Shadows of Berlin

30.

All Because of Her Little Goat

The day is cold, but the Orchard Café is warm. Rashka breathes in the scent of perfume that clouds the air around the gnä’ Fräulein, who has ordered them two coffees. No more warm milk; she is not a child. Just look at yourself in the mirror, Bissel. That’s what the gnä’ Fräulein tells her. Womanhood is upon her. The blessing and the curse of it. “Give me your face,” the woman tells her, crooking her finger, gesturing for Rashka to turn toward her. Rashka shifts in her chair. “Closer,” says the gnä’ Fräulein. Rashka pokes her face slightly forward. There is something in the gnä’ Fräulein’s hand. A tube of lipstick that pops softly when it’s uncapped. “Now, give me your lips, like so,” she says and puckers lightly to demonstrate.

Rashka feels nervous. The color of the lipstick in the tube is red, bright as blood. Very few women in Berlin have such luxuries available, and besides, don’t the Nazis detest cosmetics on good German women? But the color is so rich. She feels a pang of hunger for it as she obeys the command of the gnä’ Fräulein. The feel is waxy but thick as it’s applied. A smooth roll on the flesh of her lips. Upper lip. Then lower lip. The same slightly sticky velvety roll.

“Now do as I do,” the gnä’ Fräulein tells her and primps her lips together. Rashka obeys. The gnä’ Fräulein observes her and then nods. “Yes,” she says and holds up the small mirror in the shell-­shaped powder puff case. Rashka stares at the color ripening her mouth in the reflection.

***

Rachel is walking aimlessly. Shoulders crouched. Head down and bumping into people. Hey, lady! Watch it! Open your eyes, why don’t you! Jeez, are you blind? The words bounce off. She doesn’t care. She is fleeing herself, but no matter how fast she bores ahead, no matter how many steps she puts behind her, she is still a prisoner of her own body, of her own mind, of her own history.

Stepping off a curb, she stumbles, and a car horn blares irately over a scream of brakes. She glares at the car’s chrome bumper. The driver is shouting curses at her, but she shrugs them off. The car suddenly swings around her with an angry gun of its engine and is replaced by another car blaring its horn. At this point, like a sleepwalker coming awake, she blinks. Shakes herself. Standing at the curb is the schoolgirl with the sable braids and the wine-­colored beret, watching her as always from the silence of death.

“Hey, sweetheart. Move out of the fuckin’ street, for Chrissake!”

This time, she obeys the demand of the driver and steps back up onto the sidewalk. The girl has vanished.

“You should go see a fuckin’ shrink, crazy bitch!” she hears the driver suggest, followed by another gun of another engine.

There’s a telephone booth on the corner. Rachel is making a call as people pass by indifferently. The phone receiver in her hand, she inserts a nickel. She listens to the clatter of the dial as it rotates backward with each number. A truck rumbles past the booth as the drone of each ring precedes a dull clack of connection. But Dr. Solomon? He is not available. This is what the woman from his answering service tells her. Can she take a message?

Yes. The Red Angel is not dead. She is alive.

The answering service woman is confused. “I beg your pardon? Could you repeat that, please? The angel who?”

Rachel hangs up. Stares through the glass of the booth. Waiting for her across the street under the lamp of the United States Realty Building is the schoolgirl again. Watching.

Feter Fritz had given her the particulars. The time, the location, all arranged. She takes the Eighth Avenue Independent uptown. Entering Central Park, she feels cold. A deep, shivering chill. She digs out her bottle of Miltown to warm her, but her hands are shaking, and when she attempts to open the bottle, it slips from her grip, spilling the pills in all directions. “Scheisse!” she cries out. She could try to pick them up, kneel down on her hands and knees to retrieve them pill by pill, but that feels too humiliating, so she simply abandons the mess.

Off the Central Drive, there’s a statue called Eagles and Prey. A small goat trapped in a crevice is devoured alive by a pair of ravenous eagles. This is where she finds the bench. The spot where Feter has instructed her to wait. This is the third cigarette she has smoked, lit from the ember of the last. The butts of the first two lie flat on the sidewalk, crushed by the toe of her saddle shoe. Her eyes close. Who is she expecting? A ghost scissored from her memory? A fury from her nightmares? A bloody archangel, fiery in her naked hunger, spreading her ragged wings?

Speak of the wings and the angel appears.

“Good morning, Bissel,” she hears.

The shock is flooding. It matches the jolt from a frayed electrical plug, a cold pulse of electricity fed into the body, vibrating her bones. It sweeps through the whole of her. But then she simply stares into the still-­beautiful face.

***

A transport. It’s raining that day. The day Rashka loses her mother. Two lorries leave for the Grunewald rail station. Rashka is aware of this transport; who is not? But it is not until the gnä’ Fräulein appears that she feels a horror fill her to overflowing.

“I put your feter on the train.”

Confusion.

“The train?”

“To Poland. Your feter. Your feter and your eema both.”

The pain of a thousand needles surges through Rashka’s body. Her eyes burn. Her mouth opens, but no words come. No words at all.

“It’s for your own good, Bissel. Your uncle? Really, he was doomed from the start. Even he knew that. And your mother? Your mother, Bissel, she was holding you back,” the gnä’ Fräulein insists. “She was a drag on you,” the woman says. “An impediment. You can see this, can’t you, Bissel? I’m sure you can. For us to…to do our work, we must be free of impediments. So you must be strong, Bissel. No tears,” she commands, wiping away the tears that are streaming down Rashka’s cheeks. “You must be hard like stone.”

“I don’t understand,” Rashka whispers, her voice raw. “You promised. You promised to keep her safe!” Suddenly, she is shouting like a mad demon. The whole of her being feels aflame. “You promised! You promised!” And then she sees stars as the gnä’ Fräulein slaps her across the face with the back of her fist.

“You! How can you dare speak to me so? I’ve kept you alive. Do you think that Dirkweiler cared one shit about another insignificant Jewish sow? It was me who kept you off the trains. Not your beloved feter. Me! No one else! Me alone! And this is how I’m repaid? With your childish anger?”

Rashka feels the blood dripping from her nose. Tastes it on her lips.

“Do you think I have taken on the burden of your life for my own well-­being? A stupid little fish to keep swimming? No. This is for your good, not mine. Can you comprehend what I’ve done? I have saved your life. I chose you over your mother. Though now I think maybe I should have put you both on the train and saved myself the heartache.”

These are the woman’s last words on that day.

The next morning comes, and Rashka is aroused with a kick. “Come, Bissel,” says the gnä’ Fräulein flatly. “Time to earn your keep.”

The bombing is worse now. The Tommies by night, the Amies by day. Masses of gleaming silver wings streaking through the blue of the sky. The wine restaurant that the gnä’ Fräulein had picked for the day has evacuated to the nearest U-­Bahn tunnel, which is now thickly crowded with Berliners intent on surviving the latest onslaught. Above them, the guns of the Zoo Flak Tower begin to pound the air, and a fresh swell of people invade the tunnel, but in the crowd, the gnä’ Fräulein is suddenly gone. Separated from Rashka and the man Cronenberg. The tunnel stinks of fear and of soapless Berliners. Faces are numb-­looking. Numb to any illusion of victory piped out through the loudspeakers of the Propaganda Ministry. Numb to the daily ration of destruction. Numb to the crush of defeat.

Rashka is numb as well. She tries to imagine where her eema is. In a slave camp somewhere east? Is she hungry? Frightened? Cold? Does she believe that Rashka has abandoned her? Rashka herself feels beyond tears. She has isolated her soul within her body. Now she simply breathes in and out. Her heart simply continues to beat without purpose, when abruptly, she feels a hand invade the inside of her coat. It’s Cronenberg. For an instant, it feels like a violation. But then the hand is withdrawn. He has stuffed her coat with an envelope. She glares at the man’s face in confusion, but Cronenberg’s eyes are level.

“That’s money and papers,” he tells her. “Enough for train fare and some food along the way. Also, a bomb pass with a false name. Your building was bombed out. Your father’s at the front. You’ll be on your way to join your family in the town of Furtwangen in the Schwarzwald. That ought to put you far enough west of the Russians when they come.”

She is too shocked to answer him.

“Not much of a plan. Might not work. But it’s the best I could manage,” he tells her. “When the raid ends, leave by the opposite stairwell. I’ll make sure she doesn’t catch up with you. So good luck, little baggage,” he says, and then he is gone.

***

“I know it was me who asked for this meeting,” says the Angel, “but I almost did not come.” She tells this to Rachel on the park bench as if she is speaking more to herself. They are separated on the bench by an empty middle space of a little less than a foot. That’s all. “I thought you might be laying a trap for me.” She frowns off at the trees for a moment before she speaks. “That you might have some misguided desire for vengeance.”

“You must mean for justice.”

“Justice?” The Angel turns with a half smile. “Let’s not get in over our heads, child. Justice.” She repeats the word. “True justice. Don’t you believe that might sink us both?” She breathes in smoke and then releases it. “That’s why I decided to take the risk. I thought, if I am guilty of anything, then surely she is guilty too.”

Rachel turns away from those huntress eyes and stares at the walk. The spent cigarettes and daily sweep of litter, from which the ashes of a nameless, braided schoolgirl have risen on the breeze and assembled themselves. The girl stands before Rachel as she must have once stood before the death chamber of the Krematorium. Stripped to her flesh, staring still with terror yellowing her eyes. And then she melts in a drizzle of wind.

“So why can’t we dispose of this nonsense, hmm? I did what I did, and I’ll tell you why. It began as all tragedies begin. With a mitzvah, of course. When I was first arrested, I tried to spare my parents. They were vulnerable. Helpless. I did my best to save them. Them and myself,” she admits. “I confess to that much. I was trying to save myself as well. I had an instinct for self-­preservation, but is that a crime? Every animal has the instinct for life, and only the human animal lays blame to it. But what can be said? Did you know there was money paid for Jews?” she asks. “Two hundred marks, Dirkweiler paid me. Two hundred marks per Jew. That’s what they paid me for you. I admit it. You and your mother. Four hundred Reichsmarks you earned me. So don’t expect to get high and mighty with me, child,” she instructs. “You were pocket money.” She pauses to ignite a cigarette from a gold-­plated case.

“Why aren’t you dead?” Rachel asks aloud.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, why aren’t you dead?” she repeats. “You committed suicide in a Russian jail,” Rachel points out. “So why aren’t you dead?”

And the Angel shows her an ugly, humorless smile. “When the Red Army entered Berlin, Dirkweiler blew his own brains out. The lager disintegrated. Berlin disintegrated. Emil and I had slipped into the city at night during a raid, but we split up after the Russians crossed the Teltowkanal, and I didn’t see him again. I hid until the Russians found me like the Russians found most women,” she says. “It was brutal and debasing. But then I acquired a protector. A major in the NKVD. He was ugly and smelled of onions, but he could make things happen. It was he who had the rumor spread that I had been arrested and hanged myself.

“It was all nonsense. I was never arrested. What crime had I committed after all? But it worked. It saved me from the zealots rooting out so-­called war criminals. What dreck. One does what one must to survive, and that is a crime? You did what you did because you thought it would keep you alive, didn’t you, Bissel? When you spied that little Mädchen with the braids in the café that morning? You did what you did to stay off the transports. To keep yourself alive. To keep your mother alive. I understand. Your mother understood. That’s why she gave you up.”

Rachel glares darkly at her.

“Ah, such a look. You didn’t know, Bissel?” she taunts. “Mummy never told her little Schatzi? Well, then I will tell. I asked her permission. Your uncle Fritz had some power over the transport lists, yes, but it was limited. Dirkweiler could overrule any decision at any time. But I had the power to influence the Herr Kommandant himself. No one netted him Jews like I did, not even Emil. But. Before I brought you into the business. Shall we call it that? Before then, I wanted your mother to agree. I simply refused to allow her to pretend that I had stolen you from her. You were a gift, Bissel. Your eema gave you to me. Just as she had given me to your uncle since she was too cowardly to pursue her own feelings for me. She had a reputation. She had a child. It was hard for a woman to survive in the art world. So I understood. But I did not forgive. How does a person ever really forgive betrayal?” She crushes out her cigarette. “I have done some digging on you, Bissel. Isn’t that how it is called? Digging? You are married.”

“Yes,” says Rachel.

“But no children?”

Rachel says nothing.

“No? Your husband would like things differently, perhaps? Never mind. No need to answer. I can see it in your face. My advice, Bissel, is stand to your ground. How is it said? ‘Stick to your guns.’ The world does not have to be an unhappy place. Can you learn that, do you think? There are beautiful things to be had. To be enjoyed. If there is any lesson I can still teach you, perhaps it could be this: the world resents the unhappy but indulges those who know how to take joy from their surroundings.”

And suddenly the Angel issues a laugh. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to laugh. It’s only that here I am preaching. The last thing you expected from me, I’m sure. You must have hoped I would break to pieces in front of you. Come apart like a doll. But be honest, will you?”

Rachel grinds out words. “You have my mother’s painting.”

“Yes. So I do. And—­I believe I have the story correct, yes? Your Feter Fritz discovered it with a pawnbroker?” She pronounces the word with amused disdain. “How astonishing. It makes one suspect the hand of fate, doesn’t it? I sometimes sit and gaze at it, wondering if I could really have ever been so young. With so much fire. Your mother was a genius. She captured the essence of youth. Of desire.”

“And is this why we are here?” Rachel wishes to know. Is it for her to gloat? Kvell is the word she uses.

“What? No. I asked your uncle to arrange things not so I could kvell over a thing. But so I could offer you help. I want to help you, Bissel,” she declares.

“Help? From the one they called Red Angel?”

The Angel’s expression flattens. “Don’t use that name.”

“Why not? It was who you were. The Red Angel of Death. And help from her was always poison.”

“So I am to be blamed now for staying alive? For doing what was necessary? I thought you learned what courage survival took. I thought I had taught you that at least. But now you sound like a pitiful victim. The poor little Jewess who can never remove the Judenstern after it was sewn over her heart.”

Rachel shivers. With rage? With fear? With grief? She can speak only to spit a curse. Black sorrow she wishes upon the woman.

But the Angel is unimpressed. She shakes her head, disappointed, even as tears like ice are running down Rachel’s cheeks. “Ah, Bissel,” she laments. “In so einem Gewirr bist du,” the woman declares. Such a tangle you are in. Then she is digging into her alligator handbag for an expensive linen handkerchief. “You were a delicate child, so your mother always said. ‘Rokhl? She is a delicate little bird,’ is what she told me. Wipe your eyes,” she instructs, offering the linen square.

But Rachel refuses the offer, uses her palms to smear at her tears. “You cannot speak to me so. Ir zent nisht meyn muter,” she burns. You are not my mother.

“No,” the Angel admits, frowning lightly as she returns the handkerchief to her purse. “No. But I could be.”

Rachel’s glare goes jagged. She coughs, covering her mouth.

“I could be,” the Angel repeats. “I’m a very wealthy woman, Bissel. My late husband, Irving, was called ‘the Concrete King,’ and believe me, in New York City, the king of concrete was a very good thing to be. I could help you,” she presses. “Ikh ken helfn du.”

“You? Help me?”

“Is that so absurd? I have no children of my own. And your uncle tells me now that you are an artist. That you have inherited your eema’s talent.”

Rachel stares.

“I could help you if you’d allow it. I know many people in the art world,” she says. “I am well known as a collector. I have many connections I could share with you.”

“Such as David Glass,” Rachel notes leadenly.

“David? Yes, why not David? He has a good eye and is always interested in emerging talent.”

“I went to his gallery looking for Eema’s painting. The girl there acted as if I was demented.”

“Pfft!” The Angel dismisses this. There is a certain manic hunger creeping into her voice. Into her eyes. “That makes no difference. I spend plenty with the Glass Gallery. Plenty. So believe me, what I ask for, I will get. Oh yes. But Glass is only one gallery. It’s a big city. There are any number I could call on. Many debts I could collect.”

But Rachel has no reply to the bribe she is being offered. The bait laid by the Angel for her trap. “You made me into a murderer,” she announces and watches the woman’s face freeze, cut off in midbreath from her busy spree of possibilities. “I am the crime that you committed,” Rachel tells her. “And now you think you can buy my forgiveness? That I will sell myself like you did?”

The Angel’s expression levels. “I may have sold myself, Bissel, but never cheaply. Never for mediocre gains. I know more about you than you might guess. Your marriage to a man who makes pennies? No children. No future. A few paintings sold from a nameless gallery years ago. And then? Clapped into an asylum. My, what would your eema think of that? Her poor daughter? ‘What a waste,’ she would say.”

“Do not speak for her!” Rachel shouts, the rage like a blast of steam. “Don’t you dare speak for her! You murdered my mother!”

“I loved your mother,” the Angel shouts back. Painfully, as if her own words have cut her heart from her breast. “I was the one betrayed! She betrayed me! For you! For her child. Didn’t you ever figure that out? It wasn’t the world. It wasn’t her high-and-mighty reputation. It was you. The child! We couldn’t be together because of you! I was nineteen years old, Bissel. I would have given her myself in every way, but instead she gave me up! Passed me on to her brother all because of her little goat!”

The sky cracks open at that moment, and the rain that follows the thunder falls like a lead curtain. A man with a newspaper evacuates his bench, dashing away with his paper over his head. The Angel contains herself. Reassembles herself from her outburst and raises her umbrella.

“Ah. Now comes the flood,” she announces and then offers, “Shall we share my shirem?”

Rachel squints through the soaking downpour. She has felt a poison bubbling through her, but now it is on a full roil. She barely makes it off the bench before she heaves the whole boiling mess onto the grass, splattering the sculpture’s granite base with vomit. The sickness of it all coming up. The murderous eagles must be outraged at the affront, their slaughter interrupted. She spits.

The Red Angel has risen from her seat. She is standing there under the umbrella’s black crown, shoulders back, victorious now, a smug pity forming her expression. She thinks she won. She gazes down at Rachel as she says, “You think you are so special in your guilt, Bissel? It is so precious to you? So precious that it sickens you, but you cannot vomit it out because you do not want to. You want to keep it down in your belly where it can boil. But your guilt does not make you special.

“That girl in that farshtunken café off the Friedrich? With her silly plaits and beret? She was a casualty of war,” the Angel informs her. “Like tens of millions of others across the breadth of this farshtunken world. There was nothing special about her. Just as there was nothing special about your so-­called crime. Yet you must make it so. You must make it such a terrible transgression that it stops you from living. You hide behind it, hide from life. But you need not. You can move beyond it.”

Rachel stares at the woman as the rain begins to soak into her. Those hard green eyes. The muscle twitches along the line of the woman’s jaw.

“See yourself in my mirror, Bissel,” the Angel tells her. “I am your reflection, just as you are mine.” She reaches out. Reaches out to touch Rachel on the arm, but Rachel bats the attempt away.

“It’s you who sickens me.” She wipes her mouth on her sleeve and swallows her breath. “It is you. You are the sickness,” she declares. “It’s too bad the rumor wasn’t true. That you didn’t hang yourself ten years ago. Think of how much air you have stolen since then, just by breathing. Think of how much space you’ve purloined by staying alive. Space that should have belonged to someone else. Someone human.”

“Bissel,” the Angel says.

“You are nothing but disease! A plague that infects everyone you have ever touched!”

The Angel seizes her arm, her eyes jagged. “Rashka.”

Rachel tugs to regain her arm. “Let go! You have no claim on me.”

“I’m dying,” the woman shouts, her voice suddenly a croak.

Rachel freezes. She sees the raw bewilderment at such a fact in the Angel’s face.

“I’m dying,” she repeats.

“Another lie,” says Rachel.

“No. No, simply the truth. I have cancer of the blood.” The muscles twitch again along her jaw. “There is no cure,” she says. “Only death is the cure.”

Rachel breathes. She shrugs her arm free from the Angel’s grip, and this time, there is no resistance.

“It’s why I bought your mother’s painting. It’s why, when I was informed of your uncle’s part in its discovery, I revealed myself to him as its new owner. But not because of him or the painting either. Because I wanted to know about you. And when he told me you had your mother’s gift with the paintbrush?” She breathes out. “This is why I wanted him to push you. To produce your own work while I still have the time to act. I will buy whatever you produce, Bissel, and pay plenty for it. I still will, don’t you see? I could give you the career that your mother had!”

Rachel stares, but then turns and walks away. She walks away with her head up as the rain pours down, soaking through her. She hears the woman crying out her name behind her. But she does not turn. She does not slow. She feels the rain washing through her.

In the shower, the water is scalding.

Seated at the kitchen table, holding the cat in her lap, Rachel watches the smoke rise from the cigarette. She has replaced the green glass ashtray that she threw on the floor with a red plastic item sporting the word FIRE in white block letters—­unbreakable. She is dressed in a pullover and dungarees, her feet in wool socks, her hair still damp. A change in the wind rattles the window behind her. She absorbs the rattle. Evicts the cat from her lap and crosses into the closet beside the bedroom.

From behind the vacuum cleaner, she retrieves the shopping bag from B. Altman that hides her scrapbook of clippings. She opens it to the last entry. A United Airlines jet called the “Mainliner Denver” was destroyed in midair when a hidden bomb exploded in the luggage compartment. The creased newsprint is bumpy with library paste.

The rain has dwindled to a cold drizzle, but Rachel has not bothered to wear a coat as she opens the foyer door and steps out onto the stoop. She does not run but keeps a steady pace, trotting down the steps. The air smells lightly of smoke as she descends the steps to the cellar where the trash bins are located. Dented garbage receptacles, grimy and smelling, the street number slopped on the sides with black paint.

The blackness of the clouds has grayed. A thin flow of thunder drifts above her head as she lifts the lid on the middle can with a light clank of metal. Then drops in the bag. Goodbye to it. Goodbye to her book of scraps. Her history of disaster plummeting from the sky like a falling angel. Dumped now into the trash. Goodbye. She clamps down the lid.

Shedding the shroud from her easel, Rachel stares into the canvas. A dark rectangle. But under the skim of black, her own image emerges like a pale pentimento. Naked and glaring. The Magen David dripping down into her eyes.

She lets her head drift lightly to one side. And then she is moving. It doesn’t take long to assemble her palette. Lead white. Zinc white. Titanium. Lamp black. Alizarine crimson.

On the day she was taken, the girl with the burgundy beret did not cry. She did not scream. The terror in her eyes was banked by obedience. The girl is curled into a white fetal sphere and inserted into the womb of the painting. And there is something mysterious that Rachel searches for now as she paints the girl’s face in miniature. An attempt at life. Deuteronomy commands it. Behold, I give before you this day the life and the good, the death and the evil, blessing and curse; and you shall choose life, so that you will live, you and your seed.

When Aaron comes home, he’s brought one of the restaurant’s doggy bags with him, a little greasy at the bottom. “The red snapper was pretty good at lunch,” he says. “Thought I’d bring some home.” He passes behind her and heads for the oven. “What should I set the temp at to warm it up?”

Rachel looks at her husband’s face, the crooked half grin. The hopeful boyishness in his eyes that shines through even his exhaustion.

She bursts into tears. He reacts with confusion at first. “Hey, what’s wrong? What did I do now?” Then his brow crinkles. “Honey, what is it? Whatssa matter?”

Is she hurt? Is she bleeding somewhere, what? But then he sees the painting.

The image of his wife behind the black curtain and then the gestating ghost of a child. His face crunches up. His eyes narrow. He’s on his feet, holding onto Rachel, who’s hugging his waist. All he manages to say is, “What the…”

“It’s my crime, Husband,” she whispers. “My precious crime.”

That night. That night in bed, Rachel grasps him before he can even turn off his bedside lamp. They are artless with each other, clumsy in their coupling, but it makes no difference. The crush is all that’s important. Rachel is on her back. The springs squeak. The mattress is ungiving, unforgiving. She uses Aaron as an anchor to keep her pinned. She grips his curls like she might like to rip them out from his head.

It’s hard to keep track. To be sure that she will make him pull out in time. Hard to focus on anything but the hard pulse between them. She is thinking but not thinking. “Fire” is all she is thinking. The fire consuming her. The fire defining her. Reducing her will to ashes. And when suddenly his body arches and spasms, it’s too late to think. It’s too late and she lets him flood her, with nothing between to separate them.