Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die: A Novel Page 4

  “And that’s how the kidnapping happened,” Walkowitz said.

  Marianne sat herself down on the wooden seat next to Jud. And he told her of the money order that had come from his father’s brother, Harold Kramer, in California—seventy-five dollars, a fortune. The moment he received this enormous sum he canceled his plans for digging peat and was going to spend that day, and many more days, restoring his soul at the coffee shop in the nearby town. (It would have taken weeks and weeks, he said, to earn seventy-five dollars by digging for it.) But some of the boys in camp found out about the windfall, and an ambush was planned.

  A “Get Kramer” society, as Jud called it, was organized, and six of the bigger boys who were glad of the chance to bring down the big shot who wrote letters for them were assigned to grab him. They seized him as he strolled near the lake, but as soon as he realized the purpose of the ambush, he became a willing victim and was marched, as prisoner, to the coffee shop, followed by a parade of twenty-five sweets-hungry adolescents. The seventy-five dollars from America was consumed in an hour-long eating orgy.

  “That was my first contact with you,” Walkowitz said. “I was one of your guests.”

  “You’ve waited a hell of a long time to say thank you.”

  “Well, I didn’t know where you were until I began to read about you in the papers. You know it was because of you, in a way, that I went to Israel instead of America.”

  For the first time since he and Walkowitz had sat down at the table, Jud’s face looked grim. “I’ve always felt bad about that business,” he said.

  Marianne sensed a real sadness in Jud’s voice. He had told her how he’d organized the Zionist group in the DP camp (a fifteen-year-old boy, full of zeal, yet shyly keeping his head always covered because it had been shaved in the camp and the hair was painfully slow in growing back). Dealing with Swedish authorities, with Red Cross officials, with Zionist representatives, Jud had arranged for them all to take up residence in Palestine.

  Then, when the time came for departure, he’d chosen, suddenly and unpredictably, to go to America. In telling Marianne about it, late one night in a depressed mood, he’d used the word “betrayal.” It had been abstract to her, academic at the time; it concerned her only because Jud felt badly about it.

  Finally Walkowitz said: “You needn’t feel so badly on my account. I stayed in the kibbutz near Galilee for less than a year. Then I managed to get some free-lance newspaper work in Paris through a Romanian friend of mine.”

  Jud smiled a distracted smile. “Everyone had one Romanian friend like that,” he said. “But you know the reason I didn’t go along with the group to Israel—I mean Palestine?”

  “I haven’t asked why.”

  Jud ignored his reply. “I had this letter from my Uncle Harold, in California, asking me to come and live with them.” He stood up and walked to the big window overlooking the darkening side street. “I suddenly realized that in Palestine it would be another camp. After the German camps, then the DP camps, and then another DP camp in Haifa, and after that another camp called a kibbutz. They had nothing in common, of course, except one thing. No home, no family—and all of a sudden I wanted a family more than anything.”

  Walkowitz nodded, looking past him at the sky. It was taking on the blue-black tones of early evening; the continued falling snow was a white whisper to the eye. In a swift change of mood Jud ran to a cupboard and took out a bottle of brandy and some glasses. He set out three glasses and filled them. “Here,” he said. “Wonderful stuff. Slivovitz.” Each of them took a glass and Jud stood at the head of the long wooden table, as if this were his family, and said: “A toast, to Carl Walkowitz and the reunion of two camp-mates from long ago.”

  They all laughed a little and drank. Marianne sipped her brandy, and Walkowitz drank his neat, with a quick toss of his head. From the rear bedroom came the sound of little Sarah crying and Mrs. Broderick half-shouting something. Marianne set down her glass and smiled an apology to Walkowitz. She started for the door but was met by Sarah hurtling into the kitchen. After her came Ginny, a paper-thin Negro woman, and behind Ginny strode Mrs. Broderick. Sarah was crying, and she ran straight to Jud. He lifted her up and half sat her on his arm.

  “It’s not my fault,” she sniffed.

  “What’s the matter, pretty-face?” Jud asked.

  “She won’t tell where her glasses are,” Ginny said, and walked out of the kitchen slowly, like an outraged household god.

  “Sure she will,” Jud said. Sarah wriggled enough to make him deposit her on the floor. She stood with her little back against the enormous refrigerator, looking around at the faces looming above. Her pink mouth was set in a determined expression.

  “That’s the look,” Mrs. Broderick said. “Marianne used to have the same look.” There was a tone of irritated satisfaction in her voice, as if she was settling a score with her daughter through the little girl’s behavior.

  Marianne said gently: “Sarah, where are your glasses?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you break them? We can get new ones.”

  “Don’t want new ones.”

  “Then where are they?”

  “Don’t know.”

  The stubbornness in the small oval face seemed at the point of melting into tears again. Walkowitz went to the child, glancing first at Jud and Marianne as if to excuse himself for interfering in a family matter. Then he squatted awkwardly before Sarah, who looked guardedly pleased, accepting this as a possible distraction from her troubles.

  “Sarah,” he said. “Do you see my eyes?”

  Sarah nodded and pointed. “That one’s funny.”

  “It’s not so funny, just a little smaller than the other one. Touch it.”

  She reached out, touched it quickly, and smiled nervously.

  “I guess it’s not so funny,” she said.

  “Want me to make up a poem just for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Here:

  “All people have eyes

  To hide behind;

  So many eyes,

  All different kind …

  Glasses for you,

  One passes for me …

  Just so that

  We both may see.

  “Now you say it.”

  Sarah repeated the poem, with Walkowitz helping her when she faltered.

  “How’s that for a made-to-order-just-for-Sarah poem?”

  “It’s funny,” she said.

  “Now will you show me where you hid your glasses?”

  She paused and looked up at Marianne, then at Jud. Apparently finding what she was looking for, she took the stranger’s extended hand and walked him to the living room. From behind one of the cushions on the couch she extracted the missing eyeglasses and immediately burst into tears.

  “Nobody sat on them,” she cried. “Nobody!”

  Marianne gathered her up and carried her to her room.

  “Did you make up that ditty on the spot?” Jud asked admiringly.

  “Yes. If it wasn’t an impossible remark I’d say, ‘I’m a poet.’”

  “Why impossible?”

  He shrugged. “Today—”

  “Today, yesterday, and tomorrow—a poet is still the finest thing a man can be. The man who wrote the play I’m doing was a poet, though it’s not in verse.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Maurice Bolet—he’s dead now. Died in forty-eight. He was in Auschwitz and Dachau; he only lived three years afterwards.”

  “I don’t know his work. But, anyway, I’ve never published anything.”

  In the study the phone rang twice and stopped.

  “I’d better be going,” Walkowitz said.

  Jud fluttered his large hands. “Was there any particular reason, I mean aside from—you know—what I stupidly called a reunion before?”

  “Yes.” Walkowitz stood directly in front of him. “I want to talk to you about a job.” He seemed to be waiting for Jud to f
linch at this. Instead Jud said: “Let’s have lunch tomorrow and talk about it. How’s that?”

  Walkowitz half bowed in assent.

  “One o’clock, at Downey’s on Eighth Avenue. It’s kind of the poor man’s Sardi’s.”

  Marianne was back. She smiled warmly at Walkowitz and said, “Thank you. You did that beautifully. She’s been so troubled by the glasses—hates to wear them.”

  “I don’t blame her.”

  “How did that go?” Jud mused. “All people have eyes to hide behind …”

  “Glasses for you … one passes for me … just so that we both may see,” Marianne completed it.

  Jud stared at Walkowitz’s half-closed eye. “How did you get the—” He completed the sentence with a gesture.

  “The eye and the leg? A favorite S.S. Sturmbannführer. I don’t like to use it as an excuse, but that’s why I must go now. The leg tires easily.”

  “Hey,” Jud said, “you have to see our doctor.”

  “Doctors …” Walkowitz murmured the word as if it explained all his weariness. “I’m all right. I just get tired now and then.”

  When he raised his arm to shake hands, the sleeve slipped back. Marianne had set herself to look, and she saw, or thought she saw, the purplish beginning of the numbers stenciled into the skin. It was shocking. Jud had no such tattoo, and ever since their first meeting she had steeled herself for the sight. It never came, because, as Jud had explained to her, the Nazis operated their concentration camps systematically, but often also by whim. Systematic tattooing began in 1941, and Jud and his family had been arrested earlier. Even after 1941 some were never tattooed at all, depending on the decisions of the camp commanders. Now it was, oddly, as if she had finally seen Jud’s numbers, and it made her tremble.

  After Walkowitz left, Jud put his arm around Marianne’s waist. “I like him,” he said.

  “He’s an unusual man.”

  Ginny poked her head out of the study. “Mr. Kramer, there was a telegram from Mr. Harold Kramer in California. They phoned it in because of the snow. They’ll send a copy on later.”

  Jud looked out of the window, bemused. Snowflakes were being blown by the wind so powerfully that they became white, horizontal streaks spitting past the darkened tree shapes that lined Fifth Avenue.

  Late that night, as Jud was undressing for bed, he paused and reread the telegram from Harold. He was surprised at being so disturbed to learn that his cousin Dasha was flying to New York the next afternoon. He and Dasha had had a strange and difficult relationship, but that had been a long time ago.

  He struggled into the pajamas Marianne had bought for his birthday, having some trouble with the bottoms. Resolving to go back on his diet, he lay down on the bed and picked up a copy of the script of At the Gates. After a few minutes he found it was not registering, and instead, he was listening to the roar of the shower from the bathroom. He wished Marianne would hurry; he wanted to talk to her about the day’s rush of images from the past.

  Images or realities? Walkowitz … Harold and Dasha … Strange, since coming to New York, it was usually in spring that he experienced such echoes of past years. Perhaps Marianne had been right about the play stirring up old fears. Had the play stirred up Walkowitz, too? Perhaps. He’d said he read about Jud in the papers, probably in connection with At the Gates.

  The shower was shut off, and in the ensuing silence Jud called out: “Marianne.” Before she could answer, he knocked on the bathroom door and opened it. She was standing before the mirror in a halo of bath powder, her yellow hair unconfined, reaching almost to her waist. She was gazing in the steamed-over mirror at her face, with the absent kind of self-concentration beautiful women have.

  “Darling,” she said, “I don’t think Paul looked well today. Do you think he’s really recovered from his heart thing?”

  Jud looked at his lovely wife—at the slim arching of her back, the pale arc of her breast where it touched her arm—and everything he’d wanted to say to her flew out of his mind. He reached out and rested his hand lightly on her hair, and when she turned around, questioning his silence and his touch, he put his arms around her and touched her breast. Marianne was startled. Then she leaned her damp body against him, touched his hair and his eyes, and kissed his mouth.

  He slept all night, next to her in the big bed, without waking.

  4

  IN THE SPRING OF 1945, Judah Kramer, along with hundreds of other youngsters, arrived in Sweden. He was sixteen years old and had spent the last three years in the concentration camps of the Third Reich.

  Judah was the only member of his immediate family left alive. Bright-eyed and full of returning energy, he spent that impatient spring eating his first decent food in three years and listening to the melting snows trickling, then flowing, down to the streams in the valley outside of Stockholm, where the internment camp was located. He gained much weight rapidly, attended classes intermittently held by the Red Cross, and wandered the countryside that surrounded the camp, indulging a growing passion for the identification of things.

  A sparrow, phlox, a birch tree; these were better to know than some brownish bird, a bright blue flower, or a tree with speckled bark. In this way he was able to place himself, Judah Kramer, in an environment where things corresponded to names and could be relied upon for continuity. To give himself a part in the new scheme of things he even tried calling himself by a new name: Jud. It was an Americanization created by one of the soldiers who had liberated the last camp in which Judah had been held.

  That was the first spring in six years in which the air of Europe was filled with silence, aftermath of the Teutonic thunder. And in that silent spring, individual voices could be heard, at last, across oceans. One of these was the voice of Judah’s uncle, his father’s brother, who had lived, since long before the war, in California.

  The summons was first announced to Judah in April. By May, red tape was still holding up his departure. He tried to ease his anxiety by energetically learning incorrect English phrases from nurses and visitors. By June, when he left for New York, he could make his simpler wishes understood. For a long time his primary wish had been for food; in March, when the camp had been liberated, he weighed fifty-one pounds. When he arrived in New York, and when three days later in Los Angeles he was greeted by his big, vain Uncle Harold and his wife Manya, Judah weighed 121 pounds and was still on the rise.

  He’d expected a thousand questions from these relatives he’d never seen, but, driving back to the city proper, he began to realize that there was nothing for them to ask. Everyone was dead! That was an answer final enough for any question. In truth, the avalanche of questions finally came, from Harold and Manya and from their friends, but not until much later, and with one exception: Dasha.

  She was one of his many cousins; a slender, Biblically pretty, very dark girl of seventeen. She, too, had lost everyone, and lived with Harold and Manya in a room covered from floor to ceiling with photographs of movie stars. She not only refrained from asking questions of Judah, her manner was distant, though polite, and sometimes almost sullen. Instinctively, Judah knew the reason.

  He had been with Dasha’s father and brother in the first camp, and although he had little recollection of her father, who had died of a heart attack a few weeks after arriving, he remembered Zvi, a short, dark, birdlike boy, two years younger than he. Zvi had been picked out of the line at roll call one drizzling morning. He’d been standing near Judah, separated by only two men (in the distance there had been the sound of someone repeatedly whistling the same phrase, as if to call a dog); and Zvi had been chosen to die and Judah left to live, and there was no way of knowing why.

  It was this “why” that Judah knew immediately stood between himself and Dasha. But the sensibility that concerns itself with such things was then buried under the deluge of new experiences. It wasn’t until two years later when, in one of those accidental moments when we catch a look on another person’s face that they assume cannot be seen
, he saw Dasha look at him with clear hatred.

  From the beginning of his stay with Harold and Manya Kramer, Jud knew that he was on the move; that, for him, this was a temporary home. (It was at this time that he succeeded in establishing the use of the shortened form of his name by his family and friends.) It was not just that his uncle and aunt could never quite hide the sense of a duty being performed (as much for the dead as for the living young boy); nor did he feel a sense of impermanence because he slept on a couch in the living room, since the small house in the Hollywood Hills had no extra rooms. It was less tangible—a psychological, kinesthetic sense that made any house or neighborhood a stopping-off place, that made the future the place in which he would live.

  All that first winter Jud wandered, bemused by the artificial summer’s warmth. The sun warmed and blinded him; his trouser cuffs were always wet from the constant sprays that moistened the neat lawns—a reminder that he was living in the desert of Southern California. He was like a man awakening from the sleep of a long illness, and all of California was a warm, safe sanitarium in which he convalesced.

  “How do you like that?” Harold murmured as he and his wife were undressing for bed. “After what that boy’s been through he still has all this ambition, energy.”

  Manya melted into her faded white nightgown. Harold sat on the edge of the bed, wearing his underwear. He knocked his pipe ashes into the bedside ash tray.

  “What I mean is when he told me about getting this job at the Chateau Marmont up on Sunset—delivering papers and breakfast trays in the morning and helping out after school—Christ, he had the kind of enthusiasm you expect from a kid who’s been protected all his life.”

  Manya was silent.

  “I mean, can you remember when even I had that excitement about things?”

  “Yes,” Manya said. “The last girl. The one who kept calling you at home.”

  “Oh, Christ, are you still on that?”

  He was not annoyed. He seemed rather pleased as he stretched out on the bed.

  “Jud’s been here a year and he still comes down every Saturday to the Exchange. I’ll swear—the way he stares at everything, the display cases, the diamond cutters, the salesmen, he’s taking it all in for some reason of his own.”