I Pity the Poor Immigrant

by Zachary Lazar

  “Strange,” she said again. “I don’t know how my friend Hugh found your story, but these things happen. He knew about my life in Tel Aviv, and so he passed it on. And then everyone says ‘strange.’ ‘How strange.’ ”

  She showed me another photograph. This one was of her mother, a thin woman in a bright orange head scarf, her pale skin lusterless, like clear wax. Of course I already knew something about Gila’s mother, in particular about what Gila’s mother had done to keep them both alive during their time in Bergen-Belsen.

  “She’s sixty-four in that picture,” Gila said. “She had cancer too. I took care of her for eight years—she fought for a long time. When she died, in 1979, I had just turned forty. I didn’t want her to die, but obviously her living meant I had to keep taking care of her. I was a cocktail waitress—the Dan Hotel is still there on the beach in Tel Aviv, you can go see it sometime. What I’m saying is that there was no way someone like me was going to make a fresh start after eight years of that. There was no way for someone like me to get ahead.”

  She met my eye with a defiant candor. She was telling me this story not as a woman who’d known me as a twelve-year-old girl, but as a woman who knew me now. She was tough—I’d forgotten that. I found myself feeling a complicated warmth toward her. There was of course another part of me that felt otherwise, that deeply mistrusted her. Her affair with my father, in conjunction with my mother’s death, had caused all kinds of problems for me. Sometimes it seems that the confusion of that time has never really faded and that I go through life dazed—skeptical but also credulous, both doubter and believer at the same time—with the hazy result that I am almost never correct in my assessment of other people and their motives. The memory of my father telling me about their affair is a blur. The girl on the other side of the blur, the girl who was I, is not even someone I particularly like. Out of that blur comes whoever I am now. And so the blur is shaming, because it represents a force outside my control that is in a sense definitive.

  The opposite of yored, she told me then, is oleh—the plural is olim. Olim are those who have “ascended”—those who have gone to Israel and settled there. “The American,” as she referred to Lansky now, had wanted to become oleh, she said, but he was refused. This was the story she was telling me. The apartment in Tel Aviv was his parting gift, an odd gift that had made her feel somehow diminished. It seemed to imply that she needed his help, that she was incapable of taking care of herself. She still didn’t know how the arrangement worked. The rent was always paid, the power stayed on, the water, the gas. No one would tell her who was keeping up these payments.

  “The management company said it had been taken care of,” she told me. “What else did I want to know, it was mine. Well, they knew that I knew who was ultimately taking care of it. I did know. I’d had a relationship with him. In a sense, I still had a relationship with him. This is what I meant when I talked about yored before. The sense of going down, of descending, of being corrupt. Both of us were yordim, even though I still lived in Israel, even though I was a citizen there. We would both always be yordim, never olim. That was one of the things we had in common. This is what I thought you might find interesting.”

  She was still striking, even in her illness. I was resisting the temptation to order a glass of wine and the effort was making my mouth a little dry. Gila seemed to sense this, watching me.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said. “I was worried you wouldn’t, that you’d change your mind.”

  “It’s been twenty-eight years,” I said. “A long time.”

  “In a sense it’s been a long time. But in another sense, it’s like it just happened. All those things in the past. We haven’t seen each other in all these years. In that sense, it’s like it was yesterday.”

  She’d wanted to be a designer, she went on. In the seventies, in Tel Aviv, she had shown some sketches she’d made of women’s clothes to a man who manufactured swimwear, but he’d been dismissive. Even after her mother’s death, she’d had no real hope of getting anywhere. And yet, she told me, there was that empty apartment sitting on a quiet street in Tel Aviv which she could either live in rent-free after her mother’s death or find some other way to exploit.

  “I went to South Tel Aviv,” she told me. “Those places you wrote about where Bellen came from—Hatikva, Etzel Street. I knew enough to know that that’s where I should go. There was a cook I worked with at the hotel and he brought me—we took the bus that first time, it was a weekday, before our shift. Even back then, it was like you describe. Coffee for the men. For me, nothing. Coffee in those little gold-rimmed cups. I had to go back three or four times—it was just luck finally that got me anywhere. Luck. They wouldn’t have told me a word if I hadn’t recognized one of them. He’d been the driver of the man I told you about, the American. Because I knew his driver, I could speak to them. I could tell them that I didn’t want the apartment. What I wanted was the next year’s rent and then the apartment was theirs—whoever’s. I had no idea how much the rent was. I just thought one year sounded like a nice round figure.”

  She assumed they would say no, or worse, that they’d ask for something back, involve her somehow, but then, after two weeks of silence, the driver appeared one evening at the Dan Hotel. He arranged to meet her the next day at the apartment she’d shared with her mother all those years.

  “It was not a full year’s rent,” she told me. “It was more like a few months. But it was enough for an air ticket, with a little left over. It was enough to get me here.”

  The waiter cleared our unfinished salads. I told Gila I had to go to the bathroom, but what I really needed was to go inside and sit at the bar and write it down without her watching me. If I don’t write it down, it begins to change. I knew it was changing a little even as I was writing it down. Etzel Street. Hatikva. The names of places she’d seen in my piece. I still didn’t know how much I believed her story. It occurred to me that the whole time I was in Israel, I had never once thought of my old babysitter, Gila Konig.

  Gila Konig, born Tsilya Konig, somewhere in Hungary, 1939. Survivor of Bergen-Belsen, survivor of a DP camp outside Munich called Foehrenwald, refugee in the new state of Israel, 1950–1980. In 1980, Gila Konig had come to New York with a few hundred dollars and no connections, thinking she might find work as a designer, or if not as a designer, doing something in the fashion industry. Eventually, with my father’s help, she managed to enter into the dress business, selling wholesale to department stores—Macy’s, Dillard’s, Neiman Marcus—from her own small showroom on Seventh Avenue. And for a brief span early on in this trajectory—for a little more than a year—she had scraped by as a Hebrew school teacher at a temple on the Upper East Side, the congregation my family happened to belong to in the year my mother began dying of cancer.

  I noticed that throughout our conversation she had almost never referred to Lansky by name. It was “the man I told you about,” or “the man I knew, the American.” It occurred to me that you could read this two ways. It was either an indication that she was lying and was nervous that her story sounded untrue, or that she was telling the truth and was nervous that her story sounded untrue.

  When I returned to the table, she was talking on her cell phone. After she finished, there was a silence as we readjusted to the people we were now, as opposed to the people we’d been all those years ago. She looked away, at the long line of tables to our side, most of them empty. They each had a tiny white vase with a white orchid and a sprig of fern, which in the shade of the porch stood in subtle but dramatic contrast to the white tablecloths.

  “I’m lucky I know Hugh,” she said. “I don’t have many people in my life. He’s waiting for me. He’s at the apartment. I’ll finish telling you the story and then we should go.”

  She took another sip of water, as if in preparation, and then she told me what I would have guessed a long time ago if I had wanted to think about it. She told me that her affair with my father had started before my mo
ther’s death, not after it. She admitted that from the moment she’d met my father she could see what he would ultimately want. She could see the opening, I suppose you could say, but of course she put it differently. He was “lost” in “grief,” she said. It wasn’t what my father “wanted,” it was what he “needed.” It was “naïve,” she went on, to wish for men to be “better” than they were. I feel somehow prim writing this all down now, inserting these quotation marks. I look at my past and what infuriates me is not my father but the rigid predictability of everything I did in the hopes of getting back at him—my marriage after a promiscuous past, the affair that then broke that marriage up. All of that by my midtwenties. All so that I could for a brief time pretend to be better than my father and then repeat the kind of behavior I held against him. When you’re young, your power is self-destruction. It occurred to me that my being there at that lunch was just a late echo of that self-destruction.

  “You’re not angry at me,” Gila said.

  “I told you already, it was a long time ago.”

  “You haven’t told me what your intentions are. What your interest in all this is.”

  “If you’re asking if I want to write about your past, then I don’t have any intentions. I have other things I’m working on right now.”

  “I would think there would be money in a story like this, but maybe that’s a little vulgar for you, getting money for something you’re not that interested in, or that wasn’t your idea. I guess I think about money because I wasn’t born into a world like this one, the kind of world you were born into. The kind of world your father was able to give you access to.”

  She sat up very straight, her hands placed before her on the table, and looked at me with something like reproach. Perhaps hearing someone’s confession is inherently draining. Its effect at that moment was to prevent me from pressing her to tell me anything more. I knew that’s what she wanted, and to ask would have made me feel I was indulging her, granting her story more interest than I wanted it to have. As I said, I was familiar with people overestimating the specialness of their stories. People imagine movies. They imagine a best seller, not a vanity press book. It’s the way the world is, everywhere, not only in America. You can go through Bergen-Belsen, Foehrenwald, and still be prey to this myth.

  I knew I couldn’t write in good faith about Gila’s past with Lansky without writing about her past with my father—perhaps that explains my lack of interest at that lunch. I knew that to write about my father would only be to open up the old wounds, and I’d already done some of that years before in the memoir I’d written about my marriage and its collapse. I was tired of memoirs, I thought, tired of myself. But perhaps I was simply tired of struggling with my father and his opinion of my opinions. Which is to say that it was probably inevitable that I would eventually write about Gila and Lansky, Gila and my father, for I was still angry with my father, even if I didn’t want to be.

  The waiter came with the bill. We weren’t friends, so although I offered to help Gila with the check, I didn’t press it when she refused.

  “I’ll tell you more the next time,” she said. “When we see each other again. How about that?”

  She smiled. She wanted more from me even now. She wanted the waiter to take our photograph. I forced myself to move my chair around the table, closer to Gila’s, my hand on her shoulder, so he could fit us both in the frame.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said then, flatly.

  Hearing that sudden hardness in her voice, I had a moment of regret. I began to feel that I had judged her too harshly. She took one last look at the photo on her digital camera, then drew back the lens and put it in her purse. We smiled at each other—my smile transparently false—and before saying goodbye I made an equally false promise that we’d see each other again soon.

  2.

  I went to visit my father a few days later. He lives now on 72nd Street, about eight blocks from where we’d lived when I was growing up. When the elevator door opens on the third floor, even when you know what to expect, the light-filled spaciousness can still come as a surprise. The living room, like a vast hall, has three different groupings of sofas and chairs—it even has one of those peculiar circular couches, usually seen in hotel lobbies, with a tall bouquet at the center like the pistil in a giant lotus. Floor lamps, framed etchings, a bronze boddhisattva standing lankily in a far corner. In the room he uses as his study, he switched off the TV and I told him about my lunch with Gila. He listened inattentively, eating cold beef consommé out of a bowl.

  “She lives in Sag Harbor,” I said. “Like she’s been trying to get back there ever since that weekend.”

  He wiped his hands on a large napkin, licking his teeth. “She came in to say hello about a year ago,” he said. “Right before I closed up the shop. She had cancer, she told me. They didn’t know yet how serious it was. Maybe she just didn’t want to tell me.”

  “You never told me you saw her.”

  “Once or twice over the years she came in to say hello.”

  He was even less interested in my meeting with Gila than I’d expected him to be. I understood then that he seldom if ever thinks about her, just as, in the wake of all the trouble I brought him when I was younger, he seldom thinks of me. I made it hard for him—I frustrated and ultimately baffled him. He had only wished me well all those years. I was so accusative for so long that in his eyes that’s who I am now, no matter how often we see each other.

  He had other problems to think about in any case. A few months before this, his name had appeared in a newspaper story along with the name of a longtime partner of his—an antiques dealer in London—who had been accused of fraud. The dealer in London had sold a consignment of English furniture to a dealer in Switzerland. My father had negotiated with this Swiss dealer to sell some of the English furniture to clients in New York. The consignment of furniture, falsely valued at over three million dollars, turned out to contain several forgeries. My father has claimed repeatedly that he had no idea about this. He “flatly denies” knowing anything about it, as the newspaper put it.

  He showed me an elegant piece of furniture that afternoon—it was the massive desk in his study. It had belonged to his best friend, Harry Klein, he told me, the friend whose boat we used to go on when I was young. After Klein’s death, his wife, Deborah, had found herself in financial trouble, their assets worth far less than she’d believed. The desk, my father pointed out, had ebony marquetry and fleur-de-lis spandrels flanked by pilasters carved like acanthus leaves. It was called a partners desk, he told me. There were kneeholes on all four sides of its mahogany bulk so that four bankers could sit together in the sepia light and go over accounts. He didn’t know where the Kleins had found it. He asked me how much I thought it was worth, and I told him I had no idea. He said that Deborah Klein had lived with the desk for almost twenty years. It had made her feel a certain way about herself, about her life with Harry. They’d had a set of Hepplewhite chairs, a French commode from the eighteenth century, this partners desk from a famous workshop in England, Marsh & Tatham. After Harry’s death, the finances unraveled. Deborah had had to sell the house in Southampton, the house I’d visited as a girl. When she asked my father for his help with the antiques, he’d had to tell her, after she’d already lost so much, that the desk too wasn’t worth anything like what she’d thought. There were faded spots in the wood in places light would never have hit it. It was a fake—it had been cobbled together from scraps of other old pieces of furniture. My father gave her seventy-five thousand dollars for it, more than it was worth. She hadn’t spoken to him since. She’d thought the desk was worth four times that. In Deborah Klein’s mind, the desk was worth more than their friendship.

  “You don’t talk about yourself very much,” I said.

  “No. Not really.”

  “You think it’s tasteless?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Maybe that’s why I’m curious. Because of the tastelessnes
s.”

  “I don’t think about the past very much. I try not to.”

  “Why?”

  “My parents never talked about the past. My grandparents didn’t. The past was what you were trying to get away from. You understand why.”

  “No.”

  “Because we came from nowhere. Because we were no one. That’s why. Part of becoming someone is not having to talk about your past. I couldn’t talk about it now if I wanted to. I don’t know anything about it.”

  He had something else he wanted to share with me that afternoon, a kind of family heirloom, which he presented to me there in the study. His brother Jacob had recently passed on some recordings made by their father—my grandfather—who died before I really knew him. My grandfather had built up a chain of jewelry stores which were then fought over after his death by his two eldest sons, my uncles. They turned the chain of stores into rival boutiques that have since become famous. My father won’t set foot in either of them. He feels judged by his brothers, I think, because they have made even more money than he has. I say all this, and yet after a lifetime in his company, I don’t really know him. He is probably unknowable. When he says he has no information about the past, I believe him. It would have been not just personal shame his family felt, but also the greater shame of having left behind an impoverished world that eventually was exterminated. It wasn’t something people talked about. Very likely, it wasn’t even possible to talk about it.

  He wanted to play me these recordings. He explained that his father would sometimes amuse his sons by hosting a mock radio show which he would capture on an old-fashioned gramophone that cut actual records, small shellac discs that could then be played back. My uncle had kept hundreds of these discs in storage and finally had them preserved on CDs. My father is in his midseventies now. He bent over the stereo with a scowl that looked angry but was really only reflexive, the face he wears when concentrating. He wore what he almost always wears in summer, a dress shirt with French cuffs, linen trousers, polished shoes. His hands shook a little. He stood there stooped over the CD player as the recordings began.