Shadows of Berlin полностью

Aaron is mouthing: Who is it? Rachel turns away from him and looks blindly at the wall. A calendar from the Gruber Refrigeration Supply Company of Forest Hills, Queens, featuring an illustration of a giant red monkey pecking on a typewriter. “What’s happened, Feter?” she asks.

“Happened?” her uncle echoes the word. “Has something happened?”

“I don’t know. You sound as if it has.”

“Well, I sound as I sound, Rokhl,” he says dismissively, impatient to move past explanations. “I need to you see you. Tomorrow.”

“Why?” she asks.

“Why?”

“Yes, Feter, why?”

“Because,” he decides to admit. “Something’s happened.”

Once more, the meeting place is planned for none of her uncle’s usual niches. Instead, it’s the Automat. It’s the Horn & Hardart’s at Trinity Place across from the chapel graveyard. When she first arrived in the States, she was astonished by the existence of such a spot. The outside decorated like a Bohemian Weinstube from a fairy tale. And inside! She had never seen such a wonderland. Drop a coin into a slot, and pop open a small brass-­framed window for a plate of steaming cheese-­baked macaroni, a bowl of freshly creamed spinach, a chicken salad on rye bread with lettuce, or a tall slice of lemon meringue pie. Magic! The cafeteria steam table offered Salisbury steak, fish cakes, freshly carved ham, roast beef, and corned beef. The interior gleamed with bright light. The tile floor was shiny white. The tables were scrubbed spotless, and the customers poured in.

Now she finds the space to be a shabby ghost of itself. The customer population is sporadic. Wilted housewives in their department store hats at the end of shopping. Clots of shopgirls, stenographers, and secretaries forking up dishes of pear and cottage cheese or Jell-­O salads, shedding their heels under the table. Stooped salesmen on their lunch break fortifying themselves on roast turkey and gravy with ruby-­colored cranberry sauce and a glob of mashed potatoes on the side.

For nostalgia’s sake, she slides a nickel into a slot and removes a slice of lemon meringue. But when she sits down with it, picking up her fork, she pauses. The meringue has gone hard, crusty brown and dotted with beads of grease.

“Ziskeit!” she hears and sets down the fork. Feter seizes her hands and kisses them as he scrapes into the chair opposite. “Meyn kind!” is what he says. He is still in his tweeds, and his necktie is straight, and his hair is combed, yet he looks exhausted. Also, she notes, the bamboo cane is missing from the ensemble.

“Feter” is all she says before he interrupts her.

“Rashka. You must listen to me,” he insists. “What I am about to tell you may shock you. It may frighten you. But you must remain strong.”

Silence. She sees that for all his surface bravado, the brash persona he is wearing like a cloak is utterly fabricated. His eyes betray a dread-­filled panic.

“I hope you’ll forgive me, but…” He must pause here to fortify himself. For effect? “But I lied to you.” The confession. “Lied about me, about your eema’s painting.” And then he says, “I asked you for money for that gonif pawnbroker? You turned me down. I understood why,” he is assuring her with great sympathy. His shoulders are hunched forward.

“A person can’t give what they do not have. But I,” he says, shaking his head—­and here something begins to alter. A crack in the sheen of the performance when his eyes go overtly frantic in his head. “I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t. So I went to someone else,” he confesses. “I’ve managed to generate a few connections to the art world, even here in this meshugana metropolis,” he insists with a certain manic egoism. “Oh, yes. The name Fritz Landau is still known to a handful of discerning souls, my dear. On that you can rely.”

Rachel’s gaze is probing. Both distressed and wary. Is he having a breakdown? A stroke? Should she consider finding a pay phone for the ambulance?

“So I went,” he says solemnly, almost reverently, as if speaking of the Temple, “to the House of Glass.”

Silence.

“You doubt this?” he demands to know in a tone that is laced with both indignation and fear. Of course he must be able to read her face. “You doubt that your old uncle could still retain a shred of dignity with such a prestigious operation?”

“No. In fact, I don’t doubt it, Feter.” She does not mention Naomi’s photograph. It would only push him further toward the edge: What? I am to be spied upon, Daughter?

“I just want the truth,” she replies carefully.