Cesare Read online

  Erik had a sudden bout of vertigo. He could feel himself topple over the battlement, but his fall never seemed to end. He had no magic in this camp, no means out of this dilemma. He was in harness again, an Abwehr agent on his very last mission. He couldn’t save the settlers, couldn’t save Lisalein, but he could let their hearts beat a little longer. He was like one of the clarinetists at Theresienstadt, tinkering with a broken toy … and that special jazz peculiar to Paradise. Tinkerers didn’t have much of a choice.

  Café Kavalir

  34

  LISA WOULD HAVE NO PART IN THE CHARADE. She wanted the settlers, children and adults alike, to scream their heads off at the Red Cross. But she was overruled by the council of elders. Such royal men didn’t want to see their Paradise ruined.

  “Mein Herren”—she had to shout, since they were a little deaf—“the Red Cross will go away in their white trucks and think the SS have built a spa for us, a retirement colony and a kindergarten, with a Jewish bank and its dream money, a Jewish police force that doesn’t even have the right to police itself.”

  And that’s when Bernhard Beck began to swagger like a rhinoceros and shove the elders out of the way. He was wearing a cummerbund and one gold earring, as Theresienstadt’s cabaret king.

  “And what is the alternative, Liebschen? If we squeal, the Danes will scribble a few notes in their reports. And they’ll dismiss us as the camp’s lunatics.”

  Lisa rose up on the handle of her cane to rip at Bernard’s fat cheek with her fingernails. “That’s for you, darling. You’ve become a banker with your fortune of kronen. You’d love to swindle the Red Cross.”

  Bernhard began to blubber like a child; he was performing for the settlers in his cummerbund. “She’s crazy. She’s the commandant’s concubine.”

  He was waiting for Erik to tap him on the head so he could gather sympathy from the elders. But Erik wouldn’t knock his brains out here, in front of the elders.

  Bernhard’s whole body began to sway. “The Red Cross doesn’t give a fart about us. Its monitors are already in Hitler’s pockets.”

  “All the more reason to lash out at them, to make them see who we are,” Lisa yelled. “We should revolt on the morning they arrive.”

  “Revolt with what?” asked one of the elders. “We have no rifles. The SS will slaughter our children.”

  They were sitting in the Café Kavalir on the south side of Marktplatz. The café was named after the Kavalir Barracks, where the old, the mad, and the infirm were stored; it was Theresienstadt’s own little insane asylum. There were children and young couples at the camp, but most of the settlers were in their seventies. The Nazis had promised them a health spa in Bohemia, where they could have their own bathhouses and villas; they’d paid thousands of reichsmarks for the privilege of reserving a spot at Theresienbad. Some had arrived with their chauffeurs and limousines, and were stripped of everything once they entered the gates. They lost their fortunes and their limousines in one stroke. Many had been millionaires; now they were paupers who had to live in a barrack. Half of them became zombies within a week and were locked inside the Kavalir Barracks. The other half managed not to lose their minds.

  Several of these former bankers and business tycoons now sat among the elders in their own new asylum, the Café Kavalir. The commandant of Prague had opened his storerooms to help “beautify” Theresienstadt and stock it with the normal supplies and goods of a Czech town. And so the Café Kavalir had the ersatz coffee and lumpy little cakes that could be found in the canteen at the SS clubhouse across Marktplatz. It had folding chairs and tables that had been manufactured in the settlers’ own workshops at Theresienstadt. It had an SS battle flag above the counter and a blackened mirror that turned everyone, Nazi or Jew, into a humpbacked demon.

  It was a mirror that appealed to Lisalein, who never tired of staring into it and staring right back at her own torn reflection.

  “Rifles aren’t everything,” she said. “We need to draw out these Danish diplomats with their Red Cross armbands. They have to see who and what we really are—settlers in Hell.”

  “No,” said Bernhard Beck, caressing the marks on his cheek. “No, no, no.”

  The elders sought out their Abwehr magician, who sat with them, drinking the same bitter coffee.

  “Kapitän, tell us what to do.”

  Erik also stared into that blackened mirror and smiled at his own humpbacked demon. He’d come to kidnap Bernhard Beck and free Lisalein from this infernal camp, but he couldn’t even accomplish that. Lisa wasn’t wrong. They had to signal something to the Red Cross, to reveal the rotten underbelly of this camp, and disown all the cosmetics—the fanciful kindergarten next to the town square, the schools that were suddenly legalized and encouraged, the brand-new clarinets presented to the camp’s musicians.…

  And what would it serve? If he wasn’t careful, those Nazi butchers would rend the population in two and close the camp, as Joachim had said. And that lunatic might even set the children on fire, as he had done to Lisalein.

  “We have no choice,” Erik told the elders. “We must fight for time. We’ll help them build their little crèche, we’ll perform for the Red Cross, and hope these Danish bureaucrats can see for themselves the little wounds in the web that the Nazis have woven around Theresienstadt.”

  They would have to be more accomplished actors than the SS. And yet he could tell from Lisa’s ravaged, raging eyes that he’d already lost her. He couldn’t go along with her gamble. He understood the ferocious points of the Nazis’ play. They had prettified Paradise, shrunk the population by sending some of the Czech settlers to the “Family Camp” at Auschwitz, where these former settlers could write postcards to their friends and relatives at Theresienstadt about their excellent accommodations, while Erik knew in his gut that everyone in that Family Camp would be murdered a week after the Red Cross landed in Bohemia and left. And still he had to stay quiet.

  He sat there with his SS coffee and SS kuchen, and looked out upon the manicured lawns of Marktplatz and the music pavilion that these murderers had built. The town was cluttered with madmen; they couldn’t all be warehoused in the Kavalir Barracks. The old women kept their wits, but the ancient millionaires wandered about, mumbling to themselves, and dropped in the narrow streets like flies; children carted them in wheelbarrows to the little morgue outside the walls. This traffic was constant, but the child thieves were cautious around the SS and seldom stole a pocket watch or a pair of shoelaces. It was the SS guards inside the crematorium who kept all the plunder. A single shoelace was worth ten kronen in the camp’s crazy currency.

  But it was peaceful this afternoon. Erik didn’t have to grimace at the squeak of one hearse or wheelbarrow. He could hear a few notes of Brahms from the music pavilion. Having been plucked out of the Jewish Gymnasium at twelve, he’d never mastered the witchcraft of music. He couldn’t even carry the simplest tune. But he listened to the Brahms—it was a violin concerto. That much he could tell. The camp’s principal orchestra had once played in Prague. Its musicians would have been coveted by every orchestra in Greater Germany had they not been Jewish. The Fat One, Hermann Göring, had tried to steal them away for his own ensemble at Carinhall. But he couldn’t sneak them past Himmler’s wall of fanatics.

  The music wafted into the Café Kavalir. It had its own terrifying enchantment. And for a moment Theresienstadt could have been the Jewish Marienbad. The chess players lingered over a move, prisoners of Brahms. But Lisa wasn’t caught in that spell. She paid for the coffee with her kronen. Erik followed her outside the café. She hobbled across the town square to Hauptstrasse, and then wandered up to the very edge of the fortress’s inner wall to the Kavalir Barracks, where the feeble and the insane lived and slept, and where several camp artists had their studios in the attic. He didn’t have to help Lisa climb the steps; she maneuvered with her cane. The artists, some of whom belonged in the same mad barrack, murmured the moment they saw her. “Frau Kommandant,” they said. She undr
essed in front of their easels, smoking one of the camp’s own rotten cigarettes, smuggled in from Prague. The scars on her body resembled fish scales with a silver glow in the attic light. She never looked at Erik once.

  The artists were tenacious. Their hands trembled as they accomplished sketch after sketch of Lisalein with their pathetic sticks of charcoal, which kept breaking, and soon they had to draw her with their own blackened fingers. The barracks’ deranged population of old men kept climbing the stairs with their doctors—Theresienstadt was the one institution in the world that had as many doctor prisoners as patients. Some of these doctors were also insane. But one old man disturbed Erik; he had the angelic smile and slightly humped back of Baron von Hecht.

  Did ghosts dance on the attic boards? But it wasn’t the baron. It was a former surgeon at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. His mouth was thick with foam. He demanded Erik’s autograph.

  “I collect the signatures of somnambulists,” said this wily surgeon. “Will you help me, mein Herr?”

  “Anything,” Erik said. “What can I do, Herr Professor Doctor?”

  “Strangle me.… You are the famous strangler, are you not?”

  “That was a lifetime ago,” said Erik, and he handed the surgeon back to his own keeper, a much less distinguished doctor, who had never practiced at the Charité.

  Later he walked Lisa home to her little attic ward in the first pavilion. She was silent through the whole journey. But she didn’t banish Erik from her hospital bed. The furor of their meeting with the elders seemed to have worn off. She was as tender with him as she had ever been, hugged him all night, lay in his arms. He felt like a child, a bit of a fool, who could never crack Lisa’s mystery.

  He was alone under the blankets when he woke up. Little Sister, the commandant’s own bull-necked adjutant, sat near the door with a brutal grin. He’ll kill me one day, Erik mused, or I’ll have to kill him. Erik could feel the clutch of silk around his neck. Lisa had returned the Ritterkreuz. It sat over his heart like a miniature molten torpedo. Erik wondered if it could leak its own blood onto him.

  The Theresienstädter Ensemble

  35

  THE ROUTE HAD BEEN PLOTTED WEEKS IN ADVANCE; walls were whitewashed, streets and sidewalks scrubbed with soap. The crematorium was closed, the Kavalir Barracks put under lock and key. There were no stragglers or wandering old men. A playhouse with glass walls was constructed by camp carpenters for the children of Theresienstadt, with its own showers and swimming pool. The elders were given top hats to wear. The kitchen workers wore white gloves. A jazz band waited all morning in the music pavilion, the Theresienstadt Swingers, with their borrowed clarinets. Two soccer teams pretended to struggle in front of the pretty house where the SS soldiers and guards lived. In their blazing red-and-blue uniforms, it was hard to tell that the team members were all skin and bones.…

  It was a sunny morning in June. The fog over Theresienstadt had already lifted. The mountains on the far side of the fortress were wrapped in a slight blue haze. The grasshoppers leapt like lions in the little green patches at the edge of the old seawall near the western barracks. The cicadas chirped in Brunenpark. Children stood on the battlements, making binoculars out of their half-closed fists, and searched the landscape for the Red Cross’s telltale white trucks; in their own wild imagination, the trucks meant freedom to them—the same impossible myth had spread from barrack to barrack, that the white trucks would be coming to empty out the entire ghetto and carry the settlers to another Paradise, another Jewish Marienbad, without the SS.

  There were no white trucks. A motorcade of black Mercedes limousines passed under the main gate near the railroad tracks, without a single field car or Gestapo bodyguard, just a few SS men on motorbikes. No one wore a uniform among the Red Cross cortege, not even the Czech propaganda minister, or a colonel from the Reich’s foreign ministry; with them were five professor doctors, one from the Danish health ministry, two from the Danish Red Cross, one from the German Red Cross, and one from the International Red Cross in Geneva. The five of them looked like brothers out of the very same brood, with thick lips, red noses, and meticulous blue eyes; they all had monocles screwed into their cheeks.

  Joachim met them all at the gate; he was also in mufti. There were no Hitler salutes, no clicking of heels. Erik was the only one in uniform, since he had nothing else to wear. His cuffs were frayed; the Ritterkreuz dangled from its ribbons. Bernhard Beck had the same costume as he did at the Café Kavalir—his cummerbund and gold earring. He also had a top hat. The five professor doctors fawned over him. He was the hero of The Cabaret King Comes to Bohemia. Their whole image of Theresienstadt, this Jewish Paradise in the flatlands outside of Prague, had been nurtured by that film. It was still playing in Copenhagen. And they begged Bernhard to sing “The Ballad of Mack the Knife.”

  He twirled his entire body in front of the five professor doctors, as if he were balancing some invisible object on his cummerbund, and winked at these bureaucrats.

  “Meine Herren, I’ve lost my voice. It’s terrible, I know. I can’t entertain you. But I have prepared a skit with the Theresienstädter Ensemble.”

  “Ah, you have your own troupe,” said the Czech propaganda minister.

  “Yes, some of the performers are from Berlin.”

  “Marvelous,” said the same minister. “Then we will have Jewish cabaret at Theresienstadt.”

  “And Jewish Jazz,” said Colonel Joachim. “They are rehearsing while we speak.”

  “What a delight!” said one of the Danes.

  Erik wanted to rip all their eyes out. The whole visit would be another propaganda film, The Red Cross Comes to Bohemia. He should have listened to Lisalein and led a revolt. Perhaps it was better, even for the children, to disappear all at once than to burn slowly in Joachim’s fire. These Herren with all their fancy titles were little better than Nazis in disguise—no, they were simply sons of bitches who had closed their eyes.

  But there was a little flea in the ointment of their lives, and they had to maneuver with a bit of caution. The Allies had landed in Normandy, and God knows when Patton would appear out of the mist with his tanks. And so these ministers and bureaucrats crunched their monocles with an air of objectivity, as the elders in their top hats began to lead them along the prescribed route. They passed Kleiner Park, where children were playing on the slides that ghetto carpenters had installed a week ago. These children rushed up to the commandant. “Uncle Joachim, Uncle Joachim, no more sardines. We’ve had sardines every day.”

  It was a bitter joke. Who had rehearsed them, who had manufactured such a lie? Was it the elders or that maestro, Bernhard Beck? These children had never tasted a sardine at Theresienstadt. Sardines arrived in mysterious packets from Portugal, packets that only the commandant or a ghetto prince could afford.

  The delegation marched up Lange Strasse, passing under the new street signs. The camp had never had legitimate streets—just block numbers and barrack numbers—until last month.

  The Danish settlers had been plucked from their barracks and hurled into a little yellow chalet on Rathausgasse, with bunks and lamps and bedspreads. They’d been warned to smile and curtsy to the Red Cross delegation, and they did. These same settlers asked the delegation to thank their own king for his concern about their welfare.

  “King Christian is a good king,” they recited, as if glancing at little memory cards. “You must tell him we are happy here. And he should thank the Führer for building us our own town. We want for nothing at Theresienstadt.”

  “Indeed,” said one of the ministers, “an admirable Jewish town, as far as the eye can see.”

  Erik grew more and more morose by the middle of the morning. He felt like Saturn, ready to devour all the sons of man, particularly these sons, with their Red Cross insignias and armbands, and he wanted to pull up the earth of Theresienstadt, swallow the barracks whole, swallow the stones, and bricks, and grass. But he didn’t stray from the cortege. These monocle-men had heard
of Cesare, the Abwehr magician who went on a rampage in America, slaughtered a hundred state troopers and federal agents—the numbers multiplied with each retelling of the tale. Soon he would be the conqueror of half the nation.

  “Herr Cesare,” these fools muttered on their march across the little plain of Theresienstadt, “isn’t it a miracle? A retirement colony away from the war … where Jewish pensioners can contemplate at their leisure, right under the battlements.”

  “Miracle,” Erik muttered, and moved to the rear of the little caravan.

  They arrived at Marktplatz, where the Jewish jazzmen had assembled on the platform of the music pavilion. They still didn’t have enough breath to tootle on their clarinets with much skill. Their fingers flew all over the keys, but little was accomplished; it was like a chorale of goats bleating into a tin pail.

  “Ah,” said the ministers, “Jewish Jazz.”

  “Isn’t the Führer generous with his Jews,” remarked the Czech prime minister. “He allows them their own degenerate music. He won’t even judge these conniving children.”

  But it wasn’t Jewish Jazz. It was raucous, chaotic chatter with its own desperate fury. The tin that resounded off the bandbox touched Erik’s heart. It was much closer to the desolation of the camp than the children’s ballet performed in an old movie house on Hauptstrasse that had become a concert hall for the Red Cross. The ballet was replete with dancing elves, blond princesses, and little soldiers in black uniforms—a perfect fairy tale for diplomats. They had a long, dreamy lunch at the “restaurant” inside Magdeburg Barracks—a storage room had been converted into a dining hall. There were festoons of twisted flowers on the walls and pictures of some imaginary Zion, with a fortress and mountains. The delegation mingled with settlers in the dining hall, drank champagne presented by the Czech propaganda minister—it was the usual piss, and Erik closed his eyes and swallowed that yellow poison.