Three
“I can’t believe they ignored a Duesenberg!” Rachel Bergman’s brother, Jacob, snapped his eyes away from the two flappers on the sidewalk. Pouting, he clenched his hands on the steering wheel as he drove.
Rachel peered over her shoulder at the girls receding behind them. They were older than she was, probably twenty, but affected the same cloche hat, spit curls, and short hem uniform that she did. An odd way, it suddenly struck her, for 1928’s modern woman to assert her individuality and independence.
She rolled her eyes at her big brother. “What they ignored was a pimple-faced eighteen-year-old Jew driving his uncle’s car. Jacob, the thing that interests or disinterests a modern woman about an automobile is its driver.”
To be fair, Uncle Max’s pale gray dreadnought interested the very devil out of Rachel Bergman. Not so much because it did turn most heads, or because it smoothed Munich’s ancient cobbles into silk, but because it was as American as The Great Gatsby.
Jacob snorted. “You weren’t old enough to drink beer until this morning. What does a sixteen-year-old child know about what interests a modern woman?”
“I know that the modern woman we dropped off Uncle Max to meet is a gentile, a divorcee, who bobs her hair, and carries cocaine powder in her compact so she can sprinkle it on the mirror. Also she will probably sleep with him after dinner, to get her loan approved.”
“What?”
“Mother told Father when they didn’t know I was listening. Mother did not approve.”
Jacob parked the Duesy a block from the beer hall, helped her from the car, and they walked together as the dusk deepened.
He said, “You know this is still blackmail under the law. Blood relation to the victims is no excuse.”
“Jacob don’t be an idiot. You’re not a lawyer yet. You’re escorting your sister out for beer on her sixteenth birthday. Uncle Max snuck you out under Father’s nose the same way on your sixteenth birthday.”
“And you threatened that you would tell Father that he did.”
“I did not. I merely suggested the three of us ask Father whether his daughter and son should be treated equally.”
“Equally? Ha! Hell will freeze before Father lets me get away with half what you do.”
“No.”
“Yes! You’ve been getting away with everything for so long that you think you always will. You think that mere reality can never defeat you.”
Rachel narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying there’s something wrong with that?”
* * *
The Hofbräuhaus am Platzl had stood unchanged in Munich for so many centuries that Mozart had drunk beer in it. But Rachel had never been inside before. She would have preferred a smoky jazz cabaret, like the one where Uncle Max and his divorcee were drinking gin, and doing whatever one did with cocaine powder. But hard liquor remained, officially at least, years in a sixteen-year-old’s future.
The Hofbrau’s vaulted plaster ceilings, painted with floral murals, canopied a pillared cavern of a hall that on busy nights accommodated three thousand. Early on this June weeknight a few hundred scattered customers dotted the benches that lined the cavern’s long wooden tables.
Not that the place was quiet. A lederhosen-clad brass band, on a central, elevated stage belted out Bavarian drinking music. So loudly that the lager rippled in the glass steins of customers seated near the stage.
Jacob led her past the stage, found them an empty table away from the noise, and after they sat asked, “What did Father say to Mother when she tattled about Uncle Max’s divorcee?”
Rachel scowled and growled, imitating Sheldon Bergman. “Well, someone has to examine her collateral.”
Her brother laughed.
A pigtailed blonde bar maid with blacksmith’s biceps dropped off two liter steins of lager, from the eight she carried.
Jacob and Rachel clinked steins, then he sipped.
Rachel gulped, then she looked away and blinked, so her brother couldn’t see her eyes water. A sip would have been more prudent.
Jacob furrowed his brow. “You swill that stuff like you’ve done it before. Has somebody been examining your collateral?”
She raised her chin. “This is 1928. Men don’t tell women how to drink beer. Or with whom to drink it. You’re stodgier than Father.”
They sat and listened while the music blared and thumped.
Bavaria was home. It was charming and beautiful. It was also as old and boring as the smiling fat men playing old-fashioned music on the stage.
Today she was old enough to drink beer. With the law’s blessing, if not her father’s. Soon enough she would enter university. That would require her father’s blessing. Or at least his pocketbook. America, rude and an ocean away, was out of the question. Even, or perhaps especially, for Father’s little princess.
But today, Berlin’s cabarets crackled with America’s wicked electricity. People said Berlin was now “the sexual capital of Europe.” But Father wouldn’t even let her drink beer, when the law itself said it was perfectly fine. To let her leave home for anywhere was going to be difficult enough.
Jacob said, “Father’s not ‘stodgy,’ he’s responsible. Like any good banker. Uncle Max can afford his Duesenberg because Father moved the bank’s assets out of Marks at the beginning of the war, before the government decided to just print money to finance it.”
“Finance this.” Rachel wagged her head. “Collateral that. You and Father can be such…Jews.”
“It’s not a disease, you know.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Sometimes I wonder whether you are the least Jewish Jew in Europe. Or merely still a rebellious child, Rachel. Do you understand what Germany’s endured since the war? What Jews have endured since the Pharaohs? And how much better off our family, and the bank’s depositors, whether gentile or Jew, have been than most Germans? Because of Father’s prudence, and humanity, and common sense. Because he’s ‘such a Jew.’”
“Don’t patronize me, Jacob.” She shouted to be heard over the tuba as she stabbed a finger into her brother’s chest. “I’ll tell you what I understand. I understand Versailles wasn’t a treaty. It was the public stoning of an entire nation, by other nations that were no better. Followed by armed robbery and a gang rape.”
Jacob leaned close and whispered, “Rachel! If you expect to be treated as a lady, don’t shout about gang rape.”
A passing, mustachioed man, whose right arm ended in a stump at the wrist, leaned toward them. When he did, the two tiny medals pinned to his loden jacket swung from their ribbons.
He nodded. “That’s the truth, young lady!”
She felt the warmth and tingle of her first beer, and stuck her tongue out, little sister to big brother. “He knows a lady! And I know the truth. When I was eight, I saw the Bolsheviks beat people in the streets. So hard that blood spattered the lamp posts. I heard the gunfire. And the screams. And the sirens. Before I was twelve, I saw two more revolutions fail. I saw the government print paper marks by the bushel to pay the Versailles reparations. The same country—” she pointed at the one-handed veteran’s back, “—for which that man gave his hand, devalued his life savings. Until they were too worthless to buy his family one loaf of bread. We let the French steal the Ruhr from us at gunpoint, because Versailles denied us guns to defend our own land.
“Jacob, Germany’s been in the toilet for most of my life. And most of Germany blames it all on Jew bankers.”
“No. Not ‘most of Germany.’ The National Socialists tried to blame the economy, and the war, on us. They also tried to start a revolution in a beer hall. The Nazis who weren’t shot got thrown in jail for their trouble. Today the economy’s booming. Rachel, the Nazis won less than three percent in the elections last month. From now on they’re irrelevant. And so are their ideas.”
“Father disagrees. Father told Mother that now Hitler’s out of jail he’s soft-pedaling the Jew baiting, and the violence. That he’s saying that the good times are a house of cards, built on loans from American banks. And that the American stock market is a bigger house of cards. It will crash. And when it crashes, the Americans will call their loans. And Germany will crash, too.”
“Well, Father and Hitler happen to be right about the economy. And Hitler’s the only politician with the guts to predict the big, roaring party’s going to end badly.”
She shrugged. “Father says it’s not guts, it’s opportunism. That politicians change their convictions like honest people change their underwear.”
Jacob shrugged back. “Sure. But when the markets crash, and Germany’s in the toilet again, Hitler will look like Nostradamus. And nobody will care about his dirty underwear. You know, he could be chancellor by 1933.”
“That ranting pipsqueak?” She sniffed Jacob’s empty stein. “Was there cocaine powder in your beer?”
Jacob cocked his head at the ceiling. “If the Nazis really have matured from thugs into political dealmakers, a coalition government might be fine, compared to gridlock. Speaking of unsavory deal making…” He turned to her with puppy eyes.
Rachel tipped her stein, peered into it, and sighed. “I know. A deal is a deal. Yes, Lisl Schroeder is in my English literature club. Yes, I will introduce you to her. No, that will not get you anywhere.”
“She’s stuck up?”
“No. She’s nice.” Again, Rachel rolled her eyes at her idiot brother. “Jacob, she’s a gentile. Mother will make Father cut off your inheritance. After Mother cuts off your penis.”
“Bergman!”
The shout came from among a half-dozen young men wearing football kit. Their cleated boots’ thunder echoed through the beer hall, as loud as the band.
Her brother waved them over, and they arrived, sweaty and muddy amid much backslapping and laughter.
Horowitz, a friend of Jacob’s, smiled at her.
“Bergman, aren’t you going to introduce us to your beautiful girlfriend?”
Someone said, “Don’t introduce her to Winter if you expect to go home with her, Bergman.”
Laughter.
Someone else said, “Here he comes!”
Another called to him, “What took you so long, my captain?”
“Somebody had to stay behind and pay off the referee for that penalty kick.”
More laughter.
The team captain who waved as he trotted toward the group, holding a silver trophy cup aloft in one hand, was blond, stood taller than the rest, and was broad through the shoulders, where many football players were slight.
His eyes sparkled blue, his chin was strong and cleft, and his smile shone like the sun. Sweat sparkled on his forehead and he breathed heavily and rapidly, nostrils flared.
She shivered as she stared at him, and realized that she was holding her breath. He was the most beautiful human being Rachel Bergman had ever seen.
Jacob said to Horowitz, “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s my sister. Say hello to Horowitz, Rachel.”
Someone said, “Bergman, has no one told you there are laws against seducing your sister?”
Even more laughter.
The beautiful human set the silver cup on the table, leaned across it, and smiled into her eyes. “Rachel. Miss Bergman. I’m Peter. Peter Winter. And if you were my sister, I would break the law.”
The captain’s teammates hooted, then dragged him and the trophy away across the hall to another table, at which more of their club already sat.
Rachel stared after them, and she was sure Peter Winter had turned and searched her out, and smiled, before he was consumed in the celebration’s scrum.
Jacob said, “Sorry. Horowitz isn’t a bad sort.”
“What? Oh. Who is he?”
“I take it by ‘he’ you don’t mean fat Horowitz. Peter Winter’s the best fullback in Bavaria. Maybe in Germany. Shall I go over there and slap him, for getting fresh with my sister?”
“I may go slap him myself. On the behind.”
“Rachel!”
“He just made a joke. And a clever one at that. He seems quite nice.”
“For God’s sake, he’s nineteen.”
“And I suppose you’re going to point out that he’s a gentile, and Mother and Father wouldn’t approve.”
“Not just a gentile.”
“What?”
“His maternal uncle was one of the sixteen marchers who the police shot dead, around Hitler in the Odeonsplatz in the 1923 putsch. The Nazis call them their ‘Blood Martyrs.’ Pure blood is everything to them. That makes Peter National Socialist royalty.”
Rachel’s jaw dropped. “Him? One of those? Never!”
Jacob said, “I didn’t say that. Peter’s the kindest, most honorable fellow I know. I just reported his family tree, which is hardly his doing. But if Father’s right about the Nazis, I suppose in politics Peter’s family ties could be an advantage someday.”
She rolled her eyes again. “God. He wants to be a politician? That’s more disgusting than being a banker or a lawyer.”
“Actually, it’s even worse. He wants to be a physicist.”
“He hardly looks bookish.”
“Fullbacks rarely do. But I’m as good with numbers as Father is, and in calculus Peter not only left all the rest of us in the dust, by the end of term he was explaining differential equations and topology to our instructor. In the fall Peter’s off to University, in Leipzig.”
“Ugh. Bavaria without Alps. If he’s so smart why not Berlin?”
“Apparently, all the very best physics people are fighting to get in to Leipzig now.”
“Why?”
“There’s a rising genius there, named Heisenberg. They say Einstein himself has already nominated Heisenberg for the Nobel Prize.”
Rachel peered across the great hall, to the table where Peter Winter’s teammates raised their steins, toasting their captain, who was too beautiful to be a physicist, and too honorable to be a Nazi. Suddenly Berlin seemed less important.
“Jacob, isn’t Goethe Father’s favorite author?”
“Father is a German to his core. By definition that makes Goethe his favorite author. Unlike one of us at this table. Who prefers Hemingway and Fitzgerald.”
“Or, as Father calls them, my smut and rebellion peddlers.”
“You know, Goethe attended the University of Leipzig. Be careful. When you argue your case for university with Father, don’t even mention Leipzig, if you hope to sell him on Berlin. If he gets the idea in his head, he’ll pack you off to Leipzig kicking and screaming. To get the smut and rebellion scrubbed out of your head.”
“Jacob, you are the smartest person I know, but sometimes I think your head is a block of wood. If it’s Father’s idea to send me to study at Leipzig, and Peter Winter is there, too, neither of them can object to it, can they?”
Her brother smiled at her and shook his head slowly. “Poor Father. And poor Peter Winter. Any man who matches wits with you doesn’t realize what he’s gotten himself into. Until it’s too late.”
“Jacob, none of us ever realize what we’ve gotten ourselves into until it’s too late. The secret is to find a way out once we do.”