By Blood A Novel

88.


The patient settled into her chair, and we soon heard Michal’s voice saying: I was locked in. That Hungarian beast—he left me locked in.

I could hear people shouting in every language. The roar of heavy trucks, or tanks. I kept pounding at the door, Let me out, let me out, in every language I spoke: German, English, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Russian. But people kept running past me; there was too much noise for anyone to hear. This went on for hours—I don’t know how long. Hours. The announcement “Ihr seid frei” had come in the afternoon. And from the cracks of light around my door, I thought it had come at three o’clock, maybe four. All the while, the shouting kept on, the heavy treads—boots, I thought. Eventually the light faded: twilight came, then dark.

Something momentous was going on—what?—and there was nothing for me to do but shout “Let me out!” until I was hoarse, until I had no more energy, until I sank down exhausted by the door. Then, sometime after nightfall, I heard shots—pistols? rifles? machine guns? This terrified me because I could not know who was shooting, who was being shot, what new terrors lay outside my locked room, and now I wanted to stay where I was, thinking myself safer inside than out. No sooner did I have that thought than I heard pounding at the far end of the row of barracks, then scuffles, a man’s voice shouting in Hungarian “I had to! I had no choice, they made me, I had to!” Then a shot and a thud, and the voice was stilled, and I knew what was happening: the now-free prisoners were looking for their former guards, and executing them.

I kept hearing doors being kicked in, one after another, each time coming closer. A second guard was found in his quarters, and shot; then another door was splintered, and another. I took off my kerchief, opened my coat, unbuttoned the top of my shift, stood with a hip out—anything to make it clear at a glance that I was female. Because most men, not all—most men, no matter how evil, will hesitate before killing a woman. Something in the bones and blood says no, speaks more quickly than even the desire for revenge. So there is sometimes a moment, the merest slip of a second, during which one might turn or lunge or shout and somehow fool death one more time.

They destroyed the door of the room next to mine. Then they came to me.

I shouted, in the highest voice I could manage, a wail, a puppy-dog cry. Either they did not hear or their thirst for killing had closed their ears. They heaved themselves against my door, once, twice. With a crack, the frame gave way. And they tumbled into the room.

Three men, one rifle, pointed at me.

Hungarian whore! shouted the man with the rifle, in Polish.

Kill her! shouted the second man, in Yiddish.

I had my hands up. No, no, I am a Jew, I said in Polish, then in Yiddish. No, I am a Jew!

Liar!

Shoot her!

We were all shouting at once, and I thought I would be killed in all the confusion. I could smell their bloodlust—they had just come from killing, and they smelled of it. Any moment the trigger would be pulled, inevitably—I nearly laughed that I had come this far, survived this far, only to be killed by fellow prisoners—really, such a thought went through my head. They kept shouting “Hungarian whore!” and “Kill her!” They were shaking. Possessed. Hungry for revenge. I kept repeating, I was raped! He took me and kept raping me! Finally I yelled out, Do you want me to show you the damage, the bruising, the blood?

They fell silent. In that terrible moment I realized I had put the wrong thought in their heads. I could see in their eyes that they did want to see the damage, wanted to undress me, that they were imagining … And I thought, Oh, God! I am going to be raped again, but this time gang-raped, a fate I had managed so far to escape.

Then a voice outside the room shouted in Yiddish, What’s going on in there? And someone pushed his way into the room.

He wasn’t a big man, but there was something powerful about him, his solidity, his bearing. He stood with his back very straight, holding a rifle. His eyes were dark, and as he turned intently to each of the men, he seemed to draw all the light out of the room and into his eyes—what little light there was, so that it seemed to grow even darker around us—which put a sort of spell over the other men. Their emotions were suddenly rearranged, calmed, flattened. The rifle pointed at me fell. All three men turned to this new man. And in measured voices—thank God! I thought; they sounded sane—in measured voices, in Yiddish, they discussed me. Was I a collaborator, a kapo, a whore?

The man who had just walked in—he was clearly a leader; the others were deferring to him—turned to me and asked me what I was doing there.

I told him my story, in broken Yiddish—the one language I understood but did not speak well. I told him my story, that I had come on a transport, had been taken immediately by the guard and raped for three days, that I had heard the announcement “Ihr seid frei!” in the afternoon, but had been locked in, wondering—afraid of—what was happening. Then these men …

He said nothing for a long time, seconds, which seemed to me a pause in time itself, a cavernous room in which my fate was being decided. No one moved. I could hear the men breathing, their breath almost echoing, so vast seemed this hole in time.

Then he suddenly shouted, Let her go! Then: Let’s go!

The three men left. I pulled my coat around me and was about to go out the door when the leader said to me, Stay close. Things are very … the word he used meant something like “fluid” or “boiling.”

I followed him down the row of barracks. I heard gunfire, shouting, screams. We turned this way and that, and I could see there were crowds ahead. I had no idea where all those people had come from, they looked like prisoners but healthier, not the living corpses I had seen. I didn’t know then that there was another part of the camp where conditions were better. I only knew that there was a great surge of bodies pushing in all directions, and I struggled to stay close to this leader, this haunting man with his rifle and his penetrating eyes.

We turned a corner at the end of the barracks. The back of the structures had these sorts of eaves, and the barracks were arranged in a line, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty. From each eave hung a body.

Kapos, said the leader in my ear.

We continued on, the leader forcing his way through the crowd, but in a way I found almost magical, because in all that bedlam, he did not push or shout, only touched people and spoke into their ears—or maybe this is merely the way I am remembering it. Because the entire crowd was in a mood as murderous as the men who had forced down the door of my barracks-prison, shouting, Get the kapos! And, To the kitchens! And, Feed us, you bastards! Everyone was shouting. People all but trampling one another in the crush forward, which I soon understood was the way to the kitchen and pantries that had fed the soldiers and guards.

All at once, we were being raked by machine-gun fire. Everyone was screaming. I saw people start to fall—a machine gun was raking the crowd, starting on the far side of the space in which we were caught, a kind of plaza in front of a large building. There was something horribly synchronized about the way people fell, one section after another, dominoes falling, one area and then the next around the plaza: people shrieking, bloodied, downed. I looked up to see where the fire was coming from—it is a stupid reaction but irrepressible; something deep in your nerves wants to know, Who is killing me? I looked up, and I saw, standing on the roof of the building, a guard.

My guard. And at that moment, he saw me. And, for a shaved speck of a second, he hesitated—took his finger off the trigger. Because once they rape you more than twice, something in them adopts you, as a sort of pet, or at least a belonging, a possession. They make some animal connection, even if it is only disgust, or dominance, or a desire to prolong the time of possession. He saw me, my face, my body, the body he had owned, dominated, violated—and, for a mere skip in the progression of time, he backed off on the trigger.

I ducked. Beside me, the leader ducked. And everyone in our quadrant—no, not a quadrant; what do you call the smallest slice of an area? Everyone in our tiny angle also ducked. And was saved.

That shaved second now over, the machine gun resumed its raking to the right of us: the screaming and the falling and the dead.

The leader, next to me, stood and aimed his rifle. A miraculous shot! My guard fell dead.

Was that the one who took you? the leader said into my ear.

How did you know? I said in my broken Yiddish.

He only smiled and said, You saved my life.





89.


How did he know that? said Michal. Among all the things one could say after such a narrow miss with death: Why that? Why the belief that I had saved him?

I never knew. I only knew there was some … potency about the man, some aura that made him seem more than real, charmed. You will see this in all the stories of us survivors: improbable moments like the one I just described, events that turn on luck, on nonsensical holes in the fabric of logic, tears in reality itself. Otherwise, if we had followed the inevitability of normal events, one thing expected to follow another, the way the world works most of the time, we would be dead. There would not be that moment when the guard hesitates. The disgusting tenderness the tormentor feels for the object of his evil deeds—it could not exist. A small, compact man should not be able to take aim with a standard-issue rifle, and, with one clean shot, kill the man determined to kill us.

But so it happened, and we lived.

She paused.

The rioting went on for three days, she continued, her voice now striding on in a faster cadence. Hundreds died by gunfire. Meanwhile thousands died from typhus, from starvation. The kitchen was raided, and people could not be stopped from stuffing down everything they could get their hands on. But their bodies could not digest it all. Many choked. They died. Death by eating—who could imagine such a thing?

The British gave us aid, yes. But they also betrayed us. They had made a deal with the Nazi officers. The Germans did not surrender outright. Instead, the camp had been declared a “neutral zone,” and inside it, the Germans and their Hungarian guards were allowed to remain armed. Armed! The British army’s excuse was typhus, confining the epidemic to the camp. But typhus isn’t spread person to person. Lice spread it; to people confined to lice-infested buildings, like ours. The purpose of the guns was to keep us locked up, to shoot us if we did not behave.

And we did not behave. I should say it was the leader, and those he led, who formed the disciplined core of our misbehavers. I cannot understand how they did it, but within hours of the British soldiers’ arrival, they had captured weapons, taken up positions, gained control over parts of the camp. Who were these men? I asked myself, because I had never before seen such Jews: warlike, organized, tough. They were Polish Zionists, I learned, with lifelong commitments to creating a Jewish state in Palestine, and they had spent all their days training to take it by force, if necessary. These were the men who went on to organize the camp, who eventually joined the Irgun and Hagganah—the Jewish militias that fought the British and the Arabs in Palestine—and who now run Israel: these same warlike, organized, tough men. Whatever Israel is or will become, we have inherited their warrior nature.

She laughed. And look at the trouble it has gotten us into, she said.

There was a long pause.

All during the rioting, she continued, I tried to stay close to the leader. He kept stopping to take aim at the rooftops, where the Hungarians still patrolled, meanwhile trying to calm the half-mad prisoners who were starved and parched and desperate for help, telling them where to assemble, where to find food and water, whom to ask for when they got there. Somehow everyone believed him and trusted in him, and he knew how to express himself with his eyes, his hands, his body, and people did what he told them to do. And I, too, did what he had told me to do: I stayed close. I stuck myself at his side.

So we came to the evening of the third day, Michal went on. At twilight the camp seemed to be stilled: no more gunshots, no more mobs. I had stayed with the leader all this time, and on that third evening we found ourselves in an empty barracks. There was no forethought: Suddenly we grabbed each other. Desire simply exploded from somewhere deep within us. One moment I was overcome with the realization that I was free—my God, free! Alive!—and the next my body demanded its pleasures. Sex! As battered as my body was, I wanted it, wholly, completely. I ached for it: sex, life, which at that moment seemed the exact same thing. The act was quick, hurried, fumbling, greedy. But it was sex. With desire, the first sex I’d had with desire since … everything.

She laughed.

And then he simply buttoned up, walked out, and told some passing men where the food-distribution point could be found.

She paused at length; the tape machine droned on.

Weren’t you upset that he just left you? the patient asked her mother finally.

Oh, no, said Michal with a laugh. Not at all. I admired it, admired him. His charisma, his sangfroid—you do know what that means, my little American ignoramus, sang-froid?

I’m not an idiot, the patient replied to her mother.

Of course, said Michal.

And I don’t appreciate your calling me an ignoramus. Yes, you went through a great deal, but still: That doesn’t give you the right to treat me as if I’d spent my life on a marshmallow.

A long hiss of empty tape followed. There was not a rustle, not a cough. How surprising was the patient’s sudden expression of resentment! How long had she been sitting there chafing at Michal’s mild derision, which I had thought almost affectionate?

The patient on the tape broke the silence and said: The leader you’re talking about is Yossele Rosensaft, isn’t it?

A sudden rustle and thud: Her mother jumping up in her chair?

What do you mean? said Michal. How do you know about Yossele Rosensaft?

I told you, I’m not an idiot. I told you I did research, that I read about Bergen-Belsen. And so of course I’d find out about Yossele Rosensaft. And your description fits him: compact, charismatic, steely.

No! said her mother. It wasn’t Rosensaft. Not him! There were other leaders. He wasn’t the only one.

So which one was my father? the patient asked her mother. Rosensaft? Another “leader”? The Hungarian guard? Some kapo right before you were put on the transport? Maybe even someone on the train? Don’t you think I can do the math? Math, the one thing you know I’m good at. I can count the months from April 18th, 1945, the third day after liberation, and get close to December 26th, 1945.

She paused.

My birthday.





90.


Another long silence ensued. The recorder whined; the tape hissed. In the therapist’s office, neither patient nor doctor moved.

Then a faint sound emanated from the tape, which might have been a whimper—whose?

Finally there was a cry, and Michal’s voice saying:

Oh, my dear! Can you forgive me? I am describing events I have not even allowed myself to think of for many years. Of course you would want to know who your father was. It is natural, yes. Natural that you would want to know.

The tape stopped with a click.

And did she finally tell you? asked Dr. Schussler.

Tell me—?

Who your father was.

No, said the patient. She wept. She said she was sorry she didn’t know, couldn’t know. That I had it right. There were four men she had to have sex with right around the time of my conception—and the one man she did want, the “leader”—and she could not be sure which was my father. She kept weeping. But I did not apologize for making her cry: one victory at least. I didn’t “take care of her feelings.” I let her cry. And after a while she looked up, her eyes puffy, her cheeks wet, her beautiful skin slicked with tears, and she asked again if I would forgive her. And if I could leave and come back the next day.

She paused.

I did, and I left.

We only have a minute, said the therapist, but did you believe her? That she really doesn’t know?

I did then. But now …

Now?

I still think that when she saw me for the first time, she was stricken with a bad memory. She saw in me someone she didn’t ever want to see again, or someone who hurt her deeply. It couldn’t have been her sister that she saw in me—you’re right. She would have cried with delight if I looked like her sister.

She paused.

So I’m probably the child of some rapist. Or else of a hero, maybe Rosensaft. Or maybe not.

Does it matter?

Of course it does.

What difference does it make? It does not change you.

Dr. Schussler’s voice had slipped into the tone that invariably tells the patient, The hour is over.





91.


Does it matter? Does it matter who your father is? Your mother? Who are the exact people who dropped their blood into the container that is you?

The patient and therapist had come to the dreadful nub of the matter, the awful question that had haunted my soul since I had become a conscious being at twelve years of age; the question that had hovered over the patient since the moment she had tried, and failed, to defend her declaration I am not adopted! I have mysterious origins! For if it mattered who had spawned us, and mattered too much, I was doomed; and if the patient’s unknown and unknowable ancestor possessed the sort of genes that predominated, resonated, indeed conquered all opposing chromosomal challengers—everyone knows of such individuals, whose unlikely red hair, for example, reappears generation after generation—if her father were of that variety, she was consigned to a lifetime of fearing what resided within her: the heart of a rapist? A hero? A brute?

Tuesday morning I awoke with the feeling that something was wrong. I had a sudden, strange headache. And when it passed, I noticed that the edges of things were more rounded than they ought to have been. The window frames were bowed, the doors had gone concave. The light was dusty, chalky. The base of my skull went numb, as did the bridge of my nose: such odd places for numbness (my nose!) that I feared my brain sensors had become hopelessly scrambled, and it was really my leg that had fallen asleep and not the bridge of my nose.

I reacted as I have in the past to these sorts of events: with an attempt to resume normal activities. I went to get myself a glass of water. (I do not know why a glass of water is always offered as a cure for strong sensations, but so it is.) However, on the way to the kitchen, I noticed a rug out of alignment. Tugging it straight required moving the chair that stood upon it. As I did so, I noticed a tear in the cushion fabric that had been mended with strong tape, and I left the cushion upended while I searched for the special tape the landlord had provided. I went opening drawers to find the tape and came upon a file for which I had been searching over days and weeks. I opened the file and tried to read a paragraph but noticed that the paper, too, had become bowed in shape, which caused me to remember the water. But on the way to the kitchen once more, I felt the need to straighten a window shade. But what about the crooked calendar that hung on the wall?

I stopped. I looked about. The rug, the chair, the drawers, the calendar, the window shade—the litter of my obsessions.

I sat down and held my head in my hands, hating the very fact of my existence. For I was caught, once again, in the spider’s web of compulsion. And I did not know if, on this occasion, she would eat me (so to speak); that is, did not know when this particular episode would end, if the night in its entirety would be spent picking lint from a suit jacket, or perhaps I would be doing so into the morning light, perhaps into the days ahead. And even as I pondered these questions, I felt my eyes wander to the trash that had to be put out that night, a task interrupted by the thought that the landlord had not paid the scavenger bill as he had promised, a thought that in turn was interrupted by the idea, once again, that I ought to have a glass of water. It was as if I were trying to write a sentence and had become distracted by the thought of the em dash, and why not an en dash; and why must the question mark contain a period, implying finality, when all one wishes is a momentary pause for doubt or wonderment (the question mark should be placed here, but I do not want it!); that is, if one tried to write and became seized by what creates, shapes, and ends sentences—thereby making it impossible to write; or, applying the metaphor, to live.

In this state did I pass the night—all the long hours until the patient’s next session.

Wednesday morning dawned. The attack was yet in full form. My arrival at the N Judah stop was something of a victory in itself, the entire house ransacked in search of a missing quarter for the fare.

As I rode downtown, a terrible question came to me: What was about to transpire in the room toward which the streetcar was ineluctably carrying me? What would happen in the therapeutic hour that was rapidly approaching? Does it matter? Patient and therapist would inevitably return to the question. And everything hinged upon the skill of the therapist. If she did not guide the patient well! If she could not help her cross the river of blood ties! If she could not lead her to a self-created existence! Oh, God, if I should lose my icon, my champion, what would I do? Shout? Tear open the door? Threaten the therapist? Harm her?—

A screech. The streetcar stopped at Market and New Montgomery. The doors opened; I stepped down. I approached the building, and the gargoyles seemed to mock me: You wish to avoid something? they seemed to say. Why, then, come up here and hold the roof! Similarly did the cherubs roll their eyes in hilarity at the sight of me: What a loser! they chuckled. You’ll never make it!

Not even the white purity of the marble could wash away the dark influence of my affliction. It seemed the crows had gained entry, had gotten past the podium without its guard. I had become one of them, I thought; I carried darkness everywhere; no one could escape me (so melodramatically had my nervous condition taken hold of me). Elevator cars came and went. If I did not step into one soon, I would miss the patient’s session.

The cab seemed to float upward to the eighth floor. All the while my anxiety rose with it: What if I should lose my last protections? The protection of the patient, all that stood between me and the spider who even now legged her way toward me? What if, upon hearing the patient’s voice, I remained unchanged, unbecalmed, still the dark creature who might descend upon her? Her! Her! Her!





92.


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.





93.


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.





94.


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.





95.


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:

Shema, Yisrael!

Adonai Eloheinu

Adonai Echod

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.

Hear O Israel!

The Lord thy God

The Lord is One.

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.