Shadows of Berlin полностью

Laughter floats up from the street. Rachel’s eyes are chilled by tears. “And me,” she asks quietly. “What about your little goat, Eema? Can I be rescued still?”

A police siren whines sharply past, and a sudden red light invades the room from the window, exposing her eema as she must have looked on the day of her final Selektion before the ovens took her. A corpse stripped naked, skeletal, her hair nothing but a wiry scrub. Eyes bottomless. Arm imprinted with her number. Rescued? Only by your own hands, she says.

The siren and flashing red fade, but as the room passes back into darkness, Rachel is alone. Until she hears the front door opening, then closing. A beat of silence is followed by the noise of Aaron clearing his throat. A gleam of light as a floor lamp in the living room is switched on. “Aaron?” she calls out to him.

The lamplight invades as he opens the bedroom door and enters in his shirtsleeves, sitting on the edge of their bed with a chirrup of springs. He loosens his necktie with a hook of two fingers. When he speaks, he sounds utterly spent. “You know, I think you’re right. I don’t understand. I really don’t.” He pauses. The glow from the living room lamp paints his eyes. “I don’t understand what those people did. To you,” he says. “To your family. I try, I honestly do. I watched the newsreels when I was still in the army. Battalion ran screenings. A.P.S. footage from, ya’ know, from liberated camps. There were grown men who couldn’t stand it. Some were vomiting. Sick with sobbing. Soldiers doing this, you understand,” he stresses. “Trained men. Some of these guys had seen combat, yet they just couldn’t stomach what they were seeing on the screen. But me? I stayed. I watched them all. I had no choice. As a Jew, I felt I couldn’t just look away. But then whattaya do? What’s a person supposed to do after seeing all that?” he asks.

“To me, I guess, there was only one answer. It seemed so simple really. Hitler murdered six million Jews? So we make more. Shouldn’t that be what we’re doing? I mean, shouldn’t that be our job?” he asks his wife but does not appear to expect a reply. “I keep thinking: It’s just her fear. Just her fear, and all I gotta do is be patient. But down deep, I have to admit that—­to me—­Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz? They’re all just words. Just the names of places that might as well be on the moon. Maybe I saw the newsreels, but I have no idea, not the slightest actual idea, what they really mean to you.”

His words drift away.

Rachel wipes tears from her face. “It’s not your fault,” she tells him.

Aaron expels a sigh. Rachel sits up to guide them both back down to the bed, where they spoon together, Aaron still dressed and in his shoes.

But when she closes her eyes, feeling him nuzzling into the back of her neck, all she sees is a gust of blinding snow, obscuring the outline of the white mountain that is rising to meet her.

17.

A Jew from Flatbush

He inspects the nose-­hair situation by examining the reflection of his inner nostrils. Funny how he can remember his pop doing the same thing. He sees the old man there in the mirror, staring back at him from his own reflection.

“Com’ere,” he hears Pop command, in that flat summoning tone that always signals trouble, motioning him over to the cash register. He can tell what’s coming next, the whack on the side of the head, but he obeys anyway and absorbs the whack when it comes. The whack that’s not supposed to punish him but just knock some sense into his kop. “Look at this,” his father instructs. “How many times I gotta tell you, huh? You don’t mix the ten-­dollar bills in with the twenties, okay? How many times?” he wants to know. “It makes you look like you’re stealing.”

This shocks Aaron. Stealing? “How, Pop?”

“Never mind. It does is all,” his father assures him firmly, placing the ten in its proper spot in the cash drawer. “I’m trying to teach you something, Aaron,” he explains with a frown. His face is set in a serious affect, trying to get through to this domkop son of his. Trying as hard as he can. “I’m trying to teach you something,” he repeats. “There are two kinds of people in the world. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, I’m listening to you, Pop.”

“There are two kinds of people in the world,” his father explains. “Those people who don’t care if they do it wrong and those who work hard to do it right. Now which kind should a man be?” he asks, his voice muted but demanding.

Now, two decades later, Aaron stands in front of the bathroom mirror. He has never veered from his answer. The man who works hard is the man who does it right. It’s the man he will be. Must be. That much is chiseled in goddamned stone. But sometimes he wonders why. Sometimes he wonders what’s the point, ya’ know? To work and to die and to leave what behind? His pop left him behind when the old man’s heart burst an artery.