Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“Which situation? The babe or the Third Reich?”

“Don’t make jokes! My fortune is at stake!”

Once again I expounded my economic theory, this time making it culminate in my general theory of private ownership. My recent coup in the Basel money market lifted my prestige, all the more since my new client knew the lady personally. But he added that I had badly underestimated the size of her bank account. Moving on, I mentioned that Count Kessler was likewise suing the Third Reich, that I was typing up his private documents, too, and that if Mr. Silberstern was willing to stick with me, he’d be on the right side of the law. This news had the effect of increasing my prestige still further, for although Silberstern didn’t know the Count personally, he was on intimate terms with the Count’s wine provisioner. He could name all the vintages that got poured at the Cranach Street residence in Weimar, whenever the intellectual elite of the world gathered there.

I asked my client to return the next day at 12 o’clock sharp, knowing that he would be here at half-past ten with the punctuality of all gossips. He arrived at half-past ten, and we discussed his urgent quarrel with the Reich. At the stroke of twelve a letter to his attorney was finished, telling him that as per a letter to be dispatched with the same post, the entire affair would be turned over to the Spanish National Bank in Madrid, allowing everything to be handled automatically, within the framework of German foreign-trade arrangements. We would await directives from Madrid, and had every intention of following them to the letter. Meanwhile we would also personally notify Dr. Köcher, the German Consul General in Barcelona.

It was a gigantic bluff. I figured that Silberstern’s attorney, whose head was on the line, would fall for it — and he did. This gave me time actually to alert the National Bank in Madrid, and there, too my hunches proved correct. While hundreds of people were being murdered every day in his concentration camps, when dealing with foreign countries the Führer had to be careful to don the accepted white shirt of the diplomat instead of his normal brown attire. Cardinals, hundred-meter sprinters, shipowners, opera singers, six-day cycle racers, magnates: all such leading personalities would get to see only the gleam of white. This charade placated people’s consciences. Foreign trade flourished as never before, and the world bowed down before the image of the Lord of the German Nation. And Silberstern, such was my thinking, ought to have his little profit from it.

His attorney in Frankfurt was now sitting between two stools. He sent expensive telegrams, which his client in Spain of course had to pay for. His Dr.Dr. brother had long since been silenced, his Privy Councilor title long since vaporized. Adelfried again got the jitters, and I heard myself saying, “Don’t give up! A Vigoleis can always find a way! Take dictation!”

For the first time in his life Herr Silberstern wrote down a text that was dictated to him. That is to say, it was still Vigoleis, but in this case he dictated a text to himself. Stern — beg your pardon, Silberstern — signed with a clammy hand. Va banque .

Some months later the Banco Nacional de Madrid informed Señor Don Alfredo Silberstern, Palma de Mallorca, Calle Cecilio Metello, that the Accounting Office of the Head Supervisor of the German Overseas Currency Management in Berlin had remitted the sum of…, in writing…, and that they awaited his further instructions.

Silberstern was now a millionaire — or more exactly, he had once again become a millionaire and, as such, a worthy member of the Silberstern clan with the Aryan first names. And I, Vigoleis, had once again demonstrated my prowess in dealing with millionaires. Who knew? Perhaps I was set to become the world’s most-wanted adversary of big capital, without ever having read a word of Marx! I shook my own hand, since Silberstern declined to do so. He took all the credit for himself — that, too, was a stellar trait of his. Vigoleis’ mission from now on was to remain in the service of this gentleman, who had just learned that justice could be justice after all. But I would no longer be his legal counsel. I would be his advisor in sexual affairs.

Silberstern detested me with a passion seldom encountered between human beings. It was my fault. If I had had the good sense, using the execrable mercantile German that twirled out of his thumbs, to present him with a bill — pardon, I mean a “debit notification”—for services rendered in the capacity of legal counsel in the case of Silberstern vs. Third Reich for fees outstanding amounting to the sum of 100,000 pesetas, he would have just rubbed his greedy hands, taken the envelope, and rapidly noted down how much below a 10 % profit-share I should receive. He promised me 10 % of the dowry if I would arrange a marriage for him with a rich marrana, one of the baptized Jewesses from Silversmith Street in Palma: not more than 30 and not less than 3 × 100,000 duros. Pedro and I actually took some steps in this cattle-trading maneuver. But General Franco was against it.

Here’s what my gut was telling me: surely Silberstern would be accommodating to the tune of 10,000 pesetas, or maybe with just a single peseta that he has wangled, centimo by centimo, out of some Pilar. “Vigoleis is such a dolt and a nincompoop,” he’ll be thinking, “that he’ll consider it an honor to be working for me. And anyway, he can still learn. For example, our assault against the Third Reich! I’d like to meet anybody else who could pull that off like Adelfried, brother of Brunfried, both of us from the city of Würzburg! The German colony was astounded when the news of our legal coup made the rounds.”

For two whole years Vigoleis served this master, the guy who was Aryan in front, non-Aryan behind, and in the middle the island’s biggest putafex . He served him at dawn and at dusk, when the constellation was at zenith and again when it was below the horizon; during hours when even the most miserable slut has her bed all to herself, and always at the expense of his own work. Worse yet, and incomprehensible, was the fact that all of this affected an aspect of his existence that could have aroused the interest of Professor Többen in Münster: Beatrice’s nerves. My reader, for whom cloven personalities may well be the most inscrutable subject in the world, may well be asking himself here the same question I have pondered over time and again: why has Vigoleis always let himself be flattened like a noodle? Effi Briest’s father, in Fontane’s novel of the same name, would say, “Hmm… that would take us far afield.” God has his emissaries everywhere, and He prefers to utilize simple creatures in order to point out certain forces within His Creation, although in the world’s labyrinth of obfuscations and exaggerations this can lead to all kinds of false deductions. Would it be so very odd if He used Vigoleis to prove that an Aryan with a 2000-year-old Hunnish pedigree could, despite the long series of temptations, humiliations, extortions, and insults visited upon him by a constellation named Silberstern, avoid making him into an anti-Semite, no matter how often his friends and acquaintances made bets among themselves that he would turn out to be one? One of the bons mots to be heard on the island was that this Jew would turn Vigoleis into a Jew-baiter. But he never turned into one, and the person who was most amazed at this was the despicable Jew himself.

But was it truly gratitude, even if in microscopic form as Vigoleis liked to call it, that impelled Silberstern to do what he did when I told him that we were expecting company? A famous married couple would be arriving on the island: the Mengelbergs from Amsterdam, Carel and Rahel. We wanted to put them up at our place for a few days, after which they intended to move on with their rucksacks and their no less famous brother-in-law, the writer Helman. “They don’t have a bed?” asked Silberstern. No, I told him, they don’t have any money. They fled from Germany, where Carel had an important job at the Berlin Radio. But he also had Rahel, and the Nazis didn’t like that. A woman could, of course, have the name Rahel and still be an Aryan, I went on, just as he was a Jew despite his Adelfried. But as he well knew, the Nazis were such nitpickers about such things. In any case, the three…