Though maybe I’m all wrong about Maria’s having slept with my father and the frequency of his instances of infidelity; sometimes now I think of him as a chameleon, blending into situations and events. There’s so much about him I never understood.
At the time, I reason that there’s little point in my speculating further about Papa’s double life because the past is a puzzle whose pieces are already formed, and no amount of rearranging I might do will make those odd little shapes fit any differently. So maybe Tonio’s and Isaac’s advice to me was perfect. Still, couldn’t my father have waited more than four months to show Hansi and me that his heart is not with us? No stamina, as I’ve said.
A year has passed since the members of The Ring agreed not to see or talk to one another, so to celebrate their being able to socialize again Isaac invites Vera, K-H, and Marianne to Hanukkah dinner, and on the windy, bone-chilling evening of the 20th of December, I sneak up there for an hour, leaving Hansi in front of Harpo and his new underwater ballet partner, Chico.
As we await his guests, Isaac tells me, “I only hope we’ve spent enough time apart from each other to convince our traitor that we’re harmless.”
“Are you harmless?”
“Yes and no,” he says, pinching my cheek and looking at me lecherously.
He’s wrapped in his favorite cardigan sweater—brown, with holes at the elbows—and I’m wearing his floppy fur slippers and a scarf; heating an apartment is expensive and his business has been crippled by the Nazis.
Roman doesn’t join us; he’s with the Circus Cardinali for the winter. Rolf doesn’t come over either. None of us has seen him since Heidi’s funeral.
As soon as K-H and Marianne arrive, they offer me condolences and hugs for Mama’s death—and rub my new short hair with appreciative laughs. Vera does too, since we’re pretending we haven’t seen or spoken to each other.
K-H doesn’t take his probing eyes from me as we sip our wine and finally says, “I’d like to photograph you now that you’ve become who you were meant to be.”
How does he know? When I ask, he points to his eyes. “I’m trained to see,” he tells me.
When our guests ask after Hansi, I tell them about his scooping Groucho out of our tank and me flushing the murderous fish down the drain. Vera says we should have eaten him. “Goldfish are good on top of toast,” she says, rubbing her belly, “especially with a little horseradish.”
Despite her humor, Vera looks wan and tired, and I read in the obsessive way she smokes that she’s barely hanging on, but she assures me she couldn’t be better. As we sit down at the dinner table, I ask K-H and Marianne if they’ve spoken to Rolf.
“No, I’m afraid he blames all of us for Heidi’s death,” K-H tells me.
“Why does he blame you?” I ask.
“Because Vera and Isaac asked her to do some investigating.”
“Heidi discovered something that ended her life,” Marianne adds, “though we’ll never find out what it was.”
A statement I hear as a challenge … Did she learn the identity of the person who’d helped Georg to undermine The Ring? I let the conversation pass me by and look below the glass. Maybe it wasn’t something she knew but something she’d done that got her murdered. Could she have been the traitor who denounced Raffi and told the Gestapo where to find Vera? Someone did, so why not her? Which might mean that another member of The Ring took revenge and poisoned her.
“Oh, get this, Sophele,” K-H says indignantly, drawing my attention away from my speculations, “I got kicked off the deaf swim team for being Jewish.”
“And I got thrown off the bird-watching club for giants,” Vera adds sarcastically.
“Vera, I’d been on the team for seven years. I love swimming. It was a disappointment.”
“Oh, shut up! All we do is complain. We don’t do anything anymore. I hate it!”
Over the next hour, Vera snaps at the others a couple more times for their abandonment of the struggle. “Working with foreign journalists isn’t getting us anywhere!” she tells them.
“And working separately makes no sense.”
Depression settles over me because the solidarity these old friends once shared has vanished. K-H doesn’t even take pictures. I hadn’t realized that working together against the Nazis had given them not just a mission, but also such optimistic delight in one another, and now, disappointed in themselves, they will have to discover a new way to be together—if they can. Do they know that Isaac and I are lovers? I don’t sense any drumbeats of scandal beneath our conversation. After the first menorah candle is lit and Isaac leads us in Hanukkah prayers, it’s time for me to go home. He leads me to his door. I’m already two glasses of wine more dizzy than usual, which may be why I kiss him on the lips. He starts as if pierced by an arrow, but I want our friends to know I’m an outlaw—and to encourage them to keep battling any way they can. And maybe I even wish to live up to K-H’s assessment and be seen as myself. That was Mama’s goal and maybe it’s also my most important inheritance from her.
* * *
The next day, after school, I let myself in to Isaac’s apartment and find him in his usual sculptural position: sitting at his desk, hunched over his manuscripts. Except that this time he’s holding a big ivory-handled magnifying glass, and when he turns to me, he puts it over his nose, which grows the size of a pear. His eyes twinkle from the pleasure of making me laugh, but he doesn’t jump up to kiss me. Unusual. He lowers the lens as though the air has been let out of him. “Sophele, if I were ruining your life, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” he asks in a hesitant, concerned voice, which makes me feel as if we’re tiptoeing toward danger.
“Where’d that come from?” I ask.
“Last night, K-H, Marianne, and Vera thought I might be taking advantage of you.”
I roll my eyes, then comb his tufts of wild hair with my hand. We sit together, me on his lap. On my insistence, we talk of his childhood, which makes me feel sleepy in a good way. “I’m not too heavy, am I?” I ask every few minutes, and he just scoffs as if I’m being silly.
I like hearing his stories over and over. I like being able to lean against the reassurance of knowing what’s coming next; Mama’s death has made me that fragile and childlike again.
After we make love, he slips his arm under my head, and we talk about his wife for the first time. “For many years, she was my shadow, and I was hers,” he says. “Maybe we were even too close. Our son’s death drew us together but isolated us.” He shrugs sadly. “Then one day, I woke up and I looked all around me, and there was nothing there. A terrible thing to cast no image in front of you or behind you. Like not being born. Like living as a dybbuk—a ghost who haunts the earth.”
Knowing what he has lost makes me hold him tightly, and he doesn’t resist. His generous ease with me is why jealousy doesn’t poison us. Yet our intimacy makes me shiver after a time; the chill of being too naked in front of a lover. I stand up and fetch his magnifying glass. Sitting by him on the bed, I look at his lips—giant petals of a fleshy flower. I ask why he needs it.
“I want to see if Berekiah Zarco wrote any references to the Seventh Gate in the margins of his manuscripts … in tiny letters. I hate wearing my reading glasses and my vision isn’t what it used to be.”
“That’s because your eyes are no longer German.”
“True,” he replies, morosely.
“And I didn’t even know you had reading glasses.”
“Because they only get in the way. Sophele, Vera asked me last night to help her blow up Gestapo headquarters. We need to persuade her to emigrate before she kills somebody.”
Though maybe she already has murdered someone, I think, and I picture her wrapping her giant hands around Heidi’s throat and squeezing. I’d ask Isaac if he suspects her, too, but I’m pretty sure he’d lie to protect her. “Do you have Rolf’s address?” I ask him instead.
“Do me a favor and don’t see him,” he replies. He turns away from me abru
ptly, stands, and goes to the window. Opening the curtains a crack, he looks out.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because … because I’d prefer you didn’t. And I think that should be enough for you.”
The harsh way he talks to me makes me ask a question I didn’t know I had. “Isaac, you’re not involved in Heidi’s murder in any way, are you?”
“Me?” He turns to face me, outraged. “Heidi was a good friend of mine!”
“Still, if she were betraying you …”
“Do you think she was?”
“I have no idea. In any case, I promise I won’t break any Nuremberg laws with Rolf,” I joke, trying to ease the ill-feeling between us.
“You shouldn’t always try to be amusing,” he snaps.
He walks to his desk, where he’s left his pipe. Are we going to have our first fight? Perhaps, since I’m in no mood to cede him an inch of my right to be whoever I am. “I never thought I’d have to apologize to you for my sense of humor,” I tell him. “In any case, since you’re no longer a citizen, you don’t get a vote on how I behave.”
“You’re unstoppable.”
“Because I’m an Aryan. I’ve got honor and character.”
He gives me such a contemptuous look that I feel as if I’ve swallowed dirt. I get up and dress without a word. Who’d have thought our first quarrel would be so sickeningly silent? At the very least, I’d hoped for some smashed Mesopotamian crockery and Yiddish curses: May you grow six extra feet and not have enough money for comfortable shoes … ! This is more like a fight between two crippled hens.
He lights his pipe and goes back to reading, so self-contained that it leaves me bitter.
“So what’s Rolf’s address?” I say when I’m dressed.
“Kronprinzenstraße, Number 34, second floor. But if you visit him,” he tells me, as if it’s an order, “then go straight from school. We can’t be sure we’re not being watched, so I don’t want anyone following you from your apartment or mine. For all I know someone has a magnifying glass trained on us right now.”
Rolf lives in a dimly lit, gritty neighborhood that was built for workers at the Knorr break factory in Rummelsberg. I can’t go over in the early evening without Hansi, so he’s been dragging after me since we reached the Frankfurter Allee Station. My explanations about why I’m bringing him so far from home must not have landed in solid ground inside that miniature brain of his, so I have to threaten to do my imitation of King Kong subduing a dinosaur every few minutes or he might just start a sit-down strike on the slush-filled sidewalk and wind up with pneumonia, which I’ll have to pay for, since who else is going to care for him? Is he aware he’s slowly torturing me to death?
We’ve taken a circuitous route to get here in order to throw off anyone who might be on our trail. It has taken a full hour, and so we’re also half frozen—another reason for Hansi’s disaffection. Rolf lives in a handsome pink and white building with ironwork balconies. He answers my knocks right away, still mostly head and legs, but his hunchback has grown and makes him lean his head down cruelly to the left, as if he’s listening for squeaking in the floorboards. He’s clipped his hair as severely as a prisoner, and his eyes are smaller than I remember them—peepholes surrounded by deep wrinkles. He’s aged many years since I last saw him.
A glorious smile of surprise brightens his round little face, but he’s unable to lift his gaze all the way up to meet mine: “Sophele!”
I kneel down and we kiss cheeks. He stinks of cigar smoke. The whole apartment does. And it’s so cold that he’s wearing a long frock coat, midnight blue, undoubtedly Vera’s handiwork. “I think you met my brother once,” I say, reaching behind me for Hansi before he wanders off.
“Yes, of course. Come in, come in … !” He unfolds his arm graciously. “What brings you to this side of town?” he asks with a sweet smile.
“I just wanted to see how you were.”
He turns on the ceiling light, a white Chinese lantern. “I’m glad you came. Sit …” He points to a tattered black velvet couch with lumpy orange cushions. The coffee table between us is covered with dishes crusted with leftovers, including a rim of cheese that’s grown a smelly gray beard, and a nub of cigar. Seeing Hansi sniff at the offending smells, Rolf picks up all the porcelain and cradles the mess into the kitchen, saying, “My cleaning lady didn’t come this week …”
A crash makes me jump. I get the feeling Rolf is part of a club of Berlin widowers who grow towers of dishes in their sinks. Isaac is, of course, a charter member.
He questions me about my schoolwork and my parents, and he pats my leg stiffly when I talk of Mama’s death. I can see from his sheepish look that he thinks I might refuse a more intimate sign of his solidarity, so I kiss his cheek, which allows him to hug me. Happy with our renewed friendship, he shuffles eagerly off for his scrapbook, which documents his two decades in the circus. He sits between Hansi and me. The elephants and tigers in the background hold Hansi’s attention, but Rolf always points to Heidi. “There she is … you see her? And here I am.”
He’s a man who would notice his wife first even if she were photographed behind Jean Harlow. Rolf had a full head of luscious brown hair back then. A squashed, neckless Samson. In several pictures, he’s wearing gold Moroccan slippers, the kind with long curling toes.
“We had an act in which I played the servant of a clown who thought he was a pasha,” he explains. “When I think of the idiotic things I did …” He rolls his eyes.
Heidi wears her blond hair in braids in the old pictures. “She’d have made a much better Young Maiden than me,” I tell Rolf, which makes him grin.
Next, he brings in piles of napkins that he saved from the restaurants he dined in on his circus travels. My favorite is of ruby-colored lace. It glows like stained glass when I hold it up to the light. “That one’s from Prague,” he tells me.
Rolf as a young man, dressed for a circus performance
He also shows us his cane collection—more than fifty. He keeps them in a beer barrel in his bedroom. His two favorites have white, ceramic monkey-heads. The devilish creatures are smiling cheekily, as if they’re hiding some glorious gossip under their tongues. “I bought them in Warsaw, in a Jewish antique shop,” Rolf tells us. “I was told they’re magic wands.” He holds one out to me and says, “Make a wish, Sophele, then blow on the monkey.”
I’d wish for Heidi to return, but that’s not likely to happen, so I think, Let Isaac and me outlast the Nazis. It’s in that moment that I learn I’ve given up any hope of sending Hitler back to his Vienna garret anytime soon.
Hansi reaches out for the cane, and Rolf lets him have it. The boy presses his lips to the monkey head for far longer than would be considered normal by most people.
“You can keep it if you want,” our host tells him sweetly, which prompts the boy to fold his lips inside his mouth and make a moaning noise. “Does he need to pee?” Rolf asks me.
“That just means ‘thank you’ in the Hansi Universe.”
“You’re welcome,” Rolf tells the boy, patting his leg.
“Sophele,” he suddenly gasps, “I think I see something for you, too.” Reaching behind my ear, he produces the napkin from Prague. “Voilà!” he says, beaming.
I kiss his cheek again and spread the fabric on my lap. “I’d forgotten what a magician you are.” Leaning forward to look across at my brother, I say, “Did you see what Rolf did?”
But he’s courting the monkey with his enraptured eyes and says nothing.
“Sophele, why don’t I teach you the trick!” Rolf exclaims. “You’ll be able to keep your kids entertained.”
After fifteen minutes, my hands have grasped the basic idea, and I practice so many times over the coming weeks that I learn to pull my mom’s old watch from behind Hansi’s ear.
Rolf and I talk for a time about the disadvantages of being three foot tall in a big city like Berlin, then about Paris, Budapest, Munich … Hansi falls fast asleep. As Rolf gazes a
t the boy, his eyes turn to liquid. He whispers, “Your brother is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.” Schön, schön, schön …
Only a poet of the heart would say schön three times, and now I understand more about why Heidi adored him. And I can speak of important matters. “Rolf, Heidi was wonderful. I won’t ever forget her.”
“This may sound silly to you,” he replies, “but I never realized that her dying would be so very final. The lesson I’ve learned is that death is the only thing that never ends. You understand?” He locks his fingers, then pulls them apart. “The world has come undone … has been emptied of meaning. Like the story I just told you about Paris … All my stories are stones I toss out into the world in the hopes that one of them might make a dent that will prove I’m still alive. But they only prove the opposite—that I’m not really here.”
He talks so eloquently, and with such an effort to be understood by me, that I’m moved to tears myself. But I feel useless, too. So little good I can do for him …
“I’m being a terrible host,” he says, regaining his enthusiasm. “I’ll make us some tea, and I’ll put more coals in the stove. You poor things must be frozen.”
He and I go to the kitchen together, and while he busies himself with cups and saucers, I scrape the bearded cheese into the garbage and start soaking his dishes, which makes him tug me away from the sink. He’s a strong little man—a tiny tractor. Our struggle—back and forth—makes me burst out laughing. “We’d make a good comedy team,” I say.
After I get my way, and all the crusted porcelain is soaking nicely, he says, “Sophele, let me give you some of Heidi’s silk flowers.”
He leads me into his bedroom. Hansi is snoring, which makes Rolf grin as though he’s the cutest thing in the world, so I whisper, “Be glad you don’t have to sleep in the same room with the midnight express to Cologne. Sometimes I wish he’d derail.”
Rolf’s bed is only four feet square. His dresser comes up to my hip. We’re in Lilliput and I’m the awkward, oversized foreigner here.
“Look at this,” he says excitedly, and he turns the key in the bottom drawer, which is his hiding place for hundreds of silk blossoms. “When Heidi wasn’t cooking, she was sewing flowers. Vera taught her how. Take some. She’d want you to have them.”
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