Shadows of Berlin полностью

Bauer the super. He’s held this position since last year, inhabiting the cellar apartment opposite the boiler room. Rachel used to go down there when friendly Mr. Fitzroy was the occupant. Old Mr. Ruddy-­Faced Fitzroy, who sang loudly and lyrically while he fixed your plumbing or rewired your doorbell. But they found him on the floor two days after Christmas, dead of heart failure, and since then, their landlord, Mr. Klinghoffer, has replaced him with this—­this Hun. Whenever she travels down to the cellar to put the trash in the bins, Rachel stares at the door, picturing a charnel house behind it stacked with bones that the German shovels into the furnace to heat the apartment after Aaron jacks up the thermostat.

Now, this tubby Boche is half under the kitchen galley sink in their apartment. Dull-­faced with greasy hair going gray, though only his big white belly and dirty work pants are visible to Rachel as he clunks about with his wrenches. Smoke from his cigarette drifts upward from the pipes.

She sits, nursing a lit filter tip in a kitchen chair, dressed in a brown cardigan and a pair of Sanforized denim pants. Her hair’s tied up with a kerchief. Her arms are wrapped around her knees. She is caged by her own posture, glaring suspiciously at the interloper, when the cat suddenly leaps up onto the table and yowls loudly. Rachel seizes him as if he’s set off an alarm, drawing him into her cage as if she fears he will give her away.

There was a thuggish Waffen-­SS trooper in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse Lager known as Di Shtivl—­The Boot—­because of his reputation for kicking the prisoners—­men, women, but especially children. Put a few pounds on him and gray his hair a touch, she thinks, and this could be him. Him or some other assassin of the Jews.

Kibbitz complains about Rachel’s ever-­tightening grip, and he slips from her embrace, nipping her arm lightly, not to hurt, just to send a message, then bronking with frustration as he hits the floor and padding away. Rachel rubs the skin of her arm. The chair where her eema sat is now empty. To the super, she says stridently, “Excuse me. This will take how much longer?”

A squeak of a wrench. “The trap is clogged, Missus Perlman,” he tells her in his ugly, filthy Nazi Boche accent and sits up. His face is blotchy and pasty from all the steins of beer he must lift. Unshaven. A cigarette clenched between his lips. “It can be cleaned, but it also needs replacement.”

“And this will take how long?”

The super blows out smoke. “To clean?” he shrugs. “A minute, no more. But for the replacement, I must go to the hardware store.” He says this as if the hardware store is the highest authority on the matter. The Kommandantur of plumbing to which he must report. Rachel is incredulous at the ramifications of this pronouncement.

“So. You mean you must come back?”

“You feel hatred toward the Germans?” Dr. Solomon asks her.

“Don’t you?”

“We’re not here to discuss me, Rachel.”

“Yes. I feel ‘hatred’ as you say.”

“Toward all Germans? Even those who might be innocent of crimes?”

“If they aren’t guilty of the crimes, then they are guilty of knowing of the crimes and doing nothing. There is no such being in my opinion, Dr. Solomon, as an ‘innocent’ German.”

“I see,” says the doctor and makes a note.

“Did I say something shocking? Something to reveal myself? What have you just made note of?”

But the doctor is deaf to the question and switches topics. “I don’t mean to press you too firmly on this point, Rachel, but have you given any more thought to my suggestion about painting?” Dr. Solomon wonders.

“I’ve been busy,” she answers. Surly and flat. She hasn’t been sleeping well. Last night, she awoke convinced there was someone in the apartment. Aaron had to check out every corner, open every closet and cabinet door, before she was forced to admit she had been dreaming. But was she dreaming? Since the day she was confronted by her eema’s painting, she has been feeling watched by hidden eyes. A growing feeling that there was something terrible waiting for her concealed in the darkness. She expels smoke from her cigarette. “I think I should be going, Doctor,” she decides and begins to assembles herself.

The doctor is surprised. “But there’s still time left in the hour,” he points out.

“Nevertheless. You cannot help me any further today, Dr. Solomon. Who can? I have a sickness that cannot be cured.”

But on the subway, the brunette schoolgirl with the burgundy beret returns, sitting across the aisle, the manifestation of Rachel’s guilt. Sitting in the café up the Friedrichstrasse, hearing a voice: You’re not here on a holiday, Bissel. You must earn your keep.

The schoolgirl gazes back at her. She never appears accusatory. Never. Merely confused. Merely saddened by the lies Rachel lives by.