Max stayed indoors for three days after that, and Charlotte's spirits rose. Perhaps she could keep him after all.
She went to the bakery to hear the other women whisper. In their search for enemies of the state, the Nazis cleared out whole workers districts, broke down doors of tenements, and confiscated weapons, leaflets, books. If they didn't kill you on the spot, they sent you to Gestapo headquarters in PrinzAlbrecht-Straße.
Then he went out again. While he was gone, she ran around town doing nervous errands. She brought food from Bernstein's for her parents—braised pork knuckles and sauerkraut—left her father with a large white linen napkin tied around his neck. From there she went to Unter den Linden. Frau Bernstein kissed her on both cheeks. Charlotte breathed in her French perfume, then sat demurely on the edge of the sofa.
"They'll come for Max," Frau Bernstein said. "He's everything they hate."
Feet shuffled over the marble floor in the hall. Charlotte glimpsed Herr Esch waving a feather duster over a highboy. When she embraced Frau Bernstein, her mother-in-law felt frail as an undernourished pet.
***
The Nazis held leftist prisoners in deserted factories and cellars all over the city. But nobody protested, not even the academics. On March 3, 1933, some three hundred university professors declared their support for Hitler. At the end of the month, the Nazis forced all Jewish judges to retire.
Hitler made Charlotte sick—as if she had the flu. She couldn't sleep until the last tram passed over the track below. Even in the silence, with the window closed, she stared at the wall and wondered when things would stop getting worse.
"Get sleeping pills from Dr. Goldstein," her mother suggested. When the state-run health insurance system denied claims to Jewish doctors, dentists, opticians, pharmacies and clinics, Charlotte decided she'd pay Dr. Goldstein from her earnings.
But when she approached his building, two stormtroopers stood on the steps, hands behind their backs. Inside the building, a third stormtrooper emerged from under the stairwell.
"Can I help you, Miss?"
Behind him, on Dr. Goldstein's mailbox, hung a scrawled sign.
Jewish Doctor—No Aryans.
"I must be in the wrong building," she mumbled, backing away.
The stormtrooper stepped forward and politely held the door for her. She hurried away. Her mother greeted her, holding a furniture rag. Mondays she polished. Tuesdays she baked. They didn't need a calendar.
"I can't see Dr. Goldstein," Charlotte said.
"When they're done with the Communists, they'll go after the Jews. What will we do about Max?" her mother asked in a thin voice.
Charlotte went into the kitchen and poured herself coffee. Her mother followed her, scribbled a name and address on the back of a receipt, and handed it to her.
"Dr. Wagner's a good German," she said.
"Max is also a good German."
Her mother lowered her voice.
"He helped overthrow the republic—"
"No, you did that—constantly whining about bringing the Kaiser back."
Mouthing the word Bolshevik, her mother folded the rag and placed it on the kitchen table.
"My school friend, Irmtraud, just divorced her Jewish husband," she said, pushing down on the rag as if to fasten it to the wood.
"We've only been married two months."
"You may change your mind after the boycott of the Jewish stores. The papers are full of it—Don't buy from Jews—what will happen to Bernstein's? Inconvenient. Just before Easter."
Charlotte slammed the door behind her. But going down the stairs, she held the railing to steady herself.
Back home, she turned the key carefully, listened for the sound of his voice. Silence. When Max rose from the sofa, wiping his eyes sleepily, she threw her arms around him and hugged him so tightly that they both rolled onto the floor.
"They turned the old brewery into a concentration camp, Oranienburg—for District 28. I found out what they do," he whispered into her ear.
She turned away from him.
"They knock out your teeth, break your bones, inject acid in your penis so it burns like hell to pee."
He held her in his arms now, forcing her to listen to his hoarse whispers. She shook her head, trying not to hear.
"Those guys—my friends—the ones they sealed up in the building—Neighbors said the sounds stopped."
He released her, and they both got silently to their feet. He sat down at the kitchen table and studied the grain of the wood, running his fingers over the uneven places. For a long time, she was afraid to talk.
"You have to leave," she said at last.
He stared at her, his eyes hot.
"I'll go with you."
"I won't abandon my country."
"Did Stalin help the working classes? No. He chased out the Social Democrats and fed the little people to the Nazis."
He rose, rubbing his stomach like an old man with dry skin.
Raising Flowered Skirts
Charlotte stood on the Schloss Bridge, breathing in the smell of sewage that rose from the water. She climbed the steps to the art museum. The statues of Greek warriors at the entrance provided stony witness to her two resolves. She'd stay with Max. They'd never have a baby. Caspar David Friedrich's moonlit gnarled trees confirmed her view. Life would continue, perhaps without her. Three shadowy figures perched on rocks looked out to sea, waiting for the sucking mouth of the ocean to swallow them.
Van Gogh's orange and gold brush strokes stunned her. She wanted to take them home. From her pocket, she took colored pencils and a tiny notebook, moved her arm back and forth until her elbow gave off heat. Gradually, the distance between herself and the artist fell away. Eyes closed, she kept on drawing. She lay in a field of poppies and marsh marigolds. Above her hung a hot, yellow sun.
"Miss—."
The guard's large face loomed above hers. Her pencils rolled across the wooden floor. The guard bent to pick them up, his knees creaking. Thanking him, she moved on to the German impressionists. But something was missing. The paintings by Max Liebermann and Lesser Ury were gone. She called out—made some sort of sound. The guard suddenly stood before her, the silver buttons on his jacket almost brushing her nose.
"Some paintings are missing," she said.
He looked alarmed. But when she pointed to the discolored rectangles on the wall, relief crossed his face.
"Jews. Gone since last week."
He said it in the tone of a grocer explaining that he was out of turnips.
Won't rutabagas do for your recipe?
"We've got some tree and lake scenes by some real German painters. You'll like them, miss." His voice followed her down the hall.
Walking home, she passed a boarded-up office equipment store. A groan rose from below street level, from the center of a dyspeptic earth. As a child, she'd read a story about a typewriter that screamed. Did filing cabinets groan?
They turn everything into torture chambers.
Afterwards, they would put the bodies on the loading dock for pick-up with the rest of the trash. She quickened her pace, but the sound echoed in her ears.
The door of a nightclub opened, and a boy with brightly rouged cheeks stepped out. Would he look at the audience and giggle while a pot-bellied banker labored over his buttocks? He sauntered along the sidewalk, swinging narrow hips.
The last play she'd seen here had featured a weepy male protagonist. Dead trees and yellowed grass reflected his mood. A breast hung out of the dress of the female lead. He'd scurried upstage.
The Nazis' taste ran to nude dancing at the Haller Review. Photos from the show depicted women with boys' bodies and apricot-sized breasts. They were plastered on the columns next to election posters. Charlotte averted her eyes from the side street, where men in tuxedoes raised flowered skirts with their silver-topped canes.
Her hand around the key in her pocket, she climbed the steps two at a time.
Max was in the kitchen, clippin
g the newspaper. A small pile of articles lay next to his hand. She glimpsed a headline.
Germans—honor the boycott of Jewish businesses.
"Working hard?" she asked, hearing her own sarcastic tone.
His scissors squeaked as he cut out an editorial from the Berliner Tageblatt.
He was clearly obsessed, a professor in a burning building, analyzing the situation instead of running for the exit. In the studio, she propped up her sketch of Van Gogh's painting and transferred the landscape to the canvas in shades of tangerine. Angling her brush, she slid a thin red stripe of human pain into the sunny countryside.
Breathing calmly now, she glanced at Max's work. The woman's thighs were discolored. From the distance, over her bare shoulder, something black—perhaps a train—was bearing down on her.
Then she saw the other painting, half hidden by the chest of drawers. A wizened man sat on a chair in the middle of a stage, his legs spread wide revealing a swollen limb. A bosomy, red-haired woman pushed two small girls with blond pigtails toward him. The purple of his penis matched the little girls' hair ribbons.
I Won't Be a Coward
On the day of the boycott, Charlotte set out for Bernstein's. Signs in shop windows of non-Jews boasted—Recognized German-Christian Enterprise. Posters all over the city urged— Germans Defend Yourselves. Don't Buy From Jews.
Kohn, the jeweler in the Leipziger Straße, stood in front of his shop wearing his iron cross high on his chest. Behind him white paint dripped from letters scrawled on the window— Germans Don't Buy From Jews. At the bookstore, a stormtrooper paced, bearing a placard—World Jewry Wants to Destroy Germany. The shops along the Ku'damm bore the label JUDE.
Charlotte went home to fetch Max. Walking the two blocks to Bernstein's, they heard chanting. Hang Them. Hang Them. Nicely dressed people—smartened up for a boycott of Jewish business—gave the Hitler salute.
Max approached the door. Stormtroopers, linked like paper dolls, came towards him.
"My mother's in there," he said.
In spite of the full uniform, down to the black boots, Charlotte recognized his smirk. Herr Esch. He said something into Max's ear, turned on his heel, and entered the store. But wasn't Max the heir to the business?
It dawned on her. The Nazis—not the Communists—had grabbed the world and presented it to the little man. The fragrance of the mimosa bushes at the Lustgarten almost gave her a headache.
"The dirty bastard—"
"What did he say?"
"Said he let her out the back door, told her she couldn't come back."
The shrill voice punctured the air. The little man with the slicked-back hair stood at the podium, shouting.
The Jews have ruined the economy. They're behind every evil –ism in the world—Communism, Liberalism, Socialism.
The audience seemed intoxicated by its own chanting.
Hang them. Hang them.
Every day, the Nazis "aryanized" more Jewish shops. They eliminated Jews from banks, the stock exchange, newspapers, law and medicine. Just as Goebbels had promised, the Jews were out of the German economy. Frau Bernstein's friends had no businesses and no jobs. She wrote to her relatives in London, sold her jewelry.
When the Nazis accused her of tax evasion, she sold Bernstein's at a low price.
"I'm leaving," Frau Bernstein told them at dinner on Unter den Linden.
"Sorry," Max said, as if he alone had ruined Germany.
Herr Esch refilled their wine glasses. Frau Bernstein said, "I think we're past the last frost. Time to put down some bulbs."
She gulped down her wine and set the glass on the mahogany table.
"I saw them make an old lady salute. I won't. They'll have to shoot me."
"You'll come back?" Max asked.
"Of course, darling."
"After all, this is your country," he said.
"Not true. Max Liebermann would still be head of the academy if—"
He laid a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it away. Her eyes were little black coals.
"Get out now, both of you."
But Max shook his head, and Charlotte hated him for it.
On the way home, they passed Jewish shops with freshly smashed windows.
"Your mother was right about leaving," Charlotte said.
"I won't be a coward."
"I should divorce you."
"Good idea."
Something exploded inside her. She whirled around and slapped his cheek. The smack echoed off the buildings in the square. A man in uniform approached them. She slipped her arm into Max's and laughed giddily. Weren't lovers allowed to hit one another? The man ambled away.
Artemisia
A work crew chopped down the tall linden trees that had lined Frau Bernstein's street. The Führer wanted more room for political marches. Now checkerboard waist taxis claimed the space where trees had once stood. A taxi with its motor running waited directly in front of Frau Bernstein's house. Charlotte and Max entered the hall. Frau Bernstein stood beneath the chandelier, her purse under her arm.
"The Jews made Berlin into a great city. Now there's nothing for us here."
She snapped open her purse and fingered identity papers and cash. Max carried the two leather suitcases to the taxi.
When Max embraced his mother, she whispered something. He shook his head. She leaned against his upper arm as he led her down the steps. From inside the taxi window, she waved.
"What did she say?" Charlotte asked.
His eyes met hers briefly. Then he looked away. "'I've paid Herr Esch off.' That's what she said."
She sensed a turning point. Until now he'd never lied to her.
***
Most nights Charlotte lay awake waiting to hear footsteps in the hall, his key in the lock. Sometimes she woke in the morning with the weight of his head on her arm.
One night Charlotte paced the kitchen, waiting for him. But when she heard his steps in the hall, she hurried to the sofa and began underlining passages in an old Heinrich Heine poetry book. Not a drop of blood that's Moorish, neither of foul Jewish current. Had Heine known? Max's lips brushed the crown of her head. He disappeared into the kitchen. She followed him. He spread the butter thickly on the roll, took it to the table, didn't bother with a plate.
She wouldn't ask him who was in the group. If she knew, they would come after her too, torture her until she cried out the names.
But he couldn't keep a secret.
"A countess joined our group," he said, chewing his roll.
"Don't tell me her name," Charlotte whispered.
"That means contacts in high circles—a real resistance."
The small sum they'd gotten for Bernstein's was almost gone. And Frau Bernstein was living in Covent Garden, walking down Bond Street, balancing shopping bags.
Max and Hitler were both born in April. On the Führer's birthday, the Horst Wessel song blared from the radio. The papers featured photos of charcoal and brown dogs, creeping along like wolves—animals honoring Hitler.
The Lustgarten—dedicated to the memory of Sophie Charlotte—smelled of cut grass and trumpet vine. The image of sweeping skirts and monumental seventeenth century hairdos crowded out the recent mob's chanting Hang them. Hang them.
Christian Gottlieb Cantian's gray granite bowl, shoulderhigh to Charlotte, stood in the center of the garden. She took out her sketchpad and flipped past some bird drawings until she came to a blank page. Closing her eyes, she saw purple reptiles with bloodshot eyes chewing their own tails, apricotcolored monkeys picking bugs from under their arms, fish with emerald eyes laying eggs on the ocean floor. She drew quickly, then took out her gray pencil to create the granite bowl to contain them.
At home, she transferred the drawing to a canvas. In her old flower book, she found the tiny forget-me-not on its muscular hairy white stalk, the drooping bluebells, the cheerful pink with its yellow center. She painted them all growing up from the granite bowl. Finally, she added purple and yellow passion fl
owers.
When Max came home, the painting was ready. "How's the countess?" she asked.
"Can't talk—just know that something big's going to happen soon."
"Like every day."
Seal Woman Page 10