by Tova Reich
With quivering reverence, Maurice stretched out his hand to stroke the familiar names carved into the stone. He felt himself to be in a sanctuary, a holy place, like the Western Wall of the ancient Temple Mount. It occurred to him that maybe he should compose a little note, a kvittel, to God—“Master of the Universe,” he would write, “Save Your Holocaust!”—but there was no place on the wall to put it, no stones and no crannies as there were in Jerusalem in which to insert it, no way to dispatch his petition express to the celestial spheres. He considered affixing it with a drop of his own earwax or mucus or other bodily fluid, but he knew that it would inevitably slip down; Bunny would spot it on the floor instantly, as she had spotted his gold-embossed chairman’s card on the floor, which he had presented to Jones in good faith, in an opening attempt to deal with this gangster as if he were a civilized human being—like a bird of prey Bunny would swoop now as she had swooped then, and suck it up with her DustBuster. Instead, he drew up his wheelchair, butting it against the wall and cramming himself as close as was humanly possible. He took out the yarmulke that his Blanche now presciently stowed in the pocket of each pair of trousers for ready availability in the religious situations that a man in his position regularly encountered, and placed it upon his head. Elevating his upper body within the confinement of the chair, he leaned his head forward and pressed his brow to the cool stone by the letter S, imprinting like a quality meat stamp upon his own flesh the name of his brave partisan comrade, the Honorable Dr. Adolf Schmaltz, M.D., the hospital tycoon and unfortunate father to the terrorist Foggy Bottom Schmaltz. He closed his eyes. And trembling with passion and need at the wall in the presence of the names, Maurice Messer prayed.
2
DUE TO A COMBINATION of unfortunate circumstances, following the takeover of the museum, Rabbi Herzl Lieb missed the opening salvos at the epicenter of the action outside the building, which coalesced on the Fourteenth Street side across from the Department of Agriculture, demarcated by barriers swiftly erected and patrolled by the police of the District of Columbia. Regrettably, however, during those critical first moments, Herzl was on the patch of Park Department turf on the Fifteenth Street side to which he and his demonstration had been consigned that morning, renamed for that stretch Raoul Wallenberg Place, where he had chained himself by the waist to a tree, and sweating extravagantly on this sweltering day under the blanket of his capacious cream wool fringed prayer shawl with its licorice-black stripes and neckpiece trimming of embroidered silver and gold threads, was blowing his heart out through a shofar. Planted in the ground beside him was a cluster of signs and posters on sticks. One depicted Abu Shahid in full face and profile, with the caption “Wanted: Terrorist, Murderer, Holocaust Denier,” and then in bloodred capital letters, the question, “Should This Man Be Welcomed into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum?” Another showed a photograph of heaps of charred and emaciated Jewish cadavers discovered in the camps after the war juxtaposed against a picture of a smiling Dalai Lama in tinted aviator glasses licking an ice cream cone, with the Hebrew word Lehavdil scrawled boldly across, and in English, “How Can You Compare?” And yet another declared in banner block letters, “Maurice Messer, You’ve Made a Mess of Morality and Memory and the Museum—Move Aside!” Peering through binoculars from the tall window of the director’s office in the red brick administration building across Raoul Wallenberg Place that morning, Maurice had clutched his breast in bitterness as if physically struck by this crude ad hominem shot and was muttering, “I’ll move aside your little schmeckie, that’s what I’ll move aside, you momzer,” just as Abu Shahid was being ushered into the room by Bunny, followed by a uniformed steward rolling in a table covered with a crisp white linen cloth, heaped with fruits and pastries on china plates, fragrant, steaming coffee and tea in silver pitchers, and a sprig of white orchid tinged with mauve in a crystal vase in the center.
While Herzl remained attached to his tree, Henny Soskis was taking a break from protesting, sitting atop the coffin meant to represent the six million, which was one of Herzl’s signature props and visual aids in Holocaust-related demonstrations, generously provided free of charge by one of his legion of admirers, Alvin Tepel of Tepel and Tepel Funeral Arrangements. Al always came through like a trouper with exemplary good humor every single time the Jewish people were in danger. “Your coffin’s on the way, Rabbi, top of the line, you don’t have to hold your breath.” Al never failed him. Sitting herself down on this sturdy, deluxe coffin, Henny Soskis let out a profound sigh and, staking her well-earned claim, announced, “I’m sure the six million won’t mind this close personal contact with an old survivor’s fat tuches.”
Really, it was much too hot for a protest, Henny reflected as she fanned herself vigorously with a bunch of the flyers she had been passing out. Her dress, which she had bought on sale in the back room of Loehmann’s in Rockville for $49.95 with the designer label torn out after seeing the same exact number at Saks for five times as much, was soaked through and through, sticking to her skin like a brisket; her pastel-colored hair, which she had just had done the day before at Marie’s beauty parlor on the basement level of her senior citizen’s retirement complex in Silver Spring, had collapsed like cotton candy—but what could she do? Herzl was so intense and persistent, so devoted to the Jewish people, she could never say no to him. If only they had had someone like Rabbi Herzl Lieb during the war, she always commented to the ladies in her synagogue sisterhood, it would have been a whole different story entirely, believe me.
But of course, all the other survivors had no trouble whatsoever refusing Herzl. And it wasn’t just the temperature, as in this particular instance. It was the heat all of the time, it was the pressure and the fear. Herzl was too noisy, too radical, too in-your-face and over-the-top. Establishment Jews cringed at his shenanigans, and gentiles got this nauseated look on their faces, not to mention the fact that he regularly infuriated the great survivor-in-chief Maurice Messer, so that if it became known that they were associated with this public enemy number one, all of those nice invitations to museum functions might come screeching to a halt, especially to those fancy receptions in the children’s tile wall area on the concourse level with those tasty little noshes and the white wine, strictly kosher, a meal in itself actually, and for dessert, a political smorgasbord, a veritable Viennese table of big shots strolling around with name tags like a list of their ingredients, you could stuff yourself on them as much as you wanted until you were ready to bust.
But she, Henny, she was not afraid of Maurice Messer, not one iota, there was no way in the world he would dare to black-ball her if he knew what was good for him; on the contrary, he was afraid of her. She had beaten him once soundly, schmeissed him good, when he was prepared to desecrate the dead by putting bales of their shorn hair on display in the museum exhibition for their sensationalistic value, and, if necessary, she was ready to go after him again if he tried any of his monkey business with her—she would not hesitate for one minute, and he knew it, she knew his secrets and his lies, she knew him inside out. All it had taken to deflate him during that ugly hair feud was a little word to the president of the United States himself from the brilliant mouth of her granddaughter the intern just like a doctor M.D., her beautiful and exceptional Samantha Brittney, and Maurice had retreated in a flash, coward that he was.
Oh yes, Maurice was a famous coward, everyone knew that, it was far from a secret. That was why, as her son Arnold the psychologist also almost exactly like a doctor M.D., Samantha Brittney’s daddy in fact, had once explained to her, Maurice always made such a federal case about how he was never afraid, it was a well-known mental health symptom called overcopulating or something like that. Even during the war he was a coward—shaking, tzittering, pishing in his pants, getting up the nerve once in a blue moon to venture out at night to steal a sick chicken, trembling at every sound, a liability; they had let him join their hiding place in the woods only after he had promised on everything that’s holy t
o marry the sister with the limp of one of the leaders, a promise he had promptly broken after the war the minute he met his hoity-toity Blanche Bialystok from Bialystok in her little maroon velvet cloche with the veil and the feather. Among the survivors, it was simply the biggest inside joke in the world that he now passed himself off as a resistance fighter commander during the Holocaust. The only reason the ones who remembered him from those days who weren’t themselves in danger of reciprocal exposure due to their own concocted stories about their exploits during the war refrained from coming forward to denounce Maurice was because they were afraid the disclosure of the lies of such a prominent Holocaust operator would be grist for the mill of the deniers and revisionists and skinheads. If the story of the chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was made up, who could say what else might also be made up, perhaps even the gas chambers themselves—and without the gas chambers, ladies and gentlemen, where would we be? Just another ordinary genocide, that’s where, our status as the Holocaust lost like innocence. But if not for this very real worry and concern, Henny knew that there was nothing the other survivors would have enjoyed more than to witness this pompous old liar, this self-promoter at the expense of the dead, this Holocaust hustler, this Shoah shyster, brought down low, exposed and disgraced, twisting slowly in the fire like a broiler on the spit.
Still, Henny could not help wondering—what was she doing here on such a hot day, she, a seventy-six-year-old widow, sweating and schvitzing on top of a coffin not too different, she figured, from one she would probably in the not too distant future be stretched out inside, as if she were in training? It was a good question. The answer very simply was that she was not thinking about her own comfort, but about the survival of her people now facing the hidden Holocausts of intermarriage and assimilation, against which the only defense was strengthening Jewish identity through personal awareness of past and potential victimization. And Henny was not afraid. What did she have to be afraid of after all she had gone through in the first and still number-one Holocaust—ghettos, cattle cars, selections, death camps, forced marches, and so on and so forth through all the stations of the iron cross. Never mind her arthritis and her bunions and her headaches brought on by aggravation. She had come out even in this terrible temperature to stand beside Rabbi Herzl Lieb, to raise a voice of conscience against inviting terrorists and Tibetans into this temple to the six million. Meanwhile, her fellow survivors, lazy bums one and all, stayed home safe from heatstroke and dehydration, watching their soap operas and polishing their dentures.
Of course, Lipman Krakowski had also come out in this heat and humidity to stand with her and the rabbi, though at the moment he was out of commission, he had gone off to use the facilities in the museum’s air-conditioned administration building. He had taken along the New York Times and the Washington Post, which he pored over meticulously front to back, including the sports and classified sections and the obituaries, one of his favorites, as well as every morsel of wisdom in the editorials, sometimes even dashing off a letter to the editor while still perched on the pot, depending on the level of inspiration that seized him, he carried a pencil and pad wherever he went for just such emergencies. The newspapers, as Lipman explained, were extremely relaxing, at one and the same time expanding mind and body. So Henny knew for a fact that she would not be seeing him for a while. She also knew that even though they were engaged in protesting against the museum, there was no question that Lipman would be allowed into the building to use the men’s room; staff bureaucrats would never risk refusing him access, impressed with a deep awareness of the horrifying ruckus he was capable of stirring up if provoked. The scandal would be plastered across all the newspapers the next day: “Holocaust Museum Toilet Denied to Survivor in Distress.” Scandal was the one thing this museum dreaded above all, and Lipman knew it. Given the nature of its self-righteous subject matter with its attendant vulnerability to ethical scrutiny, and given the sucking up and selling out it was required to do simply to exist much less survive, as Lipman was very well aware, it set an enormously high premium on the appearance of impeccable virtue—like a professional virgin, Lipman thought appreciatively, condemned forever to protest her virginity.
“I’ll give you a full report,” Lipman said cheerily to Henny as he set off with the newspapers under his arm. He did not mean a report about what he would encounter as he tried to get into the building; there was no doubt at all in the mind of either one of them that he would be admitted without a murmur. Rather, as Henny understood very well, he meant a full report about the outcome and success of his session in the stall, a sacred, inviolable hour during which no disturbance would be tolerated or forgiven, but about which, afterward, he loved to hold forth at length and in detail. As Lipman always said, “At my age, a jumbo movement in the morning is the high point of the day.” And, on this particular occasion, he also meant that he would be coming back to her with a full report about the spectacular effects of the Metamucil apple crisp wafer he had ingested, the subject of a vehement argument they had been having over the past hour or so as they distributed their protest flyers, an argument made all the more irritating because Lipman was hard of hearing and Rabbi Herzl Lieb by the tree would not let up for one minute with his shofar blasting. For regularity, Lipman insisted, there was nothing to compare with Metamucil in all of its tasty varieties, solid and liquid—and also gas, ha ha ha; why, the oldest astronaut in the world, Senator John Glenn himself, refused to leave earth without it—because it made all systems go, ha ha. Henny, for her part, with equal ardor and adamancy, shouted into his ear until her voice was as rough as grit a testimonial to the superior efficacy of her own old-fashioned remedy, passed down from generation to generation, from mother to daughter—prune juice with a little hot water and a squeeze of lemon. Sitting there now on the coffin, she fished around in her overstuffed Frugal Fannie’s shopping bag to find her thermos bottle filled with this elixir, for the very practical reason that after Lipman returned from doing his business, then it would be her turn.
The truth was, Henny was thinking as she sipped her concoction, she had always had her doubts about the sincerity and genuineness of Lipman’s devotion to the well-being of the Jewish people. To give just one example, even when he narrated his oral testimony on Holocaust Remembrance Day in front of high school assemblies of bored kids jiggling around desperately inside their pants, for some unfathomably shameless reason he would always provocatively profess himself to be an atheist. “After all what I seen,” he would announce to the fascinated teenagers, “either this so-called God doesn’t exist, or if he does, I don’t want nothing to do with him.” Of course, Henny had to admit, these and other similarly outrageous stunts, such as identifying each Jewish girl in the audience to publicly appraise her face and figure in the interest of determining who might successfully evade the Nazis by blending in with the Aryans and who would not have a chance of passing, or singling out the prettiest blond cheerleader as an illustration of the type that for obvious uses and purposes would have been spared by the SS in the selection process, made him a great favorite on the juvenile Holocaust testimony circuit, utterly immune by virtue of age and a certified track record of suffering from corruption-of-youth charges and sexual harassment accusations. It was as if Lipman simply could not bear having grown old, Henny reflected, he was deliberately rebellious and contrary like an adolescent himself, which, in her opinion, was the true reason he had joined forces with her during the hair war and also why he was out here on this miserable day in this foul heat—not because of his concern for Jewish destiny but from sheer orneriness, the perverse thrill of standing out, of exhibiting himself, to demonstrate that there was still some juice left in him, to put the world on notice that he was not dead yet, to strut and to preen so that maybe the girls would turn their heads and flip him a salute one more time.
Henny sitting there on the coffin was so immersed in this analysis of Lipman Krakowski’s borderline character, drinking her pr
une-juice cocktail and enjoying the exercise of applying some of the mental health concepts such as infested development and cystic personality elucidated to her by her son Arnie the psychologist, that she was completely oblivious at first to the crowds pouring out of the museum. Nor had she noticed that Rabbi Herzl Lieb had quit blowing his shofar and, still tethered to his tree, was calling out to her in mounting frustration and anxiety to run and find out what was happening.
Run? She—Henny Soskis? The last time Henny had run was in 1945, with the SS panting behind her on the forced march from the extermination camp, and she weighed eighty pounds from starvation; now she tipped the scale at over two hundred and twenty. No, Henny did not do running, except maybe for vice president in charge of snacks of her synagogue’s ladies’ auxiliary club, if you counted that. Taking her time as befitted a woman of her age and size and history, Henny sealed up her thermos flask, stuffed it back into her shopping bag, and, creaking like a rusty old apparatus that had seen better days, hoisted herself up from the coffin onto her swollen legs in their high heels. As she made her way across the street to the museum, the great advancing shelf of her bosom leading the rest of her through the heavy air, she stopped a few of the more alert-looking goyim streaming out and discovered that the crisis was nothing more than a routine fire drill. But when she noticed the barriers going up on the Eisenhower Plaza and the line of uniformed guards closing ranks, she decided she had better investigate further. Barreling through the phalanx of officers with the cry, “Hitler tried to stop me—you also wanna try?” she made her way to the locked entrance. Adjusting on her nose the spectacles that dangled from a string of fake pearls around her neck, Henny read through the glass the sign that had been posted from the inside.