Not Me (20 page)

The cows were becoming restless, full of milk. Heshel Rosenheim got up from his stool and walked over to the stalls. There were no milking machines on Naor, they milked by hand, and he thought he could do it as well as anyone. He grabbed a bucket and slid it under Rifka. There were only five cows, and their milk was mostly used by the kibbutz. They made kefir, curds, simple cheeses, butter. He grabbed a teat and started to squeeze. She jumped a little, but he got it under control, and soon was milking smoothly. He felt calm again, peaceful.

It is not that he had forgotten. One cannot forget such a thing. It is that he had never associated it in any way with himself. He had been an observer, that’s all. He had done the numbers. And, in fact, until tonight he had mostly remembered about the hours and hours of paperwork, if he thought about it at all. It was just one day in the life of those days. People were killed in the camps every single hour. The gallows were never empty. Every night the gas chambers were filled to overflowing. And there was never a single second that the crematoria ceased belching out their fetid plumes of human smoke. It was normal. It was nothing to worry your head about. Yet the three people shot by the side of the road at Yad Mordechai had made him see it differently. Terribly differently.

He recalled now a little detail. Those trenches had to be dug up a few days later. It was the stench. And for health reasons, of course. So they ordered the few Jews left to dig it all up and set fire to the bodies right there in the trenches, and when that was done (he knew this because he logged it in his books) the bones were crushed to powder, and the ash and the bones together were loaded into burlap sacks, and the sacks were put in the warehouses, and in the warehouses the sacks were stamped with the word
FERTILIZER
, and the fertilizer was put on trains, and the trains took it to farms in Germany and Poland, in France and Belgium, in Italy and Greece.

He remembered Moskovitz, back in the D.P. camp, picking up some dirt in her fingers and saying how the very earth was sullied
—
what did she say? contaminated? cursed?
—
he could not recall. But he thought, yes, it is true, there is not an inch of soil in all of Europe unsanctified by Jewish blood.

Rifka kicked a little. He had been squeezing too hard.

“Easy, girl,” he said.

Tears began to roll down his cheeks
—
at the thought of hurting her.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the cow, rubbing her haunches and making little cooing sounds in her ear. “Sorry girl, I’m sorry.”

I put down the journal and walked out onto the catwalk. The cars with their American flags and Mogen David bumper stickers were back in their assigned spaces. The first evening of Rosh Hashanah had come and gone. I wondered if it meant anything. I wondered if God’s book was really open, and if He was thinking about all these people who owned these cars, and if it really mattered to Him what they did or thought or said. I doubted it highly. The time of judgment was supposed to be upon us. I found myself laughing at this.

I would have liked to call the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Or Mr. Kaufman at the Holocaust Archives. I would have liked to set the wheels of supposed justice in motion. But what justice? God loved him.

They had slept through the crime of the century—both of them, God and my father. They had felt no pain. Why should either of them wake up now?

And, of course, in the world of Nazi criminals Heinrich Mueller was as insignificant as one of his beloved
Sachertorten.
Even if the Allies had captured him back in 1945, he probably wouldn’t have done any time. He was just a bookkeeper, they would have said. He was as nobody as anyone could ever be. A nothing. A zero. Not worth the time. And if, today, in some incomprehensible act of revenge, they did deport him, so what? He wouldn’t even know he’d left the country. He lived in the world of
Leberknoedel
and jam-filled cookies now, as if none of it had ever happened. It was too late for justice. Too late for anything.

I saw it all so clearly. He was a coward, that’s all. And stupid. If he’d just let himself get caught in the first place, he’d have had a normal life. If he had just been a little less clever, I might have been born in Hamburg or Bremen and not been raised on his manna of bitterness and guilt.

I wanted God to come down as a pillar of fire, reach out with His awesome hand in fury and vengeance and erase my father’s name from the annals of man. Like Amelek. Like Pharaoh. Like Haman.

It was a hot, sticky night. The breeze that tried to cool our little stretch of Florida had given up. Even the breeze knew it was hopeless. I could hear the alligators crying in the canals. Frogs were clinging to the walls of the building, and two palmetto bugs were casually making their way along the edge of the walkway like an elderly couple at the mall. They seemed to like each other. They made me think of my mother and father. My father. God had chosen him, that’s all there was to it—if there was a God, that is—chosen him to bear the guilt for all of them. For all of us. Perhaps he
was
the reason the world had been able to move on, to free itself from an endless cycle of retribution and bloodshed. Perhaps he was a Just Man.

I must be going nuts, I thought.

I looked at my watch. It was two in the morning. I was drunk with sleeplessness, that’s all.

But I was too restless. I got into the car again, and this time I drove to Lake Worth, crossed the causeway to the ocean, and parked near the beach. I climbed down onto the sand and took off my sneakers and socks, and, holding my shoes in my hand, I made my way out to the surf. The moon was full, the stars were out in full regalia, and I could see far along the beach a world of shadow and foam. The lights from the boardwalk spilled onto the sand here and there in garish swaths of sickish yellow and sallow green. The water splashed on my feet and tugged at my toes as it sucked its way back into the sea. As the surf retreated, it left behind rows of shells and bits of stone, which in daylight would be brightly colored and shiny. I had forgotten seashells. We didn’t have much of that back in San Francisco, where the ocean guarded its treasures more closely. I picked up a few, then threw them back, wondering about the creatures that once lived in them. Where did they go, once they gave up their little happy homes?

The ocean seemed to have no end, but I knew that somewhere out there was Cuba, I mean, if I turned my head to the right—but I was looking straight out into the darkness, and straight ahead, if I remembered my geography, was…was…I wanted to say Spain, but that wasn’t correct. It was Africa. Liberia. Senegal. The Ivory Coast. A place as distant and foreign as any place could be, and it was right in front of me, invisible only because my eyes couldn’t see that far, at least not in the dark.

All I could think of was sailing away toward that nightmare of foreignness, to a land where no one would know who I really was.

I turned to go back to the car. Walking along, I noticed a conch shell half buried in the sand. It was mostly broken, but I picked it up anyway. I didn’t know why. Probably because the exposed, pink insides reminded me of something. I sat for a few minutes in the car with the motor off, trying to repress the anxiety that was rising in me. Without thinking, I lifted the conch to my ear, and was surprised that, broken and partial as it was, I could still hear the echo of the ocean in which it had once lived. To me, that was beautiful. I sat there with the windows rolled up, listening to this little version of the ocean for a long time, while outside, the sea itself pounded against the shore in absolute silence.

I had already taken all the pictures down from the walls—the Chagall print of the old Jew wrapped in his black-striped tallis, the tapestry of Jerusalem as it might have appeared in the days of Solomon’s Temple, the little watercolors of Arab shepherds resting their flocks among the cedar trees. Now I moved the couch away, revealing the rest of the wall, which, hidden from the sun, was two shades darker than above. I stood back and admired the smooth, vaguely salmon-colored space (“White Rose,” Mother had called it), and thought of one of those war rooms in cop movies, where they tack the clues up on the wall. That was exactly what I had in mind. I opened a fresh roll of masking tape—the man at the store promised me it wouldn’t pull off the paint—and reached for my first piece of evidence.

It was a family photo, but whose family was not entirely clear. I believed it to be a photo of my grandparents. I had found it in a box of dozens of antique photographs of people in European dress, almost entirely from the turn of the century. In this particular photo, the resemblance of the sitters to my father—the sharp nose and long earlobes of the man in the picture, the soft, sleepy eyes of the woman—was uncanny. They might as well have jumped out of the picture and pinched me on the cheek, crying,
Bubele!
—
my dear little grandson!
Although they might also have said
“Liebchen!”
instead of
“Bubele!”
for the couple was rigorously nonsectarian. The woman sat rigidly on a divan, and the man stood beside her, one hand rakishly poised on his hip, the other protectively, or perhaps possessively, guarding the back of the sofa. The difference in their postures was remarkable. She was stiffly upright, head reared back like a horse on a short rein, shoulders erect, and though her legs were hidden under a long, flowing hem, her bosom was prominent enough to strain the lace of her bodice. Her hair, too, was perfected in a tight bun with but a single strand escaping round her left ear. She might have been the picture of nobility, had she not been so relentlessly bourgeois. He, on the other hand, slouched in a cocky, relaxed posture, bright-eyed and radiating energy. Frozen though he was in time, you could feel him fidget, anxious to get going. I could practically hear him cracking jokes between his teeth, ready to fly once the powder flashed. Perhaps I took after him. Behind these two disparate figures was a painted backdrop of trees and parkland. What an odd aesthetic, I thought, to put a divan in a park. I wondered what they were trying to convey—and did in fact convey to each other—that had become lost in the ruin of generations? I stared in wonder at the photograph, looking for its clue.

I found it in the beautifully and rather self-possessed imprint embossed in the lower-right-hand corner of the dark gray cardboard frame into which the photo had been set:
Adolf Zucker, Photograph, Hundestrasse 15, Berlin.

Very well then, my grandparents—for who else could they be?—had lived in Berlin. I taped the photo to the wall, in the very center of the wall, in fact. Beneath it, I pressed a sticky Post-it on which I had written:
Grandparents. Berlin. Year? Greta. Wilhelm.
Then under that, in parentheses, I added: (
Golda? Velvel?
). My father had at different times called them by different names.

Next to this I taped the letter from Mr. Kaufman of the Holocaust Archives. I circled the word
Durnik,
the town in which the Rosenheims once lived. Under this I wrote the word
Victim
.

It was completely possible that all of them were victims. It was completely possible that all of them had perished in the same way, that they were even cousins, or brothers. Only one thing was certain. They were not from the same place. But for the moment I left unresolved the fate of the two people in the photograph.

My father had variously told me that my grandfather was a philologist, a high school language teacher, a professor of Romance literature, an expert in Finno-Ugric. This now did not sit so well with me. If he was a philologist, he was so just at the time they had gone crazy sorting out the Indo-European roots of Western language. Not coincidentally they called this root language “Aryan.” Their imagined etymologies enabled them to glibly reify for themselves remote, mythological times, conferring nobility on their own sad, dull, modern words, and, by extension, on their lives as well. They created this world of Aryan purity in the comfort of their studies, warmed by their Persian rugs and cosseted by their thick velvet curtains, not willing to see how their trains of thought might one day turn into cattle cars filled with real people.

I stuck another Post-it below the photograph.
Mad Scientist.

I would just like to add that I was once thumbing through my father’s OED and found that the Indo-European word for
salmon
was
lox
. If I could see the idiocy of that, surely they could, too. Maybe that’s why the man in the photo seemed so jittery.

I reached for my next piece of evidence. It was a train ticket I had found in that envelope filled with foreign objects. It was a ticket to Vienna. Or perhaps from Vienna. It was only the barest stub, so very little could be gleaned from it. Torn away were the basics: the date, the station. I looked for a clue.

I found it near the top edge.
Wagon-Lit 2-4-4.
I taped it to the wall about two feet above and to the right of the photograph of my grandparents. It needed to be nearer the outer circle of this story. Under it, I attached the note:
Car 2, Compartment 4, Seat 4.
My father had written that he had been on vacation in Vienna. Perhaps this was his ticket. I added the words:
To Majdanek? From Belsen? Childhood vacation before the war? Trip with Mom after the war?

It was such a small shard of a ticket that no markings such as the German Eagle or any National Socialist symbols remained, and it had been crumpled and it sustained water damage, too, but it chilled me to look at it. Trains of any sort in this context were too brutal to contemplate. Perhaps I should have studied it more closely, but I taped it to the wall and reached for the next piece of evidence.

This was Josh’s last report card. In my day, report cards were actually cards, with little boxes printed on them, and each teacher wrote down a grade in one of the boxes, and only occasionally a comment in the single line provided. But Josh’s report card was four pages long. Each teacher felt obliged to write a short essay on his “positives” and “negatives.” Josh of late was pretty much in the negative column. “Not working up to ability.” “Shows little enthusiasm for his work.” “Sloppy.” “Late with homework.” “Seems preoccupied.”

I taped it up in the far right corner, as far away from the train ticket as I could find. I put a Post-it beside it and wrote the words
Possible trouble at home.

Next to his report card I attached, with a great deal of effort, Ella’s sundress—the one I had found hanging in the closet and that mysteriously had no body in it. I tried to remember when she had worn it, and I had no idea whether this really happened or not, but I saw her come up to me at the swimming pool, and I seemed to remember she was carrying a large rattan purse with ivory-colored handles, and I also remembered sandals because her toes were bright red, and she said something to me, something like we’re all going now, are you sure you don’t want to come with us? I probably just made that up. But I scribbled on the yellow Post-it:
Where it all went wrong.

Then I turned around looking for another clue. My eye was caught by something I had not put in the clue corner, actually. It was April’s book of poetry. It was poised on the edge of the couch, sending out waves of grievance because I hadn’t even opened it, let alone read it. Why I reached for it at that moment I don’t know, but I did. I studied her name on the cover. April Love. That was more ridiculous than my stage name—and of course there was no one named Love in the condo directory. (I checked.) She must have come up with it in the sixties. I imagined her at Woodstock, forcefully shoving flowers in everyone’s hair. (I, by the way, was still in grammar school during Woodstock.) And by the time the eighties came around she must have published so many things under that name it was too late to change it. Her real name was probably Lubovnik.

The book was called
Indefinable Ecstasies
. I paged through it. It was kind of Ginsberg-y, Whitman-esque, filled with emotional excess.

But I was struck by a line of a poem she called “Questions Number 4.” It was:

If I am blind, what is that light?

It was one of those poems filled with questions like
Can I cry if I have no eyes?
and
Who said my first word?
It seemed to me I had seen poetry like this before. Or maybe I’d read her stuff sometime and just didn’t remember. In any case, it got under my skin, that line, and I didn’t really know why except that’s how I felt.
If I am blind, what is that light?
It was like that scene in my father’s book—the one when he is sitting in the back of that army truck with the sand storm raging about him, and the whole world blotted out, yet there he was, racing on…to where? He wasn’t even driving. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t even feel. And yet he knew that he had experienced something beyond his four senses, and beyond his intelligence, too. That was the time in the story when I felt I knew him, if only just a little.

But I did not think this was a clue, and I was about to put the book down when I noticed the inscription on the flyleaf. It was addressed to my father, but it wasn’t signed by her mother as she had claimed. It was from her.
My dearest Heshel,
it read.
For everything past and everything future. With deepest and enduring affection, April.

It was dated two years ago.

I tore out the flyleaf and taped it to the wall.

She was the one.

I ran out of the apartment, along the gangway, waited impatiently as the elevator snailed up from the ground floor, hopped down the stairs instead, and jogged over to the town houses. It did not take long to find the house of the woman with the famous poet daughter. The name was Bloomfeld, as it turned out. April herself answered the door. She seemed surprised and happy to see me.

“You found me!”

“Can we talk?”

“You look upset. Is your father all right?”

“He’s fine, he’s fine.”

“You want to come in?”

I could see her mother on the easy chair straining to see who was at the door.

“No. Let’s go out.”

I couldn’t think of anywhere, so I suggested Starbucks. It was ludicrous, of course, but I had to think fast. We took her mother’s Continental. Traffic was thin because it was the second day of Rosh Hashanah and the conservative and orthodox Jews were still at services. Starbucks was mostly empty, too. Automatically we went to our table—I thought of it as our table even though we had sat at it exactly one time before. I watched her pry the lid from her tea and blow on it. I had to admit I had grown to like how she looked, and even now in the flush of my anger and anticipation, I noticed how her hair glistened in the sunlight, silver with age as it was, and how her long, fine neck emerged like a bouquet from the cup of her silken collar. There were indeed wrinkles on her skin, particularly when she bunched up her forehead in thought, but they no longer obscured the lovely structure of her face.

“What is it with you and my father?” I finally asked

It was weird, she told me, how things happen in life. Being a writer, she had an obsessive need to create meaning where none actually existed. But sometimes, she said, stories really happen, sometimes the circle actually closes. Fortinbras enters stage right and carts the bodies away. April spoke like that.

Thus, it turned out that it was not entirely accidental that her mother had moved to The Ponds at Lakeshore some years after April’s father had died. In fact, it turned out that April’s mother had known my father for many years, and that she felt she owed him a debt of gratitude. Learning that he was widowed and alone, she felt impelled to be near him, to try to repay this debt, to help him if she could. That’s why she bought one of the town houses.

“Debt?” I said.

“Your father walks with angels,” April replied. She took a sip of her tea. I myself held on to my coffee cup as if for support, like it was bolted to the table. I watched her closely. The tea had moistened her lips.

Many years ago, she went on, my father had helped them. Her own father had been a physician, but he had gotten into some sort of trouble and had lost his practice. There was some misdeed. Maybe abortions. Maybe embezzlement. Maybe alcohol or drugs. She was unclear. Maybe they needed something to glue them back together. Maybe he’d already gotten back on his feet, and they wanted to move on. Anyway, they were desperate for a child. They knew there were war orphans in need of homes from all over Europe, but, with his background, they had been turned down by all the agencies, including the Jewish ones, or whoever it was who arranged these things. But somehow or another, by talking to someone who knew someone who said something to someone, they found their way to the one man who could get them a child.

“My father?”

“Your father. He found me. I think he actually went over and got me himself.”

“You’re a concentration camp victim?” I blurted stupidly.

“Actually, I don’t know,” she said.

She was found in a convent orphanage, but if her parents died in the camps, or in some ghetto, or as partisans, or in a bombing, or of starvation, or simply abandoned her—she had no clue. She had always felt that my father knew, even though he always claimed he didn’t. But he had treated her so kindly for as long as she could remember, lavished her with such tenderness and generosity, that she dared not press him. In time, she forgave him. And truthfully, sometimes she was grateful for his silence. What possible good would it do? she often thought. He had saved her. Given her a new life with good parents. Why dig up the past?