By Blood (31 page)

Convince me, said the patient to open the session. Convince me it makes no difference if my father was a monster.

(Yes! I thought as I heard her statement. This is exactly what you must demand from the therapist: exoneration from the very nature of your ancestors. Fight for yourself! Fight for us both! Make Dr. Schussler do for you what she cannot do for herself: escape the evil of a father.)

Said the therapist:

Let us put the tape aside for the moment. Do you agree?

Yes, said the patient. Funny. I didn’t even bring the recorder today.

Good, said the doctor. So we both know what is the work for today: the question of your father. So let us return to the thought with which we ended last time. I asked, What does it matter if your father is a hero or a brute?

Right. That’s where we ended. And I said it matters.

And I was about to say that it matters very little, except as one thinks about it.

What do you mean, thinks about it?

What I mean is this: Your father, since you cannot know him, is therefore a thought, an idea, a feeling. And the thought, the idea, the feeling, is something we can talk about, a subject about which your opinion may change over time.

(Yes! I thought. Excellent work, Dr. Schussler!)

Humph!
came from the patient. If Michal is my mother and I don’t look like her, then I must look like my father. I have
inherited
my body from him. It is not an idea. It’s in my
body
.

But what is in your body that predicts your behavior? You have been alive all these years, become the person you are. If you were to find out your father’s identity tomorrow, what possible difference could it make?

(Oh, no! The doctor had made a terrible mistake with that “possible.”)

Possible difference! the patient cried out.

(As I feared.)

Possible! That’s exactly the point. The probabilities and possibilities I have inherited from my father. Inclinations to respond one way or another. Temperament. My physical reactions. How do I know what’s hiding inside me, genetically? Given some jolt to my system, some extraordinary pressures, how can I know what might explode out of me? Bravery? Selflessness?
Brutality
?

But why on earth would you become brutal? asked the therapist.

Look at what happened to Patty Hearst.

(Ah! I thought as I listened. She believes as I do about Patty Hearst.)

But that was purely a product of confinement, replied the therapist, a set of severe social pressures which produce temporary—I repeat, temporary—psychological changes.

Oh, that’s just some drivel from Hearst’s defense team, said the patient.

(For that was indeed the line of defense her father and lawyer had begun to promote.)

But it is a real effect! said the therapist, nearly shouting.

(Most unusual behavior from the therapist.)

Two years ago, there was a bank robbery in Sweden, Dr. Schussler went on in a more subdued tone. Employees were held hostage for six days, during which time they became sympathetic to their captors, even rising to their defense after the robbers were captured and the employees were released unharmed. Since then, psychologists have studied this very closely.

Maybe they were accomplices, said the patient.

Not at all, said her doctor. Captivity, complete and enforced separation from regular society, fear of harm and death, a perverted social norm: These combine to coerce almost any sort of behavior in a human being. We are social creatures, born helpless. Our survival depends upon our living within a group. And our entire psychology is based upon that need: to be accepted within a society. So this has a very powerful influence upon behavior.

But some people resist.

Rarely. Given enough separation from other influences, almost no one resists. You know the Milgram experiment.

The one where they gave shocks.

Yes. Perfectly decent people, kept isolated, willingly administered to an unseen person what they believed were deadly shocks.

So what you’re saying is, I shouldn’t worry about my father because we are all brutes.

Potentially. Temporarily.

A long pause followed. The therapist shifted in her chair, again and again, as if uncomfortable in any position.

All right, Dr. Schussler, the patient said. You’ve proven to me that any decent person can become a brute. But are there any studies that show brutes becoming decent? Becoming heroes?

The doctor sighed and softly laughed.

Is there any evidence so far in your life that you are a brute?

Silence.

No, the patient answered finally. Of course I’ve been rude at times, insensitive, but no, there’s nothing particularly brutish about me. On the contrary, I think I’m too meek. That I don’t go up against things. That I haven’t seized life and turned it to my will. That I don’t even have a strong will.

Nonsense, said the doctor. You defied your parents when you went to Wharton. You defied convention by being a woman in the financial world. You have truly defied convention by being a lesbian.
Gott
, you have even resisted the norms of that demimonde! Do I have to recite any further risks you have taken? How much you have not conformed? How much internal bravery this implies?

(Bravo, Dr. Schussler!)

So if you are descended from a hero, the doctor went on, you have his bravery. Well and good. If from a rapist, you have certainly found a different way. As I said, What does it matter which one was your father?

The patient inhaled time and again, as if stopping herself from saying one thing or another. Then she said at last:

Yes. But you can’t help but thinking. Can’t help but wonder who he was.

Of course, said the therapist. You will always think about it and wonder over it. It is part of your history, and quite an unusual history at that. I imagine you will tell many stories about it as you meet people over the course of your life. But I don’t think you necessarily have to
feel
too much about it, if you understand my distinction.

I think I do.

It is an interesting and distinctive fact about you, but says nothing—

About who I am now.

Then good. We have done our hard work for the day. Of course I suppose we will have to go over this—

Over and over, said the patient with a laugh. Back and forth. Many times. Retreat and forward again. Yes, I think I’m now getting how all this works.

There was a long silence, then again came the patient’s laugh.

Ah! See? she said. I still have something left of my mysterious origins.

Miraculous! The therapist had done her job! Dr. Schussler had separated the patient from her father—returned her to the mystery of her origins and the mysterious creation of herself! I nearly cried. I did not think Dr. Schussler had it in her, indeed that any therapist could be effective in this manner, and I instantly regretted that I had quit all those analysts, doctors, counselors, social workers—perhaps too soon?

The therapeutic discussion continued until the completion of the hour, but, with the climax of the session behind them, patient and doctor were languorous, like lovers after sex.

Yet I grew increasingly uneasy. I kept hearing her mother’s denial of Rosensaft’s paternity, a denial that seemed ever more absurd as I replayed the scene in my mind. Why had her mother dismissed it so very adamantly, so oddly (come to think of it)? Perhaps Michal did indeed believe that Rosensaft was the father, and she did not want the patient to seek him out—wanted to keep Rosensaft out of the patient’s life and her own.

But was any of this true?

If Rosensaft is her father, I thought, then the patient was right: She would have to look like him. But did the patient (as I thought I knew her) look like Yossele Rosensaft (as I had seen him in news photos)?

No, I answered myself. They looked nothing alike.

Then came another invasive thought: Had I ever seen the “real” patient? That lovely woman who emerged from the elevator the day my angelic guard detained me: Was that glowing vision truly she?

Which reopened the question of Rosensaft’s paternity: Perhaps the actual patient—whom I had never seen—had indeed inherited Yossele Rosensaft’s inner and outer substance.

All of which led back to the original question: Does it matter? Does anyone’s father, especially an absent father, make any difference at all in one’s life?

Then I knew I had not escaped my spider. For I found myself spinning like a wrapped fly, stuck in fruitless, circular, obsessive ruminations: I must know who the patient’s father is! I thought. To which I replied (to myself), No! It doesn’t matter who the father is. Yes, it does matter (I contradicted myself ). Maybe Rosensaft truly is the father. And the patient should seek him out, learn more about her origins. No! She should retain her sense of mystery! Of self-creation! It doesn’t matter if he is the father! Then again, perhaps it does matter?

Suddenly the therapist’s voice broke through my chain of thoughts.

Remember that you will always wonder over your father, she said to the patient.

(As if she could hear my obsessions!)

This is normal and inevitable, the doctor went on. The best approach is for you to allow the thoughts to arise yet not become
attached
to them. Do you understand?

(Help me understand!)

Yes, I think so, said the patient.

Have the thoughts, and let them go, said the therapist.

(Let them go. Let them go.)

If you try to suppress the questioning, you will only strengthen your attachment to fragments of “evidence,” and you will come to “certainties” which most likely will be false. So, neither suppress the questions nor—

Become too attached to them, said the patient.

Yes, said the doctor.

(Just let the thoughts circle. Just let them be.)

We must end here, said Dr. Schussler.

I know, said the patient, rising from her seat.

As she did so, the night seemed to rise up with her: the doorman’s taxi whistle with its yearning cry, a truck thundering by, a man happily shouting, See you soon! It was as if we were suddenly lifted up from a deep cave, from its permanent crepuscularity and gloom, and returned to an ordinary, normal night.

The patient left; the sound machine resumed its play. As the elevator doors closed in the vestibule—with their
shuss
, like a mother’s calming sound—I felt that I had indeed been released, that the doctor had freed me from the spin of my own mind; may God bless her!

And so my thoughts were free to turn to the next session, to Wednesday, to actual happenings: to Maria Gerstner’s story. Which had been suspended at the point at which “the leader” had buttoned up his fly and left her, and she had admired him nonetheless; at the moment when Maria was about to begin her life in a liberated Bergen-Belsen—the patient already growing in her womb.

There had been no Monday-night session. Dr. Schussler had communicated this change of schedule during the langorous part of their last meeting. A seven-day separation might have panicked me. But not now. I was stronger—the doctor had becalmed my mind.

The patient did not set the scene on the tape. After some brief chatting at the opening of the Wednesday session, she simply clicked on the machine and said: Here is what happened next.

I am not sure how I survived the next few days, said Michal’s voice on the recording. I was on my own from the moment … after the encounter I described to you.

By the fifth day, she went on, the British had imposed some order on the camp. The dead were buried in mass graves—tossed in with bulldozers—just as everyone has seen in the magazine pictures. But if you have never seen anything like it before, you can search the depth and breadth of all you have ever learned about language, and you will not find a word or a figure of speech, or a form of rhetoric, to help you pronounce in your own mind what you are seeing.

Said the patient: The BBC radio reporter called it “the worst day of my life.”

Did he? asked her mother.

Yes.

Well, her mother replied as if tossing the word over her shoulder. Maybe for him.

The tape went silent, as if empty, unrecorded. The machine whirred on, for five seconds, ten. There was a cough, probably Michal’s. After which Michal said:

Then there was a miracle.

I sat on the ground in a quiet corner of the camp, Michal continued. This is still the fifth day, I’m talking about. Twilight approaching. But overhead and to the east, the sky was still a clear blue. I could not remember the last time I had simply sat and contemplated the arc of the day.

Then I heard murmuring. At first I thought it was an hallucination, a product of my senses suddenly awakened to the possibility of the loveliness. A murmuring and whispering like the stir of dry grass. But there was no grass anywhere. And then I really did believe the sound arose from my imagination, which frightened me. Maybe this was an early symptom of typhus. Or of starvation, since I had eaten so little, like everyone else.

The sound became a sort of chanting interrupted by shouts, and I was not sure if I should run away or find its source. My desire to know overcame my fear. I walked toward the center of the camp, the direction from which the murmuring or chanting or shouting seemed to be coming. Finally I went around the side of a building, to a large open space, and it took me a long minute to understand what I was seeing.

A group of men, maybe forty of them, stood tightly together, with shirts or rags or coats covering their heads, rocking on their feet, sometimes bowing slightly and abruptly coming upright. To their left stood a group of women, of about the same number, also packed tightly together, also with their heads covered, not rocking like the men but looking down into their hands. I had not been to a synagogue in decades, and even in the days when I was still a Jew, the practices were foreign to me. So not even the sight of a man with a blue prayer shawl could explain what was happening before me. I understood only when the entire group’s voices rose up in unison to chant:

The single Hebrew prayer I knew. The Shema, the proclamation of the One God. Even I, a “German of Hebrew heritage” and a convert to Catholicism, knew this prayer.

And it came to me that it was Friday. And this was a Sabbath service. Tears streamed down every congregant’s face. Women sobbed; men sobbed, some so uncontrollably that they could barely intone the second “verse” of the prayer, which I never knew well and have mostly forgotten, only that it begins with something like
Baruch shem c’vod
—something like that, I could be wrong.

I stood in astonishment as I watched the rest of the service. Gradually I took in the presence of some British soldiers, standing by, watching, maybe protecting the congregants; the rabbi in a British uniform leading the service, probably a chaplain, a Jewish chaplain; and others on the edge, watching as I was, some moving their lips along with the prayers, their eyes also wide in astonishment, because many congregants were so weak, so thin, some thin as rails, barely able to stand, and others clearly ill, so everyone seemed to be holding up everyone else, there was no other way this service could be happening. And last came the realization of where we were, Bergen-Belsen, Germany. And the question, How long had it been since a
Shabbat
service had been celebrated in Germany?

Michal paused for several seconds.

That’s amazing, said her daughter. Are you crying?

No, said Michal, but with a sniffle and a catch in her throat, perhaps truly crying. Then she said: But I have not even come to the miracle yet.

The service went on toward its conclusion, said Michal, and it ended with the singing of a Hebrew song. It had a pretty, uncomplicated melody, it seemed cheerful. Many alongside me clearly knew it well, because they slowly moved in closer and joined in the song.

And soon everyone was crying. I, too. Although I could not have told you why. There was nothing in me, up until that moment, that would have made a
Shabbat
service moving to me, nothing that I had ever cared about in the rituals and prayers: the men rocking on their feet—
davening
, it’s called—which I always thought was funny and stupid; and the separation of men and women, because supposedly men talked to God and the very sight of a woman would arouse them, take them away from God—what a stupid idea. You see, I had always scoffed at the rituals, thought them backward, embarrassing. But there I was, suddenly overcome with a sense of belonging to these people, to everyone who knew even the slightest bit of the Shema. And I cried—sobbed—for the first time since … everything.

Then a larger group joined us, very hale and hearty people by comparison. By now we were perhaps a hundred, and everyone was crying and laughing and crying—we did not know which to do first. And the ones who joined us started up another song, called “Hatikvah”—

I heard that sung at Belsen! said the patient to her mother.

You what?

I have a recording of it. Of the Belsen survivors singing “Hatikvah.” Made by a BBC reporter.

You
heard
it? The actual singing?

Yes, yes. A recording of the actual singing. It broke my heart, really. And I wondered if my—if you were part of it, if what I was hearing contained your voice.

Oh! said Michal with a great sigh. How strange is the world. But no, my dear, no. You did not hear my voice. You see, “Hatikvah” is now the Israeli national anthem, but at the time I did not know a word of it.

A quick intake of breath: a sob from Michal?

I was surrounded by the rising chorus of this song, this beautiful song, said Michal, the first time I had ever heard it, or the first time I was aware of hearing it. One woman in particular leading, a very strong voice, a steady alto, and everyone followed. All around me such singing, so much energy coming from those who were so physically weak, and I could not join in, could not sing with them. I thought: Who
are
these people? What sort of people have such determination and courage, even before all the dead have found their graves? What was giving them such strength, such hope? And the tears ran down my face, this time not with joy but with regret, and heartbreak, and longing.

Why? What happened? asked her daughter.

Well, her mother replied with a catch in her voice. This was the miracle.

The patient’s silence held the question, What was the miracle?

You see, said Michal: At that moment, and for the first time in my life, I wanted to be a Jew.