A Curable Romantic (84 page)

Redemption was only a matter of our asking for it, of our crying out with as much purity of heart as we could muster given the grinding circumstances of our lives.

And of course, it was the Holy One Himself whom the rebbe’s second audience comprised. Quite audaciously, the rebbe seemed to have challenged the Holy Blessed One, Master of our Universe, to a kind of theological disputation, the high stakes of which were our immediate ransom. Drawing upon a formidable arsenal of theological weaponry, skillfully citing theolegal and scriptural precedent, he used all his cunning to arouse the slumbering conscience of our Creator. Reading the Torah backwards and forwards, turning it inside and out, spinning the sacred law on its head until, like a prism, it threw off a thousand and one new and unheard-of interpretations, he reminded the Holy One not only of His promises but of His many promises to keep those promises. Using the Holy One’s own words against Him, like a prosecutor, the rebbe returned again and again to this one incontrovertible fact: the Holy One had obligated Himself, by His own holy law, into rising up in our defense.

I have to say, at those times, when the rebbe directed the full force of his person towards the Heavens, hurling himself against its barricades, demanding of its many offices a response to his damning list of charges, the silence of the Divine reply was as deafening as thunder.

HE SIGHED AND
dropped his glasses onto the desk before him.

“To tell you the truth, Dr. Sammelsohn, I didn’t think it would take this long.”

“Didn’t think what would take this long?”

“Before the Holy One answered our pleas.”

We were in his study, transcribing the talk he’d given the day before. Not that he seemed to need my help. On the contrary, Reb Kalonymos recalled his every word with an astonishing precision. His sterling memory made mine seem like a dull and lusterless trap. Our work was finished for the day, and he’d taken our few new pages and stacked them beneath the older ones. The ink and paper were costing him dearly, I knew, and the manuscript was thickening at an alarming rate.

“You think I’m mad, don’t you?” he said, “that what I’m doing, or rather what I’m attempting to do, is mad.” He waited for me to answer him, but I found nothing to say.

The rebbe crossed his arms. “Still, we’re taught as schoolboys that the Holy One not only studies the Torah but is obligated, so to speak, to adhere to its laws.”

“Yes, so we’re taught,” I said, and I thought: And only a schoolboy would continue to believe it.

“Taught? What am I saying?” The rebbe waved the remark away. “It’s not a matter of our being taught, but of one’s deeply knowing.
Of course
the Holy One lives according to the Law. How could it be otherwise, and yet …”

“And yet?” I wondered aloud.

“No,” he censored himself. “We must simply push on, that’s all. There’s something more mysterious at hand, although at the moment, I cannot tell you what.”

He fingered the manuscript lying like a brick on the desk between us, gazing upon it with a mixture of pride (it was, after all, growing proof of his accomplishments as an author) and despair (the larger it became, the more it spoke of its failure to move its Audience).

And what a curious book it was. Given the circumstances of its creation, I often wondered if it would even survive us? And if it did, who would ever read it?

I PROMISE YOU:
I had nothing but the purest of intentions regarding Rekhl Yehudis; and when I entered the rebbe’s kitchen, in search of a cup
of tea, romance was the furthest thing from my mind. Still, there she was with her back towards me and her delicate shoulders trembling, staring out through the rain-soaked windows. I saw instantly that she was crying. Only the most blackhearted of Bluebeards would have trifled with such a child, given her situation: in the wake of her mother’s death, she was an orphan; in the wake of her brother’s, a mourner; via our dubious state, a captive. Also, unlike in my own family, where the son had been a thorn in the bouquet of all those pretty sisters, Rekhl Yehudis had played second fiddle to her brother. At least in her father’s affections. Perhaps she’d been her mother’s favorite. I couldn’t know. But now, with her mother dead and her brother as well, there seemed only so much love even a magician like Reb Kalonymos could conjure up on her behalf. This thought created within me even more compassion for her: having been a hated child, I could only sympathize with one who had been the lesser loved.

Certainly, I could have reversed my course and backed silently out of the room, but her beauty arrested me. Not her physical beauty, which, as she was starving like the rest of us, was diminished, but an inner radiance that, despite our terrible circumstances, she yet possessed, and that reminded me not a little of my sisters. Perhaps hunger had robbed me of the ability to act quickly. Whatever the reasons, I found myself paralyzed, standing in place in the doorway, staring at the picture she made — a sorrowful girl with the rain-soaked light coloring her face — not a thought moving in my brain, until at last she had no choice but to turn and greet me.

“So sorry,” I stammered, pulled out from my famished daze. “But I’m afraid I … didn’t see you there.”

She nodded sympathetically, as though what I had said made sense. Her face was red and blotchy from crying, and she pushed her tears away with the heel of her hand.

“Are you all right, fraylin?” I took a step towards her. “You haven’t been crying, have you?”

“No,” she said, although this assertion, so transparently false, only made her cry more. We were forbidden from touching each other by the rules governing this rabbinic household, and it was all I could do not to
reach out to her and enfold her in my arms, so that she might give unchecked expression to her grief. I offered her my handkerchief instead. As she reached for it gratefully, however, our hands brushed, and I felt that oddly shocking, illicit electricity of sexual contact, made even more delicious by the stricter rules of the household forbidding it. It was all I could do not to kiss her hand or press my cheek against it, wetting it with my own tears. Ignoring our touch, she dried her eyes with the rag I’d presented to her and said, “It’s all so very sad, isn’t it, Dr. Sammelsohn?”

I nodded, standing as near to her as propriety allowed. She folded her arms and, with her chin trembling, gazed at the ceiling rafters. “Oh, how I wish you could have been here when my mother was alive.” She looked at the floor and shook her head. “All the cooking and the baking and the feasting! You wouldn’t believe it now, Doctor, but this kitchen was always filled with clouds of steam and, oh, all sorts of delicious vapors. A never-ending banquet! How I used to love to walk by and stick my head in and hear the oil sizzling and the dumplings boiling. The smells would wake me in the morning sometimes, and it was all I could do to finish dressing before dashing down to help. One of the cooks was sweet on me, and she’d give me a little taste of whatever it was she was preparing, before assigning me a chore.” She laughed a small laugh. “Visitors and relatives and servants everywhere, the clatter of silverware, of drawers opening, of rolling pins pounding, I can’t tell you! The men praying and singing with my father, the women cooking and talking and laughing. It was a proper court then, with music and dancing and …” Her breast lifted and fell heavily. “You could feel the presence of God here. But now?” She gave out a shrug. “Now I don’t know.”

She dropped her head and smiled at something. “Shall I tell you a secret?” she said.

“If you wish, fraylin.”

“When I was a little girl, I believed that nothing made God happier than His frequent visits to our house.” She closed her eyes. Two tears slid down her cheeks. “Oh, who knows anything anymore?”

“Things will return to how they once were,” I said. What else could I say?

“You’re a sweet liar.”

“Still, we must hold on.” I attempted to remove all playfulness from my voice. She was still holding my handkerchief, and she looked at it as though noticing it for the first time.

“And now” — she pulled the handkerchief through one hand — “it’s all I can do to scrounge up a cup of tea for our good doctor, who brings so much joy to our good father’s life.”

“On the contrary, fraylin, it’s he who has done much for me,” I said, although, in fact, I could think of nothing at all the rebbe had done on my behalf.

“He cherishes his Sunday mornings with you, you know. You’ve been so like a son to him.”

“I doubt that.”

“But it’s true.”

“A son nearly fourteen years his senior!” I exclaimed with a sense of theatrical heartiness.

“No!” she cried. “You don’t look it at all.” And she hit me playfully on the arm with my handkerchief.

“Now, fraylin, it’s you who are so very sweetly lying.”

“No, but really, you’re … I don’t know … quite boyish. And besides, what does it matter how old a man is when he’s as …”

But here, she stopped herself. I’m not certain which one of us dropped his gaze first, I only know that soon we were both looking at the floor.

“Here. Let me have your cup, and I’ll brew up what little tea we have and bring it in to both you and my father.”

I surrendered the teacup and, as I did so, she pressed my hand gently but firmly inside her own. The embrace was tender and warm and — unless I’m a terrible judge of such things — not a little erotic.

CHAPTER 5

We existed in a kind of traumatized dream-state. The thin membrane between sanity and madness seemed to have ruptured, and if you described your day to someone outside the ghetto, he’d no doubt assume you were recounting a dream:
The sidewalks were littered with corpses, it was wintertime, I was starving, and the government had forced everyone to turn in their fur coats.
We knew from the broadcasts we tuned in to over our contraband radios — by “we,” I mean the ever-changing group of refugees who slept on top of one another inside the Zamenhofs’ apartment — that there was no stopping the Germans as they marched across Europe, flattening everything in their path. Liberation was another dream, and every hour took its toll. Almost every day now, I saw at least two or three people dropping dead in the street, often helped along into the next world by the Jewish police, who had traded their wooden-tipped shoes for rubber-toed boots, the better to splinter our bones, without risking theirs, whenever they kicked us. I have to say: they were the worst among us. Each had been charged with a daily quota of deportees, and if they failed to round up the requisite number, members of their own families made up the shortfall. Perhaps this goes a long way in explaining their brutality. In matters of life and death, a certain shortsightedness is to be expected, I suppose, and every hour, though it be one’s last, counts. Still, we were all marked for death, the Jewish policemen included, and everyone knew it.

The deportation center, the Umschlagplatz, was directly behind the Zamenhofs’ old house, and in the twilight sometimes, when I imagined no one could see me, I’d make my way to the roof and look down into its hellish precincts. It was there that the truckloads of captives were taken for deportation, men, women, children, escorted in under armed Ukrainian guard.

Even from the heights of the rooftop, I couldn’t block out their
screams. The entrance was like the maw of some mythological beast whose hunger could not be satisfied. You could buy your way out with only a hundred złotys, but only the rich could afford that, and with prices going up every day, it was only a matter of time before they took their place in line as well.

There were doctors working in the Umschlagplatz. I could see their white smocks moving among the prisoners in the twilight from my roof. They were part of the ruse, it seemed, employed by the enemy as a way of keeping order. (Certainly, you’d tell yourself, if the authorities have gone to the trouble of hiring a doctor to put a plaster on my foot, which the Ukrainian or the Lithuanian or the Latvian guard has broken, these same authorities can’t be sending me to my death now. It didn’t add up.)

I tried not to think about it, and I attempted, as well as I could, to avoid being swept up in one of the Jewish policemen’s raids, an easy enough task on the days I wore my smuggler’s uniform — thanks to my fluency in German, I’d been impressed into service by the underground — however, on days when I appeared in the streets only as myself, my fate was as insecure as anyone’s. And naturally, when the German captain let himself into Dr. Zamenhof’s consultancy and asked for me by name, I assumed I’d been betrayed, my smuggling exposed by someone who knew me.

As with so much else in my life, however, I was wrong.

“
HERR DOKTOR SAMMELSOHN
?”

“Ja, bitte?” I said, not daring to look him in the face.

“Herr Doktor Jakob Josef Sammelsohn?”

“Ja, ja,” I said.

“You’re
Herr Doktor Jakob Josef Sammelsohn?”

“I am,” I said, although at that moment my greatest wish was not to be.

“Well,” he muttered, as though disappointed to have found me, “come along.” When I didn’t obey him immediately, he raised his voice and said, “Get your coat and come along, Doctor. That’s all now. Please.”

“But my patients,” I said, grasping at straws. When I turned towards my lone patient, who a moment before had been sitting in the waiting
room, I found that he had fled. Perhaps he’d never been there to begin with. Food, as I’ve said, was scarce, and though I continued to smuggle it in, I shared it with as many people as I could, principally the children living in the Zamenhofs’ house. I could barely remember the last time I’d eaten a full meal, and thanks to the starvation with which I lived, it was impossible at times to tell what was truly happening. My mind seemed to drift constantly. Still, this captain seemed real enough, and I did as he commanded me, putting on my coat and making my way towards the door. Glancing over my shoulder, I glimpsed the patient who had disappeared standing now in the darkness of the back room. He nodded at me, his face a picture of forlorn encouragement. I was clearly doomed, and we both knew it. I wasn’t even a Pole, but a former Austrian living illegally in Warsaw and a Jew.