The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  Which is why we put on her headstone: Courageous, Loved, and Ours.

  In 1955, Istanbul has its own Kristallnacht. Fomented by nationalist politicians with claims over Cyprus, thugs destroy more than 4,000 Greek shops on the 6th and 7th of September. Nitsa’s restaurant goes up in flames. Rather than start over in a city that no longer wants them, she and Georg decide to move to Venice, where Nitsa has relatives and where Georg decides to open a guesthouse. To help with his down payment, I give him one of the drawings by Otto Dix to sell, and he is able to get a very good price for it from a dealer in Milan.

  Georg and Nitsa live out their lives as managers of the Canaletto Hotel. We speak on the phone at least once a month, and I visit them every few years. They always insist I stay in their executive suite, which is lit by the sinuous Venetian chandelier I first saw in Berlin when Georg was posing as Andre Baldwin.

  Georg dies in 1964, Nitsa three years later. Their niece, Antonia, inherits their hotel.

  I also visit K-H and Marianne in Lisbon, and she hands me back my mother’s amethyst brooch. “I couldn’t sell it,” she tells me. “It was too beautiful.”

  Touching my finger to its violet radiance is like taking my mother’s hand. I hope she was able to forgive me for not understanding her before she died.

  K-H and Marianne are buried now in Portugal. Werner has moved back to Germany and lives in Düsseldorf. He teaches sign language at a deaf school.

  I never learn anything more about Mrs Kauffmann, Rini and her parents, Volker and VV. I’ve had young Turkish friends do searches on the Internet, but they can’t find a trace. Maybe one or two of them survived and are living quiet lives in Melbourne, San Diego, or Vancouver. Or maybe Rini made it to Hollywood and changed her name. Perhaps I’ve even seen her as a German-accented extra in a movie. I hope so every day of my life.

  Else moved to her kibbutz in 1947. She met her partner, Solène, in the early 1950s and they moved together to Tel Aviv, where Else began teaching again. I went to Israel in 1978 to visit her, and she, Solène, and I traveled around the beautiful desert together in their old Ford. Until she died in 1994, she practiced tai chi every morning on the beach. We’d speak on the phone all the time.

  Roman retired from the circus in 1969, and he and Francesco lived in Frascati for the rest of their lives. I met them twice in Istanbul, for the last time in 1970. During that stay, Roman gave a heart-stopping benefit performance in Ortaköy for the Jewish cultural center where David was then serving on the board of directors. Gazing up at that sixty-one-year-old Antinous prancing like an elf across the high wire, his white-gray hair falling to his shoulders, I thought, God bless Roman for defying gravity and so much else.

  Before the Berlin Wall went up, Tonio opened a language school in Charlottenburg. Else found that out for me. He must be a rickety old man these days. Or maybe he’s dead. I’m not tempted to find out.

  My father and Greta married just after the war. I don’t know any more than that.

  In the summer of 1957, I’m dining at a restaurant near Taksim Square with David and Gül, when a man with gray hair like porcupine bristles and clear blue eyes walks in. He looks lost and is squinting like a mole facing a long, dangerous tunnel, since the restaurant is dimly lit. He puts on his tortoiseshell-rim glasses and takes a deep, calming breath. I do too, because for the first time in seventeen years I feel a dry thud inside my heart that seems to mean I have a second chance. The mole-man studies the menu, then hands it back to the maitre d’ and leaves. I tell my dinner companions I have to pee, but instead rush out to the street and call after him. I don’t know much more English than “Wait!” but that’s enough to get him to turn around. God knows where I find the courage.

  He recognizes my accent when I apologize for bothering him, and we talk for a time in a mixture of Yiddish and German. His name is Benjamin Arons. A specialist in ancient Middle Eastern languages, he is in Turkey to do research at the Royal Hittite Archive at Boazköy. He accepts my invitation to join us for dinner, thank goodness. It’s while David is quizzing him about how he first became interested in Anatolian history that I have the daring to reach for his hand under the table. His is warm, reassuring, and strong.

  The next day, we meet for coffee and profiteroles at my favorite café on the Istiklal Caddesi. He spends the night with me in Büyükada. It was love at first sight for me. Ben will tell me later, “It took me a few weeks to fall in love with you. I’m a bit slow.”

  He’s playful, kind, and witty. And American, which means that he’s sure that the world will clear a place for him if he works hard enough. I like that philosophy, though I think it’s an illusion. It’s a particular relief that he doesn’t ever sulk. He gets on with things. And he goes to the movies with me anytime I want.

  Vera would have liked him. Isaac too. Maybe that shouldn’t be important, but it is.

  The only problem becomes Hans. He is seventeen and an architecture student at Istanbul University. Büyükada is too inconvenient for attending classes, so he has recently moved in with David and Gül, who have returned to Ortaköy. David’s parents, Abraham and Graça, both passed away two years earlier, within four months of each other.

  After he meets Ben, my son shrieks at me for the first time in our lives. He tells me I’ve fallen in love with someone inappropriate. Maybe he is under the mistaken impression that Ben will want to be a surrogate parent, but my son refuses to talk to me about his feelings.

  How hard was it growing up with a father who died in a concentration camp and a mother who still wonders all the time why she survived? It will be another seven years before Hans discusses with me how deep what he calls his “sense of precariousness” has been, though I am only too aware that he has always felt as if he had to look over his shoulder, both to get my approval and to make sure that no one was after him.

  It’s during our Long Winter, as I come to call our silent frigid war, that Hans decides he doesn’t want any of Ben’s relatives to know about him. To honor his wishes, we tell my new in-laws that he’s my nephew.

  Ben and I are married in July 1959, in a small ceremony on Büyükada. Unfortunately, we spend months apart at a time, because I’m not yet ready to leave my son. I move definitively to America only in 1962.

  The Long Winter finally comes to an end when Hans finishes his degree and marries his college girlfriend. It’s 1964 and he’s a twenty-four-year-old with Isaac’s intelligent and radiant eyes, and his Uncle Hansi’s slender build. He works as an assistant to a Swiss architect whose specialty is urban planning. I attend his wedding, of course, but without Ben. Right after his honeymoon in early May, he flies to New York to see me. He says he has wanted to talk with me for a long time and that he regrets having been so distant in recent years. Fine, except that he doesn’t explain further. Ben tells me to be patient with him and takes him to a New York Mets baseball game and the Museum of Modern Art. We go to the Bronx Zoo together. Hans discovers he likes both hummingbirds and his stepfather. He and I stay up late together on his second-to-last night in New York. He lays his head on my lap, just as he did on a Berlin bus when he was five years old, and he tells me that he wants to know everything I can tell him about his father. I’ve been waiting his whole lifetime for that request, wondering, in fact, if it would ever come, and we spend the whole night talking. I hold nothing back. We dive into the river of memory that has been wide and deep enough to hold all my conflicted, half-understood emotions. And then Hans invites me into his waters, as well …

  There was so much I didn’t know about him, though I’d had inklings: how he didn’t like to speak German as a boy because it made him feel as if he couldn’t be his own person; how he felt as if my past was too important and his own life could never have nearly as much meaning; how he felt torn in half by the tug-of-war between my Berliner friends and our Turkish relatives. These things are hard for me to hear, but his voice has lost the anger that once made me fear him. “Mama, you don’t need to defend yourself or Papa or Tia V
era or anyone else,” he tells me at one point. “I just need you to listen.”

  As we sit together in Ben’s study, surrounded by the reassuring landscape of manuscripts translated from ancient languages, I realize that Hans is far more than my son now, or even Isaac’s—that he is a man. And that he will make his way in the world regardless of what I do or don’t do. It took me too long to understand that. Maybe my lack of faith in him—or, more likely, the fragile, stained-glass world he was born into—was a big part of our problem.

  By dawn, I’m exhausted, but in a kind of tingling, ecstatic state—as if all my senses have been tuned to a higher frequency by the sound of my son’s voice, which is very much like his father’s. And as if my acceptance of his manhood, of his being separate from all my thoughts and memories of him—has tugged me through one of Berekiah Zarco’s gates.

  Maybe this pleasant and fulfilled weariness is what Isaac felt when he would stay up all night praying and chanting—at least, in the days before the Nazis made his dialogue with God so urgent that he could find no peace.

  When, just after dawn, our conversation reaches a place of well-deserved rest, Hans kisses me on the lips for the first time since he was seven or eight. And we head off to our bedrooms.

  Our Long Winter is over. And now we are free to set off on the rest of our life, whatever it may bring us.

  Late that afternoon, while we’re watching a baseball game in Central Park—with Ben trying to explain the meshugene rules to him one last time—I realize I’ve missed the sound of my son’s laughter most of all. And the way he creeps up on me and presses his lips to my cheek when I least expect it, hoping I’ll gasp and then give him a swat. He can be very silly, which means he is his father’s son. How lucky for us all!

  My heart has been ransomed, as Vera once said to me.

  At the airport, after we hug, he holds up his hand to show me he’s put on his father’s ring for the first time. “It fits perfectly, Mama,” he assures me, smiling through his tears. Having now heard my stories about Isaac’s mystical beliefs and powers, he adds, “Though I’m beginning to believe that Papa always knew it would.”

  How I wish they could have known each other! Every memory of Isaac—and even every dream of him—is, in a small way, a protest against the injustice of their never meeting.

  It’s Ben who reminds me that many historians consider the Battle of Stalingrad the turning point in the Second World War. Some 750,000 Axis troops and 850,000 Russians were killed during the German siege. It remains the bloodiest battle in recorded history. “And it ended on the 2nd of February, 1943,” he tells me pointedly.

  He mentions this after I speak to him about the Seven Gates of Europe and Isaac’s theories.

  “I don’t understand the connection,” I tell him.

  “Isaac died in early January 1943,” he tells me. “A month before the Germans lost the Battle of Stalingrad. It was then that the war turned around.”

  “Oh, I see. Isaac dropping dead on a bunk in Buchenwald won the war for the Allies!”

  I’m in a righteous fury because if six million Jewish dead doesn’t mean that God is as deaf as the lowest layer of hell, then what does?

  He kisses my brow. “I’m not saying there’s a connection. I just think it’s interesting.”

  But I can’t give up my anger just yet. “A thousand Jews must have died on the 2nd of February itself. Probably hundreds of Communists, Gypsies, and distant children too. Do you think they saved the world by being gassed?”

  “Look,” Ben says, spreading his hands to ask for patience, “going through the Seventh Gate meant a great deal to Isaac. It gave his life significance. And since I am quite certain from all you’ve told me that he knew far more than you or I about any of this, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Why can’t you?”

  I don’t know what I believe today. I am glad that Isaac died thinking he had reached God and stopped the vessels from shattering. If his journey had to come to an end, I’m relieved that it had meaning for him.

  And I am certain that he saved me and Hans by making me leave Berlin. And Georg, Vera, Julia, Martin, and a good many other people I probably don’t even know about. The Torah teaches us that in saving a single life one saves a universe, and Isaac saved quite a few.

  We are the only eyes and hands God has on earth, he used to tell me. I try to live up to that truth every day. It’s my inheritance from him.

  Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I think of Isaac and Hansi sitting beside me at the Errol Flynn pirate movie we saw together, Captain Blood. Nothing stupendous happened that day, and it was a silly film, but we were together inside that magical, flickering darkness—and defying the Nazis at the same time. Now, nearing my end, I realize I had a great many wonderful days with Isaac and Hansi. I try not to be greedy and to want more.

  In recent years, I can feel Isaac grasping my hand just before sleep, sometimes even kissing me on the lips when I awaken in the morning. As I am moving away from life, toward either another world or nothing at all, he and I are coming closer together, and I have begun to think that it may very well be possible that the mountain and the sea shall meet again in the moment I pass through the Seventh Gate.

  I suppose I have finally learned to put my trust in him as well as our son.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A final revelation takes nearly thirty years to thread its way through the cramped shadows of my life and make itself known to me in a single burst …

  After Vera and I return to Berlin in the summer of 1945, she tells me it’s unfortunate that Hansi was cremated, because it would have been important for me to see his body, so I could be absolutely sure that he was dead. She sits me down on a bench on the KuDamm so we can look at the ruins of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Church, and she explains to me that she never saw her mother’s body, because her father didn’t allow her to come to the funeral. “After that, I’d see Mama on the street all the time,” she tells me. “Or on a bench in the Tiergarten, a bus … It was terrible. Then, when I’d rush up to her, I’d see it was only a woman who looked like her.” In disgust, she adds, “Sometimes not even that. All that misery, all those ghosts, because I never saw my mother dead.”

  “I didn’t have to see Hansi dead,” I tell her. “People are different. You needed to, I didn’t.”

  “Still, it would have been better if you had,” she says threateningly. “I know about these things. And now that we’re home in Berlin, you’re bound to mistake some other boy for him.”

  “It’s enough I went to the funeral,” I assure her.

  She scoffs. “The funeral was nothing. It was just the beginning.”

  During our stay in Berlin, and even back in Istanbul, I never once mistake anyone on the street for Hansi. Instead of being content about it, as Vera thought I’d be, I’m disappointed.

  She is right, however, about the funeral being just the beginning.

  For many years after my brother’s death, I’m plunged into nightmares of him running away from me at the zoo, being hit by a car on Marienburger Straße, disappearing into the counterfeit Milky Way of the Zeiss Planetarium … I suppose my mind creates these images because I am powerless to keep from rushing forward into the future. And I wish to remain with him in the past. Probably because it’s only there that I can have a second chance to protect him.

  Hansi, the Angel of Marienburger Straße

  In 1953, I go back to Berlin for a second visit, and I stay with Rolf. By then, I’ve read extensively about the Brandenburg killing center where Hansi was gassed. I take the train to Brandenburg one afternoon. I find that almost all the residents have worked hard to forget where the Nazi factory of death was, but one gnarled old grandfather leads me there while walking his Alsatian. We amble together down a street shaded by plane trees, and I’m fine until I see a dark smokestack looming ahead of me, tilting, as if about to collapse. I kneel down, because I suddenly can’t get enough air into my lungs. And when I realize that some of th
e soot on that tall, sinister tower of brick was left by Hansi, I sit right on the sidewalk, dizzy and sick. The old man tries to help me up but I push him away. When I feel strong enough, I get to my feet and hurry back to the station.

  I spend most of my stay in Berlin visiting places I used to go with my brother. In particular, I feel the gravity of memory taking me back to where the King David School once stood. I suppose it’s because so much hope once walked the hallways there.

  One bit of good news: the owls, camels, and elephants—even the squirrels—have returned to the Berlin Zoo. Hansi would be relieved.

  In the evenings, I sometimes lie back and stare at the ceiling of Rolf’s guest room and wonder how a government could gas a boy who was just starting to learn who he was. And what it means about us as human beings that we can be trained to murder the quietest among our children and knock the gold fillings out of their mouths. He was only sixteen—far too young to pass through the last gate.

  Standing in front of our apartment house one warm afternoon, I half expect my brother to come dashing out the front door and run into my arms.

  “Believe me, it’s for the best that you didn’t see him,” Vera assures me after I return to Istanbul. “So stop torturing yourself waiting.”

  “Sometimes I can’t remember what he looked like,” I reply. When she fixes her eyes skeptically on me, I say, “I can’t. Not really. He’s disappeared.”

  “You have photographs and drawings,” she tells me.

  I let the silence accumulate between us because we both knew that I’m talking about an internal image that has somehow dissipated.

  She takes my hands and says, “It’s scary coming face to face with a dead person.”

  “I accept that, but just a glimpse would be nice.”