“Yes.”
“You’ll forgive me, Miss Posner, if I speak plainly. I don’t imagine either of us has much small talk for the other.”
“No. I don’t think we do.”
The coffees arrived. Pearl quickly moved to the bowl of sugar, the cream, another cookie.
Eva said, “I wasn’t aware of your connection to Ike before you arrived. I don’t mean to say that he kept it from me —”
“He thought I was dead,” said Malke. “Yes, I understand that.”
Eva hadn’t expected this bluntness; somehow it made things easier. “I also don’t want you to think that what happened between Ike and myself was in any way frivolous. A number of people were quite against it when it began.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that.”
“We’re very different communities here.”
“I suppose you might see it that way, yes.”
“It goes back a good deal of time.”
“Does it? Do you want me to say then that you were both very brave to pursue it? How very brave of you.”
Candor had quickly moved to something quite different. Only Eva’s decency kept her seated. “Not at all,” she said with quiet restraint. “It was hardly brave compared to what the two of you have been through.”
“Please … please don’t do that, miss. You think what you’re saying is compassionate but it’s really pity or worse. I don’t mind at all … truly, I don’t. Pity has never been a problem for me. Perhaps Yitzi finds it comforting. I don’t. But I wouldn’t want you to convince yourself later that pity was the reason things went as they did.”
Eva found herself fighting off a moment’s dizziness. She had come over only to make things easier for Ike — how, she hadn’t thought through — but now that instinct had passed. When she spoke, it was for herself alone.
“I don’t pity you, Miss Posner, I admire you, although I’m sure you’ll tell me how that offends you as well. But it’s not you I care about. I simply need to know that what you’re doing is for him and not to convince yourself that his choices make yours seem like the right ones. That would be truly pitiful. No, let me finish. To love him as I do is to be willing to lose him as long as I know there’s something inside you that I will never be able to give him. Something he himself can’t understand now, but that you, because of your love for him, know to be true and will show him one day. That, and that alone, is the reason things will go as they go.”
If Eva saw a crack in Miss Posner’s otherwise flawless stare she chose to ignore it. She felt a first flush in her own cheeks but refused to give in. Instead she turned to Pearl with an airy smile and said, “How kind of you to let us introduce ourselves, Mrs. Jesler.” And, placing her hand atop Pearl’s, she added, “And how kind of you to have shared your Ike with me, even for so small a time as we had. I’ve always wanted to thank you for that.”
She saw Pearl’s eyes begin to well up and Eva stood, her own now burning even as she blinked away the pain.
“A pleasure to meet you, Miss Posner. Mrs. Jesler.”
Outside, it was everything she could do not to collapse to the pavement. Eva thought: What a heartless, heartless woman. And how heartless of me to think it.
Thomas was at his desk when Goldah pushed through the swinging doors. It was late: He knew he’d find him alone.
Thomas didn’t look up; instead he continued to scan the sheet in his typewriter. “Hey, Ike. Look, I’m sorry about the way this whole thing has worked out.”
“You have a minute?”
Thomas marked something on the page, sat back, and tossed his pencil onto the desk. “It’s not what I wanted, you have to know that, but Weiss is giving it the green light. And what do you care? The Post wants you up in Washington next week for an interview. You’re on your way.”
Goldah stepped over and placed a large envelope on the desk. “I brought you this.”
Thomas hesitated, then picked it up and pretended to weigh it in his hand. “Am I supposed to guess?”
“You could open it.”
“I’m sorry about the kid, too. I really am. But he came to me.”
“Why don’t you open the envelope.”
“You really can’t see any of this from my side, can you?” Goldah said nothing. Thomas let out a long breath, then peeled back the flap and pulled out the pages. Taking a quick glance at the top sheet, he said, “What is this?”
“They’re yours. You wrote them.”
Confusion didn’t suit Thomas’s face. “I don’t follow,” he said.
“You were right about Abdullah in Transjordan. Much more interesting than guns. It makes for some powerful reading.”
Thomas stared vacantly across the desk before turning to the pages.
Goldah quickly saw the reaction he had been hoping for: uncertainty to surprise, curiosity to deep interest. He let Thomas get through the first of them before saying, “You see what I mean?” Thomas flipped through to the next and Goldah said, “It goes on from there. You eventually get to some very interesting ideas about the Sinai Peninsula and the Egyptians, but you’ll have to hold off on those for another month or so. You’ve got seven pieces there, all told. I’m not sure I agree with any of them — in fact, I know I don’t — but for an American gentile, I think it makes sense. I myself would have followed the guns, but then again, I’m not you.”
Thomas looked up. Admiration now colored his disbelief. “How did you do this?”
“You write well. It makes it easier to capture a voice when that’s the case. I did get your voice, didn’t I?”
“This is —”
“Yes — it is. And, I’m sure you’ve guessed I’ve done it so you’ll drop everything to do with Hirsch and Cohan.”
Thomas was still reading. “Yeah, I get that.”
“Tell Weiss you were after the truth and forgot the facts. Put it that way.”
Thomas looked up. “And you’re just handing these to me,” he said. “You realize you won’t be able to write about this yourself, at least not from the angle you want. You’re torpedoing your entire gun-supply argument. I mean you’re letting me torpedo it, if that makes any sense.”
“I do. Yes.”
“And I’m assuming each one of these keeps piling it on.”
Goldah saw the calculations ticking away behind Thomas’s eyes, the words gift horse spinning past them, the fear that he was being duped or outmatched, all of it set squarely against the prospect of what this might mean for him. The hardest part for Thomas, of course, was giving himself over to a mind more sophisticated than his own. Or maybe it was his integrity. That’s why his hesitation held firm.
Thomas said, “And you’ll let it go just like that? No piece on the partition plan two weeks from now or on who gets how much of the Negev?”
“Just like that,” said Goldah.
“They won’t like this up in Washington.”
“I don’t believe they will.”
“It’ll be some time before they give you another chance.”
“I understand that.”
Goldah knew what Thomas was thinking: I’m not seeing it all the way through, but I am, I am … It was the unfathomable thought that someone could ever throw himself under the bus like this.
Goldah said, “They’ll have what they want. A fresh new voice on the Middle East, one with some insight behind it. I wouldn’t be doing this otherwise. That voice just won’t be mine. Maybe even better not coming from a Jew.”
“And all so some tiny dock story doesn’t go to press?”
Goldah said, “The first of these pieces — maybe the first two — you’ll have to publish with Weiss.”
“And if I say no?”
“For some tiny dock story?” If Goldah wasn’t so intent on getting this done he might have admired Thomas for this last pang of conscience.
Thomas said, “Weiss won’t go for it.”
“Of course he will. He likes the notoriety. Another Morning News feather in his cap. It won’
t matter who’s handing it to him.”
Thomas said, almost protectively, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
Goldah stood. He said nothing. It was enough to bring an end to the calculations. Thomas set the papers on the desk. “It’s not so tiny, is it,” he said, “the story? I’m on to something bigger here, aren’t I?”
Goldah owed him that much at least. “Honestly? I don’t know. But I’m not willing to take the chance.”
“And does Jesler know what you’re doing for him?”
“That’s never the point.”
Thomas sat with that for a few moments. “So where did you learn to write like this?”
“Mimicry isn’t that hard.”
“No, I mean like this. All of it. Those first pieces you published with Weiss.”
Goldah had no interest in going down this road. “You keep at it,” he said. “You get better. Are we good, then?”
“No — that’s not it. This doesn’t just develop over time. Trust me, I know. Where?”
Goldah waited and then heard himself say, “My father.”
“He was a teacher?”
“An editor. A novelist. He wanted to be Joseph Roth.” Goldah let himself smile, if only for a moment. “The Radetzky March. That sort of thing.”
“Did he ever write it?”
“He did, yes.” Goldah recalled a line or two. “A beautiful piece of writing. Prague before the first war. My father was a great prose stylist, the best I’ve ever read.”
“Did he get it published?”
“He didn’t. No.”
Thomas gave a too-knowing nod. “The plight of the novelist. The dream dashed.”
“It was burned. They burned the manuscript.”
Only then did Thomas see the ground onto which he had stepped; he knew to stop asking.
Goldah said, “I watched him die, my father. He stood there, freezing in the cold and looking at me while he waited for a bullet. They didn’t allow him to speak. I’m not sure what he would have said.”
Thomas said nothing, and Goldah added, “We’re good, then?”
Thomas nodded and Goldah turned to go.
It was a lie, he thought. His father had spoken. He had taken Roth’s own words as his last: “My novel will be good, I think, more perfect than my life.” One last desperate plea for the truth and then the shot. Even now Goldah didn’t know whether his father had spoken in defiance or delusion. Whichever it was, he had meant the words for his son alone, a final nod to the bond they had never shared.
16
GOLDAH SAT at the table in his small living room and let his eyes wander to the single shelf of books he had managed to amass: a thin hardback of Rilke, Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, and a terrible translation of Hasek, all of which had come piecemeal from a bookshop in New York’s Greenwich Village: He wondered what his father would have made of them. They had each arrived wrapped in thick brown paper, with a short note from a Mr. Aberbach, the proprietor, thanking Goldah for his fine taste and encouraging him to choose his next from the list of soon-to-be acquired volumes. Mr. Aberbach wrote in a stylized German that bordered on the obsequious and allowed them both to think that such a world, distant as it was, might still exist. For Goldah its only remnants now sat on this shelf, alongside a series of Zane Grey titles and a few from Dashiell Hammett. The last in line was a well-kept first edition of Chandler’s The Big Sleep. These had been gifts from Eva, chosen from her husband’s favorites. Goldah wasn’t much inspired by the Grey but he did like the hard, honest quality of the others. He thought: People don’t really talk that way but wouldn’t it be nice if they did? He heard the knock at the door and opened it. Eva stepped inside.
She had brought a box from Gottlieb’s and set it on the table. She said, “I’ll make us some tea. The hot kind, I know.”
He followed her to the small kitchen, where she smiled when she saw the kettle over a low flame. He said, “It just needs to come to a boil.”
She turned the flame up and said, “Always one step ahead.”
“I never am. You know that.”
She brought a hand to her eye and smoothed away a tear. “I’m afraid I’m getting ahead of myself, as well. We can do this quickly, if you want. I’m glad you called.”
He said, “We can sit.”
“It’s almost boiling.”
He hadn’t expected it this way, standing in a doorway, her purse on her arm. How she managed her smile nearly broke him. He said, “She wants to go to Palestine.”
Eva’s shock lasted only a moment. “My goodness,” she said. “That’s certainly a long way to go.”
“You don’t really debate things with Malke once she’s made up her mind.”
“No,” Eva said, “she certainly does speak plainly.” Her eyes flashed and she said, “I ran into her … with Mrs. Jesler. Downtown. I felt it was right that I should introduce myself.”
“And you came out unscathed?”
The smile still held, like a shattered mast suspended by its rigging. She said, “Do you need her?” Her eyes had grown red and she blinked the tears away. “I won’t ask if you love her. I wouldn’t want to know that. But if you need her, if she brings you something …” She opened her purse and pulled out a handkerchief. She shook her head and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m so sorry for this. I really am.” He stepped toward her and she reached for the kettle. She said, “I think it should be all right now.” The pot waited on the counter. “The leaves are inside?” He nodded and she poured. “We’ll let it sit for a few minutes.” She set the kettle back on the stove.
He said, “She’s gotten it wrong, you know. She says she’s come to save me.”
This cut deeper than he expected. “Did she? I didn’t know you were in need of saving.”
“I’m not. I never have been. That’s the strangest thing about what people see now.” He never thought to tell her this; perhaps he had been foolish to believe he couldn’t. “Those of us who came through it didn’t need saving. We never did. We had saved ourselves in whatever ways we could long before anyone found us.”
He saw her face as he had never seen it — masked and unknowable — waiting for him to step closer or to pull herself away if he should. He had no idea what she might do.
He said, “It’s what I was before the camps that kept me alive inside of them, all those years learning to become numb, detached, watching from a distance. It’s what allowed me to live beyond them, until now. You don’t let me stand apart. Malke would, and she knows it, even if she can’t admit it.”
Uncertainty slipped across her face, a shadow of the loss that lay behind her eyes. When she stepped across to him and held him — pressing her cheek to his chest — he couldn’t fathom how she was doing it, or why.
She said, “I don’t let you. You’re right. I never would.”
He found himself wrapping his arms around her. Whatever words he imagined he could never say rose up from his chest only to be lost to the sharp ring of the telephone. It jolted them both and he felt her arms tighten. They stood there as it rang and rang until, finally, Eva said, “She won’t hang up. You need to get it.”
She let him go and he picked up.
“Ike?”
It was Jesler.
Goldah said, “This isn’t a good time, Abe.”
“You need to get over here. It’s … You just need to get over here now.”
Jesler had the door open before they were up the porch steps. His surprise at seeing Eva passed quickly as he ushered them inside. He said, “I’m guessing you know what this is about. I called the Kerns and the Fleischmanns. Pearl just needed the girls around.”
They came to the parlor. The men were standing uncomfortably by the window, while Pearl sat between Fannie and Selma. She held a handkerchief in her lap, her eyes raw from crying. She stood wearily and went to Goldah, nestling herself into him for an embrace. Remarkably she reached out to Eva and squeezed her hand. Pearl said, “I’m so glad you’re here, dear. I
really am.”
Goldah was about to ask the unthinkable when Jesler said, “We found it this morning. On the mantel.” He was holding an envelope. “This one was addressed to us.” He nodded toward the mantel. “That one’s for you. She wasn’t here when we found them.”
Goldah saw his name written in Malke’s hand on the second envelope. Jesler handed him the first. “You should probably read this one,” he said, “but I don’t know.”
Goldah pulled the sheet from inside and began to read.
Dear Pearl and Abe,
I want to thank you for opening your house and for the charm you made in your welcome. You are people with great heart and feeling and I have great happiness to know you. Yitzhak Goldah ist sehr fortunate to have you as his family.
When I first come to your house I have such bad memory, things I do not know, things which are empty, but when I see the boy on the beach I begin to see other memorys. Then I know I am perhaps not the maiden Malke Posner, the betrothd to Yitzhak. I know this Malke Posner. She is dead in the Lager at the time I see a small boy who is killd. They die together. I remember this. I cannot know why I am thinking I am Malke Posner since this time. My mind has many troubles. I am asking you to forgive.
I want now to go to Palestine. I will explain this with the government office in Virginia. They are keeping my papers since the time I enter America. They will understand. I will go to Milton and Sophie Lubeck for help. I wish you not to worry. I am strong. I will go to Palestine.
I am also writing to Yitzhak Goldah. Please give him the letter.
You are gracious and I will never forget.
With heartlike greetings …
She had left no signature. Goldah read through it twice, stopping on the two words in German she had let slip through. Malke had always had trouble with “very” — such a simple thing, but she could never remember it. He knew she hadn’t been aware … or perhaps she had.
Jesler said, “Have you ever heard of such a thing? I mean, after everything … in the recovery camps or —”
“No,” said Goldah, then, “Once … perhaps. I don’t know.”
Among the Living Page 24