After Auschwitz: A Love Story

by Brenda Webster

  The therapist with Claudia’s body tells her not to be afraid: she will be protected by her new mama. But the System doesn’t let her go so easily. Objects begin to take on a life of their own. The jug with a blue flower asserts itself, comes towards her aggressively. Turning away, she sees a table, a chair—both alive (Alice’s Wonderland again).

  The actress playing the therapist was brilliant. While she held the girl, she would whisper that “she” had a lovely clean body. The therapist always referred to the girl in the third person because hearing the word “you” would send the girl into a panic. Making this come alive on film, I was both the good warm breast and the baby wanting relief. Embarrassing for a grown man to admit, but secretly, making that film before I left Hannah, I was trying to lessen my burden by making it a refuge.

  When the girl feels the bond between herself and her therapist, the whole world starts to glow, warmth flooding her body. She feels the therapist’s loving concern. She allows the therapist to feed her and will only take food from her hands.

  I made a glowing light suffuse the scene, tinged it with rose—not corny the way it is when the cowboy rides off into the sunset but real and warm space—details of beauty: birds, sand, water. I wanted my audience to see it the way the girl did, suddenly waking to a different world, warm, filled with love. My plan was ambitious. I meant it to rival the great films and to an extent I think I succeeded. But though the reviews were good, people weren’t excited by it; it was too subtle—or maybe I was aiming too high.

  There are different ways of telling the story of Hannah and me that make me more or less culpable. What, for instance, if my wish for children had become overpowering and Claudia had said she would have one? She sometimes said she wanted one—a little me. But was Claudia really serious? I don’t know. It would be just for the purpose of the story. What? Didn’t you know that writers always mix fiction and fact?

  I don’t want to seem like a cad. Even after I “left” Hannah to be with Claudia, I visited Hannah every day for lunch or supper. And at the same time I tried to show her how foolish she was to hang on to me. Why didn’t Hannah enumerate my flaws, my defects of character, my narcissism, my egotism, and say to hell with you? Hadn’t her life experiences convinced her that there is no everlasting love?

  “No, Renzo,” she would say, shaking her head. “It is my reason to keep on living.”

  That’s the sort of statement that scared me silly. After surviving Auschwitz was she going to die for love? More cruelly, was I killing her? She seemed to fall into fragments like a broken mirror. But listen, her state wasn’t just because of me. Wasn’t I the one who encouraged her to work, to put herself back together through her own efforts? In our early years together I read everything she wrote—all those stories about her childhood in the village. I encouraged her to tell the truth about her mother. She was a sainted martyr, yes, all right, turned to soap the first day, but she was also narrow-minded and punitive—always trying to press Hannah into an iron mold, ready to cut off her feet if they wouldn’t fit. Just before they were expelled from their village her mother was trying to find a husband for her—at twelve years old.

  For years I supported Hannah while she wrote all day, and I read every page in the evening. She never could wait until the next day. And then I took her stories into my heart and gave them new life in films. The village life lent itself to cinema. Colorful and full of a variety of characters. I combined the strongest stories. Hannah helped me with the screen plays. It brought us closer. My favorite story was based on her father—a kosher butcher who had only a donkey to draw his cart. His wife continually berates him for being a bad provider. Then one day he finds an emaciated horse and, full of joy, brings it back to his family, where the poor animal succumbs despite the children’s frantic efforts to save it. People loved these stories; they were quite successful both in print and on the screen. Without me Hannah might not have found the courage to start.

  I swing forward and backward in time. So many hours and minutes of peace.

  “What are you doing?” she asked me one Sunday morning in our mythic beginning when she saw me stirring eggs in the frying pan.

  “Making one of my specialties,” I said.

  “If you’re trying to scramble them, turn the heat up.” She laughed, seeing me in my apron, thinking I didn’t know how.

  “Go away,” I said. “There isn’t room for two. I can barely turn around. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

  “Are you really doing this?” she asked me. Back then, not many men could be seen in the kitchen. I shooed her out and went back to my stirring. I actually enjoyed the feeling of the egg against my spoon. If you stir over a very low heat, it slowly thickens and becomes ambrosial. Its slowness was like my patience in dealing with Hannah. I called her in and served the eggs. Then I took her on my lap. She slanted her eyes at me suspiciously but she let me offer her a spoonful.

  “One for you,” I said, “and one for me. Isn’t it delicious?”

  “You’re spoiling me,” she said though she kept on eating. When she finished I sang her a little lullaby. I hadn’t planned either to cook, or to sing—they came naturally and I was encouraged because she let herself relax and enjoy them. She reminded me of a wild kitten that lurked in the tall grass near the back door of our family villa outside of Todi. Constanza, our cook, would put out milk for her, milk the little one would only drink after we retreated into the dark depth of the house.

  “Trust me,” I said to Hannah, rocking her gently. “You can trust me.” I’m not sure even now if that was true. Then I carried her back to bed and stroked her all over for a long time before entering her. She let me take care of her and she blossomed.

  After I left, I still helped her. I helped her get other jobs writing scripts and then a few long feature articles for a glossy mass-market magazine. I remember her pride when the first article came out under her byline. She wanted to write about deviants: homosexuals, transsexuals, beggars—or female creativity. Her boss wasn’t interested. He kept shunting her onto more anodyne topics. He was the typical chauvinist male, puffing big cigars and blowing smoke in her face.

  When I moved out to live with Claudia, near Hannah’s and my apartment, he tried to lure Hannah into bed with the subtlety of a Roman bus. When I came over for lunch, Hannah would tell me the latest outrageous things he’d done. She was a great mimic. “This is how he looked,” she said one particularly upsetting day, puffing out her chest to look at her watch. ‘I have two hours away from the office. Let’s not waste it, let’s fuck.’”

  “Did he really say that?”

  “And pushed against me with his erection. He’s a pig.”

  “If he bothers you again, I’ll speak to him. I’m still your husband.”

  “He knows you don’t live with me anymore,” she said accusingly, then immediately cancelled the accusation with a smile. “To soothe myself I made love with Carlos.”

  “Isn’t he gay?” I’d asked, surprised.

  “He wanted to help, he was very tender, we stayed in bed for hours.”

  I didn’t like hearing these things but I put on a tender expression and held her hand. My friends thought I was crazy. I should make a clean break. They couldn’t understand our lunch dates—every day for twenty years! In the end it was Claudia I broke up with.

  These days, when people ask “How are you?”—in their cheerful ignorant way—I want to give them the suit I read about, the one that scientists put on young doctors to help them understand what the aging body feels like. How it drags you down. It was ingenious: there were even glasses that fogged your eyes and weights that made moving exhausting and gave you pains in your joints.

  People say age encroaches gradually, on little fog feet, as it were, tiptoeing along the veins and arteries until suddenly one morning you wake up and see death grinning at you over the counterpane. But the worst aspect of aging, the one you don’t speak about if you are unlucky enough to suffer it, is what happens
to your mind.

  In the beginning Hannah and I joked about my forgetting phone numbers, book plots, restaurant names. Even though she was so much younger, she claimed to be forgetful too. She wasn’t though, and more and more her whole existence was taken up by Remembrance.

  Lists she told me, make lists. But wait. Did I tell you that I was married for twenty years to Hannah before I left to live with Claudia, and then that I spent another twenty years visiting Hannah every day for lunch? I kept it up until she had a nearly fatal heart attack and I asked her to let me come back. It’s amazing, don’t you think? That she would forgive me and let me come back? But there was also humiliation. I was so diminished. And despite her heart attack, from which she quickly recovered, she was so much stronger.

  The other day I bought her a beautiful book that I noticed in the window of a bookstore next to our palazzo, an early edition of Petrarch’s sonnets. I put papers in to mark the sweetest love songs—the ones I could no longer sing. She took it back, and I’m sure she apologized to the bookstore owner; told him about her poor husband who can’t find his way in the world anymore; who didn’t grasp the impossible price. How humiliating. I fear it is just the beginning.

  Yesterday I tried to give her five euros to help with the rent and she patted my cheek. “Thank you, Renzo,” she said, “how sweet,” the way you’d thank a child who gave you play money.

  I went into my studio and cried. Opened one of my books and saw the list of my titles, my poetry, my films, and my honors. I re-read and fondled the framed awards and statuettes: the Oscar from Hollywood, the Golden Palm from Cannes, the two Golden Lions from Venice, and the one I was most proud of, the Sol Plaatje award for my poetry. That cheered me but I still felt confused about the details of our life. Who paid the bills? The rent? Was Hannah in control? Of course not. I started to laugh. All I had to do was stay calm and the facts came back to me. I was the one who paid the bills and planned our finances. I had ever since our early days. My God, I taught her everything she knew. I sat her down every month and we went over the checkbook together. She hated doing it and the balance was always slightly off. But finally she had it down well enough.

  I repeat like a litany the ways I encouraged Hannah’s strengths. How I kept on urging her to write more about her village and her childhood; read her drafts, corrected her Italian, and finally, how I taught her to fall in love with natural beauty, the woods and streams. Despite the poverty it seemed like the Garden of Eden before the expulsion of Adam and Eve by the flaming angel with his sword.

  I loved her village stories and I urged her to go further and write a memoir—everything else had been in the third person—about the expulsion and transport. I wanted to do a film about it and suggested she interview her neighbors, see how much they understood of what had happened. She wasn’t sure she could.

  “Not one of the women raised a finger to help us,” she said. “They just stood by on the edge of the road and stared as the Nazis—some of them their husbands and sons—drove us like cattle going to market, beating us with sticks. Some of the women even joined in, throwing stones, people who’d sat in my mother’s kitchen just days before or gossiped with her on market day.”

  I could see the scene begging me to shoot it. A flashback to the market with the piles of luscious fruit, grapes, pears, and melons, and the two girls holding hands as they looked or picking up the pennies that the horse traders sometimes threw to get them out of the way. Then I cut to her friend, staring along with the other women, tears in her eyes.

  One day in the early sixties, urged on by me and buoyed by the success of her first novel, Nobody Could Love You, she got up the courage to visit her village. We boarded the Orient Express from Vienna to Romania. Hearing German on the train made her shiver.

  “Tickets please,” the conductor said, bending towards us.

  She turned away, pressing herself against me, clinging, my arm around her. I tried to imagine how German sounded to her after that ride in a cattle car as a child of twelve. How all trips now are tainted—she still gets sick anytime she has to travel—and all sounds in that guttural language are curses. Even the raucous schoolboys in the next car are a threat. I wondered whether I had made a mistake.

  When we arrived in the village with our handheld video camera, the villagers clustered around us. Hannah had brought a small icebox for a friend of her mother’s, the only one she remembered. Her village had just gotten electricity, powered by boys taking turns on a bicycle. The villagers were excited by the gift but not particularly grateful—and she was right: they showed a complete lack of curiosity about what had happened to her family.

  Hannah remembered several of the women, quite old now, by their gestures or a feature—a mole, a way of speaking. She had brought things for their children. “How is your mother?” one elderly woman asked her, as though she had not seen the soldiers driving them out, her mother wailing. Willed blindness, Hannah called it.

  “When we were driven through the countryside with bare feet in the winter,” she told me after the old woman had moved on, “our feet covered with chilblains, bleeding, putrid, most people turned away. Only a few threw pieces of bread from their windows, and then quickly shut them.”

  I wanted to show the blindness of the villagers alongside their welcoming hugs—the split between kindness and indifference to a brutal reality. I still fancied myself a therapist, showing Hannah how to trust. I was blind to the hurt I caused. I’d always felt the need to take care of the women in my family, my mother, my little sister.

  Uneasy at first, Hannah soon wanted to look for her hut among the picturesque houses clustered around a central well. The houses were rough and unadorned, made of wood, with thatched roofs. Hers was nowhere to be found, though we searched the alleys where chickens and pigs rooted and scratched.

  “These are palaces compared with mine,” she said, as I trailed her with my camera. “Ours had so many holes in the roof we might as well have been out in the rain.” She took a deep breath here, almost as if she were calling up a life force, and then went on. “You can imagine the eight of us jammed together in one bed. Papa and Mama in their bed behind a sheet where we could hear the noises of lovemaking. We listened with acute interest, just the way we watched the farm animals rutting. Dogs with their tongues hanging out spilling moisture, their red penises searching for the bitches’ hole. After seeing two horses mate—the stallion so huge and impressive, I masturbated for the first time. From then on I was intensely interested in my brothers’ morning erections.” She laughed and pressed my hand.

  I loved picturing her as a Rousseauian savage, barefoot, her clothes triple-patched, watching sex without neurosis. I exaggerated her freedom. There were always the straightened clothes, the harsh scrubbing of neck and face, the sharp tongue, the ill-tempered pronouncements of what a girl could and should do. Hannah was willing to have me bring out the earthy rebelliousness of her life in the village, but she always circled back not just to the Nazis but to her mother: sometimes blaming her for waiting so passively to be saved; at other times recalling with dreadful precision every slap and harsh word her mother had ever spoken.

  When we first slept together, she told me afterwards, she was thinking of what her mother would have said. “She would have hated everything I’ve done since she died,” she said with a crooked smile that rose slightly on only one side, giving her a lopsided look, half indulgent, half angry.

  “Aren’t you exaggerating?” I asked her.

  “Look,” she counted on her fingers. “The worst was that I married a goy. Second, that I’ve given up my religion, or at least she’d think I have. I don’t go to temple not even to say kaddish. Then I don’t have children. At least there would have been some hope because they’d be Jewish. And,” she reached her pinky, “she would certainly hate my cats. All eight of them. Animals were for food, not to have as pets. She’d be scandalized that I let them lie in bed with me, and drink a little milk from my saucer while I’m having my
latte. Even the way I spend my time writing. It was enough for her that I learned Hebrew, taught by an ugly old man who switched my legs when I was slow to answer.”

  When Hannah first met her, my mother was at the piano playing Chopin. “What beautiful music,” Hannah said shyly, “and such an elegant woman. I can’t imagine growing up in a place like this. Paintings of ancestors, tapestries, oriental rugs.”

  Our family villa was at the edge of the Borghese Gardens, surrounded by ancient pines. I remember how excited I was to have these two beloved women in one room. My mother was so gracious, going to Hannah and kissing her on both cheeks.

  All my life I’ve been a romantic—at least since the age of three, when I told my mama I was going to marry her when I grew up. The energy for each love glowed inside me like a warm beating heart. But in proportion to the beauty I saw in each beloved woman, my disillusionment when it came was total: sometimes it was something seemingly trivial like a lover’s laugh that suddenly became ribald, turning my beloved from a princess into a whore.

  But there was never anything like that with Hannah. What I fell in love with was partly the image of myself in her mysterious green eyes: savior, caretaker, magician. How could I keep that up without destroying my substance, without being eaten from the inside? A therapist might have said I was caring for her like a mother, but I don’t think that would have helped me keep it up. The weight of it was crushing. Claudia was the way out. Claudia, my dentist’s wife, often helped out as his assistant, though it seemed to me she was as bored and hostile to him as I was. My teeth, though white and even, were soft and riddled with cavities. I could imagine some therapist peering into them looking for my secrets. I often fixed my eyes on her full breasts when she bent close to me to hand her husband some instrument. I convinced myself she was unhappy and fantasized about taking her breasts in my mouth, distracting myself from whatever torture her husband was engaged in.