The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  When I see Tonio for our monthly weekend of erotic acrobatics in December 1936, he announces that his father has offered him a spectacular allowance if he’ll make a career in the army. I haven’t seen him this excited in a long time. “Sophie, if I save up for a few years, I’ll be able to buy a used Bugatti,” he explains to me as if he needs my approval. “Imagine ostrich leather seats and Brazilian mahogany doors.”

  So that’s what God looks like to Tonio now—bird skin and tropical wood! Though I also believe he’s settled on this youthful fantasy because he now accepts that his adult one—taking marriage vows with me—is very unlikely to happen. Or maybe I’m just flattering myself.

  “Sounds absolutely perfect!” I tell him gushingly, wanting to encourage him.

  We’re in his father’s apartment, naked. I’m lying on my back, studying the top of his head, which—because of his army haircut—seems too flat to me, and he’s sitting up with his legs crossed, pictures of tanks spread between us, since he’s desperate for the chance to drive a Panzer. His cheeks are shadowed with manly stubble, making his long-lashed brown eyes—lit captivatingly with future dreams at the moment—more seductive than ever. Can you be sure you’d break up with such a young man over politics?

  “I have only one question,” I tell him. “What will you do with the Bugatti in the army?”

  “I’ll quit as soon as I have it and buy my own garage, and fix fancy cars for movie stars!”

  I adore the way his lips curl into a wily smile, and I realize I want him to be happy and fulfilled. Maybe breaking up with him right now and letting him find a Young Maiden who wants nothing more than three blond children and a ride in a fancy car would be the kindest thing for me to do.

  Yet I don’t. And I enjoy seeing him one weekend a month as much as ever. Are we joined by the gravity of a friendship that began long before we first kissed, a solidarity that is deeper than his adoration of Dr Goebbels and his wish for a normal life? Nevertheless, when I’m not inside the magic circle he makes out of his charm and enthusiasm, I get angry with myself for not finding the courage to move on. Maybe if Isaac were to grow jealous, I could tell Tonio we’re finished. Yet he never once voices an objection.

  Two months later, Tonio is transferred to the 1st Panzer Division. Trying to impress me, he writes that his best friend is Franz Wittelsbach von Bayern, the son of Prince Georg of Bavaria and grandson of Prince Leopold. “Franz is royalty, but he has to salute Colonel-General Schmidt just like me!!” Tonio tells me, his two exclamation points giving me the distinct impression he’s been hoodwinked into believing that he and Franz are really regarded as equals in Germany.

  I’m glad he has realized his goal of sitting atop a Panzer, but I wonder if he’ll ever grow up. And will I?

  During 1937, I have no contact with Rolf. And neither do Vera or Isaac, at least not that they’ll admit. Though I’m pretty sure that he must have been the traitor working with Georg, a big crack often opens in my certainty as soon as I turn off the lights in my bedroom and think about all that could still go wrong with our lives. And it’s no comfort that we know nothing about whom Rolf and Dr Stangl might have been passing on information to in the Nazi hierarchy.

  I once tell Isaac about the terrors that still keep me up at night, and he assures me that I’m safe, as if my own welfare is all I’m concerned about. “But what about you?” I demand, of course. “What if Rolf still wants to hurt you? Maybe we need to do something about him.”

  “The pressure is off Rolf now that Heidi is dead,” he replies. “Even if he was the traitor, he’s finished hurting anyone. I’m sure of it.”

  “Have you spoken to him? Is that how you know?”

  “No, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve had no meetings of The Ring in a very long time. I’m living and working in a world the Nazis can’t even glimpse.” He pokes his finger into the center of his forehead in case I’ve failed to grasp his meaning.

  “Be serious!” I plead.

  He takes my hand and gives me a dark look. “I’m more serious than you could ever know.”

  Let him believe nothing can happen to him if that’s what he wants, I think angrily, but what really infuriates me is that he’ll no longer even tell me how he’s faring with his Turkish journalists, or who he is helping to flee Germany. “It’s far better for you not to know anything about all that,” he says.

  Over that winter and early spring, our life together stitches itself into secretive but regular patterns. Isaac and I are careful never to reveal our affection in public, and, having heard that the government is bugging thousands of lines, we learn to say only banalities over the phone. He and I almost never have a quarrel, and when we do it’s nearly always because he works till dawn copying Berekiah Zarco’s manuscripts and is too exhausted the next day to supervise work at his factory or even eat the supper I prepare.

  Isaac receives letters from Andre and Julia every few months, and though they are relieved to be Nazi-free, they even miss Berlin’s red-neon dinginess and stink of hops. Vera, K-H, and Marianne still come over for Sabbath dinner nearly every Friday night. Herr Wachlenberg, the owner of the River Jordan Bakery on Prenzlauer Allee, is a friend of Isaac’s and always helps me choose the challah bread for the ritual meal. Marianne teaches me how to make stuffed cabbage, Isaac’s all-time favorite food. The recipe is Heidi’s.

  In late March, Vera, Marianne, and I make a huge Passover dinner, and the pièce de résistance is a gigantic goose with Preiselbeeren. It’s not quite as good as the one Andre made, but K-H and Isaac gnaw at it down to the bone as if they’ve been starved for a month.

  Tonio writes once every few weeks, as well, and we get to see each other for weekends in April, June, and October. I bring up politics now and again, to see if he’ll give me any clues to what he and his friends have in store for the Jews and those who’ve been classified as genetically inferior. I know it’s irrational to believe that he has been made aware of some top-secret strategy, but my worries make me inquisitive and, on his October visit, foolishly insistent. In consequence, he becomes tight-lipped with me in a way he never was before. “Sophie, stop! You should know by now that we don’t set policy in the army,” he snaps at me. “We just carry out the wishes of the government.”

  His continuing impatience with me leads me to believe he may have found another girl, which terrifies me at first, then becomes a kind of unspoken wish. To stay on neutral ground with him, I end up talking mostly about the school kids. He listens closely, gives me advice meant to ease my doubts, and laughs in all the right places. In a dictatorship there’s safety in small talk, of course.

  Even so, being able to discuss the weather, art lessons, and movie stars must be little consolation to Jewish accountants and dentists, who are soon prevented from practicing their professions. Or for the heartbroken parents who have their children taken away from them by our courts because they oppose National Socialism. Still, there is some good news for all these unfortunates: those who are arrested for protesting too vehemently will no longer be sent to the overcrowded Konzentrationslager at Dachau because a brand-new one called Buchenwald has opened for business!

  Papa and Greta become glued to each other that summer and even take a cruise down the Danube in August. He spends only one or two nights a week at home now, usually on Tuesday and sometimes Wednesday, and he gives me an allowance so I can take care of the apartment and buy food. Hansi has learned to dial the phone and calls him sometimes in the evening, then hands me the receiver, clinging to me like a limpet while I invent some reason for interrupting Papa’s dinner or cocktails, sputtering on about mail he’s received and how the goldfish seem sick—anything but the taboo subject of how much his son misses him.

  “He’ll come home on Tuesday and take you for dinner,” I tell Hansi every time I hang up. And I’m not lying. On his weekly visit, Papa is attentive and kind to his son. I don’t want to let my anger tear up the shreds of a relationship they still have and usually flee the house.
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  Hansi’s main teacher Else and I go out for a drink after school every Friday, and whenever she gets a little tipsy, she reveals bits and pieces of her love life. Her great passion, Bettina, was a salesgirl from Charlottenburg, but their clandestine relationship ended when the young woman went back to her husband two years ago. Else doesn’t care for movies, but she adores theater and opera. In November, she takes me to Tristan and Isolde. All those voices rising and falling together are like a warm ocean of sound washing over me and the entire world. I could almost forgive Wagner for being the Opposite-Compass’ favorite composer.

  When I look back at that year, I think of it as a peaceful island, when I was still young enough—having recently turned twenty—to believe that the distant horizon in every direction belonged to Isaac, Vera, Hansi, and me, and not our enemies.

  Then 1938 arrives and I realize we’ve been descending into the underworld without our even knowing it. Though it begins calmly enough …

  Isaac has his seventieth birthday party on the 1st of February, 1938. Vera comes over early, and she and I prepare two ducks in orange sauce and bake a chocolate cake, though she keeps trying to make me deviate from my mother’s recipe and pours two shots of kirsch into the melted cocoa while I’m fussing with the oven. Then she scrapes the leftover batter from the bowl with her finger and licks it off with wolf-like joy.

  Mama’s ghost watches Papa and Greta

  “Why do I think you might even eat seagulls and crows on occasion?” I tell her.

  “I prefer hamsters,” she replies. “More light meat!”

  She and I manage to cram seventy yellow candles—and one red one for good luck!—into the icing, which bears Isaac’s name written in butter-cream. He is not allowed in the kitchen. When I go to the bedroom to see what he’s chosen to wear—since I’ve forbidden him from putting on anything with holes or stains—he’s naked except for the blue and yellow argyle socks I’ve bought him as part of his birthday present, which also includes new flannel pajamas. He’s staring into his wardrobe as if it’s an abyss, his pipe dangling down from his mouth.

  “What are you doing still undressed?” I demand.

  “I’ve got so little choice!”

  “You have beautiful trousers and shirts you’ve never even worn!”

  He wrinkles his nose. “They smell of mothballs.”

  “Is this hesitation because you’re anxious about turning seventy?”

  “You tell me!” He presses himself into my hip so I can feel that hesitance is hardly his problem, but I don’t give myself to him because he’d end up snoozing through dinner.

  Has his birthday sent extra hormones pulsing to his putz? He moves my hand to his impressive erection while we make quick work of the ducks, then gets tipsy and dances with me to Kurt Weill as if he’s got warm coals in his belly. He even leans me back—Rudolph Valentino–style—and gives me a long kiss. The alter kacker as The Sheik …

  The next day, after work, he goes back to copying his manuscripts, and he tells me he’s gratified to be getting to know his ancestor better. “I can sense him standing behind me and blessing me. Though he doesn’t look like I expected. His hair is shoulder length, a bit curly, and he has a scar on his cheek.”

  “So you really do see Berekiah?”

  Raising his eyebrows, he asks, “Is that unusual?”

  For the first time, Isaac reads the Megillah, the Book of Esther, to me on Purim eve, which falls that year on the 14th of February. He sings the text in his warm tenor, and though I don’t understand a word of the Hebrew, I sit happily between his legs, daydreaming of the baby he will make in me. He taps my head whenever he says the villain Haman’s name, and I boo and holler, as is the tradition. After I go back home, he stays up all night praying by the light of a single candle.

  The next day, just before sundown, he and I rush off to the Jewish Old People’s Home, Hansi and Volker straggling behind us. We make a brief detour to the River Jordan, and Herr Wachlenberg hands him a giant box of triangular cookies—hamantaschen—that are special to Purim.

  Hansi and Volker are fourteen years old now, and both of them are taller than me. My brother is slim and graceful—like a faun. He needs to shave his mustache twice a week, and his cheeks have an adult angularity that I find exciting. He’s also become fastidious about combing his hair to the side. Have his bangs been banished by thoughts of girls? I don’t ask. Volker admits that he thinks about his classmate Monica all the time but hasn’t yet told her of what he calls his “admiration” for her.

  Vera and Isaac have sewn masks for us to wear at the Old Age Home—another Purim tradition. We’ve all got different colored snouts—gold for Hansi, ruby-red for Volker, silver for me, and black for Isaac. Mrs Kaufmann and most of the old folks feign terror when they spot us, which makes Isaac howl with joy. He prances around the hallways, growling, his teeth bared.

  “Happy is the man who inspires shrieks and then gets to give everyone hamantaschen!” he tells us exultantly on the way home, handing me one last cookie that he’s saved just for me.

  On the 7th of March, Isaac bolts his apartment door and won’t answer my pleas that he let me in.

  “Go away!” he hollers once, and then says nothing more.

  Panicked, I call Vera. She comes over and bangs on the door with her fists to no avail. We go to Prenzlauer Allee and call up to his window, which makes him yank his curtains closed. Only two days later does he open his door. His face is lined with exhaustion and he smells like hell. Pouches sag under his eyes. He tells me he’s been praying for forty-eight hours. “The stained glass of our world has become so fractured that it cannot sustain its own weight, and it will soon shatter to pieces,” he explains somberly. “It’s unbelievable how quickly it’s happening.”

  He sobs in my arms. I lead him to bed, his steps labored. I try to get him to sleep, but he’s restless and inconsolable. The only way I can get him under the covers is by promising not to leave him. I get him to swallow half a luminal with a glass of schnapps, and that finally does the trick.

  He remains despairing over the next few days, but he refuses to talk to me about the shattering of our world. Then, on the 12th of March, Germany annexes Austria. On the radio, we hear that thousands of Hitler’s opponents have been arrested, and the newspapers show photographs of bearded rabbis made to sweep the streets, onlookers laughing merrily behind them. Do Aryan seamstresses make lampshades and purses out of the skin of the 500 Austrian Jews who commit suicide over the next month? That’s a question we can only ask in hindsight, of course, but Isaac and I do already wonder how long will it take for the good Christian doctors of Graz and Salzburg to take their knives to the distant children, as well as to the deaf, blind, and deformed. Such speculations might explain Isaac’s deep depression, except that he tells me, “No, we have a far bigger problem than Austria.”

  He’s hunched over his copying work at his desk, and I’m sitting on his bed. He’s wearing my beret because he claims it helps him keep his thoughts inside his head.

  “So what’s our bigger problem?” I ask. When he remains buried in his text, I add in a tone of warning, “Tell me right this instant or we’re going to have a quarrel like you won’t believe!”

  He turns around with sunken, distant eyes. “The three upper kelim won’t last much longer. They’re already spilling blood on all of us.”

  “What are the kelim?”

  “You remember when I told you about Isaac Luria, the kabbalist from Safed? Luria says that ten kelim, vessels, were originally meant to contain the Lord’s light, but that they weren’t strong enough. Seven of them shattered, which multiplied injustice and imbalance in our Lower Realms. The moral substance of our world came undone, and the kelipot came to have real power.”

  “What are the kelipot?”

  “Evil beings, or if you prefer, our capacity for evil deeds and thoughts.” He fills the bowl of his pipe. But you see, Sophele, three of the vessels did not shatter, which is a good thing, be
cause if they had, our world would have been reduced to the chaos before God spoke His initial word.”

  I come to him and kiss him on the lips, since he looks as if he needs my reassurance. “What are the three vessels that remained intact?” I ask.

  “Kether Elyon, Hokhmah, and Binah. The Crown, Wisdom, and Insight. But I believe that what is happening now is that these three last vessels are coming undone. The stained glass into which we have been born will come crashing down, and our lives will end. It will be as if all this”—he sweeps his hand in a wide arc to indicate our universe—“never existed.”

  Is he a madman or the most clear-sighted person in Germany? We await a sign, since he’s convinced the Lord will make it known to him when the upper vessels have shattered.

  “And once they have, how long will it take for the world to end?” I question as he lights his pipe and draws in the calming smoke.

  “There’s no way to know. A second, a year, a decade … God’s time is not like ours.”

  “And if you journey to Araboth and ask the Lord to stop this from happening?”

  “He will redeem the world.”

  What is the sign we await? Isaac doesn’t know. Could it be the mandatory registration of all property held by Jews, which comes on the 26th of April? He’s certain that isn’t it. Or Hitler’s order to destroy the Munich synagogue? After that grand old building comes crashing down on the 9th of June, Isaac shakes his head. “That’s not it either.”

  Isaac after staying up all night to search for the prayer formula he will need to enter Araboth

  How about the mass arrest of those Berlin Jews who have police records on the 15th of June? “After all,” I tell him, “fifteen hundred Jews in concentration camps sounds like an alarm bell to me.”