by Tova Reich
“Gloria darling,” Maurice whimpered in desperation, “you promised to have a drink mit me tonight. A night cup. Remember? We have a date. I want you should know—I’ll be waiting for you in mine lounging pajamas and mine slippers, I’ll be waiting for you all night long if I have to, in mine suite, Mrs. Lieb. You remember where mine suite is—yes, Gloria darling?” And he glared furiously at Monty, his treacherous protégé, as the couple swept brazenly out, waving to those left behind, like royalty at the open door of their fabulous cabin about to embark for places about which the rabble could not even begin to dream.
Gloria also had a suite of her own, the Palace Suite, a sensible investment of Holocaust discretionary funds, Maurice had calculated, but they made their way instead to Monty’s far from frugal expense-account room where, even in the rash and glazed condition they were in, they recognized they were less likely to be disturbed. In no time flat, all of Monty’s rumpled and limp clothing molted in a heap on the medallion of the Persian rug. He stretched out on his back in the king-size bed, his furry sponge of a belly overlapping the sheet drawn up to the general vicinity of his former waist, one hand, as he waited for Gloria to emerge from the bathroom, idly performing a housekeeping chore, picking the lint from his navel, the other arm winged on the pillow, propping up his head, which he swiveled slowly toward her when she finally appeared. “Hey, you’re a real chick,” he observed appreciatively as she stood alongside the bed, draped from breast to drumstick in a plush white towel embroidered in gold with the Grand Hotel monogram, held clutched together at the cleavage with one pampered hand. “Great legs,” Monty went on with appealing boyish enthusiasm, and then, thankfully, instead of tagging on, “for a woman your age,” which was what Gloria was vaguely expecting and dreading, already ducking figuratively against the impending blow, he added, “You should really have them insured.”
Va-va-va-voom, Gloria mused, the little champ thinks he’s about to add Marlene Dietrich to his trophy case.
“So,” Monty casually rapped out, “I hope you don’t mind being on top.”
Gloria’s eyebrows shot up. Oh, my God, I’m too old to be on top, she was thinking. Under the towel, even with all the extravagant maintenance, things were withering relentlessly, things were drooping and sagging, things, alas, would never be the same, never be as tight, as smooth, as fresh, or as firm as once they had been.
“See, I’ve been diagnosed with chronic Holocaust fatigue syndrome,” Monty explained. “I’m under strict doctor’s orders not to exert myself.”
Ah, handicapped by the Holocaust. Who could argue with that? “Sure,” Gloria said after some reflection. “No problem, Rabbi.” She began to strut around the room. For a minute Monty thought she was going to entertain him with some kind of mature-woman grinding number before dutifully climbing on top, but then she began switching off all the lights with her one free hand, drawing all the draperies gaplessly tight, inspecting the venue meticulously for even a single rogue ray of light that might have sneaked through to illuminate her, the stealth invasion of even one revealing pale moonbeam, releasing the towel shielding her only to grope her way invisibly into the bed, flinging it directly over the telephone on the nightstand, to cover the message bulb, which was glowing urgent red.
Luckily, it was only after she had hastily dressed and tiptoed considerately out of the room in the pitch-dark, only after she had shut the door softly behind her and he had popped his eyes open from the simulated sleep of the mythical sated male, that Monty pressed that button to listen to the message. “Pincus? Crusher Casey here from the Washington Post. I got your number from your wife. Look, I’m on deadline on the museum piece, and I wanna run a couple of things by you for your input. Okay, number one, according to a very reliable source, when you were a reporter for the Jewish Journal, you were responsible for the deaths of a couple of hundred, maybe even a few thousand, Jewish refugees when you charged ahead to scoop a story about a secret airlift that all the other newspapers knew about too but were sitting on for fear of endangering the escapees. Care to comment? Number two, re that police record of yours on a domestic violence spousal abuse rap, i.e., wife beating, and also for bloodying a hooker—any comment? Three, we’ve got eyewitness confirmation here that you’ve been keeping a couple of cans of poison gas from the concentration camps on a shelf in your garage. Comment? Okay, let’s see, that’s about it for now. So Pincus, give me a call, you’ve got my number. The ball’s in your court. The way I figure it, it’s probably in your best interest to tell your side of the story, or whatever the hell, but like I said, I’m on deadline. If I don’t hear from you in time, we’ll have to run with it as is, with, you know, that great old one-liner, for whatever it’s worth, ‘The Holocaust Museum’s Dr. Monty Pincus was unavailable for comment.’ So okay, Pincus, ciao, looking forward to hearing from you.”
That was enough to deflate any man. Sitting up stark naked with his thin legs hanging over the side of the bed, Monty looked at the clock next to the telephone. It was past midnight in the charnel house of Poland, which meant that it was about six hours earlier in the giddy capital of the free world. He would call that son of a bitch in Washington and if he actually got the living and breathing version on the line, he would hang up immediately. As it happened, he got the machine version. “Mr. Casey? This is Rabbi Dr. Monty Pincus, director of scholarship and academics at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, calling you from the Auschwitz death camp. I would like to make three points to you. First, you should be aware that my wife is not a reliable source. She is a sick woman not responsible for anything she says or does, of whom you are unconscionably taking advantage. There is a wealth of certified psychiatric documentation attesting to this fact. Second, you should be advised that if you move ahead and publish your scurrilous article, it is not only me that you will be hurting, but, far more importantly, the six million Jewish martyrs, including men, women, and over one and one half million innocent children, exterminated by Hitler during the Holocaust, whom you will be murdering for a second time, not to mention the fact that you will also be seriously harming the museum that has been erected in their memory. I therefore advise you to consult your conscience and to consider very carefully whether you are ready to take upon yourself such a heavy weight of responsibility and guilt. Finally, I’m giving you fair warning here and now, you bastard—if you go ahead and print this shit, I’m gonna sue the crap out of you, I’m gonna take you to court and wipe you out, sue you for everything you’ve got, your last fucking nickel. That’s a promise—and let me tell you something, motherfucker, rabbis always keep their fucking promises. It goes with the job description. Any comments?”
He was practically reeling when he smashed down the receiver. There was no point trying to sleep now. In painfully swelling agitation he threw on his gamy and rumpled pants and shirt from the pile in the middle of the floor, not bothering with underwear, and blundered barefoot straight to Krystyna’s room on the cheaper side of the hotel. “Didn’t I tell you it was him?” Krystyna commented to Bunny, who was sprawled on the bed. “I could smell you from down the hall,” she said to Monty as she stood aside to let him through the door. “You smell like her mommy,” she added in a whisper, bobbing her head toward Bunny. “Joy, the world’s most expensive perfume.”
The two women, wearing matching white terry-cloth bathrobes with the gold Grand Hotel insignia pressed onto the breast like a badge, had been watching Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS, dubbed into Serbo-Croatian, which Bunny now clicked to mute. Good old Ilsa of the splendid boobs, the leather boots, the black gloves, the shiny whip, the swastika armband, the Aryan tresses, the death’s-head cap—just what he needed at the moment! Still twitching with fury over that phone call, Monty swatted aside the candy wrappers, empty soda bottles, greasy potato chip bags, and other nauseating trash that was strewn across the befouled bed, evidence of a barbaric and costly expense-account raid of the minibar. He churned his weight down into the mattress alongside Bunny, who instant
ly recoiled, sprang up immediately as if scorched by a hot poker. He narrowed his eyes at her as she squeezed next to Krystyna on the brown velvet club chair, the two of them in their twin assembly-line robes resembling spent porno extras on a break on the set from the drudgery of boring, pointless girl-gropes-girl scenes. There was no chance of a threesome tonight, he figured resentfully as he glared at them sitting there with perfectly serviceable bodies under their robes, especially when you factored in the subfreezing signals that Bunny was giving off almost audibly, even though he really deserved an extra-special treat of some kind after what he had just gone through with that punk reporter, not to mention deserving some kind of special thank-you just in principle, just in a general sense, for all those hours, days, weeks, months, years, of his life that he had at such incalculable personal emotional and spiritual cost sacrificed to the museum, to making the Holocaust number one on the horror hit parade, the paradigm and model against which all past and future atrocities must strive but can never quite succeed to measure up. But if the Holocaust had taught him anything at all, it was that there was no justice in this world, it was foolishly naive, childishly innocent, to expect it. No, there would be no threesome for him tonight no matter how truly he deserved it, no matter even how desperately badly he needed it for the sake of his health—he was under such pressure from all that museum work, so stressed out, so tense, he needed some relief, some release, by all rights the two of them over there on that chair compacted together in their identical snow-white robes like some kind of freaky two-headed ice queen, should just break down, they should just give in, just say to themselves, Oh, what’s the big deal, we’ll do it for the cause. But no, he was not fated this night to be part of a fun trio. Their pathetic threesome, instead of getting down to business like any normal lusty threesome in this day and age, would just go on staring at the tube as if they’d been hit over the head with a sledgehammer, watching dopily with jaws hanging down while Commandant Ilsa, as part of her job description, soundlessly tortured a naked nubile female prisoner for purely scientific reasons, in compliance with the camp’s medical experimentation program to test the limits of pain endurance, and then as she went on, with equal professionalism, to chop off the useless member of a male prisoner who, like the other losers before him, could not hold back long enough to gratify her.
Monty turned from the evening’s entertainment and eyed Bunny like a rival he was about to trump. “You don’t by any chance find this stuff in any way in violation of your principles by being just a teensy-weensy bit sadomasochistic, or maybe really really offensive to women, not to mention a trivialization of Holocaust memory?” he inquired.
Deliberately avoiding returning his gaze, Bunny shook her head in wordless communion with Krystyna; this guy just doesn’t get it, was what she was beaming. “As far as I’m concerned,” she proceeded to lecture with grim didacticism, “when it comes to artistic expression, I reject all forms of censorship. In my opinion, artistically speaking, nothing’s off-limits, even with respect to the Holocaust—except, of course, denial. Holocaust denial? That’s where I draw the line, that’s the only no-no. Denial has to be outlawed everywhere, across the board, universally banned as a hate crime. I personally wouldn’t dignify a denier by arguing with him even for two seconds. Give a denier a platform, and you give him legitimacy, it’s as simple as that. But as long as you don’t deny that the Holocaust happened more or less the way it happened, it’s out there for everyone’s creative expression—kind of like my kids’ finger paints, for example, or their Play-Doh. It’s raw material for all humanity, so to speak. The Jews don’t own the Holocaust.”
So now it was denial, the latest heresy. Burn the denier at the stake and turn the pathetic little fruitcake into a major martyr. What a tiresome, self-righteous, stupid bitch! What had he ever done, Monty pondered morosely, to be named the designated receptacle of her pieties, her totalitarianism couched as liberalism, her simpleminded political correctness? So new to the Holocaust game, so fundamentally ignorant on the subject, and already she was spouting her canned opinions. Thank God he had managed in the nick of time to avoid that lurid threesome they were tempting him with, he would have shot his reputation by falling asleep in the middle out of sheer brain-numbing tedium. Still, he was keenly aware that she was the vital link to the big check that Maurice was gunning for, Maurice would strangle him plain and simple if he screwed things up, it was essential to be polite, to carry on as if he took her seriously. “Well, Ilsa’s definitely not a denier,” Monty conceded, “she doesn’t deny herself a single thing.” Then, struggling to keep the conversation going, he pushed on, taking up even in this incongruous context his handy persona of the eternal expert. “Did you know that they shot this schlock on the sly over just a couple of days, on the old set of Hogan’s Heroes—you know, the television series with that crazy Nazi Klink, ‘Co-lo-nel Klink,’ as Maurice used to say, he just loved that show?”
“Excuse me, but I really really can’t even begin to tell you how offensive it is to hear you making fun of a harmless little senior citizen’s mispronunciations,” Bunny scolded in her scariest kindergarten teacher’s tones. “How would you like it if someone made fun of something about you that you couldn’t help? And, by the way, calling this movie ‘schlock’? It just so happens that this ‘schlock’ is part of the academic curriculum of the prestigious UCLA film school.”
Maurice harmless? That’s a good one. But with the old man so bent on the grand prize of her mother’s big bucks, he wasn’t even going to begin to get into it. Instead, he went on flashing his expert’s license. “You know, it’s really too bad you weren’t at UCLA when I gave a lecture on the Holocaust in cinema. It’s one of my scholarly specialties, as it happens. Of course everyone knows that Ilsa’s a bona fide cult classic, based on a real person, as a matter of fact, the Nazi camp guard Irma Grese, who would whip female prisoners until she reached orgasm—this tidbit comes from oral testimony, needless to say, so it has been a little hard for researchers to document. In any case, one thing’s for sure—Hitler has made a major contribution to the fantasies of sadists and masochists worldwide, greater even, in my humble opinion, than the Catholic church, the medical profession, and the educational system combined. The S-and-M crowd has a lot to thank him for.”
Bunny flicked a look at Krystyna. “Where in the world did you guys ever pick up this jerk?” she asked blandly, as if getting an answer to her question did not really matter to her anyway.
Monty did not quite know how to interpret this unremitting stream of apparent hostility, so accustomed was he to regarding himself as lovable; some kindergarten teacher almost half a century earlier had done an excellent job on him in the self-esteem department. He therefore concluded once again that this nasty display of attitude from Bunny was merely superficial, the flip side of adoration, and he plunged ahead doggedly with another factoid. “Well, since you have such a high opinion of this cinematic masterpiece,” he informed, “I’m sure you’ll be pleased to learn that the producer is one of our own—Friedman, a Jew, naturlich.”
“Oh, please,” Bunny said, pursing her lips in weary disapproval. “Is it at all possible for just once in your life to look at something minus the Jewish connection? I mean, it’s just so dull and provincial. You are aware, I hope, that there are other varieties of experience in this world besides the Jewish one? To take just one example, how important do you think the Jewish question or the Holocaust is to those little guys with the loincloths and feathers in the Amazon rain forest?”
Monty set about with feigned academic earnestness to tackle her openly hostile question—even he could recognize that. “Well, if you don’t count the exploiters of the Amazon, a bunch of whom, true to stereotype, are no doubt Jewish, or the fact that some of those natives in penis gourds might very possibly be descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel exiled by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, which future DNA testing might one day prove conclusively, there are, for your information, also probably
at least a dozen or so Nazis still hiding out there in your rain forest, very much connected to the Jewish question and the Holocaust, as a matter of fact. Oh, and by the way, speaking of which, Nazis, I mean—Ilsa? The actress who plays Ilsa? I’ll bet you she’s Jewish too. She looks Jewish. She looks exactly like a Jewish mother from hell. And she’s no spring chicken either. She’s definitely over forty, about your age more or less, I’d guess. Check her out—there are unmistakable signs of wear and tear.”
“Oh, so he’s an ageist, too.” By now, Bunny was addressing herself exclusively to Krystyna.
Monty leaned over and grasped her hand, forcing her to acknowledge him. “Believe me, I have nothing against older women,” he articulated with precision. “I love older women. Trust me.”
Bunny freed herself with a shudder and stood up. “I’m out of here,” she said. She gathered up her clothing and stomped off to the bathroom. A minute later, she emerged haphazardly dressed. “Where are you going?” Krystyna asked anxiously.
“This place stinks,” Bunny declared, irrevocably on her way out. “I need some air.”
As soon as the door slammed shut, Monty stretched out his arm and roughly pulled Krystyna over to him down onto the groaning bed. “Come here, shiksa,” he said, and in an impressive feat of carnal dexterity, with one motion tore off her ridiculous robe while almost simultaneously shedding his own overworked rags. But she turned her face pettishly away from him to the stained fleur-de-lis wallpaper. “I think you may have spoiled everything this time,” she said, a fetching wenchlike pout in her voice.
Even though she was an underling and beholden, Monty recognized that there was no way he was going to score with her that night until he let her talk herself out. He did not possess the will or the energy at the moment to use brute force, which in principle, he was firmly convinced Polish girls were accustomed to and actually preferred. He was just too tired and preoccupied right then for that kind of heavy investment. For his part, there was no chance at all that he would confide his problems to her, she was too simple and alien. So lying naked on their backs side by side with their noses pointed up to the peeling ceiling under one sheet on the bed paid for through a combination of private Holocaust donations and U.S. government funding, he channeled the bulk of his mental powers to sifting and resifting through the situation with the reporter, reviewing and rehashing also in that framework his private troubles with his wife Honey at home, yet he still managed at the same time, thanks to his long experience faking listening to women, to devote a rationed number of brain cells of an inferior quality to more or less taking her story in, lubricating this show of attention with grunts and snorts now and then at what must have been approximately the right pauses and intervals, judging from the fact that she kept on going, she hadn’t yet stopped suddenly to accuse him of not listening as sometimes happened with women in similar circumstances, though not very often, he was such a pro. She was as selfishly and as single-mindedly focused on her story as he was on his own, he suspected, too absorbed in her own saga to pay attention to him; probably in the end she didn’t really care one way or another whether he was listening or not as long as she could go on unwinding her tedious soap opera—something about how Bunny was planning to get a job in the museum, in the education department or some other division, her mom would arrange it, and then Bunny would bring her, little Krystyna Jesudowicz from Brzezinka, Poland, to Washington, D.C., in the great and glorious United States of America, to work in the press office or in public relations or as chief of the guides or in collections and acquisitions or whatever, because Bunny was not only fond of her, they had so much in common despite their differences in background, it was really remarkable, but also because Bunny firmly believed that the museum should hire employees of all races and religions and minorities and sexual orientation in order to elevate the Holocaust from just a Jewish hang-up with which the Jews were guilt-tripping the rest of the world to the level of a universal archetype with all-purpose generic lessons and implications for everyone. Bunny would sponsor her, Bunny would get her a green card, Bunny would bless her with citizenship, he could have no idea what an opportunity this was for her, what all this meant to her, and now because he had been so obnoxious to Bunny, so condescending and vulgar and insulting, maybe she would change her mind, maybe it would not happen at all.