The boy pretended to read over Max's shoulder.
"Interessant, huh?" Max said.
Charlotte saw the angry look on the boy's face. At last, he walked out. Like the earth thawing, the noise in the café gradually expanded.
"Those people scare me," Charlotte said.
He leaned toward her.
"The only way to fight them is from the far left."
This was new to her. Her parents dreamed of elegance under the Kaiser. Lulu didn't talk politics, but Charlotte suspected she favored the little Austrian.
"My father would have given the boy money—"
Max looked at her gloomily, and she tried to soften the statement.
"Perhaps out of fear—"
Max thrust a wad of bills under his glass and rose to his feet.
Outside, Charlotte noticed a new ad on the poster column—a red and black drawing of a muscular man, a swastika on his belt, breaking a sturdy chain above his head. Above his thick, coarse hair hung the words Schluss jetzt! Wahlt Hitler. End it now. Choose Hitler.
"Versailles again—resentment tastes sweet. But bitter when you bite into it," Max said.
At Unter den Linden, Max stopped at a large tan-colored house with Greek columns. He climbed the steps, drawing her along behind him.
"Last gallery on the tour—my mother's house," he said.
She draped an arm around one of the columns, drawing him back.
"I'm wearing my old sweater," she said.
But she followed him into the house. The marble floor shone under the light of the chandelier. A gaunt man bowed low and exhaled a greeting.
A woman with dark hair hanging straight to her shoulders glided down the stairs toward them. She wore a soft, gray dress, gold-rimmed spectacles, and a thumb-sized piece of jade in the center of a tarnished necklace. Didn't the rich polish their silver?
Frau Bernstein eyed Charlotte over Max's shoulder. Turning to her, she offered a small hand as if for safekeeping and drew back her lips. Her teeth were small and very white, like a child's.
"Don't forget the Liebermanns," she said.
How easily they spoke with one another, without the angry sparks that
characterized conversations with her parents. And about such things—she'd never known people who owned paintings by famous people. On the sofa lay a small dog with a pushedin face. His breath rumbled in his throat. The light sparkled in the stones that studded his collar.
Frau Bernstein jangled her bracelets.
"I wish I could have tea with you, but they rescheduled the meeting of the museum board for today—yesterday's unfortunate event—"
Charlotte recalled the shooting on the museum steps. The victim and the shooter had worn uniforms from different parties.
After Frau Bernstein was gone, Max and Charlotte stared at one another for a moment. The only sound was the dog's breathing and the clattering of dishes in a distant, highceilinged kitchen. Red and brown figures drew her eye to a painting. The figures had their heads together as if haggling over a small green spot. The signature read Max Liebermann.
Max Liebermann.
"I'm named for him," Max said.
"Is it Berlin?"
"Jewish quarter in Amsterdam."
He approached, stood close to her now, and her longing for him filled the room to the ceiling. Afraid, she pulled back. But the space between them grew warm as his fingers moved over her shoulders. His mouth tasted of anisette.
Wood on Bone
Charlotte rolled up her napkin and slipped it into the monogrammed silver ring.
"I'll be working late tomorrow," she said.
Her mother's eyes narrowed.
"Lulu's sick again?"
In lusty good health, Lulu was Charlotte's perpetual scapegoat.
"Must be chronic," her father said. "Like my knee—"
Sensing his need to discuss the Great War and the Kaiser, Charlotte brought her plate to the sink, and hurried toward the door.
Outside, the clouds appeared tinged with silver. Before Max, she wouldn't have seen it. Like the world of fairies she'd read about as a child, a non-concrete world existed all around her, and she was just learning to see it. Her eye traveled the space from the gable of a building to the rooftop of the next. She measured the spaces between the bars on grillwork, the inside of an arch, the emptiness between columns, the air beneath a cornice, the openings in a balustrade. Yesterday she'd sketched the ragged gap between a dog's legs.
At the Friedrichstraße station, she peered at the bulge in the wrought iron balcony with the Prussian eagle in the center. Her gaze traveled downward to the cigar shop. Max leaned against the wall, reading a newspaper. Without saying a word, he folded the newspaper and took her hand.
In an entranceway on Friedrichstraße a black-clad man held a glowing cigarette between glossy red lips. The yellow light from the open door backlit his slicked-back hair. Brightly painted fingernails drummed his thighs.
An aroma of fried potatoes filled the air. A woman sat opposite a man in a snack shop, chewing a sausage. A fox furpiece bit its own tail around her neck. The man gazed at her, moving only to dab her cheek with a napkin when the red sauce strayed.
Charlotte stopped and stared into the window, fascinated by the glassy eyes of the fox. The woman stopped eating, and Charlotte stepped back. But later, alone in her room she planned to experiment with yellow and green for the glitter of fox eyes.
At the cabaret, Max mumbled something at the entrance. Charlotte caught the name Bernstein, and a man opened the curtain for them to enter the theatre. A pool of light illuminated the stage. A whining saxophone undulated between the legs of a small man.
A peddler, dressed in a gold and red striped caftan and a felt hat, pushed a cart onto the stage, all the time chattering in Yiddish. He picked up the saxophonist, dumped him onto his cart, and wheeled him toward the audience.
"How much for this one?" he called to the audience.
A prop manager brought a cardboard picture of the big bank on Pariser Platz. The peddler Jew dumped the little man in front of the bank. The two couples at the next table laughed.
Charlotte asked Max if it was funny.
"Just an old Jewish joke," he said.
She felt humiliated—for his sake.
The little man was back on the stage, this time with a buxom woman. During the dance, the little man disappeared under the woman's dress and came out squalling from between her legs in a simulated birth. The woman scooped him up and held him to her bosom. The little man tore open the woman's blouse. Out fell two rubber breasts. He scrambled across the stage, caught one, locked his mouth on the rubber nipple and lay on the floor, sucking noisily, his legs curled under him.
Waiters brought more drinks. At intermission, the curtain came down, and the audience applauded wildly. Out of the corner of her eye, Charlotte saw the waiter seating two uniformed men in the back.
"Time to go," Max said.
In front of the theater, everything smelled of beer. Alongside the wall, Charlotte glimpsed men in long-pocketed coats, cigarettes glowing at their mouths, arms crossed over their chests. She clutched Max's arm.
"How can you stand it?" she asked.
"I don't take those jokes personally."
"But they're about you—"
"No. They're about the East European Jews. I'm a German Jew."
She said nothing, but pictured her parents looking into their Prussian sky and seeing her on the wings of this exotic artist.
***
As a teenager, Charlotte had gone to Bernstein's after school with Lulu. They'd admired the glittering chandeliers, walked between columns decorated with carved golden grapes, had run their fingers over the mosaics on the floor, depicting the Greek goddesses—Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena. Screwing up their courage, they'd asked the haughty sales clerk to let them try on the gold and silver necklaces and earrings that gleamed in glass cases.
"You need to look at the store from the corner—so you can see
both sides of it at once," Max said.
They crossed the street. He put his hands in his pockets and rocked forward on the balls of his feet, his eyes dark under the streetlight.
"I could be working there—I mean running it," he said.
She stared at him. It was one thing to refuse to type letters, but to say no to Bernstein's—
"My mother wants me to live with her and run the store. Instead, I paint and she dresses mannequins and pays the employees."
"But later—"
"I told her if I don't succeed, I'll run the store. So she gives me an allowance, and I pop into the store when she needs me."
The red brick building looked more like a medieval city hall than a department store.
"Sometimes I think she prays I'll fail—"
She sensed that his mother wasn't the problem. Everything else in the world was.
"We have a bathtub with golden ball and claw feet," he said.
"So?"
"In some places—Neukölln and Wedding—they don't have running water. And my mother bathes in rose oil."
She'd heard about Neukölln, how the rats ate babies right out of their cribs.
Charlotte thought of her father filing city documents for thirty years, heard his voice in her head, Art school's for failures. His one concession to art was the lithograph of Kaiser Wilhelm over the sideboard in the dining room.
"You're ignoring your mother for a nasty place like Neukölln?"
She sounded like her own mother.
Shouts came from the side street. A man ran past, his face a mask of terror under the streetlight. Two stormtrooper followed, clubs held high. Max put his arm around Charlotte.
At the edge of the pavement, the stormtroopers cornered their prey. Charlotte hid her face in Max's jacket, but she could still hear the stormtrooper's voice.
"Dirty Jewish Bolshevik."
The sound of wood on bone. A scream. Two policemen appeared across the street. Max signaled to them. They glanced at him, then sauntered away. The stormtroopers tucked in their shirts and disappeared into the dark side street. The victim lay still, the back of his head leaking blood. Max climbed the steps of a café, pushing past customers who were on their way out. Charlotte saw him through the window as he entered the glass telephone booth. His finger went round the dial again and again. Then he threw the receiver back onto the hook. Charlotte grabbed both his arms as he came down the steps.
"I must be crazy, calling the police," he said.
"Yes."
"The dispatcher laughed at me."
Charlotte pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and turned to the victim. But two men already stood over him. They lifted him to his feet, draped his arms around their necks, and dragged him between them. His shoes scraped along the sidewalk.
Hues of Yellow and Lilac
Shouts came from the lake. It was high season at Wannsee. Max took Charlotte's hand, and they walked quickly down the dirt path towards the water. The bushes opened. The sun reflected off a silvery chute that trembled on stalk-like rods against the tree-lined lake. In the muddy water at the foot of the slide, bathers raised their eyes to the young woman hugging her arms on the platform above them.
With a quick motion, the woman patted her bathing cap, then gripped the sides of the slide. Her face was marked with fear as she studied her cheering friends. Suddenly, she raised her chin towards the sun, swung her arms towards the clouds, and flew. With a crash, she hit the water and disappeared. Seconds later, she exploded upwards from the surface of the water.
That was the way to do it, just let go and fly into the unknown, Charlotte thought as she eased her way down the steps of the dock. At the other end, Max jumped into the water. She stroked the distance between them and swam into his open arms, feeling his ribs under her fingertips.
Afterwards, they sat wrapped in towels, their feet touching. Max picked a scraggly dandelion, slipped it into a salami sandwich, and handed it to her. She bit into it. The flower was fuzzy between her teeth.
"Pissenlit, the French call it. Makes you pee in your bed, but protects you from colds. My mother fed it to me."
Dandelions didn't sound like Frau Bernstein, unless she was strewing poison dust on the weeds that grew along the sidewalk. Max picked a handful of dandelions and slit the stalks to make a necklace. He brought it down around Charlotte's head, arranging it over her collarbones and brushing the place where her breasts began.
"We used to make these at our summer house—my mother and I—when we were waiting for Herr Esch to call us in to lunch."
The valet again—bowing and serving, sneering and eavesdropping.
Her eyes went to his lips. They'd tasted like anisette. She stroked his cheek, moved her fingers to the back of his neck. His hand went to her breast, and she melted toward him.
Laughter crackled in the bushes. Charlotte sat up and covered herself with the towel. Through the branches, she glimpsed a man hunched over a bottle of wine, pulling the corkscrew. An extended arm held a wine glass.
In the tram, they sat close, his arm warm against hers. When the tram approached her stop, she prepared to rise. But he took her hand. She noticed that the blue of his eyes was as changeable as Monet's cathedral, painted at different times of day.
She settled back into her seat.
When he opened the door of his apartment, the smell of turpentine and rotting fruit greeted her. The photo of a dumpy woman wearing a flat veiled hat hung in the hall. The tiny black letters read, Rosa Luxemburg with friends.
In his studio, brown bananas appeared glued by their own juices to a small round table. From a distance, the canvas on his easel looked like bad weather. But up close, Charlotte saw the distorted lines of a woman's face. To the top of the easel, he'd clipped a magazine photo of an attractive actress.
"I paint what I see," he said, pointing to his head. "In here."
Suddenly, he pushed his sweater up over his head and stepped out of his pants. The curve of his back just above the buttocks was olive green in the studio light. He threw back his head and stretched his arms upwards in an arc, simulating a man dancing with a wriggling snake between his arms.
He held the snake with both hands, resisting its attempts to lock him in its embrace. Hadn't the soothsayer fought the snake that the gray-eyed goddess Athena had sent?
"Who am I?'
"El Greco's Laocoön," she said.
He grinned, clapping his hands. His chest was smooth, but auburn-colored hair surrounded his navel and bloomed between his legs.
"Your turn," he said, taking a book from the shelf and sitting down in a chair.
As a little girl, she'd loved being naked. A long time ago, even before she'd thought of painting, she'd pulled off her bathing suit and hid it in the bushes when her mother wasn't looking. Swimming the breaststroke, she'd imagined the lake water entering her body, coming out through her gills, somewhere under her arms.
Now she slipped her sweater over her head. Who would she be? Renoir's Odalisque, her eyes half closed, lounging languidly in gold-edged silken pants? No. He'd prefer a nude. She folded her clothes in a neat pile.
Conscious of his gaze, she eased herself onto the sofa pillows, tilted her body towards him, held her legs together, revealing only the top pubic hairs. She stretched her arms above her head, slid her hands under her head, felt her ribcage widen, and willed her breasts to spill to each side. She imagined the dark, secret places of the moist earth and the fertile female body. Men longed to unite with her.
"Goya's Maja Desnuda," he shouted triumphantly.
He rose from his chair, his eyes bright.
Suddenly embarrassed, she sat up abruptly. Where had she put her clothes?
But he lowered himself to the sofa. She lay back again, felt his warm thigh against her arm. The odalisque would have covered her soft hands with fragrant Indian oils and stroked him. Charlotte ran the back of her hand along his thigh. Leaning forward, he turned to her, tasted her skin with the tip of his tongue.
Moving towards her breast, he ran his tongue over the roundness of her nipple.
She touched the back of his neck where his hair began. A finger drew tiny circles on her belly, then gently probed her navel. His breath was warm on her breast.
"Monet. Manet."
He trailed his fingers over the top pubic hairs. Grasping her legs, he pulled her close.
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