Not Me (12 page)

I’ve heard it said that in families there is no such thing as a secret. Which meant I must have known all along. Did I?

Was that why I used to lie in bed at night and wonder if my father was a secret agent for the CIA? It was a logical deduction. He was the only father out there protesting the Vietnam War. All the other fathers were
for
the war. The other fathers voted for Nixon. Mine voted for McGovern. Yet he was always going on about the plight of the Soviet Jews, so he couldn’t have been a real leftist. Thus he had to be a CIA agent. QED. I found it kind of thrilling, in a twisted way. Plus it solved my problem: it was unseemly to hate him for being antiwar, even though really I did. I was only twelve when he started protesting—it was 1970 or so—and I remember thinking,
Shave your beard! Cut your hair!
But if he was actually a CIA provocateur (though I could hardly have known that word at the time)—then, no problemo—I could hate him guilt-free.

But you always know, don’t you? The secret in my house was the entire life of the house. Everything tiptoed around it, every evening of TV, every family supper, every bedtime. It didn’t just come up once in a while, on the birthdays that were somehow sad, on the New Year’s Eves, the Hanukkahs, the Rosh Hashanahs that left you feeling empty. It was every time you opened your mouth to say something and wondered if you should say it. It was every time they said something, and you wondered what else they weren’t saying.

That’s the Holocaust for you! At the time, I thought it was his suffering in the camps. I thought it was all the people he’d lost. I thought it was the horror of what was done to him that left him as a kind of sole survivor—for that’s what they all were, each in his or her own way—sole survivors. Each one the only witness.

But the question was, did I know that the secret I thought was the secret wasn’t the secret at all?

I had awoken sometime in the late morning with the sound of Josh still in my ears, and the fresh scent of soap whirling through my brain. I must have been dreaming about him. Perhaps it was the vision of him as a baby or a toddler, because he always smelled of soap then—or whatever that baby smell is, I don’t know—but it made me want to take a bath instead of a shower, something I never do, or at least not alone. I sank into the warm water and rested my head against a rolled-up washcloth, as I’d seen Ella do so many times. I tried to allow myself to relax. Maybe I touched myself a tiny bit, but not really. It was just a passing thought. Instead I sat there and waited for the bath to happen, for the toxins to leach from my body, for the feeling of cleanliness to come over me, for the bubbles to caress me. I remembered bathing Josh when he was a little boy. I realized I missed him more than I suspected.

I tried to think back, to catch a glimpse of how I must have felt as a child of his age. I must have known. Karen must have known. And now, Josh must know. People think children are chatterboxes. But actually children never tell.

I slipped under the water, as if to wash away these thoughts. But secrets never, ever disappear, even after they are revealed. And that’s the real secret right there. The empty space that never gets filled. The entropy of falsehood. The real secret is the secret itself.

I realized I never actually thought my father was in the CIA. That was really more my sister. She was younger; she had a bigger imagination. She also frequently suggested that my mother was once on stage, and that my father met her in a vaudeville theater. Mother was the most beautiful girl in the chorus line. She could have been a star, only she married and had kids.

“I don’t think they still had vaudeville when they got together,” I explained to her. “And Mom’s a nurse. They met when he went in for a checkup.”

“Then a nightclub,” she said. She had recently seen the show
Cabaret.
She knew all the songs. Mommy was just like Sally Bowles. “She wore green nail polish and sang in her underwear.” Then Karen giggled and sang “Money, Money” in a thick German accent. We were good at German accents.

As for me, I had also gone to
Cabaret
and was deeply impressed. I’d never seen Nazi uniforms in color before. There was something terribly attractive about those sharp brown shirts and colorful armbands, and the spectacular red banners that hung everywhere—with the white circles and jet-black swastikas. It was unsettling, confusing. Those boys singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” It sounded okay to me. There was such a disconnect between what they appeared to be and what I knew was coming. I wanted to talk to my father about it, but didn’t dare. And anyway, he hadn’t seen
Cabaret
. “Too trivial,” he said.

But Karen had other fantasies as well. Aside from the run-of-the-mill lost-princess-adopted-by-caretakers scenario (brought on by the film
Anastasia
), she once decided that my parents were actually aliens from another planet. This was not a joke with her. She went on about it for months, maybe years. She was always looking for evidence, and often found it. If I was recalling this correctly, it all began with a dream she had, in which she went to lie down between Mom and Dad, and Mom’s fingernails began to grow into talons and her skin turned green and pimply and her face looked more like a bird than a person. When she looked over at Dad for protection, the same thing had happened to him. He was a creature from outer space. She woke up screaming. We were still sharing a room then, that’s why I knew about it, and when she told me the dream, it was so vivid it even scared me. Only she couldn’t let it go. For her it wasn’t a dream, it was a sign. That’s when the evidence started turning up. An odd-looking glass bead she found in an ashtray became a device for interplanetary communications. Notes scribbled on bits of paper became cryptic messages about imminent invasion. Perhaps they weren’t really speaking Yiddish to each other. Maybe it was Martian.

Eventually, of course, it was just a game. But underneath it, did she know that my father wasn’t who he said he was? And my mother—what about her? Was she in on the secret, too? Is that why I played along? Is that why the two of us, one summer evening, plotted star maps to their home planet?

I made little eddies in the water with my washcloth, little vortexes twisting down into the murky bath. And then—oh my God!—it came back to me. She once said to me: “What if Daddy wasn’t in the concentration camps at all? What if he was a Nazi instead? What if he was Dr. Mengele?”

Why was I thinking so much about Karen? I never thought about Karen. But there was something in her method that was a message to me. The collection of evidence. Clues. They were everywhere, I knew. In the drawers, under the beds, in the photo albums, stuck in hat boxes. I only had to have the courage to look for them.

I once went mushrooming with a friend of Ella’s. He was French. “You can walk along for miles and see nothing, but once you see one, all of the sudden, there they are!” he told me. And it was true. I was standing beneath a live oak out at Lake Lagunitas and he said, “Look at your foot.” And there it was: a chanterelle, as big as my fist. I had almost stepped on it. I stood frozen and silent, barely breathing, as if it were a forest creature that might startle and bolt, and then, slowly turning my head, looking right and then left and then round behind me, I saw them: little dots—or smiles, really—of gold and bronze, peeping from beneath the dark, sticky loam and shiny wet leaves, like newly formed stars, winking at me—for they’d been playing hide-and-seek, surrounding me as if I were
it
in a game of blindman’s bluff. I laughed out loud, I was so dazzled and amazed.

Karen was telling me I needed to go mushrooming now. I needed to look at the ground in front of my feet, and I needed to be quiet and still, and search behind and to the right and to the left of where I was. Open your eyes! she seemed to be commanding me. Look!

The thought so nonplussed me I jumped from the tub. The water cascaded onto the floor in a wild torrent and left a mess I’d have to mop up.

The phone must have rung while the water was running in the bathtub, because when I got out, there was a message from Kaufman, the Holocaust man. Forget him! I said. And anyway, I was suddenly incredibly hungry.

So I went out to The Charm and had pastrami and corned beef on rye, Russian dressing, slaw, no mustard. Then I took myself over to Starbucks for coffee, but she wasn’t there.

When I got home the phone was ringing. I knew it was Kaufman, and I didn’t want to pick up. But when the voice came over the message machine, it was the nursing home. They told me to come quickly. My father was having a stroke. He was already on his way to the hospital.

About twenty minutes later I arrived at John F. Kennedy and was directed to the ICU. In a little while a young doctor came out to tell me Dad was stabilized. He’d only suffered a minor stroke. For a while he probably wouldn’t be able to talk, but it seems he wasn’t paralyzed. There could, however, be more dementia. He suggested his heart was weak, too. He asked me if my father had signed a living will. I thanked the doctor and went into my father’s room. He looked shrunken, and with all the tubes and pipes attached to him, he might have been the space alien my sister dreamt about. There was a terrible smell, and the sound of the heart monitor beeping, which every so often spit out a ticker tape of vital statistics. His breathing was labored; his eyes were shut.

“Can he hear me?” I asked the nurse.

She said yes. Unless he was sleeping. But he is aware, she told me.

I sat there with him for a while. I spoke gently to him, nothing of any importance, just repeating my name, telling him I was there. But it was hard for me. And I found that I could not touch him. I should have been holding his hand, I supposed, but I couldn’t. I made believe that I was there to comfort him—but really I was just observing him like you would some strange new species of insect—something large and repulsive, but impossible to turn away from—at least until you’ve had your fill.

At some point the young doctor came back in.

“He’s such a good man,” he said to me.

“You know him?”

“Not personally. But of course I’ve heard about him.” He nodded as if I should understand this. Consolingly, he patted me on the back and proffered a supportive, courageous smile. Then he left.

I sat there watching the liquids go in and out of my father’s body in tubes. The tubes were attached to needles stuck in his arms, and other wires were connected to electrodes on his chest and head, and there was some gadget on his finger with a wire protruding from it, and machines on the other side of these lines were plugged into the wall, and these signals were then sent to other machines, which, as far as I knew, were connected in turn to some central brain that monitored and maintained all the comings and goings into and out of his body, sustained the rhythm of his heart and the air in his lungs and the blood in his brain.

Dark thoughts passed through me, like bolts of lightning, sudden, and then gone.

“Who are you?” I said to him. “Who are you?”

I could see with my own eyes that all the universe was focused on keeping him alive, and always had been. It was as if he were one of those thirty-six “Just Men” legend tells us keep the world intact, without whom so much evil would arise that mankind would destroy itself in the blink of an eye. The righteous
Lamed-Vov,
they call them, the
Thirty-six.
Unknown even to themselves, their task is to reveal the hidden and redeem the world. It is said one of them might even be the Messiah. My father himself told me these stories. I had always thought they were stupid.

When I went home that evening I dragged the Cheez Whiz box back out into the middle of the Florida room, and opened the next of his journals.

The weeks passed. The undeclared war continued. People were dying in large numbers. The Arabs attacked Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem but were driven away. A huge bomb exploded on Ben-Yehuda Street, killing fifty Jews. A car bomb blew up in the Jewish Agency building. The worst thing, though, was that the Haganah had to abandon the coastal road south of Tel Aviv. The Negev was now isolated completely, and along with it, Naor. Then even worse news followed. The road to Jerusalem was cut off. The city was under siege and constant bombardment.

And then came the month of April.

Heshel Rosenheim was attached to the Southern Command, but had removed to Tel Aviv. Then one day most of his unit
—
and he with it
—
was merged into the force being assembled to open the Jerusalem road, and was thrown into the fighting immediately. After two or three days of it, Heshel found himself oddly elated and exhausted, and settled down to sleep with a bunch of other tired, bloodied men. At about six in the morning, after having had only a few hours’ rest, he was awakened by an officer and told he was needed to reinforce a critical hill above the Jerusalem road. It was called Kastel. The Jews had finally captured it, but were now under attack by thousands of Arabs. They were almost out of ammunition and food. The site had to be held at all costs. Wearily, he picked up his gear and joined his unit.

One thing went wrong, and then another and another. These Jews were unused to large-scale warfare. They were disorganized, badly equipped. The armored car kept breaking down, and they could not progress without it. They did not arrive at the base of the hill till almost two o’clock in the afternoon, and by then the shooting was so severe it was almost impossible to reach the village. Some of the men made it up the hill. Heshel was not among them. He was pinned down in a little escarpment. Next to him were three dead soldiers. As soon as he lifted his head, he was shot at, so he lay there waiting, listening to the strange symphony of explosions, gunfire, screams of agony, and cheers of victory.

As he crouched there next to the bodies, he was struck by how different they appeared than the bodies of Jews he had seen in such abundance in his former life. These beside him were beautiful even in death
—
their muscular arms flexed, their still faces yet aglow with passion, their features not even particularly Semitic, with their tanned skin and their eyes, though frozen, blue as the sea. Already he could smell the urine on one of them who had failed to empty his bladder before the attack, but it was not unpleasant. He looked around for a way down the hill and to safety.

It did not take long before he heard the trampling of many feet coming over the hillside, and he braced for death. No, not yet, not like this, he cried to himself, cowering.

But they were calling in Hebrew
—Let’s go, let’s go! Move! Move!

Some fell, but others were making it. It was enough of a chance. He took off, rolling more than running, down the rocky face.

When he was at the bottom and safe, he surveyed the men. There were no officers among them. Of the officers that had gone up, only he returned.

It was because of Shimon Alfasi, they told him. And they repeated his orders.
All privates will retreat. All commanders will cover their withdrawal.

They looked at Heshel Rosenheim. At that moment he was their commander.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he told them.

But the words of Alfasi electrified the country. It became the new battle cry. Officers would always be first under fire, and last to retreat. And that, Heshel knew, included him.

It was the next day that he ran into Levin.

“Rosenheim, right?” he called out in Yiddish.

Levin was not in uniform. Heshel’s prediction had come true. Levin had found his way to the Irgun, or perhaps worse.

“Yes, I’m Rosenheim.”

“Have you thought perhaps where we’ve met?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t remember you. I don’t think we ever met.”

“But we did, we did. Not at Auschwitz. Were you elsewhere? I myself was at three camps. I was also at Majdanek. Were you at Majdanek, Rosenheim?”

Rosenheim looked at him.

“You’re one of those who don’t talk about it,” Levin said. “I’m one of those who can’t stop talking about it.”

“I see you are not in uniform.”

“No,” said Levin.

“But you are with a unit.”

“Yes,” said Levin.

“Good luck to you, then.” Rosenheim moved away.

“We are all after the same thing,” Levin called after him. “Wait!” He ran up to Rosenheim and grasped him by the arms. “It was Majdanek, wasn’t it? Yes, I’m sure. What block were you in? What work did you do?”

Rosenheim wrestled free. “Leave me alone!” he cried.

He moved off quickly, trying to appear annoyed rather than afraid, but burned in his mind was the suspicion shooting from Levin’s eyes like twin swords. He tried to calm himself, but all he could do was wonder how long it would take Levin to put two and two together.

If I see him again, he thought, I’ll kill him.

And he did see him again, a few days later.

He was once more separated from his unit, and attached to a platoon commanded by Yeshurun Schiff. They drove into the village of Deir Yassin on the morning of the eleventh, but the village had disappeared. What was left was smoldering under dark, billowing smoke. Bodies were piled up in a nearby quarry, many of them burned and charred. There were Jewish fighters among them, but far more Arabs, including women and children. There were more than a hundred dead, he reckoned, and they were beginning to stink.

Schiff screamed at the Irgunist commander. He called him a murderer. They went on this way for a while, arguing back and forth.

In the meantime, he spotted Levin. He was sitting alone, smoking a cigarette. He wore a bloodied head band, where obviously he had sustained some sort of wound. This time it was Heshel Rosenheim who walked up to him.

“I have seen this before,” he said to Levin.

“Not the same,” Levin replied. “We lost almost half our men.”

Rosenheim stared at the man. “I do know you,” he said. “I know exactly who you are.”

“See, see?” Levin said triumphantly.

“You are the
Kapo
in the
Sondercommando,
the one they all feared, the one as cruel to his own as if he were himself SS, the one who traded in flesh. You never withheld the lash. You withheld the rations. You betrayed the women who bore children. You threw your brothers into the fire. I do know you. I do remember you. Never, ever,” he said, “seek me out again, or I shall expose you to your patriotic Stern Gang brothers, and see what they do to you.”

“What?” Levin said.

He had been speaking in Hebrew, and the man could not understand him
—
though of course he understood
Kapo,
and
Sondercommando—
and Rosenheim knew that that was enough.

But he repeated in Yiddish, “Never speak to me again, or I will tell your story and that will be the end of that.”

And then he turned and walked back to his platoon. The men wanted to get out of that place as fast as they could.