The Seventh Gate Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Search for Sana

  Guardian of the Dawn

  Hunting Midnight

  The Angelic Darkness

  The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

  Unholy Ghosts

  The Warsaw Anagrams

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2012 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Constable & Robinson, Ltd.

  Copyright © Richard Zimler, 2007

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-0322-3

  Contents

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Preface

  The First Gate

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  The Second Gate

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  The Third Gate

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  The Fourth Gate

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Fifth Gate

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Sixth Gate

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Seventh Gate

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  For my mother, Ruth G. Zimler, and our many relatives who perished in the death camps. Also, for my in-laws, Lucie Tiedtke (a Berliner!) and Aurelio Quintanilha, who had the good sense to get out of Berlin before it was too late.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am extremely grateful to Alexandre Quintanilha and Jupp Korsten for reading the manuscript of this book and giving me their invaluable comments. Thanks, too, to Jacob Staub for his help with Hebrew and Aramaic, and an especially big hug for Jupp for his quick—and ever-cheerful—replies to all my questions about German. I’m also thankful to have had the encouragement of several German friends, especially Martina Hildebrandt, Wilhelm Schlenker, and Caroline Benzel.

  I am greatly indebted to my editor, Becky Hardie, for her insightful comments and suggestions. Also thanks to Nick Robinson, Michael Rakusin, and all the good people at Constable & Robinson and Migdal Press.

  In recent years, many excellent books have come out about the Nazi war on disabled people. I am particularly indebted to Henry Friedlander’s The Origins of the Nazi Genocide. Inge Deutschkron’s memoir, Outcast, was also of enormous help to me, and I thank her for it. As always, Gershom Scholem served as a guide—and an inspiration—for much that I’ve written here about kabbalah.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The narrator of the preface to The Seventh Gate is based on a reader who was kind enough to speak to me at great length about the destiny of a German branch of the Zarco family, whom I first wrote about in The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon.

  Preface

  Aunt Sophie is the hollow-cheeked stick figure in the stained hospital gown staring at me from her cot—pink eyes squinting—as if I’m a hallucination. A scarlet woolen scarf is coiled around her neck, and her tiny right hand has vanished inside a gigantic black glove that is cupped on her lap, the leather palm facing up, like a grafted gorilla hand.

  Though Sophie will hunt through her sheets and pillows for the missing left glove over the next week, and though she will insist on my demanding its return from every nurse on the floor, it will remain forever lost in the undergrowth of University Hospital.

  It’s a Friday morning in mid-December in Mineola, New York, eighteen miles due east of Manhattan. Sophie had a heart attack four days ago. Her husband Ben—my mother’s older brother—is long dead, and they never had children. Sophie’s closest blood relative, a nephew named Hans, lives in Berlin, but I’ve had no luck reaching him or his wife. So it’s pretty much up to me to help out, especially since my mother is in her eighties and no longer driving. I’ve just flown in from my home in Boston without telling my aunt I was coming. I own a garden center in Lowell and business is slow in the winter; I can stay through Christmas if need be.

  “Is that really you?” she asks with disbelief when I reach her doorway.

  I rush to her with the urgency of a boy who learned—while sitting in her lap—that rose blossoms could be picked from behind my ear. Every childhood needs a magician, and Sophie was mine.

  She doesn’t open her arms. Not even a smile. I press my lips to her cool forehead. In the past, even trembling with a fever, she would have held me tight.

  “Ich bin …” She speaks German.

  “English,” I tell her.

  “Help me drink some orange juice. I’m dying of thirst.” She points to the white Styrofoam cup on her tray. Her skin is as pleated as crepe paper. She’s down to ninety-six pounds, the head nurse told me on the phone. Apparently, she’d stopped eating a week before her heart attack, her appetite taken away by one of her depressions. “Not an ounce of fat on her,” the nurse had added, as if she were describing the extra-lean turkey on a deli menu. “If she doesn’t eat more …”

  What will I do without her? I began thinking then, and I’m still thinking it now.

  I hand Sophie the cup. She rocks back and forth to try to sit upright, but she hasn’t enough force in her coat-hanger arms to make it. I wedge myself behind her, propping her up. She slurps through the straw. Her back presses into my chest, and it’s a relief to have her weight—the history of a woman who has lived through so much—against me. It’s like carrying a world. I want to say something heroic that is the measure of my love—I will hold you up as long as you need me … Instead, I comb my hands through her frazzled hair, which looks as if the ambulance medics set it on fire.

  “You need a shampoo,” I tell her.

  “I need a lot of things,” she replies, in that oy vey tone of hers.

  I squeeze her bony shoulders and laugh; we’ve agreed many times before that a sense of humor in the hospital is essential. But amusement is not a rabbit she can pull from her hat right now. She makes a clucking noise and leans against me—my helpless eighty-nine-year-old child. In a minute, she is asleep and snoring, but with her hazel eyes wide open.

  I wriggle gently out from behind her, but she sits up with a start and says harshly, “Why didn’t you meet me?”

  I ease her head and shoulders back to her pillow. The sun, freed from the low-hanging winter clouds, chooses the gray tile floor, the metal frame of her cot, her feet … “M
eet you where?” I ask.

  “I waited all morning at Karls Keller. You were supposed to be there.”

  Karl’s Cellar? Her eyes are moist in a strange, unseeing way as if filled with viscous glue. She’s obviously deep inside her childhood in Berlin.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. I know by now—her fourth visit to the hospital in nine months—that her delusions are the result of what the physicians call hospital psychosis. My own theory is that her mind has retreated from a situation she finds unbearable. My best strategy is simply to find a place for myself inside her mad scenarios—to join Alice across the looking glass. But this Alice turns out to be more of a Red Queen.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself!” she snaps. “When you didn’t come, Isaac left.”

  “Who’s Isaac?”

  “He lives there.” She points a jutting finger toward the window and the brick building across the parking lot.

  “Where’s he gone?”

  She gives me a puzzled look. “I don’t know.”

  “He’ll probably be back in a little while,” I say cheerfully.

  “Don’t bet on it,” she retorts in a menacing tone. Then she talks German again.

  In June, when Sophie had gastrointestinal bleeding caused by her blood thinner, she informed me she was staying in the White House. The only hitch was that Hillary Clinton had given her a maid’s room. Did Sophie add that indignity so she could complain about the uncomfortable bed and bland food? Perhaps our deepest emotional needs are the bricks and mortar of our delusions.

  * * *

  Mom and I visit Sophie the next day. While I’m holding open the hospital door, the harsh fluorescent lighting and the odor of disinfectant tempt us to race back to the car. We promise ourselves a nice lunch if we can stay with Sophie for two hours. The briberies of love.

  “Be prepared for cuckoo land again,” I tell my mother as we’re in the elevator riding up to the Coronary Care Unit.

  “Good for Sophie!” she replies, hunting in her bag for her lip balm. Mom’s lips get chapped when she’s upset. “Who’d want to know they were staying in this dump!”

  “It’s a nice place,” I reply.

  “If you want to meet the Angel of Death over a bowl of cottage cheese.”

  Lack of sleep makes my aunt’s psychosis worse over the next few days. She twists and turns on the cot as if she’s on a bed of rocks. She claims she never falls asleep at night.

  “Not efen a vink,” she informs my mother in a distraught voice.

  Sophie and Mom commiserate with flapping hands. My mother is wearing her fuchsia beret and black cardigan. Everybody’s cold but me. She takes a blue enamel butterfly from her bag and pins it on Sophie’s gown.

  “Doesn’t your aunt look cute?” I lower my magazine. The two of them are staring at me expectantly.

  “Absolutely.”

  Satisfied, Mom sits down again and moves on to George W. Bush. I love my mother for her unflagging energy in the face of all obstacles.

  “I can’t understand how even an idiot could vote for that ignoramus!” she tells Sophie.

  “Americans are as asleep as Germans when it comes to politics,” my aunt replies.

  “They’re stupid bulvans!” meaning peasants, my mother bellows.

  “So vat trouble is our Texan Führer making now?”

  Mom laughs. Sophie doesn’t. Later that afternoon, she gives up on English. I decipher what I can and guess the rest. Mom sometimes translates. She assures me that Sophie’s Berliner German and her Yiddish are practically the same language, but I have my doubts.

  My aunt never closes her eyelids in our presence. She swivels her head around and surveys the world with those gooey eyes like a refugee from a Beckett play.

  Two days later, while I’m squatting next to her, untangling her catheter from around her leg, hoping I won’t accidentally pull it out—as I had the moist misfortune of doing the day before—she whispers in my ear. “I tried to kill him.”

  Sophie says that in German, of course, but does me the favor of repeating it in English when I tell her I don’t know what she’s talking about.

  “Who’d you try to kill?” I ask, not taking her seriously.

  “Papa.”

  She nods and holds her finger to her lips like a little girl. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  I want to say, An Allied bomb dropped on your father, but I keep my mouth shut and get back to the catheter because bringing up anything to do with the real Führer may only make her retreat further.

  “Enough of that,” I say, “it’s time to take a nap.”

  I lift her foot, swollen twice its normal size with the fluids that her heart isn’t strong enough to pump around her body, and pass it gently through the plastic lasso. Success.

  “What are you doing?” she demands.

  “Testing your reflexes,” I lie as I stand up; informing her she’d been tangled would only start her criticizing the nurses for not paying enough attention to her.

  “Will you stay with me if I nap?” she asks.

  “Of course.”

  She looks around as if searching for something she’s lost. She holds up her gorilla-grafted hand.

  “Have you seen the left glove?” she asks.

  “Not that again, please!”

  She manages to sit up after several tries, then slides her leg over the side of the bed.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “I’m going to my bedroom to look for my glove,” she replies.

  The security belt tied around her waist keeps her from getting to her feet. Stymied, she sits with her shoulders hunched, staring at the white ribbon as if it’s from another dimension.

  “Take this goddamn belt off of me!” she snarls.

  I can feel my frustration as an ever-tightening knot in my chest. By now, it’s as big as a billiard ball—the sinister-looking black one.

  “I’m not allowed,” I reply.

  She glares at me. “You’re a bastard!”

  I’m obviously now part of the plot to keep her here against her will. “Why don’t you close your eyes and get some sleep,” I tell her.

  “Can you … can you take me upstairs?” She tugs on her earlobe. It’s her gesture of terror; I’ve known it for years.

  “There’s only more hospital wards upstairs,” I say gently.

  She gazes down, forlorn. I go to the window. All the oak tree branches are bare and brittle-looking. New York turns into such a frigid wasteland in December. Maybe it’s the similarity to Berlin’s climate that takes Sophie’s thoughts back to her childhood. When I turn around, she throws down her arms, livid with anger. “Vye von’t you let me go up to my room?”

  “You’ll be fine here.”

  “But I’m not here!” she says despairingly. She scowls at me as if I don’t understand her deepest needs and never will.

  “If you’re not here, then where are you?” I ask.

  Stumped, she replies, “I don’t know, but I’m not here.”

  This is the Zen-like declaration I will repeat to a dozen friends over the next few weeks. Now, it takes me a few seconds to think of a reply.

  “Well, wherever you are,” I emphasize, “you need to sleep, so close your eyes and nap.”

  She starts to speak, then looks at me as if she’s forgotten her lines.

  “Trust me,” I tell her. “I’ll keep a watch out for you. They won’t get you.”

  There’s no need to say who they are; there’s only ever been one they in my conversations with Sophie about life in Germany in the 1930s.

  Four days later, I drive Aunt Sophie to her house in my rental car. She lives in Roslyn, just a few miles from my mom. I’ve already moved one of the guest beds into the dining room, along with her night table, since she won’t be able to navigate the stairs for a while. There’s no bathroom on the ground floor, so I’ve also bought a commode. A twenty-nine-year-old Filipino nurse named Maria will spend the first two weeks with my aunt. Then we’ll see ho
w much home care she needs.

  Maria and my mother help Sophie get from the driveway to the front door. She teeters behind her walker, her stiff, nervous arms holding the metal rim too far from her body to have much balance. Maria is gripping the belt loop of her pants in case she starts to tumble.

  “Step up!” my mother keeps prodding, patting the empty fabric where Sophie’s rear end used to be.

  “I’m stepping, I’m stepping …”

  Sophie’s mind returns that afternoon. I know that for sure when she tosses her gorilla glove into the garbage.

  “Two points!” I cheer.

  I’m in the dining room eating strawberry ice cream out of the container. High-fat foods help keep me from getting depressed.

  When she looks at me the glue is gone from her eyes. “Sit,” she says, pounding the bed beside her. As I sink into the mattress, she kisses my cheek and gives me the big hug I’ve been needing. “You feel good,” she says.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” I tell her.

  “Thank you for coming.” She kisses me again. “And for moving a bed downstairs.”

  “You’re welcome. Where’d you get that glove anyway?”

  “It was Ben’s.”

  I give her a spoon of ice cream. She feigns a swoon like a silent-movie actress. “Delicious,” she says.

  She looks around at her makeshift bedroom: the wooden cabinet where she keeps her china; the dark stain in the ceiling made by the water that leaked last summer from her thirty-year-old, gasping-for-breath air conditioner; a bilingual edition of Rilke’s poetry that I’ve put on her night table; the Otto Dix drawing of a gentlemanly poet with spidery hands on the wall behind her. She ends up focusing on the small mountain of unopened letters on the dining table, probably thinking, The same pile that would be there if I were dead …

  She refuses another spoonful of ice cream and leans against me. Making it back across the looking glass only to be exiled from your own bedroom and find two dozen unpaid bills isn’t easy, and I hold her while she cries.