“We panicked,” Georg tells me. “After all, this was a surprise, and we were amateurs.”
“I painted swastikas on her face so the police would think the same person had murdered her who had killed Georg,” Vera says. “And so Rolf would think that too. Then I put her in my big suitcase.”
“So that’s why you left your beloved sewing machine behind! You had nothing to carry it in!”
“It was partly that, but I’d also forgotten about it for the first time in my adult life. Maybe I even wanted to leave it behind—to punish myself for putting my baby at risk. I don’t know.”
“So I carried Heidi to my car in the suitcase,” Georg adds, “and drove out to a wood I knew near the Rummelsburger See, to a place where Isaac and I used to go birdwatching when I was a kid. I left the suitcase there. I expected whoever found it to report the body to the police, but they apparently dumped her in the lake instead. Whoever found it must have been terrified they’d be implicated in the murder.”
“And meanwhile, you went back to your apartment,” I tell Vera.
“Yes, I didn’t go with Georg because I’m so noticeable. But I also didn’t want to stay at Isaac’s place. I couldn’t face him. The guilt … and my continuing grief over my baby … I needed to be alone. So I went home.”
“And you didn’t come out of your apartment for days.”
“I was overwhelmed by what had happened. And I couldn’t risk revealing my part in Heidi’s death to you. You had to figure that out yourself.”
“Why? You know I wouldn’t ever have put you in any danger.”
“We’ll tell you that, but first I need to tell you about Stangl,” Georg says. “You see …”
“Wait, first tell me about Rolf,” I interrupt. “Why didn’t you kill him when you found out that Heidi had lied to you in order to protect him?”
“As you told me at the time, he was living in hell without Heidi, and he was being punished enough. I ended up agreeing with you. And Georg and Isaac did too. Besides, the Nazis had lost their leverage on him. He wouldn’t do anything more to hurt us.”
“Rolf will never know how close he was to being murdered,” I observe.
“And now for Dr Stangl!” Georg announces. “I called him on the phone after I learned about how he’d used Heidi, and I told him I had important information for him. And that his life was in danger. He’d believed that Nazis had murdered me, so he was shocked to hear my voice. I told him I’d gone underground because Isaac and Vera suspected that I was a traitor to their cause and had tried to kill me. I said that the Gestapo had faked my death so I’d be free to continue to help the Nazi Party in secret.”
“But he told his wife that Rolf called,” I point out.
“He couldn’t very well tell her I was on the phone because she must have heard I’d been murdered and would have asked too many questions. He must have chosen Rolf’s name because they’d spoken so often in the past.”
“I had him meet me out by the Rummelsburger See because we wanted to follow the same pattern. And I shot him.”
“Just like that?” I ask.
Georg raises his furry eyebrows and gives me a curious look in the rear-view mirror. “Does that shock you?”
“A bit.”
“I gave Stangl a chance to tell me why he’d betrayed us, but he sneered and said that he didn’t need to justify his actions to me. So I replied, ‘In that case, I don’t need to justify what I do either’ and I aimed the gun at his chest. I was dizzy with nervousness, and I wasn’t sure I could do it until I pulled the trigger. But I couldn’t let him go on hurting good people.”
“This … this must be the first time a dead Jew ever killed a Nazi,” I say, thinking that Isaac must have appreciated that irony.
“And let’s hope it’s not the last,” Vera replies. “We could use all the Jews who are going to die in this war to keep fighting for those of us who manage to stay alive.”
“So why was keeping me in the dark so important?” I ask.
“You, meine Liebe, were our safeguard,” Vera tells me mysteriously.
“Given your personality,” Georg says, “we reasoned that you’d probably keep trying to get to the bottom of all the mysteries—just like the police. We figured that you’d do at least as well as their detectives, since you had the advantage of knowing us. And you demonstrated that you’d keep sniffing around when you tried to prove that Julia was responsible for my death. Then, when you figured out that Rolf was the traitor, we reasoned you’d start suspecting Vera of having killed Heidi and Dr Stangl. And you did.”
“As I recall, you once accused me of murdering Heidi,” Vera tells me.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be! You were right to—that’s the whole point.”
“Sooner or later, you might have started checking up on Vera and following her,” Georg says. “And who knows, maybe you’d even figure out that I wasn’t dead.”
“But I didn’t.”
“No, life got in the way,” Vera says. “You got busy with your teaching and Isaac, and with protecting your brother. And I’m glad you did, though we couldn’t afford the luxury of assuming the police would also be too busy with their home lives to forget about us.”
“Isaac was especially relieved that life got in the way of your detective work, of course,” Georg tells me. “He was not in favor of our using you to gauge our safety. He didn’t want you doing any investigating, though he also knew only too well he couldn’t stop you. In any case, Vera and I had agreed years ago that when we felt you might start getting too close to the truth we’d leave Germany—first me, because I’d killed Stangl and had disposed of Heidi’s body, then her.”
My tiny bedroom in Antwerp is a converted larder off the kitchen, with a sad little window looking out on the backs of apartments. I hang my framed photo of Garbo above my cot and tape a small sketch of Isaac hunched over a manuscript to the back of my door. Still, I feel trapped, hemmed in by all the choices I’ve had to make, and—paradoxically—as though Berlin is the only place I’ll ever be free. Sensing my daydreams are leading me toward despair, Georg takes me aside and says, “We’ll soon have you feeling at home here.” He holds my shoulders and looks at me hard—as though to show me that his strength is on my side. He wants to help, but all I can think of is that he isn’t Isaac.
Georg takes Vera and me out to dinner at a Jewish restaurant that night. We gorge on matzo ball soup, stuffed cabbage, and kasha. “This doesn’t taste at all like cat food,” I tell Vera.
“My God, you still haven’t figured that I’m a world-class nudnock?” she replies, laughing from her belly.
The next day, I go to museums and walk through the elegant old streets with their ornate Dutch houses, listening to the harsh, scraping sound of the Flemish language, picking out words with cognates in German, pressing my forehead to shop windows to see the intricate, colorful displays, researching the prices of art supplies. No swastika flags or anti-Jewish signs hang on the streets. It’s a miracle. And it’s a relief to be alone with my thoughts. Once again, I’m reminded that I need a few hours to myself each day or I’m no good to anyone.
I also phone Zarco Industries and leave a coded message with Arnold Muller, the German-American typist, that all is well. Isaac calls back that evening from the house of Frau Hagen, who takes care of his converted boathouse. “I got tipped off that I might be arrested,” he explains, “so I grabbed my manuscripts and some clothes, and some paintings to sell, and I fled.”
“Who tipped you off?”
“Now, don’t be upset, but you did.”
“Me?”
“When you told me you’d framed your father, I realized he was going to come after me, that he’d think I was involved in your little hoax. So when I returned from Cologne, I got my things and left. As it turns out, your father and two Gestapo officers showed up at my factory two days after I got back. He was in a wild rage, and he threatened to have all the workers arrested unless they
told him where you and I were hiding. He’d assumed we’d fled together.”
It seems impossible that I didn’t foresee this. “I’m so sorry, Isaac. I’ve been very careless.”
“It’s all right. You were angry and upset. In fact, I’m better off here. You made me realize that they’d probably come for me one day soon. You might have got me out just in time.”
“And you’re all right?”
“I’m happy as a kid on summer vacation. It’s beautiful here. And no one knows where I am except Frau Hagen. She’s an angel.”
We have a long talk, but the phone lines are too thin to carry the weight of our emotions. When I fall into silence, he says, “Sophele, picture me with you every night upon going to sleep, because I will be there, right by your side. And do whatever you need to do to live well.” I fear he is about to tell me that if I need to have a relationship with another man, he will understand, but he doesn’t add that, thank God.
The mind has its own strange and silly ways of showing loss; right after I hang up, I think, Who’s going to water the poor pelargoniums?
Is Papa fired from the Health Ministry because of how I’ve framed him or is he able to clear his name? Are he and Greta married? I learn nothing more about him while I’m in Antwerp.
The Belgians expect a German invasion within a few months, so, in mid-April, just after the Fatherland crushes Denmark in a single day, we book passage to Genoa on a Dutch ship leaving on the 2nd of May. From there, we’ll take an Italian freighter to Istanbul. Isaac calls a few days before we go to wish us well. He’s in a state of electric excitement. “All those years I was looking for the incantation in the wrong place, but now I know where it is!”
“And where’s that?” I ask, hopeful that this means he will soon be joining us.
“It’s not in any of the mystical treatises. It’s in the seventh text, in The Bleeding Mirror.”
“I thought that was just the story of how Berekiah survived the Lisbon Massacre of 1506.”
“I thought so too, but it’s much more than that. He used the pogrom symbolically.” Isaac tells me that Berekiah intended The Bleeding Mirror to serve as preparation for those seeking to enter the Seventh Heaven. The six mystical treatises were hidden together with it because they serve as complementary texts. “The most important clue to the higher purpose of The Bleeding Mirror comes at the very end,” he says, “where Berekiah prophesies the shattering of the last vessels.”
“Does that mean he’d entered Araboth and viewed the future?”
“Yes, I think so. Now listen …” Isaac translates various prophetic sections of The Bleeding Mirror into German for me. He finishes with a paragraph he showed me once before, when he was trying to convince me to leave Germany. In it, Berekiah writes that the European kings will always persecute the Jews. “‘Sooner or later, in this century or five centuries hence, they will come for you or your descendants,’” Isaac reminds me, quoting from the text. “‘No village, no matter how remote, will be safe when the final reckoning comes.’” Isaac speaks these last words as if seizing them with his fists. Could Berekiah Zarco, writing in the sixteenth century, have foreseen all that was now happening in Germany? “Of course, he did—that’s part of what I’ve just realized!” Isaac assures me. “And do you remember that riddle I once read you … the one Berekiah wrote?”
“Vaguely.”
“‘The Seventh Gate opens like wings as we begin our conversation. It speaks with a million bleeding voices and yet just one. Only he who hears the voices with the eyes of Moses may enter Araboth.’ The answer to the riddle is The Bleeding Mirror! Its pages open like wings, and the million voices are the words of the book, which speak to each reader in his or her own voice. ‘The eyes of Moses’ is a reference to mirrors, to their backwards images … to reading Hebrew from right to left. In other words, Sophele, Berekiah was giving us a clue that The Bleeding Mirror had a sacred aspect to it.”
“It’s all too complicated for me,” I tell him, more dismissively than I intend, probably because Isaac hasn’t yet asked after our travel plans. How silly we can be at times!
“Sophele, what’s wrong?” he asks, his voice suddenly fearful.
“Nothing. It’s just that we’ve booked passage to Istanbul. We leave on the 2nd of May.”
“Thank God!” he exults. “And bless you for taking our baby to safety. I’m so very grateful to you for making this mesirat nefesh.”
The solemn way he speaks … Ever since leaving Germany, my tears flow without resistance, as if the river I’d been holding back for years has broken through my defenses, and now is no different. I’d had no idea of how thick and high the cold stone walls were inside me. Insight often comes only years after we need it most.
“What is it, my dear?” he asks softly. “Tell me …”
“I’m just happy. And my emotions seem to be out of control of late.”
“That would be the baby. All unborn children turn their mothers upside down because they’re under the domain of Metatron.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Metatron is the angel who is the bridge between the Lower and Upper Realms, and the guardian of the unborn. He is as dazzling as the sun, and you are simply feeling his heat.”
“You’re completely meshugene,” I say affectionately.
“Very possibly. So how are you feeling?”
“Bloated. And I’m starting to show.”
Laughing, he says, “Take photographs. I’ll want to see them later.”
“I’ll try. Any news of K-H and Marianne?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Now tell me how Berekiah used the Lisbon Massacre symbolically,” I say, since he won’t be satisfied until he’s revealed much more of the intricate workings of his mind to me. And I want to listen to his voice for as long as he will talk to me.
“It’s like this, Sophele … Berekiah wrote The Bleeding Mirror as a guidebook to the dangers the mystic would encounter on the way toward the territory of prophecy. The difficulties faced by the Jews of Lisbon—the constant peril they experienced during the massacre—are symbolic of what the mystic will encounter along his journey.”
“And what does that mean for your work?”
“It means I am rereading The Bleeding Mirror with infinite care, and taking notes. I think the key is Aramaic, which, not coincidentally, was the language spoken in the Promised Land at the time of the destruction of the Hebrew Temple.”
“Not coincidentally … ?”
“The destruction of the temple is the perfect symbol for the shattering of our world. It left the Jewish mind in ruins. The center of the world became not a place, but a time—the Sabbath.” Isaac goes on to provide me with more kabbalistic explanations, most of which I don’t understand or now remember, but I’ve been able to reconstruct at least some of what he said from a letter he later wrote me about his revelations. I do know that he told me that day, “Berekiah uses the Aramaic phrase Elah Shemaiya, the God of Heaven, to refer to the Lord. He doesn’t use Hebrew. That’s because Elah Shemaiya is also the God of Prophecy. Which means that the incantation I’m looking for will be in Aramaic—or in Hebrew disguised as Aramaic.”
“Does this mean you’ll be able to join me in Istanbul soon?” I ask hopefully.
“I think it may.”
“Do me a favor and ask Berekiah for a specific date.”
I expect Isaac to laugh, but instead he says, “When I next see him, I’ll ask.”
Eight days after we set sail, we learn that Germany has invaded Belgium, France, and Holland. As we cruise down the rocky, sunlit coast of Portugal, a group of us listen to the BBC every night on a little red bakelite radio belonging to a Flemish journalist, and by the time we dock in Istanbul on the 28th of May, we’re all gripped by pessimism, having heard that King Leopold of Belgium has declared his country’s surrender. France and Holland are expected to fall soon.
Istanbul from the sea … If I close my eyes, I can see the
city’s profile silhouetted in the sunset of our arrival, like a grand sculpture made by children whose secret fantasies have been given form. The tall, slender minarets are the white-white of falling snow, just as the Turkish Ambassador once implied to me, and the domes of the mosques have been glazed bronze by the melting sun. Luminescent gulls wheel and caw overhead, and the Galata Bridge—spanning the Golden Horn—sags under the weight of a thousand donkey-wagons, wooden pushcarts, and hooting automobiles. Hundreds of bedraggled fishermen lean over the railings, their lapels upturned against the biting wind, smoking and chatting, their lines also forming a kind of bridge, between the mysteries underwater and the land. The Galata Tower crowns the hill just ahead of us, rising 200 feet above its neighbors. “Built in 1348,” one of the Turks we’ve befriended tells us. He also says that he’s always thought of it as an arrow of stone pointing to heaven a summons for protection from Allah. And from Elah Shemaiya, too, I think, because they are one and the same.
After a few years of life in Istanbul I realize that none of the city’s monuments has a universal meaning, however. Everyone in Istanbul guards his own version of the city, his own tiny silver globe—just as I always kept my own map of Berlin in my heart, and still do. Yet for me the Galata Tower will always signify freedom—ours from Germany, of course, but also of being able to rise above the decay of the chaotic world and emerge into sunlight. Sand-colored stone against the deep medieval blue of a Giotto fresco. The cry of a muezzin to prayer. Wild dogs barking. A little mop-haired boy in bare feet playing with a ball, and his mother—me—kicking it back to him. That is the Istanbul of my dreams even today. And in truth, it is my son who forever links me to the city, because he was born there.
Isaac’s cousin Abraham and his wife, Graça, meet us with effusive hugs and kisses at the dock on that cool May evening in 1940. They are wary of Vera, but we don’t take offense, because we know from experience that meeting a goddess is daunting. Abraham holds my hand lightly, like a dance partner, and steers me around the debris on the street, which is a good thing, since my belly is fairly big now and my balance has become faulty. Do they wonder at my youth? My God, how did Isaac seduce so young a lover? She must be crazy!
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