The Berlin Boxing Club Page 2

  Winzig und Spatz

  I TRIED TO BE ABSOLUTELY SILENT AS I ENTERED OUR APARTMENT building, carefully maneuvering up the winding staircase that twisted through its center. We lived in a large three-bedroom flat on the top floor of a four-story brick building in a quiet middle-class neighborhood. Each floor housed one apartment. I knew my parents would already be at the gallery, setting up for the opening. My sister and Frau Kressel, our housekeeper, were home waiting for me; I needed to get to the bathroom and clean up before they saw me. I turned the key in the lock of our flat as slowly as possible and felt the gears tumble and rotate with a few audible clicks. The door opened with a small squeak. The entry hall was dark and quiet, and I saw the dim glow of light from down the hallway toward the living room.

  As I took one step inside, the wood floors groaned under my weight. Almost instantly I heard a small voice calling: “Spatz? Spatz, is that you?”

  My sister, Hildy, called me Spatz, and I sometimes called her Winzig after her favorite book series, Die Abenteuer von Winzig und Spatz—The Adventures of Tiny and Sparrow—by Otto Berg. The books featured woodblock-style illustrations of Winzig, a tiny mouse dressed in lederhosen, and Spatz, a large sparrow who wore an alpine-style hat with a feather. They spent their adventures trying to scrounge up food and outwit Herr Fefelfarve, the obese stationmaster at the Düsseldorf railroad station, where they lived.

  Like most boys, I preferred Karl May’s cowboy adventures set in America, but for Hildy, there was only Winzig und Spatz. In her pretend games, Hildy cast me as Spatz, the brave and mighty sparrow who fearlessly soared aloft scouting for food and rescuing them from danger, while she was Winzig, the small, resourceful mouse who had a knack for escaping from tight corners and a penchant for sweets. I aspired to be a cartoonist, and I would draw Hildy original Winzig und Spatz comic strips to entertain her, creating new gags and adventures for the duo.

  At eight years old, Hildy stood barely four feet tall. Like our father, she had, curly black hair and a small hooked nose, and she already wore glasses for acute nearsightedness. I used to imagine that her eye problems gave her a distorted view of the world that made everything appear in reverse. She was always upbeat and cheerful even when there was nothing to be cheerful about. Most of all, she had a completely backward view of me. To Hildy I was strong, smart, confident, handsome, heroic, and capable of nearly any intellectual or physical feat. I certainly didn’t want her to know that my schoolmates had just used me as a punching bag and spittoon.

  I shut the front door and moved quickly toward the bathroom at the end of the hall.

  “Where have you been?” she called. “We haven’t done the wine yet.”

  As she came into view, I turned my face down and moved to the bathroom.

  “I had an accident at school. Just let me go to the bathroom and then we’ll take care of the wine.”

  She flicked on the light, caught a glimpse of me, and let out a sharp scream.

  “What’s going on?” I heard Frau Kressel call from down the hall.

  “I fell down the stairs,” I said, moving toward the bathroom.

  I tried to shut the door behind me, but Hildy pushed it open and followed me inside. Frau Kressel appeared behind her and gasped.

  I looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. The right half of my top lip had swollen to triple its normal size, and a dark red scar lined the soft pink skin along the top of my teeth. Dried blood formed a patchy goatee around my mouth, and a purple bruise framed the entire right side of my face, punctuated by large red mounds of raised flesh near my eye and my chin where I had been hit.

  “Does it hurt?” Hildy asked.

  “No,” I lied. My entire head pulsed as if a swarm of angry hornets had stung me.

  “Hildegard, wet a cloth with warm water,” Frau Kressel said. “Karl, you sit.”

  A stout countrywoman in her sixties, Frau Kressel had been cooking and cleaning for our family for as far back as I could remember. She lived in a small spare room off the kitchen with just a single bed, a dresser, and a tiny sink. She was a woman of few words, but she was an anchor for Hildy and me. While both my parents were intellectuals who talked at length about anything and everything, Frau Kressel rarely spoke beyond the simplest sentence, but when she did say something, Hildy and I listened.

  I obediently sat on the toilet seat while Frau Kressel took the wet washcloth from Hildy and gently cleaned the blood from my face. She tried to do it softly, but each swipe felt like the jab of a small penknife. She managed to clean away most of the blood, and I ran my tongue over the scar on the top of my lip and the raw hole where my tooth used to be. I knew Papa would be mad that I looked so horrible for a gallery opening.

  “What’s that awful smell?” Hildy said.

  The pain had so distracted me that I had forgotten about my soiled pants.

  “It’s nothing! Just go get the wine bottles set up, and we’ll mix them in a minute.”

  I pushed Hildy out of the room. Frau Kressel stared at me.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  I paused for a long moment and then shook my head. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded and she sighed.

  “Give me the pants. I’ll have them clean for you by morning.”

  I stripped off my pants and underwear and handed them to Frau Kressel. She had bathed and changed me since I was a baby and taken care of me whenever I was sick. So she was one of the only people in the world I could be naked in front of without being embarrassed.

  “Don’t forget to clean yourself or you’ll get a rash,” she said, and then exited the bathroom.

  As I cleaned my crotch and legs with a wet cloth, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and shuddered at the pathetic image. For years I had been able to pass as a gentile, which allowed me to walk the streets and the hallways of school without being taunted for being a Jew. Now everything would be different.

  Hitler had come to power the previous year, and I knew that things were getting bad for Jews all across Germany. Yet because of my religious anonymity at school, Hitler and the Nazis ranked only fifth on the list of my biggest concerns in life:

  1. Finding a way to gain weight

  2. Getting rid of my acne

  3. Getting inside Greta Hauser’s pants and having her find her way into mine

  4. Papa’s financial situation

  5. Hitler and the Nazis

  I was tall and extremely thin. Too thin. Thin was not the German ideal that Hitler and his propaganda machine promoted. Yet no matter how much I ate, I couldn’t put on weight. I was also plagued by acne. Despite diligent thrice-daily washing, small red patches of acne relentlessly sprouted on my forehead and cheeks, and sometimes on the tip of my nose.

  I was also obsessed with the recently bloomed chest of Greta Hauser, who lived with her family in our apartment building. My father’s art gallery and his finances rounded out my list of worries. He never seemed to sell any paintings, and I could not figure out how we survived on his meager earnings.

  Yet all of those concerns were trumped that day, because I knew that from now on I’d have to guard against future attacks. I turned away from my own reflection, finished cleaning myself, and went to my room to change into my serving whites.

  Hildy and I always worked as staff when our father had an opening at the gallery. We donned white shirts and white pants to make us look official and helped to serve the wine and cheese and to hang coats. When I arrived in the kitchen, Hildy was already dressed in her whites and waiting with ten wine bottles arrayed before her on the kitchen table. Seven of the bottles were full of cheap white wine, while the other three were empty. It was my job to redistribute the wine from the full bottles into the three empty bottles and then fill up the difference with water. Business at the gallery had been extremely slow, and Papa had been adding water to his wine for the past couple of years, first only adding one bottle of water out of ten; then gradually, as bus
iness got worse, the number rose to three out of ten. I opened the bottles and used a funnel to evenly distribute the liquids. Hildy held the funnel while I poured. In order to make sure the wine still had enough flavor, I added a half teaspoon of sugar to each bottle. Hildy followed me down the line and put the corks back in and shook up the bottles.

  When all of the bottles were mixed, I took a small taste from each one. The ten quick sips helped numb the pain in my head and made my legs feel more solid and warm.

  “Can I try some, Spatz?”

  “When you’re thirteen,” I said. “Now, let’s trim the cheese.”

  Hildy hoisted a ten-pound wheel of Muenster onto the kitchen table. It was coated with a thick fuzzy layer of green and white mold. Our father could afford only the poorest wheels of cheese from the market, so it was our job to make them look presentable. I took a paring knife and cut away the moldy outer layer.

  “Ugh,” Hildy said as she cleared away the green debris. “Rats got at this one. Look, there are teethmarks.”

  “When I’m done with it, they’ll never know.”

  After a few minutes of cutting, I had carved the ten-pound hunk of mold into what I hoped would pass for a seven-pound wheel of Muenster. I cut us each a slice to taste.

  “Not bad,” she said.

  “Okay, put it in the bag and let’s go.”

  Hildy hesitated.

  “Come on—we’re already late,” I said.

  “Do you think Papa will sell any paintings tonight?”

  “With the crap he’s showing these days—it’s not likely.”

  “Spatz, I’m scared. I heard Mama say we might have to move, if Papa—”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. Papa always figures something out.”

  “But what if he doesn’t?”

  “He will,” I said, not believing it. “Now, mach schnell. If we’re any later, Papa will kill us both, and then you’ll have nothing to worry about.”

  In every Winzig und Spatz book, they would say the same thing whenever they set off on an adventure. Spatz would begin and Winzig would complete their call to action. So mustering as much enthusiasm as I could, I said to my sister, “Come on, Winzig. There’s adventure in the air . . .”

  She looked at my bruised face, and she could tell I was scared too.

  “Karl. What will we do if—”

  “There’s adventure in the air . . . ,” I persisted.

  “And cake to be eaten.” She finally chimed in.

  I placed the bottles in a wire carrying bin along with a stack of paper cups. We said good-bye to Frau Kressel and hurried out of the apartment.

  Galerie Stern

  WE DIDN’T ARRIVE AT THE GALLERY UNTIL PAST EIGHT, and when we walked in, it took only one look to tell my father was fuming, despite his attempt to appear the perfect host. A few patrons already milled around the space, looking at the paintings by an Austrian artist named Gustav Hartzel. Papa didn’t even notice my injured face; he just gestured sharply with his chin toward a table where we were to set up the refreshments. Papa’s hair was slicked back perfectly, and he wore his freshly pressed tuxedo, accented by a blue silk scarf. He turned to talk to one of the patrons, flipping the scarf around his neck with a dramatic flourish. He always wore the blue scarf for openings, and seeing him in it made my skin crawl. I scanned the crowd, and as always, no other men were wearing silk scarves. The only other scarf wearer was an elderly woman in a long velvet dress. Mother was nowhere in sight.

  My father founded the Galerie Stern in the 1920s to specifically showcase expressionist artists, like Otto Dix and George Grosz. Harsh, raw, and abstract, their work depicted everything from the bloody trenches of World War I to the street life of Berlin. “The time for pretty pictures of flowers and kings has passed,” my father explained. “Art needs to show life, real life, in all its wonders and horrors.” My father had served with Dix in World War I. He never spoke about his experiences during the war. When I asked, he simply showed me some of Dix’s work and said, “This is all you need to know about life during wartime.”

  I often practiced drawing by sitting in the basement of the gallery and copying works from my father’s collection. All the expressionist artists had different styles, but they tended to use thick, harsh paint strokes or thin, jagged pen lines. There was nothing smooth or easy about any of their work or the worlds they depicted. I preferred their paintings and drawings of whores, exposing themselves to men on the street and in brothels.

  But Dix, Grosz, and most of the other modern artists my father represented had fled Germany since the Nazis’ rise to power. Hitler had deemed their art degenerate, and galleries were forbidden to show their work. Many artists were arrested for public indecency or on political charges. On the day George Grosz left Berlin, he came to say good-bye to my father.

  “Time to go, Sigmund,” Grosz said. “A good artist knows how to read the landscape. You should get out too.”

  “This will pass,” my father said. “Politicians come and go, but art—art endures.”

  “Well, my art will endure somewhere else. They’re burning paintings, Sig,” he said with a sigh. “Did you hear that they melted down Belling’s sculptures? Melted them down like they were worthless scrap. Think about that: They’re melting art to make bullets. These are savages we’re dealing with.”

  Against Grosz’s advice, my father had stayed, and instead of closing the gallery, he began showcasing government-approved artists. Most of the paintings featured boring landscapes or apple-cheeked workers plowing their fields in heroic poses. My father mustered as much enthusiasm as he could when selling these works, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. In the past, gallery openings were times of celebration and his adrenaline would run so high that he would barely sleep at night after premiering a show. Now the openings left him drained and dissipated, his smile fading as soon as the door was shut.

  Hartzel, the artist being featured that night, had long hair and a beard and wore a bright green untucked cotton shirt. His large canvases depicted purple and brown Bavarian mountains under dramatic blue skies with billowing clouds, the kind of art my father used to dismiss as “pretty flower paintings.”

  He and my father stood in front of one of the paintings, talking to a potential buyer.

  “The strength of the mountains has always inspired me,” Hartzel said.

  “Yes,” my father added, “the natural beauty is symbolic of the strength of the German people.”

  The patron gave a polite smile and moved on to the next canvas, clearly not impressed. Hildy and I stood by the door, taking coats and offering refreshments.

  “Karl! Bring Herr Hartzel some wine.”

  I fetched a cup of wine. Hartzel took it from me and downed it in one gulp.

  “We’ll never make a sale with this crowd,” Hartzel said.

  “Patience,” my father said. “The night is young.”

  Hartzel noticed my face.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I fell down some stairs. At school.”

  “Wunderbar,” my father said. “We’ve got an important opening and you look like Frankenstein’s monster. Go down and get the artists’ biographies that are on the press. And be careful on the stairs.”

  As I descended the stairs, a light was on in the basement, and I expected to see my mother printing the artists’ bios, one of her jobs at the gallery, but the room was empty. I moved to the back of the cold stone room and then into the printing room, where I found the papers I was looking for piled in a neat stack beside the printing press. A large iron contraption stained with rust, years of ink, and large globs of thick grease, the old press was used to make up posters, catalogs, and flyers for my father’s artists. I was grabbing the stack of pages about Hartzel when a crumpled sheet lying on the floor caught my eye. I picked up the page, which was half smeared with ink.

  BERLIN IS STILL HOT, LADIES—

  YOU JUST HAVE TO LOOK IN THE RIGHT CRACKS.

  T
HE COUNTESS HAS JUST WHAT YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR. . . .

  The ink smear prevented me from reading the rest of the page. My face flushed as I reread the sexy message. This clearly had nothing to do with gallery business. Who were these ladies? Where were the cracks? And who was the Countess? An image formed in my head of a mysterious woman with long hair and a slinky cocktail dress.

  “Karl!” my father called from upstairs. “Karl, where are you?”

  I stuffed the paper into my pocket and trudged back up the stairs to discover that the gallery had filled up nicely. I placed the pages on Hartzel on the table beside the wheel of Muenster, which had several significant pieces cut out. I glanced around to make sure that no one was retching from consuming the rotten cheese, but everyone seemed to be fine so far.

  Hildy excitedly wound her way through the crowd toward me.

  “Karl, have you seen?”

  “What? Is Mama here?”

  “No—der Meister,” she said.

  “Huh?” I said, not understanding.

  “The champ is here. He’s really here!”

  I turned and saw the imposing figure of Max Schmeling standing by the door.

  Der Meister

  THE AIR CURRENT IN THE ROOM CHANGED AS SOON AS THE CHAMP WALKED IN, AS if a breeze had directed everyone to turn his way. Heads and necks craned, people subtly pointed, nodded, and whispered excitedly, everyone confirming for themselves and one another that yes, he was really there. He stood very straight and tall, looming over those around him. His wide face was bright despite his dark brows and deep-set eyes. In America they called him the Black Uhlan of the Rhine, a nickname his manager had invented to instill fear in his opponents. The name fit. Uhlans were elite horseback-riding soldiers. And he did look like a dark warrior. But his big, inviting smile surprised me, a strange contrast to the hulking fighting machine that was the rest of him. He wore a large trench coat and a tuxedo with a crisp white shirt and a silk kerchief in his pocket.