Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“What? Now I can have her back, now that she has the schmette ?” It was enough to make him start tearing his hair out. “And to think that I had her come all the way from Cologne!”

I recommended Professor Scheidegger in Basel. For 3000 francs he would admit her to his purification plant, though it might cost as much as 5000—it all depended on the number of bacilli that the Spaniard had infested her with. After six months she could be back on the job.

Silberstern’s reply to my matter-of-fact explanation consisted in two large tears. But he wasn’t shedding them for Nina. They would have been more effective with her mother.

“It’s the familiar emigration story,” I said. “Some get it in the neck, others in the behind. And it’s always aimed at your bank account.”

I wrote the Spanish señorito that he was harboring a dangerous Third Reich spy, an activity that could come to the attention of counter-spies. She would be killed in any case, and if her corpse were found in his bed…. Three days later a limousine stopped in front of our house: in it was Nina.

Nina was given a 3rd-class rail ticket back to the railroad crossing between Cologne and Neuss, plus a letter of recommendation for potential respectable employers — a document that, oddly enough, she insisted upon. Then she was off, back home to the Reich. But in the meantime her own Reich had expanded, and it began in Barcelona. Herr Silberstern escorted his squeeze, who for him was now hardly worth a sneeze, to the harbor. Always the cavalier. And who knew — she just might …

And now the mosaic of love again ran into the money, no matter how cheap each of the little stones was that Silberstern added to it. During this exciting epoch with Nina he had rid himself of affûtage by engaging in cash-free commerce.

A Mallorquin maiden with pigtail and rebocillo , and with bosom and legs swathed beneath seven protective layers of skirts and petticoats, moved into Silberstern’s apartment. Beatrice sounded a warning: that man had better not any get funny ideas, for otherwise some island gang would lynch him.

After three days the young lady took flight. But she refrained from denouncing her employer, since at my insistence she got her month’s wage in advance. So once again, disaster was avoided. But for how much longer?

Not much longer, as it turned out. For this was not life as Silberstern wanted to live it. “In Germany…” Over and over again I had to hammer it into this emigrant’s skull that he wasn’t living in Germany, and that even if he was experiencing a certain degree of erotic deprivation, he should consider that co-religionists of his were being crowded into concentrations camps, sans women and soon enough sans life itself.

The Bible came up with the idea that it isn’t good for a man to stay alone; he should have a fitting helpmate. But the Bible doesn’t offer an answer to the question of which helpmate would be fitting for an Adelfried Silberstern. And that’s why Vigoleis had to do all that was humanly possible to close this gap. Indeed, whose rib would bring forth the right woman to grace this Adam’s brass bedstead, above which hung the photos of all the females who had played a direct role in this piece of erotic furniture? There were about fifty of them — fifty stellar hours in the life of Herr Silberstern.

I vowed to myself that I would let my sun’s rays shine upon this wretched client until vengeance was mine. One day I asked him to figure out whether it wouldn’t be cheaper to get married than to hire both a housemaid and cathouse whores, quite apart from the moral advantages of having a stable household — a household, a German home in the barren diaspora! German domestic warmth! German Gemütlichkeit ! And who but himself, I added, would have the wherewithal, intellectual and material, to create a model household in this foreign country, while back in Germany the households were fast becoming incubators of racist madness? Let the choice of a partner for you be my concern, I said, for my conscience tells me that I should make up for giving you such bad advice in connection with Nina. In any case, Nina was probably too close a neighbor of my own from the Lower Rhenish hinterlands.

I composed a personal ad, which produced an outcome different from what the suitor was imagining. He was looking for a housemaid, “later marriage not excluded”—which is to say, the kind of arrangement that the Dutch newspaper ads qualify with the phrase met gebruik van mijnheer , though of course it’s vice-versa—“dowry desirable but not obligatory.” The ad appeared in the largest newspapers of the Third Reich. The reactions were astounding. Even Silberstern was struck dumb by the realization that so many women wished to escape certain death. Jewish descent was one of the stipulations I mentioned in the ad. Yet Silberstern’s reaction focused on his own vanity: so many women wanted to share his bed!

While sorting out the replies, it occurred to me that there were countless beautiful Jewesses in Germany — perhaps not beautiful to look at, but beautiful in the way they described their lot in the letters they wrote. Herr Silberstern wanted, he had to have , the most beautiful of them all, for after all, who would be paying the freight? Because he would be paying the freight, he would reject any beautiful woman who would soon enough leave him for another man. This had the effect of excluding any and all Ninas, plus any non-Ninas whose lives were not directly threatened, and it eventually came down to just one. And this one was a lady — but not in the sense of Adelfried’s way of dealing with “ladies.”

This case, one in a thousand, affected me most deeply. The woman in question, who in all innocence was applying to sweep floors for the anonymous suitor, was the widow of a well-known Berlin banker. Shortly after the Nazi takeover, he strung himself up on his bedroom window frame. His estate was confiscated. Their son — an only child, as I recall — was in a sanatorium. Her letter was brief: she would take on any job, and she had no money for transportation.

Herr Silberstern said that while she was not exactly a beauté , and while her age somewhat exceeded his needs, she apparently came from the loftiest social circles in Berlin, which included Rathenau and, no doubt, Kessler too. He asked me to get information from the Count immediately. He also inquired whether I thought she would sleep with him, although he did think it best if he asked the lady directly since she kept such exclusive company. My response was based on my readings concerning such social circles: without question, gentlemen were in the habit of sleeping with ladies if the gentlemen were perfect gentlemen and the ladies perfect ladies — unless, of course, they just couldn’t stand each other. In the present case, I said, there should be no cause for concern — on the contrary. But first of all, this perfect lady had to be liberated from those finest Berlin social circles.

She came. She was short, thin, haggard, and dressed in clothes that seemed to indicate her decline from the mistress of a Berlin-Grunewald palace to the lowly domestic who would polish shoes for a miser — but woe to her if she put the shoe cream on too thick! Like Nina before her, we got to meet this first lady of Berlin high finance right after she stepped off the ship. Silberstern was in the best of moods. He folded his hands on his belly and twiddled his thumbs, proud as a peacock. Having come up short as a wine merchant, he had finally found the woman who would be subject to him and who, within 12 or 13 short hours, would literally lie beneath him in his bed of brass. Berlin high finance! Where Kaisers came and went!