After a few minutes, a gigantic woman wearing a gargoyle mask enters—a jutting awning of forehead over a big blunt nose, protruding chin, and gaping caveman mouth. “Best costume so far,” I whisper to Tonio, thinking that scary creatures may be in style this year.
“She looks just right for the Katakombe,” he says. The Katakombe is an avant-garde Berlin cabaret we snuck into a few months earlier.
The woman is well over six feet tall. I look down at her legs expecting to see her standing on stilts. But I can’t see her feet; she’s cloaked head to toe in black, with a long white scarf around her neck.
Black and white—Vera will never wear any other colors, but I don’t know that yet.
“My god!” Tonio suddenly exclaims, gulping for air.
“What’s wrong?”
He races off to the side of the courtyard, toward the Munchenbergs’ apartment.
“Sophie!” he calls. When I turn, he is waving me over frantically.
By now, the woman is directly in front of me. I wonder what the fuss is; it’s comforting to be so small beside her and yet still be the center of my own world.
“What’s your name?” she asks me.
It’s her distended, lopsided smile—as though her bloated bottom lip might just drop off—that gives the truth away. I do not scream, though I want to. I cover my mouth with my hands. My heart seems to burst out of my chest.
Tonio keeps calling me, but I can’t move; the word hingerissen, meaning overwhelmed and entranced, gains meaning for me forever after.
“I’m Vera,” she tells me. Leaning down, she reaches out her hand with formal grace. Would I have taken it? I’ll never know, because Tonio tugs me away.
“Get away from us!” he yells at the woman.
She tosses the end of her scarf over her shoulder and rushes past us, her head down.
“Monster!” Tonio calls after her.
Vera stops. When she turns, her eyes are hooded by rage. She marches back to us, each of her steps too long for a woman.
Vera as she looked to me on the day we met
I can’t prevent myself from staring at her; her mask-that-isn’t-a-mask is something that should only exist in a nightmare, like blood oozing out of one’s pillow. Who could turn away from such an impossibility?
My breathing seems to be deeper than ever before, and I know that I am right where I am meant to be. Years later, I will read the Greek myths and understand this feeling better; it is not often that one encounters a goddess, and even less frequently in the courtyard between two quiet, middle-class apartment houses. It was one of Isaac Zarco’s ancestors who said that God appears to us in the form we can most appreciate, and maybe for me that form was Vera.
“You shouldn’t talk to anyone so disrespectfully,” the giant tells Tonio.
Her voice is gentle, the tone of a woman who has learned how to control herself in front of little creatures that sting.
“You’re deformed!” he shrieks.
That may be true, but she is also quick and powerful; her open hand catches my friend on his shoulder, knocking him over. His cap tumbles off. By the time I’ve picked it up, Vera is entering the back building, tilting forward, as if carrying a leaden locket around her neck.
“Are you all right?” I ask Tonio.
Tears are caught in his lashes. “I’m fine!” he snaps. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
The boy is embarrassed about being knocked over, so we don’t talk about it. We go to see the crushed red American luxury car, which turns out to be a small black Peugeot 201 Cabriolet and not nearly as flattened as we’d like.
“What a disappointment,” he tells me. “I was really hoping it was a ’32 Packard. They’ve got this hood ornament made of chrome-plated zinc that’s called the Goddess of Speed. If the car had been really crushed, I’d have taken it. Imagine having one!”
“What’s the ornament look like?”
“It’s a winged angel holding up a tire.”
A tire? The Goddess of Speed sounds ridiculous to me, but sparks of joy are in Tonio’s eyes, so I tell him I’d love to see one. When Tonio is happy, he’s irresistible.
A crowd of Berliners gathered around an accident will always include more than enough gaping singularities to please our precocious sense of the grotesque, including double-chinned businessmen with pencil-thin mustaches, my personal favorite, but Tonio doesn’t share my delight in faces. He’s examining the crushed Peugeot. After a while, silence nestles itself deeply inside me. Suddenly frigid, I watch a group of unemployed men squatting on Metzer Straße by a fire they’ve made with planks of wood and rags. Behind them, seeming to guard our neighborhood with its protective strength, is my favorite local landmark, the water tower, a cylinder of dark brick rising a hundred feet into the air. I used to imagine a bearded sorcerer living at its pinnacle, and a terrified girl being held captive. Raising my gaze to its highest windows, I think about how much I’d like to talk to the gigantic woman who walloped Tonio, which leads me to consider how little the bent steel of a smashed Peugeot means compared to a face that frightens children.
Darkness falls in an instant during the Berlin winter, and by the time we reach Prenzlauer Allee, we’re walking backwards to keep the searing wind off our faces. A tap on my shoulder makes me gasp and nearly tumble over.
“Scared you!”
“Raffi, you idiot! You almost gave me a heart attack!”
Rafael Munchenberg, twenty-four years old, with flappy, elephant ears and the intense eyes of a chess master, faces me, then looks urgently down the street. He lives with his parents on the first floor of our building.
“Was ist los?” Tonio asks him. What’s up?
“I need your help—both of you. I’m being followed.”
“By who?” I ask, a flame of fear in my chest.
“A Nazi.”
“Do you owe him some money?” Tonio asks. That question should tell you how little we know about politics.
“Of course not,” Raffi scoffs.
“You’re not making this up, are you?” I ask, squinting and shifting my weight to appear insistent; this wouldn’t be the first dirty trick he’d played on me.
“Soph, don’t make trouble!” he says gruffly, and he snatches my hand. “Come on!”
He runs me down the street into the Immanuel Church, Tonio close on our heels.
Of late, Raffi has tried to change his image by wearing his thick black hair slicked back, so that he looks like a rakish jazz trumpeter. In real life, however, he’s a good-as-gold doctoral student in Egyptology, and when he can get funding, which isn’t all that often given Germany’s ruined economy, he goes to Egypt for months at a time. He was my favorite babysitter of all time because he’d read the scariest parts of Emil and the Detectives to me as many times as I liked and even permit me to eat toast on his lap no matter how many crumbs I might spill. We also used to bathe Hansi together and get as soaked as sponges, and even my normally impassive brother would laugh. Tonio and Raffi also play cards every other Friday evening, though I don’t join them. I learned the hard way—from Tonio’s resentful looks—that boys need some time alone.
We burst into the church. Two sparrowish women are praying in the second pew—knots of blue-gray hair above thick gray coats. Raffi puts his stunning, black felt hat on Tonio’s head, takes the boy’s ratty cap, and exchanges jackets with him.
“You look like a clown!” I whisper to Tonio after he’s got on Raffi’s coat, since the sleeves swallow his hands. “Besides, swapping clothes is the oldest trick in the book! I’ve seen it in a dozen movies.” A slight exaggeration, but I think my point is well taken.
Tonio shoos me away. “Shush, Sophie!” The idea of being a decoy is apparently more important than manners.
“Both of you keep quiet,” Raffi snaps. He’s holding Tonio’s jacket, since there’s little point in trying to get it on. “It’s dark out, Soph, and by the time they notice that Tonio isn’t me, I’ll be long gone. Besides,
we’re going out the back exit. Hurry!”
The icy wind swirling through the back alley makes me pull my sweater neck over my mouth and nose, so that the rest of what happens between us has always been accompanied in my memory by the warm smell of wool. Raffi gives me a quick kiss, then shushes up my questions and takes a thick envelope and piece of paper folded into a tight square from his pocket. “Keep these for me,” he says. He holds my shoulders tight, telling me with his desperate look that he really is in trouble. “Don’t give them to anyone. You hear me?”
“I won’t. I swear!”
“Hide them—hurry!”
I slip the envelope and the paper underneath my blouse. They’re rough against my skin, and disquieting—like forbidden thoughts.
“I love you, Soph,” he says, smiling fleetingly.
Before I can ask him why he’s in such a fix, he shakes Tonio’s hand with masculine graciousness—a professor and his star pupil. “Tonio, once he sees you aren’t me, he’ll stop following you. And if he questions you, tell him I’ve run off to the circus!”
He turns to me. “If I don’t come back for what I’ve given you, then … then …” A creaking sound from inside the church makes Raffi jerk his head back. He looks like a thief awaiting a police siren …
“But Raffi, where are you …”
Before I can finish my sentence, he’s running as fast as he can out of the alley and east down Immanuel-Kirche Straße toward the smokestacks of the Friedrichshain Brewery, his hand on his head to keep Tonio’s cap from blowing off. We watch him in silence until he vanishes around the corner. Nobody steps out of the church or dashes past us. Tonio thinks Raffi must have seduced some Nazi’s wife, since his mind is never further than one step from sex. Rubbing his frozen hands together, he says in an eager voice, “Good, now let’s see what’s in that envelope of his.”
“We can’t!”
“We have to, Sophie. What if he doesn’t come back? You heard him.”
“Someone might be watching us.”
Tonio and I decide to head to Frau Koslowski’s grocery. We keep looking behind us, but no one is on our trail. We hide around corners just to make sure, making believe we’re secret agents. Tonio presses against me hard as he looks over my shoulder, which I adore.
Frau Koslowski has already closed her shop for the afternoon, so we slip into the Köln Beer Garden, just around the corner, which is frequented by Brewery workers and billiards players. The carpeting of the indoor restaurant stinks like a urinal and the air is filled with enough cigar smoke to choke the Kaiser’s army. We rush to the women’s bathroom—Tonio’s idea—and lock ourselves in a stall.
Tonio, panting with excitement, rips open the envelope. “Wow!” he whispers, and he takes out a stack of English one-pound notes in two different colors, brown and green. The brown ones become my favorites. I call them my Two Georges, because they have a picture of a bearded, serious-looking King George on the right—in profile—and a handsome, bare-chested St George killing a ferocious dragon on the left. We count the bills—fifty-four. “What do you think they’re worth?” I ask.
“A fortune!” Tonio spreads them like a fan. “Buckingham Palace here I come!”
“This must be enough money for Raffi to study in Egypt for several months,” I say.
“Now hand over the paper,” Tonio orders.
“No way.” I unfold it myself and find slender rows of tiny, beautifully designed figures—mostly animals like snakes and falcons, but also feathers and scepters. “Hieroglyphics,” I whisper.
Tonio’s mouth falls open. “Maybe they’re magic formulas! We’ll be able to make gold out of thin air!”
“Don’t be stupid,” I reply, more harshly than I intended.
“Stop being mean!”
I explain that I’m worried about Raffi and hand Tonio the sheet of paper to make peace. We count twenty-four lines of writing. The first hieroglyphics in each line are surrounded by a frame, and inside the first frame are a saucer-shape, a staff, two feathers, an eagle, and a triangle.
“This has been the most unheimlich afternoon ever!” he says with delight, and he grins as he spreads the notes on his head like a crown. “So what would you like me to buy you? A mink stole … ?”
“Garbo and I prefer ermine,” I say coquettishly. “Now give them back.”
I put the money and the sheet of writing into the envelope, which I put back beneath my blouse. On the way home, I agree with Tonio that we’ve had a really strange afternoon—completely unpredictable. Of course, I have no idea that Isaac Zarco’s party and Raffi’s escape—and all those intricate little letter-shapes invented 4,000 years ago—are all intimately related.
As soon as I get to my room, I hide Raffi’s envelope in my underwear drawer, where I keep my diary. Then I make Mama and myself tea while she prepares supper. I love the way the kettle hisses, and how my feet and hands tingle back to life, as if the warmth is making me a new person from the inside out. When my fingers are supple again, I go to my room, take out my sketchbook, and draw the hieroglyphics one by one, as careful as a spy copying secret war plans, because I suspect that Raffi will lie to me about what’s written here and I am determined to know the truth. Then I hide both the original and my copy in my drawer.
The kitchen is now filled with the smell of boiled onions, turnips, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots. Almost all the meals my mother prepares make use of the same five ingredients—or maybe rice and tomatoes if she’s feeling adventurous, and bratwurst or a slice of pork if we’ve managed to save for a treat, because meat is too expensive for us to eat regularly. The steam from her cooking can cloud up our windows for hours because—as northern European women have known for centuries—vegetables are done only when they lose all their color and taste, and fall apart on your fork. In fact, most every mother between Danzig and Munich is also coping the best she can on too small an income and too little inventiveness. Not that their economizing stops their thirty million children from praying for something more tasty on their plates, of course.
Once, for my twelfth birthday, Mama made moussaka with two purple eggplants she found at a Levantine grocery on Neue Friedrichstraße. My taste buds were in ecstasy but my little brother Hansi wouldn’t go near his plate. And that was when the curtain came down on culinary experimentation in our house.
Mama doesn’t ask me about the crushed car. Papa does. We sit together at the kitchen table. Its top is a gorgeous slab of cream-colored travertine marble that was a wedding gift from his parents. Sometimes when I’m alone, I run my hand over its cool, sensual smoothness. Mama is mixing the batter for Reibekuchen, fritters. Hansi is with us, too, peeling potatoes, which give off the damp, earthy smell I love. I do not mention our adventure with Raffi, since the story of his escape might get back to his parents and earn him a lecture from his professor father. And I especially don’t say anything about Vera. She’s a gift I’ve given myself and might never share with anyone. I haven’t decided yet.
I sip my tea through a lumpy sugar crystal, which means that the words of my story tumble out and go off on a sweet-flavored, zigzagging journey. Maybe my father knows I make up a lot of what I say, maybe he doesn’t. It doesn’t matter because he laughs in the right places, and he’s always given me the right to tell him about my life any way I want.
After I finish my story, Papa gives Mama and me presents from Maria Gorman, a secretary at Communist Party headquarters with whom we’ve gone on picnics: two jars of raspberry jam, one with seeds for me, one without for Mama and Hansi. I’ll notice their jar in the garbage that night, and when I rescue it my mother will explain that she tossed it away accidentally while washing the dishes. She’s a bit scatterbrained, I think at the time.
My father soon slips away to the sitting room to read the newspaper. I ask Mama if I can go to Uncle Rainer’s party as the vampire in Nosferatu instead of a Dutch skater. The two of us had shrieked with fright when we’d seen the movie a few months earlier.
“O
h, darling, it’s too late,” my mother replies. “I’m sorry.”
“Please, we could use your face powder to make me look pale and sickly, and slick my hair down with some black shoe polish. We could cut me long fingernails out of paper. And …”
“Shoe polish!”
“I’ll get Papa’s.”
“Don’t move! We’ve got to be at your uncle’s in two hours.”
Though I know it’s useless, or maybe precisely because of that, I jump up and tell her she’s being unfair, which only makes her glare. My mother is pretty, with silky auburn hair that she’s cut with bangs, just like her favorite actress, Claudette Colbert, and she has a sweet round face, but her green eyes open as big as murder when she’s irritated.
“Sophie, your skating outfit is beautiful, and I spent hours sewing it,” she warns me, the unspoken finish to her sentence being, so don’t push your luck!
“But I don’t want to be beautiful! I want to frighten people. I … I want to cause car accidents I’m so ugly. I want terrified men to chase me out of the Immanuel Church!”
She simply shrugs as though I fell into her life from a remote galaxy and goes back to whisking the lumps out of her precious batter. Instead of insisting further, I pounce on what she loves most in the world, my eight-year-old
brother. He hasn’t yet finished peeling a dozen potatoes, although he’s been huddling over them like a worry-sick peahen for half an hour. Maybe it’s only because my parents don’t trust him with a sharp knife, but it’s also true that Hansi is a diffident boy who never tells what he’s thinking, and just maybe his slowness is because his brain is too small to learn how to get to the underside of anything, even something as simple as a potato from Frau Koslowski’s grocery. The two things he’s good at are posing for my sketches and doing jigsaw puzzles. As far as I can determine, he’s taken up permanent residence in his own hermetic world, which I’ve named the Hansi Universe.
“Go faster!” I tell him. “We’ll eat supper in March at the rate you’re going.”
“Don’t you have anything better to do than annoy your brother!” Mama snaps.
The Seventh Gate Page 3