Shadows of Berlin

27.

The Accuracy of Silence

Daniela returns with the baby, a crinkly eyed little elflette. They plan to name her Joanna Sara after Ezra’s great-­aunt of blessed memory. Rachel swallows but smiles. According to the Reich’s Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names, every Jewish male had to adopt “Israel” as a middle name, and every Jewish female, “Sara.” But Nazi policy has no place in the temple, where the rabbi calls out her name for it to be heard in Israel.

And let us say Aymen.

Rachel suffers through the prayer service, as she suffers through an excruciating twenty minutes in the infant’s department of B. Altman’s picking out a white knit layette—­hat, sweater, and booties with pink trim. They visit the Weinstocks with fillet of sole and fish sticks for the kids carried from the restaurant. With a Lindy’s cheesecake in a box. But neither she nor Aaron is much interested in staying long.

She sees the German super in the hallway once but hurries up the steps, pretending to be lost in the mail she has just collected from the box.

At the Museum of Modern Art, she stands in front of a Rothko. Before the war, the artist had become an American citizen because he feared that the U.S. government would deport Jews back to Europe. He changed his name from Markus to Mark, from Rothkowitz to Rothko, which still sounded Jewish maybe but wasn’t the name over a delicatessen. And of his canvases? They grew huge and deep. He was quoted as saying that he had “imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.” He also said, “Silence is so accurate.” A statement with which Rachel can only agree.

She would like to trap utter violence within the confines of a canvas. She would like to imprison it there, where it would live out its miserable existence in solitary confinement on the painted surface. But she also craves the accuracy of silence. Its perfect beauty, like the blank silence of an untouched canvas. The silence of a painting before it exists. So at home, she stares at the white canvas stretched across the wooden rectangular frame and tries to imagine how she could possibly capture an image of herself more silent than silence.

But then her mother is there, seated beside her on the sofa, dressed in her studio smock, her hands stained with colors, perfumed with linseed oil. You think it’s a barrier, I know. This white expanse. You think it’s a wall, and you ask yourself: Do I have the strength to break through it? But the wall, Ruchel, is an illusion. It’s not a barrier; it’s simply a screen. A screen that’s hiding the painting, which is already there, hidden behind it. You’ve already finished the painting in your head and in your heart, she says. Every stroke is already in place. All you need do is peel the whiteness away, and the truth of the work will be revealed.

“And that is what I’m afraid of, Eema. It won’t be a beautiful revelation. I’m terrified by that idea. I’m terrified of the ugliness that will come out of me. What kind of monstrosity I will release for all to see.”

Tsigele. Listen to me. For once, please listen. Art is not always beautiful. There is horror and ugliness in the world that must be painted too. It is not beauty; it is truth that’s at the heart of every true artist’s work. So I say—­paint your monstrosity. Better it live on the canvas than inside you.

“And once the truth is revealed, Eema? I will be hated and despised. I’ll have no husband nor home. I’ll lose everything I have and be shunned, an outcast. The police will find me sleeping in rags on a park bench with newspapers for a blanket and take me away.” Her eyes are filling with tears. “And what’s worse is I’ll deserve it all.”

Of course. My selfish child. Always thinking of herself, poor thing, her eema says, but not as an indictment. More like a sad, simple little fact. You believe the monstrosity belongs to you alone? You’re wrong, tsigele.

A sob breaks over Rachel. “You don’t know what I did, Eema. You don’t know the crime I committed.”

I don’t care about crimes, Daughter. You’re not listening. Your ears are blocked by your own self-­pity. Look at that canvas, Rokhl. Look at it! Do you have the slightest conception of how I long for one more hour—­one more moment—­when I could touch a brush to my palette and paint even a single stroke? To feel the strength of that? But art is for the living, not the dead. So stand up and live, child. Your paintbrush is a weapon! Use it! Defend yourself against yourself.

Rachel liberates the easel from the hallway closet. The Woolsey standing floor easel, collapsed and stowed behind the vacuum. The tarp is there too, a shop tarp from a factory floor, saved from Aaron’s days slaving for his uncle in the leather goods workshop, already stained with tanning solution before she stained it further with paint, though it still smells of both. The rusty tin of turpentine is under the sink, but her oil paints, her brushes, those are harder to find, till finally she remembers.

She must muscle out various boxes full of clothes and board games from Aaron’s childhood, the lamps that came from Webster Avenue but need rewiring. The dusty debris that’s too much trouble to pitch. Would her mother-­in-­law be upset if they threw out the tarnished brass floor lamp with the lion crest? Probably not, but why risk it? She shoves aside a box marked KIDS’ BOOKS: AARON and finds it. The scuffed and paint-­stained Winsor & Newton painter’s box. Inside are the crusty tubes of oils, the bundle of wooden-­handled brushes, the paint-­stained palette and palette knives, the broad brushes for priming. They’re all waiting for her. The smell rises into her nostrils like an ancient perfume released from a pharoah’s vault.

The canvas she bought at Lee’s Art Shop is already primed, but she still lays down a dry-­brush underpainting of umber followed by the Dead Layer. La couche morte. She mixes it generously at the center of the palette. Then she must sit back. Oils require patience. They require a geological approach to time and art. Each layer must be permitted to crust and then harden, so she sits back and watches the color fix. She is still sitting on the sofa, wearing one of Aaron’s old dress shirts as a smock, already blotted with paint, her hands already stained, her brushes soaking in turp, when the key turns in the lock. The door opens, and she hears Aaron before she sees him. “Holy mackerel, you spill the silver polish or something? It stinks in here.”

And that’s how it starts.

Aaron has always encouraged her to do what makes her happy, as long as maybe it doesn’t smell up the place. Or as long as it doesn’t interfere too much with eating a meal. Going out for a movie maybe. You know, everyday life. As long as they can still live everyday life, then it’s fine, but really the smell, criminy.

“Open a window for cryin’ out loud,” he says. “Forget that all the heat will go right out the fucking windows. How can a person breathe, huh?”

“Paint. Smells.” That’s her reply.

“I guess that on that particular point, we agree,” her husband tells her. Aaron slumps onto the sofa with an exhale of breath. They have not been doing so well since the birth of the Weinstock child. Most times, under daily pressures, something simply feels detached between them. Other times, though, it’s a kind of stewing impatience, or even anger that heats up for an instant and then simmers away into silence. But now her husband looks bleached.

“You know, Rachel. I don’t know what else to do,” he tells her. He is sitting on one end of the sofa, and she is seated at the other end, holding Kibbitz hostage on her lap. “I try to make you happy. Well, maybe that’s too much to imagine, but at least I try to make you less miserable. You wanted a cat? We got a cat. You wanted to buy expensive mail-­order oil paints because the ones at the store weren’t good enough? I say not a problem. Buy ’em. You deserve to have expensive oil paints. And then you need time to work on your painting and stuff? Great! It’s not like I expect to have a meal cooked when I come home. So we live in a pigsty? Whattaya gonna do? You’ve got other priorities.”

And that’s how it starts.

“So you missed him,” Dr. Solomon confirms.

“Yes.”

“With the ashtray.”

“I think the sugar bowl was close.”

“And then you threw the toaster?”

“Yes.”

“Did it break?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you really intend to hit him with any of these objects?”

“He was gone by the time I threw the toaster.”

“I see.”

Rachel’s eyes tear bleakly for a moment, and she wipes them. “No. I don’t think I hoped to hit him. Not really,” she says.

“And this argument. It started because?”

“Because it would kill me to wash a window. Because I open a can and dump it into a pot instead of cooking. Because I don’t vacuum the drapes.”

“Okay. So once again. Housework was the catalyst.”

“Aaron thinks I am a bad housekeeper. He wishes he had married his mother instead.”

“You said that to him?”

“He said it to me. Though,” she admits, “maybe not exactly in such words.”

“So I believe you know about my opinion concerning arguments over housework.”

“They are never about housework,” she reports, still a good little goat.

“That’s correct. So after the argument, you left the apartment?”

“No. He left.”

“And didn’t come back?”

“There’s a couch in Leo’s office at the restaurant. A big, brown-­leather, pleated chesterfield from the thirties. It wouldn’t be the first time he slept there. Charades has always been his second home anyway. He keeps a shaving kit, suits, and fresh shirts there. When the waiters’ union went on strike, he didn’t come home for days.”

A pause to examine her. “When was the last time you ate something?” the good doctor wants to know.

“Ate something? I don’t know. I’m not hungry.”

Her hair is stiff and flattened on one side while bristled on the other. She is still dressed in the same clothes that she was wearing under the painting smock. She hasn’t changed since the day before yesterday. Her skin feels gritty against her blouse. Her mouth tastes of dead cigarette smoke. She had stopped at a diner on Lexington Avenue and swallowed a single cup of scalded black coffee, sitting at the counter with the crowd of men on their lunch break, wolfing down their sandwiches and meat-­loaf specials. The Wonder Bread deliveryman and the beat cop in their ill-­fitting uniforms, and the middle-­aged drummers with chapped faces, stopping off just long enough to stuff a B.L.T. into their mouths and gulp down coffee as they glare at the headlines of the daily papers.

“You look completely done in,” the doctor observes.

“I don’t want to talk about how I look. I didn’t come all the way up here to talk about how I look.”

“So tell me, Rachel. Do you feel you live… How did you say he put it? In a pigsty?”

“Do I?”

“Yes. Do you?”

She takes a breath. “The dirty windows or the dusty furniture, I simply don’t see them. Or if I do see them, I simply don’t care.”

“And why do you think that is?”

She thinks of the Judenhaus in Berlin. The dirty hiding places in cellars and attics. As time passed, she no longer noticed the schmutz she lived in. Schmutz was her home.

The Eighth Avenue Express is not so crowded. Rachel sits across from a Subway Sun cartoon that contends: YOU MAY NOT GET TO HEAVEN—­BUT YOU CAN LIVE IN NEW YORK! She is faced by her own dark reflection staring back from the train-­car window. Could she imagine it to be the reflection of the mother of a child?

Back at the apartment, she goes into the bedroom and changes. Her hair tied back in a plain white scarf. An old striped work shirt of Aaron’s with the sleeves rolled up under the hand-­me-­down apron from her mother-­in-­law. In the living room, she shoves the furniture to the corners and vacuums the rugs once, twice. She pulls everything down from the shelves and wipes them clean. Wipes the tabletops, the table legs, until she’s coughing on dust. She chases cobwebs with the broom, fingers the dust rag into all cracks and crevices. Squirts the windows with Windex and wipes them with newsprint till she hears glass squeak.

Sweat slicks her skin. She hunts down spots on the rug with a bottle of Handy Andy spot remover, then rolls the rug to the wall. She yanks on the rubberized gloves and plunges the scrub brush into the soap pail of Spic and Span, scours the floorboards and linoleum on her hands and knees. She dumps the ashtray from the coffee table, washes it along with a coffee cup and saucer, and leaves them to dry in the dish drain. The counters are sponged, the pantry shelves. Sinks are sponged. The bathtub and toilet are pumiced clean with Old Dutch Cleanser, a crook-­backed charwoman on the label chasing away dirt with a big stick. The tiles? Let Lysol do the dirty work! Even ovens can be cleaned with Easy-­Off Oven Cleaner!

By the time she drops into one of the kitchen chairs and lights a cigarette, the striped shirt has blotted up so much sweat that it hangs on her like she’s just jumped into a pool. She reaches for the glass garden-­green ashtray, but of course it isn’t there. She swept up its remains with the dustpan hours ago.

She eats a piece of cheese and a green apple for supper. Then steps into the shower. The hot water scalds the salty residue of the day’s sweat from her skin. Cleanses her. Toweling dry, she does not bother with anything but her pink chenille robe, even though the room is chilly because she left open the window by the fire escape when she let out the cat. The sunset is a yellow bar the color of butter.

Opening up her battered box of paints, she lays out her palette in cold colors: a greasy blue, a hunter green, a squeeze of black for midnight, and earthen colors: yellow and sulfur, and brown clay. A glob of titanium white as an anchor. At the center of the palette, she will mix her elements, the alchemist.

She drops her robe onto the floor and steps out of it.

The mirror from the bedroom door is leaned against a kitchen chair, footed by phone books. The canvas is positioned on the bridge of the easel. She stands naked and white, stripped of disguises. Bare to her past. She has screwed a pair of hundred-­watt bulbs into the floor lamp and removed the shade, so it starkly illuminates her, throwing a black shadow across the floor.

She mixes an ashen-­white flesh color on the palette and strikes the Dead Layer with paint.

Painting has sapped her. She feels chilled and emptied as she climbs back into the shower. There is nothing left in her. She has mixed all of herself into the paint she used to smear her naked image onto the stretched canvas. The paint will not wash off with water. If she is to clean herself of it, she must use turpentine and a rough rag or a scrub brush, but she does not. Instead she dresses in Aaron’s plaid bathrobe that still retains his scent, her hair still damp, still dripping, her skin marked by her paints. That’s when she hears the key, before the door to the apartment opens and shuts.

When she enters the living room from the bath, she finds her husband, hat still on his head, his coat hung over his arm, and his hands stuffed into his trouser pockets. He is examining the painting, his shoulders sunk. When he turns around to face her, his expression is drained, as if he’s just finished staring at a car wreck.

“So,” he says, his voice in neutral gear. “This is what you’re painting?”

Rachel picks up a pack of Camels from the sofa and lights up using a matchbook from the restaurant. Fine Dining before Curtain Time! Expelling smoke, she drops onto the sofa. Cautious. Each keeping their distance. “Apparently it is,” she answers him. Her brushes are soaking in the coffee can of turp. Chock full o’ Nuts. Her palette is a chaos of paint, crusting over. But the paint on her canvas gleams. It will take days to dry thoroughly. To dry down to the bone of the canvas.

“And so the idea is…” Aaron begins. “The idea is that people…” he says. “People are gonna see this?”

Rachel exhales, gazing at her painted image. “It’s not finished.”

“Oh. So maybe you’re still gonna paint some clothes on?”

Rachel slides her eyes over to her husband. For an instant, she mildly hates him. He’s nothing but a Jew from Flatbush, worried about what the neighbors might think. What does he know of anything? Of anything? For an instant, she’s sorry she missed him with the ashtray. But then his face softens. He releases a small but deflating breath, and she can see how lost he is. How utterly lost.

“I dunno, honey,” he tells her in the same neutral voice, without a hint of rancor. “I think I might be in over my head with you.”