Shadows of Berlin

5.

Therapy for the Shell-­Shocked

Whenever Rashka needed a new frock or new shoes or a new coat, her nanny took her to Karstadt’s department store in the Hermannplatz. It was a gargantuan temple of merchandise the size of a zeppelin. It had lifts and escalators. Escalators! Slightly terrifying—­would she trip and be accidentally shredded by the moving steps? But also marvelously fun, like a carnival ride, going up, up, up! It was an adventure. An expedition to the top floors! But it was always a nanny who took her. Fräulein This or Fräulein That. Her mother employed and then dismissed them with regularity. But never did Eema bother to lead the expedition herself. Shopping for Rashka was too trivial a matter to gain her attention; she had her work to consider.

So when Eema returned that afternoon from the Hermannplatz, trailing a porter loaded down with haberdashery boxes and ribboned dress boxes, it was a shock. Especially when Rashka saw that Eema was arm in arm with the red-­haired fräulein. Obviously, Eema had taken the girl shopping! Rashka was wounded. They were laughing, the two women. Touching each other on the arm, the shoulder, even the face! And the new outfit that the girl was wearing! The beaded frock, the fur-­collared cloak. The snug little hat with the long feather tucked into the band. The leather gloves the color of wine. Was Eema going to paint her with clothes on now?

That night at supper, Rashka refused to eat. She kicked the empty chair beside her under the table. But it was only the nanny who bore the brunt of her anger. Eema was out for supper. Not even there for Rashka to lash out against.

Rashka was a still a young child. But not so young that she couldn’t feel pain. Not so young that she couldn’t feel envy. No so young that she couldn’t feel abandoned.

***

“Have you considered my suggestion further, Rachel?” Dr. Solomon wonders. “That you return to painting?”

A pause before she lies. “I’ve considered it.”

The doctor shifts in his chair, always a sign that he is about to mount an effort to overcome her obstacles. “Have I ever mentioned the name Mary Huntoon to you?” he asks and doesn’t wait for an answer. “At the end of the war, there was a woman I worked with briefly. An artist,” the doctor tells her, “named Mary Huntoon. She had an art studio for patients at the Winter General Army Hospital in Topeka, Kansas. Her idea was to use art as a therapeutic treatment for veterans damaged by combat neuroses.”

Aha. “So. Therapy for the shell-­shocked meydl, Dr. Solomon?”

“Is that how you’d like me to put it?” he asks.

“You know, my mother told me that every artist is cursed at birth.” And now Eema appears in order to chime in. Your imagination again. I never said any such thing. “My mother thought that it would be smarter for me to become one of the ‘sheep’ as she called them. A simple sheep who finds an ordinary man and makes an ordinary marriage.”

And you see? That was true.

“Though men, she said, were also a curse.”

Also, true, her mother agrees. Men and children both.

Leaving his office, Rachel is pursued by his suggestion. Narishkeyt! Folly! Returning to painting? Dangerous even to consider! Her heart is thumping.

But on the way home, she tries to calm herself with a Miltown. It planes down the rough edge of her panic, allowing her to at least consider such a thing as picking up a paintbrush again without sobbing or puking or losing her mind. A night in Bellevue cured her of the painting disease. All thought of such oily, messy endeavors had screamed to a halt after the Episode. It was as if the memory of holding a brush was fully erased from the muscles of her hand. She was sure that if she tried to employ a brush after Bellevue, her fingers would lose their strength, and she would simply drop it to the floor. And even if she did manage to find the temerity to slap paint onto a canvas, who knows what misshapen demon she might release into the world?

Still. She feels her eyes tear up.

She tries to imagine, as the downtown train bores through the tunnel, what might have happened if she had not been ruined. If she had not had her future torn from her and shredded. Might she be standing right now at an easel? She thinks of the paintings she has not produced in the same way as she thinks of the children she has not borne. The empty spaces of a life she is not living.

And then there is this young girl. This specter seated across the aisle between a woman with a shopping bag on her lap and a man dozing off over his newspaper. The schoolgirl with her brunette braid and burgundy beret, interloping across time. Do the dead also wonder about the lives they did not live?

Rachel closes her eyes.

Look for yourself in the crowd. Those were her instructions. You are who we’re hunting, Bissel. This is what the woman always called her. Bissel. Little morsel, A bite to swallow.

If one were to travel back in time, one needed simply to eavesdrop on any whispered conversation of contraband Jews huddled in a Berlin café to hear the woman’s name spoken in hushed tones. Pry into the nightmares of those huddled Jews, and one will see the woman’s face. She is well known to the U-­boats. Angelika Rosen. The ginger-­haired beauty in the service of the Gestapo, the huntress of jüdischen Illegalen. Rashka’s mother’s la muse du rouge now notorious under a different name. She is the Red Angel in the service of malakh ha-­mavet, the angel of death.

At home in the bedroom, Rachel sits propped up on a pillow, shoes off. Of course, she has never spoken a word aloud about the angel, not to her husband, not to her shrink.

Eema, on the other hand, simply can’t shut up about her.

You were nothing to her, tsigele, her eema scoffs. She wanted a mirror held up to herself, and you served that purpose. You were nothing more to her than a moment’s vanity.

Is this truth or jealousy?

The German language loves abbreviations, so the unwieldy designation of Konzentrationslager was reduced to “KL” or “KZ” or simply to “ein Lager.” There were two major Auschwitz camps in the marshlands of German-­occupied Poland: KL Auschwitz I and KL Auschwitz II. KL Auschwitz I had been an abandoned Polish cavalry barracks when the SS arrived to rebuild it for forced labor and mass murder. This is where Feter Fritz received the number tattooed on his arm, passing under the infamous gate that promised, “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Work Makes Freedom. But really it remained a small-­scale operation compared to its sprawling brother camp a kilometer and a half down the road. That was Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau. Birkenau was vast, with acres and acres of stone and wooden barracks housing the misery of its inhabitants as the chimneys of five Krematorien stood smoking sacred human soot into the sky. It was a camp for slave labor, yes, but mostly it was devoted to the murder process on an industrial scale. This is where Eema had been sent, and this is where her ashes lie still, at the bottom of a pit.

That night, Rachel sits on the couch with a cigarette smoldering, alone but for Kibbitz, purring like a motor as she absently strokes his furry stripes. But when she feels a chill, she is not surprised that the cat’s head darts up, and he leaps from nesting on her lap. Her eema has occupied the opposite side of the sofa, her head shaved to the skull, as it would have been on her arrival at Lager Birkenau, her eyes deeply set, and her emaciated body hung with her filthy camp rags. Rachel had seen the newsreels of Auschwitz-­Birkenau at the D.P. camp when her name was still Rashka. British Pathé had screened the Red Army’s footage. The pits crammed with decaying bodies. The piles of shorn hair. The tangled heaps of eyeglasses and gaping dentures. The mountains of discarded clothing, sleeves and skirts flapping disembodied in the breeze like a pile of ghosts. She had forced herself to watch every second of them. Kept her eyes pried open, an unblinking witness.

Do you remember, tsigele, when I taught you how to properly clean your brushes?

Rachel says nothing, but her mother does not seem to notice. She is smiling at her memory with rotting teeth. How I taught you to use the wire brush to comb the paint from the bristles? How to soak them in the mineral spirits before blotting them? And then to squeeze the spirits from the brushes with your finger? The decaying smile remains. How you made such a mess, poor thing. Do you remember?

Rachel’s eyes brim. “Yes, Eema. I remember.”

And then her mother’s eyes grow raw. The skin of her face is drawn so tautly, she cannot produce tears. But a desolate longing burns her gaze. Don’t let me be forgotten, Rashka. Her voice is a command, a dreadful plea. It’s a daughter’s duty to keep her mother’s memory alive. Don’t let me be forgotten.

The next morning delivers a white sky as a portent of the coming winter. Rachel is making coffee, scooping spoonfuls of instant into the percolator. The floor is cold as she pads across it in her socks to find her husband dressed for work. The drain in the kitchen sink is now so slow that water stands in the sink. “You should call the super,” Aaron tells her, filling a glass with tap water and then drinking it without a breath.

“The super,” Rachel repeats darkly.

“Yep. That’s the guy,” Aaron confirms. Then he gives her a businesslike smack on the cheek. “It’s his job to unclog that which is clogged,” he tells her. “Uh, no coffee for me this morning. No time. I gotta get moving. The lunch crowd’s gonna be murder today. Special matinee of The Vamp at the Winter Garden with Carol Channing.”

This means nothing to her. “No coffee, no breakfast?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll have somebody scramble me a coupla eggs at the restaurant and stick ’em on a roll.” It’s obvious to Rachel that he has securely stowed yesterday’s dispute in the drawer in his head marked WIFE TROUBLES: ONE OF MANY. Though it’s also obvious that he’s skipping breakfast because maybe it’s wiser not to hang around. He does, however, insert a tentative question. “So you okay?”

She glances into his eyes. “Hunky-­dory,” she replies. That seems to be good enough.

“Look, I gotta close tonight,” he tells her, breaking away, heading toward the door. “’Cause Solly’s still in Miami.”

“I thought you said he was back.”

“No, I said he was supposed to be back, but then his mother broke a hip or a leg, or I dunno, she broke some damn thing. So it’s double shifts for me,” he tells her, grabbing his coat and hat off the branches of the hall tree. “Do something today,” he commands thoughtfully on his way out. “Call Naomi. Go see a movie or something. Just don’t hang around in your bathrobe like a mope.”

“Are you saying I mope?”

“I’m saying some fresh air wouldn’t kill you. Don’t wait up.”

When she hears him descending the stairs, Rachel goes straight to the bottom shelf of the magazine table by the sofa, loaded with her copies of ARTnews and American Artist. But it’s also the spot where Aaron keeps the Merriam-­Webster’s Dictionary stowed for his occasional battles with the paper’s Sunday crossword puzzle. It’s a dog-­eared copy from his school days, this dictionary, in which can still be found his covert schoolboy doodles of naked breasts and such. Opening the pages, she flips through till she finds what she’s looking for. The rainy-­day twenty. Once it’s in her billfold, she considers hunting around the apartment for some small treasure. If she had anything of real value, she could put it into hock, but what does she have? Nothing. A bundle of everyday items. Household appliances. Costume jewelry. Nothing that would command a price of more than a dollar or two. Here! A can opener! Please take it on account! Think of the many cans of soup you can open at home with such a prize!

No, all she can hope for is that he’ll take pity on her. The bedbug. That he’ll take her measly twenty-­five as a down payment maybe. She can skimp for a while, promise to pay him a few dollars per month. He’ll understand paying over time. Even a businessman can take pity, can’t he? Can’t he take pity? That word that she both dreads and covets.

Outside, the air is indeed fresh, briskly scrubbed by yesterday’s rain, as she heads for the uptown subway.

She can still so easily return to her mother’s studio. The pleasing sharpness of the spirits in her nostrils. And the oily aromas of the paint on the palette. Her eema used only a certain brand of hand-­mixed Belgian oil paints famous for their vivid colors. Rachel can remember the smell of sulfur in the cadmiums was so strong it was like the smell of a match head as it ignites. Even in the pawnbroker’s shop, had she somehow expected to detect the sulfur emanating from the canvas after so many decades? In her mind’s eye, she can see it. The canvas seated firmly on Eema’s massive easel. The figure of a girl rendered in fiery colors. The pungent perfume of the cadmium red. Folklore warns that the smell of sulfur is a sign of the presence of demons. In this case, perhaps true. She can summon the image of the girl seated on the dais at rest, lazily smoking a cigarette, wearing a gauzy robe that exposed the color of her flesh. Hair red as a blaze.

Rachel was just a child. Still Rashka. She had come to her eema’s studio with her nanny. Eema, of course, was too busy with the nanny, dispensing directions, to pay much notice to her daughter, but that was bearable. Certainly not unusual. Really she had been hoping to pet the cat who lived there. A big tawny beast who often snoozed in the light that poured through the loft’s windows.

But then there was this girl. The subject of the painting that was still glossy with freshly applied paint. Rashka inhaled the telltale whiff of sulfur. It was this girl who had the cat under her spell. With Rashka, the beast was impatient. Too big for her handle. Easily provoked into scratching. But in this girl’s arms, he was tamed. Purring loudly with contentment. Rashka was jealous. Not just of the girl’s capture of the cat’s affection but of the affection itself. She was mesmerized. It was easy to fall under this girl’s spell just like the cat had. A wink and an intimate smile were all it took. She imagined what it must feel like to absorb such tender attention. She pictured herself as the cat in the girl’s arms.

***

The bell jangles above her upon entry. But when the curtains divide, it isn’t the bedbug at all who greets her from the back room, it’s a gray old man. Tall and slouched like the bedbug, but with one gold tooth in a row of brown and a belly hung over his belt. “Can I help?” he asks her, digging at the old tobacco baked into the bowl of a pipe with a penknife. His voice is throaty and rough. She can smell the sweet stench of smoke on him.

“I’m…” she starts to say. But what? She’s what? The gray man lifts a pair of wiry eyebrows. “I’m looking,” she says. “There was a gentleman here yesterday.”

Maybe the gray man thinks this is funny. A joke. “A gentleman, was he? Well. Won’t his mother be proud to hear?”

“He showed me a painting,” Rachel tells the man. “Is he here?” she asks with a certain polite impatience. “I was hoping to talk with him.”

“Not here. Not today. But tell me again.” The man scrunches his brow together. “He was showing you what?”

“A painting,” she repeats. “It’s monochrome,” she says.

“Oh, yeah, is that what it was?” he replies, still sounding grayly amused.

“It’s a painting of a girl done all in red,” she says.

“Ah.” The man’s expression lifts. “Sure.” He grins. “The nudie!”

Rachel breathes in.

“Sorry,” the man tells her, “but that one? That one’s gone,” he explains.

Her heart thumps a single stroke against her rib cage. “Gone.” She says this as if she suddenly may not understand the meaning of the word.

“Yep. That’s what I said.” The gray man sniffs, banging the pipe bowl against the rim of the black enamel ashtray, loaded with crushed cigarette butts. “I sold it this morning first thing.”

“Sold?” This can’t be. “To whom? Who bought it?” Rachel hears herself demand. She realizes that she has gripped the ledge of the counter. “Was it a man?” she wants to know. “Old? Silver in his hair? Slim? A pointed beard?”

But the gray man only shrugs. “Sweetness,” he tells her. “You know I can’t say. I’m running a business. There are rules,” he explains. “A customer bought it. That’s all.”

Michnik Brothers Tobacconist on Rivington Street feels like a dusty mausoleum when she enters. Dark wooden shelving. The air infused with an ancient odor of tobacco. She was hoping to find her uncle behind the counter at the far end, where the most expensive cigars are displayed in their boxes, but instead it’s the owner, Mr. Michnik, gazing at her through the thick lenses of his eyeglasses. He looks glumly disappointed to see her, but then doesn’t he always look a little disappointed? She doesn’t take it personally. “I was hoping to find my uncle,” Rachel tells him. “Is he working this week?”

Mr. Michnik appears pained by this question. He’s a hunched old fellow. Also a refugee, but one who left Poland twenty years before the war. Business was good here in America. He opened this shop with his brother. They sent money back to the mishpocha in Warsaw. And then he blinked, and all were gone. An entire family reduced to ashes. Then his brother passed a year after the war’s end. Heart attack, said the doctors, but who knows about the power of grief? Anyhow, he keeps the place going. She knows that he’s seen the number tattooed on her uncle’s arm. She knows he employs him more out of a sense of charity than of business. A part-­time clerk to work the cash register. Shelve the stock here and again and maybe pick up a broom. What’s the harm? Especially when he thinks of all those who perished.

But now he’s shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I just couldn’t keep him on any longer. Sometimes he wouldn’t show for his shift. Or I’d come in and find him in the back room smoking instead of working the counter. And then,” Mr. Michnik says before he sighs. He doesn’t want to say it. He doesn’t want to, but he must. “Stock went missing,” he confides. “Not much. A box or three of Phillies Panatellas.” He shrugs. “A nine-­cent cigar. Not so expensive. But when it happened more than once, how long could I ignore? Add to that the miscounts on the cash drawer, and I’m sorry,” the old man repeats. “I had to let him go.”

Rachel feels her cheeks burn. Shame. Shame and pity. Pity and guilt. Which is worse?

She searches Feter’s downtown haunts. Not only the café where they’d met the previous day but also the coffeehouses and cafeterias, the delicatessens and dairy restaurants along Delancey, and that place on Essex Street that serves everything pickled. She searches any and all of the corners below Houston where her uncle has been known to perch, but all to no avail. She finds the old snowy owl, Mr. Smushkevich, the chess maven, contemplating his board alone, trying to crack the code of some obscure gambit from les jours de tsar as he nurses his tepid tea. He shows her the ancient smile as he offers his regrets. “Ikh hob nisht leygn an aoyg aoyf im, liebling.” Haven’t laid an eye on him.

At the counter of the I.G.K.P. she finds Mr. Katzenelson and Mr. Pollak, two former theater critics in exile, still arguing over the premiere of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-­Élysées forty years ago. But nothing from them. Only shrugs. They care like cats care, which is to say they don’t. It’s Thursday, so maybe check that Milkhiger restaurant on Rivington Street. She finds one of Feter’s cronies, the socialist writer Mr. Garfinkel, known for his story from thirty years ago, Hurrah for Schmeul the Waiter!—­still available by mail as a pamphlet through the Yiddish Publishing Company. He sits with his dairy noodles, proudly wearing his I.W.W. union button pinned to his collar, but is of no help.

Nor are there any clues forthcoming from the place on Broome Street that serves milk from a ladle and has the sink installed outside the toilet for Hasidic customers. Mr. Rubinstein is a Zionist who’s never put a foot in the Promised Land but who keeps a white-and-blue tin for donations to Israel on the table with his black coffee. Also no help. “Sorry to disappoint, Kallehniu,” he tells her and gives the tin a tap, so that costs her a dime for the Promised Land.

She walks. It’s only a block away, but she saves it for last, because really why would she want to go back to such a place if she doesn’t have to? She has managed for five years not to take a step back inside. Now, against her own desire, she confronts a sooty, terra-­cotta brick tenement house on Orchard Street. One among many around Seward Park, where shabby canyons of flat-­faced brick and wooden rental barracks stand. Jews have lived here for decades, filling up the cramped apartments and spilling out onto the stoops and into the streets and markets. More since the war’s end, but not from the shtetlakh this time. Instead of all those little villages dotting Eastern Europe, this time the deluge has come from the displaced persons camps.

Rachel stands on the sidewalk facing the building’s wood-­frame entrance with its peeling varnish. Above, a latticed ironwork of fire escapes zigzags down the facade. A couple of teenaged girls burst from the door and come clattering down the steps in saddle shoes, gabbling in a language from the old country. A Baltic dialect maybe. They ignore Rachel. Ascending into the tenement’s upper floors, where the light of the stairwell thickens to soup, she hears a radio blaring Yiddish from somewhere and the yap of a dog. Mounting the stairs, she notes that the tattered step runners she remembers have been replaced by rubberized treads. The ancient smells linger, however. They’re in the woodwork, the sweat and cook pots of generations of poor immigrant Jews, boiling kraut and pickling beets, breaking their backs for a few American coins to jangle in their pockets.

On the third floor, she stops in front of the door of a flat. She wonders… If she presses an ear against it, would she hear the echo of her own voice, that skinny D.P. girl who once lived there? She had spent her days then waiting on her uncle like a servant. Preparing the food as best she could, washing clothes, sweeping the floor. She thought it was her duty to tend to her elder, and he did not disabuse her of that idea. He could still pretend that he was the master of the house.

She didn’t care. What else was there for her to do? She had no friends and no desire for them. She was content with her ghosts, who understood her pain. Understood her guilt. At night, while Feter snored to high heaven, she would lie on a lumpy mattress plopped on the floor and try to sleep—­though night was when the muscularity of her fear and shame threatened to strangle her. This was her life back then, until she met Aaron. Barely a life at all.

A tarnished tin mezuzah is tacked onto the doorframe. And thou shalt write them upon the doorposts of thy house, and upon thy gates. So says the Mishneh Torah. The mezuzah had been left behind by the previous tenant who died of pneumonia in a hospital bed, may his name be a blessing, whatever it was. How many times had she touched it and brought the touch to her lips? Shema Yisrael. The Lord is our God, the Lord is one. She had been teetering then on the cusp of changing from Rokhl to Rachel. She takes a half step forward as if to touch the mezuzah now, as if she is stepping into the fringe of a dream, but a sharp crack of the floorboard under her feet wakes her up. Reminds her she is not here for memories; she is here for her answers. How could Feter have possibly raised the money? He begs her one day for charity, then the next yanks such cash from his pockets that he drops fifty dollars on the pawnshop counter in a blink? How? What pile of straw had he spun into gold?

Rachel presses the buzzer. “Feter?” she calls urgently. “Feter Fritz? Will you open the door?” she asks him in Yiddish.

Nothing, until a voice that isn’t her uncle’s surprises her. She turns, gripping her shoulder bag as if she might need to repel an attacker. A squat old lady is slowly descending from the upper floors. “You’ll have no luck finding that one at home,” she tells Rachel. “I know, I’ve been knocking all morning.” The lady’s hair has gone gray like steel wool fashioned into a bun. Her high cheekbones are swollen now and her eyes pouched darkly. Yes, the lady has aged since Rachel saw her on the day she moved out to marry Aaron. As she descends the steps, Rachel notes that the woman’s hobble appears to have worsened. The lady stops, gripping the stair rail, huffing lightly over the exertion of living life. “Up and down these steps, it’s torture, you know, for an old widow.”

“Mrs. Appelbaum,” Rachel says.

“That’s me,” the lady answers, peering more closely through the thick lenses of her eyeglasses. “But who are you, little treasure?”

“I’m Rachel Perlman, Mrs. Appelbaum. Though when you knew me, my name was Morgenstern. I used to live here.”

The lady frowns, but maybe she can recall. “Ohh.” She nods, peering. “I might remember a certain girl. A skinny little thing with big calf eyes. Was that you?”

“That was me. But I’m married now. My husband and I live in Chelsea,” she says as if it is an accomplishment. “On West Twenty-­Second Street.”

“Ah, well. Mazel tov,” the lady wishes her.

“Thank you. B’karov etzlech.”

“It’s a wonderful thing to be happily married.”

“Yes,” Rachel says and nods.

“For forty-­six years, I was happily married to Mr. Appelbaum, may his name be a blessing.”

“That’s a long time.”

A shrug. “Time passes. But I’ll tell you what my problem is now, child. Your poppa, is he?” she asks, pointing at the door.

“Meyn feter,” Rachel corrects.

“Ah. Your uncle then,” the lady confirms. “He’s got a bad memory. He forgets to pay for his rent.”

Rachel feels a sting of embarrassment. “How much does he owe?”

“Two months. Two months and not a penny offered. I’ve told him: ‘Mr. Landau,’ I said, ‘I’m only the concierge, but I have a legal responsibility to the landlord.’ I told him if I don’t see some rent soon, I’ll have to call for the authorities.”

Appearing behind Mrs. Appelbaum, Rachel’s eema has commentary to offer. Ah, Fritzl, she laments. He could always make his money. That he had the gift for. But to keep it?

Rachel is already digging into her purse. “How much?”

“How much?” says Mrs. Appelbaum. She frowns in her accounting, eyebrows raised as she observes Rachel’s billfold. “For two months? Twenty-­four dollars,” the lady answers. “Twenty-­four dollars and forty cents.”

Cracking open her billfold, Rachel produces the five and the rainy-­day twenty, handing it over. “Now he’s paid up.”

Mrs. Appelbaum looks surprised and frowns but not unhappily. “Well,” she says. “Who could say no? A sheynem dank,” she thanks Rachel formally, folding the money into the pocket of her house dress.

“Ni’t do kein farvos,” Rachel answers her tightly. Her eema has disappeared from the steps.

“I’ll write out the receipt and slip it under his door,” Mrs. Appelbaum assures her. “Rent paid in full with sixty cents in credit.” She is smiling now like a contented bubbe. “Such a thoughtful person you’ve grown into, mammele,” the lady observes, calling her “little mother.” An endearment reserved for obedient, well-­behaved daughters. “And so pretty too. Your uncle? He should know how lucky he is to have such a devoted niece,” she says and then looks up at the creak of footsteps on the stairs. “And here we are,” she announces with the brightness of a hostess greeting her guest. “Speak of its wings and the angel appears.”

For an instant, Rachel feels her nerves tingle at the mention of an angel, but when she turns about, she sees it is only Feter Fritz, a wary expression hung on his face that he is attempting to mold into a smile.

“Look who’s come for a visit, Mr. Landau,” the old lady sings. “Your little plimenitse, a married lady now, pretty as the moon!”

Smiling very cautiously. “So I see, Mrs. Appelbaum.”

“And with such a pretty head! You must be proud!” the old woman declares as she continues her laborious journey downward, gripping the rail. “I’ll leave you two to your own company. Be healthy!”

Feter Fritz inspects Rachel with eyes that are pleasantly suspicious. “So this is a surprise,” he points out.

Inside? The apartment is no different than when Rachel left it five years before. No different, only dustier without someone to sweep. Only dirtier without someone to clean. Only with a coat of downtown grime dulling the window glass. And the smell? Maybe it smelled this way even when she lived here fresh off the boat back in ’49 and ’50. The upholstery and rugs polluted by the stale reek of her uncle’s smoking habit and the interior stink of ancient plumbing. Maybe it smelled back then too, and her nose was blind to it. But now it hits her as if she’s walked into a wall. Her uncle, though, is obviously inured to the stench as he busies himself clearing a spot on the horsehair settee that’s dribbling its stuffing. “Sit! Sit!” he is commanding graciously. “I’ll make some tea.”

But instead of sitting, Rachel surveys her surroundings. A few bleach-­stained shirts hang on metal hangers from a nail tacked into the wall. Yellowing editions of Forverts, Dos Eydishe Aoyg, and the New York Post clutter the same wobbly old table where she and Feter Fritz used to take their meals and play their games of cribbage and backgammon. Also there is an open box of Phillies Panatellas, empty of cigars but now a receptacle for loose change, vending machine slugs, and train tokens.

“I’m sorry that I’m out of coffee at the moment,” he apologizes, setting an aluminum kettle on his old hot plate. “But there’s some very decent tea from Zabar’s.”

“Tea is good,” she assures him.

“I’ll see about some sugar,” he buzzes, maintaining his industrious tone till Rachel puts an end to it.

“So where do you have it hidden?”

“Hidden? You mean the sugar?” He really is a perfect liar. Vos a talant!

“No,” Rachel tells him. “I mean Eema’s painting.”

Her uncle is frozen for an instant in the act of holding open the door of the cabinet above the sink. Then he turns, looking painfully mystified. “Her painting? Here I was hoping you’d changed your mind about the fifty dollars. But instead you think I have her painting now?”

“I went to the pawnbroker, Feter,” Rachel says in a tone that declares the jig is up. “The one on Forty-­Seventh Street. I had money. Not fifty. Perhaps not enough, but I was hoping to strike a bargain. Yet when I arrived there, it was already gone. So,” she asks again. “Where is it hidden? Behind a cabinet, perhaps? Or under your bed?”

Oddly, her feter is not chastened but bleakly amused at such an idea. He pulls down a half-­empty sack of sugar from the cabinet, the paper at the top crimped closed. “I sleep on the same Murphy bed, Rokhl, don’t you recall? I pull it down from the wall every night, so hiding secret contraband underneath would prove futile.”

“Then where, Feter?”

“What on earth makes you imagine, Rashka dear, that after begging my dear niece for a few dollars the day before, it was I, your poor Feter Fritz, who this morning waltzed in and purchased it?” He smiles grimly at his surroundings. “With all my riches abounding?” He actually picks up the cigar box and shakes it, rattling the change to prove his point. “You think I collected enough pennies from the gutter, do you? Or perhaps you think I bought it with a smile?”

A blink. It’s now Rachel herself who feels chastened. She looks down at her shoes. The penny loafers she bought with her Bonwit Teller employee’s discount.

“Ziskeit!” he calls her with a dry laugh. Sweetness!

“I thought you must have found the money somewhere,” she says. “You are usually so talented at such work, Feter, when it’s essential for you. But if it was not my uncle, then who could it have been? Who else would have known its true value but you?”

A shrug over the serendipity of life. “We had our chance, my dear. Our chance,” he says, “to rescue your eema’s name from obscurity. But it was not to be. Fate is impatient; it doesn’t wait on the indecisive. So now it’s gone. To where? Who knows? Perhaps it went to some nishtikeit with a new sofa looking for a picture to hang above it. I have no idea, Rashka. I’m just a poor Jew trying to eke through his final years before the grave.”

“Don’t say that.”

He switches on the hot plate, no longer smiling. “Everyone dies, Ruchel,” he reminds her.

“But not yet.” She feels her eyes go damp. “You still have a long life to live.”

“Do I?” he wonders. And now when he smiles, it is with no more than a hint of paternal condescension softening his eyes. “If you say so, child. From your lips to God’s ear.”

Rachel breathes in and then makes her admission. Her admission that proves her devotion to him, though why does it sound like a crime she’s confessing? “I paid your rent.”

“Say again?” A crooked expression of confusion. “You did what?” He has removed a package of Wissotzky Tea from the shelf above the hot plate, the coil now glowing red.

“Mrs. Appelbaum told me that you were two months in arrears.”

A flash of embarrassed anger streaks across his eyes. “Oh, she did? She thought that was news for the front page?”

“She remembered me. From when we both lived here.”

“And so you decided to what? Empty your bank account as a remedy for an old man’s financial dilemma?”

“It was an impulse,” Rachel attempts to offer as an explanation. Now that his theatrics are done, she knows that she must suffer through her uncle’s genuine embarrassment over money, even though yesterday he was, as he’d reminded her, begging her for it. But money for a painting? That was a deal. Paying his overdue rent? That’s charity. C’est une insulte!

Feter Fritz turns his back on her, busy filling a small mesh tea ball. “An impulse,” he says. “One of which I’m sure your good husband will disapprove.”

“I was trying to help. I was looking for you at the cigar store, and I talked to Mr. Michnik.”

“Michnik.” Feter repeats the name sourly. “A true racketeer if ever one was born. The markup on those loathsome cigars of his? He’s a swindler and a cheat, and I’m well out of his employ.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you, Feter. Please understand. I was trying to be helpful.”

“Yes, yes. Of course, Rokhl. Le vieil homme comprend, ma chère,” he says, still showing her his back. “I’m a broken old bum living in a trash dump.”

The kettle begins to gurgle on the hot plate; steam dances from its spout. But her uncle does not touch it. His shoulders square, and he does not move even as the gurgle becomes a shrill squeal. Finally, it’s Rachel who crosses the room and turns off the burner.

“I am not in possession of your mother’s painting. I wish I was hiding it under a bed I do not have. But I am not,” he tells her.

At this point, all she can do is wipe the tears from her eyes with the back of her wrist.

“I’m sorry that we could not protect her work from the hands of some anonymous philistine,” he says. “But if it is gone, it is gone. It pains me deeply, yes, but God has His plan, and who can argue? What is worse for me? What is truly painful? It’s seeing the effect of this on you, Rashka dear. How deeply it has disturbed you. You inherited your eema’s mistrustful nature, this much I know, but now? To doubt me to the point where you’ve concocted a fantasy? A fantasy that even your old uncle is deceiving you? Stealing your mother’s legacy from you? Honestly, Rokhl, I regret having involved you at all. It was thoughtless of me. In my excitement, I forgot how fragile you remain. It would have been better, perhaps, had your eema’s painting simply appeared and then disappeared in the same breath, without you ever having known. But now?” he says. “Now, all we can do is share the loss.”