The bedbug looks confused by the word. “Less?”
“I can give you twenty dollars. In cash.”
“First off,” he tells her, “I only deal in cash when I’m selling to women. Even the pretty ones, sorry to say. I’ve been screwed too many times by husbands canceling their wives’ checks. And second, why should I accept less? For chrissake, the frame alone is worth more than twenty.”
“How about thirty? If I can get your thirty dollars in your hand?”
Retrieving his cigarette from the ashtray, he spills ash onto the counter. “Sorry, baby. Fifty shekels. That’s it.”
“This is my mother’s painting,” Rachel hears herself announce.
The bedbug looks at her like maybe she’s just lost her head in front of him.
“My mother. She painted this,” she declares with greater purpose. “You see—that’s her signature. Right at the bottom.” She points at a series of parallel strokes. “LML. That’s how she signed everything! Lavinia Morgenstern-Landau. Morgenstern, her husband’s name, and Landau, her father’s name!” Is she shouting?
The bedbug still looks confused and maybe a bit perturbed. “Okay, okay, just calm down for a sec, will you? No need to have a cow, lady.”
A cow? Rachel shakes her head. “What does that mean?”
“It means give me a minute to think for cryin’ out loud,” he tells her and then snorts out a breath. “Okay, so look,” he says, setting the painting down on a chair below the glass-eyed bear head. “Let me get this straight. You say this thing was your mother’s?”
“Yes.”
“That she painted it?”
“She did.”
“And you can prove it?”
“Prove it? Prove what? That I am my mother’s daughter?”
“Yeah, I guess. Just that,” the bedbug confirms. “That Lavinia whoever. Husband’s name, father’s name, whatever. That it’s true, ya’ know? Show me a driver’s license or something.”
Rachel licks her lips. “I don’t drive. Anyway, my name is different now.”
He grins, catching on to the con. “Oh, uh-huh. I get it. Different.”
“I’m married. I’m a U.S. citizen now. My name is different.”
“So no proof,” the bedbug concludes.
No proof. How can she have proof? All the proof of her life before was either stolen or incinerated. How can she prove a thing? She tries to speak, but no words are forthcoming. Only tears. And maybe the tears are enough to wipe the smirk from the bedbug’s punim. Finally, maybe, he finds a drop or two of pity in his heart.
“Okay, okay,” he is repeating. “No need for the waterworks. I get it. Things get emotional,” he decides. “But you gotta understand, honey.” And he says this almost pleadingly. “I’m running a business here.”
Rachel sniffs, wipes her nose on her coat sleeve like a child. “What about forty?” she says and blinks. “What if I can get you forty dollars…”
“Forty?” The bedbug speaks the word like it pains him. But then he puffs out a breath, deflating. “H’okay. If you get me forty—in cash. Then I’ll cut you some slack. All right?”
Rachel swallows. Sniffs again, tries to force out a small smile of gratitude. “All right,” she agrees.
“But you better not take your time about it. Like I said, I got another buyer for this item. Farshteyn? I’d like to sell it to you over him, but if he walks in here with a fuftsik in his hand before you get back?” The bedbug shrugs. “Like I said. I’m running a business.”
This time when the bell jangles in honor of her exit, the rain has quit and a pale sun peeks out from the clouds. Her belly is tight. She can understand her uncle Fritz’s frustration. His desire foiled by money or the lack thereof. On the 42nd Street Shuttle, she makes her calculations. And good news, she finds that she has a five-dollar bill in her billfold! Five dollars! A New York miracle! Add that to the rainy-day twenty, and she’s only fifteen dollars short. But fifteen dollars? That’s nearly a week’s worth of groceries. She could write a check at the bank and hope for another miracle to cover their bills. Or simply let them turn off the electricity for a month. Would that be so bad?
The D.P.W. is doing some kind of work on Delancey Street. A man with a jackhammer is pulverizing the pavement. It’s deafening. Obliterating. Rachel can’t think; she can only endure as the chatter of the pneumatic hammer pounds inside her skull. Down in the subway, the platform is sparsely populated. She sits alone on a bench, smoking, waiting on the Sixth Avenue Express. Her guilt is a secret weight she carries. She accrues it daily simply by breathing, because she will never be absolved of her crime. The crime committed by a Little Goat in a little café up the Friedrichstrasse.
***
January 1944, the fifth year of the war. The Tommies have attacked the so-called Gustav Line in Italy. The Red Army has breached the border of Poland, and it’s only a matter of time before American and British forces invade the French coastline. The military situation is slowly disintegrating. Germany is losing the war to the Allies. But the war against the Jews? That war is still pursued with fervor. The rumor mills agree: transports to the east continue on schedule from Berlin’s Grunewald Station.
The windows of the Café Bollenmüller are frosted over. The noise of the lunchtime service fills the air as steam rises from pots of coffee brewed from ground acorns. An accordionist plays a Berliner favorite, “Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen.” A din of conversation from the crowd rises from the tables, but there is a certain tension in the room. Sharing the table with Rashka, Eema looks as exhausted and threadbare as everybody else but also hunted. And she is hunted in a literal sense. Like an animal set loose in the brush and pursued by hounds.
Rashka is sixteen now. She has grown into a thin adolescent, molded by the crushing routine of everyday terror. A terror that’s only been amplified since Eema unstitched the stars from their clothing—that yellow, six-pointed Judenstern branding them as enemies of German blood. Eema always regarded the star as a badge of shame, an indignity, and shedding it, she assured Rashka, was a kind of victory. But Rashka is not so sure. Now that it is gone from their clothing, she feels naked. The Shield of David has been removed and she is unprotected, no longer under the pale of regulations. A Jew discovered without a star, after all, is a Jew on the road to a concentration camp.
Today they have come to the café so that Eema can negotiate some rationing coupons from a black marketeer known as “Dickes Dora.” Fat Dora, a Berliner’s joke, because the woman’s thin as a shadow. They are here to spend money they can’t afford to lose. When Fat Dora arrives, Eema girds herself for action. “Stay here, and don’t move,” she instructs her daughter. “Understand?” But when Rashka doesn’t answer, her mother doesn’t wait and leaves the girl sitting by herself.
From across the room, a redheaded woman is gazing at her. Why? Rashka does not know. She cannot guess, but she gazes back. A lit cigarette stained with lip rouge touches bright-red lips. She is quite handsomely dressed, this woman, not in the normal wartime drudgery but in real glamour rags. A sable-trimmed coat. A smart crimson day suit and a matching lady’s Alpiner with a swooping brim. The black lace gloves are a most elegant touch, exquisitely delicate. Rashka knows she will never obtain such heights of beauty. That the best she will ever manage is a certain dark, peasant comeliness due her from the Landau side of the family. Pretty, maybe, with deep eyes, but she’ll never be so exquisite as the redheaded Bathsheba who is now crossing the café and seating herself at Rashka’s table with a scrape of a chair.