We Are Gathered

by Jamie Weisman

  After Kristallnacht and the murder of Levi, my father moved us to Frankfurt. Trudel’s family moved into our house. I know this because in 1976 the survivors from our town were invited to return. There were twelve survivors, but only I and one other man elected to return. Julius did not want me to go. He knew of my anger, and he warned me that I would not be able to obtain the justice that I sought. Justice in this world was not something Julius believed in. He was miraculous in that way: he was comfortable with giving and not receiving; with the fact, even, that he gave willingly and others grabbed and yanked and stole from him. I don’t know what I was thinking. I went alone. A man named Moses Frankel also went. He knew my brother David. He asked me if I knew what had happened to David, and I said I had heard that David was killed at Buchenwald, and he said that this was true. Trudel had grown up to look just like her mother, fat and pink. When she saw me, her eyes grew wide, and before I could say a word, she said, We bought the house legally. The Germans sold it to us. I said, I don’t want the house back.

  Her daughter hid behind her mother’s bloated calves, blinked at me with the same eyes that Trudel had blinked at me the day her mother interrupted our tea party. I said, I live in New York now. I have two sons. If you are wondering why I am tan, it is because I have just come back from a cruise. Then I wondered why I was explaining myself to this woman. Trudel’s little girl stuck her finger in her nose. We own the house, Trudel said. I can show you the deed. I closed my eyes. I don’t want the house, I told her. I asked her if she knew where the Bollers lived. She told me Kurt and his two brothers died in the war. His mother was still alive, in the same house where they had always lived. I wondered if Julius would let that count as justice.

  Everyone was trying to get to America before the war, but you needed someone to say that you would not be a burden to the nation. My mother’s aunt and my father’s cousin were there, but they helped their own families first. Then my father managed to secure passage for my brother Michael and Eva. Eva and Michael went to the train station. I do not know what happened after that. They got to Hamburg, and something was wrong with Eva’s papers. She was not allowed on the boat. She eventually came back to Frankfurt, but I was gone by then. My mother found a way to send me to France where I would live in a convent as a Catholic orphan. She took me to the train station. We had to walk in the street. My mother had washed my dress the night before. I complained because it was itchy, and she said that she was sorry, but she had to use cheap soap; it was all that she could find. The ends of the sleeves had not gotten all the way clean. There were rims of gray sweat around the cuffs, and I pulled my coat down to hide them. I was ashamed. I looked at my mother. Ever since the night she was pulled down the stairs, she walked with a limp, and she hobbled quickly, afraid we would miss the train. She looked old and tired. We passed a German mother pushing a pram and holding the hand of her daughter. The girl was about my age, but she was a city girl, with a black velvet coat and a white rabbit-fur muff. I could see the girl’s perfectly white collar—no stains—and the white satin ribbon that tied back her hair. It seemed to me at that moment that the girl had never been and never would be dirty or soiled in her entire life. She met my eyes and looked away. Her mother did not look at us. She stared straight ahead. I do not know if it was because we were not worth her gaze or if she was saddened by the fact that we were forced to walk in the street. She had on black patent-leather shoes; even the wheels of the baby carriage were bright and shiny. There was a very slight squeak as it passed us. My mother was wearing torn white stockings, and I could see the flesh of her legs through the rips. She looked so human and pitiful that I remember wanting to cry and hug her and never leave her and also wanting to run away and pretend that I did not know her. She held my hand. Her hand was damp and soft. I snuck my head close to it and smelled its salty, soapy scent. To this day, this is the smell of my mother and everything too good for this world.

  The train station was very crowded. We had to shoulder our way through the crowds. It was obvious when we got to the part of the train that would be taking the Jewish children because it smelled of boiled chicken and bread and onions, the food our mothers had packed for the journey. In my recollection, none of the children spoke, though I am sure this is not true. What I remember is that over the hum of the usual train station noise, the announcements of arrivals and departures, the greetings and the goodbyes, there was a condensed cloud of collective anguish, of mothers all at once pushing their children out into the world, a feeling I have never experienced since that day because, like the sounds of the woods where I went with Eva, things in nature happen one by one. Each baby bird is nudged from the nest. Each leaf falls. It was the most unnatural thing to have all these children heaved overboard all at once into the great unknown. My mother pressed me into her body; her coat was coarse and thick. She held my head with ungloved hands, then knelt down to look into my eyes. In my memory, her whole face is glazed and shining, as if she were encased in a coat of thin glass. In my memory, I poke at her cheek to see what she feels like. Of course, I know she was crying. I know that when she put her hands on either side of my face and held me still she was memorizing the look of me; she was trying to imagine the whole of my life in that moment. When my son Simon died, I caught sight of my tear-streaked face in the mirror of the hospital and saw my mother’s face that day. Even if we had grown old together, we couldn’t have loved each other more or known each other better. We would have just had more time, more days to brush up against each other and either smile or apologize, and then get on with living. Life is meant to be lived in the general orbit of those who love us, though we cannot protect each other, not from heartbreak or injustice or murder. Love is the weakest shield, but here is the truth. It is the only shield. My mother put me on the train, and then I lost her face in the sea of the glassed-in and fogged-over faces of women in coarse wool coats watching their children leave.

  The man in front of me at the wedding complains about the heat. He says, “We’re having Debbie’s wedding indoors. It’s hot as hell out here.” The air is very still, and I am sure that if everything got quiet all of a sudden we could hear birds singing and maybe the slight rustle of whatever lives in those woods, but it is not quiet. Someone is tuning a violin; glasses are clinking. The seats are filling up, and there are human sounds all around me, a cough, a cleared throat, someone calling someone else’s name and waving. I have a feeling that everyone belongs here but me, but that feeling makes me belong to myself, since I have it all the time, at dinner in the dining room of Zombie Tower, at the grocery store in front of all the cereal boxes, by David’s pool. Sometimes I think I would prefer to be in totally foreign places, like that Negro wedding, so it would make sense feeling this way. The seats all around me are full. A clumsy young man sits in front of me, scooting his chair back so that it is practically touching my knees. There are tender red pimples on his neck, and he is sweating. He belongs to the angry man and his wife. The woman puts her hand on the boy’s knee, but the man looks at him and looks away. The music changes to a Bach cello suite. Julius loved Bach. He said not everything the Germans did was bad. There had to be a Germany so there could be a Bach and a Mozart. I said that I would trade Bach for my mother. He said, No one offered that deal. It is fair to say he lost more than I did since he lost his children, but I lost my childhood. The world has never been safe for me. You might as well have condemned me to live my life at the edge of a hot and smoking volcano. I have spent my whole life waiting to be destroyed. Everything that had been added to my life, my wonderful husband, my children, my grandchildren, only makes me a bigger target.

  The bride walks down the aisle, and then the music stops and everything is quiet. I don’t hear well, so I can barely make out the sound of the rabbi.

  Trudel said that her mother had died thirty years ago, though she survived the war. Things were hard for them after the war, Trudel said. They were very hungry, and she lost an uncle and two cousins, one of whom she
had hoped to marry. Then she told me where Kurt Boller’s mother lived. I thought I remembered the house, but I wanted to be sure. I went there by myself. It was at the end of a small street that backed up to a field. The town had not changed very much, though the field was gone, and now there was a cement factory in its place. I knocked on the door. At first, it seemed no one was home. I waited a long time. I looked at the other houses. The doors were shut, and the curtains were drawn. I am sure people knew the Jews were in town. There was supposed to be a ceremony asking for forgiveness the next day. They were going to erect a plaque for all the citizens of Lauterbach who had died in the war, the Germans and the Jews alike, all listed together. I do not know if Moses Frankel attended the ceremony. I did not. I knocked again. I was about to leave when I heard the locks clicking. It sounded like there were a dozen of them, click, click, click, and then the doorknob turned and a tiny old woman with a shrunken face looked up at me through the smallest of cracks.

  She had clapped for her son when he pulled my mother out of the house by her hair.

  The woman’s eyes were whited over with cataracts. I have a cataract myself now, so now I know I must have looked like little more than a miasma to her. I spoke in German when I asked if she was Mrs. Boller. I do not know why I asked. I knew the answer. She asked why I wanted to know. I pushed the door open; it was easy, and I walked into the house. The house was dusty and smelled of bleach and mildew. I told her my name. I asked her if she remembered my mother. She shrugged and said that she wasn’t sure. She said she had trouble remembering things. I walked over to a table covered in a yellowed lace tablecloth. There were pictures of her sons when they were young, posed in a photographer’s studio, and from later when they were in uniform. I asked her which one was Kurt. She pointed to a round-faced boy with small eyes. I asked if she was sure, and she pointed to another photograph. I picked it up. It was him. I asked her if she had loved her sons. She said, Of course. I took the picture and smashed it on the table. The glass shattered. I shook the frame so the shards of glass fell to the floor, then I wrenched out the photograph and tore it up in front of her face. I told her that her son was a monster and that I hoped he had died a slow and painful death. Then she spat on my shoe, and before I had time to think, I kicked her. She fell down, and I kicked her again. She started to scream.

  I am lying. None of this happened. I put the picture down with nothing more than a thumbprint on the dusty glass where Kurt Boller’s face gleamed out at me. I wanted to punch her. I wanted to kick her and pull her hair and shove her down the stairs, and then, while she was screaming and begging for mercy and reminding me of all the kind things she had ever done, I wanted to shove her face in a heap of cow manure and laugh when she looked up at me, filthy and hideous, more animal than human, so that the only natural next stop was to harness her to a yoke and whip her while she pulled the cart. If there was any justice in this world, I would have done at least half of that, but I was scared. I was scared of that tiny brittle woman, who could bring the whole town down on me with one scream, so I told her, I am a rich woman now, and I live in a big apartment in America. My husband is a doctor. I have two sons. She looked at me curiously. Her lips were dry and parted. She said, “Who are you?”

  Then she turned and shuffled back into the dusty darkness of her house. I heard her plunk down in a chair. She started singing to herself. I let myself out. I went back to the small hotel where I was staying in a room on the second floor. There were giant roses on the wallpaper. I took my red lipstick and I wrote MURDERERS across the roses. Then I checked out, walked up the street—it was almost empty because it was dinnertime, and the windows of the houses were lit yellow, and the whole town smelled of my childhood, boiled potatoes and fried onions. A baby cried behind one window covered in lace curtains, and music seeped out of another. I closed my eyes to it all. I should never have returned. All the people who had refused the invitation had known what I knew now—that returning would only breathe life into something that was dead. It would be better if not just my childhood but the memories of it were erased, so that as far as anyone is concerned, I did not begin living until June 6, 1952, when I arrived in New York and saw my brother Michael again, who had become a stranger to me during the thirteen years we were apart. I was twenty-one years old, married to Julius and pregnant. We arrived on an airplane if you can believe it. We flew through the air.

  Everyone is clapping. I assume the ceremony is now over. I cannot hear very well anymore, but I hate the hearing aids David bought for me. They make all the wrong things loud, so when someone clears their throat, it is like a clap of thunder in my ear, and yet I still cannot hear the conversation going on across the table. People are standing. At some point, the pimple-necked boy in front of me got up and ran away, and his mother ran after him. People can be so emotional over nothing. Annette told me that Elizabeth was marrying a non-Jewish boy as if it were some terrible crime and I had to forgive her. She was actually crying. My father would not have allowed me to marry a German because German boys wanted to kill us. And we were the chosen people, keeping the 613 commandments so God would protect the Earth, though we learned the hard way that this didn’t necessarily include the Jews on the Earth. This boy is American, whatever that means. What does anyone in America have to cry about? Maybe the pimply boy was in love with the bride, but there are, of course, lots of other girls out there, even for a mieskeit like him, and what has history taught us if not that human beings come and go as quickly as mosquitoes. There was a girl I saw earlier with a birthmark, a purple face; a girl in Hesse had one too, but they married her off to a farmer. The two of them could make a go of it maybe. The sooner you learn how to replace one person in your heart with another, the better you will survive. Julius would disagree. He would say you make room for another, but the ones you have loved never leave. I said, Isn’t there a disease where the heart gets so big it doesn’t work anymore? Yes, Julius said, cardiomyopathy; it leads to heart failure, but human beings are so much more than the workings of the body. There is a soul, Rachel.

  I said, What good is a soul? Can you touch it? Does it keep you warm at night? Tell you stories? Protect you?

  It makes us who we are, Rachel. Good and bad.

  The world is too crowded with souls. I look at the father of the pimpled boy. He has a thick neck with dark stubble on it, numerous scratches, as if he is angry when he shaves, uses the razor like a scythe across his skin. He grimaces at nothing, glances at me and out across the sea of strangers. I stand up, intending to follow everyone to the tents. That is where they are going, even the angry man heads in that direction, but instead I see the woods, the disappointing American woods. It seems quiet over there, and I want to gather my thoughts for a minute. I am, of course, regretting coming to this meaningless event, but then Annette was right, what else did I have to do? Sit in the airy, overly lit dining room of Zombie Tower unable to hear Agnes and Anna’s conversation about the children and grandchildren they never see, listening to the clomp and shuffle of walkers that are as regular as the ticking of a clock, clomping and shuffling us closer to our last day, to the death that I, at least, have been expecting to arrive at any moment since 1938. The only thing that has kept it from arriving, I understand now, is my expectation of it. Death likes to make a grand entrance; nothing would disappoint it more than for me to open the door before it has rung the bell and quietly fall into step with wherever it is going.

  These are thin and pitiful woods. I can see other houses through the spindly trees, but at least there is some familiarity in the scent of decaying leaves and animal fur. How ridiculous. I am crying. Eva never had a wedding. She was in love with a boy named Elias Auerbach, who I realized many years later must have kissed her in the woods while I looked for mushrooms, and the sound that I took for screams was really laughter, and the silences were their lips touched together. Elias was murdered. Eva was murdered. My mother was murdered. My father. Levi, right before my eyes. He crumpled to the ground, and
all those around him scooted away while his dirty clothes soaked up the warm blood that spilled from his body. I am so tired. I cannot move another inch, in this world, in this life. I take off my shoes and sit down, then I lie down and look up at the white clouds drifting across the hot blue sky. The angry man was right about how hot it is, and these thin woods do nothing to shelter us from the heat. I am ready to die now. I would be happy if I never got up, but as I have said, death will not do me the favor of coming when I expect him, so I will have to go look for him. I step into the woods and start walking.

  A slice of leftover cake (with raspberry filling)

  Well, that’s done. Thirty thousand dollars, done. A large chunk of my husband’s yearly earnings, done. Check to band, done. Ten thousand to caterers, done. Five thousand for flowers, done. I don’t know how much for wine and champagne and cocktails, for the valet service, invitations, hairdresser, for the bags of Jordan almonds and the colored lanterns Elizabeth wanted and the wedding dress, done. The service is over, but there will be more bills to pay. The photographer, maybe we went over on the catering, Elizabeth asked the band to play an extra set. We will be paying for these four hours for a few more months, I am sure.

  The stiff white wedding dress, a magnificent chrysalis, hangs from my bedroom door. Elizabeth wanted to change before she left for the hotel. For the last time in my life, I undid the buttons down her back, slid my hands over her hips, felt her balance on my shoulder while she lifted one leg, then the other, and stepped free. Twenty-five years ago, I would have reached for a pair of soft pajamas and slipped them on in place of the dress she had just abandoned, but she left the dress, a ball gown with a frothy skirt, on the floor (three thousand dollars) and put herself into a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt, then reached behind her head to pull her long hair into a loose ponytail. It’s ridiculous to think that she won’t need me anymore. A mother’s work is never done, but the part that ropes you in, the part where you enthusiastically surrender your worldly ambitions, the part where you give your love, body and soul, to ensuring the joy and existence of another human being, that part is done. The lifting from the bath and cradling, the smell of her damp hair, the knowing every fold of her body more intimately than you know your own, the ear tuned to the slightest cry, the anticipation of her needs and the ability to fulfill those needs because they are simple, food, love, protection, that is gone. The sweet breath is gone, the velvety warmth of her skin, the poochy belly, the explosion of her smile, the rushing to you in the morning, and the clinging to your leg, gone.