What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories (4 page)

“Why?” Shoshana says.

“Because it might lead to mixed dancing.”

Deb and Shoshana pretend to be horrified as we let go of hands, as we recognize that the moment is over, the rain disappearing as quickly as it came. Mark stands there staring into the sky, lips pressed tight. “That joke is very, very old,” he says. And then he says, “Mixed dancing makes me think of mixed nuts, and mixed grill, and
insalata mista
. The sound of ‘mixed dancing’ has made me wildly hungry. And I’m going to panic if the only kosher thing in the house is that loaf of bleached American bread.”

“You have the munchies,” I say.

“Diagnosis correct,” he says.

Deb starts clapping at that, tiny claps, her hands held to her chest in prayer. “You will not,” Deb says to him, absolutely beaming, “even believe what riches await.”

· · ·

The four of us stand in the pantry, soaking wet, hunting through the shelves and dripping on the floor. “Have you ever seen such a pantry?” Shoshana says. “It’s gigantic,” she says, reaching her arms out from side to side. It is indeed large, and it is indeed stocked, an enormous amount of food, and an enormous selection of sweets, befitting a home that is often host to a swarm of teenage boys.

“Are you expecting a nuclear winter?” Shoshana says.

“I’ll tell you what she’s expecting,” I say. “You want to know how obsessed she really is? You want to understand how much she truly talks about the Holocaust? I mean, how serious it is—to what degree?”

“To no degree,” Deb says. “We are done with the Holocaust.”

“Tell us,” Shoshana says.

“She’s always plotting our secret hiding place,” I say.

“No kidding,” Shoshana says.

“Like, look at this. At the pantry, and a bathroom next to it, and the door to the garage. If you just sealed it all up—like put drywall at the entrance to the den—you’d never know. You’d never suspect. If you covered that door inside the garage up good with, I don’t know, if you hung your tools in front of it and hid hinges behind, maybe leaned the bikes and the mower up against it, you’d have this closed area, with running water and a toilet and all this food. I mean, if someone sneaked into the garage to replenish things, you could rent out the house, you know? Put in another family without even any idea.”

“Oh my God,” Shoshana says. “My short-term memory may be gone from having all those children—”

“And from the smoking,” I say.

“And from that, too. But I remember. I remember from when we were kids, she was always,” Shoshana says, turning to Deb, “you were always getting me to play games like that. To pick out spaces. And even worse, even darker—”

“Don’t,” Deb says.

“I know what you’re going to say,” I tell her, and I’m honestly excited. “The game, yes? She played that crazy game with you?”

“No,” Deb says. “Enough. Let it go.”

And Mark—who is just utterly absorbed in studying kosher certifications, who is tearing through hundred-calorie
snack packs and eating handfuls of roasted peanuts from a jar, and who has said nothing since we entered the pantry except “What’s a Fig Newman?”—he stops and says, “I want to play this game.”

“It’s not a game,” Deb says.

And I’m happy to hear her say that, as that’s just what I’ve been trying to get her to admit for years. That it’s not a game. That it’s dead serious, and a kind of preparation, and an active pathology that I prefer not to indulge.

“It’s the Anne Frank game,” Shoshana says. “Right?”

Seeing how upset my wife is, I do my best to defend her. I say, “No, it’s not a game. It’s just what we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank.”

“How do we play this non-game?” Mark says. “What do we do?”

“It’s the Righteous Gentile game,” Shoshana says.

“It’s Who Will Hide Me?” I say.

“In the event of a second Holocaust,” Deb says, giving in, speaking tentatively. “It’s a serious exploration, a thought experiment that we engage in.”

“That you play,” Shoshana says.

“That, in the event of an American Holocaust, we sometimes talk about which of our Christian friends would hide us.”

“I don’t get it,” Mark says.

“Of course you do,” Shoshana says. “You absolutely do. It’s like this. If there was a Shoah, if it happened again, say we were in Jerusalem, and it’s 1941 and the Grand Mufti got his way, what would your friend Jebediah do?”

“What could he do?” Mark says.

“He could hide us. He could risk his life and his family’s and everyone’s around him. That’s what the game is: Would he—for real—would he do that for you?”

“He’d be good for that, a Mormon,” Mark says. “Forget
this pantry. They have to keep a year of food stored in case of the Rapture, or something like that. Water, too. A year of supplies. Or maybe it’s that they have sex through a sheet. No, wait,” Mark says, “I think that’s supposed to be us.”

“All right,” Deb says, “let’s not play. Really, let’s go back to the kitchen. I can order in from the glatt kosher place. We can eat outside on the grass, and have a real dinner and not just junk.”

“No, no,” Mark says, “I’ll play. I’ll take it seriously.”

“So would the guy hide you?” I say.

“And the kids, too?” Mark says. “I’m supposed to pretend that in Jerusalem he’s got a hidden motel or something where he can put the twelve of us?”

“Yes,” Shoshana says. “In their seminary or something. Sure.”

Mark thinks about this for a long, long time. He eats Fig Newmans and considers, and you can tell from the way he’s staring that he’s gotten into it, that he’s taking it real seriously—serious to the extreme.

“Yes,” Mark says, and he looks honestly choked up. “I think, yes, Jeb would do that for us. He would hide us. He would risk it all.”

“I think so, too,” Shoshana says, and smiles. “Wow, it makes you—as an adult—it makes you appreciate people more.”

“Yes,” Mark says. “Jeb’s a good man.”

“Now you go,” Shoshana says to us. “You take a turn.”

“But we don’t know any of the same people anymore,” Deb says. “We usually just talk about the neighbors.”

“Our across-the-street neighbors,” I tell them. “They’re the perfect example. Because the husband, Mitch, he would hide us. I know it. He’d lay down his life for what’s right. But that wife of his …” I say.

“Yes,” Deb says, “he’s right. Mitch would hide us, but
Gloria, she’d buckle. When he was at work one day, she’d turn us in.”

“You could play against yourselves, then,” Shoshana says. “What if one of you wasn’t Jewish? Would you hide the other?”

“I’ll do it,” I say. “I’ll be the Gentile, because I could pass best. A grown woman who still has an ankle-length denim skirt in her closet—they’d catch you in a flash.”

“Fine,” Deb says. And I stand up straight, put my shoulders back, like maybe I’m in a lineup. I stand there with my chin raised so my wife can study me. So she can really get a look in, and get a think in, and decide if her husband really has what it takes. Would I really have the strength, would I care enough—and it is not a light question, not a throwaway question—to risk my life to save her and our son?

Deb stares, and Deb smiles, and gives me a little push to my chest. “Of course he would,” Deb says. And she takes the half stride that’s between us and gives me a tight hug that she doesn’t release. “Now you,” Deb says. “You and Yuri go.”

“How does that even make sense?” Mark says. “Even for imagining.”

“Shhh,” Shoshana says. “Just stand over there and be a good Gentile while I look.”

“But if I weren’t Jewish, I wouldn’t be me.”

“That’s for sure,” I say.

“He agrees,” Mark says. “We wouldn’t even be married. We wouldn’t have kids.”

“Of course you can imagine it,” Shoshana says. “Look,” she says, and goes over and closes the pantry door. “Here we are, caught in South Florida for the second Holocaust. You’re not Jewish, and you’ve got the three of us hiding in your pantry.”

“But look at me!” he says.

“I’ve got a fix,” I say. “You’re a background singer for ZZ Top. You know them? You know that band?”

Deb lets go of me, just so she can give my arm a slap.

“Really,” Shoshana says. “Try to look at the three of us like that, like it’s your house and we’re your charges, locked up in this room.”

“And what’re you going to do while I do that?” Mark says.

“I’m going to look at you looking at us. I’m going to imagine.”

“Okay,” he says. “
Nu
, get to it. I will stand, you imagine.”

And that’s what we do, the four of us. We stand there playing our roles, and we really get into it. We really all imagine it. I can see Deb seeing him, and him seeing us, and Shoshana just staring and staring at her husband.

We stand there so long, I really can’t tell how much time has passed, though the light changes ever so slightly—the sun outside again dampening—in that crack under the pantry door.

“So would I hide you?” he says, serious. And for the first time that day, he reaches out, as my Deb would, and puts his hand to her hand. “Would I, Shoshi?”

And you can tell Shoshana is thinking of her kids, though that’s not part of the scenario. You can tell that she’s changed part of the imagining. And she says, after a pause, yes, but she’s not laughing. She says, yes, but to him it sounds as it does to us, so that he is now asking and asking. But wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I hide you? Even if it was life and death—if it would spare you, and they’d kill me alone for doing it? Wouldn’t I?

Shoshana pulls back her hand.

She does not say it. And he does not say it. And from the four of us, no one will say what cannot be said—that this wife believes her husband would not hide her. What to do? What would come of it? And so we stand like that, the four of us trapped in that pantry. Afraid to open the door and let out what we’ve locked inside.

I: 1973

O
n a hilltop not many miles east of Jerusalem, Hanan Cohen watched the dust rising up in the distance and knew they were having a war. The roads remain empty on the Day of Atonement, and the cloud from a convoy barreling down toward the desert could mean only one thing. Hanan put a hand to his eyes to block the sun, hoping to see better. Holding that position, with his beard blowing, and his long white robe, and the tallit on his shoulders, he looked—poised among those ancient hills—like a man outside of time.

He walked back into the one-room shack where he lived with his wife and his three teenage sons. He undressed, put on his uniform, and took up his gun so that no one needed to ask what he had seen.

The boys said, “We will come, too. There will be some way to help.”

“Stay with your mother,” Hanan said.

And Rena, who did not need her husband to make such a decision, said, “Follow your father to the city, and see if there’s any way you may serve your country in its time of need.”

Hanan nodded, accepting. And he, along with his three boys, walked out toward the war.

· · ·

Rena did not sleep that night, worried as she was for her husband and her sons. The worry was made worse by the newness of the place and its simplicity. Centered in the middle of an olive grove, the shack was without running water or electricity. Whatever radio signal wasn’t swallowed by the surrounding mountains was blocked by the trees. A home so rustic wasn’t wired for a phone.

When Rena broke her fast after dark, she thought about hiking down across the little valley out her front door and climbing the hill on the other side. For on that other small summit sat another shack, with another family. The only Jews for miles around. In it lived a husband and wife and their new baby daughter. The husband, Skote, was a friend of Hanan’s, and together they’d come up with the plan, and bought the land, and decided to settle this area of Samaria together, and build from their two families a great and mighty city on that place.

Rena figured that Skote, too, had seen the dust. And that, most sensibly, Yehudit had taken her baby daughter and followed her husband to the closest road when he’d left to join the fight. Rena sincerely hoped that’s what she’d done. At the best of times, this was not a safe place to be alone. There was a walkie-talkie in the shack, and Rena called out to Yehudit, but heard nothing on any of the channels, only broken flashes, like lightning, of passing chatter. Rena decided against crossing. She didn’t want to find herself alone on the opposite hilltop, only to have to make her way back in the night.

Rena sat with her back to the door and her eyes to the window. She recited psalms with her rifle in her lap, and watched for any movement that might be headed up her hill. She stayed this way until morning, frightened countless times by the rustling
of leaves on stiff branches. And more so, she was terrified by what she could not see, the ever-widening gyre of frontier blocked by the tree at her window.

· · ·

After washing her hands and saying her prayers, Rena went outside with the ax to size up the task ahead. It was the biggest tree in their grove, a solid four meters around. Then she looked up to its top and knew she could conquer it. For the tree, like the men of that country, was much shorter than you’d imagine for something so tough. Rena spat in her hands. She took up her ax, and she swung at the tree’s knobbly base with all she had. She chopped and chopped, making little progress. When she was feeling forlorn, too tired to hack at that stubborn bole anymore, she’d look out past the tree over the edge of the hill at the Arab village below. And she’d swing.

Watching this handsome mother of three at work, her hair tied back in a kerchief, and reigning over this stunning hill, in a sea of hills, on a day so clear that one could see well into the purple mountains of Moab from where Rena stood, you would not know that things weighed heavy at all. You would not know it if, upon taking her periodic look over the edge of that rocky slope and spotting a skinny young man climbing its worn, ancient terraces, she hadn’t buried that ax in the ground and lifted a rifle from the dirt.

Rena chambered a round. She planted the butt on her shoulder and set her sights on the boy zigzagging his way up. When he was close enough to Rena that she could have as easily poked him back down the hill with the barrel as shot him through the heart, he said, in Arabic, “Stop chopping my tree.”

Rena either didn’t speak Arabic or didn’t care to respond. And so the boy repeated the sentence in Hebrew.

Again, it was as if he had not spoken. Rena, as if starting the conversation, said, “Who are you?”

“I am,” he said, “your neighbor down the hill.”

“Then stay down the hill,” she said.

“I would have,” the boy said. “But I looked up and I saw that you were doing something that can’t be undone.”

“It’s my tree, on my land, in my country. Mine to cut down if I please.”

“If it was your tree, I’d have seen you at my side last year during harvest. I’d have seen you the year before that, and ten years before that, and a hundred.”

“You weren’t here yourself a hundred years ago. And anyway,” Rena said, “you don’t look back far enough. The contract on this land is very old.”

“A mythical claim, as meaningless as the one you make today.”

Here the boy went silent as the shadows from a formation of fighters passed overhead. Then he waited a moment longer, for he knew they would be followed by the crack of broken sky.

“You will see,” the boy said. “The Jewish court will return this hill to us. Anyway, it looks like it’s the war, not a judge, that will decide. Tomorrow, I’d say, or the next, this tree will be in Jordan, or Egypt, or, God willing, back home in Palestine.”

“By tomorrow,” Rena said, “it will be at the bottom of the hill. And you can take it, along with your family, to any country you please.”

Here the boy’s face darkened, as if a plane again had passed, though the sky stayed clear.

“If I find one single olive branch off this tree at the bottom of the hill,” he said, a finger now raised, “I will plant you in its place myself. One more swing, I tell you, and a curse on your head—a curse on your home.”

“You are very tough for a boy with a gun aimed at his heart.”

“A settler who shoots for no reason would already have shot.”

And here the boy turned and walked back down the hill. He was halfway down when Rena called to him, against her better judgment. “Child,” she yelled. “Cousin! Are we really losing the war?”

· · ·

Rena chopped at that tree for the rest of the morning. With each swing, she thought of the boy’s curse, and the boy’s threat, and wondered, if she felled the tree that day, if he’d really come for her that night. But that tree was a dense tree. And her ax needed sharpening. And as strong as she was, her arms would need strengthening, or at least a night of rest, to get the job done. When she knew she could not finish, Rena went back into the shack. She cleared her mug and plate from the table and tipped it onto its side. She then flipped it up against the window to act as a shutter, and turned her chair around to face the other side of the room. Rena sat with her back to the window, the gun in her lap, and her eyes set on a door so flimsy that when night came, she was able to see the stars through the gaps in its boards.

Deep into that night, there was a banging at the door that Rena was sure was the boy from the village come to get her. Cloudy with sleep, she was up in an instant, the gun at her shoulder, her finger on the trigger, and squeezing so hard in her fright that there was no way to stop it, when she remembered it might be her husband or her sons coming home. In that very same instant, for it was too small to split, she pitched up the barrel and shot a tile from her roof.

Rena heard her neighbor Yehudit scream on the other side of that door. She ran to open it, saying a dozen prayers at once, thankful she had not killed her friend. When Yehudit was safely inside with her baby, and the bolt slid back into place, Rena set the hive of a lantern to glowing and held it out to the woman before her. And she saw that the baby Yehudit carried did not sit right in her arms. From the way she held it, Rena assumed that the child was already dead.

“Is she—” Rena said.

“Sick,” Yehudit said. “A thousand degrees. I tried every remedy, said every prayer.” And then, in the middle of her panic, she said, “Why did we move to this place? By whose call does it fall on us to rebuild this nation? Two families alone among olives and enemies. I said to Skote before all of this, ‘What if there is an emergency, and us cut off, no phones, no roads, only hills around? What if something happens after the baby is born?’ ”

“Do you want me to hike down with you?” Rena said, looking for a clock. “We can be at the crossing before the sun comes up.”

“It’s too far and too dangerous. And you can see already, the decision about this child’s life will be made tonight.”

“Let me hold her,” Rena said. And she took the child, who was hot as white coal. Her lips were cracked deep and peeling like parchment, her little eyes dry and dead. Rena did not think this child could be saved. She handed the baby back to its mother, and took up the blanket that was folded on her cot.

“What are you doing?” Yehudit said.

“Making you a place to rest, so that I can care for the baby while you sleep. We will take turns nursing her through the night.”

“I didn’t come for company. I didn’t come to stay.”

“Well, what can I do that you haven’t already done?”

“You can buy the child.”

“What?” Rena said.

“In the way of the old country—to outsmart what’s coming. It’s how my own grandmother was saved from the Angel of Death.”

“I’ll recite psalms with you until the pages turn to dust,” Rena said, “but superstition and magic?”

Yehudit put a hand to the back of the baby’s head and turned away the shoulder on which the child rested, as if Rena herself were possibly Death in another guise.

“You don’t see it?” Yehudit said. “Why else, on Yom Kippur, would God call my husband away to war? To do that, and then reach into my home to take back the blessing He’d just sent me? And this after I’ve left behind my whole family. This after I moved up to a forgotten hilltop, after I sacrificed happiness to make Israel whole. No, there has been a sin. There has been some evil of which I’m unaware. But it is my evil. This child, alone out here, utterly pure.”

“And you think selling your baby will break a fever that hot.”

“If she were not my child anymore,” Yehudit said, “if she meant so little to me that I’d sell her for a pittance. If she belonged, in earnest, to another mother, then maybe those forces that take interest would see that it is not worth the bother. And if she is truly no longer my child,” Yehudit said, owning whatever dark cloud hovered over her, “maybe whatever’s coming won’t even know where to look.”

Rena nodded, accepting. She rummaged through a vegetable crate full of books for the one in which she and Hanan hid their money. She took out a stack of bills. This she offered to Yehudit, who took one worthless note off the top. “
Shtei prutot
,”
Yehudit said. “I won’t take more money for her than I would for a loaf a bread.” Yehudit then gave that bill back to Rena and straightened herself, preparing for the exchange.

“I declare this child to be a daughter of this house,” Yehudit said. “I make no claim to her anymore.” She passed that boiling baby over to Rena, and in return took that single bill in her hand. “I ask only,” Yehudit said, “that you consider one humble request.”

“Yes?” Rena said, her eyes wet with the seriousness of the exchange.

“In making this deal binding, I ask that you let me spare you the burden of raising your daughter until she is a woman. I will watch over her as if I were her mother—though I am not. I will raise her with love and school her in the ways of Israel, and put her life before mine, if you grant me the right. Do you accept these terms?”

“I
don’t
,” Rena said. And a terror washed over Yehudit’s face. “I will loan you my daughter until she is grown,” Rena said, “but only if you both sleep here tonight. No daughter of mine can leave me so sick and head out into such a dark, cold night.”

“Of course, of course,” Yehudit said, stepping forward. “A deal’s a deal.” And here, Yehudit hugged Rena, with that burning baby between them—too sick to cry. Into Rena’s ear, Yehudit whispered, “Let God protect our husbands in battle. And protect our country at war. Let God save this little daughter, and let God bless this house, and protect you always. And may He bless our new city, though it is now only two hovels on sister hills.”

“Amen,” Rena said. “Thank you,” she said, and kissed her friend on the cheek.

Yehudit stepped back and wiped the tears from her face. “A silly superstition you may think,” she said, “but I believe in the power of the word.”

Rena looked in the corner at all the milk bottles full of water. “When my boys used to get those terrible fevers, I would give them ice baths to cool them down.”

“If I had ice,” Yehudit said, “I’d have done it myself.”

“There’s always a way to make do.” Rena took up her gun and walked out to the northern edge of her property, where there was a high boulder that caught the wind. She climbed the boulder in the darkness—already familiar with its every crag. She took up a jerry can she kept there to cool when the temperature dropped, one she’d tuck in the shade each morning, her refreshment as she worked the land. Rena stood on that rock and screwed off the cap. She hoisted the container in the crook of an elbow, looking for any signs of fighting from Jordan. She tipped the can back and took a long swig. And she was comforted as the water sent a chill to her bones.