But it would all be over soon, he told himself. The whole charade. In death or surrender, he would once again be Heinrich Mueller. The name sounded as foreign to him as Heshel Rosenheim once had.
Finally Levin got up and made his way into the darkness. Probably to relieve himself. Heshel grabbed his Sten and cantered over to Post 5. He slid down next to Moskovitz and asked for a light. She looked at him briefly and without feeling, and then gave him the hot end of her cigarette.
“Have you ever been in battle?” he asked.
“I’m not afraid,” she said.
“I wish to God you had gone with the others.”
“Why? Don’t you think I can handle it?” Impatiently, she spit some tobacco onto her fingers. “I wonder where Levin is?”
“I don’t like him,” Heshel said. “He’s a fanatic. The worst kind.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“I know him well enough. He was at the massacre at Deir Yassin. A man with no regrets. What kind of man is that?”
“I would think you’re jealous,” she said, “if I thought you were capable of any feelings whatsoever.”
She said this so matter-of-factly, so without a hint of cruelty, that it pierced his gut like the sharp end of a bayonet.
“He thinks we were in the lager together,” he picked up the thread as best he could. “He’s wrong about that, by the way, we were never in the camps together. He has me mixed up with someone else. But he won’t leave me alone. He keeps badgering me. If I were you, I’d be careful around him. He’s not stable. In battle, you want to be with someone stable.”
“Why the sudden concern?” she asked.
“Fradl…”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“Too late,” she said. “Here he comes.”
“Walk with me.”
But Levin was upon them, and Heshel had to move aside to let him come down. Levin’s lips convulsed into a small caustic smile. “Do you want a break, Yael?” he said. “Go ahead.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
Heshel wanted to take her by the arm, by the hair even, and drag her away, not even knowing what he would say to her, just to be near her, drink in her presence. It was suddenly clear to him. In the last vestiges of night, he saw what he was looking for.
“No, really,” she said, “I’m fine here.”
Briefly he closed his eyes and sighed. Then he jumped up and ran back to his post.
“Wait,” she called after him in the half whisper of those under watch.
He heard her and turned around. She was splendid, standing up, the first rays of sun red-hued on her olive skin, bringing the gleam back into those dark eyes, and rimming her hair, wild and black, with fire.
“Put on your helmet!” he cried back at her. For he could suddenly hear the whistle of shells and the drone of aircraft coming in for the kill.
It was an enormous bombardment, unlike anything they had experienced before. They all hid in the shelters and trenches or under their makeshift bunkers, shaking uncontrollably, their eyes shut tight, their fists clenched over their ears. Those who were caught in the Bet Am were killed within the first moments, hit with incendiaries and a massive barrage of artillery. The fields of alfalfa were ablaze, the bananas were leveled and burning, and the orange groves were hollowed out, the few standing trees leafless and broken. Heshel had seen Moskovitz dive into her foxhole, but after that he could not tell if she was alive or dead. They had no walkie-talkies, and few dared lift a head above the trench line. They stayed put and waited for the silence that would announce the Egyptian assault.
But Heshel couldn’t wait any longer. Three of his men had made it to the post before the bombardment, and he signaled them that he was going out to check on Post 5. He dashed through the trench and then jumped up on solid ground a few yards from Fradl’s post. Standing thus he could see what no one else could—the world on fire, the twisted earth studded with body parts like strange new vegetation, the banana trees like fountains of flame, the precious soil charred black with soot, the main house virtually gone from sight, and fire coming up beneath it as if from the ground itself, like demons rising from hell. He saw the plane coming, a German Stuka, and jumped into her foxhole just as it began to strafe.
“Where is she?” he said in horror.
“I don’t know,” Levin replied breathlessly. “There were wounded over by the Bet Am, so she ran to them.”
“Wounded? There’s nothing there. Why did you let her go?” He grabbed Levin by the collar and started shaking him. “She’s supposed to be with you! That’s her job! She’s the PIAT assistant! Why did you let her go? You’re her commanding officer!”
Levin pushed off Rosenheim and collapsed onto the dirt floor. “She wouldn’t listen,” he moaned. Pathetically, he looked up at Rosenheim. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You think I want to be here all by myself?”
Rosenheim was panting, filled with rage, his face contorted and blazing.
“You fucker!” he cried. “I should kill you! You pig!”
He was looming over Levin. Levin was pulling himself back into a protective ball, like a dog…when suddenly he lifted his face and, with swiftly changing expression, eyed Rosenheim with a kind of detachment that turned suddenly into a look of triumph, as if he had just solved a difficult mathematical equation.
“You spoke to me in German,” he said, rising. “And I cowered out of habit, didn’t I? To my old master. Right? I cowered like a sheep, like a dog, to the sound of that German. A voice I have not heard in some time, except in my dreams, every night in fact, in my dreams. And I begged for mercy, didn’t I? And you, with your German, with your very special German—my God! Now I do know you! I do know you!”
It was Levin who was now backing Rosenheim into the corner, pressing closer, jabbing at him with his finger, spit flying as his words cut across the burning air. His face was a lantern.
“I remember you! You were not with my friend Rosenheim, you were not in his commando. No. You were his SS keeper! You were der Buchhalter, yes? The bookkeeper of Majdanek! I remember you! Counting shoes! Counting eyeglasses! Counting wedding rings! Counting gold fillings! Yes, I remember you! Marching out to greet the new shipments—of food for you and gas for us! Strolling up and down the boxcars you had us load with hair and trousers, shoes and silk underwear, making little checkmarks on your bill of lading, stopping only to kick some mud from your fine boots, all that loot on its way to Berlin and Leiden! What a hero you were! How could I ever forget you? What? Nothing to say now, Mr. Palmach man? Skulking about the warehouses, watching us from afar, afraid almost to show your face—but I saw your face! We all saw your face. Oh…what’s this? Are you going to kill one more Jew now? Haven’t had enough?”
For Rosenheim had pulled the cocking lever on his Sten, and was pointing the barrel directly at Levin’s head. “You can’t tell anyone,” he said.
Levin laughed.
“Why, because you’ll tell them I was a Kapo? And a trustee at that. And a cruel one? All right, I was. So what? Who will believe you, and who will care? How do you think half these people survived? By being nice? Don’t you recall anything of what you did to us? What you turned us into? Is it all to be forgotten with a change of name? Is it all to be washed away with a few good deeds? Unless of course you’re a spy…Oh!” His eyes brightened even more. “What else could it be? How else do they know where to hit us so easily? Oh yes—and at the glorious battle of Deir Yassin—where we lost more than they did—attacked on every side!—gunmen hiding behind children, women firing from beneath their burkas…. But you—you could see only their suffering and not ours. A spy!”
Around them the sky was on fire, the bombs falling, yet they were standing up in the foxhole, their heads and shoulders visible above the embankment, eye to eye, the Sten pointed at Levin’s face, a bit of oil dripping from the end of the barrel.
He had to decide what to do.
&nb
sp; Suddenly there was silence.
The bombardment had ceased.
Everyone would now be running to their posts—in one second the place would be a beehive, soldiers and kibbutzniks scurrying along the trench lines and across the fields.
“It’s now or never,” sneered Levin.
It would be now, he decided. His finger tightened.
But then Levin’s head was gone. A fountain of red shot up from his shoulders, three feet into the air, raining down on Heshel and covering him in hot, sticky blood.
“Tanks!” someone cried.
Levin’s headless body fell upon him, propelling him into the dirt and out of harm’s way. But he was confused, disoriented. He hadn’t fired. Hadn’t shot him. He squirmed out from under Levin. There was no head to be seen anywhere.
“Oh dear God!” It was Moskovitz, jumping into the foxhole.
“It was the tank,” Heshel muttered.
“Oh my God,” she said again. Her hands were shaking, but she bent down and covered the body with a tarp. Then she caught her breath. “Where’s the PIAT?”
“The PIAT? What PIAT?”
She tried to calm him. “We have to stop the tanks, Heshel! I need the PIAT.”
He saw it sticking out from under Levin’s feet.
“You’ve got to get back to your unit,” she said to Heshel.
“I’ll stay with you.”
“No,” she said firmly. “I don’t need you here. They need you.”
But she pulled him close until there was no space between them, not an inch, so close he could feel her breath enter his own open mouth, and she looked into his eyes, and then, with sudden, swift resolve, she kissed him, she kissed him now as she had once before under the fragrant, blossoming orange trees, holding his blood-soaked face in her hands, and fitting her lips over his to feed him the love of her mouth.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Now, go,”
He did as he was told. With soaring spirits, he ran back to his men, firing as he went in the direction of the advancing Egyptians.
CHAPTER 27
Suddenly the weather changed and the rains started falling—incessantly, it seemed—hot, tropical rains with high, violent winds that sent the palm fronds flying through the air like snapped-off propellers. They landed noisily upon the pavement and piled up upon the grass, turning quickly into rot. Deep puddles impeded the sidewalks and flooded the roadways. It was best to keep away from the canals. People often drowned in them, their cars slipping down the embankments and disappearing into the silent waters, their screams unheard behind sealed windows, their last words inhaled by the fish.
Then the rains would stop suddenly, the heat would return in a matter of seconds, and just as suddenly the skies would turn black again and down it came in torrents so heavy it hurt when it hit you. I found it more oppressive than when it was just plain hot, and I hated Florida more than ever. By now I saw no way to go home. I felt as if I might have to stay there forever.
Also my wall was filling up. After I had tacked the name Israel in the space between the train ticket and Josh’s report card, I had gone on to find some old Life magazines with pictures from the war, from the liberation of the camps, and from the Nuremberg Trials. My parents had saved only these Life magazines. Why? I taped them in the inner circle, and wrote under them: World History/Family History? I searched the images for signs of my father. There were none. I went to the library and got a book about concentration camps and Xeroxed the pages on Majdanek. I taped these to the wall also. Among them was a photo of Colonel Weiss. It went on the wall with the words: White Tablecloth, Silver Coffee Urn. There was no mention of these details in the article, but the mass execution my father witnessed did indeed happen more or less as he described. I added Eyewitness or Eye Research? These were not really clues; nevertheless I needed to hang them on the wall. I taped the most recent phone bills from his room in the nursing home onto the wall. There were no calls to L.A. He could not have called Kaufman, I wrote. I stuck up a map of Berlin. I circled Alexanderplatz, where my father said he had lived as a boy. It was a main square. Under it the Post-it read: Not likely. I tried to find even one of my father’s forty-two-volume set of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, but they had disappeared. Instead, I attached my parents’ wedding invitation, their framed wedding photograph, and a picture of my father on the beach in 1952. I wrote: Shirt on at all times. Fair skin? Bullet holes? I put up the picture of Karen I always loved. It was when she was about thirteen or fourteen, pubescent cheeks, goofy smile encased in braces, hair parted in the middle and hanging straight down like Cher’s in the 1970s. I studied her face, trying to remember what Karen was really like at that age, tagging along, mouth still sticky with peanut butter and chocolate.
Two days before I was to leave for upstate New York my mother had called.
“Your sister is sick,” she said.
Okay, she’s sick, I thought. So? It did not really register with me. Even the word cancer had very little meaning for me. I wasn’t even sure she used that word. Possibly she said she has a growth of some kind. Maybe she used the word tumor. In fact, my mother was quite cheerful. To my few questions she answered only in the positive. The doctor says Karen is young and strong. The doctor says he can probably get it all, and she’ll be fine. They don’t make any promises, of course, but he doesn’t seem too concerned. She vaguely explained some of the procedures: they’re going to try this, and then if that doesn’t work, they’ll try that. But I shouldn’t worry. She said that quite a few times. I shouldn’t worry. Finally I reluctantly asked if I should cancel my plans. It’s just summer stock, I said. Comedy. Ridiculous! she said. No reason to come home. Everything’s fine. Enjoy yourself. Then Karen got on the phone. She also insisted I go to the Catskills. She was going to come and see me! As soon as she got just a little bit better. We told jokes. Then she laughed and gave my father the phone. “Mikey,” he sighed. I remembered that explicitly—Mikey. Even now, as I heard the faraway echo of that plaintive cry, my heart shriveled. What did he mean by that sigh? What was he trying to tell me? But then he said, Why come home? What can you do?
So off I went.
Karen was seventeen. I was only twenty. Still.
Even now, when I thought about my sister’s illness, I had the distinct impression the diagnosis and outcome were virtually in-stantaneous, as if it all happened in a day. But of course it actually groaned on for a year. I tried to recall the months and months of torturous surgeries and treatments—the chemo, the radiation—but even now it all blurred into a vision of her sparkling eyes, her intrepid cheerfulness—how when she went bald, she insisted I draw a happy face on the top of her head. Why did I blot out the weeks of nausea and pain, the emaciation that seemed to come on in a single night, and her final bizarre madness when the cancer, which had begun so far down below—in her barely used ovaries—jumped ship and coursed through her brain, giving rise to the hallucinations that, in spite of everything, made us all laugh. Even now it came to me only in bits and pieces, flashes, vignettes, as if it were a secret I had been keeping from myself, revealed only in hints and innuendo. I had evaded her suffering by painting it over like artists sometimes do when they move a figure from one side of the canvas to the other, or change a frown to a smile. I now realized that I had seen her suffering no more than Heinrich Mueller had seen the suffering of Heshel Rosenheim. No, I said, no. Not the same thing at all.
In any case, I went back to the wall and taped Karen’s hospital bracelet to a spot somewhere near the note I had written to Ella asking her to reconsider, but which was returned unopened. I always carried it around, just in case one day she might want to open it. I put the bracelet on the wall, but honestly I didn’t know why. In fact, under it I wrote simply: Why?
The wall was now almost completely covered with evidence. I stood back and studied it, drawing invisible lines of connection between objects, erasing them, and then frantically sending out vectors to other points on the wa
ll. It was here, it was all here. All I had to do was—
The doorbell rang.
It was Mrs. Gitlin, from 316.
She had a casserole cradled in one hand, an umbrella clutched in the other, and her feet encased in clear plastic galoshes. She smile beatifically, revealing bits of lipstick on her upper teeth.
“It’s Jonathan, isn’t it?”
I smiled down at her. I smelled brisket.
“I’d like to have a word with you,” she said brightly.
She waited for me to let her in.
“The house is kind of a mess,” I said.
She shrugged the shrug of a woman who’s seen it all, and isn’t about to be deterred in any case. “A man living by himself. What else is new?”
“It’s just not a good time,” I said.
There was a crack of thunder, and the wind whipped up, catching the underside of Mrs. Gitlin’s umbrella. It tugged at her so violently it almost lifted her off the walkway. I found myself rescuing her and pulling her down. Rather taken with my gallantry, she handed me the casserole.
“Just a little something,” she said.
It must have weighed eight pounds.
“Thank you,” I said, “but I couldn’t.”
“Of course you could!” she replied, rising on her toes to look past me into the apartment, but I moved to block her. For once I was glad I played right guard in high school.
“Well, thank you!” I said, and waited for her to go.
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