had said to her about ‘losing the magic touch', seeking desperately for proof that Thomas Heiselberg was still a master tactician in the corridors of Berlin. Maybe not like in the past, but he still knew how to arrange deals and astonish people with his ability to cut through the most complicated issues.

Erika was saying something about her driver's licence and a law that forbade her to walk in certain streets. How many damned stories did she have left? All he wanted now was to escape her voice. In the background Blum was cursing the Jews from Eastern Europe. From the moment they had began to show up here, en masse, something bad was going to happen.

Clarissa wasn't in his room or anywhere else. Now he understood where she was. He rushed back to the parlour again, taking care not to look at Blum and Erika, and walked through it and then down the corridor to that room. A freezing wind blew through the broken window. Clarissa lay in her dress and shoes on his mother's bed. A heavy blanket was spread over her lower body. How many times had he spread that blanket over his mother, exactly there? There was the sound of hoarse breathing, and he saw the slow movement of her chest. The dress was pressing on her. Maybe he should undo a button or two. And if she woke up? To his surprise, he was not irritated by her disappearance or her invasion of his mother's bed. He was not the kind of man to build a shrine to a dead woman. Every time he heard women gushing over the rumour that Göring had built a temple for his first wife, he felt shame that a man like that could rise so high in Germany.

Maybe Clarissa's boldness promised a change for the better. If his most alarming capacity, the quality that defined him during an attack, was to snuff the life out of things, perhaps this young woman would lead him in another direction. Even in a room containing only a bed and a shattered window she made a youthful spirit glow in him. He suddenly wanted this sleeping beauty, wanted to have her, to keep her in his possession. It appeared that he had finally met with something that he couldn't dispatch to death with a single gesture.

…

The next morning there was a commotion when he got to the office. The receptionist greeted him in tears, and Carlson's young assistant sneaked away, pretending not to see Thomas. He went to Carlson's office, and was astonished to find Frau Tschammer sitting in his chair, shuffling through his papers. It was clear that disaster had struck.

‘Thomas!' She stood up. There was a ripple of panic in her voice. ‘Mailer has gone to New York. He didn't say when he was coming back.'

She was staring at him. In the end, even Frau Tschammer believed
in his talent, in his storied reputation: if the staff at Milton encountered an abyss, before anyone could even think of moving, Thomas would have already have leaped into it and, God knows how, landed on his feet. He would blaze a trail across it, and everyone would follow.

Thomas didn't know what to say. He couldn't summon the strength to trade barbs or make toxic small talk with Frau Tschammer. It was all pointless now. After all, collapse was a simple matter.

‘Frau Tschammer,' he said, ‘the Milton Company is liquidating its business in Germany. And if we had been brave enough to examine things as they truly were, we would have seen it coming long ago.'

LENINGRAD

WINTER 1939

That night the iron bed creaked in her parents' bedroom. Sasha could hear them still discussing whether or not to sign the protocols of the investigation, even though it misrepresented their answers, and whether or not to write a confession. They ran through the same names over and over: A confessed and only got a short sentence, B confessed and disappeared, C refused to confess and was liquidated, D refused to confess and in the end they decided he was innocent.

Her father had already been interrogated twice, her mother only once, and to their surprise they were allowed home, to reconsider their pleas of not guilty. Meanwhile her father wasted time collecting documents and letters that testified to their good character and their loyalty to the party.

The next day an article appeared in the newspaper about the discovery of a counter-revolutionary cell in the Physical-Technical Institute. Two agents from the West, Germans, had joined forces with the last followers of Pyatakov, and, under the influence of the Unified
Centre, led by the criminals Trotsky and Zinoviev, they had plotted ‘to sabotage major industrial facilities'. Monstrous treachery had been discovered in the institute: ‘Enemies of the people planned to kill thousands with a single goal: to defile the revolution.'

That day her father was fired. He returned home at 10 a.m., closed the shutters in the bedroom and lay down on the bed. Her mother had been busy with housework since early morning, pickling mushrooms and beans, making wild berry jam, her white apron stained crimson and brown. Sasha was listening to a record on the gramophone. Arthur Rubinstein, whom her father had called ‘a pianist for sentimental salons', was playing the first movement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. In a moment the Funeral March of Chopin's Second Piano Sonata would be heard, and then the finale would thunder, a piece that her father called ‘the greatest musical manipulation of the nineteenth century'. Sasha always listened to music in the same order: Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, sometimes Mendelssohn, and finally Schumann. She dusted the little shelf on the bookcase that was allotted to her: Schumann's ‘Carnival Jest from Vienna', Hanon's piano exercises for beginners, copies of
Le Nouvelliste
, yellowed issues of
Nir
magazine, a book of poems by Balmont with a dedication to her parents.

Mother had not played the piano in a long time. She used to play with the twins and she and Kolya had occasionally performed together. A few years ago, after a few weeks of practice, they even played a short piece from a Borodin symphony, ‘In the Steppes of Central Asia', which Kolya renamed ‘the evil steps of Asia'.

At 2 p.m. Valeria called her husband. ‘Andreyusha,' she shouted. ‘Andreyusha, I need you!'

He shuffled into the living room in underpants and a filthy undershirt, as if he'd been fished out of a deep sleep. Thin strands of silver hair dangled on either side of his head. Her mother told him to pick up a heavy jar of cucumbers and place it next to the window. He looked at her incredulously. ‘You called me for that?' he whined.

‘Yes, exactly for that.'

He hoisted the jar up, pressed it to his chest, carried it to the window and thumped it onto the shelf.

In the afternoon Vladimir and Nikolai returned from school, and hovered at the door to the apartment. Kolya lazily leaned his long, slender body—a beanpole, according to Maxim Podolsky—against the wall. Next to him, Vlada stood erect in his grey coat, with blue and black ribbons on the sleeves and two rows of buttons on the breast, like an old officer's coat. Vlada wasn't tall like Kolya, but his body was broad and muscular, and it seemed as if he always demanded more space for himself. His hair was short, his face flushed with a babyish pink that softened the severity of his know-it-all expression.

Apparently someone at school had read the article. Sasha wondered at the stories that circulated in the schoolyard. Boys were usually obsessed with punishment—guillotines and nooses inflamed their imaginations—and were disappointed to learn that most traitors were shot. Once they had some fun at the expense of a boy whose father had been arrested: they painted their faces white, pounded their chests and roared like bears. Then they extended their index fingers, raised their thumbs and ‘shot the traitor'.