In New York City, flocks of pigeons met for their own mass in front of the steps of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on the city’s most fashionable thoroughfare. These were blue and grey birds whose necks in the bright sunlight had a pink iridescence it would be difficult to render in paint on canvas. The occasional white pigeon was mottled blue, uglier than its fellows, but it would be easier under brush. The last Jew to flee the Nazi terror scattered the pigeons as be walked through their numbers to cross the busy avenue.
He had just left the dark, highceilinged cathedral where he had sat since the early morning, watching Christ hang from His golden cross. Having crossed Fifth Avenue, he looked up to observe the statue of Atlas bent to his knee under the dull brass rings of the world he struggled to uphold. A whisper in his mind recited from Faust, which he had obsessively read and reread over the past four weeks: “By magic might before us doth appear/ massive enough, an ancient temple here/ Like Atlas who upheld the sky of old.” So Faust watched over the artist of the New World. The chauffeured car that his brother had given him also waited protectively at the curb. He knew that if some policeman ordered the driver to move, the car would regain its expected place in orbit within a reliable time.
Albert Entrater walked farther into the square of brand new skyscrapers. Building was still in process on the most distant towers. The smell of new cement and the gnashing sounds of establishmentinprogress surrounded him. His brother Artur had an expression “The city is growing up overnight” that tightened Albert’s chest muscles. Nevertheless, he was drawn to this Rockefeller Center.
He stood above the lower court, his hand on the brass railing which gently burned
against his palm in the August sun. The heat that had been unique as far north as Berlin was
normal here in New York.
It had been two days since the popular German President Hindenburg died. Two days before that, there had been steady rain in New York. A relief rain of August. The weather had allowed him to sit alone nursing a sore throat in his brother’s Long Island house. Since his arrival in New York, the days had blown by him like gusts building to a summer storm. But the days were not interested in him. They were busy with imperatives of their own convections, and no storm had broken. Just the steady twoday rain.
In his brother’s house, there was a large cooling unit throbbing in the dining room below, and similar units throughout the house, but Albert kept the small windows in his room open. Alternately, he lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, or sitting at a desk by the window, he drifted into a formless reverie. Always between him and a desired consummation came the figures of his lost friends.
Since Albert’s arrival, his brother had treated him like someone newly released from a sanitarium. At the dinner table, he was seated beside his eightyearold nephew. Artur’s wife was clearly nervous about the visitor. Artur’s mother, Albert’s stepmother, was a stout woman who wore only flowersplashed black silk dresses. She was as wary of him now as she had been in his younger days.
From time to time, he could hear the sounds of his nephew playing baseball in the yard below. The boy spoke English with no accent, which pleased Artur. His nephew also spoke fluent German in the same accentless, highpitched voice. But the only thing the child cared about was American baseball and a hero named Carl Hubbel, who had “struck out five in a row” in a socalled “AllStar Game.”
When the boy had spoken of the stars, he distractedly began to recall Konrad’s story of the Serpent Bearer, his favorite summer constellation. As his nephew pressed his ear to the large radio console, listening to the excited voice of a sports reporter, Albert had tried to recount the details of the wonderful myth.
But then he suddenly heard himself yelling at the boy in furious German, and the boy’s French nourrice interceded on the child’s behalf. He realized he had not even known the nanny was in the room with them.
It would be better to remove himself than to disturb the household, and Artur put at his service the chauffeur and car. Everyday he was taken for a tour of the city on the pretext that he was seeking out a pleasant neighborhood to find a place to live, to have a studio. “You know perfectly well he could return to Berlin,” he had overheard his stepmother say, “now that the Nazis are finished.” Instead, he had for three weeks become a wanderer in a city in which rain seemed to cause the mushroom-eruption of towering buildings. Planet meant wanderer, Konrad had taught him.
Albert now stood above the courtyard in the new Rockefeller Center, facing a marble wall centered by a golden, eighteen foot sculpture of Prometheus, apparently alighting on a ringed rock. Prometheus was in the center, flanked on either side by a bronze youth and maiden, the two who would receive the fire Prometheus upheld in his shining right hand. And where in this city, Albert wondered, was the other rock, the one Prometheus would be chained to? He idly touched the edge of a newspaper Artur had put in his hand the day his boat had docked. From that day, he had carried it with him everywhere. Artur had said, “I kept this for you,” and what Albert might have seen first of his new country was lost in the reading of the July 1st news, as reported to the New World.
Again, as he recalled the moment, he took the paper from his pocket to examine it once more. The pages were ragged at the edges, the print was smudged, but as ever, there were the three photographs  Roehm, Hilter . . . and Lisel. Her picture was a school photo. In it she looked like the young model who had appeared at his door only sixteen weeks earlier, not the woman he had left behind on the last day of June. It was the only likeness he had of her, save for the portrait in his mind. He carefully folded the paper into eighths and slipped it back into his pocket. He heard the nearby fountain gush and splash; the blinding gleam was gone from Prometheus.
He looked upward along the dizzying lines of the surrounding towers. What he saw looked like a modern painting of converging parallel lines. The image told two stories in a wordless instant: first, he was a bird, trapped among the branches of overwhelming trees; second, he was Joseph, looking up from the bottom of the well.
Blinking and shaking his head, he then saw simply that the sky high above was clouding over. He looked to the left and right of the giant statue of Prometheus and saw the figures he had named Konrad and Lisel. Drops of rain began to fall with comic slowness. The August air was too heavy and slow to move out of its way. A tourist in a straw hat turned his mouth upward to the sky to catch a drop of rain like a peanut. The comedy was a surprise to Albert. Like a longlost voice, it touched him like the rain. The mood went further. His face looked conspiratorial as he decided he must escape. The blackuniformed chauffeur would be waiting to protect him from the coming weather. He began to walk east towards the underground railway, and he considered his condition.
What had he been doing these last several weeks? Even the limousine he sat in was cushioncovered. He was like some plump walnut secure inside a shell. With brief interruptions, that was an accurate appraisal of his whole life. Did his feet touch the glitterstrewn cement of the sidewalks beginning to steam with rain? He did not feel them touch. Momentarily, he even felt invisible as he crossed Fifth Avenue. He was well out of the hindsight of his patient guardian.
He came into view again at the next curb, where the buildings and shops reminded him of Berlin. But no, the set was all too selfconscious and new to be anything but a copy for a European melodrama.
Invisible again for a block. No one could see the middleaged man running, blown along in the increasing rain. He had to stop at a light at the avenue. He didn’t see the wide grass islands; he saw instead Scotland heather. The tints of purple, pink, and blue moved in waves instead of the city street. When he moved, he moved because of the others. He was blown with the mass of heatherpollen and humanity. “For He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust,” he remembered Konrad’s words.
He could see the block ahead in the perfect rain now falling. It was an entrance to the safety of the underground. The wrought iron sign overhead said Lexington Avenue. Rain washed over his face and down his cheeks. He ran down the dark cool steps and dug a nickel from his pocket for the wooden turnstile. The noise was hellish it physically pushed at his body, but a wonderful eerie darkness surrounded him. A train for escape screeched to a metal stop. He took a seat on it. His fingertips touched the shiny, strawwoven seat.
As the doors were closing, Konrad slipped over the threshhold.
“Albert!” Konrad called. He swung his hand around a support pole and sat in the seat adjacent to him. He was out of breath. “Calm yourself, old friend. There now.” He smiled. “After all.”
“What did they do to you?”
“Less than you’d imagine.”
The train gasped and sighed. It stopped. People stepped off and on. There was a shifting within an equilibrium that the acceleration of the train transformed into direction.
“God is richer than even you. Rest assured.”
“I am not so certain there is a God.”
“Better still. Then the goodness comes from us!”
An elderly woman who sat across the aisle looked startled. She hugged her blue string bag lumpy with parcels and picked herself up heavily, swaying with the motion of the train to a more distant seat.
“There can be purpose where there is apparently no purposeful act.”
“How?
“If we make it so. That is the secret to see.”
He hung his head onto his hand, balanced on his stumped arm. Both elbows were propped on his knees. Nausea and the train’s lurching made him tremble like F ranz.
“Perhaps I do not see.”
Konrad answered with a sudden, sunlit smile.
Albert cupped his eyes which pooled with tears. He nearly fell forward as the train lurched to a stop. He looked out of reddened eyes at the now empty seat. He regained himself enough to sit back and find a handkerchief in the inside pocket of his jacket. He wiped his forehead, eyes, then mouth. A man who had taken a seat across the aisle leaned toward him.
“You okay, mister?”
He heard the English, understood.
“It’s hard times.”
“Yes… I am all right. Okay.”
He found that day’s newspaper, which a traveller had left behind. Hindenburg was still unburied. There was a reprint of the German President’s will. Oddly, it was in German. Albert nodded when he read the passages that would contribute to a new Germany.
We deem it advisable that when we no longer serve, Chancellor von Papen reestablish a constitutional State, expressive and representative of the will of the German people…
… Again we repudiate the siege of barbarism and totalitarian state of the recent past; to this end, a separation of powers is advisable. The offices of the President and Chancellor are best divided and guided by the restoration of the monarchy we were so greatly honored once and for so long to serve.
The will ended with Hindenburg’s personal farewell.
For our personal effects our truest wish is to be buried according to Christian service in Neudeck cemetery without laudatory speeches in a grave covered by a plain block of stone on which nothing but our name be inscribed. Let it be a cornerstone upon which the Royal State may ever rise.
Paul von Hindenburg
July, 1934
According to Chancellor von Papen (to think of von Papen as Chancellor!), this document was revised immediately after the “Night of the Long Knives” and the assassination of Chancellor Hitler on July 1st.
He looked over into the empty space. The helpful man across the aisle saw him turn pale, and he quickly took the seat at which Albert stared miserably.
“You got somewhere to go, buddy?” the man asked.
He looked blankly at the samaritan.
“You speak the language?” the man then asked in bad high school German.
The traveler nodded.
“I think you to be lost,” the man struggled. “We just pulled Wall Street and these train doesn’t stop up Clark in Brooklyn Heights, is perhaps at you are wenting?”
“I am not lost,” he said slowly in perfect English, but he felt the words in his mouth like unchewed food.
“Where d’ya live?” the man asked.
Albert put his thumb in his mouth and began biting it.
“The thing to do is change at Clark Street back for the City and just stay on til 86th Street. That’s where your people are,” the man said, taking a scrap of paper from his pocket on which he wrote, overlarge, the number 86. Albert nodded understanding and took out one of the business cards Artur had given him. On the back of the card he wrote the number 86 and gave it to the man. The old woman with the string bag of parcels stood close by, holding onto the pole by the door, evidently waiting for the next stop. She eavesdropped openly on the semiconversation between the traveler and his guide, and once convinced of his German origin, she spoke in a rapid, triumphant Yiddish.
“Ha! The Devil is dead! Yes!”
With arch politeness he replied, “If the Devil is dead, madam, then God is dead and with Him all the angels.”
The old woman and the man exchanged looks. She rubbed her temple in the universal sign for crazy, and the man nodded in agreement. Albert turned away from both, concentrating on the white tiles flashing past the subway window. The train ached and screamed into a station. The man touched Albert’s knee and said in German, “Clark Street. You out get… and change it.”
He stood, thanked the man, and followed the old woman out of the train with several others. She looked at him over her shoulder and in a surprising burst of energy, disappeared up a flight of stairs, away from the crazy man. He turned, suddenly truly lost. He looked back longingly at the train that contained one person who had offered help, only to see the man through the window pointing and nodding encouragement. Lightbulbs inside the train flickered and the doors closed.
He heard his heart in his ears now that the train had left. Then a pretty young woman with whiteblond braided hair was standing near him. He recognized her at once, and she smiled.
“I must go back. I was told.”
She smiled again and nodded, then gave him directions and pointed. He bowed politely to thank her, still the twinkle of recognition in his eye. When he had crossed to the token booth, he turned to look at her again. Of course, she was watching him. Then, suddenly, she waved.
He followed the directions and walked upstairs to the platform facing where she had stood. She was gone.
But he knew now he was supposed to go to 86tb Street for some special reason.
The downpour had stopped by the time he walked up the steps and stood on the corner of 86th Street and Lexington Avenue. There were deep puddles at the curbs, and rain steamed off the cement sidewalks. He stood at the corner trying to reestablish the mental compass he had lost. He saw a flowerseller’s shop. Next to the rainsoaked flowers was a newspaper stand. There he suddenly saw the German papers, and the voices of the words leaped into his mind. What a relief– he was back in Berlin again!
By the headlines, he could see which paper was Nazi: the Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter called Hindenburg’s will “Treason!” The antiNazi Deutsches Volksecho carried a photograph of Hindenburg lying in state and proclaimed “The People’s Will!” The StaatsZeitung un Herold reported “Funeral Tuesday.” He sniffed the still humid air from the Havel and Spree. He bought six newspapers at the stand and held them all under his arm, close by his body.
He heard the eager and anxious German voices as people raced about the noisy elevated train that was a pride of Berlin. The typical Berlin shops continued along both sides of the street. The buildings were three and four stories high, and nearly all had stores on the ground level. There was the familiar outdoor cafe where men sat drinking large steins of beer. He breathed in the steaming cabbage and wurst. A bakery window offered a shiny wheel of bread. A market window offered soap and coffee. “This is what these people call a ‘Depression’ and they still call themselves German,” he whispered.
A sweet arrow from childhood, the fragrance of marzipan, pierced him. He stopped, turned, and sighted the target, a narrow store whose shelved cases were filled with candies. As soon as he entered, it smelled like heaven. At the back of the store, in hearing and view, was a table at which three men sat, apparently friends of the proprietor. As he examined the counter, the men kept on with their conversation, which had been briefly interrupted when his entrance through the screen door had rung a shiny brass bell. Keeping one ear open to the talk and one eye on him, the owner busied himself rearranging the countertop where decorated tins of candies were stacked in little pyramids.
“Well, you say that because you got a job,” one voice grumbled in the accent of a true Berliner.
“It’s good to see you back here,” said another.
The first voice fairly growled, “You see, it’s women! I told you, I told you before it ever happened, the cook didn’t like us, antiNazi she was, the little bitch from Freiburg–”
“From Freiburg she was?” the third one interrupted. “I have a cousin in Braunlingen.”
“The cook didn’t like us,” the angry voice continued, “and another bitch kills the Fuhrer, and if that is not enough to break the heart of a true man, the pin in my lapel,” there was a pause during which he fingered his Nazi insignia, “they see the pin in my lapel which I am not about to remove and the Jew fires me, me and the wife, right in the middle of the day, half wages, go to hell!”
“The cook was Jewish?”
“Not the cook,” the voice yelled. “The owner, you idiot!”
“You never liked the Westchester, anyway,” the third voice soothed.
“You can talk easy, you got yourself a job,” the man repeated more calmly. “The Fuhrer would’ve taken care of them, I’ll tell you. He had a plan. And now what’ve we got? Business as usual. Jew business as usual!”
“I don’t have a job either,” one said. “Deitrich does, but I don’t.”
“You’re a Jew-lover, you’ll do just fine,” the Nazi muttered.
“I don’t love, I don’t hate,” came the response.
“That’s the best thing in the long run,” the third said. “Live and let live.”
“Oh!” the Nazi barked. “That’s what’s wrong with this goddamn country!” And he left the store by a back door everyone heard slam.
The proprietor offered his palms up to his customer by way of apology. Albert put the newspapers down on a place cleared on the counter, and began pointing at candies.
“A man out of work isn’t always reasonable,” the owner said. He tied up the box of candies and accepted payment, careful not to look at the handless arm.
“The Great War?” he said kindly.
Albert nodded.
“I lost two brothers.”
He put the box of candies back down on the counter and reached into his pocket and drew out a business card. He gave it to the puzzled store owner.
“Tell them to call my brother,” he said. “Including the Nazi.”
The man looked at the card, then whistled through his teeth, a sound which mingled with the ringing of the shiny brass bell as Albert left. Now that he had the newspapers and the candy box to manage, he tucked the papers under his short arm and held the candy by its string in his fingers. He knew just what to do. It was clearer by the minute. On the other side of the street, the fourstory brownstones continued. One had a tailor’s shop. Above the store was a deep bay window. It was an ideal location for an artist’s studio.
He stood on Prinzregentstrasse looking up at the windows of his studio. His throat burned; his face was hot. As he stared blindly at the building, he heard a boat’s horn. It was bright and piercing, and it made him turn east toward the water. He realized how close he was to the Spree and then saw with delight the tips of the masts. They were moving south past the treetops of what was a watersedge park. After a surprisingly short walk, he was at the entrance to the park, looking up at the circling birds. It was a tranquil Saturday in August after all. He found just the place beyond one of the low hills that greened along the banks. He sat. His legs were tired and aching. His heart throbbed. The grass was still damp from the rain. He could hear his father’s voice scolding against sitting on wet ground or cold stone. “Do not invite rheumatism!” The old man had died without a creak or a cringe.
Obediently, he spread out all his newspapers like a blanket on the grass. Carefully, he opened his box of special candy. The air swept in from the water, which was the amber that appeared in so many of his paintings. He pressed his lips into the soft candy, and all the holidays of childhood tasted in his mouth. He breathed crushed almonds and Mother’s perfume. He opened his eyes after this rapture and looked down the long green slope. From where he sat, he could see in this near distance of a mile or two another marina toward which a shining sailboat moved. The August wind warmly blew the boat on the glitterfinned fish that was the river, leaping over and under and south around its elemental self.
This this was the moment he had sought. The perfect moment.
He contined to nibble on the white bottom of a marzipan pear. His concentration on the candy was not lost upon a little girl of perhaps three, who was walking along the path some meters from his legs. He heard her mother’s shushings before she actually materialized before him, kneeling on the edge of his newspaper picnic blanket, holding out her palm prettily, saying, “Thank you, please.”
Lovely Hilde, in navy whitecollared dress, quickly caught up with her and begged his pardon. He didn’t stand. He realized he couldn’t.
Instead, he reached into the box and handed them each one of his candies. He spoke to them. in German. Then he started to laugh, and the child giggled. All excited, she performed her repertoire of scarey faces for him. When she was done, she popped a marzipan apple, whole, into her mouth. She noticed his missing hand. She quickly looked at the hand that held another piece of candy.
“Does it hurt?” Gerta asked.
“Only sometimes,” he said.
“God bless you,” she said, as if he had sneezed.
The child then followed her mother away. He felt greatly tired. He lay back on the newspaper and it seemed to whisper in his ears. On his back, he watched the last of the rainclouds blowing away in purple billows to the southeast. It was painful to look blankly at the bright afternoon sky. His eyes watered. He shut them and slept.
When he opened them again, the bowl of night was gathering above him, a thing of such beauty, he gasped.
“It’s all right,” a familiar voice said above him. “Thank God, I was called.”
Jupiter would still be full tonight, bright and wise. Mars and Saturn would be diminished to their waning halves, close by Virgo. The waxing halfmoon would beam by Saturn’s left hand.
“Virgo stands like St. Michael at the end of the universe,” he told people who were moving about him. Few fireflies were twinkling in the parks. The stars were all rising in the sky. He was standing up and being led somewhere. It was getting dark, and street lamps illuminated a row of red townhouses with shiny black doors and shining brass doorknobs that didn’t look real to him.
“It’s really hot as hell, isn’t it?” he said.
Overhead, Vega thrummed in the Lyre and Deneb was the burning eye of the black, bejeweled Swan. There was a humming and burning inside him; he swayed against the body that supported him.
He was leaning against a soft corner. What he saw in front of him was the frame of a car window around the finished canvas of The Park at Night, stars and moon rising overhead, the Spree in the distance in the wavy threads of low rotating clouds. In the foreground in the yellow lamplight, backgrounded by black and greenilluminated trees, were two shadowy figures.
It was Virgo and lost Pollux! They were clothed in white and glittering stars that made him blink. A dry cool hand pressed against his burning forehead. He drew a breath at the touch. He closed his eyes and sank into the coolness, and when he opened them again, he saw Lisel and Konrad standing on a rise under the lamplight under the trees. At the horizon he could see the last of the light shining through them.
Lisel raised her transparent arm Konrad did the same. They were smiling at him and waving goodbye. He lifted his arm heavily. With his ghost hand he returned their farewell. Then he leaned against his brother and gave himself up to the unconsciousness shared by the millions of other survivors.
Three decades later, Columbia University history professor Anne Frank-Koestler met the artist through mutual expatriate friends at the gallery show where she admired his painting The Park at Night and wished aloud that she could afford it. Having equally enjoyed a book of Prof. Frank-Koestler’s, Albert Entrater arranged to make the purchase possible. Thus began the dialgoue between them that led to her research into this narrow corner of modern German history she called “a mercifully quieted cul de sac” and which resulted in her Pulitzer Prize-winning work, The Right of Way, which linked the highway of history with the avenue of art, and thereby inspired this novel.