Chapter3 - 2

“I did,”

Reka said, knowing she shouldn’t, not especially caring. Sometimes she got tired of sitting like a bump on a log at these dinners, just waiting for the food to come so she could eat up and leave. “I was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in Germany before the war, young man.”

She saw him blanch and wanted to roll her eyes. It hadn’t been a crime , for god’s sake. It hadn’t even been unique. Half of Berlin flirted pink in those days; Marxism had been fashionable. “A lot of it was pretentious idiots quoting Lenin and talking about the proletariat while waiting for someone else to pick up the check,”

Reka said. “But it was also a lot of young people who thought maybe the children , the ones you’re flag-waving about now, the ones who were starving in gutters back then, deserved more of a slice of the pie than they were getting.”

Frankly, Reka still didn’t know what was wrong with that idea. It hadn’t all been cabarets and absinthe, cubism and boys dancing in tights back in those Berlin days. It had been hunger, real hunger, and real fury at those who weren’t hungry but refused to share.

Fliss and Nora looked anxious, the way they always did when voices rose. Claire leaned back on her elbows; she always enjoyed verbal fencing.

“Goodness, Reka.”

Grace chuckled softly, not sounding derisive, just amused. “Look at you. A firebrand at heart.”

“That’s an arrestable offense these days, if men like Mr.Adams here have his way,”

Reka retorted.

“Goodness, I hope not. Firebrands are good for the country, or so I’ve always thought,”

Grace mused, ignoring Harland’s sputtering. “Firebrands ask questions, and a nation where you can’t ask questions is one that is going downhill.”

“Questions that make allowances for Communists are a different matter.”

Harland looked quite red in the face now, to Reka’s enjoyment. “The threat the Communist Party poses—”

“You know who we really posed a threat to? Herr Hitler,”

said Reka. “Who do you think were some of the first people he rounded up and arrested? The Communists and Socialists, that’s who. The ones telling everyone he and his Brownshirts were a threat back when boys like you were saying America First and At least these fascists make the trains run on time! A little history for you, Mr.Adams.”

“I know my history,”

he said stiffly.

Reka was willing to bet he hadn’t known that part of it. Socialists and Reds arrested and beaten up, shipped off to camps alongside the Jews and the Romani and the homosexuals. And somehow the Socialists and Reds were still the enemy here in the land of the free, still the ones being arrested and hauled away by clean-cut young men like Harland Adams.

“You’re not still a member of the Party, are you?”

he asked, as if Reka was going to reach under her cardigan and whip out a hammer and sickle.

“If I wanted to be a Communist in America, I’d just join a church.”

Reka enjoyed his double take. “What kind of principles do you think Christ and his disciples are embodying? Living together in communal spirit, sharing everything equally between all—Lenin would approve.”

“Jaysus Mary and Joseph,”

Nora said in the broad brogue she trotted out to make them all laugh. “I should tell my mam that, just to hear her screech.”

She was trying to deflate the tension in the room, Reka knew. Herself, she didn’t particularly feel like letting Arlene’s beau off the hook. “Put that appalled look away, Mr.Adams, I’m not a Communist Party member or a church member these days. Live as long as I have and you’ll realize that whether the organization you put your faith in brandishes a Bible or a copy of Das Kapital , the haves in that organization are rarely interested in sharing with the have-nots .”

Besides, being a Party member meant meetings, and if there was anything Reka hated, it was meetings. Almost as much as she hated complacency—at least she’d knocked that plastic smugness off Harland Adams’s sharply handsome face tonight.

And then he surprised her: “Is that why you left Germany, Mrs.Muller? Your... political beliefs?”

“I left so I wouldn’t be shot.”

Left, fled, emigrated... lots of words for it, that panicked rush to leave your maddened country before the bullet, the cattle car, the camp did to you what it was already doing to your friends, and turned you into a much simpler, starker word: dead .

“You left, and this country took you in,”

Harland continued, rotating his glass between his hands. “So maybe a little less scorn for our values would be appropriate, Mrs.Muller.”

“This country did take me in,”

Reka acknowledged. “And she’s my country now, yes. But does that mean she gets a pass on criticism, forever, even when she’s wrong? Wouldn’t that go against freedom of speech and all that?”

After enduring Hitler’s Berlin, Reka was never going to let a thing like freedom of speech go unappreciated, or unused, even if it did make her a firebrand.

“You are twisting my words,”

Harland began.

“Oh, go put a few more movie stars in jail,”

Reka snapped. “Maybe you’ll win a medal—”

and Arlene swooped in then with a big false smile and eyes that screamed murder.

“Goodness, you really are feelin’ feisty today, you old sweetie. Let’s hope you’ve got an appetite to match!”

and soon a series of Grace’s mismatched plates came out, Arlene placing the biggest into Harland’s hands with a flourish. “Candle Salad,”

she cooed. “My specialty.”

For a moment, they all stared at their plates: a lettuce leaf on each one, a pineapple ring with a halved banana standing upright from the center, a cherry at the tip trailing a runnel of whipped cream...

Grace’s mouth twitched, Reka saw distinctly, and Nora’s face went perfectly blank in the way that meant she was suppressing a giggle. But it probably would have passed—Arlene was already nattering about how cute presentations like Candle Salad got children to eat their fruits and veggies; trotting out her credentials as a perfect mother to the future Harland Adams Jr.—if Reka hadn’t just thought hell with it and given in to the bellow of laughter that tore all the way up from her stomach. “It’s a p?cs ,”

she choked, remembering Otto’s p?cs waggling between his legs when they went swimming naked in the icy blue Grundlesee on their honeymoon. The banana even had a slight curve to the left like Otto’s had, and Reka was really howling now.

“It is a candle ,”

Arlene said, red-faced. “The banana is the candle, the cherry is the flame—”

“Definitely a circumcised candle,”

Claire snickered, and that did everyone in. You couldn’t find a more different batch of women than the Briar Club, Reka often thought, but after so many suppers together they had somehow acquired a shared funny bone, a way of setting each other off that made the laughter contagious when the right joke caught fire. Fliss was barely managing to contain her giggles, choking out I’m sure it’s scrumptious, Arlene! but Nora had fallen on Pete’s shoulder in mirth, and the black-haired girl named Bea had turned to the wall with her shoulders heaving. “It’s a candle ,”

Arlene kept hissing, and that just set everyone off all over again.

At last, Reka got up. “I’m too old to eat p?cs for dinner,”

she said, plunking her plate in Harland’s lap. To do him credit, he was doing his best not to laugh at his girlfriend’s embarrassment, or the culinary pornography she’d whipped up. “Nice to meet you, G-man—”

Reka said and hobbled back down the stairs to her own room, still cackling.

By the time she boiled herself a cup of instant Sanka, nibbled a few stale Crax out of the cracker box, and settled into her dilapidated armchair, it was nearly nine and Arlene was banging on the door. Harland must be gone by now; she’d never unleash that rusty-spike screech if there was an eligible man around to hear it. “You old bitch , how dare you talk like that to Harland, he probably thinks I’m some pinko slut now—”

Reka didn’t bother opening the door, just cackled and sank deeper into her chair, folding her wrinkled hands around the chipped mug. And after a while the cackles faded, and she was left staring at her barren room.

Twenty-year-old Reka Takács might have found it romantic. A narrow bed, an icebox, and some dingy walls didn’t matter when you were young, when everything had a sheen of bohemian glamour and it was all just a stepping-stone to greater things. When you were old, it just looked grim. When Otto was alive, spaces like this had seemed unbearably cramped, two of them trying to maneuver their aging bodies around each other and the roaches. Trying not to miss their flat in Berlin with the burgundy red curtains and the Chinese screen, the smell of ink from Otto’s midnight scribbling, turpentine and linseed oil from Reka’s easel in the corner; eighteen minutes’ walk to the Opernplatz where they queued to see the premiere of Wozzeck —where, eight years later, they’d stood hand in hand like two mute, terrorized children and watched as the books burned. Knowing in that moment that it was done, their time in Berlin.

“We got out, Otto,”

she whispered, barely aware that Arlene had stopped banging outside and clicked away in a huff. “We got out.”

Maybe it wasn’t much, this life—the room and its smell of stale cooking fat from the kitchen below, her occasional cheap treat of bad beer and a scrimped-for train ticket to New York to remember there were galleries with color and life and that much-missed smell of oil paint and acrylic. But it was a life, and any life was better than being dead. If she could walk back through the doors of those old Berlin cabarets now, they’d be peopled by ghosts: the less fortunate, so many of whom had died under pink triangles, red triangles, yellow stars, and all the other badges of hatred.

Still, at some point on the way to becoming an old woman, gratitude began running side by side with despondency. So she wasn’t dead—so what? She was shelving books for pittance wages when she’d once taught a generation of artists how to push their boundaries clear off the edges of their canvases. Sleeping in an empty bed because the firebrand journalist who used to share it had died of frustration and shame as much as from old age, withered into uselessness the moment he realized life in America held nothing for him but a janitor’s mop.

At least you got out. Those words had been hurled at Reka before, in bitter grief by Berliners who had lost whole families into the swastika’s maw. But the question she couldn’t help but contemplate now, staring into the future: What did we get out for ? No one had an answer for that. Not a slick young G-man who believed in his God, his flag, and his badge; not Grace March and her sun tea and her weekly suppers; not this country with its copper-green Lady Liberty and her false promises of Give me your huddled masses .

No , Reka thought, not willing to be unfair even inside her head. Not false promises. Lady Liberty had taken her in, after all—and many others—and Reka would never lose the bone-deep thrum of thankfulness for that. She just wished that so many of the huddled masses this country took in hadn’t found themselves treated like a resource: stripped of what little they’d brought with them so it could be given to someone else, someone better off. Communism in reverse. I wasn’t asking to be given everything on a silver platter when I came here , Reka thought, still thinking of Lady Liberty. I was always willing to pay my way, earn my share. So why did you have to welcome me with one hand and take everything I had left with the other?

Reka, édesem, she heard Otto chiding. Don’t think about the sketches. There’s no point. Not unless she wanted another sleepless night chewing on her own rage, gazing at the place on her wall where her future should have hung. The future that had been stolen out of her hands.

Don’t think about it , Otto said again .

But the rage was always there, always simmering—and tonight, her belly empty, she thought she might as well welcome it.

Arlene’s Candle Salad

Iceberg lettuce Canned pineapple rings 1 firm banana for every two dinner guests Whipped cream Maraschino cherries

Arrange a lettuce leaf on a salad plate, and top with a pineapple ring. Cut the bananas in half widthwise, and fix one banana half in the hole at the center of the pineapple ring, sticking up. Add a dab of whipped cream at the top for the “candle wax,”

and a cherry at the tip of the banana for the “flame.”

Eat without snickering, if you can manage it, while listening to “The Thing”

by Phil Harris.

October had turned to November, Halloween had come and gone (that big damned dog of Nora’s had howled bloody murder when the boys down the street set off some firecrackers), Mrs. Nilsson’s autumn haul of parsnips and beets ripened in the Victory Garden under her NOT for briarwood house boarders! sign, and Reka stood on the top step of the Smoot Library with her jaw hanging slack. “Fired?”

she repeated stupidly.

“That’s right, Mrs.Muller,”

the chief librarian said with pursed lips. She hadn’t even let Reka step over the threshold; just zipped straight out the doors with her hand outstretched like a traffic cop the moment she saw Reka hobbling up the steps. “I’m afraid we cannot employ your kind at the T. Nealey Smoot Library.”

“My kind?”

Reka repeated, at a loss. What kind was that, ugly old women? You’re not exactly a comely spring chicken yourself, MissSexton.

“It has been brought to our attention that you have”—MissSexton’s voice dropped—“ Communist sympathies . You understand that as a sanctum of American ideals, a place where children congregate—well, we cannot employ such a person.”

“I have not been a member of any party for nearly twenty years,”

Reka said, but she could tell it was useless, the way MissSexton’s cat’s-eye glasses glittered like knife blades. “Who told you I had Communist sympathies? Mrs.March?”

Grace, who also shelved books here, who had heard her pick a fight with Harland Adams over the Candle Salads. Grace had seemed more amused than appalled by the notion that her neighbor had waved a flag for the Reds a few decades ago... but if there was anything Reka had learned from Hitler’s Berlin, it was that you never knew which of your neighbors would turn you in.

“Never you mind, Mrs.Muller.”

A shoo of MissSexton’s hand like she was getting rid of a stray cat. “You’re lucky we don’t report you to the authorities! The T. Nealey Smoot Library would be entirely within its rights—”

She won’t do that , Otto snorted. Neither HUAC nor the FBI will concern itself with a hired page at a third-tier branch library, édesem. But there was a deep-seated fear in Reka that got her feet moving anyway, had her hobbling back down the steps with her heart thumping sickly. The ingrained fear of the refugee, which never quite disappeared—the feeling that you might be asked to show your papers, to justify yourself, to leave . A feeling that sent her scuttling away from the library, head down, the taste of copper in her mouth.

How her younger self would have jeered.

Shut up , Reka told her younger self. Being jobless at twenty-one was a lark. Mornings to sleep in, making jokes about spending your last marks on schnapps, always confident another job was around the corner. At seventy-one, the thought sent her reeling sickly into Prospect Park beside the library, breath coming in gasps. No job. No money, even the pittance library pages were paid by the hour. She had maybe two months’ rent in an envelope under her mattress, squirreled away coin by coin for a rainy day—well, on a clear-skied afternoon where sunlight shone down on the absurd bronze statue of Councilman T. Nealey Smoot beaming across the duck pond at his namesake library, storm clouds had gathered over Reka Muller’s head.

Two months of rent. Then what?

Who was going to hire a seventy-one-year-old woman? She couldn’t put in ten-hour shifts at the Crispy Biscuit like Nora; didn’t have the typing skills to join a steno pool like Claire; couldn’t teach junior high like the Italian girl Bea.

Two months of rent. All the savings Reka had.

It would be a lot more. If—

Otto warned her not to think about that, but she couldn’t hear Otto over the roaring in her ears. She stumped across Prospect Park and down Briar Avenue, knowing exactly where she was going, knowing she shouldn’t go there again. You promised yourself you wouldn’t. You promised Otto. But her feet kept moving as she pulled her coat tight against the sharp November breeze.

Astonishing how close Georgetown was to Foggy Bottom—how close the haves really were to the have-nots . Just a trudge across the C her feet screamed, and she had a stitch in her side like a dagger. Even a mile or so was too long to walk on a cold autumn day, when you were over seventy. Unless you were so angry you cared nothing at all for pain. “Mr. Barrett Sutherland.”

“He’s at his office, Mrs.—?”

“Senator Sutherland, then.”

The father had a gracious white-pillared place in Virginia, but weekdays he’d be found more often than not at his son’s house—closer to Capitol Hill and the martinis at Martin’s Tavern, he’d been known to joke. Years of concentrated hatred for the whole Sutherland clan had taught Reka a lot about their movements. “I’ll see the senator, if he’s in.”

The maid looked wary. She must be new; the previous maid had known to just shut the door in Reka’s face. “Do you have an appointment, ma’am?”

“He stole from me.”

Reka peered past the maid to the familiar strip of luxurious Persian carpet, the crystal chandelier. Sometimes she’d gotten as far as the sitting room, but usually that imposing brass-knockered door shut in her face before she got a toe inside. Reka saw someone move at the end of the foyer and raised her voice. “The senator stole something from me. I want what is mine —”

Reka , Otto begged, but she couldn’t stop. Maybe once a year she got angry enough to come make a scene. Useless, stupid. She still couldn’t stop.

“I want what is mine,”

she repeated, voice rising, trying to elbow past the maid, peering into the shadowy foyer. Was that the senator back there, or his son? She hadn’t seen either for years, except at a distance. The son with his Clark Gable jaw, his patent-leather hair, his pin-striped suit; the father the same but older, the dark hair grayer, the paunch behind the same vest and the pocket square now solidified into hard, complacent prosperity. “He took what is mine and I need it back.”

Need. That was why she was here, she supposed. It wasn’t just a matter of ownership and justice anymore; it was a matter of rent and food.

“Trudy?”

A woman’s voice drifted from the foyer—young, light, a British accent. “Who’s at the door?”

“Just a tramp, Mrs.Sutherland.”

“I’m not a tramp ,”

Reka gritted out. “You ask the senator or his son if they know the name Professor Muller ; they know. They know—”

The maid flapped at Reka like she was flapping at a housefly, starting to close the door. Reka wedged one foot in the way, raising her voice to a shout again. “ I want to see Mr.Sutherland— ”

“He’s not here.”

The maid fell back as a slim, beringed hand opened the door back up, and Reka blinked up at a tall young woman. Elegant, black-haired, endless neck roped with pearls and endless silk-stockinged legs under the trim mint-green skirt of what Reka guessed was a Chanel suit. “Thank you, Trudy,”

she continued in her soft British-accented voice. The maid disappeared, and the woman turned back to Reka. “I’m afraid my husband is chairing a committee meeting until late this evening, and my father-in-law is away in Virginia. Can I help you instead?”

The wife. Reka had never seen her before, though she knew that the younger Sutherland had a wife and son. Methodically picked up somewhere after Yale Law School, from wherever it was politicians’ wives were cooked up in some sterling silver incubator so the family picture would be complete when it came time to run for office. That was how these Washington families did it. Reka looked at the big square diamond on the woman’s hand, resting on the door, and said bluntly, “Your father-in-law is a thief, and your husband knows it.”

The fastest flicker on the woman’s face, there and gone before Reka could parse it. “What is it you think the senator took from you?”

she asked, as if this was a perfectly normal conversation to have on a Georgetown front stoop.

“I don’t think he stole. I know he did. From Otto and me. From who knows how many others.”

Reka caught a ragged breath, forcibly calming herself down. “Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”

“Of course. Trudy, if you don’t mind—”

And Reka found herself on a cushioned bench in the foyer, sipping from a cut-crystal glass. Once you were in, it was much harder to get you out—she didn’t waste time, looking up at the elegant lady of the house who had so far been more receptive than any of her menfolk.

“Your father-in-law— Does Senator Sutherland boast about how many he helped save from Germany? How many he sponsored, to make their way from Berlin to America in the thirties?”

“Yes, he’s very proud that—”

“Does he tell you he stripped them of anything they had? Anything of value, that is. He let us keep the scraps.”

The woman’s face changed again. Probably wondering if Reka was Jewish, if that was why she’d fled Germany. Or wondering why she’d left it so late that she needed American help in the first place. The question Reka had heard over and over: Why didn’t you leave sooner?

Such idiots. Do you know how hard it was to leave? she wanted to scream. Do you? Every week there was some new piece of paper you needed to emigrate, some new permission a smug faceless bureaucrat didn’t want to grant you, some milestone you weren’t meeting. Even if you could get all the bits of paper, it was near impossible to come to America without someone to sponsor you. An American sponsor: such a thing was like getting touched by the wand of a fairy godmother.

Or in their case, a fairy godfather.

And when your fairy godfather said you should send your valuables in advance, because you’d likely have to surrender anything precious on the way out of Berlin—did you question that? You did not. You were too used to Hitler’s thugs and how they helped themselves to whatever they wanted. You were too numbed and grateful to be getting away from the country that was no longer your home, the place where your friends were disappearing and you knew that any day you’d be next. So you sent your things ahead, the most precious ones, the things that would help you build a new life.

Including that one slim, irreplaceable package.

Let’s not send the sketches ahead , Reka had argued at the time. They should travel with us. I’ll tie them around my legs, under my stockings.

And see you stripped and beaten at the Lehrter Bahnhof if the guards catch even a crinkle of paper? Otto had demanded. We can’t risk it.

She wished they had. Those three flimsy pieces of paper could have bought them a new life in America. Maybe not prosperity, but some measure of ease. Could have salved, at least, the utter shock of realizing there were no valuables waiting for them when they arrived in Washington. That they had their visas, and they might be on the right side of the Atlantic at last, but that everything of value—the silver from Otto’s Viennese grandmother, the emerald earrings from Reka’s great-aunt in Debrecen, the embroidered wall hangings she and Otto had bargained for in Istanbul when they’d fulfilled a much-scrimped-for dream of riding the Orient Express—was gone. Removed from the packed clothes and sundries, which had been carelessly stuffed back into the crates without even the smallest effort to make it look like everything hadn’t been rifled.

You got your passage and your papers , they’d been told—the one meeting Otto had managed to obtain with Senator Sutherland. Barely a junior senator then, a sharp Capitol Hill climber with his eye on the main chance. Be grateful, hey?

That was the day her Otto had started to look old.