The Lady from Zagreb

Twenty-six

The next morning I got up early, left my SD uniform at home, and went shopping.

Before the war, Rochstrasse, a few blocks away from the Alex, had been filled with Jews. I still remembered the several bakers’ shops there and the delicious smell of babka, bagels, and bialys that used to fill the street. As a young beat copper I’d often gone into one of those shops for breakfast, or for a quick snack and a chat; they loved to talk, those bakers, and sometimes I think that’s where I learned my sense of humor. What I wouldn’t have given for a fresh bialy now — like a bagel, except that the hole was filled with caramelized onions and zucchini. There was still an early morning market on Rochstrasse where fruits and vegetables were sold, but I wasn’t looking for oranges any more than I was looking for bialys. Not that I would have found any oranges there, either: these days, root vegetables were pretty much all there was to be had, even at five in the morning. I was looking for something that was almost as hard to find as a bialy or an orange. I was looking for good quality jewelery.

On Münzstrasse, at number 11, was a six-story redbrick building with a bay window at the corner of every floor. It was only a year or two since the ground-floor shop had been occupied by a Jewish-owned jewelry store. That was now closed, of course, and boarded up, but on the top floor was a man who I knew helped some Jews who were living underground somewhere in Berlin, and from whom it was possible to buy bits of decent jewelry at good prices that might help a family to survive. This man wasn’t Jewish himself but an ex-communist who’d spent some time in Dachau and had learned the hard way how to hate the Nazis. Which was how I knew him, of course. His name was Manfred Buch.

After an exchange of pleasantries I gave him a cigarette and he showed me a small velvet tray of rings and let me take my time.

“Have you asked her yet?”

“No.”

“Then if you don’t make a sale with this little lady, you bring the Schmuck back to me. No questions asked.”

“Thanks, Manny.”

“For you this is no problem. Look, the fact is, I can sell this stuff three times over. Most of the Schmuck you’ll find in the fancy shops like Margraf is poor quality and expensive. What you’re looking at here is the last of the good stuff. At least for now. Most quality merchandise has been sold already or is being held back until after the winter, when it’s generally assumed things are going to get much worse.”

“From what I’ve heard that’s a fair assessment.”

“And of course you can be quite sure that whatever you buy is going to help people who are in real need. Not profiteers and gangsters. That is, if you can tell the difference between them and our beloved leaders.”

“What about this one?”

“That’s a nice band. Good quality gold. Eighteen carat. Nice and thick. She’ll love you for the rest of her life if you give her that one. And if she doesn’t, you can always get her drunk and while she’s asleep, put a little soap on her finger and I guarantee you’ll sell it for twice what I’m asking.”

“There’s an inscription inside. In Hebrew script.”

“Is she anti-Semitic?”

“No.”

“Then you should think of that as a guarantee of absolute quality. No Jew would put a cheap ring on her finger.”

“Yes, but what does it mean?”

Manfred took the ring, put a glass to his eye, and scrutinized the inscription.

“It’s from the book of Jeremiah. It says, ‘For I know the thoughts that I think toward you.’”

It seemed appropriate.

That night I arranged to meet Kirsten at Kempinski’s on the Kurfürstendamm. Unusually, in spite of being Aryanized and there being little on the menu, the place still managed to feel like a decent restaurant. I’d decided to ask her to marry me without mentioning anything of what Goebbels had told me; she was a nice girl and I figured she deserved to think that I was asking her for all the right reasons, instead of a desire to keep her out of the hands of the Gestapo. I was just about to put the question to her when the rise and fall of air-raid warning sirens sent us running to the nearest shelter; and it was down there I finally got around to proposing marriage.

“I know I’m not exactly a catch,” I said as the walls vibrated around us and dust fell off the ceiling into our hair. “You could almost certainly find someone younger. With better prospects. But I’m honest. As far as that goes, these days. And it’s just possible that I’ll make you a good husband. Because I love you, Kirsten. I love you very much.”

I threw that bit about love in because, generally speaking, it’s what a girl wants to hear when a man asks her to marry him. But it wasn’t true and we both knew it. I’m a much better liar than I am an actor.

“I assume that your proposal has something to do with this,” she said.

She opened her handbag and showed me a buff-colored envelope she’d received that very morning. It had no stamp, just a postmark, and was quite obviously from the Gestapo.

I took the letter out of the envelope, noted the address on Burgstrasse, and nodded. I knew the address, of course. It was part of the old Berlin stock exchange. And the official letter was a formal summons to explain her “antisocial” comments to a commissar Hartmut Zander. My only worry now was that she might think I’d engineered the whole thing in order to persuade her to marry me. It was the kind of dirty trick that many Gestapo men were wont to pull, just to get a peek at a nice girl’s underwear.

“It’s very sweet of you, Bernie,” she said, “but you don’t have to do this. I couldn’t let you.”

“Listen, you have to trust me on this, angel, I knew nothing about that letter. But now that I’ve seen it, here’s what I think. You’re in a tight spot. There’s no doubt about it. I’d come with you but I’m not allowed. You’re not even allowed a lawyer present at the interview. But marry me and I think I can make all this go away. In fact I’m certain of it. After that you don’t ever have to see me again if you don’t want to. I’ll forget about the ring I have in my pocket and the loud evening I had planned after we got married. We’ll just call it a marriage of convenience and leave it at that. It’ll be like a business arrangement. We’ll meet for a coffee in a year’s time and have a good laugh about it. You can divorce me quietly and everything will be like it was before.”

“Why are you doing this, Bernie?”

“Let’s say that lately my own lack of nobility has begun to get me down. Yes, let’s say that. I have an urgent need to do something good for someone else. In recent weeks I’ve seen one too many bad things, and the plain fact of the matter is I like you a lot, Kirsten, and I don’t want to see anything bad happen to you. It’s as simple as that, really.”

“Could something bad happen to me?”

“If what you told me is true, then they’ll give you a rough ride. Oh, not that rough. Just a verbal battering. And you even might talk your way out of it. Some do. Maybe you’re the type to give as good as you get. Don’t admit anything. That’s the best way to handle these Gestapo commissars. Then again it’s equally possible you’ll go to pieces, in which case you might end up in prison for a short spell. Say, six months. Ordinarily that’s not so bad. But lately things have got much tougher in the cement. Even on the outside food is short. In Brandenburg it’s several hundred calories less than that. Skinny little thing like you might find that hard going. At the very least you might lose your job. And jobs are difficult to get when you lose them on account of the Gestapo. It might be awkward getting another.”

She nodded quietly. “The ring, Bernie. Could I see it, please?”

“Sure.” I felt inside my vest pocket, polished it on my trouser leg, and then handed it over.

She looked at it for a moment, smiled a charming sort of smile, and then put it carefully on the finger of her left hand.

The next day we were married and, during the simple ceremony, Kirsten moved the ring onto the finger of her right hand, as if she really meant it, like a proper German wife. It was a small but important gesture and one that did not go unnoticed by me.