With K-H’s help, Isaac hobbles over to Columbia-House, the Gestapo’s headquarters on Prinz Albrecht Straße, where Vera has probably been taken, but no one will give him any information. Still, we know exactly what happens to her, because she tells us as soon as we next see her.
The day after her arrest, in the late afternoon, her broken wrist is finally set in plaster. Two days later, at dawn, she is dressed in a hospital gown and taken to a doctor’s office in the same brick building where she has been staying. Has a sedative been put in her morning tea? She feels heavy and dull-witted, and she is unable to fight the men who guide her up the stairs. A physician dressed in white greets her in a room with large windows. We will never know his name, but she says he has a beard and tiny brown eyes. She is forced onto an operating table. Her arms are positioned by her side and her legs spread—and fastened with leather straps. She smells ammonia and something else—“A sour scent, like acid,” she will tell me. She fears she is about to die. She pulls in vain at her restraints. Fear lodges in her throat like pebbles, and she cannot stop her legs from trembling. After the physician sits on a stool between her legs, he bends down and probes inside her with something metallic and cold, but she can’t see what. Then he hurts her badly. Whatever he uses feels like rusted hedge clippers, and she imagines he is about to cut tissues deep inside her. She screams and doesn’t stop screaming until she feels a needle prick on her arm and looks to the side to see a nurse gazing down at her contemptuously.
When she awakens, she is on a cot, her bare feet sticking out past the end of the gray bedspread. Her belly feels as though it has been scraped with scissors, and she is weak and cold. A nurse puts another blanket on her and helps her sit up to sip some water. She tries to eat but even bread only sharpens the pain.
A little while later, the doctor who performed the operation comes to see her. He has a bright, cheerful face.
“How are you feeling?” he asks, smiling benevolently.
“What did you cut out of me?” she demands.
“Shush,” he says, patting her arm. “You need to rest. There’s nothing to worry about. Everything is over now.”
Including my baby? she wants to ask, but she fears his reply and wouldn’t trust it anyway.
None of the nurses answer her questions about what’s been done to her, or about what happened to Isaac, so she keeps silent. She will wait. Sooner or later, they’ll have to release her.
She spends the rest of that day crawling inside intricate fantasies of vengeance. The next morning, Thursday, just after breakfast, she is dressed by a friendly young nurse and put in the back seat of a car that smells like new leather, and then taken to the address she gives the driver—Isaac’s factory.
Vera throws her arms around Isaac when she sees he is alive, because at least one terrible thing has not come to pass. I am not responsible for his death, only the baby’s …
She sits with Isaac in his office and tells him what happened to her, but she’s too disoriented to make much sense. He calls a taxi and takes her to his apartment, coaxes her into bed, and then sits with her. The words spill out of her as though from a great height. When she’s done with her story, she asks, “Do you think they cut the baby out of me?”
“I don’t know, but we’re going to find out. Just rest.” She starts to run a fever that evening.
“A very bad sign—it could be an infection from her operation,” Isaac tells me when I come over.
We give Vera aspirin and make her drink strong, hot tea with lemon. After I leave, K-H comes over with Roman, Rolf, and Heidi.
Late that night, Dr Löwenstein examines her. His medical evaluation is against the law, since he is a Jew and she is an Aryan, but Vera’s womb itself has become illegal, so what do the bespectacled eyes of a seventy-year-old Jewish physician matter by comparison?
He discovers incision marks on her belly.
“I’ve seen those a lot lately,” he tells her. “The surgeons tied your ovarian tubes.”
“So … so I’m no longer pregnant?” Vera asks timidly, shivering. She has had the chills for the last hour. “And I’m barren?”
“Yes, I’m sorry, Vera,” he tells her, covering her with her blankets again.
She turns her face to the wall, as though away from life, and begins to wail. Heidi climbs up onto the bed, sits beside her, and rubs her back, whispering encouragement. Roman squats in the corner of the room, leaning his head into the wall, while Rolf tries to comfort him.
“What legal authority do the Nazis have to do this?” K-H asks the doctor, but neither he nor anyone else can provide an answer. Besides, back in August, thirty-eight million German voters—ninety percent of our electorate—voted to confirm Hitler’s absolute dictatorship, so legal authority, if any is needed, is his.
Isaac covers all his mirrors that night with dark fabric. He’s in such a fury that I dare not talk with him. He says he and Vera must sit shiva for the baby for a week.
What does she feel and think? Her tears are our only clue. She will not even reply to Roman, though he reminds her in an angry voice that he has also lost a child. Maybe she is thinking, But you can have others …
Dr Löwenstein pulls me aside just before he leaves. “I’ve got an answer to your question now. If the murdered man was already dead when he was strangled, then the blood in his capillaries and veins would not burst. There’d be no bruises.”
“Are you sure?” I ask, gripped by a feeling of truth discovered.
“Positive.”
So Julia poisoned Georg, then put her hands on his neck and squeezed as hard as she could, breaking his windpipe. To make sure he was dead, perhaps. Or to confuse the police, just as she confused me.
I feel as if I’ve reached the end of a long trail, but now that our Führer can order a baby killed anytime he likes, and Hansi may be sterilized, does solving a single murder mean so very much?
Vera’s fever goes up to thirty-nine degrees near three in the morning. Isaac nurses her all night, putting cold compresses on her forehead, forcing her to drink as much chicken broth as she can hold down, and when she finally finds sleep near dawn he prays for her to remain on the near bank of the River Sambation and not cross over to the Other Side.
Vera learns what the doctors have stolen from her
Before school the next morning, Friday, I tell my parents I’m beginning private singing lessons with Fräulein Schumann that afternoon. I phone her from Isaac’s apartment after school and, on my third try, find her in. I beg her to confirm my lie about lessons if my parents call.
“But what’s happened, Sophie?” she asks in a concerned voice. “Someone I know has been wounded badly by the Nazis,” I reply. “But don’t tell anyone.”
Have I risked telling her the truth because I’m so disoriented by what’s happened?
“Be careful,” Fräulein Schumann says, and as if she can read my mind, she adds, “I’ll be very angry at you if you ever decide to leave the chorus.”
After I hang up, I realize for the first time that Vera and Isaac will end up murdered if they stay in Germany; a final confrontation is inevitable.
Isaac is praying silently with his eyes closed when I go back to his bedroom, tilting from side to side like a tower about to come crashing down. His lips sculpt his Hebrew words. His shirt is dripping with sweat. I order him to take a bath and go to sleep in the guest room, but he replies in a stubborn voice, “No, I must keep praying.”
“I’ll take over for you,” I tell him.
“But you don’t know the right prayers!”
“Then teach me.”
He writes out Hebrew prayers for me in transliterated German. I repeat them for him, and when he’s satisfied that my pronunciation won’t oblige the Lord to cover his ears in horror, he raises his hand as if to say something important, then simply rubs his eyes. “I can’t remember what I wanted to tell you,” he says, sighing.
“That’s God’s way of letting you know you need to take a bath and g
o to bed.” When he starts to protest, I raise my hand threateningly. “You don’t want to make the Lord angry!”
A surprise: he likes being given orders by a girl, at least when he’s exhausted. He stands up and shuffles off as if his legs are bound together by fetters. He knows I’m watching, because he turns around, flaps both hands at me, and says, “Go to Vera!”
I find the giant asleep, breathing fitfully. I wipe her sweaty face with a cool towel. And I pray. When I look in on Isaac in the bathroom, he’s not there. And his laundered shirts and socks are still hanging like frayed bats over the shower rod. I find him sitting on the end of the bed in his guest room, his eyes closed, his lips moving silently over ancient Hebrew words.
I take his shoes off, which makes him yawn, but he still doesn’t open his eyes.
“Unbuckle your belt and undo the buttons on your pants,” I say, and he does so.
I pull them off, spilling some Pfennige along the way. I lay the trousers and his coins on the purple velvet chair in the corner of the room that he calls the Pope’s Throne.
“Now the shirt.”
I take his shirt from him and drape it across the back of the Pope’s Throne. His chest is a swirl of gray hairs, and he stands up with a bowed back. His posture of fragility and the tender blue bruises on his shoulders and hips make me want to hug him.
His body sags from age, but that’s just as it should be for a man who has journeyed to far off worlds inside his head for the last sixty years.
“Sophele, turn the other way while I take off my underwear. Or better still, go back to Vera.”
“I’m not a kid anymore. I’ve seen what you have before.”
“I realize that, but a little privacy would be nice.”
After I turn around, his underwear flies past me and lands on the parquet, two feet short of the Pope’s Throne.
“No aim,” he says disgustedly.
I face him as he’s crawling into bed. Just in time; his penis hangs down nicely out of a nest of soft gray hair. Darker and more slender than Tonio’s. With a purplish head free of foreskin. My first Jewish penis, I think. I find it curious and handsome, and just the right shape for a hand …
With a moan, he lies down, then heaves a sigh of gratitude and pulls the sheet up his waist. I go to him.
“Sophele, I wouldn’t know what to do without you,” he says in a hoarse voice, reaching out with a grateful, straining hand, which I take. His face is so trusting of me, his eyes so dark and serious, that I wish I had my sketchbook. He kisses my fingers, one by one, then lets my hand fall on his chest. His heartbeat makes me feel as if there are emotions in him yet to be discovered. And as if our intimacy has changed into something far beyond words.
He closes his eyes as though he finally intends to sleep, which means he should release me. Instead, he turns his cheek to me and asks for a kiss in a whisper.
But I know what I want for us now and press my lips to his. He starts and opens his eyes, which are windows on a worried soul unsure of what is happening to him.
His breathing on my face is warm, and the stillness of the room seems a reflection of my thoughts. For once, I am free of expectations. A gate is opening, and we can either walk through it or forever remain outside.
I reach down under the sheet for his penis, which is warm and growing. He stills my hand and looks at me as if studying my mind. We stare at each other for a long time, and I don’t turn away because I am not frightened, and he is, and I want him to know he can trust me. And that I trust him with my life.
I play with him gently. He holds my head in his hands, presses his lips to mine, and moves his tongue deep inside me, as though searching for what I have never told him. I love the taste of tobacco and wine in his mouth, and the scratching of his whiskers, because it means he is a man of experience and can open me up and show me more of who I am.
We explore each other in the darkness behind our closed eyes, and his chest hairs might be leaves or flowers for how natural their soft tangle feels to my fingers. I compare the warm, world-tested strength of Isaac, and the easy patience in his touch, to Tonio’s urgency and youth. Not better or worse. Different.
Isaac’s nipples stand out as though straining to feel my lips and tongue, and I do not disappoint him. He caresses my hair and moans, which is gratifying, but I have other needs. Sensing I am making a decisive break with the past, I slide down and take him in my mouth. His cock is warm and hard, and he trembles as though he has waited far too long.
I feel the transcendence of darkness and light inside me, both of them mine.
He gasps, and his eyes open wide, which pleases me, because it gives me a chance to reassure him with kisses. You had no idea I would do this for you, did you? That is what I say with my eyes.
“You shouldn’t,” he whispers. “Please …” He grips my arm. “Please, no …”
His protest only makes me swallow him until I am as full of a man as I ever hope to be, and there is no space left for him to argue with me.
His back bows and he grunts. I am breaking down the walls of a palace that has been locked for a decade, all its rooms musty and dark.
I see in his gaze that he knows I am destroying his widowhood. And he doesn’t stop me.
There is so much hope in sex. No one in Germany speaks about that, but I think that’s why the intimacy of touching is so important during a war.
Isaac asks me to lie next to him. We kiss gently, exploring each other’s desire. Then he helps me out of my skirt and blouse as if it’s very serious work. Likely he’s convinced that we’re being watched by God. Tugging me to the end of the bed, he kneels down and laps at me as if the password to Araboth that he has long wanted is in the taste between my legs, and I am moaning from so deep inside me that I don’t know where my voice is coming from. Then, with the insistence of his large warm hands, he turns me over, and I press down on the bed, which seems to have always been waiting to receive me, and I feel myself spreading out like a landscape neither of us has ever seen before.
Is it enough to say I am changed forever as he enters me, and that our trust deepens until it becomes the scents and scope of our bodies? I learn his shadows and hesitancies, and how his voice sounds when he whispers forbidden words in German, words of the earth, von der Erde, as later tells me. And he learns that my fragility and strength have not been destroyed by the Semitic Wall, which is only one of the things I mean to tell him when I climb on top of him and insert him as deep as he can go.
I am sure now that we will never be able to hide from each other again. But he is a Jew and I am an Aryan, and I am not aware yet of all that means.
Afterward, he combs his fingers through my hair and breathes in what he calls the scent of my youth, then kisses my neck, curls into me and goes to sleep like a baby. I stay awake, staring at the ceiling as if it’s as soft as the sky above my beloved city, and at the blue-glass fish hanging from a thin cord as though they’re toys for the child I was, and at the Chagall village and all the other paintings welcoming me to my new home. And all the while, I imagine that Isaac and I are on a boat that’s drifting, its sails made of our bodies.
We look for our desires in all we do, and yet it takes so long to understand what we really want. Meaning is like a delayed echo, and we begin to hear it only many years after we ask our questions.
As Isaac sleeps, I sit with Vera, wearing Isaac’s dressing gown, wanting her to know I have been changed, and that there is still hope for us. I comb her hair with my fingers as if she is my child. And I pray again, but this time for the three of us.
Isaac wakes an hour later and comes into his bedroom, where Vera and I are now having tea. He’s wearing his ragged pajamas. She’s sitting up, underneath a mountain of tissues. She feels a little better. “The gonging in my head is gone,” she tells Isaac.
He feels her forehead with the back of his hand. “Your fever has gone down, too.”
He stands behind me as she talks about her continued symptoms. The on
ly indication of what we’ve done is his hand resting on my shoulder. Once, I look up, and I feel as if I’ve known him since we were both little.
When he and I are alone in his kitchen, boiling water for more tea, I expect him to apologize to me in a timid voice, and to tell me his can never happen again, but instead he holds my cheeks and kisses me hard. When he backs me up against the wall, I spread my legs as far as I can, picturing wings.
Isaac thrusts so relentlessly and brutally that he knocks the breath out of me, and I laugh at the absurdity and goodness of being fucked by an old satyr in his kitchen, with dirty dishes in this sink. He laughs, too. But he doesn’t stop fucking, thank goodness.
Lovers who see the humor in themselves. A good sign.
When we’re done, he eases out of me, and I slump down to the floor like a child, and he joins me, panting and smiling, and I wonder if I am going to survive this fall into the depths of myself.
Back in my own soft bed that night, comforted by my old gray woolen blanket, I listen to the slow, ecstatic singing of Mr Mannheim’s cello. Through such nights I slowly come to learn that I need my independence from men as much as I need their attention.
Late the next morning, Saturday, Papa takes Hansi to the barbershop for a haircut. The rituals of a father and son. And of a mother and daughter, too; Mama wants to take me shopping for a new winter coat at the KaDeWe department store. We agree to go that afternoon because I tell her I’m meeting friends that morning for roller skating.
Isaac has given me his key, and I let myself in. He’s alone in the kitchen having coffee in his pajamas, reading a handwritten letter. Vera is asleep in his bedroom.
“Hello, Sophele,” he says to me, smiling sweetly. He lifts up a newspaper clipping from the table and says, “Some good news for a change.”
Isaac’s cousin Abraham has sent him a Turkish article ferociously criticizing the Nazis. He translates the first few paragraphs for me, then, rubbing his hands together gleefully, adds, “Abraham has heard that the German Ambassador is furious and has complained directly to Ataturk. Do you understand? We’ve got them worried!”
The Seventh Gate Page 33