In the first few months after the war, while
everything was still a chaos, men and women who were fresh out of
Auschwitz and Mauthausen had been moving back and forth across
Germany in great unorganized herds. They would trudge along the
roads, from one Displaced Persons camp to another, hoping for word
of some relative or friend who might also have survived. They would
hitch rides with soldiers when they could, or else just drag
themselves over the ground, sometimes so sick and frail that you
wondered they could manage a hundred yards, and they would leave
little penciled messages on bulletin boards or the sides of
buildings:
“If anyone knows the whereabouts of Cyla Rawicz, wife
of Dr. Henryk Rawicz of Biesko, Poland, please leave word with the
Jewish Committee in Linz.”
It was all most of them had.
Europe had been a madhouse in those days.
Nobody was where he belonged, and the DPs. for the most part, had
little enough reason to want to return to the places that had once
been their homes.
“I don’t want to live under the
Russians—they’re as bad as the Nazis, almost.” “Everybody I knew in
Lodz went up the smokestacks at Treblinka. Why should I care
anything about Lodz?”
People had to be clothed and fed and
housed. Something had to be done about them. It was a long time
before any coherent, organized attempt was underway to find out who
had lived and who had gone into the incinerators.
It wasn’t as bad as that now, but it was bad.
Finding Esther Rosensaft wasn’t going to be easy.
Because a lot of peculiar things were
happening. People were disappearing into Russia without leaving a
ripple, a lucky soul here and there had relatives in England or the
United States who were willing to take them in, and the Jewish
organizations were running a regular underground railroad for
illegal immigrants to Palestine. The fact that Miss Rosensaft was
Jewish complicated things considerably. It meant she could decide
to go almost anywhere. And it meant that she might simply have
vanished into the
Bricha
escape pipeline. Christiansen could
talk to the U.N. people or the Quaker relief organizations, but the
Jews had their problems running the British blockade and weren’t
disposed to be trusting. If she had gone that route, it might even
be necessary to travel to Palestine and look for her there.
But first things first. There were still a
lot of rocks to be turned over in Europe.
As he buttoned the tunic of his uniform,
Christiansen’s eyes settled on the black leather cello case that
was resting on its side next to the closet door. He had sold his
double bass in Havana to help pay for the ship tickets to Le Havre.
That part of his life was over—he was through playing in fifth-rate
jazz groups just to make enough money to keep moving—but nothing on
God’s earth would get him to part with his cello, even if he didn’t
have the fingers to do it justice anymore. If there was anything
left in him worth saving, it had something to do with that
cello.
Perhaps he should have checked it with the
concierge, just to make sure no one nipped in and stole it while he
was gone. Perhaps he would yet. Yes. Safe was safe.
“Your honor is a musician?”
Plump, well-cared-for hands reached out to
take the case from him and set it down beside the great grid of key
boxes that took up most of the wall behind the front desk. There
was something reassuring, almost caressing, about the way the man
allowed his fingers to slide over the shoulder of the lid, as if he
understood all about the romance between owner and instrument.
“I try.” Christiansen lit a cigarette, more
out of nerves than anything else. He felt as if he were in
disguise. “Could you just put it somewhere out of the way, so
nobody will bump into it?”
“Certainly. Of course. The walls here, by the
way, are very thick, so your honor would be disturbing no one if
you wished to practice later in your room. Is your honor, by the
way, familiar with the Saint-Saens concerto? A beautiful piece,
very moving.”
Christiansen smiled—the man hardly even
expected an answer—and started on his way across the lobby to the
big revolving front door. Saint-Saens. The Germans always assumed
they were being excessively diplomatic and cosmopolitan to admit
that any foreigner, let alone a Frenchman, was fit to write
anything except exercise pieces for children.
With his hands in his pockets and the
cigarette pushed into the corner of his mouth, Christiansen began
making his way along the side of the street— only the streets were
clear; the sidewalks were still covered with rubble—in the general
direction of the Marienplatz. It was a cold morning. The sky was
the color of lead, and patches of frost sheltered against the
broken stone. It must have rained the night before because pools of
dirty water had collected between the cobblestones. Almost no one
else was out.
The great square of the Marienplatz was now
simply a cleared space surrounded by ruins. Only the church and the
Rathaus had survived total destruction; everything else had been
bulldozed. Life, however, was beginning to return to normal. Around
three sides men and women were doing a brisk business from stalls
and pushcarts. There were even a few tourists standing about to
watch the reconstruction of the clock tower. For almost the first
time since he had arrived yesterday morning from Nuremberg,
Christiansen had the sense that he was in a city instead of a
wasteland of shattered buildings.
In five or six years, he thought to himself,
this will all be back the way it was. And that was all right. He
harbored no ill will toward the Germans. The score he had to settle
didn’t take on such grandiose proportions as that.
“You can’t bring either of them back.” his
aunt had told him “Your father and mother at Kirstenstad, my son
Carl at Iwo Jima—the family has been thinned out enough by this
war. Let it rest, Inar. Men with nothing to lose are more dangerous
than all the armies in the world. Your parents wouldn’t have wanted
you to risk getting killed in this vendetta. You don’t owe this to
them.”
“I think maybe I do.”
Auntie Inger, who was almost his mother,
already getting old, her blond hair turning whiter almost from
month to month. To her the war had been like a natural disaster,
just something that had happened, terrible and guiltless. All she
wanted was to go back to the way things had been—or as close as
three deaths in the family would allow. After von Goltz’s arrest,
Christiansen had come home to the little house in White Plains
where he had grown to manhood, expecting to be understood.
“This isn’t right, what you want to do. Even
if you succeed, you’ll never be the same again.”
“I’ll never be the same again anyway.” He
smiled and got up from the overstuffed living room chair. He loved
his old Auntie, who had raised him up like her own son, but it had
been a mistake to come back here. The life he had lived within
these walls had nothing to do with him anymore. He was a stranger
now. It was time to leave.
“I’ll keep in touch.”
“No, don’t do that,” she had said, shaking
her head sadly. “I don’t want to wait for the letters to stop
coming. If you come back and the thing is finished, fine. If not,
then you will have died for me right here, now.”
And that was how he had severed his last
contact with the past, so he would be free to settle his score. No,
he didn’t have anything against the Germans. He just wanted to kill
Egon Hagemann.
He bought a plate of sausage from a
formidable gray-haired old woman with the neck and jowls of a
bulldog.
“
Amerikanishes Geld, bitter?”
she
asked, in a surprisingly sweet voice. Christiansen fished around in
his pocket until he found a fifty-cent piece and when she began to
make change for him he waved his hand and smiled. They were good
sausage, worth the money, and he too wasn’t interested in
collecting pocketfuls of the cheap little aluminum coins the new
German government in Bonn was trying to convince everybody were
legal tender. The woman offered him a fork, and he stood beside her
portable charcoal grill eating and watching the crowd.
He had the uncomfortable feeling that
somewhere or other he had attracted somebody’s notice.
It wasn’t much more than an impression, a
discordance so close to the limits of his senses that it would have
been the easiest thing to talk himself out of believing it was
there at all. He just felt edgy without knowing quite why.
Back before the war, when he had been just a
kid in New York City with nothing more on his mind than learning
the Bach C-minor Courante and how to speak English like an
American, he used to walk the twenty-six blocks between his
boarding house and Juilliard twice a day, listening to the traffic
noises and trying to arrange them into sequences so they would
sound like twelve-tone or Haydn’s
Creation
or the corridor
outside the practice rooms, where, if you stopped to notice, little
wisps of what everyone was playing would squeeze out under the
doorways and blend together into a chaotic but somehow strangely
integrated and comforting symphony. It was a kind of game that had
something to do with the scribbled-over sheets of music paper he
kept in his desk, with those first hesitant steps toward learning
how to write something that didn’t sound like a bad parody of
Brahms, and also with learning to be in this strange city, so far
from home, and to think of it as his own place.
Anyway, he had come to recognize, on some
level or other, when the harmony had been broken. Sometimes, for no
reason he could have explained to anyone, he would know that
something was wrong, turn around, and see a fistfight starting
under the shadow of a restaurant awning, or a woman lying on the
sidewalk where she had fainted of sunstroke. Once, when some drunk
in a taxicab had come lurching right up over the curb at him, it
had probably saved his life.
He had listened even harder all during the
war, and it had saved his life more than just once.
And now, in the Year of our Lord nineteen
hundred and forty-eight, standing in the Marienplatz, eating a
sausage amidst the ruins of conquered Germany seven years and ten
months after the whole wonderful experience of his student days in
New York had suddenly become as remote and unreal as the court life
of ninth-century Japan, Inar Christiansen, late of the Juilliard
Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Norwegian Army, and the human race,
was wondering where he had heard the sinister little grace note
that quavered out its warning.
Well, he decided, all things would be
revealed at the proper time.
. . . . .
The man at the United Nations office was very
cordial, asked no probing questions, and conducted Christiansen
back to a file room where the case histories of several thousand
Displaced Persons filled up shelf after shelf of file boxes. There
were six or seven other people searching through the same material,
and tables had been set aside for the sleek, complacent-looking
lawyers who were researching reparations claims and the anxious men
and women who still, after all this time, were trying to track down
the mother or husband or daughter they fancied might still be alive
somewhere. This office, and all the other places just like it
Christiansen had been to, seemed haunted by ghosts.
He dropped his hat on the table in front of
an empty chair and started in. It was going to be a long day.
Just after noon he broke off for a while and
went around the corner to a tavern where, for the equivalent of
about thirty cents, you could buy a glass of beer and a plate of
stew made with stolen U.S. Army Spam. The walls were whitewashed
and decorated with posters for soccer matches and bicycle races,
and most of the other men there were wearing work clothes. The
patroness was about fifty, with a big bosom and reddish hair cut
long in the style of American bobby soxers; the metal bracelets
around her wrists tinkled with every movement. She seemed to know
everybody, even Christiansen, whom she had never seen before in her
life.
Christiansen took his plate of stew and
looked around for a quiet corner where he could sit down and eat
it. His fellow patrons had stared at him for a few sullen seconds
when he came in, as if they were prepared to take offense at having
lost the war, and then lost interest.
When he was finished he went outside into the
fresh air for a cigarette. There was a vacant lot in the next block
where the rubble had been cleared away enough to allow the grass to
grow, and some children were playing a noisy and incomprehensible
game that was rather like hockey except that as far as Christiansen
could make out, there was no ball. He watched for a while, sitting
on part of a ruined brick staircase that led up to nothing, nursing
his cigarette and wondering if he was ever going to get anywhere
checking file folders full of names. It didn’t seem very
likely.
The records of Displaced Persons were
incomplete at best and were scattered all over the Western
Occupation Zones into the bargain. They also had the disadvantage
of being more or less voluntary. It had been easy enough to get
everyone’s name and city of origin in 1945, when these people were
all still pretty startled to discover themselves alive and were
completely dependent on the occupying armies for just day-to-day
survival, and some of them, hoping to make contact again with their
families, had continued to keep a current address on file. But if
finally they had given up hope that there was anyone left from home
to look for them, or if for some reason they didn’t want to be
found—and if Becker had been telling the truth and his Colonel
Hagemann was looking for her as well, it wasn’t so unreasonable
that Esther Rosensaft might just decide she wanted to stay
lost—then they just dropped from sight.