She saw right away who the king and queen of the class were. She had a real sense for things like that. Even in the retirement home, as soon as she arrived she knew right away whom to get friendly with and whom not to. Rivka always said that the home was like a high school for elderly people, and Raymonde agreed with her, although she didn’t really know what it meant because she had never gone to high school. Now, as the Holocaust survivor of a high school class, she understood how right Rivka had been. It was exactly the same thing, only noisier. The intrigues, the fights, the games. Before they reached Auschwitz, she already knew exactly who was against whom and who wanted whom. Like when she watched The Young and the Restless, she could predict the romances even before the characters knew they were about to fall in love.
At the hotel they gave her a very nice, large room, much nicer than her room in the home. The blankets were folded neatly, and you could see that whoever ironed them took her work seriously. In the bathroom she found one pubic hair, but instead of repulsing her, it actually made her laugh a little, and it made her a little curious too, because she’d never seen a blond goy’s pubic hair before. She opened the small fridge and took out a chocolate bar with an unfamiliar wrapping and decided she liked the taste of the chocolate in Israel better. Then she stood at the foot of the bed and tried to decide which side she would take. Victor always used to sleep on the right side; even when he was sleeping, he wouldn’t let anyone be farther right than him. And after he was gone, she left him that side out of respect. But this trip was hers and Rivka’s, and she wanted to let Rivka choose first.
After a few minutes of indecision, she decided to leave her the left side. She lay on the right side, planning to take a little nap, when the guide called to remind her that the survivor’s testimony would be at five o’clock in the lobby. Raymonde said fine. She covered herself with the Poles’ feather blanket, damn them to hell, which really was wonderful, and closed her eyes. She just had to remember to get up in time, so the survivor wouldn’t have to wait. But what survivor were we talking about here? She hadn’t seen any survivor on the bus, and she’d been the only old woman on the plane. (In the home they called her “elderly,” but that only annoyed her. She wasn’t elderly. She was old.) Suddenly, doubt began to gnaw at her. When Rivka talked about the trip, she didn’t say anything about testimonies. You visit the camps, talk a little bit about the cold and the snow, make a stop at the shopping center in Warsaw, and fly back home. It’s one thing to improvise a few memories standing in front of the barracks, but it’s something else to give a complete testimony.
There went her afternoon nap. Raymonde paced the room. If she were younger, she would have sneaked out through the window, like she did when her father locked her in so she wouldn’t see Victor. But when you’re eighty-eight, running away like that doesn’t look good, and it wouldn’t be fair to Rivka either. Now she was sorry she hadn’t gone to the Internet course they opened in the home. They say you can find everything on the Internet. You type in Auschwitz and you get all the information. But when everyone else went to the course, she and Rivka were busy with their conversations. Computers are for people who have no one to talk to, Rivka would say, and now Raymonde wanted to scream at her that computers are also for people who are supposed to talk about something they don’t know anything about. But there was no one to scream at.
Her small suitcase, with the folded socks and passport, lay on the left side of the bed, which she was saving for Rivka, and she opened them—both the passport and the socks. Maybe there was something in them she could use. The socks had the same light fragrance she loved, and the passport had Rivka’s smile, but this time it didn’t look so pleasant. Maybe a little mean. It wasn’t nice to think about Rivka like that. She isn’t the one who sent you here. You were the one who decided. But for the first time since they met, she sensed a little bit of gloating in her friend. It was like, for example, when you finished eating and only then realized that there was some aniseed in your food. She saw it when she thought back to the time they were sitting on the bench and one of the residents walked past them and slipped. Raymonde stood up to help him and Rivka stayed where she was and watched. She always watched when other people fell. Didn’t get up to help and didn’t put a hand on her mouth in shock and didn’t shout “Oy!” like the others. Raymonde always thought it was the walker that held her back, but maybe it wasn’t only that. Maybe there was some curiosity there—seeing if the person who fell would get up.
She closed the passport. The picture made her feel bad, as if Rivka was watching her now to see if she would stay standing. Ten to five. She went into the bathroom and penciled in her eyebrows. Once she had had the most beautiful eyebrows in the country. Two half-moons, Victor used to say, a moon split in two. He was nice with words, her husband—with earning a living, less. When she finished her eyebrows, she moved to her lips. Painted them brightly, like the female Indian warriors when they paint themselves before a battle, and then she went out to the hotel lobby to do battle with the guide and the Nazis and the Holocaust.
When she reached the lobby, everyone was already seated. She could smell the boys’ aftershave, strong and controlling, sending out the message they would shout out if they could, Hey! I shave! And she saw the sad look in all the girls’ eyes. Even before she said a word, they were ready to cry. What they call a supportive audience.
“Come, Rivka,” the guide said, putting a compassionate hand on her. “I know how hard it must be for you to begin, and I promise you that all of us here are with you.” She had to gain time. Maybe she’d ask the guide to get her something to drink. But she, damn her, had already brought her a glass that was full to the brim. She said, “Begin when you want,” but what she meant was “Start now.” Raymonde remembered a show Victor once took her to see, but the performers were really late, and at first the audience clapped good-naturedly, then angrily, and then they started to bang on the tables. It would be interesting to see how long it would take for the people here to start banging.
“Today,” she said in a shaky voice, “I unpacked my suitcase in my room and looked at my socks. And I thought about how I didn’t have socks then, and how cold it was.” Someone at the side of the room started to cry. Raymonde looked at her suspiciously. It seemed too soon. Even though what she said, with the socks, was completely true. She really didn’t have socks, or shoes, and that had really hurt terribly. Not because of the cold. Because of the heat. In the summer months, the tin shacks in the transit camp got hotter and hotter, the nights weren’t enough to cool them off, and before you knew it, another scorching day had started. The children who were tempted to go outside to play screamed in pain. An old memory, the memory of painful feet, suddenly came into her mind. She didn’t even know she remembered, and now it came back all at once. Attias’s sweet little girl who died of heatstroke, and her mother ran back and forth with her in her arms until, of all people, Amsalem the madroub, the crazy one, managed to stop her. She didn’t know what he said to her, but she remembered that, from far away, she saw his lips move and the mother listened, then gave him the little girl—as small as a rabbit—and started wailing to high heaven.
She told them that, changing some details. She told them about the hunger, how it eats your stomach from the inside and you try not to think about it but you can’t think about anything else. In the middle of her speech she felt it wasn’t nice not to give Rivka more room, but she couldn’t stop. Suddenly all the memories of the transit camp came and stood in line, like when they stood in line for food and people shouted and pushed, then apologized and were ashamed for suddenly turning into animals, but a day later they pushed again. That’s what hunger is like, it makes saliva fill your mouth and meanness fill your soul. Raymonde knew that Rivka would have wanted someone to tell her story. The way an olive tree wants you to take all the fallen olives and make oil from them. So she took those olives from Rivka, added them to her own and pressed them together really well. What came out was so bitter�
�but so pure—that it would be a shame not to give it to the children.
She didn’t know how long she spoke, she only knew that she kept drinking. The guide handed her glass after glass, and she drank and spoke. For every story she took out, she put a glass of water in. Because the thirst had been the worst then. That’s what she told them. Worse than the hunger and the disease and the people outside who treated them like shit. Going entire days without drinking enough because the trough was far away and also half empty, and the headache pounding between your temples was making you crazy. Until they finally hooked them up to the water system, which she didn’t tell them, there was nothing worse than the thirst. When Raymonde finally stopped to breathe, she saw everyone looking at her with red eyes.
After that evening, the children kept following her around. They fought about who would sit next to her on the bus and about who would hold her hand at the camps. After a whole day on her feet, when all Raymonde wanted was to lay her head down on the right side of the bed and rest a little, they would knock on her door and ask if they could come in. At first, she thought they were pestering her because the hotel didn’t have any TV in Hebrew. They were bored, poor things. How long can you watch The Young and the Restless dubbed in Polish (even though she understood what was going on, even in Polish)? But after a while she realized that it was something else. Some who came wanted to hear emotional stories and cry a little, too. But there were others who came because they missed home, though they would never admit it, and they wanted a grown-up to put a hand on their shoulders and remind them not to go to sleep too late. Others had lost a grandparent, and she recognized them from the way their eyes searched her face trying to extract from her old age the image of a different old lady. And there were some who came for her, to ask if everything was all right. It moved her that they cared so much. Even if she knew that part of it was just for themselves, so they could feel like angels. No one had ever showed her so much love. No one had ever listened to her so intently.
From one camp to another, she got better at it. She improved. Every evening she would prepare the next day’s story. She told them both Rivka’s stories and her own, and also stories they put on TV on Holocaust Day instead of Big Brother. At first she was afraid the guide would figure it out, but after the second day, when she finished speaking and everyone was standing in front of the showers, handing each other tissues like they were popcorn at the movie theater, the guide was already completely hers. She even asked if Raymonde was available to join other schools this year. “Sometimes there are cancellations at the last minute,” she told her, which was like saying that sometimes survivors went and died right before the flight so that she was really stuck. Raymonde had no problem being a substitute survivor. The hotels were nice and the children were wonderful, even if they were little pests sometimes, and she was even getting used to the cold. At the age of eighty-eight, it’s fun finding out you’re really good at something. Raymonde had already decided that, before the next time, she’d do what they called an investigation. First she’d talk to people in the home who had been in the camps and managed to put together an honest sentence. Then she’d sign up for the Internet course. Maybe she’d get some new material there.
After checking that she was prepared for the next day, she would take a long, hot shower, and then sit with Rivka. Since the first night, the smile on her passport picture had become pleasant again, and Raymonde was truly ashamed for the bad things she’d thought about her. She would lie in bed every night and tell her what she’d seen that day. The two children who kissed behind the barracks when they thought no one could see, and how their cheeks were so red, not only from the cold. The pile of clothes the guide took them to see that gave Raymonde such bad heartburn that she couldn’t put anything in her mouth later. I thought something of yours might be there, she told Rivka, and wondered if maybe they’d been the same size then, too.
She told her about how the rain smelled different here, and laughed with her about the Poles who sometimes spoke to her in their language, but she answered them in Hebrew, and she told the children that speaking that foreign language was more than she was willing to do. She also laughed about every time the children called her Rivka and she forgot to turn around, but instead of suspecting anything they just called louder—Rivka!—and then she remembered, turned around, and apologized for her bad hearing. Maybe that’s why they insisted that she sit in the first row at every ceremony they had in the camps, so she could hear. They didn’t let her have a little nap in the back.
She already knew by heart all the words to Yizkor, the memorial prayer they read every time. The other texts changed from camp to camp, and the songs too, even though they all sounded the same. The one who played them was Ori, a handsome boy with a guitar, whom Raymonde saw kissing three different girls on the very first day. The only reason she forgave him was that she could tell he was a homosexual. Otherwise she would have told someone. When she had something in her heart, she couldn’t hide it. That’s why it was still working so well after eighty-eight years. Not like Victor, with all his cute jokes and smiles and songs and stories, then boom, he drops dead in the middle of the grocery store because all the debts he was hiding sat on his heart like the big sacks of rice, twenty pounds a sack.
At every ceremony, a few girls sang along with the boy who played the guitar. They always wore shirts so thin that you felt like running over and putting coats on them. And there were also the girls who were studying dancing, wearing black bodysuits that made their nipples stick out so much from the cold that they looked like they might fall off any minute, and those black tights that were stuck in their slits, which didn’t look very healthy to Raymonde. They all had sad faces, because the Holocaust is very sad, and also because they were freezing their bottoms off. If they at least had a little flesh on them to keep them warm. They stood in the middle of the camp like scarecrows, dancing and singing in memory of the ones who died, while they themselves appeared as if they had just arrived on the death march.
Only one of them looked as if her mother still remembered how to cook a pot of food. A nice ass, round as an apple. Pink, healthy flesh on her hands and hips. Raymonde liked her from the start. She wanted to ask the girl to sit next to her, but the main singer, Liron was her name, always took the seat. Day after day, that Liron sat down next to Raymonde. Even if one of the other children was there first, she would tell them to move, and they obeyed her. Raymonde knew people like that from the home. That Liron had scooped her up the way the women in the home scooped up the lonely widowers who sometimes came to live there and still had control of their sphincters. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t want to say anything. She just waited to grab that sweet girl for a minute and tell her that she sang very nicely. It was in Majdanek that she finally managed to talk to her, and the girl was so moved that she almost tripped on the railway tracks.
That only made Raymonde like her more. And what she liked the most was when she saw her at dinner in the hotel, putting some food aside for the cats. She immediately thought of Rivka. Even though she wasn’t sure that Rivka would want to help Polish cats, who had done nothing to stop the horrors. But on the other hand, why were the cats to blame, it happened even before their parents were born, and Raymonde decided to pile food on another plate just for them. The guide stared but didn’t say anything—after all, she was a survivor—and later Raymonde took the plate over to the girl. They went out together to feed the cats, and the girl—in the meantime Raymonde had found out that her name was Nofar—ran to her room and brought back another shawl for Raymonde so she wouldn’t be cold. Raymonde was sure the girl would ask her more about the Holocaust. That day she had told them about the ghetto, and it was so sad and terrible that Raymonde was afraid she would have nightmares from her own stories. But the girl didn’t ask about the Holocaust. And she didn’t talk about herself either, the way many of the children there did. First they asked about the Holocaust and then, when they got tired of it, they told her
whom they loved and whom they hated, and didn’t even ask her to keep it a secret. An old lady—whom did she have to tell it to anyway? Her husband had died a long time ago, and all she had left of her twin sister, her soul sister, was a suitcase, a passport, and socks. Instead, the girl looked at her and asked what it was like to be old.
Not elderly, old.
Raymonde didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t closed her mouth since she set out on this trip, and now she was silent. The girl didn’t fill the silence. She let it be. She listened to it the way others listen to the words people say. At the end of that silence, Raymonde told her that being old is being completely alone. So alone that sometimes you make up things just to be less alone. Now it was the girl’s turn to be silent. Or rather, both of them were silent, but this time the silence was the girl’s. Her cheeks were pink from the cold and there were tears in her eyes, and Raymonde had no idea whether they were because of what she’d said. Nofar wanted to tell her that if being old meant making up things so you wouldn’t be alone, then it really wasn’t very different from being seventeen. Instead, she said psss-psss-psss to the cats and tossed them another piece of salami.
34
Maya stood at the door to Nofar’s room and looked inside. A fiery red spot blazed in her chest: you’re not supposed to be here. It was early afternoon, and the house was deserted. Her father was at work. Her mother was at work. Her older sister had just been picked up and taken to yet another TV panel.
The Liar Page 16