After Auschwitz: A Love Story

by Brenda Webster

  “Excuse me,” I said with as much dignity as I could, “but I have to…” I pushed my way through the onlookers to my door and unlocked it. All the time I was turning the double bolt she followed behind me, pulling at my jacket, trying to get a response from me. “Remember, I am your landlady as well as your neighbor. This is not a game. I don’t want you to have anything more to do with my son.”

  I managed to pull the door shut after me. I couldn’t make it to the bathroom so I dashed into the terrace and peed in the corner by the drain. As I peed, I could still hear their voices. A new voice was added, and I recognized my Hannah. My god, what if the signora wanted to evict us? She owns half the building. The rest of us only rent. She definitely has the decisive voice around here. After I finished and shook myself off I leaned out the window so I could hear better.

  “No,” I heard the signora say. “No, I meant what I said. I don’t want him having anything more to do with Roberto.”

  “Renzo wasn’t doing anything bad,” Hannah is saying, remembering perhaps how quickly her village neighbors had turned against her. “It must have frightened you dreadfully and I’m really sorry. He’s fond of the boy. Roberto is lonely. He has suffered a terrible blow. It seems like a perfect match. A marriage made in heaven.” I hear Hannah laughing, trying to make light.

  “Nothing happened, thank God,” Roberto’s new mother persists. “But it could have. If Renzo got distracted and one of those motorcycles came speeding around the corner. I just can’t treat it as a lark.” I could see that she wasn’t going to bend.

  “I don’t want to seem cruel,” she went on in a softer voice, “but I shouldn’t have to tell you about Renzo’s lapses of attention. I’ve seen him wandering around like a lost soul, not knowing where he is. What if he had the boy with him? And then there is the alarm. It has gone off three times in the last month because he used the wrong code. The security of the whole building depends on that alarm. People are starting to ignore it,” she proclaimed. “I’m sorry to say that I think Renzo is a danger not just to Roberto but to the other tenants and to himself.” For a moment I recognize the signora with the baby and am confused about which she is: monster or caring parent. Both? It is too complicated for me right now.

  I go into the bathroom to take a shower and calm myself down.

  As soon as I step inside I see that I’m not alone and jump back in alarm. There is a tall slender man with bushy eyebrows staring out at me with green eyes.

  “Who are you?” I lash out at him. “What do you think you’re doing?” It occurs to me that he is an addict stealing our pills. I try to call out but my voice sounds as if it’s coming out of a deep well and Hannah doesn’t hear me. Then I notice that the intruder is wrinkled and stooped. No need to get help, I could probably push him over. “Who are you?” I asked again. He seems about to answer. His lips move but if he says anything, I don’t hear him. I reach out and touch cold glass. The intruder is me.

  Shaken, I retreat to the shower. I want it hard, like a waterfall plummeting down around me, hiding me inside, but as usual it only trickles, an old man’s shower. I know I can’t hide inside it forever, but at least for a few minutes I can stand there, water warm on my shoulders, and think about what I can say to Hannah. She doesn’t come right away, so I get out and dry myself, glancing every few minutes at the horror in the mirror. Finally I hear a light knocking at the door.

  “What’s happening in here,” she asks, cracking the door. “I thought I heard you call. Are you alright?”

  I mumble a yes and she opens the door and comes in.

  “I know you can’t help it,” she says coming close and rubbing my shoulders, “but you can stop trembling. You’re safe now. Better here with me than outside.” She tries a smile. “But we do have to think about our landlady problem. You know she’s a very nervous woman.”

  “I hadn’t really noticed,” I muttered.

  “Remember what a fuss she made about your watering the plants too much? She was sure the water would come through her ceiling and wanted to make us put in a whole drip system. Came over one night when her husband was away and there was a thunderstorm. But even if she weren’t afraid of everything, having a new child arrive from one day to the next without any warning, being responsible for him and a new baby. Oh, what’s the point?” She said suddenly.

  “I’m sorry,” I murmured low. “I should have asked her permission.”

  “She’s our landlady,” Hannah said, and I saw her hand shake. “Her family owns half the building; she could evict us!”

  “I didn’t think of that.” Whether I could have thought of it hung in the air.

  Hannah looked at me hard. “We need to have someone here with you. At least in the mornings when I am working or shopping. I can’t work if I’m worrying about you or about losing the apartment”—she lowers her voice—“about losing my home. You must see that.” She lit a cigarette. “Don’t worry. I’ll find someone suitable but you have to help. You can’t harass them like you did that woman from Guatemala.”

  “I just asked her what she was doing here and told her politely there was nothing I needed.”

  Hannah’s face puckers up as if she were going to cry.

  “You weren’t polite; you yelled at her—‘Why are you here? Who are you? I don’t know you.’ You screamed when she tried to wash your hair and after a week she left.”

  “I don’t want some strange woman picking out my clothes for me, dressing me. It’s humiliating, seeing me naked, can’t you understand?”

  She doesn’t want to answer me. Instead she goes on with her thoughts. “That’s why I’ve been helping you myself, this year and last year too. But after I help you dress in clean clothes and comb your hair just so, the way you like it, then when I go in to work you ask me when I’ll be finished. Isn’t that so? And then you ask me for a coffee and just when I am catching the thread again, another coffee and then the bathroom.”

  Her voice softens.

  “And you say I should spoil you, do you remember? You don’t leave me alone for five minutes, and if I say wait, you don’t care.”

  I hang my head. I do remember, but I pictured myself charming and suave the way I was when Hannah’s French friend was visiting and I spoke French easily, drank wine with them, and joked. Afterwards I heard her friend whisper that I seemed fine, coherent, full of talk as usual.

  “I remember,” I say. “But I don’t think my judgment is impaired. I just wanted to take the boy out for ice cream.”

  “We have to get someone new, at least someone to help get you up in the morning, shower, go for a walk…”

  “I’m not a dog,” I say, getting louder, “needing to be walked.”

  “There’s no choice anymore. We have to have someone, can’t you see? Roberto’s mother said you needed to be somewhere else, somewhere where you’d be cared for. If we don’t get you this kind of help and you’re on your own, something else will happen and she’ll throw us out.”

  ““Why don’t you just put me on an ice floe and let me starve?” I heard myself yelling, and I couldn’t stop. I wanted to shake her. Thank God I didn’t. I just started to cry, my image of myself crumbling. “I’m just so frightened,” I said.

  “I know, I know,” she said, and put her arms around me.

  “Will you send me away?” I asked her.

  I started to cry. I wanted to kneel at her feet, kiss her feet. I slumped to the floor and held on to her legs. She snuffed out her cigarette and pulled me up.

  “No I won’t,” she said. “Never … ever.”

  I looked deep into her eyes and decided, at least for now, to believe her.

  The End

  About the Author

  Brenda Webster was born in New York City, educated at Swarthmore, Barnard, Columbia, and Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D. She is a novelist, freelance writer, playwright, critic and translator who splits her time between Berkeley and Rome. Webster has written two controversial and oft-anthologiz
ed critical studies, Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study (Stanford) and Blake’s Prophetic Psychology (Macmillan). She has translated poetry from the Italian for The Other Voice (Norton) and The Penguin Book of Women Poets. She is co-editor of the journals of the abstract expressionist painter (and Webster’s mother) Ethel Schwabacher, Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher (Indiana 1993). She is the author of four previous novels, Sins of the Mothers (Baskerville 1993), Paradise Farm (SUNY, 1999), The Beheading Game (Wings Press, 2006), which was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, and Vienna Triangle (Wings Press, 2009). Her memoir, The Last Good Freudian (Holmes and Meier, 2000) received considerable critical praise. The Modern Language Association published Webster’s translation of Edith Bruck’s Holocaust novel, Lettera alla Madre, in 2007. Webster’s novel, Vienna Triangle, “navigates between the late Sixties and fin de siecle Vienna in a dramatic exploration of family romances inside and outside the circle that so famously gathered around the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud” (Sandra Gilbert). Her new play, “The Murder Trial of Sigmund Freud,” was inspired by Vienna Triangle, but goes beyond the story of Tausk and Freud to chronicle Freud’s relationships with women patients, disciples and his family. “The Murder Trial of Sigmund Freud” was written in collaboration with Meridee Stein, who conceived the idea of a play and brought to the table many stimulating ideas and twenty years of experience in the theater. Webster is the president of PEN West.

  Wings Press was founded in 1975 by Joanie Whitebird and Joseph F. Lomax, both deceased, as “an informal association of artists and cultural mythologists dedicated to the preservation of the literature of the nation of Texas.” Publisher, editor and designer since 1995, Bryce Milligan is honored to carry on and expand that mission to include the finest in American writing—meaning all of the Americas, without commercial considerations clouding the choice to publish or not to publish.

  Wings Press produces multicultural books, chapbooks, ebooks, CDs, and broadsides that, we hope, enlighten the human spirit and enliven the mind. Everyone ever associated with Wings has been or is a writer, and we believe that writing is a transformational art form capable of changing the world, primarily by allowing us to glimpse something of each other’s souls. Good writing is innovative, insightful, open-minded, and interesting. But most of all it is honest.

  Likewise, Wings Press is committed to treating the planet itself as a partner. Thus the press uses as much recycled material as possible, from the paper on which the books are printed to the boxes in which they are shipped.

  As Robert Dana wrote in Against the Grain, “Small press publishing is personal publishing. In essence, it’s a matter of personal vision, personal taste and courage, and personal friendships.” Welcome to our world.

  On-line catalogue and ordering available at

  www.wingspress.com

  Wings Press titles are distributed

  to the trade by the

  Independent Publishers Group

  www.ipgbook.com

  and in Europe by

  www.gazellebookservices.co.uk

  Also available as an ebook.