“Do I?”
“Yes. Do you?”
She takes a breath. “The dirty windows or the dusty furniture, I simply don’t see them. Or if I do see them, I simply don’t care.”
“And why do you think that is?”
She thinks of the Judenhaus in Berlin. The dirty hiding places in cellars and attics. As time passed, she no longer noticed the schmutz she lived in. Schmutz was her home.
The Eighth Avenue Express is not so crowded. Rachel sits across from a Subway Sun cartoon that contends: YOU MAY NOT GET TO HEAVEN—BUT YOU CAN LIVE IN NEW YORK! She is faced by her own dark reflection staring back from the train-car window. Could she imagine it to be the reflection of the mother of a child?
Back at the apartment, she goes into the bedroom and changes. Her hair tied back in a plain white scarf. An old striped work shirt of Aaron’s with the sleeves rolled up under the hand-me-down apron from her mother-in-law. In the living room, she shoves the furniture to the corners and vacuums the rugs once, twice. She pulls everything down from the shelves and wipes them clean. Wipes the tabletops, the table legs, until she’s coughing on dust. She chases cobwebs with the broom, fingers the dust rag into all cracks and crevices. Squirts the windows with Windex and wipes them with newsprint till she hears glass squeak.
Sweat slicks her skin. She hunts down spots on the rug with a bottle of Handy Andy spot remover, then rolls the rug to the wall. She yanks on the rubberized gloves and plunges the scrub brush into the soap pail of Spic and Span, scours the floorboards and linoleum on her hands and knees. She dumps the ashtray from the coffee table, washes it along with a coffee cup and saucer, and leaves them to dry in the dish drain. The counters are sponged, the pantry shelves. Sinks are sponged. The bathtub and toilet are pumiced clean with Old Dutch Cleanser, a crook-backed charwoman on the label chasing away dirt with a big stick. The tiles? Let Lysol do the dirty work! Even ovens can be cleaned with Easy-Off Oven Cleaner!
By the time she drops into one of the kitchen chairs and lights a cigarette, the striped shirt has blotted up so much sweat that it hangs on her like she’s just jumped into a pool. She reaches for the glass garden-green ashtray, but of course it isn’t there. She swept up its remains with the dustpan hours ago.
She eats a piece of cheese and a green apple for supper. Then steps into the shower. The hot water scalds the salty residue of the day’s sweat from her skin. Cleanses her. Toweling dry, she does not bother with anything but her pink chenille robe, even though the room is chilly because she left open the window by the fire escape when she let out the cat. The sunset is a yellow bar the color of butter.
Opening up her battered box of paints, she lays out her palette in cold colors: a greasy blue, a hunter green, a squeeze of black for midnight, and earthen colors: yellow and sulfur, and brown clay. A glob of titanium white as an anchor. At the center of the palette, she will mix her elements, the alchemist.
She drops her robe onto the floor and steps out of it.
The mirror from the bedroom door is leaned against a kitchen chair, footed by phone books. The canvas is positioned on the bridge of the easel. She stands naked and white, stripped of disguises. Bare to her past. She has screwed a pair of hundred-watt bulbs into the floor lamp and removed the shade, so it starkly illuminates her, throwing a black shadow across the floor.
She mixes an ashen-white flesh color on the palette and strikes the Dead Layer with paint.
Painting has sapped her. She feels chilled and emptied as she climbs back into the shower. There is nothing left in her. She has mixed all of herself into the paint she used to smear her naked image onto the stretched canvas. The paint will not wash off with water. If she is to clean herself of it, she must use turpentine and a rough rag or a scrub brush, but she does not. Instead she dresses in Aaron’s plaid bathrobe that still retains his scent, her hair still damp, still dripping, her skin marked by her paints. That’s when she hears the key, before the door to the apartment opens and shuts.
When she enters the living room from the bath, she finds her husband, hat still on his head, his coat hung over his arm, and his hands stuffed into his trouser pockets. He is examining the painting, his shoulders sunk. When he turns around to face her, his expression is drained, as if he’s just finished staring at a car wreck.
“So,” he says, his voice in neutral gear. “This is what you’re painting?”
Rachel picks up a pack of Camels from the sofa and lights up using a matchbook from the restaurant. Fine Dining before Curtain Time! Expelling smoke, she drops onto the sofa. Cautious. Each keeping their distance. “Apparently it is,” she answers him. Her brushes are soaking in the coffee can of turp. Chock full o’ Nuts. Her palette is a chaos of paint, crusting over. But the paint on her canvas gleams. It will take days to dry thoroughly. To dry down to the bone of the canvas.
“And so the idea is…” Aaron begins. “The idea is that people…” he says. “People are gonna see this?”
Rachel exhales, gazing at her painted image. “It’s not finished.”
“Oh. So maybe you’re still gonna paint some clothes on?”
Rachel slides her eyes over to her husband. For an instant, she mildly hates him. He’s nothing but a Jew from Flatbush, worried about what the neighbors might think. What does he know of anything? Of anything? For an instant, she’s sorry she missed him with the ashtray. But then his face softens. He releases a small but deflating breath, and she can see how lost he is. How utterly lost.
“I dunno, honey,” he tells her in the same neutral voice, without a hint of rancor. “I think I might be in over my head with you.”
PART THREE
The Red Angel
28.
The Catcher
The numbers are rigid. A thousand Jews ordered for transport. A thousand will go. Not one less. Not one more. But the names? The names are fluid. And that is where Feter Fritz has found his value. It’s the dirty work of negotiations and graft where Feter Fritz excels. He has carved out a small position for himself in the Gross Hamburger Strasse Lager and has even some small measure of power to determine whose name is typed onto which list—Paradise or Not Paradise—or if a name is rescued from the list completely. Of course, the entire quite delicate procedure can be overturned with a pencil stroke by Herr Kommandant Dirkweiler, who reigns like a petty god.
“Keep your head down,” Feter tells Eema. “No disturbances. No arguments,” he says, so Eema tries to contain herself in a cage of her own devices. And her little goat follows.
Keep everything in. Don’t react. Don’t expect. Eat what is given. Don’t make noise.
But something shocking happens. Something terrifying for Rashka, though Feter Fritz seems to consider it a wild stroke of fortune. “She has an interest in your daughter,” he informs Eema.
“An interest? What does this mean?”
But Feter Fritz isn’t interested in answering this question. All he says is, “She has power here, Lavinia. Power with the Gestapo. Power over the lists in a way that I do not.”
So he prepares Rashka. Coaches her on how she should behave with the woman she now addresses as gnä’ Fräulein. “Think of yourself as her pupil and she as your teacher,” says Feter Fritz. “Let her talk, but don’t be afraid to ask questions. She likes an interested pupil. Only be careful,” he warns. “Under no circumstances should you question her judgment. Do you understand?”
Rashka can barely nod.
“It’s a generous offer, ziskeit. She has influence here with these lunkhead Gestapo bulls. She’ll make sure your name and your mother’s name are kept off the transport lists.”