Hansi looks up at me with the great big look of astonishment he inherited from her and says in an earnest voice, “It has to be done right.”
“I wish you’d do it wrong just for once.”
I’m referring to a lot more than peeling potatoes, of course. If only I could learn what goes on in that mysterious head of his then I suppose I wouldn’t resent him being the silent angel of the family.
“It probably just doesn’t grow,” I tell my mother.
“What doesn’t?”
“Hansi’s brain!”
“Sophie, you are a nightmare!” she shouts.
My goal. Then she banishes me from the kitchen—also an achievement. I embrace my wickedness at such moments as if it’s my Oscar award.
Hansi in his own universe, age 8
Exile pleases me because it gives me license to throw some coals on my rage. What really bothers me, however, is that I will have to go to the party at Uncle Rainer’s house as a sixteenth-century skater. How could I have been such a dunce? I try to make my feeble choice of costume my mother’s fault, but the blame just won’t stick to her.
I listen to Bing Crosby and other lovesick American crooners on the radio, sulking, sitting between my father’s legs. He’s reading the Communist Party’s Rote Fahne newspaper, as he always does before supper. I try to decipher the words of the songs. It’s how I learn English.
After a while I grow bored and put on my Marlene Dietrich records while studying my cigarette cards of movie stars. Falling in love again … I adore the whiskey-soaked gravel in her voice. When someone knocks on our front door, my father asks me to see who it is. To my surprise, I discover Mr Zarco.
He has a gaunt, tender face, with sad blue-gray eyes and thick and beautiful silver hair springing out in tufts, like the fur of a spooked cat. His large ears have been reddened by the chill. If he were an actor in a play, he’d be the forgetful uncle. Or maybe the fiendish murderer that no one ever suspects because he looks like he lives on warm milk and pumpernickel rolls. I like that dramatic idea, and also the boyish eagerness in the way he gazes down at me, but I only offer him a feeble hello; my mother has warned me about talking to neighbors we don’t know very well, and I try not to defy her over small matters so that I can win Papa’s support for the bigger ones.
I back away to fetch my father, leaving Mr Zarco standing in the doorway. Not because he’s Jewish, I should add. For now, this is still a city where Jews are Germans. As we all now know, they will defy a great many laws of nature by changing into swine and even vermin a bit later. Papa rushes to the door and shakes our guest’s hand warmly.
“Come in, come in,” he insists, taking our neighbor by the elbow. They stand in the foyer as men in Germany do—not quite sure where to put their hands and feet.
“Please excuse my unexpected visit, but a friend of mine wants to apologize to your daughter, and she’s too embarrassed to come down herself,” Mr Zarco says nervously.
“Apologize for what?”
Our guest gestures toward me. “Sophie and Tonio … they were playing in the courtyard and a guest at my party got angry at them and did something she shouldn’t have.”
“What did she do?” Papa asks.
“She hit Tonio. Apparently, the boy had ridiculed her.”
“Tonio is a handful,” Papa says with a long, unfavorable sigh, since he’s only too aware that I’m in love with an inveterate mischief-maker.
“My friend, Vera … she can be very excitable. I don’t believe she hurt the boy. I’ll go see his parents later this evening, when”—here, Mr Zarco gazes up to heaven—“I can summon the courage.”
Mama rushes in from the kitchen, a host of worries already scattering in her head. Amplifying troubles is one of her specialties, and the older I get the more I’ll suspect it’s her compensation for not having any real power.
“What’s this about Tonio being injured?” she asks.
“Not injured, hit,” Papa tells her. He turns to me. “Häschen, you didn’t mention any trouble. Tonio is all right, isn’t he?”
Papa calls me Bunny Rabbit either when he’s feeling especially affectionate or when he needs a favor from me. Now, what he wants is honesty. Given my nature that constitutes a favor.
“Tonio is fine,” I reply. “Anyway, it was his fault,” I add, and with that admission I feel a mix of terror and joy—the previously undreamed of possibility, in fact, of being able to tug my relationship with my friend in a more dangerous direction. He and I will have a quarrel when he finds out I’ve told on him, but maybe he will finally understand the depth of my love when I break down and sob. With any luck, he’ll insist on kissing me to make up.
“What do you mean?” Mama asks.
I begin my explanation. Three adults listen attentively. I’m gratified to be in the witness box without having to testify against myself.
When I get to Tonio calling Vera a monster, Papa gasps. “And what did you say?” he asks me.
“Nothing.”
“Sophie … !” Mama glowers at me, certain I must have behaved even worse than Tonio.
“I didn’t say a thing. I was hingerissen.”
There’s that word again that I now understand in my bones: entranced.
“Hingerissen?” my mother questions. “What do you mean?”
“I couldn’t move. The woman was ugly. And tall … like she was standing on stilts.”
“Sophie!” Papa snarls. “You mustn’t talk like that.”
“No, your daughter is right,” Mr Zarco says, laughing lightly, then looking at me as if we share an understanding. “Vera is uncommonly ugly.”
“Really?” Mama asks, eager curiosity in her voice. She secretly adores gossip.
“Let’s just say that she is not a sight easily reconciled with any notions of justice we might wish to have about our world.”
Mama wipes her brow with her dishtowel. She sweats a great deal when she panics. “This is all so unexpected and … and upsetting,” she sputters.
“Very,” Mr Zarco agrees. He stands very erect—the preamble to a request from a former staff sergeant in the Kaiser’s army. “Dr and Mrs Riedesel, would you mind if I escorted your daughter over to my apartment for a few minutes? Vera would like to apologize to Sophie directly. I assure you she is normally harmless.”
I like it that Mr Zarco uses the word escort. It makes me sound grown up. He calls my father doktor because Papa has a degree in chemical engineering.
“Normally harmless?” Papa questions.
“When she’s not provoked, I mean.”
“Sophie would go to your … apartment and … and talk to this Vera?” Mama stammers.
Judging from her grimace, she’s envisioning headhunters from Borneo hiding under Mr Zarco’s bed. I’m not going to be cooked in a cauldron, I want to shout. But if I were, then at least someone would get some supper tonight!
“I’ll take good care of Sophie and have her back to you in fifteen minutes,” our elderly neighbor assures her.
“No, it’s impossible,” Mama announces.
But Papa is raising up onto the balls of his feet, intrigued—the habit of a former gymnast. “I’ll go with Sophie,” he says eagerly.
Chapter Two
“I must warn you,” Mr Zarco says as he trudges up the staircase next to Papa, “Vera is not the only person in my apartment you might find a bit shocking.”
“There are two dwarfs,” I say, proud to be able to supply this information.
“Yes, Heidi and Rolf.”
“And a woman and man who talk with her hands.”
“That would be Marianne and Karl-Heinz.”
“Are you having a party?” Papa asks.
“Yes, though a bit more than just a party. For me, Carnival is important—as a ritual, I mean, or as a reenactment. All our Jewish holidays are like that—we pretend we are taking part in Biblical events, like the Exodus. Though pretend is too superficial a word.”
“Indeed,” Papa rep
lies, which is what he says when he’s at a loss for words.
“Is Carnival a Jewish holiday?” I ask.
“No, Sophie, but it could be!” Mr Zarco happily replies. “We Jews have a similar holiday when we dress up in costumes. We call it Purim. And though we don’t have the jazz bands of a Carnival ball, our celebration can be a lot of fun. We pray and sing, and we give gifts to all our friends.”
As we reach the second-floor landing, our neighbor gazes down the stairwell to make sure we’re not being overheard and whispers conspiratorially, “During Carnival, we allow what’s inside us to come up from the underworld. Even the immortals who rule over us sometimes appear.”
“Ja,” Papa says with a sincere nod, but I can tell he means, What am I getting myself into … ?
My father is an engineer and a Communist who appreciates a trigonometric equation or a political essay. Poetic interpretations whispered on the staircase of a chilly apartment house are like far-off flares to his literal mind.
Sensing Papa’s skepticism, Mr Zarco says, “You’ll excuse my metaphorical language.” He leads us up one more flight. As we reach his door, he takes Papa’s shoulder. “What if there was only one day a year when you felt you had license to leave your home without having to explain yourself?”
Without waiting for my father’s reply, he turns the handle.
Twenty faces gaze at us, framed by feathers, sequins, ruffles, and masks. Most of the guests are seated around an old Persian rug of red and gold—with a knotted violet fringe—that’s covered with platters of food. A haze of bluish cigar smoke floats in the air, dimming the tightly arranged paintings on the walls and the crammed bookshelves. A woman’s scratchy voice is coming from the record player. I spot Marianne seated with her legs crossed, eating with her fingers, and the slender toreador beside her drinking a glass of champagne, and I’m searching for Vera, Heidi, and Rolf when a flapping motion from the corner of the room catches my attention. Vera, seated in front of an old wooden secretary, is waving at me. Her fingers are fat and long—like bread dough—and they have knobby joints. She’s taken off her cape to reveal a shimmering white-velvet jacket in a military cut, with black pearls sewn at the collar. A slender bare-chested man wearing an animal mask, with a pinecone spiked on each horn, is talking to her.
Aladdin standing before his genie … That’s how big my wonderment is. Papa’s hand curls around mine and gives it a protective squeeze.
“Attention everyone!” Mr Zarco says. “This is Dr Friedrich Riedesel and his daughter, Sophie, my dear neighbors.”
I feel as if I’ve just received a letter on which my name has been written in large Gothic letters; once I open it, I’ll never be able to return to who I was.
People call out friendly greetings. Vera comes rushing over, her arms hugged around her chest, as if she’s chilled, though it’s as hot as the tropics in here. Maybe it’s the harsh electric lighting, but her face seems more angular than I’d remembered it, and her cavewoman forehead looks as if it must throb. Her clear blue eyes are reassuring, however, and I’m glad to have her towering over me again. Who can explain this love of smallness I’ve just discovered? And who can say whether it wouldn’t be more sensible for a girl in Germany in 1932 to wish she were big?
“This is Vera,” Mr Zarco says to Papa.
She is a head taller than my father. I can see him thinking that there’s no scientific theory or series of equations that should add up to her. Even Marx couldn’t have predicted her.
“Glad to meet you, Dr Riedesel,” she says.
He shakes her outstretched hand, but says nothing. He knows he has been taught, like all good Germans, not to stare, but like the rest of us, targeting his eyes on curiosities happens to be one of the things he does best. In fact, what characterizes my countrymen and -women more than our famous admiration for athletes and university professors, far more than our envy of the Italians for their sun and the French their pâtisserie, more even than our childlike delight in sentimental operettas, monuments, country lakes, and metronomic marching is our satanic ability to stare.
Marianne in her Carnival costume
“Thank you for coming,” Vera tells my father.
Papa looks between her and Mr Zarco, at a loss for what to say.
“Sophie, I’m glad to see you again,” Vera tells me, covering as best she can the awkwardness between the four of us. “I’m sorry about what happened. I shouldn’t have hit your friend.” She takes my free hand, so that for a moment I’m stretched like a paper cut-out between her and my father. “Do you accept my apology?” she asks hopefully.
Only when her voice quivers do I realize how apprehensive she is. “Yes, of course,” I tell her.
“Would you sit with me and talk for a while?”
I look at Papa for his approval.
“Do you want to?” he asks me, his hand rising to my cheek, which means he’d prefer for me to say no.
“If it’s all right with you, Papa.”
“They’ll be fine,” Mr Zarco interjects confidently.
My father gazes down for a moment, then smiles warmly at Vera. “Of course,” he says.
I’m proud of him, though I don’t think he has much choice; Papa can’t subvert his friendly nature for long.
“We have to leave in ten minutes,” he warns me, “or your mother will call the police!” Vera and Mr Zarco laugh, which pleases Papa and me both.
“And don’t get lost,” he instructs me, wagging his finger in imitation of my mother.
How far afield could I go in a two-bedroom apartment?
Vera leads me to her corner and fetches me a chair with a wicker seat. Papa stands as tall as he can and gazes after me even while he talks with Mr Zarco, which gratifies me. Not all staring is bad, of course.
“Your father loves you a great deal,” Vera says.
“Yes, I know.”
“Tell me, Sophie, do you like to read?” she asks.
“Sometimes,” I reply hesitantly.
“Fiction, poetry … ?”
“Everything.”
I can’t seem to give any real replies. After all, how am I supposed to converse with a mallet-headed goddess, especially when my mother may somehow find out what I tell her?
“That Portuguese scientist over there”—she points to the young man with the horned mask, now eating a bowl of soup—“just showed me the most wonderful poem in Spanish. I’ll read you my favorite part, then translate it into German.”
I have never liked adults reading poetry to me because their faces become so deadly serious, and I get drowsy, and the words whiz past me like swallows. If it’s one of our German teachers doing the reading, then he’s also sure to ask us questions about what the swallows look like, and how fast they fly, and what they mean, which irritates me. So my mind curls into a tight defensive ball, and I only catch a few of Vera’s words, but years later, Isaac Zarco tracks down the Antonio Machado verse she read to me:
Last night while I lay sleeping,
I dreamt—oh blessed illusion—
that a beehive I was keeping
inside my heart;
And from my bitter, rotting
failures, golden bees
were making
a pure white comb with the sweetest honey.
“If only the poet’s dream could come true for us all,” Vera says when she’s finished. She lays the book on the secretary behind us, next to her black-beaded purse. “Or maybe it’s better that dreams stay where they are. Having them come true might confuse us badly. We wouldn’t know whether we’re awake or asleep.” She looks down invitingly at me, asking for my thoughts.
“I’m not sure,” I admit, but there will come a time when I believe she has hit upon an important truth.
“Do you ever write poetry?” she asks.
“No.”
“That’s an excellent sign, Sophie. I used to write poetry when I was your age—all tragic. I knew hundreds of rhymes for Einsamkeit.” Einsamkeit mea
ns loneliness. “The poems were wretched … I burned them when I was older.” Vera grins at me, hoping I’ll smile back, but she has overwhelmed me. “I’m glad that you and I are different,” she adds.
“Why?”
“Because then if we become friends, our closeness will mean much more.”
Something beats below the surface of her that troubles me. It’s as if she’s made out of different elements from everyone else. And not because she’s deformed. Or, at least, not just because of that.
“What I have isn’t contagious,” she says. “I promise you that. Tell me, would you like to touch my face?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you touch the parts you find really ugly, you’ll be more at ease.”
When I agree, Vera moves my fingertips up to her forehead. I want to pull my hand back, but I don’t dare. The bony ridge above her eyebrows makes me gasp. “I’m sorry,” I tell her.
“Don’t apologize. I frighten myself sometimes when I look in the mirror.”
Who could breathe properly in my position? Maybe that’s why the room seems to grow dim. When we reach her tulip-bulb chin, she says, “What I’ve got is called gigantism.”
I don’t like the nervous tingle that our intimacy gives me, and when she releases my hand, I wriggle in my seat, relieved to have borders around myself again.
“That was brave of you,” Vera tells me.
“Thank you. Have you always been this way?” I ask.
“No. I started changing when I was about twelve. I’m thirty-one now,” she adds, anticipating my question.
“How do you know Spanish?” I ask her.
“My mother was from Madrid. My father is German, from Cologne.”
Emboldened now, I say, “Can I feel the pearls on your collar?”
“Of course.” She leans toward me, like a tilting tower. Their shiny darkness makes me jealous. It’s as if they’re made of moonless night. Think of all the magic that might be hidden inside them …
“If we were to crack the pearls open, what do you think we’d find inside?” I ask.
The Seventh Gate Page 4