The Jerusalem Diamond by Noah Gordon Page B

family’s diamond tradition. The telling took all afternoon and shook Alfred to the core, fed something deep within him, allowed him to begin to understand himself. It was a history to match his dreams
.
    Finally, his uncle turned over to him the money his father had left. It hadn’t been a fortune to begin with, and the cost of his education had made inroads. But Alfred also had a smaller amount he had saved out of his salary at Kimberley. It would have to be enough
.
    He couldn’t have chosen a better time to return to Germany. While he had been away his country had seen defeat, revolution, unemployment and hunger, but by the middle 1920’s the world had never been so prosperous nor felt so profligate, and foreign investors had begun to pour great sums into German industry and commerce. He wandered about Berlin, trying to decide where to locate his shop. Someone older or younger might have been repelled by what he saw, but he was at the age when vice seemed attractive. The avenues were still wide and clean and beautiful, but armies of prostitutes in green leather boots patrolled the Friedrichstrasse at any hour. Bars, amusement parks and honky-tonks had sprung up in streets he remembered as stolid residential neighborhoods of working people and merchants. Everywhere in Berlin there were beautiful women, the most stylish he had ever seen, long-legged, slender and luscious
.
    On the Kurfürstendamm, the broad boulevard where he had lived with his parents, the gray stone house looked remarkably unchanged, except that in the garden one of the two ginkgo trees had been cut down and the other had become full-grown. He stood across the street for a long time and stared, almost expecting the side door to open
. Alfred! Alfred, come at once. Your father will be home at any minute.
    Finally the door did open and an elderly man came out. He had a gray, bushy mustache and looked like a retired army officer. He glanced across the street sharply just as one of the cruising homosexuals sauntered up and touched Alfred’s arm
. “Na?”
the youth whispered
.
    â€œ
No,” Alfred said, and went away
.
    He found an apartment in a house in central Berlin, on the Wilhelmstrasse. It came with proxy parents in the landlord’s flat on the first floor. Herr Doktor Bernhard Silberstein was a retired physician, white-haired and bearded, with a chronic cough and fingers yellowed from cigarettes. His wife, a fat and comfortable old woman named Annalise, made it plain that Alfred was to have dinner with them on Fridays, to welcome the Sabbath
.
    â€œ
No, I’m not religious,” he said, too embarrassed even to thank her properly
.
    â€œ
Wednesdays, then,” Frau Silberstein said, and would hear no objections. The first time he came she gave him sliced goose liver with
gribiness
(cracklings), served as an appetizer. And then the bird itself, with fruit stuffing and a browned skin that crunched in his mouth, and potato dumplings and red cabbage. Dessert was a hot apple-nut strudel with a delicate crust that made Alfred sigh
.
    â€œ
You play chess?” Herr Doktor asked
.
    â€œ
Not for a long while
.”
    â€œ
It will come back
,”
Dr. Silberstein said, giving himself the black pieces. He was very good, he began to decimate the white chessmen “Why did you come back to Germany
?”
    â€œ
I love Berlin. For years I’ve dreamed of returning
.”
    â€œ
People here hate the Jews,” Dr. Silberstein said softly
.
    â€œ
It’s the same everywhere
.”
    â€œ
My dear young man. You knew of Walther Rathenau
?”
    â€œ
Of course, the Foreign Minister. The one they assassinated
.”
    â€œ
There used to be a Freikorps marching song
. ‘Knallt ab den Walther Rathenau,/Die Gottverfluchte Judensau.’ ‘
Shoot down Walther Rathenau,/ He’s a goddam dirty Jew.’ You know of the Nazis, the National Socialist German Workers’