Not Me (7 page)

He would do what he could to help, and then he would leave forever.

In the meantime, they liked to have movies on Saturday nights. Naor was only an hour from Tel Aviv, but to the kibbutzniks that seemed a million miles away, so once or twice a month they set up the projector in the Bet Am and watched old films and outdated newsreels. Heshel did not like the newsreels. They frequently focused on the Nuremberg Trials. He watched as Nazi after Nazi was condemned to die. Occasionally he even saw a familiar face sitting in the docks. He forced himself to sit there, and even cheer, but it terrified him. On this particular evening, the newsreel began by showing warehouses full of pocket watches, coats, suitcases, pens, handbags, and the inevitable shoes. It showed footage of happy Germans during the war, receiving relief packages of clothing and hats, of children clutching refurbished dolls and teddy bears, of a line of grateful old men being fitted for eyeglasses. Then it showed one of the American prosecutors waving a document in his hand and pointing an accusing finger at the prisoners in the dock. A moment later the film cut to a close-up of the document, laid out so it could be read, the letters, each as big as a man’s torso, filling the screen from top to bottom. The camera slowly panned down the page. It was in German, but of course Heshel could read it easily, and anyway, the narrator explained what it was.

REPORT BY SS-STURMBANNFÜHRER WIPPERN, CONCERNING VALUE OF MONEY, PRECIOUS METALS, OTHER VALUABLES, AND TEXTILES OF JEWS

The total, the narrator concluded, after adding many other items plus cash and precious metals, came to one hundred million, forty-seven thousand, nine hundred eighty-three reichsmarks and ninety-one pfennig, and was signed by Wippern, SS-Sturmbannführer, and dated Lublin, 27 February 1943. The narrator went on to say that this itemization of goods came from a single concentration camp, and covered a period of only three months, and that by December of that year, another two thousand boxcars of loot was sent to SS warehouses from this single source, including 132,000 wristwatches, 39,000 pens, 28,000 scissors and 230,000 razor blades. Himmler himself ordered that 15,000 of the ladies’ wristwatches be given as Christmas presents to ethnic Germans who lived in occupied Soviet territory, whereas pure silk underwear was to be delivered directly to the Reich Ministry of Economics.

There was complete silence in the hall, but Heshel Rosenheim grew faint. Moskovitz looked over and saw that he was swaying in his chair, gasping for breath.

She took his hand to console him. She understood: it was too unbearable to contemplate the people beneath those numbers, the wrists without the wristwatches, the spectacles without the faces, the rings without the fingers. She stroked his hand and touched his cheek with an almost otherworldly delicacy. You are here now, she seemed to tell him, all that is over. Never again will we put ourselves into someone else’s hands. They may kill us, the Arabs, the British, right here where we stand, but not without a fight. We may die, but like men, and we will never again subject ourselves to the whims either of their goodwill or their hatred. No, she seemed to say, no one will ever again control our destiny. She was like a rock of gentleness. He saw all of this in her eyes as he pulled himself together and nodded to her that he was all right again.

But you see, he recognized something in that document that she would never have guessed: his own handiwork. For he himself had written it at Majdanek. He himself had estimated the number of looted articles, assigned value to the various categories, managed the numerous calculations. In fact, he had regarded this very inventory as one of his greatest accomplishments at Majdanek. And then Major Wippern had stolen the credit for himself.

Back in 1943, he was distraught, furious. But now, as the neatly typed words burned through the movie screen, and the voice of the announcer filled the theater with outrage, Heshel thought once again: How fortunate I have been! As if God himself had intervened on his behalf! Back in those days, he merely thought that he had been too afraid to complain. But maybe it had been God’s hand that turned him into a coward. In any case, he had revenged himself on Wippern by miscalculating the shipments and exaggerating the quality of goods, which then
—
with letters demanding a refund
—
were frequently sent back as unusable
—
mainly because of bloodstains, bullet holes, and the failure to remove the yellow Jewish star which officials of the Winter Relief Agency found “disturbing,” complaining that no one would want to wear them. On top of all this, Lieutenant Mueller had figured out how to steal just enough in the way of watches and stockings to keep himself in cognac and cigars and to finance the occasional lost weekend, but he abruptly ended this practice when a number of fellow officers over at Auschwitz were summarily hanged for pilfering and “sabotage.”

And now, as he sat there in the kibbutz communal hall that served as theater, meeting room, dining room, and schoolroom, it all came back to him
—
the rows of tables piled high with eyeglasses, combs, and brassieres, the
Kapos
busily sorting and counting
,
the warehouses filled with leather, fur, goose feathers
,
the smell of human fat rising in dark, moist clouds above the gray encampment
—
and trying to shake the image from his brain, he looked over at Moskovitz. What he saw in her eyes was pity.

He got up, even though the feature had not yet started, and rushed from the room.

The sun had moved somewhat toward the west, and I could now hear voices. People were beginning to move back outside. Soon the card players and aquamaids would be poolside. I did not want to be around people. I gathered my stuff and shuffled along on my flip-flops in the direction of my father’s building. Near the entrance I ran into the ladies’ club.

“It’s Golda’s boy,” one of them said.

A pursed smile corroded my face. “I’m Lily’s,” I said.

They looked confused. But of course. Lily had been dead eight years.

“Heshel,” I said. “I’m Heshel’s boy.”

Then they gathered round me happily and started asking me how was
Hesheleh,
how was my own family doing back in—where? San Francisco? Morris and I were in San Francisco! Fisherman’s Warf! Did you know you look like a movie star?—which one does he look like, Bessie?—and when do you think he’ll be coming home, your father?

When I told them I thought he wasn’t, they all nodded knowingly, and one of them took my hand, and another said, “It’s good you’re here. You’re a good son. We all should have such a son,” and another offered, “You know, I’ve got a chicken in the oven.”

But I thanked them and made my way to the elevator.

“He’s a wonderful man, your father,” I heard one of them call after me.

And then another one sighed, “Ach, it’s terrible to be so old!”

And one said to another, “I think his name is David.”

“No, no, no,” said a third, “Sophie’s is David. Heshel’s is Barry.”

As the door closed, locking me into the stinking, moldy elevator, I gave up the idea of presenting Ella with my list.

I needed a plan. I was not generally a person who made plans. Once upon a time I did, but that was long ago, and since none of them ever amounted to anything, I now distrusted all plans. But I had to find out who brought those journals. That was the key to the whole thing. That person, and that person alone, knew the truth.

I decided to watch and wait.

I drove over to the nursing home, pulled into a spot facing the building, and turned off the engine. You could do that in the early evening, when the temperature dropped into the eighties. I positioned myself so I could look directly into his room, which was on the first floor. It was only a two-story building anyway. If someone entered his room, I’d pounce. That was my strategy.

At first, no one came. But then I saw a shadowy figure slip past the window. Tall, dark, somewhat elegant in gesture, he bent down over my father’s bed. I swung open the car door and sprinted across the lot, pushed my way through the main entrance, ran down the hall, and literally jumped into the room.

A huge black man was lifting my father in his arms and helping him into the wheelchair. He looked up, startled; then smiled.

“Oh look, Heshel! It’s your son come to help with dinner!”

“Lamar,” I said.

“See, Heshel!” he screamed good-naturedly in my father’s ear, the way orderlies who work with old people do, and pointed at me. It was dinnertime. I watched as Lamar tucked a small blanket around my father’s legs.

Lamar had a kindly face, but he was very strong, and my father was docile in his hands. He was efficient, gentle, and at the same time imposing and even intimidating. The tasks at the Lake Gardens were divided along rather rigid racial lines. The nurses by and large were white, but Christian. The orderlies were almost entirely black, like Lamar, except for Rodrigo, who was Puerto Rican. The cooks were invariably Filipino, and the cleanup staff was Mexican. The receptionist and the manager were Jewish, and the owners were a corporation in Texas. It was remarkable to me how well everyone got along, and how, sadly, things never change.

I watched as Lamar wheeled my father out.

“Lamar,” I said, “did you see a box of books in here?”

“Books? No, I don’t think I did.”

“It was a Cheez Whiz box,” I said.

He looked at me somewhat sideways. “I don’t think I did,” he repeated. “Is something missing?”

“No, Lamar. Nothing to worry about. Nothing is missing.”

“I wasn’t worried none,” he said, and moved my father down the corridor toward the dining room.

Eventually I followed them into the dining hall, which also served as the assembly room for bingo night, and the theater for movies, and the cabaret when the out-of-work comedians came to
tummel
. I often came at dinnertime. It was a strange but affecting bond between us. He liked when I helped him eat, and even though part of me found it gross, wiping half-chewed peas or dollops of custard from his chin, I felt happy to do it. Happy is perhaps not the right word. But it was all we had.

My father had reached that stage of life when it was almost impossible for him to bring a fork into his mouth. Instead, he had to lean his whole body forward, meeting it somewhere just above the bowl of tapioca. He preferred that I feed him. And then there was always the possibility that I would bring him a pastrami sandwich from The Charm. He liked it with Russian dressing and coleslaw, like an East Coast Sloppy Joe. It occurred to me, as I watched him and Lamar disappear down the corridor, that maybe I should drive over to The Charm and get him a sandwich. But I was not in the mood to bring him a sandwich. I was in the mood to kick his teeth in. Only, of course, he didn’t have any teeth. That was the other thing about Alzheimer’s. They forget to put in their teeth.

“You got me a sandwich?” he said.

“I didn’t have time,” I said back.

He looked a little annoyed, but he was gracious and attempted to butter his roll. I had found him at his usual table in the corner. He sat by himself. Like I tried to tell the nurse—he had no friends anymore.

I watched him fumble with the roll. I didn’t move to help him.

“Who’s Frau Hellman?” I said.

His eyes suddenly grew frightened. “Who?” he said.

“Frau Hellman. You mentioned her the other day.”

He seemed to have already forgotten about the roll even though it was still in his hand, because he turned to me and said, “What did I do with my sandwich?”

I could see I was going to get nothing out of him. Even so, I pressed on.

“Was she, like, from the concentration camp?”

He looked at me sharply. “The what?”

“Here,” I said, “eat your fish.” I cut off a little piece of fish stick and offered it to him on the end of his fork.

He took a bite and said, “You know we never, ever talk about that. Your mother wouldn’t like it.”

“Why not?” I said as casually as I could.

“I don’t want this fish,” he muttered.

“Which concentration camp were you in?” I asked. I affected a nonchalant tone of voice.

I was surprised when he said, “Many. First here, then there.”

“Majdanek?”

“A graveyard,” he said.

“And you were there?”

“Where?”

“Majdanek.”

He stared down at his plate. He seemed to turn into stone, except for the rapid blinking of his eyes, as if he were on the verge of falling asleep. His head fell onto his chest. Desperately, I decided on a frontal attack.

“Your journals,” I began.

“What?”

“The journals you gave me.”

“What journals?”

“You gave me a box of journals.”

Suddenly he shook his head violently. His arms jumped from his sides like two groupers convulsing in a net.

“Dad!” I grabbed him by the shoulders. “I need the truth.”

He looked up at me, but his eyes were full of uncertainty. He searched my face for a clue, as if he were struggling to figure out exactly who I was.

“Is ever’thing all right?” It was Lamar.

“I think he’s having a fit,” I said.

“Humm.” He nodded. “I be taking over then.” He wiped the spittle from my father’s chin, and spun his wheelchair away from the table so that he could not see me. “Do you want your dinner?” he asked him. “If you’re not good, then no dinner.” He said this so gently he could not have meant it.

But after a few minutes it became obvious my father didn’t want his dinner after all, and Lamar took him back to his room, his body leaping around in the chair and his arms still flailing about like someone had plugged him into an electrical socket.

I watched them go, sitting awhile in front of my father’s plate of fish sticks. It was terrible, seeing him that way, as if my questions had already put him in the electric chair. It was terrible, but I have to be honest. When Lamar wheeled him, kicking and gyrating, from the dining hall, I actually heard myself say, “Die, you son of a bitch, die!” I guess I didn’t say it aloud, because nobody turned to look at me. But
I
heard it, and I might have been as dead as the fish on that plate, for all the compassion I had in me in that moment.

That’s when I got up and started wandering through the halls of the Lake Gardens nursing home. I could not have said exactly why I was doing what I was doing—indeed I had a strange sense of déjà vu, almost as if I were recalling a dream while I was still in the dream—but there was a sort of dark clarity running through me as I set about my task. I passed the nurse’s station, taking note of its layout and where each of the nurses sat, and where the monitors were, and who tended to stay put, and who felt compelled to respond to the constant call buttons. I smiled at them and they nodded back. Then I ambled on down the hall, past my father’s room which had its door shut anyway, and checked out some of the areas I had not seen before. It never occurred to me to really
look
at Lake Gardens before. There was a maintenance closet, a small employees’ lounge with a few humming vending machines and a coffee urn, an equipment room where they kept the portable EKG machines and other—rather run-down and outdated—electrical devices, and then there was the dispensary where they kept all the medications. I lurked about this room for a minute or two just to see how it worked. Soon a nurse came up, slipped her key in the door, and disappeared within. In a little while, carts filled with sleeping pills, heart remedies, blood thinners, and stool softeners were wheeled out and pushed down the corridor, stopping at each room with their little gifts of salvation in a paper cup.

Beyond the dispensary was the end of the hall, a dark space leading to a stairwell no one ever seemed to use. I walked all the way down, turned around, and walked back. By that time, I could see that my father’s door was open, but I didn’t go in. I’d decided I’d had enough. I wanted home. It had gotten dark by now, and drenchingly humid. I stepped out into the parking lot and a herd of mosquitoes instantly materialized on my arms and neck, like pigs around a trough.

This simple thing to have done was to slip out of the kibbutz and walk to Egypt, to Gaza. Once there, go to the first army post or police station, tell them…that’s where the plan fell apart. Tell them what? He had no papers other than his kibbutz papers and those forged for him by the Yishuv. They stated that he was born in Petach Tikva, which as far as he knew was somewhere in the north of Palestine. But even if he managed to find some British or German documents, his arm bore the tattoo of Auschwitz
—
which of course also made it impossible for him to have been from Petach Tikva. Sometimes he thought he might have been saved by his SS tattoo, but he didn’t have one. He’d been glad of that immediately after the war, but now it seemed a shame. His only hope was to find someone to vouch for him
—
some other German. And that did not seem likely.

Then he thought about stowing away on a ship for South America, or even the United States, sliding down the anchor chain with the rats, and swimming to safety. But how would he live? He was not afraid of starving. But he was terrified of closed quarters, of being locked away in some container filled with oranges or dates, with no air, no light, no way out. And the possibility of getting caught. Of being jailed, and then hanged, or of summarily being tossed overboard. His mind raced with possibilities. He did not wish to be a coward, but he had to admit that he was one.

One evening, Heshel walked alone among the orange trees along the eastern edge of the settlement. Beyond them, they had just begun the experiment of planting bananas, and there were sunflowers and cotton as well, but here in the orange groves there was a sense of quiet and security. The harvest was over, yet the rains had not yet come
—
it was that week or two in October when the air was as still as a sleeping child, sweet smelling and pure, and a kind of Sabbath settled into the groves, a time apart. Heshel Rosenheim was wearing the blue work shirt that they had given him, and the loose-fitting blue work pants as well
—
he did not favor shorts
—
but his sleeves were rolled up all the way to his biceps and his collar was flared open in the style they all affected. He reached up to gather a few leaves, and in the light of the moon he saw how muscular his arm had become, how thick and callused his fingers
—
for it must be said that even though he did the books, he still was required to plow the fields, to milk the cows, to scythe the alfalfa, to chop the vegetables when his turn came in the kitchen. And he did not mind, in fact. During harvest that first year, waking at four in the morning, making his way in the dark to the groves or the fields, following a few steps behind the others, climbing the ladders, filling his sack with ripe fruit, noticing out of the corner of his eye the sun beginning its journey into the Palestinian sky
—
the Yishuv, they called it
—
the settlement
—
he felt alive and unafraid. He did not believe anyone would harm him, as long as he stood with his head in the trees.

But on this lovely, cloudless evening, the moon also illuminated the number carved into his arm. It seemed phosphorescent, like the glow of bacteria on an old piece of ham. He recalled the desperation of that hour, of crawling out of the mountain of corpses
—
they were not people to him then, or now
—
they simply were the stink of war, the fallen
—
more like piles of fish than anything else
—
and he remembered how he made his way in darkness to the SS command. It was not the darkness of tonight, but an utter darkness he recalled, a dream darkness, yet his eyes were like torches lighting his way. With such a singular state of mind, nothing could have stopped him. How had he become that machine of survival? He could not say, even now. Yet he recalled how, hiding under the desk, with no light but what the lamppost cast through the grimy windows, he stabbed himself over and over with the sharpened nib of steel
—
the very nib he had used to record the kilos of human hair to be made into pillows, the thousands of wedding bands to be melted into gold ingots
—
this he used to press the ink deep into his starved and strawlike flesh, tears running from his eyes, but feeling no pain. It was all there, written in his arm.