Alex stared for a few minutes, then stepped back to the pile of rubble across the street and sat down, taking out a cigarette. The von Bernuth house. All the thick carpeting and carved mahogany gone, presumably ash now. Had they rescued the silver or any of the Caspar David Friedrichs in their old-master frames? Or had all that been removed before the raids started?
The house had always been in the wrong part of town. Even in Fritz’s grandfather’s time the big town houses were being built near the Tiergarten, Vossstrasse, and then even farther west. But old Friedrich, whose lucky bet on a railway stock made the house possible, didn’t know Berlin well—he liked the feel of Hausvogteiplatz, the bargain price for the lot. When the clothing factories began to move in, the new office buildings, it was too late. The von Bernuths had a mansion in the middle of a commercial neighborhood. More amusement than stigma attached to this—it was considered a joke on old Friedrich, another family story.
Alex had heard them all. How the elder Friedrich invested in railroad after failing railroad, hoping for the pay dirt of another Anhalter-Bayerische line. How Fritz’s father accidentally shot a tenant, then gave him one of the farms when he recovered. How a note to a mistress was put in the wrong envelope. The sunny, overdressed years before the first war. He knew the stories because Irene and Elsbeth told them to him. It was part of their charm that the von Bernuths saw their family history as a comedy, a series of hapless misadventures. And then when the real stories ran out, he made up more, a book of them.
“You’ve made us more interesting than we are,” Irene had said.
“Not you.”
At night there were only a few lights in Kleine J?gerstrasse, so the house had seemed that much brighter, light pouring out the windows, the door lamps like beacons, waiting for guests. There were always people, the girls’ friends staying over, parties when they were older. Elsbeth was the pretty one, creamy and delicate as a Dresden doll, but it was Irene people came for, her jokes and careless sensuality, the swollen lower lip, the tangle of blond hair, forever falling out of place. And after the parties, the house cleaned and aired, there were the Sunday lunches, the long table and stiff napkins, one rich course after another, swimming in gravy, the platters almost too heavy for the maids. Saddle of venison and red cabbage and spaetzle, or pork stuffed with prunes, soups thickened with cream, breast of veal, potatoes Anna, a full afternoon of food. His aunt Lotte, who’d married Fritz’s brother Hermann, had warned him. “There’s always another course, so just take a little or you’ll never get through it.” Lotte had giggled. “They have to lie down afterward. They can’t move.” Desserts. Stewed fruit and elaborate cakes, a Spanische Windtorte. A Sunday lunch of the last century, before the money had begun to run out.
He finished the cigarette and stood up, wiping the dust off his coat. In Hausvogteiplatz a few people were on their way to work, the sky finally morning. He could see details now, not just shadowy clumps. The brass knocker on the door was gone, valuable scrap, the interiors long since ransacked. He pushed at the door.
“What do you want there?” An old man with a worker’s cap.
“Nothing.” He hesitated. “I knew the family. The owners.”
The man shook his head. “What owners? It belongs to the bank,” he said, indicating the big office building on Kurstrasse, new to Alex. “The Reichsbank.” An unexpected pride in his voice, not just any bank.
“Well, a family used to live here.”
The man nodded. “I saw you sitting here. So you’re looking for them? It’s a long time now. Since anybody was here. The bank was going to knock it down. To put up a new building. That was the idea. But then the war started and that was the end of that.”
“So it just sat here?”
“They used it for storage. Files, things like that. But then it was hit and everything went up. People thought maybe there were safes here. You know, for the gold. But we never moved it.”
“We?”
“I was night watchman. At the bank. I saw it, you know. The gold. In bars. But it was never moved here. I thought that’s what you wanted, to see if there was anything to take. But there’s nothing. Here, look.” He pushed the door open. “Nothing.”
Not even broken pieces of furniture, scavenged for firewood, just bricks and chunks of plaster. He looked across what had been the hall to the suspended piece of staircase. The built-in closet underneath it, dumping ground for umbrellas and trunks and boots, had been cut away, surgically removed by blast. The newel post had been ripped away too. Where they used to stand the Christmas tree, the first thing you saw when you came in, draped with strings of electric candles.
“Careful of the glass,” the old man said.
Alex took a step, then stopped. What was the point? “That’s all right,” he said. “I just wanted to see if the house was still here.”
The man closed the door behind them, a watchman’s instinct.
“A thousand years Adolf said. Now look.” He turned to Alex. “How is it you didn’t know? About the house. You were in the army?”
“No. I was away.” Evading.
“Away,” the man said, leaping somewhere else. “Not so many come back from that. You hear the stories—” Wanting to hear Alex’s, what the camps were like, and now it was too late to correct him, too many layers of embarrassment. When Alex said nothing the man sighed and looked away. “Well, it was no picnic here either,” he said, his hand taking in the street. “Night after night. A thousand years. What a liar. And now we’ve got the Russians. That’s what he gave us instead. The Russians. A thousand years of them.” A quick glance at Alex, to see how he was responding to this. “I never thought I’d see that. Russians in Berlin. Any of it.” He hesitated, not sure how to ask. “You’re a Jew?”
“Half,” Alex said.
“Half. That didn’t matter to them, did it?”
“No.”