"For God's sake, Friedrich!" Jacob Freund stared at his partner with stunned incomprehension as the men took the boy from his father and laid him on the stretcher. With Jacob's help from below and Wohmann's from above, they hoisted it and themselves onto the wagon. They had reached down to pull Sol up when a taxi rounded the corner.
"Taxi!" Jacob called out. It came to a screeching halt behind the vegetable wagon.
Dangling halfway between the ground and the top of the wagon, Sol felt suddenly lightheaded. It was as if the reality of Erich's injury were only now taking hold of him. The hands holding him let go and he dropped to the ground, landing unsteadily on his feet.
"A taxi will be faster," Jacob said to the attendants. "Do you think it will harm the boy to move him again?"
"It won't help him," the burly one said. But he nodded at the other man and, together, they reversed the process and settled Erich, sans stretcher, onto the back seat. When they had folded the stretcher and placed it somehow in the trunk of the taxi, Solomon and one of the men squeezed in beside the boy, leaving the other medic and Jacob to maneuver themselves into the front seat beside the driver. Friedrich Weisser was nowhere to be seen.
"What about the father?" one of the medics asked.
"We have waited too long already," Sol's father said. His features looked strained. "Let's go."
Obediently but none too smoothly, the taxi driver pulled the car away from the curb. Jolted by the abrupt movement, Erich opened his eyes. Though he was wrapped in a blanket, he was shaking and seemed to be chilled. There was not enough light in the taxi for Sol to see if his pupils were still tiny pinpoints or if they had returned to normal.
The shaking worsened.
"Hope it's not another convulsion. Could affect the brain, too many convulsions," the attendant next to Sol said, almost absently. His white jacket rubbed against Sol; it smelled of disinfectant and ether. "Has he ever had anything like this before today, Herr Freund?"
"The boy has epilepsy."
"Aha!"
"Not 'Aha,'" Jacob said, "He has small seizures. Not even seizures, really. Small episodes. I'm told the doctor calls them lightning seizures. He never passes out or anything. Just kind of shudders and then gets really sleepy."
The medic had wrapped Erich's fingers in cotton and gauze which was rapidly reddening. Sol watched, fascinated but queasy. The blood was seeping through and spreading like red ink on a blotter. He felt dizzy, as if everything hung at the edge of his consciousness. The voices around him sounded hollow, and his own thoughts felt apart from him. Don't faint, he told himself. Don't look at the blood.
He forced himself to look straight ahead. He could see the reflection of his father's eyes in the windshield. They looked old and tired. He took a deep breath and looked outside, as though needing to get away, at least until his mind and stomach settled.
They were on a side street, headed toward Unter den Linden. People and traffic moved past as if in a world he no longer inhabited. He wanted to put his head between his legs. Or worse, vomit. He was supposed to be helping his friend, but instead felt sick. What a baby he was, a baby sparrow, like Erich said; too helpless to fly.
He removed his glasses, put his head against the seat-back and tried to keep from passing out. His skin felt cold and clammy, and the world outside seemed to be composed of dots, like the French pointillist painting in the book his mother had shown him during one of the "culture sessions" she insisted upon. His heart was racing. He thought he saw people lined up for a block behind a milk cart, empty bottles in their hands waiting to be refilled.
He could not look away, and suddenly he was no longer in the taxi. He was in the queue. "Last week I waited for six hours," the elderly man behind him in line grumbled, talking to no one in particular. Sol turned around. The gray of the man's woolen beret seemed to bring out the deeply etched lines in his face. "Should have sent one of my grandchildren," he said, putting a beefy hand on Sol's shoulder. "Damn goyim," he muttered, watching the policeman near the cart screen the people in line and pull some out to the back of the line.
"Careful," the man behind him warned. "They hear you, we may never get milk. My daughter has children to feed."
There was heavy activity in front as people made a social event of their milk purchases and Jews were rerouted to the back of the line to make room for real Germans. Sol looked down at the strange canvas shoes he was wearing and began moving in place, faster and faster, like someone trying to stay warm or treading water. The sidewalk seemed to slip beneath him, like a conveyor belt. He was running in place when several boys in lederhosen trotted by, a familiar face among them.
"Erich!" Sol called out.
His friend halted. "We're off to Luna Park," he said. "They've added a new hall of mirrors to the Panoptikum. Come with us."
Sol shook his head. His feet kept moving. "I have to buy milk," he said, puffing with the effort.
"No problem," Erich said. "Give me the money. I'll get it for you."
Sol gave Erich the two bottles and a fistful of marks.
Erich and the other boys disappeared, to return in what seemed to be an instant, Erich holding a filled bottle in each hand. He held them just out of Sol's reach. "Here they are. Now let's go to Luna Park."
"Can't," Sol said, stretching for the bottles. "Mama--"
"Ma-ma, Ma-ma," Erich mimicked in a baby voice. He swung one of the bottles menacingly over the curb. "You coming with us, or are you going home with one?"
"I told you, I--"
Glass and milk splattered. Sol jerked backward to avoid both...and found himself pressing hard against the seat of the taxi, which was slowing as it neared the hospital. Light filtered through the car's window, foggy with the breath of its occupants.
"Moon...melting moon," Erich whispered, eyes open wide and staring upward. "Jungle..." Fur glistening wetly, two black-and-white long-muzzled monkeys hunched over him.
Sol blinked hard and put on his glasses. Quickly, the image vanished. No monkeys...only the attendants. A dream, he told himself. Only a bad dream.
But then, why was he still frightened?
CHAPTER SEVEN
May l922
Solomon kicked off his shoes and stretched out on top of his eiderdown. He was so tired--and shaken. A few minutes of sleep and he would start studying again, he promised himself. In less than two months it would be his bar mitzvah. He had studying for that and schoolwork and--
His eyes closed.
"Studying dreams, again, Spatz?"
"Wha--who--oh, it's you." Sol could feel sweat running down the back of his neck. He shifted his position slightly and glanced at the bed to make sure there were no damp patches. Erich knew nothing about the bedwetting; Sol wanted to keep it that way.
"Still having nightmares?" Erich narrowed his eyes and stared at Sol.
Sol nodded. "What about you?"
"The Bull dream," Erich said. "If it's the last thing I do, I'll pay my father back--"
It had been three and a half years since the accident and, though they were less frequent, the nightmares had not stopped. The day after the accident, groggy with painkillers, Erich swore he could hear Bull gurgling as Herr Weisser drowned him in the canal. He had been dreaming about it ever since. Sol's nightmares were also always the same: Erich screaming; Erich hanging limply from the grate, blood curling down his arm; the woman begging God to let her die; and the monkeys--always the monkeys. Superimposed over all of it, swollen and bloody and bruised, Erich's three crushed fingers--
He looked at Erich's hand, at the pale flesh and the scars, red and raised, like symbiotic vines that had wound themselves around his fingers and taken root. Eventually the scars would turn white, the doctor said. Whiter than the flesh--
"Want to go for a walk--feed the birds--make trouble?" Erich asked.
"Have to study."
Erich perched on the edge of the bed. "Look, Spatz, I have an idea. Remember when Karl almost drowned at the swimming meet? Remember how he
was terrified of water after that, until they made him go swimming again?"
"What's that got to do with me?"
"Saturday, you and your papa went to synagogue and I was helping in the shop. I got into the furrier's sub-basement--"
"How?"
"I have my ways." He took a key chain from his hip pocket. Attached to the chain was a small book-shaped leather pouch which Sol knew contained Erich's lock picks. "There's a padlocked sewer-entrance down there--"
"You went inside!"
"I went looking for that woman you told me about." He raised his voice and mimicked a woman's voice. "Oh God, let me die. I did not know...I did not know."
A thin shiver ran down Sol's spine--the kind his mama said meant a goose had walked on his grave. The nightmares, the fear--how foolish he had been! Maybe there had never been a woman's voice! He should have thought of this before, after the accident and Erich's grand mal seizure, when the doctor told them about some of the strange things that happened to people who had seizures. Sometimes they could not remember anything about what had happened before and after the seizure, and sometimes--during the seizure--they spoke in tongues. Erich's seizure must have been coming on when he was hanging from the grating. He could have mimicked a woman, like now, Sol thought. The sound could easily have been distorted by the sewer's weird acoustics.
Since Erich hated talking about his seizures, Sol decided to keep his latest theory about the voice to himself--at least for now. "You didn't go down by yourself," he said.
"Yes, I did." Erich looked at him and relented. "No. I didn't go down. But we're going down there tonight. I've decided."
Sol got up and walked over to his window. Two workmen were erecting an awning above the entrance into what had been the furrier's basement and was now about to become a cabaret. From where he stood, he could not see the steps leading down; the awning looked like it was at street level.
Once down those steps and through the door, there was a circular flight of metal stairs. After the basement--the cabaret--came a low-ceilinged sub-basement, on the same level as the cellar beneath the tobacco shop. And beneath both shops...the sewer.
"Forget it," Sol said. "We're not going down there."
"You're afraid." Erich joined him at the window.
"Am not!" Sol knew he didn't sound convincing. Even if it had been Erich's voice playing tricks on him, they boys had promised on their honor never to play in sewers again--and their fathers had welded the tobacco shop's grate down just in case. "Our papas will kill us if they catch us. The watchman could see us--"
"The construction-crew watchman won't be there tonight." Erich's eyes shone expectantly. "I saw him earlier this afternoon outside a Schultheiss. He was holding a quart of Pilsner and bragging to some girl about how his crew is so ahead of schedule he's been assigned to another project."
"I still don't think..."
"Tell you what." Erich sounded as if he'd just had an idea, but judging from the look on his face, Sol suspected his friend had worked out the answers to all of Sol's possible objectives ahead of time. "Bet your pewter soldiers against my bike there's no woman in the sewer."
Erich's voice had that it's no use arguing about this one tone to it that Solomon knew only too well.
"You might as well hand over the soldiers right now. Voices come attached to bodies. If there ever was a real woman in the sewer, Papa would've found her."
Erich's face darkened in anger and Sol guessed his friend was thinking about Bull. Neither of them were sure what Herr Weisser had done with the puppy; he had refused to talk to them about it. But Erich knew. Or so he said.
"I have to hear her...the woman...or you lose." Erich dangled the lock-pick pouch in front of Solomon's face.
"That's dumb! Your bike against my soldiers? Dumb!"
Erich grinned and pushed a hand through his sandy hair. "I only bet on sure things. The voice was all in your mind. The trouble with you is, you read too much."
Sol watched the sparrows pecking at cracks in the sidewalk. They were not nearly as bad as the pigeons everyone hated--Berlin's second-worst enemy, the city council called them. What perversity kept him feeding the sparrows, he did not know. Habit, maybe. He had been taking them bags of crumbs since Recha was a baby. There were times, he thought, when he wished they would repay him by flying overhead and decorating his friend's hair. That would cure Erich of some of his arrogance!
The cabaret's awning slapped and heaved in the breeze. Startled, the sparrows took wing. The black, red, and gold striped canvas billowed like a flag honoring the Republic; beneath it, newly installed hand and guard rails--painted the hue of ripe bananas--shone in the weak afternoon light. A door veneered with sculpted ceramics had replaced the mass of rusted iron and enormous locks and bolts that had formerly marked the entrance. It led into a basement likewise transformed, for the furriers had moved all their inventory--wardrobe crates, odorous with mothballs and filled with coats of leopard, mink, and seal--from there to the building's upper two levels.
During the past month, he and Erich had watched the nightclub take shape. Sol enjoyed listening to the sawing and hammering, and he liked the smell of the new lumber. Leather-aproned carpenters and chalk-faced plasterers scuttled up and down the steps. He and Erich snickered at the effeminate gray-haired decorator in purple plus-fours who stood on the sidewalk, frenetically waving his arms whenever things seemed to be going wrong. Any day now, according to Solomon's mother, trucks would arrive with furniture--God should only grant her such elegant things as she had heard were coming, she said.
The door of the tobacco shop opened and Sol's father stepped out.
Jacob Freund was a thin, bespectacled man whose neck, constricted in his high starched collar, made him look rather like a rooster. He shielded his eyes from the sun and gestured to Sol to come outside.
"See. Even your papa thinks you should get some fresh air," Erich said, coming up behind Sol. "Let's go outside. You can study after supper. There will be plenty of time before we meet to go down there."
"I haven't agreed to go, yet," Sol said, though by now he knew--and so did Erich--that it was as good as done.
CHAPTER EIGHT
"Well, boys--it seems as if it's actually going to happen." Jacob put a hand lightly on each of the boys' shoulders as they joined him on the sidewalk outside the shop. He smiled, and the crows' feet around his eyes deepened.
"Do you really think the nightclub will help the furriers all that much, Herr Freund?" Erich asked.
"It's bound to."
All of Berlin's businesses had been hurt by the rising inflation that had seized the city following the war, especially luxury shops like Das Ostleute Haus. Frau Rathenau's offer to buy their basement and sub-basement had been a double blessing. Not only would the money help keep the furrier shop afloat, Sol's father explained, but the kinds of people who would frequent the cabaret were also those who could afford life's other amenities.
"It will help the whole street." There was a soberly thankful tone to Jacob's voice. "Our business is sure to boom, not to mention that the cabaret will afford us the opportunity to meet and mingle with people such as the Rathenaus and their peers." He looked seriously at Erich and then at Solomon. "People whose decisions spell the future not only of Berlin but of the entire Fatherland--"
The pounding of a hammer interrupted him as a workman, standing on a ladder at the bottom of the basement stairs, unceremoniously nailed up a rectangular, mahogany-stained plaque above the door. The edges of the plaque were trimmed with a delicate gilt band, and the graceful lettering stood out black and bold:
KAVERNE
The sign gave Solomon a sense of satisfaction. He was proud of his neighborhood. Most of the store owners had moved to the more residential areas; he was glad his family had not--especially now. A cabaret, right here on his street! Papa said most of Berlin's nightclubs had sprung up after the war, when the Kaiser's Tanzverbot--the anti-dancing edict--was lifted. They were clustered along Leip
ziger Strasse, near the Kaiserhof Hotel and the Prussian State Theater. Many of them were known for the decadence of their patrons, whose outrageous behavior made for meaty reading in the weekend papers.
Frau Rathenau's purchase of the furrier's basement had made the newspapers, too. A columnist for Der Weltspiegel, Berlin's most widely read Sunday entertainment insert, had quoted her as saying that she had deliberately chosen to open her nightclub away from the riffraff. Kaverne was, she had said, part of her "...crusade to bring respectability to Berlin's entertainment industry." The columnist had suggested that the real purpose of the cabaret was to showcase the talents of her granddaughter--Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau's niece, Miriam, who had recently returned from America.
"I'll be back, boys. Don't go away...I have something to show you." Jacob released the boys and went back into his shop.
"If we don't go down tonight, we may never get there," Erich said as soon as Sol's father was out of earshot. "If you're too scared, I'll go alone. Once the cabaret opens, there's no way we'll get in."
"I told you, I'm scared of getting caught, not of going down there," Sol said, gesturing emphatically.
"I'll bet there's a woman's body behind one of the walls at the end of the sewer," Erich said, as if trying to goad him into agreeing. "Maybe someone sealed her up back there, like the guy in that Poe story Herr Schoenfelder made us read."
In one of their many discussions about the subject, the boys had decided the sewer had probably once been a dungeon and that there were all kinds of bones shored up behind the wall. The idea of finding them might thrill his friend, Sol thought, but it was not his idea of a good time. "I still don't think--"
"If you're worried about the bet, forget it," Erich said. As if signaling for silence, he held up his crushed hand. "Tonight. We'll meet at--" He pulled up his sweater sleeve and checked his watch. "Midnight," he said, obviously carried away by his own sense of melodrama.
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