by Clinch, Jon
What could he and Max live for with her gone?
His mind races as the razor drips. Should his wife be lost, everything will be possible. All strictures will be removed. And he knows exactly what he will do. He’ll persuade Chaim to feign illness, and in the boy’s place he’ll arrange to use Max as his assistant. For just one day. One day is all they’ll need. The two of them, father and son, will murder Liebehenschel together, locking the door to keep the cook and the housekeeper out and tying him to his chair with the linen drape and letting his blood paint the walls and soak the carpets and run down between the floorboards. Then out the window they’ll go. Out the window to freedom or whatever else might be waiting.
An entirely different dream comes true, though, when they reach Vollmer’s apartment.
They find the dining room the same as ever, although the windows are open to permit the breeze to begin scouring away the stale air of winter. Eidel’s materials are neatly arranged in a corner as usual, the painting hidden beneath its white sheet. The easel faces out into the room, and with a kind of urgency that he’s never quite felt before—an urgency driven by fear that she may have set her brush to this panel for the last time—Jacob dares to step over and lift the sheet and see what lies beneath it.
Every bit of oxygen leaves his body. He doesn’t care that the painting shows Vollmer and his family. He doesn’t even register that it shows Vollmer and his family. To him they may as well be a bowl of fruit, a sunset, for to him the painting shows Eidel in every stroke, Eidel his one beloved, Eidel and Eidel alone. He stands enraptured before it—before her—when Vollmer enters, his usual self, dour, stiff as a hairbrush, and he’s too absorbed to release the drapery and get to work, too dumbstruck to invent some fawning remark as to how handsome the family looks in their portrait, too uplifted to note that he’s been caught transgressing at all.
So Vollmer leads the way instead, taking up another corner of the white drapery and studying the painting with his head tilted at an angle and saying, “One more session, maybe two, and she will be finished.”
“Then she’s still alive,” says Jacob. Saying it without daring to say it. The words just coming out. “After the fire.”
“Oh, yes. She’s very much alive.”
And thus the spell is broken. He can go on.
*
Who else but the junkman? Count on that little itinerant opportunist from the country to gather up such tags and scraps of information as sift down among the dregs of this world and assemble them into something of meaning, if not exactly worth. Count on him to reach, in his own way, the bottom of everything.
“You’re still here!” he says to Jacob as Blackbeard pulls the old horse to a stop alongside the outdoor sorting tables of Canada. With the change of the seasons the work here is perhaps a little better than before, but the scale is always relative.
“Oh, yes,” says Jacob. “I’m still here. My pardon hasn’t come through.”
“What a kidder,” says the junkman. “If you’re still here, it’s only because your wife hasn’t finished the painting.”
“The sturmbannführer said she has another session or two.” He says it like a person who enjoys consulting with the sturmbannführer on a routine basis.
“Today’s Sunday,” says the junkman, lifting his hat to scratch underneath it. “So that’s one down. One to go.”
“One what?”
“One more session before it’s over. You heard about the picture, didn’t you?”
“Heard about it? I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Right there in Vollmer’s dining room. It’s a masterpiece.”
“No. Not that picture.” The junkman cranes his neck to be sure that Jankowski isn’t observing them. “I mean the other picture. The one she drew in her bunk. The one that Vollmer burned down the block to get rid of.”
“I don’t know about any such picture.”
“According to what I hear,” says the junkman, “it was’t especially flattering.” And then Blackbeard clicks his tongue and the horse begins to draw away and the junkman tips his hat, raising it with a slowness that gives this farewell a quality of absolute valediction.
*
Jacob finds himself praying that someone will die soon, and he doesn’t care who it might be as long as it’s someone who deserves one of Wenzel’s special burial details. There hasn’t been any pattern to these things that Jacob can discern, any connection to the dead man’s nationality or reputation or duties, any link to the weather or the time, but that just makes his prayer all the more fervent. He doesn’t even know whom he’s praying to, exactly—the God of Abraham or some other god, lesser or greater—but pray he does and with a vengeance.
A special burial detail will be Max’s opportunity to escape. Never mind the painting of poor lost Lydia. Never mind rescuing it and never mind preserving it. It’s gone and Lydia is gone and very soon Eidel and Jacob himself will be gone too. The time has come to accept all that.
Max, though.
Max, he can save.
So he tells him there’s been a change in plans. He’s to forget the pipedream of salvaging Lydia’s picture. He’s to escape, simple as that. He’s to go out on a burial detail and never return.
“I won’t go without you,” says the boy. For he’s still a boy, regardless. A boy to whom his father cannot and will not explain everything.
They’re in the bunk again, back to front, the father dripping lies into the son’s ear like poison or its antidote. “They won’t,” he says. “Your mother is still in an enviable position. They won’t harm us, not while Vollmer needs her. And if you go now, while she still has a good bit of work left, they’ll forget about you altogether.”
“They never forget.”
“They do. They will.”
“No.”
“Yes. In this case. Vollmer’s pride will make him forget.”
Max stiffens.
His father presses himself closer, whispering. “That painting of your mother’s will save us all if you let it. But you’ll have to be the one to go first. You must have faith.” It’s an impossible request, but he makes it.
Max breathes. “What about you?”
“We’ll come along later. We’ll find a way. I promise.”
*
The days pass slowly. Men die. One by one and two by two and a dozen at a time they go off to be buried or burned by the Sonderkommando, but not once does a special burial detail materialize. Day follows day, bringing death but not enough of it. Jacob waits and watches and wonders what sort of creature he’s become.
Wednesday crawls past with Jacob propped against his table in Canada, leaning forward and then back as he works, unconsciously recapitulating the motion of old men at prayer. Thus do the ancient forms come back, invoked by the flesh if not by the spirit. Jankowski is in a jolly mood today, perhaps his first on record, and life in Canada is placid, so Jacob’s intense concentration goes unnoticed and unremarked. As he works he watches the yard for the appearance of anyone from his block—they’re at work extending a bit of railroad track on the other side of the camp, and the labor is brutal and the footing is treacherous in the spring mud and from time to time an injured or dead prisoner will return either on foot or in a wheelbarrow. Losses have been high. He watches and hopes and he lets two dreams mingle in his mind, one of Max making his escape tonight, and the other of himself committing murder tomorrow—with no possibility of retribution beyond the two deaths that are already fated. This time, though, it’s Vollmer, not Liebehenschel, who goes under his razor.
But Friday morning comes all the same. Max breaks off for Canada and Jacob breaks off to meet Chaim by the fence, but not before telling his son to keep an eye out. Keep his fingers crossed. Perhaps tonight will be the night when their good fortune strikes.
Max says there’s no hurry, and his father doesn’t disagree.
At the administration building, though, word awaits that neither Vollmer nor Liebehenschel will require the barber’s service
s today. The clerk tells Chaim that they’ve been called to Berlin, but Jacob doesn’t believe her. Something is afoot. Perhaps the painting is already complete and Eidel is dead—the kitchen door was closed again today, so who knows?—and Vollmer has given orders that Jacob is to go straight to the ovens when his morning’s work is finished. But how could that be? Wouldn’t Vollmer have done the thing right away, if Eidel had finished the painting last Saturday? Wouldn’t Jacob have felt something, some deep and unmistakable burst of woe within his heart, if she were already under the ground?
And yet the day passes. He cuts hair and he shaves necks and he believes that each mustache he trims will be his last. Noon comes and the cook sets out a meal according to her custom, but Jacob doesn’t have any appetite. He watches Chaim eat, settling his stomach with sips of water and putting a little something in his pocket for Max, thinking that this morsel will see one of two very different fates. Either the entire Rosen family will be wiped out tomorrow and this will have been his son’s last proper meal, or else Max will get away tonight without having had the opportunity to eat it—leaving it to be found instead in Jacob’s own pocket when they go through his clothes.
*
The good news, unveiled when they return to Canada, is that there’s been a catastrophe on the rail project and scores of men have died. Some were buried alive in an instant, and some were hauled away for burial or burning elsewhere, and the rest were merely covered up where they fell. The luck of the draw. There were hundreds of injuries as well, more than the hospital can possibly hold, and broken men lie scattered about the yard as if felled by some military encounter. The French doctor paces among them, his hands folded behind his back.
The deaths keep up all afternoon and into the evening, wrecked bodies giving up the ghost one after another. Everything falls apart. A van comes to the block and takes away some of the bodies. Two guards from the fenceline stroll over like a pair of bored gunslingers and put an end to the suffering of a few more, but because it seems a waste of ammunition when they’re so close to death already they cease fire and advise Wenzel to have them loaded up as they are, dead or otherwise. What’s the difference. But the capo doesn’t report to them, so he keeps on.
When roll call comes, it’s impossible. Every man, alive or dead, seems to be propping up another man in the gathering darkness. Sometimes a pair of them breathe their last at the same time, as if nothing but mutuality has been holding them up, and together they collapse, inward and downward, sliding onto the clay. Wenzel’s trusted clipboard and his businesslike intentions are of no use now, not in the face of so much onrushing random death. He sends word that he needs another van, but no van comes.
“Now,” whispers Jacob to his son. “Find some other strong young fellow. Tell Wenzel he can rely on you to bury a couple of corpses, out beyond the fence.”
Max has a different idea. He steps forward and volunteers all right, but not with some other young man from the block. Not at all. Instead he volunteers himself and his father. Together. As a team. The proposal comes from his lips as if he’s been planning it this way for a while, and he has. At least since this new torrent of death has begun. Why not? Deprived of his usual sense of order, Wenzel might never miss them. He might assume that they’ve been killed too, hauled off in one of the vans perhaps, their serial numbers unnoted in the rush. It’s possible.
Except Wenzel still has some of his wits about him. “You go,” he says to Max. “And you as well,” pointing to another prisoner altogether. “This isn’t some family outing.”
Max
Did I understand that I was leaving them to die? I suppose I did. It was a long time ago, and what I remember most is the weight of the moment, the pressure and the opportunity, with death all around and my father telling me it was time to go and Wenzel giving me the order. What else could I do? Regardless of the year I’d spent in Auschwitz, I was still a child.
My mother would have wanted it as much as my father did. They’d had enough of dread. We’d all had enough. And if they couldn’t save Lydia, at least they could save me.
So I did as I was told. Until I got beyond the fence, anyhow.
The key to the antique shop was exactly where Chaim had said it would be. The painting was in a bin, rolled up with some others. I wrapped it up in brown paper and tied it with string, and I helped myself to a heavy coat that was hanging on a peg behind the counter, and I pocketed every coin that was in the cashbox. And then I set out toward what I hoped was France.
I traveled by night, keeping to the margins of anything like civilization—if you could call what was happening in Poland and Germany at that time civilization. I lived like an animal, furtive and shy of human contact and very nearly starving, which was nothing new. The whole world terrified me.
I had no sense of myself, really. The whole way to England and beyond, I didn’t have any more sense of who I was than a rat has. It had been wrung right out of me. I can’t say when I recovered it, or if I ever really did. Maybe not entirely.
Back in the sixties, people spent a lot of time talking about alienation—in those days you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting somebody who was talking about alienation, not in the art world anyhow—and it always seemed to me that I could give them all lessons on the subject. You don’t know what alienation is, until you’ve been alienated from yourself. Those people in my paintings, with their backs turned and their eyes averted? They’re not just uninterested in you; they’re uninterested in themselves. They don’t even recognize themselves. They’ve lost track of who they are, they count for so little in the world.
But nobody asked me about all that. Everyone was too busy explaining their theories to everyone else. Not that I would have told them, even if I’d been asked straight out. It’s only in a moment of weakness that I’d ever consider explaining anything, and moments of weakness always pass.
The only thing that occupied my mind on my long trek across Europe was my mother’s painting. You could picture the two of us as an Olympian and his flaming torch, as long as you didn’t imagine anything too heroic. I was just a broken boy with a badly-healed leg and an empty belly and a stolen past, making his way toward a future that he couldn’t imagine. But I did have the painting. It led me on, drawing me away from one thing and pulling me toward something else. In that way, I believe it saved my life all over again.
*
Call it a moment of weakness, then, when the tattooed girl from the National Gallery rang my bell and I let her up without putting everything away first. But how could I have done otherwise? She was in the lobby, and I’d have had to get to the basement, and it was impossible.
The painting was right there in the middle of the couch. My mother’s painting. There’s certainly no mistaking it for one of mine, and particular evidence to that effect was everywhere, on windowsills and on easels and on every stick of furniture I own. Failed attempt after failed attempt. I kid myself, you see. I’m pathetically hopeful. I bring them up now and then and I look at them in all kinds of light—two or three at a time, a dozen at a time—but the truth is that they never get any better.
You can’t paint someone else’s painting, even though I’ve tried.
The tattooed girl dropped her briefcase as if she’d never seen paint on canvas before. She didn’t ask where I’d been keeping these pictures or why, even though she’d asked a million times if I had anything else tucked away somewhere. Something I hadn’t shown anyone. She didn’t criticize me for misleading her. And she didn’t say a word about Wyeth and his goddamned Helga, thank God.
The truth is that she was dumbstruck, and she stood there in front of the couch with her mouth open for a while before she thought to ask me anything at all. I told her a little. Just enough. How the girl in the painting was my sister, how she’d been murdered on our first day in the camp, and how my mother had painted this picture back when we’d lived in Zakopane. Back before the war, when all of us were children. I didn’t say how this one painting w
as all I had left, but anyone could have seen that.
And now it’s on its way to the National Gallery. My mother’s painting along with a few of my lousy copies by way of contrast, all of them crated up like the treasures of King Tut and loaded into an armored van. Such caution, so much security, for a painting that I carried rolled up in butcher paper over better than a thousand miles’ worth of occupied Europe. A painting I used for a walking stick when I could barely stand on my own.
According to the tattooed girl, it’s exactly what she’s been yearning for all along. That was her word. Yearning. She said something about devoting one modest gallery to contexts and influences and so on, the way they do, and using my mother’s painting as the centerpiece. I believe that’s what she said. I wasn’t paying attention. I was busy watching them box it up for the trip. I was hoping that they’d light it properly down in Washington, although I suppose I shouldn’t worry too much about that. The light coming in through that attic window, with my mother behind the canvas and my father working downstairs and my sister dreaming away at her table, will be enough.
* * *
Notes and Acknowledgments
My last novel, Kings of the Earth, was in many ways a memorial to central New Yorkers of my parents’ generation—country people whose voices are dying out and whose stories are on the verge of vanishing forever. In The Thief of Auschwitz, I hope to have created a second memorial to that same generation, this time honoring those on my wife’s side of the family of man—the Jewish side—whose stories are likewise in danger of being lost.