Next to this I taped the letter from Mr. Kaufman of the Holocaust Archives. I circled the word Durnik, the town in which the Rosenheims once lived. Under this I wrote the word Victim.
It was completely possible that all of them were victims. It was completely possible that all of them had perished in the same way, that they were even cousins, or brothers. Only one thing was certain. They were not from the same place. But for the moment I left unresolved the fate of the two people in the photograph.
My father had variously told me that my grandfather was a philologist, a high school language teacher, a professor of Romance literature, an expert in Finno-Ugric. This now did not sit so well with me. If he was a philologist, he was so just at the time they had gone crazy sorting out the Indo-European roots of Western language. Not coincidentally they called this root language “Aryan.” Their imagined etymologies enabled them to glibly reify for themselves remote, mythological times, conferring nobility on their own sad, dull, modern words, and, by extension, on their lives as well. They created this world of Aryan purity in the comfort of their studies, warmed by their Persian rugs and cosseted by their thick velvet curtains, not willing to see how their trains of thought might one day turn into cattle cars filled with real people.
I stuck another Post-it below the photograph. Mad Scientist.
I would just like to add that I was once thumbing through my father’s OED and found that the Indo-European word for salmon was lox. If I could see the idiocy of that, surely they could, too. Maybe that’s why the man in the photo seemed so jittery.
I reached for my next piece of evidence. It was a train ticket I had found in that envelope filled with foreign objects. It was a ticket to Vienna. Or perhaps from Vienna. It was only the barest stub, so very little could be gleaned from it. Torn away were the basics: the date, the station. I looked for a clue.
I found it near the top edge. Wagon-Lit 2-4-4. I taped it to the wall about two feet above and to the right of the photograph of my grandparents. It needed to be nearer the outer circle of this story. Under it, I attached the note: Car 2, Compartment 4, Seat 4. My father had written that he had been on vacation in Vienna. Perhaps this was his ticket. I added the words: To Majdanek? From Belsen? Childhood vacation before the war? Trip with Mom after the war?
It was such a small shard of a ticket that no markings such as the German Eagle or any National Socialist symbols remained, and it had been crumpled and it sustained water damage, too, but it chilled me to look at it. Trains of any sort in this context were too brutal to contemplate. Perhaps I should have studied it more closely, but I taped it to the wall and reached for the next piece of evidence.
This was Josh’s last report card. In my day, report cards were actually cards, with little boxes printed on them, and each teacher wrote down a grade in one of the boxes, and only occasionally a comment in the single line provided. But Josh’s report card was four pages long. Each teacher felt obliged to write a short essay on his “positives” and “negatives.” Josh of late was pretty much in the negative column. “Not working up to ability.” “Shows little enthusiasm for his work.” “Sloppy.” “Late with homework.” “Seems preoccupied.”
I taped it up in the far right corner, as far away from the train ticket as I could find. I put a Post-it beside it and wrote the words Possible trouble at home.
Next to his report card I attached, with a great deal of effort, Ella’s sundress—the one I had found hanging in the closet and that mysteriously had no body in it. I tried to remember when she had worn it, and I had no idea whether this really happened or not, but I saw her come up to me at the swimming pool, and I seemed to remember she was carrying a large rattan purse with ivory-colored handles, and I also remembered sandals because her toes were bright red, and she said something to me, something like we’re all going now, are you sure you don’t want to come with us? I probably just made that up. But I scribbled on the yellow Post-it: Where it all went wrong.
Then I turned around looking for another clue. My eye was caught by something I had not put in the clue corner, actually. It was April’s book of poetry. It was poised on the edge of the couch, sending out waves of grievance because I hadn’t even opened it, let alone read it. Why I reached for it at that moment I don’t know, but I did. I studied her name on the cover. April Love. That was more ridiculous than my stage name—and of course there was no one named Love in the condo directory. (I checked.) She must have come up with it in the sixties. I imagined her at Woodstock, forcefully shoving flowers in everyone’s hair. (I, by the way, was still in grammar school during Woodstock.) And by the time the eighties came around she must have published so many things under that name it was too late to change it. Her real name was probably Lubovnik.
The book was called Indefinable Ecstasies. I paged through it. It was kind of Ginsberg-y, Whitman-esque, filled with emotional excess.
But I was struck by a line of a poem she called “Questions Number 4.” It was:
If I am blind, what is that light?
It was one of those poems filled with questions like Can I cry if I have no eyes? and Who said my first word? It seemed to me I had seen poetry like this before. Or maybe I’d read her stuff sometime and just didn’t remember. In any case, it got under my skin, that line, and I didn’t really know why except that’s how I felt. If I am blind, what is that light? It was like that scene in my father’s book—the one when he is sitting in the back of that army truck with the sand storm raging about him, and the whole world blotted out, yet there he was, racing on…to where? He wasn’t even driving. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t even feel. And yet he knew that he had experienced something beyond his four senses, and beyond his intelligence, too. That was the time in the story when I felt I knew him, if only just a little.
But I did not think this was a clue, and I was about to put the book down when I noticed the inscription on the flyleaf. It was addressed to my father, but it wasn’t signed by her mother as she had claimed. It was from her. My dearest Heshel, it read. For everything past and everything future. With deepest and enduring affection, April.
It was dated two years ago.
I tore out the flyleaf and taped it to the wall.
She was the one.
I ran out of the apartment, along the gangway, waited impatiently as the elevator snailed up from the ground floor, hopped down the stairs instead, and jogged over to the town houses. It did not take long to find the house of the woman with the famous poet daughter. The name was Bloomfeld, as it turned out. April herself answered the door. She seemed surprised and happy to see me.
“You found me!”
“Can we talk?”
“You look upset. Is your father all right?”
“He’s fine, he’s fine.”
“You want to come in?”
I could see her mother on the easy chair straining to see who was at the door.
“No. Let’s go out.”
I couldn’t think of anywhere, so I suggested Starbucks. It was ludicrous, of course, but I had to think fast. We took her mother’s Continental. Traffic was thin because it was the second day of Rosh Hashanah and the conservative and orthodox Jews were still at services. Starbucks was mostly empty, too. Automatically we went to our table—I thought of it as our table even though we had sat at it exactly one time before. I watched her pry the lid from her tea and blow on it. I had to admit I had grown to like how she looked, and even now in the flush of my anger and anticipation, I noticed how her hair glistened in the sunlight, silver with age as it was, and how her long, fine neck emerged like a bouquet from the cup of her silken collar. There were indeed wrinkles on her skin, particularly when she bunched up her forehead in thought, but they no longer obscured the lovely structure of her face.
“What is it with you and my father?” I finally asked
It was weird, she told me, how things happen in life. Being a writer, she had an obsessive need to create meaning where none actually existed. But
sometimes, she said, stories really happen, sometimes the circle actually closes. Fortinbras enters stage right and carts the bodies away. April spoke like that.
Thus, it turned out that it was not entirely accidental that her mother had moved to The Ponds at Lakeshore some years after April’s father had died. In fact, it turned out that April’s mother had known my father for many years, and that she felt she owed him a debt of gratitude. Learning that he was widowed and alone, she felt impelled to be near him, to try to repay this debt, to help him if she could. That’s why she bought one of the town houses.
“Debt?” I said.
“Your father walks with angels,” April replied. She took a sip of her tea. I myself held on to my coffee cup as if for support, like it was bolted to the table. I watched her closely. The tea had moistened her lips.
Many years ago, she went on, my father had helped them. Her own father had been a physician, but he had gotten into some sort of trouble and had lost his practice. There was some misdeed. Maybe abortions. Maybe embezzlement. Maybe alcohol or drugs. She was unclear. Maybe they needed something to glue them back together. Maybe he’d already gotten back on his feet, and they wanted to move on. Anyway, they were desperate for a child. They knew there were war orphans in need of homes from all over Europe, but, with his background, they had been turned down by all the agencies, including the Jewish ones, or whoever it was who arranged these things. But somehow or another, by talking to someone who knew someone who said something to someone, they found their way to the one man who could get them a child.
“My father?”
“Your father. He found me. I think he actually went over and got me himself.”
“You’re a concentration camp victim?” I blurted stupidly.
“Actually, I don’t know,” she said.
She was found in a convent orphanage, but if her parents died in the camps, or in some ghetto, or as partisans, or in a bombing, or of starvation, or simply abandoned her—she had no clue. She had always felt that my father knew, even though he always claimed he didn’t. But he had treated her so kindly for as long as she could remember, lavished her with such tenderness and generosity, that she dared not press him. In time, she forgave him. And truthfully, sometimes she was grateful for his silence. What possible good would it do? she often thought. He had saved her. Given her a new life with good parents. Why dig up the past?
She smiled up at me, her face alight, I supposed, with the memories of that happy childhood.
“So Mother wanted to help him in his later years,” she said.
But a strange thing happened. It was actually April who spent time with him. And each time she came to visit her mother, she found herself spending more and more time with him.
“At first I would bring your father something for dinner. But it seemed like every woman in Florida beat me to it. His freezer was always stuffed with roast chicken, flanken, brisket, you name it. I would come in, and there’d be deli trays, nova, layer cake. Apparently he was popular with the ladies,” she shrugged.
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew him?”
“To my parents he was a god,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me. “When they told me my story, he was always the leading man. How I arrived, speaking no English, holding his hand. How my hair was in braids, and how I used to hide from everyone, except him. How I wouldn’t eat anything except noodles, until he taught me to eat plums. And always how the good Mr. Rosenheim had gone himself to find me, how he had brought me here, how he had arranged for my papers—not that I knew what that meant—how he had come to visit every time there was trouble with me, speaking to me in my language, just a little, to calm me down. I don’t remember any of it, really. I was five. I mean, I do have some memories, but they are so vague. Virtually all of my memories begin here in America, as if nothing happened to me before that. It’s remarkable really. I can’t remember speaking any other language. I don’t even know what language I spoke. It’s all gone. I asked your father. Where did I come from? What language did I speak? He would answer, ‘Who remembers?’”
“Well, you must have been speaking German, or Yiddish,” I said.
“Or Polish, or Hungarian, or French, or Greek, or Italian,” she said.
And it was true. My father knew many languages, at least a little. And the children came from everywhere. I remembered now that there were others among my parents’ friends—a girl from France, Michelle; a little boy from Poland, I couldn’t remember his name; another girl from somewhere…. Had hebrought them all over? Had he begun his long, pathetic attempt at absolution by saving the Jewish children of Europe?
I was lost in these thoughts when she said, rather desperately, “Perhaps he did actually do some research on me. Or maybe he already knew who I was. After all, he was the one who dug me up.”
She looked at me with bright, anxious eyes.
“I was thinking,” she said, “maybe he mentioned something about me in those journals you were looking at.”
“You haven’t read them?”
“Me? No,” she said.
“But you were the one who brought them to my father’s room at Lake Gardens. You’re the one who called Kaufman.”
She looked confused.
“You were the one who brought the box to my dad’s room, right?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
I slumped down in my chair. I had been thinking, assuming—and I was more and more sure of it with every word she spoke—that I had finally solved the riddle. That my answer was right in front of me—the box delivery, the inquiries to Kaufman, the invisible friends coming at odd hours. It was all April. But now I realized that all I actually had in front of me was another question.
And she was still waiting for her answer. She was hoping with all her heart that I had unlocked the key to her identity. That it was all there in those books I had been reading. That I was the one to answer her question.
I took her hand.
“No,” I said. “Nothing. He hasn’t mentioned you at all.”
She looked down at the table, then bravely up at me. The moisture from her lips seemed to have journeyed up to her eyes.
“Oh well,” she said.
When I got home I decided to take a rest. I made some space on my father’s La-Z-Boy and reclined it. From where I sat, I could see the clues on the dining room wall. My eyes found the flyleaf from April’s book. It had been a good clue, but not the right clue. I yawned and turned onto my side, cuddling into the chair. I opened my eyes a slit, just to situate myself, and there, on the table, where I had left it the day before, was one of my father’s journals lying two inches from my nose.
CHAPTER 24
A few days after the fall of Yad Mordechai, the city of Ashdod was taken. The same day, the bombardment of Naor began.
The man who called himself Heshel Rosenheim sat in his foxhole behind the little concrete bunker that had been built a few days before and marveled at the weather. It was lovely. The skies were clear, the days a pristine, translucent blue, the nights starry and moonlit. The bombs came in waves, an hour of intense fire, an hour of silence. Then the bombing would recommence. Each wave was more violent than the one before, and soon most of the kibbutz was reduced to rubble. The watchtower was cut in half, and though the Bren gun had been saved, the operator was killed. He was the first to die. His body, without its legs, fell from the tower and landed near Post 4. In the hour of quiet they hastily buried him together with his legs, in the sand on the edge of the perimeter. Others tried to repair the damaged bunkers and reinforce what was left of the Bet Am in the center of the kibbutz—once it had been the dining hall, the meeting place, the school house, the movie theater—but now it was mostly a shell, though the blue-and-white flag still flew above it, tied to an exposed steel beam. Most people hid in the shelters during the bombings that followed, and casualties were fewer. Heshel Rosenheim remained in his foxhole, though, and it was assumed it w
as because his was the first line of defense. But the truth was, he was happiest there. It was not that he wanted to die—he still intended, in fact, to surrender to the Egyptians at the first opportunity. It was simply that he could no longer face being in such close quarters with all those Jews. He could no longer look them in the eye.
He rested his Sten gun across his knees and glanced over at Dovid, who would not leave his side, even when ordered. When the bombing stopped, Heshel would stand up and stretch, then commence to reinforce the bunker that protected his little round of turf. In the foxhole with him were some boxes of ammunition and a small supply of Molotov cocktails, and on his belt two real grenades—familiar ones, German M24s. From time to time he would send young Dovid through the trenches to bring back a little food and something to drink from the makeshift kitchen that had sprung up in the shelter. Once he even brought cold chicken. Another time some pita and a nice tomato and cucumber, which they ate in slices. The water tower had been pummeled into debris, so water was carefully rationed. Dovid sometimes brought juice or soda pop instead, which was fine with Rosenheim. He watched the boy march across the lawn which was now cratered like the moon, his arms full of booty.
“Are you still happy to be here, Dovid?” he asked.
“I am the happiest man on earth,” he replied. “Or the moon!”
When the bombs started falling again, they ducked down. Heshel ordered the boy back to the shelter, but he wouldn’t go. Or maybe he didn’t hear. It was so loud they both went deaf for minutes at a time. They played cards, cursing each other wordlessly when one or the other lost a hand.
In the evening, the bombing let up for quite a while. The Egyptians were having dinner, they supposed. An older fellow, Yitzhak, ran around trying to fix the electrical system so they could light the encampment, which, except for the shelters, had been thrown into darkness. Several Haganah teams built makeshift bunkers in the burned-out Bet Am, while others roamed the perimeter to repair the barbed wire. In the lull, a small group of reinforcements arrived, bringing with them the PIAT. Heshel watched as they leapt from the Jeep, one of them carrying the small rocket launcher on his shoulder. Moskovitz came up to him and shook his hand. It was obvious she was explaining that she was to be his assistant. The PIAT operator looked familiar.
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