Shadows of Berlin

2.

Promise Me She Is Dead

At the end of the war, it had been nearly impossible for young Rashka Morgenstern to prove that she was actually Jewish. A problem because by the time she had arrived at the gates of the displaced persons camp in the American zone, it had been designated only for Jews. So what was she to do? She was an adolescent girl on her own. She had no tattoo on her arm from a concentration camp. No documents stamped with a purple J. Her papers, in fact, said she was an Aryan! But then a young American officer with a fuzzy moustache and a pistol holstered at his hip asked her a question.

Azoy, iunge dame, aoyb ir zent take a eydish, kenen ir redn mit mir in eydish?

Tears flooded to her eyes. She cried with unadulterated joy as she answered him. Ya! Yo, ikh kenen redn mit ir! Ikh ken redn mit dir!

Yiddish had saved her.

It was her heritage. Not the holy tongue but the mother tongue. The language of Eema’s parents, Chaim and Freidka Landau, living in the sunny, clement city of Tarnów under the Hapsburg dynasty. They were religious people, Chaim and Freidka. Observant Jews, pillars of the synagogue, but also deep thinkers. And though she never knew them while they lived, this is the way they were always described by both mother and uncle to little Rashka Morgenstern growing up in Berlin. Zey zenen tif tingkerz, deyn zeyde-­bobe. Intellectual people. Teachers. Her grandfather taught languages—­German, French, also Hebrew—­in a local school, and her grandmother taught piano from the parlor of a comfortably appointed house on Lwowska Street.

When they left Tarnów for Berlin, so that Chaim could fill an important teaching position at the Jüdische Mädchenschule, maybe they spoke German in the streets, the classrooms, the shops and public spaces. The language of assimilation. But if they retained a comfortable dialect of Yiddish in their own home, who would care? And if they continued in Yiddish after their daughter, Lavinia, and their son, Fredrich, were born, who could criticize? Yiddish was the language of the heart. So when the time came that Eema had her own daughter, was it utterly unthinkable that she share the language mother to child, just as her mother and her mother before her had done? Just as she shared the very essence of Jewish blood mother to child since Sarah, wife of Abraham? Besides, with this child, it was obvious. This was a daughter with a God-­given talent for languages. “If she can hear it, she can speak it,” her eema would say of Rashka. “Just like her grandfather of blessed memory. If she can see it, she can read it. If she can read it, she can write it.”

Even so, because Rashka grew up in Berlin-­Wilmersdorf, that staid dominion of bourgeois Jewish fortunes, their Yiddish remained concealed as the language of hearth and home.

German only in society! Um Gottes willen! Don’t embarrass yourself with Yiddish in front of other Jews. What do you think, this is the Ukraine?

So it was for her a secret language that little Rashka Morgenstern spoke with Eema and Feter Fritz alone. Now, however? In the city of New York? The tribes speak aloud. One is likely to hear all variants and varieties of Yiddish anywhere and everywhere, at least on the Lower East Side. Even today on certain street corners, between Canal and Houston, in certain coffeehouses and meeting spots, outside certain delicatessens, it is the language of public conversation, for heaven’s sake.

The Orchard Café and Dairy Restaurant is one such certain place where Yiddish is king. A Lower East Side institution. It is the domain of the “alter kockers” as Aaron calls these weathered old men. White hair, silver hair, no hair left at all. Many of them men who have transplanted their bodies but not their souls from the old country. They are roosting here on the Lower East Side, bent, round-­shouldered, over their chessboards, their backgammon games, slapping down cards and poking pegs into their cribbage boards. They smoke and drink coffee together and deliberate. The State of Israel, the state of Zionism, the state of Jewish socialism, all topics of debate and examination. And they argue. They argue as if they are deciding an ancient biblical grudge over the general decline of everything. Especially literature! Especially art! Especially the Yiddish theater ! Especially the quality of the potato knish now that you can buy it frozen in the grocery like those ummeglich little pizza pies!

Entering the revolving door, Rachel inhales the aroma of stewed cabbage, chopped liver, and boiled kreplach floating in chicken stock. The Miltown had been doing its work. Crossing Orchard Street, she’d felt confident that she could tolerate the stress of sussing out her uncle’s ulterior motives. Even on the train, she’d been paging through the catalog of possibilities in her head. Another gambling debt to a bookie has caught him short? (“These are violent men, Ruchel.”) Or does he need to parade her as his daughter again? (“Only for an hour to convince the bureaucracy. You’ll fill in a few forms and put up a small fee. It’s nothing.”) Or will it be another investment. (“Really, it’s an opportunity for you, Rashka, as much as me. And for only a few dollars.”) She only hopes that whatever it is, she can keep her lies to Aaron about it to a minimum. In preparation, she’s already sketched out a lie or two in her head. (“It was nothing. He needed a few dollars for a doctor’s appointment. His anemia, you know.” Or “He was hoping to make a small donation to the Jewish Immigrant Fund. In repayment for what they did for us.”)

But when she spots her uncle seated in the corner, she feels her heart drop, and no dosage of Miltown can deter her grief. In the Berlin of decades past, his hubris had made him a charming rogue of the art world, sleek, well-­barbered, and immaculately tailored, the king of every room he entered. A man who could reserve the best tables in restaurants from Kempinski’s in the Kurfürstendamm to the Adlon at the Pariser Platz. Now the vacuum left by the disappearance of the Old World has made him a caricature. A shmittshik! Now he is, at best, a charming charity case. At worst? An opnarer. A shifty operator, with the hunger of an alley cur and the cunning of a wounded fox.

He sits, smoking in his chair at the Orchard Café, his face guarded by a blank scowl. He is thin and bony. His clothes lend him the look of a scarecrow. His hair, once lush, dark, and pomaded, is brittle and shot through with streaks of white, and his jaw is carelessly shaven. Still, the moment he spots Rachel, the dybbuk of his past returns, animating Feter’s limbs and his character. He leaps to his feet, and his eyes ignite with a bright reflection of the old days when he treated his little niece to a plate of nussecken at Karl Kutschera’s Konditorei Wien under a grand, lead-­crystal chandelier.

“Rokhl, my treasure,” he calls her, and in that instant, she fights the urge to flee, but her mother appears just long enough to scold her for her fears.

Whatever he’s up to, Rokhl, your feter is still your family, she reminds. Your blood.

Rachel says nothing. She sometimes finds him at his cribbage board, ready to double skunk all comers, but today he occupies his Stammtisch, back against the mural of the old Hester Street Market, alone with his coffee cup and the last bite of an egg cookie tucked into the saucer.

It was a miracle that they were reunited after the war, Feter and Rachel. For months, she had assumed that her uncle was farshtorbn. Mausetot zu sein. It was no secret that transport to the east meant death. But her D.P. camp was the largest in the American zone, and the Jewish population was swelling. Feter was thin as smoke, reading the camp newspaper printed in Yiddish when she found him. She had not shed a tear in so long. Not even when Eema was taken from her. Her tears had simply evaporated, but suddenly, at the sight of his emaciated face, tears surged from her like an ocean. It is said that believing that miracles occur is foolishness, but believing that miracles are not possible is blasphemy.

Feter Fritz is clasping her hands warmly and conducting her through the crowded room toward an empty chair, asking, “Are you hungry? No? Can I offer you a coffee? A deviled egg with paprika. No? Please, there must be something,” he insists.

“No,” she tells him. “No, nothing, Feter. Nothing, thank you.” She doesn’t want him spending a nickel on her, because how many nickels can he have? His fingernails are dirty, which makes Rachel sad. Her uncle was once immaculate in his grooming. But there is a fragility about him now. At home, she scrimps with her housekeeping money so she can slip him a few dollars when required. She buys her husband margarine at the store instead of butter. Instant coffee over ground. She defends her uncle against Aaron’s suspicions and even against her own. All this she does in support of his pretenses, even though this morning he seems bent on proving that his poverty, his feeble impact on the world, has reduced his once-superior instincts for art and business to a shady caricature. A man with a head full of grimy intrigues and a shoebox of crumpled dollars.

Silverware clinks, and conversations rumble about them. An ancient waiter has appeared tableside. Gray hair thinning, features broadening with age, earlobes elongating. “So, for the gentleman. You want the lentil and bean soup,” he says to Feter Fritz, not a question.

“Thank you, Alf. You always know.”

Turning to Rachel. “And the little missus? A blintz.”

“No. Thank you, Mr. Fishman, nothing.”

The old schlepper can’t credit this. In Yiddish, he asks her, “Nit afilu a moyl?” Not even a mouthful?

“Just a tea,” says Rachel.

“She’s artistic, Alfie,” her uncle explains.

“So I know. But even Rembrandt ate a bagel, didn’t he?” A fatalistic shrug. “Okay. One bowl of soup, one cup of tea. I’ll see what I can coax from the kitchen.”

Rachel breathes inwardly. Silently. The Miltown is doing its work. She is a candle flame balanced on the tip of a wick. “So, Feter,” she begins. “Let’s not beat about the bush, the two of us. Tell me, please. What is the reason you’ve asked me here?”

“The reason? Well, the reason is that you’re my family, Rashka. Is that so hard to accept, I wonder? An uncle likes to see his niece on occasion.”

“And so you see me, Feter,” she says. “Here I am. Now what is the other reason?” she asks, though doesn’t she already know? Moolah, bubala! Kies und Shotter! The old Berliner bywords: Ohne Moos, nix los! Without moss, nothing happens!

“Should I be stung by your tone, Rokhl?” her feter wonders with a careful smile. “Since when is my niece so cynical?”

A small shrug in reply. “You called me? I came.”

“Fine,” he says flatly, down to business. “I don’t want to say a big word,” the man confides with intimate restraint. “But I believe, Rashka,” he tells her. “I believe that I have discovered one of your mother’s lost masterpieces.”

Rachel feels herself grow cold. Her fingers go numb as she gazes back at her uncle’s face. She knows he is searching for some reaction. Perhaps he is hoping for even a small surge of surprise—­or, dare it be imagined, a spark of joy. But this blunt dumbness that has struck her is all she can offer, forcing her uncle to ask the question directly. “Do you know what that will mean, Rokhl?”

“Mean?” Rachel repeats. Does it mean that there is some proof remaining of her eema’s brilliance? Does it mean that her eema’s reputation will be resurrected from the footnotes of art history texts? Does it mean that a part of Eema has survived beyond the quarrelsome specter that Rachel raises from the ashes? But all Feter’s shrunken perspective and empty pockets can permit him to whisper is “It could be worth a tidy fortune.”

“Which one is it?” This is really the only question that’s important to her. Which painting has survived? Her mind races through an inventory of possibilities. The unfinished portrait of Rathenau interrupted by his assassins? The portrait of Harry von Kessler, le célèbre comte libéral, holding his dachshund on his lap? The bespectacled impressionist Ernst Oppler, painted the year before his death? Or could it be the actress Brigette Helm, armored from the neck down in her costume as the Maschinenmensch in Metropolis?

“You must tell me, Feter.” She removes a cigarette from the packet of Camels from her coat. She often carries things like men do, in her pockets, but she must open her bag to find matches. “You need to tell me which,” she insists, searching anxiously, her Miltown calm shredded and the cigarette dangling from her lips.

Feter Fritz, however, is circumspect. He seizes the opportunity to prevaricate by igniting her cigarette with the snap of a lighter that features a Pepsi-­Cola bottle cap, part of the collection of accoutrements that underpin his frayed elegance. “Let’s say for now,” he suggests, “that all I can tell you is…it’s one of her major works.”

“So I will recognize it?”

“Oh, yes.” He nods with smug certainty. “Oh, yes, you will quite definitely recognize it, tohkter,” he tells her, adopting that oh-­so-­charming and yet quite irritating custom of old-­world men, addressing young women as daughter. It’s a term of “affection” but also intended to detract from Rachel’s competence in this conversation by juvenilizing her. All in good time, child, it says. It’s a sticky matter for experts, not for les demoiselles. For now, he’s said all that he dares.

“So that is all I’m permitted to know?” she asks with a frown.

Well. Her uncle expels smoke with manly dignity. Perhaps there is one more thing he admits he should mention. And that’s when it comes. The meat of the matter. “All I need is fifty,” Feter informs her.

“Fifty?”

“Dollars, Rashka,” her uncle clarifies gently, as if Rachel may be sweetly dense. And then to add a splatter of grease to the skillet, he declares that “the fool in possession has not a whiff.” A shmegegi is how he describes this man. “He thinks the value is in the frame, a gilded monstrosity,” Feter sneers cozily. “The poor shlub has no idea what he has.”

“And who—­” Rachel starts to press but silences herself when the ancient schlepper appears.

“One cup Visotskis Tey for the big eater,” he announces dubiously as he delivers Rachel’s tea on saucer. “Plus one bowl lentil bean for the regular. And don’t worry,” he adds, setting it down in front of Feter. “It’s Wednesday. The cook never spits in the soup on Wednesday. It’s bad luck.”

Feter ejects an affected laugh at this, perfected over decades of charming waiters, hotel porters, and doormen. “Thank you, Alf. And my compliments to the chef, of course.”

“Still nothing for the little missus?” the man inquires.

“Still nothing,” Rachel tells him.

A shrug. If she says so. And he slumps away. Only then does Rachel bear down on her question. “And who possesses this masterpiece, Feter?” she pushes. “Who exactly?”

But once more, her uncle bats her question away. “A nobody,” he declares. “A bedbug from a pawnshop. I could shout his name from a rooftop, and he’d still be anonymous.”

“Is it the place on West Forty-­Seventh Street? Where you lost your diamond stickpin?”

“Unimportant,” he declares in between loud slurps of soup. His table manners disappeared at Auschwitz and never really returned. Rachel draws a breath deeply into her chest before releasing it. Her feter must sense a quickening resistance on her part, or at least a confusion of emotions, because he sets his spoon into the bowl and alters his tone sympathetically.

“I know I’m asking a great deal,” he is willing to concede.

“Yes.”

“Fifty dollars? It’s a significant sum.”

“Yes.”

“Especially when money doesn’t grow on trees,” he agrees. “But, child. Think of it. A canvas painted by your mother’s hand, surviving. A part of her legacy, undestroyed.” And here he strategically allows his cuff line to expose the tip of the number tattooed onto his forearm. A reminder of his suffering that his niece was spared.

Rachel swallows a small rock. “Yes,” she says, her eyes now gleaming with tears.

“You won’t regret it, zeisele. Fifty dollars? In the long run, it will be nothing.”

“But you must tell me, Feter,” she insists, wiping her eyes. “You must tell me. Which one is it?” Vos moler iz ir geredt vegn? “Which one has survived?”

Suddenly, her feter looks hunted. A moment before, his expression was animated. His voice excited by desire and manipulation. But now his eyes darken, and she can read in them that he’s calculating how to answer. How not to answer. So she is forced to read his mind. She knows he intends to keep her heartstrings thrumming. But he must be fearful too—­what if he reveals too much? Will he frighten her off? What if, of all the paintings her eema ever produced, what if there is one so volatile in memory, so dangerous in its passion, that Rachel might bolt from her chair at the very mention of it and flee into the street? What if such a painting exists? And what if after all the decades, after all the blood and black smoke and burnt history, what if it has survived? Without realizing it, Rachel has clamped her hand over her own mouth as if to stop herself from uttering another word. She feels a breathtaking horror. An exhilarating, electrifying moment of panic.

Rachel’s hand slips from her mouth to her throat. “It’s her.”

Her feter huffs out a breath to forestall a panic. “Rashka,” he says.

But Rachel’s eyes have gone oily black. “Tell me the truth, Feter. The painting. It’s her.” Her breath shortens.

“She’s dead, Rashka,” Feter is compelled to remind her.

“That was never proven.”

“Yes. It was. She committed suicide in Russian custody,” her uncle insists. “Hanged herself in a Red Army cell. She can’t hurt you any longer, Rashka. You must realize that.”

Rashka is searching her bag and pulls out the bottle of Miltown.

“Now what’s this?” A frown. “A potion pill? I thought you were over that, Ruchel.”

“It’s a prescription, Feter,” Rachel answers firmly, swallowing a capsule dry. “From my doctor.” She is suddenly sick of Feter Fritz. Sick of his opinions from the old country. Sick of his paternal posing and the devious nature of his affection. “I don’t need your criticism.”

“Rokhl,” he says, speaking her name defensively.

“Promise me she is dead, Feter,” she demands, her eyes swelling with tears. “Promise me.”

“Oh, my child.” Feter sounds pained but also alarmed.

“Even if it’s a lie, promise me,” she begs. “Promise me she’s dead.”

“I promise you, Rokhl,” her uncle swears, “that she can’t hurt you any longer. This I can promise. Never again.”

She is yanking a handkerchief from her coat pocket. Mopping herself up. “I’m sorry,” she starts to repeat. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“No. No apologies. No apologies,” he tells her, his tone comforting but his expression distressed. “You should go home. You’re overwrought. I’m sure it’s these pills. Doctor and pills—­they put a person on edge.” He comforts her in an overbearing manner, makes excuses for her teary eruption, though at the same time, he is preparing to make his escape. A crying woman in a public place—­vos farlegnheyt!

Rachel glares blankly at him. She feels shame like she feels anger—­deep down in the middle of her heart.

“Perhaps your old uncle should be going in any case,” Feter declares as he stands, abandoning his bowl of lentil bean. Setting his old roll-­brim at its customary angle on his head, he slides his tweedy coat over his shoulders. “Consider my request, Rashka,” he offers softly. “For what does money matter, compared to the chance to restore your mother’s name to its proper standing? Imagine that, Rashka, within your grasp.” And with that, Feter Fritz is sailing toward the door and the gritty traffic of East Broadway, leaving his niece with the bill.