Shadows of Berlin полностью

Rachel gazes at him. She understands how important it is to him. How important it is to him to be able take her out someplace nice and remove her from her own intimate insanity. To rescue her, just like he did at the library that first day, only now he is trying to rescue her from herself. She knows that his identity is still tied to playing his wife’s hero even after years of marriage. She can hear it in the boyish buoyancy of his voice—­to be the big shot himself for once and get the Broadway show tickets.

“Okay.” She surrenders. She can swallow her shame at surviving, can’t she? At having been spared the smoking ovens that consumed the millions? At least for an evening. “You win,” she whispers. “We’ll have a tsimmis.”

But across the room, standing by the sofa, is her mother. Head shaven, eyes like pits. Rachel knows why she’s come. It’s the painting. Eema cannot permit her work to be so easily lost again, like a pair of gloves left behind on a café table. She cannot permit her painting to be so simply forgotten. Forgetting the artist’s work is no different from forgetting the artist.

7.

A Heartbreaker!

When she is six years old, Rachel learns the truth about the world. About the world of a Jew in Berlin. The American stock exchange has failed, tipping the world into ruinous depression. Economies have collapsed, and Germany’s fledgling democracy is losing its tenuous foothold. The Communist Party surges in parliamentary elections, as does the so-­called National Socialist German Workers Party. Political mayhem bloodies the streets once more, as it had a decade earlier during the runaway inflation.

In the face of chaos and fearing revolution from the left, the ancient fossil, Herr Reichspräsident General-­Feldmarschall Paul von Beneckendorff und Hindenburg, the Hero of Tannenberg, once more evokes Article 48 of the Constitution to rule by emergency decree. On the first of January 1933, he uses his powers to appoint a former army corporal named Adolf Hitler to the most powerful post in the land, chancellor of the German Reich. The monarchists agree. Put this upstart Bohemian paperhanger in charge to eradicate the Marxist threat and then control his excesses. They think they’ve hired him for their show.

But this upsets Rashka’s mother greatly, and anything that upsets Eema also upsets Rashka—­though, at six, she does not understand so much the reasons why. She only knows that when she hears this man’s voice on the wireless, her mother’s face darkens, and Rashka feels a knot of painful confusion tighten in her belly.

The wireless booms: “It is my sacred mission to purge all German art of the intentionally disruptive modern jargon created by Jews and social perverts,” the newly minted Reichskanzler bellows over the airwaves. “So-­called works of art that are grotesque, unmanly, and deliberately perplexing shall now be recognized as the insulting inventions of deranged minds!”

Rashka is drawing. She is safe, she believes, at home in the salon of her mother’s Gründerzeit villa in the Fasanenstrasse, not so far from the Elephant Gate of the Zoologischer Garten. The walls are hung with Eema’s work. Her mother’s bright, savagely colorful gouache and inks. The oils on hefty canvases. Figures, faces, ugly, beautiful, human. Little Rashka is on the soft floral carpet drawing in her pad, and her eema is seated in her favorite upholstered chair, the Viennese wingback, but she is frowning at the voice from the radio bawling into the empty space of the room. Her eema’s face is a mask of tension as she smokes a cigarette screwed into her amber holder.

“It will be my eternal vow that such Jew-­inspired perversion will be forever thwarted in its attempt to poison the artistic soul of our German Volk!”

Rashka is trying to concentrate on her drawing, but the wireless broadcast is distracting her, confusing her. And when the speech concludes with a storm of Heils, Eema tersely switches off the dial.

Rashka suspends her drawing and looks up. “He is a paskudnyak!” she reports, a child trying out a grown-­up’s insult she’d overheard, but her mother reacts with unexpected force.

“Never call him that, Rashka. Not in public,” Eema warns, eyebrows arched. It’s a command underpainted with a stain of fear. “Where did you hear such a thing?”

Rashka swallows. Ehrenberg’s Konditorei is a pastry shop on the Lindenstrasse that she frequents with the housemaid, Manka. Was it Frau Ehrenberg who spoke this word? She decides it was. “Frau Ehrenberg. I heard her say it.”

“That woman is a fool with a loose mouth, and so is her husband,” Eema declares. “The both of them. Fools! Manka shouldn’t take you there. It will get us all into trouble.”

This is a disappointment, and Rashka complains. “But, Eema, they have the Mohnkuchen there!”

“Never mind Mohnkuchen. Just watch your tongue. And never call that man such a name again.”