The Jerusalem Diamond (14 page)

“
I hadn't thought of selling
.”

“
It will be harder for certain people to do business, if you catch my
meaning. If you sell now, you can remain in our employ
”.

“
I don't think so
.”

“
It will be worth much less in the future
,”
Deitrich said politely
.

Alfred thanked him for the offer
.

Hauptmann was a German name, he was a German. But now in restaurants or waiting to buy a theater ticket he felt people watching his Jewish alienness, rejecting him with their eyes
.

The Silberstein flat remained empty. He missed the Wednesday evening chess, and suddenly Lilo was busy whenever he called. One night the bartender at Tingeltangel told him she had been coming there a lot with a Brown Shirt
.

He telephoned and asked if they could talk. She was in a housecoat when he arrived, and putting up her hair in chemical curlers that smelled like rotten eggs
.

“
Yes, it is true,” she said. “I have a new friend
.”

He waited to feel fury or great sadness, but experienced neither
.

“
He has told me they are going to pass a law. It will be hard on German women who go with Jews. “She drew on the unsteady cigarette hanging from her lips
.

“
We wouldn't want that
.

She peered at him through the smoke
.

“
Good luck, Lilo
.”

“
Good luck to you
,”
she said
.

In the middle of the night he remembered he had shown her what was in the blue bag. He tried to put the thought out of mind. Whatever they hadn't been, they had been honest. He trusted her
.

But he tossed
.

Before dawn he was out of bed. He sat at the table and worked feverishly. When he had finished, the gold gleamed, the diamond glittered—the mitre was perfect. He packed it very carefully, lots of padding in a box within a larger box, and wrapped it. Then he addressed the package to Paolo Luzzatti. He was waiting at the post office when it opened its doors
.

That Friday morning he was awakened by the telephone
.

“
Herr Hauptmann
?”

It was the janitor from Leipziger Strasse. “I have some terrible news, sir
,”
the man said
.

Alfred cleared his throat
.

“
There has been … ah … burglary
.”

“
My shop
?”

“
Yes. They have taken everything
.”

“
… Have you called the police
?”

“
Yes
.”

“
I'll be there at once,” Alfred said
.

But he lay in bed another twenty minutes, as if it were Sunday and he had absolutely nothing to do. When he got up he bathed, shaved and dressed carefully, and then he packed a suitcase
.

He took a taxi but he stopped the driver more than a block away, at Herpich's because he could see two S.A. troopers standing in front of his shop. He walked all the way around the department store, to an alley leading to the back door of the brick building
.

It was locked, but he had a key. When he opened it, the janitor was standing there
.

“
Good morning
.”

“
Good morning, sir.” The man turned away and began to use his broom
.

The hallway door to the shop had been broken open. All the stock was gone, and the fixtures and the furniture were smashed. Alfred slipped into the back room and saw that they had tried to force the safe but had failed. It was scratched and a small part of the door had been peeled back, but it was a Kromer, good Ruhr steel
.

The two S.A. were standing in front of the display niche. The glass was gone and the niche was covered on the inside wall by a thin wooden door through which sound passed so easily he could hear them discussing a girl's breasts
.

Were they there because of the woman or because of the German jeweler? Or was this another random incident
?

More important, at the moment, was whether they would hear him opening the safe. He began to turn the dial as the push-push sound of the janitor's broom came down the hallway and moved out the front door
.

“
Hey, you,” one of the Storm Troopers called. “Have you seen Izzie
?”

“
Who?” the janitor said
.

“
Isidore. The jeweler
.”

“
Oh. Herr Hauptmann
.”

The safe door was open. Alfred took the letter Ritz had sent him and the packet containing the gilt-painted lump and the small diamonds and put them into his pocket
.

“
I haven't seen Herr Hauptmann since yesterday,” the janitor said
.

It took him seven hours in the American Embassy on Tiergarten Platz, most of it in waiting rooms. By the time he came out, the Damstadt National Bank, where he had an account, was already closed for the weekend but he had an American visa. He went directly to the Anhalter Bahnhof and stood in line at the first-class window for several minutes until he remembered and moved to the third class. On the train the seats were hard and narrow and the coach stank of bodies, but otherwise it might have been any business trip to Holland
.

He had casual acquaintances in Amsterdam but he wanted to see no one. In the morning he would sell one of the diamonds and go to Rotterdam to take the first ship to New York. He rented the cheapest room he could find for the night, on the fourth floor of a boardinghouse, and then went to a workman's café and had a plate of bokking and a schooner of beer. Outside, it had started to rain and without any command from him his feet followed a pattern his mind had forgotten, bringing him in front of the house where he and Laibel once had lived. Down the canal, the windmill they had loved was no longer there
.

When he found his way back to his room, he didn't know what to do next. It was a mean room, not very clean. He didn't want to get into the bed. He sat in front of the window and watched the rain
.

“
I beg your pardon, Dr. Silberstein,” he whispered to the wet and shining roofs of Amsterdam
.

Part II
HIDING

10

TAMAR STRAUSS

In the dream Yoel was alive and servicing her body with the Teutonic efficiency he had not been able to cast off with the rest of his German patrimony. Tamar was enjoying it immensely when she came awake in the quiet hotel room. For a long time she lay in the lumpy mattress, stiff with almost forgotten sorrow. The carpets gave off the smell of dust.

She tried to drift away again, but sleep evaded her. In her mind she tried to see Yoel's face clearly but it would not form. His skin hadn't been as brown as hers, but he had been swarthy for a
yecheh
, a German Jew. It had been his eyes, a contemplative blue that was startingly pale in the dark face, that had captivated her the night they met at a party at the museum. They hadn't been introduced. From across the room, he had looked at her.

She had glanced away, picked at her salad.

When she looked back his cursed Ashkenazi eyes were still on her. They had had no shame.
Beseder
? Okay? they asked.

Certainly not, you arrogant
mamzer
, her mind answered indignantly.

But her treacherous eyes met his and were her undoing.

Beseder
, they told him.

They had gone with one another for only a few months. He was in the last year of a public-health residency at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva. He had a red Volkswagen, two years old, and he drove to see her whenever he could get away. They went to the Alaska Café on Jaffa Street, and to concerts of the Israel Philharmonic, to which his parents subscribed, which caused her to believe his father was rich.

They grappled pleasurably in the little red car. It became terribly difficult to push him away, and one night on the beach at Bat Yam she could not. He hurt her. Afterward, she couldn't stop weeping. He didn't realize that according to the culture in which she had been raised, she had been destroyed. But he put her together again; he loved her.

As if bestowing condolences, his mother wished them well.
I can guess, never you mind, what was done in the dark on the sand to trap him
, her eyes, pale and contemplative as her son's, told Tamar.

He called upon
ya abba
, her father, bringing a modern version of the bridal price, a basket of fruit and a bottle of arak.

“Your children will be brown,”
ya abba
said craftily.

“I hope so,” Yoel said.

A week later Tamar returned to Rosh Ha'ayin, the Yemenite village in which her parents made their home, to find the cellophane around the fruit still unbroken, bananas black with rot, peaches and oranges white with mold. She threw the mess away. That night
ya abba
looked at her. “You will have the
yecheh
, this German?” When she didn't reply, he nodded heavily and went to open the arak.

Yoel's residency was almost over. He had proposed a study of maternity mortality among the Bedouin, and to their satisfaction it was approved, bringing with it an appointment to the mother-and-child health station at the Hadassah Hospital.

They made plans to live in Jerusalem. When his parents offered to buy them an apartment it surprised her, because she had quickly revised her early belief that they had money. They sold just enough cheap furniture in their small, dark shop to keep them in a degree of comfort.

But there was a reparations payment from Germany.

His father had been in Mauthausen, and three of his four grandparents and an aunt had disappeared within Buchenwald. The property of both families had been confiscated. His father had made a claim after the war, and recently a small sum had been paid. His parents didn't want to touch the money for themselves.

Neither did she.

Mr. Strauss came one day and took her to tea. She found herself drawn to him. He was tired and bald; would Yoel look like this?

He patted her hand. “Should I send it back to
them
?”

So like millionaires, she and Yoel settled on three rooms in a fairly new building overlooking Yemin-Moshe, trying to forget that ghosts paid for their shelter. Mr. Strauss offered to get Danish furniture at a discount, but to her relief Yoel listened to her ideas. They bought a box spring on legs, two small chests, a low table, some camelskin poufs they stuffed with an incredible number of shredded back copies of
Ha'aretz
and
Ma'ariv
. They searched out some lovely pieces of battered copper to the disgust of her mother,
ya umma
, whose friends by now had replaced their copper with the more fashionable aluminum ware. Yoel labored for three weekends, painting the walls white, and she adorned them with inexpensive Arab hangings bought at the market in Nazareth.

When they were finished it was even better than Sana'a, where she had been born.

Ya umma
wanted her to be married in traditional Yemenite garb, but her innate practicality won out. She bought a wedding dress she could wear again and again, a simple brushed-wool garment of soft lavender that made her dusky skin bloom. The ceremony took place within the tin-roofed synagogue at Rosh Ha'ayin.
Ya mori
, the rabbi, was becoming senile and dragged uncomfortably through the seven benedictions. After Yoel shattered the glass there was a dinner of roast chickens stuffed the Temani way with peeled hard-boiled egg and rice flavored with almonds and raisins, and an array of fruits, vegetables, wines and araks.

They escaped in the red car as soon as possible and drove directly to Eilat, where they had three days in perfect weather. Her period had
begun just before the wedding. Each morning they went out in a glass-bottomed boat and studied the coral and the fish. They met some French hippies who lived in tents on the beach and got into a passionate argument about Communism, but Yoel bought a bottle of wine and they were accepted back into the proletariat. They collected coral. She waded and he swam.

When they got back to Jerusalem, there was
ya umma
waiting, a standing sphinx in front of the apartment building. Her mother poured water on the ground and scattered rue leaves, welcoming them to their new home in the old way, to the mystification of several tenants. Tamar was touched, knowing what an effort it must have been for her to have made the long bus trip alone. They insisted she stay, but she kissed her daughter and shyly told her son-in-law she hoped he would rejoice in the bride. Then, comforted, she took the bus back to Rosh Ha'ayin.

To Tamar's relief love-making was infinitely better in her own bed. She became so quickly an earnest participant that Yoel, very pleased, began to tease. He made a major purchase, a wall mirror, the only furnishing that didn't go with the Arab soul of the apartment. They hung it where they could see their whiteness and brownness merge into a beautifully mottled creature all their own.