Shadows of Berlin полностью

“’Cause I heard that maybe you were having some difficulties.”

Rachel breathes in.

“Hello? You still with me, sweetheart?”

“I’m seeing a psychiatrist, Miriam,” Rachel declares. She even pronounces the word correctly.

“Yeah, that’s the thing I heard,” her mother-­in-­law confirms. “And so I’m wondering what’s going on? Is my son driving you crazy?”

Is this a joke? “Aaron. Uh, no,” Rachel manages to reply. “No.”

“Just kiddin’, honey,” Miriam explains. “But I’m wondering what this guy has to say…this psychiatrist, I mean. What’s his verdict?”

“Well, he doesn’t give a ‘verdict,’ really.”

“No? So he can’t figure it out?”

“It?”

“The problem, sweetheart,” Miriam explains. “If you’re seeing a doctor, there must be a problem, right? I mean, far be it from me to stick my nose into things, but you’re my daughter-­in-­law. I’m concerned.”

“Yes,” Rachel says.

“Is it—­you know—­like an intimate thing, if you’ll excuse me for asking?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Miriam.”

“What I mean,” she says, “is there maybe something wrong in the bedroom department between you and the boy? I only ask ’cause I’m trying to be helpful.”

“Oh. No. No, nothing like that.” She realizes that she is gripping her earring so tightly that the clip is digging into her palm.

“Okay, so not that, good. Then what?” Her mother-­in-­law tempers her tone as she asks the next question. Her voice recedes self-­consciously, almost sheepishly. “Is it,” she wonders, “is it what those dirty shtunks did to Jews back in the war?”

This is the most direct question she thinks her mother-­in-­law has ever asked her on the subject. Yet Rachel says nothing.

A painful sigh from the other end of the line. “I saw the newsreels, honey. After the war was over, they played them at the Waldorf over in Rugby Village.” A pause. She must be replaying them in her head. “I just can’t imagine. I mean, how evil does a person have to be to treat human beings like that?” she asks. “It made me feel horrible,” Miriam admits. “And so guilty? I mean, here I was safe ’n sound in Brooklyn, while millions—­millions—­who can even conceive of such numbers? While all those millions of other Jews were being… You know…”

Miriam can’t find the word to finish her sentence, but Rachel can.

“Exterminated,” she says.

There’s a deep pause. And then Miriam tells her, “I’m gonna talk to Aaron.” She declares this stridently as if she’s hit upon a solution. “I am. I’m gonna talk to that boy and make sure he doesn’t give you a hard time about your feelings, okay?”

“Oh. No, Miriam.”

“I mean of course you need to see a doctor. Who wouldn’t? I’m gonna make sure he understands, that’s all. That he treats you thoughtfully. That’s all I’m saying, honey. I’m just gonna make sure that he gets it. I mean we both know that boychik can be a teensy bit self-­centered at times, to say the least.”

Rachel releases a breath.

“All right, sweetheart. You take care now,” her mother-­in-­law commands. “Okay?”

“Okay,” says Rachel.

“Okay. G’bye then. Be well,” Miriam adds, and that’s it. Until evening, when the phone rings just as Aaron is walking in the door, so he actually picks it up, though it’s obvious he immediately regrets the impulse. Much later, he is dead bushed from the earful he’s still getting, planted on the gossip bench, still in his overcoat and hat, with his elbows on his knees. “Yes, Ma. I saw them too. We all saw them,” he’s saying.

And then, “Okay. Okay, Ma, I get it. Yes, I get it,” he keeps repeating before he’s finally allowed to say goodbye. Hanging up with an exhausted clamp of the receiver, he heaves out his last breath. “H’oy!” he declares, sending it up to the ceiling. Rachel has been observing him from the safety of the kitchen table with a purring cat hostage on her lap.

“So guess what?” he begins. “Apparently? Whatever happens? It’s all my fault.”

19.

Naomi’s Soirée

The next day, the late-afternoon sun grays the apartment. Rachel stands in the shower, allowing the water to pour over her. Staring at the empty white of the canvas has exhausted her. Emptied her. All that flat whiteness, and not a crack to pry it open. It remains the opaque blizzard the instant before the plane punches into the mountain, a solid storm of white.

Aaron appears at home an hour before his usual time.

“You’re here,” Rachel tells him, still dressing from the shower.

“I am,” he agrees.

“And it’s not even six o’clock.”

“Well, I was instructed by my darling wife to be home early,” Aaron replies, tossing his hat and coat onto the sofa. “Don’t you remember? I think your exact words were, ‘Please be home before six, because I will be forcing you to have dinner with your sister and her latest whatever.’”

“Those were not my exact words,” Rachel says. Her skin is damp and she is in her slip in the living room, a towel tied in a turban around her hair as she pours Little Friskies into the cat’s bowl.