Shadows of Berlin полностью

To which her husband can only shrug. “S’okay. I’ll suffer.” He sips at the coffee and ignites a cigarette with his Zippo as Rachel is busy fetching an egg from the fridge and cracking it into an iron skillet.

“So I heard this story,” Aaron begins, exhaling smoke. “This guy, walking down the street on East Thirty-­Third, minding his own business, when suddenly—­ka-­chunk! A piece of masonry falls off one of those big apartment buildings and lands right on his kop.”

The egg sizzles loudly in the pan. “What happened to him?”

“What happened to him? Well, honey, whattaya think happened when a hunk of masonry goes ka-­chunk on your head?”

“And did it actually make that sound? ‘Ka-­chunk’?”

“Yes. It made that sound exactly.” He smokes, done with this business of ka-­chunking and what follows. “So. Any ideas for your birthday this year?”

The question automatically inserts a splinter into Rachel’s belly. “My birthday?” she asks and flinches inwardly at the sight of a dead rat sizzling in the skillet. Absorbing the horror, she blinks it away till it is once again a frying egg.

“It’s only a couple weeks away,” Aaron reminds. “Whattaya wanna do?”

“I don’t know. What did we do last year?”

Her husband relives the boredom. “Invited Naomi over for takeout and played Scrabble. Just like the year before and the year before that and on and on back to the beginning of creation.”

Rachel replies, defending something. “Okay. Well, I like Naomi.” The toast pops. Rachel grabs it by the edges and drops it on a plate, which she shuttles over to the table.

“Uh-­huh. I like Naomi too,” her husband agrees in a flattened tone, scraping the burnt toast with a table knife. “She’s my sister, so what choice do I have? Is this butter or margarine?”

“Margarine,” Rachel tells him.

Again, he frowns but doesn’t complain aloud. “I thought this year we might do something else.”

This makes Rachel uneasy. “And what’s wrong with Scrabble anyway, I’d like to know? Scrabble is my favorite game.” The truth is that the Scrabble games with her sister-­in-­law make her feel safe. They make her feel as she did as a child in their home in the Fasanenstrasse, playing board games on the card table with school friends, rolling dice and counting off spaces. Walking the skillet over to the table, she scoops out the burnt egg using a spatula, plopping it onto the waiting piece of toast. “Sorry. It’s black around the edges.”

“S’alright. There’s pepper?”

She moves the pepper shaker from the middle of the table to a spot within Aaron’s easy grasp. God forbid he should have to reach for something.

The telephone rings. Aaron moves not a muscle to answer it. He only huffs a sigh. “H’boy. I wonder who that’s gonna be.”

The telephone is a black Bakelite instrument. It sits ringing on the old gossip bench that came from a flea market downtown. It continues to ring till Rachel picks up the receiver, because who else will answer it? “Perlman residence,” she announces.

A familiar voice responds. A male voice, a fatherly Brooklynese voice, greeting her over the noise of a busy kitchen. “Hello? Mrs. Perlman? It’s Abe Goldman.”

She can picture Abe, the restaurant’s majordomo. Aging but still a giant of a man with the kitchen wall phone tucked under his multiple chins, sweating into his tuxedo shirt.

“Can you tell Mr. P. that the refrigerator’s gone on the fritz, and we’re about to lose a shitload of red snapper, if you’ll pardon my French?”

“Hold on, Mr. Goldman,” says Rachel, proffering the receiver. “You’re about to lose a shitload of red snapper.”

Aaron has already left the table and appears beside her to accept the phone, muttering, “Stupid piece of junk.” Then into the receiver, he says, “So, Abe, did I mention I hate your guts? Where’s Leo?”

Aaron’s job is managing Charades, a swanky seafood palace opened for the theater crowd by that maven of the Great White Way eateries, Mr. Leo Blume. “Fine dining till curtain time” on Broadway across from the Winter Garden between West 15th and West 51st.

“Figures!” her husband shouts into the phone with a kind of sour vindication. “The place goes up in flames, and Mr. Big Shot is nowhere to be found, as usual.” His battles with Leo, his battles with the waiters, the busboys, the customers, the whole meshugaas—­it consumes him like a flame consumes the candle. But Rachel is detached from his struggle. In fact, she’s relieved by it. His obsession with work means less pressure on her. More solitude.