by Daniel Stern
“Don’t be angry.”
“I’m not. Hell, in this business it’s always good to know who’s on your side. But I have no doubts about Paul. Don’t forget he saved this play for me first time around.”
2
DASHA WAS LYING SPRAWLED in Jud’s chair behind the desk, facing the maritime poster. She wore a brown skirt and a bulky black sweater, and on her mussed hair was her yellow woolen hat with the pompon. She was sleeping. Jud looked from her to the poster and said, aloud: “What do you think of our star, Captain Brockhurst? Is she the real thing or am I crazy?”
She looks, Jud thought, like a wild little animal that hasn’t been created yet, something impossible, like a Palestinian panther, passions sleeping, claws safely enfolded for a moment.
For some reason the sight of the drowsing girl reminded him of mornings in the village where he’d grown up. As early as the age of four, Jud’s grandfather would take him by the hand before sunrise and walk him down the steep hill that led to the synagogue for the morning religious classes that had to be taken before the ordinary school day began. He remembered the old rabbi’s bad breath as he leaned over his shoulder, powdering chalk dust on his clothing; he remembered his grandfather’s sweet-smelling beard and caftan.
His zaideh was the only man in the village who always wore a clean caftan and black velvet hat. He was a scholar and did nothing but study the Talmud and attend to his children’s and grandchildren’s religious life. All this was paid for by his wife’s dowry, and later, by her secret selling of contraband like tea and sugar, which Jews were forbidden to sell without a license. Licenses came at a price prohibitive to most Jews.
Jud understood why he had remembered. Dasha’s brother Zvi had been the old man’s favorite grandchild, and Jud and his little sister had both suffered agonies of jealousy.
Jud moved closer to the chair. He felt a sinking sensation in his stomach. Dasha, he thought, little Palestinian panther, I’ll forgive your Zvi for being Zaideh’s favorite—if you’ll forgive me for being alive. Agreed?
She stirred. Jud stepped back and left the office, closing the door quietly after him.
Jud stood in the rear of the orchestra and blinked at the darkness. The theater lay enclosed in a musty silence, and the work light drew a yellow ring around the fragmented set. Jud’s glance moved upward and he saw the closed gates.
He sighed. The breath came from somewhere too deep to be touched or explored. Full of a nausea that made his whole body tremble, Jud held his breath, certain if he breathed he would gag.
He wanted never to be in this theater again, never to see these mocking gates, never to recall anything—anything further back than yesterday. It was a terrible thing to be left alive when the others were gone. How could you make your life valuable enough to be worth that? To survive—the word was terrible because it meant not that you’d survived your suffering—but that you’d survived all the ones who had died.
A voice spoke behind him. It was Dasha.
“Jud.” Her voice was either awed or sleepy. “Is that it?”
He nodded without turning.
“Was it like that?”
“Yes.”
“My God … how horrible.”
“Yes.”
“How could you bear it and live?”
“Not everybody did.”
“It’s like death in a landscape—so bleak.”
“You’ve read the play, heard us talking.”
“But seeing it—”
“Wait till you see the full set after it’s hung.”
“Jud, how can you stand it? Getting into it all again?”
“How about you? About Zvi, I mean?”
Her whisper was fierce. “I wasn’t there. I want to get into it, as deep as I can. I want to feel what he felt, I want to know what he knew.”
“Why?”
“I’ll remember his face then, the way it was when we were children, and all he wanted for me was for me to be happy. I’ll have him back then. I guess that’s crazy.”
“But at least it will be of some use if it gets the job done.”
“Is the job getting done, Jud? No, don’t turn around. Keep looking at the stage and tell me what you think.”
“It’s too soon, Dasha. I don’t want you watching yourself as you work.”
“I don’t have to. Janet does that for me.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I have to know.”
“Why?”
“I feel so alone, Jud. You don’t know how it feels to be that alone. I had a real shock the other day, walking home after rehearsal. I realized I’d stopped looking forward to being happy. I wonder what day it was—the one on which I stopped expecting to be happy?”
“Dashinka,” Jud murmured, still not turning around. He added the diminutive because he felt so much older, if not wiser, than his young cousin.
“Isn’t there any other reason why you’re sticking with the play?” he said.
Her hands were on his shoulders, firmly, as if she were placing him under arrest. “Yes,” she said, “because I want to be a fine actress, and famous and rich and everything there is. And because of you.”
“What do you mean, because of me?”
“So help me God, I don’t know what I mean—so help me God, I don’t know.” Her small birdlike head was on his neck.
Jud turned, finally, and she pressed herself against him, her eyes shut tightly, scattering wrinkles around her forehead and nose. He held her, not sure for the moment which of them was comforting the other.
“Dasha, don’t,” he said. “What’s all this? Not in public,” he added weakly. “Wouldn’t my wife love to see this?”
She broke the circle of his grasp and ran down the side aisle, banging into the door near the stage as she scrambled through it and disappeared.
Jud followed her at his own, slower pace. He went through the still-swinging door at the right of the stage. From the side view the half-built replica of the camp seemed stranger than before. What were those scraggly trees, their stripped, skinny branches blasted by some lightning, more symbolic than real? And what were those half-erected barracks in which he had once lived? Unreal, general—nothing to do with Jud Kramer. Still, to his eyes and rumbling heart the scene brought terrors; but they were artificial, like the fears generated by a horror movie. Time, angle of vision, the prose of what had happened transformed into the poetry of what might have happened, made it seem ludicrous to be participating in this charade. He leaned against a discarded flat, closing his eyes against the cloud of dust he raised.
Somewhere beneath the limits of safety, unsounding tremolos questioned something so deeply as to be unphrasable. It was as if his entire existence was being called into question, judged on some unspeakable, primal basis. It was an awful feeling. He opened his eyes and turned away blindly from it.
3
THE MINUTE JUD REALIZED there would be trouble, he insisted the meeting that night be held at his apartment. It was always best to fight on your own home grounds. He was impatient from the start because he knew the real purpose would be revealed only after the usual lengthy preamble.
Ginny had served an oversweet roast duck to Paul, Joe Lear, Jud, and a gangly man named Wolfson. Wolfson was red-faced and wore rimless glasses that looked incongruous on his lean, ridged face—pane-glass windows looking out over a cold landscape. Lear had saved him as a surprise for Jud. He represented a film company. The question of the preproduction sale of film rights was apparently going to be one of Lear’s weapons.
They were lolling around the living room now, after dinner. Jud had eaten too much, and felt logy. Surreptitiously, he loosened his belt and breathed more comfortably.
He allowed his private thoughts to take control, waiting for the change of tone that would announce the preliminaries were over. The afternoon’s temptations were heavy on him. An ironic, bitter voice was biting at him, reminding him that he had considered, even though briefly, making l
ove to Dasha. (What’s the matter—haven’t there been enough wild times, enough unexpected sex with unexpected girls in unexpected places? Like Kitty, the ex-Wac, on V-E night, in a Central Park gone wild, running and running when the rain began. Her laughter had turned suddenly erotic, and he’d caught her and pulled her down to the grass—and Kitty, sweet Kitty, who had never let him touch her before, yielded to his touch, damp and desirous in the rain … And Lillian, the silly young girl who’d come to her audition for Jud, prepared, diaphragm and all, for the price of a theater career. She had told him about it, and oddly enough, provoked by the idea, he had abandoned his puritanical reaction and accommodated her. …)
It had been a strange day—the hanging of the gates, and then, leaving Dasha in a half-dreamlike state in the office, he’d met Marianne in front of the theater and found her engaged in an argument with Walkowitz. At least it seemed like an argument. Walkowitz was waving a cigarette lighter in an angry arc, and his voice was too loud just for conversation.
All during lunch with the suspicious, hostile columnist Hendrix, he and Marianne had been like strangers. He couldn’t know whether it was because of the unreality of holding Dasha less than an hour before, in the theater, or whether Marianne was feeling peculiar. Why would she fight with Carl? He was ashamed of himself for the conventional question that was raised in his mind. Still, something like that was always possible. Even though he had touched no other woman intimately since his marriage, there was always the possibility … the subtle tension that by omission or commission was in the background of any marriage.
He was not going to let himself be stampeded into needless fears, but he wished that Marianne were home, now, instead of at a preview with Walkowitz.
Then it was there—the added note of intensity in the conversation around him. Jud focused his full attention on the battle at hand.
“Mr. Wolfson saw the play today,” Lear said. His tone was pure innocence.
“Oh,” Jud said.
“Yes,” Joe said.
“You mean he saw the rehearsal,” Jud said. “The play won’t be seeable for another ten days or so.”
“It looked damned impressive, even at this stage,” Mr. Wolfson intoned across the rim of his brandy snifter.
“Glad you liked it,” Jud said.
“Couldn’t help it, powerful play.”
Jud could tell Wolfson was pacing himself. But Joe Lear had no such control. He added: “Except …”
At this, Paul said resentfully, “Joe, please don’t encourage any excepts.”
Wolfson graciously took over the gambit from Joe.
“Why play games?” he said. “What Mr. Lear means is, I’d be interested in making an offer for the play if—well, that’s where the except is going to come in.”
“Which, by the way, I don’t agree with,” Paul said flatly.
Jud said, “Oh, then you knew about this?”
“We all had a drink together, after Wolfson saw the rehearsal.”
“I don’t drink much, but I would have been glad to join you. Or would that have been embarrassing, since I didn’t know Mr. Wolfson was going to witness the rehearsal?”
“Oh, Jud, come on,” Lear said, “we didn’t know ourselves until pretty late.”
“We should have told you,” Paul said. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay, okay,” Jud said, irony gone. “What was the outcome of the drink I didn’t have?”
“Well,” Wolfson said, barely removing his lips from his brandy, “it’s pretty grim for your average movie-goer. Except …”
“Ah, another except.”
Wolfson continued as if Jud had not spoken. “… that if it were not being done precisely the way it is being done, it might—just might—have a chance. There’s no question about it as a superior work of art, of course …”
“Never mind works of art, Mr. Wolfson, at least for now. A pre-production film sale would make things a lot easier for us. What are the chances?”
At last Wolfson put down the glass. He said, “I like plain talk …”
Jud leaned forward in his chair and said: “Except? …”
4
“COME AND SIT DOWN, Marianne.”
“Can’t you leave me alone?”
“You can’t leave yourself alone. You’ve been tugging at that pretty-pretty gown for ten minutes.”
“It is pretty. Can’t something just be pretty? Somebody tore the hem—they stepped on it when we left the theater and the autograph kids started in.”
“Idiots!”
“I don’t mind them. They mean well.”
“Well, I mind them.”
“Then you shouldn’t have come. I wish you hadn’t.”
“Afraid?”
“Yes. And angry.”
“Still?”
Marianne stopped fussing with her gown. She took one more despairing look at the fretful, disheveled girl in the mirror, then walked to the bed where Walkowitz lay, still wearing his overcoat. She looked down at him and said, cautiously: “You probably don’t understand why, do you?”
“Perhaps not.”
“No, you don’t. I’m doing something that scares me so, something I don’t want to do, really—and when I gave you the lighter you laughed and laughed, like a crazy man. It wasn’t meant to be an impressive gift—”
“That wasn’t it. I laughed because I could see so clearly what you were doing and you had no idea at all. Not the least bit. And that tells the whole story.”
“What story?”
He pulled her down. She resisted a little and sat down heavily, awkwardly, next to him.
“Everybody uses a kind of symbolic speech, with things instead of words. In defense of the Jews I’ve known, I’ll say that they understand this best of all. But you’re a Gentile girl—and a perfect demonstration of the shiksa mentality. You don’t think with your insides. So you didn’t get what you were saying.”
She made an angry move to pull away and stand up, but he held her. “You were saying, ‘Here, Carl, use this lovely silver lighter, unmonogrammed because you’re my illicit lover and you might have to explain a monogrammed gift some day—perhaps even to my husband. But use it instead of the two matches you always light your cigarettes with—two matches which used to prevail against the cold wind in the camps—so abandon that old protection and what it represents. Let the lighter light your way back to now, where you can forget everything, about then.’”
He paused. Marianne said nothing. She kept her eyes fixed on his mouth as he continued speaking.
“‘And where you can be like my husband,’” he continued. “‘A grade-A sleepwalker. Then I can feel happy and good and even innocent, because I’ve helped you.’ From evil cometh good. I know it seems a heavy message for one little lighter to carry, but there it is.”
“And if it were so,” Marianne said slowly, “would it be so bad of me?”
“Yes. Because you’re sitting here with me—and you’ll be lying with me, soon, for the exact opposite reason. I’m not a sleepwalker,” Walkowitz said savagely. “I don’t bury my dead so quickly—or so finally.”
He straightened his bad leg, carefully. Marianne pulled away, careful not to touch it.
“Does it hurt?”
“A little.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do it.”
This time her smile came naturally. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me all night.”
He laughed, and she leaned over him to press a kiss lightly on his mouth. Then he said: “Have you ever done this before?”
She was so startled that all she could do was shake her head, not even in the negative, rather in bewilderment.
“You don’t understand again, darling? I’ll quote from my favorite poet, C. Walkowitz:
“To how many men, in mornings, have you murmured,
‘You give me back the lost, the woman part …’
Then turned, and slept upon your heart?”
�
�Why are you saying this to me?”
“It’s a simple question—isn’t there a simple answer?”
“The answer is No. Don’t try to torment me into saying cliché things like ‘I love my husband’ and all that—though God knows it’s true—just so you can make fun of me.”
“I was only curious. Shall I tell you about your husband, Judah Kramer the director?”
“No!”
“You see, it’s no accident that he’s a director. That career, or something like it, was predestined for our survivor.”
“I won’t talk about him.”
“Then listen.”
She stood, and grabbing her purse, went to the door and opened it. Walkowitz rose on one elbow, his face bland. “Or shall I tell you, instead, how they made us dig long, deep ditches, as graves. And when they brought them out, they were mostly old people and women, with a few children—this was in the early days and the men could still work. The gas was not completely effective yet, so that many of them were still alive. But they made us bury them anyway. We piled on as much dirt as we could, hoping to help them die quickly, but quite a few of them began to crawl out of the dirt—they were like moving graves.”
She closed the door and stood against it, her eyes shut. Her purse lay on the floor at her feet, where she’d dropped it.
“Then they made us uncover all of them from their blankets of earth and we poured kerosene over them and an S.S. sergeant set fire to them. After a while they didn’t move at all, and we finished burying them.” She came to the bed. He looked at her and said: “And then I saw …”
“What, Carl?” she whispered.
He was quiet. She sat down again. Then she lay face down next to him and pressed her face into the pillow.
“As I was saying about your husband …”
She made no protest this time, so he continued. “He is a director partly because he is a survivor. There are people who must control their world, in order to avoid experiencing it. Experience brings pain, they know this—and controlling eliminates pain. Of course, it has a tendency to eliminate feeling also, but nothing is perfect.”
From the pillow, Marianne’s voice said: “Why do you hate Jud?”