The Belief in Angels (53 page)

Eyn hant.

The
hant
of the girl on the train to Lublin.

To the dark place.

They threw me on the cattle train after dark. I’d been beaten and given
nothing to eat or drink for days. The only reason I remained standing is the number of people pressing at my shoulders, keeping me from falling to the ground.

She found my hand in the dark on the awful train, and I grasped hers and realized in the midst of a train ride to a place I knew meant death that I had already begun to die.

Perhaps I would be dead when we arrived. Starved or dead of thirst.

Don’t think of the thirst.

I kept my mind busy by thinking of the softness of her
hant.

I stole glances at her face in the moonlight. The curve of her brow, her cheek, her lips. I tried not to stare for fear she might take her
hant
away.

We exchanged names and not much more.

Rinna.

In the morning we arrived in the city of Lublin.

We are separated, the men and women. The women are put into trucks and taken away while the men are marched about a half-mile in orderly rows.

Then I stepped into Hell.

I have not forgotten her face or her
hant
—they gave me a reason to reinvent myself again in the midst of that place, they saved me as surely as the Russian soldier whose life I borrowed in the last days.

The soldier Pieter. The defector. The typhoid-carrying Russian whose clothing is stripped from him in the ditch full of sticks. The soldier whose uniform I traded for my tattered clothing.

Why hadn’t I thought to do it sooner? It doesn’t work to think these things now. Now I am here in a Hell that smells like my
foter’s
hair tonic.

The sounds and smells go away again.

I am losing time.

This is what happens when you die. You lose time.

I learned when you have lost time, your understanding of time, time finds you, and time tells the truth. Time will find you and give you your truth if you want it.

Time found me in the hair tonic hospital with the angels in white dresses who cared for me as my broken limbs healed. Both hands and arms are in casts and slings. My left leg in traction.

The nurse who spoke Russian told me many bones in my body had been shattered by the blast of the torpedo. My lung collapsed. My eardrums punctured.

I had been in a coma for weeks.

Six surviving crew members and five surviving passengers. Five Jews.

Am I counted as a Jew or an officer? In Turkey, who is it safe to be now? I know I will become whoever it is safe to be.

The angels with white dresses call me Pieter, and so I am named. They found his papers in the shreds of my uniform. The Romanian uniform. They also found the address for my parents in America, which I kept folded in the bottom of my boot.

I am called Pieter. So it is.

There are others in the large hospital room. We sometimes talk to one another. We mutter occasional words between suspicious glances.

We are all hiding from death.

I don’t recognize anyone from the Mefkura.

Through the pain medication I receive, the conversation is foreign and fragmented. I hear them say the Russians torpedoed the Mefkura and shot the survivors in the waves with machine guns.

But I know those are German soldiers with machine guns around us in the water, not the Russians. I heard German voices.

The captain gave the order to ignore the warning flare and continue sailing.

Why?

He ordered the crew members in the pilothouse to lower a lifeboat and evacuate. No one argued, although we all knew it meant death for the others.

Pieter is present in the pilothouse because of a shift switch with another officer.

There is no time to notify anyone else.

The captain’s order: “Save yourself.” He said this as we loaded into the lifeboat.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? Hillel’s teaching.

It is mere minutes before the Mefkura is illuminated again, then torpedoed.

I am told by the nurses that the Jewish survivors have gone. They are taken up by the other ships traveling with us. The Bulbul and the Morina sailed on. They are home now.

Where are we headed? Palestine. The Promised Land.

Yes. This is where Pieter, now a Romanian crewmember, journeyed.

My intention—killing Pieter when I arrived.

I knew no one in Palestine. I could become anyone. I could become a Jew again.

A survivor.

I thought I could become a person with no past.

But now I don’t know if I have the strength.

Can I be a person with only a future? What is the future?

It is a man who walks out of a ditch and rescues himself.

How can I be this man?

Assemble. Assemble.

Deep in the middle of a dark night, a night spent fighting German murderers who wear Russian uniforms, a new nurse comes to my hospital bed.

I whisper to her, “My name is Szaja Trautman, but he died in the camp.”

Maybe now he is alive again.

“How can a man live without a heart?” I ask.

She whispers back,
iberkumen.

“But I don’t remember what I am surviving for.” At first she is silent; then she leans in close.

Survive for your family who pray they will see you again;

survive for all who could not.

1. Discuss the relationship between Jules and her grandfather. Do you think he made the best decisions for Wendy and his grandchildren? Have you experienced or known grandparents and grandchildren who are closer to one another than to their children and parents?

2. Are you the child or grandchild of someone like Samuel/Szaja (Jules’s grandfather)—someone who has lived through horrible violence? How has that affected your relationship with them? How does the presence of this history affect generations within a family in relation to their ability to connect with one another and form loving relationships within the family and with others?

3.
The Belief in Angels
contains vivid scenes of murder, domestic abuse, drug abuse, and alcoholism. Has reading it altered your perspective on any of these issues?

4. What is the impact of keeping secrets for Samuel/Szaja, Wendy, David, and Jules? How could the revelation of these secrets change their lives? Is there good reason to keep some family secrets?

5. The narrative of
The Belief in Angels
spans a fifty-year time period, from the ’20s through the ’70s. Discuss the cultural changes that happened in those eras. What are the historical and cultural forces at play in Samuel’s refusal to allow Wendy to move back home when she reveals that Howard is abusing her? How about his inability to view art studies as an acceptable college major for Jules?

6. How did you respond to Jules’s struggle to take care of her family? How did that influence the way you responded to Wendy? Did your opinion
of Wendy change as you learned more about her? What about the other family members? Who did you relate with most at the beginning? Did your empathy build for another character as the story progressed?

7. Jules has two drug-induced episodes. What happens and what does she take away from each experience?

8. Both Samuel/Szaja and Jules have episodes of dissociative fugues. Describe the way they are triggered and the way it manifests in each of them, keeping in mind the science of mental disorders and the role genetics vs. environment plays in the disorder process.

9. Throughout the story, Jules describes herself as an alien or outsider. In what ways? How does this shift over time? Does her friendship with Leigh and Timothy influence these feelings? What are your experiences of feeling like an outsider?

10. Jules experiences a recurring nightmare. What is the symbolic meaning of the swordfish within the dream? How does the dream shift in relation to Jules’s experiences throughout the book? What do you think the shifts within the dreams symbolize?

11. Both Jules and Samuel/Szaja experience moments of profound sadness and isolation. How do they resolve their personal doubts with their spiritual beliefs?

12. Both Jules and Samuel/Szaja experience many moments of angel-like intervention. Where in the novel did you find evidence of this possibility? Have you had experiences that support your belief in divine intervention?

13. If the character Moses were a metaphor, what do you think he would represent in the context of this book?

THANK YOU TO Mr. Viden, whose encouragement meant more to me than he could probably imagine. I’ve kept your words.

Thank you to the late Professor Nadeau for not kicking me out of playwriting class for my bad behavior, for your sage words, and, most of all, for your droll humor.

Thank you to Jane Shepard for telling me not to “give up the sheep” so many years ago. I am passing that encouragement back to you.

Thank you to Delia Taylor, who read the awful beginning things and still loved me.

Thank you to the talented Writers of the Clear Moon: Dan Amato for all his sweetness in the midst of the most gruesome moments of artistic futility and for reminding me about the way a story unfolds; Brian Joyner, who consistently comes to our meetings with structure and purpose, and whose motivation is contagious and inspiring; Stacy Magic, who redirected our intent from finishing to publication; and Phyllis Olins, for your kind support and tenacious notes as a beta reader. You reminded me that I am a storyteller, and you connected me to truth and authenticity, which is the curve I continually crave.