“You could use my ticket,” says the chemist. He wishes his son would raise his head. He’d like to see the blue eyes.
“You’ll use your ticket,” the son says. “When you feel better, you’ll use it.”
Last intelligible words: “I would have like to spend my final days there. I’m a man who needs a country he can love.”
The doctor the son summoned arrives then, but there’s nothing he can do. The chemist mumbles words neither the doctor nor the son understand, a rhythmic sort of chanting. The son makes a confession to the doctor. The doctor absolves him. He says, “If it were my father, I’d have done the same.”
As they’re talking about physical suffering, the chemist dies.
So much for aliyah. So much for God’s love for the prodigal.
1938
Karin Gläser is the family apostate. When Lenz Alter’s name comes up at the dinner parties she throws for their circle of displaced Jews in this very apartment—and his name always comes up—she says, “I wish we’d smothered him with a pillow while he slept,” and there are murmurs and titters and gasps.
No matter how many times she says this, her husband comes to his father’s defense.
“It was wartime.”
“I don’t care what time it was. You don’t leave a twelve-year-old alone to bury his mother.”
Their guests tend not to weigh in. They’re embarrassed when Karin flies furiously at Richard, like a bird attacking its own reflection, but they do enjoy the details and drama. They sit in the dinette, at the same table where the three of us still eat, and they wait, understanding that the price of hearing about the death in the garden is having to stay for the spat.
“He was critical to the war effort,” Richard says of his father’s trip to Russia. “I may have been young, but I understood completely.” He hesitates, smiles ruefully. “My mother, on the other hand, would have been furious,” he admits. “Never,” he says, “would she have left me alone under such circumstances—or frankly, under any circumstances, even the most benign. I was a wreck of a rowboat, and she was a gigantic barnacle attached to my side, my poor mother.”
Karin gets up from the table, makes busy work for herself, clearing the dishes while guests are still eating, crumbing the tablecloth while Richard makes his points.
“I must be losing my mind,” she says as she scurries about. “Did you just say your mother never would have left you? What do you call what she did, then?”
Richard says, “Well, yes, but you know what I mean.”
“You always say that, but I never do.”
He wants to end the conversation, but he knows she won’t allow it. He says to his friends, “It was the only way she could separate from me. I think she did it because she understood I needed to enter my adolescence without her so close.”
Karin’s smile is as sharp as a sliver of glass. “Ah,” she says, “she shot herself beneath her sleeping child’s window so he could thrive. To you a bullet to the chest is good mothering. Rose is about the same age you were when your mother died. Is it time for me to go outside and put a bullet between my ribs? Rose—Rose, come here. I need your opinion on something. Everyone, you know our daughter Rose. Rose, we have a question for you. Would you feel more loved if I shot myself, Rose?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mother,” says Rose.
“All right, all right,” Richard says. “But you know perfectly well what I mean.”
May 1945
. . . And they’re still having the same fight. And not only Richard and Karin. Scientists. Historians. Germans. Jews. Was he good or evil? A patriot or a monster? A savior or a slayer?
Biographers, scholars, students ask the same questions to this day. Skim through the titles of the various articles and essays. “Lenz Alter’s Experiments in Life and Death.” “Lenz Alter: The Father of Chemical Warfare.” “Lenz Alter: Evil Scientific Genius?” “Lenz Alter: The Damned Scientist.” “Deciphering the Duality of Lenz Alter’s Mind.” “Lenz Alter: Ploughshares and Swords.”
Here’s a newish one: “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lenz Alter?”
A good question, the latter, and nice, the musical allusion. The Sound of Music. Nazis. Get it? It’s so hard to resist singing along. But what rhymes with nitrogen synthesis? What rhymes with chlorine gas? What rhymes with Ecstasy? Because he synthesized that too. (We know. You’re welcome.)
And what rhymes with Zyklon? Because, yes, in addition to fertilizer, in addition to gas, in addition to MDMA, our grandfather gave that pesticide to the world.
Zyklon. What are we supposed to do with that tidbit? That’s what we can never figure out. Do we interrupt our project to meditate upon the sins of our ancestors? Do we abandon our project—our own monograph, this writing—completely because, really, how can we ever justify our existences? Do we open our windows and scream our apologies to the Upper West Side of New York? We’re sorry as hell, and we just can’t take it anymore. Or do we just shrug and say, Don’t blame us, we barely passed eleventh-grade chemistry?
We don’t know. We just don’t know what to do with this fact of our lives, this aspect of who we are.
And we’re not unaware that we may be overdramatizing or that we might be using his sins to justify something we want to do anyway, i.e., die. We’re not unaware that we are looking for a reason to do something we have no reason to do. For us, dying is just a need as basic and urgent as everyone else’s need not to.
Also—the truth is, he developed only Zyklon’s first iteration. Unlike the chlorine gas he foisted on the generals, he had no idea what Zyklon would be used for. As far as he was concerned, it was nothing more than a pesticide, a boon to German farmers, that he was formulating at the behest of the government. Before he could even finish his work, the government he was working for invited him to get the hell out of the country. He probably didn’t think much more about Zyklon after that.
It was the Aryan remains of his team who came up with the next iteration, Zyklon B.
Still, those good souls couldn’t have done it without him. They added no fillips, no improvements, no surprises. Theirs is the exact formulation Lenz Alter came up with before his exodus, except for one thing. They removed the odor designed to warn humans that they were in the presence of a virulent poison.
Zyklon B. If you don’t know what it was used for, go look it up. Or go visit any Holocaust museum, where sooner or later you’ll come to a display of old canisters filled with the stuff, some of the canisters placed on their sides, the better for tourists to see the gray-blue crystals artfully pouring forth.
Or, after we die, enter our apartment and go into the largest bedroom, the Dead and Dying Room that nobody’s slept in for years, and get down on your knees and pull out the cardboard boxes we’ve stored under the double bed that’s long lain fallow, and open the one with RICHARD & KARIN Magic Markered on the side. Rummage through the photographs and letters and other Alter artifacts. Locate and take out the journals of our maternal grandmother Karin Gläser Alter. Scan the dates until you find the journal from May 1945. Take this journal—note the soft gray leather cover; our grandmother liked her journals to be pretty on the outside—and have a seat in our living room. We recommend the sofa; three generations of Alter asses have seen to it that it’s nicely broken in. Although, before you sit, please—how rude of us—please, fix yourself a drink, help yourself to whatever you find. One word of caution, though: if there’s a blender in the kitchen with the residue of a fruit juice concoction, you’ll want to avoid that.
Now that you’re comfortable, turn to Karin’s final entry. Don’t worry if you can’t read German. Just note the handwriting, not merely the old-fashioned flourishes and curlicues, but the quavering quality, the severe downward tilt, as if she couldn’t hold the book upright or the pen steady. Just note the columns, how she tries to keep them perfectly lined up, like prisoners summoned to the yard for roll call.
Mein Vater, Hermann Gläser.
Todesursache: Z
yklon.
Meine Mutter, Ruth Baumgartner Gläser.
Todesursache: Zyklon.
Meine Schwester, Eva Gläser Hirsh.
Todesursache: Zyklon.
Meine Schwester, Anne Gläser Bierman.
Todesursache: Zyklon.
Mein Bruder, Bernhard Gläser.
Todesursache: Zyklon
Meine Nichte, Katherine Hirsh.
Todesursache: Zyklon
Meine Nichte, Ada Hirsch.
Todesursache: Zyklon
Feel free to start skimming, because, as you will see, it goes on for pages. Of course it does. Imagine how many pages it would take you to list the names of everyone you’ve ever loved, liked, tolerated, despised, or just been introduced to at some party; everyone you’ve ever worked with or gone to school with or just run into from time to time or chatted up once or twice at a coffee shop. Many more nieces. Many more nephews. The children of the nieces and nephews. The children of those children. Her cousins. Her cousins’ children and her cousins’ children’s children. Her classmates. Her daughters’ classmates. Her teachers. Her daughters’ teachers. Her husband’s aunts, Rose Emanuel Ziegler, who she never met, and the long-widowed Lily Emanuel Klein, who she adored. The children and grandchildren of her husband’s aunts. And neighbors, grocers, butchers, bakers. Dye workers. Hardware store owners. Page after page, name after name. Cause of death: Zyklon. Cause of death: Zyklon.
Maybe someone else has a diary even more aged and yellowed, with columns of names and next to them: Cause of death: chlorine gas. Cause of death: chlorine gas. If Iris had lived, perhaps that diary would have been hers. But Karin, at least in her youth, never thought to object to the gas. Quite the opposite. She was proud to marry into the family of Lenz Alter, war hero. When she became Lenz’s daughter, if only by marriage, his development and deployment of the giftgas had still been a triumph, still something to trumpet.
Karin and Richard and their three daughters, one of whom was our mother, never considered the development of chlorine gas reprehensible because Lenz had done it for Germany—his country! his love! his life!—and because it had been wartime and because he’d been feted and celebrated and promoted to captain. What had he said when people—the generals themselves—recoiled at the horror of gas?
“Death is death,” he said.
Our great-grandfather, the Gertrude Stein of chemical warfare.
But now—May 1945—a second war ending, Karin sees how mistaken she was. Now she recognizes his invention and promotion of chlorine gas not only as a crime, but also as the first sign of a pattern that led to this, his destroying her world.
Richard hasn’t stopped weeping since learning about the Zyklon. He’s been a drinker all his life and is a full-out drunk now, and a drunk of the worst kind: he’s melodramatic, emotionally flabby. Every day, it seems, there’s another article he wants Karin to read, another revelation, another reference to the horror, but also to the irony: the poison was developed by a Jew.
Talk about too smart for their own good, an editorialist writes.
Karin stands at the kitchen sink, the same one that will someday hold the remains of our final cocktail. Wearing her American muumuu, her bony legs managing to keep her emaciated body upright so long as she leans against the counter, she washes the dinner dishes because if she doesn’t, who will? The two older girls are at college, the youngest appears oblivious to the fact that her mother is sick, and Richard’s sitting a couple of feet away in the attached dinette, crying. Her disease has progressed, there’s no saving her now, but she still wants her home to be tidy. She’s careful with the soapy plates, slippery glasses. A strange part of dying: she drops things. Not only stemware, but keys and magazines and the earrings she still tries to screw on slide from her hands and fall to the floor. It’s as if her fingers have decided to be the first part of her to give up material things.
“Your mother should have killed him when she had the chance,” she calls to Richard over the running water. “You should have killed him.”
Richard has the Times open. He looks away from the article he’s been reading out loud to her. He rests his eyes on the adjacent ad for lounging pajamas, on sale, Lord & Taylor’s. Even today, as skeletons clad in striped pajamas are being led from death camps, here is this ad. Thank God for it, Richard thinks. Thank God for the human capacity to hold both kinds of pajamas in our heads at once. He says, “He was a scientist, Karin. He was doing what scientists do. Oppenheimer. All of them.”
“Am I talking about Oppenheimer?” Karin says. “I’m talking about your father. Your daughters’ grandfather. I’m talking about us, you and me. We should be lined up and shot for not stopping him.”
Richard puts down the paper, covers his entire face with his hands. “He didn’t know what they’d use it for. He was just trying to help save crops. Think about it for a minute. They’d have used it on him if they’d had the chance.”
“And on us,” Karin says. “And on this little girl. Dahlie, come over here. Papa, look at Dahlie. You see this face?” Karin has that face in her hand, fingers pressing into each cheek as if she’s trying to dimple them. “They’d have used it on her.”
And when our mother jerks away from Karin’s wet fingers and asks what they’re talking about and Karin says, “Go ahead, Papa, tell her,” and Richard begins to sob, then Dahlie, who is sixteen, says, “Oh. That.”
Karin has long known that Richard is a weak man, but this is too much. Day after day. The bawling! The moaning! She unburdens herself to Dahlie. He cried when they had to leave Germany, she says. He cried when they had to leave Paris. He cried throughout the five years in Haiti—does Dahlie remember those five sweltering years in Haiti, the sunburns, the infected bug bites, the horrible natives, so foreign, so dark?—and again when his so-called Uncle Albert finally got them their visas for New York. That time it was tears of happiness, but still—again with the tears, always with the tears.
Also, he let out a sob on the day her doctor said he was sorry but there was nothing more he could do, it was time for her to begin putting her affairs in order. Just that one sob on that day, and he swallowed it quickly, but it would have gone on and on if she hadn’t cut him with a look.
She’s not a hypocrite, she tells Dahlie. She wants tears for no one, not even for herself. “No funeral,” she says. “Tell your sisters I said so. No funeral, no memorial, no nothing. Just get on with it.”
“I’m going to get on with my homework right now,” Dahlie says.
“My girl,” says Karin.
Finishing up with the dishes, Karin gives Richard the same look she gave him in the doctor’s office. She gives it to him frequently, this look, but it no longer does any good. He can’t control himself, he cries anyway, and it’s driving her out of her mind. Is her reaction to his tears unkind? Well, what if it is? She’s in pain. She’s enraged. It’s springtime—warm days and pussy willows and Queen Anne’s lace by the river, and in the park, forsythia is beginning to bloom—and she’s a young woman, only in her early forties, and she’s dying. And, come to find out, dying’s a far more arduous process than she ever imagined. How do weak, elderly people manage it? She’s serious, she tells Dahlie. She can’t imagine doing this old and frail. It’s taking all her energy as it is. It’s draining, it’s brutal. And still he wants comfort from her. Every night, comfort and understanding and supper.
The dishwashing tonight has worn her out. She wipes her hands on her dress, struggles her wedding band back over a swollen knuckle. She heads back to her bedroom, leaning against the walls of the long hallway as she inches along. The hallway divides the apartment the same way Berlin is now divided: to its east are the shabbier, utilitarian rooms (dinette opening to the kitchen, then bath, then master bedroom), and to the west are the nicer, brighter rooms, the rooms with windows and expansive views (living room, then our small bedrooms, all in a row).
As Karin continues, making her way back to her bed, she talks out loud, loud enough so that b
oth Dahlie in her room and Richard back in the dinette can hear her.
“Oh, to be the kind of person who can just put a bullet through her own heart and be done with it,” she says. “Oh, to be the kind of person who can abandon her children, who thinks only of herself, her own troubles. Tired of living? Then just stop living. Who cares about the child left behind? Oh, to be a genuine Alter, an Alter by blood. How easy life is for an Alter. Why wouldn’t it be? To the Alters life’s the same as death. Meaningless. Empty. Death is death. Death is life. Life is death. What a family.”
She reaches the bed, struggles into it. Richard sleeps on the living room couch now. “Not the girls’ rooms,” Karin said, when, chased from his own bed, he looked to sleep in Rose’s. “It’s their personal place even when they’re not home.” So the girls’ rooms stay empty, and he sleeps on the couch, lets Karin have the sheets and pillows of the double bed all to herself so she can thrash and groan and rail, which are her only remaining pleasures, her only remaining weapons too. She pulls the comforter to her chin, then over her face. When the pain knifes her, she bites the fabric near her mouth. She’s put holes in it. When the pain ebbs, she lets the comforter go. She folds it back so she can see her surroundings.
What she hasn’t told him, what she’s confided only to that last journal, is that since that final visit to her doctor she’s turned away from her lifelong atheism. If you’d asked her even a couple of months ago, she’d have assured you she’d remain a nonbeliever to the end, that unlike all the weaklings of the world, death was not going to drive her to the obvious security blanket that is religion. But there came a night when, as she lay on her deathbed, she saw her far bedroom wall rise up like stage scenery, and there, instead of the bathroom, were people whose names she’d written in her journal—Cause of death: Zyklon. Cause of death: Zyklon—all of them milling about like ticket holders prior to some sort of gala performance. When they saw her, they turned to face her. They waved and beckoned. When they realized she wasn’t going to get up and come to them, they conferred among themselves, and several were chosen to go to her. These delegates pulled chairs she didn’t know she owned up to her bedside and engaged her in small talk. They reminisced about attending the cinema with her in Berlin or sharing a meal. They laughed about a difficult exam in the history class they’d taken together in grade school, recalling and ridiculing the questions they’d missed. “Not once in my life,” her best friend from those days said, “did I need to know the dates of the Crimean War.” They came back, day after day, often bringing food she hadn’t tasted in years: soft white pretzels, fried wild mushrooms. Sweet, brown beer the likes of which America had never seen. For weeks she’d had no appetite, but with them she ate and drank with relish. With them she was ravenous. When they left, she was stuffed.
A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel Page 18