A Stranger in My Own Country (11 page)

One of the strangest characters I encountered in the guesthouse was a dark-skinned, slender man from India,
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who had spent time in Soviet Russia as a buyer of precious stones. He bought up choice precious stones there for some prince or other. I assumed that he bought the stones illegally, then smuggled them out of the country without paying any duty. The way he stored them certainly seemed to indicate as much. He used to carry them around on his person, wrapped up in dirty pieces of paper and secreted inside various pockets and pouches. It never ceased to amaze me, the way he would suddenly reach inside his waistcoat pocket while we were talking and pull out a grubby little ball of paper, which he would then unwrap with his dusky fingers and produce a glittering cut diamond. By then I had already discovered that the precious stone that suited my wife best was an aquamarine, a stone that can appear sea-green or sea-blue, depending on the light, and which is sometimes suffused with a grey sheen, especially in daylight, like early-morning mist over the sea. I once asked the Indian if he had any aquamarines. Without a word he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a grey cone of paper, like the bags grocers use when you buy half a pound of sugar or semolina, and shook the contents out onto the table. We caught our breath for a moment: aquamarines of every size and shade lay there before us, thirty or forty of them, all polished and unmounted, and not a bad one among them. But there was one that immediately caught our eye, not just because of its size, but also because of its bright, limpid deep-blue glow. Our friend had immediately noted our interest. He picked up the stone and placed it on his open palm. ‘From an icon', he said, and mentioned the name of a Russian town that I've long since forgotten. ‘From an icon there!' he said. We were completely bowled over. We had never seen such a stone before, and I have never seen one like it since. It was as big as the palm of a baby's hand, and only ground at the edges. The man held the stone against my wife's neck, gazed at me with his gentle eyes, and whispered: ‘Only three thousand marks – and I give you!'

I fought a hard struggle with myself. We had already decided to give up the villa in Berkenbrück for good and to buy something else. Our way of life had swallowed a lot of money, on top of that we had the lawyers' bills, the financial settlement with Sponars – there was no way I could afford it! And yet it was not the price as such that stopped me buying it. I might have been able to stretch to that with an advance from my publisher. What held me back was the sheer size and beauty of the stone. All my life I have never been able to stand vulgar ostentation, and I just thought that we were not the kind of people to wear a big stone like that. Our whole lifestyle just wasn't right for it. And we wouldn't be comfortable living in a grander style, not even for the most magnificent aquamarine. ‘No', I said slowly, still looking at the stone against Suse's skin. ‘No, I'm sorry. We really can't afford it.'

The Indian smiled a melancholy smile. He shoved the stone back into the paper cone with the flat of his hand. We watched him as he did so, and then the radiant glow was gone. ‘You will be sorry!' said the gem dealer with a shrug. ‘A stone like that – and there may never be another one like it. Three thousand marks I give away – and only because it is madam!' He smiled and walked away. I have sometimes regretted not buying it, but not very much. Not much later I did buy my wife a pendant with an aquamarine from a mine in South America. It isn't half as big, and perhaps doesn't quite have the fiery glow of that stone, even though it didn't cost that much less. But the stone suits us better somehow; it is beautiful, but people don't stare at it all the time. (And I do sometimes wonder if our melancholy Indian gem salesman was a crook, who was out to con people with fake stones. The beautiful big aquamarine really was amazingly cheap. In which case, my dislike of ostentation saved me from making a prize fool of myself.) Of the other guests who stopped off at this caravanserai I will just briefly mention a genuine Indian rajah,
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a fat man who appeared at the guesthouse for a few days with several women and a large number of dark-skinned children. We saw little of them, apart from the children; they spent most of the time sitting in their rooms, and they didn't eat with us either. The children sometimes romped about in the corridors, as children of
every nationality doubtless romp about in long, echoing corridors the whole world over. But the man I often observed with admiration was the cook, who had appeared as part of the rajah's retinue. For religious reasons the rajah could not eat any of our food, and so this cook had turned up with his own saucepans and skillets and little bowls, all made of copper, and was busy at the stove alongside our fine German cook. He was a huge man, very fat, with not particularly dark skin, wearing a grubby turban, and to go with it an equally grubby-looking capacious white gown, like a kaftan. As the kitchen wasn't very large, and all the available space was really needed to prepare the food for the other guests, the giant cook had been given the window sill next to the stove – which was fairly wide, it's true – as his kitchen work surface. So there he stood, mixing and stirring and sprinkling coloured powders from little silver shakers over sauces and rice, while we, father and son, watched with bated breath. He had a true Oriental serenity about him, seemingly quite unaware of our shameless gawping, and he never once looked at us. One day, though, he held a dish under our noses with a little splodge of something reddish, and another little splodge of something yellow. The giant gestured invitingly, and for a moment I looked around for my spoon, but then I thought: ‘Let's pretend we're dining with a rajah!'

I exchanged glances with my son, who preferred the red stuff, and we both knew what to do: we reached into the dish with our fingers, took some of the mush and put it in our mouths.

Dear God in heaven, it was as if I had swallowed fire itself, my throat felt cauterized and burnt, and suddenly I was gasping for air! But I had no time at all to worry about my own sensations, thanks to the ear-splitting howl which my son now let out. Without the least regard for good manners he spat the food out and screamed like a banshee. The cook, meanwhile, was back at his window sill, sprinkling powders from his little shakers with serene Oriental composure. He was not a bit interested in the victims of his culinary arts. We never watched the nasty man at work again – not that we know for certain that he really was nasty. Perhaps he was just unfamiliar with the European palate.

We were actually the only Germans staying in the guesthouse now, apart from a certain Professor Nathansohn,
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although according to the thinking that was gaining currency at the time he was not a German at all, but at best a ‘German Jew'. And he did look the part, a fine figure of a man, portly and well-fed, with a splendid hooked nose
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and very full, very red lips, well-mannered, affable and well-endowed with that selfirony in which the Jews so excel. I gathered that Professor Nathansohn was a very famous man, though I had never heard of him myself. He was the inventor of ‘Wistra', a fibre that could be used to make the most wonderful silk fabrics. But that had not stopped the Nazis kicking him out as soon as they had seized power. Prof. Nathansohn wasn't too bothered: he had probably moved his money out of the country by then, as a successful inventor he could find work anywhere, and so he had happily moved to London without a moment's regret. Meanwhile the Nazis had discovered that ‘Wistra' was not quite working out as planned, and nobody else could sort out the problems, so they had lured Prof. Nathansohn back from England with lots of money and fine promises. So now he was working on official government orders in a large laboratory made available for his personal use, getting ‘Wistra' back on track, and was meanwhile busily inventing ‘Wollstra' too. I must admit that I often looked upon the Professor with lively pleasure, as living proof of the fact that the Nazis never hesitated to dump the sainted Party program the moment that something else seemed more important to them. And I must also admit that I would not look upon the good Professor with the same pleasure today. I did not succumb, like most of my fellow countrymen, to the endlessly repeated propaganda claiming that all the ills of the world stem from the Jews, and that the Jew is the Devil incarnate. Up until 1933 I suppose I was what people today call a ‘philosemite'; that is to say, my circle of friends and acquaintances was an entirely random mix of Aryans and Jews. I made no distinction, and had never given it any thought. The anti-Semitic propaganda of the day (see ‘Hangman' Streicher's
Stürmer
!) had always sickened me. But now, in 1933, after the Nazis had seized power, I made one or two observations that did give me pause. When I
saw this Prof. Nathansohn, for example, sitting there in all his affability and dining off roast goose at the expense of the German Reich, I couldn't help thinking that if I had been thrown out in such ignominious fashion I would not have come back to Germany and racked my brains to invent things for the benefit of the Nazis, no matter how much money they paid me. We also had a Jewish lady friend,
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the one who so cleverly managed to evade detection by dodging from one room to the next when the SA came to the house to arrest me. One of her daughters was living in London, another in Copenhagen – both daughters were married and both were comfortably off. Having asked their mother many times to leave Berlin and come and live with one of them, they finally begged her to leave, so that she wouldn't have to put up with the humiliations and persecutions of the Nazis any longer; but the mother stayed on year after year, holding out until it was almost too late to leave. And why did she hold out? She was getting a very modest pension from her husband, who had died many years previously, less than a hundred marks a month, and as she said indignantly: ‘I'm not going to hand over the money to that gang of crooks! They'll never transfer the money to London, never! No, I'm going to get every last mark out of them!' So what I discovered was that the Jews have a different attitude to money than I do, and it was an attitude that I didn't care for personally, in fact one that I found quite repugnant. One of them came back for the sake of money, the other one wouldn't leave for the sake of money: but both of them allowed themselves to be humiliated for the sake of money, consciously and by their own choice.
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And then I had another experience that really shocked me. At my publishers we had an editor in the office, Paulchen Mayer,
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a little Jew from Cologne, with tiny hands and feet, one of those products of endless inbreeding, with the fragility of porcelain, where the body hardly seems capable of supporting life. But what a head he had on him, this little man! Not a handsome head, not at all, but it was fizzing with ideas and passion! Our Paulchen had read everything, he knew everything, he thought about everything. Inside that neat, deep-browed skull blossomed a life eternal . . . And he was quite incorruptible.
Rowohlt was a big, powerful man, full of vitality; you contradicted him at your peril, even when he was in a good mood. He would immediately explode like an erupting volcano. But Paulchen contradicted him anyway, Paulchen didn't care if he was about to be engulfed in lava flows, and Paulchen was forever telling Rowohlt that the Rathenau novel by Mr von Salomon,
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beautifully written as it was, was a piece of unprincipled opportunism unworthy of the Rowohlt imprint. Rowohlt could slam doors as much as he liked, and shout down Paulchen, pitting his mighty 110 kilos against Paulchen's puny 35; Paulchen just put the tips of his fingers together, and from every finger he extracted an incontrovertible proof. In the end Paulchen always won – in theory, at least, because in practice Rowohlt didn't care about the opinions of his editor, but simply published the books that he wanted to. So in the end the vanquished Rowohlt would scoop up Paulchen in his arms and parade the little fellow through the office, nuzzling him and horsing around. So that was Paulchen Mayer, our editor, the conscience of the Rowohlt publishing house, friend and adviser to us all, incorruptible, faithful and true: nothing but a little, degenerate Jew weighing barely 35 kilos, and grotesquely ugly.

And then we had a second Jewish employee in the office, although he was not really an employee as such, he was a trainee clerk or a partner, as you preferred. Or as he preferred. Leopold Ullstein
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was a scion of the famous Ullstein publishing house, the largest in Germany at the time – and didn't he know it! In actual fact he was only the grandson. The old generation, which had built up the vast enterprise, was now living out of sight in back rooms, quietly pulling the strings behind the scenes. They were the generation that had acquired the business. Their sons had followed on after them, smart and capable businessmen, not especially brilliant, but choosing the right staff and paying them generously: they were the generation that sustained the business. And they in turn were followed by the grandchildren, the generation that squandered the business, spendthrifts and wastrels. They were already working in the office, in so far as they were prepared to work at all, and they were the subject of amusing and not-so-amusing stories. But the
worst of all these grandchildren was this Leopold Ullstein. He was so awful that not even the efforts of his powerful father or the intercession of his all-powerful grandfather had been able to obtain a position for him in their own large enterprise. But these wealthy people had a financial stake in the Rowohlt publishing house, and they used their influence as shareholders for the sole purpose of securing a cushy job for their wayward offspring. So now we were stuck with him – and we soon realized what we had let ourselves in for. A more arrogant, boorish and unpleasant person it would be hard to imagine. It was lucky for us that he took a casual approach to office hours, often not appearing much before noon, when he would condescend to glance through a few papers, dash off an opinion that was not clouded by the slightest knowledge of the subject in hand, and then disappear again. And if we could not stand this Mr Ullstein, he and our Paulchen positively loathed each other. How could it be otherwise: they were polar opposites, this shallow hedonist with loutish manners, and the fastidious, intellectual little Jew.