Good People Read online

  INTERNATIONAL PRAISE FOR

  GOOD PEOPLE

  ‘The novel is written with great talent, momentum and ingenuity…It expands the borders of literature to reveal new landscapes.’ Amos Oz

  ‘Quite possibly, Dostoyevsky would write like this if he lived in Israel today.’ Frank furter Allgemeine Zeitung

  ‘Good People is a masterful metaphysical novel written by a true artist.’ Livres Hebdo

  ‘One of the most intriguing writers in Israeli literature today.’ Haaretz

  ‘A bold and brilliant novel that walks the path of greatness to the edge of the literary abyss.’ A. B. Yehoshua

  ‘Nir Baram is the new hope of Israeli literature…[Good People is] a novel of great force and precision.’ Süddeutsche Zeitung

  ‘A very impressive and bold novel, a journey to hell with no return.’ La Repubblica

  ‘In Good People the young Israeli author Nir Baram writes about the terrors of living under the regimes of Stalin and Hitler. It is done so majestically that it reaches the same level as books by Varlam Shalamov and Vasily Grossman.’ NRC Handelsblad

  ‘Written with true heart and soul…You hear not only the voice of the writer, but the voices of his memorable characters too.’ El País

  NIR BARAM was born into a political family in Jerusalem in 1976. His grandfather and father were both ministers in Israeli Labor Party governments. He has worked as a journalist and an editor, and as an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians. He began publishing fiction when he was twenty-two, and is the author of five novels, including The Remaker of Dreams and World Shadow. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages and received critical acclaim around the world. He has been shortlisted several times for the Sapir Prize and in 2010 received the Prime Minister’s Award for Hebrew Literature. His most recent book is a work of reportage, which Text will publish in 2017.

  JEFFREY GREEN is a writer and translator living in Israel. He has a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard, and has also published, among other things, a novel in Hebrew, a book of poetry and a book about translation.

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company Ltd

  Swann House, 22 William Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia

  The Text Publishing Company (UK) Ltd

  130 Wood Street, London EC2V 6DL, United Kingdom

  Copyright © Nir Baram 2010

  Translation copyright © Jeffrey Green 2016

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published as Anashim Tovim in Israel by Am Oved

  Published by The Text Publishing Company 2016

  Design by W. H. Chong

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Baram, Nir, author.

  Title: Good people / by Nir Baram ; translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey Green.

  9781925240955

  9781911231004 (UK paperback)

  9781922253576 (ebook)

  Subjects: World War, 1939-1945—Fiction.

  Other Creators/Contributors:

  Green, Jeffrey, translator.

  Dewey Number: 892.437

  CONTENTS

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  PART ONE

  PREPARATIONS FOR A GREAT DEED

  PART TWO

  THE ARTIFICIAL MAN

  PART THREE

  THE WORLD IS A RUMOUR

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  BERLIN / WARSAW / LUBLIN

  Thomas Heiselberg, market researcher at the Milton Company

  Marlene Heiselberg, Thomas’s mother

  Johannes Heiselberg, Thomas’s father

  Hannah Stein, housekeeper and companion of Marlene

  Jack Fiske, director and then president of the European department of the Milton Company

  Carlson Mailer, Fiske’s successor as director

  Frau Tschammer, assistant director of the research department at the Milton Company

  Hermann Kreizinger, Thomas’s schoolfriend and member of the SS

  Erika Gelber, Thomas’s psychoanalyst

  Clarissa Engelhardt, Thomas’s neighbour and subsequent housekeeper

  Paul Blum, a partner in Bamberburg Bank

  Georg Weller, senior adviser to Dr Karl Schnurre in the German Foreign Office

  Rudolf Schumacher, bureaucrat in the Ministry of Economics

  Hauptsturmführer Bauer, German intelligence officer

  Albert Kresling, officer in the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost, ‘Göring’s man in Poland’

  Sturmbannführer Wolfgang Stalker, SS officer working under Kresling in the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost

  Sturmbannführer August Frenzel, commander of the freiwillige Umsiedlung, the program for the voluntary deportation of Jews from Lublin

  LENINGRAD / BREST

  Alexandra (Sasha) Andreyevna Weissberg, literary editor of confessions for the NKVD

  Andrei Pavlovich Weissberg, Sasha’s father, physicist

  Valeria Weissberg, Sasha’s mother

  Vladimir (Vlada) and Nikolai (Kolya) Weissberg, Sasha’s younger twin brothers

  Emma Feodorovna Rykova, poet

  Brodsky, literary critic

  Nadyezhda (Nadya) Petrovna, poet arrested by the NKVD

  Konstantin Varlamov, poet

  Osip Borisovich Levayev, publisher

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Morozovsky, mechanic and poetry lover

  Maxim Adamovich Podolsky, Sasha’s husband and coworker in the NKVD

  Stepan (Styopa) Kristoforovich Merkalov, head of Sasha’s department

  Reznikov, coworker of Sasha and Styopa

  Nikita Mikhailovich Kropotkin, Sasha’s superior in Brest

  BERLIN

  AUTUMN 1938

  People meet people. That’s how the story goes. There’s no need to be alone, not until you take your last breath. You see a world bursting with people, and are fooled into believing that your days of solitude are over. How hard can it be? Someone approaches someone else, they were both moved by The Twilight of the Gods, and by Gerhart Hauptmann’s new play, both invested in Thompson Broken-Heart Solutions (‘The heart is the curse of the twentieth century’), and they’re allies already. It’s a fiction useful to the state, to society, to the market. Thanks to it, lonely people buy clothes, shares, cars, and spruce themselves up for dancing.

  Through the parlour window Thomas Heiselberg could see that she was swaddled in the same fur coat she’d worn the last time she left the house. She hadn’t gone by choice. After all, the outside world offered her nothing. But his family could no longer afford to employ her. They had let her go and given her a white fur coat that had now turned grey. Parting is a chance to be reborn: something good might happen, another job might turn up, the pall of loneliness might be torn open.

  She approached with small steps—she had put on weight, Frau Stein—steps that seemed to say, ‘Don’t look. There’s nothing to see here.’ And so you have it, the cunning of history: recent events in Berlin had given Jews like her good reason to hide in the shadows.

  He watched her flat face, reddened by the cold air, her delicate neck whose grace was cruelly contradicted by her short body, like a seed of beauty that, in different circumstances, might have blossomed. She was totally alone, that was clear. He had no doubt that, aside from routine exchanges, she had scarcely spoken with anyone in the years s
ince she had left.

  A car stopped next to her. Two men sat in the front seat. She didn’t look at them, but her every movement indicated her awareness of their presence. She brushed a whitish curl from her forehead and kept walking. Now a stone wall hid her from his view. Thomas watched until the car disappeared in traffic. A moment later, Frau Stein emerged again and, he thought, saw his face in the window.

  How his mother had mourned when she left. Frau Stein was one of the family, she had filled the gaps—the sister his mother never had, for example—until they came to terms with the fact that his mother had no sister, and fired her. In the final analysis, when his mother’s annuity dwindled under the blows of inflation, and their lives were in danger, blood was blood.

  A knock on the door.

  ‘Hello, Frau Stein,’ Thomas said.

  She nodded with her impatient gaze, pushed him aside. Their eyes met: the years hadn’t diminished the hostility between them.

  He took some pleasure in her disgrace, which was all over the newspapers, in the law books and on signs in the street. Close up, he could even spot its traces, a tortured urgency in her face. Hannah Stein’s soul, just like her stooped body, was waiting for the next blow. Familiar with the house, and all its twists and turns, she hurried down the dark corridor and was swallowed up by her mistress’s bedroom. Thomas didn’t move, then he set out after her. She was sure to be plotting something.

  By the time he caught up with her, she had managed to hang her coat in the closet and seat herself at his mother’s bedside. His mother’s eyes expressed no surprise when the woman whom she hadn’t seen for more than eight years leaned across and asked whether she needed anything. His mother said no. Frau Stein asked whether she was being well taken care of, and his mother whispered, ‘Yes’, which was in fact ‘No’. Frau Stein took her hand and murmured her name over and over: ‘Marlene, Marlene.’

  Thomas imagined how she had crossed all of Berlin to see her mistress in her decline. Slightly breathlessly, she told his mother, ‘This morning by chance I met Herr Stuckert. He turned away as if he hadn’t seen me. I said to myself, very well, I’m already used to old acquaintances behaving like this. In my heart I always wish them well. But there was something strange about Herr Stuckert’s behaviour. I stopped and asked, “Sir, is there something you want to tell me?” I didn’t say his name. He could always pretend that he didn’t know me. He lowered his eyes and said under his breath, “Frau Heiselberg is very ill.”’

  His mother said something to her that didn’t reach Thomas’s ears and Frau Stein nodded. He was overcome with disgust: it was all too familiar. The countless mornings the two of them had sat, clinging to each other in the bedroom, sharing secrets. Anyone in the vicinity felt as though he were invading a country where he would never be welcome.

  Frau Stein settled the pillows under his mother’s head and stroked her hair, then buried her face in his mother’s breast. ‘Marlene, how did it happen?’ she said. ‘How did it happen?’

  With a kind of lightness the two women made the gap that had yawned between them for the past eight years disappear. It was as if a curtain was opened, revealing an older landscape: here they were again, a dreamy mistress who, on the rare occasions she ventured into the world, remembered its harshness and withdrew, and a housekeeper who had become her good friend and, in taking over her duties, had built the wall that kept her mistress isolated. They were rebelling now against the scraps of time that remained, mourning the years that had passed, and the hours that were slipping away.

  Do you still want to protect her, Frau Stein? Thomas thought in anger and turned away. Do you want to protect her from the years she sacrificed, the injustices that stained her wedding dress, the errors of her life? Then you’ll have to sketch the figure of a hangman. Here he is: a horrible illness that devastates your mistress’s body and shoves her towards death. And you still believe you can do something for her?

  Thomas stood in the roomy parlour. Following his mother’s orders, the thick velvet curtains were always drawn. He turned on a lamp beside the sofa with its down cushions, and looked at the statuettes—an Auguste Rodin, a porcelain Arc de Triomphe, and a little gilded Buddha, a gift she received from a scholar she met when she was young, and under whose influence she had become interested in the religions of the Far East. Above the Buddha, on a shelf, stood a picture of Ernst Jünger, with a dedication: ‘To Marlene, whose curiosity is so marvellous.’ Artificial plants surrounded the arched fireplace, decorated with Delft tiles that featured silly pictures of lakes and windmills. He always felt dizzy at the sight of this parlour, confronted by the clutter that was intended to reveal the breadth of his mother’s thought.

  Thomas decided to ignore what was happening in the bedroom, sat at the desk, and made a few last corrections to the presentation he was to give that evening to convince the directors of Daimler-Benz that the Milton Company was the answer to their needs. What a shame little Frau Stein hadn’t come across certain articles in the newspapers, where his name was mentioned. What a shame she didn’t know about his triumphs.

  In his early twenties, while his father and his unemployed friends were trudging the streets of Berlin dressed as tyres, sandwiches or chocolate bars, he had already dreamed up an original plan. About two years after he finished his degree, he read that the Milton market research company was planning to open a branch in Germany. Milton, an American company, with its offices all over the world but only one in Europe—in England of all places—had kindled his imagination even while he was a student. An American friend who was enrolled in economics told him about Milton and its advanced market research, which was at least ten years ahead of Europe. That had been one of the only points of light at the University of Berlin. In the early 1920s he was of course interested in the social sciences, and even considered studying linguistics, but in the end, influenced by his mother, who believed that ‘a change would take place in his spirit’ if he enrolled at a university that took pride in its intellectuals, he had studied philosophy, which he mainly thought a waste of time. The moment he received his degree of ‘Magister’ he left.

  In the winter of 1926, when he was twenty-three, he travelled to London, where he met an American named Jack Fiske, the director of the European department of Milton. He spent months—with the help of an American teacher he had hired—polishing up his English in preparation for his presentation to Fiske. He sat in a leather upholstered chair in the spacious office of the director, whose wrinkled face and thick moustache impressed him, and pored over a huge blue, red and white map of the world that had numerous flags marking Milton branches pinned to it. Seeing that map, he knew he had made the right decision. He decided to adopt a forthright manner that would put off most German executives.

  The director eyed him suspiciously, as if he couldn’t understand where this young Berliner had sprung from, with his flashy suit, blue cravat and carnation in his lapel. Thomas crossed his long legs, offered his host some fine Dutch tobacco, lit his pipe and amiably asked what had inspired the choice of a desk in the shape of a pirate ship. Then he plunged in. ‘My dear Mr Fiske,’ he said, ‘I have read about your plan to open a new branch of Milton on the continent, in Berlin in fact, my hometown. First, sir, allow me to congratulate you on behalf of my fellow Berliners. As an experienced market researcher, you will have already studied the opportunities that Europe offers, and learned from your limited success in England. Let’s face it: Milton has stumbled in Europe. Sadly, one might say that you haven’t even reached the continent. A small prediction: it will be even harder in Berlin. Sir, how do I know? It’s simple. Every community has its own system of assumptions, and the parameters of market research that have been applied to the Americans won’t do for us Germans. From my sources I’ve learned that in your meetings with German companies you boast about Milton’s scientific methods. But remember: the aura of science is in fact a fiction. You might persuade a few gullible Germans who love to “scientificate” everything, but we both
know that in two years even the most naive will realise that your methods aren’t effective, and they’ll boot you out of the German market.

  ‘My dear sir, the only science that works here is the science of the German national spirit. You don’t understand the German essence. You aren’t the first and won’t be the last. The German essence is hard to understand. Some believe that our tradition, our scholarship, our art and our philosophy have produced a fascinating mosaic of personality types. I am, however, sorry to inform you that the German spirit is much simpler. Sir, you will be surprised to discover how easily this spirit can be deciphered and manipulated. It is not the kind of simplicity that you Americans are familiar with. The educated German bourgeoisie are, for example, nothing like your assertive east-coast Americans. To understand them you have to study them in depth. The last move in a chess game may seem obvious, but it is preceded by intense preparation.’

  Fiske stretched out his legs and wrinkled his brow. ‘Actually, Mr Heiselberg, Milton has recently made a thorough study of the German market,’ he said.

  Thomas sensed that their meeting was giving him pleasure, and that Fiske was testing him. ‘With all due respect, sir, my mother will hunt down lions in the Colosseum before Americans understand the German mind. Have you read Ernst Jünger? Certainly not. He’s a close friend. Do you know Wolfgang Pauli? The yearning for a great light is planted deep in our soul. If you haven’t seen the crowd in the Winterfeldtplatz in the late evening, staring at the shining torches of Nivea, you haven’t seen Germany. Do you know what völkish means? It’s actually a definition of the German essence. And are you familiar with Naumann’s theory about the state as a Great Business for the people’s benefit? Indeed, sir, you must agree with me that you are hardly an expert on the German mind…

  ‘Now the Reichsmark has stabilised, and the economy has improved, but if you wandered around Berlin a few years ago you would have learned about the true essence of Germany! You would have seen apparently rational people simply printing money and eroding the currency until it wasn’t worth a seashell. That’s German logic: to gallop, in denial, towards catastrophe.