“Godawful mess in here,” he said, without averting his gaze.
“Well…I don’t…”
“An internal mess.” The man turned halfway around, toward the cluttered rolltop. “On the left are notes and letters from over a hundred correspondents. All still need to be typed out.” He turned back to his visitor. “Mrs. Singer is not, as you may have noticed, the fastest typist in the world.” He moved to the other side. “This pile here, this is the finished material and over there…” He was facing his visitor again. “…there, behind you, against the wall, in those files, are the company records. All our cogwheels and bearings and God knows what rubbish. I’ll be honest with you, Mr….”
My father told him his name.
The man was silent for a moment. “I’ll be honest with you. This company is a joke. We exist…We survive, I should say, thanks to the generosity of a few old buyers, customers who were always treated well by my father and his brother and who’d be ashamed to turn their backs on us now.”
My father, who was still holding his mug, began to feel uncomfortable, and took a sip of his cold tea.
“My mind is not on it anymore. Nearly everything we earn, and that isn’t much, goes into the investigation.”
“Investigation?”
The man got up from his chair, leaned heavily on the table, his face stony, and said: “The map you were looking at. What do you think it was about?”
My father tried to look the man in the eye, but had to turn away. “The Allies,” he said. “The Allies’ progress.” He thought for a moment. “But the flags are in the wrong places.”
The man jerked upright and pulled open the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. He took out a bottle and two smudged glasses. Without asking his guest if he drank—and at this hour of the day no less—he poured three fingers of whiskey in each. He set one glass down on the table and took a swig of the other. “The Germans’ progress, rather,” he said. “Each flag stands for a camp, a concentration camp. Interesting name, when you think about it.” He sat back down and swirled the whiskey around in his glass. “What did they concentrate there? Perhaps we should interpret the concept of ‘concentration’ the way it’s used in chemistry: a process by which a substance is stripped of all its diluents and extraneous material, until only the essence…no, the soul…until only the soul of that substance remains.” He drank. He drank calmly and controlledly. Not the drinking of a drinker, my father thought. “So. Every flag is a camp, where European Jewry was concentrated down until nothing remained but its soul.”
“I…”
“Yes, I know what it is you want to say. You have no business here. Your Dutch clients are looking for professional, reliable companies that can deliver on time and according to specifications. And you’re absolutely right: you have no business here. My sons had no business in Germany, either. I tried to talk them out of it. But my wife’s family was still living there, somewhere in Frankfurt, and they were going to get them out. Who would hurt an Englishman? We weren’t even at war yet.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Drink your whiskey, Mr. Speijer. It’s not every day that I open this bottle, and as far as I know it’s a good one.”
My father drank his whiskey, without finding out if it really was, as Mr. Morris said, a good one.
“They arrived at the house of my wife’s brother when the…riffraff…was throwing the furniture out the windows and carrying off the valuables in pillowcases. And before they knew it, they got carried off themselves. They were rowers, my boys, Adam and David, though they weren’t allowed on the university team. Muscular young men. They were up against a kind of hostility they’d never known. And what do they do? They roll up their sleeves to…to drive out that scum. But these weren’t just a band of hooligans, sir. They were the official representatives of the German government and they did what they’d been told: purge a Jewish home. My sons were arrested, beaten, and Lord knows what else and taken off to a camp where they were concentrated, until all that was left was their soul. And that is what keeps this company busy. We’ll sell a box of cogwheels—for a song and dance, if we have to—and pay our correspondents to find out everything they can about concentration, how it all worked, the technical side, the where and when and how. Not the why—no. That’s the easiest answer of all. And now, if you’ve finished your whiskey, you may leave.”
But my father did not leave. He stayed and listened to Mr. Morris. He stayed until the sun sank and orange light shone through the dusty windowpanes and the blood pounded in his temples. He stayed until it gradually dawned on him that he didn’t know what kind of a war he had fought in until he knew of the terrible world in which he had left his family behind seven years before. He stayed until all he could do was leave. The next day when he visited the embassy to make arrangements for his journey home, the names of his parents had appeared on the Red Cross list.
We sat side by side at the bar, where the typewriter stood and the ashtray with the cigarette butts.
“And then I came back. You know the rest.” He poured tea and handed me my mug. We drank in silence. I felt an endless weariness settling down on me.
“So if you ask me what I do for a living, I’d say I’m still looking for something as powerful as Mr. Morris’s need to find out everything he could about concentration.”
I nodded.
“Something real,” he said. “One has to do something real.”
I didn’t know if cooking fell into that category. I began thinking about that.
“On your feet,” said my father. “You’ve homework to do.”
I was
