Else talks to me sweetly and intelligently for some time, but she fails to dispel any of my discouragement until she says, “I’ve discovered that children are sponges, and they do their best to clean up any mess we make, so don’t worry so much.”
I’m unwilling to be cheered up, however, and reply, “I don’t want them to clean up my mess.”
“Go home and take a hot bath,” she advises me. “Everything will seem better in the morning.”
The eternal promise to the disheartened … But the prospect of teaching doesn’t seem any better at dawn. I sit next to Hansi and comb my fingers through his hair to calm myself.
At five to ten, just before my first class is to begin, Else hooks her arm in mine and says, “I had an idea last night. Draw them. They’ll love that, and they’ll be gratified that you’ve taken the time to look at them closely.”
“Draw my students?”
“Of course! Most of them will be happy to pose for you. And the others can watch. Start with Hansi.”
Else’s challenge reminds me of my mother’s wish to be really seen by me. So it is that I begin my second day at the King David School with Mama’s hand at the back of my neck. And God bless Else for tossing me a lifesaver.
I start with quick portraits of Hansi and his best friend Volker. The younger students crowd around me to watch, and a couple of them light up when I sketch their likenesses. Volker stares at me open-mouthed, as if he’s only just realized I’ve got supernatural powers. He trembles when he runs his finger over the big watery eyes I’ve given him. Has he never realized before how stunning they are? One boy, Stefan Neuhauser, stares at his portrait with his arms blocking everyone else away, afraid he might have to share his gift.
Still, some of the kids can’t imagine what a portrait might be for. And half of them refuse to say a word to me or even show me with their eyes that they are conscious of being in the room with me.
“What … what should I do with it?” says Monica Mueller in a fearful voice, shrinking back from my drawing of her, as if the paper might be hiding the tiny spiders that she always fears might get lost in her thick brown hair. Monica has been diagnosed with folie circulaire, the name physicians at the time have given to bipolar disorder, but Dr Hassgall says she probably has some form of schizophrenia.
“You don’t need to do anything with it,” I tell her gently.
As I reply, a slender girl with deep-set brown eyes and her auburn hair in tight braids, Gnendl Rosencrantz, rips up my portrait of her and exclaims, “All wrong!” She has the angriest expression I’ve ever seen, and she tears my paper into confetti as if she has to destroy a curse against her family. When she’s done, she makes fists with her tiny hands and squeezes them up by her ears. Maybe she likes to hear the grinding knuckles of her own rage.
“Does Gnendl have yellow eyes and no thumbs?” Isaac asks me when I describe her to him.
“No, why?”
“If she did, I’d make you a protective talisman because you’d be dealing with a powerful Jewish demon.”
In spite of Gnendl making holes in my lesson plans, I continue to sketch portraits that day, and I get the majority of the kids to make their own hesitant drawings before the bell rings. As far as I’m concerned, they and I have passed the First Gate. I’m even optimistic about coaxing the more diffident kids over that threshold over the coming weeks. Who knows, maybe Gnendl will unmake her fists one day, though I doubt she’ll ever stop breaking the crayons, which she pushes into her paper as if she needs to stub out all life on earth.
My most titanic obstacle soon becomes a blond pixie on the verge of puberty named Inge Hohenstein—the Silesian Shirley Temple, as I will call her in years to come, because she has curly cascades of blond hair and a stubborn nature. Her strategy is to keep me too busy with questions to teach.
“How long does crayon take to dry?” “What would happen if the ceiling fell on us?” “Why can’t Monica draw a straight line?”
She reduces me to hopeless tears a few times in September and October, and I regard her as my nemesis until late into the first term, when she asks, “What color is a pink crayon in the dark?”
“A pink crayon is always pink!” comes my slingshot reply, but later that day, Isaac, imitating Einstein, reminds me that color does not exist in the dark.
“An object can only be potentially pink if there is no light,” he tells me.
Maybe Inge was trying to tell me something about her own prospects. Is it far-fetched for me to believe that she has been waiting all her life for the sun to come up in whatever black-and-white universe she calls home and bring violet through red into her life?
I apologize to her the next day, which only makes her turn away as though I’m of no interest. It chills me today to think of so much I may have misunderstood about her and the rest of those kids.
But number one on my list of complete failures remains Gnendl, my eternal winter. When I ask Dr Hassgall for advice, he says, “She’s scared of you.”
“But I’m terrified of her!”
“She has trouble interpreting your facial expressions. You think you’re communicating tenderness or pleasure, but she thinks you’re furious at her—so enraged you might kill her.”
“My God!” I exclaim, because it occurs to me that this may be part of Hansi’s problem.
“Just try to be very clear in what you say to Gnendl and the others. Sooner or later she may figure out that you’re on her side.”
Number two on my failure list is a chocolate-skinned boy named Karl Skölny, who has glowing blue eyes that make my breathing quicken. I’ve never known a black person before, and when I meet his mother, Helen, she talks of the night-scents of southern Africa, and the sunsets as “fire falling through a dome of blue.” What must Karl make of our frigid winters? He never speaks except in indecipherable mumbles, and he never draws even a line. He hardly moves except to scratch his nose. I itch, therefore I am.
I teach three hours a day. It’s odd having Hansi as a student, and there are times when he curls into me, eager to let his friends know he’s my favorite, but Dr Hassgall says that he’ll soon get used to my being his teacher and stop trying to secure favors.
“You can’t stop loving him in class, so don’t even try,” he counsels me, to my great relief.
I get through my first term on adrenalin and chutzpah. My paychecks help too. The first time I take Hansi and Isaac out to a restaurant with my own money, I feel as if I’m the star of my own big-budget Hollywood movie.
My important revelation that year comes in November: each lesson doesn’t have to be clever or unique. Quite the opposite, in fact, since the kids thrive on knowing what’s coming next. I have them draw the weepy-limbed spruce tree in our garden every Tuesday throughout the late fall and winter, whether it’s glittering with sunlight or collecting snowflakes in its fingertips, and they get right to work, hunched over their papers, their hands moving as fast as bees.
But even knowing what’s coming next does little for Inge … One day during that first term, she gives me her angelic smile and says, “Fräulein Riedesel, would you mind moving the spruce tree?” To my confused expression, she signals to the right and says, “Over that way. It would be much better there.”
“I’m afraid the tree will always be where it is,” I say with false niceness. “But if you move your chair, the tree will seem to move.”
A clever answer, I think, but Inge shifts her chair around so many times over the next five minutes, setting it down with a brutal clack each time, that the others grow jittery, and Volker, who is always only one unexpected bump or thud from tears, ends up sobbing.
No matter, even Inge and Gnendl can’t stop me from loving how serious most of the kids get about drawing and painting, and the way they absent-mindedly bite their fingernails and tap their feet. It’s as though they believe that no matter what they are sketching they are always designing bridges between themselves and the world, which maybe they are. For Volker, the
bridge must be the night sky, because he puts different phases of the moon and stars in every drawing he does. He is such a quiet, reticent boy, though the few words that do come out of his mouth often fly out too fast, as if shot by a machine gun. We are always asking him to slow down.
Other kids delight in designing monsters. Veronika Vogt—or VV as I come to call her—draws red and brown gargoyles—precisely formed, snouted, pointy-eared creatures that seem to be made from blood. I ask her about them, but all she tells me is that the monsters need to be fixed to the paper, which involves covering them with a goopy layer of Henkel glue. Sometimes her hands get so sticky I have to take her to the sink and scrub them with pumice. She says her mother does that a lot, too. “I like my hands being clean,” VV tells me, holding them up for me to inspect, “but I like glue more.”
We laugh together over that. And I kiss the top of her head because I’m learning that distant kids appreciate physical closeness more than talk. Just like me, of course.
I like glue more … Just one of a hundred declarations from the kids that I will tell Isaac, Vera, and everyone else I know over the coming years.
On Mondays we draw portraits; on Tuesdays we go outside, weather permitting, and sketch flowers and trees; on Wednesdays the kids bring in objects from home and I arrange them into still-lifes on my desk; on Thursdays we sculpt clay figures; and on Fridays I read them a story, and they paint any scene they want.
Their love of knowing what to expect becomes the ground beneath us. I often stumble, but I can’t really hurt myself because there is simply nowhere to fall.
I show them pictures of my favorite paintings and drawings, too—Dürer’s sketch of his mother, Ribera’s light-infused figure of St Sebastian surrounded by darkness … I even bring in Isaac’s Chagall one day—a man and woman flying through a cockeyed village centered by an Orthodox church—and we sketch the other people who might live in the artist’s hometown. I hang some of the reproductions around the room, including the Portrait of a Rabbi by Rembrandt that taught me about taking time with my work—years, if necessary, to make every line and shadow what they want to be. Gnendl grabs hold of Goya’s Saturn Devouring One of His Sons as if it is the long-lost package she’d been expecting for years. Maybe that Titan’s appetite for human flesh justifies her fists. So one spring day I bring her in some reproductions of gruesome paintings that I’ve cut out of magazines. She gives me a surprised look, gasping, then stares at me so penetratingly that I have to turn away. Is she pleased that I indulge her morbid preferences? She doesn’t ask a single question that morning. A few days later, when she gets through an entire class without breaking a crayon, I suspect she is starting to trust me.
I also hang the students’ drawings up on our walls; I want them to know I’m grateful for all they are showing me of their inner worlds. And proud of them.
My own work from this period becomes freer than it was before. I make faces blue and pink, and my lines become less intent on realism. I give people pointy, Pan-like ears and horns. I no longer want to make proper Prussian likenesses of people. I want to evoke the feel of them—their animal nature and solidity, their capacity for transformation. I even draw crescent moons around Volker, pulling him out toward the world. Other than Hansi, he is my favorite. Volker and I sit happily on a seesaw together that entire year, going up and down effortlessly, as though the school is teaching us to breathe together. When I think back to those times, I can feel my arms around him and my brother, and it is as if the world itself were giving everything back to me that I ever wanted.
Dr Hassgall and Else take photographs of all the kids just before the Christmas holidays, and I hide the results in my K-H Collection because so many of the students are Jews. Most of their parents have had their jobs taken away, in fact, so they can’t afford our full fees, which is why our blue walls are flaking and the steps to the garden remain crudely cemented. Why, too, we shiver throughout the winter.
Dr Hassgall, Else, me, and the other teachers are standing in the back row of the photographs. After the war, I’ll look at all of us every couple of years and never fail to think, My God, I was only nineteen years old, just a kid myself …
All of those beautiful children are sterilized by the end of that 1936-37 school year: the Silesian Shirley Temple, Monica, Volker, VV, Gnendl … Which makes me wonder at the time how the surgeons and doctors of Germany can sleep at night. Later, of course, we’ll all learn that they slept perfectly.
One day, Volker takes a sketch I’ve done of him and draws stars all over his face. I’m furious, because I worked hard to do a faithful portrait of him, and demand to know what he’s doing in a nasty voice. Shuddering, he replies, “Raking leaves.”
When tears gush in his eyes, I kneel next to him and apologize. He falls into my arms, and I hold him tight, begging him to forgive me. From then on, whenever one of the kids would ask me why I was doing something they found odd, I’d often reply, “Raking leaves,” before giving my real explanation, which would always make Volker and me grin in unison.
Holding that gorgeous boy as he shakes is an important moment for me because I hadn’t realized how much power I had over these little beings. And that I’d still been holding back a good deal of my love until then, thinking teachers shouldn’t show their students their hearts.
We must be gentle, gentle, gentle with each other because we are very fragile . . . That’s what my kids teach me that year, and it’s a lesson I badly needed to learn.
Tonio talks mostly about his army regimen when we’re together now, and though he speaks proudly of the precision his superiors have inculcated in him, and with good humor about the terrible food, the way he often grows silent without any warning is new. It leads me to believe he’s dissatisfied with the path he is on. Once, he volunteers the reason: “I wish I were free to lead a normal life.”
“What’s a normal life?” I ask him.
We’re strolling arm in arm around the rose garden in the Tiergarten at the time, watching Hansi and Volker racing around, and he shrugs morosely, then changes the subject. As we’re nearing home, however, he says, “I sometimes still dream of settling down with you and having children. Though I know you don’t want that.”
I feel terrible about not being able to give him what he dreams of, and this is clearly my cue to say something reassuring, but all I reply is, “A great many things have already happened to us that I could never have predicted. So let’s not be too certain what the future will bring us.”
* * *
After I begin my teaching career, I have my afternoons free to work on art projects and prepare supper for Hansi and my father. I go back to buying books for Isaac on occasion, though so many works have been burned, hidden, or already shipped to safety that it’s getting difficult to find the authors he wants. Once a week he meets me after school, and we go for a long stroll by the Spree or in one of the city’s parks, and have tea together. Or, if we’re feeling in the mood for company, we head to the Jewish Old Age Home to bring chocolates to Mrs Kaufmann, which always makes her clasp her hands together and lick her lips. Sometimes, in a whisper, she asks after Roman, her high-wire Prince Charming.
Papa spends every weekday evening with Hansi and me, in the good cheer of a man who is moving up in the world. Apparently, Greta is bringing him into the upper echelons of the sewage company running our country.
He sleeps over at her apartment on Fridays and Saturdays, however. I don’t mind—in fact, I prefer his absences, since the mistrustful tension between us has become a stretched cord that neither of us can quite get up the courage to cut or even talk about. So we struggle—forever linked—in silence. Very German, I’d say.
Papa, Hansi, and I listen to the radio while we eat supper so that we don’t have to talk. I keep it on, in fact, whenever my father is in the house. Disembodied voices become our barrier against quarrels.
He takes Hansi out to the movies or lunch every Sunday. Guilt? Probably, but that doesn’t matter beca
use the boy hops up and down at the chance to spend all day with his father. Greta sometimes flaps along after them, but I always turn down their invitations; I’d only spoil their fun, and Mama’s ghost prefers that I keep my distance.
I encourage Hansi to stay over at Volker’s house on Friday nights so that my dream of sleeping beside Isaac until morning can come true. When this miracle finally comes to pass, he and I are as nervous as kids hunting for money in their father’s pockets, which is probably why, when we try to make love, our bodies don’t fit. I’m in tears from the palace of expectations crashing down around me. Isaac cuddles me and tells me stories about his childhood I haven’t yet heard, and it’s the gentle wind of his voice that leads me into sleep, until sunrise, when I wriggle free of his heavy arm over my waist and take his handsome penis in my mouth. It’s while he’s thrusting inside me one morning that I first realize I want to have his child. But I say nothing yet; I like the idea of a happiness that’s all mine. And I probably ought to honor Mama’s wishes and wait till I know Isaac better before I even broach the subject. And till I’m at least twenty-one years old.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of those Friday nights with the softness of his penis pressed to my bottom, his hand on my head, and the faint scent of tobacco in the rise and fall of his chest, and I make myself stay awake so I can continue to feel the quiet touching of all that we are.
Being free of Hansi and Papa on Fridays also enables Vera, K-H, and Marianne to join Isaac and me for Sabbath dinner nearly every week. Little Werner usually follows me around the kitchen as I cook, watching me with captivated eyes. A future chef? He calls me Aunt Sophie in sign language, which I love. Roman comes to supper too, if he’s in town. K-H goes back to photographing all of us.
Isaac’s new project has become copying all of Berekiah Zarco’s manuscripts out by hand into special silver-covered notebooks. He expects the work to take him two years, because—like Hebrew scribes in olden times—he must discard any page on which he makes even a tiny error. “Copying my ancestor’s words is the only way I’m going to find the password to Araboth,” he assures me. “Berekiah meant me to find it while writing. He’s left clues. I’m sure of it.”
The Seventh Gate Page 44