The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  Abraham’s driver steers his dusty black Ford through the crowded streets to the family home in Ortaköy. Georg and Graça follow behind in a taxi; Abraham was sure that Isaac’s description of Vera was an exaggeration and failed to bring a second car.

  They live in a balconied, Ottoman-style wooden house that is painted a brilliant canary yellow, with scarlet trim around the windows. It could be the grand manor house in a Turkish fairy tale, assuming that such stories exist, but it seems a bit ominous to me on that first, moonlit evening. Haunted, I’m sure, but that doesn’t bother me; I fear only ghosts who speak German.

  “Our house is golden yellow and red because they are the colors of God’s strength,” Abraham says to me in French, making a fist, and Georg translates. Our host uses charming hand gestures when he talks to me. It reminds me of how I’d give Hansi visual aids when he was a boy.

  Except for Abraham’s eldest son David, a dermatologist who studied at the German School, none of the relatives waiting for us at the house speaks any German. They speak Ladino with Vera, who is fluent in Spanish, of course, and French with Georg. As for me, I’m pretty much lost.

  We settle into the three bedrooms on the second floor that once belonged to David, his sister Luna, and brother Mordecai. Out my window, I have a view of the Mecidiye Cami’i Mosque standing guard over the Bosphorus with its lance-like minaret. In the distance is Asia, a second Milky Way of lights below a moon as friendly and soft as the ones Volker used to draw.

  Though we are only a few miles from Istanbul’s business district, the next morning I discover Ortaköy to be a quiet fishing village, with a row of ramshackle taverns near the water, children running around barefoot, and a local troubadour named Üstat who sings droning ballads while accompanying himself on a lute-like instrument called a saz. Many years later, the neighborhood’s weekend market will become popular with tourists, and the bridge between Europe and Asia will be built only a mile to the north, but for now Ortaköy looks like a sepia postcard of an insular world that few northern Euro­peans would ever be able to penetrate.

  Abraham has Isaac’s thin, sensitive lips, and his same look of diligent concentration when he reads. He smokes a curving meerschaum pipe. He is seventy-one, a year younger than Isaac. I find myself staring at him on occasion, wondering what he makes of us. He shows me pictures of himself and Isaac when they were boys: two amused, eager-eyed devils sitting in a rowboat in the Golden Horn, clowning for the camera.

  A first letter from Isaac is already waiting for me, along with a new set of oil pastels and two sketchbooks. My heart jumps a thousand miles back to Berlin as I open the envelope. He speaks of the stunning sunrise over his scruffy boathouse garden. “The Nazis have no power over trees and birds and light,” he writes. “All of nature is on our side in this battle. Please remember that when you are feeling down.”

  Isaac’s goodness is even in his small, elegant handwriting. I sleep with the letter under my pillow for months.

  We try to speak to Frau Hagen that first evening, but getting a call through to Berlin proves impossible even for David, the technology expert in the family. Finally, two days later, we manage to get her, and we leave a message for Isaac. He takes a risk and calls back that afternoon from the Turkish Embassy, where they have a better chance of getting a connection. With all the static, he sounds as if he is calling during a hailstorm, and since he warns me that the line could “disappear into Gehenna” the Jewish hell—at any moment, I don’t say much more than I am well. He tells me he loves me and will write long letters.

  The letters come once a week, and I answer them with equal frequency. He only rarely describes his progress in his work. He speaks of big-eared rabbits who peer in his windows, an owl that hoots every night, and how he slipped over a moss-slickened stone only to find himself face to face with an angry-looking yellow and black salamander. “I’m sorry we never came out here, but we’ll rectify that when our beloved Berlin is healed.”

  Georg, Vera, and I spend our first two weeks visiting the Grand Bazaar, the Hagia Sophia, and other attractions. Unfortunately for us, the Turks, Kurds, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Albanians, Circassians, Georgians, Assyrians, Azeris, Tatars, and others who call the city home stare even more satanically than Germans. Do we look like Hollywood has-beens? Visitors from another planet? Their gazes give nothing away. Poor Vera. Children follow her in the streets, laughing, shouting things we don’t understand. “It’s all part of my job,” she tells me, smiling, but I can see in her eyes she’s suffering.

  I write my father a two-line letter: “I am well, but I won’t be coming back to Berlin until your sewage company is destroyed.” Abraham posts it when he goes to Salonika on business; I want Papa to know I’m alive, but I don’t want him tracking me to Istanbul.

  We have a giddy, laughing reunion with Julia and Martin at our home. Julia is working in a herb shop in Beyog˘lu, one of the main shopping districts. Martin makes deliveries for her. When I apologize for forcing them to leave Berlin, she embraces me tenderly and says, “Don’t think about it any more. I always knew the risks I was taking, and I prefer being here at the moment.”

  We also visit the different branches of Isaac’s extended family, and we spend a week at Abraham’s summer home on the island of Büyükada, twenty miles from Istanbul in the Marmara Sea. No cars are allowed on the island, so we ride like Hungarian aristocrats in horse carriages. The floors in the wooden Ottoman houses all creak and moan, as though they come alive when we enter. I fall in love with the resplendent sunlight, the sea breezes, and the night-quiet. On a glorious June afternoon when we have a picnic, David helps me count Isaac’s cousins and other relatives: twenty-four. “Enough for a football match plus two substitutes,” Georg points out. He, Vera, and I appreciate all the attention, but we sometimes talk in hushed voices about needing to spend more time by ourselves.

  I’m intimidated by Abraham’s gentlemanly reserve with me until a little over a month after our arrival, when he leads me out to the back patio, kneels before me as if he’s a medieval knight, and says in halting, childlike German, “Isaac is a dearest brother to me, so the people he loves are my friends, too. You must not fear me. I mean only good things for you.”

  I burst into tears, especially because by then, early July, I’m six months pregnant and plagued by all the fears of an expectant mother. Later, David tells me that he wrote out his father’s speech phonetically in Ladino. “Papa memorized it,” he says, such admiration for the old gentleman in his eyes that I’m won to him and Abraham forever.

  I plan to learn Turkish or die trying, and Georg, Vera, and I soon have a tutor. His name is Manuel Levi, and he has a doctorate from the University of Vienna in Near Eastern History. He wears wire-rimmed spectacles and suspenders, and he combs his thick black hair straight back, so that he looks like a Chicago gangster. The “Turkish Jimmy Cagney,” Vera calls him. She’s taken to giving nicknames to all our new acquaintances. Manuel desperately wants to be American, and he has a crush on Judy Garland. He teaches history at the German School. He is the first friend I make in Istanbul.

  David helps me by correcting my Turkish pronunciation. He is slender and soft-spoken, but with an undercurrent of eccentricity. He usually wears a flower in his lapel—carnations most often—and he often sings to himself. He and his wife, Gül, a Moslem convert to Judaism, go for long bicycle rides in the country with their two teenage children, Samuel and Naomi. He likes working with his hands and repairs the bicycles of neighborhood children for free. If he hadn’t become a dermatologist, he’d have opened a bike shop, he assures me.

  Graça is always perfectly dressed and coiffed, and she thrives on doing tasks around the house, whether it’s making fig jam, supervising roofers, or weeding the back garden. In her spare time, she campaigns for aid to the Allies. She is also a woman of odd contradictions; one evening, for instance, I walk in on her embroidering traditional Ottoman patterns on a towel while listening to Benny Goodman on her gramophone. Vera calls
her the “Lady with the Talking Earring” because she can spend hours on the phone, the receiver pressed to her ear. She has dozens, if not hundreds, of lady friends she meets for tea. She’s been to Paris, London, and Berlin, which she found a boisterous, exciting city. “But that was before Hitler,” she says darkly. She thinks Istanbul is quaint and often lovely, but also dirty and cruel. Pittoresque et souvent belle, mais aussi sale et cruelle. Georg likes to translate her French for me because she uses surprising word combinations. He believes that in order to appreciate Sephardic Jews and their culture one must realize that they far prefer poetry to prose. “German and Eastern European Jews are prose storytellers; Portuguese and Spanish Jews are poets.”

  The second time I enter Ortaköy’s Mecidiye Cami’i Mosque to admire its colorful tile patterns, a gray dove flies in after me. The bird lands on one of the red-toned Persian carpets and starts cooing and prancing. I’ve got to find Hansi! I think gleefully. He’d love this.

  How can one forget that a little brother is dead? The realization that he’s buried in Berlin falls like a hood over my mind, because my second pair of eyes is gone forever.

  What am I going to do with myself in Istanbul? As always, I worry my way into a maze of insomnia. Georg and Vera share my preoccupation. Do the Zarcos intend for us to stay in their home forever? Georg thinks so. “After you give birth,” he tells me, “the Lady with the Talking Earring will never leave your side. We’re going to have to find our own place before that happens.” More and more, he takes on the role of my protector. I suspect Isaac asked him to intervene on my behalf whenever he felt it necessary. I’m grateful to them both.

  Pregnant in Istanbul and imagining my parents

  Georg and David conspire together to find us lodging, and in early July we move in to an apartment below Taksim Square, a block from David’s house. Abraham and Graça take the news graciously. What I don’t know yet is that for the next two years she’ll visit me twice a week for afternoon tea and bring along her own servant and samovar!

  Vera starts work that same week in Abraham’s factory. She is creating patterns for men’s suits and fancy waistcoats for export to England. She’s overjoyed by the challenge. Abraham secures work for Georg as a designer at a small advertising agency that has contracts with French and Dutch companies.

  We decide not to try to find me work during the last three months of my pregnancy, so every morning I go to one or another of the cafés on the Istiklal Caddesi, drink pomegranate juice, and sketch the astonishing variety of faces around me. I try my hand at landscapes for the first time, as well, but terrors I do not want to admit make my hands shake when I’m alone: what will I do if my baby is born dead? How will I cope if he is a distant child like Hansi?

  Georg reads about the war every day, and each German victory lowers our heads a little more and makes us speak more quietly in public. On the 15th of June, the Wehrmacht rides victorious down the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and I can easily picture Tonio, grinning, sitting triumphantly atop his Panzer. A week later, all of France surrenders. Then, on the 7th of August, Frau Hagen telephones, frantic. She tells me that the Gestapo came to the boathouse the day before, forcing Isaac to hide in the attic. “After the Nazis left,” she says, “I went to check on him. He was scared, and a bit dusty, but fine. We came back here to my home.”

  “Can I speak to him?” I ask.

  “I’m sorry, he left this morning. We tried calling you but we couldn’t get a line. He said to assure you he was fine and will try to write soon. Sophie, I’m worried. He took off with only one change of clothing and he didn’t know where he was going.”

  Frau Hagen would never have turned Isaac in. I fear that Rolf may have played one last terrible trick on us. Vera and Georg regret letting him live.

  Though it’s possible that Isaac is finally on his way to us in Istanbul. That is the hope that keeps me from returning to Germany to search for him. A long letter arrives later that month, containing writings over a two-day period. It begins on the 17th of July—much like Isaac’s previous correspondence, with grateful observations of life in the country. But then he moves into verse—prophetic poetry from the Torah, most of it seemingly about what is now taking place in Germany and a good deal of it in his own translation from Hebrew: “A fourth kingdom shall appear upon the earth. It shall differ from the other kingdoms and shall devour the Lower Realms …”

  Years later, I will do some research and find out that Isaac took all his verses from Ezra and Daniel. Why only those two books? A researcher at the Sorbonne will inform me that they are the only two Biblical books in which the Lord is referred to as Elah Shemaiya, the God of Prophecy.

  Isaac adds that he’s been thinking of Rolf and his betrayals of late. “I feel that he represents unfinished business for me, and before I can make reparations to our world, I’ll need to speak to him. Perhaps, too, I could ask him for a favor, an important one, and that would be good for us both—a kind of reconciliation.”

  The next day, Isaac’s handwriting becomes wild and erratic, as though he can’t write fast enough. “Last night, as I prayed, facing the Mount of Olives, a vision descended upon me, so powerful that it pulled me to my feet. I saw myself as an ibis stepping across the cover of The Bleeding Mirror. First my bird’s feet, then all of me, entered the manuscript itself. The beating of wings passed over me, creating a warm wind, as though I were in the desert of the Promised Land, and as my own pages opened, I looked up to see the shadow of that angel who can never be glimpsed in all his glory, and the darkness covered me and the entire world. Metatron had passed over me. The sky, turning red from the angel’s heat, was melting around me, and I was melting too, but I wasn’t scared, because as the garment of form slipped away from me, the Seventh Gate appeared before me. On its archway, scripted in silver in my own handwriting, was an inscription—an incantation. After I read it, I awoke. And I knew just where to look in my manuscripts for what had been written in silver—and what needed to be done. Sophele, the inscription turned out to be the last line of The Bleeding Mirror: ‘Beruchim kol deemuyei Eloha,’ which means, ‘Blessed are all of God’s self-portraits.’ It was one of Berekiah’s favorite expressions because he believed it was essential for us to remember that every man, woman, and child, and even all animals, are all self-portraits of the Lord.

  “I was right about needing to know Aramaic, because when I joined the first letter of each word in Berekiah’s blessing together—bet khaf dalet aleph—the word bekada was spelled out. Bekada means ‘Inside a vessel.’ In other words, he who has passed through the first Six Gates and who has prepared for the Seventh, upon speaking the words Beruchim kol deemuyei Eloha, will find himself at the very center of God’s Realm. He will enter the vessels, and he himself will effect the needed reparations from the inside, as it should be. I ought to have guessed! We are, after all, God’s hands and eyes!

  “I also know now why the destroyed Seventh Gate of Europe was never reconsecrated. Because he who would enter the vessels must consecrate the gate himself, at the central point around which the world is shattering. That was what Berekiah intended for me, so if you do not hear from me for some months, do not fear. I shall try with all my heart to come back to you, but I’m on a journey now whose end I do not know. Yet this I do know: the Opposite-Compass and all the forces of the Fourth Kingdom shall not turn me around. I shall hold tight to the silver winds of mesirat nefesh, and the music I hear will be the souls speaking in Araboth, readying to meet me. You shall be with me on the journey, as well as Hansi, Benni, Raffi, Vera, and Georg. And my wife and son. And we shall not fear the shadows that come to pursue us, because the secret of those shadows is that they are light! We shall not fear being cast into the earth, because that fall into our Mother is also the ascent into our Father. We shall not tremble as the fire burns away our bodies because that fire means everlasting life for us for those who come after us.

  “Sophele, stay strong! You need fear nothing over the coming months and ye
ars, because your courage is much greater than you imagine. I thank you for helping me, and I bless you. I kiss your eyes every night before you sleep. And I kiss our baby. Isaac.”

  Despairingly, I realize this is a letter of farewell. Vera and Georg sit with me as I sob. Then Vera grips my hand. “Look at me!” she orders. “Now listen closely,” she tells me, her eyes flashing. “I may make fun of Isaac and his beliefs, but that doesn’t mean I’m not aware that he’s the most powerful man any of us have ever met. So if there’s any way to make it back to us … to you, then I assure you, he will.”

  She means well, and I know what she says is true, but her words only seem to freeze my mind. Soon, I grow furious with Isaac for sending me away. I want a father for my baby and a warm man in my bed, not a mystic riding on prayer to imaginary worlds. It takes me weeks before I can listen to any encouragement without wanting to run and hide. I sit by the front door as I await our postman every afternoon, hoping for another letter. I try to sketch Hansi and Isaac from memory, but it’s hopeless.

  It’s the kicking and flexing of my child that saves me. Life has entered into me and is growing. And if that miracle can happen, then maybe Isaac and I will be granted another chance.

  On occasion, I take a taxi to Abraham’s house in Ortaköy and sit quietly with Graça, whom I like more and more, and sometimes we go listen to Üstat, who has taken over Benni Mannheim’s work on behalf of the physical laws of our universe. The old musician smiles on seeing me now. He has leathery skin, wild black eyes, and deep creases in his cheeks. He looks like a desert warrior, but Graça tells me that Üstat is an ashik, a person so consumed by love that he can express himself only in song. Ashiks can sing for hours from memory—“Of the pain and joy of love, of ancient heroes, of death, cruelty, and friendship.” I know enough French to understand what Graça tells me. Squeezing my hand, she adds, “And of loneliness.”