“Stangl had leverage on him because Rolf desperately wanted children. He may have refused to help Heidi get pregnant unless…”
“Unless Rolf betrayed me … The bastard! He killed my baby!”
“Vera, it’s even worse, because there was no way Heidi could get pregnant. She’d already been sterilized. Stangl was an incredibly evil man and…”
“And Rolf played into his hands!” she shouts.
“Stangl must have been very persuasive. Rolf must have been going through hell. It must still be hell. Heidi is gone and he has betrayed the only people who could comfort him. His loneliness, I could feel it when…”
“Sophie, shush! Give me a moment to think.”
Isaac has been listening to my conversation and has stepped progressively closer, smoking anxiously, which is why I reach out my hand to him, and though he takes it, I can see that he wishes I wasn’t so independent. Maybe all men would really prefer a colorful parrot to the likes of me.
Vera lets the silence build until I blurt out, “Stangl was also found in the Rummelsburger See. I lied before.”
As I say that, I look up to see Isaac glaring at me. So predictable. Not that that makes being disapproved of any easier. He drops my hand and stalks off to his room, slamming the door.
“But why did you lie?” Vera demands in a hurt voice.
“Because I had to test you,” I reply, picturing Isaac fuming in his bedroom. “I’m sorry, Vera. Please, forgive me.”
“I do,” she replies, hurrying to add, “Tell me the reason you think Stangl was murdered. I need to figure this out.”
“One of two possibilities. Either the Nazis who were controlling Stangl began to see him as a liability, as you said, or someone in The Ring decided to kill him for forcing Rolf and Heidi to betray their friends. And maybe for sterilizing Heidi, too.” Now that I’ve spoken Vera’s theory aloud, I understand why she can’t be right. “If it was one of Stangl’s Nazi bosses who lured him out of the house to kill him,” I say, “then he wouldn’t have had to pretend he was Rolf. He’d have just ordered Stangl to meet him.”
“So it’s someone I know,” Vera concludes.
“And someone who probably convinced Stangl that he had new and damning information on The Ring. Vera, do you know anyone who could imitate Rolf’s voice?”
“No.”
“Or anyone with a connection to the Rummelsburger See … with a house out there, for instance?”
“No.”
“You’re sure you don’t know anyone from your time in the circus who could use his voice in a special way—who could do imitations of people?”
“No one. Sophele, there’s something I don’t understand. If you’re right about Rolf, then why was Heidi murdered?”
“I think that Rolf must have told her what he was up to. She might have gone along with his betrayals, reluctantly or otherwise. And the killer found that out.”
“I don’t think that can be right.”
“Why, was Heidi such a saint?”
“In a way, yes, and maybe only now I’m beginning to realize that. She and I … we had an understanding. And there’s one more thing … Your theory doesn’t explain why Rolf wasn’t murdered too.”
“Maybe because the killer knew that Rolf’s life would be over the moment that Heidi was killed. What could be crueler than to let him live without her? Besides, now that The Ring no longer has any meetings, and everyone is working on their own, Rolf no longer poses much of a danger.”
“I don’t buy that either.”
“Maybe … maybe the killer isn’t finished yet. The opportunity to murder Stangl presented itself before any opportunity to kill Rolf.”
“Which means,” Vera speculates menacingly, “that he’ll be next to die.”
“I lied to you for a reason,” I tell Isaac as soon as I step into his room. He’s got his nose buried in his manuscripts and doesn’t look up. “You should be pleased—I followed your advice and looked below the glass. I discovered what we hadn’t seen before.”
He turns around, his eyes angry slits. “So, I should be pleased that Rolf may have betrayed us? And that I love someone who lies to me so easily?”
“It wasn’t easy. And would you prefer to be kept in the dark?”
“Maybe.”
“You didn’t want me to visit Rolf. That was because you suspected him, too, isn’t it?”
“I suspected everyone who knew of our plans. Now leave me alone.”
“What have I done that’s so bad?”
“Sophele, go away! I don’t want to see you!”
He speaks as if he hates me, which leaves me desolate.
“I can’t bear you talking to me like that,” I tell him. “And if you decide…”
“You should have thought of that before,” he interrupts gruffly. “You care more about solving a crime than people’s lives.”
“That’s not fair!” I reply, angry now—at his resemblance to my bullying father more than anything else. “I care about what happened to Dr Stangl because Raffi and Vera’s baby were murdered. And Heidi, too. I’m not still the little girl who chased after tram accidents, you know. Though you may think I am.”
“But you still enjoy living with danger. It makes you feel alive.”
“Maybe so, but I have no choice, do I? Would you prefer a Young Maiden learning to harpoon rabbis in her spare time? And be careful what you reply, because no blond teenager with plaited hair is going to fall to her knees for a foul-tempered old Jew like you.”
That gets his attention, and he jumps up.
“And what I enjoy,” I add, gazing at him defiantly, “if you really want to know, is the feeling that I’m doing something meaningful … that I’m living a life that counts. You’re the one who told me we all need meaning in our lives. Why should I be different?”
“Sophie,” he says, “you’re too complicated for me right now. Just go away.” He makes a weary, sweeping motion with his hand. “Go to your father and Tonio. Go to Hansi…”
His air of profound exhaustion—as if I’m a burden—only deepens my fury, so I blurt out something I wasn’t going to say, having become used to keeping silent about my deepest fears. “Has it never occurred to you that I’ve been worried about you … that you’re a good part of what keeps me up at night? Because I’ve been thinking ever since Raffi was killed that you might wind up dead on some dark Berlin street corner, swastikas painted on your face. I’m worried about that even now, because if I’m wrong about Rolf being the traitor, then an unidentified someone is still out there who hates troublemaking Jews like you. Especially the kind that sleep with little troublemaking shiksas like me!”
Isaac’s eyes open wide and he tries to put his pipe down, but misses the desk, so that it tumbles to the floor, spilling ash.
“Sophele,” he says, opening his hands in an apologetic way. “I’m such an idiot.”
“You live so deeply in those manuscripts of yours that you don’t even see what is going on around you. Wasn’t it Berekiah Zarco who said you shouldn’t abandon the living for the dead? Well, that’s just what you’ve been doing.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. He embraces me, his breathing warm and desperate on my neck, and he whispers, “Forgive me.”
I can tell from the way he presses against me that he wants to make love, but for once in my life I’m not in the mood. When I tell him, he laughs good-naturedly and says, “I’m not in love with you because I can have sex with you anytime I like.”
“Though that helps,” I reply, grinning.
“In any case, I’m still not pleased about you lying to me,” he says gently, and he picks up his pipe from the floor.
“I’ll try not to,” I assure him. “Now, during the time you headed The Ring, how many people helped you plan your activities?”
“Everyone. We voted democratically.”
“But you must have had an inner group. Some people you trusted completely, who knew what you were thinking before th
e others.”
“Yes, but that inner group got smaller as time went on, because I began to suspect there was a secret Nazi among us.”
“In April 1933, when we went to Weissman’s to break the boycott, and the Nazis were ready for us … You said that most members of The Ring didn’t know where they were headed until the last minute. Who knew we were going to Weissman’s beforehand?”
“Vera, Georg, Rolf, K-H, Marianne, and … and Julia.”
“Then I don’t understand. K-H and Marianne couldn’t have imitated Rolf on the phone because they speak with those deaf-people voices and couldn’t have heard anything that Stangl replied to them. And Julia couldn’t have done it because she was already in Istanbul.”
“So maybe someone didn’t imitate Rolf,” Isaac surmises. “Maybe he was on the phone for real. We still can’t be sure he didn’t kill Stangl. Or whoever the murderer was could have put a gun to Rolf’s head and forced him to make the call.”
“So how can I prove that Rolf betrayed you?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Unless you could find some incriminating document, and by now he’ll have destroyed anything and everything in his possession that might implicate him.”
“Should I go see him again and confront him? He wouldn’t lie to me if I was there with him. Not a second time.”
“Who do you think you are?! If he betrayed us, he’d lie to you as many times as he needs to.” Isaac sits with me on his bed and holds my hands tight, as if to keep me from fleeing. At times, I must seem like a top spinning away from him.
While he’s trying to convince me not to do anything, the phone on his night table rings. With a groan, he reaches past me to answer it. “Yes, hi … yes … all right,” he says. After a pause, during which he listens intently, he adds, “Fine, I’ll meet you at my office tomorrow, in the late morning, around eleven.”
On hanging up, he faces me and rubs his hand over his eyes, looking tired again and troubled.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Andre Baldwin needs to talk with me.”
“About what?”
“Do I know? Nobody explains anything to me anymore.” He looks up to God, shakes his head, and intones: “‘The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he carried me out by his spirit and put me down in a plain full of bones.’ Ezekiel Thirty-Seven,” he tells me.
“Why doesn’t Andre come here? Would you prefer he didn’t meet me?”
“Of course not! Andre isn’t Jewish, and unlike you, he hasn’t lost the Semitic Wall in his head. He doesn’t want to risk being seen coming to my apartment.”
I speak to Vera over the next week about Rolf and how we ought to proceed, but she, too, begs me not to see him, and I end up promising her I’ll do nothing for the moment.
“If you’re correct about him betraying us, which I now firmly believe, then you’re also right that he’s been punished already,” she tells me. “Heidi is dead, and that’s enough. And if you’re wrong, and he’s innocent, then talking to him will only drive him further from us.”
I don’t entirely believe her, but I make her promise that she won’t plan any vengeance against Rolf without telling me first.
* * *
One sunny Saturday in May, when Papa is picking out sofa cushions with Greta to match her brocade curtains, Isaac and I go for a long walk in Friedrichshain Park, where spring has transformed the plum trees into pink clouds. Hansi and his friend Volker—tiny and sweet-natured, with sweaty hands and a squeaky voice—are hunting for squirrels somewhere in the undergrowth behind us. At least, I think they are. I refuse to keep track of zigzagging twelve-year-olds searching for rodents.
“Andre is leaving town and wants to meet you before he goes,” Isaac tells me.
“Why?” I ask.
“Why’s he leaving or why does he want to meet a nudnock like you?”
“Both,” I say, rolling my eyes.
He’s leaving because he’s been fundraising for a Jewish theater company, the Jüdische Kulturbund, and the government is about to close them down, and he wrote a stinging letter to the Culture Ministry, which got him summoned to Gestapo headquarters the other day, and…” Isaac finally takes a breath. “He’s one of the people I’m helping to get out of Germany. And as for you, he’s dying of curiosity.”
“You’re helping people get out?”
“I’ve decided that books are no longer enough.”
“Who have you helped?”
“Two Jewish seamstresses who worked for me recently left for Switzerland. And five members of The Ring so far. You remember Molly and Klaus Schneider?”
“Of course, the trapeze flyers who owned Minnie.”
“They’re in the United States now … in NewYork!” he tells me, beaming.
“That’s fantastic!”
“They chose to work with American journalists on anti-Nazi articles—especially pieces about the sterilizations. So it worked out perfectly. They were able to get visas because the people at the Barnum & Bailey Circus were keen on getting them.”
“If I can help, then please let me know,” I tell him.
“I hope I won’t need to call on you, but if I do…” He ends his sentence by nodding and caressing my hair lightly. Our substitute for the kiss we’d prefer.
“Did you tell Andre we were lovers?” I ask.
“Yes, though I also told him you take terrible advantage of me.”
“True enough,” I reply, and to prove the point, I grope him, which makes him bat my hand away. “Sophele, you could get us into trouble.” He gives me an ugly, silent-movie frown.
“So where’s Andre going to go when he leaves Berlin?” I ask.
“Antwerp. Listen, he’s proposing we have dinner this weekend. Is your father going out on Saturday or Sunday with Greta?”
“I’ll check. Though we’ll have to bring Hansi along.”
When we pass a ring of tall rhododendron bushes, I lead him inside. He knows what’s up, though he exclaims, “Where are you taking me?” like a damsel in distress. That’s so he can later moan that I kidnapped him. Not that anyone would believe an old satyr with grass stains on his knees and elbows.
Andre lives across from the Wallner Theater, just around the corner from Vera. Back in September, for my eighteenth birthday, she let out the seams on my troubadour coat, so I’m wearing it for the first time in ages. I feel like a peacock with its tail spread.
Andre has short brown hair cut in a dashing, off-center way. He has strong, broad shoulders, but a bit of a paunch. I’d guess he was once athletic, but now—in his fifties—he leads a sedentary life. He’s put on a stunning black-silk coat and red tie for our supper, but my favorite thing about him are his eyebrows, which are long and flaring, and make him seem part owl.
His green eyes lighten with gladness when he sees Isaac, as if the old man is a present just for him, and they kiss cheeks.
“I’m so glad to meet you,” he tells me, smiling excitedly. The handsome, masculine way that wrinkles spread from his eyes makes me believe he could once entice any girl he wanted into his bed.
“Vera made your jacket?” I ask.
“Absolutely! And yours?”
“Who else!”
We smile at having Vera in common. Andre turns to Isaac. “So how was Dr Mabuse?”
We’ve just come from a clandestine revival of the Fritz Lang movie at the Jewish Old Age Home.
“Wonderful,” Isaac says. “The way Mabuse controls people with his stare … I thought it was ridiculous when I first saw it, but now I understand it was a metaphor for the period we’re living through.”
“But the print was awful,” I add. “It looked like cats had been trying to eat it.” Andre turns to Hansi for his opinion. “Both awful and wonderful,” the boy writes on his pad.
The men laugh appreciatively and I give my brother a happy kiss. Who would have thought he’d one day be able to make jokes?
Andre’s sitting room is small but comfortable. A Venetian-glass c
handelier plays facets of ecstatic light over us.
“My one treasure,” Andre tells me. “Saved from my parents’ house.”
Andre’s Czech accent is charming, and he has four glasses of port wine already waiting for us on a silver tray, though I let Hansi drink only a thimbleful; God knows what sort of bushy-tailed genie might come out of that boy if he ever gets drunk.
When our host hands me my drink, I notice his topaz ring. I know I’ve seen it before, but where?
“It was my inheritance from Georg Hirsch,” Andre tells me. “He was kind enough to leave it to me in his will.”
“So you were friends with him, too.”
“Yes, a wonderful man. Kind, intelligent, handsome…” He speaks with an amused twist to his lips that strikes me as odd, though maybe he’s simply recollecting happy moments they had together. I could almost believe that he knew Georg was a traitor and was using his words ironically, but Isaac has already told me that Andre was never a member of The Ring and knows nothing of its history.
“Andre,” Isaac pleads, “can we please not talk about Georg?”
At the time, I think that he simply doesn’t want to be reminded of a man who betrayed him.
We talk about Andre’s background for a time. He grew up in Prague. His father was German and a violin maker, his mother a Czech singer. Andre studied piano, but he later chose graphic design as his profession. He’s been painting scenery on a volunteer basis for the last several years, while making his living at a publishing house.
“I’d love to go to Prague,” I tell him, thinking of Isaac’s stories about the famous mystic, Rabbi Loew.
“We could go together. I’d show you some places no one knows about.” He changes to a whisper. “Including where the Golem is buried.”
“And where is that?” I ask.
“In a Christian cemetery,” Isaac answers for him. “For safekeeping, because that’s where our persecutors would never look!”
Andre switches off the Venetian chandelier and lights tall white candles around us. Throughout our subsequent conversation, the dancing flames give his sharp, precise hand gestures long, mysterious shadows—an expressionist film come to life, and undoubtedly his goal. He says he studied Jewish history and lore with Isaac for a time, though he was raised Catholic and is an atheist by conviction. “I’m indifferent to whether or not God exists,” he tells me with a dismissive wave. “The world is wondrous enough for me as it is. But I do believe that the Jews are important. Because they are a test of the evolution of the human mind and spirit. Must we all have our own country or can we get along together within the same borders?”
The Seventh Gate Page 42
