The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  Later in their conversation, Mama cites the possibility that I don’t eat enough vegetables or get sufficient sleep. Papa thinks I may be jealous of my brother, but can he seriously believe I want to be Mama’s favorite anymore? They’re parents who consider everything but the obvious; I’m not very good at leading a double life. At least, not as good as them.

  That night a piece of luck finally squeezes its way into my puzzle; Papa never reads about Mr Renn’s arrest.

  When I kiss Hansi goodnight, I apologize. “You can hit me back if you like,” I tell him. “As hard as you want.”

  But he doesn’t even make a fist, which is disappointing; I’d like there to be justice in the world even if it means a sore arm.

  “Say something!” I whisper-scream, because he hasn’t made a peep in so long. He shakes his head. “If you come back,” I add seductively, poking his belly to make him grab my hand, “then I’ll take you to the Tiergarten and buy you nuts to feed the squirrels.”

  He drops our united touch, closes his eyes, and rolls away from me.

  “I’ve slept with Tonio,” I whisper in his ear, and I give his droopy little lobe a pull, which makes him wriggle his shoulders. “But don’t tell anyone or I’ll be quartered and pickled.”

  Now, I’m no longer the sole owner of that particular secret, but sharing it with my brother doesn’t make me feel much better. A mute nine-year-old must not count as a confidant.

  I sketch him going to sleep. And for the first time, I think it will be a good thing if he keeps as far away from our world as he can—at least one person will be blameless when this is all over.

  I offer to buy eggs for my mother at Frau Koslowski’s grocery the next evening so that afterward I can make a quick detour to the Munchenbergs’. Behind the counter of the crowded little shop, over the candy shelf, hangs a picture of Hitler, his arm upraised in a salute. Frau Koslowski sees me eyeing it and tells me, “The Germans have finally found their Saint George.” I expect her to say more, but she just shrugs morosely, meaning, What can I do but make believe they’re right?

  I nod my understanding and pick out my eggs. A whole country nodding and shrugging its way into the sewers.

  Mrs Munchenberg opens the door to my knocks. She’s a darting sparrow of a woman, quick-tongued and no-nonsense. Isaac says it’s impossible to know exactly what she looks like because she never stays still long enough to be sure. She works as a legal secretary for an important Berlin lawyer. In her hands is an old linen napkin—white with a pink border—that she’s been worrying to shreds. Her eyes have a lost look and her mascara, normally precise, has become blue-black smudges.

  She invites me in, but I lift up my egg basket and tell her I can’t stay.

  “Any news from Raffi?” I ask.

  “News? Those goddamn bastards won’t even tell us where he’s being held.”

  Mrs Munchenberg swears like a coal delivery man when she’s enraged. She stares at me hard, and we share a moment of silent union.

  “Thank Raffi again for the Egyptian dates when you see him,” I tell her, wishing there was something more I could do to help her. “They were delicious.”

  “Will you have one more, Sophie?” she asks yearningly, as if it’s important to her. “I saved a few for good friends.”

  Have I become a good friend now that we’ve experienced despairing silence together? Maybe it’s because she knows I’ll always adore her son.

  When she returns from the kitchen with a basket, each date wrapped in a pink ribbon, I lift one out and put it on top of my eggs. Professor Munchenberg suddenly comes up behind her and smiles warmly at me, his hand on his wife’s shoulder. His shirttail is hanging out in back and his unshaven cheeks are creased with sleep. “Sophie, how nice to see you,” he says, and I can see in his eyes he means it. “Take three more for your parents and Hansi.”

  “Yes, do!” Mrs Munchenberg agrees, smiling as best she can.

  My parents don’t deserve them, I’d like to confess. Besides, they wouldn’t accept them from you now. Instead, I say, “No, save them for Raffi. He’ll want to remember that the Nile is waiting for him when he gets out.”

  That night I awake to shots coming from the direction of Friedrichshain Park. There’s no news in the papers about a gunfight the next morning, but my friend Marthe Salter tells me and a few other girls that workers fought with Nazis in Answalder Platz. She lives with her parents and brothers on the southern side of the square and adds that she saw a young man wearing a dark apron who was wounded and maybe killed. He fell right in front of the Kuntz Dress Shop and blood—much darker than she’d expected—seeped from his head.

  He’d been rescued by friends and carried into the back seat of a car, then driven off.

  Gurka, excited by talk of the wounded worker, tells everyone that German spies are in Switzerland, France, and America getting ready to assassinate famous Germans who’ve fled. “Marlene Dietrich included!” she announces to me, happy as a princess who gets to order a rival’s execution.

  “Who told you that?” I ask.

  “My father fixes Robert Ley’s cavities and he told us yesterday they’d all be killed within a week.” Seeing my puzzlement, she adds with pride, “Herr Ley is the Nazi Party head of organization.”

  I’m too upset to think of an adequate reply and slink away. All day, I find myself praying that Marlene has fearsome bodyguards. I only really believe Gurka doesn’t know what she’s talking about when I cross off the seventh day on my calendar. My worry for Marlene is another thing that blond cow will have to pay for.

  In mid-March, on one of my furtive, pre-school visits to Isaac’s apartment, he hands me the photos of Vera and me that K-H took at his Carnival party. I conceal them in my schoolbag and slip them behind Garbo that evening.

  My favorite: an eager girl leaning toward the lens, her thumb lifting up her pearl collar, so electric with excitement that she seems to be giving off light.

  Vera always said I looked like no one else in that photograph, which was her greatest compliment. Maybe she wanted a love of uniqueness to serve as the cure to Germany’s worship of conformity.

  Isaac also gives me my jacket, and now that the seams have been let out, it fits perfectly. But where will I wear it? My parents would never believe that I could afford to buy such a beautiful coat at a shop, and if they knew that Vera had made it for me … A treasure I’ll have to give up until life grows simpler.

  Isaac agrees to keep my coat for me, and also to hide my drawings of him, Vera, and Rini in his bookshelves, in between the volume on Giotto that he’d lent me and another on Cimabue. Seeing my work there makes me feel welcome—I’m making room for myself inside Isaac’s home and the medieval Italian art that reminds him of God and man and all the levels of heaven in between.

  He hands me a note from Julia in which she’s written the names of plants and drugs that cause the skin to turn blue: sorghum leaves, black henbane, climbing nightshade, oil of mirbane, antimony, and cyanide. “I know what your next question is,” she writes, “and I do indeed sell henbane, but I haven’t sold any in quantities that would cause anyone’s death. Cyanide and antimony might also, I think, be relatively easy to purchase, though not from me.”

  When I read the note to Isaac and tell him about my theories, he says, “So how do you think no marks were made on Georg’s neck?”

  “I think I’m stumped,” I admit.

  “Tell me, Sophele, is it possible to speak without a voice?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do K-H and Marianne communicate?” He smiles encouragingly. “You and I will keep looking below the glass and I’m sure one of us will find an answer. Though I don’t want you taking chances. You can do all the investigating you want in your head and in libraries, but you are not to talk to anyone but me and Vera about any of this! Do you hear me?”

  * * *

  Playing by Isaac’s rules for the moment, I go to the National Library and read all I can about strangulation over
the next couple of weeks, but I don’t find myself any closer to an answer. Then, a shock … On the 23rd of March, Hitler consolidates his power. Our legislature—cowed into submission by Nazi propaganda and armed brownshirts in the hallways—gives him the right to implement his own laws, control the budget, set foreign policy, and try political opponents in military-style courts where they have no right to legal counsel.

  Late that afternoon, while I’m returning from an errand in Alexanderplatz, wondering what this virtual coup will mean for me and my friends, I finally get some news about Raffi … Mrs Munchenberg is already aboard the Prenzlauer Allee tram when I hop aboard. She’s carrying a new shirt for her husband —powder blue. He’s to wear it at their nephew’s bar mitzvah in a week.

  When I consider that Thursday afternoon now, it seems criminal to me that we continued shopping, riding trams, and pointing happily to the yellow crocuses peeping through the hard soil in the city’s parks, but I suppose all of us craved the details of daily life as false reassurance that becoming a dictatorship would change nothing.

  After I admire Mrs Munchenberg’s purchase, I ask, “Any news about Raffi yet?”

  “We just got a letter saying he’s being held in Dachau.”

  Imagine a time when a German girl has to ask where Dachau is!

  “Near Munich,” she tells me, and she makes the sour face of a Berliner imagining the hinterland. “They say it’s a concentration camp.”

  It’s the first time I hear the word Konzentrationslager, which is to become an important word in our new vocabulary.

  “It’s a big sprawling prison in the middle of nowhere,” she explains, “and I’ve been told it’s surrounded by barbed-wire fences. The men and women live in barracks, and families are not allowed to visit. No one sees what happens inside.” She looks down to keep her emotions from flooding her. “The guards could be doing anything to those poor men and women … to my Raffi.”

  “What are they holding him for?” I ask.

  “Who the hell knows? The letter hardly said anything.”

  I give her hand a squeeze, which makes Mrs Munchenberg close her eyes to keep from crying. We ride without talking, though she gives me a little smile from time to time, as if to say, It’s not a betrayal of me for you to go on with your life. But maybe it is.

  It’s while I’m watching the endless rush of buildings flying past us that I realize—with a feeling of descent into myself—that the traitor in The Ring may be responsible for Raffi’s arrest. Which means I’ll have to work harder than I have to learn his identity and not give up, no matter what the risk. Because these concentration camps are going to fill up with opponents of Hitler, and Isaac and Vera could also be denounced at any time.

  A stylish chestnut-haired woman with a fox stole around her neck is standing next to me. She must have overheard what Mrs Munchenberg and I have been conversing about, because she tells her young daughter that she doesn’t think Jews should still be allowed on public transportation. She speaks loudly enough for everyone around us to hear. Twenty eager eyes turn to Mrs Munchenberg and me, expecting a confrontation.

  When I frown at the offensive woman, she says with false sweetness, “I just don’t think you belong in Germany, dear.”

  I’ll never forget that dear. And her twisted little grin, as if she’s being clever.

  “I don’t happen to be Jewish,” I reply. Ich bin aber gar keine Jüdin.

  My denial makes me feel as if I’ve swallowed dirt. I wish immediately I could take it back. But before I can make amends by declaring that I’m a loyal Communist, Mrs Munchenberg whispers to me, “I’m getting off, Sophie.” And she stands up.

  “But this isn’t our stop,” I tell her, so desperately ashamed of myself that I add, “Please, Mrs Munchenberg, don’t get off.”

  “You stay on, honey.” She touches my arm, then draws her hand back quickly.

  I step off behind her. We walk together to our apartment house, in separate silences, because she won’t look at me. I want to apologize—even for the blue sky—but say nothing. At her door, we face each other as neighbors who can move toward greater friendship or turn away into distinct worlds, and I can feel her longing as a soft pressure against my heart. But I’ve enough to conceal from my parents already.

  Sensing my dilemma, she smiles as people do when they find the courage to forge on despite the long, hopeless days facing them. Taking two anise drops out of her bag, she hands them to me. “One for you and one for Hansi,” she says. “And give him a kiss, if … if that’s all right.”

  Her if that s all right makes my chest ache, and I’m about to apologize, but she puts her finger to her lips. “Sophie, there’s no need to say anything more.”

  But there is. Why don’t I reassure her that her being Jewish means nothing to me?

  Because it does, I can hear Vera telling me, refusing to let me get away with anything.

  I sometimes wonder what would have happened had I gone in and made Mrs Munchenberg a cup of tea, and if we’d sat together talking about Raffi. Or if I’d pushed the rude woman off the tram. Or if I’d started screaming and refused to stop. Maybe I’d have helped to shatter the stained glass of our world sooner, on that day we lost our democracy, before the Nazis had time to make their plans.

  Astonishingly to me, prospects for The Ring become dismal right away; Hitler’s total command of our government has frightened our European neighbors, who now fear doing anything to provoke him. Isaac is no longer even welcome at the Portuguese Embassy.

  “They don’t understand that acting now is the only way to stop him,” he tells me angrily.

  “Maybe you ought to try something less ambitious,” I say; the possibility of his being sent to Dachau is a heavy shroud of dread over all my nights of late.

  “No, no, no,” he declares. “I’m making some slow progress at the Turkish Embassy, and slow is at least better than nothing.”

  Tonio and I use his father’s apartment twice more that month, when we have promised to be at the movies. Sex or Hollywood. It appears I cannot have both. No matter; the second time does the trick, and a window opens in my heart. Men and boys are not all ferrets, and I am beginning to understand the Trojan War, Homer, and romantic poetry. All of them are contained in a young man with a beautiful penis that never tires of me, and who carries me out to sea atop his affection, and who talks in soft tones about cars afterwards, as if they are as intimate as the warm cinnamon of our breath when we are nearly asleep and facing each other.

  A young man’s large, dark eyes as the key to existence—and my refuge. Would our chances for a life together have been better or worse in another, more tranquil, country?

  Later, as we’re dressing, he brings up the boycott of Jewish shops planned for the 1st of April—the first public display of Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies since he was named Chancellor. A test to see if the Volk—with all their innate völkischen wisdom—are behind him.

  “Will you come with me to Ziegelstraße?” Tonio asks. “There’s a large kosher butcher there. My Nazi Youth troop will be guarding it.”

  Guarding it? “I have to help my mother on Saturday,” I tell him. “She’s going with Papa to the rally where Hitler is going to speak, and she wants me home to take care of Hansi.”

  The truth for once is good enough. Papa wants Mama to be seen with him in public at a Nazi celebration. He’d take us along, but he’s worried that Hansi will be an embarrassment, though he uses that word only when he’s alone with my mother.

  Not that I really plan on staying home; Vera and Isaac have convinced me to be part of a protest that The Ring has organized against the boycott.

  “You can bring Hansi along,” Tonio says enticingly. “He’ll love seeing me in uniform.”

  “My brother likes onion soup and rodents, though not necessarily in that order.”

  “He likes me. And I’ll be there.”

  Tonio clearly regards Hansi as the younger brother he never had. I’m moved, but I still d
ecline. “Look,” I say gently, “you know my parents would feed me to the pigs if they found out I’d brought him along. And anyway, a boycott of Jewish shops seems pretty silly to me.”

  “Dr Goebbels doesn’t think so.”

  No, a Minister of Propaganda wouldn’t, would he? “Tonio,” I say carefully, “let’s not talk about Jews. We’ll only quarrel.”

  “What am I going to do with you?” he replies, as if I’m a lovable but difficult child. With a mind of her own he’d prefer I didn’t have.

  At 9:30 on the morning of the 1st of April, precisely half an hour after my parents leave for a breakfast with Papa’s co-workers and then the rally, I lead Hansi out of our apartment and walk to Frau Koslowski’s grocery, where I’ve scheduled a rendezvous with Vera. I’ve told my brother we’re off on a shopping expedition, which is true in a way, since Jewish businessmen have donated funds for those of us participating in the protest to break the boycott by purchasing merchandise.

  As soon as Vera arrives, we head into the historic center of the city, to Weinmeisterstraße, because we’re to meet Isaac at a restaurant called Karl’s Cellar. Vera, who is venturing outside during the day for the first time in years, is cloaked from head to toe in dark gray mohair. “As soft as a whisper,” she says without irony. Vera never jokes about clothing.

  She’s lifted the wing of the cloak over her lips and nose, which makes her look like an Arabian bride. There’s little she can do to hide her mallet-like forehead, however, and I learn more about expressions of horror that day than during my previous fifteen years. As we rush down Hirtenstraße, a portly businessman in a derby hat gasps. Further down the block, waifs playing marbles gawk and point, and one of them follows us, squeezing her hands between her legs, gaping like a gargoyle, unable to decide if she should pee in her knickers or dribble over her chin.

  Vera walks as fast as she can, which means Hansi and I have to run to stay even, which also means we’ve less time to avoid the obstacle course on the sidewalk. Dog Shit Is Berlin’s True Pavement. It’s not the title of an Expressionist art exhibit at the famous Der Sturm Gallery, but it could be. As we dodge a gutted armchair left outside a broken-down rooming house, my brother squashes a big one, which really isn’t his fault since it’s Saturday morning, the time when even the most crippled Berliners get out their silver-tipped canes and hobble down the street behind their eager, nose-to-the-ground mutts, who are themselves bloated with boiled potatoes and liverwurst leftovers from the night before. I scrape Hansi’s shoe on the sidewalk while he hops around, and then tie the foul-smelling thing back on him. By the time we’re finished, Vera is a hundred of her giant paces ahead. The Alfa Romeo Spider of former circus performers—zero to 120 in only six seconds …