After Auschwitz: A Love Story (3 page)

When I moved out to live with Claudia, near Hannah's and my apartment, he tried to lure Hannah into bed with the subtlety of a Roman bus. When I came over for lunch, Hannah would tell me the latest outrageous things he'd done. She was a great mimic. “This is how he looked,” she said one particularly upsetting day, puffing out her chest to look at her watch. ‘I have two hours away from the office. Let's not waste it, let's fuck.'”

“Did he really say that?”

“And pushed against me with his erection. He's a pig.”

“If he bothers you again, I'll speak to him. I'm still your husband.”

“He knows you don't live with me anymore,” she said accusingly, then immediately cancelled the accusation with a smile. “To soothe myself I made love with Carlos.”

“Isn't he gay?” I'd asked, surprised.

“He wanted to help, he was very tender, we stayed in bed for hours.”

I didn't like hearing these things but I put on a tender expression and held her hand. My friends thought I was crazy. I should make a clean break. They couldn't understand our lunch dates—every day for twenty years! In the end it was Claudia I broke up with.

These days, when people ask “How are you?”—in their cheerful ignorant way—I want to give them the suit I read about, the one that scientists put on young doctors to help them understand what the aging body feels like. How it drags you down. It was ingenious: there were even glasses that fogged your eyes and weights that made moving exhausting and gave you pains in your joints.

People say age encroaches gradually, on little fog feet, as it were, tiptoeing along the veins and arteries until suddenly one morning you wake up and see death grinning at you over the
counterpane. But the worst aspect of aging, the one you don't speak about if you are unlucky enough to suffer it, is what happens to your mind.

In the beginning Hannah and I joked about my forgetting phone numbers, book plots, restaurant names. Even though she was so much younger, she claimed to be forgetful too. She wasn't though, and more and more her whole existence was taken up by Remembrance.

Lists she told me, make lists. But wait. Did I tell you that I was married for twenty years to Hannah before I left to live with Claudia, and then that I spent another twenty years visiting Hannah every day for lunch? I kept it up until she had a nearly fatal heart attack and I asked her to let me come back. It's amazing, don't you think? That she would forgive me and let me come back? But there was also humiliation. I was so diminished. And despite her heart attack, from which she quickly recovered, she was so much stronger.

The other day I bought her a beautiful book that I noticed in the window of a bookstore next to our palazzo, an early edition of Petrarch's sonnets. I put papers in to mark the sweetest love songs—the ones I could no longer sing. She took it back, and I'm sure she apologized to the bookstore owner; told him about her poor husband who can't find his way in the world anymore; who didn't grasp the impossible price. How humiliating. I fear it is just the beginning.

Yesterday I tried to give her five euros to help with the rent and she patted my cheek. “Thank you, Renzo,” she said, “how sweet,” the way you'd thank a child who gave you play money.

I went into my studio and cried. Opened one of my books and saw the list of my titles, my poetry, my films, and my honors. I re-read and fondled the framed awards and statuettes: the Oscar from Hollywood, the Golden Palm from
Cannes, the two Golden Lions from Venice, and the one I was most proud of, the
Sol Plaatje
award for my poetry. That cheered me but I still felt confused about the details of our life. Who paid the bills? The rent? Was Hannah in control? Of course not. I started to laugh. All I had to do was stay calm and the facts came back to me. I was the one who paid the bills and planned our finances. I had ever since our early days. My God, I taught her everything she knew. I sat her down every month and we went over the checkbook together. She hated doing it and the balance was always slightly off. But finally she had it down well enough.

I repeat like a litany the ways I encouraged Hannah's strengths. How I kept on urging her to write more about her village and her childhood; read her drafts, corrected her Italian, and finally, how I taught her to fall in love with natural beauty, the woods and streams. Despite the poverty it seemed like the Garden of Eden before the expulsion of Adam and Eve by the flaming angel with his sword.

I loved her village stories and I urged her to go further and write a memoir—everything else had been in the third person—about the expulsion and transport. I wanted to do a film about it and suggested she interview her neighbors, see how much they understood of what had happened. She wasn't sure she could.

“Not one of the women raised a finger to help us,” she said. “They just stood by on the edge of the road and stared as the Nazis—some of them their husbands and sons—drove us like cattle going to market, beating us with sticks. Some of the women even joined in, throwing stones, people who'd sat in my mother's kitchen just days before or gossiped with her on market day.”

I could see the scene begging me to shoot it. A flashback to the market with the piles of luscious fruit, grapes, pears, and melons, and the two girls holding hands as they looked or
picking up the pennies that the horse traders sometimes threw to get them out of the way. Then I cut to her friend, staring along with the other women, tears in her eyes.

One day in the early sixties, urged on by me and buoyed by the success of her first novel,
Nobody Could Love You,
she got up the courage to visit her village. We boarded the Orient Express from Vienna to Romania. Hearing German on the train made her shiver.

“Tickets please,” the conductor said, bending towards us.

She turned away, pressing herself against me, clinging, my arm around her. I tried to imagine how German sounded to her after that ride in a cattle car as a child of twelve. How all trips now are tainted—she still gets sick anytime she has to travel—and all sounds in that guttural language are curses. Even the raucous schoolboys in the next car are a threat. I wondered whether I had made a mistake.

When we arrived in the village with our handheld video camera, the villagers clustered around us. Hannah had brought a small icebox for a friend of her mother's, the only one she remembered. Her village had just gotten electricity, powered by boys taking turns on a bicycle. The villagers were excited by the gift but not particularly grateful—and she was right: they showed a complete lack of curiosity about what had happened to her family.

Hannah remembered several of the women, quite old now, by their gestures or a feature—a mole, a way of speaking. She had brought things for their children. “How is your mother?” one elderly woman asked her, as though she had not seen the soldiers driving them out, her mother wailing. Willed blindness, Hannah called it.

“When we were driven through the countryside with bare feet in the winter,” she told me after the old woman had moved on, “our feet covered with chilblains, bleeding, putrid, most people turned away. Only a few threw pieces of bread from their windows, and then quickly shut them.”

I wanted to show the blindness of the villagers alongside their welcoming hugs—the split between kindness and indifference to a brutal reality. I still fancied myself a therapist, showing Hannah how to trust. I was blind to the hurt I caused. I'd always felt the need to take care of the women in my family, my mother, my little sister.

Uneasy at first, Hannah soon wanted to look for her hut among the picturesque houses clustered around a central well. The houses were rough and unadorned, made of wood, with thatched roofs. Hers was nowhere to be found, though we searched the alleys where chickens and pigs rooted and scratched.

“These are palaces compared with mine,” she said, as I trailed her with my camera. “Ours had so many holes in the roof we might as well have been out in the rain.” She took a deep breath here, almost as if she were calling up a life force, and then went on. “You can imagine the eight of us jammed together in one bed. Papa and Mama in their bed behind a sheet where we could hear the noises of lovemaking. We listened with acute interest, just the way we watched the farm animals rutting. Dogs with their tongues hanging out spilling moisture, their red penises searching for the bitches' hole. After seeing two horses mate—the stallion so huge and impressive, I masturbated for the first time. From then on I was intensely interested in my brothers' morning erections.” She laughed and pressed my hand.

I loved picturing her as a Rousseauian savage, barefoot, her clothes triple-patched, watching sex without neurosis. I exaggerated her freedom. There were always the straightened clothes, the harsh scrubbing of neck and face, the sharp tongue, the ill-tempered pronouncements of what a girl could and should do. Hannah was willing to have me bring out the earthy rebelliousness of her life in the village, but she always circled back not just to the Nazis but to her mother: sometimes blaming her for waiting so passively to be saved; at other times
recalling with dreadful precision every slap and harsh word her mother had ever spoken.

When we first slept together, she told me afterwards, she was thinking of what her mother would have said. “She would have hated everything I've done since she died,” she said with a crooked smile that rose slightly on only one side, giving her a lopsided look, half indulgent, half angry.

“Aren't you exaggerating?” I asked her.

“Look,” she counted on her fingers. “The worst was that I married a
goy.
Second, that I've given up my religion, or at least she'd think I have. I don't go to temple not even to say
kaddish.
Then I don't have children. At least there would have been some hope because they'd be Jewish. And,” she reached her pinky, “she would certainly hate my cats. All eight of them. Animals were for food, not to have as pets. She'd be scandalized that I let them lie in bed with me, and drink a little milk from my saucer while I'm having my latte. Even the way I spend my time writing. It was enough for her that I learned Hebrew, taught by an ugly old man who switched my legs when I was slow to answer.”

When Hannah first met her, my mother was at the piano playing Chopin. “What beautiful music,” Hannah said shyly, “and such an elegant woman. I can't imagine growing up in a place like this. Paintings of ancestors, tapestries, oriental rugs.”

Our family villa was at the edge of the Borghese Gardens, surrounded by ancient pines. I remember how excited I was to have these two beloved women in one room. My mother was so gracious, going to Hannah and kissing her on both cheeks.

All my life I've been a romantic—at least since the age of three, when I told my mama I was going to marry her when I grew up. The energy for each love glowed inside me like a warm beating heart. But in proportion to the beauty I saw in
each beloved woman, my disillusionment when it came was total: sometimes it was something seemingly trivial like a lover's laugh that suddenly became ribald, turning my beloved from a princess into a whore.

But there was never anything like that with Hannah. What I fell in love with was partly the image of myself in her mysterious green eyes: savior, caretaker, magician. How could I keep that up without destroying my substance, without being eaten from the inside? A therapist might have said I was caring for her like a mother, but I don't think that would have helped me keep it up. The weight of it was crushing. Claudia was the way out. Claudia, my dentist's wife, often helped out as his assistant, though it seemed to me she was as bored and hostile to him as I was. My teeth, though white and even, were soft and riddled with cavities. I could imagine some therapist peering into them looking for my secrets. I often fixed my eyes on her full breasts when she bent close to me to hand her husband some instrument. I convinced myself she was unhappy and fantasized about taking her breasts in my mouth, distracting myself from whatever torture her husband was engaged in.

When I first wrenched myself away from Hannah, I started a journal with the purpose of keeping track of how she was adjusting: taking vital signs. I sniff the pages and the book comes alive—slightly acrid, dusty. It falls open on a shock that I received one night back then: I had been lying in bed in our apartment—Hannah was staying with a friend next door while we figured out our living arrangements. Claudia was away somewhere with her mother. When I heard someone fumbling with a key outside my front door, I felt like a fool for not buying a triple lock. All Romans knew you had to have at least a dead-bolt. My lock was ridiculously easy. Child's play. I sat up just as the door swung open. In that instant I had a vision of guns firing, blunt instruments, death.

“It's me,” Hannah said softly. My heart was beating madly. As I held my hands against it to quiet it, I remembered I hadn't taken back her key. I'd given it to her for emergencies. In a flash she was beside me, arms around me, pulling me down to the bed. “Hold me,” she said between sobs, “please hold me.” I stroked her hair.

“You can't do this, Hannah,” I told her. “You know you shouldn't be here. Or were you torturing yourself with the thought of seeing us together, me and Claudia?”

“This is my home,” she hiccupped. “See, I feel better already.” I undid her arms.

“Please,” she said hugging me to her. “Let me lie down with you.”

“No, I can't,
can't
reward you for …” I wanted to say for bad behavior but I knew she'd be crushed.

“Oh, don't be so sanctimonious,” she said giving me a punch on the shoulder. “What can she give you that I can't? You know I'd do anything just to be with you.”

“Hannah, we've gone over this so many times. Sooner or later you'll see it's the only honest way and you've always prized hon …”