Shadows of Berlin полностью

The horse dung, the musty smell of browning cabbages and damp potatoes piled high in the carts of the vegetable stands. The Ostjuden orthodoxy in their beaver-­skin hats and airless black kaftans, sweating into their beards. Dangling payot, fringed tallitot. They were the first to feel the brunt of the anti-­Semitic pogrom, years even before the Nazis arrived, and the first to be stripped of German citizenship under Hitler.

“Most Jews in Berlin?” says Rachel. “They regarded the quarter as a kind of plague town and the inhabitants as the sweepings of the Pale of Settlement. Certainly my mother did. It was they who were to blame for the ugly, hooked-­nose caricatures in Der Stürmer. That was the common thinking. But I thought they were beautiful,” says Rachel. “Such faces. As if God had modeled them from the original clay.”

There’s a beat of soft silence before Naomi speaks, sounding quietly surprised. “I’ve never heard you talk about…” What shall she call it? “About your past,” she says.

Rachel shrugs it away. “What is the point? The city I was born to is gone. Ground to dust. And the Ostjuden? The crematoria took them. They’re all at the bottom of the ash pits now.” Eingeäschert. And now the silence in the tiny darkroom has gone morose. It’s the trap of her past. “I’m sorry,” Rachel apologizes. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was morbid.” She wipes the dampness from her eyes.

“No, no, it’s all right. Really,” her sister-­in-­law insists. “There’s so much I don’t know.” This sounds like a small confession on Naomi’s part. An American Jew with blank spots on the map of Europe where the Jews once lived and died. But Rachel isn’t interested in teaching history. She offers a flimsy smile.

“You can be glad over that,” she says. “Knowing too much is not so pleasant. So. Show me. What else?” Pushing up a smile, nodding her chin to the developing bins.

“Oh. Okay, sure,” her sister-­in-­law agrees, probably just as happy to be changing the subject. “There’re a couple more.”

The rectangles of light-­sensitive paper are submerged, and images float to the top. Thickening shadows evolve into more alter kockers. More pigeons, more mothers pushing prams down the sidewalk, kids trailing.

And then truth emerges.

A sleek young man maintains a certain élégance d’attitude even as he is seated on the weathered park bench among the pigeons and hopping squirrels.

“That’s David Glass,” Rachel declares, a note of trouble in her voice.

“Who?” Naomi asks, but Rachel does not answer.

The young Mr. Glass sits politely attentive as any wolf of the steppes, listening to an old scarecrow of a man beside him. Friedrich Landau was the name once engraved on his calling card in Berlin. Though Rachel has always known him simply as Feter Fritz.

“Is something wrong?” she hears Naomi inquiring, with a light note of concern, and shakes herself free of the photo.

“No,” she says, bringing up a flat smile. “No. Just a headache. It must be the whiskey. I hardly ever touch it.”

“Could be inhaling the emulsion fluid too. We should get you out of here. Sometimes the silver nitrate gives people headaches.”

“Yes,” Rachel agrees, feeling gutted. “Yes, that could be it too.”

On her way back to the subway, she stops at a pay phone and rings up Feter Fritz. Le conspirateur. The pay phone rings until one of the other tenants picks it up. A man. Has he seen Mr. Landau today? No? No, not all morning, sorry. She hangs up. She thinks she could get on the train and head for the Lower East Side. She could track him down, her feter. Grill him. Isn’t that what it’s called in the detective movies? Give him the third degree. What scheme were you hatching? What bargain were you sealing? Talk!

But does she forget? He is the master of prevarication, Feter Fritz. The maven of obfuscation, of half-truths and full lies.

Was I sitting on a park bench conspiring with the likes of David Glass? Oh, yes. And later on, I had coffee and a bun with Albert Einstein.

She would never get a straight story from him. Ever. So she will wait.

Sitting at home on the windowsill. She has shoved up the sash to free Kibbitz from the apartment, but now she sits there, the chilly air washing over her, smoking a juju, a parting gift from her sister-­in-­law. “Dope!” Naomi calls it. Better than aspirin! Better than Miltown! Smoking a little reefer. That’s Naomi’s prescription. It smells to Rachel like the sour weed from a poor man’s pipe.

Sitting on the edge of the window like she’s sitting on the edge of the world, Rachel feels a lift. She will not worry. She will wait. She will wait and be watchful for the truth of her uncle’s subterfuge to emerge. She knows that if Feter Fritz has a fatal flaw, it is that his ego will not permit him to keep silent. Eventually, he will confess his intrigues in order to boast of them.

She takes another puff, and her thoughts follow the smoke out into the infinite air.

PART TWO

The Good Hour

14.