Shadows of Berlin полностью

Advertising cards on the Lexington Avenue Local provide a lesson on Good Subway Citizenship as the train bumps through the tunnel: PLEASE, DON’T BE A SPACE HOG, A DOOR BLOCKER, A FEET RESTER, A LEG PEST, OR A LITTERBUG! All instructions that are generally ignored by passengers. This is also a difference between New York and Berlin. In Berlin, who would have dared smoke where the sign commanded RAUCHEN VERBOTEN! Or dared be a Jew where the notice declared JUDEN VERBOTEN!

The crowd in the car thins out. It’s then that Rachel notices a child staring at her. A little girl, four or five years old, with a knit hat and silky brown bangs across her little forehead. Her eyes are shiny buttons, and she gazes at Rachel with innocent interest. A contented little fox caught out in the open, yet who can look through a person to spot the animal truth of them.

It’s not that Rachel does not want children. She does, or at least there are times that she does. The desire for a child of her own strikes her in moments of urgency. Perhaps that’s how she herself was conceived. In one of her eema’s moments of urgency. God knows it’s difficult to imagine Eema actually planning for such a process as conception. Drafting out a child in her mind, laying down the sketches in her heart before a child filled them in, filling up her womb. Before a child stretched out her body and confounded her life. Before it ruined her punctuality, disrupted her routines, drained the color from her lips, and demanded strict attention on a tyrannical scale simply to survive the day. Would she have ever actually agreed to such a disruptive intrusion with the benefit of forethought? Doubtful. Her daughter must have been an accident of the moment.

Gazing back at the girl with the straight brown bangs, Rachel can only view motherhood as a foreign concept. Like the moon or like the American Dream. To dream like an American? What does this mean? Even after becoming a citizen, she does not know. Perhaps because she is still only partially here in this country. Part of her is still buried in the cinders of Berlin. Before she was Rachel the American, she was Rashka or Rokhl or Ruchel, or her mother’s Little Goat. And it is little Rashka’s terror that punctures any urgent moments in Rachel’s life that might lead to conception. Any true desire for a child of her own is restricted to a wistful reverie, in the same way she might imagine what-­if. What if her mother had loved her as much as she loved art? What if she had remained an innocent? What if she had never shared a table with the red-­haired woman in a Berlin café? What if horses could talk and pigs could fly? What if.

At home, they don’t really discuss the Episode.

She and her husband, Aaron, that is.

It’s not really on their agenda for conversation. Rather they talk around it, as in Aaron’s refrain: “We don’t want a repeat of the Episode.”

The Episode being the night she ended up in a straitjacket for her own protection, locked up in Bellevue’s psychiatric wing. The doctor there stitched and bandaged her hand slashed by the shattered glass so that no visible scar remains. But scars are often not so visible. Since that night, the surface of the wound has healed over. Already, more than half a year has passed, and both she and Aaron have returned to the routines of their daily lives, except for one thing. One thing hardly worth mentioning really. The thin layer of dread that gives an undertone to the everyday colors of every moment. The Dead Layer below all her exteriors. Other than that? Altes iz shleymesdik. All is perfect.

For their first anniversary, Aaron’s mother wanted to buy them a T.V., but Aaron is dead set against television, so it was a radio instead. A Philco 51–­532 table model that sits on a shelf. If Rachel wants to watch T.V., she must drag her husband down two blocks to the window of an appliance store on West Twentieth. There’s often a crowd when The Lone Ranger comes on, though it’s hard to hear through the glass. Rachel doesn’t care. It’s an American western. Everyone climbs into the saddle. All the men have six-­guns on their hips and are all expert shots, picking rattlesnakes off the rocks. The women wear long calico dresses, but even they can handle a rifle.

“We could buy a T.V.,” she tells Aaron.

“Who can afford one?” he asks without looking up from the kitchen table, smoking as she cleans up the supper dishes. “Besides, T.V. is for suckers. It’s all about moving the merchandise.”