by Peter Golden
The department store was a brilliantly lit palace of haute couture with a stained-glass cupola above the main hall and gold ceilings with intricate carvings. Yuli had already selected a camel-hair coat, and now, as I settled into a chair, she was trying on silk and wool sheaths that accentuated her curves, examining herself in the tri-mirrors, twirling with a languorous grace. The saleswoman was draping scarves around Yuli’s shoulders to demonstrate how they would complement the dress, while a fast-talking quartet of women surrounded her, offering their opinions in French, and Yuli nodded politely as if she understood their suggestions. A refined gray-haired woman standing by my chair, an obvious fan of Jackie Kennedy in a pillbox hat and leopard-print jacket, said, “Pardon, monsieur. Quel est le titre de son dernier film?”
She was asking me the name of Yuli’s last movie, and for fun, I said, “King Kong,” raising my hand and wriggling my fingers to emulate the giant ape holding Fay Wray.
“Non,” the woman replied. “She too young for Le Roi Kong. I see her in Vogue Paris.”
Yuli selected three scarves, a simple black wool dress, and another in silk—by Emilio Pucci, a famous designer according to Yuli—with a tumultuous geometric pattern the color of plums, mulberries, tangerines, and lavender.
I would’ve been happy to buy the clothes for her, but she paid, and I carried bags.
“I told Papka if I was going to Paris I might go shopping. He gave me dollars and I exchanged them when you were at lunch. I want to buy for you.”
“No—”
Yuli grinned. “It is not polite to let me dress well alone.”
I stopped by the sparkly cityscape of atomizers on the perfume counter, the air smelling like a flower shop. “Okay, if you tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“That you know how beautiful you are?”
Yuli laughed, short and sharp. “Only a man could believe this is a serious question.”
“Which qualifies me to ask it.”
A moment passed, then another, until Yuli started talking in a matter-of-fact tone: “Boys at school try to touch me, but they touch any girls who let them, so does this mean I’m beautiful? The girls in school, they say to me, ‘I wish I have your eyes, I wish I have your hair,’ and I learn this means they are too jealous to be my friends, so I am alone.” In a different voice, a confessional voice, reluctant and tender, she added, “But when you—like that—when you look at me, I feel beautiful. But if you weren’t here to look at me—if you weren’t, well. Let’s go buy your clothes.”
* * *
I came away from the Galeries Lafayette with a black-and-burgundy tweed topcoat, a flannel charcoal-gray suit with fine azure stripes, two black turtlenecks, and russet suede lace-up shoes. Yuli said that there was a sewing kit in Emma’s bedroom closet, so she could hem the pants, and when I asked how she had learned tailoring, she giggled. “I probably altered half the Levi’s in the Soviet Union.”
At the apartment, we decided to test our new coats in the cold by walking to the Louvre. I had been anxious to see the Picassos, but at the museum I had trouble concentrating on them and wandered aimlessly from painting to painting.
“What’s wrong, Michael?”
“Joost. I can’t stop thinking about Joost.”
“Be calm. We ride the train to Amsterdam in the morning, and we will go see him.”
“If he hurt Emma—how do I not strangle him?”
“I will not let you.”
We meandered back to the Place des Vosges. Yuli didn’t have her map, but Notre-Dame was across the river, our lodestar in the failing winter light. Down past the cathedral, we crossed another bridge to the Île Saint-Louis. On the Quai de Bourbon, I spotted a Renault up ahead of us, one of those boxy economy models. As the driver opened the door and got behind the wheel, I saw her in profile, not quite believing my eyes as I dashed toward the oatmeal-colored car, waving and yelling, “Attendez! Wait! Attendez!” while people on the quay watched me run by, and Yuli shouted, “Michael!” I was sprinting, thankful that I was wearing my sneakers instead of my new shoes, and feeling the sweat break out on my forehead and the burning in my lungs, and I didn’t stop until the Renault pulled away from the curb and disappeared around the corner.
Bending over, I rested my hands on my knees, panting.
When Yuli caught up with me, she said, “What—”
“Emma. It was Emma. Driving the Renault.”
“Michael—”
“Same face, same hair. Emma. But younger.”
Yuli put an arm around me, and I glanced up at her. From the furrowing of her forehead and the pursing of her lips, it was plain that my taking off after a woman I claimed to be a newer version of my grandmother distressed her. A reasonable reaction. It distressed me, too.
“I’m hungry,” Yuli said. “Let’s go eat. And we’ll have some wine.”
My breathing was back to normal. “Wine. Let’s get some wine.”
35
Amsterdam, Netherlands
February 1, 1965
The tall skinny brick houses on Prinsengracht stood out against the sky in shades of autumn—chestnut-brown, dove-gray, oak-tree red, and sugar-maple orange. The houses had quirky gables and leaded windows, some of them lit by pale yellow lights that reflected on the wooden houseboats lining both sides of the canal, the dark water flecked with ice and running under the stone bridges, where bicyclists pedaled across and rang the bells on their handlebars to warn pedestrians, the jangling livening up the raw afternoon like music.
Our train had arrived at Central Station an hour ago, and we had hopped on a tram to the Hotel Americain. Yuli had selected it from the guidebook she’d bought at the Gare du Nord before we boarded in Paris, because the hotel was home to the famous Café Americain, among the oldest cafés in the city, and just a little over a mile from Joost’s coffee shop. Both of us had dozed on the early-morning train, and the best thing about the trip was that we didn’t discuss my alleged sighting of the young Emma.
Tired from the eight-hour ride, we perked ourselves up at a stall on Prinsengracht with cups of hot chocolate and a bag of poffertjes, bite-size pancakes sprinkled with powdered sugar. Farther up the canal we went by a picture window, where a bottle blonde, bathed in a ruby glow, posed in a black bra, panties, garter belt, and stockings, her arms raised like a belly dancer.
Yuli noticed me glancing in the window, and kidding around—I think—asked, “Are you interested to stop?”
“More interested in you borrowing her garter belt and stockings.”
Playfully she nudged me in the side with her elbow, and we laughed until, a moment later, we went by the line of shivering people waiting for a tour of the Anne Frank House.
Yuli asked me if I had read Anne Frank’s diary.
“In school,” I told her.
“I used to wonder if it would have been worth dying in a camp if I could have died with some memories of my mother and father.”
“What did you decide?”
“On bad days, I still wonder.”
“Today?”
She threaded her arm through mine. “Today is a good day.”
We smelled the Magic Dragon before we got there, the swirls of marijuana and hash smoke wafting toward us whenever someone opened the basement door to go in or out. Inside, it was dark except for the flicker of the candle chandeliers dangling from the low ceiling, and a blue-gray haze hung over the mahogany bar. On the jukebox, Peter and Gordon were singing their doleful ballad, “A World Without Love,” and I felt as if the beatniks had fled Greenwich Village and reconvened at these wooden tables in Amsterdam, gabbing in English, passing joints and pipes, and wolfing down waffles and ice cream.
A stocky young woman was behind the bar, and I asked her if Johannes De Jong were around. She pointed toward a man at a table at the rear of the coffee shop. He was bald on top, with long grizzled hair down past the shawl collar of his sweater, and he was sitting in a wheelchair, with an afghan on his lap. Behind hi
m, built into the wall, was one of those cages that passed for elevators in Europe.
“You speak,” Yuli said. “My accent will scare him.”
She stood behind my chair as I sat across from Joost. He had sunken cheeks, and his eyes were red and bleary, the result of the blackened nubs of joints in the white-and-blue saucer that doubled as an ashtray. Next to the wheelchair was a gray schnauzer who appeared as stoned as his master, lying on the plank floor with his front paws locked over his bearded snout.
I said, “Joost Ter Horst.”
He stared through me. “I do not know him.”
“Anymore. You don’t know Joost anymore. But he used to be you, didn’t he?”
There was no mirth in his smile, only scorn, and his teeth were crooked and stained.
“And Joost knew Emma Dainov.”
On his right hand, Joost had two long brownish-yellow fingernails, one on his thumb, the other on his index finger, and he used them like tweezers, plucking a roach from the saucer, lighting it with a matchstick he struck against the table, inhaling, holding his breath, then exhaling the pungent smoke.
I said, “You figure the Bundestag will extend the statute of limitations on war crimes?”
“Why do I care?”
“Emma Dainov.”
“Why do you continue saying this name?”
“She’s my grandmother.”
“Ask her, she tell you. Joost Ter Horst save her. Without Joost, she have died with the other Jews.”
I was already sick of Joost referring to himself in the third person and calculated how satisfying it would be to break his jaw.
Joost dropped the burnt matchstick in the saucer. “Emma and Joost cook together. He teaches her the trick to Schmarrn mit karamelisierten Äpfeln.”
I had no idea what that was, nor did I give a damn. “And while you were cooking, where were her daughters, Alexandra and Darya?”
“That is Hildegard. Diese dreckige Hure.”
I’d learned a handful of curses in Munich, and I was relatively certain that Joost had just referred to his wife as a “dirty whore.”
Joost removed a matchstick from behind his ear, fired up another roach, took a hit, and let the smoke drift out of his mouth. “Joost should have married Hildegard’s cousin or one of her friends. All are angels, but none want to marry a cook. Not even a cook with his own restaurant.” He got rid of the roach and match by scraping his fingernails against the rim of the saucer. “Joost counts corpses in Russia. He not responsible for making them.”
“And Alexandra? Darya?”
A pilot light appeared to flick on behind his red-veined eyes. “Hildegard doesn’t like Alexandra with her curly black Jew hair, dark eyes, and a nose like a beak.”
As I clenched and unclenched my hands, I heard Yuli catch her breath. “And Darya?”
“A beauty. Like Emma. She could be the Norse goddess Freyja. Blond with the green eyes. That is how Hildegard calls the girl, ‘Freyja.’ ”
Rage boiled up in me, not just at the story, but that Joost was reciting it as if he were recalling a picnic. “Darya—her name was Darya. What happened to her?”
“I sent Hildegard away and then Bashe—”
“Bashe?”
“Diese russische Fotze.”
Bashe was a Russian something, but I didn’t recognize the word Fotze. “Who is Bashe?”
“Bashe—a girlfriend of Emma—and she put Joost in his wheelchair. After Hildegard leaves, Bashe arrives like a monster in a nightmare and shoots Joost.”
“Alexandra and Darya—what happened to them?”
“Hildegard happens to them.” Reaching down with both hands, Joost gently picked up the schnauzer, who let out a yip as Joost placed the dog on his lap. “Now Joost lives upstairs in this house and sits every day in his chair and watches children smoke and dream.”
Joost spun the wheels so his chair went backward toward the elevator. “Let the Bundestag kiss the ass of the Nazi hunters. Joost do nothing wrong. Hildegard do it all, and she gets a bomb on her.”
After backing his wheelchair into the cage and shutting the gate, Joost pressed a button, and as the elevator ascended, he said, “Joost does not care if the Jews arrest him. He is already dead.”
I wanted to scream. Yuli looked dazed.
“Did you understand Fotze?” I asked.
Yuli replied with an almost imperceptible nod.
I waited for her answer, but she didn’t offer one. “Is it a secret?”
“In English, I can’t say. In Russian, pizda. You know this?”
Dmitry had taught it to me. “In English, it’s cunt.”
Yuli shut her eyes for a moment. Then she looked at me. “Did Emma ever mention a Bashe?”
“No, but if they were friends in Rostov, Der might know. Can you call him yet?”
“Soon,” she said, and began walking out of the coffee shop.
36
By ten o’clock that night, neither Michael nor Yuli could sleep. They had eaten dinner at Café Americain and strolled through the Leidseplein, the square busy and bright with restaurants, bars, nightclubs, young merrymakers, and staid couples in black tie and gowns going to the Stadsschouwburg for opera. Back in their room, they had made love, expecting to drift off in each other’s arms, but now they were lying on their backs, with the nightstand lamps on, and gazing at the pink satin canopy of the four-poster.
Michael said, “I’m glad we dug up some of Emma’s past, but after hearing Joost, I don’t know if there’s any way to tell if her killer came from there.”
“Do you want to quit?”
“I want to know how Alexandra and Darya died.”
“Joost didn’t say they died.”
“Joost did say Hildegard took care of the girls. And we saw the gravestone Emma and Gak put up for them. Maybe this Bashe knows the story.”
Yuli wondered if Bashe were the same woman who collected information from her in the bathhouse—the woman who taunted her by saying she was too wild for any boy to marry. Michael was right—if she were from Rostov, Papka would know. But Yuli couldn’t tell Michael about Bashe, not until she spoke to Papka. There were so many things that Yuli couldn’t tell Michael. Or was afraid to tell him. Like the first time she had heard russische Fotze. Yuli was unsure of how Michael, this loving innocent American with the surfer hair and sparkly green eyes, would react to what she had done when the man called her that—this boy who studied her when she spoke as if he were curious about every thought in her head, this clever patient scheming boy who touched her in ways that frightened and thrilled her, the only boy who had made her feel loved. And yet—yet despite all of this—Yuli felt that her caring about his reaction was a character flaw, a weakness to be conquered.
Michael propped up his head on his hand. “If I can track down Bashe and talk to the art dealer in Charleston, that will probably fill in some blanks. Will you help me?”
“I will, but—”
“You have to get back to Otvali?”
“Sooner or later.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
The apprehension in his voice set off a wave of loss in Yuli, and she almost confessed that she couldn’t imagine going back to Otvali alone.
Yuli kissed him. “Let’s sleep. We will think tomorrow.”
He chuckled. “I hope so.”
The lamps went off. They tossed and turned. Michael switched on the lamp on his side of the bed. “I can’t sleep.”
Yuli went to the bathroom. Her makeup bag, a small, stiffened cardboard suitcase covered in pigskin, was on a stool, and she opened it and removed four orange Seconal capsules from a tin pill box and returned to bed with the Seconals and a glass of water.
“Papka gave me these for travel. You take two and you sleep.”
Yuli put the capsules in her mouth and sipped from the glass. Michael did the same, then turned off the lamp, and Yuli curled up behind him.
When his breathing was slow and regular, Yuli kissed the n
ape of his neck. He didn’t stir, and she went to the bathroom, closing the door, turning on the light. After taking the capsules out of her mouth, drying them with a tissue and dropping them in the tin, she dressed in Levi’s, a sweater, and Keds. Then she loosened four bolts on the right side of her makeup bag, revealing a false compartment and retrieving a black knit hat, a map she had drawn, a syringe with a needle, her horn-handled switchblade, and a yellow armband with a blue Star of David—the type of cloth armband the Nazis had made Jews wear. Her coat hung on the back of the door, and she put it on, then tied her hair in a ponytail, tucking it under her collar and pulling on the hat, and loaded up her pockets, hit the light, and checked again that Michael was out by kissing his forehead. He didn’t move, and Yuli decided it was safe to tell him.
“I love you,” she said.
37
Across from the hotel, an ash-gray Mercedes-Benz idled under one of the old-fashioned lantern streetlights. A flame flashed in the sedan as the driver, a bearded man in a cap, lit a cigarette. Out of habit, Yuli memorized the license plate—GZ-89-91—then started walking, going left on Marnixstraat and glancing back to see if the car or the driver had followed her.
Russische Fotze. . . . Yuli was shocked when Joost had uttered those words. She hadn’t thought about them in years. Now they were stuck in her head along with the memory of the day she first heard them. Dovid emerging from the woods with Yuli behind him. The German soldier firing. Dovid falling. The German dipping into an ammo pouch on his belt. Yuli struggling to raise the papasha, the heavy Russian submachine gun. The soldier pressing bullets into his rifle. Yuli squeezing the trigger. Her ears still ringing as she stands over the horse-faced German, a mean horse, big yellow-brown teeth. Blood leaking from the holes in his greatcoat.