Now, I let myself slip down the slope of confession. I look nothing like Gregory Peck as I claimed earlier. I have neither the energy nor the keep smiling spirit of the American. I look like my cousin, the Jewish painter Modigliani. They called him ‘The Tuscan Christ’. I forbid the use of this moniker to refer to my handsome tubercular face.
But actually, no, I look no more like Modigliani than I do like Gregory Peck. I’m the spitting image of Groucho Marx: the same eyes, the same nose, the same moustache. Worse still, I’m a dead ringer for Süss the Jew. Hilda had to notice at all costs. For a week now, she had not been firm enough with me.
Lying around her room were recordings of the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ and the ‘Hitlerleute’ which she kept in memory of her father. The vultures of Stalingrad and the phosphorus of Hamburg will eat away at the vocal cords of these warriors. Everyone’s turn comes eventually. I bought two record-players. To compose my Judeo-Nazi Requiem, I simultaneously played the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ and the ‘Einheitsfrontlied’ of the International Brigades. Next I blended the ‘Hitlerleute’ with the anthem of the Thälmann-Kolonne, the last cry of Jews and German communists. And then, at the end of the Requiem, Wagner’s Götterdämmerung conjured Berlin in flames, the tragic destiny of the German people, while the litany for the dead of Auschwitz evoked the pounds into which six million dogs were hurled.
Hilda does not work. I inquire about the source of her income. She explains that she sold some Biedermeier furniture belonging to a dead aunt for twenty thousand schillings. Barely a quarter of that sum is left.
I tell her my concerns.
‘Don’t worry, Raphäel,’ she says.
Every night she goes to the Blaue Bar at the Hotel Sacher. She seeks out the most well-heeled guests and sells them her charms. After three weeks, we have fifteen hundred dollars. Hilda develops a taste for the profession. It offers her a discipline and a stability she has not had until now.
She artlessly makes the acquaintance of Yasmine. This young woman also haunts the Hotel Sacher offering her dark eyes, her bronzed skin, her oriental languor to Americans passing through.
At first, they compare notes on their profession, and quickly become the best of friends. Yasmine moves in to Backerstraße, the four-poster bed is big enough for three.
Of the two women in your harem, these two charming whores, Yasmine quickly became your favourite. She talks to you of Istanbul, where she was born, of the Galata Bridge, the Valide Mosque. You feel a sudden urge to reach the Bosphorus. In Vienna, winter is drawing in and you will not make it out alive. When the first snows began to fall, you clung more tightly to your Turkish friend. You left Vienna and visited cousins who manufactured playing cards in Trieste. From there, a brief detour to Budapest. No cousins left in Budapest. Exterminated. In Salonika, the birthplace of your family, you discovered the same desolation, the Jewish community of this city had been of particular interest to the Germans. In Istanbul, your cousins Sarah, Rachel, Dinah and Blanca celebrated the return of the prodigal son. You rediscovered your taste for life and for lokum. Already, your cousins in Cairo were waiting impatiently for you to visit. They asked for news of your exiled cousins in London, in Paris, in Caracas.
You spent some time in Egypt. Since you did not have a penny to your name, you organised a funfair in Port Said with all your old friends as exhibits. For twenty dinars a head, passers-by could watch Hitler in a cage declaiming Hamlet’s soliloquy, Göring and Rudolph Hess on the trapeze, Himmler and his performing dogs, Goebbels the snake charmer, von Schirach the sword swallower, Julius Streicher the wandering Jew. Some distance away, the ‘Collabo’s Beauties’ were performing an improvised ‘Oriental’ revue: there was Robert Brasillach dressed as a sultan, Drieu la Rochelle as the bayadère, Albert Bonnard as the guardian of the seraglio, Bonny and Lafton the bloodthirsty viziers and the missionary Mayo de Lupé. The ‘Vichy Follies’ singers were performing an operetta extravaganza: among the troupe were a Maréchal, admirals Esteva, Bard and Platón, a few bishops, brigadier Darnand and the traitorous Prince Laval. Even so, the most visited stall in the fairground was the one where people stripped your former mistress Eva Braun. She was still a handsome woman. For a hundred dinars each, aficionados could find out for themselves.
After a week, you abandoned your cherished ghosts and left with the takings. You crossed the Red Sea, reached Palestine and died of exhaustion. And there you were, you had made it all the way from Paris to Jerusalem.
Between them, my two girlfriends earned three thousand schillings a night. Prostitution and pandering suddenly seemed to me to be ill-paid professions unless practised on the scale of a Lucky Luciano. Unfortunately, I was not cast from the same mould as that captain of industry.
Yasmine introduced me to a number of dubious individuals: Jean-Farouk de Mérode, Paulo Hayakawa, the ageing Baroness Lydia Stahl, Sophie Knout, Rachid von Rosenheim, M. Igor, T.W.A. Levy, Otto da Silva and others whose names I’ve forgotten. With these shady characters, I trafficked gold, laundered counterfeit zlotys and sold wild grasses like hashish and marijuana to anyone who wished to graze on them. Eventually I enlisted in the French Gestapo. Badge number S. 1113. Working from the Rue Lauriston.
I had been bitterly disappointed by the Milice. There, the only people I had met were boy scouts just like the brave lads in the Résistance. Darnand was an out-and-out idealist.
I felt more comfortable around Pierre Bonny, Henri Chamberlin-Lafont and their acolytes. What’s more, on the Rue Lauriston I met up with my old ethics teacher, Joseph Joanovici.
To the killers in the Gestapo, Joano and I were the two in-house Jews. The third was in Hamburg. His name was Maurice Sachs.
One tires of everything. In the end I left my two girlfriends and the merry little band of crooks who jeopardized my health. I followed an avenue as far as the Danube. It was dark, snow was falling benignly. Would I throw myself into the river or not? Franz-Josefs-Kai was deserted, from somewhere I could hear snatches of a song, ‘Weisse Weihnacht’, ah yes, people were celebrating Christmas. Miss Evelyn used to read me Dickens and Andersen. What joy the next morning to find thousands of toys at the foot of the tree. All this happened in the house on the Quai Conti, on the banks of the Seine. An exceptional childhood, a magical childhood I no longer have time to tell you about. An elegant swan dive into the Danube on Christmas Eve? I was sorry I had not left a farewell note for Hilda and Yasmine. For example: ‘I will not be home tonight, for the night will be black and white.’ No matter. I consoled myself with the thought that these two whores had probably never read Gérard de Nerval. Thankfully, in Paris, no one would fail to see the link between Nerval and Schlemilovitch, the two winter suicides. I was incorrigible. I was prepared to appropriate another man’s death just as I had appropriated the pens of Proust and Céline, the paintbrushes of Modigliani and Soutine, the gurning faces of Groucho Marx and Chaplin. My tuberculosis? Had I not stolen it from Franz Kafka? I could still change my mind and die like him in the Kierling sanatorium not far from here. Nerval or Kafka? Suicide or sanatorium? No, suicide did not suit me, a Jew has no right to commit suicide. Such luxury should be left to Werther. What then? Turn up at Kierling sanatorium? Could I be sure that I would die there, like Kafka?
I did not hear him approach. He brusquely shoves a badge into my face on which I read POLIZEI. He asks for my papers. I’ve forgotten them. He takes me by the arm. I ask him why he does not use his handcuffs. He gives a reassuring little laugh.