Granta 125: After the War (17 page)

I
n your mind, it had little or nothing to do with religion. You were aligning yourself with the forces of powerlessness, hoping to find some moral or intellectual strength by acknowledging your difference from others, but
Jew
signified a category of people rather than a theological system, a history of struggle and exclusion that had culminated in the disasters of World War II, and that history was all that concerned you. When you were nine, however, your parents joined one of the local synagogues. Needless to say, it was a Reform congregation, for that simplified, watered-down brand of Judaism best served the interests of people like them: the indifferent, unreligious, non-practising American Jews who sought to reaffirm their bond with the traditions of their forebears. Bluntly put – but without question entirely true – Hitler was responsible. The resurgence of Jewish life in post-war America was a direct result of the death camps, and the engine that drove people like your parents to join up was guilt, a fear that unless their children were taught to become Jews, the very concept of Judaism in America would fade away to nothing. Your father had not studied Hebrew as a boy, had not gone through the rigours of preparing for his bar mitzvah, and your mother, who was the daughter of a socialist, had never once set foot in a synagogue, but together they conspired to force you into doing what they themselves had never done, and so, in the same September you entered the fourth grade, you also entered Hebrew school, which meant going to the synagogue to attend classes every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon from four o’clock to five thirty as well as every Saturday morning from nine thirty to noon. There were a thousand other things you rather would have been doing, but three times a week over the course of four long years you reluctantly dragged yourself into that penitentiary of boredom, hating every moment of your imprisonment, slowly learning the rudiments of
Hebrew, studying the principal stories of the Old Testament, most of which horrified you to the core, in particular Cain’s murder of Abel (why had God rejected Cain’s offering?), Noah and the Flood (why would God want to destroy the world He had created?), Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac (what kind of God would ask a man to kill his son?), and Jacob’s theft of his father’s birthright from Esau (why would God bless a cheater, a man with no conscience?), all of which confirmed your low opinion of God, who by turns came across to you as an angry and demented psychopath, a petulant child, and a wrathful, murdering criminal – a figure even more frightening and dangerous than the God of your earliest imaginings. To make matters worse, you were stuck in a class made up entirely of boys, most of whom had even less interest in being there than you did, who looked upon this forced extra schooling as unjust punishment for the sin of merely being alive, fifteen or twenty Jewish boys with ants in their pants and an insurrectionist contempt for every word spoken by the teacher, an assistant rabbi with the unfortunate name of Fish, a short, bulky man with a large face and a high forehead, who spent most of his time in class dodging spitballs, yelling at the boys to shut up, and pounding his fist on the table. Poor Rabbi Fish. He had been thrown into a room with a pack of wild Indians, and three times a week he was scalped.

Y
ou left your parents for the first time when you were eight. It was your idea, you were the one who begged them to let you go, since you wanted to be with Billy again, your closest friend since the age of five, and now that he and his family had moved to another town, far away from where the two of you had spent the past three years together, the only chance to see him would be to go to the summer camp he attended with his older brother in New Hampshire, a sleep-away camp that lasted for eight weeks, from the beginning of July until the end of August, a long stretch for a little boy who had never been away from home for more than a single night. Your mother was hesitant, fearing the long separation might be difficult for you to
handle, but in the end, not wanting to disappoint you (or perhaps not knowing how else you should spend the summer), she and your father gave their consent. North-central New Hampshire, the area known as the White Mountains, was an exceedingly long car trip from New Jersey in 1955, since there were no interstate highways back then, at least not in that part of the country, and you remember the interminable drive with your parents, sitting in the back seat for ten, eleven, perhaps even twelve hours, and you wonder now if the journey wasn’t stretched out over two days, with a pause for sleep in some inn or motel at the mid-point of your northward trek. Impossible to remember that detail, just as you cannot remember saying goodbye to your parents when they left you at the camp and drove away, which means that whatever you were thinking or feeling at that moment is inaccessible to you now – sorrow or joy, trepidation or excitement, second thoughts or proud resolve, you simply don’t know. What you remember best about those eight weeks are the smells, the ever-present aroma of the surrounding pine forests, the dry scent of the afternoon sun cooking the dust on the heavily trodden footpath between your cabin and the mess hall, and the odour of the latrine, a primitive wooden structure with a long pissing trough and a row of toilet stalls with no doors on them, the stench of urine whenever you walked in there, like a whiff of ammonia burning up the insides of your nostrils, acrid and intense, never forgotten. Chilly nights under green woollen blankets, pseudo-Indian campfires extolling the wonders of nature and the beneficence of the Great Spirit, all the boys wearing headbands with grey feathers protruding from them, baseball, horseback riding, archery, firing .22 rifles at the shooting range, swimming in the lake, skinny-dipping. You felt far from everything there, farther away from what was familiar to you than at any time in your life, as if the long drive in the car had taken you to the edge of the world. Oddly, you don’t remember much about Billy or the other boys, the continual newness that was thrust upon you every day seems to have blotted out almost all particulars, and only two events stand out for you with any clarity. The first was an
unannounced, altogether unexpected visit from your grandfather, your mother’s father, who stopped by on his way to Maine for his annual week-long vacation with his male cronies, their principal daytime activity being ‘lobster fishing’, which was something of a misnomer, since one doesn’t ‘fish’ for lobster, what one does is drop wooden cages into the water and hope the lobsters will crawl in, all the while sitting in a rowboat, which sounded like a tedious pastime to you, but ‘lobster fishing’ also probably meant drinking and smoking and playing poker and telling dirty jokes, not to speak of some rustic hanky-panky, for your grandfather was a great one for jokes and cavorting with women he wasn’t married to, the life of the party he was, and you loved him dearly. On the day of his visit, he arrived just as you were in the middle of the post-lunch rest period, a one-hour interregnum that came before the start of afternoon activities, and on that particular day, instead of reading or writing letters as you usually did, you fell asleep, and since as a child you were someone who slept as if you were in a coma, so profoundly unconscious that little or nothing could rouse you from your slumbers, neither hail nor thunder, neither swarming mosquitoes nor the loudest marching band, and therefore, on the day of your grandfather’s visit, when one of your counsellors finally managed to jostle you awake, you emerged from your nap with a groggy head, still half asleep, barely understanding who you were, or even if you were, and stumbled outdoors to find your grandfather, who was waiting for you at the office near the main entrance to the camp. You were of course happy to see him, but because you were not quite yourself yet, still struggling to shake free of the blur and confusion inside you, you found it difficult to speak, to answer his questions with sentences longer than one or two words, and all through your brief conversation with him you wondered if you were still asleep and only imagining he was there, for this was the first time you had seen him without his suit and tie and white shirt, how curious your bald and portly grandfather looked in that bright short-sleeved shirt with the open collar, and before you could settle into one of your free-flowing talks about
baseball, a sport he followed as closely as you did, your grandfather was slapping his knees, standing up, and saying that he had to be moving along. There for an instant – and then gone, like an unholy apparition. You were disgusted with yourself for not having done better, for having behaved like a moronic lump of flesh, but some days or weeks later you were even more disgusted with yourself when you woke up one morning to discover that you had wet your bed. This problem had plagued you throughout your childhood, it was the curse you carried around with you far longer than was seemly for a boy of your age, past five, past six, and year after year the humiliation of the rubber sheet stretched out below you to protect the mattress, not the result of some psychological trouble or frailty of the bladder, your mother said (who knows if she was right or wrong?), but quite simply because you slept too soundly, because the arms of Morpheus not only enfolded you in his embrace but crushed you, smothered you, and how often during those early years did your mother tiptoe into your room in the dead of night to wake you up and lead you to the toilet, how often did she struggle to pull you from the land of dreams and fail? By the time you were six or seven, you had largely overcome this disability, the shame of your nocturnal incontinence was no longer a constant torture to you, but every now and then you would fall back into your old ways, once every month or two it would happen again, and to wake to the sickening feeling of cold wet sheets at that point in your life was so demoralizing, so outrageously juvenile and idiotic, that you sometimes wondered if you would ever grow up. Now, at the advanced age of eight, you had done it again. Not in the sanctuary of your family’s house, where everyone was aware of your condition and never said a word about it, but in the public space of a summer-camp cabin inhabited by seven other boys and a counsellor in his early twenties. Fortunately, it happened to be a Sunday, the one day of the week when reveille sounded later than usual, when breakfast was extended over an hour and a half rather than thirty or forty-five minutes, and so you waited until the other boys had left the cabin for the mess hall before you climbed out of bed, took off your
clammy pyjamas, and shoved them into your laundry bag. When you joined the others at the breakfast table, you sat there in an ever-mounting panic, wondering what to do next. Peeing in your bed had been bad enough, an insult to your pride and boyish dignity, but much worse was the fear of being found out, of being ridiculed by the other boys and forever branded as a baby, a fool, a person beneath contempt. Time was growing short, in another fifteen or twenty minutes everyone would be returning to the cabin, and because you didn’t know who else to turn to, you decided you would have to risk talking to your counsellor, a young man named George, a quiet, serious person who until then had always treated you with kindness, but how could you know he wouldn’t laugh at you when you made your confession? And yet, who else but George had the authority to release you from the mess hall and let you rush back to the cabin? There was no choice, you would have to talk to him and hope for the best, and so you stood up and walked over to George, who was sitting at the head of the table, and whispered into his ear that you had had an accident and would he please let you go now so you could wash out your sheet and hang it up to dry on the clothes line behind the cabin? George nodded and told you to go ahead. Just like that – an unanticipated miracle of compassion and understanding, but not so strange in the end, for later that morning he confided to you that he had suffered from similar lapses himself when he was your age. A fellow member of the secret fraternity of anguished, guilty bedwetters! Off you ran, then, sprinting back to the cabin, stripping the bottom sheet from your bed, the white sheet with its incriminating yellow stain, which looked something like a map of France, and then rushed over to the latrine, the foul-smelling piss-house with its corrosive, all-engulfing reek of urine, and scrubbed out the stain in one of the sinks. You were never caught. George’s mercy had protected you from the ultimate embarrassment, the mortifying shame of discovery, but it was a close call, a matter of minutes or even seconds, and your pounding heart was proof of just how scared you had been.

W
hy hark back to this story now, this ancient scrape with fear that turned out rather well for you in the end, so well, in fact, that you walked away from it without suffering any of the consequences you had anticipated with such dread? Because, finally, there were consequences, even if they were not the ones that made your heart beat so fast when you were afraid. You had a secret. There was a flaw in you that had to be kept hidden from the world, and because merely to think about being discovered filled you with a wretchedness beyond all imagining, you were forced to dissemble, to present a face to the world that was not your true face. Later that morning, when George made his confession to you, revealing that he too had once lived with that same secret himself, it occurred to you that most people had secrets of their own, perhaps all people, an entire universe of people treading the earth with thorns of guilt and shame stabbing their hearts, all of them forced to dissemble, to present a face to the world that was not their true face. What did this mean about the world? That everyone in it was more or less hidden, and because we were all other than what we appeared to be, it was next to impossible to know who anyone was. You wonder now if that sense of not knowing wasn’t responsible for making you so passionate about books – because the secrets of the characters who lived inside novels were always, in the end, made known.