Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Empedocles was at once poet and philosopher, a kind of wandering redeemer, physician, and multiplier of loaves. He read and ate with his hands, and if we can give credence to legend, one day he suddenly disappeared. Some say that he jumped into the crater of Mount Etna in order to enhance his reputation as a divine being — since gods also like to eliminate their tracks behind them. But the mountain seems to have played a trick on this super-guru — he flourished around 500 B.C. — for the story goes on to claim that the crater spewed out the miracle man’s slippers, just to show him who was who. And that is why we picked out this ancient Greek guy’s name for our head spider.

Once when things were again going badly for Count Kessler — he had received a snide letter from Goebbels, threatening him in ways that could be fatal for our work on the memoirs— I told him about my Spider Edict. It cheered him up for a while. And because he was superstitious in a manner deriving from Classical Antiquity, he believed the story about the disappearance of Empedocles.

Vigoleis, the enlightened pessimist, gave his own special spider the name Spinoza.

In place of the absconded Empedocles, another ominous “star” soon made its appearance over our heads. It was a gruesome animal — not one that captured insects, but nevertheless one that spent its entire life in cahoots with vermin. Its professional specialties were wine and women. It came from Würzburg. Its name was Adelfried Silberstern, and it was the legitimate brother of Privy Councillor Silberstern, whose first name was Brunfried.

“Vigo, do me a favor and ask the milkman to give us a whole liter today, and not just half.”

“He won’t know what’s come over us.”

“ Ciao! ”

“ Ciao! ”

I had started a novel, a caricature of the Third Reich in my home town of Süchteln an der Niers. My working title was “ Hun-less Tombs of the Huns .” On the basis of a draft chapter and through the good offices of Menno ter Braak, the Amsterdam publisher Querido had accepted it. I worked and worked on it during the hours when I wasn’t working and working for Count Kessler, and when I wasn’t composing letters to high mucky-mucks of the insane German Reich. I wrote and wrote like a man possessed, and worse yet, as a man who thought that he could swim against the tide. A human being is not a salmon; if he swims along with the crowd, he’ll always be going downstream.

The doorbell! What did Beatrice tell me? Oh yes, no milk today. I’ll just finish writing this sentence… And then, the doorbell again. That guy is in a hurry — I guess he’s worried that his milk will go sour before he’s had a chance to deliver it. Just type out one more sentence… but then our impatient visitor rang for a third time. I leaped to the door and called out my message into the dark stairwell: “Two liters today, milkman! Just a minute, I’ll go get our can!”

The milkman was hard of hearing and invisible. Was he already on the flight above us? But then a voice spoke to me in a south German accent, “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Silberstern from Würzburg, Adelfried Silberstern, wine and spirits, brother of Privy Commercial Councillor Brunfried Silberstern from Würzburg. We’re both from Würzburg.”

My mind was still back in my home town, where on Sundays the pastor would announce the banns of marriage: “With the intention of Holy Matrimony, Peter Joseph… and Anna Maria…, both of Süchteln. Should anyone have reasons why this marriage should not occur, he is by conscience bound to come forth…” My novel had to do with a marriage taking place in the Third Reich, one that had reasons for not occurring, reasons that carried the death penalty. It’s no wonder that my thoughts continued in this direction as the milkman spoke. But surely my engaged couple wasn’t from Würzburg…

It was only when our milkman stepped toward me — something he had never done before, preferring to keep a milk bucket’s distance between us — that I realized that I wasn’t in my home town with the heroes’ tombs, but on the Street of the General, House No. 23, an address that the man from Würzburg had picked up at the German Bookshop. Gradually he emerged out of the twilight of our corridor, with a torrent of words and displaying a fat belly, making me take a quick step backwards.

I turned on the light. The visitor gave his full name once again, and once again explained his connections with the Privy Councillor. They were Silberstern Bros. from Würzburg, Wine & Spirits. Instead of a business card, he handed me a brochure and said, “Here, this is us! You can read it through, but I’ve come for a very different reason. Are you listening?”

His accent was distinctly Franconian, just as my own was distinctly Lower Rhenish. His secret “brother” came out as “pruzzer,” and his brochure was an advertisement for that fellow’s “pruzzerly” enterprise, the production of wine and brandy under a franchise from Würzburg University.

Herr Silberstern stood one-and-a-half heads shorter than me. He had a keg-shaped paunch, in front of which, once he had deposited his briefcase on the floor, he kept his hands discreetly folded. He forgot to remove his expensive hat. Then he started twiddling his thumbs, forward and backward. He addressed me as “Herr Doktor,” just as every barber in every university town does with every customer. Several times he lifted his hat to brush back his short-cropped but somewhat disheveled hair, talking all the while as if he intended to wear me down with palaver. Whereupon he ceased twirling his thumbs, since he needed the latter digits to fit under his armpits as, with expanded chest, he began moving his fingers in wave-like motions. We were still standing opposite each other in our entrada . While I must have missed certain details of his story, this much was clear: Adelfried had fled his homeland just as soon as Hitler had seized power. The SS had found his 2-yard-wide bed empty, the one in which he was in the habit of sleeping with Aryan women who preferred to ignore the racial laws. He had left a fortune behind in the Reich. Countless women were lamenting his fate. All five of his brothers bore exceedingly Aryan given names ending in — fried, — wolf, and — helm, and they had a sister named — linde. In spite of all such precautions, all of their lives were at stake, although his entire family still trusted in the Führer’s generosity. He would not have left the country so precipitously, he explained, if it had not been for the fact that he was a wholesale practitioner of racial defilement. I also learned that there was a certain Nina. “What a babe, my dear friend!” She was from Cologne, and she represented the erotic apex of his entire life, the triumph of his metallic bedstead. Her father was dead, having twice fallen beneath an oncoming train. The first accident cost him a leg, the second his life. Her mother was still alive as the widow of a railroad-crossing attendant, still lifting and lowering the barrier and eking out a living with a few geese, a goat, and her daughter Nina. “What a woman, Herr Doktor! And she’s Catholic, and she’s taller than you are!”

It wasn’t at all clear why Mr. Silberstern had come to see me. Instead of tossing him out of our house, I led him to my study. To this very day, as I sit here writing my account of this encounter with the lecher Silberstern, Beatrice won’t forgive me this huge mistake.

On many occasions I had already given practical advice and/or monetary help to Jews who fled to Mallorca, sometimes even offering them our last duro. They arrived in a state of confusion or intimidation, sometimes pressing their case obstinately — each one according to his or her personality, level of education, or financial wherewithal. One very prominent legal official from Berlin, arriving on the island with his hugely imposing wife and with a daughter right out of the Song of Solomon, gave me a detailed description of his situation. He had foreign bank accounts and personal connections in many lands — just the kind of life I was hoping eventually to lead myself. His plan was to stay on the island for a restful few months, and he asked me about the local German consul: what was that man’s attitude toward Jews? I quickly gave this Berlin judge the true scoop. This particular consul wasn’t of the kind who ate Jews for breakfast. His diplomatic rank had gone to his head, but otherwise he remained in fear of the Party and its snoopers. If he could help Jews in their attempts to emigrate, he would readily do so. But they mustn’t start railing against his Führer , as I myself had done openly. “Well yes,” the judge said, “no doubt your tirade went much too far. After all, we are speaking about Germany. This Führer is a historical accident.”