Shadows of Berlin полностью

“Hallöchen, Liebling,” the woman says with the smile of a hungry cat. “Did your mummy leave you all alone?”

A sharp jolt. Only now at this intimate degree of proximity does Rashka feel a burn of confusion as she recognizes the beautiful face. La muse du rouge, her eema once called her. Though she’s famous now by another name given her by the Jews whom she hunts. Der Rote Engel she is called.

The Red Angel.

4.

The Episode

Her shrink’s office is on the Upper East Side just past the planned site for the new Guggenheim Museum. The entrance is down a short flight of granite steps. An elegantly varnished door to a cellar office in a soapstone apartment house. A discreet brass plaque is fixed to the door. DAVID A. SOLOMON, MD, PSYD. Inside, the framed diplomas on his office wall confirm his degrees from Columbia and Harvard School of Medicine, a rare Ivy League accomplishment for a Jew of his generation. Also, a framed wartime certificate commissions “Lt. Col. David Albert Solomon” as a “Psychiatric Consultant of the First Service Command.”

He is supposed to be part of the solution, Dr. Solomon. The blinds are drawn, filtering light. It’s a well-­appointed space. Built-­in shelves crowded with books. Dr. Solomon is a balding, straight-­backed mensch with a gentlemanly beard fringing his jawline. He sits with a notepad on his knee, a quiet, thoughtful presence, yet he wields a probing gaze. Always trying to exploit the cracks in her story. Always trying to bore into the holes in her heart. He has good eyes, though, behind those horn-­rims. She does not dislike him, but of course neither does she trust him.

He maintains a calm posture. Nothing is ever rushed. Even his diagnosis sounds like a suggestion. Stress response syndrome. It’s a new category usually reserved for men mustered out of the army, where it was called battle fatigue and shell shock. But stress response syndrome? That doesn’t sound too terrible. “People have stress, and they respond to it” is what her husband has decided. “Who doesn’t?” he’d added. “You put a burger on a burner? It cooks. Turn up the heat? It burns.” She knows that this is how Aaron has learned to accept his bad luck at marrying a poor meshugana refugee from Berlin-­Wilmersdorf instead of the good Jewish girl from Flatbush that his mother had certainly envisioned for him.

After the Episode at the department store, her confinement to the madhouse is a blur of unreality. A harrowing remembrance of being locked up between gray walls facing a gray steel door. Later she would be informed that it was for her own protection, that she had been tied into a straitjacket. The suffocating nature of such helplessness, of such intimate imprisonment, is what pains her most. Sleeves fastened behind her back, her arms wrapped tightly around her body without her consent. The claustrophobia of a cocoon.

The blinds are drawn as they are always drawn in the doctor’s office. He fills the opposing leather club chair, but silence stands between them.

“So you have nothing to say today,” Dr. Solomon deduces.

The painting, she thinks. She sees it in her mind’s eye. The flush crimsons and scarlets of her mother’s palette. The luminous female gaze from the canvas, drilling into her. “Must I,” she wonders aloud, “always have something to say?”

“No. Not always.” And then he asks, “Did something happen?”

“Such as what something?”

“Something that has upset you?”

In her mind, she hears the whisper. Wo ist dein Stern, Liebchen?

Rachel replies to the doctor, “Not a thing.”

Dr. Solomon removes his horn-­rims and must rub his eyes as if rubbing away her obfuscation. “Rachel,” he says. He seldom speaks her name with such weight. “It seems to me that something has changed.”

“Really? Changed how?”

“In our discussions. Since I suggested that you start painting again, you’ve become more…” What’s the word he’s going to choose? “Resistant,” he tells her.

“No, Dr. Solomon. You’re wrong,” she says.

“Am I?” He slips his glasses back into place. “Still. I can’t but feel that there is something you’re avoiding. Something you’re denying, even to yourself.”

“That I’m crazy?”

“No. Sometimes I think you say things like that—­use the word ‘crazy’—­not as a provocation but more as a diversion.” And then he says, “There was a Dutch psychiatrist, after the war, named Eliazar de Wind. He’d been sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis, but he was one of the few who lived to be liberated. As a result of his experiences, he developed a theory that he called ‘KZ syndrome,’ describing the pathological aftereffects that often afflict those who endure such trauma.”

“But I wasn’t in a concentration camp, Doctor,” Rachel is quick to point out. “That was my mother. That was my uncle.”