Shadows of Berlin полностью

But then Rashka remembers: “Feter Fritz has called him so too.” This time, however, Rashka is surprised when her mother bites off a short, bitter laugh.

“Ha! Your Feter Fritz thinks he’s the cat with nine lives. But you, Rashka? You are not. Out beyond our doors? Be a good little goat and keep your mouth closed. This man Hitler may indeed be the worst kind of paskudnyak. But he is no longer any kind of a joke.”

Rashka breathes this in. Not a cat but a goat. “But why?” she must ask. “Why is he so angry with Jews?”

“Because he hates us,” Eema informs her, smothering her cigarette in the red sandstone cendrier. The sentence is spoken curtly with the weight of common fact. But Rashka is really rather startled. Certainly, that can’t be completely true.

“Not all of us,” she says, as if perhaps her mother is mistaken.

Her eema, however, remains rigid. “Yes. All of us.”

“You, Eema?”

“Yes.”

“Feter Fritz?”

“Yes.”

“And me too?”

Her mother’s glare is merciless. “Especially you, Daughter,” she declares. “He hates you because you, Rashka, are the future.”

Rashka is mortified at the thought of such hatred. She has never imagined that anyone could hate her. Her, personally. Rokhl Morgenstern.

“What are you scribbling there?” her eema suddenly demands. “Show me.”

Rashka dutifully stands, pulls the page from her sketchbook, and presents her mother with it for inspection. “It’s me,” she says. “I drew myself.” Rashka is really quite pleased with it and hopes for her mother’s approval. But Eema scowls and rips the drawing in half, causing Rashka to burst immediately into tears.

“Eema! Why did you do that?”

“Because you can do better. And because loss is part of life, tsigele,” her mother explains. “You should learn that now.” Eema stands and drops the torn drawing into the fire that’s crackling in the hearth, leaving Rashka crying and bewildered.

***

She had left the house this morning with intention. Her sister-­in-­law, Naomi, is something of a bohemian type but is also something of a clotheshorse. Rachel is hoping that she might have something she can borrow for the Big Tsimmis, because really, who should be spending money on a new dress for one night? Also, since the Episode, Rachel avoids department stores.

She has relieved the crowded medicine cabinet at home of the bottle of Miltown and started carrying it in her bag. On the subway, she opens the bottle and downs two, even though it’s hours away from her normal schedule. But she takes two now, and by the time she is exiting the Lexington Avenue train at West Fourth, the Miltown has done its work. She feels as if she’s walking a straight line. Following the trajectory of a quiet arrow.

All manner of craziness can find a home in the Village. Aaron speaks of it as if it’s a kind of neighborhood mental asylum between Broadway and the North River, but it’s where his sister has chosen to live, in a redbrick walk-­up at the intersection of MacDougal and Minetta Lane. A stately old Italian ristorante sits across the street and farther down a neighborhood joint called Kettle of Fish.

Up the building’s stoop, Rachel finds the door unlocked as always and wanders through it, heading up the stairs. She can smell the ancient cigarette smoke, generations old, that clings to the carpet runners. But on the third floor, she catches the aroma of chemical developer. A record player is spinning the Platters hit, “Only You.” When she knocks, she calls through the door, “Naomi?”

A scratch as the record player quits and the door flings open. Answering the door is a breezy young woman in a peasant blouse over red toreador pants with bare feet. “Hey, it’s you,” her sister-­in-­law declares with a startling happy grin.

“It is me,” Rachel admits and accepts the big smack Naomi plants on her cheek.

“Well, get in here, you. I’ll break out the booze!” This is Aaron’s kid sister, though really, she is no longer a kid at all. Naomi Beatrice Perlman, known universally by the members of the Flatbush tribe as Naomi-­rhymes-­with-­Foamy. A troublemaker, a subversive, at least compared to her brother Mr. Don’t-­Make-­Waves. She likes to stir the pot. Chestnut hair in a ponytail and velvety brown eyes. Pretty in a careless, go-­screw-­yourself kind of way. A real meydl mit a veyndl.