“What do you do when that happens?”
She shrugged. “I get on the floor with Freitag and brush his coat. Or I take a walk or ride the bike. Or I have a glass of wine and put on a CD. Classical guitar works particularly well for me, I don’t know why. And the feeling passes.”
“And then you go right back to where you were?”
“Of course. Just as you go right back to your patients when you reach the end of your rope.”
Gottlieb took a step towards the bookcase and picked up a thin paperback, Elie Wiesel’s Night. “This is the most powerful book I’ve ever read about the Holocaust. The way he writes about the night he arrived at Auschwitz. That first night.”
He thumbed through a few pages in search of the exact quote. Cassandra beat him to the punch, reciting from memory, her eyes closed. ‘“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.’”
⸎
In a flash she reverted to the efficient hostess. “Enough. How about giving it a rest and having lunch?” Gottlieb nodded, replaced the book, and followed Cassandra into the kitchen.
She handed him a bottle of Vinho Verde and a corkscrew. “Do me a favor and open this while I get things ready, okay?” He did as asked while she took deviled eggs, whitefish salad, and a plate of sliced tomatoes and provolone from the fridge. Quickly, smoothly, she added finishing touches, a twist of fresh ground pepper here and a dollop of fresh parsley there, humming to herself while she worked. At times he thought he saw her pretty mouth begin to form a smile. He wasn’t sure.
He helped her bring the food to a table already set. After she made one last trip to the kitchen, for a basket of sliced marble rye, they were ready to eat. Despite his earlier high school angst, he felt almost relaxed now. Relaxed in the company of this woman whom he’d known for a matter of weeks, a woman whom he’d seen exactly twice and phoned on perhaps three more occasions, but a woman with whom he sensed a powerful, unnerving kinship.
I feel like I’m on vacation, it dawned on him. He felt far away, a willing exile on an island of calm where people didn’t clamor for his attention, where they made no demands on him at all, in fact. It also dawned on him that no one knew where he was now. Not his patients, not his coworkers at GCFI, not his wife. Especially not his wife. A rare, exhilarating state for him. He usually kept compulsively in touch.
Lunch passed easily and leisurely. A simple meal, flawlessly
prepared. Deviled eggs tart and crunchy with finely minced celery, whitefish salad accented with capers, sliced hothouse tomatoes doused in a citrus vinaigrette. Gottlieb drank the white wine slowly. Nonetheless, he found himself fighting off lightheadedness. Once in a while he found himself feeling close to giddy.
Conversation glided back and forth among a dozen topics. An upcoming trial in which he’d testify as an expert witness for a schizophrenic pedophile. A graduate seminar she was teaching on European Colonialism (“At least it’s giving me a break from the Holocaust”). Movies—The Horse Whisperer (“Good enough but too long,” she decreed. “A Titanic with oats.”) The end of the Cold War, and what would replace the Evil Empire, and would we someday yearn nostalgically for the USSR? The series finale of Seinfeld.
He was hard-pressed to remember the last time he’d enjoyed a meal so much.
When she went to the kitchen, he found himself thinking of the end of their second meeting. “Who was Franz?” he asked, after he’d returned with their mugs of coffee. At first she looked at him blankly. “The last time we met, you were talking about why you dreaded going into therapy. You said, ‘I suppose it has a lot to do with my Uncle Franz.’”
Her head flew back sharply. For a few moments she said nothing. When she spoke again, it was in a tone he hadn’t heard before, soft and tentative. At times she almost mumbled.
“My father’s family was upper middle class,” she began. “Doctors and lawyers and professors. My mother’s family was different. Skilled tradesmen, mechanics, a few small businessmen. Not so high up the ladder. One of her uncles, my great uncle, was a man named Franz Blau.”
She sipped coffee, clutching the mug with both hands. “Franz had always been something of a black sheep. Bright enough, according to the family folklore, but he didn’t do much with his brains. Bored in school, restless and distracted. He came of age just after World War I, just in time for the economic chaos of the Weimar Republic. He worked at this and that, mainly as a waiter or hotel clerk. Once he tried to start a business of his own, selling cigarettes and candy from a kiosk in a Berlin railway station. He didn’t fail, not quite, but he certainly didn’t prosper. Most of the time he lived a hand-to-mouth existence. In the process he turned angry. Bitter. One of those angry embittered people who knew he should have done more with his life but who couldn’t or wouldn’t take responsibility for his failures. And then Hitler rose to power.” She fell silent, stirring the coffee with a spoon, seeming to lose her train of thought. He began to throw in a question but decided to wait her out.
“Franz became enraptured, an instant convert. The Nazi party was tailor-made for a man like him. A man who was bright but undisciplined, full of all manner of resentments. Consumed with poorly focused anger. ‘A man with a hunger for scapegoats,’ my father said. ‘A man who looked for easy answers.’ And so he joined the party, and he loved it. He loved the medieval pageantry, the parades and the rallies and the bonfires. He loved learning of his innate superiority to the rest of the world, which he’d always suspected anyway.”
Cassandra took a moment, as if she had to steel herself to go on. “He loved Hitler. It wasn’t just that he became a passive follower, or saw him as the least of several evils, or had his fingers crossed behind his back. He loved him, he would have died for him. He, and tens of millions others.”
Stopping to sip more coffee, she resumed. “And so he joined the party, and then he went beyond mere membership. He joined the Schutzstaffel, the SS. You probably know that the SS consisted solely of volunteers. To make a long story short, he enjoyed a huge success there. The first success he’d ever had in life. He became an officer, and his career took off like a rocket. He met Eichmann and Himmler. It’s possible he met Hitler himself. Then he became involved in drawing up plans for the camps. It seems he had a talent for planning and administration. Eventually, he became second in command at a camp called Neuengamme.”
“That’s one I haven’t heard of.”
“No reason why you should have. It was small, relatively unimportant, tucked away near the Danish border. When most people think of concentration camps, they think of the big, notorious ones. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and such. There were actually hundreds of them, scattered all over occupied Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans. Some were very small, with less than a thousand prisoners at any given time. Even a Holocaust historian would find it hard to name them all.”
She pushed the coffee mug aside, poured herself the last of the Vinho Verde, drank half the glass in a single swallow and went on. “Neuengamme had no Zyklon-B, no crematoria, no Dr. Mengele performing ghastly medical experiments. It was nothing more than a tiny cog in the machinery of death. They used it primarily as a staging point for transport to the larger camps. From time to time they shot prisoners, or beat them to death with shovels, but they didn’t kill them by the hundreds of thousands. Small potatoes, you might say.”
“What exactly did your uncle do there?”
“He handled much of the day-to-day administration. Routine stuff. Making sure the camp had provisions and supplies. Making up the duty rosters, settling his underlings’ disputes. Keeping tabs on the kapos.”
“The who?” Gottlieb hadn’t heard the word before.
“The kapos. Jew-bosses. Favored prisoners, semi-trusted by the Nazis, who kept the other prisoners in check. They were also informers. Prisoners hated them as much as the Nazis, maybe more. When the camps were liberated, a few of them were literal
ly torn apart.”
She took another moment before continuing. “Back to Franz,” she said finally. “He also organized transports to the larger camps, especially to Auschwitz. He personally shot a few prisoners, and he hanged a few escapees, but he wasn’t especially sadistic by SS standards. He didn’t burn them alive or drown them in cisterns of human waste the way they did in other places. He didn’t tie the pregnant women’s legs together when they were ready to give birth. And then the war ended.” She appeared to lose her train of thought again.
“He was arrested?”
She nodded. “He was tried for crimes against humanity . . . he wasn’t important enough to be hanged. They gave him twenty years. He died in prison in 1958.”
She finished the glass of wine. “And that’s it, that’s the story of my Uncle Franz. And yes, it has lots to do with why I’ve dreaded going into therapy, and why I became a Holocaust historian.”
“How old were you when you found out about him?”
“Eleven.”
“What was it like for you, finding out?”
Her eyes flashed angrily. “What the hell do you think it was like? It was devastating. More devastating than anything that’s happened to me before or since.” She stood up, began to pace. “Up to that point, I’d been proud of my family. I knew they had their faults, of course, but I was proud of them anyway. Despite the War and the Holocaust, I was proud of my German heritage. I grew up in a bilingual household, I always loved the language—even now I still dream in it half the time. My parents were people who cared about music and art and literature. They enjoyed respect in the community, my father’s patients regarded him as a demigod of sorts. I remember telling you how my father had affairs and my mother could be the quintessential martyr, but they were basically good people. And then, to learn that . . .”
Her eyes took on a faraway look. “I used to lie in bed at night, trying to imagine what life was like in Neuengamme. Not just for the prisoners, but what it was like for the SS. What were they thinking, or did they manage not to think? Uncle Franz: what was he like? How did he feel sending women and children off to Auschwitz, or ordering someone shot or hanged? Presumably, he wasn’t a born murderer. So, what happened to him? Were we alike, he and I? We couldn’t be, but then again we had to be. We came from the same stock, we were products of the same culture.”
“Not really,” he interrupted. You’re a native-born American. Apart from your education and your travels, you’ve lived here your whole life. Living here has shaped you in a hundred ways, a thousand.”
The tempo of her pacing quickened. “Of course, it has. But that doesn’t cancel out these other similarities. I was ten when I went to Germany for the first time. A little girl who’d never been outside the United States before, except for a weekend in Montreal with her family. Now here’s the creepy thing, Hal. I felt at home there. It wasn’t just that I spoke the language. How they lived, what they ate and drank, how they dressed . . . how they looked when they stood waiting for a bus or in a movie queue . . . it was all familiar to me, as though I’d been there before, even though I knew I hadn’t been. Déjà vu, you call that? The point is, I knew that I was one of them, in some fundamental way I couldn’t explain, just as I knew that I was indelibly American. It confused me then and it confuses me now.”
Gottlieb took his time before responding. “The bad news,” he said, “is I can’t absolve you for what your uncle did. No one can. The good news is, you don’t need absolution in the first place. You’re not responsible for anyone’s actions but your own—"
“I know,” she broke in testily. “With due respect, that’s pretty obvious.”
His face reddened. “Well, a lot of psychiatry consists of stating and restating the obvious, which people have a way of overlooking. A supervisor of mine once described much of
psychiatry as codified common sense. Take guilt, for instance.”
“Do I have to?”
“Let’s say a child is badly treated,” he went on. “She’s
criticized at every turn. Her accomplishments may be consid-erable, but they’re disregarded. She feels unwanted, unloved, and unlovable. She’d done nothing wrong, but she feels guilty. Why? Because she thinks it would all be different—better—if only she were better. Smarter, prettier, whatever. She asks herself, What’s wrong with me to make them treat me like that? She doesn’t ask the more valid question, What’s wrong with them for treating me like that in the first place? Now this question may be obvious to you and me, but it may escape her altogether, even if she has an IQ of 150.”
“I suppose.” She sounded indifferent. She also sounded very tired, as though she’d talked for hours.
Her pacing brought her to his side of the table. She stood behind him, rested a hand on his shoulder. “I’ve never told anyone about him, never thought I would. Thanks for listening.”
“You’re welcome.” Without facing her, still sitting, he placed his hand on top of hers. His hand, much larger, covered up hers like a baseball glove.
He stood up, very slowly, and turned around towards her. Their faces were close enough for him to discern the outline of every freckle, to see the fine striations around her blue eyes, infinitely sad now. The wish to kiss her, to kiss that splendid mouth he’d deemed her best and warmest feature, swelled up in him like a wave about to crash against the shore. At the same time, from some deep crevasse of his brain, a voice made itself undeniable. No. Don’t do this now.
He touched her cheek with the back of his massive paw, with a touch lighter than the lightest feather. “Let’s clear the table. I’ll give you a hand.”
CHAPTER XIV
G OTTLIEB SAT ALONE IN HIS OFFICE at GFCI savoring the quiet moment. It was Friday morning, about ten thirty. Only three more hours there, plus three more in his office, stood between himself and the weekend.
For once there were no plans, no social engagements. Unusual for him and Sharon. Spontaneity did not come easily to him, but he found the prospect of two unplanned days agreeable. He would read, walk, or swim as he saw fit, take Sarah to a playground if the heat was not oppressive. Sitting in his office, his feet on his desk, he even imagined himself doing nothing. Relaxing outside on the patio, iced tea in hand, watching the birds and squirrels and clouds. At the age of forty-eight, however gingerly and belatedly, Hal Gottlieb had begun to discover the joys of unstructured time.
So far, a light day. He’d met with James Shannon and three other patients, conferred with Dwight and Norma. Apart from the paperwork, ever uncompleted, not much remained for him to do.
He welcomed the lull, which would give him the chance to read the journal James Shannon handed him at the end of this morning’s session, the journal begun right after his arrest. The same grade school composition book with a black-and-white speckled cover that sat on the desk in Shannon’s cell, the day of Gottlieb’s first encounter with him. Gottlieb had offered to read it at any time. Now, a month later, Shannon had finally felt ready to take him up on it.
“I don’t know if you’re still interested in taking a look at this,” his patient had said, almost shyly. Gottlieb struggled to keep his eagerness in check.
Shannon wrote in a neat steady hand, careful and unadorned, the handwriting taught by generations of nuns. Gottlieb started reading:
June 7. It’s finally sinking in. I no longer think of this whole thing as a bad dream I can’t wake up from. What I’ve done & where I am & the fact that all the good parts of my life are over, these are the new realities. I look back on my life of a month ago or even just a week ago, and it might as well be someone else’s life. It has nothing to do with me now.
God will give me strength to deal with these new realities, which I do not doubt, I cannot doubt. I will try to hold on to the passage in the book of Proverbs,
Trust in the Lord with all thy heart,
And lean not upon thine own understanding
From the beginning, my own understanding has been of no use at all.
I can best cope, I think, by taking things day by day, even hour by hour, & sometimes minute by minute. I will get through the next five minutes, & then I’ll worry about the five minutes after that, & then the five minutes after that, & so on. As they say, 1 day at a time. I must have heard that said a million times before, but I never understood it, not fully, until now.
I speak to no one here & almost no one speaks to me, which is as I prefer it. What with the nature of my crime, and the way the media has had a field day with it, I expected a rough time from other inmates. It’s a big relief to have them leave me alone. I guess they think anyone who’d do what I did must be very crazy, so they shy away from me, more than they would otherwise. It’s as if they think I have something contagious. The guards too. My crime must be
terribly frightening even to them. They wonder if what happened to me could happen to them, they wonder if they could go crazy and kill someone, God forbid one of their children. I can see it in their eyes.
June 9. I wouldn’t have guessed it, but the hardest part of being locked up like this is the noise. I can get used to the confinement, the lack of privacy, although it’s hard to wash and use the toilet when I know the camera’s on me. I can even get used to the danger that is always present. You feel it in the air, it’s as real as rain or snow. But I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the noise. Not even if I’m locked up for as long as I live, which will almost certainly be the case.
I’m finding that the only way to deal with this is to go very deep inside myself, to a safe and quiet place which has no connection to the rest of my life or even the rest of the world. I imagine this place as a quiet island in the tropics somewhere, the Caribbean maybe, with rough seas all around it. But the island itself is always safe and always peaceful.
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