Sergeant Charley O’Brien went with Jacobs, as his driver and assistant. After each assignment, after each tour, Jacobs told Charley the same thing: You don’t have to come with me. It gets worse as we get further into this.
Jacobs, with his large, craggy, old-at-twenty-seven face, his narrowed eyes seeing right into Charley’s heart, his voice soft and kind, told him, “It’s all too much, Charley. I think maybe you should be reassigned. To headquarters. Maybe drive a general or two around for a while. Whadda ya say, kid?”
Charley straightened, swallowed hard, and shook his head. “I have to see it all,” he said, not knowing why; God knew he’d seen enough.
At Auschwitz, there were huge Red Cross tents, trucks of medical supplies, Army barracks set up for command personnel. There were international relief personnel, trying to get histories on the survivors. Others were just trying to keep them alive.
“Don’t feed anybody,” a GI told Charley. “When we first got here, we gave anyone breathin’ K rations and candy and milk, anything we had. Three hundred a week died. Jeez, they’d swallow down stuff, double over, and die. Man, you can’t believe.”
Charley had free time to sleep, eat, shower and shave, get a haircut. There was a small chapel in the compound and a young Catholic chaplain who heard confessions and offered mass on Sunday morning. Charley walked out into the blazing April sunlight, shaking his head to clear it. The contrast between the mass and the reality all around him was exhausting. He heard a man’s voice, angry, tough, oh-my-God familiar.
There was a large, disheveled, hulking red-headed captain, his back to Charley, his legs planted far apart. He was yelling at a group of German soldiers who were lined up, enduring his anger, waiting for their lieutenant to straighten things out, officer to officer.
The German lieutenant stood very straight, stiff, military. “We are entitled to go to mass. It is all arranged, Herr Captain. Check with your commanding—”
“Turn on your heel, shithead, and get your men back into the compound. Right now.”
It was Ben Herskel from Ryer Avenue, his hands on his hips, staring the German down. The officer said something to his men. They turned smartly and marched back to the compound.
Ben stood watching them, then turned and slammed into Charley O’Brien, who grabbed him in a bear hug.
“Whoa, take it easy, pal. I—” Ben pulled back and stared, looked away, then back. “No … Charley? Jesus Christ, Charley O’Brien?”
They stood, holding each other at arm’s length. My God, Charley thought, he looks like a man of forty. We’re twenty-three years old. They were studying each other as though looking in a mirror, each searching, each registering shock.
Ben punched him on the shoulder, the old guy-to-guy affection, but it was a forced playfulness. They walked along together, leaned against a parked jeep, lit up cigarettes, exchanged information—the official stuff, how they ended up here, what they were doing here. In this place.
“They needed officers who spoke German. I threw in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, so I can talk to the survivors as well as the Germans. Officer to officer. Rules of war, Charley. The Germans have become sticklers for rules of war.”
Ben’s face was hard and lined, his mouth a tight, thin line as he looked toward the camp. He breathed in the cigarette smoke as though it were oxygen.
“I’ve got good booze, Charley. The best. You come tonight. Then we’ll talk, okay?”
Charley stared at the unfamiliar face, searched for Ben in the bitter man. “What’ll we talk about, Benny?”
Ben grinned. “About innocent days, Charley, about old times, kiddo. About the Bronx and Ryer Avenue and old friends.” And then their eyes locked. “We’ll talk about this, Charley. You and me.” He dropped his hands, grinned when Charley saluted him. He returned the salute, then feinted at Charley’s chin with an affectionate touch. “Hey,” he said. “You’re with a good man, that Jacobs. A really good man. Tough guy underneath that sweet face. See ya tonight, kid.”
Charley followed Jacobs from cot to cot in a section where the patients were kept who had the best chances of survival. Living skeletons with huge, shining eyes, the flesh barely covering the bones of their bodies, the skulls beneath their faces showing clearly. Jacobs stopped at each bed, reached out, took a hand, leaned over, said a few words. His hand caressed a withered cheek, brushed a shaven head. He spoke softly in Yiddish, leaning forward, bringing his ear close to catch whispered words. Carefully, as unobtrusively as possible, he lifted each left arm, turned and gave Charley the number to add to his clipboard, followed by a name.
“Rest, Solomon,” he said. “The doctor said you had some soup. That’s good. Shalom, Solomon.”
Sometimes there was a reaction. But mostly the huge glass eyes just stared, warily, waiting.
They walked out into the afternoon sunshine of late April. The sky was blue, with soft, white clouds. Jacobs stared up, his mouth slightly open. He took off his glasses and cleaned them with his handkerchief, then looked at Charley.
“How you doing, kid?”
Charley stiffened. Anger overwhelmed him; his tightly held emotions began to unravel. “Why the hell do you keep asking me how I am? I’m okay. Sir. I’m as okay as anybody else. I’m as okay as you are. Sir. Okay? That answer your question?”
Jacobs nodded. His voice was as soft, as kind, as solicitous toward Charley as it had been toward the survivors. “I need you to be okay. Forgive me if I ask you. I’m not needling you, Charley, or worrying about you. I just think we all have to be very careful here. We have to take breaks. We have to … I don’t know, take a walk, look at the sky, read a … a comic book, listen to music.”
For the first time it occurred to Charley that Jacobs’s control was just that—conscious control, to keep the center from exploding.
“For you, Captain, I’d recommend a game of basketball. With your height …”
“Actually, Charley, believe it or not, in college I was a swimmer. Water polo. But listen, thanks anyway, kid.”
Charley told him about Benny Herskel. From home, from Ryer Avenue. Jacobs smiled. “Good, Charley. Good. Get drunk, get silly, talk dirty, be a kid again for a little while.”
But they didn’t get drunk, although he and Ben drank a great deal of Scotch. They didn’t get silly or talk dirty. They didn’t become kids again. They were both men, and they spoke carefully at first, testing each other, building on their memories and finally remembering that they had, in the past, trusted each other.
“Ya got the build and the connections, Charley. How come you didn’t become an MP?”
“I looked at them, the MPs, when I was in basic. Jeez, I’ve seen mean-looking SOBs in my life, but these guys! Hell, they treated drunk GIs on weekend passes like they were punching bags. My family—the ones who were cops—always said you should see to it that drunks get home or find a place to sleep it off. You don’t act like they’re public enemy number one. I guess I didn’t go for the spit and polish and rough stuff.”
Ben smiled, leaned forward, and poured the last of the Scotch. “Funny how much it takes around here to get a buzz on. Salud, pal, bottoms up, plenty more around.”
“I never knew you drank, Benny.”
Herskel wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You mean ‘Jews don’t drink,’ right? And Jews don’t volunteer for the Army and Jews don’t—”
Charley shook his head. “Jesus, that’s not what I meant. Hell, Benny, you know me. Since we’re five years old, you know me.”
“Do you remember the first time you and I had a real knock-down, drag-out fistfight? I do. You went to St. Simon for your first day in first grade. I had been through kindergarten at P.S. 79, so first grade was no big deal for me. You came home and I asked you how you liked school. Do you remember what you said to me?”
Charley shook his head.
“You said, and I quote, ‘The Jews killed Christ, and you’re a Jew, Benny, so you’re a Christ killer.’”
Char
ley shook his head. “Sister Mary Magdalene’s introduction to religion. Yeah. I remember. You hit me right in the mouth. Jeez, we went at it. Yeah, I remember—and my mother came along with a bag of groceries and she grabbed us, two real thugs, and even then you didn’t rat, when she asked you what was going on.”
“That was me, super-Benny. Take care of myself, all by myself.”
“When my mother got me upstairs, she shook the hell out of me. I told her what I learned in school, my first day, and she laid out the law to me. You know there was never any of that crap in my family.”
Benny leaned back on his cot and regarded Charley with a strange expression. Amusement, sympathy, what? “I wouldn’t think there would be. In your family.”
“My mom was real tough about any kind of stuff like that about anybody.”
“My family was too. Charley …” he stopped speaking, but even through the buzz, the haze that finally took control of his brain, Charley sensed that Benny had been about to say something. Something important.
“What, Benny? C’mon. What?”
Charley felt a cold shudder across his shoulders. He felt on the edge of something. Something about himself, his family, that he had known all along, without knowing. Some mystery he had avoided confronting. How could Benny have any answers when he himself didn’t even know the questions?
Benny shook his head. “Another time, kid. Listen, Charley, there’s something I always wanted to ask you. About that night. On Snake Hill.”
For years, Charley had considered that dangerous territory. Dante had said we never talk about it, or think about it again. It happened; it’s over. Period. But here—in this place, with the smell of death and anguish, with the still-unburied nightmare corpses and the barely living survivors, their eyes staring at things Charley hoped never to see—what had happened on Snake Hill, one snowy winter night when they were kids, seemed unimportant.
“What do you want to know? We were there, all of us. We all know what happened.”
Benny leaned forward, hunched over, his elbows on his knees, feet wide apart. His eyes were bloodshot, his speech just slightly slurred, but the intensity never wavered.
“Your brother Gene is a priest. You guys all had to go to confession. What the hell did you say? What the hell did your priest say, that it was okay, it was all right for us to have battered that rotten bastard to death, who we all know deserved what he got? How did you handle it, Charley? I mean, I don’t think you could lie to your confessor.”
“Willie’s father killed him. The cops saw him. He publicly confessed, and when Father Kelly showed up to give Stachiew last rites, Willie’s old man confessed, right out in the open. Gene went to Father Kelly the next morning, told him the truth. We battered the bastard. He was attacking us and we defended ourselves.” Charley reached for the newly opened bottle of Scotch Benny had placed on the floor between his feet. He dumped a slug into his glass, swallowed it, caught his breath, shook his head.
“You been walking around all these years thinking we killed Stachiew?” he asked.
“Well, I didn’t have the luxury of a priest telling me what I did was okay, and when Willie’s old man fried, nobody told me, ‘Hey, that was justice.’”
Charley’s voice went cold and hard and sounded absolutely sober. “Do you think we killed him, that we’re murderers?”
Benny smiled and shrugged. “Hey, who am I to argue with your priest? A long time ago, kid, a whole world ago. Like a dream, like a kid’s story, like something in a comic book. Not important—the whole thing didn’t mean fucking-A. How much Scotch do you think it’ll take for me to pass out? I’ve been experimenting every night, but I can’t seem to get to it. You, on the other hand, look like you’re seeing double. Or I am. Jesus, Charley, there are two of you sitting there, looking at me. And both of you look worried. C’mon kid, forget it. Jesus, look around here and forget it. Come on, let me get you back to your quarters before those mean sonofabitch MPs come looking for you.”
They walked to Charley’s bunk, swaying, catching hold of each other, laughing, shushing each other. Ben helped Charley up the stairs, grasped him by the shoulders and spun him around. Charley was surprised that he was no more than an inch shorter than his childhood friend. Somehow, Benny always seemed larger than life.
“Wanna know what my assignment is tomorrow morning?” His hands tightened spasmodically on Charley’s shoulder. He leaned forward, his face inches away. The fumes were so strong, Charley couldn’t tell if they emanated from Benny or from himself. He squinted hard, tried to focus. Ben shook him, hard, and his voice changed. His words were clear and filled with controlled rage.
“Tomorrow, kid, I gotta march my Germans off to the local Catholic priest. They’re gonna go to confession. So that on Sunday morning they can receive communion. Do you read me? Communion.”
He dropped his hands, and Charley couldn’t think what to say. He was dizzy, he felt sick. He reached out for his friend, to soften the anguish, but Ben turned, waved away any response, and left.
What the hell was there to say?
God, I’m pissed, Charley admitted to himself. He didn’t like the spinning sensation, the loss of control that forced him to move in slow, careful imitation of normality. That’s what drunks do: move in exaggerated motions.
He pulled the hard flat pillow from under his head, put his chin up. Get the blood back to the brain. God, he felt floaty.
He started thinking about his parents. Or, rather, dreaming about them. He held his breath, ten years old, clenching his fists against the argument. He knew it was coming. When he came home from school, the two nuns swept past him, coldly dismissing him as though they’d never seen him before. He’d heard the door to the apartment slam shut, he could picture his mother’s fury—tight lips, clenched jaw, narrowed angry eyes.
He went to the kitchen and she came in, poured him a glass of milk, handed him the Hershey syrup, told him not to make a mess. And change your clothes—don’t forget to change your shoes, Charley.
His father was working a four-to-midnight shift, and Charley knew she was waiting, keeping her anger hot and explosive. His father came home and Charley covered his ears with his hands, sang softly to himself. To try to block it out. Of course, that never worked.
Sergeant Charles O’Brien shook his head from side to side, then sat up abruptly. He hadn’t been dreaming. He’d been remembering. He hadn’t thought about their argument, their continuing argument, for years. But now, his brain wide open, flooding, there it was. All the words he’d heard, through the years, late at night. It had started the way it always did.
His father, tired, gruff, sensing immediately what was coming. “Listen, I had a tough night, okay? A couple of crazies—”
His mother: “Speaking of a couple of crazies, Tom. They came again. This afternoon. Sister Holier-than-Thou and Sister Even-Holier. Tom, I’m telling you. Talk to Father Kelly. Tell him to keep them the hell away from me.”
His father: “Miri, they are simple women. They think they’re doing you a kindness. They are sincere in their belief that—”
“That when every member of my family dies, you’ll all go straight to heaven and have a wonderful reunion, sponsored by Jesus and the Sacred Heart of his Holy Mother. And I won’t be included in the party. Me, I’m bound for hell, because—”
“Look, Miri, I know you’re upset. What the hell did you do, brood about this all day long? For Christ’s sake, just forget it. They’re ignorant women who mean well.”
“They don’t mean well. They are like vampires, smiling at the prospect of looking down from heaven at me, who could have been saved, but picked the devil instead. Listen, Tommy, I’ve had it with them. Let them keep their damned stupid medieval ideas to themselves. Not in my kitchen. How dare they?”
And now his father’s voice changed. She had crossed the line. She never knew when to stop, his mother.
“You don’t say another word about my religion. You can rant and rave all you
want about these poor women, who’ve devoted their lives, by the way, to what they believe in. But don’t you say a word about my religion.”
“How can I say a word about ‘your religion’? All my kids, I let you get them all baptized, I let you send them all to parochial school. I watched them and helped them with the catechism, and smiled at them when they made their first communion. My God … not even one of them—”
“Not even one of them? Is that what you wanted, all along? To keep one of them? To learn what? That when a daughter in the family marries a goy, a shit, a whatever, that daughter is dead? That the father rips his clothes and sits for seven days, mourning, then wipes his daughter from his family forever? You wanted one of them for that wonderful tradition?”
“Don’t you dare. Don’t. You want my opinion about what garbage they filled my children’s head with? Saints to get pierced and burned and boiled alive—all for some wonderful ‘someday,’ ‘somewhere,’ when they die. If they die in a state of grace. Oh, Tommy, I know all about it.”
How had he remembered all this? Where had it come from, all of a sudden?
Because every single day, from the first camp they entered, from the first emaciated dead faces to the frozen faces of still-breathing survivors, his mother’s face floated, like a mask, over the dead and the near dead. His mother.
His mother, the orphan from upstate New York somewhere with no family, no history. Poor Miri.
Whose father rent his clothes and sat shiva. For his dead daughter, Charley’s mother, who married the Irishman Tom O’Brien, who honored her promise to raise all of her kids as Catholics. And she did.
His mother, who became furious at Father Coughlin on the radio and declared, “Keep that lunatic out of my home.” His mother, who shook each child in turn when he or she came home from the first grade with the incredible knowledge that the Jews killed Christ, and therefore they hated the Jews. Sister said.
The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel Page 20