“For God’s sake, Dad, tell me who you are!”
A nurse suddenly rushed past me toward the patient behind the curtain. He must have been pressing the buzzer. I could hear him cry, “They’re yelling so loud! They won’t stop yelling!”
And then she came round and looked at me.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You realize that your father just had a stroke, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“You need to keep it calm in here.”
“But it has been calm in here,” I said. “I think he was imagining things.”
“Mr. Antonelli?”
“Yes. Maybe he’s oversensitive to sound or something. Or maybe he was dreaming. He’s been moaning the whole time. We were just talking.”
“Oh,” she said, “sorry.”
“No problem,” I said.
“But your father does need quiet. And so does Mr. Antonelli.”
“Of course,” I said.
I smiled sheepishly at her, hoping she’d feel I was full of remorse even though I just told her I hadn’t done anything wrong. I didn’t know what the logic of that was exactly, but it seemed to work. It was as if she and I had a little conspiracy going. Crazy Mr. Antonelli. Silly old people with tubes stuck up their dicks.
“We’ll be really quiet,” I whispered.
She nodded at me, and assured Mr. Antonelli that everything would be fine now.
After she left, I settled back into the green plastic chair.
“You won’t get away with this,” I whispered to Heshel Rosenheim, but I don’t think he understood me. On the contrary, he seemed to relax. He asked me for the cup of Gatorade, and I gave it to him.
“That’s a good boy,” he said.
Maybe he’d forgotten the whole conversation. I watched him drink, then took his cup. I smiled at him.
“Tell me about your parents. They were born in Durnik, right? In Lithuania.”
“Lithuania? No. We’re from Berlin.”
“What did he do for a living?”
Dad seemed to like this question. He snuggled himself in his pillows and smiled.
“Papa was a professor of languages, oh yes. He was a genius, your grandfather. He was a great expert in Finno-Ugric languages, but of course he spoke everything. All the Romance and Germanic languages. He taught at
gymnasia
. But a very good one. The best one. And he wrote for many leading journals, and he even lectured at the university as a matter of fact, and at other places, too. Oh yes, I was jealous of Papa being away all the time, and all the professors and students coming over and me not being allowed to stay and have tea, because with tea came the special cookies my mother made.” He looked so happy, recalling the taste of his mother’s cookies.
“You inherited your ability with languages from him, I guess.”
“I’m not so good with languages,” my father insisted.
“What about your mother?” I continued.
“Mama?” he smiled. “Never was there one like her!”
“What did she do?”
“Do? She was a mother!”
“But I thought Grandpa taught at the university. Now you say it was
gymnasia
. Why?”
“I don’t know why. I was only a boy. It seems to me he also knew Sanskrit. Indo-European languages. It seems to me he was working on something with that.”
“Where did you live?”
“A beautiful place!”
“A house?”
“No, of course not. An apartment. We had—oh, it was big—with a whole room for the nanny. I once sneaked in there,” he laughed. “My bottom paid the price for that!”
“How many rooms did you have?”
“On the ground floor there was the pastry shop. At night, you could smell the baking, and in the morning we could run down and get strudel or little cakes, marzipan, Sachertorte, Linzertorte. Everything you could dream of, they had. For a penny you could get little cookies filled with jam. We would take them to class with us and eat them for lunch. In the parlor, there was a big clock, and I loved that clock, and every evening before dinner Papa would wind the clock with this big key, and only Papa could wind it, that was the rule!”
“You said you had a nanny?”
“Of course.”
“So you had money.”
“I don’t know. We never went hungry, we had beautiful clothes, every year a new pair of shoes. White cloth on the table, the curtains of lace…”
“How many were you?”
“Hmm?”
“How many brothers and sisters?”
“I told you, I told you. Your auntie Mootie, she was the youngest. Your auntie Reggie, she was the older. And then, you know, the baby died, he was just a few months old. And there were cousins and uncles and aunts.”
“You had a cousin Hans, right?”
“Did I?”
“Yes, didn’t you? You had a cousin named Hans, and he suggested you join something—do you remember?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What did ‘Mootie’ stand for?” I asked, when he failed to recall cousin Hans, the one who suggested he join the SS.
“Mootie is Monika,” he replied. “And Reggie is for Regina.”
I knew these names, of course. I knew these stories, too. But sometimes they changed. That was the thing. Sometimes Mootie stood for Mona. Reggie sometimes was Rachl. Sometimes there was Linzertorte, and sometimes there was kugel. When I was little these things didn’t seem to matter. Now they were the details on which everything hung.
“What was the street you lived on?” I tried again to connect him to some real place, some real existence. Maybe I could look it up. Maybe I would go there and ask all the old people if they remembered this Jewish family that once…
“Who remembers?” he answered.
“You don’t forget a thing like that. Come on, what street?”
He sighed.
“Mikey,” he said, “I’m tired.”
“Just one more question. What street did you live on?”
“Oy, Mikey, ask your mother.”
“I can’t ask her, Dad. Tell me the street you lived on.”
He rubbed his eyes and when he looked up, they were clouded over and red, like bisque.
“Alexanderplatz,” he muttered. “Number Twenty-five.”
“Do you remember the name Mueller, Dad?”
“Mueller?” he said.
“Yes, Mueller,” I repeated.
“Sure,” he said sleepily, “I remember that name. But it’s like Smith,” he went on, “everybody had that name.”
His strength had been amazing, but finally he fell asleep. He seemed so small and unprotected in that huge bed, unshaven and dressed in that paper-thin hospital gown with the little blue flowers on it, and snoring so unnaturally, as if the molecules of air had grown too large for him to swallow. Without meaning to, I had begun to look for clues. My heart ached in my chest to such a degree I had to sit down again and catch my own breath.
My cell phone rang. I thought it would be Josh, but it was Kaufman, from Los Angeles.
I couldn’t place him.
“From the Holocaust Library,” he explained in his thick accent. “I tried first the one number and then this one you left on my machine.” His voice was as frail as butterfly wings. He was concerned that I hadn’t gotten the materials.
No, no, I told him, I had gotten them. He wanted to know, then, how he could help me.
I had to think about that. I looked over at my father, sleeping.
“I have some questions,” I said at last.
Actually, I asked him many questions. He told me, first of all, what a memorial book is—a list of the dead and sometimes also the survivors from a town or a shtetl. Each has its own memorial book, he explained. Compiled from oral accounts, from Red Cross lists, from German documents. They are not always one hundred percent accurate, but are fairly reliable. Rosenheim? Well, it is a German Jewish name, not terribly common, but not unique either. One would expect most Rosenheims to live in Germany or Austria, but there is no reason not to find them in Galicia, or in Russia or Poland either, in fact anywhere. Durnik? It was in Lithuania, in fact, not far from Amdur. It no longer exists, he said, a shtetl of perhaps eight hundred or a thousand souls, of which about fifteen are known to have survived the war. It was liquidated on March 17, 1942, its inhabitants transported to the Vilna ghetto, and later sent to various concentration camps. Several escaped and went to live with the partisans, of which only one survived. The only Heshel Rosenheim? In all of Europe? No, no, there were probably many, though Hershel (with an
r
) would have been a more common name than Heshel. Majdanek? It was the worst of the worst. It still stands, by the way, he said. One of the few that remain. You should go see it. Mueller? A very common name. Heinrich Mueller? Don’t you mean Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo? No? He was at Majdanek? We can see if we have any mention of him, it should be on the computer, but again these lists are incomplete. But in answer to your question about Heshel Rosenheim, yes there were others, I can see them on the screen right now, but that was the one you requested. The one from Durnik. Otherwise I would have given you—oh, let me see—well, we have seventy-three listings just right here, not to mention the Hershels, and then if you want variations on the spelling of the last name.
“I asked you for Durnik?”
“Did I make an error? I’m terribly sorry.”
“No, no. But it wasn’t me.”
“It was not you? You are not Mr. Rosenheim?”
“Yes, I am. But I think someone was using my name.”
“Gott in himmel,”
he said. “Should I call the police?”
I told him not to do that. It was probably a cousin or something. Is it possible, I then asked him, if Heshel Rosenheim actually survived? That the list was wrong?
“Of course,” he said. “Anything is possible.”
He called me about fifteen minutes later. I’d been sitting there looking at my father the whole time, frozen to the chair. The minutes could have been counted in the heartbeats in my neck—like a time bomb. Hello again, he said. Yes, there was indeed a Lieutenant H. Mueller mentioned in at least one document as having been at Majdanek sometime between 1943 and 1944, but it was unclear what his duties were.
“What happened to him?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know. There is no record.”
“How can we find out?”
“We’ll never know what happened to him, Mr. Rosenheim. That’s the way it is with most of them. They rose out of the masses to do their dirty work, and faded back into the masses when it was over. He has probably lived a normal life. He was a plumber or a baker or a car salesman, he had a family, and as far as anyone knew he had spent the whole of the war at the Russian front as a truck mechanic. Walking down the street, one of his victims may run into him and not even recognize him—in fact, he’ll buy his new car from him and give him his money and shake his hand and go home and tell his wife about the nice fellow who sold him his car. I’m sorry to tell you this, Mr. Rosenheim. It seems so unfair. Perhaps there is a story in your family, about some guard named Mueller who harmed your relative, your Heshel Rosenheim, who beat him or tortured or murdered him, and that is why you want to find him and punish him. Well, I tell you: you will not find him, and if you find him he will not go to trial, and if he does go to trial he will not go to jail, and if he does go to jail they will release him in a year because of his old age, if he is even alive anymore. I am not telling you to forget it. God forbid you should forget it. Not one of us should forget a single sentence of it. We should remember it always, and teach it to our children and our children’s children. But I do advise you not to hold on to it. I do advise you to let it go, to, yes, remember that it happened, but not to live with it as if it were happening to you, in your own life, in this very day. I hope I’ve been some help to you, Mr. Rosenheim,” he said.
Silently, slowly, I folded the cell phone and put it in my pocket. My father, like a beached whale, was gasping for air and spewing back foul vapor from his mouth hole. Suddenly, I could not stand the sight of him. I lurched at him, fists clenched. The heart monitor clicked happily its message of life. In the hall, nurses and orderlies scurried by on missions of mercy. But something rose up in
me
—something familiar and dark, like an oft-repeated dream which comes to you in different guise, only, at last, to reveal itself as the obsession of your every night—and I felt my jaw grow rigid and steel-like—and I raised my fist above my father, brushing against the lifelines of fluid that led to his arm, his heart, his brain, his soul, and I held it there, my fist, shaking, threatening, ready.
“Hey you!” I heard a voice from behind the curtain. It was Mr. Antonelli.
I jumped. Startled, I fell back against the curtain and found myself in Mr. Antonelli’s side of the room.
“What is the matter with you?” he cried.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“All this noise! All this noise! Can’t you be quiet for a minute?” He shook his finger at me. “There’s something the matter with you! You need to have your brain examined.”
Then he turned over, and presented me with his back.
I fled from the room.
Then a very strange thing happened. I went out into the vestibule and ran right into that woman, the poet from Starbucks.
“What are you doing here?” I said to her. I must have been terribly agitated, because she put her hand on my shoulder and attempted to comfort me.
“I just thought I’d stop in and see your father,” she said gently.
“What?” I said.
I suddenly couldn’t remember why I was in the hall, why I had run out of the room. The
ping! ping!
of the hospital intercom—
Blood gas unit to 349!
—made me think I had momentarily and impossibly materialized on a submarine. How on earth did this woman know about my dad? She knew me only as Mickey Rose, not Michael Rosenheim, I was sure of that. And even if she did know my real name, what was she doing here anyway? I had one lousy conversation with her in a coffee shop. Was she following me? Stalking me?
Suddenly she embraced me and told me how sorry she was. She knew what it was like to lose a father.
She was rather tall, and when she grabbed me, my head was tilted downward and my nose got pressed into something incredibly soft. Her blouse was remarkably silky, considering it looked like it had just come off a camel, but, more important, I hadn’t been this close to a breast in two or three years, and in spite of my confusion and panic I didn’t pull away. Her smell, utterly foreign, was also painfully familiar, and it entered me like an oar through water, propelling me forward into her bosom almost against my will. In a warm, consoling voice she explained that her mother (as it turned out!) lived in the same condominium complex as my father. Wasn’t that amazing? Not the same building, but down the road, in the town houses. The town houses were newer and more expensive, and they were two stories high—so anyone who lived there had to have a good retirement plan and two working legs. She had told her mother about meeting this comic, Mickey Rose, and her mother had said something like “Oh,
him
” (but in a nice way, she assured me, a very nice way) and explained to her who I really was, and who my father was, and that my father had had a stroke and was at JFK.
“A bunch of us got together and sent flowers,” she said.
“A bunch of who?” I muttered into her collar, my cheek glancing upon her neck.
“His admirers, I guess,” she said.
More admirers. How on earth had a war criminal managed to get so many admirers? And Jewish ones at that! And how any of them knew he was in the hospital was beyond me. Was there some sort of Heshel Rosenheim Emergency Broadcast System? The poet lady made a move toward his hospital room.
“He’s asleep now,” I said.
“Oh,” she replied. “Well, I don’t want to bother him. But you look like a wreck, poor thing. Maybe we should get you something to eat.”
She took my hand and led me down the corridor to the elevator, and then put me in her car. We drove around awhile, looking for someplace that wasn’t a chain. We never found one.
Finally I suggested we head back to The Ponds at Lakeshore.
Why I brought her home I will never know. Was it the tenderness of her gesture, the way she hugged me, almost like a child? Or the (I had to admit it) thrilling sensation of those thick, yielding breasts and the heady scent of slight nervousness mixed with Chanel that had risen through the fabric of her blouse like ether? I was a fool. I barely knew her. She wore Birkenstocks. I was in love with my ex-wife.
When I opened the door and let her in, I glanced through to the Florida room and my heart sank. The journals were there for anyone to see. I pointed her to the kitchen and closed the door.
There was, of course, next to nothing in the refrigerator, nevertheless she managed to put something together and set it before me at the little breakfast table. I hadn’t sat at this table once the whole time I had been at my father’s, but she set a place for me there, so I sat down. She seated herself across from me and watched me eat. I imagined my mother and father must have played out this scene countless times. She was a stranger to me, but I liked the easy, familiar way she had about her. She had not asked me where things were in the kitchen. She just found what she needed and went about her work. She didn’t chatter or make small talk, which I also appreciated. And I didn’t feel like she expected me to talk either. She wasn’t waiting for me to say anything. She just sat there with a contented look, and sipped some tea.
“Do you want to see something?” I said.
“Sure,” she replied.
I got up, took her hand, and led her through the dining room and the living room and out into the Florida room. The Cheez Whiz box was still in the center of the floor. It was egregiously watermarked and moldy, the way old boxes get after they’ve been left out in the rain, and I noticed an almost animal-like smell emanating from it. It was like a dead body, exhumed and still rotting, wanting nothing more than to be put back in the ground.
She stood there quietly, looking.
Some of the journals were stuffed in the Cheez Whiz box, but others were scattered about the floor. They, too, gave off an unpleasant smell.
“I’d open a window,” I said, “but it’s always so fucking hot.”
She nodded. “Perhaps it will rain soon.”
“But then you can’t open the windows anyway.”
“It’s a problem,” she said.
I waited for her to ask me what all this mess was, but she didn’t.
“Do you want me to tell you what these are?” I said.
“If you want to,” she responded.
I looked at her. She looked back at me kindly, her hands folded near her waist. The smell in the room was suffocating. I wanted to smell her again. Not this.
“What kind of poetry do you write?” I asked.
She raised her eyebrows—she must have been surprised by my question.
“Would you like to read some?”
Why would I want to? What if it was awful? But of course I said yes.
She walked over to my father’s bookcase, the one we had passed in the living room, the one filled with books entitled
The Jewish Book of Questions, Love Your Yiddish!, Chaim Weitzman—Man of Honor,
translations of
The Mishna, The Zohar, The Book of Job
—and from among these, strangely, miraculously, jammed in with a few other slender volumes I had never noticed, she pulled out a slim paperback and handed it to me.
“My mother probably gave it to him,” she said. “I noticed it on the way in. My mother gives a copy to everyone she meets.”
I now had to look at her book. I opened it to the title page and noticed her list of prior publications on the flyleaf. There were many. Very many. And I suddenly felt that I had even vaguely heard of her.
“Read it later,” she said, “if you feel like it.”
I put the book down on the table. I was confused about books at that time anyway. I didn’t know what to think about them. For instance, just then I recalled those kisses among the orange groves.
Impetuously, I again took April’s hands in mine.
“Can I ask you a straightforward question?”
“Sure,” she said.
“What do you look like without all those clothes on?”
“I thought you wanted to tell me what all that stuff on your floor is,” she said.
But she let me draw her closer to me, so close I could taste the loose strands of her long, silvery hair and feel the moisture on her back through the fabric of her skirt.
“Oh that,” I said. “My father is a writer, too.”
It wasn’t my greatest performance. I came in about thirty seconds. But I couldn’t stop touching her, I just couldn’t stop touching her, and that seemed to make her happy, because at some point she smiled at me, stroked my face, looked me deeply in the eyes in an open and fresh way, and I knew that right then I could have said whatever it was I wanted to say to her—no questions asked, no judgments even. I took a deep breath.
“What?” she urged.
She was so close I could see little specks of gold—maybe like mushrooms—dotting the circles of her sea blue eyes.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just think I better get back to the hospital.”
She drove me back, then took off, as I asked her to.
I went upstairs. More flowers had arrived. Dad was asleep.
I sat next to him for a long time, thinking.
The nurse stopped by at some point and informed me that he was completely stabilized, and though there was no telling what might happen next—how fast, how slow, as she put it—they would be releasing him back to the nursing home sometime the next day.
“He looks so thin,” I said.
“Really, he’s fine,” she said.
The tubes had been removed and the monitors unplugged. They had given him something to eat, too, because the tray was still on the table, and I could see he had eaten well and heartily, his plate wiped clean. He looked so serene, almost angelic, except for the dark rings under his eyes which reminded me of all those pictures of Eichmann.
Then the social worker came in to describe his physical therapy and how Medicare wouldn’t really pay for any of it.