Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

The two of us went at each other tooth and nail, and parted as enemies. From the top of our stairs, I shouted down to this Berlin judge that he should use his money to get on to Brazil; all of his people were bound for extinction one after the other, and those with cash would be hounded out like pigs for the slaughter. A few days later I met the judge’s wife in the German Shop. She begged my pardon for her husband’s unseemly response to my frank explanations. The fact was, she said, that her husband was terribly nostalgic for Germany. He couldn’t live without Germany; most of all he wanted to go back to Germany, to Berlin. A month later I received a letter from her with a fictitious return address: the judge was in a concentration camp.

Be that as it may, the misery of the German Jews had never before brought us in personal contact with the likes of this charlatan brother of the Privy Councillor from Würzburg. He enshrouded me with a tangled web of chatter, mainly concerning the finest specimens of naked German women, among whom none could compare with his favorite Nina, who was educated and as dark-skinned as a Jewess, but completely Aryan and Catholic. She was a dancer, and a model at Cologne’s most fashionable Hohe Strasse department store. And because she looked so Jewish, she was fired from the store and even threatened with stoning. “Can you imagine that, Herr Doktor? In Cologne, where every year people celebrate Carnival?”

“Carnival? In 1928 I was an eyewitness in Cologne when Katz Rosenthal (or was it Rosenstein?) had his hot-dog stand demolished because a customer found a mouse in his meal, a mouse that a certain journalism student at the university, a friend of mine, had secreted into the menu. As a result, my friend Dr. Ley spent half a year in jail. But if I have understood you correctly, Mr. Silbersteg, you’re visiting me because of a certain Nina from Cologne?”

“Stern, please! Silberstern.”

“Fine, Silberstern. But I’m sorry. I lived in Cologne for quite a few years, but — Nina? But now wait a minute — you’re quite right, I must know her. A tall swarthy type, looks like a Jewess, quite a babe? And wasn’t her father a high mucky-muck in the Reich Railway?”

“Please, Herr Doktor, it’s not because of Nina that I’ve come to see you. The reason why I’ve come has to do with a very urgent matter. It has to do with my pooks. And her mother told her: Nina, this Mr. Silberstern, he’s such a fine gentleman, he’s so educated, he’s from the best of families…”

“Ah, I see. You have come here at the suggestion of your prospective mother-in-law, a woman whom I also don’t know personally. But tell me now, isn’t she likewise a rather full-bodied, imposing personage? But of course, her husband was a gravedigger in Cologne-Poll by the name of Firnich! Am I right? You’re speaking of Mrs. Firnich!”

“You’re not listening to me. I’ll tell you once more: I’ve come on account of my pooks, and we drove in my own car down through all of Germany. Thousands of kilometers with Nina always at the wheel, and we spent our nights only in the finest hotels. But just think, Herr Doktor, she never let me really have her, that’s how proper she was, not the kind that puts out for just anybody, and then Nina said when we were in…”

“I understand, Mr. Silberstern. You’ve come to see me because somebody somewhere doesn’t let somebody have her, and so now I’m supposed to…”

“You’re making a joke out of it, but I’m deadly serious about my pooks. You’ve got to help me! You’re a writer, and you’re an Aryan!”

He was seeking me out on account of his books. Apparently it was an urgent matter. But my manuscript was also urgent. I had reached the passage where the manager of the municipal de-braining department has placed an awl up against the Lord Mayor’s occiput and is already banging away with a mallet, causing the Lord Mayor’s grey matter to spill out into the official Municipal Bucket. A little kid asks his mother, “Mom, what’s that awful man doing with his hammer? He’s going to bash in the Mayor’s head!” “No, no,” his Mom answers, “he’s just letting the mayor’s brains drain out of his head.” Whereupon the kid asks the childlike question, “And what about you, Mom? Do you have brains, too? And is he going to bash you too?” Before Mom can reply that the Führer does all her thinking for her, the Lord Mayor has already been politically coordinated, and a sprig of mistletoe is placed inside his wound. He leaves the scene amid the thunderous applause of the masses. Feeling the urgent call of nature, he goes behind a tree, where he thinks no one can see him. He lifts his hand to the back of his head, and… it’s gone! Where his cerebrum had been, there is now a Hitlerian void. Ach, mein Führer!

“But I beg you! You’re not paying attention to me. Repeat what I just said!”

I cringed as if caught in some naughty act, and almost stammered, “Oh, sorry, Mr. Stern. Actually I was listening very intently. I’m crushed by what you’ve been through. Nina has stolen your books, and you want me to find you a Spanish lawyer. That I can do. I’ll write a few words to a state prosecutor I know, and everything will turn out just fine.”

The words poured out of me like an avalanche, but behind me I sensed new danger approaching: Beatrice. If she were to come now and catch sight of the newest star in my little cosmology, a comet sporting a ghostly Nina in its tail, and if he were then to say, “Good day, Madam, I am Mr. Silberstern from wherever, and with this and that, and for whatever…,” and if at the same moment his Amazon friend were to show up — there would be hell to pay!

“Mr. Silberstern, your case is urgent, but mine is, too.”

“Then come with me right away. We must set an example.”

As I put on my alpargatas , Silberstern took off his hat and, at a record pace, told me the life history of this head-covering, where he got it, how he haggled down the retail price, all the places where he had forgotten it, how often somebody took it by mistake, how it once got stolen but was recovered with the help of his brother Muthelm Silberstern, attorney in Frankfurt, married, three children, divorced, Juris Doctor—“and also, get this, a Doctor of Philosophy!”

I let him lead the way. As we walked, I was told in passing what he wanted my help for. His main topic was the love lives of the famous conductor Furtwängler and the famous surgeon Sauerbruch, both of whom had entrusted to him the management of their wine cellars.

Four crates of Silberstern’s books, I learned, were sitting in the customs warehouse, branded as prohibited literature and hence confiscated. Through all of his torrent of words concerning women who did and women who wouldn’t, I probably picked up the term “prohibited,” thus got sidetracked from my manuscript. For I am not so cowardly as to give full attention to everything any crack-brain has to say to me.

But how did a lecherous, completely sex-crazed wine merchant like this Adelfried ever get hold of politically suspect literature? But of course, it must be those brothers of his! He’s working for them. Together they intend to unseat the Führer and establish Jewish world domination, with the Island of Mallorca as its capital. But the customs administrator is sharp enough to nip this plan in the bud. I told my companion that we would soon take care of the whole matter. I was, after all, Professor d’Ester’s assistant, I was Professor Wohlers’ left- and right-hand man, so I knew my way around such things. What’s more, I was a consultant to the Honduran Freedom Movement under Don Patuco. Silberstern already knew about this connection; my reputation had preceded me. The German Bookshop, he explained, had passed on certain personal data, but was I aware, he asked, that Furtwängler did not sleep with the soprano Marietta Kefer-Froitzheim? “I’m telling you he did not sleep with her, and this was the greatest shock to the German musical world since the war, because that Ninth of his in Würzburg…!”