“Fine, but just forget what you saw,” he tells me, stern warning in his voice.
I agree to that, but as he reaches for the door handle I can’t stop myself from asking, “What do the hieroglyphics say?”
“It’s a shopping list.”
“Raffi, be serious!” I stamp on the ground. “You really scared me and now you’re lying. I hate you!”
“I promise you I’m telling you the absolute truth. Listen,” he continues, calling for peace between us with the tone of his voice, “I’ll be leaving for Egypt next week and I’ll be gone for two months, so don’t be angry with me. Soph, you’re still at an age when everything ought to be fun. But this isn’t. This is deadly serious. Life is real and people can get hurt.”
“Will you use the British pounds in Egypt?” I ask.
“Sophie, don’t you understand what I’m saying? Forget what you saw!”
That night, before Hansi and I turn off the lights, I consider destroying my copy of Raffi’s hieroglyphics, but I decide to wait; only Tonio knows I have them, and if Raffi is hurt, I’ll need to show them to someone who can help.
I wake in the early morning disoriented, as if I’ve fallen from a great height. When I think of my cheek brushing against Vera’s, panic—my mother’s sweaty, doom-soaked variety—makes me jump out of bed and scurry to the bathroom, where I scrub my face like a surgeon before an operation, sanding away with pumice what I imagine to be microscopic flakes of deformity. Then, tiptoeing to my parents’ room, I stand in their open doorway, feeling the silence of the house moving up through my shivering legs and into my hands. When I shake my father awake, he turns over and says, “Sophie, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to turn into a monster,” I tell him, bursting into tears.
He throws his legs over the side of the bed, stands up, and puts his hand to my forehead, feeling for a fever. “Let’s go to your room so we don’t wake Mama,” he whispers.
Once I’m seated on my bed, he looks over at Hansi, who is sleeping soundly, and whispers, “Now tell me what this is all about.” He looks at me with confident eyes, because he knows that when all else fails his affection can still save me.
I explain about being infected, and he takes me in his arms. “You can’t get her disease. Nothing is going to happen to you, Häschen.”
But my anxieties prove resilient even to his lips pressing to my brow. “When Vera worked in a circus, people paid just to see her,” I groan, “and she wasn’t allowed to talk, even if they called her bad names. Papa, I don’t want people to pay to look at me.”
“Sophie, do you think I would have let you sit with her if it was dangerous? Listen, you don’t ever have to see her again if you don’t want to.”
“But she’s going to fit me for a jacket she’s making for me,” I point out. “Mr Zarco is going to tell me when she’s ready.”
“I’ll tell him you’re too busy with school.”
“He won’t believe you. And I don’t want to be rude.”
“Häschen, it’s important to protect yourself. You have to learn your limits, especially now that you’re becoming a woman …” He looks away, his profile grave. Maybe this is a conversation he has put off for months, because he tells me, “Sometimes you have to say ‘no’ and be willing to disappoint other people, even friends—good friends. You have that right. Do you understand?”
His tone makes it clear that he’s talking about Tonio, as well as Vera, so I reply that I do.
“Good. In this case, I’m afraid you have to be courageous enough to be rude.”
“Don’t go just yet, Papa.”
He takes my head in his hands and kisses away my fear. “Now hop under the covers,” he says eagerly, and he tucks me in.
His hands smoothing the blankets over me make me feel safe, and I cede all my worries to him. The age-old magic between fathers and daughters makes me close my eyes. I hear the click of the light switch and his footsteps fading to silence, and soon I’m sliding into slumber, leaving my waking self behind so very quickly that I don’t realize that Papa has made refusing to see Vera into an act of bravery.
Chapter Three
It is Sunday morning, the day after Mr Zarco’s Carnival party, and most Berliners are sleeping late, but Tonio and I are slumped on our seats on the underground, sliding and bumping our way to the zoo. This was my idea; I wanted to be sure I wouldn’t be home if Vera or Georg came over to ask me to go to the Botanical Gardens. Afterward, we plan to head to the Zeiss Planetarium. Tonio’s idea, and an excellent one, since we’ll be able to warm our feet and hands, and lean against each other in a darkness lit only by a sparkly, counterfeit Milky Way. Hansi is with us, too—the price we pay for being permitted to shuttle across the city without an adult. Having my little brother along is mostly like having a second shadow, since he generally speaks only when spoken to, and hardly ever makes a fuss, unless it rains, in which case he starts shrieking and flailing, and I have to cover his head to keep him from hurting himself or someone else. A boy who feels drops of rain like pellets of fire. Could there be a good explanation for that? Nobody has been able to give us one. The doctors say that Hansi is likely to grow out of it, but I’m not betting on it.
I feel like a spy sitting next to Tonio—whatever he suspects about my feelings for him, he doesn’t know that I’ve begun to whisper to him after I wake in the morning, waist-deep in moist fantasies. Sometimes, I play my hands over my breasts, too—though he doesn’t seem to notice I’m not the little girl I was six months ago.
Tonio got his hair cut yesterday, but he’s left a four-inch forelock that he calls a whip at the front. He combs it straight back, which is a style we saw on some Swing-Jugend, university-age jazz fans, at the Katakombe, though it looks like a barber’s error. I’ve already told him I think it’s daring and wonderful, to which he replied ominously, “Papa ordered me to get rid of it this week.”
When Tonio talks about his father, his seductive eyes always grow dark, as though blackened by the punishment he fears. Know this: Tonio is handsome. In life, that makes a difference, especially when it comes to getting away with murder.
I know I’m not supposed to want him so much, since I’m only fourteen, but it’s as if everything we do together is a search for treasure. Who could have predicted I’d see Spanish doubloons in a fifteen-year-old boy who has never left Berlin?
Tonio gets to talking to Hansi about a cheetah that he was once allowed to pet, because his father went to high school with the head zookeeper for mammals. “His tongue was like sandpaper, and he purred so loud that it was as if there was a drum in his chest.”
“You weren’t scared?” Hansi asks.
“Of course, I was. If I weren’t scared, then having my face licked by him wouldn’t have been so exciting.”
Good answer, I think. “What’s your favorite animal?” I ask Tonio.
“The kangaroo,” he shoots back. “I once got it into my head that I wanted one as a pet, but the zookeeper told me that a kangaroo wouldn’t be happy in an apartment. He said that maybe I could get one if I had a farm where it could hop around. Kangaroos have to have lots of room to play and forage—and fight with one another for dominance.”
“A vampire bat!” I exclaim happily.
“What?” Tonio asks, puzzled.
“That’s my favorite animal.”
I pull back my lips to reveal my blood-sucking fangs and make squeaky noises, then attack Hansi’s neck, which makes him laugh and squirm against me. He and I fit together so much better when our parents aren’t around. I guess because there’s no pressure for one of us to be good and the other evil. And he seems so much more alert, too.
Neither Tonio nor I broach the subject of Vera’s having knocked him down, and I say nothing about telling my parents about his having provoked her. He doesn’t seem irritated with me, but he could be storing grievances for a major explosion. I plan to save any quarrel we might have until we’re off the train, since I’m pretty mu
ch like a kangaroo myself and need a lot of room to fight for dominance, especially if I’m going to lose and end up pleading for a reconciliation.
He seems to have forgotten, too, about Raffi’s hieroglyphics, but I’ve a surprise in store about that …
As we’re walking out of the Zoo Station, Tonio takes Hansi’s hand. “Which animals do you want to go see first?”
Big-brotherly kindness is not a quality he’d show in front of most people. A troublemaking suitor with a generous spirit—pretty close to ideal, as far as I’m concerned.
“I want to see the birds!” my little brother declares.
“Yes, sir,” Tonio replies, saluting.
Suddenly, they’re off and running. I call for them to wait for me, but two boys leaving behind a girl aren’t about to slow down, let alone stop, and there I am, leaning against the trunk of a tall oak tree. I try not to mind so much, since I’m determined to love all of Tonio and not just his good qualities.
I find them by a big outdoor cage that’s home to a solitary white owl—snow turned to feathers. But the two boys aren’t watching the snoozing bird. Instead, they’re gazing into the scruffy bushes bordering the pathway. Hansi is on all fours. Not a good sign; if he lost his pocket-watch or Grandpa’s army compass, my mother will find a way to make his carelessness my fault.
“Did you lose something?” I ask, launching a prayer to God.
My brother doesn’t reply. Tonio does. “He saw a squirrel.”
“Hansi, there are golden eagles and rainbow lorikeets here, you don’t need to search for a filthy rodent.”
“It wasn’t filthy—it looked thin and hungry,” the little boy mumbles to himself, but I hear him plain enough because my parents and I have been trained to pick up even his whispers.
After a minute, I lose my patience. Lifting Hansi up by his arm, as I’ve been doing since I was eight and he was two, I brush off the dirt from his pants and drag him away from the bushes.
“The damn thing probably eats better than we do,” I tell him.
“Maybe he even gets moussaka!”
But my brother has already forgotten Mama’s short-lived Hellenic period and is back behind his dim green eyes. In fact, he says nothing over the next hour, not even when we see a peacock with its tail spread in an iridescent fan. He’s probably expanded his concern about the well-being of the squirrel to all the rodents in Berlin. And there are a great many of those, particularly in the foul-smelling workers’ tenements near Schiller Park.
As we set off to visit the African mammals, the wind picks up. Through a mysterious alchemy, my shivering becomes a surge of impatience, and I apologize to Tonio for having denounced him to my parents and Mr Zarco.
“You could have made something up about why Vera hit me,” he replies matter-of-factly.
That lukewarm criticism is the extent of his righteous fury? “Yes, I should have,” I admit. “It was terrible of me to betray you.”
The time has come for tears, so I squeeze my eyelids together, but nothing will come.
“Sophie, do you feel sick or something?” Tonio asks.
It must be too early in the morning for high drama. “I felt dizzy for a moment,” I reply.
He grips my shoulders to steady me and kisses my cheek. I’ve been waiting for a gesture like this for weeks, but instead of falling into his arms, I’m hingerissen again.
“Come on,” he says excitedly, taking my hand and curling his fingers through mine, “let’s go see if that cheetah is still around.”
The ways of boys are a mystery—letters in a language I can’t speak. You put them all together and what do you have but a message that badly needs translating?
To hold hands with Tonio … My heartbeat races, and my sense of being who I am is hovering somewhere outside me. My feet keep walking, and we continue talking, but time disappears until we are inside a brick building that smells like manure, standing in front of the bars of a huge cage. Hansi, holding his nose, asks Tonio, “Which is the cheetah you petted?”
The biggest of the cats is looking off purposefully toward the other side of the room, standing guard perhaps. Two other cheetahs are behind him, on their bellies. One of them is licking its front paws luxuriously.
Dropping my hand and pointing to the sentinel, Tonio tells Hansi, “That’s the one.”
With its alert, knowing eyes and high, powerful shoulders, the creature’s magnificent compactness seems so different from our loose-limbed angularity. Hansi is scratching his bottom, like he does when he’s nervous or awe-struck, which to him are much the same thing. Tonio puts his arm over the boy’s shoulder. I don’t begrudge my brother Tonio’s affection because it seems to me now that all the animals we’ve seen—and even the day itself, with all its different landscapes and surprises—belong only to me.
It’s then that my tears start to come, and Tonio asks what’s wrong. Not much intuition, I suppose.
“I looked at the sun while we were outside,” I lie.
“Why’d you do that?”
“So I’d remember this moment.”
For a few glorious, heart-stopping seconds we stare into each other’s eyes, but because of the jumble of emotions that provokes in us we’re both cautious for the rest of our visit to the zoo. At the planetarium, we even sit Hansi between us.
Before heading home, I tell Tonio about my surprise destination and we go to the Neue Museum, which houses Germany’s ancient Egyptian collection. Raffi gave me a guided tour there years ago. The moment we enter, Hansi starts tugging on my arm and moaning. “The dust makes me sick,” he complains.
“If you don’t stop pulling my arm out of its socket, I’m going to mummify you and leave you outside for the crows to eat!”
That doesn’t deter him at all, and he starts whining, so Tonio takes him outside.
The director of the Egyptian collection isn’t in, but a lady at the ticket desk goes off to find an assistant. An hour later—by which time an impatient Tonio has checked on me twice—a bespectacled assistant, bald, with a goat-like tuft of beard, shuffles lazily down the stairs. He tells me his name is Dr Gross, and we shake hands. “Let’s see what you have there,” he tells me, fighting a grin. He obviously thinks I’m an idiot.
He looks at the paper and, with a puzzled look, summons me over to the entrance doors so he can study it in the sunlight. Showing the sheet to me, he says, “The frames around these pictograms are called cartouches. They signify names. Usually royal names, but in this case, I’d say …” He studies the page, his finger tapping nervously against his lips. “Listen, come back later this week, say Friday, and I’ll have a translation for you.”
“You can’t do it now? I don’t think I can …”
He gives me a withering look that stops my protest. When I get back to Tonio and explain what happened, he exclaims, “But you let him keep it! What if it has messages Raffi didn’t want anyone to know about?”
I worry myself sick all weekend that Dr Gross might cause Raffi problems, maybe even get his funding revoked, and I vow to destroy the hieroglyphics as soon as I’ve got them back. It’s only when Raffi leaves for Egypt on Tuesday that I feel my anxious constriction falling away from me.
I desperately want to see Tonio that week, but my parents have refused—as usual—to let me go out with him on weekdays. Nevertheless, I slip away to his apartment on Wednesday evening, but his mother says he’s being punished and can’t come to the door. She doesn’t volunteer the reason why and her cheek has a big blue bruise, which means she’s lost a bad quarrel with her husband, so I don’t dare ask anything more.
Photographs from Karl-Heinz arrive in the post on Thursday, while I’m at school, and at that precise moment, two astonishing indications of my coming adulthood converge: the correspondence is addressed to me, and Mama leaves the brown envelope on my pillow unopened—an instance of self-control worthy of the big kiss I give her in the kitchen.
On the back of each four-by-five-inch image is a white label on
which he’s typed the date and names of his subjects. That professional touch makes his gift so exciting that I need to make sure I’m not disturbed while I study them, so I lock myself in the bathroom. Sitting on the tile floor and spreading out the pictures like playing cards, I pick up the one with me, Vera, Marianne, Rolf, and Heidi, pleased to see that I look right at home with them.
I examine my face and pose in the four pictures that include me, eager to see if I exude the charisma of a future diva or the pixie charm of a promising starlet, but beside Marianne, whose blond hair glistens like the sun, I look like a drab little afterthought. After I’ve studied each photograph down to its grainy texture, I read the poem that Karl-Heinz has written at the bottom of his brief note:
Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen,
Die da träumen fort und fort,
Und die Welt hebt an zu singen,
Triffst du nur das Zauberwort.
Slumb’ring deep in everything
Dreams a song as yet unheard,
And the world begins to sing
If you find the magic word.
The idea of the world changed by one little word gratifies my delight in smallness, and I commit the verses to memory. To this day, I cannot say them to myself without seeing Karl-Heinz’s portraits spread on the glassy, olive-green smoothness of the bathroom tiles, and without feeling my own chances for an adventurous life hovering just outside the door.
The photographer signs his friendly note as K-H, which is when I start referring to him by his initials.
My mother puts on her big black glasses to examine the photograph that includes Vera. I expect a shriek, or maybe a few tears of sympathy, since this is the first she’s seen of her, but Mama merely purses her lips, hands it back to me, and returns to her stew.
“Do you think I look pretty in them?” I ask.
“Of course,” she replies, far too easily for my liking.
The Seventh Gate Page 6
