Trusting Calvin

TRUSTING CALVIN

TRUSTING CALVIN

How a Dog Helped Heal a Holocaust Survivor's Heart

SHARON PETERS

Copyright © 2012 by Sharon Peters

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

Layout artist: Melissa Evarts

Project editor: Ellen Urban

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN 978-0-7627-8061-7

Printed in the United States of America

E-ISBN 978-0-7627-9163-7

To Caroline and Will, enthusiastic young readers, special spirits, and animal lovers, who will undoubtedly become fine citizens of the world.

PROLOGUE

This was it, then—the way it would end after all the awful months and all the grim possibilities threatened and imagined. Here in the near-dusk under a canopy of chestnut trees not yet in full leaf, the darkness of night creeping forward.

The young man, a teenager still, small and impossibly thin, trained his eyes at his shoes, as required. Eye contact was forbidden, he knew. Each of the other four men lined up next to him, shoulder to shoulder, trembling, were aware of this rule, too, and they all stared at the ground.

Death might not be so bad,
he thought, attempting to calm himself by retreating inside his head, a safe, quiet place where he could stay until the moment he would breathe no more. The effort failed. He remained excruciatingly aware. He could hear the rustle of crisp uniforms and the cheerful cocktail talk of several people, ten, maybe, or fifteen, clustered not far away, a few of them women, one wearing a dusky perfume that fluttered into his nostrils when the breeze blew in a certain way. They all seemed quite gay, these people, enjoying the evening among the trees, a short distance from the big house, where the festivities had begun.

A voice suddenly soared above the rest, insistent, hard, glazed with the confidence and authority of a man accustomed to being obeyed.

He was pleased, the commandant declared, that this honored group of people had seen fit to join him, these being trying times of such enormous gravity that it was difficult for anyone to manage a few hours of diversion. He had, therefore, arranged for some entertainment, very special entertainment, befitting the auspiciousness of the occasion.

Some of the guests chuckled knowingly.

The soft rustle of movement, the swish of tea dresses, a few words whispered or spoken drifted about as the audience slid into better spots.

The silence that followed tingled with a sense of expectation.

“Toten sie!”
the commandant finally bellowed, raising his arm and pointing at one of the five tattered men in the ruler-straight row.

The kill command.

A massive German shepherd lunged forward and grabbed the designated man by the throat.

The roaring of the dog, the screams of the man, and the sloppy wet noise of a neck being ripped open filled the air. The sharp scent of blood, coppery and sickening, rose up.

The dog seemed to need no encouragement, but several guests offered it, cheering him to greater ferocity. It continued for what seemed a very long time, this unholy concert of growling, gagging, and gasping.

“Good dog,” the commandant said at last, pride edging his voice, when it was clear the entertainment was dead.

Silence fell over the clearing.

Probably I will be next,
the young man thought, the next to die in this way. A gun to the back of the head, even with the requisite pre-death humiliation of stripping naked to fan the guests' enjoyment, seemed preferable. Quicker at least. But a prisoner was never given the choice of how to die. Everyone knew that.

Seconds clicked by . . . slowly, agonizingly slowly, as the eyes of the commandant studied each of the four, one by one.

The young man could hear the prisoner standing closest to him swallow repeatedly, probably forcing back vomit or bile that fear had launched from his gut.

“Go. Take them back,” the commandant finally spat.

“March!” the guard snapped at the men, still in formation but for the gaping empty spot.

It was hard to make his legs work, hard to believe he was alive.

TRUSTING CALVIN

One

The phone has been ringing all morning, shrill and insistent, breaking into the torpor of August in Cleveland. Routine calls from friends, mostly—two inviting him to lunch, another seeking a recommendation for a good page-turner. He's a voracious reader with no patience for lax literary efforts, and his recommendations are much sought-after.

Two of the calls are of a different sort, however—a high school teacher hoping to snag him to speak at an autumn assembly, and a rabbi asking him to participate in a discussion group.

Max (né Moshe) Edelman is by no means famous, but people are beginning to seek him out, as he is someone with information few can speak about with firsthand knowledge, information that until recently only a tiny handful of people knew he possessed.

He stores the speaking dates in his head, where scores of phone numbers, addresses, and important dates reside, and allows himself a small, uncharacteristic grin of satisfaction. Not because he seeks the spotlight. He is, in fact, a guarded, private man, mostly because of a past so vile and tortured he has for decades closed it—and himself—off, containing the pollution as best he could. Still, it is important to keep busy, and also to share what you have to share, and he's pleased that with these upcoming appearances he might be taking the first tentative steps toward fulfilling a request made of him decades ago in a very different place and circumstance.

Brisk and disciplined in all his pursuits, Max will not go suddenly idle merely because he has silver hair now and recently left his job of almost forty years.

“Retirement is a time that, if handled properly, can be even more productive than earlier years,” he has declared more than once.

He has strong opinions about most matters and little restraint when it comes to sharing or living them, so it's inconceivable that he wouldn't have had one about this phase of his life—that he would have let his retirement advance in its own capricious way, buffeting him about like a bird riding the updrafts. He has many plans.

“Max, Steve just called,” his wife, Barbara, announces from the kitchen. “He and Janet will be coming by later with Hannah.”

Another smile emerges, broad this time. Hannah is his first grandchild, just weeks old, and a greater gift he cannot imagine.

“Very good,” he says. “We may go for a walk if it is cool enough.”

He speaks in the spare, almost formal manner of people from a certain part of the world who learned English later in life but learned it well, and see no reason to squander the words they have collected. And, in any case, he dislikes chatterers, people who disrupt the quiet with nonsense and prattle. He has never been inclined in that direction himself, believing that sharing a few carefully constructed ideas or a well-told story has more value than babbling about every passing thought. He sometimes wishes others behaved similarly.

Max clicks off the radio, having learned little from the newscast except that all over the city today, tempers are short, and the oppressive heat, bad even by August standards, is causing strange things to happen. Here in the modest townhouse, however, the mood is as steady as ever. Industrious. Tenacious. Composed. Qualities husband and wife toted resolutely to this country decades ago, along with the sum of their earthly possessions folded into two suitcases.

But now the air shifts a little. Max hesitates before asking the question always close to his lips these days.

“How does Calvin look to you today? Better? Worse?” he asks his wife as she settles into a chair across from him to work on an afghan she is knitting.

“His face, it looks sad to me, Max.”

Just as Max had figured.

Calvin is, at this moment, off on his own, as he often is these days, curled into a tight circle, as if the only comfort he can find lies deep within his own bones. Heart-wrenching, the unhappiness there.

Big, handsome Calvin, polite and good-natured, with a vein of goofiness coursing just beneath the surface, had worn the typical Labrador retriever expression of perpetual joy every moment of his two and a half years until he had arrived at this house. Then it had withered, fast and fully. The sparkle that once lit his eyes as if some merry mischief-making was always being remembered or plotted has faded. His big baritone bark has gone puny, halfhearted. Everything about him, in fact, seems flatter, duller.

The dog is not sick; he is unhappy—and nothing seems to lessen that.

That Max cannot actually see any of this, having been blind for nearly fifty years, doesn't make him unaware of the descent. Calvin has been losing weight; his movements are slower, less fluid. A man doesn't have to have sight to know these things.

At the root of all this lies one issue: Calvin, exceedingly well-mannered and impeccably well-trained, cannot bring himself to work for Max. He cannot force himself to do what generations of meticulous breeding and thousands of hours of careful nurturing and instruction have prepared him to do—serve as Max's guide dog. Be the sight Max does not have.

“I know he is miserable about this, Max,” Barbara has said. “It's written all over his face.”

A dog of this sort needs to work, Calvin perhaps more than most. From almost the earliest moments of roly-poly puppyhood, coffee-­colored Calvin had distinguished himself with his unflappability and love of learning new things. When he finally grew into his huge Lab feet, an adolescent of unusual conscientiousness, no one had the smallest doubt that he possessed a work ethic even beyond what is expected to become a gifted guide dog.

“That dog simply will not allow himself to be drawn into any drama that's going on around him,” Jan Abbott, an instructor at Guiding Eyes for the Blind, where Calvin was trained, had observed. The kinds of distractions or upsets that caused his young kennel mates to lose focus for a moment and tumble around with each other in happy abandon didn't induce Calvin to do the same. If he was in the middle of a task, whatever the task, he kept with it, even when very young, much sooner than anyone expected to see that kind of self-control.

Calvin had sailed through the rigorous assessments and training, demonstrating the temperament, willingness to learn, robust health, and intelligence—tried, tested, and proven repeatedly—to partner up with a blind person. No challenge or circumstance could dampen his love of work, and it had been a perfect pairing, trainers thought, uniting this purposeful dog devoted to doing things by the book with this wiry, no-nonsense man who shared those qualities.

Calvin hasn't lost that zeal for work, Max knows. Calvin has lost the will to do it for Max.

When they exit the townhouse for a walk, Calvin stands still as a statue at the sidewalk, refusing to move forward at Max's command. Sometimes the dog drops to the ground and hugs the sidewalk as if it's the only safe place in all the world. No amount of insistence, cajoling, or encouragement can convince Calvin that taking Max anywhere is a good idea.

The experts at Guiding Eyes for the Blind have counseled the man. Calvin hasn't been able to feel any sort of bond with Max, they have said, and they suggested many ways for Max to alter the way he acts toward, speaks to, and relates with Calvin so the dog will know that Max likes him, believes in him, and wants to form a connection with him. In a guide-dog team, each side must feel respect and trust, given and received, and when that's missing the work stalls.

It was good advice, precise actions for a precise man to follow, and he did, to the letter. He knows this dog, his first ever, is not at fault. The essence of this problem lies unpleasantly inside himself, like a tangle of weed roots extending into places they have no business being. And he has worked hard to build the bridge across that mess so Calvin can feel the kinship the trainers have said was necessary for him to do his job.

But all of Max's list-making and deliberate actions haven't fooled Calvin. He hasn't been convinced Max is presenting a sincere invitation into the kind of relationship required if man and dog are to work as a team.

Calvin understands how relationships with people are supposed to feel, and the one he has with Max isn't right. When Max pets him, he feels cool reserve. Max doesn't act around him as most people do; he maintains a distance as long and icy as a January river.

So Calvin sleeps today, as he does most days. More than any dog his age should.

“Everything I am doing is exactly as the trainers instructed,” Max says, “and yet this.”

That all he had counted on, worked for, tried to overcome could be extinguished by this—the emotional needs of a dog—is almost unbelievable. But this is an animal with thousands of dollars of breeding and training behind him, Max knows, and the waiting lists of people desperate for such a dog are long. Perhaps it would be best, he thinks, not for the first time, to give up on this folly, send back the dog for reassignment, and return to his white-tipped cane. The cane doesn't give him the freedom of mobility that it gives so many other people. Max has never become as accomplished with it as some people do, and it doesn't allow him the kind of go-everywhere retirement he had envisioned when he had sought out a guide dog. It's
something,
though. Maybe it is the something that he will have to rely upon after all.

“This dog Calvin just does not want to work for a man like me,” Max says at last. “Calvin wants me to be the person he wants me to be, a different person than the way I am. I don't know if I can be that person.”

The words surprise his wife. Max doesn't often share concerns he might have about falling short in some way.

The heavy hush of disappointment fills the room.

Max had always been able to analyze his way through impossible situations—imagine the facts on a ledger and devise a strategy that, if not perfect, would resolve the problems he faced. This one has remained stubbornly unsolvable.

“I am afraid,” Max says at last, “that I might have reached the end of the road with Calvin.”

Barbara abandons her knitting, and studies her husband, the unhappy slope of his shoulders.

“No, Max,” she says. “No, you have not. Much bigger challenges you have overcome. This road goes a little bit farther.”