The Boxer (3 page)

Since the man was already in the kitchen, Aron thought he might as well offer him a cigarette. The superintendent thanked him effusively and volunteered his services for any necessary repairs. Aron asked who had owned the apartment.

“You weren’t told?”

At this point the superintendent embarked on an overly long story. Until three weeks before, exactly until two days after the end of the war, a man called Leutwein, who owned the house, lived in this apartment with his wife. A man in his mid-fifties, he had been a party member since the very beginning; his membership booklet had a very low number. Everyone knew that; Leutwein never lost an opportunity to brag about his low membership number. During the war he worked for the government — not in a very important post, he didn’t have sufficient expertise, but he must’ve had influential friends because he was spared service on the battlefield. In return, he was impudent, made great speeches, threw around words such as
Wehrkraftzersetzung
and
durchhalten
, he would not tolerate any
Elemente
in his house.
^*
So he terrified people and was considered an informer. Whether he really was, the superintendent couldn’t say; personally, Leutwein never did him any harm. At the end of the war, everyone wondered why he didn’t clear out immediately. Where to? At least to an area that wasn’t occupied by the Russians. But just then his wife had come down with typhus. Leutwein loved her — these people have feelings too, said the super — he took care of her until the Russians came to get him. They even took his wife, picked her up in an ambulance; that was as much as the super knew.

With this information, Aron felt less awkward about taking possession of the apartment and its contents. It suddenly appeared legitimate. He couldn’t imagine a more just property exchange than the one that had taken place between Leutwein and himself.

I
magine another case,” he says. “Imagine that the apartment had belonged to someone who was more similar to me than this Leutwein. There also must’ve been apartments like that.”

H
owever, he now made a critical selection. With careful eyes, he went over the rooms and tried to look at the objects in the light of their history. Whatever he thought could have contributed to the specific well-being of a National Socialist he put aside. Mainly ornamental objects fell victim to Aron’s censorship. Hardly any furniture, which was for the most part considerably older than the lowest membership number, and was therefore above suspicion. Vases had to be trashed, paperweights, couch pillows and blankets, also the cuckoo clock, and all the pictures. Not just thefamily photographs, oil paintings as well. He describes one of them to me: a farmer follows a plowshare, which is pulled by a strong horse and digs a rut in the dark soil. He had observed this painting often, even before the superintendent had come. Ithung in the corridor, and until that moment had been carefully painted and had pleasant colors. Yet now it disturbed Aron, though he could not logically explain why. Hecould only convey, in passing, random concepts: return to nature, love of the land, the innocent word
Arbeit
^*

(At this early stage, it seems worthwhile for me to provide somedetails of Aron’s biography. These should serve simply to intimate that he grew up and lived not in a particularly exotic environment but rather in one where concepts of value and taste were those of the common man. He was born in Riga, into a family to which piety was a curious phenomenon to be smiled at. While he was still a child, his parents moved with him to Germany, where he lived in Leipzig for a while and later, until the year 1934, in Berlin. Then a woman called Lydia, whose only relationship to Judaism consisted of the fact that she loved Aron, convinced him to leave the country. Aron chose Bohemia, because the textile factory where he was employed had a branch there. Lydia pleaded for an exile even farther away, but he declined;he didn’t have any savings and was entirely dependent on his salary. In Bohemia they married and had three children. After the German invasion they were sent into a ghetto — Lydia too — and then one day she was taken away. Presumably for inflammatory speech. Aron never saw her again; he was left alone with the children, two of whom died before his eyes.)

Aron cleaned out the apartment, throwing things away, tearing them up, and burning them. He also rearranged everything, because he realized that a certain way of thinking can find expression even in the way objects are organized. Sometimes he would hesitate, uncertain whether what he held in his hands or observed deserved his disapproval. Yet the hesitation seemed to be a sort of proof, and so, incase of doubt, he made decisions to the disadvantage of the object. He threw a stackof handkerchiefs into the fire because they were embroidered with a monogram, E.L.

Aron wondered how he would react if one day Mrs. Leutwein would come back and demand her property. Or, worse still, if she would beg for it. A likely possibility; there have been cases of people who recovered from typhus. Aron waited hourly for her to knock. He felt fully prepared for demands or the invoking of so-called rights; he wouldn’t mind calling the police or resorting to some form of violence, even without anyone else’s help. But he was terrified at the thought of entreaties. He imagined the woman sitting in front of him, pale and emaciated from her recent illness, with tears in her eyes or sobbing unrestrainedly, begginghim to leave her the bare necessities. She would say that she was on the street, destitute, her husband was in jail and, besides, she was somehow attached to the thingsthey had lived with for so long. Wouldn’t he let her take at least this object or that? And he heard himself say, after she had begged long enough, “Take whatever you want.” But then, when the expression intended to arouse his sympathy would vanish from her features and she would start amassing things, he would throw her out. In case of emergency, he resolved to think of Lydia.

But Mrs. Leutwein did not come — pride, or death, kept her away. Instead two men visited Aron. They showed their staff ID issued by the occupying forces and said they had instructions to search the apartment for documents that may have been left behind.

“What types of documents?” Aron asked warily.

He learned that in Erich Leutwein’s trial, certain murky points had arisen that might possibly be cleared up with the help of correspondence or certificates of a certain kind. The men also said that they had already been to the apartment once but had perhaps overlooked something at the time.

“You won’t find anything,” Aron said. “I turned everything inside out, there’s nothing. There was only a folder with a couple of letters, and I burned it without reading them.”

“It’s a pity,” the men said, and made as ifto leave. Aron’s words had made the search seem unnecessary; they could thinkof no good reason why he of all people should want to cover for Leutwein. Aron held them back and asked what the unclear points in the trial were. The men looked at each other hesitantly until one nodded to the other. Aron learned that Leutwein had tried to portray his party membership as something he was forced into, his behavior during the war as disapprovingly passive and, as for the undeniable fact that he had not been called to arms — he had always found it incomprehensible. Naturally noone believed him, the men said, yet without proof the outlook was in doubt, and witnesses were nowhere to be found.

“Go to the superintendent,” Aron said, “he knows Leutwein really well.”

They had already been to him, they responded, and to most of theother tenants of the house, yet everyone claimed they knew nothing either good or bad about Leutwein.

Once the men had left, Aron sat for a long time and was annoyed about the absurd care with which these investigations were being carried out. Documents, witnesses, proof, were nothing more than obstacles in the way of a crystal clear deduction. As if there weren’t millions of obvious proofs, as if Lydia wasn’t proof. As if they didn’t know that they were dealing with a sworn gang from which they couldn’t single out witnesses by using tact and by following some rule from an aged law book. Aron simply hoped that what he had just seen was an extremely unusual case, that in other cases procedures were more reasonable andless shortsighted. But already this one case felt like an immoderate dissipation; itwas impossible for him to let it rest. He rushed down the stairs and rang at the door of the ground-floor apartment. The little super opened and smiled at his acquaintance. “Oh, it’s you.” Aron grabbed him by the collar and shook him; the superintendent gasped for air and could not free himself.

“Listen to me,” Aron said. “If you don’t go immediately and confess everything you know about Leutwein, I’ll turn you in. Mark my words, I’ll send you to jail.”

The superintendent didn’t answer, either because he was scared or because his shirt was pulled so tightly around his throat. He simply staredwith bulging eyes and had stopped struggling. Aron repeated, “Right now. Is that clear?”

The superintendent nodded. Aron let him go and watched while he pulled on his jacket and his single shoe and left the house.

S
o you were your own police?”

“Why do your questions always sound as if you were against me?”

I deny this vehemently I say that constantly agreeing with him would help neither of us. “I’m just trying to understand an event I didn’t participate in. What else do you hear in my questions?” I ask.

“I hear that you have decided to be objective, and I don’t like that. If you insist on being objective, then go and write about a soccer game. That doesn’t work with me, I’ll be exposed in a distorted light.”

A
ron maintained confident hope in one child. To this day, it remains uncertain whether or not this hope was fulfilled, but you can’t talk to him about it.

The transport that led from the Bohemian ghetto to the camp was meant exclusively for the men who were fit to work. Aron’s youngest son had to stay behind. This Mark Blank, barely two years old at the time, was left in the care of a neighbor, a certain Mrs. Fisch. She didn’t make a particularly good impression on Aron, but at the time the circle of people who could have been trusted to carry out such a delicate task had become remarkably small. Aron brought everything he still owned into her room and in addition promised her mountains of gold for her self-sacrificing care — yet he didn’t really believe things would work out.

Immediately after his release, he had found the address of an American organization that, among other things, dealt with the search for missing Jewish relatives.

Y
lou wonder why I didn’t go to Bohemia myself?”

“Yes.”

“It was terribly far. My feet hurt.”

T
h
e organization was called Rescue. Aron was sent to a room that looked like someone lived in it. He was given a cup of coffee and told his whole story. The woman who listened to him was, he found, remarkably young, seventeen, nineteen at most, he says; she had long, black hair and tear-swollen eyes. She took notes during his report and interrupted him only once with the request to spell the name of the little Bohemian town. He presumed that she heard similar stories daily and wasn’t as yet used to them, hence the tear-swollen eyes.

“As soon as we know something, you’ll be informed,” she said as they parted.

Aron assumed there would be a long wait — in those days alost child was like a needle in a haystack — yet only a week had passed whenRescue knocked on his door. A man, who wasn’t a postman, handed him a package that didn’t in fact contain the missive he was hoping for but held powdered milk, cigarettes, chocolate, and other foodstuffs from overseas. Aron ate his fill, smoked, and waited. Everything he did at that time, he says, just served the purpose of getting through the waiting period. For example, the gradual occupancy of the apartment. For example, he went to the barbershop and had his hair, which had become gray over the past years, dyed black. (Since the effect, after a short period of adjustment, pleased him, the dyeing became an established habit. He repeated it every four weeks until the matter became too time-consuming and troublesome. From the start of the sixties, his hair was allowed to grow the color it wanted to — yellowish white.)

Two weeks later, a postcard arrived, bearing the Rescue stamp. Aron read the exciting news — “I think we have something for you” — signed by a certain Paula Seltzer, presumably the girl with tear-swollen eyes. Not an hour had passed and he was there, again the cup of coffee, again the girl. This time, Paula seemed more relaxed. “I like you much more with dark hair,” she said.

She looked so pretty, Aron’s task should’ve been to pay compliments, but he just asked, “What did you find out?”

Paula started with the most important issue, she said that the child was alive. Traces of the woman, this neighbor — Fisch — were nowhere to be found, but for Aron it should be more important to know that all the children of the ghetto were transferred to a children’s camp at the beginning of ‘43. The chances of survival were desperately small, but when the Allied troops had conquered Bavaria, where the camp was, Mark was still alive.

“There is, however, something curious,” Paula said. “In the lists of the camp, your son was entered under not the name Mark Blank but Mark Berger. But he is the only Mark. One explanation could be that the listswere compiled carelessly; precision was not apparently their prime concern. It’s lucky these lists exist in the first place.”

“Did you look through the lists of the dead children?” Aron asked.

“Of course. There was no Mark Blank among the dead. And no other Mark either. Mark is an uncommon first name; we can be pretty sure of our case. Even the age is more or less right.”

“What do you mean, more or less?”

“There are no dates of birth in the lists,” Paula explained, “only the years. We have a Mark Berger, born in 1939.”

Doubts arose only later; at the time Aron was convinced that every other suspicion was superfluous. He had swum into a cloud of happiness, he says; the years had taught him that in every kind of undertaking the most unhappy outcome was also the most probable. Now delight somersaulted in his head. For minutes he looked at Paula as she spoke, without understanding a word. At a certain point he interrupted her and asked, “You are Paula, right?”