Shadows of Berlin полностью

The night brings a terrifying bombing raid. An English bomber has dropped from the sky in flames and exploded into a street not so far away. The crash site is still smoking by morning, a tower of black rising upward. In fact, the city as a whole has assumed a pall of smoke that it wears like a shawl over its shoulders. The smell of it follows them even inside. Their little troika has returned to the café in the Friedrichstrasse. Cronenberg has gone outside to smoke. He does this sometimes, Rashka has noted, when the gnä’ Fräulein is in a certain type of mood. Impatient and easily riled.

The Fräulein has her hair done up in a turban, because she recognizes that her red tresses are becoming too famous. Too easily identified among the U-­boats. Rashka is seated beside her, but there is a problem. The gnä’ Fräulein is not happy with her protégé. “I don’t have you tagging along to eat cakes, Bissel,” she tells Rashka. “Emil already thinks that I’m wasting my time. That I should throw you back to the rabble and let the next transport take you and your mother both. So you must produce results, clear? No more loafing,” she scolds.

No more loafing. If Rashka Morgenstern is to be a catcher, she then must catch! She must grab! To save her life. To save the life of her mother, this is what she must do. Find a U-­boat. Find herself in the face of another Jew. So can she be forgiven? Rashka begs of God. Can she be forgiven for what she is about to do? Cannot the Master of the Universe, praised be His holy name, step from her eema’s prayer book and, in His limitless wisdom, see past her sin? Her crime? If she devotes herself to a lifetime of mitzvoth after this moment, can’t her soul be cleansed?

“The girl in the corner,” Rashka listens to herself say. She says this trying to keep her eyes dry. Trying to imitate resolve. It’s the young schoolgirl with the sable braid and wine-­red beret returned. The girl with whom Rashka had once exchanged an innocent wave. She is against the wall alone. The woman who was with her has left the table, so she has no adult attending her for protection. Just as Rashka had been, she is left alone without a mother. The girl allows her eyes to lurk about the café. She must search for danger by herself, shielded by nothing but a fragile bubble of anonymity.

But Rashka Morgenstern has just popped that bubble.

“Why her?” the Angel quizzes.

The schoolgirl happens to catch Rashka’s eyes at that instant. She smiles without artifice. A small smile. But then the smile sinks. She looks unsure. Perhaps perplexed. But not alarmed. She is unaware that she has just been murdered.

Why her? “Because,” Rashka the catcher replies, “she is me.”

29.

Speak of the Wings

Fighting strong winds, an Aeroflot Ilyushin IL-­12 military transport, on route from Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk in the Soviet Union, has plowed into the eastern slope of Mount Sivukha, approximately thirty kilometers from the Mana River. Of all aboard, no survivors.

Rachel clips the article from the paper while Aaron is at work. At home, an uneasy truce reigns. This is how it’s been for the past several days since Aaron stopped sleeping at the restaurant and returned to their apartment, though not to their bed. He has been bunking on the couch. “Billeting” he calls it, like a soldier. They connect to one another only through the points of routine. She serves breakfast; he eats it. She washes the dishes or doesn’t. He doesn’t complain about the dirty dishes, but neither does he touch the sponge or the bottle of Ivory Liquid.

Her painting sits on the easel. The oils have dried enough for her to pick up her brush again, but she hasn’t. She has cleaned her brushes in the kitchen sink but not used them. Aaron complains that he can’t sleep lying on the couch with her naked portrait staring at him, so Rachel has draped it with a sheet like a ghost. The ghost of herself. They don’t really touch each other, not as wife and husband might. They touch only logistically. Passing to enter the bathroom, to get to the sink to spit out toothpaste. Nor do they talk about what has gone wrong. What is going wrong. Probably because neither one can really say what exactly is going wrong, only that it is. So they live not quite like roommates but like business partners in their marriage.

Morning. Rachel wakes, having sweated through her pajamas. From the next room, she hears music. Nat King Cole singing “A Blossom Fell.” She finds that Aaron has not left his bedclothes for her to strip from the couch as usual but has folded them neatly. Good Soldier Perlman. In fact, he is already dressed and wearing his necktie and suit jacket, sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee cup beside the percolator that dribbles steam from its spout. He looks up at her from his copy of the Herald Tribune. “There’s coffee,” he tells her.