“Rashka… She is.”
“No. No, you said yourself that she was dead. That she had hanged herself in a Russian cell.”
“That was the lie,” Feter informs her.
“No, this is the lie. What you are saying. She’s not alive. You’re lying, Feter. Eema always said you couldn’t help yourself. That lies were too easy for you.”
Feter is shaking his head. “Not this time.”
“She died, Feter. Elle est morte!”
“Rashka.” He makes her name sound like such a pitiable thing. “The truth is different. If someone was found hanged in a Soviet cell, it wasn’t her. She is here. In New York. Very much alive. And she wants to see you.”
30.
All Because of Her Little Goat
The day is cold, but the Orchard Café is warm. Rashka breathes in the scent of perfume that clouds the air around the gnä’ Fräulein, who has ordered them two coffees. No more warm milk; she is not a child. Just look at yourself in the mirror, Bissel. That’s what the gnä’ Fräulein tells her. Womanhood is upon her. The blessing and the curse of it. “Give me your face,” the woman tells her, crooking her finger, gesturing for Rashka to turn toward her. Rashka shifts in her chair. “Closer,” says the gnä’ Fräulein. Rashka pokes her face slightly forward. There is something in the gnä’ Fräulein’s hand. A tube of lipstick that pops softly when it’s uncapped. “Now, give me your lips, like so,” she says and puckers lightly to demonstrate.
Rashka feels nervous. The color of the lipstick in the tube is red, bright as blood. Very few women in Berlin have such luxuries available, and besides, don’t the Nazis detest cosmetics on good German women? But the color is so rich. She feels a pang of hunger for it as she obeys the command of the gnä’ Fräulein. The feel is waxy but thick as it’s applied. A smooth roll on the flesh of her lips. Upper lip. Then lower lip. The same slightly sticky velvety roll.
“Now do as I do,” the gnä’ Fräulein tells her and primps her lips together. Rashka obeys. The gnä’ Fräulein observes her and then nods. “Yes,” she says and holds up the small mirror in the shell-shaped powder puff case. Rashka stares at the color ripening her mouth in the reflection.
***
Rachel is walking aimlessly. Shoulders crouched. Head down and bumping into people. Hey, lady! Watch it! Open your eyes, why don’t you! Jeez, are you blind? The words bounce off. She doesn’t care. She is fleeing herself, but no matter how fast she bores ahead, no matter how many steps she puts behind her, she is still a prisoner of her own body, of her own mind, of her own history.
Stepping off a curb, she stumbles, and a car horn blares irately over a scream of brakes. She glares at the car’s chrome bumper. The driver is shouting curses at her, but she shrugs them off. The car suddenly swings around her with an angry gun of its engine and is replaced by another car blaring its horn. At this point, like a sleepwalker coming awake, she blinks. Shakes herself. Standing at the curb is the schoolgirl with the sable braids and the wine-colored beret, watching her as always from the silence of death.
“Hey, sweetheart. Move out of the fuckin’ street, for Chrissake!”
This time, she obeys the demand of the driver and steps back up onto the sidewalk. The girl has vanished.
“You should go see a fuckin’ shrink, crazy bitch!” she hears the driver suggest, followed by another gun of another engine.
There’s a telephone booth on the corner. Rachel is making a call as people pass by indifferently. The phone receiver in her hand, she inserts a nickel. She listens to the clatter of the dial as it rotates backward with each number. A truck rumbles past the booth as the drone of each ring precedes a dull clack of connection. But Dr. Solomon? He is not available. This is what the woman from his answering service tells her. Can she take a message?
Yes. The Red Angel is not dead. She is alive.
The answering service woman is confused. “I beg your pardon? Could you repeat that, please? The angel who?”
Rachel hangs up. Stares through the glass of the booth. Waiting for her across the street under the lamp of the United States Realty Building is the schoolgirl again. Watching.
Feter Fritz had given her the particulars. The time, the location, all arranged. She takes the Eighth Avenue Independent uptown. Entering Central Park, she feels cold. A deep, shivering chill. She digs out her bottle of Miltown to warm her, but her hands are shaking, and when she attempts to open the bottle, it slips from her grip, spilling the pills in all directions. “Scheisse!” she cries out. She could try to pick them up, kneel down on her hands and knees to retrieve them pill by pill, but that feels too humiliating, so she simply abandons the mess.
Off the Central Drive, there’s a statue called Eagles and Prey. A small goat trapped in a crevice is devoured alive by a pair of ravenous eagles. This is where she finds the bench. The spot where Feter has instructed her to wait. This is the third cigarette she has smoked, lit from the ember of the last. The butts of the first two lie flat on the sidewalk, crushed by the toe of her saddle shoe. Her eyes close. Who is she expecting? A ghost scissored from her memory? A fury from her nightmares? A bloody archangel, fiery in her naked hunger, spreading her ragged wings?
Speak of the wings and the angel appears.
“Good morning, Bissel,” she hears.
The shock is flooding. It matches the jolt from a frayed electrical plug, a cold pulse of electricity fed into the body, vibrating her bones. It sweeps through the whole of her. But then she simply stares into the still-beautiful face.
***
A transport. It’s raining that day. The day Rashka loses her mother. Two lorries leave for the Grunewald rail station. Rashka is aware of this transport; who is not? But it is not until the gnä’ Fräulein appears that she feels a horror fill her to overflowing.
“I put your feter on the train.”
Confusion.
“The train?”
“To Poland. Your feter. Your feter and your eema both.”
The pain of a thousand needles surges through Rashka’s body. Her eyes burn. Her mouth opens, but no words come. No words at all.
“It’s for your own good, Bissel. Your uncle? Really, he was doomed from the start. Even he knew that. And your mother? Your mother, Bissel, she was holding you back,” the gnä’ Fräulein insists. “She was a drag on you,” the woman says. “An impediment. You can see this, can’t you, Bissel? I’m sure you can. For us to…to do our work, we must be free of impediments. So you must be strong, Bissel. No tears,” she commands, wiping away the tears that are streaming down Rashka’s cheeks. “You must be hard like stone.”
“I don’t understand,” Rashka whispers, her voice raw. “You promised. You promised to keep her safe!” Suddenly, she is shouting like a mad demon. The whole of her being feels aflame. “You promised! You promised!” And then she sees stars as the gnä’ Fräulein slaps her across the face with the back of her fist.
“You! How can you dare speak to me so? I’ve kept you alive. Do you think that Dirkweiler cared one shit about another insignificant Jewish sow? It was me who kept you off the trains. Not your beloved feter. Me! No one else! Me alone! And this is how I’m repaid? With your childish anger?”
Rashka feels the blood dripping from her nose. Tastes it on her lips.
“Do you think I have taken on the burden of your life for my own well-being? A stupid little fish to keep swimming? No. This is for your good, not mine. Can you comprehend what I’ve done? I have saved your life. I chose you over your mother. Though now I think maybe I should have put you both on the train and saved myself the heartache.”