Shadows of Berlin полностью

“Tell her I’ll call her tomorrow. We’ll find a date.” And now she bends forward and gives him a kiss on the lips.

In the bedroom, the curtains are closed to the street, and Rachel has not snapped on her night-­light but instead lies on the bed cocooned by the darkness.

She once felt so alone in the darkness and afraid of it overwhelming her. But tonight, she feels no fear. She is not alone, not even in her own body. She starts to light a cigarette but then stops herself. Lets herself sink into the darkness instead. And then the springs groan, she smells smoke, and she sees Eema sitting on the corner of the bed, a Gitanes Brune inserted into an amber resin cigarette holder. Her eyes shine.

So here we are, you and I, her mother says.

“Yes,” Rachel whispers into the darkness. “Here we are.”

So. You’re the artist now, tsigele, she declares. And soon enough? A mother. A soft shake of her head. Children. You know they’re a curse, she says. Though even in death, there is a smile touching her lips.

That night as Aaron sleeps beside her, Rachel feels the shape of his body beside her. A man. Her husband. A Jew from Flatbush whose child she is bearing. A second heartbeat inside her mimicking her own. Sometimes she believes she can feel it. Could her eema feel it too? she wonders. When the founder of the Berolina Circle was carrying her child, could she feel her child’s heartbeat even before birth? Such a small and fragile thing, an infant’s heartbeat. Hardly more than the swish of a butterfly’s wings. And yet how it reverberates. A child full of possibilities. Full of difficulties. Carrying the future.

Outside, the West Side freight line passes, shuddering down its tracks, pursuing the night to its final boundary.

Dawn at the kitchen table. First light is streaking the lower quarters of the sky, a raw pinkish glow. Rachel lights a cigarette. Smoke rises. Kibbitz meows for attention, and she scoops him up into her arms. She can smell the spirits in the jar where her brushes are soaking. As she hugs the cat to her breast, the tears come. Grief and liberation. She sobs without constraint but not without purpose. It’s the cleansing purpose of the mikveh, washing through her. She sobs for her mother. She sobs for the millions. She sobs in grief for the world that has vanished, just as she sobs in hope for the child she carries and for the world that will come.

Author’s Note

Shadows of Berlin stemmed from my desire to dramatically explore the post-­war consequences of the Holocaust, not only for those who suffered under the Nazis and lost family to the murder machine, but also for those who lived in safety an ocean away while six million perished. So I created Rashka Morgenstern. Rashka is a young Jewish Berliner who has outlived the terror of war but carries her trauma with her like baggage as she crosses the Atlantic to a new life as a refugee in America. In New York City, Rashka becomes Rachel, and in 1950, she marries Aaron Perlman, a man who spent the war in the catering corps in California, while Europe was being reduced to cinders.

It’s through these two characters and their families (past and present) that I dig into the potent dynamics of guilt and regret, culpability and consequence that still shape the character of people’s lives ten years after the war has ended. I wanted to investigate how a traumatic experience, on both a massive and minor scale, can invest itself in the hearts of those who survive it for the rest of their lives. How “survivor’s guilt” can impact a person’s continued existence—­overtly, in the case of Rachel, and more subtly, in the case of her husband. But profoundly so in both cases.

At home, Rachel complains that her husband can never understand the depth of her grief or how she endured the tragedies of surviving Berlin. But neither does she fully understand or appreciate Aaron’s own struggles with his guilt and shame, that even though he spent the standard “duration plus six” in the army, he never spent a moment in harm’s way.