The Fräulein has her hair done up in a turban, because she recognizes that her red tresses are becoming too famous. Too easily identified among the U-boats. Rashka is seated beside her, but there is a problem. The gnä’ Fräulein is not happy with her protégé. “I don’t have you tagging along to eat cakes, Bissel,” she tells Rashka. “Emil already thinks that I’m wasting my time. That I should throw you back to the rabble and let the next transport take you and your mother both. So you must produce results, clear? No more loafing,” she scolds.
No more loafing. If Rashka Morgenstern is to be a catcher, she then must catch! She must grab! To save her life. To save the life of her mother, this is what she must do. Find a U-boat. Find herself in the face of another Jew. So can she be forgiven? Rashka begs of God. Can she be forgiven for what she is about to do? Cannot the Master of the Universe, praised be His holy name, step from her eema’s prayer book and, in His limitless wisdom, see past her sin? Her crime? If she devotes herself to a lifetime of mitzvoth after this moment, can’t her soul be cleansed?
“The girl in the corner,” Rashka listens to herself say. She says this trying to keep her eyes dry. Trying to imitate resolve. It’s the young schoolgirl with the sable braid and wine-red beret returned. The girl with whom Rashka had once exchanged an innocent wave. She is against the wall alone. The woman who was with her has left the table, so she has no adult attending her for protection. Just as Rashka had been, she is left alone without a mother. The girl allows her eyes to lurk about the café. She must search for danger by herself, shielded by nothing but a fragile bubble of anonymity.
But Rashka Morgenstern has just popped that bubble.
“Why her?” the Angel quizzes.
The schoolgirl happens to catch Rashka’s eyes at that instant. She smiles without artifice. A small smile. But then the smile sinks. She looks unsure. Perhaps perplexed. But not alarmed. She is unaware that she has just been murdered.
Why her? “Because,” Rashka the catcher replies, “she is me.”
29.
Speak of the Wings
Fighting strong winds, an Aeroflot Ilyushin IL-12 military transport, on route from Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk in the Soviet Union, has plowed into the eastern slope of Mount Sivukha, approximately thirty kilometers from the Mana River. Of all aboard, no survivors.
Rachel clips the article from the paper while Aaron is at work. At home, an uneasy truce reigns. This is how it’s been for the past several days since Aaron stopped sleeping at the restaurant and returned to their apartment, though not to their bed. He has been bunking on the couch. “Billeting” he calls it, like a soldier. They connect to one another only through the points of routine. She serves breakfast; he eats it. She washes the dishes or doesn’t. He doesn’t complain about the dirty dishes, but neither does he touch the sponge or the bottle of Ivory Liquid.
Her painting sits on the easel. The oils have dried enough for her to pick up her brush again, but she hasn’t. She has cleaned her brushes in the kitchen sink but not used them. Aaron complains that he can’t sleep lying on the couch with her naked portrait staring at him, so Rachel has draped it with a sheet like a ghost. The ghost of herself. They don’t really touch each other, not as wife and husband might. They touch only logistically. Passing to enter the bathroom, to get to the sink to spit out toothpaste. Nor do they talk about what has gone wrong. What is going wrong. Probably because neither one can really say what exactly is going wrong, only that it is. So they live not quite like roommates but like business partners in their marriage.
Morning. Rachel wakes, having sweated through her pajamas. From the next room, she hears music. Nat King Cole singing “A Blossom Fell.” She finds that Aaron has not left his bedclothes for her to strip from the couch as usual but has folded them neatly. Good Soldier Perlman. In fact, he is already dressed and wearing his necktie and suit jacket, sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee cup beside the percolator that dribbles steam from its spout. He looks up at her from his copy of the Herald Tribune. “There’s coffee,” he tells her.
Rachel approaches the table. Sits. Lights a cigarette from Aaron’s pack. The sharpness digs into the back of her throat. She sighs out smoke.
Darkness. After midnight. She had given Aaron the bed because she is painting, and he hadn’t argued. She can hear him snoring turbulently. An unshaded lamp burns, and the cat snoozes in a ball at one end of the sofa while Rachel sits on the opposite end, drilling into the past cemented in her own head.
Two decades before, on the day of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish boycott, brown-shirted storm troopers defaced hundreds of Jewish shops across the city. She was only a child, inside Ehrenberg’s Konditorei. Only a child staring out as a giant ogre in his dung-brown uniform slopped a paintbrush across the outside of the shop’s window.
She sees it before she paints it.
But the light is switched on, and the glare hits the canvas like a soft punch. She sees it like it’s been there all along, invisible until she follows the dots of a constellation. It propels Rachel forward off the sofa. Compels her to squeeze cadmium yellow from its tube onto the palette and smash a brush into the blob of greasy color before whipping up the dirty turp standing in the coffee can. She wants it wet; she wants it oozing and dripping. Muddy and desecrated to match her memory. A zodiac unto itself. A constellation now of a single star. The Shield of David, six points dribbling down the face of the canvas, clothing her nakedness.
And now she must let it dry. She must allow her paint to settle into the canvas before she can finish. Naomi had slipped a couple of her cannabis roll-ups into Rachel’s bag, so she sits by the window with the sash cracked open and smokes a juju, thinking of the schoolgirl with the sable plaits and the burgundy beret. Tears cool her cheek. A young girl entering Birkenau? It was a toss-up, wasn’t it? Many went straight to the gas. Most did. Rachel can see the girl standing in front of her. “What happened to you?” she asks. “Tell me the truth. Did I murder you?”
But she keeps the truth to herself, this girl. And then she is gone, leaving Rachel gazing at the canvas before replacing the sheet over her easel. When Aaron comes out, she is shoving a casserole dish into the oven.
“Jeez, what’s that smell?” Aaron wants to know, entering in his bathrobe and pj’s. “You smoking those clove cigarettes that Naomi thinks are so beatnik?”
“Yes,” she lies. But his attention is diverted.
“So Halloween’s long gone, but we still got the ghost here haunting us, huh?” he says, surveying the shrouded easel. Rachel only pours out coffee from the percolator, but then he is behind her. “So do I at least still get a good-morning kiss, or have we suspended that practice?” he asks.
She turns and looks into his face. The pain, the uncertainty behind his flippancy. He’s asking for mercy, so she gives him a kiss. Something more than a peck, but without heat. A kiss to satisfy the practice.
In Berlin, the transports continued till the end. Even as the thunder of the Red Army artillery drifted closer from the east, the transports continued. Lorries to the trains. Trains to the camps. The track rails were kept polished by use. For a moment, the schoolgirl joins them at the supper table. Aaron is busy with his favorite subject. Work. Something about Leo arguing with the owner of the Stork Club. Rachel is not paying attention. She’s looking at the peas that her husband has actually taken the time to remove, pea by pea, from his helping of casserole and crowd into a pea ghetto on the side of his plate.