Fourteen #2
“Really. Well, he’s doing all right now, isn’t he? We, on the other hand, have seen our business destroyed, our lives turned upside down. Just imagine, for a moment, how that is, will you? Imagine your country wants to be rid of you. A devoted German citizen, yet you have nowhere else to go.”
Satan is clever and has a way with words. Do not believe all that the devil seeks to tell you.
“What do you mean, stripped of your citizenship and livelihood? You’re not making sense...” I imagine what Vati would say, were he listening to this.
Walter takes a deep breath. “They have taken away our passports, Hetty. If we want to leave the country, we must pay something called an exit tax.”
“What’s that?”
“Essentially, it’s an exorbitant amount of money we would have to pay the government.
We’d have to give them everything we own.
” Walter speaks slowly, patiently, as though I am a small child.
“Our house, our valuables. They tax our business on its value back in 1930 when it was worth ten, twenty times what it is now. Being a Jewish business means banks, if they lend to us at all, charge us interest rates five times higher than any other business. And nobody will buy from us, other than a few loyal customers, mostly foreign ones. They have strangled us almost into bankruptcy. It’s simply sheer determination not to be beaten that has kept my uncle and my father going these last few years. ”
“I think you are taking it all too personally,” I find myself saying.
“The Nazis have rescued the nation. I think you’ve forgotten the dire state we were all in after the war.
You can hardly blame the Party when it was the Jews who were behind the shocking terms of the peace treaty that resulted in all our suffering—”
“Do you really think a bunch of conniving Jews forced the hands of those governments who signed that treaty?” Walter’s face reddens as he speaks.
He’s angry. I have prodded the tiger. “According to our Führer, Jews are the instigators behind the tyranny of capitalism AND communism. Two opposing ideologies. Why? Ask yourself, Hetty. The Jews behind everything that is bad? It’s simple and easy to blame us for all that is wrong.
And people believe what they want to believe, whether the evidence is there or not. ”
His words sting, and I squirm beneath the force of them. But he’s being unfair. We’re not personally responsible for his family’s bad fortune.
“Well, none of this is my father’s fault. People have always been jealous of his success.”
Walter stops walking. His eyes search my face. “You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“How you came by your home.”
“What do you mean? What’s this got to do with anything?”
And now there he sits, like a lord, in his stolen house.
This is not how this morning is supposed to go.
“You really don’t know, do you?” he repeats.
“Well, what then?” I shout at him. “If you know something, tell me! How can you blame me for not knowing something if I’ve not been told?”
“I’m sorry. I just thought...”
“Please tell me,” I repeat, quieter now.
Wissen ist macht. Knowledge is power.
We walk again, side by side, along the dusty path.
He takes a deep breath. “The family who owned the house you now live in were Jewish acquaintances of my parents. They were much wealthier and better connected than us. Herr Drucker was the ultimate boss of your father. He owned and edited the Leipziger Tageszeitung. But the National Socialists don’t like Jews controlling newspapers.
So a number of people, your father and the mayor among them, got together and concocted stories about Herr Drucker to oust him.
Corruption, tax evasion, that sort of thing.
All made up, of course. The whole case went to court, heard by Judge Fuchs, a big supporter of the Nazi Party, who was only too happy to oblige with a favorable judgment against Drucker. ”
“These are terrible accusations!” I cry. “Why should I believe you?”
“You don’t have to. But it’s the inconvenient truth.” The look in his eyes is honest. His expression hard. Is this the truth? Or what he has been told is the truth?
I look out across the wheat-gold field and remember the day we moved in. The fancy furniture, the artwork, the crystal and silver all left in the house. Like fitting pieces of a puzzle together, a picture emerges. Why would anyone leave such treasured things behind?
“So what happened to the Drucker family?” I ask. “Where are they now?”
“I’ve no idea. My guess is they left Germany.”
“How could you know all this?”
“I remember it so well. The day my father told me what had happened. It was the very first time I felt fear. And shame.”
“Shame?”
“I wanted to be like everyone else. Like Karl, I wanted to join the Hitler Jugend and do my bit for Germany. I didn’t see why I should be excluded.”
I look at him, and our eyes meet. I want to believe him.
I look away.
But I don’t want to believe him. With all my heart, I don’t.
Something twists in my chest and I want him to stop. “You’re giving me a warped version of the truth. Vati got to where he is by sheer hard work. He’s not some kind of... lazy criminal. You have to be wrong, Walter. You’ve been fed lies.”
“Why would I tell you something so serious if it were wrong, Hetty? I have nothing to gain and everything to fear by telling you this. Think about it.”
I watch the river flowing between the grassy banks.
“You must know, better than most,” Walter adds, “where they send people who speak up against the authorities. Concentration camps. Without a proper, fair trial. Hard labor, terrible conditions. For indefinite periods of time. Rumor has it, they even carry out executions there. There’s no doubt people are shot if they try to escape.
The SS have recently opened another camp not so far away—near Weimar.
Why would I risk telling you a pack of lies?
You only need to say one word to your vati and—”
“Oh, Walter. I’d never do that,” I interrupt. “Besides, I didn’t know about these camps. Vati rarely talks of such things. To me, anyway.”
Kuschi appears from the edge of the wheat field and nudges his nose into my palm. I scratch his ears as he walks beside me, then he dashes off again, disappearing beneath the waving wheat heads.
“If you knew all this at the time, why didn’t you say something?” I ask. “Why did you stay friends with Karl and continue to visit?”
Walter sighs. “Because I was an idiot. I never told my parents I was around your house all the time. They’d have gotten mad at me if they knew.
I was so ashamed to be Jewish. I didn’t tell anybody, and I don’t think Karl realized, not for a while, anyway.
I don’t look like the stereotype, so I suppose he had no reason to suspect.
.. I desperately wanted to be like any other normal, patriotic German boy.
It was only after he joined the Hitler Jugend, and I didn’t, that he figured it out.
One day, he just cut me off. He never explained.
” He presses his lips together and kicks at the ground. “He didn’t need to.”
We walk on in silence. I think of our big house, of which I have always been so proud.
And Vati. Vati, who calls me Schnuffel and loves me.
Vati, who tells us all the time how far he has come in this life.
How honest, hard labor reaps great rewards and how Germany can be great once the selfish, dishonest Jewish race is banished and the terrible morals of inferior foreigners are wiped out.
And here he sits in his stolen house ? Could it be true?
Walter looks at his watch. “We should head back,” he says. “It’s not that I want to, but...”
We’ve reached the end of the field. The path winds into the relative darkness of the woods that lie beyond.
“Yes. Me too.”
We turn around and retrace our steps. Kuschi lollops past, long pieces of wheat heads sticking from his collar.
He looks comical with the yellow fronds waving as he runs.
We laugh at him, and the tension is gone.
The air is peaceful once more and the morning floats with the sound of birdsong and the ripe, sweet smell of late summer.
Back at the bridge we stand facing each other. I run my fingers back and forth over the rough surface of the stone wall.
“Well. I guess this is it then,” he says softly. “It was lovely to see you again.”
“Yes. It’s a shame...” I look into his face at last.
Those fine blue eyes.
The world tips, just a little.
“Let’s shake hands and hope that sometime in the future we can be friends again.” Walter extends his hand; his grip is warm and strong. I fight an urge to step closer and take a breath of him. Shaking hands is too formal.
“Walter,” I begin, staring at my feet and his, facing each other on the dirt path. “Heaven knows what you must think of me, and I know it’s mad and stupid, and wrong, but can’t we meet here again, like this? There is no real harm, is there?”
“Hetty...”
His eyes are snug and warm, like home.
“It would be a total secret. I’ve told no one. I know how dangerous it is for you. I would never tell a soul, I promise. Please, Walter, can’t we?”
He looks away and shakes his head.
There is silence for a long time.
At last he says, “Hetty, I would love to see you again. I would love to see you every day. Since we met two weeks ago, I have thought of nothing but you. But how can it possibly be? Your father is a high-ranking SS officer, for heaven’s sake.
I can’t let you put yourself in any danger.
As for me, I’d be completely done for if we were caught together.
Let’s put a stop to this before we get into anything. .. too hard to get out of.”
He might as well stab me in the heart.
He takes my hand again, and this time, very lightly brushes his lips along the back of it.
Polite.
Old-fashioned.
Somehow, just right for Walter.
“Fine,” I say, pulling my hand away. “But just in case you should change your mind, I shall walk Kuschi here at first light, every Sunday morning from now on, even in winter.”
He stares into my eyes and with a sad smile says, “Good-bye, Hetty.”
I turn quickly and cross the bridge without looking back, Kuschi a comforting presence by my side. And all the dull and tedious way home, I feel the lingering touch of Walter’s lips on my skin.