by Daniel Stern
“That’s very important to me. I want to have an ensemble here.”
“It’s the best way to work,” Rolfe said imperturbably.
“You’ve read the play?”
Another smooth nod.
“Then you know why I don’t want it bathed in a richness of light. I want a cold clarity that blends and changes with the happenings onstage. The light should speak to the scene, not about the scene.”
Rolfe inclined his head. “Hmmm,” he said.
“What did you think of the play?” Jud said, rising to indicate the end of the meeting.
“I liked it,” Rolfe said, “very much. You’ll either have audiences that are irritated at being roused from apathy or audiences that are deeply shaken.”
“Depending on?”
“Depending on how it’s done.”
“Well, that’s where we come in, isn’t it?” Jud came out from behind his desk and shook the man’s hand. “Larry Elgin will settle the papers and such with your agent. The terms are satisfactory?”
Another nod.
“You can sketch out your preliminary lighting plot while you watch today’s rehearsal.”
Walkowitz was late, and Jud decided to begin with the scenes that seemed to be in final form. He had Dasha, Saul, and Emmet do the next to the last scene of the play. Deliberately, he started them, cold, at a high emotional pitch. He was not yet certain that Emmet could handle the part, to the point of sustaining the brilliance he’d shown earlier in the big, demanding scenes. The first time through it was awful. By the third time, even Dasha, whose sharp edge was usually unbluntable, was bland. Jud had expected this. He began to drive them, his hand subtle but strong. After half an hour it was taking shape; the natural contour of the scene made itself felt like bone beneath flesh. An intensity that was almost tangible grew between the three players. Jud caught a glimpse of Rolfe leaning forward in his seat, jaw clenched, his hands white-knuckled against the seat in front of him. As the climax approached, the moment in which the character of Avrum decides to give up his life, Emmet stopped abruptly and whirled to the orchestra where Jud sat.
“I can’t play it this way, Jud,” he said. “It’s not right.”
“Why not?”
“He has to struggle against what’s happening—he can’t just accept something like this.”
“We’ve been all over that,” Jud said. “He accepts it—he even welcomes it. He’s been imprisoned, for no real reason, in an insane camp without values. Now at least he’s done something he recognizes as wrong—caused the death of another prisoner. Now he can pass judgment on himself. Don’t you see it? He’s actually getting back something of himself by doing this.”
“No, I can’t, Jud. I really can’t.”
“Please,” Jud said flatly, “do it my way. It was catching fire.”
Then Dasha took a hand. “Let Emmet do it his way, Jud. How can you expect an actor to work like that?”
“Please, Dasha—”
“Don’t ‘Please Dasha’ me.” Under her dark skin a flush of anger crept from chin to forehead. “You’re trying to enforce an acting concept like a storm trooper.”
Jud moved out of his seat into the middle aisle.
“Ten minutes, everybody,” he called. From the corner of his eye he saw Walkowitz standing in the rear of the hall, his overcoat over his arm. Jud called out: “Carl, I want to see you, Dasha, and Emmet, please,” and headed directly for the office.
He knew that Dasha would be on the verge of weeping, if not already in tears. And he knew that he might lose her entirely; she’d nearly run away once. But he couldn’t afford to let that matter. He’d taken a big chance in the head-on encounter with his actors, but there would have been more risk in avoiding it. Conflicts such as the one between himself and Lear always communicated themselves to the cast, either intangibly or by word of mouth. Most actors were passionate, unfocused people. But he, Jud, had a passionate focus trained on this play and he intended to keep it. In order to do this, his direction and control must be absolute—even though such control involved risks.
For the first time in years, Jud was reminded of the crazy business about the soup. The Germans had devised a system of giving out pieces of yellow paper marked with red pencil as soup tickets, so that no one could get more than one bowl. Jud was then the unofficial leader of a group of youngsters foraging for themselves as well as they could. When the new soup regulation went into effect, he had an idea about how to circumvent it. He scratched his thumb with the sharp edge of a broken shirt button, and smeared blood on a yellow piece of paper, in rough simulation of the authentic mark. Dasha’s brother Zvi and the other boys eagerly followed his example. But that evening, as they stood in line in their first attempt to obtain extra servings of soup to quiet an unpacifiable hunger, Jud suffered an attack of fright. The bloody scrawl seemed a miserably inadequate forgery. He was certain that they would be caught and either beaten or killed; the temptation to signal the other boys to drop out of line was unbearable. But his fear paralyzed him long enough to bring him in front of the soup tureen, and the smell sealed the paralysis. The weary Kapo took Jud’s red and yellow food pass, barely glanced at it, and ladled a thin dripping of soup into the bowl. Later, as they triumphantly gobbled their third and fourth bowls of soup, Jud was a hero.
He never mentioned the moment of hesitation. The important thing was to take the lead. He had done it, and they had all gained more food.
Dasha’s eyes were reddish and rubbed. The first thing she said was: “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not,” Jud said. “You’re only sorry that I didn’t give in to your hysterics. Well, I’m not going to. I’ve handled tougher actresses, though not many better. This is not some off-Las Palmas, Hollywood Boulevard production. This is an important play and I won’t jeopardize it for you or your ego or even mine.”
“I’m glad you added that,” Emmet said dryly. His passion seemed to have spent itself.
Dasha sensed this, and she turned on him. “Don’t your feelings about the play matter to you?”
“Of course,” said Emmet. “But I also know you’ve got to work with a director.”
Dasha subsided at this, though still resentful, and Jud continued.
“This play is so rough, so difficult to present, that I have to choose a path for us to follow, and from then on that’s the only possible path there is. Until it’s finally set, of course, I try to sense what you feel and think about the role and what you want to do with it. But once it’s set—that’s it! Sorry to be so un-Rovic-like and un-Stanislavsky-like, but that’s how I have to work on this play. Anyone who can’t go along with it had better quit right now.”
Before anyone could say anything, Walkowitz spoke.
“The scene was strong and moving before the explosion happened,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about some changes, but I’ve stopped thinking now. I imagine if I was the author that would mean something.”
Jud smiled gratefully at Walkowitz. “It will have to do,” he said. The tension was broken, and without having resolved their differences about the nature of the role, the rehearsal resumed. Something much more important had been determined. Jud was, for the cast, the unquestioned master of the company.
As the actors took their places on stage, a trio arrived: Rovic, Lear, and Larry Elgin. Larry bounded up to Jud. “I’ve got us lined up for the Congress of Jewish Charities Dinner tomorrow night. The company can be introduced, and then stuff themselves. Paul or you can make a speech—and I’ll sign up fifty theater parties by the week end.
“Eight!” he added jubilantly. “Eight theater parties, as of this morning.”
“Great work,” Jud said. Then he saw Wolfson standing in the rear of the orchestra, leaning on the balustrade, his pallid face gleaming, like a fish’s underbelly, in the darkness.
THE JOURNAL OF CARL WALKOWITZ
Sometimes I sit imprisoned in a vacuum for entire evenings, hours of vague being in which my bod
y pulling at me gives me the only sensation of existence. In those hours, it seems to me as if the sense of self, the center of being that determines all thrust and force, has been tampered with, damaged in some subtle but important way.
From these sensations, these absences, my rage alone liberates me, leads me to action.
I am impatient of my impatience, friend;
Rigid with anger at rage that will not bend …
… whereas it is Kramer, in reality, who grows rigid, stiffened under the pressures playing over him, the way the body stiffens under the stream from a high-pressure hose. Yesterday’s rehearsal was the first of the final week before the opening. I arrived in the middle of the rehearsal when Jud demonstrated his strength by quelling a cast uprising. I was pleased to see this. Only desperation could make him behave so with his actors. He is given to handling them like precision instruments which can be thrown off by the slightest tremor.
Then the upper echelons arrived, and with them, Wolfson, the pasty-faced money man with the Oxford accent. Jud exploded. He demanded that Wolfson leave. Rovic was embarrassed, Lear was indignant. Only Larry Elgin behaved intelligently. He guided the bewildered Wolfson to the side of the auditorium while Jud and the others fought it out. Jud won, for the moment, and they all left with Wolfson, to salvage some amour-propre for him, I’m sure. Fortunately, I followed them out into the lobby of the theater, as did Rolfe, the lighting man.
And there in the lobby, it happened. The breakthrough I need, the final tool. The last few weeks have shown me how much more strength I will need to break Kramer, who seems to grow stronger with every small defeat. There’s a lesson in survival—survive the small defeats with the aim trained on the big victory. And what is that? Simply survival.
But I hear a voice question, Didn’t you both survive, when that seemed a victory beyond possibility? As ridiculous as it appears, I must answer No. We did not both survive. I simply entered another phase of my destruction—less intense, slower, but still part of the same process, another way of saying that I survived, but as a different “I” than entered the camps. But Kramer? No. Dr. Walkowitz insists that the recovery is too successful to be valid. The effects may be suppressed, but they must exist. Perhaps some experiences should not be survived in any ordinary sense. But how far back does it go, that moment when the mind and body choose survival at all costs to one’s self, or to others?
Was Jud a weakling child who decided to lead the gang of schoolboys rather than have them discover his weakness and take away from him his freedom of choice? Did some subtle weak link in the chain of my nerves prefigure my death in the camps? Could I, if I chose, track down the moment when I submitted to my own death? (Was it Ruth’s dying on the electric fence, in the middle of the night, that fragile white skin charring, the heart stopping in response to the electrical impulse from the nerves to the brain? Did she feel pain? For how long?) Could such a death be called self-chosen, when the body is exhausted beyond its sense of body-ness, when the mind you have always lived with no longer perceives enough familiar points of recognition to keep its sense of mind-ness? Kramer, the survivor would say, Yes! Self-chosen because others pushed past the same barrier of pain … No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, I More pangs will, schooled at fore-pangs, wilder wring.—I remember the lines by Hopkins, a Jesuit priest writing fifty years before Goering thought of “concentration points” for political prisoners and my poor, darling Ruth. What dark night did she and the poet share for her to destroy the gentle mouth, the slow eyes, the uterus never now to be filled with foetus in my image, that will never now grow into the air, into my name. …
I found myself performing the impossible task of trying not to think of her, yesterday, while in the park with Marianne and little Sarah. Though I didn’t tell Jud, that was the reason I was late for rehearsal. Marianne had been restive, trying to break away, inventing excuse after excuse, all quite reasonable. Finally she raised the point of Sarah’s resentment at being neglected by her father and that she must make up for this. Therefore, less time to be with me. This I cannot allow as yet.
To pacify her, I bundled the three of us against the insanely persistent snow and we went to the park and had a snow carnival in the playground. I haven’t jumped around like that in years. Marianne said I made her feel like a governess taking two children for a romp in the snow. Then I was exhausted and my bad leg began to hurt—and I was sweating heavily, my muffler sort of choking me. The snow was loosely packed in the playground and I found it difficult to walk, so I lay down on a snowy bench.
I must have looked bad because Sarah became frightened. I think Marianne was, too, though she wouldn’t admit it. To calm them I recited a little poem of mine. I held Sarah’s face in my hands, with her blue eyes blinking behind the glasses, and I wondered if I had allowed myself to become so fatigued just to alarm Marianne, to unbalance the balance of power between us for a moment. Or was it, perhaps, less calculated than that? Did I need her feelings of concern more than I thought? In any case, I recited the poem, seemingly to Sarah, but actually to her mother.
O there is great delight
In oranges and chairs,
In kisses and pears …
But still comes the night.
And there is much charm
In caged kangaroos,
In afternoon zoos …
Yet the dark brings alarm.
For being young
Is like being hung:
Intolerable, but temporary.
And I have my doubts,
While you have your pouts,
But, nevertheless, we’re contemporary.
So let us lie ’midst kisses and pears,
Tartness of oranges, softness of chairs;
And wander the sunny, seraphic zoo,
Never minding how long I will be me,
Or how long you will be you.
Sarah giggled and clapped her hands, releasing small, muffled explosions of snow. Marianne hovered over my face like a white-sprinkled, troubled bird. The moist corners of her mouth, the sudden fall of her hair from neck to shoulder, darker at the center than at the tips, the skin over her cheekbones drawn back tightly by her frowning smile; all this made something stir in me, in some place long unused to movement. In the sudden surfeit of feeling I had to do something. My eyes looked up, snow-riddled, at Marianne’s face and I grasped Sarah and hugged her, furiously. She squealed wildly until I let her go.
And, for some crazy reason, all the limping way back to the apartment, I kept seeing Ruth’s face, framed in white lace, fragile as snow, the way it was in her wedding photograph. …
But it was all to the good, going to the park and being late for the rehearsal, because the result was that conversation in the theater lobby. Wolfson stood there looking embarrassed, and Lear was off to one side remonstrating with Rovic. Rolfe offered me a cigarette from a slender silver case. I lit his cigarette for him and he exhaled a weary fume of smoke. Then he shook his head sadly.
“They have terrible tempers, haven’t they?”
“I beg your pardon?”
He made a movement with his shoulder indicating the interior of the theater and, presumably, Jud.
“Jews,” he said blandly. “You’d think they’d take things easier—more quietly, now.”
“Very often they do,” I said.
“Not that I’ve noticed.” He shrugged. “Well, you’ve got to admit their way is the right way.”
“The right way?”
“To get ahead. You have to bowl your way through. They do that very well.”
“It must be something in the blood,” I said.
Rolfe flicked his cigarette ash carefully into an ash stand. “Oh, you can’t say that. I mean it’s not very scientific, is it? It’s hard to say how Jews come by it. I imagine they’d claim it’s their defense against the persecution of centuries. But however it developed they’ve got it, all right.”
“You son of a bitch,” I
said.
His back stiffened, and the hand holding the cigarette trembled. At that moment Larry Elgin ambled up to us and began making pleasant conversation.
There it is, the missing element! An anti-Semite, and given to me just when I need one. I had better make my move now, win or lose. Providence may never again be as thoughtful.
BOOK FOUR
1
OUTSIDE THE THEATER, THE wind whistled the snow into hoops twirling in mid-air. The temperature had dropped sharply since morning, and ice was beginning to encrust the edges of things—the corners of buildings, window ledges, the corrugated surfaces of street lamps.
The noontime scramble of shoppers, music students, secretaries, ticket buyers, befurred matrons, and jeaned and short-jacketed youngsters playing hookey from school to go to Times Square movies, all trudged white and muffled paths.
Inside the theater, everyone except Paul and Jud had gone to lunch. Paul sat on the stage, at the little table at the right front, going over some expenditures. Jud stared directly at him.
Finally, he tugged the sweater he wore under his jacket down tightly around his waist and said: “I must be losing my mind.”
“It couldn’t be helped,” Paul said, without looking up. Like Jud, he was dressed very warmly, since the theater was cold. When Jud said nothing in response, Paul bunched the collar of his greatcoat around his neck and moved the thick yellow muffler up under his chin. His brown eyes had tears in the corners, apparently from the chill. He looked up at Jud, standing near him, and added, “It was a bitter scene.”
“Are you with me, Paul?” Jud asked.
“What do you mean?” Paul murmured. “In what sense—?”
“Don’t fence with me, Paul. Right now I’m not your student. I haven’t got time for your indirect, ironic teaching process. I have to know. Are you with me? It’s life or death.”
Paul smiled without humor. “It’s only a play,” he said. “No matter how important the subject, it’s still make-believe. Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not, I think for the theater.”