by Daniel Stern
“That’s still no answer,” Jud said.
“It’s a freezing, snowy winter. Everything’s difficult. Lear is cold on you. He wants a success. I may not like the way he goes about it, always, but is it so bad to want a success?”
“What do you think I want? The way Joe is heading, that’s the real failure road. I’ve seen it happen—try to please everyone and you end up with a warm milk of a play. If he hasn’t got a strong stomach and a tough mind, he shouldn’t be doing a play like this.”
Paul blinked against the harsh work light above the stage. He gave his chair a quarter turn as he pushed it away from the rickety table. His eyes, unfocused, seemed to examine some far corner of the auditorium as he spoke.
“It’s happened step by step. First the Hendrix business. Lear has as much superstitious awe of newspapermen as he has of theater people. Then there’s Walkowitz. Joe never liked the idea of him as your assistant. Then casting Dasha instead of Janet—and I’m trying to be objective, please believe me. Joe doesn’t show emotions too easily, but that was a big shock to him. He wanted a star. And he doesn’t trust Dasha, not even now. No, sit still, Jud. I’m tracing it, step by step, because it has to be done. These are the elements that turned a touchy situation into a dangerous one for all of us. On top of all this came Wolfson. Now this is crucial. It involves real money and it could mean absolute security for the production before we open.”
“Why am I suddenly the wild and woolly artiste who doesn’t care about money? I’d love to open with the production cost underwritten by an advance movie sale. But it still has to be the play we started out to do.”
“Lear and Wolfson both feel that the spirit of the play has to be more heroic—not just a stark and bleak landscape without hope, with the young man we care so much about killing himself, not only out of despair but as a self-execution because of his own corruption: that was your explanation as I remember. And I know that a more heroic feeling may seem, in this case, sort of commercial. I know, too, that you won’t move in that direction. That’s why I have great hopes for the music. If Korn can do the right backgrounds—”
Jud said bluntly: “There isn’t going to be any music.”
“Why not?”
“I had a session with Korn this morning and I changed my mind. Music would make it clear that we’re sitting in a theater, in New York City, in the Hydrogen Bomb decade of the nineteen sixties, seeing a play about a sad event that happened a long time ago. I don’t want to make it that easy.”
“Then I guess that settles that,” Paul said.
“And about Carl. I’ve begun to feel that he’s my only ally.”
Paul did not flinch at this. He groped in his pockets for a cigarette. “I know,” he said.
“You can’t know. Oh, translating, changes in the text—that’s all important. But like, say, the other night at my place. He gave me the key to the feeling of rock-bottom despair, the kind of gray anguish that comes when the hope of surviving is hopeless, because you have lost yourself somewhere along the way.”
“I think the man may know whereof he speaks,” Paul said dryly.
“And let me tell you that’s just what Joe Lear doesn’t like about having him around. Don’t you see? It’s all of a piece. Me directing the play, a survivor myself—it’s right on the nose, uncomfortably so. The play shouldn’t be so full of despair—that’s too much on the nose. Carl shouldn’t be visible because he tells the eye at a glance what the play tries to show in an entire evening. Let’s not kid ourselves, Paul. The Jew has always been an everlasting pain in the ass to everybody. Even to those who sympathize. Sympathy is not a rich emotion, God knows. Not like, say, empathy.” Jud was too disturbed to feel the pleasure he would usually have felt at handling a difficult American meaning accurately. “No,” he continued, “it’s too much like an unwilling pity—pity squeezed out of them against their will. Believe me, Joe speaks for the whole world when he says, silently of course, ‘I’m sorry for your suffering, only must you suffer so loudly and right in front of my eyes? Please, go and hide your torment under some kind of blanket, if only one made of good taste and tact. Then I’ll be glad to contribute—tears, money, anything. I may even make a heroic play out of your sufferings. Only please hide yourself.’”
Jud stood next to Paul, his eyes fixed on a point just to the right of Paul’s face; it was only darkness at that point. He felt his shoulders covered with perspiration when he moved them against his shirt. The theater was quite chilly and there was a draft across the middle of the stage, coming from some undiscovered chink in the old theater’s walls, a reminder of the white whirlwind outside.
“Listen, I know something about myself. I know I make it easy for the Joe Lears. But Carl doesn’t—and that’s exactly his value to this production.”
Paul shook his head, bemused. “I suppose that says it all.”
Jud shifted his abstracted gaze from the empty dark to Paul’s hooded brown eyes. “No,” he said. “It doesn’t say anything about you.”
“Oh, me.”
“Yes.” Jud waited.
“How can you have any doubt?”
“Because you’ve been pretty vague, half playing along with Lear and half backing me up. It’s a noncommittal stance.”
Paul frowned. “I’ve tried not to make too much of it, but I really haven’t snapped out of last year’s sickness. I’m not the same man I was.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Listen, Jud. When I was a boy my mother used to call me Cossack and my father called me the ox. I was no sickly intellectual moping in the Vilna ghetto. At sixteen I was a deck hand on a Polish freighter.”
“Yes, I know. You ran away from military service in Russia.”
“That’s right, I told you about that. You see, I’m getting old and repetitious.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Then I’m getting old and contentious. And it’s all because of the heart attack.”
“Well, what did you expect, a picnic? You have to take care of yourself now, that’s all.”
Paul shook his head. “That’s not all. And God knows what you expect after lying immobilized in a hospital bed for six weeks, after they take the oxygen tent away. There are no rules you ever learned that help you in a situation like that.”
“I’ve been afraid for you,” Jud said. “I have been ever since it happened.”
“I’m glad to hear I’m not alone. But as a director you can smell the self-pity, can’t you? I try to quiet it, but it has its say. Jud, I’m afraid I’m not to be depended on, the way I was. Do you understand that?”
“I think so. But you’re giving me the background material. I’m waiting for the real thing.”
“Maybe I can borrow that word from Walkowitz that impressed you so much—despair. A dry, cool despair that you live out behind a glass wall.”
“Glass …?”
“That’s what it’s been like since last year. I can see everyone and they can see me. But nothing has any real—it’s hard to explain—any feeling tone. I used to see things from the inside out. Now I see cold, clear, vacant.”
He hunched forward. His eyes were open and focused now, the lids wrinkled, purplish in the meager light. The heavy breaths he drew puffed his lips out slightly when he exhaled, as if he were comatose, not in control of his muscles. With a shaky feeling, Jud watched the rise and fall of his rounded shoulders under the folds of the worn tweed coat.
“Don’t upset yourself,” Jud said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears, like a recording.
“When you face everyone else in the world across that barrier, you can’t count on yourself to behave well. You can’t count on anything.” He shrugged his shoulders toward Jud, in a strange gesture of complicity, and said: “I think you know about that.”
“No,” Jud said angrily. “People are always saying that to me, or something like it. I don’t know about that. It was a murderous struggle trying to live in the camps—y
ou can’t really call it getting adjusted; call it, rather, not struggling every minute not to be where you had to be—but the idea that you couldn’t figure on anything is not true. You saw people die all the time, unexpectedly, in meaningless ways. Once I saw an old man, all naked, drowned under the boot of an S.S. man. But the people you knew, including yourself, either acted the way they wanted themselves to behave, as people, or they violated their idea of themselves. But it wasn’t just a great big anarchy, the way you might think. It was a world.”
“I didn’t mean to open up wounds.” Paul smiled wryly. “And so ineptly, too. I was thinking about the closeness of death.”
“I know. But it wasn’t the same thing there. For moments, maybe hours, it was with you. But for long times the fact of it wasn’t very real. People are good at forgetting, even in concentration camps. You had to fight yourself to keep it real. Otherwise, you died.”
“I’ve gotten pretty good at ignoring reality this last year,” Paul said. “But that glass wall I’ve been living behind is the price you have to pay for being good at it. Avoiding your own death can be expensive.”
“I know.”
“Listen.” Paul waved a hand at an imaginary audience. “I’m not going to say I haven’t had dreams, fantasies or whatever, about directing again. Especially since my stay in the hospital. But that’s all they are. And there’s no reason for me to credit them. So there’s no reason for you to credit them with being the cause of my frailness in your defense.”
“That’s not it. And I don’t need to be defended.”
“I was defending myself.”
“It also occurred to me that it could be Janet.”
“All stage fathers aren’t typical. For me, Janet is having enough success. Not enough for her, of course, but if she could ever get enough she wouldn’t be an actress.” He said bitterly, moving the cigarette between his lips: “She can do without playing this part, I can do without directing or smoking cigarettes. Anybody can do without anything, if they try hard enough.”
Jud turned so that his back was to Paul. Paul waited for him to speak, but he did not. Then Paul stood up, moving slowly with a careful weariness, like that of an old man, and walked to Jud.
“I take it back,” he said. “You have to direct this play. You can’t do without that.” He enfolded himself deeper in the oversized coat.
“Don’t think that Louise didn’t mention it, though, about my directing the play, when Lear first got involved. The justification was supposed to be that you were too close to the whole thing. And, of course, the unspoken wifely belief that I am a great man and have merely been hiding my directorial light under a bushel of students all these years. On top of the bushel of students is, of course, a bushel of fears of failing. But wives don’t take those fears very seriously. I’ve always taken them seriously, so you may as well, too. That’s all just by way of added assurance that I’m not competing, Jud. No—shut up. Please. I haven’t ever told you how valuable you and Marianne have been to me these last years. I’ve never been so certain that my life had a direction as when you were working with me in the school. And I’ve never been so certain of the importance of success as I was when you and Marianne started to become successful. I’ve never been so certain of my very tricky and shaky ability to love as when I’ve loved you and Marianne and Sarah. I’ve never been so certain of my abilities as I have been when teaching you, or watching you direct classes. And after the attack last year, when I lay in bed counting the blessings I desperately didn’t want to lose, your name, like Abou ben Adhem’s, led all the rest.”
Paul started to walk toward the stairs at the end of the stage that led into the orchestra. Jud did not move or speak. At the foot of the small staircase, Paul paused and drew on his woolen gloves. He looked up at the stage, but the dim light was angled so that Jud’s face was caught in shadows.
“Postscript,” Paul said to the short, chunky figure and shadowed face. “Try not to count on me too far, for too much. I’ll see you at the dinner tonight.”
2
JUD WALKED DOWN FROM the stage. In his office he washed his face, and finding no towel, used an old shirt he had forgotten to take home. He sat at the desk, and by an effort of will, tried to set his whirling thoughts in order.
All right, he thought, plan! They tell you the gate around the camp is electrified. You see the gate—it doesn’t look electrified. But you know it is, so you draw a wide, imaginary line, far inside the perimeter, and that becomes your gate. Then, if an S.S. guard wants to play and sets a dog loose, you can’t be forced against the gate. You have leeway. So, plan now—in the event that
Lear backs out …
With Paul on my side we’ll find other backing for the play. Paul is a famous teacher now, he knows everyone in the theater. Paul had said, “Don’t count on me.” But that was the sickness speaking, the accents of the damaged heart. Even fear of death couldn’t change someone so completely.
Memory put on its sardonic gesture and tone. Jud remembered plump, contentious Willens, the scholar, always crouching alone, reading his torn fragments of newspaper articles—thinking, still, of his scientific contributions to come, ignoring, as best he could, the conditions around him. Then eight months later, Willens—bone-skinny, kneeling on the chest of the old man, digging his thumbs into the reddish, pimply eye sockets until Jud had to turn away. Then there was the wet, spurting sound. That was the sound of weakness. Literally, the weakness of the blood vessels surrounding the eyes of an elderly, Austrian gentleman in the jewelry business—but also the weakness of that same gentleman, first clean and groomed, then gradually growing slovenly, the will atrophying, the ability to care paralyzed, until he could no longer fight for a piece of filthy bread. Worse, that sickening sound was the sound of Willens’s own weakness. The scholar had been hungry, furiously hungry, just one hour or one minute too long, and he had seen the old jeweler holding a piece of bread in his strengthless fingers. Then, suddenly, he was no longer Willens, the graduate of Heidelberg, with a fellowship in chemical research at the University of Brussels. He was then the kind of animal Klempner, the barrack Kapo, had always insisted they all were—Klempner, who doled out the small pieces of sour-smelling bread while he called out, with hoarse sarcasm: “Come, get your bread, feine Menschen, meine Intelligenten,” while they crowded around him, shoving and yapping at each other. The sound of the blood gushing under Willens’s fingers was the signal that human weakness had proven the fat Kapo correct. After a certain point under the insistence of suffering, there were no human beings, only animals and their keepers—gods who granted absolute grace, salvation, or damnation.
And if Paul’s strength failed him under the onslaught of his illness, and he failed Jud, what then?
Jud knew, as he thought the words, that he was shying away from the true thought, the imperative: Plan now—in the event that
Paul dies …
Jud forced himself to focus on the idea. He felt a familiar trembling of panic. For a moment he was afraid the dream was coming back in full immediacy, but it was not the dream. It was the time he had been transferred to a new camp.
He was being shoved into a ragged line of men and boys, walking, stumbling, crawling, then walking again. The first destination was the railroad station, where the freight cars stood, waiting. By the time they arrived there, Judah felt too exhausted ever to exert his will again, even to the extent of picking up one foot and placing it after the other.
That morning he had been so strong. His father had found him, a few moments before the morning roll call. One hand half covering his thin face with its now unkempt-looking mustache and beard, his father had said:
“I’m coming with you.”
“No, you can’t. It’s too dangerous.”
“I am coming with you, Judah.”
“No,” Judah said. “You know what’s supposed to happen when they ship you out. Besides, if they find out they’ll kill you.”
“Let them. There is o
nly us now.”
“I don’t believe it about Momma and Miriam—”
“S-h-h-h-h-h. Yes, yes, may they rest in peace with God, they are all dead. So what does it matter if they kill me because I come with you? There is only you and me, Judah.”
He noticed how his father’s cheekbones jutted out in a prominence he had never seen before. He was thin. One of the lenses of his spectacles was cracked. Judah wished he knew whether his father had enough strength to speak louder than he was speaking now, whether he could still muster the energy to call out his responses, the way he always had at Sabbath services: “Shema Yisroel”… “Hear O Israel”—like a trumpet. He closed his eyes. “No,” he said, his teeth shut against the word. “If you stay it may be all right, and we can be together when it’s over. Please, Poppa. Please. As long as you’re alive, anything is possible.”
Max Kramer raised a trembling hand to his face, to his dirt-clotted beard.
“Judah,” he said. “I don’t want to live any more. Not without you, Judah. The others are dead. Not without you, Judah.”
Dogs barked, and the wind carried the brittle sound. There was a whisper of voices somewhere. The air was damp and freezing. Judah pressed his face against his father’s shoulder.
“Big,” his father whispered. “You grew.”
“I’ll be all right. You have to live if you can. Please, Poppa.”
That was prelude. Present reality was the train, smelling like childhood outhouses, like rain-soaked cesspools, like steam baths in which all the bathers had died.
Judah sat wedged against a very old man and a boy. The boy kept muttering something to the old man, but Judah did not listen. He tried to keep his balance so as not to fall against the other two.
The pressure of a heavy man behind him forced Judah to crouch lower. A woman began to murmur, then to moan. In a moment she was screaming. Others tried to quiet her, but still others joined her. When Judah tried to put his hands over his ears to shut out the sound he found his right hand immobilized by the crush of flesh. Holding his free hand over the left ear only seemed to intensify the shrieking sound. When he tried to lower his arm he found he could not; some shift in the stinking mass around him had frozen his upraised arm.