He never talked about her either. My half-sister. She was four years old. I never knew exactly what had happened to her. When I was seven or eight – not too long before I met you, in fact – my mother told me that Lena had been killed with the other Jews in her town – that they were shot and their bodies thrown into a ravine. I didn’t know what a ravine was and imagined this big river with my sister floating away in it. That was the image that stayed with me: that the Nazis had drowned her in a big river. Mom didn’t know much more than that herself. From my reading, I’ve figured Lena was murdered in the summer of ’41, when the Einsatzkommando went into Eastern Galicia. They were the rifle squads who rounded up whatever Jews the locals left alive, lined them up naked at the sides of ditches or ravines – or graves the Jews were forced to dig themselves – and gunned them down. At that point, they were murdering the leaders first – Jewish professionals and rabbis and so on – so I don’t know how or why my father managed to survive. Maybe he was too young to be a leader. I just really have no idea. Roland said he was amazed that I never just out and asked him – when I was older, I mean. But even then, how could I have? If he was silent, it was because it would have killed him to speak, wasn’t it? Anyway, I couldn’t, I never could. I didn’t even begin to read about it – the Holocaust – until after I was out of school, after I came to New York. That was when my father first contracted cancer, so I guess it was another attempt to connect with him before it was too late, but I didn’t know that at the time. I just became fascinated with the subject suddenly, reading anything I could find about it. I mean, I’d read about it before, and I’d thought about it, but I’d avoided it too, emotionally, somehow. But now it got me. It started out, I was just walking by the Strand one day – walking up from Soho where I was waitressing sometimes – and I saw a book about it in the bins outside. Maybe The War Against The Jews or Terence des Pres, which had come out recently. I don’t remember. And I thought, hm, that looks interesting, and bought it and took it home. At first, I read books like that: overviews and theories. Getting sort of the historical movement, you know. That’s how I thought about the whole thing anyway: Jews’ rights were curtailed, then their locations were centralized in ghettoes; smaller, local killing actions went on and that led step by step to the invention of the gas vans and the death factories and finally there came the systematic emptying of the ghettoes into the camps and the gas chambers. I mean, it was almost an abstract thing, like following a battle on a map. But still, it gave me nightmares enough and stomachaches too. The inevitability of it, you know, the inevitability of the past, the done-ness. It drives you crazy after a while. You keep having these fantasies of stopping it, of changing it, and they’re like moths battering against a window because they see a fire inside but it’s a fire that’s already happened, that’s over, and the glass, anyway, is unbreakable. They kept me from sleeping – the fantasies more than the nightmares – so I would stay in Manhattan at night and drink in the bars around St Mark’s Place. And I’d meet guys – artists, craftsmen, hangers-around – and I started going home with them. I was just glad to be able to sleep away from my own bed and my books. Glad not to be alone. Before that, I’d had only two boyfriends, both in school. I’d been very slow about that sort of thing. Then I’d gone through this arch-feminist phase for a year or so, because I felt I’d been hurt, you know, by men. Anyway, I didn’t have much experience. But now, suddenly, it was every couple of nights. No condoms – we didn’t know about AIDS yet – sometimes not even my diaphragm. I didn’t kid myself about the emotional part – or I did because I thought there wasn’t any. It was all very modern and ironical and sort of deadpan, humorless. We’d do it and smoke cigarettes and shrug a lot without smiling, and then I’d be able to sleep. After a while, I started reading more personal books – Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi and so on – books by survivors. And I’d go over each incident and I’d keep asking myself – did this happen to my father, did this, did this? Did he survive like Levi because he had some scientific knowledge and they put him to work in a lab? Or was he one of the Sonderkommandoes who unloaded the bodies from the gas chambers and burned them, or even a capo, who policed his own people in order to stay alive. I used to look for his name in the indices. And of course, the sleeplessness got worse, the fantasies, of rescuing them – him – Lena – everybody. I stayed in Manhattan more and more, slept with more and more guys. Sometimes, I’d hook up with a guy for a week, a while, but then it would be no good, the insomnia would come back. Meanwhile, my father had had an operation and he was very sick, very weak. I would visit him and he was so thin and slow. I used to look at the pictures in the books, the photographs of the death camp inmates, skeletons painted with a coat of flesh – and the comparison was unbearable. As if it had somehow come back for him, as if he hadn’t gotten away at all. He would just sit in his chair all day now and watch TV. Nature shows. He loved those documentaries they do on Channel Thirteen, those incredible close-up shots of voles and ibexes eating each other or whatever. He bought a machine and taped them and I used to bring him videos from the store. I used to sit next to him, watching with him, holding his hand, feeling the loose flesh and the thin bones, and just forcing the words down into my throat: What happened, Daddy? What was it like? What did they do to you? Because how could I ask him, how could I make him talk about it? It wasn’t as if he’d changed any, being sick. My mother came to visit him once or twice and he turned that same old stare on her – his eyes were very big now but still intense – and she stopped coming after a while. He wouldn’t even let me stay with him for more than a day or two. He had a nurse, and he said he preferred to be alone. So anyway, now, when I went home to LIC, I was reading descriptions, any descriptions I could find, of actual, individual atrocities. Reading them over and over. Even hunting out unpublished testimony in the libraries once or twice to find new material. I wanted graphic stuff, see, emotional stuff. A baby being torn out of a mother’s hands and bashed dead against the ground near the unloading ramp at Auschwitz. Naked women shitting in terror as they waited their turn outside the gas chambers while the men were killed inside. A husband forced to unload his wife from the chamber, her legs streaked with shit and menstrual blood. A child being given candy and led by the hand to a place where he was autopsied alive. I wanted to stay nauseous, I wanted to have nightmares, I wanted to see it and feel it for myself. And at night, more nights than not, there I’d be, some guy I’d never met before covering me and sliding into me, sucking my breast – or me putting my mouth around his cock and drinking his scum, some guy I hardly knew. I don’t mean to make it sound hellish or anything. There was the usual collection of miserable experiences, but no one ever really hurt me or messed me up. Some of the guys were creeps, I guess, but a lot of them were just regular guys who figured, hey, they’d gotten lucky that night. I tried not to think too much about them. In fact, stupidly enough, the only one I really remember very well was this one kid, this total blithering asshole, because he was the one who finally put an end to it all. His name was Norman. He had to be all of seventeen years old. Very tall, very thin, ugly, stringy black hair down to his ass. Wore lots of leather with metal studs and death’s heads on them. And he had a particularly small dick which he made lots of unfunny, insecure jokes about. He was into heavy metal, which at the time was kind of underground stuff. I hadn’t paid much attention to it so I let him show me all these magazines he had. Pictures of bare-chested guys in leather pants playing guitars and thrusting their hips and screaming. Everyone’s seen them now – bands with names like ‘Satan’s Hour of Devastation’ or ‘Armageddon From Hell’ – but at the time I was pretty amazed. Norman explained to me how great they were because they sang these incredible songs, you know, like, about, like, serving Satan by becoming a sniper on Broadway and at the same time, you know, they make these, like, fucking motions with their hips and stick their tongues out like they’re eating pussy. And I nodded as best I could and said something like Wow, Norman, that’s gr
eat. I mean, the guy was a moron, what can I tell you? So then he fucked me which was, as you can imagine, a near-run thing, very desperate and incredibly quick. But he seemed very pleased with himself about it and he was kind of be-bopping naked around his studio afterwards, all energized, pretending to play an electric guitar and chewing gum and cupping his testicles in his hand and so on. And he noticed the book sticking out of the pocket of my flight jacket, which was hanging on his chair. I remember it was testimony from the Eichmann trial I’d found somewhere. And he kind of casually drew it out to see what it was. And he said, ‘Ooh, Nazi shit, wow, I love this shit, it’s really a turn-on.’ Then I guess he must have glanced over at me, because he said, ‘What. Hey, don’t look at me like that, man. It turns everybody on. How do you think they sell fucking newspapers? I mean, it’s not like it’s real people dying or anything. It’s just words on a page, you know. It’s just going on in your head, like a fantasy or something. It’s SM, man, everybody digs it.’ I’d like to say that I stormed out or threw up or something. But I just waved him off and rolled over and tried to sleep. Which, I’m sorry to say, made him giggle and get on top of me again. And he had at me from behind, more sure of himself this time, thwacking my ass with his hand, singing under his breath. I did manage to bury my face in the pillow so the little bastard wouldn’t hear me come.
Anyway, that’s how my Holocaust reading ended. Norman spoiled it. It just tapered off to nothing after that night with him. And my nympho period ended too. I still couldn’t sleep, but I started going to doctors for it, collecting prescriptions for tranquilizers. That’s how that got started. I guess I was pretty much tranked up most of the time until after Daddy finally died. Then I kicked the habit and went to Europe, like I said.
So now, old Harry – whoever you are – I hope my tale of woe hasn’t managed to alienate you completely. I do have that effect on people, I suspect. I did on my husband anyway, although I’m sure that had more to do with what I did to our baby. I never told him this stuff, not all of it. In fact, I’m probably going to burn this letter as soon as I finish it. Except maybe I won’t, you know. In which case, my nine-year-old hero:
All My Love,
Agnes.
I did a funny thing when I got this letter – an odd thing. I didn’t read it right away. I could guess the tenor of it and I didn’t want to ruin my good mood. So I carried the cream envelope around in my pocket for a day or two, shrugging it off when Marianne archly asked me what my ‘old girlfriend had to say.’ Then, one slow day at work, I drove out to Long Island with it and read it there. It was October, and the leaves were changing here now too and the hometown kids were back in school. The side streets were quiet, nearly empty. I parked the department’s Cadillac at the top of Piccadilly and walked down the road, past the ghost house, which was still there, to the Sole house, the muse of my old melancholies. It was painted an ugly tan these days with black shutters. The Finkelsteins were gone, and there were tricycles and a stroller on the grass out front. A lot of the houses on the block had been repainted or rebuilt, and whole new ones – big, gauche monsters – had replaced the humbler antiques in some places. The place was all changed, in other words, and yet it still managed to accomplish what I wanted. It made me nostalgic, brought up some gilded traces of the old emotions, gave me a context in which to bear her dissolution. It still had that power. That stupid, bourgeois little town. It has no meaning in the scheme of things, I know that. But I do believe that if you wiped the world clean, I could still walk the places where its streets had been. Maybe even if you wiped the world away, I could call it forth whole out of the interior terrain and walk it. Maybe, if it comes to that, I’m always walking it, every day. Maybe I’ve never walked anywhere else.
I did not hear from Agnes again for nine months, the worst nine months of my life, when I was invulnerable and full of joy. The Tax Commissioner finally died in that time, and I officially replaced her. My salary rose and Marianne began hunting for a new apartment with a feminine pleasure that made me feel manly and proud. She took pleasure, too, when the papers wrote about me, which they did once or twice, predicting good things. Her crystal blue eyes glistened, and she clipped the articles and saved them in one of those ring binders with the plasticine holders inside. Charlie, to our delight, was growing chunky and handsome and good-natured. He would walk beside me of a Saturday, holding my hand and looking up at me, or ride on my shoulders, beating a fond tattoo on my head. Marianne loved to see this, and would watch us from the window as we headed for the park together.
Agnes Mallory Page 18