The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  She waits for us just inside the door to Karl’s Cellar. Once we reach her, she sheds her cloak, hands it to me as though I’ve become her butler, and sits on the carpeted stairs leading down to the dining room. She sighs like she’s been through hell.

  “It could have been worse,” I observe. “If this were ancient Israel, they might have stoned us to death.”

  “Very reassuring,” she replies, eyeing me with hostility. When she reaches out her hand to me, I help her stand, remembering that her knee joints are made out of papier-mâché.

  We sit at a table at the back of the dining room. Vera smokes, and I join her, though I dare to inhale only once. Most of the dozen customers are still sleeping off what must have been a night of carousing, though one couple—a raven-haired prostitute and her pale, sickly looking pimp—are having an animated conversation about Czech bonds. Could she make enough in bed to consider foreign investments?

  All the table lamps have orange paper thrown over them to keep the glare from waking customers. Given the diffuse lighting, it feels like we’re stuck in a fish tank—a gaudy, reddish one, since the wallpaper features gold urns on a scarlet background. A peroxide blond with a stained white blouse takes our order for coffee and a hot chocolate for Hansi.

  She must know Vera because she doesn’t even blink.

  I’ve brought along an Italian jigsaw puzzle of Michelangelo’s David for Hansi, and when I take the box from my schoolbag, the boy grabs it and gets to work. Mama has drawn a big black circle over David’s you-know-what because she worries that if he handles even cardboard testicles my brother might turn into a women’s shoe salesman, as she calls men who sleep with other men.

  Vera helps Hansi find puzzle pieces and, to my great astonishment, my brother doesn’t push her away or caw like a crow, which must mean he has accepted her into his circle of certified assistants, which is composed of me, Papa, Mama, Tonio, and Raffi.

  My coffee, served in chipped white china, tastes like licorice. “Yuccch!” I groan.

  Vera takes a sip. “A kitchen worker must have been drinking absinthe,” she explains.

  “Don’t they bother washing the cups?” I ask, sliding it far away.

  “Consider yourself lucky—absinthe is the perfect disinfectant.”

  She trades coffees with me, but hers tastes faintly of smoked fish.

  Isaac arrives just as I’m finishing Hansi’s hot chocolate. He’s wearing a fawn-colored tweed coat, black pants, white spats, and a floral tie—red roses. His silver hair is combed back and forms dashing wings over his ears. A handsome sorcerer who might take off and fly. Attractive, maybe even sexy, but he smells of mothballs.

  “I was busy with final plans,” he says excitedly, out of breath, rubbing his hands together. He’s humming a tune I don’t recognize, then breaks out into full operatic voice. Ombra mai fu … He continues down a sequence of bright, mercurial notes, ending with a smile at me. And I’d expected a baritone made rusty by all that pipe smoking.

  Isaac gives us all popping kisses, including Hansi, and then sits next to me and finishes my coffee without remarking on its fishiness. Taste buds ruined by tobacco may also be my fate, because my second cigarette of the morning doesn’t make me want to puke like the first one did. Martin and his mother Julia join us shortly. The pear-headed young man is so excited by our outing that he gets up to pee as soon as he sits down. “Strong as a bull but with a bladder the size of an almond,” his mother confides in me, and she looks at him so affectionately as he shuffles off that I can’t help admiring her. Though I also remain wary, since she could be the person who sent Georg to his death and Raffi to Dachau.

  Then an elegantly dressed couple in their thirties arrives. The woman is pushing the wheelchair of a young man whose body is as twisted as a bonsai pine. On his lap is a bearded little mutt with wiry brown fur.

  “Minnie!” Isaac exults, standing up and clapping his hands. “Get up here!”

  Isaac holds out his arms. The dog hops to the ground and leaps into the man’s affectionate embrace with a yelp. She licks at Isaac’s face as if his skin is made of sugar crystals, wriggling with excitement. Around her neck is a small sign that reads: “Aryan, Jew, or Dachshund? Guess my race and win a kiss!”

  In German, race and breed are the same word—Rasse.

  The dog’s name is Minnie, after the Disney mouse, and she’s part dachshund, part Berlin trash hound. She bounces when she walks, with her ears flopping and rump jiggling. For Hansi, it’s love at first sight. I order him to stay put but that’s simply not going to happen now that he’s seen the reception Isaac has gotten; my brother crawls under the table and squats on his haunches next to Minnie when she’s lowered to the ground by Isaac. Hansi throws his arms around her neck and gives her kisses on the snout, which are returned with luxurious, full-tongued licking. I’ll have to wash the musty smell of dog breath off of him when I get him home or my parents will guess we snuck out.

  Minnie’s owners are Molly and Klaus Schneider—trapeze flyers at Althof’s Circus. They walk like Carmen Miranda balancing bananas on her head, with their feet turned out as if they’re always indicating 10:10 on a clock. “We were ballet dancers in a previous incarnation,” Klaus explains.

  The young man with the twisted body is Arnold Muller. A German-American from St Louis. He was born with a spine disease.

  “Arnold is famous!” Vera tells me. “You didn’t see the article on him in the Morgenpost a year ago? He was left for dead by his parents in a closet—no food and no water, yet …”

  “Vera, I’d prefer not to hear the story again,” he tells her in his heavily accented German. “I don’t actually like being famous for nearly dying.”

  Arnold works as a typist at Isaac’s factory. “I’m a demon on a keyboard,” he tells me, jiggling his fingers in the air.

  As we leave, Isaac explains that in order to prevent the Nazis learning our whereabouts, he’s informed everyone participating in our small conspiracy of their destination only at the last minute. Twelve groups that he and Vera have organized will be breaking the boycott. He’s just been on the phone with the last of them.

  In an eager whisper, he informs us that we are to head to Weissman’s Fabric Shop on Hirtenstraße, where we will meet K-H, Marianne, and Roman.

  Isaac’s sense of dangerous intrigue would have thrilled me in the past, but now it only makes me jittery. “Do you think all this precaution really necessary?” I ask him.

  “You never know how good the stuffing of a cabbage is until you cut it open.”

  “Which means what exactly?”

  “These days, it’s impossible to know who’s wearing a mask.”

  Chapter Ten

  Although it’s only a hundred paces from Alexanderplatz, Grenadierstraße might be Warsaw or Prague at the turn of the century:

  Horse carts with dusty, bent-backed peasants at the reins. The smell of burning coal, pickled herring, cheap beer, and sweat coming out from the tenements. Street-corner philosophers in fur hats whose tattered coats sweep the streets, with time-ravaged faces Rembrandt would have loved to draw. Older sisters searching their younger brothers’ hair for nits. Feral cats slinking around like spies and racing between the wheels of pushcarts brimming with pickles. And Germany’s ever-present war cripples sitting on the sidewalks, hands out, their stubbly cheeks hollowed out by hunger.

  “What’s the use of a government who leaves them to rot,” Vera observes, shaking her head.

  In front of us, a cross-eyed loner—pale as bone, with needles of hair standing straight up—tries to blow a tin trumpet but produces only one shrill note. By the Rosenzweig Beer Garden, alter kackern are discussing something that has them making furious, whirling hand movements. Their wives … ? Hemorrhoids … ? Next to them is the neighborhood Methuselah, sitting on a green velveteen sofa, tugging thoughtfully on his foot-long red beard, which must have started growing in the 1890s. A young man wearing a wide-brimmed hat is reading to him from Stefan Zweig’s b
iography of Marie Antoinette, which has been in the windows of all the bookshops over the last year.

  “The old lecher still hankers after pretty young princesses with powder on their breasts!” Vera whispers to me.

  A rubber ball suddenly bumps into Methuselah’s sofa, a tawny-colored hound just behind it. The dog barks at the rubber plaything when it stops rolling, outraged by its failure to move.

  The whole neighborhood would clearly benefit from a week at the seaside, where the salt breeze would blow away the dust and grime, and maybe even help that unidentified hacking cough that half the residents seem to have.

  “Why are they all here?” I ask Isaac.

  “Pogroms and paupery, Sophele.”

  “But they’re poor as dirt here.”

  “Yes, but maybe their children will be rich!”

  I’ve been to Grenadierstraße before, but never with a Jewish guide, and Isaac explains some of the neighborhood’s mysteries to me as we walk along. His deep, sure voice serves to calm me.

  “What’s he doing?” I ask. I’m pointing to a man mumbling to himself, rocking back and forth in front of the brick wall of a bookshop.

  “Praying,” Isaac says. “Davening. And facing the Wailing Wall. Remember, Sophele, Jerusalem is right in here.” He pokes his index finger into my forehead as he does when he wants me to remember that the Torah speaks of worlds inside ourselves.

  “And what are they doing?” A man and woman are seated at an outdoor café under the tangle of a bare-limbed rose arbor, and though he’s wearing a fancy, pin-striped suit, his glasses are held together with black tape. She looks like a giant tropical fish, with puffed-out pink lips and circles of rouge on her cheeks. They seem to be quarreling while he jots down notes in a tiny black book.

  “They’re buying and selling,” Isaac tells me. He summons us closer and we eavesdrop. “Currencies. She’s trying to sell him Romanian leu for a price he’s not willing to pay.”

  “He works for a trading house?”

  “He is a trading house! Moshe Cohen, the Walking Stock Exchange. Di Geyendike Berzhe,” Isaac translates exultantly into Yiddish.

  “And who’s she?”

  “Eve Gutkind. A matchmaker. It’s said she could wed oil to vinegar and their kids would come out as salad dressing.” He repeats the saying in Yiddish: “Zi ken khasene hobn mit naft biz esik, di kinder veln aroyskumen salat sos.”

  “Hey Moshe!” Isaac calls out. “How about buying my friend here fifty acres on Mars!” He indicates my brother with a wave.

  Moshe points his pencil at Hansi. “Any special place on Mars, son?”

  But Hansi doesn’t reply. His love affair with Minnie, whose leash he is now holding, is far more interesting.

  “Maybe you’d like a canal, Hansele?” Isaac asks my brother gently.

  Hansi covers his ears with his hands. Most people would be offended, but Isaac laughs good-naturedly.

  “Somewhere there’s lots of squirrels,” I yell to Moshe.

  “Got it!” he replies, and he notes the transaction in his book.

  Further down the street, a young man in a red and green bellhop costume is eating what looks like finely ground oatmeal.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “Some of the children of immigrants have found jobs with the Gentiles—even in fancy hotels. He must be getting some hot food in his belly before his shift.”

  “And what’s he eating?”

  “Kasha. My wife made the best in Berlin! Her kasha will be served on the Mount of Olives after the dead are resurrected and we …”

  While Isaac is finishing his homage to Mrs Zarco, I notice that the shops on this end of the street are closed. And all the apartments have their curtains drawn. No children are playing. Near the corner, the Logirhaus Centrum boarding house has planks nailed over its front door. Standing in front, like wizened guardians, are three old men wearing black hats and prayer shawls, one of whom calls out to us. “You’d better not go any further, Isaac,” he says. “Tsuris ahead …”

  “We’ll be all right, rabbi,” Isaac replies.

  “What’s tsuris?” I ask Vera.

  “Troubles.”

  Isaac shakes the rabbi’s hand and assures him all will be well, since we are acting as God’s hands and feet on earth. But when we turn the corner onto Hirtenstraße, I go all cold: twenty SA storm troopers—brownshirts—are standing in a stiff line in front of Weissman’s, which is only fifty paces away, close enough for one of them to shoot one of God’s servants. Me, for instance. Even my brother senses something is wrong, and he looks up at me as if to ask, What do we do now?

  A good question, but I’m too stunned to conceive of a reply. Isaac faces us, smiling his encouragement. “We’re just going to walk into the shop and buy some fabric and then come back out and get on our way.”

  He makes it sound so simple. Naïveté or stupidity? Possibly both.

  He takes Vera’s arm and adds, “Please, don’t let yourself be provoked. I’m counting on you to hold on tight to Sophele and Hansi.”

  As Vera grips my shoulder, I pray I haven’t made the worst error of my life. An unpleasant realization: if something bad were to happen to my brother, I could never forgive myself. I take Minnie’s leash from the boy and give it to Klaus, then order Hansi to give me his hand. He looks as though he might burst into tears, so I say, “When we’re all done, you can play with Minnie some more. And don’t you dare cry or I will, too. And then I’ll have to clobber you!”

  “Here come K-H, Marianne, and Roman,” Vera says, waving.

  They’re a hundred yards away, but K-H is already snapping photographs with his camera, so excited that he doesn’t wave back, but his wife does. Marianne is wearing men’s black trousers, a yellow scarf, and a stylish blue hat pulled low over her ears. She’s walking arm in arm with Roman, who’s got on a stunning scarlet coat with wide, flaring lapels. Two tropical birds compared to the rest of us.

  I look up at Vera and whisper, “Did you make Roman’s coat?”

  “Who else would pick such a color?” she replies.

  Roman walks with a bounce, not unlike Minnie. The happy certitude of a star who senses all of Berlin in his feet. And who is gloriously unable to see any Nazis nearby.

  “Now listen everyone, just stay behind me,” Isaac says. “We’re going to head toward the entrance now.”

  Vera, Hansi, and I walk forward, hand in hand—a lopsided trio. Each step feels as if it’s a descent, and I’m sweating so hard that my blouse clings to my skin.

  Vera whispers to me, “I won’t let anything happen to you or Hansi. I promise.”

  Her voice is secure, and I’d give her odds in any fair fight, but fair has been eliminated from the German language to make room for more useful and modern expressions such as lebensunwertes Leben, life unworthy of life. A language must evolve, after all …

  We pass the storm troopers one by one. They give us silent looks of hatred, and I don’t dare look them in the eyes, since my mouth is as dry as dust, which means tears are closing in on me. I’m aware, too, of the sexual risk between me and the men. Women can be raped: now that I’ve slept with Tonio, my body understands that bad news.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see JUDE written in large white letters on each of the shop windows. A printed banner on the roof catches my attention: Helft mit an der Befreiung Deutschlands vom jüdischen Kapital. Kauft nicht in jüdischen Geschäften. Help liberate Germany from Jewish capital. Don’t buy at Jewish shops.

  “Look at that deformed one!” one of the brownshirts says.

  Is that a reference to Vera, Arnold, or Martin? I feel as if I’m part of a circus act myself. The Girl Who Can’t Stop Trembling and Her Brother with the Sealed Lips.

  An epidemic of fear has closed the city. What else but a plague of cowardice could empty a shopping street in a city of two million on a Saturday morning? All the window shutters are closed and the curtains drawn tight. And what I hear is the silence of my own panic pu
lsing in my ears—a timepiece counting down the seconds it will take for this ordeal to be over.

  Minnie begins sniffing at something enticing on the pavement, but the sign around her neck no longer seems funny, because the well-behaved officers standing at attention—all with swastika armbands—know exactly what race needs to leave Germany, and it happens to be Isaac’s.

  Marianne and Roman greet everyone in our tight cluster with kisses, but no one says more than a few whispered words. Even the Nazis must feel the menace centered here—the frontline of a border conflict between two contrasting views of life and humanity.

  Marianne’s worried eyes never leave K-H, who is photographing the brownshirts one by one. Portraits of Men Who Have Sold Their Minds. The title of another exhibition he has planned.

  The uniformed men are not happy about being targeted by him, but they keep their displeasure to themselves. Disciplined, I’ll give them that. Until K-H reaches the brute standing in front of the door. He’s got pendulous jowls like a bulldog, a thin mustache, and a condescending glint in his eye. As the photographer focuses on the Nazi, he takes his gun from its holster. Isaac, his pipe clamped in his mouth, rushes between the two men.

  After all these years, I see one image more clearly than any other: Isaac reaching out to grab the snout of the storm trooper’s gun.