Berlin Cantata Read Online Free PDF

Rosenthaler mocked her words slyly: “Not exactly nothing, I wouldn’t say.”
    â€œThey were expropriated by the wrong government in the wrong year. Yet they’re willing to use this paper to prevent Miss Anholt from getting anything? That’s quite astonishing.”
    â€œNot astonishing at all. Why astonishing? Schiessls and Anholts concluded an arms-length transaction in 1947, ja ? Mr Anholt gave up his rights freely… But what if this paper didn’t exist?”
    By then I may have been having one of those out-of-body conversational experiences where you look down from the ceiling and say “What’s she doing here? Are they talking about me ?” But Rosenthaler was eager now, his ingenuity ready to have its day. “The Schiessls have a proposal. Let us, in effect, tear up this paper. You pursue your claim, Miss Anholt. And if and when it’s successful, you and the Schiessls split the proceeds.”
    â€œI don’t want anything to do with this.” I pushed my chair back, stumbled up, the way you’re supposed to when you’ve finally had it with something. “No! I won’t become partners with Nazis.”
    In the elevator, Anja was a fount of mollifying words, comforting words, which despite the surprising warmth of her tone were a challenge for me to pay much attention to. I was too busy convincing myself I’d really been offended: “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe my father would do business with Nazis.”
    But even then I was thinking of the onion skin paper, that you never see anymore. My father always had a big box of it. It was the only sort of paper he ever used. It went with his Remington typewriter, the box would come out whenever he typed a letter or a bill of sale, as much a part of the mystique of him as the Oldsmobiles he bought every other year, like clockwork, and proudly washed in the driveway every Saturday afternoon because that’s what Americans did and he was an American now, even as the sweet, decayed scent of his German-language books, the Goethe and Schiller that must once have been his household gods, still lingered in his study.
    At a loss, I met my friends Oksana and Nils at the old Café Charlie on the Friedrichstrasse near Nils’ office. I will say exactly three things about Nils: one, he was a reporter; two, he was one of those tall, lanky types with a long head, kind of a bearded Viking marauder turned aggressively, prematurely gray; three, he’d gone out with a number of Jewish girls before me. You might say we were his specialty.
    Confused, overcome with the sense that a naïve, Disney-drenched upbringing was surrounding me like fairy dust and obscuring the world as it really was, I laid out the facts as I understood them to my new friends. “I could file my claim, I could get everything and then these people, these Nazis , could come in and get everything from me.”
    â€œWhat does Anja say?” Nils asked.
    â€œWell she says they won’t. They’ll promise not to, because otherwise why would I even file a claim? They need to share with me. But I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Even if any of this is legitimate.”
    â€œDid your father keep business records?” Oksana asked.
    â€œThat’s what Anja suggested – to look, you mean?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Oksana said, “But if you want to be sure…”
    If there were business records, they would have been in San Francisco. The left side of my brain made a disappointed calculus of my frequent flier miles while the rest of it wondered if I should at least be smoking a cigarette or ordering something other than tea, if I wanted them to think I was less a child. Nils sat crosswise in his chair, more facing Oksana than me, so in control of himself that I could barely stand it.
    â€œYou both think my father did it, don’t you?”
    â€œYou make it sound like a