by RJ Ellory
At the beginning of June Rosen left. He took with him the child; though they had never spoken, Rosen only whispering to the child in Hebrew, the child watching him with that same open, vacant expression, they had found some sense of unity, formed a silent bond that surpassed the need to speak. Perhaps Rosen felt responsible for the death of the child’s mother, perhaps he felt an obligation to salvage one battered soul after having witnessed the atrocities of Dachau, this small German town where thousands upon thousands of human beings had been destroyed.
The unit returned to Berlin, Rosen smuggling the child through the border patrols and checkpoints inside a worn blanket, at one point laying him beneath the seat of a jeep while Russian soldiers searched the vehicle. Germans were escaping into Czechoslovakia, into the Carpathians, into Silesia and the Sudeten Mountains; the Russians were hunting them down and killing them, often torturing them, and some of the German women – knowing this – had gathered around the fences of the camps to plead with the Allies to capture them before the Soviets came. Desperate and distraught, these young women pleaded for their lives, but the Allies could not take them, they were too involved with the vast operation of liberating and saving the lives of the thousands of Jews who remained.
From Berlin Rosen took the child to the US airbase at Potsdam, and from there they flew out, on through Magdeburg, Eisenach, Mannheim, and then across the French border to Strasbourg. From here they drove by night to Paris, to the European victory celebrations, and once there Rosen took a hotel room and stayed for seven weeks, feeding the child, strengthening him, clothing him, walking him back to life through the streets, the boulevards, the parks, sitting in cafés in the sunshine – saying nothing, watching him, eventually sharing some words in a strange mixture of German, Hebrew and Polish. Haim Kruszwica began to learn English, and the first question he tried to ask Rosen was ‘Where is my father?’ Rosen, thinking that Haim’s father must have been one of the many thousands murdered in the camp, questioned him further, and came to the unwilling and unwanted realization that the child was speaking of a tall, blond uniformed man who had shared his mother’s bed. Rosen had seen the woman kill the soldier, and understood that this man must have been an officer, hiding his rank for fear of the consequences should he be discovered. He told the child that this man was not his father, that he did not know where his father was, and the child asked if Rosen would now be his father.
Rosen, tears in his eyes, said that he would do his best. The child smiled, for the first time in eighteen weeks he smiled, and Rosen cried openly, his face in his hands, there at the street table of a cafe while passers-by stared at him, his uniform, the child with him, and understood that, of all things, war tears the soul apart and reveals pain of such depth it cannot be fathomed.
At the beginning of September, three weeks after Haim Kruszwica’s eighth birthday, he and Sergeant Daniel Rosen set sail from Calais for New York. They arrived in mid-October, among hundreds of returning soldiers, to the celebrations of victory still ringing throughout the free world.
Daniel Rosen, a forty-six-year-old bachelor, took the child to his widowed sister, a devout Jew, generous and worldly-wise, and suffering her protestations to the contrary he calmed her and spoke with her for more than an hour while Haim was bathed and dressed by the housekeeper and taken to the kitchen where he was fed rich chicken broth and homemade bread. Rosen’s sister, Rebecca McCready, having left Palestine in the thirties and married an Irish-American despite her family’s threat of disavowal, stood in the kitchen doorway and silently watched the thin, wraithlike child: his wide almond eyes drinking in the sights, his ears thirsty for the sounds of other voices, for the music that played in the parlor, his mouselike eating habits as he picked mere crumbs from a heel of bread and chewed them as if they were steak.
‘Yes,’ she eventually said to her brother standing beside her. ‘I will take him.’
Haim Kruszwica became Haim Rosen, Rebecca’s maiden name, and though he was a Pole, though he knew nothing of the Jewish faith, he was taken across the East River into Brooklyn, to the Rosens’ synagogue, and was presented to God as a child of this family.
They possessed a relationship of such quiet and measured stability. Daniel taught the child the alphabet, taught him to read, to write, to spell his own name. He enrolled him in school and would sit for hour after patient hour coaching the child through his assignments. Haim asked questions, Daniel would answer them as best he could, for though he had never had either the will or the inclination for fatherhood it came more easily than he’d believed it would. The child would take his hand as they walked, would hug him when he left for school, would run with him in the park come Saturday, and on Sunday evenings, in the warm sanctuary of the Rosen home, Haim would carry Daniel’s newspapers, his cigarettes, and sit at his feet with his picture books and crayons. Rebecca, watching them, would never cease to be amazed at the resilience and compassion of the human soul. Such a thing could not be measured or fathomed, or ever truly understood. She believed such a thing was a reflection of God, and God alone would know the words with which it could be described.
Daniel Rosen was demobilised from the army in June of the following year. He lived to see Haim in school, one day sitting and watching the child run and laugh through the playground for more than an hour, his heart elated, his eyes filled with tears, and when he walked away he believed that if this act had been his life’s sole purpose then it had been worth it.
In August of 1951 Daniel suffered a stroke, became paralyzed down the left side of his body, and for eight weeks he lay in a bed in his sister’s apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side district, the child beside him, saying nothing, holding his hand, sometimes reading to the man who had brought him out of hell and back to America. Haim Rosen was fourteen years old, and though he had spoken with Daniel about his mother, though he had described what he had seen in Dachau, it still seemed that he did not understand death. At least not as something that eventually came to everyone.
On 9 November 1951, Daniel Elias Rosen, Sergeant-At-Arms, twice decorated for valor above and beyond the call of duty, passed over. Haim was there when he died; he sat with him for three and a half hours as the body cooled, as the eyes became glassy and reflective, and this was how Rebecca found him. She remembered entering the room, remembered stepping towards the bed, understanding what had happened without speaking or asking anything of Haim, and when he heard her he turned to her, and he smiled – angelically, she recalled, an expression of such peace, such complete serenity – and said in pigeon Hebrew: ‘I understand how bad the world can be, Mama. I see that our lives mean nothing at all to God. I give back my faith, for what use is faith against God? I give back my faith and belief, and I will live my life without Him.’
She remembered saying nothing, remembered hearing the words, only later understanding their import, but by that time Haim Rosen – once Haim Kruszwica, before that Kolzak, son of the errant Rasputin from the Carpathians – had become the product of a disordered mind, amoral and detached.
Haim Rosen, now less a Jew than he had ever been, left Manhattan’s Lower East Side in July of 1952, fifteen years old, and crossed the East River into Queens. Rebecca McCready did not see him again, and when she died in the summer of 1968 the last words on her lips were a blessing for her adopted son. By then, sixteen years after his departure, he had become something she would never have recognized.
And perhaps would not have wished to.
Sullivan turned over the last page and sat back in his chair. ‘Whoa,’ he sighed. ‘Not exactly “Green Eggs And Ham” is it?’
Annie was silent for a time, a little disturbed by the feelings and images the text had evoked in her. She looked towards the window; again the sound of the wind pushing at the glass beyond, and she turned and looked at Sullivan.
‘Perhaps you should come,’ she said. ‘Come to the store Monday night …’
Sullivan nodded. ‘Perhaps I should.’
THREE
Annie O’Neill woke on Friday morning, sweating in the cool half light of dawn. At the edges of her thoughts was something she had dreamed, something half remembered. Sullivan’s voice was there, slow and languorous, soothing almost.
‘There were three types of people in Vietnam,’ Sullivan had said. ‘Those who thought a lot about why they didn’t wish to kill anyone, those who killed first and thought later, and lastly there were those who just killed as many as possible and never thought about it at all. They were either frightened kids, Midwestern schoolteachers or homicidal maniacs.’
Even now she could remember the way his face had looked when he’d told her, the face of a man carrying ghosts.
Annie turned over and buried her face in the pillow. It couldn’t have been later than five a.m. The room was chilled, and she could see her own breath in the cold air. She shuddered, buried herself deeper into the mattress, and though she fought with wakefulness it had arrived with best intent, and after ten or fifteen minutes she rose and switched on the thermostat.
She pulled on a sweatshirt and some pants, busied herself making coffee in the kitchen, and when she sat down at the table, her hands clasped around the mug, she closed her eyes for a moment and wondered what had caused such dark aspects to fill her mind. She thought of the manuscript Forrester had brought, and instinctively glanced towards where it lay on the kitchen counter. Images came back, and with those images a sense of panic and apprehension.
She could hear Sullivan’s voice in her head.
‘Body bags all lined up waiting for the choppers to come down. Crew of guys collecting the dead. Killed In Action Travel Bureau we called ’em … and they used to douse those bags with Old Spice of all things. Could feel the decay in your throat … the stench of warfare, and above and beyond all of it the overpowering smell of Old Spice … made you sick like a dog Annie, sick like a dog.’
She thought of Daniel Rosen, a man no different from those Sullivan had fought alongside in Southeast Asia. Sergeant Daniel Rosen who witnessed the liberation of Dachau and brought a child back to America as if in atonement for the sins of others. And what had happened to the child? What was it he’d become that his foster mother would have been so unwilling to recognize? And who was writing of these things, and who was it they had written them for?
She thought of Forrester, and for a second wondered if there was any possibility in the world …
Why had he come? What did he want? Why did he want her to read these things? What, if anything, could it have to do with her father?
Annie shook her head and rose from the kitchen table. She walked barefoot to the bathroom, stripped her clothes off and stood for some minutes beneath the pounding heat of the shower. The feeling didn’t leave for some time. The feeling that something ugly had gotten inside her and was damned if it would leave without a fight … but it did leave, eventually, and as she dried herself and dressed again she believed the tension of the nightmare, the thoughts that had crowded her mind afterwards, were passing. She was relieved. Her life was simple, too simple perhaps, but sufficiently full to permit no room for the horrors of which she’d read. Perhaps she would tell Forrester that she wanted no part of his club, that it had been good to meet him, that she’d been happy to receive the letter he had given her, but of his manuscript, of the things it contained, she wanted no part. All she wanted to know was what he remembered of her father. That was important, perhaps the most important thing in the world, but everything else that he carried with him he could leave beyond the door.
Seemingly resolute in her decision, she made breakfast, and then she listened to Sinatra, and by the time the sun finally peeled away the shadows within her apartment she felt at least somewhat settled.
She checked on Sullivan before she left for the store, found him sleeping the sleep of a dead man on his couch, and leaning forward she touched his salt-and-pepper hair. She could smell the alcohol even now, wondered how a man could drink such a quantity and not die of liver failure. She smiled, closed his door behind her, and made her way downstairs to walk the same fifteen minutes to The Reader’s Rest on Lincoln by West 107th.
John Damianka brought her a sandwich a little after twelve, told her that his first lecture that day wasn’t until quarter after one.
‘Be a miracle if more than a dozen show up,’ he said, and she could hear the bitterness in his voice.
‘How you doing on the girlfriend front?’ Annie asked.
‘Had a date last Tuesday,’ John said. He smiled broadly, a child at show-and-tell who brought the best thing going. A real salamander. An honest-to-God-hand-on-heart rock from the moon.
‘It went well then?’
‘Sure did,’ John said. ‘Took her to that Italian place on Park near the Drake Swissôtel.’
‘And what’s her name?’ Annie asked as she leaned across the counter.
‘Elizabeth … Elizabeth Farbolin.’
‘What does she do?’
John shook his head. ‘Something at the International Center of Photography, research or something.’
‘John, I told you … you have to know everything it’s possible to know without taking away all the mystery. You have to pay attention. You want to have someone interested in you then you just ask them questions about themselves and shut the hell up.’
John shrugged. ‘I know, I know Annie, but –’
Annie shook her head. ‘But nothing John. I’ll tell you the most interesting guy I ever went out with let me talk about myself for the best part of two hours, and I came away from the date thinking he was the most fascinating person I’d ever met.’
John looked down at his shoes, a little sheepish.
‘So when d’you see her again?’
‘Week Monday … we’re gonna go see something on Broadway.’
Annie reached over the counter and punched John’s shoulder. ‘That’s my man. You listen to her now … ask half a dozen questions and let her do all the talking and she won’t be able to leave you alone.’
John nodded, reached for his ham and swiss on whole, pushed the bag containing Annie’s sub towards her and talked a little about a weekend football game he was planning on attending.
He left fifteen minutes later, told her he was lecturing nineteenth-century drama, focusing on Goethe’s Faust and its influence on twentieth-century European television melodramas.
Annie frowned, smiled, and said, ‘Knock ’em dead John, you go knock ’em dead.’
He came in as she was halfway through the sub, mayonnaise on her cheek, her hands sticky with salad oil.
He came slowly through the door, tentatively almost, and when he paused in the shaft of light that flooded in through the dusty front window she believed for a moment it was Forrester. He turned then, turned and looked right at her, and though he did not smile, and though his gaze was direct and unflinching, there was nothing menacing or disquieting about his silence.
He walked towards her then, between the waist-high stacks of battered books, around the central shelves that reached for the ceiling and could never have released their uppermost treasures without the assistance of a stepladder. He seemed lost, as if he’d wandered into The Reader’s Rest by mistake, and even now would open his mouth to ask her for directions, for help with something he was trying to find.
But he didn’t. He merely stopped and said, ‘Hello.’
‘Hi,’ Annie replied.
‘So many books,’ he said.
Annie shrugged. ‘We’re a bookstore.’
He looked at her for a second, tilted his head, and then he reached with his hand and touched his cheek with his finger.
‘Mayonnaise,’ he said.
Annie frowned.
‘On your face … here.’
Annie smiled, a little awkward. ‘Oh,’ she said, and reaching for the serviette she touched the smear of mayonnaise away and then set her sub aside. She wiped her greasy fingers on the serviette and dropped it in the trash can beneath the counter.
> The man looked slowly around the store, and then turned once again to Annie. ‘This is alphabetized, right?’
Annie shook her head. ‘No, not really.’
He frowned. ‘Not really?’
She laughed, a gentle echoey sound in the emptiness. ‘Some of it sort of hangs together around the same sort of bit of the alphabet, and some of it doesn’t.’
‘So how d’you find anything?’
She shrugged. ‘You wander, you look, you take your time … if you’re really stuck you ask me, I look in the inventory, and if we have it then we try and find it together, or I find it for you and you come back tomorrow.’
‘And this system works?’ he asked.
‘Well enough,’ she replied. ‘This is a bookstore for people who just love reading books, people who don’t really have a thing for a particular author or genre. We have regulars, quite a few of them, and each fortnight a new crate comes in and I stack them by the front door. They come in and go through the new stuff before I put it somewhere else.’
‘Well, if it works it works,’ the man said.
Annie smiled. She looked at the man more closely. She placed him at thirty-five, thirty-six perhaps. He was five-ten or eleven, reasonably well built, his hair a sandy color, his eyes gray-blue. He was dressed casually, a pair of jeans, a worn-out suede jacket over an open-necked blue shirt. His clothes were expensive nevertheless, and he wore them as if they had been cut exclusively for him.
‘You after something in particular?’ Annie asked.
He smiled. ‘Something to read.’
Annie nodded. ‘Sure, something to read. Well, something to read we can do.’
She waited for him to say something, but he stood there in silence, still surveying the semi-organized chaos around him.
‘So what do you like to read?’ she prompted. ‘And don’t say books, okay?’
The man laughed, and there was something meaningful in that sound. The sound of a man who had learned to laugh because he had to, because he’d realized it was therapeutic.