Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel (19 page)

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Authors: Thaisa Frank

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Who is he? she said to Heidegger.

Some asshole from the Party.

You shouldn’t talk that way, said Elfriede. And you shouldn’t wear that hat in the snow. She took it off and stroked the feather. It will get ruined, she continued. Don’t wear it again until spring.

Don’t bother me about the hat, said Heidegger. But look at this. He showed her the glasses and the letter. Elfriede Heidegger squinted again.

What do you people do? she said to Stumpf.

We deliver things, he answered.

Who’s we? she said.

An office.

You said you weren’t with an office, said Heidegger. He picked up Aristotle’s
Metaphysics
and walked toward another room.

You figure him out, he said to Elfriede.

Elfriede made a clucking noise and turned back to the soup.

Please sit down, she said to Stumpf.

Stumpf didn’t want to sit down. The dark wood furniture and the peaked light from the window made him feel outside of ordinary time—not the dreamlike time of séances but the tilted, malevolent time of fairy tales. Yet he felt under a spell, just like unlucky people in fairy tales, and sat on another three-legged stool that also should have been in a barn. He looked at the beams. He was sure they could fall on his head.

Elfriede kept stirring the soup. Which office are you with? she said. I know all of them.

None.

Then why are you dressed that way?

Protocol.

Elfriede Heidegger shook her head.

A uniform’s a uniform, she said. There’s no such thing as protocol.

She rummaged in a cupboard, set a bin at Stumpf’s feet and handed him a knife and five potatoes.

Please peel these, she said.

Stumpf peeled anxiously and messily—half the peels landed on his boots. While he peeled, he stared at Elfriede’s blond braids and thought she looked just like a woman named Frieda, whom he’d almost married.

Frieda was probably making soup, too, he thought—but in an ordinary house with pleasant furniture. Why had he let her go and become so entangled with the Offices? And how could he be entranced by Sonia, who sometimes, in the semiprivacy of the shoebox, did leaps, pirouettes, arabesques, twisting her body into shapes that looked like the alphabet, startling him into thinking that the letters were nearly human—both heels on her shoulders for M, slithering for S, a backbend for O, one leg on her forehead for D. Sonia could become any letter in the world, even the Cyrillic alphabet. But when he looked at Elfriede, Stumpf realized he kept forgetting Sonia was a Russian Jew—not at all like the woman he once wanted to marry.

While he peeled potatoes, Elfriede Heidegger talked about Party meetings he’d never heard of because he was sentenced to the life of an underground creature, forced to live in the Compound. He thought again of Frieda making soup in a kitchen that didn’t have a bed. He was sure she went to more Party meetings than Elfriede and had at least four children.

Elfriede Heidegger put the potatoes in the soup and swept the peels off the floor. Did Goebbels send you? she asked.

That’s exactly what I want to know, Heidegger yelled from his study.

Stumpf said he wasn’t able to divulge information but helped out as a private envoy. He was simply a connection between people of great importance: a messenger, a link, a go-between.

Andrezej,
Still no news of Ewa and the children. But I’ve been talking to someone who can travel freely and I have other news. Meet me at the edge of the barracks.
Januz

The soup was potato soup with dark bread. It was thick, but not nearly as good as the soup the Scribes made: Stumpf thought about Parvis Nafissian banging pots, Niles Schopenhauer peeling potatoes, Gitka Kapusinki sprinkling spices, Sophie Nachtgarten adding bread, and one of the Russians always saying
don’t stir the tea with your dick
. La Toya always put in something outrageous, like vodka and cinnamon, which made the soup taste better, and Elie surprised them with sausage or extra cheese. And all at once, like a child too far from home, he missed the dank mineral smell and subterranean comfort of the Compound. He even missed the Scribes making fun of him and the word games he didn’t understand. At the very same time, he missed the increasingly imaginary Frieda, dishing out soup in a pleasant house with ordinary furniture. In other words—he missed everything at once, and this crescendoed inside him like a bleating lamb, even though he couldn’t cry. He tried to elude the invitation to spend the night and was dismayed when Elfriede led him from the oblong table to the bed behind the kitchen stove. She said that they went to bed with the birds and got up with them, and he could be on his way by dawn. Stumpf climbed into the bed and realized the smell of potato peels bothered him more than the dank smell of the mine. The shadows of the pots and pans looked like bears, ready to bite as revenge for hitting Mikhail on the head when he’d gone to great trouble to write a letter.

Stumpf hadn’t slept above ground since he’d been to his brother’s farm in the fall. For a while he lay in the small bed without moving, listening to the Heideggers cough, and worrying that the rustling pines were the SS, spying on his catastrophic visit. He crept to the window and saw one lone pine. But he didn’t trust this dark and saw advantages to sleeping below the ground. It was what the Führer was doing right now.

He let himself drift and began to imagine Frieda in a large bedroom without her husband: he’d gone to the front like every other sensible German. Unfortunately he’d been killed, and Frieda was lonely. Stumpf was inching his hand toward her breasts when he saw light from the dining room flicker on the ceiling. He heard a great pounding and Heidegger shouted:

I can’t see out of these glasses!

Stumpf sat up and bumped his head on a pot. For some reason these two people, who went to sleep with the birds and woke up with them, were awake in the middle of the night.

He crept from behind the stove. Both Heideggers were at the table in bathrobes. His was dark brown, hers light blue, reminding Stumpf of a frieze in Himmler’s office of two Greek gods working in tandem. Stumpf asked Heidegger if he was sure he couldn’t see out of the glasses, and Heidegger said of course he was sure. How could he not be?

Now, said Elfriede. Tell us where you got them.

Stumpf said he couldn’t say.

Then where did you get the damned letter? said Heidegger.

An office, said Stumpf. They give us smaller things.

You think this stuff about
Ent-fernen
is small? Or this ludicrous business with triangles?

The Reich doesn’t think anything is small.

Then you
are
with the Reich.

Stumpf repeated he was an envoy. And then, as though he’d forgotten what he needed to conceal, he said Asher Englehardt lost his shop, and people who lose their shops sometimes do strange things: maybe Asher made the glasses with the wrong prescription. Or written a crazy letter.

Heidegger didn’t register that Asher lost his shop, but Elfriede Heidegger did.

How do you know? she said.

We got word from an office, said Stumpf.

Who’s we?

I can’t tell you.

They never tell you anything, said Heidegger. He shoved the letter in the soup tureen where it sank in the potato peels. Stumpf pulled it out and blotted it on his sleeve.

Someone you work with? Elfriede said.

I’m not at liberty to say.

Heidegger pounded the table. Of course you are!

Stumpf was about to go into more detail about people losing their shops. He was going to talk about the confusion of papers—mismatched files, bulging mailbags. But Heidegger’s pounding and the rattling tureen made him want to go far away from this dark, gloomy hut, to a street with soft lights where people wore fur coats, and the aroma of tea-rose perfume permeated the smell of earth. He could smell the tea-rose as if he were in the Compound. He could see the lamp on Elie’s desk and her white arm with the red ribbon as it reached for the chocolate she always gave him. And he could smell the aura that surrounded her in winter—real weather, perfumed snow.
Dieter
, he heard her say.
Elie
, he said out loud. Elfriede Heidegger widened her eyes.

Elie
, she said, as though the name quivered on a special scale.
Elie
.

Stumpf held his chins. Heidegger glared at the soup tureen.

I wonder if it’s
that
Elie, said Elfriede.

What Elie? said Heidegger.

The little tart who came to my party, said Elfriede. She got my recipe for bundkuchen.

I don’t know who you’re talking about, said Stumpf.

There was an Elie at Freiburg, said Elfriede, who was there one day and gone the next. She didn’t even tell her landlady. One of those Aryan-looking Poles with blond curls and blue eyes. Everyone said she went underground.

Lots of Elies have blond hair and blue eyes, said Stumpf. And this Elie is from Latvia.

Not so many who disappeared, said Elfriede. And not so many who snuck around.

Stumpf felt his head grow heavy. He rested it on his chins. Heidegger took the letter.

Now tell us about Asher Englehardt, he said.

I can’t.

Is he dead?

No, said Stumpf, who had no idea whether or not he was.

What about this other envoy? said Heidegger.

Stumpf didn’t answer. Heidegger held Stumpf’s chair by the rush bottom seat and pulled it off the ground.

I want you to take me to Asher Englehardt, he said. I want to hear from him if he wrote this absurd letter.

I can’t. Believe me, I would if I could, but I can’t.

Then Elfriede is going to report you. And this Elie person too.

Threats were the order of the day, as they’d been throughout the war. They came in the form of nods, snubs, notes, a revolver in one’s ribs, even a wink.

Stumpf reviewed Heidegger’s threat while Heidegger held up the chair. He was sure Mikhail had written a wonderful letter, and anyone could have taken the wrong glasses. On the other hand, he was the only person from the Compound the Heideggers had seen and could be shot for exposing the project. And even though there were times when Stumpf thought he wouldn’t mind being shot, he always thought he would be the one to decide where and when. So he found himself saying what he never imagined he would say—the unthinkable, the unutterable.

I’ll find a way to take you to Asher Englehardt.

Heidegger lowered the chair.

When? he said.

I can’t tell you, said Stumpf. These things don’t happen like clockwork. Meanwhile I’ll get Asher to sign a statement that he wrote the letter.

I don’t trust statements, said Heidegger. I want to hear it from him. And I want my glasses.

We’ll wait two weeks but no longer, said Elfriede.