The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (24 page)

I ask her to make sure that my father will not see Horst again at any time, and that regardless of whom he sees, they will not tie him up like an animal. Returning to his room with a feeling of justice accomplished, I reassure my father that he will never have another such a night—

“GET OUT!!”

My father blasts me, so suddenly and loudly, with such gleaming hatred in his eyes that I jump back.

He stares at me for a moment with contempt. It is like looking into a night-guard’s pitiless eyes. It is like falling down a bottomless black hole, and I don’t even know that I am crying until he shouts again.

“YOUR TEARS DON’T MOVE ME!!”

I had always thought he could see deep within, to the beating heart at the center of a broken world. I had thought my father, repairer of watches, was privy to the secrets of the universe. But he is no longer the hero at the center of his story. He is back in a death camp and he knows it. And this humble lot of all mankind, this mortal terminus, is something he cannot understand or tolerate. He cannot move forward. He is stuck. He raves.

There is little more he can teach me.

On other visits, my dying father is soft and docile.

“Why do you even bother to visit me? You have a recovering husband, and small children to look after, too.”

“It’s a great honor to see you, Daddy.”

“What?” he says, and I can see that he is pleased.

“Yes, an honor. I always wanted to spend more time with you, but you were working so hard. Everyone is fine now. Paul is better, the kids are in school. Where else would I want to be?”

He smiles, moved. His eyes are wet, as they are when he is touched by something beautiful. His tears move me.

Another day, he tells me that Paul and his parents have brought him the greatest happiness, and he thanks me for bringing them into his life.

“So I didn’t break my vow?”

“Never. You have always been the most faithful Karaputzi. And your little family, your children, these wonderful people from England, they have all brought me such hope.”

Please Send Help at Once

W
HEN I WAS GROWING UP, my parents’ store in Lincoln Center had had an emergency system whereby if you rattled the door or shook the windows a phone call would go out. This message would be relayed to the police station and also to our apartment, which meant me, alone after school.

A hold-up!

Or robbery!

Is taking place

At Taitz Jewelers!

Located at:

1889 Broadway

PLEASE SEND HELP AT ONCE!!

PLEASE SEND HELP AT ONCE!!

Horrified, I usually dropped the phone in panic whenever I got this message, and literally ran around the house, wondering what I should do. Despite the fact that these calls were, thankfully, only false alarms, each time they seemed real to me:
This is it.
Tragedies like this happened, I knew all too well. My parents were being held up, probably killed, and I could do nothing about it. The system would often be triggered as my parents locked up at night, so when I tried to call back, no one would answer. They would be on their way to the subway, and I would picture them dead of multiple gunshots. I would pace the house until they came home and relieved me of my terror, my guilt for not having saved them.

Saving my father from death was a familiar “must-do” on my list. After all, hadn’t he suffered enough? Hadn’t he faced that bully, death, enough times?

Most important, wasn’t it my father’s role in life to “survive,” and mine, if necessary, to devote myself to saving him? Wasn’t I his own private Wallenberg? This is why I had been born; this was my Queen Esther moment. This was what all the education had been for: this moment, this ultimate emergency. And now, I could rescue for all I was worth. I would find out what I was worth. A match with God himself. Just what my father, and perhaps I, had always been waiting for. Death as the ultimate bully, the inevitable Nazi.

On the other hand, this disease—as predicted by any reasonable prognosis of stage-four cancer—is indomitable. Day by day, my father looks thinner and more haggard. “Like a concentration camp victim,” as the sadly accurate cliché goes. Even before his relegation to the hospice, his mind had been slipping horribly.

On one of his final chemotherapy appointments, he stands up, drops his pants, and bends over for the nurse to see. “Can you see where it hurts me inside?” Apart from the shock of this action (this was a most fastidious and dignified man), I see that his haunches, legs, thighs, and buttocks are gone. All that is left are the bones of his pelvis, skin hanging off.

Later, in a last effort, my father is given a series of radiation treatments, aimed at the center of his brow. The technician puts an indelible X there, in black, so that the spot can be found on multiple visits. Must this man wear the mark of Cain? What has he ever done to deserve this?

One day, my father, who has worked all his life, puts his head down on his special watchmaker’s work table. This is something new, and awful, and it means that this fighter is beginning to wobble, to lose.

The Exchange is like a big village, a collective organism, and news spreads from booth to booth. I overhear my father’s neighbor, an Israeli jeweler in the booth perpendicular to his, murmur, in Hebrew:

“Hineh sof shel adam.” Here is the end of a man. What a horrible, biblical sound these words had; they have stayed in my mind until now. And it was true.

In his last days at the nightmarish hospice, as I feed him the orange that drips all over his gown, my father looks at me so sorrowfully that all I can think of saying is:

Min hametzar karati Yah

Anani bemerchav Yah

From the narrow strait I called out to God

God answered me with his freedom

I am quoting from his favorite psalm, recited on all the Jewish pilgrimage festivals. I am hinting that death can be a broad and freeing place. My father is trapped, and neither of us can stand the indignity of it. Death has never been spoken of before, not ever, but now it is his only hope of liberation. God will answer you with freedom, Daddy. You deserve never to worry again about being trapped and hurt.

Silently, Simon’s lips begin to mouth the words:

Shma Yisroel

Adonai Elohenu

Adonai Echad

These are the last words that are spoken by an observant Jew. They were surely spoken by a million doomed voices in the Holocaust he had survived. Forming those words, over and over, my father, at last, was surrendering.

Real Lamed-Vavniks

A
FTER A GREAT DEAL OF EFFORT, I find my father a bed in a better hospice outside Manhattan. Improbably, he is headed for Calvary Hospice, run by the Catholic diocese. How many times had my father railed against the Catholic Lithuanians who had helped the Nazis take over their country and send him to hell? How many times had I heard about his childhood Easter Sundays, dodging the congregants, freshly released from their Judas-laden sermons, itching to bash in a Jewish skull?

“Why do you deny it, Simon?” even his Catholic friends, little boys whom he skated with, with whom he threw chestnuts, would taunt. “You know you killed Christ. And you know that you make your Passover bread out of blood. The blood of Christian children. Admit it.”

It was doubly ironic to me as a child, knowing that blood, even animal blood, was forbidden to Jews. “The blood is the soul,” the Bible explains, using the Hebrew word
nefesh—
simultaneously elevating us and the world of the animals. There was a soul in the world of flesh. And there was no blood, I knew, but lots of soul, in the matzoh the Nazi’s wife had baked for my father and his fellow workshop men, in Dachau.

My father had said he smelled “Jewish blood” in the stones of the Spanish monastery in Washington Heights. The Cloisters were not, for him, a place of holy contemplation, but of trials and torture. There was a straight line, for him, between the Inquisition and the boys who shouted at him after Easter services, between those who killed his mother and those who watched, unmoved by mercy.

And yet, this merciful hospice is quintessentially Catholic, full of ministering women called Sisters. No place could be more full of grace in its treatment of the dying. The nuns, who remove a large crucifix from above Simon’s bed, are as gentle as the mothers of newborns. I think about how Christ’s skinny, twisted form is so like that of the dying, indeed so like the bodies of those who suffered and starved in the Holocaust, in all the global genocides that never seem to end. The nuns know suffering as I do—that makes them my spiritual sisters and mothers. Through them, I realize the full meaning of
gemilut chassadim,
the granting of mercies. These humble women are the real Lamed-Vavniks—the people whose modest goodness supports the world. They never give a ranting person Haldol, or tie him to a steel bed with thick, black hospital restraints. They sit with the poor soul, invigilating restlessness. Their silent goodness calms even my father, my wounded lion of Judah.

He rests.

In the end, the watchmaker’s hands move slowly in the air above his body. It is a kind of survivor’s last ballet: He lies in a coma, but his hands still open the magical gateways of pocket watches. On his last day of life, my father wakes up and looks into the round, pale face of Gita, his wife. Despite all the years of thankless work and insult, she bends over and kisses him, and he responds. He lowers his hardworking hands and puts them on her cheeks, which he covers with kisses. He does not want to let her go. It is as though he has seen her sweet and loyal face for the first time. But it is also the last time they will see each other on earth. My mother gives him one last hug and leaves the room hurriedly. Her face is wet with tears and with his kisses.

I follow her out. “I can’t anymore,” she says. “I can’t watch him die. I’ll go to the store and take care of the merchandise.” She is referring to the watches and clocks, still coming in every day, but which will never be fixed. They will be returned to their owners, sent off to another watchmaker (the new ones come from India and South America) or sold at a loss.

Returning to my father, I sit and begin to understand why Gita had had to run from the hospital long ago when my tonsils were removed. She had seen too much suffering and death in her life to ever wait for more. Now my mother runs to the Jewelry Exchange on Forty-seventh Street. She has to figure out how to carry on a business without its heart, what to tell the customers who once knew Mr. Taitz, and how to close it all down. She will mind the store for the next year or so, then, at last, retire from midtown Manhattan.

My brother and I stay with my father. Manny has come to New York from Los Angeles, where he has now been living for decades. Tan and prosperous (he wears a fine Rolex), he pulls a chair up to my Simon’s hospice bed. His body is vigorous and strong next to his sick father’s.

“Why don’t you take five,” he says to me. “You look exhausted.”

I leave the room and wander the halls. Dying people are everywhere, all thin and twisted, their faces pure as babies’. Having been there for several weeks, I am growing used to this odd place, this concentration camp of sorts, where the world of the dying literally separates from life and into a spiritual concentrate. There is a holiness here, a privileged beauty. It is the kind of humble wisdom, in time, to which we all come.

In one of the common rooms, relatives play cards or watch TV shows that seem out of place in this land of silence. The floor of this room is beige linoleum, with beige walls to match, like my childhood home. There is one picture of the seashore, and a dirty window. I look through the panes at the faraway sky, wondering if that clear, pale blue light indicates where my father will soon be going. How can sick people take the trip from this world to the next when they are not even feeling well enough to get out of bed? Are their souls young and light and happy? That would be just. That would be fair. That would make sense, after all the weight of painful existence.

I return to the room to find my brother sitting with his head in his hands. He does not look up as I enter.

“Are you okay?”

“He’s gone,” says Manny, not looking at me.

“What do you mean?”

“Daddy’s dead.”

Even though my father has been dying for months, this comment seems outlandish. There is no apparent change in my father’s appearance.

“No, no, that’s how he always looks,” I say, explaining all that I know so far. My brother has only recently arrived; he has no idea that hospice patients can look dead for weeks, months sometimes, before they actually go. I have grown used to this nightmare; I could go on like this forever. In fact, to me it no longer seems so bad; the atmosphere among the dying and the nurses is more full of tenderness than the tough world outside. And the sky is really so thin and far away. Let them all rest here a little longer.

“Check his breath,” says my brother. “He’s not breathing.”

I walk briskly over to my father and lean over him. His powerful chest seems to be moving up and down. It takes a while for me to realize that I am the one who is moving. I am shaking, I am crying, my face is near his, and my arms are around him. I am feeling only the ticking pulse of life in myself, and I still want to give it all to him.

I used to think that when my parents died, so would I. After all, they were like my children, my
kinderlach.
Who can live without their
kinderlach?
It was my job to restore their lives, to make everything good again, to give them hope.

I try to calm down enough to see who is breathing: He or I? My body is shaking, my heart is pounding, but he is still. My father’s struggles are over. He is really gone from this world.