The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  “Weismuller is an Aryan name,” he says as we step outside in the warm summer evening, “which just proves what Hitler has been saying about the superiority of our race.”

  Our race? Doesn’t one of us have a Slavic mother?

  Uncharacteristically, Mama swears she has the definitive answer to all my questions about Hitler: he owes his success to too few calories in German bellies. “Five million people practically starving, and twenty million more who are afraid to join them, are going to make the wrong decision every time. Hunger goes to the brain.”

  The certainty in her voice … It occurs to me then that she must have gone without food as a girl. Tender feelings well up inside me. “Did you and your sisters often go hungry?” I ask.

  “Of course not,” she tells me, and her deadly frown makes me feel foolish for caring about the girl she once was.

  While chopping leeks for the potato soup, I gaze down to hide my speculations about what wrong decisions Mama made because of her own hunger. My fear—so bottomless it leaves me in a cold sweat—is that giving birth to a certain badly behaved girl was one of them. Maybe my name is right at the top of her list of errors.

  I remember what Mr Zarco told me about how God appears to each of us differently, and I decide to ask Mama what she thinks Hitler finds most beautiful about the world.

  She looks up from the mop she’s pushing across the floor. “I bet it would be the sound of his own voice. But in that, Sophie,” she adds, fixing me with a disgusted look, “he’s hardly alone.”

  Contempt for her fellow human beings? Worth nurturing, so I ask her to elucidate, but she says that she was just babbling and that I better hurry up with the leeks, which makes me roll my eyes since Hansi is only just starting to peel his second potato.

  Rini is more forthcoming. “Hitler would love pulling off the wings of a live bird,” she declares. Then she flips her hair casually off her forehead and breaks off another square of her chocolate bar. “Want some, my dear?” she asks, not a trace of horror on her face.

  Sometimes that girl scares me.

  The 19th of September is my fifteenth birthday. Tonio gives me a gift wrapped impeccably in blue-and-white-striped paper, which means his mother did it for him. The card says, “For Sophie, who’ll make us all proud.”

  I hug him hard, because his words mean he understands—and supports—my desire to excel. I find a sketchbook inside—fifty sheets of smooth, heavy paper, the best I’ve ever had.

  “It’s perfect!” I beam. “Thank you.” I want to say more but I also don’t want to frighten him off—my leitmotif with men.

  No turning back: that’s what our continuing embrace means. At least to me. Who knows what a hug might signify to a sixteen-year-old boy who can’t wrap a present by himself?

  At supper, after I blow out the candles on my birthday cake, my parents give me a set of twenty-four colored pencils made in Czechoslovakia by Koh-I-Noor. Which means that they and Tonio conspired together to buy complementary gifts. A very encouraging sign!

  On Sunday, the 2nd of October, I learn some more about what The Ring has been planning, and I get my first glimpse of the road we are all about to take into our future. It’s the day after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Mr Zarco, eager to celebrate in style, takes scissors to a swastika flag and hangs the tattered fabric out his window facing Prenzlauer Allee. He does an excellent job. I find out later that other members of his group are shredding flags all over Berlin and its suburbs.

  When Papa and I return from the bakery with fresh bread, we see how Mr Zarco’s handiwork has turned the black, red, and white banner into spaghetti.

  “Good for him!” Papa exults.

  Mama disagrees hotly. “To make a public spectacle … it’s embarrassing.”

  “Why?” I ask, pausing as I munch my toast. I give her an innocent look, though I’m well aware I’m playing havoc with her emotions.

  Papa and I both stare expectantly at her. Even Hansi is gazing at her above his oatmeal, though maybe he’s only trying to communicate telepathically with her that he wants more milk.

  “Because it happens to be beneath him,” she tells me, escaping to the sink to wash her hands.

  “Why is it beneath him?”

  “Sophie!” Mama snaps, turning back to me with vengeful eyes. “I hope for the sake of your future husband that you one day learn some restraint.”

  Papa holds his finger to his lips when I glance at him for support, so I stomp into the sitting room. Mama’s testiness gives me the perfect excuse for slipping out of the apartment, and I ease the front door open and dash down the stairs, across the courtyard, and up the back staircase. I’ll pay for my rashness later, but for now I feel only a wind of joy blowing through me.

  Tonio has been waiting for me and we race to the street. On turning the corner past our building, we spot Mr Zarco’s protest and Tonio’s lips twist disdainfully. “That sort of affront makes you wonder if the Jews even want to be part of the new Germany we’re building,” he says.

  This is the first time Tonio has used we when referring to the Nazis. I’m upset, but overlooking such a major flaw also makes me feel magnanimous.

  “I have a special present for you,” he adds as we head off, “but it’s in the Neue Museum.”

  “What is it?” I ask, thrilled by his surprise.

  “Patience!” he commands, and he grins in that wily way that makes my breathing deepen.

  We make our way across Berlin, which at the moment is a journey into a myth about a boy and a girl walking beside a river of dark glass—the Spree. On Königstraße, across from the main post office, I decide to play hide and seek, and I duck in through the open doorway of an out-of-business restaurant with fake palms painted on the windows. In richer cities like Paris and New York, do the doors to ruined lives stay boarded up? Here, our homeless and unemployed knock padlocks off doors with old shoes and set their bruised suitcases down inside abandoned shops, their mop-haired kids in tow. We have an entire second city built by the wretched inside the bankrupt, and if you are willing to take a risk, you can look down into this underworld any time you like.

  Six filthy mattresses smelling of mildew are spread on the floor, an equal number of old blankets piled neatly on top of one of them. In the far corner spreads a mess of dog-food cans and old newspapers. Behind a smashed-up table and under a copy of the Morgenpost from July, I find a black violin case. Inside is a letter addressed to Heinz from Greta and underlined copies of Erich Maria Remarque’s two novels: All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Back.

  “Take a look at this,” I tell Tonio eagerly, feeling kinship for Heinz. “Maybe he’s performing in Alexanderplatz, playing Beethoven and Brahms for his supper.”

  After only a cursory look, Tonio sneers. “Remarque is an enemy of the people,” he declares.

  I don’t even try to answer that.

  A broken window at the back spreads a sheet of light across the floor and onto a wooden counter where the owners must have set out Sachertorten and other cakes in better times. Tonio doesn’t fight me as I lead him there, and we don’t say another word, because I’ve slipped my hand through his zipper. As I push him back against the counter, his eyes flutter close. I drop to my knees, eager to have his hands pressing down on my shoulders. The silence, dark and fragile, is ours. Even the clutter belongs to us, because it’s proof that our need for each other can resist the vagaries of time and place.

  I love the color of his penis—milky brown, but pinkish near its tip—and the silly way it hangs down when it’s not yet fully hard. His balls contract like magic when I cup them, and he moans as if he’s being flailed. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me how easy it was to subdue a boy? I take the pearl of fluid at his slit onto my fingertip and bring it to the tip of my tongue. A small gesture, but it makes him look at me so hard that I know he’s my prisoner.

  “Am I to be a part of the new Germany?” I ask Tonio.

  A swooning young man—his head arc
hed back and neck straining, his fingers digging into my shoulders—who can still laugh. What more could any girl want?

  “Please, Sophie … You’re breaking me in half.”

  I love the thick, pungent taste of his need for me. And the size of his power.

  After I’ve taken all he’s got for me and he’s shriveled back into a wrinkled acorn, I lick him clean, because I can’t get enough of my new sense of adulthood, and because we both need to see what we might lose if we’re not careful.

  Sex as our detour around the little man who shouts, Tonio’s contempt for Erich Maria Remarque, Georg’s death, and all the other things that might separate us. An unusual escape route, I think at the time.

  Arm in arm, we amble up the long staircase of the New Museum to the second floor and head into the Engraving Rooms, where Tonio stands me—hands again on my shoulders, but this time gentle—in front of a Dürer drawing of his mother.

  “You need to see a real live Dürer if you are going to keep improving,” he says by way of explanation, in an adult voice that’s very impressive.

  He takes a step back so I can look at it alone. This discretion is new to him. Maybe our devotion to each other is tugging him toward manhood.

  According to the indication beside the sketch, it has been 418 years since Mrs Dürer posed for her son, and yet she is still peeking out at the world from beneath her headscarf—captured forever in a moment of wary anticipation. I step closer, into the field of silence and nervous emotion that her face creates in me. Can she be wondering something so unimportant as who is about to come in her front door? Will her husband demand his lunch and a stein of beer? Maybe her son is the one whose footsteps she hears, and he is about to show her his latest canvas. More exciting for her, of course, but at times it must seem that the rivalry between son and father for her attention will never end. I see that tug in different directions in her tightly sealed lips and straining eyes, and maybe it’s why her son has drawn her midway between anger and laughter. My Mother’s Two Roads, he might have called this sketch.

  Strength appears in her gaze, as well—a glint of power, a dominance over herself and her home, and her son; though it’s 1514 and Albrecht is already famous, she is aware she holds his heart in her hands. That’s the womanly power she has, and that I am beginning to acquire over Tonio.

  “I’ll never be that good,” I tell him when he steps beside me.

  “You’ll go as far as you can.”

  He holds my arm and kisses my neck. In his touch, I feel why I’ve made only tentative attempts to draw him. I can’t give form to Tonio yet—he’s still too much a mystery to me, and too essential to my well-being to risk fixing on paper. A poor likeness—or even a good one—might be the magic that breaks our spell. No, I won’t try to draw Tonio, not even after we’re married. And what I don’t sketch will remain sacred.

  We walk back home in the early afternoon. By now, residents from all over the neighborhood have come to see the ruined flag, our first tourist attraction. I begin to believe that having Hitler around might finally put our dull little street on the map!

  Tonio kisses me goodbye below Mr Zarco’s window because he and his parents are visiting his aunt and cousins that afternoon. I soon strike up a conversation with a Jewish family from Dahlem, a neighborhood ten miles across the city. They were on their way to relatives when they spotted the flag. Their burgundy Ford is parked across the street and has drawn a crowd of screeching kids because the family’s bearded old wolfhound, Pfeffer—sitting tall in the driver’s seat—is happily licking the hands of anyone reaching inside the window.

  “Sophele!” Mr Zarco suddenly calls down. “What a nice surprise!”

  I shout up that I want his autograph, which makes him laugh with such pleasure that I’m proud of myself for the rest of that day.

  “A good idea I had, no?” he calls down to me enthusiastically.

  As I shout up my agreement, a skinny, spectacled photographer wearing a nametag saying that he works for Der Stürmer begins to snap away at our neighbor with a tiny black camera. Emboldened by the tourists around me, I step up to him. “Excuse me,” I say, “but I don’t recall Mr Zarco giving you permission to photograph him.”

  He gives me a look of violent disdain and goes back to his work. My pulse races when I think of swatting the camera out of his hands, but I don’t have the courage.

  In such seemingly insignificant ways did I slip away from myself, I now realize. If only Rini had been with me; she’d have grabbed his damn camera and hurled it against a wall, then casually offered me a square of chocolate.

  “Forget the mischief-maker,” Mr Zarco calls down, flapping his hand. “He’s harmless.”

  So it was that he, too, let his guard down.

  As I would later be told by Mr Zarco and the Munchenbergs, sometime after midnight, three men throw bricks through Mr Zarco’s window. Raffi and his parents hear the breaking glass and peer out their kitchen window in time to see them praising each other’s aim. Raffi is sure they’re wearing the brown shirts and flaring trousers of the S.A., the Nazis’ private army.

  Mr Zarco bursts out of sleep, terrified, then rushes to his window and sees the men laughing, then running away. He sits on the end of his bed, puts his head in his hands, and sobs as he hasn’t since his wife’s death, nine years earlier. After sweeping up the broken glass, he throws a towel over any tiny shards that might still be there and lays the bricks one on top of the other on his night table, next to his Yiddish copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He’s shivering from the chilly wind rushing in through the shattered window, but he takes off his nightshirt, wanting the cold to wrap around his naked body, to feel the discomfort of a city—his city—becoming a castle under siege. When he slips back under his eiderdown, he imagines that he is snuggling with his wife and making a home for himself in her. From experience, he knows it is the only way he will be able to sleep.

  He wakes three times during the night, and each time he is pleased that he has provoked a reaction from the Nazis. The brisk autumn wind now seems to confirm that he has acted bravely. Sitting up during his last bout of sleeplessness, he stares at a linden across Prenzlauer Allee as if its leaves and branches contain the answer to where all of Germany’s political turmoil is leading. And he prays, his lips moving over the syllables as quickly as he can, as if to outrace destiny.

  To my solemn disappointment, I sleep through all the excitement. Tonio does too.

  Two policemen come the next morning to interview Raffi Munchenberg and his parents, and Mr Zarco. They take away the bricks as evidence of the crime. They also order our neighbor to remove his flag, alleging that he is creating a public nuisance.

  He cedes to their wishes, but puts it back up on Tuesday morning. An emergency assembly of tenants reluctantly votes that evening to ask Mr Zarco to refrain from any overt displays of political opinions.

  “I’m sorry, but the flag stays,” he tells their delegation.

  That’s when Dr Lessing, who lives in the apartment opposite the old tailor’s, says, “Until Germany resolves the Jewish question once and for all, it’s best for you and your people to make no more trouble than you already have.”

  “Oh, is that right? Rest assured, Dr Lessing, I haven’t even started making trouble yet!” Mr Zarco replies menacingly. “And I would advise you to keep out of my way.” He then invites his guests to leave.

  Papa was a member of the delegation and tells me all this before tucking me in. Now, he’s not so sure that our old neighbor is acting sensibly. “Except in an emergency, individuals ought not to work alone or even in small groups,” he says, speaking in that artificial voice that means he’s quoting Marx or one of his other heroes. “Party leadership should determine the timing and manner of all protests.”

  “Maybe for Mr Zarco this is an emergency,” I reply.

  “It’s my curse to have so quick-witted a daughter,” he says, batting me playfully on the nose like a cat.

  The pol
ice are back on Wednesday. In raised voices, they threaten to arrest Mr Zarco. And history repeats itself; he takes in his flag only to put it back out at sunrise.

  Later that morning, as he walks to his small factory on Dragonerstraße, someone bumps into him from behind. Annoyed, the tailor turns around, and a man—slender, wearing a stylish woolen coat—whacks him in the gut with a plank of wood, breaking two ribs.

  Mr Zarco falls to his knees, gasping. A second thug—overweight, with a double-chin and mustache—hisses that he is a parasite. He grabs our old neighbor’s hair and tugs him facedown onto the sidewalk, so hard that his chin meets the pavement with a thud. For a time, Mr Zarco is unsure as to where he is. The last thing he recalls is the word Jew whispered in his ear as if it were composed of heavy sand. Is he awake or dreaming?

  At the Augusta Hospital, doctors in the emergency room bandage Mr Zarco’s broken ribs. A nurse stitches up the deep gash on his chin. Feeling the tug of the string, he decides it’s delightful being helpless in a woman’s hands again.

  The next afternoon, while Mr Zarco is snoozing, a cleaning woman lifts his tweed coat off the chair it has been resting on, and page two of the current issue of Der Stürmer tumbles out of the pocket. It’s folded in four, and when she opens it up, she discovers a photograph of him has been printed near the bottom. She puts it on his night table for safekeeping. Stirring from the sound of her footsteps a few moments later, Mr Zarco reaches for his water glass, and his hand brushes against the newsprint. Sitting up, he sees himself leaning out his window next to the ruined swastika and reads the caption: A Jewish parasite on Prenzlauer Allee in Berlin desecrates our glorious flag.

  The thugs must have identified him from this clipping and stuffed it in his pocket to be certain he understood that they were avenging his affront. But at least a dozen flags were shredded all over the city, so why did Der Stürmer print only Mr Zarco’s picture?