by Michael Oren
He had never written a paragraph before and yet they, too, came naturally. The first were merely news items—the defusing of an unexploded bomb, the reunion of siblings long presumed dead. But then came more thoughtful pieces. Half-baked views on life spiked with his own experiences in the camp.
Such stories were especially lucrative. Like the demand for black market soap and scrap metal, Levitsky learned, people craved hope. They could read about his parents being shot in front of him or how many of the survivors’ stomachs burst when first filled with G.I. milk, just as long as they also heard tales of compassion. The former prize fighter who shared his rind of bread with a starving orphan, the women who, against maniacal odds, managed to nurse a baby born in their barracks. Throw in a little midrash, a little Buber and Buddha, even—he dared not admit it—some Christ, and, voila, he had a sale.
If his approach seemed cynical, the world, he reasoned, deserved it. In the camps, he stole, he groveled, and writhed maggot-like in the mud, yet he survived. So who was anyone to judge him now that he made money tweaking people’s emotions?
And so, cynically, he wrote. In his oversized clothes and unkempt hair, a cigarette pasted on his lip, he frequented the cheaper Paris cafes. He drank and womanized with abandon.
Levitsky might have persisted like that, destroying his body as not even the Nazis could, sullying his soul. And perhaps that would have granted him forgetfulness. He might have died on his own terms, dissipated but free.
Then, five years after liberation, he wrote a book. Not a novel, exactly, or a memoir, but an extended version of one of his articles. Mass death combined with a singular humanity, barbarism with grace. “Dusk,” he called it, evoking the interface between radiance and darkness. Told in hauntingly simple language, detached yet gripping. The publication, he imagined, might pay for some of his bar bills. Within hours, though, the first edition sold out.
And, overnight, Levitsky became an icon. He found himself suddenly a source of wisdom for countless people he’d never met, a wellspring of righteousness. Letters poured in from bereaved parents, jilted lovers, the lonely and oppressed. Celebrities boasted of corresponding with him, and school children crayoned little notes of thanks. Duly, he replied to each one, reiterating his faithful message, afraid of letting them down. Unable, he realized, to let himself out.
It soon became clear that he could never go back to his bohemian lifestyle, never return to being Lev Levitsky, freelance nihilist, the drifter in charge of his fate. Once an assertion of liberty, his shabbiness was now a brand. His suffering, formerly a license for indulgence, sentenced him to virtue. Fame and admiration impounded him.
Relocating to Manhattan, Levitsky found himself at the head of Upper East Side guest lists, a speaker in constant demand. In a voice barely audible over the praise, he affirmed his gospel of rebirth. Perhaps, too, he began to believe it, or at least to forget the time when believing or not was an assertion of will.
At one gala reception, he was introduced to Vera. Terribly thin and quiet, Vera, despite Auschwitz, retained a ghost of her former beauty. Saintly Vera, the ideal partner for Levitsky, the sage. Their wedding, attended by religious leaders and toasted by the mayor, was newsworthy. The couple’s book-insulated salon on York Avenue served as a hub for truth-seekers. More bestsellers followed, more tributes that stifled his walls, two introverted children, and a reputation for rectitude which—according to a Time magazine cover-story—rivalled the Pope’s.
Here is Levitsky at sixty-five: rich, celebrated, sought out by global leaders. At home, Vera stood sentry-like over their lives, over their bed, it seemed, allowing no passion to enter. Each morning, he locked himself in his office, alone except for the assistants who kept his desk spotless and penciled in every hour of his day. The morning bagel they brought was toasted just right and the coffee exactingly sweetened. His writing time—between eight and two—was sacred.
At 2:01, precisely, each day one of those assistants stuck a head into his door and asked if he needed anything. And just as invariably he shook his now peppery flop, “No, thank you, no.”
Only once did the answer differ. One time, he did not even get a chance to respond. Rather, the assistant—an unpaid intern, he later discovered—marched into his office, planted herself in front of him and asked, “My God, how do you stand this?”
Levitsky, dumbfounded, shrugged.
“This,” she said and drew a hand over the barrenness of his desk. “Not a paper, not even a paperclip out of place. I’d go nuts.”
Strangely, in a voice he scarcely remembered, he sighed, “What makes you think I have not?”
A second passed, an endless second in which the two of them gazed at each other. The wizened writer in his gray, out-of-date clothes, and the intern, short and compact yet jack-in-the-box sprightly and keen. They stared and then, with uncanny coordination, they laughed. They roared while the intern spread papers, bagel wrappers, and half-empty coffee cups before him. “There!” she trumpeted. “Now we know, a human being works here.”
They were chuckling still when one of the regular assistants appeared and, with arms akimbo, barked, “Sidney!”
“A nice Jewish name,” she explained the following day, after he hired her. “But you can call me Sid.”
“Sid,” he repeated, as if trying on some new-fashioned suit. “Sid…”
No more than his, her own clothing never varied. High-end jeans and close-fitting sweaters that outlined her buxomness. Pumps or sneakers that seemed to him too tiny to actually contain feet. Soon, though, he stopped noticing such things. In time, there was only her eyes and lips, green and crimson, and her puggish nose that shed freckles across her cheeks with the slightest smile. And her hair. Especially her hair at which braids and clips flung themselves trying to contain an auburn vastness in which pencils—imaginably even hand tools—vanished.
“Sid,” he’d call out, usually for no specific reason, and instantly she’d come bouncing. “Sid,” he’d chuckle. “Mess up my desk.”
A clever, intuitive girl, she knew to retire in Vera’s presence, deferring to her imperious gloom. She hung back when Levitsky’s grandchildren played tag around his office. Grasping authority, she kept the other staff in line and for the most part out of his sight. Days could pass with just the two of them alone—Sid or, frequently, “my Sid,” and “Leave,” as she insisted on mispronouncing his first name, as if to command or beg him.
That relationship continued uninterrupted until the evening when the rest of the staff had already gone home. Set to receive yet another honorary doctorate, Levitsky stood in front of her and jokingly asked, “How do I look?”
She replied, “Seriously? You stand hunched over with your fingers tucked into fists. Like you were carrying two heavy suitcases or something. Your hair is a mess, your ears and nose need clipping. And this thing—this…” She pinched the lapel pin that signaled some government’s highest esteem. “It’s going to fall off any minute.”
She re-fixed the pin, aligning her nose with his Adam’s apple and then, looking up, took in the sorrows of his eyes. Then, on sneaker tips, she rose and kissed him. He kissed her back, kissed as he never had, even in his Paris days, insatiably. Somehow, a sweater came off releasing upturned breasts. Supple legs escaped from jeans. Tie, vest, a worsted suit—all flung to the floor—and papers seesawed above the desk on which the two of them first made love.
The next times would be in her apartment, amid the high school and college mementos, or in the hotels where their rooms were routinely adjacent. No one suspected. Here was a man nearly old enough to be her grandfather, and not just any man but one almost unanimously deemed above reproach and therefore beyond desire.
Yet the desire became boundless and so, too, did Levitsky. Lying beside her, filing his fingers through her uncontained hair, he for the first time vented his rage at those who had stolen his youth and butchered his family. He wept for the parents he still believed—irrationally—he could have saved. Howli
ng, he unleashed the passions imprisoned inside him for years. Ear on her breast, he recalled the thump of approaching Allied artillery and the dream that someday his captivity would end.
And soon it would, he promised her. He would divorce Vera, give up the titles and the accolades, and escape into the world beside her. “Think about it,” he said with his head still on Sid’s chest and his hand sunk in her hair. “We could go to restaurants together. Movies. Take a cruise!”
Expectantly, they set a date. Days passed, together with dozens of loving notes. The office functioned as usual. Until word arrived—by special courier—that Levitsky was to receive the President’s Freedom Prize. The press headlined the news. Congratulations gushed in and well-wishers gathered on the street below.
“How can we do this now?” Sidney asked in tears. “To her. To them?”
His voice also cracked. “How can we not do this? For us.”
The night arrived, the White House aglow with personages and photographers. A famous violinist performed Mendelssohn and a choir of Yeshiva boys sang dolorously in Yiddish. Vera looked grave but elegant while Levitsky, wan in black tie, could have passed for both undertaker and corpse. The President gushed about the author’s gift for inspiring millions, his irrepressible faith and belief in the human heart. The medallion, which Levitsky accepted with a dip of his disheveled head, reminded him of the sun he once saw beaming just beyond the gates of the camp.
They were scheduled to meet the following Monday, at the sole time not penciled in. But, though he asked and asked, no one had seen Sidney at the office. The phone in her apartment went to voicemail, her doorbell rang unanswered. Levitsky was clueless about texting—Sid always ribbed him—yet he tried that too, futilely.
That Monday passed, and many more after, and still the cubicle outside his office remained vacant. Trapped behind his immaculate desk, Levitsky wrote nothing and spoke to no one. The lines that crisscrossed his face deepened and his suits hung rag-like from his frame. His coffee and bagel grew cold.
His fame, though, only blossomed. More state visits, more schools and scholarships inscribed with his name. Twenty years on, he was accepting some of the world’s most illustrious prizes for the second time when news came of a different distinction. Even his disease was unique.
“So it’s decided, then,” one of the doctors was saying. “No press conference. No photos. We release a statement, period.”
“Period. You write it up.”
The voice Levitsky assumed was the resident’s protested, “Why me?”
“Because you’re the last one here to take freshman lit,” the senior physician snapped. “You probably even read his books.”
And then there was silence, except for the chirp of his monitor. Only some time later, as the bleeps stretched into a drone, did he feel another presence in the room. Not Vera, he knew, who died a half-decade earlier, or his grandchildren who were somewhere off at college.
Levitsky fought for awareness. Perhaps she’d come back to him after all. Choking on his oxygen tube, straining at the straps on his bed, he managed to open his eyes. Yet what he saw hardly surprised him. After all, Sid must be a middle-aged woman by now, living on the other side of the country—he vaguely recalled hearing—with a husband and three teenaged kids.
Instead of sneakers and jeans and exuberant hair, there appeared before him a helmet and tommy-gun. Light spangled through the porthole in the ward’s doorway which silently swung open. With a meaty thumb, the sergeant gestured toward a landscape greener than any Levitsky could bear. “Hey, look, buddy,” the soldier informed him. “You’re free.”
D
Pressing his face between the slats of the wooden play bridge, he smiles. At least I think he smiles, or I prefer to believe it. In fact, he may have grimaced or merely screwed up his face for some inscrutable, mechanical reason, and the expression—smile, grimace, whatever—was not meant for me at all or even intentional. It could be that Douglas, who has now stomped along the bridge and barreled into the bright orange bulb that serves as the terminus for several slides and ladders, does not even notice that I am looking at him. It could be that he is utterly unaware of his father’s presence.
What does awareness mean for him, I wonder? Not, certainly, of the other six-year old boy he pushes past, sending him plopping hard on his butt. Does he hear the kid’s bawling, I ask myself, or the shriek of the girl whose ponytail he yanks so that he can replace her at the top of the slide? I watch and want to say something, if for no purpose than to pacify the parents who may also be looking on and getting angry. But I see that Dougie’s naughtiness has gone unnoticed. The plastic playhouse becomes an echo-chamber of cries that he flees with a high-pitched wail of his own.
What is his world like—confused, indecipherable, ironic? He’s grinning still as he scampers past me on route to the sandbox. His blue ski jacket, unzippered, flails behind him, as does his strawberry blonde hair. A hailstorm of freckles, fists like wind gusts pounding the air. So I experience him at that moment, a freaky turn of weather. Other times he’s ice and others still he’s fire. And always I feel off-guard, exposed and inappropriately attired.
Douglas, Dougie, or merely D—these are the names I call him, though I’m not sure he knows them completely or understands that they signify him. Other words have been attached to him, strangely beautiful words like “echolalia” and “spectrum,” and he is strangely beautiful in his detachment. Just look at him, clutching handfuls of some preschoolers’ castles and launching them skyward, inscribing sand angels above his head. Look at him circling the box, first clockwise then counter, his orbit recorded by untied shoes.
And what am I supposed to feel? Devotion, of course, flesh of my flesh and all. Love, though love like a shout, bellowed urgently over a canyon that swallows it without a murmur. Anger? Resentment? Fear? Or is it like on those college exams: D, all of the above? And yet every emotion ends with guilt. For I made him, and Dougie is what he is and will be, long after I can no longer look after him on the playground.
Today, though, I track Douglas’s peregrinations, from the sandbox to the swings and then to a type of whirligig, a carousel powered by little feet or weary parents. None of these attractions holds his interest, though; none, perhaps, has an existence beyond his mysterious own. For me, they are merely hazards that could swipe Douglas’s head or pitch him face-first into rubbered turf. Or opportunities for hurting others, children who come to the playground to play, innocent of the dangers posed by a seemingly harmless peer who sees them not as beings or even things but, I believe, images that take up space. They are not separate from him but part of a larger, undefinable whole, an impenetrable is-ness that exists without dimension or feeling.
For Douglas does not feel, not entirely. He runs, he falls, stands and trips again, his shoulder ramming a sliding pole with a force that would send most children screaming. Yet he does not sob, not even a whimper. He does not grind his eyes and raise his tear-glistened cheeks to the darkest clouds and howl out loud for his father.
For if he did, I would come racing. I would sweep him into my arms and hug the hurt and loneliness out of him. I would kiss each freckle and rustle that strawberry hair, zip his jacket and double-knot his shoes. I love you, Douglas, I would whisper first in one button ear then the other. I love you, Dougie. I love you, D. And he would say, I love you, too, Daddy, and grace me with a real son’s smile.
Fossils
Two sets of footprints, one wide, deep, and purposeful, and the other meandering and petite, trailed them on the beach.
“If you were a painter, what colors would you choose for that?” Beatrice asked, sweeping her hand across the horizon.
Eleanor shrugged. “Pearl-gray, I guess. Metallic.” She eyed her companion peevishly. “That is such a you question.”
But Beatrice went on, still wielding an imaginary brush. “Oh, if only I’d been an artist. Capturing the blue-green of the sea, the beige of this sand—the essence of it all. If only
I’d been talented in something.”
“You were a teacher,” Eleanor snapped. “Not a brilliant one, maybe, but good enough.”
“And you were a fine principal. Dedicated if sometimes waffley.”
The peevish look turned querulous. “What do you mean, ‘waffley?’”
“You know, discipline-wise.”
“Discipline-wise,” Eleanor stiffened, “I was a rock.”
Beatrice bent down to pick up a shell. She collected shells, pretty stones, pinecones, all of which, she knew, annoyed her partner. “Rock, really?” she questioned, examining a tiny conch and depositing it in her pocket. “How about the time with that Horenstein boy?”
“He was a special case.”
“He was a pain in the rump. Always pinching the girls and getting into fights during recess. You should have suspended him, expelled him, but, no, you had a soft spot for the little brat, didn’t you?”
Eleanor huffed. She often huffed when defensive. “He showed promise.”
“He showed,” Beatrice needled her, “disrespect.”
“I suppose today they’d call it creativity. Initiative. Innovation, whatever.” Eleanor gazed at the waves as they rose expectantly and crashed. She squinted down the beach, empty at this late afternoon hour. “Today, they’d give it some fancy medical name, AD something or other. What did we know back then?”
“I wonder what he’s doing now?”
“Who?”
“The Horenstein boy?”
“Pumping gas, probably,” Eleanor chortled. “Or making movies.”
The old women glanced at each other, smiled almost, and kept ambling. The one block-shaped with her steel wool hair cut short—too butch for Beatrice’s taste—and the other painfully thin with great wisps of gray whirling around her head. While they both wore muumuus, Eleanor’s was the duller and more shopworn. She never minded how she dressed, even as a principal. Always the same brown houndstooth suits, the same square-toed flats. Beatrice, though, displayed a weakness for fashion—for tight-fitting, above-the-knee skirts, and heels that clacked on the school’s linoleum floors. Her blouses tended to accentuate her bust, which required no emphasis.