“Stop being such an alter kacker!” I tell him.
Laughing freely, he sits up straight and combs his hair back with his hands. And there it is again: the youthful radiance in his eyes that I want to try to draw.
The next day after school, Mama sits me down in the kitchen as if I’m in big trouble.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I rush to assure her. “I came straight home.”
“I don’t want you to visit Mr Zarco,” she says.
“Is he back from the hospital?”
“Yes, but you’re not to go near him. He’s not right in the head.” She pokes her forefinger into her forehead as if I’m in need of visual clues like Hansi.
“No, probably not,” I agree. “I’ll stay away from him, I promise.”
Lying is so neat and clean. I love it.
I slip away to Mr Zarco’s apartment early the next morning, on my way to school. He comes to his door in his flannel pajamas, his feet bare. He’s carrying his coffee in an olive green cup that’s badly chipped at its rim. His Mesopotamian crockery as he calls it.
“Sophele!” He hugs me gingerly, since his ribs are sore. It’s reassuring to be folded inside the sleep-scents of his body and the faint odor of tobacco. It’s like laying my head back on my father’s pillow while he dresses.
“Thank you for watering my pelargoniums,” he says with a big, welcoming smile.
“My pleasure.”
“Do you have a few minutes?”
“Yeah, but then I have to go to school.”
“So you’ve started going again!” he says in an astonished voice, as if my evil knows no bounds.
“I go when I’m in the mood,” I reply, playing along.
We sit in his kitchen. His round table is covered with a stained pink tablecloth and several big leather-bound volumes, one of them open to a page of Hebrew writing held down with another Mesopotamian cup.
“What’s that book about?” I ask.
“God’s secrets. Do you drink coffee yet?”
“Of course.” Another untruth, but lying has become my Promised Land. Sophie Discovers the Joys of Subterfuge would be my preferred subtitle for this section of my film.
“Milk?” he asks as he pours me a cup.
“Yes, please. What secrets does God have?”
He hands me the bottle of milk, then jumps up. “A great many. Be back in a moment.”
As I hear books being moved, I sip my coffee, which tastes as bitter as aspirin. I’m wondering whether adults have damaged taste buds when a loud thud makes me gasp.
Mr Zarco comes back into the kitchen with a dusty black portfolio, his face a bit red. “Sit, sit … Sorry about the racket.”
Inside are watercolors. He lifts the first two away—portraits of a boy—and moves them carefully to the side of the table. “This is the one I wanted!” he exults, lifting up the third.
“Are those you?” I ask, pointing to the ones he’s put aside.
“Yes, back in Biblical times.” He hands me one of a tiny boy with red ears and spiky black hair, his eyes like silver marbles. He’s hunched over a sewing machine, wary, his lips pressed together. An earnest, hardworking elf, but one who discovered some truths about the world too young.
“My mother painted me in my father’s workshop. I was ten or eleven.”
“You look small for your age.”
“I shot up when I was thirteen. Mama started calling me Grashupfer.” Grasshopper.
“Were you happy working for your father?”
“Yes, I was earning my keep. That was very important.”
“You didn’t like school?”
“I loved school, but the family … Enough of ancient times, this is the one I wanted you to see.”
A man who never complains about sacrifices. A truth about him I ought to write down in my diary.
He places the watercolor before me: a hushed village of stone houses nestled in a valley of golden fields and two strange windmill figures in the distance. The sky is washed pink and violet, with a fire-colored sun at the center, about to melt over a blanket of hazy hills. The sun has tender, almond-shaped eyes, as if it is sad to slip below the rim of the horizon.
“My mother felt watched at her grandparents’ house—protected,” Mr Zarco explains.
“Even at night?”
“Sophele, even in the coldest night of winter, even in a blizzard, we know the sun still exists. We know it’s curling around the earth to come back to us.”
“You think God is like that, too, don’t you?” He grins appreciatively, so I add, “And that a blizzard is coming.”
The next morning, I drop in on Mr Zarco again. His hair is mussed and he hasn’t shaved. “The Lord receded into Himself so that there would be space for our world to come into being,” he says urgently, then tugs me inside.
I write down that opening line on my palm a little while later, so I can remember it word for word. “What exactly does that mean?” I ask at the time.
“I wanted to tell you that the creative act requires withdrawal. Not just for God, but for us as well. And when we go inside ourselves, a poem might become a watercolor, or a feeling of dread might change into a frightening melody …” He sees I’m puzzled and claps his hands together as if to break a spell. “Sorry,” he says. “I tend to get lost sometimes. How about some coffee?” His eyes open wide, as though to entice me. I realize there must be times when he dives down to the bottom of himself and loses all view of the real world.
“Just half a cup,” I reply. To make believe I’m an adult, I’ll suffer the taste.
I use my thumbnail to pry free some crust on his pink tablecloth while he rinses out a cup for me. Dishes are stacked in the sink.
“Are you feeling all right?” I ask him.
“Why? Do I look that bad?”
“No, it’s just … When does your cleaning lady come?”
“Every Sunday.” Looking at me over his shoulder, he adds, “Though sometimes there’s hardly a thing for her to do, poor woman.”
I raise my eyebrows skeptically.
“That was a joke!” he hollers. Dropping down on his chair, he pours us coffee, then stares at me over the rim of his cup, smiling, his eyes moist.
“Something special has happened, hasn’t it?” I ask.
“I’m just happy. You see, I’ve been up all night praying. And now you’re here. Sitting before me—an angel who has called me back from the Seventh Gate.”
“What’s the Seventh Gate?”
“Forget my meshugene talk. I get a bit perdido, lost, when I pray all night.”
He rushes away to his sitting room and comes back with a large, slender volume. “Have you heard of Giotto di Bondone?” he asks. “He was a Florentine painter who lived in the fourteenth century.” Not waiting for my answer, he adds, These are reproductions of his frescoes in Florence and Assisi.” He hands the book to me but stills my hand when I open the cover. “No, don’t look at them now, Sophele. Keep this book as long as you want. Inside, you’ll find a little gift.”
“A gift? What for?”
“Do I need a reason to give a friend a present? All I ask in return is that you show me your drawings from time to time. I’m especially eager to see the one of me.”
“It’s not finished yet.”
“No rush. When it’s ready …”
We talk of my schoolwork for a while and then my parents. I admit for the first time to any adult that Mama drives me crazy. He doesn’t try to give me advice, which is a relief.
“Did you get along with your son?” I ask him.
“Joshua?” He puts his pipe down. “Yes, though we had a bad quarrel when he wanted to go to war. And I was stupid enough to let him go. He died in Belgium. We never got his body back. He’s still there.”
“I’m sorry. Have you ever been to Belgium to see where … ?”
“No, I won’t go,” he interrupts. He tries to smile, and it’s his effort that cuts through my spirit and leaves a tr
ace of blood behind. “My wife went. So that she could forgive him.”
“Forgive him?”
“For dying. When a child is killed in a war, and you know he shouldn’t have gone, the anger … it’s like having a deep, cold ocean inside you. I turned to stone for seven years—just so I could live without feeling those depths … those frigid depths pulling me down. My wife did too. Two granite people.”
“But you came back to yourself.”
“More or less. You’re never the same. One day, you realize you’re a person again, and you can see above the surface of the ocean where your son has died, and you swim to shore. You stand on land. You don’t forget the ocean. But you walk on. Does that make any sense?”
“Yes.” We sit in silence. He props his chin on his hands and stares off into his thoughts.
“Mr Zarco, my mother doesn’t think it’s a good idea for me to come here.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” he says.
“But if I listened to her I’d never do anything!” I exclaim.
“Sophele, I won’t forbid you from talking with me, but I think you should speak to your mother honestly about what you want.”
“I will,” I say, but I know I won’t.
Outside his closed doorway, I sit on the stairs and discover he’s slipped his mother’s watercolor of a watchful sun and sleeping village under the cover of his book on Giotto. And on the back, he has written in pencil, “For Sophele, who knocked on my door and called me back home from a dangerous place … and just in time!”
That evening, I study the reproductions of Giotto’s frescoes in my bedroom alone, unwilling to show the book to my parents or even Hansi till I’ve made it all mine. Given my conversation about God with Mr Zarco, the image that catches my eye is of St Francis receiving the stigmata from Jesus, who is depicted as having wings. Four of them, in fact. At least that’s what I think until I realize that Giotto has painted Jesus at two different moments in time, one pair of wings superimposed over the other. It never occurred to me that an artist could do that.
A few days later, I slip away again to Mr Zarco’s apartment before school. When I tell him what I’ve discovered about Jesus in the fresco, he replies merrily, “Yes, in his own way, Signore Giotto was also a big fan of moving pictures!”
I then hand him the portrait I’ve done of him. His nose and mouth aren’t quite right, but I’ve captured the depth in his eyes and their radiance. The hollow curves of his cheeks are also good.
He studies the sketch for a long time, squinting through his pipe smoke. “My God, do I really look so ancient?” he asks worriedly. Seeing the quandary he’s put me in, he adds, “You don’t have to answer that,” then looks back at the drawing. “Excellent!” he finally declares. “Can I keep it?” he questions, grimacing like a little boy who’s asked for something too expensive, and when I agree he kisses me on both cheeks. We sit at his kitchen table and he pours me coffee with the expression of a pleased host. “How long have you been doing sketches?” he asks.
“Ever since I was ten or eleven.”
“Never landscapes or still lifes?”
“Only in class. I prefer faces. I find out about other people when I draw them.”
“So what did you find out about me?” he asks eagerly.
“I don’t know. Maybe that you’re not as playful as you like people to think.” Who would have ever thought I could talk like this to an adult?
“No, maybe not.” He looks beyond me, seeing recollections of his son, perhaps.
Regret about my speaking so freely inhabits the silence between us. At length, I say, “I hope I didn’t offend you.”
“No, not at all.” He smiles reassuringly at me.
“Mr Zarco, I’d … I’d like you to tell me more about God,” I say.
He pokes his tongue out with surprise. “Where’d that request come from?”
“No one talks to me about certain things that I think about. I’ve wanted to ask you ever since you told me that you thought the Lord was an ibis.”
“Listen, Sophele, all you really need to know for now is that God is in every line you make. And even some of the lines you don’t make.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A good artist often alludes to what can’t be said, to what exists only in silence.”
I think of my vow never to draw Tonio. Maybe I’m alluding to him in every portrait I make—to my hope that a boy and a girl can love each other without reserve.
“Mr Zarco, is it true the Jews never make images of God?” I ask.
“Call me Isaac, please. We’re permitted to depict God’s hands, but never his face.” He searches for the right words. “Our religion forbids the making of idols. In part, because the true God can never be known. We call this unknowable God Ein Sof. All we can see of Him are His emanations in our world, his attributes, which our artists have occasionally symbolized as his hands.” Mr Zarco holds his coffee cup an inch over the table, casting a shadow below. “Imagine that you are as tiny as an ant and living in the tablecloth, right under my cup, and that you can’t see anything outside the fabric. What would you think has just happened?”
“That a circle of darkness had descended over me.”
“Exactly. The cup itself would be beyond your vision, so you would make the best interpretation you could. And any drawing you made of the circle of darkness would be accurate in terms of your own perceptions, but it would really be just a representation of the cup’s capacity to make a shadow. Now, Sophele,” he says, his enthusiasm making him point the stem of his pipe at me, “what’s interesting is that people with great imagination might be able to envisage such an object, and the world it comes from, just from the size and shape of the darkness that has descended over them. They might even be able to deduce the presence of my hand holding the cup, from the shadow that it, too, is making. Exploring hidden worlds is one of the great joys of being an artist.”
“I think I’m confused,” I tell him.
He grins as if that’s been part of his purpose. “All I mean is that you can journey as far as you want and make reference to the mysterious things you see along the way—to what isn’t easily perceived in a face, for instance.” He looks at my drawing of him as if it puzzles him. “Sophele, can I ask you to do something for me?”
“Anything,” I reply, hoping to make up further for my betrayal of him and Vera.
“When you’re sketching, try to imagine that the face in front of you is like the shadow of my cup.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The human face may have quite a different shape and texture in another, higher world. Even another purpose. Just keep that possibility in the back of your head when you draw a portrait. Because I’d like to know more about the human form and what it means. You can be a kind of sentinel for me. My emissary in the territory of portraiture. And now, meine Liebe,” he says, drawing in deeply on his pipe, “I’ve said way too many foolish things and kept you long enough.”
“Wait, what else is in this higher world—besides faces, I mean?”
“Everything we can imagine and a great many things we can’t.” He turns his cup over and some drops of coffee drip to the cloth, creating a spreading stain. “The higher world is filled with receptacles … with vessels containing things that spill over into our world. They hold all the hidden life that belongs to God—to God and to all of us.”
“Does the Seventh Gate have to do with this?” I ask.
He raises his eyebrows questioningly.
“You said I called you back from the Seventh Gate,” I explain.
He smiles at me, impressed by my memory, then stands up. “You, young lady, have to get to school. And I need a lot of sleep if I’m going to talk about such matters.”
The next day, Wednesday, there’s no answer to my knock on Mr Zarco’s door. After school, my mother hands me a sealed letter addressed to me.
“You’re getting a lot of private correspondence these days,”
she tells me suspiciously.
Inside my bedroom, I rip open the envelope and find a key and a note from Mr Zarco: Sophele, I have to be away for three days. The pelargoniums have asked for your help. They want only you. I thank you on their behalf. Love, Isaac.
Four days and two waterings later, Mr Zarco bicycles right past me on Prenzlauer Allee. This is during the strike of transportation workers that has halted all buses and trams, as well as the underground. His bicycle is old and rusty, and he is way too tall for it. Borrowed. Or rescued from a dump.
I call out, which makes him swerve into the curb and almost fall.
“Sophele!”
I run to him and we kiss cheeks. “Sorry for making you crash,” I say.
“It’s my fault. I haven’t ridden a bicycle since the fifteenth century. It was a crazy idea.”
“When did you get home?”
“Late last night. Thank you for watering the pelargoniums.”
“Where were you?”
“It’s better you don’t know.” Seeing that doesn’t satisfy me, he adds, “At a friend’s in Potsdam. Planning things.”
“What things?”
“Strategies for … for shredding more of Nazi ideology, so to speak,” he replies.
“Where are you going now?”
“To work. Listen, this transportation strike has made me late. I have to get to my factory.”
“On a Sunday?”
“I’ve a lot of paperwork to catch up on. Come by tomorrow morning if you can.”
I agree to that, then watch him go on his wobbling way.
That afternoon, Rini and I accompany my father to a march of striking workers and their supporters. Mama has forced me to leave behind my red Communist Party scarf and made Papa swear to remain on the sidelines; now that German politics have changed, my mother fears that he’ll lose his job if he remains politically active.
It’s Sunday the 6th of November, and today the Communists are marching side by side with the Nazis, making a show of the first alliance they’ve ever formed. Papa told me the night before that we had to trust the Communist Party leadership’s decision to form a united front with Hitler during the strike—proof that an atheist can still be a man of faith.
The Seventh Gate Page 12
