What family madness? This is news to me. And good news, too, since maybe my aunts will keep away from me forever.
The life I imagined for myself slides away from me after that, as if it’s a message carried out to sea. I do our food shopping and cook every night, and I quit the Young Maidens without attending a final choir practice. Fräulein Schumann never calls, which surprises me.
Now, so many years later, I’m astonished that I didn’t resent having to make this sacrifice. Without being aware of it, I must have spent those months after Mama’s death in a state of dissipated shock, doing my best to simply keep walking.
Papa seems to react to Mama’s death much like a Rilke poem, slowly, subtly, and also in surprising ways, though he would dismiss my comparison to verse with a derisive snort. He takes a week off after the funeral and goes around the house quietly, as if walking on tiptoe. He closes his eyes all the time, and sometimes his lashes squeeze out tears, which makes me sit with him and rub the back of his hand as if I’m polishing our grief. He takes his time when he eats supper but says little to us, as though he’s a condemned man living out his sentence. He’s aged, too—I’m aware now that the hair on his temples and over his ears has grayed. He helps me wash the dishes, mostly so we can talk about my studies, which have not gone well since Mama’s illness began. He’s worried I may fail all my classes, but for better or worse, I’ll do what I have to do to pass.
He’s good with Hansi, too, and does jigsaw puzzles with the boy even first thing in the morning. We don’t talk about Mama. I don’t bring her up because I sense that whatever I might say would only make him feel worse, and he must be thinking the same about me.
Papa becomes the man he was for a time, but when he goes back to work, his sudden absence is like a second death to me. I know it’s unfair, but I want him waiting for me when I get home from classes, and Hansi does too. For a time, the boy goes on strike the only way he knows how, by refusing to go to school. Papa pleads with him and, when that has no effect, yells at him so cruelly—calling him an embarrassment to his face for the first time—that Hansi bursts into tears and starts scraping at his neck with his fingernails. Is his frenzied swiping a symptom of his realization that the red-faced bully screaming at him is all he’s got left? Dr Hassgall comes over the next morning. God knows what magic powder that man keeps in the pockets of his tweed coat, but Hansi goes back to school with him.
As for Tonio, he’s particularly good with Hansi during our period of grief. When he’s on leave, the three of us go for long walks down by the Spree. We bring stale bread along so we can feed the ducks and geese.
Over the next few months, Papa distances himself progressively from Hansi and me. When he doesn’t think I’m watching, he looks at the boy as if he’s an intruder, and he flees to his bedroom after supper. Our father never sits with us to read his newspaper or listen to the radio. I want to be alone … Garbo’s famous line, but now it could be Papa’s. Could he be sobbing into one of Mama’s blouses, breathing in the lost scent of her like I sometimes do?
Only now do I realize that Mama—and not my father—was the center of our family.
Then the next phase of his flight from us begins: Papa leaves for work every day before Hansi and I are awake. Maybe we’re too painful a reminder of our mother. Or maybe he knows he needs to earn a living for our family and has to get on with his life despite his grief. That doesn’t occur to me at the time, but it seems an obvious explanation now.
At times, he becomes affectionate again and takes us out to supper. Afterward, he buys Hansi all the chocolate ice cream he can eat. Isaac says that I need to give Papa time. “The death of a wife is a road that has no end.”
True for the death of a mother, too: I cry tears enough to fill the giant hole inside me, but it never gets filled.
Gurka and her milkmaid friends whisper and snicker about how boyish I look whenever I pass. Their amused stares open old wounds, but I’ve already left school behind in my mind. I take one or two mornings off each week after Mama dies and discover that life is much easier when I have half the day free.
When I tell Isaac I’m quitting, he takes out his wallet and replies, “I’ve been expecting this. I know all rational arguments will fail with you, so I’ll pay you to stay in school.”
“How much?” I ask, laughing.
“However much it takes.” He spreads out a fan of Reichsmark.
“I don’t want money, I want affection.”
“Deal!” he says, opening his arms.
So it is I am bribed back into those dreadful classrooms, with curses against the Jews carved into the desks and “Heil Hitlers” in our teachers’ greetings, and exams on racial characteristics. What I remember most from my second- to-last year is our German professor, Dr Hefter, informing us in a proud voice that German is superior to English and French because even Negroes can speak those other languages. It’s then—for the first time in ages—that I raise my hand to speak.
“Yes, Sophie?” Dr Hefter asks, astonished that I want to participate. Such an innocent smile he has. It’s almost a shame to betray his pleasure in inviting me to talk.
“Seeing as how Dr Goebbels can speak German reasonably well,” I tell him, “I think we can put aside your argument that it’s a language for superior men.”
Hushed, pressure-filled silence fills the classroom around me and Dr Hefter jerks his head back as if I’ve whacked him. In his poodle-brown eyes, I can see his tiny mind racing around in circles, trying to find an explanation for this dangerous effrontery. Seizing the only one his faulty nose can sniff out, he grins. “Sophie has made a joke, but I must tell you, young lady, that …”
“It’s no joke,” I interrupt. “Anyone with eyes can see that Dr Goebbels is of inferior breeding, and yet he can speak German with reasonable accuracy. Does he speak even broken English or French? I doubt it. If he did, then he wouldn’t be a minister in this government because he’d be too cultured for the National Socialists.”
Dr Hefter coughs to cover his discomfort, then goes to his desk, and picks up the play by Schiller we’re to begin today: William Tell. “Please open to page one,” he tells the class.
And we do open our books. And no one ever says another word about my blasphemy, though Dr Hildebrandt, our headmaster, gives me a stern lecture on proper behavior the next morning. He ends by slapping his metal ruler into his desk so loud that I jump.
“Consider yourself just a single infraction from expulsion, young lady!”
That I manage to get through the school year without being expelled is a testament to my patience, though it is not often a quality I associate with my younger self. And it is good to have the summer free—for my Jewish studies with Isaac and long walks in Berlin’s parks with Tonio and Hansi. But these months of graceful ease end all too soon. Just after the start of my final year, on the 15th of September, our government passes two new laws designed to keep the vermin off the main deck of the refurbished ship we’re sailing on. The “Reich Citizenship Law” strips Jews of their German nationality and their right to vote, as well as to hold public office; and my favorite, the Teutonically pompous “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” forbids Jews from marrying “Germans” or even having sexual relations with one.
These enactments will be remembered in years to come as the Nuremberg Laws. But whatever their name, Isaac and I are now outlaws. And abracadabra … he is stateless. Our orgasms have now become evidence proving our guilt, and we risk either imprisonment or hard labor, according to the new law.
“I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer hard labor, since I’m already used to that,” I tell Isaac, laughing. I’ve just raced up to his apartment, and I’m giddy with the news that I’ll be fighting on the front lines every time we dive under his down comforter.
“It’s not the least bit funny,” he replies, annoyed, pouring me a cup of coffee since he says I need sobering up. “The Nazis want to change our instincts about what is na
tural.”
“But no one, not even the most ignorant peasant in the Black Forest, could really believe that you can change who is a German from one moment to the next. Declaring that you’re not a citizen is like declaring that an oak tree isn’t a tree. My God, you’ve been in the army—you’re more German than my father!”
“Sophele, you want our people to behave rationally, but they never have and never will. And this is a very bad sign.” He shakes his head morosely.
“A sign of what?”
“In 1449, the Spanish monarchy passed laws that stated that the Jews had tainted blood. As a consequence, we became defined not by our religion, but by our impure nature. Converting a Jew to Christianity would not take away that impurity, because our religion meant nothing. It was only our blood that counted. So the only way to prevent us from infecting those with Spanish blood was to kill us, and the Inquisition set up by the Church did just that! Then the Portuguese copied them. For hundreds of years they hunted us down. You see? The Church would have tortured and killed Berekiah Zarco and the rest of my ancestors if they hadn’t escaped to Istanbul.” He ends his sentence on a sharp intake of breath and doesn’t continue.
“What is it?” I ask
“I think that Berekiah has been trying to tell me that the killing is about to return, and that this time it will be worse, but I didn’t want to believe it.” He gives me a penetrating look.
“Sophele, these laws are a prerequisite to legislating murder.”
I think Isaac is wrong to be so worried until the next day at school. Dr Habermann, our philosophy teacher, has written the new rules about who is a Jew on the board, from which I learn that a Jew is anyone with at least three grandparents who are Jewish, or anyone who has two Jewish grandparents if he or she was a member of the Jewish religious community when the new law was passed, or joined the community later, or was married to a Jewish person, or … I don’t read to the end, because all these clauses are absurd; we are all aware that a Jew is anyone who practices Judaism, just as we know that Jews have been German citizens for as long as there has been a Germany, but all the other students copy down every convoluted word in their notebooks as if they’re sleepwalking through life. And so it is that we come to accept that an oak tree is no longer a tree. And if Hitler decides tomorrow that gravity no longer exists, will we fly up into the air?
On his next weekend off, Tonio agrees with me that these laws are absurd, but he says that Hitler’s genius is in knowing that a nation’s dreams don’t always make sense. “It’s simple,” he tells me in his preacherly voice when I tell him I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. “Germans have always dreamed of having their own country, free of … of impurities and foreign imperfections. And the Führer has taught us that we have every right to live out that dream.”
We’re lying together in bed when he declares this, and I roll over onto my belly so that I don’t have to see his self-assured face asking for my agreement. And because I’m remembering Vera telling me—when I first met her—that it’s better that dreams remain in their own realm. If only Tonio weren’t so pleased about Hitler’s malignancy, our relations would be easier. Though I’m beginning to see that he could be useful to me in terms of knowing what the Volk are thinking. After all, it will be important to know when it has become too dangerous for Isaac and Vera to remain in Germany.
As a result of the Nuremberg Laws, two of Isaac’s oldest Christian clients refuse to do business with him any longer or even to pay their outstanding bills. Isaac tries to meet with them, but humiliation is the result; they refuse to even let him in their offices. Is this a turning point in his way of thinking? Instead of spending extra hours drumming up new business, he buries himself in Berekiah Zarco’s manuscripts more obsessively than ever. When I ask if there’s anything I can do to help with his business, he replies matter-of-factly, “Don’t worry, the factory is healthy enough to take care of itself,” then asks me to make him some coffee so he can concentrate better.
One cold evening in late November 1935, Papa takes us out to supper at the indoor restaurant of the Köln Beer Garden, and a woman in a fur coat the size of a brown bear joins us there. She’s twenty-seven. I know, because I ask. She talks sweetly to me, and she is full of sincere and sad glances at Hansi. She wears bright red lipstick and cobalt blue mascara, which makes her look like a mutant parrot. Her low-cut black dress is elegant and a bit slutty, like an outfit a gangster would choose for his girlfriend. Her earrings are gigantic pink pearls. Her name is Greta Pach, and Papa introduces her to Hansi and me as a secretary at the Health Ministry.
“Your father’s secretary,” Greta adds, staking her claim, and Papa gives her a quick-tempered glare.
That single glance from my father gives their game away before it’s even started. And when I ask Greta how long she’s been at the ministry, she replies in a breathy voice—proto–Marilyn Monroe—that she started nearly four years ago, which means she was on the job the day Papa arrived.
Hansi doesn’t do the math, which is just as well, but I know now that she and Papa have been working together—and probably sleeping together—since the moment he joined the Health Ministry in August 1933. Two years, four months ago.
I go to the bathroom since I don’t want to break down in front of Papa. Will he leave us now, so he can start making little red and blue parakeets in Greta’s womb? I splash my face and neck with cold water, but I’m burning up. Sitting in a stall, I realize I have a decision to make: I can either make a scene and risk losing Papa, or I can act as sweet as possible so that he’ll stay with us.
As soon as I see Hansi slurping his soup, I realize I really have no options. I’ll be nice to our father for maybe the same reason Mama was. He Who Earns the Money Holds All the Cards. That’s what I’d like to engrave now on Mama’s gravestone.
“I’m glad you could join us for dinner,” I tell Greta after I sit down, and I ask where she lives, doing my best to sound cheerful.
Papa, believing I’m up to no good, tells me I’m being far too inquisitive, but she waves him away and says, “No, Sophie has a right to know about me,” and I can see from the cheeky, amused way she looks at me that she knows that I know what’s up. She says she lives in “too large” an apartment in Charlottenburg. To my subsequent questions she tells me that she divorced her stockbroker husband four years ago. Her maiden name was Allers. She adds that she loves painting, particularly Cézanne’s landscapes. Is that indicative of good taste or did Papa tell her what she’d need to say to win me over?
Papa’s hand rests like an awning over his irritated eyes during our friendly exchange as if he’d like to drop through a hole in the floor. From the way he’s fingering the salt shaker I can tell he’s dying for a cigarette. I understand now that this dinner was Greta’s idea.
“Someday when you come over, I’ll be happy to draw you,” I tell Greta. And I will indeed be gratified; I’ll give her a beak and feathers, and I’ll add a big cheetah behind her, with my own saber-toothed smile, ready to swallow her whole and spit out her goddamned pearl earrings.
“And you’ll have to come to my apartment,” she gushes. “You and Hansi both. You’ll love my new curtains! They’re blue and green brocade.”
“I’m a real big fan of brocade,” I reply.
She doesn’t recognize my sarcasm but Papa gives me a look of warning. Though he’s the one who’s going to have to watch it, because I understand now why we never had enough money to buy a bigger apartment; keeping Greta warmed by a brown bear and getting her new drapes has sentenced Mama, Hansi, and me to a smaller life. Still, I compliment her dress, which makes Papa nod at me as if to say, That’s more like it!
Does he suspect I’d like to tip over the tall white candle at the center of our table and set his pinstriped suit on fire?
After dessert, he lights Greta’s cigarette and takes one for himself from her tin—Haus Bergmann, his own brand. I ask her for one, too, which she offers me with a pleased smile, b
ut Papa is quick to add in an outraged voice, “Sophie, I didn’t know you smoked. And I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“You don’t know a lot of things,” I say. “So just give me a light.”
He frowns nastily, so I give him a look of warning, though my nervousness is like a fist around my throat, and I don’t know where this crazy courage to defy him comes from, and hope Mama won’t hate me if I don’t have the will to fight him for long.
When I tell Isaac about Papa’s affair, he says, “You’d best be very careful with him. If he’s fallen in love, he won’t have much patience for anyone who tries to get in the way.”
Tonio tells me much the same thing: “Just let your father and Greta get on with their lives.”
Their advice infuriates me. And seems indicative of a secret worldwide conspiracy of men.
I search in vain through my father’s coat and pants for his key to Greta’s apartment over the next couple of weeks, and while seated bent-backed on his bed, I realize Mama also must have done a lot of searching over the last two years—for lipstick stains, hotel receipts, and God knows what else. Or maybe her torment began much earlier; she must have suspected—like I do—that this wasn’t Papa’s first affair. If only she’d had the courage to confide in me. Then, all our interactions—even the difficult ones—might have been based on trust, and everything I feel now might be so much less weighted with a sense of having missed out on our life together.
Maybe my mother even met some of the other women, though I can’t think of any possibilities except Maria Gorman, Papa’s old friend from Communist Party headquarters. After all, Mama threw out her raspberry jam without even tasting it and never demonstrated any concern over her being arrested. Two clues to a marriage gone wrong. I suppose that’s not much less than most children get, so I shouldn’t feel so cheated.
The Seventh Gate Page 37