GOLD

by Peter Greenaway
�
GOLD
1 � The last apple
Joachim Fingel ate his last apple with his new gold teeth. He was practising his
new bite for the dentist. The dentist�s assistant was called Faith. She had been
named after an American film star, once seen by Faith�s father as she jumped nude
with her legs open into a blue swimming pool on the Californian coast in an illicit
coloured movie purchased in Hamburg. Faith had become a Nazi youth leader. She was
waiting in the dentist�s reception room with Joachim�s files to prove he was a Jew.
It was not out of the question that Joachim had once resisted her advances. He was
handsome and possessed an Alfa Romeo car. He practised a new smile in the dentist�s
hand mirror, whilst the dentist was upbraided for unnecessary sympathy towards the
Jewish race, and consequent wasting of resources. Joachim was persuaded to open his
mouth, brush his new gold teeth and relinquish them in great pain to the dentist
who had just put them in. Faith held the spitting bowl and her two brothers held
pistols. The apple holding the last imprint of Joachim�s new golden bite was thrown
out with the surgical waste, from where it was recovered by his tearful girl-
friend, Natalie. She treasured the browning apple and placed it above the fireplace
in her grandmother�s parlour where it was known that fruits petrified due to a
freak dryness in the room, a shadowy stillness in the house and an absence of noise
in the street outside. Natalie�s grandmother already had a bunch of petrified
grapes from the earthquake town of Posillipo near Naples, a petrified orange from
the Holy Land, and a petrified avocado from Elba that had grown in Napoleon�s
garden. They were lined up along the mantelpiece desiccated into stone for
eternity.
Joachim�s newly fashioned gold teeth went into a Nazi safe and were eventually
taken to the precious metals smelting works at Baden-Baden to help constitute gold
bar 557/KLObb, which at the war�s end, fetched up in Bolzano, a city on the borders
of Italy, Austria and Switzerland known for its inability to make good spaghetti.
Joachim was taken to Augsburg by mistake. The ticket around his neck read
Auschwitz. He was handsome even without his teeth and he did not look at all like a
Jew. He died in a cellar in the company of a captured English airman, who,
believing he was to be tortured and killed, vowed to take the life of at least one
German before he perished. The niceties and significances of Joachim being a German
Jew meant nothing to the Englishman. Joachim was strangled with a ligature made
from strips of the Englishman�s underwear.
Approaching death without underpants was a curious condition for an Englishman, but
the airman knew that nakedness and associated humiliations were usually on the
torturer�s agenda, so it might be said that he was preparing himself and
anticipating events. Perhaps he even dimly sought to see if the anticipation of
sexual masochism could be enjoyed before the pain-without-entertainment took over.
But nothing the Englishman anticipated at the hands of his captors consequently
ensued. After the airman had strangled the handsome toothless Jew as he was
painfully trying to eat a plate of hard beans, the Englishman was set free. Perhaps
he was being rewarded for being an exemplary anti-Semite.
Natalie was hounded by the authorities for having been associated with a Jew with
gold teeth. Offering her family�s money and her own body as collateral, she escaped
across France and over the mountains to Spain. She later married a rich Portuguese
who died young and left her a fortune. When she had walked the Pyrenees escape
route, Natalie had become aquainted with the sculptor Maillol, and at least ten
bronzes of her fresh, bold and buoyant naked physique exist in the world. One of
them is presently exhibited in the ground-floor cafeteria area of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York. Maillol had once written in his diary that he had
intended to have this particular statue covered in gold leaf because for him
Natalie had been such a golden girl.
Without really trying, Natalie and Joachim both left a permanent memorial; the
first in depicting Eve in bronze and the second by making a lasting bite in her
apple.
�
GOLD
2 � Blondi
On the 18th February 1942 a photograph of Hitler�s dog Blondi was published in the
Berlin newspapers.� Almost immediately loyal National Socialists took steps to own
Alsatian bitches called Blondi, or to rechristen their Alsatian bitches
accordingly. It was estimated in June 1942� that there were over 20,000 dogs in
Greater Germany who, if well-trained, would answer to the name of Blondi. It caused
some havoc in the public parks. An Alsatian dog is also known as a� German Shepherd
Dog; it was therefore also a most patriotic gesture. Such was the enthusiasm for
canine rechristening it did not go unnoticed that dogs other than Alsatians were
also being called Blondi.
By the time of the first disappointments of the battle of Stalingrad in October
1942,� the enthusiasm for canine identification with the Fuhrer�s bitch was subject
to interesting variations and reversals. In Pomerania the Gauleiter Hans
Liebermann-Richter, a keen enthusiast for racial purity of all kinds, insisted that
the name Blondi could only be given to Alsatian bitches, and that all other dogs of
that name were to be exterminated. Moreover, to call a mongrel Blondi was a
dishonour to the� Fuhrer. In response to more than a few observations, it was also
announced that the name Blondi could not be given to a male dog. To call a male dog
Blondi was tantamount to an acknowledgement of trans-sexuality, which was
undifferentiated with homosexuality, which did not exist, said Hans Liebermann-
Richter, in Germany, outside of the concentration camps where such filth rightly
belonged, and was Jewish.
In Alsace, in January 1943, in response to the continuing humiliations at
Stalingrad, it was insisted that all Alsatian bitches must be called Blondi in
honour of the Fuhrer. It was a small gesture of particular patriotic support;
afterall, the province had given the dog its name, in the same way that Dalmatia
had given a name to a breed of black spotted white dogs. In Strasbourg, the capital
of Alsace, any citizen maltreating an Alsatian bitch called Blondi, or making steps
to have such a dog put down for whatever reason, even if that reason was deemed to
be a mercy killing, should be arrested. Injuring or killing an Alsatian bitch
called Blondi with a motor vehicle was a criminal act punishable by hanging. In
Alsace, the total identification of the Fuhrer and Alsatian bitches called Blondi
was confirmed. To abuse Alsatian bitches called Blondi was to abuse the Fuhrer.
Since 1939 all Jewish citizens of the Third Reich had been forbidden to own a dog.
In March 1943, a humorist in the Police Bureau in the Nazi Party District of
Thuringia turned the tables, and decreed that all Jews should forthwith be obliged
to own a dog, and that dog must be an Alsatian bitch called Blondi. It was a
gesture to give all Jews an ever present reminder of the Fuhrer; to set in their
very midst a watchdog over their activities. It was thus metaphorically implied
that the Fuhrer was an omnipotent watchdog to universal Jewry. There were not so
many Jews left in Thuringia, so it was an obligation easily policed. All Jews
accompanied by their Blondi bitches were to report daily to their local Gestapo
headquarters where the animals were examined for their good heath, smartly brushed
coats and general well-being. To possess an unhealthy and underfed dog could mean
severe punishment for its owner.
In Volksdorf, the dog-loving, widowed mayor, Josef Hammermann, whose recently
deceased wife had been called Blondi, issued a declaration that all Jews
compulsorily owning a dog called Blondi, should provide it with a gold collar in
honour of the Fuhrer and in honour of his own wife. Josef Hammermann found himself
in some trouble for linking his deceased wife and the Fuhrer in the same
dedication, though his deputy, Harald Copernica, rearranged the wording in an
attempt to limit the damage. Copernica had been sleeping with his boss�s wife and
his attempts to straighten out the embarrassment were clumsy, perhaps through
incompetence, but more likely through jealousy, since just before her death, she
had started sleeping with her husband again. Local gossip escalated the
embarrassments and the decree was eventually rescinded, but not before the twenty-
seven Volksdorf Jewish owners of Alsatian bitches called Blondi had been arrested,
their dogs placed in a pound, and the gold collars confiscated and melted down into
two gold bars. One gold bar was lost, possibly purloined by the mayor�s deputy as
compensation for emotional injury. The other gold bar found its way to Cologne and
then Baden-Baden where it was wrapped in a green baize cloth and placed in the
vaults of the most prestigious bank in the city. A Weichmar army sergeant, Hans
Dopplemann, has been credited, at the very end of the war, as being the recipient
of this gold bar, along with another 99 gold bars, which he packed into two large
suitcases, placing them on the back seat of a black Mercedes, license number TL
9246. Ninety-two of these gold bars were later discovered in a forest just outside
Bolzano, an Italian town near the border with Switzerland, where, it has been said,
they cannot cook good spaghetti even to satisfy ravenous dogs.
The original bitch Blondi, perhaps the only creature that showed its owner an
affection and devotion that was just as truly reciprocated, was whelped of a puppy
called Wolf. Adolf had always believed that his name was an antique form of the
German word for �wolf�, so in a complex way, an identification was made that just
possibly has a suggestion of an acknowledgement of fatherhood, and therefore, at
the very least in metaphor, of bestiality. This original Blondi had her own
personal attendant, a Sergeant Fritz Tornow, whose sole responsibility was to feed
the dog and take her for walks when her owner was not able to do so, being away on
business as a Fuhrer. When Hitler began to doubt the efficacy of the brass-capped
ampoules of prussic acid as a means to his own voluntary self-destruction, he had
one tested on his bitch. A doctor, Professor Werner Haase, accompanied by Sergeant
Fritz Tornow, was summoned to the bunker under the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in
May 1945, and with a pair of pliers, they broke a capsule of the stuff into the
dog�s mouth. The experiment was very successful. Death occurred at once. At his own
finale, Hitler decided not to use the dog-tested prussic acid. He shot himself
instead with a 7.65mm Walther pistol. It is not recorded what happened to the puppy
called Wolf. Perhaps it escaped to Brazil. Perhaps it was adopted by a Russian
soldier. Perhaps it was shot.
�
�
�
GOLD
3 � Property of the BBC
Massima Troy hid her jewels in the back of her radio, and referred to them as
�Property of the BBC�. Listening to the BBC in occupied Europe was usually
punishable by death. She thus kept her treasures close to the ultimate solution. If
caught, she planned to say,
�I am listening to my jewels�, which might have been ironic, even witty, certainly
cryptic, even funny, but no defence against a death-sentence.
And of course she was indeed discovered listening to the BBC.
It was a programme called Worker�s Playtime, and she was listening to her radio at
Knokke-le-Zoute on the coast of Belgium, sitting nonchalantly at four o�clock in
the afternoon, in her white bra and yellow panties, in her six metres by eight
metres garden among the hollyhox, with a fine view of the English Channel over her
garden wall.
Worker�s Playtime was classified subversive. It had been devised as a regular
entertainment to amuse workers in the English armaments factories manufacturing
bullets and shells to kill Germans. Shopfloor workers, for the most part female,
would hum and whistle along with the Worker�s Playtime music played through loud-
speakers whilst they polished shell-casings, tamped down explosives, screwed bolts
tight, and labelled death-missiles with the chalk-scrawled message, �This one�s for
you Jerry!�
The programme was very popular in England. It had a memorable signature tune which
was wholly instrumental on the radio, but was often sung in school playgrounds with
rude and infantile lyrics that used complicated chimes and rhymes and near-rhymes
that changed weekly according to which war-time celebrity was in the news.
Ribbentrop was rhymed with chocolate-drop, he�s a fop, bottle of pop, Himmler was
ridiculed with �something similar�, Daimler, kissed her, missed her, mussed her,
undressed her, Goebbels was slandered with no balls, snow-balls, small balls,
Rommel with pommel, pell-mell, hot hell, Quisling with whistling, King�s Lynn,
Errol Flynn and Gunga Din, Lord Haw-haw with jaw-jaw, see-saw, green door and �ask-
for-more�, Churchill with Fat Bill, underhill, dung hill, Dunhill, �sugar-the
pill�, window-sill and grist to the mill. Edward VIII�s wife, Mrs Simpson came in
for the greatest slander, perhaps because she was American and female, and perhaps
because she was considered a traitor, a Nazi-lover, and certainly an American
divorcee who had persuaded a king to abdicate. Children with half an ear to their
parent�s gossip, were savage. Mrs Simpson was made to suffer. Her name was rhymed
with ding-dong, slept long, day long, Suzy Wong, Lipton, gone wrong, Sam�s song and
diphthong. Many of these references were of such local interest that it is not so
easy to decern their source, though popular songs, film-stars and tea packers were
included along with brand-name cigarettes, cars, imported Americanisms, and radio-
comedy punch-lines. It can be supposed that children only half-heard the original
names, and Chinese whispers in the playground were responsible for distortions,
diminuatives and degradations. Most of the children using the rhymes would never
have known their point of origin.
In the garden overlooking the sea at Knokke-le-Zoute, the Belgian police threw
Massima�s radio up in the air, and its smart, art-deco-styled Bakelite plastic
casing smashed to golden brown pieces on the crazy paving of her garden-path. They
found her jewels, her dead husband�s cuff-links, his golden tie-clip, his gold
coins and the fifty 19th century Spanish gold medallions he had collected whilst
fighting with the Republicans in Spain. They were all dumped in a canvas mail-bag,
and Massima, in her white bra and yellow panties, was stripped and variously
abused.
The mailbag, with Massima�s gold wrapped in her yellow underwear, was eventually
cycled over to Sluis just across the Dutch border by a postboy, Florian Gorrel, who
was related to Massima�s dead husband. He thought he might become unofficial keeper
of his family�s treasure. The gold was kept in the Sluis post-office for six
months. Florian regularly inspected its hiding-place in a suitcase of rusty monkey
wrenches. One day the gold had gone. The yellow underwear was publically abandoned
on the floor of the unclaimed parcels room. It had been used as a rag to soak up
the spilt oil from the post-office lamps. Florian was distressed that his aunt�s
underwear could be used for such a frivolous purpose. He used his American
cigarette-lighter to set them afire in the post-office back yard.
The gold had been taken on a goods-train to Antwerp and placed in a Gestapo office
filing-cabinet in the basement of the Grand Central Railway Station, whose station-
master, van Hoyten, was punctilious with other people�s property, even if it was
Jewish. Van Hoyten had Massima�s radio treasures wrapped in a green baize bag
normally used for keeping billiard balls, and he attached a ticket simply saying
�Knokke Radio Gold�. In July 1944 the golden objects in their billiard-ball bag
were locked in a portable safe, and driven to Baden-Baden. Sometime in October 1944
they were melted down to constitute a small part of a 500 gram gold bar stamped
with an eagle with spread wings and the reference number Ft67.
Four days before the end of the war, this gold bar was picked up by two military
associates who had never handled gold before, and loaded into the back seat of a
Mercedes car, along with 99 other gold bars. These military men, a sergeant and a
corporal, did their job with fixed smiles on their faces and a certain trembling in
their lower arms. The ninety-nine gold bars were then driven to Bolzano which used
to be a favourite holiday resort of BBC announcers on account of a radio seminar
once held there in 1928 when the English guests had been so well treated they had
formed a club called the BBBCCC, the Bolzano British Broad-Casting Corporation
Club. The members of this club were not necessarily keen spaghetti eaters which was
just as well because in Bolzano they would have been disappointed.
The Belgian Gestapo Police officers bundled a very bruised and never-to-menstruate
again Massima off to Auschwitz where the BBC was regarded as a crystal palace with
fountains and girls in polka-dot dresses forever speaking in low voices into
amethyst microphones. This image of the BBC belonged to Forrest Puncturio. For
twenty-eight days, a moon�s cycle, which was a long time for a Jewish Belgian
patriot to survive in Auschwitz, he was regarded as the official dreamer of his
camp-hut.� He had worked at Bush House in London, home of the BBC�s overseas
services, until patriotism and perhaps stupidity and certainly some homesickness,
had created a plan of absurd human smuggling to get him back to Brussels and then
to his Canadian-backwoods-style log cabin in the Ardennes, and then to an arrest in
a police-station at Spa, and now to Hut 45 in the men�s section of Auschwitz.
Forrest Puncturio liked wooden huts. He remembered the split-pine panelling on the
walls of the underground canteen of Bush House in the London Strand with great
nostalgia. He worked at Bush House for two years, writing, recording and editing
lengthy anti-fascist propaganda texts for anybody who might care to listen. His
most fond memory of the Bush House canteen was that the light bulbs had never been
switched off, day or night, not even for a moment, since war had been declared in
September 1938. It was now 1943. Those light bulbs had been shining continuously
for five years. He remembered a proud and melancholic Pole getting drunk and
smashing a light bulb with a wine-glass, and he remembered an enraged
Newfoundlander throwing a chair at a chandelier because a U-boat had torpedoed his
uncle�s fishing-boat off Scotland. But on both occasions, the light bulbs were
swiftly and quietly replaced, and, without a murmur, the management took care of
the costs� If the lights had been going out all over Europe, they never went out in
the BBC canteen in the Overseas Broadcasting Studios of Bush House in the Aldwych
Building in the Strand, London.
Massima Troy and Forrest Puncturio became strange conversationalists for the length
of one sunny afternoon in August 1943. Massima had wandered close to the wire. Her
hut was full of Romanian women and she could not speak their language. She looked
down at the sparse grass, searching for a different sort of plant, any plant. She
missed her seaside garden and the hollyhox plants that grew three metres tall,
especially the dark red ones, and the sea-holly with its blue foliage and yellow
flowers, and the pink campion enjoyed by ladybird beetles that came over the sea
from England. Forrest Puncturio saw Massima Troy from his hut window and wondered
how she could have approached so close to the wire and not been shot. He went to
meet such a courageous lady. He walked nonchalantly in her direction, kicking a
brick. At fifty yards he whistled to her and they walked towards each other,
exchanging pleasantries. And then all afternoon, standing and then sitting on the
grass, they talked through the two fences of electrified wire, five metres apart.
They talked about everything; cities they had known, Paris, Venice, Rome, a small
town in the Florentine Hills called Pratolino where a giant stone statue overlooked
a deep lake of pink lilies and mysterious black fish, and the early autumn crocuses
in the woods in Fiesole, walks they had taken in Ravello and the Canary Islands,
birds and plants they had seen, and white horses they had glimpsed in bright sunlit
fields, and smiling babies, and sleeping children, absent relatives, the long lines
of the recently dead, Charles Darwin, evolution, the irrelevance of religion,
swimming in blue pools, nights of sexual pleasure. Eventually they forgot to keep
looking over their shoulders at the gun-turrets and the solitary sentinels, and the
guard hut. They talked into the evening, their shadows growing longer. Then they
started talking about the BBC, and they were discussing the announcer John Snag who
read out good and bad news in exactly the same deep soothing tone of voice, when a
volley of bullets killed them both. They died within moments of each other. Perhaps
Massima Troy died first, for Forrest was certain that for a few seconds he could
hear her humming the signature tune of Workers Playtime. Their bodies, five metres
apart, lay under the August moon for eight hours. They were dragged away by their
heels at dawn, and each was buried is a separate lime pit. Massima Troy was my
aunt, my mother�s elder sister.
�
GOLD
4 � Butter crucifix gold
This is the short story of a gold bar that was slightly smaller and slightly richer
in colour than the other 91 gold bars discovered on the back seat of a car that
crashed outside the North Italian town of Bolzano where they cannot cook a good
spaghetti.
The gold bar was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a knotted shoelace. It was
like a golden slab of country butter. The brown paper and the shoelace helped to
identify where the gold came from, for once upon a time it belonged to children in
an orphanage in Toulouse. The gold bar was their surety to the nuns who were their
protectors, and it was made of melted down crucifixes.
On certain saints days in summer the nuns would untie the shoelace and unwrap the
brown paper and polish the golden bar on their sleeves. They would line up the
forty-six children of the orphanage in the cloister of the convent, and, waking
slowly, pass along them, holding the gold bar under the children�s chins so that
the sunlight reflected a golden glow upwards upon their faces. The nuns would offer
a benediction to each child.
�There you are Therese, God loves you, casting his Holy Light upon your cheeks and
making you look so beautiful. God be with you always. May his light always shine
upon you�.
�Jean-Pierre, you are truly blessed by the collected power of all the little
crucifixes. God be with you for ever and always�.
Therese�s grandfather, tortured to death in a Marseille police-station, had been
accustomed to pick a buttercup from his garden and hold it under Therese�s chin. He
would say that the golden glow reflected so richly on her face, that she certainly
loved butter and would one day fall in love with a wealthy man and marry him.
Jean-Pierre�s mother, blown into unrecognisable pieces by an explosion when he was
four years old, had been accustomed to hold a slab of butter under Jean-Pierre�s
chin in exactly the same way as the nuns held their gold bar. She had said that
because Jean-Pierre�s chin shone so yellow in the butter�s reflected light, he
would grow up to be very lucky indeed.
However, no luck, no riches, no love and no marriage. God was not with these
children. For ever. And always. They were carted off to Lyon in a dirty lorry, put
on a slow train and gassed at Dachau. Their corpses were burnt. They were Jewish
children. They had no right to be in a Catholic convent, cared for by Catholic nuns
and bequeathed a golden bar, the colour of butter, made of Christian crucifixes.
Besides what was all this? A confusion of faith and money, greed, butter,
crucifixes and superstition. German National Socialism would sweep all such
superstitions away. For ever. And always.
The golden butter bar found its way to Baden-Baden. From there it was taken to
Bolzano in a confused plan to hope to buy away a small Jewish girl believed to be
an officially recognised orphan with an official German Aryan soldier for a father,
and an official French Jewish cook from Vaux-le-Vicomte for a mother. Could it ever
have been possible that someone might have put butter under the chin of this
particular orphan?
�
GOLD
5 � The Scheherazade Commandant
A commandant in Sesnovakia ran his camp on the Scheherazade principle. Entertain me
every day and your life will be spared. Fail to lighten my boredom and you will be
thrown down the latrines, into the dog-pound, under a train, onto the electric
wire; the commandant could be inventive with his punishments. But the Scheherazade
principle was only a principle. Story-tellers were not in fact in demand in the
camp, because the commandant was a xenophobic, German-speaking Czech, and his
command of foreign languages was limited. All his guests were foreigners, mostly
Poles and Russians and assorted Balkan peoples with a few gypsies and an irregular
supply of Dutch. He did have three German speaking Austrian homosexuals under his
jurisdiction, one of whom was mute and therefore not the best of� story-tellers.
The Scheherazade principle was adapted to work in other ways; entertain me with a
song, or a dance, or a recitation or a striptease, or an obscenity or an act of
cruelty against your fellow inmates, and you can live another day. Most people have
one small trick, even if it is only employed to amuse children. Pull a foolish
face, fart rhythmically, de-stone cherries with your toes, speak the Lord�s prayer
backwards, juggle milk bottles, whistle through your nose, sing falsetto, bray like
a donkey, do a card trick, spin a plate, count in threes. Those tricks that could
be performed visually and without exotic props worked best in Sesnovakia, but even
so, few people can satisfactorily continue to amuse day after day with only one
small modest entertainment. So these people with a limited anti-tedium vocabulary
went to the wall, or rather the fence, quite quickly, unless they could offer
something else. That something else in some cases was a little gold. Difficult to
know where the gold came from. But when you are desperate to sleep another night in
a below-freezing hut on a splintered wooden bed covered in vomit without a blanket,
scratching yourself down to the bone because of the jumping lice, it is amazing
what resources you can stoke up from the recesses of your abilities.
Realising that his guests could produce such golden miracles, the commandant
permitted the socially under-talented to pay off their entertainment-dues with
gold. Needless to say in stories like this, the commandant grew greedy, stepped up
the pressure and became more inventive with the sadism. His, as it were, now paying
guests became more inventive, meaner, more competitive, rasher, doing great injury
to one another to see another foggy day in this paradise of North Poland in the
Winter-time. Bring me a ring a day. Bring me two rings a day. Bring me five rings a
day.
Work parties sent out at dawn to dig sewage trenches near a village with one
deserted church and two small farms and a cobbler�s shop amazingly returned with
gifts for the commandant. The smallest dental work of the camp�s inmates was
relocated. The woman�s quarters became suddenly a rich mineable source, and the
segregation laws became curiously lax. Even more curiously, the guard huts were not
so completely out of bounds. The commandant, by inference, was allowing his guests
to steal from their jailers. He found himself becoming a richer man. He placed half
his wealth in the Deutsche Bank, the other in his own particular no-questions-asked
bank situated in a black trunk under his bed.
The mute, Austrian, homosexual performed his Scheherazade tribute as obscene
tricks. He was quite dependable as an innovator.� He performed expressionlessly,
which encouraged those who doubted he was truly mute to reassess their prejudices.
He kept a wedding ring on his person but not on his finger. One day it fell out of
its hiding place and rang tinkling on the concrete floor of the bath-house where
the commandant and his closest cronies had assembled on one of their regular
Scheherazade candle-lit evenings, accompanied by the very best gold-paying guests
whose breath and bodies warmed the bath-house just a little. Nothing was allowed to
go to waste in a work camp. When the metallic sound of the spinning ring ceased to
reverberate, three sets of people pounced. First, the Commandant who now knew no
shame as far as gold was concerned, second, those inmates who had failed to find
the day�s gold quota, and third, the Austrian performer himself. If the Commandant
and his eager gold digging guests had learnt ferocious cruelty that is rarely seen
outside the gates of Hell, then the Austrian surpassed them. His life was in the
wedding ring. He killed the Commandant with a shower pipe ripped from the wall,
forcing it into his mouth and his throat in a no-doubt ironic attempt to make the
Commandant like himself, first mute and then dead. The Austrian and forty-nine camp
guests were butchered to death in six minutes. The fallen wedding ring disappeared.

The Commandant�s gold in the Deutsche Bank was safe enough, but the gold in his
trunk under his bed was soon pilfered. First, wrapped in a cement sack, this gold
journeyed to Warsaw and then to Vienna, transported in an armoured car. It stayed
in an apartment belonging to a blind man opposite the SemperDepot for six months,
until it was smelted down in September 1943, and, as an oversized shining gold bar,
predate-stamped May 1939 to confuse any snooper, it was taken to Cologne and then
Baden-Baden where Karlheinz Brockler managed the Gestapo treasury of Baden-
Wurttemberg. It stayed there almost for the duration of the war. In fact it was
removed from the bank cellars only on May 4th 1945 by Corporal Guelferle, who was
acting on orders from Sergeant Hans Doppleman who was fulfilling the directive of
Karlheinz Brockler�s brother-in-law Lieutenant Gustav Ivan Harpsch who had urgent
need of this gold bar along with 99 other gold bars that had been idling there,
awaiting events, like all gold awaits events. All gold has a future and patiently
waits transformation. The 99 gold bars were packed tightly and neatly in two sturdy
black leather suitcases. Most of them were taken on a four day journey to Bolzano
in North Italy where the citizens cannot cook a good spaghetti to save their lives,
their purses or their moral reputations.
�
GOLD
6 � The coat of yellow stars
A Jewish writer notorious for his predatory relationships with younger women, heard
the rumours of Heydrich�s recommendation to Hitler, encouraged by Goebbels, that
all Jews should be obliged to wear a yellow Star of David. The writer phoned his
uncle, a tailor in Babelsburg, to order a coat of many yellow stars, to be worn,
not by himself, but by his current lover, a black singer from Chicago, Greta
Nairobi, who was currently performing in Offenbach�s Tales of Hoffmann at the
Stadtsoper in Berlin. Greta refused to wear the coat of yellow stars in public, she
thought it was too great a provocation, but she wore it on the cabaret stage,
whilst singing, to accompany its trangressional nature, a song which had lyrics
that the Jewish writer had borrowed from a familiar source but had altered to suit
the circumstances.
�Twinkle twinkle yellow star,
�How I wonder what you are,
�Up above Berlin so high,
�Like a Rabbi in the sky.
The writer had secured Greta Nairobi a midnight cabaret spot at the Auberge, which
those with a satirical ear, also knew to be the name of Hitler�s favourite
restaurant in the Obersalzberg. Gentile members of cabaret audiences with a
scepticism for National Socialism sang the song at private parties, in the privacy
of their steam-filled bathrooms, and whilst riding bicycles very fast down steep
hills in Bavaria.
The antics of the Jewish writer and his black mistress were tolerated for six
weeks, by which time the Babelsberg tailor was becoming famous for turning out
imitations of his initial creation, re-creating it in yellow and black silk, and
once in yellow, stencil-dyed, black beaver-fur, and once in silver lame with
appliqu� gold stars. This last evening-gown was made for a Jewish New Yorker who
had come to Berlin for the Olympics Games, who was pleased to be able to indicate
ironic solidarity with government opposition, whilst also paying carnal attention
to the youngest member of the United States High Jump team who was a Jewish Yale
scholar with a great deal of money.
A second tailor in Magdeburg, admiring the audacity of the Berlin Yellow-Star
anarchists, ran up underwear, vests, petticoats, brassieres, underpants, bloomers,
garter-belts, and stockings decorated with yellow stars, which was bought, and
perhaps worn, by several society ladies in Lutherstadt Wittenberg, to excite their
husbands into acts of sadism. Several prostitutes in Luckenwalde are reported to
have borrowed the idea; one of them, the Jewish Marlene Lubben, becoming wealthy,
and eventually marrying Guston Blitzer, the realist writer and Communist
sympathiser from Rostock, who was known for a time as the Crimson Shipyard-Poet.
Lubben was notoriously unfaithful to Blitzer. On one occasion, she arranged to have
Blitzer locked up on a charge of blasphemy, whilst she masturbated a Ukrainian ice-
hockey team in an Italian restaurant in the Berlin Tiergarten, eventually pouring
the sauce-boat of Soviet semen over Blitzer�s head whilst she was wearing her Star
of David knickers. She was certainly aware that many Communists were as anti-
semitic as their enemies. It may be no accident that Guston Blitzer was later to
write a roman de clef called the Starry Incitement, where the humiliations
anguished over were regarded as more political than sexual.
When the Olympic Games were over and the foreign guests had departed, the draconian
anti-Jewish enthusiasms practised by the Third Reich were permitted to again have a
public face. The Jewish writer was arrested and his American mistress was driven to
Hamburg to board a P & O liner bound for Southampton and then New York. The Jewish
writer had an international reputation and the authorities felt obliged to move
slowly on his case. This was not the situation with his uncle, the Babelsburg
tailor. His shop was burnt down on a Sabbath evening, and his body, tied to a heavy
treadle Singer sewing-machine, was found in the ashes. There was a cryptic item in
the Tailor�s Gazette that suggested German sewing machines were more efficient and
lighter in weight than their equivalent American imports. The tailor�s bank
accounts were seized, and his gold valuables, discovered in a safe deposit box,
were compulsorily presented to the Charity of the National Socialist Society for
Widows of Soldiers of The Great War. To make a demonstrable gift, the gold trinkets
were smelted down and consolidated into a 1000 gram gold-bar and dye-stamped with
the Charity�s initials, and placed in a glass-case for the impressed to marvel at
the beneficence of National Socialism. It was not long before such an expensive and
publicly exhibited object disappeared, stolen, it is believed, by thieves
sophisticated enough to organise their burglary at night and with gloves, but
ignorant enough to have paid no attention to more expensive and valuable items
contained in the same showcase. The Charity-stamped gold bar was however too hot to
handle and it was soon in the possession of the Dresden Bank, whose representatives
curiously did not return it to the National Socialist Society for Widows, but sent
it to their branch in Baden-Baden, whose managers did have some sensitivity in the
matter. They got rid of it, contriving to sell the bar to the Deutsche Bank in the
same city, where it joined other gold bars of a similar but not so august pedigree,
and from where Lieutenant Gustav Ivan Harpsch�s sergeant, Hans Dopplemann, had it
collected and packaged by his corporal, to travel to Bolzano where they cannot cook
a good spaghetti.
A trunk of theatrical costumes from a German travelling theatre group of the 1940s
was recently auctioned in Vilnius and bought by the local history museum. It
contained costumes made of black satin material meticulously sewn with yellow stars
to make twelve different items, namely, three suits, a pair of pyjamas, an overall,
a night-gown, a top-coat, a set of female underwear, a set of male underwear, a
swimming-costume, a bride�s dress and a shroud. The one-time celebrated Jewish
writer was living in Lithuania after the war, having escaped innumerable terrors (a
great many of them brought on by his own arrogance) by being sheltered by a
succession of devoted lovers who had the means to keep him protected. As an elderly
man surviving on his royalties, he had invested money in a small Lithuanian theatre
to put on a play he had recently written called The Stellar Tailor.
A costume specialist at the local history museum had discovered that behind each
star had been sewn a piece of card on which, in a black indelible ink, a name had
been hand-written. Most of the names had been bleached away by repeated washings
and cleanings, but sufficient writing evidence remained, including the name Greta
Nairobi, to presume that here was a collection of the names of all the writer�s
lovers, male and female. The costume specialist counted 67 names on the twelve sets
of garments, 33 of them readable and 12 of them identifiable. It can be presumed
that most of the names were Jewish, and that their owners had perished in the
camps. One name was Lida Baarova, the Czech film actress, which sets up a series of
particular resonances, because she was, for a time, Goebbels� mistress. It would be
curious to imagine the reaction of the radically anti-Semitic Goebbels to the fact
that he was sleeping with a woman who was, or had been, the mistress of the Jewish
writer who had scorned, mocked and ridiculed his policy of forcing all Jews to wear
a yellow star.
GOLD
7 � The biscuit-tin
Three widowed sisters kept their late 18th century golden heirlooms in a biscuit-
tin under crumbling English biscuits bought at Fortnum and Masons from before the
war when their husbands were alive and shopped in Piccadilly.
An Anglophile German officer called Helmut Buttlitzer was billeted in the sisters�
large house which was gloomily overshadowed with horse chestnut trees in the
southern suburbs of Potsdam near the zoo. They ate well and frequently. Most nights
the menu included rabbit stew or rabbit soup or rabbit goulash. The rabbits were
freshly killed. The sisters kept a rabbit run in the garden.
Buttlitzer�s knowledge of English snobbery soon attracted him to the identifiable
biscuit container. With a polite smile he ate the mouldy Bath Olivers, and with an
even politer smile, admired the Marie Antoinette bracelet, the pearl and gold
necklaces that might have belonged to Madame de Stael, the gold Louis XVI watch fob
and chain, the golden hair-pins of Madame Despins, the Charlottenburg brooch that
had belonged to Amedea Rosenfeld, and the ebony and gold filigree butterfly book
marker that had once lodged in a purple passage in the Talmud belonging to Rabbi
Nicodemus Zabben. The sisters were proud of their historical inheritance made very
much in association with their Jewish ancestors� ability to lend money to the
gentile royalty of Europe. The sisters talked eagerly, interrupting one another,
knowing their listener was an intelligent man interested in such things. Whilst
they blushingly discussed what the possible purple passage in the Talmud might have
been, Buttlitzer slowly and� methodically wrapped the items discussed, in three
table napkins, and put them carefully inside his uniform pockets, buttoning down
the flaps and patting his chest to feel the snug proximity of the valuables to his
heart.
After dinner, Buttlitzer took a turn in the large, tree-shadowed garden, leaving
the sisters silently staring at one another in the house. He could see them through
the French windows gripping their coffee-cups with white knuckles. Buttlitzer
watched the rabbits. There were a great many of them, gambolling, nibbling,
defecating, burrowing, copulating. As Buttlitzer stood there listening to the
distant roar of the hungry, underfed lions in the Potsdam Zoo, he was attacked by a
hungry intruder who had climbed the garden wall in search of material to make
rabbit-pie. Taking a much unexpected bonus, the intruder robbed Buttlitzer of his
recently acquired historical souvenirs.
The valuable items were quickly fenced by an ignorant non-connoisseur and
reconstituted as separate piles of pearls, diamonds, enamel, ebony splinters and
high-class gold. The gold watch cogs and watch wheels, the rings and chain-links,
the naked pins and the bent and twisted filigree, already unidentifiable to the
father and son gold smelters whose job indeed was to make the items even more
unrecognisable, were melted down at 1947.52 degrees Fahrenheit, and re-
reconstituted as gold bar HUI 707. With all the other gold-bars, this bar was on
the back seat of the smashed Mercedes car found by police Chief Arturo Gaetano and
US Sergeant William Bell on the outskirts of Bolzano, a city which has occasionally
striven in the past to reconstitute a reputation for serving good spaghetti to
travellers, because it seems to be unable to serve good spaghetti to its local
inhabitants.
After his assault in the dark by the rabbit-catcher, Helmut Buttlitzer brushed
himself down, re-entered the house and had the three sisters put butter on the
bruise on his head, and no more was said. He took one more cup of coffee, bowed
politely to the three women and went upstairs to bed. In the morning, he thought it
prudent to make an application for a change of billet. His excuse was that the
garden of the house was too gloomy and made him feel melancholy. The billeting
office found him new accommodation closer to the zoo where the roar of the hungry
lions was very loud and getting louder.
Buttlitzer contemplated feeding rabbits to the lions, and he knew the whereabouts
of a useful source.
�
GOLD
8 � The naked jockey
Three brooches of great value were discovered in the back of a plate camera with
which the Jewish photographer Gertrude Magy-Holst had been taking photographs of
her nude husband, the jockey Corki Helmt. The brooches, holding a ruby and two
diamonds set in cushions of gold were appropriated, the stones separated out from
the gold, and the settings smelted down eventually at Baden-Baden.� Gertrude Magy-
Holst had taken celebrated portrait photographs of all the members of the Weimar
government, so the police looked for evidence of one kind or another of possible
sedition, or sabotage, or general lack of enthusiasm for the National Socialist
State. They had the photographs that were found in the camera, developed and
printed. They had laughed at the husband�s nudity, but with a certain sheepishness
for Corki Helmt was very handsome, his body, though small and slight, as was
fitting for a jockey, was very neat and well proportioned, and his genitals, the
obvious centre of interest in a photograph of a nude, were profoundly attractive
and dignified. Indeed even his feet were handsome.
The gold filigree cushions of the splendid brooches were melted down in the furnace
blast like cobwebs before a storm, and their original identity vanished as the
liquid gold mingled with gold from Serbian rings, Dutch coins bearing the face of a
popular queen who had escaped to England, Swedish crosses and an Italian golden
rosary. The gold was poured into a 60 ounce mould and stamped with the date of the
last full moon, and the letters BB g7iK.
Lieutenant Harpsch, working with two bribed members of the Third Reich military,
commandeered the gold bar along with 99 others, and 92 of them pended up in a
crashed Mercedes outside Bolzano, the one place in Italy where good spaghetti was a
rarity.
It was said that the police-officers examining the case of the naked jockey, were
much taken by the idea of having their own portraits taken nude. In two cases,
wives were coerced into becoming instant photographers, but, by all accounts the
results were not a success. Because of this, or because he was suspected of being a
gypsy, for all good horse-handlers were accused of having gypsy blood by National
Socialist enthusiasts, Corki Helmt was arrested.
Gertrude slept most of the rest of the war away in a darkened bedroom in an
apartment in Darmstadt. Her doctor kept her supplied with strong sedatives because
she never overcame her grief and pain at the loss of her jockey who was hideously
tortured to death for being so small and neat and sexually perfect.� In a strange
way Gertrude had been responsible for his death by making perfect photos of his
perfect body.
�
GOLD
9 � The burnt elephant
A small circus run by two gypsy families returned every August to Ljubljana Castle.
Their prize attractions were an albino African elephant that stood on its hind legs
and whistled through its trunk, and a fifteen year old trapeze artist called Tana
whose activities in the air made an audience feel giddy. The elephant was owned by
Frederica Goeherly, and Tana was the adopted daughter of Wilhemina Katakis.
Frederica and Wilhemina were cousins united in blood through their great
grandparents who had been born in Baghdad. As long as the takings were regular, the
family feuds were contained, and the cousins could organise their combined family
business with finesse. They sewed their valuables into their best and their worst
clothing. They left no strewn rubbish, no parched earth, no unhappy tradesmen, no
unbribed police, and they stayed in one place only long enough to be a novelty to
everyone. As soon as local star-struck daughters wanted to run off with the strong
man, and rebellious sons wanted to ride the white circus horses, Frederica and
Wilhemina knew it was time to leave. And they always left silently at night. By
dawn they were thirty kilometres along the road, out of reach save for the most
desperately in love or the most determinedly vindictive.
In September 1941, German National Socialism declared gypsies undesirable. The
citizens of Ljubljana had never considered Frederica and Wilhemina to be gypsies.
The two women wore civilised clothing, ate and drank in good restaurants and they
paid their bills. But Tana, the fifteen year old trapeze artist, fell in love with
a Nazi officer, and the whistling white elephant ate flowering bindweed and ran
amuck. SS directives forbade the former because he was a German and she was a
gypsy, and objected to the latter, because elephants were too obscure in Germany to
warrant a license number. Paper work in the Gestapo Office seemed to regard both
events, delirious love and
uncontrollable animals, under the same heading. The gypsy community had methods to
deal with undesirable love and sick elephants, and so did the Gestapo. The Gestapo
put its brash actions into operation before the gypsies. The lovesick Nazi officer
was sent to Trieste under armed guard and soldiers armed with shotguns chased the
elephant. The officer escaped and the elephant went into the forest; the gypsies in
both cases being surreptitiously instrumental in making these events happen.
The citizens of Ljubljana turned out to watch the possibility of a double capture.�
But neither lover or elephant were caught and the Gestapo took revenge for their
double humiliation by burning down the circus and arresting Frederica and
Wilhemina. The two women insisted on wearing their best clothing to the police
station. They were stripped and their gold was soon discovered sewn into the lining
of an ermine tippet, a silk embroidered bodice, a fox-fur hat, built-up shoes and
woollen stocking-tops. It was much too hot to wear winter clothes in August. The
locals pillaged what was left of the circus caravans. They taunted the animals, and
they set dogs to sniff elephant dung and pursue its one-time owner into the forest
from where they flushed it out into the cobbled streets, splashing it with petrol
and setting it alight by throwing bales of lit petrol-soaked straw in its path. The
white elephant eventually found its way to the river that runs through the city,
and, unable to cool its scorched trunk, died of heart attack sitting in the water.
Its carcass was later sliced up for trophies and dog-meat.
There was no law about sleeping with gypsy women before the time of the Ljubljana
elephant. There was after. The male relatives of Frederica and Wilhemina, even
including the underage male children, were accused of sleeping with women anciently
related to the Jewish race, and they were deported to Poland, Baghdad being
regarded as too far away. The gold resulting from ten thousand circus tickets sold
to watch albino elephants and high trapeze artists too young to fall in love, was
sent to Munich. The Deutsche Bank wagon visited the smelter before delivering its
load of gold bars to Vault Three in Baden-Baden, to the future treasure-chest of
Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch, a soldier who believed he could find his small daughter
amongst the tens of thousands of Europe�s dispossessed and buy her freedom.
The Gestapo never thought to search the worst clothing of Frederica� and Wilhemina,
which consisted of several pairs of overalls, three pairs of leather boots, a
ripped scarf with a plaid lining, a battered straw-hat and several pairs of heavily
patched underwear. And as a� consequence they never found twice as much valuable
material as they had discovered in the two lady�s very best police-visiting
outfits.
�
GOLD
10 � Peter the Great
A Jewish family in Rostov whose ancestors had been Dutch were keen to try to
emulate the activities of Peter the Great of Russia when he had stayed in Holland.
Through his example, they lathed ivory, made buckets, studied dentistry, wrote the
letter R backwards and learnt to inscribe gold with a diamond. Every piece of the
family�s golden hoard had been inscribed, rings, bracelets, teething-rings,
lockets, brooches, table-napkin rings, spoons, cigarette-cases, fountain-pens, hub-
caps and bath-taps. And then it had all been confiscated by invading German
soldiers. It was taken to Munich where, for a time, out of curiosity, it was kept
together as a collection. But eventually the itemised gold trinkets were separated
from one another. The more august pieces found there way back to Leningrad, but
some eighteen smaller items started to travel in and out of the hands of middlemen
and fences until they arrived in Mainz and then the smelting works at Baden-Baden.
From there they temporarily, and in another golden state, fell into the hands of
Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch and arrived at Bolzano, the worst place in Italy to taste
a good spaghetti.
In his enthusiasm for all things non-Russian in Europe, Peter the Great had thought
of making spaghetti an important contribution to Russian cuisine. He had tasted it
as cooked by the servants of Venetian silk merchants in the Amsterdam shipyards. In
the event he took back the secrets of making silk to St Petersburg and not the
secrets of making good spaghetti. Commentators, determined to make Peter wiser and
more prophetic than he could possibly have been, deliberated on Italy, silk and
spaghetti and found the correct connection in noodles which is certainly
manufactured in strands like silk, was probably taken back from China, like silk,
by Marco Polo, and was most certainly introduced into Italy, like silk, via Venice.
These were the commentators who were not slow to support Peter�s suggestion that St
Petersburg was Russia�s Venice. They endeavoured to import Chinese cooks into
Western Russia, but these unhappy exiles despaired of cooking good noodles, took up
washing instead, and set up a St Petersburg Imperial laundry. The British are
credited with being the first to invent, build and run concentration-camps at the
time of the Boer War to imprison Dutch farmers whose ancestors may have taught
Peter diamond-inscribing. But Peter had predated their initiative. He himself had
kept a primitive concentration-camp at Novogorod, harbouring recalcitrant Cossacks
who vehemently hated Peter�s foreign enthusiasms, especially those learnt in the
Netherlands, a land, they thought was populated by people with webbed feet who ate
tulip bulbs and would rather ride in a boat than on a horse.
�
GOLD
11 �� The Colosseum Jews
The Americans arrived on the outskirts of Rome on 18 July 1943. A family of Jews
living near the Colosseum celebrated too early, too loudly and too exuberantly.
Their excuse was that they wished to express immediate solidarity with their
relatives in Philadelphia, in Massachusetts, in the cellars of Carnegie Hall, and
in the tenements of the Bowery where you pick gold up off the streets for the
effort of bending over. The family lit the candles of a seven-branched candle-stick
in their window overlooking the Colosseum, and they stood in the street looking up
at the pink and tangerine sky for the three stars that would permit them license to
start an evening service.
Three German soldiers were awaiting trial for raping an Austrian journalist in the
Belvedere. The journalist was the niece of their commanding officer, and each of
the infantrymen had a very low expectation of seeing Berlin again. Drunk on black
market gin, they commandeered the military police vehicle taking them to the
barracks in Trastevere, and crashed it on the corner of Via St Laurenzio and Via
Lineo Posti where the Jewish family were celebrating. They vented their bitterness,
frustration, anger and resentment in a way that satisfied their dim memories of the
purposes of the Colosseum turned around to persecute Jews instead of Christians.
They themselves were theoretical Christians. Between them they had Irish Catholic
parents, Jehovah Witness grandparents, Mormon antecedents and and an Alabama
Baptist great grandfather lynch-mobbed by sadists at Little Italy, Alabama. The
soldiers dragged Alfredo and his two sons Caspio and Luigi and his three daughters,
Laura, Margarita and Spitzi across the road and into the Colosseum arena and they
stoned them. Alfredo was killed with a blow to his left eye. Caspio had the
effrontery to throw stones back.
Three hours later US servicemen drove around and around the Colosseum, hooting,
shouting, and waving small paper flags, their headlamps blazing. Two of the three
German soldiers were still abusing Margarita and Spitzi, having tied them up like
Christian sacrificial martyrs. They were shot.
The third soldier had returned to the Jewish apartment in search of booty and had
found gold. With his pockets jingling with ancient Jewish coins, he had left Rome
on a retreating auxiliary medical truck carrying war-wounded to the Apennines. He
lost his Jewish Colosseum treasure in a poker game, to a corporal who went to
relieve himself over a cliff-top to be shot by a sniper, from which side it was not
clear. The corporal�s body fell into a deep ravine where the night silence for four
hours was broken by his sobbing that sometimes sounded like the trickling of fresh
water in a hidden stream and sometimes like the singing of a melancholic bird. And
then he died. His body was found by partisans who took the gold from the chamois-
leather bag he wore around his belly under his trouser-belt, and they sold it to
buy rifles to kill more Germans.
The gold coins arrived in Turin and for a time were in the possession of Giovanni
Triborius Daley who knew their value as Hebrew treasure and sold five to a Sicilian
antiquarian which are now in the Museum of Roman Archaeology in Taormina. The
remainder he hid in a clothes-trunk. They would be good collateral for post-war
survival. War prices for historical artefacts was more likely to be based on their
current metal price not their artistry or age, besides they were Jewish and
automatically tainted. Triborius Daley was killed in a train-crash near Cologne,
and his daughter sold his assets to the Dresden bank in a bid to buy her passage to
America.
The gold had now left the public domain. It became anonymous and the coins were
smelted down and stamped and shipped and trafficked about from branch to branch of
the Deutsche bank until three months before the end of the war they arrived in�
Baden-Baden as gold bar FG780P.
Baden-Baden was an unfamiliar city to Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch and his corporal
and his sergeant who drove into town in a transport with a diplomatic flag on its
bonnet indicating some amalgam of VIP, military police, and SS. Whilst Gustav
Harpsch used his credentials and charm and some threats to commandeer a black
Mercedes from the bank garage, the corporal and the sergeant requisitioned the 100
gold bars from Vault Three with an order-paper signed by the Deutche bank manger,
Harpsch�s brother-in-law, and packed them into two large black suitcases and placed
them on the back seat of the car. Ninety-two of these gold bars were all set for
the crash and disappointment in Bolzano, that city in North Italy where they cannot
cook a good spaghetti, and where the Romans, as in most cities they conquered in
the Mediterranean, had built a small amphitheatre to amuse pagans with involuntary
Christian entertainers, in the days before the marauding German tribes from the
North came down to lay waste.
�
GOLD
12 � The violin suitcase
In Prague, a music teacher was forbidden to teach music because of his Jewishness.
He kept his valuables in his violin. If the violin could not play music it could be
well used as a safe to house a meagre inheritance for his children, three girls and
two little boys and a baby.
Their mother had died of puerperal fever.
On a house search, drunken fascist authorities demanded to be entertained. They
pulled up five chairs and a sofa and sat with the music-teacher�s children on their
laps. The lack of resonance in the violin disappointed them. It was a case of bad
violinist or bad violin. They could not be bothered to find out. They played a game
with the violin teacher. He and his violin could have the privilege of being
cremated together or buried together. Bad music was not permissible in a former
capital of the German-speaking Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the children now
clustered around his knees, the violinist chose to be buried with his violin. That
way his children might possibly have a slight chance of one day recovering their
meagre inheritance. The authorities were disappointed at the violinist�s calm
acceptance of his fate and they seized his youngest child and made her part of the
bargain. What did he prize most, his tired violin or his frightened baby? The
violinist was silent. They built a pyre in the buttercup field opposite the
violinist�s small house and gave him a choice which should be burnt first, his baby
or his violin; which was the greatest treasure, his music or his youngest child?
The music teacher came out of his frozen trance in horror that such a suggestion
could pass through a human imagination. He threw himself at the monster who had
suggested such a thing. The violin-teacher was shot, and he was burnt on the pyre
with his violin whilst his children watched. When the ashes cooled they went in
search of their inheritance which to them was not the contents of the violin but
their father�s charred bones.
The imperishable contents of the violin case were discovered some months later when
they came to cut the grass of the buttercup field. There was not so very much in
gold but enough to collect, sieve from the wood-ash, and smelt with other Jewish
Prague booty and take to a centre collecting-point in Vienna, and then distribute
to National Socialist accounts in the Deutsche Bank, including the branch in Baden-
Baden managed by Lieutenant�s Harpsch�s brother-in-law. Lieutenant Harpsch
collected the bar that contained the meagre inheritance of the violinist�s
children, and tried to make that inheritance part of the inheritance of his own
child. But he failed because of a white horse.
�
�
�
�
GOLD
13 � The sausageman
The sausageman in Weisel-on-the-Rhine had a brightly lit stall on the corner of
Glopperstrasse and Hockstandradplatz. He was a fence. By way of the sausageman
activities, practically anything saleable could be bought or sold at his stall. And
if you had nothing to sell that was portable, he would make an offer for your body
for a frankfurter with a little mustard and some sauerkraut. His offer stood for
men, women and boys. He would not touch little girls. The saucepans at the back of
the stove were full of cold grease and jewels. Their lids were tied on with string.
He violated women with frankfurters. His notoriety was so familiar and so
apparently untouched by restrictions from authority, he could have put up a notice
saying �I buy and I sell. Sausages for gold, sausages for sex�.
A husband, a sheet-metal worker, with an unaccustomed full belly realised with
horror why his guts had stopped rumbling, and why his wife had locked herself in
the bedroom. He took his three brothers and his two brother-in-laws and turned over
the sausage stall, sending its ovens and saucepans sprawling in the street. He
popped all the brightly coloured lights with the heel of his boot. He scalded the
sausageman from crown to heel, paying especial attention to his private parts. The
evening commotion alerted the police who regularly received bribes from the
sausageman in sausages, gold and rejected little girls. They fired on the sheet-
metal worker and his relatives. They killed two and wounded a third. The husband
and his youngest brother were ordered to clean up the mess, except that they should
not touch the saucepans with the lids tied down with string. Those pans heavy with
white grease were to be delivered to the police-station. The jewels-for-sausages
were boiled free and bartered for money. The collected sausage-gold was smelted
down into a thick �Indian Runner� bar and eventually left Weisel on the Rhine to
travel to Vault Three of the Baden-Baden Deutche Bank. Lieutenant Harpsch collected
this gold and took it to Bolzano to be redistributed, thanks to his inattention in
crashing a car, to the Swiss financial community.
A new sausage stall was paid for. Business continued much the same as before, but
with a new sausageman. The old proprietor lay in hospital for three years, never
likely to walk or talk or use his prick again. His urine was persuaded to leave his
body by an unaccustomed route. Then his burns bed was needed for more deserving
war-wounded. He did not survive the move to a humble cot in a hospital corner. He
died unmourned.
There was one new feature for the Weisel-on-the-Rhine sausage-stall on the corner
of Glopperstrasse and Hockstandradplatz.� Mussolini had been rescued from his
Belvolio captivity in a daring raid, and to celebrate a fresh solidarity with the
Italian Fascists, the new sausageman started a tentative side-line in Italian food,
pizza and spaghetti, served on paper-trays, with tomato sauce and sauerkraut.
Discerning Italians might not have been so enthusiastic about this addition to the
menu, save perhaps those Italians in Bolzano who probably would not have known the
difference between good Italian spaghetti cooked in Naples and indifferent
spaghetti cooked in Weisel-on-the-Rhine on the corner of Glopperstrasse and
Hockstandradplatz.
�
�
�
�
GOLD
14 � The goose girl
A goose-girl in Lorraine kept forty geese to make pate, a prized delicacy in a
world whose palate was losing its subtlety. She tended geese who could lay golden
profits. She had Jewish friends and wanted to help them. She had a plan. She force-
fed selected geese with Jewish gold trinkets. Holding the goose tightly between her
plump knees, she placed a long-necked funnel deep into their throats and ground in
hazel-nuts mixed with a little gold - small objects, thin anniversary rings,
slender chains, finely wrought golden studs for a small child�s ear - massaging the
long geese necks with her thick white fingers to help the birds swallow the booty.
The pink and purple goose livers swelled. You could see a cut slice of mauve and
pink goose liver lying on a white plate with a sprig of parsely and a golden chain
like a precious fossil curled in a serpentine rhythm along a urinary conduit.
Jealous gentiles informed the police who killed off the flock, ripping open the
goose bellies to find the valuables that were not for eating.
They left the goose-girl weeping, the white feathers around her bruised body
blowing on the green grass. White and green. She painted the feathers gold for
Christmas, but she died of cold and starvation, for who wanted gold feathers when
they once dreamed of gold eggs? White and green and gold.
The goose-gold was smelted and arrived quietly as a glistening golden bar in the
Deutsche Bank in Baden-Baden. And Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch commandeered it with
all the rest of his gold bars and drove it in his black Mercedes to Bolzano hoping
to buy back his daughter from a Swiss Red Cross sanatorium. White and green and
gold and red.
�
GOLD
15 � Danae
Rosamunda Blasco, a Jewish Portuguese hairdresser from the Carmen Miranda Salon in
Lisbon slept with her jewels in her bed. She sometimes slept with her gold held
between her thighs and against her belly. Her boyfriend, Eduardo Tedesco Bolinar,
called her Dana after the Greek heroine who was ravished by a shower of gold,
another Jupiter disguise.
Rosamunda was imaginative. She had seen the relevant films. She was frightened of
cat burglars and nocturnal thieves. She knew they could quietly scramble up a
drainpipe, noiselessly break a window, move silently through her kitchen and into
her bedroom and steal her valuables and then depart, and she would not know that
her jewellery had been stolen until she woke up the next morning. She was having
none of that. She would make sure the burglar would have to wake her to find her
jewellery. That way she could at least put up a fight. That way she could at least
see her assailant�s face. Rosamunda possessed a golden rosary, a wrist chain of
gold Tarot charms, and a pair of gold earrings in the shape of leaping fish. Her
mother had given Rosamunda three wedding-rings, the proof of her mother�s three
marriages, the third unregistered, all three wrapped together in a chamois leather
bag. Rosamunda also possessed two gold necklaces, a gold-strapped wristwatch and a
golden image of the Virgin Mary standing on a slither of rock from Golgotha that
had been sold at Lourdes and blessed by the Bishop of Armagh. The Virgin could be
unscrewed from her Golgotha. She slept in Rosamunda�s lap; the rock occupied an
ashtray on the bedside table.
One Thursday in May 1940, Rosamunda went to lunch with a rich English woman who
wanted her hair cut to look like Merle Oberon in the film of Wuthering Heights.
Rosamunda loved the smell of the English woman�s perfume, it was called Catherine.
Rosamunda became pleasantly addicted to mayonnaise made with avocado and frothed
egg-yolk; it was called an Emerald Serpent on account of the way it was laid on
your plate. She frequented the rich woman�s car, and the rich woman�s summerhouse
on the garden roof of the Capra Hotel. She liked to sit in the rich woman�s special
Radio-Room where she listened to Somerset Maughan and Ivor Novello tell stories
about the English in Rangoon and on the Cote D�Azur. She never knew who these
people were or where those places might be. Rosamunda enjoyed taking a bath in the
rich English woman�s bathroom and she enjoyed stretching out on the rich English
woman�s bed, and she enjoyed spending afternoons watching American Romances in
expensive seats at the Sunset Boulevard Cinema. Rosamunda�s boss, Hermione Picaro,
at the Carmen Miranda Salon, encouraged her in all these things. The rich English
woman was the wife of a minister in Salazar�s government and she gave very big tips
indeed, like a new device called a Refrigerator, which was like a big ice-box but
it had a door instead of a lid, trays for making Pink Gin ice-cubes, and a light
that went on when you opened it up. The light worked on some sort of magnetic
principle. Or a car radio, a radio that you could actually put in your car and,
except for when you drove under a bridge or in a tunnel, it would play you American
music. This car radio apparently also worked on some sort of magnetic principle.
With just a little prompting, Rosamunda would draw a moustache with mascara on her
upper lip to imitate Laurence Olivier playing Heathcliff, and with extra white
make-up and thick black lipstick she would imitate Merle Oberon in a black and
white film playing Catherine. It satisfied the rich woman who stroked Rosamunda�s
hair and her breasts and kissed her knees, and gave her a cocktail-shaker-set with
six small glasses, six large glasses, a bottle of rum, a bottle of absinthe and a
bottle of Pernod, and two aluminium shakers with red plastic screw-on tops, a
bottle of maraschino cherries and an ice-bucket, and ten swizzle-sticks in the
shape of miniature umbrellas which actually opened and shut.
Eduardo Tedesco Bolinar was jealous. He stole money from the cash-register at the
Carmen Miranda Salon and contrived to get Rosamunda blamed. She was arrested and
accused of unnatural practices, whether on account of impersonating Merle Oberon or
Laurence Oliver is not reported. Eduardo�s uncle, Ferdinando Belize, was a police
clerk, and could arrange to fictionalise all written reports, which he did as a
matter of honour wishing to be a script-writer in Hollywood. He hoped a film
producer would one day read his police reports and sign him up for imaginative
writing. Eduardo�s uncle sent two policemen around to Rosamunda�s apartment. They
could not get in or break the door down, such were Rosmunda�s anti-burglar
precautions, so they had to help one another climb a drain-pipe, noisily break
three windows and climb across various hazards in the kitchen before they could get
to the bedroom and find the jewels in Rosamunda�s bed. If Rosamunda had been in
bed, she certainly would have been woken by all the noise and disturbance. She
certainly would have seen their sweaty, ugly faces.
The golden trinkets were impounded as circumstantial evidence, to be considered as
probable bribes or likely gifts received as a result of sexual blackmail. They were
carefully itemised in case the rich English woman should take an interest in
Rosamunda�s case and arrange bail.
Rosamunda was bored at the police-station. She volunteered to cut hair to make the
time pass more quickly. She accepted requests. A Ramon Novarro, an Errol Flynn, a
John Gilbert, several Rudolf Valentinos, and a Bela Lugosi, though she had to flick
through several film magazines before she could find a good enough picture of Bela
as Dracula to make a decent copy of his hair-style; she even did an Adolf Hitler
though no-one could remember having seen Adolf in an American Romance.
Retrospectively Adolf as Dracula could have been engaging.
Meanwhile Rosmunda�s valuables moved around the police-stations of Lisbon. The
Virgin Mary statue was taken home on loan for three days by a police-chief�s wife,
who hoped to make an impression on a visiting Irish bishop. The three wedding-rings
disappeared. Eduardo was given the empty chamois leather bag out of which he made
himself a jockstrap. He was now seeing the rich English woman and spending the
afternoons at expensive seats in the cinema, chain-smoking long black cigarillos
which made him cough until his eyes watered. Eduardo�s uncle collected 14,000
escudos in dirty untraceable notes from a judge�s clerk, proceeds probably from
selling the golden rosary.
On the occasion of a police clean-up, with sundry other items, the remains of the
Rosamunda collection were quickly shifted across the border to Madrid, out of the
way of a supervision that might get too close and create accusations of corruption.
The trinkets subsequently travelled to Salamanca where they were stolen with
comparative ease from a police truck by a trader in tourist trinkets called Enrico
Solstice, who used them to enlarge his gold collection to negotiate for an early
period Joan Miro, sold at the back door of the Portuguese National Gallery
Collection to pay for restoration of the gallery�s cooling system. It was a
painting of a rabbit and three fish, an image that was later made popular by being
reproduced on the menu cover of the restaurant at the Joan Miro Museum in Barcelona
in the 1990s. Enrico had been a little impatient. He had hoped to buy an El Greco
from the same source one day, perhaps ostensibly to help them out with the
gallery�s security alarm system, but that would have needed five times as much
bullion.
Rosamunda�s gold, now almost as good as invisible in the eight metal cases of
valuables sent to Medrun on the French-Spanish border, was in the hands of
Portuguese fascists determined to help their friends in France. Addressed to
Suzanne Creaux, the niece of Pierre Laval, official Vichy negotiator, the
consignment was intercepted by the maquis somewhere near Roux, and broken down into
small collections that could easily be spirited away. One of these collections was
itemised by a young clerk called Jacques de la Lune, and contained a golden Virgin
Mary standing on a sliver of black rock, which surely once belonged to Rosamunda
Blasco. This clerk may have been a turncoat, for the Virgin arrived in Vichy, its
original intended arrival destination, in the summer of 1944, and was subsequently
sent to Colmar and then Baden-Baden where it was unscrewed from its contact with
Golgotha and smelted down without any sentimental or religious anxieties.
Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch in the end got his hands on Blasco�s legacy, and as a
fugitive Nazi, fearfully running away from persecution and hopefully running
towards his three-year old daughter, involuntarily dumped it in a spectacular car-
crash on a highroad near Bolzano, a place in Italy that had earnt a reputation for
not being able to cook a good spaghetti.
What of all the characters in this story?� Well, Rosamunda Blasco made no other
known mark on European documentary history, neither did Eduardo Tedesco Bolinar or
Hermione Picaro, Ferdinando Belize, Enrico Solstice, Suzanne Creaux or Jacques de
la Lune, but it is known that Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, one time dictator of
Portugal, died in his bed, scarcely mourned. Merle Oberon was discovered by
Alexanda Korda, had four husbands, and caused the collapse of the film I Claudius
by a near fatal car crash. Laurence Olivier earnt a reputation on the British
stage, making at least two films that have since become classic adaptations of
Shakespearean plays. He marryied two contrasting English women, Vivien Leigh, who
drank herself to death, and Joan Plowright who is still alive at the time of
writing and continues to play dippy English grandmothers with hearts of gold.
Ivor Novello was an effete English songwriter and sometime actor, following both
professions with some entertaining camp wit. Somerset Maughan was a novelist
famously painted by Graham Sutherland against a yellow wall, who lived the life of
a professional English exile in places much warmer than London. Ramon Novarro was
murdered in a motel-room by hooligans who may or may not have known his identity,
and were possibly over-excited at Novarro�s sexual appetite. Errol Flynn supposedly
had a sexual organ that encouraged him never to wear short trousers in public, John
Gilbert star of passionate romances, was rumoured at one time to be Garbo�s lover,
failed to make it into the talkies and died of drink aged forty-one. Rudolf
Valentino, the archetypal cliched Latin lover, was repeatedly and badly imitated,
most famously in a photograph by Cartier-Bresson, and engendered one of the world�s
first huge fan-clubs, conveniently dying at a young age to help his continuing
fame. Bela Lugosi was a Hungarian actor who reputedly never spoke more than five
words of English. He famously played Count Dracula, parodied in the cartoon series
Sesame Street by a puppet who announced himself as �I am Count Dracula, I count�.
Adolf Hitler was a dictator who kept no written records of his responsibilities in
the murder of millions and successfully entered into a suicide pact with his two-
day old wife, Eva Braun, in an underground bunker in Berlin. Joan Miro made himself
a fortune and a huge Spanish reputation, trying to fill Picasso�s shoes by
repeating his same tedious set of motifs for forty years. And El Greco, the Greek,
was a 17th century Spanish painter with an astigmation of the eye and a liver
complaint that caused him to paint long etiolated figures that look as though they
have just come out of seclusion in damp earth like crocus bulbs in February.
It might be possible to fill in a little with some of the other names in this short
story, to provide you, for example, with a little information about Danae and
Jupiter, Emily Bronte, Carmen Miranda, Pernod, Eva Braun, Shakespeare, Picasso,
Graham Sutherland, Cartier-Bresson, and even the Virgin Mary, but the danger is
that yet more names would inevitably arise and we would be here all night.
You may have noticed that one name is missing, the name of the rich English woman
who created the circumstances to engender this story in the first place. But we
cannot supply her name. She is still alive and is determined to remain anonymous,
if only to protect the privacy of her five illegitimate children by Eduardo Tedesco
Bolinar.
�
GOLD
16 � Love of dentistry
A supply of gold kept in a glass-fronted cabinet by a Dutch Jewish dentist in
Eindhoven was stolen and taken to the mint at Saarbrucken by a Dutch woman from
Maastricht whose husband was a Russian prisoner-of-war. She traded her body to a
young Belgian smelter who insisted on a contract of an hour of her time for an
ounce of his smelting. She was generous and they ended up married, having to suffer
the consequences of the possible return of her husband at the end of the war. They
were lucky. Her Dutch prisoner-of-war husband from Maastricht had been a slave
labourer on a Russian Collective Farm, coerced into sleeping with a Polish farmer�s
blind daughter who had eventually nursed him through diptheria, cholera and
influenza, and had married him.
�
No-one reported the two bigamists from Maastricht to any authority, Dutch, German,
Russian, Belgian or Polish.
In Holland, the dentist�s smelted gold, now constituting gold bar FG890P, was sold
and the proceeds bought the smelter and his new wife a large apartment. They still
live together happily in an old people�s home in Potsdam. Their daughter is a
dentist practising in Dresden.
In Novgorod, the prisoner-of-war and his blind Polish wife worked on a Collective
Farm but also rented an allotment where their cabbages and eggs brought them enough
local prosperity to help them take their daughter through medical school. She now
teaches dentistry in Kracow, her mother�s home-town.
Gold bar FG890P was in Vault Three in Baden-Baden in 1944, and picked up by Gustav
Harpsch on his abortive attempt to find and buy back his infant daughter from the
Swiss. He never discovered his daughter, having been involved in a car crash which
displayed all his stolen gold to the eyes of an American Occupational Force
Sergeant, William Bell, on the outskirts of Bolzano in North Italy where spaghetti
is rarely cooked with any accomplishment. It so happened that this American
sergeant�s daughter was a dentist practising in Ottawa. Who knows, perhaps
Harpsch�s daughter, associated by inference with all these coincidences, might one
day develop a trauma with teeth.
�
GOLD
17 �� The Left-Biased Steering-Wheel
Maxima Fortunelli was a Roman-born Jew of Sicilian origin, orphaned at 10, brought
up by a Jewish family that shared no blood with her. She was stern and no-one knew
she had lovers who were not Jewish, that included a short-sighted German of Dutch
parents who wouldn�t wear glasses and who sometimes lived in Trieste. Maxima sold
paintings and antiques, and she was supposed to be a secretary, and indeed did put
several hours into a publishing-house that erratically published art magazines that
favoured Spanish art and Italian Mannerism, and loved Velasquez, Altdorfer and
Caravaggio, the first for his brush-strokes, the second for his thorns and the
third for his boys. Maxima�s friends saw the connections in all this; dark,
tenebrist, moody, dangerous, a little masochistic, erotic. The point of declaring
this character background for Maxima Fortunelli is to indicate her love of secrets
and danger, and to go someway to explain her actions.
It was known that she kept her valuables in strange places, in a cobra head in a
hotel safe in Modena, in a Gladstone bag in a Scottish hospital run by a great
grandchild of Cavour, in her nursery rocking-horse, in a ceramic pipe under a
swimming-pool in Luxembourg, in the steering-wheel of her car, a dark green
Austin.� She used her car a great deal, going backwards and forwards between
Sorrento and Paestum in Southern Italy, and Mestre and Trieste in Northern Italy.
All four places were littered with her erotic escapades. She regularly met an
English lover by the women�s bath-house in the ruined city of Herculaneum, where
she wore a thin print dress and no underwear, her buttocks on the cold marble with
her lover on her lap. She wore red dresses in Ravello and deliberately took her
amusements without love, in a bamboo garden beside a deep tank occupied by giant
toads. She frequently took a cabin in the regular ferryboat to Capri. She sat in a
pony and trap by the beach-road outside Paestum. She did boats in Mestre and trams
in Trieste. Sometimes the meetings were for business only, but most times she
combined business with her pleasure.
In September 1941 she fenced gold for Jews who wished to escape to Israel, and she
had secured a family fortune in her steering wheel. She was not watching what she
was doing on the Via Emilia just after the Ferrara turn-off and she bumped heavily
into a hay-wagon, breaking her front passenger side-window and causing her hollow
steering-wheel to rattle with loose rings every time she took a sharp left turn.
Outside Padua at ten o�clock in the evening, she was stopped at a road-block, and
forced to give a lift to a German officer who had severe stomach cramps and
urgently needed to see his Austrian doctor. Uncharacteristically fearful of her
rattling steering-wheel, she refused to turn left to the appointed place of her
Jewish contact, and instead, drove straight on until the complaining officer
fainted and Maxima tipped him out onto the highway in the middle of the night
somewhere near Avventura. She drove on to Ferrovia before realising that she was
being followed, whereupon she accelerated, momentarily lost concentration, braked,
swerved and hit a tree. With Maxima unconscious from a bump on her head, her car
ran driverless on into a dark wood, miraculously just� missing fifty tree-trunks
until it came to a natural stop on an incline of pine needles, its headlights
spiking the misty darkness. Maxima came to, found the engine dead, changed her
shoes and ran off into the night. Her car remained alone in the wood until
discovered by two teenage lovers who used the brown leather back seat as a snug
refuge. A week later the girl remembered the car lost among the trees and phoned
her brother who owned a garage. He went searching and found the silent car. He was
obliged to cut down several pine trees, being unable to find the path that the car
had used to reach its resting-place, and he finally winched it onto the back of his
pick-up truck. He spent a day patching the car�s front bumpers and repairing a flat
tire and he sold it to a solicitor�s son, who drove it for a week before his
patience at the steering-wheel rattling every time it turned to the left, persuaded
him to take the car back to the garage to get the steering fixed. The garage
mechanic discovered the gold hoard, but kept the find to himself, showing the
solicitor�s son only scraps of loose metal filings as being the cause of the
rattling. The mechanic split his findings into three parts and sold the first part
to a bank clerk who kept them in his bank strong-box to be discovered when he was
sacked for irregularities. The gold was sent to Baden-Baden and smelted into a
single gold bar, which, with 91 other gold bars, was discovered in a black
Mercedes, license plate number TL9246 abandoned at the road-side at Bolzano, the
one place in Italy where they could not make good spaghetti.
Working forwards in this story, the bank-clerk became the manager of the Central
Bundes-bank in Vienna, the mechanic bought a string of garages along the Via
Emilia, and the solicitor�s son, after performing valuable work at the Nuremberg
War Crimes trials, assisted in rewriting the Geneva Code for the Protection of
Victims of War and officiated as a European High Court Judge in the Hague and then
in Jerusalem on the occasion of the Eichmann trails. The German officer who was
suffering from appendicitis was later exonerated by the Americans and went to Salt
Lake City as a military adviser, to later become a member of Kennedy�s staff at the
time of the Bay of Pigs, and to travel in Nixon�s entourage to China. Maxima
organised a Miro exhibition at the Guggenheim in Venice in 1960, was transferred to
the New York Guggenheim when the Frank Lloyd Wright Building opened, married an
executive of Sotheby's and now lives as a rich happy widow in the Dakota Buildings
on the West side of Central Park. There is a Dali, two Braques and an early Renoir
hanging in her dining-room and untold surprises, it is said, in her dressing room.
Some say she has a Velaquez in her toilet, an Altdorfer in her bathroom and a
Caravaggio still-life of grapes in her bank-vault. The Velasquez was
uncharacteristic and therefore did not attract attention, Altdorfer is a painter
whose works are not that widely recognised and Maxima took a risk on a guest
recognising its value. The Caravaggio was immediately identifiable and therefore
she did not dare to hang it even in a public private space like her bed-room.
Denial of these facts of ownership is said to be a smokescreen to avoid the
snoopings of thieves and the inland revenue.
�
�
�
GOLD
18 � The haystack story
At the approach of the Fifth Army marching to Poland, three Catholic farmer
families collected their valuables together and hid them in a haystack with their
thirteen children. The farmers were persuaded to entertain Nazi soldiers and bring
their best schnapps out of the cellar to celebrate Hitler�s birthday. The children,
thinking to delight and surprise their parents and their guests, came out of hiding
festooned in the familys� jewellery collection. The children, the jewels and five
cows were confiscated. The gold was stripped from the jewellery collection and
eventually arrived in Munich, where, it was refashioned into convenient gold bars.
One of these travelled to Baden-Baden labelled perishable goods and arrived in
Lieutenant Harpsch�s possession to be discovered with 91 other gold bars in a
crashed black Mercedes, license plate number TL9246, at the road-side near Bolzano,
the one place in Italy where they cannot make good spaghetti.
This event was tragedy enough, but the drama was curiously compounded. One child
and one gold necklace were never found. The families searched the haystack over and
over again. In their desperation, they dismantled it, scattering the hay across the
farmyard.� But they never found the child or the necklace. The child�s name was
Hyka and the necklace was worth 300,000 marks. The Catholic families never saw
child or necklace again.
One week after the Fifth Army had passed by and tens of thousands of Jewish Polish
families had been liquidated and Great Britain had declared war on Germany, one of
the farmers� Jewish neighbours obtained passports to England, bought new suitcases
and emigrated to Lancaster to work in the linen factories. They took with them an
orphan who was delighted by her new name, Adovisher, which in Eastern Silesia is
Yiddish for needle.
�
GOLD
19 � The ring collector
Albert Albers gave receipts for the wedding-rings he coerced off the women in his
family, thirty-seven pieces of pink paper signed with his initials in blue ink. He
said they could get the rings back after the war with fifty per cent interest
relevant to the newly Viktorious German global gold-standard to be recognised in
London, Berlin, Tokyo and New York. It sounded official and optimistic and sort of
impressive. He said their wedding-rings were needed to help buy Japanese bonds to
support the war effort against the British in Singapore. The pink receipts could be
used in Kelsterbach near Wiesbaden as credit notes for food of a non-perishable
nature at the local grocers. The women needed to feed hungry mouths and they agreed
to Albert�s unlikely promises. In return for acknowledging the pink receipts,
Albert had promised the Kelsterbach grocers war-credit based on forcibly selling
pork to rabbis to encourage them to become gentiles. Albert argued that a pork-
eating rabbi would have to become a gentile since his ethical credit would be
valueless among his own people. He discussed his plans with the Jewish community,
asking for their co-operation, and offering as an inducement, funds to rebuild
their synaogogues after crystal-night by way of auctioneering re-cycled bricks
bought at knock-down prices from a dismantled gas-factory in the Wiesbaden suburbs.
Albert was a schemer with innumerable exciting financial plans.
After the war, not only were there no rabbis in the Wiesbaden area to demand a
refund, but there were no grocer�s shops left standing and, at the end of Albert�s
financial chain, not a single wedding-ring could be returned. Albert was
consequently ostracised by the women in his family, by his sisters, his sisters-in-
law, his grandmothers, his aunts and his female cousins. The women despised him. He
was ignored at christenings and cold-shouldered at birthdays. He was not invited to
funerals. Even his wife began to sleep downstairs, in a single bed under the
window. He was exasperated. He loved women and he wanted to be well thought of by
them. He spent two years dreaming up schemes to earn money to pay them back for
living so long without their wedding-rings. He worked hard to return into the bosom
of their favour.
Finally, the drama for Albert ended a little like that Maupassant short story of
the woman who borrowed a pearl necklace to wear at a grand ball, lost it, spent
twenty years of her life scrubbing floors and taking in laundry to afford to
replace it, only to find the necklace had been made of paste pearls and was
virtually worthless. Most of the wedding- rings in the Albers family were nearly
worthless but Albers was never made aware he had been tricked, though trickery was
not really in the minds of his female relatives, the currency associated with their
wedding-rings was in sentiment not riches.
As to the wedding-rings - what had happened to them? It is a truism that most
people in the world do not own gold, now or then. But if they do own gold it is
most likely to be in the form of a wedding-ring. A golden wedding-ring is like a
talisman. There is of course something significant in associating fidelity for
eternity with the most precious of metals. It suggests confidence. Which is perhaps
curious because gold is so valued for itself, that almost inevitably it will be
melted down from its present condition and turned into something else. This of
course is what happened to the wedding-rings belonging to the women in Albert�s
life.
It could be said that wedding-rings at certain times of the war and in certain
places, became for a time a semi-official currency. Twenty wedding rings in
Mannheim in April 1943 could buy you a passport to America. The going rate for a
petrol-filled English car in Delitzsch near Leipzig in the autumn of 1944 might be
thirty wedding-rings. But, considering their symbolic value, it was often unwise to
meddle with wedding-rings. They could so easily have a negative value. A passport
purchased with wedding-rings was bound to be fake, a car purchased with wedding-
rings was bound to crash. It was just too much an unlucky bargain.
From the German gentile point-of-view, playing with wedding-rings as a currency was
unlucky for the Albers family. The wedding-rings� became part of a gold bar. And
this gold bar wrapped up in a newspaper announcing the bombing of Pearl harbour
travelled to Baden-Baden on a slow train. These thirty-seven wedding-rings of the
Albers family were thus associated with the entry of America into the war which
marked the definitive beginning of the end for Germany. For four days, the Albers
wedding-rings constituted one sixth of one gold bar out of the 92 gold-bars that
eventually arrived in Bolzano. They contributed in a very small way to a possible
happiness for him. Now there indeed is a worthwhile currency, a currency of
happiness. But a currency of happiness is difficult to convert or change or
transfer. Harpsch could not hold on to it, bank it or buy anything with it. He lost
it all in a car crash on the outskirts of Bolzano where locally-cooked spaghetti
could certainly not be recognised as a profitable commodity.
�
�
�
GOLD
20 � Hot water valuables
This is the story of a collection of gold jewellery that had been stuffed into hot
water pipes where the constantly boiling running water discouraged� investigation.
A Jewish owner of a block of apartments in Potsdam had done this service for his
tenants who feared their valuables would soon be the property of the police. The
landlord� made sure the water was kept at a scalding temperature, day and night,
summer and winter, and he had re-arranged the plumbing in the block of some forty
apartments to make identification of the source and the routing of the boiling
water exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to find. It must be said that the
valuables would also be inaccessible to their individual owners, who were not
unaware of this but their trust in one of their own kind was greater than their
trust in one of the police kind. In cold weather plumes of excess steam billowed
from the chimney pots, and at night the walls burbled with the restless hot water.
The building became a haven for cats, rats and tramps, and those who lived for
bathing and showering and washing their cold hands twenty times a day.
Then the landlord died of a heart attack whilst sitting in a public toilet
straining to empty his constipated intestines. His own piping was not as efficient
as the piping of his property. The water in the apartment building cooled. Some of
that gold had been immersed in boiling water for four years. The boiling point of
water is 100 degrees Centigrade. The boiling point of gold is 1064.18 degrees
Centigrade.
On a piece of whispered advice that the apartment block was a goldmine, now that
the powerful landlord was dead, the apartment blocks were cleared of Jews and the
building�s secret places ravaged and wrecked. The entire plumbing system was ripped
from the walls, unearthed from under the floorboards and pulled down from the
ceilings. The golden treasury, little the worse for its constant scalding, was
discovered and put on display in the police-station to indicate the ingenuity of
the greedy Jewish imagination. Subsequently it was boxed up and driven to Stuttgart
and from there to Baden-Baden where it was smelted to make six golden bars, one of
which eventually was appropriated by Lieutenant Harpsch, the unhappy father of an
abducted baby girl.� Assisted by his sergeant and a corporal, he had persuaded his
brother-in-law, the manager of the Deutche Bank in Baden-Baden that he knew of a
secret place to make a stash of gold to assist them and their families after the
war. Lieutenant Harpsch had suggested 100 gold bars would be just enough,
sufficiently portable in a crisis. Harpsch had lied of course. The money was to
find and pay, if necessary, for his daughter�s release from custody whatever that
might be. He had heard many rumours of where she might be. One was that she was
held for safety�s sake with a bourgeois family in Besancon, her mother�s home town.
Another rumour suggested Basle where the child�s grandmother had once been a nanny
of Swiss children. Harpsch�s greatest conviction was that his daughter was held in
Switzerland, in a Swiss sanatorium across the border from the north Italian town
called Bolzano, or Bozan by the Germans. He was prepared to buy back his daughter
at whatever price it cost from the greedy Swiss. They could add his stolen Jewish
gold to their vaults in Zurich or Geneva, or they could return it to the Jews or
give it to the Americans, anything, as long as they returned his daughter.
Harpsch had succeeded in setting off on his circuitous journey with 100 gold bars
packed tightly into his two black suitcases. Only 92 of the gold bars arrived in
Bolzano. One of the original 100 gold bars had gone to his sergeant to ensure his
complicity, another seven had been exchanged for petrol, food, alcohol, maps, hotel
beds, a bath, free passage and a new tyre. And cigarettes. Harpsch was a great
smoker. He was probably smoking when he crashed the Mercedes into a white horse in
the moonlight one kilometre outside Bolzano where they had trouble cooking a good
spaghetti. Perhaps the cooks of Bolzano never learnt that scalding water was a
perquisite for the cooking of good spaghetti.
GOLD
21 � The golden weathercock
The weathercock on the church of St Peter and St Ursula in Bannesdorf on the island
of Fehmarn in Holstein on the Baltic was rumoured to be made of gold. It certainly
shone brightly, perched very high on the tall spire of the small and otherwise very
modest building. It was a doubly significant symbol; an ostentatious signal of the
church�s wealth, and a demonstration of how to put wealth out of reach. To climb
the tower of St Peter and St Ursula in Bannesdorf in order to test the rumour of
gold would have been a considerable feat, to do so in secret extremely difficult.
The weathercock was fashioned in the shape of a cockerel sitting in a boat, a
combination, it was said, of the cockerel that crowed three times before Peter
acknowledged Christ, and the boat that conveyed St Ursula and her three thousand
virgins across the Baltic to the Holstein coast. Ursula�s presence in the Baltic
can be disputed, though she did have some supposed connections with Cologne, the
seat of the original benefactors of Bannesdorf in the 13th century. The actual
association of Peter and Ursula remain obscure. Inevitably local wits created
stories of a sexual nature heavy with cocks and virgins.
Six German infantry soldiers in May 1940 , fortified with alcohol, attempted to
test the weathercock�s golden substance. They raised ladders, two short and one
long, roped, tied and fastened to a drain-pipe, various gutterings, a clerestory
window, broken shingle supports and a wall sun-dial, and they began to climb up,
like thieves in the moonlight, one behind the other, each not wishing the others to
be alone in the investigation.
One soldier, Kurt, had climbed as far as the base of the golden boat, and had one
hand on the arrow that pointed East and had the crook of his left leg over the bar
that supported the arrow that pointed to the South, when the long, rotten wooden
ladder strapped to the shingled tower came loose, and in a graceful slow motion
curve began to arc backwards away from the spire in the direction of the graves in
the churchyard cemetery.� Kurt at the very top of the ladder, travelled the
furthest of the six companions, perhaps as much as 23 metres. He came down in a
sitting position on a square limestone tomb and broke his spine. He died instantly.
He was eighteen. Hans was next. He lost his grip on the ladder and brushed down the
side of a yew tree, snapping the branches as he fell; the branches ripped open his
belly and his chest, and his plump body settled heavily on the rusty spikes of a
child�s grave, a fleur de lys decoration lodged in his throat. He died instantly.
He was twenty-one. Pieter was next. He had just reached the level of the spire�s
base and, as the ladder began to arc backwards, he made a grab for the guttering
which broke in his hand; he took it with him, falling to the ground some fourteen
metres from the base of the tower, smashing his head on a path made of small
flints, his skull splintering like a cheap light-bulb. He could be said to have
buried himself in wooden rungs and guttering ends. He died instantly. He was
eighteen.
Tomas was at a point where the toppling ladder splintered in one of� its long
shafts, spiking him in the groin before gracefully spiralling a little, making
Tomas pirouette in the air, to land in the outstretched arms of a limestone angel
offering a stone wreath to the empty night air. He died instantly. He was nineteen.

Christian had climbed up as far as the clerestorey window, and he was resting, his
leg twisted around the back of the ladder so as to free his hands to better hold a
whisky bottle. He ultimately fell on the bottle, its neck penetrating his belly
though his navel, though the smashing of his face on a wooden cross was the cause
of death. His father had difficulty in recognising him and official acknowledgement
of his identity was through dental records and buckle scars on his buttocks. He was
twenty.
Helmut was the closest to the ground, some 12 metres above the earth. He had been
the most drunk and he was the slowest climber. His spine was broken near the coccyx
on the ridge line of the Saint Ursula chapel. He did not die instantaneously. He�
lived for three days in a coma dreaming of smoking a pipe where the smoke came out
of every orifice in his body, smelling of a mixture of apple wood bonfires that he
remembered from his boyhood in Silesia, and Cheepstoke Mild, a tobacco from
Virginia which he had experienced in the lounge bar of a hotel in the Unter den
Linden after watching Fricka Hansler sing dirty words to the Blue Danube Waltz in
the White Bear Bar. He was seventeen.
Six drunken soldiers trying to steal a bogus gold weathercock from a church
dedicated to St Peter�s Denial of Christ and St Ursula�s Virginity was bad
publicity. The Third Reich was antagonistic to Church authority, but this adventure
could not be seen as an iconoclastic gesture. A different turn of events had to be
invented.
The villagers of Bannesdorf had assassinated six young infantrymen whilst they were
on curfew duty. Many of the villagers were of Danish origin. The troubled Danish-
German history of Schleswig-Holstein was invoked. Reprisals were necessary. The
spire of the church was blown up with infantry explosives and the weathercock of
gold painted cast-iron dragged from the wreckage and weighed. It was heavy. 247
pounds. With the cast iron letters, the complete phenomenon weighed 341 pounds, so
341 pounds of gold had to be extracted from the villagers of Bannesdorf as
compensation for their murder of six young infantry soldiers who were all
posthumously promoted and buried as heroes in Cologne Cathedral. The village was
given three days to come up with the necessary compensation, or one person would be
shot for every unaccounted pound. It was a story of impossible tasks and sadistic
cruelty expected of the first collection of the Brothers Grimm. But then Wilhelm
Grimm had lived for a year on Fehmarn collecting stories and he had been invalided
with meningitis in Niendorf which is the next village to Bannesdorf.
Alongside their account of the six infantrymen, the Holstein District newspaper
printed the Grimm story of Rumpelstiltskin, the Widow of Petacki, and the Cobbler�s
Holiday.� In the first story a female prisoner had to spin straw into gold, in the
second a prince had to empty a lake with a teaspoon, and in the third, two brothers
were obliged to cut down a forest with a pair of sewing scissors. All three stories
ended satisfactorily, good was rewarded, revenge satisfied and all victims received
a large quotient of happiness. It is not recorded what the Bannesdorf village
readership thought of the publication of these stories at such a time, but it is
certain that they would not have ignored the inferences.� The ending of the
Bannesdorf Weathercock story was not happy for them. In the event 110 men, 15 women
and 3 children were shot, and 71 pounds of gold in the shape of family rosaries,
wedding rings, earrings, cuff-links, candlesticks, crucifixes, a monstrance, a
ceremonial golden shovel, a paper-knife, a gold watch, several gold teeth and a
gold spectacle frame were taken and weighed and sent to Cologne where they were
exhibited in the cathedral as evidence of a town�s gratitude for the heroism of the
young soldiers of the German army.
When Cologne was bombed by the Allied forces, this golden hoard was removed to a
bank. Eight weeks later it was taken in a truck to Karlsruhe and then to Baden-
Baden where it was smelted and added as three �biscuit� gold bars to the collection
in the Deutche Bank.� Two of the bars were used to pay off a blackmailer certain to
incriminate the manager and two clerks for homosexual activities, the third became
part of the Harpsch collection that found its way to Bolzano in Northern Italy
where it is reputed spaghetti cannot be cooked with honour and the cathedral has a
weathercock dedicated to St Peter in the shape of two giant keys. One of these keys
is rumoured to open the door to Heaven for the Good, and the other key is rumoured
to open the door to Hell for the Wicked.� Nobody has yet tried to climb the spire
to borrow these keys to see if the rumour is true.
GOLD
22 � Twelve days of Christmas
On a Friday evening a few days after Christmas 1939, Hans and Sophie Himmel,
ironically known as the turtle-doves because of their mutual devotion, sat down
after dinner in their second floor apartment in the Biestricht District of Dresden
and wrapped five gold rings in a sheet of the morning�s newspaper that had printed
a photograph of their dead son. He had been awarded the Iron Cross after being shot
in the back of the neck fighting for Germany in Poland. Hans and Sophie ironically
imagined that the iron cross was public substitute jewellery for what they now
decided privately to hide. They put the twist of newspaper in a brass spectacles-
case that they wrapped in a cocoa-tin that they placed inside a leather satchel
that they buried under the pear tree in their backyard. They lined the floor of the
canary cage with a second sheet of the newspaper, threw a cloth over the cage and
they went to bed. They had heard that neighbourhood Nazi youths ironically
nicknamed The Broken Hearts were looking for Jewish gold to pay fashionable
prostitutes in the Pernickenstrasse to commit sodomy with pigs.� There was much
irony in Dresden. The Jews don�t eat pigs.
The first hidden gold ring was a wedding-ring that had belonged to Hans�s
grandfather, the second gold ring was an engagement-ring that had belonged to
Sophie�s grandmother, the third gold ring was a wedding-ring that had been worn for
forty years by Hans�s father, the fourth gold ring belonged to Hans himself and he
had worn it twenty-five years, and the fifth gold ring belonged to Sophie and she
had chosen it on a short holiday she and Hans� had taken together in Danzig at her
aunt�s seaside villa. Five gold rings. Various widths, various heavinesses, worn on
various fingers for a total of 137 years.
Corporal Kettle saw at once that a newspaper photograph of Goering lined the bottom
of the Himmel canary-cage. He opened the cage and the birds flew out the broken
backdoor. He took Hans and Sophie at gunpoint into the backyard.� It was raining
and whilst the corporal stood in the shelter of the porch jabbing his rifle under
Sophie�s lifted skirt at the bare flesh of her belly, Hans, hatless, coatless,
trouserless, began to sneeze and shiver and his shifty glances at the pear-tree
created suspicion. Very shortly the grainy, indistinct newspaper photograph of a
young man who had been awarded the Iron Cross for bravery in Poland became damp in
the steady rain and began to disintegrate, and a small and modest golden Jewish
heritage lay in a Nazi swag-bag.
Hans died three weeks later at Boutenberg, choking on his vomit in a railway siding
chicken-run. He was a long time dying. When the hens finally sat down on his face,
it could be said that he was dead. Sophie died three months later in Treboggan in a
small forest clearing, among silver birch trees that belong to the German military
leader called Werner von Blomberg, who reserved the woods to shoot pheasants and
partridges. Sophie was naked, the caesarean scar that indicated her hero-son�s
entry into the world was plain to be seen by her torturers who jibed at her
inability to give birth through the right exit. Sophia died with another
disfigurement on her corpse, a hole at the back of her neck. Thus two scars united
her to her son, a birth scar and a death scar.
Five gold rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle-doves and a
partridge in a pear tree. The list of the Christmas song was complete. The five
gold rings, with about six hundred others, went by truck to Gotenberg, then to a
smelting factory at Holstein where they became part of the substance of a gold bar
that was to be stamped HS 56ExH 42.� H stood for Holstein, and S stood for
Smeltering-works, though H was also the initial for Hans and S was the initial for
Sophie and 56 was a batch number and also their ages. Ex stood for executor but
also the Latin for plural departure.� H stood for Holdtstatter, but also Himmel.
1942 was the year of the gold bar�s manufacture and also the year of the Himmels�
death.
The gold bar, with many other gold-bars, all packed in green baize bags with red
tie-strings, was driven eventually to Munich. It subsequently and for various
reasons, travelled to Vienna, Bern, Baden-Baden, and finally with 91 other gold
bars, was discovered in a black Mercedes, license plate number TL9246, abandoned at
the road-side at Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they could not cook a good
spaghetti.
�
GOLD
23 � The gold pistol
A ballroom dancer had a small decorative pistol fashioned in gold for his mistress,
a twenty-year old shop-girl called Petra who had blonde hair, small breasts, and an
ambitious and possessive father. She worked in a haberdashery on Dortmundstrasse,
Magdeburg. The shopgirl was approached by her boss on Ash Wednesday 1938, enjoyed
his flatteries and soon confronted her dancer-lover with her infidelity. Whilst she
used the bathroom in a run-down hotel on Falkensteinplatz, the dancer rummaged in
Petra�s handbag, found the pistol, and shot her in the belly. Attempting to shoot
himself with the gold pistol, after hurriedly reloading it with a wrong calibre
bullet, it� exploded and the� barrel lodged in his� throat. In great pain, he threw
himself down the hotel stair-well, the fractured gold pistol-grip, the trigger-
guard and trigger clattering down the stairs in three separate pieces with him to
land on the cellar steps where they were found by Claus, the caretaker�s son.
Claus played with these gold items for a while after the police had come and gone,
and after Petra�s father had smashed up the toilet, assaulted the hotel-keeper and
bled four pints of blood into the hotel welcome mat after being struck by the
police-chief for causing a commotion in a quiet neighbourhood.� Claus painted his
three gold finds� green with a can of enamel he found in the dustbin belonging to
Frau Decker in Room Sixteen, and then abandoned them because the enamel would not
dry. The sticky green-painted gold pistol pieces� were later swept up by the
caretaker, and handed over to Herr Mussil, who had a stall for scrap metal at 17A
Heiderstrasse. Frederick Mussil recognised them for what they were, cleaned them up
with spirits of turpentine and included them in a collection of gold trinkets
stolen from the pillaged house of his neighbour, a kosher butcher, and deposited
them with a fence who sold them on the black market to a bank clerk of the
Darmstadt bank who laundered them with his bank manager and together they had them
smelted when the manager went on his weekly trip to Leipzig. The golden pistol
fragments helped to constitute Gold Bar Lei98, which, sometime in 1940, travelled
to Baden-Baden, where it lay untouched in a vault that used to be a convent cellar
until Harpsch�s sergeant and corporal� picked it up with 99 other gold bars in May
1945, and they all began their journey to Bolzano where spaghetti could be
described as a foreign delicacy.
�
GOLD
24 � Photographic Evidence
At a Nazi party in Danzig, three prostitutes, one underage, were encouraged with
bribes and threats, to wear on their naked bodies the jewellery stolen from the
city�s Jewish community. The jewellery was to be auctioned to� raise money to buy a
private Rolls Royce for a retiring general, and the most generous bidder was to be
rewarded with time spent in the company of the whore of his choice. The three women
paraded on a stage used the night before to award posthumous medals to forty sea-
cadet victims of a submarine disaster, and they walked and pirouetted and cavorted
before a large photograph of the stricken submarine to the rhythm of an orchestra
playing the Blue Danube too fast, and they were photographed. The photographs were
to be sold to the party-goers to assist in increasing the funds available for the
departing general. To make the photographs attractive enough to purchase for large
sums of money, the prostitutes were encouraged to assist in their erotic content.
After the war these photographs were used to identify the missing jewelery items in
a bid to attempt to return them to their owners. Identification was in several
circumstances very possible. The jewellery items not auctioned at the party were
collected in two champagne buckets which were hidden under a napkin beneath a
table. They subsequently disappeared, and we do not know of their fate.� But
nineteen of the photographically identifiable items had a different adventure.
It is said that Archibald Klemperer, the main contributing bidder at the party was
too drunk to make full use of his winner�s prize, and that she had beaten him over
the head with a silver candlestick,
possibly with the� help of a confederate who had been a waiter at the party, and
the auctioned gold items had been removed from Klemperer�s apartment, fenced,
transported, and after seven days in the hull of a ship moored off the coast of
Malmo in Sweden, taken to Baden-Baden and smelted down to make gold bar BB890/36.�
This bar was wrapped in green felt and ended up in Harpsch�s Mercedes in a car-
crash in Bolzano, the one Italian town where it is reputed the local citizens
cannot cook good spaghetti, and cannot find it in themselves to laugh at this
short-coming.
The majority of the representatives of the fourteen Jewish families who had been
invited by the auction-house of Christie in Geneva to examine the photographs taken
in 1941 of the three whores cavorting with Jewish treasures, were able to put a
positive identification on the property of their fathers and grandfathers. Those
that had arrived with great expectations and had been disappointed, were
compensated by being given a copy of each of the original photographs, whose
contents, a Christie representative� is reported to have said, could be seen to be�
rewarding in other ways.
The Klemperer story might have been concocted to hide� the desire of the original
party organisers, three SS generals, to increase the retiring general�s prize from
an expensive English car to a small French aircraft with an English engine, in
which they intended to place explosives� to make the general� fall out of the sky
over the English Channel. In the event the retiring general apparently abandoned
his prize and eventually reached Venezuela unharmed, accompanied by the underage
prostitute who had posed as his daughter. Their second child became Cultural
Minister for the Arts in Venezuela in 1978.
�
GOLD
25 � In threes
In Budapest in November 1944 they were throwing the Jews off the bridges in threes.
Roped together with the heaviest Jew in the middle. Maybe they would shoot the one
in the middle. To wound but not to kill. In the spine, perhaps to paralyse the
legs. The water was icy. The current was swift. The river was deep. The time
allotted to die was not calculable. Many factors were present but we can say that
death was not always so quick.� One thing that was dependable was the roping
together in threes.� It had an almost superstitious regularity.
There were wits among the executioners. They played with names as they played with
people.
�Mesach, Shadrach and Abnego�.
�The Three Wisemen�.
�God the father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost�.
�Put the Ghost in the middle�.
�They all look like ghosts�.
�Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill�.
�The fat man should be in the middle�.
�They are all fat men�.
�Roosevelt�s not so fat, but he�s a cripple, we could be accurate�.
�Put Roosevelt in the middle. That way the Americans will bring the�� Russians down
on the left and the British down on the right�. �Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks
and Mary Pickford�.
�The Yankee rich kids�.
�Isn�t Chaplin a Jew?�
�With the Fuhrer�s moustache, Churchill�s bowler hat and Roosevelt�s walking stick�

They slashed Charlie Chaplin�s upper lip to give him a moustache, they hacked off
Roosevelt�s leg to make him a cripple, they gave Churchill a bloody crown to make
him wish he had worn his bowler hat.
Some nights Raoul Wallenberg came along to the bridge.
�Here comes the nightwatchman, nightwatching for the Jews�.
They kept the most pathetic cases for Raoul. A bottle of whisky for a blind old
man. Four hundred florints for a woman, six hundred if she was pretty, a thousand
if she was pregnant. A diamond for a child perhaps.
�What on earth does Raoul do with these people?�
The rescued Jews climbed into the back of Raoul Wallenberg�s Swedish diplomatic
car, and the driver whisked them away.
�The Swedish Embassy bedrooms are probably crammed with Jews�.
�Jews in the toilet�.
�Jews in the bathroom�
�Jews up the chimneys�.
�Jews in the cupboards�.
�Jews under the stairs�.
�Where does Raoul get the money, the whisky and the diamonds?�
Sometimes as many as seven people got into that diplomatic car. With the driver,
that meant eight. Four in the back, two in the front sitting on one another�s laps,
one in the boot. Raoul had to walk back home, trudging off down the bridge with his
collar turned up and his breath condensing on the cold night air.
There were film buffs among the part-time executioners.
�Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzenko�.
�The sun and the moon and the stars�.
�Tinker, tailor, soldier�.
�The three whores from Kracow�.
�Antony, Crassus and Pompey�.
The river was full of allegorical figures, Russian film directors, Roman
celebrities, Hollywood film-stars.� All floating downstream practising various
forms of dying, but mostly just drowning.
The executioners began asking Raoul for gold.
�No more whisky, florins and diamonds. You can get drunk on anything, money just
flies away, and who the hell wants diamonds?�� �How can you get rid of diamonds?�
�Wine, women and song�,
�Schnapps, little boys and a wind-up gramophone�.
�Heaven, Hell and Paradise�.
Raoul began to bring gold. Crucifixes, little gold crucifixes.
�Where the hell does he get them from?�
What was this transfer commodity? Jews for crucifixes? Is it a joke?
�The pope would crap in his knickers�.
�I�ll take crucifixes. I need post-war insurance. So I can go to Yalta and see
where the big three sat on their fat arses carving up Europe in the name of Jewry�.

�The three virgins�.

�The Three Priests of Popacatapetal�.
�Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh�.
�Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar �.
Sandor Novotny, expert at throwing Jews into the Danube in threes and giving them
symbolic names, stashed the gold crucifixes he had bargained from Raoul Wallenberg
behind a loose brick in the Padorovski Cemetery underneath a memorial to Bela
Kiraly, an obscure Hungarian poet who had died of tuberculosis in 1848, the
European Year of Revolutions, all of them suppressed. Sandor had three women in his
life; his mother-in-law, his wife and his married daughter. The first woman and the
last woman had been widowed by the combined forces of Stalin, Roosevelt and
Churchill. The woman in the middle was symbolically widowed, because Sandor had
joined the Arrow Cross Hungarian Nazi party essentially to get out of the house,
and Sandor Novotny and Nadia Novotny had not slept together for five years, four
months and two weeks. Sandor kept careful count. But he did have sex near his stash
of gold under the loose brick on top of a gravestone to Jozsef Oczel, an obscure
Hungarian composer who died in 1871, the year the Germans occupied France and took
over Alsace and Lorraine.� Sandor had illegal sex with married Jewish women, then
he roped them to strangers on the bridge and threw them over. He probably arranged
these things both to spite his wife and also to do himself some kind of macho
honour. He hoped eventually to rope three of the women he had dishonoured and cast
them all together into the waters. He has some idea it would be a biblical gesture,
like the Old Testament casting of stones at prostitutes, afterall they were both
Jewesses and adulterers.
Raoul Wallenberg, had, over the months since Christmas, bought a number of Sandor�s
Jewish women, though after being with Sandor, at least three of them did not want
to be bought, and preferred the river. They seemed to actually want to welcome the
freezing embrace of the Danube.
Sandor was followed one night to the Padorovski Cemetery by his wife�s brother who
watched his wild adultery, all flailing legs and wild grunts, and saw where he kept
his crucifixes. Sandor�s wife�s brother hit Sandor over the head with the loose
brick out of the wall. He took the Raoul gold, and shoved his brother-in-law�s body
into an open stone tomb-memorial to Elemer Paschek, an obscure Hungarian painter
who specialised in painting dead nudes in the years immediately before the First
World War when Europe became restless again for violence.
So there you have it. Three obscure Hungarian cultural heroes, Bela Kiraly, Jozsef
Oczel, and Elemer Paschek, three witnesses to Sandor Novotny�s money, sex and
death.
Sandor�s wife�s brother tried to sell the crucifixes to a Gestapo lieutenant from
Salzsburg, and he was shot for black-marketeering, but Raoul�s gold was impounded,
placed in a safe deposit box and found its way back to Munich in a diplomatic bag.
In January 1945, it was melted down into a single gold biscuit-bar weighing 70
grams, and soon found its way to Baden-Baden where Gustav Harpsch, the Weichmar
lieutenant who had an obsession to find his infant daughter, became its temporary
owner, exchanging it for a motor-vehicle death outside Bolzano on the 5th May
1945.� Bolzano is almost in Austria, and the main street looks a little like the
main street of an Austrian town like Salzburg; it has a swiftly flowing stream
running with icy water from out of the mountains; it has riverside terraces, wine-
bars and riverside cafes. The restaurants in Bolzano are all a little sheepishly
set back from the main view of tourists and visitors, in the back streets by the
cathedral. It is said that this is because there is an inability to cook good
spaghetti in the city which, in itself is a sort of established trade mark of being
a good Italian patriot. Patriotism and spaghetti go together. Was it true that bad
spaghetti-cooks were bad patriots?
�
GOLD
26 � The Canadian envelopes
Henri-Claus Tannenbaum sent wedding-rings, engagement rings and christening rings
to Canada in brown envelopes addressed to his uncle, a stamp collector in Quebec.
There was a single ring in each envelope, padded around with German franked stamps
collected from his fiancee's office in Osnabruck that organised a correspondence
course in business studies for young female stenographers. The Third Reich urgently
needed young female stenographers. The paper work of the aspirant Third Reich was
mountainous and rising.
�
�
�
�
Henri-Claus �s fiancee practised her typing in her love letters.
�Gottenburgstrasse, 137
�1st November 1936
�Dear Henri-Claus,
I miss you. I have six long hours before I touch you again in all those places I
know you like to be touched. Do you miss me as much� as I miss you? Mother wants to
know if I am stopping your composing with my chatter? I will see you tonight on the
green bench and I eagerly wait for eleven o�clock when the lights go out and we can
be together again in the dark, wrapped up warm, but not so wrapped up that I cannot
find your bright alert candle to light up our love,
�I love you,
�Mathilde.
In April 1937, at Wilhelmhaven, en route by air to Quebec, three of Henri-Claus�s
envelopes were intercepted and opened in a random check associated with a search to
discover documents of a plot to kill the Fuhrer. The carefully wrapped valuables
were discovered, the sender�s name and address were noted, the Osnabruck Gestapo
were informed by telephone, and Henri-Claus Tannenbaum was put under scrutiny.
Henceforth, because of the nature of the check, his name, totally without
foundation, was associated with attempted assassination. It was to become an
irreducible mark.
�Gottenburgstrasse, 137
�10th January 1937.
�My dearest Henri,
Although you are only five kilometres away from me as I sit in my bedroom, I feel
you are in the Sahara desert or New York or the North Pole. Or indeed in Canada
where I know you are so eager to take me.
I trust you never to deceive me in anything that you say or do. I am no stickler
for etiquette or manners or even vulgarity, in fact I enjoy it when you speak to me
vulgarly, it makes me excited in ways I know that you could enjoy, but I could not
stand any sort of lying,
�Yours without a lie, your lover for always,
�Mathilde
On the night of 14th June 1937, Henri-Claus Tannenbaum�s body, with its throat cut,
was laid lengthwise as though taking a nap, on the green bench under the yellow
street-light across the road from 137 Gottenburgstrasse, where Henri-Claus�s
fiancee, Mathilde, lived with her mother and two aunts.
�Gottenburgstrasse, 137
�21st February 1937
�My Henri,
Mother wants to hear you play the piano again. She is determined to make you famous
if only to show off to my aunt Ulrike who is always applauding her nephew. I think
she also enjoys an opportunity to dress up for a concert in her furs, and to put on
her rings and necklaces though they cannot really be so valuable. Do you think I
look like my mother at all? And do they have green benches in Quebec?
�Yours, looking especially good lying on a green bench in the dark,
�Mathilde.
Henri-Claus and Mathilde had kissed and fornicated for eighteen months on that
green bench after the street-light had gone out at eleven o�clock punctually each
evening, his hand under her dress, his fingers in her damp pubic hair, her hand
around his penis in the dark.� They had met there every weekday evening at ten
o�clock, and they had held themselves in waiting for one hour, talking about what
they would do to one another when the street lamp went out and they had darkness.
�Gottenburgstrasse, 137
�5th March 1937
�My dear little Henri,
One day we shall be discovered by my aunt who I am sure spies on us from her
bedroom window. Did Mozart ever go to Canada? I doubt he even knew where it was.
When I am pregnant� - which will never be the way you treat me - I want to be in
Germany, not in some non-German speaking place where it is thirty degrees below
freezing on Christmas Eve.
�Waiting your expert touch,
�Your little moist Mathilde.
Mathilde now stares and stares at the dead body of her lover from her bedroom
window across the street. Henri-Claus Tannenbaum was a composer, 29 years old, with
a two-movement symphony, two violin concertos, a piano cycle and a one-act opera
about Goethe�s love for Charlotte Buff, to his credit. All had been performed. He
was on his way.� So was it not incredibly stupid of him to steal his future mother-
in-law�s jewellery, piece by piece, item by item, ring by ring, and send them off
to Quebec as an insurance policy for the day that would surely come and they would
have to emigrate?
�
�Gottenburgstrasse, 137
�30 March 1937
�My dear Henri VIII,
�I will be your eight wives or was it six? Did anyone write music for Henry VIII?
�I have a lyric for you. �Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived�.
�I could play all six parts.
In Canada we will certainly make babies. They will have Indian-looking faces and
rub noses when they kiss. They will be covered in lard to keep themselves warm. We
could practice it. You will not find me missing tonight on the bench in the
darkness,
�Yours, yours, yours,
�The Dancing Mathilda (or is that Australian?).
�
Henri-Claus would become a French-Canadian composer. Mathilde would become a
French-Canadian housewife. They would have French-Canadian babies far from the
anti-Semitic clutches of the Third Reich. Mathilde was a bold girl, inventive in
her excitements, especially if they were of a sexual nature. She was certainly
bolder than Henri-Claus. But Mathilde could not forgive Henri-Claus for stealing
her mother�s jewellery and lying to her and betraying her trust. She had swiftly
told the Gestapo Police where they might find Henri-Claus, and at what time,
waiting for her at ten o�clock on the� bench under the street-lamp opposite 137
Gottenburgstrasse. And the police did what they thought was their necessary duty.�
After all he was associated with a plot to assassinate the Fuhrer, and he was
dangerous.
�Gottenburgstrasse, 137
�9th April 1937
�Henri,
Today I learnt to type for the first time in English. �The quick brown fox jumps
over the lazy dog� - there, all the letters in the English alphabet at least once.�
I am the fox, you are the lazy dog. When Germany rules the world we will all need
English because Americans speak English and the Americans are really the coming
thing. Look at Mr Fritz Lang, and� Mr von Sternberg, though the von is phoney,� and
think of the German-American millionaires, Mr Roosevelt, Mr Lindbergh, Mr Kalmann,
Teddy Spearhoffer. I heard today that my favourite American writer, Fritzgerald was
born in Hamburg - well it is not so surprising with a name like Fritz,
�Hoping we will fritz tonight,
�Your lady-in-waiting unless you don�t want me to be a lady,
�Mathilde.
Mathilde watched Henri-Claus�s corpse until eleven o�clock and the street lamp went
out and hid his murdered body. She sat at the window all night. It was her wake,
her staying up with the corpse as a sign of respect. When it was light, the body
had gone. She had not seen it taken away. She must have dozed, her forehead against
the cold windowpane.
�Gottenburgstrasse, 137
�21st April 1937
�Dearest Henri,
What were you doing in my mother�s bedroom? To tell me that you wanted to look at
our green bench from my mother�s point-of-view is not that convincing.
Tonight I have a surprise for you. I will be wearing a new perfume and you will
have to come very close indeed with your nose to smell it. I will give you a clue
how close you will have to come. What did Goethe say about Frankfurt? If you answer
correctly, I will be your Frankfurt.
�Yours with very sticky fingers. No! I have only been baking jam tarts.
�Yours,
�Mathilde
Three nights later she was sitting at ten o�clock in the evening on the bench
weeping, when the police came for her. When the street-light went out at eleven
o�clock, they collected her mother and her two aunts and took all four of them to
the railway station, and they disappeared for ever into the damp foggy air over
Poland.
�
�Gottenburgstrasse, 137
�26 May 37
�Dear Henry,
Shall I spell your name in the English way with a letter Y? My English is fast
improving. But I should use French. If I were to write to you now in French -� I
can tell you things which few in Germany will be able to read.
When I live in French-Canada with you, in a house with ice on the roof, and tennis-
rackets on my feet, and a white horse in the back paddock, do not worry, I will
never ever pine for Germany. We can have all our furniture made of wood and painted
greenand we can place a yellow light above the radio to remind us of 137
Gottenburgstrasse.
�Yours with more love than you can dream of,
�Matty.
Thirteen rings had arrived safely in Quebec and placed in a bank safe deposit box
until the time should arrive for their collection by Henri-Claus and his fiancee.
Three rings had been impounded at Wilhelmhaven and sent to Osnabruck. Three more
rings were found in the lining of Henri-Claus�s coat pocket when they stripped him
at the morgue. The six gold rings were sent through the mails to meet each other.
They were examined for clues though none were discovered, and they were thrown into
a drawer of Jewish trinkets at the police station in Zevenplatz, Osnabruck. Later
the contents of the drawer were examined by a goldsmith referred to on the receipt
papers as Wasseral which is Frisian for a small water-bird with a piping cry.
�
�Gottenburgstrasse, 137
�12 June 37
�Dear Henri,
I am tired of all this waiting to go to Canada. Our neighbours took a train to
Lisbon yesterday and they hope to catch a boat to New Hampshire. It cost them their
house. But they were pleased to go.
I have an ultimatum. Make me pregnant with your little Henri-Claus, Mr Christmas-
tree, and I will get mother to make you a fur-hat, a pair of brown socks and make
you a joint heir with me. She would be so pleased. I know she will help us with
everything, including a new piano, and then in six months we can send for her and
she will come like a shot, especially if she knew there was another Christmas-tree
growing in my German forest,
�Yours for ever and ever and ever,
�Mathilde,
The trinkets were smelted down to constitute a �Dutch-hat� gold bar that was
stamped with a trident and the letters FDG98. The gold bar stayed in Osnabruck
until moved to Baden-Baden in March 1944 where it was signed for by Sergeant Hans
Dopplemann and Corporal Reynard Guelferle on the 4th May 1945 and it began its
journey to Bolzano where spaghetti is not considered a local dish, but a foreign
import best cooked by non-residents in the hidden privacy of their hotel-rooms.
�
GOLD
27 � Callisto Magdalene
A small statue of dubious taste was owned by the Glasmin-Contaxi brothers of Parma.
They were dealers in Parmesan cheese, and they owned the Parma Stendhal Hotel and
part-owned the Palma Verdi Hotel, thus capitalising on Parma�s most celebrated
product and on her two most celebrated cultural visitors.
The statue of dubious taste supposedly represented Callisto, the pregnant nymph
metamorphosed by Diana into a bear and transported into the night sky to help lost
sailors. The statue depicted the humiliated Callisto in the act of being discovered
eight months pregnant, her large belly pushed forward, her legs bent, her knees
parted, her arms over her breasts, and her hands over her face.� Diana, the
professionally chaste leader of a band of virgin nymphs, had considered Callisto�s
behaviour treacherous, even though Callisto had been seduced by a dirty trick. She
had loyally rejected all Jupiter�s advances until he had turned himself into the
likeness of Diana herself. The myth intimated Diana�s own advances and implied her
shame at her lesbian seduction of Callisto. Why else the disproportionately savage
punishment?
For forgiveness of sins of a financial nature associated with the cinema, the
Glasmin-Contaxi Brothers, alongside other favours, permanently loaned their statue
to the Archbishop of Munster, their cousin. The archbishop suggested to his devoted
parishioners� that the bronze statue was a representation of Mary Magdalene
discovered, so to speak,� in flagrante delicto; the apparent swelling of the belly
being an idiosyncrasy of fashionable taste in feminine beauty of the 1440s. You
could see such a feature, for example, in Van Eyck�s marriage portrait of Jan
Arnolfini and his wife, Flemish heretics certainly, but a couple who believed in
celebrating their marriage vows nonetheless.
The Archbishop of Munster was wrong on at least four counts. The statue, as we have
seen, was certainly of Callisto and not of Mary Magdalene, it was cast in the 1540s
not the 1440s, Jan Arnolfini was not a heretic but a good catholic, and the item
was not of bronze but of gold. It had been patinered with ammonia, vinegar and
salt, no doubt to avoid those who might want to by-pass its eroticism in favour of
smelting it down for cash.� It was probably made by a member of the atelier of
Cellini when Mannerist tastes tended to make seductive females full in the belly,
thus placing Callisto legitimately on the cultural iconographic agenda and making
her a fashionable subject matter in 16th century Europe.
The archbishop�s more sardonic visitors entertained no doubts as to the salacious
intent of the statue, and one of them, a medical man,� stole it for lecherous
reasons, and, investigating its potency, scratched its thigh with a scalpel and
discovered gold. Sex and gold can be an irresistible combination.� He treated the
statue with a medical� solution of sal ammoniac, and he polished her until she
shone and he set her in a glass-case in his bedroom above his surgery.
A devout Catholic lady of means who was a regular visitor to the archbishop�s house
was suffering from ovarian cancer. She found little solace in religious comforts
and careless of her reputation in the face of pain and death, she sought drugs and
the doctor�s bed to die on. She naturally saw the statue in its new home, and was
surprised to recognise the archbishop�s Mary Magdalene now dressed in shining gold.
The little hussy. It was a little miracle.
Unknowingly mirroring the Glasmin-Contaxi transaction, the doctor said the statue
was a gift from the generous archbishop for medical attentions to repair the
ravages of sins of an intimate nature concerning atrophied reproductive organs. The
devout Catholic lady reasoned to herself that an archbishop obliged to celibacy had
no business worrying about his reproductive capacities. Under the doctor�s
treatment, the� lady was comparatively without pain for several weeks. She
recovered her religious equilibrium and her conscience, and she reported the two
professional men, priest and doctor, to their respective authorities. The bishop
was defrocked and the doctor debarred, though the Callisto Magdalene affair was but
a straw that broke the camel�s back for both men had been chicanerous in several
other ways.
�Strictly we should not be talking camels�, the local newspaper suggested, �but
dromedaries, for a dromedary has two humps not one, making two mounds of sin on the
body bourgeois.�
However the local paper, like the local bishop had its facts wrong, for the
dromedary has a single hump; it is the Bactrian camel that has two. One of the last
acts of the devout Catholic woman was to put this right. She wrote a letter to the
newspaper editor, making suggestions that Germany with its present moral collapse
would soon be as wasted and forgotten as Bactria, a lost desert kingdom somewhere
in the Hindu Kush.
�Who on earth knows where Bactria is now?�, she said.
But camels and a dromedaries are� resourceful animals. The bishop and the doctor
survived and indeed thrived. The woman died in agony. The Callisto Magdalene was
impounded by officials who apparently had little sexual curiosity and even less
knowledge of art history.� They soon had the item melted down to help swell the
Nazi Party coffers.
Lieutenant Harpsch of course knew none of this though he was a man of significant
sexual desires and some taste. He unwittedly carried this ghost of Callisto and
Magdalene half way across Europe in his black suitcase. She burst out in spirit
from the gold bars on the back seat of his borrowed car which crashed in Bolzano
where there is a considerable amount of art featuring fallen women of both secular
and religious cultures, but where it is rumoured that no amount of gold can buy a
good spaghetti carbonara.
�
GOLD
28 � The ring cycle
Told to undress outside the gas-chamber at Sobibor, a bold woman swallowed her
wedding-ring. Her neighbours in the crush of naked bodies before the door followed
suite. An old woman who possessed a splendid engagement ring of complicated
construction choked to death. In a rage, the warders who regarded themselves as
legitimate scavengers of the gassed corpses, slit the bodies open when the gas
chamber doors were re-opened, but could only find sixteen out of the estimated
twenty-seven wedding-rings. It was an anatomical mystery that became part of the
Sobibor mythology.
Anticipating a repeat performance at the next human consignment the warders chopped
off all hands to be certain of easy access to personal jewellery.
The valuables left the camp every Wednesday in a trunk marked �Candles� to be
stored in an underground coal-mining shaft at Gidzor that was also the storage
centre for the non-Dutch painting collection of The Amsterdam Reichsmuseum.
Gauleiter Fritz Haberlein weekly checked his cultural stock in the shafts and
corridors of the mine, and finding it comparatively easy to shift the personal
items stolen from the Sibibor camp dead, had them moved to Weimar and then Baden-
Baden, where dis-associated from all anecdote and origin, they were eventually
smelted down into bars of different metals and the gold was stored ready for the
lovesick father Gustav Harpsch to take to Bolzano in the Dolomite Mountains where
spaghetti might as well have been an exotic dish unique to New Guinea.
�
GOLD
29 � Midas
There was a Jewish family in Castricum on the coast of Holland who panicked at the
advance of Nazi thugs down their street. The family threw their precious
possessions into a laundry basket and hid it under the stairs. They assembled their
trinkets and jewelry and gold rings in a leather shopping bag, and their ten-year
old daughter Jaqueline placed its handles in the jaws of their German shepherd dog
King Midas, and set him in the paved back-yard under the blossoming laburnam tree
and told him to guard the bag with his life and not to bark. They would be back.
And they would find him a bone and a plate of chopped liver. �Now darling Midas be
a good dog and guard this for us. We will be back. We�ll find you a bone and a
plate of chopped liver from Stacey�s. Be a good dog, King Midas. We love you and we
know you love us�.
Jacqueline patted the dog on the head and, as instructed, it did not bark when the
family were taken away. The dog stayed where it had been told to stay. It lay down
on the golden flagstones and the blossom of the laburnam fell down around King
Midas. Its eyes were fixed on the back door waiting for a bone from Stacey�s, and
waiting for Jacqueline to pat it again on the head. It gradually grew weak from
hunger. After seven days it died. Its rotting corpse and the bag of gold trinkets
still fixed in its jaw were discovered two weeks later by a neighbour intent on
tracking down the smell of decay. He took the jewels to a dentist and received 400
marks. The dentist gave the jewels to his wife who took them to Amsterdam, and was
shot for misunderstanding the rules of a road-block posted in German. Her car was
searched and the jewels, with a packet of contraband tobacco and two bottles of
whisky and a slab of� Belgian chocolate, were placed in a security-box at in the
Princesgracht Post-Office. Some time later the security box was sent to Munster and
its contents sorted and the jewels weighed and broken down, and the gold, wrapped
in green tissue-paper, was taken to Grostner and along with other stolen gold,
smelted. The resulting gold bar with nine others travelled to Threnkel in August
1944, where it was separated out by a customs official hoping to pay for his
daughter�s wedding to a wounded air-force pilot.� The pilot found out about the
theft, had his new father-in-law arrested, and the bar finally arrived in Baden-
Baden wrapped in parachute-silk. With 91 other gold bars, it was eventually
discovered in a black Mercedes, license plate number TL9246 abandoned at the road-
side at Bolsano, the one place in Italy where they could not cook good spaghetti.
There were dogs in Treblinka, and they too were very obedient. When Jacqueline got
off the train she patted a German Shepherd Dog on the head. She was weak. She had
been on a crowded train for seven days, travelling third class, with nothing to
eat. The dog was just like King Midas. Maybe a little bigger. It seized Jacqueline
by the throat and shook her to death.
�
GOLD
30 � Gloved in the bath
Avril Soundermann Poulder had been a singer. She had married a plumber and then a
hairdresser and had benefited from the industry, the energy and the money of both
of them. But a month or so after her marriage to each man, she had to remind both
of them that she had been a singer.
�I am a singer - listen�.
And she would demonstrate.
The plumber had first seen Avril in a cabaret act when she was dressed as a naked
cat; and the hairdresser had first listened to Avril�s bathroom voice through a
shared wall. She continued to sing for both her husbands and at times and on
occasions when they had wished she would not. The plumber fell down a sewer in a
thunderstorm and was drowned in human effluent; the hairdresser had been
electrocuted, not at his place of business among his hot water basins and his
electric hair-dryers, but in a novelty tram drawn by white horses that had run off
its rails and into an electricity pylon.
Avril had sung at each man�s funeral. She sang a song from Shakespeare�s Tempest
for the plumber.
�Full fathom five thy father lies�.
She thought it had good and appropriate watery and weighty connections for a
drowned man whose working material had been primarily lead. And she had sung a
popular Budapest cafe song in Hungarian for her electrocuted hairdresser. It
contained many references to heated emotions. �My heart is on fire for you�, was
the basic refrain.
Then having satisfactorily sung with a mixture of references to those two volatile
elements, water and fire, in honour of the dead, she retired from professional
singing and she spent her inherited fortune on jewellery, mainly rings.
She wore her jewellery hidden on her person. She concealed her necklaces under high
collars. She hid her brooches under thick woollen shawls. When she walked to the
butcher�s-shop you would look at her and you would not think she was a walking
jewellery store. She kept her rings hidden under her gloves. She bathed in her
gloves. She eventually did not even dare to show her rings to herself. She washed
herself in the dark, huskily whisper-singing the songs she had sung at both her
husband�s funerals. She sometimes saw, out of the corner of her eye in the gloom of
the bathroom mirror, a glint of her jewellery through the damp black silk of her
gloves. The sight of so much thievable jewellery terrified her.
Not having anyone any longer to sing to, she began to lose some of her personal
sparkle and self-esteem. She haunted the jewellers� shops, knowing that to be
buying more valuable trinkets, she would be able, at least for a time, to put aside
her unhappiness.� She grew increasingly weary of expecting to be attacked and
assaulted. She became more and more exhausted by the long, dark, lonely days in a
dark house, thinking she was perpetually being watched by every man in a belted
overcoat who walked down her street. She continued to spend a great deal of her
time in her bath. She put three bolts and four locks on the bathroom door. She was
perhaps like Marat, though she could not claim to have a skin disease, and she
possessed few political opinions, and not one of them was revolutionary.
Then she died. It could be said by a truthful coroner that mentally she had died of
the effects of perpetual fright. Her hair had turned white. The undertaker was
amazed at the carapace of rings he discovered on Avril�s fingers under the shabby
black silk gloves she had been wearing as she lay in her last bath by the light of
candles and the heat of a one-bar electric fire. The actual moment of death had
happened when the fire had fallen into the bath-water. Avril had physically
perished as a result of two of the most volatile elements, water and fire,
colliding under the influence of the conducting metal she had hidden on her person.
The rings covered every centimetre of her fingers and thumbs, and had turned both
her hands into five-pronged aerials of death.
The coroner collected up the rings and exchanged them for a crimson Maserati
racing-car owned by a Krupp nephew who used them in a fancy-dress party he gave for
his Chinese girl-friend in Berlin. After the party the Krupp nephew gave the rings
away as going-home presents. One astute and quick fingered young woman left for
Potsdam with nearly a hundred rings stuffed into the lining of her muff. Drunk,
tired and eager for sleep, she put the ring-heavy garment on the bottom tread of
the stairs in her grandfather�s front-hall. Her grandmother discovered the rings
and took them to a bank who itemised them carefully and sent them on to an
accredited gold bar manufacturer in Dresden.
Seventy of the rings which at one time had graced the fingers of Avril Soundermann
Poulder the singer, ended up in an 80 gram gold bar that Lietanent Gustav Harpsch
took with him to Bolzano, a city in Northern Italy where spaghetti could have been
a card trick, an obscure foreign novel, a cone-bearing pinetree, a breed of cat, a
deceased bankrupt currency, anything in fact except for a internationally
celebrated Italian pasta dish.
GOLD
31 � The dollshouse booty
A child collector of glass beads in Ummanz on the Baltic coast was used as a front
to dispose of a cache of gold trinkets. For twelve days the criminals persuaded her
to keep their booty in her doll�s house. The criminals were systematically working
their way through an old people�s tenement built along the ancient harbour wall,
running fake errands in order to enter kitchens and bathrooms and bedrooms to rifle
the drawers and cupboards of elderly Jewish ladies and elderly Jewish widowers. At
one time, the child collector of glass beads had several hundred thousand marks
worth of gold rings and gold earrings in her miniature kitchen, under her miniature
beds, in her miniature toilet and buried in her miniature garden. The little girl�s
name was Circe, which is the name of a Greek heroine who turned men into pigs.
Circe played with the old men�s watch-chains and the old widows� sentimental
possessions, sticking the rings loosely on her small fingers and tying them
together in strings to make necklaces for the necks of her dolls.
The day came to dispose of the valuables, and the criminals, seven small boys aged
between eight and ten, walked boldly beside Circe as she pushed her doll�s house on
a wheelbarrow to the local fish market. They knew that if they were stopped and
searched they could say that the gold was Jewish, and was needed for the war
effort. Nobody would call the police. Many sons of fishermen were going to die for
Germany. They could say that the mothers of German soldiers needed money to buy
thick English socks and French rubber contraceptives to help their sons survive
cold Finnish winters and diseased Russian whores.
A cockle-seller gave the troupe a box of haddock and a bag of potatoes and a sack
full of empty muscle shells in exchange for the Jewish hoard. The children were
pleased. They knew how to profitably sell off the haddock, fish by fish. They
bought Circe a sherbet dip and a liquorice straw so she could suck up the bitter
powder and make herself sneeze, and they bought her a red bow for her hair, and a
small wooden toilet for her doll�s house lavatory. They bought themselves a pistol.
And a bicycle.
The gold items fetched four thousand marks at a gold coin sale in Bremen. They
travelled to Hamburg and Hanover and then Cologne, gathering a little and then
losing a little at every paltry transaction. They ended up in Baden-Baden
hopelessly undifferentiated from innumerable other small collections of trinkets.
Six months before the end of the war, they were smelted down and reconstituted as
six gold bars, which were sorted out equally between three vaults. One gold bar
that certainly had some of the Ummanz dollshouse booty within its substance, was
collected by Gustav Harpsch�s corporal and sergeant, and packed with the other 91
gold bars into two black suit-cases. Then Harpsch took them to their car-crash in
Bolzano where the spaghetti is uneatable.
The children from Ummanz lived on to have adventurous lives. Three of the seven
boys became soldiers and died in pain in various parts of Europe. A fourth boy went
to Greece as a gun-runner and became rich, eventually dying a martyr�s death in a
revolutionary incident at the time of The Greek Colonels. The fifth boy started to
read, learnt how to lie with words, and became a politician. He died in Munster,
after having eaten a plate of stale mussels, with a mayor�s heavy chain of office
around his neck which he refused to take off even though the pain in his belly was
doubling him up. His vomit stained the mayoral gold links, and the official emblem
of office ever after stank of his stomach acids, though local wits said it was the
smell of his corruption that irredeemably corroded the city treasure. The sixth boy
became a pimp and was stabbed to death by an offended husband, and the seventh
married a fisherman�s daughter, bought a boat and lived off the sea for thirty
years. Circe grew up to be very beautiful and exceedingly attractive, and indeed
seemed to be involved in a great many situations where men behaved like pigs. When
she died in Tampa, Florida in 1981, she possessed gold jewellery to the value of
several hundreds of thousands of boxes of haddock at 1940 prices.
�
GOLD
32 � The cigar-box
Erich Fromm was a Jew. He had pale skin, dark hair, a thin ridged nose, red thick
lips, sharp eyes, narrow chest, pale nipples, a circumcised penis, narrow insteps,
long toes, a fierce intelligence and a quick wit that was vigourously employed to
make a coat of impenetrable and humourously decorated armour to protect him from
the world�s arrows of outrageous fortune. All we have of him now are two charred
dental bridges and part of a scorched jawbone. They sit very quietly in a cigar-
box. Those of you with some interest in macabre facts may just possibly recognise
something here.
There are a great many stories from American, Russian, Hungarian, German, British
and Italian sources, some inside and some outside authority, some blatantly
sensational, some prurient, and some, we must admit, the result of serious
investigations conducted to search for real historical truth. Many of these stories
talk of a scrotum with one testicle, a twitching hand, a South American passport, a
singed moustache, a built-up shoe and even a black heart. But by now after over
fifty years of filtering and researching and cleaning away the myths and lies and
vested interests, the final believable other account of two dental bridges and part
of a jawbone in a cigar-box is an account of the last remains of Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler was a gentile, or so he said. We could give you a description of his
physical self, like we did with the Jew Erich Fromm, but Adolf Hitler is a
celebrity and Erich Fromm is not, so we think you know what Adold Hitler looked
like. It is curious, considering their mutual animosity, that Erich Fromm and Adolf
Hitler should end up the same way. Though we must admit, we are cheating a little,
because there is an importance difference. Whereas both dental bridges in the
cigar-box in the story of Erich Fromm belonged indeed to Erich Fromm, one of the
dental bridges in the cigar-box in the second story belonged to Hitler�s wife.�
Erich Fromm used to have a wife but she had disappeared on Chrystal Night.
Erich Fromm was gassed and burnt at Triblinka. Adolf Hitler was shot and burnt in
Berlin. Both their deaths, you could say, were self-inflicted. Erich Fromm had
beaten the Triblinka Camp Commandant at chess, and in doing so he had declared that
the Jews had invented the game of chess whilst on holiday in Egypt in 910 BC.
Everything fitted. The king on the chess-board was an almost impotent pharoah in a
matriarchal monarchy. He was so governed by etiquette he could only make a simple,
single step at a time to keep intact his rigid dignity and imperial bearing, whilst
his sister-wife had almost unlimited powers of movement. The castles were pyramids
with a square base that meant they could only move forwards or sideways to keep
their alignment to the sun, and the soft desert sand governed the movement of the
knights� horses, making them hesitate with a sideways movement before they could go
forward in the ultimate desired direction. And the pawns, which on most chess-
boards look like savagely circumcised pricks, were the Jewish slaves easily
disposed of, but capable one day, after the Germans, just like the Egyptians, had
been defeated, of putting back their foreskin crowns and becoming kings again.
For his ingenuity and great temerity, Fromm was put under a cold shower and
attacked by dogs. Then he was scratched about the head with barbed-wire, shot in
the hands, then in the feet and then just under the second rib on the right hand
side. He was under some pressure to declare the Camp Commandant had won his chess
game, that chess had been invented in Prussia as an elitist war-game to be played
by gentlemen-officers, and was certainly not invented by Jews in Egypt where the
English General Montgomery was at that very moment defeating the German General
Rommel, and that the Third Reich would be everlasting, and certainly last longer
than Judiasm or Christianity. Erich Fromm could not find it in him to agree to much
of this, and he eventually died joking about the smell of National Socialist
hospitality, enquiring about room service and asking for the central heating to be
turned up a little because he had a cold coming on.
Hitler had been under some pressure too. The times were so hopelessly malevolent.
The Russians were making their way street by street to his town apartment whilst he
would much rather have been in his country retreat on the Obersalzburg. The
ceilings were likely to fall in from almost continuous bombing, the garden was a
mess, he was on a last minute honeymoon which wasn�t going too well, and his
friends were either deserting him or killing their children in the room next door
with Prussic Acid.
Erich Fromm�s uncle was a capo, a trusty. He shovelled the ash. He used to be a
dentist, and he had cared for the teeth of all his family. He recognised his
workmanship from his nephew�s mouth, and since the jawbone was attached, he picked
up the full set from under his broom and hid them in a cigar-box, which had been
confiscated by a camp guard from the otherwise empty suitcase of a Dutch Jewish
citizen who had hoped to smoke a last ritual cigar. This Dutch optimist made
fearlessly confident because the times were so hopelessly rebarbative, had fancied
dying with a Havanna cigar in his mouth. And he had almost managed it, standing
naked beside the death-pit, wreathed in sweet smelling smoke, stroking his pot
belly and looking at the moon. The first shot had blown the cigar out of his mouth,
and the second shot had blown the brains from his skull.
Erich Fromm used to own a suitcase. It too had been almost empty, save for an ebony
and ivory chessboard with 32 gold chess-pieces. Erich was a good player.� On the
sudden and mysterious disappearance of his wife, he had sold everything he and she
had ever possessed in Berlin, and bought a very expensive chess-set. It had not
been as expensive as it should have been, but the times were so hopelessly
incorrigible. It was good to invest all your savings in your second love, now that
your first love had gone missing.� However the chessboard and it 32 gold pieces
never even made it passed the collecting-point at Friederichstrasse. The gold king
and the gold queen decorated a field marshal�s� mantelpiece for several weeks, then
the complete set with a missing knight, was sold to an opera-singer who was singing
Herman Baristichoff in The Queen of Spades at the Deutche Statsoper. With a missing
black queen and separated from their board, the pieces were then temporarily lodged
in a bombed church that served as a temporary SS Headquarters. Missing two bishops,
the now 28 piece gold chess-set disappeared into a railway signal box outside
Munich, saw the inside of a cauldron at Gestling, and united in molten form with a
set of candlesticks and a gold tap marked H for Hot, arrived as a gold bar in Baden
Baden about the same time the Americans� landed at Messina. Ultimately this gold
bar, gold bar 27 in Sergeant William Bell�s inventory for the� Washington Bank
temporarily set up above a Medici palazzo in Verona, ended up on the back seat of
Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch�s stolen and crashed Mercedes. Perhaps we should not be
too surprised to know that the dimensions of this gold bar are the same as the
dimensions of the cigar-box that rests in the surgery desk drawer of Erich Fromm�s
cousin in Monterrey. Erich�s cousin, like his father, became a dentist, and we can
easily think up reasons why Erich�s cousin kept this macabre relic, like sentiment
for a relative, a memento mori for his grandchildren, a proud exhibit of their
great grandfather�s excellant workmanship, a last piece of defiant evidence of
Erich�s famous talking mouth, a grisly memorial of never to be repeated infamy, and
perhaps, since Erich�s Monterrey cousin was something of an amateur geneticist, the
remains were a repository of DNA material that future researchers might find useful
to connect Adolf Hitler to Erich Fromm and prove they both had the same great great
grandmother. Adolf was always fearful that his mother�s family were Jewish. Just
think if we had kept the skeletal evidence available throughout history, with the
new methods of genetic analysis, we could have solved so many� of history�s little
mysteries. Anastasia candidates could be proven to have been Romanoff, child
corpses found in the Tower of London could be proven to be related to their
murderer Richard III, and Christ�s children could have proved themselves to have
had a father who was himself the son of God, and thus stopped the hopelessly
unlimited flow of masonic literature now burdening airport bookshops of the world.
Erich Fromm�s uncle died of lung cancer in Pasadena in 1956. After he had been
liberated from Treblinka by the Americans, he had taken up smoking cigars. Maybe
there was no connection, but I doubt it because everything we know is connected
somehow, the good and the bad, the comfortable and the uncomfortable, fact and
fiction, Jews and anti-Jews, Erich and Adolf.
�
GOLD
33 � The golden fleece
Maria Syrena Constantina Nydoreski� was a miller�s daughter living in Polkoi off
the Warsaw to Lublin high road. Her husband was dead. He had been struck down by a
sail of her father�s windmill after he had drunkenly challenged it to a fight. With
bare knuckles. Cervantes had never been heard of in the Nydoreski family so we can
safely say that Maria�s husband was not trying to make life imitate art.
Maria�s father, the miller, died in his bed dreaming of going to America where the
cheeses were not so full of worms as they were in Polkoi, and you could be a free
thinker and believe what you liked and sit all day long in a diner on 57th Street,
New York. You could talk to strangers as much as you wished and only have to pay
for one coffee and one jam doughnut that came with a layer of powdered icing-sugar
and was carried to your table by a black women whose grandparents had been Alabama
slaves.
Maria�s father bequeathed his daughter all his worldly goods, his mill, his house,
his valuables and his ferocious ram, Timorous.� Millers who were even only half way
efficient could normally be rich, so Maria was not left without means.� The miller
had been a gossip and a talker and his business had meant contact with strangers,
wayfarers, itinerants, outsiders, richmen, poormen, beggarmen, thieves. He liked
people. As long as they could tell a good story, preferably against the
establishment, or as long as they could introduce a new idea, preferably
iconoclastic, the miller would listen, maybe give the visitor a bowl of soup,
perhaps a bed in his barn. One thief blessed with story-telling abilities, had
stayed, and he had become Maria�s husband. He was now buried at the bottom of the
orchard under the walnut tree which had been prodigiously bountiful since his
death.
He had used to say that for a man to be truly happy he must remember to constantly
beat the three most important possessions in his life, his wife, his dog and his
walnut tree. That way he would be sure of getting the best out of them.� He had
never beaten his wife because Maria would have certainly beaten him back, he had
never possessed a dog, but, each winter, he had beaten the walnut tree half to
death. Because the walnut tree now blossomed and bore copious fruit, perhaps one
third of his homily was true. He should have extended the homily to include
Timorous, the miller�s ram, that persistently harboured a great emnity towards him
on account of its great affection for Maria. Maria had nursed the animal when she
was a child and Timorous was a lamb.� There is a nursery rhyme that has variations
all over Europe but not in Poland.
Mary had a little lamb
Whose fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.
It was true. When Maria went to the outside privy, Timorous sat on the roof. When
Maria walked into Polkoi to buy tinned tomatoes, the ram walked with her. The ram
had made the life of Maria�s husband a game of hide and chase. Maria�s husband
hiding, Timorous chasing. A constant sneeking about interrupted by quick bouts of
fast running to escape the large, solid-as-a-wall, battering head and horns.� But
since the nursery rhyme is unknown in Poland, the ram could not be said to be
trying to get life to imitate art.
At her father�s wake, Maria met a pedlar selling laces and empty green bottles that
had once held aniseed balls and still retained their smell.� The pedlar introduced
Maria to cigarettes. She was intrigued, and that evening getting into bed on her
own for the first time in her life in the now empty manless millhouse, she
practised smoking and burnt the mill down. Her newly inherited property, windmill,
millhouse, barn, stable, pigsty and two privies, lit a beacon on the flat land that
was seen for thirty miles all around. She salvaged most of her father�s valuables,
which were largely of gold that had been bargained at the Lublin jewellers� shops
in return for sacks of copper coins, promissary notes, Russian roubles and barrows
of flour. She tied the valuables up in leather bags and hung them on the fleece of
her ram, Timorous, and she set out to walk to her father�s sister�s house in Chelm
near the Russian border.� She walked a hundred miles with a Golden Fleece. Jason
and his Argonauts had never been heard of in the Nydoreski family, so we can safely
say that Maria was not trying to make life imitate art.
Thanks to the miller�s curiosity and his news-gathering habits and the tall stories
of her drunken husband, Maria had considerable� knowledge of the world beyond
Pokloi and making cheese and grinding corn and the vagaries of the wind.� She knew
about Chicago prohibition gangsters who shot one another in the back,� she knew
about the whorehouses of San Paulo who charged more for a bottle of beer than a
night with a virgin, she knew about child prostitution in Calcutta that filled the
cemeteries with little corpses, she knew about the sending of British bastards to
be eaten by alligators in the swamps of Australia, but she scarcely believed in the
enormity of the German invasion that had turned her country into a porchway to
Hell. She was about to find out.
As the moon came out across the Polish steppes on the Russian border, Maria was
stopped on the road into Lublin by three motorcycles of a reconnaissance patrol of
the Fifth Panzer Division.� Timorous the ram, ever ready to defend his mistress
before she was attacked, butted a goggled sergeant into a ditch and stood astride
his body and urinated into his face. The ram was shot, and then so was Maria when
she protested. They shot her, firing bullets first into her feet, then her knees,
and working their way up her body, concentrating on significant anatomical
features, finishing at her eyes. Her body was hung upside down on a blossoming
rowan tree so that all passers-by could see she wore no knickers. The soldiers
stuck twigs into her vagina to pretend that Maria and the tree were growing
together. They had no knowledge of the story of Apollo and Daphne so they could not
be accused of trying to get life to imitate art.
The leather bags were ripped from the ram�s fleece by the motorcyclists still
trying to hide their mirth at their sergeant�s discomfort and urine-soaked face.
The golden trinkets were tipped into a motorcycle despatch bag, and later dumped in
the mayor�s safe at Lublin.� They stayed there for two years, until swept up by the
departing Germans as they retreated across Poland in front of the revengeful Red
Army. They were taken from a goods train at Dresden, placed in an armoured car
travelling to Regensburg and then to Stuttgart and finally to Baden-Baden where
they were smelted into a gold bar that was eventually collected by Gustav Harpsch�s
sergeant who packed it with 91 other gold bars� in Harpsch�s suitcase under a
greatcoat on the back seat of the black Mercedes. The gold bar of the Golden Fleece
saw moonlight again on the road into Bolzano where spaghetti is an Italian dream,
and is easily better cooked, for example, in the diner on 57th Street, New York,
New York, where it still might be brought to your table by a black waitress whose
great grandmother had been a slave in Alabama.
�
GOLD
34 � The pusher
This is the story of an elderly man, the executioner of thirty women and fourteen
children in a forest clearing fifty kilometres south of� Belgrade, who went back to
the killing-site to retreive the possessions of those victims who he thought might
have hidden valuables. He was not so unlucky. The women, hugging their children,
holding their hands, had stood on the side of the long loam trench; they were
wearing their best clothes and each carried their one permissable suitcase. The
elderly man had run his eyes over their potential.
Now at one o�clock in the morning in the dark forest, among the damp ferns and the
silver-birch trees, with his hands yellow with the clay-loam, he made a collection.
Eighteen gold rings, seventeen rosaries, eight gold crucifixes, seven St
Christopher medals, a gold penknife with an inlaid ivory handle, seven gold
spectacle frames, some silk underwear, a new pair of shoes, a brass-ferruled
walking stick and a child�s first meal-time utensils, a small gold spoon, a small
gold fork and an instrument - in gold - known as a pusher. The old man kept the
pusher because it intrigued him as to its shape and size and significance. It was a
short blade anchored nearly at right-angles to a tapered handle. The blade had
rounded edges so as not to harm a child�s mouth and the handle was just long enough
for a three-year old to manoeuvre her chopped-up food with ease around her dinner-
plate. The old man kept the silk underwear in a brown paper-bag under his bed, he
put the brown lace-up shoes on his mantelpiece and he sold the rest of the golden
trophies to an Austrian publican, a community outsider, a man who minded his own
business. The old man was paid such a miserable price for such nocturnal rummaging
among the dead, that so much trouble for so little reward must have surely some
other motive than a desire for money. That motive, it was said, by even those who
thought Jews to be vermin who collected their own ear-wax to polish the seats of
their commodes, was the old man�s fear of women. He was taking a revenge, and
indulging, although they scarcely ever used such a fancy word, in necrophilia.
The child�s golden pusher had been given as a christening present by a childless
uncle who had been present by accident at the child�s birth. He and the child�s
mother had been walking among the vine-fields between Vernov and Plechnour when her
waters had broken. The child was delivered in the shade of an olive tree. There was
no drinking water and the uncle had crushed grapes in his large hands for the
mother to quench her thirst. She had sucked his fingers. Four days later in
Plechnour, the family had celebrated and the child had been given the name Olivia
in remembrance of the place of her birth.
Olivia�s golden pusher was now kept in the top breast pocket of the old
executioner�s shabby black-suit jacket. When the old man was alone, sitting at the
end of the white table-clothed trestle table at midsummer supper, he took out the
golden object and played with it, pushing the bread crumbs around the salt and
pepper cruet, between the vingear bottle and the olive oil. The golden pusher
betrayed him. It was recognised by a widow who had been a neighbour of the murdered
child. She saw it as she hurried by with a plate of salted aubergines. She told her
neighbours who threw vinegar in the old man�s face and called him names that opened
up old sores, accusations of being childless, living alone, not washing, speaking
to Austrian publicans, interferring with small children, collecting his own ear-wax
to polish the seat of his commode. They tipped him off his chair and he wet his
trousers. They stripped him and laughed at his shrivelled little penis and his
stained underpants. They poured boiling water over his wizened chest. The golden
pusher had fallen into the long grass and was lost among the juicy dandelion plants
whose bruised stems oozed milk, and whose brilliant yellow flowers were starting to
seed, layering the meadow, if you crouched down and looked along its length, with a
white mist of drifting seed-heads. Dandelion plants have many names, and piss-a-bed
and Juno�s teats, and swine-shunt, and virgin�s-milk, and nun�s temptation, and
cardinal�s dangle, are among the more disquieting, uncomfortable, and embarrassing
nick-names.
In the autumn, the grass of the long meadow had turned yellow and then brown, and
they cut it with short-handled sickles. The scything swipe of a sickle-blade
flicked and spun the golden pusher into the air. It became community treasure and
was housed in the mayor�s parlour in a strong box, an oak reliquary that had once
housed the finger-bones of a saint who had been martyed by having nails driven into
his skull. The pusher shared space in the oak reliquary with damaged coins, broken
screwdrivers, a bicycle tyre repair kit, disputed deeds of ownership and a small
statue of Stalin.
In the April of 1942, the mayor�s daughter, suffering rejection by her lover
because of her odiferous menstruation, tried to forget her misery by a vigorous
bout of spring-cleaning. The reliquary box was emptied and polished and sold to a
Croatian translator. The contents were sorted and the child�s golden pusher sent to
Vernov where it was dumped in a wicker basket with other confiscated Jewish gold
items that were eventually smelted down into a low-grade modest gold �boater� bar
in Belgrade. Shipments of confiscated items, including regular consignemnts of gold
bars, travelled back to Germany in armed convoys often some thirty vehicles long.
The incidental treasures of� the country became the property of German museums and
banks. The banks were permitted the first look. What they rejected was looked over
by museum curators. What the curators rejected was sold to antiquaries. What the
antiquarians did not want was sold to flea-market traders. The flea-market traders
of Augsburg and Munich were traditionally exiles from Belgrade. The Yugoslavian
heritage was handed back after being filtered and seived by the Third Reich.
The gold bar, that in small part was the gold dining utensil of an executed 4-year
old girl with a Jewish mother and a Ukrainian father, eventually found its way to
Baden-Baden and the back seat of a German Mercedes car driven by a German
Lieutenant, Gustav Harpsch. Gustav Harpsch planned to use this gold bar with 91
other gold bars to buy back a 4-year old girl with a Jewish mother and a German
father from a Swiss sanitorium, and take her to Uruguay or Paraguay or Ecuador or
Chile or Peru or Bolivia. This car crashed on a forest road close to Bolzano which
is a gentle enough town but ravaged by the guilt of not being able to contribute to
Italy�s reputation as a maker of fine spaghetti.
�
GOLD
35 � The railway line
Around the town of Heptrograd in Eastern Bulgaria peasants took advantage of the
fluctuating laws of discrimination against Jews and plundered Jewish families. When
discrimination was state policy the peasants stole Jewish property. Their cow-
bells. Their brass bath-taps. Their wooden buckets. Their engraved candles. Their
daughters� wooden dolls with ceramic faces. Their marzipan-moulds. Their black,
broad-brimmed hats. Their brooms from under the stairs. The carved palings from
their fences. Their paper doilies. Their buttons. Their model ships from Gdansk.
Their unchipped crockery. The lace curtains from their windows. Their calamine-
scented toilet soap. Their emboidered camisoles. Their rope made from pine bark.
Their book-markers made of golden paper. Their quills cut from swan feathers. Their
golden trinkets.
When the state was interested in cementing a national alliance with a foreign power
whose Jewish laws were not as draconian as their own, the anti-Jewish legislation
was lifted and the peasants excoriated for being too thorough in their greediness.
They were encouraged to take back the Jewish cow-bells, Jewish� bath-taps, Jewish
buckets, Jewish candles, Jewish dolls, Jewish marzipan-moulds, Jewish hats, Jewish�
brooms, Jewish palings, Jewish paper doilies, Jewish� buttons,� Jewish model ships
from Gdansk, Jewish unchipped crockery, Jewish lace curtains,� Jewish toilet soap,
Jewish camisoles, Jewish� rope, Jewish book-markers and the Jewish quills. But they
did not return the Jewish golden trinkets.� Instead they took them down to the
railway at Hucknow, where the line comes out of a dark wood before rushing across
the Narjinkia Plain, and they laid them on the rails to be crushed into
irrecognizability. That way their owners could not claim them back. It was not so
easy to identify a crushed watch, a smashed set of cuff-links.
Imagine some twenty peasants dressed in sombre colours crouching in the morning
mist by the railway line that glistens with condensation, with a long line of
golden objects spread along the iron track. A little further back, partially hidden
by silver birches,� are their carts with the horses cropping the roadside grass,
and small children plaiting reeds from a stream and playing with a dark green frog.
At eight thirty a train is due, travelling from Sophia to Bucharest. It comes out
of the wood at sixty miles an hour. The peasants with their ears to the track have
heard it coming four minutes ago, and they hide, just in case the train has
governmental eyes and they will be reprimanded.
The train rushes by, flattening an 18th century brooch once stolen by a pickpocket
in St Petersburg from Anna Petrovina, the Czar�s mistress, a Rabbi�s wedding ring
that once fell into a drain in Minsk and was rescued by a tramp wih a pin on a long
piece of string, a golden clasp from a Talmud published and bound in Cheapside,
London in 1666, the year London burnt like a bag of sticks, a gold chain with
twelve hundred links, one hundred links for each of the lost twelve tribes of
Israel. The giant iron wheels spit from the track an amulet containing a lock of
hair from a kidnapped baby, and the springed clasp of a woman�s handbag made in
Athens about the time Lord Elgin stole the Acropolis marbles.� The wheels cut in
half an enamelled and engraved bracelet, the half that depicts the Finding of the
Infant Moses flies into the grass and is never� found again, the half that depicts
the key found in the belly of the whale, drops onto a wooden sleeper. The carriages
wheels continue to exaggerate and accentuate and emphasise the damage.
The train is three miles down the track, passing the village of Pordim Krivodo when
the peasants come out of hiding and gather and squabble to collect their stolen
gold, squashed and partly melted by the pressure and heat into lumps that ressemble
the white of a fried egg, a cowpat, the greasy intestines of a sheep. Those pieces
of stolen property still recognisable to their Jewish owners will have to wait for
the 9.15 train to Pleven to be reflattened. This heat press is not reliable.
The golden scatterings are useless to their new owners, but cannot be recognised by
the pawnbroker in Sadovec where a policeman stands outside the door� taking small
bribes to turn a blind eye; he will accept a packet of unsalted cashew nuts, two
eggs, a fish wrapped in red paper, a half sack of potatoes, a cabbage.� The
pawnbroker smelts the ravished gold pieces in a charcoal stove and brings them to
useable shape as small �sugarloaf� gold bars.
The single sugarloaf gold bar smelted on the 7th December 1941, the day the
Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, reaches Prague by various� routes and strategems,
and sits for seventy days behind the altar of St Wencelas by the river that runs
through the city. On All Saints Day it is given to the Foundling Hospital by a
novice priest who is angry and despairing at the death of children through hunger.
The nuns are embarrassed. What can they do with such obvious evidence of booty from
God knows where - probably stolen from Jews. They take it to the bank who promptly
confiscate it and send it on to Vienna where it is restamped with a gold cross and
the initials GH� which Christianises and bureaucratises the bar though no one now
knows what GH was supposed to stand for. It arrived in Baden-Baden ready for its
future crash in Bolzano where they do not know how to cook spaghetti because they
leave out the salt, or cook the pasta too dry or too long, or add the tomato sauce
too late, or boil the clams too fast, or make the meat sauce too thin.
In Prague there are curiosity shops along the river where you can buy oddments,
junk, antiques, evidence, it is advertised, of the disappeared Jews from Eastern
Europe. You can buy bath-taps, wooden buckets, wooden dolls with ceramic faces,
hats, brooms, paper doilies, buttons,� model ships, crockery, lace, toilet soap,
camisoles and� book-markers made of golden paper. As the years go by, objects of
domestic usage disappear. Where do they go? Broken, stolen, burnt, lost, sold. At
the start of this story we had twenty-five Jewish artefacts, the peasants returned
fifteen, in the shop in Prague we now have only eight. This is of course only a
story and you can please yourself how you organise fictions to suit your
intentions, but it is supposed to be a researched fact that after a hundred years
only three per cent of all objects manufactured by man survive, and after three
hundred years only one per cent.� It is an interesting but, I suppose, not so
surprising a fact, that what has survived a hundred years stands a one in three
chance of surviving three hundred. A third of all things survived will go on being
survived by a third forever.
�
GOLD
36 � HH to posterity
Hedda Hemsler, who was to be known as HH to posterity, imitated Eva Braun, who was
known as EB to Hitler�s chauffeur. Hedda Hemsler had an infatuation, a crush. She
declared as much to her full-length bathroom mirror, but this infatuation was
complicated and sometimes worked in reverse. She herself did indeed recognise it as
a sometime reverse-infatuation, that is, it was sometimes as virulently against as
it might be for. Hedda Hemsler had a crush on Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler, sometimes
separately, sometimes together, sometimes for, sometimes against. Adolf Hitler was
the Fuhrer of the Third Reich, and Hedda Hemsler�s infatuation was ambitious
because Eva Braun was Hitler�s mistress.
�They said�.
�Who�s they?�
�It�s not true.�
�Why isn�t it true?�
�Because I, Hedda Hemsler, am Hitler�s mistress. Who the hell is Eva Braun? Who the
hell does she think she is - this Eva Braun?�
Hedda Hemsler was never certain in the early days whether her crush was for Hitler
or for Eva Braun. Or whether she was so obsessed that she hated them both for being
together, for being lovers. Sometimes she identified with Eva Braun and hated Adolf
Hitler, sometimes she� identified with Adolf Hitler in his love for Eva Braun.
Sometimes she hated both of them together for irritating her life.
�Which one is really the problem?�
After a while Hedda tried to simplify things for herself. She began to dress like
Eva Braun, she learnt to laugh like Eva Braun, she photographed herself like Eva
Braun. Or so she thought, because not many people were familiar with Eva Braun.
Hitler hid her away. There was of course one big difference between Hedda Hemsler
and Eva Braun, a sort of difference of almost irrelevant interest to the average
man or average woman in the average street at average times, but Hedda Hemsler was
Jewish, and Eva Braun, apparently, was not. And this of course was the clue to the
whole pseudo-infatuation because if Eva Braun was discovered to be Jewish, Hitler
would kill her.
�Shoot her, chop of her head, hang her with piano wires in a butcher�s shop. And he
would be unutterably disgraced and discredited. The prophet of anti-Semitism is
sleeping with a Jew?�
Consternation, confusion, disgrace, resignation, suicide, collapse of National
Socialism.
You can see now that Hedda Hemsler�s infatuation was politically inspired. She
continued to address herself in her full-length mirror.
The mirror answered back, but largely with questions to her questions. Two
problems.
�Did Hitler ever in fact, sleep with Eva Braun?�
�Difficult to say.�
�Would that hypocritical bastard really resign after murdering Eva Braun on her
pink sheeted bed?�
�Probably not�.
Third problem.
�Hitler would probably decide, whatever the evidence, that Eva Braun was not in
fact Jewish at all. He would change the laws. He would decide that all Jewish women
are Jewish except the Jewess, Eva Braun�.
Hedda Hemlser was not a stupid woman, she saw all the angles. And the bathroom
mirror was a long-time, non-suffering confidante.� It sent back to her all the
answers she gave it without fear or favour, and very privately. She asked the
mirror how should she, Hedda Hemsler, bring down National Socialism?
�How can I, Hedda Hemsler, bring down National Socialism?�
�You could realise your infatuations for those two, that dual power base that
causes so much success and so much misery�.
�What is a dual power-base?�
And she would destroy them.
�I will destroy them�.
Sometimes she thought her image in the mirror really was Eva Braun, and sometimes
she was sure Eva Braun answered her, and even encouraged her.
�Eva Braun is certainly an unhappy woman�.
Hedda Hemsler decided she would be the real Eva Braun, sleep with Hitler, really
sleep with him.
�Fuck him. Become pregnant by him. Produce a baby with him quickly, say, in eight
months. Make Adolf a happy father.�
��And then you can have the baby circumcised�.
�Hitler�s baby is cut�.
�Hitler�s baby is a Jew�.
Consternation, confusion, disgrace, resignation, suicide, collapse of National
Socialism.
Two problems. How did Hedda Hemsler from the village of Gerbaring in Westphalia,
get into bed with Adolf Hitler? And was Hitler fertile? He was only supposed to
have one testicle.
�Did this one testicle work?�
Third problem. Was Hedda Hemsler fertile? Fourth problem.
�What do you do about the non-Jewish impostor Eva Braun? Will she get in the way?�
�Put her on a train to Dachau.�
In the event Hedda Hemsler went to Berchtesgaden on the Obersalzberg mountain, got
a job as a waitress in the Aloiner Cafe, and rented a single room in the Tivoli
Hotel, where the concierge�s wife sometimes took in laundry from the Berghof where
Hitler spent his summer-holidays. Under her apron and under her frilly headband,
Hedda Hemsler dressed like Eva Braun until even blindmen could see the similarity.
Some observers said that Berchtesgaden was full of blind men, at least it was full
of men who certainly could not see very clearly.
Hedda saw Hitler twice. From a distance. Once when he passed the Aloiner Cafe in a
black Mercedes with the window down, and then, accompanied by fifteen aides, when
he fed grass to a white horse outside the favoured tea-room on the Obersalzberg.
Hedda counted the aides as she sat on her bicycle. All the aides wore leather-coats
and Hitler had a dog with him that frightened the horse.
Hedda eventually made it into bed with Hitler�s chauffeur. Maybe Hitler�s chauffeur
fancied Eva Braun, and he saw the similarity. Hitler�s chauffeur was not a stupid
man. At least not yet.� Hedda Hemsler fucked with Hitler�s chauffeur three times,
once in Hitler�s car, once in a pine-forest and once in a cable-car.
�The first time in Hitler�s car was the most exciting, lying back on the black
leather seat of the Mercedes, I could feel I could almost be Eva Braun, though,
truth to tell, I doubt whether Hitler ever fucked Eva Braun in his car�.
It was this first liaison that probably made her pregnant, and she told Hitler�s
chauffeur almost as soon as she knew. Hitler�s chauffeur who always referred to Eva
Braun as EB, stretching it out to EeeBee, was already by this time calling Hedda
Hemsler EB2, stretching it out to EeeBeeToo as a sort of whispered private joke.
But he was already fucking another waitress in the Aloiner cafe, who, if she looked
like anyone of his acquaintance, looked a little like Goebbels wife, Magda. And
Hitler�s chauffeur had never fancied Goebbels wife.
Hitler�s chauffeur arranged for EB2 to be sent to Basle. She refused to go.
�I am not going there.�
So he arranged to send her to Vienna.
�I am not going there. I have plans�.
She refused to go. So he arranged to send her to Dachau.
�I am not going there. I have plans to change Europe as we know it�.
So Hitler�s chauffeur sent Helmut Spranger and Theosis Wortzler and Kurt Heigel to
her small bedroom in the Tivoli Hotel and they aborted her. With bent coat-hangers.
They took them from the wardrobe. They stole her underclothes and her perfumes and
her mother�s gold ring marked with the two musical notes FA and SO which also stood
for Falasto Achemanie and Sophia Ochreman, Hedda Hemsler�s parents. Falasto and
Sophia had been piano teachers in Dresden, and they certainly went regularly to the
synagogue in the Hocklestrasse Platz.
Hedda Hemsler bled to death. She was found by a postman who was the current lover
of the concierge�s wife. With the concierge, they arranged for a very discreet
burial, and for three months Hedda Hemsler�s grave was marked with a red ceramic
pot of geraniums and a piece of cardboard torn from a sugar box scrawled with the
initials HH.
�I wonder who HH could be?�, said visitors who happened to pass Hedda�s last
resting place on a sunny Sunday afternoon. By October someone had removed the
flower-pot with the unwatered geraniums, and the sugar-box cardboard had blown
away. HH�s claim on posterity had lasted three months.
It was said that Hitler�s chauffeur played a trick. Kurt Heigel said that Hitler�s
chauffeur contrived to get Eva Braun to wear Hedda Hemsler�s knickers. Afterall the
concierge sometimes took in Hitler�s washing. It is not impossible that a confusion
could have been arranged. If it was true then this was the nearest HH ever got to
EB.
The gold ring from Prague inscribed with the musical initials lay in the inside
pocket of Theosis Wortzler�s jacket for four weeks. And the jacket hung in the
walnut-wood wardrobe of his bedroom in Thomenstrasse. Then it disappeared. Wortzler
enjoyed fighting. Perhaps he had worn the jacket in a brawl. Perhaps his sister had
taken the ring from his jacket when she went in search of house-keeping money.
Either way the ring, which was very identifiable, ended up in the cash-register of
the petrol station at Goedering at the foot of the East Mountain. Hedda Hemsler did
not drive but she liked cars. At the petrol station the ring was exchanged for
seven boxes of American cigarettes. Hedda Hemsler did not smoke. The ring arrived
in Bayreuth and was in the safe of the box-office of the opera-house at the same
time Hitler was attending a performance of Siegfried, the same night in fact that
Hitler agreed to the National Socialist Four-Year Economic Plan for Germany with
Goering, and agreed to assist Franco in Spain with an operation called Magic Fire
named after Siegfried�s rescue of Brunnhilde. This Bayreuth connection can be
authenticated because in the box-office safe, the ring had been placed in a
complimentary ticket envelope dated the 25th July 1936. Hedda Hemsler had never
liked opera. She preferred Al Jonson.
The musical initials on Hedda Hemsler�s ring both personalised but also eternalised
it. The ticket-office assistant whose name was Imogen had placed it in the
complimentary envelope in the safe as a gift for a baritone she loved and whose
buttocks and swinging scrotum she had once glimpsed through a half-closed dressing-
room door when he was changing for his part in Tannhauser. The baritone collected
his complimentary tickets, discovered the ring, suspected its provenance, bought
Imogen a beige crepe dress, and gave the ring, with Imogen�s permission, to his
mother as a musical gift on her fiftieth birthday. The baritone had fat fingers,
and could never have worn it. Hedda Hemsler had thin fingers. The baritone�s mother
was Italian, from Modena, a widow who tried to conceal her poverty from her son.
She sold the ring as a musical curio to an Italian music-loving pawn-broker in Bern
who was raided by Gestapo thugs who swept up all his gold trinkets and took them to
a metal-smith in Hanover. The musical initials disappeared at 1061 degrees
centigrade, and the ring helped to constitute gold bar TGH78 which was shipped to
Munster and then Baden-Baden. Gustav Harpsch became its temporary owner, about the
same time he became the temporary owner of 100 other gold bars. This temporary
ownership ended in a car-crash when 92 of those gold bars were scattered across the
back seat of his black Mercedes. Harpsch did not like opera. He too preferred Al
Jonson. Two Al Jonson fans were thus very indirectly linked on a black leather seat
of a Mercedes in a car-crash in Bolzano, where they cannot cook good spaghetti. Al
Jonson didn�t like spaghetti.
�How the Hell do we know that?�
��Well ...... �.
�
GOLD
37 � The three bears
A mirror manufacturer hid his collection of gold coins in three bears. The bears
were yellow, made of wool, had red bead eyes and belonged to his daughter Emmeline
who identified them with the three bears in the story of Goldilocks; father-bear
had a twist of yellow silk thread around his neck, mother-bear had silver earrings,
and baby-bear had a white arm, courtesy of an unexpected dip in a bleach bath. The
seventy gold coins were Roman, most of them from after the time of the Emperor
Hadrian.
The mirror manufacturer�s home was raided by Nazi police who were convinced that
his wife was Jewish, and his wife and daughter were arrested and deported, probably
to Treblinka. The mirror manufacturer had been in hospital convalescing from a
poisoned appendix when the authorities had arrived. His family had visited him two
hours before their arrest, and had brought him three bedside gifts, a packet of
Liptons Earl Grey Tea, a pink scarf manufactured in Rheims, and an American novel
called �Against the Sky� by Clement A.J. MacArthur. The mirror manufacturer had
kept these three items, undrunk, unworn and unread, by his bed throughout the rest
of the war. As long as they were beside his bed, he had no trouble at all sleeping.
The glass-mirror-manufacturer slept in many beds from 1936 to 1945, most of them
made from a randomn accumulation of coats, newspapers and sacks, in cellars and
air-raid shelters, ditches and army barracks, until five days before the ceasefire,
when he spent the night in what used to be the five-star Konigsberg Hotel in
Bremen. He slept between clean white sheets smelling of violets and under a warm
eiderdown sewn with blue stars. At nine o�clock in the morning, the hotel was
destroyed by a bomb dropped by a Wellington aircraft on its return to England
across the Baltic Sea. A falling plaster ceiling destroyed the mirror
manufacturer�s rented bed along with his bedside packet of tea, his pink scarf and
his American novel. The mirror manufacturer was down the corridor at the time
vomiting his breakfast into a porcelain bath which had brass taps in the shape of
dolphins. The involuntary reactions of his body for a second time had preserved him
from a likely death. But at the loss of his bedside talismen, the mirror
manufacturer�s peace of mind was smashed. He gave up being a mirror manufacturer.
He just identified himself now as a very unhappy insomniac. He earned a living, but
did not live a life, as an accountant for a Swedish company manufacturing winter
sports equipment, and he lived in Basle, travelling frequently on business to
Geneva.
In 1953, on an insomniac walk in the early hours of the morning through the empty
streets of Geneva, he stopped to stare in the showcase window of a celebrated
auctioneer. A collection of some 300 stuffed woollen bears advertised an auction of
19th century toys. One small yellow woollen bear had one red eye and one white arm.
He was convinced that it had once belonged to his daughter.
In the morning the ex-mirror-manufacturer, ex-numismatist, ex-husband and ex-
father, attended the viewing of the auctioneer�s sale, and was reprimanded for
over-zealously fingering an item in Lot 27 devoted to American toys manufactured in
Boston by the firm of Jason Smears and Cohen in 1925. The ex-mirror-manufacturer
doubted the American pedigree of one item, being convinced it had been made in
Hamburg where he had bought it; he was not going to draw attention to the
auctioneer�s poor research. The 27th May was his wife�s birthday. He bid for Lot
27. He bid vigourously and paid too much, and momentarily caused heads to turn in
surprise at a possible lost bargain. He took his parcel to a shoe-shop in the Rue
Cassel, and quietly placed the small bear in the shop�s pedoscope, an X-ray machine
designed to show how a new shoe fitted a foot. He saw seven white discs on the X-
ray glass. He abandoned as many toys from Lot 27, a golliwog, a jack-in-a-box, an
uncle sam, a mother hubbard, a simple simon, a pinocchio and a mickey mouse, and
left them sitting in a row on the shop chairs, all hoping to be served with new
shoes.
In the privacy of his hotel bedroom with the curtains tightlydrawn, he slit the
small bear open with his penknife, and he uncovered seven gold coins of the post-
Hadrian Roman Empire. A coin for the Emperor Vespasian who died from dysentry, a
coin from the Emperor Romulus who died from multiple stab wounds, a coin from the
Emperor Sulla who was poisoned with lead scrapings from a plumber�s maul, a coin
from the Emperor Septimus who drowned, a coin from the Emperor Constantinus who
died from eating poisoned oats.
The ex-mirror manufacturer could not have known that his daughter�s other two bears
had been destroyed in a fire, and that 38 of a possible 41 gold coins had been
raked out of the ashes by children, exchanged for coal and gramophone records,
carried in a hat to a coin collector who pronounced them worthless in order to
secure them himself. The coin collector had his shop raided by Gestapo officials
looking for small arms. The hungry Gestapo officials traded them for fish and sex
with a fishmonger pimp in Linz who took them to a jeweller and had them smelted
down with several gold candlesticks and a gold model of the Taj Mahal to make a
gold bar� that was certainly in Baden-Baden for Gustav Harpsch to collect and lose
at Bolzano where they cannot cook a good spaghetti.
�
GOLD
38 � The spectacles
Lance Corporal Alfred Heisterling was myopic, but he had always been determined to
join the Luftwaffe. He had learnt the drills, memorised all the information for the
visual examinations, and tested himself exhaustively and with ingenuity to lie and
charm where he could not otherwise cheat. Once inside the establishment of his
dreams, he had kept his grip on his shortsightedness, apparently convincing his
superiors. He was not so stupid as to enter for a pilot examination, but arranged
things to pass a navigator�s test. Small-scale map-reading was afterall no
challenge to a man who best viewed the world from a distance of ten centimetres.
Excited about his success, and after a bout of drinking and a rare intimacy with a
woman younger than himself, whose body had revealed itself to him in a succession
of exhilarating close-ups, he let down his guard. He bragged of his successful
deceptions. He was promptly reported and demoted, and only due to his brother�s
intervention was he not dismissed. He took a revenge.� He collected spectacles to
destroy them. If others could use them with success why could not he? He stole them
at first, then he broke into an eye-hospital. He filled his locker with spectacles.
When he opened the locker door the spectacles spilled out over the concrete floor
with a sound like a mighty crowd of falling giant insects. He stamped on the
lenseless spectacles, scrunching them into a scramble of plastic-covered wires.
Then he took to stealing spectacles from passers-by in the street. From Jews it was
easy. First because they seemed to wear more spectacles than gentiles, and second,
they rarely resisted. Devotional Jews he discovered, wore gold rimmed spectacles.
He took to collecting gold rimmed spectacles. Sometimes the wearers painted the
gold with a black lacquer to disguise their possible value. This disception was
quickly discovered by Alfred Heisterling for his natural viewpoint was always close
close up. Such a deception was a special encouragement for him to include violence
in his thievery for he felt he was duty-bound to uncover such camouflage
considering he had passed all his examinations as a professional airforce navigator
whose responsibility to uncover deceptive landscapes was absolutely paramount. He
stole gold-rimmed spectacles and he took out the lenses. His boldness as a thief
increased. He took to standing at traffic-lights on street-corners, and when the
lights changed, he snatched the spectacles from off the noses of drivers in open-
topped cars. And then he ran off. Inevitably sooner or later, he was to misjudge
the out-of-focus background movement of traffic, and he was run over. His head was
crushed, his eyes completely destroyed. His brother collected Alfred�s belongings
from the morgue, was given access to the locker-room and collected 14 sackfuls of
gold rimmed spectacle material, which he carried to a French optician in Marseille
who gave him 900 marks for the recoverable gold.
Fourteen sackfuls of golden wire from spectacles does not produce that much
compacted gold, but enough to be sold on profitably to a travelling salesman who
had friends in a German bank who might take it in for a consideration. The bank was
the Deutche Bank and they had their own smelting processors in several key cities.
One of them was in Baden-Baden close to Germany�s border with France. The gold bar
that could be said to be sighted with a thousand metres of spectacle rims was
stored in Vault Three of the Baden-Baden Deutsche Bank, and collected by Lieutenant
Gustav Harspch towards the end of World War Two to be driven to Bolzano on the back
seat of a black Mercedes car.
�
GOLD
39 � The watch children
The Munstel children of Eisel made it their business to specialise in looking for
gold in the intestines of watches and clocks, and they made their activities into a
game. They prised open the stolen items with a screwdriver and a chisel and tipped
them onto the revolving turn-table of an old wind-up gramophone.� With wide eyes
they watched the springs and cogs and spindles and golden screws revolve in the
light of two spluttering candles. They had made a miniature theatre, a revolving
city of sparkling metal. Eager to immediately see the theatrical effects of their
plundering, they took to carrying their wind-up gramophone on their pillaging,
treating their battered Jewish victims to the spectacle of their time-pieces
disgorged, forcing them to watch, tieing them to a chair or a bed to marvel at the
magic they had once unknowingly owned in their timepieces.
To separate out the various metals of a watch�s interior the two boys had invented
various trial-and-error processes. They boiled the picturesque metal scrap to
shrink out the small diamonds, they heated the metal intestines to melt out the
lead, they soaked them in vinegar to identify the copper by its corroded green
colour. They collected the various metals in small watchmaker�s boxes and keeping
the tangle of metallurgically valueless steel springs for themselves, they sold the
remainder to a goldsmith on Bockelstrasse. They were inevitably short-changed but
received sufficient funds to buy themselves canned food and raspberry syrup.
After the war, Helmut, the elder of the Munstel brothers, eventually joined the
Schiller Theatre in Hamburg as an art-director, and Fritz, the younger brother,
emigrated to Canada and became a camera operator working in California on feature-
films starring Elizabeth Taylor who he worshipped from afar, and once helped home
in a taxi when she was very drunk and angry with Richard Burton.
The Bockelstrasse goldsmith in Eisel regularly smelted down his gold in a mould
stamped with the sign of a griffin and the letters DRLO whose significance he never
knew, having inherited the moulds from a Polish count who did not speak German.
This gold bar was certainly on the back seat of Harpsch�s crashed Mercedes in
Bolzano where they cannot cook good spaghetti.
In the car-wreck, Harpsch�s body had been cut into three pieces, a foot, a hand and
then the rest. The hand had been cut at the wrist and it wore a watch that had
burst open. The silver metal intestines had bunched and rucked to look in minature
like a mechanical forest in winter-time frost. It would not have failed to have
excited the Munstel brothers of Eisel. This excellent army-issue German timepiece
had stopped at five passed one in the morning. And the date was May 7th 1945.
Officially this is regarded as the exact time of the end of the Second World War in
Europe.
�
GOLD
40 - Grosz enthusiasm
Incited to indignation by the drawings and paintings of George Grosz, a young
student shaved his head, stole a German army uniform and, making a good imitation
of a goose-stepping, brain-dead private infantryman, burst into a church in Stolp,
Pomerania on a Sunday morning during Mass. With fiercesome menaces he demanded the
valuables of the church-goers so that he might finance his art-school training to
repudiate Grosz�s anti-establishment propaganda of flat-breasted whores, and
pigeon-chested business men with timid hairy genitals showing through transparent
trousers. From the intimidated worshippers, he collected 500 marks worth of
property, enough to afford him three weeks training at the Royal Saxon Academy of
Art in Dresden where the pipe-smoking Grosz had studied between 1909 and 1911.
The student was arrested and his collected valuables were itemised. But they were
not returned to their owners because of a general embarrassment that appeared to
intimidate the city authorities and the church-goers themselves. The practice of
taking valuables from Jews was widespread in Stolp, and this incident, where
Gentiles had been subjected to the same sort of menances that Jews were obliged to
continually undergo, shamed all good Catholics.
The collected items included three gold watches, some twenty gold rings of various
descriptions, several rosaries with gold attachments, a gold propelling pencil, a
bible with a wooden cover and two gold clasps, a gold necklace, three gold
crucifixes and a gold spring-clip for holding bank-notes. The items were placed in
a bank-box and locked in a bank-vault that had previously been used to store French
soft cheeses. The student was let off with a caution. His patriotism was not in
doubt, but his methods were declared unwise. Three years later he started to study
medicine, and after the war became a valuable doctor in obstetrics working in
Berlin.
In April 1942 the bank at Stolp was bombed, the vaults cleared and all valuable
items collected without paperwork into canvas-sacks, which were transported to
Munich and then to Baden-Baden where they were sorted, and the gold removed to be
smelted into gold bar BB8910p, which subsequently found its way into Harpsch�s
possession and transported to Bolzano where it ended up with 91 other gold bars in
a car crash just outside the city where they cannot apparently cook good spaghetti.

�
GOLD
41 � The toothbrush
Tomas Homilberg was scrubbing the paving stones with his toothbrush when the very
smartly dressed corporal told him he had to clean his teeth. He complied. A little
grit abraded his gums and the taste was somewhere between engine oil and eggs. The
corporal told him to scrub the pavement. He complied. It was almost impossible to
work up a lather. Perhaps a little spittle made a few swirling bubbles on the
paving stone for about four seconds and then they disappeared. The corporal told
him to scrub his teeth. He did as he was told. The taste was now more like sour
milk mixed with blood. His gums were bleeding. Tomas was at a stage when events
were abstracted and removed from emotional context. He was a writer. Or he used to
be. Three hours ago he was a writer. Now he was just a man scrubbing the pavement
with a toothbrush. As was his practice, he viewed events from the outside,
assessing them for their literary interest value. It was certainly a practice
resulting from his own voluntary self-enforced training. He had not known how to
train to be a writer. He just practised emotional removal and the outside-yourself
attitude and he wrote down what he discovered. He now knew he would probably have
little difficulty in writing about his present predicament.
Tomas was ordered to scrub the pavement again. He complied. He permitted himself a
quiet slow smile, and the corporal hit the side of Tomas�s head with his rifle
butt. Tomas fell sideway onto his toothbrush hand. The stem of the toothbrush
snapped. Now he could not scrub the pavement. Or indeed his teeth. Never mind. The
smartly dressed corporal told him to scrub the pavement with his knuckles. Tomas
had kept most of his right hand hidden in the long sleeve of his raincoat, now his
fingers were revealed. The corporal saw Tomas�s� wedding ring and smashed Tomas�s
hand with his rifle butt down onto the pavement. Tomas knew that a writer had to
have a hand to write with. Tomas knew that a writer had to be imaginative. If he
had been imaginative enough to be a good writer, he surely� ought to have thought
to have hidden his wedding ring in his pocket, in his underwear, in his shoe,
anywhere, but not on his wedding finger. He ran through the possibilities. Under
his foreskin, under his eyelid, in his navel, in his mouth, in his ear, up his
nose, up his anus. Tomas reviewed hiding places on the human body. Perhaps a woman
had more opportunities. Tomas then suddenly reacted with emotion, excessive
emotion. He had suddenly thought of his wife having to hide her wedding-ring on her
body. He nearly lost his nerve and his self confidence and his temper under the
very trying current circumstances.
The corporal ordered him to strip. Tomas swiftly leapt back into his emotional
neutrality. For his own preservation.� In front of some fifty people out shopping
in the Great Market, Tomas stripped as he was ordered.� It would have been a waste
of time hiding his wedding-ring in his underwear or in his shoe. Or up his anus.
The smartly dressed corporal - why worry if he was smartly dressed - just concern
yourself that he, the corporal was dressed, and you, Tomas, was naked. The corporal
made Tomas kneel on the pavement he had just scrubbed with his toothbrush outside
the City Hall in Podz. And he made Tomas hold the cheeks of his buttocks apart.
Tomas was surprised at such a command. It was something he had never done before,
holding the cheeks of his buttocks apart for an anus inspection. Not even in front
of his wife as some kind of delightful, exhibitionist, love-sex display game. He
did as he was told, with his bloodied and damaged right hand and his dirty left
hand. There were murmurs of disapproval in the watching crowd. The corporal fired a
volley of shots into the air that scared the pigeons. The crowd dispersed, ran
away, fled. Within seconds they were all gone. The corporal and Tomas were alone in
the street outside the Podz Town Hall. Tomas was surprised they had all gone away
so quickly. He smiled. Showing his anus had attracted sympathy. The corporal was
not sure what to do with this able-bodied naked Jew now he had no audience. He
kicked Tomas�s clothes around on the pavement,� and he stamped on Tomas�s
underpants with a dirty boot. Tomas smiled again.
This material was unbelievable. He was unlikely to have invented it.� Here was
petulance and cowardice and sadism and hysteria and sexual humiliation all together
in one place outside a Building of the State on a beautiful day. In Podz. In
Poland. A white horse in the distance pulling a beer cart. A child in the distance
riding a red bicycle. A pregnant women in the distance pushing a pram. White clouds
racing across a blue sky. The pigeons circling. The light shining on the pigeon
feathers as the birds suddenly wheeled to the right as a single united flock, one
slow pigeon trailing behind. Details help to make the picture more believable.
Tomas laughed out loud at the incredulity of his present experience. He laughed out
louder and the corporal shot Tomas through the head.
The corporal stole Tomas�s wedding-ring. Six infantrymen crept up on him, surprised
him, laughed at him, asked him if he intended to get married. A secret wedding.
Weddings were for idiots. They shoved the ring in the corporal�s mouth. They pulled
down his smartly creased trousers and his bleached clean underpants and they firmly
grasped his prick so that to move was agony, and they shoved the ring up his arse,
prodding it deep within him with their dirty fingers. The corporal threw Tomas
Homilberg�s ring away in disgust. A Polish jew�s wedding ring had been up his
German Aryan backside.
The ring was picked up by a tramp, exchanged for a bowl of cabbage soup. The ring
was thrown into a box, dumped at a railway station, left at a post office, sent to
a bank, arrived in Baden-Baden and was smelted down with a hundred other polish
Jewish trinkets and became anonymous gold. Harpsch took it with him to Bolzano.
�
GOLD
42 � Paper-clips
Two sons of the banker Otto Mayer dealt differently with the problem of the
possibility of their gold being confiscated by the Nazi authorities. Their father
had crashed and risen, crashed and risen with the financial adventures of the
depression. The brothers knew that wealth in paper money was a foolish investment.
Jura, the elder brother, named after the mountains, chose the simple expedient of
simply wearing his gold and carrying his gold on his person; not ostentatiously,
but perhaps as a tie-pin, or a key chain or a wedding-ring (though he was not
married) or as a signet ring, or as loose change in his pocket, or perhaps as two
watches, one for Berlin time, one for Moscow time (the Russians were allies). By
not hiding his gold, Jura could not be accused of concealing it which was a
punishable offence. Jura clanked a little.
The other brother Dolo, named after the mountains, or, as he pronounced it, after
American currency, arranged for his gold inheritance to be made into thin wire,
which was cut up and coated with black enamel, and bent and folded into paper-
clips, rather heavy paper-clips, 40,000 of them.
Both brothers went naked, perhaps hand in hand, to the gas chambers in Dachau.�
Both marvelled at the pleasureable size of each other�s penis; they had been a
secretive family.
Jura�s gold of course had been discovered very quickly. He had gone to a public
lavatory in Dusseldorf Railway Station in search of sexual comfort, and a tired,
listless soldier had been surprised at the heavy clank of metal as Jura�s trousers
hit the toilet floor. �Blackmail was the one-way conduit of Jura�s gold, flowing
out inexorably�, said his aunt twenty years later. She was the unlikely editor of
the Zionist newspaper, The Magpie, named after the one-time Turkish, black-and-
white bird that Christians believe is half in and half out of Hell, and has to
welcomed every morning with a cheery greeting to appease its burnt black feathers.
The soldier at the railway station bought warm underwear, gave up sucking male
anatomy till it bled, ate asparagus and mussels at a French restaurant, and rented
an apartment with a bath and a Paul Signac painting on the bedroom wall.
Dolo�s golden paper-clips had of course also been discovered. In his office at 17
Badomerstrasse, Dolo kept hundreds of boxes of blank typing paper clipped
needlessly together in batches of ten sheets. He kept thinner coloured paper in
separate folders clipped together in batches of twenty, and thinner-still carbon-
papers in clipped batches of thirty in unsealed brown envelopes. To an author
excited by order it looked as though Dolo was to start writing a major novel
arranged in advance into chapters and sections on empty pages to be filled and
copied and transcribed ready for translation. But an idle clerk picked his milk
teeth with a black enamelled paper-clip that had fallen onto the carpeted floor by
accident, and the secret was out.
Imagine 40,000 black paper-clips in a jumbled and tangled pile on a red one-inch
pile carpet. The clerk�s paper-clip was not forgotten. He was asked to take it from
his pocket where he had stored it as a souvenir. He held it between his thumb and
forefinger and let it drop. Everyone in the room heard its soft ching as it met its
fellow paper-clips. They used first a shovel, then a pan and brush and then their
fingers. And then the kiln. They watched through the thick silicon window. The mass
of folded wire glowed red and� then burst into blue flame as the black enamel paint
caught fire and frizzled away in a brief black smoke. And then the mass of cob-
webbed undisguised gold glowed white and then bright shiny buttercup-gold. The
wire-tangle mountain coallesced, dripping down on itself like clear olive oil until
it splashed like milk drops into itself, and settled first like a marsh, then a
rippled pond and then a soft sea and then stillness, a gold platter, a gold mirror.
The German soldier Gustav Harpsch benefitted.
�
GOLD
43 � The rabbi conspiracy
This is a story about a pawn shop whose entire ticketed and invoiced stock was
confiscated by a Nazi contingent searching for evidence of a Jewish conspiracy
organised by two rabbis, whose father, like Nobel, had made a great deal of money
out of gunpowder. The Nazis had used the rabbis� daughters as chess-pieces on the
Leghorn Public Piazza, having been unable to find the red queen and a black rook�s
pawn,� for which indignities the two brothers intended to blow up the entire
gentile world, starting with Leghorn Public library.
The pawn shop�s property was not returned and all the items sorted into piles for
redistribution. The gold found its way to Basle and then Goestatingen and then
Baden-Baden where Lieutenant Harpsch commandeered it with false promises to his
brother-in-law that they would share it after the war. In the end this never
happened. Both brother and brother-in-law were killed. Gustav Harpsch in a car
crash and his brother-in-law in a coughing fit. Harpsch�s brother-in-law had been a
natural worrier. His worries had kept him protected against pain and disaster
throughout the war; because they were so close to his heart and so omnipresent in
his mind, he had no time to think of bigger issues like murdered jews, or Russian
winters, or thinking that Hitler and his henchmen were no better than public-house
brawlers turned lucky.
When the war ended and the surrender of the German army was official, he sat
himself down in the ruins of his garden with a cold glass of champagne he had kept
throughout the war for just such an occasion. On his fourth sip he had begun to
cough. In four and a half minutes he was dead. He never had time to discover that
his brother had deceived him. And his brother was never going to find out that his
brother was dead, because he was killed twelve days earlier in Bolzano, the city in
North Italy where spaghetti was eternally badly cooked.
What of the rabbis? The rabbis were cabbalists. Every significance was milked. They
were profoundly interested in metaphor. They decided that the gentile population
should have violence with their daily bread. The brother rabbis put bombs inside
loaves. White bread. Gentiles liked bread baked with refined flour. The trigger was
a bite, a cut with a bread knife. The result was bloodied mouths, broken teeth,
smashed jaws along with unsalted butter, jam-preserve, honey, slices of shredded
cheese, pieces of pastrami, a shower of damp crumbs circling above a blasted head.
Finally brother rabbi Ephrahim perished eating an exploding bagel primed by his
brother Josephat. It split his face from ear to ear.
Josephat was struck white with horrific guilt. Hair, skin and tongue. He exhibited
his white tongue to show how horror-struck he was.� He, a rabbi, had killed his
brother, a rabbi, in a gentile-destructive conspiracy. Before he could explode
himself by taping his fingers to a clumsy bomb that he would be unable to untape if
he changed his mind, Josephat was knifed in the belly by his angry sister-in-law.
She had five boys under eight to be educated to grow up to be rabbis of
international esteem.
The destruction continued. What had started with rook�s pawn takes knight and
queen�s pawn takes king�s pawn en passant, with two little girls enjoying their
jobs as substitute chess-pieces, ended in the violent destruction of an entire
devout extended Jewish family, now given over to family vendetta. And you have
guessed it. Sixty-four people in eight countries over a period of eight years
perished before the game was over, one for each square on the chessboard.
The pawn-shop golden valuables were smelted down to make gold bar 5YHJJ90.�
Lieutenant Harpsch, oblivious to the mayhem that created this golden talisman, took
it to Bolzano and lost it in a crash only seen by nocturnal field mice and only
heard by owls. Curiously this crash and the consequent demise of Harpsch, happened
when it happened, to satisfy a prophecy made by his father, a man who said that his
son would love and fight in a second world war but would not survive it. As it was,
Harpsch waited until the very last minute, if not the last second, of the Second
World War to fulfil the prophecy, because he was killed at� 2.14 am on the 7th May,
1945. His broken watch timed it. It was the exact time that most historians agree
marks the definitive ending of the Second World War in Europe.
�
�
GOLD
44 � Lilac soap
Benjamin hid his gold cigarette-lighter encrusted with a single diamond, and
Martha�s gold bracelet, and her gold and silver brooch shaped like a mermaid and
her gold pendant earrings, in two bars of soap. He sliced the soap bars open, put
the valuables inside, closed the halves and ran the soap under a hot tap. The soap
was perfumed to remind the user of lilacs. It had been bought in Marken, which was
unusual because the Calvinist citizens of Marken did not believe essentially in
bars of soap smelling of lilac.
A small contingent of Dutch Nazis ransacked Benjamin�s little wooden house and set
it alight with matches, newspapers and paraffin. They were like boy scouts lighting
their first camp-fire. And the bars of soap had melted on the ceramic tiles of the
ground-floor bathroom scullery, before the eyes of a plump, volunteer, fire-
fighting postman who was called Claus Richter after the First World War hero who
had committed suicide under water for fear of being captured by the enemy. Claus
Richter had a large ginger moustache, and he� wore his fire-helmet like a man
vastly enjoying himself.
Benjamin and Martha were dragged into the street and laughed at for being so clean
and shining that they had kept their valuables in soap.
The earrings dangled from the ears of the Claus Richter�s wife for three weeks, and
the brooch shone on the breast of Claus Richter�s daughter for three weeks, and the
bracelet shone on the wrist of Claus Richter�s other daughter for three weeks. The
effect was mildly curious when seen in association with local National Costume,
which was usually obligatory at public functions in traditional Marken.
And then all the glittering jewelry was confiscated at a party organised by
Stormtrooper Guillemot who also, like Claus Richter had a ginger moustache, though
the swatch of hair on his upper-lip was tooth-brush shaped like his hero who would
also commit suicide for fear of being captured by the enemy, not under water this
time, but certainly underground.� The party was organised to irradicate, obfuscate,
deflect, under-emphasise, dismiss the memory of Stalingrad. Guillemot patriotically
made a compulsory collection of all the valuables of his guests to fight a second
battle at Stalingrad which the Germans would indisputably win. Martha�s family
golden trinkets were destined at least in theory to help absolve the bad smell of a
German defeat.
Benjamin�s confiscated cigarette-lighter had meanwhile passed to a butcher� in
exchange for a small unplucked chicken and a pound of kidneys. It then went on a
hand-to-hand journey from butcher to grocer to policeman to a factory warden and
finally and surprisingly it joined its erstwhile companions in a furnace in
Gulmetter. Having lost their identity as cigarette-lighter, bracelet, brooch and
earrings, their metallic essence entirely expunged of all sentimental connotations,
they travelled as cold gold to Baden-Baden and were further smelted with other
Jewish trinkets into a gold bar stamped FRT 672742, which with 91 other gold bars,
were discovered in a black Mercedes , license plate number TL 9246 abandoned at the
road-side at Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they could not make good
spaghetti.
Benjamin and Martha went to a work-camp at Treblinka where there was supposed to be
an instruction to consider experimenting with the possibility of turning human fat
into soap. Everyone thought the idea was apocryphal, a gross scare story to see who
could think up a heinous act against humanity that would also be a pragmatic use of
resources. There was no instruction that the soap should smell of lilac.
There were twelve lilac bushes lining the southern perimeter fence of the work-
camp, and throughout the last two weeks of March, the whole of April and the first
two weeks of May, if you stood close enough to that line of twelve bushes you could
almost not smell the smoke coming out of the crematorium chimney.� Benjamin,
looking through the wire, named each lilac bush after a tribe of Judea. He was in
the habit of learning modern American poetry as a precaution lest he should ever
have to teach it in an American University after the war.� He tried to idle his
mind by quoting poetry of the most erudite kind. He innocently but earnestly
misquoted Eliot - �March is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead
land�.� He was correct about the dead land, correct about the lilacs, wrong about
the month.
Perhaps he genuinely made a mistake, but perhaps he was being superstitious.� If he
named April, it might never arrive for him. He was to be proved correct. Both he
and Martha were dead by the Spring equinox. The lilacs bloomed on for another three
weeks.
The site of Benjamin and Martha�s house in Marken is now a small cafe selling
tourist souvenirs. It has a small studio out the back where visitors can have their
photographs taken wearing traditional lace caps and traditional embroidered
costumes.
�
GOLD
45 � Pre-Columbian Death
A professor of South American pre-Columbian history kept a collection of Mayan and
Aztec gold weights, gold drinking vessels and gold facial ornaments in his home
overlooking the river at Cologne. He had converted his living-room into a modest
museum with glass showcases, glass-fronted shelves and free-standing vitrines. His
wife was a woman of Indian descent from Ottacawa near� Buenos Aires. She was a
primary-school teacher who in her summer holidays had assisted in an archaeological
dig organised by German specialists.� Her name was Rinsaria. She was twenty years
younger than the professor, had dark hair and dark skin and a strong nose.
In Cologne the professor had an assistant, Hans Topperler, a normally modest and
thoughtful young man who wanted to live in Terra del Fuego far from German
civilisation, where the inhabitants only wore a mat tied with string that was
turned around their bodies to face the quarter from where the wind blew. Perhaps as
part of his longing, he began to watch Rinsaria, washing dishes in the professor�s
kitchen, standing on a chair cleaning the glass of the vitrines. He felt she needed
to be freed from such petty bourgeois preoccupations and be returned to her own
country where she could go naked and repudiate the Christian God. Hans, though
intelligent, allowed his lechery to overturn his knowledge. The fact that Rinsaria
could speak English and German and had a Spanish name and possessed parents who
were caretakers of the Santa Maria Chapel in Montedore, did not seem to distract
him from thinking of her as a native girl fresh out of the high and windy mountains
of a country of bright colours, simple passions and a contemplative life watching
the clouds and counting the butterflies. Hans could be said to have fallen
passionately in love with Rinsaria. His dreams of her and an escape to an
impossible Latin-American paradise became one. His unrequited love deeply disturbed
his common-sense, threw his normal caution into disarray and upset his balance.
After observing Rinsaria tipping the gravel out of the professor�s turn-ups,
plucking the hairs from the professor�s nostrils, and sitting astride his thin
naked knees in the bathroom as he sat on the toilet, he denounced Rinsaria to the
Gestapo as being Jewish. What on earth he hoped to gain but further misery was
impossible to say. The professor were sent to Triblinka accused of fornicating with
a Jewish woman. Rinsaria was imprisoned for further investigation. Hans was giving
the task of collecting up all the gold items and having them smelted down to help
the German war effort. This was the final blow to his sanity; to have lost his
love, his job, his professor and now to be obliged to smelt away such valuable and
beautiful cultural artefacts turned his mind. He carefully collected the Mayan and
Aztec gold items in three sacks and took them to three football fields on the
outskirts of the city and buried them in three separate places. And then he
committed suicide. He took his bicycle to the top of the tallest building in
Cologne and rode it around and around in ever widening circles, until on the edge
of dizzy insensibilty he ran himself over the edge.
The first sack of gold was easily found. The second was unearthed when the field
was re-grassed in the 1950s, and the third was never recovered. The first sack
contained all the evidence of Hans�s sensuous dream of an imagined Indian Paradise
-� the curled golden snakes and the big breasted golden women with wide smiles, and
the golden flying birds with singing mouths and the golden children sleeping on
palm leaves and the golden tortoises and the golden long-eared warrior with the
pierced nose and the upstanding joyous penis that Hans himself imagined he could
have with Rinsaria - all these items of a South American Heaven found their way to
German Baden-Baden and the cauldron. One anonymous rectangular bar of this
vanished� treasure found its way to Bolzano thanks to the desire of a German army
officer in April 1945 to rediscover a paradise for his daughter.
Thinking of South American gold, look at the ring on your finger, or if you do not
wear jewellery, the ring on your neighbour�s finger as you sit in a tram or bus or
plane. The chances are almost certain� that the ring will contain some Aztec or
Mayan gold. There is only so much gold in the world. Harpsch�s brother-in-law in
the Baden-Baden bank had read that if all the usuable gold in the world were to be
collected together in one place it would only make a cube of 60 metres by 60 metres
by 60 metres, which if you think of it, is really not so large. So much of this
gold came from South America.� And so much of it travelled east in the 16th and
17th century to be melted down and refashioned immediately. Think what a mighty
thesarus of finely conceived, beautifully wrought artifacts representing hundreds
of years of cultural discovery, knowledge and pleasure has been melted away like a
mountain of ice perishing in the desert. The Spaniard Pizarro saw only yellow
metal, he did not see Hans�s Heaven.
Like his second buried sack of gold, it was the mid-1950s before Hans�s body was
found. With his bicycle he had fallen into a blocked alleyway between two
buildings, a sort of space that architects pretended did not exist because it
embarassed ancient rights or made their symmetrical drawings asymmetrical. Hans had
been a� thin boy and the smell of his decay had not been noted.
�
GOLD
46 � A family heritage
To protect her family�s heritage, Valery�s grandmother had laid a curse on all
those who might mistreat, sell or otherwise disturb the integrity of her jewelry
collection. Under no condition whatsoever was it to leave the family. Misfortune
would befall the family if it should do so. It did and it did.� It did leave the
family and misfortune indeed befell.
In September 1938, three days before Crystal night, when more glass was broken in
five hours than had ever before in the history of the world been broken in five
hours, a policeman took his terrier for a walk. The terrier was a plump bitch
called Cockducker because she refused to be take any interest whatsoever in sexual
congress. She had soft eyes, an attractive rump, a discreet anus under a high-
pitched tail, and broken patch of brown fur over her eyes that looked like a
blindfold. Policeman and bitch walked along the Gabrielstrasse into the comfortable
leafy streets of the new housing estate of Midelhausen across the river in East
Troysburg. The bitch urinated against the hedge of number 33 Gabrielstrasse right
next to the synagogue with the hooded porch and the purple-tiled roof. The
policemen, idly looking in the uncurtained window of the front-room of number 33,
saw Joachim, Valery�s elder brother, counting money on the green table-cloth
between the silver cruet and three beer bottles.
On Crystal Night, three evenings later, the policeman took advantage of
circumstances, and, treading gingerly over the glittering, glistening, sparkling
pavements of glass , broke into number 33 Gabrielstrasse, to discover Valery,
Joachim, Gabriel, Maisie, Stephanie, Claus and Herman in the act of trying to hide
the family jewelry. All were arrested, and at the police-station, a terrified
Valery was forced to pull a gold necklace from her vagina, where she had sought
very uncomfortably to have hidden her grandmother�s most favoured possession.
Twenty-seven gold pieces of early 18th century jewelry, a gold goblet from the
Napoleonic period, and a gold paper-weight in the shape of the Statue of Liberty,
were confiscated. Joachim was given a receipt of pink paper. On it was scribbled
�Jewish Jewelry� in such a way as to make the two words into one word. This was
accompanied by an illegible signature. Joachim�s grand-daughter, a receptionist at
the Jewish Museum on 87 Street East, New York, had the pink paper framed in a gold
frame in 1983, and she clamped it with magnets� to the door of her� refrigerator.
Domestic history on ice.
In company with some twenty gold rings and a gold-handled paper-knife, this
family�s inheritance was smeltered in a small furnace at Frinkel into a gold bar
standard-number FRT 45042, and passed from the Gestapo headquarters at Hanse to
Golotche, and to a bank at Gossering from where it was collected by the sergeant
attached to Lieutenant�s Harpsch�s company, who signed for it, looping his Ps with
great flourishes. He rarely had an opportunity to use his signature officially. It
was very easily legible, and became an interesting, though not particularly
valuable, court document.
Because of Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch�s bizarre behaviour, this gold bar ended up
finally with 91 other gold bars in two black leather suitcases in a crashed
Mercedes car, license plate number TL 9246, discovered abandoned at the road-side
near Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they could not make a good spaghetti.
And the grandmother�s curse prevailed. All the family were murdered� at Troysberg.
Valery disappeared. She had been a beautiful woman with fine legs, and the most
perfectly arching eyebrows. It was believed that the three policemen who had
witnessed her recovering the jewelry from her person, had become excited, and had
taken her to a bar or a restaurant or a field. She was never seen again. Gabriel
was shot in the head. Maisie was shot in the head. Stephanie was shot in the head.
Claus was shot in the head. Herman was shot in the head.� Joachim was shot in the
belly. He lingered with a bullet in his abdomen for seven hours in a trench of
bodies unable to free his legs from under a stout women who was not his wife, and
with whom his face almost had carnal relations. He was finally buried with
composted leaves in his mouth and violent spasms in his lungs, when they shovelled
nitrogeneously-rich soil into the trench that has subsequenty nurtured a fine grove
of beechtrees that appear in a photograph that celebrates Troysberg as winner of
the 1957 competition for Most Beautiful Village of South Westphalia. If the bitch
Cockducker had whelped, her male offspring could almost have certainly made use of
this line of fine trees. The policeman died peacefully in bed in 1989 wearing a new
pair of blue and white Marks and Spencer pyjamas. His daughter lived in
Hammersmith, London, and regularly sent her parents good-quality, inexpensive
night-clothes and underwear.
�
�
GOLD
47 � Burnt hands
Screaming, Lazlo Kreckner ran into the hospital in Provo Street, Magdeberg. He had
burnt his hands smelting gold. His big hands looked like red gloves decorated with
casual golden stitches and random shining studs. The nurses tried to remember the
name of the man whose touch had turned everything to gold; it could be said
literally that Lazlo Kreckner was a man with a golden touch. The tips of his
fingers were like golden thimbles.
Lazlo died. They said he was in so much pain his corpse continued to scream after
death and his hands stretched and flexed under the shroud. The police went to his
home and found his makeshift kiln. It was fired by four gas jets conducted by
rubber pipes from his cooking stove to focus their fierce heat on a single cast
iron pot. The whole apparatus was still blazing, but lying on its side on a paving-
stone Lazlo had stolen from the street. It was a wonder that the house had not
caught fire. Some of the former gold contents that had not decorated Lazlo�s hands,
were spattered across the floor and lay in burnt holes on the chequered red and
white lino; the gold beads and gold driblets were playing chess. A pile of gold
wedding rings and golden bracelets lay on the kitchen table in a brown paper bag.
Lazlo Kreckner had made his gold collection by preying on the cemetery visitors in
the graveyards of Magdeberg. These visitors were largely bereaved Jewish widows
kneeling beside graves, straightening the flowers, weeding the soil under the
marble chips, wiping the rain splashes from the polished travertine and porphyry,
filling their watering-cans at the communal taps at the end of the tree-lined
gravel paths in the drifting clouds of fireweed seeds. Lazlo had scared the
occasional gentile, but jewesses, who would not wish to be noticed screaming and
drawing attention to themselves, were easy prey. The weapon of persuasion was
seldom resisted. It was the threat of tomb desecration, not necessarily at that
moment, but later; perhaps that night when the widow was in her bed with the cat
asleep on the counterpane. Lazlo sometimes idly just happened to be carrying a
large hammer in his big red hands. And he would tap gently on the nearest
gravestone with its large metal head.
Magdeburg Jewish widows could now rest in peace at the thought that the Kreckner
blackmailer was dead, and perhaps they could rejoice that he was dead but not at
peace. But a policeman sent to investigate a desecrated grave and its weeping widow
who still had her wedding ring on her finger, was interested in the idea of
creating a copycat adventure. But he never tried to smelt down his captured
trinkets. He sensibly took them to a jewel smith, and together they made a small
fortune and retired after the war, with their wives and Pomeranian poodles, to the
Canary Isles.
The Provo Street Hospital nurses scraped the drops and driblets of gold from
Lazlo�s fingers and from under his blackened fingernails, and they put them in a
wine-glass to view it with all the attention that a wineglass gives to its
contents. They put the wine-glass on a window-sill in the restroom, washed their
hands with carbolic soap and they went home.� In the morning the wine-glass and its
contents had gone. They had been taken by a radiologist, who exchanged them for a
breakfast of bacon and eggs in the English style at a corner cafe. The cafe
proprietor kept them in his display case among the other curiosities he had there
like an American helmet, an African bible with date-wood covers, a mummified foot
and a human tattoo soaked in brown alcohol. Then he lost his license to sell
schnapps and abandoned his cafe to tramps and the bombed homeless who stripped his
cafe of saleable items, and Lazlo�s gold found a new home in a perambulator along
with twenty candlesticks in a jeweller�s shop. The gold was later accumulated in a
munitions box, smelted into several gold bars, and one of these Gustav Harpsch
later commandeered from Vault Three of his brother-in-law�s bank in Baden-Baden� to
take on an unsuccessful trip to Bolzano where a good spaghetti-dish is a scarce
commodity.
�
GOLD
48 � Euthanasia
A white truck painted with two red crosses drove down a gravel path through the
woods and pulled up in a clearing above the lake where children were swimming. The
driver took a short length of flexible silver pipe from under his seat, walked
around to the back of the truck, and fixed the pipe to the exhaust.
Without turning off the engine, and leaving the door to his driver�s seat open, the
driver took a red thermos flask and a white metal box and walked a hundred yards to
a fallen tree trunk and sat with his back to the truck, and ate his lunch in the
sunshine watching the children splashing and shouting in the lake. It was one of
the first really warm days of Spring. He only once briefly looked back at the white
truck that was shaking violently with some movement inside. He ate his sandwiches,
drank his tea and looked at his watch. The children in the lake were swimming
naked. They looked like small white frogs, or crocus bulbs kept too long out of the
sun. He pushed� the white paper that had wrapped his sandwiches into a hole in the
tree-trunk, urinated where he stood, and returned to the truck which was now still
and quiet. He shook the last drops of tea from his flask, unscrewed the silver pipe
from the exhaust, placed it under his driver�s seat, and he drove back to the
clinic. His name was Hans.
The two spina bifida patients, the polio cripple, the congenital encephalitis
patients, the three Down�s syndrome babies, the Turrette Syndrome elderly man, the
epileptic woman, an elderly blind and deaf woman, an incipient hermaphrodite child
with a cleft palate, and the girl who had tried to commit suicide by slitting her
wrists when abandoned by her elderly lover, had been wearing clinical gowns which
could hide or conceal very little.� Nonetheless Hans the driver, with Claris the
medical orderly, looked the bodies over as they off-loaded them from the white
truck marked with the two red crosses. The image of white frogs or crocus bulbs
kept too long out of the Spring sunshine, again sprang to Hans�s mind.� In five
minutes they had added two St Christopher medals, a gold crucifix and a gold
identity bracelet to their collection of gold trinkets in the bottom drawer of
Hans� locker.
Hans made three trips a day. There was the morning trip to the tourist spot
overlooking the river, the lunchtime trip to the woods above the lake, and the
afternoon trip to the deserted and unfinished boulevard at Glistwasser. That is 18
trips a week. Then every Wednesday evening Hans drove his white medical truck to
the jewellers in Dessau. He and Claris collected a single gold bar from the
jewellers every three weeks. This continued to be a regular practice for 18 months.
Then Hans� wife became pregnant and gave birth to a Down�s Syndrome baby. Hans�
wife refused to let Hans park the white truck outside their house anymore. Three
months later Hans and his wife separated. She went back to Dusseldorf to live with
her widowed mother, taking her son and a gold bar from Hans�s lock-up trunk in the
garden shed. Three months later she tried to commit suicide by drinking lye. She
was stopped from emptying the whole bottle by her mother, but she was incurably
damaged, bed-ridden, incontinent, paralysed. Hans�s mother-in-law negotiated with a
retired waitress to live-in as a permanent nurse to look after her daughter and
grandson. The gold bar found its way to the Deutche Bank and was taken to Baden-
Baden sometime in 1943, where it became part of Harpsch�s surety for intended
happiness.
Hans enlisted as a tank-driver. He was caught in the blast from a gas explosion. He
was blinded, deafened and his lungs were scorched. He spent the rest of his life in
a clinic in Brandenburg.
Six months after Hans�s military accident, the Euthanasia Action Programme, code-
named T4 after its initial address in Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin-Charlottenburg,
was disbanded. But by then a minimum of 70,000 individuals had been subjected to
medical euthanasia.
�
GOLD
49 � The Italian Letter-writers
The Fetterling family of Lausanne were great letter-writers. They wrote in Italian
to their relatives in Friuli and the Veneto. The contents of the letters was
private, gossipy and could tell you much about Jewish bourgeois life practised by
Jewish families who rarely advertised their Jewishness. In 1931, after Forte
Fetterling lost his teaching job, and his two sons were persuaded to leave their
school, because their penises were circumcised and their noses hooked, grandfather
Horeing Fetterling decided to bury his valuables. He needed to communicate the
whereabouts of his hiding place to his family so he sent out coded messages in his
copious correspondence.� He had sufficient children and sufficient grandchildren to
make a description of the hiding place by using the initials of their first names.
This amateur code was broken by an inspired and energetic young blackshirt in the
offices of the Heidenburg Sewing Machine Company at Innsbruck. He was interested in
calligraphy and palaeography, had theories about the writings of great men, had
read all Goethe�s letters in handwritten facsimile, and wanted to work in a great
library after the war had been won, perhaps in Munich or better still in Berlin. He
wanted to sit in a musty room with a shaft of sunlight illuminating a stream of
golden dust particles, just like those streams of sunlight illuminated golden dust
particles in the photographs of Central New York Railway station to be seen in
illegal American copies of the Saturday Evening Post magazine. He imagined he would
have access to a solid wooden chair with lion�s heads on the arm-rests which would
be set before a broad table lit with a green-shaded lamp, with a most simple bottle
labelled Evian at his side which would contain water collected from slowly melting
glaciers in the French Alps. Before him would be 18th century manuscripts full of
commentaries it would be his responsibility to update according to how ideas were
going in 20th century Germany. But that was all in the future. Save it was not in
the future because there was not going to be a future for this ambitious bookish
blackshirt, because he was going to be stabbed in the groin between urethea and
anus by a revengeful Russian whose wife had been treated in much the same way in a
village near Smolensk by six German youthful soldiers keen to see how they could be
sadistic. Their idea of sadism was literary, their attempts to put it into realism
had been messy.
The discovered 72 jewellery-items of the Lausanne Fetterling family were
inventoried in the pocket-book of inspector Helmut Enschede, and packed carefully
in tissue paper of three colours in a diplomatic bag sent to the German Embassy in
Geneva. Helmut Enschede� selected one item for himself. It was a brooch in the
shape of a skull and cross-bones made in Paris in 1888, the year Helene Gosidore
auctioned the jewels given to her by Cabinet Minister Pichet for services to his
body wounded in the 1871 Franco-Prussian war on the steps of Strasbourg cathedral.
This skull and cross-bones in gold may have been part of that Parisian sale.
The Fetterling gold was made into one slightly overweight gold bar, subsequently
stamped twice with the mark DRE 16 and the mark DRE 17 and dated GE03 44 - Geneva
March 1944. The bar was sewn into the tails of a leather coat worn by a bank
manager of the Dresden Bank until he was discovered by a hat-check girl in a Berlin
restaurant who dropped the coat and was intrigued by a loud clang of metal. The
bank manager was arrested for embezzlement and possibly because his name was
Dortelmaus. The name caused amusement, and amusement was rare in the Praedstrasse
police-station. The police sergeant wanted to see the face that fitted the name.
The gold was appropriated. The bank manager bargained for a quick release by giving
up his stolen gold to his captors as a personal gift. The bar were sent to the gold
clearing centre at Baden-Baden, and from there, found its way by now well-known
routes to the Mercedes car on the tree-lined country-road outside Bolzano, the one
place in all Italy where they could not make good spaghetti.
�
GOLD
50 � Jackdaw gold
The church of St Maria del Carmine at Acresotia on the German-Polish border, had
6th Century foundations, a bell tower with 9th Century stonework, a 13th Century
nave, 14th and 15th Century chapels, a 17th Century reconstructed rose window, 18th
Century tombs and its 15th Century hammerbeam roof had been refashioned and
renovated every century; there had been restorative painting work completed in 1923
and 1929. And the church had toilets, one for men and one for women. Few churches
have toilets. The church was proudly cherished.
In January 1940, in revenge for the shooting of four German officers who had
bullied the owner of a local hostelry and raped his 16 year old daughter, the 117
men of the parish of St Maria del Carmine, their wives, daughters, children and
babies were rounded up along with the men, wives, daughters, children and babies of
seven Jewish families, and locked in the church which was set alight. It burned for
two days.
Some 90 of the villagers had crowded around the altar, another 35 had sheltered in
the vestry, 27 stood before the west door and 15 huddled in the chapel dedicated to
St Lawrence, an ancient martyr who had been toasted to death on a griddle over a
slow fire to be subsequently cherished as the patron saint of firemen. Two women
and a child had sheltered in the toilet for men, and three children had sheltered
in the toilet for women. The hammerbeam roof had fallen in, the walls had glowed,
sparks had flown up into the winter night sky and had scorched the leafless trees.
A side door had burst open with a roar and a blast of light had blown out to scorch
five tombs, melt their metal work and calcify their scrolls and cupids and
deathsheads to a yellow chalky dust.
Five days after the massacre by fire, three small children dodged the dozing German
sentries that sat under the ruined arch that used to be the doorway to the St
Lawrence chapel, and watched three jackdaws pick through the ashes. These birds,
who habitually delight in shiny objects, had found gold.
The jackdaw is not a unique speicies in the world of birds at being attracted to
shiny objects, especially at times of mating and nesting. There are theories that
the male birds of such species use pieces of coloured stone, bright petals and
brightly coloured fragments of china, tile, plastic, metal, silver paper and ribbon
to demonstrate superior magnificence by proxy in order to attract a mate or impress
a male rival into submission as regards a mate or a territory for mating and then
nesting. A dull-coloured bird or a dark-coloured bird or a bird with a modest vocal
attraction, or a bird that habitually favours a shadowy environment like a forest
floor, might use the shiny objects as a substitute for bright feathers or decorated
feathers or a complex feathered plummage. The European jackdaw is certainly a dark
bird; it has a general black plumage and an even blacker poll to its head.
The gold was not from the church altar furniture. As soon as war had been declared,
the church monstrances, chalices, censors, candlesticks, metal-bound breviaries and
crucifixes had been taken to caves to the north of the village, and buried in
places that the occupying forces had never discovered despite torturing the deacon
and the deacon�s wife, neice, aunt, grandmother, daughter and grand-daughter. Nor
was the gold melted down from an isolated gold watch chain, or a single wedding-
ring, or an lone earring.� It was a hoard of Jewish gold.
Seven Jewish families had come to Acrestocia in 1865 from Poland. They were
travelling to London via Vienna, Munich, Lyons and Paris in a bid to set up a fur
and fancy goods trade in Bethnal Green in the City of London, but their carriage
had become unhitched from the rest of the train on the rail-line just outside
Acrestocia. It could have been sabotage, the line was unpopular among farmers. The
farmers� wives believed the smoke poisoned the cattle and flavoured the local soft
cheeses, and the train shaking the rails would bring on avalanches in winter.� But
it was probably an accident of bad coupling at Lepageon. The carriage was dragged
by ropes and horses off the main line onto a side-track, and the seven foreign
Jewish families stayed in the carriage six days and worshipped the Sabbath there on
the seventh. A Jewish wife gave birth to twins there, a Jewish patriarch died
there. Two children became healthy there after two years of whooping cough. Perhaps
it was the effects of the cold dry mountain air, or the smell of pine-resin.
Despite the Polish Jews transitory state, important domestic life had intervened;
the place had been introduced to their births and their deaths. The Jews felt
blessed and they stayed. They sold some of their goods, built wooden houses that
looked like Polish wooden houses, worked hard, were very polite, good at medicine,
learnt the local dialects diligently, wrote letters, even made one or two
conversions. They prospered. They made money which they immediately converted into
gold valuables.� Five generations after their arrival they were well-off,
respected, respectable. They never banked their valuables. At the German round-up
in the village, not thinking a Christian church was for them, but an imminent
journey was being prepared, they were very surprised when they were herded away
from the railway station where they thought they would be continuing the journey
their ancestors had abandoned eighty years before. As a consequence of their
expectations, they had filled their pockets with golden trinkets, they had sewn
their rings into their leather overcoats, they had packed small suitcases with
brooches and bracelets, and they had folded necklaces in among the books, underwear
and goat cheese sandwiches. The Polish jews had perished, their bodies reduced to
an ash totally indistinguisable from the ash of Gentiles. Their gold had gone
through a transmutation as a result of the great fire. Perhaps it could be said
that the Polish jewish gold had been ultimately smelted by the heat generated by
the proximity of the Polish Jewish burning flesh.
The children watching the jackdaws were delighted to see two shining pieces of
metal transported through the air to a distant beech tree. The jackdaws habitually
nested in the church tower, but the church tower had gone, its bricks, heated to
exceedingly high temperatures, had crumbled. The jackdaws had been quick to change
their nesting habits. They were adaptable birds. The children walked among the ash
and the scorched wood and had made a collection and kept it from their parents
whose state of shock and mourning made them oblivious to a great deal going on
around them. The children wore the shiny misshapen pieces of gold like war medals,
until they were inevitably discovered and confiscated. The ruins were searched to
find more. They discovered three hundred grams of prime gold. Money was urgently
needed and few questions were asked. The gold pieces were taken to a smelter in
Graven and hastily sold to a branch of the Deutches Bank. The bank shared out its
gold bullion across the country. The Jackdaw Gold, for that is what it now was
called, went to Baden-Baden, and Gustav Harpsch retreived it from Vault Three to
take it to Switzerland to pay for his three-year old daughter�s release. Gustav
Harpsch was dressed in a dark blue uniform, his gold gave him glamour and shine.
GOLD
51 �� The golden bookshop
When the ghetto at Groningen was cleared in April 1941, it was estimated that three
million marks-worth of gold bullion was confiscated from the Jewish families who
had lived in the ghetto�s three streets and forty-eight houses. A great deal of the
gold had been hidden in hollowed-out books kept in the bookshop of Hellas Dedee.
Dedee kept an account of his �golden books�� in his book-keeping inventory, marking
the entries with the initials of the owners, all of whom, without exception, he had
known since childhood. Occasionally there were very small crosses to indicate
exceptional value, and circles to indicate shared ownership, and small squares to
indicate that the owner of the gold was dead. As a small irony, but also to throw
possible meddlers off the scent, for who would think a Jew would keep his gold in
association with heresy, Dedee hid most of the gold on the shelves titled Christian
Theology.� It is true that a gold tiara, an Empress Josephine necklace and a
Spanish Charles V bracelet which was supposedly an item of booty from the sack of
Rome of 1527, were discovered in the Culinary Section. The last two items were
hidden amongst books on the baking of bread with yeast, another ironic comment
perhaps on both rising wealth and Gentile practices.
Whatever the amusement value of a secret code, in the end complications of
librarianship and the exhibition of irony exploded the treasury. For by chance an
Anabaptist Sunday School teacher, looking for a biography of Luther, came across in
the wrong place, on the wrong shelf, a most unexpected item, a 1623 New Testament
in Hebrew, which contained, within the pages expressly cut to hold it, a christian
gold cross.
Niceties of scholarship mingled with reactionary ignorance and sheer malevolence in
the mind of the Sunday School teacher created the feeling that some sort of
blasphemy had been committed. Perhaps it was blind and wrong-headed thinking
because of unadulterated spite and naked revenge, for the National Socialists had
sent most Anabaptists to work-camps in Poland. The Sunday School teacher was firing
on all cylinders at all imagined enemies. And as a result Dedee was shot on the
road to Aduard as a thief and a Jew, which for his widow was a surprise because she
had expected the citation to read a Jew and a thief.
The confiscated bibliographical hoard, since it was found to be so apparently rich
in Christian trinkets, was offered to the Groningen Museum, but the collection was
refused as historically valueless, and it lay in a below-street-level vault
opposite the university throughout the summer of 1943 still packed inside those
books Dedee had ordained as its hiding-place, all arranged neatly in five book-shop
wooden trunks. The entire collection only arrived� in the gold smelting works in
Baden-Baden by a mistake that Dedee would have enjoyed. Three of the trunks had
labels which read in English, �A Golden Treasury of English Poetry�. A part-time
teacher of Physical Training had been coerced from the University gymnasium to help
clear the vault after a flood had been caused by students determined to turn the
basement into a swimming-pool on the Queen�s Birthday. The Physical Training
instructor, lifting a wooden trunk with a certain bravado designed to impress his
students, had become excited by the word �golden�, one of the few English words he
could recognise and understand.
The Groningen hoard was smelted down probably in the May of 1944 and several were
exchanged for American dollars via the Deutche Bank in Baden-Baden. One bar from
this transaction found its way into the collection of Gustav Harpsch, and with the
91 other gold bars, it was part of the discovery of gold bullion found in the black
Mercedes car, license plate number TL 9246, abandoned at the road-side at Bolzano,
the one place in Italy where they could not cook you a good spaghetti for gold or
any other currency.
GOLD
52 � Magritte�s businessman
Magnus Schulman carried his family jewels to his office in Antwerp everyday in his
black briefcase for fear of leaving them at home to be stolen. He persistently
retained a great fear of returning to his house to find the front door open, the
coat-rack thrown down, the kitchen window smashed, his desk ransacked, his cat
strangled with the curtain-cord, and human faeces on his bed.
Magnus set out from his second floor apartment above the tailors in Erminstraat
everyday at 8.05 to catch the 8.27 train to Bruges. He wore a bowler hat and
carried a black briefcase and sometime when the sky was overcast, he carried a
black umbrella. He smoked a pipe and his regular tobacco was The Hard Black Cedar
Number Three from Milwaukee. He always walked down Aeschelstraat, crossed the
Achenplein, crossed through the Turpinallee and entered the station near the van
Clopoon Hotel.
In the end attack came from another direction. Magnus was mugged at the railway-
station. His gold was sold cheaply on the black-market, but bought by a Jewish
widow who read of the attack in her newspaper in Brussels. She returned the
considerable golden collection to Magnus who gave her a reward. But the whole
transaction had been monitored by informers, and the gold was appropriated all over
again, because Magnus still persisted in carrying his golden valuables with him to
the office. This time it was soldiers in uniform who confiscated it. It was a semi-
freelance operation masterminded under official army sponsorship but carried out
illegally. Magnus�s gold joined other illegally confiscated gold collections and
was put on a goods train to Berlin where at the Hamburger Banhoff Railway Station,
on the evening of 28th February a large shipment of cooking oil held in metal
containers overheated and blew up. The area was cordoned off by the army, and the
wreckage minutely examined and pieces of gold were picked out of the tangle of the
railway tracks and overhead wires, but 2000 grams of gold were never recovered.
Perhaps they had effervesced or scattered themselves thinly over the trees and
facades of the buildings to be somehow re-absorbed. How could you recover such a
thin mist of golden particles?
It is needless to say that Gustav Harpsch benefitted indirectly from these events,
or why else does this story appear in this collection?
There was an official investigation of the event. There were contradictions. It was
declared that those responsible were not German soldiers, but Belgians. Five German
soldiers overnight had their nationality forcibly changed, and a solution was found
to court-martial them and threaten them with the firing squad unless the gold was
replaced. An impossible task. Two of the soldiers fled to Amsterdam, one committed
suicide, one apparently went mad, shaving his face to the bone. The fifth soldier
nonchalantly opened a grocer�s shop and promised to pay back the debt in
instalments. This soldier�s uncle was Admiral Wilkerstein and this soldier was
permitted to resume his German identity, but he was persuaded to leave the army
where he officially had never been a soldier, and he was obliged to change the name
above his shop-front to Muller.� He was left in peace and his debt annulled as an
act of clemency on Hitler�s next birthday.
And what of Magnus Schulman? He disappears from history. There is no shop named
after any pseudonym he wished to imagine.� It is believed that he might have
travelled to Switzerland, where he possibly may have married an upholsterer�s
daughter. But Magnus Schulman had indeed unknowingly made his mark on posterity.
Without remotely comprehending it, Magnus Schulman had been the model for
Magritte�s archetypal businessman. Magritte, himself an early riser and man of very
regular habits, rented a studio at number 15 Aeschelstraat. Magnus Schulman had
walked passed his studio window every day for three years. In the summer the studio
window was open on to the street, and Magritte had regularly smelt Magnus
Schulman�s tobacco - The Hard Black Cedar Number Three from Milwaukee.
It is salutary to think that every businessman in a Magritte painting� - and there
are a great many - is carrying gold in his briefcase. It has been calculated that
Magritte unknowingly painted seventeen million dollars worth of invisible gold at
1940s New York stock-market prices.
�
GOLD
53 � Passports to Vespuccio, Haden and Erehwon
Jewish lower middle-class professionals went to Achim Loacher in Raphaelstrasse in
Bremen in the late 1930s to have their false passports manufactured and their
imitation visas updated in readiness for escape when the time came. Achim insisted
on being paid in gold. He too wished to prepare himself for escape when the time
came.
He was ready to manufacture papers that took anyone anywhere. He could make out
German transit papers to Madagascar where every German bureaucrat seemed to have
plans to send Jews, and to Shanghai, where visas for incoming European Jews were
unnecessary; to Spain whose persecution of Jewish minorities had been hesitating in
an evasive and unadvertised way between stop and go since Ferdinand and Isabella
kicked out Islam; to Portugal which scarcely had an immigration policy; to England
which made promises that a certain number of children would be welcomed and
accepted, but their parents would not, which was known to be impractical, heart-
breaking and derisory; to Palestine who had an open door but closed shop policy; to
Wales who thought all foreign Jews were ice-cream selling Italians; to San Martino
which, for a population of 200,000 was generous to receive 2,000 Jews with or
without passports; to Canada whose geographical spaces needed filling, and to
America whose Ellis Island days were over in letter if not in spirit, and where you
might be persuaded to change your name to something pronounceable.
Jews were great travellers. Achim Loacher�s grandmother had been a great Jewish
traveller. She had been born in Warsaw, a large lady with needles in her hair and
only one eye and a propensity to pass wind and say,
��There goes another angel Achim. Now I only have another eleven left.�
It was always the same.� Always eleven angels remaining. Maybe it was a reference
to the tribes of Israel. Achim asked her the inevitable arithmetical question one
day, as they walked hand in hand down the Raphaelstrasse.
� How many angels do I have left?�
� Twelve,� she said. � Because little boys� farts do not count until they get
married�.
Achim knew Raphael was an angel. Perhaps Raphael had been a boy, though he was
pretty sure he had not got married. Putting all things together, Achim, walking
down the� Raphaelstrasse, was certain there had to be twelve angels hereabouts
dying to fart but not having the correct license. He looked around. He did not see
one and he had been looking ever since. Achim grew up to be a large man. He had his
grandmother�s bones. When he walked down the street, people watched him. He was out
of the ordinary in size. Could he be an angel? He doubted whether large angels were
valid, but he still asked himself the necessary question. Would he ever get married
to change the nature of his farts? Would be ever get married? There were lots of
mysteries in the world.� It must be confessed that Achim himself decided to add
more. He backed up his work of manufacturing passports and forging visas with what
he called voluntary supplimentaries. If he was fascinated by the currently
commissioned forgery from an ambitious banker�s clerk, or the wife of dentist�s
assistant, he would often throw in several voluntary supplimentaries. He might
write six bogus letters from relatives in six foreign languages, he might invent
imagined Australian business associates, and he might conjure up distant cousins
who lived as guests of the Egyptian royal family. He more than once invented
letters from the dead. He was an expert, greatly in love with his job, playing word
games, letter games, games with places of double meaning, treble meaning and no
meaning at all. It was he who introduced the idea in the German Post Office that
Thrall was a place in Transylvania where unaddressed parcels would naturally
gravitate. If he lived in the 16th century he would have been applauded as the most
imaginative of cabbalists. But all this time, it must be admitted, he was not
unmindful that his little pile of gold was growing.
He did not forget the deeply unfortunate. To those who had nowhere to run to, he
made out transit papers to three imaginary places. First there was a country called
Vespuccio, which had characteristics which perhaps were the very opposite of those
of the country named after that Italian merchant�s christian name. There was a city
called Haden and there was an island called Erehwon. He backed up the authenticity
of these places with invented correspondence, franked envelopes and imaginatively
designed postage stamps. He gave his clients hope. They whispered knowingly to
their neighbours in the street.
�We are going to Vespuccio where they grow keywee-fruit, which is a sort of dark-
green jam-damson, only sweet, with black seeds inside instead of stones�
�We are going to Haden where Catholics are unknown, well, at least Catholics who
acknowledge Rome, are unknown.�
�What is a morimeter? Achim says all Hadeans carry morimeters and not just when
it�s raining. Do you think they are like umbrellas? Can I buy a morimeter in
Bremen?�
Achim had wanted to be a seriously published Jewish writer. That�� seemed now to be
increasingly unlikely, so his writing skills were put to other uses. But Achim was
also a mournful man, because more than part of him hated himself for what he was
now doing. He was helping to empty Europe of Jews. Who was worse, he asked himself,
Adolf or Achim? At the rate he was working, he might be sending more Jews into
exile than Hitler, making the rest of the world richer, and Europe poorer. To
compensate himself a little for these thoughts, he insisted on shaking the hand of
every one of his clients; it was a sentimental personal touch. And dangerous. It
was like a Judas kiss. Too bad. If these fellow Jews were to be exiles from Europe,
he at least wanted to shake their hands and make an official good-bye. No one else
would. He had a massive handshake. His enthusiasm for saying good-bye could result
in crushed fingers. He suggested shaking hands at two handshake addresses. One on
the corner of Raphaelstrasse where his grandmother had once counted the farts of
angels, and the second on the pedestrian bridge of Bremen Central Railway Station,
a useful vantage-point to watch his fellow Jews depart to the edges of the world
with the passports he had so skilfully provided.
Achim had an unscheduled meeting in a bar with a Jew who behaved suspiciously like
an amateur informer. This man wanted a visa for travel in the Black Forest, which
was stupid because the Black Forest was German already. Unless of course there was
another Black Forest Achim had not heard of, or he had been slow and not discovered
yet another National Socialist Directive that said that forests had been blacked to
Jews, which was not such an impossible directive in the Third Reich. He had to be
careful. Perhaps it was a trap. In the event he pretended to go along with the
man�s wishes. He manufactured the papers and went to Bremen Central Railway Station
and stood on the pedestrian bridge over Platform Eleven, wreathed in white steam
and smoke, watching the Jews get on trains to places he had glamourised and places
he had rediscovered and places he had re-invented. One family had been sold four
tickets to Erehwon via Tenerife, with an onward connection to Haden in a reserved
second class carriage with window-seats. They saw him and waved to him, big smiles
on their expectant faces. Achim watched Jews board trains as though they were going
on holiday.
Achim was standing there, appearing and then disappearing in the damp white smokey
cloud, looking half bear and half angel, waiting for his Black Forest client, when
the storm troopers came to arrest him to take him to a country he certainly did not
know. They said the passports you needed to go there would be covered in blood from
the back of your eyes, and spattered with the spittle that had been coughed up from
your lungs. The visas to this new country would certainly be drowned in tears.
Besides they said he was too big a man to be a normal German. He was bodily too
conspicuous. They would have to cut him down severely to turn him into a proper
German. They stripped him and rubber-stamped him all over, and pasted him with his
own acid-free glue and stuck him all over with his imaginary stamps and his
inventive letters. They cut off his nimble fingers, the fingers that had sent so
many Jews to so many Paradises, and they wrapped up each finger in brown paper,
tied it around and around with string, and got him to hold out his bloodied tongue
so he could lick a stamp which they fixed on the brown paper, and they took him
down to the post-box and got him to post his fingers to himself. Then they started
on his toes and eyed his big friendly penis. But they grew tired. They found other
victims to torture. They left his big body in an untidy mess for the cattle-truck
journey. And when they got him to Dauchau, they squeezed him, still a big man
despite the missing pieces, into the biggest oven. The oven was hot but it was not
at full strength. Achim sizzled and bubbled for ten minutes and then he died. He
certainly went to Erehwon. Poor giant with a heart of gold. We weep for him even
now.
Achim�s collected gold fees received the heat treatment too. All those Jewish
travel arrangements ended in a gold bar in the back of Harpsch�s borrowed Mercedes,
spilled out on the black upholstery. Achim�s gold, it could be calculated, had
travelled to 92 cities from Baden-Baden to Bolzano. We could make you a list. In
the spirit of Achim�s inventiveness, trying to reconstruct Harpsch�s last journey,
let us at least make you a list of 23 places, a quarter of the places the gold
travelled to, and let us make all these places be initialled with the letter B,
starting of course with Baden-Baden and finishing with Bolzano. Respecting Achim�s
inventiveness, one or two of the place names may be a little fictitious, and could
be decorated with some hearsay evidence.
There was Baden-Baden itself, a spa-town, a paradise for arthritics and a sanctuary
for the bored, and there was Buhl, bombed and burning when Harpsch approached it
from the North, and Bahlingen, noted for its toffee which you could smell on the
evening wind, and Botzingen full of evacuated children wearing red berets captured
from a French convent school, and Breisach where von Ribbentrop married his first
wife in the Hockmeister Chapel, and Bad Krozingen where the spa-water tastes like
cod-liver oil, and Buggingen where Harpsch had to change a flat tyre in the rain,
and Bolintent where there is a park full of Monkey Puzzle trees planted by the
English botanist Edward Hooker, and Bad Bellingen where William Tell embarrassed
the King of Piedmont, and Basel famous for being undecided whether to be Swiss or
German or French, and Bern that had an observatory whose viewing apparatus had
delighted Schiller, and Beauvais where the local costume twinkled with mirrors, and
Blesson where they ate a cake made of goat�s cheese, and Blouseenvaix, where the
roads are very narrow on account of the overhanging houses, and Bleek in whose
gambling house Stendhal lost the shirt from his back and walked home bare-chested,
and Beaune where they say it could be paradise because the women are so beautiful
you never see them, and Beaux where they wear springs on their shoes to see over
their neighbour�s walls, and Brig who celebrate Mayday by asking a maiden to ride
naked three times around the cathedral on a white horse decorated with pink
ribbons, and Bellinzona where snow in the early winter is sometimes pink because
the Virgin in menarche rides overhead on St Joseph�s day, and Bellagio on Lake Como
were the Roman general Belasarius was apostrophised, and Bagnatica where the first
tomato, that national Italian vegetable, was eaten in Italy in 1507, and Bronzolo
where the inhabitants never mention the Devil, and finally Bolzano, which is a
paradise for those who cannot stand the sight, smell or taste of spaghetti because
it is entirely absent from their cuisine.
�
GOLD
54 � Bird Jewellery
A woman walking from the railway station at night into a city she did not know was
attacked. Her assailant stole two pieces of gold jewellery. Both were in the shape
of birds. The first was a golden heron with its neck tucked in and a single eye
marked with an emerald. And the second was a golden stork with a black enamelled
beak that carried a baby. The young woman in the fur-trimmed, black coat and
matching cloche hat, lay still on the wet pavement bleeding from a blow to the head
until, after two hours, she died. When she had finally left Vienna, she had died.
Freda Strachey was in love with Claus Pechstein in Vienna. Freda Strachey was an
Austrian Jewess, daughter of a banker. Claus Pechstein was the son of a German
diplomat. Bankers and diplomats. And Vienna was Vienna. Freda was 36. Claus 25. And
Vienna 900 years old. In every relationship one party loves more than the other.
Freda loved Claus more than Claus loved Freda. And both Freda and Claus loved
Vienna more than Vienna loved either of them. If fact Vienna could not have cared
less about either of them, a Jewess and a foreigner. Freda loved the broad white
pavements and the dark heavy architecture and the deep porches that had so many
antechambers that you felt that you were never really inside a building but also
never outside it, and the unlit museums full of grinning bears and bulky beasts,
and standing under horse chestnut trees as the blossom fell around you, sweet
smelling but when you faced the other way also smelling of stale horse urine. Twice
a week she walked down into the crypt of St Stephen�s to say good evening to a
corpse of a girl who had died pregnant in 1710.� You could do that in Vienna.
Claus loved the cafes where you could sit in the warm, your fingers deep in the
pile of the carpets they placed on the tables, drink thick black coffee, read
foreign newspapers and stare out the windows at the sun on the snow. Claus loved
all the bright lights, was eager to examine and also to criticise any new neon sign
that was freshly� illuminated. He understood neon. He completely understood, for
example, the problems of joining the dot to a lower-case i in neon. And he loved to
watch the Viennese whores with varicose veins who had no shame whatsoever. They
were like fictional whores. Any fictional whore he invented in his hungry
imagination, he could be sure of finding an almost perfect replica.
One important person had been left out of this arrangment, and that was Freda�s
father, Como. He loved his daughter. He probably loved her in a Viennese way, that
is with a great deal of guilt and considerable amounts of sentiment. And Vienna
loved Como, showered him with honours of a bookish nature, staged his plays,
printed his commentaries, bought him many seven-course meals at his publisher�s
expense. Como quickly realised that Claus did not love Freda as much as Freda loved
Claus. In fact Como realised that Claus did not love Freda at all. Claus slept with
her because she had breasts that had nipples that pointed like surprised eyes up to
the sky, because she had fair hair, big buttocks and enjoyed almost injurious
sexual intimacies. Soon Como struck up an unofficial relationship with Claus. He
paid Claus money to pretend Claus� loved Freda. From Claus�s point of view, he paid
Claus money so that Claus could stay in Vienna.
Freda found out. Whether she� found out whilst saying good evening to her pregnant
friend in the St Stephen�s crypt, or whilst reading foreign newspapers in a cafe or
whilst standing under the falling blossom of a horse chestnut tree - we cannot say,
we do not know.
Freda had a collection of bird jewellry bought for her by her father ever since she
was a little girl. There were blackbirds, swallows, twittering robins, swans with
long necks, eagles with exaggerated talons wrought in diamonds, albatrosses, an
emu, penguins. Her jewel box was an aviary. Freda never before in her life had left
Vienna. She loved Vienna and had never wanted to fly away to any other place, but
when she found out that Claus did not really love her, she put on her two favourite
pieces of bird jewellery and took a train.
She was not even very certain what station she had alighted at. But it was indeed
Foucasse. The heron and the stork took flight from Foucasse. They flew to Gras,
were exchanged for dollars, flew on to Locarno and then Lugano where they were
exchanged for lire, before settling temporarily onto the breast of a French
patisserie widow in Geneva whose shop almost overlooked the grave of Calvin, which
is now no more than a stone�s throw from the grave of Borges. The birds, aided by
fences and pawnbrokers and various other attendant middlemen, flew on to Zurich and
then to Dusseldorf and then to Stuttgart and then to a temporary nest in Baden-
Baden where they grew very hot and lost their shape and shared their substance with
various accumulated golden trinkets and became a gold bar stamped with the Hapsburg
double-headed eagle. Harpsch took their melted substance on a further flying visit
to Bolzano where the locals do not eat spaghetti with any great relish. Even the
pigeons and the sparrows disdain to eat it when it spills out of the Bolzano
dustbins.
�
GOLD
55 � Body Parts
Six women in Cologne took shelter in an air-raid bunker during a blitz by allied
bombers. They discussed with some macabre humour the separated body-parts of their
loved ones which they would recognise without any trouble at all after an
explosion. One woman said that her mother�s sewing thumb could easily be
identified. It had been so repeatedly scarred and calloused by the countless sewing
needles that it had held over the last 37 years.� A second woman said with much
laughter that her husband�s prick would be unmistakable to her for it had punched
on its glans a red round disc like a spot of red confetti. A third woman said that
her husband�s ear would be unmistakeable, its curves and folds had formed the
letter S twice� - S for his name Simon, S for her name, Sapia. Such sentimental
anatomical signaturing was greeted with indulgent smiles.� A fourth woman offered
her husband�s foot on account of the large toes and the small webs between them
that made him such a good swimmer, a fifth woman offered her young son�s navel on
account of its likeness to an apple complete with a leaf and a stalk, and a bite
taken out of it. He might not have an Adam�s apple, but he certainly had an Adam�s
navel. They laughed again. The sixth woman slowly unwrapped a bundle and produced
her lover�s head.
�I would recognise this head anywhere�, she said. �Even in the bed of his
mistress�.
Influenced by the horror of the times, and appalled at her lover�s insensitivity to
her great affection, she had shot him and then severed his head with a kitchen
knife.
The five women gave the sixth woman their wedding-rings to pawn to buy flowers to
place on the earth above where she planned to bury her lover�s head.� She was
arrested and she hung herself in her cell. Of course her story is not completely
true because she did not kill her lover and sever his head, but found her lover�s
head blown from his body by an explosion when she returned from a shopping
excursion to buy bread. She had so wanted to tell the world of her great love that
she had invented a story to demonstrate the dramatic extent of that love. And in
wartime such stories are not impossible.
�The wedding rings lent to pledge money to buy flowers were discovered and
confiscated by the police. They were dumped in a kitty of ambiguous gold trinkets
and eventually gravitated like so much gold in these stories to the collecting-
point in Baden-Baden where they lost their shape and mass and identity and became
mere gold in a bar, and began their journey in the last days of the Second World
War to Bolzano where they cannot cook a good spaghetti.
The story of the severed head could have been told differently. Here it is again.
After the five women in the Cologne bunker had described those parts of their loved
ones that they would easily recognise if separated from the rest of their bodies,
the thumb, the penis, the ear, the foot, and the navel, the sixth woman slowly
unwrapped a bundle and produced a head.
�I would recognise this head anywhere�, she said.
�Even in the bed of his mistress. It is the head of my lover�
The woman had returned from buying bread to find her apartment in ruins from an
explosion, and the decapitated head of her lover lying on the kitchen floor.
Influenced by the horror of the times, she had wrapped the head in bandages and
placed it in her shopping basket, and when the air-raid warnings sounded she had
carried the shopping basket to the bunker to keep the head safe from further
danger.
The five women in the shelter had given the sixth woman their wedding-rings to pawn
to buy flowers to place on the earth above where she planned to bury her lover�s
head.� The woman was arrested as she was digging a hole beside the road. She wanted
to be caught and imprisoned and punished. She hung herself in her cell with the
bandages that had covered her lover�s face. She had not in fact discovered her
lover�s head on the kitchen floor when she had returned from buying bread, but had
discovered him in her bed fast asleep in the arms of his mistress. She had shot him
and taken a kitchen knife and cut off his head. Her name was Judith.
�
GOLD
56 � Munich railway station
Henk Tierkopt, the cashier, lost his life disputing the accuracy of a sheaf of
receipts exchanged for a consignment of gold coins handed into a collecting centre
on Platform Seven of Munich�s central railway station in a storm where the rain was
so heavy it burst in waterfalls through the station�s glass roof. Tierkopt was
reputed to be an extremely honest man. He was very popular with his seniors and his
subordinates. He had counted the gold coins and found that two were unaccounted for
on the receipts. At three minutes to six in the evening, he was shot straight
through the heart by a Nazi officer who was furious that his own honesty had been
questioned by a man whose reputation for honesty was itself impeccable. It was a
question of a challenge to who possessed the greatest honesty.
The dramatic action of the Nazi officer may have been influenced by a complicated,
unstable confluence of vanity, lust and impatience. The heavy rain pouring through
the station-roof had thoroughly dampened the Nazi officer�s hair and showed up his
baldness. He was due to meet a good-looking, plump, married woman at 6 o�clock in
Room 56 at the Station Hotel. For the rendez-vous, he had bought a bottle of white
Jamaican rum to give him sexual courage. This bottle of alcohol was at the very
moment of the shooting, wrapped in turquoise tissue-paper in his briefcase in the
station-master�s office.
The consignment of gold coins minus two went to Baden-Baden with the reputation of
being associated with bad luck. They were to constitute the greater part of gold
bar FF789L which was one of many in the cache discovered on the back seat of a
black Mercedes car on a country-road on the outskirts of Bolzano, the one place in
Italy where very few foreigners ordered spaghetti if they could help it.
Henk Dierkoptf, the cashier, was given a funeral that rivalled a Nazi hero. It was
said some eight hundred people lined the Kurfendamstrasse to watch his cortege pass
by, and the little florist kiosk on the corner of Goierplatz and Georingstrasse
completely sold all its stock down to the last leaf of laurel.
Before he was arrested, the Nazi officer had completed one last act of gallantry.
To excuse his non-arrival at his six o�clock rendez-vue, he had tipped a porter,
and directed the bottle of alcohol, accompanied by two glasses, to the married
woman�s hotel room.� In each glass he had placed a gold coin.� With one gold coin
the plump, good-looking married woman with the soft fingers had later bought a hat
and a pair of high-heeled red shoes, and with the other, she had bought a train-
ticket back to Salzburg where she lived with her husband who was a singer.
�
GOLD
57 � The pork waiter
In the Pocklar Restaurant in Aachen on a Friday night in June 1930, an irritable
waiter insulted a diner over a plate of pork. Anti-Jewish sentiments were
expressed, including all that business of pigs and circumcision. The angry diner
drew a gun, the waiter had his penis shot away and thirty-seven restaurant guests,
all of them Jewish enough to make Hitler salivate, were herded into the restaurant
kitchen at gunpoint and relieved of their valuables. The diner, dragging his
screaming girlfriend by the wrist and still wearing his table napkin around his
chin, ran out into the street and boarded a passing tram. Police arrested him at
the tram terminal, and the girlfriend ran off screaming down the Cassastrasse. The
valuables, wrapped in the table napkin, were placed in a police safe and forgotten,
largely because of other urgent police matters like a train crash on a bridge over
the river Cassa, a mass murderer threatening to throw himself off a disused
gasometer, and the disappearance of a police sergeant believed to have been
kidnapped by a crowd of Communist wives incensed at his boorish and vulgar
behaviour in a lingerie shop.
In September 1935, at a party to celebrate the successfully rigged local elections
of a Nazi mayor, a drunken police accountant who was eager to show off his prowess
at picking locks, opened the forgotten police safe and recognised the monogrammed
napkin of his father�s restaurant. In the ensuing struggle to possess the
attractive forgotten property, the valuables were placed in a child�s cot under a
red and white blanket, and transported in a car-boot to a Gestapo Headquarters,
from where almost immediately it was sent to Baden-Baden by a tidy-minded clerk,
eager to keep his desk clear of unnecessary paperwork during a painting
refurbishment.
The gold at Baden-Baden was separated out from the precious stones, the semi-
precious metals, the coloured enamels, the silver pins and the pieces of wood and
leather, and smelted down to make gold bar 45GH which was stored in Vault Three of
the Deutche Bank for Lieutenant Harpsch�s sergeant to collect on the morning of the
23rd April 1945.� This particular bar that had consisted of the gold possessed by a
single evening�s collection of diners, who, five years previously, had eaten
asparagus soup with brown buttered toast, and sole meuniere with parsely and new
potatoes, and had drunk a French wine from the vineyards of Macon and had smoked
Dutch cigars, ended up in a town which could not cook a simple spaghetti.
�
GOLD
58 � The swallowed ring
In Strasbourg, a child of six, hearing his anxious mother discuss where best to
hide her wedding-ring from the police, swallowed it.� He thought he was doing her a
good turn. He began to choke to death. His distraught mother carried her child to
the teaching hospital where two drunken Fascist interns tore the child�s throat
open to return the ring to his mother. Undressing the corpse of the child, they
discovered its circumcised penis, and knew, or thought they knew, that the mother
was Jewish, and they raped her. They hid the child�s body in a surgical waste-bin
and threw the wedding-ring into a toolbox. The child�s body was found and carried
to the mortuary to be settled in a tub of formalderhyde for use in the student
hospital. Student autopsies on children were not common.
The ring was discovered by a doctor looking for a nail to hang a picture of
Lindenberg on his surgery wall. He put the ring in the top pocket of his white
medical coat, which he hung in the canteen cloakroom, where, mistaking it for his
own, it was put on by a visiting orthodontist. The ring was subsequently found by
the wife of the orthodontist, who took it to her father, claiming it as evidence of
her husband�s� infidelity. The father quietly took the ring, calmed his daughter�s
anxieties, and left it in his safe deposit box in a branch of the Deutsches Bank at
Colmar.� In a Gestapo raid on the bank�s assets, the ring, along with much other
valuable material, was conviscated, sorted, redistributed and finally, with a
collection of English gold medals, melted down, and became a small part of� gold
bar 456Y7N, which subsequently found its way to Bolzano, the one place in Italy
where they could not make good spaghetti.
�
GOLD
59 � Goebbels� Diary
Goebbels kept a diary.
�The Fuhrer told me this evening of his prophecy for the Sudeten affair�.
�The Fuhrer said that Chamberlain is weak and we are sure to be in Warsaw by
Christmas�.
�The Fuhrer says the Russians will collapse like snow before fire�.
�The Fuhrer is right again. He is truly a prophet�.
�We dined together at a private table in the Schloss Restaurant in Munich. The
Fuhrer is feeling strong. He is invincible. There is no limit to his vision�.
�The Fuhrer drank English tea and said that we will soon punish the English at the
heart of their culture. Who knows, we will soon perhaps be masters of India, for
what is now England�s, will soon all belong to Germany�.
Goebbels was a Hitler sycophant. Whether he was writing for himself or for
posterity or simply because he was an incontinent diarist, or because he hoped one
day that Hitler would read his published diaries and reward his sycophancy, is all
open to discussion.
On the 4th January 1940, there is an entry in the Goebbels diaries that could
perhaps be of another nature. It might show that not only was Goebbels the personal
sycophant of Hitler but also his pimp.
�The Fuhrer watched a woman light a cigarette in the Boren Cafe in Berchtesgaden,
and asked me who she was. He said she looks like a film-star.�
Hitler throughout the 1930s was a keen film-watcher. He had a private cinema
constructed in the Berghof, and, right up until the invasion of Holland and
Belgium, he spent most afternoons watching films with his secretaries. Goebbels
often watched with him. They both enjoyed American films.
�The woman was unwilling to stay, so we detained her. Her name is Marion Schuster�.

Marion Schuster was not detained. She was arrested. For smoking in an undesignated
area. It became undesignated when Goebbels�s Austrian assistant Fritz Cappet said
so. Marion Schuster was locked up in a three-star hotel suite with a man at the
door to await the Fuhrer�s pleasure.
�We have discovered that the film-star Marion Schuster is of impeccable Aryan
descent and comes from Linz. Her mother is Viennese and her father a wine importer.
Her medical records show no ill health, no venereal diseases, no evidence of
gynaecological complications, and no record of a pregnancy�.
Marion Schuster was not a film-star, and the way Goebbels wrote his diary could
suggest he was indeed writing it for Hitler as prime audience, anticipating
possible questions from that source.
Marion Schuster did not take her coat off but sat on the bed, biting her lip,
scratching her palms, turning her gold wedding-ring around and around on her
finger.
�She does not wear a wedding-ring�.
She did wear a wedding ring. Fritz Cappet was asked to acquire Marion Schuster�s
wedding-ring by any stratagem that did not alarm her.
�She has a husband and there is male acquaintance in Linz who has been seeing her
regularly. The fact that she does not wear a wedding-ring indicates that she is
seeing her male friend. We have arranged that her husband�s employers have seen to
her husband�s promotion and sent him to Helsinki on urgent business. The male
friend has not yet been located�.
The diary may have been written this way to make Marion Schuster less perfect than
the Fuhrer might have been afraid of. Hitler was a man who prided himself on family
values and had been publicly furious when Goebbels had a less than secret affair
with a Romanian actress. Otto Marcus Schuster, Marion Schuster�s husband, arrived
in Finland to be accused of financial espionage. He was given the choice of driving
himself at night a hundred kilometres to Horthar in Northern Nilsomer to clear
himself before a business committee, but the petrol tank had been punctured to
cause the fuel to be exhausted after fifty kilometres with the expectation that
Otto Marcus would� freeze to death on the Thulinberg Pass.
�The Fuhrer likes Hollywood� films. Yesterday afternoon he watched Barbara Stanwyck
in The Lady Eve and Bette Davis in All This and Heaven Too at the Brechtesgarden.
The Fuhrer joked. He said that when the Third Reich governed America, and I was
governor of California, he would clean up New York, shut down Las Vegas and get
Speer to replan Sunset Boulevard to look more like the Unter den Linden. The Fuhrer
likes Lana Turner�.
Marion Schuster in Room 304 of the Obersalzberg Hotel looked just a little like
Lana Turner. Goebbels ordered photographs of Lana Turner to be sent to Hitler�s
office and asked advice about Lana Turner�s make-up and cosmetics, underwear and
shaving habits.
The Fuhrer went to Berlin, Goebbels returned to Munich. Marion Schuster was
forgotten. There are no more mentions of her in the Goebbels diaries.
Fritz Cappet, Goebbels�s Austrian assistant, visited Marion Schuster on a Sunday
afternoon when his wife was menstruating. Marion Schuster had scarcely moved in
three days.� A maid had taken her coat, bought her fresh underwear, soap and
perfume. Marion had scarcely said a word. On the fourth day the maid had persuaded
her to take a bath and had washed her underwear, brought her cigarettes, flowers
and chocolates. The maid had drawn and undrawn the curtains eight times, before
Fritz Cappet had thought it prudent to pay Marion Schuster a visit. He brought
along a bottle of Irish whisky. He offered her a glass. She refused. Fritz drank
alone. He became drunk. He hit her, stripped her, fingered her groin and then
stopped, remembering why she was there, and whose guest she was. He locked her in
the bathroom and made three phone calls in the bedroom. They still had not found
Marion Schuster�s male friend. There was no male friend. Fritz unlocked the
bathroom door, and blackmailed Marion Schuster in a complicated and contradictory
way. He said that the Fuhrer was interested in her, that she was an adulteress
having a lover when her husband was away on important business, that the Fuhrer was
interested in children and hoped some day to have some of his own,but not
daughters, that she had stripped in front of him, that the Fuhrer would not be
pleased at her lewd behaviour. He demanded her wedding-ring because how come an
adulteress had the right to wear a wedding-ring? She refused. It was the first full
indication of a show of resistance. She put up a fight. He wrestled with her and
wrenched the ring from her finger.
�Now that we have settled that we can amuse ourselves�.
He promised to rape her unless she sat on his face. He raped her and then whipped
her repeatedly with his buckled belt, saying it was a fitting punishment for an
adulteress who had refused to obey the Fuhrer.
Fritz Cappet put Marion Schuster�s wedding ring in a linen envelope and sent it by
messenger to Goebbels� office in Munich. They had found a man who had agreed for
400,000 marks to say he was Marion�s lover. They had his signature on the deal.
They sent him to Room 304 of the Obersalzberg Hotel where he was obliged to
engineer a quarrel whose shouting could be heard through the wall.
The wedding-ring in its linen envelope stayed in Goebbels�s office for six weeks,
until the name Marion Schuster had disappeared from everybody�s memory. She was
only now a name on three pieces of paper - a florist�s receipt, a laundry invoice
and a forged signature on a slightly doctored black and white glossy photograph of
Lana Turner. In an office spring-clean, the ring was bundled up with other assorted
trinkets and packaged with several unclaimed lost property items in a tool bag and
then forgotten again. Marion was dead by now. She had thrown herself under an army
truck carrying flowers.� The Linz police said she may have not seen the truck
because� it looked as though she had recently been blinded in one eye. They
mentioned how she had born a remarkable likeness to the Hollywood actress Lana
Turner who had appeared in We Who Are Young, Somewhere I�ll Find You, The Youngest
Profession, and Marriage is a Private Affair.
Marion Schuster�s wedding-ring was appraised by a jeweller, and thrown into a
melting point. It was not so valuable. It helped in a very small part to constitute
a gold bar that was taken to Baden-Baden in June 1944, and this gold bar was one of
the 92 that Harpsch�s sergeant and corporal had lifted into the back seat of the
black Mercedes to be driven to Bolzano where they cannot cook a good spaghetti.
Otto Marcus Schuster is still alive. He lives in Oberammergau and in 1970 played
two parts in the celebrated Oberammergau Miracle Play. The first part was Lazarus,
who is raised from the dead, and the second, Joseph of Arimathe� a who is the rich
businessman who permits Christ�s body to be laid in the tomb he had prepared for
himself.
�
GOLD
60 � The golden gardeners
This is the story of� two elderly gardeners, brother and sister, who lived in
Dusseldorf. They tended a carp-pond on behalf of the zoological gardens. They had
always been natural prophets of doom because of a continuous family history of
griefs and disasters. He, a Czech professor of marine mammals practising in a
country without a sea-coast,had lost a leg a day after the end of the First World
war in a misunderstanding over the term �armistice�.� She, a bio-chemist, had lost
her only daughter in a motorcycle accident, and had terminated three pregnancies
from liasons with a husband, a lover and an uncle for fear motorcycles would again
cause her grief.� As devout Jews practising their scientific occupations in a
bureaucratic gentile community, they sensed sure disaster in the Third Reich.
Refusing to flee, they had endeavoured to hide as lowly caretakers.� They had read
Huxley�s novel about longevity. Carp lived to a great age, some apparently to 200
years. Carp had a very slow digestion system, their gut sometimes took four weeks
to digest their vegetarian diet of algae. Huxley had believed that slow digestion
was one key to long life.
In September 1941, the zoological gardens were appropriated as an officer training
school by the German 101 Army Battalion who had been stationed in Munich. The
reasons given were an admiration for the well-appointed offices, a delight in the
well-designed accomodation for staff, and a desire to daily use the heated
swimming-pool designed by the fashionable Dutch architect van Reichfeldt, whose
attention to architectural detail was legendary, though at the Erasmus Philosphy
Building he designed in Rotterdam, he seems to have been bored with considering the
comfort of urinating males, designing a washroom where the basins were too low and
the urinal bowls too high, privacy impossible, and pedestrian flow prone to
tripping, sliding and being struck in the back by erratic doors unable to decide
whether to swing in or swing out.
The brother and sister caretakers of Dusseldorf caught the two oldest fish in the
carp pond and nicked their tails to aid future identification. They had then fed
the fish their gold rings and gold chains wrapped up in bread-balls.� They hoped
after the war to persuade the carp to give them back.
On the first Good Friday of the new management, the Catholic officers of Battalion
101 had the carp caught and cooked. The fish were eaten with little relish. A slow
digestion and a very limited diet made the fish-flesh dull and sluggish. But the
jewelry was discovered, and it goes without saying, to the diners� great surprise
and delight. The 101 Battalion hoped for more discoveries and the entire carp
population of the former zoological gardens was slaughtered. It was said that in
half an hour, eighty fish with possibly three thousand years of existence between
them, were killed and gutted. But not eaten. Apart from being of an unappetising
taste, they presented too big a cooking problem in the small saucepans of the
former zoo kitchen. A zoo kitchen is usually designed on a vegetarian and raw meat
basis for the obvious reason that animals did not eat cooked food.
Not surprisingly little of value was discovered as a result of this piscine
slaughter. There was a cache of coins possibly worth 450 marks or 80 English
pounds. The coins were mostly in English currency, though there was a little in
Italian and a little more� in Irish; all three nationalities are� known to throw
coins in still water as the� guarantee of a return. There were also several fish-
hooks, a toy soldier, a corkscrew, five buttons, all apparently from the same
garment, and a musket-ball which could have been Napoleonic.
The first Good Friday find of gold rings and gold bracelets found its way to
Bolsano by a very circuitous route that took in London and Manchester, Rotterdam,
Amsterdam, Antwerp and then Mainz, all cities which possessed buildings designed or
built by Richardt Reichfeldt. In the Norasolda Smelting-Works in Mainz, the gold
was melted down with a collection of gold golfing trophies won in Scotland, and
some twenty gold medals associated with the Danish sculptor Thorswalden. The
resulting gold bar reached Baden-Baden in May, lay� in the vault of the firm of
Emmer and Sons for ten days,
and then with 91 other gold bars, on the morning of March 31th 1945, began its last
known journey in German hands - a mere three hours covering 140 kilometers. All 92
gold bars were discovered on the back seat of� a black Mercedes, license plate
number TL9246, abandoned at the road-side at Bolsano, the one place in Italy where
they could not make good spaghetti.
The two carp lovers committed suicide by drowning. Not in Dusseldorf, but in a
latrine without basins, toilet bowls or doors at Dachau.
�
GOLD
61 � The troop train
Hermann Plitzermann, returning from Predioskia in a troop train with the remains of
his unit, was dozing like all the other soldiers in his compartment, when it
stopped at a siding somewhere between Hydermain and Floorst, fifty kilometres
inside the Polish border.� His leg was in plaster. He had lost three toes, and his
left elbow was dislocated and his arm bound up in bandages and a sling. His
buttocks were burnt. He wept frequently to think of what his wife would think of
his shredded scrotum. A male nurse in a crowded ward behind a floral curtain at
Gniperbad had helped him achieve an erection with a mouth of scalding tea; the
experience had been slow, painful, humiliating and without semen. Hermann
Plitzermann had promised his wife three children, two girls and a boy, Gerda, Heidi
and Adolf. Adolf was to be a customs officer like his father-in-law. Herman
suffered from neuralgia and occasional blurred vision, spasms of uncontrollable
shivering, fits of vomiting, and low self-esteem. He was an ideal candidate for
impossible visions.
A train slowly pulled alongside. Perhaps the troop train had stopped to permit this
other train to overtake at a set of points. It was full of first class carriages
and officers drinking coffee, chatting and laughing. Herman looked into each slowly
passing compartment, small orange-lit rooms peopled with uniformed strangers all
behaving in ways that Hermann thought privileged, lifting a small white coffee-cup,
wiping fingers with a small white napkin, looking in a mirror, fingering a tight
collar, knocking the ash off a long cigarette, sneezing onto the back of a hand,
whistling, smiling, laughing. The train of first class
carriages finally stopped, presenting a brightly lit compartment exactly opposite
Hermann. He could see straight through the carriage and out the window on the other
side, straight into a red and purple sunset. And Hermann Plitzermann saw Hilter.
The Fuhrer was staring out of the window without any discernible expression on his
face. An officer on his far side was talking and gesticulating.� Hermann must have
been four metres away from the Leader of the Third Reich.� Hitler caught Hermann�s
eye and they stared at one another for three and a half seconds. Then Hitler said
something and an adjutant pulled down the window blind. Probably Hitler wanted a
little privacy. His train pulled slowly away.
Hermann began to babble. He had just seen Hitler.
��And a naked Marlene Dietrich just pissed in my mouth.�
�He was smoking.�
�Marlene Dietrich is a dyke�.
�And she gave me a 500,000 mark note and made me managing director of Krupps.�
�He doesn�t smoke.�
�I do. Burn my prick so that I can see Hitler�.
�That�s a joke, Hermann Plitzermann�.
�Hitler doesn�t tell jokes�.
�And he stared at me - Hermann Plitzermann.�
�Hitler doesn�t stare�.
It quickly passed down the train that Hermann Plitzermann had just seen Hitler
telling a joke, screwing Marlene Dietrich and lighting a cigarette with a million
mark note. The carriage was sealed off and uncoupled at Terius, a small town
thirty-five kilometres inside the Polish border.� Hermann Plitzermann was arrested
along with the five infantrymen and the corporal who had shared his compartment.
They were temporarily locked in a station waiting-room without a toilet but with
their crutches, their unchanged bandages and three sentries sworn to silence.
Hermann Plitzermann was shouted at, punched, kicked, abused and reminded frequently
that he had been sucked off by a well-known faggot forty times in one night. �If
only�, whispered Hermann, as he turned his wedding-ring round and round the third
finger of his left hand. �If only�.� His foot was beginning to smell and he passed
blood as he urinated out of the window. After three days, and because of the strong
smell of gangrene, the seven soldiers were taken to a local hospital at Grospoknia
which was staffed by Polish orderlies, with no nurses, and under the jurisdiction
of a retired dentist. One soldier immediately fell down a flight of concrete steps
and died from internal injuries. One soldier apparently committed suicide with a
kitchen fork. Two soldiers died in two days from food poisoning. One soldier went
missing and Hermann died of untreated gangrene poisoning. It could be said that
only Hermann died a natural death. From a biological point of view gangrene-
poisoning is a natural death, certainly more natural than the deaths of his
comrades. The retired dentist negotiated a sack of flour, a box of cauliflowers, a
dozen broken eggs, ten pairs of socks, a scarf and four red balaclavas for three
German wedding-rings, a Saint Christopher medal, a gold crucifix that had been hit
by a piece of shrapnel and a small gold key. These military relics were kept in the
inside pocket of a post-master�s padded jacket for three weeks and then traded for
a fake passport, and then passed to jeweller in Adenberg where they were smelted
down to a thirty ounce gold bar that was impounded by the Gestapo. This gold bar
was taken to Baden-Baden where the accumulated bad luck was eventually passed onto
Gustav Harpsch who, riding like a knight on a white horse to find his infant
daughter, crashed into a white horse just outside Bolzano where spaghetti is kept
hidden in case it might be ordered by foreigners crossing into Italy from Austria
eager to taste the national dish on its native soil.
In the small cemetery at Terius there is a gravestone inscribed with the words �Six
Dead Germans�. Hermann Plitzermann might again have missed out on the good things
in life, because there were certainly seven soldiers in that railway compartment.
�
GOLD
62 � Frank�s friends
This is the story of a small horde of Polish-manufactured gold trinkets made as
Christian pilgrim-badges for wealthy visitors to the Shrine of the Holy Virgin at
Grednova outside Kracow. They were discovered in a backroom above a baker�s shop at
265 Prinsengracht, in the Jourdan area of Amsterdam. The occupants of the backroom,
presumed Jewish, had been arrested six weeks before� on the morning of the 3 August
1944, and deported to Bergen-Belsen via the Dutch clearing-station at Westerbork.
Accepting that house numbers are often organised in odds and evens down two sides
of a street, or in this case, on two sides of a canal, 265 Princesgracht is not
surprisingly next door to 263 Prinsengracht.� It was from a hiding-place in the
attic of a back-room at 263 Princesgracht that Anne Frank and her relatives were
arrested on the morning of the 3 August 1944. It is conceivable that the presumed
owners of the Polish pilgrim-badges were on the same transport train as the Franks.

The pilgrim-badges were known to be in the possession of SS Sergeant Karl Josef

Silberbauer, the Franks� liberator into fresh air and then death, for at least a
week. His corporal remembers Silberbauer shuffling through the badges as they lay
in a shoe-box in the Blue Knapsack coffee-house on the corner of Elandsgracht and
Prinsengracht. This corporal remembers Silberbauer laughing at the absurdity of a
figure with three legs, presuming that the third leg was an enlarged penis, which
was unlikely because the gold figure was otherwise female. There is no evidence
that Silberbauer knew the pilgrim-badges were made of gold. Like Anne Frank,
Silberbauer probably died in late February or early March 1945.� His body was never
identified with total conviction when he was supposedly pulled from a canal on Java
Island to the north of Amsterdam. The only evidence was the uniform, but since the
corpse wore no shirt, no underwear, and no socks or shoes, it was suggested that
the Silberbauer�s uniform tunic and trousers had been put on a drowned naked corpse
to deliberately confuse identity.
When investigated, the corporal had the opinion that Silberbauer had given the
pilgrim-badges away to children. Silberbauer had been fond of small children.
Thirty of the items had been in the possession of a nine-year old girl called
Elizabet Guningsturm.� It is likely that she had swapped many of them with the
neighbourhood children with sweets taken from her mother�s tobacco-shop. The girl�s
mother was Polish and she had recognised the pilgrim-badges for what they were, and
had sold them to a painter in Helmingstraat, who exchanged them for food in the
Amsterdam Pipe District. From laying in the bottom-tray of a cash-register
associated with a soup-kitchen set up on the Museumplein, they ended up in the
luggage of fleeing German collaborators and on the 26 March they became virtually
the last items to be smelted down in Baden-Baden at Emmer and Sons.� The Polish
pilgrim-badges probably constituted most of� gold bar 56GHT/K and according to the
disposition of the gold bars in Harpsch�s black suitcase, might very well be among
the last ten to be packed.
�
GOLD
63 �� Russian hot rings
Little Viktor Steinbruker had a Russian grandmother on his mother�s side.� She
spoke little, if any, German so as deliberately not to be able to speak to her son-
in-law, a horse-and-cab driver who had painted his name, Big Viktor Steinbruker, on
the side of his cab. And you do not advertise yourself like that in a city like
Lubeck whose citizens do not love Jews. Besides you simply do not advertise
yourself like that. It�s vulgar.
�It�s beautiful. And Viktor Steinbrucker, Big or Little, is not a Jewish name�.
Little Viktor Steinbrucker�s Russian grandmother was a peasant from Pytorstockgrad
near Minsk, and not a little snobbish. She was full of peasant wisdom. When Little
Viktor had a headache, she heated� up her gold wedding ring on a white saucer on
the stove, and placed it on Little Viktor�s forehead just above the right eye. When
Little Viktor had a cold she wrapped a hot flannel around her rosary and Little
Viktor wore it around his neck under his vest until the cold went away.
Around the end of February 1935, Little Viktor caught a cold which developed
quickly into pneumonia. His grandmother was convinced he had caught the chill from
the cab horse that waited for customers on the end of Praedmasterstrasse. She
kicked the elderly mare in the belly for afflicting her grandson. She may have been
kicking her son-in-law�s horse by proxy, which was as good as kicking her son-in-
law, because he was devoted to his horse, whose name, in eternal hope of flying,
was Pegasus. The horse strangely had white ears but was otherwise totally black.
Little Viktor did not get any better. His grandmother collected all the wedding
rings of the women of the house, herself, her daughter, her widowed second
daughter, her daughter-in-law, the old woman who had come with her from
Pytorstockgrad near Minsk, the concierge and the concierge�s neice. She boiled them
all for an hour in two tablespoons of jet black balsamic vinegar from Modena in
Italy and laid them in a symmetrical pattern on Little Viktor�s chest.� He
screamed. His grandmother added an eighth ring from a Ukranian neighbour for good
measure. The neighbour had come in for comfort because they were threatening to
search the houses in the next street.
At midnight, four uniformed policemen and six youths with swastika arm-bands broke
down the door. They were carrying two buckets of horse shit and the head of a horse
that had white ears. They scattered the horse shit around the bedrooms and placed
the bleeding horse head on the kitchen table. They squashed the eight women into
the lavatory where the Ukranian neighbour fainted, Little Viktor�s grandmother got
her backside stuck in the toilet and all were soon heavily perspiring. Upstairs,
the intruders discoverd a small boy aged seven laying naked on a turned down bed
with a hot flannel laid across his forehead and eight hot wedding rings laid in a
regular pattern on his chest. The wedding-rings, still warm, disappeared into Big
Viktor�s leather money purse and were taken away.� When Big Viktor came home to a
house of wailing women locked in the lavatory, and a dead horse-head bleeding on
the kitchen table, and the smell of hot balsamic vinegar from Modena, he decided
his days as a horse-and-cab driver were over and he should send in his papers to
emigrate to Madagascar. And Little Viktor Steinbruker, no longer subject to Russian
superstition, recovered.
The stolen rings soon had company.� Big Viktor�s leather purse swelled with
involuntary contributions from along the street. The items were eventually stacked
neatly in a drawer from a Louis� XV writing desk and kept in the house of a Gestapo
official whose sister was married to Reinhard Heydrich�s uncle. The writing desk
was kept for four years in the best bedroom of Heydrich�s official country
residence, and had become the repository of his wife�s most precious possessions,
her christening gown, her first communion dress, her wedding-party invitations, her
engagement ring, the first clothes of her sons, her husband�s war medals, his
credentials as the organiser of plans for what was called the Jewish solution. On
Heydrich�s assassination in 1943, the writing-desk was packed into a wooden crate
marked Personal Property and taken to Baden-Baden, his widow�s home town. It was
stored in a garage where it was ostentatiously re-labelled Heydrich�s Artworks. A
year later, the garage was bombed, the crate opened by Gestapo officials, and the
jewellery contents examined, sorted and broken down, and the gold smelted to
convenient gold bars ostensibly to be part of the inheritance of Heydrich�s
youngest son who had been patted on the head by a white-faced Hitler at his
father�s public funeral in Berlin. Both the Hitler pat on the head and the golden
treasury, which in part contained the wedding-ring that had belonged to Little
Viktor Steinbruker�s grandmother, were to haunt the younger Heydrich for the rest
of his life. Three gold bars of the Heydrich inheritance were kept in Vault Three
of the Deutsche Bank in Baden-Baden and one of them was removed from there by
Lieutenant Harpsch. He was responsible for moving it with its small contribution of
Russian superstitious medical magic to Bolzano, driving in the dark along the Via
Emilia which passes through Modena where the jet black balsamic vinegar is mixed
with a distillation of the balsam plant carefully distilled from the sweet-smelling
leaves that could have helped to make Bolzano spaghetti a little more appetising.
�
GOLD
64 � Twelve golden kilometres
This is the complex story of a collection of gold wedding rings that were dropped
through the chinks of the floorboards of a railway cattletruck travelling between
Winterplatzburg and Freiberburg, a distance of twelve kilometers. Ninty-three gold
rings were collected by a very surprised farmer�s daughter walking the rails to
meet her lover in Helinghaus. This lover was unfaithful. He stole the rings from
the chamber-pot under the bed of his unsuspecting girlfriend and exchanged them for
a car to convince his new mistress he was in love with her so that she would sleep
with him. The former owner of the car, the son of a miller, unused to handling gold
and almost certainly knowing the rings had arrived in his possession by some
infamous means, panicked. He threw the rings down a well hoping to recover them
after the war was over and the times were not so dangerous.� He was enlisted in the
army and sent to Italy where his throat was cut for firing his rifle in the middle
of the night at the bells of a small church in Castelfranco-Emilia in order to make
them ring. He had been lonely.
The summer of 1939 was hot and the well dried out. The miller, still wearing the
black mourning-bands for his son on his shirt-sleeve, took advantage of the
drought. Cleaning out the well, he found the valuables. He took them to the
farmer�s co-operative bank. The bank was appropriated by the local Nazi party and
the gold found its way by circuitous routes to Croatia where it was smelted down to
be exchanged for rifles on the Hungarian border. As a gold bar stamped DD5.OOL,
weighing a little more than the regulation 100 ounces, the Winterplatzburg-
Freiberburg rings ultimately reached Baden-Baden, and then with 91 other gold bars,
was ultimately discovered spilling out of two black suitcases on the back seat of a
Mercedes car, license plate number TL9246 found abandoned at the road-side at
Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they cannot seem to make good spaghetti.
All of which might explain how the story ended, but not how the story began. On a
cattle-truck bound for a work-camp, a woman who had made the journey before and
knew what was to be expected, argued that the Germans should be allowed to take as
little as they could from their victims. Such was the woman�s eloquence, the entire
178 inmates of the truck took off their wedding-rings, and in one or two cases, a
modest pair of gold earrings and a small brooch in the shape of a swallow in wild
flight, and a child�s christening chain, and had sacrificed them to the railway
lines between Winterplatzburg and Freiberburg� All the travellers, arriving
ringless in Belsen, had perished. They could never know, though if they had thought
for a moment of the possibilities, they might have suspected, that their symbolic
sacrifice had petered out into a sorry provincial story of infidelity, lust, panic
and greed.
�
GOLD
65 � Giving away gold
Gertryud Silvester, heir to a fortune accrued by her father in the fur trade, gave
up her jewelry in ignorance of Nazi policy. She believed in helping the war effort
if it meant that perhaps her parents might have the opportunity to be resettled in
Israel or even Madagascar.� What she gave the small bespectacled government
employee in a leather shopping-bag was worth 15 million marks, one million US
dollars or nearly 500,000 English pounds. Among the 270 items, the collection
contained a tiara once thought to belong to Queen Victoria, and a gold locket
certainly inscribed with the Romanov initials. The small bespectacled government
employee unpacked the shopping-bag and laid out the hoard on his kitchen table.
When it grew dark, he switched on the kitchen�s 60 watt bulb. So much wealth was
illuminated with so little light, but it impressively dazzled the government
employee who stared at his confiscated treasure for three hours, dreaming not of
Israel and Madacascar, but of New York and Las Vegas, of white sheeted beds with
Scandinavian women with long legs, a box of Gualmeir chocolates with lemon desert
soft centres, and a bottle of cold Mallarme Absinthe served in glasses rimmed in
sugar with a slice of lemon.
The small bespectacled government employee was only mildly imaginative. The theives
that knocked him on the head that night had no imagination at all. Before they were
caught and then released with a mild admonition, the collection had been passed to
a middleman whose wife was a jeweller�s daughter who stripped away the jewels and
the enamels, packed the gold fragments in a child�s diaper and mailed it to her
cousin in Frankfurt. The mail train was bombed at Hugenglastmeir in Bavaria.The
carriages lay in the snow for a month until the Spring thaw when the diaper package
of gold was found in the proximity of the corpse of a dead baby and ignored. In
September 1944, a Forestry Commissioner, tidying up the debris from a second
railway disaster on the same site, discovered the gold fragments, or at least some
of them, and smuggled them to his son in Baden-Baden where the package was opened
by a Nazi enthusiast and tipped into the general sorting bins ready for smelting.
Transmutated into a single, aesthetically tedious gold bar, stamped BB670p, they
were stored in Vault 3. Harpsch got his hands on 100 gold bars on the morning of
4th May 1945, by a fake requisition order idly examined by a duty officer intent on
wishing Harpsch a happy birthday in the knowledge that Harpsch�s brother-in-law,
the manager of the bank, always threw good parties, and was usually generous with
invitations.� Gold bar BB670p was among the 100 gold bars, and it travelled the 150
kilometres to Bolzano where Harpsch�s black Mercedes crashed into a white horse,
some called Polly Lipton, because its owner might have been English, and with a
name like Lipton, be related to the tea-packing company.� There is an English
nursery rhyme which goes:
Polly put the kettle on,
Polly put the kettle on,
Polly put the kettle on,
And we�ll all have tea.
�
GOLD
66 � The initial B
The kosher butcher Anselm Bezrer from Rotterdam tried to bribe a passage for his
family on a boat going to Bergen in Norway. As collateral he offered the boat�s
captain 15,000 guilders, his mother�s gold necklace, his grandmother�s gold-handled
walking-cane, a pair of brightly polished new shoes, and with winks and nudges and
a trembling voice, the virginity of his 28-year old crippled daughter. The boat�s
captain was an imaginative man with pro-German sympathies and a zeal for
vegetarianism, but he was also sympathetic in general to the total female
predicament, having lost a daughter and two wives in various accidents and
adventures of which no-one could truly make him responsible. He particularly
appreciated the metaphor of the offer of polished shoes by a man planning to run
away with a crippled daughter. The captain contrived to leave the butcher�s
grandmother and the butcher�s wife in a coffee-shop on the quay, whilst he handed
the butcher and the material bribe over to the custom�s police. They took the money
and the jewels and arranged for Anselm Bezrer to be arrested and sent to Belsen.
The daughter meantime had been hidden aboard the boat and enjoyed by the captain.
And she safely reached Bergen in Norway.
The gold necklace and the gold handle of the walking-cane eventually arrived in
Baden-Baden and were smelted down to become part of a gold bar, later to be
recovered in a smashed black car on the outskirts of Bolzano where they reputedly
cannot cook a good spaghetti.
So many letter Bs in this story make the account sound phoney, but we could
continue to make it sound even more unlikely, because the daughter�s name was
Berthe and her first true sexual encounter in the captain�s berth created a great
love that was reciprocated. After the war the couple married. And yes, they had a
daughter, and yes, they named her after the captain�s boat, Belinda.
�
GOLD
67 � Amersfort Ice
Forty Jewish thieves were rounded up at Amersfort in January 1941 and pushed into a
hole blown with a hand grenade in the ice of the Reichdecker Canal. Heinkel, a
plump man of 32 years of age, was the last to perish. It took him 2 minutes and 39
seconds to die. Official death causes could be said to be hypothermia aggravated
with water on the lung. Heinkel was a good swimmer. You could not really say that
he had drowned.
By six o�clock in the evening, the ice had frozen over again and the white bodies
could be seen under the ice, like children looking through a shop window at goodies
they could not have. Those goodies were simply gulps of air. You can live three
weeks without food, three days without water but only three minutes without air. A
large pile of clothes and a small pile of wedding rings were heaped on the quay.
The rings were taken in a bucket to Samuel Zinkler� who parcelled them up in a
Gestapo numbered envelope and sent to Zwolle where, accompanied by other envelopes
containing similar booty, it travelled across the frost-covered landscape to
Dusseldorf and a hot furnace to assist in making gold bar Tg78A.
The cold spell in central Holland lasted five weeks. Seven Christian citizens of
the town could not tolerate any longer the sight of the forty Jewish thieves�
looking up at their children as they crossed the Reichdecker Bridge on their way to
school.
�Papa, who are those angels in the water?�
�Why don�t those men swim to the shore?�
�Do you think mama, that those gentlemen in the water could use my scarf and
gloves?�
�Papa, what did those quiet swimmers in the water steal?�
The children, who picked up gossip with alacrity, called the underwater Jews, the
Forty Thieves and it was not long before they christened Heinkel, who was a big man
and nearest the surface of the ice, Ali Baba. Ali Baba and the Forty Theives.
Though, to be strictly accurate, there were forty-three Jews and they were not
theives.
The Mayor of Amersfort, Arnold Gluck-Pressing was a model National Socialist
supporter and his anti-semitic beliefs were a little to the right of Goebbels, and
Goebbels anti-Semetic beliefs were a liitle to the right of Hitler, so the forty
theives had little hope of a rescue before the weather turned or the Germans lost
the war. Perhaps memories of German soldiers under the ice in Stalingrad had been a
persuasive factor. Mayor Gluck-Pressing was adamant that Ali Baba and his men
should stay in the water as a warning to others.
The weather changed enough for the ice to melt. But the ground remained rock hard
and was impenetrable to pick or spade. Ali Baba and his Forty Theives were taken
out of the water. They were roped� to horses who dragged the corpses down the
frosty roads out of town.� It was rumoured� that Ali Baba and the Forty Theives had
gone on holiday and were staying at the Toronto Red Barn, a tempting winter
vacation venue.� But the theives did not apparently enjoy the amenities and they
soon packed their bags and left, wheeled away under the moon on barrows by their
relatives, across the frosty crackling earth. Curiously Ali Baba was the last to
leave. He had become a celebrity and a figurehead and he stayed at the Toronto Red
Barn, lying on a barn door, looking quite regal until the temperature rose to a
minus two. He had been given a pair of dark grey gloves; one was fitted over his
genitals for decency�s sake, though it was a bit late since everyone in Amersfort,
including the children, had witnessed their pexcessive size and excessive
masculinity. The other glove was placed on his right hand to hide the injuries. It
had been difficult to get his wedding ring off his plump fingers. He had first put
the ring on his finger when he was a slim young man of 24 on his wedding-day when
he had married Herma Gopeling. Herma was proud that Ali Baba was the last to leave
the Toronto Saloon. Three tearaway boys set the Amersfort Clock Tower on fire to
create a diversion when Herma and her five sisters came with an old grocer�s van to
take Heinkel back home from his holidays.
GOLD
68 � The tennis match
The Vogelpark in Amsterdam in 1941 hosted an exclusive tennis club used by the
children of the wealthy professional people who lived in the� large art-deco houses
around the park. The tennis club had the use of six clay-courts, two grass-courts,
a club-house, an indoor heated� swimming-pool, rest-rooms, showers, changing rooms,
a billiard-room and a small cafeteria run by a Sardinian ex-waiter called Sammy.
When the Germans occupied Holland, they made ample use of all existing facilities,
and the Tennis Courts was on the list of officers� privileges. They parked their
cars on the clay-courts, being sticklers for true tennis that could only be played
on grass. They sacked Sammy because they had no wish to see a swarthy face among so
many bright, white-skinned, desireable Dutch youth. Sacking the Sardinian was
tantamount to sacrilege for the Dutch jeunesse doree. He was not one of them it was
true, but he was invaluable. He provided alibis for errant behaviour, knew
abortionists, catered exotic food in hard times for the parties of the rich
children.
It was mutually agreed that the two types of club players, Dutch youths and German
officers, should form teams whose representatives would engage in a tennis knock-
out competition for three days over an August weekend. The winner would be the
proud possessor of a gold-sprayed Volkswagon. Two teams of 12 players were
appointed. The Dutch children were the better players. They were younger. This was
their home territory. They were bored. They had cars already. The German officers
cheated. By the second day the Dutch were exasperated by German bad behaviour.
Several engaged the German officers in conversation whilst others of their number
sneaked into the locker-room and stole cuff-links and cap badges and tie-pins and
gold wrist-watches They discretely sliced open some fifty tennis balls with a cut-
throat razor, and hid the valuables inside. Then, with as much nonchalent
carelessness as they could muster, within the playing of the games, they contrived
to knock the balls off court and into the hawthorn thicket and the stagnant canal
beyond the fence so that they could be recovered later. The Dutch adolescents still
contrived to win.
With balls being swooped over the wire with surprising regularity by such good
players, and with balls bouncing with such curious erratic movement because of the
small weighted ballast inside, the German officers grew suspicious. They pounced,
discovered the deceit and rounded up the youths in the empty swimming-pool where
they proceeded to bait and threaten and torture. They locked the doors and they
raped the girls and forced the boys to commit sodomy.
Sammy, with some sixth sense of loyalty, never far from his long-term association
with the tennis-club, had noticed the quiet courts with the tennis rackets
abandoned on the grass, and he had come close enough to hear the screaming.� With
reckless bravery he climbed the club-house to attempt the rescue through a sky-
light. The Germans caught him and slit his throat. The gush of blood brought the
orgy to a halt. The tennis-courts were closed. A girl committed suicide. Parents
were arrested.
Some twenty weighted tennis balls were dredged from the canal. The hostility of the
neigbourhood intimidated the dredgers. They left knowing more tennis-balls could be
recovered. The missing balls were quietly collected at night by the Vongelpark
youth. Their valuable German contents were sold to an Amsterdam Bank with the
purpose of creating a fund to decently bury the Sardinian ex-waiter. The Bank
smelted down the gold items as quickly as possible, and they were incorporated in a
gold bar, which was immediately confiscated by the German police. The bar arrived
by circuitous routes in Baden-Baden and was there for Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch to
collect, and take to Bolzano in a bid to rescue his daughter.
GOLD
69 � The Golden bullet
Because he had lost his wife, his mother, his left arm, his right eye and his
enthusiasm for life, Max Oppenheist, an officer in the 33rd Infantry made a golden
bullet for an ultimate game of Russian Roulette. He was a card player, a drinker
and he enjoyed provoking Chance. He was a Prussian. He had a duelling scar. His men
thought he was a sacred joke; they liked him. He challenged three friends to play
three bullets each on four occasions. These occasions were the anniversary of his
wife�s death, his mother�s death, the death of his left arm and the death of his
right eye. But the golden bullet refused to take their lives. On his sixtieth
birthday Max challenged the golden bullet again. Expectations grew higher and
higher as the gun again refused to deliver its fatal bullet. The participants grew
over-confident and careless with their aim; they were convinced the golden bullet
would never kill. Then Max rolled the barrel and fired, and the golden bullet
entered his head but not his brain. He lay in hospital dreaming of the Brandenburg
Funeral March, Schopenhauer�s Death-mask and Hitler�s favourite painting� of
Bocklin�s The Isle of the Dead. He recovered. The only ill effects were a crumpled
forehead and a little forgetfulness. The golden bullet was beside his bed in a
empty wine glass of mild disinfectant. It was untouched, unscratched. He stared at
it revengefully. When the golden bullet on his sixtieth birthday had waited for
sixty percussions of the firing pin to become effective, and then not to become
effective enough, it did not seem likely that the bullet had been designed at all
to be his messenger of death.
The soldier was compulsorily but respectfully retired. He lived in a barracks for
retired soldiers and he wore his golden bullet around his neck in a small leather
pouch. He slept with it around his neck, bathed with it, swam in the River Gretchen
with it, visited whores with it, visited priests with it. Then he lost it, and he
lost his upright bearing, his confidence and then his sanity. His hair went white.
He dribbled. His left eye went blind. He sat in an armchair looking over the River
Gretchen and then he died.
The bullet went into the barracks museum along with the faded captured flags of
Waterloo, Prince Rupert�s dyed moustache, and a candle blown out by the breath of
Florence Nightingale after the battle of Sebastopol.
At the time of the Allied invasion in 1944 every scrap of helpfulness was
appropriated for the war effort. Max Oppenheist�s golden bullet was not to be made
an exception. It was smelted down with low grade gold taken from Jewish widows and
it arrived in Baden-Baden in gold bar TY901L. Harpsch, without sentiment for old
soldiers, old widows, young wives, lost causes, domestic tragedies, family
inheritances, took it all clean away. Ninety-two gold bars meet death on the
Bolzano highway. It was as unexpected as the unlikely meeting of an umbrella and a
sewing machine on a dissecting table. Not quite. More like the unexpected meeting
of a white horse and a black Mercedes on the road to Bolzano.
�
GOLD
70 � The Three Sisters
There were three sisters, Dolores, Sybil and Saffron. The first had a broken nose,
the second was pregnant and the third, a half-sister, was exceedingly beautiful.
When the Germans created the petty French state of collaborators known as Vichy,
the three sisters left Marseille pushing prams. They knew full well that they had
been given a Jewish identity because their husbands were successful, foreign,
sometime malcontent and usually outside the law. The husbands had originally come
from Morocco. To pronounce Jewishness on a citizen was low in bureaucratic
organisation and high in effect, and was scarcely ever examined, criticised or
vetoed. So to be called a Jew was a convenience for ostracisation, like a lettre de
cachet� of the ancien regime where two conspiring relatives could effortlessly
imprison a third by simply declaring him or her insane. The sisters knew their
lives were going to be made miserable, if not intolerable, if not cut suddenly
short.
For their husbands it was worse. They were determined to go home to Morocco, and,
if necessary, swim there. The husband of Dolores, as a child, had washed dishes in
his uncle�s cafe, had bought himself an oven, cooked squid on the street, and at
seventeen had rented a corner of a grocer -shop where he fried whitebait and boiled
clams. By the time he was thirty he had borrowed money and opened a small
restaurant of his own that specialised in shellfish and was on every American
tourist�s itinerary. When the fascist persecutors came close, he stowed away to
Casablanca on the shrimp boat of one of his suppliers.
Sybil�s husband was first a bicycle messenger-boy, then a taxi-driver, then a
motor- mechanic, then a chauffeur, then he bought himself a petrol-pump franchise
and a lock-up garage and took over a tyre-repair shop and ran an unlicensed taxi-
service. On a Saturday night in June 1940, he made love to his wife which certainly
made her pregnant, put on his oldest clothes, drove one of his three taxis to
Gibraltar and jumped nude into the sea on the Sunday afternoon. Ostensibly he was
determined to practice his backstroke. He ended up practising his backstroke,
breast-stroke, crawl and butterfly-stroke and various forms of floating, all the
way to the Moroccan coast.
Saffron�s husband, once a child pickpocket, then an adolescent whisky smuggler, an
escort dancer, a professional impostor, a dealer in hashish, then a child
kidnapper, a sometime amateur pimp and possible contract killer, had more money
than his two successful brother-in-laws put together, but he still stole 200 US
dollars from an American priest dining in his brother-in-law�s shellfish restaurant
to pay for a very draughty open-cockpit plane trip to Casablanca.
By arrangement the three sisters carried their husband�s not inconsiderable worldly
possessions in gold and jewellery away from their sphere of operations inland to
some safe haven which all three devout sisters believed to be Avignon, City of the
Popes. They sought a disguise of poverty, wore shabby print summer dresses but
could not leave behind their high-heels and little white gloves. They stuffed their
matrimonial valuables into potatoes packed around with coal in three old and
battered prams. Gold, potatoes and coal. They took to the country roads through the
olive groves and through the vineyards. They soon abandoned their fancy gloves and
shoes and walked barefoot, growing tanned and happier every kilometre they
travelled from the coast. They walked laughing and smiling and joking from
Marseilles to Arles to Tarascon. But at Chateaurenard they disappeared.
At night they had camped in the fields, boiling up a kilo of potatoes, after first
washing off the coal-dust and sticking a knitting-needle into each potato in case
it harboured a secret interior. They picked allotment cabbages and garden radishes
and ate desserts of stolen grapes and oranges. At first no one had taken took
notice of these three women pushing dilapidated perambulators down dirt roads deep
in the country. Then they had collected admirers and soon had a small army with its
own advance scouts picking them up at the next village square. They were invited
into barns and houses and to weddings and christenings and wakes. They had
preferable treatment from mayors and priests. They were serenaded by young guitar
players. They smoked cigarettes with old grandfathers on dusty porches in the long-
shadowed evenings whilst watching white horses roll in the nettles.
The unaccustomed dust of walking feet attracted the enemy, but for a time the enemy
was outmanoeuvred. A mythology was born of three knowing town-ladies, one with a
broken nose, one with a pregnant belly and one of incredible striking beauty all
pushing broken prams along the skyline against the setting sun. Who were they? Were
they indeed so very rich? Did potatoes cooked in coal-dust make you energetic and
charismatic and dangerous?
On the prominent curve of a hill with a church tower and a grove of ilex trees and
an assortment of darting swallows, the three prams were discovered riddled with
bullets. When the local villagers developed enough confidence to come close to the
source of the living legend, they found only a handful of potatoes in the bottom of
one pram. In three� potatoes they found three wedding rings. Who were the
assailants? The fascist police? Greedy villagers? Jealous unrequited lovers? The
strongest story but completely unproven, was that the assailants were the sisters�
husbands angry at the disappearance of all their hard-earned wealth? And where did
all the wealth go, and why?
Harpsch would have appreciated the myth; he admired stout-hearted, courageous
Jewish women determined to combat oppressive forces; he had fallen in love with one
in Vaux. Dolores, Sybil and Saffron were not Jewish, only pretend bureaucratic
Jewish. Harpsch would have happily made them honorary Jewish and got them to meet
his wife, the mother of his daughter he was now to find, not with a pram of gold
but with a black Mercedes of gold.
Harpsch had just a little of the sisters� vanished glory in their three gold rings,
now smelted into a gold bar with sundry other golden objects in Lyons. The gold bar
was taken to Turin and then to Munich and then to Baden-Baden to be securely placed
in Vault Three of the Deutches Bank. Harpsch reached Bolzano on the 16th April 1945
and crashed. If he had had an opportunity to eat a meal in that North Italian town,
he might have discovered that the Bolzano restaurants could cook and serve potatoes
much better than they could cook spaghetti.
�
GOLD
71 � I am dead
�I am dead. I love you. See you later, Peter�.
This was the message Peter wrote to his wife from the Peterhaus State prison,
Warsaw.� It was true. He was dead. He was dead when Constra received his message.
Why write in the future tense, �I will be dead�?
The words were written without haste; they were very legible. The last part of the
simple message was very familiar. Peter wrote frequently. He always kept a book of
postage stamps in his pocket ready to post a message at any time, from anywhere.
�Dear Constra and Hetty, I love you. See you later, Peter�.
It was the �I am dead� that was different, unique, unusual. Constra was in her car
when she read the message.
�It�s a letter from your father. He is in Warsaw. Which is the capital of Poland.
Which is a country over there to the right. Where the rain is coming from�.
Constra read the message to her daughter as the windscreen wipers were beating
furiously, trying to conquor the rain on the windscreen.
Only she left out the first three words.
Constra had left the house in a hurry to take their daughter Hetty to school, and
she had grabbed the letter in the brown envelope with all the other letters� from
the lino behind the front door; a bill for coal, a bill for milk, a cheque for
fifteen marks from the Food Office, a letter from her sister Janny, and a message
from Peter in a brown envelope� with the correct address, and a single sheet of
folded paper insidep. He had licked the stamp. His spittle was on the envelope.
Three sentences. Ten words. In groups of three and three and three and one.
Constra did not even hesitate in her driving. The car ran smoothly all the way to
Anselmplatz. She parked the car, ran through the rain with Hetty, kissed her on
both cheeks three times as was the family custom. Her grandmother had been Dutch.
She smoothed down Hetty�s brown hair, said goodbye, patted her backside, smiled at
the teacher, returned to the car. She shut all the doors and locked all the windows
and she screamed for twenty minutes until she fainted. You could see her silent
scream in the locked car with the rain falling on the windscreen and the wipers
working furiously.
Constra knew Peter�s message was not a lie. His grandmother had been Greek. Peter
is Greek for rock.
�All Greeks are liars. I am a Greek. Since I am a liar, I will tell you that I am
not a Greek, therefore I am not a liar�.
Stupid, argumentative, awkward, perverse, complicated, a deliberately infuriatingly
playful man. So �I am dead� was obviously true.
The car with the unconscious woman inside was still there when the rain stopped and
the sun came out and three school bells rang and Hetty ate her lunch and attended
an afternoon lesson on the History of Germany and then put on her coat, could not
find her mother, walked confidently out into the road to where she had last seen
the car, saw her father�s diplomatic black Volkswagon standing with the wipers
still moving and saw her mother sleeping inside and knocked on the window. She
knocked for five minutes, starting to cry after the second. A teacher saw her,
looked in the car, called the school superintendant. They had to break a window.
Two weeks later Constra received an envelope and inside was Peter�s wedding ring,
twenty carat gold. Constra swallowed it and hoped to die. Peter was a minor German
civil servant working on Salt Mine plans in Warsaw. He had been accused of
sabotage. It might have been true, he was not at all fond of the Third Reich. It
might have been because he was Jewish. Or maybe because someone wanted his black
diplomatic Volkswagon. Or maybe for all three reasons.
They dragged Peter�s wedding-ring out of Constra�s throat. They put it in her
handbag which was stolen by a thirteen-year old messenger-boy, who gave the ring to
his mother to buy bread and coal. The coal-merchant exchanged the ring for dollars
at his bank where his wife was chief cashier. They were arrested. The ring began
travelling until it was smelted at Munich and its identity entirely lost in a gold
bar which Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch collected one sunny morning to take with him to
Bolzano and oblivion.
�
GOLD
72 � The U-bend
Thirty gold items were hidden in the U-bend of a toilet closet at 17B
Balintourstrasse, Paderborn in 1938, and not re-discovered until 1991. The urine
and faeces, spit, menstrual blood, cigarette-butts, chewing-gum, half-burnt love
letters, ripped-up pornography and occasional vomit of three generations of the
Hocklester family had passed over the family�s fortune.� This familial and familiar
activity had continued throughout the Second World War, the Defeat of National
Socialism and Germany, the Allied and Soviet Occupations, the East-West Split, the
Cold War, the Economic Revival, the Adenaur Years, and the Breaking up of the
Berlin Wall. A long time. All in big initials. Important times for Germany.
But it�s not true. Because the thirty gold items were Fakes. In big initials. It
was a question of Shit over Fakes.
The original items had been melted down into five gold bars, four of which are now
in the Hong Kong bank in Zurich, identified as a set by their stamped PADERBORN
initials, and a fourth is missing, believed to be in Osaka on the desk of a banker
related to a cousin of the family of the Japanese Emperor. This banker� is a keen
collecter of German war souvenirs, but he has not been an insensitive man. He has
had the gold bar lacquered red to disguise it, and he used it as a paperweight
placed between the Weimar telephone and the Baudermeir ash-tray.� The banker was
one of a consortium of economic advisers to the Emperor�s family who tried to
financially persuade Speilberg to do for Japan what Speilberg did for Germany in
the film of Schindler�s List.
The original Hocklester gold had a more interesting history that the fake
Hocklester gold. In 1938 it had been packed into two suitcases and a briefcase, and
had been found and seized without fuss by SS officers looking for a Jewish boy
accused of sling-shotting a National Socialist nightwatchman, a large man noted for
his bullying, his vocal obscenities in front of small children, his stealing of
female underwear and his masturbating into his shoe stimulated by a faded print of
the Mary Magdalene in the local Catholic vestry. This new boy David had conquored a
new giant Goliath and become a local hero. He was kept hidden and protected by his
admirers. Wrapped in towels and shawls and curtains, he was passed from cupboard to
closet to cellar to attic like a Holy Relic with two other children of his same
approximate size and weight to confuse the forces of the enemy. The original
Hocklester gold hoard was a by-product of the new David mythology whose prime star
was considered far more precious than 250 ounces of dead yellow metal.� But the
David supporters had probably been too clever.
The Nazis eventually discovered the boy in a widower�s double-bed wrapped in a
sleeping-bag, and they strung him up in a cat-alley with a skipping-rope. Save that
in 1991, the real David turned up in Dresden. It was about the same time as the
discovery of the U-bend golden hoard and the Great Thaw of East Germany.� This
original David was soon made aware of the terrible mistake. In homage and
recognition of the boy who had been hung in his place, he became a silversmith, and
as a boy irrevocably associated with the Hocklester gold, this refound David
Hocklester made a memorial, recreating the lost Hocklester gold in silver. It is
now on permanent exhibition in the museum in Paderborn.
None of which still tells us very much about the original Hocklester treasure. It
seems that gold and silver smithery ran in the Hocklester family, and Ritveld
Hocklester, with his two sons,� anticipating forced seizure of Jewish valuables,
had spent some eight months replicating the original treasure in gold-plated
bronze.� Having an illicit drink in the� local hostelry, an action initially
perpetrated by a desire to merge effortlessly into the local social landscape, but
which had been continued for its own good sake, Ritveld and his sons had been
arrested. Apparently the circumcised penises of the two boys� had been spotted by a
voyeuristic Nazi sympathiser who had drilled a spy-hole for his vicarious pleasure
in the wall of the latrine. Ritveld and sons were last seen on a truck travelling
towards the Altenbeken Forest. And the story goes that the fakes were so good that
Ritveld�s wife, panicked into quick action by the SS officers hammering her door
down, had quite innocently but erroneously placed the real ones in the suitcases
and the fake ones in the deep U-bend of the family toilet.
From Paderborn the Hocklester gold items were transported to� Hannover and from
there to� Gottingen where they were smelted down into gold bars. The goldsmith was
permitted a three per cent share in every monthly consignment and he chose to take,
without any special reason,� two of the Paderborngold bars. They were kept in his
private safe in the Guidheim Bank until a bomb accidentally trapped in an otherwise
empty� bomb-bay of an American plane flying back to England after a raid on
Leipzig, chose to swing lose. The bomb fell on the bank. Looters completed the
dismemberment� of the bank and its contents. One of the looted gold bars travelled
to Prague and eventually by a very complicated route arrived in Instanbul in 1950,
Hong Kong in 1953, and Osaka in 1956, by way of exchanges that included a bucket of
pigswill, twenty thousand roubles in used notes, three submachine-guns, four square
meals and three Albanian soldiers, a girl�s English education at Rodean and
Cambridge, six weeks free sex in a brothel in the Crimea, a library of books once
owned by Lenin, a small butter mountain and the redistribution of the wealth of two
businesses specialising in pyjamas and contraceptives, forty tons of
pharmemecticals in Vienna that may have influenced the storyline of Graham Greene�s
novel The Third Man, a restaurant chain, a small fishing boat, a milk plant and an
airline based in Macao.
The other gold bar was exchanged for a farm-truck, and found itself in the hands of
professional financiers who sold it to the Mayor of� Kassel. By now it was August
1945 and the Mayor of Kassel had done too much on the wrong side of the street to
ever be considered a future model German citizen. He drove his wife and three small
children towards the� Dutch border, but was persuaded at gunpoint to exchange his
gold bar for petrol near Baden-Baden where the petrol-attedant turned it in for
credit to his bank from where it was stolen by Harpsch who then drove his hoard of
collected gold pieces across Germany, into France, around the Western Alps and
through part of Italy to his destination in Davos in Switzerland, only to be in
collison with a white horse outside Bolzano where they cannot cook good spaghetti.
�
GOLD
73 � Rings on a knife
Achip Buhler owned a thirty centimetre long hunting knife with a red leather-bound
handle and the letter A stamped on the metal boss. He had thrown it to strike
quivering into a wooden door, into tree branches, tree trunks, soft earth and a
deer corpse. He had never killed anything with it, but was hoping to.
Achip lived at Lodz on the German-Polish border. He frequently rode over to
Goncharov in Poland, in his battered farm truck to taunt Jews. It was 1936. Jesse
Owens had just won four medals at the Berlin Olympic Games. Achip Buhler would have
liked to have taunted negroes. In Goncharov there weren�t any negroes. There
probably weren�t any negroes within a hundred square kilometres of Lodz, and
probably never had been any. What would a negro be doing within five hundred square
kilometres of Lodz?� Half way between Lodz and Goncharov was a hamlet called
Frunchen; it was just on the German side. Coming back from not taunting negroes in
Goncharov, Achip saw a group of some thirty middle-aged Polish women who had come
over the border� scavenging for he did not know what in a recently harvested German
potato field. They could not be scavenging for potatoes since German farmers were
aburdly thorough, and German farmer�s wives even more so. Any potato left in a
German field was an insult to a farmer�s wife; she would box her husband�s ears if
such a potato could be found. Achip drove his truck as close as he could to the
women and he trudged across the mud getting his new boots dirty. Some of the women
stood upright and watched him, some of the women slowly backed away, two ran off in
the direction of the border two fields away, one sat down in a muddy furrow and
started to wail, a pregnant woman actually moved forwards towards him, perhaps she
hoped to pass him by and reach his truck and sit down on a leather seat with
springs to rest her legs, hips and the small of her back. All the women without
exception wore black head scarves. It was part of the uniform of being a middle-
aged woman on the German-Polish border. All heads had certainly turned his way.
Achip thought their heads looked like a flock of dark birds facing into the wind.
He was the wind.
An elderly big-breasted woman in a brown blouse, a Jewish Polish grandmother,
suddenly chose to ignore him, turned her back and bent over to scrabble in the clay
mud. What the Hell was she doing?� There were certainly no potatoes in this field.
Achip was convinced that she had thrust her buttocks deliberately in his direction.
Achip took out his thirty centimetre long blade and threw it with some force into
her backside. She screamed and gulped and gasped for air. She fell face first into
the mud, the knife stuck firmly into her flesh. All the women screamed. Achip
walked forward to retreive his knife. It came out cleanly. No blood. Two more women
ran off in the direction of the border. Another three women sat down. The pregnant
woman came right up to Achip and smashed him across the face with a large cold wet
red hand. He reeled and then stuck the blade into her pregnant belly. She went down
without a sound. Her baby was dead. Her body was soon to die with it. It was a baby
girl. Achip had got his wish. His knife had killed. A foetus. He had killed a
foetus. What sort of Viktory over hostile forces was that? Soon he could say he had
killed a mother. Both his kills were female. Achip the hero.
Achip retreived his knife and brandished it over his head. Now there was blood.
What was he to do now? He contemplated rape but he was convinced all the woman,
aged between thirty-five and sixty, wore threadbare underwear, ragged vests and
ragged pants, stretched brassieres and stretched petticoats and other garments
without names full of holes and darns, underwear stuffed with newspaper for warmth,
wrong sizes, underclothes in scraps discoloured with repeated washing, never
shining white as in the American movies, but probably grey or green-grey, tied at
the waist and the knee with string because the elastic had broken long ago. He did
not fancy a confrontation with this sort of underwear.� Besides these women were
certainly Jewish. And you didn�t fuck Jewish women, least of all in a potato field
on the German-Polish border. With witnesses. Seven crows had arrived. What did they
want? They alighted on a furrow top, flapping their wings impatiently. Why were
they behaving impatiently?
Instead of contemplating rape, Achip had another idea. He decided to collect their
wedding-rings on the blade of his thirty centimetre long hunting knife. He
indicated what he wanted. Half of the women were strangely relieved. This sadistic
maurauder only wanted valuables. Intimidated, they complied. It was getting dark.
The western sky was black with a large cloud slit with a jagged edge of orange.
They put their wedding-rings on the point of the blade of Achip�s shiny knife.
Thirty-three rings. Thirty three, the age of Christ and Alexander at death. Achip
could not get any more rings on his knife. The rings were pushed down to a point
where the blade was wider than a finger. The dying pregnant woman would not stop
screaming. He had had enough. His boots were sticky. Holding his ringed blade
pointing upwards he turned his back. He had not taken four steps when a clod of wet
mud struck him in the back of the neck. He turned and a clod of wet mud struck him
in the face. Twenty clods of heavy, sticky mud brought him down. They killed him,
stuffing his mouth with mud, kicking at his head and his face and his groin,
especially his groin, mashing his groin till his trousers matted with blood.
A truck loaded with pigs came along the road from Goncharov. Its faltering single
headlight could be seen a great way off. There was sufficient time for the women to
make their escape. They ran off carrying their dead and wounded. The wounded
pregnant woman was dead before they reached the edge of the field. The women had
left Achip with his hand sticking up out of the mud, still holding his knife
vertically complete with the thirty-three wedding rings. From a distance of twenty
metres Achip�s vertical arm with the rings on his knife looked like a bizarre
memorial made by an undertaker with no taste. Achip was black with mud, his face
covered. Perhaps he looked like a negro.
The man with the truck, Bela Vertreker, wiped a little mud from Achip�s face. He
recognised a neighbour he did not like. Bela took the rings and drove away.
Bela Vertreker sold thirty-two of the rings to a fellow pig dealer who travelled
all over the border region, a big man called Helas who passed the rings on to a
jewel-smith in Lodz who smelted the rings down the same evening. The resulting bar
was lodged in a bank for six weeks and arrived in Baden-Baden, squeezed into a
green baise bag with a red draw-string and placed in Vault Three ready to be taken
away by Harpsch.
But ony 32 of the 33 rings went into that gold bar because Bela had kept one ring
and had given it to Portia Tchercoff, a kitchen girl at the Lodz railway station
whose pink nipples he hoped one day to suck, whose pink buttocks he hoped one day
to smack, whose hairless pink vulva he hoped one day to fuck. He had seen her only
once in a bathhouse at Drusela-Kstaad on a railway-worker�s holiday outing. He had
peeped over a broken partition into the women�s changing-room. Portia had just come
out of a very hot shower. She glowed and steamed. She was pink and white, like a
thoroughly washed and scrubbed pig. Bela Vertrekker swore Portia Tchercoff could
have possessed a small curly tail lodged above the soft divide of her buttocks. She
had been more than enough to turn his head. Bela had frequently fucked his pigs. He
saw Portia as a suckling pig. Lewd man. And stupid man. The ring he gave her turned
out to be her mother�s wedding-ring, and Portia Tchercoff�s mother was no Jewess.
Bela the pigman was arrested, and accused of murder. His advocat offered a
complicated defense. First, he should confess to the murder of a pregnant woman and
the wounding of a grandmother. What? Though Achip had done the murdering and Bela
had only done the stealing, it would sound better and less criminal to a judge in
these times, to say that he had stolen from a woman or women rather than he had
stolen from a man. Besides it did not sound good that a local man had run amok in a
potato field and then been kicked to death by middle-aged and elderly potato
scroungers. From Poland. Potato scrounging was illegal and farmers could be
penalised for letting it be considered as a possible venture. Then Bela, to cap his
defense , should say that he had thought the women were Jewesses. The grandmother
Jewess was nearly sixty-five and would be soon dead anyway, and who wanted fresh
young Jew children in the world nowadays? Perhaps Bela had helped the Jewish
question in some small part. No problem. Bela wept in the dock, though he was
weeping over the prospect of never fucking the suckling shiny pink body of Portia
Tchercoff. His abject look went well for him. Bela was released in three days.
�
GOLD
74 � Golden heels
On a visit to Venice in 1925 when Corina Assel was nineteen, she had wandered into
the Museo Correr. She had idled in front of a glass case of 17th century shoes,
boots and slippers. Venetian courtesans in the early 1600s had worn shoes built up
on platforms. In the vitrine were examples made in leather, wood and ivory. Many of
the shoes were decorated with inlaid enamel or hammered with silver nails or gold-
plated studs, or painted with red lacquer as though the bootmaker had made a visit
to Japan, which perhaps was not impossible in 1605. One especially exotic pair of
gold painted shoes had been fretted with strips of ivory as though the cobbler had
carefully scrutinised the footwear of foreigners from the Middle East visiting
their countrymen on Guidecca.
Corina Assel was studying English literature. She was slowly making her way across
Europe to London. She had relatives on Guidecca. This Venetian island had serviced
exotic foreign visitors for a thousand years, but we must not imagine the name is
derived from the Italian word for jews; it more likely comes from �giudicati��
meaning the judged, a reference to the banishment to the island of malcontents and
troublesome aristocrats. Corina�s relatives on Guidecca, her mother�s first
husband�s brother and his two step-sons, were not very forthcoming in informal
communications. Corina saw more friendliness in their horse, a shockingly white
stallion with an ebony black head and jet black genitals. The horse was stabled
incongruously in a long garden paddock that ended in a quay that overlooked the
lunatic asylum on the island of San Clemente. The family supplemented the
stallion�s diet with hay rowed over from Torcello, and they exercised it on the
broad quay of the Fondamenta della Croce. Corina herself collected dandelion leaves
for the horse from the nineteenth century ruin of the Stucky Flour Mill. She walked
there at night with a large canvas sack, fearful of meeting the ghost of Stucky the
unpopular Miller who had been murdered by an aggrieved employee in 1910. Corina had
been born in Tel Aviv. Her grandfather had also been a miller, and in some unclear
way he had been Stucky�s competitor, and involved, also in an unclear way, with
Stucky�s sister, a loud, short lady given to prefering tall lovers. Corina Assel
was on the short side but it had never really worried her, and at nineteen, she had
not experienced sufficient lovers to have developed preferences.
Corina further contemplated the built-up shoes in the glass-case on the third
storey of the city museum. She thought about the courtesans who had worn them. She
sat down on a wooden Savanarola and stared at the shoes. It was peaceful in the
museum, with the quietness created by noise at a distance, in this case, the
conversation and footsteps of tourists walking down below in the Ala Napoleonica.
Corina Assel thought about walking on built-up shoes in 1605, the year of the
Gunpowder Plot and Shakespeare�s The Merchant of Venice. Guy Fawkes was a Venetian
Catholic and Shylock was a Venetian Jew. Were there courtesans walking on built-up
shoes in a play by Shakespeare? Why did Venetian courtesans walk on built-up shoes?
Venice was sometimes flooded. Corina had seen photographs of a flooded St Marks
Square decorated with duckboards, damp pigeons and children splashing. Were the
platform shoes for keeping the feet dry above the water when Venice was flooded?
High shoes were precarious. Walking to confession through fifteen centimetres of
water on decorated heels was not an entertaining walk for the walker, though
perhaps it was an entertainment for an onlooker. High heels threw the body forward,
drawing attention to the breasts and making the buttocks tremble. Corina touched
her buttocks. Perhaps the practical considerations of keeping the feet dry had
developed possibilities of display. But this was not just a question of a high
heel, the whole shoe in the glass-case was high. What about having high toes as
well as having high heels?� The platform shoes in the glass case were constructed
like small stilts.� Were Venetian courtesans of the early 1600s stilt-walkers
because they traditionally were all short women, like her grandfather�s mistress,
the sister of Stucky the Miller who had been shot? Were Venetian courtesans all
Sicilians or Neapolitans and consequently short? No, this could not be true. She
stared again at the boots and shoes. The platforms could be hollow. Perhaps they
would need to be hollow in order to keep the shoes light. You could perhaps keep
things in the hollow space within. Money, valuables, coins, jewels, poison,
letters.� Was there poison in the Merchant of Venice, or was the poison in Romeo
and Juliet which took place in Verona? Or Milan?
Your house-key. That was it. The built-up shoes had nothing to do with flooding or
being on the short side. The stilted shoes were a secret hiding-place for
valuables.
In 1943 Corina was 37, she had experienced sufficient lovers to have developed
choices, and now quietly nursed a preference for men with long noses, long pricks
and long hair. Each one of her most important lovers had possessed one of these
characteristics. Now she had found a lover with all three characteristics. She had
finally and indisputably fallen in love with a courier taking messages for the
Italian Resistance Movement between Torino and Genoa. He was a Venetian who kept
his long hair tidy with a red strip of ribbon. He had a very sharp long nose and
yellow eagle eyes. Corina had accomplished very little with her life until she met
this Venetian adventurer, now she was making up for lost time and did anything he
asked. She would have slit her own wrists if he had demanded it. She readily agreed
to become a spy and a courier. She had remembered her Venice contemplations in the
Museo Correr. She visited a cobbler who made her a pair of built-up shoes in red
leather with imitation side-pieces of off-white ivory. She began to carry messages
in her built-up shoes. She impersonated a whore. It was her lover�s idea. Whores
could travel incognito, their trade obviously advertised. Her Venetian lover posed
as her pimp. She took messages from Torino to Genoa and returned with gold. There
is only so much gold to be carried in a built-up shoe, but it was a valuable
exchange trade. Rings, bracelets, crucifixes. Then she developed the habit of
carrying other articles of wartime usefulness. Radio valves. Dollar bills.
Counterfeit postage stamps. Opium. Contraceptives. Nylons. Even bullets. Her lover
went to Bologna to harass German troop trains. They wrote to one another. His
letters were a great comfort and she carried her lover�s letters in her built-up
shoes along with the gold.
On a mission of small public importance but of great private import, she rowed in a
boat across the Festina Lake on a foggy winter�s morning, and the boat was shot
through with bullet holes. Corina�s red leather shoes floated because of the air-
filled cavities. The gold and the letters were confiscated. Corina was arrested and
made to whore in earnest. She kept her mouth tightly closed and they cut off her
feet to stop her escaping. Her letters were read. They contained sufficient
information to have her lover arrested and later shot at Marabotta, but not before
he was able to send Corina�s body to Guidecca for a memorial service and then to
transport her corpse to her birth-place in Tel Aviv for burial. To pay for so much
expensive attention to the corpse of his lover, the Venetian used some of the gold
Corina had once carried in her shoes. Much of the rest found its way to Genoa where
it was smelted by officials of the branch of the Bank of Milan and eventually
became the property of the Gestapo who sent it by rail to Munich from where it
arrived in Baden-Baden and the hands of Gustav Harpsch for a journey back to Italy
by black Mercedes to Bolzano.
The museum at Veneria Reale just outside Torino was completed in 2004, and the
museum�s designer, the English film-director Peter Greenaway, devised a historical
structure where a room was allocated for every year of the palace�s history from
1500 to the year of the museum�s inauguration. The room devoted to the year 1943
contained various local memorabilia, a first-draft manuscript of �If this is a man�
by Primo Levi, the suicide note of Arturro Foix, and, in a separate glass-case,
Corina Assel�s red leather built-up shoes.
�
GOLD
75 � The tram decision
Kaspar Asperto Fricker, an Austrian, an anglophile and an enthusiast for the
English language, seemed to want to confuse the word �Jews� with the word
�jewels�.� Being a good anti-Semetic Nazi Party member, it of course suited his way
of thinking admirably, for it underlined the self-evident truth that Judaism
somehow spawned wealth naturally and indiscriminately. Shake a Jew and jewels fell
out.
Armed with the invincibility of the language of the English, a superior race, he
walked the streets, shaking Jews. For a time he indeed prospered. He became rich in
trinkets. Golden thimbles from scared seamstresses, golden chains from small
frightened children, a gold earring from a widow with cataracts, a gold brooch from
a young woman who sobbed several nights away greiving its loss, a few golden coins
of the reign of Leopold V from an old man with memories. Treasure indeed. Fricker
gloated. He took his gains to a goldsmith who saw in him a potentially steady�
supplier. Every month a new consignment of fresh gold was smelted down and Kaspar
Asperto�s credit mounted.� With the goldsmith�s wry assistance, he calculated his
ambition, and he subsequently put in an order for one gold bar to consolidate his
thievery. The bar should be 100 ounces in weight, 16 centimetres long, eight
centimetres wide, one half centimetre thick. He bought himself a second-hand coat
which had a pocket just that size.� In due time he had one gold bar�s worth of
people�s misery. He took it home, clutching it tightly in his inside pocket as he
walked up Innsbruckerstrasse. He was knocked down by a tram-full of Jews. The
driver of the tram was a gentile from Manchester. Kaspar Asperto woke to an uneasy
and intermittant consciousness in hospital, lying on the white sheets of a neat
hospital bed but still wearing his overcoat. His boots had been taken off and his
gold bar had gone. The implications for Asperto were confusing. A gentile of
impeccable English origins, driving Jews in a public conveyance, had removed his
wealth with his consciousness.
The gold bar, harbinger of insights, had found another owner, a shopkeeper who had
found it in the Insbruckenstrasse gutter at the time of the accident. The
shopkeeper banked his find, visiting it frequently in the bank vault where he had
his own metal safe-deposit box with a key. He turned the gold bar over and over in
his fingers, and gave it a value far exceeding its potential. Then without fuss the
shopkeeper died and his wife inherited. She promptly saw more value in liquid cash
than she did in a gold bar, and she cashed in it, receiving far less than she
should, but she was not to know this. From a distance it was easily possible to see
that a gold bar has a changing value according to who owns it, who values it, who
wants it.� The bar became the property of the Deutche Bank in whose interests, a
gold bar should adopt a steady price, and it journeyed around a little, getting
used to various dark bank vaults before settling down in Baden-Baden. And it was
from Baden-Baden that as gold bar number 47 it was collected by Harpsch�s sergeant
and ended up in a car� crash near Bolzano, the city that knows it cannot be
depended upon to make a consistent value for a plate of spaghetti.
�
GOLD
76 � Breaking glass
Twelve-year old Claus Ulrichtermann went around breaking gentile glass in revenge
for crystal night. His best friend Herman had disappeared. Along with his bike. The
two of them used to ride the red-painted bicycle dangerously and joyfully all over
Maeterling. In his childhood grief and loss, Claus threw milk-bottles at lamp-posts
and beer bottles at trees, and he jumped up and down on the broken shards,
shredding his shoes till his mother threatened to send him out barefoot.
On a Sunday morning he threw a bottle full of disinfectant at a grocer�s window,
and was black-mailed into crime of a more serious nature. The grocer, a man of
florid complexion and Bavarian accent, made Claus into a gold-thief in return for
not reporting him to his mother for disobedience, and to the police for being an
incipient Jew-sympathiser.
Claus considered his new employment as part of the continuing battle to regain, or
this time, buy back his friend Herman. He made himself believe that sufficient gold
- as yet the sum unknown - could purchase Herman from the grip of whatever was
stopping him from returning to the streets of Maeterling, and a little more gold on
top of that could even bring back the red bicycle.
Claus was generally liked in the shops and houses of Maeterling. He was amusing to
talk to. He had enthusiasms that were very engaging. He had, as we have seen,
fierce loyalties. His mother�s neighbours were often amused to have him in their
parlours, larders, store-rooms and sitting-rooms, and were not too alarmed to find
him sometimes in their bathrooms and bedrooms, scratching the metal of the hot-
water taps with his finger-nail, sitting on their toilet-seat swinging his legs and
whistling, whilst he idled through the contents of their bathroom cupboard laid out
carefully on the linoleum. They even tolerated him biting their coins, the ones he
had borrowed to look at from under the mattress. They never thought he might be
gold-searching and gold-testing. Perhaps they might have guessed, because one time
he discovered his uncle holding his hand under the urine flow of a young shop
assistant in a walk-in cupboard, and he had to be bribed to keep his mouth shut. He
chose gold. And another time he laughed too loudly as he crouched behind a sofa
that moved rhythmically under the weight of the barber�s wife as she experimented
with the private parts of the butcher�s boy. Again he asked for gold to keep his
mouth shut. And his mother subsequently cooked meat on Tuesdays and Saturdays as a
result of the barber�s wife�s oversight,� and sometimes the butcher�s boy, a chubby
and fastidiously clean lad from Alsace, came to dine with them and sometimes he
slept overnight on the couch and sometimes he slept elsewhere in the house but
Claus was not always certain where. It was a big house. His father was dead. Killed
wih shrapnel in his belly. Apparently in Berlin. What shooting had there been in
Berlin? His father came back in a small box. How could his father have been so
small?
There were four bedrooms in his mother�s house, and his mother restlessly slept in
all of them in turn. Claus did once see the very clean butcher�s boy standing naked
in front of a window with his mother crouched in front of him, tieing bows in his
pubic hair. Claus watched fascinated. It was apparent even to Claus that not a few
women in Maeterling treated the butcher�s boy like a big baby, but a baby that did
not shit its pants, though they liked to change his underwear, did not demand to be
breast-fed but did not mind if a nipple was pushed into his mouth. He was someone
they could wash and fondle. For some unexplained reason, perhaps because these
women believed the butcher�s boy was a big baby, he was thought to be impotent,
which put him in even higher demand as a plaything. The women of Maeterling shared
him out and he grew chubbier on their cooking and caresses. It has to be said he
also grew more indolent, though the sexual attentions did not seem to spoil his
good nature. Husbands continued to tolerate him; they thought him harmless. It was
said that the coalman�s brother and Friedrich Ulianow, the undertaker, played with
him in their own particular way for comfort, their wives being such shrews. It was
even suggested that the Feulberts, husband and wife, hardware store-owners, had him
stay on every other Wednesday in their married bed, she to fondle as an absent
child, he to prove his virility because his prick always hurt his wife. But these
are all rumours and unlikely to be true. They should be included in the genre of
war-time stories, titillatory, escapist, a little scandalous, certainly passed
along the trails of gossip to turn people�s attention away from death, loss, grief
and war.
So Claus stole from his neighbours small items of gold that every Jewish household
had concealed somewhere or other. And due to lax and loose bribery, greed for
comforts of every description, complex Maeterling rivalries and friendships, and of
course a desire for a good local story, Claus got away with his petty crimes. And
the grocer made profits.
Then Claus became thirteen, and he read all at the same time, a gynaecological
text-book, a soldier�s sex-manual and an American comic of ill-repute, and he
recognised the new stirrings in his imagination for what they were. He began to
envy the butcher�s boy, and wanted his job, not as butcher�s boy, but as bed boy.
Claus now washed and bathed very often, kept his teeth well brushed, and decided to
became fatter. He ate pastries and sweets and took sugared tea. He needed to pay
for his wish to become fat. He began to keep the grocer�s gold, but such a little
of it that the grocer hardly noticed the drop in supply.
The butcher�s boy was now twenty and a little grosser. He had a double chin now and
his beard grew very quickly and he started to be very interested in motor-bikes. He
was becoming less fascinating. It was even said he was regularly seeing Pamela
Hardstanding who lived on the other side of the Hohenstauffen Bridge. Claus was
really ready to take over. But it did not happen. Claus was liked well enough but
not well liked enough in the right way. Women preferred to listen to Claus�s funny
stories than undress him before the fire on a rainy evening.
Then things suddenly got very difficult. Virtually all in a single weekend. Claus�s
mother was discovered to be pregnant, Pamela Hardstanding seduced Claus after
Friday evening cinema, the undertaker committed suicide, it was said, for reasons
of unrequited love, the widow on Francis Street discoverd her seven gold table-
napkin rings had disappeared, and Rommel lost the North African campaign. And the
grocer�s golden hoard of Claus-stolen trinkets was discovered by the Gestapo. The
gold was forcibly confiscated, rushed to Horstling because too many pieces had been
owned by Gentiles, and they were hurriedly smelted down. The resulting seven gold
bars were numbered FRT67 to 73, and placed in different banks. FRT 69 was
eventually trucked to Baden-Baden, and thence of course we know it ended up in
Bolzano, the one place in Italy they cannot cook good spaghetti.
�
GOLD
77 � The golden film
At the premiere of the Veit Harlan film Kolberg in Bremen in 1944, two thousand
members of the audience were repeatedly surprised by blemishes that landed like
explosions on the film surface. The blemishes were accompanied by rasping,
crackling noises that drowned the dialogue and added nothing of significance to the
music.� The interruptions were sufficient to persuade a section of the audience in
the most prestigious seats to visit the projectionist at the start of the second
hour and ask him to stop the film. The film was inspected on the projectionist�s
bench and indeed found to be damaged at intervals apparently because objects of a
not immediately discernable identity had been wound into the film reel. By some
extensive detective work it was discovered that those objects had been gold coins.
The making of the film Kolberg was Goebbel�s idea. This small town on the Baltic
had repulsed Napoleon in the 1800s, and could be a good example of courage in the
face of great adversity for the 1940s.� Little expense had been spared and 200,000
badly needed soldiers were pulled from badly needed defences of the Reich to appear
on celluloid. The propaganda virtues were obviously worth more than a military
Viktory.
It was discovered in Bremen that the Jewish projectionist had been stealing from
the box-office safe for eight months. He had converted his cash into gold coin. On
the threat of a police raid where over a hundred police officers were looking for a
child-kidnapper also believed to be a film enthusiast, the projectionist had
desperately sought a hiding-place for his valuables. He had wound his gold coins
into the Kolberg reel, thinking to recover them later before the premiere of the
film in front of the very distinguished audience. It was such an unlikely hiding-
place, the police would never have the imagination to consider it a place of
concealment.
The projectionist by inclination and political necessity was a recluse. He slept in
his projection-box. The cinema was open eighteen hours a day. There were no
windows, the world of day and night, bad weather and sunshine was an irrelevance to
him. He was a figure in the dark, scarcely ever seen, an obedient voice in the
gloom. No-one had considered the possibility of his Jewishness, because no-one,
apart from the manager, and the manager�s wife, knew he was there. The fact that
the manager�s wife was Jewish was surely relevant. There was an agreement between
husband and wife that the projectionist should be considered as her nephew.
If it was thought that the projectionist�s small financial chicanery was the only
irregularity surrounding the film, then that thought would be incorrect. The film
and its making had spawned various conspiracies. First, the assistant director took
bribes to permit soldiers to play in the film and avoid real military action,
second, the director was persuaded with financial inducements to film the material,
not at Kolberg, but further up the coast at Telgeter, where the local craftsman and
catereres would stand to benefit considerably. Thirdly, a large proportion of the
original film negative had been bought on the black-market, and had proved to be
faulty, having been stored badly, and consequently subject to partial exposure. So,
in the face of such large-scale chicanery, what significance in all this was the
projectionist�s thirty pieces of gold coin, the produce of stealing from the box-
office cash-desk?
Well, it had spoilt a public showing of the film. Disgruntled youths, excited by
the propaganda purposes of the film, and eager to punish the enemy within as well
as the enemy without, used it as an excuse� to burn down the cinema The
projectionist himself was dragged out into the night streets and stoned to death
with cobbles ripped from the Bremen pavements. The next day the cinema-manager was
sent to Dachau for sleeping with a Jewish woman whose status as his wife was deemed
irrelevant.
Before he died the projectionist had been forcibly persuaded to reveal where he had
hidden his pathetic horde of gold coins before he had committed them to the coils
of the film reel. It was in a pile of hair. He had collected the hair of the wife
of the cinema manager, stealing into her bathroom,from her comb and her hair-brush
and her underwear. He had wanted to make himself a nest of the hair, a love-nest to
sleep in. He loved the cinema manager's wife. But he loved her like an unloved son
loved her. For he was in fact her illegitimate son, product of a liason with a
Jewish lover, a film director, long ago the victim of anti-Semitism.
The gold coins were taken to the bank. They were smelted down with a consignment of
French gold taken from the Hermitage, once deposited there by Napoleon; curious
ironies as a background to the making of a film that used Napoleon as a bogey-man.
The resulting gold bars reached Baden-Baden sometime in January 1945, and were
distributed among the three vaults. Harpsch and his assistant theives certainly
loaded a gold bar� that was partly constituted of the Kolberg bounty into the black
Mercedes, and it travelled to Bolzano, a city so far north in Italy it was almost
Austrian, and Austrians would never seriously claim to be able to cook spaghetti
with the true excellence expected of bone fide Italians.
�
�
�
�
GOLD
78 � Storks
The Frobischers had a large garden in Deventer, and had laid it out in the Dutch
manner, on a sort of reduced French pattern but more practical, that is to say, the
garden beds grew more vegetables than flowers, and the trees were apples, pears,
plums and almonds and not silver birch and laburnam which look entertaining, but
their produce is not habitually eaten by humans. In the middle of the garden was
the chimney-stack of a dieing factory that had boiled squid to produce a blue dye.
The smell of boiling squid is unpleasant and had to be wafted high in the air,
hence a high chimney. The factory had been dismantled; who needs squid for blue dye
in 1939? All that was left was the chimney, a privy and a porch. The privy had been
converted into a chicken coop, and the porch was now a summer-house. Both were
practical buildings, but the chimney had been kept strictly for the birds. It had
been wrapped around with six iron bands to make sure the stones did not come apart.
It had be allowed to stay because migrant storks had fancied its height and had
chosen it as a nesting-site. Storks mean good luck. They mean fertility and
plentitude and babies. The storks came every year to visit the Frobischer garden
and to fill their stomachs with frogs and moles from the Deventer fields and water-
meadows.
The nest of a stork is large and untidy, an interweaving of sticks lifted sometimes
to a height of twenty metres, and fixed in place by two red beaks, a great deal of
skill, and the assistance of good weather. The presence of storks, they say, is
always an encouragement for other birds, perhaps they sense that storks are highly
valued by humans and the benevolent toleration will extend to them. Sparrows and
chaffinchs built their nests within the stork pile itself, and rooks and jackdaws
roosted in the neighbouring church tower. Swifts and swallows regularly filled the
skies across the garden, and blackbirds sang on the roof-tops late into a summer
night.
In the spring of 1938 the storks had again returned. They cossetted themselves by
much excessive clattering of beaks, and much synchronous stretching and bending of
their necks to demand one another�s attention. They stood together, one bird doing
very much what the other bird was doing. Both peering over the edge of the nest in
a simultaneous and synchronous movement to watch the gardener below pick the first
lettuces. The storks of the spring of �39 were truly a pair, proving, in their
unconditional mutual devotion, the strength of the myth of fecundity. The
Frobischer family were great stork-watchers. Storks bring babies. Mrs Frobischer
found herself pregnant with twins even though she was 44 years old and had hairs on
her chin. Mr Frobischer was delighted. He bought his wife an extravagant silk
night-gown covered in 250 ounces of embroidered gold thread patterened in the
imagery of birds. Mrs Frobischer was to wear it in her full pregnancy. August 17th
1939 was to be the birth-date.
In a story like this one, the reader will probably guess what happens next. Storks
and Frobischer will become united. They will share a same destiny.
Mrs Frobischer went into an easy childbirth. She had twins, both had red birthmarks
at the back of their necks, storkbites, the mark where the red bill had held them.
A bomb hit the Dutch garden and felled the chimney. Two large white eggs were
smashed. One Frobischer child died and the other was brain damaged.
The storks were not standing on their untidy pile of twigs when the bomb exploded,
but they returned soon after, astonished and alarmed. They lingered in the
surrounding meadows for a few days, returning at intervals to see if the chimney
had righted itself from the bomb-crater in the vegetable-bed. Finally then
departed, perhaps to North Africa. Mrs Frobischer locked herself in the chicken-
coop and pulled out the gold threads from her pregnancy dress. She wound the
threads around her fingers so tightly that they bled. She died of blood poisoning.
Her husband was certain that the cause of death was grief, but a �death by grief�
is not usually committed to a death certificate. The gold threads were taken away
by the gardener who was worried that the chickens might think they were worms. He
wound them around a spindle and gave the spindle to his wife who exchanged it for a
pound of butter on the black market. A round-up of valuables by the Deventer
Gestapo amassed sufficient gold to make a journey to the smelter a worthwhile
proposition. The smelter made a thin gold bar, hardly worth packaging on its own,
but it was slipped into a brown envelope and dropped into a brief-case, and lodged
in the Deutsche bank in Munster. It arrived eventually in Baden-Baden as Nazi
resources grew low, and joined other gold bars for a journey to Bolzano in a car
driven by a German officer eager to gather up his lost child and take her to South
America.
�
GOLD
79 � Train gold
At around eleven o�clock on the evening of the 15th February 1939, seven policemen
attached to the railway-station at Truroa fell upon a bonanza. They were herding
newly rounded-up Jews into the cellars that used to be the livestock yards of the
railway station. They were stealing the Jewish wedding-rings, and knocking out
their gold teeth, when they came across Hermann Hesserling who had just got married
two hours before. His father-in law had been dismayed that his new relative had
such a mouth of bad teeth. He did not want his grandchildren to have to ask awkward
questions over the wedding photographs. Hermann had not worried. Afterall he had
already captured his bride and she apparently had not minded about the contents of
his mouth. His future father-in-law, as a wedding present, had paid for Hermann to
visit the dentist. Hermann had 14 gold teeth fitted in seven appointments, the last
one on the eve of his marriage. His bruised lower jaw had still ached when he had
officially kissed his bride. Curiously of course it could be said that the interior
of Hermann�s mouth was now hygenically safe, but, his best friend, if he had had a
best friend, would have been duty bound to say that the interior of Hermann�s
mouth, now frequently glimpsed when Hermann excessively smiled in his present state
of happiness, was aesthetically monstrous. A very cynical observer could have said
that the Gestapo Police at the railway station had done Hermann�s mouth an
aesthetic favour, except that now the bones of his lower jaw was smashed, the upper
jaw was splintered in three places, his nose was broken and his face was rapidly
losing blood he could ill afford to lose. Moreover his expensive hired wedding-suit
was covered in blood stains. And he was screaming.
The combined collected valuables of the evening�s railway station entertainment
were sorted and shared out and placed into seven sealed, unaddressed, brown
envelopes, one envelope per policeman which had also meant two each of Hermann
Hesserling�s new gold teeth per person. The envelopes were temporarily stored in a
mailbag under the police-counter.
There was a regular police inspection of the station at midnight when the place
became noisy with drunks, railway officials changing shift, refugees without a
place to sleep, the homeless, and the departure of the regular train to Hamburg
with three extra cattle-trucks added at the rear which would be shunted off at
Drogsburg to be attached to a train travelling to Belsen.
On this particular night, in this regular midnight station-mayhem, twenty mailbags
full of small parcels, letters and postcards were dumped in the police-office of
the railway-station because of a road accident to a postal truck, and twenty-one
mail-bags were picked up at one o�clock the following morning. They were all
correctly shipped to the destinations on their name-tags. The mailbag containing
the Jewish artefacts ended up in Frankfort.� The unaddressed envelopes and their
contents were soon discovered, and shipped to a bank for safe-keeping, where they
were examined by the bank manager and handed over as party funds to the local
Gestapo who sent them to Meiden where they were smelted as quickly as possible so
as to make the gold untraceable. From Meiden, as gold bars, this little confiscated
hoard of now unrecognisable and unidentifiable Jewish property went to Berlin and
then to Charleroi and then to Antwerp and then to Brussels and then to Strasbourg
and then to Cologne in a zig-zagging motion across Western Europe, as though it did
not want to settle, so ashamed was it to contain Hermann�s teeth. Finally it
travelled to� Baden Baden where they became the property of Lieutenant Gustav
Harpsch who died in a car accident outside Bolzano, the one place in Italy where
they could not satisfactorily make spaghetti.
Hermann Hesterling died on his wedding-night. His bride died the next day, from
injuries relevant to her having thrown herself under a train.
�
GOLD
80 � Crystal collection
Joseph Boam had a collection of gold and crystal ornaments that had been made at
his grandfather�s factory in Rimini on the Italian Adriatic coast in the 1890s. In
1936, the ornaments were kept in three glass cases in Joseph�s furniture shop in
Leipzig. They were not for sale. Joseph had for a long time specialised in office
furniture and his Italian origins had been submersed in German cultural priorities.
The Italian family glass business had been sold, and Joseph�s grandfather had been
buried outside of town in the Leipzig Jewish cemetery.
The gold and crystal ornaments were just a memento. They had been made as virtuoso
examples of fine craftsmanship for merchandising purposes, and had been exhibited
in the Italian pavilion at the 1921 Barcelona Trade Fair� The collection consisted
of 46 pieces, most of them in the shape of animals entering Noah�s ark, though
there were two palm trees and a figure representing Mrs Noah, and an angel known
with affection in the Boam family as the Angel of the Rains. A male elephant, a
female baboon and Noah himself were missing.
Joseph�s grandfather, Amos, had insisted on the iconographic authority of the
pieces, and the gender identifying anatomy of the animals had been explicit to
illustrate the thoroughness of the original biblical source material - and the
animals went in two by two - by a man who also admired Charles Darwin and respected
the laws of Natural Selection. The penis of the male elephant and the protuberant
breasts of the female baboon had been broken off by the prudish Barcelona Trade
Fair Authorities. Amos had subsequently thrown them away. The authorities had also
interferred on behalf of children in considering the crocodiles with their open
mouths as too terryifyng for young imaginations, and Noah had been stolen, perhaps
by a enthusiast who had admired Noah�s virility, for Amos had somehow identified
Noah and his wife with Adam and Eve, which,� iconography considered, was not so
inaccurate, Mr and Mrs Noah being the second creation, so to speak, of Man and his
Wife on Earth.
Though the main purpose of the manufacture of the pieces was to exhibit high
prowess in the manipulative carving of glassware, each piece had gold accessories.
Amos had sought to gild the lily. There was an impression that he wanted to raise
the value of his product in aesthetic and financial terms by the association of
gold. Goldsmiths have a higher status in the aesthetic marketplace than the makers
of cut glass-crystal.� Consequently Mrs Noah had gold hair, a gold rolling-pin and
golden sandals, all of the animals had gold eyes, the palm trees had gold leaves,
the angels had golden hair and wings and halos, the monkeys gold tails, the lions
golden teeth and the tigers golden claws.
It was said in the Exhibition Catalogue that the ark itself had been entirely
fashioned from gold, but that architectural item had long vanished.
The Nazi enthusiasts had marched into Joseph�s furniture shop and had obliterated
the three glass cases with their Rimini crystal exhibits in about seven swipes of a
gun butt. The thugs had gathered up the golden eyes and tails, claws and teeth and
swept them into a hat taken from the back of the washroom. They had poked Joseph in
the stomach with a sharp object, and had passed on to the shop next door to take
their fill of pastrami. Joseph�s neighbour also had Italian origins, but from
Forli, a city further to the west of Rimini, along the old Roman Road that ran east
to west across the breadth of Italy. Joseph bled for several hours until the wife
of his Forli associate found him, and dragged him by his trouser belt along the
pavement to another neighbour of Italian Jewish extraction, a tailor originally
from Bologna which lies even further to the west of Forli at a distance equal to
the distance between Rimini and Forli. The smudged blood trail along the pavement
in Leipzig was a source of fascination to the neighbourhood children who dared one
another to touch it.
The thugs passed on down the street of the Italian community of shopkeepers and
traders, abusing, stealing, threatening, wounding. The victims of their sadistic
mayhem made a catalogue of Italian exiles, itemising its way west up the Via Emilia
- Rimini, Forli, Bologna, Modena, Parma, Piacenza. When the mauraders came to a
hatter from Milan, they were exhausted, drunk and bored with Italians. The rout of
the Italian Jewish exiles along the Via Emilia was complete. The hooligans bordered
a tram and went to look for Polish Jews.
The intricate gold details of antediluvian mythology continued to have a history
because of the impossibility of deciphering their meaning. Removed from their
crystal glass context in Joseph�s furniture-shop, they were a mystery. They were
constantly put aside until someone could give them a satisfactory identity. They
were passed on to a Gestapo chartered accountant who had once upon a time collected
gold weights, but his ignorance on this particular subject was complete. They were
just simply in the end to be regarded as spoils of war and they were delivered
eventually to Baden-Baden.
The Jewish gold and crystal maker, Amos Boam from Rimini, turned in his grave, and
turned in his grave quite literally because the tombs in the Leipzig Jewish
cemetery where he was buried were ploughed over. Joseph Boam, his furniture-shop
proprietor grandson died of his wound in the belly, and was buried in an unmarked
grave.
�
GOLD
81 � The Blue room
At his interrogation in the Blue Room, Mikkail Frostmann attempted a most
complicated activity. He contrived to get the American chewing-gum out of his mouth
without Gestapo Officer Golarche noticing. Golarche had turned to the window at the
sound of a female scream. Mikkail contrived to get the wedding ring off his finger
without Golarche noticing. Golarche had stood up to break wind, and his gaze had
glazed as he had parted his legs and stared at the floor for that comforting
moment. And Mikail contrived to get the chewing gum to stick the wedding ring onto
the underside of the wooden desk behind which he had been told to sit.� Golarche
had sipped a mouthful of hot coffee and turned, disgusted and angry, to spit the
sugarless liquid into the tin waste-paper basket.
The American chewing-gum was a superior brand. It stuck remorselessly.
Gestapo officer Golarche was interested in married men. He was excited by the idea
of masculine sexual apparatus that had been used. And he wanted to know that his
sexual interest in these men would hurt the interests of their wives. The married
men who left Golarche�s company often had their testicles raked with a metal comb,
slashed with a razor-blade, opened up like the petals of a flower, or smashed with
a wooden mallet once used by an auctioneer. Golarche, before the war, had been an
auctioneer. He kept the mallet on his deak; a rememberance of former times. The
married men who left Golarche�s company were certainly beyond the possibilities of
further fathering.
So the Blue Room possessed a grand desk and on its underside a collection of rings
stuck together by American chewing-gum in a bee-skep-like agglutination, ring on
ring, clinging upside down, defying gravity much as it had helped to defy
Golarche�s sexual sadism.
Snow fell in November and the Blue Room grew cold. The American chewing-gum became
brittle and a ring became unstuck. It fell off. Golarche was sitting on his chair
watching his most recent victim, the shivering, naked Musa Leopold, a 19-year old,
newly married farmer�s son, sob in anticipation of violence. The ring hit the floor
with a gentle chime and it rolled in a wide circle towards the window. Master and
victim watched the ring stop, spin, and topple. The hiding place was revealed.
Golarche realised he had been tricked so many many many times, as many times as
there were rings under the table. He began to rant for revenge. He shouted out the
names of those who had tricked him, men who had hidden their wedding-rings to
divert his sexual attentions. Musa, the thin young farmer, killed the officer by
hitting him over the head with the auctioneer�s malet. The officer�s threat of
revenge went unfulfilled. Musa was sentenced to death. They hung him with wire.
From the time he had bludgeoned Golarche to his death five days later, they had not
let Musa put his clothes on. By the time of his death this man had suffered every
conceivable humiliation, most of them sexual. In huge defiance, five thousand
people came out of hiding to give Musa Leopold a hero�s burial. His grave stands by
the highway at Frosterling. Barren women, wishing for children, still put flowers
on his grave.
The accumulated wedding-rings were scraped from the bottom of the desk and thrown
into the office boiler to rid them of their American contamination. They were put
into a sack and sent to Baden-Baden, to make a contribution to Lieutenant Harpsch�s
imaginative project to rescue his lost daughter from the mountain gnomes of
Switzerland.
�
GOLD
82 � The heaps and piles man
�I am a ten-pile man. Piles and heaps. Heaps and piles. I like to see things in
heaps. And piles. First pile, coats and hats and gloves. Second pile, frocks and
dresses. Third pile, trousers and skirts. Fourth, underwear, neatly folded so as I
can�t see the shit-stains. Fifth, shoes and boots and little tiny booties. Six,
money, all kinds. Seven, gold rings, only gold. Eight, other valuables. Ninth pile,
your fear and vomit. Tenth pile, semen, if you like. Spill your filthy seed upon
the ground, you miserable swine, so I can stamp your progeny into endless
oblivion.�
He was strange man, made up of apocalyptic Christianity, complicated sexual
desires, love of astronomy, hatred of the Jews which was largely programmed, and a
passion for order.
The intimidated crowds of docile Jews did as he commanded. They threw off their
clothes and their dignity. He threw petrol on the underwear and set it alight. He
scattered the shoes, kicked the coats, rubbed the womens� faces in the shit,
collected the gold, sifted through the valuables, shot all the men, garroted all
the women, and pushed all the screaming children into the smoking lime-trench. And
he ate his dinner off china. And he smoked a cigar for breakfast. And he died, aged
71, in his bed in Brazil in 1963.
The rings were reduced to anonymity in a gold bar at Baden-Baden which was
discovered with 91 other gold bars near Bolzano where they cannot make a
satisfactory dish of spaghetti, and apparently throw it in the streets in piles. Or
heaps. Some say the heaps or piles are graded according to an order of ten. For
tramps, dogs, pigeons, cats, rats, to block the drains, fertilise the flower-beds,
make mould .....you can think of the rest? What can you do with unedible spaghetti?

�
GOLD
83 � Scarecrow
Francis-Pierre Pilaterre made scarecrows. He dressed them to look like the kings
and queens of France. He set them up in the fields to talk to one another and to
scare the rooks and the crows.
Four seeds in a row,
One for the rook,
One for the crow,
One to rot and one to grow.
He had heard his grandfather sing this melancholy song in a low, flat cracked voice
as he looked at his reflection in the kitchen cabinet mirror to wax the upturned
ends of his white military moustache� with an Austrian sweet-smelling yellow pomade
squeezed from a lead tube.
Francis-Pierre dressed Louis XIV impeccably. Louis XIV had a moustache. He dressed
Marie-Antoinette shabbily. Marie-Antoinette had a moustache. He gave Louis XVI a
watch-chain. His best creation was Louis-Phillipe; he had exactly captured this
pseudo-king�s fat and pear-shaped body. He had cut Louis-Phillipe�s fat face out of
a turnip. He had given the kings carrots for pricks, and the queens swedes for
breasts, except for Marie-Antoniette who came breastless. And since he hated
monarchies and royalty and crowns and crown-princes and princesses he opened fire
on his scarecrows regularly with a rusty and noisy 1914 rifle whose bark was more
effective than its bite.
Stupid old man.
Not so stupid. His scarecrows were his treasury. He filled the pockets of his
selected scarecrow royalty with valuables stolen from Jews in the wealthy suburbs
of Colmar. Perhaps he opened fire on his royal scarecrows to frighten not only the
birds, but also to frighten away snooping theives.
Francis-Pierre was not a farmer. The fields in which he planted his scarecrows were
not his fields. He and his wife made a living selling firewood and making ladders,
broom-handles and coal-skuttles. When he was a boy the local farmers had given
Francis-Pierre a few centimes for every rook and crow he had brought down with his
sling shot and hung on a string on their field-gates. Since that time, Francis-
Pierre�s animosity towards rooks and crows had taken curious turns. A broken right
arm, his right sling-shot arm, casualty of a fall from one of his own ladders in an
apple tree, had mended badly. His sling-shot aim was now wild. He took to tending
rooks and crows, not annihilating them. Then he married and his wife started
growing asparagus and he again started to scare the rooks and the crows, but this
time in a more friendly way, not with stones, but with images of royalty and the
sound of a noisy gun.
And then the Nazis shot his wife because she put her tongue out at their antics.
Francis-Pierre went crazy. He stripped his scarecrow kings and queens and dressed
them like German soldiers, and opened fire on them mercilessly. Then the imitation
German soldiers made of straw and branches and agricultural rubbish were not real
enough for him. Francis-Pierre went out at night to do better. He caught his
military victims off-guard, when they were suffering or enjoying� moments of
private distraction or private grief or private ecstacy, or� when they were wrapped
in contemplation of the world�s wonders, mysteries or anxieties. He garotted a
soldier who was quietly stroking his prick in a dark alley, he used an axe on a
corporal weeping in the night for remembered trysts with his fiance on her kitchen
floor, he knifed a sentry dozing in a privy with his trousers around his ankles, he
shot an officer writing a poem to his dying wife by candelight on an upturned
bucket, he battered a sergeant who had his arms around a tree whilst crying
obscenities to the moon. His victims fitted his sense of abject and unconsolable
melancholy.
He made a collection of thirty-one of these hapless, unhappy-before-death, happy-
after death soldiers propped up on stakes, dotting the cold winter fields. In
memory of his melancholy grandfather, he gave them all upturned white moustaches
made from frayed string smoothed into points with butter, and he sang his
grandfather�s ditty over their corpses.
The Germans never caught him. When they came looking for him, he lay down in a
ploughed field in his dirty, mud-spattered jacket and trousers, and they could have
marched passed him at two metres and still not seen him. The military police did
collect Francis-Pierre�s bullet-ravaged, mouldering scarecrows, and they pocketed
the trinkets they found in the scarecrow pockets and stuffed arms and inside their
pitted helmets. The gold was sorted out and sent to Baden-Baden for Lieutenant
Harpsch�s eventual collection.
Francis-Pierre�s last dramatic action was to dress himself as Kaiser Wilhelm II,
who had the largest waxed moustache he had ever seen. He filled his pockets with
gunpowder broken out of the cartridges of his 1914 rifle, and he stood in front of
Grunewald�s Crucifixon Tripdych in the cathedral at Colmar, brought out of
protective storage in the Hohkonigsburg for six days over Easter to demonstrate to
the faithful that it was undamaged. Just in time, he was seen lighting a cigar in
front of the melancholy tortured Christ, as a prelude to lighting his waxed and
flammatory moustache which was a fuse to his trouser-pocket. Francis-Pierre was
hurriedly frog-marched out of the cathedral by two burly sergeants and pushed into
a gutter where he exploded in a shower of sparks.
�
�
�
�
GOLD
84 � Navel gold
In Bologna they make a pasta called tortellini. Young women with very small and
nimble fingers are highly valued to wrapt the small pieces of pasta dough around a
minced morcel of cooked pork flavoured with a little cheese, garlic and rosemary.
All the daughters of families who own restaurants in Bologna are doomed to spend
their nights in the kitchen making tortellini, and they traditionally marry early
to escape the pasta slavery.
Patrizia was the 16 year old daughter of Maria and Federico Olmi who kept the
Nicodema Fratelli Restaurant off the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna. Patrizia was in
love with Domenico Zeno who stood on the seat of his bicycle propped against the
wall of the back kitchen of the restaurant, peering in the kitchen window at nights
to keep Patrizia company. It could be said that they had fallen in love through an
open window. And it could be said that they exactly knew the moment of falling in
love - three minutes past one o�clock on 7th May 1940. It was the moment when
Domenico first fell off his bicycle.
Domenico started watching Patrizia making tortellini to pass the time, as a joke,
because he could not sleep, because he had left his house-key in his bedroom and
dare not wake his parents to let him in. Watching people make tortellini palls
after five minutes. Only smiling, patronising, ingratiating foreign tourists find
it entertaining, and that is largely because fastidiously making tortellini seems a
radical waste of valuable time.
�How can these people dedicate so much time to such a time-consuming, fiddly,
unnecessary occupation?�
�Repetitive and unimaginative�.
�And it all ends up as shit in the end�.
Domenico had watched tortellini makers ever since he was seven months old and could
sit up straight. The activity held no magic for him. But Patrizia was magical and
he forgave her for boring him with tortellini-making. Domenico and Patrizia had
known one another since childhood. They had attended the same school, though in
different classes. Domenico was seven months older than Patrizia.� They had swum
regularly with about fifteen other children in the same swimming-pool. Maria had
once seen Domenico naked, peeing into a priest�s hat. He was doing it to earn
himself three white mice wagered by an atheist in return for an anti-clerical
gesture. Patrizia was annoyed at Domenico at first. She worked fast when she
concentrated. She could be in bed by two o�clock if she worked without interruption
and without thinking about anything at all. Then she began to enjoy Domenico�s
visits, and then she was irritated if he did not show up with his curly head poking
over the windowsill before midnight.
After several weeks they had arrived at a special sort of inconsequential bantering
vocal race designed to try to impress one another. With his chin on the window-sill
and her head bent over her pasta-board, their conversation consisted largely in
introducing a subject or a proposition, debating it to discover what each other
thought about it in general, what were the weaknesses and the strengths of their
ideas on the matter, and then deciding to� taking sides, beginning to argue
ferociously and with greater and greater heat until they reached an impasse, a
stuttering rage or complete and sulky silence. Being good Catholics they of course
debated all the Catholic mysteries, most of them very familiar, though some of a
sort of secular Catholicism not discussed in the Bible or the catechisms or the
service or indeed in the Vatican, did priests have to wash, did the pope have a
penis, what to think about when eating the host, did nuns shave all their body, is
it possible to walk to Rome on your knees, if Man was made in God�s image, did God
have a navel? If God was Jewish originally, was He circumcised? And if he was, and
Man was made in His image, why didn�t male babies come into the world with a little
of their pricks missing?
The two of them sometimes took sides against their better judgement. Patrizia, for
example, sincerely believed in Virgin Birth but was forced, because she was
determined to argue against Domenico because one night he was being far too
belligerent and arrogant, to deny it. She took an extremely superior tone
especially when she was surprised and shocked to find that Domenico actually
believed a woman gave birth through her anus. He had been told somewhere, probably
by his elder brother, that the only way to explain Virgin Birth was to say that the
Virgin Mary had given birth through her arse. Patrizia would have been even more
surprised to have found out that only eighteenth months previously Domenico had
believed that a woman gave birth through her navel, though Domenico himself had to
admit it was difficult to explain why men had navels, though there again, men had
nipples and did not breast feed. It alarmed him that, who knows, perhaps men did
have to breast feed on occasions.
Patrizia and Domenico debated the marriage sacrament, and because Domenico said
marriage was easy, and you could now get a divorce like his aunt in Milan, Patrizia
said it was difficult. Soon, totally dismayed at herself, she found herself saying
because marriage was difficult and troubling and binding forever, it should be
banned. Domenico lost interest in the marriage discussion, and was surprised that
Patrizia got so furiously heated and white in the face that she left the kitchen
for at least five minutes and then came back with red eyes. Her denial of marriage
had deeply shocked her. For several moments she had been convinced she was godless,
and she was waiting for God to strike her dead. Better He should strike her dead in
the dark of the cellar than in the bright lights of the kitchen before a witness.
They discussed the war. Patrizia disliked Americans. Domenico worshipped them. But
their advocacy was again to do with pride rather than conviction. Patrizia in fact
liked American movies, American sun-dried raisins and the look of a green dollar,
and Domenico was rather frightened and intimidated by the thought of Americans and
their reputation for drinking fresh orange juice, having bright teeth and easy
smiles. When they finally came and they surely would, he would have to lose a great
many bad habits, like, for example, talking to Patrizia deep into the nights. All
Americans were in bed before eleven o�clock because they had this saying �An hour�s
sleep before midnight was worth two after�. Patrizia asked Domenic to spell
Massachusetts, Mississippi and Arkansan He failed. He even put two fs in
California. She asked him if he knew why America was called America, which he could
not answer, and then completely surprised him by saying that America was named
after an Italian. Domenico flatly denied it and insulted her with some words that
he had recently learnt from his brother and which Patrizia did not know but guessed
were very rude.
They discussed Mussolini. Patrizia got caught saying he was a good man because he
always kissed babies, bathed three times a day, and was so clean he wore silk
underwear. He even wore perfume. That made Domenico shriek with contempt, and
Patrizia had to sush him in case he woke her parents. But Domenico had already
fallen off his bike in a fury that owed more to his elder brother�s opinion than
his own. He sat on the pavement beneath the restuarant kitchen window nursing his
shin. More in pain and shame than because he believed it, half shouting and half
whispering, he said that Mussolini was an Albanian, had two mistresses, shaved his
head to hide the fact that he could not grow hair and planned to live in Buckingham
Palace with the Queen of England when he lost the war.
Patrizia fell in love with Domenico at this moment because she realised that he did
not really know what he was talking about, and had the ability to force her to deny
what she knew to be true, which she presumed, remembering her parents, was a recipe
for a long, happy and permanent relationship.
Domenico had smashed his ankle on the bike pedal on his way down to the pavement.
It was quite some way. The window ledge was some twoand a half metres from the
pavement. Domenico had screwed the bicycle seat as high as it would go, propped it
solidly against the restaurant wall and then stood precariously on the seat so that
he cold lean over the kitchen siull, resting the length of his arms along the
window-ledge propping his chin on the sill or his wrists.
Patrizia came to the window and watched Domenico pick himself and his bicycle off
the cobbles. He said he had to go home because it was late but it was an inadequate
excuse. He just wanted to go around the corner where Patrizia could not see him to
rub his smashed ankle and lick his wounds. Patrizia, full of a great spasm of love,
watched him walk away, fully aware that he was trying not to limp or show her his
tear-stained face.
After that first fall, Domenico often fell off his bicyle, his legs cramped by the
balancing act. Patrizia�s mother sometimes asked her daughter about the strange
marks on the painted plaster under the window, and the pieces of broken silver
bicycle lamp that sometimes littered the pavement. But the ice had really broken.
Within days he was� touching her fingers covered in flour. He had read in a tourist
guide that tortellini was sometimes called the navel of Venus. He asked Patrizia to
show him her navel. After three weeks of asking she came to the window and lifted
her blouse. The tourist books were not incorrect. Patrizia had a navel like a
neatly folded piece of Bologna tortellini.� Three further weeks and Domenico was
kissing that navel, leaning far into the kitchen over the window-sill, such that
his feet lost contact with his bicycle seat and the bicycle crashed to the paving
stones, smashing yet another silvered lamp, and leaving his legs dangling in the
air.
Then Domenico�s elder brother was arrested for ant-fascist activities which were
really only general anti-establishment behaviour, and he was put in jail and badly
treated because he was cheeky and then he escaped and ran off into the mountains.
Domenico became some sort of messenger boy between his elder brother and his
worried parents, carrying food paniers and clean underwear, and then food and
newspapers and letters to other partisans in the mountains. Then Domenico�s elder
brother became serious in his hatred of Mussolini and Domenico started carrying
money and guns.
In a city like Bologna, even in wartime, nobody really stopped you if you were
carrying food, and so Domenico soon involved Patrizia, and she was spending nights
not wrapping up morcels of cooked pork flavoured with a little cheese, garlic and
rosemary but wrapping up gold coins and gold earrings in small packets of pasta.
Necessarily her pasta packages were growing larger, the exceptional finesse and
experience of her very small and nimble fingers were over-qualified. But she
willingly helped the war effort by willingly helping her young lover.
Very early one Tuesday morning, or as they both saw it, very late one Monday night,
Domenico got Patrizia to wrap his mother�s gold earrings, his Milanese aunt�s
redundant wedding-ring and the three christening chains of his three neices in
pieces of tortellini, and he took them in a hot broth in a thermos flask wrapped in
silver foil saved from countless bars of chocolate on a train ride to his
grandmother�s house in the mountains. The train was ambushed. Its passengers were
suspected of conniving in the sabotage. Their possessions were searched. Convinced
his family fortune would be discovered, Domenico quickly ate his tortellini,
burning the roof of his mouth. In the mellee and confusion he escaped into the pine
woods beside the railway tracks. He suffered great stomach cramps. He sat in a
brook beside a highway and defecated into his shirt, using it as a fine seive to
recover the valuables. His bloody defecation ressembled a Bolognese sauce. He died
in great pain. He was found by two whores who, more than familiar with the vagaries
of male behaviour and habits, took pity on his soiled body and covered him with
pine needles. They collected the jewels that had passed through his body, and left
it to a vagrant to uncover the body again and cut open his stomach to search for
more. The vagrant was a silversmith�s grandson; he recognised their value and sold
them in Modena to buy himself a car to take him to his favourite drinking bar and
his mother�s grave in Bolzano.
The citizens of Bolzano well know that tortellini is not spaghetti.
Quite unbelievably, considering her resilient character and the fact that she was
only sixteen and had far to go in life, Patrizia became a nun; if she wasn�t going
to marry Domenico she certainly wasn�t going to be a pasta slave .
�
GOLD
85 � Tree gold
Coming down from her bedroom in her nightgown to make coffee, Alison Hanneker raked
the fire and found a gold ring in the ashes of her hearth. The ring was inscribed
with the words �With this ring I wed thee Forever�. �With this ring�, and �Forever�
were inscribed on the inside, and �I wed thee�, was inscibed on the outside. The
ring was still warm from the ashes. Alison slipped the ring on her finger. It
fitted. It stuck. She was amused. She had difficulty taking it off. Where had it
come from?
She wore the ring in the house. When she left the house she put the ring in a
drawer in the key-cupboard in the hall. One day she forgot to take the ring off
when she went to the office, or perhaps she had not forgotten, but had begun to
enjoy wearing the ring as evidence of an imaginary married status. She perhaps
wanted other people to see. She was a virgin in body and experience. She was
twenty-seven. She had just taken up a new job as the chief receptionist of a firm
of solicitors employed in divorce law. In 1943, Hitler did not approve of divorce,
or women working away from the home, or adultery. Presumably he also did not
approve of imaginary marriages. Nobody at the firm of solicitors was sure of
Alison�s true marital status. But to tell the truth no-one was interested in her
enough to bother to ask. Alison shared an office with a sixty-three year old
spinster, Hilda Goestal, who had been beautiful in her youth. Hilda had been
employed by the firm for thirty years as the proprietor�s most respected secretary.
She knew more about divorce law than her employer. She saw the ring on Alison�s
finger, remarked on its inscription, and said she was convinced that the sentence
continued on the inside. Alison was surprised, but then the ring or the message�
were hardly unique. There must be many rings like the one on her finger.
The following day Hilda Goestal, the spinster, asked Alison Hanneker, the virgin,
where she had found the ring. Where had Alison�s husband bought it? Alison
hesitated, and then on a burst of feeling that might be interpreted at relief at
being able to tell the truth, she admitted that she had no husband, and that she
had found the ring mysteriously lying among the ashes in her hearth. The first of
the two confessions illicited no response from Hilda. Either she had expected it or
the fact did not interest her. The second confession caused Hilda to think for a
few moments, and you could see that a train of thought had developed.
�Where do you live?�
�In Brockhagen�.
�Do you burn wood ?�
� Yes.�
There was a long pause, and then a confident statement.
�In that case, do not take offence, but I�m sure the ring is mine.�
�Oh! How can that be?�
Alison had replied with a very conventional and muted sound of surprise, but
curiously she did not feel surprised.
� Where does the wood come from? Would you know?�
� I have no idea�.
� I have an idea that it came from the Strohn Company and they cut their wood in
the Patthorst Forest�.
The fairy tale aspects of the story of the ring were beginning to increase.
�I had a ring just like that. It was given to me by Horace Johannes van Verde. A
Dutchman. We were to get married. I was 16, which was the age of the Virgin Mary at
the birth of Christ. It has been calculated that Joseph was an old man, perhaps
thirty-three years older than Mary. My Dutchman, when I knew him, was 33 years
older than me. 33 was the age of Christ at the time of the crucifixion. I was
fascinated that I was born exactly 33 years after this man. Horace was a religious
man. We had kissed and we had lain naked together on a white sheet which I stained
with my menstrual blood which scared him. We never made love though he had touched
my vagina and I had stared at his penis until it rose like the Feret drawbridge. He
referred to his antomy everafter as his �ferret� which in English, I believe, is a
vicious, sharp-teethed animal sent down rabbit-holes to catch and kill rabbits. We
never really made love. He was called up but before he left for Italy he said we
would get married in private. There was no time to get married in public.� He
bought a gold ring and he had it inscribed. We walked in the forest on a spring day
and we lent against our favourite tree and since he could not bring himself to
place it on my finger for all the world to see, we agreed to commit it to the tree.
Together we placed it in a deep crevice in the bark at about shoulder-height - at
his shoulder-height, at my eye-height. After the war we would return and retrieve
it and show it to the world on my finger where it should rightly be. It would be
safe in the tree�.
Hilda left the office. She returned. She had been to the toilet and had washed her
tear-stained face, and she carried an object wrapped up in brown paper. It could
have been an axe.
�I lived in a small house on the edge of the wood with my parents. I had seven
brothers and an invalid grandfather. There were no hiding places in my house that
would not be discovered. I was 16 and impressionable. He was 49 and a minister of
the church. An impossible relationship. You must not wear it at home, you cannot
wear it in the street.� After the war he would return to claim me.
He was killed. I slept under the tree for three night, my parents thought I was
mad. My brothers taunted me. My grandfather looked at me wth sad eyes.� I could see
the ring.� Perhaps I could have retreived it but I did not. It was safe in the
tree. To take it and keep it or wear it or hide it somewhere else was not
thinkable. I went back frequently. The tree grew. The ring grew deeper into the
bark. One day I could no longer see it. I could I suppose still have taken a chisel
and prised it out. I did not. And then the events of my life continued. Love faded.
I became busy with other things, other men. I still believed he would return and
take an axe and chop the tree down and take the ring and marry me. It was a fairy
tale. I bought an axe and kept it sharpened�.
Hilda undid the brown paper around the object she had brought from its hiding-place
in the ladies� toilet. It was a sharpened axe.
�I had a child. She knew the tale, and then she was killed in a train crash. You
may remember the big train crash outside Cologne in 1931? 123 died, 340 injured,
including the centre-forward for the Munchen-Gladbach football team. His name was
Horace too, and he was a Dutchman. It was a curious sign. I think, I believe, I
know that you have found my ring. Like Excalibur, the sword taken from the stone.
The key retreived from the whale�s belly. You could keep it�.
�No, you must have it�.
Hilda died a week later under a tram. It was probably suicide, but� a sort of
unconscious suicide. A suicide of forgetfulness. Of carelessness. At the wrong
moment. Most moments of forgetfulness signify little or not at all in our lives.
But this moment of forgetfuness coincided with the sudden approach of a tram. Yet
Hilda had adjusted her will. Again, perhaps this is not so surprising, because she
was a solicitor�s secretary. The inscribed ring went to Alison who had already
quitted the solicitor�s office and was living in Bad Salzuflen. She had met a young
man. They had fallen in love.� He had a large apartment inherited from his father.
Alison and her boyfriend were the same age. There was no large discrepancy in ages.
There was no suggestion of a perverted relationship of an older man seducing a very
young woman. No dirty old man Joseph and no innocent Virgin Mary arrangement. It
would all be fine and perfect. Their sex was consummated immediately and was very
good.
Alison did not want the ring, it reminded her of unsuccessful love. She left it in
the envelope it had arrived in. It got lost, forgotten, put away for safety. But
lost. Alison never saw it again. She probably thought about the ring only five more
times in a happily married life of forty-five years.
The ring of course was not lost. In a sense nothing ever gets lost. Alison had put
its envelope in a filing cabinet. Alison�s new man had a housekeeper. She had found
it, wrapped it up in tissue paper for what she was sure would be her new mistress,
and she had put it in a jewellery box in a Nile-green painted cupboard. The
cupboard had been moved by house decorators to a new room that was scarcely ever
used. New furniture was ordered. Old furniture sent to a cousin, drawers re-
arranged emptied, refilled. The ring was placed in a curiosity-box in a junk shop,
its gold unrecognised. It was bought for a few marks be a shopkeeper�s daughter who
had lost it in a week. The seventeen-year old had left it is a ladies� toilet at a
theatre when she had washed her hands because it was a little big for her finger.
She always took the ring off lest it fell down the basin plug-hole. The ring was
found on the ledge of a wash-basin, given to the concierge, and lodged in the box-
office to await collection. A corps de ballet dancer saw it there, coveted it and
received it as a present from the concierge� husband for a kiss on the lips and a
squeeze of a breast. The dancer sold the ring to buy bread and tea and laces. It
was passed on to a jewellery-smith to erase the inscription and add a stone to make
an engagement-ring for a cripple who never collected it. It was pawned and never
retrieved. In April 1944 it was swept up in an end-of-the-financial-year tax
investigation, and taken to a bank who placed it in a bank deposit-box. Then the
ring�s long and tired life was ended. It was smelted down and became a gold bar
that travelled to Baden-Baden and then Bolzano with Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch who
never married his great love either.
�
GOLD
86 � The golden pen
Richard Samuel Hartmann had a golden pen and wrote the novel Shame, Scham in
German. Ostensibly it was the story of a gentile arrested for loving jews, and one
jew in particular, a 40 year old widow called Martha. In practice it could better,
if less sympathetically described as a self-indulgent pornography and an
inflammatory political tract. It was certainly a best-seller appealing to the
politically adventurous and the sexually starved. When the book was publically
burnt outside the publisher�s house at Maxfeldstrasse 27, Nurnberg, Richard further
flouted the laws and took a Gentile mistress. He was taken aside by the jewish
community and severely reprimandedd. Richard in turn accused the community of
cowardice, sowing internal dissension. The local Gestapo looked on with amusement
as the jews quarrelled among themselves. They knew that� they could pick the writer
up any moment they chose. But they had no wish to make him a martyr or a hero. They
decided to arrest him on a technicality concerning his car. To have arrested him
for speeding might have drawn too much attention to his attractive and privileged
life-style.They held a meeting to decide what was the most insignificant thing they
could think of to arrest him for. One suggested an offence of permitting an
incorrect speed for his windscreen wipers, another that the leather upholstery of
his car was too comfortable and likely to induce sleep in the driver, another said
the writer was out of control of the car whilst drinking water from a flask whilst
his car was stationary at a red traffic light.
In the event they arrested the writer for highway obscenity. They discovered him
and his mistress in his car in an act of fellatio on a turnpike layby.
They took his golden pen. The writer languished in jail in the bourgoise suburb of
Steinbuhl, Nurnberg. They cut the fingers off his right hand, just in case he
should think of writing again. And they cut the fingers off his left hand in case
he imagined he might learn to write left-handed. Just below the thin veneer of
civilisation is a layer of primitive excitement at afflicting pain through envy,
coupled with a logic that should lie above the thin veneer of civilisation, of
fitting punishments to crimes. They cut off his penis in case he ever thought he
might again take a Gentile mistress, or indeed any sort of mistress, one day in the
future. He died of blood poisoning. They had rubbed dog vomit into all three
wounds. With a little salt and vinegar served on a silver tray carried by a warder
dressed up in a white, partly-see-through, Chinese-silk blouse and a short red
skirt and black high-heeled shoes, just like the habitual clothes of the writer�s
fictional heroine Martha from Richard Samuel Hartmann�s book, Shame, Scham in
German. The arresting police-officers had read the book; it was such a best-seller
everyone knew who Martha was. They had wanted to try to interpret Shame in their
own way.
The golden pen lay on the desk of the Chief of Traffic Police for several weeks. He
had thought of having it framed along with a recent photograph and an up-to-date
signature of Richard Samuel Hartmann. The Police Chief had seen such a framed
memento before the war, of the Dutch writer Multatuli, in a shop window in a
gentleman�s outfitters in Pieter Cornelius Hooftstraat in Amsterdam.� Though
Richard Samuel Hartmann was now dead. Perhaps they should make a death-mask of the
celebrated Jewish author.� They phoned for a undertaker, but by the time he had
arrived with his wax-moulds, the golden pen had disappeared, perhaps stolen by an
admirer, or maybe by a common thief surprised at his good luck.
The whereabouts of the writer�s body is unknown. No one can make a pile stones on
his grave. After the war, a nephew, as official next of kin, tried to claim
royalties on the book. You can occasionally still see a copy in German or English
in second-hand bookshops. It is not uncommon to come across a Russian translation,
though in Russian, it was given a title which translated back into English was
Uneasy Virtue.
The golden pen still filled with dark blue ink, was casually tossed into the
smelting kiln at Ingolstadt. This celebrated writing impliment contributed to a
�boater� gold bar stamped INGOL 789, which travelled, over a period of eighteen
months to Saarbrucken and then Baden-Baden from where Gustav Harpsch took it to
Bolzano.
Richard Samuel Hartmann�s gentile mistress became a housewife living in Innsbruck.
She died in 1953 of cervical cancer.
�
GOLD
87 � Santa Claus
Martin Erich Nikolaus dressed up as Santa Claus at Christmas, and systematically
dropped Jews from the Wassertower� in Dortmund. He said it was to make their Jewish
wealth bounce out of their pockets. It certainly made a mess. Sometimes Claus�s
Jewish victims had to meet the requirements of gravity by first being accelerated
through a glass pane, in which case, the blood was flowing out of their bodies
before they hit the concrete car-park. Claus, like his namesake, was considered a
giver of gifts, because he gave away the smallest trinkets he confiscated from the
Jews, like rings and tie-pins, to young smiling shop-girls. But he grew richer on
his more substantial confiscations until his body too was found smashed on the
tarmac. Perhaps he had been pushed out of the window by two Jewish boys named Isaac
and Jeremiah, who had been seen on the seventh floor sucking milk out of the same
bottle with orange straws.
Investigation of Nikolaus�s Christmas sacks and his apartment cupboard revealed a
treasure trove. The gold all went to Baden-Baden and was conveniently re-packaged
thanks to considerable heat, into a neater way of handling precious metals.� One of
the resultant gold bars was stamped WD 67 I043 IJ (perhaps WD stood for Wassertower
Dortmund, and IJ were the initials of the milk-drinkers) and ended up with Harpsch
in Bolzano, the one place in Italy where spaghetti does not get a good press.
�
GOLD
88 � The runover gold
Sampson Karmovitch, a Russian patriot, a Russian exile and Russian widower, had,
thanks to his dead wife�s family, become a very rich man. He had been arrested on
suspicion of helping the Underground Communist party in Augsburg. Since his wife�s
murder he had become an idealist, determined to hinder, destroy or otherwise
inconvenience her tormentors, the German National Socialist Party.
As the police-car taking him to the Jesuitengasse Police Post approached the Anton-
Fugger Bridge, Sampson threw his suitcase of valuables out of the car window. He
had been on his way to a rendez-vous in Duisburg to purchase small arms for an
ambush planned rather inconclusively, and in some sloppy detail, on the life of von
Ribbentrop, Hitler�s sometime impulsive and arrogant Minister of Foreign Affairs,
whose dealings with Russia could at the very least be described as treacherous.
Sampson was using a small part of his wife�s fortune as revenge collateral. The car
had been travelling fast and the contents of the suitcase had scattered along a
considerable stretch of the road leading back to Lechhausen. The police made him
get out of the car and find and collect the valuables. They ran him over whilst he
was kneeling half on the curb and half in the gutter, with his hand and arm down a
drain, scrabbling to find his mother-in-law�s gold necklace. They targetted his
buttocks and drove his spine into his lungs. They reversed and drove his head into
his chest.
A golden tie-pin, seventeen gold rings, a gold brooch in the shape of a pair of
love-birds made by Lapinger of St Petersburg, twenty gold chain necklaces, a gold
cigarette case and a gold cocktail shaker were taken to Stadbach, itemised in a
ledger of confiscated property, placed in a strong-box and taken by truck to
Stuttgart and then Baden-Baden where they were smelted down to make a 500 gram gold
bar reference number FTYB41. This ingot of golden memories of sixteen years of a
happy marriage was eventually collected by Harpsch�s sergeant and Harpsch�s
corporal, and packed with another 91 gold bars into the two black leather suitcase
which Harpsch had possessed since his duties at Vaux, north of Paris in the early
days of the German occupation of France. Harpsch drove two days to Bolzano, which
is an Italian city know to Germans and Austrians as Bozen situated not so far from
the Swiss border. Late at night, on a forest road, Harpsch�s black Mercedes was in
collision with a white horse ridden by an unidentified cavalary-officer whose name
may have been Giacomo Ference. Bolzano is known to commercial travellers as a city
which rarely advertises spaghetti on its restaurant menus.
�
GOLD
89 � The hairdresser
A Jewish hairdresser, Simon Kessel, whose parents had run a hair-dressing business
in Stuttgart in the early 1930s, had been intimidated by growing anti-semitic
animosity and had emigrated to Hilvershum, close to Amsterdam, where the Dutch
National Broadcasting Commission had settled because the land was just a little
higher than the surrounding flat plains of the Netherlands, and radio communication
was consequently considered to be more efficient. Kessel Junior, the hairdresser,
now cut hair on the heads of radio announcers and radio actors. A young actress
called Sylvia Hoost who earnt a good living reading the parts of American
mistresses in escapist dramas for the afternoon Four O�clock Radio Drama Show, was
a regular customer. Even though the radio microphone had no eyes, Sylvia Hoost�s
confidence rested in her appearance, and she believed that the Jewish hairdresser
was her saviour. Her boyfriend, Gherti, a Nazi sympathiser working in the incipient
Dutch Television industry, grew jealous at Sylvia's repeated visits to Kessel�s
hairdressing shop on Utretchtstraat. Accompanied by his two brothers, he paid a
visit to Simon Kessel, larked around in his shop, urinated in his hand-basins, and
made suggestive threats about the possible collapse of his business unless Kessel
paid a fee of four hundred guilders a day into the Hilvershum Future Prophecies for
Television Company, which was a cover for Gherti�s personal bank account. From
Gherti�s point-of-view, the blackmail was successful. Simon�s business was blooming
and Simon had no wish to repeat his emigration plans and make another move.
Gherti, accompanied by his fascist cronies, made the barber�s shop a regular
meeting-place. Locking the shop door, they tied Kessel to his haircutting chair and
cut his hair until he had none left, and they stripped him and shaved his body with
a cut-throat razor until his body was as hairless as a child�s and covered in
blood, wounds and scratches. They masturbated over his head and genitals, declaring
there was nothing like Dutch semen to stimulate new hair growth. They clipped his
ears, widened his nostrils, enlarged his navel and recircumcised his penis. They
plastered his street windows with hand-written advertisements accusing him of
incest and pederasty.
Kessel had suffered too much. Taking his golden scissors, a treasured prize from a
haircutting competition, and collecting the last remaining change from the till, he
caught a train to Schedel and walked into the sea. His golden scissors were found a
week later by a child building sand-castles. They were handed in to the coast-guard
who passed them on to the Gestapo who offered them to the German bank who shipped
them to Amsterdam and thence to Eindhoven and thence to Stuttgart where they
eventually went to Baden-Baden. Along with sundry other golden trinkets, they were
melted down to become part of gold bar 717YH P2 which ended up in Bolzano in
Harpsch�s car.
Sylvia Hoost got a radio job playing American whores in Berlin and died in the
Russian shelling of April 1945. Gherti, her boyfriend went to New York and worked
for NHS which was bought out by RKO and then eventually Sony, under whose
management he retired with the position of managing director on a pension of� two
hundred thousand dollars a year in 1981. Simon Kessel�s body was never found, or if
it was, it was never identified as the body of a missing hairdresser. Perhaps the
coastal police were embarrassed.
�
GOLD
90 � Finger grease
Most of the particular 500 miligram gold �barge� bar RT45 T/0 found in the
overturned car at Bolzano was made up of gold rings confiscated from Jewish widows
at Mentzel.� To obtain them a young officer in the Mentzel police corps had sliced
off the widows� fingers.� His excuse was that he had been in a hurry because, he
said, his wife was about to give birth. He wanted, he said, to be on hand to
assist. He had wanted, he said, to touch contaminated Jewish female flesh as little
as possible before such an auspicious domestic event. Many of the rings, he said,
had made themselves as good as inseparable from their owners� fingers. He had
tried, he said, to encourage separation. He had done no such thing. He had made a
list, he said, of the substances he had used to lubricate the rings from the
fingers. The list was inventive. It included mayonaise, hair-oil, butter, soap,
sardine-oil, lard, petroleum jelly, balsamic vinegar made in Modena, olive-oil,
melted brie, spit and spittle. He had indeed written down both spit and spittle. He
did not say if the spit or the spittle was his or theirs. Perhaps the spit was
theirs, and the spittle his.
The officer�s wife gave birth to a girl who weighed 8 pounds, 3 ounces. They called
her Besoar, which could sound Jewish, though his wife said it was her grandmother�s
name and she had been born in Engadin. Engadin�s southernmost parts abutted onto
the Italian territory very close to Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they
cannot make good spaghetti.
�
GOLD
91 � The Sempstress
An elderly farmer panicked at the prospect of being persecuted because he had taken
a plump young gypsy for a second wife. His first wife had fallen downstairs and
spiked her head on a splintered banister. The farmer�s neighbours, if not directly
related to his first wife by blood, had certainly been her close friends. They had
no proof, and absolutely no real cause to think there had been foul play; all their
uncertainties and accusations had been retrospective. They said that the farmer had
been bewitched, which perhaps was not so untrue in the most general positive sense
since the gypsy woman, Florentina, was beautiful, and adroit at giving pleasure of
all kinds, starting with her joyful smile and stretching way beyond how she handled
the farmer�s sixty-year old prick in a ten-candle-lit bed. The neighbours were
certainly not averse to using the new National Socialist persecution of gypsies to
aid their campaign of gossip and incrimination. They bribed key figures in the
local administration with salted hams and pickled apples, and the farmer received
semi-official written threats demanding that he should� rid himself of tainted
stock to set an example to the farming community, since farmers were the backbone
of the nation and they had a responsibility with regards to such phenomena as �good
stock�, �inbreeding�, �genitical purity�, and something they called �Darwinian
priorities�. The local� printed propaganda was a cloudy rewrite of material issued
by the Goebbels�s Central Office of Information in Berlin.
The police tried to intimidate the farmer, driving their police-cars very slowly
along the isolated stretch of roadway that lead past his farm buildings. At least
three of the local police were related to the farmer�s� first wife, and they took a
personal interest in his livestock, requisitioning an occasional chicken or goat,
and driving it home to their kitchens. Their justification was that the property of
the farmer was also the property of the farmer�s wife�s, and since they or their
wives were her relatives by blood, they certainly had more of a right to her
property than the gypsy usurper.
Florentina saw what was happening, and regretted it, because, although she
certainly benefitted from a settled life with an elderly man who most certainly
would make her his heir, she was still excited by his physical attentions. And she
was pregnant, though nobody knew but her. However, sensibly, in the end she was
determined to save her own skin, and she was sure, being a gypsy, she could.
One Thursday evening, there were five police cars in the lane by the chicken sheds,
all with their engines running and their head-lamps ablaze and flashing, sending
the turkeys, as it grew dark, into a panic. Florentina was conscientiously feeding
the hens. She had anticipated a show-down and she had made her preparations. Over
the previous eighteen months, the farmer had given her jewellery, gold ornaments
and gold heirlooms, and he had amused himself and her by buying her a collection of
silver and gold sewing-needles. She now had several hundred. It was a sentimental
reference to how they had met. With her immediate family, Florentina had coming
knocking at the farmer�s door asking if there was work to be done. Florentina�s
brother sharpened scythes and knives, scissors and sometimes plough-shears,
Florentina�s uncle mended broken furniture and wooden toys, and made wooden
clothes-pegs; Florentina�s sister plaited corn-stalks into table-mats and sun-hats
and small propitiary harvest dolls. Florentina herself was a sempstress. She sewed
on buttons, made pockets in skirts, embroidered bows, mended broken zips, fixed
garments to make them look new. The farmer�s first wife had given them all work.
She had sat Florentina on the farm-house step and asked her to overhaul her
wardrobe, to make new lace-cuffs, undo a hem to make a skirt longer, patch
underwear, lengthen a shoulder-strap, invisibly darn the worn knees of white
stockings. The farmer had watched Florentina on the step concentrated at her work,
singing popular songs, moving her needle with the greatest dexterity. Florentina
knew herself to be watched. She began to move her needle in ways that could only be
described as erotic. The farmer was excited.
The gypsies had left satisfied enough with their payment to leave bunches of
heather wraped in leaves, and a wreath of horse-shoes with their ends tucked inside
a circle of rosemary to bring good luck and everlasting memory. That night five
hens and two mirrors were missing, and a cart had lost its wheels, but the farmer
turned a blind eye. Five months later the farmer�s wife suffered her fall on the
stairs, and her widower took to riding his brown mare along the lanes looking for
Florentina. He eventually found her and began a long courtship. They were not
officially married. Florentina kept her declarations open-ended. Her relatives did
not disapprove, but she did not have their blessing. She made an agreement with her
grandfather that she would eventually return. The farmer knew better than to argue.
He considered himself fortunate and did not feel he had to lock his barns at night.
The farm curiously prospered. When his neighbours had chicken pest, the farmer�s
chickens were immune. His ditches were water-filled when others ran dry. Grass
fires skirted his property.
Now there was to be a reckoning. Having watched the police-cars gathering in the
lane every evening for a week, Florentina had bundled her valuables, the farmer�s
golden trinkets, her best underwear, her rings, her earrings and her collection of
gold and silver sewing needles into a small granary sack that she kept continually
fastened around her waist. She continued to feed the chickens. Three more police-
cars drove along the farm-lane and all eight started to beep their horns. They kept
up their beeping until the panicking turkeys had destroyed themselves on the wire-
fencing. The farmer came out with a shot-gun and sprayed the police-cars with
bullets. The provocation had workerd. The police had their excuse. They beat up the
gypsy-loving farmer, broke his arms and arrested him. They seized his gypsy wife as
she was running away across the fields. They found the needles tied in the granary
sack around her waist. They made Florentina into a pin-cushion, concentrating most
especially on her breasts and buttocks. Florentina�s gypsy family came out of the
dark and broke the policemen�s heads with pick-axe handles.
There was an enquiry. One hundred and nine silver and gold sewing needles were
offered as some sort of evidence. Offensive weapons. Illegal tools. Unlicensed
luxuries. Fetish items. It was not easy to make the needles integral to the death
of eleven policemen. There were reprisals. A community of small-holders was
humiliated. Six farmers were shot. A teenage girl was drowned. A boy swallowed
laburnum seeds. A baby lying on a blanket in the sunshine, died without
explanation. A dog choked. Fish died. The district was convinced that the whole
affair was the work of gypsies.
The gold needles were separated from the silver and laid on a white plate. If they
tarnished then it was definitively the work of gypsies. An impatient doctor of
medicine, known for his atheism, seized the gold needles and took them to the bank.
They stayed in a bank vault for several weeks, were collected up in a monthly
audit, sent to Berlin, smelted with other golden debris, and the resulting gold bar
transported to Baden-Baden. Harpsch eventually took the gold bar with him to
Bolzano.
Florentina was sent to a concentration camp, her husband to the Russian front where
he shot his commanding officer for taunting him about his gypsy wife. He was hung.
Florentina improbably led a sewing circle at Treblinka, patching uniforms for free.
She too killed her superior, sticking a needle in his eye after being sexually
assaulted. Jews and gypsies were carnally forbidden territory outside of the camps;
inside, gypsies became legitimate targets for persistent abuse and constant
humiliation, prized over Jewesses because they were not contaminated by any
obviously advertised religious beliefs.� The commandant was sexually interested in
pregnant woman in their seventh month. He had arranged, through his camp guards, to
be regularly supplied, though infertility, miscarriage and voluntary abortion
frustrated his lechery. When questions were asked after the war about the
commandant�s sexual fascination, it was said that he had declared there was no
better advertisement for a good and profitable way of life than the steady
production of progeny, and therefore his camps were to be considered very
productive.
The heavily pregnant Florentina went into hiding among the huts, the women looking
after her welfare as much as they dared, concealing her beneath a false floor. In
the end she tired of hiding. She hung herself with a length of twisted wool, and
created her last diversion as her pregnant naked body swung into view, tied to a
ceiling joist, at an inspection of infant corpses by senior offices interested in
the effects of poison-gas on babies.
�
GOLD
92 � Harpsch�s Story
There is nothing in this story about Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch that you have not
heard before. But this time all the facts concerning Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch are
put in one place.
Gustav Harpsch was born in Linz on the first day of the First World War and he died
in Bolzano on the last day of the Second World War. His father was an insurance
businessman who collected 18th century furniture. His mother brought up five
children. He enrolled in the Nazi Youth but that was as good as compulsory and not
to be easily avoided. All his friends enrolled, and so did he. He enjoyed the
summer-camps, the constant company, exploring in the mountains, swimming, singing,
campfires. He joined the army, did a term in Austria at the time of the Anschluss,
marched in the Sudentenland, became a Lieutenant in 1936 and, eight weeks after the
German invasion of France, he was stationed in Vaux le Vicompte near Paris. His
commanding officer was Field Marshal Fosterling, who he admired and respected.
Fosterling was anxious to help Himmler build a Birth Clinic to exploit ideas of the
Aryan inheritance. Harpsch did not disagree with the principle, but his emotional
sympathies suddenly changed his opinions. He and his fellow officers at Vaux were
billeted in the chateau that had been built by Fouquet, Louis XIV�s finance
minister in 1632, a house of such grandeur in architecture, decorations, gardens
and landscaping that it had been forcibly pirated by the king who ousted Fouquet on
exaggerated accusations of chicanery, embezzlement and corruption. All the Vaux
decorations, hangings, furniture, paintings, riches, plants and exotic features
were carted off to begin a new splendid palace at a place called Versailles. Though
the splendours of the mid 17th century were not recoverable, the German occupying
officers lived well. There was a cook, Anna-Maria Oosbacker. Her surname was
originally German, though she herself was thoroughly French. Her great grandparents
had lived in Alsace after 1871 when the Germans claimed the French province as
rightful conquest. Anna-Maria�s grandfather, a horse-master in considerable demand,
had moved from Strasbourg to Luxembourg, and then to Belgium, where he had started
to spell his name a little differently to accommodate the local difficulties of
pronunciation. When Anna-Maria�s father was born, he had moved to Paris. Anna-
Maria�s father had married a girl from Vaux, and, after the first world war, she
was brought up in the shadow, and under the influence, of the great house. Her
German origins were completely forgotten. She spoke only French. She was 32, a
widow. Her husband, a stable master, a pupil of her grandfather�s, had fallen from
a horse and smashed his head. They had no children. There had been more than a few
opportunities to remarry, but she had never been interested.
Anna-Maria Oosbacker and Gustav Harpsch fell in love over a plate of asparagus. He
had watched her and enjoyed her cooking for six weeks. She had first shunned him
and his laughter, cooking and serving the six billeted officers regularly, and
preparing bigger meals when officer contingents came on tours of inspection. She
was polite but distant. She had seen Harpsch in pensive moods, walking the paths of
Vaux with the house dogs. She had seen him stripped to the waist in the poultry
yard, polishing his boots. She had heard him singing French 17th century songs in a
high falsetto voice at a celebration of Hitler�s birthday. She spilt the hot butter
from the asparagus onto the table cloth. It had splashed a little on Harpsch�s
hand. He slowly licked it off whilst smiling steadily at her. They slept together,
first in the kitchen scullery and then on the lawn near the summerhouse, then in
the servants� bedrooms and then on the carpeted floor of an aristocratic bathroom.�
She was scared of the taint of intimate collaboration. The present owners of the
house, second generation parvenus, tried hard to identify themselves with the
house�s aristocratic forebears and standards; they were snobbish, reactionary and
they slowly began to find found the German officers not so infamous. The lower
servants were Socialists and Communists, the butler found Anna-Maria�s conduct
entirely unacceptable, the bedchamber maid had German parents and was jealous of
Anna-Maria capturing the attentions of a young officer from the mother country.
Anna-Maria became pregnant. She and Harpsch delighted in the possibility of
marrying after the war. They took risks, made envious enemies. Fosterling,
Harpsch�s immediate superior was benign and indulgent, but wanted Harpsch for his
breeding programme, and Anna-Maria had black hair. Harpsch defied cohabitation with
the local blond female community. The butler did not want his staff to be tainted
with any accusation of German collaboration. The bedchamber maid went searching for
usable genealogical evidence in the local newspaper archives with which to condemn
her fellow-servant. Anna-Maria was delivered of a baby girl. It was the first known
child of a Franco-German union in the area. An unprecedented situation had arisen.
What was the nature of collaboration? Sleeping with the enemy was declared ten out
of ten in guilty blackness. The best policy was to consider Anna-Maria Jewish.
Within three hours of the baby�s birth, she was sacked and put under house arrest
with her baby. Harpsch was sent to Paris. Anna-Maria disappeared. Her grandmother
on her mother�s side had been seen in a synagogue at Mousse. Harpsch returned to
find his child cared for by a serving girl. General Fosterling was disgraced in an
ambiguous plot of his own making to refashion history, to reinstate Fouquet as
Vaux�s rightful owner. In a mock reconstruction of the Fouquet and Louis XIV
antipathy, he had made himself foolish and allowed an important English spy called
Tulse Luper to escape. He had tried to shoot himself, had failed and had suffered
the ultimate disgrace of being given a coup de grace by his English prisoner.
Harpsch saw the serving girl with his daughter at her breast. He protested and was
put under guard; there had been enough irregularities among the Vaux occupying
forces. The baby was taken away. She had been put up for adoption, but though
charming and placid and very attractive, no-one would take her; the associations
were too dangerous. It was suggested that she should be taken back to Germany, but
the German transport taking her to Hamburg had been bombed on the road. The last
Harpsch had heard of his child was that she had been taken into the custody of the
Red Cross and put in the care of a Swiss children�s orphanage, maybe at Creux or
Marchand or a place called Des Caves near the Swiss-Italian border. There were
other and worse rumours. She may have followed her mother to a concentration-camp.
Harpsch was sent to the Russian front. He survived due to injuries to his right
leg. He fought at Monte Cassino and in the Apennines. He continued to make
enquiries of his daughter at Swiss orphanages. He pinned his hopes on buying his
daughter back. He made a risky journey to Linz, to collect the gold that he knew
existed in his family. He had it smelted down to make a single gold bar. He
persuaded his grandmother to sew a pocket in the inside of his trouser leg to house
his treasure. He then grew bolder in his ambition, and more reckless in his desire.
He established a plan with his brother-in-law, Karlheinz Brockler, who managed
Gestapo assets of cash, gold and US dollars in the Deutches Bank in Baden-Baden.
Gustav and his brother-in-law met in Karlsruhe and they discussed contingencies for
after the war. They planned to extricate cash from the bank and hide it to fuel
their post-war existence. Harpsch said he knew of a place. He had heard that his
daughter, now aged four, was held in a Swiss Sanatorium at Creux,� a favoured place
for German childless couples who wished to adopt children. He was scared that his
daughter would be given a new identity and he would lose her forever. There were
stories that when the Americans came, and they surely would, they would take war-
orphans and unclaimed children to live in The Sunshine State of California. Gustav
arranged to collect 100 gold bars from the Deutches Bank in Baden-Baden. With the
help of a sergeant and a corporal, on the 14th April 1945, he loaded 92 gold bars
into two heavy suitcases , and he set out to drive in a black Mercedes,
registration number TL 4692 to the Swiss-Italian border, considering it prudent to
go across France and Northern Italy and enter Switzerland via Bolzano, an Italian
town known as Bozen to German-speaking travellers. On a forest road outside
Bolzano, Harpsch�s car collided with a white stallion ridden by a young Italian
cavalry officer whose name may have been Giacomo Farenti. Harpsch was killed. The
92 gold bars were spilt out of their black suitcases over the back seat of the car
to be seen first by an Italian policeman, Arturo Gaetano, and then by an American
serviceman called William Bell, lately stationed in Mittersgill in Austria where he
had been associated with the death of the composer Anton Webern. The adventure was
over. Harpsch�s daughter has still not been claimed.
�
GOLD
93 � In the river
This is the story of the origin of the gold bar that Harpsch hastily exchanged for
27 gallons of petrol in Baden-Baden to facilitate his quick departure.
A pregnant woman who husband had been reported dying of diptheria somewhere on the
Russian border in the kitchens of a German work-camp, threw her gold necklace and
her wedding and engagement rings into the River Hus on a cold winter�s night rather
than let the Nazis have them. She had been watched and she was forced to wade the
icy river until she found them.
She lost her baby, but she found the gold necklace. It became just one small
contribution to gold bar TRE 45Sd which finally arrived in Bolzano, a place sadly
known to be unable to produce a good spaghetti for the discerning palate of the
expert gourmet.
�
GOLD
94 � Bauhaus jewels.
This is the story of the origin of the gold bar that Harpsch exchanged for alcohol
and cigarettes in his hasty departure from Baden-Baden on May 4th 1945.
The design studios of the Bauhaus were anathema to German National Socialism.
Abstraction, non-figuration, non-representation, the use of unorthodox materials,
subversive ideas, Marxism, Communism, Bolshevism, free-love, Judaism. Most of the
largely Jewish disciples of the Bauhaus had left Germany by 1936, but they could
not take very much with them except ideas.
A glass-ceilinged, glass-walled jewellery studio above a ceramics factory in
Stuttgart was locked up in July 1935. It was owned by Serenio Rigard-Provo and her
husband Barnst Schmidt-Aven. The husband and wife owners smoked their last
cigarette and rinsed out their last coffee-cups, and touching nothing else, put on
their coats and locked the door. They posted the key to somewhere far away in the
East, to Glenelge, Adelaide, Australia. It was an address arrived at by sticking a
pin in a world atlas, then a country atlas, then a city atlas and then a street
map. The jewellers had a certain sort of thoroughness, even in play. This site
chosen at random represented a place that Serenio and Barnst would never visit. The
gesture represented the end of an Old Life. They were going to a New Life.
In New York.
The glass-ceilinged, glass-walled jewellery studio had shone brightly at night when
Serenio and Barnst worked there until the early hours. It was like the illuminated
forecastle of a ship perched above the black mass of the factory beneath. Now it
was abandoned. Ivy grew up the walls and crept across the barred windows and across
the glass ceiling and filled the interior with green shadows. The gutters blocked
and moss absorbed the rain-water. A small sycamore tree grew out of a kiln chimney.

The building became a seven-year time old capsule. Seven years is not so very long,
but the world, and especially the German-speaking world, had changed so much in
that time. Their last unfinished work was there still in preparation on the
benches, the tools were laid out ready for use, exhibits were marked for sale,
order books open at the last commission, invoices for materials acknowledged. On
the main work-bench was a microscope and large magnifying glass, and a bracelet of
bleached bird-bones hung around a wooden last.
One evening in June 1944, when the sun was setting after a thunderstorm, an Allied
plane, a Spitfire, shining and gleaming after coming out of the rain-soaked clouds,
hurtled, with ever gathering speed across the roofs of the ceramic factory-
buildings, and arrowed straight for the glass studio. To name a fighter plane, a
Spitfire, is perhaps curious. To �spit� suggests something infantile or spiteful,
and the English plane, propeller-driven, surely issued no flames. It was on its way
to destroy a delicate fragile case of glass.
The red, white and blue ensign on the silver wings of the Spitfire in June 1944 was
momentarily reflected a hundred time in the glass windows of the jewellery studio,
and then the Spitfire and the glasshouse exploded together in a shower of sun-lit
glass and silver metal. It was a crystal night. Of sorts. It was not known why the
British pilot had chosen to die like this. There had been no significant action in
the air for three hundred square miles. The plane, from the reports of eye-
witnesses, appeared not to have been in trouble. For several minutes, a scattering
of white paper sheets, documents, invoices, orders, swirled around in the growing
darkness. Serenio Rigard-Provo and Barnst Schmidt-Aven had been meticulous keepers
of papers anhd documents. The local police came to examine the unusual event.
Examination of the paper work suggested the movement of precious metals, certainly
the movement and working of gold. The Gestapo never found any. The authorities were
irritated. Such a singular uncharted event suggested a local prize beneficial to
local interest, mainly the interest of the management�s local bank-account. But no
gold was found. Instead a list of unusual materials for a jeweller ws separated
from the broken mountain of glass. Feathers, blue-dyed wooden beads, candle grease,
copper wire coated in colourful plastic, marble chips, ceramic chips, metal
washers, brass screws. But no gold. This is strictly not true. They cut the English
pilot out of a straight-jacket cage of aircraft metal, and shook sackfuls of
tinkling glass from his lap, and found his wedding-ring on an undamaged hand. It
was a simple band. The English pilot was twenty-three and he had been married for
two months to a twenty-year old championship swimmer from Australia named Robyn
Bowman. Robyn�s father had kept a gift shop on the coast selling semi-precious
stones to tourists. Her mother had committed suicide, very possibly from missing
her daughter in England. Her mother had jumped from a pier to swim with the fish.
Robyn�s father had closed down his shop above a beachside restaurant. He had
boarded up the windows and gone back to the city.
The English pilot�s wedding ring was thrown into a wooden cigar-box of gold
trinkets in a Stuttgart police-station. When the cigar-box was full of golden
ephemera, such that you could not close its lid, the collected contents were sorted
and melted down and became part of a gold bar that Lieutenant Harpsch transported
to Bolzano, the city of dissatisfied spaghetti-eaters.
When Robyn Bowman was told three weeks later that her husband had been officially
reported missing, she waited five months in case the War Office had got it wrong.
Then she went home to Australia to have her baby, and think and dream on the wide
sunlit beaches where you had to squint your eyes when you looked north-west in the
direction of Europe.� And she went home to bury her father. To distract herself
from grief and war and boredom, she made it her responsibility to sell up her
father�s property. She sought out the boarded-up house on the coast at Glenelge,
and with her father�s brothers, she pushed open the wedged front-door to find the
hall floor scattered with the letters and parcels that had been delivered over the
last ten years. One of the smallest parcels had a Stuttgart postmark, and inside
was a key. Robyn scratched it and found it to be of gold.
Perhaps the only gold items associated with the Stuttgart jewllery studio that had
once belonged to Serenio Rigard-Provo and her husband Barnst Schmidt-Aven, were the
wedding-ring belonging to Robyn Bowman�s husband and this golden key.
�
GOLD
95 � Barbarossa
This is the story of the origins of the gold-bar that Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch
gave to his sergeant in return for services. The exchange occurred in the car park
of the Deutche Bank car-park in Baden-Baden, under a street lamp in a shower of
rain. The sergeant left delighted, but his ability to exchange the gold for
something more immediately valuable was fraught with difficulties.
When the Russians began to advance across Eastern Germany, Daniel Fosser, a garage
mechanic in Goestering packed his belongings and walked two hundred kilometres to
his mother�s house in Helsteding. Over the previous seven years Daniel had made a
collection of metals of various description - lead, aluminium, zinc, chromium,
copper, silver and gold. He had transported them over to his mother�s house in his
truck, but now his truck had been commandeered by the army. The only independent
way he now could reach his mother�s sanctuary was to walk there. His mother lived
in the Black Forest, and had a garage and a garden and a bunker and an air-raid
shelter built by her fancy man, a butcher from Freiderichburg. There was plenty of
room on his mother�s property for Daniel Fosser to store metals. Daniel was 53
years old. He wanted many things. He had plans to live in Munster where a woman
with three children had once said she loved him. She lived in a three-room
apartment that had a workshop in the attic. Daniel wanted to build a boat and sail
to Ireland, where he believed his ancestors had come from. He wanted to grow a
beard and look like a wise and ancient mariner. He wanted to make a Viking helmet.
And he wanted to see if it was really possible to inscribe the Lord�s Prayer on a
walnut. But the Russians were coming. He had to hurry to realise at least one of
his ambitions. He chose to concentrate on the ambitions that gold could help to
satisfy.
Daniel selected the best combination of the most precious and least bulky of his
metal treasures and, with his mother�s help, took his father�s green canvas fishing
jacket from the attic, and they worked to give it more pockets. Daniel�s mother
also made him a coat with� many hidden pockets and a security body-bag with two
pockets, and a six-pocketed haversack, and she sewed reinforced turn-ups on his
trousers and made him a canvas hat with a stiff brim and a reinforced pocket
lining. Giggling, his mother even made her 53 year old unmarried son a pair of
underpants with a reinforced pouch where Daniel�s precious metals and testicles
could fight for room and together make him seem well endowed. Daniel squeezed his
gold and silver treasures into his twenty-nine pockets, and fully-dressed,� weighed
six hundred kilos and could only walk slowly and with ponderous effort. He looked
like a dim-minded robot.
In two days Daniel had walked as far as Tremontias on his way to Munster. He was
aware that a curious-looking young man with a gaunt face and a high receding hair-
line, had been watching him for some time, walking fifty metres behind him and on
the other side of the road. Daniel thought of him grimly as Doctor Death. He
decided to wade the stream at Gieing to avoid the highway across the bridge, and
hopefully lose his persecuting shadow. The roads were packed with refugees, and
every man and woman, especially the women with children, were out for themselves;
they became thieves, pickpockets, and hungry scavengers. There had been a killing
over a slice of pie on a garage forecourt at Thringer. Daniel slept sitting up for
most of the night, on the river bank under a willow tree, with an iron bar gripped
tightly in his left hand. Just before dawn, he waded into the river and the water
came up to his knees. He was exhausted from lack of sleep and fell over in the
middle of the stream. He could not release himself from his haversack straps and
his heavy coat and even heavier fishing-jacket.� Even his hat, moistened with the
river-water, stayed on his head. He struggled to stay upright. He could not get up,
such was the weight of his stolen metals. There was a moment when the cold water
even seemed inviting. He wanted to let go of his anxieties. He looked back at the
river bank and saw that the young man with the gaunt face was sitting with his
hands on his knees, watching him.� Daniel knew the story that a drowning man sees
his life reviewed. Daniel remembered the plumber he had locked in a water-filled
cellar in order to steal his lead. And the Jewish woman polishing the candlesticks
who he had hit with a balaclava full of gravel. And the Jewish couple he had run
over in his truck in order to steal their rings and fiddle with the woman�s private
parts. And the woman whose shop he had set alight to scare her out of her gold
heirlooms. And the night-watchman he had threatened with sodomy unless he gave up
his gold watch and chain. And then there were the children he had beaten over the
head to steal their crucifixes.
Daniel drowned like Frederick Barbarossa in less than a metre depth of river water.
Barbarossa had been an old man weighed down with cares and more importantly with
dress-armour. Perhaps the cold had also contributed to Barbarossa�s death. Old,
tired, heavily laden, weak. Daniel was 53, Barbarossa had been 75, still
comparisons were not so bad, though Daniel had not made himself a world celebrity
in the twelfth century.
Daniel�s body was found at ten o�clock. It had scarcely moved from where it had
fallen, so heavily weighted was his corpse. He was dragged and pulled and shifted
to the water�s edge and his pockets were rifled by two soldiers wearing overalls
and a labourer wearing pyjamas. Two farmers with shotguns frightened them off, and
Daniel�s body-bag and satchel were slung over the cross-bars of two rusty bicycles
and wheeled away across the water. The young man on the bank watched in silence.
After the commotion at the discovery of the body had receded, he went up to the
gold-stripped corpse, and stared at it. Then he removed Daniel�s canvas hat with
the stiff brim, and the heavily pocketed green canvas fishing-jacket. He put them
on and walked up and down the bank stroking his newly stolen clothes. The young
man�s name was Joseph Beuyce and his curious garments with the multiple pockets
were to become a trademark in a future life he lived as a celebrity associated with
war-guilt.
Five kilometres down the road towards Munster, the two bicycling shotgun farmers
were stopped and searched by an orderly squad of uniformed soldiers lead by a
fiercely moustached sergeant and a meek and very neat corporal. The gold was
separated from the silver and hidden in mess-tins under the remains of a thick
sludgy soup made from swedes and dandelion leaves. The men lay down to sleep on a
pile of dirty straw in a hay-field. The sergeant left the camp-fire in the middle
of the night with six mess-tins and was knifed in the back by his corporal, a
precise man who took the gold to a bank in the small town of Hurring. The following
day the gold scrap was in a truck on its way to Baden-Baden and a smelting kiln. It
contributed to a gold bar which was probably the most recently manufactured of all
the gold bars Harpsch took with him to Bolzano in his black Mercedes.
�
�

GOLD
96 � Deaf gold
This is a small part of the story of the gold bar that Harpsch exchanged for
groceries,� thirty bottles of water, and maps of France, Switzerland and Northern
Italy.
Stephan Rheiner kept a diamond ring in his hearing aid. It had belonged to his late
wife who had been killed in an aircrash. He believed it was a good hiding place. In
fact it made no difference to his hearing but he believed it did. He claimed the
diamond made him hear better. If the diamond had helped him to hear better he did
not use it to his advantage because he continued to shout to his interlocutors, and
his shouting about his diamond revealed its whereabouts to an eavesdropping
informer. She reported him to the police. She had the hearing-aid knocked from his
head. Stephan was standing on the corner of Loeringstrasse and Holderinplatz in
Foldstrum near Dresden.� The hearing-aid�s tortoise-shell parts were crushed
underfoot and the diamond forcibly separated from its setting. The denuded gold
ring was picked out of the pieces and transported to Baden-Baden by rail to be
entirely lost in the golden metal masses of bar 87H/98j, a metal ingot largely
constructed from gipsy gold from Kiev. The runaway National Socialist Gustav
Harpsch took the bar to Bolzano and lost it in death.
Stephan Rheiner�s diamond lay in the detritus of the gutter for a week and then a
rainstorm washed it into a drain, and it travelled three hundred metres by fits and
stars to a catchment-trap where it settled in the sediment and lay there for fifty
years. It probably lays there still.
�
GOLD
97 � The hiding place
This is the story of the gold bar that Harpsch exchanged for currency in three
denominations, German, French and Swiss. The rate of exchange was almost arbitrary,
and entirely open to negotiation.� Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch was in a hurry and
knew he was being under-compensated for the loss of another of his gold bars.
Mathias Singel boasted a most special and extraordinary hiding place for his old
jewels in association with his young wife. Most of his treasures were small and
ornithological. They were a collection of golden decorated eggs. Not Faberge eggs,
they were far beyond his means, but items he had collected patiently, waiting for
them to arrive before his curiosity and his heavy purse on his many travels as a
cultural diplomat. He had discovered his eggs in curious places, a� small golden
coptic Ibis egg from Jersualam, a golden quail egg from Mexico, a decorated
enamelled golden egg from Seville, a clutch of perfume bottles in the shape of
golden eggs from Antwerp. He was very proud and very pleased of his treasures and
their hiding place. He boasted so loudly and so proudly that he was arrested, and
under torture (they pinched his ears) he revealed his special and extraordinary
hiding-place. His wife�s vagina was consequently slit to join her navel to her
anus. Her torturers wanted to be certain that Mathias knew that they had understood
the implications of his pleasure, and the golden eggs were temporarily slipped even
deeper into her womb to join her ovaries, an even more special and extraordinary
and appropriate hiding place. But it was a temporary hiding-place, used just as
long as it took for Mathias�s wife to die.� And temporary because the jewels were
more valuable a currency than the wife. Beside she was now so thoroughly spoilt.
You cannot spoil gold that easily.
The bloody jewels were dropped in a bucket and taken to a tap and washed. The wife
was dragged to a ditch and someone threw a coat over her, but it fell in such a way
as to hide her face but not her thighs. Children walking to school saw a woman
whose body looked as though some-one had attempted to cut it clumsily in half with
a blunt knife.
The gold was ultimately sent to Goringen and then to Essen where they cleaned their
major furnaces for a fortnight in August, when the employees collectively went on
holiday. A small maintainance force of three elderly caretakers consequently
smelted the ornithological gold� in a side-kiln to amuse their nephews. The five
infant visitors, wearing hot summer shorts and mica goggles, watched the eggs fry
and then become scrambled, and then, after momentarily glowing yellow like the yolk
of a fine fresh farm egg, deliquese to the state of shimmering butter and then
transparent olive oil. The consequent golden bar went to Baden-Baden and from there
to Harpsch�s desperate clutches in Bolzano and from there to the American valuables
depository at Lausanne. And from there perhaps to Geneva and Zurich where it still
might lie, apparently unclaimed, in a deep underground vault, hoping that no lawyer
would be able to file a successful reparations suit since his clients would surely
all be dead.
�
GOLD
98 � The tuberculosis bacillus
This is the story of the origins of the gold bar that Harpsch exchanged for
bedding, a waxed ground-sheet, a mattress and clean ironed sheets at Berne. He
parked his car in a forest clearing, and made his bed up in the bracken. It was the
first full night�s rest he had experienced for three nights.
Smart people wishing to indicate their sophistication with modern medicine
frequently applied their lightly learnt knowledge to the Jewish question.
�The tuberculosis bacillus has been isolated and can now be eradicated�.
�Modern techniques have surmounted an old enemy�.
�This clinging parasite has laid low many tens of thousands of the German nation
for hundreds of years�.
�We are now in a position to rid ourselves of the parasite of Jewry just as we can
now rid ourselves of the parasite of tuberculosis�.
It has always been a characteristic of tuberculosis to regard its victims as
somehow identifiable with their disease. They cough and splutter and spit and fill
the air with germs and contaminated blood. They lie all day in bed. They travel in
search of relief to contaminate foreigners and rely on a stranger�s charity to
succour and support them. They live on nursery food. Tepid soup. Gruel. Pap. Warm
milk. Malingerers. Tuberculosis is the disease of poets. And dreamers. It has been
called the poet�s disease, The Foggy Dew, The Wet Curse, The Phlegm, The Bloody
Spew, names which may also suggest prejudiced references to female anatomical
functions. But German medicine has conquered tuberculosis. Malingerers, poets,
effeminates, undesirables, those who cannot work and contribute to The Third Reich,
most espeiciallyJews, can now be eradicated at one and the same time by the
application of modern methods.
Such talk, such repeated propaganda in the name of respected scientific advances,
did its job well. Small atrocities and large atrocities in hospitals, clinics,
surgeries, health centres produced the required misery. Patients were abandoned,
injected, maltreated, starved, abused, neglected, shunned. What other verbs do you
need?
One incident of several hundred thousand: In Saas-Belzec, a German doctor, Egbert
Dachson, was prepared to proselytise the propaganda to his patients, both
sophisticated and unsophisticated. To the sophisticated he sent pamphlets. They
withdrew their financial contributions to tuberculosis sanatoria. To the
unsophisticated he leant confidentially over the surgery desk and explained the
dilemma simply. Thirty villagers from Altosalzburg, armed with hay forks and a
First World war revolver, took it on themselves to eliminate the convalescing
tubercular patients from the Saas-Belzec Sanatorium. Seven Swiss children of Jewish
parents, an American Jewish businessman, a German Jewish architect, and the wife
and daughter of an Austrian Jewish economist were dragged from their beds, and
thrown out into the snow of the Sanatorium�s Alpine Garden. Records were destroyed,
lockers rifled, wardrobes stripped, suitcases from under the beds tipped open,
valuables taken. And then a postman�s wife suddenly decided that tuberculosis was
present in all Jewish possessions and the tuberculosis bacillus had certainly
contaminated Jewish gold. A small pile of gold trinkets was abandoned on the
sanatorium steps, soon to be covered in a light fall of snow. The janitor, Michael
Ignatisson, swept the trinkets into a metal pan and took them home to his married
daughter who stood in front of the bedroom mirror wearing three pairs of earrings,
six wedding-rings, three gold necklaces, a brooch, a tie-pin and two wrist-
watches.� She kept the brooch but only after boiling it in scalding starch-water
for two hours on the advice of the postman�s wife. She bargained the rest for
furniture, a massage and a pair of wooden orthopaedic shoes made in Colombia. The
sanatorium valuables, minus the brooch, travelled to Munich, then Vienna where they
were smelted down to a single gold bar that found its way to Baden-Baden ready for
Harpsch to take it on an aborted visit to the city of absent spaghetti, Bolzano.
Baden-Baden had a reputation once upon a time as a city of good health and Jews and
non-Jews took the waters there and lounged in day-beds to overcome the ravages of
the tuberculosis bacillus which is not particular as to its host�s religious,
social or ethical beliefs.
�
GOLD
99 � Ventimiglia
This is the story of the origins of the gold bar Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch
exchanged for a safe passage through the Sensadorf tunnel.
On Ventimiglia railway station on the 23rd August 1941, between the Rome-bound
15.15 Express and the 15.37 slow-train to Venice, a pair of young lovers were told
to strip and pack their clothes into two suitcases. It was a hot summer afternoon,
with a bright sky and a haze above the hills. Italian music was being played on the
station Tannoy, an aria sung by a living virtuoso singer from a popular opera
running in Torino. The gramophone stood alone on the station platform in a patch of
sunlight with the shadow of the revolving record sharp on the platform tarmac. The
18-year old boy threw his clothes abruptly into his allotted case, but the 17 year
girl carefully folded her clothes, placing her blouse with the gold brooch given to
her by her mother at the bottom for safe-keeping.
The Italian station-master rummaged through her clothing, sniffing the underwear.
He removed the brooch from the blue blouse for his wife.
The event was watched by two Italian guards in uniform, and two German officials in
suits with swastika armbands. Two children watched from a signal box. There was a
man in his pyjama jacket and wearing blue underpants brushing his hair at an open
window in one of the houses. Behind him was a woman in a negligee putting on a
brassiere and manoevering her hands behind her back to fit the straps and clasps.
They were a man and his wife dressing after the siesta. An elderly woman watched
from a shop doorway; she hid her face as she watched.
The words �Jewish troublemakers� was written in chalk on each of the lovers�
suitcases. The lovers were shot dead. One bullet each in the head. Their advertised
crime was incest, which was absurd. And they were considerede to be trouble-makers.
They had known one another since they were at kindergarten, and their mothers had
the same Christian names, and they had lived together in the same house for twelve
years. But how come that means incest? It is difficult to understand why they were
considered trouble-makers, unless the example of their love was trouble-making. The
accusation of incest was just inflammatory propaganda. Nobody really believed it.
Their unadvertised sin was being Jewish.
When the couple were naked and their clothes were packed in the two suitcases, the
German official closed the suitcases and wrote CLOTHES OF A JEWISH TRAITOR in
German on the lids. He lashed the two suitcases together with a rope - making a
double suitcase. The couple were taken away around the corner of a station
building. There was the sound of two revolver shots. From under the gramophone and
across its shadow, a slow trickle of blood ran slowly across the platform.� A
splash of water from a watering can washed the blood away.� One of the Italian
guards copulated with the woman�s dead body as it lay over her dead lover. The
porter carrying the watering-can walked up the platform making figure of eight
spirals of water on the hot dry tarmac.
The Italian station-master�s wife lost the brooch in the aftermath of an explosion
panic in the market at San Lorenzo. It was picked out of the debris by a soldier
whose commanding officer impounded it.� It was locked with other valuables in a
safe and trucked to Genoa. From there it travelled to Baden-Baden where it was
smelted into a gold bar to be stamped HGT V 42, and eventually it arrived in
Bolzano by way of Lieutanant Harpsch, a Weichmar army soldier bent on rescue.
Absolutely no-one noticed the fact that all the participants and observers and
associates of this incident on Ventimiglia railway station perished with some
violence within six months of its occurence. The station-master was crushed between
two carriages, his wife died of complications of her lungs believed to be related
to the San Lorenzo explosion. One of the watching porters was killed in a coach
accident, the second drowned in a water-butt when drunk. One of the Gestapo agents
was poisoned with quicklime by his daughter for forbidding her to sleep with her
lover. And the second was killed in action in the Straits of Messina. The man in
the sky blue underpants died of an asthma attack in a tunnel, and his wife
succumbed to breast cancer. The elderly woman died of advanced bronchitis in her
bed and one of the two children in the signal-box was knocked to the ground by a
runaway bull and remained unconscious for three years before they turned off the
life-support system, and the other went missing on a shopping expedition and his
body was discovered in a waste disposal machine six weeks later. The opera singer
was killed in a plane crash. Absolutely no-one noticed the connection between these
deaths. Maybe this is because no-one thought that the jewish lovers on the
Vestimiglia railway station could be significant enough as to form and create a
link that could be associated with so many calamitous endings. And then there was
Harpsch. He died violently too.
�
�
�
�
GOLD
100 � Black gold
This is the story of the origins of the gold bar that Harpsch exchanged for a new
tyre at Bellazona on a moonless night when the mountain-side towards Locarno was
alight with a thousand fires.
Fearful of the devaluation of the paper currency that had ruined his father in the
Depression years, Heinrich Assenberg bought gold. And he wore it. At first as a
wedding ring. He was married to Julia Fokkering, a nurse. They bought each other
wedding rings in an open market jewellery sale in Paderwurst, Cologne. Julia earned
more money than Heinrich, so his ring was bigger than hers.
Heinrich worked for twenty weeks as a sugar beet sorter and bought himself a gold
cigarette case. He did not smoke. His wife bought a pair of gold earrings in the
shape of strawberries. They pinched her ears so she kept them in a mustard can with
her diaphragm. Heinrich drove a doctor�s car for a Christmas journey from Hannover
to Venice and earnt sufficient money to buy an identity bracelet in gold. He had it
inscribed with his initials and the initials of his wife. Julia bought a thin chain
of two thousand links to hang around her� throat. After working as an elderly
persons� chaperone for six months, she added a crucifix. She was not a Catholic.
She wanted to own gold and she wanted to disguise her Jewishness.
Heinrich drove a horsebox to a season�s horse meeting in the Ruhr and having two
days to kill before he returned the vehicle, he crossed the border into Belgium,
and knowing Antwerp�s reputation as a gold market, he bought a gold watch from a
booth under the arches of the Central Railway Satation. The spring-mechanism was
not reliable, but the piece was heavy and looked handsome in association with a
pair of gold cuff-links he bought from a street-trader on the pier at Harlem.
Husband and wife wore their gold when eating out, and had a combined supper-time
weight of 197 pounds. They were heavy people growing heavier. After eating, they
were obliged to walk home slowly. They were easy meat for plunder.
When Germany invaded Poland, Heinrich and Julia enlisted in the German army,
Heinrich in the technical services of the airforce, Julia as a nurse in an army
hospital. Heinrich had his military cap-badges and shoulder buttons fashioned in
gold, Julia bought a gold ankle-bracelet.� Both partners painted their gold black
as a measure to deter detection and assault.� Wearing their blackened gold
jewellery, husband and wife were killed when a bomb blew up a theatre on the
Hesselstrasse in Cologne. Their disguised golden hoard was discovered amongst the
distorted remains of their flesh. It was regarded as legitimate war booty and
melted down to make a single gold bar. This husband and wife gold bar became the
temporary property of Gustav Harpsch. He took it to Bolzano in memory of his wife
to buy his daughter out of lonely obscurity.
�
GOLD
101 � Fidelia
This an extra story, an addendum. It is an epilogue of sorts.� It concerns the
origins of a gold bar closely associated with Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch, but the
gold bar in question is not one of the 92 taken from the bank in Baden-Baden to be
discovered later in the pinewoods outside Bolzano. It is perhaps closer to Harpsch
than all these gold bars. Because it was a bar that he himself was responsible for.
It is the story of the gold bar he had originally devised to buy back his daughter
from the Swiss, a bar that contained the collected gold valuables of himself and
his family.
Fidelia, the daughter of Gustav Harpsch, always dreamt of going to South America to
be an Indian. She would live there with her father among Blue Cactus trees and wear
feathers, red for her father and blue for herself. She would ring a bell for
breakfast and bang a drum for lunch and shout the Badgers Green Pea Soup Song for
dinner. She would eat three meals a day sitting beside her father on a long bench
which had worm holes bitten into it by an orange and yellow ichneumon fly.
Fidelia had owned a dream like this since she was four and could ride her red
bicycle up and down the drive of the Scuol Red Cross Sanatorium not so far from the
Swiss-Italian border. She cycled through the silver birch trees, past the
roundabout, though the kitchen unit, up the hill of yellow stones, under the Cedar
tree, past the butterfly bushes as far as the white gate. She climbed up onto the
gate so that she could rest her chin on the top bar and stare down the road among
the pines towards Ardez which was surely the way her father would come. He would
probably be walking, dressed in a blue uniform carrying a bunch of white and blue
wild flowers he had picked for her. He would have sandwiches in his pocket,
probably beef and pickle, wrapped up in a brown bag with the words Bormio Groceries
on the outside in red letters. He would have walked over from Italy especially to
see her.
But there again perhaps he would come along the Gruethanger Road.
Fidelia got back on her red bicycle and cycled as fast as she could passed the
butterfly bushes, under the low branches of the Cedar tree, alongside the seven
Christmas trees, past the geranium flower-beds and up the little path to the green
gate beside the bureau-office. She could open the gate if she stood on the seat of
her bicycle to reach the latch, and she would cycle across the gravel yard to the
electric fence that kept the sheep out and look towards the foothills of the Piz
Tasna mountain and imagine her father singing a song as he came down through the
snow. If he came this way he would have his sandwiches wrapped in a red and white
spotted handkerchief like Fletcher Martin in the Picador Street stories. But
perhaps he would come another way.
Fidelia cycled very fast back through the green gate and along the asphalt path to
the Walterburg entrance where the plane had crashed taking a sick man to Brig. She
parked her bike at the wicker gate that lead into the forest and she stood on a
white-painted stone and looked through the trees. If her father came this way he
would carry his sandwiches in her mother�s handbag. There�s a thing. The sandwiches
would be brown bread with mozzarella and Corona tomatoes with pepper and a little
garlic.
Fidelia had one last place to wait for her father. She cycled as fast as she could
to the Branenspitz Gate where the petrol lorries came in to fill the generator
tanks and leave oil-stains on the grass. If her father� came this way he would
smell a little of petrol and have dirty hands, but he would be smiling, and his
sandwiches would be of pastrami and cucumber and be wrapped in a newspaper dated
4th May 1945 which announced the end of the war and had a photograph on the back
page of a dead white horse lying in a forest next to a black Mercedes car, license
number TL 9246.
When she was eight Fidelia had been given this newspaper cutting. The assistant
warden, Frau Nancy Stripps, who was expecting a baby and had to leave, had been
emptying her cupboards and had found the newspaper cutting folded neatly in a green
envelope. The end of the war and the dead white horse were obviously connected.
Frau Nancy Stripps was of a romantic nature. She had said that Fidelia�s father had
been coming on a white horse to rescue Fidelia, when he got stopped at Bolzano and
had to go back to finish off the war for the generals.
When Fidelia was nine, a parcel came for her, delivered by a man wearing goggles
who had tripped on the bureau carpet because his legs were so stiff from riding a
motorcycle. They unwrapped the parcel for Fidelia in the office. Inside was a gold
bar sent by a woman in Linz, in Austria; an old woman, her father�s grandmother,
her great grandmother. They kept the gold bar for Fidelia wrapped in a green baize
bag, in the office safe in Block Four down by the gate that lead to Wappingsturm.
The gold bar was to be, as they said, Fidelia�s nest-egg.
When she was twenty-one, Fidelia went back to the Red Cross Sanatorium to collect
her nest-egg. It had strangely shrunk in size. Fidelia formerly identified herself
with her Swiss passport, but she now called herself Mary Smith. It was the plainest
and most insignificant name she could think of in English. She wanted everyone to
immediately realise it was not her real name but a waiting-name, a temporary name
to be used whilst she waited for her father to come and collect her. He would give
her a real name. It would not be Fidelia which was her Sanatorium name, and the
warden�s choice. The warden was supposed to be �lovesick�, a word they often use at
the Sanatorium, and she sought consolation in Beethoven and his opera, Fidelio. The
warden told Fidelia that Fidelio meant �the faithful one�. Fidelia was faithful to
her father�s memory. She certainly rejected the name Fifi, which is what Frau Nancy
Stripps had called her, as though she, the small girl on the red bicycle, was a
fancy poodle in a circus.
Now that Fidelia, sometimes called Mary Smith, sometimes called Fifi, had her gold
bar, her life could really begin. She cashed her gold. She immediately was in
possession of a small fortune at 1960 prices. With her baby called Kurtz, she was
off to South America to meet her father. They had obviously just missed one another
in the great rushing about that had affected everyone at the end of the war. She
would look in Buenos Aires and Montevideo and San Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and Lima
and Mexicio City.
Fidelia never went to South America. She got as far as Bolzano and stayed in a
pension-house. She had planned to catch a train to Milan and then a plane at Linate
airport. She had the tickets in her purse. But first she wanted to have a look at
Bolzano where her father had ridden on a white horse. She went out looking in the
pine forests. What she was looking for exactly she could not decide. Perhaps she
would find what she was looking for when she found it. She was twenty-one. She
wandered among the sun-lit pine-trees and remembered things.
She had fair hair when she was a child and she often wore white and red ribbons to
match her socks.
When she was seven, she had a dirty dog called Piper who enjoyed water and who only
responded to commands in Italian. Fidelia had found the dog splashing in the pond
in the sanatorium grounds. It scattered her with water so that she could taste the
ducks on her tongue.
Fidelia had often run away. One day she got as far as Ramosch with her dog Piper,
and they brought girl and dog back in a black Mercedes. She cried and screamed
until they stopped the car and let her get out to look at the number plate. It was
not TL9246. They chained her red bicycle to the fence and every day she took her
breakfast cereal plate and shared her American cornflakes with her bicycle,
encouraging it to keep its strength up for a great journey which they would be
bound to take together one day. Frau Nancy Stripps had to watch her all the time,
but Nancy was always playing games with the garage men or the men who came to mend
the typewriters, taking her knickers down in the forest and coming back smelling of
pee.
Fidelia stole a camera to take pictures of herself in a mirror, or by holding the
camera at arm�s length. The pictures would be for her father who would want to know
how she had been growing up whilst he was away.
Fidelia had a red scarf as a comfort sheet when she went to bed.
Her favourite colour was red and her favourite fruit was cherries. She persuaded
Frau Nancy Stripps to buy them when she could and in return let her use her attic
bedroom far from the corridors to entertain her men-friends. And sometimes her
women-friends. Fidelia slowly sucked on the black and red fruit making them last.
She collected the cherry-pips. She soon had thousands. She kept them in a suitcase
lined with grease-proof paper. She never brushed her teeth very well, which drew
the attention of the visiting Red Cross dentist and also the dentist�s son. She was
always visiting the dentist. Sometimes the dentist visited Frau Nancy Stripps in
Fidelia�s bedroom, which meant more cherries and more cherry-stones for her
suitcase.
Fidelia played on the sanatorium roundabout, going round and round just like the
world. She would travel round and round the world looking for her father. Sometimes
she was joined on the roundabout by her friends. But they did not stay long. They
were soon adopted, taken to good homes in Germany or Luxembourg.� They would never
travel around the world like she was going to do.
Fidelia often asked to see her gold bar, and one of the secretaries was friendly
and let her play with it on the office carpet whilst he spoke on the phone to
adoption agencies around the world. Fidelia studied her gold bar carefully and
remembered it in every detail. It had a stork imprinted in its surface on one side
and on the other the numbers FFMS 567. Fidelia was shocked. Those letters made her
initials. Fidelia Fifi Mary Smith. What did the numbers signify?
An American childless couple tried to adopt her but she forced herself to shit
herself everytime they came near. She ran away again, but the sanatorium wardens
lured her back, saying that her yapping dirty dog and her red bike missed her so
much.
Her collection of suitcases grew. She kept them in her attic bedroom. They were
full of made-up memories like the time she went to London and bought a ticket to
the Harringay Exhibition of Gladioli.� And the special snow that came down pink
because it was stained with sand from Africa; the snow quickly melted and she
filled the suitcase with yellow pencil stubs to hide her disappointment. And she
had a suitcase full of lumps of coal that she would someday need to make a fire to
make herself toast to cheer herself up when she was gloomy.
When she was thirteen, Fidelia was let out in the winter time to help the tourists
at the ski-resort. She was given drinks by the skiers and she enjoyed the dreamy
state they induced. She stole bottles from the back of the bar to dream and think
of her life in South America with her father in uniform with the ichneumon flies.
Fidelia laced and unlaced ski boots all day till the constant head-patting
disturbed her.
She sat on the knees of uniformed men to see what uniform cloth felt like.
When she was fourteen, she made a formal request to visit Linz to discover from
where her gold bar had come from. Her great grandmother was dead. She had died
three days after sending Fidelia the gold bar.� She must have known she was going
to die. Fidelia met her great grandmother�s sister who remembered things for her,
or perhaps invented things for her. This old lady had heard from her sister that
Fidelia�s mother had been a great cook, and that her speciality was cooking
asparagus and spaghetti. Fidelia resolved to be a great asparagus and spaghetti
cook. When she got back to Scuol, Fidelia resolved to practice cooking in the
sanatorium kitchens.
Her great grandmother�s sister was seated permanently in a wheel-chair and they
went for walks together in the silent Sunday afternoon streets in Linz. She had to
help the old lady go the the toilet. Fidelia�s great grandmother�s sister told her
about the gold bar, and how her father had served in Vaux in France, and had
returned to Linz, and had told his grandmother that the only thing in the world
that people truly valued was gold, and that he was going to try to find his long-
lost daughter and buy her back from whoever held her. Together, grandson and
grandmother, had collected all the family trinkets and valuables. As far as the old
woman could remember, among the collected items, were all those objects that
Fidelia should have inherited if things had turned out differently. There was a
gold watch and chain, the clasp of his grandmother�s purse, a golden paper-weight
in the shape of a battleship, seven gold rings, a brooch in the shape of a hovering
death�s head hawk moth, three gold coins of the time of Napoleon, a twenty-
centimetre high crucifix that had been in the family for three generations.
Fidelia�s father had these items smelted down and made into a gold bar which he had
sewn inside a specially made pocket inside his trousers. A year later her father
had returned to Linz, and had said that he had heard that his daughter was in
Switzerland. He had given the gold bar back to his grandmother because he now had
other plans. One gold bar would never be enough for the Swiss, who had hundreds of
thousands of gold-bars anyway.
At fifteen Fidelia was so alone and so miserable that when her dirty mongrel Piper
became sick, she deliberately tried to drown herself in the pond where she had
found her dog. She remembered how happy the dog had been, splashing and leaping in
the water. Perhaps there was happiness under the water. Fidelia simply did not want
to have to collect more miserable memories, she had enough already.
At sixteen she had been seduced by the dentist�s son. Maybe she had seduced him.
She had been reading American comics left behind by the tourists. They taught her a
great deal about love, sex, morals, food, cars and spiders. The dentist�s son was a
curly headed German named Gustav. The name had excited her.
Fidelia listened assiduously to the foreigners. She learnt German and French in
honour of her parents. She spoke Romanisch to Nancy Stripps and Italian to the
dentist and the dentist�s son.
She became an expert skier. One day she would ski right over the mountain to a
place called Bolzano where black Mercedes cars live in the forests and there are
stables built especially to house white horses.
Her dog Piper died and she secretly stole money and had him stuffed and put him
comfortably tucked up in a sitting position in one of her best suitcases, and kept
him beside her bed, stroking his nose to remember his cheerful friendliness.
Most of her seventeenth year she had been drunk. It was a year she scarcely
remembered.
She married the dentist�s son who unnecessarily replaced all her teeth to make her
an advertisement for his coming practice. He had promised one day to take her to
New York. She knew he never would, but it was a real and possible dream put into
words, and no one had ever done that for her before. She hung up her red bicycle on
the wall of her bedroom. She would not need it anymore, except to go on dream
rides.
In a cinema at Locarno she saw Resnais�s film Night and Fog and cried for three
days. She was sure she had seen her mother in a crowd of women rushing across a
snow-covered field. Her mother was wearing a brown, white spotted dress and she was
carrying a saucepan of asparagus. Or was it spaghetti? Did they eat asparagus or
spaghetti at Dachau?
When Fidelia was 19 she had a baby and lived with Gustav, still only a dentist�s
assistant, in a chalet at Eidenberg. She often went back to the sanatorium to watch
their new TV in the games-room where no-one disturbed her as she suckled her baby
and drank condensed milk straight from the can. The warden of the sanatorium had
changed three times. Fidelia scarcely knew anyone on the staff anymore.
She walked in the pine-woods around Eidenberg on Sundays, staring at the trees for
long periods of time. Sometimes she might take along one of her suitcases. She
began not to care about anything very much. She went from bad to worse. How low did
she sink? She was paid four hundred dollars for an act of Roman Charity with three
business men for Potsdam. She punished herself by sticking pins in her breasts.
An older Nancy Stripps returned to work in an old people�s home� near Ardez. Her
baby had died. Or been adopted. She now had red hair and red fingernails, and she
played games with Fidelia�s dentist-assistant husband in the pine-woods. Fidelia
saw them through binoculars together on the tree-line doing lewd things. As soon as
she could, Fidelia packed her suitcases, took her money out of the savings bank,
and here she was in Bolzano where all her reconstructed memories seemed to begin.
She stayed three days in Bolzano, a week, two weeks, a month. She knew that her
nest egg would not last forever. She did not want to be parted from her suitcases,
but it was not going to be so easy carting them around the world. She got a job as
a waitress in a cafe in Bolzano that allowed her to keep her baby in a wheelchair
in the kitchen. She could speak four languages and was learning English, so she was
a valuable asset. She rented herself two rooms. She laid out her suitcases on the
floor, under the bed, on a long table, all opened ready for her to examine their
contents at any time she wanted; her stuffed dog, her empty perfume bottles, her
cherry-stones, the dentist�s tools that had extracted all her teeth, the yellow
paint she had poured from six paint cans and left to grow hard and solid, her
sewing-needles, her Anna Karenina novels, the love letters she had invented between
her parents, one hundred candle-ends, her almost featureless maps of deserts, light
bulbs she took pity on for being no longer able to light up, pieces of broken
mirror, lost property she had found in the Locarno cinema when she was convinced
she saw her mother in the film of Night and Fog, her broken china dogs - a futile
attempt to resurrect Piper, postcards of Rome showing ancient buildings, her
collection of names of places around the world she had thought beautiful or exotic
or enticing, and sand that smelt of the sea she had never seen.
Remembering her mother, she began to cook pasta. She was good. She gave up waiting
tables. With the remainder of her Linz gold fortune, she opened a small restaurant.
She called it the Red Bicycle and she cooked spaghetti and was a great success.
Bolzano at last had a spaghetti kitchen that was reputable. Bolzano had been
waiting patiently for Fidelia. Fidelia knew that every dish she cooked, she cooked
for her father, and one day she knew he would come and eat at her table.