by Alan Elsner
Truth was, I longed for female company. Most of my friends were deep in married bliss, with two or three kids already in tow. At the synagogue, nearly every week, some amateur matchmaker tried to fix me up on a blind date, but none of these led to anything. Word had gone around that I was too picky and difficult to please.
Lately, I'd been having lustful thoughts about Lynn, my assistant, who had to be eight or nine years younger than me. She had a law degree, but she still carried the air of a student about her. Her energy level and enthusiasm were scary. Just the sight of her tearing down the corridor, perpetually in a hurry, sent a low-level electrical jolt through my body. But she was off-limits. Making passes at personal assistants, even those wearing glasses, was strictly verboten.
A Simon and Garfunkel disc was in the CD player. The song was one of Jennifer's favorites — “Bridge over Troubled Water.” The words seemed to mock me. As the song ended, I slipped Winterreise into the machine, hung up my jacket, took off my shoes, and lay down on the bed. It began with a series of falling chords on the piano. Then Roberto Delatrucha began singing.
It was an extraordinary voice—deep, soft, and velvet, resonating with a haunting tone of longing and regret. I had never heard anything quite like it. It's unreasonable, I know, but after years of poring over SS documents, German for me had become the language of mass murder. Yet from these lips, it sounded lyrical and gentle. The sound of his voice reaching for the high notes was like a caress. A lump formed in my throat, and I blinked away a tear. I'd banished music from my life, and now it had snuck past my defenses.
I extracted the sleeve notes and followed the lyrics of the songs. The word lieder simply means “songs” in German, particularly songs set to German poetry. This composition consisted of twenty-four poems sung with piano accompaniment. They told the story of a rejected lover condemned to wander through a bleak winter landscape, looking for, but not finding, redemption. The first song set the tone:
As a stranger I arrived here.
A stranger, I go hence.
The path is dismal, veiled in snow.
No one who is even a little lonely should have to listen to such despair. For months, I had tried to bury myself in work. These songs brought me face to face with my isolation. Typical morbid Germanic nonsense, I told myself, yet there was something about these songs that demanded attention. Partly the tunes, deceptively simple yet full of surprising changes of mood and tempo. Partly the intimate dialogue between singer and pianist. But mostly the voice itself, rich and dark and bitter, like strong black coffee.
The leaflet contained some sketchy biographical details. Delatrucha received his musical education in Buenos Aires and at Juilliard in New York. There, he met his accompanist, later to become his wife, Mary Scott. There was a small black-and-white picture of the two of them. Mary was sitting behind the piano, a small woman, her features hard to discern in the fuzzy photograph. Delatrucha posed behind her, one hand over his heart, the other flung artistically in the air.
After his arrival in this country from Argentina, Delatrucha slowly built a reputation as a serious interpreter of German 19th-century art songs. Not for him the easy path to fame and fortune. Not for him the facile rendition of operatic favorites and popular encores. Through four decades, Roberto Delatrucha has remained true to his singular mission, almost single-handedly reviving American interest in this beautiful but neglected repertory.
The songs still played in my head as I lay down to sleep, and they welled up again when I awoke. The first thing I wanted to do, after reciting the morning blessing, was listen to them again, but the music would have to wait. Struggling into my coat, I rushed into the chill, dark air, anxious not to miss the daily minyan, which began at six thirty each morning. Some of the most fervent worshippers met half an hour earlier each day to study a page of the Talmud, but that was too much devotion even for me.
Back home, I played the disc during breakfast while skimming the Post. It was an unequal contest; the music won hands down. I had to switch it off to concentrate on the newspaper. Good thing I did, too. After days of no news, a story about Sophie Reiner appeared in the Metro section. Her earthly remains had been returned to Germany for burial. The article said Sophie had no family to mourn her. Her elderly mother had recently died; her father had been killed in the war, before she was born. So Sophie had been writing that letter to a ghost. I felt sad for her. Nobody should have to live and die alone. The police said they were still investigating. “We are pursuing several possible leads,” a spokesman said. It didn't sound promising.
I cut out the article to add to the file I had started on the case, then looked at my watch. Time for one more song from another of the Delatrucha discs. This time, the voice of a younger, more assertive Roberto Delatrucha filled the room. This performance had been recorded in the mid-1950s, when he was just starting to build his career. You could hear the youthful vigor and confidence in his delivery. The first song was called “Der Erlkönig,” “The Elf King” in English. It began with a rush of powerful piano chords, pounding and throbbing to mimic the sound of a galloping horse. The words by Wolfgang von Goethe told of a father and son riding through a forest in winter, the father nestling the child to keep him warm. The son senses a ghostly figure, the Elf King, lurking in a shadow, beckoning to him. “Father, father, look over there,” the young boy cries. But the father sees nothing. The evil spirit begins whispering seductively to the child, “Come with me, come with me.” Still, the father remains blind and deaf to the threat. The Elf King creeps closer, ever closer; he reaches out and seizes the child. “Father, he's hurting me,” the child cries in anguish. His soul is being wrenched from his body; the father is helpless. The horse gallops on, the father clutching his still-shuddering child to his breast. They reach safety, but it's too late. The child is dead.
The song required Delatrucha to sing in three different voices. The father's voice, deep and gruff; the son's, high-pitched and terrified; and then the voice of the Elf King himself—soft and beguiling, creepy and tempting. It was artistry of the highest order, and deeply disturbing. Every father tries to protect his children, but what happens when he can't? What happens when the evil is so great it overpowers him? It made me think of my own father. I picked up the phone and called him.
“Well?” came the brusque response.
“Dad, it's me, Marek.”
“Why are you calling at seven thirty in the morning? What's wrong?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to hear your voice. I guess I was feeling a little lonely. How are you doing?”
“You're lonely? You need to find yourself a wife. What happened to that nice young lady you're seeing? What's her name?”
“Jennifer. And I told you six months ago. We broke up.”
“Well, call her up and say you're sorry for whatever it was you did. She was nice, that one.”
“It's too late,” I said. “We couldn't get along. She was way too nice for me.”
“It's not too late. It's never too late. Only after death is it too late. Remember that, Marek. Only after death,” he said in his harsh, guttural accent.
“Okay, Dad, I get it.”
“So you will call this Jennifer?”
“Forget Jennifer, Dad. She's history. It's over. Done, finished, kaput.”
“History, your whole life is history. Why don't you find a proper job, make some money, and live in the real world with the rest of us? You're thirty-six years old.”
“Thirty-five.”
“Thirty-five, thirty-six, it's time to stop this nonsense and get a real job before it's too late. Who would have thought my son would grow up to be a fanatic?”
My spirits slumped. It was always like this between us. We couldn't have a conversation without exchanging reproaches. The two of us had been abandoned to face the world together, but the tragedy had only driven us apart. He had retreated into a shell, leaving me to cope with my own sadness the best way I could. Judaism offered a channel through whic
h to be angry at God and—eventually—a salve for my wounds.
“Dad, I only called to say hello, not to fight. How are you coping with the winter?” My father had retired five years ago when he hit seventy. Spurning Florida, where most of his friends had fled, Jacob Cain bought a cabin deep in the hills of West Virginia, where he faced the bitter winters alone, chopping his own firewood and stomping defiantly through the snow. He said it reminded him of Poland.
“I'm coping. Winter is winter. It's cold, thank God. Some things you can still trust to stay the same.” He spoke precise English with few mistakes, but he had never lost his accent, a mixture of Polish and Hebrew. He had been lucky. The eldest of four children, he had rebelled against his religious upbringing to join a socialist, Zionist organization. In 1937, when he was only eighteen, he said farewell to his family and left Poland for a kibbutz in Palestine. That decision saved his life. Letters arrived regularly from his village until the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939. After that, news occasionally trickled through. He knew his family had been evicted from their home and herded into a ghetto early in 1941. Then, nothing. He volunteered to fight with the British and took part in the invasion of Italy. Not until after the war did he discover the truth. All the Jews from his village had been deported to Belzec in August 1942. None survived.
He paid a brief visit to Poland after the war, looking for traces of his loved ones. Nothing. Poles were living in the family home. They refused even to let him inside. He returned to Palestine with a bitter heart. He fought again in 1948 in the Israeli War of Independence. Later, in the 1950s, tired of fighting, he moved to the United States, where he met my mother, an Auschwitz survivor, and changed his name from Cohen to Cain, a name denoting perpetual exile. He opened a liquor store in D. C. I was their only child.
“Maybe I'll come out there one weekend. We could do some cross-country skiing and sit in front of the glowing embers, drinking hot punch,” I suggested.
“You don't like cross-country skiing. You're no good at it.”
“I do occasionally. It's not as bad as ballroom dancing or mud wrestling,” I joked. “I'd like to see you. I miss you.”
“There's no synagogue and no kosher food. You know all this.”
“I'll pray on my own and eat vegetarian. God won't even notice I'm gone.”
“It's a long drive just for a weekend, especially when the roads are snowed up. They don't plow very often around here.”
“That doesn't bother me. I'll find a free weekend and let you know.”
“Don't come because you feel sorry for me.”
“I don't feel sorry for you. I feel awesome filial respect. Aren't you even a bit lonely, Dad?”
“Why should I be lonely? I'm comfortable with my own company. You're the one who lives in the past, chasing ghosts.”
“Not ghosts, Dad. They're real men, your age, who murdered people—who may have murdered your own family, or Mother's. Doesn't that mean anything to you?”
“What I know is this, Marek. My parents, my brother, and my sisters have been dead for more than fifty years, and there's hardly a day I don't think of them. But life goes on. I built my life, got married, raised you. And now you're an attorney. You could be rich and successful. You could live in a big house and fill it with my grandchildren. But instead, you poke about in the past and make yourself miserable.”
“But Dad, there is such a thing as justice.”
“What justice? If you find some old man who killed Jews fifty years ago, will that bring my sisters back to life?”
“It might prevent the same thing happening again.”
“Ah, you are so naive, Marek. It already has happened again. It's happening right now in Bosnia, it happened last year in Africa.”
He had me there. The slaughter of 800,000 innocent people in Rwanda, while the world stood by and watched, had plunged me into despair. I agonized over what to do. Several times, I started drafting an angry resignation letter. To its eternal shame, the United States did nothing to stop the killing until it was too late. But my letter remained unfinished. One day, the world would need people like me with experience finding and prosecuting war criminals to settle accounts with the new generation of mass murderers.
But my father was still fulminating.
“Justice. Pshaw, you talk of justice? Justice is showing the Nazis we won because we chose life. But what's the use? We've had this conversation a thousand times.”
“Dad, just so you know, I love you! That's an official statement.”
“Bah! Find a woman to love, Marek. Get out of that rut you're in. Raise a family. Then you'll learn about love.”
He was right about that, I knew. But it didn't make me feel any better.
Where do you begin to right the wrongs? Do you start with the doctors and nurses who lend their hands to the slaughter? No, executing one or two would achieve nothing. They will burn in hell, along with the mothers who murder the flesh of their flesh. The judges in black robes who defend the baby-slaughterers—they too shall be called to account. I believe this with perfect faith.
These headaches, where my brain splits in half and it feels like someone is winding barbed wire around my head, I never used to get them before the war. Sometimes I see visions, flashes of brightness, wavy lines dancing in front of my eyes, but I welcome them. The more I suffer, the more I see. I see that the root of the evil lies within our monstrous government. I see that death must be fought with death, that lesser means will not suffice. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”
I remember the feel of her hair as I grabbed it, the warm saggy skin on her neck as I stretched it back, her terrified eyes, that stale, damp smell, and then the blood.
Next on my list is the man who calls himself the Nazi hunter. The hunter will become the hunted. I am judge, jury, and executioner. I alone decide when to carry out the sentence.
I need more money. I called to ask when I would get the five grand for the German woman.
“It's already in your account in West Virginia,” the voice said. “Don't call this number again. We'll contact you again when we have more work for you soon.”
5
I hate a life
That unfolds itself easily
—“THE BOATMAN” BY JOHANN MAYERHOFF, MUSIC BY FRANZ SCHUBERT
I WENT STRAIGHT UPSTAIRS TO ROSEN'S OFFICE, passing Janet in the corridor. “Do you know anything about Schubert?” I asked her.
“Not a thing, babe. But if you want to know about the Grateful Dead—”
“That's okay, I'll pass. Did we ever hear back from the Lithuanians about their archives?”
“My State Department guy was right. There was an official announcement yesterday from Vilnius. I circked a memo.”
“It's probably in my in-box. When are you leaving?”
“Sunday. I hear the food there is vile.”
“As long as the beer is drinkable, you'll be fine.”
Eric's door was open, so I walked in. “I'm busy,” he growled. “Go away.”
“Top o’ the morning, Eric. Beautiful day. How are you?”
He muttered something without looking up.
“Nice of you to ask. I'm fine,” I said.
“Didn't you hear, Cain? I said I'm busy. Come back next January. Better yet, make it February.”
“You're always busy. I'm always busy. The whole world's busy. But not too busy for Schubert,” I said, tossing Winterreise into his lap.
“What's this?” he asked.
“I thought you needed some culture. Read the liner notes if you can take five minutes from your busy life. See if anything strikes a chord.”
I glanced around his office, admiring the collection of signed photographs on his desk, showing Eric with each of the nation's presidents from Ford to Clinton. Eric's most
prized photo showed him standing next to Reagan. Ronnie was gazing off into space, his eyes gentle and unfocused. Rosen, a good eight inches shorter, glared at the camera, swollen with pride. Those were good days, under Reagan, when our work had unquestioned support from both parties and the White House. How times had changed! Mitch Conroy kept reminding everybody how committed he was to slashing “bloated federal programs.” Were we a bloated federal program? How much support for Nazi-hunting would there be from this new regime? Already, Conroy was threatening hearings on all aspects of government spending in the New Year. And Jack Doneghan, his chief speechwriter and right-hand man, was no friend of ours. A former conservative columnist, he had once written an op-ed piece denouncing our existence and methods and siding with some of what he called our “victims.”
Eric finished reading the blurb. “Hmm, I see what you mean,” he said. “There is something here, maybe. Actually, just one word.”
The word was Argentina. Around 60,000 Nazis, including Eichmann, Mengele, and many other top leaders, fled from Germany to Argentina in the years after the war, many with the help of Catholic priests and Vatican officials.
“You notice it doesn't say where he was born,” I said.
“Shouldn't be too tough to figure out. Is he any good?”