The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  “So what does your father’s friend need?” she asks, her hands playing nervously together.

  “He’d like something for his asthma. If you want some time to make a mixture, you could have it delivered.” Clicking the latch on my trap, I say, “He’ll be at Number 18 Tieckstraße from five to six this afternoon.”

  “No, I can give you what he’ll need right now.”

  Inside her shop, she scoops up colt’s foot, chamomile, and two other herbs I’ve never heard of into a bowl, then swirls around the mixture with a wooden spoon and funnels it into a pink bag. “He’ll have to prepare this as an infusion,” she tells me as she folds the top closed. She raises a teacherly finger: “Three times a day. You understand?”

  “Thank you,” I reply, taking the bag from her. “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing,” she says, putting her hands together into a position of prayer. “Just be careful. And please don’t tell anyone you were here.”

  “What did you get?” Tonio asks me as I meet him across the street. He reaches for my bag but I hold it away from him. “Some medicine for Hansi.”

  “What’s he got?”

  “Pinworms.”

  “Hansi, you’ve got pinworms?” he asks the boy.

  The little lizard shakes his vacant head, which makes Tonio look at me and frown.

  “It’s to help me sleep,” I tell him in a confessional voice.

  He buys my explanation, and we go home. But after I’ve kissed him goodbye and dropped Hansi at home, I dash back to the street. I reach Tieckstraße at ten to five according to my watch. I wait down the block from the apartment where Tonio and I have our trysts, trying to calm my frenzied breathing. But by 5:15 I begin to believe I’ve misjudged Julia, and when 5:30 goes by, I consider leaving. It’s so cold that my teeth are chattering, and my nervous excitement is completely gone.

  A few minutes later, however, a black Mercedes drives by and stops in front of Number 18. Two Gestapo officers step out, one with his gun already drawn. Another man—hard to see what he looks like—stays behind in the back seat of the car.

  “The traitor in your group is Julia, I’m sure of it!” I tell Isaac as soon as he lets me in his apartment. I’m panting from the thrill of catching a murderess, and because I think I’ve just saved him and Vera, though I won’t deny that I can also hear a whisper from the part of my mind formed by Hollywood saying, This was too easy … “Though I bet she’ll deny it,” I add. “She’ll say the police already knew where he was hiding. She’ll …”

  “Sophele, slow down,” he pleads. He leads me into his kitchen and points to a chair. I sit down and so does he.

  “Isaac, listen to me!” I tell him, and I go on to explain then how I trapped Julia, the words flying out of me like arrows.

  He questions me for a time, then stands up and goes to the window. He lights his pipe. I try to speak, but he holds up his hand. “I need to think,” he tells me.

  When he returns to me, he kneels by my chair. “Now listen, you have to let me handle this. You have to promise me you won’t do any more … you won’t go to see Julia.”

  “Isaac,” I say desperately, “how can I promise that? I loved Raffi, and she might be responsible for his death. Who knows what she told the Gestapo about him? And what about Georg? She has to be punished!” And you’re not even grateful! I want to add, but instead I say in a hesitant voice, “You … you don’t even seem pleased I found out who was betraying you.”

  “Because Julia is one of my oldest and dearest friends. Though I thank you for finding out about her. Now listen,” he adds, standing up, “you are to keep away from her. She might make trouble for you—and even Hansi.”

  Does he add my brother’s name because he knows I won’t dare put him in danger again, not after the terror we went through at Weissman’s?

  I agree to let Isaac deal with Julia. And I promise, too, that I will refrain from buying books for at least a month. No Risks for Sophie is the title of this new movie, and I am to rejoin my quiet life far from the front lines. Though I am happy to report there are other battles to be won …

  “No, and don’t ask again!” Mama says when I beg her for a small dog for Hansi for the third or fourth time, adding, “I don’t want to hear of this ever again! The last thing Hansi needs is a mutt leaving his … his deposits all over the house.”

  Isaac worried for my safety

  I’m nearly seventeen and she still can’t say shit in front of me.

  But Dr Hassgall surprises me by telling me that Mama is perfectly right and that a fish tank would be better for the boy. “Distant children need lots of visual stimulation,” he says conclusively. “But nothing too … exciting. I’d say fish are perfect.”

  So we buy one orange and one white goldfish at Tannenbaum’s Pet Shop on Prenzlauer Allee. They’re as fat-bellied as George Grosz bankers. Still, out of affection, I call them Fred and Ginger, but the names my parents give them are the Germanically dull Willi and Tilli.

  “Be glad they’re not Adolf 1 and Adolf 2,” Isaac tells me to cheer me up.

  Hansi follows the two gulping, marble-eyed fish with a rapt gaze. As for those poor creatures themselves, they’re now confined to a two-foot-wide, green-tinted tank that sits on a wooden stand near our radio. Do they prefer Lotte Lenya to Al Jolson? They’re not saying. I’ve planted two daffy-looking, bright green wooden palm trees with yellow coconuts in the white gravel floor of the tank—my homage to Flying Down to Rio. My brother can sit there for hours, entranced. Maybe he sees the key to the universe in Fred’s air bubbles or in how Ginger swims up to snare the food pellets we shake in.

  Dr Hassgall also tells us that Hansi would benefit from a fixed routine. So after school, he watches the goldfish for an hour, then works on a jigsaw puzzle till dinner preparations, when he peels potatoes or carrots as if each one is a block of Carrera marble.

  “You’re the Michelangelo of potato peeling,” I tell him with my best Italian accent.

  He smiles up at me, which earns him a kiss, and returns to sculpting. He’s more alert since he started school, and happier, but his voice is still on an extended holiday.

  After supper, he and I work on his jigsaw puzzle, then Mama puts him to bed. Every Friday and Monday I bathe him. I love knowing the ins and outs of his little body. I draw him whenever I can’t sleep.

  My own after-school routine becomes Young Maidens on Tuesday, Tonio on Wednesday, and choral practice on Thursday. When I resume book-buying, I make my rounds only when my schedule permits. I’ve lulled my parents into thinking I’m as loyal as the Rhine, so they’ve stopped checking up on me. On Saturdays, I generally go to the movies or stroll through the Tiergarten with Tonio and Hansi, and on Sunday, after church, I visit Vera or Isaac on the sly. Sometimes, if we’re not in the mood to continue my Jewish studies, he and I go to the Jewish Old Age Home on Große Hamburger Straße, where he has a ninety-year-old friend—Mrs Kaufmann—who adores the poppy-seed cakes we take her. Mrs Kaufmann usually thinks I’m her granddaughter Else and gives me photographs of herself as a girl in Heidelberg that she keeps in a box under her cot.

  I find comfort in having a set pattern, too, which may mean I’m more like Hansi than I’d like to believe.

  I do not go near Julia’s shop. I’m afraid of what I’d say to her, and of getting Isaac in trouble. All he tells me is that she’ll never hurt anyone again in a voice darkened by anger. I suspect he’s threatened her, and I sense—just as she must have—that he’d be capable of murder to protect the friends he loves.

  Near the end of March, Tonio is inducted into the army. He’s handsome and commanding in his uniform, and I’d get on my knees before him any time he likes. And he knows it.

  He’s stationed at a training camp near Potsdam, and he is permitted to leave only one weekend a month, which is good because I enjoy him more in small doses. We never even come close to quarreling, which may mean he likes me better only two days a month as well. In any case, he adores soldie
ring. He can talk for hours about rifles and guns, and the gang of boys training with him. We often do complain about being apart, but that’s just to prove we’re committed to each other. Is he sleeping with other girls on occasion? All I know for sure is that no more crabs try to build Metropolis in my pubic hair.

  Just as leaves sprout on the branches of the linden trees on Prenzlauer Allee, Roman returns, tanned and relaxed. He and Vera get down to the business of baby-making at the end of May. I visit them with Isaac sometimes on Sunday. They’ve become playful together, like kids who’ve embarked on a grand adventure, and Vera is so exultant that she’s taken to singing as she sews, as off-key as a seal. She’s also stopped smoking in her apartment, since Roman hates it. I’d never have guessed she was capable of such a concession.

  Vera has worked out a circus act with Roman that makes her laugh as if it’s the funniest thing in the world. “How many fingers am I holding up?” she asks him, sticking up three of her massive breadsticks, for instance. But he’s as blind as the bottom layer of hell, as she once told me, and what chance is there that he’ll spot her fingers from way down there?

  “Three,” he says. And he’s always right, whether she’s holding up one or four or none.

  She must give him the answer with a particular inflection in her voice, or some coded pattern of words, but she denies it. “I’m not telling how we do it!” she declares, and that’s when she collapses giggling and snorting in the nest of overstuffed pillows on her battered couch. I’m guessing it’s the effect of several weeks of sex after a decade of chastity.

  Not even Roman will let me in on their technique, but I give him a bear hug meant to squeeze the truth out of him, which is really just an excuse for me to touch him; he’s all muscle and lithe elegance. If life were a Schiller play, he’d be the good prince who brings peace to his dominion, which worries me sometimes, because wouldn’t a good prince only make most people jealous in the real world?

  I occasionally accompany Roman home on Sunday evenings, and alongside such a man, I feel as if we’re walking across a magic carpet. Of course, this is Berlin and not a Persian rug, so when I’m off in the clouds and not steering him properly, he occasionally puts a foot atop a squashed bratwurst or in some other unidentifiable muck, but he doesn’t get angry. He’s yet to invite me in for drinks. I think he suspects I might jump on him. I suspect he’s right.

  Proof of Vera’s love … Roman performs one Sunday on Grenadierstraße for the benefit of the Jewish Old Age Home and she comes out of hiding during the day to see him. Not only that, she buries her head in her hands as he rides a unicycle across a wire stretched between the roofs on opposite sides of the street, fifty feet over the death waiting for him on all those grimy cobbles. He’s bare-chested and wearing shimmering white tights. Every sleek contour is visible, including the one I’m most interested in, which does not disappoint …

  We have blue skies and an unusually warm breeze from the west, so everyone is out in their shirtsleeves. The old folks gaze up from their walkers and wheelchairs, mouths agape, dentures in their hands. Even Mrs Kaufmann watches him with her gooey gray eyes open wide for the first time in ages. Mistaking me for her granddaughter again, she whispers to me, “My God, Else, he’s like a Greek statue of Antinous come to life. If I were twenty again …”

  Mrs Kaufmann might occasionally try to water the roses printed on her pillowcases, but she knows the right man to bring her snoozing soufflé to life when she sees him.

  A scalding summer day in mid-August brings out an irrepressible sense of curiosity and freedom in me, and I go to Julia’s shop. The petite salesgirl I’ve seen before is helping two customers. After they leave, I go in and explain I’m a friend of Julia’s.

  “I’m afraid she’s no longer here,” the young woman tells me. “She decided to stop working.”

  “But she’s still living here—in Berlin, I mean?”

  “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure where she’s gone.” She smiles, embarrassed not to know more.

  “And Martin?”

  “I’m assuming he’s with her.”

  When I tell Isaac that Julia has probably left town, he says, “Then that’s that.”

  “That’s what?”

  “Sophie, you must learn to let go when you have to. And to move on. Or else you’ll find yourself stuck in glue so thick you’ll never get out.”

  Good advice for some people, no doubt, but not for me.

  Isaac drops another note to me from his window at the end of August: “Good news: the mieskeit is pregnant!”

  Vera dances me around her apartment that Sunday, while flapping an ostrich-feather fan she’s taken out of mothballs for the occasion.

  “Are you absolutely sure you’re pregnant?” I ask her.

  “Yes, I visited my doctor twice. A little Roman is tightrope walking inside my womb!”

  She drops down on her sofa and puts a pillow over her head, then fans herself some more because she claims the pregnancy makes her hot. She sticks her tongue out at me because I’m staring. Vera has the long, pointy tongue of a demon. And it’s fuzzy from all her smoking.

  “Do you want a boy or a girl?” I ask.

  She starts, then gazes down, afraid to speak.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, coming to her.

  “Oh, Sophele,” she says, grabbing my hand, “I don’t care if the baby is a boy or a girl, as long as it isn’t deformed!” She looks up to heaven then and whispers, “Are you listening, mein Lieber, or are you as deaf as death?”

  I understand more about Vera’s urgency to get pregnant three weeks later, when she receives a letter from Reich Health Department telling her that she is to appear before an Erbgesundheitsgericht, one of those new words we’re all learning. This one means Hereditary Health Court, and it will decide whether she’s to be sterilized or not. Isaac gives me this news as I enter his apartment with an old book I’ve just bought from Mr Poppelauer. I do not recall its title, or the author, but I’ll never forget its dead weight in my hand because it was as I gave it to him that I first heard that brutal German word, Erbkranke—meaning people with a hereditary disease.

  “Vera falls into one of the categories covered by the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses,” Isaac tells me. “So she’ll be sterilized.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say.

  “The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases,” he repeats. “The Nazis passed it in July of last year. At the very same time they signed a concordat with the Vatican and declared themselves the only legal political party in Germany, which should tell you something if you look below the glass. Where were you when all this was happening?” Isaac glares at me as if I’ve torn a page out of his Torah.

  “I guess … guess I missed it.”

  “I guess you’ve been asleep!” he shouts. I rush into his kitchen, but he stalks me there, and since he’s about to shout again, I say, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You should know what’s going on in your country. It’s that goddamned luminal you’re taking! Half the country is asleep and the other half has a mind like urine. And close the curtains!” He stomps past me and snaps them closed to frustrate snooping eyes.

  “If I were aware of everything that was happening,” I shout back, “then I wouldn’t risk buying you books! I could end in Dachau, just like Raffi.”

  Isaac turns pale. “Oh God, don’t even say such a thing, Sophele! Forgive me.”

  Now it’s my turn to glare.

  “A schnapps … I need a schnapps to calm my nerves. And so do you. Please, let me get you one. You’re old enough now.”

  He pours me a glass and kisses the top of my head. “Do you forgive me?” he whispers.

  “Yes, but no more yelling.” After he agrees to that, I ask, “Does Vera have to go to this hearing?”

  “Yes, or she’ll be arrested. Her physician must have reported her to the authorities. She should never have had a do
ctor examine her. That must be why she got the letter now.”

  He lights his pipe with quick movements. Even when upset, he’s agile. Sixty years of sewing seams.

  “What did he report her for?” I ask.

  “For being deformed.”

  “Is that a punishable offense?”

  He snorts. “Of course.” Imitating Hitler’s accent and savage delivery, he adds, “And the punishment is we turn your ovaries into a Wiener Schnitzel.”

  “But Vera is pregnant!”

  “Yes, she’s outwitted them for now. And we can thank God that Roman has avoided this trap so far.”

  “Why would Roman be sterilized?”

  “Sophele, he’s congenitally blind!”

  “But he’s so handsome and …”

  “Sophie, do you think it’s fine to sterilize people who are ugly? Or deaf? Or with epilepsy or anything else?”

  “I only meant that Roman being so … so …”

  Isaac laughs from his belly.

  “What?” I demand, irritated.

  “Nothing. Let’s just say that desire is a good thing for a young girl to feel.” Seeing that his amusement irritates me, he quickly adds, “I don’t mean anything bad. Half the people I know would like to sleep with Roman.”

  “Would you?”

  “Me?” He gazes off into his thoughts. “If he were to ask me, I wouldn’t refuse. But I’m afraid I have other preferences.” He raises his eyebrows and points the stem of his pipe at me, in that way that makes me feel special. “Do I shock you?”

  “Yes and no,” I reply. His trust in me makes me understand that I’ll continue to take risks for him whenever he wants.

  “So is Vera safe now?” I ask.

  “Yes, the authorities will have to let her have the baby, and only then will they sterilize her.” He downs his schnapps in a gulp, licks his lips like a cat, and refills his glass. “You don’t mind if I get so drunk I can’t think, do you?”

  “Not at all. So there’s no way out for her?”