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

  In a flat tone Manya said: “He wants to be an actor. He watches because he’s teaching himself. He told me about it.”

  “An actor. That’s a crazy idea. Well, he’s entitled to a few at his age. It’s a wonderful thing to be young.”

  “He looks so much better to my eyes now,” Manya said. “He has flesh.”

  “Yeah,” Harold said. “When he first got here he looked out of place, all skinny, with the black hair and the blue eyes. I never noticed how many well-fed blonde people there are in Hollywood till Jud came. Maybe it’s the sun.”

  “Does he look like your brother Max?”

  “I don’t know. I never knew Max after we were kids. Now he’s dead, it’s like I never knew him at all.”

  Manya nodded. “Judah looked strange when he got sunburned, at first. Remember? He was like a tanned scarecrow. Now he looks more natural, like a Californian.”

  Manya lay down on her side of the bed and closed her eyes.

  “He’ll be all right,” Harold said wearily, “he’s ambitious.”

  Several months later, the false warmth of the desert winter was over and the summer’s heat began to loosen thoughts, ideas, feelings.

  Once, in the middle of the wind and insect clamor of the night, Jud awakened. Drawn from sleep by what? The horses of the night—peculiar steeds, saddled with memory, their spirit never really broken by time.

  The first awareness? Smell. But not the acrid, clothes-pervading smoky odor that used to bring sick tears to the eyes. Now it was the oversweet emanation of the jasmine flowers that sifted into the room through the screened windows.

  The second awareness? Memory of whatever it was caused him to wake. There was a touch of fear in this, but the sweetish smell convinced him that he was in Harold and Manya’s two-story stucco house, on the borderline between Hollywood and Beverly Hills. There were no sounds of sighing, moaning, spitting, scratching, crying—and, mercifully, no smell but that of the cool clean sheets under his cheek and the flowers. The fear was gone. Nothing awful had awakened him. And, as suddenly, it was back. It was something terrible. Not a dream but a remembrance, and from no longer ago than yesterday—a Shakespeare lecture in school. The teacher had been reading aloud from King Lear.

  “‘We are all God’s spies,’” he had just intoned, in his mock-heroic teacher’s voice. Then, suddenly, there was a terrible gurgling sound coming from a few seats away from Jud. It was a boy they called Fat Harry. He was leaning far back in his seat, his head lolling at an odd angle and spittle oozing from the corner of his mouth, and he was making a strange sound, something between speech and a moan.

  There was terror in the room, quickly. The teacher dropped the book he was holding and ran to the boy. He loosened his tie and called: “Get a spoon. Somebody get a spoon!” Jud ran to the lunchroom and back so swiftly that he had a stitch in his side by the time he returned with the spoon. The teacher inserted it deftly into the boy’s gaping mouth and Jud watched, fascinated (it was like feeding a dying man), until he guessed that the spoon kept him from biting or choking on his tongue.

  Later in the day the teacher explained to them some of the details of Fat Harry’s epilepsy, while Jud remembered the dark saint, Dostoevski, who, he’d read, had been epileptic, too. Did Fat Harry, the ludicrous, not very bright boy who waddled around the bases during ball games to the laughter of his classmates—did he share the secret of the blinding visionary light with the great Russian? Had Fat Harry experienced the godlike elation, the sense of magical omnipotence, at the very moment when all Jud had been able to see was a shaking, fat belly and spittle trickling around a dangling spoon?

  Now, shifting his head on the pillow, Jud wondered about some of the people he had known. Leo Gross, the tall, caustic Hungarian who wore and guarded his pince-nez day and night until his death, whose extraordinary calm had never been shaken. What visions and terrors had been living inside of Leo? Or in Aunt Manya, with her meek and sullen ways; or in Harold, behind his manly bluster. Could Jud even know what was within his father as he last remembered him, skinny and shivering in the dawn, when he tried to accompany Jud to what seemed certain death … the bitter light giving a painful clarity to the barracks, to the stony earth … the S.S. guard standing nearby, stiff as a tree … his father whispering:

  “Listen, Judah, I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  With a practiced effort that still took all his strength, Jud turned away from the memory. But he lay awake for a long time in mindless, cool patience, waiting for the rhythm of the night to return him to sleep, or for the first light of the morning.

  THE JOURNAL OF CARL WALKOWITZ

  It is a slow and careful destiny that reveals him to me after all these years. I could almost say—delivered him into my hands—but I am not so certain that this fine movement of events is anything more than chance. And—he is not yet in my hands. But the opportunity is mine and I am grateful, horrified, and curious. Curious, in particular, as to whether this marvelous façade he seems to have is actually in working order. Does he really believe that he is the same as other people now, that time has wiped away his bloody distinction, that he is only a surviving victim making a new life for himself, like so many others?

  Do murderers, then, feel themselves innocent? I visualize the scene. A banal setting, truly. The central office of the camp S.S.

  I see clearly the desks, the files, the interrogation areas, all undoubtedly the same as the S.S. offices I’ve seen. Only here at the desks sit prisoners, as well as S.S. men. Most of them have green triangles on their breasts—the criminals, usually older prisoners with lower numbers stenciled into their arms. But occasionally a yellow Star of David is seen, either because the Jew has some special skill that the S.S. needs or because he has bribed his way into the privilege. And quite a privilege it is: No work details in the quarry or cesspool, no building barracks, and none of the various and endless labors invented by the S.S. guards to exhaust, torment, or kill their prisoners. Only the pleasures of working in, say, the t.b. ward of the camp infirmary can compare with the refuge of the office. No snow or freezing wind, no grilling heat. And there is food. Sometimes whole potatoes, soup with scraps of real meat. The benefits are too close to life and death to be treated lightly.

  So sits Judah Kramer, surviving roll call after roll call. Then, one morning, in a sheaf of papers on a desk he sees the list of the following day’s “deportees.” On the list he reads three names:

  Judah Kramer

  Miriam Kramer

  Sarah Kramer

  He sits, staring vacantly at them. It must take at least a moment for certainty of death to be perceived with any sharpness. The enormous force behind such a blow tends to dull impact. We are accustomed to dealing with half horrors, half joys. Extremes lead the mind to caricature or nightmare.

  Here the survivor begins to define himself. He is the one who quickly finds the reality element within caricature and nightmare and takes action in order to survive. The list is retyped, the three names removed, and, by necessity, the next three names are substituted. The writing and signing of a death sentence always comes down to this, finally—a small matter of clerical work. It remains only for certain flesh and blood to die instead of certain other flesh and blood. Now, almost two decades later, it seems the matter has come up again.

  Does our good survivor realize that, in saving himself, since the universe of the condemned is finite, he is actually choosing the victim who will replace him … under the pistol, or in the gas chamber, or in the burning ditch …

  In the midst of the tension of that strange scene, which I have anticipated for so long, and have acted out in my mind in countless permutations, I found unexpected poise and control. But, in the first moment of meeting his young wife, Marianne, I was almost devastated. She has Josanne’s eyes, her tightly packed mop of silky yellow hair. Even their names have a sound relationship; Josanne … Mari
anne. She looked as out of place in an apartment over Central Park West as Josanne did in that ridiculously tiny ground floor apartment in Neuilly.

  All I could think for that first moment was: If the dead aren’t dead, then why can they not cross oceans, too? But then she spoke. Her voice was pitched high, and had an actress’s precision, entirely unlike Josanne’s warm, fuzzy tone.

  He was not what I expected, either. Intense, but not formidable; hardly the kind of man who survives at any cost. I’m having lunch with him today to talk about a job—and suddenly it makes me sick to think of it, and I’m empty of all purpose. Luckily, such moments do not last in the brightness of a winter afternoon. It’s only at night when the memory of old injustices contracts the eyes and burns the stomach, demanding understanding, or action … when the crazy little doggerel I made up in Auschwitz spins around in my head, over and over again, as it did when I was making plans to kill Rauschner and then myself, just to end the torment. I recalled it, today, in Kramer’s kitchen when his little girl came in crying about her eyeglasses. I made a child’s version for her. But I remember now how it used to go, addressed in my mind to dear Sturmbannführer Rauschner:

  All people must die,

  My friend, even we.

  Here’s a death for you,

  Here’s a death for me,

  So that we both

  May cease to be.

  BOOK TWO

  1

  DOWNEY’S WAS FILLED WITH the Wednesday afternoon pre-matinee crowd. Jud sipped a vermouth on the rocks as he waited for Walkowitz. From among the mass of pink hats and white gloves Nancy Lear appeared.

  She laughed. “Jud, this always happens. When I’m seeing people in the evening, I always bump into them in the afternoon.”

  “Sit down a minute, Nancy,” Jud said.

  “Just for a minute. I have an appointment.”

  “Agent, director, or producer?”

  “No, a human being. I have to interview a new maid.”

  “Portrait of the struggling young actress,” Jud said dryly. It was a commonly accepted joke, because Nancy was married to Joe Lear, who was very rich.

  She stripped off a white kid glove and gave Jud’s hand a nervous little squeeze, saying: “How about a drink for me, at your expense, instead of jokes at mine?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Are you meeting Marianne?”

  “No. She’s being interviewed at the house by some hotshot journalist. I’m waiting for a friend.” He ordered a drink for Nancy and then said: “He’s a kind of an interesting guy. I may bring him tonight—if it’s okay.”

  “Of course. I’m excited about tonight. I don’t really know why. I guess Joe’s excitement has gotten to me. The jump from backer to producer has taken twenty years off him.”

  Curious, Jud asked, “How old is Joe, Nancy?”

  Nancy grinned. “You mean, I’m so much younger?”

  “Forty?”

  “Joe is fifty.”

  “I hope I look as bright and bushy-tailed when I’m fifty.”

  “You probably will, Jud. You and Joe both have the same kind of energy.” She looked at him, bright and expectant. “I’m really quite happy. I mean I have the children and Joe is good and Paul says I’m talented and getting better …” She paused and let a secret sort of smile slip across her face. “I wish I had the courage to add something about how nice the money is. I almost could, with you, Jud. I don’t think you’d misunderstand.”

  “Then try it once,” Jud said. “Just to see the difference between how you’re afraid it would sound and how it really sounds—like an acting problem.”

  She finished her drink in one swallow and said, “Okay. Sometimes when things are real difficult—when I miss out on a good part I should have gotten, or one of the kids is sick, or when Joe and I have a rotten time, for a while—then, all of a sudden, there’s all that money. And it’s very nice.”

  Jud looked at Nancy for a moment before speaking, seeing a slender, almost girlish woman in her mid-thirties, with skin, eyes and hair so light in color as to make her loveliness seem vague and undefined. She struck him as having the sadness of the in-between; no longer the bright-eyed ingénue in her early twenties, nor yet a mature woman past the theoretical maturing age of thirty-five.

  He found himself visually tracing the outline of her slightly plump belly beneath the yellow woolen dress she wore. Her figure was attractive, but automatically he compared it to Marianne’s. Marianne came out ahead.

  “There you are,” he said to Nancy. “Telling a piece of the truth doesn’t hurt too much, does it?”

  “I always find it easier to talk to you than to most people.”

  “Liking a lot of money isn’t the best thing in the world. I don’t think it’s the worst, either.”

  Nancy drew in the necessary breath for a defensive reply, but Walkowitz was standing at the table and Jud said: “Hello. Nancy Lear, this is my friend, Carl Walkowitz.”

  Jud and Walkowitz ordered lunch and sat over their drinks, measuring each other like friendly but wary animals. Walkowitz glanced over his shoulder toward the door. “She’s pretty,” he said.

  “Who, Nancy?”

  He nodded. “The nervous girl.”

  “She’s married to the producer of the play I’m doing. I guess she is nervous.”

  “Actress?”

  “She’s trying.”

  “Trying always produces anxiety.” He gazed at Jud over the rim of his glass. “On the way over here the bus passed Seventy-sixth Street and Third Avenue. I had a place there, in a brownstone, when I first came here. I felt nostalgic passing it—then I remembered how hard I was trying, then, and how full of nervous fury I was all that time.”

  “I know,” Jud said. “Last year’s anxieties seem like happiness, this year.” Now that Walkowitz and he were seated opposite each other, with the ceremony of drink and food under way, Jud felt more comfortable. He had been fearful of the encounter ever since yesterday, and now that he was aware of this, he spoke more directly.

  “Tell me about yourself. Then we can talk about the job.”

  Walkowitz smiled. It was a heavily weighted smile. “What would be the easiest way to tell it? Did you ever see papers, documents in the camps? Of course you did.”

  Jud nodded.

  “Well—Walkowitz, Carl. Birthplace: Warsaw, Poland. Father: Josef—chemical engineer (with a degree in Political Science, as well). Mother: Anna. Occupation: housewife. No brothers or sisters. Date of birth: December twenty-seventh, 1924. Married at age eighteen to Ruth Leonidoff, who died in Auschwitz, age nineteen. Rest of family also dead. Places of death undetermined. Arrested for crime of belonging to the Jewish race. Liberated from Bergen-Belsen by British Army, at age twenty, after two and a half years of imprisonment … Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. That’s about it.” He leaned back, shifting his left leg stiffly.

  Jud laughed. Walkowitz sat gazing at him, waiting. His silence acknowledged Jud’s right to laugh.

  “That’s the trouble with documents,” Jud said. “They don’t tell you anything. You’re a poet, you should know that.”

  “Sometimes a poem is a document.”

  “But a document is almost never a good poem. I could spin out my dossier to you and—”

  “I know it.”

  “Oh?”

  “I saw A Time for Men without knowing who you were.”

  “Then?”

  “When I found out your background through the newspapers, I started to keep track of your journey.”

  “But all this doesn’t tell me what you’ve really been doing. Yesterday you mentioned Israel and Paris—”

  The waiter arrived with their food. Walkowitz salted everything heavily and started to eat. “I’ve done a little of everything. Mostly, for a living, I’ve done translations. I guess that gives me a profession. I learned how to use the misfortune of all the languages I’ve had to speak, from a girl in Paris.”

  “A girl?
”

  “She’s dead,” Walkowitz said flatly. “Anyway, call me a translator. It’s a stamp—and it has a nice sound to it.”

  “You never remarried?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “The girl in Paris?”

  Walkowitz nodded. “I think I’ll have another drink. How about you, Jud?”

  “No, thanks. One drink, happy—two drinks, groggy.”

  While Walkowitz drank his second whisky, Jud felt the pressure relax; he knew what to do. Since the previous day, Walkowitz had been an insistent, unresolved force, pressing so hard it had come between Jud and his thinking in preparation for the play. Now, more relaxed, he let his glance roam the restaurant. He saw a number of casual half-friends and then the familiar skinny shape of Larry Elgin moving toward their table. Jud turned his attention back to Walkowitz. He felt warmly toward him now. The man had a sharp cutting edge to his intelligence and they had been through the same experiences.

  Now he said: “I’ve got it figured out. The job, I mean.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s a natural.”

  Walkowitz blinked his eyes nervously and said, “You haven’t asked me why I need a job now. Or why I came to you for one.”

  “It’s a funny thing. For some reason, ever since I saw you talking to Sarah in the kitchen I’ve had the feeling that whatever’s happened to you is pretty much like what’s happened to me.”

  “And in your kitchen I was thinking exactly the opposite. You have the wife, the child, the play—everything.”

  Jud said, “I was an actor for some time. And not a very good one. I know about hotel rooms—and being broke—loose ends of all kinds.”

  Walkowitz smiled. “Nothing human is alien to me, eh?”

  “Something like that,” Jud replied, sensing the irony and ignoring it. “That’s a quote, isn’t it?”

  Then Larry Elgin was at their table. “Hey, Jud,” he said. “I tried to get you at home, but you’d left.”