Shadows of Berlin полностью

She’s a mess. Her eyes sleepless and swollen. Hair in an untidy ponytail. Barefooted. She’s thrown on a pair of baggy old dungarees with the cuffs folded up the ankles and a stained wool pullover. She also smells, not just of vodka but of a kind of grimy misery. “You sure I can’t get you something?” she asks Rachel. “I mean, it doesn’t have to be alcoholic. I think I’ve got a soda in the fridge. Or maybe I could put on the kettle for tea or something.” She looks toward her miniature apartment stove where a steel kettle rests atop a burner, but her expression is glazed. As if a journey to the stove is a distant concept.

“No, no,” Rachel assures her. “Really, I’m fine.”

Naomi nods blankly. “So I guess you must have figured it out by now,” she says, her eyes dropping shamefully to the coffee mug of vodka in her hand. “Tyrell,” she says, speaking the name, but then she must pause and swallow. “He broke things off.”

Rachel takes in a breath and expels it.

Naomi frowns, eyes still downcast. “He said,” she begins, but then must stop and start again. “He said what happened at the restaurant. The fistfight. The police. Getting arrested. It just made him realize that we had no future. Not in the long run. And that…that it wasn’t fair to me,” she whispers, her voice beginning to disintegrate into tears, “to keep things going.” She sniffs hard. Smears at her eyes and then kicks back a swallow of vodka from her mug. “That’s it.” She shrugs. “So I’ve been downing the mashke ever since.”

“You should eat,” Rachel instructs. “It’s not good for you. You should eat. I could fix you soup,” she says and starts to move from the sofa. The truth is, she doesn’t do well dealing with other people’s grief. She would feel more comfortable avoiding empathy by diving into action, even it’s only emptying a can of Campbell’s chicken and rice into a saucepan. But Naomi restrains her escape from the sofa with a hand.

“No. Please. Nothing. I’d only throw it up anyhow.”

At home, over T.V. dinners but with no T.V., Aaron gloats in a fatalistic manner. “Well, it was bound to happen, honey. Can’t say as I’m surprised.”

“Nor can you say you’re unhappy with it.”

A frowning nod. “Now that you mention it,” he concedes.

“She was in such deep pain,” Rachel laments. “I didn’t know how to help her. What to say.”

A flick of a shrug as he dips his fork into the vegetable medley. “She’ll get over it,” Aaron assures her. “She’s tough.”

“She was also drinking. Heavily.”

Another shrug. Maybe this one is less comfortable. “Well. I dunno. There were hints that we had an aunt on Pop’s side of the family who was a bit of a boozehound. But nobody ever talked about it much, at least not in front of us kids. And anyhow, she lived to be eighty-­something, so how bad could it have been?”

25.

You Must Earn Your Keep

She dreams that the police come banging on the door in the middle of the night to arrest her. Aaron keeps saying, I told you not to cut up that newspaper at the library, and now look—­the cops are here. My mother’s gonna hit the roof! He’s saying this as he opens the door, dressed in his pajamas. In come two giant men, not in the blue uniforms of the N.Y.P.D., but in the green of the Reich’s Grüne Polizei. She tries to hide under the bed, but they drag her out. She keeps screaming. Gevalt geshreeyeh! But then Aaron is replaced by Feter Fritz wearing his secondhand shmatte with his bamboo cane. My hands are tied, ziskeit, he tells her. Your name is on the list.

Rachel wakes up with a floating anger in her chest. It swells her throat. Thank God that Aaron is at the Fulton Market that morning, so Kibbitz is the only one who must suffer her mood. Wisely, he exits through the fire escape window at his first opportunity. She’s been thinking about the painting. Stewing over it. The red muse. It angers her that it has been stolen from her. Yes, those are the words. Stolen from her. The coffee she drinks only serves to underscore her anger. Not even the Miltown is a match for it.