I call Vera off and on for weeks, but she never answers. Isaac tells me glumly that she won’t talk to him either. The police come to interview him, but they won’t tell him about the circumstances of Heidi’s death. Even with his red-rimmed eyes and heavy, hopeless hand gestures, he is a suspect.
Rolf soon learns that an autopsy has revealed that Heidi had been poisoned with enough tranquilizers to sedate a small army.
“Someone wanted to copy Georg’s murder,” Isaac tells me. “To give us a symbolic message.”
“What message?”
“He’s telling us that he’s prepared to kill us all in the same way. And discarding the body in the lake—it means we are trash to him.” Later, after I’ve made Isaac eat some lunch, he adds that the autopsy also revealed that Heidi’s ovarian tubes had been tied. She’d been sterilized.
“But I overheard her saying that her doctor promised her fertility drugs to get pregnant, and you were giving her teas recommended by Julia.”
“Rolf says he and Heidi were never told about her sterilization. Do you remember her miscarriage? Afterward, Dr Stangl told them that she was hemorrhaging and had to have an emergency operation. That must have been when a surgeon tied her tubes.”
“But why didn’t Dr Stangl inform them? Why give Heidi hope of having a baby?”
Isaac reaches for his pipe and starts to clean the bowl, trying to distract himself. “The Nazis hadn’t yet made their sterilization laws, so what they did was illegal. Besides, even at the best of times, people like Stangl like to be cruel to dwarfs. It keeps them entertained.”
Isaac tells me that the members of The Ring have had a special meeting where they voted not to even telephone one another for at least six months to avoid provoking more murders—and not to get together with one another, even in small groups, for a year. No letters either. I am not to so much as speak the names of Rolf, K-H, Roman, or Marianne. And I am not to visit Vera.
“But Vera needs us now,” I insist.
“Don’t worry, I’ll check up on her. I’ll take her back her sewing machine and give her the special orders for garments I’ve received, then check up on her now and again. Once she gets back to work, she’ll be all right.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I can’t be.” From the way he looks at me, unapologetic, daring me to challenge him, I understand that certainty will not be in our vocabulary for some time.
On Tonio’s next weekend visit in late November, we make good use of his father’s apartment—sex as my refuge, once again. And I adore his slender angularity and polished skin more than ever, maybe because of their contrast to Isaac’s more masculine contours. One change: Tonio seems lonely. I suspect his soldiering isn’t as fulfilling as he hoped. Or maybe his father is angry at him. He drops vague comments about both these possibilities, but I don’t ask. He’ll tell me what he wants to at his own pace. Or he won’t. In any case, sharing his thoughts with me doesn’t much matter, because his loyalty to me is in his lips and hands. If a similar devotion to me is not in his mind, well, at least I’m better prepared now.
And the best way I can help both of us, I sense, is through our physical intimacy.
Is Isaac bothered by his being relegated to the quiet corner of our triangle? When I come to his apartment on Monday afternoon, he says, “On the contrary … You need to have sex with someone your own age.”
I’d question him more about his magnanimous feelings, but he doesn’t give me time. He leads me to the rug in his sitting room and tugs my skirt off. Kneeling before me, he pulls my panties down and buries his head between my legs, working at me so voraciously that I have to laugh. Twisting me around, he has a go at my behind, moistening me, then he lays me on my belly and explores me with his fingers and finally his cock as though he’s searching for a treasure my other lover may have left behind in a place where no one is ever supposed to look. Does it excite him that he can scent another man on me? I hope so.
After our lovemaking, Isaac reads at his desk. As usual, he’s naked, with his legs crossed. It’s a charming pose worthy of Rembrandt, but I grow to feel helpless when he’s hunched over his manuscripts, puffing smoke signals toward the ceiling. It’s as if his true life is in another world—the one in his mind where an angel named Metatron writes down the good deeds that even those of us living by the rules of the Opposite-Compass manage still to make on occasion. I drape a blanket over his shoulders, since such remote lands of the mind may be even colder than Berlin in the autumn, and I leave him with his thoughts. I refuse to be the gravity holding him back.
We talk sometimes about Jewish mysticism when he’s finished with his studies, and when we do it’s with a new urgency. I sense that Isaac needs to hear his own theories spoken aloud. And to see if I understand them—if he is being clear. I have become his mirror.
He performs breathing exercises now, as well, and once while he is in a trance his naked body grows so hot that wisps of vapor rise from his brow. He calls this process tov, from the Hebrew term for light stored away for the righteous in the World to Come. “It keeps me warm on my longer journeys,” he grins. “That and your blankets!”
He also practices what he calls letter permutation—repeating common words aloud with their letters rearranged. When I ask him why, he says, “Are there stars in the sky during the day?”
“Not that we normally see.”
“Exactly. They’re there but we can’t see them because of the blanketing light of the sun. Now, imagine nighttime does not exist, Sophele. Daylight is all we have. We’d have to wait for an eclipse to see the stars. And we’d be astonished by them, though we might also be scared out of our wits! What are all those millions of tiny radiant eyes peering down at us … ? Now, imagine the stars and moon and planets are a form of deeper reality inside ourselves. Letter permutations can create an eclipse inside our mind … can block out the overwhelming light of our thoughts so we can see galaxies of stars … so we can see subtle patterns and constellations. And if we are blessed with grace, we might even see God somewhere inside them.”
Once, I get a quick glimpse of what Isaac might mean. He’s at his desk, reading, and I’m sitting on his bed, my legs crossed, my sketchbook in my lap. The glare of his wall lamp has made his hair shine like polished silver. Is that what moves me beyond myself? While watching the rise and fall of his chest, I feel a constriction of energy in my gut, a knot of sexual need tugging me toward him, but I draw instead. My hand moves fast, and I’m not thinking about what I’m creating. I am the paper giving itself to me and the zigzagging bee-movements of my hand, and even the light bouncing ecstatically off Isaac’s hair and everything else around me, all pulsing, breathing with existence.
The border between inside and outside has dropped away.
When I’m done with my sketch, I see that I have not drawn Isaac at all; the face seems like a stranger’s at first, but then I realize it’s Hansi’s—a Hansi who has grown up, as he might look fifty years into his future.
Unbeknownst to Isaac, Vera and I sometimes speak on the phone over the next few months. On a couple of occasions, we risk meeting in a foul-smelling beer hall for theatergoers and gay men just off the KuDamm. She always tells me she’s doing well, and she tries to be amusing, but I can see in her eyes she’s still grieving for her baby. Once, just after New Year’s celebrations, I call her up and tell her to meet me at the entrance to the Berlin Cathedral in the early evening. “We’ll light candles for your child,” I tell her. “And for all the other babies that were murdered last year.”
I’d suggest we go to visit her child’s grave, but it has none, of course.
Vera thinks religion is absurd and dangerous, so she makes a counter-proposal and I meet her near the Tiergarten instead. And then we walk through the park, arm in arm, letting the bare, merciless silence of winter make us feel as if we are alone on the earth.
The patterns of my life continue largely unperturbed for the next five months, until the end of May 1935.
I’ll be eighteen in three and a half months and am finishing my second-to-last year of school. Hansi is almost twelve. Still not a word out of him, but Dr Hassgall is teaching him sign language for the deaf, and I pick up words here and there: hungry, tired, itchy, squirrel, jigsaw puzzle. The essentials.
“How do you say, ‘Peel faster or I’ll drown you in your fish tank?’” I ask my brother one afternoon.
He laughs. A victory! Especially since we can have something like a normal conversation again. Not that he tells me anything about the dramas taking place in the Hansi Universe, but at least I can ask if he wants to go roller skating and he can signal, Yes, and can we get some ice cream, too? His new love affair is with chocolate ice cream. He’d bathe in it if he could. An inheritance from Papa, which seems promising, because if my father sees that he and his son are alike, maybe he won’t continue to find the boy an embarrassment.
Hansi is more confident and secure than ever before, and he gives me a real smile when I hug him and even studies the drawings I do of him. He is growing up. And he’s five feet tall now, only an inch shorter than Mama, and four inches shorter than me. Now he can subtract, add, multiply, and divide, and he can read quite well, though he pushes away the books I suggest. When I ask him why, he tugs at imaginary whiskers on his upper lip in order to sign, “Too many cats.” I don’t know what that means but I figure it has to do with not wanting a meddling sister.
Our fish-tank residents Fred and Ginger have been replaced by Groucho and Harpo. My choice of names, and Papa and Mama don’t forbid it. Maybe they’ve forgotten the Marx Brothers are Jewish. The weird thing is that Groucho always tries to munch on Harpo’s fins. Cannibalism Among Prussian Goldfish. The title I imagine for Hansi’s doctoral thesis.
Tonio has become happier with his life as a soldier—or more resigned. And he, too, is growing up. At least physically. He’s five foot nine inches tall now and needs to shave every day, though sometimes I ask him not to so I can feel his stubble against my cheek when he is on top of me. He has become more generous in his lovemaking, as well, as if he has discovered—a revelation!—that I have needs that don’t always match his. One troubling sign: he has become ashamed of his mother’s imperfect German and refuses to speak Russian any more. “Talk German or don’t talk at all!” he once snapped at her in my presence, and the way she looked at him—as if she feared her own son—raised gooseflesh on my arms and neck.
Hansi at the Third Gate, age 13
He and I hardly go to movies anymore. Hollywood has lost most of its glamour, and I no longer even fantasize about being a star. We go skating in winter and take long hikes through the Grünewald and the Spandauer State Forest in summer. Hansi tags along.
In early June, I answer Isaac’s phone while he’s shaving and speak to Andre Baldwin for the first time. “I’m a friend of Isaac’s,” he says with a Czech accent. When I identify myself, he says eagerly, “Isaac has told me a lot about you. Don’t worry, all good!”
Isaac comes to the phone and tells Mr Baldwin he can’t talk now. Because one cheek is still under a mask of shaving foam or because I’m there?
“What’s Mr Baldwin do for a living?” I ask when he hangs up.
“He acts as a front for my business, so non-Jews will buy from me. Which is illegal,” he notes, walking back to the bathroom, “so just forget you ever heard his name.”
Such a schemer Isaac is. And if I knew my films of Conrad Veidt better than I think I do, I might even guess that there’s more to his schemes than he’s telling me.
I also get a first photograph from Rini at this time. At least, I assume it’s from her. A black-and-white still will come from someone, if not her, once every few months all the way up until the summer of 1938. Never with any accompanying note.
The first is an autographed picture of Paul Wegener, the great silent movie star. He’s dressed as The Golem, the legendary man of clay given life by Rabbi Lowe in order to do battle for the Jews of medieval Prague. Wegener has a muddy face, a helmet of wooden-looking hair, and a puffed-out chest. And a star around his chest. He looks like he hasn’t bathed in twenty years. Not very Jewish, if you ask me …
It’s reassuring to have even the distant edges of Rini’s friendship back, and I begin sending her cigarette cards of stars, also without notes. I hope that—unlike me—she hasn’t lost her delight in Hollywood; a young woman like her, whose every gesture is graceful, could really end up in the movies.
I still go to Young Maiden choir practice every Thursday, though I skip our meetings and athletics training on Tuesdays. How many times can a girl hurl a javelin without concluding that it’s not an entirely useful skill? Maria, our group leader, has warned me recently that if I continue trying to set a record for unexcused absences, I will risk expulsion.
I have my heart set on going to university at the Lehranstalt des Kunstgewerbemuseums, the School of Applied Arts, but my parents find that unrealistic. A woman artist in Germany? “Like a goldfish writing poetry” was how I overheard Papa describing my goal to Mama, since everyone in my family has become an expert at fish analogies by now. My father wants me to get a good, solid engineering or science degree that can be of use to the Volk, and my mother—though she hasn’t said so—wants me to marry Tonio and have at least three babies. If I looked into my crystal ball, I’d say there is great disappointment ahead for either them or me.
In mid-June, my mother wakes up feeling queasy. She vomits blood into the kitchen sink. Papa is already out and Hansi is still asleep, and she swears me to silence.
“Just tell me if you’ve thrown up blood before,” I plead with her.
“Sophie, forget it. It’s not important.”
Over the next month, Mama’s abdominal pain becomes so bad that she cries out in her sleep, and she’s unable to keep even crackers down. The hollows deepen in her face as if she is caving in, and her hair becomes as dry as hay. One day, she calls me into her bedroom and asks me to touch the spot in her belly where the pain is centered.
Why doesn’t she ask her husband to do this? That question occurs to me only days later.
Mama is so thin now that her hips jut out like shovels, and her face is skeletal and gray. It’s terrifying—like seeing a demon replacing her. When I touch the spot that hurts her, a lump about the size of a plum meets my fingertip and makes me gasp.
“Mama, you’ve got to see your doctor. It’s big.”
“Oh, Sophie …” Her face peels open and, before I know it, she’s weeping in my arms. Years of resentment vanish as she shakes. I learn that the magic cure for grudges is despair—not that I forget my grievances, but glimpsing a mother’s gravestone on the horizon is the greatest wind in the world, and it blows all the dry, resentful leaves in my heart far away. At least for the moment.
I call Papa at work, and he phones Dr Nohel. Two days later, Mama is admitted to the hospital. She’s operated on the very next morning. Afterward, the surgeon tells us that her tumor has been removed, but the cancer has spread to her liver, which is misshapen. He uses the word missgestaltet. I’ll never forget because Vera says that about her own face. Her lungs are affected, too. She must have been feeling symptoms for at least six months.
I don’t know if Papa ever asks her about why she never told us, because when she comes home from the hospital they keep their door closed and talk in hushed voices. Papa orders me not to bother her in a stern voice, but that hardly seems enough reason to keep quiet.
“You were ill for a long time, weren’t you?” I ask Mama the moment we have some time alone.
“How was I to know that it was something serious?” she replies as if she really means it. She’s sitting up on her bed, the floral lacquer tray she loves on her lap. I’ve just brought her lunch: two hard-boiled eggs that I’ve cut very thin, and a slice of pumpernickel. Her appetite is back, and she looks almost like herself, except for her hollow eyes, which have lost their shine. Dull jade sitting inside heavy crescents of yellowish skin.
She
never leaves her bedroom. I wake at six every morning to get the oven started and make her lunch, then head out to take Hansi to school. I don’t mind the extra duties; I’m grateful for being exhausted and nervous all the time because it’s proof that I am making up for all the time I spent disliking my mother. I also become her hairdresser, and I tape two magazine pictures of Claudette Colbert to the bathroom wall to match them to my mother’s bangs from every angle. After Mama looks between Claudette and her reflection in the mirror, she smiles warmly. “I should have asked you to cut my hair all along,” she confesses, kissing me on the cheek.
She calls me into her room early one morning and hands me a gold brooch studded with fourteen tiny amethysts in the shape of a rose. I count them as she talks to me, as if each one is a step down into a lightless dungeon. “This brooch was given to me by my mother,” she says cautiously, as if she wants me to remember every word, “and now I want to give it to you.” Which means she is going to die, so I refuse her present, screaming that it’s ugly and she can throw it into the Spree for all I care. I run out.
Wandering in hopeless circles around the neighborhood, I realize that the life I had may be over. Before bed, Mama shuffles into my room, drops down beside me, and presses her lips to my brow. When she asks me why I fled from her, I reply, “Mama, don’t talk, just hold me.”
And she does. For a long time. Till we sense death receding and know that the present moment is only made of life. We laugh together about being so silly and emotional.
A few days later, Papa takes Hansi into his bedroom to talk to him seriously about Mama’s prognosis. The boy looks eager and happy when he emerges, and he asks me in sign language if I want to feed Groucho and Harpo with him.
The Seventh Gate Page 35