Shadows of Berlin

13.

The Infinite Air

Aaron is still asleep after a late-­night closing, the blanket drawn tightly over his shoulder. His face scrunched up as if he’s dreaming of walking on nails. Staying quiet is easy for Rachel, of course. Living life as a U-­boat, she learned to walk as quietly as a cat. At the kitchen table, she turns down the ankles of her socks and slips on her pair of saddle shoes. She lights a cigarette and sticks the rest of the pack in her sweater pocket. She’s on the way to pick up Naomi’s dress from the dry cleaner’s on West 23rd, slipping on the kid leather gloves with the silk lining from Gimbels.

From out in the hall, she hears children, overlaid by a firm but lyrically maternal voice, and when she opens the door, she finds that it’s Daniela Weinstock, who else? Maneuvering her hugely pregnant belly down the stairs with her three-­year-­old twins, one boy, one girl, and a toddler in a red metal stroller. The toddler, also a girl, is playing with the stroller’s ring of wooden beads. The twins gaze up at Rachel with their mother’s deep, dark eyes.

“Well, look who it is,” Daniela announces to her children in a sweetly prompting manner. “It’s Mrs. Perlman. Say hello.”

“Hello!” the boy repeats loudly, grinningly, with a wave of his small hand, happy to participate. But the girl remains silent.

“Hello, Josh,” Rachel replies to the boy, smiling, positioning her cigarette away from the child so that the smoke drifts up toward the ceiling. She cups her hand around the crown of Josh’s silky hair. Josh has his father’s myopically squinted expression—­he’ll be wearing glasses by the time he’s five—­but unlike his poppa, he is always full of joyful hellos, full of dimpled smiles and inquiries. Mommy, why is your hair black? Mommy, why are there cats? The fullness of life sings in his voice, innocent in his bustling joy.

Rachel cupped his head because maybe she hoped to snatch some of that from him. Is that a crime? No, he has so much he could hardly miss it. A small bit of childish joy stuffed in her pocket, who would know? But perhaps it’s that covetousness that Daniela detects and instinctually guards against as she absently presses the boy to her side in Rachel’s presence. The girl, Leah, on the other hand? She’s always unsettled Rachel. Those watching eyes, as if the child can look through skin and see the interior schemes of a skeleton at work.

“So how are you doing? How are things?” Daniela is asking. “Haven’t seen you in a bit.”

“I’ve been busy,” Rachel explains. “Things are crazy.”

“Really?” Daniela lifts her eyebrows with interest. “Crazy how?”

Rachel swallows. She thought she had learned by now to field these hallway chitchat questions. And crazy is one of her preferred American words, because it’s a cover-­all word, like a big crazy blanket. Crazy. Work is crazy. Our schedule is crazy. Things are crazy. No one is supposed to ask why. “Well, the restaurant’s the usual nuthouse for Aaron.” She has learned nuthouse the hard way.

Daniela’s brows knit. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” She sympathizes.

“And how are things with all of you?”

“Fine. Except Ezra’s caught a cold,” Daniela reports.

“Oh?” Rachel asks, sounding concerned.

“Yes. It’s going around his office. I just hope he hasn’t brought it home. The last thing I need is for these three munchkins to come down with runny noses.” And then, “Wouldn’t that be too bad?” she asks her children, inserting them oddly into the conversation. “Wouldn’t that be too bad if Daddy spreads his sniffles? We don’t want that, do we?” She does this often, Rachel notices: addresses her “munchkins” in this manner, even though she’s talking with an adult, as if she cannot help but include the children in her every breath. But the children aren’t paying attention, so to Rachel, she says, “He thinks it’s all the fumes. The car exhaust, the bus exhaust in the streets.” And then, her voice drops, grows more confidential. “By the way, I just want to say again how sorry I am that Ezra wasn’t himself at dinner the other night.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Rachel assures her quickly.

“He must have been on the verge of getting sick. Also, he’s just been under so much pressure. The workload is terrible at the P.D.’s office. Almost unbearable. He’s always trying to juggle clients and cases, and of course there’s no money for public defenders. So he can be grouchy,” she chooses to say, “when he shouldn’t be.”

“I understand,” Rachel assures her. “Aaron too. Exactly the same way.” Once more. Two wives apologizing for their husbands’ poor conduct.

“You know they’ll be back to normal with each other in no time.”

“Well, wasn’t it sort of normal for them anyway?” Rachel asks. It’s a gamble. It’s a joke that could go wrong. But to her relief, Daniela laughs aloud.

“Yes,” she happily concedes, “I suppose it is. Men can be such children,” she confides, as if this is such a big secret.

Going down the stairs, of course, Rachel volunteers to help with the stroller, though it’s awkward, and the Taylor Tot contraption is not exactly light. Picking it up from the front, she must carry it while walking backward down each flight to the foyer, while Daniela grips the handle from above, the weight of the toddler in between. Step down, step down, pause. Step down, step down, pause. And all the while, the little child gazes deeply as if Rachel is a foreign object. Until the girl starts banging loudly on the stroller’s metal tray with a frown darkening her little face. Can children, in their innocence, perceive her crime against innocence? She’s honestly feared this now for years.

“Okay!” Daniella announces brightly. “I can take it from here, I think,” she tells Rachel as they reach the foyer. “The stoop steps are easy. Just bump, bump, bump.”

Rachel opens the front door and holds it for the caravan of mother and children to pass.

“Thank you! Thank you!” Daniela repeats buoyantly and prompts her twins. “Say ‘thank you’ to Mrs. Perlman!” Daniella never probes. She never probes. Rachel’s past is an undisturbed country, though she must wonder, mustn’t she? And Rachel wonders too. What does this young mother from Astoria think late at night? What is her conception of the murder factories that polluted the skies with death? Does she ever dare let it touch her? Does she ever lie awake, while Ezra snores beside her, imagining herself on the final march to the smoking chimneys, gripping her crying toddler so tightly in her arms, instructing the twins to hold each other’s hands? Hold your sister’s hand, Joshua. Be Mommy’s good soldier. Be Mommy’s darling little soldier.

Rachel knocks on the door of Naomi’s apartment. A pause, then a dead bolt slides, and the door opens, revealing Naomi in her chemical-­stained work clothes, hair in the usual ponytail. “Oh my God. It’s you,” she declares as a greeting.

“I’m sorry. I should have called,” Rachel apologizes. “I brought back your dress.”

“Oh, jeez, you didn’t have to take it to the cleaner’s.”

“Actually? I did,” Rachel replies, handing it over by the wire hanger, still in the clear plastic bag. “So I don’t want to interrupt. You must be in the midst?”

“No, no, I’m not. Just fucking around with some stupid pix I took over the weekend. They’re not even very good. Come in,” she invites. Inside, the apartment is in the same basic disarray as always. Naomi snatches up a blouse from the sofa and tosses it onto a chair. “You look like you could use a pick-­me-­up,” she decides, dropping the dress in its dry cleaner’s sheath over the ladder-­back chair. “What’s your poison?” Liquor bottles clink as she sorts through her inventory.

Rachel has crept in carefully behind her, reconnoitering the scene. “Whatever you have,” she answers. “What are the pictures about? From the weekend.”

“Oh. Nothing. A bunch of the alter kockers on the benches when I was up in Tompkins Square. But they turned out—­I don’t know—­kinda boring.” She says this while examining a bottle of gin. “I’m a little low on provisions. No more vodka, and no more decent scotch. But I’ve got some Gordon’s and some Lejon extra-­dry vermouth. I could make us martinis if you don’t mind drinking them without olives. Oh! Wait!” She spots it. “There’s that bottle of Four Roses you and your huzz-­band brought over last month.” She never misses a chance to razz Aaron, even when he’ s not there to score against.

Rachel sits carefully on the sofa. “I remember it. That was the night Aaron got his elbow caught in the subway door.”

Naomi laughs as she unstops the bottle of bourbon. “And kvetched about it the whole fucking time if I recall.” She pours out two measures neat and ferries them over. “So! Tell me all about the big night! How was the show?” Naomi wants to know. “Was it hilarious? I read it was hilarious.”

“Ah. Um. We ended up seeing something else. Something that was not the Pajama Game. And it wasn’t very funny.”

“Oh? Well, that’s too bad. Did the shtoomer fuck things up? Forget to bring the tickets or something? He must have,” she insists.

Rachel changes the topic. “I’m sorry it took me so long to return your dress,” she tells her sister-­in-­law.

“Forget it. Nobody’s taking me to a Broadway show anytime soon,” Naomi says and swallows whiskey.

“Really? I thought… Isn’t there the law student?”

“Y-­y-­yeah,” Naomi answers evasively, “but jazz clubs are more his speed. Which reminds me. Are you and Aaron…” she starts to say but then stops and starts the sentence again. For an instant, Rachel fears that she’s going to ask, Are you and Aaron having trouble? But what she says is “Are you two still planning on coming over on Saturday night?”

“Saturday?” Has she forgotten something again? Plans she agreed to inadvertently, while not really listening? It happens. It’s how she once ended up suffering through a matinee of The Girl in Pink Tights with Leo Blume’s first wife, Muriel. “I suppose we are,” Rachel replies too tentatively.

“Oh, so Aaron didn’t mention it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he did. It’s been a very exhausting week. He’s been closing at the restaurant almost every night.”

“Well, then. Just in case Mr. Big got too busy to remember. You and he are invited for dinner this Saturday night for the new specialty of the house: chicken Kiev and asparagus in remoulade sauce.”

“Okay. Well. That sounds wonderful,” Rachel tells her, because it does. But there’s something behind her sister-­in-­law’s voice. Something hidden.

Naomi kills her whiskey. “So, darling, you wanna see what I was working on when you knocked?”

“You mean in your darkroom?” Rachel asks. She is slightly surprised. Her sister-­in-­law has always been resistant to opening her darkroom to those she deems “civilians.”

“Why the hell not? I could use an artist’s eyeball for a change. Just don’t get your hopes up,” she warns. “’Cause great art it’s not.”

Printmaking in the red glow of the darkroom is a cramped business. “I’m trying to put together a new portfolio,” Naomi is explaining. “Something other than shots of Swanson’s frozen dinners, and I’m bored with most of my old Village stuff.”

Images emerge on Kodak paper soaked in a bath of developing fluid. From a white surface to a gray ghost, to a sharp contrast of light and shadow. It’s a shot of a park bench lined with Naomi’s alter kockers. Old men dotting the benches.

“It’s magic,” Rachel says. “A blank sheet, and then out of nowhere, a picture.”

“It is magic. You’re right,” Naomi agrees. “It still feels like that even to me.”

She removes the print by the corners, wearing a pair of rubber gloves, then rinses it in a tray and pins it onto the line where it hangs drying with a number of others. Paper curls on the line. The old men smoke, drowse over Yiddish newspapers, some just sitting in the sun or in the shade because that’s their life now.

“These are wonderful, Naomi.”

“You think so? I’m not so sure. Old farts on park benches? Pretty kitschy.”

Rachel disagrees. “No, no. Not these. You can—­you can feel the weight of the years they’re carrying.” She smiles. Is it nostalgia? “I can recall the Orthodox men with their long beards gathering outside the cafés in the Grenadier Strasse. This was in Berlin. The Scheunenviertel, uh—­the ‘Barn Quarter’ I should say. It was called so because long before, it was used as sheds for cows. But the men? I was only a child, but they looked so ancient.” So strange and exotic, she explains, with their dangling side curls and their great fur hats. The Ostjuden from the shtetlakh. “Most were destitute. As poor as the dirt under their feet. I remember the very sour aroma of salted fish perfuming the streets.”

The horse dung, the musty smell of browning cabbages and damp potatoes piled high in the carts of the vegetable stands. The Ostjuden orthodoxy in their beaver-­skin hats and airless black kaftans, sweating into their beards. Dangling payot, fringed tallitot. They were the first to feel the brunt of the anti-­Semitic pogrom, years even before the Nazis arrived, and the first to be stripped of German citizenship under Hitler.

“Most Jews in Berlin?” says Rachel. “They regarded the quarter as a kind of plague town and the inhabitants as the sweepings of the Pale of Settlement. Certainly my mother did. It was they who were to blame for the ugly, hooked-­nose caricatures in Der Stürmer. That was the common thinking. But I thought they were beautiful,” says Rachel. “Such faces. As if God had modeled them from the original clay.”

There’s a beat of soft silence before Naomi speaks, sounding quietly surprised. “I’ve never heard you talk about…” What shall she call it? “About your past,” she says.

Rachel shrugs it away. “What is the point? The city I was born to is gone. Ground to dust. And the Ostjuden? The crematoria took them. They’re all at the bottom of the ash pits now.” Eingeäschert. And now the silence in the tiny darkroom has gone morose. It’s the trap of her past. “I’m sorry,” Rachel apologizes. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was morbid.” She wipes the dampness from her eyes.

“No, no, it’s all right. Really,” her sister-­in-­law insists. “There’s so much I don’t know.” This sounds like a small confession on Naomi’s part. An American Jew with blank spots on the map of Europe where the Jews once lived and died. But Rachel isn’t interested in teaching history. She offers a flimsy smile.

“You can be glad over that,” she says. “Knowing too much is not so pleasant. So. Show me. What else?” Pushing up a smile, nodding her chin to the developing bins.

“Oh. Okay, sure,” her sister-­in-­law agrees, probably just as happy to be changing the subject. “There’re a couple more.”

The rectangles of light-­sensitive paper are submerged, and images float to the top. Thickening shadows evolve into more alter kockers. More pigeons, more mothers pushing prams down the sidewalk, kids trailing.

And then truth emerges.

A sleek young man maintains a certain élégance d’attitude even as he is seated on the weathered park bench among the pigeons and hopping squirrels.

“That’s David Glass,” Rachel declares, a note of trouble in her voice.

“Who?” Naomi asks, but Rachel does not answer.

The young Mr. Glass sits politely attentive as any wolf of the steppes, listening to an old scarecrow of a man beside him. Friedrich Landau was the name once engraved on his calling card in Berlin. Though Rachel has always known him simply as Feter Fritz.

“Is something wrong?” she hears Naomi inquiring, with a light note of concern, and shakes herself free of the photo.

“No,” she says, bringing up a flat smile. “No. Just a headache. It must be the whiskey. I hardly ever touch it.”

“Could be inhaling the emulsion fluid too. We should get you out of here. Sometimes the silver nitrate gives people headaches.”

“Yes,” Rachel agrees, feeling gutted. “Yes, that could be it too.”

On her way back to the subway, she stops at a pay phone and rings up Feter Fritz. Le conspirateur. The pay phone rings until one of the other tenants picks it up. A man. Has he seen Mr. Landau today? No? No, not all morning, sorry. She hangs up. She thinks she could get on the train and head for the Lower East Side. She could track him down, her feter. Grill him. Isn’t that what it’s called in the detective movies? Give him the third degree. What scheme were you hatching? What bargain were you sealing? Talk!

But does she forget? He is the master of prevarication, Feter Fritz. The maven of obfuscation, of half-truths and full lies.

Was I sitting on a park bench conspiring with the likes of David Glass? Oh, yes. And later on, I had coffee and a bun with Albert Einstein.

She would never get a straight story from him. Ever. So she will wait.

Sitting at home on the windowsill. She has shoved up the sash to free Kibbitz from the apartment, but now she sits there, the chilly air washing over her, smoking a juju, a parting gift from her sister-­in-­law. “Dope!” Naomi calls it. Better than aspirin! Better than Miltown! Smoking a little reefer. That’s Naomi’s prescription. It smells to Rachel like the sour weed from a poor man’s pipe.

Sitting on the edge of the window like she’s sitting on the edge of the world, Rachel feels a lift. She will not worry. She will wait. She will wait and be watchful for the truth of her uncle’s subterfuge to emerge. She knows that if Feter Fritz has a fatal flaw, it is that his ego will not permit him to keep silent. Eventually, he will confess his intrigues in order to boast of them.

She takes another puff, and her thoughts follow the smoke out into the infinite air.