Not Me (13 page)

But even before Deir Yassin, Kastel had been abandoned by the Arabs, and the Jews took it back without firing a shot. None of it made any sense.

Thus, too, with the road to Jerusalem. It was open for a week or so, and then it was cut off again. The Arabs revenged Deir Yassin by massacring seventy-seven doctors and nurses on their way to the Hadassah Hospital. Battles flared up, died down. Towns were taken, lost.

The important centers of Haifa, Safed, Tiberias, and Jaffa were also either abandoned by the Arabs or overrun by the Jews, and they became Jewish cities.

Many people on both sides were killed. But Heshel Rosenheim survived.

He knew it really wasn’t over with Levin. He knew Levin was one of those people who never let anything go. He was the kind of person who mulled things around endlessly, thought everything through and through, examined the issues from every possible angle, and always came out with the same answer: he was right in the first place. That way he might never feel one iota of guilt.

But had not Rosenheim so often done the same thing himself? Had he forgotten so completely that he was born not Heshel Rosenheim but Heinrich Mueller? Had the statistics he kept so assiduously not, in fact, pertained to people? People scurrying about in rags, covered in filth, clinging to their dinner bowls, limping through their miserable existences in ill-fitting shoes that turned their feet into pulp? Had not other numbers simply disappeared into the ovens by stepping to the right instead of the left, or the left instead of the right
—
and had he not recorded them as well? Had he not pawned a gold fountain pen, a diamond ring, a leather jacket, purloined, he thought, from the Reich, but in fact stolen from some fellow whose name had once been painted on a shop window, some woman who once drank tea from china cups, some young man who once thought he would become a chemist or a music teacher or even a doctor of philosophy? Had he not allowed the whole of that well of despair to grow invisible, numerical, abstractive, mathematical? Where in that sum was his guilt?

Yes, Levin would be back. And Rosenheim would have to deal with him. But in the meantime he was caught up in the war.

On May 14, at nine-thirty in the morning, the last of the Etzion Block of kibbutzim fell to the Arabs. The Jews who surrendered were massacred on the spot. On the same day, May 14, the British ended their mandate of Palestine, and all but a few of their troops were evacuated. In the U.N., three resolutions to make Jerusalem, with its Jewish majority, an international city were rejected by the Arab nations, who demanded all of Palestine be Arab.

At five o’clock that evening, in the main hall of the Tel Aviv Museum, David Ben-Gurion declared the birth of the state.

No one in Heshel Rosenheim’s platoon who had gathered round the radio had any idea what the state would be named. Zion? Judaea? Herzliya? But when Ben-Gurion uttered the words
State of Israel,
it was as if he had given a name to each man and woman’s own secret yearning, and a kind of electrical charge ran through them. They held hands. Breathlessly, they listened to the Declaration of Independence.

They listened as Ben-Gurion recalled the ancient ties to the land where their spiritual and political identity was forged, giving birth to all their cultural and religious values, to the Bible itself, and how though exiled, in each generation for two thousand years, the people kept faith with the land, striving to return, and how they did return, reviving the Hebrew language, building their towns and villages, making, in his words, the desert bloom. They listened as he recounted the promises of the nations to help them establish a homeland, and the catastrophe of the Holocaust which only proved how desperately such a homeland was needed, a land open to every Jew, allowing each to live in dignity and freedom, finally becoming masters of their own fate. They listened, and their hearts filled with hope as he declared a nation grounded upon justice and equality for all, regardless of race, religion, gender, safeguarding all the holy places, Muslim, Christian and Jewish alike, living as brothers with their Arab neighbors, and when he pleaded with these neighbors to live with them in peace, to join with them in building a new way of life, the Jewish soldiers shook their heads. They knew it was not to be.

Then, as they heard the crowd in the Museum Hall go wild, the platoon cheered too. They hugged one another and tears streamed from their faces.

Heshel Rosenheim sat in the corner watching them. In some strange way, he realized, he was responsible for all of this
—
for the darkness and now for the light
—
that he, and all the Germans, were tied so closely to this people and its fate, that they had always somehow been kin. He did not feel good about this. He felt deeply ashamed.

“Rosenheim!” someone called out. “Come over!”

He smiled wanly and stayed put.

“I was just thinking,” he said, stroking the barrel of his Sten gun, “tomorrow the Arabs will attack.”

“True, Hesheleh,” another replied, “but now at least they know we are real men.”

I had come back to the hospital in the morning, and was sitting in the lounge waiting for them to finish sponging him off. He was already out of the ICU and very quickly recovering, almost, the nurse said, as if he hadn’t had a stroke at all. I found my way to the little glassed-in waiting room at the end of the hall. They had comfortable chairs there, a table with some magazines on it, a television set tuned to the Cartoon Network. Across from me a small family sat quietly with blank faces. They had cried themselves out, and talked themselves out too, I guessed, because they looked like the kind of family that never shuts up. There was a youngish woman among them, slender, long fingernails, probably the daughter. Her hair was disheveled, and she had no makeup on, but her jeans were skin tight and her midriff was exposed. I wanted to be aroused. I should have been aroused. But I wasn’t. In a minute I’d have to go back in and see my father, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I knew now he was going to die,
Lamed-Vovnik
or not—perhaps not today, not right now—but soon. I was running out of time.

The young woman suddenly lay her head in her mother’s lap, just like a child would, even though she must have been around twenty. Her mother was not someone I’d like to lay my head upon—she was wearing a Disney World T-shirt and pink pants. She was grossly overweight. She wore running shoes. But there it was—all in that simple gesture: the mother stroked her daughter’s ratty hair, and they both closed their eyes as if communing with some deep, spiritual source. They were a family.

I opened a magazine and tried to read about how to manage your portfolio, which was something else I did not have.

“Mikey.”

He was sitting up in bed, smiling.

“How you feeling, Dad?” I asked.

“Funny,” he said, “I thought I saw Israel here. Crazy. Like a ton of bricks—that’s how. It’s all these goddamned tubes. I’ve even got a goddamned tube up my whatsacallit. Can’t wait for them to take that one out. That’s going to be fun.”

His words were slurred, but I could understand him well enough to squirm at the thought of having a catheter removed. My squirming seemed to make him feel better.

“I’m fine,” he said, but softly.

“You had a stroke.”

“So they tell me.”

“They don’t think it’s too severe. With a little rehabilitation you’ll be good as new.”

For the moment we had run out of things to say, so I sat down on the little plastic chair and looked around. It was a double room, but the curtain was drawn between him and whoever was next to him. From the other side I could hear someone moaning softly but continuously, the volume rising and falling on the tide of each failing breath. I also noticed there were flowers in my father’s room. I, of course, hadn’t sent any flowers.

I drew my chair closer to his bed.

“I was thinking about things last night,” I said rather casually, “about you and Mom and us kids and being Jewish and everything.”

“We tried,” he said.

“I know. But it’s weird, isn’t it, how you and Mom were so involved with Israel, but I just didn’t know anything about it?”

“Of course you do.”

“Like how it became a state. I don’t know that.”

“What are you talking about? We always go to Israel Independence Day, don’t we? You have all those little flags, remember?”

“Not really,” I said.

“You don’t remember singing
Hatikva
?”

“I think I knew two things. I knew ‘they made the desert bloom’ and if you swim in the Dead Sea you float like a cork.”

“We should have made you go with us. You didn’t want to. Next time.”

“No, I did want to go. You never took me.”

“We never took you?”

“It was like you didn’t want me to see something.”

“What wouldn’t I want you to see?”

I didn’t answer him. Instead I said, “Frankly I think the Palestinians should have a state. I think what Israel is doing is awful.”

“History is not so simple,” he said.

I looked at him.

“But what do I know? I never studied it. I run a business. I make a living.”

I report this conversation as if we were strolling in the park, but actually it came out in driblets and sudden spurts as he struggled to make himself understood, rested frequently, took little sips of Gatorade through a plastic straw, and drifted away and then back to me on the shifting sands of his dementia.

After one of these breaks, when I saw he was ready again, I scooted my chair even closer. “How come you never told me much about Grandpa and Grandma?” I asked.

“What are you talking about? We go there all the time.”

“No, no. Grandpa and Grandma Rosenheim. Your parents.”

“We can’t go to them, Mikey. They’re dead. So we go to Bubbie and Zayde.” He was referring, of course, to my maternal grandparents, who had lived in Newark and had been dead for many, many years now.

“Did they die in the Holocaust?” I asked.

“What are you talking about? We just had Pesach there!”

“Your parents, the Rosenheims.”

“Why are you suddenly asking me this? Who remembers?”

“You don’t forget if your parents died in the Holocaust.”

“I don’t talk about it.”

“But I need to talk about it.”

“Why all the sudden? You never wanted to talk about it before.”

“No,
you
never wanted to talk about it.”

“I don’t know how they died,” he said finally.

“Then how do you know they died?”

“They’re not here, are they? They died. Why go into it?”

“In the concentration camp?”

He nodded, but without conviction, I thought.

“Which one?”

He looked at me impatiently. “Auschwitz, I think.”

“Not Majdanek?”

“Where did you even hear of Majdanek? No one ever remembers Majdanek. They say Treblinka. They say Auschwitz. Buchanwald. Who ever brings up Majdanek? Only you.”

“It existed, didn’t it?”

“Yes, of course it exists. They all exist. I can give you a list of every one of them if you want. You want? Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Flossenbürg, Neuengamme, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Stutthof, Nordhausen, Natzweiler—did I forget something? Birkenau, that is part of Auschwitz. And your Majdanek. And you think that’s all? Did I say Bergen-Belsen? Did I mention Theresienstadt? Do you think that’s all? That’s all they know about. But there are more. They come and they go in a night. On the banks of some river, in some ravine, in the woods behind the town. They come with their trucks and their guns, and with buckets of lye. And of course,” he added with, I thought, special bitterness, “their account books, their ledgers. No deed goes unrecorded. But then they erase it. They burn it down. Bury it. Everywhere you look—yesterday, they were there. Believe me, there is not an inch of ground not stained with Jewish blood.”

He was shaking with rage. Outside, a small cloud passed over the sun, darkening the room. I felt my throat tighten like a clamp.

“You were in Auschwitz, right?”

“I am not in Auschwitz!” he cried.

“Not now, Dad. I mean before.” I grabbed his emaciated arm and held it up. “You have the tattoo. They only did that at Auschwitz, isn’t that right? So you must have been in Auschwitz. Or did you get it somewhere else? Tell me, did you get it somewhere else?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. I might have.”

“Dad!” Now I pushed his arm right in front of his face. The faded blue-black numbers seemed to loom ever larger on his sad, shriveled flesh. “Where did you get it?”

He eyes widened as if he had never seen it before, and he started weeping.