Diary of the Fall

by Michel Laub

  7.

  I don’t know how my grandfather used to react when he heard a joke about Jews, assuming anyone ever told such jokes to him, or if he, as the distracted guest at some cocktail party or supper or business meeting, was ever in a room where someone was telling them and where he might have heard a high-pitched giggle in response to the word Jew — or what his reaction would have been to knowing that this is what happened to me when I was fourteen, that this was the nickname that began to be used as soon as João mentioned our previous school with the little synagogue in the grounds and the seventh-grade students studying for their bar mitzvah, and that the nickname meant something different for me, that instead of feeling angry at an insult that ought to be confronted or indignant at the implied stereotype — the old men all in black and with vampire teeth and speaking in a foreign accent who used to appear in films and TV soaps — I preferred not to say or do anything, at least initially.

  8.

  It’s not difficult to explain that attitude: you just have to imagine changing schools, the passing of a few months during which someone does sit-ups and weight lifting and his voice breaks and he grows ten centimeters before he meets his new classmates, and all it takes in the first week is for one of those classmates to try and provoke João and for João to respond and for the classmate to raise his voice and for João to raise his voice too, and it’s as if we were back in the playground at the old school during the same break-time and with the same bullying classmate, except that João is taller and stronger now and knows he has little to lose apart from getting a warning or a trip to the first-aid room to have a Band-Aid applied to his head, and there I am watching João doing exactly what he should have done the year before, you only have to react once, you just have to close your eyes and launch yourself at the person provoking you and grab him by the throat or sink your teeth into him and tear a piece out of him if necessary, just once, and no one will ever again call you weak or scared or a goy or a Jewish son-of-a-bitch.

  9.

  Just once, and in the weeks that follow everything changes, the first party, João and me in the middle of the small group who went to the classmate’s house whose parents were away, sixty guests at the party and our small group arriving slightly late, João ten centimeters taller now and with no trace of what happened to him in the previous year, the music, the dance floor, the girls, me and the ice chest and the plastic cup and the speaker, me drinking one cup after another while João was dancing as if he’d never eaten sand, going over to one of the girls, hands on hips, as if he’d never been buried in the sand, the way he turns his head, the words he whispers in her ear, João taking the girl by the hand as if he’d never fallen flat on his back at his own birthday party in front of his father and sixty other people who would never believe what I was seeing now, while I had already gone out into the garden, already found a dark corner, was already lying beneath a tree while the world was spinning and I could feel only the damp grass and my throat and my stomach as I watched João approach with the girl and lean her against the tree before leaning against her.

  10.

  What can change in a matter of months? A ten-centimeter growth spurt. A deeper voice. An older face. When you’re fourteen, you can easily get strong doing push-ups and weight lifting, and that in itself gives you extra confidence if anyone should make a snide comment about you, and just the way you turn your head will determine whether what the person said will be passed off as a joke or never again repeated, and just the way you walk and lean casually on the speaker and behave with girls at a party will determine how the rest of your year will go, you who were in the majority at the school where you both studied before, you who had more friends at the school where you both studied before, who did what you liked throughout your years at the school where you both studied before, Jew, but if all that ends, you become the one dependent on your friend, the one who gets invited to a classmate’s house because of him, the one they put up with, and you have to accept the fact that they only talk to you because he does.

  11.

  I doubt that João ever read If This Is a Man, and it’s possible that he would never have considered what an Auschwitz survivor would say about being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, knowing that in a few years he would forget everything, childhood, school, the first time a neighbor was arrested, the first time a neighbor was sent to a concentration camp, the first time you heard the name Auschwitz and realized that it would stay with you for a very long time, your fellow prisoners in Auschwitz, the guards at Auschwitz, the people who died in Auschwitz, the meaning of that word disappearing into a limbo outside the eternal present that will gradually become your sole reality.

  12.

  I was the one who told my father he had Alzheimer’s. I talked to him about the initial stages of the illness, about the long period of time that would pass before the symptoms got worse, and that was all I could do because in two clicks of a mouse my father had access to any website describing the condition in detail: photos of patients, always the same blank gaze and the sense that something is missing from the photo, the relatives out of sight, behind the camera in the hospital room or kilometers away if possible, in another city so as not to run the risk of having to make a Sunday visit and find their father reduced to a pair of blue pajamas, a figure with short hair, a sheet and the gaze of someone who no longer knows what a camera or a photograph is, like a baby in front of a mirror with no notion yet that the reflection contains the image we have and will have of ourselves until everything begins to change.

  13.

  The image I had of myself on the day I told my father he had Alzheimer’s was this: a man nearing forty, who had been reasonably successful in his career, who had published books that had enjoyed a reasonably warm critical reception, and who managed to get on reasonably well with the people to whom he was close, writers, publishers, translators, agents, journalists or friends he had lunch with twice a year but whose wife’s or children’s names he didn’t know, friends whose habits and plans and conversations had long since ceased to interest him.

  14.

  At nearly forty, I was on my third marriage. The first lasted three years. I was twenty-one when we met and I made all the mistakes one would expect in that situation. It was a prolonged period of mutual incomprehension, and now I feel neither regret nor pain nor tenderness when I think of that time.

  15.

  The second marriage lasted even less time, two years out of a total of six years spent together, and which ended in more or less the same way, but afterward I would often remember the apartment we lived in, the trips we made, the friends we had in common, the things she would tell me about her work and that I would tell her about mine, the dinner parties we gave, the Sunday mornings spent reading the paper, me snuggled up close to her beneath the sheets one night when the hail was beating so hard against the shutters we thought the building was going to collapse, her family, her clothes, the films and books she liked, her voice, her hair, the shape of her fingers, the little groan she gave when she stretched, and all the infinite number of details that were lost because we never spoke to each other again.

  16.

  None of the women I married knew anything about João. Once I grew up, I never talked about him or about my first weeks at the new school, the new classmates who drank and smoked hash and sniffed glue and benzine, and went out in the late afternoon setting fire to litter bins and stealing tokens from public phone boxes. You have to rip the whole apparatus off the wall, leaving only a stub of cable, and you stand close by the classmate who’s doing this, then run off with him to a safe place where someone with a screwdriver and a hammer and a chisel breaks through the outer shell into the box containing a handful of tokens that will never be of any use, and although none of that should have struck me as new in relation to what I’d more or less experienced during the previous year, it did. The new school was a hostile environment in a different way, and that wasn’t just because of the way my classma
tes looked at me and talked to me, but also the way in which João dealt or appeared to deal with it.

  17.

  João never talked to me in detail about the months that followed the fall. He forgave me so easily, became my friend so easily, accepted my decision to go with him to the new school, a thirteen-year-old saint who never expressed the least surprise at what I’d done and never told me what he really felt during that time: if he had dreams too, if he also relived the moment of the fall each night, if the thud on the floor had sounded the same to him as to me, and if seeing the scene from below had the same effect — if, in his dream, the people at the party were wearing tallits and kippahs, like an army formed up around the throne of David, with me standing above the throne holding an open Torah, and it’s then that the door opens and João sees his father enter pushing a wheelchair, his father surrounded by nurses who all look at João and smile and put João in the wheelchair and the next scene is João in the classroom with his atrophied legs and his toes turned in and his arms grown strong from pushing the wheelchair back and forth.

  18.

  João never knew that I fought with my father because of all this. That I hurled a Scotch tape dispenser at him because of all this. That for a moment there was a chance I could have hit my father on the head and injured his face, resulting in an operation on the cheekbone under general anesthetic, leaving him with one eye that he would never be able to open again and all because my father — with his stories about the Holocaust and the Jewish renaissance and the obligation every Jew in the world had to defend himself using whatever means he had — was in some way responsible for what happened to João, making him the enemy who will always be there before you and who will always be in your thoughts because now he’s in a wheelchair.

  19.

  I never told João that the quarrel with my father was the closest physical contact I’d had with him for thirteen years. On the day I found out he had Alzheimer’s, I went to a bar and ordered a whisky and then another and then several more and ended up leaving the bar and sleeping on a park bench. When I woke it was broad daylight and I was filled with a feeling of immense weariness when I thought about how I was going to break the news to my father, and I remember that one of the things I thought was whether or not I would touch him when I gave him the news, whether I would take his hand or place my hand on his shoulder or give him a hug or attempt a smile indicating a minimum of optimism about the initial prognosis.

  20.

  I never told João what happened to me after I saw him fall. Surely he must have thought about it. Did he, for example, imagine that I became his friend out of pity? Or out of guilt? Or because I was alone and no one else would speak to me after my conversation with the coordinator? Or for any one of those reasons that would justify the resentment that would perhaps have remained hidden had it not been for the new circumstances, the new school, the new classmates, the numerous friends he’d never had before and who allowed him to do something he had perhaps always wanted to do, a month after the start of term, two months, then three, and there comes a moment when João realizes that he doesn’t need me anymore, that I serve only as a reminder of the worst moment of his life, and he needs to move on from that memory and it’s then that he can do something he’s been planning for a long time, the one occasion on which he doesn’t bother to lie when his new classmates ask him about the previous year.

  21.

  I’m not sure whether it happened in March or in April or at the latest in May, João telling them about the birthday party, the one occasion on which he let it slip in the middle of the jokes they had got used to making about me, at least they would sound like jokes now, after all the years that have passed and all the times someone has looked at me and talked about money and about a conspiracy by the rats that have infested our houses ever since the Middle Ages and spread discord and hatred among decent people. I wasn’t there on the day, of course, and it wasn’t perhaps João’s deliberate intention, not directly anyway, but the fact is that it became public knowledge that I had allowed him to fall at his birthday party, my Jewish rat paws letting go of his head, my Jewish rat instinct fleeing in the ensuing confusion, my parasitic moneymaking cancerous Jewish rat nature betraying the rest of the gang in order to save myself and to continue sucking other people’s blood and health.

  22.

  The next day everyone at school knew about it, but this time I was prepared, as if anesthetized by what I’d experienced the previous year and which I would clearly go through again: the way people immediately changed the subject whenever I came into view, my name and the Star of David chalked on the wall in the corridor, and this time I myself would quickly rub it off so that no teacher would see it, so that the coordinator at the new school wouldn’t call me into her office and express her profound regret at that display of religious and cultural intolerance, and so that faced by the coordinator’s sympathy I wouldn’t again run the risk of feeling sick and vomiting up the names of the classmates I believed had done it, or even giving João’s name, because he must have known who was doing it, João who now only spoke to me in class or when we were alone together, where he wouldn’t have to demonstrate in public that he had been or still was my friend or feel obliged to invite me to some party at the weekend, and gradually I would cease to know anything about João’s life outside school, if he was still stealing tokens from public phone boxes, if he was still smoking hash and sniffing glue, if he had a girlfriend and was the first in the class to have one, and I started going straight from school to home and from home to school, cut off from João and all my other classmates and from any other possibility apart from studying and my bedroom and my life, which didn’t change throughout the eternity of every day, every hour of eighth grade.

  A FEW MORE THINGS I KNOW

  ABOUT MY FATHER

  1.

  Of the six hundred and fifty Jews sent to Auschwitz along with Primo Levi, six hundred and thirty-eight died within the first year. Of the twelve who survived, Primo Levi was the only one to write a book, If This Is a Man. Unlike my grandfather, he was concerned with recording every detail of the camp routine, from his arrival in 1944 to his liberation by the Red Army when the war ended.

  2.

  Before If This Is a Man, no one knew about the card placed beside a tap just inside Auschwitz, warning inmates not to drink from it because the water was dirty. The rules also forbade sleeping in your jacket or without your underpants, or leaving the hut with your collar turned up or not taking a shower on the prescribed days.

  3.

  Fingernails needed to be trimmed regularly, but that could only be done with your teeth. With toenails, the friction of the shoes was enough. The shoes were distributed in a completely arbitrary fashion, and each prisoner had only a few seconds in which to choose, from a distance, a pair that appeared to be the right size, for there could be no changing them later, and according to Primo Levi, this was the first important decision to be made, because a shoe that is too tight or too loose causes blisters that burst and in turn cause infections that make the feet swell and stop you walking or running, and the rubbing of the swollen foot against the wood and cloth of the shoes causes more blisters and more infections that end up taking the prisoner to the hospital with a diagnosis of swollen feet, a complaint for which there is no cure in Auschwitz.

  4.

  Primo Levi says that in Auschwitz death begins with the shoes, and I wonder if he was referring only to his time in the camp or to the decades that passed after putting on the pair he managed to grab during those five decisive seconds. Primo Levi died when he was sixty-eight, in Turin, Italy, having written thirteen books, many of them about the Holocaust and many of which had been translated into various languages, and having resumed his career as a chemist, and married and had children and received prizes and become a literary celebrity in Europe and the world, and I wonder: was he thinking about that choice of shoe, too large or too small, or perhaps, with rare and enviable luck am
ong the million and a half prisoners who passed through the camp, a shoe that was just the right size, was he thinking about that when he opened the door of his apartment, walked over to the stairs and fell down the stairwell, an occurrence that almost none of his biographers believes to have been accidental.

  5.

  Death begins in many ways, and I don’t know if my grandfather ever managed to pinpoint the seed, the crucial moment when it ceased to matter that he had survived Auschwitz who knows how, and left there in who knows what state, and recovered in Poland or in Germany or who knows where, and managed to get himself on a boat heading for Brazil after overcoming who knows what difficulties, because from that moment on it was pretty clear that he would spend the rest of his life much as Primo Levi did. The only difference is that, instead of leading an apparently normal family life and decades later throwing himself down a stairwell, he led an apparently normal family life and decades later began writing those notebooks.