The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  “Did you ever meet any of his work friends?”

  “I don’t think so, but I met his boss once—Joseph Brenner.”

  “Nice?”

  “He seemed so. We didn’t talk long.”

  The waiter—a double-chinned gargoyle with his greasy hair combed straight back—glares at us when he takes our order for tea and cake, and he tells Marianne gruffly that she ought to go to the women’s room to feed her baby.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she whispers as soon as he’s gone.

  “But Werner is still hungry. And our order …”

  She’s trying unsuccessfully to button her blouse with one hand and doesn’t notice me speaking. The moment I take Werner from her he starts to cry again, and as we sneak out, I realize that he’ll never hear his own sobbing. The sound enters a realm beyond his senses, and yet that doesn’t silence him. So he must know that making noises when he is hungry is useful, that a world exists where his voice can be perceived, because there are beings who do hear him—who live in this realm he cannot detect and who will come to his aid.

  And I am one of those beings. I live with one foot in his world and the other in a place he’ll never know. What higher worlds exist that none of us can detect with our usual senses? And who makes their home there?

  “I know a place we can go,” Marianne says, and we rush to Kaiserstraße. Inside the squat, brick synagogue where we find refuge, a large chandelier hangs from a cupola patterned in gold and blue, like a crown in a dome of sky. A tiny man in a hat, wearing a white shawl with dangling fringes at its corners, comes shuffling up to us.

  “I need a place to feed my baby, rabbi,” Marianne tells him. “Is it all right?”

  “Cantor,” he corrects her, smiling. “Yes, come with me. Sit in the front where it’s warmer.”

  As Werner begins to suckle, he keeps one hand over his right eye, as if he enjoys peeking, the other at Marianne’s breast—just to be sure that heaven is not going anywhere.

  “My husband, Karl-Heinz Rosenman, went to this synagogue when he was a boy,” Marianne tells the cantor. “He lived just around the corner.”

  “I remember him well, though he was never much of a schulgoer. Tell him Cantor Kretschmer sends his best regards.” He touches his fingertip delicately to Werner’s nose and speaks in baby talk, then, smiling again, says, “I’ll give you and your sister some privacy now.”

  Sister? So it is that Marianne, Werner, and I become forever linked.

  The stocky officer with a working-class Berlin accent who’s sitting at the reception desk at Police Headquarters informs us that he can’t take a statement from Marianne because her husband has been missing only for twelve hours. After she pleads with him, however, he agrees to writes down K-H’s name in case he hears anything. He leers at her as we leave and even winks when we turn around by the door. If he were any more of a cartoon character, his tongue would be hanging out.

  Marianne gets no news about K-H that afternoon or evening. Insomnia for most of those who know him and the start of my own long battle to the death against sleeplessness.

  Mr Mannheim’s melodies cease to inhabit the darkness near midnight, so I slip into the kitchen to make some chamomile tea. Mama hears me stirring, and though I assure her I’m fine, she sits behind me and brushes my hair. The motion of her hands—quick and sure—is the feel of my childhood, and the way she smells faintly of rose perfume brings me back to when we’d go for picnics along the Spree. She’s caressing me into the girl I used to be.

  “You’re getting more lovely every day,” she tells me, which would be gratifying to hear but I know every pitch in my mother’s voice and can tell she’ll soon be asking me serious questions—probably about Tonio—and that this is a compliment meant to loosen my tongue. I also sense that lovely is code for adult, and that she’s not entirely pleased about my maturity.

  When she’s done brushing, she grips my shoulders to make sure I don’t jump up and asks me about my schoolwork. I tell her my studies are going wonderfully. A lie, but one that puts me ahead in our little tennis match, fifteen-love. To her further questions, I assure her that Rini and Frau Mittelmann are in good form. Forty-love, as far as I’m concerned.

  As I stand up to escape back to bed—game, set, and match—she takes my arm. “Do you want to talk about Tonio?” she asks.

  “He’s fine, Mama,” I say, though we both know that she’s not asking how he is.

  “Häschen,” she says, caressing my cheek, “why can’t you sleep?”

  “It’s Papa,” I say, thinking that’s a safe lie, but as I turn to her, the shock in her face—fear drawing back her pretty lips—opens an ache in my gut. It’s a reminder, too, of how alike we are.

  “Hitler says that Communists are traitors and Russian agents, and they will die at the end of Nazi knives,” I tell her in a rush, and before I can stop there are tears at my eyes—for K-H, as well as Papa.

  She kneels next to me and puts her hand gently over my mouth. “Listen, Sophie,” she says in a determined voice, “you let me and your father worry about Herr Hitler. Can you do that—can you let me worry for you?”

  Evidence of hidden strength in her? I nod my agreement.

  “I’m taking my hand away,” she says, “and with it I’m taking all your cares.”

  Trapping my jumble of worries in her fist, including, I hope, my nagging indecision about whether I should give myself to Tonio, she tosses them behind her back, then presses her lips to my brow. “Just give Mama and Papa some time to work things out.”

  She means well, but panic seizes me because her unusual show of strength gives me the notion she’s hiding a decision that’s already been made. Maybe we’re going to flee Berlin in the middle of the night.

  “I couldn’t stand leaving home,” I tell her. “All my friends are here. Tonio and Rini and …” I almost add Mr Zarco but stop myself just in time.

  “Sophie, I’ve no intention of leaving.” Her voice grows harsh probably because she’s frustrated that her magic hasn’t calmed me. “Now go back to bed. And please, don’t breathe a word of what we’ve talked about to Hansi.” Transforming again, her eyes flash with anger and her coming words remind me of why I can never fully confide in her. “I’m warning you. Don’t you dare scare your little brother!”

  * * *

  At one-thirty in the morning, while I’m still tossing and turning, Isaac hears pounding on his front door. According to what he will tell me the next morning, he opens it warily—just a crack—and sees Karl-Heinz kneeling on the landing, shivering like a lost child. His arms are laced behind his back as if he’s been handcuffed.

  “Thank God!” Isaac exclaims, taking the photographer’s elbow and lifting him up. “You must be half-frozen, poor boy.”

  “Don’t be frightened,” K-H tells him as he hobbles inside. “I’ve had a minor accident.” He holds out his hands. Several fingers are crusted with blood and his right thumb has been bent at an impossible angle.

  “Mein Gott!” Isaac gasps. He walks K-H over to the sofa, his arm tight around the young man’s waist to keep him from falling. Did the traitor in The Ring tell the Nazis that K-H would be taking photographs at the election celebrations? “Sit here, my boy,” he adds, easing K-H down. “I’ll get Marianne and we’ll go to the hospital.”

  By the time Marianne rushes into the sitting room, her husband has fallen unconscious. Isaac recognizes—from his days in the army—that K-H has gone into shock. The old man covers him with woolen blankets and calls an ambulance. Marianne sits on the floor, holding her husband’s limp hand to her cheek. Though she’s in despair, she thanks God that her worst fear—one that has plagued her since she was old enough to know she was deaf—has not been realized: K-H has not had his eyes put out.

  When I stop by Isaac’s apartment before school, his face is so drawn—with pouches of distress under his eyes—that my heart dives toward panic.

  “No, K-H isn’t dead,” Isaac tells me, anticipating my quest
ion. “He was beaten badly, but he’ll recover. He’s in the hospital. Marianne and Werner are asleep in my guest room. As for me,” he adds, letting his body deflate, “I haven’t slept a wink.”

  “Me neither.”

  Joined by insomnia, we walk to the kitchen. His hand wrapped around mine is a wall separating me from all the bad things that could happen.

  “I almost nodded off while Benjamin Mannheim was playing his cello,” he tells me, “but then Werner started screaming his head off. I walked the mieskeit round and round for half an hour, cooing like a meshugene pigeon, and he still didn’t shut up!”

  “What’s a mieskeit?”

  “A little ugly monster, but one that you can’t help but love.”

  “Mr Mannheim’s name is Benjamin?”

  Isaac nods, then drops down on a chair and closes his eyes. I make him coffee and oatmeal, then steal his pipe so he’s forced to eat. In a hoarse voice, he explains all that happened the night before. “I’m too old for crying children,” he confesses. “I passed that gate forty years ago and if I look back I’ll turn into a pillar of shit.”

  “You sound like Vera,” I say.

  “No, anything but that!” he replies in mock horror, and a clump of oatmeal falls from his spoon to the table. “Please God, send me no goyishe amazons this morning.” He swipes the fallen cereal with his fingertip and gobbles it down.

  He tells me then that brownshirts took a hammer to K-H’s hands after interrogating him about his work. “They told him he’d never take another Jewish photograph.” He pauses with his spoon in the air. “Sophele, what do you think a Jewish photograph is?”

  “I don’t know, but if the Nazis don’t like them then they must be a very good thing.”

  “Well put, my dear. Every time Mr Hitler raises his arm he points 180 degrees from beauty. He’s the perfect opposite-compass.”

  So it was that we began using Opposite-Compass as our private name for Hitler.

  “After they hurt K-H what happened?” I ask.

  He sips his coffee. “They drove him to the Tiergarten and pushed him out of their car.”

  “What kind of car was it?” A question that probably means I’ve spent too much time with Tonio.

  Isaac raises his eyebrows. “Maybe you also want to know what cologne the louts were wearing?” He taps his finger to his temple as if I’ve lost my mind.

  Even with his cocoons—as Isaac refers to K-H’s bandaged hands—the photographer is able to contribute to his album of baby pictures within a few days. My first favorite: Vera pressing her distended lips to Werner’s nose and the baby reaching for her ear. Everything in the picture is sharp except the blur of his teeny hand, which looks like a bird taking wing. And my second: Isaac holding the sleeping Werner and offering the naked boy to the camera as if he’s the most gorgeous present in the world. A baby as an entire universe.

  Karl-Heinz makes me copies of these two and I add them to what I now call my K-H Collection.

  On the 5th of February, Hitler closes down all Communist Party buildings and enterprises, and his police begin making arrests. Two labor leaders who went to university with Papa hide out in our apartment.

  The younger of the two, Ernst, plays dominoes with me after supper, then helps me and Hansi with a jigsaw puzzle of the Eiffel Tower. He’s blond and blue eyed—the Opposite-Compass’ ideal. After we’ve got all the pieces in the Tower, I run off for my collection of photographs of Garbo and Dietrich. Most of the ones I have are cigarette cards given away in the tins of Haus Bergmann cigarettes, which Papa and Ernst both smoke. He laughs at one in which Dietrich’s long, arabesque eyebrows are obviously painted on, then argues merrily with me about what he calls my “bourgeois” preferences in actresses. Mama watches us with her eyes like targets, her lips reduced to a resentful slit. She thinks Papa has betrayed us by putting us at risk and that I’ve committed treason by keeping our guest entertained. I’m ashamed of her.

  The other man, Alex, is wiry, with long, oily hair. He chats with Papa in the kitchen. Their voices are hushed, and when I go in to fetch the sugar crystals for Mama’s tea, hoping to prove I’m on her side, they stop speaking.

  Ernst and Alex sleep on the floor in our sitting room that night and slip away before dawn. Afterward, Papa and Mama have a long, muffled quarrel behind the closed door to their bedroom. “If you don’t stop with these accusations, then I swear I’ll leave you!” I hear Papa threaten at one point.

  Did Mama accuse him of putting us all in danger? I think so at the time, but now I’d be willing to bet my guess was way off the mark.

  Over the next week, the tense, clinging silence created by my parents’ ongoing feud becomes a living thing lumbering through the house. The caustic winter light doesn’t help any; it’s too sparse to give us any real hope in a change of fortune. Berlin in February—with that slow ballet of death playing out in every bare tree branch and patch of black ice—makes us all feel as if our spirits are besieged.

  Papa reads to Hansi every night before bed as a way, I think, of trying to end the day with something simple and good that we can share together. Our reward for surviving another dark turn of the earth. I often gaze at myself in our mirror after my brother falls asleep, by the light of a single candle I hold in my fist. Sometimes I touch my fingertips to the shadows on my face and wonder where the girl I was has gone.

  I often draw Hansi, but my hands seem to have developed their own ideas of how his portrait ought to look. Once, I sketch him with his lips sewn together, like a shrunken head, and it frightens me, not because of what it means about his quiet nature, but because I don’t know who I am if I could create such a thing. Did Dürer ever wonder if he’d moved too far from himself?

  On occasion, I also try to draw Georg as Cesare, but I’m not good enough to pull his face out of my memory. I visit his advertising agency one afternoon when Mama is on the warpath. It’s on the fifth floor of a concrete building with big glass windows on Königstraße, just west of the main post office. I walk all the way up, since I once got stuck in an elevator at Wertheim’s department store and fainted dead away into Mama’s arms. After a long wait, Georg’s former boss, Joseph Brenner, admits me into his wood-paneled office, which has a splendid view of the cathedral’s spires poking into the ominous leaden sky. Herr Brenner is dressed in the old style, with his collar up, and he invites me to sit by his desk. He’s bald and severe-looking, and quite formal, and as soon as I see him my spirits sink; I realize that he’ll never tell a fifteen-year-old girl anything important about his former employee. Nevertheless, after he asks me how he can be of help, I explain about my having met Georg at Isaac’s party, and of my being friends with Marianne and K-H. I decide to rely on the truth for a change and tell him that my worry for Isaac and the others prompted me to see where Georg worked. “I’m so sorry to waste your time,” I finish. “I’ve been very silly.”

  “It’s all right, Miss Riedesel,” he replies with surprising kindness. “These are violent times we live in. All of us get upset on occasion and do silly things.”

  “His death must have been a terrible shock to everyone here.”

  “Very much so,” he admits, and he reaches for a cigar.

  “Would you just tell me one thing?” I ask.

  “If I can.” He clips off the tip of his cigar and sticks it in his mouth.

  “Do you think he had any idea this might happen?”

  He makes me wait while he lights up, puffing mightily. “Georg seemed quite relaxed,” he finally replies, leaning back luxuriously in his chair. “We went out to lunch a week or so before he died and he was in great form—joking with me and the others.” Taking a satisfied puff, as if glad to confound me, he looks me right in the eye and adds, “But Georg was a born performer, of course, so I don’t think we’ll ever know what was really in his head.”

  I see Isaac only infrequently in February because he’s so busy with his factory and with his activities for The Ring. Occasionally, we sip coffee
together from his cracked, Mesopotamian cups, and discuss his progress at the Portuguese and British embassies, which is too slow for his liking; he hasn’t even met with the ambassadors yet.

  As usual, Tonio and I often go to the movies on weekends, our intimacy blessed by the flickering darkness. For the moment, he has stopped pestering me to sleep with him, but I can see in the determined way he stares at me—when he thinks I’m too absorbed by Garbo to notice—that he’s biding his time. Perhaps he plans on jumping on me and getting it over with. And maybe that’s the only way I’ll actually ever give in to him.

  One day late that month, I return from school to find our kitchen clouded with thick smoke. Mama has been tearing up all of Papa’s political books, then burning them in the oven, but in her mad haste she has overloaded it with paper. Her handkerchief is pressed to her mouth, and tears are streaming down her face because she can hardly breathe. The window is open only a crack.

  I cup my hand over my nose as she tells me what she’s doing. When she’s finished, she says, “Now go away and close the door behind you. The smoke is escaping.”

  “Why didn’t you just throw the books out?” I ask.

  “Neighbors might find them!” she snarls. “Do you want Papa to be arrested?”

  “Stop blaming me!”

  “Sophie, I’ve no time for one of your quarrels right now.”

  “My quarrels?” Displaying a new maturity, I decide to overlook that provocation. “At least open the window a bit more,” I say. “You’re going to suffocate.” When she doesn’t move, I walk past her to do it myself.

  “No!” she says, pushing me hard, so that I crash against the cabinets. “The neighbors will spot the smoke and call the police. Sophie, get out of here and take Hansi with you.”

  Papa doesn’t come home that night. Mama suspects he’s fled the city, or maybe even the country. Which, as far as I’m concerned, gives her the right to shriek, pull out her hair, or even push me into the kitchen cabinets, but not to steal my property; just before supper, I discover that a dozen of my books have vanished, including some that I’d slept with under my pillow for weeks, like Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, as well as my beloved copy of Emil and the Detectives and a glorious poetry anthology of Rilke’s that Dr Fabig, my German teacher, gave me as a Christmas present and inscribed in the most beautiful Gothic lettering I’d ever seen. So my list of Raffi’s names is also gone forever.