Shadows of Berlin полностью

Night passes without sleep for Rashka. They have been loaded into the rear of a black touring sedan in an all-­business manner by two Gestapo men and driven over the Weidendammer Brücke to this place. What was once the Jewish home for the elderly but is now designated by the SS as the Grosse Hamburger Strasse Lager. The attic space is crammed full of other captives—­all Jews without stars. A starless galaxy of misery in a claustrophobic room. The moans, the snoring, the weeping. These are the noises that serve as Rashka’s lullaby on the night before they are scheduled for transport. Transport to the east, they were told by the men who appeared in gray coveralls, sporting yellow Judenstern and red armbands. Die Ordneren! The Jewish lager orderlies. They stayed only long enough to distribute the placards to be worn about the neck.

Her mother has drifted away. If not into sleep then into some version of waking slumber that separates her from the reality of the world. Sometimes her eyes are open, and she is staring like the dead stare. Rashka does not wish to cry. She does not want to be a weeping child. She has, therefore, taken a tool in hand. On the back of the transport card, she is scratching out a likeness of herself with the nub of a pencil from her pocket. She has no mirror, so she uses the mirror of her mind to draw her face. A dark, scratchy cartoon of a ragamuffin. A scruffy animal with oily moons for eyes. If she is to wear this piece of cardboard, T for Transport, if this is to be the sum of her identity, a transported Jewess, then she will mark it. She will make it hers. With the final strokes, she scores a six-­pointed star on the forehead.

The morning comes. The Jewish orderlies arrive shouting instructions, bellowing in a mix of German and Yiddish. “All those for transport! Stand! Form a queue! Move! Move!”

Rashka can tell that her eema is starting to panic. Not in a hysterical manner. She is, after all, an honored member of the Prussian Academy of Arts and founder of the Berolina Circle. She is too grand for tears and screaming. No, Eema’s panic is interior. It stiffens her movements. Hunches her attention. Curdles the color in her eyes. Her grip on Rashka’s hand is stone. The queue is proceeding. The shambling assembly of those marked for the east.

But then. Then at the door.

“Not this one,” the ordner with the scared face commands. “Or this one,” he instructs his underling with a scowl, shoving first Eema and then Rashka from the queue.

Instead of being sent to the trains, they are led down a pair of narrow stairwells into the cellar. The stone and mortar foundation that comprises the wall is a cold color, not quite gray, not quite brown. That’s what Rashka concentrates on as they are shoved into a room where the windows have been bricked over. The door is steel, painted a greasy black. It clanks closed. Silence between mother and child. And then the door clanks open just as it had clanked shut.

Eema jumps to her feet as if she has been shot up by a spring. “Fritz!” she shouts and seizes her brother with such vehemence that she nearly topples them both off their feet. Feter must pry himself free from her grip. He is thin and pale in the face. Clad in the gray coverall of an ordner, he bears the Judenstern, and his sleeve is banded by a red armlet.

“Listen, listen to me, Vina,” he is telling her in Yiddish. “I want you to keep your head, do you hear me? Keep your head! You must keep yourself in check no matter what.”

“In check? What to do you mean, Fritzl?” Eema is searching her brother’s eyes for understanding, but Feter Fritz is dodging her efforts. “What do you mean, I must keep myself in check. In check for what? What is coming?”

The door clanks again.

And there she is. So immaculately dressed. So carefully coiffed. A fashion plate from Die Dame. Her hair in a bright-­red sweep over her collar like a roll of fire. And for her eyes? Two lit emeralds.

Eema’s face drains of expression.

“No need to fear, Lavinia,” the woman says. “Perhaps I am no longer your muse, but I can be your savior. Only you must cooperate. You must swallow your pride for once and do as you are told. You are not the mistress of this house.”

***

Rachel ignites a cigarette and watches the smoke rise. It curls slowly upward. She is telling Dr. Solomon about her mother. How her mother suffered after the loss of her husband.

Maybe it wasn’t love between them. Maybe there was no enduring romantic passion. But to lose a companion? The only companion she had chosen for herself? She suffered because she was alone.

“But she had you,” the good doctor points out. “Her child.”