The Book of Air and Shadows

exoticism jones with a little more of my personal history. No, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t Jewish (here a sidebar on the matrilineal-descent rule) because my mother was a Catholic, and in those days, if a Catholic married a non, they were excommunicated unless they made their peace with the church, the main part of which was swearing to raise the kids in the faith and we all were, me and my older brother, Paul, and my sister, the youngest, Miriam, the whole nine yards: baptism, catechism class, first communion, altar service for us boys. And, naturally, lapsing, except for Paul, although Paul lapsed like a bastard, until he un-lapsed and got his Vocation.
    And the cherry on top? Okay, another flashback, and I believe I have time, because I suddenly realized that they would not be so foolish as to try to cross Lake Henry in this darkness, and why should they? So I have all night, I suppose. Anyway, here’s my dad, eighteen years old, a Brooklyn wiseguy in training, a budding bookmaker of sports bets. Unfortunately for Dad’s career, it was 1944 and he got drafted. Of course, he went to the dons on it, but they said he’d have to go unless he wanted a guy to run an ice pick into his ears, pop his drums, they’d be glad to help out there. He declined.
    So a year or so later, Dad finds himself attached to Third Army headquarters as a cipher clerk, a good job for a nice Jewish boy, clean indoor work, never heard a shot fired in anger; besides it’s March 1945 by now, and for the American forces in Europe, the fun part of World War II is just beginning. The Wehrmacht had essentially stopped fighting in the west and its legions were drifting docilely into the POW cages. The American soldiery soon discovered that anything could be had in exchange for American cigarettes-antiques, heirlooms, girls, unlimited amounts of intoxicants-and Dad was not slow in understanding that here was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to accumulate capital.
    He was stationed in Ulm, where his official duties-coding messages for transmission-were not onerous. His real job was running a black market operation, moving fuel and food from army stores to the hungry civilian economy. He had no trouble setting up an organization, for Germany at the time was well supplied with underemployed thugs. These fellows had simply shed the handsome Nazi regalia they’d worn for twelve years and were open to opportunities in free-market, rather than state-sponsored, gangsterism. Dad was able to help with de-Nazification certificates, of course, and also used his accountancy genius to cover up the pilferage. He had no compunction about using the former Gestapo in his business. I think it tickled him to see these guys meekly taking orders from a Jew, and from time to time he’d covertly feed one of them to the authorities or, worse, to the Jewish revenge underground that was active at the time. It kept the others in line.
    Although officially lodged in the Third Army headquarters-company barracks, Dad spent most of his time in a suite he maintained in the Kaiserhof Hotel in Ulm. Now, it is one of my father’s eccentricities that he never enters a place of public accommodation through the main, or normal, entrance, but only through the service areas. I think he got this tic from the mobsters of the ’40s, whose habit this also was, when visiting, say, the Copa or El Morocco. It may have had something to do with security, or maybe they did it just because they could; who was going to stop them? In any case, one night in the winter of 1946, returning from a nightclub and approaching the Kaiserhof via its kitchen entrance, he found my mother among the urchins and old ladies rooting through the garbage cans set out there. He ignored them, as he usually did, and they ignored him, except for one who, lifting her head from the filth, said, “Give me cigarette, Joe.”
    He looked, and there-only partially disguised by dirt and the soiled rag she wore around her head-was that face. I’ve seen photographs taken around then and it’s quite amazing-she looks just like a younger Carole Lombard, blond and ridiculously exquisite. She was just a week past her seventeenth birthday. Of course he gave her cigarettes, of course he invited her up to his suite, for a bath, some nylons, a change of clothes. He was gaping. How had this creature survived unclaimed in 1945 Germany? Somewhat later, when she was clean and shiny, and draped in a pink silk robe, and he attempted