by Daniel Stern
“Yes.”
“But doing that,” Jud said, still softly, “you know what you’ve become?”
Walkowitz’s face was the color of ashes. Exhaustion pinched the corners of his eyes into a squint. He sat down on the step of the barracks. The extended bad leg was trembling. He stilled the limb by pressing a hand to it.
“Leave me alone,” he said. “Anything I did to you is nothing—”
“You’re right,” Jud said. “But not for the reasons you think. You haven’t taken my wife away from me. I may not even lose the play,” he said. “So, you see, finally, you will have taken nothing away.
“But you’ve damaged. None of it is going to be easy from now on. Marianne or my work or my reputation, because of you.”
Walkowitz said flatly, “I told you anything I did is nothing.”
“Wait a minute, Carl. You should get more credit than that for your efforts. All these weeks something has been eating away at me. I didn’t know what was happening, just that everything I had built up seemed to be falling away. A terrible emptiness, a feeling of fighting vague shadows, but shadows with real danger. Sound familiar?”
Walkowitz shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
Jud walked closer to the barracks step. He shivered with a chill; the theater had grown freezing. He pulled his coat tightly around him. From the corner of one eye he saw Marianne staring at him.
He said to Walkowitz: “Doesn’t it sound familiar? The phantom business, the shadows that could really hurt you, but kept on being shadows—you know?”
“The camps.”
“I knew you wouldn’t fail me.” Jud imitated Walkowitz’s mocking style. It was an extra weapon.
“The extermination list I changed wasn’t invented by you or me. The fact is, we were both in a hell we didn’t make. That’s one of the definitions of Hell, isn’t it?—that it’s made for you by somebody else. But this was a hell for the innocent—and that innocence had to be corrupted, to make us so many thousands of separate animals. That’s one reason they made prisoners into Kapos, why the people who stuffed Jewish bodies into crematoriums had to be Jews, always. The thing was to eliminate the whole idea of innocence or guilt, or acts having any meaning at all. But I don’t want an excuse. The fact is that even in Hell, the real one, the everlasting flames, some souls would behave better than others.
“I know you must have felt as paralyzed as I did. That nothing you ever did again could make any difference, that you were like what they called you—and treated you as—shit! When I saw that list, I’ll tell you something ridiculous. I felt a jump inside me that wasn’t just being afraid. Changing the list, I don’t know how to say it exactly, it did something strange for me.” He paused, standing right in front of Walkowitz, and looked directly at him. “For a moment, when I did that, I felt like a man.”
Walkowitz said, “That must be a comfortable feeling.”
“No. But I wasn’t shit, or an object. I was Judah Kramer and my mother was Sarah Kramer and my sister’s name was Miriam Kramer. And I tried to save their lives, and mine.”
“You took three others—and they became shit, and then ashes. For your family you were a man—for mine you were the Supreme Being.”
Jud’s breathing was tight in his chest.
“Carl, it was you who made use of that fantastic freedom you once talked about. You decided I’d forfeited everything, even the right to be killed quickly, in revenge. That would have been, at least, natural. If you killed me in revenge you would have been killing Sarah’s father, too, and Marianne’s husband—and Sarah and Marianne are innocent. But you wouldn’t have stopped to think about that. I didn’t think, either. I tried to save my life—and the others I cared about. That’s my only defense.”
“You make me sorry I didn’t kill you,” Walkowitz said. “Or myself.”
“Maybe you hoped I’d do the job for you. That’s the easiest kind of suicide, to provoke someone to murder you.”
“Why did you stop?”
“I don’t exactly know. Maybe because I felt your stiff leg, saw your eye—and I remembered who you were. You would have liked to see me crumble, little by little, while you watched from behind the scene—with the extra irony of being my assistant, my friend, you would have stripped me down. You felt the proper punishment included the fact that I wouldn’t quite know what was happening to me, or why. (Remember the day you were first arrested?) A strangeness with my wife, with Paul, the play slipping away from my control, in ways I could never quite understand; the business about Rolfe spreading around me like a net, without my knowing it, until you suddenly pulled the net closed with Hendrix and the telegrams.”
Jud waited, as if for objection. Then he continued: “They won you, in a peculiar way. You left the camp without hope; they had killed not just your whole family but everyone else in the world—and you were a ghost walking among ghosts. Except for me. I was the only one left alive. And when you found me, you began to perform the same operation. To turn me into a thing that couldn’t protest because he had no right to protest, no defense. The way a Jew was a kind of bug to the Nazis. With bugs you don’t bother about innocence or guilt. The crime is their existence, their so-called nature.”
Walkowitz’s head was inclined forward, his eyes fixed on the floor. One finger caressed the half-moon of his injured eye.
Jud said, “But you can be proud of one thing—you’re an amateur. You don’t know how to do a job like that, how to scientifically turn a man into a thing so he’ll play your game with you … walk into ditches and wait to be shot, or crowded, uncomplaining, into gas chambers. There’s still too much of the human in you. You learned from good teachers, but it takes a good student, too.”
Walkowitz raised his head. He did not reply, but kept his steady stare, as if he were paralyzed and mute.
“I suppose you have another reason to hate me now,” Jud said. “For not killing you when I started before. For not taking away that rotten job of surviving the others. They knew it so well, those German bastards, how it sets people apart from each other, the fact that every day they’re selected to live, one of the others dies instead. Didn’t you think I knew that? You had it worse than some. You saw—But we all know we’re alive instead of someone else.”
Again, in the dark, chilly theater, he waited. But Walkowitz sat on the barracks step, silent as an abandoned idol.
Jud went to Marianne. He raised his hand to cup her cheek with his palm, but paused. “Go get your coat,” he said.
Jud and Walkowitz were alone on the stage, facing each other. Neither would turn away. Now that Marianne had gone, the surrounding set enclosed them entirely. The gray, weathered barracks, the S.S. office, gleaming with polished wood, the long street whose perspective led past the dry and deadly-looking trees to the painted green and brown suggestion of a murmurous forest—and, ruling over the scene, the great gates.
In that strange silence, composed unequally of the past and present, Jud had a sense of how it must have been for Walkowitz to carry this landscape with him all those years—waiting for it to materialize again so that it could be exorcised. And he wondered, too, if perhaps this had been the reason, or reasons, he himself had seized on the play as if it were his whole life. But at least he hadn’t been like Walkowitz, who had lived as if anesthetics had never been discovered—anesthetics like a new family, like daytime forgetfulness, like work.
Marianne had called them two sides of the same coin. Who was this Walkowitz? The always-present other side, never forgetting, never forgiving, refusing to grow, refusing to change until punishment has been exacted? He had been wrong about his visitor from the past. Perhaps it was not a divergent road he had chosen; both roads existed always, at the same time. Both roads led directly to this set, to the camps, grim with detailed suffering. Yes, he thought wearily, yes, it is true. Even in Hell people behave differently. Some are better than others.
Marianne returned. The voluminous minkcoat was crushed ar
ound her shoulders. She had turned the collar up so that her face was almost completely hidden.
“Come,” Jud said to her.
She walked shakily down the steps leading from the stage, without looking at Walkowitz. Jud turned back. He saw that Walkowitz’s eyes had not left them. Then he started down the steps after Marianne.
BOOK SIX
Let not worms eat my body …
Let me be consumed in flames,
For I have always loved the warmth and the light.
—INSCRIPTION ON A CREMATORY
OVEN AT DACHAU
1
IN THE CAB MARIANNE curled away from Jud, as close to the window as she could. Neither of them spoke. She wanted to, but she was afraid of the words she might find to say. It was a foolish thing, but she felt she could not bear it if there was one more click from the meter. When it came she bent forward and wrapped her arms around her head.
Jud said, “Marianne …”
Her entire body shook slightly, expressing a negative.
“I’m not going to cry,” she said in a muffled voice. “Don’t worry about that.”
“Cry if you like.”
She shook her head. “For who?”
“Whoever you like,” he said stiffly.
“Maybe for me,” she said.
“Why?”
“That’s a cold ‘why.’”
“Why? Are you sorry for what you found out?”
“It’s not that simple. I can’t be sorry for what happened years ago. Sorry would be a foolish word to use for that.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t know what I mean.”
“That’s a new problem for us. You’d better tell me right out, as if I were a stranger.”
“All right. You won, but you wouldn’t stop. All his threatening was over, but you wouldn’t stop. You had to finish him off.”
“He finished himself off.”
“That’s just it. Why couldn’t you have walked away from him then? By the time he got through to you, it was as if he’d brought it home to himself, and you could see it breaking him apart. It was horrible to watch.”
“Yes,” Jud said. “I was there.”
She turned her face back toward him. “If I saw it acted out on a stage I would have sworn that you—the character of you, I mean—would have been moved to … what would you call it, compassion, I suppose. I would have sworn that, Jud.”
“Is that what you had? Is that why—”
She said nothing.
“All right,” Jud said. “But you’re saying something pretty wild, you know. He tried to rip my whole life up, and then, when he failed at it, he needed my help and I should have given it.”
“Is that so wild?”
“I don’t know. Did he need you? Was that what it was all about? I can’t seem to stay off it, can I?”
“Would it be so insane, so awful if that were it—even all of it? What do you want me to do, tick off the elements as if it were a dramatics class? Need, then compassion, the chance to get through a silence curtain … only to have it turn out that—”
“Yes?”
“You heard him say that part, I’m sure. ‘Your little-girl attempt,’” she quoted bitterly, “‘to find your husband through me … Walkowitz reveals Jud Kramer to his naïve shiksa wife.’”
“He said, ‘Judah Kramer.’ I heard that part of it. And was he right?”
Her voice was scarcely audible, but Jud saw her nod. This time, she did not raise her eyes to meet his.
Jud paid the cab driver and helped Marianne up the steps of the apartment house. While waiting for the elevator he suddenly realized he could not stay there for another minute.
“I’m going out for a walk,” he said. “You go to bed.” He added, mechanically: “I won’t be long.”
“All right,” Marianne said.
After half a block Jud found it impossible to go on walking, but the snow harbored few cabs. Finally one rolled by and he hailed it.
The driver opened his window to ask, warily: “How far you goin’, Mac?”
“Gramercy Park,” Jud said, not expecting the words, but not surprised, either, when he heard them.
2
GRAMERCY PARK SLEPT WHITELY under the moon. Jud got out of the cab in front of Walkowitz’s hotel. He hesitated for a moment. Across the street glimmered the neon sign announcing another hotel. Jud slogged his way to its snow-stuffed doorway and pushed the reluctant revolving door. The desk clerk was a cheery sort, determinedly wide awake in the middle of the night. He wore a bright red bow tie and he peered affably at Jud after Jud had requested a room.
“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”
Jud shook his head.
“Oh yes.” The clerk grinned. “I can’t remember a lot of things, but I never forget a human face. You want any special room?”
“Just give me a single, any one.”
In the room Jud sat on the bed and wondered what to do. He wasn’t tired, yet he felt drained. Walking to the window was a tremendous effort. In spite of the lateness of the hour the buildings that rimmed the park winked with random lights. They brought a comforting feeling of the life of men, of families. Jud felt as if he had been isolated from the rest of the world for days, weeks, months. “I never forget a human face.” The thought was too funny for laughter.
Under the snow the rectangular park gleamed within its gates—the snowy shapes of trees, the promise of grass and flowers, seasonless, anonymous.
He felt like a boy, unfocused and lost, pursued by demons that could not be easily quieted. When he was a child he had slept, for a time, at his Uncle Jacob’s house while his own house was being painted. He remembered being afraid in an unfamiliar house that smelled strangely of things like naphtha and benzene (Uncle Jacob had a shop in which he did carpenter’s work, for his own pleasure and occasional profit). Jud’s fears were especially strong at bedtime. To calm them he used to simulate a voice that was a composite of the tone in which his family spoke. He would speak to it, saying: “I am Judah.” And the voice would answer, playfully, “Who is it?” And he would say again, “I’m me, Judah.” And the voice would say, “Who’s there?”
Now he said in a half voice: “This is me, Judah.” But there was no answer from the cold glass or the park beneath the window. He took off his shirt, pants, and shoes and lay down on the hotel bed. Closed eyes and measured breathing did not bring sleep. Finally he stood up and dressed. He went downstairs, not raising his eyes to the desk clerk as he dropped the key before him.
It had stopped snowing, and the night gleamed cold and dead white under the drifting moon.
The snow was crisp, half yielding, when he stepped across the street. A stooped old lady, inexplicably, was walking a dog across ahead of him. She groped in her purse for a moment, then took out a key and opened the gates to the park. Like a sanctuary suddenly found, the park seemed enormously desirable to Jud. The dog was a beagle, and he loped gaily across the loosely packed snow, his ears rising and falling comically. How he had wanted a dog like that when he was a kid. But his father thought dogs were not for Jewish boys. And although his mother was affectionate toward dogs, she was actually afraid of them.
Jud followed the two figures through the gates into the half-lit interior of the forbidden park. The beagle padded around the moonlit rectangle while Jud tried to make out the features of the woman as she followed behind. But they stayed shadowed, somehow, no matter at what angle the yellow light of the street lamp touched her face.
The old lady did not see Jud in the ten minutes or so she spent in the park. When she leashed the dog, finally, and left, Jud stood listening to the clink of her key in the gate’s lock. He felt an odd exhilaration at being imprisoned in the elegant little park.
Then the bells began to ring. They struck the hour of three with a kind of empty resonance. Jud brushed a miniature storm of flakes from a bench and sat down.
At the corner nearest him he saw a shadowed figur
e. To himself, but aloud, he whispered: “Carl …” Then he saw that it was his father. It was neither a dream of his father nor the reality, but still it was Max Kramer, wearing a black suit, his beard neatly trimmed. The moon dragged itself from behind a black snow cloud and illuminated the entire park in a clear yellow-white. Halfway toward the gate he saw his sister Miriam standing, her head turned away from him. Near her stood his mother, brushing something from Miriam’s hair, her face also hidden from Jud’s sight. But he knew it was she.
He called out, to all of them, but most of all to his father.
“Who is that?” his father said.
“It’s me.”
“Who—who’s there?”
“It’s me, Jud.”
“Who?”
Jud paused in white silence. Then he said, softly: “Judah.”
“Judah,” his mother whispered.
“Momma.”
“Judah,” his father intoned.
“Poppa.”
“Judah,” his sister said.
“Miriam.”
They were all silent, and he saw that they were not there at all, not even as shadows or subtle configurations of trees, snow, and cloudy moonlight. He had been playing a new version of the old child’s game.
Jud opened a squashed package of cigarettes and lit one.
He was hunting me, he thought in amazement, all this time he was hunting me.
For the first time since leaving the theater, Jud allowed himself to recall the scene on the stage with some clarity. He had not brought Walkowitz down with any counteraccusations. The man had toppled himself by the weight and immediacy of his own grief. He had lived with it so long and so intensely that it must have grown dulled—then it was brought back, dragged in by the heels like a body, newly killed …
His own justification felt flimsy in the shadowy lamplight of the park. Yet he could not surrender it. It was as true as the other side was true. The trouble was, it was not as real. (“What would you have done?” he should have asked the man.) But Walkowitz would not have been tricked. It was a true question, but not a real one. The reality was: it had been Jud’s choice to make.