Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die: A Novel Read online

  She asked him, “Did you talk to Jud about the part?”

  “Yes, dear. He’s not sure yet.”

  “He’s cast most of the other parts already.”

  “We’ve cast,” Rovic corrected her gently. “This is a Workshop production, not a Broadway circus.”

  Janet moaned, “You know what I mean, Daddy. It’s a good part and I want it. Did he say I was too young?”

  “No, but I imagine that will be the only problem.”

  “Oh, please,” she said, “please don’t let the age thing kill my chances.”

  Rovic looked at her, watching her pretty oval face crinkle into unhappiness. “I want you to play the girl,” he said. “I think you can do it beautifully. But Jud is the director, and you have to convince him.”

  “Then at least promise me I can read for him.”

  “I’ll try and exact that oath from Jud this afternoon. Now, can you get through the day?”

  He stood up and touched her black, shiny hair in dismissal.

  “Do you think Jud wants Marianne to play it instead of me?” she murmured.

  He grinned. “If you’re trying to prove you’re a born actress, you’re doing splendidly, Janet. No, I don’t think so. Anyway, she’s going to make a movie.”

  Rovic listened to his daughter reply, trying to recall if years ago her voice had sounded more natural, more right for a young girl, than this breathy, actress’s sound that projected attitudes instead of feelings. He watched her as she stood in a characteristic young woman’s slouch (at least the posture was genuine): back curved inward, youthful belly pushed slightly forward. Since she was nervous this morning the slouch was exaggerated, her make-up was careless, and her low-lidded brown eyes seemed unable to focus on him.

  “She might change her mind,” Janet was saying.

  “Subject closed,” he said firmly.

  “All right.” She smiled. “I’ll go and cut flowers like a sad Chekhov heroine.” Janet started to leave, then stopped and said, as an afterthought: “How are you feeling?”

  “Oh, get out,” Rovic said.

  She was gone, leaving a trace of lilac scent. Rovic took a cigarette from a box on the coffee table, placed it between his thin, pale lips, and puffed lightly, his way of trying to satisfy the old habit of years without breaking the doctor’s orders. It kept the mouth busy, and if he puffed hard enough he got a sniff, if not a taste, of the tobacco.

  Outside, pigeon wings cast slippery shadows on the stone sill. The gulping sounds the birds made were usually familiar and pleasant. This morning they annoyed him. They seemed inappropriate to a morning in November, and they accentuated his feeling of being a convalescent. He dropped the cigarette and went to the window to look out at the chill rippling of the river.

  His mind was taken up, suddenly, with Jud’s face—roundish, serious, with a grave, listening expression and clear, blue eyes. Jud had become his acting student five years ago. He was a bad actor, lacking a certain physicality, an identification with his own body, that a fine actor must have. But Jud and he were in immediate rapport about the theater. Running the Workshop and his private classes, Paul had gotten caught up in the mechanics of teaching, while Jud was living in a furnished room in the Village, night-clerking in a hotel and burning with ideas he wanted to put on a stage.

  Louise took a certain pleasure in pointing out that it was a banal situation—the older teacher, the young director. It a was as if Jud had taken up in a direct line where he had left off when he’d begun to teach more and more for financial security, when he’d begun to turn down plays that seemed risky ventures, and when reviews sloughed off his work, or on occasion, failed to mention it at all.

  There was more to it that Louise could not possibly know. Jud’s distaste for the superficial work all around them, and his ability to demonstrate in class productions that he had ways of getting at the truth under the skin of a play, had a direct reverberation in Paul’s memory. It was the way he himself thought, the driving thinking behind the few successes he had had as a young director in the early thirties.

  It was flattering, too, the way Jud treated Paul—a mixture of friendship and respect and family feeling. This last was particularly important to Paul. It had been a great disappointment to him when, after giving birth to Janet, Louise was told she could not have any more children. The doctors had doubted the possibility of a successful birth the first time. So she had submitted to having her tubes tied off and Paul had been forced to forgo his desire to be the head of a big family. Then Jud came, his own family ashes and smoke over Europe, anxious to gather together a new family without delay.

  Rovic thought again of Jud and what he had survived. And behind this thought there came a feeling that replaced the rootless sadness of a moment before; it was a fugitive feeling, but it was one of joy.

  “Louise, he won’t promise anything,” Janet moaned.

  Her mother took it calmly. “Don’t sit on the bed just after it’s been made.”

  “Oh, who cares about that? What am I going to do?”

  Louise smiled at her in genuine affection. “Just fear God and do right. That’s an old motto—of the French kings, I think.”

  “Well, it can’t have been such a good motto. They don’t have kings in France any more.”

  “That’s true. You’d better forget that one.”

  “And try Jud?”

  “No-o-o. First let me try Joe Lear.”

  “I don’t know, Louise. I think he’s supposed to be only for money. He’s not going to be involved on the production end.”

  “Wait, my girl, just wait. The fever will strike Joe Lear. When a businessman catches fire for the theater, it makes Stanislavski’s passion look like an adolescent crush.”

  Janet grew excited. “How should we approach it? Shall I come along? What are you going to say?”

  “We’ll see. But in the meantime, get off that damned beautiful bedspread!”

  Janet jumped up. “I don’t see what’s so important about the way a bedroom looks. Outside of sleeping, the only thing this big bed is there for is when we have people in, or when there’s a party, and then there’s always a thousand coats and furs and hats all over it. So why all the fuss about a brocaded bedspread?”

  “For two people. Me, and that first person who comes in here to toss a coat down.” Louise drew the Venetian blinds so that a half light colored the room. She paused to study the effect of the big four-poster, the white drapes that fell smartly to just an inch above the gray shag rug, and the overly delicate chaise longue.

  These were some of the tangible results of the last few years, which had seen the growing success of Paul’s Theater Workshop and of his personal reputation as a teacher. Louise was enjoying it fiercely.

  3

  MARIANNE ANSWERED THE DOORBELL. Ginny was vacuuming one of the back rooms and hadn’t heard the ring. A tall man, wearing an olive-green raincoat much too light for the season, stood in the hall in an attitude of patient expectation. For some reason Marianne knew immediately who he was.

  “You must be Mr. Walkowitz,” she said.

  “Yes,” the man said. “Mr. Kramer asked me to come by. I spoke to him on the telephone, earlier.” There was a vaguely foreign lilt to his voice, a rhythm and inflection rather than a specific accent.

  “He told me,” Marianne said. “Please come in.”

  While she hung his coat in the hall closet, Walkowitz, hands in the pocket of his trousers, inspected the apartment and Marianne, without staring directly at him, inspected Walkowitz. He was impressive and disturbing at first sight. Tall, over six feet, he had a burly build and a face that was, in contrast, almost too poetic looking—the fine, narrow-bridged nose and high, prominent cheekbones drew the face into a perpetual, ironic half smile that radiated from beneath dark brown eyes and a mass of ill-tended pepper-gray hair. There were two elements in his appearance that drew the attention most strongly: his right eye was half-closed, the lids almost touching each other, maki
ng even his most casual glance seem like an oddly intense stare; and he walked with a slight limp, not favoring the left leg, but moving it inflexibly.

  Marianne found it impossible to guess his age. Walkowitz could be anywhere from his late twenties to his early forties.

  “They’re having a discussion about the new play.” She indicated the closed door of the study. “But they should be through soon.”

  Walkowitz sat on the couch in the living room and looked out at the park. Large flakes of wet snow had started to fall, melting the moment they touched the ground. It was the premature November snow that comes, in New York, before the real cold. He settled his leg in a comfortable position and looked at Marianne’s trim figure, encased in green slacks and a yellow knit sweater, with such open admiration that she turned away in embarrassment.

  “Jud tells me you were in the DP camp, in Sweden. Except …”

  “Except he does not remember me,” he said, smiling.

  “I’m sure it was all so confused that he may have forgotten.”

  “No, Mrs. Kramer, it is more simple than that. I’m older than your husband. And boys tend to go in groups of their own age. I was lonely, though, and sometimes I would tag along with Judah’s group. I wouldn’t expect him to recall me right off.”

  “It’s strange hearing him called Judah.”

  “It’s his name, isn’t it?”

  “He’s always been called Jud.”

  “Not always.”

  “A woman feels a man’s life begins when he meets her.”

  Walkowitz laughed and settled his leg more comfortably. His reserve seemed to vanish suddenly. “Judging from appearances”—his appraising glance included Marianne and the room—“it’s a very good life.”

  Covering Marianne’s pause, he added, “This is a lovely apartment.”

  “I’m still not used to it. It’s such a jump from our last place. Where do you live?”

  “The Parkwald Hotel—a musty shadow of a place, across from Gramercy Park. I like it because you can hear bells every quarter hour or so. There are a few churches and a seminary, I think. They ring bells for Matins and Evensong. I guess that wouldn’t be so glamorous if I weren’t Jewish.”

  “I’m not Jewish and I love the sound of bells.”

  “Also, I like it because it’s full of elegant, gray-haired ladies wearing mink coats and walking dogs, and they look tense, as if something very important was about to happen to them.”

  “I’ve always loved it down there. It’s different from the rest of the city. Always, I mean, since I came here. I’m not a native.”

  “They tell me that’s the definition of a New Yorker.” Walkowitz said.

  The easy contact was strange for Marianne. She was both nervous because of it and enjoying it. “Why do you live in a hotel, Mr. Walkowitz?” she said. “Do you like it?”

  “I don’t like hotels, or dislike them, exactly. I just know them. Parks, too, I know, and public libraries, and ice-skating rinks, and American Express offices in Paris and Rome and Hyde Park and Union Square … all the places where the state recognizes the possibility that a man might be just”—he turned both palms out in an open gesture—“just unconnected.” He gazed at Marianne as if personal statements like this were an ordinary occurrence in a conversation with a stranger. Marianne found herself, beneath a tight smile, listening for sounds from the study that might indicate the meeting was breaking up. Instead she heard the hum of Ginny’s vacuuming, then the sound of the front door opening and her mother’s voice talking to Sarah.

  Walkowitz continued: “You know, you look just like a girl I knew in Paris when I was—” He was cut short by the precipitous entrance of Sarah, a plump, snowsuited bundle of wet cloth. Behind the glasses, her eyes looked as if they still saw spinning pinwheels of sun and snow. Mrs. Broderick plodded after her.

  Sarah hurled herself at Marianne, shouting: “Snow, there’s snow!” Following Marianne’s gaze, she turned and said to Walkowitz, “It’s not real, though. It melts.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s not real,” Walkowitz said. “What’s your name?”

  “Sarah Jenny Kramer,” she replied, moving away from Marianne and toward Walkowitz. “Who are you?” she asked.

  Marianne interrupted to introduce her mother to Walkowitz. To Sarah she said, “Go find Ginny, darling, and change your clothes.” Sarah started out of the room. Marianne caught a flicker of her hand toward her face. She added, “And leave your glasses on.”

  Mrs. Broderick sank into a chair and smoothed her wet reddish hair. “Oh, she runs marvelously wild in the park. She gives me the ‘grandmothers,’ and I’m ashamed of myself.”

  “What are the ‘grandmothers’?” Walkowitz asked.

  “They’re like the ‘mothers,’ only worse. You know—‘Look out, Sarah, don’t fall—and watch out for that boy in the playground with a stick, it has a nail in it.’”

  She took a sequined cigarette case from her purse and perched a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. Walkowitz leaned over and lit it, holding two matches together.

  “Why do you use two matches, Mr. Walkowitz?” she asked.

  “I got into the habit in the camps.”

  Mrs. Broderick looked at Marianne. “Camps?” she said. “You mean concentration camps?”

  “Yes,” he said. “When you’re outdoors a great deal, and there’s a wind, it’s easier to light a cigarette if you use two matches—if you have two matches and if you have a cigarette.”

  “Then you’re a friend of Jud’s?”

  “Not exactly. It’s a long story.”

  Walkowitz was saved the necessity of an explanation by the termination of the conference in the next room.

  Rovic and Michaels, the designer, came into the room, Jud behind them, their voices still pitched to the high key of their discussion.

  “Look, Paul,” Michaels was saying, “the name of the play is not accidental. It’s At the Gates, and the author chose it carefully because he was a careful writer. Am I right?” He went on without pausing. “Then the set must show the gates of the camp.”

  “But my objection is very simple,” Rovic said. “No action takes place that directly involves the gates.”

  Jud stood between the two older men. He touched Rovic’s shoulder.

  “I want the gates, Paul. They frame the meaning of the play for me.” Before Rovic could reply, he added, “They don’t have to be placed realistically. But their shape has to be seen—and I want the three words on the gates to be seen also.”

  Walkowitz spoke out as if he were a participant in the conversation. He said: “Arbeit macht Frei.”

  The self-absorbed trio broke apart and turned toward Walkowitz. Jud walked up to him. “Walkowitz? I’m Jud Kramer. Sorry to keep you waiting all this time.”

  “He’s been entertaining my mother and me,” Marianne said.

  “I’m very glad to see you, Mr. Kramer.” Walkowitz stood up slowly, with a dignity of movement that was apparently forced on him by the stiffness of his bad leg.

  “What do you think,” Jud asked him, intently serious. “Could you imagine a play about Auschwitz without showing the gates?”

  Walkowitz thought half a moment, then said, decisively: “You need the gates, even if you don’t use them. I’ve never forgotten them.”

  Jud nodded and turned to Rovic and Michaels, who were looking at Walkowitz curiously.

  “Another witness, Paul,” Jud said.

  Rovic shrugged. “All right, Jud. Let’s see how it works out. You’re the director.”

  Michaels grinned. He was a delicately made, almost dwarfish man. His frequent bright-toothed grinning gave him a clownish quality. “Good,” he said. “I’ll rough out some new sketches for tomorrow.”

  “Make it a masterpiece,” Jud said. “Nothing less will do. And leave out the emotion. It’s all there to begin with. We don’t want any posters from World War Two.”

  “Yes, Herr Colonel,” Michaels said.

&nbs
p; After the others had left, Jud and Walkowitz sat at the wooden table in the wide, tiled kitchen and talked. Marianne groped for crackers in the big pantry, deliberately taking her time. In the cool, spicy darkness, she heard their laughter. She set the crackers and cheese on the table and returned to the pantry for jam; she heard Jud talking, his words surrounded by spurts of laughter.

  “My God, I haven’t thought about that crazy business for years. Hey, Marianne.”

  She joined them, a golden-haired counterpoint to the dark, Semitic statement of the two men. They collaborated on telling her the story.

  It had been in the DP camp in Sweden where Jud had been suspended between lives, not knowing yet where he would go, or with whom.

  “I used to write letters for the other kids. A lot of them were from real peasant villages and couldn’t read or write. I guess they resented me after a while. They had a hell of a nerve, though. I used to write emotional rhapsodies, telling about the sufferings they’d been through, begging for kindness and help. No, not begging. I was too smart for that, even then. I used to insist on their right to be helped after what the Nazis had done to them.” He beamed in retrospect. “I got wonderful results. Homes in England and America for some of them who’d been through the worst of it.”

  “I spent most of my time reading books the Red Cross gave us,” Walkowitz said, “when I wasn’t out digging, uh—I forget what it was we used to dig.”

  “Yes,” Jud said excitedly. “What was that stuff?” He turned to Marianne. “We used to dig it in the fields for extra money.” He snapped his fingers impatiently, tracking the memory. “They use it in Ireland to burn in the fireplace for heat.”

  “Peat?” Marianne offered, unbelieving.

  “That’s it,” Walkowitz said. “I couldn’t get the smell off my hands for months afterwards.”

  Marianne was still incredulous. “They made you dig for peat in a DP camp, after you’d been freed from—”

  “No, darling, they didn’t make us. Just if you wanted extra money. The camp authorities only gave us bare living expenses.”