Christ! he thought. Levin.
They brought the PIAT down to Post 5, which was about twenty yards from Heshel’s Post 4. Moskovitz, walking with Levin, listened carefully to his instructions. He looked up at her as he spoke, leaning into her. Watching their silhouettes move through the moonlight, Rosenheim bristled, but he did not stir. They disappeared into the trench, and he went back to contemplating the stars.
After a while there was a halfhearted barrage of mortar and small cannon fire, but then the night grew calm again. Ari and Pinchas came to relieve him, and he made his way along the trench line toward the Bet Am, smoking. He could hear voices coming from the shelter nearby; he could hear the plaintive cry of a cow in need of milking—they had set them free, but most had wandered back, and they waited among the ruins, mooing in distress.
He walked past the little detachment of reinforcements seated together round a small kerosene burner, drinking tea and eating black bread spread with jam. There were three of them, Irgunists. Probably no one else left to send, he thought. It was a matter of where to find a PIAT. It could be an effective antitank weapon from close range, but they were tricky to use, spring loaded, difficult to aim. You needed an experienced operator. He thought he felt Levin looking up at him, but he couldn’t be sure. He continued along in his leisurely way.
“Rosenheim!”
The voice was unmistakable. He turned.
“Who would have thought I’d find you here?”
“I live here,” Heshel replied.
“A kibbutznik!”
Heshel tried to look through him, but could not get past the jumpy, hungry eyes.
“To think we’d be fighting together!” said Levin in Yiddish.
“What do you want from me?”
Levin just smiled. “Since our last…conversation,” he replied, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Have you?”
“Yes, I have. I have. Racking my brains actually. Trying to place you. You may recall you made up a story about me. Do you remember? You made accusations, unfounded accusations. As if it were a crime to survive. Perhaps I did steal someone’s bowl, or someone’s shirt, so what? We all did. How many shirts did you steal, Rosenheim?”
“What do you want of me?”
“No one survived without stealing, without having friends in the kitchen, without smuggling contraband, without having patrons, without skills. So how did you survive? I wondered. I asked myself that, I thought about that.” He tapped his forehead with his finger to let Heshel know exactly where all this thinking had taken place. “You see what I’m getting at, Rosenheim? You said I was some sort of criminal, but really, I’m a hero, aren’t I? I survived. They couldn’t kill me! Of course, luck is part of it, certainly. Luck is always very important. But no, you needed more than luck, didn’t you? To survive more than a day, a month, more than three months, a miracle. Who survived more than three months, even in the work camps? One or two—the chosen ones. They did what they had to do. They were forced to do what they had to do. Who, after all, could remain human there? We were all reduced to some criminal state, some subhuman state. So I thought to myself—why this outburst from Lieutenant Rosenheim of the Palmach? I tested and retested my memory, I went down every little alley, looked both ways at every little crossing—Rosenheim, Rosenheim. Ah! I did know a Rosenheim! Yes, I told you that once. He was a shoemaker, so he was saved for a while by fixing the shoes that were sent to all those poor, needy Germans. But you know shoes—they just pile up! They filled the warehouses from top to bottom. So enough with fixing shoes! The shoe fixing was over! This Rosenheim, he knew what that meant. He knew it was shoes or gas. But he was smart, too, this Rosenheim, and he found another job. I couldn’t remember. I knew him only briefly, of course. What job did he get? I racked my brains! I remembered! They sent him across the highway. Outside the barbed wire. To work in an office. Every day he marched off with his little commando—two or three of them, I think—he even got a clean uniform, and shoes with leather soles, and a shave, once a week!—so he shouldn’t stink up the place, right? I remember watching him—it came back to me—watching him march off holding his bowl and his spoon—out in the morning, back in the evening—sitting all day in the warmth of the office, having his extra ration of bread and his soup from the bottom of the pot where all the cabbage was—and you know what? I hated that Rosenheim. I did. I hated him with every shred of my being. I regret that, but I did.” He shook his head sadly to indicate regret.
“Why are you telling me all this?”
Levin sneered, “Do you remember when you threatened me at Deir Yassin?”
“I remember.”
“I could not understand all your words, but I understood all that anger. You were at Majdanek, all right. But you were not that Rosenheim. So who were you?”
Heshel was acutely aware that he should not have stood there so long listening to this—it was an admission of something—but he found he could not pull himself away. Levin himself did not interest him. And his story was also nothing—he knew it all too well himself. He was not even afraid of jail or execution anymore. Something else terrified him. If he were exposed now, what would it mean? That’s what he asked himself. When he listened to Levin he barely remembered who that SS-Mann was in the office across the highway—he could not recall his voice, or his thoughts, or his desires any more than he had been able to recall even the slightest detail of the real Rosenheim’s face.
“So who am I?” he insisted.
“I’m still working on it,” replied Levin, with a sly wink.
“Perhaps I’m just who I say I am.”
“No. No, I don’t think so. You stole his name. I’m just not sure why. Were you in his commando? Were you a spy? A murderer? I can’t recall. But it will come to me. Because you see, I know your face. I just haven’t sent my brain down the right street yet.” He smiled again, his little threatening smile.
Heshel crushed out his smoke and walked away at last. His hands were shaking and his heart was pounding, but he felt compelled to turn around and face Levin once again.
“What happened to him?”
“Who?”
“Rosenheim. The Rosenheim you say you remember.”
“Who knows? I’m sure he’s dead.”
“Why?”
“He was soft.”
“Soft?”
“I saw him share his rations more than once.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Maybe some part of him had remained alive. Maybe he still had a soul.”
“Then he was better off dead.”
“Exactly,” said Levin, who went back to his comrades and poured himself some more tea.
He tried with all his might to recall one thing about the prisoner, Heshel Rosenheim, but he could not.
Perhaps a vague, dim face did appear before his eyes. The sunken cheeks, the dark, overgrown brows, shaven head, neck like twisted hemp, gaunt fingers with long, shit-colored nails—nothing special at all, nothing to particularize him, nothing.
But then creeping up from some dark hole in his fevered heart, a voice.
“But what should I say?” it seemed to cry. “About what in particular?”
It washed over him, thrilling and horrifying at the same time—this voice—for that was the one thing they could not burn out of them. Their voices—implacable, immutable, like fingerprints of their souls, holy in their absolute and irreducible separateness.
But it was less than air, less than a dream, and he could no more hear it than he could see the face, or the man behind the face. The voice simply melted into the lowing of the cows, the chatter from the bunkers, the flapping of the bats that sometimes swept like storm clouds across the fields.
CHAPTER 25
I didn’t know how many days passed, but I kept building up my wall, one little clue at a time. He’d been calling me “Israel” a lot lately, so I wrote the name down. Israel! he’d say. It’s good to see you! Israel, can you turn on that lamp
! Israel, have a cookie! It occurred to me that he was seeing some sort of angel or something. Maybe Israel just stood for the whole Jewish People. Maybe in his crazy mind he believed he was finally a full-fledged member of the tribe. Anyway, I taped the name Israel to the wall about midway between the train ticket and Josh’s report card, near the ceiling. I attached a Post-it, but I left it blank. I knew it was a clue, but I didn’t know what it might mean, not in the slightest.
For instance, a day or two before, I had gone to see him.
I had asked Lamar, the orderly, to bring in some soup, and now I held the plastic spoon up to his lips.
“Papa,” I said, “iss ein bisschen suppe.”
He opened his mouth. He had heard me.
A little bit of broth found its way in. He opened his eyes. Wide and sightless like gardenias floating in bowls of gray water.
“Israel!” He smiled.
“Hey, Dad,” I smiled back tightly. “It’s Michael.” I wondered if I’d ever hear him say my real name again.
“More,” he said in German. “Kann ich bitte…”
His voice was reedy, insubstantial, but for all that, present. As usual, he should have been worse, but he was better.
I fed him another spoonful. And then another.
“You’re hungry,” I said. “That’s good.”
“I feel good now you’re here,” he said with a voice thin as wafer.
“You’ve been speaking in German.”
“I am?” He shrugged. “Who can tell anymore?” He studied me with those foggy eyes, thick-lensed, creamy. “You don’t look so good, my Mikey.”
“I don’t look so good?”
“Well,” he said, “I’m no beauty queen, either.” What he actually said was I’m no Schönheitskönigin. He was somehow lost between then and now, like a ghost trapped in a mirror.
“We have so much to talk about,” I said to him.
“Yes, we do,” he said.
“Do you think you are up for it?”
“I can try,” he said.
“Then let’s try,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s try.”
His face tilted benignly toward me, and he suddenly remarked, “Did you know that the word holocaust is Greek? It means a burnt offering—when the oracle would place the sacrificial bull on the altar and burn it in its entirety, until nothing was left but ash. Not a bite left to eat. Not a shred of skin or hide to make a scrap of clothing. Not an ounce of anything left for any useful purpose whatsoever. Burnt to nothing. That is what holocaust means.”
I must have known that, since I had briefly studied Greek in undergraduate school when my ambition was to be a philosopher, and yet it did come as a surprise to me.
“Tell me more,” I said.
“You know everything there is to know.”
“Then tell me about you,” I said.
“Memories come and go. Sometimes I think I’m still there. Sometimes when a bell goes off I think it’s the siren in the camp. You know what selektion is?”
I did. It was when they divided them into those who would stay and work, and those who would go directly to the gas.
“Sometimes when they announce bingo I think it’s selektion. I can smell the ovens, hear the footsteps of the prisoners—God in heaven! you cannot imagine what is that sound. A thousand feet all at once—quick step! quick step!—sloshing through the mud…”
“How do you feel then?” I said.
“How can one feel? A nightmare from which one cannot wake.”
“Why is it, do you think, you were never selected?”
“That’s the great mystery, isn’t it, my love?” he said, trying to fill his wooden lungs with air. “That’s what I live with. Why not me? There’s no answer, Mikey. Death itself is not fearsome, my darling boy. Only hatred and cruelty. Only the human mind, that engineers such wholesale destruction. They say to destroy one life is to destroy an entire universe, yes? What is it then to destroy a universe? Death is nothing—but what is fearsome is to look into the eyes of a man who has no human feeling, and see yourself reflected there. He is nothing, you are nothing. God has flown the chicken coop. That is what is meant by terror.”
“I feel that way,” I said.
“What way?”
“That God has flown the coop.”
“No! No!” he cried with great agitation. “That’s the thing. That’s the thing to actually understand.”
“What is?”
“We run from Him, not the other way around.” Then he wagged one finger at me. “Plus, He always catches up, my little one. That’s His game. You run. He catches.” He pointed to his oxygen tank. “As you can see.”
He made an attempt to wink at me, but it was more like he closed both eyes and then had a very tough time opening them again.
I could see how tired he was. More than tired, the kind of tired that only happens once in a person’s life. I wanted him to rest, but I was too afraid to let him go. Not until we spoke of it.
But before I could say anything, he suddenly reverted to English and announced, “It’s really about you, I want to talk.”
“Me? What’s to talk about me?”
“Well, for one thing, are you happy?”
“Happy?” I said.
“Ya. Happy.”
“How could I be happy?”
I looked at the floor. “I’ve lost Ella. I can’t seem to connect with Josh. And then you.”
He shook his head. “Don’t worry about me,” he said.
“No!” I said. “Those journals you wrote. I need to know, Dad. I need the truth. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see how desperate I am for the truth?”
“Yes, desperate. That describes you.” Somehow, he reached out with his hand, the translucent skin bereft of all fat, his fingers corroded with arthritis, and laid it upon mine. “Don’t be so desperate, Michael. Everything is all right. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Everything you need, you have. Or you can get just by snapping your fingers. You know how to snap your fingers, don’t you? You don’t need to go, go, go. Always go, go, going. That was you, even as a little boy. Looking everywhere. Never finding.” He wheezed out a little laugh. “It’s all in that crazy keppela of yours,” he said, trying to jab his finger at my temple, but his touch was as light as snowfall.
“I don’t know how to be anymore,” I cried. “I’m totally confused.”
“Not the end of the world,” he replied, sinking back into the crumpled bedsheets.
“They think you should go to hospice,” I said. “Are you ready for that?”
“I’m happy here,” he said. “I won’t take long.”
“Oh, stop!” I said.
Again he laughed. “I’m telling you, death is nothing, Mikey. Nothing. After what I’ve seen.”
Finally! I thought.
“Then tell me what you’ve seen.”
“Everything a man could see. Everything you should never see.”
“The camps.”
“The camps.”
I held my breath and forced myself to take his hand, this hand that pulled me back to safety when I leaned out too far that time on the Staten Island Ferry; the same that caught me as I careened out of control down those rapids on the Russian River, snatching me out like a ripe plum just before I hit the rocks; and the same that often was raised in anger but never, ever came down, and yet was strong enough to crush walnuts in its bare palm when, after the dishes were cleared, the grown-ups sat around the table talking politics. It was the same hand that today was like flatbread, dry, brittle, lifeless—I could have cracked it in half with a flick of my wrist, and now I held it and waited. A minute ago I might have been repulsed by this shadow of a hand, and by this rancid smell that seemed to float around him, by the sunken, bony eyes—but now I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all. I felt something else. I couldn’t exactly say. But I sensed I was closer to him in this depressingly stupid, two-bit nursing home than maybe I’d been in my whole adult life.
He looked at me for a long time, and nodded as if he had told me the answer, but his lips had never moved.
“Why won’t you tell me?” I whispered.
“Like everybody else,” he barely said, “I was on my own side.”
Almost immediately he fell asleep, as if he could no longer carry the burden of speech. I let go of his hand and set it carefully at his side, stood up, arranged his blanket and tucked it in, brushed his hair back with my hand the way he liked it, straight back, the long white tendrils pressed behind his ears, and gently I ran my hand along his forehead and down his cheek.
Back at home, at his apartment, rather, I could not see how anything on my wall made any sense. What else could I do? I picked up another volume of his writings, and ruefully began to read.
CHAPTER 26
They sat together speaking in Yiddish, Moskovitz smoking a cigarette and Levin absently wiping down his PIAT. Lieutenant Rosenheim watched them with growing annoyance. The moon had moved across the sky, and soon it would be dawn. With first light the attack most likely would begin, and before that he expected a heavy bombardment, the likes of which few of these people had ever seen or even imagined. Over the hours of this night he had thought about many things; he had planned with his cadre how best to meet the enemy advance; he had gone over in his mind variations and permutations of attack and defense; he had tried to bring to mind the many people who were counting on him, the people who had somehow become his friends; he thought long and hard about his own plans for surrender, and what ultimately he would have to do about Levin, but mostly he thought about Fradl—or Yael, as she was now called. Levin was flirting with her; it was obvious. He watched to see how she reacted, if she touched him, or leaned in toward him, how she laughed—politely or seductively. She mostly seemed to keep her distance, as if she sensed how dangerous he was—but then, all of a sudden, she would giggle like a little girl, or allow him to light her smoke.
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