The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  I race into the kitchen and find her staring out the window, the ash from her cigarette curling and about to fall. A bad sign; Mama smokes only when she’s been drinking.

  “What did you do with my books?” I demand.

  “I burned them. They could have gotten us into trouble.”

  “You could have at least asked me. You had no right!”

  Mama turns back to the window as if whatever ghosts she sees there are more essential to her life than me. I dash away before she sees me sobbing.

  My only relief is that my mother didn’t find my K-H Collection in my underwear drawer. I forgo supper that night as a protest. Not that Mama notices; the apologetic words whispered through my bedroom door—the ones I write for her in my head over and over again—never come. One more grievance to add to my pile.

  Papa manages to phone her the next afternoon, just after I return from school; having learned from an old schoolmate that he was about to be arrested, he’s now in hiding, but he can’t let us know where—the police may be listening to our call. After Mama hangs up, she repeats to me what he told her—her shock and disbelief transformed into a frail monotone—then sits on her bed, her hands joined on her lap, her bottom lip folded inside her mouth. She looks as though she’s facing a tower of regrets that she will never, now, be able to scale. Maybe she’s recalling the moment when she realized that she was not going to live the life she’d wanted. My strangling fear is that it was when she got a first good look at me in the hospital.

  I almost ask her if my guess is right, but I couldn’t bear to hear I’d stolen her happiness. Is that the real reason she took my books? Her small theft to make up for mine, which was far greater …

  She makes no reply to my offer to prepare supper. Are women all across Germany going on strike for a different future at that very minute? I bring her a cup of hot milk on her favorite tray—Japanese black enamel, ornamented with gold flowers—but she won’t even take a sip. Later, she snaps the curtains closed and sits by the radio with a glass of brandy in her hand, listening to reports of arrested Communists and street battles between workers and Nazis. When I assure her I’ll quit school and work as a waitress if Papa is imprisoned, I’d like her to thank me and tell me that we’re a long way yet from having to make such sacrifices, but she gives me a murderous look and orders me not to use the word eingekerkert, imprisoned, ever again. “Sophie, you will promise me right now!” she tells me when I hesitate, the foul scent of too much brandy on her breath. She tucks her chin hen-like into her neck, preparing for battle.

  “Whatever you want,” I tell her, letting her win; she obviously needs a victory more than me.

  Sitting alone again in my room, I feel as if our house has hidden staircases I’ve never dreamed of before, and that Mama climbs up them at night, when we’re all asleep. A mother who goes places her daughter can’t even imagine. And vice-versa, of course. Each of us summoned by voices the other can’t hear.

  I consider visiting Tonio, but if he brought up my virginity or even just pressed himself into me I might wallop him. If only I could go visit Rini. Instead, I tug Hansi to Isaac’s apartment, promising that if he doesn’t fight me I’ll make him onion soup with bits of garlic bread floating on top—his third favorite thing, after jigsaw puzzles and squirrels.

  We slurp our soup and eat some cheese on matzo. Hansi’s lap becomes a blanket of crumbs that Isaac whisks onto the floor with the back of his hand before I can stop him.

  Our host sits next to my brother and cuts pieces of cheese for him with scissors, a technique that summons crazy laughter from me—smoke-induced hysteria, I’d guess.

  He gives me half a glass of wine to try to calm my nerves. Hansi agrees in his silent, stone-faced way that the scissors method is perfectly reasonable. My brother hasn’t uttered a word since Papa’s colleagues stayed the night. And why should he? The Hansi Universe has got to be a lot better than our home right now. Every now and then I wave at him just so he knows I’m here.

  Heidi and Rolf knock on the door while we’re listening to Lotte Lenya on the phonograph. They waddle inside with presents—one of Heidi’s chocolate cakes and some incense they bought from a Gypsy family at a flea market. So we have a sweet-scented party—complete with kosher wine.

  Heidi’s cut her hair short and given herself bangs—a style that nicely frames her face. When we kiss, I detect the faint odor of fading flowers—just what Joachim’s cousin in The Magic Mountain was said to have smelled like. I can’t stop thinking about that book now that Mama has turned it to ash.

  Heidi is wearing a beautiful dress—lavender satin, with delicate black lacework at the neck. “Vera designed it for me,” she tells me when I offer my compliments.

  Heidi, Berlin’s best baker

  “Does she make all her friends’ clothing?” I ask.

  “Just the people who are hard to fit,” she replies. “Like me and Rolfie,” she adds, leaning over to tug on his ear, so that he gives a happy yelp.

  “We’d be lost without Vera,” Rolf assures me. “Heidi and I used to have to go to children’s clothing shops.” He raises his upper lip like an irritated donkey.

  Rolf is in a giddy mood because he’s just found a well-paying job as an accountant at a firm that exports pectin. He does some card tricks for us while we eat our cake, and he’s a real wizard. He even makes the ace of spades vanish into thin air, then pulls it out from Hansi’s elbow. My brother’s eyes sparkle when he sees that miracle.

  Heidi and Rolf don’t ask me to explain Hansi’s silence to them, which is good, because I’m never sure what to say when people come up to me on the street and ask, What’s wrong with your brother? Based on years of experience, I know that How the fuck should I know? is not the answer they want from an older sister.

  “Any luck with the Dutch Ambassador?” I ask Rolf.

  He starts, then looks questioningly at Isaac.

  “I told her we’re trying to convince Germany’s neighbors to prepare for an embargo,” he says.

  “So far I’ve met only with an assistant for commerce,” Rolf tells me disappointedly. “He’s all of twenty-three years old and seems to think only about wearing stylish clothes.”

  Isaac keeps topping up my wine glass, and I get tipsy for the first time in my life. Underneath our conversation about the Nazis’ plans for a military build-up, I hear my own wheezing breath, and I grow silent so I can listen to it. I must be hearing what my fear for my father’s safety sounds like because I’m imagining a hounded fugitive on an evening train to Amsterdam. Watching him sitting alone in a dark compartment, the glow of his cigarette reflecting off the window, I feel as if something important—something made of the night—wants to make itself known to me. But all these voices … I wish I had the courage to beg Isaac, Rolf, and Heidi to keep quiet. Lifting the silver cake-cutter, I imagine slicing the blade across my arm to get their attention, doing damage that could never be repaired. Maybe that would be enough to please her, I think. Her is my mother, of course.

  But no dark epiphany comes to me—unless it’s simply that Mama would end up burning everything in our apartment if Papa went to prison. Then she could leave behind the life she never wanted, marry someone else, and try her best to have two normal children.

  How long will it take for Isaac, Heidi, and Rolf to notice that I’m no longer talking? I start counting as if each number is a hammer blow—the mathematics of a girl who has drunk too much. I must be making an odd face because after another minute or so, Isaac says worriedly, “Sophele, what’s the matter? You haven’t said a word, and the way you look …”

  “I think she’s a little drunk,” Rolf interjects.

  “I’m not!” I exclaim defiantly, which only makes the two men smile conspiratorially and Heidi rest her hand on mine.

  Accurately forecasting disaster on the horizon, Isaac tries to take my wine glass away. While jerking it away from his hand, I spill some down my white blouse. Heidi to the rescue. She dabs it with water an
d then milk to keep the stain from setting, but it’s too late. Accompanying my feeling of dread is an image of Georg in K-H’s photographs, maybe because I’m only now coming to understand that his death can never be undone.

  Kissing my cheek, Isaac says, “No one is making fun of you. We all love you.” He grips my hand tightly under the table, which improves my mood.

  At length, Heidi tells him, “Isaac, we need your help.”

  “If it’s money again, then stop worrying. I’m sure we can …”

  “No, we’re all right for now,” Rolf says. Turning to his wife and placing his hand on hers, he adds, “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this now, Haselnuss, the children are here.” Rolf calls his wife all sorts of names, and I record them in my diary: Hazelnut, Parikeet, Strudel, and my all-time favorite, Gingerbread, Pfefferkuchen …

  “I’ll take my brother into the sitting room and look at books,” I tell them.

  “You’re an angel, Sophie,” Isaac says, smiling gratefully and giving my hand a squeeze.

  This is the first time in history I’ve beaten Hansi to that description, but what Isaac doesn’t know is that my eavesdropping powers are first class. I sit my brother down on the sofa. As I’m looking for a picture book he might like, Heidi says, “Can you ask Julia to give me something to … to enhance my chances of getting pregnant again?”

  “So you’ve had no luck?” Isaac asks his guests.

  “None,” Rolf replies morosely. “And we haven’t missed a night,” he adds in a whisper.

  I hear a chair slide back, then cabinets opening. “Try this,” Isaac says. “Make it into a tea twice a day—once in the morning, and once an hour before … before …”

  “We understand,” Rolf assures him.

  “It has herbs that will thin your fluids and give Rolf’s sperm a little … little help in reaching your egg.”

  Heidi laughs. “Isaac, you make it all sound so biological,” she observes.

  “You’d prefer I use plumbing metaphors?”

  “No, let’s leave those to Dr Stangl.”

  “Have you seen him lately?”

  “Him? I’m staying away from him as long as I can,” Heidi announces indignantly.

  While they’re talking, I lug Ducks of the World over to Hansi. It’s nearly the same size as him and sounds promising. “Look at this,” I command. Having decided he’s the one to blame for our being banished, I drop it on his lap from high up, which makes him grunt. Good, at least that’s some reaction.

  I creep beside the door to the kitchen, where I can hear more clearly. Walking on tiptoe fills me with delight. Mephistopheles must have had a great time, despite what Goethe and Dr Fabig might think.

  “… And then, before I left the hospital,” Heidi says, “he informed me, in that authoritative voice of his, that it was just as well that I lost the baby. According to him, our child would have hurt Germany’s development.” Resentment coarsens her voice.

  Hansi is staring at me. I shake my fist at him, and though I’ve never once punched him hard enough to do any real damage, he gets my point and opens the book.

  “Dr Stangl said that the traits we’d give to our kids would be inferior,” Heidi continues.

  “We’re too small for the new Germany,” Rolf adds. “And inferior.” Rolf uses the word minderwertig for inferior—part of the new Nazi vocabulary we’re all being forced to learn.

  “The worst part was that before I left the hospital,” Heidi continues, “he brought a colleague from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to see me—from the Eugenics section.”

  “Was his name Fischer, by any chance?”

  “Yes, Eugen Fischer,” she replies, surprised. “Do you know him?”

  “I read one of his books. He thinks dwarfs and deaf people are ballast. And he fired a great many Jewish professors when he was head of the University of Berlin.”

  “Ballast?” Rolf asks.

  “That’s how he and his physician friends describe people like you and Vera and K-H. Ballast to be tossed overboard at the first opportunity.”

  He adds something in a whisper I can’t make out. But I do hear “Hansi” said as a question by Heidi, and then her sharp intake of breath.

  Did Isaac whisper that Fischer would regard my brother as ballast too?

  I can feel the powerful beating of my worry for my brother underneath the silence. I look at the boy, but he seems perfectly like himself to me—normal, because he’s who he is.

  “At first, Dr Fischer was friendly enough,” Heidi says ominously.

  “He said he wanted to give a lecture to his students about dwarf anatomy,” Rolf adds, “and that Heidi could be very helpful as an example.”

  “He asked if I would please consider coming to his lecture hall, so they could see … see my body, and my peculiarities. He said it would be an honor to have me participate. I said I’d need to think it over. But then Dr Stangl told me he’d permit me to get pregnant only if I agreed to help Dr Fischer.”

  “Permit you!” Isaac shouts. “What business is it of his?”

  “I don’t really know,” Heidi replies sadly, her voice trembling. I picture her husband taking her hand because she says gently to him, “I’m all right, Rolfie.”

  “I can’t believe you let yourself be fooled by those bastards.”

  Rolf says adamantly, “We weren’t fooled, we were threatened! Dr Stangl implied that he could order Heidi to have an abortion the next time she got pregnant. He showed us a letter from the Ministry of Health recommending abortions for people with … with deformities.”

  “He must have written that letter himself to convince you. The Nazis haven’t yet had time to …”

  “It looked pretty official,” Rolf interrupts.

  “So what happened when you got there?”

  “It started out all right,” Heidi replies. “But I began to suspect something bad might happen when they wouldn’t let Rolf come into the lecture hall. I went inside by myself, and about a hundred students were in the audience, and a young woman … a nurse, I guess … she helped me take off my gown. Dr Fischer had me stand naked in front of everyone. He held a pointer, and he indicated places on my body with it, which made me shiver. I don’t recall much after that. My mind … I couldn’t think. I seem to recall him telling his students that my deformities meant I mustn’t have children, but I don’t know for sure. I don’t even know how long I was in there.”

  “Nearly an hour, Pfefferkuchen,” Rolf says.

  “By the time he was done, my heart … I felt as if it had stopped.”

  “That son of a bitch!” Isaac exclaims.

  “You’re the first person we’ve told,” Rolf says. “The amazing thing is that no one apologized to Heidi afterward. All Dr Stangl said was that if we still insisted on having children after all that Dr Fischer had said, he would live up to his bargain and sell us fertility drugs, though he warned us they were very expensive.”

  “Have you used anything he’s given you?” Isaac demands.

  “We haven’t gotten the money together yet,” Heidi replies nervously.

  “Good, just drink the tea I gave you, and for the love of God don’t take anything Sebastian Stangl gives you. Shit! To think how excited he used to be to have circus performers as his patients. How people change!”

  Silence. After a while, I think they’re going to call me and Hansi back inside, but then Isaac says, “When I was a boy, I read of a rooming house that had just been knocked down in Paris. Below the foundations, workmen found about twenty skeletons in a mass grave. They were very tiny skeletons—too small even for babies. So maybe they were from animals—the valuable bones of some ancient deer or extinct rodents. A great find for the Natural History Museum! But forensic specialists ended up concluding that the skeletons belonged to dwarfs and midgets who’d been killed, some just after birth, others when they were a year or two old. They dated the bones back to the eighteenth century. The tiny children had been suffocated or drowned, because there were
no signs of bodily injury on any of them. I’ve never forgotten those skeletons. And not just because they made me realize that dwarfs have been systematically killed for centuries, with full impunity, but also because the Parisian officials were disappointed that they hadn’t found rodent bones.” Isaac’s voice grows enraged. “Rats would have been better than people like you, and they simply discarded those tiny skeletons as if they were garbage. So if you believe Dr Stangl is right, if you really think you’re both just garbage, then use his drugs, because I’m betting they’re poison!”

  The silence afterward is so deep that I step into the doorway. Rolf has his arm around Heidi, who is crying silently. Looking at the misery in her eyes, I shiver, and I think: there must be mass graves for Minderwertige in Germany, too.

  Papa stays in hiding through one more day of stormy relations between me and my mother, then returns the following evening, his face gaunt and cheeks unshaven, a ghostly double of himself. His eyes glisten as he holds me away—“I want to look at you,” he says in a hoarse whisper. His clothes are crumpled and soiled, and he smells of the earth. Our first greetings are weepy, and comic in their awkwardness, like a badly translated Italian opera. After Mama throws her arms around him, she wets a hand towel with hot water and wipes his face, blessing him for returning in a voice choked by emotion. I take his coat off and bring him his favorite plum brandy. I sit close to him, my hand around his leg to keep him from escaping. His graying stubble burns my cheeks pleasantly when we embrace again. Hansi wants to be held, so Papa sits him on his lap.