The Jerusalem Diamond (13 page)

But he liked her company. They went to the cabarets, especially their favorite, Tingeltangel. Sometimes she got a woman for Ritz, even though he hooted at them for calling jazz “yatz,” but more often she and Alfred went alone. He took her to the theater, to her first concerts. At Philharmonic Hall, Artur Schnabel brought tears to her eyes
.

Alfred gave her a necklace, a bracelet. He bought her a fur piece from Herpich's and sometimes he gave her money, but there was no arrangement
He was smug about his life and thought himself a hell of a fellow. But one night they entered the bar at Tingeltangel between shows, in time to hear the
conferencier
complain because the bartender had turned off the radio
.

“
Tonight there is no music, “the bartender said. “It is talk, talk, talk about New York. Who cares about New York
?”

“
What is happening in New York?” Alfred asked, sliding onto the barstool
.

The bartender shrugged. “Some
lausig
about the Stock Exchange,” he said
.

A few months later the janitor of the building where the shop was located told Alfred that conditions reminded him of 1921. “Where were you in ‘21, sir
?”

“
In Switzerland, still in school
.”

The man sighed. “In 21 my children often went to bed hungry
.”

It was true, children were hungry again in Germany. The last thing anybody wanted to buy was diamonds. Suddenly, there was nothing for the Dutch technicians to polish or set. He gave them as much final salary as he dared and let them go
.

Lew Ritz said that business in his father's American hat factory, in a place called Waterbury, had come to a standstill. That spring Ritz got his medical degree and went home. The day after he left, a letter arrived from Uncle Martin. If Alfred wanted, Martin would release Karel from the Voticky shop so he could come to Berlin and help his cousin. In fact, things were so slow in Prague it might be possible that Laibel could come to work for Alfred, too
.

He wrote and advised them to stay where they were
.

“
They're blaming the Jews,” Dr. Silberstein said. Alfred didn't like the way he looked. Annalise had told him her husband's health was very bad. His heart was failing, that's why the cough never went away. On hot nights the old man had trouble breathing and sat for hours near the open window, propped against pillows
.

“
I still have a cousin from Poland in a yeshiva at Frankfort am Main,” Dr. Silberstein said. “The Nazis are beating the Jews there. The police don't even listen to complaints
.”

“
Berlin is still civilized,” Alfred said
.

“
You should leave. You're still young
”.

Alfred lost patience. “Let's play chess
”.

Business became even worse. In Capetown, a man named Ernest Oppenheimer had become chairman of DeBeers and discovered he had problems in addition to the Depression. DeBeers had accumulated a vast supply of diamonds, so large an inventory it would completely devalue gems if it were marketed. To make matters worse, new mines had been opened in the Transvaal and in Namaqualand. Oppenheimer dissolved the Syndicate and replaced it with the Diamond Corporation, designed to release stones into the market in a careful trickle, to keep prices up. But what good was it to maintain value if nothing sold
?

Alfred awoke one morning and found he hated being a businessman, going to a shop every day to watch a door that seldom opened. Some fine jewelers had begun selling the kind of trash Uncle Martin had wanted him to carry in the first place. Instead; he treated himself to four days in Holland and ordered a line of well-made blue-and-white Delft jewelry. Whatever gems were in the shop on voucher were returned, and he liquidated everything else except for seven small yellow diamonds that he kept in the safe so he could continue to feel like a dealer. A Swiss watch replaced the white diamond in the window niche. The new line sold poorly, but it wouldn't have helped if he had stocked cheaper things. In the forests around Berlin, the unemployed were raising tent colonies
.

“
We need a strong man to take us out of this mess,” the janitor told him, studying Alfred's beautiful suit. There was something in the janitor's eyes; he was either a Nazi or a Communist, or perhaps his children were hungry again
.

Paolo Luzzatti of Sidney Luzzatti & Sons wrote from Naples that the need for the work they had discussed in Antwerp several years before was imminent. Alfred had thought a lot about the Inquisition Diamond. The prospect of the Mitre of Gregory was something with which to fight the grayness. Otherwise, life in Berlin darkened. He had loved to walk on Unter den Linden; now, two or three times a week there were parades, brown-shirted S.A., or Communists from the eastern districts in faded yellow work shirts. Whenever the columns met, they dissolved into violence, like beetles fighting roaches on the most beautiful street in the city
.

The September election was a disaster. The Nazis had boasted they would raise their twelve seats to fifty. Instead, six and one-half million Germans gave Adolf Hitler a gift, one hundred and seven seats in the Reichstag
.

A week after the elections, Paolo Luzzatti came to Berlin, carrying the Mitre of Gregory in a blue cloth satchel with a sticky zipper, the kind of bag in which a plumber might carry his luncheon sausage
.

“
Magnificent thing,” Alfred said when he saw the mitre
.

“
You do good work in your family
.”

He nodded to acknowledge the compliment. Luzzatti's had taken out a huge insurance rider, which Hauptmann ‘s had to match. Paolo fluttered nervously in the background throughout the insurance arrangements
.

The gold headpiece had been damaged when it was dropped. Luzzatti peered over his shoulder as he delicately pried the great yellow diamond from its setting and peered at it through his loupe. They both knew how easily a diamond can be cracked and ruined, despite its hardness
.

“
It appears to be unharmed,” he said. The other man sighed
.

“
I shall have to do some extensive testing to make certain. It will take some time. While I have it,” he said casually, “I may as well repair the setting
.”

Paolo frowned at him. “Do you have the skill? It must be perfect when it is returned to the Vatican
.”

He shrugged. “I may have to call in a goldsmith. There are one or two fine ones here
”.

Eventually, to their mutual relief, Luzzatti took the train back to Naples and left the mitre with Alfred
.

Despite the insurance he never let the diamond or the mitre out of his sight, carrying them home at night in the blue bag and to the shop every morning. One evening when Lilo was at his apartment he showed them to her
.

“
Whose are they
?”

“
The Pope's
.”

She frowned. She wasn't religious but he saw that she thought such jokes improper. Especially coming from him, perhaps
.

“
Before that, the diamond belonged to a man in Spain. He was burned for being too Jewish
.”

“
Sometimes I think you're crazy
,”
she said crankily
.

At the end of the testing, he knew that the stone was undamaged. One morning he reset the diamond into the mitre. He wondered if the people at the Vatican knew what the design was based on. His ancestor had shaped the headpiece exactly like the drawings Alfred had seen of the
misnepheth,
the mitre of the High Priest. But that had been made of linen and this was gold. It was extremely difficult to clean, for which Alfred was grateful. He took his time. He experimented and found that it wouldn't be necessary to call in a goldsmith. He tapped out the damaged area himself, a fraction of a centimeter at a time, loving little blows with a hammer that seemed to draw inspiration from the talent and skill with which his ancestor had fashioned the mitre
.

Much as he tried, he couldn't shut out everything else with the work. In October the new Reichstag convened. Thousands milled outside the Reichstag Building and shouted for Hitler. Against the law, the Nazi members had smuggled their Storm Trooper uniforms inside. They changed clothes in the washrooms and made a shambles of the session, singing and stamping, shouting down anyone who tried to speak. When the police finally dispersed the mob outside, organizers led a parade to Herpich's, where they smashed the department store's windows and looted the furs
.

Alfred sat in his shop and listened to them pour by on their way to Wertheim's
. “Juda verrecke!”
they shouted. “Perish the Jews, Perish the Jews! perish the Jews, perish the Jews!
”

Lew Ritz wrote that he was taking his internship in a New York hospital
. “ … I understand that requests for American visas have risen sharply in Germany. Have you thought of coming here? On the chance I can persuade you, I'm sending the enclosed. You would need it, as they aren't granting visas to people who can't prove they won't make the breadlines longer. I hope you'll come. If you do, I'll take you to a place called the Cotton Club and you'll find out you've never heard real ‘yatz' …”

“
The enclosed” was a statement signed by Lew's father, attesting that
Alfred Hauptmann would be given employment by the Ritz Headwear Corporation upon entering the United States. He put the envelope into the safe. But when he wrote to thank Lew, he reminded him that the Nazis were only the second largest party in Germany
. “Paul von Hindenburg is President of the German Republic and he has sworn to uphold the Constitution,”
Alfred wrote. He resolutely put out of his mind the fact that Hindenburg was eighty-four years old and took lots of naps
.

Lilo continued to demonstrate friendship and affection, but what was happening clearly had begun to bother her. She no longer crooned to her little Jewish knight and sometimes, lying in the dark, she blurted out her fears
.

“
The Nazis have places in different parts of the city. Abandoned warehouses and former factories, you know
?”

“
I hadn't heard
.”

“
Yes, they call them concentration points. They bring their enemies there for questioning, Communists and Jews
.”

“
How do you know
?”

“
Someone told me
.”

He patted her thigh comfortingly. It was probably just a story but it might be true, people disappeared. Bodies were always being fished out of the Landwehr Canal
.

Everywhere Alfred went, he saw men in the Nazi uniform. So many of the Brown Shirts were new. Hitler promised jobs and prosperity once the wrongs done at Versailles in 1919 had been righted, and the Jews had been driven from Germany
.

An editorial in
The Attack
piously advised citizens not to attempt individual solutions to the Jewish question, since it was a state problem. However, more individuals tried their own solutions every day. Bernhard Silberstein's Polish cousin panicked at the savagery in Frankfurt am Main and fled his yeshiva to live with his relatives in Berlin. A pinch-faced youth with a sparse beard, Max Silberstein was immediately identifiable as one of the despised
Ostjuden,
a Jew who had come to Germany from eastern Europe. Two days after his arrival he walked to the kiosk to pick up his cousin's newspaper and ran into the Storm Troopers who were selling
The Attack.
He came home pale, his eyes glazed, a
sign pinned to the back of his coat: I
AM A
J
EWISH THIEF
. Next day he was on the train back to Cracow
.

It was the final straw for the Silbersteins. They settled their affairs and went to live with a woman physician who owned a farm in the Harz Mountains. “Why don't you leave this country?” Dr. Silberstein demanded when he said goodbye
.

“
I have a business here,” Alfred said, trying to speak calmly
.

“
Are you waiting until everybody tries to leave, when it will be too late
?”

“
If you feel that way, why don't you leave Germany
?”

“
You fool! One must pass a physical to get a visa
.”

They stared at one another. “Forget your business. “Dr. Silberstein was getting too excited, he was breathing with difficulty. “What do you have of real value that you can't take with you
?”

Alfred thought about it. “This city,” he said
.

Yet the city he loved was almost gone. The Nazis and the Communists had graduated from truncheons, and when he was out walking, it wasn't unusual to have to adjust his route to avoid an area from which gunfire could be heard
.

He came to work one morning to find a huge J
UDE
scrawled across the plum-colored brick in runny white paint. He left it there and perhaps it worked like an advertisement. Several nice people came in each day and he sold a number of delftware pieces. Herpich's glass was replaced two or three times and broken again, and finally some of the windows were boarded up and left that way. There was a rumor that the Herpich family was considering selling its store to Christians. Perhaps it was true. There was a drive to Aryanize business, and one afternoon Richard Deitrich came into the shop and told him Deitrich Brothers had bought out Irwin Koenig
.

Richard Deitrich had a clean, shining face and a very good tailor. In the lapel of his gray overcoat a swastika pin indicated it would have been correct if he had chosen to wear a uniform. “This is a lovely little shop. I have always admired it,” he said. “Would you be interested in selling out to us, Herr Hauptmann
?”