"Another march."
"Shut the window, so we don't hear the drums."
"This one's about university students."
That evening they followed the crowd to Unter den Linden and walked past Frau Bernstein's house, occupied by a Nazi official and his family now. Herr Ulrich Esch had brokered the sale and stayed on to work for the new residents. Charlotte and Max followed the torchbearers to Opera Square. Young people ran along the street, their arms full of books. Up ahead, the sky glowed red.
At the bonfire, students were feeding books to the flames.
"Heine's books sold out," Max said. The words rang in Charlotte's head. Heed not Moors nor Jews, spake the knight with fond endearments.
A young man stood apart from the others. He had no books, and he was not singing. A stormtrooper nudged him.
"Let's see you salute."
The student put his hands into his pockets.
"Bolshevik, huh?" the brownshirt said and brought brass knuckles down on the student's head. Another stormtrooper joined in. The boy sank soundlessly to the ground.
Charlotte pulled on Max's arm when the kicking began.
Back home, she threw up in the toilet. She came out of the bathroom, feeling sour and empty as if somebody had pulled the plug on her feelings until they'd drained out. She drank water while Max ate a piece of herring on black bread—his birthday dinner.
She remembered the gift.
"A fantasy from another world," she said, handing him the painting wrapped in newspaper.
He ran his fingers over the monkeys and reptiles, studying the detail.
"Artemisia," he said, reaching for her. For the first time since his mother left, he looked relaxed. Desire—a feeling that Hitler had practically stifled—overwhelmed her. He unbuttoned her dress, and she watched his hands—rough as a worker's now—stroke her breasts. His hair smelled of smoke and dirt. On the couch, they caressed one another. She held herself back, watched herself make love to him, then succumbed at last, letting all her senses explode into pleasure.
The Bear Dance
During Köpenick Blood Week, the Nazis arrested and tortured over five hundred people. Charlotte wished Max would stop saving the world and stay home. She couldn't understand why he didn't share her desire to leave Germany. Jews had no jobs. They were banned from public sports fields, gymnasiums, and youth centers. Signs appeared on public park benches and in restaurants.
No Jews Allowed.
Max could no longer attend the academy after the Nazis introduced quotas on Jewish entry to schools and universities. He appeared to absorb each indignity. How could his slender body contain it all? One morning in late summer Charlotte found him at the kitchen table staring at the newspaper—not reading just staring. She caught the headline over his shoulder.
Jews are no longer allowed to swim at the Wannsee Lake public beach.
She placed her hands on his shoulders, less from affection than from a need to anchor him and herself. How many years since they'd kissed in the bushes near the lake? He jumped up so quickly that she staggered backwards. He balled up the newspaper, threw it across the room, and strode to the door.
"Careful—" But the door closed on the rest of her warning.
That night he didn't come home. At dawn, exhausted with listening for his footsteps, she set out to look for him. Downstairs she stepped into a drizzly fog. A pair of coal wagon horses shifted their legs and snorted. A man staggered under bags of coal.
At Alexanderplatz, the smell of old beer came from an open door. A young woman, her apron flapping at her ankles, swept cigarette butts into the gutter. Charlotte hurried along.
At the police station, a heavy-lidded officer peered at her.
"My husband—" she began.
He raised an eyebrow.
"Disappeared."
"That's what they do. Every day. Bolshevik?"
She moved her hands as if to hide her face. He came at her from another angle. "A Jew?"
Her lip quivered. She covered her mouth. His breath smelled of yesterday.
"Bolshevik-Jew?" he chirped.
She nodded.
"Probably at the old brewery—Oranienburg. They'll inject acid into—"
She closed her ears. His eyes lit up.
"You his woman?"
She turned and walked away, heard him chanting behind her. Peck. Peck. Back home, she curled up on the sofa, shivering, her legs drawn up to her knees. Fear bit into her skin as if her body were pinned up by clothespins. Every night that week she kept the same stiff posture of vigilance.
One night, she lay curled under a blanket on the sofa. Between sleeping and waking, she heard a muffled sound at the door, like a cloth sack of potatoes against wood. Thud. Thud. She stumbled to the door. "Who's there?" she whispered. No answer. Slowly she opened the door. A punched-in, bloodyfaced creature covered in rags stood in the hall. His mouth was a purple mass, his eyes sunk in puffy bruised flesh. Then she saw the leather patch on the elbow of his sweater.
Max.
She placed his arm over her shoulder and half carried him to the sofa. She rolled him carefully onto his stomach. He whimpered into the cushions when she cut the sweater shreds from the wounds on his back. Deep cuts puckered his back in a crisscross pattern. She soaked towels in cold water, wrung them out, and laid them on his back. He stretched arms forward, and his fingers gripped the arm of the sofa.
They could be sitting in Hyde Park with Frau Bernstein, painting ducks and trees.
"What did they do?" she asked.
A sound came from his throat, not words. For several days he slept fitfully, often crying in his sleep. One morning, when she was changing his bandages, he spoke. She brought her ear to his mouth. "Whipped us with hippo hide. Guards—they peed in my mouth."
She said nothing.
"Smashed in our noses and teeth. Made us do the bear dance. Big boots. No laces. They laughed. Made us jump. More. More. Made us sing nursery rhymes."
He seemed to have difficulty breathing. "Shhh," she said, touching his head. His hair felt unfamiliar, like fur pasted on his head. "Shhh."
His voice had a croak in it, as if it were coming from a narrow place. "There's more."
Studying the new bald spot on his head, she waited. His back and shoulders trembled. She covered him with the blanket, but she couldn't stop his crying. At last he said it.
"We beat one another."
His whole body shook. Choking sounds came from his chest. He went on like this for a long time until finally, like a broken engine grinding slowly to a halt, he stopped and lay quietly and slept.
One morning, he lay on his stomach while she changed the compresses. He raised his head from the pillow.
"One day I refused to punch my cellmate. Guard threw me down. Kicked me. All right I'll do it. They stood me up. And I punched my friend. He punched me. They kept standing us up. Hit him. Hit him. Laughing. When I stopped, the guard punched me. I went crazy. I kept hitting my friend and hitting him. Finally, he fell. They held him up, but his legs were like jelly. And then—"
She placed a fresh compress on his back. He winced.
"And then—he died. I killed him."
A groan came from somewhere deep inside him. More from the center of his soul than his lungs.
"It wasn't you—" she said.
"It was—It was."
Each day, she rubbed salve into his wounds. Gradually, he got better. One day he stopped talking about life in prison. Later that day, he asked her to help him put on his shoes.
Standing at the door, he hesitated over the door handle as if he'd forgotten how to go out. A scar had formed next to his mouth. He walked with a limp, and he clutched his collar by the lapels.
"I'm going for a newspaper," he said apologetically.
"If you don't come back, I'll never forgive you."
In 1935, the Nazis crossed the threshold of Charlotte's bedroom with the Nuremberg Laws, the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German
Honor. Jews could no longer vote and were forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with Gentiles. The child of a marriage between a Jew and a gentile was a Mischling.
She mustn't become pregnant.
The sign appeared in restaurant windows and at the cinema box office.
Jews not desired.
The new laws quickened old embers that smoldered in Charlotte's parents. That Sunday when Charlotte visited her parents, she discovered a Nazi publication, lying next to her father's elbow. Her father had circled the update on racial incidents: Jew arrested for raping Aryan neighbor.
Her mother looked up from her baking. "All the Jewish accountants in your father's office are gone."
"Don't tell me about it," Charlotte begged.
"You know the Jewish spinster on the first floor?"
Charlotte walked away, but her mother raised her voice. "Yesterday the baker refused to wait on her."
"Does it concern me?" Charlotte asked.
"It's a bad time for Jews—" and without stopping for a breath, "The Cohen woman divorced her Jewish husband— didn't want to be defiled by a Jew in the marriage bed."
Her father's compressed lips underlined his wife's words. Mornings for thirty years, he'd packed a lunch in his briefcase and strapped it to his bike. Evenings, the briefcase had contained a banana peel and an old newspaper. He didn't break patterns.
"Max can't blend in now," her mother said, as if he were an odd-colored jungle animal.
She kneaded the dough with quick, vigorous movements. "After Frau Cohen divorced her husband, her brother got his job back with the government."
A happy ending. Charlotte hated her mother for thinking that.
Back in the days when she was bringing food from Bernstein's, her mother hadn't talked to her like that. She'd heated up the fillets of zander with radish-filled pancakes and poured the Charlottenburger Pilsener beer for her husband. They'd especially liked the berry compote with vanilla sauce, Bernstein's best dessert.
A Dolphin-like Creature
Charlotte woke up with a metallic taste in her mouth. Her throat felt furry when she swallowed. The thought of bread and butter made her stomach form a fist—still she was hungry. Wine puckered her lips, and coffee tasted nutshell bitter. No sign of blood yet. She was often late. But as she marked the days on her calendar with an X, a chill crept up the back of her neck. Her calendar picture, Grock the clown, mocked her. "A mistake," her mother said, pinching Charlotte's pale cheeks. A mistake, even before Charlotte told her.
Max's eyes widened at the news. For weeks, he ate only crackers, went to bed early, waited for her to cross the imaginary line on their mattress, and reach for him. He would carry the baby in his belly if only she'd let him he told her.
She lived each day by the hour, chewing a bread crust and sipping malt beer—just enough to take the edge off her hunger without awakening the slumbering throw-up serpent. She shut the studio door against the greasy paint odor that made her stomach heave. Even the empty canvas had a smell.
On the way to the butchers she sucked on a bit of chocolate to keep down the nausea. But the smell of blood overwhelmed her, and she raised a hand to her mouth while the butcher packaged her sausages. She ducked down a side street to vomit. After that Max bought their meat. He'd have to cook it too, she told him.
To regain her balance, she tried knitting. But forcing the needles through holes in the pastel-colored wool only tightened her stomach. She couldn't paint, and without the painting, her mood sank. One night, she lay trembling in Max's arms.
"I don't want a baby," she sobbed.
He dried her eyes with his fingers, told her to cry quietly. The neighbors.
Actions crowded her mind—the stormtroopers kicking the student, men beating one another with rods, Frau Bernstein leaving for London. Suddenly, she remembered.
"What did your mother say when she left?"
In the darkness, his breathing seemed loud.
"What?" she pressed.
He spoke in a ragged whisper.
"'Don't have a baby'—that's what she said."
The world no longer existed outside on the noisy street, but beneath her navel. When she could, she worked at the café— setting down the coffee pot and running to heave the contents of her stomach into the tiny toilet—furtively wiping perspiration off her forehead with her sleeve when she returned.
But after the first three months, when the dried crust on a closed paint tube no longer brought the bile into her throat, Charlotte started painting again. She sat at the kitchen table daubing the plover's orange beak on a miniature canvas from a photo in a bird book. The stocky little bird waded into the surf on legs like orange elbows bent backwards. In the corner of the page, she drew white speckled eggs. Her world shrank to a nest for Max, herself, and the baby.
At the museum, she moved quickly past the mutilated Greek torsos and the noseless head of Pericles toward the fleshy legs of the Christ Child and the rosy bosom of the Virgin Mary.
She and Max no longer made love in the usual hungry way. Max lit a candle on the nightstand and, in the flickering light, stroked her swelling breasts and full hips. Then he lay back and talked about George Grosz—"that painting, the Agitator, that's how I feel."
Next day, at the gallery, she studied Grosz's sprawling paintings full of people doing hateful things to one another. The creature growing inside her kicked her.
One evening when she was in her eighth month, Max prepared dinner for her, washed the dishes afterwards, called over his shoulder that she should lie down, carried her to bed, made love to her with gentle strokes, circumventing their treasured centerpiece. Afterwards, he untangled his arms and legs from hers, taking care not to touch the belly that protruded into their future.
At night she lay awake while the baby pushed against the small of her back. Toward morning, Max caressed her belly, first along the sides, then over the top. She put her hands on his, and together they traveled over her skin, stopping when they felt the baby kick.
"Cramps in your legs?" he asked.
"Yes," she lied.
He rubbed her shins until the rhythmic movement made her drowsy. But the weight of the baby and the placenta pulled her into the mattress until Max placed one hand under the baby, the other under her shoulder, and rolled her over. Then he snuggled up behind her, his fingers exploring her belly, seeking the outline of tiny feet and fists. At last they slept, all three of them.
Soon her belly began brushing against café customers, and the manager asked her to stay home. Charlotte spent mornings lying in a bath fragrant with gardenia from Frau Bernstein's bath powders. When her strained muscles relaxed, the baby tried the usual jailbreak, this time kicking so hard at the wall of its marine world that the outline of a tiny heel appeared on her belly. A dolphin-like creature would swim out from between her legs into the warm water, slither along her hip, then splash to the surface. Charlotte closed her eyes. That's how it would be.
The Bear's Foot
The Nazis cleaned up for the 1936 Olympic games. Overnight the signs—No Jews or Animals and Jews, the Road to Palestine Does Not Go Through Here—disappeared.
In the absence of No Jews Allowed signs, elderly Jews sat on park benches, their faces raised to the sun. Hitler was trying to convince visitors that he was not a hate-filled fanatic. Swastika banners and flags from all the German towns hung on the government buildings on Unter den Linden. The Brandenburg Gate was covered with flags and garlands.
Max wanted to visit a restaurant, an old favorite. The Jewish Customers Not Desired sign was gone. Bowing low, the waiter took their order for beetroot soup and spicy meatballs and veal with German noodles and herb dumplings.
"It won't last," she said, tipping her soup spoon sideways like he'd taught her.
But he wasn't in the mood for that kind of reality.
"The lower class—" he said, sipping his wine.
If only she could get him out of Germany. But his roots ran deeper than hers.
"—never gets what it needs. Krupp and Thyssen get rich off the poor devils' backs."
He talked of his dead heroine, Rosa Luxemburg. Her father called her "Bolshevik fish food" because her body had been dumped into the canal where it rotted all winter.
"People gobble down roast duck while the unemployed warm their hands over tin can fires in tent cities," he said, slicing the tender veal.
The next day at the procession of the Olympic flame one hundred thousand spectators cheered when the airship Hindenburg floated over the stadium. Twenty thousand white pigeons flying up into the blue sky gave Charlotte a sense of hope. Another world must lie beyond this choked society.
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