by Daniel Stern
“This is a serious step, Joe. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Jud. I think we should all meet before tomorrow morning’s rehearsal and go over the whole question from top to bottom.”
“No, that’s out, Paul. You stood up for Jud when I first wanted him out and I went along with you. I’m only a Goddamned businessman. The theater is a strange area for me. I hope I’m not just a financial Neanderthal stomping around on artistic sensitivities. I don’t think I am. I’m using the same judgment tonight that I’ve used in a pretty successful business life, and I’ve had to make decisions on the spot, whether I was ready or not. Jud told me we couldn’t work together if I handed out ultimatums. This is an ultimatum.”
“All right, Joe,” Paul said, still pacing his words slowly, “I’ll think about it and call you back.”
Paul hung up the phone. He thought, All I have to do is count to one hundred and pick up the phone. He went back to the bathroom and brushed his teeth again. Then he washed his face. He had a weak, sickening feeling, something like nausea. It grew stronger, and he leaned his hands against the cold marble of the sink. He felt as if he didn’t have the strength to reach out and turn off the running water. There was no pain, and gradually the sick feeling subsided. The nausea was gone, leaving only a lemony taste in his mouth. He drank a glass of water when he felt stronger, then went into the living room to find Louise. He knew it had not been an attack and there was no need for him to take one of the pills the doctor had provided. He knew, also, what Louise would say about Lear’s phone call and what he was going to do about it.
Remembering his sense of elation after comforting Janet, earlier in the evening, he thought it was strange that beginnings so often had the sour taste of endings.
BOOK FIVE
1
BY ONE IN THEMORNING the reign of snow over the city was absolute. At the outer reaches, past the George Washington Bridge, the drifts were as high as four feet. Along the highways were humpbacked shapes of varying sizes—stalled cars abandoned to the continuing snowfall. Their former function concealed, they appeared simply as various forms of white. Further down the drifts were not as high, but were growing. The sky over the city was entirely hidden by its own outpouring. It was as if there was no sky, no horizon; nothing but millions of trembling flakes curved by the wind into hieroglyphs floating on the surface of the city.
The temperature was falling when Jud reached the theater’s stage door. He was undecided about calling to see if Marianne was home before he went inside. If she was not at home he was certain she was in the theater with Walkowitz. That was something for which he wanted to be prepared. He waited, shivering, his coat and hatless head getting soaked. Few people were braving the weather. Neon lights from the corner filtered through the haze of snow outlining a policeman on horseback, an old man carrying a suitcase tied with string. There was the sound of a band playing rock ’n’ roll music, first loud, then faint.
Stings of sleet began to barb the snowfall. He thought of Walkowitz, with his fury that was always a moment away, a gesture away. Fury diverted to subtle sarcasm, to ironic movements of hands or shoulders (or to what other invisible expressions?).
Jud brushed melted snow and sleet from his hair, and thought: This is the Walkowitz winter, cold, furious, uncertain. Then, tired of his own indecision, he knocked on the stage door and roused the night watchman. He had never seen him before, but he identified himself, and the bald old man with a profusion of hairs protruding from his ears and nostrils said: “Yes, yes. Some of the others are here.”
They were in the first row of the orchestra. The dimmer house lights were on, as well as a row of footlights, providing just enough light to see by. Walkowitz, in his customary sprawl, seemed cramped by the narrow space between the rows of seats. Marianne was standing, her back to the stage. The lights behind her cast shadows that planted unaccustomed lines on her face, in the corners of her mouth and eyes; placed shadowed creases in the slender folds of her throat.
She appeared to Jud, for the moment, as she would look some years later, when time would have scraped, permanently, into the real flesh the maturity that was now an illusion created by the lights behind her. Her evening dress and the pearls around her throat added an extra element of unreality to the scene.
They did not see him at first. Jud could hear their voices, but not their words. He was sweating, and there was a rhythmic jabbing of blood at his temples. He walked slowly down the center aisle, expecting them to notice his presence. He desperately wanted to hear what they were saying, but he did not want to feel cheap, ludicrous—the cliché husband, eavesdropping, earning his horns.
“… the day after tomorrow,” Marianne was saying, “and thank God this will be over.”
“That’s not very flattering.”
“Do you need flattery?”
“No. Nothing—I need nothing.”
“You didn’t need me. I don’t even think you wanted me.”
“Poor Marianne, no one needs her.”
“Then you won’t be sorry that I’m going. Or glad when I come back.”
“I won’t be around when you get back.”
“I don’t know how I worked into your plans, whatever they were. I only know you hate Jud and you used me. Why? You promised to tell me if I’d come with you tonight.”
Jud was halfway down the center aisle and they still had not noticed him. His face was flushed at what he’d heard. He didn’t give a damn, now, about sneaking or eavesdropping. Quietly, he lowered a seat and sat down.
Walkowitz said, “There was something else implied.”
“You can go to hell. That part is finished for good.”
“So you made clear in the dressing room.”
“You just wanted to humiliate me one last time.”
“It’s not that simple, Marianne. You’re a lovely, natural girl—you touched me in some place that hasn’t been alive for years.”
“Is that a way of saying you love me? Be careful, you’ll spoil that highly moral, disinterested tone of yours that you’ve kept all the way through.”
“So have you. Jud has been in mind every minute. This affair has been a kind of abstraction for you. Some kind of imitation experience, with me playing a Jud as he might have been. You’ve never really tried to touch me. Not with any genuine feeling.”
“Then why did you bother?”
“It amused me to see your little-girl attempt to experience something real in your make-believe sleepwalker’s world. It amused me to see you trying to find your husband through me. Through me, of all the men in the world! The final irony—Walkowitz reveals Judah Kramer to his naïve, untouched shiksa wife. He would never have sat still for it.”
“But you did.”
“For a time, only for a time.”
“Then all you got from it was the pleasure of stealing something of Jud’s.”
“Yes, but there was more. I touched Ruth, my wife, a little—the virginal part that never really yielded itself. And Josanne—the part that wanted to know a suffering so great that it could make her own pain seem foolish. Also, I have to admit, for moments I touched something all your own, something Jud must have felt—a fresh, cool hand on a dry heart.”
“If I could believe that, the last part, I could believe you wouldn’t tell Jud.”
“You mean he shouldn’t know? Not ever?”
“No, I’ve gotten the message. He was always supposed to know. But I think that’s my pretty job.”
Walkowitz waited a moment, and said, “Then you’d better tell him damned fast.”
Marianne moved to the right side of the stage in an angry swirl of skirts. Walkowitz followed her, walking more slowly. She was halfway across the stage when he called out: “Where are you going?”
“First to the dressing room,” she said, “to get my coat. Then home to do my pretty job.”
Neither of them heard Jud running until he was actually on the stage and they could hear the clack of his shoes on the wood of t
he floorboards. Marianne saw him first. By the time Walkowitz turned his head, Jud was on top of him.
The first lunge carried them both to the floor. They landed with Walkowitz on his back. Jud straddled him, slammed a fist into his cheek, and heard the head smack, hard, on the boards. The sound was so sharp Jud thought he might have knocked him out. He grabbed Walkowitz by the throat and raised his head a few inches. Almost at once a fist caught him hard on the right temple and a knee shoved into his groin. Jud felt a spasm of pain in his testicles; there was a ringing in his ears. He grabbed Walkowitz by the throat again and began to squeeze hard enough to choke out any air at all. Jud’s eyes were almost closed but he saw Marianne kneeling near him.
“Please,” she moaned. “Please, Jud.”
Tears were streaking her face and she began to pull at his fingers. Jud was oblivious.
“You fucking son of a bitch,” he said. His hands were unable to stop squeezing and his eyes saw only blurred images. Beneath him, Walkowitz was jerking wildly. He was gasping for air, at the same time using what breath he had left to gasp out unidentifiable words. Marianne was digging her nails into Jud’s wrists, tearing bloody marks along the skin. But that was not what made him stop. For an instant his vision cleared and he saw Walkowitz’s right eye. All that could be seen between the lids was a thin sliver of white, shot with crooked, bloody lines. At the same time Jud felt the body he straddled struggling on the right side only—he sensed the awful rigidity of the left leg.
Suddenly, the familiarity of those injuries made it Carl Walkowitz he was crushing. Jud’s hands dropped from the bruised throat and went to his own face. He pressed it between his sweaty palms and wept.
2
WALKOWITZ HAD PULLED HIMSELF up into the big chair in the elevated S.S. area. He lay in it, stretched out as if he had been flung there. The reddish marks on his throat slowly whitened.
“Why?” Jud said. It was the only word he could find.
Regaining his wind, Walkowitz said hoarsely: “Marianne’s here—ask her.”
Jud did not turn his head. “I know it takes two,” he said. “But I feel it—and you know it—this is something you did, isn’t it? Something you planned.”
“You mean I seduced her?” Walkowitz said.
“You bastard, I mean you seduced her against me. Never mind why Marianne did it. I’m not going to talk to you about her motives. That’s between my wife and me.”
“Such a noble stance—my wife!”
“You once taunted me into hitting you, that crazy time when we acted out the past. Don’t do it now, Carl. If I hit you again I won’t stop. I’ll kill you. That was a nightmare, this is real.”
“Marianne, you should be proud. You have a husband who knows what is real and what is a nightmare. Perhaps he was never in the camps at all.”
Marianne moved from the shadow of a stunted tree in which she stood. The artificial stage light exaggerated her pallor. She had ripped the hem of her dress while trying to stop the fight, and it hung beneath her scraped knee, a reminder of violence. She ignored Walkowitz and spoke directly to Jud.
“Let me say something. I don’t know why … something became twisted … slowly, at first … then with the play it got faster. I lost control—”
Jud said: “Marianne, go home!” He tried to make his tone balanced and firm, but it came out rubbed raw with anger.
“Please, let me talk. It was so much the way the play brought everything back to you—but none of it could get to me. It even brought him—and he got mixed up in my mind with what happened to you. It felt like a chance to break through that damned silence curtain. I’m not making excuses. God only knows what’s going to happen to us …”
“Marianne, go home. I’ll talk to you at home!”
“I couldn’t—Oh, God, I don’t even know what I wanted so much … but if you could only understand that.”
“Will you go home now?”
She glanced up, crazily, at the gates suspended over the scene. “You brought those damned gates with you and you kept them shut.”
Jud went to her. He grasped her by the shoulders, to move her from the stage toward the exit.
“Leave her alone,” Walkowitz said. He was on his feet, holding tightly to the chair. Jud continued as if he hadn’t heard. This time it was a loud call, a command:
“Kramer, leave her alone!”
Jud half turned to him. “Look, keep out of this—”
“I’m telling you to keep quiet.” Walkowitz’s voice was even louder now. It rang with authority, and echoed in the empty theater. “You have no right to object. You have no right to give orders. You have no rights of any kind.”
Marianne spoke first. “Carl, are you crazy? For God’s sake, leave us alone.”
Walkowitz kept his focus on Jud, direct and intense.
“I don’t want Marianne to leave now,” he said. “It is important for her to know.”
Walkowitz still clung to the chair. He had not regained all his strength. He spoke, calmly, as if explaining a lesson. “Jud, you have no rights at all. Not even the right to be alive. You’re alive instead of someone else.”
Jud made the full turn toward him. “I’ve taken enough from you. Maybe you are crazy …”
“Alive instead of my mother or father or one other,” Walkowitz Went on. “I’m pretty sure there were three. But before I’m called crazy again, remember—I know it’s been a sleep of fifteen years, but remember—the S.S. orderly room.”
Jud frowned. He and Marianne were part of a frozen tableau. One of his hands was still on her white shoulder, gleaming, bare except for the thin black straps of her cocktail dress; Jud’s formal, black coat unbuttoned, soggy with melted snow, his tuxedo damp and creased. They stood thus, surrounded by the bleak camp street with two stripped and twisted trees, in front of an open barracks. Completing the tableau: Walkowitz, leaning on the big leather chair in the raised area of the S.S. officer’s quarters. Next to the chair was the desk, on which the prop man had left some papers and a shiny pair of black boots. The half light moved over the scene in slow, dusty ambiguity.
“Yes,” Jud said finally. “I remember the orderly room.” His mind was suddenly empty. Then he tried to recall, straining as if it was a physical effort, and felt his mind go truly blank. Everything was blurred, indistinguishable. It was present, though, even in the mindlessness, had probably always been there. It was not part of the bad dreams, not one of the torments that had recurred in the California growing days—certainly not one of the things he had actively kept from Marianne during the early, questioning days, the probing, sullen nights. It had been, simply, there, next to so many things that had demanded to be done. In that moment the blurring disappeared. At the same time he knew the reason for its original appearance: to prevent thinking of what personal stake Walkowitz might have in the matter. But it couldn’t work. It covered and contained the knowledge at the same time.
Marianne and Walkowitz were both looking at him, waiting. “I told you,” Jud said, “I remember the orderly room.”
The tableau unfroze. Walkowitz limped a few steps to the front of the chair and sat down.
Marianne said, “What is it?” She spoke to both of them.
“Sit down,” Walkowitz said.
She looked at Jud automatically. But she saw that the question of Jud’s commands or countercommands had been suspended, in some way, by what Walkowitz had said. The closest chair was the leather one facing Walkowitz, in the elevated S.S. area. She mounted a step and sat down.
“Good,” Walkowitz said to Marianne. “You see how he quiets down? How all the righteousness seeps out of him? You’re puzzled. Perhaps even Jud is, though somehow I doubt it. Didn’t you ever wonder if his silence, all his vagueness, hid more than just pain—something shameful, perhaps?”
Marianne shook her head.
“I wasn’t hiding anything,” Jud said.
“Oh, you mean she knows?”
“What you’re talking about
is something anybody would have—if we’re talking about the same thing.”
“We are!”
“You mean the list—”
“You’ll spoil my promise to your wife, Jud. I said I’d tell her my reasons. So let me state my case.”
“You were the one who called Hendrix, weren’t you?”
Walkowitz nodded.
“And sent the telegrams to the papers.”
Again a nod.
“You hoped it would lose me the play.”
“We can get to my iniquities later. First—” Walkowitz stood. His strength seemed to have returned. He leaned on the table now, not for support but for emphasis. “I’ll be as fair as I can, Marianne.” He faced her.
“You see, a great deal hinges on Jud getting a superb assignment in the S.S. orderly room—that’s the central office,” he added. “It was a magnificent place to be, comparatively speaking. For a Jew, human dung, it was just about impossible to get an assignment there. Bribery was about the only way.”
In a voice empty of feeling, Jud said, “Who told you about it?”
“Think.” Walkowitz snapped his fingers in a mocking gesture, as if to awaken an hypnotic subject. “Think. To how many people could you tell such a story?”
“Jankl,” Jud said. “It was Jankl.”
“May his soul rest in peace,” Walkowitz said sardonically. Jud was silent.
“So—” Walkowitz returned to addressing Marianne. “I have to start with the question of records. Because this story is built around a list of names and numbers. The Germans kept systematic records, not just of people, of things, too. After a while the two merged. Names and numbers were not enough. Don’t forget this was part of a revolution, and all revolutions try to classify every section of society. The Nazis were so thorough about this that even the human garbage was carefully classified, before and after it was disposed of and burned. Everyone had an insignia. Common criminals wore a green triangle sewed over the upper left chest. Political prisoners, a red triangle … asocials, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others whom the Germans could understand least, a black triangle. They even had one for homosexuals, Mr. Rolfe would be amused to know. Their triangle was pink. Wasn’t that clever? But we Jews, we were doubly honored. We wore two yellow triangles, one inverted inside the other. Visualize it—it forms the Star of David. In a disordered world it’s always comforting to know who is who.