The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  “Don’t get off the line,” I tell him, and I explain to Isaac that I have to go fetch Volker.

  “You are not leaving this apartment!” he orders, jumping up and glaring at me.

  “Well, someone is going to have to get him! I’m not leaving him alone.”

  “I’ll go,” he assures me.

  “No! One look at your identity card and they’ll know you’re a Jew.”

  “We’ll send a taxi,” Benni interjects.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, thinking, This man is an idiot!

  “I have a taxi owner who takes me wherever I want to go. Where does Volker live?”

  “In Gesundbrunnen, near St George’s Hospital.”

  “Good, not too far. Tell the boy to get ready. And have him leave a note for his parents.”

  A taxi in the middle of a pogrom? Such are the contradictions of Berlin these days.

  Rainer Kallmeyer—I’ll write down the taxi driver’s name in my diary that night, and also note how he brought us a boiled chicken, sent by his wife. Within half an hour, he’s knocking on our door; he’s walked the trembling boy up to Isaac’s apartment. Volker rushes into my arms, nearly knocking me over.

  Isaac then gives me the number of the Jewish Old Age Home; we fear it’s been set on fire. But the night nurse who answers is as calm as can be. “Storm troopers came and went without doing too much damage,” she assures me.

  A chicken never tasted so good. Handing Volker a wing, I say, “Let’s rake some leaves,” which makes him try to smile. Mostly he gazes down into his fear, so I keep kicking his foot; I don’t want him vanishing into himself. Near three in the morning, the boy steers Benni into the guest room so the two of them can get some sleep. I go back home to tell my father I’m fine, but he’s fast asleep in his armchair. Hansi is up, so I tell him where I’ll be and that Volker is safe, then tuck him in and return to Isaac. We talk until dawn, sitting under the covers, holding hands. His words of outrage spill between us. When we speak of Benni, he tells me that after the accident, he stopped seeing people. “He likes his privacy, but maybe now that his hands have memorized your face, we can visit him from time to time.”

  The next day, Isaac frees Benni’s exuberant Shetland sheepdog, Ringelblume, from his wardrobe, and retrieves his cello. Its neck has been snapped off, then broken in half. “I can have another one made, and the sound will be perfect,” Benni tells us, scoffing at the difficulty, which relieves us all.

  What he doesn’t say is that he has no money to pay for the repair, and none of us will ever hear him play another note. He hides his despair well. I suppose he feels that we hardly need more bad news, which is true enough. Or maybe he already understands that the time for men like him in Germany has come to an end.

  The Morgenpost describes the pogrom as a “spontaneous day of vengeance” for the death of vom Rath. Every Jewish shop in Berlin has been ransacked and destroyed, and all the synagogues have been damaged or burned to the ground, including the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße, the largest in the world. Thousands of Berlin Jews have been arrested and reportedly taken to a new concentration camp called Sachsenhausen, though the rumor is that dozens have already been shot or hanged.

  After the war, we’ll learn that 7,500 Jewish shops were smashed to pieces in Germany on what comes to be known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Shattered Glass. Nazis and their supporters turn 1,600 synagogues to ruins of splinters, shards, and ash. Walking through Berlin over the next days, seeing the Jewish shopkeepers and children sweeping up piles of broken glass and shattered wood, I believe that we’ve survived the worst the government can do. Yes, I am still that naïve.

  A melted streetlamp on Kantstraße, curling toward the ground like a weeping tree in a surrealist nightmare, is the strangest sight I see that week. But it’s the brown bloodstains I spot all over Berlin—and that can never now come off our sidewalks—that seep hot into my dreams.

  Even so, the pogrom is not the sign Isaac has been waiting for. How can he be certain? “I would sense the sky descending and the waters beginning to rise,” he tells me.

  “Please, Isaac, I’m too exhausted for poetry,” I plead.

  “That’s all I have,” he says, and as he turns his pockets out, he says, “Prose is powerless now, and, in any case, I’ve none left.”

  Benni’s daughter, Deborah, comes over the next morning, full of thanks, and she leads her father home. Isaac heads out to check on K-H, Marianne, and countless other friends.

  On the way to school that morning, I take Volker and Hansi to the Rykestraße Synagogue to show them the wasteland the Nazis want to create out of what was once our culture. The boys and I don’t speak. Silent outrage is not enough, but it is all we have.

  When we stop by Rini’s apartment, a man I’ve never seen before answers my knocks and tells me that the Bloch family moved out last July. None of the neighbors knows where they’ve gone.

  I’m too late for Rini by four months. Each day I let fall between us is a weight on my heart.

  Only a third of the students come to school that day. Having stood guard all night, Dr Hassgall naps in his office after giving his morning classes. I call Volker’s aunt in Frankfurt that afternoon, but she won’t be able to fetch him until the weekend, so I bring him home. My father has unglued himself from Greta because of the pogrom and returns from work while Volker and Hansi are concentrating on a jigsaw puzzle of a muscular athlete by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor. It was a present from Papa.

  “What’s that Jewish boy doing here?” my father whisper-screams at me in the kitchen.

  Having predicted his disapproval, I have my reply ready: “Trying to find some fragments of Breker’s balls, I’d guess.”

  “That’s not funny, Sophie. Get rid of him.”

  “You get rid of him,” I say, calling his bluff.

  “Volker!” my father hollers, and the boy comes into the kitchen, all eagerness. “Listen, son,” Papa tells him. “You’ve got to go.”

  That’s proof enough that there’s no bottom to his evil, as far as I’m concerned. Volker gazes down, petrified. “What my father means,” I tell him softly, “is that we’ve had a small change of plans. I’ll be going over to Mr Mannheim’s apartment later this evening to make certain he’s all right. Could you stay there until Saturday when your aunt can come and get you?”

  “Yes, that’s all right,” he replies, his face brightening.

  “We’ll leave in an hour—after supper.”

  As soon as the boy is back at his puzzle, Papa says, “You think I’m a monster, but I’m only protecting our family. You’ll realize that someday.”

  If I were a man, I’d probably deck him with a punch as my reply, but I limit myself to the essential, “That beautiful boy’s parents have been arrested by your friends. If it weren’t for Hansi, I’d leave you.”

  He opens his arms wide. “Be my guest—go whenever you want.” And he grins so as to stick the knife in deep enough to hit bone.

  Mr Mannheim is surprised that I’ve brought Volker to him, but his guest room is free and Ringelblume gives her approval, licking the boy as if he were made of marzipan. If only all our problems were solved so easily.

  On Saturday, Isaac shows me a new government threat in the newspaper, “Jews, abandon all hope. Our net is so fine that there is no hole through which you can slip.”

  The threat’s reference to the inscription on the gates of Hell in Dante’s Inferno—abandon all hope—makes me wonder where all our good Christians have been hiding. Shouldn’t at least thirty million of them have come out in the streets by now to protest against the pogrom against their savior’s people? Except for the preachings of Bernard Lichtenberg, the provost of St Hedwig’s Cathedral, we haven’t heard more than an occasional squeak from our priests and ministers since Reverend Niemöller’s march in Dahlem nearly a year before, when 115 demonstrators were arrested. Apparently 115 is just the right number to tie a gag on the next 29,999,885. Or maybe
the pious prayers of German Christians have always been lies.

  So it is that I lose hope that any organized group will fight for the Jews. And now that the Nazis have destroyed synagogues and shops, only Jewish homes can be next. That is the meaning of Kristallnacht to me, and I tell Isaac he’ll have to get out as soon as possible.

  “Where would you like me to go?” he asks, turning away from the radio to challenge me.

  “Istanbul.”

  Giving me one of his Biblical frowns, he leans forward and raises the volume.

  The frigidity of his reactions makes me curse him at times. Weeks go by without our conversing as friends or making love. Even little annoyances now seem like acute forms of torture. For instance, he leaves trails of ash and pipe tobacco everywhere, even in his pajamas and slippers. I see in his eyes that he still loves me, but the me he cherishes has to make no demands or risk being locked out. I feel cornered by him, my father, and my country, backed up to the imprisoned center of my own powerlessness. I crave Vera’s rudeness, which I can see now was an effective barrier against complacency. I fantasize about leaving for Antwerp all the time.

  At school now, I often pause in the middle of a lesson and wonder why I’m discussing how to draw the slope of a neck or the limbs of a tree. At times, I simply can’t fathom the importance of teaching. A stale taste is in my mouth nearly all the time. Maybe that’s what’s left of my sense of humor. Or a symptom of my continuing lack of sleep. Once, while I’m preparing supper for Hansi, I find my old pillbox and discover six luminals left. They’re tempting, but Hansi is watching me with worried eyes, so I dump them down the toilet for the mutant albino crocodiles, who are also probably suffering sleeplessness these days. I let him do the honors of flushing.

  After the war, dozens of Americans will tell me in their ever-so-earnest way that they’ll never understand how Jews and their supporters could have failed to flee in time. We had people depending on us, I always want to shout. Is that so hard to understand?

  And then there are reasons that are harder to put into words …

  We were waiting for a whole country to wake up. We were offended and wanted an apology. We thought we could outlast them. We didn’t want to drop the novel in the middle.

  Those replies sound either pitiful or laughable after watching newsreels of rag-doll corpses being tossed into ditches inside the death camps, so I keep my lips sealed tight.

  * * *

  Rioters destroy K-H’s studio and steal his cameras during Kristallnacht. The next day, two Gestapo officers come to his apartment and interrogate Marianne. He has gone to the Fasanenstraße synagogue to photograph its smoldering shell, but she tells her guests that he has gone hiking in the Tegeler Forest and won’t be back for several days. After they leave, Marianne grabs Werner and leads him on a circuitous route to Fasanenstraße in case they’re being followed. She finds K-H taking portraits of the rabbi, who is holding a melted brass Exit sign that looks as if it slipped off a canvas by Salvador Dali. K-H picks up Werner, and as a family they head to the Savigny Platz Station. They sleep at K-H’s cousin’s apartment that night and come to Isaac’s home the next morning to get the key to his converted boathouse on the Havel River. Unfortunately, they have meager savings and almost nothing valuable to sell.

  Isaac gives them all the cash he keeps hidden in a pair of moldy old Moroccan slippers, and I fetch the amethyst brooch I inherited from my mother, but Marianne refuses to take it.

  “Cantor Kretschmer told us we were sisters that time we ducked into the Kaiserstraße synagogue,” I remind her. “And sisters protect each other. Besides, it’s only jewelry.”

  Beautiful words, but my mother whispers to me disapprovingly as I hand it to her.

  I manage to reach Rolf over the weekend. “Sophie, thank God, you and Isaac are safe,” he tells me. “And thank God, too, that Heidi wasn’t here to see what’s become of her beloved Berlin.”

  He doesn’t ask after Vera, and I don’t tell him anything.

  As if to re-earn our nickname for him, Hitler soon fines the German Jewish communities one billion marks for the destruction of their own shops and temples, estimated at a fifth of the combined wealth of the 200,000 Jews still living in Germany. Over the next months, they’re also forbidden from going to museums, concert halls, and parks, and their businesses are given to Aryans. The government section of the city south of Unter den Linden becomes off-limits. Their driver’s licenses are taken away, too.

  “Rotz—snot—doesn’t drive, so why should Roth!” The punchline to a joke circulating around Berlin at the time. No, the Nazis will never be funny, but they try on occasion …

  Juden verboten. Almost all the shops along Prenzlauer Allee now have such signs in the windows, though a popular variation is, No Jews or Dogs. But the winning sign is at Lehmann’s Florist Shop: Dead Jews Accepted As Fertilizer.

  My father goes back to spending nearly all his time with Greta. Once, Hansi writes on his pad, “Is Papa married to her?”

  It’s then that I realize they may very well have had a wedding without telling us. “Maybe,” I reply. “Would it bother you if he was?”

  “Not much,” he writes. “But I think it would upset Mama.”

  So he still considers what she would think. Just like me.

  Tonio’s letters to me from that autumn and winter speak of his pride in being able to help Hitler create an empire of German culture in Europe. He does not mention Kristallnacht; maybe he’s certain I’d never see him again if he voiced his opinion.

  One day in early February 1939, K-H and Marianne disappear. At the boathouse, Isaac finds no evidence of a break-in or a struggle, and the hurried note they leave says only, “It is time for us to go. We’ll try to contact you soon. Thank you for everything.” Over the next weeks, we get no call or letter. Isaac is sure they don’t send news because our mail is probably being read and our phones tapped.

  Later that month, when Jews are ordered to turn in all their valuables, Isaac begins selling his artwork, though in this buyer’s market he receives almost nothing for them, even the Chagall. He holds on to my favorite, Otto Dix’s portrait of Iwar von Lücken, but he also sells three early Grosz drawings. In all, he earns enough for four months of groceries if he eats at his usual mouse-like pace.

  By that time, most of the 30,000 Jews sent to concentration camps on Kristallnacht have been returned to their homes on the condition that they emigrate. Volker’s father and mother are among them, so the boy can return from his aunt and uncle’s house in Frankfurt.

  Soon after that, Dr Hassgall tells me that Zarco Industries is sinking fast, so he has ordered a pay cut for all the workers, including Isaac, who has received a modest monthly stipend since the sale of his business. I also suffer a twenty percent reduction of my school salary. Happily, Papa keeps getting raises, and he’s up for a big promotion. I ask him for more household money than I need and spend what’s leftover on Isaac.

  Jewish schools start to be shut down on the 1st of April, which is a lopsided piece of good news for Dr Hassgall, since seven new students enroll with us. Then, the father of one of our old students writes a protest letter to him. The man—Lothar Strauss—claims that there are too many Jewish pupils and that we are no longer able to provide a “healthy, German atmosphere.”

  Dr Hassgall invites Herr Strauss and all the other parents—Jews and Gentile alike—to a meeting in order to talk over school policy, but the disgruntled man proves himself a coward and refuses to show up to face the people he is most injuring. Only when the Jews are excluded does he come, along with seven other fathers and twelve mothers. He gives a showy, stiff-armed “Heil Hitler” to the other parents.

  Papa is not there; fearing that he’d remove Hansi from school, I tossed his invitation into the garbage.

  Dr Hassgall conducts the tense session with his dignified, nineteenth-century demeanor until Mr Strauss says that our headmaster has been threatening the education of his Aryan majority simply to please some
rich Bolshevik Jews.

  “Give me the names of these rich Bolsheviks!” Dr Hassgall challenges him.

  The first parent Mr Strauss names is Volker’s father, who has lost his job as a supervisor at a candy-making factory and is living on handouts from relatives and what he can make at contract bridge tournaments. The lout goes on to name all the other Jewish parents. When he’s finished, Dr Hassgall replies, “I’ll give you this—you have a fine memory for names.” His admiring and amused tone takes us off-guard, which is why several fathers and mothers gasp when he adds, “Now, Herr Strauss, if you don’t leave my school immediately, I’m going to fetch my old army pistol and put a bullet in what’s left of your brain.”

  Else, shaken by a tremor of emotion, grips my arm. If I were still the wayward danger-seeker I’d been as a girl, I’d be thrilled that we seem to have entered a German Western just prior to the big shootout, but my nerves are always one raised voice from panic these days and it’s all I can do to keep from running out of the room. For better or worse, Herr Strauss refuses to write himself into the gunfight, and he stomps out after telling Dr Hassgall he’s pulling his son out of the school. Five sets of parents decide to do the same.

  After the meeting, Dr Hassgall apologizes to the teachers for his outburst. His shirt collar is soaked and he can’t get enough breath. I fetch him his bottle of Russian vodka from his office and hand it to him with a kiss on the cheek. “I know it cost you to get angry, but it was worth it!”

  Vera writes every two weeks. As could be predicted, she hates Antwerp. She has made no friends and tells us that Andre is sick of sharing his apartment with her, and the only thing more wretched than the Flemish sense of humor is the cuisine. “Everything tastes like old cat food,” she alleges.

  When I read Hansi her letter, he writes on his pad, “How does she know what old cat food tastes like?”

  We laugh and laugh; hysteria, too, accompanies my long slide into depression.