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

by Nathan Englander

  48. About sacks of corn and the one time I felt like a man: My grandfather and I drive out to the farm stand. It’s open, but no one’s in it. There’s a coffee tin filled with money, under a sign that says self-serve. Folks are supposed to weigh things themselves and leave money themselves and, when needed, make change. This is how the owner runs it when she’s short-staffed. We’ve come out for corn, and the pickings are slim, and that’s when the lady pulls up in her truck. She gets out, makes her greetings, and drops the gate on the back. And in the way industrious folks function, she’s hauling out burlap sacks before a full minute has passed. My grandfather says to me, “Get up there. Give a hand.”

  49. I hop up into the bed of the truck and I toss those sacks of corn down. It’s just the thing an able young man is supposed to do—and I’d never, ever have known. But I don’t hesitate. I empty the whole thing with her, feeling quiet and strong.

  50. They are sacks of Silver Queen and Butter & Sugar, the sweetest corn in the world. She tells us to take what we want, but my grandfather will have no such thing. We fill a paper sack to overflowing and pay our money. At my grandparents’, I shuck corn on the back steps, the empty beetle jar tucked in the bushes beside me and music from the transistor coming through the screen of the porch. And—suburban boy, Jewish boy—I’ve never felt like I had greater purpose, never so much felt like an American man.

  51. The woman I love, the Bosnian, she is not Jewish. All the years I am with her, to my family, it’s as if she is not. My family so good at it now. My family so masterful. It’s not only the past that can be altered and forgotten and lost to the world. It’s real time now. It’s streaming. The present can be undone, too.

  52. And I still love her. I love you, Bean. (And even now, I don’t say it straight. Let me try one more time: I love you, Bean. I say it.) And I place this in the middle of a short story in the midst of our modern YouTube, iTunes, plugged-in lives. I might as well tell her right here. No one’s looking; no one’s listening. There can’t be any place better to hide in plain sight.

  53. On Thanksgiving, this very one, I am hunting for a gravy boat in the attic. I find the gravy boat and my karate uniform (green belt, brown stripe) and a shoe box marked dresser. Lifting the lid, I understand: It’s the remains of my grandfather’s towering chest of drawers—a life compacted, sifted down. Inside, folded up, is a child’s drawing. It’s of a man on a chair, a hat, two arms, two legs—but one of those legs sticks straight out to the side, as if the man were trying to salute with it. The leg at a ridiculous and impossible angle. It’s my mother’s drawing. She hasn’t seen it in years. She doesn’t remember filling that box.

  54. The drawing is of Great-Grandpa Paul. “Hit by a train,” she says. And already—in a loving, not-at-all-angry, Jewish son’s way, I’m absolutely furious. She knows I’m writing this story, knows I want to know everything, and here, Great-Grandpa Paul, a lifetime at the railroad and killed by a train. I can’t believe it—cannot believe her.

  “Oh, no, no,” she says, “not killed, not at all. Eighteen when it happened. He survived it just fine. Only, the leg. He could never bend that leg again.”

  55. The first time Bean brings me home, we walk to the river in Williamsburg. We stand next to a decrepit old factory on an industrial block and stare at Manhattan hanging low across the water, a moon of a city at its fullest and brightest.

  56. Bean takes out a key. Behind a metal door is a factory floor with no trace of the business that was. The cavernous space is now a warren of rooms, individual structures, like a shantytown sprouting up inside a box. “I’ve got a lot of roommates,” she says. And then: “I only just finished building. The guys helped me put the ceiling on last night.” Toward the back, behind a mountain of bicycle parts, is a grouping of tiny rooms with a ladder (which we climb) leading to a sort of cube on top. She’s bracketed together scavenged frames of all shapes and sizes to make four window walls under a window ceiling through which one may stare at the rough beams above. It’s a miracle of a room, a puzzle complete. “I guess I’ll need curtains now,” she says as we sit on her bed. And I say, “You live in a house made of windows, but”—and I motion—“you can’t see outside.” She takes it well, and takes my hand.

  57. I mention him to my grandfather just once. Visiting from college, drinking whiskeys, playing gin. I mention his dead brother Bennie—the army brother—who I’d just found out existed. I say something awkward about the only guy at school called up for the first Iraq war—the good one. I say something about younger brothers, being a younger brother myself.

  58. My grandfather picks a card, arranges his hand—making sets. “For a while we owned a building. Two stories. We were landlords to a deli on the ground floor and a pair of tiny apartments upstairs. More than once,” he says, “I found a body. I’d head over to check on things before work, and I’d find them. One time in the stairwell, and another, a stiff in the alley, still wearing his hat. These weren’t crimes of passion, either. These were deals settled, people done in.” He lays his cards facedown on the table. I look at their backs. “Gin,” he says. And he goes out to the porch to smoke a cigar.

  59. I use the Freedom of Information Act to get at it. We don’t have such a law in my family, but the government, the government will tell you things about a missing brother. The government will sometimes share secrets if you ask.

  60. Where is my Bean when I need her? Where is Bean when I’m having a feeling I can’t face? It’s not that I want to share it. It’s the exact opposite—the old me in play. What I want is to turn pale for her, saying nothing. I want to go anxious and ask her—should anyone call—to come find me under the bed.

  Where she is right then is out dancing on tables. That’s what I see in my head. And that’s our standard joke during the rare times we speak. Me saying, “I picture you out dancing on tables whenever I wonder what you’re up to.” “Oh, yeah,” she says, “that’s me. Out dancing every night.”

  61. The letter is real—in both realms real. There is an envelope from the government, a pack of papers, forms typed uneven, faded reproductions, large spaces for the clipped explanation. In it is a letter written in my grandfather’s hand. It’s a beautiful, intelligent, confident (but not cocky) script. It’s a polite letter to the government, a crisp, clean letter. He is writing on behalf of his mother, about her son—his brother, killed in (after) the war. They’d filled out the forms, and they’d still not received—he was wondering when they might get—his dead brother’s things.

  His effects.

  Bennie’s worldly effects.

  62. Here is me, fictionalized, sitting on the couch with a letter, written in my grandfather’s hand. I am weeping. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen his handwriting before. I think to call my mother, to tell her what I’m holding. I think to call my brother, or maybe Cousin Jack. But really, more than anyone, I think to call that missing love—that missing lover. Because it’s her I wish were with me; it’s her I want to share it with right now. And more so, to find myself weeping from a real sadness—not anxious, not disappointed, not frustrated or confused—just weeping from the truth of it, and the heartbreak of it, and recognizing it as the purest emotion I’ve ever had. It’s this I want to tell her, that I’m feeling a pure feeling, maybe my first true feeling, and for this—I admit it—I am proud.

  63. I am sad for my grandfather, ten years passed, and his mother, dead forty, and his brother, sixty years gone from this world. I am on the couch alone, and I am weeping. It is the purity of the letter, the simplicity of it: Your last brother dead, and you’re asking for his things.

  Camp Sundown

  I want I should talk to Rabbi Himmelman.”

  This from Agnes Brown, seventy-six years old, standing behind Josh’s chair in the dining hall and addressing the back of his head.

  Josh turns to her. She is not alone. She is never alone—Arnie Levine, seventy-eight, is at her side. “You both know,” Josh says, “Rabbi Himmelman is gone. I am t
he director—I’ve been the director all summer.”

  “You’re too young to be the director,” Arnie says, her defender.

  “And you, Arnie, are too old to be at camp.”

  “It’s Elderhostel,” Agnes says.

  “Is there instructional swim?”

  “We can,” Agnes says, “have a swim lesson in the lake.”

  “Any place with instructional swim,” Josh says, definitive, “is camp.”

  He holds her gaze, staring eye to eye, though he sits and she stands. She is shrinking, his Agnes. Every summer, the old people grow smaller as the children grow big. Josh has decided that there is only so much height in the world and the inches must change hands.

  He turns back to his lunch in time to see it carried off by one of the girls brought in from Poland to do the kitchen work. They are good workers, the Polish girls. And they are paid a fair wage. Though it is, Josh feels, a woeful way to see America—or not see it—these young women ferried straight to the Berkshires to care for Jews too young or too old to care for themselves.

  By the time Josh is finished thinking this thought, his lunch, and the Polish girl, have disappeared into the kitchen. He grabs hold of his coffee mug and clasps it tight. He can sense the pair still hovering at his back.

  It is always like this with the campers from this side of the lake. They are very old, some of them. They are very slow. Sometimes very sick. And yet, wherever Josh goes, however fast, however far, he can feel them right behind.

  Arnie’s stiff, speckled hand is at his shoulder, tapping, Agnes talking.

  “Boychik,” she says, “Squirt. What has happened to Himmelman? Always he takes care.”

  “Why do you talk like that?” Josh says.

  “Like what?”

  “Like ‘Always he takes care.’ Like you haven’t been in Livingston, New Jersey, for the last fifty years. Like it’s not now 1999, the cusp of a new millennium. Honestly, where does it come from, the ‘I want I should talk to the rabbi’ and all that?”

  “Rude boy!” she says. “Still, you are a nice rude.” This part she tells to Arnie. “In this way, the emotional ones are disrespectful, because they are afraid to have feelings.” Here she turns back to Josh and winks. “My granddaughter, she is rude, too.”

  “The vegan?” Josh says. “The born-again Hassidic vegan with four kids?”

  “Yes,” Agnes says. “Maybe you’ll meet her. At your point, a bald head”—Josh reaches up to rub what’s left of his hair—“and this job—a sad job, you’ll admit? For us, a treat, but for you, well, this? Three months a year living in a pressboard house smells like raccoons … I’d say, for you a nice divorcée maybe is good. On visiting day, maybe have a stroll, the two of you. Steal a kiss. Maybe let her walk ahead and have yourself a stare at the center of a nice solid tush and ignore in the end how wide.”

  “ ‘Tunnel vision,’ they call that now,” Arnie says, always adding his “now,” as if all the others are trapped in the past and only he has access to the present.

  “Visiting day,” says Josh, holding up a finger to Arnie, another point. “Did you hear her? She said, ‘on visiting day’. If it has visiting day, it’s camp.”

  “The lady,” Arnie says, “she asked for Himmelman. He was the one who worried on us. Tanglewood, Himmelman always got us a place. And bug spray, always, for free—a can in his pocket. A schpritz when you needed. My fifth summer here, and after the first, I never got malaria again.”

  “You didn’t get malaria,” Josh says. “We don’t have malaria. We have Lyme disease—and you didn’t get that. You were just tired.”

  “Yes, it was the Lyme,” he tells Agnes. “That’s what I had. They nearly killed me, here.” And to Josh: “You still haven’t said why a rabbi just disappears—”

  “Because it’s not your concern, is why. A problem,” says Josh. “A problem on the children’s side of the camp. All you need to know is, I’m here now, and Himmelman is gone.”

  “What problem?” Agnes says. “I saw no little boys facedown in the lake. Is it the turtles?”

  “No, it’s not turtles. Kids—I’ll have you know—do not complain about turtles. They love them. They can outrun them. Only old people complain about turtles. And because of that, I’ve had their habitat moved, poor things. I’ve had them fished from the lake and moved far, far away.”

  “They will come back,” Arnie says. “Like elephants—that’s how the turtles remember.”

  “And Himmelman?” Agnes says.

  For once, Arnie helps Josh out. “When they say, ‘a problem’? Today, that means what we used to call a pervert before there were lawyers like squirrels, hundreds waiting in every tree. Back in my day, every church in Brooklyn kept in its icebox, like beer, a six-pack of altar boys. To get enough kids together for a stickball game, my son would have to sit on the stoop and wait for them to thaw—”

  “What are you saying?” Agnes says, drawing him back.

  “Himmelman—he is a fondler. He fondles. Our friend who got us always tickets.” Arnie shakes his head, disappointed. “Terrible to learn. He seemed so nice and always the hands where you could see them, waving while he talked.”

  “What are you saying?” Agnes says. “Is that Yiddish, fondul? I don’t understand.”

  “No, no,” Arnie says. “Fondle—fondle is to touch. Everything sounds Yiddish to you. Far-fetched, far-flung …”

  “Farflung is Yiddish.”

  “No,” Arnie says, “it’s not. Anyway, the boy is saying, this one—too good for your granddaughter because she wears now a wig and eats the snafu hot dogs.”

  “Tofu,” Josh says.

  “What he is trying to tell us is that he got a promotion because of a fondle. He’s a pervert’s replacement. Big shot!”

  “Thank you,” Josh says. “Anyway, anyone who signed up for tickets to Tanglewood will get tickets. … Did you sign up on the sheet?”

  “We signed,” Arnie says.

  “Then it’s done,” Josh says. “Then you can go hear music.”

  “Okay,” Agnes says.

  “Good. Now, if I turn back to the table, if I scooch around and reach for ‘a nice piece of honey cake,’ as you’d say, my dear Agnes, will you still be back there?”

  “There is one more thing,” Agnes says.

  “That’s what I wanted to know. Tell me, is it the same ‘one more thing’ as the last two days? Is it the same topic that we promised never to address out loud, and if we really do need to address it, then not in the dining hall, where the subject of said ‘one more thing’ might hear and might be wounded and might have a really, really rotten time here at … at Elderhostel?”

  “If you know,” Agnes says, “if you want to ask with a long sentence being a teaser and an ironic maker, then why don’t you do something?”

  It is then that he passes. The big man, Doley Falk—quiet-looking and sweet as sugar. He is not one of the troublemakers who complain all day to Josh, morning to night, for whom life has turned into one unbroken disappointment. He’s just a serious old bridge player, come from Toledo, Ohio, who wants nothing more than to eat kosher food and play cards, and to scream “Two no trump!” when he feels the Alzheimer’s sneaking his way.

  He is one of the campers who offers Josh his moments—the caught moments that make Josh come back every year, that get him through the winters of planning and recruiting, that, in fact, make it not a sad job for a man to have, but make it plain beautiful.

  The first year, it was Rita Desberg, staring off at the lake. Josh spotted her standing stock-still as a mist rose and the sun dropped—a moment so peaceful that even her body for an instant forgot the tremor built in. The second summer it was Charlie Kornblum, his life only tragedy, stories too sad to repeat, and there, Josh saw it, so simple. It was Charlie stepping aside and smiling as a tumble of junior campers rolled by, kicking up behind them a wall of dust.

  They are few and far between, these precious instants. And big Doley, a new camper here
for the last two weeks of summer, is one to offer them. Josh has already seen.

  Doley Falk does not smile at children. He does not stare at the lake. He takes no joy in eating, and snaps his paper when the widows take the chair by his side. But when that hulk of a man sits down at a bridge table, when he hears the first ruffle of the deck, he nods to his partner and looks, positively, like he’s eighteen again, a sparkle in his eye.

  He’s a joy to watch. A pure affirmation of why Josh does what he does. He is one of Josh’s specials, and he won’t have the man’s time here besmirched. But Agnes, she won’t leave off him. She and Arnie won’t let the man be.

  “I’m telling you with respect,” Josh says. “The camplike structure, for good and for bad, it revives certain adolescent elements of human nature. You come every year, you two. You stay the whole summer. And you cannot help it. When it comes to the two-weekers, the newbies, the last-session bridge players—toward them, you are, inevitably, cruel.” He raises a hand, not rudely, just to stop them from speaking. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. You always cold-shoulder them—I see what you do. And forgive me for saying it, but you treat them like the new kids in high school bused in for ninth grade.”

  Arnie brings out the big guns. He rolls up a sleeve and flashes the number on his arm.