After Auschwitz: A Love Story

by Brenda Webster

  I panicked. What would Hannah do? For a moment it crossed my mind that he was too young to drive, but then I forgot it. If he was calling like this he must have gotten a license since we saw him last. To be honest, I hadn’t paid much attention to him when he came over for tea one day with his mother to visit with Hannah. I tried to keep my attention focused on Guido’s problem. It all hinged on money which is one of the things I find hardest now. Was it twenty-four euros he needed or twenty-four hundred? By now the man who called himself a public defender had gotten on the phone and gone over the whole story. It was the bigger sum—a mistake would have been unfortunate. The point seemed to be that Guido needed it right away or else his failure in some test, a breath test I think, would be on his record forever and ever. Where would I get the money? I was searching for my key with the idea of going to the bank with Hannah’s bank card—she’d taken mine away—and explaining the whole thing and persuading them I needed to use her card, that it was an emergency. I was waiting for the elevator outside our front door when Hannah came back.

  ““What are you doing?” she asked me, then she answered herself. “Were you coming to look for me again? I told you I’d be home in an hour and its only forty-five minutes. Come, let’s go inside and have some tea.”

  I babbled out my story, tripping over my tongue, feeling completely mortified.

  “Oh Bubbi, can’t you see it’s a scam? And what a cruel one.” I hung my head. “Didn’t you remember that he’s only fifteen, that he has no license?”

  “I almost did … but then …” I felt as if I were about to cry. Was this the same man who had directed movies and given lectures to students?

  “Never mind, then.” Hannah said kindly. “It was such an inventive scam that I’m sure a lot of people would have been taken in.”

  “If I were still twenty I would have known. At eighty-eight the mind doesn’t function in the same way.” I waved away my age with an elegant flick of my wrist. I wished she’d stop looking at me so pityingly. We went inside and she made me a cup of chamomile tea.

  “If I were still twenty,” I repeated, “I would have been more alert. It was the word ‘uncle’ that did me in.”

  “Of course it would. Family—what is more important?” she paused and I saw the faraway look she has when she is thinking about her novels and trying out a scene or a bit of dialogue. And it was amazing how inventive this scam was. It was like something that might happen in a novel. Full of intense emotional drama.

  A little later, I was reclining in my chair under a throw when Hannah handed me the paper. “Don’t brood, Renzo. It’s bad for digestion. Nothing happened after all; we’re lucky. But in the future …” I could hear her pausing. She had wanted to urge me to remember something, but she wasn’t sure I could. “I’ll write down some questions you could ask. If anything like this happens again. Above all, don’t lead with information. Let them tell you.” She kissed my head and took the tea things into the kitchen.

  I spread the paper on my lap and studied the photo of a big ship lying on its side. Actually it may have been a picture of something else, but I’m sure it was something that could start a novel. In the case of the ship, the press made it into a theatrical with the cowardly play boy resembling Berlusconi and the upright sailor like our head of state, Monti, who told the fleeing captain to get the hell back on the ship. We love struggles between good and evil. It must be something genetic, taken in somehow with mother’s milk. Look at the Americans now, ankle deep in moral mud with their ridiculous candidates bellowing and roaring their love of Jesus while committing every possible sin. I love the recent story in which the newspapers excuse a former senator’s affair because, after all, he asked his wife for permission to have an open marriage.

  Wait a minute—didn’t I once try to get Hannah to do that with me? Put her on a starvation diet with just enough to keep her alive. Is it possible the Muslims have the right idea? Every wife has to have equal time and attention. I’d like to interview some of those wives! Even young and strong I doubt I could have done it, and I don’t mean just the sex.

  Still, if it were customary to have several wives I could have moved Claudia right in without Hannah’s being able to make much of a fuss. Once in Paris, I was attending a conference on film, memory, and history and went to a panel discussion of Guests of the Sheik by Elizabeth Furnea. At that time I was rather taken with doing a film about harem life. I loved the idea of all those women lounging by baths, like the odalisques in the paintings of Ingres, who was attracted to the sensuality of all that lovely flesh. Furnea found that, contrary to our Western prejudice, many of the women enjoyed their harem life, particularly the opportunity to gossip and go on outings together. Raising their children together apparently relieved much of the isolation of family life in the West. And of course the sheik took care of them when they were sick or grew old.

  It didn’t seem half-bad and was certainly a great source of male fantasy. Imagine choosing a different woman every night. And each of them showing only me—the sheik—their fancy clothes, silk teddies, lacy bras, and gold jewelry hidden under their black abayas. Naturally I didn’t mention my fantasies to the gaggle of feminist scholars who were inveighing against genital mutilation, which of course I opposed as well.

  After the panel I ended up at dinner with four young men from Mali, a country somewhat to the north of Nigeria—who had actually seen harem life close up. They were the most amazing looking people, black as ebony with gleaming white teeth. The oldest was writing about his family’s experience with polygamy. His grandfather, he told me, had 58 wives and 256 grandchildren, his father only four. It was terribly difficult for him to be allowed only one. He felt diminished, limited by European law.

  I asked him how the wives got along. His mother was the youngest, and the elder wives were quite jealous and would play tricks, trying to get her in trouble, but his father was very much in love with her and would always laugh and pull her onto his lap and kiss her. Sometimes if one of the elder wives was particularly angry, he would look serious and promise that he’d punish her later. But he never did.

  If I’d been a woman I would have been fascinated by the young men, their skin that invited touching, like a fine fabric. But not dry, more like a dolphin’s wet darkness. I could imagine them running down to the ocean naked.

  How much bravery is needed to return to a sinking ship in the dark? Primo Levi says it is impossible to judge ahead of time what one is capable of doing in a crisis. I could almost swear that I wouldn’t have gone back. I say almost because I agree for the moment that one can never be sure. I was a coward from childhood. Or at least that’s how I see myself. I remember one incident at Mardi Gras in Venice, I was wearing a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit, my golden ringlets down to my shoulders. The suit was brown velvet with a antique lace collar. My mother thought I was adorable but it served only as a red flag to the local bulls.

  I was set upon and hit, not very hard, by three slightly larger boys. They had socks filled with rice. I was petrified and ran back to our hotel in tears. Much later I’d find my sanctuary in language, knowing things, speaking and understanding many languages. Apparently in the Lager, the Italian prisoners died soon after they arrived, partly because they couldn’t understand German and couldn’t find out the things they needed to know—not facts in the lives of Proust or Tolstoy, but the things that would keep them alive: how to get shoes and illegal food, how to deal with illness.

  Hannah, though she only spoke Romanian and Yiddish, was good at survival, having to practice these tactics in her village. And she had her older sister, Leah, with her, a woman of strong character who maintained her humanity and tried always to shield her, even volunteering to be selected in her place. I couldn’t imagine doing that, though I’d like to believe if Hannah were sick or threatened, I’d put my body between her and a bullet.

  Somehow even with all my freight of eighty-eight years, I wasn’t able to grow my humanity to its fullest. Early o
n I developed a protective shell. I didn’t suffer the horrors of the camps, but certainly my life was full of suffering. I feel embarrassed at still pointing my finger at my mother, making it her fault. Someone once said that a suicide leaves its skeleton in the survivors’ closet. Was I fated to seek out a person who was as damaged as I felt myself, despite all my languages and honors? Primo insists that suffering doesn’t make the prisoners saints as some have called them.

  Critics, when Hannah presents them with a new work, treat it like Holy Scripture—particularly the one in which she tells her mother about her life, knowing her mother will disapprove—but if I were to describe the way my mother ravaged my psyche, I’d be criticized for whining, for cowardice. There seems to be no way out for me.

  Primo Levi himself insists that the camp inmates became more and more like their tormenters the longer they stayed. Isn’t that true in the outside world too? A beaten child beats his wife or children, a drunk spawns an enabler, someone who simpers and colludes with his oppressor. But Primo also says that you can’t judge unless you have been there. To say we are all murderers deep inside—a trope picked up by some artists—is false, a moral disease that serves only to muddy the truth.

  When I met Hannah I felt as if I shared her suffering, taking it on, jettisoning my own past, but I couldn’t keep it up, could I? An uglier motive for my care taking was my envy. I wanted to gain merit as a saint, if not in the camps, here at home.

  Was it Virginia Woolf who said that when you have a toothache the whole world contracts to that point of pain in your mouth? Something like that anyway. And when the on-going blitz set off firecrackers in her brain, she stuffed her pockets full of stones. I picture them as those black smooth ones so friendly to the touch, maybe warmed by the sun along the banks of the river. Was she tempted by the comforting roundness to stay awhile? By that point, she was too afraid of her madness, the voices in her head.

  I see suicides are piling up in my remembrances. Arshile Gorky, Anne Sexton, Gina’s daughter, Virginia Woolf, Primo Levi, and like a Greek chorus after each one, my mother, my mother, my mother. I think I said that if you want to escape being dragged down by the stones of death, you have to find pleasure. The thing is, for the most part their pleasure receptors were high. They didn’t sit around burdened by gloom. Gorky for instance could be transported by the thought of his mother’s apron. My mother was thrown into raptures by the purple radiance of a desert sunset, or even the saturated color of a single flower. I remember as a child asking her to show me what she saw, thinking that I was defective, that I was missing some sense. And it didn’t stop at colors. She also smelled and tasted things more intensely than I did.

  It occurs to me that autistic children are exquisitely aware of certain things. That’s why they fiddle with their fingers or bang their heads, which may hurt but it’s regular and, more important, they can regulate it themselves. Filmmaking was a little like that for me. I could doctor the images the way people do now in Photoshop, adding more yellow, more blues and purples, cutting and cropping, flattering myself that I was seeing more than the ordinary person, inside and out. I specialized in flashbacks. The memories of the characters became mine to manipulate.

  Well, I had my painful tooth extracted, one of my yesterdays. The doctor saved the tooth to show me. There was a hole in the root below the gum line, and the whole inside was eaten out, so brittle there was no way to fill it. It was hollow like the hollow men in Tom Eliot’s great poem, except that there was no straw around to fill it. An anti-Semite, old Tom, and he behaved badly to his wife as well, if you like odd facts. The hollow men make me think of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, setting out so bravely to get his head filled with brains, and of Jack Pumpkinhead, getting a fresh head when the old one wore out.

  I was reading again to my little neighbor Roberto and we talked for a while about there being no death in Oz, though you could be cut into pieces and hidden. Dorothy should always wear the magic belt, he said. Then she’d be safe. I asked him if he’d like to make a magic belt for himself. He said yes, and I told him I had the perfect thing for it. I had a beautiful piece of gold cloth—in fact it was a shower curtain that Hannah hated and that we were going to replace. We took it out on the terrace in the sun, along with a gardener’s sheers and some fabric swatches that we could cut up to make diamonds and some superglue to attach them. He couldn’t quite manage the sheers but he did very well with the glue and we decided that some of the diamonds should be changed to emeralds or sapphires, so he got to color them with indelible magic markers, being very careful not to get any color on his shirt. When we finished I made a clasp out of safety pins and put it on him. He took a deep breath and I felt the tension going out of his body, then he leaned against me and very lightly kissed my shoulder.

  It occurs to me that I haven’t said much about sex. I haven’t admitted for instance that I think of it constantly, am always touching myself though I’m afraid to work at it very hard for fear of a heart attack. I get scared when I feel a throbbing in my temples, as though I am going to rupture something. Some people would certainly say that sex oughtn’t to be a concern for a person of my age.

  “Eighty-eight! My god,” they say, “you should be glad that you’re still alive.”

  They wouldn’t care if I had my balls cut right off. I find myself touching them at times during the day just to reassure myself that they’re still there. My mother was only in her forties when she died, but she was bedridden off and on before that with some kind of a fatigue syndrome; it never was clear whether it was psychological. But it made her think a lot about what she was missing. Drawing was the one thing that seemed to ease her pain. She could draw propped up on her pillows, leaning her pad on her breakfast tray. She had one with folding legs that kept it from pressing on her.

  Much later, I found some of the drawings: big penises spouting spunk. I was shocked. No one, of whatever their age, likes to think of his mother having sex. I wasn’t as prudish as one of my friends who found his mother in bed with a man at the nursing home, but still. The most disturbing of her drawings was one of Christ on the cross with a big erection. Was the absence of sex crucifying him? Remember that D. H. Lawrence novella with Jesus and some pagan priestess? Or was that the Spanish writer? The one who wrote The Stone Raft? I’ve forgotten his name.

  My mother had scrawled some words in the margins: “I want someone, male or female, to come and make love to me.”

  There were other things as well. They made me wonder if Hannah really still wanted it too, aside from hugging me in bed and letting me put my head on her breasts—still nice by the way—white and welcoming with large pink nipples made for suckling. But lately she hasn’t signaled that she wants to go further. That might be my fault, however. I haven’t wanted to confront my diminishing powers, or frighten myself with the pounding in my head.

  It is the waiting that is unbearable, someone wrote recently. This suspension of time, waiting for something to happen and knowing you are unable to struggle against it.

  I am getting too broody. I’ll get Hannah to take me to a big show of Tizianos, mostly from the Prado. I haven’t fully dressed myself for days, just lounging about in my robe and pj’s, but the idea of seeing the Tizianos rouses me and, looking in the mirror after I dress, I rather like the distinguished older man who stares back at me. I slept well last night and the pouches under my eyes are diminished. If I put on a little bit of Hannah’s makeup, they won’t be visible at all—or hardly.

  “Don’t rush down the steps,” Hannah cautions me. “Remember what happened to Lucian on his last visit.”

  I did remember: he almost fell and we had to help him up. “It’s the last time I’m going to risk my neck on these damn stairs,” he muttered under his breath, reverting to the scrappy Brooklyn boy he had been when I met him. “But your terrace is so glorious with everything in bloom.”

  I don’t know if I’ve said that Lucian was a devoted gardener. Maybe that is connected to his
having spent years showing peasant farmers in third world countries how to urge something green from parched earth. Then again, maybe there is no connection. When I used to go with him to his country villa in a little village on a lake near Rome, we would always stop at his favorite horticulturist and pick up pots of something special for his garden. I would help him carry them. It was always a treat to visit. He would throw open the windows one after another and the dazzling blue of the sunlit lake would suffuse the rooms with color. It was the stairs that did him in. The three-story house was built into a hill. He should have had his knees replaced, but he was a stubborn man, Lucian. I am lucky; I still can walk the full flight from the fifth floor up to the sixth. Our attico must be an add on, so the elevator doesn’t go all the way up.

  With my folding stool—Hannah carried it for me though I could do it perfectly well myself—I sat and drank in, devoured really, all that beautiful creamy flesh in the Tizianos. My favorite is the Danaë, with her lying back on her pillows, swooning, one hand limp between her legs while Jupiter rains down gold coins. His head, visible in the cloud, suggests that the painting is the dream of an old man. Danaë is ravished by his imagination. When we got home, I took Hannah to bed, still thinking of Danaë. Do you know that Stendhal recorded all the times he had sex and the number of his orgasms? Well, one for me then. Slower, less impetuous, but golden all the way through.