Not Me (26 page)

“They weren’t shot,” he said. “And she wasn’t bayoneted, if that’s what you think. It wasn’t a mortar either.”

“Sure it was. Or she was stabbed and gutted.”

“No,” he said. “No one was that near them.”

“What then?”

“Grenade,” he said.

He understood it all now.

He understood why he had been granted such clarity of vision. Why every nuance of the field was at his command. Why he had become so fearless and reckless and full of hope. Why he was allowed his one moment of supreme happiness.

No, she had not stayed behind to save Dovid. She was killed with him, by the same explosion. The German grenade had misfired. He had seen that kind of wound before, it was so common it even happened in training. And yes, somewhere in the back of his head, he had heard it go off, hadn’t he? He must have. And one of his secret eyes must have seen Dovid’s arms fly from his body like rockets, spewing fuel of blood, and his other eye must have seen Moskovitz thrown into the air, her stomach splitting open like a tin can, terror and surprise on her face. He had given them the instrument of their own deaths. He must have known what would happen. Had to know. Killer of Jews. Heinrich Mueller, SS-Obersturmführer.

Now he understood the meaning of divine retribution. Even if there were no God, now, for him, there was. A God that would never set him free. Never undo what had been done. Never absolve him of his crimes.

It had been the grenade.

Avigdor watched him. After a while he took a deep breath and spoke again.

“There is something else I should probably tell you.”

Heshel lay still as a stone.

“She was pregnant,” he said. “They could see the child.”

Wincing in pain, the wounded man turned on his side so that Avigdor could not see his face.

“Six months pregnant at least. She was hiding it. Can you imagine? If anyone had known,” he added, “she would never have been allowed to stay.”

In a little while the nurse came strutting down the floor, followed by the doctor, a small man wearing a fez and a vested tweed suit. He had a jolly smile, and spoke a beautiful, richly textured English.

“Ah,” the doctor said pleasantly, “he seems to be awake!”

He picked up the charts.

“Heshel Rosenheim…is that right?”

Heshel looked at him.

“Your name? Do we have it correctly? Heshel Rosenheim?”

When the prisoner did not respond, the nurse eyed the doctor with concern and said something to him in Arabic. He shrugged and then bent down and spoke directly into his patient’s ear, as if he might have lost his hearing, perhaps due to shell shock.

“Your name. What is it? Who are you? Can you hear me? Who exactly are you?”

“My name? Who am I?” he said in Hebrew.

“What is he saying?” asked the doctor.

This time it was the nurse’s turn to shrug.

The man in the bed stared past the doctor, up to the white-painted ceiling. He tried to see what he had seen before
—
the movie of his life
—
he tried to see his boyhood days in Berlin, his mother and his father, he tried to smell the mothballs of his mother’s cedar chest, or taste the schnitzel she prepared on Thursdays, he tried to feel the comfort of sitting at his father’s knee, studying his grammar and listening to his father’s stories in French and Italian, he tried to see himself in his new SS uniform, and feel the oil that he used on his dagger as he rubbed it between his fingers, and he tried to see himself sitting in his dark office with his precious accounting books, ordering the little men in striped suits to do his bidding, he tried to feel the pleasure of that, he tried to see the long march back to Bergen-Belsen, and the last days of starvation and fear, and how he hid among the corpses and how he avoided the lice and how he carved the numbers in his flesh and how he fooled the British and how he laughed when the starving Jews died from eating too much too soon, and how he fooled the Jews in their D.P. camp and how he slogged onto the shores of this strange land, and how he plotted his escape and how he was ambushed by the Arabs who he thought could save him, and how he came to be a soldier in the army of his enemy, and how he fell in love with the woman of a hated race, and how he fathered a child who would never know its father, and how he was shot by his own captain at the very moment he had grasped his own salvation
—
but none of it came to him. All he saw was the blank, white, broken plaster of the bare ceiling, bright with nothing.

He looked at the doctor. Finally, he could be anyone he wanted to be.

“My name is Heshel Rosenheim,” he said.

I was startled when I heard him cry out.

He was looking straight ahead, as if someone were standing at the foot of his bed.

He reached out his hand. “Please!” He was speaking in some mix of Yiddish and German, his voice almost inaudible, shattered, like glass. “Come closer so I can see you.”

Even though he wasn’t speaking to me, it was I who came closer.

“Dad,” I said, touching his shoulder gently.

He suddenly looked at me as if waking from a dream.

“Your brother was just here,” he announced.

“I don’t have a brother,” I said.

“Oh no, that’s right, you don’t.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“No,” he said simply.

“I’m Michael,” I said. “I’m your son.” When there was no response, I asked him, “Do you remember your name?”

“My name?” He thought for a while. “No,” he finally admitted. He began to cry. “Isn’t that awful? I can’t remember my name. Can you tell me?”

But before I could answer, his eyes lit up. He suddenly seemed to recognize me. “Israel! You’ve come! You’ve come!”

“I’m not Israel, Dad. I’m Michael. I don’t even know anyone named Israel.”

“Don’t lie,” he said, stroking my hand. “It’s all right. You don’t have to hide from me anymore.”

“Who is Israel?” I said.

“Who is Israel? What a question!” He tried to squeeze my hand, but all his strength had finally abandoned him. And yet somehow he found the strength to smile. “After all this time! Have you read everything?”

“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.