City of God (25 page)

But then someone directly at my back, a girl who had wept and wept the first day so that my shirt was wet by her tears, but had since then only whimpered in a high pitch almost like a cat, and, among the shifting stiffened bodies, had come to hold her arms around my waist, with her cheek pressed between my shoulder blades—this girl, with no warning sound, died, and, the train rocketing around a curve, her legs sank under her, and her arms slid over my hips and down around my knees so that I was pulled by her weight down a few inches to where I found myself looking through the slot through which I had breathed the air outside.

A blur, brush, a woods so close to the railroad embankment that leaves slapped against the siding, a dense woods so thick as to create shadows dark as night. Then suddenly a broad sunlit vista of a green field with a house and barn in the distance. “A farm!” I called. “Now a road. A horse and wagon.” And so I broadcast the news of the world to those who would listen. Birch trees. A brook. Women, children culling potatoes. A river. A stationmaster lighting his pipe.

Among the people in my car whom I had seen climbing into it before me were some I knew. When I sensed from the smell of soot and the appearance of a track yard that the journey was coming to its end, it seemed to me important to recall who they were: Mr. and Mrs.
Liebner and their son, Joseph, who had been a year ahead of me in school, the twin old-maid sisters Chana and Deborah Diamond, the baker Mr. Licht, a Dr. Hornfeld, recently arrived, who had gone to work with Dr. Koenig in the little hospital, my friend Nicoli who shared with me his German-language cowboy novels, and the blond girl Sarah Levin with her pretty mother, Miriam, the music teacher, who had told my mother that Sarah had an eye for me. I could not see them now. They might have been there with me, but they were of the past. Even had I been able to turn and look behind me, what of them would I have recognized at this time of their degradation, when like myself they had been sundered from their names, when their beings were undone, when whatever they had been was in process of industrial transfiguration, when all together we were no more than a suspension of disjunctive torments of the living dying and stiffened dead of that boxcar?

—We arranged to meet for lunch at the Luxembourg, on West Seventieth Street. Fortunately it was not crowded this particular afternoon—it tends to be noisy with its art deco banquettes, mirrored and tiled walls—but the usual attractive clientele were there, on the youngish side, but commanding attention as people whom you might not know but who nevertheless looked familiar, as if you ought to have known who they were. The point is, she fit right in, she was wearing a smart gray suit, a black blouse, her neck was unadorned, her smartly cut hair was combed back to show her ears, which are quite small, and she was vibrant and alive to the place, leaning forward for our exchanges, holding her knife and fork above her plate as she spoke, and the chardonnay having brought a flush to her cheeks.

“You don't know what a luxury this is, lunch out.”

“Liberation.”

“Now that the boys are in school all day. But still, it's usually a sandwich at my desk, or a working lunch with papers all over the place.”

She has a melodic alto voice, a lovely laugh. This was really the first time I'd seen her without Pem. I had given her the ghetto material to read and she was to tell me what she thought. There's a softness about
her not quite up to aerobic fashion, but it's very attractive, it's her, Sarah, unapologetically, a suggestion of fullness under the chin, thin line or two around the neck, maternal bosom. And when her face was in repose or she became thoughtful, it was, God help me, sexy as hell. This had to be part of Pem's feeling for her, that she is a woman unmoved by the profane but urgently available in a holy union. Certainly there is no diffidence about her. She is direct, forthright, though oddly her small gold-rimmed eyeglasses make her seem even more youthful than she is—I would say she is nearing forty—and perhaps overly solemnized by Pem's description of her grief, I am repeatedly startled by her charm and the astonishing blue of her eyes and the infectious smile that breaks out and, for an instant, ambiguously suggests itself as prelude to tears. I think now she is, after all, the Sarah Blumenthal of the Heist section.

I wanted to ask what a woman like her was doing in a place like the rabbinate.

“Yes?” She waited.

“Never mind,” I said.

“No, what were you going to say?”

“Stupid question.”

“Go ahead, Everett.” She smiled. “I'm asked it every day, usually by older men.”

“What,” I said, trying to recover, “if you like Frank Sinatra?”

Laughing. “Sinatra? Where did he come from? That wasn't—”

“Sure it was. And I know the answer. You listened to rock. Your generation tried to bury Sinatra.”

“No, he was okay, just sort of irrelevant.”

“Who'd you listen to?”

“The Dead. Creedence. Dylan, of course. But a few years ago Joshua brought home some of the early recordings with Tommy Dorsey, and I was ready to listen.. . . You know, I really don't mind answering your question.”

“It's sexist. On the other hand I didn't have a sense about Pem either, at first, that he was an ecclesiastic.”

“How would you characterize us as a class?”

“Well, as having a certain self-assurance, a knowledge mastered, a self-positioning for the life instruction of others. And often being hard to talk to naturally, as I seem to be able to talk with both of you.”

“Rabbis are not priests or ministers. We can run a service, bury the dead and, among the Orthodox, rule on law. But essentially a rabbi is only someone who's done the reading.”

“Which you have.”

“It never stops. . .”

“But you didn't grow up religious.”

“No, my family was nonobservant. I mean, maybe we would go to someone else's seder for Passover. That was about the most my father could tolerate. Every once in a while my mom grew wistful about it, but she knew better than to bring it up.”

“So what happened?”

Sarah cleared her throat. “Well, she died. My mother died. It was sudden. I was in high school at the time. We were living in Chicago—my father had gotten a job teaching Comp Lit at Northwestern—and in the months after her death, I went to an institute in the city that taught Yiddish language and literature. She's American-born, but when I was a little girl I heard her speak Yiddish with her mother.. . . I think that was the beginning, wanting to speak Yiddish as my mother did, wanting to speak words she spoke with her mother.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

She shook her head. “After I learned the language, I turned political and helped raise money to get Russian Jews out of the Soviet Union. Then as a junior at Harvard I changed my major to Judaic studies. Then the decision to go to Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. One thing led to another, it was incremental, unplanned. Only looking back can I see that all together it was inevitable. One continuous stubborn. . . assertion.”

“Directed even to your father.”

“Without question. But it was after I met Joshua and we began talking that I realized that ethnicity, incorporating the tradition in yourself, is not enough. That one can do the reading and. . . not even have begun.”

And then she was quiet, thoughtful, and so that I would not keep staring at her, I turned to the food on my plate. Only after the silence went on did it occur to me that she was composing herself to talk about my pages.

I said: “Did you—?”

“I did. I'm very impressed.”

“Really? I was so—”

“No, it's terribly moving. Of course,” she said, “anyone familiar with the literature will recognize that this is the Kovno ghetto you're talking about, from the Abraham Tory diary?”

“Yes, I relied heavily on it.”

“But the Kovno ghetto was larger than you represent.”

“Yes, I made it not much more than a village. But I wanted that geography. The bridge across to the city. The fort.”

“And my father was not from Kovno, of course. He was from a village closer to Poland. The Jewish resistance in Poland was more developed than in Lithuania. Those could be Polish Jews you're talking about, their attitude, that Benno and so on.”

“Yes.”

“And I have to say, you must be careful not to oversimplify the way things were. Certainly in the Kovno ghetto they had clandestine military training, for example. They were doing all sorts of rebellious things.”

“Yes,” I said, my heart beginning to sink.

“And there was a black market in vodka. The heavy drinkers among the Jews were a danger to the whole community. And you say nothing about soap. My father told me they obsessed on soap—they had none, they risked their lives to smuggle it in, it was as crucial as food.”

She saw my dismay. “But I was very moved,” she said. “It may be inaccurate, but it's quite true. I don't know how, but you caught my father's voice.” She laid her fork down, folded her hands, and stared at the tablecloth. “He was not appointed a runner, like your little Yehoshua. It was more happenstance than that, because even before he was orphaned, he made himself useful. He was a little fellow and he could dart about. And they came to depend on him. And then, when he was given his official runner's cap—that was toward the end. And it did save his life. In more ways than one.”

“How is he managing these days?”

“He's in a good, well-run home and they try to keep him occupied.”

“This is in Chicago?”

“Yes. He no longer speaks. Of course dementia is never pretty. But when I think of that prodigious intellect I grew up with. . . And he
saw it coming before anyone. He detected the signs in himself and resigned from the faculty.”

“I'm sorry.”

“No, listen, in one sense it's a blessing. It would have been too terrible for him to know of Joshua's death.” Her eyes lowered, she took a sip of wine. “He never asked Josh to do that, to go over there, to find the diary. But that wouldn't have made any difference. He could never go back himself, it was just something he could not bring himself to do. He loved my husband. And he was proud of us, our calling, as only a parent can be whose children subscribe to a belief. . . that in his view cannot be seriously held.”

“That's very Jewish.”

“Isn't it?” Her smile broke out.

“Pem was enormously fond of your husband. I can understand why they hit it off.”

“Yes.” She opened her shoulder bag on the banquette beside her and began to root about. “Entirely different personalities, but Pem doesn't fit the mold either—of his tradition, I mean. He somehow lets you know in everything he says that his expectations of the world, or of God, haven't been satisfied.”

She withdrew a letter. “At the same time, he seems to be appealing to some court or other not to pass sentence just yet.
Gottdrunkener mensch
is the phrase that comes to mind, how would you translate it?”

“God-bombed.”

“That'll do. He can be exhausting to be with, the father.”

“I'll say.”

We laughed at that. “In fact he has gone and done something entirely uncalled-for, if not presumptuous. But he's a dear, good friend,” she said, and unfolded Pem's letter and read it to me.

His search for the ghetto diary had taken him to Moscow.

—When St. Tim's was deconsecrated, Pem was left unassigned while the See wondered what to do with him. His first response was to assign himself to a hospice on Roosevelt Island, where he did a lot of the
dirty work for the indigent dying as a kind of self-imposed penance, though without entirely understanding what he should feel penitent about. Perhaps that he was not himself dying. Yet death there had a kind of normality to it, it was reliably routine, some patients were weeks away, some days, some just hours, and everything was processional in the manner of life's other marked events such as christenings or college graduations. He noticed of the regular nurses and nurses' aides that they came to work as cheerfully as anyone else, as if the ready availability of dying people for their ministrations were the evidence of a healthy economy.