Hope: A Tragedy: A Novel

by Shalom Auslander

  Hell of a show we’re putting on down here, thought Kugel. Don’t forget to tip your creator.

  So, Anne, he said as he watched Mother down below. Why does everyone think you died in Auschwitz?

  Bergen-Belsen.

  Whatever.

  It’s a lot easier to stay alive in this world, said the old woman, if everyone thinks you’re dead.

  Mm-hmm, said Kugel.

  Mother was at the gate now. If she pushed, she’d be out. She pulled, and pulled again, wiped her brow, and moved on, as ever, from salvation to bondage.

  There were, of course, continued the old woman, a number of financial considerations as well.

  Mother fanned herself with her hat.

  Sol! she called out. Solly, I’m stuck!

  Financial considerations, said Kugel.

  I was alone, Mr. Kugel. I was eighteen, hiding in the attic of an old farmhouse somewhere between Belsen and Hannover. Man by the name of Franz Something, I can’t recall any longer, the self-loathing son of a former midlevel SS officer. Franz was hiding me, this sickly, terrified Jewish girl, from nothing, in his attic, even though the war had ended, hoping, I suppose, that the unimaginable sins of the father could be absolved by the second-rate good deeds of the son. Blew his head off ten years later, the poor bastard did. The sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons. What an abominable idea. Who said that?

  God, said Kugel, looking down at Mother struggling in her garden. She called for him again—Sol!—and turned to look up at the house, shielding her eyes from the sun. Kugel instinctively ducked to the side of the window, though he knew she could never see him from that distance.

  One day, she continued, Franz came up to the attic, carrying a newspaper in his hand. He held it out to me with tears in his eyes. Is this you? he asked. Thousands of people, it seemed, were reading my diary. I’d forgotten about it by then, to be honest; it was a couple of years later, and I was already at work on my first novel. Terrible thing, hideously conceived, something about a talking, shame-filled monkey or some such ludicrous conceit; I hope to Christ nobody finds that one like they did my diary. Anyway, I convinced Franz to take me to the publisher in Amsterdam. It was the first time I’d been out of the attic since the war ended, and the first time I’d been in Amsterdam since the war began. With my heart in my throat, I knocked on the publisher’s door. May I help you, he asked. I’m Anne Frank, I said.

  Mother began pulling on the gate again.

  And what did he say? asked Kugel.

  After a moment she replied: He said, Fuck you.

  Kugel turned to her; she had finished packing up the boxes and was now pushing them with her back toward the wall.

  I was taken aback, she continued, as you can imagine, and so I repeated myself, assuming he’d misheard me. I’m Anne Frank, I said. Who isn’t? he replied. As it turned out, there had been, ever since the diary was published, a steady stream of girls in to see this publisher, day in, day out, all claiming to be me, all wanting a piece of the royalties. I recalled as he told me this seeing some other girls my age in the waiting area outside his office—some tall, some short, some fat, some thin—all of them, though, wearing as downcast and maudlin a countenance as they could manage, much as they imagined the woeful little girl from the attic would. The editor, naturally, thought I was a fraud as well, but when I told him about the parts of the diary my father had edited out—parts only I, back then, could have known about—he saw that I was indeed who I claimed to be. And do you know what he said then?

  Fuck you? offered Kugel.

  She fixed her eye on him once more.

  He closed his office door, she said, sat me down in his chair and said, Stay dead.

  Having finished righting all the boxes, the old lady pulled herself back along the floor to the western wall and scurried behind it. When she was gone from view, Kugel went to the boxes and began lifting them, one by one, back into place.

  He said, Mr. Kugel, the anger in her voice beginning to rise, that nobody wants a live Anne Frank. They want a martyr, they want to know we’ve hit bottom. That it gets better, because it can’t get worse. They want to know that we can rise like a phoenix from our own fiery human ashes. But tell me, Mr. Kugel, what is the point of a phoenix rising if all it ever does is gaze down with perverse longing at its own torched reliquiae? Stay down, you miserable bastard bird, stay down! The glory was in rising, fool, not in having burned! We all burn, everyone burns. Burning doesn’t make you special!

  She was shouting now, and Kugel stepped back from the wall.

  He went to his desk, Mr. Kugel, held up a copy of that goddamned diary, with that goddamned smiling child on the goddamned cover, and said, They don’t want you. They want her.

  Mother called out for him again.

  Sol, please, I’m frightened!

  Kugel took the shopping list in his hand, pressed it into his pocket, and headed for the stairs.

  I told him I was working on a novel, Anne Frank called out loudly after him. Do you know what Mr. Editor did then, Mr. Kugel? He laughed! Stay dead, he repeated, stay dead! I’m a writer, Mr. Kugel! I am not a child! I’m not some goddamned memoirist! I am a writer! Thirty-two million copies, Mr. Kugel, that’s nothing to sneeze at! I will leave this attic when I finish this book, and not one moment sooner! Not one moment sooner! I am a writer, Mr. Kugel, do you hear me! A writer!

  Kugel headed down the stairs.

  Matzoh! Anne Frank shouted after him. Get me my matzoh!

  Kugel folded the stairs and let the attic door close with a crash.

  He enjoyed the silence that followed.

  Mother called again.

  Sol, please! I’m frightened!

  Anne Frank, Kugel muttered to himself as he headed outside to rescue Mother from her garden.

  That’s all I fucking need.

  8.

  THE SUN WAS IN THE SKY like a something. The breeze blew like a whatever.

  I was so frightened, said Mother.

  The gate’s right here, said Kugel. You just have to push.

  He demonstrated the proper technique for her as they left the garden.

  See? Like this, Mother, it’s not complicated. I got no sleep last night, Mother, and there’s a very complicated issue I’m dealing with, okay, very thorny, a lot of very sensitive . . . you know? I don’t need to be rushing out here every . . .

  Pull going in, push coming out, Mother said with a shake of her head. Everywhere else it’s push going in and pull going out. They did it on purpose, those Germans, to torture me, to drive me mad.

  I built that garden for you, Mother, not the Germans.

  Ever since the war, she said softly.

  He put his arm around her shoulders and they made their way back to the house.

  I know, said Kugel.

  Kugel was a small boy, no older than six years old, when he woke up one morning to find his father gone. In the days and months that followed, Mother’s explanation for Father’s absence varied. Sometimes she told Kugel that he simply disappeared; sometimes she told him he had died; sometimes she told him he had been murdered. Wrong place at the wrong time, she said. All Kugel knew for certain, then as now, was that he was gone. Life was good, and then, one day, it was bad. It was evening, it was morning, it sucked. Kugel sometimes wondered if it would have been better if Father had left sooner, if Kugel had never known him, never known that happier time. According to Professor Jove, it was the knowing that there had been a happy time, a place of joy and peace and security, that made the sudden absence of it all so agonizing for young Kugel. Not the agony of what was, but the agony of what was no longer; this was the source of all life’s pain—not the fear of a hell to come, but rather the knowledge of an Eden that is no more. Hell isn’t the punishment, said Professor Jove. Eden was.

  Whatever happened to Father, it caused Mother to hate him, utterly and completely, and she wanted Kugel to hate him, too, and so Kugel did. Mother was hurt, and sad, and suffering a pain that yo
ung Kugel could not ease. Suddenly she was a single mother with two small children—Kugel was six, and Hannah, his younger sister, was not yet two—and because there had been no body, no death, there were no life insurance moneys, either. Overnight, it seemed to young Kugel, Mother became older, wearier, and try as he might to cheer her up—no matter how many chores he did, no matter how well he did in school—nothing seemed to help. Hating Father was the least young Kugel could do. It was also the most he could do. Hatred was all he could offer her. And so he did.

  It was soon after that Mother first began referring to the war. The first time Kugel recalled hearing about it was the day after they moved into that small city apartment; Mother had left some of the cardboard boxes in the stairway, and Mr. Rosner pounded on the front door, citing all manner of violations and shouting all manner of threats. Mother opened the door, shook her head, apologized and said, in a soft voice, as Mr. Rosner’s tirade finally drew to a close, Ever since the war.

  This seemed to extinguish the fire in Mr. Rosner’s heart, and he put his hands on his hips and shook his head.

  It’s okay, Mr. Rosner said.

  Those sons of bitches, said Mother.

  It’s okay, he said.

  Mother was Kugel’s whole world now, and he loved her dearly. He admired her strength, her resilience, how quickly she silenced that pig Rosner. So it didn’t surprise young Kugel to learn that Mother was a war hero; she was a hero to him already.

  Kugel never asked Mother which war she was referring to, or why Mr. Rosner would care as much as he did. Her references were vague: Those sons of bitches, she said, or Such cruelty, or Whole families destroyed, or Never again. Some nights, she would come into young Kugel’s bedroom, sit on the edge of his bed, and tell him violent tales of riots and torture and pogroms.

  What are pogroms? asked young Kugel.

  One evening, when Kugel was eight years old, Mother came to his bedroom, brushed the hair from his brow, and told him that it was time he learned about a terrible place known as Buchenwald. She had a large book with her called The Holocaust, and she showed him the photographs inside: of mass graves, starved prisoners, piles of naked corpses.

  That’s your uncle, she would say.

  That’s your grandfather’s sister.

  That’s your cousin’s father.

  What’s that? Kugel asked, pointing to the lamp shade she had placed beside him on the bed.

  That, she said with a sigh. That’s your grandfather.

  Then she buried her face in her hands and wept.

  I’m so alone, she sobbed. I’m so frightened. How could he leave me, how could he do this?

  She cried openly now, shaking her head.

  That son of a bitch, she said.

  Kugel held the lamp shade in his hands and turned it over.

  This is Zeide? he asked.

  Mother nodded, composed herself.

  You see what they do to us? she said. There’s no peace, no peace. Wherever we go, wherever we hide. Terror and more terror and more terror.

  It says Made in Taiwan, Kugel said.

  Mother looked at him, disappointment and anger in her tearstained eyes.

  Well, they’re not going to write Made in Buchenwald, are they? she snapped.

  No, said Kugel.

  If the intended effect of the gifting of the lamp shade was to make Kugel fearful of people, it had, in actuality, something of an opposite result; he came to fear inanimate objects. If the lamp shade could be his grandfather, was the sofa his cousin? Was the ottoman his aunt? The armoire, he was certain, was giving him filthy looks. For weeks he crept outside and peed against the apartment house wall, concerned that perhaps the toilet was his uncle, the bathroom mirror an unknown but all-seeing relation disgusted by his most secret rituals. To this day, Kugel was a relentless anthropomorphizer, concerned for the agony of the logs he condemned to the fireplace, the terror of the underwear he imprisoned in the washing machine, the heartache and sorrow of the families of those innocent creatures—the grasshoppers, the ants, the frogs—that perished so gruesomely under the blade of his lawn mower.

  Never again, whispered the spiders.

  Never again, replied the crickets.

  It wasn’t until two years later, when he entered the sixth grade, that young Kugel discovered the truth. Mrs. Rosengarten, his history teacher, arranged for a class trip to a nearby Holocaust museum; the children were about to enter middle school, declared Mrs. Rosengarten, and they were old enough now to learn about man’s capacity for inhumanity to his fellow man. The students’ nervous giggling as they entered the museum was soon replaced with a timorous, reverential hush. The girls’ eyes filled with tears and they sniffed as they wiped the streaks of black eyeliner from their cheeks; the boys pretended, characteristically, to be unaffected, but their uncharacteristic silence as they moved from one exhibit to the next revealed the truth. As they entered a room labeled The Transports, one image in particular seemed to arrest the young students and stop them in their tracks. It was a photograph of the exterior of a cattle car, enlarged to such a size that it covered the entire wall. Four young women waved to the photographer through the bars of the tiny window on the side of the car. Perhaps it was their young age, in their twenties, that so shook the students; perhaps it was because they were attractive, with long blond hair, and they seemed more human than the shaven-headed prisoners that filled so many of the other photos; perhaps it was because they were smiling and waving, that they didn’t know what was coming, that they were so unaware of how bad things had already become, that they didn’t know they would likely be dead before the train ever reached its destination. Whatever the reason, the children all stopped and stood, horror struck, before this enormous image. For a moment nobody moved, nobody said a word; and then young Kugel stepped forward, pointed to the woman at the far right side of the window, and said, his small voice cracking with emotion, That . . . that’s my mother.

  He buried his face in his hands and cried.

  The students gasped.

  Those sons of bitches, wept young Kugel.

  Ellen, the pretty, dark-haired girl who sat beside him in math, looked at him with sadness in her sparkling blue eyes. Kevin, the popular star of their football team, patted him reassuringly on the shoulder.

  Your mother? said Mrs. Rosengarten. That’s not your mother.

  It is, said Kugel. She told me so.

  Your mother’s my age, Solomon, said Mrs. Rosengarten. She wasn’t even born when that photo was taken. And she was born in Brooklyn.

  How would you know? demanded Kugel. You don’t know anything!

  I know your mother, said Mrs. Rosengarten. We went to Camp Sackamanoff together. Up in the Catskills. The food was awful, young man, but it was a far cry from Auschwitz.

  She shook her head and motioned for the children to follow her.

  Let’s go, class, she said.

  Ellen rolled her eyes at Kugel as she pushed past him. Kevin gave him a forceful shove.

  You’re dead, said Kevin.

  Over the years, perhaps as a result of this incident, perhaps as a search for some unattainable truth, Kugel became a voracious reader, hungry for facts and knowledge, and he excelled in all his classes (if he couldn’t heal Mother’s past, he thought, perhaps he could provide for her a better future); books seemed to hold all the answers—to life, to happiness—if one could just read enough of them. Mrs. Rosengarten had been correct, he learned; Mother had been born in Brooklyn, in 1945, the year the hostilities between the Allies and Axis powers officially ended. She must have been protecting him, Kugel assumed, from some even greater horror that she had experienced. He wondered if perhaps she had been referring to a different war—had she served in Vietnam? had she seen time in Korea?—so he traveled by subway one afternoon, uptown, to his grandmother, who showed him a photo album full of old pictures of Mother’s cheerful youth in Brooklyn, of her playful adolescence in the Catskills, and, later, of Mother’s life as a contented youn
g wife in northeastern suburbia.

  Never suffered a day in her life, Grandmother said with a shake of her head.

  Kugel, crestfallen, slammed the heavy album closed with a thud.

  Grandmother jumped. She buried her face in her hands.

  Ever since the war, she said.

  It didn’t take Kugel much digging to discover that Grandmother hadn’t been in the war, either. The Kugels were fifth-generation Americans; none of them had been in the war. They had lost family in the Holocaust, of course, but most had been cousins, and most of those quite distant. A few months later, Grandmother passed away, and a few months after that, on the night of Kugel’s eighth-grade graduation, Mother came into his bedroom, sat on the edge of his bed, brushed the hair from his brow, and handed him a shiny black box. The inside of the box was lined with purple velvet and the base was covered in purple satin, upon which sat a smooth white bar of soap.

  What’s this? he asked.

  Your great-grandmother, she said.

  Then she buried her face in her hands.

  Those sons of bitches, she said.

  Thirteen years old that day, Kugel was beginning to feel the need for individuation, for the spreading of his wings; he had less and less patience for Mother’s lies—fabrications? exaggerations? myths?—and dared, once again, to challenge her. He reached in, picked up the soap, and turned it over in his hand.

  Her name was Ivory? he asked.

  Mother frowned and grabbed the soap from him. Her eyes filled with tears.

  Well, they’re not going to write Auschwitz on it, are they? she said.

  It was the last time he ever questioned her about her past or about the war. He resolved from then on to show her nothing but compassion and support. She seemed to need the war, and he was pleased to be able to give it to her. At last there was something other than hate that young Kugel could give the mother he so adored: he could give her suffering.

  Careful, said Kugel as he helped Mother through the garden door.

  He led her down the hallway, to her bedroom, and lifted her into bed.