Shadows of Berlin

6.

Doughnut Paradise

Rachel’s life with Aaron begins in January of 1950, when, still fairly fresh off the boat, she has some trouble with a desk attendant at the Seward Park Library. A young balding fellow with a brown mole on his cheek gets sharp with her. “Hey. Whattaya you think you’re doing?” this fellow demands to know, though the answer is really quite obvious. Air France Flight 009, flying from Paris to New York, has crashed into a mountain in the Azores, dispatching all aboard, and Rachel is busy tearing the article from the branch’s copy of the Daily News.

Stopping in midtear, she blinks blankly at the fellow with the mole. “I beg your pardon?” Her accent is on display.

“That is library property, hon. Know what that means? Other people get to read it too. You can’t just start ripping it apart.”

Her spine straightens. A beat of panic stabs her heart. It simply hadn’t occurred to her that she might be committing a library crime. She lets go of the paper and balls her fists as if she may be forced to defend herself, but before she speaks another word, her eyes attach to the man who will, within months, become her American husband, Aaron Samuel Perlman. A solid young mensch, dressed in a black wool jacket, with a soldierly haircut growing out into curls and hooded eyes of manganese blue. He’s come to the Seward Park branch, she will later discover, to return an overdue copy of a book called Battle Cry, but now he goes to battle for her.

“Hey, can we give the young lady a break?” he suggests with some force to the offended attendant, stepping into the scene in a helpfully assertive manner. “You can hear that she’s obviously new to our country, am I right? And who knows? Maybe this is how they do things back in Odessa. I mean, come on,” he insists. “Here’s a dime,” he says, slapping a coin on the desk. “Really. I’ll cover the cost of a new copy so none of your very important customers miss out on the news of the day. Or maybe they can just read the Post instead. Whattaya think?”

Of course, she isn’t from Odessa. She is from Berlin, that pulverized city on the Spree, which is what she tells him over the lunch he buys her at Katz’s Delicatessen. KATZ’S, THAT’S ALL! reads the ancient maroon sign on East Houston. How-­sten Street, he teaches her to say. Entering the restaurant, Rachel is light-­headed. She hears Yiddish ringing off the walls, yes, but she’s also dizzied by how expansively American the place is in its size, its veracious noisiness, and its overwhelming plenty. Not just the luxurious aromas of Jewish cooking but the towers of stacked pastrami and corned beef. The platters of plump, orangey-­pink lox. The golden loaves of rye and challah crowding the racks. The bagels and bialys. The monstrous dills in monstrous jars. Abundance like this can make her nauseous.

“So. Why were you tearing up the newspaper?” this boy with the curls has to ask. But that’s when the harried, slightly surly waiter arrives at their table, and the boy orders for them. A Reuben with extra Russian for him, a sweet-­potato knish for her. And two egg creams.

She avoids the question of newspapers. “And what,” she wonders, “what is this egg cream?”

“It’s a drink. Like a, uh, like a chocolate milk only with a spritz of seltzer. Very sweet, very fizzy.”

“Where is the egg?”

“There is no egg.”

“And the cream?”

“There is no cream, but don’t worry. You’ll love it.”

“There were no such drinks where I grew up,” she tells him. “When I was a child, we had only a ‘Schlammbowle’ at parties,” she says, producing a ten-­cent packet of cigarettes. “In English, you would say, I think, a ‘Mud Bowl.’”

“Yes. I would say that. I would definitely say that,” the boy assures her, eyes bright.

“So. Into this bowl go the fruit juice, the tangerines, the peaches and, uh—­die ananasscheiben. How is it called? The pineapple slices. From a tin. All with the ice cream,” she says, almost tasting its sweet flavor. She is not accustomed to the taste of happy memories. “Of course this was for the children. The adults? They must add schnapsen. Booze,” she translates with fervor and laughs.

The boy is producing a shiny Zippo lighter. “Sounds scrumptious,” he says earnestly, flicking open a tear of flame. She leans forward to accept the light, touching his hand. Just a small touch, but she can tell it has its effect because his pupils dilate.

“I collect the stories of the aeroplane crashes,” she confesses. “This is why I tore the paper.”

The Zippo snaps closed. “Hmm. Interesting,” Aaron decides. “Only airplanes?”

She exhales smoke. “Nur,” she tells him. Only.

“Not trains or cars or anything? Why is that?”

“Must I know? I hardly know why I do many things I do. Do you?”

He smiles, baffled. “Yeah, pretty much,” he says with a lightly comic note of lament. “I pretty much always know why I do the things I do.”

This boy lifts her heart. His name is Aaron. He is funny and lithe and interested in talk. Perhaps Rachel catches a glimpse of a destination in his eyes. He is teasing her over reading the dictionary, which she does in order to learn new words.

“I won’t give away the ending,” he tells her, “but it has something to do with zoos.”

She does not understand.

“Because Z is the last letter in the alphabet,” he must explain. “Never mind. Things just come outta my mouth. I dunno. You get used to it after a while.”

His smile is so unpretentious. So very down-­to-­earth American.

“Okay, so—­dictionary or not, you speak pretty great English. How’d you learn?”

“Languages were important to my mother,” she says. “So she hired different tutors for my education. One for the English, one for the French, even the student from the Hildesheimer Akademie für das hebräisch. Though my Hebrew is very light.”

“Wow,” says the boy. “Wow. I hear this and I’m like… Holy mackerel.”

Rachel does not know what this means, of course, but can tell from his expression that she is drawing him in, just like the sweet taste of the egg cream from the straw.

“I mean, I had some Spanish in high school. Erasmus Hall High on Flatbush Av’—­so public school kid all the way here. I can still maybe remember how to ask where the bathroom is, I think. Dónde es? Dónde está el bañoá? Or something like that.” He shrugs and chuckles. “But Hebrew? Hebrew and I pretty well parted company after my bar mitzvah.” Saying this, he chomps into his sandwich. The Reuben with extra Russian. Chewing and swallowing in a hurry, so he can ask, “How’s your knish?”

“Oh, it is good,” she says, nodding. “So big.” She cuts off another small forkful and slips it into her mouth. Many times with strangers, she cannot eat in front of them. But she finds that with this boy, she has an appetite.

“Yeah, ya can’t beat Katz’s.” He nods sagely. “That’s all I gotta say.” When he leaves a spot of dressing on the corner of his lips, she reaches over and wipes it away with her thumb. His eyes widen at the touch, and he confesses the truth. “I gotta tell you. I am just—­what? Gobsmacked. That’s it. That’s what I am. I am just absolutely gobsmacked by you, Rachel Morgenstern.”

Incomprehensible. “This is good?” she asks with hope.

“You can’t get better than gobsmacked, my friend. It’s the top of the line.”

Top of the line? Also incomprehensible. But she smiles at his beaming expression.

“So,” he says and hunches forward. “Are you a skater?”

She blinks. “Skater?”

“Ya know. On the ice. An ice-­skater.”

“Oh. Yes,” she answers. “Ha! Very long ago. There was the Rousseau-­Insel—­uh, which is the island in the Tiergarten. I would go there with friends to skate on Sundays in the wintertime. But”—­she expels a breath—­“then the Nazis came, and Jews were no longer permitted.”

Immediately, she feels the conversation wobble. Immediately, she tastes regret. Is she stupid? Why did she speak so?

“Ah,” says the boy in response. His face grows dim, and she can feel him recede from her. She thinks he has a strong male face, and she finds that she has a desire to weave her fingers through his mop of impossibly curly hair. But the space has clouded between them. She has opened up a divide. It’s only that she has lived so long under the laws against this or against that, they became rather commonplace to her. Words slip out because she forgets that not everyone’s daily existence was stamped by the Nürnberger Laws.

“I’m sorry,” Rachel tells him. “I shouldn’t be speaking of this. It is not so polite, I think.”

“No, no,” he answers quickly, his voice gaining a higher pitch. “It’s fine. It’s fine,” he repeats. But is it? She cannot tell. He catches a breath but seems somewhat bewildered over how to proceed. So it’s Rachel who decides to lean forward this time. If she has opened a divide, then she must find a way for them to leap it. Elbows folded on the tabletop under her breasts, she bends her shoulders toward him, closing the gap. “May I have a taste of your pickle?” she asks and watches him blush.

The first time the boy meets with her for a rendezvous, it is called “a date.” They go to the ice-­skating rink in Radio City. She does not own a pair of skates, and the ones available for rent hurt her feet. Such high arches, her mother always said. She grimaces as she stands on the skate blades and wobbles.

“Whatssa matter?” the boy wants to know. And when she tells him, he knows immediately what the problem is. The problem is that they aren’t laced properly. “Sit,” he says. “I’ll do it for you.”

And to her surprise, he is right. “Can you feel your toes?” he asks after he yanks the laces taut.

Is this a test? What is the correct answer? “No,” she says. “I cannot.”

“Good. That means they’re nice and tight.”

She is relieved. She has given the correct answer! She can also tell that he is not wrong. Even while she’s sitting there on the bench, the skates feel comfortably snug instead of painful. The fact that this boy knows better how to lace her skates than her? Does it also irritate her slightly? A bit perhaps. She does not like to be bested at anything, even the art of skate lacing. But at the same time, he is so very competent. She realizes she wants to touch him. She holds on to his shoulder as she stands to test her balance, even though she does not need to do so.

“How’s it feel?” he asks.

“Good,” says she, then pushes up on the blades and kisses him on the lips. Just a small kiss. A peck, not much more. Just a Küsschen. But when he smiles at her in surprise, she is surprised that she is smiling back.

“Well. Thanks,” he says in a pleasantly awkward way.

“You are welcomed,” Rachel replies.

The boy blinks. Swallows. Then suddenly bends forward and returns the kiss she’d given him.

“That was nice,” he informs her with a certain profundity weighting his voice as their lips part. “That was a nice kiss.”

Out in the rink, music is playing over the loudspeaker. Calliope music. Carousel music, with a gusty melody that turns its own circles. Rachel is happy to feel her muscles moving as she pushes off onto the ice, holding on to Aaron’s arm. Happy to feel the fresh chill on her face, and soon enough, she feels the swift balance of her body as they whoosh around the inner lane, letting the momentum carry them. The boy grips her hand in his, and they let themselves float into the long straightaway.

***

That night, on the Lower East Side as Rachel tries to sleep, she feels a strange energy vibrating through her body. As if her body is waking up. Returning to life. Returning to something she feared was lost. Her desire to create. The next day, she introduces something new into the flat she shares with her uncle. A piece of Masonite board. Not very large. Nowhere near the size for big ideas or a giant talent. But big enough to receive paint. Odd shapes emerge. Ghostly fumes. Nothing living, but the colors—­blues, purples, thin grays—­rise up like chimney smoke. When her uncle sees what she is doing, he frowns thoughtfully. “Is this a painting?” he asks. She, however, is not prepared to answer that question.

Three weeks later—­or was it only two?—Aaron takes her to a theater on Broadway. There’s singing and laughter in the play. The audience laughs, Aaron laughs, so Rachel laughs too, timing her laughter to match his, even though she doesn’t really follow what’s happening onstage. Still, the laughter makes her feel light.

Later, they go to a homey, all-­night doughnut shop on the corner of 14th Street and Seventh. The coffee is overheated and bitter, and the doughnuts are greasy with sugar. But it’s a busy concern even after midnight, and Rachel and Aaron share the counter with other night owls. Aaron is taking the opportunity to instruct Rachel on the proper dunking technique, using a plain brown old-­fashioned.

“See,” he instructs, dunking the doughnut into his coffee cup, “now this is a regulation dunking. Grasp the doughnut with two fingers positioned on the forward area, and the third finger to the rear in a support role. Then lower the doughnut at a steady but moderate pace into the coffee. And here’s the essential part,” he stresses. “Two dunks, no more, for maximum exposure to the coffee flavorfulness without endangering the all-­important doughnut integrity. Remove doughnut from coffee, followed by one single lightly applied tap on the rim of the cup to prevent dripping, then raise doughnut to mouth and…” He demonstrates by biting firmly into the doughnut and chewing with gusto. “Mmmmm” is what he has to say about this sort of perfection. “The result? Doughnut paradise.”

Rachel has been smiling throughout his technical demonstration, but now she pounces, attacking the doughnut in Aaron’s fingers with passionate appetite.

Chuckling, he tells her, “Hey, hey, leave some fingers, will you?”

She chews the doughnut with exaggerated hunger. “No, I will leave nothing. I will devour you entirely.” And she falls on his neck, devouring him next, making hungry noises. He fends off the attack in a maybe kind of embarrassed-­in-­public-­but-­still-­pleasurable sort of way. “H’okay, h’okay, h’okay.” He’s laughing.

The night owl beside them lifts his eyebrows in late-­night surprise. Or is it appreciation? Aaron can only speak the truth. “What can I say? She’s a tigress.” The night owl lifts his coffee cup in salute. Rachel laughs.

Outside, the snow is coming down, piling up, but she is safe inside a doughnut shop. Not huddling inside a cold cellar or walking the ice-­slick streets. That is how Eema and she had lived as U-­boats until the day of their arrest. But now she is warm. Warm in her wool stockings. Her wool pullover. Warm with this boy. In the doughnut shop, she holds the cheap white china mug with both hands, stealing from its heat. He, though, has set his coffee aside with quiet intention. Then planting the jeweler’s box between them, he squares his elbows on the tabletop and gazes at her in a clear, affectionately businesslike manner. “So? What do you think?” is his proposal.

She stares back at him, still gripping the china mug. “What is this?”

“What is it? What’s it look like?”

Another swift stare at the small black velveteen box.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” he asks.

“You wish me to?”

The curve of his smile deepens. “Yes, I wish you to. Of course. What else?”

A swallow. Then her fingers move, opening the box with a quick movement and a soft pop of the box’s hinge. Her eyes settle on the contents, but her expression remains controlled. The pinpoint gleam of the precious stone makes her uncomfortable. She has the urge to snap the box shut and squirrel it away, as if it is a chunk of bread that she will hoard.

“So,” Aaron repeats. “Whattaya think?”

“You wish…” she begins, then stops and starts again. “You wish to marry me?” She asks this because she just wants to be sure. To be clear about the proposal being made. She fears, for an instant, that he might answer her with sarcasm or impatience. Or with the knowing irony he often adopts. But instead, his face loses all its calculation and grows soft.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I wish you to marry me, Rachel,” he assures her, his voice gentle and without hesitation. “Rachel Morgenstern, I wish you to marry me and become my wife. Will you?”

“What does your mother say?”

“My mother?”

“What does your sister say?”

“My mother says a lot of things. My sister says a lot of things, but I’m asking you to marry me, not them.”

“But how do they feel about adding a poor refugee to their family?”

“We’re Jewish. We were all refugees at some point in history. Besides, my sister’s crazy about you. She likes you more than she does me.”

“And your mother?”

“My mother? Whatever makes me happy makes her happy. This is what she says to me.”

“And I make you happy?”

“Yes,” he says. And it sounds so true that when he removes the ring from its velvet box, she permits him to slip it onto her finger, a tiny sparkle of light.

That night, they make love for the first time in his dingy downtown efficiency, with the flaking wall paint and wheezing plumbing, and she takes him inside her as if she is taking him completely. It hurts for only a moment. A curt cleaving. She is making him happy. She, Rashka Morgenstern, has the power to make him happy.

In six weeks’ time, only how many weeks after they first met—­ten maybe? Something like that. They are both so primed for change, so primed to escape their oppressive lives, how long should it take? So three weeks after doughnut paradise, Rachel Morgenstern enters the Office of the City Clerk, Brooklyn Municipal Building. There, in the dingy, pillared edifice across from Borough Hall, she is married to Aaron Samuel Perlman by the power invested in a notary of the Marriage Bureau by the State of New York and Kings County. Blessed are You, Lord, our God, Master of the Universe, who creates joy and gladness, groom and bride, mirth, song, delight, and rejoicing, love and harmony, and peace and companionship. B’aruch ata Adonai, m’sameiach chatan im hakalah.

Aymen.

For their first year, they live on East Tenth Street. A one-­bedroom on the top floor of a sandstone apartment block across from Tompkins Square Park. Rachel likes to walk through the park sometimes in the afternoon or sit and smoke on a bench where the old men read their newspapers in Yiddish, though Aaron forbids her to enter the park after dusk. Too dangerous for a woman alone, he insists. The reason? Hopheads. Hopheads, dope peddlers, and beatniks, a ghastly array of interlopers in her husband’s mind. The neighborhood was going to hell, he complains, and they should find a place uptown. Somewhere on the Upper West Side maybe. But really Rachel doesn’t mind the peeling paint, the unswept gutters and dilapidated streets. Even in the face of Aaron’s hopheads, dope peddlers, and beatniks, who are waiting to plunder any woman who steps too close, she feels free there.

She strolls down to the coffee shops, to Washington Square. She can go sit in the park or eat a pierogi at the Ukrainian luncheonette on Ninth Street. Reconnoitering the Book Row on Fourth Avenue, she finds she has a taste for mystery novels. Whodunits, especially Nancy Drew. She sits in the Reggio all afternoon reading The Ghost of Blackwood Hall or The Clue of the Velvet Mask. The Upper West Side may have Murray’s Sturgeon Shop to recommend it, but really, who wants to live in the Eighties as a slave to the Seventh Avenue Local?

Then certain phone calls are made.

When Aaron’s cousin Ezra mentions that a one-­bedroom is opening up in the building where he rents with his wife and brood just above the fur district? Well. Wheels are set in motion. Ezra’s mother calls Aaron’s mother, and anyway, the rest is history. The Perlmans move into a new home in a five-­story walk-­up, not in the Upper East Side but on West 22nd Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in Chelsea. A prewar red brick with black-­iron fire-­escape scaffolding bolted to the facade. Aaron refers to it as a shitty little one-­bedroom while talking to Ezra, because he certainly doesn’t want his cousin to get a big head about it, but honestly it’s not so shitty at all.

Rachel finds it rather roomy. Inside there is the salon, or should she say the living room? There is a sofa flanked by matching lamp tables, but not matching lamps. Then comes a galley kitchen with a linoleum floor and a narrow apartment stove from Welbilt, the bedroom with a double bed and foam mattress, the bath with a claw-­foot enameled tub and a showerhead. A hall tree by the front door, opposite a closet. A few other sticks of furniture here and there, and that’s it. Basic digs. Not a luxury penthouse maybe, but not a dump either.

She misses their old place at times, maybe not the drippy faucet or the noisy steam radiators, but the park? The homely old neighborhood? Those she misses, she thinks. Though what does that really mean to her, misses? Things, neighborhoods, homes? They have no real hold over her. She knows if she must, if she has to save herself, she can walk away from any address. Any home. Any possession. Perhaps even any person. She can slip away like a shadow. Though at night, she often lies awake listening to the dark rumble of the trains traveling the elevated West Side line and fights an urge to crawl beneath the bed. She fears trains. Fears their power. Once you’re on a train, you can’t always simply decide to get off at your stop. Sometimes your stop is decided by the train.

Night. Rachel lies in bed, her eyes open and gazing upward. She is examining her eema’s painting in her mind. Shining an inner light on the brushstrokes. Seeing it in the rubbish heap of the pawnbroker’s shop, even dulled by a film of dust, it shocked her how Eema’s brushstrokes were still as fiery and challenging as they were when paint first touched canvas. The moody crimson of the background eclipsed by la muse’s figure, a thick rush of color overtaking the foreground. A brightly alluring female shape. Flesh on exhibition. Eema painted la muse like an icon. The sacred red harlot, the intimacies of her feelings revealed on the canvas by the impassioned attention of Eema’s technique. Rachel can still recall how the canvas stood on Eema’s easel in the blaze of a sunset. Transcendent.

Will she ever create something so stunning? She’s heard that if a thousand monkeys are set before a thousand typewriters with a thousand reams of paper, they’ll eventually hammer out the works of Shakespeare. Could that work for her as well? If she slings enough paint across enough canvases, will she eventually create a masterpiece? She once wanted to believe this could happen. But she knows better now. She knows that she’ll never create anything of value until she has freed herself from her ghosts. Freed herself from her guilt. Freed herself from her crime. Angelika Rosen made murder easy. Easy enough for anyone to commit. Even a little morsel. Was that God’s plan as well? And if it was, what’s His plan now? Why has this painting reappeared one moment only to disappear the next? Is it bait? A lure to her entrapment or a path for her deliverance? Salvation or damnation?

The front door opens in the next room and then quietly shuts. Rachel pushes herself up on her elbows and switches on the bedside lamp. Aaron appears, still dressed in his shirtsleeves, his collar open and tie unknotted, home from another double shift managing the restaurant that isn’t even his. The business in which he owns no equity beyond the equity of sweat.

“I woke you,” he observes, unbuttoning his shirt.

“I wasn’t really asleep,” she tells him and lights a cigarette from her half-­empty pack of filter tips, feeling the smoke biting the back of her throat.

He sits on the mattress beside her with a scrunch of bedsprings. Steals a drag. “So I’m sorry about last night. It’s been bothering me, getting so bent out of shape about everything. I mean, what do I really care about the electric bill in the big scheme of things? So it’s a little higher than normal if it means you stay warm?”

She gently brushes a few stray curls from his forehead. He smiles dimly.

“I just thought this year on your birthday, we’d make it a tsimmis. Not a big tsimmis, but a small tsimmis, that’s all. Have a nice meal at the restaurant and then take in a show. Like for instance, I dunno, orchestra seats for The Pajama Game?” He says this as if he’s revealing a prize. The cat trots in and hops up on the bed, but Aaron scoops him up one-­handed and drops him back on the floor. “They got a big hit going at the Saint James. Supposed to be gangbusters. Sold-­out crowds. But I’ve got a guy who can swing tickets.”

“Who is a guy?”

“Just a regular at the bar. A guy named Chernik. He’s a booking agent. Knows all the big fish on Broadway. Very funny, always cracking everybody up.” He waits for a beat. “So whattaya think?”

Rachel gazes at him. She understands how important it is to him. How important it is to him to be able take her out someplace nice and remove her from her own intimate insanity. To rescue her, just like he did at the library that first day, only now he is trying to rescue her from herself. She knows that his identity is still tied to playing his wife’s hero even after years of marriage. She can hear it in the boyish buoyancy of his voice—­to be the big shot himself for once and get the Broadway show tickets.

“Okay.” She surrenders. She can swallow her shame at surviving, can’t she? At having been spared the smoking ovens that consumed the millions? At least for an evening. “You win,” she whispers. “We’ll have a tsimmis.”

But across the room, standing by the sofa, is her mother. Head shaven, eyes like pits. Rachel knows why she’s come. It’s the painting. Eema cannot permit her work to be so easily lost again, like a pair of gloves left behind on a café table. She cannot permit her painting to be so simply forgotten. Forgetting the artist’s work is no different from forgetting the artist.