Book of Numbers: A Novel

by Joshua Cohen

  But in the event that Bringdom came from you, I’ve been giving it my all. Thorough notes will have to wait, but here:

  1. you shouldn’t have a sex scene longer than a page that’s a dream (pp. 99-101),

  2. you shouldn’t have a death scene shorter than a page that’s a flashback (p. 250),

  3. the war theatricals have all obviously been informed by reporting, but they’re too much in the fact department, the military lingo is too much especially for the abstracted Kafka or like Camus in the Sunni Triangle mood you’re aiming for (let the Weinsteins or The HBO tang up the slang for the next generation of soldiers),

  4. because once I was out of Chapter 2—and this is my main point—once Bringdom’s PTSD and debt and failed marriage and failure to engage with his child have been effectively established in “the present,” by which I mean “the topical,” and the novel’s deployed on this death mission account of his past, his enlistment and training, all his ballsdeep macho martyrdom antics (you’ll get a Purple Heart for nonpurple prose under fire), I was doing that guiltily-flip-ahead-to-gauge-how-many-pages-are-left-in-the-chapter thing, the guess-how-many-desert-boring-pages-are-wasted-on-this-already-wasteful-war thing, and was disappointed to find that all of them were (about war), except for the jerking-it-to-the-Kurd-girl-who-turns-into-his-mother-in-the-middle-of-a-soyfield dream, and the maybe-suicide-maybe-not-of-his-father flashback I mentioned above, which though I realize I just warned you not to use flashbacks and dreams, I meant only contextually, because in terms of content this is your truest territory: Home.

  (And Rachel-Anne, nice touch—as perduring as the Plains, and as open as the Kmart pharmacy.

  I know, I know, she’s not my Rach—she’s your authorial prerogative.)

  Anyway, onto your concluding scenes. Rachel-Anne getting that call, and fainting, with all the customers just waiting. That you’ve written it so that readers can only suppose they know what the call’s about, but can never know for sure: it’ll play better with the soundtrack behind it, unison cellos and solo muted horn. That the concerned customer who pats her hand and gives her a plastic poppy is black but is never described that way and it’s only made relevant by her coworker’s racist comment: it’s like I’m reading you sweat. This restraining tendency feels especially unfair with the decision to withhold the baby’s name. Just name the baby, Cal—for me.

  There’s more, of course. And more about style. But then you always doubted that, style. Next time, if time and I get squared.

  “With compliments and condolences—we have to be in touch” (about how to market what’s basically a male violence novel to females ages 18 to 80 who together are responsible for approx 68% of all new book buying and approx 64% of all public library book borrowing in America today) (my stats are reliable),

  j

 

  P.S. Read this postscript first.

  The way I was raised, Cal, from the earliest, was that my mother’s was the only war. That what she experienced (her Yiddish would be vos mikh hot getrofn, “what has befallen me”), being stowed away in that Carmelite convent in southern Poland on the Czechoslovak border and beaten and enslaved, essentially, was worse than anything any other human had ever experienced, but what occurs to me now was that Moms had never insisted on this, Dad had. Only Dad would attempt to exploit her trauma in explanations of her insomnia and bedsoilings and health issues, including, of course, her infertility, or in rationalizing her lateness in picking me up from baseball practice, or in leaving the laundry in the hamper and the pantry bare. This is all to establish that from the very start of planning my book (Moms had agreed to let me interview her, but only after I’d threatened to write about her regardless), I had no impression of my father’s pathologizing as anything other than an expression of his devotion to my mother, a duty that required both uxory and coddling. I’d failed to recognize his denial—abnegation, sublimation, displacement mechanism (I’m the first in my family to ever talk to a shrink) (about anything)—how my father had developed this smothering veneration in order to avoid discussing his own war. It was how he avoided anything even remotely to do with himself.

  But the time to return to is 12 years ago, Cal, the research, the writing, Tel Aviv. I sat with my Tante Idit, not my aunt but my mother’s first cousin, interrogating her in the parched garden of the white duplex she shared with her seething companion, a retired Maghrebi army general who resembled King Hussein of Jordan and never once said shalom to me. He blamed me for the crying—Idit was crying all the time. And her brother Menashe was crying, and he was calling his crying sister by her birthname, Yetta, and they were calling Moms by her birthname, Yocha. They answered all my questions sincerely, shamelessly, but with rivalry too—after finding out how selective of an account Moms had given me. 12 goddamned years ago.

  And then it was fall already, and I was off like a thief to Poland—to Warsaw. Renting that Daewoo on Moms’s MasterCard and driving it to Sobibór and Majdanek, or what Communist memorials remained of them, to Bełżec, or what Communist memorials remained of it, past the lot that’d been my mother’s house in Kraków, and the convent at Chyżne that’d abused and saved her thanks to luck and her parents’ money and their influence with the Kraków Judenrat, and finally across the cankered karsts of the Tatras in what’d lately been Czechoslovakia, to Vienna—from which I flew back to the States.

  I stayed in NY and wrote, and went down to Jersey only to present Moms with my transcripts to confirm or deny, as the intelligencers say—but she just set down the pot she was glazing and made me promise never to print anything the cousins told me, and I agreed, or she said I agreed, and that she trusted me.

  So then I went ahead and printed all of it, Cal, because that’s just what we do—I’m not going to pretend it was ever a choice, but neither am I going to pretend it wasn’t difficult. 9/11 pubdate, Miri pulverized, Aar gnashing out in the wilderness beyond all assuagement and phone reception, you and your fame, Cal—and then in the midst of all that, Finn came through, or Kimi! did (and what the hell ever became of Kimi!?), either one of them or just a distributor’s order fulfillment robot sent Moms a finished copy. I hadn’t let her read any earlier version (I’m not about to lecture you, Cal, on how agonizing it is letting others read your drafts, doubly so if they’re the subject and are bound to be troubled). Moms wasn’t just troubled, she was furious, but she didn’t call me, she called Israel. She’d gotten online at the house around then, and she and her cousins were emailing too. She was never “raped” by the Soviet starshina, she said, because after the first time, he paid her in food, and after the last time, he paid her in a map and outlined a tentative route to where her brothers lived, where they had lived and operated branches of their family’s lumber firm, in Žilina (or Sillein in German) and Brno (or Brünn). Anyway, she said, the soldier wasn’t a starshina, but a podpolkovnik. Moms and Tante Idit and Onkel Menashe feuded back and forth over whether “rape” meant the same thing in Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. Whether the Red Army rank of the soldier corresponded to the Israeli Army rank of seren or segen—lieutenant colonel? full colonel? And it wasn’t like I was trying to stay out of it, Cal—Moms kept me out of it, and the only way I knew anything was that the Israelis would fwd: me the emails. That’s how I knew that Moms otherwise enjoyed the book, or just wouldn’t admit to her cousins that she hadn’t—all her emails began “Dear Yetta and Menashele,” and ended with her signing herself, not Yocha, but “Love, Gloria.”

  I also got a letter then—through the mail, through the fanmail, Cal—forwarded from Random House, October or November, 2001. I responded, and it led to a lunch. Which led to another. Retirees transited in from the Five Towns on the Island and from Main Line Philly to have lunch with me and then go gawk at the pit downtown.

  They were readers, they were my only readers—if I didn’t snare the women I at least had a corner table with the only consolation demographic, geriatric Jews—but they didn’t want to talk about my book. They wanted
to talk about my father.

  You know, I’m sure you do, Cal, how you expend all this effort writing something and thinking through the detail of every decision (do I name the restaurants we met at? or just describe them? do I mention what was ordered? who took care of the bill?), but then you finish, or you delude yourself into finishing, and realize—too late, with the book already a classic of the bargain bin—that you’d missed something, a scene or even just a line that would’ve brought everything together, that would’ve resolved all the fogs—a gesture just as crucial to your life, but also as easily forgotten in daily life, as a person you’d loved who’s now dead.

  My father. I’d hardly mentioned him in all my pages. Because Moms’s account of their meeting had demoted him into a handsome uniform that acted swiftly. My father was like a new character introduced at the end of a book, as the end of a book—a Daddy ex machina, maybe. And it’s been on my mind ever since, or—I’m trying for honesty—what’d then been a guilty notion I was in no psychological state to pursue is recurring only now, the notion that if there were to be any reissue or updated edition I would write an afterword to it, an afterword about him. And hey, a girl can dream, can’t she? a girl can flashback????

  David Cohen, Private First Class, US First Army, had liberated Buchenwald, where the Yiddish competency he demonstrated so impressed the OSS officers he debriefed that they took him along to interrogations at Dachau, Mauthausen, and after V-E Day, here, to Vienna, where he was attached to command—according to the oldsters I was meeting with, my father’s former colleagues.

  To be totally accurate, Cal, the guy who’d read my book and initially contacted me was this decorous epitomist Connecticut WASP, from rep tie to bucks with the blueblood suit between, and it was only after he’d vetted me over lunch at the Union Club that he sent the other guys my way, his octogenarian Jewish subordinates who claimed they recalled me coming up to their knees, their knees since replaced, at my father’s funeral—there was a Prussian yecca type with spoon up his ass posture who as a policy refused to eat and talk or even be talked to at the same time, and then two widowers who resembled Dad biographically, being the sons of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw who grew up south of Delancey speaking Yiddish. That language had bound them together, and brought them to the captain—the WASP had retired from the OSS as a captain—for whom they interpreted interrogations of, and translated testimonies by, survivors of concentration and labor camps, which were cited extensively in the subsequent war crimes tribunals.

  Cal, they were filling in a man I had never known. A man my mother, reciting the shameless sanitized version of this story, the Story, had never known either—or had forgotten with her arrival in Jersey, her renaming as Gloria, her infirmities (avitaminosis) (stomatitis), and lack of baby, her spats with my father’s parents, attempts to master cooking and English by reading Ladies’ Home Journal recipes and cooking through the irreconcilable fascinations of The Honeymooners and Bonanza.

  Vienna, 1945, the latter winter of a year that’d felt all winter—my father left US Army HQ, the former Hotel Bristol, located on the Ring (after the war it became a hotel again, and now its rooms cost north of €308/night). In one direction was the recently unnamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz, in the other the recently renamed Josef-Stalin-Platz—Vienna, like Berlin, was divided into zones. But my father headed for neither. Nor did he stop at his lodgings off Kärntner Straße. Instead, he went on toward the river—Why? The downtown Jews said, Why? Because word had come in that the Danube had just frozen over, and my father wanted to check. The downtown Jews told me this as if it was unimpeachably logical, and it was, because that’s who Dad was: the type of man who if you told him the river’s frozen was going to want to check. There by the riverbank he met a woman—a woman who’d just walked in gaiters taken off a Wehrmacht soldier, which meant off a Wehrmacht corpse, from Poland to Žilina to Brno to Vienna (I’m in no position to record the numbers just now, Cal, but consult the book or imagine around 600 kilometers or 400 miles), and was starving and feverish and out in the incipient snow begging—Moms would never admit to begging—and who called out to him in Yiddish, Zeit moychel, because Dad had a face like one of her brothers, who’d died in Theresienstadt, or Auschwitz. Dad gave her chewinggum, took her for a sawdusty schnitzel at a basement café. And then maybe to his room, the downtown Jews said. Then again, maybe not. Because she was icicle skinny like a Muselmann, they said. That’s what they called the people in the camps not gas exterminated but exterminated by hunger, Muselmänner. My mother was named Yocha then—did I mention that? Is this what senility is like? It was illegal to marry her. The downtown Jews said the Army might’ve courtmartialed my father under the GI ban on fraternization, which tended to treat brides unable to provide evidence of their identities as enemy nationals until proven innocent. But the captain said they wouldn’t have dared. The yecca, that scooped asshole Prussian, who just before I closed our tab at French Roast ordered fries for takeout, said that he was the one who’d forged her papers—though, he noted, it might not have been forgery because it was done on the captain’s orders—and not a Nansen Displaced Persons document either but a straight Shipley US passport that characterized the bearer as a secretarial assistant in the office of the special advisor on Austrian affairs, and falsified her age. My father was 21 and had an honorable discharge pending, Moms was—she guessed she was—16. They married, 4/16/1946, in the synagogue on Seitenstettengasse, the sole shul to survive in Vienna, in a ceremony officiated by Chaplain Rabbi Daniel S. Daniels of Worcester, MA, who died in a car wreck on I-95 in the late 1980s, on Shabbos. Back in civilian life, Dad studied actuarial science at Newark Technical School. In the gaps between assignments and a Bamberger’s shift he set about tracking down Moms’s relatives. Yetta had become the Hebraicized Idit, after Birkenau, but Menashe, who’d fled to Argentina, was still just Menashe—did I mention that? Am I confusing you, Cal? Moms and Dad visited them regularly in Israel—because, Moms liked to say, the Tel Avivniks were always too poor to visit us—and after I was born they brought me with them, though they went less and less, until we moved from Newark out to Shoregirt and they got up the confidence to fly without me maybe twice, because Shoregirt had a yard and picket fence and Jewish neighbors in the insurance business for me to stay by, the Tannenbaums. The last time my parents made the trip I wasn’t yet 12, and I’d worked out this compromise by which I was able to spend the afterschool day at my own house all alone, but had to report to the Tannenbaums’ house at dinnertime each night, for boiled chicken “cacciatore,” kugel “moussaka,” a dessert review of my bar mitzvah portion, and bed. Then my parents returned, and the back muscle that Dad had strained—from having lifted their suitcases loaded with a copy of Walt Whitman’s Bletlekh groz for Menashe and bras for Idit and cameras and camcorders for all their children and grandchildren—was diagnosed as a lung sarcoma, and all the traveling they did after that was to Sloan Kettering. My father refused to die only because it meant leaving my mother, but what was truly remarkable was that he’d lived that way too, which was why he’d never attended the reunions, and only met his army friends on worktrips to NY, and at his funeral—he had to be there anyway.

 

  You can’t fly anywhere, anywhen, from Vienna.

  Or you can, but it’s never cheap. To JFK, Washington-Dulles, Chicago-O’Hare. Connections in Amsterdam, Brussels, or Frankfurt knock a schilling off the price. There was also a layover option via Budapest. Layovernight. Tuesdays were the most affordable days to fly. Still, I was barely able to afford London on a Tuesday, noon. Vienna–London–Toronto–LaGuardia, more than 20 hours, eight procedurals, six sitcoms, four films with their plane fatalities edited out, four meals (or “snackboxes”).

  I wasn’t checking luggage but if the clerk found that suspicious she didn’t say.

  Let her just try and check this prose, let everyone.

  Vienna—I slotted Principal’s passport into an aperture fit for transacting with an ulcerous deli
clerk out on a drug corner. The guard took it and swiped it and flipped his interest through, in a way that convinced me of his scrutiny, so I said, “I get that all the time,” and either he didn’t find that hilarious or it wasn’t hilarious or he was just keeping busy for the surveillance scrutinizing him, then waved me through.

  On the other side, in the immigration zigzag in NY—CNNing all around with Afghan dronestrikes, and then as a teaser before commercial break, which realityshow celeb really and showily got tossed out of a Manhattan Gopal store for cutting in line?

  But then it was my turn to passport the officer, so I said, “I get that all the time,” which got a grin. “You must be the 10th guy who’s said that today.”

  Just then I recalled how I always used to like having my passport stamped. It fixed my persona. Nailed my being down. So I asked the officer for a stamp.

  And he answered by saying, “I’d love to, friend, but they’re phasing out that ink stuff.”

  Customs was/were: spit thrice over your shoulder when anyone praises you, knock wood twice when praising yourself. Another line, another form handed over, smudged with Moms’s addy, permanent addy.

  I went out into the chill, cab exhaust.

  I joined the queue, waited, though I guess I could’ve called the agency, collect, could’ve had Lisabeth or Seth spring for a livery out of pity, shave and a haircut, suite at the Plaza, a sandwich. But I wanted to continue on my own—wanted Jersey, mother, buffer.

  The expediter was a deadringer for La Guardia, the mayor, but with cornrows—“Where you going?”

  “Jersey,” I said.

  She sneered borough cred, directed me with her middlefinger down the idlers.