The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  It’s good to see him so happy. I drop down next to him, steal a sip from his cup, and play with him under the table, which makes his eyes flutter closed. Sighing as if he’s in pain, he lifts my hand away. “I’d be exhausted all day, and Vera needs my help.” He gives me a pecking kiss.

  I make potato and carrot soup for Isaac and Vera’s lunch. She trudges in to see me. Her face is the color of cigar ash, and her sunken eyes are red from crying. She whines to me that Isaac won’t let her go back to her apartment as though trying to get a bullying older brother in trouble. He’s seated at the table, reading one of his manuscripts by Berekiah Zarco.

  “Maybe he’s right and you shouldn’t be alone at the moment,” I tell her.

  She frowns at me as if I’m a stain on the floor and shuffles back to bed.

  Isaac pats my arm. “She confessed last night that she thinks of killing herself,” he whispers. He picks up his pipe, then lets it fall, helpless.

  I try to get Vera to talk to me, but she turns away whenever she hears my footsteps. As I’m making ready to go, Roman brings over stewed tomatoes he’s just made. She won’t talk to him either. That’s when I have an idea and shoo away the two men.

  I ease down onto her bed. “Vera, I don’t know how, but I think Julia and someone she was working with turned you in to the Gestapo. We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to find out who. So you’ve got to get better as soon as you can.”

  “You don’t know anything,” she moans, as if I’ve been plaguing her for weeks with silly theories. She folds the crook of her arm over her eyes. “Go away,” she says roughly.

  I don’t leave, and she decides to sits up. As I help her, she grabs my wrist as if to keep me from falling. “I want you to stay far away from all this cloak and dagger work,” she tells me gravely.

  “But I’m already involved. And besides, detective work takes my mind off other matters.”

  “Heidi and Rolf will do all the investigating necessary.”

  “Why them?”

  “Because they’re adults,” she says, as if that’s obvious. “And they know all the people in The Ring. That’s important, because whoever turned me in wasn’t Julia. She’s been in Istanbul for weeks.”

  “Istanbul?”

  “Isaac sent her there—to his relatives. Just before I was arrested and …”

  “Why didn’t he tell me?” I ask angrily.

  “Listen, Sophele, there are some things you need to know or you’ll never understand Isaac or me, or what’s really going on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Isaac was worried about you taking too many risks, so we didn’t tell you the whole truth. Georg wasn’t an innocent victim. He was betraying us. And that’s why something had to be done about him.”

  “I don’t understand. You said that Georg was head of The Ring.”

  “Yes, but we ended up realizing he got himself elected so he could betray us more completely. He was clever … and he was undermining our work every chance he got. We didn’t suspect until it was too late. He even staged his shooting in Savigny Platz.”

  “So that was how he managed to stay so calm. But … but why would he become a Nazi?” I ask.

  “For the same reason as your father.”

  “And what about Julia?”

  “You were right about her. Do you remember when Isaac went to Potsdam … that time he had you water his pelargoniums? Some of us, including Julia, were meeting to decide what to do about Georg. You see, we’d learned that he was the one who’d gotten Raffi in trouble for bribing Nazis.” She shakes her head sadly. “We warned Raffi against coming back from Egypt, but he thought the National Socialists would regard him as insignificant after their stunning success in the elections. Besides, he’d stopped making bribes. And once he’d destroyed those silly hieroglyphics he kept, there was no proof against him.” She slams her arm down against the mattress. “What idiots we were! We didn’t realize that no proof was necessary to send a man to a concentration camp.”

  A burst of fury makes me jump up. “You had me working under the wrong impression for so long! All the times I sneaked out so I could try to help … !”

  “At first, we didn’t know if we could trust you. Then your father switched sides and it seemed unwise to tell you the truth, especially after Georg was murdered and Raffi arrested. Sophele,” she says gently, reaching up for my hand, “I can’t talk with you if you’re standing.”

  “You’d better, because I’m not sitting with you!” To punish her for lying, I want to withhold my love; proof, I suppose, that I’ve still much growing up to do …

  Vera nods her understanding. “You think that because you’re a good person and are on our side that you have a right to know everything that goes on with us—with me and Isaac and the people you love. Under normal circumstances, that might be true. We could always be honest with each other.” She spreads her fingers in front of her face. “But Germany has become Carnival all year long … a time of masks,” she whispers, “when we have to keep ourselves hidden. You can’t know everything about me or Isaac. Do you understand?”

  “No,” I reply like a hurt little girl.

  Vera sits further up and fixes a pillow behind her head. “Listen, Georg’s death … it was a total shock to us because we hadn’t reached any consensus about killing him. And he’d been a good friend. At least, we thought he was. Julia decided to poison him on her own. When I discovered his body, I was sure that brownshirts had killed him. We figured that Georg had tried to defy whoever was paying him … that they’d asked him to provide incriminating evidence against me or Isaac, and he’d refused. I don’t believe he’d have betrayed the two of us.” She shrugs sadly. “Though … though maybe I only want to believe that. One other thing … Before Raffi’s last trip to Egypt, he made Isaac and me promise to leave you out of our plans.” Vera gives an odd little laugh, charmed and saddened, I’d guess, by a memory of him. “Raffi was devoted to you. And when he died … Let’s just say that we didn’t want to break our word to a dead man unless we had to.”

  Her respect for Raffi calms me. “Vera, if Julia was on your side the whole time, and if she’s still your friend, then she’d never have told the police to go to 18 Tieckstraße to find the labor leader I invented. But the Gestapo were there! She must have told them.”

  “No, you were being followed.”

  “By whom?”

  “Georg was not working alone to undermine our projects. Someone was helping him. And whoever it was, you must have raised his suspicions by buying books for Isaac. My guess is that you’ve been followed on and off for months. And you were trailed from Julia’s shop to your home, then to Tieckstraße.” She takes a long sip of water. “Except there’s a problem … We still can’t figure out how whoever was following you knew it was Number 18, since you told Isaac you didn’t go into the apartment or even stand in front of the building.”

  “I know how,” I confess. “I’d been going there for months. To be with Tonio. It’s an apartment his father uses. So when I walked to Tieckstraße, whoever was helping Georg must have known immediately that what I’d told Julia had to do with Number 18. He must have called the Gestapo. What I don’t get is how would he have known that I’d told her something that the Gestapo would find worth their while?”

  She looks away for a time, then eyes me as if she’s had a sinister revelation. “You know, it’s just possible that it wasn’t someone who worked with Georg who followed you. Tonio might have tracked you to Tieckstraße, then called the police. That would also explain how they knew it was Number 18.”

  “But he didn’t hear a word I said to Julia! I’m sure of it.”

  “He knew you were up to something sneaky, and he knows where your sympathies lie.”

  “But he wouldn’t betray me,” I announce, which makes Vera cringe; after all, we both know he has already betrayed me once, so why not again? “I’ll have to confront him,” I tell her.

  “No! We don’t w
ant him to know that we suspect him. It’s safer and more useful to us if he thinks you still trust him. That could work to our advantage later.”

  “If you say so,” I reply, but my mind is already working out a way to trap him. Vera knows me by now and says pleadingly, “Just for once, Sophele, do as I say!”

  “All right, but I’m still confused about something. If Julia wasn’t the traitor in your group, then why did Isaac send her away?”

  “Whoever followed you to Tieckstraße saw you talking with her in her shop. He must have told the Gestapo that Julia was willing to help you do something suspect. Not a good thing. And if you were able to figure out that she’d killed Georg, then sooner or later the Gestapo would, too. Before she got her one-way ticket to Dachau, we thought it best for her to go.”

  “So the Gestapo must know now I’m working against them, too.”

  “Absolutely! Which is why you have to be more careful than you’ve ever been before. They could come for you or Isaac or me at any moment if we slip up. So you won’t be buying books for a while. You will be a perfect Young Maiden.” She tugs on the end of my hair. “You can start by making some goddamn braids!”

  We laugh a little too freely—the fear of being sent to a camp is playing havoc with our emotions. And guilt soon creeps up on me. “It’s my fault Julia had to leave,” I observe.

  “Listen closely,” Vera says solemnly. “The Nazis are to blame for all these complications. And she isn’t angry at you. Isaac’s cousins in Istanbul will treat her and Martin well. She’ll find good work. And it’s much safer for Martin there. Both of them will come back when they can.”

  “Safer?”

  “One day soon, the Nazis are going to toss people like Martin and me overboard.”

  “Vera, you’re breaking your word to Raffi by telling me all this. Why are you doing it?”

  “Because I need you to let Rolf and Heidi try to find out who was Georg’s accomplice by themselves.”

  “But dwarfs are … are conspicuous. What can they …”

  “They just need to ask the right questions,” she interrupts impatiently. “Nothing more than that. And I refuse to spend my days worrying about you.” She slides back down under the covers and gives me a reassuring smile. “And now let me die here alone of whatever I’ve caught. Pass the tissues. I need to blow my nose.”

  “You’re hardly dying,” I say, handing her the packet.

  “Sophele, people like me, with gigantism … I want you to keep what I’m going to tell you to yourself. We grow too big for our hearts. They end up bursting and we drown in our own blood.” She honks into her tissue, then studies the gook that’s come out as if it’s fascinating.

  My mouth has gone dry, and I sense I’ve just started down a pathway that can only end in grief, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “You know,” she continues, “I think my lungs are coming out, which given all my smoking may be for the best. In any case, this illness … it’s woken me up to what can happen at any time. Now,” she says, slapping my hand, “if you tell anyone I told you this I’ll knock you senseless! The last thing I want is sympathy from an alter kacker, two dwarfs, and a blind women’s shoe salesman.”

  “Vera, please,” I moan. “Stop trying to be funny. You’re scaring me.”

  “Anyway, maybe I’ll defy the odds and outlive you all.” She makes paddling motions with her arms. “I’ll swim to the other shore of this dark ocean.”

  I gaze off, trying to imagine her death, but I can’t visualize a world without her. “You need to eat something,” I tell her gently. “I’ve got soup on the stove.”

  I start to stand, but she says pleadingly, “Don’t go. The sadness … it comes in waves.” We sit in silence, staring at each other. I don’t know what she sees, but I see the most courageous woman I’ve ever met, a glorious being trapped behind a face that’s been twisted and crushed by bad luck, with no way to break out except through her dreams.

  “It was wrong, wasn’t it?” she asks in a little girl’s voice, full of doubt. When she looks up, her eyes are so pained that I reach for her hand. “What they did to me—cutting my baby out and making sure I’d never have another. That was wrong. Even if I’m ugly. Even if I’m someone erbkrank?”

  “Of course it was.” When I embrace her, she tucks her head below my arm and starts to cry. Then, by a dark alchemy of the heart that I hope to never experience, her tears become dry howls—as though from an animal whose baby is dying. My bones go cold, my hair stands on end; it’s a sound that could only come out of a person in hell. If our world were a place of justice, her wails would rescue her unborn child from the underworld, but the world is hardly that, and Vera will always now be barren and deformed. That truth, hitting her with the force of the ocean she would like to cross into old age, makes her begin to tremble.

  “I’m here with you,” I tell her. “And I won’t go no matter what.”

  Isaac and Roman rush in. Is the terror in their faces a reflection of my own?

  I hold Vera as tight as I can, just as Isaac wanted to hold the arm of the Nazi boy who’d come to take her away. And I think, The truth is, we’re losing this war.

  It’s not until Monday morning that I have a chance to see Isaac and Vera again, but when I knock at his door, no one answers. From what I find out later, Isaac left for his factory at dawn. Vera assured him she would stay in his apartment and that she could cope alone.

  But early that afternoon, she leaves. Isaac panics when he comes home. Vera has vanished, and although she’s taken both her suitcases, she has left her sewing machine behind, which must mean that not even her talent means anything to her any more. He takes a taxi to her apartment but she won’t let him in and shouts at him to go away.

  He tells me all of this when I visit him on Tuesday afternoon, adding, “With Vera, tsuris schläff nie.” Trouble never sleeps.

  He’s worried that she will take her own life, and so am I. We talk for a long time about her—chains of words linked by desperation. Maybe in consequence we make love as though we are trying to burrow so far down into each other that we’ll never have to come back up. Afterward, he says sadly, “You’re going to ruin everything, Sophele.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your gravity is strong. I may not ever be able to break free from you. Even in prayer.”

  At the time, I presume that his tears mean that he has just discovered that he has fallen in love with me—and fears that I will break his heart. “If you’re trapped,” I say, kissing his cheek, “then so am I.” I tell him I love him for the first time, which makes me tense, as if I should not have admitted it aloud. Our spell might break …

  Later, he sits at his desk, naked, his legs crossed and shoulders hunched, and reads, looking harder than ever for an entrance to the Seventh Gate in Berekiah Zarco’s writings. When I interrupt him to bring him some tea, he talks to me of his search as though it’s a race against time. When I ask him why, he replies, “The stained-glass window of our world has just begun to break apart. And I now believe the damage may spread faster than I ever thought possible.”

  I call Vera that evening from Isaac’s flat, and early the next morning, too, but she won’t pick up the phone. I picture her lying in a pool of blood; I somehow know that if she were to end her life, she’d stick a gun up to her jutting forehead and pull the trigger.

  I visit Isaac again on Wednesday, in the late afternoon. He looks as if he hasn’t slept, and the musty scent of distress on him is overpowering.

  Filled with dread, I ask, “Is it Vera? Is she dead?”

  “No. But Heidi hasn’t come home.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rolf says she hasn’t been home for the last two days. He hasn’t seen her since Monday morning, when he left for work.”

  “Did he know her plans for that day?”

  “She was going to do some food shopping, and then make a special meal for Vera’s lunch—to try to coax her to join the world again.” He
rubs his eyes, saying, “Oh God, this is too much,” then walks into the kitchen without waiting for me.

  “And did Heidi visit Vera before she disappeared?” I ask, following him.

  He turns on the tap in his sink and splashes his face. When I hand him a dishtowel, he dries himself and replies, “Vera told Rolf that she turned Heidi away from my apartment without opening the door. She has no idea where Heidi went after that.”

  “Vera asked her and Rolf to do some investigating for her, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Have you learned anything more about who has been betraying you … who might have been working with Georg?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Do we know what time Heidi went to see Vera?”

  “Around noon.”

  “Then I’ll just have to cut school tomorrow and see what I can find out.”

  But my efforts the next day prove pointless. The problem is that a three-foot-high, thirty-eight-year-old dwarf in a winter coat looks like a child from a distance. The neighborhood shopkeepers don’t recall having seen her. So the trail ends at eleven in the morning on the previous Monday, when Heidi purchased onions, beets, tomatoes, and a slice of Black Forest ham at a grocery near her home.

  She turns up three days later. A fisherman spots her compact body on the muddy bank of the Rummelsburger See, beyond the eastern outskirts of the city. She is putrid from exposure to the lake water and air. A clump of her hair comes off in his hand. Blue paint smudges are faintly visible on her face.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When I find out about Heidi’s death, I cry only a little while. Maybe I’m getting used to vultures wheeling in the sky high above my head. Germany’s new national bird. Or maybe I simply can’t believe she is gone.

  Did the blue smudges on her face once form swastikas?

  Late one evening, after Papa and Mama are snoring away, I try to draw her from memory but my likeness is pathetic and I rip my paper to shreds. Like any good Young Maiden who can’t get enough air into her lungs, I ought to simply take a luminal or two, then slip under my covers and join the rest of Germany in slumber-land. But I won’t drug myself any longer, especially now that Isaac and I are together. So I crawl into bed behind my brother and rest my hand atop his head. I listen to the cars and other night noises of the city as if Berlin will protect me if all else fails.