BOOK ONE: YESTERDAY 49 harder lot, He pulled out his eyeglasses, polished them, and put them away again. In a sudden gust of emotion he went over to Gustav, touched him lightlyon the arm, and drew him across the room to Klara and Jaques Lavendel. Then he fetched Edgar in the same way. There they sat together, the Oppermann brothers and sister, solid, secure. It was a stormy time, they too had had their share of the deluge, but they could stand that, they remained firmly on their feet. They and the picture of old Immanuel belonged together. They could justify themselves to the picture, its col- ours had not faded on their account. They had won a place for themselves in this country, a good place; but they had paid a good price for it. Now they sat there firmly, contentedly, se· cureIy. The others noticed the family group and detached them- selves from it, so that the Oppermann brothers and sister sat alone, The chief clerk Siegfried Brieger was particularly pleased with this emphatic evidence of family feeling. Every type of solidarity pleased hirn. "Unity," he said to Professor Mühlheim. "Everything depends on that. It's lucky that we Jews stick to- gether. Like monkeys. That's why nothing can happen to us. You can cut the tree away from under us a hundred times. There's always one of us that climbs up to the top again and we others, like the monkeys, catch hold of his tail and he pulls us up with him," Frau Emilie Franccis envied the Oppermann women, from the bottom of her heart, their husbands' sense of family solidarity. It was certain that none of them would risk an imprudent remark and endanger wife and child. Ruth Oppermann stared at her uncle out of her big, intense eyes. She was sure that in the end she would be ahle to explain to a man, who so obviously felt his unity with his family, the unity with his tradition. Sybil Rauch, too, was watehing the Oppermann graupe She

5° THE OPPERMANNS stood there, slim and resolute, her eyes looking resentful under the high, headstrong, childlike, brow. No one could have said that the picture by Andre Greid was a caricature. It was a curi- ous idea of Gustav's to stage these family scenes for his friends. Sentimental. Silly. He was young for his age, he looked weIl, he loved her, and she was fond of hirn. He helped her, he Ul1- derstood a good deal about her affairs, she hardly knew how she could get on without hirn. But it was coming out now, he was really nothing but asentimental old [ew, She looked across at Friedrich Wilhelm Gutwetter, comparing them. Gustav was ten times as clever, ten times as much a man of the world. But the author, with his big eyes, in his obsolete dress, at onee ridiculous and touching, was all of a piece. Everything about Gustav was involved, multiple, divided, there was layer upon layer of hirn. There was his family, his intellectual interests, his sport, his feeling for her, his strange affection for that per- son Anna in the background. Where was the real Gustav? Gustav himself was cornpletely happy. He had drunk, not too much, he never did that, but enough to feel exhilarated. The only pity was that the others did not see how completely and unconditionally happy he was. That he enjoyed women, friends, his family, and his house was perfectly obvious to everybody. That he enjoyed books, his efforts on behalf of the author Gutwetter, his Lessing biography, was known to a few. But the happiness that carne from uniting the two, from this two-fold possession-that was a joy which, at most, onIy Mühlheim and Franccis understood. But even if the others could not understand, he wanted to do his best to make thern as happy as possible. He decided to treat thern to sorne of the cognac, which Professor Mühlheim had sent hirn, the cognac which had been distilled in the year of his own birth, 1882. Schlüter brought the bottle, a gigantic bottle, and the big, bulging glasses. But a further ceremony was necessary before