Shadows of Berlin полностью

Kibbitz is mewing loudly to be let out, so Rachel shoves up the window sash, smelling the street fumes greasing the chilly air. The cat hops out onto the fire escape and charges upward toward the roof. There’s an extravagant depth to the vastness above the buildings. The last ripe blues of November swelling the sky before the drabness of winter settles in. She compulsively breaks apart the color into painterly hues. Van Gogh said that there is no blue without yellow and orange. This sky holds undertones of cadmium yellow and vermillion to give it the proper weight. Then a blend of cobalt and white flattens it into an endless sheet.

“Haven’t you heard me tell him a hundred times, Abe, that we need a new freezer?” Aaron is demanding confirmation. “A hundred times at least.”

“You should tell him to phone the man you bought it from,” Rachel calls from the window.

“Okay, okay, I’m on my way,” Aaron is conceding into the telephone. “In the meantime, get what’s-­his-­name on the phone. Gruber. The swindler who sold us the piece of crap to begin with.” Aaron hangs up with a bang and puffs a sigh, resigned to his fate. “So whatta surprise,” he says, frowning his standard frown. “The joint’s in chaos, and Leo’s uptown smoking a Montecristo B on his terrace.”

Chaos! Enough to give him the gastritis. Just the way Aaron likes it! He is on his way to dress when the phone rings again. “If that’s Abe,” Aaron is yelling from the bedroom, “tell him I gotta put my pants on before they’ll let me on the goddamned A Train!”

“You should hail a cab and have Leo pay for it,” Rachel yells back to him and picks up the receiver. “Mr. Goldman,” she says, “he has to put his pants on before they’ll let him on the A Train.”

“Rashka!” she hears and feels her grip on the phone tighten.

“Feter Fritz,” she says loud enough for Aaron to hear as he reenters from the bedroom now wearing his trousers, his dress shirt unbuttoned. He responds to the mention of her uncle’s name with an eye roll. Seizes a brownish banana from the kitchen counter and starts peeling.

“Bistu gut, Feter?” she asks the phone.

“Rashka, ziskeit, tsu hern deyn kul iz a brkhh.” Even though her uncle likes to insist that one language is never enough, he seldom speaks to her in anything but the language of their homelife. Not German like the good Yetta Jews spoke, raising up their Christmas trees, trying to be more German than the Germans. But Yiddish! Especially on the telephone, as if a phone call is a kind of spectral connection, voices thrown over distance, not bound by physical proximity, that must be anchored by a common touchstone of their past. Their vanished lives. Vanished in all ways except how they speak, how they think, what they remember or choose to forget.

She can see him in her mind, her uncle, ensconced like an exiled princeling on the scruffy velveteen sleigh chair that he drags out into the tenement’s hallway to make use of the pay phone. A lit cigar ribboning smoke upward to the tobacco-­stained ceiling. She is buoyed by his voice, yet she knows that every conversation with her feter has a price attached. He wants to see her, he tells her. And not just wants to! “It’s essential, Rokhl,” that he sees her. And that she sees him. Normally, these conversations are chock-­full of her uncle’s ersatz cheer, but this time, a smear of desperation underpaints his jaunty bravado. It makes her wish she had simply let the phone ring. But she agrees to meet him, because what else can she do? It means she doesn’t go to the grocery to pick up sugar for her husband’s coffee or take his shirts to the cleaners. It means she doesn’t use the morning to clean the oven or vacuum the draperies. Those are tasks she’ll have to leave to the mice if they want to make time. Aaron is tossing the banana peel into the trash as she hangs up, his shirtfront now buttoned and tail tucked into his waistline.

“So, your uncle, huh?” he says, still chewing the last bite of banana but frowning now, as if the mention of her feter has ruined the taste. She knows Aaron believes that her Feter Fritz is an open drain for her. “And how is he?” her husband wonders, lifting a wing tip onto his chair to retie a loose shoestring. “And by that I mean what does he need?” Licking his thumb to rub clean the toe of his shoe leather.

“Nothing,” she assures him. “He doesn’t need a thing. Just inviting me for a coffee,” she insists and retrieves her husband’s coat and hat from the hall tree by the door.

“So you don’t think he’s after another ‘loan.’ And I used that word ironically, since we’ve never seen a dime back.”

“No,” Rachel replies blankly, holding Aaron’s hat. “He’s not after anything.”

“Okay, sorry.” An unapologetic apology. “Don’t mean to sound insulting. It’s just that usually? He is.”

“Is what?”

“After something.”

“He’s not.”

“Okay,” Aaron says again as he shrugs on his coat. “Just don’t get bamboozled is all I’m saying.”

“How can I be, since I don’t even know what this means?”