As for all those shortages you might have heard about, well, I didn’t suffer any. If a fellow had money, he had brandy, cigars, fine suits, and all the pretty girls he could eat; I didn’t need ration coupons for them. I drank and smoked and whored and debauched and made clever conversation, just as I used to, only now the evening was likely to end with me taking a girl down the street to a darkened doorway and stealing more than just a couple of kisses.
Through it all, Sofia was my dark muse, my twisted inspiration. If I made a girl squirm, if I made a girl scream, she was still the motivation that gave my actions shape. My new life was a circus freak-show doppelganger for my old life.
December, 1942. It was late, maybe two or three in the morning. The setting was a filthy, piss-smelling alleyway alongside a theater in Montmartre, the walls running iridescent blue-green with mold. I was just finishing up with a showgirl from the naughty revue around the corner. Full, satisfied, I was just letting her down on the pavement when I heard a sound behind me.
Let it be rats, I prayed. Please God, let it be rats.
I wheeled around. Someone was standing between me and the street.
“Sinclair?” The voice was English, with an upper crust accent, familiar. “Raphael Sinclair?”
Now I could see his face. A tall Englishman with dark, wavy hair. He was gaping at the showgirl, at the blood commingling with the sequins and the bedraggled feathers on her costume. He stared at me, stared at the girl, stared back at me again. Someone was with him, a boy with eyeshadow and lipstick, who took one look at me, crossed himself and disappeared.
“Oh, my God, Sinclair,” he whispered. “Oh, dear God. So it’s true.”
“What’s true, Colby?” I said, walking slowly towards him, heartsick. Colby, Colby, why did it have to be you?
He was licking his lips nervously, backing away. “Leo was very funny about it…he said…it was the damndest thing, utterly mad…”
He was wearing a white dinner jacket with a red carnation under a black overcoat. I fingered the lapels of his coat. “Nice,” I said. “Cashmere?”
He nodded. “Found this tailor on the Row. Brilliant work.”
I asked him if he had a smoke. He reached into his pocket, produced a silver case. I put a cigarette between my lips. He leaned forward to light it, then lit one for himself. We both blew smoke into the cold air.
I named a dozen people we both knew. He’d just had a letter from Sawyer, who had married and taken up residence in Rhode Island, where his family had a cottage. Beata never returned from visiting her family in Czechoslovakia, Erlichmann was lost without her. Most of the others had emigrated to New York, except for Lulu the model, who had taken up with a German soldier.
I left Leo and Margaux for last. His eyebrows jigged up, and he gave me an impenetrable look. “Oh, well, you know. They’re all right. They never seem to suffer shortages the rest of us do. They’re leaving for New York in a few days.”
There was a moment of silence as he drew on his cigarette. Then he said, “She’s still here, you know.”
Something in my head started pounding. Deep in my pockets, I balled my hands into fists. “Who?” I made myself say.
“Sofia. She’s still in Poland.”
My face must have registered shock, though it felt like it was made of stone. “I thought…they would have left for America by now.”
“Last I heard, she was living with her parents.” His face was a blur of blue smoke. “Skip seems to have arrived in Mother Europe with his own agenda. Perhaps he, like the rest of us, found the taste of liberation irresistible.”
He exhaled, stubbed out his cigarette, screwed his eyebrows together and scrutinized me. “Now, what about you?” He whipped off my hat, then handed it back to me. “Smashing haircut,” he said, admiringly. “When did you start wearing bespoke suits? And those shoes! Handmade as well, if I’m not mistaken. Hold on. Do I detect cologne? On the great Raphael-art-is-all-that-matters-Sinclair? Good God.”
We touched on news of the war, the Russians beating back Hitler at Stalingrad, Rommel being trounced in North Africa, tide was turning, etc., etc. I asked him if he was working on anything new. He gave me a quirky grin. “Well…with the war and all, the market for lovely little landscapes dried up. I’m painting forgeries now. Germans can’t get enough Bouguereau shepherd girls.”
I laughed at that. He gave me a warm smile and said, “God, it’s good to hear your voice.” And then his face flooded with concern, and he said, “What happened to you, Sinclair?”
For a brief moment I considered confiding in him, letting him in on it. What a relief it would be, for a single human being to know what I was, and to accept me anyway. What would be the harm in it? Anastasia had Rudi, didn’t she?
But then Colby’s eyes fell on the mottled body of the girl behind me in the alleyway, and I saw his eyes fill with revulsion and fear. It was then that I understood the difference. Colby was a decent man.
“Dear God,” he said. “You’re the Montmartre Ripper, aren’t you.”
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said helplessly.
He was backing away. My nostrils filled with the odor of his panic. “Got to tell somebody,” he said thickly.
“Can’t let you do that, old man.” I said. He was almost at the mouth of the alleyway now.
“Don’t come any nearer,” he warned me in a shaky voice. “Or I’ll…”
“Colby,” I said. He was already in my thrall as I walked steadily towards him. I was close to him now, so close that I could feel him breathing. I stood there for a long time, looking into his kind, familiar face, desperately not wanting to do the thing I was about to do; and then I put my hands around his neck and pulled him down towards me.
I felt a tremor pass through his body; it might have been the cold or fear or desire. I could feel his carotid artery pulsing against my cheek. I gashed it open with my fangs and clamped my jaws around his trachea.
He fought like a lion. He pushed and pulled and kneed and kicked and rolled and struggled and made horrible voiceless noises. He was a big man, and I almost lost my nerve, but my arms were coiled around him like a boa constrictor, and after only a few terrible minutes he weakened and began to sink to the pavement.
I held my friend until he was gone, feeling his heartbeat slow and stop, watching with sorrow and shame as the light in his eyes died down to a spark, then blinked out. I took his wallet, so that it would look like a robbery, but first I folded his identity papers neatly and tucked them into the breast pocket of his dinner jacket.
I left him there in a filthy alleyway, with only the body of a dead whore to keep him company. And then I went into Sacré-Coeur and lit a candle for his soul.
At sunset on the evening of January 13, 1943, I stepped out onto the platform at the eastern border town of Wlodawa. The terrain outside my window was perfectly flat, gray and lifeless savannahs rolling on into infinity under the frosty Polish stars. I refreshed myself on a reasonably clean-looking guard slumbering outside the station and went to acquaint myself with the town.
I knew exactly what I was going to do. Destroy Sofia’s life the way she had destroyed mine.
I had practiced it a million times over in my imagination. She would be surprised, of course, to find me at her door. She would invite me in, glad to see an old friend, and when the door closed behind her, when she was greeting me with a polite kiss on both cheeks in the continental manner, I would sink my fangs into her lily-white throat and suck on her vital fluids until there was nothing left. As she was expiring, she would cry, “Why, Raphael, why?” and I would snarl, “Just my way of saying thanks for making me the man I am today.”
I found the Wizotsky estate almost immediately, a white Baroque villa set among trees and gardens, just as she’d described it. But the family was no longer there. The local Gestapo overlord had commandeered it for his headquarters, and no one seemed to be able to tell me where they had gone.
I didn’t speak Polish, and
nobody spoke English. But my innkeeper knew a bit of French, and the cabdriver a bit of German, and by breakfast the following morning, I knew which part of town she lived in. By noon, I knew the name of the street. By sunset, I had her address.
It was raining as I stalked across the square. Dirty weather for a dirty deed. I found the house by the blue light of a stuttering streetlamp and knocked on the door.
When no one answered, I moved closer and inhaled. Beyond the street smells of horse dung, outhouses and fermented cabbage, I thought I detected a whiff of lilac. I knocked again, more insistently this time. I heard cautious footsteps, and then the bolt slid back, and the door creaked slowly open.
Sofia, unmistakably Sofia. Love of my life, architect to my passion, muse to my irredeemable afterlife. There was a black shawl wrapped around her head and what looked like rags tied around her hands. Her hair had grown longer, and it fell in soft, fluttering waves around her face. But her eyes, her eyes…they were just as I remembered them, dark and wild and beautiful, oracles of tragedy.
She didn’t say a word. In my fedora and overcoat, she must have taken me for the Gestapo. I drew closer, stared down into her eyes. I wanted her to recognize me before I took her in my arms, then took her life.
Suddenly, her eyebrows, as expressive as exclamation points, drew together and danced apart again, and her features melted and blurred and changed shape like a watercolor. Tears came to her eyes, though they did not fall, and her lips trembled as if she were trying to remember how to speak. And then she took a single step forward and threw her arms around my neck.
My arms opened wide to encompass her, and I clasped her slight body to mine and buried my face in her hair, choking with emotion. My lurid plans dissolved like mist in sunlight, and suddenly, I understood with perfect clarity that it was I who had been in her thrall all along.
“Raphael, Raphael,” she breathed. “My angel of healing.”
She looked furtively to the right and to the left, to see if anybody had observed us. Taking both of my hands, she said, “Why don’t you come in.” Then she drew me in and bolted the door behind me.
The room is memorable only for its squalor, with stained, peeling walls, as cold inside as it was outside. A blanket concealed the windows, a single naked bulb provided the only light. In the middle of the room, a battered wooden table displayed two chipped teacups, a teaspoon, paper and a pencil. Off to one side, a bed was laid with a rumpled quilt. A door at the far end of the room opened into a small, dingy kitchen.
But I was holding her, holding my beloved Sofia in my arms, Sofia, whom I had never let go, not in life, not in death, and nothing else mattered. I kissed her hair with lips that had sucked the life from countless struggling victims, I held her with arms that had pinned them down as they died.
She stepped back and held me at arms length, taking me in, my smart handmade suit, the perfect Windsor knot in my tie, the buffed and shiny shoes. A look of admiration flitted over her features; then puzzlement, then ineffable sadness.
She offered me tea. I accepted. She seemed to need something to do to occupy her hands, they were shaking. She brought the tea in delicate porcelain cups trimmed in gold and painted with pink almond blossoms. Even with my dulled sense of taste, I could tell it was thin, horrible stuff. I choked down a swallow and carefully set the teacup back down on the saucer. I picked up the tin, printed in crimson and gold. The name Wizotsky ran in regal letters in a banner across the front of the box. Embarrassed, she apologized, explaining that she had been using the same dusty bits from the bottom of the tin for two weeks, the last tea leaves ever to be packaged under the Wizotsky label.
There were some sheets of writing paper in the middle of table, and I picked them up and pretended to scan them, as a way to justify the awkward silence. Heavy black lines embossed the paper; drawings of starving children, anxious mothers, soldiers menacing old women. A parade of bowed people and wooden carts filled with household possessions straggled past a row of wooden houses, pelted by rain.
My eyes strayed from the paper back to Sofia, seated across from me at the table. Now I noticed how perilously thin she was.
There was a sound from the bed, a cry. She leaped to her feet and hurried into the dark nook at the back of the room. I heard a soft muttering, a lullaby in a foreign language, and then she was back. To my infinite astonishment, she was holding a child bundled in a shawl, a dark head against her shoulder. It had never occurred to me that she might have become a mother in all this time.
“Yeshaya,” she said softly. “There is someone I would like you to meet.”
I saw a small pale face, rosebud lips. Sleepy eyes, half-open. Two up-and-down slashes for eyebrows, unmistakably Sofia’s.
The small face turned away from me, hiding in her shoulder. I heard her hum an unfamiliar lullaby. When he had fallen asleep again, she returned him to the bed, making sure he was well covered.
I could see uncertainty in her eyes, in her fleeting tentative smile. I knew what was going on in her head; she was thinking that I had been cured of my infatuation for once and for all. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was more in love with her than ever. She no longer looked like the girl she had been, it was true. Care had worn into her face, tracing new paths, altering her virginal prettiness into transcendent beauty. She had become one of the Madonnas she had always been copying.
“Ye-sha-ya,” I said, the unfamiliar syllables strange on my lips. “What is that in English?”
“Isaiah,” she replied.
Her hand was resting on the table next to the teacup. I knew I shouldn’t—she was another man’s wife, after all—but I reached across the table to take it. And then I said, “For God’s sake, Sofia. What have they done to you this time?”
When her parents wrote with the news of her engagement, Sofia didn’t know how to feel. She knew she was in love with me. She also knew she could never have me. I was a shaygetz, a goy. I was as forbidden to her as the snails they served at Brasserie Lipp.
The first time she saw Skip, he was standing at the bottom of the staircase off the courtyard that led up to her apartment. The shadows were deep inside the stairway, and for a fleeting moment, as she looked down at him, she thought he was me.
But then she heard him speak. From his flat Midwestern accent she gathered that he was the man her parents had arranged for her to meet. As she came slowly down the stairs, and he came forward into the light, she saw that he was remarkably handsome. A movie star, just like her mother said. And as he looked up at her, clutching a street map, she realized that he was surprised, too. He was as nervous as she was.
God had finally smiled on her. All the waiting had been worth it. She had feared her parents, desperate in these last few minutes before all hell broke loose, would pawn her off on a misfit, a cripple, a freak. All her worrying was for nothing.
There was one hitch in the plan. She loved me. There was no question, no doubt. She had felt the pull between us as immediately and as fervently as I did. But she was an Orthodox Jewish girl. And though religion played no part in my life, I was still a follower of Christ. Some years ago, a girl from Wlodawa had gone off to the study at the University of Warsaw, where she met and married a non-Jew. Her family had rent their clothes and mourned her for seven days, after which time they never spoke of her again.
This was so easy. Skip fit right into the slot in her life that was marked Husband. Her family was crazy about him. Of course she said yes.
The wedding was held at her parents’ house. She walked down the aisle in a white silk confection copied from the dress Mainboucher had designed for Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, her face covered with a heavy lace veil. Skip was already under the chuppah, next to the rabbi, dressed in a white linen robe. As he slipped the ring onto her forefinger, she thought of me. Suddenly, she experienced a rush of dizziness, a heaviness weighing on her heart. She forced herself to focus on the happy life she would lead with her handsome new husband in the United
States. She would leave tragedy behind her, in tired old Europe.
The newlyweds were led to the guest cottage, where they would be alone for the first time as man and wife. Skip kissed her, undressed her, took her. Only after he fell asleep did she fold the covers down, study him. In her mind, she was painting his lovely body swathed in sheets, noting the contrast of his golden skin against the brilliant white of the goosedown comforter.
After a week of parties, each more magnificent than the next, she expected to hear about arrangements for leaving Poland. However, Skip didn’t seem to be in any kind of a hurry. He liked Poland, he told her, liked the relaxed atmosphere, a welcome change from the hustle bustle of the big city. People were making such a fuss about the war. There was plenty of time.
She didn’t contradict him. He was her husband. She was sure he knew what he was doing.
The Holocaust came to the town of Wlodawa in exactly the same way it came to other towns in Poland. When the first German appeared in the middle of September, it was almost anticlimactic. A helmeted soldier putt-putted into the center of the market square on his motorcycle, revved his motor a few times, then stopped at the pump for a drink.
Immediately, the Nazis seized all Jewish businesses. Sofia’s father was forced to hand over the Wizotsky Tea Company, which had brought the family wealth and respect for more than a hundred years, to a smirking stranger. It’s nothing, he told his wife and children. As long as we have a roof over our heads and each other.
The next day, the Germans turned the Jews out of their homes. Sofia’s family moved to a dilapidated house in the ghetto in the smaller, shabbier section of town. Her parents took the parlor apartment, giving Yechezkel and his family the top floor. Sofia and Skip were allotted two dark rooms on the ground level.
Swiftly, they issued a flurry of anti-Jewish laws. Jews could no longer serve as doctors, lawyers, or teachers. Jewish children were expelled from schools. Jews were to wear an armband, white with a blue Jewish star. Jews were forbidden to purchase anything from farmers, from the stores, or to trade in the marketplace. Being out after dark was punishable by death. Leaving town was punishable by death. Baking bread, punishable by death. Sofia’s neighbor, blind old Mrs. Bronshtein, was executed for caning herself along the sidewalk as an SS Unterscharführer passed by; Jews had to walk in the gutter.
The Color of Light Page 40