Berlin Cantata Read Online Free PDF Page B

crime,” Oksana said.
    â€œDo you really think a nice Jewish man, three years out of Auschwitz, with a daughter dead, a wife traumatized, would make a deal with Nazis for money?”
    But my words sounded rhetorical, as if I were rehearsing something, and I knew the chance I could come out wrong on this. After all, what was truly astonishing to me was not that my father would accept, but that such an offer had been made in the first place. Nazis making postwar deals with Jews? I had never imagined such a thing. But Daddy was a practical man. My mother said this so many times about him, usually in apologetic tones, as though “practical” were an antonym to spontaneous or joyful or easy.
    Nils kept his silence awhile, having the habit which I’ve found to be not universal, particularly among European men, of wanting to be sure of something before he ventured in, then finally he said: “Probably the best thing your father ever did. It was what he could do to overcome humiliation. It was noble. It was hard. Your father was a saint.”
    So, in the opinion of one individual who at the moment was way on my good side, my father was a saint. I tried to imagine my father humiliated, as though standing there with egg dripping down his face and onto his clothes. With nothing he could do about it; a fertile egg, a pinprick of blood. And then others, like Nils, recognizing my father’s humiliation for what it was, not letting it go in secret, saying it, speaking it out loud.
    One week later I was on a plane to San Francisco. I skipped the nostalgia tour of Walnut Creek and drove my rental directly to the U-Stor-It. There, in a chainlink locker the size of a jail cell, surrounded by boxes of my parents’ possessions that howled accusations of neglect, I again opened their metal strongbox and found, underneath the camp photos and report cards, in a packet of documents held by string, a second original of the quitclaim document I had seen in Berlin. This time my father’s watery, clear, childlike signature reminded me of him sitting in the back room of the office supply business he had built for twenty years behind a thick-legged oak desk that always seemed a size too big for him writing check after check out of a ledger checkbook. Never complaining. He didn’t seem to have a huge amount of money, but just enough. Like the Henny Youngman joke, old Jewish man gets hit by a truck, he’s lying in the gutter, ambulance on its way, the cop comes, balls up his jacket, puts it under the guy’s head, asks, “Are you comfortable?” Jewish guy says, “I make a nice living, thank you.” And then he died, and I myself had just enough, a couple thousand extra a month, anyway, so that now I could do crazy, unscheduled things like quit a good job in Paris or go to a city where I knew no one and had never had a desire to be or fly halfway across the world to prove the obvious.
    I browsed further, as a delaying tactic as much as anything, or a distraction from what I felt as a defeat. And soon I found, among copies of life insurance policies that had lapsed, and expired warranties, and letters from the Naturalization Service dated 1953 congratulating my parents on their American citizenship, an escrow agent’s receipt for the down payment on our house in Walnut Creek. It was for the same sum the Schiessls paid him, four thousand five hundred dollars. The escrow payment was dated the seventh of October, 1947. The agreement with the Schiessls was from three weeks before. He had used the Schiessls’ payment to buy the house that I grew up in.
    The storage bin felt like my home then; or the place out of which I had hatched, a hermit’s place, where I could sit all day in wan fluorescent light wondering if Jews had saints. I called Anja Mann in Berlin to tell her to make the deal with the old Nazis, my new partners.
    Then one night after returning to Berlin I drove with Nils to the GDR