Shadows of Berlin

7.

A Heartbreaker!

When she is six years old, Rachel learns the truth about the world. About the world of a Jew in Berlin. The American stock exchange has failed, tipping the world into ruinous depression. Economies have collapsed, and Germany’s fledgling democracy is losing its tenuous foothold. The Communist Party surges in parliamentary elections, as does the so-­called National Socialist German Workers Party. Political mayhem bloodies the streets once more, as it had a decade earlier during the runaway inflation.

In the face of chaos and fearing revolution from the left, the ancient fossil, Herr Reichspräsident General-­Feldmarschall Paul von Beneckendorff und Hindenburg, the Hero of Tannenberg, once more evokes Article 48 of the Constitution to rule by emergency decree. On the first of January 1933, he uses his powers to appoint a former army corporal named Adolf Hitler to the most powerful post in the land, chancellor of the German Reich. The monarchists agree. Put this upstart Bohemian paperhanger in charge to eradicate the Marxist threat and then control his excesses. They think they’ve hired him for their show.

But this upsets Rashka’s mother greatly, and anything that upsets Eema also upsets Rashka—­though, at six, she does not understand so much the reasons why. She only knows that when she hears this man’s voice on the wireless, her mother’s face darkens, and Rashka feels a knot of painful confusion tighten in her belly.

The wireless booms: “It is my sacred mission to purge all German art of the intentionally disruptive modern jargon created by Jews and social perverts,” the newly minted Reichskanzler bellows over the airwaves. “So-­called works of art that are grotesque, unmanly, and deliberately perplexing shall now be recognized as the insulting inventions of deranged minds!”

Rashka is drawing. She is safe, she believes, at home in the salon of her mother’s Gründerzeit villa in the Fasanenstrasse, not so far from the Elephant Gate of the Zoologischer Garten. The walls are hung with Eema’s work. Her mother’s bright, savagely colorful gouache and inks. The oils on hefty canvases. Figures, faces, ugly, beautiful, human. Little Rashka is on the soft floral carpet drawing in her pad, and her eema is seated in her favorite upholstered chair, the Viennese wingback, but she is frowning at the voice from the radio bawling into the empty space of the room. Her eema’s face is a mask of tension as she smokes a cigarette screwed into her amber holder.

“It will be my eternal vow that such Jew-­inspired perversion will be forever thwarted in its attempt to poison the artistic soul of our German Volk!”

Rashka is trying to concentrate on her drawing, but the wireless broadcast is distracting her, confusing her. And when the speech concludes with a storm of Heils, Eema tersely switches off the dial.

Rashka suspends her drawing and looks up. “He is a paskudnyak!” she reports, a child trying out a grown-­up’s insult she’d overheard, but her mother reacts with unexpected force.

“Never call him that, Rashka. Not in public,” Eema warns, eyebrows arched. It’s a command underpainted with a stain of fear. “Where did you hear such a thing?”

Rashka swallows. Ehrenberg’s Konditorei is a pastry shop on the Lindenstrasse that she frequents with the housemaid, Manka. Was it Frau Ehrenberg who spoke this word? She decides it was. “Frau Ehrenberg. I heard her say it.”

“That woman is a fool with a loose mouth, and so is her husband,” Eema declares. “The both of them. Fools! Manka shouldn’t take you there. It will get us all into trouble.”

This is a disappointment, and Rashka complains. “But, Eema, they have the Mohnkuchen there!”

“Never mind Mohnkuchen. Just watch your tongue. And never call that man such a name again.”

But then Rashka remembers: “Feter Fritz has called him so too.” This time, however, Rashka is surprised when her mother bites off a short, bitter laugh.

“Ha! Your Feter Fritz thinks he’s the cat with nine lives. But you, Rashka? You are not. Out beyond our doors? Be a good little goat and keep your mouth closed. This man Hitler may indeed be the worst kind of paskudnyak. But he is no longer any kind of a joke.”

Rashka breathes this in. Not a cat but a goat. “But why?” she must ask. “Why is he so angry with Jews?”

“Because he hates us,” Eema informs her, smothering her cigarette in the red sandstone cendrier. The sentence is spoken curtly with the weight of common fact. But Rashka is really rather startled. Certainly, that can’t be completely true.

“Not all of us,” she says, as if perhaps her mother is mistaken.

Her eema, however, remains rigid. “Yes. All of us.”

“You, Eema?”

“Yes.”

“Feter Fritz?”

“Yes.”

“And me too?”

Her mother’s glare is merciless. “Especially you, Daughter,” she declares. “He hates you because you, Rashka, are the future.”

Rashka is mortified at the thought of such hatred. She has never imagined that anyone could hate her. Her, personally. Rokhl Morgenstern.

“What are you scribbling there?” her eema suddenly demands. “Show me.”

Rashka dutifully stands, pulls the page from her sketchbook, and presents her mother with it for inspection. “It’s me,” she says. “I drew myself.” Rashka is really quite pleased with it and hopes for her mother’s approval. But Eema scowls and rips the drawing in half, causing Rashka to burst immediately into tears.

“Eema! Why did you do that?”

“Because you can do better. And because loss is part of life, tsigele,” her mother explains. “You should learn that now.” Eema stands and drops the torn drawing into the fire that’s crackling in the hearth, leaving Rashka crying and bewildered.

***

She had left the house this morning with intention. Her sister-­in-­law, Naomi, is something of a bohemian type but is also something of a clotheshorse. Rachel is hoping that she might have something she can borrow for the Big Tsimmis, because really, who should be spending money on a new dress for one night? Also, since the Episode, Rachel avoids department stores.

She has relieved the crowded medicine cabinet at home of the bottle of Miltown and started carrying it in her bag. On the subway, she opens the bottle and downs two, even though it’s hours away from her normal schedule. But she takes two now, and by the time she is exiting the Lexington Avenue train at West Fourth, the Miltown has done its work. She feels as if she’s walking a straight line. Following the trajectory of a quiet arrow.

All manner of craziness can find a home in the Village. Aaron speaks of it as if it’s a kind of neighborhood mental asylum between Broadway and the North River, but it’s where his sister has chosen to live, in a redbrick walk-­up at the intersection of MacDougal and Minetta Lane. A stately old Italian ristorante sits across the street and farther down a neighborhood joint called Kettle of Fish.

Up the building’s stoop, Rachel finds the door unlocked as always and wanders through it, heading up the stairs. She can smell the ancient cigarette smoke, generations old, that clings to the carpet runners. But on the third floor, she catches the aroma of chemical developer. A record player is spinning the Platters hit, “Only You.” When she knocks, she calls through the door, “Naomi?”

A scratch as the record player quits and the door flings open. Answering the door is a breezy young woman in a peasant blouse over red toreador pants with bare feet. “Hey, it’s you,” her sister-­in-­law declares with a startling happy grin.

“It is me,” Rachel admits and accepts the big smack Naomi plants on her cheek.

“Well, get in here, you. I’ll break out the booze!” This is Aaron’s kid sister, though really, she is no longer a kid at all. Naomi Beatrice Perlman, known universally by the members of the Flatbush tribe as Naomi-­rhymes-­with-­Foamy. A troublemaker, a subversive, at least compared to her brother Mr. Don’t-­Make-­Waves. She likes to stir the pot. Chestnut hair in a ponytail and velvety brown eyes. Pretty in a careless, go-­screw-­yourself kind of way. A real meydl mit a veyndl.

Inside, the place is its usual casual mess, and the smell of the developing fluids is stronger. Rachel lights a cigarette against it. She stares back at the faces assessing her from the walls. Naomi works for a commercial agency on East 70th to pay the rent, photographing Sara Lee’s all butter yellow cake for magazine advertisements, but her walls at home are papered with looming photographic prints of the quirky hardscrabble denizens of the Village. Battered, scarred, suspicious, or confrontational faces glaring in black-and-white. Close up. Intentionally ugly and beautiful at the same time. Camera equipment and paraphernalia are scattered everywhere. A Kodalite Midget Flash Holder sits beside a carton of GE Surefire flashbulbs, like a carton of eggs with several eggs missing. A yellow tin of Kodak Microdol-­X Developer is ready to roll off the top of the bookshelf with the next bump. All around, there’s an air of post-­explosion, as if a minor rupture of chaos in the cosmos has scattered everything everywhere.

Naomi is quick to uncork the half bottle she has in her humming fridge. Maybe it’s only noon, but this is the Village, so she sloshes Chianti into mismatched glasses from her shelf. The wine is overchilled and tastes like it’s about to turn, but what the heck? They drink it anyway, seated on the sofa where Naomi has cleared away errant bits of clothing and photo magazines.

“Your brother is taking me to a Broadway show,” Rachel announces.

“Oh, so the shtoomer finally stuck a crowbar in his wallet, did he?”

“A crow?”

“A crowbar. You know.” Naomi makes a prying motion. “For prying shit open.”

“Oh. Yes.” Incomprehensible. “He has a friend in the ticket business.”

“Of course. Always a friend somewhere. Always looking to squeeze out a few pennies.” Naomi drinks. “He gets that from Pop. The man who bought his coffin from Sherman Brothers ten years before he died so he could get the discount.”

There’s this goulash of family turmoil with the Perlmans of Flatbush, always roiling just under the surface, which all of them so nonchalantly stir. It confuses Rachel. She understands bitterness and envy, anger and resentment; God knows she understands all that. But it’s so casual here in America. In Berlin, accusations were formal and heavy as bludgeons. Here it’s all a sport of stinging anecdotes disguised as humor. It baffles her, and when she tries to imitate and play along, the words come out like cold poison. “Well, my mother, you know, was the worst kind of public egoist with a stone for a heart. She once abandoned me in the Karstadt department store because she had forgotten I was with her and had gone instead for supper at the Adlon. But I was forced to love her anyway.” Only a clumsy silence follows that.

“So I have no clothes to wear,” Rachel says. “Nothing glamorous. Aaron says I should buy something, but…” She lets that sentence finish itself.

“No worries. Naomi’s got you covered,” her sister-­in-­law assures her and begins to disgorge the clothes from her closet. And not just any old rags, but the stylish velvets, silks, satins, and gabardines. Where does such a closet come from? “Try the pencil dress,” Naomi tells her. “Black always does the trick.”

Rachel no longer retains a sense of modesty when it comes to undressing. That was driven from her in hiding. She strips off her blouse and pants and slips into the dress, completing it with black satin three-­quarter-­length opera gloves. The wine is working a happy magic through her. Posing in front of the closet mirror, she shares the dress’s reflection with Naomi.

“Perfect,” Naomi decides. “With a string of pearls? You’re Audrey Hepburn.”

Rachel is pleased with her reflection in this flattering mirror. She feels as buoyed by it as she does by the Chianti. “It’s not too much?” she asks just as a test.

“Nope.”

“Not too phony? Your brother doesn’t like phoniness,” she says, causing Naomi to pull a face.

“Oh, my brother,” she replies and blows a raspberry. Then picks up her Leica from the sofa and advances the film. “Screw him and his opinions. He has no opinions that he didn’t inherit. Mostly from the materfamilias, by the way, if you haven’t noticed by now. He may sound like Pop? But scratch an inch underneath and it’s the Iron Hausfrau of Webster Av’. Mind if I take a few shots?” she asks but doesn’t wait for an answer and starts snapping pictures. Winged by the wine, lightened by the Miltown, Rachel plays along for a bit, posing this way and that way. This sort of attention is rare for her.

Naomi gives a laugh and shakes her head in delectable admiration. “Christ, you’re a heartbreaker!” she declares. “The camera fuckin’ loves you.”