“You must tell me, Feter.” She removes a cigarette from the packet of Camels from her coat. She often carries things like men do, in her pockets, but she must open her bag to find matches. “You need to tell me which,” she insists, searching anxiously, her Miltown calm shredded and the cigarette dangling from her lips.
Feter Fritz, however, is circumspect. He seizes the opportunity to prevaricate by igniting her cigarette with the snap of a lighter that features a Pepsi-Cola bottle cap, part of the collection of accoutrements that underpin his frayed elegance. “Let’s say for now,” he suggests, “that all I can tell you is…it’s one of her major works.”
“So I will recognize it?”
“Oh, yes.” He nods with smug certainty. “Oh, yes, you will quite definitely recognize it, tohkter,” he tells her, adopting that oh-so-charming and yet quite irritating custom of old-world men, addressing young women as daughter. It’s a term of “affection” but also intended to detract from Rachel’s competence in this conversation by juvenilizing her. All in good time, child, it says. It’s a sticky matter for experts, not for les demoiselles. For now, he’s said all that he dares.
“So that is all I’m permitted to know?” she asks with a frown.
Well. Her uncle expels smoke with manly dignity. Perhaps there is one more thing he admits he should mention. And that’s when it comes. The meat of the matter. “All I need is fifty,” Feter informs her.
“Fifty?”
“Dollars, Rashka,” her uncle clarifies gently, as if Rachel may be sweetly dense. And then to add a splatter of grease to the skillet, he declares that “the fool in possession has not a whiff.” A shmegegi is how he describes this man. “He thinks the value is in the frame, a gilded monstrosity,” Feter sneers cozily. “The poor shlub has no idea what he has.”
“And who—” Rachel starts to press but silences herself when the ancient schlepper appears.
“One cup Visotskis Tey for the big eater,” he announces dubiously as he delivers Rachel’s tea on saucer. “Plus one bowl lentil bean for the regular. And don’t worry,” he adds, setting it down in front of Feter. “It’s Wednesday. The cook never spits in the soup on Wednesday. It’s bad luck.”
Feter ejects an affected laugh at this, perfected over decades of charming waiters, hotel porters, and doormen. “Thank you, Alf. And my compliments to the chef, of course.”
“Still nothing for the little missus?” the man inquires.
“Still nothing,” Rachel tells him.
A shrug. If she says so. And he slumps away. Only then does Rachel bear down on her question. “And who possesses this masterpiece, Feter?” she pushes. “Who exactly?”
But once more, her uncle bats her question away. “A nobody,” he declares. “A bedbug from a pawnshop. I could shout his name from a rooftop, and he’d still be anonymous.”
“Is it the place on West Forty-Seventh Street? Where you lost your diamond stickpin?”
“Unimportant,” he declares in between loud slurps of soup. His table manners disappeared at Auschwitz and never really returned. Rachel draws a breath deeply into her chest before releasing it. Her feter must sense a quickening resistance on her part, or at least a confusion of emotions, because he sets his spoon into the bowl and alters his tone sympathetically.
“I know I’m asking a great deal,” he is willing to concede.
“Yes.”
“Fifty dollars? It’s a significant sum.”
“Yes.”
“Especially when money doesn’t grow on trees,” he agrees. “But, child. Think of it. A canvas painted by your mother’s hand, surviving. A part of her legacy, undestroyed.” And here he strategically allows his cuff line to expose the tip of the number tattooed onto his forearm. A reminder of his suffering that his niece was spared.
Rachel swallows a small rock. “Yes,” she says, her eyes now gleaming with tears.
“You won’t regret it, zeisele. Fifty dollars? In the long run, it will be nothing.”
“But you must tell me, Feter,” she insists, wiping her eyes. “You must tell me. Which one is it?” Vos moler iz ir geredt vegn? “Which one has survived?”
Suddenly, her feter looks hunted. A moment before, his expression was animated. His voice excited by desire and manipulation. But now his eyes darken, and she can read in them that he’s calculating how to answer. How not to answer. So she is forced to read his mind. She knows he intends to keep her heartstrings thrumming. But he must be fearful too—what if he reveals too much? Will he frighten her off? What if, of all the paintings her eema ever produced, what if there is one so volatile in memory, so dangerous in its passion, that Rachel might bolt from her chair at the very mention of it and flee into the street? What if such a painting exists? And what if after all the decades, after all the blood and black smoke and burnt history, what if it has survived? Without realizing it, Rachel has clamped her hand over her own mouth as if to stop herself from uttering another word. She feels a breathtaking horror. An exhilarating, electrifying moment of panic.
Rachel’s hand slips from her mouth to her throat. “It’s her.”
Her feter huffs out a breath to forestall a panic. “Rashka,” he says.
But Rachel’s eyes have gone oily black. “Tell me the truth, Feter. The painting. It’s her.” Her breath shortens.
“She’s dead, Rashka,” Feter is compelled to remind her.
“That was never proven.”
“Yes. It was. She committed suicide in Russian custody,” her uncle insists. “Hanged herself in a Red Army cell. She can’t hurt you any longer, Rashka. You must realize that.”
Rashka is searching her bag and pulls out the bottle of Miltown.
“Now what’s this?” A frown. “A potion pill? I thought you were over that, Ruchel.”
“It’s a prescription, Feter,” Rachel answers firmly, swallowing a capsule dry. “From my doctor.” She is suddenly sick of Feter Fritz. Sick of his opinions from the old country. Sick of his paternal posing and the devious nature of his affection. “I don’t need your criticism.”
“Rokhl,” he says, speaking her name defensively.
“Promise me she is dead, Feter,” she demands, her eyes swelling with tears. “Promise me.”
“Oh, my child.” Feter sounds pained but also alarmed.
“Even if it’s a lie, promise me,” she begs. “Promise me she’s dead.”
“I promise you, Rokhl,” her uncle swears, “that she can’t hurt you any longer. This I can promise. Never again.”
She is yanking a handkerchief from her coat pocket. Mopping herself up. “I’m sorry,” she starts to repeat. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“No. No apologies. No apologies,” he tells her, his tone comforting but his expression distressed. “You should go home. You’re overwrought. I’m sure it’s these pills. Doctor and pills—they put a person on edge.” He comforts her in an overbearing manner, makes excuses for her teary eruption, though at the same time, he is preparing to make his escape. A crying woman in a public place—vos farlegnheyt!