Mama Vander's pill-box was the first thing I ever stole – a surprisingly intense little thrill – although of course I did not think of it as stealing, only borrowing. I saw it there, in a drape-hung anteroom in the Vander apartment, resting on the edge of a pedestal that bore a bust of Goethe, where Mama Vander had put it down in passing and forgotten it; the silver glint of it was as inviting as a wink. I pocketed it without thinking, without breaking my stride. I needed money, and quickly, for there were books I was anxious to buy while there was still time, before they were banned from the shops, or consigned to the pyre. I intended to tell Axel what I had done, after I had redeemed the box, thinking it would surely amuse him, but I never did, tell him, I mean. What kept me silent was a sense of gravity, not the gravity of my misdemeanour, but of the thing itself: the stolen object, I discovered, takes on a mysterious weight, becomes far heavier than the sum of the materials of which it is made. That little box – all it contained was a few of the sugared violet pastilles that its owner, its former owner, was addicted to – was so ponderous in my pocket it made me feel I must list to that side as I hurried away with my purloined prize. I did not delay in getting rid of it. It turned out to be a valuable piece, French, early eighteenth century; old Wassermann was reluctant to part with it, I could see, when I came back to redeem it. After that I kept it, for many years, through all manner of vicissitude and loss, and although in time it ceased to be as emblematic as once it had been, it never quite shed that unaccountable, undue weighti-ness. Now it has disappeared, made off stealthily without my noticing, in that mysterious way that objects have of escaping one's disregardant grasp.
That was the last time I was in the Vander apartment, the time I stole the pill-box. The theft was not the reason for my banishment; I am not sure it was ever detected, or, if it was, that I was held to be the culprit. In those days of invasion, defeat, occupation – all of which dizzying disasters came quickly to be referred to primly as the events – I was no longer as welcome among the Vanders as I had once been. Nothing was said, of course, but there was a constriction that occurred in the atmosphere now when I entered those spacious, overheated rooms that my heightened sensibilities could not but register. So I withdrew. The break was decorous, and went unremarked, on both sides. It is a curious thing, how even the most violently disrupted circumstances will quickly improvise and impose their own rules of mannerliness. In the early days, after it had sunk in that les événements, de gebeurtenissen, "were irreversible and would somehow or other have to be lived with, there was a certain small smile, wry, rueful, pained, accompanied by a flicker of the eyes heavenward, that people would exchange at unwontedly difficult moments, such as when some new and seemingly capricious edict had been announced, restricting the movement or meeting of persons, or imposing yet more levies on this or that section of society, most usually that section to which I belonged. At first these measures were merely an annoyance. We suffered them, having no choice, while at the same time we strove at least to maintain the appearance of disdaining them. However, as the months went on, life in those mean little streets on the wrong side of the square became increasingly attenuated, until we seemed truly to be living on air. We had a sense of floating above ourselves, buffeted now this way, now that, the frail tethering lines jerking and straining with each new ordinance that was issued against us. We grew lighter and lighter as all that we possessed was taken from us, article by article. One week we were forbidden to ride on trams, the next to ride on bicycles. One Monday morning it was ordered that every household must hand up so many men's suits, women's dresses, children's overcoats; at noon the order was rescinded, without explanation, only to be issued again the next day. We were told we could no longer keep household pets; it was the middle of winter, and, for days, long straggles of people wound their way on foot – no trams for us, remember – along snowbound roads to the designated pound on the outskirts of the city where our dogs and cats and budgerigars were to be put down. Yet in its usual uncaring way, life went on. There was the theatre, there were concerts to go to, and lectures and public meetings to attend, and when all that was put out of bounds to us there were the cafés where we could meet and talk, and then when even talk was proscribed there was the wireless, bringing news from elsewhere, all those elsewheres, crackling along the airwaves. Music broadcasts I treasured especially; they came from Stuttgart, Hilversum, Paris, sometimes London, even, if the atmospherics were right. The music was, well, the music, but how strangely affecting it was in the intervals to hear the stir and heave of the audience as it relaxed for a minute, all those people, so far away, and yet magically here, their presence so palpable I might be sitting in their midst. Even yet I cannot hear in the concert hall the sound of that murmurously expectant concourse without being transported immediately back across half a century to the little wallpapered living room with the tasselled tablecloth and the lampshade the colour of dried skin, and the big wooden wireless set with the Bakelite knobs and the canvas grille and the single, glowing green cat's-eye pulsing and contracting, and the blurred music pouring into the room and filling it like a luminous fog. I could not but hate them, too, of course, those audiences; they seemed to my ear so at ease, so lumpenly careless of all they had and I did not, here, where all around, stealthily, the world was closing in, armed with cudgels and flaming torches.
Axel and I continued to meet, not as often as before, away from his home, away from the Stoof, and away from the shtetl people, too, needless to say. We met on neutral ground, while there still remained ground that could be called neutral. His attitude toward me, at least in the early days of de gebeurtenissen, was one of affability tinged with impatience, restrained exasperation. He would tap me on the wrist, not unfondly, and accuse me of being overly alarmist in the face of my plight and that of my people. "Yes yes yes," he would say, with a frowning smile, waving a hand, "I am aware of all that, I read the papers too, you know." But surely, he would go on, surely I must agree that something had to be done, that matters could not go on as they had been doing? And even if people were to be sent away somewhere, would that be so bad? They might thrive, in a climate better suited to their temperament and racial characteristics. Anyway, it would only be the troublemakers who would go, them, and perhaps the sick, the very old, the mad, the syphilitic. They would be sent to Heligoland, to the Tatra Mountains; Hendriks had told him for a fact that only last week a thousand had been put on a ship at the Hook of Holland bound for South America. And in any case, Axel said, why was I worrying? I was safe, I was his friend. Had not our photographs appeared side by side in De Vlaamsche Gazet?
What could I say to him, what reply? He could not know that sense I had now when I ventured beyond our side of the square of being crouched in hiding behind myself even as I walked down one of his streets, sat in one of his cafés, listening to him tell me, with an irritated rictus, that this was just the trouble with me, with all of my people, this hysteria, this cringing and complaining, this constant, kicked-dog whining Why had we not thought of the consequences before we infiltrated the banks and the judiciary and the government ministries until they were full to bursting with our secret, burrowing brood? It was all perfectly straightforward, perfectly obvious. Something had needed doing, as he had always insisted, and now it was being done. How could we not have seen what was coming, until it had arrived in our midst, clanking and smoking? Anyway, it would all soon be over and done with. That things were bad, and would get worse, he did not deny; most likely the last act would be bloody – "As it always," with a flash of small, square, white teeth, "is" – but when all the bodies had been dragged by the heels into the wings, how clean and free and filled with possibilities would be that emptied stage! While he was saying these things he looked me calmly in the face, shaking his head a little, with that smile, as if he were recounting to a child in simplified terms the plot of a tragedy the convolutions of which only grown-ups could properly disentangle. The possibility did not seem to occur to him that the directors and the stage managers of all this drama might end up by bringing the house down. I was embarrassed – yes, really, I was embarrassed, for myself, and for him. This, mark you, this was that same Axel Vander whose monograph on Heine which he wrote when he was seventeen had provoked more than one wise professor to mumble into his beard of the arrival in our midst of a new Hofmannsthal. What would I find to say if, one day, I were to be called upon to help him exonerate himself, when at last, slapping a hand to his forehead, he should come to his senses and see all this present foolishness and vile fantasy for what it was? He had put himself among fanatics and barbarians, the most reasonable-seeming of whom would in an instant turn a perfectly mild-mannered conversation into ranting, stamping theatrics. One quickly learned to spot in these people the signs of an incipient tirade: the reddening brow, the glazing eye, the bullish thrusting forward of the head. Women were some of the worst, adding to male fury their dash of hysteria and sexual revulsion. I was in bed one afternoon with an actress – porcelain face, bobbed hair, mouth like a scarlet insect, one of Axel's cast-offs – who halted in the middle of the act itself and lifted herself above me, her braced arms shaking from the strain and her little breasts trembling, and told me in tones of florid indignation how the previous night a vuile jood in a fur-collared coat had accosted her at the stage door and offered her money to come to his house and do with him what she would have realised, had she thought for a moment, was exactly the thing that she was doing now, here, in this bed, with one of the impudent fellow's pure-blooded brethren.