Feter smiles in an interior way. As if perhaps this is a joke he is missing. “I beg your pardon?”
“The matchbook, Feter,” she explains. “And when did you start smoking cigars from Havana?”
So now he must laugh lightly at her presumption. “Rokhl, the matchbook came from somewhere, who knows? I picked it up.” A shrug. “And the cigars? An old man treats himself in his waning years. That’s a crime?”
“I don’t know. Is it?”
Feter’s smile turns leaden. “Rashka. Ziskeit. What are you driving at?” This he asks her in English.
Driving at? Rachel catches a breath. “Nothing, Feter,” she tells him, dropping eye contact. “I don’t mean to accuse you of anything or to imply.” She glances submissively at her hands to put him off the scent that she is onto him. Not her mother’s hands, not the accomplished hands with the slender fingers, so expressive. Not those hands, but hands of the competent peasant. Her father’s hands, she’s been told. The hands of the missing man left behind for her at her birth. “I’ve been easily upset it seems. Perhaps I’m not thinking clearly.”
Feter appears to accept this as an apology, a confession, and even as a statement of fact. He clasps her hands in his and gives them a consoling pat. “I understand, Daughter,” he promises. The edge of his cuff has inched upward, revealing the tail of the number tattooed above his wrist. “I understand,” he tells her.
A perfect touch. The small reminder of his tattoo. Of his suffering. Of course she shouldn’t be surprised. She knows that her feter is a master of extemporaneous solutions, a talented ad-lib performer. This is how he has survived. This is why he is still alive.
On the way home, she thinks about the painting itself as the subway barrels through the tunnel. Of all her mother’s works, it was the only portrait with a living heartbeat. Perhaps that is why the sight of it was so frightening. To be confronted by a demon in the flesh brought back from death. The angel resurrected. Terrifying. It makes her reach for the comfort of Miltown. She should be relieved, shouldn’t she, that it vanished again? She should be thankful that it haunts the walls of some unsuspecting shlimazel with fifty dollars, who thought it matched the drapes.
Back at the apartment, she changes into her robe and sits on the bed, trying to distract herself until the Miltown can level her out. They have plans this evening, though nothing to look forward to. Dinner with Ezra and Daniela, oy gevalt, at Daniela’s favorite kosher place. So Rachel is smoking a cigarette before she has to change into a dress and paging through an art magazine from last month. If she can concentrate on normal things, then she can be normal. Or at least imitate normal. Isn’t that how it works?
She hears the front door open. “Halloo,” Aaron is calling. “King of the castle’s home.”
“I’m in the bedroom,” she calls back. According to ARTnews, David Glass, the princely scion of the House of Glass on Fifth Avenue, has brought Berlin to New York in a retrospective of Käthe Kollwitz.
We never cared for each other personally, her mother informs her. Kollwitz and myself. But I respected her work and she respected mine. This is said with stately certainty. She had hallucinations as a child, you know. She would see a house cat, apparently, but to her, it was the size of a panther. Or her mother would appear the size of a doll, poor woman. Eema is sporting a fashionable sable-trimmed cloak but vanishes as footsteps approach. Aaron enters, tie loose, collar open, home after another day in the salt mines.
“So here’s the lady of leisure,” he declares pleasantly. “Scooch over,” he tells her and sits on the edge of the bed her mother had occupied a moment before. Yanking off his shoes, he tosses them with a breath of relief. Florsheim Imperials, walnut-brown leather wing tips. $14.98 at Falk’s Sports Wear on Delancey. You Save Dollars! We Make Pennies! “Scooch over, will you,” Aaron repeats. “I own one side the bed, if you recall. It was in the fine print of the marriage contract.”
Stubbing out her cigarette in the bedside ashtray, she discards her magazine and scooches. “This isn’t Budapest,” she says. “We don’t have a marriage contract.”
But Aaron has already left the joke behind. Satisfied with his space, her husband unknots his tie and drops it. “Man, am I bushed,” he tells her. “Whattaya say we just dig in here tonight and relax? Order some Chinese or something.”
“Because we can’t.”
“No?” He has rolled his weight against her and begun to nuzzle her neck. “You sure?”
“I am. We have dinner with your cousin.”
Aaron groans. “Ah, jeez. Tell me that’s not really tonight, is it?”
“It is.”
“I thought it was next week.”
“No, this week. Tonight. So go. Get ready,” she instructs and interrupts his nuzzling by giving him a loud peck on the cheek before removing herself from the bed. “I need to change, and you could use a shower.”
10.
The Shield of David
As the war drags into another year, the Jews of Berlin are considered aliens in their own land. Since the police decree regarding the identifying emblem for Jews was issued last September, all Jews over the age of six must, by law, wear the Judenstern. The details were published in the SS-controlled mouthpiece, the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt. “The Jewish Star,” it declared, “is a six-pointed star, drawn in black lines made of yellow fabric, the size of the palm of a hand.” At the center, the word Juden is machine-stitched in black, mock-Hebraic lettering. Jews must display the star “visibly” on the left over the heart. No pinning of the star either. What a slippery Jewish trick that is! Slipping it on and off as it suits them? No! It must be sewn securely! The police will check.
And of course, everyone has had to pay for the stars that mark them as outcasts and pariahs. Ten pfennigs apiece. Rashka pricked her finger sewing one of them onto the ragged, oversized coat she wears. It’s a coat for a boy, but she wears it because it still has a heavy flannel lining intact. She pricked her fingers and left a drop of blood on the star, marking it hers. Rashka’s Star. Claimed by bloodshed.
Years before, when she was six years old, the Nazis had staged a boycott of Jewish businesses. They were new to power then, and their effort fizzled after a few days, but Rashka can starkly recall standing inside Ehrenberg’s Konditorei in the Lindenstrasse, staring out through the glass while a giant storm trooper in his dung-brown Sturmabteilung uniform painted a sloppy Magen David across the shop’s window.
Her eema used paintbrushes too. Sometimes Rashka was even permitted to play with the old ones that had been retired from work. She liked smearing paint on a scrap of canvas in the shape of a hare or maybe a pony with a bristly mane. She liked the feeling of the brush in her hand. She liked the smooth application of the paint, just as she liked the broom of color, thinning into cartwheels as she smashed the brush’s head into a starburst. But to watch this behemoth storm trooper with his fat belly hung over his belt, using a paintbrush to mock the Jews? Terrifying. To single out Jews for ridicule! It was a stunning affront. A frightening theft of the power of a paintbrush.
Frau Ehrenberg was in tears behind the bakery counter, muttering “Eine Kulturschande” over and over. A culture shame!
But Eema was dry-eyed. “Don’t be frightened, child,” she had commanded Rashka at the time, gripping her hand tightly. “Don’t be frightened.” But it was obvious that even Eema was swallowing fear. And Rashka? She was only a small girl, but it both enraged and horrified her down to her soul as she watched the paint dribble down the glass.