A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

Whatever—tall, short, slim, plump, young, mature, dark, or fair—you’d be different, a man in a different image. I couldn’t tell them, Isabella, Hanni, could I? About the fourteen years, the fourteen years since Hook. The fourteen years and hundreds of penises, great and small, thick and thin, knobbed and veined, circumcised and un-, consistent only in their inability to—s’i’ credesse, Ben—to sustain an erection.

  The first four or five times you think, oops, a spot of bad luck, girl. These men are working too hard, drinking too hard, making love too recently to their wives, donating blood at lunchtime. Then the suspicion begins to creep up your thigh that you attract only impotent men. And there you are, just one frustrating truth away from the recognition that your spanking-new, ultra-fantastic, super-sexy body is just Too Much. Men are overwhelmed by it, can’t see past the curves how they could possibly please it, fill it, excite it, satisfy it, stand up to it. So they don’t.

  Word gets around. For a while, you become a challenge, and, itchy as you are, you revel in it. The airline pilots, the muscle-builders, the construction workers, the entire trombone section of the Berlin Philharmonic have a go at you. Blind men, men wearing gloves, it doesn’t matter. No sensory deprivation is total enough for you to find a man who can make love to you the way Man ought. I have it on film—one doctor insisted. It’s like a Looney Tunes cartoon, the potted plant wilting as soon as the watering can comes near. Then the challenges dry up. It’s hardly reasonable to expect an entire species to play sexual Sisyphus.

  But you’d be different, Ben—s’i’ credesse! You would take me here, jumpsuit down, unclasp my bra. You’d bend and cup my breast around your bearded, bristled, smooth-shaven cheek, take its fullness into the wide O of your mouth, tease my nipple with your tongue. You’d lift me up and off—whatever your size, your strength would be infinite. You’d take me in your hairy, muscled, tattooed, slender, balletic arms, and float me into the garden like Good King Sol with the Hashemite woman, lay me beneath the olive trees on a bed of lichen and thyme. My head would arch back to the stars above the Moorish wall as those strong, delicate, workmanlike hands of a violinist spread my thighs apart with the merest, impossibly tender touch, and the mouth I’ve never heard talks to me in a tongue I haven’t felt since my second spring. And then, like the never-faltering wonder you are, you would rise up before me, the waters would part, and unlike, very unlike, the rest, never wilting, never failing, move into me, around me, guide me, send me travelling as no man has in fourteen winters, fourteen summers.

  O Ben, O Ben, O Ben, Ben, Ben …

  “Here’s my story, Isabella. Like Holland, I changed.”

  Re-zipped, de-storied, I sat on the steamer trunk by the fountain. Isabella had wedged a cushion between two stone lions. Hanni stood before us, eyes sparkling, poised to recite.

  A week after Mama’s death, Papa sold the travel business and wrote us two tickets on the Vulcania to fight the Fascists in Spain. Mama died on my thirteenth birthday, but as I had been figuring the accounts in the office for over two years, Papa expected he’d find some suitable desk job for me among the Republicans.

  Mama had always wanted to tour the Spain of her ancestors. But I don’t think guilt played a major role in Papa’s choice of destination. Mama was the one who set great stock in death and remembrance. She was the one who collected history books. Papa bought art—well-framed reproductions of Modigliani and Picasso, autographed photos of baseball stars. Papa’s vision was forward, always forward. He loved Mama with pride and genuine physical passion. But Mama was dead, her body cremated. Tears had been shed, ashes stored in a discount urn in Queens. The inventory of Halevy Travel now belonged to a Pole named Zenizek. It was Monday, a new week.

  I packed ten days’ worth of clothing for each of us in two medium-size mahogany-colored dry-cleaning boxes with leather straps. A hand-tooled portfolio held our European maps and railroad timetables. My vision of traveling off to fight for freedom in the parlor car of a regularly scheduled train was not entirely crazy. New York was well insulated from the bitter cold of Europe. The week before we left, the thermometer climbed to 70 degrees for the big Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, and the Yankees headed off to spring training in St. Pete without signing Joe DiMaggio.

  The pain of leaving America struck me only on the morning of our departure, standing with our bags in the shadow of the great hull of the Italian liner at the end of Fifty-second Street. Fifty-second Street itself—not at the Hudson River but in the heart of the heart of the city, the Onyx, the Famous Door, the jazz clubs that Mama and Papa loved, the 78s they brought home, autographed by Joe Venuti, Stuff Smith, Eddie South. And a memory of a river—standing in the middle of the middle of the brand-new George Washington Bridge, the biggest bridge in the world, the three of us spitting down into the Hudson, like Galileo from the leaning tower of Pisa. I had thought of myself as a citizen of maps, and my innocence caught me that much more by surprise. I had never traveled.

  “Where’s Papa?” Zenizek ran up, out of breath. I pointed to the shipping office. Fifteen minutes later, the two of them returned. Papa hoisted me on his shoulders. Zenizek strapped our luggage on his back. Our plans had changed. The Spanish government had fallen. Franco was in power. Papa was a romantic, but he was not a fool. Two blocks later, we stood in the shadow of the Queen Mary. Just after noon, we waved to Zenizek from the tourist-class deck, as we pushed back from the dock and sailed, in front of the Vulcania, bound for Cherbourg.

  It was a Saturday, February 25, 1939. Bette Davis had just won the Oscar for Jezebel.

  Because we had booked at the last possible minute, our cabin was cramped, below the lowest of the low. It was equipped with a single bunk—I slept on a fold-out cot—and shared a communal toilet and bathroom with the entertainers. It was there, as I was damping my frizzy hair in the hopes of keeping it down, that one of the long-legged chorus girls told me that Yehudi Menuhin was a passenger and would perform that night for the first-class passengers.

  You had to have been deaf and blind in America in the thirties not to have heard of Yehudi, the child prodigy, the chubby little California boy who wowed Elman, Heifetz, and Kreisler himself with a monstrous technique and a fierce concentration. I had seen him play a Paganini caprice at a New Year’s Day party when I was five—all fireworks and gunpowder. As soon as the last explosion had died away, I rushed over and hugged him so tightly that it was only with the promise that he would teach me a tune that he rescued his violin. We spent the rest of the afternoon together with his beautiful sisters. At bedtime, I told Mama on the spot that Prince Charming could go find himself another bride, I would marry a violinist.

  Dressed in the memory of that afternoon, wearing party frock, adult stockings, and patent-leather pumps, I stepped across the chain at five minutes to eight and marched down the corridor to the first-class salon of the Queen Mary. I had, of course, sold plenty of first-class tickets in my brief career in the business. But we were a family of travel agents, movers, never passengers. The idea that the restrictions and privileges of class applied to me and Papa was entirely absent from my plans for the evening.

  So my struggle against the steward’s request that I leave the recital and go back to the tourist side of the ship began as sincerely bewildered innocence. It was only as the whispers rose around me—half-caught half-sentences about my “rudeness,” my “hair,” my “nose,” my “Jewish behavior”—that my resistance turned into refusal. I think the steward would have left well enough alone—the lights were dimming—if I hadn’t insisted on maintaining my right to stay by shouting, “Hi, Yehudi, it’s me, Hanni!” as my hero walked out onto the stage.

  “Perhaps we spoiled you, your mother and I,” Papa said a few minutes later, stroking my wild hair while I cried out my anger. “There are rules and regulations in fine print at the bottom of every ticket, yours included.”

  “I don’t like being a passenger,” I shouted at him. “I want to go home.”

  “Another week or so,
” he said.

  “Cooped up in this cabin?” I wailed.

  “Here.” He handed me a packet of papers. “If you have nothing better to do, read this,” and he walked quietly into the corridor.

  That was the first time I held the Esau Letter in my hands, the letter I’ve come to Spain to find. Over the next few years, I read the Letter dozens, hundreds, of times, memorized passages. But that night on the Queen Mary, as I sat in the cabin, reading about events five hundred years distant, all I could think was how sad it must be to be my father, to be my travel agent. And hours later, when my godlike Papa returned from the bar leading a flushed Yehudi by the arm for a private midnight recital, it was only the strongest, most supreme joy that overcame my remorse and contrition.

  Though we continued to see Yehudi, the sea change in both me and Papa owed more to the triumph of Papa’s will. Yehudi had turned into a slimmed-down twenty-one, newly married, with an expectant wife back in California. I had lost a dream husband. No matter. I had fallen desperately in love with my father. And on the fourth day of my trip, on the strength of my father’s lesson, I attracted another beau.

  The unseasonably sunny weather was perhaps part of the cause for my metamorphosis on board the Queen Mary. A change, Holland—not as dramatic, perhaps, as your dramatic growth. A change, after all, is not unexpected in a thirteen-year-old who finds herself bereft of a mother and embarked on the Queen Mary in the space of two weeks. Still, sudden emotion and exposure to the sun doesn’t turn black hair blond. Brown eyes don’t turn blue from tears or from hours of staring at the waves, no matter what the song says. I began to menstruate on board ship, but that wouldn’t entirely explain the changes in my features, the rising of the cheekbones, the shortening of the nose. Something happened. That something must have been Papa. Papa’s footnotes to the Esau Letter, Papa’s lessons about motion. Papa’s dreamy-eyed dissertation on travel agents. Papa was preparing me for a new life, a new challenge in our new destination—Germany.

  Over the years, and by years Papa meant centuries, the family had developed a theory of survival based more on physics than biology. In the beginning of the universe—and you understand that the seeds of this theory were sown long before Newton and fertilized well before Einstein—all matter was condensed into a single particle. All matter. Everything that might possibly, someday, somewhere, somehow, turn into something—stars, planets, moons, trees, oceans, people, fish, hair, warts, holidays in Tuscany, sleepless nights, falling in love—everything was contained in this single particle. Then something pushed this particle, something split it, something started it moving at an unbelievably fast pace, so fast that the universe continues to expand to this day. Time continues to move forward, people are born, copulate, and die, life goes on.

  And you ask yourself, if you are a curious person, who pushed the particle without being pushed himself? Who split this lifeball without herself exploding into hundreds of thousands of millions of pieces? What started the whole ball rolling without losing its balance? Some call it God, some call it the Unmoved Mover.

  Our family says it’s travel agents, travel agents who move the world.

  Of course it’s a give-and-take. Sometimes people decide for themselves where and when and how they want to go. Sometimes other people decide for them. Ultimately, they all ask the travel agent, even those who believe they are clever enough to book direct. Ultimately, it is the travel agent who writes the fine print.

  “There are going to be a lot of people in motion throughout Europe in the next few years,” Papa predicted in the winter of ’39. “They are going to need our help.” With the fall of the Republic in Spain, the next logical travel hub was Berlin. And by the force of a will that would have been the envy of Hitler had he known of it, in only three days Papa and I acquired an impeccable command of German, as it is spoken by an echt Berliner who has been forced—by circumstances unmentioned but undoubtedly to do with the Treaty of Versailles—to live outside his beloved city for a time. My father went from Mr. to Herr, and I from Marjorie Morningstar to Marlene Dietrich.

  “Gloria Swanson,” Jack said, as he vaulted across the chain from the first-class deck to tourist during a lifeboat drill. “Gloria Swanson, that’s who you look like.” He insisted on cinching my life jacket and spent the rest of the afternoon sipping bouillon on the promenade deck with me and Papa, making sure we knew about his brilliant career at Harvard, his brother the Air Force pilot, and how he was off to London to give his father, the U.S. ambassador, a few tips about Britain and appeasement. The next evening, my makeover so successful that no steward approached except to hold my chair, I dined with Jack at the captain’s table. I liked Jack, he was a mover. At the very least, he knew all the moves.

  “He’s got all the makings of a travel agent,” I said proudly to Papa after Jack had escorted me back from a flirtatious starlit stroll to the eighth ring of our tourist-class inferno.

  “I’m afraid not, Hanni,” Papa said, stroking my hair, still marveling over his new, womanly daughter. “He knows how to move people. I wish your Mama could see how lovely you look.” I shimmied away from his hand, shy but delighted.

  “But Jack needs the company of people,” Papa went on. “So too does a travel agent, from time to time, have to be a passenger, to mix, to judge, to consider. But afterward, it’s back to the desk, to the phone, to the timetables. Jack is a star. If we do our jobs right, we travel agents are merely the darkness at the center of the universe.”

  Within four weeks we had set up shop as MittelEuropa Reisebüro on Iranische Strasse in the heart of Berlin. Upstairs, a bedroom and a sitting room, downstairs, the office, with a small alcove for reception, and a large kitchen with an eating nook that doubled at night as a bedroom for our one luxury—Frau Wetzler. An unused basement and dusty attic served to store files, furs, and fugitives, with little thought to their future value. Cozy, efficient.

  Even then, six months after the unmistakable signal of Kristallnacht, the Jews of Germany were booking vacations along the Baltic coast, cruises to Reykjavik and the Norwegian fjords. Until the end of 1941, when the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and the Wannsee Conference dealt a serious blow to the travel business, the German government actively encouraged the emigration of German Jews. By moving Jews north, west, south through Italy to Palestine, through Spain and France to Bolivia and Argentina, through the Netherlands to the Caribbean, and from everywhere to the United States and Canada, we were providing a universal service.

  We had only two opponents. One was bureaucracy—the eight-page, hopelessly detailed documentation of possessions, from pocket watches to shirt studs. I helped hundreds of families fill in these forms, hired derelicts to stand on line, bribed officials to move our clients up the visa ladder. But our most determined enemy was the Jews themselves, the bullheaded German Jews who wanted to stay and tough it out, the Jews who felt that their exodus would signal the death of German Kultur. It took hidden discounts, reduced fares, incentive programs, magicians and Mendelssohn for Papa and me to encourage families to pack, to take their children and grandparents. Twenty thousand Jews left Germany on package cruises in those last few years before travel, as we had known it, became illegal.

  Many of these discounts, of course, came out of our pockets, and we had to take on a good deal of government work to make ends meet. Papa joined the Party—there were more than a few secret Jews. I dated appropriate officials whenever appropriate. We consulted with the government to improve the railroad timetables; we passed along the wisdom of centuries on how to move large groups of passengers. We moved by train, by plane, by boat, by car. In the first six months of 1944, we booked over two million individual tickets.

  We tried to move more clients westward than eastward. Our unspoken personal defense was rooted in that balance. We kept statistics, in neatly bound ledgers, like good Germans. For the sake of sanity, we couldn’t afford to look at them.

  Much of our success came through
our furniture-moving division. Whenever an officer needed to move house or office—the skeptical aristocrats of the Luftwaffe were particularly helpful—Papa or I would arrange for a few Jewish families, hidden in our warehouses, root cellars, and friendly churches, to be packed in sideboards or piano cases and spirited out of the country. It seemed safer initially for us to make all the arrangements without the participation of either foreign governments or resistance movements.

  But one morning—a warm, brilliant 1943 June—a message arrived at Iranische Strasse. A Danish border guard had discovered a sealed boxcar with our stamp—a container of thirty-five ornamental urns, shipped weeks before to Stockholm. I borrowed a driver from a beau in the Gestapo, along with several sticks of dynamite. From one hundred yards away, the stench told me all I needed to know. Thirty-five Jews had either starved or suffocated to death. I had to blow up the boxcar to hide the evidence. I cried for a week.

  Papa and I recognized two facts—that we needed help and a change of tactics. Moving large numbers of people was no longer effective. We had to narrow our focus, to move one person in particular, even if assassination was the motion of choice.

  So it came to pass, on the night of July 20, 1944, as Papa and I sat numbed by Hitler’s voice on the radio, that I first spoke to Zoltan. Hitler was railing, shrieking about an attempted assassination earlier that day that had left him wounded but still firmly in command. I discounted the entire story initially as fabrication, an opportunity to clean out the ranks. But I knew Papa’s silence well enough to sense not only that the plot was sincere, but that somewhere along the line, transportation had been provided by MittelEuropa Reisebüro.

  There was a knock. Zoltan was ushered in by Frau Wetzler. Papa’s face cleared for a moment, a look of relief, perhaps even joy. He flipped off the radio, turned to me to make a quick introduction, and then dropped back into his chair, his face wet, as if tears had blanketed the night like morning dew.