After Auschwitz: A Love Story

by Brenda Webster

  “I don’t have any students anymore.”

  “I know, I know, I was just joking but she certainly acts like one. You know who I mean—Ernesto’s young wife, Elena. She has a project to do a video interview.”

  “Oh yes,” I say but really I don’t remember saying the young wife could come.

  “On aging,” Hannah adds kindly. “You should change your shirt. Wear the blue pinstripe. It brings out the color of your eyes.” She goes to the closet and brings me the shirt and a fresh pair of khakis. Then leaves me to change. As though on cue, the doorbell rings just as I am zipping my pants.

  “I’ll get it,” Hannah calls. You go into the salòtto.”

  I wish she wouldn’t tell me everything. I can still decide the best spot to be interviewed. I’m not that far gone. Not a child either. But she gets pleasure out of always being the one who knows.

  It turns out that the interview is to be about what is beautiful in aging. How did I ever agree to this? Probably just because I like looking at a pretty woman, especially when she is looking back at me.

  Elena is wearing a pink shirt that clings to her breasts. They are not big but sweetly shaped. I sigh and take up the paper she gives me. Instead of questions, there is just a repeated phrase: aging is beautiful because …

  “Age isn’t beautiful, it’s horrendous,” I say.

  “Please,” she pleads, looking at me with her big eyes. Her legs are as lovely as her breasts. Tanned, shapely.

  “Age is beautiful,” I go on, pleased with the idea of twisting the phrase to mean its opposite, “because you look at a girl and she doesn’t see you.

  “Age is beautiful because you don’t remember the words of a song.

  “Age is beautiful because you can’t tie your shoes.

  “Age is beautiful because you fall and break a leg. Here I look at her and smile. My smile is still good, I think. It underlines the wry humor in my responses.

  “Age is beautiful because you talk and are not understood.

  “Age is beautiful because you fix a telephone and it doesn’t ring.” Just as I say that the phone does ring and the young wife laughs. I wish I could think of a project that would have her visiting more often. It is Lucian calling me. I tell him to call back and look back at the paper.

  “Age is beautiful because you piss your pants.” No. That was too much. Over the line. She grimaces, no longer amused.

  “Basta,” I say. “Enough. Let’s have some tea.” Hannah, acting the part of secretary, had brought in the teapot. Reaching for it, I drop my cane. The young wife lunges towards it obviously afraid I’ll crash, but I beat her to it.

  “Don’t worry, my dear. I’ve got it,” I say, retrieving it awkwardly.

  My head feels heavy, as though it is determined to pull me down, while my thighs are signaling distress at having to hold me back. Poor me. Trying to ignore my pains, I suggest to the young wife that she add some photos of me as a young man. I tell her where to look for the photo album on the high shelf near the door. I’ve shown enough bravado for one day. She mounts the little step-stool gracefully and pulls it down. The photos are black and white, slipped into black corners. I motion to her to sit beside me on the white couch and together we turn the pages.

  “You were so handsome,” she says.

  “Were?” I tease, and she blushes. God, I was a lion … baring my teeth in a seductive smile. Thick dark hair. Sex seemed to radiate from my skin. She feels it too and my transformation bewilders her. I am like a desiccated insect, its color faded. Now it is all mental. Games for a failing man. Loose on the page is a recent photo that has slipped its moorings. I can see exactly how the bottom of my face has sunk and become gaunt, bones jutting out where there used to be plump glossy skin. I sigh.

  “I’ve tired you,” she says guiltily, putting her papers together.

  After Hannah shows her out, I start thinking of couples I know where one is old and the other young, like Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren. Power and Beauty living together and I no longer have either. She stayed with him her whole life and was with him when he died. Thinking about death depresses me and I go back to bed and sit there reading a magazine. Articles with pictures are easier for me when I feel this way. I pause at a picture of a beautiful little girl of around five, with cascades of ringlets. The caption is, “Was she killed by her mother?” How could anyone hurt this angelic being? Apparently, the mother’s boyfriend didn’t want her around. He felt she interfered with his plans and wishes. I always used to say that some people oughtn’t to have children.

  It’s a cliché that having children is a blessing. Often when a couple is on the verge of separating, they’ll have one “to bring them close again.” But actually it is a huge strain, like driving an eighteen-wheeler over a bridge that hasn’t been upgraded in years.

  I never felt up to it. Playing with my nephews for a couple of hours was delightful but really all I could manage. I’m not boasting. It makes me sad that I felt so incapable.

  After the war many of my friends went into analysis. It was a fad among intellectuals. Both Gabriella and Lucian were analyzed. They ended up getting married. Gabriella’s shrink pronounced after meeting Lucian that he was the best of her suitors. I fantasized that it could help me find the perfect mate. Instead, my analyst seemed to be reading from a script, speaking with reverence of the Oedipus complex as the key that unlocked every neurosis including the one that stood in the way of my progress.

  It’s not that my relationship with my mother couldn’t bear looking into—I was a manipulative, histrionic child and from early on I could wheedle almost anything out of her. It was the analyst’s attitude that upset me. So knowing, so superior, as though he were a god, not a human being with ordinary flaws. Belief in Freud was at its peak. And if I ever objected to one of his interpretations, he would insist I was resisting.

  “Don’t you see zat?” He spoke Italian with a strong German accent, particularly clear on his consonants. “This it is part of ze transference onto me of feelings that you had towards your vather?”

  I should have left. The truth is I had no transference to my analyst, not even a liking for him. If I’d liked him I might have accepted more of his interpretation. As it was, my image of myself suffered and I came away with a negative view of myself.

  The analyst perceived right away that under my charm and warmth I was a somewhat selfish narcissist. I erase the word narcissist and leave the qualified somewhat selfish-Narcissist seems too harsh. His judgment of me still hurts. True, I didn’t want a child to take a woman’s attention away from me. But thousands of men probably feel the same way.

  And by the time I found Hannah, wasn’t she herself my mother-child in one? She, too, wanted total possession. She couldn’t share me anymore than I could have shared her. She was damaged more grievously than most, a child who had suffered the unspeakable cruelty of the camps. But that only made it more challenging to save and nurture her. Every time I thought of something new to bring her, I felt as excited as I did when I was shooting a film or writing a poem and something snapped into place. And I loved the image of myself I saw in her eyes: liberator, magician of the possible.

  When I met Hannah in her early twenties she had a rudimentary knowledge of Italian, spoke Romanian and Yiddish, and only knew enough Hebrew to pray. How it excited me in those early days and years to introduce her to art and the books I loved. At first she was hesitant. Her mother had rebuked her innumerable times for sitting in the house reading poetry instead of praying. She would tear the book from Hannah’s hand. Angry at what she called her fantasies. Without poetry life would be insupportable, Hannah said, her head on my shoulder.

  “Why didn’t Mamma know that?”

  She had forgotten all she knew in Auschwitz, even the songs. I felt I was participating in a rebirth.

  I had no doubt about what I wanted to offer her first. I went right to Dante. I’d always felt that the fifth Canto of the Inferno was, though spiritualized, extremely erot
ic. I pictured reading it and then tumbling into bed. I drew her over to the couch and opened my book with its sensuous red leather cover. We sat shoulder to shoulder reading the wonderful stanza where the poet summons the lovers Paolo and Francesca to tell how they were undone by love. Their punishment of course is to never be separated, blown like morning doves by the wind. Francesca explains to Dante that when she and Paolo read about how the great lover Sir Lancelot kissed his beloved’s longed-for smile, Paolo, Francesca’s own love, lost restraint and “kissed me on the mouth, all trembling:”

  Quando leggemo il disiato riso

  Esser baciato da cotanto amante

  Questi, che mai da me sia deviso

  La bocca mi bacio, tutto tremante.

  I wanted to say something about poetry and love. I caressed her shoulder, kneaded it with my palm, waiting for her to melt into me as she had so many times before. But unexpectedly she burst into tears. Later I realized that it was the words che mai di mi sia deviso—“who will never be parted from me”—that reduced her to tears. They moved her so much because she thought of us that way too. As eternally loving, never abandoned or abandoning.

  Love was the only religion Hannah had held on to. If I die first, I have no doubt that she’ll dress in black like the Sicilian women, mourning me for the rest of her life. I’m ashamed to admit that it gives me a moment’s pleasure to think of extending my power over her, but then I feel a frisson of fear and my hands go cold. Too much, too much wild intensity. In the past it became frightening when I had to leave for any reason, to work on a film or go to a conference or read. Then she would accuse me of wanting to get away from her story.

  Once I went out to meet Monica Vitti for dinner to talk about a film we were planning to do together. It was a balmy summer night and we were in Piazza Navona talking after dinner and having a cigarette. Because of the music—a jazz group was improvising and the fountains plashing—it was hard to hear. I was leaning forward, trying to tell Monica something, speaking directly into her ear, when I suddenly caught a glimpse of Hannah standing in the shadows craning her neck, trying to see more plainly. Her fists were clenched, and I thought for a moment she planned to attack.

  She told me later that she felt betrayed by Monica, who was her friend as well. That she had in fact wanted to kill her, calling her every possible name: whore, piece of shit. But what enraged her most was that I was content and self-contained existing without her. It was right after that incident that I decided to take her back to her village and do a film about it and her. I also doubled my attentiveness, if such a thing were possible.

  There was a story in the Herald Tribune—which I still read occasionally to have something to talk about with our American friends—about a woman Marine who discovered that her boyfriend had been cheating on her. Powered by rage and humiliation, she drove through the night in diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop on the way. When the police pulled her over for speeding, she had rope and pepper spray, a BB gun, a two-pound drilling hammer, and pictures of bound women, making it clear she meant to kidnap and hurt her rival. How can reason even begin to understand such things? For that moment of vengeance she lost her whole life’s work and her honor.

  I wake up worried about this supposed memoir I am writing. I remember from before how things have to have a beginning, a middle and an end, but it doesn’t mean the same thing to me now. Better T. S. Eliot’s “In my end is my beginning.” Would he have been willing to say that if he had been an atheist? Perhaps imagining going back into soft earth and emerging as a colorful plant. Wasn’t there a legend about a woman who put her beloved’s head in a pot after he’d betrayed her and she’d beheaded him, and in the spring roses grew there red as blood?

  One thing is sure: everything circles back to Hannah. I started with her and I’ll finish with her. Maybe a double suicide of the sort the Japanese love, the couple dressed up in wedding kimonos launched together hand in hand off a cliff, their kimonos, exquisitely painted with spring flowers, billowing so they look like giant birds in the warm air. But my liking for that is purely aesthetic. I imagine one of us will die of a weak heart and the other will climb onto the bed and take the cooling body into her arms.

  I remind myself that death isn’t pretty. If I had ever been tempted to see it that way, Hannah would have cured me. For years she had the most terrible nightmares about the death camps. Her most persistent one was of Mengele coming into her barracks to select the people to gas or to be experimented on, fed poisons, or submerged in freezing water and then revived. She must have been a beautiful child, but with her face filthy, standing in her ragged camp uniform, she learned to disappear.

  “It was so important not to be seen, Renzo,” she told me, “My life depended on it.”

  Even then she had a ferocious will to live. She stood looking down, her beautiful eyes hidden by dirty blond hair. Sometimes she would even rub dirt through her hair and over her skin—anything to dull the shine of her. When all her efforts to fade into the background didn’t work and she was selected, she ran away and hid with her sister. But in her nightmares the barracks capo grabs her by her dirty neck and hands her over to Mengele.

  There was a rumor among the women in her barracks that Mengele’s latest project was training dogs to rape young girls. Hannah wakes screaming from a horrible dream where they are coming with the dogs to get her. Or she dreams of a friend running against the electric fence, determined to die, and she is unable to help her. The girl had given Hannah a precious gift, a wooden spoon, after hers had been stolen. Such unselfishness was rare in the camps. But it kept them from feeling like animals.

  When such things have happened in real time, it is hard to “recover.” Veterans of our misguided wars remind us of that, should we be tempted to forget. Hannah still jumped at sudden noises, loud sounds. But just as my memories are all jumbled up, what was confused in her was the line between nightmare and our waking life. To know what was real. Could the reality that had been so painful coexist with gentleness and warm baths, scrambled eggs and kisses?

  Even after years of being here in the same house, Hannah would get lost when she went out for a walk. Our palazzo is on Vittorio Emanuele. In back, after a short section on Santo Spirito, is Via dei Banchi Nuovi, which goes into Via del Governo Vecchio then pauses at Pasquino’s statue—where Gina used to post her angry rhymes about the whorishness of Rome and Berlusconi. The statue makes its square eminently recognizable. A few blocks further on is Piazza Navona, one of Rome’s most famous piazzas. How is it possible to get lost there? But she does. Time after time she confuses the path there with the streets on the other side of Corso Emanuele.

  There the landmark is a newspaper kiosk that you can see as soon as you open our front door. From the kiosk, if you take Banchi Vecchi to Via di Pellegrino you will end up at Campo dei Fiori and the market. She loves our Roman vegetables and fruits, especially in the summer, and must have gone to the market hundreds of times, but if she wakes up tired or is distracted by thinking of her writing, for a moment she will confuse Banchi Nuovi and Governo Vecchio with Banchi Vecchi on the other side. I have given her maps with everything marked in red and the different routes: the one to her favorite shop, the one to our friend Arianna’s house, the Campo, and for that day or week she’ll be all right but then she misplaces my map and forgets again which route is which. After years of her doing this, it began to annoy me.

  “Isn’t it time to let this go? To recognize how strong you are now? You’re not the little girl in the camps anymore.”

  “Stop stop,” she said putting her hands over her ears. Later she tried to explain. “Please believe me. I don’t like being lost. It’s just that the streets become unrecognizable. I try and remember but I can’t. Oh, it’s hopeless, you can’t understand.”

  The irony, my love, is that now I do understand. I went out the other day to pick up some cornetti at the café on Via Giulia where we have always gone for our espressos, sitting side by side reading the Corrie
re della Sera. I took a little walk, enjoying the smell of fresh baked bread and the sight of vans unloading produce: red and green tomatoes, eggplants in their glistening purple skins, and slender green zucchini with the blossoms still intact. Then I got the idea of shopping for a birthday present for Hannah.

  I crossed back over the Corso and started looking in the windows of the antique shops lining the street for a pretty pillbox to give her. I thought I would write “ti amo sempre” on a slip of paper and put it inside. A tower clock chimed ten. Startled, I checked my watch and, seeing that it was really getting late, turned to go home. But suddenly I’d forgotten the way. I had a memory of crossing the Corso when I left our front door but somehow that wasn’t right anymore. Nothing was familiar. All the small streets seemed possible. After a few minutes of standing in one place, wondering if I should beg someone to help me, I suddenly remembered the magazine kiosk on the corner where I always crossed over the Corso in the mornings to pick up my paper before going on to the café for my cappuccino.

  I didn’t tell Hannah because I knew her fear for me would make her scold me. She would have made me take a map, and sketched out important landmarks. I went from near tears to laughter thinking about it—a case of the blind leading the blind. But I am touched, too, at the thought that she would try and do something so difficult for her—out of love. I determined to mark the maps myself while I still could.

  When we’re young we tend to think of memory as something belonging to us. There are good memories and bad ones, but aside from forgetting names occasionally, it is hard to imagine what ceasing to rely on your memory means. My mind still functions enough for me to be frightened and feel diminished. Someday, I hope not too soon, I’ll cease to be alarmed; I’ll slide out from under the wearisome tasks of everyday life and my poor Hannah will have to take them up.

  But I’m still worrying about my failure to organize my memories into some form. At least I should put my early years with Hannah first, then Claudia, finally me, old and aging.