After Auschwitz: A Love Story (10 page)

When finally I begged her to let me come home, I was in my late eighties. And Claudia was married to a wealthy business man. Hannah had survived a heart attack and it left her purged. I could help her, I said, help take care of her. I didn't like her being alone in that apartment. I could see that she had less need to squeeze me like an orange, getting every last spurt of juice. She even allowed herself a little contentment.

She cried, calling a cherished friend and asking if she should forgive me. The friend said, “you already have. You forgave him when you kept seeing him during the Claudia years.”

Forgiving is hard.

My brother Mario came over to see me today. He is four years older—have I said that already? Sorry. When I was born, he was already a tough little kid. Mother told me he hadn't liked me from the start. She had pointed out my squalling helplessness, how I couldn't do anything, how I needed him. The only effect that had was to infuriate him, especially later when I started to crawl and knocked over his block towers. By the time I was five he had me completely under his thumb. He used to tell me frightening stories about goblins and ghouls that he said lived in the Borghese garden zoo, in cages next to the big cats, the panthers and tigers. At night one of the keepers would change into a werewolf and let them out. Our house was on the very edge of the gardens. They would be drawn by our smell, the warm blood. Suddenly my brother would stop.

“Did you hear that?” he'd ask, assuming a look of terror. “The leaves are rustling. Can't you hear them coming?” Then he would make a sound between a roar and a shriek, turn his fingers into claws, and clutch my stomach. I would invariably call for Mama who would pat my head and sigh.

“Why can't you boys get along?” She'd ask no one in particular.

“Because he's a little sissy,” Mario would say and spring out the big front door, laughing ghoulishly.

So here is my brother trying to be nice to me seventy-five years later, asking how I am, what the doctors are doing. I frown at him.

His questions are perfectly innocuous but suddenly I feel consumed by rage. I hate the way he sits there with his memory intact, nothing wrong with him, hiding his smug arrogance under a fake smile. His gray eyes cool as ice. He must know, damn him, that the doctors can do very little. The only drugs around make just the tiniest difference in staving off senility. I will end up a vegetable before he finishes directing his new movie.

I try to come up with better reasons for my anger. Our father always preferred him, for one thing. He was clearly brilliant from a young age. But why did Papa have to leave him more money? Each sentence in that will stabbed me in the heart. And he didn't even know that Mario had a sick wife and two children. That might have made some sense anyway. Give to the eldest one. But we were just boys when he wrote his will. He didn't know about Hannah either, of course. Or that I'd left the only woman I really loved.

Mario comes back from the kitchen with Hannah's cookies. He offers me one. We both eat quietly and he throws the crumbs over the terrace wall. The gulls pounce, cawing like mad.

“It's rotten luck,” he says. “I'm so sorry, Topo.” No one has called me that—short for
topolino
—since I was a boy. I stare at him, making sure he isn't insulting me, bringing up my height—five feet, five inches—whereas he is almost six feet. Tall for an Italian.

What is the matter with me? He isn't just trying to be nice, he is genuinely sorry for me. The brother of today isn't the brother of back then. I'm the one who is stuck in the piss and mire of childhood. But my increasing incapacity makes me
unjust. I want to scream. Remember me please, remember me, keep me alive in you. Somewhere. I'll just take up a tiny corner. I'll crouch very low in the corner but don't forget me.

“I can't stand the thought of life going on without me,” I say. “It makes me lonely, as though I'm lying in a room full of ice, unable to move a finger while the world with its trees, birds and flowers gradually fades.” He presses my hand. I can see the water welling in his eyes.

One morning when I was about ten, our cook, my mother's most trusted servant, came to me with a frightened expression.

“Your mother is still asleep,” she said. “I can't seem to get her to wake up.”

My mother slept in a mahogany bed with a damask canopy, like a princess, I thought. I remembered her alone, though my father slept there too, of course: the royal couple. Through one window I could see the cypresses lining our walk. Through the other, her roses. That day the gardener was planting some pansies in the border, dark violet that played against the deep reds and yellows she preferred. Around the garden were classical statues of fawns.

“Please,” our cook said. “Be a good boy.”

“Why can't you do it?” I asked, though I knew perfectly well that Luisa was afraid of mother, who often threw tantrums and screamed at her.

“All right,” I sighed as the gardener's sheers opened beneath a fading flower. “But I don't see why you can't let her alone.” Ordinarily if I frowned, Luisa would immediately soothe me, but this time she shifted unhappily from foot to foot, she wouldn't move. I was beginning to feel uneasy myself, though I didn't know why.

I don't really remember walking up to the bed. But I must have done it. Her head was on the pillow and her eyes were closed. I don't think I had ever seen her sleeping before. Her eyelids were a deep blue, almost purple. I stood and looked.

“Mother,” I said, touching her lightly on her shoulder. Under her satin nightgown I could feel her warm skin. Wake up Mother, it's time.” But I couldn't remember what it was time for. I shook her lightly but she wouldn't open her eyes. I don't know what made me realize that she didn't hear me, that she wouldn't wake up no matter how much I shook her or how loudly I yelled in her ear. I ran out of the room, almost bumping into Luisa who was waiting right outside. “She won't wake up,” I screamed, my body hot and cold in turn. My heart was thumping like a giant frog. My knees shook so hard I could barely stand and waves of shudders passed from my head to my feet. Luisa was calling
pronto soccorso.

When the men came with the stretcher, they took one look at her and the empty pill bottles next to her bed, scooped them up without even a word to me, and took her away.

“Someone stop them,” I cried out. “They're taking my mama away.”

My memory is playing tricks on me. The true horror of that scene was that I felt nothing except a mild wish not to be disturbed, a feeling that someone else should take care of this, that I was too young, too completely unready. It was wrong. It ought to be erased. But I remember no other feeling. I don't think my heart thumped anymore. No, I was preternaturally calm. A sort of blankness fell over me like a cape.

I moved and spoke but I didn't feel, not at all. I stood fascinated by her purple eyelids, but felt no curiosity—nothing but a pale cloud-like vacancy where feelings should have been. Isn't that strange? My brother was away on camping trips for prospective leaders on the Left, and before he came home I stood in front of a mirror and practiced my expressions. Horror: mouth open and distorted, eyes wide. For grief, I remembered how I felt when my dog died. Then my motions had been perfectly natural. I sobbed and tossed my head. I begged to dig his grave myself and carried him to it, wrapped in a blanket. Now I screwed up my face and tried to force tears
from my eyes, but they stayed dry. I felt nothing at all.

I was afraid that my brother would notice—that I would somehow be excommunicated. He would point out my heartlessness. In fact, if my friends had called and invited me to a party, I would have gone. Laughed and joked, eaten until my stomach hurt. But Mario was wrapped up in his own feelings, unless like me he was numb. I never asked him, and we never spoke of it.

Last night I wandered for hours in different landscapes. One was a ruined city. You could tell it had once been beautiful from the arches still standing, entrances now to nowhere. One arch had signs of fire along the top. The stones were blackened. I stood at the entrance wondering if I should walk through it. There were so many arched entrances I was afraid I'd get lost. Perhaps if I counted. I'd go in the third. I turned around and tried to memorize the arch I was going through but it was just like all the others. I'd have to remember it was the third from where I was standing. I had no pencil or paper the way I do now to write down the things I know I'll forget. I have pads, I have different color pens—they are scattered everywhere in our apartment. This morning I found one behind the classical statue of an athlete near our bed. Another in our little kitchen alcove next to the salad twirler. But in my dream I had nothing to help me. Nothing and no one. Still, something propelled me. It turned out there was a whole city alive in the ruins—scavengers and homeless men lying in their tattered blankets against the walls, worn boots on their feet or under their heads.

I remember how Hannah had told me about the importance of boots in the camps. If someone's boots were stolen they'd probably die. They made every effort to hold them together—with bits of string, or if they had holes they'd stuff them with paper. In our brutal world today, people more than ever need their boots.

Hannah told me that during the long march through Germany at the end of the war, her boots fell apart and she walked barefoot, her feet infected and full of pus. And no one in the villages threw them bread. She tried hard not to return their hate but couldn't accustom herself even to the sound of German. It made her sick.

In my dream I was suddenly afraid someone would rob me. Still, I counted to three and went under the third arch into a narrow street. I tiptoed past the sleepers. Then the scene changed and I recognized the landscape with its vine-covered hills. I was in a green field near our tower—part of an old palazzo outside of Todi. I knew if I got there I'd be safe. Our family had owned it for generations. It had protected the peasants from marauders in the Middle Ages. We even have a heraldic device, a lion
couchant
with crossed spears. I moved towards it but was immediately lost in tall grass. A woman's voice suggested I turn left, but I was too afraid. Grass was everywhere, mounded into shapes like freshly dug graves. There was no clear trail. An animal appeared, a bobcat, lean and sinuous. I threw it some bread to keep it away, but instead it came towards me, its eyes glinting red. I woke, heart pumping.

I fell back to sleep almost at once, but no sooner was I asleep than I had another dream. In this one, I was being slowly pushed towards a well. I tottered on the stone edge. Terrified, I awoke and called out for Hannah. “Hannah, Hannah,” I said in a strangled voice, “I fell into a well. I was covered in mud. In my eyes, in my mouth, everywhere.” She took me in her arms and comforted me, shushing me like a child, rocking me against her breasts. “It was just a dream,” she said with a hint of severity. She hates it when I talk about a dream as if it were real. She doesn't understand how real it is for me, wandering like Alice, changing my size and shape. Powerless.

Our bed is just a platform set under the eves in our
attico,
where the one sleeping on the inside will bang his head if he get up too quickly. The ceiling there is that low. I can't
remember the right word for the protrusion with a window at one end. Starts with a
g
I think—
goal, ghost, growl, ground.
Ah yes,
gable.
I'm not much of a carpenter but this bed was one of my most successful achievements. Since we both read a lot before going to sleep, I screwed two small lamps onto the gable's sides.

When we were first married, we used to sit there, cozy as birds in a nest. And since our backs were to the window, I put a mirror on the frame so we could see a reflection of the view behind us. The window holds a splendid view of the
Gianiculo.
The dark green forests marching up the hills, the ancient walls, and the papal palace at the top. After I moved back to our beloved apartment in Rome, when my prostate weakened and I had to get up several times in the night to pee, we turned the bed sideways with me on the outside with a clear route to the hall and the bathroom. But now—whether it's been weeks or months I'm not sure—since I walk in my sleep, Hannah moved me to the inside where she will notice if I try to move.

I used to find our maid Erminia staring at the mirror suspiciously. I'm sure she thought it was there for nefarious purposes—to reflect the tangle of our naked bodies when we made love. Alas, I can't do that much anymore. Now at most she holds it and squeezes gently. Is it an act of charity, I wonder? If I try to enter, it goes soft. But still, it is sweet.

“Go to sleep now,” she repeats.

“I'll try.” I say, but I know I won't be able to. My nightmare images merge with hers. I think of the way she lived at Auschwitz and how even when she was dropping with fatigue she had to be aware of what was going on around her—some-one being suffocated in her bed for her rations, or her boots. Alert to the approach of danger, I can't imagine what she went through though for years. I've tried to, tried to depict parts of her experience in my films. But I always stopped before the gates to Auschwitz—there is a region that shouldn't be
touched. It would invite participation in the Nazi crimes—sadomasochism, even pornography—inviting us to peer with the guard through the small window into the showers where people were being gassed. The only thing Hannah would let me film was her life “before,” in an impoverished Romanian village that would have been of little interest if we didn't inevitably imagine the box cars waiting with their open doors.

In those transports, people died every day. I'm sure I would have gotten a cough or a stomach ailment—shit out my insides. I was always something of a sissy. Even when I had a headache or a bad tooth I was afraid, complained, needed to be tended. My only danger now is my failing brain. Looking up at the huge worm-eaten beams above my head, I wonder if my dreams are messages. Watch out, they are telling me, you are about to fall. Notice how you shuffle off balance when you walk, almost falling when you hit a tiny crack in the pavement. The well, the mud, show me where it will end. All my efforts to remain alert, to be vigilant—will fail.