by W. E. Gutman
His parents’ political leanings could also account for Peter’s anguished and confused allegiance to Germany. He was no doubt convinced, as his parents must have been, that Hitler’s millennium was at hand. What I can’t reconcile -- and what my uncle refused to discuss -- is to what extent he knew of his neighbors’ activities. More troubling yet is that he and my grandmother weathered, unscathed, the German occupation, whereas nine-tenths of my father’s family perished in Hitler’s gas chambers, and that they were spared the daily horrors meted out by Romania’s brown-shirted Fascist thugs. Some sixty years after the fact, still lacking essential details, I accept full responsibility for the conclusions my speculations might invite.
What happened next is unclear. My best guess is that Peter and his parents were spirited out of Romania by Nazi confederates, and taken to Spain. They must have left in a great hurry. I inherited several of Peter’s toys and many of his illustrated books, including the antics of Max und Moritz. My uncle acknowledged having been in touch with them “sporadically” after the war. I remember asking for Peter’s address.
“What for? You’re both grown men and you live far apart. What could you possibly have to say to each other?”
I never found out.
Time blunts curiosity. It dampens the urge to know.
MY FATHER’S TOWN
In his 1994 bestseller, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Elie Wiesel had mused:
“Why is it that my town still enchants me so? Is it because in my memory [Sighet] is entangled with my childhood? In all my novels it serves as background and vantage point. In my fantasy I still see myself in it.”
Scenes from his childhood, I could tell, danced in my father’s head as we entered Sighet. As if to reconcile past and present, his eyes darted in restless syncopation from place to place, surveying the church steeple up the road, the graceful fountain in the center of the square, the shops and small eateries, the whitewashed row houses now bathed in a late afternoon amber glow. Memories quickly coalesced with the reality of the moment. It was not what had been lost or transformed that caught my father’s eye but what had never changed.
The village idiot had aged but he was still a pathetic buffoon who caught and ate invisible flies and exposed himself in public. His contorted, drooling smile, his roving, unfocused, rueful gaze, his uneven stride and childish antics were no more amusing now than they’d been years earlier. The smell of poverty and madness and heedless despair still clung to his pores.
Old couples ambled arm in arm through the common, their gait tentative, their eyes fixed upon the ground. Peasants, hardship and chagrin carving deep furrows upon their weathered faces, still led teams of steer to market or drove rickety horse-drawn carriages brimming with onions and potatoes and cabbage. Children sat on porches or peered out of windows, eyeing vacantly a spectacle of tranquil desolation. Outwardly given to its usual routines, the town, my father would later recollect, seemed exhausted. But it was he who was worn out -- eviscerated by the war, baffled by the nature of immutability, stunned by the steadfastness of change. The Sighet of his childhood stood before him, surreal, like a movie set, a parody of a macrocosm he had once taken for granted, a mere village whose heartbeat was now out of sync with his own.
Memories are like tears; they burn or they evaporate.
*
In 1962, on a pilgrimage that set the mood for his bittersweet, The Town Beyond The Wall, Elie Wiesel would rummage through an ossuary of buried emotions. What he unearthed would leave him refreshed, mystically self-renewed. He would reconcile with his childhood, put it in storage, so to speak, the way one consigns cherished but cumbersome antiques to some unused antechamber.
Hopelessly pragmatic, an odium for sentimentality concealing a lacerated soul, my father found no telltale spirituality in the experience, only emptiness.
“It was as if I’d blinked and been transported to an improbable now,” he sighed.
Whereas Wiesel would draw inspiration from Sighet’s denizens, my father found in the broken souls that crossed his path that afternoon an echo of his own demonic inner struggles. He refused to look at the beggars and the cripples and the mad as mythic beings or wandering sages or instruments of divine strategy but as pathetic and pitiable creatures affronted by God. He found no lyricism in their disfigurements, gained no inspiration from their tragic uniqueness. He would not elegize poverty and suffering, or poeticize ugliness; instead, he deemed them an emblem of blasphemy, an insult by nature against innocence and vulnerability, an unwanted offering flung at a reluctant recipient by a scornful giver. He took care not to elevate “the lost, the forgotten and the hopeless” to allegorical dimensions for fear that he might learn to condone their agony. And when he visited the old Vizhnitzer Klaus synagogue and chanced upon wizened patriarchs sitting in near darkness wrapped in their prayer shawls, he wept, stirred by ancient voices tugging at his soul and mourning the ideological chasm that now separated him from them.
If men only knew how much God hates go-betweens, they’d insist on direct communications.
*
Why had we come to Sighet? Was it whim, nostalgia or master plan? An uncertain future would help shelve a tormenting past, at least for a while, in favor of attendant preoccupations, like paying rent, buying groceries, reconnecting with the minutiae of existence, this time in a small town that reeked of bad memories and seemed bereft of dreams.
“I can’t find my place,” my father blurted out one evening as we sat around the dinner table. We looked at each other. No one said a word for fear of uttering platitudes. We’d settled in a sprawling split-level furnished duplex in the center of town. Was it on Mihaly Street? The upper level had been transformed into a medical office. We occupied the lower level with my father’s three sisters -- Ellen, the eldest, Malku (Aunt Mary to me) and Lilli, a vivacious freckle-faced redhead, the youngest. All three had miraculously survived internment and been freed by the Russians. Their parents and two brothers had perished in one of Hitler's death camps.
I remember a large kitchen lined with copper pots and pans, and the aroma of homemade plum and apricot preserves. The kitchen gave onto a narrow courtyard in which strutted a pair of jittery peacocks. I tormented the poor birds by imitating their mating call. Bright and cheerful, the den-like living room where we retreated after dinner smelled of old books and boasted a grand piano on which I would attempt to play, by ear, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Impressed, a kindly neighbor offered to teach me the rudiments of piano playing. I gave up after three or four lessons, bored with finger exercises, scales and one-handed renditions of Frère Jacques and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. I never learned how to read music but continued to play extemporaneously, for my own diversion, painfully reminded every time I attempted to improvise, in the key of C or F, that a keen ear is meaningless without nimble fingers and years of back-breaking practice.
What my father had alluded to at the dinner table (and would echo for years to come) was not a place at all but a mindset -- serenity -- freedom from inner-conflict. To my chagrin, I never found the right words. How do you extend condolences to a man who grieves over his own inner death? How do you offer hope without trivializing the hopelessness? I would invariably change the subject. Too smart and too principled to insist, my father would take the bait and help clear the air. We’d then play chess, a game whose greatest virtue is the contemplative silence it imposes. I never won a single game but we were both spared the tedium of small talk.
Time flies but not always in the same direction.
As I grew up and older, I would inherit my father’s anxieties and spend my life in a nearly constant state of controlled inquietude. A friend, a psychoanalyst, casually urged me to go on a popular psychotropic drug. I declined. Nor would I commit to years on the couch trying to remember life in the womb. I would overcome the incubus within, I assured him, by sheer force of will. I would harness it; use it as a gateway to inspiration and creativity. I still suffer from occasional bouts of depression --
winter and sunless days bring them on. I manage. Melancholy adds substance to form.
*
My recollections of Sighet are tenuous. From an otherwise impenetrable limbo, bits and pieces emerge but their clarity is questionable. They seem so distant and yet so real. I’ve resurrected a few snippets because, in their triviality, they are so telling of how memory works. They also offer a glimpse of the boy I was and the realities that permeated my boyhood.
I remember my mother watching me in silent terror as I rode a bicycle at breakneck speed in the middle of Sighet’s main street, hands off the handlebars. I took pleasure in her unease and zoomed past her, back and forth, giggling.
I revisit the variety show I attended one night at the local theater. I’d snuck up on stage during intermission, parted the curtain and told the audience how the magician had done one of his tricks. I was elated at the laughter and applause this act of daring earned me. My parents had front-row seats. They were in stitches. I’d acquired a precocious taste for exposing fakes. Applause is a siren call and leading roles in high school plays would later grant me the sweet rapture of public praise. My mother's fondest wish, to her dying day, was to see me on stage, on screen. She’d been especially fond of my Danny Kaye impersonations. (I toyed briefly with show business when I lived in Hollywood in the late 1950s. Genetically disinclined to chase after money for its own sake, repelled by the celluloid world and the plastic denizens I got to know, and secure in the notion that living my life was already a command performance, I never chased after my mother's dream).
I also remember a friendly bat performing dizzying aerobatics in the living room then disappearing through a small hole in the corner of the ceiling. My mother was terrified of bats and wore a kerchief on her head for the remainder of our stay. I delighted in the little winged animal's antics and looked forward to its nightly visits.
Fékété, the cat that came with the house, caught mice in the yard and brought them indoors, a “look-what-I've-found” expression on his face. He toyed with them then feasted on his frolicsome playmates. Every night, one of the mice -- my mother swore it was the same one -- ventured cautiously toward the center of the carpet, sat upright on its hindquarters, studied us for a moment or two, then scurried out of sight.
I must have enjoyed many untroubled hours in the midst of general boredom. Melancholy and unease, percolating at the fringes of consciousness, usually faded away at the first hint of a crisis or unusual event. These would prove to be more frequent and emotionally taxing than I could have foreseen.
One day I spotted Russian soldiers swimming the Tisza River. Some were stark naked. I learned new words: spirit alcohol, drunkenness, looting, rape.
Then came a phone call in the middle of the night. It was the mayor. He wanted my father to examine the decomposed remains of a German officer found face down near an embankment outside of town. I begged my father to take me with him. He refused at first then relented.
The stench, as we neared the body, was overpowering. Mesmerized and horrified, I managed not to throw up. Almost blanched, a few tufts of hair still clinging to scraps of blackened and desiccated skin, the right side of the skull was cracked like an eggshell. Near the body rested a leather military map-holder, a pair of wire-rim spectacles and a camera, a Zeiss. The officer had died from a massive gunshot wound to the head. The film inside the camera was developed. The negative and prints would later be turned over to Israeli intelligence.
From the depths of time I also reconstruct an odd conversation: A border guard complained to my father that smuggling (once a lucrative commerce among Sighet Jews) had declined and that he was no longer getting the great “commissions” he used to earn. My father reassured the man that, “one day soon, a great favor” would earn him more than all the bribes he'd ever collected. Less than a year later, my father would escape from Romania on foot with the help of the very same border guard.
*
I try to imagine or reenact what a fading power of recall prevents me from reconstructing with any degree of precision. Sometimes, inadvertently, I succeed. I relive scenes of family life that may or may not have occurred in the time frame I placed them, or in the same setting, or with the same cast. They remind me of one-act plays or scenes from the theater of the absurd.
*
It’s bad enough to be lied to. It’s humiliating when the liar makes no effort to render his lie believable.
I would later learn that myth and family resentments are more likely to be remembered -- and circulated -- than truth. My much maligned great-great-grandfather Abraham, it turns out, had suffered in silence. Only Fabian knew the sadness that devoured his father. He could see it in his eyes. He could hear it as Abraham sobbed quietly in the middle of the night. He was sole witness to the daily squabbles, Sarah’s petulance and spitefulness, the sleepless nights, the moments of despair, so deep and trying that Abraham stopped eating and nearly died. Yes, Abraham had had affairs. His mistresses were youthful, vivacious, attentive and full of tenderness. In their arms he could be young again and find unused reserves of love he needed to lavish and share.
“To be safe, call it fatalism or scruples, an adulterous man often stays married to his wife the way a car owner keeps a spare tire. I’d long since stopped loving Sarah….”
Often, impotence is merely the echo of indifference or disgust. Love ceases to be a joy when it becomes a burden. Sex ceases to be fun when it becomes an obligation.
His new wife Rivka had made him happy. Fabian did all he could to destroy their relationship. He criticized her cooking, mocked her gaiety and enthusiasm, and ridiculed her coquettish and loving nature. The family could not openly admit that it was not in Fabian’s nature to be kind. He was jealous and vindictive. His mother had died and his father now catered to an intruder who favored spicy Hungarian dishes over the fatty and calorific Polish fare of his parents. Nor did Fabien have any affection for his mother. He resented her tyrannical nature and detested his father for submitting to Sarah’s arrogance and daily taunts.
“I will never forget the day,” Abraham confided in his diary, “when, enraged by Sarah, Fabian charged at his mother, grabbed her by the throat and pinned her against the kitchen wall. I thought he was going to kill her. Stunned, I felt a sudden rush of euphoria and anticipation coursing through my veins.” A myocardial infarct would yank Abraham from Sarah’s clutches a few months later.
Had Fabian really been forced to sleep in the attic? One of the Guzmán-Gutman who’d managed to evade the Burgos Grand Inquisitor -- a converso who’d mistreated Jews more relentlessly than the Christians -- declared:
“Repeated often and with enough conviction a lie becomes the truth.” The axiom would not be lost on future generations of miscreants.
Three centuries later, Abraham wrote “[Fabian] could have slept in his room and snuggled under the eider down comforter. Sleeping in the attic sharpened his sense of martyrdom. In winter, with the wood stove on all night in the family room, the attic is quite warm. In summer, nights are cool and refreshing.”
Had Fabian been served leftovers?
“In his dreams! Absurd. He refused to join us at the table. Rivka put his plate in the ice box and he stuffed himself late at night when everyone was asleep.”
Was Fabian “exiled” miles away from Sighet?
“Not exactly. We were running out of options. Fabian was aggressive, vicious. He poisoned our life. So I asked an old friend who ran a small soap and candle factory less than two hours away to hire him and teach him a trade. Fabien had little aptitude for anything. He was lazy, undisciplined. My friend fired him twice; I had to beg him to take him back, which he did grudgingly one last time. This put an end to our friendship.”
Fabian grew up. Morose, quarrelsome and unmotivated, he would blame the world for his shortcomings and take refuge from imaginary wrongs in confrontation.
The apple never falls very far from the tree. Fabian’s son Yudel, my paternal grandfather, inherited the soap and
candle business. My father told me that Yudel spent his days at the synagogue or immersed in his holy books -- the Torah, the Talmud, the Zohar -- or strolling attired in three-piece suits bought on credit and rarely paid in full. He and his wife, Pepi Weisz, would produce six children. Three would survive the Third Reich’s slaughter houses. Yudel, Pepi, Leibi and Favish were exterminated in Auschwitz. The fat from their sizzling corpses were turned into soap and their skins into lampshades.
*
Then, early one morning, we packed our bags, hugged Malku and Helen and hitched a ride back to Bucharest. Lilli had been killed in a grotesque, gangland-style drive-by shooting. A phone call in the middle of the night had summoned my father to the scene of the crime. He had no idea who the victim was until he saw his sister's bullet-riddled body. She’d been machine-gunned, along with three friends, as they drove to a neighboring town for a wedding. The killers, Russian soldiers on a drunken joy ride, were never apprehended. Lilli had just turned twenty.