After Auschwitz: A Love Story

by Brenda Webster

  Another visit to the neurologist. Things seem to be more or less the same. I couldn’t remember the name and address she gave me and had trouble spelling backwards—both things I had trouble with last time. I’m on a plateau, she says. No telling how long it will last. Hannah told her about my falling for the scam and she added a caveat: maybe my judgment is slightly impaired. But I think a lot of people could have fallen for it.

  On the way back in the taxi Hannah kept looking at her watch. It turned out she was supposed to meet Carlo, a young director, about doing a film of her latest book. She had mentioned this before, but I have my doubts that it will happen since he sounds scattered and has been going to and fro—first trouble with money, then trouble with his wife.

  “You’re just jealous,” Hannah said. “And I’m not going to humor you by telling you there is nothing in it. He’s a handsome man, yes? I like him. You don’t have a leg to stand on, you know, even if I were to fall in love with him, especially if I fell in love with him.” Then she laughed in an unpleasant way. “But I’m not in love with him now, so you don’t need to put on your doleful face. Stop!” she called out and the taxi driver screeched to a halt just beyond our corner. They always seem to overshoot.

  I got out. I would have liked to be the one to pay the driver but lately Hannah has been doing all the money things, just because I made a mistake and gave a waiter fifty euros for a tip, by mistake instead of five. I felt humiliated as she got out and walked around to his front window and paid, then took my arm and walked me to the door. I stepped ahead and fumbled with my keys, suddenly not sure which was to the downstairs door.

  “The big one,” Hannah said impatiently. “You see how much bigger that one is.” And she reached out, took the key, and opened the door.

  Upstairs I didn’t even want to try to disarm the alarm. I couldn’t remember the code. I had trouble with that even before I started having memory problems. I never was at home with numbers. I had set it with a historical date, thinking I’d be sure to remember that. Was it 1492, the date Colombus set sail, or…? But before I could try it, Hannah brushed by me and punched in the numbers.

  “I knew that,” I said.

  If you made a mistake—and I had made several—the alarm set off the most horrible wail. Our neighbors would open their doors and peek out, afraid that someone had broken in. It happens every few years that someone comes down from the roof and breaks one of the terrace doors. Or picks the lock which isn’t very strong. I had gotten in the habit of hiding my valuables. I got so good at it, and we had so many nooks and crevices, that Hannah used to say if something happened to me, she’d never find them.

  “You’re tired,” she said now as she opened the shutters and the sliding door and brought the back pillow for my terrace chair. She wanted me to amuse myself watching the gulls while she was out drowning in the midnight blue eyes of this punk producer.

  I don’t think of myself as a jealous man, except maybe of my brother. But this Don Carlo strikes me as a con artist or maybe just an enthusiast. He bought her book, loved it, and now this business about a film, Moon Dreams he wants to call it. I try to question her but she shrugs me off.

  “You just like control,” she says, “but this has nothing to do with you now.”

  I can’t help reminding her of the films I made with her about her village, how I helped her, how without me she wouldn’t be where she was now.

  “I don’t want to hear that ,” she said. “Then was then, now is now. But if it will make you feel any better, I think he’s gay.”

  She has a lot of gay friends, though being gay didn’t stop one of them from sleeping with her when I was off with Claudia. I began to feel that she was taunting me, turning the tables now that I was weak. Standing there, I was about to cry from frustration when she turned affectionate, put her arms around me, and hugged me.

  “It’s you I love,” she said, fluffing my chair pillow and pushing me down. “I can’t help it. You are an irresistible man, you know that? Of course you do.” She opened the big umbrella over the deck and stuck in the pin. “You were so sure of me you thought you could get me to accept that ridiculous Claudia as your second wife, the sort of woman we always made fun of, with only big tits on her résumé. Don Carlo at least has brains.”

  When she goes, I sit in my canvas chair and brood. Maybe the worst thing is that this Don Carlo is also in the movie business. It isn’t exactly true that I’m not jealous. Certainly I was jealous as a child of my father—following the old Freudian script. I did everything I could to satisfy her and make her happy but it clearly wasn’t enough. I could clean my room until it sparkled and pick up my wash, even though I knew the servants were supposed to do those things and could do them better. But she did let me brush her hair, and I was the only one who had that privilege.

  Her hair was honey colored and thick like amber-colored silk spread over her shoulders. Afterwards she let me smooth a cream onto her shoulders and neck to keep them fresh and sometimes if she felt lonely she would invite me to lie with her in bed. That was what I imagined heaven to be—lying forever next to my mother, my face buried in her hair. Sometimes I got an erection and she would pretend to be shocked and banish me and “that nasty thing,” at other times she would let me lie behind her and would move her back and buttocks against me while pretending to sleep.

  In liceo I always had crushes on beautiful aloof girls and set myself to wooing them, but I don’t think I was jealous until now. I hate it that Hannah isn’t content with me and my aging body. To torment myself I make a list of things she complains about. I leave my shoes in the doorway and she trips over them in the night. I don’t turn the knob fully and the door clicks open in the night if there is a wind. I leave the cabinets open. I was distracted and let a pot burn smoky black. When I make myself an egg—something she used to do for me—I don’t rinse the pan out and egg sticks to it like glue. I won’t get new heels on my shoes; I complain that they don’t fit. I fart in bed a bugle call to the apocalypse. The list keeps growing; I cry thinking of it. All these little things add up. I’m sorry, I say, so sorry. I know how hard it must be for you.

  Some hopeful news about Alzheimer’s in the paper today. I was at Alfredo’s lingering over my cappuccino and cornetto while Hannah went to Campo di Fiori to search for a melon she wanted to have for lunch with prosciutto. The melons in our local vegetable store weren’t fully ripe, and we were having company: Arianne and her husband. We have been seeing relatively few people.

  I used to do most of the fancy cooking. I made a fantastic spaghetti with clams, and my fried zucchini blossoms were famous. But recently I seemed to have lost my touch, cooking things too little or too much. It seemed easier to let Hannah do it—otherwise she just stood around carping. And she didn’t laugh when I called her my cuòco del diètro, roughly, “my backside chef.”

  Anyway, apparently diseased brain cells can spread to their neighbors. I think they call it the Tao, or is that something in Buddhism? Maybe it’s Tau—a protein of some sort. I just read about it a minute ago and already I’ve forgotten. But the point was that they can now concentrate on blocking the Tao/Tau, or whatever it is, and they might have a cure by 2025. Since it’s too late for me in any case, I shut the paper and concentrate on the sensation of the cappuccino’s warm foam against my lips. It gives me a pang to see the heart drawn in the foam. Alfredo’s widow is keeping up his custom, but without the maestro of Via Giulia greeting us by belting out a passionate passage from Tosca or Aida while he sets down the tray, it’s not the same. He has been the guardian, the soul of this great street for thirty years. He knew the history of all the important buildings and the families that lived in them.

  A week before he died he sat at our table with us and proudly showed us an article about him and the existentialist poet Ingeborg Bachmann. She lived in the old Sacchetti Palace down by the river, and one night she went to sleep without putting out her cigarette. Alfredo went to deliver her espresso one morning
and found her dead. At least that was the story. I mentally add her to my somewhat obsessive list of suicides, along with Tosca. I don’t know why I haven’t thought of Tosca before. The Castel Sant’ Angelo where she threw herself off the walls is clearly visible from our terrace.

  I hum a little from Mario’s last aria and nod to a well-dressed stranger who seems to want to share my table. His name is Emilio Sacchetti and he wants to talk. This is unusual for strangers in Rome unless they are adolescents on the make. He starts by complaining that he is only a duke, he’d rather be a prince. In any case there are too many people in Rome who have his rank, mostly Germans. It infuriates him. His grandparents are buried in the church across from us and his father lives in the Sacchetti Palace. He should be the heir but his father has married a young and beautiful woman who has usurped his place. I cluck sympathetically. People think Rome is so romantic, but history can weigh heavy. It isn’t all coronets and ermine. People’s ideas of what is important changes—even the church has shrunk in importance just in my lifetime.

  Hannah hates pretentious people. When she comes back with her melons she exchanges a few words with the duke and immediately dislikes him. He looks like a complainer, she says later. In Auschwitz the privileged were often the first to die. Unable to do anything for themselves, they would fall into a state of shock when they were treated just like everybody else. She takes my arm and we saunter back across the Corso to straighten up a bit before our friends arrive.

  I see why Hannah wanted to have Stefano over. Arianne had been complaining that he was depressed. Not even their daughter’s new baby girl could cheer him up. Oh I know, I know; I think I called him something else when I mentioned him before. If I did that’s not because of my memory issues. It’s because Hannah and Arianne are friends. Arianne confides in Hannah. She would feel dreadful to see his name in print. I planned to erase it later, though of course I might forget.

  Luckily it was a beautiful day and we sat outside under a Titian blue sky filled with puffy white clouds while Arianne complained about Israel’s settlement policy and threats to bomb Iran. She comes from a famous Jewish merchant family and gets as angry at Israel as if it were her own wayward child.

  “It’s crazy. They’re suicidal,” she said. Hannah agrees with her.

  Stefano just shook his head. Arianne kept trying to interest him in the discussion but the medicine he is taking doesn’t really seem to help him. It just makes him sleepy. I feel a sudden chill even though the day is warm. Am I looking at myself a year from now?

  I’ve been reading more about Alzheimer’s. They have been sending electrical stimulation to the portion of the brain where Auschwitz—what an odd mistake—I mean Alzheimer’s, starts. The electric charge not only stops the disease from progressing—when given to mice, of course, creatures quite different from men—the stimulation also brings back the lost memory from 60 to 90 percent. The memory that improves is called spatial memory. The researchers tested it by a game of taxi where the goal is to drop off passengers at selected spots in an unfamiliar city.

  Something snaps into place in my head. I have a faulty navigational system. It’s not disease. I’ve had it as long as I can remember. Here in Rome, no matter how often I walk Governo Vecchio to Piazza Navona, I can’t remember where a certain shop is. Or the gym where I used to work out three times a week. In the same way, across the Corso I don’t remember the stores on Banchi Vecchi, in particular the one where I have many times bought dresses for Hannah.

  Stefano is half asleep, his eyelids heavy. He opens his eyes and looks at me. I try to think of something amusing and tell him the joke about three Texans in a bar boasting about how much property they own. The first two talk about their tens of thousands of acres, King Ranch, Hot Springs Valley. The smallest man says he owns ten acres and they look at him amazed at his poverty. “What do you call it?” they ask. “Oh,” he says, “Downtown Dallas.” Stefano gives me the hint of a smile. He looks defeated. It’s too hard to struggle. There was a group in the death camps that had given up hope of returning to normal life, of returning to any life. They were called “Mussulmen” and strenuously avoided. I understood. Without thinking, I moved my chair subtly away from him, though he’s not in such dire straits and even if he were…. Under the table Arianne reached out and took Stefano’s hand, squeezing it. Helping him hang on to life.

  I was depressed after their visit and decided to get a massage to waken my flesh. I have a masseuse, a sweet young woman. She came around four o’clock with her lotions and her folding massage table. I lie with my privates covered by a towel and watch her jiggling breasts. They’re not so big but the curve of them as they rise into her blouse is delicious, enchanting. As she bends over me, her hands lightly oiled, and starts to work on my shoulders and arms, I have to force myself to look away, picking a spot next to her left ear so as not to be rude.

  “My shoulder is still causing me trouble,” I tell her, “and my hip too. The right one. Probably from sitting at the computer.”

  She says we’ll get to that later. She starts telling me about her trouble with a teenage daughter. I barely listen, responding with the obligatory “Uh huh” or “that must be hard.” Meanwhile something else is getting hard, luckily hidden beneath the towel. I’d like to boast about it to her—at my age and all that. It feels so spritely. But I imagine she wouldn’t be pleased. Once in Florence I was teaching a film course at the university, which incidentally has a fine psychology department. While I was in residence I went to a lecture on perfezionismo by a famous doctor—I’m not sure why, maybe I just loved the word—the desire to make perfect, to be perfect. Don’t I have a bit of that, or was it just the desire to be right, which is quite a different thing?

  Anyway, this gorgeous girl always sat in the front row mesmerizing the professor as her breasts rose and fell with her breath and she looked at him doe-eyed, drinking in the wisdom flowing from his parted lips. On the last day of the semester she came to his office and thanked him for being the first male in her life who seemed to be able to see beyond her tits.

  My masseuse asks me to turn over, which I do briskly, taking care to hide my erection. She starts to knead my buttocks strongly. I point to the spot that hurts and she tells me that two muscles meet there. She presses so hard it hurts. I am conscious of how close she is to my anus. I imagine her reaching between my extended legs and massaging my balls very gently. Despite my excitement my erection is faltering. Fantasy can take me only so far.

  Before I know it she is finishing up. I make another appointment for next week.

  There was an article in the paper today about the Holocaust memorial in Israel, Yad Vashem. It has grown into a huge museum with audio tours in fifty languages. There is an accompanying photo of a group of serious-faced Asians looking at an exhibit. I wonder if they were comparing what they saw in it with what their grandparents may have suffered. At Hiroshima.

  It’s odd, having lived with Hannah all these years, that I never saw Lanzmann’s famous film, Shoah. But maybe I didn’t need to. I lived with it. The last survivors, like Hannah, are dying out. What will happen then? What will happen in this new century? Will the memories get fainter and fainter as they pass to the children of survivors and then to the grandchildren?

  We know several children of survivors, some very neurotic, others less so. Most are struggling with anxiety and fear. Some project it forward onto their children. I look at the photo of the Asian women. One of them said that she was afraid she would be depressed but that she had found the audio commentary unexpectedly inspiring because of the way the prisoners helped each other. Primo Levi wouldn’t have agreed. He said the prisoners had one aim—to preserve and consolidate their privileges vis-a-vis the weaker ones. Isn’t this what is happening today in our country? The rich grind down the poor who are in turn indignant that the poorest among them may get something they don’t deserve. Hypocrisy flourishes along with religion.

  When my eyes tire, I listen to Slumdog Mil
lionaire, the novel that was made into a film that won an Oscar. The author compares the slum dwellers, the garbage collectors, to the prisoners of the camps—they too try continually to consolidate their position vis-a-vis the poorest of the poor. She follows the life of one of them who arouses envy in his fellows, who in revenge accuse him of a crime he didn’t commit, ruining him, perhaps sending him to jail for life.

  Primo, though I didn’t know him well, was an admirable man. He pointedly tells how when he found a pipe leaking water, he shared it with his best friend but not with a third because the water might not have been enough for three. The story is a beautiful mix of generosity and calculation of what was necessary to survive. Still, Primo, seeing his dehydrated third friend feverish, dragging himself along with caked dried lips, felt ashamed and questioned the morality of what he’d done. Eventually his friend discovered traces of water on the pipe. Afterward when they had both survived, their friendship was never the same. My own feeling is that for each who shared a last piece of bread, there were many who refused to share, even if they themselves had enough. Human nature may be worse than we think.

  I am depressed. If I weren’t, I’d remember that there are plenty of examples in Primo’s books of people who helped him at considerable risk, like the German who left him extra food every day at the fence where they were working. Or the illiterate man—I can’t remember if he was a guard or a prisoner—who copied out Primo’s letter to his mother and sent it. Hannah—saying I tend to remember the bad things and forget the good—would remind me of the guard in Auschwitz who let her lick his plate, always leaving some small scrap. She wasn’t formally religious but for her, he was God!

  Thinking about human nature, I am reminded of a rather sick game called Who Will Hide Me?” I don’t remember exactly how it was played, but the question was which of a player’s friends would betray him and which would hide him. I wondered what I would do. I was fairly sure I wouldn’t inform on anyone, but to risk my neck to hide someone was another story. Right away I hear myself protesting that there is no hiding place either here or in Todi. The outbuildings have no cellars or attics. Then too there is my age—though you would think that being nearly finished would make me more willing to help. It embarrasses me that despite my years of conscious effort, I still often feel like a victim.