The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  Reading that horrible newspaper, I realize I’ll have to confront Raffi when he returns from Egypt. But if I discover he’s taken money from the Nazis, how will we ever continue to be friends?

  Having chickened out on my gift from Vera, I slip thief-like around corners and into shadows whenever I spot Mr Zarco, but one sunny Saturday morning in early April, while I’m sitting on my haunches in our courtyard, potting violet-colored pelargoniums in our window boxes, he appears above me without warning.

  “How’s my little Sophele?” Mr Zarco asks in an exuberant voice, using a Yiddish nickname for me that implies affection and which he pronounces Sopheluh.

  His eyes are inquisitive and amused. He’s clearly a man whose delight in young people devours his grievances.

  “I’m fine,” I say. Standing up and raising my soiled hands—two slick brown mittens—I add, “It’s good to get my fingers in some dirt.” I want him to know I’m not the kind of girl who thinks she’s made of porcelain.

  His pipe, set in his jaw, bobs up and down comically. The same boyish energy makes Papa rise up onto his toes. The two of them could be extras in a Charlie Chaplin movie.

  “What exactly are you doing, meine Liebe?” he asks. He combs a hand back over his tufts of silver hair. His wife, who died when I was little, must have been armed every morning with a wet hairbrush.

  “The flowers in our pots died over the winter, and I can’t stand looking at them any more.”

  “I understand. Are they geraniums?”

  “Pelargoniums.”

  “Pel-ar-gon-ium,” he says, spreading his right arm in a luxurious arc, as if he’s a ballet dancer. “Sounds like a Latin poet.” Holding his belly, he adds, “Or maybe a rare stomach disease.”

  We laugh together, and somewhere inside that sound is the trust I feel for him. His teeth are brown-edged from his pipe smoking, and crooked too, but I once overheard a prostitute on the underground saying to her colleague that a man needs some defects to make him really handsome, and now that I’m in love with a boy who claims to believe that Communists and Jews are no good, I understand what she means.

  “Give me the honor of smelling your fingers,” he says. He unfurls his hand toward me—another gesture from the stage.

  “You’ll get dirty,” I protest.

  He shrugs away my concern. Sniffing rabbit-like at my fingers, he says, “Similar tangy odor to geraniums … not all that pleasant.” His touch draws away my strength. I must not be a normal person around men anymore—even elderly ones with mussed hair. I’d like to simply faint away and float into the sky.

  “Are you all right, Sophele?” he asks, releasing his hold on me.

  “I’d like to be weightless sometimes. I wish I could just rise up toward the sun.”

  “And be led away by Hermes to the top of Mount Olympus.”

  “By who?”

  “The messenger of the Greek gods is Hermes. He appears as sunlight in our world.” In an enticing voice, he adds, “He might even be telling you something.”

  “What?”

  “That we may not be earth-bound after all!” he declares.

  “You think we might be able to fly?” I ask eagerly.

  “If God is a bird, then why not?”

  “But God’s not a bird!” I retort. How sure I was of matters I knew nothing about!

  “Someone has given you meshuge information, Sophele. I can assure you that for me, the Lord often appears to me as the sacred ibis of Egypt. He is white, with a black head and silver eyes. In fact, some very courageous ibises once guided Moses across an Ethiopian swamp riddled with hungry snakes. That was God protecting a prophet.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “To my wife, the Lord was present in those big, shaggy snowflakes that fall in silence. ‘The still whiteness of gravity,’ she wrote once. A nice thing to say, no? My wife, Marthe, was the poet in our family. My mother was the watercolorist. And if you look closely at her work, you can see God taking form in the sunset over the village near Dresden where her grandparents lived. I’ll show you sometime.” He gestures toward my flowers. “Who knows, the Lord might even appear to a girl named Sophie as pelargoniums listening in to her conversation with an alter kacker neighbor.”

  “A what?”

  “An old shitter,” he explains. “A fossil who complains a lot.” To my puzzled look, he adds in a thoughtful tone, “I’m speaking like a village idiot. Sorry. All I mean to say is that we each find different things beautiful and symbolic of something greater.” He points the stem of his pipe at me. “What touches you most is what God chooses as His hand.”

  I think about that for a time. “So He has a different hand for each person?” I ask.

  “Of course.”

  “And God’s eyes, what are they?”

  “His eyes are yours.” He raises his thick, caterpillar eyebrows like a trickster. “So when you get a glimpse of the Lord, Sophele, you are also seeing yourself.”

  I’m more confused than ever, and I let my head drop comically, as though I’m a marionette whose strings have been cut.

  Laughing again, he says, “I’m envious of you, you know. I’d like to have pelargoniums at home, but I’d always worry about them when I was away. A plant dying of thirst is not something I’d want on my conscience.” Mr Zarco turns out the fraying pockets of his tweed coat, finding keys and an old museum ticket in one, and a silver lighter and a handful of cracker crumbs in the other—the keepsakes of a widower. “Travel light,” my papa always told me. “Things just weigh you down.”

  “But all the books on your shelves! And your paintings.”

  “I know,” he moans. “Unfortunately, my father also told me that a two-legged donkey is a German who doesn’t read books.” He holds up a finger. “Which reminds me of a Yiddish joke. What do you do if one man calls you a donkey?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “You ignore him—he’s just provoking you. And if two people call you a donkey?” He spreads his hands to call for my reply, and when I say I still don’t know, he replies, “You consider what it might mean about your character. After all, you’re a thoughtful person, no? And if three people call you a donkey?”

  “I give up.”

  “You buy a saddle!”

  I laugh, but mostly because he does. And because the melody of his Yiddish is like German twisted by a thousand years of conversations on village street corners.

  “Tell me, Sophele, do you think a book could get as thirsty as a pelargonium?” he asks. With such questions, I come to learn that he is different from anyone I’ve ever met.

  “Maybe if it weren’t ever taken down from its shelf,” I reply. “If nobody ever read it.”

  “Exactly—I worry about that all the time,” he confesses.

  This is the first time I consider that he may be deranged. And maybe it’s the first time that he conceives of a plan for how I can help him in his struggle.

  “I could water any plants you decided to get,” I say. “When you’re away from home, I mean.”

  That’s an offer made by a girl desperate to scrub off the ink stain left by her betrayal, of course. “No, that would be asking too much.”

  We both know why he says that, and it’s now that I should apologize for my cowardice, or at least try to explain it, but before I can speak he rubs the residue of my dirt from his hands right onto the seat of his woolen trousers and says, “I’m off to synagogue. And then a funeral.” He gazes at me sadly.

  “Someone died?”

  “A friend. I think you met him at my Carnival party—Georg Hirsch. He was dressed as Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.”

  My heart does a somersault. “Georg! Oh my God. What happened to him?”

  “He was murdered at his apartment.”

  I feel as if the ground has shifted beneath me. I can’t think of what to say. And I can feel tears rising into my eyes from shock.

  “I’m sorry I had to give you bad news,” Mr Zarco says g
ently.

  “Did they … did they catch who did it?”

  As he shakes his head, a shudder ripples through me. “Why … why would someone want to murder him?” I ask.

  “Sophele, with the Nazis around, we all have enemies,” he replies. “They tried to shoot Georg once in Savigny Platz but missed. We should have gotten him out of Germany.”

  “Vera said he was involved in politics.”

  “He’d become the head of a group called The Ring that I founded about twenty years ago. We help circus performers like Rolf and Vera find good work after they stop performing. We’ve decided to fight for better conditions for brewery workers of late. We try to help wherever we can. Maybe some big Nazi didn’t like that and ordered Georg killed. They … they painted swastikas on his face … blue swastikas on his cheeks and forehead. And on his hands, too.”

  “Why blue?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Did you know Georg for a long time?”

  “Since he was a boy. We’re cousins. I was fifteen years older than him and used to take him all over the city with me when he was a boy.” Mr Zarco’s smile is made of memories. “You never saw a child so quick. My wife used to say he was a copper wire—all that electricity! His parents were lovely people, too.”

  “Did you used to take him to the Botanical Gardens?”

  “Yes, he loved them, but how did you know that?”

  “That’s where Georg wanted to go when I met him.” Seeing Mr Zarco’s puzzled look, I add, “At your party, he asked Vera if she wanted to go there, and he ended up asking me, too.”

  “It was Georg’s personal mission to bring Vera out of her cocoon.” He re-lights his pipe, puffing hard, his cheeks hollowing with the effort.

  “Would you mind telling me how … how he was murdered?” I ask hesitantly. It’s a question that just pops out, maybe because I’ve read Emil and the Detectives too many times. I’m also aware that I want to help Mr Zarco find the killer—and that any reasonable person would regard it as presumptuous of me to believe I can.

  He gives me a hard look from behind a cloud of smoke. He looks like a sorcerer getting ready to cast a spell of silence.

  “I’m sorry if I offended you,” I tell him, grimacing. “I’m just … just curious. My mind has been distorted by reading novels and by watching Hollywood movies—at least, that’s what Mama says.”

  “I see,” he says, amused. His expression becomes grave. “The police said he was strangled. Apparently, his windpipe was broken.”

  “Did they tell you anything else?”

  “Not much. They were mainly interested in threatening me.”

  “Threatening you?”

  “They seemed to think that all Jews are liars. And they insisted that I ought to know more than I do about Georg’s whereabouts prior to his death.”

  “Did the Nazis beat him up first?”

  “No, there was no evidence of that.”

  “No bruises on his face or body … maybe on his arms?”

  “Nothing. But Sophele, I’m not sure I should be discussing this with you. It’s all so terrible.”

  “It’s just … don’t you think that if Nazis killed Georg they’d have hurt him first, Mr Zarco?”

  “I don’t know.” He looks down and swirls his foot along the ground, as if to lead his mind toward an answer. I can tell he’s only now started to consider Georg’s death as a mystery that needs solving. Maybe older people don’t think like detectives.

  “You don’t watch many movies, do you?” I ask.

  “No, but I get the feeling I should,” he replies, amused by me again. He gazes at me keenly, eager now to hear what I have to say.

  “Do you know if the lock on his door was broken or … or a window smashed?”

  He funnels his smoke above him. “No, I’ve been to his apartment. Nothing was broken.”

  “So there was no struggle, which means he knew the person who killed him.”

  “But that would mean a friend or acquaintance of his would have to be a secret Nazi,” he says, a questioning tone in his voice.

  “Yes, though even if his attacker had been a friend, Georg must have fought back … and fought back hard. Which would mean he might have been restrained and gagged. But you say there were no marks made on his face or arms. So something doesn’t add up.” A chain of meaning locks around me. Hoping Mr Zarco will say no, I ask, “Is Raffi Munchenberg a member of the group that Georg headed, by any chance?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “A hunch.” So maybe Georg had learned that Raffi was accepting money from Nazis and needed to be silenced. And maybe the color blue has a special meaning to an Egyptologist.

  “What’s wrong, Sophele?” Mr Zarco asks.

  “Nothing,” I lie. “Did the police say whether they found any blood on Georg?”

  “No, he looked …” Mr Zarco’s eyes moisten. He tries to speak, but fails. Finally, he says, “Sorry, it’s just that I had to identify his body. His parents are dead and his sister lives in Hamburg.”

  “Was anything stolen?”

  “His sister told me that when she came to collect his things, his makeup kit was gone.” To my puzzled look, he says, “Georg walked the high-wire. Circus people use makeup.” He rubs his cheek as if he’s afraid to ask me something, and I keep quiet so as not to scare him off. “I’d like you to come with me to synagogue sometime,” he finally tells me.

  “All right, though I won’t know what to do.”

  “What to do? You just sit with me,” he says good-naturedly. “We’ll pick a day soon. Sophele, I’ve got to be off. Happy potting!”

  He starts away. Thinking of Papa and suddenly worried for his safety, I call after him, “Was Georg a Communist?”

  He turns back. “No, why do you ask?”

  “My papa is a Communist,” I whisper.

  “Your father is going to be fine,” he says definitively, understanding my fears. “Georg was Jewish. That’s probably what they hated.”

  “Mr Zarco, do you think a Jew would ever accept money from a Nazi?”

  “Some of us own shops where anyone can purchase things.”

  “No, I mean funding for a project … a special project.”

  “I suppose if the money could be put to good use.”

  “And another thing. Do the Jews have the same God as Christians?” I ask.

  “Naturally.”

  “The sacred ibis?”

  “With two silver eyes,” he says, dotting each one with the end of his pipe, “and a long beak to scare away snakes.” He lifts one of his feet. “And yellow toes.”

  Mr Zarco is the first adult I’ve ever met who has ever said anything interesting about God. He is giving me an invitation, I think. And not just to synagogue. I can either ask him to tell me more about the way he thinks or lose this chance forever.

  * * *

  It’s Saturday afternoon, and Tonio and I have just reached our courtyard after visiting a tire factory in Neukölln whose roof caved in the night before. We’ve also kissed in public for the first time—while sitting on a bench in Treptower Park. And I let him feel my breasts, too, but only for a few shameless and thrilling seconds. Right now we’re as sopped as dishrags from the heavy rains that fell as we hurried to the underground for the trip home. Wanting to know what God looks like to Tonio, I ask, “What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen? Or the thing that touched you the most?”

  “I need to think about that,” he replies.

  Once we’re inside, we dry our hair with a towel and drag two armchairs up to the radiator. Tonio’s mother throws an eiderdown over us and lectures us in a mixture of German and Russian for having taken along only a single umbrella. She gesticulates wildly. Maybe everyone from Novograd—“the oldest city in Russia,” she always tells us proudly—emphasizes their words by making all sorts of waving motions in the air, but to us she’s one of a kind.

  “You two will end up with pneumonia one day,�
� she concludes. She and Tonio have decided that hot chocolate is what we need, but there’s not a drop of milk in the house. On her way out to Frau Koslowski’s grocery, she makes two fists and says in Russian, “Winter holds back springtime in this city with both its hands.” Tonio translates. She gives him a big, confirming nod, kisses the top of his head, then mine, and rushes out the door.

  Maybe we can blame the blood returning to our youthful hands and feet. Or the eiderdown, which gives our growing warmth the weighty blessing of German family tradition. Or even the possibility of his mother coming back early and shrieking hysterically at us. Whatever the case, Tonio chooses this moment to duck under our covering and begin pawing at my ankles, huffing at my feet, and barking. I’m laughing and squirming, and telling him to quit tickling me, since a protest is a must for any girl in my position, so that later she can testify, But I told him to stop!

  Gentle now, he cups my knees in his hands. I give a little jump. “What are you doing?” I whisper.

  He doesn’t answer. I turn back for the front door, imagining steps. The rain batting against the windows means that we cannot be seen or heard. What is developing between us is taking place outside of time. Although maybe that’s just a convenient illusion favored by all girls about to fall from grace.

  He pushes my legs apart. Moaning, I resist, but he begins to growl.

  If I were to draw my feelings, they’d be a luminous river cascading around me, washing the evidence of my desires away, because I’m not yet supposed to feel this way.

  A girl cedes herself to a boy because she wants to believe their love will make her a new person. Anything that won’t change me forever does not deserve to be called love. That’s what I decide afterward, trying to remain calm and justify myself.

  Now, however, I have no thoughts, only Tonio’s velvety hair between my fingers, and his slow licking. The whiskers on his cheeks burn the inside of my thighs, marking all of me as his territory. I tighten my legs around him so that neither of us can escape our fate. We will fall together.