The Sleepwalkers (35 page)

They tumbled onto Sommer Strasse, wheezing and covered in soot. It was pitch-dark. Freezing out. In the noise and chaos nobody noticed them. Fire trucks were screaming from every direction. Horrified spectators, holding their foreheads, pointing, faces flickering sickening red. The whole Reichstag was an inferno, long, fiendish tongues licking from the windows, the roof, the dome. But standing right next to them, a sinister-looking bunch in trench coats and fedoras seemed bizarrely heartened.

“At last,” one spoke feverishly, his eyes burning as bright as the building. “The long-awaited hour has arrived. Your dark night is over, Germany. These flames call us—arise. Arise!”

“Police and auxiliary SA are already on the move, Führer.”

“I want every Communist official shot . . . tonight. Communist deputies. Friends of the Communists. Social Democrats. Anyone who stands in our path.”

“Jawohl.”

“Tomorrow we’ll start on the rest.”

Willi dragged Kai away, wanting to run, to fly and never look back. But the pull was too overpowering, and like Lot’s wife he turned one last time, freezing into a column of bitterness. Iron girders supporting the Reichstag’s glass dome twisted in a death
agony, the whole beautiful emblem of freedom collapsing in a hellish roar. It was more than just a building burning, he understood better than anyone else. More than just the evidence from Sachsenhausen.

In those flames went the future of millions.

In the darkness before dawn, driving west along the Tiergarten Strasse up to Breitsheidplatz, beneath the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church—its bells tolling the bitter hour—he fled. Along the Ku-damm the great neon advertisements hung black on the streamlined-building façades. Only a few dog walkers were out. A yellow streetcar rattled past, the first of the day. The early edition of
Berlin am Morgen
was arriving at the kiosks. In another hour the mailmen would be on their rounds, he knew. Curtains pulled open in a million apartments, pillows and blankets plopped in windowsills. Gentlemen would be riding along the old imperial trails in the Tiergarten. Clerks and secretaries pouring into the U- and S-Bahn stations. Tietz would unlock its revolving doors. Ruta would grind her coffee beans, and police at the Presidium get down to business. All without him.

He was too numb to care.

Last night the walk back empty-handed from the Reichstag was the worst in his life. Worse than the capitulation march in 1918. Worse even, in different ways, than the stupefied crawl from the hospital when Vicki died. After giving Kai the master keys to get back to Ruta, he had to creep through the dark, dusty and grimy, still in his laundryman’s smock, his eyes too pained, too overburdened, to take in what they saw. Trucks of SA Brownshirts racing down the streets. Lines of prisoners along the sidewalks, hands in the air, many still in nightclothes, some with signs hung around their necks:
I am a Communist pig.
At the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party, typewriters and desks flying from windows. Around the corner, in front of a wrecked flowershop, a man and a woman stripped to their underwear, holding bunches of gladiolas and forced to shout, “I am a Red traitor! These are for my grave!”

He could have prevented this. Saved the nation. The world.

But he’d failed.

Sylvie was waiting when he stumbled back after midnight. “You’ve got to leave, Willi. First thing in the morning. And consider yourself one of the lucky ones.”

A few minutes later though, they learned that leaving had become more easily said than done. Germany’s borders were sealed, according to the radio. No one allowed in or out without a special police visa, in keeping with the new “Decree for the Protection of the People and State,” just enacted by our Führer.

“
Our
Führer they’re calling him now, on the radio,” she said, wringing her hands.

The Communist and Social Democratic parties were outlawed, their publications seized. Trade unions suspended. All newspapers under strict emergency regulation. Freedom of speech and assembly curtailed. Willi realized Mr. Oppenheimer’s chain-reaction theory had proven exactly correct. An uncanny sensation made his neck hairs stand. So had the Great Gustave’s prophecy . . . a conflagration burning through the House of Germany this February. Could it all have been planned months ago?

The Jews, too—the announcer’s voice rose—would not go unpunished since they’d obviously benefited from this crime against the German people. That they were German people, too, or how they could have benefited from the Reichstag fire, wasn’t mentioned. Only that on April 1 a nationwide boycott would be commenced against all Jewish business and professional services. Any German patronizing a Jewish store or Jewish doctor, Jewish lawyer, Jewish dentist, Jewish accountant, Jewish tailor, etc., would be considered a traitor to the fatherland. In addition, the Prussian State Library and the University of Berlin would be purged of all Jewish and other non-German-thinking writers that for a generation had been polluting young minds, including such profligate degenerates as Heinrich Heine, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Maksim Gorky, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Andre Gidé, André Malraux, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Helen Keller . . .

Sylvie turned off the radio. “I’m going to find some way to get you out of this nightmare.” She grabbed her address book and started poring through it.

Willi lay on the couch, too depleted to move. He felt the way he had after Vicki’s funeral. After his father’s, during the ritual mourning week when they were sitting in the parlor, and gazing at all the objects he’d seen his whole life, he’d realized nothing looked familiar. That his whole world had slid out from under him, like a landslide.

He heard Sylvie finally hang up. “Okay, I found something.”

Her lips were moving, but he could barely comprehend.

“My old school chum Trude lives on the Belgian border. I haven’t seen her in ages, but she’s trustworthy to the bone. Says she can get you across, but you’d have to come quickly. Things could tighten up fast.”

Willi shut his eyes. For two thousand years his ancestors had been forced into exile, country to country, continent to continent, with only the clothes on their backs. Now it was his turn.
Why did he imagine this day could never come? Not in Germany. To him. An Inspektor-Detektiv. Bearer of the Iron Cross, First Class. Lucky he’d emptied his bank accounts. But what if it wasn’t enough?

“How much does she want, Sylvie?”

“Want? I told you, Willi, she’s a dear old friend. Besides, her husband’s a fabulously successful businessman. She’ll probably have a catered feast for you.”

Something about it sounded too easy, he thought, driving quickly through the quiet streets of Wilmersdorf and into suburban Grunewald. Fritz’s house grew clearly visible on the hilltop, its long, curvilinear glass walls glinting in the dawn. One last time he let his 320 loose along the Avus Speedway, pushing it to its full potential . . . 120 . . . 130 . . . 140 kmh, his heart pounding wildly. But slowing to leave Berlin via Potsdam, the gloom came back. No one was going to risk her life to sneak a total stranger across a closed frontier for nothing.

If he made it that far.

Clear across Germany though, Berlin to Hannover, Münster to Dortmund, down along the Rhine, no roadblocks, no searches. All that marred his progress were memories. Grasping the wheel with clenched fingers, locked jaw, mind adrift, he kept seeing images flickering across the white-cloud screens, making his eyes burn. His mother, pregnant with his baby sister, sitting by the window looking down at him playing in the street, blowing a kiss. Vicki waking up, stretching her long white neck and yawning. The boys trudging off to school, leather briefcases strapped to backs, the big one insisting on holding the little one’s hand as they crossed the street. Even before he realized it, the sun was setting. And he had reached the little border town of Aachen.

Now would come the true test. How was this trustworthy-to-the-bone friend of Sylvie’s going to get him across a sealed
border? He pictured himself led through a dark, empty field alone, uneasy. Then held up for all he was worth.

Shot through the back of the neck.

But Sylvie’s friend’s house was on the border as promised.

Literally. Sitting on it.

“One step out that back door, Willi, and, voilà, you’re home free. Take the bus to the train station and in less than two hours, Brussels.”

Amazing. One step, and freedom.

Home, no. Statelessness. Rootlessness.

But life. Love. Family.

“Go freshen up and have some dinner first. You must be starved.”

Sylvie was right about Trude’s generosity, but obviously ignorant of her financial plight, he saw. Her house was well-enough furnished, but threadbare. The carpets worn. Her sweater elbows patched. Clearly her husband’s “fabulous” business success had withered with the Great Depression, and Trude had been too proud to tell her old school chum. The meal was simple sausage and kraut. She refused to take a pfennig.

“Anything to help.” She spooned him a second dish. “Those Nazis make me ashamed to be human.” She looked at her watch. “You’d better go, love. There’s a bus in a couple of minutes.”

Opening the back door, she offered him a smile that seemed to say,
You’re a lucky man, Willi. To have made it. When so many never will.
Willi smiled, too, knowing she was right. Then suddenly remembering something, he dug in his pocket and pulled out a silver key. “For your kindness.” He winked. “The little BMW out front.”

Handing it to her, he crossed the threshold. Night had fallen. It was freezing out. He felt completely naked, but never more awake, as he buttoned his collar and stepped into exile. Anyway, he thought, looking down the dark street, then up at the sky, better to be a wandering Jew—he saw stars through the blackness—than
a dead one. “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing.” A quote from Deuteronomy rose to mind from somewhere in his boyhood. “Therefore choose life”—he walked on, chin held high—“that thou and thy seed might live.”

Less than five months after the fall of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich, Willi gave in to a terrible urge and returned. It had been twelve years, the darkest in human history. Fifty million dead. Twenty million Russians. Six million Jews. He’d read about the destruction of German cities, seen the pictures in the papers, but as he flew into Tempelhof, his first glimpse knocked the breath from him.

This was Berlin?

Block after block, street after street, of homes, businesses, schools, churches, all just hollowed shells. Mile after mile of desolate fields, here and there a chimney, a wall rising from the rubble. He recalled walking to work once during a transit strike, imagining the destruction another war might bring. But his imagination had failed him, utterly.

In his new home, from the fifth-floor balcony on Hayarkon
Street overlooking the beach, the turquoise Mediterranean practically lapped at his toes. Behind it sprawled the white city of Tel Aviv, its broad, green boulevards bustling. Proud. Free. And though goodness knew there was trouble aplenty in that hot, little desert land, he had a good life. A good job as an inspector with the municipal police. A three-bedroom apartment in a sleek building designed by a protégé of Erich Mendelsohn’s. A loving wife and four beautiful children. But he needed to come back—one last time. To see for himself. And to pay back some debts of gratitude, if he could.

On the ride in from the airport he was even more shocked than he’d been from the air. Long human chains of women, dirty turbans tied around their heads, labored to clear mountains of rubble, hand to hand, brick by brick—like insects trying to repair their wrecked hives. Families in wall-less apartment buildings, like dollhouses, lived completely exposed to the street, dirty blankets strung up for privacy. Gaunt, pale shoeless children played on charred tanks and antiaircraft batteries. His own childhood, a dream by comparison. Scrawled in chalk on countless crumbled walls were notes:
Father, Anna and I are safe and living at
. . .

It took two days, but through the post office he was able to find the address of his former secretary. Her home in Berlin-East a little shack amid the rubble, built of steel shutters and planks of wood, a tiny vegetable patch eked along the side. She was shocked when he appeared, too happy even to be ashamed, she said, crying in his arms.

“Oh, Willi, you were so lucky to get out when you did.”

“Once you risked your life for me . . . now I want to help you, Ruta.”

He gave her enough money to move her whole family into the Siemen’s Housing Project, untouched by bombs and in the safety of the American sector. She couldn’t stop thanking him as he pushed aside the torn blanket and stepped back into the sun.

Now of course he understood he had been lucky to have left
when he did. And to have fled France in ’38, a year before it became too late. Perhaps, had he never seen those jars of floating brains, those barracks full of deformed prisoners, at Sachsenhausen, he’d never have been impelled to rip his family up a second time and smuggle them to an unknown land. He would have ended up like his boyhood chum Mathias Goldberg, the neon advertising genius, who, when war broke out in ’39, got interned by the French for being a German, and again in 1940 by the conquering Germans, for being a Jew. Stamped with the yellow star in ’42, he was “resettled east” with his wife and children, to that unspeakable realm presided over by the Angel of Death—Josef Mengele.

The mad doctor of Auschwitz.

Camp Sachsenhausen, as Mengele had promised, had indeed been rebuilt, a little farther north along the river Havel, bigger and better than before. Nearly one hundred thousand people perished there, while neighbors kept their eyes and mouths and noses shut.

From Ruta’s he took a cab to Tiergarten Strasse to see if he could find Sylvie—but her little villa was gone. No chalk forwarding address. He went to the Adlon to see if he could find Hans, but the chief concierge had been lost in an air raid. The hotel smashed to dust.