Shadows of Berlin

11.

The Clog

Rachel awakens with a bolt of lightning shooting through her. For an instant, she is still in Berlin on the morning she and Eema step out into the street without their stars. She remembers those first steps, the scuff of her ill-­fitting shoes on the slate pavement, and feeling as if a thousand eyes were spying from every window. She must catch her breath, return to the present, to the traffic noise from the windows reminding her that she is in her bedroom on West 22nd Street, not Berlin.

In the kitchen, murky water stands in the sink. And then a plunger appears. A plunger being plunged at an even, measured pace before it’s removed. Water gushes in from the faucet for a moment before it’s shut off. Small drips. But the sink does not drain.

“So the drain is clogged,” Aaron announces.

“What?”

“The drain in the kitchen sink. It’s now officially clogged.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure, yeah. Three inches of standing water, not draining even a little. Makes me suspect.”

“Can’t you just try the plunger?”

“You didn’t notice? I just tried the plunger. Got me nowhere.”

“Try it again.”

“Did you call the super like you said you would?”

“Did I what?”

Aaron expels a slow breath, sticking the plunger back under the sink. “Rachel. Honey,” he says with a note of strained husbandly patience. “He’s just the super,” he assures her. “That’s all.”

“That’s not all.”

“I know. I know. He’s a kraut. But his name is Bauer, honey, not Bormann.”

“You don’t know who he is, Aaron. Mr. Klinghoffer said he came here after the war. He could be anybody. How do you know he’s so innocent?”

“I know that Klinghoffer hired him as the super. And when the drain clogs, it’s the super’s job to unclog it. This is what I know. Now, I gotta go. No Time for Sergeants just opened at the Alvin with what’s-­his-­name. The hillbilly guy, so the matinee crowd’s gonna be a ballbuster, and we’re down a waiter. G’bye. Call ’im. You’ll be fine. G’bye.”

Door opens, then closes.

A beat.

A clattering noise and then suddenly here comes the plunger again, but this time splashing furiously into the standing water, thumping hard before it’s yanked out.

A beat.

Nothing.

Nothing until here it comes again—­the plunger smacking the water, thumping manically before it is yanked out.

Water settles.

No change.

Still clogged.

“Scheisse!” Rachel swears.

Bauer the super. He’s held this position since last year, inhabiting the cellar apartment opposite the boiler room. Rachel used to go down there when friendly Mr. Fitzroy was the occupant. Old Mr. Ruddy-­Faced Fitzroy, who sang loudly and lyrically while he fixed your plumbing or rewired your doorbell. But they found him on the floor two days after Christmas, dead of heart failure, and since then, their landlord, Mr. Klinghoffer, has replaced him with this—­this Hun. Whenever she travels down to the cellar to put the trash in the bins, Rachel stares at the door, picturing a charnel house behind it stacked with bones that the German shovels into the furnace to heat the apartment after Aaron jacks up the thermostat.

Now, this tubby Boche is half under the kitchen galley sink in their apartment. Dull-­faced with greasy hair going gray, though only his big white belly and dirty work pants are visible to Rachel as he clunks about with his wrenches. Smoke from his cigarette drifts upward from the pipes.

She sits, nursing a lit filter tip in a kitchen chair, dressed in a brown cardigan and a pair of Sanforized denim pants. Her hair’s tied up with a kerchief. Her arms are wrapped around her knees. She is caged by her own posture, glaring suspiciously at the interloper, when the cat suddenly leaps up onto the table and yowls loudly. Rachel seizes him as if he’s set off an alarm, drawing him into her cage as if she fears he will give her away.

There was a thuggish Waffen-­SS trooper in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse Lager known as Di Shtivl—­The Boot—­because of his reputation for kicking the prisoners—­men, women, but especially children. Put a few pounds on him and gray his hair a touch, she thinks, and this could be him. Him or some other assassin of the Jews.

Kibbitz complains about Rachel’s ever-­tightening grip, and he slips from her embrace, nipping her arm lightly, not to hurt, just to send a message, then bronking with frustration as he hits the floor and padding away. Rachel rubs the skin of her arm. The chair where her eema sat is now empty. To the super, she says stridently, “Excuse me. This will take how much longer?”

A squeak of a wrench. “The trap is clogged, Missus Perlman,” he tells her in his ugly, filthy Nazi Boche accent and sits up. His face is blotchy and pasty from all the steins of beer he must lift. Unshaven. A cigarette clenched between his lips. “It can be cleaned, but it also needs replacement.”

“And this will take how long?”

The super blows out smoke. “To clean?” he shrugs. “A minute, no more. But for the replacement, I must go to the hardware store.” He says this as if the hardware store is the highest authority on the matter. The Kommandantur of plumbing to which he must report. Rachel is incredulous at the ramifications of this pronouncement.

“So. You mean you must come back?”

“You feel hatred toward the Germans?” Dr. Solomon asks her.

“Don’t you?”

“We’re not here to discuss me, Rachel.”

“Yes. I feel ‘hatred’ as you say.”

“Toward all Germans? Even those who might be innocent of crimes?”

“If they aren’t guilty of the crimes, then they are guilty of knowing of the crimes and doing nothing. There is no such being in my opinion, Dr. Solomon, as an ‘innocent’ German.”

“I see,” says the doctor and makes a note.

“Did I say something shocking? Something to reveal myself? What have you just made note of?”

But the doctor is deaf to the question and switches topics. “I don’t mean to press you too firmly on this point, Rachel, but have you given any more thought to my suggestion about painting?” Dr. Solomon wonders.

“I’ve been busy,” she answers. Surly and flat. She hasn’t been sleeping well. Last night, she awoke convinced there was someone in the apartment. Aaron had to check out every corner, open every closet and cabinet door, before she was forced to admit she had been dreaming. But was she dreaming? Since the day she was confronted by her eema’s painting, she has been feeling watched by hidden eyes. A growing feeling that there was something terrible waiting for her concealed in the darkness. She expels smoke from her cigarette. “I think I should be going, Doctor,” she decides and begins to assembles herself.

The doctor is surprised. “But there’s still time left in the hour,” he points out.

“Nevertheless. You cannot help me any further today, Dr. Solomon. Who can? I have a sickness that cannot be cured.”

But on the subway, the brunette schoolgirl with the burgundy beret returns, sitting across the aisle, the manifestation of Rachel’s guilt. Sitting in the café up the Friedrichstrasse, hearing a voice: You’re not here on a holiday, Bissel. You must earn your keep.

The schoolgirl gazes back at her. She never appears accusatory. Never. Merely confused. Merely saddened by the lies Rachel lives by.

Pulling a half pound of frozen hamburger out of the icebox freezer, a frosty brick of meat wrapped in cellophane, she sticks it in the sink and turns on the hot water to defrost it when she hears someone knocking politely on the door.

“Missus Perlman?” the German is calling. “Hallo? Missus Perlman. It’s Bauer the super. I have come from the store with the new sink trap.” He rings the bell once, twice, then knocks again.

The cat, alerted by the buzz of the bell, meows. Thumps down onto the floor from his spot on the sill and pads over to the apartment door to investigate. He meows at the noise, but Rachel has shut off the water and become motionless. She is still an expert at silences.

The next morning, she makes coffee and drops two slices of bread into the toaster. Aaron walks over to the kitchen sink in his wrinkled flannel pajamas over his undershirt. Carpet slippers flopping.

“Shall I cut a grapefruit?” she asks him.

“Sure,” he says, stepping up to the sink beside her. He turns on the tap water and lets it gush into a glass. He drinks, draining the glass as the faucet still runs. Thirst quenched, he releases a satisfied Ahhhh. Then frowns down at the sink. “Hey. I thought the super fixed this.”

Rachel slices a fat yellow grapefruit into halves. “You what?”

He shuts off the tap. “I said, I thought the super had fixed this drain. Didn’t he come by?”

Rachel hesitates, but only for an instant. “He came by.”

“And?”

The toast pops. “And he cleaned it out, but then said there was something else wrong. He must get a part from a store.”

“And so when is that supposed to happen?”

Rachel only shrugs. Starts spreading margarine on toast.

“Well, that stinks,” her husband announces. “Just what we need. A drain that doesn’t drain. And for this we pay how much a month for this place?”

“Ninety-­eight dollars,” Rachel answers.

“No, honey, I know how much we pay. I’m just saying.” He sets the emptied glass in the sink. “I guess I’ll have to talk him.”

Rachel sets the toast on her husband’s plate. “I guess you will.”

“So there’s coffee?” he wonders.

“In the pot on the table.”

Aaron nods. Pads to the table and manages to pour himself a cup on his own, then snaps on the radio. Drags out a chair where he sits and ignites a cigarette with a click of his Zippo. Opens his newspaper as Rachel nestles the two grapefruit halves in their bowls. She is not speaking another word on the subject. The super came, the super went. That’s all. The song on the radio makes a defiant statement: I hear you knockin’, but you can’t come in!