By Blood A Novel

105.


The next session confirmed—indeed made me certain—that I had arrived at the truth about the patient’s birth.

The patient had barely settled in when she said to Dr. Schussler: Michal told me I almost didn’t make it.

Make it? asked the therapist.

Almost didn’t get to live.

(Not one of us moved, none drew breath; as if we, too, if not careful, might fail to achieve life.)

I was thin, Michal told me. Lethargic. Cranky. Irritable. In her exact words: I was “delicately devoted to being alive.”

There the patient stopped; and the doctor asked:

And how did you feel when your mother said this?

The patient laughed. That all my emotions now made sense, she said. It’s just as I am now. I’ll never change. I’ll always be stuck in this irritable self, unsoothable and uncomfortable in my skin. I’ll always have a delicate devotion to being alive.

(No! I thought. You must resist this thought. We can, must, overcome the life of the womb.)

The therapist hummed, as if deferring a response.

Michal said I was born in a freezing Kinderbaracke.

Children’s barracks, said the doctor.

Well, of course you’d know the word, said the patient.

Dr. Schussler sighed. She was not about to be drawn into another discussion of her German heritage.

It was the dead of winter, of course, the patient continued. Born in December: a very bad idea if you’re in a displaced-persons camp, in a freezing children’s barracks. With a mother who was glad to be rid of you.

What makes you say that? asked Dr. Schussler.

She told me she had no milk. She had to beg one woman, then another, to nurse me. Beg. Because those other women also had children at risk, if not as delicately devoted to being alive as I was. Wet nurses! Was this some nineteenth-century novel? But Michal claimed—she swore!—my fragile state had nothing to do with why she gave me away.

Again the doctor deferred a response.

She claimed it had to do with that Hadassah Bimko, the camp doctor, the only woman in the Central Committee.

(Now here is indeed the nub of it, I thought.)

According to Michal, it all started with something I’d read about in one of the packets from the Chicago agency. Some British Jewish organization wanted to take Belsen’s orphans to England, where they’d find homes for them with Jewish families. But the camp leadership protested, saying the children would either stay with them or else go to Palestine. As I said, I’d read about it—which surprised Michal. Anyhow, it was considered a big victory when the British caved in and granted emigration visas for the children.

Here. I’ve cued the tape. Where Michal’s reaction startles me.

Shameful! said Michal as the recording began to play. Using those poor children as pawns in their Zionist games! The children would have been much better off in Britain. England was not in great condition after the war, but at least the war was over there, finished. Imagine those children toddling in peaceful English gardens, she said, on the stoops of friendly streets. Now picture them in Palestine, where the Irgun is blowing up British installations, where there is a nasty little war brewing between Jews and Arabs. Why would they take those poor orphans there if not to make a political point? It had nothing to do with the welfare of the children!

So, Michal continued, Bimko travels with a hundred orphans from Belsen, and then she’s given another thousand children who came from God-knows-where in the British zone. And when she gets to Palestine, she is suddenly enraged to find various Zionist organizations interviewing the children, trying to send them to appropriate homes. Bimko wanted them to stay together. But she’d arrived without a plan, and what did she think was going to happen? That the children would be placed in an instant kibbutz?

And there she is, said Michal, that savior, that great leader, taking eleven hundred children into a war zone for the glory of Zionism—or for her personal glory?

Michal paused, then said: It was Bimko’s trip to Palestine that made me decide.

Decide what? asked the patient.

To give you up for adoption.

I don’t understand.

I refused to let you be a pawn in the Zionist cause.





106.


I saw no future for anyone, Michal went on. I had lost my illusions about the Zionists. Power was concentrated in a very few hands, as I have told you. Also about Bimko poisoning Rosensaft.

(Said the woman who had lost her lover to her rival.)

The only course was to leave Belsen. And the only possible place I could go was Palestine. And I did not want that life for you. Every time I thought of taking you there, the image of Hadassah Bimko and her orphans rose before my eyes, and I decided, each time, that I would find a better future for you.

(Bimko again, I thought sadly. If only I could find a way to tell the patient how this Bimko had changed her mother’s life.)

There was a Polish woman I had befriended in the camp, said Michal. A Catholic, therefore free to roam about and find her postwar fortune. She had found employment of a sort at a nearby … monastery, convent, I cannot remember which. They donated food to Belsen, and because I volunteered in the kitchen, I spent time with her. Her name was Bibianna Lobzjeska. One day we were working side by side in the pantry, and she began talking about some group that was gathering up Jewish children who had been left with monasteries and convents before the war.

I know about this group, the patient on the tape interrupted her mother.

You know this group?

Yes, the patient replied. My mother—my adoptive mother—told me about it. That they essentially stole the children. Before any Jewish people could come for them, they farmed them out, clandestinely.

I did not know that! Are you sure? I thought the children were truly orphans, that no one had come for them, and—since the children had been baptized and had spent the better part of their lives as Catholics—it seemed logical and generous to find them Catholic homes.

No, said the patient. Not all of them. Some had people looking for them, maybe aunts or cousins, not parents but relatives. But unless it was the actual parent, they refused to give up the child. Sometimes not even then.

My God! But you see there were hundreds, said Michal. Hundreds of children given over by parents who were being rounded up by the Germans, parents who hoped their children would survive even if they did not. Well. I have to say, if the choice was between a good Catholic home and some distant cousins in a displaced-persons camp or a dusty farm kibbutz in Palestine where the children would have to learn to shoot rifles, I would choose the Catholic home. Otherwise, it is no better than what Bimko did: put children in harm’s way for the sake of a principle.

For the sake of a religion, said the patient quietly.

There was silence on the tape.

Pooh! said Michal finally. Pooh on religion.

You mean the Jewish religion.

Her mother said nothing for several seconds.

Knowing only what I knew, knowing only what I could know, said Michal finally, I asked Bibianna to put me in communication with the group.

And they came and got me.

Yes.

And how long until they came?

One month.

So quickly?

I was glad. I was relieved. I put you into the hands of a priest and told him I had been baptized as a Catholic, that your father was a German Catholic, and that I wanted you to be baptized and raised within the Catholic faith.

Wait! said the patient. You said you didn’t know who my father was.

That is only what I told him. I wanted to be sure they would give you to a good family. I wanted to be sure they did not see you as just another spawn of a converted Jew. It was not as if anti-Semitism had disappeared with the death of Hitler, you know.

Oh, I know, said the patient to her mother. I know. Anti-Semitism is why I am with my parents, my adoptive parents, and not with some insane, Jew-hating, fundamentalist Catholic sect.

What are you talking about?

Oh, yes. I didn’t tell you, did I? That nice Catholic life you put me into? I was first adopted by the man who is the father of my adoptive father. He was the chief nutcase in a fundamentalist Catholic cult that was about to remove itself from the sin of the cities to some compound in rural Illinois. And when he found out I was Jewish, that I had a Jewish mother, he wanted to dispose of me.

My God! whispered Michal.

Yes. God. It was all about his “God.” My father and grandfather were completely estranged, and somehow my father took me because of some bizarre struggle between them. I don’t know any more than that. Mother—my adoptive mother—was not exactly forthcoming.

The tape whirred; neither woman spoke.

I … said Michal. How … How could I know?

Of course you couldn’t know. You just dropped me into this priest’s hands and sailed away.

More whirring; more silence.

Okay, said the patient to her mother with a breath, that’s over and done with. I didn’t come here to berate you.

Really, replied Michal flatly.

There was a pause before the patient replied: Really.

Then what did you come for?

Another pause ensued.

Just to know, the patient said. To know where I came from.

The tape rolled on for several seconds.

Oh, I am so … completely sorry, said Michal at last. I only wanted what was best for you, what I thought was best for you. But I can only tell you the story as I know it, as it happened to me, and as I understood it. That is what you wanted, yes?

Yes, said the patient. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I came for. So, she said after a pause. You just picked me up out of a crib and handed me to a priest you’d never met. And he simply walked out of the camp—no questions asked? When this baby just disappeared from the Kinderbaracke—this little baby only how many months old?

Five months.

When this infant—me—when I disappeared, what did you tell them?

I told them I had sent you on to Palestine with a Catholic group, and that I was joining you there.

And off you went.

Yes. I was a convert. To him, I was a Catholic. He helped me get an emigration visa. And I went.

So you traded me for a visa! Everyone else in Belsen is stuck there, but you make a deal with Mr. Priest: I give you this baby, now get me out of here. God! Everyone traded me for something!

Oh, no, no. You must not think like that. The way I saw it, you were off to a good life and I was going to hell, at least to a different hell, one not surrounded by barbed wire.





107.


The tape wound on, neither the patient nor Michal speaking. Five seconds, ten. Dr. Schussler had drawn a breath as if to initiate a discussion when the patient’s voice on the tape returned.

I may—may—understand why you gave me up when you did, she was saying to her mother. Why you surrendered me, is the proper term I think. But why didn’t you ever look for me? Why didn’t you ever contact me? Try to reunite with me. After all, you now have a good life in Israel.

You think so? replied Michal.

Well, it seems so, said the patient.

Seems. Seems! Michal exclaimed. We seem to be fine. What you see is a lovely, prosperous city, gleaming buildings, white-sand beaches, young people lounging in cafes. And do not forget the luxurious villas our politicians built for themselves. Seems. This is what you see when you look at us with your naïve eyes. You have a nice hotel?

What?

Your hotel. Which is it? Never mind. It is not the shabby little seafront place where just a few months ago Fatah murderers came ashore in a dinghy, took eight hostages, then killed them. Did you even read about this?

I … no. I don’t remember.

You don’t remember, don’t remember. Do you remember reading about the guerrillas who broke into a school and took hostage a hundred and twenty children. Children. This was a first for us. Did you read about it?

I … No.

I am sure you were never even aware of it. And how about … Never mind. The incidents are too many to tell you about. One thing: Do you at least remember reading about the Yom Kippur War?

Yes, replied the patient. Of course.

Ah, well, at last! Of course. Because we were surprised, nearly overrun. If not for a handful of berserker tank fighters in the Golan, who held off the entire Syrian army, there would be no Israel now. Do you know what it is to live with this? With the knowledge of such a fragile life, such a fragile existence as a country?

She paused.

It is good you do not even try to answer because you cannot. No person living in the United States can feel this. You do not live moment to moment thinking your country might disappear, your life will be over, everyone will be dead.

The bomb, said the patient. I grew up thinking any minute we’d all be dead from nuclear war.

But that would happen to everyone! said Michal with a laugh. It is a madness that would take down the whole world. But here … it would just be us, the little state that is the Jewish remnant: obliterated while the rest of the world goes on about its business.

You cannot imagine what happened to us, Michal went on after a long pause, the trauma when we nearly lost the Yom Kippur War. We are a country that lives by the sword. A desert warrior nation. Remember I told you: The people who founded this country were like the mad, unyielding men of Belsen. We believed in our army, the invincible Israeli Defense Forces. Then, for the first time, we understood that the IDF was not magic, was only an army. We understood that we could be beaten. Now we all sit and shudder and think, When will the time come? When will we not prevail? Someday our enemies will no longer be the pitiful armies of feuding sheiks. Someday they will come at us from all sides with modern armies and real arms and unified purpose. Then who will help us? Who will save us?

America? posited the patient.

Michal laughed until she coughed.

Do you not see what is happening? she asked. Young people all around the world have replaced the Vietcong with the Palestinians as the current cause célèbre of anti-imperialism. I see the young Americans come here. The nice, liberal American Jews who walk through the King David Hotel wearing Arafat’s keffiyeh as a scarf. And I think: Here come our American saviors!

And all this because we will not go back to the pre-’67 borders, she continued. But what were those precious pre-’67 borders? Some grand internationally negotiated settlement? Some U.N. resolution? Some solid black lines on ancient maps? No, simply where we stopped in 1949. At the end of the War of Independence. Then another war. And another. War after war after war.

She grew quiet. The clock-tick filled the silence, seeming to grow louder as the seconds passed.

And not a pretty war, that first one, Michal finally said. There were horrors on both sides, I will admit. There is cause for the Arabs’ bitterness. Many were driven from their homes.

Well, she said with a sigh. I cannot ask you if you remember that, because the story has not been written down yet. We are still living in the fantasy that we were all heroes. Someday—should we survive—we will be allowed to be a normal country, with good and bad, with skeletons in our closets, like everyone else.

This city, she went on after a pause. Jaffa. Two hundred thousand Arabs lived here before the War of Independence. Now they live in some wretched refugee camp in Gaza. We are ringed with their encampments, refugees sitting in their warrens, seething with hatred for us. Do you think we can hold them off forever?

Ah! she said with a sound that might have been her hand slapping the table. Somewhere down a maze of hovels in Gaza is a woman, a woman sitting there brimming with fury, holding the key to this house. My house.

I often think, Michal continued after a long pause, What am I doing living in this rough country, speaking a language that feels flat in my mouth? And with yet another name: Michal Gershon.

Again she seemed to slap the table.

Sometimes I detest it here, she said, her Ts like little knife stabs. Truly. Detest it. Which you may have supposed by now. So why would I want to bring any child here? Where we are ringed by enemies. Tell me, skinny girl who has come all the way from America to find me. Where exactly are we wanted?





108.


For many seconds, the patient said nothing in response to her mother. The sound of the ticking clock in Michal’s kitchen somehow managed to interweave itself with the clicks of the cassette, so that, for a moment, the time then—the patient with her mother, and Michal’s first arrival in Palestine—seemed to merge with the time now—the patient with her therapist (and with me). It was as if we all sat in some room together outside of normal duration, where we could not stop asking ourselves: Where exactly are Jews wanted?

So you are telling me, the patient said to her mother (time returning to its proper depth), that you didn’t come for me because your life was so dismal here?

Well. No. Not exactly dismal, said Michal. But. Yes. But more. As I—

As you what? What?

As I have said, over and over. I did not want you to be a Jew.

But why? Why should I not be a Jew?

Michal did not immediately reply. The tape continued with its rhythmic thumping, as if the end of the tape, and their conversation, were bearing down upon them.

I wanted you to enjoy the world, Michal said at last, wearily. And by the world, I mean … God … Europe … my long-lost, beloved, still dreamed-of Europe.

If you are not a Jew, she went on after an enormous sigh, you can sit in a bistro in Paris, drink a Kir, smoke a stinking cigarette, and never have to look around and wonder, Are these the people who turned us over for deportation? Climb the Tour Eiffel, walk the Champs-Elysées. And never think: How quickly they all succumbed to save their precious Paris. Even Hitler loved Paris so much he was relieved not to have to destroy it. Ah! Go to the spa at Evian. Enjoy the waters. Eat supper in the elegant dining rooms. Drink the cool, clear, miraculous water and never associate the place with the conference at which the Western powers learned of the fate of the Jews and decided to ignore it. Be massaged by sturdy women, and never once stop to think: These are our murderers.

Travel south to Provence. Walk the foothills of the Pyrenees, and never think of the Jews who walked there to escape France only to arrive in Franco’s Spain. Go! Go in the early summer! Eat mussels by the seashore, watch the local military academies march to honor the local war veterans. See the good burghers expand their breasts laden with medals. All this, and you never have to think: Vichy. This was Vichy. All around me are the people who were only too happy to rid France of Jews.

And … the Netherlands. Lovely Netherlands. See the charming houses of Amsterdam. The canals filled with boats. The sturdy women pedaling bicycles. The placid lives they lead. The happy children playing in the street: Imagine that someday those will be your children, tossing balls in security, skipping rope, if someday you will care to have children. You may dream so! And no need to defend the Dutch for their weakness, for their fears, lacks, collaborations, for being accessories, trembling accessories, to the murder of your people. You can see them as normal people who behaved less than honorably under the pressure of intimidation, flattery, fear of their own deaths.

Now … I cannot even think of it … but Germany. Germany so beautiful I cry when I think of the life I lost. The forests, the bier halls, the new summer wines served at tables set under the trees—terrible, tart, sour wine but everyone happy, drinking, singing. Oh! The hills covered with vines. The tidy, heimlich towns, all tucked in, hiding their garbage where no one can see it. You can gaze upon the Rhine and Danube, upon the breathtaking confluence of the Rhine and Mosel. And think only of the beautiful music they inspired, the waltzes, the ladies swept around the floor by dashing men. And Bavaria at Christmastime: Go to a Christkindlmarkt, the little shacks that appear in every church square selling tree ornaments, Glühwein, Lebkuchen, lights shining in the dark of a winter night. By God! You can enjoy the whole canon: Goethe, Schiller, read all the masterworks without once wondering: How did such a culture, in which we were so intricately woven, how did it cast us out? What am I saying—cast us out? Murdered us! If you are not a Jew, my darling, you are free from all this. You can look at the peasants bringing in the crops and never think, Were they devoted Nazi Party members? Are they living in grandmother’s summer house? Did they take all the old silver?

Europe! It can be yours to love. The cathedrals, the ancient city centers, the twisting streets, so picturesque. Eat a Sacher torte for me when you are in Vienna while you gaze at the great St. Stephen’s. And never imagine Hitler’s exuberant welcome into Austria. Listen to the lovely voices of the Boys’ Choir, high and clear like angels, and never have to think: What joy the Führer took from hearing those tender boys!

And the Italian Riviera. Where Rosensaft and Bimko went to forget their Jewishness. Rent a villa! Swim in the Mediterranean! Rent a car and drive the Amalfi Coast. Go there and never have to think of compromise, defeat, embarrassment. Go there and simply enjoy it without a moment’s thought that you are betraying your people. How can you not understand? I wanted to give you merely what Rosensaft and Bimko stole for themselves: Forgetfulness. Obliviousness. The ability to live, without guilt or sense of obligation, among those who murdered your family. Whereas … if you were my daughter … if you were a Jew …

If? intruded the patient. What is this “if I were”? I am your daughter, and you do admit that, don’t you?

The clock slashed away at the seconds.

There is nothing to admit, said Michal at last. Admit—as if it were a crime. Yes. You are my daughter.

So I am your daughter. Born in Bergen-Belsen. Given away to a priest. But you at least agree: I am—

My daughter. Do you need me to say it again?

I do. I need you to say it!

Yes. I cannot say it more directly than this: You. Are. The. Daughter. I. Gave. Away. In. Belsen.

Therefore, said the patient, I am the daughter of a Jewish woman. So then: How can I not be a Jew?

You are not a Jew just because I bore you.

A Jew is something I am!

No. It is not inherited—

—everyone believes it is.

So to hell with them. That is some nonsense made up by racists and old rabbis. In any case, why does anyone have to know anything about it? It is no one’s business. You just decide! Decide right now. You simply do it. From then on, you are what you always thought you were: Protestant. Protestant!

Michal slapped the table.

Make up your mind to it, she said. Now. Then it’s done, finished, over: You are not a Jew!





109.


And what followed, in Michal’s next breath, were the shouted sentences with which this encounter was fated to end:

Do not look for me again! she cried out. I beg you: Never again try to contact me!

Yet now we heard those words in a different light.

The patient clicked off the tape recorder, then said nothing for ten or fifteen seconds. The sounds of the night rose from the street: the complaint of the hotel doorman’s taxi whistle, the church carillon playing the three-quarter hour, cars idling on New Montgomery Street. From deep inside our building came its systemic hum.

You know, the patient said finally. I really can’t think of her as my mother. She threw me out of her life—twice—and what sort of mother does that? No. She is not a mother. Not really my mother.

Said Dr. Schussler: Yes. That is right. She is not a mother to you.

But I can’t hate her, the patient said. Because she hates her own life more than I could ever hate her. I think she really believed she was saving me from it, from her, from everything that had happened to her.

Dr. Schussler hummed in agreement.

It’s sad, said the patient.

Sad how? asked Dr. Schussler.

The patient hesitated. Then she said:

The whole story is more about her than about anything else. It’s the good and the bad news: Her shoving me out was not about me; it was about her.

I see the good news, replied the therapist. But how is it bad?

Oh! sighed the patient. All that angst about should I find her or not. Then, if I wanted to find her, how could I possibly do it. Then, having found her, should I go see her. All that: years of suppression, then examination, then suspense, then action. Funny. And after all that, finding my birth mother turns out to be all but irrelevant.

Whatever I was or wasn’t didn’t matter to her, she went on. Her story and mine do not intersect.

Then both sat silently as the truth of the patient’s statement permeated the night.

We will meet again on Wednesday, said the doctor.

Yes, Wednesday, said the patient.

A long pause followed. The night sounds—the horns, the taxi whistle, the tires whispering by—reinhabited the room as the human voices retreated.

Her story and mine do not intersect.

The patient’s words lingered behind her, rustling in the air like felicitous banners.

And I thought: If only the world could be stopped, right here, in this calm harbor of time, as the patient sails on without her mother. For what a perfect ending we had come to for this chapter of the patient’s life.