Cesare Read online

  He had his own quarters in the first pavilion, given to him by the commandant, but he carried her up the steps to that little hospital ward in the attic. She dismissed Joachim’s adjutant, the male nurse, and she lay down with Erik on her own rumpled bed. They didn’t even bother to undress. They fumbled with each other in their clothes, like vagabonds. And when he tried to unbutton her, she clutched at his hands.

  “I haven’t washed,” she said. “You’ll have to ravish me with my clothes on.”

  And Erik wore that same mournful face. He didn’t know what to do. He wouldn’t tie her arms to the bed, as he had done at the Adlon and on the Dragonerstrasse, to inflict his own pain on her, to wound her the way she had once wounded him. He moved in her with a kind of soft dream. He did not want to wake. And he whimpered in his dream with Lisa, worried she wouldn’t be there.

  She wasn’t beside him when he woke. He panicked until he saw her shoes near the bed and heard the faucets running. Lisa was taking a bath somewhere within the battlements. But the sound of running water reverberated across the pavilion’s many walls, and Erik couldn’t even tell where it was coming from.

  He wandered in and out of alcoves, expecting some Mad Hatter to leap at him from a wall. He went down a staircase to an alcove between two floors and discovered a bathroom with its own little flight of stairs. Lisa was inside. She had turned the faucets off, but was humming a childish tune she must have picked up from her nanny in the Grunewald. It was about a wild boar and a girl with golden hair. The boar devours the girl but is driven to madness by the memory of her hair and leaps off a ravine.

  Erik was riveted to Lisa’s lament. He opened the door. Lisa was drying herself with an enormous towel. But she hadn’t folded herself into the towel yet. The sunlight streamed onto her from a dormer window until she was ablaze. She wasn’t a witch. All that burning light had come from the bluish marks on her body—she was scarred from her shoulders to her thighs.

  She caught him looking at her. She didn’t bury herself in the towel, or scream at Erik. She stood there.

  It wasn’t pity he felt. The markings on her limbs were beautiful. He longed to kiss every scar. The Nazis didn’t know how to destroy Lisalein. They were like children bent on mischief, but the more damage they did, the grayer these Dreckshunde grew. Joachim could break her bones. But he couldn’t catch her. And what about Erik? Would he catch Lisalein before Paradise shrank within its own walls?

  Erik sang out his love. But he sounded like one of the wounded clarinets of Theresienstadt. So he shut his mouth. And he made love to Lisalein on her enormous towel, under the battlements, his uniform piled like a little mountain of laundry, with his boots on top. He kissed as many of her scars as he could, while Lisa examined his own markings, all the punctures and scratches of an Abwehr man. She’d never seen him naked in such streaming light. It astounded her.

  “Erik,” she whispered, “it’s like an illustrated map of war.”

  “I was careless,” he said.

  “A careless man wouldn’t have come to Bohemia to visit his fiancée—this is a charnel house. Even the Nazis are corpses here.”

  “But the settlers tell me how you fight off every guard to feed the children.”

  “No one settles at Theresienstadt. We’re dead souls in transit. Except for Mackie Messer. Greed keeps him alive.”

  “And what if I’m greedy for you?”

  “Then you’ll rouse the dead Lisa with your kisses … and she’ll start to cry. It’s much too painful to be alive.”

  “And if I devote myself to you, kiss every blue bump on your body?”

  “Ah,” she said, “I might change my mind.”

  And she snuggled next to one of his knife wounds, the light burning a halo into her hair.

  The Baroness of Theresienstadt

  31

  DEAD LISA WAS MORE AND MORE ALIVE. She had to wake the ghetto before the Red Cross got here and the ghetto ran out of time. The Red Cross would lull the Jews into believing that each man, woman, and child was safe within the walls. Hitler had become their dark angel. That’s what infuriated Lisa. They had joined the conspiracy of their own ruin; they were wanderers in a land of wind and lice, trying to persevere until the Red Cross waved a magic wand. The most gullible of them all were the Prominenten—scientists, opera singers, millionaires, and members of the Jewish royal caste.

  Such Prominenten looked with great scorn at the Jews in their crowded barracks, considered themselves a breed apart, and wondered why they were at Theresienstadt. The SS had promised to send them to the island of Madagascar, where they would have their very own colony of Prominenten like themselves, without lice-laden Jews. All they had to do was sing the camp’s praises to the Red Cross, tra-la-la!

  Madagascar was another myth. There was no such resettlement colony. In fact, she’d learned from the commandant himself that it was a code name for Auschwitz. One night, all these notables would be put on a train to Madagascar. And so Lisa pitied them, even with their haughtiness. They had no one but Lisa to look after them, to barter on the black market for an extra blanket, to find the cough medicine that Countess X needed, or to delouse another countess’s lice-laden shawl.

  The shrewdest among them had found work in the ghetto, had ventured out of their tiny asylum, had wrapped bandages, or helped children learn to draw, or read books to the dying. The others just vegetated in their vast illusions, sat in clothes that would never have been washed without Lisa’s care, convinced that the Kaiser’s former guardsmen would free them from this city of Jews. Yet they also had a kind of cruel comprehension of the camp. They weren’t utterly ignorant of what went on outside the walls of their little crumbling “palace” that had once been a poorhouse.

  “Baroness, have you gone riding with the commandant?”

  They meant to wound her with that remark, to imply that she was Joachim’s whore, that she might have been stuck here with them had it not been for the commandant. But she didn’t answer with any malice.

  “It’s difficult for me to mount even the gentlest mare. And I have little time to ride.”

  “What a pity,” said Countess X, pursing her lips. “I hear he calls his own white Arabian ‘Lisalein.’ Surely that should give you some influence.”

  “None at all,” said Lisa, relishing her own little lie. “But he’s determined to ride me one way or another.”

  All the countesses began to titter, and Lisa decided to make one last appeal.

  “Comrades, you must confide in the commissioners when they come. They will listen to you. You must reveal the fault lines in Hitler’s Paradise, every lie.”

  “And ruin our chances with the Red Cross,” hissed Countess Y. There was such venom on their faces that Lisa left this poorhouse of a palace. She still had to think of their soiled clothes, and whom she would have to bribe to put the countesses’ “trousseaus” high up on the laundry list, or nothing would get washed for another three months.

  Bribery and fear were the language of Theresienstadt, and both were often intertwined. The SS lived in their own strange hierarchy. They had their compounds, their clubs. But they couldn’t repair a toilet or bake a loaf of bread. The chief baker was the real king of Theresienstadt. Husbands threw their wives at the baker for an extra portion of bread. Children clung to him. He had his little army of sycophants. He didn’t sleep in any barrack. He kept three rooms on the top floor of the old garrison bakery near the ramparts. He had his own transportation—not a motorbike, like the SS, or a white Arabian, like the commandant, or even a hearse pulled by old men, but a dogcart with a team of German shepherds, given to him by the SS garrison at the Little Fortress.

  The SS were beholden to him. He supplied the commandant and his men with a tub of ersatz tapioca pudding that was much tastier than any pudding they might have happened upon in the depleted shops of Prague. He wanted to show them what the chief of all the cooks at Theresienstadt was worth.

  He was waiting with his dogcart the moment Lisa
left the countesses. He feared Lisa much more than he ever did the commandant, who wouldn’t have dared put his baker on a transport to Poland. But the baroness was much more fickle. She was always demanding little cakes from him, not for herself, but for orphans and the living dead in the tuberculosis ward. If he failed her, she might whisper in the commandant’s ear, and God knows what she might say. He could land in a cattle car going east, and all the pudding in the world wouldn’t save him.

  No wonder half the women in their little Paradise called her Frau Kommandant. Who could describe the madness that went on between her and Colonel Joachim? So the chief of all the cooks was careful with her.

  “Baroness,” he said, after clucking at his dogs, “where might I take you, please?”

  “To Hell,” she told him.

  “Ah,” he said, because he had a touch of fickleness in him, too. “Then we might as well close our eyes and just stand still.”

  “What have you to complain about? You won’t find another heaven like Theresienstadt. You were a grubby baker’s assistant before you came here—you worm, why have you put the whole children’s barracks on such short rations? And your bakers steal bread from the mouths of old men.”

  Suddenly, he was shivering, and the dogs could sense his apprehension; they began to howl and bark at the wind.

  “Who has slandered me, Baroness, who? I don’t steal from children or the old.”

  “Then why do I see them almost delirious with hunger, while your lackeys deliver bread everywhere in their hearses?”

  “I’ll punish every crime,” he muttered. “Whoever’s been hoarding, I’ll break his neck.”

  And Lisa climbed aboard the cart with the help of her cane. “The Blindenheim,” she shouted into the wind; the dogs kept barking, and the dust swirled all around them on the unpaved roads of Paradise until Lisa was in her own blinding storm. She preferred it that way. She wouldn’t have to look inside the barracks and see six or seven thousand souls crammed into a space where several hundred soldiers had once lived—half-starved men or women packed like pale sardines from the rafters to the cellars down below. But it was wicked of her to consider sardines in a camp where men would have killed for one or two precious tins from Portugal. Sardines, sardines.

  The dust storm lifted and she could see the town’s Jewish carpenters dismantling the old numbered signs of the ghetto’s nameless streets and putting up the new street signs—Lange Strasse, Rathhausgasse, Turmgasse—of the Nazi’s fictional health spa for Jewish heroes and rich retirees, and then there was that ultimate lie, as the SS rechristened the ghetto with still larger signs that read THERESIENBAD, as if they had created a new Marienbad in the dusty sun.

  There were no miraculous springs, no luxurious hotels, no five-star meals; this health spa was nothing but a cvokárna, as the Czech inmates called Theresienstadt in ghetto slang, a nuthouse where the real lunatics were the SS, and the Jews had to battle with all their might to preserve the least sense of sanity.

  She caught a squad of old men wandering in the street. The old men had been scavenging garbage barrels for potato peels and lost their way. She had them hold on to the dogcart and led them back to their barrack. But she could hear their stomachs growl, and she had the baker stop at his own compound and give them each a slice of bread.

  “Baroness,” the baker rasped, “you spoil these old men. They put on a big act in front of you, and they know you’ll feed them. It’s just cabaret.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And will it also be cabaret when I ask the elders to revoke your license, and you become another beggar at Theresienstadt?”

  The baker kept quiet. He drove the baroness to the little ragged fort on Badhausgasse where the blind lived and then disappeared into his own swirl of dust. She’d come to visit the blind women who worked in the mica factory. It was a grueling but delicate ordeal. Mica was one of the Nazis’ “war” minerals used as an electrical insulator at Hermann Göring’s aircraft factories. But it came in flat sheets that had to be cut into the thinnest-possible portions. This cutting needed a woman’s fine hands. Any man, even a surgeon, couldn’t manipulate the mica worker’s blunt knife; he’d press too hard, and the sheet would shatter. And so a small band of women were locked inside the cutting room with their knives. But the mica sheets gave off such a wicked glare that the women’s eyes would begin to bleed after a few hours. Thus, the SS scoured the barracks for blind women who wouldn’t suffer from migraines while they were at the bench.

  But even blind women weren’t immune to the glare. Their eyes also bled. So Lisa had come to visit the Blindenheim’s three blind mica workers. She had a lotion for the blind women that the doctors had given her. She also fed them pudding from the commandant’s own supply. And she read to them. These women weren’t as snobbish as the countesses, though they were far more valuable to the camp’s economy, and, for the moment at least, were safe from the transports. Colonel Joachim would never have allowed them onto a cattle car.

  And the blind women loved to clutch Lisa’s hands while she read to them from a strange Czech author who wrote in a macabre and brutally simple German about a hunger artist, a man who lived in a cage and starved himself for spectators.

  “Baroness,” the blind women said, “he should have joined us at this camp.” But it was a cruel joke, since the author’s own sister, Ottilie Kafka, had once been a settler here; she’d left on a transport of ragged, frightened, barefoot boys from Bialystock with fifty other nurses, and none of them ever came back, neither the nurses nor the barefoot boys.

  The blind women hadn’t meant to be cruel, and when they recalled Ottilie, who had been so gentle with them, they began to cry. Ottillie had disappeared before Lisa’s time at the camp. But she couldn’t stop thinking of Kafka’s sad tale about Gregor Samsa and his sister, Grete. Gregor could have been at Theresienstadt. He lived in a world of bedbugs, like the settlers, who were overrun with bugs once the lights went out. One morning, Gregor himself is transformed into a monstrous bug. It’s Grete who feeds him and cleans his room. It’s Grete who keeps him alive, and it’s Grete who finally abandons him.

  Lisa had always seen herself as another Grete, who had abandoned everyone—a father who had loved her a little too much, blond submariners who had depended on her every whim—until she was a monstrous creature with her own carapace. She, too, had landed in a world of bedbugs. And she belonged here.…

  Ännchen and the Frau Kommandant

  32

  LISA LEFT THE Blindenheim AND LIMPED ALONG PARKSTRASSE, ablaze with a bed of roses planted by Jewish gardeners to beguile the Red Cross. Every maneuver was done with the Red Cross in mind, every twist, every turn.

  She arrived at Magdeburg Barracks, the camp’s own administration building. The entire ghetto was run from this building. It was where the council of elders convened and where the tailors had their workshop. These men made and repaired uniforms for the Gestapo and the SS; they stitched with a kind of golden thread. There was a wild, irrational demand for their services. They had twenty apprentices and helpers in their workshop. And such was the brutal irony of ghetto life that their former bosses, the dethroned manufacturers of Hamburg and Berlin, couldn’t have survived without attaching themselves to these tailors, the new princes of Theresienstadt.

  Bankers and other millionaires had become beggars at the camp. The cleverest ones had joined the administration as clerks, while the rest were “mules” who swept the streets or were hitched to hearses—the trolley cars of this ghetto—carting corpses and loaves of bread, dirty laundry, barrels of potatoes, or exhausted and starving widows who wanted to attend lectures at the other end of town.

  Magdeburg was also the headquarters of the camp’s Jewish police force, hooligans from Prague or young Berliners in jackboots and ridiculous top hats tied with yellow ribbons. They carried cudgels, like the SS, and went after “rat packs” of children who stole from the living and the dead. Their own mothers had taught these children to steal. They had the for
ce of logic behind them. If the SS stole from the Jews, why shouldn’t the Jews steal from themselves?

  Yet the council of elders couldn’t tolerate such open plunder, and the little thieves were cudgeled and kept in jail until they went before the children’s tribunal, which was held in an ornate room of the barracks that served as a courthouse. The children stood before a judge, often one of the elders, while another elder recited a litany of charges, prepared by some clerk. Lisa loved to attend such “recitals,” since they exposed all the contradictions of the camp. Children, wild or not, had become the saviors of most families, since they were far more clever and adept at stealing food than adults. Men, women, and children all lived in separate barracks. But it was the children who often kept their fathers alive, smuggling food into the barracks, or meeting their mothers near the ramparts.

  The tribunal was full today. The elders had to clear the streets before the young thieves poisoned the atmosphere and ruined things for the Red Cross. Lisa counted thirty children in the prisoners’ dock as she entered the tribunal, all of them looking bewildered and worn. There was a murmur among the elders and the clerks of the court. She had become an avenging angel with that limp of hers, and they were wary of the Frau Kommandant. The elders and their clerks had to prepare the list of all those who were to be sent east on the transports—a thousand names for each transport, often more. It was a shattering task, trying to save some and offering up others to the SS. They had their “exemptions,” and so did the commandant, who didn’t want to lose his tailor or his stable boys. The transport quotas came down from Berlin, and the commandant had to comply. But the Frau Kommandant complicated things. She would protect every child on a transport. The elders worked like dogs with the ghetto police, trying to console those who were selected—often a husband would volunteer to accompany his wife to Madagascar—and carrying the torches that lit the way to the little railroad outside the gate.