Garden of Beasts

the National Socialist dogma. Paul, don’t you know what is happening here? Why, in the basements of half the hotels and boardinghouses in Berlin are signs that were taken down for the Olympics and that will be put back up the day the foreigners leave. They say No Jews. Or Jews Not Welcome Here. There is a sharp turn on the road to my sister’s home in Spandau. The sign warns, Dangerous Curve. 30 Kilometers Per Hour. Jews Do 70. It is a road sign! Not painted by vandals but by our government!”
    “You’re serious?”
    “Serious, Paul. Yes! You saw the flags on the houses of Magdeburger Alley, the street here. You commented on ours when you arrived.”
    “The Olympic flag.”
    “Yes, yes. Not the National Socialist flag, like on most of the other homes on this street. Do you know why? Because this building is owned by a Jew. It’s illegal for him to fly Germany’s flag. He wants to be proud of his fatherland like everyone else. But he can’t be. And how could he fly the National Socialist flag anyway? The swastika? The broken cross? It stands for anti-Semitism.”
    Ah, so that was the answer.
    Surely you know. . . . 
    “Have you heard of Aryanization?”
    “No.”
    “The government takes a Jewish home or business. It’s theft, pure and simple. Göring is the master of it.”
    Paul recalled the empty houses he’d passed that morning on the way to meet Morgan at Dresden Alley, the signs saying that the contents were to be sold.
    Käthe moved closer yet to him. After a long silence she said, “There is a man. . . . He performs at a restaurant. ‘Fancy,’ it would be called. That is to say the name of the establishment is Fancy. But it is fancy too. Very nice. I went to this restaurant once and this man was in a glass cage in the middle of the dining room. Do you know what he was? A hunger artist.”
    “What?”
    “A hunger artist. Like in the Kafka story. He had climbed into his cage some weeks before and had survived on nothing except water. He was there for everyone to see. He never ate.”
    “How does—”
    “He is allowed to go to the lavatory. But someone always accompanies him and verifies that he has had nothing to eat. Day after day . . .”
    Words spoken in the dark, words between lovers.
    What those words mean is often not important. But sometimes it is.
    Paul whispered, “Go on.”
    “I met him after he had been in the glass cage for forty-eight days.”
    “No food? Was he a skeleton?”
    “He was very thin, yes. He looked sick. But he cameout of the cage for some weeks. I met him through a friend. I asked him why he chose to do this for a living. He told me he had worked in the government for some years, something in transportation. But when Hitler came to power he left his job.”
    “He was fired because he wasn’t a National Socialist?”
    “No, he quit because he couldn’t accept their values and wouldn’t work for their government. But he had a child and he needed to make money.”
    “A child?”
    “And needed money. But everywhere he looked, he could find no position that wasn’t tainted with the Party. He found that the only thing he could do with any integ—What is that word?”
    “Integrity.”
    “Yes, yes, integrity. Was to be a hunger artist. It was pure. It could not be corrupted. And do you know how many people come to see him? Thousands! Thousands come to see him because he is honest. And there is so little honesty in our lives now.” A faint shudder told him she was shivering with tears.
    Words between lovers . . .
    “Käthe?”
    “What have they done?” She gasped for breath. “What have they done? . . . I don’t understand what has happened. We are a people who love music and talk and who rejoice in sewing the perfect stitch in our men’s shirts and scrubbing our alley cobblestones clean and basking in the sun on the beach at Wannsee and buying our children clothing and sweets, we’re moved to tears by the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, by the words of Goethe and Schiller—yet we are possessed now. Why?” Her voice faded. “Why?” A moment later she whispered, “Ach, thatis a question for which, I’m afraid, the answer will come too late.”
    “Leave the country,” Paul whispered.
    She rolled about to face him. He felt her strong arms, strengthened from scrubbing tubs and sweeping floors, snake around him, he felt her heel rise and find the small of his back, pulling him closer, closer.
    “Leave,” he repeated.
    The shivering