But inside the Adlon’s dining room, the Schubert quintet continues without the musicians skipping a note, as Fritz and Angelika gaze grimly at the storm of tiny Hitlerite crosses blowing past the window in the lorry’s wake.
“Should we be frightened of them?” Angelika wonders aloud.
Fritz frowns at the window glass. “You mean as good Germans?” he asks. “Or as Jews?”
A certain tension defines Angelika’s silence. She waits for him to answer himself.
“We’d be foolish not to be cautious,” Fritz says. “But what can they do really other than act the bully? Von Hindenburg, that old fossil. He’ll never agree to the Viennese tramp as the Reich’s chancellor. It’s impossible. He despises the little paskudnyak.”
“I heard that he wanted to be an artist.”
“Who?”
“The paskudnyak. I heard he wanted to be a painter, but the academies wouldn’t have him.”
Fritz tosses a shrug. “I had heard he was a former paperhanger. But if he had artistic aspirations? Well. Too bad for him. And too bad for us if the impossible happens. Because it’s been my experience that there is no more embittered creature on the face of the earth than a failed artist.” He says this and then offers her a light smile. “Shall I order another brandy, Fräulein Rosen,” he suggests, “and we can put politics aside?”
The beautiful face changes again. She fastens her eyes on him. “She’ll be angry with me, if we do this. And she’ll be angry with you too.”
Fritz is reassuring. “Liebling, she’ll never need know.”
Morning arrives. The drapes are open in the bedroom of Fritz’s suite. Angelika stirs groggily. She blinks at the sunlight that stings her eyes. Then suddenly realizes she is not alone. There’s another presence filling the space at the end of the bed, and it’s not Fritz Landau. It’s a little girl. A little dark thing stationed at the foot of the bed gazing at her in silence.
“And who are you, Bissel?” Angelika wonders.
But the child’s answer is silence. She only stares.
Then footsteps arrive, but they don’t belong to Fritz Landau either.
“Rashka? Where have you gotten to?” a woman calls out in a voice that Angelika recognizes all too quickly.
“Shit,” she breathes. “You should go to your mummy now,” Angelika instructs the child urgently, scrambling to gather the satin bedclothes around her to cover her nakedness. “She’s calling for you.”
But little Rashka ignores Angelika’s instruction just as she ignores her mother’s call.
“Damn me, but you’re a stubborn one,” Angelika whispers. “Go on. Shoo.”
Too late, though, too late. The bedroom door creaks, and there she is. The artist. Rashka’s mummy, Lavinia Morgenstern-Landau. “Rashka, what have you—” the woman is in the middle of asking when she halts in her tracks at the sight of Angelika ensconced in her brother’s bed, obviously without a stitch under the sheets.
Angelika can only stare back at her.
At this point, Fritz manages to make his appearance. “Hello? Who’s here leaving my door standing open?” he’s calling as Lavinia seizes Rashka by the hand and drags her from the bedroom. Angelika can hear the short melodrama that follows.
“Lavinia? You simply disregard my privacy now? Appear uninvited without notice?”
“You must have it all, mustn’t you, Fritz! You must sully everything with your licentious appetites.”
“I beg your pardon? My what?”
“Is there nothing you won’t take from me? Nothing you won’t steal?”
“Well, that’s an interesting way to put it, chère sœur. What exactly have I stolen from you?”
Angelika exhales a breath. Selects a cigarette from the lovely teakwood box by the bedside and ignites it using the shiny sterling table lighter. The smoke from her cigarette balloons into the air. Beyond the bedroom, angry words are supplanted by angry footsteps in retreat, followed by the slam of a door. Angelika waits till Fritz reappears and leans against the threshold.
“Well, that was unfortunate,” he concludes.
Angelika draws in smoke and exhales it through her nostrils. “She looked wounded.”
Fritz only shrugs. “Of course she did. You’re her muse, Liebchen.”
“Her muse?” Why does it hurt her to hear this?
“Oh, yes,” Fritz assures her and gathers up the blankets covering her until flesh is exposed. “You,” he says, “are her muse du rouge.”
Two days pass. The artist at her easel, pursuing her work on the canvas. She’s attempting to finish the painting even though the dais is empty. Even though the subject is no longer posing. There is a certain leaden pain in her heart as she works, though it is a pain she has resigned herself to carrying. Since when is pain something new to the artist?
Frowning, she hears a door open behind her. “Rashka. I told you. You must leave Eema alone,” she calls to her daughter. But she does not turn until the fat yellow cat at her feet stands and runs to the intruder. Angelika scoops him up, slowly scratching the scuff of his neck as he begins to purr like a drill bit boring into wood.
“Am I your muse?” Angelika asks her. She is wearing hand-stitched Ferragamo heels and a fashionably cut frock from Paul Kuhnen. Proof that Fritz Landau maintains his accounts in all the best shops and with all the best designers.
The artist does not speak a word at first, but her expression is a complex mixture of pain, shock, and relief. “You’ve cut your hair.”
“Yes.” Her long red tresses have been bobbed.
“Was that my brother’s suggestion?”
“No. Don’t be cross. I did it for you. I thought you might like me more modern.” The girl touches the straight line of bangs that frames the arch of her eyebrows. “Do you approve?”
Lavinia stares. “What choice have you given me?”
Angelika approaches the easel, cradling the cat in her arms, as she gazes with deep fascination at the painting. “Look,” she tells the feline. “I have been transformed. Little Gelika from the Kastanienallee has become a goddess,” she says with a quiet astonishment.
Lavinia pets the feline’s head. “She speaks like a slum girl,” she informs her cat. Is it possible to say this affectionately? Only then does the artist raise her head to meet the muse’s eyes, and there she lets them settle for a deep moment before returning her brush to the canvas. “Hurry,” she says. “Shed those glamour rags you’re wearing and take up your pose. Before I lose the light completely.”
13.
The Infinite Air
Aaron is still asleep after a late-night closing, the blanket drawn tightly over his shoulder. His face scrunched up as if he’s dreaming of walking on nails. Staying quiet is easy for Rachel, of course. Living life as a U-boat, she learned to walk as quietly as a cat. At the kitchen table, she turns down the ankles of her socks and slips on her pair of saddle shoes. She lights a cigarette and sticks the rest of the pack in her sweater pocket. She’s on the way to pick up Naomi’s dress from the dry cleaner’s on West 23rd, slipping on the kid leather gloves with the silk lining from Gimbels.
From out in the hall, she hears children, overlaid by a firm but lyrically maternal voice, and when she opens the door, she finds that it’s Daniela Weinstock, who else? Maneuvering her hugely pregnant belly down the stairs with her three-year-old twins, one boy, one girl, and a toddler in a red metal stroller. The toddler, also a girl, is playing with the stroller’s ring of wooden beads. The twins gaze up at Rachel with their mother’s deep, dark eyes.