worn-out suspension when we crossed a junction, the views of skyscrapers, bridges, and a large bay made me feel dizzy.
The house was situated in a peaceful street. Like all the houses it was made of wood. Steps led to the front door. Up I went and rang the bell. An old man opened the door. ‘Mr Hirsch?’
‘My husband’s been dead for six years,’ she said in rusty German. ‘You needn’t apologize, I’m often taken for a man and I’m used to it. You’re the German Vera was telling me about, right?’
Perhaps it was the confusion or the flight or the cab ride – I must have fainted and came to when the old woman threw a glass of water at my face.
‘You’re lucky you didn’t fall down the steps. When you’re ready, come and I’ll give you a whisky.’
The whisky burned inside me. The room was musty and smelt of age, of old flesh and old food. The same smell had suffused my grandparents’ house, I suddenly recalled, and just as suddenly I was seized by the fear of growing old that I’m continuously suppressing.
The woman was perched opposite, and scrutinizing me. Shafts of sunlight shone through the blinds onto her. She was completely bald. ‘You want to talk to me about Weinstein, my husband. Vera thinks it’s important that what happened is told. But it’s not a good story. My husband tried to forget it.’
I didn’t realize straight away who Karl Weinstein was. But as she started to talk I remembered. She didn’t realize she was not only telling his story but also touching upon my own past.
She spoke in an oddly monotonous voice. Weinstein had been professor of organic chemistry in Breslau until 1933. In 1941, when he was put in a concentration camp, his former assistant Tyberg put in a request for him to be sent to the RCW laboratories, which was granted. Weinstein was even quite pleased that he could work in his field again and that he was working with someone who appreciated him as a scientist, addressed him as Professor, and politely said goodbye in the evening when he was taken back to the camp along with the other forced labourers of the Works. ‘My husband didn’t cope well with life, nor was he very brave. He had no idea, or didn’t want to know, what was happening around him and what was coming for him, too.’
‘Were you with Weinstein at this time?’
‘I met Karl on the transport to Auschwitz in nineteen forty-one. And then again only after the war. I’m Flemish, you know, and could hide in Brussels to begin with, until they caught me. I was a beautiful woman. They conducted medical experiments on my scalp. I think that saved my life. But in nineteen fortyfive I was old and bald. I was twenty-three.’
One day they’d come to Weinstein, someone from the Works and someone from the SS. They’d told him how he must testify before the police, the prosecutor, and the judge. It was a matter of sabotage, a manuscript that he’d supposedly found in Tyberg’s desk, a conversation between Tyberg and a co-worker that he’d supposedly overheard.
I could picture Weinstein, as he was led into my office, in his prisoner’s clothes, and gave his testimony.
‘He hadn’t wanted to at first. It was all false and Tyberg hadn’t been bad to him. But they showed him they would crush him. They didn’t even promise him his life, only that he could survive a little longer. Can you imagine that? Then my husband was transferred and simply forgotten in the other camp. We’d arranged where we would meet should the whole thing ever be over. In Brussels on the Grand Place. I came there simply by chance in the spring of nineteen forty-six, not thinking of him any more. He’d been waiting there for me since the summer of nineteen forty-five. He recognized me immediately although I’d become this bald, old lady. Quite irresistible!’ She laughed.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I was the one Weinstein had delivered his testimony to. I also couldn’t tell her why it was so important to me. But I had to know. And so I asked, ‘Are you certain that the testimony your husband gave was false?’
‘I don’t understand. I’ve told you what he told me.’ Her face turned cold. ‘Get out,’ she said, ‘get out.’
3 Do not disturb
I walked down the hill and came to the docks and warehouses by the bay. Far and wide I could see neither cab nor bus, nor subway station. I wasn’t even sure if San Francisco had a subway. I set off in the direction of the skyscrapers. The street didn’t have a name, just a number. In front of me a heavy, black Cadillac was crawling along. Every few steps it drew to a standstill, a black man in a pink silk suit got out, trampled a beer or coke can flat, and dropped it into a large blue plastic sack. A few hundred metres ahead I saw a store. As I came closer I saw it was barred like a fortress. I went in looking for a sandwich and a packet of Sweet Afton. The goods were behind grating and the checkout reminded me of a counter at the bank. I didn’t get a sandwich and no one knew what Sweet Afton was, and I felt guilty even though I hadn’t done anything. As I was leaving the store with a carton of Chesterfields, a freight train rattled past me in the middle of the street.
On the piers I came across a car rental and rented a Chevrolet. I was taken by the one-piece front seating. It reminded me of the Horch on whose front seat I was initiated into love by the wife of my Latin teacher. Together with the car I got a town plan with the 49 Mile Drive highlighted. I followed it without trouble, thanks to the signs everywhere. By the cliffs I found a restaurant. At the entrance I had to edge forward in a line before being led to a seat by the window. Mist was curling over the Pacific. The show captivated me, as though, beyond the rents in the fog, Japan’s coast would come into view any second. I ate a tuna steak, potato in aluminum foil, and iceberg lettuce salad. The beer was called Anchor Steam and tasted almost like a smoked beer in the Bamberg Schlenkerla. The waitress was attentive, kept refilling my coffee cup without my having to ask, enquired after my health and where I was from. She knew Germany, too; she’d visited her boyfriend at the US base in Baumholder once.
After the meal I stretched my legs, clambered around on the cliffs, and suddenly saw before me, more beautiful than I remembered it from films, the Golden Gate Bridge. I took off my coat, folded it, put it on a rock, and sat on it. The coast fell away steeply, beneath me bright sailing boats were crisscrossing, and a freight ship ploughed its gentle path.
I had planned to live at peace with my past. Guilt, atonement, enthusiasm and blindness, pride and anger, morality and resignation – I’d brought it all together in an elaborate balance. The past had become abstract. Now reality had caught up with me and was threatening that balance. Of course I’d let myself be manipulated as a prosecutor, I’d learned that much after 1945. One may question whether there is better manipulation and worse. Nevertheless, I didn’t think it was the same thing to be guilty of having served a putative great, bad cause, or to be used by someone as a pawn on the chessboard of a small, shabby intrigue I didn’t yet understand.
The stuff Frau Hirsch had told me, what did it amount to exactly? Tyberg and Dohmke, whom I’d investigated, had been convicted purely on the strength of Weinstein’s false testimony. By any standard, even the National Socialist one, the judgment was a miscarriage of justice and my investigation was wrong. I’d been taken in by a plot made to trap Tyberg and Dohmke. My memory of it started to come back. In Tyberg’s desk hidden documents had been found that revealed a promising plan, essential to the war effort, initially pursued by Tyberg and his research group, then apparently abandoned. The accused repeatedly stressed to me and to the court that they couldn’t have followed two promising paths of research at the same time. They had only put the other one on a backburner, to return to later. The whole thing was under the strictest secrecy and their discovery had been so exciting that they’d safeguarded it with the jealousy of the scientist. That had been the only reason for the cache in the desk. That might have got them off, but Weinstein reported a conversation between Dohmke and Tyberg in which both agreed to suppress the discovery to bring about a quick end to the war, even at the price of a German defeat. And now this conversation had never actually taken place.
The sabotage story had unleashed outrage at the time. The second charge of racial defilement hadn’t convinced me, even then: my investigation hadn’t produced any evidence that Tyberg had had intercourse with a Jewish forced labourer. He was sentenced to death on that account, too. I pondered who from the SS and who from the economic side back then could have set up the conspiracy.
There was a constant flow of traffic over the Golden Gate Bridge. Where did everyone want to get to? I drove to the approach, parked my car beneath the monument to the architect, and walked to the middle of the bridge. I was the only pedestrian. I gazed down onto the metallic gleaming Pacific. Behind me limousines whizzed by with a callous regularity. A cold wind blew round the suspension cables. I was freezing.
