Shadows of Berlin полностью

But even with jobs, their incomes were meager. H.I.A.S. provided a small monthly stipend per head, but generally not much money was to be had. So Feter would attempt to ration his cigar supply, smoking judiciously. Always one cigar with his morning coffee, one after his midday meal of boiled mushrooms on toast, and one every evening after his usual bowl of kasha with a side of chopped eggs and onions. Or maybe the fried cheese kreplach with cream if he could manage a two-­dollar supper at Ratner’s and still afford his niece’s lettuce and tomato sandwich for thirty-­five cents.

But mostly the food was irrelevant to him. Feter Fritz had been taught to eat to survive by Auschwitz, which meant to eat without joy. The cigar, however, was what he savored. The ritual. The strike of the match, the whisper of flame. The rhythmic pace of puffing that kindled the tip into a glowing ruby. The long, low hush of smoke. It was during those few precious moments relishing his cigar that he would return to the man that Rachel had known as a child. The confident, charming, canny Feter Fritz, not the displaced person. Yet it was like watching a ghost inhabit a living body, a dybbuk of hubris that would possess him and then slowly dissipate with the smoke.

Out of the heat of the shower, Rachel’s hair is dripping. Chilly air has slipped under the bathroom door as she towels herself down. Because she is always cold, she has bought a heater. An EverHot Ray-­Vector space heater that’s stationed under the bathroom sink. The heating elements glow in red-­gold coils when she switches it on. The wave of heat calms her as she dresses in her slip, the rayon clinging to her skin. She wipes the steamy fog from the medicine cabinet mirror with her palm, gazing into her own reflection. Then she pulls open the mirror that squeaks on rusty hinges.

The shelves of the medicine cabinet are crowded with a half-­used tube of Brylcreem, a little dab’ll do ya, a packet of razor blades, an aerosol can of Old Spice Smooth Shave, and a bottle of Kings Men aftershave. A Vaseline jar, a pocket tin of Anacin tablets, ten cents on special at Block Drug Store, a roughly squeezed tube of Preparation H hemorrhoid salve, because Aaron has problems with that and often needs more than a little dab. She has to rearrange everything to find the small bottle of pills prescribed by her shrink as a minor tranquilizer. Miltown it is called.

Her mother had sometimes dosed herself with an extraite de l’opium known as Laudanum de Rousseau, because a single teaspoon every three hours reduced the grief of menstrual cramps. It wasn’t much of a secret. Women in Eema’s circles carried on a love affair with laudanum. Eema decanted her elixir into a rose glass bottle with an elegant crystal stopper. But Miltown? Not so much elegant as commercially manufactured. It’s a sedative with an advertising profile.

In the newspaper ads, wives and mothers on Miltown get their husbands off to work and their children off to school calmly and without fuss. Picking up a prescription for Miltown, the ads assured her, is as common and wholesome as picking up a quart of milk from the grocery. Two tablets, four hundred milligrams each, twice a day, morning and night. Rachel unscrews the cap from the bottle and swallows her dosage as fortification against her meeting with Feter Fritz. By the time she boards the Eighth Avenue IND at West 22nd, she should be feeling as relaxed as a cat poised on a sunny windowsill.

2.

Promise Me She Is Dead

At the end of the war, it had been nearly impossible for young Rashka Morgenstern to prove that she was actually Jewish. A problem because by the time she had arrived at the gates of the displaced persons camp in the American zone, it had been designated only for Jews. So what was she to do? She was an adolescent girl on her own. She had no tattoo on her arm from a concentration camp. No documents stamped with a purple J. Her papers, in fact, said she was an Aryan! But then a young American officer with a fuzzy moustache and a pistol holstered at his hip asked her a question.

Azoy, iunge dame, aoyb ir zent take a eydish, kenen ir redn mit mir in eydish?

Tears flooded to her eyes. She cried with unadulterated joy as she answered him. Ya! Yo, ikh kenen redn mit ir! Ikh ken redn mit dir!

Yiddish had saved her.