GOLD
1 – The last apple
Joachim Fingel ate his last apple with his new gold teeth. He was practising his new bite for the dentist. The dentist’s assistant was called Faith. She had been named after an American film star, once seen by Faith’s father as she jumped nude with her legs open into a blue swimming pool on the Californian coast in an illicit coloured movie purchased in Hamburg. Faith had become a Nazi youth leader. She was waiting in the dentist’s reception room with Joachim’s files to prove he was a Jew. It was not out of the question that Joachim had once resisted her advances. He was handsome and possessed an Alfa Romeo car. He practised a new smile in the dentist’s hand mirror, whilst the dentist was upbraided for unnecessary sympathy towards the Jewish race, and consequent wasting of resources. Joachim was persuaded to open his mouth, brush his new gold teeth and relinquish them in great pain to the dentist who had just put them in. Faith held the spitting bowl and her two brothers held pistols. The apple holding the last imprint of Joachim’s new golden bite was thrown out with the surgical waste, from where it was recovered by his tearful girl-friend, Natalie. She treasured the browning apple and placed it above the fireplace in her grandmother’s parlour where it was known that fruits petrified due to a freak dryness in the room, a shadowy stillness in the house and an absence of noise in the street outside. Natalie’s grandmother already had a bunch of petrified grapes from the earthquake town of Posillipo near Naples, a petrified orange from the Holy Land, and a petrified avocado from Elba that had grown in Napoleon’s garden. They were lined up along the mantelpiece desiccated into stone for eternity.
Joachim’s newly fashioned gold teeth went into a Nazi safe and were eventually taken to the precious metals smelting works at Baden-Baden to help constitute gold bar 557/KLObb, which at the war’s end, fetched up in Bolzano, a city on the borders of Italy, Austria and Switzerland known for its inability to make good spaghetti.
Joachim was taken to Augsburg by mistake. The ticket around his neck read Auschwitz. He was handsome even without his teeth and he did not look at all like a Jew. He died in a cellar in the company of a captured English airman, who, believing he was to be tortured and killed, vowed to take the life of at least one German before he perished. The niceties and significances of Joachim being a German Jew meant nothing to the Englishman. Joachim was strangled with a ligature made from strips of the Englishman’s underwear.
Approaching death without underpants was a curious condition for an Englishman, but the airman knew that nakedness and associated humiliations were usually on the torturer’s agenda, so it might be said that he was preparing himself and anticipating events. Perhaps he even dimly sought to see if the anticipation of sexual masochism could be enjoyed before the pain-without-entertainment took over. But nothing the Englishman anticipated at the hands of his captors consequently ensued. After the airman had strangled the handsome toothless Jew as he was painfully trying to eat a plate of hard beans, the Englishman was set free. Perhaps he was being rewarded for being an exemplary anti-Semite.
Natalie was hounded by the authorities for having been associated with a Jew with gold teeth. Offering her family’s money and her own body as collateral, she escaped across France and over the mountains to Spain. She later married a rich Portuguese who died young and left her a fortune. When she had walked the Pyrenees escape route, Natalie had become aquainted with the sculptor Maillol, and at least ten bronzes of her fresh, bold and buoyant naked physique exist in the world. One of them is presently exhibited in the ground-floor cafeteria area of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Maillol had once written in his diary that he had intended to have this particular statue covered in gold leaf because for him Natalie had been such a golden girl.
Without really trying, Natalie and Joachim both left a permanent memorial; the first in depicting Eve in bronze and the second by making a lasting bite in her apple.
 

GOLD
2 –  Blondi
On the 18th February 1942 a photograph of Hitler’s dog Blondi was published in the Berlin newspapers.  Almost immediately loyal National Socialists took steps to own Alsatian bitches called Blondi, or to rechristen their Alsatian bitches accordingly. It was estimated in June 1942  that there were over 20,000 dogs in Greater Germany who, if well-trained, would answer to the name of Blondi. It caused some havoc in the public parks. An Alsatian dog is also known as a  German Shepherd Dog; it was therefore also a most patriotic gesture. Such was the enthusiasm for canine rechristening it did not go unnoticed that dogs other than Alsatians were also being called Blondi.
By the time of the first disappointments of the battle of Stalingrad in October 1942,  the enthusiasm for canine identification with the Fuhrer’s bitch was subject to interesting variations and reversals. In Pomerania the Gauleiter Hans Liebermann-Richter, a keen enthusiast for racial purity of all kinds, insisted that the name Blondi could only be given to Alsatian bitches, and that all other dogs of that name were to be exterminated. Moreover, to call a mongrel Blondi was a dishonour to the  Fuhrer. In response to more than a few observations, it was also announced that the name Blondi could not be given to a male dog. To call a male dog Blondi was tantamount to an acknowledgement of trans-sexuality, which was undifferentiated with homosexuality, which did not exist, said Hans Liebermann-Richter, in Germany, outside of the concentration camps where such filth rightly belonged, and was Jewish.
In Alsace, in January 1943, in response to the continuing humiliations at Stalingrad, it was insisted that all Alsatian bitches must be called Blondi in honour of the Fuhrer. It was a small gesture of particular patriotic support; afterall, the province had given the dog its name, in the same way that Dalmatia had given a name to a breed of black spotted white dogs. In Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, any citizen maltreating an Alsatian bitch called Blondi, or making steps to have such a dog put down for whatever reason, even if that reason was deemed to be a mercy killing, should be arrested. Injuring or killing an Alsatian bitch called Blondi with a motor vehicle was a criminal act punishable by hanging. In Alsace, the total identification of the Fuhrer and Alsatian bitches called Blondi was confirmed. To abuse Alsatian bitches called Blondi was to abuse the Fuhrer.
Since 1939 all Jewish citizens of the Third Reich had been forbidden to own a dog. In March 1943, a humorist in the Police Bureau in the Nazi Party District of Thuringia turned the tables, and decreed that all Jews should forthwith be obliged to own a dog, and that dog must be an Alsatian bitch called Blondi. It was a gesture to give all Jews an ever present reminder of the Fuhrer; to set in their very midst a watchdog over their activities. It was thus metaphorically implied that the Fuhrer was an omnipotent watchdog to universal Jewry. There were not so many Jews left in Thuringia, so it was an obligation easily policed. All Jews accompanied by their Blondi bitches were to report daily to their local Gestapo headquarters where the animals were examined for their good heath, smartly brushed coats and general well-being. To possess an unhealthy and underfed dog could mean severe punishment for its owner.
In Volksdorf, the dog-loving, widowed mayor, Josef Hammermann, whose recently deceased wife had been called Blondi, issued a declaration that all Jews compulsorily owning a dog called Blondi, should provide it with a gold collar in honour of the Fuhrer and in honour of his own wife. Josef Hammermann found himself in some trouble for linking his deceased wife and the Fuhrer in the same dedication, though his deputy, Harald Copernica, rearranged the wording in an attempt to limit the damage. Copernica had been sleeping with his boss’s wife and his attempts to straighten out the embarrassment were clumsy, perhaps through incompetence, but more likely through jealousy, since just before her death, she had started sleeping with her husband again. Local gossip escalated the embarrassments and the decree was eventually rescinded, but not before the twenty-seven Volksdorf Jewish owners of Alsatian bitches called Blondi had been arrested, their dogs placed in a pound, and the gold collars confiscated and melted down into two gold bars. One gold bar was lost, possibly purloined by the mayor’s deputy as compensation for emotional injury. The other gold bar found its way to Cologne and then Baden-Baden where it was wrapped in a green baize cloth and placed in the vaults of the most prestigious bank in the city. A Weichmar army sergeant, Hans Dopplemann, has been credited, at the very end of the war, as being the recipient of this gold bar, along with another 99 gold bars, which he packed into two large suitcases, placing them on the back seat of a black Mercedes, license number TL 9246. Ninety-two of these gold bars were later discovered in a forest just outside Bolzano, an Italian town near the border with Switzerland, where, it has been said, they cannot cook good spaghetti even to satisfy ravenous dogs.
The original bitch Blondi, perhaps the only creature that showed its owner an affection and devotion that was just as truly reciprocated, was whelped of a puppy called Wolf. Adolf had always believed that his name was an antique form of the German word for “wolf”, so in a complex way, an identification was made that just possibly has a suggestion of an acknowledgement of fatherhood, and therefore, at the very least in metaphor, of bestiality. This original Blondi had her own personal attendant, a Sergeant Fritz Tornow, whose sole responsibility was to feed the dog and take her for walks when her owner was not able to do so, being away on business as a Fuhrer. When Hitler began to doubt the efficacy of the brass-capped ampoules of prussic acid as a means to his own voluntary self-destruction, he had one tested on his bitch. A doctor, Professor Werner Haase, accompanied by Sergeant Fritz Tornow, was summoned to the bunker under the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in May 1945, and with a pair of pliers, they broke a capsule of the stuff into the dog’s mouth. The experiment was very successful. Death occurred at once. At his own finale, Hitler decided not to use the dog-tested prussic acid. He shot himself instead with a 7.65mm Walther pistol. It is not recorded what happened to the puppy called Wolf. Perhaps it escaped to Brazil. Perhaps it was adopted by a Russian soldier. Perhaps it was shot.
 
 
 

GOLD
3 – Property of the BBC
Massima Troy hid her jewels in the back of her radio, and referred to them as “Property of the BBC”. Listening to the BBC in occupied Europe was usually punishable by death. She thus kept her treasures close to the ultimate solution. If caught, she planned to say,
“I am listening to my jewels”, which might have been ironic, even witty, certainly cryptic, even funny, but no defence against a death-sentence.
And of course she was indeed discovered listening to the BBC.
It was a programme called Worker’s Playtime, and she was listening to her radio at Knokke-le-Zoute on the coast of Belgium, sitting nonchalantly at four o’clock in the afternoon, in her white bra and yellow panties, in her six metres by eight metres garden among the hollyhox, with a fine view of the English Channel over her garden wall.
Worker’s Playtime was classified subversive. It had been devised as a regular entertainment to amuse workers in the English armaments factories manufacturing bullets and shells to kill Germans. Shopfloor workers, for the most part female, would hum and whistle along with the Worker’s Playtime music played through loud-speakers whilst they polished shell-casings, tamped down explosives, screwed bolts tight, and labelled death-missiles with the chalk-scrawled message, “This one’s for you Jerry!”
The programme was very popular in England. It had a memorable signature tune which was wholly instrumental on the radio, but was often sung in school playgrounds with rude and infantile lyrics that used complicated chimes and rhymes and near-rhymes that changed weekly according to which war-time celebrity was in the news. Ribbentrop was rhymed with chocolate-drop, he’s a fop, bottle of pop, Himmler was ridiculed with “something similar”, Daimler, kissed her, missed her, mussed her, undressed her, Goebbels was slandered with no balls, snow-balls, small balls, Rommel with pommel, pell-mell, hot hell, Quisling with whistling, King’s Lynn, Errol Flynn and Gunga Din, Lord Haw-haw with jaw-jaw, see-saw, green door and “ask-for-more”, Churchill with Fat Bill, underhill, dung hill, Dunhill, “sugar-the pill”, window-sill and grist to the mill. Edward VIII’s wife, Mrs Simpson came in for the greatest slander, perhaps because she was American and female, and perhaps because she was considered a traitor, a Nazi-lover, and certainly an American divorcee who had persuaded a king to abdicate. Children with half an ear to their parent’s gossip, were savage. Mrs Simpson was made to suffer. Her name was rhymed with ding-dong, slept long, day long, Suzy Wong, Lipton, gone wrong, Sam’s song and diphthong. Many of these references were of such local interest that it is not so easy to decern their source, though popular songs, film-stars and tea packers were included along with brand-name cigarettes, cars, imported Americanisms, and radio-comedy punch-lines. It can be supposed that children only half-heard the original names, and Chinese whispers in the playground were responsible for distortions, diminuatives and degradations. Most of the children using the rhymes would never have known their point of origin.
In the garden overlooking the sea at Knokke-le-Zoute, the Belgian police threw Massima’s radio up in the air, and its smart, art-deco-styled Bakelite plastic casing smashed to golden brown pieces on the crazy paving of her garden-path. They found her jewels, her dead husband’s cuff-links, his golden tie-clip, his gold coins and the fifty 19th century Spanish gold medallions he had collected whilst fighting with the Republicans in Spain. They were all dumped in a canvas mail-bag, and Massima, in her white bra and yellow panties, was stripped and variously abused.
The mailbag, with Massima’s gold wrapped in her yellow underwear, was eventually cycled over to Sluis just across the Dutch border by a postboy, Florian Gorrel, who was related to Massima’s dead husband. He thought he might become unofficial keeper of his family’s treasure. The gold was kept in the Sluis post-office for six months. Florian regularly inspected its hiding-place in a suitcase of rusty monkey wrenches. One day the gold had gone. The yellow underwear was publically abandoned on the floor of the unclaimed parcels room. It had been used as a rag to soak up the spilt oil from the post-office lamps. Florian was distressed that his aunt’s underwear could be used for such a frivolous purpose. He used his American cigarette-lighter to set them afire in the post-office back yard.
The gold had been taken on a goods-train to Antwerp and placed in a Gestapo office filing-cabinet in the basement of the Grand Central Railway Station, whose station-master, van Hoyten, was punctilious with other people’s property, even if it was Jewish. Van Hoyten had Massima’s radio treasures wrapped in a green baize bag normally used for keeping billiard balls, and he attached a ticket simply saying “Knokke Radio Gold”. In July 1944 the golden objects in their billiard-ball bag were locked in a portable safe, and driven to Baden-Baden. Sometime in October 1944 they were melted down to constitute a small part of a 500 gram gold bar stamped with an eagle with spread wings and the reference number Ft67.
Four days before the end of the war, this gold bar was picked up by two military associates who had never handled gold before, and loaded into the back seat of a Mercedes car, along with 99 other gold bars. These military men, a sergeant and a corporal, did their job with fixed smiles on their faces and a certain trembling in their lower arms. The ninety-nine gold bars were then driven to Bolzano which used to be a favourite holiday resort of BBC announcers on account of a radio seminar once held there in 1928 when the English guests had been so well treated they had formed a club called the BBBCCC, the Bolzano British Broad-Casting Corporation Club. The members of this club were not necessarily keen spaghetti eaters which was just as well because in Bolzano they would have been disappointed.
The Belgian Gestapo Police officers bundled a very bruised and never-to-menstruate again Massima off to Auschwitz where the BBC was regarded as a crystal palace with fountains and girls in polka-dot dresses forever speaking in low voices into amethyst microphones. This image of the BBC belonged to Forrest Puncturio. For twenty-eight days, a moon’s cycle, which was a long time for a Jewish Belgian patriot to survive in Auschwitz, he was regarded as the official dreamer of his camp-hut.  He had worked at Bush House in London, home of the BBC’s overseas services, until patriotism and perhaps stupidity and certainly some homesickness, had created a plan of absurd human smuggling to get him back to Brussels and then to his Canadian-backwoods-style log cabin in the Ardennes, and then to an arrest in a police-station at Spa, and now to Hut 45 in the men’s section of Auschwitz. Forrest Puncturio liked wooden huts. He remembered the split-pine panelling on the walls of the underground canteen of Bush House in the London Strand with great nostalgia. He worked at Bush House for two years, writing, recording and editing lengthy anti-fascist propaganda texts for anybody who might care to listen. His most fond memory of the Bush House canteen was that the light bulbs had never been switched off, day or night, not even for a moment, since war had been declared in September 1938. It was now 1943. Those light bulbs had been shining continuously for five years. He remembered a proud and melancholic Pole getting drunk and smashing a light bulb with a wine-glass, and he remembered an enraged Newfoundlander throwing a chair at a chandelier because a U-boat had torpedoed his uncle’s fishing-boat off Scotland. But on both occasions, the light bulbs were swiftly and quietly replaced, and, without a murmur, the management took care of the costs  If the lights had been going out all over Europe, they never went out in the BBC canteen in the Overseas Broadcasting Studios of Bush House in the Aldwych Building in the Strand, London.
Massima Troy and Forrest Puncturio became strange conversationalists for the length of one sunny afternoon in August 1943. Massima had wandered close to the wire. Her hut was full of Romanian women and she could not speak their language. She looked down at the sparse grass, searching for a different sort of plant, any plant. She missed her seaside garden and the hollyhox plants that grew three metres tall, especially the dark red ones, and the sea-holly with its blue foliage and yellow flowers, and the pink campion enjoyed by ladybird beetles that came over the sea from England. Forrest Puncturio saw Massima Troy from his hut window and wondered how she could have approached so close to the wire and not been shot. He went to meet such a courageous lady. He walked nonchalantly in her direction, kicking a brick. At fifty yards he whistled to her and they walked towards each other, exchanging pleasantries. And then all afternoon, standing and then sitting on the grass, they talked through the two fences of electrified wire, five metres apart. They talked about everything; cities they had known, Paris, Venice, Rome, a small town in the Florentine Hills called Pratolino where a giant stone statue overlooked a deep lake of pink lilies and mysterious black fish, and the early autumn crocuses in the woods in Fiesole, walks they had taken in Ravello and the Canary Islands, birds and plants they had seen, and white horses they had glimpsed in bright sunlit fields, and smiling babies, and sleeping children, absent relatives, the long lines of the recently dead, Charles Darwin, evolution, the irrelevance of religion, swimming in blue pools, nights of sexual pleasure. Eventually they forgot to keep looking over their shoulders at the gun-turrets and the solitary sentinels, and the guard hut. They talked into the evening, their shadows growing longer. Then they started talking about the BBC, and they were discussing the announcer John Snag who read out good and bad news in exactly the same deep soothing tone of voice, when a volley of bullets killed them both. They died within moments of each other. Perhaps Massima Troy died first, for Forrest was certain that for a few seconds he could hear her humming the signature tune of Workers Playtime. Their bodies, five metres apart, lay under the August moon for eight hours. They were dragged away by their heels at dawn, and each was buried is a separate lime pit. Massima Troy was my aunt, my mother’s elder sister.
 

GOLD
4 – Butter crucifix gold
This is the short story of a gold bar that was slightly smaller and slightly richer in colour than the other 91 gold bars discovered on the back seat of a car that crashed outside the North Italian town of Bolzano where they cannot cook a good spaghetti.
The gold bar was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a knotted shoelace. It was like a golden slab of country butter. The brown paper and the shoelace helped to identify where the gold came from, for once upon a time it belonged to children in an orphanage in Toulouse. The gold bar was their surety to the nuns who were their protectors, and it was made of melted down crucifixes.
On certain saints days in summer the nuns would untie the shoelace and unwrap the brown paper and polish the golden bar on their sleeves. They would line up the forty-six children of the orphanage in the cloister of the convent, and, waking slowly, pass along them, holding the gold bar under the children’s chins so that the sunlight reflected a golden glow upwards upon their faces. The nuns would offer a benediction to each child.
“There you are Therese, God loves you, casting his Holy Light upon your cheeks and making you look so beautiful. God be with you always. May his light always shine upon you”.
“Jean-Pierre, you are truly blessed by the collected power of all the little crucifixes. God be with you for ever and always”.
Therese’s grandfather, tortured to death in a Marseille police-station, had been accustomed to pick a buttercup from his garden and hold it under Therese’s chin. He would say that the golden glow reflected so richly on her face, that she certainly loved butter and would one day fall in love with a wealthy man and marry him.
Jean-Pierre’s mother, blown into unrecognisable pieces by an explosion when he was four years old, had been accustomed to hold a slab of butter under Jean-Pierre’s chin in exactly the same way as the nuns held their gold bar. She had said that because Jean-Pierre’s chin shone so yellow in the butter’s reflected light, he would grow up to be very lucky indeed.
However, no luck, no riches, no love and no marriage. God was not with these children. For ever. And always. They were carted off to Lyon in a dirty lorry, put on a slow train and gassed at Dachau. Their corpses were burnt. They were Jewish children. They had no right to be in a Catholic convent, cared for by Catholic nuns and bequeathed a golden bar, the colour of butter, made of Christian crucifixes. Besides what was all this? A confusion of faith and money, greed, butter, crucifixes and superstition. German National Socialism would sweep all such superstitions away. For ever. And always.
The golden butter bar found its way to Baden-Baden. From there it was taken to Bolzano in a confused plan to hope to buy away a small Jewish girl believed to be an officially recognised orphan with an official German Aryan soldier for a father, and an official French Jewish cook from Vaux-le-Vicomte for a mother. Could it ever have been possible that someone might have put butter under the chin of this particular orphan?
 

GOLD
5 – The Scheherazade Commandant
A commandant in Sesnovakia ran his camp on the Scheherazade principle. Entertain me every day and your life will be spared. Fail to lighten my boredom and you will be thrown down the latrines, into the dog-pound, under a train, onto the electric wire; the commandant could be inventive with his punishments. But the Scheherazade principle was only a principle. Story-tellers were not in fact in demand in the camp, because the commandant was a xenophobic, German-speaking Czech, and his command of foreign languages was limited. All his guests were foreigners, mostly Poles and Russians and assorted Balkan peoples with a few gypsies and an irregular supply of Dutch. He did have three German speaking Austrian homosexuals under his jurisdiction, one of whom was mute and therefore not the best of  story-tellers. The Scheherazade principle was adapted to work in other ways; entertain me with a song, or a dance, or a recitation or a striptease, or an obscenity or an act of cruelty against your fellow inmates, and you can live another day. Most people have one small trick, even if it is only employed to amuse children. Pull a foolish face, fart rhythmically, de-stone cherries with your toes, speak the Lord’s prayer backwards, juggle milk bottles, whistle through your nose, sing falsetto, bray like a donkey, do a card trick, spin a plate, count in threes. Those tricks that could be performed visually and without exotic props worked best in Sesnovakia, but even so, few people can satisfactorily continue to amuse day after day with only one small modest entertainment. So these people with a limited anti-tedium vocabulary went to the wall, or rather the fence, quite quickly, unless they could offer something else. That something else in some cases was a little gold. Difficult to know where the gold came from. But when you are desperate to sleep another night in a below-freezing hut on a splintered wooden bed covered in vomit without a blanket, scratching yourself down to the bone because of the jumping lice, it is amazing what resources you can stoke up from the recesses of your abilities.
Realising that his guests could produce such golden miracles, the commandant permitted the socially under-talented to pay off their entertainment-dues with gold. Needless to say in stories like this, the commandant grew greedy, stepped up the pressure and became more inventive with the sadism. His, as it were, now paying guests became more inventive, meaner, more competitive, rasher, doing great injury to one another to see another foggy day in this paradise of North Poland in the Winter-time. Bring me a ring a day. Bring me two rings a day. Bring me five rings a day.
Work parties sent out at dawn to dig sewage trenches near a village with one deserted church and two small farms and a cobbler’s shop amazingly returned with gifts for the commandant. The smallest dental work of the camp’s inmates was relocated. The woman’s quarters became suddenly a rich mineable source, and the segregation laws became curiously lax. Even more curiously, the guard huts were not so completely out of bounds. The commandant, by inference, was allowing his guests to steal from their jailers. He found himself becoming a richer man. He placed half his wealth in the Deutsche Bank, the other in his own particular no-questions-asked bank situated in a black trunk under his bed.
The mute, Austrian, homosexual performed his Scheherazade tribute as obscene tricks. He was quite dependable as an innovator.  He performed expressionlessly, which encouraged those who doubted he was truly mute to reassess their prejudices. He kept a wedding ring on his person but not on his finger. One day it fell out of its hiding place and rang tinkling on the concrete floor of the bath-house where the commandant and his closest cronies had assembled on one of their regular Scheherazade candle-lit evenings, accompanied by the very best gold-paying guests whose breath and bodies warmed the bath-house just a little. Nothing was allowed to go to waste in a work camp. When the metallic sound of the spinning ring ceased to reverberate, three sets of people pounced. First, the Commandant who now knew no shame as far as gold was concerned, second, those inmates who had failed to find the day’s gold quota, and third, the Austrian performer himself. If the Commandant and his eager gold digging guests had learnt ferocious cruelty that is rarely seen outside the gates of Hell, then the Austrian surpassed them. His life was in the wedding ring. He killed the Commandant with a shower pipe ripped from the wall, forcing it into his mouth and his throat in a no-doubt ironic attempt to make the Commandant like himself, first mute and then dead. The Austrian and forty-nine camp guests were butchered to death in six minutes. The fallen wedding ring disappeared.
The Commandant’s gold in the Deutsche Bank was safe enough, but the gold in his trunk under his bed was soon pilfered. First, wrapped in a cement sack, this gold journeyed to Warsaw and then to Vienna, transported in an armoured car. It stayed in an apartment belonging to a blind man opposite the SemperDepot for six months, until it was smelted down in September 1943, and, as an oversized shining gold bar, predate-stamped May 1939 to confuse any snooper, it was taken to Cologne and then Baden-Baden where Karlheinz Brockler managed the Gestapo treasury of Baden-Wurttemberg. It stayed there almost for the duration of the war. In fact it was removed from the bank cellars only on May 4th 1945 by Corporal Guelferle, who was acting on orders from Sergeant Hans Doppleman who was fulfilling the directive of Karlheinz Brockler’s brother-in-law Lieutenant Gustav Ivan Harpsch who had urgent need of this gold bar along with 99 other gold bars that had been idling there, awaiting events, like all gold awaits events. All gold has a future and patiently waits transformation. The 99 gold bars were packed tightly and neatly in two sturdy black leather suitcases. Most of them were taken on a four day journey to Bolzano in North Italy where the citizens cannot cook a good spaghetti to save their lives, their purses or their moral reputations.
 

GOLD
6 – The coat of yellow stars
A Jewish writer notorious for his predatory relationships with younger women, heard the rumours of Heydrich’s recommendation to Hitler, encouraged by Goebbels, that all Jews should be obliged to wear a yellow Star of David. The writer phoned his uncle, a tailor in Babelsburg, to order a coat of many yellow stars, to be worn, not by himself, but by his current lover, a black singer from Chicago, Greta Nairobi, who was currently performing in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann at the Stadtsoper in Berlin. Greta refused to wear the coat of yellow stars in public, she thought it was too great a provocation, but she wore it on the cabaret stage, whilst singing, to accompany its trangressional nature, a song which had lyrics that the Jewish writer had borrowed from a familiar source but had altered to suit the circumstances.
 Twinkle twinkle yellow star,
 How I wonder what you are,
 Up above Berlin so high,
 Like a Rabbi in the sky.
The writer had secured Greta Nairobi a midnight cabaret spot at the Auberge, which those with a satirical ear, also knew to be the name of Hitler’s favourite restaurant in the Obersalzberg. Gentile members of cabaret audiences with a scepticism for National Socialism sang the song at private parties, in the privacy of their steam-filled bathrooms, and whilst riding bicycles very fast down steep hills in Bavaria.
The antics of the Jewish writer and his black mistress were tolerated for six weeks, by which time the Babelsberg tailor was becoming famous for turning out imitations of his initial creation, re-creating it in yellow and black silk, and once in yellow, stencil-dyed, black beaver-fur, and once in silver lame with appliqué gold stars. This last evening-gown was made for a Jewish New Yorker who had come to Berlin for the Olympics Games, who was pleased to be able to indicate ironic solidarity with government opposition, whilst also paying carnal attention to the youngest member of the United States High Jump team who was a Jewish Yale scholar with a great deal of money.
A second tailor in Magdeburg, admiring the audacity of the Berlin Yellow-Star anarchists, ran up underwear, vests, petticoats, brassieres, underpants, bloomers, garter-belts, and stockings decorated with yellow stars, which was bought, and perhaps worn, by several society ladies in Lutherstadt Wittenberg, to excite their husbands into acts of sadism. Several prostitutes in Luckenwalde are reported to have borrowed the idea; one of them, the Jewish Marlene Lubben, becoming wealthy, and eventually marrying Guston Blitzer, the realist writer and Communist sympathiser from Rostock, who was known for a time as the Crimson Shipyard-Poet. Lubben was notoriously unfaithful to Blitzer. On one occasion, she arranged to have Blitzer locked up on a charge of blasphemy, whilst she masturbated a Ukrainian ice-hockey team in an Italian restaurant in the Berlin Tiergarten, eventually pouring the sauce-boat of Soviet semen over Blitzer’s head whilst she was wearing her Star of David knickers. She was certainly aware that many Communists were as anti-semitic as their enemies. It may be no accident that Guston Blitzer was later to write a roman de clef called the Starry Incitement, where the humiliations anguished over were regarded as more political than sexual.
When the Olympic Games were over and the foreign guests had departed, the draconian anti-Jewish enthusiasms practised by the Third Reich were permitted to again have a public face. The Jewish writer was arrested and his American mistress was driven to Hamburg to board a P & O liner bound for Southampton and then New York. The Jewish writer had an international reputation and the authorities felt obliged to move slowly on his case. This was not the situation with his uncle, the Babelsburg tailor. His shop was burnt down on a Sabbath evening, and his body, tied to a heavy treadle Singer sewing-machine, was found in the ashes. There was a cryptic item in the Tailor’s Gazette that suggested German sewing machines were more efficient and lighter in weight than their equivalent American imports. The tailor’s bank accounts were seized, and his gold valuables, discovered in a safe deposit box, were compulsorily presented to the Charity of the National Socialist Society for Widows of Soldiers of The Great War. To make a demonstrable gift, the gold trinkets were smelted down and consolidated into a 1000 gram gold-bar and dye-stamped with the Charity’s initials, and placed in a glass-case for the impressed to marvel at the beneficence of National Socialism. It was not long before such an expensive and publicly exhibited object disappeared, stolen, it is believed, by thieves sophisticated enough to organise their burglary at night and with gloves, but ignorant enough to have paid no attention to more expensive and valuable items contained in the same showcase. The Charity-stamped gold bar was however too hot to handle and it was soon in the possession of the Dresden Bank, whose representatives curiously did not return it to the National Socialist Society for Widows, but sent it to their branch in Baden-Baden, whose managers did have some sensitivity in the matter. They got rid of it, contriving to sell the bar to the Deutsche Bank in the same city, where it joined other gold bars of a similar but not so august pedigree, and from where Lieutenant Gustav Ivan Harpsch’s sergeant, Hans Dopplemann, had it collected and packaged by his corporal, to travel to Bolzano where they cannot cook a good spaghetti.
A trunk of theatrical costumes from a German travelling theatre group of the 1940s was recently auctioned in Vilnius and bought by the local history museum. It contained costumes made of black satin material meticulously sewn with yellow stars to make twelve different items, namely, three suits, a pair of pyjamas, an overall, a night-gown, a top-coat, a set of female underwear, a set of male underwear, a swimming-costume, a bride’s dress and a shroud. The one-time celebrated Jewish writer was living in Lithuania after the war, having escaped innumerable terrors (a great many of them brought on by his own arrogance) by being sheltered by a succession of devoted lovers who had the means to keep him protected. As an elderly man surviving on his royalties, he had invested money in a small Lithuanian theatre to put on a play he had recently written called The Stellar Tailor.
A costume specialist at the local history museum had discovered that behind each star had been sewn a piece of card on which, in a black indelible ink, a name had been hand-written. Most of the names had been bleached away by repeated washings and cleanings, but sufficient writing evidence remained, including the name Greta Nairobi, to presume that here was a collection of the names of all the writer’s lovers, male and female. The costume specialist counted 67 names on the twelve sets of garments, 33 of them readable and 12 of them identifiable. It can be presumed that most of the names were Jewish, and that their owners had perished in the camps. One name was Lida Baarova, the Czech film actress, which sets up a series of particular resonances, because she was, for a time, Goebbels’ mistress. It would be curious to imagine the reaction of the radically anti-Semitic Goebbels to the fact that he was sleeping with a woman who was, or had been, the mistress of the Jewish writer who had scorned, mocked and ridiculed his policy of forcing all Jews to wear a yellow star.
GOLD
7 – The biscuit-tin
Three widowed sisters kept their late 18th century golden heirlooms in a biscuit-tin under crumbling English biscuits bought at Fortnum and Masons from before the war when their husbands were alive and shopped in Piccadilly.
An Anglophile German officer called Helmut Buttlitzer was billeted in the sisters’ large house which was gloomily overshadowed with horse chestnut trees in the southern suburbs of Potsdam near the zoo. They ate well and frequently. Most nights the menu included rabbit stew or rabbit soup or rabbit goulash. The rabbits were freshly killed. The sisters kept a rabbit run in the garden.
Buttlitzer’s knowledge of English snobbery soon attracted him to the identifiable biscuit container. With a polite smile he ate the mouldy Bath Olivers, and with an even politer smile, admired the Marie Antoinette bracelet, the pearl and gold necklaces that might have belonged to Madame de Stael, the gold Louis XVI watch fob and chain, the golden hair-pins of Madame Despins, the Charlottenburg brooch that had belonged to Amedea Rosenfeld, and the ebony and gold filigree butterfly book marker that had once lodged in a purple passage in the Talmud belonging to Rabbi Nicodemus Zabben. The sisters were proud of their historical inheritance made very much in association with their Jewish ancestors’ ability to lend money to the gentile royalty of Europe. The sisters talked eagerly, interrupting one another, knowing their listener was an intelligent man interested in such things. Whilst they blushingly discussed what the possible purple passage in the Talmud might have been, Buttlitzer slowly and  methodically wrapped the items discussed, in three table napkins, and put them carefully inside his uniform pockets, buttoning down the flaps and patting his chest to feel the snug proximity of the valuables to his heart.
After dinner, Buttlitzer took a turn in the large, tree-shadowed garden, leaving the sisters silently staring at one another in the house. He could see them through the French windows gripping their coffee-cups with white knuckles. Buttlitzer watched the rabbits. There were a great many of them, gambolling, nibbling, defecating, burrowing, copulating. As Buttlitzer stood there listening to the distant roar of the hungry, underfed lions in the Potsdam Zoo, he was attacked by a hungry intruder who had climbed the garden wall in search of material to make rabbit-pie. Taking a much unexpected bonus, the intruder robbed Buttlitzer of his recently acquired historical souvenirs.
The valuable items were quickly fenced by an ignorant non-connoisseur and reconstituted as separate piles of pearls, diamonds, enamel, ebony splinters and high-class gold. The gold watch cogs and watch wheels, the rings and chain-links, the naked pins and the bent and twisted filigree, already unidentifiable to the father and son gold smelters whose job indeed was to make the items even more unrecognisable, were melted down at 1947.52 degrees Fahrenheit, and re-reconstituted as gold bar HUI 707. With all the other gold-bars, this bar was on the back seat of the smashed Mercedes car found by police Chief Arturo Gaetano and US Sergeant William Bell on the outskirts of Bolzano, a city which has occasionally striven in the past to reconstitute a reputation for serving good spaghetti to travellers, because it seems to be unable to serve good spaghetti to its local inhabitants.
After his assault in the dark by the rabbit-catcher, Helmut Buttlitzer brushed himself down, re-entered the house and had the three sisters put butter on the bruise on his head, and no more was said. He took one more cup of coffee, bowed politely to the three women and went upstairs to bed. In the morning, he thought it prudent to make an application for a change of billet. His excuse was that the garden of the house was too gloomy and made him feel melancholy. The billeting office found him new accommodation closer to the zoo where the roar of the hungry lions was very loud and getting louder.
Buttlitzer contemplated feeding rabbits to the lions, and he knew the whereabouts of a useful source.
 

GOLD
8 – The naked jockey
Three brooches of great value were discovered in the back of a plate camera with which the Jewish photographer Gertrude Magy-Holst had been taking photographs of her nude husband, the jockey Corki Helmt. The brooches, holding a ruby and two diamonds set in cushions of gold were appropriated, the stones separated out from the gold, and the settings smelted down eventually at Baden-Baden.  Gertrude Magy-Holst had taken celebrated portrait photographs of all the members of the Weimar government, so the police looked for evidence of one kind or another of possible sedition, or sabotage, or general lack of enthusiasm for the National Socialist State. They had the photographs that were found in the camera, developed and printed. They had laughed at the husband’s nudity, but with a certain sheepishness for Corki Helmt was very handsome, his body, though small and slight, as was fitting for a jockey, was very neat and well proportioned, and his genitals, the obvious centre of interest in a photograph of a nude, were profoundly attractive and dignified. Indeed even his feet were handsome.
The gold filigree cushions of the splendid brooches were melted down in the furnace blast like cobwebs before a storm, and their original identity vanished as the liquid gold mingled with gold from Serbian rings, Dutch coins bearing the face of a popular queen who had escaped to England, Swedish crosses and an Italian golden rosary. The gold was poured into a 60 ounce mould and stamped with the date of the last full moon, and the letters BB g7iK.
Lieutenant Harpsch, working with two bribed members of the Third Reich military, commandeered the gold bar along with 99 others, and 92 of them pended up in a crashed Mercedes outside Bolzano, the one place in Italy where good spaghetti was a rarity.
It was said that the police-officers examining the case of the naked jockey, were much taken by the idea of having their own portraits taken nude. In two cases, wives were coerced into becoming instant photographers, but, by all accounts the results were not a success. Because of this, or because he was suspected of being a gypsy, for all good horse-handlers were accused of having gypsy blood by National Socialist enthusiasts, Corki Helmt was arrested.
Gertrude slept most of the rest of the war away in a darkened bedroom in an apartment in Darmstadt. Her doctor kept her supplied with strong sedatives because she never overcame her grief and pain at the loss of her jockey who was hideously tortured to death for being so small and neat and sexually perfect.  In a strange way Gertrude had been responsible for his death by making perfect photos of his perfect body.
 

GOLD
9 – The burnt elephant
A small circus run by two gypsy families returned every August to Ljubljana Castle. Their prize attractions were an albino African elephant that stood on its hind legs and whistled through its trunk, and a fifteen year old trapeze artist called Tana whose activities in the air made an audience feel giddy. The elephant was owned by Frederica Goeherly, and Tana was the adopted daughter of Wilhemina Katakis. Frederica and Wilhemina were cousins united in blood through their great grandparents who had been born in Baghdad. As long as the takings were regular, the family feuds were contained, and the cousins could organise their combined family business with finesse. They sewed their valuables into their best and their worst clothing. They left no strewn rubbish, no parched earth, no unhappy tradesmen, no unbribed police, and they stayed in one place only long enough to be a novelty to everyone. As soon as local star-struck daughters wanted to run off with the strong man, and rebellious sons wanted to ride the white circus horses, Frederica and Wilhemina knew it was time to leave. And they always left silently at night. By dawn they were thirty kilometres along the road, out of reach save for the most desperately in love or the most determinedly vindictive.
In September 1941, German National Socialism declared gypsies undesirable. The citizens of Ljubljana had never considered Frederica and Wilhemina to be gypsies. The two women wore civilised clothing, ate and drank in good restaurants and they paid their bills. But Tana, the fifteen year old trapeze artist, fell in love with a Nazi officer, and the whistling white elephant ate flowering bindweed and ran amuck. SS directives forbade the former because he was a German and she was a gypsy, and objected to the latter, because elephants were too obscure in Germany to warrant a license number. Paper work in the Gestapo Office seemed to regard both events, delirious love and
uncontrollable animals, under the same heading. The gypsy community had methods to deal with undesirable love and sick elephants, and so did the Gestapo. The Gestapo put its brash actions into operation before the gypsies. The lovesick Nazi officer was sent to Trieste under armed guard and soldiers armed with shotguns chased the elephant. The officer escaped and the elephant went into the forest; the gypsies in both cases being surreptitiously instrumental in making these events happen.
The citizens of Ljubljana turned out to watch the possibility of a double capture.  But neither lover or elephant were caught and the Gestapo took revenge for their double humiliation by burning down the circus and arresting Frederica and Wilhemina. The two women insisted on wearing their best clothing to the police station. They were stripped and their gold was soon discovered sewn into the lining of an ermine tippet, a silk embroidered bodice, a fox-fur hat, built-up shoes and woollen stocking-tops. It was much too hot to wear winter clothes in August. The locals pillaged what was left of the circus caravans. They taunted the animals, and they set dogs to sniff elephant dung and pursue its one-time owner into the forest from where they flushed it out into the cobbled streets, splashing it with petrol and setting it alight by throwing bales of lit petrol-soaked straw in its path. The white elephant eventually found its way to the river that runs through the city, and, unable to cool its scorched trunk, died of heart attack sitting in the water. Its carcass was later sliced up for trophies and dog-meat.
There was no law about sleeping with gypsy women before the time of the Ljubljana elephant. There was after. The male relatives of Frederica and Wilhemina, even including the underage male children, were accused of sleeping with women anciently related to the Jewish race, and they were deported to Poland, Baghdad being regarded as too far away. The gold resulting from ten thousand circus tickets sold to watch albino elephants and high trapeze artists too young to fall in love, was sent to Munich. The Deutsche Bank wagon visited the smelter before delivering its load of gold bars to Vault Three in Baden-Baden, to the future treasure-chest of Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch, a soldier who believed he could find his small daughter amongst the tens of thousands of Europe’s dispossessed and buy her freedom.
The Gestapo never thought to search the worst clothing of Frederica  and Wilhemina, which consisted of several pairs of overalls, three pairs of leather boots, a ripped scarf with a plaid lining, a battered straw-hat and several pairs of heavily patched underwear. And as a  consequence they never found twice as much valuable material as they had discovered in the two lady’s very best police-visiting outfits.
 

GOLD
10 – Peter the Great
A Jewish family in Rostov whose ancestors had been Dutch were keen to try to emulate the activities of Peter the Great of Russia when he had stayed in Holland. Through his example, they lathed ivory, made buckets, studied dentistry, wrote the letter R backwards and learnt to inscribe gold with a diamond. Every piece of the family’s golden hoard had been inscribed, rings, bracelets, teething-rings, lockets, brooches, table-napkin rings, spoons, cigarette-cases, fountain-pens, hub-caps and bath-taps. And then it had all been confiscated by invading German soldiers. It was taken to Munich where, for a time, out of curiosity, it was kept together as a collection. But eventually the itemised gold trinkets were separated from one another. The more august pieces found there way back to Leningrad, but some eighteen smaller items started to travel in and out of the hands of middlemen and fences until they arrived in Mainz and then the smelting works at Baden-Baden. From there they temporarily, and in another golden state, fell into the hands of Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch and arrived at Bolzano, the worst place in Italy to taste a good spaghetti.
In his enthusiasm for all things non-Russian in Europe, Peter the Great had thought of making spaghetti an important contribution to Russian cuisine. He had tasted it as cooked by the servants of Venetian silk merchants in the Amsterdam shipyards. In the event he took back the secrets of making silk to St Petersburg and not the secrets of making good spaghetti. Commentators, determined to make Peter wiser and more prophetic than he could possibly have been, deliberated on Italy, silk and spaghetti and found the correct connection in noodles which is certainly manufactured in strands like silk, was probably taken back from China, like silk, by Marco Polo, and was most certainly introduced into Italy, like silk, via Venice. These were the commentators who were not slow to support Peter’s suggestion that St Petersburg was Russia’s Venice. They endeavoured to import Chinese cooks into Western Russia, but these unhappy exiles despaired of cooking good noodles, took up washing instead, and set up a St Petersburg Imperial laundry. The British are credited with being the first to invent, build and run concentration-camps at the time of the Boer War to imprison Dutch farmers whose ancestors may have taught Peter diamond-inscribing. But Peter had predated their initiative. He himself had kept a primitive concentration-camp at Novogorod, harbouring recalcitrant Cossacks who vehemently hated Peter’s foreign enthusiasms, especially those learnt in the Netherlands, a land, they thought was populated by people with webbed feet who ate tulip bulbs and would rather ride in a boat than on a horse.
 

GOLD
11 –  The Colosseum Jews
The Americans arrived on the outskirts of Rome on 18 July 1943. A family of Jews living near the Colosseum celebrated too early, too loudly and too exuberantly. Their excuse was that they wished to express immediate solidarity with their relatives in Philadelphia, in Massachusetts, in the cellars of Carnegie Hall, and in the tenements of the Bowery where you pick gold up off the streets for the effort of bending over. The family lit the candles of a seven-branched candle-stick in their window overlooking the Colosseum, and they stood in the street looking up at the pink and tangerine sky for the three stars that would permit them license to start an evening service.
Three German soldiers were awaiting trial for raping an Austrian journalist in the Belvedere. The journalist was the niece of their commanding officer, and each of the infantrymen had a very low expectation of seeing Berlin again. Drunk on black market gin, they commandeered the military police vehicle taking them to the barracks in Trastevere, and crashed it on the corner of Via St Laurenzio and Via Lineo Posti where the Jewish family were celebrating. They vented their bitterness, frustration, anger and resentment in a way that satisfied their dim memories of the purposes of the Colosseum turned around to persecute Jews instead of Christians. They themselves were theoretical Christians. Between them they had Irish Catholic parents, Jehovah Witness grandparents, Mormon antecedents and and an Alabama Baptist great grandfather lynch-mobbed by sadists at Little Italy, Alabama. The soldiers dragged Alfredo and his two sons Caspio and Luigi and his three daughters, Laura, Margarita and Spitzi across the road and into the Colosseum arena and they stoned them. Alfredo was killed with a blow to his left eye. Caspio had the effrontery to throw stones back.
Three hours later US servicemen drove around and around the Colosseum, hooting, shouting, and waving small paper flags, their headlamps blazing. Two of the three German soldiers were still abusing Margarita and Spitzi, having tied them up like Christian sacrificial martyrs. They were shot.
The third soldier had returned to the Jewish apartment in search of booty and had found gold. With his pockets jingling with ancient Jewish coins, he had left Rome on a retreating auxiliary medical truck carrying war-wounded to the Apennines. He lost his Jewish Colosseum treasure in a poker game, to a corporal who went to relieve himself over a cliff-top to be shot by a sniper, from which side it was not clear. The corporal’s body fell into a deep ravine where the night silence for four hours was broken by his sobbing that sometimes sounded like the trickling of fresh water in a hidden stream and sometimes like the singing of a melancholic bird. And then he died. His body was found by partisans who took the gold from the chamois-leather bag he wore around his belly under his trouser-belt, and they sold it to buy rifles to kill more Germans.
The gold coins arrived in Turin and for a time were in the possession of Giovanni Triborius Daley who knew their value as Hebrew treasure and sold five to a Sicilian antiquarian which are now in the Museum of Roman Archaeology in Taormina. The remainder he hid in a clothes-trunk. They would be good collateral for post-war survival. War prices for historical artefacts was more likely to be based on their current metal price not their artistry or age, besides they were Jewish and automatically tainted. Triborius Daley was killed in a train-crash near Cologne, and his daughter sold his assets to the Dresden bank in a bid to buy her passage to America.
The gold had now left the public domain. It became anonymous and the coins were smelted down and stamped and shipped and trafficked about from branch to branch of the Deutsche bank until three months before the end of the war they arrived in  Baden-Baden as gold bar FG780P.
Baden-Baden was an unfamiliar city to Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch and his corporal and his sergeant who drove into town in a transport with a diplomatic flag on its bonnet indicating some amalgam of VIP, military police, and SS. Whilst Gustav Harpsch used his credentials and charm and some threats to commandeer a black Mercedes from the bank garage, the corporal and the sergeant requisitioned the 100 gold bars from Vault Three with an order-paper signed by the Deutche bank manger, Harpsch’s brother-in-law, and packed them into two large black suitcases and placed them on the back seat of the car. Ninety-two of these gold bars were all set for the crash and disappointment in Bolzano, that city in North Italy where they cannot cook a good spaghetti, and where the Romans, as in most cities they conquered in the Mediterranean, had built a small amphitheatre to amuse pagans with involuntary Christian entertainers, in the days before the marauding German tribes from the North came down to lay waste.
 

GOLD
12 – The violin suitcase
In Prague, a music teacher was forbidden to teach music because of his Jewishness. He kept his valuables in his violin. If the violin could not play music it could be well used as a safe to house a meagre inheritance for his children, three girls and two little boys and a baby.
Their mother had died of puerperal fever.
On a house search, drunken fascist authorities demanded to be entertained. They pulled up five chairs and a sofa and sat with the music-teacher’s children on their laps. The lack of resonance in the violin disappointed them. It was a case of bad violinist or bad violin. They could not be bothered to find out. They played a game with the violin teacher. He and his violin could have the privilege of being cremated together or buried together. Bad music was not permissible in a former capital of the German-speaking Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the children now clustered around his knees, the violinist chose to be buried with his violin. That way his children might possibly have a slight chance of one day recovering their meagre inheritance. The authorities were disappointed at the violinist’s calm acceptance of his fate and they seized his youngest child and made her part of the bargain. What did he prize most, his tired violin or his frightened baby? The violinist was silent. They built a pyre in the buttercup field opposite the violinist’s small house and gave him a choice which should be burnt first, his baby or his violin; which was the greatest treasure, his music or his youngest child? The music teacher came out of his frozen trance in horror that such a suggestion could pass through a human imagination. He threw himself at the monster who had suggested such a thing. The violin-teacher was shot, and he was burnt on the pyre with his violin whilst his children watched. When the ashes cooled they went in search of their inheritance which to them was not the contents of the violin but their father’s charred bones.
The imperishable contents of the violin case were discovered some months later when they came to cut the grass of the buttercup field. There was not so very much in gold but enough to collect, sieve from the wood-ash, and smelt with other Jewish Prague booty and take to a centre collecting-point in Vienna, and then distribute to National Socialist accounts in the Deutsche Bank, including the branch in Baden-Baden managed by Lieutenant’s Harpsch’s brother-in-law. Lieutenant Harpsch collected the bar that contained the meagre inheritance of the violinist’s children, and tried to make that inheritance part of the inheritance of his own child. But he failed because of a white horse.
 
 
 
 

GOLD
13 – The sausageman
The sausageman in Weisel-on-the-Rhine had a brightly lit stall on the corner of Glopperstrasse and Hockstandradplatz. He was a fence. By way of the sausageman activities, practically anything saleable could be bought or sold at his stall. And if you had nothing to sell that was portable, he would make an offer for your body for a frankfurter with a little mustard and some sauerkraut. His offer stood for men, women and boys. He would not touch little girls. The saucepans at the back of the stove were full of cold grease and jewels. Their lids were tied on with string. He violated women with frankfurters. His notoriety was so familiar and so apparently untouched by restrictions from authority, he could have put up a notice saying “I buy and I sell. Sausages for gold, sausages for sex”.
A husband, a sheet-metal worker, with an unaccustomed full belly realised with horror why his guts had stopped rumbling, and why his wife had locked herself in the bedroom. He took his three brothers and his two brother-in-laws and turned over the sausage stall, sending its ovens and saucepans sprawling in the street. He popped all the brightly coloured lights with the heel of his boot. He scalded the sausageman from crown to heel, paying especial attention to his private parts. The evening commotion alerted the police who regularly received bribes from the sausageman in sausages, gold and rejected little girls. They fired on the sheet-metal worker and his relatives. They killed two and wounded a third. The husband and his youngest brother were ordered to clean up the mess, except that they should not touch the saucepans with the lids tied down with string. Those pans heavy with white grease were to be delivered to the police-station. The jewels-for-sausages were boiled free and bartered for money. The collected sausage-gold was smelted down into a thick “Indian Runner” bar and eventually left Weisel on the Rhine to travel to Vault Three of the Baden-Baden Deutche Bank. Lieutenant Harpsch collected this gold and took it to Bolzano to be redistributed, thanks to his inattention in crashing a car, to the Swiss financial community.
A new sausage stall was paid for. Business continued much the same as before, but with a new sausageman. The old proprietor lay in hospital for three years, never likely to walk or talk or use his prick again. His urine was persuaded to leave his body by an unaccustomed route. Then his burns bed was needed for more deserving war-wounded. He did not survive the move to a humble cot in a hospital corner. He died unmourned.
There was one new feature for the Weisel-on-the-Rhine sausage-stall on the corner of Glopperstrasse and Hockstandradplatz.  Mussolini had been rescued from his Belvolio captivity in a daring raid, and to celebrate a fresh solidarity with the Italian Fascists, the new sausageman started a tentative side-line in Italian food, pizza and spaghetti, served on paper-trays, with tomato sauce and sauerkraut. Discerning Italians might not have been so enthusiastic about this addition to the menu, save perhaps those Italians in Bolzano who probably would not have known the difference between good Italian spaghetti cooked in Naples and indifferent spaghetti cooked in Weisel-on-the-Rhine on the corner of Glopperstrasse and Hockstandradplatz.
 
 
 
 

GOLD
14 – The goose girl
A goose-girl in Lorraine kept forty geese to make pate, a prized delicacy in a world whose palate was losing its subtlety. She tended geese who could lay golden profits. She had Jewish friends and wanted to help them. She had a plan. She force-fed selected geese with Jewish gold trinkets. Holding the goose tightly between her plump knees, she placed a long-necked funnel deep into their throats and ground in hazel-nuts mixed with a little gold - small objects, thin anniversary rings, slender chains, finely wrought golden studs for a small child’s ear - massaging the long geese necks with her thick white fingers to help the birds swallow the booty. The pink and purple goose livers swelled. You could see a cut slice of mauve and pink goose liver lying on a white plate with a sprig of parsely and a golden chain like a precious fossil curled in a serpentine rhythm along a urinary conduit.
Jealous gentiles informed the police who killed off the flock, ripping open the goose bellies to find the valuables that were not for eating.
They left the goose-girl weeping, the white feathers around her bruised body blowing on the green grass. White and green. She painted the feathers gold for Christmas, but she died of cold and starvation, for who wanted gold feathers when they once dreamed of gold eggs? White and green and gold.
The goose-gold was smelted and arrived quietly as a glistening golden bar in the Deutsche Bank in Baden-Baden. And Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch commandeered it with all the rest of his gold bars and drove it in his black Mercedes to Bolzano hoping to buy back his daughter from a Swiss Red Cross sanatorium. White and green and gold and red.
 

GOLD
15 – Danae
Rosamunda Blasco, a Jewish Portuguese hairdresser from the Carmen Miranda Salon in Lisbon slept with her jewels in her bed. She sometimes slept with her gold held between her thighs and against her belly. Her boyfriend, Eduardo Tedesco Bolinar, called her Dana after the Greek heroine who was ravished by a shower of gold, another Jupiter disguise.
Rosamunda was imaginative. She had seen the relevant films. She was frightened of cat burglars and nocturnal thieves. She knew they could quietly scramble up a drainpipe, noiselessly break a window, move silently through her kitchen and into her bedroom and steal her valuables and then depart, and she would not know that her jewellery had been stolen until she woke up the next morning. She was having none of that. She would make sure the burglar would have to wake her to find her jewellery. That way she could at least put up a fight. That way she could at least see her assailant’s face. Rosamunda possessed a golden rosary, a wrist chain of gold Tarot charms, and a pair of gold earrings in the shape of leaping fish. Her mother had given Rosamunda three wedding-rings, the proof of her mother’s three marriages, the third unregistered, all three wrapped together in a chamois leather bag. Rosamunda also possessed two gold necklaces, a gold-strapped wristwatch and a golden image of the Virgin Mary standing on a slither of rock from Golgotha that had been sold at Lourdes and blessed by the Bishop of Armagh. The Virgin could be unscrewed from her Golgotha. She slept in Rosamunda’s lap; the rock occupied an ashtray on the bedside table.
One Thursday in May 1940, Rosamunda went to lunch with a rich English woman who wanted her hair cut to look like Merle Oberon in the film of Wuthering Heights. Rosamunda loved the smell of the English woman’s perfume, it was called Catherine. Rosamunda became pleasantly addicted to mayonnaise made with avocado and frothed egg-yolk; it was called an Emerald Serpent on account of the way it was laid on your plate. She frequented the rich woman’s car, and the rich woman’s summerhouse on the garden roof of the Capra Hotel. She liked to sit in the rich woman’s special Radio-Room where she listened to Somerset Maughan and Ivor Novello tell stories about the English in Rangoon and on the Cote D’Azur. She never knew who these people were or where those places might be. Rosamunda enjoyed taking a bath in the rich English woman’s bathroom and she enjoyed stretching out on the rich English woman’s bed, and she enjoyed spending afternoons watching American Romances in expensive seats at the Sunset Boulevard Cinema. Rosamunda’s boss, Hermione Picaro, at the Carmen Miranda Salon, encouraged her in all these things. The rich English woman was the wife of a minister in Salazar’s government and she gave very big tips indeed, like a new device called a Refrigerator, which was like a big ice-box but it had a door instead of a lid, trays for making Pink Gin ice-cubes, and a light that went on when you opened it up. The light worked on some sort of magnetic principle. Or a car radio, a radio that you could actually put in your car and, except for when you drove under a bridge or in a tunnel, it would play you American music. This car radio apparently also worked on some sort of magnetic principle.
With just a little prompting, Rosamunda would draw a moustache with mascara on her upper lip to imitate Laurence Olivier playing Heathcliff, and with extra white make-up and thick black lipstick she would imitate Merle Oberon in a black and white film playing Catherine. It satisfied the rich woman who stroked Rosamunda’s hair and her breasts and kissed her knees, and gave her a cocktail-shaker-set with six small glasses, six large glasses, a bottle of rum, a bottle of absinthe and a bottle of Pernod, and two aluminium shakers with red plastic screw-on tops, a bottle of maraschino cherries and an ice-bucket, and ten swizzle-sticks in the shape of miniature umbrellas which actually opened and shut.
Eduardo Tedesco Bolinar was jealous. He stole money from the cash-register at the Carmen Miranda Salon and contrived to get Rosamunda blamed. She was arrested and accused of unnatural practices, whether on account of impersonating Merle Oberon or Laurence Oliver is not reported. Eduardo’s uncle, Ferdinando Belize, was a police clerk, and could arrange to fictionalise all written reports, which he did as a matter of honour wishing to be a script-writer in Hollywood. He hoped a film producer would one day read his police reports and sign him up for imaginative writing. Eduardo’s uncle sent two policemen around to Rosamunda’s apartment. They could not get in or break the door down, such were Rosmunda’s anti-burglar precautions, so they had to help one another climb a drain-pipe, noisily break three windows and climb across various hazards in the kitchen before they could get to the bedroom and find the jewels in Rosamunda’s bed. If Rosamunda had been in bed, she certainly would have been woken by all the noise and disturbance. She certainly would have seen their sweaty, ugly faces.
The golden trinkets were impounded as circumstantial evidence, to be considered as probable bribes or likely gifts received as a result of sexual blackmail. They were carefully itemised in case the rich English woman should take an interest in Rosamunda’s case and arrange bail.
Rosamunda was bored at the police-station. She volunteered to cut hair to make the time pass more quickly. She accepted requests. A Ramon Novarro, an Errol Flynn, a John Gilbert, several Rudolf Valentinos, and a Bela Lugosi, though she had to flick through several film magazines before she could find a good enough picture of Bela as Dracula to make a decent copy of his hair-style; she even did an Adolf Hitler though no-one could remember having seen Adolf in an American Romance. Retrospectively Adolf as Dracula could have been engaging.
Meanwhile Rosmunda’s valuables moved around the police-stations of Lisbon. The Virgin Mary statue was taken home on loan for three days by a police-chief’s wife, who hoped to make an impression on a visiting Irish bishop. The three wedding-rings disappeared. Eduardo was given the empty chamois leather bag out of which he made himself a jockstrap. He was now seeing the rich English woman and spending the afternoons at expensive seats in the cinema, chain-smoking long black cigarillos which made him cough until his eyes watered. Eduardo’s uncle collected 14,000 escudos in dirty untraceable notes from a judge’s clerk, proceeds probably from selling the golden rosary.
On the occasion of a police clean-up, with sundry other items, the remains of the Rosamunda collection were quickly shifted across the border to Madrid, out of the way of a supervision that might get too close and create accusations of corruption. The trinkets subsequently travelled to Salamanca where they were stolen with comparative ease from a police truck by a trader in tourist trinkets called Enrico Solstice, who used them to enlarge his gold collection to negotiate for an early period Joan Miro, sold at the back door of the Portuguese National Gallery Collection to pay for restoration of the gallery’s cooling system. It was a painting of a rabbit and three fish, an image that was later made popular by being reproduced on the menu cover of the restaurant at the Joan Miro Museum in Barcelona in the 1990s. Enrico had been a little impatient. He had hoped to buy an El Greco from the same source one day, perhaps ostensibly to help them out with the gallery’s security alarm system, but that would have needed five times as much bullion.
Rosamunda’s gold, now almost as good as invisible in the eight metal cases of valuables sent to Medrun on the French-Spanish border, was in the hands of Portuguese fascists determined to help their friends in France. Addressed to Suzanne Creaux, the niece of Pierre Laval, official Vichy negotiator, the consignment was intercepted by the maquis somewhere near Roux, and broken down into small collections that could easily be spirited away. One of these collections was itemised by a young clerk called Jacques de la Lune, and contained a golden Virgin Mary standing on a sliver of black rock, which surely once belonged to Rosamunda Blasco. This clerk may have been a turncoat, for the Virgin arrived in Vichy, its original intended arrival destination, in the summer of 1944, and was subsequently sent to Colmar and then Baden-Baden where it was unscrewed from its contact with Golgotha and smelted down without any sentimental or religious anxieties. Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch in the end got his hands on Blasco’s legacy, and as a fugitive Nazi, fearfully running away from persecution and hopefully running towards his three-year old daughter, involuntarily dumped it in a spectacular car-crash on a highroad near Bolzano, a place in Italy that had earnt a reputation for not being able to cook a good spaghetti.
What of all the characters in this story?  Well, Rosamunda Blasco made no other known mark on European documentary history, neither did Eduardo Tedesco Bolinar or Hermione Picaro, Ferdinando Belize, Enrico Solstice, Suzanne Creaux or Jacques de la Lune, but it is known that Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, one time dictator of Portugal, died in his bed, scarcely mourned. Merle Oberon was discovered by Alexanda Korda, had four husbands, and caused the collapse of the film I Claudius by a near fatal car crash. Laurence Olivier earnt a reputation on the British stage, making at least two films that have since become classic adaptations of Shakespearean plays. He marryied two contrasting English women, Vivien Leigh, who drank herself to death, and Joan Plowright who is still alive at the time of writing and continues to play dippy English grandmothers with hearts of gold.
Ivor Novello was an effete English songwriter and sometime actor, following both professions with some entertaining camp wit. Somerset Maughan was a novelist famously painted by Graham Sutherland against a yellow wall, who lived the life of a professional English exile in places much warmer than London. Ramon Novarro was murdered in a motel-room by hooligans who may or may not have known his identity, and were possibly over-excited at Novarro’s sexual appetite. Errol Flynn supposedly had a sexual organ that encouraged him never to wear short trousers in public, John Gilbert star of passionate romances, was rumoured at one time to be Garbo’s lover, failed to make it into the talkies and died of drink aged forty-one. Rudolf Valentino, the archetypal cliched Latin lover, was repeatedly and badly imitated, most famously in a photograph by Cartier-Bresson, and engendered one of the world’s first huge fan-clubs, conveniently dying at a young age to help his continuing fame. Bela Lugosi was a Hungarian actor who reputedly never spoke more than five words of English. He famously played Count Dracula, parodied in the cartoon series Sesame Street by a puppet who announced himself as “I am Count Dracula, I count”. Adolf Hitler was a dictator who kept no written records of his responsibilities in the murder of millions and successfully entered into a suicide pact with his two-day old wife, Eva Braun, in an underground bunker in Berlin. Joan Miro made himself a fortune and a huge Spanish reputation, trying to fill Picasso’s shoes by repeating his same tedious set of motifs for forty years. And El Greco, the Greek, was a 17th century Spanish painter with an astigmation of the eye and a liver complaint that caused him to paint long etiolated figures that look as though they have just come out of seclusion in damp earth like crocus bulbs in February.
It might be possible to fill in a little with some of the other names in this short story, to provide you, for example, with a little information about Danae and Jupiter, Emily Bronte, Carmen Miranda, Pernod, Eva Braun, Shakespeare, Picasso, Graham Sutherland, Cartier-Bresson, and even the Virgin Mary, but the danger is that yet more names would inevitably arise and we would be here all night.
You may have noticed that one name is missing, the name of the rich English woman who created the circumstances to engender this story in the first place. But we cannot supply her name. She is still alive and is determined to remain anonymous, if only to protect the privacy of her five illegitimate children by Eduardo Tedesco Bolinar.
 

GOLD
16 – Love of dentistry
A supply of gold kept in a glass-fronted cabinet by a Dutch Jewish dentist in Eindhoven was stolen and taken to the mint at Saarbrucken by a Dutch woman from Maastricht whose husband was a Russian prisoner-of-war. She traded her body to a young Belgian smelter who insisted on a contract of an hour of her time for an ounce of his smelting. She was generous and they ended up married, having to suffer the consequences of the possible return of her husband at the end of the war. They were lucky. Her Dutch prisoner-of-war husband from Maastricht had been a slave labourer on a Russian Collective Farm, coerced into sleeping with a Polish farmer’s blind daughter who had eventually nursed him through diptheria, cholera and influenza, and had married him.
 
No-one reported the two bigamists from Maastricht to any authority, Dutch, German, Russian, Belgian or Polish.
In Holland, the dentist’s smelted gold, now constituting gold bar FG890P, was sold and the proceeds bought the smelter and his new wife a large apartment. They still live together happily in an old people’s home in Potsdam. Their daughter is a dentist practising in Dresden.
In Novgorod, the prisoner-of-war and his blind Polish wife worked on a Collective Farm but also rented an allotment where their cabbages and eggs brought them enough local prosperity to help them take their daughter through medical school. She now teaches dentistry in Kracow, her mother’s home-town.
Gold bar FG890P was in Vault Three in Baden-Baden in 1944, and picked up by Gustav Harpsch on his abortive attempt to find and buy back his infant daughter from the Swiss. He never discovered his daughter, having been involved in a car crash which displayed all his stolen gold to the eyes of an American Occupational Force Sergeant, William Bell, on the outskirts of Bolzano in North Italy where spaghetti is rarely cooked with any accomplishment. It so happened that this American sergeant’s daughter was a dentist practising in Ottawa. Who knows, perhaps Harpsch’s daughter, associated by inference with all these coincidences, might one day develop a trauma with teeth.
 

GOLD
17 –  The Left-Biased Steering-Wheel
Maxima Fortunelli was a Roman-born Jew of Sicilian origin, orphaned at 10, brought up by a Jewish family that shared no blood with her. She was stern and no-one knew she had lovers who were not Jewish, that included a short-sighted German of Dutch parents who wouldn’t wear glasses and who sometimes lived in Trieste. Maxima sold paintings and antiques, and she was supposed to be a secretary, and indeed did put several hours into a publishing-house that erratically published art magazines that favoured Spanish art and Italian Mannerism, and loved Velasquez, Altdorfer and Caravaggio, the first for his brush-strokes, the second for his thorns and the third for his boys. Maxima’s friends saw the connections in all this; dark, tenebrist, moody, dangerous, a little masochistic, erotic. The point of declaring this character background for Maxima Fortunelli is to indicate her love of secrets and danger, and to go someway to explain her actions.
It was known that she kept her valuables in strange places, in a cobra head in a hotel safe in Modena, in a Gladstone bag in a Scottish hospital run by a great grandchild of Cavour, in her nursery rocking-horse, in a ceramic pipe under a swimming-pool in Luxembourg, in the steering-wheel of her car, a dark green Austin.  She used her car a great deal, going backwards and forwards between Sorrento and Paestum in Southern Italy, and Mestre and Trieste in Northern Italy. All four places were littered with her erotic escapades. She regularly met an English lover by the women’s bath-house in the ruined city of Herculaneum, where she wore a thin print dress and no underwear, her buttocks on the cold marble with her lover on her lap. She wore red dresses in Ravello and deliberately took her amusements without love, in a bamboo garden beside a deep tank occupied by giant toads. She frequently took a cabin in the regular ferryboat to Capri. She sat in a pony and trap by the beach-road outside Paestum. She did boats in Mestre and trams in Trieste. Sometimes the meetings were for business only, but most times she combined business with her pleasure.
In September 1941 she fenced gold for Jews who wished to escape to Israel, and she had secured a family fortune in her steering wheel. She was not watching what she was doing on the Via Emilia just after the Ferrara turn-off and she bumped heavily into a hay-wagon, breaking her front passenger side-window and causing her hollow steering-wheel to rattle with loose rings every time she took a sharp left turn. Outside Padua at ten o’clock in the evening, she was stopped at a road-block, and forced to give a lift to a German officer who had severe stomach cramps and urgently needed to see his Austrian doctor. Uncharacteristically fearful of her rattling steering-wheel, she refused to turn left to the appointed place of her Jewish contact, and instead, drove straight on until the complaining officer fainted and Maxima tipped him out onto the highway in the middle of the night somewhere near Avventura. She drove on to Ferrovia before realising that she was being followed, whereupon she accelerated, momentarily lost concentration, braked, swerved and hit a tree. With Maxima unconscious from a bump on her head, her car ran driverless on into a dark wood, miraculously just  missing fifty tree-trunks until it came to a natural stop on an incline of pine needles, its headlights spiking the misty darkness. Maxima came to, found the engine dead, changed her shoes and ran off into the night. Her car remained alone in the wood until discovered by two teenage lovers who used the brown leather back seat as a snug refuge. A week later the girl remembered the car lost among the trees and phoned her brother who owned a garage. He went searching and found the silent car. He was obliged to cut down several pine trees, being unable to find the path that the car had used to reach its resting-place, and he finally winched it onto the back of his pick-up truck. He spent a day patching the car’s front bumpers and repairing a flat tire and he sold it to a solicitor’s son, who drove it for a week before his patience at the steering-wheel rattling every time it turned to the left, persuaded him to take the car back to the garage to get the steering fixed. The garage mechanic discovered the gold hoard, but kept the find to himself, showing the solicitor’s son only scraps of loose metal filings as being the cause of the rattling. The mechanic split his findings into three parts and sold the first part to a bank clerk who kept them in his bank strong-box to be discovered when he was sacked for irregularities. The gold was sent to Baden-Baden and smelted into a single gold bar, which, with 91 other gold bars, was discovered in a black Mercedes, license plate number TL9246 abandoned at the road-side at Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they could not make good spaghetti.
Working forwards in this story, the bank-clerk became the manager of the Central Bundes-bank in Vienna, the mechanic bought a string of garages along the Via Emilia, and the solicitor’s son, after performing valuable work at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, assisted in rewriting the Geneva Code for the Protection of Victims of War and officiated as a European High Court Judge in the Hague and then in Jerusalem on the occasion of the Eichmann trails. The German officer who was suffering from appendicitis was later exonerated by the Americans and went to Salt Lake City as a military adviser, to later become a member of Kennedy’s staff at the time of the Bay of Pigs, and to travel in Nixon’s entourage to China. Maxima organised a Miro exhibition at the Guggenheim in Venice in 1960, was transferred to the New York Guggenheim when the Frank Lloyd Wright Building opened, married an executive of Sotheby's and now lives as a rich happy widow in the Dakota Buildings on the West side of Central Park. There is a Dali, two Braques and an early Renoir hanging in her dining-room and untold surprises, it is said, in her dressing room. Some say she has a Velaquez in her toilet, an Altdorfer in her bathroom and a Caravaggio still-life of grapes in her bank-vault. The Velasquez was uncharacteristic and therefore did not attract attention, Altdorfer is a painter whose works are not that widely recognised and Maxima took a risk on a guest recognising its value. The Caravaggio was immediately identifiable and therefore she did not dare to hang it even in a public private space like her bed-room. Denial of these facts of ownership is said to be a smokescreen to avoid the snoopings of thieves and the inland revenue.
 
 
 

GOLD
18 – The haystack story
At the approach of the Fifth Army marching to Poland, three Catholic farmer families collected their valuables together and hid them in a haystack with their thirteen children. The farmers were persuaded to entertain Nazi soldiers and bring their best schnapps out of the cellar to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. The children, thinking to delight and surprise their parents and their guests, came out of hiding festooned in the familys’ jewellery collection. The children, the jewels and five cows were confiscated. The gold was stripped from the jewellery collection and eventually arrived in Munich, where, it was refashioned into convenient gold bars. One of these travelled to Baden-Baden labelled perishable goods and arrived in Lieutenant Harpsch’s possession to be discovered with 91 other gold bars in a crashed black Mercedes, license plate number TL9246, at the road-side near Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they cannot make good spaghetti.
This event was tragedy enough, but the drama was curiously compounded. One child and one gold necklace were never found. The families searched the haystack over and over again. In their desperation, they dismantled it, scattering the hay across the farmyard.  But they never found the child or the necklace. The child’s name was Hyka and the necklace was worth 300,000 marks. The Catholic families never saw child or necklace again.
One week after the Fifth Army had passed by and tens of thousands of Jewish Polish families had been liquidated and Great Britain had declared war on Germany, one of the farmers’ Jewish neighbours obtained passports to England, bought new suitcases and emigrated to Lancaster to work in the linen factories. They took with them an orphan who was delighted by her new name, Adovisher, which in Eastern Silesia is Yiddish for needle.
 

GOLD
19 – The ring collector
Albert Albers gave receipts for the wedding-rings he coerced off the women in his family, thirty-seven pieces of pink paper signed with his initials in blue ink. He said they could get the rings back after the war with fifty per cent interest relevant to the newly Viktorious German global gold-standard to be recognised in London, Berlin, Tokyo and New York. It sounded official and optimistic and sort of impressive. He said their wedding-rings were needed to help buy Japanese bonds to support the war effort against the British in Singapore. The pink receipts could be used in Kelsterbach near Wiesbaden as credit notes for food of a non-perishable nature at the local grocers. The women needed to feed hungry mouths and they agreed to Albert’s unlikely promises. In return for acknowledging the pink receipts, Albert had promised the Kelsterbach grocers war-credit based on forcibly selling pork to rabbis to encourage them to become gentiles. Albert argued that a pork-eating rabbi would have to become a gentile since his ethical credit would be valueless among his own people. He discussed his plans with the Jewish community, asking for their co-operation, and offering as an inducement, funds to rebuild their synaogogues after crystal-night by way of auctioneering re-cycled bricks bought at knock-down prices from a dismantled gas-factory in the Wiesbaden suburbs. Albert was a schemer with innumerable exciting financial plans.
After the war, not only were there no rabbis in the Wiesbaden area to demand a refund, but there were no grocer’s shops left standing and, at the end of Albert’s financial chain, not a single wedding-ring could be returned. Albert was consequently ostracised by the women in his family, by his sisters, his sisters-in-law, his grandmothers, his aunts and his female cousins. The women despised him. He was ignored at christenings and cold-shouldered at birthdays. He was not invited to funerals. Even his wife began to sleep downstairs, in a single bed under the window. He was exasperated. He loved women and he wanted to be well thought of by them. He spent two years dreaming up schemes to earn money to pay them back for living so long without their wedding-rings. He worked hard to return into the bosom of their favour.
Finally, the drama for Albert ended a little like that Maupassant short story of the woman who borrowed a pearl necklace to wear at a grand ball, lost it, spent twenty years of her life scrubbing floors and taking in laundry to afford to replace it, only to find the necklace had been made of paste pearls and was virtually worthless. Most of the wedding- rings in the Albers family were nearly worthless but Albers was never made aware he had been tricked, though trickery was not really in the minds of his female relatives, the currency associated with their wedding-rings was in sentiment not riches.
As to the wedding-rings - what had happened to them? It is a truism that most people in the world do not own gold, now or then. But if they do own gold it is most likely to be in the form of a wedding-ring. A golden wedding-ring is like a talisman. There is of course something significant in associating fidelity for eternity with the most precious of metals. It suggests confidence. Which is perhaps curious because gold is so valued for itself, that almost inevitably it will be melted down from its present condition and turned into something else. This of course is what happened to the wedding-rings belonging to the women in Albert’s life.
It could be said that wedding-rings at certain times of the war and in certain places, became for a time a semi-official currency. Twenty wedding rings in Mannheim in April 1943 could buy you a passport to America. The going rate for a petrol-filled English car in Delitzsch near Leipzig in the autumn of 1944 might be thirty wedding-rings. But, considering their symbolic value, it was often unwise to meddle with wedding-rings. They could so easily have a negative value. A passport purchased with wedding-rings was bound to be fake, a car purchased with wedding-rings was bound to crash. It was just too much an unlucky bargain.
From the German gentile point-of-view, playing with wedding-rings as a currency was unlucky for the Albers family. The wedding-rings  became part of a gold bar. And this gold bar wrapped up in a newspaper announcing the bombing of Pearl harbour travelled to Baden-Baden on a slow train. These thirty-seven wedding-rings of the Albers family were thus associated with the entry of America into the war which marked the definitive beginning of the end for Germany. For four days, the Albers wedding-rings constituted one sixth of one gold bar out of the 92 gold-bars that eventually arrived in Bolzano. They contributed in a very small way to a possible happiness for him. Now there indeed is a worthwhile currency, a currency of happiness. But a currency of happiness is difficult to convert or change or transfer. Harpsch could not hold on to it, bank it or buy anything with it. He lost it all in a car crash on the outskirts of Bolzano where locally-cooked spaghetti could certainly not be recognised as a profitable commodity.
 
 
 

GOLD
20 – Hot water valuables
This is the story of a collection of gold jewellery that had been stuffed into hot water pipes where the constantly boiling running water discouraged  investigation. A Jewish owner of a block of apartments in Potsdam had done this service for his tenants who feared their valuables would soon be the property of the police. The landlord  made sure the water was kept at a scalding temperature, day and night, summer and winter, and he had re-arranged the plumbing in the block of some forty apartments to make identification of the source and the routing of the boiling water exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to find. It must be said that the valuables would also be inaccessible to their individual owners, who were not unaware of this but their trust in one of their own kind was greater than their trust in one of the police kind. In cold weather plumes of excess steam billowed from the chimney pots, and at night the walls burbled with the restless hot water. The building became a haven for cats, rats and tramps, and those who lived for bathing and showering and washing their cold hands twenty times a day.
Then the landlord died of a heart attack whilst sitting in a public toilet straining to empty his constipated intestines. His own piping was not as efficient as the piping of his property. The water in the apartment building cooled. Some of that gold had been immersed in boiling water for four years. The boiling point of water is 100 degrees Centigrade. The boiling point of gold is 1064.18 degrees Centigrade.
On a piece of whispered advice that the apartment block was a goldmine, now that the powerful landlord was dead, the apartment blocks were cleared of Jews and the building’s secret places ravaged and wrecked. The entire plumbing system was ripped from the walls, unearthed from under the floorboards and pulled down from the ceilings. The golden treasury, little the worse for its constant scalding, was discovered and put on display in the police-station to indicate the ingenuity of the greedy Jewish imagination. Subsequently it was boxed up and driven to Stuttgart and from there to Baden-Baden where it was smelted to make six golden bars, one of which eventually was appropriated by Lieutenant Harpsch, the unhappy father of an abducted baby girl.  Assisted by his sergeant and a corporal, he had persuaded his brother-in-law, the manager of the Deutche Bank in Baden-Baden that he knew of a secret place to make a stash of gold to assist them and their families after the war. Lieutenant Harpsch had suggested 100 gold bars would be just enough, sufficiently portable in a crisis. Harpsch had lied of course. The money was to find and pay, if necessary, for his daughter’s release from custody whatever that might be. He had heard many rumours of where she might be. One was that she was held for safety’s sake with a bourgeois family in Besancon, her mother’s home town. Another rumour suggested Basle where the child’s grandmother had once been a nanny of Swiss children. Harpsch’s greatest conviction was that his daughter was held in Switzerland, in a Swiss sanatorium across the border from the north Italian town called Bolzano, or Bozan by the Germans. He was prepared to buy back his daughter at whatever price it cost from the greedy Swiss. They could add his stolen Jewish gold to their vaults in Zurich or Geneva, or they could return it to the Jews or give it to the Americans, anything, as long as they returned his daughter.
Harpsch had succeeded in setting off on his circuitous journey with 100 gold bars packed tightly into his two black suitcases. Only 92 of the gold bars arrived in Bolzano. One of the original 100 gold bars had gone to his sergeant to ensure his complicity, another seven had been exchanged for petrol, food, alcohol, maps, hotel beds, a bath, free passage and a new tyre. And cigarettes. Harpsch was a great smoker. He was probably smoking when he crashed the Mercedes into a white horse in the moonlight one kilometre outside Bolzano where they had trouble cooking a good spaghetti. Perhaps the cooks of Bolzano never learnt that scalding water was a perquisite for the cooking of good spaghetti.
GOLD
21 – The golden weathercock
The weathercock on the church of St Peter and St Ursula in Bannesdorf on the island of Fehmarn in Holstein on the Baltic was rumoured to be made of gold. It certainly shone brightly, perched very high on the tall spire of the small and otherwise very modest building. It was a doubly significant symbol; an ostentatious signal of the church’s wealth, and a demonstration of how to put wealth out of reach. To climb the tower of St Peter and St Ursula in Bannesdorf in order to test the rumour of gold would have been a considerable feat, to do so in secret extremely difficult. The weathercock was fashioned in the shape of a cockerel sitting in a boat, a combination, it was said, of the cockerel that crowed three times before Peter acknowledged Christ, and the boat that conveyed St Ursula and her three thousand virgins across the Baltic to the Holstein coast. Ursula’s presence in the Baltic can be disputed, though she did have some supposed connections with Cologne, the seat of the original benefactors of Bannesdorf in the 13th century. The actual association of Peter and Ursula remain obscure. Inevitably local wits created stories of a sexual nature heavy with cocks and virgins.
Six German infantry soldiers in May 1940 , fortified with alcohol, attempted to test the weathercock’s golden substance. They raised ladders, two short and one long, roped, tied and fastened to a drain-pipe, various gutterings, a clerestory window, broken shingle supports and a wall sun-dial, and they began to climb up, like thieves in the moonlight, one behind the other, each not wishing the others to be alone in the investigation.
One soldier, Kurt, had climbed as far as the base of the golden boat, and had one hand on the arrow that pointed East and had the crook of his left leg over the bar that supported the arrow that pointed to the South, when the long, rotten wooden ladder strapped to the shingled tower came loose, and in a graceful slow motion curve began to arc backwards away from the spire in the direction of the graves in the churchyard cemetery.  Kurt at the very top of the ladder, travelled the furthest of the six companions, perhaps as much as 23 metres. He came down in a sitting position on a square limestone tomb and broke his spine. He died instantly. He was eighteen. Hans was next. He lost his grip on the ladder and brushed down the side of a yew tree, snapping the branches as he fell; the branches ripped open his belly and his chest, and his plump body settled heavily on the rusty spikes of a child’s grave, a fleur de lys decoration lodged in his throat. He died instantly. He was twenty-one. Pieter was next. He had just reached the level of the spire’s base and, as the ladder began to arc backwards, he made a grab for the guttering which broke in his hand; he took it with him, falling to the ground some fourteen metres from the base of the tower, smashing his head on a path made of small flints, his skull splintering like a cheap light-bulb. He could be said to have buried himself in wooden rungs and guttering ends. He died instantly. He was eighteen.
Tomas was at a point where the toppling ladder splintered in one of  its long shafts, spiking him in the groin before gracefully spiralling a little, making Tomas pirouette in the air, to land in the outstretched arms of a limestone angel offering a stone wreath to the empty night air. He died instantly. He was nineteen.
Christian had climbed up as far as the clerestorey window, and he was resting, his leg twisted around the back of the ladder so as to free his hands to better hold a whisky bottle. He ultimately fell on the bottle, its neck penetrating his belly though his navel, though the smashing of his face on a wooden cross was the cause of death. His father had difficulty in recognising him and official acknowledgement of his identity was through dental records and buckle scars on his buttocks. He was twenty.
Helmut was the closest to the ground, some 12 metres above the earth. He had been the most drunk and he was the slowest climber. His spine was broken near the coccyx on the ridge line of the Saint Ursula chapel. He did not die instantaneously. He  lived for three days in a coma dreaming of smoking a pipe where the smoke came out of every orifice in his body, smelling of a mixture of apple wood bonfires that he remembered from his boyhood in Silesia, and Cheepstoke Mild, a tobacco from Virginia which he had experienced in the lounge bar of a hotel in the Unter den Linden after watching Fricka Hansler sing dirty words to the Blue Danube Waltz in the White Bear Bar. He was seventeen.
Six drunken soldiers trying to steal a bogus gold weathercock from a church dedicated to St Peter’s Denial of Christ and St Ursula’s Virginity was bad publicity. The Third Reich was antagonistic to Church authority, but this adventure could not be seen as an iconoclastic gesture. A different turn of events had to be invented.
The villagers of Bannesdorf had assassinated six young infantrymen whilst they were on curfew duty. Many of the villagers were of Danish origin. The troubled Danish-German history of Schleswig-Holstein was invoked. Reprisals were necessary. The spire of the church was blown up with infantry explosives and the weathercock of gold painted cast-iron dragged from the wreckage and weighed. It was heavy. 247 pounds. With the cast iron letters, the complete phenomenon weighed 341 pounds, so 341 pounds of gold had to be extracted from the villagers of Bannesdorf as compensation for their murder of six young infantry soldiers who were all posthumously promoted and buried as heroes in Cologne Cathedral. The village was given three days to come up with the necessary compensation, or one person would be shot for every unaccounted pound. It was a story of impossible tasks and sadistic cruelty expected of the first collection of the Brothers Grimm. But then Wilhelm Grimm had lived for a year on Fehmarn collecting stories and he had been invalided with meningitis in Niendorf which is the next village to Bannesdorf.
Alongside their account of the six infantrymen, the Holstein District newspaper printed the Grimm story of Rumpelstiltskin, the Widow of Petacki, and the Cobbler’s Holiday.  In the first story a female prisoner had to spin straw into gold, in the second a prince had to empty a lake with a teaspoon, and in the third, two brothers were obliged to cut down a forest with a pair of sewing scissors. All three stories ended satisfactorily, good was rewarded, revenge satisfied and all victims received a large quotient of happiness. It is not recorded what the Bannesdorf village readership thought of the publication of these stories at such a time, but it is certain that they would not have ignored the inferences.  The ending of the Bannesdorf Weathercock story was not happy for them. In the event 110 men, 15 women and 3 children were shot, and 71 pounds of gold in the shape of family rosaries, wedding rings, earrings, cuff-links, candlesticks, crucifixes, a monstrance, a ceremonial golden shovel, a paper-knife, a gold watch, several gold teeth and a gold spectacle frame were taken and weighed and sent to Cologne where they were exhibited in the cathedral as evidence of a town’s gratitude for the heroism of the young soldiers of the German army.
When Cologne was bombed by the Allied forces, this golden hoard was removed to a bank. Eight weeks later it was taken in a truck to Karlsruhe and then to Baden-Baden where it was smelted and added as three “biscuit” gold bars to the collection in the Deutche Bank.  Two of the bars were used to pay off a blackmailer certain to incriminate the manager and two clerks for homosexual activities, the third became part of the Harpsch collection that found its way to Bolzano in Northern Italy where it is reputed spaghetti cannot be cooked with honour and the cathedral has a weathercock dedicated to St Peter in the shape of two giant keys. One of these keys is rumoured to open the door to Heaven for the Good, and the other key is rumoured to open the door to Hell for the Wicked.  Nobody has yet tried to climb the spire to borrow these keys to see if the rumour is true.

GOLD
22 – Twelve days of Christmas
On a Friday evening a few days after Christmas 1939, Hans and Sophie Himmel, ironically known as the turtle-doves because of their mutual devotion, sat down after dinner in their second floor apartment in the Biestricht District of Dresden and wrapped five gold rings in a sheet of the morning’s newspaper that had printed a photograph of their dead son. He had been awarded the Iron Cross after being shot in the back of the neck fighting for Germany in Poland. Hans and Sophie ironically imagined that the iron cross was public substitute jewellery for what they now decided privately to hide. They put the twist of newspaper in a brass spectacles-case that they wrapped in a cocoa-tin that they placed inside a leather satchel that they buried under the pear tree in their backyard. They lined the floor of the canary cage with a second sheet of the newspaper, threw a cloth over the cage and they went to bed. They had heard that neighbourhood Nazi youths ironically nicknamed The Broken Hearts were looking for Jewish gold to pay fashionable prostitutes in the Pernickenstrasse to commit sodomy with pigs.  There was much irony in Dresden. The Jews don’t eat pigs.
The first hidden gold ring was a wedding-ring that had belonged to Hans’s grandfather, the second gold ring was an engagement-ring that had belonged to Sophie’s grandmother, the third gold ring was a wedding-ring that had been worn for forty years by Hans’s father, the fourth gold ring belonged to Hans himself and he had worn it twenty-five years, and the fifth gold ring belonged to Sophie and she had chosen it on a short holiday she and Hans  had taken together in Danzig at her aunt’s seaside villa. Five gold rings. Various widths, various heavinesses, worn on various fingers for a total of 137 years.
Corporal Kettle saw at once that a newspaper photograph of Goering lined the bottom of the Himmel canary-cage. He opened the cage and the birds flew out the broken backdoor. He took Hans and Sophie at gunpoint into the backyard.  It was raining and whilst the corporal stood in the shelter of the porch jabbing his rifle under Sophie’s lifted skirt at the bare flesh of her belly, Hans, hatless, coatless, trouserless, began to sneeze and shiver and his shifty glances at the pear-tree created suspicion. Very shortly the grainy, indistinct newspaper photograph of a young man who had been awarded the Iron Cross for bravery in Poland became damp in the steady rain and began to disintegrate, and a small and modest golden Jewish heritage lay in a Nazi swag-bag.
Hans died three weeks later at Boutenberg, choking on his vomit in a railway siding chicken-run. He was a long time dying. When the hens finally sat down on his face, it could be said that he was dead. Sophie died three months later in Treboggan in a small forest clearing, among silver birch trees that belong to the German military leader called Werner von Blomberg, who reserved the woods to shoot pheasants and partridges. Sophie was naked, the caesarean scar that indicated her hero-son’s entry into the world was plain to be seen by her torturers who jibed at her inability to give birth through the right exit. Sophia died with another disfigurement on her corpse, a hole at the back of her neck. Thus two scars united her to her son, a birth scar and a death scar.
Five gold rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle-doves and a partridge in a pear tree. The list of the Christmas song was complete. The five gold rings, with about six hundred others, went by truck to Gotenberg, then to a smelting factory at Holstein where they became part of the substance of a gold bar that was to be stamped HS 56ExH 42.  H stood for Holstein, and S stood for Smeltering-works, though H was also the initial for Hans and S was the initial for Sophie and 56 was a batch number and also their ages. Ex stood for executor but also the Latin for plural departure.  H stood for Holdtstatter, but also Himmel. 1942 was the year of the gold bar’s manufacture and also the year of the Himmels’ death.
The gold bar, with many other gold-bars, all packed in green baize bags with red tie-strings, was driven eventually to Munich. It subsequently and for various reasons, travelled to Vienna, Bern, Baden-Baden, and finally with 91 other gold bars, was discovered in a black Mercedes, license plate number TL9246, abandoned at the road-side at Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they could not cook a good spaghetti.
 

GOLD
23 – The gold pistol
A ballroom dancer had a small decorative pistol fashioned in gold for his mistress, a twenty-year old shop-girl called Petra who had blonde hair, small breasts, and an ambitious and possessive father. She worked in a haberdashery on Dortmundstrasse, Magdeburg. The shopgirl was approached by her boss on Ash Wednesday 1938, enjoyed his flatteries and soon confronted her dancer-lover with her infidelity. Whilst she used the bathroom in a run-down hotel on Falkensteinplatz, the dancer rummaged in Petra’s handbag, found the pistol, and shot her in the belly. Attempting to shoot himself with the gold pistol, after hurriedly reloading it with a wrong calibre bullet, it  exploded and the  barrel lodged in his  throat. In great pain, he threw himself down the hotel stair-well, the fractured gold pistol-grip, the trigger-guard and trigger clattering down the stairs in three separate pieces with him to land on the cellar steps where they were found by Claus, the caretaker’s son.
Claus played with these gold items for a while after the police had come and gone, and after Petra’s father had smashed up the toilet, assaulted the hotel-keeper and bled four pints of blood into the hotel welcome mat after being struck by the police-chief for causing a commotion in a quiet neighbourhood.  Claus painted his three gold finds  green with a can of enamel he found in the dustbin belonging to Frau Decker in Room Sixteen, and then abandoned them because the enamel would not dry. The sticky green-painted gold pistol pieces  were later swept up by the caretaker, and handed over to Herr Mussil, who had a stall for scrap metal at 17A Heiderstrasse. Frederick Mussil recognised them for what they were, cleaned them up with spirits of turpentine and included them in a collection of gold trinkets stolen from the pillaged house of his neighbour, a kosher butcher, and deposited them with a fence who sold them on the black market to a bank clerk of the Darmstadt bank who laundered them with his bank manager and together they had them smelted when the manager went on his weekly trip to Leipzig. The golden pistol fragments helped to constitute Gold Bar Lei98, which, sometime in 1940, travelled to Baden-Baden, where it lay untouched in a vault that used to be a convent cellar until Harpsch’s sergeant and corporal  picked it up with 99 other gold bars in May 1945, and they all began their journey to Bolzano where spaghetti could be described as a foreign delicacy.
 

GOLD
24 – Photographic Evidence
At a Nazi party in Danzig, three prostitutes, one underage, were encouraged with bribes and threats, to wear on their naked bodies the jewellery stolen from the city’s Jewish community. The jewellery was to be auctioned to  raise money to buy a private Rolls Royce for a retiring general, and the most generous bidder was to be rewarded with time spent in the company of the whore of his choice. The three women paraded on a stage used the night before to award posthumous medals to forty sea-cadet victims of a submarine disaster, and they walked and pirouetted and cavorted before a large photograph of the stricken submarine to the rhythm of an orchestra playing the Blue Danube too fast, and they were photographed. The photographs were to be sold to the party-goers to assist in increasing the funds available for the departing general. To make the photographs attractive enough to purchase for large sums of money, the prostitutes were encouraged to assist in their erotic content.
After the war these photographs were used to identify the missing jewelery items in a bid to attempt to return them to their owners. Identification was in several circumstances very possible. The jewellery items not auctioned at the party were collected in two champagne buckets which were hidden under a napkin beneath a table. They subsequently disappeared, and we do not know of their fate.  But nineteen of the photographically identifiable items had a different adventure.
It is said that Archibald Klemperer, the main contributing bidder at the party was too drunk to make full use of his winner’s prize, and that she had beaten him over the head with a silver candlestick,
possibly with the  help of a confederate who had been a waiter at the party, and the auctioned gold items had been removed from Klemperer’s apartment, fenced, transported, and after seven days in the hull of a ship moored off the coast of Malmo in Sweden, taken to Baden-Baden and smelted down to make gold bar BB890/36.  This bar was wrapped in green felt and ended up in Harpsch’s Mercedes in a car-crash in Bolzano, the one Italian town where it is reputed the local citizens cannot cook good spaghetti, and cannot find it in themselves to laugh at this short-coming.
The majority of the representatives of the fourteen Jewish families who had been invited by the auction-house of Christie in Geneva to examine the photographs taken in 1941 of the three whores cavorting with Jewish treasures, were able to put a positive identification on the property of their fathers and grandfathers. Those that had arrived with great expectations and had been disappointed, were compensated by being given a copy of each of the original photographs, whose contents, a Christie representative  is reported to have said, could be seen to be  rewarding in other ways.
The Klemperer story might have been concocted to hide  the desire of the original party organisers, three SS generals, to increase the retiring general’s prize from an expensive English car to a small French aircraft with an English engine, in which they intended to place explosives  to make the general  fall out of the sky over the English Channel. In the event the retiring general apparently abandoned his prize and eventually reached Venezuela unharmed, accompanied by the underage prostitute who had posed as his daughter. Their second child became Cultural Minister for the Arts in Venezuela in 1978.
 

GOLD
25 – In threes
In Budapest in November 1944 they were throwing the Jews off the bridges in threes. Roped together with the heaviest Jew in the middle. Maybe they would shoot the one in the middle. To wound but not to kill. In the spine, perhaps to paralyse the legs. The water was icy. The current was swift. The river was deep. The time allotted to die was not calculable. Many factors were present but we can say that death was not always so quick.  One thing that was dependable was the roping together in threes.  It had an almost superstitious regularity.
There were wits among the executioners. They played with names as they played with people.
“Mesach, Shadrach and Abnego”.
“The Three Wisemen”.
“God the father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost”.
“Put the Ghost in the middle”.
“They all look like ghosts”.
“Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill”.
“The fat man should be in the middle”.
“They are all fat men”.
“Roosevelt‘s not so fat, but he’s a cripple, we could be accurate”.
“Put Roosevelt in the middle. That way the Americans will bring the   Russians down on the left and the British down on the right”. “Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford”.
“The Yankee rich kids”.
“Isn’t Chaplin a Jew?”
“With the Fuhrer’s moustache, Churchill’s bowler hat and Roosevelt’s walking stick”
They slashed Charlie Chaplin’s upper lip to give him a moustache, they hacked off Roosevelt’s leg to make him a cripple, they gave Churchill a bloody crown to make him wish he had worn his bowler hat.
Some nights Raoul Wallenberg came along to the bridge.
“Here comes the nightwatchman, nightwatching for the Jews”.
They kept the most pathetic cases for Raoul. A bottle of whisky for a blind old man. Four hundred florints for a woman, six hundred if she was pretty, a thousand if she was pregnant. A diamond for a child perhaps.
“What on earth does Raoul do with these people?”
The rescued Jews climbed into the back of Raoul Wallenberg’s Swedish diplomatic car, and the driver whisked them away.
“The Swedish Embassy bedrooms are probably crammed with Jews”.
“Jews in the toilet”.
“Jews in the bathroom”
“Jews up the chimneys”.
“Jews in the cupboards”.
“Jews under the stairs”.
“Where does Raoul get the money, the whisky and the diamonds?”
Sometimes as many as seven people got into that diplomatic car. With the driver, that meant eight. Four in the back, two in the front sitting on one another’s laps, one in the boot. Raoul had to walk back home, trudging off down the bridge with his collar turned up and his breath condensing on the cold night air.
There were film buffs among the part-time executioners.
“Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzenko”.
“The sun and the moon and the stars”.
“Tinker, tailor, soldier”.
“The three whores from Kracow”.
“Antony, Crassus and Pompey”.
The river was full of allegorical figures, Russian film directors, Roman celebrities, Hollywood film-stars.  All floating downstream practising various forms of dying, but mostly just drowning.
The executioners began asking Raoul for gold.
“No more whisky, florins and diamonds. You can get drunk on anything, money just flies away, and who the hell wants diamonds?”  “How can you get rid of diamonds?”
“Wine, women and song”,
“Schnapps, little boys and a wind-up gramophone”.
“Heaven, Hell and Paradise”.
Raoul began to bring gold. Crucifixes, little gold crucifixes.
“Where the hell does he get them from?”
What was this transfer commodity? Jews for crucifixes? Is it a joke?
“The pope would crap in his knickers”.
“I’ll take crucifixes. I need post-war insurance. So I can go to Yalta and see where the big three sat on their fat arses carving up Europe in the name of Jewry”.
“The three virgins”.
“The Three Priests of Popacatapetal”.
”Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh”.
“Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar ”.
Sandor Novotny, expert at throwing Jews into the Danube in threes and giving them symbolic names, stashed the gold crucifixes he had bargained from Raoul Wallenberg behind a loose brick in the Padorovski Cemetery underneath a memorial to Bela Kiraly, an obscure Hungarian poet who had died of tuberculosis in 1848, the European Year of Revolutions, all of them suppressed. Sandor had three women in his life; his mother-in-law, his wife and his married daughter. The first woman and the last woman had been widowed by the combined forces of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. The woman in the middle was symbolically widowed, because Sandor had joined the Arrow Cross Hungarian Nazi party essentially to get out of the house, and Sandor Novotny and Nadia Novotny had not slept together for five years, four months and two weeks. Sandor kept careful count. But he did have sex near his stash of gold under the loose brick on top of a gravestone to Jozsef Oczel, an obscure Hungarian composer who died in 1871, the year the Germans occupied France and took over Alsace and Lorraine.  Sandor had illegal sex with married Jewish women, then he roped them to strangers on the bridge and threw them over. He probably arranged these things both to spite his wife and also to do himself some kind of macho honour. He hoped eventually to rope three of the women he had dishonoured and cast them all together into the waters. He has some idea it would be a biblical gesture, like the Old Testament casting of stones at prostitutes, afterall they were both Jewesses and adulterers.
Raoul Wallenberg, had, over the months since Christmas, bought a number of Sandor’s Jewish women, though after being with Sandor, at least three of them did not want to be bought, and preferred the river. They seemed to actually want to welcome the freezing embrace of the Danube.
Sandor was followed one night to the Padorovski Cemetery by his wife’s brother who watched his wild adultery, all flailing legs and wild grunts, and saw where he kept his crucifixes. Sandor’s wife’s brother hit Sandor over the head with the loose brick out of the wall. He took the Raoul gold, and shoved his brother-in-law’s body into an open stone tomb-memorial to Elemer Paschek, an obscure Hungarian painter who specialised in painting dead nudes in the years immediately before the First World War when Europe became restless again for violence.
So there you have it. Three obscure Hungarian cultural heroes, Bela Kiraly, Jozsef Oczel, and Elemer Paschek, three witnesses to Sandor Novotny’s money, sex and death.
Sandor’s wife’s brother tried to sell the crucifixes to a Gestapo lieutenant from Salzsburg, and he was shot for black-marketeering, but Raoul’s gold was impounded, placed in a safe deposit box and found its way back to Munich in a diplomatic bag. In January 1945, it was melted down into a single gold biscuit-bar weighing 70 grams, and soon found its way to Baden-Baden where Gustav Harpsch, the Weichmar lieutenant who had an obsession to find his infant daughter, became its temporary owner, exchanging it for a motor-vehicle death outside Bolzano on the 5th May 1945.  Bolzano is almost in Austria, and the main street looks a little like the main street of an Austrian town like Salzburg; it has a swiftly flowing stream running with icy water from out of the mountains; it has riverside terraces, wine-bars and riverside cafes. The restaurants in Bolzano are all a little sheepishly set back from the main view of tourists and visitors, in the back streets by the cathedral. It is said that this is because there is an inability to cook good spaghetti in the city which, in itself is a sort of established trade mark of being a good Italian patriot. Patriotism and spaghetti go together. Was it true that bad spaghetti-cooks were bad patriots?
 

GOLD
26 – The Canadian envelopes
Henri-Claus Tannenbaum sent wedding-rings, engagement rings and christening rings to Canada in brown envelopes addressed to his uncle, a stamp collector in Quebec. There was a single ring in each envelope, padded around with German franked stamps collected from his fiancee's office in Osnabruck that organised a correspondence course in business studies for young female stenographers. The Third Reich urgently needed young female stenographers. The paper work of the aspirant Third Reich was mountainous and rising.
 
 
 
 

Henri-Claus ’s fiancee practised her typing in her love letters.

 Gottenburgstrasse, 137
 1st November 1936
 Dear Henri-Claus,
I miss you. I have six long hours before I touch you again in all those places I know you like to be touched. Do you miss me as much  as I miss you? Mother wants to know if I am stopping your composing with my chatter? I will see you tonight on the green bench and I eagerly wait for eleven o’clock when the lights go out and we can be together again in the dark, wrapped up warm, but not so wrapped up that I cannot find your bright alert candle to light up our love,
 I love you,
 Mathilde.

In April 1937, at Wilhelmhaven, en route by air to Quebec, three of Henri-Claus’s envelopes were intercepted and opened in a random check associated with a search to discover documents of a plot to kill the Fuhrer. The carefully wrapped valuables were discovered, the sender’s name and address were noted, the Osnabruck Gestapo were informed by telephone, and Henri-Claus Tannenbaum was put under scrutiny. Henceforth, because of the nature of the check, his name, totally without foundation, was associated with attempted assassination. It was to become an irreducible mark.

 Gottenburgstrasse, 137
 10th January 1937.
 My dearest Henri,
Although you are only five kilometres away from me as I sit in my bedroom, I feel you are in the Sahara desert or New York or the North Pole. Or indeed in Canada where I know you are so eager to take me.
I trust you never to deceive me in anything that you say or do. I am no stickler for etiquette or manners or even vulgarity, in fact I enjoy it when you speak to me vulgarly, it makes me excited in ways I know that you could enjoy, but I could not stand any sort of lying,
 Yours without a lie, your lover for always,
 Mathilde

On the night of 14th June 1937, Henri-Claus Tannenbaum’s body, with its throat cut, was laid lengthwise as though taking a nap, on the green bench under the yellow street-light across the road from 137 Gottenburgstrasse, where Henri-Claus’s fiancee, Mathilde, lived with her mother and two aunts.

 Gottenburgstrasse, 137
 21st February 1937
 My Henri,
Mother wants to hear you play the piano again. She is determined to make you famous if only to show off to my aunt Ulrike who is always applauding her nephew. I think she also enjoys an opportunity to dress up for a concert in her furs, and to put on her rings and necklaces though they cannot really be so valuable. Do you think I look like my mother at all? And do they have green benches in Quebec?
 Yours, looking especially good lying on a green bench in the dark,
 Mathilde.

Henri-Claus and Mathilde had kissed and fornicated for eighteen months on that green bench after the street-light had gone out at eleven o’clock punctually each evening, his hand under her dress, his fingers in her damp pubic hair, her hand around his penis in the dark.  They had met there every weekday evening at ten o’clock, and they had held themselves in waiting for one hour, talking about what they would do to one another when the street lamp went out and they had darkness.

 Gottenburgstrasse, 137
 5th March 1937
 My dear little Henri,
One day we shall be discovered by my aunt who I am sure spies on us from her bedroom window. Did Mozart ever go to Canada? I doubt he even knew where it was. When I am pregnant  - which will never be the way you treat me - I want to be in Germany, not in some non-German speaking place where it is thirty degrees below freezing on Christmas Eve.
 Waiting your expert touch,
 Your little moist Mathilde.

Mathilde now stares and stares at the dead body of her lover from her bedroom window across the street. Henri-Claus Tannenbaum was a composer, 29 years old, with a two-movement symphony, two violin concertos, a piano cycle and a one-act opera about Goethe’s love for Charlotte Buff, to his credit. All had been performed. He was on his way.  So was it not incredibly stupid of him to steal his future mother-in-law’s jewellery, piece by piece, item by item, ring by ring, and send them off to Quebec as an insurance policy for the day that would surely come and they would have to emigrate?
 

 Gottenburgstrasse, 137
 30 March 1937
 My dear Henri VIII,
 I will be your eight wives or was it six? Did anyone write music for Henry VIII?
 I have a lyric for you. “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived”.
 I could play all six parts.
In Canada we will certainly make babies. They will have Indian-looking faces and rub noses when they kiss. They will be covered in lard to keep themselves warm. We could practice it. You will not find me missing tonight on the bench in the darkness,
 Yours, yours, yours,
 The Dancing Mathilda (or is that Australian?).
 
Henri-Claus would become a French-Canadian composer. Mathilde would become a French-Canadian housewife. They would have French-Canadian babies far from the anti-Semitic clutches of the Third Reich. Mathilde was a bold girl, inventive in her excitements, especially if they were of a sexual nature. She was certainly bolder than Henri-Claus. But Mathilde could not forgive Henri-Claus for stealing her mother’s jewellery and lying to her and betraying her trust. She had swiftly told the Gestapo Police where they might find Henri-Claus, and at what time, waiting for her at ten o’clock on the  bench under the street-lamp opposite 137 Gottenburgstrasse. And the police did what they thought was their necessary duty.  After all he was associated with a plot to assassinate the Fuhrer, and he was dangerous.

 Gottenburgstrasse, 137
 9th April 1937
 Henri,
Today I learnt to type for the first time in English. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” - there, all the letters in the English alphabet at least once.  I am the fox, you are the lazy dog. When Germany rules the world we will all need English because Americans speak English and the Americans are really the coming thing. Look at Mr Fritz Lang, and  Mr von Sternberg, though the von is phoney,  and think of the German-American millionaires, Mr Roosevelt, Mr Lindbergh, Mr Kalmann, Teddy Spearhoffer. I heard today that my favourite American writer, Fritzgerald was born in Hamburg - well it is not so surprising with a name like Fritz,
 Hoping we will fritz tonight,
 Your lady-in-waiting unless you don’t want me to be a lady,
 Mathilde.

Mathilde watched Henri-Claus’s corpse until eleven o’clock and the street lamp went out and hid his murdered body. She sat at the window all night. It was her wake, her staying up with the corpse as a sign of respect. When it was light, the body had gone. She had not seen it taken away. She must have dozed, her forehead against the cold windowpane.

 Gottenburgstrasse, 137
 21st April 1937
 Dearest Henri,
What were you doing in my mother’s bedroom? To tell me that you wanted to look at our green bench from my mother’s point-of-view is not that convincing.
Tonight I have a surprise for you. I will be wearing a new perfume and you will have to come very close indeed with your nose to smell it. I will give you a clue how close you will have to come. What did Goethe say about Frankfurt? If you answer correctly, I will be your Frankfurt.
 Yours with very sticky fingers. No! I have only been baking jam tarts.
 Yours,
 Mathilde

Three nights later she was sitting at ten o’clock in the evening on the bench weeping, when the police came for her. When the street-light went out at eleven o’clock, they collected her mother and her two aunts and took all four of them to the railway station, and they disappeared for ever into the damp foggy air over Poland.
 
 Gottenburgstrasse, 137
 26 May 37
 Dear Henry,
Shall I spell your name in the English way with a letter Y? My English is fast improving. But I should use French. If I were to write to you now in French -  I can tell you things which few in Germany will be able to read.
When I live in French-Canada with you, in a house with ice on the roof, and tennis-rackets on my feet, and a white horse in the back paddock, do not worry, I will never ever pine for Germany. We can have all our furniture made of wood and painted greenand we can place a yellow light above the radio to remind us of 137 Gottenburgstrasse.
 Yours with more love than you can dream of,
 Matty.

Thirteen rings had arrived safely in Quebec and placed in a bank safe deposit box until the time should arrive for their collection by Henri-Claus and his fiancee. Three rings had been impounded at Wilhelmhaven and sent to Osnabruck. Three more rings were found in the lining of Henri-Claus’s coat pocket when they stripped him at the morgue. The six gold rings were sent through the mails to meet each other. They were examined for clues though none were discovered, and they were thrown into a drawer of Jewish trinkets at the police station in Zevenplatz, Osnabruck. Later the contents of the drawer were examined by a goldsmith referred to on the receipt papers as Wasseral which is Frisian for a small water-bird with a piping cry.
 
 Gottenburgstrasse, 137
 12 June 37
 Dear Henri,
I am tired of all this waiting to go to Canada. Our neighbours took a train to Lisbon yesterday and they hope to catch a boat to New Hampshire. It cost them their house. But they were pleased to go.
I have an ultimatum. Make me pregnant with your little Henri-Claus, Mr Christmas-tree, and I will get mother to make you a fur-hat, a pair of brown socks and make you a joint heir with me. She would be so pleased. I know she will help us with everything, including a new piano, and then in six months we can send for her and she will come like a shot, especially if she knew there was another Christmas-tree growing in my German forest,
 Yours for ever and ever and ever,
 Mathilde,

The trinkets were smelted down to constitute a “Dutch-hat” gold bar that was stamped with a trident and the letters FDG98. The gold bar stayed in Osnabruck until moved to Baden-Baden in March 1944 where it was signed for by Sergeant Hans Dopplemann and Corporal Reynard Guelferle on the 4th May 1945 and it began its journey to Bolzano where spaghetti is not considered a local dish, but a foreign import best cooked by non-residents in the hidden privacy of their hotel-rooms.
 

GOLD
27 – Callisto Magdalene
A small statue of dubious taste was owned by the Glasmin-Contaxi brothers of Parma. They were dealers in Parmesan cheese, and they owned the Parma Stendhal Hotel and part-owned the Palma Verdi Hotel, thus capitalising on Parma’s most celebrated product and on her two most celebrated cultural visitors.
The statue of dubious taste supposedly represented Callisto, the pregnant nymph metamorphosed by Diana into a bear and transported into the night sky to help lost sailors. The statue depicted the humiliated Callisto in the act of being discovered eight months pregnant, her large belly pushed forward, her legs bent, her knees parted, her arms over her breasts, and her hands over her face.  Diana, the professionally chaste leader of a band of virgin nymphs, had considered Callisto’s behaviour treacherous, even though Callisto had been seduced by a dirty trick. She had loyally rejected all Jupiter’s advances until he had turned himself into the likeness of Diana herself. The myth intimated Diana’s own advances and implied her shame at her lesbian seduction of Callisto. Why else the disproportionately savage punishment?
For forgiveness of sins of a financial nature associated with the cinema, the Glasmin-Contaxi Brothers, alongside other favours, permanently loaned their statue to the Archbishop of Munster, their cousin. The archbishop suggested to his devoted parishioners  that the bronze statue was a representation of Mary Magdalene discovered, so to speak,  in flagrante delicto; the apparent swelling of the belly being an idiosyncrasy of fashionable taste in feminine beauty of the 1440s. You could see such a feature, for example, in Van Eyck’s marriage portrait of Jan Arnolfini and his wife, Flemish heretics certainly, but a couple who believed in celebrating their marriage vows nonetheless.
The Archbishop of Munster was wrong on at least four counts. The statue, as we have seen, was certainly of Callisto and not of Mary Magdalene, it was cast in the 1540s not the 1440s, Jan Arnolfini was not a heretic but a good catholic, and the item was not of bronze but of gold. It had been patinered with ammonia, vinegar and salt, no doubt to avoid those who might want to by-pass its eroticism in favour of smelting it down for cash.  It was probably made by a member of the atelier of Cellini when Mannerist tastes tended to make seductive females full in the belly, thus placing Callisto legitimately on the cultural iconographic agenda and making her a fashionable subject matter in 16th century Europe.
The archbishop’s more sardonic visitors entertained no doubts as to the salacious intent of the statue, and one of them, a medical man,  stole it for lecherous reasons, and, investigating its potency, scratched its thigh with a scalpel and discovered gold. Sex and gold can be an irresistible combination.  He treated the statue with a medical  solution of sal ammoniac, and he polished her until she shone and he set her in a glass-case in his bedroom above his surgery.
A devout Catholic lady of means who was a regular visitor to the archbishop’s house was suffering from ovarian cancer. She found little solace in religious comforts and careless of her reputation in the face of pain and death, she sought drugs and the doctor’s bed to die on. She naturally saw the statue in its new home, and was surprised to recognise the archbishop’s Mary Magdalene now dressed in shining gold. The little hussy. It was a little miracle.
Unknowingly mirroring the Glasmin-Contaxi transaction, the doctor said the statue was a gift from the generous archbishop for medical attentions to repair the ravages of sins of an intimate nature concerning atrophied reproductive organs. The devout Catholic lady reasoned to herself that an archbishop obliged to celibacy had no business worrying about his reproductive capacities. Under the doctor’s treatment, the  lady was comparatively without pain for several weeks. She recovered her religious equilibrium and her conscience, and she reported the two professional men, priest and doctor, to their respective authorities. The bishop was defrocked and the doctor debarred, though the Callisto Magdalene affair was but a straw that broke the camel’s back for both men had been chicanerous in several other ways.
“Strictly we should not be talking camels”, the local newspaper suggested, “but dromedaries, for a dromedary has two humps not one, making two mounds of sin on the body bourgeois.”
However the local paper, like the local bishop had its facts wrong, for the dromedary has a single hump; it is the Bactrian camel that has two. One of the last acts of the devout Catholic woman was to put this right. She wrote a letter to the newspaper editor, making suggestions that Germany with its present moral collapse would soon be as wasted and forgotten as Bactria, a lost desert kingdom somewhere in the Hindu Kush.
“Who on earth knows where Bactria is now?”, she said.
But camels and a dromedaries are  resourceful animals. The bishop and the doctor survived and indeed thrived. The woman died in agony. The Callisto Magdalene was impounded by officials who apparently had little sexual curiosity and even less knowledge of art history.  They soon had the item melted down to help swell the Nazi Party coffers.
Lieutenant Harpsch of course knew none of this though he was a man of significant sexual desires and some taste. He unwittedly carried this ghost of Callisto and Magdalene half way across Europe in his black suitcase. She burst out in spirit from the gold bars on the back seat of his borrowed car which crashed in Bolzano where there is a considerable amount of art featuring fallen women of both secular and religious cultures, but where it is rumoured that no amount of gold can buy a good spaghetti carbonara.
 

GOLD
28 – The ring cycle
Told to undress outside the gas-chamber at Sobibor, a bold woman swallowed her wedding-ring. Her neighbours in the crush of naked bodies before the door followed suite. An old woman who possessed a splendid engagement ring of complicated construction choked to death. In a rage, the warders who regarded themselves as legitimate scavengers of the gassed corpses, slit the bodies open when the gas chamber doors were re-opened, but could only find sixteen out of the estimated twenty-seven wedding-rings. It was an anatomical mystery that became part of the Sobibor mythology.
Anticipating a repeat performance at the next human consignment the warders chopped off all hands to be certain of easy access to personal jewellery.
The valuables left the camp every Wednesday in a trunk marked “Candles” to be stored in an underground coal-mining shaft at Gidzor that was also the storage centre for the non-Dutch painting collection of The Amsterdam Reichsmuseum. Gauleiter Fritz Haberlein weekly checked his cultural stock in the shafts and corridors of the mine, and finding it comparatively easy to shift the personal items stolen from the Sibibor camp dead, had them moved to Weimar and then Baden-Baden, where dis-associated from all anecdote and origin, they were eventually smelted down into bars of different metals and the gold was stored ready for the lovesick father Gustav Harpsch to take to Bolzano in the Dolomite Mountains where spaghetti might as well have been an exotic dish unique to New Guinea.
 

GOLD
29 – Midas
There was a Jewish family in Castricum on the coast of Holland who panicked at the advance of Nazi thugs down their street. The family threw their precious possessions into a laundry basket and hid it under the stairs. They assembled their trinkets and jewelry and gold rings in a leather shopping bag, and their ten-year old daughter Jaqueline placed its handles in the jaws of their German shepherd dog King Midas, and set him in the paved back-yard under the blossoming laburnam tree and told him to guard the bag with his life and not to bark. They would be back. And they would find him a bone and a plate of chopped liver. “Now darling Midas be a good dog and guard this for us. We will be back. We’ll find you a bone and a plate of chopped liver from Stacey’s. Be a good dog, King Midas. We love you and we know you love us”.
Jacqueline patted the dog on the head and, as instructed, it did not bark when the family were taken away. The dog stayed where it had been told to stay. It lay down on the golden flagstones and the blossom of the laburnam fell down around King Midas. Its eyes were fixed on the back door waiting for a bone from Stacey’s, and waiting for Jacqueline to pat it again on the head. It gradually grew weak from hunger. After seven days it died. Its rotting corpse and the bag of gold trinkets still fixed in its jaw were discovered two weeks later by a neighbour intent on tracking down the smell of decay. He took the jewels to a dentist and received 400 marks. The dentist gave the jewels to his wife who took them to Amsterdam, and was shot for misunderstanding the rules of a road-block posted in German. Her car was searched and the jewels, with a packet of contraband tobacco and two bottles of whisky and a slab of  Belgian chocolate, were placed in a security-box at in the Princesgracht Post-Office. Some time later the security box was sent to Munster and its contents sorted and the jewels weighed and broken down, and the gold, wrapped in green tissue-paper, was taken to Grostner and along with other stolen gold, smelted. The resulting gold bar with nine others travelled to Threnkel in August 1944, where it was separated out by a customs official hoping to pay for his daughter’s wedding to a wounded air-force pilot.  The pilot found out about the theft, had his new father-in-law arrested, and the bar finally arrived in Baden-Baden wrapped in parachute-silk. With 91 other gold bars, it was eventually discovered in a black Mercedes, license plate number TL9246 abandoned at the road-side at Bolsano, the one place in Italy where they could not cook good spaghetti.
There were dogs in Treblinka, and they too were very obedient. When Jacqueline got off the train she patted a German Shepherd Dog on the head. She was weak. She had been on a crowded train for seven days, travelling third class, with nothing to eat. The dog was just like King Midas. Maybe a little bigger. It seized Jacqueline by the throat and shook her to death.
 

GOLD
30 – Gloved in the bath
Avril Soundermann Poulder had been a singer. She had married a plumber and then a hairdresser and had benefited from the industry, the energy and the money of both of them. But a month or so after her marriage to each man, she had to remind both of them that she had been a singer.
“I am a singer - listen”.
And she would demonstrate.
The plumber had first seen Avril in a cabaret act when she was dressed as a naked cat; and the hairdresser had first listened to Avril’s bathroom voice through a shared wall. She continued to sing for both her husbands and at times and on occasions when they had wished she would not. The plumber fell down a sewer in a thunderstorm and was drowned in human effluent; the hairdresser had been electrocuted, not at his place of business among his hot water basins and his electric hair-dryers, but in a novelty tram drawn by white horses that had run off its rails and into an electricity pylon.
Avril had sung at each man’s funeral. She sang a song from Shakespeare’s Tempest for the plumber.
“Full fathom five thy father lies”.
She thought it had good and appropriate watery and weighty connections for a drowned man whose working material had been primarily lead. And she had sung a popular Budapest cafe song in Hungarian for her electrocuted hairdresser. It contained many references to heated emotions. “My heart is on fire for you”, was the basic refrain.
Then having satisfactorily sung with a mixture of references to those two volatile elements, water and fire, in honour of the dead, she retired from professional singing and she spent her inherited fortune on jewellery, mainly rings.
She wore her jewellery hidden on her person. She concealed her necklaces under high collars. She hid her brooches under thick woollen shawls. When she walked to the butcher’s-shop you would look at her and you would not think she was a walking jewellery store. She kept her rings hidden under her gloves. She bathed in her gloves. She eventually did not even dare to show her rings to herself. She washed herself in the dark, huskily whisper-singing the songs she had sung at both her husband’s funerals. She sometimes saw, out of the corner of her eye in the gloom of the bathroom mirror, a glint of her jewellery through the damp black silk of her gloves. The sight of so much thievable jewellery terrified her.
Not having anyone any longer to sing to, she began to lose some of her personal sparkle and self-esteem. She haunted the jewellers’ shops, knowing that to be buying more valuable trinkets, she would be able, at least for a time, to put aside her unhappiness.  She grew increasingly weary of expecting to be attacked and assaulted. She became more and more exhausted by the long, dark, lonely days in a dark house, thinking she was perpetually being watched by every man in a belted overcoat who walked down her street. She continued to spend a great deal of her time in her bath. She put three bolts and four locks on the bathroom door. She was perhaps like Marat, though she could not claim to have a skin disease, and she possessed few political opinions, and not one of them was revolutionary.
Then she died. It could be said by a truthful coroner that mentally she had died of the effects of perpetual fright. Her hair had turned white. The undertaker was amazed at the carapace of rings he discovered on Avril’s fingers under the shabby black silk gloves she had been wearing as she lay in her last bath by the light of candles and the heat of a one-bar electric fire. The actual moment of death had happened when the fire had fallen into the bath-water. Avril had physically perished as a result of two of the most volatile elements, water and fire, colliding under the influence of the conducting metal she had hidden on her person. The rings covered every centimetre of her fingers and thumbs, and had turned both her hands into five-pronged aerials of death.
The coroner collected up the rings and exchanged them for a crimson Maserati racing-car owned by a Krupp nephew who used them in a fancy-dress party he gave for his Chinese girl-friend in Berlin. After the party the Krupp nephew gave the rings away as going-home presents. One astute and quick fingered young woman left for Potsdam with nearly a hundred rings stuffed into the lining of her muff. Drunk, tired and eager for sleep, she put the ring-heavy garment on the bottom tread of the stairs in her grandfather’s front-hall. Her grandmother discovered the rings and took them to a bank who itemised them carefully and sent them on to an accredited gold bar manufacturer in Dresden.
Seventy of the rings which at one time had graced the fingers of Avril Soundermann Poulder the singer, ended up in an 80 gram gold bar that Lietanent Gustav Harpsch took with him to Bolzano, a city in Northern Italy where spaghetti could have been a card trick, an obscure foreign novel, a cone-bearing pinetree, a breed of cat, a deceased bankrupt currency, anything in fact except for a internationally celebrated Italian pasta dish.

GOLD
31 – The dollshouse booty
A child collector of glass beads in Ummanz on the Baltic coast was used as a front to dispose of a cache of gold trinkets. For twelve days the criminals persuaded her to keep their booty in her doll’s house. The criminals were systematically working their way through an old people’s tenement built along the ancient harbour wall, running fake errands in order to enter kitchens and bathrooms and bedrooms to rifle the drawers and cupboards of elderly Jewish ladies and elderly Jewish widowers. At one time, the child collector of glass beads had several hundred thousand marks worth of gold rings and gold earrings in her miniature kitchen, under her miniature beds, in her miniature toilet and buried in her miniature garden. The little girl’s name was Circe, which is the name of a Greek heroine who turned men into pigs. Circe played with the old men’s watch-chains and the old widows’ sentimental possessions, sticking the rings loosely on her small fingers and tying them together in strings to make necklaces for the necks of her dolls.
The day came to dispose of the valuables, and the criminals, seven small boys aged between eight and ten, walked boldly beside Circe as she pushed her doll’s house on a wheelbarrow to the local fish market. They knew that if they were stopped and searched they could say that the gold was Jewish, and was needed for the war effort. Nobody would call the police. Many sons of fishermen were going to die for Germany. They could say that the mothers of German soldiers needed money to buy thick English socks and French rubber contraceptives to help their sons survive cold Finnish winters and diseased Russian whores.
A cockle-seller gave the troupe a box of haddock and a bag of potatoes and a sack full of empty muscle shells in exchange for the Jewish hoard. The children were pleased. They knew how to profitably sell off the haddock, fish by fish. They bought Circe a sherbet dip and a liquorice straw so she could suck up the bitter powder and make herself sneeze, and they bought her a red bow for her hair, and a small wooden toilet for her doll’s house lavatory. They bought themselves a pistol. And a bicycle.
The gold items fetched four thousand marks at a gold coin sale in Bremen. They travelled to Hamburg and Hanover and then Cologne, gathering a little and then losing a little at every paltry transaction. They ended up in Baden-Baden hopelessly undifferentiated from innumerable other small collections of trinkets. Six months before the end of the war, they were smelted down and reconstituted as six gold bars, which were sorted out equally between three vaults. One gold bar that certainly had some of the Ummanz dollshouse booty within its substance, was collected by Gustav Harpsch’s corporal and sergeant, and packed with the other 91 gold bars into two black suit-cases. Then Harpsch took them to their car-crash in Bolzano where the spaghetti is uneatable.
The children from Ummanz lived on to have adventurous lives. Three of the seven boys became soldiers and died in pain in various parts of Europe. A fourth boy went to Greece as a gun-runner and became rich, eventually dying a martyr’s death in a revolutionary incident at the time of The Greek Colonels. The fifth boy started to read, learnt how to lie with words, and became a politician. He died in Munster, after having eaten a plate of stale mussels, with a mayor’s heavy chain of office around his neck which he refused to take off even though the pain in his belly was doubling him up. His vomit stained the mayoral gold links, and the official emblem of office ever after stank of his stomach acids, though local wits said it was the smell of his corruption that irredeemably corroded the city treasure. The sixth boy became a pimp and was stabbed to death by an offended husband, and the seventh married a fisherman’s daughter, bought a boat and lived off the sea for thirty years. Circe grew up to be very beautiful and exceedingly attractive, and indeed seemed to be involved in a great many situations where men behaved like pigs. When she died in Tampa, Florida in 1981, she possessed gold jewellery to the value of several hundreds of thousands of boxes of haddock at 1940 prices.
 

GOLD
32 – The cigar-box
Erich Fromm was a Jew. He had pale skin, dark hair, a thin ridged nose, red thick lips, sharp eyes, narrow chest, pale nipples, a circumcised penis, narrow insteps, long toes, a fierce intelligence and a quick wit that was vigourously employed to make a coat of impenetrable and humourously decorated armour to protect him from the world’s arrows of outrageous fortune. All we have of him now are two charred dental bridges and part of a scorched jawbone. They sit very quietly in a cigar-box. Those of you with some interest in macabre facts may just possibly recognise something here.
There are a great many stories from American, Russian, Hungarian, German, British and Italian sources, some inside and some outside authority, some blatantly sensational, some prurient, and some, we must admit, the result of serious investigations conducted to search for real historical truth. Many of these stories talk of a scrotum with one testicle, a twitching hand, a South American passport, a singed moustache, a built-up shoe and even a black heart. But by now after over fifty years of filtering and researching and cleaning away the myths and lies and vested interests, the final believable other account of two dental bridges and part of a jawbone in a cigar-box is an account of the last remains of Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was a gentile, or so he said. We could give you a description of his physical self, like we did with the Jew Erich Fromm, but Adolf Hitler is a celebrity and Erich Fromm is not, so we think you know what Adold Hitler looked like. It is curious, considering their mutual animosity, that Erich Fromm and Adolf Hitler should end up the same way. Though we must admit, we are cheating a little, because there is an importance difference. Whereas both dental bridges in the cigar-box in the story of Erich Fromm belonged indeed to Erich Fromm, one of the dental bridges in the cigar-box in the second story belonged to Hitler’s wife.  Erich Fromm used to have a wife but she had disappeared on Chrystal Night.
Erich Fromm was gassed and burnt at Triblinka. Adolf Hitler was shot and burnt in Berlin. Both their deaths, you could say, were self-inflicted. Erich Fromm had beaten the Triblinka Camp Commandant at chess, and in doing so he had declared that the Jews had invented the game of chess whilst on holiday in Egypt in 910 BC. Everything fitted. The king on the chess-board was an almost impotent pharoah in a matriarchal monarchy. He was so governed by etiquette he could only make a simple, single step at a time to keep intact his rigid dignity and imperial bearing, whilst his sister-wife had almost unlimited powers of movement. The castles were pyramids with a square base that meant they could only move forwards or sideways to keep their alignment to the sun, and the soft desert sand governed the movement of the knights’ horses, making them hesitate with a sideways movement before they could go forward in the ultimate desired direction. And the pawns, which on most chess-boards look like savagely circumcised pricks, were the Jewish slaves easily disposed of, but capable one day, after the Germans, just like the Egyptians, had been defeated, of putting back their foreskin crowns and becoming kings again.
For his ingenuity and great temerity, Fromm was put under a cold shower and attacked by dogs. Then he was scratched about the head with barbed-wire, shot in the hands, then in the feet and then just under the second rib on the right hand side. He was under some pressure to declare the Camp Commandant had won his chess game, that chess had been invented in Prussia as an elitist war-game to be played by gentlemen-officers, and was certainly not invented by Jews in Egypt where the English General Montgomery was at that very moment defeating the German General Rommel, and that the Third Reich would be everlasting, and certainly last longer than Judiasm or Christianity. Erich Fromm could not find it in him to agree to much of this, and he eventually died joking about the smell of National Socialist hospitality, enquiring about room service and asking for the central heating to be turned up a little because he had a cold coming on.
Hitler had been under some pressure too. The times were so hopelessly malevolent. The Russians were making their way street by street to his town apartment whilst he would much rather have been in his country retreat on the Obersalzburg. The ceilings were likely to fall in from almost continuous bombing, the garden was a mess, he was on a last minute honeymoon which wasn’t going too well, and his friends were either deserting him or killing their children in the room next door with Prussic Acid.
Erich Fromm’s uncle was a capo, a trusty. He shovelled the ash. He used to be a dentist, and he had cared for the teeth of all his family. He recognised his workmanship from his nephew’s mouth, and since the jawbone was attached, he picked up the full set from under his broom and hid them in a cigar-box, which had been confiscated by a camp guard from the otherwise empty suitcase of a Dutch Jewish citizen who had hoped to smoke a last ritual cigar. This Dutch optimist made fearlessly confident because the times were so hopelessly rebarbative, had fancied dying with a Havanna cigar in his mouth. And he had almost managed it, standing naked beside the death-pit, wreathed in sweet smelling smoke, stroking his pot belly and looking at the moon. The first shot had blown the cigar out of his mouth, and the second shot had blown the brains from his skull.
Erich Fromm used to own a suitcase. It too had been almost empty, save for an ebony and ivory chessboard with 32 gold chess-pieces. Erich was a good player.  On the sudden and mysterious disappearance of his wife, he had sold everything he and she had ever possessed in Berlin, and bought a very expensive chess-set. It had not been as expensive as it should have been, but the times were so hopelessly incorrigible. It was good to invest all your savings in your second love, now that your first love had gone missing.  However the chessboard and it 32 gold pieces never even made it passed the collecting-point at Friederichstrasse. The gold king and the gold queen decorated a field marshal’s  mantelpiece for several weeks, then the complete set with a missing knight, was sold to an opera-singer who was singing Herman Baristichoff in The Queen of Spades at the Deutche Statsoper. With a missing black queen and separated from their board, the pieces were then temporarily lodged in a bombed church that served as a temporary SS Headquarters. Missing two bishops, the now 28 piece gold chess-set disappeared into a railway signal box outside Munich, saw the inside of a cauldron at Gestling, and united in molten form with a set of candlesticks and a gold tap marked H for Hot, arrived as a gold bar in Baden Baden about the same time the Americans  landed at Messina. Ultimately this gold bar, gold bar 27 in Sergeant William Bell’s inventory for the  Washington Bank temporarily set up above a Medici palazzo in Verona, ended up on the back seat of Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch’s stolen and crashed Mercedes. Perhaps we should not be too surprised to know that the dimensions of this gold bar are the same as the dimensions of the cigar-box that rests in the surgery desk drawer of Erich Fromm’s cousin in Monterrey. Erich’s cousin, like his father, became a dentist, and we can easily think up reasons why Erich’s cousin kept this macabre relic, like sentiment for a relative, a memento mori for his grandchildren, a proud exhibit of their great grandfather’s excellant workmanship, a last piece of defiant evidence of Erich’s famous talking mouth, a grisly memorial of never to be repeated infamy, and perhaps, since Erich’s Monterrey cousin was something of an amateur geneticist, the remains were a repository of DNA material that future researchers might find useful to connect Adolf Hitler to Erich Fromm and prove they both had the same great great grandmother. Adolf was always fearful that his mother’s family were Jewish. Just think if we had kept the skeletal evidence available throughout history, with the new methods of genetic analysis, we could have solved so many  of history’s little mysteries. Anastasia candidates could be proven to have been Romanoff, child corpses found in the Tower of London could be proven to be related to their murderer Richard III, and Christ’s children could have proved themselves to have had a father who was himself the son of God, and thus stopped the hopelessly unlimited flow of masonic literature now burdening airport bookshops of the world.
Erich Fromm’s uncle died of lung cancer in Pasadena in 1956. After he had been liberated from Treblinka by the Americans, he had taken up smoking cigars. Maybe there was no connection, but I doubt it because everything we know is connected somehow, the good and the bad, the comfortable and the uncomfortable, fact and fiction, Jews and anti-Jews, Erich and Adolf.
 

GOLD
33 – The golden fleece
Maria Syrena Constantina Nydoreski  was a miller’s daughter living in Polkoi off the Warsaw to Lublin high road. Her husband was dead. He had been struck down by a sail of her father’s windmill after he had drunkenly challenged it to a fight. With bare knuckles. Cervantes had never been heard of in the Nydoreski family so we can safely say that Maria’s husband was not trying to make life imitate art.
Maria’s father, the miller, died in his bed dreaming of going to America where the cheeses were not so full of worms as they were in Polkoi, and you could be a free thinker and believe what you liked and sit all day long in a diner on 57th Street, New York. You could talk to strangers as much as you wished and only have to pay for one coffee and one jam doughnut that came with a layer of powdered icing-sugar and was carried to your table by a black women whose grandparents had been Alabama slaves.
Maria’s father bequeathed his daughter all his worldly goods, his mill, his house, his valuables and his ferocious ram, Timorous.  Millers who were even only half way efficient could normally be rich, so Maria was not left without means.  The miller had been a gossip and a talker and his business had meant contact with strangers, wayfarers, itinerants, outsiders, richmen, poormen, beggarmen, thieves. He liked people. As long as they could tell a good story, preferably against the establishment, or as long as they could introduce a new idea, preferably iconoclastic, the miller would listen, maybe give the visitor a bowl of soup, perhaps a bed in his barn. One thief blessed with story-telling abilities, had stayed, and he had become Maria’s husband. He was now buried at the bottom of the orchard under the walnut tree which had been prodigiously bountiful since his death.
He had used to say that for a man to be truly happy he must remember to constantly beat the three most important possessions in his life, his wife, his dog and his walnut tree. That way he would be sure of getting the best out of them.  He had never beaten his wife because Maria would have certainly beaten him back, he had never possessed a dog, but, each winter, he had beaten the walnut tree half to death. Because the walnut tree now blossomed and bore copious fruit, perhaps one third of his homily was true. He should have extended the homily to include Timorous, the miller’s ram, that persistently harboured a great emnity towards him on account of its great affection for Maria. Maria had nursed the animal when she was a child and Timorous was a lamb.  There is a nursery rhyme that has variations all over Europe but not in Poland.
Mary had a little lamb
Whose fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.
It was true. When Maria went to the outside privy, Timorous sat on the roof. When Maria walked into Polkoi to buy tinned tomatoes, the ram walked with her. The ram had made the life of Maria’s husband a game of hide and chase. Maria’s husband hiding, Timorous chasing. A constant sneeking about interrupted by quick bouts of fast running to escape the large, solid-as-a-wall, battering head and horns.  But since the nursery rhyme is unknown in Poland, the ram could not be said to be trying to get life to imitate art.
At her father’s wake, Maria met a pedlar selling laces and empty green bottles that had once held aniseed balls and still retained their smell.  The pedlar introduced Maria to cigarettes. She was intrigued, and that evening getting into bed on her own for the first time in her life in the now empty manless millhouse, she practised smoking and burnt the mill down. Her newly inherited property, windmill, millhouse, barn, stable, pigsty and two privies, lit a beacon on the flat land that was seen for thirty miles all around. She salvaged most of her father’s valuables, which were largely of gold that had been bargained at the Lublin jewellers’ shops in return for sacks of copper coins, promissary notes, Russian roubles and barrows of flour. She tied the valuables up in leather bags and hung them on the fleece of her ram, Timorous, and she set out to walk to her father’s sister’s house in Chelm near the Russian border.  She walked a hundred miles with a Golden Fleece. Jason and his Argonauts had never been heard of in the Nydoreski family, so we can safely say that Maria was not trying to make life imitate art.
Thanks to the miller’s curiosity and his news-gathering habits and the tall stories of her drunken husband, Maria had considerable  knowledge of the world beyond Pokloi and making cheese and grinding corn and the vagaries of the wind.  She knew about Chicago prohibition gangsters who shot one another in the back,  she knew about the whorehouses of San Paulo who charged more for a bottle of beer than a night with a virgin, she knew about child prostitution in Calcutta that filled the cemeteries with little corpses, she knew about the sending of British bastards to be eaten by alligators in the swamps of Australia, but she scarcely believed in the enormity of the German invasion that had turned her country into a porchway to Hell. She was about to find out.
As the moon came out across the Polish steppes on the Russian border, Maria was stopped on the road into Lublin by three motorcycles of a reconnaissance patrol of the Fifth Panzer Division.  Timorous the ram, ever ready to defend his mistress before she was attacked, butted a goggled sergeant into a ditch and stood astride his body and urinated into his face. The ram was shot, and then so was Maria when she protested. They shot her, firing bullets first into her feet, then her knees, and working their way up her body, concentrating on significant anatomical features, finishing at her eyes. Her body was hung upside down on a blossoming rowan tree so that all passers-by could see she wore no knickers. The soldiers stuck twigs into her vagina to pretend that Maria and the tree were growing together. They had no knowledge of the story of Apollo and Daphne so they could not be accused of trying to get life to imitate art.
The leather bags were ripped from the ram’s fleece by the motorcyclists still trying to hide their mirth at their sergeant’s discomfort and urine-soaked face. The golden trinkets were tipped into a motorcycle despatch bag, and later dumped in the mayor’s safe at Lublin.  They stayed there for two years, until swept up by the departing Germans as they retreated across Poland in front of the revengeful Red Army. They were taken from a goods train at Dresden, placed in an armoured car travelling to Regensburg and then to Stuttgart and finally to Baden-Baden where they were smelted into a gold bar that was eventually collected by Gustav Harpsch’s sergeant who packed it with 91 other gold bars  in Harpsch’s suitcase under a greatcoat on the back seat of the black Mercedes. The gold bar of the Golden Fleece saw moonlight again on the road into Bolzano where spaghetti is an Italian dream, and is easily better cooked, for example, in the diner on 57th Street, New York, New York, where it still might be brought to your table by a black waitress whose great grandmother had been a slave in Alabama.
 

GOLD
34 – The pusher
This is the story of an elderly man, the executioner of thirty women and fourteen children in a forest clearing fifty kilometres south of  Belgrade, who went back to the killing-site to retreive the possessions of those victims who he thought might have hidden valuables. He was not so unlucky. The women, hugging their children, holding their hands, had stood on the side of the long loam trench; they were wearing their best clothes and each carried their one permissable suitcase. The elderly man had run his eyes over their potential.
Now at one o’clock in the morning in the dark forest, among the damp ferns and the silver-birch trees, with his hands yellow with the clay-loam, he made a collection. Eighteen gold rings, seventeen rosaries, eight gold crucifixes, seven St Christopher medals, a gold penknife with an inlaid ivory handle, seven gold spectacle frames, some silk underwear, a new pair of shoes, a brass-ferruled walking stick and a child’s first meal-time utensils, a small gold spoon, a small gold fork and an instrument - in gold - known as a pusher. The old man kept the pusher because it intrigued him as to its shape and size and significance. It was a short blade anchored nearly at right-angles to a tapered handle. The blade had rounded edges so as not to harm a child’s mouth and the handle was just long enough for a three-year old to manoeuvre her chopped-up food with ease around her dinner-plate. The old man kept the silk underwear in a brown paper-bag under his bed, he put the brown lace-up shoes on his mantelpiece and he sold the rest of the golden trophies to an Austrian publican, a community outsider, a man who minded his own business. The old man was paid such a miserable price for such nocturnal rummaging among the dead, that so much trouble for so little reward must have surely some other motive than a desire for money. That motive, it was said, by even those who thought Jews to be vermin who collected their own ear-wax to polish the seats of their commodes, was the old man’s fear of women. He was taking a revenge, and indulging, although they scarcely ever used such a fancy word, in necrophilia.
The child’s golden pusher had been given as a christening present by a childless uncle who had been present by accident at the child’s birth. He and the child’s mother had been walking among the vine-fields between Vernov and Plechnour when her waters had broken. The child was delivered in the shade of an olive tree. There was no drinking water and the uncle had crushed grapes in his large hands for the mother to quench her thirst. She had sucked his fingers. Four days later in Plechnour, the family had celebrated and the child had been given the name Olivia in remembrance of the place of her birth.
Olivia’s golden pusher was now kept in the top breast pocket of the old executioner’s shabby black-suit jacket. When the old man was alone, sitting at the end of the white table-clothed trestle table at midsummer supper, he took out the golden object and played with it, pushing the bread crumbs around the salt and pepper cruet, between the vingear bottle and the olive oil. The golden pusher betrayed him. It was recognised by a widow who had been a neighbour of the murdered child. She saw it as she hurried by with a plate of salted aubergines. She told her neighbours who threw vinegar in the old man’s face and called him names that opened up old sores, accusations of being childless, living alone, not washing, speaking to Austrian publicans, interferring with small children, collecting his own ear-wax to polish the seat of his commode. They tipped him off his chair and he wet his trousers. They stripped him and laughed at his shrivelled little penis and his stained underpants. They poured boiling water over his wizened chest. The golden pusher had fallen into the long grass and was lost among the juicy dandelion plants whose bruised stems oozed milk, and whose brilliant yellow flowers were starting to seed, layering the meadow, if you crouched down and looked along its length, with a white mist of drifting seed-heads. Dandelion plants have many names, and piss-a-bed and Juno’s teats, and swine-shunt, and virgin’s-milk, and nun’s temptation, and cardinal’s dangle, are among the more disquieting, uncomfortable, and embarrassing nick-names.
In the autumn, the grass of the long meadow had turned yellow and then brown, and they cut it with short-handled sickles. The scything swipe of a sickle-blade flicked and spun the golden pusher into the air. It became community treasure and was housed in the mayor’s parlour in a strong box, an oak reliquary that had once housed the finger-bones of a saint who had been martyed by having nails driven into his skull. The pusher shared space in the oak reliquary with damaged coins, broken screwdrivers, a bicycle tyre repair kit, disputed deeds of ownership and a small statue of Stalin.
In the April of 1942, the mayor’s daughter, suffering rejection by her lover because of her odiferous menstruation, tried to forget her misery by a vigorous bout of spring-cleaning. The reliquary box was emptied and polished and sold to a Croatian translator. The contents were sorted and the child’s golden pusher sent to Vernov where it was dumped in a wicker basket with other confiscated Jewish gold items that were eventually smelted down into a low-grade modest gold “boater” bar in Belgrade. Shipments of confiscated items, including regular consignemnts of gold bars, travelled back to Germany in armed convoys often some thirty vehicles long. The incidental treasures of  the country became the property of German museums and banks. The banks were permitted the first look. What they rejected was looked over by museum curators. What the curators rejected was sold to antiquaries. What the antiquarians did not want was sold to flea-market traders. The flea-market traders of Augsburg and Munich were traditionally exiles from Belgrade. The Yugoslavian heritage was handed back after being filtered and seived by the Third Reich.
The gold bar, that in small part was the gold dining utensil of an executed 4-year old girl with a Jewish mother and a Ukrainian father, eventually found its way to Baden-Baden and the back seat of a German Mercedes car driven by a German Lieutenant, Gustav Harpsch. Gustav Harpsch planned to use this gold bar with 91 other gold bars to buy back a 4-year old girl with a Jewish mother and a German father from a Swiss sanitorium, and take her to Uruguay or Paraguay or Ecuador or Chile or Peru or Bolivia. This car crashed on a forest road close to Bolzano which is a gentle enough town but ravaged by the guilt of not being able to contribute to Italy’s reputation as a maker of fine spaghetti.
 

GOLD
35 – The railway line
Around the town of Heptrograd in Eastern Bulgaria peasants took advantage of the fluctuating laws of discrimination against Jews and plundered Jewish families. When discrimination was state policy the peasants stole Jewish property. Their cow-bells. Their brass bath-taps. Their wooden buckets. Their engraved candles. Their daughters’ wooden dolls with ceramic faces. Their marzipan-moulds. Their black, broad-brimmed hats. Their brooms from under the stairs. The carved palings from their fences. Their paper doilies. Their buttons. Their model ships from Gdansk. Their unchipped crockery. The lace curtains from their windows. Their calamine-scented toilet soap. Their emboidered camisoles. Their rope made from pine bark. Their book-markers made of golden paper. Their quills cut from swan feathers. Their golden trinkets.
When the state was interested in cementing a national alliance with a foreign power whose Jewish laws were not as draconian as their own, the anti-Jewish legislation was lifted and the peasants excoriated for being too thorough in their greediness. They were encouraged to take back the Jewish cow-bells, Jewish  bath-taps, Jewish buckets, Jewish candles, Jewish dolls, Jewish marzipan-moulds, Jewish hats, Jewish  brooms, Jewish palings, Jewish paper doilies, Jewish  buttons,  Jewish model ships from Gdansk, Jewish unchipped crockery, Jewish lace curtains,  Jewish toilet soap, Jewish camisoles, Jewish  rope, Jewish book-markers and the Jewish quills. But they did not return the Jewish golden trinkets.  Instead they took them down to the railway at Hucknow, where the line comes out of a dark wood before rushing across the Narjinkia Plain, and they laid them on the rails to be crushed into irrecognizability. That way their owners could not claim them back. It was not so easy to identify a crushed watch, a smashed set of cuff-links.
Imagine some twenty peasants dressed in sombre colours crouching in the morning mist by the railway line that glistens with condensation, with a long line of golden objects spread along the iron track. A little further back, partially hidden by silver birches,  are their carts with the horses cropping the roadside grass, and small children plaiting reeds from a stream and playing with a dark green frog. At eight thirty a train is due, travelling from Sophia to Bucharest. It comes out of the wood at sixty miles an hour. The peasants with their ears to the track have heard it coming four minutes ago, and they hide, just in case the train has governmental eyes and they will be reprimanded.
The train rushes by, flattening an 18th century brooch once stolen by a pickpocket in St Petersburg from Anna Petrovina, the Czar’s mistress, a Rabbi’s wedding ring that once fell into a drain in Minsk and was rescued by a tramp wih a pin on a long piece of string, a golden clasp from a Talmud published and bound in Cheapside, London in 1666, the year London burnt like a bag of sticks, a gold chain with twelve hundred links, one hundred links for each of the lost twelve tribes of Israel. The giant iron wheels spit from the track an amulet containing a lock of hair from a kidnapped baby, and the springed clasp of a woman’s handbag made in Athens about the time Lord Elgin stole the Acropolis marbles.  The wheels cut in half an enamelled and engraved bracelet, the half that depicts the Finding of the Infant Moses flies into the grass and is never  found again, the half that depicts the key found in the belly of the whale, drops onto a wooden sleeper. The carriages wheels continue to exaggerate and accentuate and emphasise the damage.
The train is three miles down the track, passing the village of Pordim Krivodo when the peasants come out of hiding and gather and squabble to collect their stolen gold, squashed and partly melted by the pressure and heat into lumps that ressemble the white of a fried egg, a cowpat, the greasy intestines of a sheep. Those pieces of stolen property still recognisable to their Jewish owners will have to wait for the 9.15 train to Pleven to be reflattened. This heat press is not reliable.
The golden scatterings are useless to their new owners, but cannot be recognised by the pawnbroker in Sadovec where a policeman stands outside the door  taking small bribes to turn a blind eye; he will accept a packet of unsalted cashew nuts, two eggs, a fish wrapped in red paper, a half sack of potatoes, a cabbage.  The pawnbroker smelts the ravished gold pieces in a charcoal stove and brings them to useable shape as small “sugarloaf” gold bars.
The single sugarloaf gold bar smelted on the 7th December 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, reaches Prague by various  routes and strategems, and sits for seventy days behind the altar of St Wencelas by the river that runs through the city. On All Saints Day it is given to the Foundling Hospital by a novice priest who is angry and despairing at the death of children through hunger. The nuns are embarrassed. What can they do with such obvious evidence of booty from God knows where - probably stolen from Jews. They take it to the bank who promptly confiscate it and send it on to Vienna where it is restamped with a gold cross and the initials GH  which Christianises and bureaucratises the bar though no one now knows what GH was supposed to stand for. It arrived in Baden-Baden ready for its future crash in Bolzano where they do not know how to cook spaghetti because they leave out the salt, or cook the pasta too dry or too long, or add the tomato sauce too late, or boil the clams too fast, or make the meat sauce too thin.
In Prague there are curiosity shops along the river where you can buy oddments, junk, antiques, evidence, it is advertised, of the disappeared Jews from Eastern Europe. You can buy bath-taps, wooden buckets, wooden dolls with ceramic faces, hats, brooms, paper doilies, buttons,  model ships, crockery, lace, toilet soap, camisoles and  book-markers made of golden paper. As the years go by, objects of domestic usage disappear. Where do they go? Broken, stolen, burnt, lost, sold. At the start of this story we had twenty-five Jewish artefacts, the peasants returned fifteen, in the shop in Prague we now have only eight. This is of course only a story and you can please yourself how you organise fictions to suit your intentions, but it is supposed to be a researched fact that after a hundred years only three per cent of all objects manufactured by man survive, and after three hundred years only one per cent.  It is an interesting but, I suppose, not so surprising a fact, that what has survived a hundred years stands a one in three chance of surviving three hundred. A third of all things survived will go on being survived by a third forever.
 

GOLD
36 – HH to posterity
Hedda Hemsler, who was to be known as HH to posterity, imitated Eva Braun, who was known as EB to Hitler’s chauffeur. Hedda Hemsler had an infatuation, a crush. She declared as much to her full-length bathroom mirror, but this infatuation was complicated and sometimes worked in reverse. She herself did indeed recognise it as a sometime reverse-infatuation, that is, it was sometimes as virulently against as it might be for. Hedda Hemsler had a crush on Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler, sometimes separately, sometimes together, sometimes for, sometimes against. Adolf Hitler was the Fuhrer of the Third Reich, and Hedda Hemsler’s infatuation was ambitious because Eva Braun was Hitler’s mistress.
“They said”.
“Who’s they?”
“It’s not true.”
“Why isn’t it true?”
“Because I, Hedda Hemsler, am Hitler’s mistress. Who the hell is Eva Braun? Who the hell does she think she is - this Eva Braun?”
Hedda Hemsler was never certain in the early days whether her crush was for Hitler or for Eva Braun. Or whether she was so obsessed that she hated them both for being together, for being lovers. Sometimes she identified with Eva Braun and hated Adolf Hitler, sometimes she  identified with Adolf Hitler in his love for Eva Braun. Sometimes she hated both of them together for irritating her life.
“Which one is really the problem?”
After a while Hedda tried to simplify things for herself. She began to dress like Eva Braun, she learnt to laugh like Eva Braun, she photographed herself like Eva Braun. Or so she thought, because not many people were familiar with Eva Braun. Hitler hid her away. There was of course one big difference between Hedda Hemsler and Eva Braun, a sort of difference of almost irrelevant interest to the average man or average woman in the average street at average times, but Hedda Hemsler was Jewish, and Eva Braun, apparently, was not. And this of course was the clue to the whole pseudo-infatuation because if Eva Braun was discovered to be Jewish, Hitler would kill her.
“Shoot her, chop of her head, hang her with piano wires in a butcher’s shop. And he would be unutterably disgraced and discredited. The prophet of anti-Semitism is sleeping with a Jew?”
Consternation, confusion, disgrace, resignation, suicide, collapse of National Socialism.
You can see now that Hedda Hemsler’s infatuation was politically inspired. She continued to address herself in her full-length mirror.
The mirror answered back, but largely with questions to her questions. Two problems.
“Did Hitler ever in fact, sleep with Eva Braun?”
“Difficult to say.”
“Would that hypocritical bastard really resign after murdering Eva Braun on her pink sheeted bed?”
“Probably not”.
Third problem.
“Hitler would probably decide, whatever the evidence, that Eva Braun was not in fact Jewish at all. He would change the laws. He would decide that all Jewish women are Jewish except the Jewess, Eva Braun”.
Hedda Hemlser was not a stupid woman, she saw all the angles. And the bathroom mirror was a long-time, non-suffering confidante.  It sent back to her all the answers she gave it without fear or favour, and very privately. She asked the mirror how should she, Hedda Hemsler, bring down National Socialism?
“How can I, Hedda Hemsler, bring down National Socialism?”
“You could realise your infatuations for those two, that dual power base that causes so much success and so much misery”.
“What is a dual power-base?”
And she would destroy them.
“I will destroy them”.
Sometimes she thought her image in the mirror really was Eva Braun, and sometimes she was sure Eva Braun answered her, and even encouraged her.
“Eva Braun is certainly an unhappy woman”.
Hedda Hemsler decided she would be the real Eva Braun, sleep with Hitler, really sleep with him.
“Fuck him. Become pregnant by him. Produce a baby with him quickly, say, in eight months. Make Adolf a happy father.”
 “And then you can have the baby circumcised”.
“Hitler’s baby is cut”.
“Hitler’s baby is a Jew”.
Consternation, confusion, disgrace, resignation, suicide, collapse of National Socialism.
Two problems. How did Hedda Hemsler from the village of Gerbaring in Westphalia, get into bed with Adolf Hitler? And was Hitler fertile? He was only supposed to have one testicle.
“Did this one testicle work?”
Third problem. Was Hedda Hemsler fertile? Fourth problem.
“What do you do about the non-Jewish impostor Eva Braun? Will she get in the way?”
“Put her on a train to Dachau.”
In the event Hedda Hemsler went to Berchtesgaden on the Obersalzberg mountain, got a job as a waitress in the Aloiner Cafe, and rented a single room in the Tivoli Hotel, where the concierge’s wife sometimes took in laundry from the Berghof where Hitler spent his summer-holidays. Under her apron and under her frilly headband, Hedda Hemsler dressed like Eva Braun until even blindmen could see the similarity. Some observers said that Berchtesgaden was full of blind men, at least it was full of men who certainly could not see very clearly.
Hedda saw Hitler twice. From a distance. Once when he passed the Aloiner Cafe in a black Mercedes with the window down, and then, accompanied by fifteen aides, when he fed grass to a white horse outside the favoured tea-room on the Obersalzberg. Hedda counted the aides as she sat on her bicycle. All the aides wore leather-coats and Hitler had a dog with him that frightened the horse.
Hedda eventually made it into bed with Hitler’s chauffeur. Maybe Hitler’s chauffeur fancied Eva Braun, and he saw the similarity. Hitler’s chauffeur was not a stupid man. At least not yet.  Hedda Hemsler fucked with Hitler’s chauffeur three times, once in Hitler’s car, once in a pine-forest and once in a cable-car.
“The first time in Hitler’s car was the most exciting, lying back on the black leather seat of the Mercedes, I could feel I could almost be Eva Braun, though, truth to tell, I doubt whether Hitler ever fucked Eva Braun in his car”.
It was this first liaison that probably made her pregnant, and she told Hitler’s chauffeur almost as soon as she knew. Hitler’s chauffeur who always referred to Eva Braun as EB, stretching it out to EeeBee, was already by this time calling Hedda Hemsler EB2, stretching it out to EeeBeeToo as a sort of whispered private joke. But he was already fucking another waitress in the Aloiner cafe, who, if she looked like anyone of his acquaintance, looked a little like Goebbels wife, Magda. And Hitler’s chauffeur had never fancied Goebbels wife.
Hitler’s chauffeur arranged for EB2 to be sent to Basle. She refused to go.
“I am not going there.”
So he arranged to send her to Vienna.
“I am not going there. I have plans”.
She refused to go. So he arranged to send her to Dachau.
“I am not going there. I have plans to change Europe as we know it”.
So Hitler’s chauffeur sent Helmut Spranger and Theosis Wortzler and Kurt Heigel to her small bedroom in the Tivoli Hotel and they aborted her. With bent coat-hangers. They took them from the wardrobe. They stole her underclothes and her perfumes and her mother’s gold ring marked with the two musical notes FA and SO which also stood for Falasto Achemanie and Sophia Ochreman, Hedda Hemsler’s parents. Falasto and Sophia had been piano teachers in Dresden, and they certainly went regularly to the synagogue in the Hocklestrasse Platz.
Hedda Hemsler bled to death. She was found by a postman who was the current lover of the concierge’s wife. With the concierge, they arranged for a very discreet burial, and for three months Hedda Hemsler’s grave was marked with a red ceramic pot of geraniums and a piece of cardboard torn from a sugar box scrawled with the initials HH.
“I wonder who HH could be?”, said visitors who happened to pass Hedda’s last resting place on a sunny Sunday afternoon. By October someone had removed the flower-pot with the unwatered geraniums, and the sugar-box cardboard had blown away. HH’s claim on posterity had lasted three months.
It was said that Hitler’s chauffeur played a trick. Kurt Heigel said that Hitler’s chauffeur contrived to get Eva Braun to wear Hedda Hemsler’s knickers. Afterall the concierge sometimes took in Hitler’s washing. It is not impossible that a confusion could have been arranged. If it was true then this was the nearest HH ever got to EB.
The gold ring from Prague inscribed with the musical initials lay in the inside pocket of Theosis Wortzler’s jacket for four weeks. And the jacket hung in the walnut-wood wardrobe of his bedroom in Thomenstrasse. Then it disappeared. Wortzler enjoyed fighting. Perhaps he had worn the jacket in a brawl. Perhaps his sister had taken the ring from his jacket when she went in search of house-keeping money. Either way the ring, which was very identifiable, ended up in the cash-register of the petrol station at Goedering at the foot of the East Mountain. Hedda Hemsler did not drive but she liked cars. At the petrol station the ring was exchanged for seven boxes of American cigarettes. Hedda Hemsler did not smoke. The ring arrived in Bayreuth and was in the safe of the box-office of the opera-house at the same time Hitler was attending a performance of Siegfried, the same night in fact that Hitler agreed to the National Socialist Four-Year Economic Plan for Germany with Goering, and agreed to assist Franco in Spain with an operation called Magic Fire named after Siegfried’s rescue of Brunnhilde. This Bayreuth connection can be authenticated because in the box-office safe, the ring had been placed in a complimentary ticket envelope dated the 25th July 1936. Hedda Hemsler had never liked opera. She preferred Al Jonson.
The musical initials on Hedda Hemsler’s ring both personalised but also eternalised it. The ticket-office assistant whose name was Imogen had placed it in the complimentary envelope in the safe as a gift for a baritone she loved and whose buttocks and swinging scrotum she had once glimpsed through a half-closed dressing-room door when he was changing for his part in Tannhauser. The baritone collected his complimentary tickets, discovered the ring, suspected its provenance, bought Imogen a beige crepe dress, and gave the ring, with Imogen’s permission, to his mother as a musical gift on her fiftieth birthday. The baritone had fat fingers, and could never have worn it. Hedda Hemsler had thin fingers. The baritone’s mother was Italian, from Modena, a widow who tried to conceal her poverty from her son. She sold the ring as a musical curio to an Italian music-loving pawn-broker in Bern who was raided by Gestapo thugs who swept up all his gold trinkets and took them to a metal-smith in Hanover. The musical initials disappeared at 1061 degrees centigrade, and the ring helped to constitute gold bar TGH78 which was shipped to Munster and then Baden-Baden. Gustav Harpsch became its temporary owner, about the same time he became the temporary owner of 100 other gold bars. This temporary ownership ended in a car-crash when 92 of those gold bars were scattered across the back seat of his black Mercedes. Harpsch did not like opera. He too preferred Al Jonson. Two Al Jonson fans were thus very indirectly linked on a black leather seat of a Mercedes in a car-crash in Bolzano, where they cannot cook good spaghetti. Al Jonson didn’t like spaghetti.
“How the Hell do we know that?”
 “Well ...... “.
 

GOLD
37 – The three bears
A mirror manufacturer hid his collection of gold coins in three bears. The bears were yellow, made of wool, had red bead eyes and belonged to his daughter Emmeline who identified them with the three bears in the story of Goldilocks; father-bear had a twist of yellow silk thread around his neck, mother-bear had silver earrings, and baby-bear had a white arm, courtesy of an unexpected dip in a bleach bath. The seventy gold coins were Roman, most of them from after the time of the Emperor Hadrian.
The mirror manufacturer’s home was raided by Nazi police who were convinced that his wife was Jewish, and his wife and daughter were arrested and deported, probably to Treblinka. The mirror manufacturer had been in hospital convalescing from a poisoned appendix when the authorities had arrived. His family had visited him two hours before their arrest, and had brought him three bedside gifts, a packet of Liptons Earl Grey Tea, a pink scarf manufactured in Rheims, and an American novel called “Against the Sky” by Clement A.J. MacArthur. The mirror manufacturer had kept these three items, undrunk, unworn and unread, by his bed throughout the rest of the war. As long as they were beside his bed, he had no trouble at all sleeping. The glass-mirror-manufacturer slept in many beds from 1936 to 1945, most of them made from a randomn accumulation of coats, newspapers and sacks, in cellars and air-raid shelters, ditches and army barracks, until five days before the ceasefire, when he spent the night in what used to be the five-star Konigsberg Hotel in Bremen. He slept between clean white sheets smelling of violets and under a warm eiderdown sewn with blue stars. At nine o’clock in the morning, the hotel was destroyed by a bomb dropped by a Wellington aircraft on its return to England across the Baltic Sea. A falling plaster ceiling destroyed the mirror manufacturer’s rented bed along with his bedside packet of tea, his pink scarf and his American novel. The mirror manufacturer was down the corridor at the time vomiting his breakfast into a porcelain bath which had brass taps in the shape of dolphins. The involuntary reactions of his body for a second time had preserved him from a likely death. But at the loss of his bedside talismen, the mirror manufacturer’s peace of mind was smashed. He gave up being a mirror manufacturer. He just identified himself now as a very unhappy insomniac. He earned a living, but did not live a life, as an accountant for a Swedish company manufacturing winter sports equipment, and he lived in Basle, travelling frequently on business to Geneva.
In 1953, on an insomniac walk in the early hours of the morning through the empty streets of Geneva, he stopped to stare in the showcase window of a celebrated auctioneer. A collection of some 300 stuffed woollen bears advertised an auction of 19th century toys. One small yellow woollen bear had one red eye and one white arm. He was convinced that it had once belonged to his daughter.
In the morning the ex-mirror-manufacturer, ex-numismatist, ex-husband and ex-father, attended the viewing of the auctioneer’s sale, and was reprimanded for over-zealously fingering an item in Lot 27 devoted to American toys manufactured in Boston by the firm of Jason Smears and Cohen in 1925. The ex-mirror-manufacturer doubted the American pedigree of one item, being convinced it had been made in Hamburg where he had bought it; he was not going to draw attention to the auctioneer’s poor research. The 27th May was his wife’s birthday. He bid for Lot 27. He bid vigourously and paid too much, and momentarily caused heads to turn in surprise at a possible lost bargain. He took his parcel to a shoe-shop in the Rue Cassel, and quietly placed the small bear in the shop’s pedoscope, an X-ray machine designed to show how a new shoe fitted a foot. He saw seven white discs on the X-ray glass. He abandoned as many toys from Lot 27, a golliwog, a jack-in-a-box, an uncle sam, a mother hubbard, a simple simon, a pinocchio and a mickey mouse, and left them sitting in a row on the shop chairs, all hoping to be served with new shoes.
In the privacy of his hotel bedroom with the curtains tightlydrawn, he slit the small bear open with his penknife, and he uncovered seven gold coins of the post-Hadrian Roman Empire. A coin for the Emperor Vespasian who died from dysentry, a coin from the Emperor Romulus who died from multiple stab wounds, a coin from the Emperor Sulla who was poisoned with lead scrapings from a plumber’s maul, a coin from the Emperor Septimus who drowned, a coin from the Emperor Constantinus who died from eating poisoned oats.
The ex-mirror manufacturer could not have known that his daughter’s other two bears had been destroyed in a fire, and that 38 of a possible 41 gold coins had been raked out of the ashes by children, exchanged for coal and gramophone records, carried in a hat to a coin collector who pronounced them worthless in order to secure them himself. The coin collector had his shop raided by Gestapo officials looking for small arms. The hungry Gestapo officials traded them for fish and sex with a fishmonger pimp in Linz who took them to a jeweller and had them smelted down with several gold candlesticks and a gold model of the Taj Mahal to make a gold bar  that was certainly in Baden-Baden for Gustav Harpsch to collect and lose at Bolzano where they cannot cook a good spaghetti.
 

GOLD
38 – The spectacles
Lance Corporal Alfred Heisterling was myopic, but he had always been determined to join the Luftwaffe. He had learnt the drills, memorised all the information for the visual examinations, and tested himself exhaustively and with ingenuity to lie and charm where he could not otherwise cheat. Once inside the establishment of his dreams, he had kept his grip on his shortsightedness, apparently convincing his superiors. He was not so stupid as to enter for a pilot examination, but arranged things to pass a navigator’s test. Small-scale map-reading was afterall no challenge to a man who best viewed the world from a distance of ten centimetres.
Excited about his success, and after a bout of drinking and a rare intimacy with a woman younger than himself, whose body had revealed itself to him in a succession of exhilarating close-ups, he let down his guard. He bragged of his successful deceptions. He was promptly reported and demoted, and only due to his brother’s intervention was he not dismissed. He took a revenge.  He collected spectacles to destroy them. If others could use them with success why could not he? He stole them at first, then he broke into an eye-hospital. He filled his locker with spectacles. When he opened the locker door the spectacles spilled out over the concrete floor with a sound like a mighty crowd of falling giant insects. He stamped on the lenseless spectacles, scrunching them into a scramble of plastic-covered wires. Then he took to stealing spectacles from passers-by in the street. From Jews it was easy. First because they seemed to wear more spectacles than gentiles, and second, they rarely resisted. Devotional Jews he discovered, wore gold rimmed spectacles. He took to collecting gold rimmed spectacles. Sometimes the wearers painted the gold with a black lacquer to disguise their possible value. This disception was quickly discovered by Alfred Heisterling for his natural viewpoint was always close close up. Such a deception was a special encouragement for him to include violence in his thievery for he felt he was duty-bound to uncover such camouflage considering he had passed all his examinations as a professional airforce navigator whose responsibility to uncover deceptive landscapes was absolutely paramount. He stole gold-rimmed spectacles and he took out the lenses. His boldness as a thief increased. He took to standing at traffic-lights on street-corners, and when the lights changed, he snatched the spectacles from off the noses of drivers in open-topped cars. And then he ran off. Inevitably sooner or later, he was to misjudge the out-of-focus background movement of traffic, and he was run over. His head was crushed, his eyes completely destroyed. His brother collected Alfred’s belongings from the morgue, was given access to the locker-room and collected 14 sackfuls of gold rimmed spectacle material, which he carried to a French optician in Marseille who gave him 900 marks for the recoverable gold.
Fourteen sackfuls of golden wire from spectacles does not produce that much compacted gold, but enough to be sold on profitably to a travelling salesman who had friends in a German bank who might take it in for a consideration. The bank was the Deutche Bank and they had their own smelting processors in several key cities. One of them was in Baden-Baden close to Germany’s border with France. The gold bar that could be said to be sighted with a thousand metres of spectacle rims was stored in Vault Three of the Baden-Baden Deutsche Bank, and collected by Lieutenant Gustav Harspch towards the end of World War Two to be driven to Bolzano on the back seat of a black Mercedes car.
 

GOLD
39 – The watch children
The Munstel children of Eisel made it their business to specialise in looking for gold in the intestines of watches and clocks, and they made their activities into a game. They prised open the stolen items with a screwdriver and a chisel and tipped them onto the revolving turn-table of an old wind-up gramophone.  With wide eyes they watched the springs and cogs and spindles and golden screws revolve in the light of two spluttering candles. They had made a miniature theatre, a revolving city of sparkling metal. Eager to immediately see the theatrical effects of their plundering, they took to carrying their wind-up gramophone on their pillaging, treating their battered Jewish victims to the spectacle of their time-pieces disgorged, forcing them to watch, tieing them to a chair or a bed to marvel at the magic they had once unknowingly owned in their timepieces.
To separate out the various metals of a watch’s interior the two boys had invented various trial-and-error processes. They boiled the picturesque metal scrap to shrink out the small diamonds, they heated the metal intestines to melt out the lead, they soaked them in vinegar to identify the copper by its corroded green colour. They collected the various metals in small watchmaker’s boxes and keeping the tangle of metallurgically valueless steel springs for themselves, they sold the remainder to a goldsmith on Bockelstrasse. They were inevitably short-changed but received sufficient funds to buy themselves canned food and raspberry syrup.
After the war, Helmut, the elder of the Munstel brothers, eventually joined the Schiller Theatre in Hamburg as an art-director, and Fritz, the younger brother, emigrated to Canada and became a camera operator working in California on feature-films starring Elizabeth Taylor who he worshipped from afar, and once helped home in a taxi when she was very drunk and angry with Richard Burton.
The Bockelstrasse goldsmith in Eisel regularly smelted down his gold in a mould stamped with the sign of a griffin and the letters DRLO whose significance he never knew, having inherited the moulds from a Polish count who did not speak German. This gold bar was certainly on the back seat of Harpsch’s crashed Mercedes in Bolzano where they cannot cook good spaghetti.
In the car-wreck, Harpsch’s body had been cut into three pieces, a foot, a hand and then the rest. The hand had been cut at the wrist and it wore a watch that had burst open. The silver metal intestines had bunched and rucked to look in minature like a mechanical forest in winter-time frost. It would not have failed to have excited the Munstel brothers of Eisel. This excellent army-issue German timepiece had stopped at five passed one in the morning. And the date was May 7th 1945. Officially this is regarded as the exact time of the end of the Second World War in Europe.
 

GOLD
40 - Grosz enthusiasm
Incited to indignation by the drawings and paintings of George Grosz, a young student shaved his head, stole a German army uniform and, making a good imitation of a goose-stepping, brain-dead private infantryman, burst into a church in Stolp, Pomerania on a Sunday morning during Mass. With fiercesome menaces he demanded the valuables of the church-goers so that he might finance his art-school training to repudiate Grosz’s anti-establishment propaganda of flat-breasted whores, and pigeon-chested business men with timid hairy genitals showing through transparent trousers. From the intimidated worshippers, he collected 500 marks worth of property, enough to afford him three weeks training at the Royal Saxon Academy of Art in Dresden where the pipe-smoking Grosz had studied between 1909 and 1911.
The student was arrested and his collected valuables were itemised. But they were not returned to their owners because of a general embarrassment that appeared to intimidate the city authorities and the church-goers themselves. The practice of taking valuables from Jews was widespread in Stolp, and this incident, where Gentiles had been subjected to the same sort of menances that Jews were obliged to continually undergo, shamed all good Catholics.
The collected items included three gold watches, some twenty gold rings of various descriptions, several rosaries with gold attachments, a gold propelling pencil, a bible with a wooden cover and two gold clasps, a gold necklace, three gold crucifixes and a gold spring-clip for holding bank-notes. The items were placed in a bank-box and locked in a bank-vault that had previously been used to store French soft cheeses. The student was let off with a caution. His patriotism was not in doubt, but his methods were declared unwise. Three years later he started to study medicine, and after the war became a valuable doctor in obstetrics working in Berlin.
In April 1942 the bank at Stolp was bombed, the vaults cleared and all valuable items collected without paperwork into canvas-sacks, which were transported to Munich and then to Baden-Baden where they were sorted, and the gold removed to be smelted into gold bar BB8910p, which subsequently found its way into Harpsch’s possession and transported to Bolzano where it ended up with 91 other gold bars in a car crash just outside the city where they cannot apparently cook good spaghetti.
 

GOLD
41 – The toothbrush
Tomas Homilberg was scrubbing the paving stones with his toothbrush when the very smartly dressed corporal told him he had to clean his teeth. He complied. A little grit abraded his gums and the taste was somewhere between engine oil and eggs. The corporal told him to scrub the pavement. He complied. It was almost impossible to work up a lather. Perhaps a little spittle made a few swirling bubbles on the paving stone for about four seconds and then they disappeared. The corporal told him to scrub his teeth. He did as he was told. The taste was now more like sour milk mixed with blood. His gums were bleeding. Tomas was at a stage when events were abstracted and removed from emotional context. He was a writer. Or he used to be. Three hours ago he was a writer. Now he was just a man scrubbing the pavement with a toothbrush. As was his practice, he viewed events from the outside, assessing them for their literary interest value. It was certainly a practice resulting from his own voluntary self-enforced training. He had not known how to train to be a writer. He just practised emotional removal and the outside-yourself attitude and he wrote down what he discovered. He now knew he would probably have little difficulty in writing about his present predicament.
Tomas was ordered to scrub the pavement again. He complied. He permitted himself a quiet slow smile, and the corporal hit the side of Tomas’s head with his rifle butt. Tomas fell sideway onto his toothbrush hand. The stem of the toothbrush snapped. Now he could not scrub the pavement. Or indeed his teeth. Never mind. The smartly dressed corporal told him to scrub the pavement with his knuckles. Tomas had kept most of his right hand hidden in the long sleeve of his raincoat, now his fingers were revealed. The corporal saw Tomas’s  wedding ring and smashed Tomas’s hand with his rifle butt down onto the pavement. Tomas knew that a writer had to have a hand to write with. Tomas knew that a writer had to be imaginative. If he had been imaginative enough to be a good writer, he surely  ought to have thought to have hidden his wedding ring in his pocket, in his underwear, in his shoe, anywhere, but not on his wedding finger. He ran through the possibilities. Under his foreskin, under his eyelid, in his navel, in his mouth, in his ear, up his nose, up his anus. Tomas reviewed hiding places on the human body. Perhaps a woman had more opportunities. Tomas then suddenly reacted with emotion, excessive emotion. He had suddenly thought of his wife having to hide her wedding-ring on her body. He nearly lost his nerve and his self confidence and his temper under the very trying current circumstances.
The corporal ordered him to strip. Tomas swiftly leapt back into his emotional neutrality. For his own preservation.  In front of some fifty people out shopping in the Great Market, Tomas stripped as he was ordered.  It would have been a waste of time hiding his wedding-ring in his underwear or in his shoe. Or up his anus. The smartly dressed corporal - why worry if he was smartly dressed - just concern yourself that he, the corporal was dressed, and you, Tomas, was naked. The corporal made Tomas kneel on the pavement he had just scrubbed with his toothbrush outside the City Hall in Podz. And he made Tomas hold the cheeks of his buttocks apart. Tomas was surprised at such a command. It was something he had never done before, holding the cheeks of his buttocks apart for an anus inspection. Not even in front of his wife as some kind of delightful, exhibitionist, love-sex display game. He did as he was told, with his bloodied and damaged right hand and his dirty left hand. There were murmurs of disapproval in the watching crowd. The corporal fired a volley of shots into the air that scared the pigeons. The crowd dispersed, ran away, fled. Within seconds they were all gone. The corporal and Tomas were alone in the street outside the Podz Town Hall. Tomas was surprised they had all gone away so quickly. He smiled. Showing his anus had attracted sympathy. The corporal was not sure what to do with this able-bodied naked Jew now he had no audience. He kicked Tomas’s clothes around on the pavement,  and he stamped on Tomas’s underpants with a dirty boot. Tomas smiled again.
This material was unbelievable. He was unlikely to have invented it.  Here was petulance and cowardice and sadism and hysteria and sexual humiliation all together in one place outside a Building of the State on a beautiful day. In Podz. In Poland. A white horse in the distance pulling a beer cart. A child in the distance riding a red bicycle. A pregnant women in the distance pushing a pram. White clouds racing across a blue sky. The pigeons circling. The light shining on the pigeon feathers as the birds suddenly wheeled to the right as a single united flock, one slow pigeon trailing behind. Details help to make the picture more believable. Tomas laughed out loud at the incredulity of his present experience. He laughed out louder and the corporal shot Tomas through the head.
The corporal stole Tomas’s wedding-ring. Six infantrymen crept up on him, surprised him, laughed at him, asked him if he intended to get married. A secret wedding. Weddings were for idiots. They shoved the ring in the corporal’s mouth. They pulled down his smartly creased trousers and his bleached clean underpants and they firmly grasped his prick so that to move was agony, and they shoved the ring up his arse, prodding it deep within him with their dirty fingers. The corporal threw Tomas Homilberg’s ring away in disgust. A Polish jew’s wedding ring had been up his German Aryan backside.
The ring was picked up by a tramp, exchanged for a bowl of cabbage soup. The ring was thrown into a box, dumped at a railway station, left at a post office, sent to a bank, arrived in Baden-Baden and was smelted down with a hundred other polish Jewish trinkets and became anonymous gold. Harpsch took it with him to Bolzano.
 

GOLD
42 – Paper-clips
Two sons of the banker Otto Mayer dealt differently with the problem of the possibility of their gold being confiscated by the Nazi authorities. Their father had crashed and risen, crashed and risen with the financial adventures of the depression. The brothers knew that wealth in paper money was a foolish investment.
Jura, the elder brother, named after the mountains, chose the simple expedient of simply wearing his gold and carrying his gold on his person; not ostentatiously, but perhaps as a tie-pin, or a key chain or a wedding-ring (though he was not married) or as a signet ring, or as loose change in his pocket, or perhaps as two watches, one for Berlin time, one for Moscow time (the Russians were allies). By not hiding his gold, Jura could not be accused of concealing it which was a punishable offence. Jura clanked a little.
The other brother Dolo, named after the mountains, or, as he pronounced it, after American currency, arranged for his gold inheritance to be made into thin wire, which was cut up and coated with black enamel, and bent and folded into paper-clips, rather heavy paper-clips, 40,000 of them.
Both brothers went naked, perhaps hand in hand, to the gas chambers in Dachau.  Both marvelled at the pleasureable size of each other’s penis; they had been a secretive family.
Jura’s gold of course had been discovered very quickly. He had gone to a public lavatory in Dusseldorf Railway Station in search of sexual comfort, and a tired, listless soldier had been surprised at the heavy clank of metal as Jura’s trousers hit the toilet floor. “Blackmail was the one-way conduit of Jura’s gold, flowing out inexorably”, said his aunt twenty years later. She was the unlikely editor of the Zionist newspaper, The Magpie, named after the one-time Turkish, black-and-white bird that Christians believe is half in and half out of Hell, and has to welcomed every morning with a cheery greeting to appease its burnt black feathers. The soldier at the railway station bought warm underwear, gave up sucking male anatomy till it bled, ate asparagus and mussels at a French restaurant, and rented an apartment with a bath and a Paul Signac painting on the bedroom wall.
Dolo’s golden paper-clips had of course also been discovered. In his office at 17 Badomerstrasse, Dolo kept hundreds of boxes of blank typing paper clipped needlessly together in batches of ten sheets. He kept thinner coloured paper in separate folders clipped together in batches of twenty, and thinner-still carbon-papers in clipped batches of thirty in unsealed brown envelopes. To an author excited by order it looked as though Dolo was to start writing a major novel arranged in advance into chapters and sections on empty pages to be filled and copied and transcribed ready for translation. But an idle clerk picked his milk teeth with a black enamelled paper-clip that had fallen onto the carpeted floor by accident, and the secret was out.
Imagine 40,000 black paper-clips in a jumbled and tangled pile on a red one-inch pile carpet. The clerk’s paper-clip was not forgotten. He was asked to take it from his pocket where he had stored it as a souvenir. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and let it drop. Everyone in the room heard its soft ching as it met its fellow paper-clips. They used first a shovel, then a pan and brush and then their fingers. And then the kiln. They watched through the thick silicon window. The mass of folded wire glowed red and  then burst into blue flame as the black enamel paint caught fire and frizzled away in a brief black smoke. And then the mass of cob-webbed undisguised gold glowed white and then bright shiny buttercup-gold. The wire-tangle mountain coallesced, dripping down on itself like clear olive oil until it splashed like milk drops into itself, and settled first like a marsh, then a rippled pond and then a soft sea and then stillness, a gold platter, a gold mirror. The German soldier Gustav Harpsch benefitted.
 

GOLD
43 – The rabbi conspiracy
This is a story about a pawn shop whose entire ticketed and invoiced stock was confiscated by a Nazi contingent searching for evidence of a Jewish conspiracy organised by two rabbis, whose father, like Nobel, had made a great deal of money out of gunpowder. The Nazis had used the rabbis’ daughters as chess-pieces on the Leghorn Public Piazza, having been unable to find the red queen and a black rook’s pawn,  for which indignities the two brothers intended to blow up the entire gentile world, starting with Leghorn Public library.
The pawn shop’s property was not returned and all the items sorted into piles for redistribution. The gold found its way to Basle and then Goestatingen and then Baden-Baden where Lieutenant Harpsch commandeered it with false promises to his brother-in-law that they would share it after the war. In the end this never happened. Both brother and brother-in-law were killed. Gustav Harpsch in a car crash and his brother-in-law in a coughing fit. Harpsch’s brother-in-law had been a natural worrier. His worries had kept him protected against pain and disaster throughout the war; because they were so close to his heart and so omnipresent in his mind, he had no time to think of bigger issues like murdered jews, or Russian winters, or thinking that Hitler and his henchmen were no better than public-house brawlers turned lucky.
When the war ended and the surrender of the German army was official, he sat himself down in the ruins of his garden with a cold glass of champagne he had kept throughout the war for just such an occasion. On his fourth sip he had begun to cough. In four and a half minutes he was dead. He never had time to discover that his brother had deceived him. And his brother was never going to find out that his brother was dead, because he was killed twelve days earlier in Bolzano, the city in North Italy where spaghetti was eternally badly cooked.
What of the rabbis? The rabbis were cabbalists. Every significance was milked. They were profoundly interested in metaphor. They decided that the gentile population should have violence with their daily bread. The brother rabbis put bombs inside loaves. White bread. Gentiles liked bread baked with refined flour. The trigger was a bite, a cut with a bread knife. The result was bloodied mouths, broken teeth, smashed jaws along with unsalted butter, jam-preserve, honey, slices of shredded cheese, pieces of pastrami, a shower of damp crumbs circling above a blasted head. Finally brother rabbi Ephrahim perished eating an exploding bagel primed by his brother Josephat. It split his face from ear to ear.
Josephat was struck white with horrific guilt. Hair, skin and tongue. He exhibited his white tongue to show how horror-struck he was.  He, a rabbi, had killed his brother, a rabbi, in a gentile-destructive conspiracy. Before he could explode himself by taping his fingers to a clumsy bomb that he would be unable to untape if he changed his mind, Josephat was knifed in the belly by his angry sister-in-law. She had five boys under eight to be educated to grow up to be rabbis of international esteem.
The destruction continued. What had started with rook’s pawn takes knight and queen’s pawn takes king’s pawn en passant, with two little girls enjoying their jobs as substitute chess-pieces, ended in the violent destruction of an entire devout extended Jewish family, now given over to family vendetta. And you have guessed it. Sixty-four people in eight countries over a period of eight years perished before the game was over, one for each square on the chessboard.
The pawn-shop golden valuables were smelted down to make gold bar 5YHJJ90.  Lieutenant Harpsch, oblivious to the mayhem that created this golden talisman, took it to Bolzano and lost it in a crash only seen by nocturnal field mice and only heard by owls. Curiously this crash and the consequent demise of Harpsch, happened when it happened, to satisfy a prophecy made by his father, a man who said that his son would love and fight in a second world war but would not survive it. As it was, Harpsch waited until the very last minute, if not the last second, of the Second World War to fulfil the prophecy, because he was killed at  2.14 am on the 7th May, 1945. His broken watch timed it. It was the exact time that most historians agree marks the definitive ending of the Second World War in Europe.
 
 

GOLD
44 – Lilac soap
Benjamin hid his gold cigarette-lighter encrusted with a single diamond, and Martha’s gold bracelet, and her gold and silver brooch shaped like a mermaid and her gold pendant earrings, in two bars of soap. He sliced the soap bars open, put the valuables inside, closed the halves and ran the soap under a hot tap. The soap was perfumed to remind the user of lilacs. It had been bought in Marken, which was unusual because the Calvinist citizens of Marken did not believe essentially in bars of soap smelling of lilac.
A small contingent of Dutch Nazis ransacked Benjamin’s little wooden house and set it alight with matches, newspapers and paraffin. They were like boy scouts lighting their first camp-fire. And the bars of soap had melted on the ceramic tiles of the ground-floor bathroom scullery, before the eyes of a plump, volunteer, fire-fighting postman who was called Claus Richter after the First World War hero who had committed suicide under water for fear of being captured by the enemy. Claus Richter had a large ginger moustache, and he  wore his fire-helmet like a man vastly enjoying himself.
Benjamin and Martha were dragged into the street and laughed at for being so clean and shining that they had kept their valuables in soap.
The earrings dangled from the ears of the Claus Richter’s wife for three weeks, and the brooch shone on the breast of Claus Richter’s daughter for three weeks, and the bracelet shone on the wrist of Claus Richter’s other daughter for three weeks. The effect was mildly curious when seen in association with local National Costume, which was usually obligatory at public functions in traditional Marken.
And then all the glittering jewelry was confiscated at a party organised by Stormtrooper Guillemot who also, like Claus Richter had a ginger moustache, though the swatch of hair on his upper-lip was tooth-brush shaped like his hero who would also commit suicide for fear of being captured by the enemy, not under water this time, but certainly underground.  The party was organised to irradicate, obfuscate, deflect, under-emphasise, dismiss the memory of Stalingrad. Guillemot patriotically made a compulsory collection of all the valuables of his guests to fight a second battle at Stalingrad which the Germans would indisputably win. Martha’s family golden trinkets were destined at least in theory to help absolve the bad smell of a German defeat.
Benjamin’s confiscated cigarette-lighter had meanwhile passed to a butcher  in exchange for a small unplucked chicken and a pound of kidneys. It then went on a hand-to-hand journey from butcher to grocer to policeman to a factory warden and finally and surprisingly it joined its erstwhile companions in a furnace in Gulmetter. Having lost their identity as cigarette-lighter, bracelet, brooch and earrings, their metallic essence entirely expunged of all sentimental connotations, they travelled as cold gold to Baden-Baden and were further smelted with other Jewish trinkets into a gold bar stamped FRT 672742, which with 91 other gold bars, were discovered in a black Mercedes , license plate number TL 9246 abandoned at the road-side at Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they could not make good spaghetti.
Benjamin and Martha went to a work-camp at Treblinka where there was supposed to be an instruction to consider experimenting with the possibility of turning human fat into soap. Everyone thought the idea was apocryphal, a gross scare story to see who could think up a heinous act against humanity that would also be a pragmatic use of resources. There was no instruction that the soap should smell of lilac.
There were twelve lilac bushes lining the southern perimeter fence of the work-camp, and throughout the last two weeks of March, the whole of April and the first two weeks of May, if you stood close enough to that line of twelve bushes you could almost not smell the smoke coming out of the crematorium chimney.  Benjamin, looking through the wire, named each lilac bush after a tribe of Judea. He was in the habit of learning modern American poetry as a precaution lest he should ever have to teach it in an American University after the war.  He tried to idle his mind by quoting poetry of the most erudite kind. He innocently but earnestly misquoted Eliot - “March is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land”.  He was correct about the dead land, correct about the lilacs, wrong about the month.
Perhaps he genuinely made a mistake, but perhaps he was being superstitious.  If he named April, it might never arrive for him. He was to be proved correct. Both he and Martha were dead by the Spring equinox. The lilacs bloomed on for another three weeks.
The site of Benjamin and Martha’s house in Marken is now a small cafe selling tourist souvenirs. It has a small studio out the back where visitors can have their photographs taken wearing traditional lace caps and traditional embroidered costumes.
 

GOLD
45 – Pre-Columbian Death
A professor of South American pre-Columbian history kept a collection of Mayan and Aztec gold weights, gold drinking vessels and gold facial ornaments in his home overlooking the river at Cologne. He had converted his living-room into a modest museum with glass showcases, glass-fronted shelves and free-standing vitrines. His wife was a woman of Indian descent from Ottacawa near  Buenos Aires. She was a primary-school teacher who in her summer holidays had assisted in an archaeological dig organised by German specialists.  Her name was Rinsaria. She was twenty years younger than the professor, had dark hair and dark skin and a strong nose.
In Cologne the professor had an assistant, Hans Topperler, a normally modest and thoughtful young man who wanted to live in Terra del Fuego far from German civilisation, where the inhabitants only wore a mat tied with string that was turned around their bodies to face the quarter from where the wind blew. Perhaps as part of his longing, he began to watch Rinsaria, washing dishes in the professor’s kitchen, standing on a chair cleaning the glass of the vitrines. He felt she needed to be freed from such petty bourgeois preoccupations and be returned to her own country where she could go naked and repudiate the Christian God. Hans, though intelligent, allowed his lechery to overturn his knowledge. The fact that Rinsaria could speak English and German and had a Spanish name and possessed parents who were caretakers of the Santa Maria Chapel in Montedore, did not seem to distract him from thinking of her as a native girl fresh out of the high and windy mountains of a country of bright colours, simple passions and a contemplative life watching the clouds and counting the butterflies. Hans could be said to have fallen passionately in love with Rinsaria. His dreams of her and an escape to an impossible Latin-American paradise became one. His unrequited love deeply disturbed his common-sense, threw his normal caution into disarray and upset his balance. After observing Rinsaria tipping the gravel out of the professor’s turn-ups, plucking the hairs from the professor’s nostrils, and sitting astride his thin naked knees in the bathroom as he sat on the toilet, he denounced Rinsaria to the Gestapo as being Jewish. What on earth he hoped to gain but further misery was impossible to say. The professor were sent to Triblinka accused of fornicating with a Jewish woman. Rinsaria was imprisoned for further investigation. Hans was giving the task of collecting up all the gold items and having them smelted down to help the German war effort. This was the final blow to his sanity; to have lost his love, his job, his professor and now to be obliged to smelt away such valuable and beautiful cultural artefacts turned his mind. He carefully collected the Mayan and Aztec gold items in three sacks and took them to three football fields on the outskirts of the city and buried them in three separate places. And then he committed suicide. He took his bicycle to the top of the tallest building in Cologne and rode it around and around in ever widening circles, until on the edge of dizzy insensibilty he ran himself over the edge.
The first sack of gold was easily found. The second was unearthed when the field was re-grassed in the 1950s, and the third was never recovered. The first sack contained all the evidence of Hans’s sensuous dream of an imagined Indian Paradise -  the curled golden snakes and the big breasted golden women with wide smiles, and the golden flying birds with singing mouths and the golden children sleeping on palm leaves and the golden tortoises and the golden long-eared warrior with the pierced nose and the upstanding joyous penis that Hans himself imagined he could have with Rinsaria - all these items of a South American Heaven found their way to German Baden-Baden and the cauldron. One anonymous rectangular bar of this vanished  treasure found its way to Bolzano thanks to the desire of a German army officer in April 1945 to rediscover a paradise for his daughter.
Thinking of South American gold, look at the ring on your finger, or if you do not wear jewellery, the ring on your neighbour’s finger as you sit in a tram or bus or plane. The chances are almost certain  that the ring will contain some Aztec or Mayan gold. There is only so much gold in the world. Harpsch’s brother-in-law in the Baden-Baden bank had read that if all the usuable gold in the world were to be collected together in one place it would only make a cube of 60 metres by 60 metres by 60 metres, which if you think of it, is really not so large. So much of this gold came from South America.  And so much of it travelled east in the 16th and 17th century to be melted down and refashioned immediately. Think what a mighty thesarus of finely conceived, beautifully wrought artifacts representing hundreds of years of cultural discovery, knowledge and pleasure has been melted away like a mountain of ice perishing in the desert. The Spaniard Pizarro saw only yellow metal, he did not see Hans’s Heaven.
Like his second buried sack of gold, it was the mid-1950s before Hans’s body was found. With his bicycle he had fallen into a blocked alleyway between two buildings, a sort of space that architects pretended did not exist because it embarassed ancient rights or made their symmetrical drawings asymmetrical. Hans had been a  thin boy and the smell of his decay had not been noted.
 

GOLD
46 – A family heritage
To protect her family’s heritage, Valery’s grandmother had laid a curse on all those who might mistreat, sell or otherwise disturb the integrity of her jewelry collection. Under no condition whatsoever was it to leave the family. Misfortune would befall the family if it should do so. It did and it did.  It did leave the family and misfortune indeed befell.
In September 1938, three days before Crystal night, when more glass was broken in five hours than had ever before in the history of the world been broken in five hours, a policeman took his terrier for a walk. The terrier was a plump bitch called Cockducker because she refused to be take any interest whatsoever in sexual congress. She had soft eyes, an attractive rump, a discreet anus under a high-pitched tail, and broken patch of brown fur over her eyes that looked like a blindfold. Policeman and bitch walked along the Gabrielstrasse into the comfortable leafy streets of the new housing estate of Midelhausen across the river in East Troysburg. The bitch urinated against the hedge of number 33 Gabrielstrasse right next to the synagogue with the hooded porch and the purple-tiled roof. The policemen, idly looking in the uncurtained window of the front-room of number 33, saw Joachim, Valery’s elder brother, counting money on the green table-cloth between the silver cruet and three beer bottles.
On Crystal Night, three evenings later, the policeman took advantage of circumstances, and, treading gingerly over the glittering, glistening, sparkling pavements of glass , broke into number 33 Gabrielstrasse, to discover Valery, Joachim, Gabriel, Maisie, Stephanie, Claus and Herman in the act of trying to hide the family jewelry. All were arrested, and at the police-station, a terrified Valery was forced to pull a gold necklace from her vagina, where she had sought very uncomfortably to have hidden her grandmother’s most favoured possession. Twenty-seven gold pieces of early 18th century jewelry, a gold goblet from the Napoleonic period, and a gold paper-weight in the shape of the Statue of Liberty, were confiscated. Joachim was given a receipt of pink paper. On it was scribbled “Jewish Jewelry” in such a way as to make the two words into one word. This was accompanied by an illegible signature. Joachim’s grand-daughter, a receptionist at the Jewish Museum on 87 Street East, New York, had the pink paper framed in a gold frame in 1983, and she clamped it with magnets  to the door of her  refrigerator. Domestic history on ice.
In company with some twenty gold rings and a gold-handled paper-knife, this family’s inheritance was smeltered in a small furnace at Frinkel into a gold bar standard-number FRT 45042, and passed from the Gestapo headquarters at Hanse to Golotche, and to a bank at Gossering from where it was collected by the sergeant attached to Lieutenant’s Harpsch’s company, who signed for it, looping his Ps with great flourishes. He rarely had an opportunity to use his signature officially. It was very easily legible, and became an interesting, though not particularly valuable, court document.
Because of Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch’s bizarre behaviour, this gold bar ended up finally with 91 other gold bars in two black leather suitcases in a crashed Mercedes car, license plate number TL 9246, discovered abandoned at the road-side near Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they could not make a good spaghetti.
And the grandmother’s curse prevailed. All the family were murdered  at Troysberg. Valery disappeared. She had been a beautiful woman with fine legs, and the most perfectly arching eyebrows. It was believed that the three policemen who had witnessed her recovering the jewelry from her person, had become excited, and had taken her to a bar or a restaurant or a field. She was never seen again. Gabriel was shot in the head. Maisie was shot in the head. Stephanie was shot in the head. Claus was shot in the head. Herman was shot in the head.  Joachim was shot in the belly. He lingered with a bullet in his abdomen for seven hours in a trench of bodies unable to free his legs from under a stout women who was not his wife, and with whom his face almost had carnal relations. He was finally buried with composted leaves in his mouth and violent spasms in his lungs, when they shovelled nitrogeneously-rich soil into the trench that has subsequenty nurtured a fine grove of beechtrees that appear in a photograph that celebrates Troysberg as winner of the 1957 competition for Most Beautiful Village of South Westphalia. If the bitch Cockducker had whelped, her male offspring could almost have certainly made use of this line of fine trees. The policeman died peacefully in bed in 1989 wearing a new pair of blue and white Marks and Spencer pyjamas. His daughter lived in Hammersmith, London, and regularly sent her parents good-quality, inexpensive night-clothes and underwear.
 
 

GOLD
47 – Burnt hands
Screaming, Lazlo Kreckner ran into the hospital in Provo Street, Magdeberg. He had burnt his hands smelting gold. His big hands looked like red gloves decorated with casual golden stitches and random shining studs. The nurses tried to remember the name of the man whose touch had turned everything to gold; it could be said literally that Lazlo Kreckner was a man with a golden touch. The tips of his fingers were like golden thimbles.
Lazlo died. They said he was in so much pain his corpse continued to scream after death and his hands stretched and flexed under the shroud. The police went to his home and found his makeshift kiln. It was fired by four gas jets conducted by rubber pipes from his cooking stove to focus their fierce heat on a single cast iron pot. The whole apparatus was still blazing, but lying on its side on a paving-stone Lazlo had stolen from the street. It was a wonder that the house had not caught fire. Some of the former gold contents that had not decorated Lazlo’s hands, were spattered across the floor and lay in burnt holes on the chequered red and white lino; the gold beads and gold driblets were playing chess. A pile of gold wedding rings and golden bracelets lay on the kitchen table in a brown paper bag.
Lazlo Kreckner had made his gold collection by preying on the cemetery visitors in the graveyards of Magdeberg. These visitors were largely bereaved Jewish widows kneeling beside graves, straightening the flowers, weeding the soil under the marble chips, wiping the rain splashes from the polished travertine and porphyry, filling their watering-cans at the communal taps at the end of the tree-lined gravel paths in the drifting clouds of fireweed seeds. Lazlo had scared the occasional gentile, but jewesses, who would not wish to be noticed screaming and drawing attention to themselves, were easy prey. The weapon of persuasion was seldom resisted. It was the threat of tomb desecration, not necessarily at that moment, but later; perhaps that night when the widow was in her bed with the cat asleep on the counterpane. Lazlo sometimes idly just happened to be carrying a large hammer in his big red hands. And he would tap gently on the nearest gravestone with its large metal head.
Magdeburg Jewish widows could now rest in peace at the thought that the Kreckner blackmailer was dead, and perhaps they could rejoice that he was dead but not at peace. But a policeman sent to investigate a desecrated grave and its weeping widow who still had her wedding ring on her finger, was interested in the idea of creating a copycat adventure. But he never tried to smelt down his captured trinkets. He sensibly took them to a jewel smith, and together they made a small fortune and retired after the war, with their wives and Pomeranian poodles, to the Canary Isles.
The Provo Street Hospital nurses scraped the drops and driblets of gold from Lazlo’s fingers and from under his blackened fingernails, and they put them in a wine-glass to view it with all the attention that a wineglass gives to its contents. They put the wine-glass on a window-sill in the restroom, washed their hands with carbolic soap and they went home.  In the morning the wine-glass and its contents had gone. They had been taken by a radiologist, who exchanged them for a breakfast of bacon and eggs in the English style at a corner cafe. The cafe proprietor kept them in his display case among the other curiosities he had there like an American helmet, an African bible with date-wood covers, a mummified foot and a human tattoo soaked in brown alcohol. Then he lost his license to sell schnapps and abandoned his cafe to tramps and the bombed homeless who stripped his cafe of saleable items, and Lazlo’s gold found a new home in a perambulator along with twenty candlesticks in a jeweller’s shop. The gold was later accumulated in a munitions box, smelted into several gold bars, and one of these Gustav Harpsch later commandeered from Vault Three of his brother-in-law’s bank in Baden-Baden  to take on an unsuccessful trip to Bolzano where a good spaghetti-dish is a scarce commodity.
 

GOLD
48 – Euthanasia
A white truck painted with two red crosses drove down a gravel path through the woods and pulled up in a clearing above the lake where children were swimming. The driver took a short length of flexible silver pipe from under his seat, walked around to the back of the truck, and fixed the pipe to the exhaust.
Without turning off the engine, and leaving the door to his driver’s seat open, the driver took a red thermos flask and a white metal box and walked a hundred yards to a fallen tree trunk and sat with his back to the truck, and ate his lunch in the sunshine watching the children splashing and shouting in the lake. It was one of the first really warm days of Spring. He only once briefly looked back at the white truck that was shaking violently with some movement inside. He ate his sandwiches, drank his tea and looked at his watch. The children in the lake were swimming naked. They looked like small white frogs, or crocus bulbs kept too long out of the sun. He pushed  the white paper that had wrapped his sandwiches into a hole in the tree-trunk, urinated where he stood, and returned to the truck which was now still and quiet. He shook the last drops of tea from his flask, unscrewed the silver pipe from the exhaust, placed it under his driver’s seat, and he drove back to the clinic. His name was Hans.
The two spina bifida patients, the polio cripple, the congenital encephalitis patients, the three Down’s syndrome babies, the Turrette Syndrome elderly man, the epileptic woman, an elderly blind and deaf woman, an incipient hermaphrodite child with a cleft palate, and the girl who had tried to commit suicide by slitting her wrists when abandoned by her elderly lover, had been wearing clinical gowns which could hide or conceal very little.  Nonetheless Hans the driver, with Claris the medical orderly, looked the bodies over as they off-loaded them from the white truck marked with the two red crosses. The image of white frogs or crocus bulbs kept too long out of the Spring sunshine, again sprang to Hans’s mind.  In five minutes they had added two St Christopher medals, a gold crucifix and a gold identity bracelet to their collection of gold trinkets in the bottom drawer of Hans’ locker.
Hans made three trips a day. There was the morning trip to the tourist spot overlooking the river, the lunchtime trip to the woods above the lake, and the afternoon trip to the deserted and unfinished boulevard at Glistwasser. That is 18 trips a week. Then every Wednesday evening Hans drove his white medical truck to the jewellers in Dessau. He and Claris collected a single gold bar from the jewellers every three weeks. This continued to be a regular practice for 18 months. Then Hans’ wife became pregnant and gave birth to a Down’s Syndrome baby. Hans’ wife refused to let Hans park the white truck outside their house anymore. Three months later Hans and his wife separated. She went back to Dusseldorf to live with her widowed mother, taking her son and a gold bar from Hans’s lock-up trunk in the garden shed. Three months later she tried to commit suicide by drinking lye. She was stopped from emptying the whole bottle by her mother, but she was incurably damaged, bed-ridden, incontinent, paralysed. Hans’s mother-in-law negotiated with a retired waitress to live-in as a permanent nurse to look after her daughter and grandson. The gold bar found its way to the Deutche Bank and was taken to Baden-Baden sometime in 1943, where it became part of Harpsch’s surety for intended happiness.
Hans enlisted as a tank-driver. He was caught in the blast from a gas explosion. He was blinded, deafened and his lungs were scorched. He spent the rest of his life in a clinic in Brandenburg.
Six months after Hans’s military accident, the Euthanasia Action Programme, code-named T4 after its initial address in Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin-Charlottenburg, was disbanded. But by then a minimum of 70,000 individuals had been subjected to medical euthanasia.
 

GOLD
49 – The Italian Letter-writers
The Fetterling family of Lausanne were great letter-writers. They wrote in Italian to their relatives in Friuli and the Veneto. The contents of the letters was private, gossipy and could tell you much about Jewish bourgeois life practised by Jewish families who rarely advertised their Jewishness. In 1931, after Forte Fetterling lost his teaching job, and his two sons were persuaded to leave their school, because their penises were circumcised and their noses hooked, grandfather Horeing Fetterling decided to bury his valuables. He needed to communicate the whereabouts of his hiding place to his family so he sent out coded messages in his copious correspondence.  He had sufficient children and sufficient grandchildren to make a description of the hiding place by using the initials of their first names. This amateur code was broken by an inspired and energetic young blackshirt in the offices of the Heidenburg Sewing Machine Company at Innsbruck. He was interested in calligraphy and palaeography, had theories about the writings of great men, had read all Goethe’s letters in handwritten facsimile, and wanted to work in a great library after the war had been won, perhaps in Munich or better still in Berlin. He wanted to sit in a musty room with a shaft of sunlight illuminating a stream of golden dust particles, just like those streams of sunlight illuminated golden dust particles in the photographs of Central New York Railway station to be seen in illegal American copies of the Saturday Evening Post magazine. He imagined he would have access to a solid wooden chair with lion’s heads on the arm-rests which would be set before a broad table lit with a green-shaded lamp, with a most simple bottle labelled Evian at his side which would contain water collected from slowly melting glaciers in the French Alps. Before him would be 18th century manuscripts full of commentaries it would be his responsibility to update according to how ideas were going in 20th century Germany. But that was all in the future. Save it was not in the future because there was not going to be a future for this ambitious bookish blackshirt, because he was going to be stabbed in the groin between urethea and anus by a revengeful Russian whose wife had been treated in much the same way in a village near Smolensk by six German youthful soldiers keen to see how they could be sadistic. Their idea of sadism was literary, their attempts to put it into realism had been messy.
The discovered 72 jewellery-items of the Lausanne Fetterling family were inventoried in the pocket-book of inspector Helmut Enschede, and packed carefully in tissue paper of three colours in a diplomatic bag sent to the German Embassy in Geneva. Helmut Enschede  selected one item for himself. It was a brooch in the shape of a skull and cross-bones made in Paris in 1888, the year Helene Gosidore auctioned the jewels given to her by Cabinet Minister Pichet for services to his body wounded in the 1871 Franco-Prussian war on the steps of Strasbourg cathedral. This skull and cross-bones in gold may have been part of that Parisian sale.
The Fetterling gold was made into one slightly overweight gold bar, subsequently stamped twice with the mark DRE 16 and the mark DRE 17 and dated GE03 44 - Geneva March 1944. The bar was sewn into the tails of a leather coat worn by a bank manager of the Dresden Bank until he was discovered by a hat-check girl in a Berlin restaurant who dropped the coat and was intrigued by a loud clang of metal. The bank manager was arrested for embezzlement and possibly because his name was Dortelmaus. The name caused amusement, and amusement was rare in the Praedstrasse police-station. The police sergeant wanted to see the face that fitted the name. The gold was appropriated. The bank manager bargained for a quick release by giving up his stolen gold to his captors as a personal gift. The bar were sent to the gold clearing centre at Baden-Baden, and from there, found its way by now well-known routes to the Mercedes car on the tree-lined country-road outside Bolzano, the one place in all Italy where they could not make good spaghetti.
 

GOLD
50 – Jackdaw gold
The church of St Maria del Carmine at Acresotia on the German-Polish border, had 6th Century foundations, a bell tower with 9th Century stonework, a 13th Century nave, 14th and 15th Century chapels, a 17th Century reconstructed rose window, 18th Century tombs and its 15th Century hammerbeam roof had been refashioned and renovated every century; there had been restorative painting work completed in 1923 and 1929. And the church had toilets, one for men and one for women. Few churches have toilets. The church was proudly cherished.
In January 1940, in revenge for the shooting of four German officers who had bullied the owner of a local hostelry and raped his 16 year old daughter, the 117 men of the parish of St Maria del Carmine, their wives, daughters, children and babies were rounded up along with the men, wives, daughters, children and babies of seven Jewish families, and locked in the church which was set alight. It burned for two days.
Some 90 of the villagers had crowded around the altar, another 35 had sheltered in the vestry, 27 stood before the west door and 15 huddled in the chapel dedicated to St Lawrence, an ancient martyr who had been toasted to death on a griddle over a slow fire to be subsequently cherished as the patron saint of firemen. Two women and a child had sheltered in the toilet for men, and three children had sheltered in the toilet for women. The hammerbeam roof had fallen in, the walls had glowed, sparks had flown up into the winter night sky and had scorched the leafless trees. A side door had burst open with a roar and a blast of light had blown out to scorch five tombs, melt their metal work and calcify their scrolls and cupids and deathsheads to a yellow chalky dust.
Five days after the massacre by fire, three small children dodged the dozing German sentries that sat under the ruined arch that used to be the doorway to the St Lawrence chapel, and watched three jackdaws pick through the ashes. These birds, who habitually delight in shiny objects, had found gold.
The jackdaw is not a unique speicies in the world of birds at being attracted to shiny objects, especially at times of mating and nesting. There are theories that the male birds of such species use pieces of coloured stone, bright petals and brightly coloured fragments of china, tile, plastic, metal, silver paper and ribbon to demonstrate superior magnificence by proxy in order to attract a mate or impress a male rival into submission as regards a mate or a territory for mating and then nesting. A dull-coloured bird or a dark-coloured bird or a bird with a modest vocal attraction, or a bird that habitually favours a shadowy environment like a forest floor, might use the shiny objects as a substitute for bright feathers or decorated feathers or a complex feathered plummage. The European jackdaw is certainly a dark bird; it has a general black plumage and an even blacker poll to its head.
The gold was not from the church altar furniture. As soon as war had been declared, the church monstrances, chalices, censors, candlesticks, metal-bound breviaries and crucifixes had been taken to caves to the north of the village, and buried in places that the occupying forces had never discovered despite torturing the deacon and the deacon’s wife, neice, aunt, grandmother, daughter and grand-daughter. Nor was the gold melted down from an isolated gold watch chain, or a single wedding-ring, or an lone earring.  It was a hoard of Jewish gold.
Seven Jewish families had come to Acrestocia in 1865 from Poland. They were travelling to London via Vienna, Munich, Lyons and Paris in a bid to set up a fur and fancy goods trade in Bethnal Green in the City of London, but their carriage had become unhitched from the rest of the train on the rail-line just outside Acrestocia. It could have been sabotage, the line was unpopular among farmers. The farmers’ wives believed the smoke poisoned the cattle and flavoured the local soft cheeses, and the train shaking the rails would bring on avalanches in winter.  But it was probably an accident of bad coupling at Lepageon. The carriage was dragged by ropes and horses off the main line onto a side-track, and the seven foreign Jewish families stayed in the carriage six days and worshipped the Sabbath there on the seventh. A Jewish wife gave birth to twins there, a Jewish patriarch died there. Two children became healthy there after two years of whooping cough. Perhaps it was the effects of the cold dry mountain air, or the smell of pine-resin. Despite the Polish Jews transitory state, important domestic life had intervened; the place had been introduced to their births and their deaths. The Jews felt blessed and they stayed. They sold some of their goods, built wooden houses that looked like Polish wooden houses, worked hard, were very polite, good at medicine, learnt the local dialects diligently, wrote letters, even made one or two conversions. They prospered. They made money which they immediately converted into gold valuables.  Five generations after their arrival they were well-off, respected, respectable. They never banked their valuables. At the German round-up in the village, not thinking a Christian church was for them, but an imminent journey was being prepared, they were very surprised when they were herded away from the railway station where they thought they would be continuing the journey their ancestors had abandoned eighty years before. As a consequence of their expectations, they had filled their pockets with golden trinkets, they had sewn their rings into their leather overcoats, they had packed small suitcases with brooches and bracelets, and they had folded necklaces in among the books, underwear and goat cheese sandwiches. The Polish jews had perished, their bodies reduced to an ash totally indistinguisable from the ash of Gentiles. Their gold had gone through a transmutation as a result of the great fire. Perhaps it could be said that the Polish jewish gold had been ultimately smelted by the heat generated by the proximity of the Polish Jewish burning flesh.
The children watching the jackdaws were delighted to see two shining pieces of metal transported through the air to a distant beech tree. The jackdaws habitually nested in the church tower, but the church tower had gone, its bricks, heated to exceedingly high temperatures, had crumbled. The jackdaws had been quick to change their nesting habits. They were adaptable birds. The children walked among the ash and the scorched wood and had made a collection and kept it from their parents whose state of shock and mourning made them oblivious to a great deal going on around them. The children wore the shiny misshapen pieces of gold like war medals, until they were inevitably discovered and confiscated. The ruins were searched to find more. They discovered three hundred grams of prime gold. Money was urgently needed and few questions were asked. The gold pieces were taken to a smelter in Graven and hastily sold to a branch of the Deutches Bank. The bank shared out its gold bullion across the country. The Jackdaw Gold, for that is what it now was called, went to Baden-Baden, and Gustav Harpsch retreived it from Vault Three to take it to Switzerland to pay for his three-year old daughter’s release. Gustav Harpsch was dressed in a dark blue uniform, his gold gave him glamour and shine.
GOLD
51 –  The golden bookshop
When the ghetto at Groningen was cleared in April 1941, it was estimated that three million marks-worth of gold bullion was confiscated from the Jewish families who had lived in the ghetto’s three streets and forty-eight houses. A great deal of the gold had been hidden in hollowed-out books kept in the bookshop of Hellas Dedee. Dedee kept an account of his “golden books”  in his book-keeping inventory, marking the entries with the initials of the owners, all of whom, without exception, he had known since childhood. Occasionally there were very small crosses to indicate exceptional value, and circles to indicate shared ownership, and small squares to indicate that the owner of the gold was dead. As a small irony, but also to throw possible meddlers off the scent, for who would think a Jew would keep his gold in association with heresy, Dedee hid most of the gold on the shelves titled Christian Theology.  It is true that a gold tiara, an Empress Josephine necklace and a Spanish Charles V bracelet which was supposedly an item of booty from the sack of Rome of 1527, were discovered in the Culinary Section. The last two items were hidden amongst books on the baking of bread with yeast, another ironic comment perhaps on both rising wealth and Gentile practices.
Whatever the amusement value of a secret code, in the end complications of librarianship and the exhibition of irony exploded the treasury. For by chance an Anabaptist Sunday School teacher, looking for a biography of Luther, came across in the wrong place, on the wrong shelf, a most unexpected item, a 1623 New Testament in Hebrew, which contained, within the pages expressly cut to hold it, a christian gold cross.
Niceties of scholarship mingled with reactionary ignorance and sheer malevolence in the mind of the Sunday School teacher created the feeling that some sort of blasphemy had been committed. Perhaps it was blind and wrong-headed thinking because of unadulterated spite and naked revenge, for the National Socialists had sent most Anabaptists to work-camps in Poland. The Sunday School teacher was firing on all cylinders at all imagined enemies. And as a result Dedee was shot on the road to Aduard as a thief and a Jew, which for his widow was a surprise because she had expected the citation to read a Jew and a thief.
The confiscated bibliographical hoard, since it was found to be so apparently rich in Christian trinkets, was offered to the Groningen Museum, but the collection was refused as historically valueless, and it lay in a below-street-level vault opposite the university throughout the summer of 1943 still packed inside those books Dedee had ordained as its hiding-place, all arranged neatly in five book-shop wooden trunks. The entire collection only arrived  in the gold smelting works in Baden-Baden by a mistake that Dedee would have enjoyed. Three of the trunks had labels which read in English, “A Golden Treasury of English Poetry”. A part-time teacher of Physical Training had been coerced from the University gymnasium to help clear the vault after a flood had been caused by students determined to turn the basement into a swimming-pool on the Queen’s Birthday. The Physical Training instructor, lifting a wooden trunk with a certain bravado designed to impress his students, had become excited by the word “golden”, one of the few English words he could recognise and understand.
The Groningen hoard was smelted down probably in the May of 1944 and several were exchanged for American dollars via the Deutche Bank in Baden-Baden. One bar from this transaction found its way into the collection of Gustav Harpsch, and with the 91 other gold bars, it was part of the discovery of gold bullion found in the black Mercedes car, license plate number TL 9246, abandoned at the road-side at Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they could not cook you a good spaghetti for gold or any other currency.
GOLD
52 – Magritte’s businessman
Magnus Schulman carried his family jewels to his office in Antwerp everyday in his black briefcase for fear of leaving them at home to be stolen. He persistently retained a great fear of returning to his house to find the front door open, the coat-rack thrown down, the kitchen window smashed, his desk ransacked, his cat strangled with the curtain-cord, and human faeces on his bed.
Magnus set out from his second floor apartment above the tailors in Erminstraat everyday at 8.05 to catch the 8.27 train to Bruges. He wore a bowler hat and carried a black briefcase and sometime when the sky was overcast, he carried a black umbrella. He smoked a pipe and his regular tobacco was The Hard Black Cedar Number Three from Milwaukee. He always walked down Aeschelstraat, crossed the Achenplein, crossed through the Turpinallee and entered the station near the van Clopoon Hotel.
In the end attack came from another direction. Magnus was mugged at the railway-station. His gold was sold cheaply on the black-market, but bought by a Jewish widow who read of the attack in her newspaper in Brussels. She returned the considerable golden collection to Magnus who gave her a reward. But the whole transaction had been monitored by informers, and the gold was appropriated all over again, because Magnus still persisted in carrying his golden valuables with him to the office. This time it was soldiers in uniform who confiscated it. It was a semi-freelance operation masterminded under official army sponsorship but carried out illegally. Magnus’s gold joined other illegally confiscated gold collections and was put on a goods train to Berlin where at the Hamburger Banhoff Railway Station, on the evening of 28th February a large shipment of cooking oil held in metal containers overheated and blew up. The area was cordoned off by the army, and the wreckage minutely examined and pieces of gold were picked out of the tangle of the railway tracks and overhead wires, but 2000 grams of gold were never recovered. Perhaps they had effervesced or scattered themselves thinly over the trees and facades of the buildings to be somehow re-absorbed. How could you recover such a thin mist of golden particles?
It is needless to say that Gustav Harpsch benefitted indirectly from these events, or why else does this story appear in this collection?
There was an official investigation of the event. There were contradictions. It was declared that those responsible were not German soldiers, but Belgians. Five German soldiers overnight had their nationality forcibly changed, and a solution was found to court-martial them and threaten them with the firing squad unless the gold was replaced. An impossible task. Two of the soldiers fled to Amsterdam, one committed suicide, one apparently went mad, shaving his face to the bone. The fifth soldier nonchalantly opened a grocer’s shop and promised to pay back the debt in instalments. This soldier’s uncle was Admiral Wilkerstein and this soldier was permitted to resume his German identity, but he was persuaded to leave the army where he officially had never been a soldier, and he was obliged to change the name above his shop-front to Muller.  He was left in peace and his debt annulled as an act of clemency on Hitler’s next birthday.
And what of Magnus Schulman? He disappears from history. There is no shop named after any pseudonym he wished to imagine.  It is believed that he might have travelled to Switzerland, where he possibly may have married an upholsterer’s daughter. But Magnus Schulman had indeed unknowingly made his mark on posterity. Without remotely comprehending it, Magnus Schulman had been the model for Magritte’s archetypal businessman. Magritte, himself an early riser and man of very regular habits, rented a studio at number 15 Aeschelstraat. Magnus Schulman had walked passed his studio window every day for three years. In the summer the studio window was open on to the street, and Magritte had regularly smelt Magnus Schulman’s tobacco - The Hard Black Cedar Number Three from Milwaukee.
It is salutary to think that every businessman in a Magritte painting  - and there are a great many - is carrying gold in his briefcase. It has been calculated that Magritte unknowingly painted seventeen million dollars worth of invisible gold at 1940s New York stock-market prices.
 

GOLD
53 – Passports to Vespuccio, Haden and Erehwon
Jewish lower middle-class professionals went to Achim Loacher in Raphaelstrasse in Bremen in the late 1930s to have their false passports manufactured and their imitation visas updated in readiness for escape when the time came. Achim insisted on being paid in gold. He too wished to prepare himself for escape when the time came.
He was ready to manufacture papers that took anyone anywhere. He could make out German transit papers to Madagascar where every German bureaucrat seemed to have plans to send Jews, and to Shanghai, where visas for incoming European Jews were unnecessary; to Spain whose persecution of Jewish minorities had been hesitating in an evasive and unadvertised way between stop and go since Ferdinand and Isabella kicked out Islam; to Portugal which scarcely had an immigration policy; to England which made promises that a certain number of children would be welcomed and accepted, but their parents would not, which was known to be impractical, heart-breaking and derisory; to Palestine who had an open door but closed shop policy; to Wales who thought all foreign Jews were ice-cream selling Italians; to San Martino which, for a population of 200,000 was generous to receive 2,000 Jews with or without passports; to Canada whose geographical spaces needed filling, and to America whose Ellis Island days were over in letter if not in spirit, and where you might be persuaded to change your name to something pronounceable.
Jews were great travellers. Achim Loacher’s grandmother had been a great Jewish traveller. She had been born in Warsaw, a large lady with needles in her hair and only one eye and a propensity to pass wind and say,
 “There goes another angel Achim. Now I only have another eleven left.”
It was always the same.  Always eleven angels remaining. Maybe it was a reference to the tribes of Israel. Achim asked her the inevitable arithmetical question one day, as they walked hand in hand down the Raphaelstrasse.
“ How many angels do I have left?”
“ Twelve,” she said. “ Because little boys’ farts do not count until they get married”.
Achim knew Raphael was an angel. Perhaps Raphael had been a boy, though he was pretty sure he had not got married. Putting all things together, Achim, walking down the  Raphaelstrasse, was certain there had to be twelve angels hereabouts dying to fart but not having the correct license. He looked around. He did not see one and he had been looking ever since. Achim grew up to be a large man. He had his grandmother’s bones. When he walked down the street, people watched him. He was out of the ordinary in size. Could he be an angel? He doubted whether large angels were valid, but he still asked himself the necessary question. Would he ever get married to change the nature of his farts? Would be ever get married? There were lots of mysteries in the world.  It must be confessed that Achim himself decided to add more. He backed up his work of manufacturing passports and forging visas with what he called voluntary supplimentaries. If he was fascinated by the currently commissioned forgery from an ambitious banker’s clerk, or the wife of dentist’s assistant, he would often throw in several voluntary supplimentaries. He might write six bogus letters from relatives in six foreign languages, he might invent imagined Australian business associates, and he might conjure up distant cousins who lived as guests of the Egyptian royal family. He more than once invented letters from the dead. He was an expert, greatly in love with his job, playing word games, letter games, games with places of double meaning, treble meaning and no meaning at all. It was he who introduced the idea in the German Post Office that Thrall was a place in Transylvania where unaddressed parcels would naturally gravitate. If he lived in the 16th century he would have been applauded as the most imaginative of cabbalists. But all this time, it must be admitted, he was not unmindful that his little pile of gold was growing.
He did not forget the deeply unfortunate. To those who had nowhere to run to, he made out transit papers to three imaginary places. First there was a country called Vespuccio, which had characteristics which perhaps were the very opposite of those of the country named after that Italian merchant’s christian name. There was a city called Haden and there was an island called Erehwon. He backed up the authenticity of these places with invented correspondence, franked envelopes and imaginatively designed postage stamps. He gave his clients hope. They whispered knowingly to their neighbours in the street.
“We are going to Vespuccio where they grow keywee-fruit, which is a sort of dark-green jam-damson, only sweet, with black seeds inside instead of stones”
“We are going to Haden where Catholics are unknown, well, at least Catholics who acknowledge Rome, are unknown.”
“What is a morimeter? Achim says all Hadeans carry morimeters and not just when it’s raining. Do you think they are like umbrellas? Can I buy a morimeter in Bremen?”
Achim had wanted to be a seriously published Jewish writer. That   seemed now to be increasingly unlikely, so his writing skills were put to other uses. But Achim was also a mournful man, because more than part of him hated himself for what he was now doing. He was helping to empty Europe of Jews. Who was worse, he asked himself, Adolf or Achim? At the rate he was working, he might be sending more Jews into exile than Hitler, making the rest of the world richer, and Europe poorer. To compensate himself a little for these thoughts, he insisted on shaking the hand of every one of his clients; it was a sentimental personal touch. And dangerous. It was like a Judas kiss. Too bad. If these fellow Jews were to be exiles from Europe, he at least wanted to shake their hands and make an official good-bye. No one else would. He had a massive handshake. His enthusiasm for saying good-bye could result in crushed fingers. He suggested shaking hands at two handshake addresses. One on the corner of Raphaelstrasse where his grandmother had once counted the farts of angels, and the second on the pedestrian bridge of Bremen Central Railway Station, a useful vantage-point to watch his fellow Jews depart to the edges of the world with the passports he had so skilfully provided.
Achim had an unscheduled meeting in a bar with a Jew who behaved suspiciously like an amateur informer. This man wanted a visa for travel in the Black Forest, which was stupid because the Black Forest was German already. Unless of course there was another Black Forest Achim had not heard of, or he had been slow and not discovered yet another National Socialist Directive that said that forests had been blacked to Jews, which was not such an impossible directive in the Third Reich. He had to be careful. Perhaps it was a trap. In the event he pretended to go along with the man’s wishes. He manufactured the papers and went to Bremen Central Railway Station and stood on the pedestrian bridge over Platform Eleven, wreathed in white steam and smoke, watching the Jews get on trains to places he had glamourised and places he had rediscovered and places he had re-invented. One family had been sold four tickets to Erehwon via Tenerife, with an onward connection to Haden in a reserved second class carriage with window-seats. They saw him and waved to him, big smiles on their expectant faces. Achim watched Jews board trains as though they were going on holiday.
Achim was standing there, appearing and then disappearing in the damp white smokey cloud, looking half bear and half angel, waiting for his Black Forest client, when the storm troopers came to arrest him to take him to a country he certainly did not know. They said the passports you needed to go there would be covered in blood from the back of your eyes, and spattered with the spittle that had been coughed up from your lungs. The visas to this new country would certainly be drowned in tears. Besides they said he was too big a man to be a normal German. He was bodily too conspicuous. They would have to cut him down severely to turn him into a proper German. They stripped him and rubber-stamped him all over, and pasted him with his own acid-free glue and stuck him all over with his imaginary stamps and his inventive letters. They cut off his nimble fingers, the fingers that had sent so many Jews to so many Paradises, and they wrapped up each finger in brown paper, tied it around and around with string, and got him to hold out his bloodied tongue so he could lick a stamp which they fixed on the brown paper, and they took him down to the post-box and got him to post his fingers to himself. Then they started on his toes and eyed his big friendly penis. But they grew tired. They found other victims to torture. They left his big body in an untidy mess for the cattle-truck journey. And when they got him to Dauchau, they squeezed him, still a big man despite the missing pieces, into the biggest oven. The oven was hot but it was not at full strength. Achim sizzled and bubbled for ten minutes and then he died. He certainly went to Erehwon. Poor giant with a heart of gold. We weep for him even now.
Achim’s collected gold fees received the heat treatment too. All those Jewish travel arrangements ended in a gold bar in the back of Harpsch’s borrowed Mercedes, spilled out on the black upholstery. Achim’s gold, it could be calculated, had travelled to 92 cities from Baden-Baden to Bolzano. We could make you a list. In the spirit of Achim’s inventiveness, trying to reconstruct Harpsch’s last journey, let us at least make you a list of 23 places, a quarter of the places the gold travelled to, and let us make all these places be initialled with the letter B, starting of course with Baden-Baden and finishing with Bolzano. Respecting Achim’s inventiveness, one or two of the place names may be a little fictitious, and could be decorated with some hearsay evidence.
There was Baden-Baden itself, a spa-town, a paradise for arthritics and a sanctuary for the bored, and there was Buhl, bombed and burning when Harpsch approached it from the North, and Bahlingen, noted for its toffee which you could smell on the evening wind, and Botzingen full of evacuated children wearing red berets captured from a French convent school, and Breisach where von Ribbentrop married his first wife in the Hockmeister Chapel, and Bad Krozingen where the spa-water tastes like cod-liver oil, and Buggingen where Harpsch had to change a flat tyre in the rain, and Bolintent where there is a park full of Monkey Puzzle trees planted by the English botanist Edward Hooker, and Bad Bellingen where William Tell embarrassed the King of Piedmont, and Basel famous for being undecided whether to be Swiss or German or French, and Bern that had an observatory whose viewing apparatus had delighted Schiller, and Beauvais where the local costume twinkled with mirrors, and Blesson where they ate a cake made of goat’s cheese, and Blouseenvaix, where the roads are very narrow on account of the overhanging houses, and Bleek in whose gambling house Stendhal lost the shirt from his back and walked home bare-chested, and Beaune where they say it could be paradise because the women are so beautiful you never see them, and Beaux where they wear springs on their shoes to see over their neighbour’s walls, and Brig who celebrate Mayday by asking a maiden to ride naked three times around the cathedral on a white horse decorated with pink ribbons, and Bellinzona where snow in the early winter is sometimes pink because the Virgin in menarche rides overhead on St Joseph’s day, and Bellagio on Lake Como were the Roman general Belasarius was apostrophised, and Bagnatica where the first tomato, that national Italian vegetable, was eaten in Italy in 1507, and Bronzolo where the inhabitants never mention the Devil, and finally Bolzano, which is a paradise for those who cannot stand the sight, smell or taste of spaghetti because it is entirely absent from their cuisine.
 

GOLD
54 – Bird Jewellery
A woman walking from the railway station at night into a city she did not know was attacked. Her assailant stole two pieces of gold jewellery. Both were in the shape of birds. The first was a golden heron with its neck tucked in and a single eye marked with an emerald. And the second was a golden stork with a black enamelled beak that carried a baby. The young woman in the fur-trimmed, black coat and matching cloche hat, lay still on the wet pavement bleeding from a blow to the head until, after two hours, she died. When she had finally left Vienna, she had died.
Freda Strachey was in love with Claus Pechstein in Vienna. Freda Strachey was an Austrian Jewess, daughter of a banker. Claus Pechstein was the son of a German diplomat. Bankers and diplomats. And Vienna was Vienna. Freda was 36. Claus 25. And Vienna 900 years old. In every relationship one party loves more than the other. Freda loved Claus more than Claus loved Freda. And both Freda and Claus loved Vienna more than Vienna loved either of them. If fact Vienna could not have cared less about either of them, a Jewess and a foreigner. Freda loved the broad white pavements and the dark heavy architecture and the deep porches that had so many antechambers that you felt that you were never really inside a building but also never outside it, and the unlit museums full of grinning bears and bulky beasts, and standing under horse chestnut trees as the blossom fell around you, sweet smelling but when you faced the other way also smelling of stale horse urine. Twice a week she walked down into the crypt of St Stephen’s to say good evening to a corpse of a girl who had died pregnant in 1710.  You could do that in Vienna.
Claus loved the cafes where you could sit in the warm, your fingers deep in the pile of the carpets they placed on the tables, drink thick black coffee, read foreign newspapers and stare out the windows at the sun on the snow. Claus loved all the bright lights, was eager to examine and also to criticise any new neon sign that was freshly  illuminated. He understood neon. He completely understood, for example, the problems of joining the dot to a lower-case i in neon. And he loved to watch the Viennese whores with varicose veins who had no shame whatsoever. They were like fictional whores. Any fictional whore he invented in his hungry imagination, he could be sure of finding an almost perfect replica.
One important person had been left out of this arrangment, and that was Freda’s father, Como. He loved his daughter. He probably loved her in a Viennese way, that is with a great deal of guilt and considerable amounts of sentiment. And Vienna loved Como, showered him with honours of a bookish nature, staged his plays, printed his commentaries, bought him many seven-course meals at his publisher’s expense. Como quickly realised that Claus did not love Freda as much as Freda loved Claus. In fact Como realised that Claus did not love Freda at all. Claus slept with her because she had breasts that had nipples that pointed like surprised eyes up to the sky, because she had fair hair, big buttocks and enjoyed almost injurious sexual intimacies. Soon Como struck up an unofficial relationship with Claus. He paid Claus money to pretend Claus  loved Freda. From Claus’s point of view, he paid Claus money so that Claus could stay in Vienna.
Freda found out. Whether she  found out whilst saying good evening to her pregnant friend in the St Stephen’s crypt, or whilst reading foreign newspapers in a cafe or whilst standing under the falling blossom of a horse chestnut tree - we cannot say, we do not know.
Freda had a collection of bird jewellry bought for her by her father ever since she was a little girl. There were blackbirds, swallows, twittering robins, swans with long necks, eagles with exaggerated talons wrought in diamonds, albatrosses, an emu, penguins. Her jewel box was an aviary. Freda never before in her life had left Vienna. She loved Vienna and had never wanted to fly away to any other place, but when she found out that Claus did not really love her, she put on her two favourite pieces of bird jewellery and took a train.
She was not even very certain what station she had alighted at. But it was indeed Foucasse. The heron and the stork took flight from Foucasse. They flew to Gras, were exchanged for dollars, flew on to Locarno and then Lugano where they were exchanged for lire, before settling temporarily onto the breast of a French patisserie widow in Geneva whose shop almost overlooked the grave of Calvin, which is now no more than a stone’s throw from the grave of Borges. The birds, aided by fences and pawnbrokers and various other attendant middlemen, flew on to Zurich and then to Dusseldorf and then to Stuttgart and then to a temporary nest in Baden-Baden where they grew very hot and lost their shape and shared their substance with various accumulated golden trinkets and became a gold bar stamped with the Hapsburg double-headed eagle. Harpsch took their melted substance on a further flying visit to Bolzano where the locals do not eat spaghetti with any great relish. Even the pigeons and the sparrows disdain to eat it when it spills out of the Bolzano dustbins.
 

GOLD
55 – Body Parts
Six women in Cologne took shelter in an air-raid bunker during a blitz by allied bombers. They discussed with some macabre humour the separated body-parts of their loved ones which they would recognise without any trouble at all after an explosion. One woman said that her mother’s sewing thumb could easily be identified. It had been so repeatedly scarred and calloused by the countless sewing needles that it had held over the last 37 years.  A second woman said with much laughter that her husband’s prick would be unmistakable to her for it had punched on its glans a red round disc like a spot of red confetti. A third woman said that her husband’s ear would be unmistakeable, its curves and folds had formed the letter S twice  - S for his name Simon, S for her name, Sapia. Such sentimental anatomical signaturing was greeted with indulgent smiles.  A fourth woman offered her husband’s foot on account of the large toes and the small webs between them that made him such a good swimmer, a fifth woman offered her young son’s navel on account of its likeness to an apple complete with a leaf and a stalk, and a bite taken out of it. He might not have an Adam’s apple, but he certainly had an Adam’s navel. They laughed again. The sixth woman slowly unwrapped a bundle and produced her lover’s head.
“I would recognise this head anywhere”, she said. “Even in the bed of his mistress”.
Influenced by the horror of the times, and appalled at her lover’s insensitivity to her great affection, she had shot him and then severed his head with a kitchen knife.
The five women gave the sixth woman their wedding-rings to pawn to buy flowers to place on the earth above where she planned to bury her lover’s head.  She was arrested and she hung herself in her cell. Of course her story is not completely true because she did not kill her lover and sever his head, but found her lover’s head blown from his body by an explosion when she returned from a shopping excursion to buy bread. She had so wanted to tell the world of her great love that she had invented a story to demonstrate the dramatic extent of that love. And in wartime such stories are not impossible.
 The wedding rings lent to pledge money to buy flowers were discovered and confiscated by the police. They were dumped in a kitty of ambiguous gold trinkets and eventually gravitated like so much gold in these stories to the collecting-point in Baden-Baden where they lost their shape and mass and identity and became mere gold in a bar, and began their journey in the last days of the Second World War to Bolzano where they cannot cook a good spaghetti.
The story of the severed head could have been told differently. Here it is again.
After the five women in the Cologne bunker had described those parts of their loved ones that they would easily recognise if separated from the rest of their bodies, the thumb, the penis, the ear, the foot, and the navel, the sixth woman slowly unwrapped a bundle and produced a head.
“I would recognise this head anywhere”, she said.
“Even in the bed of his mistress. It is the head of my lover”
The woman had returned from buying bread to find her apartment in ruins from an explosion, and the decapitated head of her lover lying on the kitchen floor. Influenced by the horror of the times, she had wrapped the head in bandages and placed it in her shopping basket, and when the air-raid warnings sounded she had carried the shopping basket to the bunker to keep the head safe from further danger.
The five women in the shelter had given the sixth woman their wedding-rings to pawn to buy flowers to place on the earth above where she planned to bury her lover’s head.  The woman was arrested as she was digging a hole beside the road. She wanted to be caught and imprisoned and punished. She hung herself in her cell with the bandages that had covered her lover’s face. She had not in fact discovered her lover’s head on the kitchen floor when she had returned from buying bread, but had discovered him in her bed fast asleep in the arms of his mistress. She had shot him and taken a kitchen knife and cut off his head. Her name was Judith.
 

GOLD
56 – Munich railway station
Henk Tierkopt, the cashier, lost his life disputing the accuracy of a sheaf of receipts exchanged for a consignment of gold coins handed into a collecting centre on Platform Seven of Munich’s central railway station in a storm where the rain was so heavy it burst in waterfalls through the station’s glass roof. Tierkopt was reputed to be an extremely honest man. He was very popular with his seniors and his subordinates. He had counted the gold coins and found that two were unaccounted for on the receipts. At three minutes to six in the evening, he was shot straight through the heart by a Nazi officer who was furious that his own honesty had been questioned by a man whose reputation for honesty was itself impeccable. It was a question of a challenge to who possessed the greatest honesty.
The dramatic action of the Nazi officer may have been influenced by a complicated, unstable confluence of vanity, lust and impatience. The heavy rain pouring through the station-roof had thoroughly dampened the Nazi officer’s hair and showed up his baldness. He was due to meet a good-looking, plump, married woman at 6 o’clock in Room 56 at the Station Hotel. For the rendez-vous, he had bought a bottle of white Jamaican rum to give him sexual courage. This bottle of alcohol was at the very moment of the shooting, wrapped in turquoise tissue-paper in his briefcase in the station-master’s office.
The consignment of gold coins minus two went to Baden-Baden with the reputation of being associated with bad luck. They were to constitute the greater part of gold bar FF789L which was one of many in the cache discovered on the back seat of a black Mercedes car on a country-road on the outskirts of Bolzano, the one place in Italy where very few foreigners ordered spaghetti if they could help it.
Henk Dierkoptf, the cashier, was given a funeral that rivalled a Nazi hero. It was said some eight hundred people lined the Kurfendamstrasse to watch his cortege pass by, and the little florist kiosk on the corner of Goierplatz and Georingstrasse completely sold all its stock down to the last leaf of laurel.
Before he was arrested, the Nazi officer had completed one last act of gallantry. To excuse his non-arrival at his six o’clock rendez-vue, he had tipped a porter, and directed the bottle of alcohol, accompanied by two glasses, to the married woman’s hotel room.  In each glass he had placed a gold coin.  With one gold coin the plump, good-looking married woman with the soft fingers had later bought a hat and a pair of high-heeled red shoes, and with the other, she had bought a train-ticket back to Salzburg where she lived with her husband who was a singer.
 

GOLD
57 – The pork waiter
In the Pocklar Restaurant in Aachen on a Friday night in June 1930, an irritable waiter insulted a diner over a plate of pork. Anti-Jewish sentiments were expressed, including all that business of pigs and circumcision. The angry diner drew a gun, the waiter had his penis shot away and thirty-seven restaurant guests, all of them Jewish enough to make Hitler salivate, were herded into the restaurant kitchen at gunpoint and relieved of their valuables. The diner, dragging his screaming girlfriend by the wrist and still wearing his table napkin around his chin, ran out into the street and boarded a passing tram. Police arrested him at the tram terminal, and the girlfriend ran off screaming down the Cassastrasse. The valuables, wrapped in the table napkin, were placed in a police safe and forgotten, largely because of other urgent police matters like a train crash on a bridge over the river Cassa, a mass murderer threatening to throw himself off a disused gasometer, and the disappearance of a police sergeant believed to have been kidnapped by a crowd of Communist wives incensed at his boorish and vulgar behaviour in a lingerie shop.
In September 1935, at a party to celebrate the successfully rigged local elections of a Nazi mayor, a drunken police accountant who was eager to show off his prowess at picking locks, opened the forgotten police safe and recognised the monogrammed napkin of his father’s restaurant. In the ensuing struggle to possess the attractive forgotten property, the valuables were placed in a child’s cot under a red and white blanket, and transported in a car-boot to a Gestapo Headquarters, from where almost immediately it was sent to Baden-Baden by a tidy-minded clerk, eager to keep his desk clear of unnecessary paperwork during a painting refurbishment.
The gold at Baden-Baden was separated out from the precious stones, the semi-precious metals, the coloured enamels, the silver pins and the pieces of wood and leather, and smelted down to make gold bar 45GH which was stored in Vault Three of the Deutche Bank for Lieutenant Harpsch’s sergeant to collect on the morning of the 23rd April 1945.  This particular bar that had consisted of the gold possessed by a single evening’s collection of diners, who, five years previously, had eaten asparagus soup with brown buttered toast, and sole meuniere with parsely and new potatoes, and had drunk a French wine from the vineyards of Macon and had smoked Dutch cigars, ended up in a town which could not cook a simple spaghetti.
 

GOLD
58 – The swallowed ring
In Strasbourg, a child of six, hearing his anxious mother discuss where best to hide her wedding-ring from the police, swallowed it.  He thought he was doing her a good turn. He began to choke to death. His distraught mother carried her child to the teaching hospital where two drunken Fascist interns tore the child’s throat open to return the ring to his mother. Undressing the corpse of the child, they discovered its circumcised penis, and knew, or thought they knew, that the mother was Jewish, and they raped her. They hid the child’s body in a surgical waste-bin and threw the wedding-ring into a toolbox. The child’s body was found and carried to the mortuary to be settled in a tub of formalderhyde for use in the student hospital. Student autopsies on children were not common.
The ring was discovered by a doctor looking for a nail to hang a picture of Lindenberg on his surgery wall. He put the ring in the top pocket of his white medical coat, which he hung in the canteen cloakroom, where, mistaking it for his own, it was put on by a visiting orthodontist. The ring was subsequently found by the wife of the orthodontist, who took it to her father, claiming it as evidence of her husband’s  infidelity. The father quietly took the ring, calmed his daughter’s anxieties, and left it in his safe deposit box in a branch of the Deutsches Bank at Colmar.  In a Gestapo raid on the bank’s assets, the ring, along with much other valuable material, was conviscated, sorted, redistributed and finally, with a collection of English gold medals, melted down, and became a small part of  gold bar 456Y7N, which subsequently found its way to Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they could not make good spaghetti.
 

GOLD
59 – Goebbels’ Diary
Goebbels kept a diary.
“The Fuhrer told me this evening of his prophecy for the Sudeten affair”.
“The Fuhrer said that Chamberlain is weak and we are sure to be in Warsaw by Christmas”.
“The Fuhrer says the Russians will collapse like snow before fire”.
“The Fuhrer is right again. He is truly a prophet”.
“We dined together at a private table in the Schloss Restaurant in Munich. The Fuhrer is feeling strong. He is invincible. There is no limit to his vision”.
“The Fuhrer drank English tea and said that we will soon punish the English at the heart of their culture. Who knows, we will soon perhaps be masters of India, for what is now England’s, will soon all belong to Germany”.
Goebbels was a Hitler sycophant. Whether he was writing for himself or for posterity or simply because he was an incontinent diarist, or because he hoped one day that Hitler would read his published diaries and reward his sycophancy, is all open to discussion.
On the 4th January 1940, there is an entry in the Goebbels diaries that could perhaps be of another nature. It might show that not only was Goebbels the personal sycophant of Hitler but also his pimp.
“The Fuhrer watched a woman light a cigarette in the Boren Cafe in Berchtesgaden, and asked me who she was. He said she looks like a film-star.”
Hitler throughout the 1930s was a keen film-watcher. He had a private cinema constructed in the Berghof, and, right up until the invasion of Holland and Belgium, he spent most afternoons watching films with his secretaries. Goebbels often watched with him. They both enjoyed American films.
“The woman was unwilling to stay, so we detained her. Her name is Marion Schuster”.
Marion Schuster was not detained. She was arrested. For smoking in an undesignated area. It became undesignated when Goebbels’s Austrian assistant Fritz Cappet said so. Marion Schuster was locked up in a three-star hotel suite with a man at the door to await the Fuhrer’s pleasure.
“We have discovered that the film-star Marion Schuster is of impeccable Aryan descent and comes from Linz. Her mother is Viennese and her father a wine importer. Her medical records show no ill health, no venereal diseases, no evidence of gynaecological complications, and no record of a pregnancy”.
Marion Schuster was not a film-star, and the way Goebbels wrote his diary could suggest he was indeed writing it for Hitler as prime audience, anticipating possible questions from that source.
Marion Schuster did not take her coat off but sat on the bed, biting her lip, scratching her palms, turning her gold wedding-ring around and around on her finger.
“She does not wear a wedding-ring”.
She did wear a wedding ring. Fritz Cappet was asked to acquire Marion Schuster’s wedding-ring by any stratagem that did not alarm her.
“She has a husband and there is male acquaintance in Linz who has been seeing her regularly. The fact that she does not wear a wedding-ring indicates that she is seeing her male friend. We have arranged that her husband’s employers have seen to her husband’s promotion and sent him to Helsinki on urgent business. The male friend has not yet been located”.
The diary may have been written this way to make Marion Schuster less perfect than the Fuhrer might have been afraid of. Hitler was a man who prided himself on family values and had been publicly furious when Goebbels had a less than secret affair with a Romanian actress. Otto Marcus Schuster, Marion Schuster’s husband, arrived in Finland to be accused of financial espionage. He was given the choice of driving himself at night a hundred kilometres to Horthar in Northern Nilsomer to clear himself before a business committee, but the petrol tank had been punctured to cause the fuel to be exhausted after fifty kilometres with the expectation that Otto Marcus would  freeze to death on the Thulinberg Pass.
“The Fuhrer likes Hollywood  films. Yesterday afternoon he watched Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve and Bette Davis in All This and Heaven Too at the Brechtesgarden. The Fuhrer joked. He said that when the Third Reich governed America, and I was governor of California, he would clean up New York, shut down Las Vegas and get Speer to replan Sunset Boulevard to look more like the Unter den Linden. The Fuhrer likes Lana Turner”.
Marion Schuster in Room 304 of the Obersalzberg Hotel looked just a little like Lana Turner. Goebbels ordered photographs of Lana Turner to be sent to Hitler’s office and asked advice about Lana Turner’s make-up and cosmetics, underwear and shaving habits.
The Fuhrer went to Berlin, Goebbels returned to Munich. Marion Schuster was forgotten. There are no more mentions of her in the Goebbels diaries.
Fritz Cappet, Goebbels’s Austrian assistant, visited Marion Schuster on a Sunday afternoon when his wife was menstruating. Marion Schuster had scarcely moved in three days.  A maid had taken her coat, bought her fresh underwear, soap and perfume. Marion had scarcely said a word. On the fourth day the maid had persuaded her to take a bath and had washed her underwear, brought her cigarettes, flowers and chocolates. The maid had drawn and undrawn the curtains eight times, before Fritz Cappet had thought it prudent to pay Marion Schuster a visit. He brought along a bottle of Irish whisky. He offered her a glass. She refused. Fritz drank alone. He became drunk. He hit her, stripped her, fingered her groin and then stopped, remembering why she was there, and whose guest she was. He locked her in the bathroom and made three phone calls in the bedroom. They still had not found Marion Schuster’s male friend. There was no male friend. Fritz unlocked the bathroom door, and blackmailed Marion Schuster in a complicated and contradictory way. He said that the Fuhrer was interested in her, that she was an adulteress having a lover when her husband was away on important business, that the Fuhrer was interested in children and hoped some day to have some of his own,but not daughters, that she had stripped in front of him, that the Fuhrer would not be pleased at her lewd behaviour. He demanded her wedding-ring because how come an adulteress had the right to wear a wedding-ring? She refused. It was the first full indication of a show of resistance. She put up a fight. He wrestled with her and wrenched the ring from her finger.
“Now that we have settled that we can amuse ourselves”.
He promised to rape her unless she sat on his face. He raped her and then whipped her repeatedly with his buckled belt, saying it was a fitting punishment for an adulteress who had refused to obey the Fuhrer.
Fritz Cappet put Marion Schuster’s wedding ring in a linen envelope and sent it by messenger to Goebbels’ office in Munich. They had found a man who had agreed for 400,000 marks to say he was Marion’s lover. They had his signature on the deal. They sent him to Room 304 of the Obersalzberg Hotel where he was obliged to engineer a quarrel whose shouting could be heard through the wall.
The wedding-ring in its linen envelope stayed in Goebbels’s office for six weeks, until the name Marion Schuster had disappeared from everybody’s memory. She was only now a name on three pieces of paper - a florist’s receipt, a laundry invoice and a forged signature on a slightly doctored black and white glossy photograph of Lana Turner. In an office spring-clean, the ring was bundled up with other assorted trinkets and packaged with several unclaimed lost property items in a tool bag and then forgotten again. Marion was dead by now. She had thrown herself under an army truck carrying flowers.  The Linz police said she may have not seen the truck because  it looked as though she had recently been blinded in one eye. They mentioned how she had born a remarkable likeness to the Hollywood actress Lana Turner who had appeared in We Who Are Young, Somewhere I’ll Find You, The Youngest Profession, and Marriage is a Private Affair.
Marion Schuster’s wedding-ring was appraised by a jeweller, and thrown into a melting point. It was not so valuable. It helped in a very small part to constitute a gold bar that was taken to Baden-Baden in June 1944, and this gold bar was one of the 92 that Harpsch’s sergeant and corporal had lifted into the back seat of the black Mercedes to be driven to Bolzano where they cannot cook a good spaghetti.
Otto Marcus Schuster is still alive. He lives in Oberammergau and in 1970 played two parts in the celebrated Oberammergau Miracle Play. The first part was Lazarus, who is raised from the dead, and the second, Joseph of Arimathe  a who is the rich businessman who permits Christ’s body to be laid in the tomb he had prepared for himself.
 

GOLD
60 – The golden gardeners
This is the story of  two elderly gardeners, brother and sister, who lived in Dusseldorf. They tended a carp-pond on behalf of the zoological gardens. They had always been natural prophets of doom because of a continuous family history of griefs and disasters. He, a Czech professor of marine mammals practising in a country without a sea-coast,had lost a leg a day after the end of the First World war in a misunderstanding over the term “armistice”.  She, a bio-chemist, had lost her only daughter in a motorcycle accident, and had terminated three pregnancies from liasons with a husband, a lover and an uncle for fear motorcycles would again cause her grief.  As devout Jews practising their scientific occupations in a bureaucratic gentile community, they sensed sure disaster in the Third Reich. Refusing to flee, they had endeavoured to hide as lowly caretakers.  They had read Huxley’s novel about longevity. Carp lived to a great age, some apparently to 200 years. Carp had a very slow digestion system, their gut sometimes took four weeks to digest their vegetarian diet of algae. Huxley had believed that slow digestion was one key to long life.
In September 1941, the zoological gardens were appropriated as an officer training school by the German 101 Army Battalion who had been stationed in Munich. The reasons given were an admiration for the well-appointed offices, a delight in the well-designed accomodation for staff, and a desire to daily use the heated swimming-pool designed by the fashionable Dutch architect van Reichfeldt, whose attention to architectural detail was legendary, though at the Erasmus Philosphy Building he designed in Rotterdam, he seems to have been bored with considering the comfort of urinating males, designing a washroom where the basins were too low and the urinal bowls too high, privacy impossible, and pedestrian flow prone to tripping, sliding and being struck in the back by erratic doors unable to decide whether to swing in or swing out.
The brother and sister caretakers of Dusseldorf caught the two oldest fish in the carp pond and nicked their tails to aid future identification. They had then fed the fish their gold rings and gold chains wrapped up in bread-balls.  They hoped after the war to persuade the carp to give them back.
On the first Good Friday of the new management, the Catholic officers of Battalion 101 had the carp caught and cooked. The fish were eaten with little relish. A slow digestion and a very limited diet made the fish-flesh dull and sluggish. But the jewelry was discovered, and it goes without saying, to the diners’ great surprise and delight. The 101 Battalion hoped for more discoveries and the entire carp population of the former zoological gardens was slaughtered. It was said that in half an hour, eighty fish with possibly three thousand years of existence between them, were killed and gutted. But not eaten. Apart from being of an unappetising taste, they presented too big a cooking problem in the small saucepans of the former zoo kitchen. A zoo kitchen is usually designed on a vegetarian and raw meat basis for the obvious reason that animals did not eat cooked food.
Not surprisingly little of value was discovered as a result of this piscine slaughter. There was a cache of coins possibly worth 450 marks or 80 English pounds. The coins were mostly in English currency, though there was a little in Italian and a little more  in Irish; all three nationalities are  known to throw coins in still water as the  guarantee of a return. There were also several fish-hooks, a toy soldier, a corkscrew, five buttons, all apparently from the same garment, and a musket-ball which could have been Napoleonic.
The first Good Friday find of gold rings and gold bracelets found its way to Bolsano by a very circuitous route that took in London and Manchester, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Antwerp and then Mainz, all cities which possessed buildings designed or built by Richardt Reichfeldt. In the Norasolda Smelting-Works in Mainz, the gold was melted down with a collection of gold golfing trophies won in Scotland, and some twenty gold medals associated with the Danish sculptor Thorswalden. The resulting gold bar reached Baden-Baden in May, lay  in the vault of the firm of Emmer and Sons for ten days,
and then with 91 other gold bars, on the morning of March 31th 1945, began its last known journey in German hands - a mere three hours covering 140 kilometers. All 92 gold bars were discovered on the back seat of  a black Mercedes, license plate number TL9246, abandoned at the road-side at Bolsano, the one place in Italy where they could not make good spaghetti.
The two carp lovers committed suicide by drowning. Not in Dusseldorf, but in a latrine without basins, toilet bowls or doors at Dachau.
 

GOLD
61 – The troop train
Hermann Plitzermann, returning from Predioskia in a troop train with the remains of his unit, was dozing like all the other soldiers in his compartment, when it stopped at a siding somewhere between Hydermain and Floorst, fifty kilometres inside the Polish border.  His leg was in plaster. He had lost three toes, and his left elbow was dislocated and his arm bound up in bandages and a sling. His buttocks were burnt. He wept frequently to think of what his wife would think of his shredded scrotum. A male nurse in a crowded ward behind a floral curtain at Gniperbad had helped him achieve an erection with a mouth of scalding tea; the experience had been slow, painful, humiliating and without semen. Hermann Plitzermann had promised his wife three children, two girls and a boy, Gerda, Heidi and Adolf. Adolf was to be a customs officer like his father-in-law. Herman suffered from neuralgia and occasional blurred vision, spasms of uncontrollable shivering, fits of vomiting, and low self-esteem. He was an ideal candidate for impossible visions.
A train slowly pulled alongside. Perhaps the troop train had stopped to permit this other train to overtake at a set of points. It was full of first class carriages and officers drinking coffee, chatting and laughing. Herman looked into each slowly passing compartment, small orange-lit rooms peopled with uniformed strangers all behaving in ways that Hermann thought privileged, lifting a small white coffee-cup, wiping fingers with a small white napkin, looking in a mirror, fingering a tight collar, knocking the ash off a long cigarette, sneezing onto the back of a hand, whistling, smiling, laughing. The train of first class
carriages finally stopped, presenting a brightly lit compartment exactly opposite Hermann. He could see straight through the carriage and out the window on the other side, straight into a red and purple sunset. And Hermann Plitzermann saw Hilter. The Fuhrer was staring out of the window without any discernible expression on his face. An officer on his far side was talking and gesticulating.  Hermann must have been four metres away from the Leader of the Third Reich.  Hitler caught Hermann’s eye and they stared at one another for three and a half seconds. Then Hitler said something and an adjutant pulled down the window blind. Probably Hitler wanted a little privacy. His train pulled slowly away.
Hermann began to babble. He had just seen Hitler.
 “And a naked Marlene Dietrich just pissed in my mouth.”
“He was smoking.”
“Marlene Dietrich is a dyke”.
“And she gave me a 500,000 mark note and made me managing director of Krupps.”
“He doesn’t smoke.”
“I do. Burn my prick so that I can see Hitler”.
“That’s a joke, Hermann Plitzermann”.
“Hitler doesn’t tell jokes”.
“And he stared at me - Hermann Plitzermann.”
“Hitler doesn’t stare”.
It quickly passed down the train that Hermann Plitzermann had just seen Hitler telling a joke, screwing Marlene Dietrich and lighting a cigarette with a million mark note. The carriage was sealed off and uncoupled at Terius, a small town thirty-five kilometres inside the Polish border.  Hermann Plitzermann was arrested along with the five infantrymen and the corporal who had shared his compartment. They were temporarily locked in a station waiting-room without a toilet but with their crutches, their unchanged bandages and three sentries sworn to silence. Hermann Plitzermann was shouted at, punched, kicked, abused and reminded frequently that he had been sucked off by a well-known faggot forty times in one night. “If only”, whispered Hermann, as he turned his wedding-ring round and round the third finger of his left hand. “If only”.  His foot was beginning to smell and he passed blood as he urinated out of the window. After three days, and because of the strong smell of gangrene, the seven soldiers were taken to a local hospital at Grospoknia which was staffed by Polish orderlies, with no nurses, and under the jurisdiction of a retired dentist. One soldier immediately fell down a flight of concrete steps and died from internal injuries. One soldier apparently committed suicide with a kitchen fork. Two soldiers died in two days from food poisoning. One soldier went missing and Hermann died of untreated gangrene poisoning. It could be said that only Hermann died a natural death. From a biological point of view gangrene-poisoning is a natural death, certainly more natural than the deaths of his comrades. The retired dentist negotiated a sack of flour, a box of cauliflowers, a dozen broken eggs, ten pairs of socks, a scarf and four red balaclavas for three German wedding-rings, a Saint Christopher medal, a gold crucifix that had been hit by a piece of shrapnel and a small gold key. These military relics were kept in the inside pocket of a post-master’s padded jacket for three weeks and then traded for a fake passport, and then passed to jeweller in Adenberg where they were smelted down to a thirty ounce gold bar that was impounded by the Gestapo. This gold bar was taken to Baden-Baden where the accumulated bad luck was eventually passed onto Gustav Harpsch who, riding like a knight on a white horse to find his infant daughter, crashed into a white horse just outside Bolzano where spaghetti is kept hidden in case it might be ordered by foreigners crossing into Italy from Austria eager to taste the national dish on its native soil.
In the small cemetery at Terius there is a gravestone inscribed with the words “Six Dead Germans”. Hermann Plitzermann might again have missed out on the good things in life, because there were certainly seven soldiers in that railway compartment.
 

GOLD
62 – Frank’s friends
This is the story of a small horde of Polish-manufactured gold trinkets made as Christian pilgrim-badges for wealthy visitors to the Shrine of the Holy Virgin at Grednova outside Kracow. They were discovered in a backroom above a baker’s shop at 265 Prinsengracht, in the Jourdan area of Amsterdam. The occupants of the backroom, presumed Jewish, had been arrested six weeks before  on the morning of the 3 August 1944, and deported to Bergen-Belsen via the Dutch clearing-station at Westerbork.
Accepting that house numbers are often organised in odds and evens down two sides of a street, or in this case, on two sides of a canal, 265 Princesgracht is not surprisingly next door to 263 Prinsengracht.  It was from a hiding-place in the attic of a back-room at 263 Princesgracht that Anne Frank and her relatives were arrested on the morning of the 3 August 1944. It is conceivable that the presumed owners of the Polish pilgrim-badges were on the same transport train as the Franks.
The pilgrim-badges were known to be in the possession of SS Sergeant Karl Josef Silberbauer, the Franks’ liberator into fresh air and then death, for at least a week. His corporal remembers Silberbauer shuffling through the badges as they lay in a shoe-box in the Blue Knapsack coffee-house on the corner of Elandsgracht and Prinsengracht. This corporal remembers Silberbauer laughing at the absurdity of a figure with three legs, presuming that the third leg was an enlarged penis, which was unlikely because the gold figure was otherwise female. There is no evidence that Silberbauer knew the pilgrim-badges were made of gold. Like Anne Frank, Silberbauer probably died in late February or early March 1945.  His body was never identified with total conviction when he was supposedly pulled from a canal on Java Island to the north of Amsterdam. The only evidence was the uniform, but since the corpse wore no shirt, no underwear, and no socks or shoes, it was suggested that the Silberbauer’s uniform tunic and trousers had been put on a drowned naked corpse to deliberately confuse identity.
When investigated, the corporal had the opinion that Silberbauer had given the pilgrim-badges away to children. Silberbauer had been fond of small children. Thirty of the items had been in the possession of a nine-year old girl called Elizabet Guningsturm.  It is likely that she had swapped many of them with the neighbourhood children with sweets taken from her mother’s tobacco-shop. The girl’s mother was Polish and she had recognised the pilgrim-badges for what they were, and had sold them to a painter in Helmingstraat, who exchanged them for food in the Amsterdam Pipe District. From laying in the bottom-tray of a cash-register associated with a soup-kitchen set up on the Museumplein, they ended up in the luggage of fleeing German collaborators and on the 26 March they became virtually the last items to be smelted down in Baden-Baden at Emmer and Sons.  The Polish pilgrim-badges probably constituted most of  gold bar 56GHT/K and according to the disposition of the gold bars in Harpsch’s black suitcase, might very well be among the last ten to be packed.
 

GOLD
63 –  Russian hot rings
Little Viktor Steinbruker had a Russian grandmother on his mother’s side.  She spoke little, if any, German so as deliberately not to be able to speak to her son-in-law, a horse-and-cab driver who had painted his name, Big Viktor Steinbruker, on the side of his cab. And you do not advertise yourself like that in a city like Lubeck whose citizens do not love Jews. Besides you simply do not advertise yourself like that. It’s vulgar.
“It’s beautiful. And Viktor Steinbrucker, Big or Little, is not a Jewish name”.
Little Viktor Steinbrucker’s Russian grandmother was a peasant from Pytorstockgrad near Minsk, and not a little snobbish. She was full of peasant wisdom. When Little Viktor had a headache, she heated  up her gold wedding ring on a white saucer on the stove, and placed it on Little Viktor’s forehead just above the right eye. When Little Viktor had a cold she wrapped a hot flannel around her rosary and Little Viktor wore it around his neck under his vest until the cold went away.
Around the end of February 1935, Little Viktor caught a cold which developed quickly into pneumonia. His grandmother was convinced he had caught the chill from the cab horse that waited for customers on the end of Praedmasterstrasse. She kicked the elderly mare in the belly for afflicting her grandson. She may have been kicking her son-in-law’s horse by proxy, which was as good as kicking her son-in-law, because he was devoted to his horse, whose name, in eternal hope of flying, was Pegasus. The horse strangely had white ears but was otherwise totally black.
Little Viktor did not get any better. His grandmother collected all the wedding rings of the women of the house, herself, her daughter, her widowed second daughter, her daughter-in-law, the old woman who had come with her from Pytorstockgrad near Minsk, the concierge and the concierge’s neice. She boiled them all for an hour in two tablespoons of jet black balsamic vinegar from Modena in Italy and laid them in a symmetrical pattern on Little Viktor’s chest.  He screamed. His grandmother added an eighth ring from a Ukranian neighbour for good measure. The neighbour had come in for comfort because they were threatening to search the houses in the next street.
At midnight, four uniformed policemen and six youths with swastika arm-bands broke down the door. They were carrying two buckets of horse shit and the head of a horse that had white ears. They scattered the horse shit around the bedrooms and placed the bleeding horse head on the kitchen table. They squashed the eight women into the lavatory where the Ukranian neighbour fainted, Little Viktor’s grandmother got her backside stuck in the toilet and all were soon heavily perspiring. Upstairs, the intruders discoverd a small boy aged seven laying naked on a turned down bed with a hot flannel laid across his forehead and eight hot wedding rings laid in a regular pattern on his chest. The wedding-rings, still warm, disappeared into Big Viktor’s leather money purse and were taken away.  When Big Viktor came home to a house of wailing women locked in the lavatory, and a dead horse-head bleeding on the kitchen table, and the smell of hot balsamic vinegar from Modena, he decided his days as a horse-and-cab driver were over and he should send in his papers to emigrate to Madagascar. And Little Viktor Steinbruker, no longer subject to Russian superstition, recovered.
The stolen rings soon had company.  Big Viktor’s leather purse swelled with involuntary contributions from along the street. The items were eventually stacked neatly in a drawer from a Louis  XV writing desk and kept in the house of a Gestapo official whose sister was married to Reinhard Heydrich’s uncle. The writing desk was kept for four years in the best bedroom of Heydrich’s official country residence, and had become the repository of his wife’s most precious possessions, her christening gown, her first communion dress, her wedding-party invitations, her engagement ring, the first clothes of her sons, her husband’s war medals, his credentials as the organiser of plans for what was called the Jewish solution. On Heydrich’s assassination in 1943, the writing-desk was packed into a wooden crate marked Personal Property and taken to Baden-Baden, his widow’s home town. It was stored in a garage where it was ostentatiously re-labelled Heydrich’s Artworks. A year later, the garage was bombed, the crate opened by Gestapo officials, and the jewellery contents examined, sorted and broken down, and the gold smelted to convenient gold bars ostensibly to be part of the inheritance of Heydrich’s youngest son who had been patted on the head by a white-faced Hitler at his father’s public funeral in Berlin. Both the Hitler pat on the head and the golden treasury, which in part contained the wedding-ring that had belonged to Little Viktor Steinbruker’s grandmother, were to haunt the younger Heydrich for the rest of his life. Three gold bars of the Heydrich inheritance were kept in Vault Three of the Deutsche Bank in Baden-Baden and one of them was removed from there by Lieutenant Harpsch. He was responsible for moving it with its small contribution of Russian superstitious medical magic to Bolzano, driving in the dark along the Via Emilia which passes through Modena where the jet black balsamic vinegar is mixed with a distillation of the balsam plant carefully distilled from the sweet-smelling leaves that could have helped to make Bolzano spaghetti a little more appetising.
 

GOLD
64 – Twelve golden kilometres
This is the complex story of a collection of gold wedding rings that were dropped through the chinks of the floorboards of a railway cattletruck travelling between Winterplatzburg and Freiberburg, a distance of twelve kilometers. Ninty-three gold rings were collected by a very surprised farmer’s daughter walking the rails to meet her lover in Helinghaus. This lover was unfaithful. He stole the rings from the chamber-pot under the bed of his unsuspecting girlfriend and exchanged them for a car to convince his new mistress he was in love with her so that she would sleep with him. The former owner of the car, the son of a miller, unused to handling gold and almost certainly knowing the rings had arrived in his possession by some infamous means, panicked. He threw the rings down a well hoping to recover them after the war was over and the times were not so dangerous.  He was enlisted in the army and sent to Italy where his throat was cut for firing his rifle in the middle of the night at the bells of a small church in Castelfranco-Emilia in order to make them ring. He had been lonely.
The summer of 1939 was hot and the well dried out. The miller, still wearing the black mourning-bands for his son on his shirt-sleeve, took advantage of the drought. Cleaning out the well, he found the valuables. He took them to the farmer’s co-operative bank. The bank was appropriated by the local Nazi party and the gold found its way by circuitous routes to Croatia where it was smelted down to be exchanged for rifles on the Hungarian border. As a gold bar stamped DD5.OOL, weighing a little more than the regulation 100 ounces, the Winterplatzburg-Freiberburg rings ultimately reached Baden-Baden, and then with 91 other gold bars, was ultimately discovered spilling out of two black suitcases on the back seat of a Mercedes car, license plate number TL9246 found abandoned at the road-side at Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they cannot seem to make good spaghetti.
All of which might explain how the story ended, but not how the story began. On a cattle-truck bound for a work-camp, a woman who had made the journey before and knew what was to be expected, argued that the Germans should be allowed to take as little as they could from their victims. Such was the woman’s eloquence, the entire 178 inmates of the truck took off their wedding-rings, and in one or two cases, a modest pair of gold earrings and a small brooch in the shape of a swallow in wild flight, and a child’s christening chain, and had sacrificed them to the railway lines between Winterplatzburg and Freiberburg  All the travellers, arriving ringless in Belsen, had perished. They could never know, though if they had thought for a moment of the possibilities, they might have suspected, that their symbolic sacrifice had petered out into a sorry provincial story of infidelity, lust, panic and greed.
 

GOLD
65 – Giving away gold
Gertryud Silvester, heir to a fortune accrued by her father in the fur trade, gave up her jewelry in ignorance of Nazi policy. She believed in helping the war effort if it meant that perhaps her parents might have the opportunity to be resettled in Israel or even Madagascar.  What she gave the small bespectacled government employee in a leather shopping-bag was worth 15 million marks, one million US dollars or nearly 500,000 English pounds. Among the 270 items, the collection contained a tiara once thought to belong to Queen Victoria, and a gold locket certainly inscribed with the Romanov initials. The small bespectacled government employee unpacked the shopping-bag and laid out the hoard on his kitchen table. When it grew dark, he switched on the kitchen’s 60 watt bulb. So much wealth was illuminated with so little light, but it impressively dazzled the government employee who stared at his confiscated treasure for three hours, dreaming not of Israel and Madacascar, but of New York and Las Vegas, of white sheeted beds with Scandinavian women with long legs, a box of Gualmeir chocolates with lemon desert soft centres, and a bottle of cold Mallarme Absinthe served in glasses rimmed in sugar with a slice of lemon.
The small bespectacled government employee was only mildly imaginative. The theives that knocked him on the head that night had no imagination at all. Before they were caught and then released with a mild admonition, the collection had been passed to a middleman whose wife was a jeweller’s daughter who stripped away the jewels and the enamels, packed the gold fragments in a child’s diaper and mailed it to her cousin in Frankfurt. The mail train was bombed at Hugenglastmeir in Bavaria.The carriages lay in the snow for a month until the Spring thaw when the diaper package of gold was found in the proximity of the corpse of a dead baby and ignored. In September 1944, a Forestry Commissioner, tidying up the debris from a second railway disaster on the same site, discovered the gold fragments, or at least some of them, and smuggled them to his son in Baden-Baden where the package was opened by a Nazi enthusiast and tipped into the general sorting bins ready for smelting. Transmutated into a single, aesthetically tedious gold bar, stamped BB670p, they were stored in Vault 3. Harpsch got his hands on 100 gold bars on the morning of 4th May 1945, by a fake requisition order idly examined by a duty officer intent on wishing Harpsch a happy birthday in the knowledge that Harpsch’s brother-in-law, the manager of the bank, always threw good parties, and was usually generous with invitations.  Gold bar BB670p was among the 100 gold bars, and it travelled the 150 kilometres to Bolzano where Harpsch’s black Mercedes crashed into a white horse, some called Polly Lipton, because its owner might have been English, and with a name like Lipton, be related to the tea-packing company.  There is an English nursery rhyme which goes:
Polly put the kettle on,
Polly put the kettle on,
Polly put the kettle on,
And we’ll all have tea.
 

GOLD
66 – The initial B
The kosher butcher Anselm Bezrer from Rotterdam tried to bribe a passage for his family on a boat going to Bergen in Norway. As collateral he offered the boat’s captain 15,000 guilders, his mother’s gold necklace, his grandmother’s gold-handled walking-cane, a pair of brightly polished new shoes, and with winks and nudges and a trembling voice, the virginity of his 28-year old crippled daughter. The boat’s captain was an imaginative man with pro-German sympathies and a zeal for vegetarianism, but he was also sympathetic in general to the total female predicament, having lost a daughter and two wives in various accidents and adventures of which no-one could truly make him responsible. He particularly appreciated the metaphor of the offer of polished shoes by a man planning to run away with a crippled daughter. The captain contrived to leave the butcher’s grandmother and the butcher’s wife in a coffee-shop on the quay, whilst he handed the butcher and the material bribe over to the custom’s police. They took the money and the jewels and arranged for Anselm Bezrer to be arrested and sent to Belsen. The daughter meantime had been hidden aboard the boat and enjoyed by the captain. And she safely reached Bergen in Norway.
The gold necklace and the gold handle of the walking-cane eventually arrived in Baden-Baden and were smelted down to become part of a gold bar, later to be recovered in a smashed black car on the outskirts of Bolzano where they reputedly cannot cook a good spaghetti.
So many letter Bs in this story make the account sound phoney, but we could continue to make it sound even more unlikely, because the daughter’s name was Berthe and her first true sexual encounter in the captain’s berth created a great love that was reciprocated. After the war the couple married. And yes, they had a daughter, and yes, they named her after the captain’s boat, Belinda.
 

GOLD
67 – Amersfort Ice
Forty Jewish thieves were rounded up at Amersfort in January 1941 and pushed into a hole blown with a hand grenade in the ice of the Reichdecker Canal. Heinkel, a plump man of 32 years of age, was the last to perish. It took him 2 minutes and 39 seconds to die. Official death causes could be said to be hypothermia aggravated with water on the lung. Heinkel was a good swimmer. You could not really say that he had drowned.
By six o’clock in the evening, the ice had frozen over again and the white bodies could be seen under the ice, like children looking through a shop window at goodies they could not have. Those goodies were simply gulps of air. You can live three weeks without food, three days without water but only three minutes without air. A large pile of clothes and a small pile of wedding rings were heaped on the quay. The rings were taken in a bucket to Samuel Zinkler  who parcelled them up in a Gestapo numbered envelope and sent to Zwolle where, accompanied by other envelopes containing similar booty, it travelled across the frost-covered landscape to Dusseldorf and a hot furnace to assist in making gold bar Tg78A.
The cold spell in central Holland lasted five weeks. Seven Christian citizens of the town could not tolerate any longer the sight of the forty Jewish thieves  looking up at their children as they crossed the Reichdecker Bridge on their way to school.
”Papa, who are those angels in the water?”
“Why don’t those men swim to the shore?”
“Do you think mama, that those gentlemen in the water could use my scarf and gloves?”
“Papa, what did those quiet swimmers in the water steal?”
The children, who picked up gossip with alacrity, called the underwater Jews, the Forty Thieves and it was not long before they christened Heinkel, who was a big man and nearest the surface of the ice, Ali Baba. Ali Baba and the Forty Theives. Though, to be strictly accurate, there were forty-three Jews and they were not theives.
The Mayor of Amersfort, Arnold Gluck-Pressing was a model National Socialist supporter and his anti-semitic beliefs were a little to the right of Goebbels, and Goebbels anti-Semetic beliefs were a liitle to the right of Hitler, so the forty theives had little hope of a rescue before the weather turned or the Germans lost the war. Perhaps memories of German soldiers under the ice in Stalingrad had been a persuasive factor. Mayor Gluck-Pressing was adamant that Ali Baba and his men should stay in the water as a warning to others.
The weather changed enough for the ice to melt. But the ground remained rock hard and was impenetrable to pick or spade. Ali Baba and his Forty Theives were taken out of the water. They were roped  to horses who dragged the corpses down the frosty roads out of town.  It was rumoured  that Ali Baba and the Forty Theives had gone on holiday and were staying at the Toronto Red Barn, a tempting winter vacation venue.  But the theives did not apparently enjoy the amenities and they soon packed their bags and left, wheeled away under the moon on barrows by their relatives, across the frosty crackling earth. Curiously Ali Baba was the last to leave. He had become a celebrity and a figurehead and he stayed at the Toronto Red Barn, lying on a barn door, looking quite regal until the temperature rose to a minus two. He had been given a pair of dark grey gloves; one was fitted over his genitals for decency’s sake, though it was a bit late since everyone in Amersfort, including the children, had witnessed their pexcessive size and excessive masculinity. The other glove was placed on his right hand to hide the injuries. It had been difficult to get his wedding ring off his plump fingers. He had first put the ring on his finger when he was a slim young man of 24 on his wedding-day when he had married Herma Gopeling. Herma was proud that Ali Baba was the last to leave the Toronto Saloon. Three tearaway boys set the Amersfort Clock Tower on fire to create a diversion when Herma and her five sisters came with an old grocer’s van to take Heinkel back home from his holidays.
GOLD
68 – The tennis match
The Vogelpark in Amsterdam in 1941 hosted an exclusive tennis club used by the children of the wealthy professional people who lived in the  large art-deco houses around the park. The tennis club had the use of six clay-courts, two grass-courts, a club-house, an indoor heated  swimming-pool, rest-rooms, showers, changing rooms, a billiard-room and a small cafeteria run by a Sardinian ex-waiter called Sammy.
When the Germans occupied Holland, they made ample use of all existing facilities, and the Tennis Courts was on the list of officers’ privileges. They parked their cars on the clay-courts, being sticklers for true tennis that could only be played on grass. They sacked Sammy because they had no wish to see a swarthy face among so many bright, white-skinned, desireable Dutch youth. Sacking the Sardinian was tantamount to sacrilege for the Dutch jeunesse doree. He was not one of them it was true, but he was invaluable. He provided alibis for errant behaviour, knew abortionists, catered exotic food in hard times for the parties of the rich children.
It was mutually agreed that the two types of club players, Dutch youths and German officers, should form teams whose representatives would engage in a tennis knock-out competition for three days over an August weekend. The winner would be the proud possessor of a gold-sprayed Volkswagon. Two teams of 12 players were appointed. The Dutch children were the better players. They were younger. This was their home territory. They were bored. They had cars already. The German officers cheated. By the second day the Dutch were exasperated by German bad behaviour. Several engaged the German officers in conversation whilst others of their number sneaked into the locker-room and stole cuff-links and cap badges and tie-pins and gold wrist-watches They discretely sliced open some fifty tennis balls with a cut-throat razor, and hid the valuables inside. Then, with as much nonchalent carelessness as they could muster, within the playing of the games, they contrived to knock the balls off court and into the hawthorn thicket and the stagnant canal beyond the fence so that they could be recovered later. The Dutch adolescents still contrived to win.
With balls being swooped over the wire with surprising regularity by such good players, and with balls bouncing with such curious erratic movement because of the small weighted ballast inside, the German officers grew suspicious. They pounced, discovered the deceit and rounded up the youths in the empty swimming-pool where they proceeded to bait and threaten and torture. They locked the doors and they raped the girls and forced the boys to commit sodomy.
Sammy, with some sixth sense of loyalty, never far from his long-term association with the tennis-club, had noticed the quiet courts with the tennis rackets abandoned on the grass, and he had come close enough to hear the screaming.  With reckless bravery he climbed the club-house to attempt the rescue through a sky-light. The Germans caught him and slit his throat. The gush of blood brought the orgy to a halt. The tennis-courts were closed. A girl committed suicide. Parents were arrested.
Some twenty weighted tennis balls were dredged from the canal. The hostility of the neigbourhood intimidated the dredgers. They left knowing more tennis-balls could be recovered. The missing balls were quietly collected at night by the Vongelpark youth. Their valuable German contents were sold to an Amsterdam Bank with the purpose of creating a fund to decently bury the Sardinian ex-waiter. The Bank smelted down the gold items as quickly as possible, and they were incorporated in a gold bar, which was immediately confiscated by the German police. The bar arrived by circuitous routes in Baden-Baden and was there for Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch to collect, and take to Bolzano in a bid to rescue his daughter.
GOLD
69 – The Golden bullet
Because he had lost his wife, his mother, his left arm, his right eye and his enthusiasm for life, Max Oppenheist, an officer in the 33rd Infantry made a golden bullet for an ultimate game of Russian Roulette. He was a card player, a drinker and he enjoyed provoking Chance. He was a Prussian. He had a duelling scar. His men thought he was a sacred joke; they liked him. He challenged three friends to play three bullets each on four occasions. These occasions were the anniversary of his wife’s death, his mother’s death, the death of his left arm and the death of his right eye. But the golden bullet refused to take their lives. On his sixtieth birthday Max challenged the golden bullet again. Expectations grew higher and higher as the gun again refused to deliver its fatal bullet. The participants grew over-confident and careless with their aim; they were convinced the golden bullet would never kill. Then Max rolled the barrel and fired, and the golden bullet entered his head but not his brain. He lay in hospital dreaming of the Brandenburg Funeral March, Schopenhauer’s Death-mask and Hitler’s favourite painting  of Bocklin’s The Isle of the Dead. He recovered. The only ill effects were a crumpled forehead and a little forgetfulness. The golden bullet was beside his bed in a empty wine glass of mild disinfectant. It was untouched, unscratched. He stared at it revengefully. When the golden bullet on his sixtieth birthday had waited for sixty percussions of the firing pin to become effective, and then not to become effective enough, it did not seem likely that the bullet had been designed at all to be his messenger of death.
The soldier was compulsorily but respectfully retired. He lived in a barracks for retired soldiers and he wore his golden bullet around his neck in a small leather pouch. He slept with it around his neck, bathed with it, swam in the River Gretchen with it, visited whores with it, visited priests with it. Then he lost it, and he lost his upright bearing, his confidence and then his sanity. His hair went white. He dribbled. His left eye went blind. He sat in an armchair looking over the River Gretchen and then he died.
The bullet went into the barracks museum along with the faded captured flags of Waterloo, Prince Rupert’s dyed moustache, and a candle blown out by the breath of Florence Nightingale after the battle of Sebastopol.
At the time of the Allied invasion in 1944 every scrap of helpfulness was appropriated for the war effort. Max Oppenheist’s golden bullet was not to be made an exception. It was smelted down with low grade gold taken from Jewish widows and it arrived in Baden-Baden in gold bar TY901L. Harpsch, without sentiment for old soldiers, old widows, young wives, lost causes, domestic tragedies, family inheritances, took it all clean away. Ninety-two gold bars meet death on the Bolzano highway. It was as unexpected as the unlikely meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table. Not quite. More like the unexpected meeting of a white horse and a black Mercedes on the road to Bolzano.
 

GOLD
70 – The Three Sisters
There were three sisters, Dolores, Sybil and Saffron. The first had a broken nose, the second was pregnant and the third, a half-sister, was exceedingly beautiful. When the Germans created the petty French state of collaborators known as Vichy, the three sisters left Marseille pushing prams. They knew full well that they had been given a Jewish identity because their husbands were successful, foreign, sometime malcontent and usually outside the law. The husbands had originally come from Morocco. To pronounce Jewishness on a citizen was low in bureaucratic organisation and high in effect, and was scarcely ever examined, criticised or vetoed. So to be called a Jew was a convenience for ostracisation, like a lettre de cachet  of the ancien regime where two conspiring relatives could effortlessly imprison a third by simply declaring him or her insane. The sisters knew their lives were going to be made miserable, if not intolerable, if not cut suddenly short.
For their husbands it was worse. They were determined to go home to Morocco, and, if necessary, swim there. The husband of Dolores, as a child, had washed dishes in his uncle’s cafe, had bought himself an oven, cooked squid on the street, and at seventeen had rented a corner of a grocer -shop where he fried whitebait and boiled clams. By the time he was thirty he had borrowed money and opened a small restaurant of his own that specialised in shellfish and was on every American tourist’s itinerary. When the fascist persecutors came close, he stowed away to Casablanca on the shrimp boat of one of his suppliers.
Sybil’s husband was first a bicycle messenger-boy, then a taxi-driver, then a motor- mechanic, then a chauffeur, then he bought himself a petrol-pump franchise and a lock-up garage and took over a tyre-repair shop and ran an unlicensed taxi-service. On a Saturday night in June 1940, he made love to his wife which certainly made her pregnant, put on his oldest clothes, drove one of his three taxis to Gibraltar and jumped nude into the sea on the Sunday afternoon. Ostensibly he was determined to practice his backstroke. He ended up practising his backstroke, breast-stroke, crawl and butterfly-stroke and various forms of floating, all the way to the Moroccan coast.
Saffron’s husband, once a child pickpocket, then an adolescent whisky smuggler, an escort dancer, a professional impostor, a dealer in hashish, then a child kidnapper, a sometime amateur pimp and possible contract killer, had more money than his two successful brother-in-laws put together, but he still stole 200 US dollars from an American priest dining in his brother-in-law’s shellfish restaurant to pay for a very draughty open-cockpit plane trip to Casablanca.
By arrangement the three sisters carried their husband’s not inconsiderable worldly possessions in gold and jewellery away from their sphere of operations inland to some safe haven which all three devout sisters believed to be Avignon, City of the Popes. They sought a disguise of poverty, wore shabby print summer dresses but could not leave behind their high-heels and little white gloves. They stuffed their matrimonial valuables into potatoes packed around with coal in three old and battered prams. Gold, potatoes and coal. They took to the country roads through the olive groves and through the vineyards. They soon abandoned their fancy gloves and shoes and walked barefoot, growing tanned and happier every kilometre they travelled from the coast. They walked laughing and smiling and joking from Marseilles to Arles to Tarascon. But at Chateaurenard they disappeared.
At night they had camped in the fields, boiling up a kilo of potatoes, after first washing off the coal-dust and sticking a knitting-needle into each potato in case it harboured a secret interior. They picked allotment cabbages and garden radishes and ate desserts of stolen grapes and oranges. At first no one had taken took notice of these three women pushing dilapidated perambulators down dirt roads deep in the country. Then they had collected admirers and soon had a small army with its own advance scouts picking them up at the next village square. They were invited into barns and houses and to weddings and christenings and wakes. They had preferable treatment from mayors and priests. They were serenaded by young guitar players. They smoked cigarettes with old grandfathers on dusty porches in the long-shadowed evenings whilst watching white horses roll in the nettles.
The unaccustomed dust of walking feet attracted the enemy, but for a time the enemy was outmanoeuvred. A mythology was born of three knowing town-ladies, one with a broken nose, one with a pregnant belly and one of incredible striking beauty all pushing broken prams along the skyline against the setting sun. Who were they? Were they indeed so very rich? Did potatoes cooked in coal-dust make you energetic and charismatic and dangerous?
On the prominent curve of a hill with a church tower and a grove of ilex trees and an assortment of darting swallows, the three prams were discovered riddled with bullets. When the local villagers developed enough confidence to come close to the source of the living legend, they found only a handful of potatoes in the bottom of one pram. In three  potatoes they found three wedding rings. Who were the assailants? The fascist police? Greedy villagers? Jealous unrequited lovers? The strongest story but completely unproven, was that the assailants were the sisters’ husbands angry at the disappearance of all their hard-earned wealth? And where did all the wealth go, and why?
Harpsch would have appreciated the myth; he admired stout-hearted, courageous Jewish women determined to combat oppressive forces; he had fallen in love with one in Vaux. Dolores, Sybil and Saffron were not Jewish, only pretend bureaucratic Jewish. Harpsch would have happily made them honorary Jewish and got them to meet his wife, the mother of his daughter he was now to find, not with a pram of gold but with a black Mercedes of gold.
Harpsch had just a little of the sisters’ vanished glory in their three gold rings, now smelted into a gold bar with sundry other golden objects in Lyons. The gold bar was taken to Turin and then to Munich and then to Baden-Baden to be securely placed in Vault Three of the Deutches Bank. Harpsch reached Bolzano on the 16th April 1945 and crashed. If he had had an opportunity to eat a meal in that North Italian town, he might have discovered that the Bolzano restaurants could cook and serve potatoes much better than they could cook spaghetti.
 

GOLD
71 – I am dead
“I am dead. I love you. See you later, Peter”.
This was the message Peter wrote to his wife from the Peterhaus State prison, Warsaw.  It was true. He was dead. He was dead when Constra received his message. Why write in the future tense, “I will be dead”?
The words were written without haste; they were very legible. The last part of the simple message was very familiar. Peter wrote frequently. He always kept a book of postage stamps in his pocket ready to post a message at any time, from anywhere.
“Dear Constra and Hetty, I love you. See you later, Peter”.
It was the “I am dead” that was different, unique, unusual. Constra was in her car when she read the message.
“It’s a letter from your father. He is in Warsaw. Which is the capital of Poland. Which is a country over there to the right. Where the rain is coming from”.
Constra read the message to her daughter as the windscreen wipers were beating furiously, trying to conquor the rain on the windscreen.
Only she left out the first three words.
Constra had left the house in a hurry to take their daughter Hetty to school, and she had grabbed the letter in the brown envelope with all the other letters  from the lino behind the front door; a bill for coal, a bill for milk, a cheque for fifteen marks from the Food Office, a letter from her sister Janny, and a message from Peter in a brown envelope  with the correct address, and a single sheet of folded paper insidep. He had licked the stamp. His spittle was on the envelope. Three sentences. Ten words. In groups of three and three and three and one.
Constra did not even hesitate in her driving. The car ran smoothly all the way to Anselmplatz. She parked the car, ran through the rain with Hetty, kissed her on both cheeks three times as was the family custom. Her grandmother had been Dutch. She smoothed down Hetty’s brown hair, said goodbye, patted her backside, smiled at the teacher, returned to the car. She shut all the doors and locked all the windows and she screamed for twenty minutes until she fainted. You could see her silent scream in the locked car with the rain falling on the windscreen and the wipers working furiously.
Constra knew Peter’s message was not a lie. His grandmother had been Greek. Peter is Greek for rock.
“All Greeks are liars. I am a Greek. Since I am a liar, I will tell you that I am not a Greek, therefore I am not a liar”.
Stupid, argumentative, awkward, perverse, complicated, a deliberately infuriatingly playful man. So “I am dead” was obviously true.
The car with the unconscious woman inside was still there when the rain stopped and the sun came out and three school bells rang and Hetty ate her lunch and attended an afternoon lesson on the History of Germany and then put on her coat, could not find her mother, walked confidently out into the road to where she had last seen the car, saw her father’s diplomatic black Volkswagon standing with the wipers still moving and saw her mother sleeping inside and knocked on the window. She knocked for five minutes, starting to cry after the second. A teacher saw her, looked in the car, called the school superintendant. They had to break a window.
Two weeks later Constra received an envelope and inside was Peter’s wedding ring, twenty carat gold. Constra swallowed it and hoped to die. Peter was a minor German civil servant working on Salt Mine plans in Warsaw. He had been accused of sabotage. It might have been true, he was not at all fond of the Third Reich. It might have been because he was Jewish. Or maybe because someone wanted his black diplomatic Volkswagon. Or maybe for all three reasons.
They dragged Peter’s wedding-ring out of Constra’s throat. They put it in her handbag which was stolen by a thirteen-year old messenger-boy, who gave the ring to his mother to buy bread and coal. The coal-merchant exchanged the ring for dollars at his bank where his wife was chief cashier. They were arrested. The ring began travelling until it was smelted at Munich and its identity entirely lost in a gold bar which Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch collected one sunny morning to take with him to Bolzano and oblivion.
 

GOLD
72 – The U-bend
Thirty gold items were hidden in the U-bend of a toilet closet at 17B Balintourstrasse, Paderborn in 1938, and not re-discovered until 1991. The urine and faeces, spit, menstrual blood, cigarette-butts, chewing-gum, half-burnt love letters, ripped-up pornography and occasional vomit of three generations of the Hocklester family had passed over the family’s fortune.  This familial and familiar activity had continued throughout the Second World War, the Defeat of National Socialism and Germany, the Allied and Soviet Occupations, the East-West Split, the Cold War, the Economic Revival, the Adenaur Years, and the Breaking up of the Berlin Wall. A long time. All in big initials. Important times for Germany.
But it’s not true. Because the thirty gold items were Fakes. In big initials. It was a question of Shit over Fakes.
The original items had been melted down into five gold bars, four of which are now in the Hong Kong bank in Zurich, identified as a set by their stamped PADERBORN initials, and a fourth is missing, believed to be in Osaka on the desk of a banker related to a cousin of the family of the Japanese Emperor. This banker  is a keen collecter of German war souvenirs, but he has not been an insensitive man. He has had the gold bar lacquered red to disguise it, and he used it as a paperweight placed between the Weimar telephone and the Baudermeir ash-tray.  The banker was one of a consortium of economic advisers to the Emperor’s family who tried to financially persuade Speilberg to do for Japan what Speilberg did for Germany in the film of Schindler’s List.
The original Hocklester gold had a more interesting history that the fake Hocklester gold. In 1938 it had been packed into two suitcases and a briefcase, and had been found and seized without fuss by SS officers looking for a Jewish boy accused of sling-shotting a National Socialist nightwatchman, a large man noted for his bullying, his vocal obscenities in front of small children, his stealing of female underwear and his masturbating into his shoe stimulated by a faded print of the Mary Magdalene in the local Catholic vestry. This new boy David had conquored a new giant Goliath and become a local hero. He was kept hidden and protected by his admirers. Wrapped in towels and shawls and curtains, he was passed from cupboard to closet to cellar to attic like a Holy Relic with two other children of his same approximate size and weight to confuse the forces of the enemy. The original Hocklester gold hoard was a by-product of the new David mythology whose prime star was considered far more precious than 250 ounces of dead yellow metal.  But the David supporters had probably been too clever.
The Nazis eventually discovered the boy in a widower’s double-bed wrapped in a sleeping-bag, and they strung him up in a cat-alley with a skipping-rope. Save that in 1991, the real David turned up in Dresden. It was about the same time as the discovery of the U-bend golden hoard and the Great Thaw of East Germany.  This original David was soon made aware of the terrible mistake. In homage and recognition of the boy who had been hung in his place, he became a silversmith, and as a boy irrevocably associated with the Hocklester gold, this refound David Hocklester made a memorial, recreating the lost Hocklester gold in silver. It is now on permanent exhibition in the museum in Paderborn.
None of which still tells us very much about the original Hocklester treasure. It seems that gold and silver smithery ran in the Hocklester family, and Ritveld Hocklester, with his two sons,  anticipating forced seizure of Jewish valuables, had spent some eight months replicating the original treasure in gold-plated bronze.  Having an illicit drink in the  local hostelry, an action initially perpetrated by a desire to merge effortlessly into the local social landscape, but which had been continued for its own good sake, Ritveld and his sons had been arrested. Apparently the circumcised penises of the two boys  had been spotted by a voyeuristic Nazi sympathiser who had drilled a spy-hole for his vicarious pleasure in the wall of the latrine. Ritveld and sons were last seen on a truck travelling towards the Altenbeken Forest. And the story goes that the fakes were so good that Ritveld’s wife, panicked into quick action by the SS officers hammering her door down, had quite innocently but erroneously placed the real ones in the suitcases and the fake ones in the deep U-bend of the family toilet.
From Paderborn the Hocklester gold items were transported to  Hannover and from there to  Gottingen where they were smelted down into gold bars. The goldsmith was permitted a three per cent share in every monthly consignment and he chose to take, without any special reason,  two of the Paderborngold bars. They were kept in his private safe in the Guidheim Bank until a bomb accidentally trapped in an otherwise empty  bomb-bay of an American plane flying back to England after a raid on Leipzig, chose to swing lose. The bomb fell on the bank. Looters completed the dismemberment  of the bank and its contents. One of the looted gold bars travelled to Prague and eventually by a very complicated route arrived in Instanbul in 1950, Hong Kong in 1953, and Osaka in 1956, by way of exchanges that included a bucket of pigswill, twenty thousand roubles in used notes, three submachine-guns, four square meals and three Albanian soldiers, a girl’s English education at Rodean and Cambridge, six weeks free sex in a brothel in the Crimea, a library of books once owned by Lenin, a small butter mountain and the redistribution of the wealth of two businesses specialising in pyjamas and contraceptives, forty tons of pharmemecticals in Vienna that may have influenced the storyline of Graham Greene’s novel The Third Man, a restaurant chain, a small fishing boat, a milk plant and an airline based in Macao.
The other gold bar was exchanged for a farm-truck, and found itself in the hands of professional financiers who sold it to the Mayor of  Kassel. By now it was August 1945 and the Mayor of Kassel had done too much on the wrong side of the street to ever be considered a future model German citizen. He drove his wife and three small children towards the  Dutch border, but was persuaded at gunpoint to exchange his gold bar for petrol near Baden-Baden where the petrol-attedant turned it in for credit to his bank from where it was stolen by Harpsch who then drove his hoard of collected gold pieces across Germany, into France, around the Western Alps and through part of Italy to his destination in Davos in Switzerland, only to be in collison with a white horse outside Bolzano where they cannot cook good spaghetti.
 

GOLD
73 – Rings on a knife
Achip Buhler owned a thirty centimetre long hunting knife with a red leather-bound handle and the letter A stamped on the metal boss. He had thrown it to strike quivering into a wooden door, into tree branches, tree trunks, soft earth and a deer corpse. He had never killed anything with it, but was hoping to.
Achip lived at Lodz on the German-Polish border. He frequently rode over to Goncharov in Poland, in his battered farm truck to taunt Jews. It was 1936. Jesse Owens had just won four medals at the Berlin Olympic Games. Achip Buhler would have liked to have taunted negroes. In Goncharov there weren’t any negroes. There probably weren’t any negroes within a hundred square kilometres of Lodz, and probably never had been any. What would a negro be doing within five hundred square kilometres of Lodz?  Half way between Lodz and Goncharov was a hamlet called Frunchen; it was just on the German side. Coming back from not taunting negroes in Goncharov, Achip saw a group of some thirty middle-aged Polish women who had come over the border  scavenging for he did not know what in a recently harvested German potato field. They could not be scavenging for potatoes since German farmers were aburdly thorough, and German farmer’s wives even more so. Any potato left in a German field was an insult to a farmer’s wife; she would box her husband’s ears if such a potato could be found. Achip drove his truck as close as he could to the women and he trudged across the mud getting his new boots dirty. Some of the women stood upright and watched him, some of the women slowly backed away, two ran off in the direction of the border two fields away, one sat down in a muddy furrow and started to wail, a pregnant woman actually moved forwards towards him, perhaps she hoped to pass him by and reach his truck and sit down on a leather seat with springs to rest her legs, hips and the small of her back. All the women without exception wore black head scarves. It was part of the uniform of being a middle-aged woman on the German-Polish border. All heads had certainly turned his way. Achip thought their heads looked like a flock of dark birds facing into the wind. He was the wind.
An elderly big-breasted woman in a brown blouse, a Jewish Polish grandmother, suddenly chose to ignore him, turned her back and bent over to scrabble in the clay mud. What the Hell was she doing?  There were certainly no potatoes in this field. Achip was convinced that she had thrust her buttocks deliberately in his direction. Achip took out his thirty centimetre long blade and threw it with some force into her backside. She screamed and gulped and gasped for air. She fell face first into the mud, the knife stuck firmly into her flesh. All the women screamed. Achip walked forward to retreive his knife. It came out cleanly. No blood. Two more women ran off in the direction of the border. Another three women sat down. The pregnant woman came right up to Achip and smashed him across the face with a large cold wet red hand. He reeled and then stuck the blade into her pregnant belly. She went down without a sound. Her baby was dead. Her body was soon to die with it. It was a baby girl. Achip had got his wish. His knife had killed. A foetus. He had killed a foetus. What sort of Viktory over hostile forces was that? Soon he could say he had killed a mother. Both his kills were female. Achip the hero.
Achip retreived his knife and brandished it over his head. Now there was blood. What was he to do now? He contemplated rape but he was convinced all the woman, aged between thirty-five and sixty, wore threadbare underwear, ragged vests and ragged pants, stretched brassieres and stretched petticoats and other garments without names full of holes and darns, underwear stuffed with newspaper for warmth, wrong sizes, underclothes in scraps discoloured with repeated washing, never shining white as in the American movies, but probably grey or green-grey, tied at the waist and the knee with string because the elastic had broken long ago. He did not fancy a confrontation with this sort of underwear.  Besides these women were certainly Jewish. And you didn’t fuck Jewish women, least of all in a potato field on the German-Polish border. With witnesses. Seven crows had arrived. What did they want? They alighted on a furrow top, flapping their wings impatiently. Why were they behaving impatiently?
Instead of contemplating rape, Achip had another idea. He decided to collect their wedding-rings on the blade of his thirty centimetre long hunting knife. He indicated what he wanted. Half of the women were strangely relieved. This sadistic maurauder only wanted valuables. Intimidated, they complied. It was getting dark. The western sky was black with a large cloud slit with a jagged edge of orange. They put their wedding-rings on the point of the blade of Achip’s shiny knife. Thirty-three rings. Thirty three, the age of Christ and Alexander at death. Achip could not get any more rings on his knife. The rings were pushed down to a point where the blade was wider than a finger. The dying pregnant woman would not stop screaming. He had had enough. His boots were sticky. Holding his ringed blade pointing upwards he turned his back. He had not taken four steps when a clod of wet mud struck him in the back of the neck. He turned and a clod of wet mud struck him in the face. Twenty clods of heavy, sticky mud brought him down. They killed him, stuffing his mouth with mud, kicking at his head and his face and his groin, especially his groin, mashing his groin till his trousers matted with blood.
A truck loaded with pigs came along the road from Goncharov. Its faltering single headlight could be seen a great way off. There was sufficient time for the women to make their escape. They ran off carrying their dead and wounded. The wounded pregnant woman was dead before they reached the edge of the field. The women had left Achip with his hand sticking up out of the mud, still holding his knife vertically complete with the thirty-three wedding rings. From a distance of twenty metres Achip’s vertical arm with the rings on his knife looked like a bizarre memorial made by an undertaker with no taste. Achip was black with mud, his face covered. Perhaps he looked like a negro.
The man with the truck, Bela Vertreker, wiped a little mud from Achip’s face. He recognised a neighbour he did not like. Bela took the rings and drove away.
Bela Vertreker sold thirty-two of the rings to a fellow pig dealer who travelled all over the border region, a big man called Helas who passed the rings on to a jewel-smith in Lodz who smelted the rings down the same evening. The resulting bar was lodged in a bank for six weeks and arrived in Baden-Baden, squeezed into a green baise bag with a red draw-string and placed in Vault Three ready to be taken away by Harpsch.
But ony 32 of the 33 rings went into that gold bar because Bela had kept one ring and had given it to Portia Tchercoff, a kitchen girl at the Lodz railway station whose pink nipples he hoped one day to suck, whose pink buttocks he hoped one day to smack, whose hairless pink vulva he hoped one day to fuck. He had seen her only once in a bathhouse at Drusela-Kstaad on a railway-worker’s holiday outing. He had peeped over a broken partition into the women’s changing-room. Portia had just come out of a very hot shower. She glowed and steamed. She was pink and white, like a thoroughly washed and scrubbed pig. Bela Vertrekker swore Portia Tchercoff could have possessed a small curly tail lodged above the soft divide of her buttocks. She had been more than enough to turn his head. Bela had frequently fucked his pigs. He saw Portia as a suckling pig. Lewd man. And stupid man. The ring he gave her turned out to be her mother’s wedding-ring, and Portia Tchercoff’s mother was no Jewess.
Bela the pigman was arrested, and accused of murder. His advocat offered a complicated defense. First, he should confess to the murder of a pregnant woman and the wounding of a grandmother. What? Though Achip had done the murdering and Bela had only done the stealing, it would sound better and less criminal to a judge in these times, to say that he had stolen from a woman or women rather than he had stolen from a man. Besides it did not sound good that a local man had run amok in a potato field and then been kicked to death by middle-aged and elderly potato scroungers. From Poland. Potato scrounging was illegal and farmers could be penalised for letting it be considered as a possible venture. Then Bela, to cap his defense , should say that he had thought the women were Jewesses. The grandmother Jewess was nearly sixty-five and would be soon dead anyway, and who wanted fresh young Jew children in the world nowadays? Perhaps Bela had helped the Jewish question in some small part. No problem. Bela wept in the dock, though he was weeping over the prospect of never fucking the suckling shiny pink body of Portia Tchercoff. His abject look went well for him. Bela was released in three days.
 

GOLD
74 – Golden heels
On a visit to Venice in 1925 when Corina Assel was nineteen, she had wandered into the Museo Correr. She had idled in front of a glass case of 17th century shoes, boots and slippers. Venetian courtesans in the early 1600s had worn shoes built up on platforms. In the vitrine were examples made in leather, wood and ivory. Many of the shoes were decorated with inlaid enamel or hammered with silver nails or gold-plated studs, or painted with red lacquer as though the bootmaker had made a visit to Japan, which perhaps was not impossible in 1605. One especially exotic pair of gold painted shoes had been fretted with strips of ivory as though the cobbler had carefully scrutinised the footwear of foreigners from the Middle East visiting their countrymen on Guidecca.
Corina Assel was studying English literature. She was slowly making her way across Europe to London. She had relatives on Guidecca. This Venetian island had serviced exotic foreign visitors for a thousand years, but we must not imagine the name is derived from the Italian word for jews; it more likely comes from “giudicati”  meaning the judged, a reference to the banishment to the island of malcontents and troublesome aristocrats. Corina’s relatives on Guidecca, her mother’s first husband’s brother and his two step-sons, were not very forthcoming in informal communications. Corina saw more friendliness in their horse, a shockingly white stallion with an ebony black head and jet black genitals. The horse was stabled incongruously in a long garden paddock that ended in a quay that overlooked the lunatic asylum on the island of San Clemente. The family supplemented the stallion’s diet with hay rowed over from Torcello, and they exercised it on the broad quay of the Fondamenta della Croce. Corina herself collected dandelion leaves for the horse from the nineteenth century ruin of the Stucky Flour Mill. She walked there at night with a large canvas sack, fearful of meeting the ghost of Stucky the unpopular Miller who had been murdered by an aggrieved employee in 1910. Corina had been born in Tel Aviv. Her grandfather had also been a miller, and in some unclear way he had been Stucky’s competitor, and involved, also in an unclear way, with Stucky’s sister, a loud, short lady given to prefering tall lovers. Corina Assel was on the short side but it had never really worried her, and at nineteen, she had not experienced sufficient lovers to have developed preferences.
Corina further contemplated the built-up shoes in the glass-case on the third storey of the city museum. She thought about the courtesans who had worn them. She sat down on a wooden Savanarola and stared at the shoes. It was peaceful in the museum, with the quietness created by noise at a distance, in this case, the conversation and footsteps of tourists walking down below in the Ala Napoleonica. Corina Assel thought about walking on built-up shoes in 1605, the year of the Gunpowder Plot and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Guy Fawkes was a Venetian Catholic and Shylock was a Venetian Jew. Were there courtesans walking on built-up shoes in a play by Shakespeare? Why did Venetian courtesans walk on built-up shoes? Venice was sometimes flooded. Corina had seen photographs of a flooded St Marks Square decorated with duckboards, damp pigeons and children splashing. Were the platform shoes for keeping the feet dry above the water when Venice was flooded? High shoes were precarious. Walking to confession through fifteen centimetres of water on decorated heels was not an entertaining walk for the walker, though perhaps it was an entertainment for an onlooker. High heels threw the body forward, drawing attention to the breasts and making the buttocks tremble. Corina touched her buttocks. Perhaps the practical considerations of keeping the feet dry had developed possibilities of display. But this was not just a question of a high heel, the whole shoe in the glass-case was high. What about having high toes as well as having high heels?  The platform shoes in the glass case were constructed like small stilts.  Were Venetian courtesans of the early 1600s stilt-walkers because they traditionally were all short women, like her grandfather’s mistress, the sister of Stucky the Miller who had been shot? Were Venetian courtesans all Sicilians or Neapolitans and consequently short? No, this could not be true. She stared again at the boots and shoes. The platforms could be hollow. Perhaps they would need to be hollow in order to keep the shoes light. You could perhaps keep things in the hollow space within. Money, valuables, coins, jewels, poison, letters.  Was there poison in the Merchant of Venice, or was the poison in Romeo and Juliet which took place in Verona? Or Milan?
Your house-key. That was it. The built-up shoes had nothing to do with flooding or being on the short side. The stilted shoes were a secret hiding-place for valuables.
In 1943 Corina was 37, she had experienced sufficient lovers to have developed choices, and now quietly nursed a preference for men with long noses, long pricks and long hair. Each one of her most important lovers had possessed one of these characteristics. Now she had found a lover with all three characteristics. She had finally and indisputably fallen in love with a courier taking messages for the Italian Resistance Movement between Torino and Genoa. He was a Venetian who kept his long hair tidy with a red strip of ribbon. He had a very sharp long nose and yellow eagle eyes. Corina had accomplished very little with her life until she met this Venetian adventurer, now she was making up for lost time and did anything he asked. She would have slit her own wrists if he had demanded it. She readily agreed to become a spy and a courier. She had remembered her Venice contemplations in the Museo Correr. She visited a cobbler who made her a pair of built-up shoes in red leather with imitation side-pieces of off-white ivory. She began to carry messages in her built-up shoes. She impersonated a whore. It was her lover’s idea. Whores could travel incognito, their trade obviously advertised. Her Venetian lover posed as her pimp. She took messages from Torino to Genoa and returned with gold. There is only so much gold to be carried in a built-up shoe, but it was a valuable exchange trade. Rings, bracelets, crucifixes. Then she developed the habit of carrying other articles of wartime usefulness. Radio valves. Dollar bills. Counterfeit postage stamps. Opium. Contraceptives. Nylons. Even bullets. Her lover went to Bologna to harass German troop trains. They wrote to one another. His letters were a great comfort and she carried her lover’s letters in her built-up shoes along with the gold.
On a mission of small public importance but of great private import, she rowed in a boat across the Festina Lake on a foggy winter’s morning, and the boat was shot through with bullet holes. Corina’s red leather shoes floated because of the air-filled cavities. The gold and the letters were confiscated. Corina was arrested and made to whore in earnest. She kept her mouth tightly closed and they cut off her feet to stop her escaping. Her letters were read. They contained sufficient information to have her lover arrested and later shot at Marabotta, but not before he was able to send Corina’s body to Guidecca for a memorial service and then to transport her corpse to her birth-place in Tel Aviv for burial. To pay for so much expensive attention to the corpse of his lover, the Venetian used some of the gold Corina had once carried in her shoes. Much of the rest found its way to Genoa where it was smelted by officials of the branch of the Bank of Milan and eventually became the property of the Gestapo who sent it by rail to Munich from where it arrived in Baden-Baden and the hands of Gustav Harpsch for a journey back to Italy by black Mercedes to Bolzano.
The museum at Veneria Reale just outside Torino was completed in 2004, and the museum’s designer, the English film-director Peter Greenaway, devised a historical structure where a room was allocated for every year of the palace’s history from 1500 to the year of the museum’s inauguration. The room devoted to the year 1943 contained various local memorabilia, a first-draft manuscript of “If this is a man” by Primo Levi, the suicide note of Arturro Foix, and, in a separate glass-case, Corina Assel’s red leather built-up shoes.
 

GOLD
75 – The tram decision
Kaspar Asperto Fricker, an Austrian, an anglophile and an enthusiast for the English language, seemed to want to confuse the word “Jews” with the word “jewels”.  Being a good anti-Semetic Nazi Party member, it of course suited his way of thinking admirably, for it underlined the self-evident truth that Judaism somehow spawned wealth naturally and indiscriminately. Shake a Jew and jewels fell out.
Armed with the invincibility of the language of the English, a superior race, he walked the streets, shaking Jews. For a time he indeed prospered. He became rich in trinkets. Golden thimbles from scared seamstresses, golden chains from small frightened children, a gold earring from a widow with cataracts, a gold brooch from a young woman who sobbed several nights away greiving its loss, a few golden coins of the reign of Leopold V from an old man with memories. Treasure indeed. Fricker gloated. He took his gains to a goldsmith who saw in him a potentially steady  supplier. Every month a new consignment of fresh gold was smelted down and Kaspar Asperto’s credit mounted.  With the goldsmith’s wry assistance, he calculated his ambition, and he subsequently put in an order for one gold bar to consolidate his thievery. The bar should be 100 ounces in weight, 16 centimetres long, eight centimetres wide, one half centimetre thick. He bought himself a second-hand coat which had a pocket just that size.  In due time he had one gold bar’s worth of people’s misery. He took it home, clutching it tightly in his inside pocket as he walked up Innsbruckerstrasse. He was knocked down by a tram-full of Jews. The driver of the tram was a gentile from Manchester. Kaspar Asperto woke to an uneasy and intermittant consciousness in hospital, lying on the white sheets of a neat hospital bed but still wearing his overcoat. His boots had been taken off and his gold bar had gone. The implications for Asperto were confusing. A gentile of impeccable English origins, driving Jews in a public conveyance, had removed his wealth with his consciousness.
The gold bar, harbinger of insights, had found another owner, a shopkeeper who had found it in the Insbruckenstrasse gutter at the time of the accident. The shopkeeper banked his find, visiting it frequently in the bank vault where he had his own metal safe-deposit box with a key. He turned the gold bar over and over in his fingers, and gave it a value far exceeding its potential. Then without fuss the shopkeeper died and his wife inherited. She promptly saw more value in liquid cash than she did in a gold bar, and she cashed in it, receiving far less than she should, but she was not to know this. From a distance it was easily possible to see that a gold bar has a changing value according to who owns it, who values it, who wants it.  The bar became the property of the Deutche Bank in whose interests, a gold bar should adopt a steady price, and it journeyed around a little, getting used to various dark bank vaults before settling down in Baden-Baden. And it was from Baden-Baden that as gold bar number 47 it was collected by Harpsch’s sergeant and ended up in a car  crash near Bolzano, the city that knows it cannot be depended upon to make a consistent value for a plate of spaghetti.
 

GOLD
76 – Breaking glass
Twelve-year old Claus Ulrichtermann went around breaking gentile glass in revenge for crystal night. His best friend Herman had disappeared. Along with his bike. The two of them used to ride the red-painted bicycle dangerously and joyfully all over Maeterling. In his childhood grief and loss, Claus threw milk-bottles at lamp-posts and beer bottles at trees, and he jumped up and down on the broken shards, shredding his shoes till his mother threatened to send him out barefoot.
On a Sunday morning he threw a bottle full of disinfectant at a grocer’s window, and was black-mailed into crime of a more serious nature. The grocer, a man of florid complexion and Bavarian accent, made Claus into a gold-thief in return for not reporting him to his mother for disobedience, and to the police for being an incipient Jew-sympathiser.
Claus considered his new employment as part of the continuing battle to regain, or this time, buy back his friend Herman. He made himself believe that sufficient gold - as yet the sum unknown - could purchase Herman from the grip of whatever was stopping him from returning to the streets of Maeterling, and a little more gold on top of that could even bring back the red bicycle.
Claus was generally liked in the shops and houses of Maeterling. He was amusing to talk to. He had enthusiasms that were very engaging. He had, as we have seen, fierce loyalties. His mother’s neighbours were often amused to have him in their parlours, larders, store-rooms and sitting-rooms, and were not too alarmed to find him sometimes in their bathrooms and bedrooms, scratching the metal of the hot-water taps with his finger-nail, sitting on their toilet-seat swinging his legs and whistling, whilst he idled through the contents of their bathroom cupboard laid out carefully on the linoleum. They even tolerated him biting their coins, the ones he had borrowed to look at from under the mattress. They never thought he might be gold-searching and gold-testing. Perhaps they might have guessed, because one time he discovered his uncle holding his hand under the urine flow of a young shop assistant in a walk-in cupboard, and he had to be bribed to keep his mouth shut. He chose gold. And another time he laughed too loudly as he crouched behind a sofa that moved rhythmically under the weight of the barber’s wife as she experimented with the private parts of the butcher’s boy. Again he asked for gold to keep his mouth shut. And his mother subsequently cooked meat on Tuesdays and Saturdays as a result of the barber’s wife’s oversight,  and sometimes the butcher’s boy, a chubby and fastidiously clean lad from Alsace, came to dine with them and sometimes he slept overnight on the couch and sometimes he slept elsewhere in the house but Claus was not always certain where. It was a big house. His father was dead. Killed wih shrapnel in his belly. Apparently in Berlin. What shooting had there been in Berlin? His father came back in a small box. How could his father have been so small?
There were four bedrooms in his mother’s house, and his mother restlessly slept in all of them in turn. Claus did once see the very clean butcher’s boy standing naked in front of a window with his mother crouched in front of him, tieing bows in his pubic hair. Claus watched fascinated. It was apparent even to Claus that not a few women in Maeterling treated the butcher’s boy like a big baby, but a baby that did not shit its pants, though they liked to change his underwear, did not demand to be breast-fed but did not mind if a nipple was pushed into his mouth. He was someone they could wash and fondle. For some unexplained reason, perhaps because these women believed the butcher’s boy was a big baby, he was thought to be impotent, which put him in even higher demand as a plaything. The women of Maeterling shared him out and he grew chubbier on their cooking and caresses. It has to be said he also grew more indolent, though the sexual attentions did not seem to spoil his good nature. Husbands continued to tolerate him; they thought him harmless. It was said that the coalman’s brother and Friedrich Ulianow, the undertaker, played with him in their own particular way for comfort, their wives being such shrews. It was even suggested that the Feulberts, husband and wife, hardware store-owners, had him stay on every other Wednesday in their married bed, she to fondle as an absent child, he to prove his virility because his prick always hurt his wife. But these are all rumours and unlikely to be true. They should be included in the genre of war-time stories, titillatory, escapist, a little scandalous, certainly passed along the trails of gossip to turn people’s attention away from death, loss, grief and war.
So Claus stole from his neighbours small items of gold that every Jewish household had concealed somewhere or other. And due to lax and loose bribery, greed for comforts of every description, complex Maeterling rivalries and friendships, and of course a desire for a good local story, Claus got away with his petty crimes. And the grocer made profits.
Then Claus became thirteen, and he read all at the same time, a gynaecological text-book, a soldier’s sex-manual and an American comic of ill-repute, and he recognised the new stirrings in his imagination for what they were. He began to envy the butcher’s boy, and wanted his job, not as butcher’s boy, but as bed boy. Claus now washed and bathed very often, kept his teeth well brushed, and decided to became fatter. He ate pastries and sweets and took sugared tea. He needed to pay for his wish to become fat. He began to keep the grocer’s gold, but such a little of it that the grocer hardly noticed the drop in supply.
The butcher’s boy was now twenty and a little grosser. He had a double chin now and his beard grew very quickly and he started to be very interested in motor-bikes. He was becoming less fascinating. It was even said he was regularly seeing Pamela Hardstanding who lived on the other side of the Hohenstauffen Bridge. Claus was really ready to take over. But it did not happen. Claus was liked well enough but not well liked enough in the right way. Women preferred to listen to Claus’s funny stories than undress him before the fire on a rainy evening.
Then things suddenly got very difficult. Virtually all in a single weekend. Claus’s mother was discovered to be pregnant, Pamela Hardstanding seduced Claus after Friday evening cinema, the undertaker committed suicide, it was said, for reasons of unrequited love, the widow on Francis Street discoverd her seven gold table-napkin rings had disappeared, and Rommel lost the North African campaign. And the grocer’s golden hoard of Claus-stolen trinkets was discovered by the Gestapo. The gold was forcibly confiscated, rushed to Horstling because too many pieces had been owned by Gentiles, and they were hurriedly smelted down. The resulting seven gold bars were numbered FRT67 to 73, and placed in different banks. FRT 69 was eventually trucked to Baden-Baden, and thence of course we know it ended up in Bolzano, the one place in Italy they cannot cook good spaghetti.
 

GOLD
77 – The golden film
At the premiere of the Veit Harlan film Kolberg in Bremen in 1944, two thousand members of the audience were repeatedly surprised by blemishes that landed like explosions on the film surface. The blemishes were accompanied by rasping, crackling noises that drowned the dialogue and added nothing of significance to the music.  The interruptions were sufficient to persuade a section of the audience in the most prestigious seats to visit the projectionist at the start of the second hour and ask him to stop the film. The film was inspected on the projectionist’s bench and indeed found to be damaged at intervals apparently because objects of a not immediately discernable identity had been wound into the film reel. By some extensive detective work it was discovered that those objects had been gold coins.
The making of the film Kolberg was Goebbel’s idea. This small town on the Baltic had repulsed Napoleon in the 1800s, and could be a good example of courage in the face of great adversity for the 1940s.  Little expense had been spared and 200,000 badly needed soldiers were pulled from badly needed defences of the Reich to appear on celluloid. The propaganda virtues were obviously worth more than a military Viktory.
It was discovered in Bremen that the Jewish projectionist had been stealing from the box-office safe for eight months. He had converted his cash into gold coin. On the threat of a police raid where over a hundred police officers were looking for a child-kidnapper also believed to be a film enthusiast, the projectionist had desperately sought a hiding-place for his valuables. He had wound his gold coins into the Kolberg reel, thinking to recover them later before the premiere of the film in front of the very distinguished audience. It was such an unlikely hiding-place, the police would never have the imagination to consider it a place of concealment.
The projectionist by inclination and political necessity was a recluse. He slept in his projection-box. The cinema was open eighteen hours a day. There were no windows, the world of day and night, bad weather and sunshine was an irrelevance to him. He was a figure in the dark, scarcely ever seen, an obedient voice in the gloom. No-one had considered the possibility of his Jewishness, because no-one, apart from the manager, and the manager’s wife, knew he was there. The fact that the manager’s wife was Jewish was surely relevant. There was an agreement between husband and wife that the projectionist should be considered as her nephew.
If it was thought that the projectionist’s small financial chicanery was the only irregularity surrounding the film, then that thought would be incorrect. The film and its making had spawned various conspiracies. First, the assistant director took bribes to permit soldiers to play in the film and avoid real military action, second, the director was persuaded with financial inducements to film the material, not at Kolberg, but further up the coast at Telgeter, where the local craftsman and catereres would stand to benefit considerably. Thirdly, a large proportion of the original film negative had been bought on the black-market, and had proved to be faulty, having been stored badly, and consequently subject to partial exposure. So, in the face of such large-scale chicanery, what significance in all this was the projectionist’s thirty pieces of gold coin, the produce of stealing from the box-office cash-desk?
Well, it had spoilt a public showing of the film. Disgruntled youths, excited by the propaganda purposes of the film, and eager to punish the enemy within as well as the enemy without, used it as an excuse  to burn down the cinema The projectionist himself was dragged out into the night streets and stoned to death with cobbles ripped from the Bremen pavements. The next day the cinema-manager was sent to Dachau for sleeping with a Jewish woman whose status as his wife was deemed irrelevant.
Before he died the projectionist had been forcibly persuaded to reveal where he had hidden his pathetic horde of gold coins before he had committed them to the coils of the film reel. It was in a pile of hair. He had collected the hair of the wife of the cinema manager, stealing into her bathroom,from her comb and her hair-brush and her underwear. He had wanted to make himself a nest of the hair, a love-nest to sleep in. He loved the cinema manager's wife. But he loved her like an unloved son loved her. For he was in fact her illegitimate son, product of a liason with a Jewish lover, a film director, long ago the victim of anti-Semitism.
The gold coins were taken to the bank. They were smelted down with a consignment of French gold taken from the Hermitage, once deposited there by Napoleon; curious ironies as a background to the making of a film that used Napoleon as a bogey-man. The resulting gold bars reached Baden-Baden sometime in January 1945, and were distributed among the three vaults. Harpsch and his assistant theives certainly loaded a gold bar  that was partly constituted of the Kolberg bounty into the black Mercedes, and it travelled to Bolzano, a city so far north in Italy it was almost Austrian, and Austrians would never seriously claim to be able to cook spaghetti with the true excellence expected of bone fide Italians.
 
 
 
 

GOLD
78 – Storks
The Frobischers had a large garden in Deventer, and had laid it out in the Dutch manner, on a sort of reduced French pattern but more practical, that is to say, the garden beds grew more vegetables than flowers, and the trees were apples, pears, plums and almonds and not silver birch and laburnam which look entertaining, but their produce is not habitually eaten by humans. In the middle of the garden was the chimney-stack of a dieing factory that had boiled squid to produce a blue dye. The smell of boiling squid is unpleasant and had to be wafted high in the air, hence a high chimney. The factory had been dismantled; who needs squid for blue dye in 1939? All that was left was the chimney, a privy and a porch. The privy had been converted into a chicken coop, and the porch was now a summer-house. Both were practical buildings, but the chimney had been kept strictly for the birds. It had been wrapped around with six iron bands to make sure the stones did not come apart. It had be allowed to stay because migrant storks had fancied its height and had chosen it as a nesting-site. Storks mean good luck. They mean fertility and plentitude and babies. The storks came every year to visit the Frobischer garden and to fill their stomachs with frogs and moles from the Deventer fields and water-meadows.
The nest of a stork is large and untidy, an interweaving of sticks lifted sometimes to a height of twenty metres, and fixed in place by two red beaks, a great deal of skill, and the assistance of good weather. The presence of storks, they say, is always an encouragement for other birds, perhaps they sense that storks are highly valued by humans and the benevolent toleration will extend to them. Sparrows and chaffinchs built their nests within the stork pile itself, and rooks and jackdaws roosted in the neighbouring church tower. Swifts and swallows regularly filled the skies across the garden, and blackbirds sang on the roof-tops late into a summer night.
In the spring of 1938 the storks had again returned. They cossetted themselves by much excessive clattering of beaks, and much synchronous stretching and bending of their necks to demand one another’s attention. They stood together, one bird doing very much what the other bird was doing. Both peering over the edge of the nest in a simultaneous and synchronous movement to watch the gardener below pick the first lettuces. The storks of the spring of ‘39 were truly a pair, proving, in their unconditional mutual devotion, the strength of the myth of fecundity. The Frobischer family were great stork-watchers. Storks bring babies. Mrs Frobischer found herself pregnant with twins even though she was 44 years old and had hairs on her chin. Mr Frobischer was delighted. He bought his wife an extravagant silk night-gown covered in 250 ounces of embroidered gold thread patterened in the imagery of birds. Mrs Frobischer was to wear it in her full pregnancy. August 17th 1939 was to be the birth-date.
In a story like this one, the reader will probably guess what happens next. Storks and Frobischer will become united. They will share a same destiny.
Mrs Frobischer went into an easy childbirth. She had twins, both had red birthmarks at the back of their necks, storkbites, the mark where the red bill had held them. A bomb hit the Dutch garden and felled the chimney. Two large white eggs were smashed. One Frobischer child died and the other was brain damaged.
The storks were not standing on their untidy pile of twigs when the bomb exploded, but they returned soon after, astonished and alarmed. They lingered in the surrounding meadows for a few days, returning at intervals to see if the chimney had righted itself from the bomb-crater in the vegetable-bed. Finally then departed, perhaps to North Africa. Mrs Frobischer locked herself in the chicken-coop and pulled out the gold threads from her pregnancy dress. She wound the threads around her fingers so tightly that they bled. She died of blood poisoning. Her husband was certain that the cause of death was grief, but a “death by grief” is not usually committed to a death certificate. The gold threads were taken away by the gardener who was worried that the chickens might think they were worms. He wound them around a spindle and gave the spindle to his wife who exchanged it for a pound of butter on the black market. A round-up of valuables by the Deventer Gestapo amassed sufficient gold to make a journey to the smelter a worthwhile proposition. The smelter made a thin gold bar, hardly worth packaging on its own, but it was slipped into a brown envelope and dropped into a brief-case, and lodged in the Deutsche bank in Munster. It arrived eventually in Baden-Baden as Nazi resources grew low, and joined other gold bars for a journey to Bolzano in a car driven by a German officer eager to gather up his lost child and take her to South America.
 

GOLD
79 – Train gold
At around eleven o’clock on the evening of the 15th February 1939, seven policemen attached to the railway-station at Truroa fell upon a bonanza. They were herding newly rounded-up Jews into the cellars that used to be the livestock yards of the railway station. They were stealing the Jewish wedding-rings, and knocking out their gold teeth, when they came across Hermann Hesserling who had just got married two hours before. His father-in law had been dismayed that his new relative had such a mouth of bad teeth. He did not want his grandchildren to have to ask awkward questions over the wedding photographs. Hermann had not worried. Afterall he had already captured his bride and she apparently had not minded about the contents of his mouth. His future father-in-law, as a wedding present, had paid for Hermann to visit the dentist. Hermann had 14 gold teeth fitted in seven appointments, the last one on the eve of his marriage. His bruised lower jaw had still ached when he had officially kissed his bride. Curiously of course it could be said that the interior of Hermann’s mouth was now hygenically safe, but, his best friend, if he had had a best friend, would have been duty bound to say that the interior of Hermann’s mouth, now frequently glimpsed when Hermann excessively smiled in his present state of happiness, was aesthetically monstrous. A very cynical observer could have said that the Gestapo Police at the railway station had done Hermann’s mouth an aesthetic favour, except that now the bones of his lower jaw was smashed, the upper jaw was splintered in three places, his nose was broken and his face was rapidly losing blood he could ill afford to lose. Moreover his expensive hired wedding-suit was covered in blood stains. And he was screaming.
The combined collected valuables of the evening’s railway station entertainment were sorted and shared out and placed into seven sealed, unaddressed, brown envelopes, one envelope per policeman which had also meant two each of Hermann Hesserling’s new gold teeth per person. The envelopes were temporarily stored in a mailbag under the police-counter.
There was a regular police inspection of the station at midnight when the place became noisy with drunks, railway officials changing shift, refugees without a place to sleep, the homeless, and the departure of the regular train to Hamburg with three extra cattle-trucks added at the rear which would be shunted off at Drogsburg to be attached to a train travelling to Belsen.
On this particular night, in this regular midnight station-mayhem, twenty mailbags full of small parcels, letters and postcards were dumped in the police-office of the railway-station because of a road accident to a postal truck, and twenty-one mail-bags were picked up at one o’clock the following morning. They were all correctly shipped to the destinations on their name-tags. The mailbag containing the Jewish artefacts ended up in Frankfort.  The unaddressed envelopes and their contents were soon discovered, and shipped to a bank for safe-keeping, where they were examined by the bank manager and handed over as party funds to the local Gestapo who sent them to Meiden where they were smelted as quickly as possible so as to make the gold untraceable. From Meiden, as gold bars, this little confiscated hoard of now unrecognisable and unidentifiable Jewish property went to Berlin and then to Charleroi and then to Antwerp and then to Brussels and then to Strasbourg and then to Cologne in a zig-zagging motion across Western Europe, as though it did not want to settle, so ashamed was it to contain Hermann’s teeth. Finally it travelled to  Baden Baden where they became the property of Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch who died in a car accident outside Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they could not satisfactorily make spaghetti.
Hermann Hesterling died on his wedding-night. His bride died the next day, from injuries relevant to her having thrown herself under a train.
 

GOLD
80 – Crystal collection
Joseph Boam had a collection of gold and crystal ornaments that had been made at his grandfather’s factory in Rimini on the Italian Adriatic coast in the 1890s. In 1936, the ornaments were kept in three glass cases in Joseph’s furniture shop in Leipzig. They were not for sale. Joseph had for a long time specialised in office furniture and his Italian origins had been submersed in German cultural priorities. The Italian family glass business had been sold, and Joseph’s grandfather had been buried outside of town in the Leipzig Jewish cemetery.
The gold and crystal ornaments were just a memento. They had been made as virtuoso examples of fine craftsmanship for merchandising purposes, and had been exhibited in the Italian pavilion at the 1921 Barcelona Trade Fair  The collection consisted of 46 pieces, most of them in the shape of animals entering Noah’s ark, though there were two palm trees and a figure representing Mrs Noah, and an angel known with affection in the Boam family as the Angel of the Rains. A male elephant, a female baboon and Noah himself were missing.
Joseph’s grandfather, Amos, had insisted on the iconographic authority of the pieces, and the gender identifying anatomy of the animals had been explicit to illustrate the thoroughness of the original biblical source material - and the animals went in two by two - by a man who also admired Charles Darwin and respected the laws of Natural Selection. The penis of the male elephant and the protuberant breasts of the female baboon had been broken off by the prudish Barcelona Trade Fair Authorities. Amos had subsequently thrown them away. The authorities had also interferred on behalf of children in considering the crocodiles with their open mouths as too terryifyng for young imaginations, and Noah had been stolen, perhaps by a enthusiast who had admired Noah’s virility, for Amos had somehow identified Noah and his wife with Adam and Eve, which,  iconography considered, was not so inaccurate, Mr and Mrs Noah being the second creation, so to speak, of Man and his Wife on Earth.
Though the main purpose of the manufacture of the pieces was to exhibit high prowess in the manipulative carving of glassware, each piece had gold accessories. Amos had sought to gild the lily. There was an impression that he wanted to raise the value of his product in aesthetic and financial terms by the association of gold. Goldsmiths have a higher status in the aesthetic marketplace than the makers of cut glass-crystal.  Consequently Mrs Noah had gold hair, a gold rolling-pin and golden sandals, all of the animals had gold eyes, the palm trees had gold leaves, the angels had golden hair and wings and halos, the monkeys gold tails, the lions golden teeth and the tigers golden claws.
It was said in the Exhibition Catalogue that the ark itself had been entirely fashioned from gold, but that architectural item had long vanished.
The Nazi enthusiasts had marched into Joseph’s furniture shop and had obliterated the three glass cases with their Rimini crystal exhibits in about seven swipes of a gun butt. The thugs had gathered up the golden eyes and tails, claws and teeth and swept them into a hat taken from the back of the washroom. They had poked Joseph in the stomach with a sharp object, and had passed on to the shop next door to take their fill of pastrami. Joseph’s neighbour also had Italian origins, but from Forli, a city further to the west of Rimini, along the old Roman Road that ran east to west across the breadth of Italy. Joseph bled for several hours until the wife of his Forli associate found him, and dragged him by his trouser belt along the pavement to another neighbour of Italian Jewish extraction, a tailor originally from Bologna which lies even further to the west of Forli at a distance equal to the distance between Rimini and Forli. The smudged blood trail along the pavement in Leipzig was a source of fascination to the neighbourhood children who dared one another to touch it.
The thugs passed on down the street of the Italian community of shopkeepers and traders, abusing, stealing, threatening, wounding. The victims of their sadistic mayhem made a catalogue of Italian exiles, itemising its way west up the Via Emilia - Rimini, Forli, Bologna, Modena, Parma, Piacenza. When the mauraders came to a hatter from Milan, they were exhausted, drunk and bored with Italians. The rout of the Italian Jewish exiles along the Via Emilia was complete. The hooligans bordered a tram and went to look for Polish Jews.
The intricate gold details of antediluvian mythology continued to have a history because of the impossibility of deciphering their meaning. Removed from their crystal glass context in Joseph’s furniture-shop, they were a mystery. They were constantly put aside until someone could give them a satisfactory identity. They were passed on to a Gestapo chartered accountant who had once upon a time collected gold weights, but his ignorance on this particular subject was complete. They were just simply in the end to be regarded as spoils of war and they were delivered eventually to Baden-Baden.
The Jewish gold and crystal maker, Amos Boam from Rimini, turned in his grave, and turned in his grave quite literally because the tombs in the Leipzig Jewish cemetery where he was buried were ploughed over. Joseph Boam, his furniture-shop proprietor grandson died of his wound in the belly, and was buried in an unmarked grave.
 

GOLD
81 – The Blue room
At his interrogation in the Blue Room, Mikkail Frostmann attempted a most complicated activity. He contrived to get the American chewing-gum out of his mouth without Gestapo Officer Golarche noticing. Golarche had turned to the window at the sound of a female scream. Mikkail contrived to get the wedding ring off his finger without Golarche noticing. Golarche had stood up to break wind, and his gaze had glazed as he had parted his legs and stared at the floor for that comforting moment. And Mikail contrived to get the chewing gum to stick the wedding ring onto the underside of the wooden desk behind which he had been told to sit.  Golarche had sipped a mouthful of hot coffee and turned, disgusted and angry, to spit the sugarless liquid into the tin waste-paper basket.
The American chewing-gum was a superior brand. It stuck remorselessly.
Gestapo officer Golarche was interested in married men. He was excited by the idea of masculine sexual apparatus that had been used. And he wanted to know that his sexual interest in these men would hurt the interests of their wives. The married men who left Golarche’s company often had their testicles raked with a metal comb, slashed with a razor-blade, opened up like the petals of a flower, or smashed with a wooden mallet once used by an auctioneer. Golarche, before the war, had been an auctioneer. He kept the mallet on his deak; a rememberance of former times. The married men who left Golarche’s company were certainly beyond the possibilities of further fathering.
So the Blue Room possessed a grand desk and on its underside a collection of rings stuck together by American chewing-gum in a bee-skep-like agglutination, ring on ring, clinging upside down, defying gravity much as it had helped to defy Golarche’s sexual sadism.
Snow fell in November and the Blue Room grew cold. The American chewing-gum became brittle and a ring became unstuck. It fell off. Golarche was sitting on his chair watching his most recent victim, the shivering, naked Musa Leopold, a 19-year old, newly married farmer’s son, sob in anticipation of violence. The ring hit the floor with a gentle chime and it rolled in a wide circle towards the window. Master and victim watched the ring stop, spin, and topple. The hiding place was revealed.
Golarche realised he had been tricked so many many many times, as many times as there were rings under the table. He began to rant for revenge. He shouted out the names of those who had tricked him, men who had hidden their wedding-rings to divert his sexual attentions. Musa, the thin young farmer, killed the officer by hitting him over the head with the auctioneer’s malet. The officer’s threat of revenge went unfulfilled. Musa was sentenced to death. They hung him with wire. From the time he had bludgeoned Golarche to his death five days later, they had not let Musa put his clothes on. By the time of his death this man had suffered every conceivable humiliation, most of them sexual. In huge defiance, five thousand people came out of hiding to give Musa Leopold a hero’s burial. His grave stands by the highway at Frosterling. Barren women, wishing for children, still put flowers on his grave.
The accumulated wedding-rings were scraped from the bottom of the desk and thrown into the office boiler to rid them of their American contamination. They were put into a sack and sent to Baden-Baden, to make a contribution to Lieutenant Harpsch’s imaginative project to rescue his lost daughter from the mountain gnomes of Switzerland.
 

GOLD
82 – The heaps and piles man
“I am a ten-pile man. Piles and heaps. Heaps and piles. I like to see things in heaps. And piles. First pile, coats and hats and gloves. Second pile, frocks and dresses. Third pile, trousers and skirts. Fourth, underwear, neatly folded so as I can’t see the shit-stains. Fifth, shoes and boots and little tiny booties. Six, money, all kinds. Seven, gold rings, only gold. Eight, other valuables. Ninth pile, your fear and vomit. Tenth pile, semen, if you like. Spill your filthy seed upon the ground, you miserable swine, so I can stamp your progeny into endless oblivion.”
He was strange man, made up of apocalyptic Christianity, complicated sexual desires, love of astronomy, hatred of the Jews which was largely programmed, and a passion for order.
The intimidated crowds of docile Jews did as he commanded. They threw off their clothes and their dignity. He threw petrol on the underwear and set it alight. He scattered the shoes, kicked the coats, rubbed the womens’ faces in the shit, collected the gold, sifted through the valuables, shot all the men, garroted all the women, and pushed all the screaming children into the smoking lime-trench. And he ate his dinner off china. And he smoked a cigar for breakfast. And he died, aged 71, in his bed in Brazil in 1963.
The rings were reduced to anonymity in a gold bar at Baden-Baden which was discovered with 91 other gold bars near Bolzano where they cannot make a satisfactory dish of spaghetti, and apparently throw it in the streets in piles. Or heaps. Some say the heaps or piles are graded according to an order of ten. For tramps, dogs, pigeons, cats, rats, to block the drains, fertilise the flower-beds, make mould .....you can think of the rest? What can you do with unedible spaghetti?
 

GOLD
83 – Scarecrow
Francis-Pierre Pilaterre made scarecrows. He dressed them to look like the kings and queens of France. He set them up in the fields to talk to one another and to scare the rooks and the crows.
Four seeds in a row,
One for the rook,
One for the crow,
One to rot and one to grow.
He had heard his grandfather sing this melancholy song in a low, flat cracked voice as he looked at his reflection in the kitchen cabinet mirror to wax the upturned ends of his white military moustache  with an Austrian sweet-smelling yellow pomade squeezed from a lead tube.
Francis-Pierre dressed Louis XIV impeccably. Louis XIV had a moustache. He dressed Marie-Antoinette shabbily. Marie-Antoinette had a moustache. He gave Louis XVI a watch-chain. His best creation was Louis-Phillipe; he had exactly captured this pseudo-king’s fat and pear-shaped body. He had cut Louis-Phillipe’s fat face out of a turnip. He had given the kings carrots for pricks, and the queens swedes for breasts, except for Marie-Antoniette who came breastless. And since he hated monarchies and royalty and crowns and crown-princes and princesses he opened fire on his scarecrows regularly with a rusty and noisy 1914 rifle whose bark was more effective than its bite.
Stupid old man.
Not so stupid. His scarecrows were his treasury. He filled the pockets of his selected scarecrow royalty with valuables stolen from Jews in the wealthy suburbs of Colmar. Perhaps he opened fire on his royal scarecrows to frighten not only the birds, but also to frighten away snooping theives.
Francis-Pierre was not a farmer. The fields in which he planted his scarecrows were not his fields. He and his wife made a living selling firewood and making ladders, broom-handles and coal-skuttles. When he was a boy the local farmers had given Francis-Pierre a few centimes for every rook and crow he had brought down with his sling shot and hung on a string on their field-gates. Since that time, Francis-Pierre’s animosity towards rooks and crows had taken curious turns. A broken right arm, his right sling-shot arm, casualty of a fall from one of his own ladders in an apple tree, had mended badly. His sling-shot aim was now wild. He took to tending rooks and crows, not annihilating them. Then he married and his wife started growing asparagus and he again started to scare the rooks and the crows, but this time in a more friendly way, not with stones, but with images of royalty and the sound of a noisy gun.
And then the Nazis shot his wife because she put her tongue out at their antics. Francis-Pierre went crazy. He stripped his scarecrow kings and queens and dressed them like German soldiers, and opened fire on them mercilessly. Then the imitation German soldiers made of straw and branches and agricultural rubbish were not real enough for him. Francis-Pierre went out at night to do better. He caught his military victims off-guard, when they were suffering or enjoying  moments of private distraction or private grief or private ecstacy, or  when they were wrapped in contemplation of the world’s wonders, mysteries or anxieties. He garotted a soldier who was quietly stroking his prick in a dark alley, he used an axe on a corporal weeping in the night for remembered trysts with his fiance on her kitchen floor, he knifed a sentry dozing in a privy with his trousers around his ankles, he shot an officer writing a poem to his dying wife by candelight on an upturned bucket, he battered a sergeant who had his arms around a tree whilst crying obscenities to the moon. His victims fitted his sense of abject and unconsolable melancholy.
He made a collection of thirty-one of these hapless, unhappy-before-death, happy-after death soldiers propped up on stakes, dotting the cold winter fields. In memory of his melancholy grandfather, he gave them all upturned white moustaches made from frayed string smoothed into points with butter, and he sang his grandfather’s ditty over their corpses.
The Germans never caught him. When they came looking for him, he lay down in a ploughed field in his dirty, mud-spattered jacket and trousers, and they could have marched passed him at two metres and still not seen him. The military police did collect Francis-Pierre’s bullet-ravaged, mouldering scarecrows, and they pocketed the trinkets they found in the scarecrow pockets and stuffed arms and inside their pitted helmets. The gold was sorted out and sent to Baden-Baden for Lieutenant Harpsch’s eventual collection.
Francis-Pierre’s last dramatic action was to dress himself as Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had the largest waxed moustache he had ever seen. He filled his pockets with gunpowder broken out of the cartridges of his 1914 rifle, and he stood in front of Grunewald’s Crucifixon Tripdych in the cathedral at Colmar, brought out of protective storage in the Hohkonigsburg for six days over Easter to demonstrate to the faithful that it was undamaged. Just in time, he was seen lighting a cigar in front of the melancholy tortured Christ, as a prelude to lighting his waxed and flammatory moustache which was a fuse to his trouser-pocket. Francis-Pierre was hurriedly frog-marched out of the cathedral by two burly sergeants and pushed into a gutter where he exploded in a shower of sparks.
 
 
 
 

GOLD
84 – Navel gold
In Bologna they make a pasta called tortellini. Young women with very small and nimble fingers are highly valued to wrapt the small pieces of pasta dough around a minced morcel of cooked pork flavoured with a little cheese, garlic and rosemary. All the daughters of families who own restaurants in Bologna are doomed to spend their nights in the kitchen making tortellini, and they traditionally marry early to escape the pasta slavery.
Patrizia was the 16 year old daughter of Maria and Federico Olmi who kept the Nicodema Fratelli Restaurant off the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna. Patrizia was in love with Domenico Zeno who stood on the seat of his bicycle propped against the wall of the back kitchen of the restaurant, peering in the kitchen window at nights to keep Patrizia company. It could be said that they had fallen in love through an open window. And it could be said that they exactly knew the moment of falling in love - three minutes past one o’clock on 7th May 1940. It was the moment when Domenico first fell off his bicycle.
Domenico started watching Patrizia making tortellini to pass the time, as a joke, because he could not sleep, because he had left his house-key in his bedroom and dare not wake his parents to let him in. Watching people make tortellini palls after five minutes. Only smiling, patronising, ingratiating foreign tourists find it entertaining, and that is largely because fastidiously making tortellini seems a radical waste of valuable time.
“How can these people dedicate so much time to such a time-consuming, fiddly, unnecessary occupation?”
“Repetitive and unimaginative”.
“And it all ends up as shit in the end”.
Domenico had watched tortellini makers ever since he was seven months old and could sit up straight. The activity held no magic for him. But Patrizia was magical and he forgave her for boring him with tortellini-making. Domenico and Patrizia had known one another since childhood. They had attended the same school, though in different classes. Domenico was seven months older than Patrizia.  They had swum regularly with about fifteen other children in the same swimming-pool. Maria had once seen Domenico naked, peeing into a priest’s hat. He was doing it to earn himself three white mice wagered by an atheist in return for an anti-clerical gesture. Patrizia was annoyed at Domenico at first. She worked fast when she concentrated. She could be in bed by two o’clock if she worked without interruption and without thinking about anything at all. Then she began to enjoy Domenico’s visits, and then she was irritated if he did not show up with his curly head poking over the windowsill before midnight.
After several weeks they had arrived at a special sort of inconsequential bantering vocal race designed to try to impress one another. With his chin on the window-sill and her head bent over her pasta-board, their conversation consisted largely in introducing a subject or a proposition, debating it to discover what each other thought about it in general, what were the weaknesses and the strengths of their ideas on the matter, and then deciding to  taking sides, beginning to argue ferociously and with greater and greater heat until they reached an impasse, a stuttering rage or complete and sulky silence. Being good Catholics they of course debated all the Catholic mysteries, most of them very familiar, though some of a sort of secular Catholicism not discussed in the Bible or the catechisms or the service or indeed in the Vatican, did priests have to wash, did the pope have a penis, what to think about when eating the host, did nuns shave all their body, is it possible to walk to Rome on your knees, if Man was made in God’s image, did God have a navel? If God was Jewish originally, was He circumcised? And if he was, and Man was made in His image, why didn’t male babies come into the world with a little of their pricks missing?
The two of them sometimes took sides against their better judgement. Patrizia, for example, sincerely believed in Virgin Birth but was forced, because she was determined to argue against Domenico because one night he was being far too belligerent and arrogant, to deny it. She took an extremely superior tone especially when she was surprised and shocked to find that Domenico actually believed a woman gave birth through her anus. He had been told somewhere, probably by his elder brother, that the only way to explain Virgin Birth was to say that the Virgin Mary had given birth through her arse. Patrizia would have been even more surprised to have found out that only eighteenth months previously Domenico had believed that a woman gave birth through her navel, though Domenico himself had to admit it was difficult to explain why men had navels, though there again, men had nipples and did not breast feed. It alarmed him that, who knows, perhaps men did have to breast feed on occasions.
Patrizia and Domenico debated the marriage sacrament, and because Domenico said marriage was easy, and you could now get a divorce like his aunt in Milan, Patrizia said it was difficult. Soon, totally dismayed at herself, she found herself saying because marriage was difficult and troubling and binding forever, it should be banned. Domenico lost interest in the marriage discussion, and was surprised that Patrizia got so furiously heated and white in the face that she left the kitchen for at least five minutes and then came back with red eyes. Her denial of marriage had deeply shocked her. For several moments she had been convinced she was godless, and she was waiting for God to strike her dead. Better He should strike her dead in the dark of the cellar than in the bright lights of the kitchen before a witness.
They discussed the war. Patrizia disliked Americans. Domenico worshipped them. But their advocacy was again to do with pride rather than conviction. Patrizia in fact liked American movies, American sun-dried raisins and the look of a green dollar, and Domenico was rather frightened and intimidated by the thought of Americans and their reputation for drinking fresh orange juice, having bright teeth and easy smiles. When they finally came and they surely would, he would have to lose a great many bad habits, like, for example, talking to Patrizia deep into the nights. All Americans were in bed before eleven o’clock because they had this saying “An hour’s sleep before midnight was worth two after”. Patrizia asked Domenic to spell Massachusetts, Mississippi and Arkansan He failed. He even put two fs in California. She asked him if he knew why America was called America, which he could not answer, and then completely surprised him by saying that America was named after an Italian. Domenico flatly denied it and insulted her with some words that he had recently learnt from his brother and which Patrizia did not know but guessed were very rude.
They discussed Mussolini. Patrizia got caught saying he was a good man because he always kissed babies, bathed three times a day, and was so clean he wore silk underwear. He even wore perfume. That made Domenico shriek with contempt, and Patrizia had to sush him in case he woke her parents. But Domenico had already fallen off his bike in a fury that owed more to his elder brother’s opinion than his own. He sat on the pavement beneath the restuarant kitchen window nursing his shin. More in pain and shame than because he believed it, half shouting and half whispering, he said that Mussolini was an Albanian, had two mistresses, shaved his head to hide the fact that he could not grow hair and planned to live in Buckingham Palace with the Queen of England when he lost the war.
Patrizia fell in love with Domenico at this moment because she realised that he did not really know what he was talking about, and had the ability to force her to deny what she knew to be true, which she presumed, remembering her parents, was a recipe for a long, happy and permanent relationship.
Domenico had smashed his ankle on the bike pedal on his way down to the pavement. It was quite some way. The window ledge was some twoand a half metres from the pavement. Domenico had screwed the bicycle seat as high as it would go, propped it solidly against the restaurant wall and then stood precariously on the seat so that he cold lean over the kitchen siull, resting the length of his arms along the window-ledge propping his chin on the sill or his wrists.
Patrizia came to the window and watched Domenico pick himself and his bicycle off the cobbles. He said he had to go home because it was late but it was an inadequate excuse. He just wanted to go around the corner where Patrizia could not see him to rub his smashed ankle and lick his wounds. Patrizia, full of a great spasm of love, watched him walk away, fully aware that he was trying not to limp or show her his tear-stained face.
After that first fall, Domenico often fell off his bicyle, his legs cramped by the balancing act. Patrizia’s mother sometimes asked her daughter about the strange marks on the painted plaster under the window, and the pieces of broken silver bicycle lamp that sometimes littered the pavement. But the ice had really broken. Within days he was  touching her fingers covered in flour. He had read in a tourist guide that tortellini was sometimes called the navel of Venus. He asked Patrizia to show him her navel. After three weeks of asking she came to the window and lifted her blouse. The tourist books were not incorrect. Patrizia had a navel like a neatly folded piece of Bologna tortellini.  Three further weeks and Domenico was kissing that navel, leaning far into the kitchen over the window-sill, such that his feet lost contact with his bicycle seat and the bicycle crashed to the paving stones, smashing yet another silvered lamp, and leaving his legs dangling in the air.
Then Domenico’s elder brother was arrested for ant-fascist activities which were really only general anti-establishment behaviour, and he was put in jail and badly treated because he was cheeky and then he escaped and ran off into the mountains. Domenico became some sort of messenger boy between his elder brother and his worried parents, carrying food paniers and clean underwear, and then food and newspapers and letters to other partisans in the mountains. Then Domenico’s elder brother became serious in his hatred of Mussolini and Domenico started carrying money and guns.
In a city like Bologna, even in wartime, nobody really stopped you if you were carrying food, and so Domenico soon involved Patrizia, and she was spending nights not wrapping up morcels of cooked pork flavoured with a little cheese, garlic and rosemary but wrapping up gold coins and gold earrings in small packets of pasta. Necessarily her pasta packages were growing larger, the exceptional finesse and experience of her very small and nimble fingers were over-qualified. But she willingly helped the war effort by willingly helping her young lover.
Very early one Tuesday morning, or as they both saw it, very late one Monday night, Domenico got Patrizia to wrap his mother’s gold earrings, his Milanese aunt’s redundant wedding-ring and the three christening chains of his three neices in pieces of tortellini, and he took them in a hot broth in a thermos flask wrapped in silver foil saved from countless bars of chocolate on a train ride to his grandmother’s house in the mountains. The train was ambushed. Its passengers were suspected of conniving in the sabotage. Their possessions were searched. Convinced his family fortune would be discovered, Domenico quickly ate his tortellini, burning the roof of his mouth. In the mellee and confusion he escaped into the pine woods beside the railway tracks. He suffered great stomach cramps. He sat in a brook beside a highway and defecated into his shirt, using it as a fine seive to recover the valuables. His bloody defecation ressembled a Bolognese sauce. He died in great pain. He was found by two whores who, more than familiar with the vagaries of male behaviour and habits, took pity on his soiled body and covered him with pine needles. They collected the jewels that had passed through his body, and left it to a vagrant to uncover the body again and cut open his stomach to search for more. The vagrant was a silversmith’s grandson; he recognised their value and sold them in Modena to buy himself a car to take him to his favourite drinking bar and his mother’s grave in Bolzano.
The citizens of Bolzano well know that tortellini is not spaghetti.
Quite unbelievably, considering her resilient character and the fact that she was only sixteen and had far to go in life, Patrizia became a nun; if she wasn’t going to marry Domenico she certainly wasn’t going to be a pasta slave .
 

GOLD
85 – Tree gold
Coming down from her bedroom in her nightgown to make coffee, Alison Hanneker raked the fire and found a gold ring in the ashes of her hearth. The ring was inscribed with the words “With this ring I wed thee Forever”. “With this ring”, and “Forever” were inscribed on the inside, and “I wed thee”, was inscibed on the outside. The ring was still warm from the ashes. Alison slipped the ring on her finger. It fitted. It stuck. She was amused. She had difficulty taking it off. Where had it come from?
She wore the ring in the house. When she left the house she put the ring in a drawer in the key-cupboard in the hall. One day she forgot to take the ring off when she went to the office, or perhaps she had not forgotten, but had begun to enjoy wearing the ring as evidence of an imaginary married status. She perhaps wanted other people to see. She was a virgin in body and experience. She was twenty-seven. She had just taken up a new job as the chief receptionist of a firm of solicitors employed in divorce law. In 1943, Hitler did not approve of divorce, or women working away from the home, or adultery. Presumably he also did not approve of imaginary marriages. Nobody at the firm of solicitors was sure of Alison’s true marital status. But to tell the truth no-one was interested in her enough to bother to ask. Alison shared an office with a sixty-three year old spinster, Hilda Goestal, who had been beautiful in her youth. Hilda had been employed by the firm for thirty years as the proprietor’s most respected secretary. She knew more about divorce law than her employer. She saw the ring on Alison’s finger, remarked on its inscription, and said she was convinced that the sentence continued on the inside. Alison was surprised, but then the ring or the message  were hardly unique. There must be many rings like the one on her finger.
The following day Hilda Goestal, the spinster, asked Alison Hanneker, the virgin, where she had found the ring. Where had Alison’s husband bought it? Alison hesitated, and then on a burst of feeling that might be interpreted at relief at being able to tell the truth, she admitted that she had no husband, and that she had found the ring mysteriously lying among the ashes in her hearth. The first of the two confessions illicited no response from Hilda. Either she had expected it or the fact did not interest her. The second confession caused Hilda to think for a few moments, and you could see that a train of thought had developed.
“Where do you live?”
“In Brockhagen”.
“Do you burn wood ?”
“ Yes.”
There was a long pause, and then a confident statement.
“In that case, do not take offence, but I’m sure the ring is mine.”
“Oh! How can that be?”
Alison had replied with a very conventional and muted sound of surprise, but curiously she did not feel surprised.
“ Where does the wood come from? Would you know?”
“ I have no idea”.
“ I have an idea that it came from the Strohn Company and they cut their wood in the Patthorst Forest”.
The fairy tale aspects of the story of the ring were beginning to increase.
“I had a ring just like that. It was given to me by Horace Johannes van Verde. A Dutchman. We were to get married. I was 16, which was the age of the Virgin Mary at the birth of Christ. It has been calculated that Joseph was an old man, perhaps thirty-three years older than Mary. My Dutchman, when I knew him, was 33 years older than me. 33 was the age of Christ at the time of the crucifixion. I was fascinated that I was born exactly 33 years after this man. Horace was a religious man. We had kissed and we had lain naked together on a white sheet which I stained with my menstrual blood which scared him. We never made love though he had touched my vagina and I had stared at his penis until it rose like the Feret drawbridge. He referred to his antomy everafter as his “ferret” which in English, I believe, is a vicious, sharp-teethed animal sent down rabbit-holes to catch and kill rabbits. We never really made love. He was called up but before he left for Italy he said we would get married in private. There was no time to get married in public.  He bought a gold ring and he had it inscribed. We walked in the forest on a spring day and we lent against our favourite tree and since he could not bring himself to place it on my finger for all the world to see, we agreed to commit it to the tree. Together we placed it in a deep crevice in the bark at about shoulder-height - at his shoulder-height, at my eye-height. After the war we would return and retrieve it and show it to the world on my finger where it should rightly be. It would be safe in the tree”.
Hilda left the office. She returned. She had been to the toilet and had washed her tear-stained face, and she carried an object wrapped up in brown paper. It could have been an axe.
“I lived in a small house on the edge of the wood with my parents. I had seven brothers and an invalid grandfather. There were no hiding places in my house that would not be discovered. I was 16 and impressionable. He was 49 and a minister of the church. An impossible relationship. You must not wear it at home, you cannot wear it in the street.  After the war he would return to claim me.
He was killed. I slept under the tree for three night, my parents thought I was mad. My brothers taunted me. My grandfather looked at me wth sad eyes.  I could see the ring.  Perhaps I could have retreived it but I did not. It was safe in the tree. To take it and keep it or wear it or hide it somewhere else was not thinkable. I went back frequently. The tree grew. The ring grew deeper into the bark. One day I could no longer see it. I could I suppose still have taken a chisel and prised it out. I did not. And then the events of my life continued. Love faded. I became busy with other things, other men. I still believed he would return and take an axe and chop the tree down and take the ring and marry me. It was a fairy tale. I bought an axe and kept it sharpened”.
Hilda undid the brown paper around the object she had brought from its hiding-place in the ladies’ toilet. It was a sharpened axe.
“I had a child. She knew the tale, and then she was killed in a train crash. You may remember the big train crash outside Cologne in 1931? 123 died, 340 injured, including the centre-forward for the Munchen-Gladbach football team. His name was Horace too, and he was a Dutchman. It was a curious sign. I think, I believe, I know that you have found my ring. Like Excalibur, the sword taken from the stone. The key retreived from the whale’s belly. You could keep it”.
“No, you must have it”.
Hilda died a week later under a tram. It was probably suicide, but  a sort of unconscious suicide. A suicide of forgetfulness. Of carelessness. At the wrong moment. Most moments of forgetfulness signify little or not at all in our lives. But this moment of forgetfuness coincided with the sudden approach of a tram. Yet Hilda had adjusted her will. Again, perhaps this is not so surprising, because she was a solicitor’s secretary. The inscribed ring went to Alison who had already quitted the solicitor’s office and was living in Bad Salzuflen. She had met a young man. They had fallen in love.  He had a large apartment inherited from his father. Alison and her boyfriend were the same age. There was no large discrepancy in ages. There was no suggestion of a perverted relationship of an older man seducing a very young woman. No dirty old man Joseph and no innocent Virgin Mary arrangement. It would all be fine and perfect. Their sex was consummated immediately and was very good.
Alison did not want the ring, it reminded her of unsuccessful love. She left it in the envelope it had arrived in. It got lost, forgotten, put away for safety. But lost. Alison never saw it again. She probably thought about the ring only five more times in a happily married life of forty-five years.
The ring of course was not lost. In a sense nothing ever gets lost. Alison had put its envelope in a filing cabinet. Alison’s new man had a housekeeper. She had found it, wrapped it up in tissue paper for what she was sure would be her new mistress, and she had put it in a jewellery box in a Nile-green painted cupboard. The cupboard had been moved by house decorators to a new room that was scarcely ever used. New furniture was ordered. Old furniture sent to a cousin, drawers re-arranged emptied, refilled. The ring was placed in a curiosity-box in a junk shop, its gold unrecognised. It was bought for a few marks be a shopkeeper’s daughter who had lost it in a week. The seventeen-year old had left it is a ladies’ toilet at a theatre when she had washed her hands because it was a little big for her finger. She always took the ring off lest it fell down the basin plug-hole. The ring was found on the ledge of a wash-basin, given to the concierge, and lodged in the box-office to await collection. A corps de ballet dancer saw it there, coveted it and received it as a present from the concierge’ husband for a kiss on the lips and a squeeze of a breast. The dancer sold the ring to buy bread and tea and laces. It was passed on to a jewellery-smith to erase the inscription and add a stone to make an engagement-ring for a cripple who never collected it. It was pawned and never retrieved. In April 1944 it was swept up in an end-of-the-financial-year tax investigation, and taken to a bank who placed it in a bank deposit-box. Then the ring’s long and tired life was ended. It was smelted down and became a gold bar that travelled to Baden-Baden and then Bolzano with Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch who never married his great love either.
 

GOLD
86 – The golden pen
Richard Samuel Hartmann had a golden pen and wrote the novel Shame, Scham in German. Ostensibly it was the story of a gentile arrested for loving jews, and one jew in particular, a 40 year old widow called Martha. In practice it could better, if less sympathetically described as a self-indulgent pornography and an inflammatory political tract. It was certainly a best-seller appealing to the politically adventurous and the sexually starved. When the book was publically burnt outside the publisher’s house at Maxfeldstrasse 27, Nurnberg, Richard further flouted the laws and took a Gentile mistress. He was taken aside by the jewish community and severely reprimandedd. Richard in turn accused the community of cowardice, sowing internal dissension. The local Gestapo looked on with amusement as the jews quarrelled among themselves. They knew that  they could pick the writer up any moment they chose. But they had no wish to make him a martyr or a hero. They decided to arrest him on a technicality concerning his car. To have arrested him for speeding might have drawn too much attention to his attractive and privileged life-style.They held a meeting to decide what was the most insignificant thing they could think of to arrest him for. One suggested an offence of permitting an incorrect speed for his windscreen wipers, another that the leather upholstery of his car was too comfortable and likely to induce sleep in the driver, another said the writer was out of control of the car whilst drinking water from a flask whilst his car was stationary at a red traffic light.
In the event they arrested the writer for highway obscenity. They discovered him and his mistress in his car in an act of fellatio on a turnpike layby.
They took his golden pen. The writer languished in jail in the bourgoise suburb of Steinbuhl, Nurnberg. They cut the fingers off his right hand, just in case he should think of writing again. And they cut the fingers off his left hand in case he imagined he might learn to write left-handed. Just below the thin veneer of civilisation is a layer of primitive excitement at afflicting pain through envy, coupled with a logic that should lie above the thin veneer of civilisation, of fitting punishments to crimes. They cut off his penis in case he ever thought he might again take a Gentile mistress, or indeed any sort of mistress, one day in the future. He died of blood poisoning. They had rubbed dog vomit into all three wounds. With a little salt and vinegar served on a silver tray carried by a warder dressed up in a white, partly-see-through, Chinese-silk blouse and a short red skirt and black high-heeled shoes, just like the habitual clothes of the writer’s fictional heroine Martha from Richard Samuel Hartmann’s book, Shame, Scham in German. The arresting police-officers had read the book; it was such a best-seller everyone knew who Martha was. They had wanted to try to interpret Shame in their own way.
The golden pen lay on the desk of the Chief of Traffic Police for several weeks. He had thought of having it framed along with a recent photograph and an up-to-date signature of Richard Samuel Hartmann. The Police Chief had seen such a framed memento before the war, of the Dutch writer Multatuli, in a shop window in a gentleman’s outfitters in Pieter Cornelius Hooftstraat in Amsterdam.  Though Richard Samuel Hartmann was now dead. Perhaps they should make a death-mask of the celebrated Jewish author.  They phoned for a undertaker, but by the time he had arrived with his wax-moulds, the golden pen had disappeared, perhaps stolen by an admirer, or maybe by a common thief surprised at his good luck.
The whereabouts of the writer’s body is unknown. No one can make a pile stones on his grave. After the war, a nephew, as official next of kin, tried to claim royalties on the book. You can occasionally still see a copy in German or English in second-hand bookshops. It is not uncommon to come across a Russian translation, though in Russian, it was given a title which translated back into English was Uneasy Virtue.
The golden pen still filled with dark blue ink, was casually tossed into the smelting kiln at Ingolstadt. This celebrated writing impliment contributed to a “boater” gold bar stamped INGOL 789, which travelled, over a period of eighteen months to Saarbrucken and then Baden-Baden from where Gustav Harpsch took it to Bolzano.
Richard Samuel Hartmann’s gentile mistress became a housewife living in Innsbruck. She died in 1953 of cervical cancer.
 

GOLD
87 – Santa Claus
Martin Erich Nikolaus dressed up as Santa Claus at Christmas, and systematically dropped Jews from the Wassertower  in Dortmund. He said it was to make their Jewish wealth bounce out of their pockets. It certainly made a mess. Sometimes Claus’s Jewish victims had to meet the requirements of gravity by first being accelerated through a glass pane, in which case, the blood was flowing out of their bodies before they hit the concrete car-park. Claus, like his namesake, was considered a giver of gifts, because he gave away the smallest trinkets he confiscated from the Jews, like rings and tie-pins, to young smiling shop-girls. But he grew richer on his more substantial confiscations until his body too was found smashed on the tarmac. Perhaps he had been pushed out of the window by two Jewish boys named Isaac and Jeremiah, who had been seen on the seventh floor sucking milk out of the same bottle with orange straws.
Investigation of Nikolaus’s Christmas sacks and his apartment cupboard revealed a treasure trove. The gold all went to Baden-Baden and was conveniently re-packaged thanks to considerable heat, into a neater way of handling precious metals.  One of the resultant gold bars was stamped WD 67 I043 IJ (perhaps WD stood for Wassertower Dortmund, and IJ were the initials of the milk-drinkers) and ended up with Harpsch in Bolzano, the one place in Italy where spaghetti does not get a good press.
 

GOLD
88 – The runover gold
Sampson Karmovitch, a Russian patriot, a Russian exile and Russian widower, had, thanks to his dead wife’s family, become a very rich man. He had been arrested on suspicion of helping the Underground Communist party in Augsburg. Since his wife’s murder he had become an idealist, determined to hinder, destroy or otherwise inconvenience her tormentors, the German National Socialist Party.
As the police-car taking him to the Jesuitengasse Police Post approached the Anton-Fugger Bridge, Sampson threw his suitcase of valuables out of the car window. He had been on his way to a rendez-vous in Duisburg to purchase small arms for an ambush planned rather inconclusively, and in some sloppy detail, on the life of von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s sometime impulsive and arrogant Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose dealings with Russia could at the very least be described as treacherous.
Sampson was using a small part of his wife’s fortune as revenge collateral. The car had been travelling fast and the contents of the suitcase had scattered along a considerable stretch of the road leading back to Lechhausen. The police made him get out of the car and find and collect the valuables. They ran him over whilst he was kneeling half on the curb and half in the gutter, with his hand and arm down a drain, scrabbling to find his mother-in-law’s gold necklace. They targetted his buttocks and drove his spine into his lungs. They reversed and drove his head into his chest.
A golden tie-pin, seventeen gold rings, a gold brooch in the shape of a pair of love-birds made by Lapinger of St Petersburg, twenty gold chain necklaces, a gold cigarette case and a gold cocktail shaker were taken to Stadbach, itemised in a ledger of confiscated property, placed in a strong-box and taken by truck to Stuttgart and then Baden-Baden where they were smelted down to make a 500 gram gold bar reference number FTYB41. This ingot of golden memories of sixteen years of a happy marriage was eventually collected by Harpsch’s sergeant and Harpsch’s corporal, and packed with another 91 gold bars into the two black leather suitcase which Harpsch had possessed since his duties at Vaux, north of Paris in the early days of the German occupation of France. Harpsch drove two days to Bolzano, which is an Italian city know to Germans and Austrians as Bozen situated not so far from the Swiss border. Late at night, on a forest road, Harpsch’s black Mercedes was in collision with a white horse ridden by an unidentified cavalary-officer whose name may have been Giacomo Ference. Bolzano is known to commercial travellers as a city which rarely advertises spaghetti on its restaurant menus.
 

GOLD
89 – The hairdresser
A Jewish hairdresser, Simon Kessel, whose parents had run a hair-dressing business in Stuttgart in the early 1930s, had been intimidated by growing anti-semitic animosity and had emigrated to Hilvershum, close to Amsterdam, where the Dutch National Broadcasting Commission had settled because the land was just a little higher than the surrounding flat plains of the Netherlands, and radio communication was consequently considered to be more efficient. Kessel Junior, the hairdresser, now cut hair on the heads of radio announcers and radio actors. A young actress called Sylvia Hoost who earnt a good living reading the parts of American mistresses in escapist dramas for the afternoon Four O’clock Radio Drama Show, was a regular customer. Even though the radio microphone had no eyes, Sylvia Hoost’s confidence rested in her appearance, and she believed that the Jewish hairdresser was her saviour. Her boyfriend, Gherti, a Nazi sympathiser working in the incipient Dutch Television industry, grew jealous at Sylvia's repeated visits to Kessel’s hairdressing shop on Utretchtstraat. Accompanied by his two brothers, he paid a visit to Simon Kessel, larked around in his shop, urinated in his hand-basins, and made suggestive threats about the possible collapse of his business unless Kessel paid a fee of four hundred guilders a day into the Hilvershum Future Prophecies for Television Company, which was a cover for Gherti’s personal bank account. From Gherti’s point-of-view, the blackmail was successful. Simon’s business was blooming and Simon had no wish to repeat his emigration plans and make another move.
Gherti, accompanied by his fascist cronies, made the barber’s shop a regular meeting-place. Locking the shop door, they tied Kessel to his haircutting chair and cut his hair until he had none left, and they stripped him and shaved his body with a cut-throat razor until his body was as hairless as a child’s and covered in blood, wounds and scratches. They masturbated over his head and genitals, declaring there was nothing like Dutch semen to stimulate new hair growth. They clipped his ears, widened his nostrils, enlarged his navel and recircumcised his penis. They plastered his street windows with hand-written advertisements accusing him of incest and pederasty.
Kessel had suffered too much. Taking his golden scissors, a treasured prize from a haircutting competition, and collecting the last remaining change from the till, he caught a train to Schedel and walked into the sea. His golden scissors were found a week later by a child building sand-castles. They were handed in to the coast-guard who passed them on to the Gestapo who offered them to the German bank who shipped them to Amsterdam and thence to Eindhoven and thence to Stuttgart where they eventually went to Baden-Baden. Along with sundry other golden trinkets, they were melted down to become part of gold bar 717YH P2 which ended up in Bolzano in Harpsch’s car.
Sylvia Hoost got a radio job playing American whores in Berlin and died in the Russian shelling of April 1945. Gherti, her boyfriend went to New York and worked for NHS which was bought out by RKO and then eventually Sony, under whose management he retired with the position of managing director on a pension of  two hundred thousand dollars a year in 1981. Simon Kessel’s body was never found, or if it was, it was never identified as the body of a missing hairdresser. Perhaps the coastal police were embarrassed.
 

GOLD
90 – Finger grease
Most of the particular 500 miligram gold “barge” bar RT45 T/0 found in the overturned car at Bolzano was made up of gold rings confiscated from Jewish widows at Mentzel.  To obtain them a young officer in the Mentzel police corps had sliced off the widows’ fingers.  His excuse was that he had been in a hurry because, he said, his wife was about to give birth. He wanted, he said, to be on hand to assist. He had wanted, he said, to touch contaminated Jewish female flesh as little as possible before such an auspicious domestic event. Many of the rings, he said, had made themselves as good as inseparable from their owners’ fingers. He had tried, he said, to encourage separation. He had done no such thing. He had made a list, he said, of the substances he had used to lubricate the rings from the fingers. The list was inventive. It included mayonaise, hair-oil, butter, soap, sardine-oil, lard, petroleum jelly, balsamic vinegar made in Modena, olive-oil, melted brie, spit and spittle. He had indeed written down both spit and spittle. He did not say if the spit or the spittle was his or theirs. Perhaps the spit was theirs, and the spittle his.
The officer’s wife gave birth to a girl who weighed 8 pounds, 3 ounces. They called her Besoar, which could sound Jewish, though his wife said it was her grandmother’s name and she had been born in Engadin. Engadin’s southernmost parts abutted onto the Italian territory very close to Bolzano, the one place in Italy where they cannot make good spaghetti.
 

GOLD
91 – The Sempstress
An elderly farmer panicked at the prospect of being persecuted because he had taken a plump young gypsy for a second wife. His first wife had fallen downstairs and spiked her head on a splintered banister. The farmer’s neighbours, if not directly related to his first wife by blood, had certainly been her close friends. They had no proof, and absolutely no real cause to think there had been foul play; all their uncertainties and accusations had been retrospective. They said that the farmer had been bewitched, which perhaps was not so untrue in the most general positive sense since the gypsy woman, Florentina, was beautiful, and adroit at giving pleasure of all kinds, starting with her joyful smile and stretching way beyond how she handled the farmer’s sixty-year old prick in a ten-candle-lit bed. The neighbours were certainly not averse to using the new National Socialist persecution of gypsies to aid their campaign of gossip and incrimination. They bribed key figures in the local administration with salted hams and pickled apples, and the farmer received semi-official written threats demanding that he should  rid himself of tainted stock to set an example to the farming community, since farmers were the backbone of the nation and they had a responsibility with regards to such phenomena as “good stock”, “inbreeding”, “genitical purity”, and something they called “Darwinian priorities”. The local  printed propaganda was a cloudy rewrite of material issued by the Goebbels’s Central Office of Information in Berlin.
The police tried to intimidate the farmer, driving their police-cars very slowly along the isolated stretch of roadway that lead past his farm buildings. At least three of the local police were related to the farmer’s  first wife, and they took a personal interest in his livestock, requisitioning an occasional chicken or goat, and driving it home to their kitchens. Their justification was that the property of the farmer was also the property of the farmer’s wife’s, and since they or their wives were her relatives by blood, they certainly had more of a right to her property than the gypsy usurper.
Florentina saw what was happening, and regretted it, because, although she certainly benefitted from a settled life with an elderly man who most certainly would make her his heir, she was still excited by his physical attentions. And she was pregnant, though nobody knew but her. However, sensibly, in the end she was determined to save her own skin, and she was sure, being a gypsy, she could.
One Thursday evening, there were five police cars in the lane by the chicken sheds, all with their engines running and their head-lamps ablaze and flashing, sending the turkeys, as it grew dark, into a panic. Florentina was conscientiously feeding the hens. She had anticipated a show-down and she had made her preparations. Over the previous eighteen months, the farmer had given her jewellery, gold ornaments and gold heirlooms, and he had amused himself and her by buying her a collection of silver and gold sewing-needles. She now had several hundred. It was a sentimental reference to how they had met. With her immediate family, Florentina had coming knocking at the farmer’s door asking if there was work to be done. Florentina’s brother sharpened scythes and knives, scissors and sometimes plough-shears, Florentina’s uncle mended broken furniture and wooden toys, and made wooden clothes-pegs; Florentina’s sister plaited corn-stalks into table-mats and sun-hats and small propitiary harvest dolls. Florentina herself was a sempstress. She sewed on buttons, made pockets in skirts, embroidered bows, mended broken zips, fixed garments to make them look new. The farmer’s first wife had given them all work. She had sat Florentina on the farm-house step and asked her to overhaul her wardrobe, to make new lace-cuffs, undo a hem to make a skirt longer, patch underwear, lengthen a shoulder-strap, invisibly darn the worn knees of white stockings. The farmer had watched Florentina on the step concentrated at her work, singing popular songs, moving her needle with the greatest dexterity. Florentina knew herself to be watched. She began to move her needle in ways that could only be described as erotic. The farmer was excited.
The gypsies had left satisfied enough with their payment to leave bunches of heather wraped in leaves, and a wreath of horse-shoes with their ends tucked inside a circle of rosemary to bring good luck and everlasting memory. That night five hens and two mirrors were missing, and a cart had lost its wheels, but the farmer turned a blind eye. Five months later the farmer’s wife suffered her fall on the stairs, and her widower took to riding his brown mare along the lanes looking for Florentina. He eventually found her and began a long courtship. They were not officially married. Florentina kept her declarations open-ended. Her relatives did not disapprove, but she did not have their blessing. She made an agreement with her grandfather that she would eventually return. The farmer knew better than to argue. He considered himself fortunate and did not feel he had to lock his barns at night. The farm curiously prospered. When his neighbours had chicken pest, the farmer’s chickens were immune. His ditches were water-filled when others ran dry. Grass fires skirted his property.
Now there was to be a reckoning. Having watched the police-cars gathering in the lane every evening for a week, Florentina had bundled her valuables, the farmer’s golden trinkets, her best underwear, her rings, her earrings and her collection of gold and silver sewing needles into a small granary sack that she kept continually fastened around her waist. She continued to feed the chickens. Three more police-cars drove along the farm-lane and all eight started to beep their horns. They kept up their beeping until the panicking turkeys had destroyed themselves on the wire-fencing. The farmer came out with a shot-gun and sprayed the police-cars with bullets. The provocation had workerd. The police had their excuse. They beat up the gypsy-loving farmer, broke his arms and arrested him. They seized his gypsy wife as she was running away across the fields. They found the needles tied in the granary sack around her waist. They made Florentina into a pin-cushion, concentrating most especially on her breasts and buttocks. Florentina’s gypsy family came out of the dark and broke the policemen’s heads with pick-axe handles.
There was an enquiry. One hundred and nine silver and gold sewing needles were offered as some sort of evidence. Offensive weapons. Illegal tools. Unlicensed luxuries. Fetish items. It was not easy to make the needles integral to the death of eleven policemen. There were reprisals. A community of small-holders was humiliated. Six farmers were shot. A teenage girl was drowned. A boy swallowed laburnum seeds. A baby lying on a blanket in the sunshine, died without explanation. A dog choked. Fish died. The district was convinced that the whole affair was the work of gypsies.
The gold needles were separated from the silver and laid on a white plate. If they tarnished then it was definitively the work of gypsies. An impatient doctor of medicine, known for his atheism, seized the gold needles and took them to the bank. They stayed in a bank vault for several weeks, were collected up in a monthly audit, sent to Berlin, smelted with other golden debris, and the resulting gold bar transported to Baden-Baden. Harpsch eventually took the gold bar with him to Bolzano.
Florentina was sent to a concentration camp, her husband to the Russian front where he shot his commanding officer for taunting him about his gypsy wife. He was hung. Florentina improbably led a sewing circle at Treblinka, patching uniforms for free. She too killed her superior, sticking a needle in his eye after being sexually assaulted. Jews and gypsies were carnally forbidden territory outside of the camps; inside, gypsies became legitimate targets for persistent abuse and constant humiliation, prized over Jewesses because they were not contaminated by any obviously advertised religious beliefs.  The commandant was sexually interested in pregnant woman in their seventh month. He had arranged, through his camp guards, to be regularly supplied, though infertility, miscarriage and voluntary abortion frustrated his lechery. When questions were asked after the war about the commandant’s sexual fascination, it was said that he had declared there was no better advertisement for a good and profitable way of life than the steady production of progeny, and therefore his camps were to be considered very productive.
The heavily pregnant Florentina went into hiding among the huts, the women looking after her welfare as much as they dared, concealing her beneath a false floor. In the end she tired of hiding. She hung herself with a length of twisted wool, and created her last diversion as her pregnant naked body swung into view, tied to a ceiling joist, at an inspection of infant corpses by senior offices interested in the effects of poison-gas on babies.
 

GOLD
92 – Harpsch’s Story
There is nothing in this story about Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch that you have not heard before. But this time all the facts concerning Lieutenant Gustav Harpsch are put in one place.
Gustav Harpsch was born in Linz on the first day of the First World War and he died in Bolzano on the last day of the Second World War. His father was an insurance businessman who collected 18th century furniture. His mother brought up five children. He enrolled in the Nazi Youth but that was as good as compulsory and not to be easily avoided. All his friends enrolled, and so did he. He enjoyed the summer-camps, the constant company, exploring in the mountains, swimming, singing, campfires. He joined the army, did a term in Austria at the time of the Anschluss, marched in the Sudentenland, became a Lieutenant in 1936 and, eight weeks after the German invasion of France, he was stationed in Vaux le Vicompte near Paris. His commanding officer was Field Marshal Fosterling, who he admired and respected. Fosterling was anxious to help Himmler build a Birth Clinic to exploit ideas of the Aryan inheritance. Harpsch did not disagree with the principle, but his emotional sympathies suddenly changed his opinions. He and his fellow officers at Vaux were billeted in the chateau that had been built by Fouquet, Louis XIV’s finance minister in 1632, a house of such grandeur in architecture, decorations, gardens and landscaping that it had been forcibly pirated by the king who ousted Fouquet on exaggerated accusations of chicanery, embezzlement and corruption. All the Vaux decorations, hangings, furniture, paintings, riches, plants and exotic features were carted off to begin a new splendid palace at a place called Versailles. Though the splendours of the mid 17th century were not recoverable, the German occupying officers lived well. There was a cook, Anna-Maria Oosbacker. Her surname was originally German, though she herself was thoroughly French. Her great grandparents had lived in Alsace after 1871 when the Germans claimed the French province as rightful conquest. Anna-Maria’s grandfather, a horse-master in considerable demand, had moved from Strasbourg to Luxembourg, and then to Belgium, where he had started to spell his name a little differently to accommodate the local difficulties of pronunciation. When Anna-Maria’s father was born, he had moved to Paris. Anna-Maria’s father had married a girl from Vaux, and, after the first world war, she was brought up in the shadow, and under the influence, of the great house. Her German origins were completely forgotten. She spoke only French. She was 32, a widow. Her husband, a stable master, a pupil of her grandfather’s, had fallen from a horse and smashed his head. They had no children. There had been more than a few opportunities to remarry, but she had never been interested.
Anna-Maria Oosbacker and Gustav Harpsch fell in love over a plate of asparagus. He had watched her and enjoyed her cooking for six weeks. She had first shunned him and his laughter, cooking and serving the six billeted officers regularly, and preparing bigger meals when officer contingents came on tours of inspection. She was polite but distant. She had seen Harpsch in pensive moods, walking the paths of Vaux with the house dogs. She had seen him stripped to the waist in the poultry yard, polishing his boots. She had heard him singing French 17th century songs in a high falsetto voice at a celebration of Hitler’s birthday. She spilt the hot butter from the asparagus onto the table cloth. It had splashed a little on Harpsch’s hand. He slowly licked it off whilst smiling steadily at her. They slept together, first in the kitchen scullery and then on the lawn near the summerhouse, then in the servants’ bedrooms and then on the carpeted floor of an aristocratic bathroom.  She was scared of the taint of intimate collaboration. The present owners of the house, second generation parvenus, tried hard to identify themselves with the house’s aristocratic forebears and standards; they were snobbish, reactionary and they slowly began to find found the German officers not so infamous. The lower servants were Socialists and Communists, the butler found Anna-Maria’s conduct entirely unacceptable, the bedchamber maid had German parents and was jealous of Anna-Maria capturing the attentions of a young officer from the mother country. Anna-Maria became pregnant. She and Harpsch delighted in the possibility of marrying after the war. They took risks, made envious enemies. Fosterling, Harpsch’s immediate superior was benign and indulgent, but wanted Harpsch for his breeding programme, and Anna-Maria had black hair. Harpsch defied cohabitation with the local blond female community. The butler did not want his staff to be tainted with any accusation of German collaboration. The bedchamber maid went searching for usable genealogical evidence in the local newspaper archives with which to condemn her fellow-servant. Anna-Maria was delivered of a baby girl. It was the first known child of a Franco-German union in the area. An unprecedented situation had arisen. What was the nature of collaboration? Sleeping with the enemy was declared ten out of ten in guilty blackness. The best policy was to consider Anna-Maria Jewish. Within three hours of the baby’s birth, she was sacked and put under house arrest with her baby. Harpsch was sent to Paris. Anna-Maria disappeared. Her grandmother on her mother’s side had been seen in a synagogue at Mousse. Harpsch returned to find his child cared for by a serving girl. General Fosterling was disgraced in an ambiguous plot of his own making to refashion history, to reinstate Fouquet as Vaux’s rightful owner. In a mock reconstruction of the Fouquet and Louis XIV antipathy, he had made himself foolish and allowed an important English spy called Tulse Luper to escape. He had tried to shoot himself, had failed and had suffered the ultimate disgrace of being given a coup de grace by his English prisoner. Harpsch saw the serving girl with his daughter at her breast. He protested and was put under guard; there had been enough irregularities among the Vaux occupying forces. The baby was taken away. She had been put up for adoption, but though charming and placid and very attractive, no-one would take her; the associations were too dangerous. It was suggested that she should be taken back to Germany, but the German transport taking her to Hamburg had been bombed on the road. The last Harpsch had heard of his child was that she had been taken into the custody of the Red Cross and put in the care of a Swiss children’s orphanage, maybe at Creux or Marchand or a place called Des Caves near the Swiss-Italian border. There were other and worse rumours. She may have followed her mother to a concentration-camp.
Harpsch was sent to the Russian front. He survived due to injuries to his right leg. He fought at Monte Cassino and in the Apennines. He continued to make enquiries of his daughter at Swiss orphanages. He pinned his hopes on buying his daughter back. He made a risky journey to Linz, to collect the gold that he knew existed in his family. He had it smelted down to make a single gold bar. He persuaded his grandmother to sew a pocket in the inside of his trouser leg to house his treasure. He then grew bolder in his ambition, and more reckless in his desire. He established a plan with his brother-in-law, Karlheinz Brockler, who managed Gestapo assets of cash, gold and US dollars in the Deutches Bank in Baden-Baden. Gustav and his brother-in-law met in Karlsruhe and they discussed contingencies for after the war. They planned to extricate cash from the bank and hide it to fuel their post-war existence. Harpsch said he knew of a place. He had heard that his daughter, now aged four, was held in a Swiss Sanatorium at Creux,  a favoured place for German childless couples who wished to adopt children. He was scared that his daughter would be given a new identity and he would lose her forever. There were stories that when the Americans came, and they surely would, they would take war-orphans and unclaimed children to live in The Sunshine State of California. Gustav arranged to collect 100 gold bars from the Deutches Bank in Baden-Baden. With the help of a sergeant and a corporal, on the 14th April 1945, he loaded 92 gold bars into two heavy suitcases , and he set out to drive in a black Mercedes, registration number TL 4692 to the Swiss-Italian border, considering it prudent to go across France and Northern Italy and enter Switzerland via Bolzano, an Italian town known as Bozen to German-speaking travellers. On a forest road outside Bolzano, Harpsch’s car collided with a white stallion ridden by a young Italian cavalry officer whose name may have been Giacomo Farenti. Harpsch was killed. The 92 gold bars were spilt out of their black suitcases over the back seat of the car to be seen first by an Italian policeman, Arturo Gaetano, and then by an American serviceman called William Bell, lately stationed in Mittersgill in Austria where he had been associated with the death of the composer Anton Webern. The adventure was over. Harpsch’s daughter has still not been claimed.
 

GOLD
93 – In the river
This is the story of the origin of the gold bar that Harpsch hastily exchanged for 27 gallons of petrol in Baden-Baden to facilitate his quick departure.
A pregnant woman who husband had been reported dying of diptheria somewhere on the Russian border in the kitchens of a German work-camp, threw her gold necklace and her wedding and engagement rings into the River Hus on a cold winter’s night rather than let the Nazis have them. She had been watched and she was forced to wade the icy river until she found them.
She lost her baby, but she found the gold necklace. It became just one small contribution to gold bar TRE 45Sd which finally arrived in Bolzano, a place sadly known to be unable to produce a good spaghetti for the discerning palate of the expert gourmet.
 

GOLD
94 – Bauhaus jewels.
This is the story of the origin of the gold bar that Harpsch exchanged for alcohol and cigarettes in his hasty departure from Baden-Baden on May 4th 1945.
The design studios of the Bauhaus were anathema to German National Socialism. Abstraction, non-figuration, non-representation, the use of unorthodox materials, subversive ideas, Marxism, Communism, Bolshevism, free-love, Judaism. Most of the largely Jewish disciples of the Bauhaus had left Germany by 1936, but they could not take very much with them except ideas.
A glass-ceilinged, glass-walled jewellery studio above a ceramics factory in Stuttgart was locked up in July 1935. It was owned by Serenio Rigard-Provo and her husband Barnst Schmidt-Aven. The husband and wife owners smoked their last cigarette and rinsed out their last coffee-cups, and touching nothing else, put on their coats and locked the door. They posted the key to somewhere far away in the East, to Glenelge, Adelaide, Australia. It was an address arrived at by sticking a pin in a world atlas, then a country atlas, then a city atlas and then a street map. The jewellers had a certain sort of thoroughness, even in play. This site chosen at random represented a place that Serenio and Barnst would never visit. The gesture represented the end of an Old Life. They were going to a New Life.
In New York.
The glass-ceilinged, glass-walled jewellery studio had shone brightly at night when Serenio and Barnst worked there until the early hours. It was like the illuminated forecastle of a ship perched above the black mass of the factory beneath. Now it was abandoned. Ivy grew up the walls and crept across the barred windows and across the glass ceiling and filled the interior with green shadows. The gutters blocked and moss absorbed the rain-water. A small sycamore tree grew out of a kiln chimney.
The building became a seven-year time old capsule. Seven years is not so very long, but the world, and especially the German-speaking world, had changed so much in that time. Their last unfinished work was there still in preparation on the benches, the tools were laid out ready for use, exhibits were marked for sale, order books open at the last commission, invoices for materials acknowledged. On the main work-bench was a microscope and large magnifying glass, and a bracelet of bleached bird-bones hung around a wooden last.
One evening in June 1944, when the sun was setting after a thunderstorm, an Allied plane, a Spitfire, shining and gleaming after coming out of the rain-soaked clouds, hurtled, with ever gathering speed across the roofs of the ceramic factory-buildings, and arrowed straight for the glass studio. To name a fighter plane, a Spitfire, is perhaps curious. To “spit” suggests something infantile or spiteful, and the English plane, propeller-driven, surely issued no flames. It was on its way to destroy a delicate fragile case of glass.
The red, white and blue ensign on the silver wings of the Spitfire in June 1944 was momentarily reflected a hundred time in the glass windows of the jewellery studio, and then the Spitfire and the glasshouse exploded together in a shower of sun-lit glass and silver metal. It was a crystal night. Of sorts. It was not known why the British pilot had chosen to die like this. There had been no significant action in the air for three hundred square miles. The plane, from the reports of eye-witnesses, appeared not to have been in trouble. For several minutes, a scattering of white paper sheets, documents, invoices, orders, swirled around in the growing darkness. Serenio Rigard-Provo and Barnst Schmidt-Aven had been meticulous keepers of papers anhd documents. The local police came to examine the unusual event. Examination of the paper work suggested the movement of precious metals, certainly the movement and working of gold. The Gestapo never found any. The authorities were irritated. Such a singular uncharted event suggested a local prize beneficial to local interest, mainly the interest of the management’s local bank-account. But no gold was found. Instead a list of unusual materials for a jeweller ws separated from the broken mountain of glass. Feathers, blue-dyed wooden beads, candle grease, copper wire coated in colourful plastic, marble chips, ceramic chips, metal washers, brass screws. But no gold. This is strictly not true. They cut the English pilot out of a straight-jacket cage of aircraft metal, and shook sackfuls of tinkling glass from his lap, and found his wedding-ring on an undamaged hand. It was a simple band. The English pilot was twenty-three and he had been married for two months to a twenty-year old championship swimmer from Australia named Robyn Bowman. Robyn’s father had kept a gift shop on the coast selling semi-precious stones to tourists. Her mother had committed suicide, very possibly from missing her daughter in England. Her mother had jumped from a pier to swim with the fish. Robyn’s father had closed down his shop above a beachside restaurant. He had boarded up the windows and gone back to the city.
The English pilot’s wedding ring was thrown into a wooden cigar-box of gold trinkets in a Stuttgart police-station. When the cigar-box was full of golden ephemera, such that you could not close its lid, the collected contents were sorted and melted down and became part of a gold bar that Lieutenant Harpsch transported to Bolzano, the city of dissatisfied spaghetti-eaters.
When Robyn Bowman was told three weeks later that her husband had been officially reported missing, she waited five months in case the War Office had got it wrong. Then she went home to Australia to have her baby, and think and dream on the wide sunlit beaches where you had to squint your eyes when you looked north-west in the direction of Europe.  And she went home to bury her father. To distract herself from grief and war and boredom, she made it her responsibility to sell up her father’s property. She sought out the boarded-up house on the coast at Glenelge, and with her father’s brothers, she pushed open the wedged front-door to find the hall floor scattered with the letters and parcels that had been delivered over the last ten years. One of the smallest parcels had a Stuttgart postmark, and inside was a key. Robyn scratched it and found it to be of gold.
Perhaps the only gold items associated with the Stuttgart jewllery studio that had once belonged to Serenio Rigard-Provo and her husband Barnst Schmidt-Aven, were the wedding-ring belonging to Robyn Bowman’s husband and this golden key.