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This one was musty and indifferent, as if the law moved more slowly here, through a more humid atmosphere, a place where you’d expect a ceiling fan to be groaning. In the elevator she had said, “You need not say anything. Speak only with me,” a cue that could lead one beset with uneasiness but not wishing to be seen as weak to do pretty much exactly the opposite.
    The other lawyer wore a sport jacket rather than a suit. He was thin with thinning white hair and close-set eyes and there was something androgynous in his manner. It’s possible his handshake was too pleasant. I didn’t like the fact that he wore a sport jacket instead of a suit. Was he not taking my case seriously? His name was Rosenthaler. Like Anja, his English was efficient, university-trained, although he had the habit of prefacing or concluding any utterance where it halfway fit with ja , as if this were the one word in German which I was sure to understand.
    â€œAre the others coming?” Anja asked.
    â€œThe Schiessls? No. The Schiessls won’t be here.” Rosenthaler’s thin fingers picked briskly through his file. “My principals are eighty-seven and eighty-three respectively. Just let me get these things together. Let me explain the situation…”
    He pulled out whatever documents he was looking for, three or four sheets of onion skin paper, then addressed me directly. “Our understanding, Miss Anholt, is you have filed your claim for these properties. The Schiessls have also filed their claim.”
    It was a moment when I loved my lawyer’s wince, as if it were exactly mine, as if for a moment we shared the same face. “With all due respect, the comparison is absurd. Between a Jew holding proper pre-war title and people who benefitted from a forced Nazi sale?”
    â€œ Ja, ja, of course,” Rosenthaler conceded. “But kindly examine this.” I recall the hushed sibilance of the onion skin sheets as he passed them across the conference room table. Anja took them and studied them for what seemed too long a time, her eyes with metronomic efficiency clicking up and down the pages. All I could make out was that the edges of the paper were brown, like a cake that had been baked too long. Finally: “Would you recognize your father’s signature, Miss Anholt? Is this it?”
    She turned the aged papers so that I could examine them. My eyes ignored the German text and went directly to the unevenly blue-inked name at the end of many dense paragraphs. There was something modest to my father’s signature, it seemed almost too legible, with its broad strokes and full loops, as though good penmanship and good citizenship were thought by its author to be related, valued things. But I also imagined: it was a signature not difficult to forge. “It looks like it,” I said.
    â€œCan you read the German?” she asked me.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThen I’ll explain. This document purports to be a sale, agreed to between your father and the Schiessls, in which your father gives to the Schiessl family for four thousand five hundred dollars U.S. whatever rights he may have had in any of these properties. And it’s dated 1947, years after the Nazis fell.”
    I stumbled towards the obvious, feeling the beating of my blood. “So what does it mean?”
    Attorney Rosenthaler was ready for that softball. “Please, let me explain why we’re here. The Schiessls’ claim has its own problem. They themselves were expropriated in 1948, ja , when East Germany was under direct Soviet occupation. But the new claims law provides compensation only for expropriations under the Nazis, until 1945, or after the East German government was instituted, from 1949.”
    â€œSo they have no rights to compensation at all.” Indignation came easily to Anja Mann, her cheeks flush, her voice low and sure. “Their claim’s worth exactly nothing.”
    But