The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  “Then how do you hear me?”

  “I read your lips.”

  Hans looks up at me suspiciously, as if K-H might be lying, so I say, “It’s the absolute truth. Just like his photos.”

  I tell K-H about my brother, Vera, and Georg—and that I’m still hunting for Isaac. He says that Marianne and Werner are in Lisbon. He didn’t want them to return to Berlin until he could be sure it was safe. Lisbon? Over glasses of cheap red wine at a nearby café, K-H tells me that a French friend of theirs managed to sneak them over the border. From there they made their way to Paris. “We didn’t dare write to Isaac. We figured all his mail was being read.”

  On the 12th of June, just before the Germans took Paris, they made their way south, hoping to catch a boat from Marseille to North Africa or Istanbul. “But on the way, we heard of a Portuguese Consul in Bordeaux who was issuing transit visas for Jews and other refugees. We reached Bordeaux on the 16th and waited outside his apartment. Hundreds of Jews and others were there. We formed a line and kept filing inside. He was issuing visas for everyone who came to him. It was a miracle.” K-H’s eyes moisten. “His name was Sousa Mendes. He was signing visas as fast as he could. I took pictures of him. I’d like to make an exhibition of people who saved Jews someday.”

  “So you’ve been living in Lisbon all this time?”

  “Yes, we thought of going to Brazil, but Marianne had this idea … Isaac’s family was originally Portuguese, so we looked up the name Zarco in the phone book and found five in Lisbon alone. We visited them with a German refugee friend who’d been in Portugal since ’33 and who could speak the language. We explained that an Isaac Zarco from Berlin was a good friend of ours. The first three Zarcos didn’t want anything to do with us. But the fourth one, Samuel, said he’d help. Marianne started cooking at a small restaurant he owns. I take photographs of tourists at the city’s sights. Werner goes to a Portuguese public school.”

  Before we go to meet Georg and Vera, I ask if K-H shouldn’t lock the door to the factory housing his exhibit. “No,” he says, “if visitors want to steal the pictures for their own use, so much the better. I have the negatives. I’ll make as many copies as people want.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Hans adores posing for K-H in his yellow hat. We’re seated around a big round table at Karl’s Cellar. The peroxide-blond waitress—Bettina—still works there. We kiss cheeks, and she takes Hans back to the kitchen so he can choose what he wants to eat, since he’s being fussy. Most of the customers these days are Russian soldiers and their escorts. She tells us that the gay men have gone the way of the Jews, though a few survivors have trickled back in of late.

  The train ride to Isaac’s boathouse will only bore Hans, so the next morning I leave him with Vera, who has decided to try to bribe Russian soldiers into letting them visit the Neue Museum. She’s hopeful she can take the boy to see the sculptures of the Pharaoh Akenhaten, whose face resembles hers and whom she has always regarded as her royal ancestor.

  I go to Frau Hagen’s house first, and her daughter Maria gives me the sad news that she died a year and a half ago. Maria hands me a folder with three drawings by Otto Dix and four by Georg Grosz. My favorite—Dix’s portrait of the poet Iwar von Lücken—is amongst them. “Isaac told my mother that you should sell them only when the prices go back up,” Maria informs me. “You’re to auction them in London or Paris, where they’ll fetch good prices.”

  Maria tells me I’m far too thin and insists on feeding me soup made of turnip greens from her vegetable patch. She’s charming and gentle. The Good German’s Daughter Showing Me Her Garden. The sketch I make of her that day, on my way back to the city.

  This is my first visit to Isaac’s converted boathouse. It has a pier extending into the lake and a large balcony. Birds have stolen all but a few of the fruit from the cherry trees in the garden. It’s peaceful and lovely, but my spending an hour there is enough to condemn me to years of useless fantasies about the life we never got the chance to make.

  A few days later, a lawyer in Berlin will tell me that my deeds for Isaac’s apartment and boathouse are still valid. I may never get to use the flat, however, since it has been occupied for years and it would take a lawsuit to evict the tenants, but the boathouse is firmly mine and I will save it for Hans. Until then, Maria will rent it out to vacationers for its upkeep.

  * * *

  I go back to Greta’s apartment a week later. She comes to the door and gushes—kissing my cheek—that she is absolutely delighted to see me. “But I can’t invite you in because I have a guest,” she adds apologetically.

  Is he Russian, American, British, or French? I want to ask, astonished that after all these years I’m still that angry.

  We stand in her doorway. She’s wearing a black, low-cut gown and impressive pearl earrings—the same ones she had on when I first met her, I’m pretty sure. In her hand is a white silk handkerchief. Fifty million dead in the war and she still wants to look like Jean Harlow.

  I’ve left Hans with Vera. Of late, she’s able to entertain him better than I can; he adored the Egyptian wing of the New Museum and has decided he wants to live on a boat in the Nile. Could he be the reincarnation of Raffi?

  I don’t question Greta about why she hasn’t called me. Instead, I ask, “My father … do you know what’s happened to him?”

  “Not entirely. We broke up after you left.”

  “Did that have to do with the photograph I gave you?”

  “Oh, that!” She gives a little laugh. “Don’t be silly! I knew it was a forgery. I was well aware of your … your sense of humor by then.”

  She gives me a knowing smile. What a sensational actress she is, and how foolish I was to believe I was any match for her!

  “Still, I was angry at your father for not telling me about his past,” she continues. “One thing led to another … We began to quarrel all the time, about all sorts of boring things.” She heaves a sigh. “Your father was frustrated that he wasn’t rising through the Ministry as he had hoped. And his disappointment made him disagreeable. So we broke up. I could no longer be his secretary, of course. I stopped working. And then the world collapsed around him … around all of us. Your father, along with others at the Ministry, ended his life before he could be taken prisoner and reveal any secrets. It was very courageous of him.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Cyanide tablets.”

  Papa’s death is like a trap-door opening beneath my feet. “Do you … do you know where he’s buried?” I stammer, reaching out for the wall to steady myself.

  “No, I have no idea.”

  And then, as I’m trying to assemble my next question out of my thoughts of disbelief, Greta tells me it was lovely to see me and ushers me out into the hallway, locking the door securely behind me.

  I get all the way to Savigny Platz before thinking, Greta has given another stellar performance! So I dash back to her place and stand down the street. And sure enough, after an hour or so, my father holds the front door for her as they come out. He’s a middle-aged gentleman in a beige felt hat and handsome matching jacket. The little I can see of his hair is gray, and he looks lean and healthy. And happy. Thankfully, he and Greta walk the opposite way on Pfalzburger Straße. I feel the tension of the rope that will always be stretched between Papa and me, but I let him go. Not even today, six decades later, can I describe my emotions about him in any precise way. It’s as if the man he was simply cannot fit inside my head. A square peg in a round hole, as Ben would one day tell me.

  A few days later, a U.S. lieutenant steers Georg and me to a representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a relief organization. The young man’s name is Henry Lefkowitz. Having spoken Yiddish throughout his childhood and studied German literature at Brooklyn College, he’s fluent in German. “Call me Hank,” he tells me, in that cheerful NewYork way, holding out his big, baseball player’s hand to me. He starts a new page in his little notebook with my name a
nd addresses in Berlin and Istanbul, then takes down all I can tell him about Isaac, Rini and her parents, the Munchenbergs, Mrs Kauffmann, Volker, and Veronika Vogt. Georg tells him about friends of his that are missing, as well. Hank tells us that it may take months, if not years, to track down where they were taken.

  Is it worth my staying in Berlin to wait for Isaac? When I ask Hank that, he pats my hand and replies, “You can’t really think someone else can answer that for you, Sophie.”

  Hans and I live with Else until the end of August, then leave for Büyükada. Georg and Vera return with us. Rolf sees us off at the station. Vera and Georg won’t talk to him. She refers to him as the Toxic Tree Stump, which she finds amusing. I hug Rolf, however, knowing that Isaac had trusted him. Karl-Heinz will remain for a few more weeks, then head to Lisbon. We have agreed to try to visit him as soon as we put our finances in order. Hans wears his yellow hat and carries an old KaDeWe shopping bag saved by Else. In it are a dozen photographs of himself and our friends. His own K-H Collection.

  The day before, alone, I sat by Hansi’s grave. I thought of him peeling potatoes and racing after squirrels. I spoke to him of his nephew.

  Isaac once told me that the dead can sometimes be more generous than the living. If so, then maybe my brother has already forgiven me for not saving him and Volker.

  Over the next six years, I receive letters from Hank Lefkowitz every Passover, saying that he and others from his organization are still working on my cases. Then, in 1951, he writes to say that he discovered Professor and Mrs Munchen­berg on a list of Jews transported from the Grünewald Station in Berlin to Lodz, along with 1,250 other Jews, on the 18th of October, 1941. If they survived the miserable conditions of the Lodz ghetto, he suspects they were sent on to Auschwitz. A year later, he writes that Rini and her mother were on the transport to the Theresienstadt concentration camp on the 24th of August, 1942. As for Rini’s father, there’s no indication. Hank believes he might have been on an earlier transport. “Families were often separated by circumstance or by the Nazis themselves,” he writes.

  Nothing yet on Isaac, Mrs Kauffmann, Volker and his family, or Veronika.

  Then, in April 1953, Hank locates a survivor of Buchenwald who knew Isaac in the camp: Gabe Sonnenberg. Hank’s letter includes his phone number in London.

  By then, I’ve spent eight years reading about the camps and the trials against Nazi war criminals, particularly the Soviet proceedings of October 1947 against the commanders of the Sachsenhausen camp. So I know all that I want to know about Buchenwald, especially about the “medical” experiments on prisoners. And I’ve heard enough about Ilse Koch for two or three lifetimes: wife of the Buchenwald camp commandant, she had prisoners killed for their body parts—skin, thumbs, and bones—which she then had fashioned into household objects such as lamps.

  Gabe tells me that he’d been at Buchenwald for only a month when Isaac arrived. They were both newcomers and became fast friends. This was in December 1942. Isaac had come from Theresienstadt, and he was painfully thin and riddled with lice, though his eyes were clear and lucid. “He hadn’t lost his mind—no, not at all,” Gabe assures me.

  He says that the sleeves of Isaac’s striped uniform were too short, which irritated him. He could be kind and witty, but like everyone else, he was often exhausted, short-tempered, and disconsolate. He missed his pipe terribly and sometimes traded his morning bread for half a cigarette. Gabe and Isaac shared a bunk and a single blanket with three other prisoners. Isaac faced Jerusalem and prayed every morning before leaving for the quarry where he and Gabe labored all day, and again in the evening after supper. During their moments of rest, they spoke in whispers about their lives, and Isaac told him about me. He said he often sensed me sitting on his cot with him and drawing his face. It made him feel protected. “He tried to guess the name of your child,” Gabe tells me. “He figured that if you’d had a boy, you named him Hans, after your brother. If it was a girl, he figured it would be Greta or Marlene. After Garbo and Dietrich, of course. He said you were nuts about those two.”

  “His name is Hans,” I tell Gabe.

  “So he got it right!”

  “Sometime in early January 1943, Isaac developed typhus,” Gabe continues. “One evening, Isaac told me, ‘The time has come,’ because he didn’t think he had the strength to work in the quarry and would be executed. He wanted to stand, so I helped him up, and he etched something in Hebrew on our bunk with a nail he’d hidden. I walked him to the end of the barracks and he etched the same sentence by the door, where we’d have affixed a mezuzah if we’d had one. What he wrote was in Hebrew, so I didn’t know what it meant. When I asked him, he smiled and said it was his calling card.”

  “Beruchim kol deemuyei Eloha,” I say in my wretched Hebrew.

  “How did you know?” Gabe asks, shocked.

  “He needed to speak those words before the Seventh Gate of God in order to be admitted.”

  “I was told by a rabbi that it means ‘Blessed are all the images of the Lord.’”

  “Yes, or ‘Blessed are all of God’s self-portraits.’”

  “I then helped Isaac shuffle back to our bunk and he prayed sitting up, with his eyes open, which I’d never seen him do,” Gabe continues. “They were very reflective, even in the winter darkness. I’ve never seen anything like them before or since. Maybe because he was so skeletal, they seemed like dark jewels embedded in … forgive me, now, for saying so … embedded in death. It was a cold night, but he was sweating because he was producing an enormous amount of heat. It was astonishing. I’d never have believed it possible. I was worried about him. Another prisoner and I, Marko … we stayed up with him an hour or so, but then he broke his trance to tell us that it was all right for us to sleep. He kissed me and Marko and said, ‘Everything is going to be all right. I am with God now and He has agreed to help.’ I can’t say I thought he was crazy, because I’d already seen far stranger things in the camps. Marko and I were still worried about him, but we soon fell asleep again. We were always exhausted, you understand. When I woke for breakfast, I found Isaac still seated next to me, leaning against the wall, and his eyes open. But the light was gone from them, and he was cold … so very cold. The nail with which he’d etched his calling card was poking out of his fist. I took it and buried it at the camp, and after we were liberated, the first thing I did was have a soldier dig it up for me. I hadn’t the strength.” Gabe, overcome by the memory, loses his voice for a time, then goes on. “I have it with me still. It means a lot to me. You know, Sophie, I sometimes think that knowing Isaac saved me. Marko and I still talk about him every time we speak on the phone. The thing is, I didn’t realize it then, but he was someone blessed. Not that I even know what that really means. But there was something about him … a resilience, a grace, as though he had a compass needle inside him to show him where Jerusalem always was, a mechanism, in any case, that most people don’t have. And I don’t mean he had it because of the camps. He was as broken as any of us—as diseased and desperate. It was something from before the camps, something that not even typhus and lice and starvation could touch.”

  * * *

  So it is that I learn that Isaac descended from the Reichstag into a tangled machinery of death that fed on men and women and children—and from there he prayed his way into the center of the last three vessels.

  As I thank Gabe in the best voice I can assemble, I think, Why am I alive when Isaac is dead? The question that has been at my throat for the rest of my life.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  One Friday morning during the spring of 1954, Vera takes the boat from Büyükada to Istanbul so she can meet with Abraham to discuss her new designs for men’s suits. She arrives back in the afternoon and collapses just after she steps off the ferry.

  “She just fell over,” Mr Hasan, one of our neighbors, will tell me later. He was coming back with her and was a few paces behind her. Vera always exited the boat like a rocket.

  Mr Hasan
and Mrs Ahmet, the baker’s wife, run to help her. They’d known her for more than a decade by then. All the islanders had.

  A buggy driver jumps down from his perch and dashes up the hill to get me. Hans isn’t home from school yet, so I’m alone. I find Vera lying with her head in Mr Hasan’s lap. Her eyes are dull and glassy.

  I already know she’s gone, but I kneel next to her and reach for a pulse. Dr Levi comes running out of nowhere. He listens to Vera’s chest with a stethoscope. On his orders, five men, including Mr Hasan, carry her to his medical office. But it is too late.

  “Her heart simply gave out,” Dr Levi tells me.

  “Yes, she knew it would, sooner or later.”

  Vera was fifty-three years old.

  We bury her on the island. At the funeral, I drape the troubadour coat she made for me over my shoulders and Hans carries his beloved yellow hat with bells.

  Charismatic people like Vera help us define ourselves. I know who I am because I am Vera’s friend … Without knowing it, that’s what I told myself for twenty-two years, and for a long time afterward, I’m forced to wonder who I am. Isaac and Vera—two continents gone.

  My consolation: her last years were good ones. She walked everywhere on Büyükada during the day, without any covering and without any shame. The sun and the sky became welcome companions for the first time in her life. And the islanders, once they got used to her, invited her over for apple tea and baklava. They praised the way she’d learned Turkish so well. They marveled at how much she could eat and how directly she talked.

  Hans adored walking beside her, just like me. “Tia Vera is bigger than Ataturk,” he used to say.

  Even the local children stopped making fun of her after the first year. Once, I witnessed a fight between two boys because one of them, an outsider, had dared to shout that she was a monster. Mario, who grew up down the hill from us, punched the offending visitor right in the face. But just before he did, he shouted, “She’s no monster, she’s ours!”