Shadows of Berlin

23.

A Man Forgets His Wallet

Love. So complex. So organic, it can grow or die. It can drug a person, elate or poison them. Or both. Rachel thinks about her mother. Eema held love in contempt but never stopped hunting for it. Never stopped mixing it into her palette. It radiates from her portrait of the red muse.

Looking into the bathroom mirror that night, preparing for bed, Rachel can see her eema’s face. Not from a spectral image but in her own reflection. In the eyes? The shape of the mouth? The cheekbones, less plump and more etched? The older she becomes, the more of her mother shows up in the mirror. She carries the resemblance as a burden of memory. She is responsible for maintaining not only her own face, but the face of her eema. The face of the dead. Dressed in her flannel nightgown, she rubs Phoebe Snow greaseless cold cream onto her skin, forming a mask, while Aaron noisily scrubs his teeth in his pajamas.

“Do you think that some women are born to be lesbian?” she asks him.

His mouth is foamy, and he unplugs the toothbrush long enough to spit some toothpaste and squint at her in confusion. “Do I what?”

Rachel repeats the question. “Do you think that some women are born to be lesbian? Or do you think being a lesbian is a decision?”

“How the hell should I know?” He returns to brushing with extra vigor and then spits. “And do you have to keep using that word?” He slurps water from his palm to rinse.

“Lesbian? Why, you think it’s like a magical spell? If I speak the word, I become one?”

“Prob’ly not, but why risk it?” Aaron shrugs, wiping his hands, then balling up the hand towel to wipe his mouth.

Rachel starts removing the excess cream with a Kleenex. “In Yiddish, there’s not even a word,” she says.

“Really? And here I thought Yiddish had a word for everything,” he tells her. He bares his teeth in the mirror to check that there’s nothing been missed. “Why are you asking me this? Have you been reading one of those crazy Village rags again?”

“Just wondering.”

“Okay. Well, ya got me. I’ve never known one in my life. I mean, not a lot of lesbians in Flatbush, I don’t think. Though God knows I’ve met a couple of real ballbusters.”

“You think lesbians are ballbusters?”

“I dunno, honey. You asked, I answered.” He gulps a mouthful from the bottle of Listerine and winces at the burn, swishing it around as if he’d like to rinse the entire conversation from his mouth, then spits out. “Can we talk about something else, maybe?” he wonders. “Something less creepy, like the atom bomb or tuberculosis?” One final inspection of his bared teeth, then he gives Rachel a squeeze and a peck on the neck before he wanders out of the bathroom.

“You know, I use this bottle of Listerine too,” she calls out after him. “Now it is full of my husband’s germs.”

“It’s mouthwash,” he calls back. “It kills germs. Read the label.”

***

In Berlin, life as a U-­boat is an erratic journey. Unpredictable day to day, moment to moment. They are on the move again, Rashka and her eema. The Aryan whose root cellar they were hiding in has demanded more money. Either more money or permission to rape Rashka. He was a smelly old party comrade who ran a butcher shop above them. Rashka heard him make his proposition to her mother. He wasn’t shy about it. “Either another three hundred,” he said and tossed his head in Rashka’s direction, “or a taste of the girl. But only if she’s a virgin. It’s bad enough I must dirty myself with a Jewess, so she must at least be chaste. I won’t be soiled by a slut.”

The look on her eema’s face as the man spoke? It was like she was Lot’s wife the instant before she calcified into a tower of salt.

“I’ll get you the money,” Eema said flatly, her voice losing all its tone. But Rashka knew she wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

Perhaps even the party comrade knew this, because he frowned morosely at Rashka standing in the corner of the cellar, arms clasped in front of her waist. “One or the other,” he said, “when I come back tonight.”

And so they had vacated the butcher’s cellar immediately and were walking through their shoes again on Berlin’s pavement. The winter had been cold but at least bereft of heavy snows, as if all of Germany’s allotted snowfall had been sucked east to freeze the armies entrenched outside all those Russian cities they had not managed to conquer. It had given Rashka some little satisfaction that if she was cold, think of the thousands of good Nazi killers shivering in their boots in a Soviet icebox.

But only a little satisfaction.

Days and nights. Weeks turn to months. A fledgling Berliner spring is peeking through the gloom. By midday, the sun is yellow and bright and warming the streets. Winter recedes, revealing a shabby wartime town stripped of joy by shortages and surreptitiously disheartened by a growing yet unspoken fear. The unspoken fear of defeat that is underscored by the bombing raids launched by the so-­called British Air Pirates. Though oddly, Rashka feels safest when the bombers invade the skies, sending the population scrambling underground. The U-­Bahn stations become air raid shelters, and nobody much questions who’s an Aryan and who might be a Jew when the world above them is being hammered by tons of high explosives.

But raids on Berlin continue to be spotty at this point, like occasional heart attacks. Gestapo men checking papers indiscriminately are more of a threat than bombs to U-­boats. Berlin, after all, has been declared “Jew-­free” by no lesser a personage than the Little Doctor himself, Reichsminister Goebbels. How embarrassing would it be for him to find that it’s not quite the truth. This is her feter Fritz’s little joke, spoken in a low whisper as they share a table in a café up the Friedrichstrasse. Eema, as usual, is mortified by his little jokes and glares as if she has just stepped on a nail but must keep quiet about it. Feter Fritz gives his niece a conspiratorial wink, sharing his little joke with her, even at Eema’s expense. Those small moments of power over Eema? Rashka appreciates them, though without her uncle there, she is without a scrap of power. She is a piece of luggage that must be lugged.

And so it goes. From hour to hour, day to day, week to week. Rashka loses her sense of days. Monday? Tuesday? Thursday? Who knows? But her sense of hours, even of minutes passing, sharpens. Each hour spent in an attic, cellar, toolshed, or U-­Bahn station is distinct. Each minute divergent from the rest, spent in silence inside a closet or an empty flat. Calculable and stowable. Sitting so very still so as not to prompt a floorboard to creak and alert the neighbors belowstairs. She has found a discreet silence in herself, a silence that is so powerful, she has become the silence and otherwise doesn’t exist at all.

Her mother finds them shoes. They don’t fit. They’re too small and pinch Rashka’s toes, but they’re better than the shoes they have, which have separated at the soles and flop like lazy crocodile jaws. Also there’s a woolen dress that’s too big, but at least it’s not going to tatters. Food is usually a few moldy potatoes often eaten raw with a package of Knackebrot, or—­on the rarest of occasion—­a wax-­sealed pot of processed “meat.” Sunlight is often something that is only remembered or hinted at through cracks in leather-­faced blackout curtains or painted-­over windowpanes. This ghost existence between the dimensions of oblivion and daily life carries them through summer and into the autumn when, in the course of two nights, the British RAF rains down the fiery lightning of Zeus upon Fortress Berlin. It’s bombing on a new and devastating order that will soon become routine.

In two nights, the Café Romanisches is blasted to pieces. The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is reduced to the charred stump of its tower. The KaDeWe department store on the Ku’damm explodes when a downed bomber crashes through the roof. The vacant New Synagogue in the Oranienburger Strasse is crushed to jagged rubble. A gasworks in Neukölln ruptures in a gust of flame. The raids produce all these terrible landmarks of destruction, but what is more important to Rashka and Eema is that a Tommy incendiary strikes the building where they are held prisoner by their Jewishness and spills flaming thermite over the tar-­paper rooftop. In the chaos of good Germans escaping the fire, even a pair of U-­boaters manage to save themselves. They will find shelter on the second night of bombing by joining the thousands inside the thick concrete fortress of the Zoo Flak Tower. The 88-­millimeter flak cannons on its fortified rooftop are like the hammer of God above them.

All these things Rashka is teaching herself to accept. Teaching herself to absorb them into the silence that is enlarging her from within, armoring her heart. Turning her into a fortress. Fortress Rokhl.

***

Aaron has called her at home. He’s forgotten his wallet somewhere in the apartment. He could borrow a couple of bucks from Leo, but how wonderful would that be? God knows what might happen. Leo might start pulling out wads of cash from his twenty-four-karat money clip. “‘What? Boychik? You need taxi fare?’” Aaron mimics. “So other than mooching a subway token off Smitty at the door, I got nothing.” Not a crisis, but does she think maybe she could bring it by before she sees what’s-­his-­name the shrink? It’s probably on the bureau top. Or maybe it’s still in the pair of pants he wore yesterday, the brown ones that he hung over the chair.

She finds it in neither of those places but on the floor of the bedroom. Yet she understands. A man out in the strife of the world without his wallet? It’s emasculating. So she slips it into her purse.

Before her hour with Dr. Solomon, Rachel takes the I.R.T. Broadway Line uptown to the restaurant. “Good afternoon, Mr. Smith,” she says to the doorman. He afternoon-­ma’ams her in return, smiling blindly and tipping a salute off the peak of his cap. It’s obvious that he does not recognize her as anyone but yet another white woman for whom he is hired to hold the door. Lunch rush is over, so the tables are mostly empty or being cleared by the busmen. A few show people from the Winter Garden sit at the bar drinking Kahlúa and coffees, kvetching over this or that review or casting call.

She is surprised, however, to find Leo installed at Table 27. It’s early for him, isn’t it?

“Ketsl.” He grins when he spots Rachel and kisses her on the cheek like an uncle. “Sit,” he instructs in his graveled, intimate tone as he slips back into the booth. “You want some coffee? Or maybe a nice shot of cognac?”

“No. Thank you, Leo.”

“Don’t be silly. You need something. You’re a bone. Solly,” he tells the balding waiter who has appeared to refill Leo’s coffee cup. “Get Mrs. Perlman a cognac and slice of the French apple cake, will you?”

“Sure, Mr. Bloom,” says Solly, finally back from Miami but without a tan, capping the dirty ashtray and leaving a clean one in its place. “And how are you, Mrs. P.?”

“I’m fine, Mr. Kolinsky, thank you. How are you?”

“Good, good,” he says, quickly lighting Rachel’s cigarette the instant she draws one from her pack.

“Thank you,” Rachel tells him before he smilingly vacates.

“So out shopping?” Leo inquires. He is hunched forward, elbows on the table as he pops two fresh sugar cubes into his coffee.

“Shopping?”

He stirs his cup. “Yeah. Though I don’t see any bags. God knows, when Gloria goes shopping, she needs a truck to carry it back.” Shopping, Rachel realizes, is the only thing that Leo can conceive of a woman doing out and about in the city during the day. So she doesn’t correct him.

“Uh, I didn’t find anything I liked,” she says. It also makes it easier to explain her arrival here. She can keep the forgotten wallet a secret and avoid wads of cash appearing from a golden money clip. “How is your wife, by the way?” His second wife, Gloria, is a trim, fierce woman in her forties with beauty-­parlor blond hair and a smoky voice, mother of two out of three of his children.

Leo shrugs in mild despair. “Gloria? Upstate since October,” he announces. “She likes the season up there. You know, the leaves and whatnot. And since the kids are gone, she goes up by herself. I could get run over by a bus, she don’t care”—­he grins crookedly—­“so long as it don’t interrupt her nature hikes. Suddenly, she’s a crazy woman about nature. Completely tsedrait!” He takes a drink from his cup. Go figure. “So what’s news with the lovely Mrs. Perlman, huh? Painting any masterpieces?”

Rachel swallows. She knows that Leo actually means well with this question. What could she paint if not a masterpiece, right? So talented. But she cannot even manage a spurious response. The question pains her. “No, not at the moment” is her only response. “But I have a question for you, Leo,” she hears herself say. Honestly, she had no intention of bringing this up. No intention of trying to test Tyrell’s theory. Maybe it’s simply to deflect any further questions about masterpieces. Maybe it’s that she happens to notice the young, dark-­skinned man in the white busman’s jacket clearing a table of dessert dishes and coffee cups. “Do you have a policy about seating Negroes?”

Leo looks like she just started speaking to him in gibberish. “Do I got a what?” he asks.

“A policy,” Rachel repeat. “About seating Negroes.”

“What kinda policy? I don’t know what you’re asking me here, ketsl. ‘Policy’?” He smiles at the word. “What I gotta ‘policy’ for?”

“It’s simple. If a Black man comes through the front door and asks to be seated? Would you seat him?”

“Well.” Leo shrugs, frowns at the tablecloth, tugs his earlobe. A man trying to be diplomatic as well as evasive. “I don’t know where this is coming from, sweetheart. You think I have a policy about what if a colored guy comes in for a table?” He puffs his cheeks and gives a slow shrug, as if it hurts his shoulders. “I suppose, if it’s a private party, we take everybody in through the Forty-­Sixth Street entrance anyhow, so I would say, what’s the harm? One or two of the party members ain’t exactly Caucasian? I say, so what? It’s my place. I can do what I want.”

“But a Black man couldn’t get in through the Eighth Avenue door, if he and his wife, say, just wanted dinner before curtain time. Abe wouldn’t seat them.”

“Cognac and a slice of French apple cake for the lady,” Solly announces in a pleasant rasp as he sets the snifter and plate in front of Rachel.

“Sol, remind Abe, would ya? The Goodricks are my party this evening, if I forget to mention.”

“Will do, Mr. Blume,” says Solly, and he is gone.

Rachel inhales a breath and repeats herself. “Abe wouldn’t seat them.”

Leo frowns as he sips from his coffee cup, then sets it down with a clink on his saucer. “Look, ketsl,” he says. “You think I care about skin color? Black, white, yellow, purple? I don’t care. God made the universe, so he made the coloreds too, as far as I’m concerned. But you gotta understand.” And he says this carefully. As if he is cautious to put it in comprehensible terms. “It’s the public. The customers,” he explains. “Maybe I don’t care about black, white, or purple, but the public? They do care.

“So if I tell Abe to seat some colored boy and his wife, then you know what happens? Every table around them gets up and leaves—­fargreser a ayln out the door. And if I keep telling Abe to seat them, then pretty soon the colored boy and his wife are the only customers I got left, ’cause everybody else’s standing on line outside Sardi’s. Without the public, this room goes dark. Without this room, I’m on my way to the poorhouse, and everybody’s outta work. Including, God forbid, your husband.”

“All that,” Rachel says, “because a Black man sits down at a table for some salmon soufflé?”

A shrug. The way of the world. “I don’t make the rules. That I leave to God.”

“So it’s God who won’t seat Negroes? Wasn’t that the same thing the Nazis said about us? That God wanted to punish the Jews.”

“I don’t pretend to know, ketsl. I don’t pretend to know. All I can say is that I do what I do to keep a roof over everybody’s head.” A shrug slumping his body slightly, opening his hands. “You should take a taste of that cognac. It’s Courvoisier. Good stuff. Two bucks a pop.”

Rachel picks up the snifter and runs her finger around the rim. “Thank you, Leo,” she says. She gets it. Waste not, want not. Otherwise Solly’s going to have to try to pour it back into the bottle with a funnel. So she takes a large swallow. It burns smoothly, like heated licorice.

But Leo’s face has sagged. His expression is weighted, and the usual mask of gritty charm seems to have slipped as he leans forward carefully. His voice has gone low. “You gotta understand something,” he says, the normal bemusement in his eyes drained. “I can’t say what happened to you exactly. What you went through with the war and whatnot. I can’t say ’cause I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I was here busting my tuchus trying to get this joint on its feet. But I’ve heard the stories.

“You gotta understand,” he says, “that what happened to our people? What happened to you? It shouldn’t have happened to a dog, much less a little girl like yourself. Entsetzlich! Utterly unspeakable. But nothing particularly new. The white man’s been trying to drive the Jew into firepits for thousands of years. The Nat-­zees?” he says, and he hangs the t onto the z. “They just did a better job of it than the rest. More efficient, like their accursed race. Four million, five million, six million? Who could survive it?

“So all I’m sayin’ is… What you went through? It ain’t nothing to be ashamed of,” he tells her. “It means you beat the bastards at their game. All these jokers come back from the war with geegaws on their chest, this medal, that medal. None of that’s important. It’s life that’s important. You’re alive, ketsl,” he says. “Don’t let those farshaltn Nat-­zees take that away from you. They tried to stamp you out, but you spit in their faces. Every breath you take, you spit in those evil butchers’ faces. You know? You sent them to the devil! You’re a Jew. You beat the white man’s odds. That, to me?” he says. “Is something to celebrate.”

Rachel gazes at him, gripping the snifter of brandy. Then Leo is suddenly turning to the aisle. “Hey, hey”—­he grins—­“it’s the boss man himself.” Rachel quickly wipes her eyes and collects herself back into one piece.

“Yeah, boss man of my ass,” says Aaron. “Leo, Chef Boy-­ar-­dee in there wants you to come taste the chowder.”

“What, I’m the cook now too?”

Aaron shrugs. “Whattaya want me to do? You made it into such a federal case about the Tabasco last week that he wants you to taste it before we start dishing it out.”

“Fine.” Leo surrenders with a frown. “Chief cook and bottle washer,” he tells Rachel with a wink, back to his old self. “Sit,” he tells Aaron. “Talk to your wife, why don’t you?”

Aaron slumps into the booth. “So thanks for coming up, honey,” he says confidentially. “You got it, right?”

“I got it.” She nods and opens her bag, dispensing the forgotten wallet to its owner.

“Thanks,” he whispers and shifts to stash it in his right rear trouser pocket. “So I see you got the French apple cake treatment,” he observes.

“With the Courvoisier.”

“Impressive. That’s two bucks a pop.”

“So I heard,” Rachel says. He looks exhausted already, and the place hasn’t even opened for dinner.

Dragging the plate of cake over to himself, Aaron picks up the fork and digs in blankly. “God, this thing is good,” he says, chewing, but without any particular enthusiasm. “I could eat this forever.”

And in that moment, she wants to seize him. She wants to give herself to him atop Table 27. To give him babies, to lose herself in him. But then she sees that schoolgirl with the burgundy beret has inserted herself into the booth beside him, the ragged little U-­boat girl, who looks up hungrily with hollow-­socketed eyes dark with death. No cake for me? those eyes ask.