"Caravaggio," he said, sliding his fingers inside her. Playing with the damp tendrils, he chanted, "Carracci brothers," now moving his fingers in and out.
Bending over, he brushed his lips over her belly, and his voice came from between her legs.
"Delacroix."
Throbbing under his tongue, she reached forward to stroke his ears and grip his hair. He rose to his knees. With the fingertips of both hands, she stroked his erect limb. He groaned under her touch. The blood pounding between her legs, she guided him toward her.
"Van Gogh," he breathed, entering.
In a field of sunflowers and lavender, lilac and yellow hues washed over her in wave after wave of color and fragrance. Afterwards, she held his head between her breasts and relived muted shades of sunshine and periwinkle.
The Fault of the Jews
Charlotte and Max stood on the balcony of Frau Bernstein's house. Below, a group of elderly men carried black, red, and gold banners, the anti-Nazi colors. Charlotte glanced at Frau Bernstein, who smoked in silence.
Suddenly, Herr Esch appeared and extended an ashtray. Mischievously, Frau Bernstein flicked her ash onto the balcony tiles. He rolled his eyes and withdrew.
Why did they keep the valet? Max had told Charlotte how Herr Esch had steadied him on his new bike when he was eight years old. But whenever Charlotte walked down the hall, the man pressed himself against the wall with a mock obsequiousness. Once, she'd looked back and caught him smiling to himself.
Max stroked her arm.
"Tomorrow's May first," he said.
She'd seen the call for demonstrations on the posters, knew about the police ban on open-air assemblies and demonstrations.
"You'll get arrested," she said.
The Social Democrats had hired volunteer fighters from the Freikorps to beat down the Communists. And the right wing Freikorps would go beyond that. Killing an heir to Bernstein's would be a coup.
"It'll be a rout."
"I don't like dead bodies," she said.
By the time she went to sleep, she had a headache. Still, next morning she rode with him to Hermanns Platz. Men in frayed clothes stood in the square carrying signs.
Save the Workers.
Charlotte sensed the distrust in their eyes. Was it her hair? No Bolshevik bun for her. She wore it short and stylish, like in the magazines. Nodding to Max, the demonstrators formed a knot and sang the Internationale.
A woman crossed the square, her arms weighed down by shopping nets bulging with potatoes and onions. Lacy green carrot stalks hung over the top of one of the nets. She tilted her head, peered at the hand-lettered signs.
"May Day—for higher wages," Charlotte said.
It'll be hand-to-hand combat with press coverage as the ultimate goal, she started to say. Gunshots cracked across the square. People ran. A tram stopped, and passengers spilled out. A man with a briefcase and an umbrella scrambled up onto the sidewalk. A schoolboy clutched his cap to his head and jumped curbs to shelter. Police officers, clubs raised, surrounded the demonstrators.
More shots. The woman fell to the ground. Potatoes rolled onto the cobblestones. Max took Charlotte's hand. They ducked behind the abandoned tram, then crept into a niche behind Julius Meinl's furniture store.
Pleasure edged Max's voice.
"They're fighting back—"
He took a step toward the scuffle.
Charlotte grabbed the back of his sweater with both hands.
He shook her off but didn't advance onto the square. A layer of smoke crept over the woman's body where it lay on the ground.
"I want to go home," Charlotte said.
He took her hand, and they made their way down the side streets. Shots continued behind them on the square. Riding on the tram, he stood behind her.
"I shouldn't have taken you there."
But she knew he didn't mean it.
Later when she mentioned the dead housewife, he told her the police had been brutal. He didn't trust people in uniform the way she did—firemen, police, bus drivers. That was one big difference between them. She had two waitress uniforms, she told him, and was proud of the spare.
When Max wasn't looking for trouble, he pretended they lived in normal times. He invited Charlotte to the Scala to see Grock the clown and Rastelli the juggler. A pair of clowns stepped onto the stage and pretended to wrestle. One fell to the floor, then jumped up and draped his arm around the other. They sang:
If it thaws, or if there's a breeze, if it drizzles, if it sizzles,
If you cough or if you sneeze, it's all the fault of all those Jews!
On the way home, Max took her arm, drew her close, spoke quietly. "I'd hate to be Jewish." "But you are."
He stiffened. She didn't understand him at all. On the Ku'damm they passed broken windows of Jewish stores, places where Jews had been beaten up. Where did he fit in?
After that, Charlotte set up her easel in Max's studio. In yellow, red, and blue, she painted the police chasing the demonstrators over the square and the dead woman. Toning down the colors, she created an overall effect of yellow streetlights burning through the haze of fog and smoke.
Suddenly he threw his brush down, sauntered over to her easel, stood next to her, arms folded. Something prickled at the back of her neck. She wasn't in the mood for criticism.
"You made the demonstrators too big—the police too small," he said.
She glanced at his canvas, at the series of black jagged lines that gave his figures a look of perpetual motion. The police resembled gargoyles. He was glorifying people who ran across squares and got shot for a cause.
Her brush sucked up the red on her palette. She used it to paint the sole of the dead woman's shoe scarlet. Her bare foot she colored pink, as if her veins still carried blood to the skin of her extremities—as if she were still alive.
***
The Weimar Republic ducked but not fast enough. In October 1929, when the U.S. stock market crash set off a worldwide economic crisis, the wound to the struggling German republic was lethal. The Communists and the Nazis hugged the impoverished Germans to death. The Communists looked over the embraced lover's shoulder with an eye on the goal—a Soviet Germany. Nazis linked arms with Communists and mouthed slogans.
Free the working class.
But the brownshirts dreamed of a Third Reich free of the Communists.
Storekeepers in the Friedrichstraße went bankrupt. They sold their wares from wooden carts. It became a song and dance number in the cabarets.
Shops on wheels, just like in America.
Charlotte's father developed a black humor that replaced his sulky longing for the Kaiser.
"If I lose my job, we can get horse meat at the soup kitchen," he said at dinner, talking about a man who fed his family at the soup kitchen. He'd gone to the bank for his money. When it was his turn, the teller had shaken his head, pulled down the iron lattice. Charlotte mashed a potato into her broth. Next time, she'd bring them something from Bernstein's to cheer them up.
On the Jewish holiday, stormtroopers popped up like mushrooms on a damp day. When worshipers spilled out of the synagogues in the Fasanenstraße and Lehniner Platz, stormtroopers closed in on them singing their favorite song.
When Jewish blood spurts at the end of the knife.
The day after the attack on the synagogues, Charlotte went with Max to the girly review at the Metropol. They sat in the front row, holding hands in the dark.
On the stage, women—among them a few black women— danced nude but for the mandatory crotch cover. At first, the musicians in the pit played marching music. The dancers moved with an athletic bounciness, celebrating their strong, healthy bodies. Then to the drums, the dancers moved rhythmically. Suddenly the music stopped. In the silence, a man sang, Take it Off, Petronella. Soon the audience joined in. The dancers undulated to the tuneless chanting. In the center, a chubby blond woman wiggled pleasurably.
A police whistle squealed. The dancers stopped, bumping into one anot
her.
But the blond kept on dancing and humming to herself, eyes closed. She kicked out her leg, and her crotch cover drifted to the floor, revealing a chestnut-colored bush.
A stormtrooper approached the stage. He picked up the patch and waved it. Everyone laughed. He turned to the woman. She was giggling nervously now. Using both hands, he nudged the cloth back into place.
Like a wind-up toy, one of the officers swiveled to face the audience.
"He's perfect for the part," Charlotte giggled. But Max looked ready to leap.
"I smell garlic—must be Jews here," the policeman said.
This time nobody laughed. A shiver went up Charlotte's neck. The stage lights reflected off the officer's visored helmet.
"The dancer is in violation of the dance obscenity laws of 1926," the officer said.
A woman next to Charlotte got up and left. The stormtrooper who had fondled the dancer faced the audience.
"Be good Germans and go home. The police will shut down this swinish Jewish show."
Outside, the nails in a stormtrooper's boots clinked on the tram tracks as he crossed the street. In front of him, a small dark figure disappeared down an alley.
The Peddler
In the summer of 1932, street fights erupted daily. Charlotte and Max walked quickly, ducking down different streets, discussing Delacroix's influence on the French academy—pretending things were normal. They often crossed the city with sketchpads under their arms, stopping in quiet places to draw.
But there was one place Max wouldn't go—the Hacke'sche Markte, where Eastern European Jews, bearded people with skullcaps and black robes, sold their wares from carts. She wanted to paint them, but he wouldn't go with her.
"Those people make me feel uncomfortable," he said.
She rolled those people around in her mind, his strange attitude toward Jews. Once she'd joked about it, tried to formulate it in a way that made sense to her.
"You're a German department store Jew, not a Yiddishspeaking peddler's cart Jew."
He glared at her.
To celebrate her birthday, Max invited Charlotte to the summer palace built for Queen Sophie Charlotte, Schloss Charlottenburg.
They stood looking up at the statue of Friedrich Wilhelm, the great Elector. Max slid his arms around Charlotte's waist.
"He loved Sophie Charlotte so much. But he couldn't keep her from dying," he said.
Leaning back into his warmth, she felt a wave of melancholy at the sight of the blue-green dome of the palace. She'd often come here with her mother who loved to talk about the beautiful Sophie Charlotte and the elegant life she lived in the seventeenth century.
"I'd rather visit the Hacke'sche Markte for my birthday," Charlotte said.
Without a word, he took her arm and walked with her toward the tram.
People spilled out of the side streets into the Rosenthaler Straße. The air smelled of frying potatoes, onions, apples, and spices. Cart wheels creaked on cobblestones. Vendors shouted out their wares. Closer to the ground, dogs barked and children squabbled and sang. Something silky brushed against Charlotte's skin. A peddler with stained teeth held up filmy scarves.
He extended an arm draped with shoelaces.
She fingered leather shoelaces for boots. But Max gripped her hand, pulled her away, elbowing his way through the crowd, calling to her over his shoulder.
"Bad neighborhood here. Let's get a sausage at the Alex."
But the dark street narrowed, and the peddlers crowded in closer. She almost bumped into a cart piled high with coral necklaces and fabrics. She gripped the edge of the cart and picked up an amber-colored brooch.
Max was edgy, but she ignored him.
The red-bearded peddler held up a cracked mirror for her as she struggled to pin the brooch to her blouse. But in it, she saw the angry flush in Max's cheeks.
"I'll buy you jewelry on the Ku'damm," he said.
"But I like this one," she said.
Seeing the interest in the peddler's eyes, she was ashamed of the whine in her voice. Max abruptly handed the peddler a stack of bills, clipped together. The peddler offered him change, but he'd already turned his back. A mother and two children stared up at her.
Smells of salty and sour foods tickled her nostrils. Pickled herring lay next to pastries rolled in honey and sesame seeds. Women in long dark skirts, scarves on their heads, talked to friends, keeping a hand on a child's shoulder.
"Everything for your sewing needs," a peddler called, gesturing at cards of buttons, hooks and eyes, spools of thread, lace collars, and elastic bands of different widths for waists and legs of underwear.
Dresses hung on hangers across a wooden rack. A woman fingered a blue one with tucks at the waist. The peddler took it down, spreading the dress over his arm.
"Meine Dame."
Max stood in a small open area between carts and watched, as if he'd finally gained the distance he needed. Charlotte went to his side.
"Where do they come from?" she asked.
"Eastern Europe—the shtetls of Galicia."
A man with hands and arms like gnarled branches pushed a cart heaped with pretzels. Studded with quartz-like chunks of salt, they sparkled in the sun. A boy in a short shiny robe and an embroidered skullcap ducked under his cart, then jumped out again and ran alongside, holding a stick against the cart's rolling wheel. He laughed when bits of bark broke off the stick.
"Oi vey, Junge. Bist du meschugge?" the peddler called, slapping the boy.
"What did he say?" she asked.
"You crazy?"
"You speak Jewish?"
"My aunts talk shtetl."
The peddler offered Charlotte a pretzel. But then suddenly he noticed Max.
"You again," he said.
Max extended his hand.
"Bielski—"
Ignoring the proffered hand, the peddler embraced Max, then stepped back and looked up into his face.
"I've got to talk to you."
After some instructions to the boy, the peddler took Max's arm, led him to a doorway, set so low that Max had to duck to enter. Charlotte followed. In the dark, Charlotte felt her way along the table before sitting down. Without a word, a man in a stained brown apron brought rolled herring for Bielski. Gradually, Charlotte distinguished two bearded men in black robes seated at the next table.
Max placed his hands, palms down, on the table.
"What is it Bielski?"
"I've missed you."
"I'm not in the mood for your story, not with Charlotte here."
Bielski's mouth sagged. "It's been a long time."
"She doesn't need to hear it."
"Rivka's begun to cry again at night—keeps me awake."
The peddler turned to Charlotte.
"Would you like to hear about my little daughter Rivka?"
"Yes," she said, averting her gaze from Max's face.
Bielski's eyes gleamed. "Know about the Cossacks?"
She'd seen pictures of men with big teeth and fur hats.
"We came to Berlin a long time ago when my daughter Rivka was young, but it seems like yesterday. Do you know why it seems like yesterday?"
Charlotte smiled encouragingly.
"Because she never got over it. It happens to her again every night."
Bielski cleared his throat.
"The Cossacks came to our village every time the price of bread went up in Kiev. Big men—ate much meat, grew up on creamy milk. Wore leather boots and fur-lined gloves. You could hear them laughing long before they got to the village. Laughed when they kicked in the doors. Laughed when they broke the furniture, tore up the bedding, dumped the winter grain onto the snow. Laughed so we couldn't hear our women screaming when they raped them.
"It was 1914 before Russia got sucked into the Great War. We were getting soft—hadn't had a pogrom for a while. Then suddenly in the middle of sunny winter's day, I hear the horses' hooves, and I know they're back. I see their big white teeth as they ride down the stree
t. I run indoors, close the shutters, pray they'll pass us by. But then I hear the screams from next door, my brother's house. Isaac, the fool, must've fought back, I think. Later, I find him. They'd crushed his skull with their rifle butts."
Bielski stopped for a moment. He was breathing hard, as if he couldn't get enough oxygen to fulfill his mission.
"They come after us, eyes hot. First they tear up the mattresses. Break the plates against the walls. I know what they're after. We'd hidden her, but not well enough. Rivka. My beautiful Rivka—only fourteen. They laugh when they pull her out from behind the boxes in the closet. And what do I do? Do I rip the Adam's apples out of their throats? Do I give my life for my beloved daughter? Do I throw the doorstop at them? Kick them from behind to bust their kidneys? No. I put my hands over my ears to shut out her screams. That's what I do with my hands. Like a pet dog, I follow them outside until one of them picks me up and throws me against the wall of the house.
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