Shadows of Berlin

22.

The World Is Stupid

Whose idea was it to go to a bar for a drink? Tyrell’s or hers? Didn’t Tyrell say, “How ’bout a quick beer?” Yes. Rachel thinks so. And she had accepted, without thought, during the elation of his lightning victory over the grand master. If ever there had been an example of the word Blitzkrieg in the world of chess, that game had been it, she thinks. Blitzkrieg in Washington Square! So it must have been his idea to go for the beer. She was simply happy to accept. Then, walking west on Washington Place, she had started noting the glances. Quick, sidelong assessments, up and down, back and forth, from the eyes of fellow New Yorkers. Nothing spoken aloud, of course. Not even a frown. But the eyes snagging them like they were hooks. A Black man, a white woman.

Tyrell seemed oblivious to it. He was suddenly talkative. She had encouraged him to tell her about the game, how it had played out in his head, and he seemed, in fact, not to need much encouragement. “You know, I could see it,” he tells her. “Yaakov’s trap—­classic Italian game, ’cause the man likes it quiet. But I could suddenly see it, six, maybe seven moves out.”

When they cross West Fourth, a middle-­aged couple passes by them from the opposite direction, and the quick probe of their eyes appears synchronized. Tyrell, however, doesn’t even blink. Maybe it’s that he is so accustomed to ignoring that kind of snap-­judgment glance from people. A Black man, a white sidewalk.

There are no signs over any of the entrances to this bar. An upshot, he says, of its early days as a speakeasy. And the feeling now is that if you don’t know how to get in, maybe you don’t belong there.

Exclusive, she says.

He shrugs. But it’s clear to her that he likes the idea of getting into an exclusive joint. Of an outsider belonging. He takes her into a courtyard and through an unobtrusive door. The Garden Door he calls it. Inside, the place is crowded with tables but not many patrons. “We’re early,” he tells her. “It’s usually packed in here.” And she can’t tell whether he’s disappointed or relieved.

“Grab a table,” he says. “I’ll get us a couple of drafts. Uh, you have a preference?”

“No,” she tells him. “You pick.”

She slips into a corner table tucked into a long upholstered banquette and takes out her cigarettes. The lighting is diffuse, intimate. The walls around her are plastered with the dust jackets of famous novels and portraits of famous writers. She lights up as Tyrell returns with two tall glasses.

He raises his beer as the foam sinks to the bottom in a stream of bubbles. “Cheers,” he offers.

She raises her glass to meet the salute. “To the victor of Washington Square,” she toasts, and Tyrell smiles in a modestly dignified way. He really is an excessively handsome man, this Mr. Williams. It’s easy to see why Naomi is so crazy for him. But when Rachel tries to coax more about the game from him—­How long have you been playing chess, Mr. Williams?—­something has changed. Their connection has become more stilted, more self-­conscious.

He shrugs and tells her how he first learned the game from his stepdad when he was six. He grins as he recalls the first time he beat the man. How his stepdad didn’t speak to him for days, but then how Tyrell would spy him studying the chess books after supper, and finally the chess board came back out. “You’re black.” He imitates his stepdad’s gruff voice. “And I thought—­‘Well, I believe I know that by now, Pap.’” He laughs at the story, and so does Rachel. But something has definitely changed. For both of them. Sharing this booth, separated by beer glasses, suddenly words don’t seem to come so easily. She inhales smoke and glances up at the rafter beams lined with framed book covers.

“You like this place,” she says.

“Yeah, I guess it holds its appeal for me. I read all the time growing up. For a minute or two, when I was in high school, I even thought maybe I’d like to be a writer.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Sent out some stories to some magazines. But, you know, they were all about growing up back in Chisolm,” he says. “In any case, stories about Negroes from the neighborhood were not at the top of the list for publication,” he says, and then he smiles without mirth. “Or maybe I just stank at writing. That could be true too.”‘ He shifts the concentration toward her. “So. You’re an artist, I hear. A painter.”

“That is what you hear?”

“Naomi says you’re very talented.”

“Naomi likes encouraging people.”

“Yes,” he must admit with half a smile as he pulls his pack of Chelseas from his shirt pocket. “She does at that.” He lights up and then there’s that silence again, awkward and gawky, separating them and yet coiled with its own brand of urgings. “Do you feel uncomfortable?” he asks her.

“Uncomfortable?”

“Sitting here in public. Sharing a booth with a Black man.”

“No. I simply feel uncomfortable in the world. The oysvurf.”

“More Yiddish,” he half smiles tolerantly. “What’s that one mean?”

“Like an autseyder, only worse. An outcast. An oysvurf is a person with a dead soul.”

Tyrell looks concerned at this. He doesn’t say anything, but what can someone say to that? And why did she say it in the first place? Maybe it’s the beer. The beer she is drinking has hit her. Not like a hammer, but it’s hit her. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that it’s mugged her. A popular word. It’s given her a quick punch in the head and robbed her of her ability to properly defend herself against the world. She lights another cigarette, only to have Tyrell point out that she’s got one burning in the ashtray.

The tables are filling in around them, and a comfortable grumble of conversation floats in with the growing cloud of cigarette smoke. She feels her mouth loosen. She’s talking. Talking and talking, she can hear her own voice as if she’s listening in from the next room. Eavesdropping on herself. What’s more, she seems to be speaking any words that come to mind. Her eema. The greasy smell of oil paint. The solid wall of a white canvas. The Magen David slopped on across a bakery window in Berlin. The foggy existence of their U-­boat days. The hiding places. The deprivation, the fear. The necessity of remaining invisible.

“So I have compulsions,” she tells him. “For instance, I steal bread from the table. I must have a light burning to fall asleep,” she says and looks at Tyrell, who is wearing an expression of quiet pity. “Don’t look at me that way,” Rachel tells him.

His expression does not change. “What way?”

“With pity. I hate pity. Not because I am too proud, but because I love it too much. Forget about consuming alcohol,” she tells him and takes a swallow from her draft. “Pity is the superior intoxicant. I can get drunk on people’s pity faster than on any beer. On any wine or whiskey.” And then she says, “I’m sorry that my husband was offensive to you. He’s not a bad man, just fearful.”

Tyrell only shrugs in a small way. “Forget it. It was nothing, really, compared to what I get just walking down the street in Midtown. A Negro man in a suit and tie,” he says. “I’m sure if I was wearing a doorman’s livery or a chauffeur’s cap, it would be dandy. But a nice suit with a nice tie and a solid shine on my shoes? It seems to incense a lot of white folks. Like I think I’m equal with them. Or worse, better than them.”

“You sound embittered,” Rachel observes.

Tyrell smokes. “Hard not to. I fight it, but it’s tough.” He shakes his head. “Maybe I’m not grateful enough for the life I have. My mother tells me I’m not, and she could be right. But what am I supposed to do? Here I am, sitting across from a white woman in a bar. In a place like this? In the Village? Maybe it’s no big deal. But.”

“But?”

“But ask your husband if they’d let a Negro through the front door of the restaurant he manages.”

Now Rachel frowns.

“Oh, maybe if I was Lena Horne, they might, but then only if I was on the arm of Walter Winchell. Otherwise, all the rest of us colored folk gotta enter through the service door, and that’s it.”

Rachel stares. Inhales smoke, then blows it out into a cloud that quickly dissolves.

“I used to think,” he says, “that if I played along, you know? That if I was the good Negro. That if I served my country in the army. That if I went to college. That if I did all the right things to make myself the right kind of Black man, I’d break through. But that just ain’t the case. And that’s what keeps me angry, Mrs. Perlman. The stupidity of it.”

Rachel wonders. “Do you say these things to Naomi?”

“Do I?”

“It’s none of my business.”

“No, but you’re asking anyhow.” He inhales smoke. “Sometimes. Mostly we pretend, though, like it’s not a problem. Like there is no problem. Just like we did during supper that night. And sometimes when we’re together, when it’s just the two of us, I can even believe it.”

Rachel absorbs this and then asks him, “Do you love her?”

“Love?”

“Are you in love with her?”

“Is she in love with me?”

“I don’t know. Is she?”

“She says so,” Tyrell replies.

“But you’re not so sure?”

“I am mistrustful.”

“Of her?”

“Of the word. Of the concept,” he says. “But yes. I think I do. Love her.”

“Good.”

“Is it?” he says. “I wonder.”

“Because she’s white?”

“Because I’m not. Because sometimes I think that our relationship is more about her wanting to shock the people in her world. About thumbing her nose at her childhood. Her family. Her brother.” He expels a cloud of smoke and shrugs. “And I get that. It’s not like my people are too damn pleased about me seeing a white girl either. My aunties like to murder me every time the subject comes up. And it does come up,” he says, his half smile returning. “My old man thinks I’m looking to get lynched. And my sister, Chloe, says that it means I must hate my own race. Or at least that’s how the white man will see it—­as evidence that even Black men think that Negro women aren’t good enough for them.”

“But none of that is true?” Rachel asks.

Tyrell fastens a look on her. “No. I met a woman who makes me feel good. And I wanted to be with her. That she was white?” He says this as if he’s asking a question to the air. To the world. “It didn’t matter. But I don’t imagine…” he says next. “I don’t imagine that we have much of a future. Greenwich Village is a quirky place. But it ain’t the world. And the world is like a hammer always pounding away. Honestly? I’m not sure that I’m strong enough. Or that she’s strong enough. That what we have between us is strong enough to survive the inevitable punishment. I mean, can you picture it?” he asks. “Naomi and me showing up on your mother-­in-­law’s doorstep with a couple babies in the pram?”

“Only if you’re raising them Jewish,” Rachel tells him just to amuse. “And of course, you’d have to convert as well.”

“Oh yeah?” That half smile.

“There are Black Jews. In Abyssinia, I think. Some came once to Berlin when I was a girl. They consider their royal line to be descended directly from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.”

“Well,” Tyrell says, carving a bit of ash from his cigarette on the rim of the ashtray. “I am not Abyssinian, nor to my knowledge am I descended from any kings or queens.” He picks up his glass and downs the rest of his beer, leaving only a web of foam at the bottom. By this point, any ebullience at his victory over Yaakov has dissipated. “I should probably hit the trail,” he decides.

But Rachel feels that she doesn’t want him to go. Sitting here in this bar with him has taken her out of herself in a way that she finds liberating. She feels shielded from the judgment of the world in Tyrell’s presence, regardless of how the world judges them sitting together in this booth. Perhaps that’s why she makes her sudden confession. To keep him here. To keep the small bubble they are sharing intact, at least for a little longer. Or perhaps it is simply her need to confess that Tyrell has triggered. Her desire to purge herself of the shame she carries, one autseyder to another.

“I betrayed a young girl who was in hiding from the Nazis,” she says, spilling out the words. “She was a Jewish girl just like me. And I sent her to her death.”

The sentence separates them and entangles them both, as if she has just dumped a bale of barbed wire on the table. Tyrell’s face is caught in a look of confusion and dread, as if maybe he hasn’t quite heard what he’s just heard. So she repeats herself. “A Jewish girl whom I picked out of a crowd in a café. A schoolgirl. I didn’t know her name. I didn’t know anything about her. Only that I felt, at that instant, as if she was my opponent in a terrible game, and that between us, the loser of the game was going to die.”

Tyrell looks at her as if he is staring into the scene of a disaster. A car wreck. A train wreck. A plane wreck, where there are obviously no survivors.

Rachel comes home to find Aaron not manning the cash register at work like his father but sitting at the kitchen table drinking Ballantines and playing cards with, of all people? Cousin Ezra the Fucknik. “Hey there, buttercream,” her husband greets her.

“What happened?” Rachel asks, hanging up her coat.

Aaron glances away from his cards. “What happened?”

“Why aren’t you at work? Did another water main break?”

“Nope. Milton Berle walked into the joint, and suddenly Leo had to be the man in charge. So I said fuck it, let Uncle Milty deal with him, I’m going home. So I bumped into Ignoramus here, and he begged me to beat him in a couple hands of Michigan rummy.”

“Begged?” says Ezra. “Challenged is more like it.”

Rachel doles out a small kiss on the lips for Aaron and scrapes a chair up beside him. “Either way, it’s more than I can ever do,” she tells Ezra and sorts the cards in her husband’s hand for him. “He never plays cards with me.”

“So why do you taste like a brewery?” Aaron asks.

“I told you.”

“No, don’t think you did.”

“Well, I had a beer today, if that’s a crime. And I don’t taste like a brewery any more than you do. Play your two sixes,” she suggests.

Aaron flops down the cards and slips one from the draw. “I mean, who… Why were you drinking a beer?” And then he says it. “Never mind. Let me guess. Naomi.”

Rachel doesn’t lie; she simply doesn’t correct him.

“Great.” Aaron pulls a frown. “Now my sister is getting my wife schnozzled in the middle of the day.”

“I am not schnozzled,” Rachel replies. “You’ve got a pair of deuces.”

“I can see that I’ve got a pair of deuces, thank you very much.” And she can see that even the mention of Naomi has gotten under her husband’s skin. “I don’t know why she thinks it’s okay to be knocking back a few just whenever the urge strikes her. Shouldn’t she be working?”

“Why are you getting so upset?”

“I’m not getting upset. I just don’t get it. Why can’t Naomi just have a normal life, huh? Just a normal fucking life like everybody else?”

“Hey there, Sergeant Perlman,” Ezra interjects. “Let’s not get stupid over this, okay?” he suggests.

“Mind your own business, Ezra,” Aaron snaps back. “Just for a change of pace.” He stews in silence for a minute, then slaps down the pair of deuces. “Besides. You think I’m the one getting stupid? Of the two of us, who’s down a hundred and twenty points?”

“A hundred and ten,” Ezra corrects. “And I’m letting you win.”

“Yeah? Well, how stupid is that?”

Ezra only shrugs. “Der oylam is a goylem,” he answers. The world is stupid.

Rachel has extracted a cigarette from Aaron’s pack of Luckies and reaches for the green glass ashtray. She lights up from Aaron’s Zippo and peers at his hand again. She has a desire just to be nearer to him. Maybe because she feels guilty for lying to him, or rather not telling him the truth about Tyrell and the beers she drank. But why stir him up again? Let him be mad at Naomi instead of her; he’ll get over it. She should be satisfied to allow the air to settle between them, because what she’s really thinking about is her confession. The admission of her crime.

She was honestly shocked at how quickly Tyrell attempted to let her off the hook. Maybe it was the lawyer in him on the lookout for a defense, for a loophole. She had been no more than a child herself when it happened, he’d pointed out. How old was she? Only sixteen? That’s still a child. A child suffering under a crushing amount of pressure. She was not the criminal in this situation. She was a child wrongly forced by an immoral adult to make a choice that she should never have been faced with. A choice between life and death.

Yes, Rachel had agreed. A terrible choice. Her life for a girl’s death. Why? How is it that such unforgivable choices are given? Perhaps she’ll never know. Or perhaps Ezra has actually provided the answer to her question. The simplest answer possible. Der oylam is a goylem.

The world is stupid.