The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  Even Papa? Maybe he’s waiting for the right moment to have me arrested, and maybe this is the real reason he called me a slut. “So you’ve forgotten your Jewish friends … forgotten Raffi?” I ask.

  “He was never my friend!”

  “He was! You used to play poker every other Friday evening. I remember, even if you don’t.”

  “But we were never friends! You should know that—I proved it when I informed on him to the Gestapo.”

  I jump up, tense with horror. “You did what?”

  “I thought you guessed. I told the Gestapo about his hieroglyphic messages, and when he came back from Egypt, I went to them again.”

  “You son-of-a-bitch!” I shout. “You fucking bastard!”

  “It was my obligation to turn him in. Otherwise, I couldn’t have lived with myself.”

  “Then … then it must have been you who followed me when I went to Julia’s shop.”

  “Who’s Julia?”

  “I went to her shop that day I told you Hansi had pinworms. But you followed me and called the Gestapo.”

  He shrugs as if it no longer matters. “I did what I had to.”

  “You were in their car … waiting outside when they came here. You betrayed me! You’ve betrayed me every step of the way, and I didn’t want to see it!”

  “I was trying to keep you out of trouble. Someday you’ll realize I’ve been kinder to you than you had any right to expect.”

  It was in the moment that Tonio told me my fondness for Isaac was a disease that I began to believe that the physical laws of the world had indeed been inverted: up was down, cruelty kindness, and love hate. Yet I also realized he’d been telling me the kind of person he was all along. He’d made no secret of his allegiances; he had even said that Hansi had no place in the new Germany. I’d refused to believe he’d ever act on his beliefs. And I’d convinced myself that he was hiding kinder sentiments.

  A lesson learned too late: when people tell us who they are, we should listen closely and believe them.

  When I tell Isaac about my break-up with Tonio and how he informed on Raffi, he grows silent, then flees his bedroom for the kitchen. When I chase him down, he proposes that we stop seeing each other for at least a couple of months.

  “But if people already know about us, what’s the point?” I ask.

  He has no answer to that. We end up agreeing that I should go up to his apartment only after dark. And never meet in public or talk on the phone.

  Probably because of our rushed, irregular lovemaking over the next months, pregnancy eludes me. What I dread most is being told I’m barren, so I will not visit a physician. At least not yet.

  Papa says nothing to me about my relationship with Isaac; maybe he doesn’t know about us, after all. Or more likely he’s still waiting for the perfect moment to up his assessment of me from slut to whore.

  I question Hansi about whether he’d be all right if I left Germany for a while.

  “Could I come?” he asks by pointing to himself.

  “Later. I’d go first, and then you’d join me.”

  He writes hurriedly on his pad. “Could Volker come, too?”

  “If he wants to. Listen, would you get frightened if you didn’t see me every day?”

  “No,” he signals.

  “And you’d go to school?”

  “Where else would I go?” he writes.

  When he turns back to his studies, I knock him on the head with my fist, hard enough to earn an irritated look. “What’s that for?” my brother’s puzzled eyes ask.

  “I just felt like it. You can hit me back if you want,” I say invitingly.

  But he doesn’t. He squeezes my hand instead. He’s definitely growing up.

  Isaac says that we need more propitious circumstances—biological and mystical—to make a baby. So he writes to Julia for help and receives a package of dried herbs in the post. Following her instructions, he boils her mixture into a sour concoction that I drink on waking and again on going to bed. I have my doubts that her witch’s brew is doing anything but making my stomach churn and my tongue furry, but he assures me that it is turning the liquids in my body more fluid and giving his “ancient Mesopotamian sperm” a better chance to swim upstream to my egg.

  Despite our best efforts, I menstruate normally in October and November.

  “You’re a tough case, but sooner or later the baby will come,” he assures me.

  “Maybe I can’t conceive,” I moan.

  “You’re just anxious all the time. I don’t think I’ve seen you completely relaxed since that day I discovered you potting pelargoniums in the courtyard.”

  I don’t realize the truth of Isaac’s words until the 1st of December, when Papa and Greta go off to Rome for two weeks; she’s a Catholic and has always wanted to visit the Vatican. His parting words to me are, “Try not to do anything too scandalous while I’m gone.”

  “For you, anything,” I tell him sarcastically.

  After he and Greta are safely on a train zooming south, I can finally sit in a quiet house where hostile footsteps never approach, and where a man who despises me can’t criticize what I’ve made for supper or how I wear my hair. Heaven is drawing Hansi while he feeds the goldfish and in knowing that Isaac is the only man who will walk through the door. We spend all night together in his apartment, since Hansi and Volker have been invited to another classmate’s house, and I sleep through the night without waking even once—for the first time in years.

  Hanukkah is the Festival of Lights and therefore ideal for bringing a new spark of life into the world, according to Isaac. “And even if it weren’t,” he adds cagily, “your father being gone means we can take our time and do things right.”

  On the first evening of the celebration, the 6th of December, he leads me into his bedroom, walking on tiptoe. He carries his menorah ahead of us like a shield, and its single candle sends our thick shadows wobbling over the walls. Twelve days have passed since my last period, so the timing is almost perfect.

  “Are we allowed to make love by the light of a menorah?” I ask Isaac softly as he sets it down on his night table. “As long as you don’t read while we’re at it. Reading is strictly prohibited.”

  “Then I better not bring any novels to bed.”

  After he helps me undress, he takes my head in his hands and asks, “Are you sure this is what you want?”

  “How can you even ask that?” Looking up into his apologetic eyes, I realize more of how his mind works. “You thought my doubts might have been preventing me from getting pregnant.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Silly man, I never wanted anything so much in my life,” I tell him, kissing his lips while standing on my toes. I adore the way my body stretches to him. It’s a kind of ballet that I will dream of many times in years to come.

  I jump onto the bed like a little girl, and as we kiss, I feel as if life has already begun in my womb—just from touching the man I want to father my child and wishing it so. And I feel as if my body is truly mine for the first time in years. “If only Papa would move permanently out of Berlin,” I tell him.

  “You’re an adult now and he has very little power over you,” he tells me, but I know that’s not true; for as long my father can decide Hansi’s future I’ll be his prisoner.

  As Isaac enters me, he recites a verse from Isaiah: “‘Never again shall your sun set, nor your moon withdraw your light.’”

  I try not to laugh, but I do. That prophetic voice he uses … it’s like being fucked by Moses. “I’m sorry,” I tell him.

  He grins, then kisses my eyes. “To laugh when making a baby is a kind of mitzvah—a good deed.”

  We whisper as we make love because our voices make me feel protected. Soon, I catch up to his rhythm, and we are children digging up buried treasure, and I would like us to dig so far down that no one else could ever find us.

  We make love once more that night, and this second time it seems as if Tonio is being purged from me
. The baby will consign him to a past that cannot wound me.

  Over the next seven nights of the holiday, Isaac leads me to bed behind our menorah, and the last time we make love in his bedroom it is under the protection of all seven candle flames. Just as he asks, I recite the verse from Isaiah when he enters me for the eighth time: Never again shall your sun set, nor your moon withdraw your light.

  * * *

  Papa comes home on the 15th of December, looking rested and happy. And with his hair parted on the side. This new style is clearly designed to make him look youthful enough to be dating Greta, and maybe it works. His smile is boyish and bright when he greets me. He’s brought me a gift, too, an old recording of Enrico Caruso. As we listen together, sharing astonishment at the singer’s vocal acrobatics, I sense that his voice is leading us toward a delicately balanced truce. If I manage to become pregnant, maybe Papa will even welcome the news. A complete fantasy, I know, but can I really be blamed for still wanting my old father back?

  A few days before Christmas, I’m summoned to the Turkish Embassy and given my visa by the ambassador himself, a bullish man with a waxed mustache, who insists on offering me a sumptuous lunch, which is when I taste my first manti, meat-stuffed ravioli topped with yoghurt. Have I met my culinary future? He says Istanbul is a small city compared to Berlin, and chaotic, and that the packs of wild dogs are a nuisance, but that it’s lovely when blanketed with snow. “The needle-towers of the minarets against all that white …” he says, taking a big breath of ecstasy.

  “Any moussaka?” I ask.

  “Everywhere. We have a huge Greek community.”

  The next day, the 23rd of December, I have my period, which sets me weeping. When I tell Isaac, he hugs me hard, then runs me a bath. The feel of his big kind hands washing every inch of me only makes my melancholy even worse, however, since this is a man who should have children and I’m helpless to make that happen. “I’m a failure,” I tell him. “And everything has gone wrong.”

  “Shush … Besides, it’s probably me. My Mesopotamian sperm may be defunct.”

  By the time we’re done Isaac is soaked with water, his rolled-up shirtsleeves dripping, just like Raffi and me when we used to bathe Hansi. At first that makes me laugh, but then I start sobbing again. I can’t recall ever feeling so hollow.

  “Get dressed and I’ll take you out for tea and cake,” he says, holding out a big white towel for me.

  “Cake isn’t going to help,” I tell him.

  “I know. But what can I do?”

  He holds open his arms for me to come to him, but I don’t. Two helpless people at an impasse in their very bodies, and neither of us knows the password.

  On Friday the 29th, Monica Mueller comes down with scarlet fever and enters St George’s Hospital with a high fever. Then, on the 3rd of January, she becomes delirious and begins hearing voices. Else and I try to visit her, but we’re turned away by a doctor who tells us that her condition is too precarious for visitors.

  Monica must have given her scarlet fever to her friends before she started showing symptoms, and Hansi breaks out with a red rash all over his face on the 9th of January. He is running a fever of 39.2 by the next afternoon. I put cold compresses on his forehead and give him aspirin. At the same time, Monica’s mental state deteriorates further, at least according to a supervising physician who speaks to her great-aunt on the phone.

  “The poor thing must be terrified,” I write in my diary that evening. “Call parents tomorrow!”

  Monica lives with her diabetic, eighty-two-year-old great-aunt, and the fragile old woman gives me their phone number. They live in Dortmund and tell me they’ll be unable to visit Monica before the weekend. From her father’s sour tone, I have a feeling that they will not come, which means that the girl is on her own.

  On the 11th, Papa insists that my brother be taken to the hospital because he’s read in the newspaper of several recent deaths caused by scarlet fever and Hansi’s temperature is up to 39.8. Having seen all my students sterilized and Vera’s baby murdered by German doctors, I tell him it’s a bad idea. “I’ll stay home and look after him,” I promise.

  “You can’t—you’ll lose your job. And he needs professional care.”

  “Then let’s send him to the Jewish Hospital.”

  “Sophie, are you mad?” he questions, and his sneer is so disdainful that it marks the end to our truce.

  “You and I both know that we can trust Hansi only with Jewish doctors,” I tell him.

  “I don’t know anything of the sort. The boy is an Aryan!”

  Papa calls Dr Nohel, who telephones for an ambulance. After he hangs up, I plead with my father again. “You know what the doctors are going to think of Hansi once they find out he’s been sterilized for feebleminded­ness. He won’t get proper treatment. You’ve got to send him to Jewish physicians!”

  “Don’t you tell me what to do! A girl like you … Don’t forget I could have you put away for how you lead your life.”

  “I’m twenty-two. You can’t touch me!”

  “What you do is illegal. And immoral. I could have you arrested. You and that filthy Jew! If your mother knew … You know what I’ll do? I won’t have you imprisoned, but I’ll have you put in an institution for the insane for the rest of your life. That happens to girls who display sexual misconduct, you know.”

  Now that Tonio has taught me the value of believing what I’m told, I realize that Papa is letting me know precisely what he intends to do if I continue to fight him. His honesty is a form of generosity in the upside-down world we’ve entered; he’s giving me fair warning.

  I stand by the fish tank, my hand gripping its glass, wondering if I should quarrel more violently now, but I decide to wait. A fatal error? Dr Nohel comes over and does his best to reassure me. I find him so physically repulsive that the hairs on my neck stand on end. When the ambulance arrives, I realize I’ve been out-dueled.

  My brother has been in his pajamas for a week, so I ask everyone to leave his bedroom and dress him in woolen pants and his winter coat. I also want a chance to talk to him alone.

  “I don’t feel well,” he signals for at least the twentieth time in the last few days.

  “You can get better more quickly at the hospital.” He signals for me to hand him his pad. His brow crinkled with worry, he writes, “You’ll tell Volker where I am?”

  “Of course.” I’m not supposed to kiss him because he’s contagious, but I do anyway, right between his eyes, just as I once saw him kiss Minnie the dachshund. A silly gesture given the risk, but my heart is pounding too hard to abide by boundaries.

  The ambulance races away with Hansi to the Herzberge State Hospital, and Papa and I follow behind in a taxi. Everything goes smoothly there, especially since Dr Nohel clears a path through the bureaucracy. The room my brother is given has a window looking out on oak trees. I try to divert his attention by saying that I saw a squirrel, but he’s scratching his behind nervously. I let Papa talk to him alone to calm him. After our father leaves for home, I read to Hansi until he falls asleep. Then I draw him until early evening. The familiar movements of my hand ease my mind. When the nurse tells me it’s time to go, he’s still snoozing, so I leave my sketch on his chest. I write on top, “Be back tomorrow. Love, Me.”

  When I get to Isaac’s apartment, he says, “My God, you look like you’ve been run over.”

  “I have.” I explain to him what has happened and he orders me into the bath again. That’s his new solution for all the ills of Germany, at least as they affect me. He scrubs me down and dries me in a big luxurious towel, then helps me dress and orders me to go straight home to sleep, which is exactly what I do.

  The next morning, Else tells me that she spoke to Monica’s great-aunt. The girl has been sent home. Her mind is still in a manic tangle, but her rash and fever are gone. I burst into tears of relief, especially because this is such a good omen for Hansi.

  Two of our other students—transferees from a close
d Jewish school—are in the Jewish Hospital and doing well. This is the only occasion I can remember in the past six years when I think, We’d be much better off if we were Jews.

  * * *

  When I visit Hansi on the afternoon of Sunday the 14th, he sits up for the first time in days. His back is sore, so I rub it, then we play poker. He doesn’t grasp all the rules, but I let him win, so he’s happy. And he has his sense of humor back: when I ask him if the hospital cuisine is all right, he writes, “It tastes like old cat food.”

  The next day Hansi’s rash is almost gone. I beg his physician, Dr Schmidt, to send him home with me.

  “I don’t like the sound of his chest,” he replies. “He’s wheezing. I want to keep him here for observation for two more days. After that, he’s all yours.”

  Dr Schmidt smiles warmly and is very reassuring. I consider that Papa may have had better judgment than I did. I admit that to him that night, but he simply walks past me out of the kitchen and turns up the radio. I escape to Isaac and return home only after midnight.

  When I arrive the next afternoon at the hospital, a floor nurse informs me that Hansi has been transferred. Dr Schmidt tells me that an X-ray of the boy’s chest revealed tuberculosis. “It went undetected for some time, I’m afraid. He’s been transferred to the Buch Waldhaus, a sanitarium that specializes in cases like Hansi’s.”

  “Without my permission?” I ask, outraged.

  “Your father agreed to the transfer. We called him at his office yesterday.”

  The sanitarium is an imposing three-story building in the shape of an E, topped by a red-tile roof and fronted by a lawn and pleasant garden. The receptionist and staff are friendly, and Hansi is in a light-filled triple room on the third floor, but there’s a problem: his two roommates seem to be either catatonic or schizophrenic. One of them looks like a waterbug, with bony elbows and big hollow eyes. He doesn’t move or speak. The other has a shaved head and crust on his hands. He’s tied to his bed with a belt. He mumbles to himself about horses.