The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  Other guests have also brought foods that are scarce—and I get tiny slices of a red banana, a section of a Tuscan tangerine, and a sliver of proscuitto from Parma. No moussaka, but I do see my first avocado. All the way from Greece. Isaac drops a slice in my hand and I let it sit on my tongue, imagining that oily green slipperiness about to enter me.

  While Lotte Lenya sings of pirates and sinners on the phonograph, Heidi and Rolf dance a miniature waltz. Marianne lets me hold Werner, who—to my joy—still giggles when I blow on his ears. K-H shows me how the boy loves to hold a ping-pong ball in his hand and then won’t let go. A future catcher in a trapeze act? After Werner reaches for my nose, which he pulls to his mouth and drools on, he gives me a giant toothless grin.

  “A smile that could make kreplach sing,” Isaac exults, kreplach being dumplings. He entertains the boy by making his pipe bob up and down in his mouth.

  Then it’s Vera’s turn to dote on Werner. She takes him from me, kisses him all over, and tosses him in the air, up by the ceiling. Werner looks stunned, then wets his diaper, which is Marianne’s cue to take him back. When he’s grown up, will he remember the gigantic aunt who always made him pee?

  Heidi and Rolf join me after their dance. Tugging me down, she whispers sadly about her continued failure to conceive. “I feel so … so barren. Like there’s a desert inside me.”

  Vera lifting up Werner

  “But it could be Rolf,” I say, an awkward attempt to be encouraging.

  “No, it’s me,” she declares glumly. “A woman knows these things.”

  Julia comes around with a tray, offering me a pink, hibiscus-blossom tea in one of Isaac’s Mesopotamian cups. She’s wearing a conical headdress of violet silk, a long pink gown, and a quiver of arrows on her back. “I’m a fairy godmother!” she announces when I fail to guess.

  “With arrows?”

  “Wouldn’t you want your fairy godmother armed these days?” she asks, and when she grins, the skin around her eyes wrinkles handsomely. Her eyes are clear and black—as though made of hard obsidian. She tells me her people, the Tunshan, are Buddhists, and she is certain we will reincarnate, which gets us talking about our hopes for a future life. “Whatever I come back as,” she tells me, “I want to see the wildflowers that blossom every spring on the Asian steppes. All those yellow petals pushing through snow, as though reaching for our hands …”

  That evening, I’ll write down her words in my diary. Getting up my courage, I ask her now what drugs might cause a man’s face to turn blue, which flusters her. “Why … why do you want to know?” she sputters.

  Is her reticence suspicious or only natural? In either case, my fertile imagination takes off, and the road I take ahead becomes based on her momentary loss of balance. Though maybe that’s how we always grope ahead into our future.

  When I explain what I’ve discovered about Georg’s murder, which is frustratingly little, she says in a careful, measured voice, “Sophie, I don’t want to risk giving you incorrect information, so I’ll ask an apothecary friend of mine and then get back to you.”

  After we talk about school, which seems just about everyone’s favorite tactic for having me talk about safe matters, she excuses herself and goes off to find Martin. Vera summons me into the kitchen with a shout that could splinter wood. Once we’re together, she hands me a box wrapped in black paper with a big white ribbon.

  “Open it before I have a heart attack!” she pleads with me.

  I jiggle it. “It’s my jacket!”

  Her eyes, full of fondness, confirm the truth.

  “Oh, Vera, I’m sorry I was mean to you before.” I rush into her arms. Then I sit down and tear off the wrapping paper.

  The jacket is black silk with cobalt-blue pockets, pink pearls sewn exquisitely into the collar, and white, mother-of-pearl buttons. The same military cut as Vera’s.

  “It’s perfect!” I exclaim, feeling as if I’m back now on the path I was meant to take.

  “Try it on,” she says. Designing a curve in the air, she adds, “I’ve altered it to allow for your … your maturity, but I’m not sure it’s going to fit.”

  She helps me slip it on. It’s tight, but if I breathe in hard …

  “Don’t worry. I left ample fabric at the seams. I’ll let it out an inch or two this week. Let me get a good look at what I need to do.”

  She steps around me in a circle, leaning down, chewing on her thumbnail as she concentrates.

  “Vera, you’re the most talented person I know,” I tell her.

  “Which only means you know too few people. You can take it off now. I’ll get it back to you next weekend.”

  “No, first I’ve got to look at myself in a mirror! Let’s go to Isaac’s bedroom.”

  We tap on the door and, when there’s no answer, steal inside like children on a mission. A big chipped mirror—its glass yellowed from pipe smoke—sits on his dresser.

  The pearls look like a floating necklace against the shimmering black silk. I pull my hair back. My cheekbones aren’t bad, though my eyes are still too close together. I’d look much more alluring if I were sun-darkened like Raffi.

  “Look at that!” Vera says excitedly, and when I turn to her, I see she’s pointing to my portrait of Isaac, which hangs next to his mother’s watercolor of a forest of fire-colored trees. It’s in a stunning, gilded-wood frame. It’s as if I’ve joined Dürer and Rembrandt. I’m a professional artist!

  As I’m studying the portrait, Vera exclaims, “Don’t move … we need a photo!”

  She drags K-H back to me. His cocoons have been removed from his hands and all his fingers work reasonably well, except for his right thumb, which is now just a nub. He’s got a tiny black camera with him.

  He hops around Vera and me, figuring out the shot he wants, bending and kneeling, framing the picture with his fingers. Am I perverse for wondering again what he’d look like naked? Maybe it’s lack of experience that makes me so curious. After all, except for my brother’s thimble-sized putz—which doesn’t count—I’ve seen only Tonio’s.

  K-H takes three photos. In my favorite, Vera is turning her head to look at Isaac, who has just entered the room. She’s smiling like Werner when he’s found something delightful within reach. We all are. Proof that happiness was still possible in Germany in 1933.

  After Vera died, I kept that photo by my bedside for years, to commemorate the day we became close friends—and to give me the strength to take my second chance.

  Chapter Nine

  Two days after Isaac’s party, our parliament building, the Reichstag, goes up in flames, sabotaged—the radio announcer says—by a Dutch left-wing radical named Marinus van der Lubbe who hoped to start a left-wing coup. The next morning, three policemen come to arrest Raffi. He tries to escape through the courtyard window and is shot in the foot. I was stuck at school during all this excitement, but Mama heard the shot and tells me what happened in an angry voice. I presume that her outrage is directed at the trigger-happy policeman until she suggests that Raffi might have been a member of the plot to topple our government.

  “Not unless van der Lubbe is interested in sculptures of the Pharaoh Akenhaten,” I tell her.

  It’s careless of me to reveal that I still talk to Raffi, of course. Scenting my small treason, Mama glares at me. “How do you know so much about Rafael?”

  “I can’t help who I accidentally bump into, Mama.”

  “I forbid you to talk to him or his family. He could even be a secret agent.”

  “A spy for Akenhaten?” I ask, happy to play the innocent.

  “No, for Russia! Or France! Why are you pretending you don’t understand?”

  “I’m not pretending. But he wouldn’t do anything like that.” Or would he? And if he worked for a foreign government trying to undermine Hitler wouldn’t that be the highest form of patriotism?

  “With a name like Rafael, who knows what we should expect!” Mama snarls.

  I decide not to dignify that even
with sarcasm, since I don’t want to be accused again of having a sense of humor. But how can she speak like this about someone she used to love? I want desperately to speak to Raffi’s parents about him, but if Mama found out …

  Papa doesn’t come home until late that evening because he’s being “educated” in National Socialist ideology, which is Mama’s way of saying that he’s having what’s left of his mind replaced. Mama, Hansi, and I listen to the radio while we wait for him, which is how we learn that Raffi was just one of several thousand enemies of Germany arrested in nationwide sweeps. The Nazis have used the Reichstag fire as an excuse to eliminate their opponents. And to abolish freedom of speech, as well as all political parties of the left. When we hear that Papa’s old friend Maria Gorman and others at Communist Party headquarters have been arrested, Mama jumps up.

  “Sophie, hurry,” she bursts out, “bring me any letters from your grandparents you’ve saved!”

  “My grandparents?”

  “They might have mentioned your father’s … past affiliations.”

  “Mama, they never write to me.”

  “Then get anything Rini gave you. And anything that seems Jewish.”

  “Seems Jewish?”

  “Sophie, don’t be difficult! Just bring me anything that might get us in trouble.”

  I take advantage of my time alone to hide my sketchbooks and diary under my mattress, though I’m going to have to get rid of my drawings of Rini, Isaac, and Vera.

  History has a way of repeating itself, and Mama feeds all our letters into the oven. After all, an aunt or cousin may have inadvertently mentioned Papa’s Communist past. I hand her my stack of birthday cards from Rini.

  How are Jewish gifts like Jews themselves? The start to a joke circulating around Berlin that Paula Noske, one of my girlfriends, will ask me the next day, which must mean thousands of mothers are up to the same frenzied tricks as mine.

  You can warm your hands over them when you stick them in the oven, Paula tells me, and she laughs like a donkey.

  Of course, the joke isn’t funny at all, but it’s not really meant to be, since humor is part of the Semitic and Bolshevist plot to detour Germany from its glorious future.

  After today, our kitchen walls never lose the charred scent of Mama’s panic, and the only phoenix I can see rising out of the ash is her clawing mistrust of everyone except Hansi. If I were to say that suspiciousness stalked all the words she addressed to me for the rest of her life, I would not be exaggerating. Though perhaps if she’d have lived longer …

  When I ask Mama if there’s something we can do for Maria Gorman, she says impatiently, “Don’t be silly, Sophie. That woman can handle herself just fine.”

  Papa comes home late and when he slips into my room to say goodnight, I tell him about Maria and say, “I hope she’ll be all right.” Implied in my tone is, Can you do something to help her?

  “Don’t worry, the worst that will happen is they’ll kick her out of Germany. She’ll go to Russia. Or maybe to London. She has a sister there.” Glaring at me, possibly because I’ve implied that he has a responsibility toward her, he says, “Forget about Maria.”

  So it is I learn that enemies of the Fatherland are not even permitted to enter my thoughts.

  Rini greets me at the school gate the next morning and summons me out to the street. We haven’t shared anything but resentful glances over the last months. Best friends who can’t find their way home.

  “I just want to make sure your father hasn’t been taken by the police,” she whispers.

  “He’s safe,” I reply. “He switched teams just in time.”

  She smiles with such relief that the tide of emotions I’ve been holding back washes over me, leaving behind deep regret and shame. “Oh, Rini,” I say, “I miss being with you.”

  She tugs at her ear—a sign of anxiety she’s been making since we were little kids and that I’ve come to copy. “Don’t say anything more or I’ll break down like … like …” Resorting to humor to change our mood, she clasps her hands by her cheek and gives me a pathetic, agonized look.

  “June, my darling, I’d know you anywhere!” I gush with melodramatic passion, since it’s her June Marlowe imitation.

  Our friendship renewed by our delight in imitating bad actresses, we watch a tall young man washing the windows in a house across the street, intrigued because he’s wearing a black beret.

  “Good enough to eat for dessert!” Rini whispers.

  Apparently, we’ve both grown up when it comes to men, and all we haven’t said over the past year—especially about boyfriends—sits on our shoulders.

  “Is everything okay with you and your parents?” I ask.

  “No. Mama’s brother was arrested and Papa will probably lose his job. Jews can’t switch teams, but we’ve contracted a good Aryan lawyer.” She casts a look back at the school and scowls.

  “Gurka is watching us,” she tells me out of the side of her mouth.

  I turn. Five neatly dressed girls—three with perfect pigtails—are staring at us as if they’d like to drive stakes into our hearts. Murdered by Bavarian milkmaids—what a fate!

  “One day, I’m going to make that blond-haired toad pay!” I announce.

  “It’s not her fault,” Rini says.

  “I don’t care!”

  She grins at my evil nature. “Give my regards to your parents and give Hansi a kiss,” she tells me, and she starts away until I grab her arm.

  I have no idea what I want to say. I only want to make her stay with me.

  “We’ll laugh about this in a few years,” she tells me, trying to make her voice sound sure. “Oh, I almost forgot …” She reaches into her schoolbag and hunts down a cigarette card: Garbo as Mata Hari, a jeweled collar around her neck.

  I kiss her when I’ve got it in my hands; I’ve been wanting this picture for years. Then the school bell rings. While the other girls file inside, Rini takes out a chocolate bar and breaks off a piece, then bites it in two and gives me half.

  Two infantry soldiers sharing a last cigarette in a Remarque novel. We’re part of a generation of girls who will never need such a scene explained to them.

  If Rini and I were to meet now as two old women, I’d ask her if chocolate ever tasted the same to her after that morning. And I bet her answer would be the same as mine: it became the taste of our forced separation.

  As she leaves me, I think about never going to class again, and how gratifying it would be to be expelled, but I shuffle in after all the others. Madame Navarre has moved back to Nantes and our new French teacher, Dr Braun, greets us with “Heil Hitler” and a stiff-armed salute. While we’re conjugating verbs, Gurka and her friends throw spitballs at Rini’s head, and at the two other Jewish girls in our class, Ruth and Martina. I’m sure Professor Braun sees, but he does nothing, and all I can do is make another one of my seething promises to get revenge.

  That afternoon, I stop by the Munchenbergs’ apartment to ask if there’s any news about Raffi but no one is home. Sitting on my bed after school, I read in the Berliner Tageblatt that Ludwig Renn has been arrested. Garbo gives me a look of complicity from the wall, asking me to promise I won’t denounce her if Papa demands the photograph of Mr Renn and him from my K-H Collection.

  After supper, Papa asks where his newspaper is.

  “I’m not … I’m not sure,” I lie.

  “You were reading it before, Sophie,” Mama observes, setting down her needle and thread. She’s sewing up a ripped seam in one of Hansi’s shirts.

  “But I can’t remember where I put it.”

  “How many places could it be?” my father asks.

  “I suppose it might be in my room.”

  “Then I suppose you should get it,” Mama says sarcastically.

  I beg Papa to do a jigsaw puzzle with Hansi and me instead. I hang on to his arm like a leech, which used to win me easy laughter.

  “I’m too tired,” he says, shaking me off. “And you’re too big for t
his sort of begging.”

  I sulk, but as he sits down he says roughly, “Get the paper now, Sophie.”

  After I hand it to him, he spreads his newsprint wings, a gesture that was always a strange comfort before, an assurance that he was an adult with ties of duty to the world outside our home. But no longer. I turn on the radio, loud, but he snaps at me to lower the volume.

  “Can’t a girl want to do something with her father in the evening?” I demand.

  As if it’s a civilized answer, he spreads his wings again. I sit behind him, by the radio, so I can keep an eye on his progress through the Tageblatt. My brother is lying on his belly beside me, looking at pictures of fancy roadsters in one of Tonio’s magazines. If only Papa needed reading glasses, I could accidentally misplace them in the basement garbage. Or trick Mama into stepping on them, which would be even better.

  As he reaches the article that could lead me to betray the Jews and dissidents whom Garbo is protecting, I whack Hansi over the head, which makes him burst into tears.

  “He hit me first!” I explain. “I swear!”

  That’s about as likely as Marius van der Lubbe setting the Reichstag fire, and Papa, fuming, stands up and orders me to my room. I leave my door open a crack. After Mama has quieted my brother with kisses and cooing, she and Papa talk in the kitchen.

  “It’s Tonio,” Mama says. “That boy makes her lose her mind.”

  True enough. But my sex life really isn’t the point, is it?

  “And she’s still obsessed with Garbo and Dietrich,” Mama adds indignantly.

  “She’s bound to grow out of this movie phase of hers,” Papa replies calmly.

  “Grow out of it? Freddi, Tonio even took her to one of those wretched Westerns a few weeks back.”

  So it is that I learn Tom Mix and his horse Tony are to blame for my rebelliousness. Good to know in case the Gestapo interrogate me.