Shadows of Berlin полностью

Rachel breathes in but takes the offered toke, drawing in deeply, tasting the sour smoke as she accepts it into her body. Holding, then exhaling. Her head lightens. Her body lightens. Different from the Miltown. Miltown is pedestrian. A mood dampener. This feels as if part of her brain is unmoored and on its own course.

Naomi drops back her head, eyes closed, to soak up the chilly sunlight. “God, I love sunshine,” she declares with a sweet tranquility. And then? Still with her eyes closed to the sunlight, “Can I ask you a question? I mean, it’s kind of a personal thing.”

This should have warned Rachel off, but maybe with the juju, her guard is down. “Sure,” she replies. Honestly, she thinks it’s going to be a question about Aaron or maybe about some sisterly element of feminine biology. Menstrual cycles or tampons. A personal question.

But what Naomi asks her is “Why did you stop painting?”

“Why did I stop?” Perhaps, if she repeats the question aloud, she can stall for time. Because she’s afraid that if she’s not careful, she might actually give a truthful answer. Naomi is unaware of details of the Episode. Aaron passed it off to his family as an anemic attack. Iron-­poor blood. Maybe Naomi believes this and maybe she doesn’t, but either way, it was a lie that Rachel has maintained, even though it has created a gap between Naomi and her. A small unspoken thing as painfully annoying as a pebble in a shoe.

“You were so good,” her sister-­in-­law assures her. “Those ghosts or spirits or whatever. They were scary in a way,” she says, “but really moving too. And then you just stopped.”

“I was sick,” Rachel answers.

“Yeah. I know. The anemia thing. But you didn’t go back. So I’ve always kinda wondered why.”

Rachel has to suddenly concentrate on keeping herself in check. No tears. No tears.

“I’m sorry,” Naomi offers. “I’m upsetting you.” She can see that. “Never mind. Forget I asked.”

“I stopped,” Rachel declares. “Because I was afraid to continue,” she confesses. “I was afraid that if I continued? Something terrible would come out of me. Something,” she says, “unforgivable.”

Night. Alone in the bed. The racket of the elevated West Side freight passes, rattling the bedroom’s window glass. Rachel absorbs the blunt thunder of the tracks completely. Then speaks quietly to the air. “Tell me the story again, Eema.”

The mattress creaks softly.

Which story?

“The story of the drowned kittens.”

Eema is a silhouette, shrouded by the room’s darkness, but she has brought the perfume of the Krematorium to her daughter’s bedroom. Ah. Well. My mother. Your grandmother of blessed memory. You never knew her, I know. But she taught me a lesson when I was very small, which I would never forget.

Rachel smokes in silence, her eyes gleaming with the ruby ember of her cigarette.

A terrible thing had happened, her eema tells her. A frightening thing. I had seen a man drown a bag full of kittens by dropping them over the side of the Weidendammer Brücke. I could hear them, their panicky little meows from inside his burlap sack. And when he tossed them over into the river, he listened for a moment for the sound of the splash. When he heard it, he simply walked off as if he had done nothing. As if he was an innocent man.

I was so—­so shocked. So overwhelmed that I lost my voice. It’s true, she says. Your eema didn’t speak for days. I was so utterly racked by guilt. Guilt that I should have stopped him, this criminal. That somehow, I should have rescued those little kittens from their fate. And I felt the remorse of the world on my heart like a heavy stone, she says. Until my mother came into my bedroom one night, just like this, while I was lying in the dark. And she said to me, “Vina. You cannot rescue what cannot be rescued. You cannot save what cannot be saved.”

A beat.