The German Money Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Also by Lev Raphael

  Title Page

  Dedication

  THE GERMAN MONEY

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Praise for The German Money

  “Lev Raphael writes of love, redemption, and revenge with an unflinching honesty that is rare and beautiful. This is an exquisite portrayal of a troubled family, of three siblings each affected differently, but painfully, by their mother’s past. A poignant reminder that we cannot hide from history no matter how fast and far we run, The German Money is a true and powerful triumph.”

  —Binnie Kirshenbaum, Author of Hester Among the Ruins

  Also by Lev Raphael

  FICTION

  Dancing on Tisha B’Av

  Winter Eyes

  MYSTERIES

  Let’s Get Criminal

  The Edith Wharton Murders

  The Death of a Constant Lover

  Little Miss Evil

  Burning Down the House

  NON-FICTION

  Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Shame

  Journeys & Arrivals

  Dynamics of Power (with Gershen Kaufman)

  Stick Up For Yourself! (with Gershen Kaufman and Pamela Espeland)

  Teacher’s Guide to Stick Up For Yourself ! (with Gershen Kaufman and Pamela Espeland)

  Coming Out of Shame (with Gershen Kaufman)

  for B., again and again

  “The living room, the most treacherous country of all.”

  —Elizabeth Benedict, Safe Conduct

  THE GERMAN MONEY

  I used to think that some people had a true gift for life, more than just a talent or even a skill. Call it a richness of being. While others, like my family, like me, were paupers, doomed to struggle against their own inner poverty.

  I was wrong, of course—but then there’s always a story if you think you can see around corners.

  Here’s where mine begins: I actually thought I was lucky when my mother died. I was alone, in another state, and I knew nothing about the money she had left me, the German money, we had always called it, reparations for her years in Nazi concentration camps.

  I had escaped to a small cabin on the western shore of Old Mission Peninsula, lent to me by a fellow librarian at the University of Michigan. Old Mission is one of the more isolated spots in northern Michigan. Stretching up from Traverse City, this thin strip of rolling hills cuts Grand Traverse Bay in half and the 36-mile drive around the peninsula is one of Michigan’s most romantic.

  It was a perfect hideaway in a place I’d often imagined sharing with Valerie, the woman I’d dated in college and should have married. But I’d stupidly fled New York and her years ago, so that was impossible.

  Michigan’s winter tends to start well before Thanksgiving, and though many people are weary of it by late March, I wasn’t. The time just before the buds grew large was one I loved most, when the nude trees stood out starkly against the snowy ground and the dove-gray skies, more compelling than any sculpture could be. There was no trace of real color yet and you were wrapped in amazing gradations of gray and brown—like living in a Braque collage. Even the sunsets were muted, and every second of true attention and silence revealed subtle textures and a kind of wealth that stills the mind.

  I disconnected the cabin’s phone, shut off my cell phone and hardly even talked to the friendly cashiers when I drove down to the huge mall market twenty minutes south in Traverse City that was a glare of food, appliances, drugs and sale clothing, to pick up fish, steak, and thick soups.

  The drive north to Traverse, up 27, up to the hills and farms and then west on two-lane roads, had stripped from me people, time, words. I read very little that weekend, never listened to the CD player I had almost forgotten to bring. Mostly I just walked up and down the hills or along the shore, satisfied and quiet. The cabin was as bland, as characterless as a worn-out doll without clothes, hair or eyes—so getting out wasn’t just pleasurable, it was a must.

  From the highest ridge on the peninsula, I could see both arms of the bay and imagine Lake Michigan further west. Despite its size, Lake Michigan is finished, bounded: you can comprehend it in your mind as well as on a map. Even though I grew up in New York City, the Atlantic has always seemed more like an idea of a body of water to me, a theory or example.

  Once, maybe twice, I thought about the phone message I’d received about a week before from my mother, the first one in years. There was no greeting, no content, no request for a return call, just the blunt statement “This is your mother.” As if there was a doubt I’d recognize her voice no matter how infrequently I heard it. At first I was startled, then puzzled, then angry. Why was she calling? And why couldn’t she have left a real message?

  I didn’t call back. I was terrible at answering messages, but if I’d stayed home in Ann Arbor an extra day or not shut off my cell, I would have gotten my brother Simon’s calls telling me my mother had died, and I’d have flown to New York.

  Simon had to handle everything, because our sister Dina, furious at her husband Serge, had flung her cell phone under a truck, and stormed off to sit in the bar of Quebec City’s Hotel Frontenac, drink a whole bottle of Veuve Clicquot, smoke half a pack of DuMauriers, and flirt with her waiter—a set of rituals she indulged in whenever she was irate.

  Simon went ahead with our mother’s funeral on his own, helped by Mrs. Gordon, a new neighbor of hers I’d never met, but who seemed to have become very close.

  “Mrs. Gordon saved me,” Simon kept repeating. And who else could have? We had no close relatives alive and most of my parents’ friends had died or retired to Florida.

  I didn’t know the woman, but I felt jealous, and stung. Why was this stranger making such a difference?

  My younger brother functioned well in emergencies he hadn’t created, but afterwards would grind himself down with criticism, a slave to what he should have done. Looking at his slim frame and youthful face you’d never have guessed he harbored such internal savagery. All the disasters that had soiled his life seemed a fulfillment of some kind—as if the ugliness he felt inside could only be given outward expression in divorce, debt, scandal, and utter failure.

  I was isolated and unreachable while Simon went ahead with the funeral and Dina sulked in retreat from the latest in a series of men who couldn’t give her what she longed for. My sister had made a confused career of rage—trailing broken windows, torn clothes, lipstick scrawls on bathroom mirrors from man to man, or so she said, a little proudly. They generally forgave her, at least the ones she allowed to.

  That lasted until she got married seven years ago to Serge, a rich and unrelenting Québécois who looked like a Gallic Pierce Brosnan. For many reasons, it was a difficult marriage, and I knew that just from the little Dina told me. His holy terror of a mother despised his having married not just an English speaker and a non-Catholic, but a Jew, one of the Devil’s own. Serge and the other Gilberts were a fierce and proud clan, tracing their lineage back to the founders of New France in Canada. Anything Dina did that Serge disliked was apparently the subject of censure by sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, probably even baby sitters and maybe commiserating neighbors, too. When Serge argued with Dina, he carried himself like a broker representing his entire investment house—backed by its power, authority, tradition.

  This corporate disapproval was new for Dina. Men had always succumbed to her tantrums, because she was a knockout: curly blonde hair, gray eyes, sexily slim theatrical body and voice, a presence more than a woman. Dina had tried acting in college, but the lights, sets, costumes, and makeup had diminished her somehow, forced her into unaccustomed calculation.


  Dina’s the beautiful one, Simon is messed up, and I’m the brain—at least that’s how we thought of ourselves, which tells you a lot doesn’t it? We were stick figures, not people.

  When I left Old Mission and drove the five hours back to Ann Arbor to find Simon’s phone messages and telegram, I felt protected by the silence I always discovered up north, from my walks down the beach at the tip of the Peninsula (which was half way between the North Pole and the Equator), the clear nights gaping at the Milky Way and a wilderness of stars, afternoons dozing on the sun-beaten couch, three days of solitude and rest.

  I played my brother’s messages standing in my bedroom, looking out at the quiet street. His voice sounded thinner and more nasal than usual. Spring was a little closer down here than up north, but winter was still in command, having stripped the large maples and oaks of their leaves long ago. My view was framed and laced by dramatic, jagged bare tree limbs, thrust into a prominence they deserved. This neighborhood was full of 100-year old trees, and in the late fall and winter, driving or walking its streets was like entering a vast quirky sculpture hall.

  In Michigan I often felt the seasons form a kind of pentimento, with one peering out from under another. Maybe because I’d fallen in love with the state and its history, through travel and through reading, and so often mused on the larger cycles of time. The ways in which over the centuries trappers were succeeded by loggers, then miners, and after them the men building cars, and how certain towns in the state were still identified with one industry, sometimes even after it had moved on. I could easily picture the snaking dusty Indian trails giving way, in time-lapse photography, to the log roads and ultimately the grim highways.

  Looking out the window at the bare trees, with Simon’s messages a weird kind of white noise, I could hear people on tractor mowers sucking up leaves to dump in ragged soft piles by the road to be hauled off by huge noisy trucks, and smell the tang of leaves from the few driveways where they were being burned (illegally) that seemed to have infiltrated my comfortable apartment.

  Listening to the answering machine message again and again, I heard about my mother’s sudden death, heard Simon’s requests for support and advice, heard how the funeral—which according to the Jewish tradition Simon refused to violate—had to be within twenty-four hours, and Dina’s hysterics when she found out. Through each grim recital, I felt a tranquility as deep as the grief I would have expected to feel.

  I was surprised at her heart attack because my mother had always been in perfect health, at least I thought so, remembering her brisk walks along Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. And she’d once boasted that she had the heart of a woman half her age.

  But I wasn’t frightened or depressed. That was probably the difference my solitary weekend on Old Mission had made for me. I did not feel, as Simon probably did, finally thrust into a grim adulthood, orphaned; or like Dina, deprived of a reality that had shaped her revolt. If anything, I was calm. I felt ready, and preparing to fly to New York to be with my brother and sister—who I hadn’t seen in over five years—I kept thinking how lucky I was that the worst was over.

  “Cremation would have made more sense,” Dina said when we came back to Simon’s apartment in Forest Hills from the vast stone and grass death park in New Jersey. I was startled by the blaze of her beauty, heightened by the elegant black Armani suit and heels that had a vaguely foreign edge to them. With a mass of blonde curls, Dina had the looks of one of those rosy, dreamy-eyed angels playing a lute in a Renaissance fresco, and she had always carried herself differently from her friends, back straighter, head higher, yet without a sense of strain. The first time I traveled to Paris, I realized she had somehow picked up the kind of grace and self-possession you see in women around the Place Vendôme or on the Rue de Rivoli. She had enviable chic and I had seen women on buses or subways in New York scan her up and down, sullenly looking for a flaw.

  That gauntlet was nothing compared to what she grew up with. Our mother criticized her relentlessly: Dina was never good enough, never pretty enough, never stylish enough. She would badger Dina about her hair being too long or too short, her makeup being too flashy or too subtle, damn the colors she chose, the styles she wore or discarded—even her nail polish. “Leave her alone!” Dad would say, but it was barely a suggestion, more the good-humored, disinterested chiming-in of a kibitzer watching a card game. My mother not only criticized the shape of Dina’s eyebrows when she plucked them (and when she didn’t), she went further, deeper: “You’ll never keep a man. Nobody will want you.” These slaps were delivered with the matter-of-fact brutality of a disgusted coach calling his team “wimps” (or worse), but I never believed my mother was trying to harshly inspire Dina. It felt more like punishment. Dina fought back, but her rage was desperate—the last response of a defeated population to its triumphant invaders. And almost always, she was quelled or fled crying to her room. Later, she learned to stare our mother down, but between them that was not a triumph, only a deadly silent draw.

  “Cremation,” Dina repeated.

  I had felt alien there at the cemetery in that broad glistening sea of tombstones, wave after wave of carved Hebrew swirling around me, heavily reminding me that I was no more substantial than the small rocks or pebbles that people left on the monuments to mark their visits. I never understood this Jewish custom, which no book had seemed to adequately explain to me. And it seemed pointless—didn’t the stones fall off? Despite the gesture, nothing was changed, nothing achieved. People left the scene of this vain effort just as separate, confused, and thrust apart by what always sundered them: the knowledge that all of us would end up here, or someplace like it.

  I hated not knowing exactly where to stand because every square inch of ground seemed given over to graves. In my awkward progress from the parking lot to my mother’s grave I could have been a little kid trying to step across hot sand. Now and then the carving on a tombstone, or the glint of sunlight on dark polished granite, or simply the music of a name in English had reached me, but otherwise I felt overwhelmed, crushed. So many lives, so many names. I suddenly remembered Valerie once joking that when we died, we could have side-by-side graves marked ‘His’ and ‘Hers.’

  “But that means we’d be married,” I had blurted out, and she turned away.

  At the cemetery, I thought, my mother is buried out here, but the words weren’t any more meaningful than an advertising slogan you glimpse on the side of a bus. And Dina, Simon, and I were like strangers drawn by curiosity to the scene of a minor accident, not mourners. I avoided glances from anyone we passed, not wanting them to see how little was in my eyes. I was dead, too.

  If the barren grave site had made me dizzy, it silenced us all on the hour and a half ride back to Forest Hills cutting through the city in dense traffic that stunned me after the relative quiet of Michigan. Even driving on the highways around Detroit at 85 miles per hour—if you didn’t want to be cut off—wasn’t this chaotic and oppressive, perhaps because there wasn’t the heavy dull backdrop of brick and concrete there, seemingly about to tumble across the lanes of cars. New York struck me as resentful and lurking, ready to fall.

  As usual, Dina was the first to speak when we got upstairs at Simon’s. And I winced when she said “cremation.” It struck me as crude and disgusting—forget about it being forbidden to Jews. While I may not have been only vaguely Jewish, this taboo was somehow one I’d absorbed very early. Just like the injunction never to do anything shameful that “the goyim” would see. My mother never said much about either subject, so my father was the source of both prohibitions, I suppose, but especially the latter. He’d read The Post or The Daily News and make tsktsk-tsk noises if he found a story about a criminal with a Jewish-sounding name. These he read aloud, with dramatic pauses, whether anyone seemed to be paying attention or not. And the fact that a Jew was giving other Jews bad publicity seemed worse to him than the transgression involved, even if it was murder. He had come over from Russia as a boy, but he
acted as if Americans were as Jew-crazy as the Russians, waiting for the least excuse to launch a pogrom.

  When Dina had said the word “cremation,” for me it did not conjure up romantic images of a lover’s ashes scattered at sea. All I could think of was hungry, horrible flames.

  The three of us were silent for a few moments.

  “But Mom was against cremation,” Simon objected, looking lost on his florid gold couch. “Wasn’t she?”

  Dina shrugged. “I never heard her talk about it.”

  “It’s disgusting,” he said softly. And I agreed, though I felt distracted.

  I had not seen Simon’s new one-bedroom apartment before. It was strange, surprisingly vulgar, glittering with fake crystal, slashed with red and gold: like the bad taste of someone who had known poverty, I thought, and found relief in the textures and colors of a child’s fantasy castle. The thick drapes were baroquely swagged and festooned. Sitting there drinking coffee from a china cup smeared with shepherdesses, I saw Simon as incomprehensible. How could my brother have chosen to live like this? It was bizarre as if he’d robed himself in hemp and taken to squatting in some musty cave. All this spurious frou-frou must have been left by a previous tenant, and maybe its very completeness was what had attracted my brother, for whom something always seemed to be missing. The apartment was like some wildly improbable shell a hermit crab might have crawled into, especially given the way he looked now.

  Simon’s blond hair was short and spiky to match a scrap of goatee, and he had on baggy cargo pants, Converse All Stars and an oversized gray sweater whose sleeves hung almost down to his fingers. He looked half his age, not that clothes could have made him seem much older. His voice still had the kind of buzz you hear in adolescent boys, and he had never outgrown the lanky awkwardness of a teenager who seems at war with his own body, fighting its potential for public humiliation. His nose and lips were full for his angular face and he often seemed on the verge of sinking down into himself, hurt green eyes hooded, shoulders falling and back slumping over as if responding to some internal inquisition he could only answer with silence.