The German House Read online

  “Is this still the priest inside you? You’re a prude, Jürgen. Uptight!” Jürgen spat back that the sex in that movie had nothing to do with the intimacy and fulfillment he associated with the act. Nothing to do with love. “I thought what you needed was marriage, now suddenly it’s love? In which case we could do it? Or maybe you just don’t find me desirable?! I’d appreciate if you’d tell me the truth!” Eva fumed. Jürgen called her “lustish” in response. And although Eva knew the word didn’t actually exist, she was outraged. She couldn’t believe that she had to beg a man to sleep with her. “How could you humiliate me like this?”

  “You’re seeing to it yourself!”

  When Eva got home from the movies that evening, she knocked on her sister’s door. Annegret, with all her experience, ultimately concluded that Jürgen was gay and that Eva had to decide whether this was something she could live with. Eva cried a lot that night, but the next morning Jürgen showed up at the door with flowers and such an unhappy expression that she forgave him. She looked into his eyes and felt sure that he loved and desired her. Clearly there was something inhibiting him, but Eva dismissed the possibility that it could be any kind of otherness.

  ONE EARLY MORNING, while the city was still dark, the first mild spring breeze blew in from the west. At the Sun Inn, Otto Cohn had been lying awake for some time; every few minutes, the elderly Hungarian man reached for the pocket watch he had set on the bedside table, opened it, and read its face. The gentlemen from the prosecution had kept putting him off, because everything was unfortunately taking longer than anticipated. Because something had been rearranged in the order of the hearings. He had waited patiently for many days. But today was the day. It was slowly brightening outside the orange curtains, and a bird began to chirp. The bird earnestly and persistently repeated the same three tones: foo fa fee, foo fa fee. When his watch read seven o’clock, the Hungarian man got up. Like every night, he had slept in his clothes. Like every morning, he put on his black hat with the narrow brim and took out a dark blue velvet bag embroidered with Hebrew characters from his suitcase. He looked in the mirror and was pleased to see that his beard had already grown past his shirt collar. When he walked through the lobby in his coat moments later, and wordlessly placed his heavy key on the counter as he passed, the proprietor didn’t bother inviting him to the breakfast served in the small room behind reception. He had only tried the first few days: “Breakfast is included in the price.” A waste of breath each time. After Cohn left the boardinghouse that day without eating, the owner said to his wife, as she stepped out of the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee, that that kike was probably off to pray again. His wife quieted him. They had been through enough already, he didn’t need to pile it on. She had read in the paper that the people had been “sectioned, or whatever it was called,” upon arrival. Some to die and the others to work, which killed them soon enough. They really hadn’t deserved that either. Her husband shrugged. He wasn’t bothering the Jew. He was providing him with shelter, wasn’t he? For weeks now! Even though he was certain they’d have to delouse the room after. “Deep down, you are really just a good person, Horst,” his wife said and slipped into the breakfast room. The innkeeper wasn’t sure if she was mocking him. It wasn’t worth taking his time to find out, though. He had to review the quote from a plumber to install new sinks in four rooms. The man had named an outrageous price. And they were friends, no less.

  The Hungarian man had reached the Westend Synagogue by this point. He gave the uniformed guard at the door a quick nod and entered the soaring, whitewashed sanctuary. More than a dozen older men were gathered here. The cantor, a small, energetic man in a black hat, prayed out loud to the congregation in Hebrew:

  One of the worshippers was a young man with an embroidered yarmulke resting on his red hair, which was just a little long in the back. The Hungarian man recognized him. It was one of the members of the prosecution. The redhead kept looking around, studying the other congregants’ behavior. The Hungarian man removed his prayer shawl from the velvet pouch and uttered the appropriate verse as he wrapped it around himself. He murmured and his upper body fell into a gentle, rhythmic swaying. Today, though, he was not praying with the congregation. He was asking God’s forgiveness for what he intended to do. What he had to do.

  David Miller didn’t notice the Hungarian man. He also wasn’t following the cantor, who now recited, “Are not heroes as though nothing before you, and men of fame as though never born, and the wise as though without understanding, and intellectuals as though without reason? For their works are confused, the days of their lives vain before you, and man has nothing over the beast, for all is vain.”

  David Miller was not praying with the congregation, either. He prayed to God for gruesome vengeance upon the defendants. Especially upon the haggard man with the face of a ferret, Defendant Number Four. The Beast.

  ALTHOUGH EVA WASN’T SCHEDULED until afternoon, she took her seat in the row behind the prosecutors’ table half an hour before court was called to order. She enjoyed the almost reverent atmosphere in the hall. Not many people were there yet. And the few who were there, preparing for the day, placing documents and folders on the tables of the court, moved about cautiously and quietly, at most whispering to one another. Even the light seemed muted, like in church. The tall floodlights—which had been installed in every corner of the hall several days ago, to supplement the daylight and overhead fixtures and to help the judge spot nuances in the defendants’ facial expressions—had not yet been turned on. Eva was wearing a new, pale gray suit made of a lightweight material that had cost nearly 100 marks. But she was earning 150 marks a week now, and her dark blue suit had made her sweat. The hall was usually overheated, and the many bodies in the room—there were always at least 200 people—further warmed the space and spent the oxygen. By midday, despite the high ceilings and cracked windows, and even after hall attendants turned off the heat, the room was stifling. Women sitting in the gallery had even fainted. Although that may have been caused by the witnesses’ horrific descriptions, Eva thought as she pulled out the two dictionaries from her briefcase. She didn’t understand why some of the spectators came to the hearings. The reporters, mostly young, unkempt men in dusty suits, could be identified by their notebooks and strangely impassive expressions, and Eva was by now familiar with the wives of the main defendant and of Defendants Number Four and Eleven, who never missed a day of proceedings. The other spectators must be relatives of the deceased. Or friends. They listened to the accounts with wide, horrified eyes, shook their heads, cried, and even exclaimed in rage when the defendants maintained, “I knew nothing! Saw nothing! Did nothing! That is beyond my knowledge!” Then there were the men who followed everything unresponsively but whose sympathies clearly lay with the defendants—men who gathered during the breaks and automatically clicked their heels when the main defendant passed. But there was also a group of spectators Eva couldn’t classify. Some of them came every day and hung on every word. Eva had invited Jürgen to come listen sometime. He’d said he was too busy with the autumn/winter catalog. Eva knew it was an excuse. But she understood, and she even understood her family. Why should anyone voluntarily open themselves up to this chapter of history? So why am I here? Eva asked herself. She didn’t know the answer. Why did she want to hear the testimony of the Hungarian man she had brought to his hotel that time? Why did she want to know—need to know—what had happened to him? Since the first day of the trial, Eva had repeatedly seen him in the foyer, with his big black hat and bearded face. As a witness, he was barred from following the trial. He often sat beside the door to the auditorium during proceedings, on a chair he had positioned there, as though he were keeping guard. He and Eva had exchanged glances a few times during the breaks, but he gave no indication as to whether he still knew who she was.

  An attendant wheeled a cart into the hall with the help of one of the technicians. On the cart was a boxy device that had a short tube with a lens protruding from t
he front. It looked like a little tank without tracks. An episcope. Eva recognized it from her days in girls’ school, when their geography teacher had projected photographs of alien worlds onto the wall. Usually naked savages standing before their smoking huts. “Is this race more ape or more human? Fräulein Bruhns?” Herr Brautlecht had loved that question. Sometimes, before he arrived, Eva and her classmates would turn on the machine and place pictures, which they had snipped from the papers, underneath of the stars they were currently swooning over. Young men in playful poses with pointy shoes. By contrast, Herr Brautlecht’s painted Pygmies fell short of the mark. Eva smiled a little at the memory and watched the technician position the cart opposite a large white screen that had been hung beside the map of the camp. Holding the cord, he searched between the defendants’ desks for an electrical outlet. They were probably hoping the device would help save time. Up till now, photographs and other pieces of evidence had been passed around and reviewed in turn by the court, defense, and prosecution, which was inconvenient. The technician turned on the machine. A quivering square of light appeared on the screen. At the technician’s instruction, the hall attendant placed a sheet of paper on the projector’s glass plate and closed the lid. Blurry words appeared on the screen. The technician turned the lens, and the letters grew more illegible.

  “Don’t we not need you till this afternoon?” David Miller walked past Eva to his table in the second row.

  “Good morning, Herr Miller,” she responded.

  “We’ll see if it turns into one.”

  Eva tried to craft a clever retort but couldn’t think of anything. David took out several colorful folders from his briefcase and arranged them on the table in a specific order. A round, embroidered piece of fabric fell onto the table as he moved. A little cap, which David put back in his pocket.

  “What is it you have against me, anyway?”

  David did not turn around, but kept sorting his papers. “What makes you think I have anything against you?”

  “You don’t even say hello to me.”

  David still refused to look at Eva. “I didn’t know you thought it so important: a very good day to you, Fräulein Bruhns.”

  The technician had finally managed to focus the projector: Please do not flush sanitary napkins! Toilet will clog! This sign hung over every ladies’ room toilet in the building. The hall attendant and technician grinned.

  The lead prosecutor, already suited up in his black robe, entered the auditorium and greeted Eva with a quick but friendly nod. His light-colored hair, which was as fine as an infant’s—“angel hair,” Annegret said it was called—shone damply. Had it started to rain? It was impossible to tell through the glass panes. David handed the blond man a folder.

  “If we don’t nail the pharmacist today . . . here’s the arrest warrant. He’s not waltzing out of here again! And if our man in the moon doesn’t comply . . .”

  The blond man waved a dismissive hand. “Then what? Then you’ll arrest him yourself, is that it? I have repeatedly asked you to exercise greater discretion, Herr Miller. And yet you continue to behave as if you were the hero of a Western.”

  The blond man turned away from David and stalked across the room toward the chief judge, who had entered through a side door with the two associate judges. His face more closely resembled the full moon than ever, it was true. “Our man in the moon” was fitting, Eva thought. She smiled. David glanced at her over his shoulder.

  “What are you looking at me like that for?”

  He was clearly irked that she had witnessed the rebuke.

  “I’m not looking at all.”

  “I’m not blind.”

  “I fear you may be suffering from delusions of grandeur, Herr Miller!” Eva had read an article about psychological disorders once that mentioned this term. David angrily opened a dossier. One of the stenotypists appeared in the entrance to the hall, Fräulein Schenke. She was wearing a new suit too, hers a tight fit and softly gleaming pink. She smiled at Eva as she took her seat. Eva flashed a quick smile in return. She didn’t especially like Fräulein Schenke, who had a certain shiftiness about her—or “something Catholic,” as her father would say. But Eva liked David Miller, she was surprised to realize at that moment. She looked at the back of his head as he bent deeply over the file. She regretted her comment and felt the need to place a hand on his shoulder. Like a friend.

  A short time later, the spectators, followed by the prosecution, and then the defendants and their attorneys, flanked by eight policemen, had taken their seats. The last to enter were the judges, and everyone in the courtroom rose upon their appearance. The police lined up behind the defendants’ tables, where they more closely resembled a guard of honor. As on every day of the trial, not a single open seat in the gallery remained. Otto Cohn stood rigidly at the witness stand and lightly braced himself against the tabletop with three fingers of his right hand. His big, jet-black hat with the narrow brim made him appear taller than he was. He had refused to take it off. He was wearing his thin leather shoes, no socks, as Eva could see, and his shabby coat. Cohn’s beard reminded Eva of the Christmas tree her father and Stefan had carried up to the attic the day after Epiphany for keeping till spring, when they would burn it in the yard. It looks like he hasn’t washed since I spoke to him at the Christmas market. At the very least, why didn’t he shave? Eva thought. Eva was almost ashamed of the man’s disheveled appearance, even though she scarcely knew him. Eva couldn’t have known that Otto Cohn not only wanted to be heard and seen—no, he intended for those guilty men sitting at the defendants’ tables to smell him too. Cohn spoke in German with a loud voice. Strongly accented, perhaps, but easily intelligible. He had insisted. “So that those people there hear me!” And he spoke fast. Fräulein Schenke and the other two girls could barely keep up on their little clicking stenotype machines. Like a mountain stream splashing over rocks, he recounted how he had been deported with his wife and their three young daughters in September ’44 from the Romanian city of Hermannstadt, which had at that time belonged to Hungary. “When we arrived at the ramp, got out, there was a crush of people moving forward. I was with wife, three children—three daughters—and I said to them, ‘Most important is that we five are together. Everything will be fine.’ No sooner had I said that than a soldier stepped between us: ‘Men to the right, women to the left!’ They broke us from each other. I had not the time to embrace my wife. She screamed after me, ‘Come kiss us!’ Perhaps some womanly instinct told her the danger that threatened us. I ran to them, kissed my wife, my three children, and then I was pushed back to the other side, and we kept moving forward. Parallel but separated. Between the two platforms. Between the two trains. Suddenly I hear, ‘Doctors and pharmacists gather here.’ So I join this group. There were thirty-eight doctors from Hermannstadt, and several pharmacists. Suddenly two German officers turned to us. One of them, a high-ranking, handsome, young-looking man asked us nicely, ‘Where did you gentlemen study? You, for example, you, for example?’ I said, ‘In Vienna,’ the next said, ‘In Wrocław,’ and so on. The second officer we recognized immediately, and we whispered to each other, ‘Why, that’s the pharmacist.’ He often worked with us doctors as a fill-in. I said to him, ‘Sir, I have two twins, and they require closer care. If you would allow—I’ll do whatever work you like, if you would only allow me to remain with my family.’ Then he asked, ‘Twins?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Where are they?’ I pointed and said, ‘There they go.’ ‘Call them back,’ he said to me. And then I call my wife and children loudly by their names. They turn around, they come back, and the pharmacist took them by the hand, my two daughters, and led them to another doctor. At his back, he says to me, ‘Well, tell him.’ I said, ‘Captain, sir, I have two twins,’ and was about to say more, but he said, ‘Later. I don’t have time now.’ He sent me off with a wave of his hand. The pharmacist said, ‘In that case, they have to return to their side.’ My wife and my three children went on their way. I began to sob, and he said to me in Hu
ngarian, ‘Ne sírjon. Don’t cry. They’re just going to bathe. You’ll see them again in an hour.’ So I went back to my group. I never saw them again. The pharmacist was Defendant Number Seventeen there. The one with the black glasses. At that second, I was grateful in my soul to the pharmacist. I thought he wanted to do something good for me. I only discovered later what it meant to hand over twins to that doctor for his experiments. I also got an explanation for why the doctor hadn’t been interested in my girls. My twins were fraternal—they weren’t identical. They were very different. One was just a delicate little thing and—”

  The chief judge interrupted him. “Herr Cohn, are you certain that you recognize Defendant Number Seventeen as the pharmacist you spoke to on the ramp?”

  Instead of answering, Otto Cohn reached into his coat pocket, searched around a little inside, then pulled something out. It was two photographs. He moved toward the bench and placed the pictures before the judge. The chief judge signaled the attendant who had been trained in operating the episcope. He approached earnestly and took the photographs. He turned on the episcope and solemnly placed the first picture on the glass plate. He briefly adjusted the lens, and the enlarged image appeared on the white screen for everyone in the auditorium to see. Eva had seen the photo before, for a fleeting moment, in the open suitcase in the small hotel room. She could study it properly now. Pictured was a family in a yard, gathered there on any other day in life. Just then, the school bell rang next door to the courtroom. The windows in the glass panes wall were open a crack, but the schoolyard behind the municipal building remained quiet. Eva knew that vacation had begun. Stefan had been put on the train to Hamburg to visit Grandma the day before, laden with admonitions and snacks enough for five trips.