The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  “No, no, no!” he replies angrily. He points his pipe at me.

  “And close the door on your way out. I need to work.”

  Among the Berlin Jews dragged out of their homes on the 15th of June is Gnendl Rosencrantz’s pharmacist father. Dr Hassgall says he has been arrested because the police were called to his shop in 1934 when he got into a fistfight with a customer who called him a dirty Bolshevik Jew. Isaac tells me that’s nothing; Moshe Cohen, the Walking Stock Exchange I met on the day we protested against the first Nazi boycott of Jewish shops, was taken away for having unpaid parking tickets!

  The day after her father’s arrest, I try to talk to Gnendl as soon as she arrives, but she squirms out of my grasp and sits at her desk, vibrating with such clenched anger that I decide to wait an hour or so before trying again. But while we’re drawing a bouquet of flowers, she pushes all her crayons to the floor and rushes into the back garden. She sits on the swings. I kneel next to her.

  “I only want to be nice to you,” I say, because I know by now my intentions have to be absolutely clear. “May I touch you?”

  She shakes her head and moans.

  “Then would you let me push you on the swings?”

  No answer. I stand behind her and grip the wooden chair she’s sitting in. As she pendulums through the air, she closes her eyes tight, as though craving darkness. I push her for a long time, and the other kids crowd by the door, watching us and whispering nervously.

  The next morning, Gnendl doesn’t come to school. And not the next day either. A few days later, after Dr Hassgall makes some frantic phone calls, we discover that her mother, lacking any means of support, has had to give up their apartment. Fearing that her phone was being tapped and letters intercepted, she didn’t dare tell us that she and Gnendl had left for her sister’s house in the suburb of Spandau.

  In July, K-H takes a record number of photographs, because the government has decided that all Jews must carry special identity cards. I clip Isaac’s silver tufts back for the shot since Nazi geneticists have decided that the left ear of Jews gives away their Semitic descent and must be clearly visible in every picture.

  We have special ear-inspectors now, and yet the world regards the Germans as a rational people. To my utter astonishment, it’s a reputation that will even persist after the war.

  I keep my hair pinned behind my left ear during classes now. A hollow gesture perhaps, since I am a Christian, but I will not let Volker, Inge, and the rest of my Jewish students be threatened without showing them clearly that I’m on their side.

  Isaac and all the other Jewish men of Germany have also had Israel added as a middle name to their identity cards, as decreed by law, just as Jewish women have been forced to add Sarah. And his fingerprints need to be registered; after all, as Dr Goebbels explains, it is the responsibility of any good government to keep track of what he calls Ungezieferr, meaning vermin. So one sunny afternoon we wait on line at our local police station on Rykestraße, right next to the synagogue where Isaac attends services. Nearly everyone is more offended than angry. “Who would have believed proper law-abiding Germans could be treated like common criminals!” one elderly woman in a wheelchair tells me.

  How could you still not understand the Nazis don’t regard you as German! I want to shout at her, but Isaac reaches for my shoulder to keep me from making a scene.

  His left and right index fingers are inked and pressed down to paper by a policeman. I almost quarrel with him on the way home for his not even voicing a protest, but all my energy dissipates on seeing the ink smudges that he’s rubbed onto his cheeks. Beneath his dark eye pouches, they look like bruises that will never heal. On the way home, we see Gestapo officers smashing the windows of a printing house on Prenzlauer Allee. On the door, they’ve painted “On Vacation in Dachau!” We don’t say a thing. Our silence feels like a betrayal for which we’ll never be able to make amends.

  That night we learn that Jewish doctors are prohibited from practicing medicine.

  “When Jews are no longer allowed to use bathrooms we’ll have mass protests,” Vera tells me, trying to make light of the new laws, but my sense of humor is gone, having vanished when Isaac, K-H, and Marianne had a big J stamped on their passports. By now, K-H has warned me that Isaac better ask for a Turkish visa quite soon because that J is making it much harder to emigrate. “Countries are reducing their quotas,” he tells me. “You’ve got to convince him to make plans.”

  I sneak up on Isaac late one Friday night after our Sabbath dinner. He’s in his kitchen preparing the strong coffee that helps him continue his work into the early morning.

  “Isaac, maybe you should go visit your Cousin Abraham in Istanbul for a little while,” I tell him. “I’m sure he’s worried about you, and all your relatives there would undoubtedly love to see you.” I don’t dare add that he will also then be able to further his work with Turkish journalists.

  “I know what you want,” he replies, glaring at me, “but I’m not fleeing. Has it never occurred to you that Germany is my home?”

  “I know it’s your home, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

  “My wife and my parents are buried in Berlin. And as much as I regret it, my son died fighting for this wretched country.”

  When he turns away from me, I grab his arm. “And when they knock down all the synagogues, what then?”

  He marches out of the kitchen into his bedroom and shuts the door.

  Over the next few days, Isaac refuses to eat more than matzo and cheese or to turn away from his manuscripts. Despite what he once confessed to me about my gravity keeping him tied to me, I am helpless against his withdrawal.

  He never hugs or kisses me now. I miss our tenderness. And the caresses of his whispering voice. And the sense that we are in this fight together.

  This is a time of cold distance—the winter of my heart.

  Vera tries to help, as do K-H, Marianne, and Roman, but nothing they say to Isaac can make him return to us. He no longer sets foot in his factory, and Vera tells me that his workers are petrified that Zarco Industries will soon go bankrupt, leaving seventeen tailors and seamstresses unemployed, six of whom are Jews who’ll probably be unable to find other jobs. I set off for the factory to try to help with the accounts, but the files are a complete jumble, so I phone Dr Hassgall, who once again saves the day. He calls our work together forensic accounting, since it’s more archaeology than arithmetic.

  The little hope that enters my life at this time comes from Mr Mannheim, who plays Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring every evening now, as if he knows that Bach is what we need in this wilderness. The melody—a dance up to the sun—seems to come from a simpler world that’s long gone, however.

  One evening, Hansi announces to me that he won’t get undressed with me in the room. I don’t need to look long into his challenging eyes to know that he needs—and deserves—his privacy, so he and I move my bed into the sitting room, between the fish tank and the radio. I leave the music on sometimes to help me fall asleep and wonder why I didn’t think of this before.

  In September, K-H sells his studio to a Christian friend because a lawyer has advised him that the Nazis may soon start confiscating Jewish property. He and Marianne have applied for visas for both England and the United States. Marianne has a cousin in London who can sponsor her.

  Later that month, we get a big scare: Isaac is arrested by the Gestapo on the evening of Wednesday, the 28th of September. He’d previously given me instructions to contact his one remaining Christian client—Wolfgang Lange of Munich—if he were ever in trouble with the government. On the phone that night, Herr Lange is patient with my tearful explanation, and he assures me in a calm, avuncular voice that he’ll have Isaac out in a day or two. He somehow makes good on that promise and Isaac comes home the next evening, his walk a fragile balancing act, his eyes puffy and bloodshot. I sense the horror he’s been through in the desperate way he grips me when we embrace, and in the solemn, moist-eyed
way he gazes around his apartment. While he’s shaving in the bathtub, he tells me he was taken to the police station in Alexanderplatz and interrogated through the night. “Which wasn’t so bad,” he shrugs, dipping his razor in the bathwater, “because the mattress on my cot was so lumpy that I couldn’t sleep anyway.”

  He wants me to laugh but I can’t. And he won’t tell me if he was beaten, though there’s a red welt on his cheek where he must have been slapped or punched. I sit on the edge of the tub and shampoo his hair. “How did Herr Lange get you out?” I ask.

  “He knows some important Nazis, and he told them that my factory is indispensable to him—that he couldn’t stock his women’s clothing shops without me.”

  “And what information did the Nazis want to get from you?”

  “Who knows? They kept pressing me to tell them how I was trying to undermine the government. I assured them I wasn’t working against Hitler or anyone else, and that I was simply journeying as far as I could in my prayers. After a while, I got the feeling they thought I wasn’t right in the head.” He smiles up at me boyishly and places some shampoo foam on my nose with the tip of his finger. “Which was, of course, exactly what I wanted them to think.”

  Isaac’s arrest is a very bad sign, of course, and Vera and a committee of seamstresses from his factory meet with him to beg him to sell his business and apartment to a Christian before the Nazis seize all his property. Despite my protests, he puts his flat and boathouse in my name, and sells Zarco Industries for one Reichsmark to Dr Hassgall, who enlists me to go around to former clients to drum up more business for the company, since Herr Lange and Isaac’s two remaining Jewish clients are hardly enough to pay salaries and bills.

  So it is that I again learn the humiliation of dressing like a Young Maiden. Vera does my lipstick and mascara, and I show a Greta-like, red-pepper smile to the Aryan businessmen I entertain. I drink the champagne they slip into my hand, and to my eternal shame I once even let a jowled Prussian stinking of cheap cigars run his fat hand along my thigh. “Now that the management is Jew-free,” he says, making a gangsterish clicking noise with his tongue, “I think we can work something out.”

  This from a man who invited Isaac to his daughter’s wedding nine years earlier.

  I have to scrub myself in the bath to get the stink of his fat fingers off me. But the contract is all that counts, Vera assures me. Maybe that’s just her self-interest talking, but who among us can judge her? And who can say where she gets a gun … ?

  In mid-October, Tonio’s Panzer Division rolls past Dresden into Sudetenland to “free” that province from its Czechoslovakian rulers. In his first letter, he writes that the German army has been met with open arms, and he even had red roses tossed to him by two girls standing on the balcony of a house in the town of Teplice v Cˇ echách. “To keep you from getting jealous,” he writes, “I enclose a gift from one of the shops there. I hope you like it!”

  Enclosed is a pale-blue scarf. Very handsome, but I can easily imagine a terrified Jewish shopkeeper on his knees, handing it to Tonio as part of a bribe to spare his life. I never even try it on.

  A couple of weeks later, 17,000 Polish Jews, some of whom have been residing in Germany for a decade or more, are rounded up and sent in boxcars to the Polish border town of Zbozyn, where they languish in no-man’s-land—camping on the train or on the streets—since the government of Poland refuses to accept them. Vera joins a small protest in the Neukölln neighbor­hood of Berlin, a workers’ stronghold. I hear the story told breathlessly by Isaac only that evening, but apparently the Gestapo started shooting, and so did Vera. She told him she put a bullet into the shoulder of a storm trooper. When he collapsed, she stepped on his face.

  She’s exultant when she sneaks over later that night to Isaac’s apartment. “I should have started stepping on those little men five years ago!” she tells me. Leaning close to me, she adds, “When I heard his nose cracking under my heel … It was the most wonderful sound I ever heard!”

  “Except that you’ve put yourself in danger!” Isaac bellows. “And you may be needed here with me.”

  He has a Biblical way of talking and gesturing now, as if every word he says might be the stone that fells Goliath. His stern power terrifies me, and at times the playful man I fell in love with seems to have vanished entirely.

  Vera must be the easiest woman in Berlin to identify, and the Gestapo are sure to search Isaac’s apartment, factory, and warehouse for her. So where should she hide?

  We set out for Emdener Straße right away, but the city does not seem to be on our side. I’ll never forget the dim, miserable glare of the streetlamps, and the black, coal-like hardness of the Spree, as if it were about to blaze into flame, and the gawking of a group of Nazi Youth standing in front of Heiland Church. We take turns carrying her suitcase, which contains her sewing machine. “It’s all that stands between me and ruin,” she tells me. “I’d never go anywhere without it.”

  That makes me feel a strange sense of disquiet, and I soon remember a time when she didn’t take it with her. But for now I say nothing. I take out the key to the King David School, let us in, and turn on the lights. We walk to Dr Hassgall’s office, whispering in shameful voices, because we’re endangering the school.

  Vera drops down on the couch. “I promise I’ll leave before classes start in the morning,” she assures me. Weariness having finally overcome her exultation, she closes her eyes and leans back.

  “But how will you get out of the city?” I ask her.

  “I’ll take care of that,” Isaac tells us. “Vera, I’ll pick you up here at six in the morning. I’ll ask K-H for his car.”

  “Where will you take her?” I ask him.

  “We’ll go to Cologne,” she replies. “I have cousins and an uncle there. And from there I’ll make my way to Andre.” She looks up at Isaac. “Then, Istanbul.”

  Isaac nods, and I can see from the way they look at each other that they agreed on this plan long ago. Andre must have gone to Antwerp to help Jews and others fleeing Germany. How did I fail to understand that they’d developed an ongoing strategy?

  “How many people have you helped get out by now?” I ask Isaac.

  “Nine. Not including Julia and Martin. But there’ll be more.”

  Turning to Vera, I say, “So you knew that you’d need to leave one day.”

  “Once the Opposite-Compass started pointing us toward our graves, howcould I make my future in Germany?”

  “And your gun, what did you do with it?”

  “I tossed it in the Spree.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “I inherited it from Andre.”

  “Vera, when you fled Isaac’s apartment after your unborn baby was murdered … you left without your sewing machine.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Still, that’s what happened.”

  “So what’s the difference?” she snarls.

  “You said before that your sewing machine is all that stands between you and ruin. Why would you leave it behind unless you had to?”

  “Listen, Sophele, I’ll solve all the mysteries for you one day soon, but there’s no time right now,” she says enigmatically, and she shushes me with an angry gesture when I insist on answers.

  Saying good-bye to her makes me ache with hopelessness. When we hug, she presses her lips to the top of my head for a long time, as though to make sure she will remain in my memory forever. When we separate, I feel as if I’m standing in the presence of a timeless being, because not even a day seems to have passed since we met in the courtyard of our building. The knowledge that my world will be much smaller when she leaves chokes my voice.

  “Why did you choose me?” I ask in a whisper. A question I didn’t know I had.

  She wipes away her tears. “Choose you? What do you mean?” She fumbles around in her bag for her cigarettes.

  “You befriended me. Why?”

  “Sophele, who the hell ever knows why two peop
le are attracted to each other? Besides, it was Isaac who brought you into our circle.” She lights her cigarette.

  “Sophele, I’ve always thought you were beautiful,” Isaac tells me, his hands on my shoulders, and his eyes are full of affection for me for the first time in months. I fall into his arms.

  Vera smiles at me as I’m encircled by his protective embrace and says, “Maybe it’s because I’m not envious of your good looks. Because you’re one of the Erbkranke—hereditarily diseased. Just like me.”

  “What’s my disease?” I ask.

  “It’s always been Hansi, of course. And happily, you’ll never be cured.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “What did Vera mean when she said that she’d solve all the mysteries for me?” I ask Isaac as he and I head home. “Do you think she knows for sure who murdered Heidi and Dr Stangl?”

  “I have no idea,” he says.

  “Was she involved in their deaths?”

  “I only know what she promised me—that she didn’t kill them.”

  At dawn the next morning, Isaac picks Vera up and they drive across Germany to Cologne. After a quick supper together in a beer hall she’s always liked near the main train station, he drops her at her cousins’ apartment, then speeds back to Berlin. He manages to make it home by eight in the morning. He’s been up for twenty-eight straight hours when I visit him. He’s washing dishes in the pajamas I bought for his seventieth birthday, barefoot. His eyes are red and his back is bent, but he claims he’s drunk too much coffee to sleep. I make him sit down and heat up some milk, then pour it into a glass with a healthy shot of schnapps. Leaving Berlin seems to have been good for our intimacy, if not his body; as I put him to bed, he talks about his concern for Vera and, pressing my hand to his stubbly cheek, begs me to stay with him. So I call the school and leave a message for Else saying I’ll be late to work, then lie down next to him, caressing his beautiful hair. Once he’s snoring, I sit at his desk and watch him. He’s part of my breathing now. That’s what I realize while he sleeps.