Naomi laughs as she unstops the bottle of bourbon. “And kvetched about it the whole fucking time if I recall.” She pours out two measures neat and ferries them over. “So! Tell me all about the big night! How was the show?” Naomi wants to know. “Was it hilarious? I read it was hilarious.”
“Ah. Um. We ended up seeing something else. Something that was not the Pajama Game. And it wasn’t very funny.”
“Oh? Well, that’s too bad. Did the shtoomer fuck things up? Forget to bring the tickets or something? He must have,” she insists.
Rachel changes the topic. “I’m sorry it took me so long to return your dress,” she tells her sister-in-law.
“Forget it. Nobody’s taking me to a Broadway show anytime soon,” Naomi says and swallows whiskey.
“Really? I thought… Isn’t there the law student?”
“Y-y-yeah,” Naomi answers evasively, “but jazz clubs are more his speed. Which reminds me. Are you and Aaron…” she starts to say but then stops and starts the sentence again. For an instant, Rachel fears that she’s going to ask, Are you and Aaron having trouble? But what she says is “Are you two still planning on coming over on Saturday night?”
“Saturday?” Has she forgotten something again? Plans she agreed to inadvertently, while not really listening? It happens. It’s how she once ended up suffering through a matinee of The Girl in Pink Tights with Leo Blume’s first wife, Muriel. “I suppose we are,” Rachel replies too tentatively.
“Oh, so Aaron didn’t mention it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he did. It’s been a very exhausting week. He’s been closing at the restaurant almost every night.”
“Well, then. Just in case Mr. Big got too busy to remember. You and he are invited for dinner this Saturday night for the new specialty of the house: chicken Kiev and asparagus in remoulade sauce.”
“Okay. Well. That sounds wonderful,” Rachel tells her, because it does. But there’s something behind her sister-in-law’s voice. Something hidden.
Naomi kills her whiskey. “So, darling, you wanna see what I was working on when you knocked?”
“You mean in your darkroom?” Rachel asks. She is slightly surprised. Her sister-in-law has always been resistant to opening her darkroom to those she deems “civilians.”
“Why the hell not? I could use an artist’s eyeball for a change. Just don’t get your hopes up,” she warns. “’Cause great art it’s not.”
Printmaking in the red glow of the darkroom is a cramped business. “I’m trying to put together a new portfolio,” Naomi is explaining. “Something other than shots of Swanson’s frozen dinners, and I’m bored with most of my old Village stuff.”
Images emerge on Kodak paper soaked in a bath of developing fluid. From a white surface to a gray ghost, to a sharp contrast of light and shadow. It’s a shot of a park bench lined with Naomi’s alter kockers. Old men dotting the benches.
“It’s magic,” Rachel says. “A blank sheet, and then out of nowhere, a picture.”
“It is magic. You’re right,” Naomi agrees. “It still feels like that even to me.”
She removes the print by the corners, wearing a pair of rubber gloves, then rinses it in a tray and pins it onto the line where it hangs drying with a number of others. Paper curls on the line. The old men smoke, drowse over Yiddish newspapers, some just sitting in the sun or in the shade because that’s their life now.
“These are wonderful, Naomi.”
“You think so? I’m not so sure. Old farts on park benches? Pretty kitschy.”
Rachel disagrees. “No, no. Not these. You can—you can feel the weight of the years they’re carrying.” She smiles. Is it nostalgia? “I can recall the Orthodox men with their long beards gathering outside the cafés in the Grenadier Strasse. This was in Berlin. The Scheunenviertel, uh—the ‘Barn Quarter’ I should say. It was called so because long before, it was used as sheds for cows. But the men? I was only a child, but they looked so ancient.” So strange and exotic, she explains, with their dangling side curls and their great fur hats. The Ostjuden from the shtetlakh. “Most were destitute. As poor as the dirt under their feet. I remember the very sour aroma of salted fish perfuming the streets.”
The horse dung, the musty smell of browning cabbages and damp potatoes piled high in the carts of the vegetable stands. The Ostjuden orthodoxy in their beaver-skin hats and airless black kaftans, sweating into their beards. Dangling payot, fringed tallitot. They were the first to feel the brunt of the anti-Semitic pogrom, years even before the Nazis arrived, and the first to be stripped of German citizenship under Hitler.
“Most Jews in Berlin?” says Rachel. “They regarded the quarter as a kind of plague town and the inhabitants as the sweepings of the Pale of Settlement. Certainly my mother did. It was they who were to blame for the ugly, hooked-nose caricatures in Der Stürmer. That was the common thinking. But I thought they were beautiful,” says Rachel. “Such faces. As if God had modeled them from the original clay.”
There’s a beat of soft silence before Naomi speaks, sounding quietly surprised. “I’ve never heard you talk about…” What shall she call it? “About your past,” she says.
Rachel shrugs it away. “What is the point? The city I was born to is gone. Ground to dust. And the Ostjuden? The crematoria took them. They’re all at the bottom of the ash pits now.” Eingeäschert. And now the silence in the tiny darkroom has gone morose. It’s the trap of her past. “I’m sorry,” Rachel apologizes. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was morbid.” She wipes the dampness from her eyes.
“No, no, it’s all right. Really,” her sister-in-law insists. “There’s so much I don’t know.” This sounds like a small confession on Naomi’s part. An American Jew with blank spots on the map of Europe where the Jews once lived and died. But Rachel isn’t interested in teaching history. She offers a flimsy smile.
“You can be glad over that,” she says. “Knowing too much is not so pleasant. So. Show me. What else?” Pushing up a smile, nodding her chin to the developing bins.
“Oh. Okay, sure,” her sister-in-law agrees, probably just as happy to be changing the subject. “There’re a couple more.”
The rectangles of light-sensitive paper are submerged, and images float to the top. Thickening shadows evolve into more alter kockers. More pigeons, more mothers pushing prams down the sidewalk, kids trailing.
And then truth emerges.
A sleek young man maintains a certain élégance d’attitude even as he is seated on the weathered park bench among the pigeons and hopping squirrels.
“That’s David Glass,” Rachel declares, a note of trouble in her voice.
“Who?” Naomi asks, but Rachel does not answer.
The young Mr. Glass sits politely attentive as any wolf of the steppes, listening to an old scarecrow of a man beside him. Friedrich Landau was the name once engraved on his calling card in Berlin. Though Rachel has always known him simply as Feter Fritz.
“Is something wrong?” she hears Naomi inquiring, with a light note of concern, and shakes herself free of the photo.
“No,” she says, bringing up a flat smile. “No. Just a headache. It must be the whiskey. I hardly ever touch it.”
“Could be inhaling the emulsion fluid too. We should get you out of here. Sometimes the silver nitrate gives people headaches.”
“Yes,” Rachel agrees, feeling gutted. “Yes, that could be it too.”
On her way back to the subway, she stops at a pay phone and rings up Feter Fritz. Le conspirateur. The pay phone rings until one of the other tenants picks it up. A man. Has he seen Mr. Landau today? No? No, not all morning, sorry. She hangs up. She thinks she could get on the train and head for the Lower East Side. She could track him down, her feter. Grill him. Isn’t that what it’s called in the detective movies? Give him the third degree. What scheme were you hatching? What bargain were you sealing? Talk!