Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (14 page)

Tattooed.
Her mind drifts to
the forearm of her grandfather Istvan, a series of numbers, an inscription as
cold to the touch, she imagines, as Ben’s strand is hot. The last time she saw
her mother’s father was in a decrepit nursing home in Queens with the grimly
ironic name of Hopeview Manor. Among the half-alive hulks in wheelchairs he had
been bright and alive with his flashes of humor and bitterness, the crumpled
suit he carefully dressed himself in each morning, and the liver cancer he saw
as a black joke (I was never a drinker, darling, that’s the shame of it. I
should have drunk! I should have drunk a martini every day with the life I
had). She had been able to extract a scant minimum of stories from him, halting
and halted narratives of that life-in-death, the fragment of history his body
was: the extra food he obtained from a Polish guard in exchange for the string
of pearls that had belonged to his wife, her grandmother, and which he’d
concealed somehow and given away one by one, just often enough to maintain
strength, cunning, life; how he’d gotten a job in the camp barbershop—he’d been
a trained hairdresser in Budapest as well as, she’d gathered from other
sources, a gambler and rakehell, perhaps even a thief or fence—and the single
indelible image he’d painted for her of him standing erect behind a barber’s
chair with the commandant seated in it, stropping his straight razor to
administer the cleanest possible shave. How did you do that?
she
asked him. How did you not cut him, kill him, draw your razor across his
jugular,
take
your revenge? And the answer, simple and
true and unsatisfying: I wanted to live. And he did live, had lived, had
survived the camp and survived the death march from Poland to Germany and
survived the chaos of the war’s end and made his way back to the city where his
daughter, her mother, was waiting for him, along with his own parents, who’d
escaped deportation thanks to false papers and a neighbor who’d acted from a
mixture of benevolence and greed, a mixture she’s all too familiar with from
the hours and days she’d spent reading the grim unilluminating details of
testimony that had been at the crux of her thesis, her exploration of the role
of women in the Warsaw Ghetto. But the Budapest Ghetto, which had no similar
history of resistance, and she’d had no call to interview her grandfather for
her work, and as for her grandmother she’d died long ago—“She died before she
died” had been M’s enigmatic phrase. How Ruth wished she could talk to her, ask
her questions, hear her story—her grandfather had never wanted to talk about
it, had shrugged her most persistent inquiries away—”It was luck, pure and
simple,” he’d said, referring only to the fact that her grandmother had
happened to get into a cab driven by one of Istvan’s cousins, who’d gotten him
similar work upon his arrival in the previous year—she couldn’t have guessed
that he’d changed his name to Freeman from Freitag, the name her mother had
reclaimed for herself and for her daughter, who’d kept it into her marriage.
Luck, pure and simple—but that only explained (it explained nothing) Istvan’s
New York reunion with his wife, it said nothing about her own wildly improbable
survival, given what everyone always said about her frailty and nervous
disposition.
Klara, that
had been her given name:
Grandmother Klara to distinguish her from Grandmother Marta, her grandfather’s
second wife, whom he’d married just eight months after Klara’s death from a
perforated ulcer in 1967, less a woman in Ruth’s memory than a red wig, an
accent, and a cloud of cigarette smoke. She’d divorced Istvan when he was in
his seventies and moved to Florida, and he’d stayed on in the basement
apartment of the building on Kissena Boulevard in Flushing where for twenty
years he’d kept watch over a tetchy boiler and carried older tenants’ groceries
for them, until finally he got too sick to stay and wound up in the Hopeview,
sharing a room with an elderly black diabetic double amputee (the legs) named
Raymond who watched soaps all day and never said a word, a room with a view of
the Unisphere over which jets thundered at all hours of the day and night.

The first and only
time she had visited him there he showed her the room with a sweep of his arm,
then, grinning faintly, opened the blinds so she could see the big dumb steel
softball coruscating in the afternoon sunshine. It was hot and the ancient air
conditioner under the window labored to cool the sticky air with its tang of
rot. She sat on the bed, he sat in the oversized chair, holding the one cigar
per day he permitted himself to carry but not to light, at least not until
after he’d taken his dinner in the dreary basement cafeteria with the bare
fluorescents and stained acoustic tiles that crouched claustrophobically over
the diners’ nigh-moribund heads. This in spite of the rasp in his voice, in
spite of the portable oxygen tank perched next his chair, a clear tube running
up to meet the piece on his nose, where it blended weirdly with the white hairs
of his walrus mustache. The awfulness of the place had stunned her into silence
and banalities for the first hour of her visit, as he showed her what little
there was to see, a tour of green hallways and gray carpets, human hulks
slumped in chairs with wheels and without, the upsetting and unforgettable
vision of a sunken-chested gray-faced man slouching slowly through the hall in
a hospital gown, his full colostomy bag dangling from a hook on his walker,
gown parted to reveal the shagged slumping flesh of his buttocks. Now, in the
room, the small talk about her studies had ground to a halt. He seemed to read
her mind.

It’s all about money,
darling, he said, with a kind of a K poking its head out of the G. This place
takes the Medicare, which is all I’ve got.

She couldn’t help
herself.
But Mom….

He waved the cigar
dismissively. Let her lead her life.

You haven’t told her?
She doesn’t know?

Of course she
knows. Darling, it’s not so bad. It’s not so far from the old place that I
can’t still see some friends. Your Uncle Jozsef has been taking me to breakfast
almost every Sunday: he comes in the car and takes me to the diner, and after
that we walk around the neighborhood a little bit and talk. Well, we used to
walk: now I mostly sit on the bench. And I say we talk but it’s me, you know
Jozsef, it’s like talking to a wall, like he never learned English and yet
forgot all his Hungarian too. Maybe I should try German on him, who knows.

Has she visited you
here? When he shrugged in reply, she flared: Then she doesn’t know what this
place is like!

I tell you darling,
it’s all right. Wait until you meet my girlfriend Charisse—a looker! And she
looks after me better than either of my wives ever did. No disrespect,
sweetheart, on your grandmother, but she was never the same you know.
After the war.

Ruth at that moment
felt sunk in guilt, knowing and wishing to say what
seemed
the obvious thing
: if Mom won’t rescue you than I will. But she was only
a student and had no money that wasn’t borrowed and spoken for. And she lived
in a small apartment in a cold upstate town that was all hills, miles from any
place that could provide proper care; she didn’t even have a car. She pushed
the guilt and excuses both out of the way with the help of the opening he
offered. Tell me about her.

Charisse?

No, Grandma.

What’s to tell? I
met her during a football match, on Margaret Island in Budapest. We were down
one goal to zero when I spotted her watching from the sidelines, a small simple
girl with a kerchief over her head looking
all the
world like a frummer except for the lipstick she was wearing. What a beautiful
face, I’ll never forget it. That’s when I knew we had to win the game and I had
to win it. The very next time the whistle blew I just went charging down the
field and sidestepped the guy with the ball, he was slow, and I got inside his
guard and then the ball and I were both moving down. I could have gone for it
but my pal Almos was open and I could somehow already tell, just from that
face, that she’d appreciate an assist from me more than me shooting it in. So I
passed it to Almos and we tied it up, and when we
came
running back to defend our own goal I could see she was watching me. It came
down to the last few minutes and everyone thought it would go into overtime,
but the evening was coming on and I was afraid she’d leave. So when the ball
went again to the same guy, who was not a small guy, by the way, I went after
him again, and this time when he saw me he just lowered his head and stepped
right, I stepped left, boom! Down I go with this shmuck on top of me, knocked
all my wind out and bruised my ribs, I can tell you. Well nobody calls a
foul—it’s a rough game, we’re all kids, even the umpire—and play resumes after
a minute and this time the situation’s reversed, it’s Almos who sends the ball
my way, and I can hardly run my ribs hurt so, but I run, and I do a header—this
is a long time before they were doing headers, let me tell you, I was ahead of
my time, heh, you like that? And the ball goes in and we win the game and I won
it. And afterwards I look and this girl is gone, but I hang around a while with
the chaps and then, this is right before curfew, I see her all alone by the
fence waiting. And I go up and I say my name is Istvan and she says my name is
Klara, bold as that lipstick. And that was it.

I remember that
story. I love that story. I wish I could have heard her tell it.

She would have told
you everything the same as I told you.
Because you can only
tell the truth one way.

But what she was
like, really? Bold you say?

Bold, yes, but
sneaky. I mean she always looked like a good girl—she
was
a good girl. But if she wanted something,
even something her parents or her friends told her she shouldn’t want, well,
that was it: she would go after it. She wanted to wear that lipstick even
though nice girls didn’t do that. And she wanted me, who knows why. So that was
it.

There was a
photograph Ruth saw only after her grandfather’s death, in the moldy album that
had been among his few effects, of himself and Klara on their wedding day. It
had been a simple civil wedding and he was wearing a striped suit and she wore
what looked like a gray dress and a cloche hat and held a small bouquet in
which daisies figured prominently. He seemed much sharper and nattier than she
did with his zoot suit and the mustache (thinner, trimmer, blacker) and the
gleam of pomade in his hair. Of course what drew the eye immediately, before
taking in the slyness of his smile or Klara’s curiously neutral expression,
were the Stars of David affixed to their clothes. It was 1943 when they got
married and they had less than a single year of together to look forward to before
their violent separation, unimaginable ordeals, and dramatic reunion in
America. Back in the Hopeview, voice straining from talking over the wheeze of
the air conditioner, she wants to ask an even more impossible question: What
was it like? What was it like to be singled out for a part of yourself that may
or may not have been important to you, to be prohibited from working or from
eating where you liked or from living anywhere but in a tiny island crammed to
bursting with others whose affinity with you was being imposed from outside, by
the state? And what was it like not to know, as she did: always she’d read the
endless hopeless stories of European Jews who’d refused to believe in what for
her coming after was the simple factual abyss of murder; who’d said fearfully
to one another as the latest outrage came down the pike, Well, let’s see,
things could be worse, and were probably still saying that to each other in the
cattle cars carrying them to their deaths. But the question goes unanswered,
and anyway her grandfather had moved on to more general conversation and the
question of dinner: of course she desperately wanted to do something for him
and dinner at least she can do, but he wouldn’t go anywhere but his usual
diner, a grimy coffee shop that’s kind of a long walk for a man with emphysema
but they did it, stopping frequently in a way that marked them as other even in
the churning oddball streets of Queens where a crowd of Puerto Rican men were
camped out listening to a boombox in front of a bodega, where they must dodge
two men carrying a very large sheet of glass down the sidewalk with no frame,
not even so much as a bit of cardboard to absorb impact; where a dark-skinned
woman in white moon boots and a flamboyant pink weave was stepping into the traffic
on 111th Street talking on a cell phone and looking neither to the right nor
left as cars screeched to a halt and drivers shouted curses at her. In all that
noise she still felt conspicuous, a girl in a gray felted dress and glasses
shuffling alongside an old man with tubes in his nose, pulling a green oxygen
tank behind him with difficulty but refusing absolutely all offers of help. It
was even worse in the diner, a place the color of a cracked saucer, with
cigarette burns in the Formica tabletop and a sullen bottom-heavy waitress with
no name badge who resisted all of her grandfather’s charming if automatic
efforts at flirtation. She felt sad for him, but he didn’t seem to notice, even
when the woman forgot or deliberately omitted the ice cream he’d asked for on
the gelid slice of apple pie he had for dessert. She pushed some food around
and drank awful coffee and tried to fix him in her mind. How handsome he still
was, in spite of the thin greasy grayness of his skin that showed too much of
the skull: he still had a full head of white wavy hair but this had the effect
of making his actual head seem smaller, bobbing atop what had never been a big
body but was now assuredly a wasted one, with his Adam’s apple bobbing up and
down behind his tie like an elevator without a building. He was winded from the
walk so there wasn’t much conversation until the food was all gone and he was
staring down into his own coffee cup, into which he’d poured what seemed like
six tablespoons worth of sugar and no cream or milk.