My Holocaust

by Tova Reich

  Krystyna was sincerely relieved that Bunny had recovered her bearings and made it to the end of her remarks. The whole business with her mother had been an awful drain. It had dragged her down, especially after Gloria’s husband Leon had thrown up his hands and declared, “I’m sorry, I can’t deal with another sick wife,” and dumped the whole problem in Bunny’s lap—and he was supposed to be a rabbi and a Holocaust survivor, of all things. Though his own daughter Rama, as she now insisted upon being called, who had been reconciled with her father after the Auschwitz camp reunion by Gloria no less, had sought to chasten him with her pronouncement that sick wives were his karma, he had probably been a gynecologist or an abortionist or a female genital mutilator in one of his previous incarnations, he had just better accept his place on the wheel of life, Leon had bailed out, literally moved from the Fifth Avenue duplex back to his old apartment on Riverside Drive in which he had lived with his first wife, Rose, handing the entire mess over to Bunny.

  And it was a mess, Krystyna reflected, shaking her head. Gloria’s decline beginning soon after her return from Auschwitz was shocking. It seemed, at first, almost selfishly purposeful and intentional, almost like a case of gross self-indulgence. Bunny had been furious. Until she finally found a doctor who would sign off on a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or, at the very least, dementia, Bunny could not forgive her mother for what she interpreted as cold abandonment and neglect, just like what had happened to poor little Binjamin Wilkormirski in his memoir, which she had no doubt, though she knew very well that some spiteful people now regarded it as a pathological fantasy and a fraud, was truer than true; she and Krystyna still maintained the ritual of reading a passage out loud from its pages each and every night, faithfully, at bedtime. With no consideration whatsoever for Bunny’s needs or feelings, shortly after she came home from Auschwitz, Gloria totally and almost maliciously gave up taking care of herself. She began to eat desperately, as if she had herself been a victim of starvation in the camps and had just been liberated, anything she could lay her hands on she ate, from morning to night, never pausing through all of her waking hours. She was never without food in her mouth, as if there were no tomorrow and yesterday had all been deprivation. Bunny was obliged to dispatch Krystyna to secondhand thrift shops to purchase extra-large T-shirts for Gloria and polyester skirts with elastic waistbands. It was astonishing to witness this once supremely elegant and impeccably groomed woman wearing a purple shirt from a rock concert stamped with the logo of a forgotten band called Brain Dead, strands of gray hair wilting around her bloated face. The only personal item she held on to, struggling ferociously to assert her claim to it even while being bathed by her caretakers or manipulated by licensed health care providers or when the Chinese herbalist and acupuncturist brought over by Marano attempted to apply three fingers to her pulse for diagnostic purposes, to pinpoint exactly where the flow of vital energy from the bodily organs had become unbalanced or been interrupted, was a heavy charm bracelet that Marano had fashioned for her, weighted down with single earrings that had languished forlorn in her drawer when their mates were lost—To transform your losses into healing, Marano said therapeutically; to keep before me at all times a reminder of what I have lost, Gloria thought.

  A little more than a year after the Auschwitz trip, following a private meeting with Maurice, the last non-family member she saw not including medical and household personnel, on the day that Bunny was installed as director of the museum in a solemn ceremony in the Hall of Remembrance by the eternal flame atop the altar filled with museum-quality soil collected from the concentration camps, Gloria stopped walking. “I’m not playing anymore,” she said. Then she stopped opening her eyes. “You haven’t shown me anything about the boy,” she said. Finally she stopped talking, except for rare occasions, such as during one of Bunny’s visits, when Gloria suddenly turned to her Filipino caretaker and inquired, “Who is that old lady, Loretta?” She must have opened her eyes for a flash to have a peek at the visitor, and unfortunately they had missed it. She also stopped feeding herself, though her devotion to eating remained as single-minded as ever. “Your mama have very good appetite,” Loretta told Bunny—pints of vanilla ice cream, slabs of chocolate cake, bowls of melon and oranges, potatoes and pickles and pasta, chicken and lamb chops and loaves of crusty bread. Her teeth were phenomenal, a rich woman’s teeth, the best that money could buy in dentistry; she ate voraciously. “All right already,” Gloria would say, “give me another cookie.” Bunny had heard this herself when she visited the Fifth Avenue duplex to observe one of the marathon feeding sessions, Loretta cooing encouragingly, like a mother feeding her baby, opening her own mouth sympathetically as she pushed into Gloria’s perpetually open mouth like a ragged fledgling’s poking upward from the nest spoonful after spoonful, each feeding session lasting a minimum of an hour and a half. But when, after more than three years of faithful service, never missing a day, Loretta informed Bunny that she planned to begin training a substitute to cover for her over a period of a few weeks while she returned to Manila to visit her own mother, who was also ailing, and then traveled on to Puttaparthi in India for a short retreat at the ashram of her guru, Sai Baba—she really really needed a break, she needed to clear her head and refresh her soul—Bunny announced that this would be the perfect time to put Gloria in the nursing facility, it was something she had long intended to do, keeping her at home in this ridiculous patched-together substandard setup was just so unprofessional. “But who will feed your mama?” Loretta had cried. “Nursing home will put feeding tube in her.” “Never, no way,” Bunny said. “Absolutely no feeding tube, it’s against our principles. No drastic measures, Mother would never have wanted that.” “Your mama not need feeding tube anyway,” Loretta said glumly. “She need somebody to feed her.” Then she added in desperation, “Your mama love to eat, but she cannot feed self. If nobody sit and feed your mama how long it takes, I afraid she die.” Bunny closed her eyes to express her thinly concealed impatience with Loretta’s incapacity to get it. The nursing home had professional feeders to deal with clients who for whatever reasons refused to feed themselves, she coldly informed the subordinate. Mother will just have to get used to it.

  “I’m not used to it yet,” Gloria had said as Loretta leaned over the railing of her hospital bed on her second day at the nursing home. This, at least, was what Loretta reported in a telephone call to the museum, which Krystyna had been obliged to take in her chief of staff’s office since Bunny refused to talk to her former employee. It was in that phone call, too, at Bunny’s behest, that Krystyna ordered Loretta to cease and desist at once from visiting Gloria; in any event, Director Bacon had given firm instructions to the nursing home administration to eject Loretta should she make any further attempts to invade the premises. And by the way, Director Bacon did not for one minute believe that Gloria ever said anything coherent at all such as that she wasn’t used to it yet; these were just quotes that Loretta invented to convince Director Bacon that Gloria was not a goner, that she still had a claim on life, so that she, Loretta, could keep her job. If Gloria really could speak, why on earth would she talk to a stranger, to an alien from a Third World country, instead of to her own daughter, to a benighted follower of this Baba boy guru, no less, a well-known pedophile and pederast and sexual harasser, as it happened, his name was on a list to be considered for condemnation by the museum’s Conscience Committee, speaking out against abusers and cults was definitely one of the important lessons of the Holocaust. Finally, in her capacity as Director Bacon’s official spokesperson, Krystyna advised Loretta that if Gloria persisted in refusing to make productive and efficient use of her turn with the nursing home’s professional feeder, who of course in all fairness had to divide the meal hour equitably among all the other geriatric clients on the floor who also required her assistance, which was only right and appropriate, she was in danger of losing her eating skills, of forgetting how to chew and swallow and so on, the staff would be afraid to risk the
liability of feeding her lest she choke or aspirate or something. The bottom line was, Krystyna told Loretta, if Gloria wanted to survive, she had just better descend from her high horse and get used to it.

  That was about two weeks ago when Gloria had been delivered to the nursing home. Krystyna could hardly believe it, it seemed so much longer, she and Bunny had gone through so much. And now Gloria was dying. Just as Bunny had predicted, the professionals had thrown up their hands, they had determined that Gloria was as good as dead, she was just too spoiled and stubborn for her own good, they had drawn up the stop-all-feeding papers for Bunny’s approval and signature. It was a truism that at any given moment on this earth, someone is being born and someone is dying, but it really made a difference, Krystyna reflected resentfully, it was in its way an uncomfortable intrusion and imposition and irritation, to know who it was while it was happening. Especially in the matter of dying, it was unseemly, prurient, disturbing information to have forced upon you, well beyond what you cared to know.

  Krystyna’s eyes fell upon the twins, Rumi and Rumi, at the bottom of the staircase. The dying woman had doted upon them for a while after their birth, but had progressively lost interest as she continued deliberately to shut down into nothing more than an eating machine, divesting from the twins just as she had divested from her own daughter. They were striking children, like exotic display pieces, dressed in white embroidered kurtas over their loincloths, in bare feet, with shaved skulls punctuated by their silky ponytails, and dark eyes rimmed in kohl. As Gloria went on relentlessly with her business of dying at the Parklawn nursing home in New York, one of the Rumis at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., was being bounced to the chanting of the Monotone Monks, now entertaining the crowd, on the lap of that coddled teenage princess who earlier in the program had read the greeting from the Tibetan government-in-exile. Krystyna had heard that she was related to Rama in some fashion, which explained how one so young and unimpressive had landed such a singular honor—another personalized extracurricular to be added to the résumé on her college application. The other Rumi was perched a step or two higher, dancing with beguiling innocence and abandon to the delight of the audience, as the Buddhist singers with their shaved heads, in their mango-colored robes and yellow rubber flip-flops, sat cross-legged on the makeshift stage and intoned their mantras to the rhythms of their cymbals and bells, their drums and gongs.

  The Monotone Monks had been creatively recruited by Monty only the day before to be the entertainment portion of the Tibetan Holocaust program. After their lucky break of a gig at the Tibetan pavilion during the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival on the Mall in the early days of the summer, they had just casually ignored their visas and neglected to use the other half of their plane tickets to return home to their place of exile in a remote village in Bhutan with no electricity or running water or McDonald’s. Monty, walking leisurely back to the museum the day before the Tibetan program at around three-thirty in the afternoon from lunch at Gerard’s Place with the newest intern in the survivors’ affairs department, showing her the sights, had spotted them busking in Lafayette Park in front of the White House, coins and wrinkled bills tossed by passersby piling up in an empty bottle of the moonshine they had learned to appreciate from their Folk Life costars in the Mississippi Delta pavilion. The crowd at the museum was going wild over them. From the honorable chairman, to the minister of jihad, to the lowliest overweight Holocaust voyeur in backward baseball cap with a Coors Beer patch and exposed rear cleavage, this entire collection of mortality in the Hall of Witness that broiling afternoon had lost all awareness of its own transience on earth, united in moist sentiment as the Monks led the singing of the Tibetan national anthem, after which the whole house exploded with cries of “Free Tibet! Free Tibet!”—swaying and clapping, rocking and rolling along with the Monotones until their hearts nearly burst in palpable ecstasy from the swelling of their own goodness and virtue.

  It was a rousing warm-up for the featured speaker, and as the Monotone Monks took their triumphant bows with the rhythmic clapping segueing to crashing applause, Rama and Koan Gilguli, waving bouquets of burning incense sticks, pushed Roshi Mickey Fisher forward in his wheelchair, right to the brink of the landing at the top of the flight of stairs, extracting an audible gasp from some of the spectators standing in the front rows of the pit who would have received the full brunt of the impact had he cascaded over. Fisher-roshi good-naturedly jiggled his generous girth in his seat, rocking the wheelchair playfully to demonstrate that it was securely braked. He smiled with mystical wisdom, his grizzled beard splaying across the neckline of his magenta robe lit up with gold threads. It pleased him to alarm his audience in this way. There was an important teaching to be gleaned from it. Life was illusion. Whether we have an awareness of it or not, we are always on the edge. Behind him to his right, on the black granite wall carved with the words of the prophet Isaiah, “You are my witnesses,” the projected image of the bejeweled cover of the Tibetan Book of the Dead was superimposed over the intricate pattern of a mandala fashioned out of ephemeral sand. Fisher-roshi raised both of his heavy arms in an appeal for order. “My holy, holy friends,” he said when they quieted down at last, “let us meditate.”

  Most in that crowd simply bowed their heads, deprived as they were of meditation training and skills, assuming for the occasion the familiar moment-of-silence position that is the price of admission to the ball game, but there were a few adepts who instantly folded into authentic lotuses on the spot and smoothly glided into their measured breathing, showing off with the swagger and display of insiders in a house of worship who know the tune and belt out by heart every word of the prayers in a dead language. Fisher-roshi, aided by Rama and Koan Gilguli seated on the floor on either side of his wheelchair, then began the mantra—ohm mani padme hum—until, very soon, as if captured in the expanding web of a trance, the entire audience was chanting along with them—ohm mani padme hum, peace and love, compassion and enlightenment, ohm, ohm, behold, behold, the jewel in the lotus, behold the Jew. Koan Gilguli held up a large prayer wheel, spinning out the mantra printed in Tibetan script on diaphanous paper as the congregation went on chanting, while Rama nestled the glossy-eyed Rumi and Rumi in the cradle of her folded legs, each child nursing at a breast.

  “Hey!” the roshi suddenly bellowed, startling them out of their enchantment, setting their hearts pounding in a panic as if they had been hurled from the clutch of a paralyzing dream. “Hey, you dead souls in this mausoleum to memory! Hey, you who were once called Chazkel and Chatsche in Warsaw, Tenzing and Tenzin in Lhasa, Norodom in Cambodia, Kagame in Rwanda, Omar in Bosnia, Vartan in Armenia, listen with full attention, do not be distracted. Your oppressors are defeated—the Germans, the Chinese, the Khmer Rouge, the Hutus, the Serbs, the Turks—all are maya and illusion. Do not be terrified, do not tremble, do not cling to your suffering as you wander in the spiritual transition, in the narrow bardo of the cycle of samsara. Do not be overcome, do not be embittered, do not fear. Attain liberation. Seek release from your physical body. Seek rebirth.”

  The roshi gripped both arms of his wheelchair with his two thick-fingered hands, hoisting himself to his feet with a rushing noise like fluttering seraph wings. At the same time, Koan Gilguli quickly stepped forward to pull the wheelchair back from where his master was rising.

  “What is happening to me?” Fisher-roshi cried.

  Under the stupefied gaze of the audience he began to move in his place, then to dance rapturously. “I have transcended my body,” he exulted. “I am liberated. I am released. I am transformed. I am reborn. I am dazzled by light—wisdom, perfection, clarity. My holy, holy friends”—and here Fisher-roshi opened his arms in an all-encompassing universal embrace—“praised be the Lord Buddha, hallelujah!”

  Whether it was from the shock of the roshi’s resurrection or from the ponderous heat, which was becoming more and more liquefied and oppressive, no one could say, but as Mickey Fisher thrust forward a crimso
n velvet slipper from under his gold-threaded magenta robe to begin his descent of the stairs into the bosom of his flock, like Moses from the Mount, someone in the crowd fainted—the news was broadcast in alarm by the voice of an unidentified woman. At first, the quarantine-like circle that had already formed around the fainter who now lay in a dark heap on the floor—a creature in a torn woolen cloak that enshrouded its entire body and hooded its face, male or female, nobody could make a definitive diagnosis—grew wider rather than contracted. Bystanders leapt even farther back, listening in stunned horror as the cowbell around its neck engraved with the warning “leper”—or was it its former owner’s name, “Pepper”?—tinkled steadily as the body spiraled dreamily downward, as in a slow-motion replay, collapsing finally against the battered baby carriage filled with brown paper grocery bags that it had wheeled into this lessons-of-the-Holocaust program in the Hall of Witness.

  Within a moment, however, a young Hasid rushed forward in his shoulder-padded, boxy black suit and wide brimmed black felt Borsalino hat that hid his face except for the tuft of sparse beard pointing like an arrow in the direction of the overcome creature, his long sidelocks and the fringes of his ritual garment flying as he pushed ahead. “Hatzolah, I’m from Hatzolah!” he cried. “Volunteer lifesaver coming through! Move back! Out of my way!” Behind him came a nun with lowered head carrying a half-empty plastic bottle of water, murmuring, “The paralytic, the leprous, I will go and heal them, Jesus said.” From the height of the landing where he sat in his place of honor, Abu Shahid had an excellent view of the action. Flashing a gold ring set with a glittering diamond as he stroked his mustache with his trigger finger, he turned to his host, Maurice Messer, who was fuming at Rama for exposing her “maternity brassiere filling mit out the brassiere,” as he phrased it from his first career in the foundation business, “like this state-of-the-art museum is some kind of bazaar in Calcutta mit overage suckling babies mit flies walking on their eyes,” and at Fisher-roshi for his preposterous grandstanding—“I’m gonna eat that swami-salami faker alive,” he growled into Bunny’s ear. “What does he think this is, some kind of revival preacher show in a fershtunkene circus tent maybe?”