What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories

by Nathan Englander

  No one knew the quality of the Anti-Semite’s night vision. The only claim that could be made in his defense is that until the lapse, the Blum boys had been the sole draggers of the garbage pails on every other trash day in memory. In the Blum boys’ defense—and they would forever feel they needed one—three watched windows left one side of the house unguarded. All that said, the sound of metal pails being dragged up a gravel driveway brought the Anti-Semite racing out of the dark—and masked his approach for Mrs. Blum.

  Mrs. Blum, of course, had not been in our class. She had no notion of self-defense and was wholly unfamiliar with weaponry. When this brute materialized before her, his arm already in motion, she did not assume a defensive posture. She did not raise her fists or prepare to lunge. What she did was turn at the last instant to get a look at the tiny leather wand sticking out from his swinging hand. She had never seen a blackjack before. When the single blow met with the muscles of her back, it sent a shock through her system so great that she saw a thousand pinpricks in her eyes and felt her legs give way completely. Connecticut or no, Mrs. Blum was a Jew. “Shanda!” she said to the boy, who was already loping off.

  Oh, those poor Blums. As we had found Zvi, Zvi discovered his own mother—not hanging from a bolt, but curled in the grass. Inside the house, an ice pack in place and refusing both hospital and house call, Mrs. Blum told her sons what she’d seen.

  “Shanda!” she said again. “Busha!”

  The boys agreed. A shame and an embarrassment.

  When their mother lifted the receiver to call the police, Aaron pressed his finger down into the cradle of the phone. Mrs. Blum looked at her son and then replaced the receiver as Aaron slid his finger away. “Not this time,” he said. And this time, she didn’t.

  · · ·

  When my mother told my father what had happened, he didn’t want to believe it. “Nobody ever wants to believe what happens to the Jews,” she said, “not even us.” My father simply shook his head. “Since when,” my mother said, “do anti-Semites have limits? They will cross all lines. Greenheath no better.” Then she, too, took to shaking her head. I was sorry I’d told her, sorry to witness her telling him. We’d known our parents would respond with hands to mouth and oy vey iz mirs, but none of us expected to see such obvious disillusionment with the world they’d built. I turned away.

  Though we’d been abandoned, Boris’s wisdom still held sway. We were going to see to it that the Anti-Semite never hit back again. “Anti-Semite school,” Harry Blum called it, mustering a Boris-like tone. A boy who attacks a woman half his size, who had already attacked her son, would, if able, do the same thing again. We decided we would use Zvi as our siren—set him out in the middle of the lot at the public school, so that the Anti-Semite might be drawn by the irresistible call of the vulnerable Jew. The rest of us would stay hidden in those bushes and then fall on our enemy as one. But looking from face to face, taking in skinny Lipshitz and fat Beryl, the three Blums full of anger and without any reach, we realized that we couldn’t defeat the Anti-Semite, even as a group.

  Boris was right. It was true what he’d said about us. We were ready, we were raring, and we were useless without a leader. We went off like that, leaderless, to Ace Cohen’s house.

  · · ·

  Tears, mind you. We saw tears in Ace Cohen’s eyes. He stopped playing his Asteroids and did not get back into bed. Little Mrs. Blum attacked—it was too much to bear. Such aggression, he agreed, needed to be avenged. “So you’ll join us,” we said, assuming the matter had been decided. But he wouldn’t. He still didn’t want any part of us. A singular matter, the blow to Mrs. Blum. And likewise a singular matter, he felt, was the act of revenge.

  One punch is what he offered. “You’ve got me, my Heebie-Jeebies. But only for one swing.” We pressed him for more. We begged leadership of him. He showed us his empty hands. “One punch,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

  · · ·

  Certain things went according to plan. When the Anti-Semite arrived, he showed up alone. That he passed on a Saturday, and in a mood to confront Zvi, we took as a sign of the righteousness of our scheme.

  We’d already been hiding in those bushes all morning, skipping shul. Sore and stiff, we were sure that the creaking of our joints would give us away, that the sound of our breathing, as all our hearts raced, would reveal the trap we’d laid.

  And Zvi—what can be said about that brave Blum, out there alone on the asphalt between the jungle gym and the bushes, cooking under the hot sun? Zvi was poised in his three-piece suit, a red yarmulke like a bull’s-eye on top of his head.

  The Anti-Semite immediately began to badger Zvi. Zvi, empowered, enraged, and under the impression that we would immediately charge, spewed his own epithets back. The moment was glorious. Little Zvi in his suit, addressing—apparently—the brass belt-buckle on that mountain of a bully, raised an accusing finger. “You shouldn’t have,” Zvi said. His words came out tough; they came out beautiful—so boldly that they reached us in the bushes, and clearly moved the Anti-Semite to the point of imminent violence.

  The situation would have been perfect if not for one unfortunate complication: the small matter of Ace Cohen’s resistance. Ace Cohen was unwilling to budge. We begged him to charge with us, to rescue Zvi. “Second thoughts,” he said. “A fine line between retaliation and aggression. Sorry. I’ll need to see some torment for myself.” We implored him, but we didn’t charge alone. We all stayed put until push came to shove, until the Anti-Semite started beating Zvi Blum in earnest, until Zvi—his clip-on tie separated from his neck—hit the ground with a thud.

  Then we sprang out of the bushes, on Ace’s heels. We had the Anti-Semite surrounded, and Zvi pulled free with relative ease.

  Ace Cohen, three inches taller and fifty pounds heavier, faced the bully down.

  “Keep away” is all Ace said. Then, without form or chi power, his feet in no particular stance, Ace swung his fist so wide and so slowly that we couldn’t believe anyone might fail to get out of the way. But maybe the punch just looked slow, because the bully took it. He caught it right on the chin. He took it without rocking back—an exceptional feat even before we knew that his jaw was broken. He remained stock-still for a second or two. Not a bit of him moved except for that bottom jaw, which had unhinged like a snake’s and made a solid quarter turn to the side. Then he dropped.

  Ace pushed his way through the circle we’d formed. It closed right back up around the Anti-Semite, bloodied and now writhing before us.

  As I watched him, I knew I’d always feel that to be broken was better than to break—my failing. I also knew that the deep rumble rolling through us was only nerves, a sensitivity to imagined repercussion, as if a sound were built into revenge.

  What we really shared in that instant was simple. Anyone who stood with us that day will tell you the same. With the Anti-Semite at our feet, confusion came over us all. We stood there looking at that crushed boy. And none of us knew when to run.

  Peep Show

  Allen Fein is on his way to Port Authority when he stubs his toe and scuffs his shoe—puts a nick in a five-hundred-dollar investment. He pulls out a handkerchief and spit-shines his toe cap, cursing with every pass of the cloth.

  The scuffing, the nick, has bumped Allen from the flow to which he is accustomed. And he looks around Forty-second Street at the gentrified theaters and the wholesome shops, the kind a family can enter in the bright light of day. Where are all the hucksters who used to stand outside promising Nirvana and shaken booty, forbidden acts and creamy thighs? So busy has Allen been with his own transformation that he’s missed the one going on around him.

  He blushes at the thought, wondering how little Ari Feinberg had ever become Allen Fein, Esq., in fancy oxblood wing tips. When had he become a grown man, on his way home to a loving wife, a pregnant wife, a beautiful blond Gentile wife, who laughed when he didn’t know how to work the Christmas lights, who bought a candle with a picture of Jesus on it
when it came time for the memorial for his father? (“They were out of the little white ones,” Claire had said. “Can’t you just turn Jesus toward the wall?”)

  Allen straightens his tie and picks up his briefcase. He takes another look around and asks himself, As polished, as straight, as on the up-and-up as Forty-second Street now appears, is it still the same inside?

  And then the man says it.

  “Buddy,” he says. “Mac,” he says. “Upstairs. Girls. Live girls inside.”

  “What?” Allen says, catching the sign in the window: a giant neon token with “25¢” flashing in its center.

  “That’s right, buddy,” the man says. “Twenty-five cents for a spherical miracle. New York’s only three-hundred-and-sixty-degree all-around stage. Just follow the stairs, you can’t get lost—all the arrows lead to one place.”

  And Allen goes in, glancing only for a second to see if fate has mustered an office mate or neighbor to descry his ascent. He heads into a stairwell and makes his way to the second floor.

  When he enters the hall, he faces a towering figure behind a counter. Behind this giant, the hallway opens into a large room containing a single massive pillarlike structure, with doors to individual booths spaced evenly all around.

  Allen smiles at the man as if the two are in on a joke, as if his visit is an understandable bit of mischief, the kind of thing he could tell Claire about. Yes, if he feels guilty enough, he’ll tell Claire he went inside. Allen fishes out a quarter and places it on top of the counter.

  “A dollar,” the man says.

  “It says a quarter.”

  “It’s a dollar,” the man says. He does not return Allen’s smile.

  Fumbling with his wallet, Allen pulls out a five-dollar bill and takes five tokens—too bashful to ask for change.

  · · ·

  “Touch,” she says. She is looking right at him; she can see him. This is not how Allen Fein remembers past visits, not with the women staring back. There are four women seated on a carpeted platform, and all, eyeing him, make the same offer. “Touch,” they say. “Touch.” Well, three of the women say it. The fourth—sitting in a cheap plastic lawn chair, too wide for it, her thighs, cut in half, drooping, like her breasts, in languid arcs toward the floor—is reading a book. She’s got glasses on and is holding a page, ready to turn it, and Allen knows the motion will be slow and lazy, as weary as her posture.

  They are all naked, or almost so. The second woman wears a bra, the third panties, and the fourth has the book and glasses. It is the first one who is, to Allen, beautiful.

  He has not set foot in a peep show since boyhood, but he recalls almost everything from then. He remembers shivering so badly that his teeth chattered, his hands pressed between his legs for warmth. He’d been afraid that he might freeze to death, actually expire from excitement. And he’d often indulged this nightmare, squandered precious viewing time on the darker fantasy of dropping dead right there in the booth. Allen remembers the old setup. The sound of a token dropping and then the labored spin of gears. He remembers the strip of light at the bottom of the window frame as the wooden partition was drawn up into the wall. Behind thick glass—smudged and fingerprinted, always fogged with heavy breath—were the women. They danced as if they cared, moving to titillate the observer.

  The individual booths are more or less the same. It’s the windows that are different. Allen is shocked to find that the glass is gone. The women just sit on their chairs, vivid, looking back.

  The stage is circular and completely surrounded by the inner wall of the booths. Many of the partitions are raised, and Allen can see men in their compartments at all angles. One middle-aged, broad-headed voyeur is clearly masturbating with vigor. Allen catches the eye of a Latino man off to the side, wearing the very same tie he is. Allen puts a hand on his chest and feels the tie pulsing along with his heart. The Latino man, such a good-looking man, turns away from Allen and makes eye contact with the woman in the bra.

  She stands up and walks over to the man, and his hands come out through the window, penetrating the fantasy world. Allen has never seen it broached before—the world of dreams cracked open.

  · · ·

  When the first girl looks at Allen, he feels unworthy to watch. He can hardly bear having her acknowledge him. He wants to ask her what she is staring at. “Can I help you?” he would have said if they had been anywhere else. The girl is perfection, and Allen wants her desperately. It’s a feeling so pure that he wants to cry. How terribly unfair that his whole self aches because of the shape of a shoulder, the soft line of a hip. Allen stares at the girl’s legs, a deep black against the whiteness of the chair, and then up at the trained beckoning in her face. There is the glow of real personality behind the staged.

  “Touch,” she says. And Allen wants to touch her—to see if she is real. But he hasn’t yet responded, and the girl is moving toward him, long and graceful, the woman of his dreams.

  Allen is shaking again, as he did when he was a boy. And why shouldn’t he be? A loyal husband, who, reaching out, touching, had always honored his vows.

  He does not move his hands or his fingers, just holds them against her wonderful skin, so warm, almost hot. The girl takes Allen’s hands in her own, presses them to her chest, and massages. It calms him. She does this like an expert, a masseuse, someone trained in an art. Allen hasn’t been so aroused in years. He wants to climb through the small window to be with this woman. But the partition starts to come down. His time has run out. In the split second he has to make his choice, Allen takes back his hands.

  Leaning up against the wall in a panic, Allen tells himself that the fondling of this woman was an aberration, just like his coming up those stairs.

  He had only wanted a peep. He’d gone up the stairs a loyal husband and lover, a working man on his way home to the burbs. And now, minutes later, a different man emerges: a violator of girls and wives and matrimonial bonds. Allen considers leaving the booth, though his legs feel hollow and unsteady. And there is also his erection, diabolically hard, bringing to mind all the basest descriptions in pornographic magazines.

  Allen is so close to climax that he is afraid to move. He wants to get away without having to face the enormity of his pleasure. He remains still, his hand clutched tightly around the tokens, and thinks of Claire waiting at the bus stop, the seat belt stretched over the arc of her stomach, a chamomile tea steaming in her travel mug. But then there is the girl on the other side. So wonderful. Her legs and skin. The way, the skill, with which she touched. The idea of her is so enticing, it pushes him past control. Allen lets go and lets the shame rush in and fill the emptiness, so that even his hollow legs feel solid and full.

  Immediately, there is plotting. Already the deceit grows. What to do with his boxer briefs? And to ride the bus to Parsippany this way, to face Claire, soiled. She could drop him at the gym. The gym before dinner, that is the plan. But his erection endures. Allen is neither so old that it should disappear in an instant nor so young that it should remain, and in such a pronounced and steadfast state.

  Then again, he thinks, why should it fade when that angel of a girl is so near and there are four more tokens? He has already crossed the threshold and made his way inside. The erection builds strength and, Allen fears, may never go away. He cannot walk out in this state. And he admits to himself that if he didn’t ever have to leave, if it meant irretrievably losing the outside world, he would sacrifice it all if only that siren would stand up from her chair, take his hands, and guide them over her body once more. But he won’t allow himself such an indulgence. He will put in the token, but he will not touch. He will look at his shoes and the scuff mark that damned him. This is how he will occupy himself, without a whit more enjoyment. He will use up what he paid for, but the penance begins right now.

  · · ·

  Allen drops the second token in the slot and, closing his eyes and hearing the partition rise, falls against the wall of the booth.

  There
is silence. He waits, counting in his head. A dollar doesn’t buy much, and soon the window will close.

  “Hey!”

  He hears it, the voice deep, raspy, and, he thinks, rather accusatory. “Hey, you. Feinberg. You want to touch?” Allen knows who it is. But it takes some time, an understandable pause. “Touch, Feinberg? You want to cop a feel?”

  He raises his eyes and goes cold. There, in the first chair, looking the same, though fifteen years older, is Rabbi Mann. He is naked and fat, his chest hairy. Mann has become so overweight that his masculine breasts are bigger than the girl’s.

  Down the row are three other rabbis from his old school. Rabbi Rifkin sits in the second chair, wearing boxers, a bleached-out blue. Then there’s Rabbi Wolf, wearing tzitzit, the once white fringes now yellow against the chair. In the last seat is Rabbi Zeitler, a tractate spread across his lap, his glasses black and thick-lensed, so that his eyes seem tiny and his head deeply notched. Zeitler adjusts his glasses, pushing them higher on his nose.

  Amazed at himself for not passing out or losing, immediately, his mind, Allen wishes that his shrink, Dr. Springmire, were there to help him along. The rabbis’ return is a lot for him to process. He has worked hard at breaking from their world and he doesn’t remember ever wanting it back.

  Rabbi Mann stamps a foot against the floor. “Down to business, Feinberg. Should I come over so you can lay a hand on me? Do you want me to come over by you?”

  Allen grabs the window frame, scratches at the groove in the top, trying to drag the partition down. “Please, Rabbi. Sit. Do sit.”

  “Of me you don’t want a pinch?” Mann puts on a falsetto. He holds up his arms and waves his fingers. He is trying to look dainty. “I’m not so good as the pretty girl with the long legs? Too hairy? Too Jewish to be touched by the big-shot lawyer? By Mr. Ari-Allen-Feinberg-Fein?”