Dr. Resnick then testified that Max had always been a steady worker and a stable person and Max tried to listen but he heard other voices.
War es Rabinowitz?
Ich weiss nicht.
Wer gab ihm die Zange?
Ich nicht.
The Kommandant drew a knife across Max’s bare chest and a thin red line appeared.
Dr. Resnick on his way back to the audience stopped to ask Max if he was all right.
Max stared blankly at him and then noticed that he was clutching his chest. He folded his hands on the table. “Yes, fine, thank you,” he said.
And then Shmuel was called to testify. “How long have you known Mr. Friedman?” Martin asked after Shmuel had been sworn in.
Shmuel in his new tweed suit sat on the edge of the seat like a schoolboy kept after class. “We worked together five, maybe six years.” His bony hands delivered the message and then retracted.
“You worked together for five or six years,” Martin repeated. “Were you surprised when you heard that Mr. Friedman had committed this crime?”
“Surprised? I didn’t believe it.”
“Are you and Mr. Friedman very close?” Martin asked.
Shmuel glanced up. The flickering light caught his eye for a moment. “He was teaching me to play chess.”
Martin waited, shuffled his feet, looked at the judge, and said, “I see.” Shmuel nodded. “You and Mr. Friedman were both in concentration camps during the war,” Martin said. “Do you feel that the brutal treatment Mr. Friedman received in those camps might help the court understand why he committed this crime?”
Max wanted to shout, but his mouth was stone.
“Yes,” Shmuel answered.
“How?”
Shmuel moved forward on the chair and Martin and Max both moved as if to catch him, but he didn’t fall. “I don’t know,” he said.
Martin turned completely around. The judge gaveled down the laughter in the courtroom and Martin advanced on Shmuel, his forefinger aimed at Shmuel’s heart, but he seemed to change his mind and, his voice cracking, he asked the judge for a recess.
Max’s cousin pushed his way to the railing and grabbed Max by the shoulder.
“Not now,” Martin told him, taking Max by the arm.
“What is it, Morris?”
“Did you do it? I just want to know yes or no. If you didn’t do it I will get the best lawyer I can find.”
Max pulled his arm free and stared at his cousin. “Yes,” he said. “I did it.” Morris turned and Max watched him walk straight out of the courtroom. Clara was struggling to get to the front of the room now, but Martin took Max by the arm again and pulled him away.
“Your friend Shmuel was certainly no help,” Martin said excitedly. “I would like you to testify.”
“Testify?” Max cried, looking at the empty witness chair. “No. No, I don’t want to testify.” He started for the door. The bailiff stopped him.
“I tried to ask you this morning. If you won’t testify for yourself I will have to call your fiancée, Clara Axelrod.”
“Clara? No, don’t call Clara.” He stared at the door. “All right,” he said. “I’ll testify.”
When court reconvened Martin called Max to the stand.
“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help you God?” the clerk asked.
“Yes,” Max answered, trying to keep his hand from touching the Bible.
Martin asked him to give a brief account of his education and his background in Germany before he came to America and he did so mechanically, telling about the University and the concentration camp and the trip to Israel and then to America out of memory, a phonograph turned on and played while he watched the spectators. He understood why Clara would be there and Shmuel and the Thompsons, but he wondered about the strangers, the old man sitting next to Clara, for instance, or the fat woman in front of Shmuel. Was she the same woman he sat next to at Holtz’s trial? In the front row were seven young boys all in blue suits, waiting as if to be bar mitzvahed. Max felt that he would like to speak to them, if only he had time and knew what he wanted to say.
“Do you regret having committed this crime?” Martin asked.
“Yes, of course.” His eyes searched now for what Holtz had stared at. It was the clock!
“Can you tell the court why a man like yourself would commit such a crime.”
Max thought a moment. “It was an accident,” he said. “I didn’t mean to.”
Martin’s eyes pleaded with him to cooperate and Max answered with his eyes: Why are you doing this to me?
While Martin withdrew to the defense table to consult his notes, Max looked about the court. Before him the reporter sat, fingers poised over his machine; the empty jury box was to his left and just beyond it a water fountain. On the other side a large blackboard hung like a blank picture on the wall and next to it a calendar with July, August, and September showing. What else was there to look at but the people and the clock?
Martin returned to stand in front of the witness box.
“The sex you had with the girl was consensual, was it not? That is, she agreed to have sex with you?”
“I thought so,” Max said.
The lawyer studied the ceiling and then looked Max in the eye as if imploring him for help.
“Another man has already been convicted of this crime. Why did you confess?”
“It was my business.” Max said.
“Your business?”
“I mean my duty.” Max could almost hear Sarah’s voice prompting him, feel her warm lips on his cheek.
“Did you know that the man whom your confession has set free is a Nazi?”
“I can’t help that.”
The courtroom had grown very still. Only Martin’s voice, in tones of surrender, disturbed the peace. “But you do regret having caused her death?”
“Yes,” Max said reassuringly. “Yes, of course I do.”
The prosecutor called Mr. Jordan to the stand and he testified that Max had come to his house a week or so after the crime and pretended to be looking for someone who didn’t live there.
Martin asked Max what that was about and Max shrugged. Even when called to the stand and asked by the prosecutor to explain his visit to the Jordan house, Max said simply, “I can’t explain it.”
Then the prosecutor went over the case again in a mechanical way, arguing that it wasn’t an accident at all but an act of anger when the girl resisted his advances. He recommended to the judge a sentence of ten to fifteen. That created a stir in the court, but Martin reassured Max that such a recommendation was routine.
After another brief recess, Martin made a speech in which he reminded the court that Max had never been convicted of anything before and that his confession was a sign of repentance. He paraded before the judge’s bench as he spoke, but occasionally he forgot and marched to the jury box, gesturing to the empty seats. “I ask the court to remember the suffering Mr. Friedman has already—ah—suffered in the concentration camps, himself a victim of Nazi oppression. Experiences such as I am about to recount might temporarily warp the judgement of any of us.” He stared a moment at the judge and then went to the table and took a book from his briefcase. Max saw the title, Nazi War Crimes, and tried to grab Martin’s arm, but Martin pulled away and Max was afraid to speak. Martin began reading descriptions of Nazi atrocities, old Jewish men compelled to dig their own graves, teenaged girls forced into prostitution, a swastika burned into the chest of an aged rabbi. Max wanted to stop him, then decided to let him go on. Finally the judge looked down and said, “Mr. Martin, I think that is quite enough.” Martin, bewildered, looked from the judge to Max and then with a sigh of defeat suggested to the court that justice in this case required mercy. The judge declared a recess.
A crowd of people rushed to the front of the room, Clara leading them, but the bailiff came and took Max to the holding cell. After a while he was taken to a detention cell where h
e had lunch.
Martin came to see him there. “You’ll get off with five to ten,” Martin said. “With time off for-” Max stood up, knocking a bowl of soup to the floor. “Get out!” he shouted. “You know nothing about it! Nothing!” And to Martin’s back he whispered, “Clown.” He pushed the rest of his food off the table. Back in the courtroom he held his head in his hands, waiting for the judge to return. When the clerk called the court to order, Martin prompted Max to stand and then stood himself, half turned to the jury box, his back to Max. The judge sat down stiffly in his high chair and waited for the court to settle down. The lawyer pressed Max’s arm, urging him to sit. Not long ago, Max remembered, the boy’s life was in his hands; now his life was in the hands of the judge. He turned to look at the judge and saw that the judge had been looking at him. “Stand up,” Martin whispered fiercely, and stood up himself as soon as Max was on his feet. The judge began to read from a paper he held in both his hands.
“Max Friedman, I find you guilty of voluntary manslaughter.” The judge read slowly and softly so that Max had to lean forward to hear. “I sympathize with you over the inexcusable treatment you received from the Nazis, but that sympathy is washed away by your own treatment of a seventeen-year-old girl. I have tried to take into account your age, but your age should have made you wiser.” A whisper began in the courtroom and the judge banged his gavel, but there was still a buzzing in Max’s head and he wished only that the judge would hurry. “I have taken into account the fact that you have no previous record and are apparently not a habitual sex offender. You will not say why you returned to the girl’s house, but that act suggests an unhealthy and perhaps uncontrollable curiosity. Your uncooperative attitude this morning when you were called to testify in your own behalf indicates that perhaps you do not care what happens to you. Perhaps you seek punishment for your crime and that you shall get.” Max had to remind himself that he was the subject of this discourse. He had an odd inclination to just get up and walk out, and the feeling that the judge had so hypnotized everyone that he would not even be stopped. “Only your confession and perhaps what I have noted as a desire to be punished does anything to mitigate the horror of your double crime, and your confession came rather late. Your confession may represent a sincere effort at repentance. On the other hand, our young girls must be protected from the likes of you. It seems to me therefore to be entirely consistent with the demands of justice and possibly your own desires as well to sentence you to ten years imprisonment at a place to be determined by the California Department of Corrections.” He rapped his gavel, but as before it brought silence, it now brought a scream that Max recognized as Clara’s, and it unleashed a confusion of noise.
22
It was an ordinary bus except for the chicken wire over the windows and as it sped quietly over the Golden Gate Bridge Max was conscious of the cold handcuff that made him the iron partner of a young man who whistled as if they were all going to summer camp. Another prisoner, a black man, told him to shut up, but the boy went right on whistling and the black man appealed first to the sheriff’s deputy sitting in the rear and then to the whole busload of prisoners. The boy kept whistling. Max turned in his seat to watch the city shrink until it looked no larger than a toy that he could reach out and pick up in his hand. Then the blue waters of the bay climbed suddenly to the brown hills of Marin County. A prisoner raised himself a bit and leaned his head against the window. “Look sharp when the road curves,” he told everyone. “It’s the last chance to see the city.”
The black prisoner caught Max’s eye. “Can’t you make him stop whistling?”
Max shrugged his shoulders, but he wished the boy would stop. He was trying to think.
It was two days since the judge had sentenced him. Clara came to see him, but she cried through the whole visit and at the end Max told her not to come anymore. Then the lawyer came. Max apologized for yelling at him and Martin told him he understood and was working on an appeal. “Don’t bother,” Max said. The bus went through a tunnel and then the road curved and Max pressed his face to the window, but he missed the city. He wondered what people back there were saying about him. Clara would never believe he did it. Poor Clara. He remembered the night he first knocked on her door. When he closed his eyes he could imagine himself standing in her doorway. Come in, Mr. Friedman. He recalled the warm feeling as he stepped into her apartment, the smell of blintzes, her cool hands on his forehead. Even that first night he knew he would ask her to marry him. Ah, if only … if only one night a boy hadn’t jumped out on the path in front of me. He wanted to go back to Clara, to lie in her arms.
“Stop whistling already!” he shouted at the boy, and to his surprise the boy stopped.
The bus turned off the highway and started down the road to the prison. “Won’t be long now,” someone said. “Man, I feel like I’m coming home.”
Max knew what the Thompsons would say. Mrs. Thompson will tell Mr. Thompson, I told you so, and Mr. Thompson will swish his imaginary knife through the air as he tells the new tenant about the old tenant.
“There it is,” the black man said. Max saw the huge cream colored prison against the bay. With its towers and little windows it looked like a castle along the Rhine.
The iron doors groaned and shut behind them like great cymbals and the prisoners were led to the reception room of the prison. There they were searched and then one by one they were allowed to shower under the close supervision of a guard. Max felt an old fear creep inside him at the sight of the shower. “What’s the matter?” the guard said. “Ain’t you ever seen a shower before?” Max turned the water on and washed the old fear away. He thought of Shmuel, pictured him at the office hurrying across the room with his little duck walk, waving a letter and saying something, but Max could not decide what. Then he remembered the night Shmuel had come to visit him, saw him rolling up his sleeve and shouting, We were both inside! “Hurry it up,” the guard said. Well, who’s inside now? Max thought, rinsing the soap off. He looked at his own numbers, soaped them over, and washed them once more. They looked a little faded to him and he started to wash them again when the guard reached in and turned off the water. “All right,” the guard said, “this ain’t the Turkish baths.”
The prisoners all lined up and were taken to be fingerprinted and photographed again, just as they had done when he was booked, and then to the Distribution Department where he traded his clothes for jeans, a denim work shirt, a jacket, and a pair of slippers. Dressed in his new clothes and with a guard on either side, he was escorted across the big yard. A few prisoners stared at them.
When they were first led into the camp they heard music and the prisoners said to each other, See, it’s not so bad, and they began to laugh and clap each other on the back. The band played “Alle die Vogel Sind Hier” and some of the new prisoners started singing. Max couldn’t wait to see Sarah so he could tell her she was wrong about the camps. Perhaps she could hear the music herself. He cleared his throat to join in the chorus but just then the other voices stopped, not together but one at a time. Everyone was pushing against the barbed wire fence and Max too pushed his way to the fence until he could see the main yard of the camp. The band was marching around the yard. There were three violinists and two accordion players. All the other prisoners were lined up in the yard and they all wore the striped uniforms that looked like pajamas, as if they had all been brought there in the middle of the night. The band too wore the terrible pajamas. Behind them came other prisoners pulling a wagon with a man standing on it and German guards accompanying the parade. Only the guards were smiling. “What does it mean?” Max asked the man next to him, but the man replied, “Look how thin they are!” Then everyone seemed to see the gallows at the same time as the band led the eyes of the new prisoners to it. The man on the wagon dismounted and pushed aside a guard who tried to escort him to the gallows. He mounted the box himself and put the rope around his own neck. A German with a peaked cap and medals on his chest said something
which the new prisoners could not hear. The guard kicked the box out from under the condemned prisoner and Max turned away. When he looked again, the man was dangling in the air and the guards were collecting the instruments from the band.
The men were lined up in the warden’s office where a guard captain told them the rules. Max did not listen. He kept thinking about Clara, probably making lunch right now. It would be nice to have lunch with her; he supposed that would never happen again. And Arnold? He will go away to college and get married. Then, one day, he will comfort his mother and tell her how lucky she was. And, who knew? Maybe she was. The guard captain finished talking and the men were marched out of the office and into the main body of the prison. First they stopped outside another steel door where a guard was seated comfortably at a desk, feet up, reading a magazine. He got up and began searching the men. Max thought of telling him that they had all been searched already downstairs, but on second thought it was probably better not to say anything. The other men did not seem to mind.
Then they were in the cell block. Tiers of cells completely surrounded an open space in the middle. It looked as if a zoo had been temporarily evacuated to a warehouse, or like circus cages piled up, waiting to be loaded on trains. Feeling sick to his stomach, Max saw arms sticking out of the cages, faces at the bars. He half expected to hear animal roars fill the hall. A guard led him to a cell.
Behind him the barred door shut with a dull metallic off-key sound. Before him was the cell. A man sat on the lower of the two bunks. He had a crewcut squaring off an oval face with a nose like a handle and eyes like two drops of tea under intense dark eyebrows. It was not an unpleasant face, but the man did not give any sign of welcome. He just sat on his bunk, sleeves rolled up almost to his shoulders. The collar of his shirt stood up too. He picked his nose and stared at Max. Besides the man and the two bunks, the upper one suspended from the wall by chains, there was a sink, a toilet, a desk that also lowered from the wall, and one barred window.
The Kiss of the Prison Dancer Page 17