After Auschwitz: A Love Story (2 page)

Looking at her, I wondered, not for the first time, whether she had been raped in the camps. But she said no. A young soldier had mocked her, spit on her, said that if she were a little older he would have taken her to bed, but no, no rape. I took the red washcloth off its peg and kneeling beside the tub, gently rubbed her back, her shoulders. She lifted her legs one after the other and I ran the cloth over them.

“Did your mother ever do this?” I asked.

She snorted. “I could never have imagined such a thing—with eight children to care for! Besides, we had no running water except what fell on us from the sky, dripping or pouring from the thatch of our hut. Sometimes we collected it in whatever bowl or tub came to hand or went down to the river with buckets. If it was winter we'd have to break through the ice.”

“You sound angry. If it's at me, I'm sorry if I offended you.”

“It's not you. It's not even the hut and its leaky thatch. It just reminds me of my mother—so infuriatingly accepting of everything. For instance, she always said it was impossible to feed so many mouths. Then one day I saw from her swollen belly that she was pregnant again. ‘What?' I said, ‘I thought we were too many already.'”

“‘Shhh. It's God's will,' mother said. But I had grown up on the farm watching animals in rut. ‘I thought you slept with
Papa,' I answered, and she slapped me across the mouth. So where was God that he didn't see how it was with us?”

Hannah sighed and slipped lower in the tub. I reached for the end of her blond plait, undid it and washed her hair, scratching her scalp, turning her head from side to side.

One of the cats slipped into the bathroom. The big black one—her favorite (she had five)—stood on its hind feet and peered into the tub, quizzical.

“I'll never have children,” she told me soon after she moved into my apartment on Corso Vittorio near the river. I'd had two wives but no children. Now that I'd found a woman I thought I could stay with, I would have liked to have children, but Hannah was adamant. “How could I bring up a child? Tell him about the camps? Make him drunk on the milk of Auschwitz? I see what happens to my sister's children. How fearful they are without knowing why. My cats are enough. My cats and you….” She lurched up in the tub and grabbed at my arm.

“You're getting soap all over me,” I laughed, but she didn't let go, looking at me with green glinting mermaid eyes. “I shouldn't let you care for me this way. It's too good. Too much what I want. What if you leave me?”

“I won't,” I murmur. “Why do you tell yourself sad stories? The nightmare is over. Let yourself trust.”

“I've lost everything—my language, my family. I can't lose you.”

“Stop it. Stop yourself. It's over now.” I found myself shaking her. My hands holding her shoulders covered with soap.

“Our neighbor offered me a place to hide,” she went on, holding the thread of her memory. “In her cellar. But my mother wouldn't think of letting me go. She stood rubbing her hands on her apron and looking up at the sky, waiting for a sign while God spit on her.”

“You're so angry.” I pulled her even closer, ignoring the
water soaking my clothes. “But still you sleep with a piece of your mother's embroidered apron beneath your pillow.” She nodded. It was all she had left. I didn't tell her then, but I had a plan to frame that scrap of mother love and surprise her by hanging it above her desk.

The irony is that I couldn't stand the burden. I stood it for many years and I can't say they were unhappy years, but it was too much—to be there, to be always available to her. Always soothing, helping. Twenty years of married care. It was too much. I felt mean, small, but I couldn't respond anymore to the endless physical ailments. I didn't only have to sympathize, I had to talk her down. So brave as a child but now always fearful, lost in the streets in front of our house, expecting cancer, heart attacks. She had fears about losing our apartment, fears about travel. Once she had to get off the train when we were going for a preview of one of my films.

I'm not sure when it started with Claudia. At first it was sort of a joke. When I was making my film,
Journey into Madness,
about a schizophrenic girl, the actress I had cast as the therapist had no breasts, but my dentist's wife Claudia's were superb. I asked Claudia to double in a few key shots and she was just vain enough to let me display her body. Or maybe she was impressed that I was a famous director.

One of my films had just won an Academy Award for best foreign film of the year. I now had the unexpected luxury of being able to make whatever films I wanted. I wrote a script about a girl who is in crisis after a terrible automobile accident. When she is brought to the hospital, she is in a near-catatonic state, unable to move or speak; wrapped in mummy bandages, no longer struggling. Only if you looked closely you could see the skin of her mouth quiver. A Picasso world where eyes, noses, teeth hung crazily, known but unrecognized. And all
seen in a glaring light making everything shiny and smooth. Metallic voices. Words without meaning spoken by puppets. No warmth anywhere.

Her parents visit and seem just as frozen. Rich, spoiled people who couldn't be bothered. Blind to her suffering. Making social chitchat with her doctors. Too bad she couldn't be like her younger sister, they simper, a perfect, beautiful, gifted child.

I had a perfect sibling too. Although of course I loved my brother, he always outclassed me; he was always more handsome, humble, modest, and appealing. Despite my successes in writing and directing, my brother was always my mother's favorite.

So I put my heart into this film. I was daring. I wanted to convert the girl's inner world to something an audience could experience. I wanted to make them see the sudden shifts. Frame 1: A child plays in the schoolyard. She is looking at the fence. Seeing it with the exactness of a camera. Frame 2: But now she doesn't recognize it. The singing children become prisoners. She cries in anguish. The school grows immense, and presses against her. The children are like ants. She shakes the grating, trying to get out.

I needed to show how the strangeness descends on the girl. Children are skipping rope. Suddenly one grows large as a lion, her features distorted. One, two, buckle my shoe. The girl is like Alice in a more dangerous Wonderland. Sometimes she fights the distortions, but more often she thinks of succumbing to what she calls the System, feels as if she is whirling on an infinite plane, crushed by the pitiless light. She wanders lost in an astral cold, terrified. She feels that if she sinks far enough into the System, she will stop feeling terror. I use painters to help me imagine her world: Dali with his bleak planes and distorted objects.

While I was shooting the film, I thought of my mother unable to bear any more of her voices as she was dragged
deeper and deeper into her madness.

I thought of Hannah, too, making my own connections between the Gestapo guards and the elaborate punitive rules imposed on the schizophrenic girl by the System. Hannah described the inventive cruelty of the concentration camp matrons and the rage they inspired. The girl in my film has similar rages which I imagined in red tumor-like shapes, cancerous flowers, huge red mouths pulsing with the desire to eat, white stamens stark against the red like a Bosch painting. Some shapes with legs and arms kicking or striking. Some in the act of swallowing.

“I hate everyone,” the girl says. “I want to blow up the world. Steal people's brains and leave them as robots obedient to my will.” Her psychiatrist sits beside her, arm lightly around her shoulders and for the first time the frozen nature of things begins to thaw; she feels warmth. The therapist's breasts became crucial to the character's development and the relationship between the girl and her therapist in the film: big soft breasts that you could sink into like a pillow. Lying with her head on her therapist's breasts and pretending to nurse, the girl gradually recovers.

The therapist with Claudia's body tells her not to be afraid: she will be protected by her new mama. But the System doesn't let her go so easily. Objects begin to take on a life of their own. The jug with a blue flower asserts itself, comes towards her aggressively. Turning away, she sees a table, a chair—both alive (Alice's
Wonderland
again).

The actress playing the therapist was brilliant. While she held the girl, she would whisper that “she” had a lovely clean body. The therapist always referred to the girl in the third person because hearing the word “you” would send the girl into a panic. Making this come alive on film, I was both the good warm breast and the baby wanting relief. Embarrassing for a grown man to admit, but secretly, making that film before I
left Hannah, I was trying to lessen my burden by making it a refuge.

When the girl feels the bond between herself and her therapist, the whole world starts to glow, warmth flooding her body. She feels the therapist's loving concern. She allows the therapist to feed her and will only take food from her hands.

I made a glowing light suffuse the scene, tinged it with rose—not corny the way it is when the cowboy rides off into the sunset but real and warm space—details of beauty: birds, sand, water. I wanted my audience to see it the way the girl did, suddenly waking to a different world, warm, filled with love. My plan was ambitious. I meant it to rival the great films and to an extent I think I succeeded. But though the reviews were good, people weren't excited by it; it was too subtle—or maybe I was aiming too high.

There are different ways of telling the story of Hannah and me that make me more or less culpable. What, for instance, if my wish for children had become overpowering and Claudia had said she would have one? She sometimes said she wanted one—a little me. But was Claudia really serious? I don't know. It would be just for the purpose of the story. What? Didn't you know that writers always mix fiction and fact?

I don't want to seem like a cad. Even after I “left” Hannah to be with Claudia, I visited Hannah every day for lunch or supper. And at the same time I tried to show her how foolish she was to hang on to me. Why didn't Hannah enumerate my flaws, my defects of character, my narcissism, my egotism, and say to hell with you? Hadn't her life experiences convinced her that there is no everlasting love?

“No, Renzo,” she would say, shaking her head. “It is my reason to keep on living.”

That's the sort of statement that scared me silly. After surviving Auschwitz was she going to die for love? More
cruelly, was I killing her? She seemed to fall into fragments like a broken mirror. But listen, her state wasn't just because of me. Wasn't I the one who encouraged her to work, to put herself back together through her own efforts? In our early years together I read everything she wrote—all those stories about her childhood in the village. I encouraged her to tell the truth about her mother. She was a sainted martyr, yes, all right, turned to soap the first day, but she was also narrow-minded and punitive—always trying to press Hannah into an iron mold, ready to cut off her feet if they wouldn't fit. Just before they were expelled from their village her mother was trying to find a husband for her—at twelve years old.

For years I supported Hannah while she wrote all day, and I read every page in the evening. She never could wait until the next day. And then I took her stories into my heart and gave them new life in films. The village life lent itself to cinema. Colorful and full of a variety of characters. I combined the strongest stories. Hannah helped me with the screen plays. It brought us closer. My favorite story was based on her father—a kosher butcher who had only a donkey to draw his cart. His wife continually berates him for being a bad provider. Then one day he finds an emaciated horse and, full of joy, brings it back to his family, where the poor animal succumbs despite the children's frantic efforts to save it. People loved these stories; they were quite successful both in print and on the screen. Without me Hannah might not have found the courage to start.

I swing forward and backward in time. So many hours and minutes of peace.

“What are you doing?” she asked me one Sunday morning in our mythic beginning when she saw me stirring eggs in the frying pan.

“Making one of my specialties,” I said.

“If you're trying to scramble them, turn the heat up.” She laughed, seeing me in my apron, thinking I didn't know how.

“Go away,” I said. “There isn't room for two. I can barely turn around. I'll call you when it's ready.”

“Are you really doing this?” she asked me. Back then, not many men could be seen in the kitchen. I shooed her out and went back to my stirring. I actually enjoyed the feeling of the egg against my spoon. If you stir over a very low heat, it slowly thickens and becomes ambrosial. Its slowness was like my patience in dealing with Hannah. I called her in and served the eggs. Then I took her on my lap. She slanted her eyes at me suspiciously but she let me offer her a spoonful.

“One for you,” I said, “and one for me. Isn't it delicious?”

“You're spoiling me,” she said though she kept on eating. When she finished I sang her a little lullaby. I hadn't planned either to cook, or to sing—they came naturally and I was encouraged because she let herself relax and enjoy them. She reminded me of a wild kitten that lurked in the tall grass near the back door of our family villa outside of Todi. Constanza, our cook, would put out milk for her, milk the little one would only drink after we retreated into the dark depth of the house.

“Trust me,” I said to Hannah, rocking her gently. “You can trust me.” I'm not sure even now if that was true. Then I carried her back to bed and stroked her all over for a long time before entering her. She let me take care of her and she blossomed.

After I left, I still helped her. I helped her get other jobs writing scripts and then a few long feature articles for a glossy mass-market magazine. I remember her pride when the first article came out under her byline. She wanted to write about deviants: homosexuals, transsexuals, beggars—or female creativity. Her boss wasn't interested. He kept shunting her onto more anodyne topics. He was the typical chauvinist male, puffing big cigars and blowing smoke in her face.