Shadows of Berlin

25.

You Must Earn Your Keep

She dreams that the police come banging on the door in the middle of the night to arrest her. Aaron keeps saying, I told you not to cut up that newspaper at the library, and now look—­the cops are here. My mother’s gonna hit the roof! He’s saying this as he opens the door, dressed in his pajamas. In come two giant men, not in the blue uniforms of the N.Y.P.D., but in the green of the Reich’s Grüne Polizei. She tries to hide under the bed, but they drag her out. She keeps screaming. Gevalt geshreeyeh! But then Aaron is replaced by Feter Fritz wearing his secondhand shmatte with his bamboo cane. My hands are tied, ziskeit, he tells her. Your name is on the list.

Rachel wakes up with a floating anger in her chest. It swells her throat. Thank God that Aaron is at the Fulton Market that morning, so Kibbitz is the only one who must suffer her mood. Wisely, he exits through the fire escape window at his first opportunity. She’s been thinking about the painting. Stewing over it. The red muse. It angers her that it has been stolen from her. Yes, those are the words. Stolen from her. The coffee she drinks only serves to underscore her anger. Not even the Miltown is a match for it.

She takes the Seventh Avenue Local uptown. The gallery is housed in an elegant Upper East Side monolith of polished sandstone. The G. Albert Glass Gallery of Fifth Avenue, universally known as the House of Glass. She is surprised to find that the door is unlocked when she tugs on it. Aren’t they concerned that any vagabond might steal into the temple? She steps inside, feeling her heartbeat rise. What does she think she’ll find? La muse du rouge on the wall restored to glory? But no. It’s a Chagall. The true Jewish artist, he is called. After all, he was born Moishe Segal of Vitebsk. And God knows how many prints she has seen of his wistful gouaches and watercolors depicting dreamy Yiddish motifs from the shtetlakh of his childhood, all neatly framed in doctors’ offices and dental waiting rooms from Midwood to Washington Heights. Even her mother-­in-­law has a lithograph of The Three Candles in a frame over the dining room table in Flatbush.

But the dream is not always airy pastel washes for mass-­market merchandising. A plummeting red rocket hangs on the wall. An angel’s descent exploding the scene. A fiery seraph—­L’ange tombant. The Falling Angel. It took him a quarter century to paint. She’d read this. Stretching from the twenties till after the war, and every year—­she can see it, it’s so apparent to her—­every year the raging destruction of the earth stained and ignited the colors of the angel as it descended, till its wings were burning red. Till its body was gorgeous with blood.

Chagall was an innocent, her mother tells her, wearing her paint-­stained smock. Naive as a child. It’s amazing that he survived himself, much less survived the war. But that was his luck. Always in the wrong place but never at the wrong time.

A college girl in a black turtleneck, her blond hair in a boyish garçon bob, approaches Rachel as if she is something that needs sweeping back out onto the sidewalk. “May I help you?”

“Yes. I want to see Mr. Glass,” Rachel tells her.

“Mr. Glass is not available.”

“Tell him, please, that I’m the niece of Mr. Landau?”

“I’m sorry, but Mr. Glass is not available.”

“Tell him I’m the daughter of Lavinia Morgenstern. She knew Chagall. When he was in Berlin. Tell him I’m here to see The Red Muse.”

“The red?”

“My mother’s painting. I want to see it. Is it in the back room? I could just take a peek.”

“Uh, no. No, that’s not possible.”

“Just a peek, nothing more.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”

“Rachel Perlman. That’s my name now. In America, but once, I was Rokhl Morgenstern. He knows my uncle—­Mr. Glass, that is. I’ve seen them together in the photograph.”

“As I said, Mr. Glass is unavailable. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do for you.”

“I think they must have struck a secret bargain.”

“And I think I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“So I’m being polite. I’m being polite,” Rachel tells her. “But you must understand. He had no right, my uncle. He thought he was still the great Kunsthändler, making his deals, but he had no right. That painting, if it belongs to anyone, it belongs to me.”

“Miss, this is private property,” the girl says.

“She was a monster. Der Engel. But if she is anybody’s monster, she is mine. I paid for her in full. And now, you think you can deny me? Pretend that I am nobody? I am the daughter of Lavinia Morgenstern! The founder of the Berolina Circle of Artists! A member of the Prussian Academy!” She hears herself shouting at this young slip of a girl, whose eyes are now bright with fear at the onslaught of the crazy lady.

“I can call the police! If you won’t go, I can call the police.”

“Call the police! I am an artist. Don’t you understand that? An artist! I have my rights too! That painting is mine! So tell the exalted Mr. Glass that he made his deal with the wrong Jew! Tell him that!” Rachel shouts and then abandons the room, sweeping back onto the sidewalk, her face streaming in tears. She hears the door lock behind her to keep out the mad interloper. But she doesn’t look back.

***

Their last hiding place as U-­boats is a bicycle repair shop in Berlin-­Kreuzberg. The owner of the shop is dead, his body buried in some frozen corner of the Ostfront, but the widow, Frau Huber, is making a little on the side to supplement her pension payments by hiding the odd Jew or two in her dead husband’s vacant shop. The windows are painted over for the blackout. It’s one long room down a set of steps in the Falckenstein Strasse. The place has a grimy feeling to it and an odor of wood rot and machine oil combined with the reek from the stinking night pail. So—­a palace! They are gaunt, underfed, and street-­worn like most all U-­boats. But then that could describe most Berliners by this point of the war, so their very shabbiness affords them some lumpenproletariat camouflage when they venture out into the beyond.

They sit in the Café Bollenmüller up the Friedrich, her mother tensed, overtly watchful. As usual, Eema has brought Rashka along because the sight of a hungry child is the only leverage available to her to influence price. She has explained this to Rashka. Explained that her job in this transaction is to look pitiful and underfed. A little waif. Sometimes it works, other times not. If the seller is a woman, then maybe such tactics have a better chance of depressing the cost of the counterfeit ration cards or some small identity document, like a postal card, or whatever it is she is hoping to purchase. But Rashka is never very talented at this, and this time when she tries to present a sympathetically heartbreaking face, her mother is disappointed in the outcome. “Never mind,” says Eema. “You look like you’re farshtopt.” Constipated. Blocked. “Just sit and think about nothing.”

Rashka attempts to follow this instruction as they sit this time in the perilous calm of a café morning, not buying but selling. Eema is trying to sell the last of her mother’s jewelry. A white-­gold bracelet studded with tiny diamonds. A piece that dates back to the imperial epoch of the Österreich. Rashka tries hard to think about nothing. Nothing but a zero. A void. But still, thoughts intrude. She cannot help but look at the faces. Aryan faces? They look not so much different than they did before Aryans existed. Only paler. Thinner.

She cannot help but play a game. Who is the crooked-­over old man blowing the steam from his cup? A veteran of the last war, maybe? Unmarried. Bitter because he could not recover from his wounds. She would paint him in blue and black with yellow eyes. Then there’s the younger woman with the middle-­aged man. They seem hardly connected, staring separately into the air as they consume their coffee and bun. Yet there is some link chaining them together. A marriage where love has been left behind? She would paint him in greens from shoes to hat and her all in yellows with purple lips.

When the buyer arrives, it’s a man. A black marketeer. The rumor is he was a gem cutter in Antwerp, a diamantaire, run out of the business because of underhanded trading. But who really knows? People like to make up stories. They like the world to fit together, especially when nothing fits together any longer. He’s a frowning, unhappy specimen, with a sagging face and eyes as sharp as drawn knives. All it takes is a glance under the napkin at the table for him to instantly size up the value of any piece of merchandise. He mumbles a price. Eema looks displeased. She frowns, using her mouth only. Her eyes remain the shiny black rocks into which they have hardened. “Please. It must be worth more than that,” she insists.

The man only shrugs. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

“Those are diamonds,” Eema points out. “Diamonds,” she repeats.

“So find somebody else to buy them if you think I’m cheating you,” the man suggests.

“I’m only asking. A few more marks? Couldn’t you see your way? For the sake of the child.”

Really, Rashka despises being used as an object of pity in these transactions. She breaks away from her mother’s dealing and returns to the stories she’s telling herself in her head, all inspired by the crowd around them. A woman abandoned by her husband? A man sick with a disease that he pretends is not killing him? But then she catches the eye of another girl. Across the room is a schoolgirl not much younger than her. Velvety brown eyes, creamy skin with a cool ash-­green underpainting. Her sable hair is woven into a braid, and she wears a burgundy beret. Sitting with a wrinkled old grandpa who is lost in the consumption of a bowl of soup, the girl dares to offer Rashka a tentative smile. Rashka dares to smile back.

She will never know the girl’s name. This small exchange of childish smiles beyond the strictures of their isolation will compose the sum total of their communication. But yet. For that instant, Rashka can spot the lonely yearning they share. She can recognize herself. Another solitary heart.

Meanwhile the black marketeer is unmoved by her mother’s plea. The offer is the offer, take it or leave it.

On the day they are arrested, the sky is bleak with ashen clouds and a low, white winter sun. They have entered the Bollenmüller. An accordion player is busy with a crowd-­pleaser called “Du, du liegst mir im Herzen.” Seated at a table in the rear, they spend precious pennies on ersatz coffee and a cup of warm skim milk. Rashka tries to drink the milk slowly, but she can’t. It feels like everyone is watching her, so she downs it in a few gulps before it can be snatched away.

Meanwhile, the coupon seller they are waiting on is not appearing. Eema has tacked her eyes to the door, watching intently as the woman doesn’t arrive. Rashka knows that the few marks Eema earned from the sale of the bracelet, that small amount, composes their entire fortune, and that after it is spent, there will be nothing left. Eema has recently instructed her to start praying. “For a miracle,” Rashka is told. A miracle that will feed them, fit them with new shoes, mend the holes in their clothes. A miracle that will suddenly conjure them out of danger with a wave of a hand by the Master of the Universe. He parted the Red Sea for Moses, didn’t he? Why not a small-­in-­comparison miracle for them?

When the door creaks open from the street, Eema is drawn forward in her chair as if caught in the pull of a magnet. A dowdy Berliner Frau has finally appeared and taken the small round table nearest the door. She is not as watchful, this Frau, as black marketeers normally are. There is also something insular about her expression. Her posture is tense, hunched, but she is focused on her hands instead of the room. When she does finally raise her eyes long enough to speak a word to the waiter, Rashka spots a scab on the Frau’s lip and a purplish bruise shadowing the under-­crescent of her eye.

“What’s happened to her face, Eema?” she whispers to her mother, but her mother has already locked Rashka out of her course of action. Her daughter is no more now that the sad mannequin Eema can point to, hoping to shave a few marks off the cost out of sympathy.

“Stay here, and don’t move. Understand?” her eema commands, then stands, marching toward the Frau. The two women huddle together, crowding the small table. Watching from this distance, Rashka can see how Eema has lost her looks. What a tattered rag her mother has become! It makes her feel ashamed and prompts her to look away. It is by this accident of embarrassment that she catches the red-­haired woman’s gaze. A gaze that is at once dangerous and intimate.

Rashka has no defense against the resolve of those eyes. She can only stare back, even as this beautiful creature crosses the café, seating herself at Rashka’s table with a scrape of a chair.

“Hallöchen, Liebling,” the woman says with a smile contouring her bright-­red lips. “Did your mummy leave you all alone?”

Rashka is both terrified by the woman’s arrival and oddly thrilled by the attention. So beautiful! Beautiful even as the seven worlds!

And then the memory strikes her.

How could she ever discard the memory of those eyes? The eyes of the girl posing on a dais in Eema’s studio? Rashka’s heart bumps heavily. It’s obvious that the woman does not recognize her any longer, but for Rashka, it’s like reclaiming an icy dream. The eyes of la muse du rouge. She thinks she should call over to her eema, but to say what? She is here! The girl you painted! But she doesn’t do this, because she is trapped. She cannot speak.

The woman puts her hand on Rashka’s arm and asks, “Where is your star, Liebchen?”

Her mother abruptly returns, and Rashka is confused by what happens next. The expression on the beautiful woman’s face chills deeply. “Lavinia” is all she says.

Eema looks as if she has opened a door on a tiger. She lurches forward and seizes Rashka by the arm. “Please,” she whispers in a raw voice, her eyes gone round. “For the child.” A drop of hesitation colors the woman’s eyes. But there is already an operation in motion. A trap snapping shut.

Men in trench coats appear out of nowhere, pointing pistols. “Geheime Staatspolizei!” they announce. A slim, blond man in a leather trench is pleasantly impatient. “Time to go, little mice,” he declares. “Off to your new hole.”

Night passes without sleep for Rashka. They have been loaded into the rear of a black touring sedan in an all-­business manner by two Gestapo men and driven over the Weidendammer Brücke to this place. What was once the Jewish home for the elderly but is now designated by the SS as the Grosse Hamburger Strasse Lager. The attic space is crammed full of other captives—­all Jews without stars. A starless galaxy of misery in a claustrophobic room. The moans, the snoring, the weeping. These are the noises that serve as Rashka’s lullaby on the night before they are scheduled for transport. Transport to the east, they were told by the men who appeared in gray coveralls, sporting yellow Judenstern and red armbands. Die Ordneren! The Jewish lager orderlies. They stayed only long enough to distribute the placards to be worn about the neck.

Her mother has drifted away. If not into sleep then into some version of waking slumber that separates her from the reality of the world. Sometimes her eyes are open, and she is staring like the dead stare. Rashka does not wish to cry. She does not want to be a weeping child. She has, therefore, taken a tool in hand. On the back of the transport card, she is scratching out a likeness of herself with the nub of a pencil from her pocket. She has no mirror, so she uses the mirror of her mind to draw her face. A dark, scratchy cartoon of a ragamuffin. A scruffy animal with oily moons for eyes. If she is to wear this piece of cardboard, T for Transport, if this is to be the sum of her identity, a transported Jewess, then she will mark it. She will make it hers. With the final strokes, she scores a six-­pointed star on the forehead.

The morning comes. The Jewish orderlies arrive shouting instructions, bellowing in a mix of German and Yiddish. “All those for transport! Stand! Form a queue! Move! Move!”

Rashka can tell that her eema is starting to panic. Not in a hysterical manner. She is, after all, an honored member of the Prussian Academy of Arts and founder of the Berolina Circle. She is too grand for tears and screaming. No, Eema’s panic is interior. It stiffens her movements. Hunches her attention. Curdles the color in her eyes. Her grip on Rashka’s hand is stone. The queue is proceeding. The shambling assembly of those marked for the east.

But then. Then at the door.

“Not this one,” the ordner with the scared face commands. “Or this one,” he instructs his underling with a scowl, shoving first Eema and then Rashka from the queue.

Instead of being sent to the trains, they are led down a pair of narrow stairwells into the cellar. The stone and mortar foundation that comprises the wall is a cold color, not quite gray, not quite brown. That’s what Rashka concentrates on as they are shoved into a room where the windows have been bricked over. The door is steel, painted a greasy black. It clanks closed. Silence between mother and child. And then the door clanks open just as it had clanked shut.

Eema jumps to her feet as if she has been shot up by a spring. “Fritz!” she shouts and seizes her brother with such vehemence that she nearly topples them both off their feet. Feter must pry himself free from her grip. He is thin and pale in the face. Clad in the gray coverall of an ordner, he bears the Judenstern, and his sleeve is banded by a red armlet.

“Listen, listen to me, Vina,” he is telling her in Yiddish. “I want you to keep your head, do you hear me? Keep your head! You must keep yourself in check no matter what.”

“In check? What to do you mean, Fritzl?” Eema is searching her brother’s eyes for understanding, but Feter Fritz is dodging her efforts. “What do you mean, I must keep myself in check. In check for what? What is coming?”

The door clanks again.

And there she is. So immaculately dressed. So carefully coiffed. A fashion plate from Die Dame. Her hair in a bright-­red sweep over her collar like a roll of fire. And for her eyes? Two lit emeralds.

Eema’s face drains of expression.

“No need to fear, Lavinia,” the woman says. “Perhaps I am no longer your muse, but I can be your savior. Only you must cooperate. You must swallow your pride for once and do as you are told. You are not the mistress of this house.”

***

Rachel ignites a cigarette and watches the smoke rise. It curls slowly upward. She is telling Dr. Solomon about her mother. How her mother suffered after the loss of her husband.

Maybe it wasn’t love between them. Maybe there was no enduring romantic passion. But to lose a companion? The only companion she had chosen for herself? She suffered because she was alone.

“But she had you,” the good doctor points out. “Her child.”

Rachel smiles grimly. “Me? I was only a burden. She needed someone to share her love of art. To share her love of herself, really. To hold the mirror for her genius. But I could not do that. A child was a constant distraction. She made that very clear to me. And my uncle? His admiration was too tainted by his commercial interests. Selling Eema’s genius by the pound, you know? Like a commodity. No, my mother was lonely. Very lonely. Until…”

The doctor waits patiently. Until?

“Until,” says Rachel, “her muse appeared.”

She returns home in a drizzle. The stairwell is stuffy with the dampness of the day as she plods upward. Opening the door to their apartment, she is met by the sight of her husband stuffed into the gossip bench, talking again to his sister. Rachel listens and notes how, as usual, Aaron’s tone has changed now that his wife has intruded. He is more public in his summation, wrapping things up. “Okay, okay, yeah. So anyhow, like I said. I just wanted to say, ya know, that I was sorry that things didn’t work out for you and Tyrell, and I’m sorry for being a jerk to the guy.”

He’s looking at Rachel as if to say: See? I’m not a complete putz. “And look. I know he gave you the dough to pay me back for the bond, but why don’t you just hold on to it?” Suddenly Mr. Generosity. “I dunno, pay your rent on time. Go buy a couple cheesecakes at Lindy’s or something. Give one to Ma next time she drops by. She’s gotta close her mouth at least to eat.” And then, “Look, I gotta go,” he declares next. “Rachel just came home.” Then, with a quick “’Kay, bye,” he clamps the phone’s receiver firmly into the cradle. “That was Naomi,” he announces.

“Yes,” says Rachel. “It sounds like she’s doing better.”

He shrugs. “I guess. I mean, yeah. She sounded pretty good. And you know how she is. One of these guys dumps her, she falls apart, but then in a couple days, she’s off to the races again.”

Rachel nods blankly. She feels detached from this conversation. “So now you’re sorry for being a putz? Now that you can afford to be?”

Aaron scrunches up his expression. “Huh?”

Shaking her coat, she hangs it on the hall tree and steps out of her shoes. “Now that they’ve broken apart, and you no longer must worry about the race of future nieces and nephews. Now you can afford to apologize. That’s all I’m saying.”

“So.” Her husband frowns. “Let me get this straight. First, I’m a putz who should apologize, and then when I do, I’m still a putz because it was too easy.”

Rachel crosses to the refrigerator and pops it open. “Yep.”

“So what you’re really saying is the husband can’t catch a fuckin’ break.”

She removes the last Ballantine and shuts the refrigerator door with a clunk. “We’re out of beer,” she announces. “You should go see your sweetheart at the liquor store.”

***

Rashka has been separated from her mother, deposited into a bland little room by a large SS man and left there seated in a chair. It is a harshly lit place with an old oak table at the center. On the wall? A framed photograph, not of the leader of the German Volk but of the SS-­Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler. A soft, puffy schoolmaster’s face with pince-­nez glasses. She is staring at the face when the door opens and the red-­haired Fräulein sweeps in. Rashka stands as she’s been trained to do when an adult enters the room, which seems to amuse the woman. She smiles as she occupies a chair like a throne and ignites a cigarette.

“You’re so grown up, aren’t you, Bissel? When last we saw each other, you were still a little brat. But look how you’ve blossomed. A little more meat on your bones and you might be attractive in a sprightly way.”

Rashka does not know how to react to this. But the woman does not wait for a reaction. “Sit,” she instructs. “Your momma and I have had a little talk.”

Rashka sits obediently and waits.

“I’ve decided to take you on, Bissel,” the woman tells her. “To take you on as my student,” she says. “Isn’t that good news?”

But Rashka is confused. A student? She swallows. “Pardon me, gnä’ Fräulein?”

This response seems to aggravate the woman. “You didn’t expect a free ride, did you?” she demands to know. “You’re not here on a holiday, Bissel. You must earn your keep like anyone else. Like me. Like your uncle. Even Herr Kommandant Dirkweiler. Even he must work, so I hope you didn’t expect to be treated differently.”

Rashka swallows. “No, gnä’ Fräulein.”

“Good,” the woman tells her, seemingly mollified. She expels smoke and inhales it smoothly back through her nostrils. “Because otherwise, I’ll have you and your mother transported east,” she explains. “But you’re a good little goat, aren’t you? Isn’t that what your momma calls you, Bissel? Her little goat? Yes. I can see that you are. You’ll do your best for us all.”

When Rashka is returned to her mother, they have been moved to a different room. The Unterkunft Zimmer it’s called. The room of accommodation, where Feter Fritz sleeps with the rest of the Jewish lager workers. “The gnä’ Fräulein says I must work, Eema,” she whispers to her mother on the straw mattress they share.

“Yes, Rokhl,” her mother answers.

“That I must be her ‘student.’”

“Yes, Rokhl,” her mother says again. Her face gray. Her voice leaden.

“But I don’t know what that means, Eema.”

“It means that you are saving our lives, tsigele,” her mother answers. “No matter what she asks of you—­no matter how terrible it might feel—­you must obey her. Do you understand that, child? You must obey her.”