Shadows of Berlin полностью

You were a precious treasure, she hears her Eema say. Standing beside her as she recalls her in the flush of her success. The day you were born, I thought you were a gift from God Himself. “Behold, I give before you this day the life and the good.”

“So what’s gonna happen to us?” she hears Aaron ask her. It’s a simple question. At least he makes it sound like it’s a simple question. And maybe it is. Maybe it’s just a simple matter of logistics. But Rachel has no answer for him.

27.

The Accuracy of Silence

Daniela returns with the baby, a crinkly eyed little elflette. They plan to name her Joanna Sara after Ezra’s great-­aunt of blessed memory. Rachel swallows but smiles. According to the Reich’s Law on the Alteration of Family and Personal Names, every Jewish male had to adopt “Israel” as a middle name, and every Jewish female, “Sara.” But Nazi policy has no place in the temple, where the rabbi calls out her name for it to be heard in Israel.

And let us say Aymen.

Rachel suffers through the prayer service, as she suffers through an excruciating twenty minutes in the infant’s department of B. Altman’s picking out a white knit layette—­hat, sweater, and booties with pink trim. They visit the Weinstocks with fillet of sole and fish sticks for the kids carried from the restaurant. With a Lindy’s cheesecake in a box. But neither she nor Aaron is much interested in staying long.

She sees the German super in the hallway once but hurries up the steps, pretending to be lost in the mail she has just collected from the box.

At the Museum of Modern Art, she stands in front of a Rothko. Before the war, the artist had become an American citizen because he feared that the U.S. government would deport Jews back to Europe. He changed his name from Markus to Mark, from Rothkowitz to Rothko, which still sounded Jewish maybe but wasn’t the name over a delicatessen. And of his canvases? They grew huge and deep. He was quoted as saying that he had “imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.” He also said, “Silence is so accurate.” A statement with which Rachel can only agree.

She would like to trap utter violence within the confines of a canvas. She would like to imprison it there, where it would live out its miserable existence in solitary confinement on the painted surface. But she also craves the accuracy of silence. Its perfect beauty, like the blank silence of an untouched canvas. The silence of a painting before it exists. So at home, she stares at the white canvas stretched across the wooden rectangular frame and tries to imagine how she could possibly capture an image of herself more silent than silence.

But then her mother is there, seated beside her on the sofa, dressed in her studio smock, her hands stained with colors, perfumed with linseed oil. You think it’s a barrier, I know. This white expanse. You think it’s a wall, and you ask yourself: Do I have the strength to break through it? But the wall, Ruchel, is an illusion. It’s not a barrier; it’s simply a screen. A screen that’s hiding the painting, which is already there, hidden behind it. You’ve already finished the painting in your head and in your heart, she says. Every stroke is already in place. All you need do is peel the whiteness away, and the truth of the work will be revealed.

“And that is what I’m afraid of, Eema. It won’t be a beautiful revelation. I’m terrified by that idea. I’m terrified of the ugliness that will come out of me. What kind of monstrosity I will release for all to see.”

Tsigele. Listen to me. For once, please listen. Art is not always beautiful. There is horror and ugliness in the world that must be painted too. It is not beauty; it is truth that’s at the heart of every true artist’s work. So I say—­paint your monstrosity. Better it live on the canvas than inside you.