“If I tilt any further my neck will snap off!”
“Are you still in love with him?” Isaac asks.
“I think so,” I reply in my muffled voice.
“Then you might as well just keep bleeding,” Vera declares, yanking the handkerchief away.
“Vera!”
“Okay, okay …” She starts blotting again.
“Sophele, try talking to him about what’s bothering you about your parents and the way our country is going,” Isaac tells me. “He could be waiting for you to be honest with him. He’s caught up in things beyond his control, too.”
Vera makes a skeptical tsk noise. “Oh, please, Tonio is what … sixteen, seventeen?”
“Seventeen,” I tell her.
“At that age, no one respects anyone else’s opinions. I didn’t. And I’m quite sure you didn’t either, Isaac.”
“I respect Tonio’s opinion—at least sometimes,” I point out.
My nose has stopped bleeding. Vera leans away from me and says, “You respect what the little delinquent says because you’ve got a soufflé that can be bruised, meine Liebe. And because his affection seems more important than being right or wrong. That errant belief is what has always doomed us.” She shakes her head as if all women are a lost cause. One of the many themes to Vera’s life.
“Anyway, I can’t go to him,” I announce. “He has to come to me.”
“Take him a present as an excuse for visiting him,” Isaac says excitedly. “How about a drawing of Hansi.” Seeing my frown, he says, “Or a book—one of mine. I’m getting rid of them anyway.”
“You’re not throwing them out?”
“Good God, no! But when there’s a war on, books are some of the first casualties, so I’m sending them away. It’s part of a new campaign I’ve just started in this war.”
“Is there a war on?”
Vera points a make-believe pistol right between my eyes. “You’re the enemy … you and me and Isaac.” She pulls the trigger and makes a popping sound.
“And Hansi too,” Isaac adds gravely.
I feel as if I’m backed up against a wall made of my own fear. I have to fight too, I think, fiddling with the pearls on my collar. “So where are you sending your books?” I ask.
“To my relatives in Turkey. I’m keeping only the ones I need for my studies.”
“Oy!” Vera says, snorting. “You’re not still trying to wriggle your way into Araboth?”
“How else will I beat Sophele to the cover of Worm-Eaten German magazine?”
“Is that why you went to Istanbul?” I ask. “To prepare your relatives to receive your books.”
“No, not really. I went because we’ve decided to take the war overseas.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We were going around to the embassies, as you know. But we weren’t getting very far, so I had another idea,” he says excitedly, his hands pushed boyishly between his legs. Why not start working with journalists in Paris and London, Rome and Budapest? Why not convince them to write about what the Nazis have in store for the world—long, intelligent articles. So I went to Istanbul to present our cause to some reporters there. A few good pieces have already been published. The plan is to build up popular feeling against the Nazis and then, when the time is right, start planting the idea in people’s heads for an embargo. While I was in Istanbul, others in The Ring went elsewhere. We’re going to work individually from now on. As I told you, no more meetings. It’s too dangerous now that the Nazis have so much power. So each person has a country. And we’ve agreed not to talk about the progress we’re making. Even if our telephones are tapped, the Nazis won’t learn anything.”
“But if they do find out, they’ll say you’re committing treason! You could be executed.”
“I am committing treason—at least from their point of view!” Sticking his pipe stem in his mouth and grinning, he adds, “And I’ve never felt better.”
“Isaac,” I say, looking down to prepare for a confession that may irritate him, “back in early June I followed Julia … to Karl’s Cellar.”
“Big surprise!” he exclaims, scoffing. Then, with merriment in his eyes, he says, “I’m the one who sent Karl to chase you out.”
“How did you spot me?”
“It was K-H,” Vera says. He notices every girl between the age of sixteen and thirty within half a mile. He’s got a kind of lecherous radar.”
“You drew lots out of a hat,” I say.
“For those of us without language skills or preferences, we decided country assignments that way.”
“I had to go to Madrid,” Vera says glumly.
“It didn’t work out?” I ask.
“Sophele, I can assure you that being jeered at in Spanish is even worse than in German. The street kids … malignant little pests … and with a satanic ability to spot me even in the dark. As for the journalists, they’re doing an excellent job on Hitler, but Spain has its own problems. There might be a civil war.”
Checking Vera’s watch for the time, I jump up in horror. “Yipes! I’ve got to get going.”
“But I haven’t even asked you my question,” she whines.
“I’m listening.”
“Sit down first.”
After I’m seated, she announces, “I’ve found someone who wants to be the father of my baby.” She makes a grimace as if I might condemn her.
“That’s wonderful!” I exclaim, though I won’t deny thinking she might give birth to the mieskeit of the century. “Who’s the lucky man?”
“A Polish mason. Very handsome. And get this … he’s seen a photograph of me and my face didn’t dissuade him. K-H found him for me while photographing a construction site.” She looks up to the sky and mouths, Thank you, Jesus, Mary, and Karl-Heinz Rosenman … “The point is, I’m meeting him in two days to discuss when we’ll start to … to … you know …” Vera tilts her head to the side and gives me a girlish smile.
“It’s incredible, you haven’t even met the Rudolph Valentino of Poznan yet and you’re already turning into a blushing bride!” Isaac observes. Pointing his pipe at me, he adds, “What she means is, she has to talk to him about when they’ll start schtuping.”
“Fucking,” Vera translates, a furrow in her brow, concerned, perhaps, about how she’ll perform after so many years of hiding backstage. “And I can’t be alone when I meet him, Sophele. I’ll burst into flame and set what’s left of the Reichstag and the rest of Berlin on fire. So I want you to come with me.”
Before I leave, Isaac gives me a monograph on the German painter Caspar David Friedrich for Tonio, though I know I’ll never address so much as a single word to him unless he apologizes to me first. Childish or wise, I know it with the certainty of the small death in my gut.
The following Thursday morning, I tell my mother we’re having a special Young Maidens supper and meet Vera at her apartment on Blumenstraße in the late afternoon. It’s a top-floor garret in a soot-darkened building with a mildewed wooden staircase that creaks under my feet as if it’s been practicing for a film set in a haunted house. On her door she’s tacked a photograph of Minnie bleeding onto the street. At the bottom she has written, “If you approve, vote for Hitler.”
After I knock, she peers at me through a slowly opening crack, then pulls me in as if I’ve arrived late. “I don’t like my neighbors knowing who comes and goes,” she explains.
Her living room is a tobacco-scented hothouse crammed with rickety bookshelves, a small round dining table—wooden with a metal rim, of the kind used in outdoor cafés—and two old chairs that she’s upholstered with black and white striped fabric.
“My place is gemütlich, cozy, isn’t it?” she says cheerfully.
“Absolutely,” I enthuse, though suffocatingly cramped would better describe it. Worst of all, the ceiling is badly cracked and sags down half a foot, as if it’s filled with rainwater. She reaches up and palms a big fissure. “I can hold it up in an emergency, so don’t wor
ry.”
“Who’s worried?” I say, practicing my acting skills. “Can I see the rest of the apartment?” I want to find the bathroom in case I have the courage to ask her my favor.
“For an Aryan you’re pretty nosey, aren’t you?”
“If I’m going to inform on you, I need to case the joint.”
Her bedroom is just big enough for her cot, which is so long that it looks like a barge. “My mattress was special-ordered from Heitinger’s,” she tells me. “Isaac got me a discount.”
Black curtains frame two small windows. For the first time I realize that Vera is poor.
“Is Isaac’s business doing all right?” I ask her.
“It was going well until a few months ago when he started losing his Aryan customers.” She feigns polishing a crystal ball and gazing into its depths. “I see hard times ahead for Isaac Zarco and his friends, including … what’s this? I see a girl … a very pretty but evil girl with a gorgeous, pearl-collared jacket …”
“You never cease to amaze me,” I tell her, laughing.
“Amazing is my only option,” she replies, grinning.
“Not true,” I tell her. “I don’t know what I’d do without you and Isaac.”
Vera caresses a hand through my hair, plainly touched, then gives me a tour. The bathroom is covered in mildewed brown tile, and two red-tinted bulbs stick out like clown noses above the mirror. It’ll have to do, I think. “I need your help before we go find Prince Charming,” I tell her.
“With what?”
“I have an itch that won’t go away. Down below,” I say, pointing. “But I can’t find anything. Would you take a look?”
She closes the shutters and goes to her bedroom for a reading lamp and chair. After I take off my skirt and slip, she has me sit on the bathtub rim. Pulling up her chair, she shines the lamp between my legs. It’s hot. “Hmmnnn,” she says darkly, peering at my personal parts.
“Please say it’s nothing serious!” I plead.
“Sophele, I’m afraid you’ve got Filzläuse.”
In German, that means felt-lice, and I’ve never heard of them before. “What are you talking about?” I ask skeptically.
“Filzläuse, my dear—you’re crawling with them.” Vera stands up with a grunt and explains the miniature parasitic nature of crab lice to me. To show me how they’re biting into my tender skin, she opens her mouth and bares her teeth—nicotine-stained daggers.
“How many do I have?” I’m expecting she’ll say ten, or at the most twenty. I am, at the time, a total idiot.
“I don’t know, maybe a thousand!”
“Oh, my God!”
A chill shoots up through my body and out the very top of my head. A rocket of dread. The next thing I see is Vera leaning dangerously close to me. For some reason, the ceiling is behind her. She’s holding her hand to my forehead, and when I reach up to brush her cheek to make sure she’s real, she says, “Welcome back to planet Earth.”
She has me sit up and drink a cup of linden tea, everyone’s favorite remedy. “You passed out for a few seconds,” she tells me. “You’ll be fine now.”
We put on my slip and skirt. I cradle the teacup in both my hands like a tiny girl. My arms feel as weak and pliant as a rag doll’s.
“How long have you let this go on?” she questions, washing her hands at the sink.
“A couple of weeks. Vera, where did they come from?”
“Take a guess,” she replies, grinning like a rogue.
“I’ve been in some pretty run-down movie theaters. And the bathrooms there …”
“What in God’s name do those Young Maidens teach you?” she hollers, scandalized.
“Oh, Vera, tell me how I got them,” I moan. “I’m not in the mood for guessing games.”
She dries her hands with a dishtowel. “They’re a parting gift from Tonio. The only way you can get crab lice is from someone you’ve slept with.”
“Oy,” I say.
“Oy is right.”
“Which means …”
I decide not to end that troubling sentence, but Vera does: “… that he must have slept with a girl who was infested.”
Now I know how he could leave me so easily! He’s found someone else. Or a great many someone elses.
We purchase dusting powder for my lice and I sprinkle it on myself in the bathroom of Karl’s Cellar, creating toxic puffs in the air that sting my eyes. I then rub the insecticide around per Vera’s instructions, furious at myself for being such an innocent. After I wash my hands raw to get off the stink of powder, I slip back into the restaurant, picturing the busy city of lice feeding off me. My own Metropolis right between my legs.
Vera waiting nervously for the Polish Rudolph Valentino
Vera is sipping ouzo—her preferred drink—when I join her. Looking around, I discover the restaurant is filled today with women’s shoe salesmen, as my mother would say, some of whom are holding hands and even kissing.
“Are there lots of places in Berlin for men who like other men?” I whisper to Vera.
“Dozens,” she says. “And thank God for that or where would I be able to go?”
Our Polish worker enters after ten minutes. Even in the dim, moist lighting of this red-tinted fish tank, he’s gorgeous, though he’s more of a middle-aged Randolph Scott than Rudolph Valentino. His thick gray hair is pleasantly mussed, and deep, masculine wrinkles frame his blue-gray eyes. His walk is solid, too, and has a bit of a lilt to it, as though a jig—or more likely, a polka—is playing in his head. I have a vision of him as a rough-talking cowboy in an American Western.
“Oh, my God!” Vera whispers to me, her megalithic jaw dropping open. “Get a look at him! My baby will be gorgeous.”
Fearing he’ll walk out without noticing us at the back, she waves to him, arms high, as though she’s a semaphore specialist helping a battleship into berth. He rushes to us purposefully and shakes her hand and mine in his work-toughened paw, then drops down next to her with the sigh of a heavy laborer and gives us a sweet and eminently seductive smile. His nails are crescented with dirt and his fingers are enormous—as big as cigars.
As we converse, I notice that whenever he really gets a good look at Vera, his eyes tear. Cristophe, the sensitive cowboy from Poznan!
After the introductions and a few pleasantries about the wretched weather, a popular subject of conversation for Berliners at least ten months a year, Vera asks how he likes living here, but his German is no more than rudimentary. “Very big,” he says, opening his arms wide. Then he puts his hands over his ears. “And too much noise.”
He lights her cigarette, then one for me and finally himself. The touch of his hand makes either my lice or my soufflé itch, though I’m pretty sure I know which.
Vera and Cristophe talk in ever-tightening circles around the subject at hand and finally agree to begin meeting at her apartment in two weeks. She hands him a first payment in an envelope and tells him her address is inside. Then she squeezes his arm. “God bless you, Cristophe,” she says as if he’s saved her life, then races off to the woman’s room because she hasn’t drunk enough ouzo yet to numb her emotions.
Instead of going directly home, I head to Georg’s apartment after saying good-bye to Vera, and I knock again on Mr Habbaki’s door; I’ve thought of some questions I should have asked him the first time around.
My tiny Lebanese host serves me almond cookies and cherry juice, overjoyed to have a visitor, and after he’s vented his irritation about his apartment’s faulty heating, we get down to business. Unfortunately, he doesn’t recall much of anything about Georg’s last weeks.
“Was he sick before he was killed?” I ask, thinking he might have been poisoned slowly.
“I don’t think so.”
“Did he get any unusual guests … other than the people who moved his furniture? Did he complain of being followed or watched? Did he change the time he left his apartment in the morning?”
Mr Habbaki can’t recall anythin
g.
He soon runs out of cookies and I run out of questions. Fortunately, a retired nurse who lives upstairs and who was out the first time I visited remembers more. Mrs Brill and I sit on her black velvet sofa together. After I’ve complimented her on the beige bedspread she’s just crocheted for her son, and the white ceramic water dish she purchased yesterday for her cross-eyed toy poodle, Max—named by her late husband after the German boxer, Max Schmelling—I interrupt her rambling and ask about Georg. Max sits on her lap, pants, and licks his scrotum and paws as we talk. After about ten minutes, she finally says something worth my while. “I do remember one unusual thing,” she says, placing her hand in mine, as if we’ve known each other for ages, “because Georg had such beautiful hair. I saw him one day in the street, just before … before he died, and all of it was cut off.” She makes a slicing motion to emphasize her point. “I told him, it’s such a shame that you’ve cut off all your beautiful hair. And do you know what he told me … ?” I give a big nod, since she’s slightly deaf and maybe a bit batty too, and she says, “‘It’s my new look for the spring, Mrs Brill.’”
Did Georg want to appear less recognizable to his enemies? Maybe he found a new job that required short hair—one that he told no one about, not even Vera.
“Georg was always changing the way he looked,” Isaac tells me dismissively when I inform him about the haircut. “He didn’t like being … being trapped by other people’s expectations.”
“So you don’t think he’d taken a new job that he told no one about?”
“Definitely not. We spoke nearly every day on the phone and he’d have at least given me his new number.”
On my insistence, Isaac fetches K-H’s photographs of the dead man, and as he hovers over me, I confirm that Georg’s hair was closely cropped. And a bit ragged around his ears. I’d missed that before, having concentrated solely on the swastikas.
“If you ask me, he got a bad haircut,” I tell Isaac, who shrugs as if it’s of no interest.
He lets me keep the photos on the condition that I never mention them to anyone, and I slip them in behind Garbo in my K-H Collection.
The Seventh Gate Page 28
