The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  Isaac tells me that he once prepared Andre to step through the Fifth Gate at the Prague Cathedral.

  “Yes, we fasted, prayed, and chanted, and then I stepped through the gate, and the most glorious thing happened.”

  “You found yourself in the Fifth Heaven?” I ask.

  “No, I was in such a nervous state that I fainted dead away … plop!” He laughs merrily. “But lying there on the ground, bleeding from the back of my head like a stuck pig … After I awoke, the cathedral was so beautiful and quiet. And strangers were fussing over me! A man took off his sweater and put it under my head. An old lady whispered prayers over me. I’ll always remember their faces. It was as if … as if their good wishes had brought me back from the dead. I felt I was just where I was meant to be.” He pauses, collecting his thoughts. “And I thought, dying isn’t so bad.” He smiles sweetly at Isaac. They seem almost like father and son. “It was a moment that changed my life. Fear for myself, my physical well-being, left my life … I’m still a different man even today, ten years later.” He gives me a serious look. “Even if I were sent to Dachau, I’d be all right.” Turning to Isaac, he adds, “I want you to know that.”

  “You are not going to be arrested,” Isaac tells him definitively. “You will be safe where you are going. Trust me.”

  When dinner is nearly ready, Andre leads us to the dining room. A rug with a fringe of knotted violet cord sits below the round wooden table.

  “That rug is yours!” I tell Isaac.

  “Mein Gott, what a memory you have, Sophele! I gave it to Andre.”

  “Isaac took pity on me,” our host tells me. “I had nothing but the clothes on my back when I moved here.” He beckons us to sit at the table.

  “Why did you come to Berlin?” I ask him, but he holds up his hand to have me wait and rushes off to the kitchen.

  “For the ocean air,” he calls back after a few seconds. He appears in the doorway and pats his chest. “I’ve got the lungs of a lobster.”

  “But we have no ocean here,” I say.

  He shrugs. “I was poorly informed.”

  He disappears back into the kitchen.

  “I don’t get it,” I call in to him.

  “Neither does Isaac,” Andre calls back.

  “Andre’s sense of humor isn’t normal,” Isaac observes.

  “Yes, I prefer humor that isn’t funny,” our host says, appearing in the doorway again.

  He’s a bright, curious, and unpredictable man, which is all in his favor, and he wins my eternal allegiance when he brings in a golden-brown goose drenched in berry sauce that smells like heaven. “It’s gorgeous,” I exclaim, and I swoon, knocking into Hansi on purpose, which makes him hit me playfully on the top of the head. Andre carries the bird to the table on a silver platter, wearing white gloves. He makes me feel I’m in the presence of a star on his day off, and when I catch his eye, he gives me a knowing smile, as if to say, I’m overjoyed to have you in my home, so please don’t mind my performing a bit.

  Our conversation over dinner becomes relaxed, and even Hansi writes us a list of all the famous places he’d like to visit, most of which come from his jigsaw puzzles—Big Ben, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower … I’ve never seen him scribble so quickly. The effect of an ounce of port wine? Maybe if I got him really drunk he’d start talking again.

  After dinner, the men puff on their cigars and I open the windows as wide as they’ll go so Hansi and I don’t cough to death. On Isaac’s insistence I’ve brought a couple of props with me, and I extract Mama’s old wristwatch from behind Hansi’s ear, then take Heidi’s lily out from behind Andre’s elbow. The men applaud. Hansi takes a bow with me, as my lovely assistant.

  Andre smiles generously at me when Isaac sits beside me on the sofa and puts his arm over my shoulder. “It makes me more happy than you can imagine to see how good you are for each other,” he tells us.

  I know right away I’ll always remember his words because he has seen our love. And I hadn’t even guessed I’d wanted anyone to serve as our witness.

  Isaac, Hansi, Vera, and I help Andre put his possessions in boxes a week later, though Vera crams his crockery in so hard that she breaks an old Delft teacup and is relieved of duty, which was probably her goal all along, since now she is free to criticize our efforts from the sidelines. Andre calls her “The Queen of the Damned,” which is a perfect nickname.

  When we’re finished, he takes us all out for cake and coffee at Karl’s Cellar. He and the Queen of the Damned waltz to a scratchy Blue Danube on the phonograph. Vera insists on leading, her head scraping the ceiling.

  Andre leaves the next day for Antwerp. Isaac sees him off at the station, and when he returns, he hugs me long and hard, declaring, “I’ve helped put one more beyond their reach!”

  Eight weeks before the end of school, Greta Ullrich, a.k.a. Gurka Greulich, comes to class with crusty eyes, her lashes dabbed with a viscous ointment. The diagnosis: conjunctivitis. Delighted by this turn of events, I steal two sheets of Health Ministry stationery from my father’s desk on reaching home, bound down the stairs and cross the courtyard to Isaac’s apartment, and, with my heart diving gleefully into my evil plans, type a brief but well-worded note to the headmaster of our school. Isaac hasn’t come home from work yet. I’m still reworking the letter when he pokes his head in to the guest room, where he keeps his typewriter. “I’m creating a harmless hoax,” I explain.

  “I do not believe harmless is a word in your vocabulary,” he replies, which gratifies me enormously.

  Having been lectured in the Young Maidens on the various horrific venereal diseases we’re likely to get from Jews and Gypsies if we so much as brush against them or give them a kiss—the Jew’s fleshy lips and giant nose being extensions of his perverse sexual nature—I know exactly what I want to write, though I admit to having to look up how to spell gonorrheal ophthalmia. After presenting the facts of the case, I write:

  I must stress that Fräulein Greta Ullrich is to be kept away from the other students because this particular venereal disease is highly contagious and may even lead, in acute cases, to blindness. I would also highly recommend that you oblige her close friends to go for medical checkups at the earliest possible convenience and have the girls provide full details about their sexual history over the last few months to their doctors.

  I write a slightly different letter to her parents, calling into question the morals of the Ullrich family. Maybe that will prove to them how easy it is to be regarded as trash in Germany.

  As I’m about to post my letters, however, I realize that school officials might be able to trace them back to me, since I may be the only student with a parent in the Health Ministry. To be safe, I decide to simplify my fraud and send a single letter from a doctor at Wittenau State Hospital to the headmaster. I call the intake desk to find out the name of the chief pediatrician—Christian Keller—and sign his name to a letter I type on plain white stationery. I take Hansi with me to Wittenau that Saturday. Having put stamps on the letter already, I convince the nurse at the reception desk to put them in the hospital mail for us.

  Two days later, Gurka is sent home early from school and four of her friends are summoned to the headmaster’s office. By the next morning, all the other students are trying to guess in what unusual and disgusting ways she might have caught gonorrhea in her eyes! And yet, seeing Gurka humiliated, I do not feel the triumph I’d expected. Guilt clings to me, and I realize that no one will really benefit from my prank.

  Is my hoax finally exposed? It must be, since Gurka is back at school within a week. And she clearly suspects me, since she glares at me with hate every time we cross paths.

  We speak only once more. A month before the end of school, she marches up to me in the hallway and says, “I’m going to make sure you’re shot one day by the Gestapo. You and Irene Bloch both. And I’ll dance on your graves!”

  She’s a frightening girl, and she has a kind of obscene power, like a witch in a fairy tal
e. I sometimes wonder if she’d have carried out her threat against me if I’d remained in Germany. In Rini’s case, she might have even succeeded.

  At the time, however, I’m glad she speaks to me hatefully, because it gives me a chance to shed all my guilt and to have the last words between us. I suspect my sudden eloquence comes from how much I really do fear her. “Gurka,” I say, “don’t fuck with me, because I’m smarter than you, and I have no scruples, as you’ve just discovered. And I have a gun that I won’t hesitate to use, and you can be sure that every Jew and Gypsy in Berlin will be delighted at the chance to dance with me on your grave! And I’ll invite them all!”

  My exultation doesn’t last long; as graduation approaches, my failure to apply to art school becomes an acid eating through my days. I refuse to make love with Tonio one afternoon because he arrives half an hour late to our rendezvous. And I start quarrels with Isaac at every opportunity. One evening, I hurl insults at him for his refusal to let me into the bathroom while he’s shaving. I’m standing in the doorway, threatening to invade the poor man’s last private territory, and he warns me—his hand up, forming a shield—not to dare go any further. His cheeks and chin are sculpted with foam, and his eyes are cold gray beads.

  “How can you be so mean-spirited?” I demand.

  “Where do you get such chutzpah? I need some time to myself. Is that so difficult to understand?”

  “Mean about everything, not just this.”

  “Look, you wanted revenge on yourself, and now you’ve got it. So don’t blame me.”

  “I don’t like the way you presume to know my mind.”

  His shrug means, Why would I care what a little pisher like you thinks? Then he starts mumbling to himself about me in Ladino, since he knows I don’t understand.

  “So what revenge have I gotten?” I interrupt.

  “You’ve prevented yourself from continuing your education.”

  That accusation feels like a slap. “And why do you think I wanted revenge?”

  Shooing me away, he replies, “Sophie, can’t you see I’m busy at the moment?”

  For not loving my mother enough, and for not being worthy of my father’s respect. Those are the answers I give him when he emerges from the bathroom. “Is that right?”

  “That sounds reasonable to me, but only you can say for sure.”

  He smiles in his patient way and caresses my fingers across the polished smoothness of his cheek, then presses the palm of my hand over his nose, breathing in the scent of me.

  Feeling his need for me, the mantle of my anger drops off my shoulders. “So what do I do now?” I ask.

  “You find a job and make some money, just like the rest of us. And next year…” Here, he gives me his Biblical glare, “you go to university!”

  A good plan, but Dr Hassgall has other ideas. He comes to lunch at Isaac’s apartment that weekend, looks at the pastels I’ve been working on—his hands clasped gentlemanly behind his back—and says, “How would you like to teach art at my school?”

  “I’ve never thought about it before.”

  In an amused voice, he says, “The pay is abominable, and the kids will tie your patience in knots, and the classrooms are cold in winter, but once you’ve taught my students, you will know you are capable of much more than you once believed possible. Three classes a day, eight to ten students per class, and I won’t give you any pupils you’d have no hope of reaching. What do you say?”

  As quickly as that, I seem to be lifting up and out of my dilemma straight toward the sun of his yellow schoolhouse. Still, it’s a big decision … “I don’t know anything about Rudolf Steiner and his philosophy,” I reply, pouring him and Isaac their pre-lunch schnapps.

  Dr Hassgall takes his glass and thanks me. “My senior teachers know Steiner back and forth. You just use any techniques you can to help the kids climb up to the tip of their crayons.” He steps his fingers up through the air, as though ascending a ladder.

  “I’m afraid the Young Maidens only trained me for climbing ropes,” I reply.

  “Stop with the cleverness!” Isaac snarls, and since he takes the withering look I give him as an accusation, he adds, “And no, this wasn’t my idea.”

  “Sophele, my dear,” Dr Hassgall says in a tone of peacemaking, “all you’ll have to do at first is keep the kids from swallowing their paints.”

  He and Isaac laugh like old poker buddies. Extremely irritating. “I’ll think it over,” I tell him, which makes Isaac roll his eyes. I can hear him thinking, More revenge…

  Later, over his soup, Dr Hassgall points his spoon at me and says, “I want you to name your brother’s enemies.”

  “What?”

  “What enemies do distant children have?”

  “Not being understood. Not being wanted or … or even loved. Cannibalistic fish. Jigsaw puzzles with missing pieces. And cars driving too fast on Marienburger Straße.”

  “Yes, exactly, my dear,” he says, and the solidarity for me I see in his eyes seems to push away the rest of the world for a moment. While considering his next words, he takes a sip of wine and wipes his lips carefully, his little finger out at a dainty angle. At such times, he seems to be posing for a nineteenth-century canvas of an aristocratic gentleman.

  “A distant boy who loves to draw or paint just might cope more effectively with not being understood by his parents,” he tells me. “And he will be less lonely all his life because he will be able to count on his own resources, which is vitally important for kids who don’t make friendships easily, and maybe he’ll even learn how to cross the street safely and make his own jigsaw puzzles.”

  Dr Hassgall talks in run-on sentences when he’s impassioned, and I’m charmed by his effusive hand gestures; it’s as though he’s conducting an orchestra.

  “I doubt I’m a good enough artist yet,” I protest.

  “Sophele, I don’t think you realize how unusual your dedication to Hansi is. Most of these children have been discouraged from living … from becoming creative beings. This Nazi sterilization program is abominable, but it needs to be seen as part of the general climate of discouragement that keeps boys and girls like Hansi from realizing their potential.”

  “I’ve never thought of it that way.”

  “We take away their right to have children because we’re afraid of their expressing their desires, their affection … of their becoming creative beings. We don’t want them to defy our expectations. But they deserve more than our cowardice. And with your talent for drawing, you may even help a few of the kids become more than they thought possible … a few who can be reached only through form and color.”

  The moment he mentions art as a way to fight all the evil done to Hansi and the other children, I realize that this is my way forward. So that summer of 1936, while the Nazis finalize plans for a spick-and-span Olympics—taking down the anti-Semitic posters across Berlin and herding the city’s Gypsies into camps in the suburbs—I plan my counterattack in a series of forty lessons designed to get Hansi and his friends sketching their differences and desires. I work every evening on my project.

  “Dr Hassgall is a poet posing as a headmaster,” I tell Isaac after he leaves.

  “That’s why he’s so good at his job. Children don’t really understand prose, though we fool ourselves into thinking they do.”

  THE FIFTH GATE

  Five are the books of Moses, the prayers of Yom Kippur, and the senses we use to contemplate the splendor of the Lower Realms. With the number five, heh, God created the world.

  As you move through the Fifth Gate, past commitments fall away and you may either turn back toward youth—and find yourself trapped on a cliff overlooking Gehenna—or gather your courage to continue the journey. The corresponding heaven is Ma’on, where angels sing before the Lord during the night and grow silent during the day, so that even the voiceless prayers of those in the Lower Realms may be heard.

  God said, ‘Let the waters teem with countless living creatures, and
let birds fly above the earth across the vault of heaven.’… Evening came, and morning came, a fifth day —Genesis 1.

  Berekiah Zarco, The Book of New Beginning

  Chapter Seventeen

  I lug my lesson plans to school on my first teaching day in September 1936, a couple of weeks prior to my nineteenth birthday. Dr Hassgall introduces me warmly to an assembly of all thirty-seven students, but my first lesson, beginning with a brief talk about classical Greek art, leaves three of my younger pupils with their heads flat on their desks, eyes closed, drifting toward dreamland. Panic sets in when I look at Hansi and see worry ribbing his brow. I stop in mid-sentence. How did I get here? I feel as though I’m an actress who’s stepped on stage only to find she’s in the wrong play, and my audience—eight children from nine to fifteen—is a wall of puzzled eyes.

  Several of the kids don’t draw anything when I distribute paper. They don’t even grab a crayon. They’re confused and so am I.

  And my other two classes go no better. Afterward, Else König, Hansi’s main teacher, comes to sit with me on the steps down to the back garden. Her thick copper-colored hair now falls to her shoulders. She wears black woolen trousers and a simple white blouse. Her earrings are dots of red garnets. She radiates down-to-earth optimism. I can see why the kids fight for her attention.

  We share a cheese sandwich. She’s bright-faced and eager to help, but I’m near tears, shipwrecked on my inexperience.

  “Please tell me I don’t have to come back tomorrow,” I plead.

  “Look, Sophie,” Else replies, “you are going to make mistakes, just like I did. But teaching will get easier.”