Shadows of Berlin

17.

A Jew from Flatbush

He inspects the nose-­hair situation by examining the reflection of his inner nostrils. Funny how he can remember his pop doing the same thing. He sees the old man there in the mirror, staring back at him from his own reflection.

“Com’ere,” he hears Pop command, in that flat summoning tone that always signals trouble, motioning him over to the cash register. He can tell what’s coming next, the whack on the side of the head, but he obeys anyway and absorbs the whack when it comes. The whack that’s not supposed to punish him but just knock some sense into his kop. “Look at this,” his father instructs. “How many times I gotta tell you, huh? You don’t mix the ten-­dollar bills in with the twenties, okay? How many times?” he wants to know. “It makes you look like you’re stealing.”

This shocks Aaron. Stealing? “How, Pop?”

“Never mind. It does is all,” his father assures him firmly, placing the ten in its proper spot in the cash drawer. “I’m trying to teach you something, Aaron,” he explains with a frown. His face is set in a serious affect, trying to get through to this domkop son of his. Trying as hard as he can. “I’m trying to teach you something,” he repeats. “There are two kinds of people in the world. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, I’m listening to you, Pop.”

“There are two kinds of people in the world,” his father explains. “Those people who don’t care if they do it wrong and those who work hard to do it right. Now which kind should a man be?” he asks, his voice muted but demanding.

Now, two decades later, Aaron stands in front of the bathroom mirror. He has never veered from his answer. The man who works hard is the man who does it right. It’s the man he will be. Must be. That much is chiseled in goddamned stone. But sometimes he wonders why. Sometimes he wonders what’s the point, ya’ know? To work and to die and to leave what behind? His pop left him behind when the old man’s heart burst an artery.

Standing behind the counter punching the keys on that holy cash register he was so damned proud about. The R.P.P.C. Cash Register from Burl & Kenny on Atlantic Avenue. Leased, not owned! But that was top secret information. God, how Pop worshipped that thing. It was his tabernacle. Not because he gave a shit about money, ’cause, really, everybody knew that money was like water running through his fingers. He never learned how to hold on to it. Mr. Generosity. Mr. Soft Touch to the whole fucking neighborhood. But that machine was a sacred talisman of menschenschaft. The orderly cash drawer was the sign of the orderly mind. The orderly soul. The ethical soul. It showed that he was somebody. A man who ran a cash register out of his own business, made his own buck, was a cut above.

But after he died, the guys from Burl & Kenny came and carted it off, and what was left? So they buried another mensch in Washington Cemetery off the Bay Parkway. So what? What was left of Pop? Only his children? A son, a daughter. A blessed memory to his wife. What else? Nothing else. I’m trying to teach you something, Aaron. So when it’s Aaron’s time to be planted in the ground, what will he be leaving behind? A shadow? Shadows don’t last, but maybe that’ll be it. Maybe a shadow on the ground, on a wall, on a door is the only mark he’s ever gonna make.

On his first day back in New York after the army, he’d stepped out into the cathedral concourse of Grand Central and felt the buzzing crowds sucking him in. Like he could step into the throng of people zigzagging though the station and be borne anywhere. Swept up into a vast, bustling chaos, and God knows where he would end up! Over the moon maybe. He’s spent the prime of his life in the service. And now he was twenty-­three years old, standing there with his duffel bag beside him, kitted out in his khaki service dress. Technical Sergeant Aaron S. Perlman, Serial No. 47 412 997. Tie tucked into his uniform blouse, garrison cap at a slight angle on his head.

He’d been shipped from California to Fort Sam Houston in Texas to be mustered out after serving the standard duration plus six. Like a million other schmoes, he’d been drafted in ’43, but lucky him, he’s never seen a minute of combat. A lot of the men from basic ended up in some desert death trap in North Africa, but Aaron had spent the war as a quartermaster sergeant battling U.S.O. caterers in Culver City.

Now he was back home. Back home to New York, standing on the precipice of the Greatest Fucking City in the World. He lights one of his issue Lucky Strikes. Even the smoke is sucked into the swirling, gorgeous pandemonium of destinations.

But in this giant world, where is he going next? To the most constricting address in the world is his answer: 360 Webster Avenue in Flatbush.

Home.

1950

The year they marry at Brooklyn City Hall is the year that the Knesset passes a resolution that Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel. It is the year that Alger Hiss is sentenced to prison for perjury and that a senator named McCarthy announces that the State Department is home to 205 Communists. Not 204, not 206. It is the year that the Kingdom of Jordan annexes the West Bank, that President Truman sends American troops to defend South Korea from the North. A gallon of gas costs about twenty-seven cents and three cans of Campbell’s pork and beans costs a quarter. They honeymoon for six days in the Poconos at the Paradise Resort Hotel, where Aaron steps in poison ivy and blows up with toxins. It is also in this momentous year that Aaron takes his bride, the younger Mrs. Perlman, to the home of his mother, the elder Mrs. Perlman, to celebrate their first Seder together as wife and husband. Husband and wife.

It’s an hour’s trip on the bustling Sixth Avenue Local. Crossing under the river, the train thumps through the tunnel’s heat, and Rachel lets herself be bobbled by its rhythm. Finally, at Eighteenth Avenue, they get out and walk ten minutes. It’s not the first time Rachel has visited the house on Webster Avenue where Aaron spent his childhood. There have been suppers, there have been drop-­bys on their way back from Coney Island on the B.M.T., smelling of sea salt and suntan oil. (Well, look who got some color!) Drop-­ins to pick up this or that item for “setting up housekeeping” as his mother always calls it. The old vacuum cleaner from the synagogue. (It still works! Why buy a new one?) The oscillating electric fan and the brass floor lamp. The kitchen gadgets that Aaron bought for Mother’s Day but that his mother never bothers with. (You should just take them, dear. Make them useful.)

But this is their first holiday gathering. The house is one in a row of functional, well-­kept, two-­story brick or wood-­frame dwellings with shingled porches and small grassy patches of yard that form a fringe against the sidewalk. Trees shade the street at uneven intervals, but otherwise the sun brightens the springtime greening and shrinks the shadows under the porch roofs.

“God knows she’s been cleaning like a maniac since Purim,” Aaron advises Rachel. Still outside as they are heading for the front door. “You won’t find a particle of schmutz for fifty miles in any direction,” he says, “so mention how spotless the house looks, and you’ll be in like Flynn.”

At the door, a mezuzah. Nothing too fancy. A functional little brass casket inscribed with the holy seal of God. Aaron performs his usual tap-­and-­kiss routine and doesn’t notice that his wife breaches the barrier without any such gesture. He is already busy announcing their arrival in his favorite singsongy Yiddish bubbe’s voice, thick with diphthongs. “Halloo! Cherished mishpocha peoples! Guess who it is come from the big city!”

Inside, the sun’s bright edge fades as it’s filtered through the drapes. A homey, murky veil of daylight hues color the living room. The house is small on the inside but appears content with its crowd of bulky furnishings. The armchairs and living room couch are comfortably padded but not voluptuously so. The bureaus and tables are thick, dark mahogany. The rugs on the floor vacuumed half to death. The air pungent with the deeply simmering aroma of chicken soup and matzah balls.

“So, Ma, I see you took the slipcover off the sofa,” Aaron calls to his mother in the kitchen, then turns to Rachel and takes her jacket. “You must be very special,” he says. “She never does that. I’m serious. The Prophet Elijah could actually walk through the front door, and she wouldn’t take the slipcovers off the sofa for him.”

“What a fresh-­mouthed boy I’ve raised,” his mother declares as she walks in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She is a thin, diminutive woman dressed in a pale-­green sweater and black hostess skirt. The green of the sweater is obviously chosen to highlight the green in her eyes. She is a woman who must have been beautiful in her youth and has become handsome with middle age. Her hair is a dark chestnut like her daughter’s with threads of silver. “Hello, troublemaker,” she says affectionately to her son.

“Hi, Ma,” he answers with a boyish smugness and gives his mother a confident peck, still his mother’s boy who gets away with the moon and the stars.

“And hello, darling,” she says to Rachel and plants a motherly kiss on her cheek.

“Hello, Mrs. Perlman,” Rachel replies.

“Please, so formal. Call me Miriam. I keep telling her, Aaron,” she complains with a smile. “We’re family now,” she says, and there’s only a small hint of like it or don’t in her voice as she says it.

“Miriam,” Rachel repeats. “Your house is so nice and so well kept.”

Miriam glances around the room, just to confirm that this is true. “Well, thank you, dear.” She lifts her eyebrows with approval to Aaron. “Such a courteous thing,” she commends him. “Now if only your sister could learn how to be so polite. But of course, her father, may he rest, took care of that. There was nothing I could do,” she confides wearily to Rachel. “She was always her poppa’s pet, and he let her get away with bloody murder.”

“Why, thank you, Mother,” Naomi announces as she enters from the kitchen, without an apron but with a goblet of wine. “I see you don’t waste any time, do you?”

“Oh, Gawd, Naomi,” the woman squawks. “I see you don’t waste any time either. You’re into the wine already?”

“Relax, Ma,” Aaron injects magnanimously. “We’ve all gotta drink four cups, right? Don’t have a stroke.”

“Thank you, shtoomer,” Naomi replies with acidic gratitude. Then gives Rachel a sisterly smack. “Poor girl. To think you’re married to him now.”

“Will you lay off, please?” Aaron instructs his sister amiably enough. “Rachel’s not like you. She doesn’t have the hide of a rhinoceros. And speaking of rhinoceri, where’s the boyfriend, Mr. Hockey Player?” he asks.

“His name is Roger, as I’m sure you’re aware, and he couldn’t come. It’s his weekend with his kids for the month.”

Miriam huffs out a thick sigh of disapproval the size of a billboard.

“What, Ma?”

“Nothing. I just still can’t believe, Chella, that my daughter is seeing a divorced man.”

“And don’t forget, Ma,” Aaron chimes in helpfully. “He’s also a goy.”

“Don’t get me started.” His mother frowns.

“Ma. This isn’t Budapest,” Naomi points out. “Things are different in America.”

“Well, I was born in America too, Missy, and I have news for you. If I had ever stepped out with a man who’d left his wife of twenty-­two years to futz around with me, I would have been shipped off to Budapest on the next boat!”

“I told you, Ma, Roger’s marriage was over before we even met.”

“Never mind. I don’t want to hear it,” Miriam commands. “I’m only glad your father didn’t live to see the day. It would have killed him.” The doorbell rings and punctures the argument. “Go. Answer the door like a person, will you?” Miriam commands her daughter. “It’s probably Bubbe and Zaydi.”

“Oh God,” Naomi groans dully, but she trudges off in the direction of the door. “If Bubbe pinches my cheek, I’m gonna lose it, Ma. I swear it.”

“Mind your manners!” her mother instructs her in a loud, routine scold, then turns to Rachel, eyebrows arched over her cat’s eyes. “Rachel, honey,” Miriam says. “How about you come into the kitchen to help me finish up?”

“Of course,” Rachel agrees.

In the kitchen, a table knife in Rachel’s hand, she scrapes butter across the brittle unleavened surface of the matzah crackers. The bread of slavery, the bread of freedom. Miriam likes them buttered and stacked on the plate catty-corner so that they form the angles of the Magen David. Meanwhile, the woman is peeling her hard-­boiled eggs. “So you’d tell me, right?” she asks.

A half glance. “Tell you?”

“Yeah. You’d tell me. If there was any news.”

Rachel scrapes the knife. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean. News of what?”

“News,” Miriam repeats with a bit of added force. Maybe it’s that her daughter-­in-­law is simpleminded. “I mean you and Aaron have been married for how long now?”

“Seven months.”

“Okay. Well, I was just asking, ya know?” She rolls the egg against the cutting board, fracturing it, then peels the shell away from the glossy egg meat. “I thought you might have some news.”

Finally, Rachel gets it. She breathes in and then out as she butters. “Oh. No. No news.”

“Well,” Miriam says with a smidge of a frown. “I suppose things are different today,” she says. “Nobody’s in a hurry.”

The table is set with her mother-­in-­law’s finest. The Paragon china with floral sprays. The Royal Danish sterling and Lenox crystal. The delicate lace table linen that was a wedding gift from Miriam’s mother, may her memory be a blessing. And beside every neatly arranged place setting is a thin yellow-­and-­burgundy paper booklet from the grocery store with pages numbered back to front.

Her husband and sister-­in-­law refer to them with wry affection as the Maxwell House Haggadahs. A publication available to every Jewish housewife for free at the Foster Avenue grocery and every other grocery across the land that stocks matzah and gefilte fish. Rachel’s is pristine. Picked up new for the occasion of her introduction to the family Seder table. A hammered steel emblem is printed on the cover. Deluxe Edition Passover Haggadah in English and Hebrew, Compliments of the Coffees of Maxwell House, Kosher for Passover. But the other copies have obviously been exhausted by the years. Dog-­eared and stained, both Naomi’s and Aaron’s are mottled with childhood wine spills and have been thumbed halfway to rags. “Ma, do ya think you might pick up a couple of new ones for us at some point?” Aaron says. “The pages are falling out.” But Rachel can tell that he’s not really complaining.

“New? These are the ones with history,” his mother insists. “Your whole childhood is in them practically. You want new? Go to the Ornsteins. They got everything new there. Okay! Calling all cars,” she broadcasts from the kitchen. “Everybody who hasn’t should go wash up so we can sit down.”

The table could stand to be a little longer. What with Bubbe and Zaydi Perlman, Great Uncle Meyer with his enormous belly, Aunt Deenah and her husband, Walt, who owns the bakery on Ditmas Avenue, neither of whom anyone could mistake for thin, Uncle Hyram grown fat in the scrap iron business, plus the cousins from Parsippany, whose names Rachel has forgotten, their twin boys, whom Naomi calls Leopold and Loeb, their sullen teenaged girl who must be the tallest girl in her class, and the chair reserved for the Prophet Elijah, remembered for good. With the entire balibt mishpocha seated, they’re a little crowded, so it’s just as well that Naomi’s goy stayed on the Upper East Side with his kids. Otherwise, they would have had to suspend him from the glass bowl chandelier. This is the joke Aaron must make, because he’s the funny one.

Rachel feels, she must admit, a little hemmed in. A little trapped. Once she and Eema hid out from the Gestapo in a closet in Moabit after an SS crackdown during the race to call Berlin “Judenfrei.” She could see the Stapo men’s shadows pass by in the line of light from under the door. Hear the creak of the floorboards under their shoes. When she and Eema survived that ordeal, it felt like such a miracle. The Finger of God! They celebrated the Seder for the first time in years. Also for the last time. The two of them together in an attic of a bomb-­damaged building with a rabbi’s son, creating their Seder out of nothing. A precious egg. A bit of horseradish and green onion. A scrap of chicken bone. A bottle of kosher wine gone sour.

Then, it had felt like a victory. The Nazis thought they were winning their war against the Jews? They thought they were obliterating all things Jewish? They wanted to declare Berlin “Jew-­free,” but how wrong they were, because here were three Jews at the Seder table! Reciting the ancient blessings, singing the verses of history, alive, still keeping faith, still remembering the struggle against bondage as the angel of death stalked Pharaoh’s streets.

But now, at the table on Webster Avenue in Flatbush, Rachel feels like a stranger. If Elijah stepped through the open door with his scrolls and mantle, would he politely inquire exactly what she was doing here, sweetness? Rachel thinks of her eema’s blessing over the candles as she lit them in that bomb-­wrecked hiding place, her recitation of the Shehecheyanu, how practiced and poised. Bubbe Perlman’s blessing isn’t exactly as graceful, but she spits out her Hebrew without hesitation as she lights the candles, like some ancient gristle she’s been chewing for years. Bubbe Perlman, hands gnarled and purple, her spine bent. Her glasses are as thick as cake icing, but the golden tears of flame dancing on the candle wicks shine in her lenses.

The Seder plate is the antique pewter that Miriam’s great-­grandmother bundled across the Atlantic from the old country. Rachel’s mother-­in-­law places it in front of Aaron, who’s standing with stiff authority at the head of the table, wearing a black silk yarmulke. It’s so odd for Rachel to see him like this as he pours the wine from the silver pitcher, Aaron assuming his father’s presence. The white sleeves, the narrow black necktie. The stern concentration as he recites the Kiddush, the brightly polished chalice raised a careful nine inches from the table.

Her mother had a chalice that came from her husband’s side of the family, the artistry of a Berlin silversmith dating back to Bismarck. A gleaming relief of the ancient city of Jerusalem, the Temple of Solomon at its pinnacle. Gone now, of course. Lost. Temple and chalice melted down in the furnace of history.

Rachel breathes in and stares at her husband. Where did Aaron’s yarmulke come from? Was it the same one he wore for his bar mitzvah? Has Miriam kept it in a drawer ever since, along with a lock of his baby curls? Rachel is nearly positive that Aaron doesn’t have one at home. She puts his socks and boxer shorts away and has never come across anything of the kind.

She licks her lips and craves a cigarette. What would her own mother think of the people of Aaron’s family? Would she think them gauche? Vulgar? Gemeinbürgerlich? Or what would Eema’s beloved grandfather think? An observant man, Eema’s saba, come from a world of solemn worship, ritual baths, the separation of the women from the men. Come from generations of those who would not round the corners of their heads and who actively mourned the destruction of the Temple. Those who listened to the tinkling bells of the Torah crowns and yearned for the Messiah.

Would he, if he were to stand up from his grave, even recognize these Americans as Jews? Could he identify Cousin Sheila, who’s training as a beautician in Long Island, or her husband who sells refrigerators and washer-­dryers, as members of God’s Chosen? Does Uncle Hyram study the Holy Book at night after he comes home from the scrap-­yard office, or does he light a cigar and turn on People Are Funny? But then, speaking of judgment, how would she explain herself? Or her eema for that matter? Artists, Saba. We are artists. You see? With the paint? With the canvas? Nit! It’s not debauchery. It’s art! Kunst, Saba! Azoy zeyer sheyn!

As the basin is passed for the Urchatz on Webster Avenue, Rachel notes that her eema has slipped into Elijah’s chair in her camp rags and is dunking her filthy fingers into the water, leaving it oily with death. But the daughter says nothing, keeping her mother’s secret. The truth is she’s happy to see her. The truth is she’s envious of all the cranks and colorful oddballs of Aaron’s family. The quarreling and long-­standing bickering, chiseling away at everybody’s nerves. The despair that the people you love will never understand you. The bitter root, the sacrifice and mourning, the bondage of family. The hard edges and soft tugs, the ugly bigotries, and the sudden flares of laughter. She envies all this. The shared history of family blood. The unspoken knowledge of the family heart. A togetherness that is more than a simple congregation around a table. It walks you home. It tangles your dreams as you sleep. It glues you into one piece.

She knows that they are doing their best, their very best to treat the little refugee from cindered Europa like a member of the clan. Bubbe Perlman worries over her, clucking tearfully through the agenda of tragedy that tags along with Rachel as she hugs Rachel’s shoulder to her old bony body. Zaydi Perlman offers her the nice chair, bowing to the sheyne kleyne khlh. The lovely little bride. Even Uncle Lou, who can only grouse over those goddamned Puerto Rican kids soaping his windshield and how the Internal Revenue Service is robbing him goddamned blind—­even he wants to know how married life is treating her. But her sense of family has been shattered. She can only press her nose against the glass and peer through. She is a specimen from a blackened planet. Alone at this table, except for the shadows that cling to her.

After it’s over, after the candles have been extinguished and the plates cleared, Rachel is in the kitchen with her mother-­in-­law, helping with the dishes. Miriam washes, Rachel dries as in comes Aaron searching for a bottle of Ballantine in the fridge. “Scusi, scusi,” he announces with a fake Italian accent.

“So who’s that one for?” his mother wants to know, keeping track.

“Uncle Meyer,” he answers, popping off the cap with the opener hanging from a hook.

“I see,” says Miriam. “So if it’s for Uncle Meyer, why is it my son who’s drinking it?”

Aaron belches casually after swallowing the slug of beer and leans against the refrigerator door. “’Cause I’m his beer taster, Ma. You know how upset he gets if his beer’s too hoppy. So did she tell you?”

A glance. “Tell me what, smart aleck?”

“There’s this woman who sold a painting.”

Rachel feels a furious burn rise in her cheeks. “Aaron.”

“What? Nobody should know?” Aaron shrugs. “Somebody buys your painting? It’s good news, isn’t it? She had like an exhibition at this gallery,” he announces. “It was even in the newspaper.”

“The newspaper?” Miriam echoes.

“Yeah. Didn’t you send Ma the clipping?” he’s asking Rachel but then turns back to his mother. “I told her to send you the clipping.”

“I must have forgotten,” Rachel decides. “Besides, it was only the Post.”

“Hey. A newspaper’s a newspaper,” Aaron assures her, but all Rachel can hear him say is, Look what my wife can do! Such tricks she can perform!

“It wasn’t even much of a gallery,” she says. “Just a place on Tenth Street where for five dollars, you can pay for a little space on a wall.”

“Hey. It was a good enough gallery to sell a painting, okay?”

Miriam slants a glance at her son, not Rachel. “So what’s the painting, dear?” her mother-­in-­law asks her.

Aaron answers for her, helpfully. “Well, it’s a kind of—­you know.” Another shrug, turning to his wife. “I don’t know, honey. How would you describe it?”

“How?”

“Yeah, uh. It’s kinda like. I don’t know. Kinda spooky looking.”

“I painted a ghost,” Rachel admits.

“Really? A ghost? Of whom?” Miriam wonders. “Like a special ghost? What’s the name of that ghost in the story for Christmas?”

“Just a ghost,” Rachel lies.

“A hundred bucks she’s made so far,” Aaron injects eagerly. “And that just for the first one. The guy from the gallery’s interested in more.”

“A hundred dollars?” Miriam says. Impressed or skeptical? “For a picture of a ghost.”

“People pay money for art, Ma. That how the art business works,” Aaron says as if he needs to explain it so his mother will understand. “The buyer’s making an investment. He pays a hundred bucks now, but in ten years or whatever, who knows what it’ll be worth.”

“I get it,” his mother tells him.

“Like when Pop bought those Liberty Head silver dollars.”

“I said I get it, Aaron,” his mother informs him with quiet menace.

Aaron blanches slightly and must steal another swig of his uncle’s beer. “Okay. So now you know. Great. I was just saying.”

“Well,” the woman says to Rachel, “that must be some kind of thing, sweetheart.”

Rachel dries another dish with the hand towel and places it atop the stack on the counter. A pause. A clink of a dish as it’s soaped.

“It was my mother,” Rachel suddenly announces.

Another pause as this sinks in.

“The ghost. It was my mother as I imagined her after she went to the gas.”

When Rachel looks up, she sees that both Aaron and his mother appear deflated. Quite literally as if the air has been let out of them. Miriam gazes at her with those blank cat eyes for a moment. And then when she speaks, all the scold, all the challenge, all the archness has been displaced from her voice. Instead, she sounds uncomfortably perplexed. “And that’s something you want people to see, hon?” she has to wonder.

At which point Naomi enters the kitchen.

“So what’s going on?” she asks, eyes flicking from face to face.

Aaron blinks, sounds vaguely defensive. “Whattaya mean, what’s going on?”

“Well, what I mean is you went to get Uncle Meyer a beer like a year and a half ago and never came back.”

“I got carried away by little green men,” Aaron answers bleakly. “Here,” he says, going into the fridge for another Ballantine. “Give him this one.”

“Too late for that,” says Naomi, grabbing the opener and snapping off the cap for herself. “He’s already conked out on the couch, snoring like a pardon-­my-­French freight train.”

On the way home, sitting on the subway, Aaron finally says it: “You never said before. About the painting. I mean, about who the ghost thing was supposed to be or the other stuff.” By this, he means the gas chamber. His voice is neutral, but she can tell that underneath, there is a tint of irritation that he was ambushed by her pronouncement in his mother’s kitchen. That he was embarrassed for her and for him both.

“I never said because you never asked,” she replies.

“Never asked? Well, of course I never asked. I’m a Jew from Flatbush. What the hell do I know about art? You painted a picture, so I figured, okay—­maybe it looks a little creepy but it’s supposed to, right? You said it was a ghost.”

“Did I offend her? Your mother?” Rachel wants to know.

“Offend her? No. Terrify her? Kinda sort of.”

“I should keep my mouth shut,” says Rachel.

“No,” her husband disagrees. But only kinda sort of. “You don’t need to do that. Just…I dunno. Prepare a person for what’s coming maybe.”

Rachel nods. “I should keep my mouth shut,” she says.