Rachel approaches the table. Sits. Lights a cigarette from Aaron’s pack. The sharpness digs into the back of her throat. She sighs out smoke.
Darkness. After midnight. She had given Aaron the bed because she is painting, and he hadn’t argued. She can hear him snoring turbulently. An unshaded lamp burns, and the cat snoozes in a ball at one end of the sofa while Rachel sits on the opposite end, drilling into the past cemented in her own head.
Two decades before, on the day of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish boycott, brown-shirted storm troopers defaced hundreds of Jewish shops across the city. She was only a child, inside Ehrenberg’s Konditorei. Only a child staring out as a giant ogre in his dung-brown uniform slopped a paintbrush across the outside of the shop’s window.
She sees it before she paints it.
But the light is switched on, and the glare hits the canvas like a soft punch. She sees it like it’s been there all along, invisible until she follows the dots of a constellation. It propels Rachel forward off the sofa. Compels her to squeeze cadmium yellow from its tube onto the palette and smash a brush into the blob of greasy color before whipping up the dirty turp standing in the coffee can. She wants it wet; she wants it oozing and dripping. Muddy and desecrated to match her memory. A zodiac unto itself. A constellation now of a single star. The Shield of David, six points dribbling down the face of the canvas, clothing her nakedness.
And now she must let it dry. She must allow her paint to settle into the canvas before she can finish. Naomi had slipped a couple of her cannabis roll-ups into Rachel’s bag, so she sits by the window with the sash cracked open and smokes a juju, thinking of the schoolgirl with the sable plaits and the burgundy beret. Tears cool her cheek. A young girl entering Birkenau? It was a toss-up, wasn’t it? Many went straight to the gas. Most did. Rachel can see the girl standing in front of her. “What happened to you?” she asks. “Tell me the truth. Did I murder you?”
But she keeps the truth to herself, this girl. And then she is gone, leaving Rachel gazing at the canvas before replacing the sheet over her easel. When Aaron comes out, she is shoving a casserole dish into the oven.
“Jeez, what’s that smell?” Aaron wants to know, entering in his bathrobe and pj’s. “You smoking those clove cigarettes that Naomi thinks are so beatnik?”
“Yes,” she lies. But his attention is diverted.
“So Halloween’s long gone, but we still got the ghost here haunting us, huh?” he says, surveying the shrouded easel. Rachel only pours out coffee from the percolator, but then he is behind her. “So do I at least still get a good-morning kiss, or have we suspended that practice?” he asks.
She turns and looks into his face. The pain, the uncertainty behind his flippancy. He’s asking for mercy, so she gives him a kiss. Something more than a peck, but without heat. A kiss to satisfy the practice.
In Berlin, the transports continued till the end. Even as the thunder of the Red Army artillery drifted closer from the east, the transports continued. Lorries to the trains. Trains to the camps. The track rails were kept polished by use. For a moment, the schoolgirl joins them at the supper table. Aaron is busy with his favorite subject. Work. Something about Leo arguing with the owner of the Stork Club. Rachel is not paying attention. She’s looking at the peas that her husband has actually taken the time to remove, pea by pea, from his helping of casserole and crowd into a pea ghetto on the side of his plate.
That’s when the schoolgirl makes her appearance. Filling a chair. Gazing with empty eyes. Rachel wonders. If she survived the ramp where the trains were unloaded and the first Selektion began, it was just as likely that she starved, died of disease or an infected wound, or simply was sent to the Kremas on a whim by some SS doctor in a white coat. Or she froze to death on her pallet or dropped dead during a never-ending roll call on the Appellplatz. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, there were plenty of ways to die.
There’s another headline at the bottom of the page of Aaron’s discarded newspaper. A U.S.A.F. B-29 Superfortress has crashed into a suburb in California, killing all aboard. She separates the page of newsprint and folds it into a square that she slips inside the basket of magazines next to the sofa. She will save it for her clippings book.
That night, the telephone rings. It’s after supper, and she is at the kitchen table with a cigarette, smoke hanging over the coffee cup that she’s poured but left untouched. Aaron is reading
She crosses to the gossip bench and picks it up. “Hello?”
“Rashka,” she hears a familiar voice answer.