by Rufi Thorpe
But Vera seemed slightly disappointed with the news. Or maybe she was still just grouchy from our strange fight the night before.
“You sounded so excited on the phone, I thought it would be something big,” she explained.
“It is big,” I said.
“I guess,” she said, “but what are you even going to say to this guy? I mean, you don’t live here. It’s not like you’ll become friends or something.”
“I know,” I said. I couldn’t explain how excited I was. It made me feel boyish and embarrassed. On some level I had always longed for brothers, for male cousins, for uncles, for a father, though this longing remained inchoate because it seemed a betrayal of my mother. She was always so quick to avow she needed no one but me, that other people were useless to her, aliens. I knew that Justine’s Herkus wouldn’t suddenly be my buddy, but the fact that we were blood related must mean something.
“Papa,” Vera said, “Judith and I don’t want to go to the afternoon thing, either.”
“What? What’s the afternoon thing?”
“The Holocaust Museum,” Vera said.
“I am very sorry,” Judith said, holding up her tiny pink hands, which reminded me of mouse paws, the fingers splayed as though to hold off my objections, “but I do not think I can handle it. And I have learned at this age to respect my own fragility. I am an old woman. I have lived in Israel. I have been to my share of Holocaust museums, and I do not need to go to this one.”
“Of course,” I said. Judith’s decisions were her own and needed no justifying, let alone to me, and after the way Vera broke down over the Great Synagogue yesterday, I thought it might be a good idea for her to stay away as well. And yet, the idea of going to the Holocaust Museum alone was like volunteering to spend the afternoon being sad. And I didn’t want to be sad. I was already feeling anxious from my hangover, overstimulated and disoriented by the night with Susan, the fight with Vera, and now the sudden news of Herkus.
“What are you going to do instead?” I asked, hoping I could tag along.
“Go shopping!” Vera cried, practically yipping with glee.
“I want to get something for my daughter,” Judith explained. “Maybe some amber jewelry. Something.”
“I’m going to take her to the store that has the nice amber stuff,” Vera said.
“Which one?” I asked. I hadn’t been aware that Vera had already zeroed in on the best place, but it had been in my mind to sneak off at some point and buy her a piece of amber jewelry. Amber was a big deal here. The Baltic Sea spat up some of the best amber in the world. It would be a memento of the trip, but I also wanted it to be some kind of emotional gesture.
“It’s right there on Gedimino prospektas. On the right before the chocolate shop,” she said. I could barely bring up the map of the town in my mind and remember where Gedimino prospektas was. I had no idea what chocolate shop she was referring to, but I committed the description to memory, hoping I would be able to find it later.
“Well, have fun, girls,” I said. “Shall we meet for dinner, or just meet at the reading?”
“If you’re around when we get back, let’s have dinner,” Vera said, “but if we miss you, then we can always catch up at the reading.”
“Deal,” I said.
Judith headed downstairs to get ready, and Vera busied herself with her makeup. Even watching her apply mascara made my eyes water. I remembered vividly the fuss and fury regarding the planning out and orchestration of Vera’s bat mitzvah, maybe because it had been the year I seriously reentered her life. Most of the fuss had to do with dresses and caterers and decorations. Kat had been so focused on it. She had wanted that bat mitzvah for Vera so badly, though I had never entirely understood why.
My most vivid memory of the day of the bat mitzvah was watching Katya apply Vera’s mascara beforehand. I was sure the entire time that Kat was going to blind the girl. What recklessness mascara was! What madness!
“You’re making my eyes water,” I said to Vera, as she stroked layer after layer of black paint on her eyelashes.
Her mouth was held open with concentration, so her response was weirdly distorted: “You big pussy,” she said.
—
We discussed the Holocaust with Darius almost every single day. Every part of the city told a part of the story. So I already knew the facts.
When the Germans had occupied Vilnius, one of the first things they had done was hire native Lithuanians to act as their police force. These “police” trolled the streets with trucks, picking up Jewish men and telling them they were being taken to a work camp. Then they would take them to Ponary, an area near Vilnius, where there was a large pit from an unfinished construction project. The men were put in a fenced enclosure. Ten at a time, they were taken to the pit, lined up, and shot in the back so that they would fall in. From the group in the fenced enclosure, another ten would be chosen, lined up, shot, and so on. In the beginning, they were shooting only sixty or eighty men a day, but by the end of summer they were lining up women and children, managing to kill sometimes seven or eight hundred in a single day.
Darius never became emotional as he told us these things, though he waited patiently when people in our group, especially the women, would break down crying. But I did not get the feeling that Darius didn’t care. Every statistic, every date, every fact he had gathered was his way of caring. He was a man lit with the fire of remembrance. What a relief it must be to be a man like Darius, I thought. He was probably perfectly in control of the ship of himself, steering through choppy waters, his eye trained on a horizon I had never been able to see.
As I set out that afternoon to meet up with Darius and the group, I already knew that I did not want to go to the Holocaust Museum and that, in fact, I was not going to go though I did not yet know how I would achieve this. I wandered the old medieval streets, a maze through mismatched buildings in pastel colors, affording sudden views of church spires and at other times dead-ending in private courtyards. I got lost, and I enjoyed it. I even hoped I would get so lost that I would be too late and miss the group, but I was not.
As I crossed the street to the lecture hall, I saw that Darius and the group were already outside, standing on the sidewalk, dappled in sun and shade. Susan was there. I felt a surge of luck then, as though the universe were abetting all my most secret desires, providing cousins and walks alone through a sunny city and afternoons with beautiful and fascinating women. It was the kind of feeling that would cause a gambler to bet everything on red. There was no reason not to, no Vera watching, no propriety to maintain, and so I walked up to Susan, leaned over, and whispered into her hair, “Escape with me. I don’t want to visit the Holocaust.”
Chapter 8
Date: 7/16/2014 9:12 PM
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: The Shoah and your pretty idiot
Dear Fang,
I got into a horrible fight with Judith after we waited around forever at this stupid poetry reading and now I don’t know what to do. I am literally so frantic about it and I can’t seem to calm down. You should have seen the way she looked at me. Like I was such a disappointment. Like she was disgusted with me. She had thought I was something, a person, maybe silly and young, maybe even annoying, but someone worth spending time with. She was mentoring me! She was letting me ask all sorts of questions and she was patient with me the way a mother cat is patient with kittens and now I have fucked it all up, I have fucked up everything and she sees me for what I am. Which is…a ruined thing. A piece of garbage. Something that could have been nice, but has been perverted, distorted, and is beyond saving.
And you know what? She’s right.
I was trying to ask her my question, the “why the Jews” question. Maybe I was getting a little bit strident. I was asking her, I was saying, “Why did the Shoah happen?” She always calls it the Shoah, I grew up calling it the Holocaust, yet another way I feel like not-a-real-Jew, but wha
tever. I pointed out that the Native American genocide had a very clear motivation—yes, there was a lot of talk about subhuman savages, but in the end it was about greed: We wanted the land. About American slavery, yes there was a lot of talk about subhuman savages, but in the end, again, it was all about greed: White men were making fortunes off the backs of their slaves and they would use anything, even the Bible, to excuse their behavior. I understand the state that Germany was in when Hitler came to power, I understand that all the same subhuman rhetoric was applied to Jews, that they were dirty, that they were “holding back the motherland from her potential” or something, but doesn’t the whole thing seem kind of cracked? It all seems so terribly indirect. Like, exactly HOW were the Jews harming Germany? Show me the money trail, was basically what I was asking.
I mean, I think people who complain about welfare moms in America are just tragically uninformed because we spend way more on rockets and bombs than we do on helping out a few single moms, but whatever, at least they are mad because it is their tax dollars being spent on a group they feel isn’t “working hard enough.” But the Jews were taking care of themselves. They weren’t relying on German handouts or anything. The logic of “if we build a huge expensive killing machine, it will make our economy better” is just way, way out there, right? Except, I guess it kind of did, right? It kind of worked. I mean the Reich hired tons of people and they turned even the bodies of the Jews into products that they made money off of, soap and lampshades, etc., and they confiscated so much Jewish wealth, art, jewelry, gold teeth, I mean, they took it all, so that had to be helping. But still, they could have just motivated themselves to do ANYTHING to create an industry, it didn’t have to be exterminating Jews. It just doesn’t make sense. I literally don’t understand the logic and I don’t understand how everyone wasn’t just confused. Like, they are following along with Hitler’s speeches, and then he’s like, ERGO, we should kill all the Jews, and wasn’t everyone like, huh?
Maybe this is naïve and totally uninformed. I haven’t read any of Hitler’s speeches and I haven’t read Mein Kampf because Mama said it wasn’t a good idea. So I probably came off as totally snotty and sophomoric to Judith, who after all has been thinking deeply about this her whole life, and anyway, I think she thought what I was saying was that the Jews had DONE SOMETHING to get killed. And it’s true, I kept saying it that way, I kept saying, “But why the Jews? What was it about us? Would it have been different if Jews had been more blend-y, like more assimilated? Or was it Jewish success that was making Germans jealous, like if the Jews had been even poorer than the poorest Germans, maybe they would have just felt pity and not the need to turn us into soap?”
I can think of, like, a million reasons now why all of this bothered her, but I don’t know which are true or if I am just making them up. Maybe she objected to me casually using “us,” as though I were part of the Jewish experience, when really I am a spoiled American girl who hasn’t been to temple in years. Or maybe it was just so obvious that I didn’t know the very basics of the situation and I was asking for, like, a Sesame Street–level history refresher course from her. Maybe she wondered why I had decided she was somehow my teacher and it was her job to explain the fucking SHOAH to me, of all things.
Anyway, what she said was: “You must never entertain this line of reasoning. You must never allow any conversation to begin that predicates German actions on Jewish behavior. There is no reason for what they did. You must never, ever, ever seek to explain the Shoah by exploring Jewish culpability.”
“I’m not saying the Jews are ACTUALLY culpable,” I said. “I’m saying the Germans must have thought we were culpable of something or else they wouldn’t have tried to kill all of us, and I am not exactly sure what we are supposed to be guilty of except not being blond and usually there is just a better reason than that!”
And then she tried to tell me about Heidegger and about how he had this whole argument that Jews were modern and that in embracing modernity they had actually caused their own destruction. He even referred to the Shoah as the Jewish “self-destruction” as though they were the ones doing it to themselves! He said it was the “supreme fulfillment of technology.” But the truth is, Fang, I didn’t understand all of this and I don’t really know who Heidegger is, though she said he was a philosopher, but who cares about philosophy, no one reads it, it doesn’t matter, right? I couldn’t understand why she was bringing him up, so I just kept saying, “But I don’t care about Heidegger and anyway he sounds crazy too!”
Which, I mean, he DOES, right? Was there something in the water? Was there mold in the rye bread? What the fuck was going on? The supreme fulfillment of technology? It’s like a weird 2001: A Space Odyssey fantasy in which the killing machines just decided to start killing Jews on their own.
So she says, “Any argument that hinges on the Jews doing anything at all to cause the Holocaust is that argument. Any argument that even deigns to entertain that as a question, is already insane and should not be pursued.”
So basically she was saying that I was being Heidegger, which I thought was really unfair and I told her so, and she said I was just too young to understand any of this, that I didn’t have any real experience with anti-Semitism, which is probably true but still rude, and I said so, and she said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore and could I please leave her apartment and take the cat with me, she wasn’t fond of cats.
But she said it in this way like she really meant that she wasn’t fond of teenage girls and she was just being too polite to say so outright and all this time she had only been barely tolerating both the cat and me. Which is probably true. But she is the one who decided to come on a weird history tour for vacation. If she wanted to be alone, she should have stayed at home. Because let’s be honest, she wouldn’t be functioning on this trip without me, I am the only one who can open her door and she still can’t find the supermarket on her own.
I am being uncharitable.
I just hate feeling like I am not even allowed to ask questions. Isn’t there something terribly unsatisfying and obviously FALSE about saying that there can be no line of reasoning that explores why the Germans did what they did? That it has to be this sort of spontaneous miracle of cruelty? That it rose up out of pure evil and it isn’t part of the world at all? Because it very much is part of the world. And it isn’t just the Germans. It isn’t just the Shoah. It’s all of history, Fang. The other day, we were walking up these stairs to get to a park and Darius said to look down at the stairs and he pointed out that some of them had inscriptions in Hebrew. The Soviet authorities had destroyed the Jewish cemetery and repurposed the headstones as slate for building projects. Every day Lithuanians literally climb up a hill on the headstones of Jews. Where the Great Synagogue used to be, there is a kindergarten now. I bet there are kids who go there who grow up and go their whole lives without ever knowing there was a temple there.
Like, I am scared to even be writing this down, but if we are going to talk about evil on a human level, on like a one-to-one level, it seems like people generally have reasons for murdering each other. They might be WRONG. They might be stupid reasons. But they have them, and so I think the Germans had reasons, but whenever their reasons are explained to me they make no sense and I feel like someone is hiding something from me.
And here is what I think they are hiding: Humans don’t need a reason. In other words, even their reasons are never the real reasons. The idea that we are rational and in control of our actions is a recent and temporary delusion. For most of history, we have totally been murdering each other. We are just violent animals. We like to hurt each other. It feeds some part of our nature. And so we will find any excuse to do it. Sometimes it is greed, like with slavery or with the colonization of America. But sometimes we can kill people for hardly any reason at all. My mom was complaining about social media making us crazy and the world being so violent and on Facebook you hear about every single sad story of a dad beating his kid to dea
th, but I was like, Mom, wake up, imagine what it would be like to hear someone live-tweeting the Wild West. It would be terrifying. Shit is way more under control now.
But maybe it isn’t. Maybe underneath all that control is something terrifying and liquid and burning, like lava. Maybe sometimes it just bubbles up.
Poor Judith. Why would I make her have to explain such a thing to me? I am ashamed. She is just a widow, wandering alone through this world, and I tried to force her to articulate the most terrifying truth there is.
I am suddenly very tired.
With love,
From Vilnius,
Your sorry,
V
“THANK GOD YOU SAID SOMETHING,” Susan said, “because I was going to make myself take my medicine and go, but I really think I would have had a mental breakdown.” We were in a tiny Moroccan restaurant where we sat on pillows and where the service was very slow and the food entirely mediocre, bowls of lukewarm lentils, stacks of dried-out pita bread. Even though it was early afternoon, we ordered wine, a red that was inexplicably sweet and metallic-tasting.
Susan told me she stayed up all night the previous night reading the diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, which described in precise detail the murders at the pits in Ponary. His farm was right there on the road, and he began to keep a record of what he was seeing from his house, and then he buried the pages in a lemonade can in his yard where they were later recovered. It was always a detail like that which defeated my attempt to not imagine these horrible things actually happening: a lemonade can. I pictured a Minute Maid can, though of course it couldn’t have been.
“No emotional content at all,” Susan went on. “It’s addictive to read, you kind of can’t stop, but at the same time by two in the morning I was so sick I thought I would throw up and then I just couldn’t sleep. The Jews in Vilna finally figured out what was going on because some of the children survived in the pit and then climbed out again at night and walked all the way home. Can you imagine?”