Shadows of Berlin полностью

“You know, Rachel. I don’t know what else to do,” he tells her. He is sitting on one end of the sofa, and she is seated at the other end, holding Kibbitz hostage on her lap. “I try to make you happy. Well, maybe that’s too much to imagine, but at least I try to make you less miserable. You wanted a cat? We got a cat. You wanted to buy expensive mail-­order oil paints because the ones at the store weren’t good enough? I say not a problem. Buy ’em. You deserve to have expensive oil paints. And then you need time to work on your painting and stuff? Great! It’s not like I expect to have a meal cooked when I come home. So we live in a pigsty? Whattaya gonna do? You’ve got other priorities.”

And that’s how it starts.

“So you missed him,” Dr. Solomon confirms.

“Yes.”

“With the ashtray.”

“I think the sugar bowl was close.”

“And then you threw the toaster?”

“Yes.”

“Did it break?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you really intend to hit him with any of these objects?”

“He was gone by the time I threw the toaster.”

“I see.”

Rachel’s eyes tear bleakly for a moment, and she wipes them. “No. I don’t think I hoped to hit him. Not really,” she says.

“And this argument. It started because?”

“Because it would kill me to wash a window. Because I open a can and dump it into a pot instead of cooking. Because I don’t vacuum the drapes.”

“Okay. So once again. Housework was the catalyst.”

“Aaron thinks I am a bad housekeeper. He wishes he had married his mother instead.”

“You said that to him?”

“He said it to me. Though,” she admits, “maybe not exactly in such words.”

“So I believe you know about my opinion concerning arguments over housework.”

“They are never about housework,” she reports, still a good little goat.

“That’s correct. So after the argument, you left the apartment?”

“No. He left.”

“And didn’t come back?”

“There’s a couch in Leo’s office at the restaurant. A big, brown-­leather, pleated chesterfield from the thirties. It wouldn’t be the first time he slept there. Charades has always been his second home anyway. He keeps a shaving kit, suits, and fresh shirts there. When the waiters’ union went on strike, he didn’t come home for days.”

A pause to examine her. “When was the last time you ate something?” the good doctor wants to know.

“Ate something? I don’t know. I’m not hungry.”

Her hair is stiff and flattened on one side while bristled on the other. She is still dressed in the same clothes that she was wearing under the painting smock. She hasn’t changed since the day before yesterday. Her skin feels gritty against her blouse. Her mouth tastes of dead cigarette smoke. She had stopped at a diner on Lexington Avenue and swallowed a single cup of scalded black coffee, sitting at the counter with the crowd of men on their lunch break, wolfing down their sandwiches and meat-­loaf specials. The Wonder Bread deliveryman and the beat cop in their ill-­fitting uniforms, and the middle-­aged drummers with chapped faces, stopping off just long enough to stuff a B.L.T. into their mouths and gulp down coffee as they glare at the headlines of the daily papers.

“You look completely done in,” the doctor observes.

“I don’t want to talk about how I look. I didn’t come all the way up here to talk about how I look.”

“So tell me, Rachel. Do you feel you live… How did you say he put it? In a pigsty?”

“Do I?”

“Yes. Do you?”

She takes a breath. “The dirty windows or the dusty furniture, I simply don’t see them. Or if I do see them, I simply don’t care.”

“And why do you think that is?”

She thinks of the Judenhaus in Berlin. The dirty hiding places in cellars and attics. As time passed, she no longer noticed the schmutz she lived in. Schmutz was her home.

The Eighth Avenue Express is not so crowded. Rachel sits across from a Subway Sun cartoon that contends: YOU MAY NOT GET TO HEAVEN—­BUT YOU CAN LIVE IN NEW YORK! She is faced by her own dark reflection staring back from the train-­car window. Could she imagine it to be the reflection of the mother of a child?

Back at the apartment, she goes into the bedroom and changes. Her hair tied back in a plain white scarf. An old striped work shirt of Aaron’s with the sleeves rolled up under the hand-­me-­down apron from her mother-­in-­law. In the living room, she shoves the furniture to the corners and vacuums the rugs once, twice. She pulls everything down from the shelves and wipes them clean. Wipes the tabletops, the table legs, until she’s coughing on dust. She chases cobwebs with the broom, fingers the dust rag into all cracks and crevices. Squirts the windows with Windex and wipes them with newsprint till she hears glass squeak.