Rashka turns to her mother. “This is what I must do, Eema?”
Her mother sighs with mournful resignation. “At least,” she says, “if it keeps us off the trains…”
“But why? Why does she want me?” Rashka wants to know. She wishes to cry but holds it in. “What am I to her?”
A silence. Then Eema says, “She has no children of her own. Perhaps she thinks she’s protecting you. Perhaps she wishes to punish me by stealing you away. Perhaps both.”
“But why?” Rashka asks again. Though no answer to her question is forthcoming.
A café near the Anhalter Bahnhof. “A fresh hunting ground,” the woman calls it. The two of them sit side by side at a table facing the door. Rashka’s clothes are worn and stiff with the grime that comes with U-boat life. Her shoes battered, she wears a knit hat, but she has been given a new coat. A lovely wool coat with a fitch fur collar. A lady’s coat. A “gift” from the gnä’ Fräulein, so smartly clad and coiffed beside her. Black lace gloves and a matching lace veil over her eyes. Angelika Rosen, la muse rouge. Eema calls her Fräulein Rosen or simply “the lady,” as in “You must do as the lady says,” though Rashka has heard the other names given her. The Red Angel. The Angel of Death.
“Light me a cigarette,” the gnä’ Fräulein commands. Rashka knows how this is done because she used to light cigarettes for her eema when she was small. She strikes the match, sucking in air. The smoke fills her mouth, but she doesn’t inhale. She whistles it out, careful to keep her lips pursed so she doesn’t make the cigarette paper soggy.
“Two coffees, please, and a bun,” the gnä’ Fräulein tells the craggy old waiter, employing a sleekly imperious tone that is both superior and seductive. Then she turns to her pupil. Down to business. “So. Do you know who you are looking for, Bissel?” she asks.
“Jews,” Rashka answers simply, because isn’t that the truth of the matter?
But the gnä’ Fräulein laughs lightly at the absurdity. “Well. If you mean beaked noses and heavy lips? Goggled eyes? Then no, Bissel. No. That’s strictly rubbish. We aren’t here to search for repulsive caricatures. We are hunting the invisible Jew. A very elusive quarry,” she says and expels a graceful drift of smoke from her cigarette.
Rashka can remember a pair of beautiful red suede gloves. Ten years before, when she was a child and the gnä’ Fräulein was not so much older than Rashka is now. The gloves were immaculately stitched with scalloped cuffs. A gift from the artist to her muse, according to Eema, as if that would explain away the light brightening her mother’s eyes. A light seldom bestowed upon her daughter.
The waiter reappears to deliver the coffees and a lumpy bun on a plate. Only old men are left in Berlin to wait at table. Rashka inhales the sweetish smell of the Feigenkaffee, ground from dried figs, and the slight chemical bake of the bun’s ersatz flour.
“Eat,” the woman tells her with a flick of her lace-gloved hand, so Rashka does so, attempting to refrain from wolfing down the bun, but she can’t really stop herself. Soon the plate holds nothing but crumbs. Crumbs that she collects and licks from her fingers.
“That’s the clue we’re looking for,” the gnä’ Fräulein announces with a taste of disdain on her lips. “There. Exactly what you’re doing now.”
Rashka blinks. Swallows heavily.
“A little mongrel licking crumbs from her plate. Only starved little animals do that. It’s a perfect signal.”
Rashka blinks again. Is the woman angry with her? She sounds like she might be, and Feter Fritz warned her of the lady’s temper. But then the gnä’ Fräulein arches an eyebrow. “Wipe your fingers, child,” she says in a tone that is nearly maternal. “And when you look,” she instructs, “look for yourself in the crowd. You are who we’re hunting, Bissel. Not ‘Jews.’ Not ‘U-boats.’ You.”
There is a man too. Cronenberg is his name, though the gnä’ Fräulein calls him Emil. Like the Fräulein herself, he has great freedoms. Great privileges. He is handsome like a wolf is handsome and blond as any Aryan might hope to be, though Rashka knows him to be a Jew. Like the gnä’ Fräulein, he is a “Greifer.” A catcher. A grabber. He favors the style of leather trench coat and snap-brim hat that Gestapo men often wear as an unofficial uniform and carries a police pistol in his coat pocket. He is quite brazenly obvious in his desire for his red-haired partner. On the other hand, he observes Rashka like she is a dog turd he must avoid stepping upon.
It is his job to make the arrests. The gnä’ Fräulein searches out her prey, and the man steps in with his pistol. Hands up, little mice! The cat is here, and the game is up! He drives a glossy French automobile to ferry their prisoners back to Grosse Hamburger Strasse. It is through Emil that Rashka first hears of the term applied by the Gestapo to their little tribe of catchers. The Search Service. And for whom are they searching? Well, the gnä’ Fräulein has already made that clear to Rashka. She is searching for herself.
By the end of the summer of 1944, things change drastically for all residents of the Grosse Hamburger Strasse when the Judenlager is moved to smaller quarters in the Schulstrasse. Transport after transport, trainload after trainload, even as the city suffers under bombing day and night, has depleted the camp’s human inventory. There simply aren’t enough Jews left to warrant such space. So orders were issued by Dirkweiler’s bosses. The whole operation has been transferred from the former old age home to the Jewish Hospital in Berlin-Wedding.
An iron gate located at Schulstrasse 79 leads to the pathology building, where Jews are now confined to the morgue. Therefore, in order to cram the whole show into this new, congested space, the fat must be trimmed! The glut of Jews who are of no value to Kommandant Dirkweiler must be shipped out. The Gestapo is finished with many of the Jewish functionaries. Their services are no longer required, nor are the services of many of the orderlies. So a special transport to the Paradise lager is organized. Yet—a miracle! Feter’s name is scratched from the list! Not by a miracle, really, but by the miracle worker, Angelika Rosen. “Perhaps,” Rashka’s eema posits, “she has not become so hard-hearted as to completely forget the past.”
On the floor of the morgue, the Jews huddle, sleeping in an imitation of death. The cacophony of snores and snorts, however, indicates life. Rashka is pressed back to back with her eema. She can feel every twitch of her mother’s body like it’s her own, every spasm of sleep. When she hears the scuff of shoe leather on the tiles, her eyes pop open.
“Feter,” she whispers with a small note of joy. Her uncle has crouched down beside her.
“Rokhl,” he whispers in return, pressing a finger to his lips. And then he says, “Don’t wake your mother.”
Walking down the corridor beside Feter, she is hugging her shoulders with her arms against the chill of the cellar. Rashka is confused. “I don’t understand,” she is saying. “Why must I leave Eema?”
“Because it’s the best thing for you,” her uncle tells her.
“Because the gnä’ Fräulein says I must?”
“There’s a small room that’s empty that she wants you to fill. You’ll have better food. Warm blankets.”
“But why?”
“Because the gnä’ Fräulein says you must.”
“I don’t understand,” Rashka repeats. “Why can’t Eema come with me?”
“Your eema will be safe where she is,” Feter Fritz assures her as they walk through the gray light. “Protected,” he says.