He snorted. “If I were a Jew I’d be dead. They had to leave right away. The rest of us, they waited, hoping we would join, then it was an order-party member or out. So I was out. I really was a Social Democrat.” He smiled. “Of course, you may not believe me. But you can check the records. 1938.”
“You were at the institute?” Jake said, interested now.
“Since 1919,” he said proudly. “They had places, you see, after the influenza, so I was lucky. It counted for something then, just to be here. Well, those days. I remember when we got the measurements from the eclipse. For Einstein’s theory,” he said, a teacher explaining, catching Jake’s blank expression. “If light had mass, then gravity would bend the rays. Starlight. The eclipse made it possible to measure. Einstein said it would be 1.75 seconds of an arc, the angle. And do you know what it was? 1.63. So close. Can you imagine? In that one minute, everything changed. Everything. Newton was wrong. The whole world changed, right here in Berlin. Right here.” He extended his arm toward the building, his voice following it in some private reverie. “So, then what? Champagne, of course, but the talk. All night talking. We thought we could do anything-that was German science. Until the gangsters. Then down the drain—”
“I had a friend at the institute,” Jake said, breaking in before the old man could drift further. “I’m trying to locate him. That’s why- perhaps you knew him. Emil Brandt?”
“The mathematician? Yes, of course. Emil. You were his friend?”
“Yes,” Jake said. His friend. “I was hoping someone would know where he is. You don’t-?”
“No, no, it’s many years.”
“But do you know what happened to him?”
“That I couldn’t say. I left the institute, you see.”
“And he stayed,” Jake said slowly, piecing together dates. “But he wasn’t a Nazi.”
“My friend, anyone who was here after 1938—” He stopped, seeing Jake’s face, and looked away. “But perhaps he was a special case.” He dropped his cigarette. “Thank you again. I must say good evening now. The curfew.”
“I knew him,” Jake said. “He wasn’t like that.”
“Like what? Goering? Many people joined, not just the swine. People do what they have to do.”
“You didn’t.”
He shrugged. “And what did it matter? Emil was young. A fine mind, I remember that. Numbers he could see in his head, not just on paper. Who can say what’s right? To give up your work for politics? Maybe he loved science more. And in the end—” He paused, looking again at the building, then back at Jake. “You disturb yourself over this. I can see it. Let me tell you something, for the price of a cigarette. The eclipse? In 1919? The Freikorps were fighting in the streets then. I myself saw bodies, Spartakists, in the Landwehrkanal. Who remembers now? Old politics. Footnotes. But in that building we changed the world. So what’s important? A party card? I don’t judge your friend. We are not all criminals.”
“Just the golden pheasants.”
A mild smile, conceding the point. “Yes. Them I don’t forgive. I’m not yet a saint.”
“What does it mean, anyway? Golden pheasants?”
“Who knows? Bright feathers-the uniforms. The wives left in fur coats, before the Russians came. Maybe it was that they flew out of the bushes as soon as they heard the first shots. Ha,” he said, the joke for himself. “Maybe that’s why there are no Nazis in Berlin.” He stopped and looked again at Jake. “It was a formality, you know. Just a formality.” He tipped his hat. “Good night.” ‹›Jake stood for a minute in front of the gloomy institute, unsettled. Emil must have joined. There wouldn’t have been any exceptions. But why did it surprise him? Millions had. A formality. Except Jake hadn’t known. All that time, something unsaid. A pleasant man with gentle eyes, quiet at parties, diffident, who saw numbers in his head-someone Jake never thought about at all. Not a Nazi, one of the good Germans. Standing with his arm around Lena. Had she known? How could he not tell her? And how could she stay with him, knowing? But she had.
It was getting dark, so he started down Thielallee. A jeep had pulled up in front of the Kommandatura, dropping off two soldiers, who hurried up the stairs with briefcases. New politics, soon to be as old as the Freikorps. What was important? People do what they have to do. She had stayed. Jake had left. That simple. Except Emil wasn’t simple anymore, which changed things. Had she known, those afternoons when they drew the shades to keep Berlin outside?
Jake felt suddenly disoriented, his mental map redrawn like the city’s streets, no longer where they were supposed to be. When he turned right off Thielallee, he saw, confused, that he was literally lost. The side street didn’t connect back to Gelferstrasse as he’d thought it would. And your German isn’t the best either anymore, he thought to himself, smiling. But he had never known this part of town; the streets here had always gone this way. It was the other Berlin, the one he had known, where you now needed a compass to find your way, some needle pulled by gravity, strong enough to bend starlight. Contents — Previous Chapter / Next Chapter
CHAPTER FOUR
Almost all the other buildings in Elssholzstrasse had been knocked out, so the Control Council headquarters stood even larger now. A massive hulk of Prussian stone, its grim streetfront must have seemed an appropriate way station in the old court days, when the judges inside, party members all, had sentenced their victims to worse prisons. The main entrance, however, around the driveway into Kleist Park, presented a lighter face, tall windowed doors flanked by carved floating angels who looked down across what had been a formal lawn bordered with hedges toward two symmetrical colonnades at the other end, an unexpected piece of Paris. The whole place was noisy with activity-cars crunching on the gravel, a work party repairing the roof, banging tiles-like a country house getting ready for a big weekend party. Four bright new Allied flags had been hung over the entrance; 82nd Airborne guards in white spats and shiny helmets were posted at the doorway. Even the dusty grounds were being tidied up, raked by a detachment of German POWs, the letters stenciled on their backs, while a handful of bored GIs kept watch, standing around idly and taking the sun. Jake followed a group of husky Russian women in uniform through the chandeliered hall and up a grand marble staircase, an opera house entrance. He was met, surprisingly, by Muller himself.
“I thought you might like a look around,” Muller said, heading them down the corridor. “We’re still trying to get things in shape. Place took a fair amount of damage.”
“Maybe not enough, given what it was.”
“Well, we have to use what we can. Biggest place we could find. Over four hundred rooms, they say, although I don’t know who’s counting. Maybe they threw in a closet or two. Of course, only part of it’s usable. This is where the council will sit.” He opened the door to a large chamber, already converted to a meeting room with long tables arranged in a square. In each corner, near their respective flags, were desks with shorthand typewriters for recording secretaries. A stack of ashtrays and notepads sat on one table, waiting to be distributed.
“Nobody’s been here yet,” Muller said. “You’re the first, if that means anything to you.”
Jake looked around the empty room, feeling he was back at the Cecilienhof, counting chimneys. “No press section?”
“No press section. We don’t want to encourage speeches-hard to resist with the press around. Give them an audience, they can’t help themselves. We want working sessions.”
“Nice and private.”
“No.” He nodded to the recording desks. “There’ll be minutes. The council will meet once a quarter,” he continued. “The Coordinating Committee once a month, the subcommittees-well, all the time. There’s a lot to do.”
Jake fingered the stack of notepads. “All organized.” ‹›“On paper,” Muller said, leaning against the table, his back to the window, so that his silver hair developed a halo of light. “Actually, nobody knows how it’s going to work. Until we do it. We’re making it up as we go along. Nobody planned on this, running the country.” He noticed Jake’s raised eyebrows. “Not this way. They trained a few people, somewhere down in Virginia-to help the Germans with the transition,” he said, drawing out the word. “Transition. I don’t know what they expected. The last war, I suppose. Get a peace treaty, hand the country over to the good guys, and go home. But not this time. There wasn’t anybody to hand it over to. Twelve years. Even the mailmen were Nazis. And the country-you’ve seen it, it’s just
