Love and Treasure (24 page)

How Amitai envied the moral certitude of those who had never had to confront the pain of ambiguity.

She continued, “He said he’d made so many mistakes in his life. That he hadn’t held on to the people he cared about, which was ridiculous. He and my grandmother were married for more than forty-six years. And while his relationship with my mom wasn’t the greatest, it wasn’t terrible. And I don’t know anybody who is as close to their grandfather as I was. I couldn’t figure out what he meant.”

“He was sick, Natalie,” Amitai said. “He was dying. He wasn’t making sense.”

“I don’t know. He seemed like himself. Weaker. But he was all there. And he knew exactly what he wanted me to do for him.”

“To return the necklace he stole.”

“Yes. I promised him I would, and it seemed to relieve his conscience, somehow. That day we watched a movie together, and I read to him a little bit from this book of Greek myths for children that he used to read
to me when I was a little girl. I made him some soup that he couldn’t eat, and then he went to sleep.” She paused then, as if remembering. “When I kissed him good night he called me Ilona.”

“Ilona?”

“Yes.”

“And who is Ilona?”

“The girlfriend. The one from Nagyvárad.”

“So perhaps he was not as all there as you thought?”

She shook her head. “Then he said I was his beautiful red-haired girl. He always loved my hair. My grandmother used to say he had a thing for redheads, that her hair was why he married her. She was a student in his Ancient Greek history class at Wellesley. He noticed her hair on the first day of class, and by the end of the semester they were engaged. I always figured that the scandal was why he left Wellesley for Columbia.”

“Very romantic.”

“I always thought so. She even converted for him. She was Irish. My mom didn’t have red hair, though. I guess it skipped a generation.”

Amitai wrapped one of her fiery tendrils around his finger. “It is very beautiful, your hair.”

“When I went in with his tea and toast the next morning, he was dead.”

“You found him?”

“Yes.”

“That must have been very hard.”

“You’d think so. But it wasn’t. He was gone. It wasn’t him anymore. Just his body. My dad flew up that afternoon, and we buried him the next morning, just the two of us and the undertaker. When my grandfather put up my grandmother’s headstone, he’d put up one for himself right next to it. Hers had her name, Florence Wiseman, and the dates of her birth and death, 1930 to 1997. His said
JACK WISEMAN
1922—and then just empty space. It was like that for sixteen years, waiting for him.”

“Your mother? Is she buried in the same place?”

“No. She wanted to be cremated. Which drove my grandfather crazy. He was the least religious man in the world, but he kept telling her when she was dying that Jews shouldn’t be burned up in ovens. I guess because of his experiences during the war.”

“Was he at the camps?”

“He would never talk about the war, so I don’t know what he did. I don’t even know if he was in battle. I tend to doubt it. He spoke a lot of languages, so he probably was just a translator before they assigned him
to guard the Gold Train.” She gazed at the scars on Amitai’s shoulder. “You know,” she said. “He had scars on his shoulder. One on the front and one on the back. He said it was a training accident. But I wonder …”

“You wonder what?”

“Nothing.”

She was quiet for a moment, and Amitai said gently, “Your grandfather? He died only a couple of weeks ago?”

“What day is today?”

“Tuesday.”

“Fifteen days. We were lucky it’s been such a warm winter in Maine. Usually in that part of the country you have to wait until the spring thaw to bury people.”

“Your grandfather died fifteen days ago, and right away you boarded a plane to Budapest?”

“First we had the shivah.”

“I think you are an impulsive person.”

“So they tell me. Though I prefer to think of it as ‘spontaneous.’ Anyway, I had to come. I promised my grandfather. And I’m glad to do it. My grandfather knew me better than anyone. He knew that this kind of project was sort of made for me.”

“Why?”

“I’ve always been interested in the Holocaust. Ever since I was a kid in Hebrew school, and they showed us those movies. You know the ones the Nazis made to document what they were doing? I remember one photograph, I must have been about eleven or twelve when I saw it for the first time, sometime before my bat mitzvah. It was of a man who had crawled under the wall of a barracks or a fence, something like that. He died before he could get all the way through, and the photograph is just of his face and of his hand by his cheek. Do you know it?”

“If I’ve seen it, I don’t remember.”

“I used to be obsessed with that photograph. Wondering why he didn’t make it, how close he got to getting away. I read so many books when I was a kid, young-adult novels about the Holocaust. And then eventually I read
Night
and Primo Levi’s memoirs. All that stuff. In college I majored in Holocaust studies.”

Every once in a while, Amitai’s work put him in contact with a certain type of Holocaust-obsessed American Jew, the kind who spent holidays touring the camps of Poland and Germany, and Sundays watching all nine and a half hours of
Shoah
for the thirteenth time. Ironically, given
the way Amitai earned his living, he himself felt detached from the history of the Holocaust. As a Jew of Syrian descent, his connection to the decimation of the Jews of Europe was not personal. During World War II, the Free French in Syria and Lebanon had defeated the Vichy forces and their Nazi allies. While the Jews of Europe were being murdered, Amitai’s parents were playing soccer with Muslim playmates, eating chicken with apricots, miniature meat pies, and date cookies prepared by their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, praying in synagogues dating back, some said, to the fifth century, and in all ways living the lives their ancestors in Aleppo had lived since the time of the Romans, all but untroubled by the war.

But it was not merely the divide between the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi that led to Amitai’s detachment. Though the Israeli origin story was inextricable from the Holocaust, it was also in aggressive opposition to it. The surviving remnant of European Jewry was not rescued, they were “raised up” from the abyss, led to the summit by a different kind of Jew, the indomitable and pugnacious Israeli. Inherent in this lesson, necessary to it, was an unacknowledged but nonetheless palpable contempt for those who died without fighting, who trudged meekly to the ovens. The German Jewish founders of the kibbutz on which Amitai was born had abandoned the comforts of their bourgeois German homes for the pestilent swamps and unforgiving deserts of Palestine before Hitler had fully seized power. They considered themselves pioneers, not survivors. The few elderly kibbutzniks with numbers on their arms spoke little about their experiences, except on Holocaust Remembrance Day when they came to the children’s classrooms to recite the lesson of “Never Again.”

Natalie said, “My ex-husband? All four of his grandparents were Holocaust survivors. His mother’s parents got out of Germany in time, but his paternal grandparents were both from Poland and ended up at Auschwitz. Daniel’s father was born in a DP camp.”

“Ah.”

“Ah, what?”

“You have always been fascinated with the Holocaust, and you married a child of survivors.”

“A grandchild of survivors. But yes. I get your point. But I didn’t marry Daniel because he was the grandchild of survivors.”

Who knows why we marry whom we marry, Amitai thought. He had ended up with Jessica because he had been eager for a home, a community, after leaving the kibbutz and Israel. The American branch of his
family welcomed him warmly, but they had strict rules about whom he was permitted to marry. In 1935, the leading Syrian rabbis of New York issued a document known as the Edict, proclaiming that no member of their community was permitted, on pain of excommunication, to marry a non-Jew, even one who had undergone an Orthodox conversion. Every successive generation of Brooklyn-based Syrian Jews vowed never to accept a convert or a child born of a convert into their midst and to expel any child, no matter how beloved, who married such a person. Amitai’s immediate family, the Shashos of Kibbutz Hakotzer, were Israeli, and thus not technically governed by the Edict, but once Amitai moved to New York, Jacob Shasho, the family patriarch, informed him that as he was now a Syrian Jew of the New World, he was subject to its rules. Had Amitai wanted to marry an outsider, the Edict would have required evidence of genealogical purity going back at least three generations. The rules were so restrictive that they had their intended result: by far the easiest path for a Syrian Jew was to marry a person from the same community. And so Amitai had married Jessica, whose family was from Aleppo, like his. After their divorce, his uncle Jacob made it clear that Amitai was permitted to look no further than their own community for a replacement. Amitai had so far refused the attentions of no fewer than three of his ex-wife’s first cousins. He had no grounds to criticize another person’s idiotic reasons for having married the wrong person.

He said, “Did you ever meet your ex-husband’s grandparents?”

“Just his Polish grandmother. But we were close.” Natalie paused, as if to consider her words. “I mean, I was as close to her as she would let me be. She wasn’t an easy woman to be close to. Daniel couldn’t stand her, not that he ever really tried. He used to say she grossed him out.” She shook her head. “He was such a shit. She couldn’t bear loud noises, especially when she was sleeping, and she used to have these wax earplugs that she’d leave all around her room. I mean, I admit they were disgusting, little pink balls with greenish earwax stuck to them. But Daniel never bothered for a minute to consider why she needed them. Why she couldn’t stand noise. He didn’t make the slightest effort.”

“And you did?”

Natalie shrugged. “She spoke English, but by the time I met her, she had kind of regressed to speaking Yiddish. I studied Yiddish in college, so I was able to communicate with her in the language she was most comfortable with. She’d tell me stories about her family. I tried to ask her about the camps, but she wouldn’t talk about the war at all.”

“Okay, so Natalie. Tell me. What if you cannot do what your grandfather asked. What if you can’t find the heirs to the locket? What will you do if you fail?”

She pleated the sheet between her fingers. “I don’t know. But I have to at least try. And anyway, how hard can it be? We’re looking for a suffragette dwarf.”

“The painting is of a woman of normal size. So I think it is not the dwarf we are looking for, but her friend.”

“The dwarf will lead us to the other woman. And suffragette dwarfs don’t just disappear off the face of the earth.”

Surely, he thought, someone who had majored in “Holocaust studies” understood that in Hungary, in the first half of the twentieth century, all sorts of people disappeared off the face of the earth, even suffragette dwarfs and their bosom friends.

•
18
•

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING
, Amitai descended through the opulent decay of the Gellért’s lobby to its basement. After navigating a venerable and intricate bureaucracy—securing an admissions ticket, a towel ticket, a ticket for a massage, this key available from that clerk, that key from this clerk—he was eventually permitted to execute a shallow dive into the most beautiful swimming pool he had ever had the privilege of enjoying. For a few moments, he kicked lazily, gazing up at the glass vault of the ceiling, then settled down to business with a strong and serviceable freestyle. He had large hands that plowed deep furrows in the thermal-heated water. His kick was smooth and had a lot of muscle behind it. But the wound in his shoulder, though healed twenty years ago, gave his left arm stroke a hitch as it came up out of the water. The wound in his leg, where bits of shrapnel still lurked and made periodic, painful journeys to the surface, caused his right leg to be slightly weaker than the left. Yet even without lane markers, he kept to a straight line, and when he reached the wall his flip turns were crisp and wakeless.

Compensating for his injuries enough to swim true and turn cleanly required intense concentration, and at the end of his sixty laps Amitai was shaking with exhaustion and had not thought of Natalie, of the balsam smell of her hair, the salt taste of her tongue, for a full forty minutes. Happily spent, he returned to the men’s section of the baths, settled himself in a corner of the vast soaking tub, and draped a damp cloth over his eyes. He was close to drifting off when he was awakened by a great splashing and loud voices complaining in Hebrew about the heat of the water. He pulled the towel down farther over his face in a vain effort to avoid the fate that he knew awaited him. The cloth slid down his forehead and tumbled free. He reached to catch it, but it was too late; across the soaking pool, one of the ultrasensitive Sabra detectors his countrymen all carried around in their heads began urgently to klaxon. He closed his eyes, as if with an infantile hope that, if he did so, Dror Tamid might disappear.

“Shasho? Amitai Shasho?”

Amitai opened his eyes.

“Hello, Doctor,” he said.

“Please!” Tamid said. “Dror!”

“Hello, Dror.”

It was not much of a coincidence that he and Dror Tamid would bump into each other in one of the former capitals of European Jewry, considering that they were both in the business of exploiting the region’s history. Dr. Tamid was not, like Amitai, a dealer in lost and stolen art but a historian of the Holocaust, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, who periodically led tours on behalf of Yad Vashem. When Amitai had first begun dealing in Holocaust art and had felt the need to educate himself, he had taken one of Dr. Tamid’s tours, imagining that it might prove to be a more entertaining alternative than embarking on a course of dense, relentless reading. After the second day in Auschwitz, which had followed a whirlwind visit to Treblinka, to the Nazi processing center in Lublin, and to the Majdanek death camp, Amitai, under the influence of too much vodka and the ghosts of too many dead Jews, had found himself unable to refrain from posing a question to their tour leader, the eminent Dr. Tamid. What, he asked, was the point of elevating the history of Jewish calamity to such fetishistic heights? Wasn’t it a kind of idolatry?