Free The Other Side of Love by Jacqueline Briskin Page A

a place called Leventhal’s.”
     
    “The department store?”
     
    “From the way he spoke I should be impressed.”
     
    “Since 1933 it’s called The Berliner.”
     
    “Hey, on Leipzigstrasse? Acres and acres of shop with a glasscovered central court?”
     
    “That’s it.”
     
    Wyatt whistled, then squinted up at the rays cast by the setting sun.
    “We had seconds on coffee, then the judge picked up the watch.
    “Young man, we have no connection to this.”
    “
    “Rotten,”
    she said.
    “Rotten.”
     
    “Sad’s more like it. Here they knew I was their grandson, their only descendant, yet even after all these years they couldn’t back down. I still can see them sitting on those stiff chjlrs, two old people, lonely, so lonely.”
    Wyatt sighed.
    “At the time, tho h, there was no measured compassion in me whatsoever. I was ready to howl at the moon. Here was rejection on the most basic level. Because their son had married a Christian girl he was dead to them. They had mourned him. I didn’t exist.”
     
    Kathe touched his arm consolingly. He gripped her hand, then released it.
     
    “I’d been considering visiting the local Leventhals to see if they needed anything. On the q.t., of course - it’d be a shot through the heart to Dad if he knew I was in on the secret. Hearing they’re in the Rothschild league takes a load off my mind.”
     
    Kathe thought of the letter delivered to Aubrey’s hotel room. She thought of Anna Elzerman emigrating because her father’s fashionable practice had been ruined. She thought of the signs stripped down for the Games. She thought of the crude, hate-drenched, anti-Semitic cartoons in the chauffeur’s newspaper. Yet in a sense Wyatt was right. The German Jews were not subjected to the same
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    beatings and indignities as Ost-Juden, which was what the press called eastern European Jewry.
     
    “Wyatt, if there’s ever anything you want me to do …
    “
    “Keep Myron between us, that’s all.”
     
    “I won’t ever tell anyone.”
     
    “Is that right hand of yours on a Bible?”
     
    “I never break my promises.”
     
    “This isn’t just about hurting Dad. It’s me. I like being a Kingsmith. Oh God, Kathe, Kathe. I’m so damn confused.”
     
    She put her arms around him, and for a few seconds they clung together.
     
    That Sunday of the closing ceremonies, the entire family gathered at the Griinewald house for a mid-morning meal of cold meats and rolls. The gold medallists were toasted with raised steins of Weissbier, the raspberry-flavoured beer unique to Berlin. Everyone trooped outside on to the sun-splashed terrace. Porteous sat in an ornate armchair brought from the drawingroom; Araminta reclined in a deckchair with a leg-rest for her cast; the others stood.
     
    Halfway down the lawn that sloped gently to the small lake stood a carriage-house that had been converted to a garage and chauffeur’s quarters. Here, where a stone retaining wall divided the garden, Herr Ley, the gardener, had dug two holes. Kathe and Wyatt, laughing yet self-conscious in their Olympic uniforms, walked down to the small excavations. She planted her oak sapling. As she kneeled to press the soil around the roots a light breeze came up, blowing pale gold strands across her forehead.
     
    Above them, Aubrey shouted:
    “Three cheers for Kathe.”
    Ragged cries of
    “Hip, hip, hooray”
    echoed in the sabbath quiet.
     
    Wyatt planted his tree, and three more cheers went up.
     
    “So you’ll let me know how my oak’s doing?”
    Wyatt asked as they returned to the terrace.
     
    “I’ll write to you often.”
     
    “Good,”
    he said.
    “Great.”
    *
    The stadium was jammed. Twenty thousand more than the official hundred thousand capacity had crowded inside. The reddening sun slipped behind the Olympic flame on top of the Marathon Gate, distant cannon boomed, and high atop the Glockenturrn the Olympic bell began its steady tolling. Trumpeters sounded a