The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  I take a blue lily and a white rose.

  “Vera says she hasn’t seen you in a while,” I say as he relocks the drawer. I use a light tone so as not to upset him.

  He glares up at me. “So you’ve spoken to her about me?” he asks, as if I’ve committed a crime.

  “Just once. The other night, she came to Isaac’s apartment.”

  “I’ve nothing to say to her. Or any of the others.” He waddles out of the room angrily.

  “But why?” I call from behind him. “They’re worried about you.”

  In the kitchen again, Rolf angles his head up to meet my gaze as best he can, his tiny eyes flashing, his neck trembling from the effort to look up. “I’ll never forgive Vera for not opening her door to Heidi on the day she vanished. If she had, then …” He doesn’t finish his sentence because nothing now can save his wife from being murdered.

  “Vera told me she asked you and Heidi to look into who might be betraying The Ring. Do you know if she’d discovered anything that might have gotten her into trouble?”

  “We didn’t have much time to really ask around.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have been informing the Nazis of The Ring’s activities?”

  “No.” The water for our tea has come to a boil and Rolf begins to pour it into his pot.

  “Do you think that Vera might have something to do with Heidi’s death?”

  Rolf starts, spilling water on the oven, which hisses. “Shit!” he exclaims under his breath.

  “Sorry. Did you get some on yourself?”

  “No, I’m all right.” He secures the wooden handle of his pan with both his hands and holds it out from his body like a sword. When he’s done filling his teapot, he gazes out the window, capturing his thoughts. He looks younger in profile, and I can easily imagine him as a mop-haired little boy, dashing through his parents’ legs, delighted by simple things like silk flowers and cakes. I hope his parents recognized his bright nature as a gift.

  “I considered the possibility that Vera may have been involved,” he tells me. “But Vera and Heidi were close. They had an understanding about women’s things, about …” He sighs at his failure to find the right word. “I can’t imagine Vera discarding Heidi in some lake. If I believed that, I couldn’t … couldn’t go on.”

  After Rolf, Hansi, and I have had our tea, it’s time to go, since we have to reach home before Papa. At the door, Rolf waves me close to him and says, “Something odd has happened that I haven’t told anyone about.”

  “What?”

  “Sebastian Stangl, the doctor who fooled me and Heidi, who had her sterilized … He vanished, too, but no body has been found.”

  “Did you read about him in the newspaper?”

  “No, I went to his office just after I received the results of Heidi’s autopsy. I wanted to confront him for betraying us, but one of his nurses told me he’d already been missing for ten days. Two policemen came to interview me shortly after that. They searched my apartment and then brought me down to the station for more questioning. Then they released me. If they had any proof, I’d be in jail now. I’m pretty sure they’d need to have a body to accuse me of murder, in any case.”

  “But you didn’t kill Dr Stangl, did you?”

  “No, but I wish I had. Not that the police believe me. They’re still watching me. I can’t help thinking that there’s a kind of symmetry to what’s happened.”

  “A symmetry?”

  “Dr Stangl is now dead most likely, just like Heidi. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were lying in the Rummelsburger See. In fact, I’d wager everything I own, even Heidi’s flowers, that if the police find out what happened to him, they’ll discover who killed my wife, as well!”

  On reaching home, I look up Dr Stangl’s number in the phone book, but I find only his office number. When I call, no one answers. I try several times the next day without any luck. It’s only on the following morning that a nurse named Katja Müller finally picks up and tells me I was lucky to find her in; she’s putting files into storage. She gives me Dr Stangl’s home number, since I tell her I’d like to express my sympathy to his wife. Mrs Stangl doesn’t answer that day, but I find her in the next afternoon. Her suspicion of my motives chills the line between us. When I explain about being a friend of Heidi’s, thinking that will warm her tone, she bursts out that she’s sure that Rolf has killed her husband.

  After she calms down, she explains that Dr Stangl received a phone call on the day he vanished. “He left the house right away because the patient who called was in distress. Sebastian was like that … he’d go out in the middle of the night to rescue a friend.”

  And then he’d sterilize them against their will, I think. “Who did your husband say the call was from?” I ask.

  “Rolf.”

  “Did your husband actually mention his last name?”

  “No, but he said it was the dwarf. And to think of how many times my husband saw him after hours! If I could count the number of visits that little bastard made to our home for help … in the morning, at night … And my husband never turned him away. Never!”

  “I think someone pretending to be Rolf lured Dr Stangl out on the evening he vanished,” I tell Isaac.

  No answer. He talks little these days and spends nearly all his time studying Berekiah Zarco’s manuscripts. If I didn’t prepare him hard-boiled eggs and toast, he’d starve to death. Even so, his ribs have begun to show, and he looks a bit like a Picasso goat. Sexy in a desperate way. We’ve got the heat back on temporarily, though it’s still a bit chilly, and at this moment he’s sitting on the end of the bed in his bathrobe, scanning The Third Gate with his ivory-handled magnifying glass from Istanbul. I’m lying behind him on my side, propped on my elbow. My bare feet are warming against his back, because he’s the best oven in the world. No coal necessary. Just sex, toast, and eggs.

  “Isaac, do you have any idea who might be able to imitate Rolf’s voice?” I ask loudly.

  He looks back at me, annoyed that I’m disturbing him. “What makes you think Rolf didn’t do it?”

  “He said he didn’t, and I believe him. Is that stupid of me?”

  “Maybe a bit naïve.” He turns the page of his text and leans forward, so low that he looks as though he’s sniffing his ancestor’s sixteenth-century Turkish ink.

  “Could Dr Stangl have been the person betraying The Ring?” I ask.

  “Sophie, I’m trying to read!”

  “Raffi is dead, and so is Vera’s baby. And now Heidi … I want some answers!”

  “I never let Stangl in on our plans. I’m not that big a Dummkopf.”

  “But maybe someone else did. You said that your circus friends had him as their doctor.”

  He flaps his hand at me over his shoulder. A sign I should keep quiet, but I like testing his patience. “Did you like him?” I ask. “His wife seemed to think he was a saint.”

  “A saint!” he exclaims in an outraged voice as he whips around. “He was a horror. Though it’s true that he was kind to us when I first met him.” He shrugs. “People change … he changed.”

  Standing, he goes to his desk to look at another manuscript. He opens his bathrobe so he can scratch his balls. Then he tugs on their hairs. Maybe Tonio will enjoy the same mild torture when he’s pushing seventy.

  “Isaac,” I say, sitting up, and when he doesn’t look at me, I make the cackling noise of a Berlin crow; I’ve discovered it works better than words.

  “What is it?” he asks without turning around.

  “Why do you think someone would kill both Heidi and Dr Stangl?”

  He looks at me pleadingly. “Stop! I’ve told you before, I don’t like you running around Berlin asking questions about murders.” He gives me his fatal, squinty-eyed glare, but I’ve been vaccinated against his indignation by now.

  “I’ll stop when I get to the end of the mystery,” I tell him. “That’s my Araboth.”

  He lets his body sag. Another strategy to get his
way—he wants sympathy for the frail old tailor who started working when he was ten. “I worry about you,” he says.

  “I promise I’ll be careful.”

  “Sophele, if you ever get into trouble, you are to come to me. Or call me. No matter what has happened, I’ll help you. Do you remember what mesirat nefesh means?”

  “The willingness to go into the Land of the Dead to rescue a loved one.” I know what’s coming next, so I add, “You won’t need to make any sacrifice for me.”

  “But if you do get into trouble …”

  “You’ll be the first to know. I promise.”

  His eyes brighten. “I want to give you a present. I thought of waiting until your birthday, but it’s too far away.”

  “I think I can see what you’ve got for me,” I say, since his putz has begun to stir.

  “Oh, you can have that old thing anytime you want it,” he says, stretching out his penis to do his silly imitation of an elephant trunk, then letting it fall. “No, I’ve got a real present for you!” Kneeling down, he takes out a red-wrapped box from the bottom drawer of his desk and holds it out to me. “Open it.”

  Inside, I find a wooden case of forty-eight oil pastels, all the colors Chagall, Cézanne, and Sophie Riedesel might want, even that particularly helpless shade of gray that glazes over Isaac’s eyes when I lead him away from Berekiah Zarco to our bed.

  After he’s spent and moaning on his back like a shipwrecked man on the Island of Insatiable Lovers—more to amuse both of us than from actual exhaustion—I take out the oil pastels and try to make a color portrait for the first time. But my hands and eyes are confounded by too many possibilities. It’s as if I’ve been handed a deck with 200 cards, and I make such a tangle of lines and colors that Isaac ends up grimacing and hiding his eyes from his lopsided likeness. Nobody born after the age of silent movies could make such a melodramatic face. The man has talent.

  I try right away to sketch him again, but I’m unable to translate the textures and emotions of his face—the soft, tender folds of his eyelids, the shell-shadows inside his ears, his tired affection for me—into blue, red, and yellow. In fact, it takes months before I begin to feel as if I am coming to learn how to deal with color. Isaac says that it’s no wonder; the spectrum is one of the most powerful emanations of God, and the ability of white light to separate into its constituent parts is a very great mystery.

  He also tells me that color symbolizes the joy of creation. “Imagine Adam when he saw the blue sky for the first time! Or Eve, when she held that red apple!”

  “Was Eve wrong to eat the apple?” A question I’ve wanted to ask him for a long time.

  “No, no, no. If she didn’t take the apple, we’d never have left Eden, and men and women would never know there was a world around them, or have any sense of themselves. In any case, Eve didn’t do anything that we all don’t do.”

  “No?”

  “Each of us in our lives takes a bite of that same apple in the moment before we first recognize ourselves in a mirror. We are all Eve, just as we are all Adam. And as we chew the apple, we say to ourselves, ‘I exist, and I am separate from God.’”

  “So the snake isn’t evil?”

  “No, the snake is eternity—the earth-born spark of eternity that starts the fire … the blaze in each of us. The snake is life recognizing itself, and knowing that we have a great deal of work to do while we’re here. Remember, the only hands and eyes God has are our own.”

  “So why do people regard the snake as evil?”

  “Because they think the world is made of prose when it’s made of poetry.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Because you’ve only just reached the Third Gate,” he says, kissing the center of my forehead. You’re just a little pisher who’s figuring out how to use her pastels.”

  “When will I reach the Fourth Gate?”

  “When you marry and have children.” Groaning he adds, “Though you’ll see it approaching when you start to have all the headaches that come with falling in love.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  By the end of February, I grow to love the layering I can achieve with my pastels. And just as Isaac would wish I’m astonished by how they constantly remind me of all that lies below the surface of what we see and hear and feel. I learn that a landscape of nearly invisible color lies underneath what looks like the uniform black enveloping Ribera’s figure of St Sebastian in the Emperor Frederick Museum, where Isaac takes me to see the Spanish, Italian, and Dutch masters. And I learn, too, that there is so much effort we don’t notice in Rembrandt’s canvases unless we study them closely—so much drawing, blending, and shading needed to summon forth the images that he saw straining to be born … And so much experience. A lifetime of sadness and hope in the eyes of the old rabbi whose portrait he has painted, and who watches me as if he knew I’d one day come to visit him. And all that work an attempt to give shape to the border between the artist and the world. That’s what I grow to value in those hard little sticks that become extensions of my fingers. They speak to me in voices as quiet as the slanting yellow light in van Ruisdael’s Oak Forest and as loud as my growing love for Isaac. And they whisper to me what each sheet of paper wishes to become. Another great mystery: how paintings determine themselves; how everything—including us—unfolds toward completion.

  And I have Isaac to thank for this chance to begin again; if left alone, I’d have denied myself the world of color, I now realize.

  Still, I don’t inform myself over the coming months about how I’ll need to proceed if I want to compete for a place at the School of Applied Arts next year. That goal just seems now like a dream that vanished while I wasn’t looking.

  Tonio takes me skating one clear cold day in February 1936, and as we’re gliding arm in arm across the ice he brings up marriage again. He assures me that his mother adores me.

  “But what about your father?” I ask.

  “Oh, he doesn’t like anyone. But he’ll accept you once we tie the knot. And he’ll love you once you give him a grandson.”

  The thought of Dr Hessel getting his big coarse hands around any son of mine sends a message of doom shooting right to the top of my head. And it doesn’t help my mood to learn that Tonio’s plans for us may really be about pleasing his father.

  “We’ll discuss it when you’re free of your commitment to the army,” I tell him. And I think my performance is excellent, but I see in his distant look that he doesn’t believe me. And that I’ve hurt him. I always tend to forget how sensitive he is. “Forgive me,” I say, bringing his fingertips to my lips. “Mama’s death has left me so disoriented that I don’t know where I am half the time.”

  The letter ordering my brother to appear in court for a sterilization hearing comes in early March. The date set is Monday the 16th. I rush away from Hansi to the bathroom and lock the door so that I can be alone with my terror, then leave the letter on the kitchen table to await Papa. Has the notification come now because Mama is no longer around to oppose her son’s operation?

  When my brother is finished changing out of his school clothes, he drops down in front of his jigsaw puzzle. I join him. I try to hold his hand, but he keeps snatching it back. I could get him in a head lock and force him to hug me but that wouldn’t change anything; the Taj Mahal will always be more interesting than his sister.

  Papa reads the Health Ministry’s letter as soon as he gets home, then slips it into his coat pocket and stands up to flee to his bedroom. I cover my pot of chicken and say, “What are we going to do?”

  His resentful look means I don’t have permission to put him on the spot. “Do about what?” he asks, feigning incomprehension, undoubtedly hoping I’ll turn away from him and simply add another onion to the stew.

  “Do about preventing a surgeon from removing your grandchildren from Hansi’s future.”

  “Sophie, have you looked at your brother lately?” he asks defiantly.

  “I look at him more than
you do!” I snap back.

  “How wonderful to be so attentive! You win the goodness contest between us.”

  “I don’t want to win anything. I’d just like you to spend more time with him. Papa, he knows that you think he’s an embarrassment.”

  “Sophie, shut up! You don’t know what he knows. Or what I feel about him. Can you honestly tell me he’d make a proper father?”

  “Have you made a proper father?”

  His clenched jaw means he’d like to clout me, and my glare means I’d like him to do just that, because then I could be free to despise him without being menaced by guilt all the time. He reaches into his coat pocket for a cigarette to steady his nerves. Good for Greta for convincing him to smoke openly again!

  “How easy it has become for you to judge me,” he says, sorrow in his voice, the cigarette dangling from his lips.

  He looks and sounds almost like his past self, which means that this is where a generous screenwriter would have me apologize and melt into my father’s arms, but I feel as if I’m a bitter, vengeful ghost—the role my mother ought to have but has handed over to me, since the spirits of betrayed, cancer-ridden wives are not permitted in our ever-optimistic Germany these days: too subversive, too real, and too complex. I’m surprised that Hitler hasn’t banned cancer entirely. I watch Papa light his cigarette, and I can tell he enjoys my waiting for him because it means he’s in control of our relationship. But I’d bet my K-H Collection that my thoughts would surprise him. He’s still a good man, despite everything, and I can’t help but love him. I come to such an unlikely conclusion because my contempt for him makes me feel my old affection that much more strongly, embedded in the deepest, most silent part of myself, so mixed with my own blood and breath, and so much more resilient than words that nothing could ever dispel it—not even our final betrayals.