9.
That summer, visiting Belsen became a kind of fad for British and American troops. Every day two or three transports arrived, driven by grinning privates or grim sergeants or young, visibly drunk officers, who all said the same thing, that they’d heard what happened, and they wanted to do something. None of them had consulted anyone; they’d just taken whatever was nearby and diverted it to Belsen, where they pulled up at the gate with the eager look of schoolboys who’d brought something unusually interesting to show and tell, and unveiled their cargo of soup, or tents, or, in one case, enormous spools of copper wire. Because no one else wanted to do it, I helped them unload whatever it was into a shed, added it to the list of the shed’s inventory, then—this was the tricky part—I tried to get the visitors to leave without taking the tour to which they felt themselves entitled. Everyone wanted to see the concentration camp; they were disappointed to learn that it had been burned. I did my best to keep them away from the displaced persons camp at the Panzer School, but I was often outranked, and the whole situation lay outside the scope of my orders. So I acted as a guide, leading the Brits and Americans on quick tours of the DP camp. Here was the cinema, here the post office, here was Harrod’s. I was appalled by how many of the visitors expressed disappointment. “Hell, it’s just like the University of Indiana,” an American major said. I tried to protect the inmates from such morons. “Keep back, please, they’re easily startled,” I said, although the opposite was true. The inmates would accost anyone, even in the absence of a mutual language, to ask for newspapers, stockings, nail scissors, thread, whatever they’d run out of. Sometimes, shamefully, I said the inmates were contagious. Typhus, you know. “Oh!” was the usual response, and more often than not, I thought, the visitors were relieved. They had done their duty; they’d seen Belsen! Story for the grandchildren. Now back in the truck, and on to some less unsettling part of the peace.
The truth was that the inmates were recovering. No one had thought they would. The psychiatrists who passed through the camp in April estimated their chances of returning to anything like normal human life at nil, but already in early June, young men were playing soccer on the parade grounds, and promenading up and down between the barracks in smart summer clothes. It was possible to hear laughter in what had been Belsen. It’s true that most of the survivors were young, between eighteen and thirty-five, and many of them had arrived at the concentration camp just a few weeks before liberation. Also true that many were not well and that, among those who appeared to be mending, there were many who, when a door slammed or a work crew dropped a mallet, retreated to some terrible place from which they were slow to return. But life was turning out to be more powerful than any psychiatrist had guessed; life was winning. When I saw children kicking a ball, or a young man sitting under a tree, reading a book—books were making their way into the camp, thanks to a Jewish organization in New York—I could almost believe that the horror I had seen in April had been only a dream.
Luiza, too, was getting better. When she talked about the library, it was as if the whole thing had been a joke. “Can you imagine, we really put all those terrible books in a closet?” She was campaigning to be elected to the permanent committee of liberated Jews that would be formed in the fall. She told me about her conversations with Yossi Rosensaft, the head of the DP camp’s Provisional Committee: a small but massive man who’d survived the mines at Dora, where the Nazis built their rockets. “He wants me to do something in education,” she said. “I told him, no!” “Why?” I asked. Luiza laughed. “I am sick of being a teacher! You have no idea how hard it is. You come in, Hello class, and there, you have all these dull little faces looking up at you, like puddings. You work and work, and still, they are puddings!” “You’re not a pudding,” I pointed out. “I was never a pudding,” Luiza said. “The world is divided that way. Puddings and not. It isn’t fair, but I don’t see why I should have to fix it.” “What will you do?” I asked. “I want to be in charge of dances,” Luiza said. “Dances, and parties. For example. Soon, it will be winter. I want to make a huge mound of snow in the banquet hall”—the former officers’ mess, in the Roundhouse—“and let the children sled down it. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” “I suppose,” I said. “But why not just get a heap of snow together outside?” “Because, foolish person, I do not want the children to be cold.” She tapped my arm with a nail: manicured, and painted deep red. “They have suffered enough, don’t you think?” I said that it was very inventive of her. “I know,” she said. “I just thought of it now! I am going to tell Yossi, before I forget.” She was off.
I don’t know whether Luiza was in any way responsible for it, but there was a dance that June. It was held upstairs from Harrod’s, in the former officers’ beer hall, now a nightclub called the Coconut Grove. It was a strange affair, the young women in their new best dresses, but still very thin, dancing with big, sheepish servicemen who handled them like porcelain teacups. There was no liquor, at least, not officially; but many of my brothers in arms had smuggled in their flasks, and I think, on the civilian side, there had been some distillation of slivovitz and potato vodka. I was sober but I don’t know, I’ll never know, if Luiza was drunk. I danced with her. Charlotte had taught me the steps, although it turned out that what I knew was only their dead form; Luiza spoke the living language. Under the guise of following, she flung me around the room like a toy duck on a string. Then, abruptly, she let me drop. “That was nice,” she said. “Now I want to sit down.” I said I’d keep her company, but another girl sprang up and beckoned. “Private! You dance very nice.” I was there to help. I tried to keep track of Luiza, but it was impossible; the party had heated up. Many people were drunk. At the tables, couples kissed, and their hands groped under cover of the white tablecloths. There was a lot of shouting.
I left around ten o’clock and walked across the parade ground. It was a clear night, with no moon; thousands and thousands of stars pointed out that ours wasn’t the only planet, and that whatever mess we’d made here was, from another point of view, nothing but a speck of light. But the Earth didn’t seem like a mess. The air smelled of pine needles and heather and clay. They’d opened the windows in the Coconut Grove, and the music came softly out. Just as I was beginning to enjoy myself, though, I remembered what had happened here. Then I was furious: as if the pines and the stars had tricked me. I was going to borrow a Jeep and drive back to Celle, when I bumped into Luiza. “There you are, Leo!” she said. “I was wondering when you would ever come out.” She took my hand and we walked away together. “Did you dance with many girls tonight?” she asked, in Hungarian. By then we’d spoken it enough that I could have a clumsy conversation. I said that I had just been doing my duty. “Of course you were,” Luiza said. “You’re a very kind person, Leo.” “I’m Canadian,” I said. “Yes, Canada,” Luiza said. “Tell me about it.” I talked about Parry Sound, its church dances and candy stores, its public library and movie theaters, and the great excitement everyone had felt when I was a child and the Mail Car Bandit stole Mrs. Laird’s car and ran it into a ditch. I think I must have spoken for quite a long time, as much to remind myself of Canada as to inform Luiza about it, but she did not lose interest. When I was done, she said, “It sounds lovely.” “It is,” I said. I hadn’t realized how much I missed it until then. “What about Budapest? How was it before the war?” Luiza squeezed my hand. “Another time,” she said. We had walked to the edge of the forest, the familiar, terrible forest. “Leo,” Luiza asked, “am I your friend?” “Of course you are.” “Good,” Luiza said. “Will you marry me?” I liked Luiza: she of the indoor sledding hill. I did not love her, not the way I loved Doris. But I thought she and I could be happy together, and I imagined that by marrying her I might undo some of the war’s destruction. Spending the rest of my life with Luiza would be my way of rebuilding; it would be my way to make a future that was better than the past. “All right,” I said. “Wonderful!” Luiza said. “Now, I am
going to bed.” She kissed my cheek and ran into the dark.
We were married in the middle of July, at the DP camp’s synagogue, a repurposed room in one of the barracks blocks. It was decorated for the occasion with scarlet rowanberries and blue lupins. Luiza carried a bouquet of white flowers which grew all over the heath that summer, a cross between white lilac and hydrangea. I don’t know what they were called. Her friends had baked cakes, and the Red Cross in Brussels sent a bottle of champagne. Yossi Rosensaft made a speech. The newspapers took pictures of us coming out of the barracks; then we got into a black Opel and drove out of the camp for three days’ honeymoon. We were going to stay in Hanover, but as soon as we’d got out of view of the DP camp, Luiza told me to pull onto a side road, and we made love on the Opel’s creaky backseat. “Now shall we go to our hotel?” I asked, afterward. “We will not go to any hotel,” Luiza said. “We will not give one cent of your money to any German.” And we didn’t. We spent our wedding night on the heath, and commandeered our coffee and bread the next morning from a surly farmer. “Congratulate us!” Luiza instructed him. “Congratulations,” he said. Luiza put her arm around my waist. “We are going to have many Jewish children,” she told the farmer. “OK,” I said. “OK?” Luiza said, sharply. She’d taught school, all right. “It is OK with you, Leo?” The farmer turned away in disgust. The rest of our honeymoon was more or less the same. I couldn’t blame Luiza for any of it. Things will be better when we get home, I thought.
My repatriation papers came in October, but because of a bureaucratic mix-up, Luiza’s visa wasn’t ready, and we couldn’t leave until December. In that time, the DP camp became a fully living place. Just as Luiza had foretold, the Provisional Committee elected a Central Committee, with Rosensaft at its head, and they began the serious business of lobbying England for permission to emigrate to Palestine. They opened a library, too, the bulk of which was twenty thousand volumes of Jewish writing that the Nazis had cached, with characteristically boundless perversity, in Berlin. The inmates had what they wanted: Torah and hundreds of volumes of commentary, but also Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Asch, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Jakob Wassermann, Stefan Zweig, Max Brod. I was amused to see that while wiser books stayed on the shelves, the novels were almost always on loan, romances in particular. It made me think that what the world needed was not wisdom, but stories. Some of the books I’d brought to the DP camp had escaped destruction, too; now and then I’d see a kid furtively leafing through a comic book, and once I even saw a bespectacled Polish boy sitting on the bank of the Meissen, reading Lovecraft. At the time he looked to me like the first green shoot poking up from a burned forest, although when I think about that scene now it seems quite monstrous.
Luiza and I stayed in London long enough to spend my back pay on hotels and dinners and clothes. Just before Christmas, we took a ship to Halifax, and from there we took the train to Toronto, and on to Parry Sound. Walter was dead. Of a heart attack, ironically, just as I first drove Lieutenant Yale through the gates of Belsen. Luiza and I made our way through high snowdrifts on Avenue Road, and when we came to the house on Waubeek Street, this house, we found an evergreen wreath on the door. Charlotte skipped out of the kitchen to greet us, wearing an apron over a shiny new dress. “Leo!” she gasped, “you look like a soldier!” And, turning to Luiza: “So, this is your wife!” They took stock of each other. Unfortunately, Luiza was better dressed than Charlotte, more simply, but more elegantly. Nothing about her appearance had been disturbed by our walk through the snow, whereas Charlotte, who had been cooking, was flushed; strands of gray hair clung to her forehead. “It is a pleasure to meet you,” Luiza said, and she stepped toward Charlotte to kiss her cheeks. Charlotte, who had rarely failed to embarrass me by kissing my friends and their parents and near strangers in the street, held out her hand. “Enchantée,” she said. “I would linger, but I am making a Christmas goose; in fact, an entire Christmas feast.” She hurried back into the kitchen. Luiza and I sat in the parlor, drinking leaden eggnog by the Christmas tree until the meal was ready. It was, indeed, a feast: a goose with cranberry sauce and a bacon-chestnut stuffing that glistened with fat; roasted carrots; mashed potatoes; and a tourtière, a pie stuffed with roast pork and more potatoes. And to begin with, a platter of Prince Edward Island oysters on ice. “Charlotte,” I murmured. “Quoi?” Charlotte said. “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” “Mais rien,” Luiza said. “On vous est très reconnaissant.” She inclined her head formally. “Il n’y a pas de quoi,” Charlotte replied, beaming. “Vous êtes de la famille! Leonard, you are the man of the house now. Will you say grace?” We bowed our heads. All through the meal, Charlotte pretended to be delighted by Luiza’s French. How had Luiza learned it? Was it true she was a teacher? Did she know that there were many French people in Canada? By the time we got to dessert—a steamed plum pudding with suet—my wife was on the verge of tears. “Please,” she said, “I will go and lie down.” I helped with the dishes. “She’s very nice,” Charlotte said. “But so frail! Of course, considering . . . No, I’m very happy for you.” And Luiza, upstairs: “Leo, your mother is a monster!” “Ssh!” I said. “She is!” Luiza said. “We must leave this place, as soon as we can.”
I couldn’t leave, though. I had just come home. Everyone had just come home; everyone was looking for work. I was lucky to have a job in the hardware store. “But we can go anywhere!” Luiza said. “To Saskatchewan, if you want! There must be work somewhere.” I said she wouldn’t like Saskatchewan. She said she didn’t like Parry Sound. She missed streetcars and pastry and concerts, all the things she’d promised herself when she knew she was going to live. We fought in whispers in my childhood bedroom. Then one day in February, Luiza called my mother a Nazi and said that she wouldn’t live under her roof any longer. “Leo,” she said, “are you coming?” “Where are you going?” I asked. I’d said you.
Even so, Luiza didn’t leave entirely. She moved into a room at the far end of Church Street and started giving French lessons. “This woman amazes me!” Charlotte said. “She hardly speaks French!” In fact, she spoke it very well, but with an accent. Luiza returned to our house for supper every night; sometimes, when she’d eaten well and life seemed less intolerable than usual, she came upstairs with me, and we nestled in my bed. She had become very thin again; I think supper was often her only meal. We didn’t make love. Instead, Luiza whispered her dreams at me: She was going to Toronto, to become an actress. She was going to open a hat shop in Parry Sound. She was going to become a radio announcer. Her dreams had nothing to do with her abilities, or with what the world wanted from her. They were built haphazardly out of parts that didn’t go together, like the indoor mountain of snow. Her genius was for knitting them into a coherent story and defending them in the face of everything. “When I have my radio program,” she whispered to me, as we lay squeezed together, “I will invite on it all the generals, and they will explain how it took so long to liberate the Jews. And they will tell why the Jews still cannot go to Palestine, why they must stay in their camps.” “Good question,” I said. Luiza hit my chest. “I am serious!” she said. “I will talk to Churchill, and I will change his mind. Everyone will go to Palestine.” “I hope so.” “We will go, too, Leo,” she said. “We’ll have a farm.” “I thought you wanted to live in a city?” “No, on a farm! We’ll have sheep, and roses.” “All right,” I said.
The Canadian Pacific rattled over Waubeek Street. Downstairs, the radio was still on, playing classical music. Charlotte must have got into the habit of leaving it on, after Walter died, so she wouldn’t feel alone in the house. I felt guilty about not having come home sooner, although I couldn’t have come home any sooner than I did. I wanted to be a good son, a good husband, but, in reality, I was living the life of an automaton, running the hardware store by day, and by night, giving Luiza a safe place to deposit her dreams. Luiza knew it. One afternoon in March, she came to the store. It was sleeting, and her umbrella was sheete
d with ice. She shivered. I went to hold her, but she stepped back. “Leo,” she said, “will you do a favor for me?” “Anything,” I said. “The drainpipe over my window is broken,” she said. “Water is coming through the top of the window. It’s making a mess!” I said I would come by as soon as the store closed. Luiza hesitated, and then said that would be all right. She kissed my cheek. “I am lucky to have married you,” she said. I wondered if that meant things would get better. I wondered how long it would take to save up enough money for us to move to Toronto. At the end of the day, I shuttered Spinks Hardware, gathered up some tools, and went to Luiza’s house. Her room was empty, except for a note on the bed, which said that she had gone away, and not to forget her, please. She would remember me. I went to the window, as if she might still be nearby, but the street was deserted. The drainpipe was, in fact, broken.
Two weeks later, Luiza sent me a postcard from Edmonton. She had fallen in love with a dentist, she said. They were going to be married. Strangely, she didn’t ask for a divorce—maybe the idea of bigamy appealed to her. Maybe it didn’t even occur to her that it would be a problem. She’d started over so many times, she’d learned not to think too much about what she left behind. When I told Charlotte what had happened, she patted my hand. “Poor Leo,” she said. “Life can be very disappointing, sometimes. And poor dentist!” I wanted to hit her. I went to the station and bought a ticket for Edmonton. The train didn’t leave for several hours, so I went over to the Belvedere Hotel, and while I was sitting at the bar, eating peanuts and wondering whether I was making a terrible mistake, Horace Tudhope came in. He’d just come back from Europe. He told me that he had stayed in the Algonquin Regiment until the end of the war. Just about everyone else from the beginning was dead. Dozens had been slaughtered in Normandy, when a misread map sent them to a hill five miles behind German lines. Others died crossing the Leopold Canal, a body of water with two channels, each about thirty feet wide. It was incredible that so many people could have died in so little space, and for so little space. “That’s war,” Tudhope said. “You spill ten guys’ blood to get across the fucking street.”
The Night Ocean Page 26