After Auschwitz: A Love Story

by Brenda Webster

  But that doesn’t interest me now. Instead, I think of making a long list of all the dishes I cooked for her. Pasta with clams was one of her favorites, but I also made pasta Bolognese and strozzaprete with porcini mushrooms.

  (Hannah was gleeful about the suggestion that priests were being strangled. The pope had been friendly to the Germans; even now the present pope had trouble speaking to officials of the Israeli government.) I roasted baby lamb and potatoes and baked every sort of fish in the oven: rospo, swordfish, sea bass, all roasted with tiny tomatoes. For desert I made crème caramel and hot apple torte

  Another thing that frightened her was the idea she might lose her apartment. The one she had when I met her. She was paranoid about her landlady, whom she felt sure had been a Fascist, because once when Hannah was late with the rent and had gone to hand it to her personally, Hannah had caught sight of the photo on the sideboard of a man in a Fascist uniform. It was all she could do to keep from cursing the woman, telling her how she had suffered from men like her husband and father. Instead she wrote a story. Black words leaking from her pen onto paper.

  Last night there was a thunderstorm. We were lying together in our bed under the eaves when the thunder started crashing right over our heads. The eaves are so close that we have to crawl into bed on our hands and knees. I started worrying about the baby gulls on the roof below our terrace. Was the soft fluff cradling their bodies enough to keep them dry? I knew their parents—mother or father—would spread their wings as far as they could and the chicks would cuddle close. I moved under Hannah’s arm and inhaled the slightly acrid but always pleasing scent, like warm grass mixed with lemon zest.

  Lightning flashed blue outside. Zigzagging across the sky, punctuated by the booming of thunder. Bang bang bang.

  I decided that tomorrow I would throw some bread or meat scraps down to the gulls. Our landlord, Barry, would be furious if he knew. He told our maid, Erminia, that he had poured boiling water on the eggs one year. Our terrace has a rickety iron staircase leading to a viewing platform that offers a 360 degrees view of red-tiled Roman roofs. He told her if they nested up there—they like to be able to see who’s coming—to take the eggs and throw them away. Erminia had taken them and put them on the edge of our fountain. Perhaps enchanted by their color she didn’t throw them out. People have a sentimental view of peasants, Liberals at least, but maybe Erminia had some other motive, something else entirely.

  Erminia did have a charming naïveté sometimes. She told me that her grandfather had fought in World War II (or would it have been her father?) and in the army he had his first sight of black men. It astonished him. Once a black soldier caught him staring and asked him what he was staring at.

  “I was wondering if you were a Christian,” her grandfather answered.

  “By ‘Christian’ he meant a human being like me,” she explained. Erminia didn’t remember what the man had answered.

  In the morning I went out to look at the gulls and found them sleeping in the sun, wedged into hollows made where the tiles joined a small chimney. Their parent stood guard on the chimney top. I went into the fridge and found some leftover beef with fat I could trim. The mother gull was enchanted and doubtless will process it for the chicks.

  I am in a strangely sentimental mood, wanting to see young creatures. There is a mother and baby who often come out on their terrace. They are there now, the baby all dressed up, with tiny socks and a matching hat. The mother is playing with it, tossing it up and making it laugh. She sees me looking and waves.

  “Che bel bambino,” I call to her.

  “It’s a girl,” she says.

  “Someday you must come over and bring her for tea.”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  She reminds me of Claudia. I think I said that Claudia attracted me because of her big breasts, but I should have added that she was nursing a child, that when she leaned near to me I could smell the sweet milk. Later, her little girl—an absolutely beautiful creature named Leila with a cascade of blond curls and big blue eyes—was part, maybe a big part, of my attraction. I liked to watch Claudia mothering and imagine how it would be to be cared for that way. My own mother wasn’t able. A memory bubbles up of the fantasies I sometimes had about running my hands over Leila’s body. It was so perfectly formed, so white it made my mouth water looking at her. I imagined her in the bathtub—something I saw often enough—and me kneeling beside the tub rubbing the soap over her.

  “And always soap between your legs,” I’d imagine myself saying, taking the soap from her and showing her how. “Or you can put the soap on your hand, like this,” and I gently rub right on the rosy lips, holding myself in the other hand, out of sight.

  Poor Nabokov in an early draft of Lolita imagined accustoming Lolita to seeing a man naked with an erection, but in that early draft she ran screaming from the house. Later he imagined her as a sly tease. But even in imagination I censored the idea of letting Leila see me. I couldn’t stand the thought of frightening or repelling her. Of course, I never acted on my fantasies—jerking off fantasies, I called them to myself. I spent a lot of solo time imagining different scenarios and progressions, and sometimes when I was with Hannah, I would think of Leila when we made love.

  None of this is so odd, is it? Everyone has fantasies of some sort. I would hate to think I was a pervert, a dirty old man, though I notice that somehow being old has loosened my inhibitions. I am always patting Hannah’s bottom or thighs, calling her my little one, Piccina, even when company is here. But Hannah is an old woman like me and I’m sure the guests think it is sweet.

  When Hannah takes me to the Villa Borghese Gardens near where my family lived when I was a child, we sit on the steps and I watch the young children with their nurses. The smaller children stay close. On a warm day I can see their round chubby arms and legs as they try out their steps. Their skin is so beautiful—fresh and clear, not yet written on. I drink in their freshness. Without young children there would be only bruised skin, violet and yellow unfolding like flowers on the arms of old men.

  The ponies come by, led by such a man. He isn’t defeated by his age. He smiles and beckons to the children. His little hat sports a red feather—it says, I am not dead yet, not yet. And the bigger children beg for a ride in his painted cart.

  “Thank you for bringing me, love,” I tell Hannah and she smiles at me, pats my hand, sneaks a peak at her watch. I don’t begrudge her. She has things to do—her work, the house—in addition to the burden of caring for me. I consider telling her my fantasies about Leila, to see if I can get her to tell me some of hers and expose the last bits of the inner life we’ve hidden from each other.

  “I’ve been reading some poetry,” I say. “Nothing hard. William Carlos Williams.” Nothing to harden my prick.

  “I’ve heard the name,” she says without enthusiasm.

  “They are very simple,” I tell her, “and you feel good after reading one. It’s like eating a chocolate Baccio. You can savor it and carry it around like a snapshot.” But right this minute I wish I’d brought something erotic—one of the Latin poets, the ones that make your loins tingle in anticipation of a good screw.

  “Sounds nice,” she says but I sense that she is restless, her thoughts elsewhere. “Did I tell you that Marti Restov wants to translate a couple of my poems for a new anthology?”

  “No,” I say, feeling suddenly tired, flaccid. “That’s great.” Hannah writes poetry herself. She has even been translated. She is probably better known than I am. I have a flicker of envy. But it only lasts a minute or two. I envy her much more for her intact brain.

  “I’ve noticed that images—a white gull with pink feet, a red lily—stick better in my mind than facts or names even of people I know quite well.”

  “Why don’t you read me something?” she says with sudden generosity. I flip through the pages of the slim volume I brought with me. “Here,” I say “just a taste:”

  Her body is not so white as
/>
  anemone petals nor so smooth—nor

  so remote a thing. It is a field

  of the wild carrot taking

  the field by force.

  She cocks her head and looks at me. “Anemone?”

  “Five petals, red or purple or white. I love the way he makes it about degrees of whiteness and the personalities of the flowers. You’re my wild carrot.”

  “Not sure if I should be flattered,” she says.

  “You should. You’re no hothouse flower. You are stronger than you think.”

  She wraps her arms around herself and shivers as if to contradict me. I wonder what Hannah’s sexual fantasies are like. I’ve never been rough with her, always treated her gently, trying to erase her memories of the camps, but what if she imagines pain: being tied and tormented, spanked, pinched in sensitive places? I look at her, trying to imagine myself into her head.

  Later, back on our terrace, I sit in one of the intact chairs, the one with the embroidered cushion and look over my notebook. Already I am forgetting what I wrote earlier. Some of it sounds quite good. I’d be interested in it if another old man had written it.

  But suddenly I see I’ve made a terrible error. Here I say—quite clearly in blue ink—that Hannah heard my mother playing Chopin, but Hannah didn’t hear her, didn’t even know her. I was confused. It’s true my mother was elegant and regal. I can still remember her dressed to go out to the symphony in a blue velvet gown, her chestnut hair swept up and tamed, but Hannah didn’t know her.

  If Hannah had known her, would she have liked her? I think so. Funny how their meeting seems so true. Did I say that Hannah saw her dead body and kissed her face? I can’t remember if I said that, but that isn’t true either. I would have liked it certainly, the two women I care most about, together.

  Hannah had insisted on a visit to a neurologist “just to have a baseline.” I hated the idea. It suggested a progressive worsening. Before my follow-up visit I was so afraid of what the doctor would find that I threw up. My vomit was thin and green with yellow specks. An abstract painting that mesmerized me for some minutes before I got off my knees and washed my face.

  It’s not that my doctor is unfriendly or incompetent, but still she makes me feel as if I’ve dropped into a parallel universe, changing from subject to object. She scans my face, looks me over, and asks me how I’m doing. I try to be upbeat. Then she asks Hannah if she has noticed anything new since last time. Hannah tells her about my mistakes with money, my difficulty with simple arithmetic, my confusion about what things cost. My buying the seventeenth century book. I am embarrassed, like a small boy at school trying to sound out words that he doesn’t know.

  “I’ve been tired lately,” I say. “I haven’t been well.”

  The doctor exchanges a look with Hannah. I suddenly can’t remember what kind of a doctor she is. Pediatrician? Geriatrician? Oncologist? I feel more and more anxious and cover it with a smile. She is talking to Hannah about some new medicines that are being tested. I protest that I don’t want any medicine.

  “It might help with forgetfulness,” the doctor says, “brighten up your synapses. It can’t hurt you.” I see Hannah nodding.

  “All right,” I say, “I’ll try it.” The last thing I want is to seem unreasonable.

  The doctor has pretty hands. I can imagine them stroking my face, soothing me the way you would a crying child. I read a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald once about a man, Benjamin Button was his name, who instead of growing older grows younger until he becomes a baby and floats helplessly away on a river to die. Someone made a movie of it starring Brad Pitt. Maybe I could do an Italian version some day.

  Is this what is happening to me? My wish to be surrounded by children might have been a sort of foreknowing. A wish to become a child again, like the luscious putti on the church ceilings with their unashamed penises and gossamer wings—fresh souls. My brief flare-up of sexual energy when I thought about Leila wasn’t a sinking into prurience. It was the life force holding on before it flickers out.

  The doctor isn’t going to stroke my face. Instead she asks me questions. The year, the date, the place where we are now. Then she makes me touch my shoulder with my left hand while moving my right hand towards the window. I have trouble getting it. Clearly the pressure to perform is confusing me.

  “I’m going to give you an address,” she says finally, “and I want you to remember it while we do some other things. All right?”

  I nod.

  “Andrea Monte, Via Governo Vecchio, 85,” the doctor says. I look at Hannah to see if this is a trick of some sort. Hannah gives me a sad little smile because that was one of the streets that she used to get lost on.

  I check my mind to see if I still have the address she gave me and I do. I think of how I’m going to rattle it back at her with gentle reproof for her suspicion that I couldn’t remember a simple name and address. Meanwhile she gives me some other tests, asking me to touch places on my body. To count backwards, spell backwards. “Do I have to? Do that?” I asked her. “I’ve always had trouble with directional things. Are all these tricks really necessary?”

  “You’ve done very well,” she says. “We’re almost at the end.”

  Then she asked me for the name and address she had given me. It seemed to be on the tip of my tongue but I couldn’t capture it even when she gave me hints or multiple choices. She says it’s too early to give a firm diagnosis. The only thing that really seems to bother her is my forgetting the name and address she gave me. I try to recall it now that she’s reminded me what it was and all I remember is that it was the place where my Hannah got lost. On the way home we stop at the farmacìa and order my new medicine.

  I was looking for something on my bookshelf but forgot what I was looking for. Instead a novel falls into my hands. The title is in crimson, the letters drip blood. How odd. I don’t like murder mysteries except Agatha Christie’s, and this author has an unknown name: Ella Erickson. Sounds Swedish. Ah, I see it’s a translation and, looking at the inside flap, I see the book described as the spine-chilling story of a woman and an old man.

  I begin to remember now. They’d been lovers and he’d let a gasoline lamp fall and it killed her baby. I remember thinking it was just an accident: he didn’t mean to do it. But she was determined to avenge her child’s death. When he became infirm and advertised for a home nurse, she took the job and set about to torture him. Ah, yes, he was becoming demented. But still able to understand how much she hates him. One day he tries to escape, tells his visiting daughter that he is being persecuted, that the “nurse” she hired isn’t really a nurse but a woman who wants to destroy him.

  The “nurse” pretends concern that his dementia is worsening.

  “The other day,” she says, “he tried to wheel his chair down to the road, yelling, ‘Help! I’m a prisoner!’”

  She promises to be more vigilant, not to leave him alone for a minute. He sobs in despair. I think at the end she suffocates him with a plastic bag.

  A truly horrible book—though at the time I read it, I didn’t identify with the old man. Now I do and it seems even more horrible. When we’re sick we have to be more trusting—have to believe that the people tending us will measure out the right dose of medicine, give us the proper injections. That’s why we shudder when we read in the newspapers about killer nurses who purposely inject lethal substances in their patients’ veins. What could make a person do that?

  Oh, come on, Renzo, you remember when your mother used to chase you around the house screaming that she wanted to kill you, enraged because you’d told a little lie or forgotten to do your addition homework. Curled up on your bed crying, rubbing your arm where she hit you, didn’t you ever have murderous thoughts? No, maybe you didn’t. You were too young and too vulnerable—probably just longing for her love, trying to think of ways to get it.

  I think what I’m asking myself now is, when I left Hannah for Claudia, did she feel enough rage to want to hurt me? Or did she
suppress it the way I did mine as a child? The way she did when the young Nazi spit on her naked body? She told me she thought of grabbing his pistol and shooting him. But her wish to live was too strong. She just bowed her head with that meek expression she had learned to put on when she was begging the guards for scraps from their pails, a piece of fruit, a peel, a rotten potato.

  Love, hate, vulnerability, dependence. I write the words and make circlets of flowers around them. How hard to chart the mixtures. No recipe for love.

  Sometimes I think I see the curl of her lip, a slight hint of a smile that isn’t all friendly. And who is to blame her?

  After I moved out all those years ago, I tried to make my absence tolerable by seeing Hannah daily and bringing her small presents when I went off on my trips. But actually my daily visits only made things worse, reminding her that I had chosen not to be with her. At one particularly unfortunate lunch—I’d come back from seeing a season’s worth of new work by young German directors—she told me she had just gotten a part in a film. The director wanted her to play a Jewish woman. He thought she’d be perfect.

  Did I have to tell her that the director was a nobody without any talent? I had been lecturing Hannah that she needed to be independent. Why wasn’t I pleased when she made the first small steps? But I wasn’t pleased. Anymore than my mother was pleased when I found a friend who invited me over to play, whose mother caressed my curls and told me what a handsome, good boy I was. That same day, over roast chicken, I criticized Hannah for not really enjoying her liberty.

  “No, I don’t,” she said, “I hate it. It would be different if you hadn’t loved me, though even then I can’t imagine liking to be alone.”

  “You have more friends than I do. Lovers too, if you want to get down to it. It doesn’t seem to stop you. And I’ve never objected. I’m afraid you just want me to feel guilty, to feel that I’ve damaged you beyond repair.”

  “I don’t mean to make you feel bad,” she said. “You haven’t destroyed me—maybe made me lose a few pounds—see, I’m functioning.” She moved her arms up and down like a bird ready to take off. She gave me a lopsided smile, “As for enjoying my liberty, I’m even beginning to like having the bathroom to myself.”