The sign on the wall said Köpenicker Straße. A steaming horse waited hooked up to a wagon while a man in patched clothes lifted baskets of produce into the back. He nodded to Max. In the courtyard, a woman wearing a headscarf unpinned socks from a clothesline.
The air was gritty with the smell of boiling potatoes. Like two different versions of the same symbol, flags featuring swastikas and the hammer and sickle hung from windows at every level. It was Monday, and unemployed men leaned against the walls. Fighting words were scrawled on the wall.
First Food, Then The Rent!
"Tenants strike. No jobs," he said crisply.
At the courtyard's center, a statue, an angel of freedom with wings high and unfurled, revealed a shapely leg between dress folds.
"Hope of the future," Max said.
"She wants the Kaiser back?" Charlotte asked.
"Don't you believe in Germany?"
She thought of the caricatures of thick-lipped Jews in her father's newspaper, of Frau Bernstein apologizing for the banks that wouldn't give your money back, of the Communists beating up the Social Democrats, of the Social Democrats hiring freelance street fighters to shoot at the Communists.
"No."
A small boy, green mucous at his nostrils and a school satchel on his back, was looking up at her. Charlotte reached into her pocket, brought out a handkerchief, and placed it under the boy's nose. He took it from her and ran away. The sound of bells came from the courtyard entrance. An organ grinder wearing a Prussian helmet decorated with tiny bells wheeled an organ decorated with golden dragons across the cobblestones, still shiny from the night drizzle. Like animals of different species squabbling, the sound of bells, drums, organ, and harmonica filled the courtyard.
A woman appeared in a doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. Charlotte glimpsed a tub of soaking wash behind her. The organ grinder shook his head so that the bells tinkled. The woman stepped forward and put her arms around her neighbor. Unsteadily at first, then dipping and twirling vigorously, the women danced across the courtyard.
Wir tanzen den Lichtensteiner Polka, mein Schatz.
Two girls in pigtails held hands and danced. More women appeared in doorways. They clasped one another and swayed to the music. A man in a tweed cap approached Max and handed him some papers.
Back out on Köpenicker Straße, Charlotte gave Max a look. "You signed something."
He looked around, seeing nobody on their side of the street but an old man with a cane, he spoke in a whisper.
"Remember how they cut the pay of the tram drivers?"
She recalled how the leftist parties had protested.
"We're going to strike against the Berlin Transit Company," he said.
"Do you realize the inconvenience?"
"It'll bring the city to a halt," he said happily.
She'd like to smack him, she thought as they walked to the tram.
He spent days painting signs and making lists of strike participants and their assigned posts. The day of the strike it rained. He didn't deserve to be fed, but at lunchtime she brought him a sandwich. At the depot, tram and bus drivers linked arms and formed a line that snaked around the building. Rain dripped from Max's ears and nose. "You'll be sick. Let's go home," she said.
Instead he withdrew from his companions and took her to the train station at the Zoo. The line to buy tickets wound its way down the street.
"Chaos," he said proudly.
"What about the little grandma who just wants to catch a train to visit a sick grandchild?"
He looked at her as if she'd spoken Chinese.
They sidestepped puddles, passed parked trams and inactive subway stations. Finally, at the main station, shouts rang out.
Red Front. Heil Hitler.
Picketers surrounded the station. Two figures stood in front of the others. Charlotte recognized the little club-footed Nazi leader, Joseph Goebbels, arm in arm with a stocky man with a mustache. His picture was in Max's literature—the Communist, Walter Ulbricht.
Carrying Max's empty coffee thermos, Charlotte cursed herself for falling in love with a foolish idealist.
The Warmth of Acceptance
The Nazi press glowed with reports of the transport strike. Goebbels had given the voters the choice between Bolshevist anarchy and National Socialist order. Voters would choose a strong leader to put an end to the chaos of the republic.
But in the final election of 1932, only 720,000 Berliners voted for Hitler.
Frau Bernstein, with Herr Esch at her shoulder, paced the floor and smoked a pack a day of cigarettes. She mourned the republic even while it still lasted.
But Max was elated over the election.
"Both the Communists and the Nazis are calling the republic the enemy of the little man—70% voted either for the Communists or Nazis."
His mother wasn't impressed. "Then you're both fools."
"We can work it out with the Nazis—we both stand for saving the working class," he said.
Charlotte hummed the song about Jewish blood at the point of a knife.
"Nazis are just a staging post on the way to a fair and just society," he said.
"Why don't you just paint?" Charlotte asked.
"Somebody has to save Germany."
Feeling guilty for thinking him a fool, she put her arms around his waist, laid her cheek against his, vowed to forgive him for his absurd idealism.
Later that week, at Frau Bernstein's, Max talked about the election, how they might have to sacrifice the republic for the tenement dweller who divided a potato five ways. His mother picked a piece of tobacco off the tip of her tongue and examined it thoughtfully. She turned to Charlotte.
"When Max was a boy, he begged me to let him visit a factory. So I took him to see my friend—his company produced tram tracks. We went in wearing goggles and ear covers. Max loved it—tugged on the sleeves of the workers. 'How do you like your job?' he kept asking. Imagine, eleven years old."
Max pulled a stray silk thread from sofa's upholstery. Frau Bernstein went on.
"He stayed in his room after school, drawing pictures of workers demonstrating and striking. Wouldn't wear a suit to Bernstein's—said it set him apart from the workers."
***
The wedding was to take place in the middle of January 1933. Much too cold, Charlotte's old aunts said. But they disappointed Charlotte by promising to come anyway. She went over the guest list—friends and business associates of Frau Bernstein's, a few artists, some of Max's school friends, and girls from Charlotte's high school class.
Max wanted to get married in the French Cathedral on the Gendarmenmarkt, a refugee church, he pointed out. Expelled from France, the Huguenots built this church to look just like the one in Charenton that the Catholics destroyed in 1688.
Cheated out of playing a Middle Eastern princess beneath the majestic Moorish cupola of the New Synagogue on the Oranienburger Straße, Charlotte let Max know she'd just as soon get married on a tennis court.
"I've never liked churches or synagogues—except for the statues and paintings," he said. So Frau Bernstein had her way and reserved a bank lobby for the wedding.
The flower-decorated tellers' windows seemed a poor replacement for a Byzantine dome, Charlotte thought. Still Frau Bernstein arranged for paintings of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah to be displayed among bank interest rate charts.
On her wedding day, Charlotte's black dress slid like coldblooded skin over her arms, settling into place on her body. Her mother stood in the doorway wearing a dark blue suit, wrinkled after a decade of hanging against the back of the closet. A black pillbox crowned the ensemble.
"You can't wear that," Charlotte said.
"Who cares—it's a Bolshevik wedding," her mother said petulantly. "Bernstein's not Bolshevik."
"I won't go," her mother said.
"Nobody'll miss you."
Later, Charlotte stood by the door while her father, in woolen knee pants, called the taxi. A noise from the bedroom.
Her mother appeared in a purple silk dress, familiar from the old photographs. She pulled her shoulders back and strode out the door and down the steps ahead of them. Her father clasped his wallet, letting them know as they sat pressed tightly against one another that it wasn't every day that they traveled by taxi to the Gendarmenmarkt.
At the bank, the judge, a friend of Frau Bernstein's, greeted them. Men in dark suits and women in furs sat on folding chairs. Besides the Old Testament prophets, Frau Bernstein had hung paintings bought at auction—the annunciation, the nativity, and the assumption—all in gold frames. Daniel in the Lion's Den hung directly behind the lectern.
Charlotte's school friends looked pinched from poor food and guarded conversations. But Lulu, like a curly-haired cherub with bright red lips, wore a fitted coat that underlined her bosom. The bank lobby rang with Bach's cello sonatas played by members of the national symphony.
Then silence. A rubber shoe squeaked on the marble. Charlotte looked into Max's eyes. They were the same blue as the sky in the Münstereifel oil painting behind the lectern, part of the bank's permanent collection. The sky was forever.
Afterwards, Max and Charlotte posed in front of the Schiller monument outside on the square, pressing against one another for warmth, her parents and his mother flanking them like off balance columns in a Greek temple. The old aunts refused to be in the photo, jumped instead into the first taxi.
"Always you and me," Max whispered in her ear. His voice sent a quiver across her belly. How would she get through the wedding meal without sliding her fingers across his navel? She longed for his smell free of the perfume of the relatives.
The Café Kranzler was brightly lit, and Frau Bernstein, red highlights in her hair, glided from table to table, extending an elegant hand, kissing a powdered cheek, smiling at a compliment.
Is the stuffed oxtail to your liking? The wine sauce piquant enough?
And when Frau Bernstein turned, Charlotte tilted her head to enjoy the warmth of acceptance on her cheek.
A Bright Red Dot
Under a blaze of torches the brownshirted stormtroopers and the blackshirted SS sang at the top of their lungs as they marched from the Tiergarten through the Brandenburg Gate. Max and Charlotte watched from the window of Frau Bernstein's house.
Frau Bernstein blew out smoke rings.
"Such fun. Follow the leader."
A short man holding a glass of whiskey with both hands stood next to her. He opened his mouth and sang:
As long as Unter den Linden the old trees are bloomin'
Nothing can overcome us, Berlin is always Berlin!
"No, Rudolf." Frau Bernstein tapped the singer on the wrist.
Charlotte knew he owned the next biggest department store in the city, next after Bernstein's, and that he and Frau Bernstein often had dinner together. Max compared his mother to Queen Elizabeth I of England. She'd never give up her throne for a man. Like a poet studying a pond for signs of life, Rudolf looked into his glass, then up at Max.
"I don't give your Commies much time."
"No, Rudolf." Frau Bernstein's voice was sharp.
That night Max made fierce love to her, as if their lust could fend off the Third Reich. Afterwards, she slid her hands down his sweating back and held him until he slept. Her own inner eye—the organ that normally overflowed with colors and shapes for paintings—stared all night long at eager florid faces, distorted by blazing torches.
The next day, too tired to paint, she spent the morning prying wax from between floorboards. A knock at the door startled her.
The mocking expression was the same. Surrounded by Frau Bernstein's crystal, marble, and silver, he'd looked less menacing than he did now, standing in the dim hallway. Herr Esch handed Charlotte a box, then bowed so low that she could chart the furrowed terrain of his head.
"Madam thought you would like these."
Like an elastic springing back, he rose quickly. Had she imagined the tiny click of his heels? Seeing him shift his weight, she set the box down and took a banknote she'd saved for shopping from her pocket. But he backed away. He was looking not at her but at Max's old poster of Rosa Luxemburg. His expression changed from self-effacement to contempt. Hearing his boots descending the steps, Charlotte shut the door and opened the package.
Frau Bernstein's gold-rimmed wine glasses. They'd drunk Riesling from them last week.
***
At first, Max was pleased with the new chancellor because he handled the Communists gently. But in February, Hitler passed the Law for the Protection of the German People, empowering the police to raid Communist headquarters at the Karl Liebknecht House.
"I know what they want," Max said.
Charlotte was sick of his politics. Wasn't it enough to face the Nazis? Did he also have to mark off an area between the Nazis and the Social Democrats for his party and hate both sides equally? Didn't they have enough trouble?
"They want us to lose our tempers and attack the police and the Social Democrats, so they can eliminate us as a threat to the Reich," Max said. "And will you?"
She mustn't get angry now. But it was all gibberish, Stalin wanting friendly relations with the Nazis, not allowing the German Communists to rebel against the Nazis. Max's altruistic belief in equality was being manipulated by a dictator in another country. "I don't like lying low when I'm angry and ready to strike."
Used to lying low, she hadn't spoken above a whisper since the stormtroopers took posts in their stairwell. Late one night, he moved restlessly in the bed. "My mother wants to leave Germany," he said.
"She's right."
"They can't chase us out of our own country."
She only hummed the tune, but he knew the words.
When Jewish blood spurts from the knife.
"They'll go after Bielski, not me," he said.
Later, in the gray dawn, she eased herself off the bed and stepped onto the rag rug—they'd bought it last week from the second hand dealer in Kreuzberg—and pushed open the little window, breathed in the smell of coal smoke and damp streets, heard a tram bell clang and tires slurp over wet streets.
She shivered as she dumped two heaping spoonfuls of coffee into the cloth bag, then poured the boiling water. The bed creaked, and she heard him padding towards his studio. He shut the door behind him. Hugging her arms, she paced the floor. At last, she knocked on his door.
No answer. She turned the knob.
He stood in the middle of the floor in his underwear, a paintbrush in his hand. Behind him was a sprawling, colorful canvas, full of figures clad in robes, hunched over carts stacked high with necklaces, socks, fish. The Hackesche Markt. He'd filled a canvas with peddlers. In the foreground, a white-clad figure bolted from the scene.
"I thought—"
But he turned from her towards the painting and placed a bright red dot on one of the carts. She picked up a pencil stub and wrote him a note—bread, onions, potatoes, sausage—and left it on the kitchen table.
I Won't Abandon My Country
Max spent the day pacing the floor barefoot. But next morning he put on his shoes and soaped his face to shave.
"If the SS sees you talking to somebody—" she said.
He put on his gray suit, the one he'd worn for their wedding. Once he was gone, she caught herself staring at the door, willing his return. By evening she was certain that he wouldn't come back. She'd heard the gossip in the bakery. The Nazis had arrested thousands of Communists for the Reichstag fire.
But finally, the key clicked in the lock. He slipped in, closed the door behind him, and stood in front of her like a little boy. His voice trembled.
"I went to the house where we used to meet. The Nazis had sealed it up—doors, windows, everything."
"You shouldn't have gone out."
"I could hear them inside, banging on the walls."
Anger came up in her, directed more at him than at the Nazis.
"I wanted to do something, went to where the window was, but I ducked back into
the shadows when I saw the stormtrooper—I'm such a coward."
He put his hands to his face. She led him to a chair and made strong coffee. When she held it to his lips, he gulped it down, then coughed hard, like a man intent on turning inside out.
"On the way back, I heard screams from cellar windows. They got a guy I knew from the picket line—fifty lashes for being a Communist, fifty for being a Jew."
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