By Blood A Novel

73.


We were still in the living room, said the patient, sitting in the catty-corner armchairs. Michal had just told me she didn’t want me to be a Jew. And I replied something like, I don’t get it, which made Michal laugh. It was my “I don’t get it,” which she repeated with an exaggerated American accent, making me feel stupid. Stupidly American.

Then she just sipped her tea and her whiskey, and didn’t say anything. A long time went by like that: Michal blowing across her tea, that clock ticking from somewhere, the children shouting and playing outside. Finally Michal stirred in her chair, put down her teacup, and suddenly cried out:

Oh! Why do you want to go into all this! Why must you? There was so much … unhappiness in that time.

When she said “unhappiness,” her face fell. Every feature was drawn down as if weights were hooked onto her eyelids, cheeks, mouth. And I immediately returned to the habits I’d developed with Mother, big-M Mother. That is, I didn’t want to inflict unhappiness on her, I wanted to protect her from all those sad feelings I aroused simply by existing.

And when I realized that—that I was doing it all over again, sacrificing myself for my mothers—something broke in me. I actually shook. I found myself jumping out of the chair, almost yelling: I don’t care if it makes you unhappy to remember! I don’t care! You have to tell me!

I kept yelling it over and over. You have to tell me! I have to know where I came from! It’s horrible to live without knowing. Like starting from a blank. You have to tell me!

I found myself crying—shaking, out of the blue—and I fell into the chair.

Michal stood slowly, with difficulty—I saw her in my peripheral vision. She came over to me, took my chin in her hand. And she lifted my face to her. And again I felt that I’d never seen such a look of warmth and caring in my life, such sympathy. And she said,

Oh, my poor dear. Is it so horrible not to know?

I told her yes. That there was this space that had … nothing in it. Like my whole being floated on … nothing.

Oh, my God, she said. I never meant to hurt you. I only meant for you to have a better life.

She sighed and turned to sit down. I stood and helped her. Then she said, Oh, all right. If you feel you need to know this, I will tell you the whole story.

She stopped and looked at me.

But you may not like what you learn. Do you understand that? Life was hard, almost inhuman, and people did what they had to do to survive. When you are humiliated until your humanness leaves you …

Oh! she sighed. All right. I will tell you the whole thing, the whole … ugliness of it. But not today. No. I am in shock. Let me recover. Come tomorrow, and we will begin.





74.


My poor patient spent the night reviewing the waves of memories that had seemed to wash across Michal’s face. She could not sleep, only drifted off in tiny sips of the night, meanwhile wondering: Who was it that Michal recognized right away? Who is it that I look like? Who?

The next day, as she was about to leave the hotel, it occurred to her that she was unlikely ever to visit her birth mother again, that she should record whatever it was that Michal was going to tell her. The hotel deskman told her there were many places selling inexpensive cassette recorders and directed her to the nearest one. There she bought a nine-by-six-inch portable with a leather shoulder strap.

Then I went back to Michal’s house, the patient told Dr. Schussler. Once again, Gerda led me into the dark room with that slash of light. To the two upholstered chairs set at right angles, Michal in the same seat as yesterday. Everything the same as if nothing had happened between this time and the last.

But before I could ask—demand!—all I wanted to know, Michal turned to me with that open, sympathetic face. Her skin glowed. Her eyes were kind and soft, full of light. And she said: I spent all night wondering over you. Wondering who you have become. You are a grown-up woman with a life. Almost thirty, yes? So tell me, for instance, what do you do? I mean as your profession.

Suddenly, again, I wanted to please her, the patient told the therapist. How damnedly deep is this desire to make your mother love you! Love me, love me, love me. Tell me what I must do to win your love. So I succumbed. I told her I was an economics analyst, to make it simple, since who knows what a “quant” is?

And she immediately replied:

You are not an artist?

Hardly, I said. Was I supposed to be?

On my side, she said, we were all artists and writers and art dealers. But, oh! There was my uncle on my mother’s side, the architect, and his son, the engineer. Is economic analysis anything like architecture or engineering?

I felt I was auditioning for the role of daughter, the patient said to her doctor. For the role of the daughter she had imagined. Even though—through no fault of my own—I’d become an American. Even though—through no fault of my own—I’d failed to become an artist, still: I would have her see me as creative, interesting, worthy.

I told her that what I did was a lot like architecture. Architects imagine and analyze space, engineers turn that into numbers. I told her that I envision and analyze money, which is a completely imaginary space.

The patient went on to give a witty, detailed description of her work (which I found utterly fascinating, as it clarified many points that had confused me as I had sat listening to her sessions).

I’m not sure how much of it Michal understood, the patient said to Dr. Schussler. I tried my best to make it all clear to her, a “civilian,” as we call them. I wanted her to see my work as stimulating, inventive. I didn’t want to find another Charlotte, who would wave me away as being on the wrong side of life. I didn’t want to be rejected because I wasn’t an “artist.”

I played the role of “creative quant,” if there can be such a thing.

It’s all an elaborate belief structure, I told her, a structure based on reputation, in which the players must trust one another. In other words, a house of cards. My job is to try to understand the stresses—yes, like architectural engineering—to try to prevent the house from falling down.

And I got my “bravo!”

How marvelous! Michal cried out. How intelligent you must be to do such work! I am utterly delighted!

I looked hard at Michal. She was beaming. Pleased. Admiring. My God! I thought. Finally a mother who approves of me.

But then came the next question, the inevitable question, the one that always sends me into hiding.

She asked: And are you married? Or perhaps “with” someone?

I answered: I just broke up with someone.

Normally I would have gone on in the usual gender-indistinct way. You know, saying “this person” and “someone.” Or always sticking with the plural. But here I was with my birth mother. And I couldn’t stand it anymore. So I came out and said:

The person I broke up with was a woman. A beautiful woman. But she was a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Lesbian-Separatist bicycle messenger, and I am an economic analyst with a Wall Street brokerage.

Michal burst out laughing. So you’re a lesbian! she said. Isn’t that just wonderful! My sister, my older sister Gisella, was a lesbian. She brought home the most marvelous, strange girls. We lived in Berlin—in a big, beautiful house. My mother was the most gracious and interesting hostess, and everyone wanted to visit us. And there was Gisella with her exotic creatures, one after another, each more beautiful than the last. I think half of our visitors came just to look at her conquests. I was so jealous that I did not have an attraction to women. It seemed by far the more interesting way to be.

She laughed again, then I laughed, both of us giddy to find we were really related to each other. And I … My God, it was the first time in my life I felt I had come from somewhere, where I was normal, not an alien. Then it came to me … Then I realized … That world didn’t exist anymore. The world of artists and writers, architects and lesbians and marvelous strange girls—my ideal life—gone.

I think the feeling of a lost life came to Michal at the same moment. We sat and didn’t say anything for a long while. Again I was aware of the clock ticking, the children playing in the courtyard. Reality seemed to press on us. We were undeniably in Israel, a long way from her house in Berlin.

Finally she said: You cannot understand what happened to me, to you, unless you understand my life in Berlin. Oh! she said with a gasp. It pains me even to remember it, the wonder of it. Could such a life disappear from the face of the earth?





75.


Here’s where my recording starts, the patient said to Dr. Schussler.

There came clicks and whirring sounds, then a voice that penetrated the scratch and hiss of the tape.

And what a voice it was! Just as the patient had described it: low, resonant, a choir of sound. Now came a creamed-coffee alto, now a bourbon baritone, here and there a sprinkle of soprano laughter. The accent was too complex and blended for me to place. German, British English, Hebrew—but others seemed to play below the surface. Which? I did not know. Yet the accent was all the more alluring for the hidden identities of its components: a caravan of languages reflecting Michal Gershon’s sojourns through the world.

On the tape the patient and her mother are drinking tea—one could hear the occasional clicks of cups and spoons and saucers, the pauses as one or the other stops to drink. I imagined them in their armchairs, the tea set between them on a low table, the dim room surrounding them, the scrim of light that curtained the space.

Slowly I was able to strip Michal’s voice of its accent, of the age that had roughened the tone. And I was overcome by the recognition: It was the patient’s voice!

The patient was not an alien on this earth. She did indeed “look” like someone. Except it was not on the mere surface. She had inherited the more profound interior configuration of the body, the subtle crenellations of lung and diaphragm and sinuses, the delicate architecture of the airways; all of which combine to produce that aspect which is last noted but finally most determinant of one’s overall feelings about a person: that which produces a sense of pleasure or displeasure in her presence, an awareness of her graciousness or lack of it, a tug of intrigue or a drone of boredom; that which makes the plainest woman magnetic, the one most visually lovely an irritant: the voice.

Did the patient know this? Was she aware—when she described her mother’s voice as beautiful, low and resonant—that it was so similar to her own? Fixed as she was—as fixed as her adoptive mother had made her be—upon the surface features, the colors of eyes and hair, it was unlikely that the patient understood the quality of her own voice: its divinity. Had no one told her?

Our house had twelve bedrooms, her mother began, in the warm sound that was the ancestor to the patient’s voice. Eighteen fireplaces, a ballroom, Michal went on. Can you imagine this today? A very large room reserved for the rare social occasion called “a ball”? Four servants lived on the attic floor. Oh God! What a vanished world! Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and still hear the Berlin of my childhood.

She spoke of horses neighing, the ring of bicycle bells, the drone of organ-grinders. Trams rumbling down the boulevards. Cars racing in the streets, jamming the roads, backfiring and stinking.

My father was an art dealer, she said. Not that he made any money at it. He collected art out of a passion for it. Grandfather was very rich. And he did not mind funding my father’s artistic pursuits. My grandfather’s idea was: What is the use of having all this money if we cannot subsidize the artists and dreamers in this damned family?

She took several sips of tea.

We were the Rothmans, you see. Of the “Joseph A. Rothman and Company” Rothmans. The maker of the finest textiles. Established in 1809 by my great-great-great-grandfather. But you don’t even know my original name.

She laughed.

I was Margarette, Margarette Rothman. Oh, there was another whole life in that name. For seventeen years, I had that esteemed name and that wonderful life, from the “before time.” I saw my last ball in our ballroom when I was fourteen, the last swirl of dresses, the last incense of perfumes, the last salons.

The Rothmans, Michal continued. My father’s side of the family. They had lived in and around Berlin for three hundred years. My mother’s family was a more recent arrival.

She laughed.

Only a hundred years.

You see, she said after a pause, we were later called anti-German elements. I ask you, how many hundred years does it take to become a German?

We did not think of ourselves as Jews, you must understand. We considered ourselves to be … in English you would say, “Germans of Hebrew Heritage.” What we inherited: so many silver wine cups and little spice boxes. Otherwise no different from the Germans who were Protestant or Catholic.

The German Jewish community was very, very rich, very established. You must understand this, what the world was like for us then. Imagine it: the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse. A magnificent structure. Crowned by three domes. My parents told me that the emperor himself attended the opening in 1912. Seats for seventeen hundred people. It was our cathedral. Seventeen hundred well-dressed German Jews gathered for the Jewish New Year.

Her voice became bitter.

Our cathedral did not stand for long. I last saw it just before my parents left. It was destroyed by the Nazis on Kristallnacht.

You see how they came to hate us.

Why would they come to hate you? the patient on the tape asked her mother.

Because we were doing too well. Ah. Here is the new pot of tea at last.

See the pattern on this set? said Michal after she had served the tea to the sounds of clicking cups and clanging silver. Look at the roses, the tiny roses. Each painted by hand. This is Rosenthal porcelain. From before the war, I mean before the first war. I searched and searched in the Sunday markets until I found it: the pattern my mother had for her dinner service. I have just these two cups and saucers and the creamer.

All gone. My mother’s beautiful things. Service for twenty-four, all the pieces you can imagine on a table.

She said nothing for several seconds; there came the sound of her settling back in her chair.

All gone, she said again. Looted by my husband’s family with the help of the Nazis. All the china and silver and crystal and linen. The feather beds and sofas. The mahogany furniture and the paintings—let’s not forget the fortune in fine art carried away by the Nazis—all the things they were jealous of and hated us for. Looted by that band of thieves.

I don’t understand, the patient said. Your husband’s family?

Michal sighed, almost a sob.

I’m getting ahead of myself, she said. Let me go back. Let me stay awhile longer in that … in that “before time.”

She stopped to drink her tea, then said:

Oh! We knew everyone. All the famous artists of Weimar, and the ones who would become famous, some of them because of Father. There was Max Liebermann, of course. Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, Hannah Hoch, Oskar Kokoschka, Ludwig Meidner. But do you know even one of these painters?

The patient must have shaken her head no.

Ach! Of course not, she said. American cultural limitations. I am sure you know no one but Monet and Picasso.

Renoir? said the patient weakly. Degas?

Her mother laughed.

I am sorry, dear. Most everyone loves the Impressionists. But hatred of them was one of the liveliest parts of our evenings. Our drawing room was crowded every night my mother was receiving—Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays. The artists and their girlfriends—or boyfriends, in some cases. Musicians and poets. My sister’s beauties. Hangers-on and would-bes. Desperate former members of Russian nobility and society. Intellectuals. Professors. Not once did the question of our being Jews have any part of these evenings—oh, yes, there was one time.

Ludwig Meidner was drunk, said Michal. Meidner, the painter. He held forth one night, excoriating Max Liebermann for having altered his scandalous portrait of Jesus in the temple. It was an old painting, from 1879 or 1880, but it remained controversial among the artists in the drawing room. In it, Max originally showed a twelve-year-old Jesus talking to the elders. One elder wore a Jewish prayer shawl. But the real problem—for the crown prince of Bavaria, among others—was that Jesus was portrayed as Semitic, swarthy. How brave! How new! It was maybe Max’s best painting, because so much of his work was derivative of Corot and Manet. Too many Münchner Biergärten and Bäuerinnen. And in the middle of all that work was this daring painting: Jesus as a Jew. Of course, what else could Jesus have been—a Hindu?

Max wasn’t there that night. This took place in about … Let’s see. I was twelve. Max was an old man by then, and he had retreated to his country house on the Wannsee. Huh! The house on the Wannsee. Expropriated later, of course. Only to become the site of the Wannsee Conference. You know the Wannsee Conference?

Where the final solution was planned, said the patient.

Ah! said her mother. This you know.

There came the sound of clicking silverware, someone shifting in her chair, sighs.

But I am getting ahead of myself again, said the patient’s mother. Let me go back …

A long pause followed, the tape hissing.

So everyone was there that night, in the drawing room, Michal went on, her voice striving but just failing to reach its former energy. And drunken Meidner was shouting and swinging his glass about, she said. He was in his late thirties, a madman; his paintings were challenging, dark, angry. He began railing about how Liebermann had repainted the picture. The coward! No painter with respect for himself and the craft would do such a thing! Repainting the finished canvas—what kind of coward does such a thing? Repainted Jesus, turned him into a little blond darling. A blond boy! To satisfy the fine German sensibilities—Jesus had to be a Münchner, German, Aryan. Why not just put a Bier stein in his hand?

Everyone was yelling. Why go into this now? Aren’t things bad enough for Jews? Meidner was a Jew. Max Liebermann was a Jew, but only as the Rothmans were: just barely.

Every good memory leads to the bad, Michal went on, her voice almost a whisper. It is impossible to keep “before” and “after” separate in one’s mind. Weren’t things bad enough for the Jews? Ah! If only that had been the worst. One looks back and sees that there were fissures through which we might have seen the future, but of course one lives drenched in the past, that wet cloak that weighs around one’s shoulders.

The patient stopped the tape.

Michal shuddered, she told Dr. Schussler. Just as if a cold wet cloak had actually dropped on her. Then she called for Gerda to come and take away the tray and told me, You have to leave now. I’ll tell you the whole story, but it must come slowly. Come tomorrow at the same time and we’ll resume.

I rose without question and walked toward the far end of the room. Obeying, allowing myself to be sent away. Then—maybe because I had put some distance between us—before I left the room, it came to me that I still did not have an answer to the one question I’d been determined to ask. So I walked back and stood over her.

But I have to ask you, I said. You must tell me … When I walked in here, you knew me right away. I know you’re tired. But you can’t understand what it’s like to live not looking like anyone. Not related to anyone. Please: You knew me immediately. So who is it? Who do I look like?

Her face went blank for a moment, and I was afraid she would shout and wave me away again. But then she smiled, very slowly, very sadly. My sister, she said finally. You have her face exactly. Her figure. Her grace. Your pointed chin, the haze of hair around your face. It was as if my sister had come back from the grave and stood before me.

Nothing of my father?

Her face hardened. She snorted. Ha! Whoever that might be.





76.


I looked down at my watch and was shocked to see that the session had gone well overtime. I had been so engrossed in the story that I had lost track of the hour; perhaps this had happened to Dr. Schussler as well, I thought. But then in a soft voice she said:

We have gone overtime tonight because I thought it best not to interrupt you. Sometimes a session is that critical, and I wanted to let you continue as long as possible. But I am afraid we must stop now.

I understand, said the patient. And thank you.

But before you go, let me ask: Did you believe what your mother told you?

About?

About your looking like her sister.

Well … Yes … I did. And I have since. But now I suppose …

She stopped speaking, and there was hardly a sigh or a crinkle of leather issuing from the neighboring office. This went on for a good half minute, an eternity in a conversation, until the patient said at last:

I guess it all fit so well with my fantasy. When big-M Mother first told me the whole story, she kept asking me if I really wanted to know the truth. Remember? And I had a moment where I wanted to cling on to one last fantasy. The rich woman in her house in Berlin who held salons. A grand house full of the intelligentsia of prewar Europe. And here was my actual birth mother fitting right into that dream. But something in me knew it was all too good to be true. A mother so beautiful, still young-looking but for that problem with her back or her hip—oh, that just makes the story better: a war wound of some kind, from a bombing, maybe. Then add artists of Weimar. And then the beautiful lesbian sister. And I look like her!

She paused. I really did want to believe her. But now that you ask …

She was quiet for perhaps twenty seconds, then said:

Why are you asking?

It only seems odd, said Dr. Schussler, that she would not have told you right from the beginning. Why not, when you walked in, say, My God! The image of my beloved sister! Or when she told you Gisella was a lesbian—why not then?

The patient hummed. Maybe I sensed that. Maybe I did. So you think … You think she’s not saying …

She could be telling you some things she believes you would like to hear, said Dr. Schussler. Also perhaps what she would prefer to remember.

I don’t understand. Is there something else you think was, well, a lie?

Weimar was not … Germany was … It was a very difficult time.





77.


And that is how the therapist left her patient! On that note of doubt! The one solace the patient had gained during the visit—the knowledge that she looked like a daring lesbian with her gorgeous girls—obliterated by Dr. Schussler. What kind of doctor sends one out the door saying, Perhaps you have cancer. Perhaps not. Come back in a few days. Yet this is exactly the condition in which my poor patient was turned out into the street past ten o’clock on a Monday night, when Market Street was returning to its seedy core.

Dr. Schussler finally gathered her things and left about fifteen minutes later, after which I found myself curiously agitated. I waited for the N Judah. The air was cool, the wind down, the fog having completed its invasion and now blanketing the night. The city lights played against the thick, low clouds—here blue, there reddish, there the dun color of hopelessness—so that I seemed to stand not under a natural sky but encased in a metallic dome. The streetcar rumbled toward me out of the fog; it screeched to a stop; the doors yawned open. Yet I remained rooted to the platform, unable to induce myself to climb aboard. After some interval, during which time the car gently rocked on its tracks, the driver did not look at me, and the three people in the car did not speak, the tram shut its doors and rattled off into the night.

Without intention, I found myself wandering “outbound” on Market Street (or such is the direction as calibrated by the good San Franciscans, who seem not to travel east or west, north or south, but into the city center and out of it). Beyond the wide boulevard of Van Ness came the no-man’s-land of vacant lots and abandoned buildings. And an unbidden thought came to me: The city through which I walked was a sister to Weimar Berlin. Two wild, depressed cities in a nation stupefied by inflation and unemployment, two countries humiliated by lost wars—World War I, Vietnam—chafing under the decline from greatness into shabbiness.

And all at once a gimlet eye opened in my mind as I reviewed Michal’s story. Something was amiss, as Dr. Schussler had sensed. Margarette Rothman may have been youthful during the time of Weimar, but not so young that she would not have been aware of the larger world. There was something of the fairy tale about her story—yes, the patient had hit upon it exactly. All that was needed was a viscount or two to turn the whole thing into a bad Victorian novel. The three-hundred-year presence in Berlin. Ballrooms, the art gallery, the famous painters, the salons. What about the hyperinflation, the poverty—all the misery shown in the work of the Weimar painters—the desperate whores and ugly fat cats of Otto Dix’s paintings, Grosz’s amputees and maimed war veterans—where was all that in her story? How many lies had she told the patient? Or to herself?

Suddenly my chest began to reverberate. Doom-bah, doom-bah, doom-bah, doom-bah.

Someone shouted at me, Come on up, Pops! Come on up!

What was happening? Where was I? I had been lost in my own thoughts, and now I looked up to see an open balcony, the source of the doom-bah rhythm pouring down upon the street. The sign on the balcony said “The Metro,” and it was from its second-story patio that the shout had come. A dense crowd of men filled the patio, all of them naked above the waist but for something crisscrossing their chests—leather straps studded with metal, I saw.

Come on up, Pops! yelled the voice again amidst hoots and whistles and proffered beer bottles, and men bumping hips and groins.

Where was I? I asked myself again, wheeling around and back until I found the street signs above the three-cornered intersection: Market, Noe, Sixteenth Street.

You’re in the Castro, old man! came the voice, as if understanding my confusion.

The Castro. Yes. I had walked out far enough to have entered “the Castro,” the “gay Mecca,” as it was called, a district I had not visited before nor had intended to visit now. I looked down at my watch. Eleven-ten. At midnight, the “owl service” would begin on the N Judah line, at which time a bus would be substituted for the streetcar, using a route I did not know. I should ask someone for the nearest tram stop, I told myself, and ask soon. I continued walking outbound on Market toward Castro Street itself, where there was a great crush of people, among whom, surely, would be someone who could direct me to the N Judah.

But when I turned the corner onto Castro, I was so amazed by the scene before me that I forgot my intention to ask after the streetcar. It was as if I had entered yet another city, this one inhabited by lumberjacks, cowboys, leathernecks, roughriders, policemen, firemen, musclemen, bikers—such was the demeanor of the hundreds of men (thousands?) who thronged the street. As I tried to negotiate the sidewalk, I was thrown from store window to gutter, into groups of lean, bare-chested men, then into ones covered in leather; next set amidst youths in tight T-shirts and jeans; then put shoulder-to-shoulder with stout, half-naked, extremely hairy men; and so on through the many types, each expressing such a stark and heavy masculinity that my senses were assailed with odors of maleness—now sweaty, now cologned, now something I could not identify but which seemed concocted of leather and tobacco and the chlorine of ejaculate. I thought, I must get off this sidewalk!

At that moment, a bar door opened and I was swept inside by the crowd.

Deafening music assaulted my ears. It was dark but for strobing blue lights, which revealed the bar’s inhabitants in epileptic flashes. So displayed, each face suggested menace—a false impression, I struggled to see, as it was soon clear that this bar catered to the milder tight-jeans-and-T-shirt types—but a suggestion clearly intended by the establishment, which had painted the walls black, and the floor black, and had illuminated the back bar with the sort of red one imagines as the color of Hades. Many eyes turned toward me. I did not belong there, they seemed to say. And I very much wished to leave—desperately wished to leave!—but again a scrum of bodies swept me along, and I soon found myself pressed against a stool at the far end of the bar.

I turned a shoulder in an attempt to slide through the crowd. And before me was a face that stopped me as if I had been turned into a pillar of salt. My dear student! I thought.

I looked into the face. I could see it only in blue flashes. Was it he? As the lights blinked over him, I looked at the eyes: childish rounds. At the body outline: slim, still adolescent. No! It could not be he! See! This youth sitting here does not know me, and besides, my dear student could not possibly be here, now, in San Francisco. He had returned. He had completed his “pilgrimage,” he said. He was back at the university. No! It was not he!

I pushed my way through what seemed a wall of flesh; was cursed at and elbowed and scoured by nasty glances; and finally reached the street.

I fought my way back toward Market Street. But as I approached the corner, I remembered that I did not know where I was going. It was nearly midnight. Where was the stop for the N Judah?

Before me, as if magically, was the most improbable of stores: a bead shop. I all but shook my head in disbelief at seeing this slip of a shop on such a street. Supplies for stringing necklaces and bracelets and earrings. Was this truly here?

The shop was empty but for an elderly woman, who sat upon a stool behind a vitrine filled with beads of various descriptions.

Can you please direct me to the nearest stop of the N Judah? I asked her.

Oh, yes, she replied in a sweet voice, going on to say that I should cross Market Street and go uphill until I passed a hospital on my right. Then, turning right, I would find the stop on Duboce, just below the crest of the hill.

It is the last stop before the tunnel, she said with a smile. But you had better hurry, dear. You’ll want to get there before the owl.

Her way of putting this—that I must get there before the owl—seemed to say that a dark, winged creature would descend upon the tunnel at midnight. And in that mood of dark enchantment, I hurried across Market Street as directed, then marched up the steep hill leading out of the intersection.

The night overtook me: the dunnish sky, its metallic dome, the cold of the fog. The higher I climbed, the more empty became the streets, until I seemed to be the sole creature about. Even the hospital, as I passed by it, appeared stilled and shut. Then, just as my good witch had predicted, I came to Duboce. I turned right, and glanced down the hill: She had not deceived me.

The platform was deserted, its lights enswirled in fog. My watch said 12:05, but I put aside my panic by reminding myself that midnight referred to the time when the last car left downtown, and surely it would need more than five minutes to travel this far outbound. I stared into the maw of the tunnel, at the dark outline of the hill rising above it, then back at the street, my eyes following the line of the tracks until they, too, were surrounded by fog.

When suddenly out of the mist swam a police cruiser. It slowed as it neared me, stopped. The officer riding shotgun gave me a once-over, and I felt guilt drip from me like the condensing fog. I am the one who did it, I thought, whomever you are seeking, whatever the crime. Then I saw him mouth “Zodiac.”

I began to shake; I thought I would fall down. A rumble rose from the tracks. Something creatural wobbled toward me: the one-eyed light of the streetcar. It screeched to a stop; I climbed aboard the too-bright car; the doors shut behind me. I saw the police cruiser drive off.

The streetcar entered the mouth of the unlit tunnel, its stone walls painted black. At moments, the tram lost its electrical connection, and we rode in utter blackness under the hill.

Finally we emerged at Cole and Carl, the first stop at the other end of the tunnel, on the west side of the hill. We had left the world of the Castro. From here, we would ride farther and farther away from the gay bars, into more respectable neighborhoods, where families huddled in their apartments and houses, worried over jobs and budgets, struggled against the stagnation and dereliction that had been visited upon our country, carefully locking their doors against the serial killer who was still at large.

At that moment, I thought of the patient and my dear student, and I ached with envy. They belonged to the wild world of San Francisco: to their very own Weimar of danger and carousing men and marvelous strange girls. Whereas I did not belong in the Castro, nor was I welcome at A Little More; and neither was I respectable, proper, productive. I have no family, I thought, no firm connections. I am dross, a castoff. Only the crows know what I am.





78.


Two days slouched along at a dilatory pace. My mood was not improved by the fine fall weather that descended upon San Francisco, the very air betraying me with its fresh feel of a new semester. I could not help but remember my feelings at that time of year, the hopefulness of beginnings, the happy sight of students holding books they had not yet read but soon would. And I felt how far away I was, banished, haunted by the eyes of the boy in the bar, the round childish eyes in the strobe of blue light.

Then my loneliness grew teeth. My only defenses were thoughts of the patient. I told and retold myself Michal Gershon’s portrayal of her early life in Berlin, like a bedtime story one reads to a frightened child, a story that must be repeated exactly with each retelling. In this way, I suppressed my suspicions about Michal’s version of events—closed my gimlet eye upon them, as it were. Otherwise, if I persisted in my skepticism, I would find no comfort in the tale.

At last came Wednesday. Finally the session began. And a great tranquillity settled over me, for the story resumed: The patient was back in Tel Aviv. There she was to see her mother again, the mother I had helped her find. The scene was Michal’s little house, the patient told us, a room we had not previously visited: a small dining area that adjoined the kitchen.