The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  A nurse explains to me that the sanitarium is filled to the limit and Hansi had to be put in the psychiatric wing.

  “I want him out of here now!” I shout.

  “You’ll have to talk to the director.”

  “But these men in here could hurt my brother.”

  “They’re on tranquilizers, and Herr Feldman is also belted. Nothing is going to happen.”

  I wait for an hour to speak with the director, Dr Hans-Jürgen Dannecker. From behind a giant vase of red tulips—his shield—he repeats what the nurse told me, but also adds in a calming tone, “I’ll see what I can do to have your brother moved. I realize how upsetting it must be for you to see him there. We’ll take care of it. I promise. Give us a day or two.”

  From his window, Hansi can see a small pond, so when I go up again, I try to cheer him up by summoning him to the window but he won’t come. He is as silent and impenetrable as the high walls guarding his universe, and I know from experience he’s terrified. For one thing, he’s sitting up with his legs pulled in to his chest. His fortress position. And his rapid blinking means he’s got his finger in a dyke of tears. Offering a quick prayer to his squirrel god, I take my secret weapon out of my book bag. “Drum roll, please …” I announce, and then I put down my new jigsaw puzzle between us. “The great pyramid of Giza!”

  Not a single stone in the Hansi Fortress even loosens, though we might have a chance if roommate number 2 would end his private monologue. “I found it in this crowded little shop on Hutten Straße,” I tell my brother, and since he’s always been fond of geographic details, I add, “right near the power plant. I’ll take you there when we get better. It’s full of amazing junk.”

  I speak in a cheerful voice and keep the sentences short, just as he prefers, but he knocks the puzzle box off the bed with his foot and it falls with a dry thud.

  Before I leave, he writes, “You didn’t tell them to let me go home.” That’s just to make sure I understand I’m being punished.

  I visit him every day, but he won’t write another word. Papa is staying at home this week, so I don’t even have the benefit of being able to spend nights with Isaac. Three more days go by and not only hasn’t Hansi been moved to a better room, but Dr Dannecker will no longer admit me to his office. His secretary tells me to have my father come in the next day.

  I accompany Papa to the sanitarium on the 20th. Hansi’s eyes have grown as dull as pewter. I’m in a clinging, sweaty panic, which may be why I don’t consider that the physicians are drugging him. I try kissing my brother on the lips and holding him in my arms while whispering my apologies, but he fails to turn back into a prince.

  Papa returns from his meeting with Dr Dannecker and tells me, smiling, “Hansi will be moved tomorrow.”

  “Thank God, Papa. You’re wonderful.” I press my lips to his cheek.

  This is the first time I have felt Papa and I are on the same side since my mother’s death, but he doesn’t even kiss me back.

  As promised, my brother is moved the next day, into a pleasant double room. His roommate looks to be in his twenties and also has tuberculosis. His name is Karl. He talks in a calm, educated voice and is friendly to me. Still, Hansi won’t say a word to either of us. All the silence between us … It seems like a metaphor for how helpless we are to really help our loved ones at their most difficult moments. And every time I leave the sanitarium, I feel as if I’ve been spun around like Benni Mannheim, with a lethal gift—Papa—waiting for me back at home.

  By the 23rd of January, I should have had my period, because I’m usually quite regular. I don’t say anything to Isaac yet, though when I see Hansi on the 24th, I whisper, “I’m trying to make a baby with Isaac Zarco. And just maybe I’ve succeeded. Will you give me your blessing?”

  But he’s still punishing me and won’t even look up at me. I move the palm of his hand over my cheek so he can feel my words, and I say: “Nothing and no one could ever make me abandon you. I will be with you every step of the way.” Trying for a little humor at this terrible moment, I add, “You’ll never get rid of me.”

  When I let his hand go, he tugs it back into his lap as if I’ve burned him. And his eyes close.

  By the 26th, I allow myself to believe I might be pregnant. When I tell Isaac, he dances me around his bedroom, then listens to my belly. “Strange—all I hear is gas,” he tells me, giggling.

  Since I don’t want to get too excited over a false alarm, we agree that we’ll consider ourselves successful only if I don’t have a period by the 1st of February.

  I’ve brought Isaac real coffee—a luxury—that I purchased on the black market, and we drink it while eating matzo smeared with butter and honey, his favorite snack. Then we listen to a Bach violin concerto on the phonograph. I sit between his legs and he massages my shoulders. Unfortunately, the happiness of knowing I’m just where I want to be only makes me feel my little brother’s terror all the more deeply.

  When I tell Isaac about how Hansi is not coming out of his desolate state, he offers to come with me to meet with Dr Dannecker. “Somehow, we’ve got to either get Hansi home or have him moved to a smaller, more cheerful place,” Isaac tells me, as if he’s reading my thoughts.

  I call for an appointment, but Dr Dannecker has no free time until after the weekend. On the morning of Monday the 29th, he listens to us patiently, but tells us that he can’t release Hansi without Papa’s agreement. “The boy is a minor. My hands are tied.”

  Papa has moved back in with Greta and when I go to her apartment to plead with him to sign Hansi’s release papers, he doesn’t invite me in. Sighing mightily, he says, “Sophie, I’m getting awfully tired of your theatrics. As soon as he’s cured completely, I’ll bring him home.”

  I call Papa every other day to see if Dr Dannecker has given him any good news, but there’s none. I stay away from Greta’s apartment, which means I never see him. And neither does Hansi, who sits in bed with his eyelids shut tight. When he does open them, all I see is a despair so deep that it terrifies me.

  The 1st of February comes and goes without any traces of blood, which means I must be pregnant. Isaac kisses me all over and thanks me, tears so thick in his eyes that he complains he can’t see me, and I’ll never forget our long, grateful embrace. I’ll allow us only a small celebration until Hansi is allowed to come home, and since we no longer go to local restaurants together, we take the tram to a vegetarian restaurant on Friedrichstraße named Behnke that I’ve been to with Else and where no one who could get me in trouble would ever go.

  “I think my father wants a few weeks to see how it feels to be free of both his kids,” I tell Isaac over our soup.

  “My fear,” he replies, taking my chin to fix my attention, “is that Greta will pressure him to leave Hansi in the sanitarium so she and your father can live together permanently. It’s quite common for parents to want to put difficult children in institutions.”

  So maybe Greta is the person I should be talking to. That never happens because Hansi’s room is empty when I arrive at the sanitarium on the 2nd of February. I rush into Dr Dannecker’s office, ready to squeeze the life out of him, but he assures me that everything is fine; Hansi was simply transferred the previous afternoon to a specialized institution in Brandenburg in order to determine the best course of treatment. “They want to know if he is a good candidate for a chest operation called a thoracoplasty,” he adds.

  Tears are already flooding my eyes. “I’ll need the address of the hospital,” I tell him.

  “I’m sorry, that’s impossible. They don’t allow visitors. But your brother should be back here within a week—two weeks at the most. I’ll let you know as soon as he gets here.”

  “At least give me the phone number,” I plead, but Dr Dannecker tells me that’s also strictly forbidden.

  I phone him twice that week, but each time his secretary tells me he’s received no news about Hansi. I don’t see Papa over this period. Whenever I call Greta’s apartment she tells
me he’s not there, and he comes home to pick up his mail while I’m teaching.

  Then, ten days after Hansi’s transfer, on the 12th of February, Papa receives a letter from Brandenberg’s Trostbriefabteilung, the Department of Condolence Letters:

  We are sorry to inform you that your son, Hans Riedesel, who was transferred to our institution on the 1st of February, 1940, suddenly and unexpectedly died here on the 9th of February due to complications caused by his tuberculosis, most particularly acute cardiac insufficiency. In spite of all medical efforts, we were unable to save him.

  We offer our most sincere condolences for your loss, and we hope you will be able to find comfort in the thought that your son did not suffer. He died quietly and without pain. Police ordered an immediate cremation of your son’s body because of the legal requirement to combat epidemics.

  The letter continues with bureaucratic details and informs Papa that he will be able to obtain Hansi’s ashes once we send a certificate from a licensed cemetery indicating that proper burial arrangements have been made. Two copies of Hansi’s death certificate are enclosed. I fold these papers in my hands over and over while I sit on the cold floor in front of my bed. My next memory is of knocking on Isaac’s door.

  “Hansi is dead,” I tell him.

  I remember the reassuring firmness of his arms around me and my sense of complete helplessness, of needing to enclose myself in his apartment forever and never venture outside, because the hardest part of my life will now begin: the long walk alone into a future I don’t want.

  I’d have taken on Hansi’s tuberculosis and silence to save him. I’m certain of it. Mesirat nefesh—I now know what that means. But my realization is useless; I will never know how his life was meant to turn out. I will never meet the girl who captures his heart. I will never help him find a job or choose an apartment. He will never again pose for me and look over my shoulder at his likeness, his breathing warm on my neck. And I will never press my hand to his hair when he is sleeping and feel the rise and fall of him, the soft and delicate presence of the person who taught me what it meant to give to the world without demanding anything in return. And I’ll never again receive a love so quiet that it could be poetry spoken by Isaac or the sound of wind through the linden trees on Marienburger Straße.

  Isaac and I talk in his apartment but I don’t recall what we say. I think I tell him that I know better now what Vera felt when she learned that her unborn child had been murdered, and maybe, too, what Benjamin Mann­heim felt when he learned that he’d never play his cello again.

  Perhaps, too, I am beginning to understand why Isaac doesn’t talk about his son. What is there to say except that there is a hole in him that will never be filled up, not by confessing his emotions to me, not by lovemaking, not by weeping, not by the passage of time, not by whispering prayers all night to the Lord of Abraham and Moses.

  “Not even love can do much to ease the way you are feeling,” Isaac whispers to me during my first week of grief. “And I’m not sure we would even want it to. After all, my son and your brother deserve a pain as big as all that we are. And they deserve for it not to ever entirely disappear.”

  The Hebrew language understands this, he tells me. “The word chalal means both an empty space and a person who has been murdered or killed in battle.”

  Is it worth saying that I weep for Hansi and myself for years, even when I make no sound at all? Until the end of the war, I will spend a portion of every day trying to figure out what I should have done differently and how he could have been saved. And for decades I will wonder what he might have become. My favorite fantasy—Hansi as an animal trainer at the Berlin Zoo. Silly, but that’s what my mind arranges for him.

  I’m eighty-nine years old now, but Hansi will forever be sixteen. That’s too young to end up in a jar of ashes underneath a gray-marble headstone in a Prenzlauer-Berg cemetery.

  I’d like to inscribe Too beautiful, beautiful, beautiful for this ugly country on the stone but I don’t dare tell Papa. He chooses: Beloved son and brother.

  Papa cries real tears when he tells me what he has asked the stone carver to write. A surprise.

  Yet a girl like me knows by now that tears are easy. Even Hitler and Goebbels must cry on occasion. And I’m fairly certain that Werner Catel, Max de Crinis, Julius Hallervorden, Hans Heinze, Werner Heyde, and all the other Nazi physicians who murdered boys like Hansi weep when they learn of a loved one’s death.

  Not that I know anything about any of these fine Germans yet …

  Was Hansi really a beloved son? If I try to be fair, which I don’t often want to be, then I have to admit that human beings are contradictory creatures. Our minds are made of darkness and light, and our hands are dexterous enough to juggle affection and resentment for sixteen years with no difficulty at all.

  I dream of Jacob’s Ladder awaiting Hansi

  I take a break from teaching over the next two days and wear Hansi’s shirts around the apartment because I don’t want to lose the smell of him. When I can’t sleep out of the need to touch him, I bury my face in his pillow and breathe in as deep as I can. I break out into the sweat of a condemned prisoner whenever I picture the pit where he will lie forever. I don’t dare take out my last drawings of him.

  Isaac asks me if he can go to the funeral, and I say yes. Some Jewish friends of Hansi’s from school also agree to come. I’ve called Else and Dr Hassgall, and they will be there.

  Papa overhears me talking to Else on the phone and forbids her and my other friends from coming. “If my superiors from the Health Ministry see any Jews, we can say goodbye to my promotion—maybe even my job.” He shakes his head at me as if I’m a witless fool.

  “At least let Dr Hassgall come.”

  “No. I took heat for leaving Hansi in that school of his, and I can’t risk his being there.”

  “Then I won’t go.”

  “Don’t be absurd. Everyone will expect you there.” Seeing I’m about to say no again, he plays his trump card. “Hansi would want you there.”

  “Yes, he would,” I agree, “but he’s dead now and has no say in the matter.”

  “You make it very hard for a father to love you, you know.”

  “Should loving a daughter always be easy?”

  “And there you go again … always too clever! You’ll go to the funeral, or I will do something I don’t want to do.”

  You and Greta got what you wanted when Hansi died, and now you want me to be sent away too! I want to shout that at him but I eat all my words of rage these days. I live on them and nothing else, which means I grieve for Hansi while starving. As it should be.

  THE SIXTH GATE

  Six is the inward direction, the silver hook joining the Upper and Lower Realms, the days of the week leading to and from the Sabbath, the points of the Star of David, and the sections of the Talmud (the seeds, seasons, couplings, ethics, holy things and purities).

  The Sixth Gate holds the mirror of memory, in which we are enjoined to watch the reflections of the journey past and consider their consequences as we prepare to venture forth into one last palace of mystery. The Sixth Heaven, Zebul, is presided over by Moses, and its radiant angels stand guard over the Upper Realms.

  Behold, six men came from the direction of the higher gate, which lieth toward the north, and every man carried a battle-axe in his hand —Ezekiel 9.

  Berekiah Zarco, The Book of Memory

  Chapter Twenty

  It’s not until after the war that I find out that Brandenburg became a killing center for handicapped children and adults at the end of 1939, one of six such institutions that would soon be established by the Health Ministry. Tuberculosis was one of the fraudulent reasons for death commonly given to concerned families.

  I did a great deal of reading into the killing centers when books started appearing on the subject in the 1960s. I learned that Hansi must have been transferred to Brandenburg in a gray bus belonging to the Gemein-nüzige Kranken-Transport, the Charitabl
e Foundation for the Transport of Patients— a government company that was hardly in the charity business. He and any other sanitarium patients on his bus were undoubtedly met by a nurse or technician and led to a reception room, where they were told to undress because they would later be bathed, though it’s possible the showerheads had not yet been installed by February 1940. In that case, the patients would have been told they were to inhale a special therapeutic vapor. Hansi’s clothing was sorted, labeled and numbered, and he was weighed and measured. He was five-foot eight inches tall, and the scale would have shown a little less than 139 pounds; that was the last weight for him we’d recorded at our school. Then he’d have been questioned and examined by a physician—wearing a reassuring white coat—who would have tried to determine which fraudulent cause of death might best meet the boy’s appearance. Perhaps Hansi tended to present a wasted, tubercular look to physicians because he was so slender.

  My brother’s gaze would not have met the doctor’s eyes when he was questioned. By then, he’d have been hiding deep down inside the Hansi Universe. I pray he was untouchable, beyond pain and humiliation.

  The physician would have marked Hansi with a cross on his back to indicate that he had gold fillings to be robbed before cremation.

  Hansi would then have had a number stamped onto him or attached to him with adhesive tape. He’d have been photographed sitting and standing. Maybe he was filmed, too, for propaganda purposes—as evidence of the danger posed to Germany by the feebleminded.

  He was then assembled together with other patients, some from different transports, perhaps, and they’d have been led to the shower room.

  Hansi would have stepped on tiptoe over the tile floor, because he always hated his feet being cold. Maybe he sat on one of the wooden benches along the wall after he entered the low-ceilinged room. I bet he remained standing, however, with his hands over his penis and testicles. When I draw him in that position, I feel certain that’s how he’d have looked. He would have glanced down, too, to keep from having to see any panicked faces. Maybe he didn’t notice the showerheads, if they were there, or the holes in the ceiling where they would soon be installed. The idea of being sprayed with water would have terrified him. Too much like rain. Which means, of course, that it’s possible he started shrieking. A doctor, most likely the supervisor, Christian Wirth, would have given him a sedative in that case.