The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  The only thing I whisper the whole time he’s at me is, “God help me,” because I know that goodness will have to change its meaning if I am ever to explain this to my parents. I’m a girl without a signpost, groping ahead toward herself. Later, I will recall the cheetah Tonio petted and what he told me: “If I weren’t scared, then having my face licked by him wouldn’t have been so exciting.”

  I am part of him now, I think afterward, just as Mrs Hessel is turning the key in the door.

  “Warmer now?” she asks, and she feels Tonio’s brow. “You’re burning up!” she shouts. “I’m fine,” he says.

  She feels my forehead, too. “You poor children, you both have fevers.”

  “The hot chocolate … ?” Tonio reminds her.

  “Linden tea would be better. With a little honey and pepper. And a thimbleful of vodka.” A recipe from Russia that’s been curing Tonio’s ancestors for centuries.

  “Whatever you say, Mama,” Tonio agrees, since vodka is an adult treat.

  Concealed under our covering, his hardness grows in my hand, and while his mother is busy in the kitchen the next of us to duck below the eiderdown is me.

  Chapter Four

  The following week I go again to the pub on Landsberger Straße to hunt through Der Stürmer and find several more corresponding names. Disturbing. But maybe Raffi accepted money from Nazis only so he could undermine their work. He wouldn’t be capable of doing anything terrible, and I could never believe he was involved in a murder.

  I glimpse Vera, Rolf, and Heidi only once more that year, on the evening of the 19th of April, though I spot Mr Zarco coming and going with some regularity, of course. I’m making Hansi pose as a reader at the kitchen table—his hands under his chin and eyes gazing purposefully down at my copy of The Magic Mountain—when a harsh and familiar voice coming from outside makes me bolt upright. I rush to the window and find Vera in the courtyard, her hands on her hips, irritated about something. Heidi and Rolf come through the door to the front building a few moments later. He’s chomping on a cigar and Heidi, blue lace at the collar of a pretty white dress, is carrying a pink cake box. Vera calls them forward, her hands in a frenzied whirl, and Rolf gives Heidi a peck on the cheek as if to say, Bear with her …

  My first urge is to call out. My second is to lean back out of sight, which is what I do. Our window is open, so I can hear them clearly.

  “Stop that!” Vera snaps at her friends. “It’s enough that you two walk like tree stumps, you don’t have to compound the problem with unnecessary affection.”

  “Define unnecessary,” Rolf replies, laughing.

  “All affection between married couples. It’s an affront to all we hold dear in Germany.”

  “Vera, you make my bones ache!” he tells her, but Heidi, gently, suggests that Vera go on up the stairs and they will catch up.

  Impatient with everyone and everything. The modus operandi of a goddess who spent years on view to gaping circus-goers.

  Heidi and Rolf penguin-walk behind her into the rear building.

  “What is it?” Hansi asks, still posing perfectly. An amazing child. He deserves a medal from the Artists Guild.

  “And that’s that,” I whisper with resentful finality, sensing I’ll never get to know such special people. I sit back down and grab my pencil.

  “That’s what?” my brother asks.

  I aim the pencil point at him threateningly. If he were normal, this is where he’d scream at me to stop being such a bully or call my mother for help. But Hansi is who he is; he simply rests his head on the table and vanishes into his cloud of thoughts.

  Papa enters the kitchen a short time later and, sensing something is wrong, says, “Show me your drawing, Häschen.”

  A kind man, but sweetness in parents can be irritating—like too soft a pillow. I stifle my urge to scream and hand him my sketchbook. Papa studies my previous drawing—Hansi in profile, his tongue poking between his lips and eyes focused on a distant surprise. “No doubt about it—you’ve got talent,” he says proudly.

  “It’s all wrong,” I say, because some dark part of me wants to spoil our easy intimacy.

  “It’s not—I’d know that handsome boy anywhere.” He rests a gentle hand atop Hansi’s head, as he does when he knows his son is lost to us. We both do that a lot. Returning my sketchbook to me, Papa says, “You’re more of an artist than you know.”

  “Thanks,” I reply, and it is a lovely thing to say, but I’m really thinking, Why are my family and Tonio not enough for me?

  Vera, Heidi, and Rolf must have been invited to Mr Zarco’s for Passover dinner. If I’d kept the curtains open, I’d probably have spotted K-H and Marianne, too.

  That night before bed, Papa discovers that an envelope with my name on it has been pushed under the door. Alone in the room I share with Hansi, I rip it open and find a photo of a woman’s swollen belly—as smooth and bright as marble in the moonlight—and a neatly printed note: “Our child and me—first portrait. World premiere four months away! Love, Marianne and K-H.”

  Raffi comes home in mid-May, his skin as dark as cinnamon and his black hair falling down to his shoulders, the picture of a Biblical acolyte. We talk in our courtyard, and I try to be interested in his descriptions of Egyptian life 3,300 years ago, but the Nazi names we don’t mention lie like cadavers between us. A week later, unable to bear the chill I feel whenever I pass his apartment, I knock on his door one evening after supper. His parents are out, and he and I sit in his room, me on his neatly made bed, him at his desk chair, which he has turned around so he can lean forward over the cane-work back.

  “I can’t tell you much because other people would be in danger,” he says even before I have a chance to explain why I’ve come. “But what I told you was the truth—it was a shopping list.”

  “Have you been getting money from the Nazis on your list to support your fieldwork?”

  He laughs in a single burst. “That’s a good one!”

  “Then why the British money? Didn’t you intend to use it in Egypt?”

  “Soph, you’ve got far too vivid an imagination for your own good.” In a low voice, he tells me, “I was bribing Nazi politicians. And others with similar ideas. They prefer British pounds because it’s a more solid currency than the mark. Every time I made a bribe, I wrote down a name and a date.”

  So I was partially right. “Bribing them why?” I question.

  “To get their support on certain issues. To ease up on their hateful rhetoric.”

  For the first time in weeks, I feel as if the ground is solid beneath me. “And where did you get the money?”

  “Isaac told me you know now about The Ring. The members pay dues according to how much they can afford. I used some of our … our funds to purchase pounds on the black market.”

  Relief sweeps through me. “Thank God. I thought …” I shake my head at my silliness.

  “You thought I’d switched teams, didn’t you?” Only now realizing that I probably copied down his list, he jumps up. “You took down my hieroglyphics and … and then had them translated somehow,” he says, horrified.

  “Yes, Dr Gross, at the …”

  “So Dr Gross knows what you found out?”

  “No, I never mentioned your name. And he has no idea what links all the names on the list. Or what the numbers mean. He thinks they’re part of a game.” I explain what I told Dr Gross.

  “We can’t be sure he’s forgotten what he saw.”

  Raffi looks off into his thoughts. I see fear in the clenching of his jaw.

  “I did something really dumb, didn’t I?” I observe.

  He smiles generously. “No, it’s going to be all right. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m sorry, but I was really worried about you.”

  “Forget about it.” He sits with me and tells me to turn so he can braid my hair—a vestige of his babysitting duties.

  I can see from his face that he’s pondering how to rectify the situation. “Raffi,
I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Everything is okay. In any case, I’m out of the bribery business. So none of this matters anymore.”

  “Can you tell me who was chasing you that day Tonio and I helped you?”

  “Soph, I can’t make braids if you keep turning around! It was someone who wanted to learn who I’d been bribing.”

  I love the pull and tug of his hands. “But what if the police interrogate you? Or Nazi thugs?”

  “All I could tell them would be old news at this point,” he assures me, his voice now secure. “The only people who could get in trouble besides me would be the Nazis themselves. Because I would never reveal the names of the people in The Ring.”

  Bravado or the truth?

  “Did Georg Hirsch plan the bribery campaign? I mean, he was head of The Ring, wasn’t he? Was that why he was killed?”

  Raffi leans past my shoulder and looks at me darkly. “I told you these were serious, adult matters.”

  “Does Mr Zarco know why Georg was killed?”

  He grips both my shoulders and says threateningly, “Soph, either you shush or we won’t be able to be friends anymore.”

  Georg was killed by a Nazi assassin because he threatened to go public with the names of National Socialists being bribed by The Ring. After all, accepting hush money from a group filled with Jews would discredit them completely—and look very bad for the party in general. That’s what I soon conclude, but I don’t share my thoughts with anyone, not even Rini. I tell her that Raffi’s list consisted of the names of Nazis about whom he’d written letters to the Chancellor, denouncing their anti-Semitic beliefs. She’s disappointed, since it’s hardly a discovery worthy of the sleuthing we’ve done, but it’s safer for Raffi this way. And maybe for Rini, too.

  Over that spring and summer, Mr Zarco and I are friendly whenever we bump into each other, but I can tell from the deliberateness in his speech and hand gestures that he’s waiting for me to make the first move to renew our friendship. “Reserved” is how Mama describes him. “Secretly exuberant” seems more accurate, though Papa says that makes no sense. He has the appreciation for poetry of a shoehorn.

  Rini suggests that the stunning Nazi victory in the July elections may be responsible for Mr Zarco’s reticence. After all, I’m a Christian and he’s a Jew, and Hitler now presides over what has become the most powerful party in Germany, with 230 seats in the Reichstag. And it’s a fact that everyone I know is more tense than usual. Even Papa, who explodes at me for my faulty dishwashing one warm August evening, sending me to my room in tears. Mama, sitting at the foot of my bed, confides that the election results have left him plagued by insomnia. So maybe sleeplessness is a curse I inherited from him.

  Seeing Hitler’s speeches in newsreels, we grow familiar with his spasmodic, epileptic rants, as well as his Viennese suburban accent and vocabulary.

  “The personality of a village rat-catcher,” Papa tells me. “Mark my words, he’ll be sent back to his garret in Bavaria in less than a year.”

  Like most Berliners, Papa pronounces Bayern, Bavaria, as if it’s a land of toothless troglodytes. That must hurt Mama, who loves her homeland as if it’s a magic kingdom in a fairy tale, but I’m too young—and maybe too resentful of her—to direct any words of sympathy her way.

  Papa’s opinion of Hitler is the popular consensus, but my art teacher, Frau Mittelmann, disagrees. She’s the person who first interested me in sketching. No one can draw a daisy, carob pod, or stuffed walrus head like her, except maybe Albrecht Dürer, whose work she always shows us as inspiration. Frau Mittelmann has the pointy face of a fox, with a range of smiles from devilish to beatific that would be the envy of any actress, and she always darts around class as though she has just drunk an entire pot of coffee. She has short brown hair that she combs straight back like a man—very stylish, and she wears antique clothing in bright colors, like one of the Gypsy dancers I once saw on the KuDamm. To begin a drawing session, she always reads a quote from a famous painter. The one that makes me tingle is from Cézanne: “Fruits like having their portrait painted. They seem to sit and ask your forgiveness for fading. Their thoughts are given off with their perfumes. They come with all their scents, they speak of the fields they have left behind, the rain which has nourished them, the daybreaks they have seen.”

  When I mention Papa’s opinion of Hitler before class one day, Frau Mittelmann smooths down the front of her floral-print smock with tense hands. “Your father should never forget that the Pied Piper was a rat-catcher, too,” she says menacingly. A few minutes later, while we’re sketching two proud yellow apples and the sadly withered pomegranate that doubles as her paperweight, she kneels down beside my desk. “Hitler has vowed to free us from our shame over our defeat in the Great War,” she whispers. “But we’ll have to give him our children in exchange.” Then she stands up, her knobby knees creaking, and says with uncharacteristic coarseness, “I must be mad to discuss these things with you. Get back to your drawing, Sophie.”

  Is she afraid that I will report her to Dr Hildebrandt, the school principal? We’ve all heard the rumors that he attended a Nazi rally in Nuremberg last year.

  Over lunch that day, I complain about Frau Mittelmann’s brusqueness to Rini.

  “You just don’t understand, Soficka,” she tells me. “You can’t imagine the pressure we Jews are under.”

  Rini often calls me Soficka, the cka suffix borrowed from my horrid middle name, Ludowicka.

  “So explain it to me,” I say, digging my fork into my boiled potatoes.

  “That would be pointless.” She lands with all her certainty on her last word, and I feel the thud deep in my chest. “You are either a Jew or you aren’t, and all the goodwill in the world can’t change that.”

  She sounds as if she’s glad that a Semitic wall has grown up between us, which makes me so mad I could clock her right over the head with my history book, but Rini is in one of her squinty-eyed black moods, so I ask her instead why she thinks Hitler has had such success of late.

  “Once you pass the outskirts of Berlin, my dear, you are back in the Middle Ages as far as the Jews are concerned,” she tells me, saying my dear in English because it’s her latest affectation. “Three steps past Neuenhagen Süd, our country becomes an anti-Semitic wasteland. The people out there”—Rini tosses away a dismissive wave in the general direction of Silesia—“still think we have tails and horns, and that we boil Christian children like you and Hansi in cauldrons for our Passover dinner.”

  “I don’t think I’ve enough meat on me even as an appetizer,” I say, making Rini laugh, “and Hansi would taste really bland, like over-boiled rice.”

  Our German teacher, Dr Fabig, gathers Rini, me, and a handful of other students around him a few days later, having overheard our political conversations. He speaks in a hushed voice while stuffing papers in his briefcase—dark leather, with a brass handle—then stands it on his desk. He takes off his wire-rim glasses, which he does only when he’s upset. “The Volk despise our great writers. They think Goethe is far too effeminate. And Schiller, my God”—here, Dr Fabig shakes his head morosely—“my poor dear Schiller puts them in a catatonic state. And now that the Jews are considered un-German, I’m afraid Heine is done for.” He stands up and grabs the handle of his briefcase, making ready to go. “As for Rilke, they could never take the time away from counting their spare change or milking their cows to understand what he writes. They cheer for Hitler because he despises our great men. He prefers reading a weapons catalogue to Novalis. It’s as simple as that.”

  Frau Koslowski, from the neighborhood grocery store, says that posters of Hitler and the Nazi Party are everywhere because we have no icons in our churches. The way her milky eyes focus on me, as if I’m to blame, makes me take a step back. “If you Germans had saints around you, listening to your every heartbeat, then you would not need a leader to speak to you of the glories of this world.”

  Raffi tells me in a scornful voice, “A gangster
is what the rabble want—a man who will barge into the homes of his enemies with both hands swinging and a grenade in his pocket, and send all the crystal crashing to the ground, then blow up the evidence behind him.”

  Even Hansi has an opinion about Hitler, which he mostly expresses by covering his ears every time our Chancellor rants on the radio. “He shouts too much!” my brother observes.

  So it is that we begin referring to Hitler as the little man who shouts.

  “He’s the only politician with vision,” Tonio’s father, Dr Hessel, tells me.

  I’m in his sitting room, waiting for Tonio to dress, studying the framed picture of the Nazi leader that’s joined the photograph of Czar Peter on the wall behind the couch. Hitler is giving his stiff-armed salute to a cheering crowd.

  “He sees what we could become if we aspire to greatness—to heaven on earth,” Dr Hessel continues, speaking to an audience that isn’t there, like a man who has confused Wagner’s operas for real life.

  Tonio himself is convinced you have to shut your eyes to understand the man’s charisma. “Sophie, I admit that Hitler is physically repulsive,” he says, “so don’t look at him. Then you’ll hear that his passion is real—more real than anything you’ve ever heard before.”

  I close my eyes tight while we’re watching a newsreel of a rally in Munich, but all I can hear is his painful, frantic urgency and provincial pronunciation. A passionate rat-catcher that could only ever appeal to the willfully blind. That’s what I think.

  And who would lose to Tarzan in any battle of wits, I add to my description a few minutes after the newsreel ends, because Tonio has dragged me to see Tarzan the Ape Man, and as soon as we’re transported to that wondrous black-and-white Hollywood jungle it becomes clear to me—and likely every woman and girl in the Ufa-Palast Theater—that a bare-chested Johnny Weissmuller is someone we’d prefer to vote for. But Tonio and I have kissed in that inhabited darkness—floating between the screen and our seats, between California and Berlin—and I don’t want to upset him. Though it turns out he has an answer all ready for me …