You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (9 page)

Mendel’s father was strict, but he was also probably too exhausted to notice the shenanigans of kid number eight. Mendel lived recklessly, at least in retail situations. He’d walk through a store, grab something from a shelf, and keep moving. You usually watched in shock, but once you pointed out your displeasure.

“What are you gonna call me?” Mendel yelled. “A crook?”

“You said it already,” you shot back. “I have nothing to say.”

That was the first of many fights you remember. But you always forgave each other. That’s what you do for a friend who’s always there.

When you were both eighteen, you needed money to buy a particular pair of shoes. You and the outfits! Mendel dreamed up a solution: You pooled your money and bought a two-wheeled cart, some frosted cookies and candy. You trudged five or six miles out to the farms and traded the goodies for rags and pieces of iron, which you then carted back to the city. Mendel’s junkman brother-in-law bought them from you. Soon, you’d raised enough cash to commission a pair of leather shoes from the shoemaker.

One afternoon, as you made your way to the farms, Mendel stopped.

“Wait here for me,” he said.

He walked away and you waited. The police drove by, but still no Mendel. Finally, you went home alone. It would take Mendel a while longer. Turns out he’d spied a piece of iron in a field and had gone back to swipe it. A farm worker witnessed the crime and called the cops. Mendel was arrested and spent a month in jail.

Your mother knew how close you’d come to receiving the same punishment. If Mendel had said you were with him when the crime occurred, you would have been arrested, too. We both know he never would have sold you out. In the future, he’d risk his life for you. Still, she forbade you from doing business with him again.

“Did I tell you to steal?” you scolded Mendel after he’d been released. “Whatsa matter with you? Now we can’t work together.”

You sold the cart and split the proceeds. The next time you worked together your bosses were Nazi guards.

You swore you’d never come here; I have the notes to prove it. Did you know that I wrote down everything you ever said that made me feel something? So that’s pretty much
everything
you ever said.

NOTE: He wouldn’t go to a nursing home—he thinks it’s like a concentration camp. He says he’d kill himself if he got “real frail” and couldn’t take care of himself before he’d live in a nursing home.

NOTE: He hates being dependent on anyone, or confined.

NOTE: He’ll use pills.

NOTE: He wants to die in his own apartment, in his own room.

NOTE: He’ll take the pills rather than go to a nursing home if his good eye goes.

QUOTE: “I can’t stand in a nursing home seeing ninety-five- and one-hundred-year-old people who are incontinent.”

Oh, my dear. It breaks my heart whenever I see the package of adult diapers beside your dresser. How I wish I could have spared you that indignity.

You were waiting for the Hanukkah miracle when I found the pictures. They were the only ones you’d never shown me, so maybe you wanted to keep them private. But I couldn’t help it—you’d asked me to find your checkbook and said it might be in your jacket. I reached into the breast pocket and discovered what you’d pressed over your heart almost every day of your adult life. The worn leather portfolio was the size of a business card. On the right, you’d tucked two pictures of Vera, your best girl: one from the happy days of your relationship, and one from her youth, in which she looks stunning and regal. On the left, you kept photos of your own youth. They were taken very shortly after
the war. In both, you’ve regained weight but your face is still swollen, especially around the eyes, so it looks as if you’ve been beaten. The smaller photo appears to be a different version of your handsome passport shot. The larger shows you from the waist up. You are wearing a striped concentration camp shirt and matching cap. On the back you wrote your name, a date, and this word:
SICK
.

You’re lucky you had a friendship so rich that it filled your heart for most of your life. I have some friends like that, but most of them live far away from me. I’m light on arm’s-reach friends right now.

I’ve never had trouble like this before. Sure, I got dumped by three girls I’d been devoted to in tenth grade, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned that most women have been spiritually hacked by other females at some point in their lives. It’s like being tenderized: a beating that makes you kinder in the end. But apart from that traumatic rite of passage, my friend life flourished until I became an adult in the suburbs.

People in suburbs are very cliquey. Maybe in cities, too, but I wouldn’t know, because I stupidly settled in a lawn-dominated bedroom community with great schools. Suburbs are also very boring. The antidote to being bored and feeling left out is to find a clique of one’s own.

David and I started hanging out with the parents of Carrie’s preschool friends. These weren’t the type of people I’m normally drawn to. Most of them lived in new subdivisions in houses with two-story foyers and pale carpeting. Shoes in the house were bad manners. They displayed no books on their white shelves and never admitted to experiencing emotional pain, but I figured I’d get below the surface eventually. They were friendly and fun, which I thought was enough for the beginning of a friendship. One hosted a Western square-dance party. Another rented a pony for their kid’s birthday party.

Then there was the dinner party.

I didn’t tell you about it when it happened, but I should have. You would have gotten quite a kick out of this one.

Let’s skip right past the part where one woman invited the men to accompany her to the bathroom so she could prove that she hadn’t had a boob job. Forget about the other women who pretended to perform fellatio on desserts. To me, that was just immaturity and goofiness, everyone trying to show who could be the bawdiest.

As people started clearing the table, the host turned the lights down and the music up.

“Everybody dance with someone else’s husband!” she instructed.

Nope. Not kidding.

So we did, like lambs, because people do what they’re told when everyone around them is complying. I ended up chest to chest with a man who lived on a street of couples rumored to engage in spouse swapping. Of course, I didn’t believe anyone actually did that.

As we slow-danced, I said, “This is why people think you swing.”

“Don’t knock it,” he said in the creepiest whisper I’ve ever heard in real life.

There was only one dance, thank God, before the group settled onto living-room couches, each married couple back together. The front of the room was like a stage, so people took to it. You know those gags where one person stands behind another and pretends to be the front person’s arms? That happened. A man stood behind a woman who wasn’t his wife while she sang a song and he mimed her hand gestures. Before it ended, he put his hand several inches down the front of her pants. On the inside. Everyone laughed except for the man’s wife and me.

“We have to get out of here,” I said to David.

When the laughter quieted, I announced that we had to leave early to relieve our babysitter.

“She has a dance recital tomorrow morning,” I lied.

They all understood. Dance classes are also big in the suburbs.

The next day, I saw one of the culprits on the Little League baseball field. She was sober and bundled in her let’s-pretend-we’re-rustic barn jacket.

“Wasn’t it fun to act like kids again for one night?” she chirped. Yes, she’s a chirper.

What? Was this some kind of cover? Maybe they’d made a pact: We’ll pretend it was a crazy lark so Sue doesn’t realize we all hooked up amid the Play Doh after they left. Or was she serious—had she honestly engaged in that kind of horseplay when she was young and single? Because that’s not what we did in my heyday. Never have I ever let a friend, never mind a friend’s sex partner, put his hands down my pants. Not even after those college two-for-one happy hours. Either way, her comment confirmed that this wasn’t the social group for me.

We tried to enter other gangs. It seemed like a good idea to explore one of the town’s private worship groups, called Chavurat. The super-liberal Chavura seemed like a commune, so there was still the possibility of group sex, but we figured the members would at least be more down-to-earth and spiritual. And they may have been, but when we attended one of their events, not one person welcomed us.

The other Chavura we knew about wasn’t taking new members, which was just as well. Their earnest discussions about Torah were like parenthetical asides to their real lives, during which they kept busy with infidelity, lying, and workplace ethics violations.

So we stopped searching for a gang. Fortunately, we met friends who weren’t wedded to cliques, either. With three couples we could hang out with on a whim, whose kids got along with ours, who we could be our quirky selves with, we had plenty.

Then, we had nothing.

Our two favorite families moved away within months of each other, one to Seattle and one to London, abandoning us in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere. The third friendship dissolved shortly thereafter when the woman broke up with me because I’d canceled a lunch date at the last minute. I took responsibility for disappointing her with my bad manners and apologized an out-of-proportion number of times, but she still insisted on severing the friendship.

“You’re a good person,” she wrote to me in an e-mail, “but I just can’t take this anymore.”

I still don’t know what “this” was. My Seattle and London girlfriends assured me that I wasn’t a bad friend, which left me even more confused. What had I done to this woman?

David and I continued to meet acquaintances for pleasant dinners. I kept in touch with all my old, dear friends who lived far away. I developed new girlfriendships, but not a new best friend. One of the nicest things about our suburb is that when someone gets sick, the community steps in with food. The victim’s best friend usually organizes a food chain, with a different family delivering foil pans of lasagna or roast chicken every night. I’ve long wondered who would organize my food chain if I got breast cancer.

You used to tell people I was your best friend.

“Anything you need I would do for you, and anything I need you would do for me,” you explained.

Ours didn’t operate like the best friendships I’d had in the past. We bickered. I nagged and you hung up on me. You asked for things and I gave them to you. But I never asked for what you gave me, which was so much harder to secure than sugar cookies and undershirts. You gave me a clique. Its members were nurses and nurses’ aides, dying old people and their gray-haired children, a family of big-hearted Odessans. They accepted me so naturally that I didn’t even notice I’d landed in a group that let me forget my suburban loneliness.

Does that make you my best friend? Perhaps. For all these years, you’ve certainly been the steadiest friend I’ve had.

The nurse with the pretty blue eyes comes in to check on you. She tells me you were fine at bedtime, but the night nurse reported that you talked in your sleep so often that your roommate started yelling at you to shut up. He feels bad about it now, but he didn’t know you were so
sick. He’s not a bad guy. I can’t even blame him for getting cranky when you dribble pee on the bathroom floor.

He says all he could decipher of your mumblings was a word that sounded like “stomach,” which also sounds like “coming.”

The nurse says they thought you were sleeping late. Since you’d had such a disruptive night, they decided not to bother you. When they finally did, you wouldn’t wake up.

They called the doctor, who checked you out, covered your mouth with an air pocket, and called me.

I tell her I want to talk to the doctor. It’s been years since I saw one of those on this floor. They never replaced your first doctor after she moved back to Ireland, deciding instead to double a colleague’s workload.

I don’t expect to see him soon, if at all, but he shows up very quickly. I guess this is what you gotta do to get some service around here.

I ask him questions that are impossible to answer.

“It looks like he’s struggling to breathe. Can he feel that? Is he suffering?”

He tells me they’re giving you oxygen to keep you comfortable. He can add morphine to the order.

Morphine. That’s rather serious.

“What happened?” I ask the doctor.

“Congestive heart failure,” he says. “Maybe a stroke.”

Well, I want to yell, which is it? Pick one.

If he picks one, my thinking goes, you can recover. If it’s both, I’m not so sure. But I keep my mouth shut. I don’t want to know yet.