Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel (20 page)

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Authors: Thaisa Frank

BOOK: Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel
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Two weeks, I promise. Can I have the letter now?
No, said Elfriede, tucking it in her bathrobe. We’ll keep everything until you bring Martin to Asher. He was a wonderful man, by the way. You’d have no idea his father was Jewish.
The plan agreed with Heidegger. He began to talk about the Being of lost objects—in this case his glasses. Or maybe they weren’t lost, he said. Maybe they were only
wrongly categorized
—in a drawer with buttons and bric-a-brac and letters. And perhaps, so was Asher Englehardt. Mentioning Asher Englehardt made Stumpf worry that Heidegger knew about the camps. Mentioning letters made him worry that he knew about the Compound. But letters and camps weren’t his point. Heidegger meant the glasses were somewhere in the world—brute objects, not part of human life, the way he’d seen his glasses when he hadn’t recognized them.
Heidegger speculated, Elfriede touched her crown of braids, and Stumpf remembered he had over twenty pairs of glasses in his jeep. One of them might be Heidegger’s. But the thought of waiting while Heidegger tried them on was unbearable, and he left as soon as he could, taking a brown bread Elfriede forced on him, saying
Very soon!
and
Less than two weeks!
At last Elfriede closed the door, and Stumpf walked down the path so quickly he dropped his hat. He picked it up without looking around, as if the mere sight of the hut would turn him to stone. And he was surprised to find the ill-fated box of glasses and dictionary spotted with blood in the Kübelwagen. It was as though he’d come from a realm where ordinary objects didn’t exist. He had to drive slowly on the unplowed road—back through the pines, which seemed even more ominous since he’d been bewitched. By some miracle the main highway was plowed—a sign of redemption, he was sure. He breathed freely and drove with speed. All he wanted was to get back to his crystal balls and Sonia dancing letters of the alphabet. But when he remembered he’d promised to take Heidegger to Auschwitz, he drove so slowly the Kübelwagen dragged along the road.
THE ANGEL OF AUSCHWITZ
Dear Marietta,
I think of you all the time, and sometimes imagine I can see your face looking at me from the apartment opposite one of our walls. Thank God you left. People are in factions, always arguing and everybody agrees that in a few months, this ghetto will see an uprising. None of us will be alive afterwards, but it won’t matter because none of us are alive now.
Love,
Gustav
Twenty-seven hours after Stumpf assaulted Mikhail and left the Compound, Gerhardt Lodenstein began to straighten the room he had trashed for the second time in ten days after an explosive fight with Elie where he’d called her a meddler and a traitor. She’d locked herself in Mueller’s old room.
Maybe
, he thought,
it’s only my illusion that I’m Obërst. Maybe my life really consists of destroying this room and putting it back together again.
He started by putting things he’d thrown back in his trunk—an enormous trunk he used to stockpile keepsakes.
The trunk was from the Navy, and he kept it for memorabilia because ever since he’d come to the Compound something had happened to his sense of time: ordinary things he touched, heard—even Elie—seemed to go through a slipknot and become part of a memory of
having happened
. One instant a pen, a scrap of paper, a face, would simply be itself. The next moment it became part of the past and reverberated like memories from childhood—the sound of street games, the rim of a skate. He wondered if this was because he was afraid he might not survive the war or worried that Elie would be killed on a foray. Or did the war itself warp time, pulling objects and events into wormholes? He held a white velvet rose and remembered the smell of summer lilacs.
Elie made these roses for women in the Compound because she couldn’t find fresh flowers, except feverfew, which grew during summer. She assembled the velvet into petals so they thrust up like real flowers, sprayed them with tea-rose perfume and offered them with the same abandon as she offered fur coats. Now and then she gave a rose to Lodenstein. She’d given him this rose when he persuaded her to sleep upstairs again—after their fight about the children.
The trunk was filled with objects: used typewriter spools, a glass lamp, photographs, Elie’s empty perfume bottles, a crooked whisk, a typewriter, fingerless gloves. He picked up pieces of the wool carder and put them back in the trunk carefully, next to a pair of glasses with a white tag marked
für Martin Heidegger
. Then he retrieved two maps. One was the original blueprint for the Compound. The other was a duplicate map—his private record that showed how it was really used. He’d named Elie’s old room
Fraulein Schacten’s Gift to the Scribes
and had drawn a skull and crossbones where the Compound dead-ended in the tunnel. On Stumpf’s watchtower he’d crossed out
watchtower
and written
séances, shoebox, invocations to the dead
. He’d changed
guards’ quarters
to
nightwalkers
and Mueller’s room to
site of mysteries
. He’d marked the water closet where people held conferences,
place of asylum
.
Now he wrote
Elie’s hideout
over Mueller’s old room and
hutch of fiascos
over Stumpf’s watchtower. He considered writing
backstabber
over the Solomons’ house. But Mikhail and Talia had endured enough aspersions before they came to the Compound. Instead he picked his way across the room to get another rose. He put it in the trunk.
During the twenty-seven hours since Stumpf left, a pall had come over the Compound: Mikhail had a huge welt on his forehead and stayed inside
917
, as did Talia, who said to him,
This place is as bad as Lodz
. Lars, who blamed himself for not guarding Mikhail more carefully, kept watch outside the house. Elie almost never left Mueller’s old room. Scribes used the kitchen quietly.
Only Dimitri was happy because Elie was downstairs all the time. Since he’d come to the Compound, she took him with her almost everywhere. And if she didn’t, Dimitri shadowed her, popping up near her desk so often the Scribes nicknamed him
the little mouse
. He loved to look at the stamps on the letters as well as pictures of animals Elie found in books. And early that morning, Elie had taken him to the well, and a thin calico cat walked out of the forest. The cat delighted him. He named her Mufti.
As for Lodenstein, even solitaire upset him. Games that once amused him, like Beleaguered Castle or Forty Thieves, now had aching resonance—about Elie’s schemes, Mikhail’s collusions, and the letter on its way to Heidegger. He’d capsized the bed and had to play on the floor. Cards kept slipping under socks.
He thought about trying to play another game, then noticed two pieces of paper he’d found in the main room. One read:
Who in the hell is bothering to write to us?
The other read:
If Lodenstein thinks this is all horseshit why does he go along with imagining Goebbels?
Both sounded like La Toya. He folded them and saw light in pale bands through the oblong windows. It was already dawn. He’d slept only three hours.
He was picking up another rose when he heard an engine roar into the clearing and boots crack the ice. The door to the shepherd’s hut opened, and Lodenstein felt wind and cold weather on his face. Then he saw Stumpf tiptoeing past his room, holding his boots. Lodenstein walked over the smashed ivory box and experienced a moment of piercing repulsion, a sense of visceral recognition that happens after someone who’s familiar has left and then comes back: all the things he’d done to airbrush Stumpf were out of reach.
Stumpf didn’t know he was being watched. It gave Lodenstein vicious pleasure to put his hands around Stumpf’s thick neck.
You evil fucker, he said. I should shoot you in front of everyone.
Please, said Stumpf, in a wheezing voice. I didn’t do anything.
Then why was Mikhail unconscious? And why are the glasses gone?
A terrible thing has happened, said Stumpf. Yes. Terrible.
What in God’s name are you talking about?
Please don’t shoot me, said Stumpf.
What happened?
I don’t want to tell you.
Stumpf’s eyes were points of dread in his enormous face. Lodenstein’s stomach lurched.
What did you do? he said.
You don’t want to know. Believe me.
You have to tell me.
I can’t.
I have to know.
Stumpf looked down. Tears fell in the crevices of his face.
I promised to take Heidegger to Auschwitz, he said.
What?
I have to take Heidegger to Auschwitz.
Lodenstein pushed Stumpf against the wall so hard the bread Elfriede gave him fell from his pocket. Lodenstein picked up the bread and ground it into Stumpf’s face. Then he pounded Stumpf’s chins and neck and heavy shoulders and slammed his head against the wall as if he could pummel out everything Stumpf had done.
I can’t believe you’re real. You fuck up everything you touch, he said.
Stumpf began to wail.
Heidegger is a living link! he sobbed. A living link to the Compound!
Don’t bother to spell it out. You’ve told me enough.
But Stumpf spelled everything out: How Elfriede Heidegger had made him peel potatoes. How Martin Heidegger had made him walk in the Black Forest. How planks could have fallen on his head. How he’d had to sleep behind a stove. How he’d brought the wrong glasses. How Mikhail’s letter had fallen in the soup.
He went on and on until Lodenstein put his hands around Stumpf’s neck with such force his chins rose around his face.
I want you to tell me about Elie, he said.
They don’t know anything about Elie.
But Lodenstein knocked him to the floor again, and Stumpf’s teeth cut his lips, oozing blood.
Tell me, he yelled.
Stumpf wiped the blood with his sleeve.
They know about Elie, he said.
Dear Cipriana,
People are stealing shamelessly from each other—not just food, but shoes and coats. Still, every day I save a little more bread for you. Please come talk to me.
Love,
Mirella

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