Not Me

by Michael Lavigne

  “Yes, I think so. I think I’ve read the whole thing.”

  “Then you understand?”

  “I’m trying,” I said honestly.

  His words were like falling leaves slowly drifting down, long spaces in between, alighting almost in silence upon my ears.

  “Do you see I meant him no harm, your father?” he said. “Do you see that I didn’t know then…who I really was, or who he was? How could I see? I had no eyes. It was only later I was given eyes. But I did everything I could to make it up to you, didn’t I? Didn’t I? I knew I could never make it up to you. But what can a man do? Only what is allowed him, and no more. Such is the mercy of God! The money I gave you, the clothing, the education, all of it is nothing. I know. I know. Oh my boy! Every single thing I did with every moment of my life was for you, and I know that it was nothing, nothing, nothing….”

  He clutched my hand.

  “Israel!” he begged, his gluey eyes filling with tears, “I only ask one thing. Say me Kaddish.” He meant the prayer for the dead, the prayer of remembrance, that only a son can say for a father, only a father for his son. “Please! Please!” he went on feverishly. “Say me Kaddish!”

  “Daddy,” I said to him. “It’s Michael.”

  “Michael?”

  “Michael. Your son.”

  “Who?”

  He closed his eyes, sank back, darkness seemed to spread over him.

  “Dad!” I cried. “Don’t go!”

  Suddenly he shot straight up in bed.

  “Forgive me!” he wailed. “God in heaven, forgive me!”

  And then he fell back like a stone.

  He let out one long, hoarse exhalation—one could not call it a breath—and then there was no sound at all.

  I stared down at his body. His arm, disfigured by the concentration camp tattoo, was splayed out over the side of the bed as if his last wish were to keep it as far from him as possible. I studied the grim numbers that had become the algebra of both our lives. I saw the endless procession of locomotives depositing their freight of human suffering—day after day, night after night—into the gates of Majdanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Ravensbrück. I imagined the little bookkeeper in his grim little office, his account books opened upon his well-organized desk, the pen in his hand, the ink stains on his fingers, as he counted the eyeglasses and shoes, the gold fillings and braids of human hair.

  And yet I stood there amazed. In spite of every horror, every cruelty, every act of despair, when I looked upon his face I could not help but see light, and, as when I had read the words of his journal, I could not help but feel hope, like an ice pick to my frozen heart.

  Yet I found it so hard to believe any of it really happened. How could a person change from one thing to its direct opposite, as if becoming someone else is as easy as changing your tie? And yet, what if it were true? What if he had been in the SS and on kibbutz and served in the Palmach and was a hero of the War of Independence and through pain and loss finally achieved some sort of capacity for love?

  I remembered how once he tried to explain to me the meaning of repentance. I was playing with the fringes of his long, elegant tallis. He smiled down at me.

  “In Hebrew,” he said, “it means turning. Better, it means re- turning. It means to come back, Mikey, to come back to your true self.” And then he laughed and pinched my nose. “And what could be easier than that?”

  “So why do we have to do it every year?” I asked him.

  “Because, my dear little one, there is no one true self. And that is why repentance can never end.”

  I’m not saying he was saved. I’m not saying any of us can be saved, or that in the celestial balance all those commemorative plaques, all those rescued orphans, all those wildly extravagant donations would outweigh a single death in the gas chambers of Majdanek. But when I consider the things he had done in the second half of his life, what acts of mercy he showed the world, even if no mercy was shown him, and what joys he must have felt, just to have my mother, my sister, and me—three people to love!—even if they could never love him for the person he actually was—Oh! I thought—in atonement—what power!

  But forgiveness?

  Only when he met the ghosts of those who perished under the weight of his ledgers could he be absolved, and only if they saw fit. And surely, surely they would. For tempered by the gas and the crematoria, the starvation, humiliation, pain and filth, they would surely have become angels. What else was left to them? Forged in such a crucible of unimaginable suffering, how could they bear the suffering of even a single molecule of God’s creation, let alone a whole man? They could be his judges.

  He had called out for Israel. Israel! Let Israel be his judge!

  And then suddenly I understood.

  Who was it who asked Kaufman for the Memorial Book of Durnik? Who was it who brought my father the Cheez Whiz box of journals from wherever it was long hidden? Who was it who visited him in secret, long into the night? And why was my father the one who saved April from the orphanage or the D.P. camp or wherever she was? Why would he be the one who knew how to find children? Why would he be the one to search them out himself? What was he after?

  There could only be one conclusion: there had been a child.

  Not Moskovitz’s child, but Heshel Rosenheim’s child. The real Heshel Rosenheim, the Jewish Heshel Rosenheim, the one in the lice-infested uniform and torturous wooden shoes. And the name of that child was Israel.

  Perhaps he had been secretly born in the camps and hidden from the guards, or perhaps he was born in the time before the Nazi roundups and saved by some kindly Lithuanian peasant. Perhaps they had once spoken of it….

  “Just tell me about your little Jewish life!”

  “But about what? About what in particular?”

  “Just talk! Is that too hard for you? Should I find someone else?”

  “No, no! I’m happy to talk.”

  Or, overcome with guilt, my father had scoured the records for any shred of evidence, any hint of a life before, during, after…sought out a survivor, a relative, a friend…and found that, God be praised! there was someone—a child. And he must have been searching for him all those years, bringing child after child back to America—as he had April—hoping that one day, one of these children would be Heshel Rosenheim’s. Heshel Rosenheim’s Israel.

  And perhaps—perhaps he had found him. Yes! And then he secretly sent him money, clothing, paid for his school. Perhaps he brought him to New Jersey and settled him with some family and quietly watched over him as he grew. Yes, this was the Rosenheim who wrote to Kaufman. Israel Rosenheim! He had finally figured it all out and decided to expose my father—of course! of course!—but then—then—he read the journals. Just like me. He read the journals and relented. His heart cracked open, his anger slid away, he allowed himself to hope, and then he decided to offer this hope to me. And why to me? So that I might stand by my father when he could not. So that I might say the Kaddish that he could not.

  It was not likely I would ever meet him. It was not likely that I would ever be sure of his existence. (For who could prove that it was not my father who wrote to Kaufman, produced the Cheez Whiz box, and visited himself each night, to comfort himself with the dream of forgiveness.) But of Israel Rosenheim’s power I was certain.

  The man in the bed beside my chair may have been a monster, a criminal, a fugitive. And yet, as I looked upon his pale, distorted face, emaciated beyond recognition and only barely human, I wept tears of love. I knew I was not alone in this. I knew that Israel Rosenheim felt as I felt. I knew that the entire Jewish community felt as I felt. They would soon come out to honor him. They would sing eulogies of praise to him. His name would be in the papers, not just here in West Palm Beach County, but in Miami, and in New York, and in New Jersey, and even, without a doubt, in Israel, where he would be honored in the Holocaust Memorial for his good works. His would be an example of the exemplary life, and the blessings of his deeds would live on for
generations.

  No, I would not be his judge. I would be his son.

  I bent down and kissed his hand.

  CHAPTER 33

  It was with great trepidation that I stepped out of the car.

  People were streaming by me. They were mostly old people, groups of women, couples, a few men by themselves. They moved slowly, as old people do, but with expectation, as if something great were about to happen to them. Interspersed among them were a few younger families, the women holding their daughters’ hands, the men their sons’. They marched across the asphalt as if drawn by some call, a sound I could not hear. Even in the open air I could smell the mixed multitude of perfumes and colognes rising like an offering of incense, sweet and pungent, familiar and suffocating. They laughed and chatted, gesticulated broadly, stopped occasionally to tie a shoe or make sure they had their eyeglasses, then rejoined the stream as easily as water rejoins water.

  I stood behind my open car door and watched them. In my right hand was my father’s tallis bag. In my breast pocket his little prayer book.

  I had spent the rest of that morning signing papers. Not many really. Dad had long ago made all his own arrangements, paid for everything, and left complete instructions about the funeral, including the plain pine coffin, the small graveside ceremony, and no viewing. He was to be interred next to Mom. He even preordered a stone. The thought of them sweltering forever beneath the relentless Florida sun made me uneasy, and I thought briefly about taking them back with me to California or returning them to New Jersey and burying them next to poor Karen. I was quite certain I didn’t want to come back here again, and I thought, when will I ever visit them? But then again, when did I ever visit Karen? The answer was never. I had never visited Karen. Ever. Not once.

  I now knew that I would have to do that. I would have to look her grave in the face, so to speak. It was a sobering thought.

  All this occurred to me as I was sitting there filling out those papers. I also realized that I had never in my life been to a funeral. Yes. I had not been to Karen’s funeral. That had proved impossible for me. And I had not been to my mother’s funeral either, though I was less certain why.

  I had always told myself that I didn’t go to Karen’s because I was taking final exams—as if you couldn’t get your exams delayed if your sister just died—but that is exactly what I had been telling myself for years, and that’s even how I actually remembered it—pounding out those exams, tears flowing from my eyes. But there were no exams that day or even that week. I had been hiding in my dorm room, sleeping. I slept for several days, maybe longer. I roused myself only to stumble to the bathroom or to take a drink of water or stuff some Cheerios in my mouth. Then I’d fall back into a stupor. When my mother died, it was the same. Only that time, I was on the road and I told my father I couldn’t break my engagements, they’d sue me. But I did break my engagements, and stayed in my motel room watching television and drinking beer and tequila and ordering in pizza and Chinese food, until Ella, on her way back from the funeral, found me and dragged me home. I also recalled that when I told my father that I would not be coming to Mom’s funeral, he did not even berate me. Maybe he despised me then, or maybe he pitied me, or maybe he just loved me.

  I remembered all this while I was signing papers and watching the morticians slide my father’s body onto their gurney. They lifted him together with the sheet and slid him off. He hit the gurney like a bag of cement, banging his head on the stainless steel frame. I winced. He, of course, did not.

  I watched them wheel him out. At least they had not put him in a body bag. They had a special exit in the rear, to keep him out of sight of the other patients. It was in the dark space, at the end of the hall. I thought that was a good idea. So they quietly wheeled him away and when they reached the end of the hall, I understood it was the last time I would see him. I couldn’t help myself. I waved good-bye.

  For all that I had learned, with all my clues and evidence, all my questions and reading, I still was certain of very little. I would never know with absolute certainty if the iconography of my youth—those six blue-black numbers on my father’s arm—had been burned into his skin by torturers, or cut into it by his own tortured hand—but I did know this: those numbers were the very equation of our lives, yet they added up to nothing, explained nothing, and never would, and now their mystery had doubled, tripled, quadrupled, expanded in an exponential curve out into infinite space, where they would hover over every deed and every thought and every step I would ever take.

  I signed the papers they put in front of me. I nodded when the morticians told me what my father had decided upon. I shook my head when they asked me if I wanted to change anything, if I wanted a nicer casket, or a viewing, or a ceremony inside their beautiful air-conditioned chapel. They told me they would deliver the little benches for sitting shivah, and the laminated cards with the prayers on them, and they suggested a good caterer I might call, and they handed me a little box filled with funeral announcements that I could fill out “when I was feeling a little better,” and a glossy how-to kit to help me through this troubled time (how to write an obituary, how to tell family and friends, how to contact a rabbi of one’s preferred denomination), and finally they told me that the burial could not happen till after Yom Kippur, for religious reasons, but not to worry because it would still be within three days of his passing, as they put it, so it would be kosher. Then they shook my hand and went away. I looked at the hospice nurse who had been called in earlier in the day. She smiled sympathetically and told me it was time to go home.

  I passed Nurse Clara at her station. I knew it would also be the last time I would ever see her. That struck me as somehow poignant.

  Suddenly she hugged me.

  “You be good, now!” she said.

  Driving down the same roads my father used to drive, in the same car, sitting in the same overpadded seat, listening to the same stupid radio station—he always wanted big band, I always changed it to classical—I found myself slinking down as low as I could so my head was barely visible above his fuzzy-covered steering wheel. I wanted to know what it felt like to be him, but all I noticed was that I couldn’t see over the steering wheel.

  I pulled into a gas station and threw away the hypo. Actually I squeezed it out into the toilet, and bent the needle till it snapped. Walking back to the car, I felt that familiar heaviness against my chest—his journal in my breast pocket, the final volume that I had finished reading just moments before he died. The story had abruptly ended with the words “My name is Heshel Rosenheim.” No mention of how he got to America, how he met my mother, how his past tied to my past. If he had just connected his story to my story, to the world I had known, to my mother, my sister, me, the house in New Jersey, the wallpaper store, anything—I might have been able to make more sense of it. I might have been able to break through the secret—

  With a sigh, I tossed it onto the car seat.

  Just then, a bit of yellow paper, tightly folded and neatly creased, slipped out from between its pages. It must have been stuck to the back cover, and the force of my throw dislodged it. Stained with little spots of mold, and brittle as old newspaper, bits of it fell off in my hand as I unfolded it. I was surprised to see it was in English, written hastily, and with an unsteady hand, as if the police were about to knock down the door.

  My Darling Dear Michael,

  It is not likely you will see these notebooks while I am living. Only if I should be suddenly crazy, or if someone else gets hold of them, or if for some reason you really need to see them, if they will somehow help you at a desperate hour in your own life, then maybe.

  The man in this story could not erase the past. He did not want to erase it. He did not want to forget it. How could he forget it? He wanted merely to transform the past into something else. He wanted to turn the shadow into light. He wanted to believe that some part of him was still good and life-giving. He did not ask to be forgiven, nor did he seek punishment. He sought red
emption.

  The man in this story made a choice. He chose, as we Jews love to say, Life.

  God might continue to torment him—as God had every right to do—but what was required of this man was to simply live his choice. What else could he do?

  As for me, I, too, thought all was lost. I thought no help would come, and all would remain in darkness. But one day something happened. It was the day you were born. On that day, I held you in my arms and I knew there was holiness in this world. I looked at your face and saw for the first time the face of Mercy.

  Now I must stop my writing. Enough is enough. But I praise God that you are my son, and my love for you is eternal and full of gratitude.

  I pray that when it is time for you to make your choice, you too can recall the past, and embrace the future.

  Your loving father,

  Heshel Rosenheim

  I sat in the car a long time, holding the letter in my hands, and reading it over again and again.

  I got home close to four. There was a note on the door from April. It was a condolence card. How she knew he was dead, I didn’t know, but I’d stopped asking such questions. I went in and collapsed on the sofa, exhausted.

  Voices outside my door awakened me.

  “Jonathan! Jonathan! Are you there? It’s Rose Gitlin! Time to go!” Her voice was as warm as honey, not the slightest impatient or upset. “Are you in there, sweetie?” she called. “Listen, we have to go. But if you change your mind, we’ll wait downstairs a few minutes. And if not, we’ll save a seat for you.”

  “This is Harry,” another voice said, “the husband. If you’re late, no big deal. Just come!”

  I heard their footsteps move away, and then I heard one of them shuffle back.

  “We’re all thinking of you,” Rose Gitlin called through the closed door.

  And then she ran off to join the others.