After Auschwitz: A Love Story (13 page)

At the same time, I hear the boy's high-pitched voice on the next terrace and, peering through the lattice, I can see his head moving along under the laundry hung up to dry. He is talking to the young
signora,
his voice full of polite respect for the grown-up. After a minute or so, he puts his head against the lattice.

“I have to go out now for a while,” he says. “I'm going to help with the shopping and maybe get a treat.”

I am amazed by the disappointment I feel that I can't have him right away. If I had ever had a child, I would have had a grandchild like this boy. I remember when my friends, when we were in our sixties, all together as if they've been choreographed, switched from talking about their children to talking about their grandchildren. Their delight seems to stem partly from being able to enjoy them without responsibility. Without anxiety, everything the baby does is exciting, promising. Maybe that's how I have to learn to think about getting old; I have to find what is going on in my body and mind interesting, but at a distance. Like a Buddhist.

I do wish though that people could maintain their looks the way Hannah's big black cat Mignon does. Her fur is still full and glossy. She moves a little stiffly, but there is nothing that is visibly disfigured like my arthritic hands, all gnarled and twisted.

The next afternoon his “mother” lets him come to me for the afternoon
merènda.
I told her we had just received a fresh honeycomb from Todi, from our bees there. Our caretaker had something to do in Rome and brought it with him. I took Roberto into our tiny kitchen.

“It's so small,” he said and I explained that we used to eat out a lot. He nods politely and carries his plate out to the terrace. Honey is dripping down his face. I tie a napkin around his neck.

“When I was small I used to get a net for my head and then I could go with our caretaker to watch him smoke the bees and take out the frames full of honey from the hive.”

“Does it hurt them, the bees?

“No, they'll come back after a while and make more. It's just to keep from getting bites.”

“I had a bite once,” he said, “and my mommy put mud on it … my real mommy.” Then he sat quietly.

This is the kind of quiet that lasts a lifetime.

“They are buried in the English cemetery. My mother was English. I saw their grave,” he adds. “It is under a tree, big as this.” He held his arms wide. “It's at the very edge of the cemetery next to the wall. Soon there won't be any more room for new graves and then people will have to stop dying.” He gave a strangled laugh and was quiet again.

Were they really buried there? I wondered. I thought you had to be famous. Like Keats with the obituary he wrote for himself.
Here lies one whose name was writ in water
is etched on the chaste stone that gives you a pang every time you look at it.

“Would you like me to read to you?” I asked him after a couple of minutes. He was frowning slightly and I thought I saw the beginning of tears. He had his book with him in a little sack. He sat down next to me on the white sofa, and I began to read about Dorothy and Ozma and the wicked Nome King. I wonder if he has picked this story because of the family turned to stone—no, to glass or porcelain—by the Nome.

As if reading my mind, Roberto put his hand on my biceps. “You have a strong muscle,” he said hopefully.

“I used to,” I said. “But now—I know some magic tricks, tricks with cards. Maybe some day I'll show you.”

Some days are worse than others. Following my own advice to cuddle more, I try when I wake up early to hug Hannah and lie next to her, spoon fashion. But she says it keeps her from getting back to sleep and rolls away from me with a perfunctory pat. I groan. She pays no attention.

What if she tires of me and my sagging flesh? No, after all these years I don't think she will. But perhaps I should encourage her to go out more and see friends. Still, she has her work and there she is at her typewriter—old as Methuselah—writing yet another book of witness. I wonder if I am using too much of her life in my scribbles here. I once told her she could say anything she wanted about me. What did she say then? Probably only “Thank you.” She knew from the beginning she would write what she wanted.

When Hannah reminded me that our friend Lucian's funeral was at four this afternoon, I got an awful headache. Somehow I had managed to forget that he died. Then when she told me, for a minute I thought it was my mother's funeral she was talking about. My brother said our mother had a better funeral than she deserved. Friends appeared who hadn't seen her in years: the daughter of a famous judge, artists, members of the Senate and friends of my doctor father paid their respects. Father had been in the Senate, too, working on Liberal health bills. He would have been in favor of the vaccine to protect young girls from sexually transmitted disease that caused such an uproar here when it was first introduced. Senators beat their breasts and poured out eloquence against the idea of such things in a Catholic country. Are these children going to have intercourse? Are we encouraging schoolchildren to have sex?

I'm unable now to get as far as the toilet, and I throw up in the sink. After three bouts it got plugged up and Hannah had to call Erminia's husband to clear it—the same man who fixed the big pot on the terrace when it blew over in the storm. He's really a mason but doesn't mind doing our odd jobs.

When he came, he was very kind and suggested chamomile tea. That made me feel like a child again. My peasant nurse used to prescribe that too—I never liked it. I must have been a difficult child. Getting sick was one of the ways I used to get attention. Or at least I tried, but my mother couldn't be lured to my bedside, she had a horror of germs and would never come near me. If I seemed seriously ill, say with bronchitis, she'd hire a nurse. I remember one of them wore a stiff white uniform and put mustard plasters on my chest. I cried and cried but my mother never came.

Even after the vomiting subsided I kept getting surges of stomach acid in my throat. I told Hannah I didn't think I was up to going to the funeral. She looked at me with that slight curl of the lip that expresses a suppressed criticism and offered me a panoply of pills. The standard one—what is it,
Lomatil?
And charcoal, which usually worked but this time did not. Hannah was angry.

“You know you have to go anyway,” she said finally, stating the obvious.

“Well, he won't know will he?” I said. “And it's not like I have a Nazi
capo
counting me present for a work detail.”

Then I apologized. That was a terrible thing to say—or maybe I just thought it. I hate it when I don't live up to my view of myself as empathetic, warm, and caring. But right now I was having trouble feeling anything but my gut.

“Of course, I'll go,” I said. “Poor old Lucian. Life had become a burden to him.” He was one of the last friends from my younger days. “How could I even think of not going?”

Hannah hugged me and went to look in my closet for my dark suit and a proper shirt. I pushed her aside and found them myself. I was always something of a dandy, a smart dresser, though recently I'd downgraded to khakis and blue work shirts. The only sign of my former self is that they're tailor-made.

I remember going to a jazz club with Lucian and his wife, Gabriella. Lucian used to be an attractive man. He had a
slew of girlfriends before he settled down with her. It's hard to believe he is gone, vanished from the earth. No, not vanished but about to be reabsorbed; he'll be held down by shovelfuls of dirt. I wish I could imagine him reborn in flowers and plants sprung from his body. I wish I could promise myself that I would plant something on his grave, but I knew that I might only do it once and find reasons to forget it. I'd like my ashes to be buried in one of those green cemeteries next to a brook. No funeral.

As for funerals in general, I've sometimes had a little frisson of pleasure at the thought that it isn't me. Isn't me who choked in the night on a cough drop and had a heart attack. It isn't me who bent over to lace his sneaker for a run and fell face down on the pavement. But now it was different. I had seen Lucian with his urine bag and his wool cap, his face covered with stubble, and I was horrified. And what horrified me was that I was slowly moving towards that state. I didn't feel a saving distance between us. But Hannah was right, I had to go.

To encourage myself in the proper thoughts, I took out the packet of Christmas letters Lucian had sent me over the years. Nothing Christmassy—or Jewish for that matter—just lively descriptions of life with Gabriella. One I particularly liked had a picture of a family of ducklings on their lawn by the lake. Apparently the duck had laid her eggs in the bushes and when they hatched she wasn't able to get them down the very steep incline to the water. There must have been a drop-off too. Eventually Lucian carried them down, the mother duck following along anxiously. He was a good man, Lucian. He cared about people. I want to stir up my feeling for him but I can't find it. Only a slight trace of anger at him for removing himself. With him and George gone, there'll be just Gabriella and the memories of her much-loved brother, Primo.

At the cemetery I think I somehow expected a crowd like the one that followed his coffin. Would a reader nowadays
understand the reference? You'd think as an Italian he would at least know the name and be able to say by rote: a great writer Primo Levi, one of the greatest in our time. But what would it mean to him? What remnants of a moral vision are left in our modern consumerist Italy? The economic miracle without a soul.

By now only the grandchildren of survivors are alive and the very old like me. Of course I had read Primo's books about Auschwitz. I'd admired his lucidity, his absence of rage at his persecutors, wondered how he could sustain these things; apparently he couldn't. In the end he succumbed, hurled himself down the stairwell of his mother's house. People said it was a delayed reaction to Auschwitz. That made it murder, not suicide, and allowed him to remain a hero. One can think that one is suffering at facing the future and instead be suffering because of one's past. I think he said that, though he didn't mean it in the Freudian sense. Then too he thought a lot about suicide. He talks in particular about an Austrian philosopher tortured by the Gestapo. This man, Amery, unable to forget what he'd been through, became incapable of finding joy in life, in living itself. That makes me feel that I am on the right track in soaking myself in whatever pleasure I find.

Just now a great flock of starlings went by, turning the sky dark with the beating of wings. Off to a new roosting place, I suppose. Primo found solace reciting Dante's Ulysses canto in which, if I remember correctly, Ulysses wants to sail to the ends of the known earth. Was hubris his sin?

It was enough to see the rabbi recite the
kaddish
to throw me back to that awful day. Back then, another spring morning, Hannah couldn't stop crying. Primo had called her in despair a few days before his death, and she had responded to him as if he had a headache, lecturing him on setting an example for the rest of them, the survivors.

“You couldn't have known,” I told her. It seemed impossible that the man who had looked at the worst human beings
can do to each other, that this man had done violence to himself. SAVED BUT DROWNED the newspapers trumpeted. TURIN MOURNS THE MAESTRO. But his funeral itself was like a silent movie. There were no noisy speeches. The widow in black and dark glasses walked behind him. So did she, of course, Gabriella. Delayed homicide, the rabbi had called it, so that he could be buried with honor. The Jews, like the Christians and Muslims, think of suicide as a sin and bury suicides in a separate unconsecrated part of the cemetery.

Hannah thought it wasn't the camps that had destroyed him; she insisted it was a love problem, an affair with a German woman. This seemed strange but she insisted, though she wouldn't tell me how she knew. And just now there was a biography that hinted at the same thing. His sister hated it, of course, and I put both biographies away somewhere and now I can't find them. I have some bookshelves set under the gable windows. I put them there when I was agile enough to crawl in and retrieve them. Anyway, I thought that Primo was worn down by the difficulties of living virtually imprisoned by his aged blind mother. Living with her was as much a litmus test of character as living in the Lager. Later, one of his biographers said, there had been a woman. I think he said a German woman, though I can't remember if he thought it was a love affair. Primo tended to have Platonic relations.

Now grave keepers have taken the fake grass from the grave and Lucian's coffin is lowered down. The rabbi chants the twenty-third psalm. I had wondered if there would be a nod to his Jewish roots. Then there were three short speeches at the grave side, one about his work for the World Health Organization, making films showing the correct way to plant and harvest crops in developing countries; another about his past as a Red on the Hollywood blacklist; and a third by a close friend who told about the wonderful rose garden Lucian had created near his country house on the lake outside Rome—almost a hundred species.

The roses lifted my spirits slightly but I kept looking down at the simple black coffin and remembering Edger Allan Poe's fear of being buried alive. If I had spoken I'd have told about Lucian's love of conversation. His memory was still intact, probably the only thing that was, and he loved to reminisce about his time in Hollywood and Mexico. You probably think the worse of me for not speaking, but since my mother died, I've hated funerals and avoided them whenever I could.

I think strain makes my memory worse. I mean stress, the stress of Lucian's funeral. Gabriella with pain with her leg, used an elegant cane. I need a brain cane. And while I'm thinking of it, it is really silly to keep calling her by an assumed name. Anyone who knows anything about Primo Levi will know she is his sister. And I have only good things to say about her. She is still beautiful, fine featured, elegant.