***
It was a hot, humid morning, and Charlotte lumbered up the stairs, carrying canned goods and bread. Sweat formed under her sleeves. She blew like a bellows at every landing. Her skin felt like it would rip away from her sides, and the baby would drop to the floor. Inside the apartment, she turned on the radio. Stadium crowds cheered.
Jesse Owens, the black American runner has won the race.
When Charlotte laughed, something inside her gave way, and warm liquid trickled down her leg. She reached between her legs. The water flowed over her hand into a puddle on the floor. No. She wasn't ready. Groaning, she went down on all fours and wiped the floor with a dishcloth. Digging her fingers into the kitchen counter, she raised herself from the floor. Water ran down both her legs.
When Max walked in the door, she lay on the sofa breathing hard.
"I'll call a taxi," he said, stroking her damp hair.
Shuddering under a contraction, she pushed him away. No money for that. They'd wasted it on dinner. He helped her to her feet, peeled off her wet clothes until she stood naked, like a huge leaking animal. Her body bore down on her like a runaway train. She could barely push her arms into the sleeves of the big cotton dress he held out for her.
A few minutes later, she sat next to Max in the front seat of the tram, a small suitcase between her feet, digging her fingers into his arm with each contraction. Stop it, she barked when Max stroked her knee. The flowing water formed a secret stream between her legs. The wetness of her seat humiliated her. Another contraction. The baby ripped at her muscles.
In the hospital bed, she writhed and sweated.
A woman in a stiff, white dress came toward her carrying a Great War gas mask like her father had worn. Was this a military hospital? The nurse placed a dead frog over her nose. She tried to push her away but she drifted on the smells of pond and rubber.
The world beyond the window was dark when she woke up. Charlotte glanced at the calendar on the wall. Still August. The frogwoman was at her side, stroking some creature. It had a flat nose and puffy cheeks in a red face.
The woman's voice rolled like something from inside a cave. Charlotte touched her belly. Gone. The frogwoman held a dead thing. She understood. It was a doll to comfort her. Her eyes brimmed over, not for herself but for Max. He would be disappointed.
"Go away."
But the pushy tart inched up to Charlotte's arm, placed the old, wrinkled doll on her chest. It was still warm from the tart's body. Then Charlotte saw the tiny movement. Its rosebud mouth quivered. She grasped its body with both hands, brought it to her nose and sniffed. Then she inhaled deeply. New human life had its own smell.
The first night back home, Max didn't miss a feeding. In fact, he was the first to hear the mewling cries before they became piercing screams. Charlotte sensed his fingers on the buttons of her nightgown, the baby's cod-like mouth clamping her sore nipple, the sharp pull in her groin. Coming awake, she nosed the soft spot on Lena's head where the skull had not yet knit together. Her eyes met Max's over the infant's downy hair. Gently, he eased Lena over to the other breast.
***
Through the network of brave individuals ready to give their lives for a better world, Max met a botanist who was not afraid to hire a Jew. Wildflowers. Could Max draw and paint them? Of course. Anything. A whole book? A whole library. Whatever the botanist wanted.
At first Max got blurred vision from studying tiny hairs on stalks and leaves. He rode the tram into the countryside beyond Potsdam and took photographs of lady's slipper, hibiscus, and chickweed. Sometimes he cut wisteria, honeysuckle, and yarrow in the fields on the outskirts of the city, brought them home to paint. The smell of flowers in the apartment promised survival.
Accustomed to painting big shapes, Max squinted at roots, tubers, nodes, lines in the petals, details he had to capture on canvas before the plant withered. He studied botanical drawings from the Renaissance, done for the Medici family in Florence, tracing the swollen and desiccated nodes on the tuber of a spotted orchid by Bartolomeo Bimbi. When Charlotte paced the floor, burping Lena, he held up Bimbi's drawing of a cauliflower and a horseradish.
"Look at the legs and belly on that."
She developed an attachment to each of Max's nature paintings and missed them when they went to the botanist. At night men cut other men's throats on the streets below, but the little family cuddled together in its warm cocoon.
Sometimes after a feeding, Charlotte got out of bed and looked at the flower painting that would be gone the next day. The deep blue fringed gentian with its flared petals was named after King Gentius of Illyria. Its roots could cure all things, including listlessness in love, but the flower was so delicate that it opened its petals only in sunshine.
The next day, with Lena sucking contentedly at her breast, Charlotte remembered the gentian and wondered if she could paint what lay hidden within flowers, something beyond the botanist's truth.
Max spent hours on the nectar tubes of the bell-like columbine, the sticky leaves of the carnivorous common butterwort, the white hairs on the stalk of the forget-me-not. But he also did sketches of Lena. By the time she was a year old, his drawings recorded every stage of her development— rolling over, pulling herself up, taking her first steps.
When she began to walk, she held onto the arms of the sofa, then dropped back to a crawl, later pulling herself up by a table leg. He followed her, sometimes crawling too, all the time making circles on paper, rendering her head, her trunk, her bottom from every angle. In his "mood" series, he depicted Lena sucking her thumb, laughing, brooding, then pinned a sketch to his easel and transferred Lena to a canvas.
After covering Jesse Owens' victory over the stocky Aryan runners, the foreign journalists left Berlin. The signs reappeared. A poster on the information column at the Ku'damm made Charlotte's skin prickle.
Without a solution to the Jewish question, no solution for the German nation.
Like before Jesse Owens, Jews only shopped at designated times against the backdrop of words scrawled on the wall of an abandoned building—Martin Luther's words.
The father of the Jews is the devil.
Swimming pools were off limits. Jews had to carry identity papers at all times. The worst ban for Max was the one forbidding Jews to ride the tram. For a few weeks he ignored it, rode into the country to collect flowers, then traveled across town with flower drawings under his arm for the botanist. But one day, he was sitting on the tram when two Gestapo agents entered at the Zoo station. One stood in the front and glared at the passengers.
"I smell garlic," he said.
Max fixed his eyes on the conductor's pay box.
The other agent approached the man seated next to Max and demanded his papers. Fumbling through his pockets, the man jabbed Max's side. His elbow felt warm, like an extension of his own skin. No papers. Through the window, Max glimpsed the man lying on the sidewalk, arms raised to protect his face. The tram pulled away, and Max faced forward. That night he whispered to Charlotte under the blanket. His face was bloody. I couldn't help him. Just sat there.
The next day she sat on the edge of the bed, sewing the hem on Lena's dress, waiting for him to return. The hem grew crooked. She ripped out the stitches, then pricked her finger. Squealing, she barely heard him at the door. When he was finally inside with the door closed behind him, she blurted out the question, the one she didn't want answered because knowing wasn't safe.
"Who's this countess?"
He leaned forward and whispered into her ear. "Russian, a Romanov."
"How can a Romanov be working with a bunch of Communists?"
"Not just with the Communists—" he said, placing a hand on her knee. Normally, this gesture signaled intimacy. And before long she'd be in his lap. But now it meant only one thing. Quiet. Or we're both dead.
With his other hand he moved her chin so that their eyes met.
"They've arrested her," he said.
Charlotte searched his face for
fear, came up emptyhanded.
"Go underground," she said.
He shook his head.
"Our friends will hide you."
"I won't live like that, hiding in a closet, waiting for food, handing out a tin can of excrement to the people who risk their lives for me."
When she woke up the next morning, he was still at his easel. His eyes were bloodshot, but his gestures were calm and his expression peaceful, as if he'd come to terms with something. On the easel was a painting of Lena, surrounded by flowers. She was laughing. Her eyes radiated hope.
Later, after he'd gone out, she went to the portrait and gazed at it. Gradually she began to see what she'd missed before. Within Lena's vitality lay its opposite—a sad lethargy. Max had placed something sinister behind the happy moment he had captured. Or had she uncovered something hidden, hidden even from him?
Christmas diverted Charlotte from the Gestapo, the Communists, the countess, and the humiliation of the Jews. She needed a teddy bear for Lena. That meant going to Bernstein's under the Aryan owners who'd bought it for a low price.
Nothing had changed in the store—the bright lights, the ornate columns, and the glittering display cases. She bought a bear with an intelligent face and brown glassy eyes.
It'll last for years, the clerk told her. The arms wouldn't come off when Lena dragged it around. Back home, Charlotte found a scrap of cloth and threaded the embroidery needle. She plunged her needle into the fabric, pulled it out again, formed knots, undid them, stitched words into the distorted little rag.
Lena Bernstein, born 1936.
She removed the felt pad on the bear's right foot and pulled out some stuffing. With a knitting needle, she pushed the cloth into the bear's foot and sewed the pad back on.
A Yellow and Blue Dress
When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Charlotte ran the water in the sink so she could listen to the short wave radio. They drank the last of Frau Bernstein's Riesling wine to celebrate the poor performance of the Reichswehr.
But the Nazis decided to blame the Jews for the German defeat at Stalingrad. In September of that year, Charlotte had to stitch a yellow star on Max's jacket. If she didn't, the neighbors downstairs would turn them in. And if she did, sooner or later the Gestapo would pick him up.
At first Max wore his other jacket, the one without the star. But when the Gestapo beat up the Jews down the street for not complying with the badge law, he stayed indoors sketching the gray hairy stems of the chamomile.
Evenings, Charlotte turned hems and darned holes in socks until the original fabric formed a slender bridge between darnings. Days, she swept the floor, washed windows again and again, scraping an imaginary spot with her fingernail. For dinner, she chopped onions and cooked potatoes with a thumb length of sausage for flavor.
Lena, age five now, sang along with her—"Monday's baking day, Tuesday's washday. Every day's shopping day." At night Charlotte lay in bed tightening and releasing the muscles in her legs, feet, and hands. When that didn't bring sleep, she recited one of her mother's recipes—apple cake, 1 cup of flour. 4 tablespoons butter, ½ teaspoon of cinnamon.
Slice the apples very, very, very thin.
One night, Max pressed against her back. His lips touched her ear.
"Keep Lena safe."
His heart pounded against her shoulder blade.
"Of course."
He fell back to his side of the bed.
When Charlotte cooked, Lena sat under the kitchen table drawing eggs in a bird's nest, speckling each egg with her pencil point. Sometimes she sat behind Max, talking to her bear, while he painted at the easel. The botanist had requested marsh marigolds and wild geraniums. After drawing the scientific version of each flower, Max blended the flowers together in a sprawling painting of yellow and blue blossoms.
At supper, Lena ignored the steaming potatoes on her plate. She stroked Charlotte's arm.
"Can you make me a yellow and blue dress?"
Charlotte sighed. No more sewing. Lena watched her over the rim of her glass.
If only she hadn't gotten pregnant, Charlotte thought. She'd been so careful. "I'll see if grandma has some material," she said at last.
Lena banged her feet happily against the legs of her chair.
***
Clutching her ration card, Charlotte set out early to shop. On the sidewalk stood a group of people. Each one held a small suitcase. Stars yellow as canaries brightened their dark coats. A truck pulled up. Without a word, they climbed into the back. Bielski came into Charlotte's mind. Rivka.
The next day the letter arrived. Charlotte opened it while Max slept. He was to report to the collection point in the Große Hamburger Straße. At breakfast she handed it to him. He read it and slipped it back into the envelope as if it were redeemable at his convenience.
Charlotte mouthed the words over Lena's head. "Somebody can hide you."
"It's nothing. Just means going to the East."
"East? What is it?" Lena chirped.
"A place for uppity Berlin Jews, so they can meet the little people in skullcaps and black cloaks, their fellow Jews," Max said as if Lena were not a child.
Charlotte placed a finger on her lips. But the letter had unleashed something in him.
"It's a resettlement scheme," he said. "—to knock the pomp out of the 'good German' Jews, the ones like me—the ones who look down on the pickled herring peddlers, the ones who think Bielski is of a different race from the rest of us Jews."
His cheeks were flushed from some inner fire she couldn't understand. Her own skin was cold with dread.
"Can you pack me a suitcase? Just enough paints for the trip to the East?" he asked in a polite voice, as if they barely knew one another.
Charlotte took the suitcase from the closet—the same one she'd brought to the hospital. Max was in bed before her. Lena lay asleep curled up in the middle of their bed, like a spoiled pet. Charlotte picked her up and carried her to her own bed. Then she undressed very slowly. Max lay on his back, waiting, his eyes open. In the bathroom, she washed carefully. Finally, she applied the last drops of fragrance from one of Frau Bernstein's bottles.
Max lifted the sheet, and she crept under the covers. He drew her hungrily to him, wrapped his legs tightly around hers. They climbed upwards with a hard, painful pleasure toward the climax. At the top, came relief, not wellbeing. But even as he was deep inside her, she sensed the cold beyond the magic circle of their locked bodies. When he withdrew, she placed a hand over her mouth. He must not hear her sob.
The next morning he stood facing her in the hall, the suitcase in his hand. He looked apologetic, not frightened. His cheek touched hers for a second—long enough for her to sense the otherness of his skin.
"Don't go."
But he left, and she cursed him for being gone.
The next morning before dawn, Charlotte left Lena sleeping, ran down the side streets, avoiding the streetlights. As she approached the collection point, she heard the shouts of officers and the growling of their dogs. Ordinary looking people climbed into the back of the trucks. But Max was not among them.
Every day she went. Finally, at the end of the second week, she saw him. He sat in the back of the truck, wedged between two men in threadbare jackets. His eyes looked into hers for a second, then down at the toes of his scuffed boots. By dismissing her, he was making it easier for her—she knew that. For a long time she'd wanted him to fear the Nazis, fear them enough to run away. But now she prayed he was still unafraid.
When the truck pulled out and lumbered over the curb, she stared until it was gone. Then she stood in the spot where Max once had been. On the pile of suitcases, she saw the label in red letters. Would the Gestapo send it to him? A dog growled next to her thigh. She drew back.
At home, she crawled into bed, curled up around Lena to warm herself. But Lena stretched and began the little movements that preceded her waking. Charlotte studied the brown curls, the vibrations of the eyelids. Perhaps it
was the light, but she thought she saw a worry line between the eyebrows.
Suddenly the child's eyes opened.
"Is Papa back yet?"
"Still with the relatives," she said airily.
Lena got up and crept under the table where she kept her colored pencils and paper. Charlotte studied the hairs on Max's pillowcase. She drew the pillow to her chest and breathed in the smell of his scalp. She imagined a thick-fingered Nazi opening the little brown suitcase, squeezing the expensive paints onto a palette, then painting pornography. She ran her lips over the Bernstein monogram on the pillowcase, swore never to change it.
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