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.
 
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.
 
 
 

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.
 

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?
 

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.
 

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 appliqué 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.
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 
 
 
 

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.
 
 
 

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.
 
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.
 

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.
 
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.
 
 
 

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.
 
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.
 
 
 
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.
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.
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.
 
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.
 

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 

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 ...... “.
 

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.
 

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 
 

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
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.
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.
 
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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 

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.
 
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.
 

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.
 
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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
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.
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.
 
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.