The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  What did my brother think when he heard the hollow thud of the steel door closing behind him? Were some of the patients around him already shouting or sobbing?

  The hard metallic sound of the door being locked scares me the most. That’s the moment when Hansi would have guessed that the rusted iron teeth of this trap would soon be biting into his leg.

  I try not to put myself in Hansi’s place too often because the feeling of dread that enters me is like a nighttime ocean—endless, with no lights from land in sight. And now that I am old I can no longer find the courage to live inside my brother for more than a few minutes at a time.

  A technician in an adjoining room would have been given a signal that the patients were ready. He’d have had his hand on the valve of a compressed canister of carbon monoxide. Maybe the canister had the name IG Farben printed on its top, and Made in Ludwigshafen.

  The technician would have started to turn the valve and, using a pressure gauge, would have measured the amount of gas released. His name would be Franz or Werner or Karl. He’d be a careful man, obedient and loyal. He’d have two or three beautiful children. He probably always opened doors for women and stopped for red lights. He occasionally went to the opera to please his wife, but he’d be a fan of dance tunes or jazz or maybe even Lotte Lenya.

  Frans or Werner or Karl would have kept the valve open for ten minutes.

  I’m told carbon monoxide gas is odorless, but Hansi would have heard the hissing sound coming from the ceiling and then he’d have felt terror gripping his chest. With his heart caving in, he’d have reached out a hand to steady himself. Maybe he began scratching at the wall because he couldn’t get enough air and there must be a way out …

  Does he see Dr Wirth’s face pressed in the window, eager to learn how long it will take for this particular batch to expire? Some of Hansi’s neighbors must see a curious face in the glass—either Wirth’s or someone else’s—and they’d be banging on the window with their fists, calling out for help. Others fall to their knees, grimacing in agony, their chests heaving, their bladders emptying …

  Though perhaps they felt only a dizzying mist swirling around them and lost their balance, falling helpless—panting and confused—to the ground. I’ve been told by American physicians that carbon monoxide is painless, though since it causes asphyxiation I’m not certain what that means.

  What do I hope that Hansi was thinking as the gas rushed into his nose and eyes, pushing all the life out of him? That life was worth living even if this was the end? No, that’s not it. That life was beautiful? Hardly.

  I hope he had no thoughts at all, because any thought he had would have only made him more terrified and desperate. I hope his mind was empty. And I hope that spreading inside that emptiness was another emptiness so deep and wide that it cannot be named or labeled. Or murdered.

  After the gas chamber was ventilated with fans, Dr Wirth and several other physicians would have checked that this latest group was dead, which they were, because not even Harry Houdini could survive ten minutes of carbon monoxide. Not even God, very likely.

  Hansi would have probably been dead after two or three minutes. Five minutes at the most. Though my chemist father might know better.

  His body would have been dragged to the autopsy room, by technicians whose job it was to burn the bodies. It was hard work, not just because the corpses had to be disentangled from one another and piled, but also because idiots, epileptics, and deaf mutes are heavier than one would guess. So much life they had. As much as normal people. Surprising.

  Prior to cremation, the staff would have hunted in Hansi’s mouth for his gold fillings and knocked them out. With hammers? There are some details I don’t allow myself to know. Maybe he’d have been autopsied, too, so that the young physicians on staff could earn academic credits toward their specializations. If so, then his heart and liver would likely have been stolen. And his brain. Professor Julius Hallevorden of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Neurology collected more than 600 of them from Brandenburg and kept them in jars in his office. Science must goose-step forward, after all.

  “Where they came from and how they came to me was really none of my business,” Professor Hallevorden would later testify. A good German answer!

  The thick smoke from the crematorium carried all the way to Werder, some twelve miles away, when the wind was blowing from the west. I know, because I questioned people in Werder when I returned to Berlin years later. And I went to Brandenburg itself. So I know the city’s 55,000 residents grew to recognize the smell of burning human flesh, but what did they tell the tourists visiting the fourteenth-century St Catherine’s Church? “We just said it was from the slaughterhouse,” an old man told me. Accurate enough.

  Hansi’s gold-filled molars would have been sent by courier, along with hundreds of other rattling teeth recently collected, to a villa at 4 Tiergartenstraße in Berlin—code named T4. This handsome three-story manor house served as the headquarters for a program that would end up murdering more than 200,000 people.

  Hansi in Brandenburg

  Did the killing centers turn a profit from the sale of gold and organs? Did T4 medical director Paul Nitsche and business manager Gerhard Bohne become wealthy? Questions that no true German need ask, of course, because saving the race is its own reward.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Before Hansi’s death, Isaac and I had agreed that I would leave for Antwerp shortly after Purim, in late February. As that date approaches, however, we both realize I’m in no condition to travel. For one thing, morning sickness has weakened me, in large part because I can’t keep anything down but a little matzo, cheese, and onion soup. And the truth is, I do not want to leave Germany. I want to be left alone to sit by Hansi’s grave, and I want to have my baby at home. Is that too much to ask? Evidently it is, because Isaac is so gruff and insistent that I end up begging him, sitting on the edge of his bed with my head in my hands, to leave me be. “We’ll put the date back,” he finally gives in. “But just by a few weeks.”

  When I resume teaching, he accompanies me every day to the school, and he waits for me when classes end. He carries my book bag. At times, it seems he doesn’t want to let me out of his sight. What I don’t realize is that he already suspects that my brother has been murdered, and he fears that the same will happen to me.

  “Vera will meet you just across the border,” he tells me whenever I lose my nerve about leaving.

  “And you’ll come to me as soon as you do what needs to be done?” I ask him.

  “Yes, I promise.”

  He kisses my hands these days. And steps my fingers over his face. Having more experience than me at farewells, he is already preparing himself for my departure.

  I agree to leave on Friday, the 22nd of March. I can see now that it’s the sense that I am about to hurl myself off a cliff into absolute darkness that makes me provoke one last quarrel with my father. After all, my contempt for him will strengthen my resolve to leave. Still, if Papa had not revealed his plans, maybe I’d have simply turned away from him and walked quietly into the sunset.

  He comes home on Friday, the 15th of March sparkling with eagerness because he has a dinner with high officials of the sewage company and decided to pick up his best brown suit. Greta will not be accompanying him; this is men-only.

  Just before he leaves, he says, “Greta and I are engaged. But it’s a secret at the moment, so I’d prefer you not tell anyone.”

  “Have you set a date?” I ask, sensing the complete dissolution of our family as an invisible hand pressing at the back of my neck.

  “Sometime toward the end of the year,” he replies. “Maybe in November.”

  “I suppose I should offer you congratulations.”

  My ambivalence makes him laugh. “I suppose you should,” he says.

  Grudging admiration for me makes him continue to smile. He’s still a handsome man, and he cultivates the firm stance and confidence of an athlete even now. I can sense the lov
e I used to feel for him prompting me to confess I’m leaving. I want to tell him in order to bring to life a fantasy in which he begs me to stay. It’s a scene that has been playing in my head for the past two weeks: Papa, on his knees before me, holding my hand, saying, “Forgive me for having betrayed you so disgracefully.” Yes, I’ve borrowed John Gilbert from one of Garbo’s finest movies, Queen Christina, and added some dialogue of my own. In fact, in my version, Papa confesses, “I feel terrible guilt over what happened to Hansi. I acted very badly.”

  These are the only words that would ever permit me to forgive my father, and I want to give him a last chance to say them. I’m being disingenuous again, of course, and I’m taking a risk, but the force of feeling between a daughter and father evidently cannot be underestimated.

  “Papa, Hansi died because we didn’t get him proper treatment at the hospital,” I tell him. “You see that now, don’t you?” I say we as a bridge over which my father can walk toward me.

  “Hansi died of tuberculosis,” he replies, tugging on his jacket sleeves to bring them perfectly even with his cuffs. As a Health Ministry official, maybe he already knew the diagnosis was a ruse. Perhaps he’d been toying with Hansi and me ever since the boy’s sterilization.

  “Have you ever admitted you’re wrong about anything?” I question in a frustrated tone, since it now occurs to me that I never heard him once apologize to Mama.

  “Only about you,” he tells me.

  A cruelly clever reply, delivered with perfect timing, and it catches me off guard. If only he’d gone on to soften his words by saying, I thought you loved me once, but instead, he says, “I once believed you’d turn into a fine young woman, a credit to the Fatherland, but you’re an embarrassment. And you were an embarrassment to your mother, too.”

  As soon as he leaves, I sit on Hansi’s bed and go as deep down within myself as I can, as far from the pain as my mind can travel. I make a slice in my forearm with a paring knife to see my blood and to test how Benni Mannheim must have felt. But I don’t feel anything. Then I bandage my wound and take down my framed photograph of Garbo from the wall, removing from its backing my K-H Collection. Papa and Comrade Ludwig Renn look like old friends.

  I head to Isaac’s apartment. I let him kiss my hands. Then, while he resumes his work, I remove the cover from his typewriter. The photograph slips right into the carriage. I know what to type because Mr Renn has written Isaac at least one letter since fleeing Germany.

  Dearest Comrade Friedrich Riedesel,

  I am glad to hear that you are once again working with us, and I assure you that your position as a trusted National Socialist will serve us well. All goes as well as can be expected in Spain, and fighting with the Republicans has given me back a bit of my youth. I shall contact you when I am next in Germany. Keep up the good work and keep sending news!

  Isaac gives me a suspicious look when I go into his bedroom and ask for his letter from Mr Renn, so I say, “It’s just another small hoax I’m planning.” On receiving the full blast of his disapproving stare, I add, “My last, I promise. After this, I renounce my criminal past.”

  With Mr Renn’s letter to Isaac in my hands, I practice his signature, then sign the photograph. With ink, I blacken out the date that K-H typed on the back and substitute the 14th of July, 1937. Bastille Day seems an amusing touch from where I am, though, of course, destroying a parent is hardly funny.

  * * *

  I call Greta that evening. We can’t meet on Friday because she’ll be dining with Papa, so we agree to get together at her apartment on Thursday the 21st. That means I’ll have to leave one day early for Antwerp, because I won’t be able to come home again after I give Snow White my poisoned apple. We decide not to tell Vera about this change in plans in case the government is listening to our calls. Isaac and I will spend a night in a hotel in Cologne, and I’ll cross the border on the 22nd as originally planned.

  I use that week to pack. I will take with me only my favorite drawings, some art supplies, my K-H Collection, and a suitcase of clothing. I’ll also take Berekiah Zarco’s original manuscripts with me—all seven. Isaac will do his work using the copies he’s made, and he’ll ship me the rest of what I need when I get to Istanbul. He gives me a talisman for the journey, which I wear around my neck. It’s a piece of vellum depicting three Jewish angels, Sanoi, Sansanoi, and Samnaglof. Isaac’s renderings are little more than stick figures. “I never claimed to be the artist in the family,” he says, smiling cheekily, “but the angels know who they are and that’s all that’s important.”

  I also take the lock of hair I snipped from Mama just after she died.

  On Thursday afternoon, I put on a rumpled blouse and do my mascara haphazardly, which is why, as soon as Greta lets me into her apartment, she asks with breathy urgency, “What’s happened—is your father all right?”

  “Oh, Greta, everything has gone wrong. I didn’t know who to turn to except you.”

  “Sit yourself down,” she tells me, leading me to her sofa, and she brings me a drink—sherry again. She’s in a dressing gown—mauve silk with a white ermine collar.

  “Now tell me what’s happened … calmly,” she says, and she eases down beside me. Her fingernails are the same shade as her dressing gown. Why does that detail remain in my mind for more than sixty years?

  I take a big sip. “I … I don’t know where to start. I’m so … so confused.” I don’t want to overdo my stammering, but I’m too pleased with my performance to stop.

  “Tell me why you’re so upset,” she says.

  “It’s Papa … oh, Greta, I feel … I feel terrible! You see, last week, I was looking in his dresser to see what keepsakes of my mother he might have held onto, and …” Here, I lift my book bag onto my lap and take out my photograph. “I found this. You may have seen it already.” With my hands trembling, I accidentally drop the picture onto the floor so she can pick it up and discover the damning evidence herself. A nice touch, if I don’t say so myself.

  “Who’s this man with your father?” she asks.

  “Ludwig Renn, the Communist journalist. He was famous for a few years. He was arrested in 1932 and later released. I think he was in Spain fighting with the Reds for a while.”

  “Your father knew him?”

  “Then he hasn’t told you either about his activities?” I ask, sounding astonished.

  “No.”

  I moan. “I thought that maybe you could explain this to …”

  “Sophie,” she interrupts roughly, because Greta is a quick woman who needs quick answers, “are you saying your father was friends with a famous enemy of Hitler’s?”

  “They were more like acquaintances. Though I thought Papa had renounced his past with the Communists. I was sure of it, but now. . . I have to admit, Papa had me fooled.”

  Greta finishes reading the typed inscription, then jumps up, realizing she could be implicated in Papa’s treachery. “Tell me again where you found this?” she demands.

  “In one of his drawers, hidden under his shirts. I shouldn’t have been looking but …”

  She stares at the phone—does she mean to call the Gestapo? Then she goes to the window and gazes down purposefully at the street below.

  “I wasn’t followed,” I assure her. “I was very careful.”

  “Thank God,” she tells me. She rubs a tense hand back through her hair.

  “Greta,” I say hesitantly, as if this is painful for me, “if Papa is involved in some sort of conspiracy, then what do you think we ought to do?”

  “Shush!” she says harshly. “I need to think.” She takes a cigarette and taps it on the coffee table, then lights it and smokes with an absent gaze, envisaging her strategy.

  “He’s going to hate me for finding this,” I tell her. “And now I’m going to worry all the time about the Gestapo coming for him … and me.” Gestapo is my cue to start crying, but I’ve suddenly lost my nerve. I bring trembling hands up to my cheeks and close my eyes instead.
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br />   “Sophie,” she declares, “I need to keep this photograph. Now I want you to go home. Don’t say a word to anyone. You understand?”

  Will Greta keep the photograph a secret, to use as evidence against Papa should the need ever arise, or will she turn it in to the police immediately? I’m betting she’s already slipping into something slinky in order to impress the Gestapo, but either way is fine with me.

  Isaac has waited for me in our getaway car, a Berlin taxi. He throws his coat over our joined hands as we ride to the Potsdam Station.

  Most of what I remember about the train to Cologne is the feeling that I am outside my own body. Floating free of all I’ve been. Distanced from everyone except Isaac and Hansi.

  We spend the night in a dingy pension next to the main station, since the fancier hotels refuse to admit Jews. I lie on the sunken mattress in Isaac’s arms and try to forget the urine odor in the carpeting and my previous life. We stay up most of the night talking. In the early morning, we find sleep. We make love on awakening at dawn. I weep in his arms afterward because he says no when I plead to be able to stay with him.

  “I’ll join you as soon as I can,” he assures me. “I promise.”

  “I’d like to hide inside you until the Nazis disappear.”

  “Alas, human bodies aren’t made like that.”

  “Mine is. I’ve got our baby.”

  “Yes, women have that advantage,” he observes, caressing my arm.