He’d exhaled his Tareyton smoke, careful not to pull the sheet away from my body because he knew I didn’t like it. “Really? But Jesus, just listen to it, Hannah: ‘surely.’ It sounds so tentative. It’s a question. As if each time the old man has to barter with an abductor to get his own creation back. That doesn’t sound like a God you can take much comfort in.”
“I don’t need comfort. Just the hope of it. And anyway, you’re projecting things from how you feel about your own God.”
“I don’t feel anything at all about him, point of fact. Mine’s a total wash.”
The view from my bedroom window back then was of a crack of sky and the corner of a brick building. If I hold very still I can also remember other conversations about God, pieces of debate, my adopted father asking my adopted mother, in his loving but pointed way, if it weren’t better for her to stop believing in God entirely, given all that had happened and was still happening in the world; that it would be better if there were no God at all, because then we would all know we had no one else to take care of us, only each other to rely on, and this would make us feel small, and grasping, and middling, and cold, and willing to huddle together.
My young interviewer is looking at me now, under those dark brows, a bit like my father’s; and for a moment I wonder if that’s sympathy for an orphan I see in his eyes. But I’m not sure. Maybe it’s only sympathy of the researcher’s variety? Or is it the kind I used to practice so often, the sympathy of the lawyer who wants to know everything only so there will be no surprises?
Before I can stop myself, I’m reaching my hand out across to him, hopefully, generously, touching his knee without meaning to. But then, I’m an old woman, so he shouldn’t take anything amiss.
I say: “I wonder, Mr. Bardawil, would you do me a small kindness? Would you come away with me for a moment? I’d like to show you something. But it’s on the other side of the hall in my mother’s music room. I think you’ll find it helpful to understanding me. And who I was.”
He stands professionally, scooping up his phone. “Of course.”
We pass through the dining room where the silver chafing dishes are already set out, waiting to be filled. The flowers are a bit overdone in the centerpiece. Maia will have to do something about that. The china and crystal gleam.
“So, you’re having a good-sized party this evening.”
“No,” I say, distracted. “Actually a fairly small one. Just a few special people. Old legal colleagues, mostly. But I suppose there are enough of them.”
“Because you worked for many years as an attorney.”
“Yes, until I was seventy. Then I sold what I had in the city and retreated. Because I thought I had earned some quiet. Here.”
I show him into the music room with its view, through the multi-paned windows, of grain silos in the distance, stuck into an otherwise empty sky. In the corner is Mother’s grand piano, covered with gilded frames, her collection of photos. I stroke its side. “My mother used to play, though not often. She felt it was too showy, drew too much attention to her. She was a very modest, proper woman. So this piano became more of a gallery, over time. These were the pictures she liked to keep out. For herself and for company.”
I pull one frame in particular toward him. “This is me. At sixteen. In the kibbutz.” He pulls away with what looks like shock.
“I know, I know. A hundred years old I look, don’t I? Older than I do now. This is the one they never, never used in the papers, in the stories about my being found after the sinking of the ship called the Kostas. You can see why, can’t you? They preferred getting a picture of me petting the goats, or pumping water at the well, or doing something…healthy. Probably like what you found in the Times archive. Because just standing there, you see, with my bucket beside me, I look like a phantom. I hardly even recognize myself. I’m sure no one else did.” That used to trouble me so. Why, with my picture in so many papers around the world, did no one recognize me? No one claim me? Help me find my memory? But now I know. Because a father had been told his daughter was dead. Even though the person who’d told him this had said only that Anna Frank had come down with typhus and disappeared from her bunk.
I allow this young, vigorous man some time to take in my chin hanging like a brick inside my jaw, my legs like pins, the black circles under my eyes.
“When was this taken?”
“Nineteen forty-six. Imagine what I must have looked like the year before! I think, you know, we never really looked the way we might have looked, if the war had never happened. I think we girls, especially, were altered beyond recognition. I did like that checked dress, though. For so long I never could believe in the idea of my own clothing.” I sigh and touch my skirt.
He’s holding the silver frame in his smooth palm, balancing it. Now he looks at me. “When you look at this picture now, what do you see? Who do you see? Do you believe you are looking at one of the most famous girls who has ever lived?”
“Before we start up again, Mr. Bardawil, do you mind if I make a suggestion?” I pull my scarf off because suddenly it feels too hot in this old, closed room. “What say we move outside for a little while, so we can get some fresh air and keep ourselves comfortable as we go forward? Wouldn’t that be nice? Don’t you think the inside is feeling a bit stuffy? It will be cooler outdoors by now. Oh, and I’ve just realized: I’ve never even offered you anything to drink! What a terrible hostess. Would you like something before we go on?”
He sets my picture down, carefully. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“Really?” I smile and shake my head. “But I’m not. Come. This way.” And I lead him into the hall, where I drop my scarf on the padded bench, thankfully. “I’m going to pour myself my first glass of wine for the day. It’s my birthday, after all! Are you sure you won’t join me? In just a little something? No? How about soda with a bit of lime and ice? Good! And while I’m getting that ready,” I say before he can say anything else, “why don’t you carry your things out through those French doors there, and make yourself comfortable in one of the Adirondacks? Move anything around you like. Please. Make yourself right at home,” I say as I leave him, so that he’ll feel, as I do, the release, the momentary pause in things that is necessary when you still have so far to go, so much to cover.
* * *
HE’S SETTLED INTO THE stiff incline of one of the chairs and moved the cushion at his back. He’s taking in the view to the east, the red-capped silos jutting like meat thermometers.
I hand him his drink.
“So. Are you enjoying your doctoral studies in psychology?”
“Yes. Very much. Thank you.”
He takes the soda from me, staring through it, analyzing it.
“Do you know, I think that’s something I might like to have studied myself. But now it’s too late. Where did you do your undergraduate work?”
“In Cairo.”
“Really! I had a very good friend who was on the foreign desk in Cairo for a while. As an editor. He was a reporter before that. He worked for the Times. An old Irish friend of mine. This was probably before you were born.”
“Let me turn on my recorder again.” He rests the phone on the wide-planked arm of the Adirondack.
“Oh. Of course,” I say. A bit disappointed. Such a hard worker this serious young man is. He doesn’t want to give either one of us a break at all.
*
“SO YOU BELIEVE YOU are Anne Frank,” he prompts me. “Or were. That you have recovered her life, as a past life. I’m sorry, but I have to ask you this: are you aware that most people who recover a past life believe they are someone famous?”
I smile and stare down into the open mouth of my wine glass. Its comforting red bowl. I adjust the cushion at my own back.
“But I was already famous, Mr. Bardawil, you have to remember. Famous as the only survivor of a famous sinking, at a famous time. And I was miserable. So you can’t think I’m hungry for celebrity. What you have to grasp is that I now k
now I was famous for the wrong reason. Back then. For the wrong me. Reporters used to hunt that girl down and shove their microphones out—which were these horrible, awful, soft clubs in those days—and they would say, Oh please can you tell us again about your remarkable salvation… And when I couldn’t bring myself to say anything remarkable—because I didn’t remember anything about the ship called the Kostas, about the sinking, although they said I swam away from her and survived—away they went, almost angry.”
Back then, back then, so tense around reporters I was. And later, around my reporter lover, too. Though I thought sleeping with him would help. Maybe a kind of revenge on them all. I used to slink under his sheets, sink down behind the pipes of his big brass bed, the one that dominated his Chelsea studio in 1960, when good girls, professional women, weren’t supposed to sleep with men they weren’t married to, and when I’d finished him off he would lie on his back and I would watch his thick red chest heave up and down and say nothing. Entire afternoons lost in this way. Empty, beautiful afternoons, autumn and spring and winter and summer, leaves then snow flying against the cracked window panes. When I couldn’t stand my own blankness next to his fullness, I took the train to New Haven and sat in a coffee shop near the station and pretended I was a housewife taking a break from my school-aged children. Smoking was so nice in those days, before I gave it up; it made my lungs match the burning in my head.
I imagined being the perfect American woman, a perfect American wife, sitting there in my lunch booth. Calmly, smoothly managing all around me, making sure everyone was happy and at ease, with a modern home where I swept around during a cocktail party in a glittering, wide, petticoated dress, opening myself to everyone like a fan. Not the woman that I became, defensive, known for winning over a jury with all my talking, through a clenched jaw.
*
“BUT COULD YOU HAVE gotten away from Belsen?” he prompts me again. “That was impossible.”
Well. He wants to know. So I will say it then.
What I see, I tell him, is what I saw in that white flame, that candle, that night, and it was me, the real me, bright white against the dark mud, dark mud funneling between two sharp, white shoulder blades. Mud so watery, at last, that I floated away from the pile near the fence I had been placed against; I floated away in that flood, away from the others, like an unshelled snail. Now, why didn’t anyone, the Kapos, notice my being flushed out? Because they didn’t. That’s all. That is all there is to it.
It was very cold and stormy, and I floated away, without trying, I believe. I closed my eyes while I drained away through that hole the storm had cut under the fence, through a channel under the wires, and it wasn’t until I was sloughed as a rag out through to the other side that I opened my eyes and saw where I was. Flung out with the trash. Nothing but trash.
I couldn’t move, roll on my side, or call out. I could only keep my head turned in one direction, to my right, my left ear drowning in the mud, my nose barely out of the water. I could only blink one eye, and wait to die. There is no real difference, when you come down to it, between dying alone or lumped with everyone else. It is cold, and miserable, and expected.
*
I HAVE TO STOP for a minute and sip my wine. Surely this young man will see all as clearly as I do now? Surely there can be no question. But if there is, I will go on. I go on, as if writing in my diary:
And from the mud a wailing, maddened farmer lifted me up and carried me across a stinking field, lit by lightning, for a long, long time, until we reached a barn and he ducked both our heads under the door, and lay me down in a wheelbarrow full of straw and leaves and left me there to sleep or die. In the morning he picked the handles up with his crooked arms and pushed me around the yard, past an overflowing dam and a duck pond, so that I could see the birds, and the sun shining on the water. He said I was his wife and that he loved me…
My interviewer is looking at me oddly. He’s adjusted his breath, like an athlete who suddenly sees that a race is going to be much longer and more strange than he’d guessed.
I rest, taking a moment to enjoy this small step forward toward being known. I lean back in my Adirondack, exhaling. The thin clouds over the horizon at the edge of the wheat fields are knotted and bunched; they haven’t unraveled and flattened the way they will by dusk. The wind is light but cool. Maybe, in a moment, I’ll ask this boy the question that’s bothered me these last three weeks; I will ask him why he thinks it is that everyone, everyone, researchers and historians and scholars, students trained, like him, to be rigorous—even the reporter-editor I once loved—have always been so willing, all these years, to believe a person like her, like Anne, I mean like me, could simply disappear? Could simply go down without a trace? Is it because it is easier to accept evil than to imagine winning over it? Is it because they only want to see what is obviously there? Reporters, reporters especially are so keen on that. And they care only for the worst, and find it. That is the news. They fight to find the worst of a story, and go into dark alleys, and are tough, and impolite, and unreasonable, and ingratiating, calling and calling and calling, Irish stubbornness it was, always fishing for more. He’d waited for my father one day outside the courthouse where we’d been called for an arraignment:
“Sir! Sir! Tell us anything about that woman, your client?”
My father called out, before lunging into a taxi: “I will tell you she is telling the truth!” I had followed him into the cab but looked back quickly at the man from the Times everyone said could get at the truth faster than anyone else, as though he were an athlete and the news was a race and the ribbon always fresh.
“But she’s accusing a politician’s son—a war hero!”
“You’re only a hero,” my father shouted out the window, “until you understand that no one is.”
The man who became my lover followed me a few months after this into a bookstore on 57th Street, where I used to go to find histories of what had happened during the war.
“Congratulations,” he said, peering at me over the bunkers of the shelves. “Your side won.”
“Thank you. It wasn’t us. It was justice.”
“Couldn’t agree more. Care to have a drink to celebrate?”
“No. Thank you.”
“Trial’s over. I don’t want anything. I promise.” He grinned, a little crookedly.
“No.” I already was seeing someone, a dull boy from my building who worked in advertising and didn’t ask questions and sat wherever I told him to.
The Irishman leaned over a table stacked with books, his hair tousled, his chin stubbled. Such a rumpled thing he was, a caricature of a newsman. But he didn’t seem to know it.
“You look exhausted,” he said abruptly.
“Do I?”
“You were the one, you know, I kept watching in the courtroom. Feeding your father whatever he needed whenever he needed it. Your father is an amazing man, by the way. But you. There was never anyone more behind the scenes who seemed more up front, to me.”
“I’m tired. You’re right.” I started trying to get rid of him.
He rubbed his hand over the fence of his beard. “I’m tired too. Always am, when a big thing’s done and turned in. Then I don’t know what to do with myself. For a while, I’m completely lost.”
I nodded without meaning to. Because I understood that. How, when a thing was finished, you didn’t know how to keep the loud hum going in your ears.
“There’s the bar around the corner,” he beckoned.
“You never give up, do you.”
“An objective truth.”
English. Such a wonderful language. You can say things like that and get away with it. Say the same thing twice, just for effect. Objective truth. A language for boasting. For wheedling.
“What about dinner?”
“You think I’m going to change my mind?”
“Why not? You could without any worry, you know, because I can assure you I won’t try to cajole information or anything
else out of you. Nothing immoral.”
“There’s always the next big case.”
“Another objective truth. But…” Here he held the door of the shop open for me, and we stepped into the daily parade of coats and hats. “I’m thinking of taking a break from it all for a little while. A kind of vacation. To do some thinking. About what I can really do with my typewriter. If I should do more, see more. Don’t you ever need a vacation, now and then? Time to rethink yourself?”
“I keep busy. Or try to.”
“Then let me keep you busy having dinner.”
“No, not tonight.”
“Then tomorrow night.”
I looked into his green, slightly sagging eyes and tried to figure out if I would like to have them pressed against my forehead.
“I’m not sure I want to have anything to do with you,” I said honestly.
“Well, if you’re not sure then you should have dinner with me so you can decide whether or not you want to have anything to do with me. Okay? Because how is there any other way to know, really? Plus I find it’s always best to assess another human being when you’re wildly hungry. It sharpens all the instincts. Skip lunch tomorrow. Have dinner with me.”
I could spend time with the dull boy in advertising, I thought. Or this not dull one.
“I have one stipulation. I want to choose the restaurant.”
“Choose.”
I picked the Italian close to my building, so I could leave and walk home if I wanted to, if I didn’t want to rub foreheads. No need to hail a cab, even. I made sure to be the first to arrive and took the table I always took, close to the kitchen. I preferred sitting at the back, and told him so after he’d sat down and loosened his tie.
The Wedding of Anna F. Page 3