The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  Monet had the water-lilies of Giverny and Van Gogh had the sunflowers of Arles, and a moderately talented girl living on Marienburger Straße has a mute little boy with long earlobes and silken hair. For hours at a time I draw his face and hands, and his elfin feet, which look like they were made for jumping down rabbit holes after his own never-to-be-revealed ideas and opinions. Sometimes in the early morning, I try to draw him inside the spangled dust swirling around us. Fairy powder making us the only two people on earth. If only I could grab hold of my brother as he dives into his own world—his own personal Araboth. So many answers might be waiting for me there: how to get Raffi home and keep him and Isaac safe, and maybe most important of all, how to make my real father return.

  I sit by his bed when I have insomnia, which is almost all the time. Hundreds of sketches of a boy with arms and legs at spider angles, or curled into a ball, his covers on or off, snoring, snuffling … Once, he even talks in his sleep, and though his words are too muffled to understand, I think I hear the word Finland.

  I sometimes put my hand on Hansi’s head while he is in dreamland. I feel the fragile softness of his breathing entering into me. Maybe his very presence—his innocence—is protecting me, keeping me sane. Is that what I’d see if I looked below our surface?

  After school ends for the year, Mama orders me to join the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the Young German Maidens, so starting in July, two afternoons a week, I train my public double for her place in the Fatherland. Our uniform consists of a knee-length, dark blue woolen skirt with a double pleat in the center, a white blouse with two breast pockets, and a black neckerchief. In it, I could be Gurka. No, let’s be honest, I am Gurka! Rini may be Jewish and therefore a bloodsucking insect, but at least she doesn’t have to suffer the indignity of looking like she’s training to become a Prussian prison guard.

  Thankfully, we Maidens have to wear our outfits to school only on Hitler’s birthday and other such happy occasions, so most of the time I can dress as though I were still living in the twentieth century. As I might have predicted, Tonio and my mother both adore me in my uniform. When Mama sees it on me for the first time, she clasps her hands together and tells me I’ve never looked more charming. A statement meant to divert me from understanding that what’s truly beautiful to her is my being forced to wear such wretched things, but what would she think if she knew that my boyfriend asks me to dress in my uniform at his father’s private apartment? A Young Maiden on her knees for Germany … That’s the heroic sculpture Tonio makes with his bowed back and racing heart every time we close his father’s adulterous door behind us. I don’t mind in the least; that handsome young man’s polishing of my desires may be the only thing saving my mind. And the joy he thrusts inside me when I’ve got my eyes closed and am pleading with him to open me as wide and deep as possible cannot yet be used as evidence against me in any of the Führer’s courts.

  More than anything else, I love the power I feel when he is in my mouth, that dirt-pure sense of being a girl worshipping an altar older and far more meaningful than Hitler, Göring, and all the other lesser divinities who’ve created this world where I have to wear a swastika armband to school, and make believe Rini doesn’t exist, and stand outside Isaac’s door without daring to knock because someone with a mind fit for a latrine has decided that culture is bad for the German soul. I adore the patina of Berlin grime in our dimly lit, one-room shack in the fairy-tale forest we make with our own bodies, with its spider webs in every corner and its gray fungus-muck on the shower curtain, and the lavender-scented foot powder left by Tonio’s father’s secretary on the chipped red bathroom tiles. In this grotesque refuge from proper behavior that’s not on any map in my parents’ possession, I’m using every forbidden trick I’ve got—and I’m discovering I’ve got plenty!—to please a young man, one who may or may not be worthy of me, as it turns out. Maybe that determination ought to matter to me a great deal, but it doesn’t, because he’s as breathless and exalted as God was when he first spurted the universe into existence, and I’m doing what’s been done by women since Adam and Eve first were exiled for coiling like snakes around the knowledge of good and evil, and giving myself in ways that every father in the Fatherland would despise.

  Each stain on my Young Maiden blouse and skirt is my victory not just over my mother and father but over my country. You think that’s crazy? Then consider yourself very fortunate, because you didn’t live in Berlin in 1933.

  Sex may be the only hope in a dictatorship like ours. Not that the Maidens know anything about such subjects. We sew and sing, bake cakes, learn how to keep our fingernails clean, and practice the proper Hitler salute. All essential for the German homemaker. We also read about ourselves in Das Deutsche Mädel magazine. Each issue is full of lively news of girls scaling the Alps, for instance, but what they do when they finally make it to the top of Mount Wendelstein is anybody’s guess. Surely one or two of the more fame-hungry girls might at least stumble from exhaustion over a cliff to give the readers something captivating to read about, but no such luck.

  When Maria Borgwaldt, our group leader, inspects me and the other new girls after our first week of training, she strongly advises me to wear my hair in plaits. “Good-looking and practical,” she tells me, tugging on the ends of hers like two bell-ropes, which may be her way of either remaining alert or of reminding herself not to say what she really thinks.

  Maria speaks in a voice so sincere that it is a miracle God doesn’t appear to her and order her to stop talking for Him.

  “I’ll think seriously about braids,” I tell her, but we both know I mean no.

  The next week, as I’m waiting my turn to shimmy up a rope in the school gymnasium, she pulls me aside to give me private advice. We stand arm in arm, which is a privilege for me, since she is renowned for having mastered all of the more difficult techniques in our Young Maiden Cookbook. Our Lady of Soufflés, is what I call her. Because Maria’s personal soufflé is never going to fall, of course.

  “Sophie,” she tells me, “you wouldn’t want your hair to slow you down or get caught on something. That could be dangerous. You really must braid it.”

  Daring to reveal a crack of light from behind the Semitic Wall, I reply, “Do you really believe that letting my hair stay loose is keeping me from setting a world record in the long jump?”

  No smile. “That’s not the point, Sophie,” she says, as if I ever thought it was. “Even if you only jump one centimeter further, that could make all the difference.”

  “To whom?” I ask. Now that I’ve started talking like myself, I can’t seem to stop.

  “To the Führer.”

  I look around. “He seems to have stepped out for a smoke.”

  “I don’t think he smokes.”

  “Cigarettes and cigars, maybe not, but he loves smoking books.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Maria looks like a deer paralyzed by car headlights. A dangerous sight; those blue eyes of hers are so empty and pretty that I might just fall in and never find my way out.

  “Forget it,” I tell her.

  If Maria were to lose her virginity would she gain a sense of humor? A question worth asking of Martin Heidegger and all the other philosophers who are sleeping now in Hitler’s bed.

  In our studies, I learn that we will be expected to have hordes of happy children and obey our husbands. Aryan rabbits with our legs open. Wearing invisible collars around our necks and chains on our ankles—the Maiden uniform that no one sees or even imagines. Except maybe Tonio: perhaps it’s the clanging of my fetters and metal scent that gets him panting like a dog. If so, good for him!

  We learn that Maidens may not spit, curse, or get a tattoo. Maria tells us that such debauched habits brought down the Roman Empire. As did frolicking in bed before marriage apparently, because she also implies—using terms so vague that a few of the girls ask me later what I think she may have meant that—it is strictly verboten to take our boyfriends in our mou
ths, let alone allow them inside our baby-making apparatus.

  Obviously, any girls trying to model themselves on Marlene Dietrich aren’t going to make it in the Maidens. But I am, despite my wry contempt. Within a few weeks, I’ve forged friendships with two of the more cynical girls—twins living on Senefelder Platz named Betina and Barbara. I’ve also earned a merit badge—a brass eagle—for embroidering swastikas onto men’s woolen hats. I considered making the messiest ones in the history of the Reich, but Papa—who watched me sewing them at home—told me that since the hats were going to be distributed to Berlin’s poor, they had to be perfect. He’s obviously still on the side of the proletariat, who are now called the Volk.

  I also win a third-place medal for running the hundred-meter dash faster than everyone except Ursula Krabbe, who has such long legs that she is obviously reincarnated from a stork, and Maria herself, who has her hair braided and fastened in a tight knot, and who therefore had an unfair advantage against the rest of us.

  I’m also not as bad at javelin throwing as I thought. My best: twelve meters. Excellent news for our defense forces should we be attacked by short-sighted Finns escaping from Hansi’s dreams. Or should the Jews rise up against us, as Maria warns.

  I begin to feel reasonably comfortable with the other Maidens until a physician named Herbert Linden gives us a lecture on Racial Hygiene, complete with slides of the kind of men we must not marry if we are to keep the Aryan race pure. The Jew is, of course, Number One on our list of verboten suitors, and we see a mug shot of a fat-faced specimen in profile so we can better see his monumentally hooked nose. Number Two is a swarthy, smirking Gypsy whom we see head-on so that we can remark his greasy halo of shoulder-length hair. Last but not least of these inferiors is a bare-chested Negro sitting on a stool while a man in a white coat uses calipers to measure his thick lips. Three and a half centimeters of proof that he is beneath our contempt. The girls groan each time another beastly candidate for our German maidenhood comes up, and nervous laughter breaks out when we see dwarfs and hare-lipped men. But nothing compares to the hoots of horror and giggles when a hump-shouldered giant with a cruel, caveman face appears against a background with a grid measuring his height—two meters seven. I’m as silent as death because he could be Vera’s brother.

  Later in the slideshow we hear about the dangers of marrying men who look normal but who are anything but—idiots, epileptics, syphilitics, the congenitally deaf and blind. And those who live in their own universe, whom Dr Linden calls schizophrenics. One of the types he describes is Hansi, which makes my legs quiver as if I need to run and never stop.

  Isaac returns during the third week of July. He’s been gone for over a month. “Thank God, you’re safe,” I say when he opens his door to me.

  I’d like to fall into his arms and cede all my worries to him, but he’s frowning. “Sophele, it’s a risk for you to come here. Your parents … And the neighbors …”

  “I don’t care about them,” I tell him, but he doesn’t invite me in. “Where have you been?” I ask.

  “Istanbul—visiting my relatives.”

  “You could have told me you were going.”

  “Maybe, but I wanted to keep my plans something of a secret.”

  “Are your relatives all right?”

  “Just fine.” He wants to tell me more—I can tell by the indecision in his eyes and then his quick look away—but at length he says, “You’d better go home. I don’t want to get you in trouble.” Since I’ve already started to cry, he says, “Sophele, please, this is hard for me, too. You may never know how hard. Forgive me.”

  And just like that, he closes his door on me. I sit on his stairs because Mama will only ask me inconvenient questions if she sees me sobbing. And I stay there a long time, because I feel as if I’ve been discarded by the only man who might help me stop from turning into a Young Maiden.

  That same week, Papa tells us he has been authorized to tell us about his new job. He’s become a Senior Technician in the Health Ministry’s Research and Development Department. “In the future,” he says, beaming, “we’ll be able to cure tuberculosis and other diseases with pills we synthesize in the laboratory. And we shall keep the price of these life-saving medicines down within the reach of even the poorest German.”

  I try to believe that this isn’t a line he’s memorized, but I just can’t do it. And I try not to think about the other people I’d rather be with. I’ve decided that I ought to abide by my parents’ rules for a while—to make believe I’m the girl they want me to be.

  Papa asks me to invite Tonio to go out with us to the Café Bauer to celebrate, and my boyfriend wears his Nazi Youth uniform for the occasion. He looks more and more like a young Cary Grant. I play with his feet under the table. He keeps pushing them away. The embarrassed son-in-law.

  I eat duck dripping with a sauce of Preiselbeeren, tart little berries. It’s so good that I fake swooning and end up making even Hansi laugh. After a waiter takes away our plates, all the lights go dark and the tuxedoed maitre d’ brings a giant chocolate cake to our table topped with lighted candles. When it reaches us, I see Hansi’s name in whipped cream. My brother will be ten on the 16th of August, which is tomorrow, and we sing a rousing happy birthday. I know he wouldn’t want his big sister helping him blow out the candles in front of all these people, so I lean back in my chair, but my boyfriend helps him. Then Tonio shows me a grateful smile, and I realize he understands that I withheld my assistance out of respect for the world of men. I could kiss him for that. Being understood by him now seems lifesaving.

  Over the next months, whenever I see Isaac in the courtyard or walking on the street, I slink away, but his eyes often follow me in my thoughts. A constant, watchful presence—a third eye in my head. I don’t dare to break the silence between us, however, though both of us slowly learn that it’s safe to smile at each other. That small gesture is our life raft. And what’s left of my resistance to our dictatorship.

  Despite my pledge, I’ve let Georg’s murder slip away from me completely. Like so much else.

  Late that summer, I realize why men like my father have been able to get more rewarding work of late; all the Jews are fired from their government jobs, including our teachers. Dr Fabig, among others, doesn’t return for the start of the new school year. According to the rumors, he turned out to be one-quarter Jewish, like his beloved Rainer Maria Rilke, and resigned before getting his letter of dismissal, although maybe a twenty-five percent Jew could have hung on to his job for a while longer.

  Rini and the other Jewish girls also fail to return for the start of the new term. It’s rumored that she’s now attending an Orthodox school on Schützenstraße.

  The best friendship of my life, and I allowed it to be buried along with so much else.

  And so it is that my sixteenth birthday comes and goes on the 19th of September without much happiness. On top of everything else, this year’s theme for presents seems to be hideous clothing: Tonio gives me a cotton skirt in a floral pattern fit for my Bavarian grandmother; Mama buys me a plain white cotton blouse two sizes too large in order to conceal my breasts; and Papa gets me a fringed brown shawl with swastikas at its corners, perfect for a Gypsy Nazi with really bad taste, if such a person exists.

  Does the girl they want me to be try on these monstrosities together, as they intend? You bet, and I even tell them that they go together splendidly.

  One day in November, I spot Mrs Munchenberg while Mama and I are shopping at Wertheim’s. She must have lost her law job because she’s a saleswoman at the perfume counter. She holds a finger to her lips, then whips around so Mama won’t see her, humiliation in her bowed back.

  When she dares to turn to me again, I slip away from my mother, who is busy shopping for soaps. “Any news on Raffi?” I whisper.

  Mrs Munchenberg brings my hand to her cheek, then kisses it, as if I’m the confidante she’s been waiting for. “Oh, Sophie, not a thing. It’s been terrible. All we know is th
at he’s still in Dachau.” Her hands are frozen. “Maybe you could ask your father to write to the Justice Ministry for us … ?”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t think he’d do that.”

  “Why? What risk would he run?”

  “Please, Mrs Munchenberg, I have to go.”

  “No, Sophie, you can’t. I need …”

  I have to pry her hand off me to get back to my mother, and when I turn to check that Mrs Munchenberg is all right, she’s sitting right on the floor, her head in her hands, and another saleswoman is trying to help her up.

  Tonio is relieved that Jewish physicians have been forced to leave their posts at state hospitals. Even those in private practice are prohibited from having Aryan patients.

  “Imagine a Jew cutting you open,” he tells me one afternoon just before Christmas, shuddering for dramatic effect, just as we’ve reached his father’s hideout.

  I say nothing, and with a sneer he tells me, “You’re always silent when I mention Jews.”

  “Because I can’t think of anything nice to say about your opinions,” I reply, which makes him throw up his hands as if I’m hopeless.

  For the first time ever, his penis doesn’t get hard when I lick it. The cause or the result of his sour mood? After he manages an erection, he thrusts inside me angrily. I roll over onto my belly afterward, because I feel as though he’s sliced me open. By the time I look at him again, he’s nearly dressed. I reach out to him, but he thrusts my arm away. “You know, you really disgust me,” he says contemptuously. I’m too shocked to utter a word, which gives him time to glower at me and add, “I don’t even think you’re very pretty. If you want the truth, I never did.”

  He walks into the hallway and I trail after him, naked. He reaches for his coat from the hook, then grabs the door handle.

  “What happened? Where are you going?” I ask, reaching behind me for a wall that’s not there; I feel as if I’ve been clubbed on the head.