Another:
Just a quick card to let you know I’ve received yours but I’m headed to Buenos Aires in a few hours and don’t have time to respond at length the way I’d like to. We can talk when I get back, all right, let’s have dinner the way normal middle-aged friends tend to do with drinks before and after and all that, all right? Much love.
And:
I hope this finds you well. I found this postcard at a stall in front of the Duomo. Not far from the coast. I love the Italians. Be well. Much love.
And:
Yes, I find it interesting, too, the slow evolution, or rather devolution, of our bodies. I guess we’ll have to discuss it at length, one of these days. Maybe next time I’m in the city. It is good to be alive, though, don’t you think? I do. Time is the honor of being overlooked by the devil. Since you ask, Haifa was hot, crowded, and commercialized. I’m sitting here sweating at a café table, so unbecoming. Next stop Tel Aviv. No, don’t worry, it’s dangerous everywhere. Be well. Love.
And later:
Do you remember that time, years ago, when we drove out to Cape Cod and window-shopped for houses? When you finally said you would marry me? And we looked at that tiny cottage with the deck overlooking the bay. We seemed perfectly able, didn’t we, to agree on something, finally. I still remember how we had that agent drive us out and take us up and stand with us on the balcony looking out, and had her open all the doors on the appliances for us, and go boringly on about all the plumbing work and electrical business, and let her compliment us on our happiness, like we were newlyweds—and all the while, let’s face it, we were fooling her. My mind drifts back, sometimes, to that shingled, lost house. And then I wonder—what if? But no. We fobbed her off, that realtor. And then we were having dinner after, and whatever crab you were having was covered in sauce, and you had it all over your face and hands, and you were calling the waiter for another steamed towel, but I didn’t wait, I put my hands on both sides of your face and kissed you, rubbing us both in it, and we were all alone in that dark booth, and I started to slide my hand down your neck, just a little, and I said, God, I think I’ll just throw you over the side of this table and drown you in butter, you need to be drowned with my love, but you pulled away from me and said, You would never say that to HER, and I said who? and you said, the kind of woman you should be living with, a woman from Connecticut. And I still have absolutely no idea what you meant, and I’ve never understood it, and I will never understand what you meant, who you were talking about, and why you got so angry… What is even harder to remember, but what I don’t fear to remember, because it’s us, such as we are, or such as we were, is that in the parking lot, you pushed me away again with your words, though I wanted nothing but to take you back to the hotel, and you said, I am not a story, I am not a patient, you have no right to me, and then you swore… I know you don’t like to be reminded of such coarseness, but if you are going to ask why I haven’t written lately, Hannah, it seems only fair and honest to remind you. There is only so much grease in the fire a man can take.
I don’t know if I could find that lost, shingled house again on my own, but if I do I think I’ll go back to that restaurant, sometime, when I’m back on the coast, if I get the chance, and see if by dint of effort I can locate again that hole in the universe that allowed us to imagine something peaceful, for a moment. I will write again when I get back from Lebanon. Yes, it is a bit dangerous. No, don’t worry. Be well, old girl. Love.
*
I’M STILL LOOKING OUT at the dry bone of the barn. But what luck, here comes Maia, pulling in across the gravel drive in her bright blue compact car. She is, without question, a responsible, fine, sturdy, upstanding woman. One you can trust. The kind of person who can always be counted on to do the right thing. No need for me to ever have worried or even to have imagined for an instant that she was going to be late.
“Mr. Bardawil,” I gesture toward the banister, “would you go up while I take just a moment to catch up with my assistant? You can make yourself comfortable up there. My study is the first door to the right when you reach the top landing. Have a look around, at anything you like. There are pictures and placards and things on the walls, things that might help you.”
“All right, but—”
A brief exchange of looks between the two of them as Maia comes in. A blunt, sexual sizing up. Ah, the young. He turns away.
When he’s gone, I ask her:
“Did you have a nice break, Maia? Are you feeling rested?”
“I did and do.” She opens the hall closet and tosses her bag in, as she always does. “I had some lunch and checked your e-mail while I was there. Also I checked the weather for you. It’s shaping up to be a nice evening. Your friends are going to have a beautiful drive up from the city. Oh, and what else, let’s see. More birthday snail mail in your P.O. box.” She holds out a packet. “Do you want it now?”
“Later is fine.” No more letters. No.
She lifts her heavy chin, pointing upstairs. “I thought he’d be long done by now. What have you two been talking about all this time?”
“Oh, legal matters. You know. And he’s been telling me about his travels,” I say, breezy. “Can you take care of everything down here if we’re not finished by the time my first guest arrives?”
“I don’t like the sound of that, Hannah. You shouldn’t be going on for so long, and you know it. You’ll wear yourself out. You know how you forget things when that happens, how you start thinking things that are a little… Don’t make me get all worried about you, now, okay?”
Big-hearted thing. I’ve missed her. “I’ll be fine, Maia. I like the boy. I even thought we should invite him to the party. It might be exactly the right thing to do.” And maybe, I can admit it now, what I’ve been planning all along. So we can announce my true identity together. To the surprise and delight of my friends.
“Just don’t let him suck the life out of you, is all I’m saying. ABDs can do that.”
“Oh, I can keep going as long as I need to.”
“Mm-hmm. That’s like saying the tree can keep going while you chop some firewood.”
I turn my deaf ear to her.
*
CLIMBING UP THE POLISHED stairway is harder for me in the afternoons than it is in the mornings. I have to pull the banister toward me in a slow tug-of-war. Then have to wait for a minute on the first landing to catch my breath. From here I can look up and see half of him inside my study, not in silhouette, as when he first came, but sharply defined and slightly wrinkled at the back from already having sat so long with me. A handsome angel looking over my bookshelves. My diplomas. The various tributes for my charity work. When I sold the family properties I had, I gave most of the money away. I have always wanted to do good in this world.
I feel my heart thumping at the sudden change in level. I wait a moment at the top landing. Take another breath. All right. Ready to go.
“Finding anything good?” I smile and walk in.
“You’ve got some very fine history books here.” He turns to me. “About the war period and after.”
“Yes. Some of those were my father’s. The books in Yiddish were my mother’s.”
“But no copy of the—ah—diary?”
“Not here. I keep it beside my bed.” That’s where diaries belong. The sun is shining, the sky is deep blue, there is a lovely breeze and I’m longing—so longing—for everything…
I go behind my desk because that’s where I’m most comfortable in this room. I gesture. “Have a seat. I was obsessed with history and the law for a long time, as you can see. I wanted to understand the relationship between time and the law, between history and what is legal, what is allowed. Those are some of my books from my student days, over there. You have to treasure your student days. There’s nothing like them.” That infant time long before you know all you will ever know.
He slides his hips into the leather chair in front of me. Of course Maia wouldn’t like him; he’s not me
aty enough for her. I move the birthday flowers, the wild lilies and delphiniums some of my old clients have sent me, so that they don’t block my view of him. The light from the curtained window behind me slants, hitting him on the chest.
He pushes his recording phone forward again.
“So we were up to where, you say, you left the Displaced Persons camp.”
“Yes. And I was making my way through Allied-occupied Germany. The summer of 1945. And there I joined the Berihah movement. Berihah. You might not be familiar with the word? It means ‘organized escape.’”
“I am familiar with it.”
“Oh.”
I wish I had a cigarette, suddenly, like in the old days. I really do wish, all at once, that he was Scottish, the way I’d thought he’d be. Bide a while with me. He might not like what I’m going to have to say. He might become offended again, or even hostile, and then he might not want to believe me and will try to class me with others, the Anastasias, or maybe the Shirley MacLaines. But it shouldn’t matter. Bardawil. Not if he’s a just soul. The truth is only what happened. There is no turning back from it. The truth is an unchanging future, made in the past.
*
I FOUND MY WAY into a German field, and there, at dusk, I dug myself into a haystack, out of the cold. I pulled my weight in after me, closing the hay behind me, but also leaving it partly open so I could breathe and look out, if I needed to, to see the first, glistening stars. The color of the sky was the color of an iris fading…
No wind or breeze. Not even a cricket stirred. The haystack seemed fresh, but after a while, it stank. Just like our hayfields here upstate.
I was tired, so very tired, and so I started to sleep, in spite of the smell. My shoes sinking like coffins at the ends of my legs. My arms pricked by needles.
A vivid dream. I still have it sometimes. Of people sitting around a dinner table, laughing. And I know every face. I know and could have crawled inside each one and looked out through their eyes. What’s to be done about her? they ask, as I turn my good ear away from them. The table is set, there is plenty of food, the pots are all big and hot. I make a well in the middle of my potatoes and kale, to hold my gravy. The arguing still going on. Almost whispered now. What’s to be done about her? What’s to be done about Anna? The gravy is dark with bits of meat in it. The potatoes are reedy with cabbage. A clock ticks. A cat winds its tail around my legs. I need to get up and use the WC, but I’m too comfortable. Moonlight spoons in from a window, and I’m being lifted out into an armful of light.
Now a new smell: a burning cigarette. What should we do about her? A torch, a flashlight, is burning through my eyelashes. A flashlight is shining in my eyes bright enough so that I turn the inside of my arm, my forearm, over my face, showing my number. Hay falling from under my armpit. Then I hear, in Hebrew:
“She’s one of us. Put that gun down.”
* * *
“MEMBERS OF THE MOSSAD. Former resistance fighters. Tough looking, armed, and very serious. The Berihah.” I pull my sleeve down over my wrist, so that Bardawil will not go on looking at it. “The beam of light fell and turned into a circle shining on a soldier’s boot. I saw cigarette tips moving and glowing in the night, and eyes shimmering like leaves. And shoulders hunched, because they were all carrying heavy military packs. Like the soldiers who found me later on the beach. There were about ten of them who came to sleep that night in that field. They picked up more refugees, like me, as they went on. Men and women. Old and young. But mostly young.” So cold it was, some mornings. Waking in a field. Like getting up inside an unlit stove. I remember that so clearly now. All of us carrying weight.
“So you are saying you traveled out of Germany with the Berihah movement.”
“Exactly. If a group grew too large, they broke up into smaller groups. I was assigned, that first week, to a group of six. No one was allowed to move without papers or organization, and the role of the Berihah was to obtain false papers, to smuggle us around, even though the borders were closed. There were passports waiting for us at key places, false names for us, given up by legal immigrants to Palestine who were already across the sea, who had sent them.”
I look at him, anxiously.
“I can’t help,” my young biographer leans forward across my desk, “but notice something as you speak, Hannah.”
“Anna. Please.”
“I can’t help but notice that at a crucial moment in your adolescence you were forced to develop a false identity. That must have been very difficult for you, during what was already a very traumatic time.”
I tap my fingernail on the wood of my desk. “Look at that thing, Mr. Bardawil.” I point to his phone. “So small. Just a sliver. You don’t see how it can hold everything inside it. And yet, of course, it was designed to, so it does. It does. It manages. Do you see?”
He nods, makes notes.
“We made it to Vienna. We were kept inside there for weeks. It was terrible. All I wanted to do was go out, take a walk, do the things that other, normal people did. At night I’d curl up on a pallet next to other women in a room that had been a child’s room, a nursery, with a window shaped like a slice of bread.” How I’m longing—so longing—for everything… “I can see it all so clearly again. I remember I tried to get up before the others in the mornings. To give myself a minute to stand at that window and look down into the street. Alone. A kind of freedom. A chance to see everything. Nothing stirring. The streetlamps still glowing. The houses and shops still standing behind their closed shutters, the stars falling against the roofs.” I shivered in my new socks, in my borrowed nightgown. At first I thought it was ash obscuring the stars. Then I realized it was only snow. The chimneys started to smoke. A cat curled around a wrought-iron gate. Late flowers in a window pot wilted in the cold. Like in Connecticut. In Connecticut the snow is different than in the city; it falls in flakes like pastry dough, or sometimes in soft balls. I might have married a man and lived in Connecticut.
“Finally we were given more false papers and train tickets and we were carried to Italy. Where the Kostas was waiting. From the Greek, meaning the stable, the steady.”
I find my hands fidgeting, feeling for my red scarf. I don’t like that I’ve had to remember this part. That boat. Waiting for days to board it. While narrow bunks were being built below decks, harder, narrower even than in the concentration camps. But I have to remember, to say everything. To prove myself. Prove who I am. To build my case. “In Italy we had pastaciotti,” I say to lighten the moment. “I used to have them on Grand Street with my adoptive parents, many years later, and never understood why I liked them so much, until now. In any case, we stayed in that safe house, an Italian villa, pink as a bow. It had two balconies supported by metal grates. At first all I wanted to do was stand and stare from that balcony. I could have hung there for hours, mooning at the Mediterranean.”
At night, the village harbor lit up in a half circle. The moon rose thin and sharp, like an envelope balanced on its edge, and the air turned sweet with night flowers and it didn’t seem like winter anymore, though it was. The waves in the dark sounded like an avalanche falling over and over again. In the dimly lit streets women carried woven shopping bags and men walked under black hats, and the children all looked healthy.
“And then one day, Mr. Bardawil, a girl with a baby arrived in the house. And her name was Hannah.”
He lifts his head to me. “Hannah?”
“Yes. It’s a common name among us. Of course, it’s also the name they found on me, on the false passport I was wearing around my neck when they discovered me on the beach at Haifa. I remember when Hannah came to the villa. The women were upstairs stitching a new flag together out of scraps and rags.” And they said about her:
Oh no. Look at that. All you have to do is look at the way she carries that child around.
Not good, not good.
There is definitely something there. A story. I’ll say.
Why won’t she speak?
/> Perhaps she’ll speak of it when she’s ready?
The group she came with on the train says she doesn’t speak. Who of us does, really?
Which hellmaker was she in?
Belsen.
No ovens there.
Because they didn’t need them.
That baby of hers is so young, so young. Almost a newborn.
Both so young.
But not both blond. No.
Oh no.
Only the baby blond.
“We became friends. Neither one of us liked gossips, you see. And I got to know Hannah very well, Mr. Bardawil. But such a terrible, hollow thing she was. No amount of cooked potatoes seemed to fill her out.” White dice for knees. Gray glass for teeth. Black shells under the eyes. “But then we all looked the same, that year. She usually ducked away from people, preferring to sit and rock with her baby on her cot on the women’s floor.” Not a gentle motion. An agitated rocking. After a while, she grew calmer. The rocking helped, the scraping over and over again at the same inch, feeling it wear away. Her body was so small it was hard to imagine a baby having come out of it. A baby who looked nothing like her. Blond. Fat. Piercing blue eyes. The women of the villa tried to say that babies sometimes started out with blue eyes and blond hair and then settled into something more…familiar. But they didn’t believe what they spoke. Sometimes Hannah would settle him in his basket and then forget all about him, leaving him to go off to stare from the balcony, looking down into the street at the people passing.
The Wedding of Anna F. Page 5