Shadows of Berlin

9.

Things Went Amiss

The night passes. Dressed in her pink chenille bathrobe, hair uncombed, she stares at her warped reflection in the toaster’s aluminum. She had learned from the radio show Alka-­Seltzer Time how to defend herself against a sour belly and drinks a glass of water in which she has dropped two tablets of antacids that are fizzing as they dissolve. It leaves a sour tang on her tongue, like a lime slice in seltzer, although more chemical.

Aaron appears, giving her his husbandly peck on the cheek but with an extra squeeze, bunching up her shoulders against his chest. “You need something in your stomach,” he determines. “Some dry toast, maybe a little burnt around the edges,” he tells her and actually opens the sack of rye bread to stick two slices into the toaster. Aaron the cook! “That’s what Ma always gave us when we were sick as kids. Dry toast, a little burnt around the edges,” he repeats, describing the miracle cure.

Rachel nods. “Thank you.”

“Look,” he says. “Again. I’m really sorry for what happened. Subjecting you to that play.”

“It’s okay,” Rachel tells him.

“We should have,” he says. “We should have gone to Naomi’s like you wanted in the first place.”

“It’s okay,” Rachel repeats. “You needn’t keep apologizing. Really. You were trying to be the good husband,” she says to let him off the hook, because she does not know how many more apologies she can suffer. “You were trying to do something nice.”

He nods lightly. This is true, after all. He pours a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and downs it. “So you want me to call the super? The drain’s still slow.”

Rachel swallows. “No. I’ll call him,” she lies.

“Okay,” he agrees. No more pressure. “You’re sure you’re gonna be all right if I head in to work?” he inquires.

“Yes,” Rachel replies and tucks a renegade strand of her hair behind an ear. “I’m going to be fine.”

“I mean I could call Abe. Go in a few hours late.”

“Aaron. I will be fine,” she tells him.

“Okay,” he says, stroking her head. “And don’t worry,” he assures her with certain conviction. He will put a boot up somebody’s ass today for poisoning his wife with a piece of bad fish. Oh yes, he will kick some tuchus, all right. You bet he will. Though he offers this information gently, as if it’s comforting. But really her husband’s voice is just a drone in her ears. A few minutes later, the apartment door opens and then closes. Rachel locks it behind him and leans her back against it, staring into the interior of their apartment.

The paint on the wall is eggshell white. When they first moved in, their landlord paid to paint the place every year, but that custom has fallen by the wayside, and the walls are getting dingy. They betray an underpainting of gray in the light. And the floorboards squeak at every step. Still, sometimes it feels like a palace, even though it’s just the shitty one-­bedroom. As U-­boats hiding in Berlin, she and Eema would have happily settled for a fraction of the space she has here.

A thin wisp of smoke rises from the toaster, and she winces as the toast suddenly pops up, burnt black. Eema, in fact, is at the kitchen table, once more the KaZetnik in clogs and rags. One of the dead of Auschwitz-­Birkenau, reconstituted from the ash pits and now smelling up a Chelsea apartment.

“So tell me this, Eema,” Rachel says. “Do you think Feter is lying?”

Always a clear possibility.

“You think he knows who holds your painting?”

Perhaps or perhaps not. But I do think, without doubt, my brother knows more than he says. It’s the diktat of his personality.

Rachel is quiet for a moment. “It is still a beautiful work,” she tells her mother. A sheyn kunst verk.

Eema draws a breath and exhales a burnt stench. But her bloodshot eyes have gone soft. Even in death, she has longings. She was a beautiful subject. So beautiful.

“They say she hanged herself, you know. After the war as a prisoner of the Russians.” But her mother has no further comment. She is gone, and Rachel is alone.

Days pass. She wakes up confused. Where is she? The chaos of her sleep has infiltrated her waking mind. For a moment, she thinks she is on the floor in Grosse Hamburger Strasse camp, a prisoner awaiting transport to the east. When she shouts out in fear, Aaron sticks his head out of the bathroom, interrupted while brushing his teeth.

“You okay?” he wonders.

“Yes,” she lies. “Yes. Just a bad dream.”

She is on the move, heading out into the street. She is convinced that her eema is right. That Feter Fritz knows more than he is willing to divulge. He’s always had his secrets. Even as a Jew under the Gestapo’s roof, he considered secrets a form of currency.

It’s Friday, so it’s easy enough to find him stationed at a table in the Garden Cafeteria. A plate of latkes with applesauce sits on the table in front of him, accompanied by a cup of coffee and a glass of seltzer as he is writing in his little dog-­eared notebook. The notebook is a habit of his from decades before. The secret reminders and intimate scraps of information recorded. Who knows when a person will need to remember something? A date, a name, a transaction? The exchange rate on the pound sterling? Where to purchase the best Italian leathers? That was then. These days, he usually scribbles with a nubby pencil snatched from the library, and God knows what he’s jotting down. Tips on playing cribbage for cash? Where to buy the cheapest shoelaces? How to trick a vending machine with a slug? Rachel can only imagine.

Feter pretends to be happy at her arrival, but she can tell that he is actually not so happy. After so many years, she has learned to see through the masks he wears. She sits beside him so she can whisper, so that no gossips of Feter’s acquaintance can overhear. He wonders to what does he owe the pleasure of her visit.

“Isn’t it possible, Feter,” she begins, “that you know something that you’re not telling me?”

In response, her feter appears more confused than wounded by the question. And maybe even a bit amused. “Ah, so the mother comes out in the child. The result of the rich diet of mistrust your eema weaned you on, I fear,” he says and laces together his fingers on the table. “What precisely—­if I may ask—­what precisely am I supposed to know that I am pretending not to know?”

“Eema’s painting,” Rachel answers.

“Ah!” He should have known!

“I feel as if it was stolen from me.”

“Stolen?” And her feter is the thief? Again, not hurt but merely amused. “Her poor feter? This is what she thinks?” he asks the air. “My own flesh and blood, and yet to her, I am the swindler?”

“I didn’t say that,” Rachel insists.

“Didn’t you?” he wonders aloud. Then his voice dips. He adopts a forgiving tone, an understanding tone. “Ruchel. Ziskeit,” he says. “I swear to you. God in heaven, I did not steal your mother’s painting from you.”

“I said I feel as if it has been stolen. I didn’t say by whom. I only wonder what you know. That’s all.”

“What I know, Daughter, is that you suffered too much. Too much, Rokhl, at such a tender age. It’s made you…suspicious,” he decides to call it. Perfectly understandable, he tells her. A child with such a history? How could she not be fearful of her own shadow? He opens up his old leather-­bound cigar case, lighting up with the matchbook advertising a fancy kosher steakhouse in Murray Hill. Rachel also notes the band on the cigar. H. Upmann, Habana. “Am I hurt?” he asks. “Who wouldn’t be hurt? After all, didn’t I come to you first? Ask for your help? A few dollars, Rashka, and we would have had your mother’s painting in our hands. But. That was not to be. Things went amiss, and I know my niece. I know that for all that goes amiss, she must find someone to blame.”

Someone laughs sharply from across the room. A truck grinds its gears in the street.

“So here’s a question for you, Feter. When did you start eating steak at Yosef Levi’s?”

Feter smiles in an interior way. As if perhaps this is a joke he is missing. “I beg your pardon?”

“The matchbook, Feter,” she explains. “And when did you start smoking cigars from Havana?”

So now he must laugh lightly at her presumption. “Rokhl, the matchbook came from somewhere, who knows? I picked it up.” A shrug. “And the cigars? An old man treats himself in his waning years. That’s a crime?”

“I don’t know. Is it?”

Feter’s smile turns leaden. “Rashka. Ziskeit. What are you driving at?” This he asks her in English.

Driving at? Rachel catches a breath. “Nothing, Feter,” she tells him, dropping eye contact. “I don’t mean to accuse you of anything or to imply.” She glances submissively at her hands to put him off the scent that she is onto him. Not her mother’s hands, not the accomplished hands with the slender fingers, so expressive. Not those hands, but hands of the competent peasant. Her father’s hands, she’s been told. The hands of the missing man left behind for her at her birth. “I’ve been easily upset it seems. Perhaps I’m not thinking clearly.”

Feter appears to accept this as an apology, a confession, and even as a statement of fact. He clasps her hands in his and gives them a consoling pat. “I understand, Daughter,” he promises. The edge of his cuff has inched upward, revealing the tail of the number tattooed above his wrist. “I understand,” he tells her.

A perfect touch. The small reminder of his tattoo. Of his suffering. Of course she shouldn’t be surprised. She knows that her feter is a master of extemporaneous solutions, a talented ad-­lib performer. This is how he has survived. This is why he is still alive.

On the way home, she thinks about the painting itself as the subway barrels through the tunnel. Of all her mother’s works, it was the only portrait with a living heartbeat. Perhaps that is why the sight of it was so frightening. To be confronted by a demon in the flesh brought back from death. The angel resurrected. Terrifying. It makes her reach for the comfort of Miltown. She should be relieved, shouldn’t she, that it vanished again? She should be thankful that it haunts the walls of some unsuspecting shlimazel with fifty dollars, who thought it matched the drapes.

Back at the apartment, she changes into her robe and sits on the bed, trying to distract herself until the Miltown can level her out. They have plans this evening, though nothing to look forward to. Dinner with Ezra and Daniela, oy gevalt, at Daniela’s favorite kosher place. So Rachel is smoking a cigarette before she has to change into a dress and paging through an art magazine from last month. If she can concentrate on normal things, then she can be normal. Or at least imitate normal. Isn’t that how it works?

She hears the front door open. “Halloo,” Aaron is calling. “King of the castle’s home.”

“I’m in the bedroom,” she calls back. According to ARTnews, David Glass, the princely scion of the House of Glass on Fifth Avenue, has brought Berlin to New York in a retrospective of Käthe Kollwitz.

We never cared for each other personally, her mother informs her. Kollwitz and myself. But I respected her work and she respected mine. This is said with stately certainty. She had hallucinations as a child, you know. She would see a house cat, apparently, but to her, it was the size of a panther. Or her mother would appear the size of a doll, poor woman. Eema is sporting a fashionable sable-­trimmed cloak but vanishes as footsteps approach. Aaron enters, tie loose, collar open, home after another day in the salt mines.

“So here’s the lady of leisure,” he declares pleasantly. “Scooch over,” he tells her and sits on the edge of the bed her mother had occupied a moment before. Yanking off his shoes, he tosses them with a breath of relief. Florsheim Imperials, walnut-­brown leather wing tips. $14.98 at Falk’s Sports Wear on Delancey. You Save Dollars! We Make Pennies! “Scooch over, will you,” Aaron repeats. “I own one side the bed, if you recall. It was in the fine print of the marriage contract.”

Stubbing out her cigarette in the bedside ashtray, she discards her magazine and scooches. “This isn’t Budapest,” she says. “We don’t have a marriage contract.”

But Aaron has already left the joke behind. Satisfied with his space, her husband unknots his tie and drops it. “Man, am I bushed,” he tells her. “Whattaya say we just dig in here tonight and relax? Order some Chinese or something.”

“Because we can’t.”

“No?” He has rolled his weight against her and begun to nuzzle her neck. “You sure?”

“I am. We have dinner with your cousin.”

Aaron groans. “Ah, jeez. Tell me that’s not really tonight, is it?”

“It is.”

“I thought it was next week.”

“No, this week. Tonight. So go. Get ready,” she instructs and interrupts his nuzzling by giving him a loud peck on the cheek before removing herself from the bed. “I need to change, and you could use a shower.”