The Seventh Gate

by Richard Zimler

  “Our son or daughter will need a healthy father, so please be careful.”

  “I hope that you’ll need me, too,” he whispers, since he’s now lost his voice.

  He rests his head on my belly and I comb his soft silver hair with my fingers. I’d give all the drawings I’ve ever done—even my whole future—to stay in this room forever.

  As we walk to the train station, I confess what I’ve done to my father. Isaac already knows that my rash behavior will complicate his life, but he doesn’t want to hurt my feelings or make our farewell any worse. “You did what you had to do,” he tells me. “And it’s not for me to judge you.”

  Once we’re standing beside the train, he says, “When you’re in Belgium, try not to get too angry at me for not coming along.”

  “I’ll try, but no promises,” I reply, doing my best to smile.

  “I’ve got a tiny going-away present to help you appreciate what Vera will tell you when you reach her.”

  “What’s she going to tell me?”

  “You like mysteries, so have a little patience.”

  “So what’s the present you have?”

  He hands me a piece of paper on which he’s written a riddle: I cross the German-Belgian border and rise on the Mount of Olives. Who am I?

  “But the Mount of Olives is in Jerusalem?” I say.

  “Yes, and it’s where we shall all be reborn when the Messiah comes.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Because it’s a riddle!” he exclaims, throwing up his hands.

  We laugh at his comic exasperation, and I put the square of paper in my card case, next to the photograph of Raffi that Mrs Munchenberg gave me when I said good-bye to her. I kiss Isaac, and I tell him I love him. And in that one word live so many other emotions that I cannot express, so I simply hold him tight. He kisses me back, taps his finger at the center of my forehead, and recites my favorite poem:

  Last night while I lay sleeping,

  I dreamt—oh blessed illusion

  that a beehive I was keeping

  inside my heart;

  And from my bitter, rotting

  failures, golden bees

  were making

  a pure white comb with the sweetest honey.

  “Remember those magic words as long as you live,” he says. “And let the bees do their work!”

  The conductor strides past us, about to signal the train to depart. Each step up the staircase into my wagon feels hard and brittle, as though I’m breaking a pact between us. I turn to him from the landing. We both look at who we’re about to leave. The whistle sounds, making me start. I wave good-bye, the weight of my tenderness for him heavy on my shoulders. He waves, as well, then puts his pipe in his mouth and stares at me, his eyes moist and shoulders hunched, as though he’s a little boy.

  I don’t know what he sees in me at that moment, but I see everything that’s ever made me feel my life was important—Hansi kissing Minnie as she lay dying, Dürer’s portrait of his mother, Vera handing me my troubadour coat … I see Berlin in a fairy-tale darkness and a girl who sits between her beloved papa’s legs while listening to American crooners, and a mother hunting for a dumpling recipe, and all the past that will never be repeated even if I am reborn a thousand times.

  When will Isaac and I meet again?

  Andre and Vera are waiting for me at the station in Liège.

  “I’m so sorry about Hansi,” Vera tells me, bending down to kiss my cheek. She holds me away and studies me. “Was the journey all right?”

  “I survived.”

  “And the baby?”

  “Fine, I hope. So Isaac told you I’m pregnant?”

  She gives me an evil squint. “He knew better than to try to keep important news from Aunt Vera!”

  When I reach out to shake Andre’s hand, he grins like a trickster. “I’d prefer it if you use my real name,” he tells me, and he no longer has a Czech accent.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “I don’t understand,” I tell Andre. “What’s your real name?”

  We’re threading through the crowds at the end of the platform. People gape at Vera and speak in hurried French about her height. Je n’ai jamais vu une femme si grande …

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Vera says. “Isaac’s Carnival party, 1932. We almost went to the Botanical Gardens together.” Seeing me stumped, she adds, “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.”

  “Georg Hirsch?”

  “That’s right.” He takes my shoulder. “I’m sorry we had to fool you.”

  “But Georg Hirsch is dead,” I tell him, thinking that it would be just like Vera to welcome me with a practical joke. “Isaac was in tears when he told me …”

  “Isaac is no romantic lead, but he gives a fine performance when he has to.”

  “But I saw the photos that K-H took of Georg at the morgue!” I exclaim.

  She grins at my confusion, patting my head as if I’m a little girl. “Wait till we get in the car.”

  Andre summons me over toward an old, battered Mercedes parked on a side street. He unlocks the doors. I sit in the back seat but lean over the front to talk to them. Though Vera slouches, her head still scrapes the ceiling.

  “We faked my death,” Georg tells me, starting up the car, gazing at me in the rear-view mirror. “I became Georg again here. I’ll put on my Cesare makeup later and you’ll see.”

  So this is the answer to Isaac’s riddle. “You were the one who crossed the border and rose on the Mount of Olives,” I tell him.

  “In a way of speaking.”

  “And all these years you’ve been lying to me!” I tell Vera, punching her shoulder.

  “I had to.” She gives me a stiff-armed salute. “General Zarco’s orders, Private Riedesel.”

  “And he lied to me too!”

  “What makes you think you always have a right to the truth?” she tells me, sighing as though I’m a cross to bear. “As a matter of fact, lying to you was very important. Though we tried to keep it to a minimum. You’ll have to hear more about Georg before the reason will make sense to you.”

  “All that you told me about Prague … that was all made up?” I ask him.

  “No, I lived there for four years. That’s why I chose the name Andre Baldwin. He’s the main character in Paul Wegener’s The Student of Prague.”

  I pound my seat because I should have guessed. “I knew I’d heard the name somewhere!”

  In The Student of Prague, Andre Baldwin makes a deal with a sorcerer. He gets wealth and a wonderful marriage, but the sorcerer is permitted to makes use of the student’s reflection, which he coaxes out of a looking glass and brings to life.

  “I was being targeted by the Nazis,” Georg continues. “They shot at me once in Savigny Platz. They might have got me next time. So we faked my death and summoned out a new identity for me from the looking glass.”

  “So that was why you once told me the safest place to be was already dead,” I tell Vera.

  “Bull’s-eye!”

  “And that’s why,” I say, speaking to Georg, “when you had Isaac and me over for supper you got such amusement about saying nice things about your alter ego.”

  “I couldn’t help being a little silly.”

  By now we’re driving west out of Liège. “Then who was in the photographs I saw?”

  “What was his name?” Georg asks Vera. “I can’t recall.”

  “Helmut something.” Vera turns to me. “K-H must have told you he was a police photographer before he started working at the deaf newspaper. Well, he knew everyone at the coroner’s office. That proved useful when we needed a body.”

  “Though we had to wait a month to get a man of my age and build,” Georg tells me.

  Their hoax now seems a fitting opening to my life beyond Germany, though I still don’t guess just how clever Isaac, Georg, and Vera have been.

  “And Helmut was a good match?” I ask excitedly.

  “Actually, he wasn’t so hot,” Vera
replies, “but we couldn’t risk waiting any longer. We bribed one of the vampires at the morgue to give us Helmut’s body and made him up to look like Georg.” She offers me a cigarette, but I pass. “We even dyed Helmut’s hair,” she says in an exhale of smoke.

  To Georg, I say, “And you cut your hair short to match his. One of your neighbors, Mrs Brill, told me about your haircut.”

  “Yes, as it turns out, she’s got a pretty good memory.”

  “Guess who got stuck with clipping Helmut’s yellow, dead-man’s fingernails?” Vera asks me, and her snarling tone makes the answer obvious. “Because this old hen here refused to do it!” She pushes Georg’s shoulder. “As for your brave friend Isaac, leader of the Hebrew tribe of shvuntzes—cowards—he wouldn’t look at the cadaver’s face.” She hides her eyes behind her hands, then peeks out girlishly. “After Helmut’s transformation, we took him to Georg’s apartment. I was …”

  “Wait, how did you get him there?” I interrupt.

  “At first we wanted to put him in Benjamin Mannheim’s cello case,” Georg says.

  “Isaac’s idea,” Vera adds, snorting, which makes me laugh out loud for the first time in weeks. I seem to have entered a Chaplinesque comedy; outwitting the Nazis—and being across the border—has revived my humor.

  “The case was too small, of course,” Georg tells me. As he tilts his head, he makes a cracking noise. “We nearly broke the poor man’s neck trying to stuff him in. So we took Isaac’s rug to the morgue in a delivery truck that Julia had access to, and we rolled Helmut inside—just like a bratwurst.”

  “So that’s why neighbors saw you moving things just before your death. And that’s why you had Isaac’s rug when you turned into Andre!”

  “We were too exhausted to bring it back,” Georg tells me. “And besides, we didn’t want to be seen coming and going from Isaac’s place.”

  “And the police believed Helmut was you?”

  “They must have. Isaac, as my only local relative, identified the body, and we know they were investigating my murder thoroughly because they questioned Vera and Isaac so roughly.”

  “We diverted the attention of the authorities with my excellent makeup job,” Vera says. She bats her eyelids. “My idea, and a very good one, especially those blue swastikas, which matched Helmut’s skin discoloration so nicely. I didn’t want anything to clash, of course.”

  “You used Georg’s makeup kit,” I speculate. “And then removed it from his apartment.”

  “Exactly.”

  Georg says, “The idea was to confuse the police with small mysteries—the blue swastikas, the missing makeup kit, the precise cause of death … That way, they wouldn’t notice the identity switch. And we wanted to confuse you, as well.”

  “Why me?”

  “Patience,” Vera says seductively.

  “All right, but tell me if Helmut was really poisoned, like I thought?”

  “Yes. We were told his wife did it. Antimony, I believe.”

  “Which is why his face turned blue.”

  Vera shrugs. “I suppose that’s what caused it. I don’t really know.”

  “Do you know why she killed him?”

  “Not a clue,” Georg replies.

  “But she strangled him after she poisoned him, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, and she was so forceful that she broke his windpipe,” Vera tells me. “I bet she was petrified he’d wake up. She probably hit him over the head, too. There was a bruise on his forehead that didn’t show up in the photographs.”

  “Sophie, there was another reason why I had to vanish,” Georg tells me in a grave voice.

  “We’d decided to kill the traitor in The Ring,” Vera tells me. “And Georg could do that now with little risk of being caught. Because he was dead!”

  “Except that it wasn’t easy finding the traitor,” Georg confesses.

  “But in the end, you learned it was Rolf?” I ask. “I mean, was I right about that?”

  “Yes and no. Just before I received the notice about my sterilization hearing, we’d narrowed down the list of possible traitors to Rolf, Heidi, K-H, and Marianne. Then, when I went into hiding to avoid appearing in court, I decided to tell Rolf and Heidi that I was going to be at Isaac’s factory, but I told K-H and Marianne I’d be at the warehouse across the street. And I made them swear not to tell anyone else … not even members of The Ring.”

  “So all you had to do was wait to see which of the two places the Gestapo searched,” I say, admiring their strategy.

  “They went to the factory,” Vera reminds me.

  “So you knew Heidi and Rolf were the traitors,” I observe.

  She nods. “But were both of them betraying us or only one? And which one? We had to know for sure. Do you remember that going-away party for me you came to—when you made a wicked face at me because you overheard me telling Heidi that the get-together was a last-minute decision, and you knew that wasn’t true.”

  “I remember. I thought you were acting very suspicious.”

  “I’d decided to invite Heidi and Rolf over to see if I could trick one of them into slipping up, but their performances were line-perfect. I took such a stupid risk!”

  “Though none of us thought so at the time,” Georg reassures her. “We had Isaac tell Heidi and Rolf about Vera’s party at the last minute, at their apartment, and he escorted them straight over to his place. That was so they wouldn’t have time to alert Dr Stangl or any other Nazi who might be working with them.”

  “And after the party, K-H took Heidi and Rolf home. We told him to drive slowly and not let them out of his sight for at least half an hour—to give me time to get away.”

  “But the Gestapo still came for you,” I say.

  “They must have been watching Rolf and Heidi’s every move. They followed them to Isaac’s apartment and then dragged me away.”

  “It’s possible that Rolf and Heidi didn’t know that Nazis were watching them so closely,” Georg observes. “That’s what Heidi told Vera, and maybe it’s true.”

  “You spoke to Heidi about all this?” I ask, stunned.

  “After I’d lost the baby, I confronted her. I didn’t want to face Rolf and her together. I felt I could get the truth out of Heidi alone. She agreed to come to my apartment. I think there were some things she wanted to tell me, too. I … I was planning to kill her.”

  She shakes her head at the difficult memory and takes a long puff on her cigarette, then tosses it out her window. The passing houses seem so small and quiet, and the sky hangs low over the red-tile rooftops and darkened fields. The deep, steady beating inside my chest is Berlin disappearing behind me, and my fear that I will never live there again.

  “Sophele, I was three minutes from escaping,” Vera continues in a desperate voice. “Three minutes from saving my baby, and Heidi took that future away from me!”

  Georg asks Vera to check we’re headed the right away. As she compares town signs with the indications on her map, he and I share a look of concern for her in the rear-view mirror.

  Certain now that we’re headed away from the Fatherland, Vera turns around to face me. “Heidi explained to me about Dr Stangl giving her expensive fertility drugs in exchange for information about The Ring. The poor little thing was weeping. She said she never once thought my baby would be killed. I ended up believing her.”

  “And all that time she’d had her tubes tied, just like Vera,” Georg reminds me.

  “Heidi told me that Rolf hadn’t betrayed me,” Vera continues. “She said she always went alone to Stangl to report on our activities.”

  “And that’s why,” I speculate, “when I told you that Dr Stangl’s wife had complained about all the visits from Rolf, you got so upset. You realized she’d lied to you. And fooled you.”

  “Yes, but things get complicated here. You see, I didn’t believe her entirely—I thought she might be lying to protect Rolf. She asked me to come to her apartment the following afternoon, while Rolf was at work. She
’d prove that only she was responsible. ‘Why should I trust you?’ I asked her, and she said, ‘Because I hate what I did to you. And because even after all that’s happened, you must feel we’re still friends or you’d have killed me by now.’ She was right, so I went to see her.”

  “With me,” Georg adds. Because I didn’t trust Heidi at all. And I took my gun. But Heidi wasn’t at home …”

  “Was your gun the same one you had before you changed your identity?”

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “Because when I asked Vera what happened to your gun after you were supposedly murdered, she hesitated, which made me suspicious. Then she said she gave it to the police.”

  “You’re right, Sophele, I almost slipped up. I didn’t realize you’d ask that question. I wasn’t prepared for everything.” She smiles cagily. “Though mostly I gave a pretty good performance, don’t you think?”

  “Too good.”

  “Anyway, Heidi wasn’t home when we got to her apartment,” Georg continues. “We waited to see if she’d show up, and when she didn’t, we returned to Isaac’s place. In the kitchen, we found her body, lying on the floor.”

  “She’d left a note for me,” Vera says. “She wrote that ending her life was the only way she had to try to make up for my dead baby. She begged me not to tell Rolf she’d killed herself, because he’d feel responsible. She repeated that he had nothing to do with betraying us.”

  “How did she commit suicide?”

  “I found an empty bottle of tranquilizers next to the sink,” Vera replies.

  “So Heidi gave up her life to save Rolf,” I say.

  “Yes, and to even out our destinies,” Vera replies. “You see, without intending to, I gave her a way to make her death have some purpose … some meaning. Knowing Heidi, she’d have wanted that, especially after being duped by Stangl.”

  “And how did she get into Isaac’s apartment?” I ask.

  “She left his key on top of her note. She’d borrowed a spare one years before, and she must have still had it.”

  “And you discarded her body in the Rummelsburger See,” I say.