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

by Nathan Englander

  “I wouldn’t know from ninth grade. Never went. But camp? My share of camps. A different camp than this one, yes? You want camps? I know camps. I know from human nature. And I have seen before. I know—”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Josh says too loudly. “What can I say to numbers? My apologies. On the matter of camps, I defer.”

  Arnie comes in close. “You don’t see what we see,” he says. “Maybe at the cash machine, the code to get money is gone from my head. Maybe sometimes my own grandchildren, I admit it—their names can’t be found. But the faces from back then, from that place,” Arnie says.

  And Agnes, with vigor: “These, we do not forget.”

  “Leave him be!” Josh says. He is almost yelling, which he never does. They are old. They talk a lot. They push buttons. They have lost the sense, or the will, to self-edit. They enjoy the privileges of old age. He does not get frustrated, but this, this accusation—it is more than mean, and more than confused; it is beyond the glimmers of dementia that make themselves constantly known.

  “Don’t tell me you can’t see it,” Agnes says. “When he sits down at that bridge table, that face, it turns to what it was. It turns back into the face of—”

  “Beautiful!” Josh yells. “Beautiful! The man looks beautiful when he plays!”

  And now it’s not just Doley Falk who turns to look at Josh. It’s the whole room that’s staring. Because somehow Josh is standing, and somehow he is screaming, and somehow tiny, sweet, maddening Agnes is holding up a shaky hand in front of her, as if, as if … His Agnes looks afraid. She steps back, teetering as if she might fall. And Josh steps forward, reaching. When she is steadied, he says, “Enough. It’s time to leave that nice man alone.”

  “Go shit in a lake,” Arnie says to him, and walks off holding Agnes’s hand.

  · · ·

  Josh rushes out into the heat, out of the air-conditioned meat locker that the old folks like for a dining hall. He rushes out, shaking, into the sun. Seven years at the camp, six as assistant director, and never has he raised his voice, not once. Not to the aged.

  He heads for the path to the kids’ side of the lake. A little fresh air, a little youthful energy. He needs it to calm down. But he simply cannot—he cannot have them saying it. It is madness. He cannot let Agnes and Arnie infect the whole place.

  Doley Falk, they think, was there with them—back in those other camps. They are convinced Doley Falk is a murderer. Agnes remembers him positioned at a fence. She remembers him, a Nazi camp guard. A Demjanjuk.

  Now Josh is not saying forget. But this idea … Doley Falk, a Nazi. An old Nazi hiding in the Berkshires under the guise of a blue-toed low-sodium bridge-playing Jew. It is madness. It is too much to take.

  Josh stays by the lake on the kids’ side until he is feeling nearly copacetic, at the edge of true peace. That is precisely when he finds himself—with all that open space—cornered by Lou Lebovick, head of Youth Sports.

  “We got issues here, too,” Lou says. “It’s like you only come over when one of the old folks needs a spare part. Is that what you’re after? A fresh kidney? A nice free-range, kosher-fed, Horace Mann–educated heart? I tell you, they pump like the dickens inside the little ones. It’s a wonder their heads don’t pop off from the pressure.”

  Josh steps back to study Lou. And he can’t help it. He hears Agnes talking inside his head. A thirty-six-year-old man who unwinds tetherballs for a living—this is a life? It fills Josh with pity, and he hooks arms with Lou and walks him to the very edge of the water so that their sneakers take root in the mud. Josh points across the lake to a structure, and Lou’s eyes follow in a squint. “That is my office over there, and my cabin behind it, both of which you know. The doors are forever open to you, Lou, as they always have been. Canoes, paddles, fresh T-balls and tees—honestly, when have you ever wanted for something?”

  “I know,” Lou says, looking sheepish.

  “So tell me? What is it? Basketballs? Basketball pumps? What is it that I can do?”

  “Needles,” Lou says. “The needles that go between the pumps and the balls.”

  · · ·

  Josh’s office door is indeed perpetually open. To Lou Lebovick. To Agnes. To the Polish girls. To anyone with any problem at all. Because of this, the air conditioner stays off—a waste. And because the old folks, at the best of times, can’t hear anything Josh is saying, he’s also forced to avoid the whir of a fan. This leaves the office sweltering, a nice touch that Josh appreciates, for people visit to complain, but no one dares stay long.

  First thing the next morning, it is the Blachors, Yama and David. They’ve come all the way from Santa Fe to play bridge for two weeks, their first time. The Blachors live in an adobe house, they tell him. They retired from Englewood, New Jersey, to live in an adobe house because they’d heard too many terrible stories over the years. It is very dangerous to sleep in a house made of wood. It’s very easy for them to catch fire. And this pair, twenty years gone from the East Coast, has discovered they can no longer bear to sleep in anything like a rustic wooden cabin. They cannot bear being seated too deeply in that firetrap of a dining hall. And they have taken to wearing, each, around their necks, a smoke alarm on a lanyard woven specifically for this purpose in crafts.

  “You cannot wear those contraptions,” Josh tells them. “They sow panic. They convince the others that there is a danger. And certain ideas in a closed environment are contagious,” Josh says, “like fire.” To which the Blachors, nodding, recoil. “All the wood in the camp,” he says, “the walls, the floors, the dock—it’s fire retardant. The rooms are already equipped with detectors. In the dining hall, it’s the same. If anything on the grounds so much as warms up, I will hear the alarm, the fire department will hear, remotely—”

  “Up here? The fire department? Do you have any idea how many miles it lies distant?” Yama asks.

  “How many miles does it lie distant?” Josh says.

  “Twelve,” David tells him. “Twelve miles of curvy road. Of barely a two-lane road. That is how far away help rests.”

  “Well, you decide how to proceed,” Josh tells them. “You can wear them, but not to activities, not to anywhere where anyone else will see. I’ll have your meals brought to your room, if need be. I’ll have a deck of cards sent over. If you insist on wearing the smoke detectors, you’re stuck in your room playing gin.”

  The Blachors consider, and as they do, Josh can see from a hundred yards away the mountain that is Doley Falk rushing his way, the mountain coming to the man. Doley holds a hand to his chest, his face red, a sweat on him. He’s in obvious distress and headed straight for Josh’s open office door.

  To the Blachors, Josh says, “How about this? You go right now, and for today you can wear them—but no testing. I don’t want to hear them. Today, you can wear them under a nice light sweater. Tomorrow, we reconvene.”

  And the Blachors, feeling successful, are gone.

  Josh pulls a water from his minifridge and an ice pack from its freezer. He is always thinking ahead about disaster. A perfect first summer. He wants no ambulances, no paramedics. He wants no blown hearts on this side of the camp, and no Himmelmans trolling the other—he won’t have it, not on his watch. Josh will send every single camper home, healthier and happier than when he or she arrived.

  Doley is at his door.

  “They say to me ‘Hi’ ” is what Doley keeps repeating, sounding delirious, while Josh tries to ease this giant man into a chair, to get him to sit, to drink, to cool. Josh drops the ice pack to the floor and, without asking, pours the cold water on Doley’s head.

  Doley calms. He says, “Thank you,” and, still panting, begins again. “They say to me ‘Hi,’ and I say to them ‘Hi,’ because I think they say to me ‘Hi’ and wave. … But they are not. It is heil. They are saying to me ‘Heil,’ to a Ukranian Jew, who has been. And the waving, the arms up in the air, they are not—”

  “Is it Arnie?” Josh says. “Arnie and Agne
s?”

  “Names, I don’t know,” Doley says, panting, and now unable to get his breath. He holds one hand low, approximating height, and the other yet lower, right near to the floor.

  “Yes,” Josh says, grabbing for another bottle, this time pouring water on himself. He is afire, afire with anger, enough to set to ringing the alarms hung around the Blachors’ necks. Josh fans Doley with the camp songbook. “You don’t worry,” he whispers, practically cooing. “I’ll take care of it. I know exactly who.”

  · · ·

  Josh is losing control of the camp. His first year in charge and, so close to the end of the summer, he’s losing the reins. Josh storms into the reading group, where eight of the oldsters sit in a circle, clutching large-type editions of Les Misérables before them. A retired fifth-grade teacher who summers in Lexington has driven up in a chocolate Lexus sports coupe to lead the weekly class. She is dressed, head to toe, in summer Chanel.

  “I don’t know why they call this book Les Misérables,” she says, leaning into the circle, as if sharing a secret. “As you will discover, this book is not less miserable. It is more miserable than you can imagine.” Josh points at Agnes and Arnie, interrupting, and, like a principal, he says, “You two, in my office right now.”

  Arnie and Agnes cross their arms, defiant.

  “We don’t go!” Agnes says. “Whatever you need, you tell us here. We are all one,” she says of the assembled campers. “The secrets we know, they know—and agree.”

  “They agree?” Josh says.

  “They agree,” Arnie says.

  The teacher gives a series of nervous pats to a hive of Aqua Net–frozen hair. “What do we all agree on?” she says, trying to stay in charge of her domain, exactly as Josh is trying to do with his. “What is it we know?”

  “It’s all right,” Josh says to her, a forced smile. “You can go. Class dismissed, or whatever it is. There’s an emergency today—a disciplinary matter.”

  “But I drove all this way from Lexington. I could have been with my boys by the pool. I’ve got a lesson plan, already set.”

  “Then you’re fired,” Josh says, “if that makes it easier.”

  “Fired?” she says. “I volunteer.”

  “Then unvolunteer. It’s an emergency, I’m begging you. Please, get out of the room.” As she leaves, looking mortally offended, he says to the others, “And any of you who disagree with this madness, who understand it as such, feel free to go to the canteen. My treat, whatever you want, put it on my tab.”

  The others, like Agnes and Arnie, cross their arms.

  “You really want to throw your lot in with these two?” Josh says. “They’re in hot water, I tell you. Up to their necks in it.”

  The others nod, accepting.

  “We boil together,” Arnie says.

  “You boil?” Josh says. “Really?” He cannot believe this. “No,” he yells. “No, you don’t boil. I don’t give you that option. All of this stops right now. You leave that man alone. He is no murderer. He is no Nazi. You are—all of you—mistaken.”

  “How can we be mistaken,” Arnie asks, “if Agnes is not mistaken?”

  Josh looks to Agnes, trying out sentences in his head, wanting to be nice. “You are convinced that you’re right,” he says to her. “But it is time, it is memory, that has turned you wrong.”

  “Those faces,” Agnes says; “time can’t see them undone.”

  Josh is nodding. Josh is looking empathic, preparing to speak with his “master’s in social work” tone. He will delicately and apologetically disabuse Agnes of this notion. But Arnie will not have it.

  “No,” Arnie says. “Do not go and dress up disrespect in the clothes of compassion. I can tell,” he says, wagging a finger. “You think we don’t feel the creak in every thought, same as to the bend in our knees? You think we do not, like the archer—”

  “The archer?” Josh says.

  “Yes, with the arrows. The archer, absolutely. They adjust for the wind. This, with every word, we do, measuring before we speak. We know we are old. We know what is lost and what is left. But certain faces cannot be unseen. No more than those little pishers on the other side of the lake, with their winkles touched by the rabbi—no more than they will ever wake to a morning where they don’t first see Himmelman when they open their eyes. Mercy on those boys.”

  “Wrong!” Josh yells. “Whisperings! And forget now Himmelman!” he yells, his diction ruined by this place.

  “Because you forget Himmelman,” Arnie says, “because some board decides to forget Himmelman, because it is better for the camp to forget, it does not mean justice wants to see Himmelman forgotten. Such actions are not in the service of justice, Herr Direktor. And for us, for the Book Group Eight—”

  “You’re the Book Group Eight now?” Josh asks, incredulous.

  “It was either that,” Agnes says, “or ‘the Miserables.’ But the novel, we haven’t yet read.”

  “Our name, yes!” Arnie says, “And our manifesto: We will not leave Doley Falk among us, to bid out, at the bridge table, his last days.”

  “Then call the police on him if he’s so guilty,” Josh says. “Twelve miles away,” he says, now quoting the Blachors. “They’ll be here in no time. Share your manifesto with them.”

  “You think we are lawless, Herr Direktor? This is the first thing we tried, those local yokels.”

  “And?”

  “And they won’t come. They mocked. They said to try Interpol, to call up Her Majesty’s Secret Service and ask for James Bond. They said they don’t do Nazi hunting anymore. They said the kids at this camp ordered twenty-five pizzas to the station last year, and the year before, too. Prank calls. Nonsense calls. And they say every weekend they need to bring back underage counselors from town, each one drunk as a skunk.”

  “So, you see?” Josh says. “These are professionals, men of the law, and even over the phone they grasp how crazy a notion this is. They, who are sworn to follow up on these matters, know it’s best to ignore it. So tell me, what would you like us to do here at camp? What could you possibly want me to do better?”

  “A trial. A camp trial. A jury of his peers. If he is innocent, we leave him be.”

  “And if he’s guilty?” Josh says, smiling, proud of himself. “What punishment could a sleepaway camp possibly give?”

  “Don’t you understand?” Agnes says. “If he’s guilty, then he’s your Nazi, too.”

  Josh ponders this. At first, he feels sick at the notion. What if there’s real guilt? And then he turns, angry, ludicrous as the notion is. “But he’s not guilty. He isn’t. And there’ll be no trial.”

  “A shame, then,” Arnie says, actually sounding threatening, “because either way, justice must be served.”

  · · ·

  Josh opens his eyes to the Blachors, Yama and David, standing over his bed. “Outside,” they say. “A fire.”

  His mind and body awake in different measure, Josh pauses only to zip his shorts and grab the emergency walkie-talkie from its charger by the door. He’s outside faster than he’s ever been in his life, and, jumping from the porch, still airborne, he calls for the Blachors to tell him the way. “The quad,” they say. “Our cabins.” And Josh races over at great speed.

  What Josh finds there is not really a fire. What it is, is yahrzeit candles, hundreds of them, stolen from the supply closet, memorial candles in their jam jars lit and dropped into paper day-trip lunch bags. A whole night’s work spread out before him, the bags lined up, it seems, to form a giant Jewish star.

  It takes Josh a moment, his system flushed through with adrenaline, his brain primed and in emergency mode. It takes an extra beat to understand what this installation is. Who it is. Then Josh gets it. Arnie and Agnes. Symbols flipped. It is their burning cross.

  The other old people, thank God, have no idea. At this point, they’re nearly all out of their cabins, enjoying the spectacle. They take it as a sweet, sanctioned nighttime activity. The songbooks ar
e already open, and the younger campers in pajamas, their sneakers unlaced, stream across the path from the other side of the lake to join in the fun. They will sing and dance for the old people, earning points for a mitzvah project, good deeds that will be repaid in Italian ices and soda. The counselors, excited themselves, have begun to build a bonfire.

  Josh hunts down Doley, frantic, terrified that he, too, has sussed out what this burning star is. As the bonfire comes up, as the first hint of real smoke blends with the air of a perfect piney foothills night, Josh finds that giant man at the side of his cabin in the shadows, and he can see that Doley understands. Doley looks afraid, and—Josh hates himself for thinking it, the power of suggestion—he looks guilty, too: guilty, cowed, and afraid. Josh accepts then that he is losing his mind. As he runs off to hunt for those book-group hooligans, he wishes he could call the old director. He knows Himmelman would ask him to repeat it twice. “Vigilante Nazi justice,” Josh would say. “Retribution and recrimination. Geriatric revenge.”

  Josh’s face is a one-man mask of comedy and tragedy. His scowl is in constant rotation with a big fat smile as he searches out Agnes and Arnie. He grins and slaps counselors on the back, making the most out of what is, hands down, the summer’s most successful cross-generational event, and then he relocks his jaw, renarrows his eyes, and maneuvers toward his prey.

  Josh circles and circles without finding even one of the Book Group Eight, a damning absence. He loiters by the bonfire, busying himself with policing all the tiny pyromaniacs who draw too close to the flames. Livid, he waits.

  It’s there that Agnes and Arnie choose to appear. They edge out of the darkness toward Josh, stepping into the halo of firelight.

  “Is this you two?” Josh says, his rage unchecked. “Is this the work of the Miserable Eight?”

  “Who’s to know?” Agnes says. “At our age, who even remembers what happened a minute before?”

  “She’s making you your own point, boychik,” Arnie says.