Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“ Summum jus , Herr Silberstern, summa iniuria . The adage wasn’t written by St. Augustine, but one could easily ascribe it to him, unless he is in fact the originator. It contains all that I know about legal matters. In your case, what the judge is interested in is your head and your money, which will fall into his lap when your head rolls. And since here on the island your head can at best fall into some puta ’s lap, the judge will grab your money with the alacrity that is common to the mindless profession of the law. As for your Aryan attorney, he will not run the gauntlet for you unless you grant him as a fee your entire fortune, now frozen in banks in the Reich. You can cross out your brother with his two doctorates — he’s due for hanging; his Aryan first name will give him away. The Privy Councilor, too, will end up on the gallows. All of you Silbersterns will have had it, together with your fortunes, which you yourself have admitted amount to several million marks. You keep trusting in legal codes and codicils, when you really ought to be trusting in your money. The court of last resort may still let you have everything back, but only if you’re willing to do it the Jesuit way. For once, you should take a lesson from the Catholic Church. You’ll get your money only by spending money.”

Silberstern was sitting on a crate in our apartment, breathing heavily. Instead of twirling his thumbs, he now began twirling his greedy eyes. Words such as “money” and “ puta ” formed the core of his lilliputian vocabulary. Now he would have to pay attention. What’s this would-be poet saying, anyway? A guy who can’t even negotiate his own fee for legal counsel? Writers are stupid when they write what they write. “Take dictation!”

The documents kept piling up. Silberstern was in his element; he dictated for hours at a time. In order not to let Kessler’s memoirs suffer, I had to stay up late at night, and did it willingly. I recuperated from the day’s labor by typing out the Count’s life history. After that, a few more pages of my Tombs of the Huns, although more than once, at the crack of dawn, Beatrice found me lying in a decidedly unheroic tomb of my own — fallen asleep over my manuscript.

Weeks went past on the island — maybe it was months. Then came the great moment when Silberstern was asked to formulate and notarize a declaration to be forwarded to the highest authorities in the Reich. His Aryan attorney informed him that the matter would proceed swiftly. Now it was va banque with Silberstern’s pieces of silver.

I wouldn’t have minded at all if this blockhead, this pretentious miser with a soul of corruption, were to lose all his usurious gains. But I didn’t want the Nazis to get hold of them. So I started fighting with all the zeal I could muster for good or ill in another man’s name. I presented him with an equation similar to the one I used in the case of Zwingli’s godmother. The Többen coefficient remained the same, but this time I altered the larger unknown. Outlining my theory, I hammered away at the man with a “star” in his name, but he remained adamant. “The Reich is the Reich, and justice is justice!” “ Porra !” “Don’t you meddle in my personal affairs! Take dictation!” “All right — bye-bye, ye starry millions!”

I handed over the neatly typed documents to my boss. With beads of sweat on his brow he studied them carefully, signed them, and sauntered off to the post office. There’s no helping a guy whose head is as fat as his ass.

It was already past midnight. The moon wandered slowly through the park of the beautiful daughters. The wind was rustling in the coconut palms, the field mice were out hunting, their piercing squeal sounding much like the bats that were coursing through the sultry air. In addition, the girls’ monthly flags were swinging like little ghosts on the clothes line — a captivating memento quia pulvis es on this night of a million stars.

Beatrice lay sleeping next to me on the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung . She is an early bird, whereas I am a night owl. With the aid of two of my inventions I had made my typewriter almost soundless. Wet cloths damped what little of the tapping noise was still to be heard, while serving also as a coolant. Nothing disturbed my lover’s sleep as I wrote down Kessler’s past life and Vigoleis’ future, which was still dormant in the Hunnish tombs near the banks of the Niers.

The mayor had just unveiled the “Tomb of the Unknown Brain” in the name of the Führer . Councilmen laid wreaths, the crowds shouted, the air was alive with the patriotic bloodthirst of the repressed Huns, and now the mayor yelled to his flock, “Germans! You now no longer have to think and write poetry! For this you must thank your Führer , who now will think and write for you in a way that no human brain has ever thought possible to think and write, not even our former nation of poets and…”—“thinkers” was the word he was looking for, but instead I heard a dull thump at our apartment door. I was startled, but unsure whether that was because of what I had just written, or the noisy interruption from outside.

Was it some drunks? Spaniards don’t get drunk — with the exception of our sereno , who instead of guarding our house was at this moment squatting in some tavern on Atarazanas Square. Was it Nazi murderers? Those guys sneak around in their stocking feet, and in Spain they’ve been working most recently with chloroform and abductions. Was it the old lady upstairs? She has varicose veins, and sometimes she slips on the stairs and falls against our door. If it’s her, I’ll take her back up under the roof. But she’s not in the habit of nosing around in the nighttime. I figured it was the Huns who did the thumping, and so I just went on typing. Whoever conjures up ghosts must not recoil in their presence, even if they are poor old ghosts that have trouble moving.

The second thump was very much of this world, and had nothing whatever to do with my manuscript. I went to the door and undid the lock.

There came rolling into the apartment a man’s hat, whose price, quality, and circumstances of purchase were well known to me. Then came a flurry of letters, forms, and neatly typed documents — these items, too, familiar to me in every detail. Then Herr Silberstern lifted himself up from his second fall and staggered into the hall. I took a quick look down the stairwell, but heard and saw nothing. My first thought was: members of the German National Work Brigade were after the Jew. They intend to make him perish. He doesn’t want to perish, and so he’s come running to his legal advisor to dictate a letter of protest. I locked the door behind him.

Silberstern began a big harangue, his own kind of harangue, which was gibberish. It cost me a whole chapter of my novel, but it cost the Nazis the Jew’s entire fortune.

Adelfried had not sent the documents to his attorney. My suspicions and my allusions to the Jesuits had addled his toad-like brain: “Suppose he’s right, this pathetic poetizer who can’t even afford to buy a bed? What if what he’s telling me is true, that Germany has ceased to be a country governed by laws? It’s a little strange that my Aryan lawyer signs all his letters to me, a Jew, with ‘ Heil Hitler !’ And are they really going to hang my Aryan lawyer for sending a Jew’s money abroad?”

At the very same hour when the Ciudad de Palma was plowing its way through the leaden swells of the Mare nostrum , carrying in its postal sack the useless load of his undispatched legal documents, our litigant was swimming in the arms of a personage charging 2.50 pesetas, from which he was able to knock off half a peseta using sweaty sign language. Having completed this double transaction, the brother of Privy Councilor Silberstern betook himself to the door of his legal advisor, who he knew would still be pounding away at his typewriter. He slipped and fell on the stairway but then, raising a finger and still trembling at the thought, he let me know that she would have done it for 1.50 if only he had been able to say a few words of broken Spanish. “How would you have handled the situation?”