At the Berlin art academy that afternoon students were painting quickly, taking advantage of the faint winter light that still lingered over their canvases. A model sat on a stool, her nipples dark and puckered against blue-white skin. Charlotte chewed the handle of her brush. She'd painted the model's arms thick as thighs. Her neighbor stood behind her and stared at her drawing. He made her nervous.
"Add some curve to the hips," he said, picking up a piece of charcoal and measuring the space between the crook of an arm and the waist. He rubbed out the original line and drew a new hip.
A stool leg squeaked. The model rose stiffly and wrapped herself in her robe.
"Maybe a bit of yellowish-green," he said, folding his arms and studying her canvas.
The instructor was in the front of the room, arranging bruised apples, brown bananas, and a wilted cabbage on the table. Charlotte didn't want to paint decaying food, and she needed to get away from this blue-eyed critic. Outside, scanning the dark, gritty street for her bus, she heard a voice in her ear. "Hardest thing is seeing the bones under the flesh." She turned to face her hawk-nosed classmate. He smiled and extended his arm. "Join me for a beer?"
When her bus arrived, she didn't get on. Her mother would be holding a bowl of steaming potatoes, waiting to discuss typing lessons. And she wouldn't be there.
"Max Bernstein," he said.
The name brought to mind elegantly dressed mannequins in the window of a luxurious department store. She'd stood under her mother's elbow, her nose on the cold windowpane, studying Bernstein's dolls, the finest in Berlin. Her mother's voice had sounded metallic.
Too expensive for us.
"Sophie Charlotte."
"Goddess of wisdom?" he asked.
"Wife of the elector in Brandenburg. My mother admired her."
She wouldn't tell him about her waitress job.
The pub was packed with men in blue overalls. Sitting on a rickety wooden chair, she watched the waitress drop two coasters on the table, mark them with a pencil she kept behind her ear, lower the tray, and place two sweating glasses of beer on the coasters. Charlotte couldn't have done that. She'd have sloshed the foam on the customer's shoulder. Feeling like a little girl in the front row at school, she watched Max take a small square book from his backpack and open it to the photos of Rembrandt.
"See the red on the tip of his nose? How the painter matched it with the red in his eyebrow?"
He was a real painter. Why was he spending time with her?
"Watch the light. Does it land on the model's elbow? Does it change the color of her skin? How many colors did Renoir use for each breast?"
He cupped an imaginary breast on his own chest, pointed to where the nipple would be.
"Pink, then yellow in beige, light green where the breast's connected to the body."
The door opened, and a cold gust blew across the room. A young man in a brown shirt and brown pants tucked into black leather boots entered. The metal in his heels clicked on the nails in the floorboards.
"Watch—no sense of humor," Max whispered.
The brownshirt approached the poster on the wall, an advertisement for a cabaret. A topless woman with spots of rouge in her white cheeks raised her leg. The brownshirt's hand shot out as if to punch the woman's breast.
"Juden Dreck," he said, tearing the poster from the wall.
The workmen at the next table froze. The brownshirt clicked his heels and walked out.
Max spoke out of the side of his mouth. "No sense of humor."
"Why Jewish dirt?" Charlotte asked.
"Whatever's wrong, it's the Jews' fault."
Her stomach clenched at a memory. She'd asked her father for coins to buy bread.
Go look in my briefcase.
She'd found a Nazi newspaper featuring a fat Jew sitting on a German bank, buttocks hanging like flaps over the eaves of the roof. A hooked nose the size of a squash dominated the face. She'd asked him about it.
Somebody gave it to me. One of those people who stand on the corner.
Max gestured toward the shreds of poster still tacked to the wall. The name of the cabaret, Schall und Rauch, 44 Unter den Linden, was legible at the bottom of the poster.
"Have you been there?" he asked.
Did walking past with her friend Lulu count? Two men in tuxedoes and a woman had been getting into a taxi. A rubber penis lolled from the woman's cleavage. A clown with black slitted eyes stood in the doorway, a thin line of smoke wafting from his mouth. He waved at the departing taxi. The woman waggled the penis at him.
"The cabaret mocks everyone—especially Jews," Max said.
She raised her glass, set it down again without drinking.
"You know Don Carlos?" he asked.
Attending Schiller's play—a class field trip—they'd giggled so hard when the wizened emperor approached his peachfresh young wife that the teacher had taken them back to school during the intermission.
Max dropped his voice.
"My uncle's cabaret made Don Carlos into a Hebrew, Markwitz, a big-nosed cartoon figure who talks Jewish, but wears a tiny imperial mustache and gets baptized every ten minutes."
He laughed, but Charlotte didn't think it was funny.
"My uncle hired a famous director, the one who matches the scenery to the actor's mood. Yellow and green forests if the actor's sick. Blue and purple sky if he's suicidal. He made Jews laugh their heads off at hook-nosed little men in bathrobes, bowing at the Wailing Wall."
She indicated the torn poster.
"And the Jewish Dirt man?"
"I was there the night Mr. Blackboots showed up at the cabaret. He and his friends roared at the Jewish jokes. Even the Jews hate the Jews, they probably said. When the Nazis published my uncle's jokes in their paper, he understood. After that, no more Jewish jokes."
By the time they left the pub, Charlotte's neck ached from bracing herself against Max's truth. Some things she'd rather not know. At the Friedrichstraße cigar shop, the poster gleamed in the street lamp—a woman with pouty lips, a monocle at her eye, held a midget to her bosom. He waved a white-gloved hand.
Max's breath warmed her ear.
"Cabaret?"
Excitement rose in her.
"We'll go as artists," he said quickly.
She saw the fun in his eyes and herself, a tiny figure, mirrored there.
You're an Artist.
At Aschinger's, Charlotte balanced a tray, struggling to keep the curry sausages from rolling off the plate and the beer from sloshing over the rim of the glass. Sometimes she had leftovers. Today it was a half-eaten sausage. When nobody was looking, she raised her tray and bit into the other end. She never went to class on an empty stomach.
Later she stood in the back chewing a leftover fricassée of chicken and sipping a Bock beer without touching her lips to the rim of the glass when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned to face the manager.
"I saw you," he said and pointed to the door. His other hand went to her waist, wiggled a finger under the waistband of her apron. He