The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  “No violence,” Isaac says. A command, not a plea.

  The bulldog takes a step back and pulls his gun free, then faces sideways and points it at Isaac’s head. The pose of a fencing enthusiast.

  “Take a step back, Jew. And you,” he shouts at K-H, “get that camera away or I’ll shoot you both!”

  He has a Swabian accent. Just what we need, I think, a hillbilly with a loaded gun …

  Isaac—God knows how—glares at the man. “We have come here because we are certain that what you are doing is illegal and immoral,” he says in a high German so beautiful that it could make Hugo von Hofmannsthal sit up in his grave in Vienna. “We shall be making some purchases, so if you will just step aside …”

  “Get your ass out of here!” the bulldog snaps back.

  “As soon as we’re finished shopping.”

  Does Isaac want to get shot so he can make all the newspapers? By now, he must know that one dead Jew will only merit a sentence or two after the unseasonably warm weather in the Alps.

  “Follow me,” he says to us, and maybe we really would file behind him directly into the shop and a history book or two, but before he can lead us any further, Mr Weissman—a neatly dressed little man with thinning gray hair—shuffles out of the shop. A tall young Nazi stands behind him, his gun drawn, smirking like a kid who has successfully stolen licorice from a candy shop. In short, a delinquent. For me, it’s another threshold passed; he’s the first thug I’ve ever seen who clearly enjoys humiliating another person.

  Around the old shopkeeper’s neck is a sign that reads: Kauft nicht bei Juden, kauft in deutschen Geschäften! Don’t buy from Jews, shop in German businesses. Herr Weissman’s face is bright red. He’s holding his glasses, which I now see are badly cracked—stepped on by the happy delinquent, most likely.

  “Look up!” the bulldog orders. “And tell your friend what to do!”

  Weissman obeys. His forehead is ribbed and sweaty. “You can’t go in, Isaac,” he says in an apologetic voice. “You have to leave. The Nazis have been expecting you, and there’s a brownshirt inside who’ll shoot you when you go in. He’ll say you were armed and started a fight.”

  So the Nazis were warned we’d be here.

  Isaac faces me and gives me a grave look in which I see danger for all our futures. “Will you and Hansi go in, Sophele?” he asks. “No one would ever believe you and your brother were armed. You don’t have to, of course, but it’s important.”

  In years to come, when I tell this story, Ben and others will be appalled that Isaac took such a risk with our lives, but we didn’t have the benefit of hindsight then, and we didn’t know that the Nazis were capable of killing children. His request seemed reasonable to me at the time.

  I look at Hansi, whose eyes are fixed on Minnie sniffing the pavement, her tail thumping. Every second of my brother’s future is in my hesitant breathing. My heartbeat has gone haywire.

  Vera squeezes my hand and says, “Don’t go in.” Then, to Isaac, she adds, “I think we should just go home like Mr Weissman said. We can try later to …”

  “No, I’ll go in alone,” I interrupt. I unpeel Hansi’s fingers from around my hand and entrust the boy to Vera.

  “Don’t move an inch!” I instruct him. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He looks at me with a compressed face, confused. I lean down to give him a quick kiss and surprise myself by whispering to myself one of the prayers Isaac taught me: Baruch ata Adonai Eloheynu Melech ha’olam shehehiyanu ve’kiymanu ve’higianu la’zman ha’zeh. Blessed are You, O Lord our God, King of the universe, Who has kept us in life and preserved us …

  As I walk forward, I feel as if I always knew I would be tested in this way. And as if my death—if that’s what happens—will be my revenge against my parents. For exactly what I cannot even now put into words.

  Music starts playing loudly down the street: the Comedian Harmonists singing the folksong, Ach, wie ist’s möglich denn? Ah, How Is It Possible?

  Isaac’s choice? After all, How is it possible? is the perfect question for a boycott of Jewish shops. Later, he will confirm to me that he arranged for the music with some friends.

  The Nazis turn in unison to face the Harmonists’ angelic voices as though they’re synchronized swimmers in an Esther Williams movie. Laughable in better times.

  It’s time for me to make my move. But the bulldog grabs my arm as I stride past him. Hard enough to cause a mark I’ll notice that evening.

  Our symmetry has stayed in my mind—lodged in black fear—for seventy years: the Nazi’s got me and I’ve got the door handle. Who will give in first?

  I stare into the face of a man who should be home in Swabia, scaring his children with the Brothers Grimm, like ten generations of good German sadists before him.

  “I want to buy some fabric,” I tell him matter-of-factly.

  “You can’t go in,” he replies equally calmly.

  “I’m from Berlin,” I say, since he’s not, and we both know I mean that he can’t tell me what to do in my city. The courage of place. It shouldn’t be discounted at such decisive moments.

  “So what?” he sneers.

  “So I was born here. I’ll shop anywhere I want. And I’ll shop at Weissman’s long after you go home to Ulm.”

  Not the answer he wants. He raises his gun and presses the barrel into my cheek. And he smiles. A sexual taunt in addition to a threat.

  With death against my tingling skin, I go all stiff and close my eyes. The silence of my own terror squeezes me. And all I can think of is Hansi bursting into tears when I’m dead.

  “Sophele, come here … come back to me,” Isaac says pleadingly.

  A warm moistness slithers down my legs; I’m peeing on myself. The Nazi lowers his pistol and laughs. Which is when I open the door and step inside.

  The most courageous moment of my life. And it happens without any conscious decision. I’m no more aware of why I do it than a dog chasing after a rubber ball on Grenadierstraße.

  When I was fifteen. A child in so many ways. And yet if I was able to go on with my life after the war, it was because of that one moment.

  The shop is divided into aisles of shelving holding bolts of fabric. A youthful brownshirt is kneeling over a floral print he has spread on the floor. Maybe he is deciding whether he’ll steal a few yards for curtains. Hilde Weissman sits behind the counter. A slender-necked woman wearing a pearl necklace. That’s all I’ll ever remember about the way she looked.

  She has been resting with her head on the cash register, and when she looks up, she thrusts out her hand as if to say, Wait there, don’t move! And she jumps up.

  Her hair is wet. Later, Isaac will tell me the Nazis dunked her head in the toilet.

  At the same time, the brownshirt rushes to me with his gun pointing at the center of my chest, but he never reaches me. A shot from outside draws him to the door.

  “Hansi!” I yell.

  I race onto the street. Minnie is lying on the ground, dead, a flower of blood blooming across her soft pink belly. My brother is seated next to her, reaching for the blossom, but when I try to lift him up, his eyes go dull and he is unable to stand.

  The blond delinquent is being yelled at by the bulldog.

  “It’s just a dead Jewish mutt!” the young man shouts back.

  Tears flood me, not out of desperation for Minnie, though blood-spattered memories of her will pursue me for weeks afterwards. All I feel now is relief that Hansi, Isaac, Vera, and everyone else are safe.

  Later, I find out that the Nazi in charge ordered Molly and Klaus to take the sign off Minnie. Molly refused, saying she’d never obey a Nazi order as long as she lived and that was when the delinquent pulled the trigger.

  Vera grabs my arm as if she’ll never let me go, while Arnold tries to draw my brother’s attention from the dachshund by talking to him gently. Molly is now kneeling over Minnie, sobbing, both her hands pressing at the blood, as though she’s trying to keep more peta
ls from forming.

  Isaac carries Hansi to the tram; the boy is gone from the world.

  “I’m so sorry,” the old tailor keeps telling me over and over. “I never expected …”

  “It’s not your fault,” I reply, and I mean it.

  He thinks I blame the Nazis. But I don’t; I blame myself.

  At home, Isaac eases my brother into his bed. When we’re alone in the sitting room, both pale with worry, I say what I’ve wanted to since I first saw the line of brownshirts waiting for us on Hirtenstraße: “A traitor in your group must have told the Nazis to be ready for us at Weissman’s—maybe the same person who killed Georg. It’s possible he informed on Raffi, too, though I suppose some other German hero might have done that.”

  Death comes to Hirtenstraße

  “Yes, I’ve long suspected we were being betrayed.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was hoping, I suppose, that it wasn’t true. And I didn’t want you to get any more involved than you already were. When you told me you were stumped by Georg not having any bruises on his neck … I’ve been hoping you’d get so frustrated that you’d give up playing detective. What’s happening in Germany has made me very irresponsible—with you and Hansi most of all. I’m sorry.” He rubs a weary hand over his face. “I’m no good at these public protests. I can see now that I’m just going to get the people I love killed.”

  As we sit inside the morose silence, a revelation comes to me. “Georg found out who was betraying you, and that’s why he was murdered!”

  “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “And Raffi, too,” I whisper to myself, believing I understand things clearly now.

  “What did you say?”

  “Isaac, I know that Raffi was bribing Nazis with money that your group raised, but maybe that wasn’t why he was arrested. Maybe he, too, learned who the traitor was. The Gestapo took him away because he could reveal the man’s identity. After all, now he can’t tell anyone anything.” I then launch a probe. “You think that’s right, don’t you … that every time someone gets too close to the truth, he’s eliminated?”

  “Yes, I’ve thought of that,” he admits, distraught, “but now. . . Sophele, it’s all too much for me. I’ll just have to stop my public activities and concentrate on the Turkish Embassy. In the meantime,” he adds, “we can both pray that nothing more happens to anyone we love.”

  After Isaac leaves, I collapse in the armchair in the sitting room. Hansi stirs from his nap an hour later and taps my head to awaken me.

  “What’s up?” I ask, relieved that he can walk again. And that he doesn’t hate me.

  He points to his stomach.

  I don’t dare mention Minnie or anything else that’s happened as I make him lunch. My brother and I will never discuss that day. A secret with deadly thorns.

  I’ve heard many an expert on German history say that forgetfulness became a way of life after the war, but Hansi and I learned to put our memories in a locked Giftschrank—a cabinet for poisons, as the Germans say—long before our army fought any battles.

  I make us potato soup with sliced cheese on toast, and we sit on opposite sides of the kitchen table, munching away while working on his Michelangelo jigsaw puzzle. After a while, we play at stealing what’s left of each other’s cheese. I have a fit of giggles, till tears are sliding into my mouth. How good it is to be alive and alone with my brother! That afternoon, we listen to Marlene Dietrich on the phonograph, gratitude in every look between us.

  In the evening I bathe him and coax him under the covers by promising to read him a story, but I fall asleep before I even open Treasure Island, his favorite book at the moment. My parents come in at ten in the evening. I wake up in the chair next to Hansi’s bed, and over my legs is a woolen blanket that I didn’t put there. My brother the brownie.

  I’m overjoyed to hear Mama and Papa’s voices—the sound of all the protection I needed this morning. As though they’ve been away for weeks, I race into the sitting room. I try to give my father a kiss right away, but he grabs my wrist, gives me a shake, and says angrily, “We know what you’ve been up to!” His face is outraged.

  “You do?” I ask. As I pull my hand out of his grip, I notice the dark mark that’s already formed on my arm where the Nazi grabbed me.

  “Frau von Schilling told us.”

  “Who’s Frau von Schilling?”

  Papa begins to slip out of his overcoat. Mama helps him.

  “Vicki von Schilling’s mother, of course,” he replies.

  When I give him a puzzled look, Mama shouts, “She goes to school with you!” She tosses Papa’s coat onto the sofa, and I can see from her eyes—squinting with animosity—that whatever she learned about me from Frau von Schilling ruined her entire evening.

  “What exactly did Vicki’s mother tell you?” I ask.

  “She said that you’ve been talking to Rini again,” Papa snarls. “And you accepted some chocolate from her!”

  He spits out his words as if the government has uncovered proof that Jews own all the cocoa plantations in Africa.

  “That’s all?” I ask.

  “Isn’t that enough?” he growls.

  Relief sweeps through me like that sea breeze I wanted for the residents of Grenadierstraße. “I suppose it is,” I say. “After all, she’s a Jew and I’m an Aryan. Or maybe just a dachshund.”

  “What are you saying, Sophie?” Mama asks.

  “It’s just a small joke that isn’t funny and now …” I want to add that the joke is now dead, but that wouldn’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t with me this morning.

  I hold out my arms, ready for handcuffs. “Guilty as charged. You may lead me to my cell.” I feel another fit of mad giggles approaching, and I’m about to add, I’ll go willingly to the gallows in the morning but now let me get a good night’s sleep, but Papa grabs me and slaps me across the face.

  I’m so stunned that I cannot cry. Or catch my breath. I bend over, fighting for air.

  Papa shakes me hard again and orders me to my room. Mama leads Hansi away while he takes his belt off. I’ll have to bury all that I like about myself to keep from losing my mind, I think. A paradox, but it makes perfect sense to me at the time.

  Each whack of leather is a shovelful of earth over the girl I want to be.

  Papa leaves early the next morning for work. Mama confiscates what’s left of my cigarette card collection, including Garbo as Mata Hari. “Your father and I have agreed that you will be spending all your weekends at home for the next three months,” she informs me. “No Tonio, no movies, nothing!”

  “Can I still draw in my sketchbook?”

  “No!” She gives me a contemptuous look and hisses, “I hope you’re satisfied now!”

  “That depends on your exact definition of satisfied,” I reply, defiant. “Though if you’re referring to the welts on my backside, no, I’m not happy about them.”

  She’s decided to take me to the Immanuel Church this morning. Mein Kampf has failed to save me, and she’s convinced that the New Testament is my only hope. But wouldn’t Jesus have had a Jewish sense of humor, too?

  On Monday, I wake up with a sore throat, and my bones ache. My neck feels rusted. Mama takes my temperature. When she discovers I’ve got a low fever, she snickers.

  “You see what your rebelliousness brings you?” she says.

  I’m too weak to assure her that she’s already more than convinced me how much she despises me and that she can move on to another subject.

  “I’ve got food shopping to do today,” she continues, “and now what am I supposed to do with you ill?” She stares at me in challenge.

  “I can stay home alone. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Who’s worried about you?” she says, and her eyebrows arch up to emphasize the point. “I’m only concerned you’ll give your cold to Hansi.”

  Possibly the meanest thing she has ever said to me. But I haven’t the strength to protest, and she knows
it. Mama’s philosophy: kick ’em while they’re down. Maybe that’s to be found in the New Testament if you look at it with her Bavarian eyes.

  That afternoon, Dr Nohel comes to visit. Hansi and I have always thought he looks like a horse—giant brown teeth, big ears, a long slender face, and thinning hair slicked back with shoe polish into a creepy black mane. We even once found the brand he uses in his doctor’s bag—Lion Noir. French and sour-smelling.

  After putting on his monocle, he crushes my tongue with one of his satanic wooden sticks and looks down my throat. He smells like Limburger cheese. It must have been in his feed-bag at lunch.

  Maybe he spots a diagnosis written in tiny letters on my uvula, because he adjusts his monocle for a closer look, and when he finally lifts up his muzzle for a little air he announces I’ve got the flu. “It’s going around,” he assures us.

  Sure enough, my fever rises that evening. While Mama makes me potato soup, Papa sits with me. We don’t mention the beating he gave me. Another memory swept below the surface of our family history. He reads to me from the newspaper as if we’re best friends. Among other highlights, I learn that Jews have been arrested for spreading “lies” to the foreign press about violent tactics used by brownshirts during the boycott and that the swastika will become our official flag on the 22nd of April. Our red and black dye-makers must be ecstatic. Hitler’s biggest supporters.

  “Which reminds me …” Papa says with an eager smile, and he dashes boyishly out of the room. When he returns, he’s holding out an armband for me. “A present I’ve owed you for some time,” he says, grinning. “Show me how it looks.”

  The proud father at his daughter’s National Socialist christening. If only he’d just hit a bottle of champagne over my head instead and knock me out for a few years.

  I slip the armband over the sleeve of my nightgown. It clashes badly with the pink.

  “Very nice,” he beams. “You like it?”

  His face is so hopeful that it would be a sin to disappoint him. “I love it,” I say. “Thank you. Did you get one for Hansi, too?”