The Prosperous Thief (21 page)
Heini steps a little closer. In the wavery light he sees the grey pits where the man’s cheeks used to be and a few wisps of hair poking beneath a bandage wrapped around his head. He sees how skeletal are the hands scrabbling for the water bottle, and he hears the mad raving. Heini can’t stand the sound of it and turns sharply away. He covers a couple of hundred metres before he stops, stops for a long time, then makes a reluctant treading back to the man. He wants to be away from here. But for what? he wonders. For what?
Back at the man’s side, he helps him take a drink. The man has some mouldy bread, Heini offers instead some sweet pastries, fine crescent-shaped biscuits that melt in the mouth. The man feels better after eating. He can’t sit up without help, but says he’ll be stronger tomorrow. Not much chance of that, thinks Heini, but says nothing.
The man says he’s Martin Lewin, from Krefeld near Düssel-dorf, heading towards Berlin in search of his wife. He pulls a photograph from a pouch. The woman is all right if you like them scrawny and dark which Heini doesn’t, but he makes the right noises and the man seems satisfied. Such a small amount of talking and the man is exhausted. Heini helps him take a piss, then wraps his own coat around the pathetic body. The man falls asleep immediately and soon is muttering like a drunk.
During the night Heini goes through the man’s pouch. Apart from the photograph of the wife, there’s a nice pen probably worth a bit, and two more photographs. The first is of the wife with a child and a man Heini guesses is Martin, although from the picture would not have known. The second photograph shows an entirely different woman, large and blonde and much more to Heini’s taste, standing with a different man and three small children. The photographs are wrapped in a small piece of material as slippery as water. Heini tips the pouch inside out, but there’s nothing else. This Martin Lewin from Krefeld could be Jesus Christ of Nazareth for all the identity he carries, and if not for the Jewish prick could pass as German. Even the way he talks: nothing like the old pastry-cook, more like rich Berliners from Charlottenburg.
The man stirs, coughs a bit then returns to his muttering. Heini wipes the sweat from his face. People do survive typhus, people do survive years of deprivation, particularly with a little food and care. Perhaps Martin Lewin from Krefeld will live. And if he lives, perhaps he’ll help Heini like the old pastry-cook did so long ago. And just as quickly Heini realises how stupid he’s being. The Germans have been doing away with Jews ever since Hitler came to power.This Jew, any Jew, will look at Heini and see a German – not a good German nor a bad German, just a German, in much the same way Germans didn’t single out good Jews or bad Jews, just went ahead and laid into the lot of them.
Heini settles himself down and falls asleep but not for long. He is awakened by the Jew’s raving, and in the jumble a veritable atlas of places: Amsterdam, Berlin, America, Canada, Shanghai, and the Danes, he keeps calling out to the Danes. And names: Renate, Alice, Friedrich, lots of Friedrich. On and on he raves. A fever of words, sometimes perfectly clear, and at other times such a slurring of memories that even if you’d been there you wouldn’t recognise them. At one stage he seems to think he’s in Holland talking to a woman called Gertrude about visas, then a whole scramble about ‘going under’, and suddenly his eyelids spring open and he is wide awake.
As Heini helps him to some water, he asks about this ‘going under’. The man is quite lucid now. He explains he went into hiding in Amsterdam, not with Dutch people, they were too busy looking after their own Jews, but with a Danish family.
‘Good people,’ he says.‘Such good people.’
Heini has never had much time for talking, but suddenly he finds himself asking questions, lots of questions to reveal how a Jew could survive so long.And it is not as if he knows what he is going to do, but something is growing in his mind. He questions Martin about Amsterdam, and about the camp at Westerbork; and because a Jew’s experience of Belsen would be very different from his own, he asks about Belsen too. He is about to start on the wife and child when Martin’s eyelids begin to droop, and before long he has slipped back into his raving.
Heini leaves him to garble on while he goes for a piss. The sky is clear of clouds with a good solid chunk of moon and more stars than ever were visible in Berlin. He wanders just a few metres away, finds a low branch that’s as smooth as a chair and swings himself up. Through the silence he can still hear Martin’s raving, but low and steady now like the distant growl of an aeroplane. He forgets about his bladder and sinks into his thoughts. He has nothing to look forward to, even this Jew with typhus has a better future. The lowest of the low when the Germans were on a roll, what poor pickings would be left to him now Germany is on her knees? He’d do better, he realises, being a Jew.
The next day dawns bright and clear, an early summer’s day. Heini offers to remove Martin’s swaddling, and will wrap him up again later when it is cooler. They set off; but with Heini doing most of the walking for both of them, they don’t get very far, certainly not to the main road to Berlin. At lunchtime, Heini feeds Martin from his own store, lets him sleep an hour, then they continue until nightfall. The Jew is small, and reduced as he is to his bones he’s not much heavier than a child, but still Heini has had enough for one day. As for Martin, he is exhausted but different from the previous night, more alert, and now convinced he will survive.
‘I don’t know who you are and I don’t know why you’ve helped me, but if there’s any justice in this world you’ll be rewarded.’
He tells Heini about his wife, also about his daughter safe in England, and he’s talking now not raving. Heini encourages him. He learns that the wife, Renate, ended up at Auschwitz – you can kiss her goodbye, Heini is thinking – and the brother and sister-in-law were also sent to the east and were unlikely ever to be seen again.
Heini asks Martin about his papers and is told they disappeared long ago. And because Martin is so different from the pastry-cook, he asks what sort of Jew he is. He learns there was no way of telling with some German Jews that they were in fact Jewish. They didn’t wear Jewish clothes nor eat Jewish food nor practise any of the customs.‘What about Yiddish?’ Heini asks, thinking again of the pastry-cook, and Martin explains that German Jews like him would never speak Yiddish. He even asks about the Jewish prick, and learns that some Jews, those who were more German than Jewish, would have had a normal one, just like Heini’s own. And he asks about the name, Lewin. Is it a common Jewish name? And is told, common enough. In a single hour Heini learns the sort of background a Jew from Germany might have and how such a person might have survived.
Towards the end of the conversation it emerges the men have the same birth date, although Martin is five years older.‘My special twin,’ he says.
Not long afterwards, Martin falls asleep. The coughing begins around midnight and continues for a couple of hours, but between spasms he says he knows he’ll live. Finally the noise stops, and wrapped in Heini’s coat Martin falls deeply asleep. Heini watches. The breathing, so shallow and rapid a short time ago, quietens to such an extent that Heini bends his head to Martin’s chest and listens. He wipes the sweat from Martin’s face and adjusts the coat, then he settles himself down for the night.
Around dawn, Heini rises from his forest bed where he has not been sleeping and stands looking down at Martin. The Jew might survive and he might not, but whether he lives or dies he will be very sick for several days. Heini has his own future to consider. Such slow progress they will make and his food store already depleted, and the countryside filling with Americans and Russians, French and British, all of them bristling with victory. There’s his own future to consider, he tells himself as he squats down and lays his hands one each side of Martin’s head. He twists. It is over in a moment. He unravels his coat from the dead man and rolls him gently into a grassy hollow. Heini then gathers his belongings and turns away from Berlin, heading instead towards the displaced persons’ camps in the south.
A
lice Carter arrived in Melbourne in the summer of 1995, her file from the
Kindertransport
archive tucked into her hand luggage. She had boarded the plane not in San Francisco but Toronto where she’d been attending a series of meetings for conservators. She now regretted what had seemed to be an efficient plan for a woman short of time. For the flight to Australia had been interminable, the hours distended by dull films and duller food, and through it all a continual debate between her desire to meet Henry Lewin and her determination to let old losses lie. By the time she stepped into the Melbourne morning she had decided at least a dozen times she would see him and a dozen more times she wouldn’t. She was stale, exhausted, desperate for a shower, and resolved to wait as long as possible before she again travelled by air for more than a couple of hours.
Raphe had offered to accompany her but, having still not told him about Henry Lewin, Alice persuaded him to change his mind. As it happened, when the time came to leave, Raphe preferred to stay home. He had met a woman he was already describing as the love of his life. This was the one, he told Alice, the one he planned to marry, the one who would bear his children. It was not his failure at relationships that had kept him unmarried for so long, he said, rather he’d been waiting for perfection. Perfection’s name was Juno, and while Alice thought she was a rather loud, contrived young woman, Raphe was happy, and that was all that mattered.
So here she was in Melbourne alone. She had arranged to stay in a serviced apartment three or four miles from Henry Lewin’s home and a short walk from the city’s Botanic Gardens. She had rather fancied walking through tropical greenery while she decided whether or not to see Henry Lewin. She had considered contacting him from America, had toiled for weeks over a letter, but the words simply wouldn’t come. And while she knew her approach was risky when dealing with a man in his eighties, in the end she decided to keep her options open. She had, however, arranged to meet with a couple of colleagues in case she needed some diversions.
A serious case of jetlag meant it was a few days before she was ready to talk to anyone. Without warning she would find herself falling asleep or rather falling out of consciousness, a mental vacancy while her coffee went cold, or the news programme she’d been watching finished, or the shopping strip she’d been strolling along became a stretch of apartment buildings. At two o’clock in the morning she would find herself wide awake, too wired to read, too wired for middle-of-the-night television, would wait out the wakefulness with a bared-teeth irritation, finally falling into a swampy blackness around six. She took long solitary walks in the Botanic Gardens, down into damp fern gullies and over wide lawns, past huge old eucalypts and beneath a multitude of fruitbats hanging from the trees like flags of sun-dried leather. A fabulous variety of flora and fauna, but not much in the way of tropical species. Indeed, when she first arrived in Melbourne, nothing about the place was tropical. It was summer, but she needed a jacket in those first days, and while soon there would be a blast of heat straight from the equator, she had not yet learned about Melbourne’s jittery weather.
She woke, she slept, she wandered the Botanic Gardens and she thought about Henry Lewin. Such a jangle of thoughts, wonderful far-flung possibilities of how this man had known her father, vying with the old losses and a wad of new disappointments. To see him or not? The decision seemed beyond her. Then on the fourth evening and without knowing why, she returned to the apartment, lifted the phone and dialled Henry Lewin’s number.
The call was answered by a youngish sounding woman.When Alice asked to speak to Mr Henry Lewin, the woman introduced herself as Laura Lewin, his daughter. She said her father was out taking a walk but would be home shortly. Would Alice like to leave a message? Alice explained she was a visitor to Melbourne, that it was possible Henry and her family had known each other before the war and –
The daughter’s excitement burst down the phone. How she hoped there was a connection. Her father had emerged from the war with no one left, not a single relative. How exciting if after all this time … Yes, yes, she’d get her father to ring as soon as he came in. And then after a brief pause she invited Alice to join the family for a barbecue on Sunday.
Henry Lewin called back within thirty minutes. In stark contrast with the daughter, he could hardly have been less interested. He said at the outset he was sure there was no connection, but nonetheless, and with his daughter’s urgings quite audible in the background, he reiterated the invitation to Sunday lunch. Alice accepted, more for the daughter than herself, and spent the rest of the evening trying to escape her disappointment. In the end she took herself off to a local cinema where she sat through two hours of a hefty Czech film which was in its finishing throes before she realised she hadn’t even bothered to put on her glasses. And through the elegant drear on the screen the same old questions: When would she stop adding to old losses? When would she stop picking at old scars? And why couldn’t she be satisfied with the infinite possibilities of dreams?