Shadows of Berlin полностью

A schoolgirl is watching with melancholy. Brunette hair plaited into a single braid. A burgundy beret tugged at an angle. She dares to offer Rashka a tentative smile in the recesses of her memory, while the black pencil dress is flecked with her regurgitation. Rachel is sweating and shivering. She cannot stop. She must vomit up her life.

Her past. Herself.

9.

Things Went Amiss

The night passes. Dressed in her pink chenille bathrobe, hair uncombed, she stares at her warped reflection in the toaster’s aluminum. She had learned from the radio show Alka-­Seltzer Time how to defend herself against a sour belly and drinks a glass of water in which she has dropped two tablets of antacids that are fizzing as they dissolve. It leaves a sour tang on her tongue, like a lime slice in seltzer, although more chemical.

Aaron appears, giving her his husbandly peck on the cheek but with an extra squeeze, bunching up her shoulders against his chest. “You need something in your stomach,” he determines. “Some dry toast, maybe a little burnt around the edges,” he tells her and actually opens the sack of rye bread to stick two slices into the toaster. Aaron the cook! “That’s what Ma always gave us when we were sick as kids. Dry toast, a little burnt around the edges,” he repeats, describing the miracle cure.

Rachel nods. “Thank you.”

“Look,” he says. “Again. I’m really sorry for what happened. Subjecting you to that play.”

“It’s okay,” Rachel tells him.

“We should have,” he says. “We should have gone to Naomi’s like you wanted in the first place.”

“It’s okay,” Rachel repeats. “You needn’t keep apologizing. Really. You were trying to be the good husband,” she says to let him off the hook, because she does not know how many more apologies she can suffer. “You were trying to do something nice.”

He nods lightly. This is true, after all. He pours a glass of water from the kitchen faucet and downs it. “So you want me to call the super? The drain’s still slow.”

Rachel swallows. “No. I’ll call him,” she lies.

“Okay,” he agrees. No more pressure. “You’re sure you’re gonna be all right if I head in to work?” he inquires.

“Yes,” Rachel replies and tucks a renegade strand of her hair behind an ear. “I’m going to be fine.”

“I mean I could call Abe. Go in a few hours late.”

“Aaron. I will be fine,” she tells him.

“Okay,” he says, stroking her head. “And don’t worry,” he assures her with certain conviction. He will put a boot up somebody’s ass today for poisoning his wife with a piece of bad fish. Oh yes, he will kick some tuchus, all right. You bet he will. Though he offers this information gently, as if it’s comforting. But really her husband’s voice is just a drone in her ears. A few minutes later, the apartment door opens and then closes. Rachel locks it behind him and leans her back against it, staring into the interior of their apartment.

The paint on the wall is eggshell white. When they first moved in, their landlord paid to paint the place every year, but that custom has fallen by the wayside, and the walls are getting dingy. They betray an underpainting of gray in the light. And the floorboards squeak at every step. Still, sometimes it feels like a palace, even though it’s just the shitty one-­bedroom. As U-­boats hiding in Berlin, she and Eema would have happily settled for a fraction of the space she has here.

A thin wisp of smoke rises from the toaster, and she winces as the toast suddenly pops up, burnt black. Eema, in fact, is at the kitchen table, once more the KaZetnik in clogs and rags. One of the dead of Auschwitz-­Birkenau, reconstituted from the ash pits and now smelling up a Chelsea apartment.

“So tell me this, Eema,” Rachel says. “Do you think Feter is lying?”

Always a clear possibility.

“You think he knows who holds your painting?”

Perhaps or perhaps not. But I do think, without doubt, my brother knows more than he says. It’s the diktat of his personality.

Rachel is quiet for a moment. “It is still a beautiful work,” she tells her mother. A sheyn kunst verk.

Eema draws a breath and exhales a burnt stench. But her bloodshot eyes have gone soft. Even in death, she has longings. She was a beautiful subject. So beautiful.

“They say she hanged herself, you know. After the war as a prisoner of the Russians.” But her mother has no further comment. She is gone, and Rachel is alone.

Days pass. She wakes up confused. Where is she? The chaos of her sleep has infiltrated her waking mind. For a moment, she thinks she is on the floor in Grosse Hamburger Strasse camp, a prisoner awaiting transport to the east. When she shouts out in fear, Aaron sticks his head out of the bathroom, interrupted while brushing his teeth.

“You okay?” he wonders.

“Yes,” she lies. “Yes. Just a bad dream.”