Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel by Thaisa Frank Read Free Book Online Page B

shattered glass.

    While Mueller was leaving, Dieter Stumpf was in his shoebox deciding which Scribe should answer Martin Heidegger’s letter to Asher Englehardt. It was a nuisance to answer even one letter to the living when so many dead were waiting. But he was sure if he could deliver everything, Goebbels would decide that Lodenstein should live in the shoebox, and he would be reinstated as Obërst of the Compound.

    To this purpose, he looked down at the immense room and consulted a list that detailed the background of every Scribe: the list, compiled by the SS, said where each Scribe had been born, their siblings, where they’d gone to school, and what they’d studied. While he read the list, Elie Schacten opened the door to the main room and sat at her desk facing the Scribes. She shoved pencils into jars, put papers away, and took out her dark red notebook. She looked up at Dieter Stumpf in his shoebox. He looked away.

    The vast room, lit by kerosene lanterns, would have been dreary except for splotches of color on the Scribes’ rakish scarves and fingerless gloves. Stumpf looked from the room to the list and back to the room again. The last time he counted there were fifty-four Scribes, and every one had studied something he didn’t understand. But only five had read in philosophy:

    There was a blond, somewhat wasted-looking woman named Gitka Kapusinki from Poland, who’d been pulled from a deportation line when an SS man heard her speak Czech. And her lover, Ferdinand La Toya, who wore a long black coat and smoked potent Spanish cigars, was snatched from deportation when a guard told him to go fuck himself, and he’d answered—first in Catalan, then in Italian— under what circumstances? And Niles Schopenhauer—not related to the Schopenhauer—who was sent from a work camp because he knew seven languages. There was also Sophie Nachtgarten, who’d published a paper called Time and The Unicorn: A Treatise on Necessary Truth . She’d surprised a guard whose mother came from Norway, regaled him with Norwegian drinking songs, and charmed her way to the Compound instead of Bergen-Belsen. And Parvis Nafissian, with black beetle brows and a trim goatee. He was the only Scribe who’d been forced to write a letter. But when a guard saw he’d written one in Turkish and another in Farsi, he pulled him from the line at Treblinka and shoved him into a Kübelwagen. Nafissian answered almost no letters at all. He read whatever detective stories Elie could find.

    Stumpf decided that any of them would do, and—since any of them would do—all five could write the letter together. He was about to go down his spiral staircase to talk to them when Sonia Markova knocked on his door, and Stumpf went through the laborious business of unlatching it. Sonia, who’d once danced with the Bolshoi ballet, had snuck from Russia to see a lover in Berlin, was caught on her way back, and demonstrated three Russian dialects. She had delectable legs, high cheekbones, green eyes, translucent skin, and black curls. She was also clairvoyant and sometimes agreed to secret séances—not only for people who’d died in camps and ghettos but for ordinary people as well—the 19th-century dressmaker, for example, whose séance caused the fire in the upstairs room, or a woman who’d written her lover fighting in the Crimea. Stumpf had taken these letters secretly from attics of people who had been deported or warehouses and old files of government offices. There were letters from button makers, coach makers, furriers, boat makers, wheelwrights, printers, illusionists, and artists. He thought all the dead deserved answers.

    Now Sonia walked in looking gloomy and said she couldn’t keep her mind on anything because it was her niece’s birthday.

    She’s ten, said Sonia. And she doesn’t even know where I am.

    Stumpf said she’d feel better if she held one of his crystal balls. He hoped this would turn into a séance for all the dead