Shadows of Berlin полностью

“See yourself in my mirror, Bissel,” the Angel tells her. “I am your reflection, just as you are mine.” She reaches out. Reaches out to touch Rachel on the arm, but Rachel bats the attempt away.

“It’s you who sickens me.” She wipes her mouth on her sleeve and swallows her breath. “It is you. You are the sickness,” she declares. “It’s too bad the rumor wasn’t true. That you didn’t hang yourself ten years ago. Think of how much air you have stolen since then, just by breathing. Think of how much space you’ve purloined by staying alive. Space that should have belonged to someone else. Someone human.”

“Bissel,” the Angel says.

“You are nothing but disease! A plague that infects everyone you have ever touched!”

The Angel seizes her arm, her eyes jagged. “Rashka.”

Rachel tugs to regain her arm. “Let go! You have no claim on me.”

“I’m dying,” the woman shouts, her voice suddenly a croak.

Rachel freezes. She sees the raw bewilderment at such a fact in the Angel’s face.

“I’m dying,” she repeats.

“Another lie,” says Rachel.

“No. No, simply the truth. I have cancer of the blood.” The muscles twitch again along her jaw. “There is no cure,” she says. “Only death is the cure.”

Rachel breathes. She shrugs her arm free from the Angel’s grip, and this time, there is no resistance.

“It’s why I bought your mother’s painting. It’s why, when I was informed of your uncle’s part in its discovery, I revealed myself to him as its new owner. But not because of him or the painting either. Because I wanted to know about you. And when he told me you had your mother’s gift with the paintbrush?” She breathes out. “This is why I wanted him to push you. To produce your own work while I still have the time to act. I will buy whatever you produce, Bissel, and pay plenty for it. I still will, don’t you see? I could give you the career that your mother had!”

Rachel stares, but then turns and walks away. She walks away with her head up as the rain pours down, soaking through her. She hears the woman crying out her name behind her. But she does not turn. She does not slow. She feels the rain washing through her.

In the shower, the water is scalding.

Seated at the kitchen table, holding the cat in her lap, Rachel watches the smoke rise from the cigarette. She has replaced the green glass ashtray that she threw on the floor with a red plastic item sporting the word FIRE in white block letters—­unbreakable. She is dressed in a pullover and dungarees, her feet in wool socks, her hair still damp. A change in the wind rattles the window behind her. She absorbs the rattle. Evicts the cat from her lap and crosses into the closet beside the bedroom.

From behind the vacuum cleaner, she retrieves the shopping bag from B. Altman that hides her scrapbook of clippings. She opens it to the last entry. A United Airlines jet called the “Mainliner Denver” was destroyed in midair when a hidden bomb exploded in the luggage compartment. The creased newsprint is bumpy with library paste.

The rain has dwindled to a cold drizzle, but Rachel has not bothered to wear a coat as she opens the foyer door and steps out onto the stoop. She does not run but keeps a steady pace, trotting down the steps. The air smells lightly of smoke as she descends the steps to the cellar where the trash bins are located. Dented garbage receptacles, grimy and smelling, the street number slopped on the sides with black paint.

The blackness of the clouds has grayed. A thin flow of thunder drifts above her head as she lifts the lid on the middle can with a light clank of metal. Then drops in the bag. Goodbye to it. Goodbye to her book of scraps. Her history of disaster plummeting from the sky like a falling angel. Dumped now into the trash. Goodbye. She clamps down the lid.

Shedding the shroud from her easel, Rachel stares into the canvas. A dark rectangle. But under the skim of black, her own image emerges like a pale pentimento. Naked and glaring. The Magen David dripping down into her eyes.

She lets her head drift lightly to one side. And then she is moving. It doesn’t take long to assemble her palette. Lead white. Zinc white. Titanium. Lamp black. Alizarine crimson.

On the day she was taken, the girl with the burgundy beret did not cry. She did not scream. The terror in her eyes was banked by obedience. The girl is curled into a white fetal sphere and inserted into the womb of the painting. And there is something mysterious that Rachel searches for now as she paints the girl’s face in miniature. An attempt at life. Deuteronomy commands it. Behold, I give before you this day the life and the good, the death and the evil, blessing and curse; and you shall choose life, so that you will live, you and your seed.