Shadows of Berlin

29.

Speak of the Wings

Fighting strong winds, an Aeroflot Ilyushin IL-­12 military transport, on route from Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk in the Soviet Union, has plowed into the eastern slope of Mount Sivukha, approximately thirty kilometers from the Mana River. Of all aboard, no survivors.

Rachel clips the article from the paper while Aaron is at work. At home, an uneasy truce reigns. This is how it’s been for the past several days since Aaron stopped sleeping at the restaurant and returned to their apartment, though not to their bed. He has been bunking on the couch. “Billeting” he calls it, like a soldier. They connect to one another only through the points of routine. She serves breakfast; he eats it. She washes the dishes or doesn’t. He doesn’t complain about the dirty dishes, but neither does he touch the sponge or the bottle of Ivory Liquid.

Her painting sits on the easel. The oils have dried enough for her to pick up her brush again, but she hasn’t. She has cleaned her brushes in the kitchen sink but not used them. Aaron complains that he can’t sleep lying on the couch with her naked portrait staring at him, so Rachel has draped it with a sheet like a ghost. The ghost of herself. They don’t really touch each other, not as wife and husband might. They touch only logistically. Passing to enter the bathroom, to get to the sink to spit out toothpaste. Nor do they talk about what has gone wrong. What is going wrong. Probably because neither one can really say what exactly is going wrong, only that it is. So they live not quite like roommates but like business partners in their marriage.

Morning. Rachel wakes, having sweated through her pajamas. From the next room, she hears music. Nat King Cole singing “A Blossom Fell.” She finds that Aaron has not left his bedclothes for her to strip from the couch as usual but has folded them neatly. Good Soldier Perlman. In fact, he is already dressed and wearing his necktie and suit jacket, sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee cup beside the percolator that dribbles steam from its spout. He looks up at her from his copy of the Herald Tribune. “There’s coffee,” he tells her.

Rachel approaches the table. Sits. Lights a cigarette from Aaron’s pack. The sharpness digs into the back of her throat. She sighs out smoke.

Darkness. After midnight. She had given Aaron the bed because she is painting, and he hadn’t argued. She can hear him snoring turbulently. An unshaded lamp burns, and the cat snoozes in a ball at one end of the sofa while Rachel sits on the opposite end, drilling into the past cemented in her own head.

Two decades before, on the day of the Nazis’ anti-­Jewish boycott, brown-­shirted storm troopers defaced hundreds of Jewish shops across the city. She was only a child, inside Ehrenberg’s Konditorei. Only a child staring out as a giant ogre in his dung-­brown uniform slopped a paintbrush across the outside of the shop’s window.

She sees it before she paints it.

But the light is switched on, and the glare hits the canvas like a soft punch. She sees it like it’s been there all along, invisible until she follows the dots of a constellation. It propels Rachel forward off the sofa. Compels her to squeeze cadmium yellow from its tube onto the palette and smash a brush into the blob of greasy color before whipping up the dirty turp standing in the coffee can. She wants it wet; she wants it oozing and dripping. Muddy and desecrated to match her memory. A zodiac unto itself. A constellation now of a single star. The Shield of David, six points dribbling down the face of the canvas, clothing her nakedness.

And now she must let it dry. She must allow her paint to settle into the canvas before she can finish. Naomi had slipped a couple of her cannabis roll-­ups into Rachel’s bag, so she sits by the window with the sash cracked open and smokes a juju, thinking of the schoolgirl with the sable plaits and the burgundy beret. Tears cool her cheek. A young girl entering Birkenau? It was a toss-­up, wasn’t it? Many went straight to the gas. Most did. Rachel can see the girl standing in front of her. “What happened to you?” she asks. “Tell me the truth. Did I murder you?”

But she keeps the truth to herself, this girl. And then she is gone, leaving Rachel gazing at the canvas before replacing the sheet over her easel. When Aaron comes out, she is shoving a casserole dish into the oven.

“Jeez, what’s that smell?” Aaron wants to know, entering in his bathrobe and pj’s. “You smoking those clove cigarettes that Naomi thinks are so beatnik?”

“Yes,” she lies. But his attention is diverted.

“So Halloween’s long gone, but we still got the ghost here haunting us, huh?” he says, surveying the shrouded easel. Rachel only pours out coffee from the percolator, but then he is behind her. “So do I at least still get a good-­morning kiss, or have we suspended that practice?” he asks.

She turns and looks into his face. The pain, the uncertainty behind his flippancy. He’s asking for mercy, so she gives him a kiss. Something more than a peck, but without heat. A kiss to satisfy the practice.

In Berlin, the transports continued till the end. Even as the thunder of the Red Army artillery drifted closer from the east, the transports continued. Lorries to the trains. Trains to the camps. The track rails were kept polished by use. For a moment, the schoolgirl joins them at the supper table. Aaron is busy with his favorite subject. Work. Something about Leo arguing with the owner of the Stork Club. Rachel is not paying attention. She’s looking at the peas that her husband has actually taken the time to remove, pea by pea, from his helping of casserole and crowd into a pea ghetto on the side of his plate.

That’s when the schoolgirl makes her appearance. Filling a chair. Gazing with empty eyes. Rachel wonders. If she survived the ramp where the trains were unloaded and the first Selektion began, it was just as likely that she starved, died of disease or an infected wound, or simply was sent to the Kremas on a whim by some SS doctor in a white coat. Or she froze to death on her pallet or dropped dead during a never-­ending roll call on the Appellplatz. In Auschwitz-­Birkenau, there were plenty of ways to die.

There’s another headline at the bottom of the page of Aaron’s discarded newspaper. A U.S.A.F. B-­29 Superfortress has crashed into a suburb in California, killing all aboard. She separates the page of newsprint and folds it into a square that she slips inside the basket of magazines next to the sofa. She will save it for her clippings book.

That night, the telephone rings. It’s after supper, and she is at the kitchen table with a cigarette, smoke hanging over the coffee cup that she’s poured but left untouched. Aaron is reading National Geographic, sitting with it on the sofa when the phone starts to ring. On the third ring, he looks up. “Telephone, honey,” he informs her.

She crosses to the gossip bench and picks it up. “Hello?”

“Rashka,” she hears a familiar voice answer.

Aaron is mouthing: Who is it? Rachel turns away from him and looks blindly at the wall. A calendar from the Gruber Refrigeration Supply Company of Forest Hills, Queens, featuring an illustration of a giant red monkey pecking on a typewriter. “What’s happened, Feter?” she asks.

“Happened?” her uncle echoes the word. “Has something happened?”

“I don’t know. You sound as if it has.”

“Well, I sound as I sound, Rokhl,” he says dismissively, impatient to move past explanations. “I need to you see you. Tomorrow.”

“Why?” she asks.

“Why?”

“Yes, Feter, why?”

“Because,” he decides to admit. “Something’s happened.”

Once more, the meeting place is planned for none of her uncle’s usual niches. Instead, it’s the Automat. It’s the Horn & Hardart’s at Trinity Place across from the chapel graveyard. When she first arrived in the States, she was astonished by the existence of such a spot. The outside decorated like a Bohemian Weinstube from a fairy tale. And inside! She had never seen such a wonderland. Drop a coin into a slot, and pop open a small brass-­framed window for a plate of steaming cheese-­baked macaroni, a bowl of freshly creamed spinach, a chicken salad on rye bread with lettuce, or a tall slice of lemon meringue pie. Magic! The cafeteria steam table offered Salisbury steak, fish cakes, freshly carved ham, roast beef, and corned beef. The interior gleamed with bright light. The tile floor was shiny white. The tables were scrubbed spotless, and the customers poured in.

Now she finds the space to be a shabby ghost of itself. The customer population is sporadic. Wilted housewives in their department store hats at the end of shopping. Clots of shopgirls, stenographers, and secretaries forking up dishes of pear and cottage cheese or Jell-­O salads, shedding their heels under the table. Stooped salesmen on their lunch break fortifying themselves on roast turkey and gravy with ruby-­colored cranberry sauce and a glob of mashed potatoes on the side.

For nostalgia’s sake, she slides a nickel into a slot and removes a slice of lemon meringue. But when she sits down with it, picking up her fork, she pauses. The meringue has gone hard, crusty brown and dotted with beads of grease.

“Ziskeit!” she hears and sets down the fork. Feter seizes her hands and kisses them as he scrapes into the chair opposite. “Meyn kind!” is what he says. He is still in his tweeds, and his necktie is straight, and his hair is combed, yet he looks exhausted. Also, she notes, the bamboo cane is missing from the ensemble.

“Feter” is all she says before he interrupts her.

“Rashka. You must listen to me,” he insists. “What I am about to tell you may shock you. It may frighten you. But you must remain strong.”

Silence. She sees that for all his surface bravado, the brash persona he is wearing like a cloak is utterly fabricated. His eyes betray a dread-­filled panic.

“I hope you’ll forgive me, but…” He must pause here to fortify himself. For effect? “But I lied to you.” The confession. “Lied about me, about your eema’s painting.” And then he says, “I asked you for money for that gonif pawnbroker? You turned me down. I understood why,” he is assuring her with great sympathy. His shoulders are hunched forward.

“A person can’t give what they do not have. But I,” he says, shaking his head—­and here something begins to alter. A crack in the sheen of the performance when his eyes go overtly frantic in his head. “I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t. So I went to someone else,” he confesses. “I’ve managed to generate a few connections to the art world, even here in this meshugana metropolis,” he insists with a certain manic egoism. “Oh, yes. The name Fritz Landau is still known to a handful of discerning souls, my dear. On that you can rely.”

Rachel’s gaze is probing. Both distressed and wary. Is he having a breakdown? A stroke? Should she consider finding a pay phone for the ambulance?

“So I went,” he says solemnly, almost reverently, as if speaking of the Temple, “to the House of Glass.”

Silence.

“You doubt this?” he demands to know in a tone that is laced with both indignation and fear. Of course he must be able to read her face. “You doubt that your old uncle could still retain a shred of dignity with such a prestigious operation?”

“No. In fact, I don’t doubt it, Feter.” She does not mention Naomi’s photograph. It would only push him further toward the edge: What? I am to be spied upon, Daughter?

“I just want the truth,” she replies carefully.

“The truth? And what is that?” He snorts. Frowns. He closes his eyes for a moment and massages the side of his head with his fingers. Then he looks away from her. Bites his lips for an instant, eyes gone raw. What inner trauma is he staring at? Is it a breakdown, or is it an act? “Very well,” he decides. “Truth is what you desire, then it is truth you shall receive. I met,” he says, “with David Glass. Yes. The exalted one. The great man himself.” He breathes out. “I explained to him what I knew.”

“What you knew?”

“And, as it happened? What I knew was valuable. I was promised a commission,” he says. “A commission for your eema’s painting, ziskeit,” he declares and swallows. Swallows hard. The blush of performance is leaking away from him. The color draining from his cheeks, exposing la couche morte beneath. The Dead Layer. “I convinced the man that if he buys for pennies, he could sell for a fortune. I would take no more than a modest percentage. Honestly, I was a bit amazed how quickly he agreed. But then it struck me that he must already have a buyer in mind. I simply never conceived that the buyer could be…” He stops. Unable to speak the name. His gaze goes hollow. “She married a rich man, of course. She’s Mrs. Irving Mendelbaum now.”

Rachel repeats the name vacantly. “Mendelbaum.”

“Yes.” He nods with leaden eyes. And then he says, “You recall the proverb, ziskeit? ‘Speak of wings and the angel appears.’”

Silence.

And then her uncle says, “She’s alive” in a toneless voice.

Rachel feels her face heat, her nerves vibrate. “No. No, she’s not.”

“Rashka… She is.”

“No. No, you said yourself that she was dead. That she had hanged herself in a Russian cell.”

“That was the lie,” Feter informs her.

“No, this is the lie. What you are saying. She’s not alive. You’re lying, Feter. Eema always said you couldn’t help yourself. That lies were too easy for you.”

Feter is shaking his head. “Not this time.”

“She died, Feter. Elle est morte!”

“Rashka.” He makes her name sound like such a pitiable thing. “The truth is different. If someone was found hanged in a Soviet cell, it wasn’t her. She is here. In New York. Very much alive. And she wants to see you.”