Love by the Morning Star (3 page)

Hannah saw the tremor of terror cross her father's face, but it passed almost at once. “You should take your turn onstage, old friend. You're overreacting. You've been predicting doom since 1932.”

“And it has been coming. Now it is here. They say they'll destroy every Jewish business, imprison you, send you to Poland . . .”

“We've lived with that threat for years,” Aaron Morgenstern said lightly. “They won't touch me.”

But Cora's pale brow furrowed. “Maybe now it is time, love.”

“It was time long ago!” Alder said. “When they cast your people out of the civil service, you said only, ‘Good thing I'm not a civil servant,' and the Devil laughed. When they forbade your people to teach in the universities, you said, ‘Well, I'm no intellectual, what does it matter?' Do you think because you can make a Gestapo brute chortle he won't send you to Buchenwald? You'll laugh your way to the grave, and take your family with you.”

Aaron looked at his wife, her powdered porcelain face a deliberate mask of calm, and at his daughter, whose slight frame seemed to him now so terrifyingly fragile. But Der Teufel! Its bricks could endure anything, filled as they were with the goodwill of all the powerful men who had eaten and chuckled and grown tipsy within its walls in the two decades since its founding. He was host, he was jester, to the most powerful men of Berlin. He'd been safe so far. Surely his luck would last. About one thing he was adamant—he would not leave his cabaret. He had built it—not its walls, perhaps, but its reputation, its glamour—and it was his lifeblood.

Still in costume, he stroked his beard, pulling the tip into a sharp point. “I won't leave,” he said. “I'm a German. They'll come to their senses eventually. But, Cora, I think you and Hannah should go back to England for a while.”

“Hannah, yes,” Cora said, giving herself a little shake and turning away from them all to apply her lipstick with a slim golden brush. Anyone watching her would have thought her cold, indifferent, but this was the only way she knew to tackle her deepest troubles, to shoo them aside as if they were a cloud of summer gnats, and deal with the task at hand brusquely and efficiently. Hannah always thought of it as her mother's Englishness, that ability to balance problems so that a scuffed shoe and an impending disaster were almost equally distasteful, but both were borne with aplomb.

“But I have too much to do,” Cora went on. “Who will keep the Edelweiss Twins in line if I'm in England, eh? Who will remember that oysters must be ordered on Thursday, and langoustines on Friday?” She shrugged her bare shoulders, then dusted them with shimmering gold flakes. “No, it is ridiculous to think I'd leave. Our business would crumble without me here.”

Hannah could see the pulse racing in the hollow of her mother's throat, and knew she loved her husband too much ever to leave him voluntarily. The couple joined forces and turned on Hannah.

“You, however, will go to my brother-in-law's house. He will be perfectly happy to take you in,” Cora said, with far more confidence than she felt. “That should be easily arranged, no? Documents and such?”

“I will see that it is done,” Alder said. “But, Cora, you must go too. You are an English citizen still, so you will have no trouble. Our government is most adamant that foreigners not be inconvenienced. You, Aaron, will be harder to place, but perhaps if you go first to France—”

“I told you, I'm not going. This is my business and—”

“Fool, what have I been telling you? The tide has turned, the deluge has come. There will be no more Jewish businesses. They are being confiscated, now, tonight, next week. It is the end for you. I'll help you with money, but—”

“They can't do it!” Aaron shouted. “I own it free and clear. I don't owe a cent to any man. They can't steal the property of a German citizen!”

Alder took his old friend by the shoulder. “The Jewish people are no longer citizens of Germany,” he said gently. “You are an undesirable.”

Aaron could hear the muted cheers from the audience, officers positively glittering with medals and insignia, industrial giants in bespoke suits being insincerely adored by women their wives did not know about. All the power of Berlin trickled in through his door. They had toasted him. They had shaken his hand.

“I am an undesirable,” he repeated, trying to make sense of it.

“Der Teufel will be gone. Be smart and go first.”

The greatest men, Hannah remembered reading somewhere, make the greatest decisions lightly. She saw something come over her father then, a strange mix of resignation and triumph. “As it happens,” the Devil said, “Der Teufel is no longer a Jewish business.” He brushed past his family and out of the dressing room, taking the stage just as the buxom Bavarian shed her final feather. “My friends,” he cried, “as the good lord gave plagues and pox to his most faithful Job, I, the Devil, must be a contrarian, and to my friends give gifts. Benno, come onstage, if you please.”

Whoever is in charge of such things had been sparing with his blessings at the moment Benno was born. He had neither looks nor wit nor skill. He was not large or strong, he could not sing; in fact, he had a stammer, which on most occasions left him self-consciously mute. One gift only had he been given, a gift as simple as it is rare: the gift of pure goodness. He knew, unerringly, what was right, what was kind, what would make people happy, and he did it without fail. His goodness took no effort; there was no internal scale to be balanced. He hoped for no reward and feared no hell. He was not clever—in his final year of school before the teachers despaired of him, he was asked how he would equitably divide a half-pound loaf of bread among himself and two friends. He said he would go without and his two friends would each have a quarter pound, and neither threats of failure nor the switch could persuade him to change his answer. He had done odd jobs at Der Teufel ever since, supporting the grandmother who had raised him after his parents' death.

“Dear souls who are mine for this night, is there a lawyer in the house?” Aaron asked. There were several, and one, chivvied by his friends, gamely hopped up onto the low stage, thinking he'd be part of a burlesque. There was a quick, whispered consultation, and then Aaron called for paper and pen. “Riches are a curse in disguise, the camel through the needle's eye and all that, so the crafty Devil gives away his wealth. Perhaps if I am a pauper, I can sneak into heaven behind the camel's hump, eh?”

Aaron bent over and invited the lawyer to use his back as a desk, while the audience, perplexed, waited for the punch line and poor Benno lingered in the shadowed wings, hoping he wasn't really expected to do anything.

“There!” Aaron shouted. “All perfectly legal now, save for the signatures. Come here, Benno, and make your
X
.”

Benno pushed his wheat-colored hair away from his face and sheepishly came center stage. “Der Teufel is yours, my boy,” Aaron said, too softly for even the lawyer to hear. “I hope you'll let me stay on.” He smiled beneath his gray beard.

Benno's face fell. “N-no!” he gasped, but couldn't get any more out. He didn't know what it meant, but he didn't want it. Then he looked into Aaron's eyes, glistening bright, and though he didn't understand what was happening in the least, suddenly he knew on which path goodness lay. He signed his name.

“Witnesses!” Aaron called, shooing Benno out of the spotlight. “Champagne for everyone who puts his name as a witness on this deed of sale!”

In the end there were thirty signatures crammed at the bottom of that document: the SS officer, a member of the Luftwaffe High Command, the richest hotelier in Berlin, the city's most notorious madam. They did not know if it was avant-garde art or absurdist comedy, but the transfer was real, and Der Teufel belonged to simple Benno, who, after all, had one more gift, one of particular value in the years to come—he was Aryan.

 

T
HEY CAME LATER THAT NIGHT
when Hannah was onstage again, singing one of her sweetest love songs. As the young couple's fingertips touched for the first time with poignant minor notes that boded ill for their future, the door was shoved open and a group of armed men stormed in. They weren't in uniform, but most were party men or SA or SS members, and after their first bullhorn announcement that this Jewish-owned establishment was hereby shut down, were rather chagrined to be told by patrons who happened to be their superiors,
Shut up, we're enjoying our champagne
. They smashed a window but were disheartened to learn that despite what they had been told, Der Teufel was no longer a Jewish cabaret. They checked a few papers, referred to their list, then summoned Aaron Morgenstern to join them for a conversation outside. Hannah tried to cling to him but he brushed past her without appearing to recognize her. None of the mob paid her the slightest attention. She was dressed once more in her blond wig and dirndl.

They kicked her father to the gutter as she watched, while her mother dug her nails into her daughter's arm, pulses of pain sending the silent coded message:
Do nothing. By law you are Jewish too
. Down the street, all through Berlin, worse was happening. Storefronts were smashed, inventory burned. A synagogue two blocks away was in flames, its relics plundered or destroyed. Dimly, Hannah saw someone surrounded, heard laughter, saw a ghoulish figure raise a sledgehammer. Old women were thrown out of their homes in their nightclothes, their teeth still in jars at their bedsides. Young men were rounded up for Dachau. A shot rang out. Another. And through it all, like the crackling of a wildfire, breaking glass.

Aaron was lucky. Seeing an old man in this Devil's disguise, they decided he was unfit for labor and set him loose with no more than a split lip and a cracked rib. Der Teufel's juggler and two of the waiters were taken to labor camps, and only the juggler ever returned, years later, gaunt and lash scarred.

Near morning, when all was still at last, Hannah crept out to the street. The infernal gasses of the neon devil still glowed above her, pulsing red, leering at the river of glass shards and knocked-out teeth and once-prized possessions littering the boulevard.

This was mine
, she thought, looking out at Berlin.
This was my city. I loved it. It loved me
.

Numbly, she found a broom behind the door and tried to clear away some of the rubble, murmuring all the while, “My city . . . my city . . .” Before long, a middle-aged man came by, a man with kind, tired eyes, a baker or grocer up early to open his store.

“Don't bother with that,
Fräulein
,” he said pleasantly. “A nice girl like you needs her beauty sleep. They'll drag out some Jew dogs to clean up the mess soon enough.” He tipped his cap to her. “Good morning!”

She watched him pick his way carefully through the glittering glass fangs, a typical Berliner, who smiled at pretty young girls and worried about his neighbor. A good man, except for one thing.

When he was gone, she ripped the forgotten blond wig off her head and flung it after him.

December 1938

H
ANNAH STOOD AT THE GATE
of Starkers and watched her cab motor away. The driver had been paid by the Jewish Aid Committee to deliver her from the refugee agency, and he was not at all pleased to have to go so far out of his London route with no possibility of a tip from what was so obviously a penniless waif. It was only when he was gone that Hannah realized the castle was half a mile away from the gate.

“Oh, well,” she said aloud. “Makes me rather glad I don't have any luggage after all.” She straightened her travel-shabby hat and contemplated the dusty trek to her new home.

She'd been forced to stay at the refugee agency for several days after all of her baggage and money were stolen. She tried to pay them for their help. Cora, though scrupulously loyal to Aaron, was after all beautiful and popular, and it was beyond her power to refuse the strands of pearls that many admirers, inspired by her name, forced on her. She had perfected the art of saying
no
in a tone that implied
if only
, and even as she aged, the pearls continued to come. Most had been sold through the years to pay for the cabaret, but she'd sewn the remainder into Hannah's skirt seams.

The refugee agency refused to accept them, saying she should save them for her parents when they finally followed her to England.

“His Lordship will pay you back, I'm sure,” she told them.

Now she pushed open the heavy iron gate and stepped onto the grounds. In the distance she could see the crenelated heights of Starkers Castle.

For a second, she forgot shattered glass, distant family, the terror of the last weeks and the loneliness of the past days, and surrendered to the magnificent absurdity of it all. To think that because her mother's older sister had been married to a little man called Peregrine for a few months before she and her baby died in childbirth (
A few months only?
Hannah suddenly wondered, counting to nine and discovering possible scandal), she should have an earl's estate as a sanctuary.

“You must accept any treatment, be prepared for any harsh words they might throw at you,” her mother had warned. “My sister was not considered a suitable match, and then, when she was dead, they didn't approve of me moving to Germany. I had become family through marriage, you see, and they thought they should control me, for the sake of the family's reputation. They've acknowledged your connection and have agreed to take you in, but don't expect them to be kind. It will only be for a while. Whatever happens, however they treat you, you must promise to stay at Starkers until we come. I need to know you're safe with family. Even an unloving family.”

Hannah didn't believe her mother's gloomy prognostication. She stood still on the frost-browned grass at the winding roadside and knew exactly what Starkers would be like.