Shadows of Berlin

24.

What’s Done Is Done

Her session with Dr. Solomon? It doesn’t go well. He keeps asking her questions that she does not wish to answer. Have you thought of painting? Yes, I’ve thought of it. And? And I keep thinking about it.

“Really? Because it seems you’re rather tangled up with other issues. Your husband. Your sister-­in-­law’s boyfriend. Racism in our nation,” he says.

“And racism isn’t an important issue?”

“Of course it is. But,” says the good doctor, “it’s not helpful if you’re using it as a distraction.”

“Distraction?” As if the word makes no sense.

“A distraction from other troubling issues that you’re facing.”

Rachel pulls a face that indicates just how silly, how very, very silly such an idea sounds to her. “Oh. So you think I have something to hide, Dr. Solomon?”

“What I’m saying? And forgive the bluntness. But racist remarks from your husband did not put you into a hospital straitjacket.”

“I think I’m not feeling very well, Doctor,” Rachel suddenly says, eyes steaming as she glares at the rug. “You’ll pardon me if we end early today.”

At home, Rachel is confronted by the empty canvas. But that night, she says, “I’ve been thinking about what you said. If he was a German.”

“Look, I overstepped.”

“If it had been a German with Naomi. You’re correct, I would have felt differently. But as far as that goes? Your comparison of my feelings about Germans to yours about Negroes?”

“I don’t have ‘feelings’ about Negroes, okay, honey?”

“Negro people,” she says, “did not send anyone to the gas chambers. In fact, they were once enslaved even as Jews were once enslaved.”

“So I apologized,” Aaron is telling her. “I’m sorry that they were slaves a hundred years ago, but it’s not like I had anything to do with that.”

“If I hate the Germans, it is only because Germans are murderers.”

A shrug. “Okay. The Nazis certainly were, yes,” Aaron offers. “No argument there. And I’m no great fan of the Krauts in general either. But seriously, do we have to make them all into Hitlers and Himmlers?”

“Why not? Of course, I know there were French Nazis too. And Dutch Nazis, and Hungarian Nazis, and English, and Italian, and Ukrainian, and even American Nazis. I know this. And they could all be complicit, or they could all be murderers themselves. Killing Jews has been a sport for centuries. Who doesn’t know that? But only the Germans stoked the crematoria. Only they made it an industry.”

“Look, what you went through? Losing what you did? It was”—­he shakes his head over the inadequacy of words—­“horrific. But does it mean that all Germans are murderers? The SS were criminals, true. No argument. But weren’t they a little different from the regular dope on the street? That’s all I’m sayin’. Must we make the building super out to be Julius Streicher?”

Rachel shakes her head and drops her eyes to the floor. Really, she is just waiting for Aaron to stop talking. If that ever happens. This is the big argument that Americans like to put forth. That there were good Germans. Even good Nazis, or at least Nazis who were not murderers. The scientists, for instance. The physicists. The anti-­Communists. The useful Nazis, who were “denazified.” Only America could come up with such a concept as “denazification.” Those denazified Nazis have been exonerated to defend against the Communist onslaught. Exonerated, though not by her. Not for the first time she says, “You don’t understand.”

They change into their pajamas in the bedroom. Quietly. Not much conversation. In the bathroom, she asks her husband, “So what made you so threatened by Negroes?”

Aaron stops dead in the middle of brushing his teeth. Rachel is rubbing cold cream onto her face, waiting for an answer. Aaron returns to his scrubbing, but only for a second before he spits desolately into the bowl of the sink. “I’m not ‘threatened,’ as you put it, by Negroes, Rachel. I’ve got nothing against one race or another. I just want that said out loud for the record. And this guy Tyrell? He’s probably a decent guy. It’s only I’d rather not have him as a brother-­in-­law.” He rinses his mouth with water from the tap and spits again, then pats his mouth dry with a towel.

“You think Naomi wants to marry him?”

“Who knows what in hell my crazy sister wants?” is Aaron’s answer. “I just believe that everybody needs to stick with their own is all. Jews marry Jews,” he declares, cutting the air with his hand as if he is giving it a chop, cutting through any wishy-­washy confusion on the subject. “That’s all I’m saying. Jews marry Jews and have little Jews. Let Blacks marry Blacks and have little Blacks. It’s the way nature intended.”

“And you know this how?” his wife wonders.

Aaron frowns at the question. “Look, can we drop this, please? I just wanted to say what I had to say, and that’s it. I don’t need to be interrogated in my own goddamned bathroom, thank you very much.” Claiming ownership of the spot where he stands. My own goddamned bathroom. My own goddamned living room. It’s his way of trying to assert a kind of masculine authority over the moment. She’s learned this.

He drops down onto the bed, holding his cigarette as he picks up an old LIFE magazine with Sophia Loren on the cover and starts paging through, glowering. Rachel is on the bed beside him, her legs tucked under her. “You think your mother knows?”

Aaron huffs at the thought of this. “Well, no mushroom clouds over Flatbush, so my guess is not,” he says, then shakes his head. “But who knows? Who can guess? I can’t figure Ma out anymore. Since the old man passed, she seems to have gone off the rails.”

Silence for a moment as Aaron gazes ahead.

Then Rachel inserts, “I’m sorry.”

A blink. “Sorry? For what? That your husband’s an ass?” he asks, parking his cigarette in the ashtray.

“Yes, I’m sorry about that too,” she says, leaning over him to steal his cigarette. “But that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry you feel so lost. I know how that is.”

Aaron frowns. “I’ve got nothing against the guy, Rach. How many times I gotta say that? Mr. Almost-­a-­Lawyer is prob’ly better than buttered toast. I just don’t want trouble. I don’t want another big crisis to have to deal with. And I’d like to know why?” he asks the air, his voice rising. “Why the hell Naomi has to try to bust my balls all the time.”

Rachel tamps out his cigarette in her ashtray, then hooks his arm around her and rests her head against his shoulder. She likes the feel of his muscles. The shape and firmness of his body. “She’s competitive. She thinks your parents always discounted her opinion because she was the girl.”

“She said that to you?”

“No. But isn’t it true?”

“Well, it’s not like my opinion ever counted for much either.” He closes the magazine and tosses it wearily to the floor. It’s clear that his mind is grinding over some old family dynamic, but he doesn’t say more, and Rachel doesn’t ask. A quiet descends. The cat hops onto the bed and winds into a ball at Rachel’s feet, only to shoot away when the telephone rings. Rachel feels her heart jump. Aaron turns and looks in the direction of the noise, not with his normal annoyance at the intrusion of the phone at such a late hour but instead with quiet resignation.

“You want me to get it?” he actually asks.

They have dashed back into their clothes and met Naomi at the police precinct on Charles Street. She doesn’t sound as wildly frantic as she had over the telephone but is now fortified by her shock and seething. Her hair is out of its ponytail and twirled off her neck into a tight French twist, and not only is she wearing the same black pencil dress that she had leant Rachel, under a stylish wrap, but she’s wearing cosmetics. Lipstick. Eyebrows shaped by a pencil, but even with mascaraed lashes, her eyes are as dangerous as vats of acid. “Fucking racists,” she keeps muttering. “Fucking shithead racists. This isn’t Alabama, ya’ know!” she rails at a passing officer, who blandly ignores her. But Rachel physically tightens her grip on her sister-­in-­law’s arms. Naomi shouting at uniformed policemen unnerves her, even though summary execution by pistol is probably rare even in the Village.

Aaron, meanwhile, has separated himself, the head of the family taking charge, talking to the police on a man-­to-­man basis, and Rachel understands that it is her job to keep the lid on Naomi, to stop her from turning this bad-­enough shtunk into the shtunk of nightmares. “He’ll be out soon,” Rachel is trying to assure her, because what else can she say? “Aaron is writing the check for his bail, no problem. He’ll be out soon, I’m sure.”

“That’s not the point,” Naomi answers, though she doesn’t seem to be speaking to Rachel directly. “That’s not the fucking point. They had no right to arrest him. He was fucking defending himself, for Chrissake!”

Aaron returns to them, hands in the pockets of his overcoat. “Twenty-­five bucks,” he announces, as if it’s the cost of fixing a set of leaking pipes, anticipated, necessary, but still nothing to smile about. “We should go downstairs, I’m told. That’s where they release offenders.”

“Offenders?” Naomi takes issue with the word. “Is that what you’re really calling him? An offender?”

“Sorry.” Aaron surrenders quickly, showing his palms, as if addressing a ticking bomb. “That was their word. I just repeated it.”

Naomi frowns, her eyes heating up with tears, blurring her mascara. “Never mind. I’m sorry,” she admits. “You came all the way down here and paid his bail without arguing. Thank you,” she says.

A shrug with his hands hung back in his coat pockets. “Hey, what else am I gonna do, huh? So let’s get the hell outta here.”

Downstairs, a door clanks as it’s held open by a white officer, allowing Tyrell to exit. He looks bruised, not just in his face but in his soul maybe. As if he is threaded together by a tattered, burdensome rage suppressed by an equally burdensome weariness. His lip is split. His cheek has taken a punch. He’s dressed for an evening out, a suit under a Brooks Brothers overcoat, but his tie is missing, and his shirt collar is ripped. Naomi breaks away from Rachel and Aaron, rushing to Tyrell and seizing him in an embrace.

“Thank God,” she whispers aloud. “Thank God.”

Tyrell hushes her consolingly. “I’m fine. I am,” he keeps telling her. “Really.” But his reaction to her embrace, Rachel notes, is reticent. He gives her a squeeze in return but then deftly separates himself from her.

Naomi does not resist, though she is unwilling to release him completely and wraps her arm around his, walking him forward. “We should sue those bastards at the restaurant,” she’s insisting. “And that cop too. We should sue the whole fucking department for false arrest!”

Tyrell pats her arm as if to quiet her as much as console her. “We’ll talk about this later,” he instructs. “I’ve got to sign for my belongings,” he says. “I’ll just be a minute.” This gives him reason to peel away from her, leaving her drifting. Rachel steps up and hooks her with her arm, guiding her away from the heavy oak bureau manned by a middle-­aged sergeant with a chalky face.

“Bastards,” Naomi is whispering to the air, scowling. Rachel hands her a clean handkerchief. “Thanks.” Naomi sniffs. “But I’ll get mascara all over it.”

“So who cares about that?” Rachel asks.

Naomi purses her lips and wipes her eyes, smearing black over the white cotton. “I feel so fucking helpless. Furious but so fucking helpless.”

“Yes. I know that feeling. But for now, we concentrate on getting Tyrell away from this place. That’s all. More can come later,” Rachel says.

Naomi nods again. “Thank you for saying that. And for swooping in when I called. Especially you, Brother,” she says to Aaron, “for footing the bill.”

Aaron shrugs. “No big deal. What was I doing but sleeping anyhow?”

Tyrell appears, unloading the contents of a large kraft-paper envelope onto a windowsill. Slipping his wallet into his coat pockets. A fountain pen. “Missing a cufflink,” he inventories with a slight grimace of pain. “Got a lighter but no cigarettes. One wristwatch with a busted crystal,” he says, then shakes it against his ear. “No longer ticking.”

“Fucking crooks,” Naomi curses. But in any case, Tyrell seems to take it in stride.

“Thank you, Mr. Perlman,” he says to Aaron in a heavy, formal tone, “for coming down here at this hour and for paying my bail.” But it’s a heavy thank-­you. Not a comfortable one. “I’ll get it back to you tomorrow.”

“No rush,” Aaron replies, waving off any need for haste. “Really. Whenever,” he says.

“I had actually told Naomi to call my sister,” the man points out thickly. “But I guess she called her brother instead,” he says. This is a sideline scold directed toward Naomi.

“Well, whattaya gonna do?” Aaron shrugs. “Families stick together.” In other words, Jews stick with Jews.

But Naomi leans in. “Let’s just get the fuck outta here,” she injects with an exhausted urgency. She has regained Tyrell’s arm and gives it a tug.

It is raining by the time they exit onto the street. Not a downpour yet, but certainly a hefty sprinkle. There’s a metal bucket by the door, though, containing a handful of forgotten umbrellas with a hand-­printed sign that reads LOST AND FOUND. “Ah, now will you look at this?” Aaron sounds pleasantly surprised as he selects a long, black item. “You want one too, Mr. Williams?” he asks.

“No, thanks,” Tyrell assures him. He lifts his arm free of Naomi and separates himself, squinting at the rain as he turns up the collar of his overcoat. “So, Mr. Perlman, do you think you could see that your sister gets home?”

“Home?” Aaron repeats, sliding open the umbrella.

But it’s Naomi who jumps in. “Wait a minute. What do you mean, see that I get home? I’m not leaving you,” Naomi insists, pained confusion rising in her voice. “Not after all this shit.”

But Tyrell acts as if he’s gone deaf to her. “If you wouldn’t mind, Mr. Perlman.”

“Uh. Sure,” Aaron replies. “Sure.”

“Tyrell,” Naomi squawks, and only now does he acknowledge her.

“It’s late,” he tells her inflexibly, placing his hand on her arm. “I have to be up early, so I need to get home and get some sleep. And I’ll sleep better knowing you’re home safe.”

“Me? What about you getting home safe.”

“I’ll be fine,” he insists. “Really. I’ll call you tomorrow,” he promises and then quickly seals his exit with a kiss on Naomi’s cheek before stepping off the curb and trotting across the street, dodging past the lights of a car.

Naomi calls out his name and advances a step as if to follow him, but Aaron drops his hand on her shoulder and draws her under the umbrella. “Let ’im go, Naomi” is all he says.

“You know, I woulda called his sister except she scares the holy shit out of me. And I guess now I embarrassed him. Fuck!” she spits.

“Look, what difference does it make?” Aaron is quick to reply. “The bail is paid, and the man’s outta the clink. Beside, what’s so embarrassing?”

“What’s so embarrassing is that I put him in the debt of a white man.”

“Oh, is that what I am?”

“You bet it’s what you are. I shoulda just fuckin’ called Chloe like he wanted me to.”

And now Aaron is frustrated that she is refusing to cast him as the hero of this story as she should be. The man who got out of bed in the middle of the fucking night to answer her call for help. The man who shelled out the money, not just for the bail—­twenty-­five bucks, a week’s rent—­but for how many taxi rides? “Okay, okay. Let’s forget about who called who, all right? What’s done is done. Let’s just go, for cryin’ out loud.”

Two days come and then go. It rains. Aaron goes to work, comes home, and goes back out to work. When Rachel arrives at Naomi’s apartment in the middle of the afternoon, she finds that it has returned to its normal state of chaos, except now the ashtrays are overflowing, and there are new cigarette burns on the old blue sofa. Empty bottles of beer stand abandoned on surfaces like lonely sentinels, and the centerpiece of the coffee table is a half-­empty fifth of Smirnoff’s. “I started out mixing martinis,” Naomi explains, “but then thought, fuck it, who needs vermouth? Just fuckin’ cut out the middleman, right?”

She’s a mess. Her eyes sleepless and swollen. Hair in an untidy ponytail. Barefooted. She’s thrown on a pair of baggy old dungarees with the cuffs folded up the ankles and a stained wool pullover. She also smells, not just of vodka but of a kind of grimy misery. “You sure I can’t get you something?” she asks Rachel. “I mean, it doesn’t have to be alcoholic. I think I’ve got a soda in the fridge. Or maybe I could put on the kettle for tea or something.” She looks toward her miniature apartment stove where a steel kettle rests atop a burner, but her expression is glazed. As if a journey to the stove is a distant concept.

“No, no,” Rachel assures her. “Really, I’m fine.”

Naomi nods blankly. “So I guess you must have figured it out by now,” she says, her eyes dropping shamefully to the coffee mug of vodka in her hand. “Tyrell,” she says, speaking the name, but then she must pause and swallow. “He broke things off.”

Rachel takes in a breath and expels it.

Naomi frowns, eyes still downcast. “He said,” she begins, but then must stop and start again. “He said what happened at the restaurant. The fistfight. The police. Getting arrested. It just made him realize that we had no future. Not in the long run. And that…that it wasn’t fair to me,” she whispers, her voice beginning to disintegrate into tears, “to keep things going.” She sniffs hard. Smears at her eyes and then kicks back a swallow of vodka from her mug. “That’s it.” She shrugs. “So I’ve been downing the mashke ever since.”

“You should eat,” Rachel instructs. “It’s not good for you. You should eat. I could fix you soup,” she says and starts to move from the sofa. The truth is, she doesn’t do well dealing with other people’s grief. She would feel more comfortable avoiding empathy by diving into action, even it’s only emptying a can of Campbell’s chicken and rice into a saucepan. But Naomi restrains her escape from the sofa with a hand.

“No. Please. Nothing. I’d only throw it up anyhow.”

At home, over T.V. dinners but with no T.V., Aaron gloats in a fatalistic manner. “Well, it was bound to happen, honey. Can’t say as I’m surprised.”

“Nor can you say you’re unhappy with it.”

A frowning nod. “Now that you mention it,” he concedes.

“She was in such deep pain,” Rachel laments. “I didn’t know how to help her. What to say.”

A flick of a shrug as he dips his fork into the vegetable medley. “She’ll get over it,” Aaron assures her. “She’s tough.”

“She was also drinking. Heavily.”

Another shrug. Maybe this one is less comfortable. “Well. I dunno. There were hints that we had an aunt on Pop’s side of the family who was a bit of a boozehound. But nobody ever talked about it much, at least not in front of us kids. And anyhow, she lived to be eighty-­something, so how bad could it have been?”