Shadows of Berlin полностью

The tables are filling in around them, and a comfortable grumble of conversation floats in with the growing cloud of cigarette smoke. She feels her mouth loosen. She’s talking. Talking and talking, she can hear her own voice as if she’s listening in from the next room. Eavesdropping on herself. What’s more, she seems to be speaking any words that come to mind. Her eema. The greasy smell of oil paint. The solid wall of a white canvas. The Magen David slopped on across a bakery window in Berlin. The foggy existence of their U-­boat days. The hiding places. The deprivation, the fear. The necessity of remaining invisible.

“So I have compulsions,” she tells him. “For instance, I steal bread from the table. I must have a light burning to fall asleep,” she says and looks at Tyrell, who is wearing an expression of quiet pity. “Don’t look at me that way,” Rachel tells him.

His expression does not change. “What way?”

“With pity. I hate pity. Not because I am too proud, but because I love it too much. Forget about consuming alcohol,” she tells him and takes a swallow from her draft. “Pity is the superior intoxicant. I can get drunk on people’s pity faster than on any beer. On any wine or whiskey.” And then she says, “I’m sorry that my husband was offensive to you. He’s not a bad man, just fearful.”

Tyrell only shrugs in a small way. “Forget it. It was nothing, really, compared to what I get just walking down the street in Midtown. A Negro man in a suit and tie,” he says. “I’m sure if I was wearing a doorman’s livery or a chauffeur’s cap, it would be dandy. But a nice suit with a nice tie and a solid shine on my shoes? It seems to incense a lot of white folks. Like I think I’m equal with them. Or worse, better than them.”

“You sound embittered,” Rachel observes.

Tyrell smokes. “Hard not to. I fight it, but it’s tough.” He shakes his head. “Maybe I’m not grateful enough for the life I have. My mother tells me I’m not, and she could be right. But what am I supposed to do? Here I am, sitting across from a white woman in a bar. In a place like this? In the Village? Maybe it’s no big deal. But.”

“But?”

“But ask your husband if they’d let a Negro through the front door of the restaurant he manages.”

Now Rachel frowns.

“Oh, maybe if I was Lena Horne, they might, but then only if I was on the arm of Walter Winchell. Otherwise, all the rest of us colored folk gotta enter through the service door, and that’s it.”

Rachel stares. Inhales smoke, then blows it out into a cloud that quickly dissolves.

“I used to think,” he says, “that if I played along, you know? That if I was the good Negro. That if I served my country in the army. That if I went to college. That if I did all the right things to make myself the right kind of Black man, I’d break through. But that just ain’t the case. And that’s what keeps me angry, Mrs. Perlman. The stupidity of it.”

Rachel wonders. “Do you say these things to Naomi?”

“Do I?”

“It’s none of my business.”

“No, but you’re asking anyhow.” He inhales smoke. “Sometimes. Mostly we pretend, though, like it’s not a problem. Like there is no problem. Just like we did during supper that night. And sometimes when we’re together, when it’s just the two of us, I can even believe it.”

Rachel absorbs this and then asks him, “Do you love her?”

“Love?”

“Are you in love with her?”

“Is she in love with me?”

“I don’t know. Is she?”

“She says so,” Tyrell replies.

“But you’re not so sure?”

“I am mistrustful.”

“Of her?”

“Of the word. Of the concept,” he says. “But yes. I think I do. Love her.”

“Good.”

“Is it?” he says. “I wonder.”

“Because she’s white?”

“Because I’m not. Because sometimes I think that our relationship is more about her wanting to shock the people in her world. About thumbing her nose at her childhood. Her family. Her brother.” He expels a cloud of smoke and shrugs. “And I get that. It’s not like my people are too damn pleased about me seeing a white girl either. My aunties like to murder me every time the subject comes up. And it does come up,” he says, his half smile returning. “My old man thinks I’m looking to get lynched. And my sister, Chloe, says that it means I must hate my own race. Or at least that’s how the white man will see it—­as evidence that even Black men think that Negro women aren’t good enough for them.”

“But none of that is true?” Rachel asks.