The old man smiled crookedly. “No, there are no Nazis in Berlin. Not one. Only Social Democrats. So many, all those years. How could the party have survived with so many against them? Well, it’s a question.” He took another drag and stared at the glowing tip. “All Social Democrats now. The bastards. They threw me out.” He looked toward the institute building. “Years of work. I’ll never make it up now, never. It’s all kaput.”
“You’re a Jew?”
He snorted. “If I were a Jew I’d be dead. They had to leave right away. The rest of us, they waited, hoping we would join, then it was an order-party member or out. So I was out. I really was a Social Democrat.” He smiled. “Of course, you may not believe me. But you can check the records. 1938.”
“You were at the institute?” Jake said, interested now.
“Since 1919,” he said proudly. “They had places, you see, after the influenza, so I was lucky. It counted for something then, just to be here. Well, those days. I remember when we got the measurements from the eclipse. For Einstein’s theory,” he said, a teacher explaining, catching Jake’s blank expression. “If light had mass, then gravity would bend the rays. Starlight. The eclipse made it possible to measure. Einstein said it would be 1.75 seconds of an arc, the angle. And do you know what it was? 1.63. So close. Can you imagine? In that one minute, everything changed. Everything. Newton was wrong. The whole world changed, right here in Berlin. Right here.” He extended his arm toward the building, his voice following it in some private reverie. “So, then what? Champagne, of course, but the talk. All night talking. We thought we could do anything-that was German science. Until the gangsters. Then down the drain-”
“I had a friend at the institute,” Jake said, breaking in before the old man could drift further. “I’m trying to locate him. That’s why- perhaps you knew him. Emil Brandt?”
“The mathematician? Yes, of course. Emil. You were his friend?”
“Yes,” Jake said. His friend. “I was hoping someone would know where he is. You don’t-?”
“No, no, it’s many years.”
“But do you know what happened to him?”
“That I couldn’t say. I left the institute, you see.”
“And he stayed,” Jake said slowly, piecing together dates. “But he wasn’t a Nazi.”
“My friend, anyone who was here after 1938-” He stopped, seeing Jake’s face, and looked away. “But perhaps he was a special case.” He dropped his cigarette. “Thank you again. I must say good evening now. The curfew.”
“I knew him,” Jake said. “He wasn’t like that.”
“Like what? Goering? Many people joined, not just the swine. People do what they have to do.”
“You didn’t.”
He shrugged. “And what did it matter? Emil was young. A fine mind, I remember that. Numbers he could see in his head, not just on paper. Who can say what’s right? To give up your work for politics? Maybe he loved science more. And in the end-” He paused, looking again at the building, then back at Jake. “You disturb yourself over this. I can see it. Let me tell you something, for the price of a cigarette. The eclipse? In 1919? The Freikorps were fighting in the streets then. I myself saw bodies, Spartakists, in the Landwehrkanal. Who remembers now? Old politics. Footnotes. But in that building we changed the world. So what’s important? A party card? I don’t judge your friend. We are not all criminals.”
“Just the golden pheasants.”
A mild smile, conceding the point. “Yes. Them I don’t forgive. I’m not yet a saint.”
“What does it mean, anyway? Golden pheasants?”
“Who knows? Bright feathers-the uniforms. The wives left in fur coats, before the Russians came. Maybe it was that they flew out of the bushes as soon as they heard the first shots. Ha,” he said, the joke for himself. “Maybe that’s why there are no Nazis in Berlin.” He stopped and looked again at Jake. “It was a formality, you know. Just a formality.” He tipped his hat. “Good night.” ‹›Jake stood for a minute in front of the gloomy institute, unsettled. Emil must have joined. There wouldn’t have been any exceptions. But why did it surprise him? Millions had. A formality. Except Jake hadn’t known. All that time, something unsaid. A pleasant man with gentle eyes, quiet at parties, diffident, who saw numbers in his head-someone Jake never thought about at all. Not a Nazi, one of the good Germans. Standing with his arm around Lena. Had she known? How could he not tell her? And how could she stay with him, knowing? But she had.
It was getting dark, so he started down Thielallee. A jeep had pulled up in front of the Kommandatura, dropping off two soldiers, who hurried up the stairs with briefcases. New politics, soon to be as old as the Freikorps. What was important? People do what they have to do. She had stayed. Jake had left. That simple. Except Emil wasn’t simple anymore, which changed things. Had she known, those afternoons when they drew the shades to keep Berlin outside?
