An Image of Death

by Libby Fischer Hellmann

  But then we passed Penn’s Landing, a recently developed park with concerts in the summer, ice skating in the winter, and a series of permanently moored ships to tour. As we turned toward Society Hill, I twisted around in my seat. Late-afternoon sun slanted down on the Ben Franklin Bridge, splashing molten light across its steel cables. David and I could take a walk down here over the weekend. A bit of quiet time, by ourselves, without any pressure, might soothe the raw spots in our relationship.

  The cab pulled up in front of a four-story Federal townhouse near Second and Pine. I’d been here before, but each time I visit I like it more. It’s a straightforward, proud house with red brick facade, white trim, and sand-colored shutters. It suits him. My favorite spot is his backyard, a walled garden with two flowering cherry trees. I hadn’t seen them in bloom yet, but I planned to visit when the delicate pink flowers blossomed this spring.

  When David answered the door in rolled-up shirt sleeves and jeans, a ping shot through me, and all thoughts about trees and flowers melted away. It was all I could do not to climb all over him. He leaned in and gave me a kiss. I rested my hands on his arms. He looked tired.

  “How are you?”

  “It’s been a long couple of weeks.”

  I stepped into a narrow entrance hall that was decorated with arches and chair-rail moldings. “How was the trip back?”

  “Both flights were delayed. Otherwise uneventful.”

  “How did your uncle bear up?”

  “Willie did fine.”

  “Willie.” I smiled. “Where is he?”

  “Up in the den.” Despite a spacious living room on the first floor, David spends most of his time upstairs, where the kitchen, den, and dining room are located. He started up, carrying my suitcase. “His English is passable. He speaks Dutch, French, and a little Russian, but, of course, he’s most comfortable in German.”

  I followed him up the stairs, letting my hand trail up the banister. I’d decided I wouldn’t say anything about his leaving for Europe so precipitously until we’d had a chance to unwind. He had a lot on his mind. I didn’t want to add any stress. Then I heard myself saying, “I guess you were pretty rushed when you left.”

  He stopped. “What do you mean?”

  “You never called or e-mailed to tell me you were leaving. Not that you had to, of course.…”

  He paused briefly, almost imperceptibly. “Right. I’m sorry. I just—well, things did get hectic.”

  That wasn’t what I was hoping to hear. But what did I expect? That he’d fall all over himself apologizing? Sweep me into his arms and swear not to neglect me again? I was probably making too much of it. Finding his uncle was one of the most important events in David’s life. It was my need for security and reassurance that was exacerbating the situation. I resolved to push away my anxiety.

  At the top of the stairs he set down the suitcase, crossed the hall, and opened a partially closed door. “Willie, die Ellie ist da.”

  I peered into the room. A man rose from David’s couch. He was tall and gaunt, with hollow cheeks and a lined face. Iron gray hair, and lots of it, was combed to the side. But his eyebrows arched so high they seemed tethered in a perpetually surprised expression, and the blue eyes beneath them reminded me of a summer sky. I thought I saw a resemblance between him and David, something around the mouth, perhaps, though when you’re looking for a similarity, you’re apt to find one, whether it’s there or not.

  He was wearing a white shirt, tie, and dark pants. He rolled his shirt sleeves down, grabbed a suit jacket from the back of a chair, and shrugged into it. “It is my pleasure, Miss Foreman.”

  You could see he was in poor health, but there was something very appealing about him. He struck me as a gentleman, a kind man, a man for all times. We shook hands. “Please. Call me Ellie.”

  ***

  That night we cabbed over to Bookbinders in Center City for dinner. The original restaurant had been around the corner from David’s, but it was closed. The décor of the Fifteenth Street place was disappointing: dark wooden floors, draped nets, and predictable pictures of fish on the walls.

  Once we were seated, Willie slipped on a pair of small, round glasses with metal frames. I’ve always found glasses attractive; they gentle a person, especially a man. He inspected the menu, peppering David with questions in a combination of pidgin-English, French, and German.

  Our appetizers came right away.

  “There’s so many questions I want to ask, Willie,” I said, after a few bites of crab cake. “Do you mind?”

  “Nein. You ask.” He gave me a courtly smile.

  “Tell me how you survived the war.”

  His story, accompanied by lots of enthusiastic hand motions to bridge the language barrier, started on a sunny afternoon in the summer of ’39 when the SS came to the Gottliebs’ house in Freiburg. Willie’s father, David’s grandfather, knew right away what was happening and tried to resist. He was killed. Willie, who happened to be down the block at a neighbor’s, heard the shots. A few minutes later, his mother and younger sister were taken away in a truck. He never saw them again. That night, he stole back to his house, packed a bag, and ran. He spent the rest of the war bouncing from one town to the next, hiding out in the woods, never staying in one place more than a day or two. He never admitted he was Jewish. Just a boy who’d been orphaned by the war.

  Over time he hiked north, cutting over to Belgium and the Netherlands, where the atmosphere was slightly more tolerable. Some people helped him; others didn’t. When he couldn’t borrow or steal eggs and fruit, he foraged in the woods, learning by experience which berries and plants were edible. He had the stomach problems to prove it.

  David asked if he remembered the one letter he’d managed to send his mother.

  Willie nodded vigorously. “C’etait un fermier—a farmer—der landwirt—near Cologne who posted for me the letter. But no one, after, could I find to post one.”

  After the war Willie headed back to Freiburg. But the city, which had been leveled by both Allied and German bombers, who mistook it for a French target, was hardly more than a spot on the map. The rubble, the bitterness, the shattered lives, were more than he could handle, and he sank into a despair he hadn’t allowed himself to feel while he was running.

  One day he ventured into the dense woodland where he and Lisle and their younger sister had played as children, hoping, perhaps, in some mystical way, to find some remnant of his family’s presence, their spirit. He waited for a sign, a leaf grazing his cheek, perhaps, or a sudden shaft of light that might guide him toward the future, but he saw and felt nothing. He left Germany the next day.

  “You went straight to Antwerp?” I asked.

  “Nein. I have been traveling much. Belgien. Frankreich. Die Niederlande. No one has money, you see, but they has work. I work. They feed. Is gut.”

  He told us how, after several months, he hitched a ride on a milk truck in Belgium, a milch wagen, that made stops along its route. One of the stops was Antwerp.

  “How was it that you settled there?”

  “Before the war, Antwerp was considered second only to Paris as a center for art and culture,” David explained.

  “Is good businesses there, a large Jewish quarter, und is Antwerp capital of the diamond world,” Willie said. “Und is second largest port in Europe. Ships go from Antwerp uber die ganze Welt.” He raised his palm. “It is easy place to leave in a hurry. Even with bag of diamonds in pocket, you can go. Verstehen?”

  “I understand.” But did I? I was raised in a safe haven. My right to exist had never been challenged. Willie’s life had been defined by fear and a profound need for legitimacy. And David, who’d been shunted from home to home as a foster child, shared a similar itinerant background. I played with my food, wondering, not for the first time, whether my stability, or at least the perception of it, was part of what attracted David to me.

  I looked at Willie. “You never married.”

  His expression turne
d wistful. “I meet woman in Antwerp. She is survivor auch, aber lost husband and baby in Dachau. We fall in love. She want me to move with her to Israel.”

  “Next to Antwerp, Tel Aviv is probably the largest center for diamonds in the world,” David spoke up.

  Willie sighed. “Ja, but I cannot go.”

  “Why not?”

  He clasped his hands in front of him. “War auch ein fighter. She wanted to make sicher it does not happen again. She thought Israel was place to do that.”

  “You didn’t agree?”

  “I can not chance nehmen. Take the chance.” He flashed me a sad smile. “If God would not let the Jews survive in Europa, what are the chances in Israel, with fiend—enemies on all sides?”

  ***

  I was brushing my hair in David’s bathroom, thinking about the similarities in Willie’s and David’s lives, when David’s reflection appeared in the mirror. I smiled.

  He didn’t smile back.

  “Is something wrong?” I turned around.

  “No. Nothing.”

  “And my name is Grace Slick.” I eyed him. “David, something’s been bothering you ever since I got here.”

  He looked at me, then gave a little shrug. “It’s just—it’s just that you found out more about Willie in two hours than I did all week.”

  I put down the brush. “He was probably in the mood to talk. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, he and Brigitte and I were together, and he.…” He cut himself off.

  “Who?”

  An odd look came over him.

  “Who is Brigitte?”

  He padded into the bedroom. “Brigitte is the daughter of his late partner. The one who came into the business after her father died. They’ve been working together for years. But I don’t think she knows as much about his life as you do.”

  I followed him in and stood on my tiptoes to kiss him. “I have a vested interest.”

  Finally, a smile.

  We got into bed. “You know who would love to meet him?”

  “Your father.”

  “Yes.” I snuggled in close. “Willie is Lisle’s brother. Your uncle. I’m sure Dad would give anything to be here.”

  My father had been in love with David’s mother years ago when they were young. It hadn’t worked out, and I sometimes felt Dad hoped David and I would make good on the promise he and Lisle hadn’t. I reached for David’s hand and ran it down my cheek.

  He pulled away.

  Five minutes later, his even, regular breathing said he was asleep. I lay without moving, trying to ignore the ache in my chest. He’d been through a lot. He was exhausted. That’s all it was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A low-slung sun flickered through the trees as I headed to a coffee shop the next morning. I’d thrown on my coat, hat, and gloves over a pair of David’s sweats, but opening the door, I realized I didn’t need the insulation. Philadelphia winters have much less bite than Chicago’s. I stuffed my hat and gloves into my pocket.

  The Second Street Coffee Shop was, mercifully, not a Starbucks. Bigger and brasher, the décor consisted of brightly polished copper tubes, pipes, and curlicues that snaked up, down, and around, and even seemed to produce a cup of coffee. It had normal-sized tables, too, occupied by groups of two or more sipping their drinks, reading newspapers, and chatting. I selected half a dozen pastries that looked relatively healthy and ordered three lattés. As I waited for the order, I happily sniffed the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee and eavesdropped on two women sitting nearby.

  “The problem is that the senior partners still think technology is just a word processor and spread sheet,” one of them said. “But they don’t have to go to the law library. They send associates like me.” She speared a piece of cheese Danish.

  “Did you see Jennifer yesterday?” The other woman looked off to the side. “She doesn’t look so good.”

  “And IP, the one department you’d think would embrace it, isn’t out front on the new system.” The first woman looked off to the side, too, as if a third, unseen person were at the table. “You know what I think? Everyone’s afraid to confront the Luddites. Nobody wants to upset the apple cart.”

  “She’s lost weight, and she looked pale. I’m worried about her.”

  I turned back to the cash register, wondering if either woman would remember this moment a month, a year, a decade from now. What they were drinking, what they were wearing, what they said—or didn’t say—to each other. Was that the way David and I had been communicating?

  He was in the shower by the time I got back, so Willie and I set out breakfast in the dining room on a mahogany table. I took a blueberry muffin, cut it in half, and sat down opposite a large bay window with a view of the garden. Willie chose a raspberry scone and bit into it eagerly. It was Saturday, but he was wearing a crisp white shirt, tie, and dark pants. I pictured him in Antwerp on a weekend morning, strolling down the street, an umbrella in one hand, a bag of pastries in the other, eager to return home and devour his treat.

  “How did you get started in diamonds?” I asked around a mouthful of muffin.

  “You like them?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “That’s sure.” He brushed crumbs of scone off his face. “A diamond is art. Better than Rubens. Even Van Gogh.” He chuckled. “When I leave Freiburg, I take with me my mother’s diamond necklace. Is small stone, barely one carat. But I keep with me.”

  “Your mother’s necklace?” I imagined how the memory of his mother, embodied in that stone, kept him alive through the dark days of the war. How that necklace, and who it belonged to, influenced his choice of career. How, even now, he cherished it, keeping it in a special place. “What happened to it?”

  “I trade for a chicken in Belgium.”

  So much for my imagination.

  “Nein.” He held up a finger. “Do not fuehl schlecht. Feel bad. When I get to Jewish quarter in Antwerp, I meet diamond cutter. Marcel Berken. He needs help caring for equipment. I remember my mother’s diamond. I think maybe it is way to ehre mein mutter. Honor her memory. So I work for him. No money. Just food. But I learn how to set bench. Clean tang and dop. Oil wheel with diamond dust.”

  “He’s the one who taught you how to polish diamonds?”

  “For six months, I just watch. Is important. With diamonds, one wrong cut, stone is—kaput.” He made a brushing aside gesture with his fingers.

  “Ruined.”

  “Ja. Ruined.”

  David came into the dining room, his hair still damp. When I passed him the plate of pastries, he flashed me a warm smile. I had been overreacting last night. He’d been stressed out. My doubts melted away. Tonight would be different.

  “I learn slow,” Willie went on. “The first diamond I cut, I make like my mother’s halskette—necklace. Maybe she see it. I think she do.” He paused. “After ten years, Marcel tell me is time to open my own shop. ‘You are good, Willie’ he say. ‘You see diamanten. Diamonds.”

  “See the diamond?”

  “You take yellow stone. Or brown. Maybe greasy. Haesslich. Ugly. Worse than quartz in sunlight. But you know inside is—how you say….”

  “You see the possibilities?”

  “Ja. Possibilities. It may be brilliant. Or princess. Maybe something else. But always it brings out inner licht. Light.”

  “I wouldn’t know a rough diamond if I held one in my hand,” I said. “What happened to the diamond you cut in honor of your mother?”

  He patted his shirt pocket. “I have it still. I wait to give it to right person.” He stole a look at David. A flush crept up David’s neck. Willie finished his scone and pushed his plate away. “But enough from old man. Was ist deine arbeit? What work you do, Ellie?”

  “I’m a filmmaker.”

  David translated. “Direktor. Film.”

  Recognition lit Willie’s eyes. “Steven Spielberg, yah? ET…Star Wars?”

  Star
Wars was Lucas, but I didn’t object. “Not exactly. I produce industrials. Corporate videos.”

  He canted his head.

  “Let’s say one of the diamond schools in Antwerp wants to make a video about diamond cutting. Or De Beers wanted to showcase some of their better quality stones. They might hire me to make that video.”

  Again David translated. “Industriewerbung.”

  “I see. This is gut?”

  “It’s a living.” Except when someone drops off a tape that shows a woman being murdered. “Oh.” I turned to David. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you. Officer Davis thinks they found the location where the tape of the woman was shot.” I filled him in on the Russian dentists’ murders, carefully avoiding any mention of Celestial Bodies.

  “Was ist das?”

  David explained. When he was finished, Willie said something in German. All I heard was Russisch.

  “What did he say? All I could make out was Russian.”

  David waved a hand. “It’s not important.”

  I remembered my father’s propensity to compare Russian and German Jews, usually to the detriment of the Russians. I’d always thought it was just an American practice.

  David looked over, as if he knew what I was thinking. “It’s not what you think. He was just saying he has to be careful with Russians. Especially now.”

  “Why is that?”

  “That part of the world is in such chaos that people are desperate. They’ll do anything to get by. He says you have to know who you’re dealing with.”

  I pushed the half-eaten muffin away. Is that what had happened at home? The dentists were Russians—had they come into contact with other, more desperate Russians, who, for whatever reasons, caused their deaths? Were their murders the result of a robbery gone awry? Or, given what Davis said about the Russian mafia, an extortion or blackmail scheme that backfired?

  Or were the dentists’ deaths linked to the tape? Were they killed because they knew the dead woman? Or had something to do with the tape of her murder? And if that was the case, how long would it be before the killers discovered that I had something to do with the tape, too? I shifted uneasily. “I sense you don’t think it’s such a good idea for me to be involved with Russian dentists, cleaning ladies, and women with tattoos.”