Shadows of Berlin

3.

God Laughs

A person plans and God laughs. This is what’s said. Rachel is standing in a weak drizzle outside a shop window on 47th Street, her head covered by a rain scarf. The grimy glass is dotted with the same sprinkle of raindrops that she blinks away from her eyelashes. A display of once-­coveted objects fills the window, objects traded for cash loans, now ticketed with price tags. Over the door, a sign features a troika of golden balls hanging from a bar. The ancient symbol of the pawnbroker.

A bell jangles as she pushes into the shop. The glassed-­in counters are filled with more of the hocked treasures never collected: watches, rings, necklaces, silver plate, precious brooches, all the sad glitter. The rest of the shop resembles a cluttered attic filled with items slowly devolving into junk. Appliances, a dress dummy, musical instruments hung from nails, cameras, vacuum cleaners, a dragoon’s saber, ugly prints in ugly frames, a stuffed bear’s head mounted on the wall. The bear growls glass-­eyed at eternity.

A man with a cigarette in his mouth appears, squinting one-­eyed through the smoke. He wonders what he can do for her in a slack-­jawed manner. His hair is in need of a trim or at least a shampoo. His chin is pimply. He’s tall and slouches and wears a brown pullover, frayed at the cuffs, and a closed-­collar shirt. This must be the bedbug. The anonymous little man of Feter’s description.

“I’m looking for a painting,” she tells him.

He sniffs, removes the cigarette from his lips, and taps ash into a dirty enamel ashtray. “Yeah? Okay. Paintings I’ve got. What’re you looking for? Something for what? Like over the sofa? Over the mantel?”

Rachel swallows. She brushes her rain-­damp hair away from her forehead. She looks up at the bear. “Is that real?”

“Oh, you mean Smokey Bear up there?” The bedbug smiles. “Yeah, he’s real. Shot him myself when he tried to kick my campfire out,” he offers. Rachel looks back at him without comprehension.

“It’s a particular painting,” she reveals. “A painting of a woman.”

“Oh, so it’s something you know we’ve got. Why didn’t ya say so?” he asks. Rachel licks her lips. She finds it hard to describe, she tells him. But what she doesn’t tell him is that she finds it hard to describe because finding it terrifies her. That it could have survived, indestructible. That it could have followed her here to America.

“It’s a painting of a woman,” she repeats. “A painting of a girl. She was only a girl back then. A teenager. Painted all in monochrome. All in red.”

Oh, and now the bedbug gets it. “Ah, red. Sure! You mean the nudie,” he announces with a touch of emphasis that is both lecherous and disdainful. “It’s in the back,” he tells her, parking his cigarette in the ashtray. “But I gotta warn you, sweetheart,” he prepares her. “It ain’t exactly cheap.” Disappearing through a door marked PRIVATE, he leaves it standing open so he can still talk. “And I should also mention? I’ve already got an interested buyer on the hook for it. But here we go. Let’s give it a look, because why not?”

Rachel feels a wave of panic strong enough to pull her under. She’s not ready. Not ready to see that face again. Not in her mother’s painting. A voice emerges from the past inside her head. A woman’s voice. A purring, menacing voice:

Wo ist dein Stern, Liebchen?

Where is your star, little darling?

Rushing toward the door, Rachel pushes it open as the bell jangles and the damp air strikes her face. But she is stopped by the figure of her mother, blocking her exit, naked, a victim of the Konzentrationslager, her hair nothing but a cropped scrub of gray, her yellowed, pockmarked skin gloved tightly over her skeleton, and her eyes oily with death.

“Hey, where you goin’?” the bedbug wants to know. “You wanna see this thing or not?”

She stares starkly into the pit of her mother’s gaze, then turns swiftly, eyes wet with fear. “I’ll see it,” she says. Rachel steps back into the shop, her breath a slow bellows in her chest. She approaches the counter with the reluctance of the condemned.

Her mother always favored large canvases. They made her feel at ease with her subject and with herself. Herr Lemberg, the Galician Jew who constructed her frames, also stretched her canvases, always according to la standard française for sizing. Eema insisted that painting on anything smaller than une toile de quarante gave her hand cramps.

The canvas that faces Rachel now is trapped in an ugly gilded salon frame. But it must be une toile de cinquante. A canvas of fifty. Converting to American measurement? An approximation would be called three feet by four feet, standing taller than little Rashka stood when it was first painted.

She hasn’t set eyes upon this painting in nearly twenty years, but she remembers as vividly as she would remember a lightning strike.

Even as a child, she liked to watch her mother at work in her studio. Every canvas began simply with the application of an imprimatur of Dammar varnish and turpentine. Then a dry-­brush underpainting of umber followed by what was then called la couche morte. The Dead Layer. An underpainting of grays. Once applied, the hidden palette of the work would lift the colors of her brushwork into the heavenly realms of translucence.

The figure before her throbs off the canvas.

A sensual inferno of red pigments. It both repulses Rachel and draws her in. The long, willowy body. The beatific face with the untamed eyes of a leopard. Persephone erupting from the Underworld. La muse du rouge. She glares at it as if staring straight into a furnace.

“So for a lousy fifty bucks, I wrap it up,” the bedbug informs her. “And this little gem is all yours, hon. I’m sure it’ll kill over your sofa.”

Rachel blinks. Her eyes shoot to this skinny specimen with his buggy eyes.

He presses. “So what’ll it be?”

Rachel’s head is a tangle. She is desperate to flee, desperate to return to a world where her mother’s work has been completely incinerated by the past. But knowing this piece has survived…this terrifying canvas. How will she live now without it?

“Fifty dollars,” she repeats blankly back to the man. She has, perhaps, a dollar in her billfold, plus a quarter in her change purse and a couple of vending machine tokens. Fifty dollars, when they pay eighty-­nine dollars a month for their apartment? How can she possibly lay hands on such a sum? She could try to what? Raid Aaron’s wallet at night after he undresses, even though she knows he doesn’t carry more than cab fare.

She could write a check. She thinks there’s some money in their checking account, because Aaron was paid last Friday, but that would leave them too broke to cover their rent and monthly bills. The only possibility that remains is the twenty dollars her husband has stashed in his copy of the Merriam-­Webster Dictionary. Only for emergencies. “Rainy-­day cash” he calls it. Well, it is a day, and it is raining.

“Will you take less?” she probes.

The bedbug looks confused by the word. “Less?”

“I can give you twenty dollars. In cash.”

“First off,” he tells her, “I only deal in cash when I’m selling to women. Even the pretty ones, sorry to say. I’ve been screwed too many times by husbands canceling their wives’ checks. And second, why should I accept less? For chrissake, the frame alone is worth more than twenty.”

“How about thirty? If I can get your thirty dollars in your hand?”

Retrieving his cigarette from the ashtray, he spills ash onto the counter. “Sorry, baby. Fifty shekels. That’s it.”

“This is my mother’s painting,” Rachel hears herself announce.

The bedbug looks at her like maybe she’s just lost her head in front of him.

“My mother. She painted this,” she declares with greater purpose. “You see—­that’s her signature. Right at the bottom.” She points at a series of parallel strokes. “LML. That’s how she signed everything! Lavinia Morgenstern-­Landau. Morgenstern, her husband’s name, and Landau, her father’s name!” Is she shouting?

The bedbug still looks confused and maybe a bit perturbed. “Okay, okay, just calm down for a sec, will you? No need to have a cow, lady.”

A cow? Rachel shakes her head. “What does that mean?”

“It means give me a minute to think for cryin’ out loud,” he tells her and then snorts out a breath. “Okay, so look,” he says, setting the painting down on a chair below the glass-­eyed bear head. “Let me get this straight. You say this thing was your mother’s?”

“Yes.”

“That she painted it?”

“She did.”

“And you can prove it?”

“Prove it? Prove what? That I am my mother’s daughter?”

“Yeah, I guess. Just that,” the bedbug confirms. “That Lavinia whoever. Husband’s name, father’s name, whatever. That it’s true, ya’ know? Show me a driver’s license or something.”

Rachel licks her lips. “I don’t drive. Anyway, my name is different now.”

He grins, catching on to the con. “Oh, uh-­huh. I get it. Different.”

“I’m married. I’m a U.S. citizen now. My name is different.”

“So no proof,” the bedbug concludes.

No proof. How can she have proof? All the proof of her life before was either stolen or incinerated. How can she prove a thing? She tries to speak, but no words are forthcoming. Only tears. And maybe the tears are enough to wipe the smirk from the bedbug’s punim. Finally, maybe, he finds a drop or two of pity in his heart.

“Okay, okay,” he is repeating. “No need for the waterworks. I get it. Things get emotional,” he decides. “But you gotta understand, honey.” And he says this almost pleadingly. “I’m running a business here.”

Rachel sniffs, wipes her nose on her coat sleeve like a child. “What about forty?” she says and blinks. “What if I can get you forty dollars…”

“Forty?” The bedbug speaks the word like it pains him. But then he puffs out a breath, deflating. “H’okay. If you get me forty—­in cash. Then I’ll cut you some slack. All right?”

Rachel swallows. Sniffs again, tries to force out a small smile of gratitude. “All right,” she agrees.

“But you better not take your time about it. Like I said, I got another buyer for this item. Farshteyn? I’d like to sell it to you over him, but if he walks in here with a fuftsik in his hand before you get back?” The bedbug shrugs. “Like I said. I’m running a business.”

This time when the bell jangles in honor of her exit, the rain has quit and a pale sun peeks out from the clouds. Her belly is tight. She can understand her uncle Fritz’s frustration. His desire foiled by money or the lack thereof. On the 42nd Street Shuttle, she makes her calculations. And good news, she finds that she has a five-­dollar bill in her billfold! Five dollars! A New York miracle! Add that to the rainy-­day twenty, and she’s only fifteen dollars short. But fifteen dollars? That’s nearly a week’s worth of groceries. She could write a check at the bank and hope for another miracle to cover their bills. Or simply let them turn off the electricity for a month. Would that be so bad?

The D.P.W. is doing some kind of work on Delancey Street. A man with a jackhammer is pulverizing the pavement. It’s deafening. Obliterating. Rachel can’t think; she can only endure as the chatter of the pneumatic hammer pounds inside her skull. Down in the subway, the platform is sparsely populated. She sits alone on a bench, smoking, waiting on the Sixth Avenue Express. Her guilt is a secret weight she carries. She accrues it daily simply by breathing, because she will never be absolved of her crime. The crime committed by a Little Goat in a little café up the Friedrichstrasse.

***

January 1944, the fifth year of the war. The Tommies have attacked the so-­called Gustav Line in Italy. The Red Army has breached the border of Poland, and it’s only a matter of time before American and British forces invade the French coastline. The military situation is slowly disintegrating. Germany is losing the war to the Allies. But the war against the Jews? That war is still pursued with fervor. The rumor mills agree: transports to the east continue on schedule from Berlin’s Grunewald Station.

The windows of the Café Bollenmüller are frosted over. The noise of the lunchtime service fills the air as steam rises from pots of coffee brewed from ground acorns. An accordionist plays a Berliner favorite, “Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen.” A din of conversation from the crowd rises from the tables, but there is a certain tension in the room. Sharing the table with Rashka, Eema looks as exhausted and threadbare as everybody else but also hunted. And she is hunted in a literal sense. Like an animal set loose in the brush and pursued by hounds.

Rashka is sixteen now. She has grown into a thin adolescent, molded by the crushing routine of everyday terror. A terror that’s only been amplified since Eema unstitched the stars from their clothing—­that yellow, six-­pointed Judenstern branding them as enemies of German blood. Eema always regarded the star as a badge of shame, an indignity, and shedding it, she assured Rashka, was a kind of victory. But Rashka is not so sure. Now that it is gone from their clothing, she feels naked. The Shield of David has been removed and she is unprotected, no longer under the pale of regulations. A Jew discovered without a star, after all, is a Jew on the road to a concentration camp.

Today they have come to the café so that Eema can negotiate some rationing coupons from a black marketeer known as “Dickes Dora.” Fat Dora, a Berliner’s joke, because the woman’s thin as a shadow. They are here to spend money they can’t afford to lose. When Fat Dora arrives, Eema girds herself for action. “Stay here, and don’t move,” she instructs her daughter. “Understand?” But when Rashka doesn’t answer, her mother doesn’t wait and leaves the girl sitting by herself.

From across the room, a redheaded woman is gazing at her. Why? Rashka does not know. She cannot guess, but she gazes back. A lit cigarette stained with lip rouge touches bright-­red lips. She is quite handsomely dressed, this woman, not in the normal wartime drudgery but in real glamour rags. A sable-­trimmed coat. A smart crimson day suit and a matching lady’s Alpiner with a swooping brim. The black lace gloves are a most elegant touch, exquisitely delicate. Rashka knows she will never obtain such heights of beauty. That the best she will ever manage is a certain dark, peasant comeliness due her from the Landau side of the family. Pretty, maybe, with deep eyes, but she’ll never be so exquisite as the redheaded Bathsheba who is now crossing the café and seating herself at Rashka’s table with a scrape of a chair.

“Hallöchen, Liebling,” the woman says with the smile of a hungry cat. “Did your mummy leave you all alone?”

A sharp jolt. Only now at this intimate degree of proximity does Rashka feel a burn of confusion as she recognizes the beautiful face. La muse du rouge, her eema once called her. Though she’s famous now by another name given her by the Jews whom she hunts. Der Rote Engel she is called.

The Red Angel.