The Things We Cherished (9 page)

Sol ducked farther below the row of men’s overcoats, watching the girl behind the counter pass a paper-wrapped package to a customer. As the salesclerk’s fingers grazed the elderly man’s hand, Sol was instantly filled with envy at the inadvertent touch. She smiled sweetly and said a few words to the customer before turning back to the cash register to finish recording the sale.

He had first seen the girl nearly a week earlier when he had come to the massive Kaufhaus des Westens to pick up some yarn for his mother. He’d balked at the errand—it was nearly four and even with the days lengthening there was not much time to get ready for the Sabbath and make his way to shul. But his mother had insisted—she and the maid were finishing up dinner preparations and without the yarn she would have no way to pass the long day tomorrow. He wanted to remind her that knitting on the Sabbath was an abomination or, from a less principled standpoint, ask why Jake could not go for her instead. But Jake was not yet home from work, Sol could tell from the quiet that still filled the house. Sol’s own job at the Gemeinde, checking copy for the obituaries and other non-news items to be printed in the Jewish newspaper, had ended at three that day. Having no excuse, he reluctantly set out
for the department store, handing a clerk in notions the fistful of marks necessary to buy anything at all these days, as well as the note from his mother specifying exactly what she wanted so he would not, God forbid, get the wrong shade of blue.

Then, as he carried the yarn toward the exit, he first glimpsed the girl at the counter by the front of the store. Initially he kept walking, his neck burning, feeling as though something was stuck in his throat. Then he stopped and turned back. She was Jewish, he was certain of that, though it was often harder to tell with the women now that most had gotten so liberal in how they dressed. This one was different, though, her sleeves a bit longer, blouse buttoned at the collar, with a modesty he found refreshing. Her skirt, he suspected, would be longer than was fashionable too, if he’d been able to see it. And it wasn’t just the tight curl of her raven black hair, which refused to be cowed into the low knot she’d attempted, which signaled her faith. Nor was it the arc of her nose, flanked by dark eyes set just a shade too close, reminding him of a wise owl. No, there was a fearful look, a slight hesitation as she hung back from the other clerks, that told him she was not one of them.

His mind raced as he boarded the streetcar for home and for days after he saw the girl’s face in his mind. “Do you need some more yarn?” he asked his mother the following Friday afternoon, hoping to come up with an excuse to return to the store.

Her brow furrowed with confusion as she patted the still-round skein beside her. “
Nein
, darling.” Then she smiled, accepting her son’s offer at face value for the goodwill it seemed to convey. “But perhaps some needles.” She reached for her bag, but when she turned back, marks in her outstretched hand, he was already gone.

Sol loitered now behind the coats, purchased needles in hand, watching as the salesgirl wrapped a parcel for her final customer of the evening. Inhaling the dusty smell of fresh wool, he tried to
come up with some excuse to inquire about the fine jewelry the girl sold. In earlier years, he might have turned his nose up at the idea of a shop girl, but he had little room for snobbery now that the family was not so well off. And it took experience and a certain poise to get a job at the city’s largest store, especially in such an upscale and centrally placed department.

Not that Sol had ever had the opportunity to consider women in the real sense of the word. Before the war, when he’d been scarcely more than a boy, they were like dangerous animals in the wild, strange creatures to be studied from a great distance. And afterward, well, he’d come back so broken … it was hard to imagine anyone wanting to share the life of a lone Orthodox clerk who lived at home and had nothing.

The girl was packing up her belongings, he could see, closing out her register for the night. He imagined the conversation that he would never have with her, cursing his own lack of nerve.

“Mein Herr,”
a voice said behind him as the girl started for the door. It was a salesclerk, nudging him to buy something or move on. Sol did not turn or respond, but started swiftly for the exit. Outside, he looked toward the bus stop at the corner, hoping the girl might be waiting there, but there was no sign of her.

Defeated, he turned away. He had lingered longer than anticipated and it was almost sundown, so he tucked the needles in his pocket to give to his mother later, then made his way absentmindedly toward shul.

Bypassing the streetcar stop, he navigated the busy thoroughfare and made his way across Wittenbergplatz, past the still fountain. The tinkle of piano music spilled forth from the open door of a
Kaffeehaus
. Sol turned to look through the window at the patrons enjoying their end-of-week gatherings, caught somewhere between envy and disdain. The revelry was unseemly, he thought, in a city
where so many people could barely find work, let alone socialize. And it felt forced somehow, like people were acting as they thought they should behave, mimicking what they had read in books or perhaps seen in a movie, if they had been fortunate enough to visit the
kino
, as Sol had managed twice over the years. In the warmer months, when the outdoor beer gardens drew even larger throngs, he avoided the square altogether.

The synagogue, set at the edge of the Jewish quarter, was a large, opulent structure with stained-glass windows and a gold dome on top. As Sol entered, the other men looked up and nodded vaguely in his direction before turning back to their conversations. They were middle class, mostly, or had been in better times, merchants and tradesmen hailing from the surrounding eastern districts of the city, their work clothes pressed a bit more carefully or perhaps covered with a suit coat for the Sabbath.

They thought him odd, he knew. A lone single man who came to shul every Friday night and Saturday was an anomaly among the younger Jews of their once-affluent section of Berlin. The Reform movement had caught on like wildfire, and most young people attended the more modern temple across town, if they went anywhere. Still others, like his brother Jake, went to the Jewish social club on Reisstrasse, where they did not worship at all, but instead had a meal and then debated politics over schnapps and cigarettes late into the night.

Sol pictured his twin brother’s face as he made his way down the aisle. Jake, who had shaved his beard to a tiny goatee and trim mustache, was too busy for shul. He traveled in a wide circle of friends, many of whom were non-Jews, and spent long hours at his job at the ministry. Of course, he never explained his lack of observance that way. The Sabbath, Jake said, had traditionally been home-based—it was only in diaspora that Jews had felt the need to
come together at the synagogue each week. It was infuriating the way he did that, tried to find nuggets from the Talmud to support his modern views, while ignoring wholesale so much of what the holy text required. But Jake had always done what he wanted, and so each Friday he joined their mother for the Sabbath dinner, making conversation with the handful of guests she assembled, before disappearing to the social club or for drinks with God knows who.

What, Sol wondered, fingering the edge of his tallis, would their father have thought of Jake’s lifestyle? But even if he was still alive, Sol likely would not have known. Max Rosenberg had seldom been home and, when he was, had kept his thoughts to himself. Born penniless in a shtetl in Bohemia, Max had spent every waking hour of his life working, building from a single tiny hardware store to a chain, third biggest in Berlin. He had gone to shul dutifully each week when he was in town, not out of a sense of religious obligation but in order to keep the goodwill and patronage of his Jewish customers. No, their father would not have approved of Sol’s own observant lifestyle, with its focus on books and study rather than earning money, any more than he would have agreed with Jake’s social high jinks.

As the rabbi began to chant, a faint scuffling noise came from the rear of the sanctuary. Sol’s eyes darted to the back of the room where a group of men, recent immigrants from the east, shuffled in, clad in work clothes that were crude and worn despite their best efforts to wash the factory dirt from their collars and cuffs. The newcomers had arrived in greater numbers and frequency in recent years, owing to the violence that had worsened under the earlier czarist regime, the harsh economic conditions exacerbated by the war and its aftermath. Their faces still bore the scars of what they had seen, the permanently fixed haggard expressions more telling
than anything they could say in their accented Yiddish. Sol doubted that their lives here, living in cramped apartments, often two families to a single room, and working long hours in the factories for little pay, could be any less harsh than in the Pale. But the workers accepted each word or gesture like food offered to a starving man. Berlin’s treatment of its Jews, in Sol’s estimation, was far from perfect, more of a shove than an embrace. But to the immigrants, the city was worlds away from the barbarism of the shtetls from which they hailed, a haven. Here in modern Berlin, they were safe.

An hour later when the prayers had ended, Sol stepped outside, lowering the brim of his hat and raising the collar of his overcoat against the now-frigid March air. He fought the urge for a cigarette, stopped in equal parts by his desire to avoid his mother’s scowl when she smelled the smoke on his breath and the fact that it was
Shabbes
. The streets were emptier now, and the few passersby moved swiftly, heads low to the wind. Sol paused at the corner to fish some coins from his pocket for the homeless man who sat against a building, a one-legged veteran he had seen there before. The man had to eat, after all, even on the Sabbath.

Walking, his thoughts returned to his father once more. Sol recalled Max as a shadowy figure from his childhood, coming home from work late at night, gone on mysterious travels for weeks at a time. Max worked feverishly, and after he died from an unnamed illness at the age of fifty-seven, Sol often wondered if all of the work had killed him. But the gamble paid off in the pecuniary sense of the word—by the time Max was found slumped over his desk, he was president of a prosperous business and had left his beloved Dora with the comfortable house on Rosenthaler Strasse and what he thought would be more than enough money to see her through her days. It would have been, too, had their mother, naive to begin
with and numb with grief, not fallen prey to an investment scam that left her not a year after he had died with a fraction of what he had put away.

Twenty minutes later, Sol entered the house. As he took off his boots in the entranceway, he winced at the sound of laughter that erupted from the dining room. Even as a child, he had felt like his mother’s dinner parties were an affront to the quiet dignity of the Sabbath.

“Sol?” his mother called, hearing the door. He cringed. Usually by the time he arrived home from shul, dessert had been served and the wine-tinged conversation was noisy enough that he could sneak up the back stairs unnoticed. Reluctantly, he walked into the dining room.

His brother was still there, he noted instantly. Sol was surprised. Jake should have been long gone to meet his friends by now. But today he lingered, leaning back, running his hand through hair uncovered by a yarmulke, showing no inclination toward leaving. Then, scanning the guests, he saw the reason Jake was still there: a dark-haired young woman, seated beside him, talking animatedly.

Then she turned toward Sol, and as he saw her face he froze. It was the salesgirl from the department store.

No, it wasn’t, he realized, taking a closer look, his heart still pounding. The resemblance was striking, though. She had the same dark eyes and curved nose, the same full lips and quick smile. But her hair was styled in a short, sleek bob, and there was something about her lipstick and rouge that Sol found garish, her sweater tight and immodest, a style that he knew his girl would never wear.

Still, Sol was intrigued. Jake had never brought a girl to dinner before. Who was she: a secretary from the ministry? But she looked nothing like the dour, frumpy women he’d seen leaving the
government building the one time he met Jake outside his office. Perhaps she worked at one of the brokerage houses for the bankers who came in every day from the elegant suburb of Grunewald by bus, the Roaring Moses it was called because of the large number of Jews who rode it. Or maybe she was an artist or performer or didn’t work at all. With Jake, it was hard to say; he traveled easily through myriad groups, slipping from one mantle to the next seemingly without effort. Even as he disdained his brother’s lifestyle, though, there was a part of Sol that secretly wished Jake might for once sweep him up and take him along on the magic carpet ride that was his social life.

“Sit down,” Sol’s mother urged. He peered longingly down the table, wishing that he could squeeze past the others and find a seat down by Jake and the girl, but the guests were packed elbow to elbow and so he reluctantly pulled up the only available chair, a low-backed wooden one, and slid into the space his mother indicated beside her.

Sol studied the remnants of dinner that littered the table, crumbs scattered across the lace tablecloth and fine china. On the surface his mother’s weekly gatherings had not changed—there had been savory chicken with spaetzle, he could tell from the lingering aroma, delicious chocolate tortes for dessert. Only one who had been there years earlier before the war might notice that the cuts of meat were leaner, the wine not so expensive. The dishes, casseroles and stews, were designed to stretch the expensive ingredients, to hide amidst the gravy and starch the fact that there was less.

The guests themselves were changed too—in earlier years, none would have been caught wearing anything but the latest fashion. Now if he looked closely he could see a bit of hand darning at Frau Leifler’s collar, a scuff on the toe of Herr Mittel’s dress shoe where
the leather had worn thin. No one, it seemed, had been exempt from the economic hardship that followed the war.