“How may I serve you, Herr Landau?” she wonders in a languidly vicious tone.
“I thought you should know,” Fritz informs her. “Your parents are on the list.”
She bursts into Dirkweiler’s office, pushing past the outraged objections of his secretary, that ugly SS bitch. The door bangs open. She finds him standing behind his desk in his shirtsleeves. “Take them off the list!” she shouts into his face. “You promised me they would be safe! Take them off the list!”
His face reddens, and his response is simple. He strikes her hard across the face with the back of his hand. She staggers, grabs for the chair to keep from falling, but pulls it over when her knees buckle and tumbles to the floor.
“See what happens when you forget yourself!” he roars at her, a vein popping at his temple. “You filthy Jewish sow, you think you are some kind of queen here? You are Jewish trash! And Jewish trash does not give me orders. Do you understand that, you filthy slut?”
She is still trembling from the blow, her head ringing. She paws at the chair.
Dirkweiler huffs heavily. Dismisses his secretary who had followed the chaos into the office and tells her to shut the door behind her. The anger in his voice has slackened as quickly as it rose. “Get up, get up,” he tells Angelika, now sounding more put-out than incensed. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, get up,” he commands, righting the chair. Angelika feels herself wrenched to her feet and plunked into the chair’s seat. Her fingers shake as she touches her face. It throbs.
Dirkweiler steps back behind his desk and plops into his own chair as if deflating. He ignites a cigarette and hands it over to her. “Here. Take it.”
She does, drawing in smoke as her hands tremble.
“You see, this is what happens,” Dirkweiler explains. “I’m a reasonable man, but I will not be disrespected.”
She nods. Nods quickly, spewing the smoke. “Yes. Yes, Herr Kommandant. I apologize…apologize for my outburst. You were right to strike me.”
This appears to mollify the man. He frowns and lights his own cigarette, huffing smoke into the air. “So. This is about the list, yes?” he surmises. “This is the problem?”
“Yes, Herr Kommandant,” she confirms. Meekly now.
“You’re agitated because I put your parents on the list for Poland.”
She cannot answer this. Her words forsake her. She can only keep her eyes down, staring blankly at the desktop cluttered with files.
“You must understand,” he explains, “that it’s really for your own good.”
Her heart thumps heavily, but she does not look up.
“They are an impediment to you,” the man assures her. “Can’t you see? They are an anchor around your neck. You must know it’s true,” he says. “To do your work, you must be free. You must free yourself of them. Of their old mentality. I’m sure you know this. I’m sure you know exactly this.”
And now her eyes rise.
“Now, I know that even Jews have feelings in such cases,” the Herr Kommandant is willing to admit. “One’s parents,” he says. “But you must be strong. You must be like steel.”
She blinks downward. “Would it… Would it be possible, Herr Kommandant… Could they be sent instead on the train to Theresienstadt?” she asks. “Not to Poland.”
Theresienstadt. The so-called Paradise Camp in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. A showpiece for visitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross. But this request causes the Herr Kommandant to sigh. He taps his cigarette against the edge of a brimming ashtray, frowning again. “Well,” he replies. “I have my quota from headquarters to consider. The pencil pushers in the Kurfürstenstrasse demand their numbers be met, and I have a train to fill. Besides, you’re missing the point,” he tells her, leaning forward. “You must free yourself from them completely. Even from their memory. You must take this opportunity to wipe them from your mind. Be truthful with yourself. Are you truly venturing into the streets every day to protect two old Jews? That’s a distraction. A falsehood. You are out there to do your job. And to do it exceedingly well.”
When she leaves Dirkweiler’s office, Fritz Landau is waiting. He takes in her face. The mark of Dirkweiler’s knuckles. But all he asks her is, “Do you want to see them? Before they go?”
She blinks. Then shakes her head. What good would that do? To see them? She couldn’t possibly keep the truth from them. “Let them keep their hope” is all she says.
Fritz nods. He is a man, after all, who can understand the cruelty of truth and the merciful utilities of lies.
A week later, after a day during which she had personally dragged a middle-aged woman from the toilet in the Café Trumpf, she is called into the Kommandant’s office. It is morning. A crisp Berlin day outside. The birds enjoy the greenery of the cemetery across the way. A pair of mourning doves have taken up residence in the trees, and she can hear their cooing. When she enters the office, she finds Dirkweiler hunched over the telephone. He frowns, snapping his fingers and signaling that she should step forward and shut the door behind her, though he is still mumbling into the receiver. She closes the door and waits, standing like a department store mannequin. There is, she notes, a striped dress box with a ribbon sitting on one of the chairs in front of the man’s desk. Still frowning over his conversation, Dirkweiler breaks free of it long enough to order her to open it.
She hesitates but then does so. She recognizes the box. It’s a famous design, those stripes, from a noted Berlin modiste in the Ku’damm. She unties the ribbon, slips off the top, and draws a delicate breath inward. For an instant, she forgets herself and touches the dress’s fabric intimately. Soft as a cloud. Good Saxon merino wool. Berlin blue, dark as midnight, with scarlet tulle-covered satin-weave charmeuse buttons, handmade. Beautiful. But her fingers snap away from it when Dirkweiler’s chair squeaks.
His hand is over the mouthpiece again. “Take it out,” he tells her.
She feels a lift under her heart. Such a lovely creation. She slips it from the box and automatically holds it up against herself to size it, knee lifted and toe pointed, a hand pressed to the waistline. Long fitted sleeves, with a shoulder wedge silhouette and a standing collar. It breaks perfectly below her knees.
Again comes the squeak of the chair. “There are rewards for those who work,” he tells her, then waves her away and returns to his call.
16.
The Empty Canvas
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is still weeks away, but Christmas shoppers are starting to crowd the sidewalks and jam the trains. Women labor to manage packages. On the Eighth Avenue Local, Rachel gives up her spot to an overloaded middle-aged lady, because men seldom surrender their seats unless the woman is pregnant or struggling with an infant. An armload of shopping bags from B. Altman’s, they seem to agree, she brought upon herself. Rachel stands staring at a poster of a well-barbered husband embracing his smiling wife who sports a polka-dot apron and holds a feather duster.
So the harder a wife works, the cuter she looks! the husband proclaims.
Growing up in Berlin, Rashka had compared all advertisements designed to attract women to her mother. How would that dress look on her eema? How would that perfume smell compared to the smell of oil paints? But in America, Rachel has often relied on advertisements to construct her own makeshift identity. Ads offer lessons on how to shop, how to behave, how to fit in, and she has tried to learn from them. She has tried! If she buys Heinz condensed cream of tomato soup, her husband won’t yawn over her cooking. Even a woman can open Alcoa Aluminum’s bottle caps—without a knife blade, a bottle opener, or a husband! The most important quality in coffee is how much it will please your man.