You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (26 page)

The nurses are convinced that you do it on purpose. I hate to tell you, but I agree. Except for the time the aide saw you slip while putting
on your pajamas, I think all of your falls have been sit-down strikes. But what are you protesting? Loneliness? Your body’s stubborn hardiness? Lack of attention?

Or is it more extreme? I’ve heard that when everyone was being loaded onto cattle cars, some people deliberately sat down on the train tracks because they knew the guards would shoot them in the head and get it over with. Is that what you’re up to when you hit the floor?

“I’m just disgusted with the whole life,” you said on your last birthday.

Nah. I think you just want to create drama, which is exactly what happens every time you “fall.” Whenever a patient goes down, the nurse is required to tell the family and write a report. But first she must get the patient up, which often requires a mechanical lift.

Then you’re surrounded by action. Nurses and aides stop what they’re doing, ignore other patients, and work on raising you off your rear. You get a talking-to, because the nurses are fed up with this scheme. But that must not be too bad, either, because regardless of their harsh words, at least they’re engaging with you. You are a man again, in an argument, rather than a task wearing diapers.

Or maybe you’re simply bored. My office mate heard my end of the conversation the last time a nurse called to report a fall.

“Were you talking to someone about a dog?” she asked after I hung up.

I told her the story, which didn’t surprise her at all.

“Well,” she said, “it’s something to make the day pass. You can’t just eat and poop.”

What’s your take on heaven today? Sometimes, like religion, you think it’s bullshit.

“When you’re dead, you’re like a piece of wood,” you said not too long ago.

But I like your other explanation better, the one you gave me in various iterations throughout our friendship. The one that promised you’d have the power to return.

“I’ll be with you in your dreams,” you’ve reminded me.

I’m counting on that.

You were asleep in your hallway chair when I arrived. When I tapped your shoulder and whispered your name, you opened your eyes. But you weren’t fully with me yet. It was as if you fell deep into another world whenever you slept and the further you traveled, the longer it took you to return.

When you finally got back, you were miserable.

“I wish, like when I go to Birkenau—I wish to die,” you said.

Every time you talked like that and behaved like that, I thought I’d lost the real you forever. But you kept surprising me. Like the time I ignored your complaints and talked instead about a problem we’d been having with a neighbor after Max and some friends exercised their throwing arms in the direction of his abandoned property. The boys apologized, got punished at home, and offered to pay for the damage to the rotting house’s ancient windows, but the neighbor still called the police.

“You’re upset,” you said.

I was shocked. Not only had you heard what I was saying, but you had read what I was feeling. You knew why I’d told you the story: not to pass the time or to get advice, but because I needed a metaphorical pat on the back from a friend. Lo and behold, you patted. Then you even got witty about it.

“Between me wishing to die and Max with the windows, you got your hands full,” you said with a chuckle.

Sometimes you actually were sick. Once I found you perched in a wheelchair in front of your room instead of near the nurses’ station. You looked quite happy, as if you were waiting to check people into a conference or distribute brochures of some kind. But it was lunchtime and you were wearing a bib.

“What are you doing down here?” I asked.

“I got a cold,” you said.

But it was more than a cold. Gloria emerged from your room and told me you’d been swabbed for swine flu and were in quarantine until the results came back.

Why hadn’t they told me?

Weren’t you hysterical? For once, a real illness.

Yet you seemed perfectly fine. “Everyone gets sick,” you said. “You get better or you don’t.”

That’s when I knew the body snatchers had struck. Where was my Aron?

The worst part of your illness was that your voice was weaker than ever. You’d been speaking very quietly for a while, as if after nearly ninety years your vocal cords or diaphragm were too tired to push a message all the way out. Your lips moved, but the sound seemed stuck behind your teeth. I had to lean in and strain to hear you, especially on that day. The words I caught sounded like gibberish. Or Yiddish. But I could hear some English in the middle of phrases.

“Are you speaking in Yiddish?”

You smiled, partly embarrassed and partly entertained by yourself.

“It’s a good language.”

I don’t think you’d realized that you’d fallen back into it, but once I pointed it out, you didn’t seem upset. I, however, was completely rattled. If you were going back to the land of Yiddish, weren’t you moving farther away from me? Was this a sign that the end was near, like when dying people speak to their mothers right before the end? And even if
it wasn’t the end, what if you lost your English before you died and we couldn’t talk anymore?

It’s so quiet in here. Where are all the
meshuggeners?
I used to scold you when you referred to the other residents that way, but in many cases, you were right. Whether due to age or genetics, many of them are
nutty
.

Let’s review.

“Do you know how I can get the ferry to New York from here?” a man asked me last month.

“Nope,” I said.

I’m so bad with directions. Plus, we were in the middle of a nursing home in Massachusetts.

At least he was in a good mood. That same guy, the one who pushes his wheelchair with his feet, a la Fred Flintstone, had it out for you last year.

“Be very careful of this man,” he said to me as he pointed at you. “He’s a very dangerous man.”

“He thinks I killed his wife and daughter,” you told me with annoyance.

Then he looked at me with his asymmetrically set eyes and asked me how Pearl was. Who the hell is Pearl?

The lady with Alzheimer’s was much more pleasant. She may have lost her sense of time, but she hadn’t lost her enthusiasm or inflections. Listening to her was like spending time with a wise relative who cared enough to give advice—somebody else’s wise relative, because none of her statements applied to me.

“That’s exactly what your mother used to say,” she said to me one day. We hadn’t been speaking prior to her comment.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

She looked well: neat gray hair, matching outfits, occasional teeth.

“You should always listen to your mother,” she added, a little more firmly. “You’ve only got one mother.”

I didn’t tell her that I’d lost my mother five years earlier because I didn’t want her to stop. It amazed me that she could still be delightful despite spewing nonsense.

Your nonsense sometimes delighted me, too. Like the time you started rambling about “grease for Axel.”

“Who’s Axel?” I asked

“You so smug!” you barked. “You go to college and know nothing about axles. I’m talking about a cart with a horse.”

Oh, really? That’s what we were talking about? I guess I’d missed the entire beginning, middle, and end of the conversation.

Then you turned to your table mate.

“She’s a professor.”

“Of what?” he asked.

“Bananas.”

Now that’s entertainment.

The doctor explained that you have vascular dementia, which can come from small strokes and bring on sudden drops in brain function. But instead of a sudden or gradual decline, yours has been choppy, as if you’re walking long stretches of flat land then suddenly trip and fall off a cliff.

Once she hypothesized that your cataract was disorienting you. That made sense; you couldn’t see your world well, so you saw another.

You were having a conversation the first time I witnessed it. You looked toward the chair in your room and spoke to Bibi. It was hard for you to give her your full attention because you believed Vera was standing behind you, talking at the same time. And I kept asking questions, too.

“What is Bibi saying?” I said.

“You ask her.”

“Umm, why don’t you?”

You turned to face her, mumbled something, nodded your head, then returned to me.

“I can’t hear her.”

No matter, because it was time to go. You were anxious to get to Rosenberg’s bakery, which you claimed was somewhere out in the hallway.

“It’s down the street,” you said, as if I was blind.

I guess it was hard for me to see because the real Rosenberg’s bakery was actually down a street in Zychlin in 1940.

When we got to the hallway—or the sidewalk in front of the bakery, in your case—you had a lot to tell me. Such adventures were happening at night! You ate pancakes with a bunch of men. You had to dodge a guy who was out to get you because you’d accepted a blanket from his woman and he thought that meant you were fooling around with her. The guy was nuts, you said with a gleam in your eyes, and not just toward you. You said he wanted to shoot you and “the other Jewish fellas.”

All of this should have broken my heart, but it didn’t because you told it with the joy and animation of a child disclosing a secret. I hadn’t seen you that happy in—ever. Despite worrying about the guy with the gun, you were content. You’d built a world that included your hometown, your late wife, and your absent girlfriend. Who was I to interfere?

I didn’t realize how bad your hoarding had gotten until you started smuggling fruit to me.

“In the dresser,” you whispered, peering around for the authorities. “Take the bag.”

“What bag?”

“Shhhh!”

“What bag?”

“Just take it. Don’t ask questions.”

The bag contained two apples, three oranges, and a banana. Bruised, mushy, and squashed. Yum.

I appreciated the gesture, though I tossed the fruit out as I left the
building. The next week, you unfolded a napkin to reveal a pear that you’d hidden in your walker basket.

“Take it.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Take it! I got it for you.”

I thanked you again, but said you didn’t have to steal fruit for me. I didn’t want you to get in trouble. It was bad enough that you were throwing their napkin inventory off.

Your basket is always stuffed with paper napkins. Also, sugar packets. Rolls of wild cherry Life Savers spill out of all your pants pockets. Multiple cups of water slosh around your tray.

Sometimes the head of nursing confiscates the collection, but you build it right back up again.

I understand the impulse, the need for a survivor to accumulate stuff, just in case. But why napkins? How the hell can paper napkins save anyone?

I feel like there are things I should be doing. Vera should know what’s going on. Shall I run down to get her? That would mean leaving you, so no, not yet. It’s incredible that she may outlive you. Then again, that lady is proof of women’s strength.

You’ve been pretty stubborn about visiting her on the Russian floor. The last time you refused, I went alone. All the women down there look similar, like babies in a nursery, with their round faces, tiny noses, and spiky pixie cuts. I found Vera, wheeled her into the hall, and told her you weren’t with me because you didn’t feel well.

“Aron,” she said.

It was the first word I’d heard her speak in four years.

Then she pointed to the ceiling and I knew she wanted to go see you. Despite all she’s lost, she was determined to get close to her man.