Heidegger's Glasses Read online

  All of me likes you, said Elie. I’m just saving the other half for later.

  Dear Luigi,

  It was an easy journey even though it was long.

  The country is lovely here. Come meet me.

  Love,

  Rosaria

  The officer went to their room—five yards up the incline—and Elie took the mineshaft almost ten meters down into the earth. The mineshaft lift was a small, cramped cage, and she was relieved when she could pull back the diamond-shaped guard. It opened to a rose-colored cobblestone street lit with gas lamps. Opposite the mineshaft was a large mahogany door with Gleichantworten Mögen (Like Answers Like) hammered out in the same jaunty semicircle as Arbeit Macht Frei. Elie opened this door to a room the size of a small stadium, where more than forty people slept on desks. She heard glissandos of snoring and rustling. If someone moved or shifted too abruptly, papers fell to the floor. The walls were lined with sewing machines, mixing bowls, coats, mirrors, typewriters. Elie’s desk was in the front of the room, facing the others. As soon as she lit its kerosene lamp people struggled from sleep to greet her. A door on the far wall opened, and sixteen more people tumbled out. Everyone crowded around Elie, asking if she was safe, rushing to bring treasures from the mineshaft. She opened the hamper of food, and they applauded when they saw ham, a roast chicken, sausages, smoked fish, cheese, cigarettes, vodka, fleischkonserve, cans of ersatz coffee, and thirteen loaves of freshly baked bread—a gift from a baker whose niece Elie helped escape to Denmark. They opened the vodka and toasted news that the Russians were advancing. Then they toasted Elie.

  To Elie! they said. To our Gnädige Frau!

  Elie raised her own glass and wrapped the fresh meat and bread in soft cloth. She took the mineshaft back to the room she shared with the officer who met her as she walked up the incline. He held out his hands, and they walked to their room, the last remnant of life above the earth. It was a small white square with oblong windows near the ceiling that became trapezoids as they sloped closer to the ground. Elie wanted nothing more than to lean into his arms and tell him how much she had missed him, but she was afraid she would start to cry from sheer exhaustion. Instead she shone the kerosene lantern around the room with a slight aura of disapproval. There were socks, playing cards, boots, and books scattered on the floor. There was also another green sweater.

  This looks just like the outpost, she said.

  Actually, Elie, I changed the sheets.

  That was good of you.

  So I’m exonerated?

  Maybe.

  Elie draped her coat on a chair. Then she opened her arms.

  Both sides of me are ready for you now.

  Elie had moved from the small dark room below the earth because she said people needed extra space to sleep. But everyone knew it was because she loved Gerhardt Lodenstein, who was Obërst of the Compound.

  The crazier things get the longer three days seem, he said, pulling her to the bed. What took so long?

  The less you know the better, said Elie.

  The SS shoot people like flies these days. I worry.

  It’s not so crazy at the borders, said Elie. I had three kids under blankets, and the SS hardly looked. They’ve stopped believing in this war. Everyone has.

  Not Himmler or Goebbels, said Lodenstein. And not the camps. They’re killing more people every day.

  Mentioning the camps made Elie remember the story about the angel. She kissed Lodenstein, took her revolver from her cardigan, kicked off her boots, and got under the covers. She was still wearing her skirt, her blouse, and the red silk ribbon.

  You can’t sleep in your clothes, Elie.

  Lots of people do these days.

  I know. But we’re still safe here.

  Still, said Elie.

  Still is safe enough.

  Elie smiled, and he undressed her carefully. When he touched her, she felt as soft as the ribbon he’d untied—the ribbon that, along with classified papers, allowed her freedom to travel. He pulled her toward him. She pulled away.

  Something’s wrong. What happened to you out there? he said.

  Elie touched the quilt. It was a feather comforter, covered with grey silk, and came from a raided house in Amsterdam.

  There’s a mess out there, she said. And we sleep under this Reich-fucked thing.

  But that’s not what’s bothering you.

  Lodenstein turned off the kerosene lantern, and the dark felt soft, almost tangible. He touched Elie, and her body felt like lace. They made love slowly.

  Who can resist the feeling of being made into lace? she thought. Only someone who knows they’re about to be gassed or doesn’t know if their child will eat the next day. Only someone who has to walk for kilometers in danger on a cold winter’s night.

  Lodenstein fell asleep, but Elie lay awake, thinking about the SS man who had transformed into an angel. Elie imagined his conversation with the Commandant, the prisoner being told he could leave. She imagined the two of them walking out of Auschwitz. If one person can leave, two people can leave, she thought. And then three. And then four.

  Before Goebbels gave her identity papers, he’d shown Elie photographs of Auschwitz, watching for signs of compassion. She’d been careful not to register anything while she looked at rows of barracks and the russet barbed-wire fence that billowed around the camp as if frozen by the wind. The tufted wires looked like runes but could tear skin to shreds. What would it take to get someone past that fence? she thought.

  Dearest Herta,

  I can’t tell you how much I miss you. There’s someone in this camp who can sing Lieder. They allow him to sing at night because the officers enjoy it and it reminds me of you. I can hear your voice inside this fence. This is all I can write for now.

  Love,

  Stefan

  While Elie lay awake she looked at the sliver of black phone beneath maps and papers and thought of people to call to ask about the angel. But she and Lodenstein already lived in peril because they helped fugitives, and a call to the wrong person could get them shot. So Elie pressed her head into the quilt and tried to ignore the dank mineral smell of the mine permeating from below. At night the smell grew stronger, as if the mine were denouncing its transformation after Hans Ewigkeit, a famous German architect, had toured it and said this will do.

  No detail had been too small: the mine was masked by a shell, enclosing three water closets, a kitchen, a cobblestone street, an artificial sky, a room for over fifty people, and a shoebox of a watchtower. Everyone who slept below the earth had fallen from some place or other. And at night, while Elie felt the weight of a feather quilt, they shifted and coughed and fought to keep warm. Everything in the project depended upon them. It was called the Compound of Scribes.

  Near dawn it began to snow heavily, piling against the windows and filling the room with blue light. Elie touched Lodenstein’s light brown hair and traced the hairline scar on his forehead. Everything felt soft, as if made of another element, and she finally fell asleep, light-years away from the Compound.

  When Lodenstein woke up, Elie was still sleeping. One arm trailed along the side of the bed, reminding him of the first time he’d ever seen her sleep—on a train when she’d brought him to the Compound. They’d traveled at night, and the benches were transformed into bunks. Elie slept on top; he slept below, and one of her arms was so close he could have touched the red ribbon on her wrist. Once he’d gotten out of bed to look at her and was so entranced—and so further entranced by her charming dishevelment in the morning—he’d left his shaving kit on the train. It was sent to the Compound two weeks later with a note from Goebbels’s office: There’s a war on. We don’t give out shaving kits like pfennigs.

  He wondered what Elie had done in her search for ways to help people. What SS men had she flirted with? What hawkers on the black market? What flagging underground newspaper group would keep printing because she’d found them money? What forgers would make passports because she’d hidden a rel
ative? Lodenstein understood that flirtations and unholy alliances were the stuff of rescues: they appeased guards, suspicious landlords, inquisitive neighbors. But when Elie was gone an extra day, he worried about blurred lines between secrets for the good of the Resistance and secrets that belied a hidden life.

  Elie woke up, looked at him, and closed her eyes.

  I wish it wasn’t morning, she said.

  I’ll get breakfast. The morning can wait.

  Lodenstein threw his green sweater over a pair of fatigues, took the mineshaft to the cobblestone street, and turned left to the kitchen—a four-meter-long galley with pots hung so low they clanged like hollow bells when people brushed against them.

  Two Scribes were lifting a can of ersatz coffee while another spooned it into glass jars. They didn’t notice Lodenstein, and he wondered, not for first time, if they knew he had anything to do with their lives being close to bearable. Even at this early hour he heard someone offer cigarettes as a prize for inventing a crossword puzzle in fifteen languages. He also heard typing—probably in coded diaries—and a lottery to sleep in Elie’s old room. Goebbels didn’t allow these things, but he ignored them.

  More people came in to make coffee. The mine was cold, and everyone wore fur coats from the outpost. He felt ermine, mink, fox, and lamb’s wool. They nuzzled his back like friendly animals.

  The bread Elie had brought the night before was on a butcher block in the middle of the kitchen. There had been five loaves of white bread and eight of pumpernickel in the hamper last night. This morning all the pumpernickel was left, and there were three loaves of white. He cut two thin, cautious slices. Someone saw him and said:

  Take more! For Elie!

  Another Scribe said the same thing and then another and another until Elie’s name rang all over the kitchen like an invocation. He cut more bread and thanked them in a dozen languages. They laughed and thanked him back.

  Everyone spoke German, but conversations were filled with foreign words—Hungarian for shame (szégyen), Italian for ink (inchiostro), Polish for shadow (cień). Every week there were more words because the inhabitants—collectively—were fluent in forty-seven languages and dialects besides German. And this was why they’d been spared the camps and could be in this shell—fighting, scribbling, clawing, to carry out a mysterious and Byzantine mission.

  My lovely Susanne,

  I arrived last week and was lucky to get work building a road. The food is good and I like being out in the fresh air. There is good work for women, too—sewing uniforms, mending, typing. I know you would like it here.

  Love,

  Heinrich

  Gerhardt Lodenstein was fluent in five languages but hadn’t needed to barter in any of them for his position as Obërst of the Compound: long ago, in return for a bicycle, he’d promised his father that he would enlist in the secret police, where his father was a prominent member. The secret police was called the Abwehr—a remote, elite organization expert in deciphering codes and known for its hatred of the Reich. Its head, Wilhelm Canaris, tried twice to assassinate Hitler before the war. When he joined, Lodenstein thought he’d spend two years learning codes, then practice law. But the Reich created its own secret police, shrinking the Abwehr, and reducing Gerhardt Lodenstein’s job to filing old papers from the First World War. Eventually Goebbels—with malice because he disliked Lodenstein’s father—enlisted him in the SS and made him the reluctant head of the Compound of Scribes, forcing him to oversee an absurd and useless project: answering letters to people who were dead.

  These letters were part of a plan referred to as Briefaktion (Operation Mail), in which prisoners were forced to write to relatives, praising conditions in camps and ghettos. They were mailed to The Association of Jews in Berlin so no one knew where they came from.

  Their purpose was to camouflage the fact that most of these people were about to be killed and encourage relatives to come to the camps voluntarily. They also served to dispel rumors about the camps. But the mail system was chaotic, and many relatives had been deported, no doubt forced to write letters themselves. So thousands of unread letters were returned to Berlin.

  Himmler had forbade burning them: he believed in the supernatural with a vengeance, and thought the dead would pester psychics for answers if they knew their letters were destroyed—eventually exposing the Final Solution. Goebbels, who despised the supernatural, wouldn’t burn them for a different reason. He wanted each letter to be answered for the sake of record-keeping so there wouldn’t be any questions after the war. In order to look authentic, he decided the letters should be answered in their original language: hence the Compound motto Like Answers Like. The SS went to deportations to find the most fluent and educated to be Scribes.

  Dearest Mishka,

  Please don’t worry about us: The children are fine and the food is delicious—thick soup with dark bread. There’s also a beautiful forest here. They’re taking a group of us on a walk in a few minutes. You’ll have to join us, even if we won’t be here to welcome you.

  Love,

  Levka

  When Operation Mail began, the Scribes lived in a bunker in Berlin. Facilities were cramped, the smell of cabbage was everywhere, but—as people liked to joke—they managed. Yet as more people were pulled from deportations, Goebbels worried that clotheslines, billowing in the middle of the city, would arouse suspicion and sent scouts to find an abandoned mine in the North German woods. There, with Hitler’s blessing, he enlisted the architect Hans Ewigkeit and transformed the mine to indulge his romantic notions. There was a rose-colored cobblestone street lit by tall gas lamps. There was a canopy of fake sky with a sun that rose and set, and stars that duplicated the constellations on Hitler’s birthday. There were mahogany doors and wrought-iron benches. The mine was sequestered by a narrow road and concealed by a shepherd’s hut.

  The idea of answering the dead made Gerhardt Lodenstein queasy, and he became more so when he came to the Compound over a year ago and found it in chaos: the original Obërst, who, like Himmler, believed the dead were waiting for answers, was caught holding séances to contact them. This Obërst had been demoted to Major and hated Lodenstein for getting his room above the earth. Some Scribes wanted to leave the Compound, even though it meant almost certain death, and Himmler was starting to talk freely about the Final Solution he originally wanted to conceal. A week after Lodenstein arrived, Goebbels wrote that if he didn’t report to Berlin immediately he’d send him to the front. Lodenstein drove all night. By morning he was in the crimson halls of the new Reich Chancellery. Goebbels sat on books to look taller than five-feet-five and growled at Lodenstein to close the door.

  You must know, he said in a low voice, that some people think the dead are waiting for answers and will hound us until they get them.

  Lodenstein, who couldn’t decide what to say, didn’t say anything. Goebbels pounded his desk.

  Of course you know. Don’t act like a moron.

  He shoved over a pamphlet called War Strategies from the Thule Society. Lodenstein saw a list of names—Himmler, a few SS officers, and some famous mystics.

  These idiots think they’re allied with the fucking beyond, and they meet to get advice about the war from the astral plane, said Goebbels. So a certain demoted Obërst may bother you about it. But remember there is no fucking beyond, and the dead can’t read. Make answers short, and keep that asshole from holding séances. This is just about record-keeping.

  Lodenstein said, yes, of course he would, and Goebbels showed him a model of a building to exhibit the letters after the war. The building had Greek columns and marble nooks. A mausoleum, Lodenstein thought.

  Only Elie saved Lodenstein’s life from complete absurdity. And since she did, he didn’t ask why she was rummaging near the telephone when he came back with breakfast. They huddled under the quilt and drank ersatz coffee, which they agreed was getting weaker and weaker, and talked about soldiers deserting, not enough food, accelerating chaos since Stalingrad. El
ie leaned against him and said she was exhausted. He stroked her hair and asked—trying to sound casual:

  Did anything happen at the border?

  I already told you: They’ve stopped caring.

  Then why an extra day?

  The mother didn’t want to leave her kids, and there wasn’t room in the jeep. I had to find her a guide.

  And the baker?

  What do you mean the baker? He baked the bread because I got his niece to Denmark. Why do you grill me whenever I come back?

  It was an old conversation. Elie flirted for favors. Lodenstein got upset. They had this conversation again and again, never resolved it, and never stopped loving each other. Elie’s voice was thin, as though she was about to cry. She threw down her napkin and took the mineshaft to the main room where she lit the lantern at her desk and wrote down supplies she hadn’t been able to get on her foray: Kerosene. Wicks. Knäckebrot. Then she made a list of people who might help find out whether the Angel of Auschwitz was real. She crossed out some names, added others, wrote the names in code, and crumpled the first piece of paper. Later she would burn it. Elie was always burning papers. No one in the Compound worried when they saw small fires in the forest.