A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  I slept until I was discovered and hefted from the canvas sacks in Köthen. A night and a day passed until, by accident, I found an empty boxcar headed north and collapsed.

  “Wer bist du?” The soldier woke me, I don’t know how much later; it could have been a dream.

  “Was ist heute?”

  “Der erste Mai.” He laughed.

  “Wo bin ich?”

  “In Hell,” he said, and burrowed deeper into his shadowy corner to stifle his uncontrollable giggles. The train had stopped. I looked through the door. The sign said Wannsee. Wannsee—where only three years earlier Heydrich and Himmler brewed the Final Solution and turned the world of travel upside down. I had come full circle. I was back in my element. I needed no map to tell me where to go.

  I wished the soldier well and slid heavily from the car. As my shoes hit the roadbed, my water broke, thick and red and gelatinous, soaking through my underpants. I left them on the gravel of the tracks. It was a warm May day, and the cool air on my thighs renewed my strength.

  My old Berlin had disappeared. I had heard nothing of the bombing in the nine months since I had left, nothing of the constant barrage of the big Russian guns, nothing of the special madness that had kept Hitler fighting past the point of breakage. Only the sound of distant guns convinced me that there was still a war going on. I set my course by smell—there were very few landmarks left standing.

  I had my first contraction near Bahnhof Zoo. Fire was everywhere, smoke everywhere else. Corpses missing limbs, corpses missing heads, everywhere horses, half-burned, half-eaten. There was no one about to hear my first cry of surprise. At the second contraction, I winced in disbelief. How could my passenger complain so sharply? But I kept walking. By the time I reached the shambles of the Potsdamer Platz and the billowing smoke of the Reichstag, the contractions were thirty paces apart. I began to sing, the fugue from Bach’s Sonata in G Minor for Solo Violin, its constant pulse matching my step, the way it had underscored the click of the wheels as Zoltan and I rode through the Auvergne. Each contraction crunched on the strings with the force of a double-stop, building to a triple-stop, and finally a fully armed four-note chord, stopping me for only the splittest of seconds before wrenching me back to the pulse.

  Twenty measures from the end of the fugue, I stood at the head of Iranische Strasse, barely able to walk. The street was paved with the houses of our neighbors, the bodies of soldiers, of old men, old women, young boys wearing hastily scribbled swastikas on their armbands. The police station at the corner was only a doorway and, remarkably, a glass lantern. The Swedish church across the street, where we had hidden so many Jews and other refugees, was a pile of bricks and broken glass. Only our house remained standing.

  I had to lean against the doorpost for a moment. The door had disappeared. So had the downstairs walls. I called for Papa, for Frau Wetzler. Nothing. I called again. There was a rustling from upstairs, heavy steps.

  Papa! I thought, and shouted, pulling myself heavily up the staircase—a contraction—bits of plaster slipping from under my shoes, the banister falling away with a bang as I reached the landing—another. Bits of wallpaper still clung to the hall, a photograph of my poor dead Mama, dusty but unbroken on its nail—Oh, Mama, help me, I looked in her eyes, willing the pain down, down. The door was closed to our sitting room, and its doorknob came away in my hand as I squeezed it with all the pain of the worst pain so far. Not a moment too soon, I thought, here it comes—Papa! And I opened the door.

  I knew he was a Russian from his uniform and his haircut, a slightly dented version of Zoltan’s. I was defenseless. There was no time to adapt, no easy Atlantic afternoons to become fluent in Russian entreaty, and all pantomime to explain my condition was redundant. His pants were dropping even as he backed me onto my old, familiar bed. All I could do was think about my passenger and hope there was room for two in the couchette.

  I screamed, from the pain, from the fear of the contraction, but he was at me, lifting my skirt, deaf, obviously, from months of shelling and fighting and death, to any human expression. But I screamed also from relief. I knew, before the Russian clawed at my hem, that the passenger had arrived, how completely, I could tell only from the look on the Russian’s face, just smelly, bristly inches from mine. There was no way, lying there in the dusty corner, the sound of artillery constant now as the tanks rolled freely into Berlin, that I could hold back any longer. I groaned, a groan of nine months of carting my passenger with the muscles of my legs, the tendons of my back, across Europe, home, home to Berlin. I pushed, I screamed, a Cyrillic scream that finally translated, as the Russian’s face jerked back, his lips pulled back from his jaws, his body tried to flee, as my baby, no longer a tadpole, but my great, hairy, toothy boy, reached with his first natal instinct, grabbed the red-veined testicles of the Russian, lifted his head with the upbeat of a born maestro, and sank his precocious teeth—poor, hungry thing—into the Russian’s half-cocked penis. Which of us fainted first I never discovered.

  HOLLAND—CHACONNE

  Isabella’s eyes were lowered, the violin case on her lap. I couldn’t tell whether she was embarrassed by Hanni’s description, tired from the long night, or simply didn’t understand.

  “When I woke up,” Hanni continued, “the Russian and the baby were gone. I was lying in my bed, covered by a clean blanket. Frau Wetzler was stroking my hair. She had arrived in time to deliver the afterbirth, but there had been no sign of either the baby or the soldier. I jumped out of bed, frantic, and ran down to the street. But you can imagine what it was like, the day the Russians liberated Berlin. I followed rumors, sightings, filed official reports in a British DP camp.

  “My favorite half-belief was that my son had been traded by the Russian to a British soldier for a carton of Woodbines, and then adopted by a spinster professor of philosophy at Cambridge. Two years later, I slipped into England as a domestic in Leo’s house. On my first half-Wednesday, I rode the Underground to Liverpool Street and the train to Cambridge. I walked the mile and a half from the station to the philosophy faculty. I walked from college to college.

  “I found the spinster professor’s rooms up a narrow staircase in Corpus Christi. Empty. No curtains, no cradle. It could have been Berlin. The porters told me she’d taken a post in the United States. No forwarding address.

  “Leo found me, rescued me from the grim confusion of Addenbrookes Hospital, thanked the porters for their attention. Eventually Leo loved me. Eventually he proposed. His love gave me strength enough to doubt the rumor. Eventually I doubted the birth itself. Because, in our twenty-five years of marriage, longer even than yours, Holland, I was unable to conceive.

  “Papa was dead—a knock on the door, a small sound, no time for surprise. There had been a body, a certificate, even a funeral of sorts. I visited his grave once with Frau Wetzler, the day before we were separated. He may have been the only travel agent to be buried among high-ranking Gestapo. He can’t have been the only Jew.

  “I never went back. That last night, in the shadows of the stairwell on Iranische Strasse, he had given me a message. He had entrusted me with Zoltan and the Esau Letter. With one, I would continue our race, with the other I would continue our history. I had lost both. I had failed him as an agent, I had failed him as a daughter.”

  “May second?” I asked Hanni.

  “May second, yes, nineteen forty-five. If my son were alive, somewhere, he’d be forty-six years old.” My age to the day, although I know I was born in Surrey to enormous celebration. “And August second,” Hanni added.

  “August second?”

  “The day I lost Zoltan.” A private Granadan thought. The date of my private loss, an emptiness, as strong as any contraction, enough to make me shiver in the Spanish darkness of the early morning. Not enough to make me talk, to tell that story.

  “Do you ever wonder,” I asked, “very early in the morning, alone and half-awake, whether there are choices we make, have made, that will come around again, and
then again? Not whether time will repeat itself, but whether people, things, we have lost or turned against will present themselves to us again? Whether we will have that second chance, that third chance, be stronger, wiser, more capable?”

  “There isn’t any way of looking at that film, is there?” Hanni pointed at my wheels. I had lost her.

  “Which film?” I was stuck in that endless close-up, the face of the Russian soldier on Iranische Strasse. I had forgotten about my wheels, Sandor, Flamenco Halevy, The Lost Tribes.

  “Did Sandor ever mention the war?”

  “He avoided it, the question.” I would have liked Hanni to answer me. Someone. “Before he moved down to Mariposa, he was kept as a semi-indentured servant/semi-houseguest in a bougainvillea-draped cliffhouse on the Costa Brava. His semi-semi-mistress was something to Franco. It embarrassed him in many ways. He was reduced to playing Sarasate party pieces in an ornate gazebo just north of S’Agaró. The more calorific the rondo, the more cholesterol in the glissandi, the higher the tip. His great escape was to the south. I never pushed for further info. I wanted him to play for me. Assumed he’d been in Spain during the Civil War, avoided the question.” I’d been embarrassingly derelict on the Sandor shoot. I knew little more about the man than when I had started. I was after a single, live performance, a tape, for purely personal and, I suppose one might unkindly say, reiteratively pornographic reasons.

  “So Sandor could be Zoltan!” Hanni’s eyes flashed. She screwed the top on her jar of kipferln and stood.

  The thought had occurred to me. The ages matched, the virtuosity. Both Zoltan and Sandor were as tall as necessary. I had a momentary something of a something at the black-and-white still of Zoltan/Sandor making love to this eighteen/sixty-five-year-old woman in a boxcar in the south of Vichy/France.

  I hooked up the Spinoza to the twenty-five-inch Mitsubishi in Sandor’s bedroom. Hanni sat at the foot of the four-poster. I opened a window as the tape began. Over the courtyard, over the far side of the villa, the grey, two-hour announcement of the onset of a new day was just clearing its throat at the horizon. The shadow of the beach was empty, a mile down and away.

  An eternity of black silence on the screen, waiting for the image of Sandor. I fast-forwarded the tape. Nothing. I switched tapes. Flamenco Halevy, Conchita, the military man, me and the owner of the Teatro La Rábida, dancing, my God, dancing. Switch. Ivy’s guitar, Roger’s voice, Isabella’s face looking down at the tabletop of the Santa Maria. Switch. Three tapes. No Sandor. Had I failed to push Record, inadvertently erased the tape, been unwittingly zapped at Colón by a roving Beta-ray machine? I knew the answers were No, but what other explanation for a lost fortune?

  “Slow down,” Hanni soothed from the foot of the bed. “Think. Where have you been? Where could you have left the tape? Dropped it? Has it been in your possession without interruption?”

  “Stop being such a travel agent!” I snapped at her common sense.

  Then I heard it. Heard, not saw—the screen still dark with the exposed, unenlightened, unforthcome tape. But the sound track—there were the first thick D minors of the Chaconne, regal, dignified, Sandor in caftan. We couldn’t see him, but the sound—

  “That’s it,” Hanni said, and when I turned, the music had lifted her off the mattress to a point somewhere just below the ceiling. “Zoltan, Sandor, Zoltan!” I felt her hand feeling into mine, a soft chamois palm. We stood there, staring at the blackness of the screen, each of us seeing something different but undoubtedly the same musician, as chords turned into a line of semiquavers, each one a miracle of precision, yet the entire line an argument, a persuasion with the force of a full novel, fictional notes far more vivid than any dry dissertation. The crystal arpeggios, the crackle of the demisemis, the reprise, the cusp of the modulation into the major—I was holding the hand of a strange woman staring at a failed TV screen, but I was hot, damp, hotter and damper than in the Plaza de Toros two, than in Hampstead fourteen years before. I had soaked through my knickers—the sound even more penetrating and destructive than the night before, when Sandor had been only six warm and human feet in front of me. I was squeezing Hanni’s hand, shaking, I couldn’t help it, my calves buckling, slipping off my shoes, two hundred measures on the way to a Mach 3 orgasm, when the light through the window caught the tip of a silver bow down below, and my eyes rose from the blank screen, out to the courtyard.

  She stood as she had behind the bulletproof glass at Colón, only this time I was above and the glass was air and proof against nothing. Isabella. Isabella, not Sandor, not Zoltan. Although, to be more truthful, it was Isabella and Sandor, the pupil having mimicked the teacher so well, not just the style, but the tone, the timbre, the attack, the vibrato, the aura of the musician. A thirteen-year-old girl with a gift of music and ventriloquism so perfect that we had stood fifteen minutes in front of an empty TV screen in the belief that ghosts could play Bach. Hanni, at her lower height, couldn’t see. I didn’t want to make a move that might interrupt the music, that might distract her, that might break Isabella’s magic.

  All the same, I was distracted. There are certain taboos that even I tremble at breaking. And I trembled on the brink of trembling. How to turn the heat from my groin to my chest, since, Isabella, I loved you already?

  As the Chaconne drew to its final reprise, D minor again, full and strong, Hanni’s grip on my hand loosened. She followed my eye and took the step to the window. What power, what strength that girl had, a fortissimo so strong, the last chord as fierce and as loud as the explosion—it could have been the same chord, the same sequence of notes—that destroyed the Santa María.

  Isabella looked up. Her bow arm relaxed, then the fiddle, with the smoothness of a sweep-second hand. Her head tossed once, a shiver, the hair back over the shoulder. She smiled. I felt such an emptiness that it was only Hanni’s arm pointing, her eyes, unbelieving, threatening to ignite the courtyard, that pulled me up from drowning. I followed the direction of her arm down to Isabella’s violin case. There, held tight by the pressure of two auxiliary bows, was a packet of papers, tied in a hair ribbon, faded, frayed, but, even from our height, unmistakably purple.

  “Esau.”

  Tell me a story.

  THE ESAU LETTER

  A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

  In a previous edition of the Guide, we printed correspondence with a traveler that we felt bore directly on the question of authenticity. We are reprinting a brief extract in the current edition in the hope of clarifying what we feel to be one of the chief concerns of the questioning traveler.

  “Let everyone,” the traveler wrote, “confess that there is not in all the world a more beauteous damsel than the Empress of La Mancha, the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso.”

  While admiring the conviction of the writer, and having no cause to doubt his word, we replied that we were loath to pass judgment without meeting the woman.

  “If I were to show her to you,” he wrote by return post, “what meat would there be in your confessing a truth so self-evident? The important thing is for you, without seeing her, to believe, confess, affirm, swear, and defend that truth.”

  Ben

  PAPA—25 FEBRUARY 1939

  Aboard the Queen Mary

  25 February 1939

  My dearest daughter Hannah,

  You are thirteen. You may have thought in the surprise and sorrow of your Mama’s death that I had forgotten. I had not. The thirteenth birthday has meant a great deal to Mama’s family and mine, which, as you know—if only in a vague sense of felt dinner-table conversations and whispered jokes—are the same family.

  It is an ancient principle among the Jews to honor their own at this birthday, which in former times signaled the legal and religious beginning of adulthood and responsibility. Our family has been short on religion, but long on tradition. And in our family, no story has carried on the tradition as strongly as the Esau Letter.

  It is a letter, a history, a deathbed testament written by our ancestor,
Eliyahu ben Moshe Halevy, to his only son, Eliphaz, 433 years ago. To your Mama, this letter was the sun, the moon, and the stars. To me? Ah, Hanni. Perhaps it is only a father who sees more history in his daughter’s eyes than in a few scraps of paper.

  You and I are embarking today on an adventure back to the dark continent from whence our ancestors sailed hundreds of years ago. It may strike you as odd that we return while our people are fleeing in ever-increasing numbers. “Our survival is in our motion,” Esau writes in his letter. Some read that to mean flight. I read it otherwise, but then, I am a travel agent. Perhaps your eyes will find a third reading that will guide you through the uncertain days ahead.

  Your loving Papa

  ESAU—A BRIEF RELIGIOUS HISTORY

  Mayaimi

  31 December 1506

  My dearest Eliphaz,

  When you were small, and I was agile enough to duck, you asked me many questions. Why was I a full head taller than any man in our village? Why did I have a beard when no other man had a single hair on his face? Why was your mother’s skin even and dark, while mine was rough and pale? Why was the penis of your uncle smooth like an eel, while mine was rough with the bumps of a lizard?

  These are good people that we live among, the Mayaimi. They have shown me only kindness. They have allowed me to show them knowledge. They have accepted me like a brother, and you like a nephew.

  But they are not our people.

  You have heard me talk, on the warm full moons when the women and children gather with the men on the shore round the council fire, of a land across the water, a land almost as far away as the rising sun. I will not live to see that sun rise again. Listen to my story.

  I was born in a land of three tribes. Not the Calusa, the Jeaga, and the Mayaimi of your homeland, but the Catholics, the Muslims, and the Jews. None of these tribes believe in the Fish Spirit. None of them believe in the Deer Spirit. None believe in the Spirit of the Hunt, the Spirit of the Fire, or the spirits of the thousand wonders your playmates and their mothers and their fathers worship. They believe in a single spirit called God, whose breath takes refuge in every thing that lives on land and in the sea, every pebble and every star.