Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die: A Novel Page 7

  “I believe in Jud,” he said. Then, to regain the poise he felt he’d lost, he groped for a cigarette and placed it between his lips. He dragged heavily on the unlit tobacco.

  “Let’s not play games, Fanny. This is not going to be an easy play to sell, no matter how well it comes off.”

  Fanny at last allowed herself a moonlike smile. “You mean you need our theater parties pretty bad.”

  “Yours and a lot of others. It might just make the difference between defeat and a fighting chance.”

  Fanny added an attempt at a sympathetic tone to the lunar smile. “Well,” she asked, “is there much humor in the play?”

  4

  THE THREE OF THEM sat in Jud’s makeshift office, backstage. It was a converted dressing room, containing only a desk, two folding chairs, a tired, torn couch, and a rust-stained sink. On the peeling yellow wall was a large proclamation printed in the nineteenth century, a treasure Jud had discovered in an old Los Angeles bookshop when he was seventeen, and had kept with him ever since.

  Jud was scrubbing his face and hands at the little sink and sputtering: “There’s no use trying to explain how it happened, darling, really. There’s no way, eh, Carl?”

  “It wasn’t a real fight,” Walkowitz said. He was lying down on the shabby couch. His breath was short and his bad eye drooped more than before, so that he appeared to Marianne as a one-eyed creature. In disgust, she thought of the word “Cyclops,” and was instantly ashamed. A fine Cyclops, half crippled and exhausted by an unexplained but unequal fight with her husband.

  She was sitting on the far end of the couch. Automatically she reached forward and brushed some of the dirt from Walkowitz’s suit. The hem of his jacket, she noticed, was badly frayed.

  “You’re right,” she said, “there’s no explaining something as crazy as that. Two grown men rolling around the filthy stage of an empty theater, beating each other up. I don’t want to hear an explanation.” Then she added, absently, “You don’t even know each other well enough to fight.”

  Both men laughed and Jud said, “Think of it this way, Marianne. It started as a kind of character exercise …” He paused, rubbing his cheek ruefully. “Anyway, it’s a great way of getting to know someone—fighting. Like men and women when they meet in the movies.”

  He dried himself with a make-up towel. Marianne went to Jud and touched his cheek with a white-gloved hand.

  “You’re bruised, you idiot.”

  “I guess I don’t know my own strength,” Walkowitz offered.

  “Don’t flatter yourself, my friend. I probably bumped my cheek on the table leg.”

  Marianne leaned her cheek against Jud’s, and without warning, began to cry. No hysterics, just a soft sobbing.

  “What is it?” Jud whispered. “Don’t, darling. What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” she murmured, trying hard to still the tremors of her body. “Didn’t you ever just want to cry for no reason at all?”

  She dried her eyes with a small, cologne-scented handkerchief and recovered her poise swiftly. Jud sensed that Walkowitz’s presence made it impossible for Marianne to say any more.

  “Want to wash, Carl?” he said.

  “I think I’ll go back to the hotel and change my clothes.”

  “And Jud—” Marianne said. “I came over to tell you your cousin Dasha arrived. She called before I left to say she’d be at the house soon.”

  “Well, I have some things to go over with Carl first. You welcome her, hey?”

  “I’ve got to go downtown and I won’t be home for an hour or so.”

  “It won’t hurt Dasha to wait an hour. I know her. She’ll explore the bookcase and the closets and chain-smoke. She’s a very patient, independent girl. Or at least she was.”

  Walkowitz said, as if he had been asked a question: “People don’t change.”

  Marianne rubbed her eyes and wiped away a smudge of mascara. “I could never tell if she was Jud’s childhood sweetheart or childhood enemy.”

  She became aware that Walkowitz was studying her face, and she looked away, saying to him: “Are you feeling better?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, raising his body carefully from its reclining position.

  “I have to run,” Marianne said. She hugged Jud and kissed his bruised cheek. “Good-by,” she said, “I’ll yell at you later.”

  “You can yell at both of us. Carl’s coming to the Lears’ dinner party. In case I forgot to tell you, he’s going to be my assistant on the play.” Jud rummaged through the papers on the desk and handed Walkowitz a copy of the script. “You’re employed,” he said with a grin. “Mazel tov. At a very low salary. We’ll find out just how low tonight when I talk to Joe Lear and Elgin.”

  “Yes, sir,” Walkowitz said, with a mock half-bow.

  “Oh, you’ll get used to that,” Marianne said. “When he becomes the director, you won’t recognize the gentle man he was before.”

  Walkowitz smoothed his mussed gray hair with a big paw and said, “Can I drop you anywhere, Mrs. Kramer? I’m going downtown, too.”

  “Oh, yes, the hotel in Gramercy Park. I’ll wait for you in the lobby. Jud, don’t be too late, darling.”

  Marianne left the office, her tone sounding, in her ears, artificial, actressy. She walked a little unsteadily through the empty theater and stood waiting in the lobby, embarrassed and disoriented by the afternoon. It was the sort of feeling she used to have, often, in the days when the life that had delivered Jud to her, alive, had been much closer.

  That life had never been far from them when she and Jud first started to go out together. For one thing, he still had a trace of Europe in his speech, a trace that only the most practiced ear could detect today. Also, something in her had responded passionately to the ordeal he had suffered. Unlike her eminently practical mother (“Marianne, that’s the way things are and you better get used to it”), she’d always had a sensitive vibration to the slightest injustice, sentimental but strong, vengeful.

  Marianne remembered how it had been when they were living in the one-and-a-half-room apartment in the Chelsea district, among the factories, furniture stores, and barber shops—lovers in love with each other, themselves, the theater. Jud was night-clerking in a nearby hotel and she was a part-time salesgirl, while they both studied with Paul Rovic.

  Unlike the usual pattern of such relationships, Marianne had not wanted to get married and she tried not to let it come to that crisis point. Besides, she had discovered in her classes at the Theater Workshop that she could, perhaps, become a serious actress, not just a light comedienne or a dancer-actress—the roles she’d played in one-night stands in the Mid- and Southwest. She was drunk with new knowledge of her possibilities that spring, and Jud was part of the young city-drunkenness.

  Bedtime, Sunday mornings, was a ritual. “Marry me,” he’d say.

  No.

  “Not ever?”

  “Not today.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Ask me tomorrow. No, I take that back, ’cause you will.”

  “You still say ‘’cause.’ You can take the girl out of Texas—”

  “Now don’t turn nasty just ‘’cause’ I won’t marry you today.”

  “We could go to Greenwich, Connecticut—”

  “Don’t have to. I know what time it is.”

  “Who would believe such stale jokes could come from those fresh lips.”

  “Anyway, I don’t think actresses should marry actors.”

  “I’m going to be a director. We can do Ibsen together.”

  “Is that what people are allowed to do after they get married?”

  “Marianne, I love you.”

  “Me, too,” she yawned, stretching.

  “All right, don’t marry me. As long as we continue to do Ibsen together.”

  “Lecher. Anyway, we can’t afford to get married.”

  “We’re living now. We just get a license.”

  “And children.”

  Jud�
�s tone suddenly turned serious. “Yes, children. If you’re going to be one of those actresses who are afraid children will spoil their waistline and all that, let’s forget it now.”

  She brushed her hair away to see him clearly. “Don’t you know better than that by now, Jud? I’m looking forward to founding the Kramer dynasty. You know what I mean. I want you to have a family again and I’m proud that I’m the first part of your new family.”

  Jud reached out and touched her cheek, blotchy with sleep. “You know what you’ve just said, don’t you?”

  Marianne leaned her head against his shoulder and sighed: “Well, a pogrom is a pogrom.”

  “You sound more Jewish every day.”

  “That’s a point, my darling. What will your precious Uncle Harold and his wife say about me? Being a shicker, I mean.”

  Jud laughed. “Not a shicker; a shicker is a drunkard. You’re a shiksa, Marianne.”

  “I always get it mixed up.”

  “I don’t care what he says.”

  “If you don’t, then I don’t.”

  But he did care, she knew. Months after they were married he’d told her how much; how it had forced him into several days of searching out what it was that defined his love, before he was able to call Harold in California and say something direct and uncomplicated about him and Marianne.

  Then, one night breathless with the warmth and mist of late spring, they dawdled through a listless dinner of cold Sunday-night spaghetti and tall glasses of milk and followed it with a movie at one of the garish grindhouses on Forty-second Street. It was A Double Life, with Ronald Colman lending his tender urbanities to the concept of an actor playing Othello, who could not shake off the intensity of the role when the curtain came down.

  As they always did, Jud and Marianne clucked and giggled, or even occasionally murmured in appreciation. Then Marianne noticed that there was an odd whispering sound coming from a little man sitting next to her. He was slumped low in his seat. They both tried to ignore him, and after a time the sound stopped.

  When the picture was over, the lights of the theater came on and yawning ushers walked through the emptying rows, turning up seats. Jud was struggling into his coat when Marianne noticed the man in the seat next to hers. He was lying in a peculiar position, rigidly unmoving. Marianne whispered something to Jud, who took one look, and pushing Marianne away, bent over the small, twisted figure. Then he grabbed Marianne by the shoulders and hustled her to the rear of the orchestra.

  “What’s the matter?” she said angrily. Marianne hated not knowing things.

  “He’s dead,” Jud answered. “Wait here while I tell somebody.”

  At home they drank coffee and did not speak for a long time. Marianne was still shaken by the experience. She had seen only one dead person before, her father. It had been strange, awful to see him lying there, formal and unfamiliar. And now this grotesque incident in the movie. She began to talk, in an hysterical stream, about what Jud must have seen that he never spoke about, that inside his normal-looking appearance was a boy who had lived a stretched-out version of that moment in the movie theater, for years. When was the last time he had seen his mother or father or sister? Had he been beaten or tortured? What did it do to a boy to live like that, day after day?

  The only time he would speak about was the liberation of the camps, and the DP camps, afterwards. Three and a half important years of his life were absolutely opaque to her, and he deliberately kept it that way—a silence curtain, cutting her off completely.

  She wept and clutched at Jud, quieted down, then began again. Jud put her to bed, and she immediately fell into an exhausted sleep. Later, he’d told her how he’d sat in an old stuffed chair next to the telephone for hours, trying to force himself to call Harold and Manya, but somehow, words were not there, he couldn’t call.

  In the morning, after whatever alchemy sleep possesses, the words were there. It was a line from Othello, perhaps triggered by the movie the night before, in which Ronald Colman had played the Moor. It was not until he had washed his face and was lathering preparatory to shaving that he got the line clearly and understood that his problem was solved.

  It was from the scene in which Othello is explaining to Brabantio that he had not seduced his daughter, Desdemona. And Othello says: “She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d; and I lov’d her that she did pity them.”

  As soon as the line spoke itself in Jud’s mind he knew that calling Harold and Manya and telling them he wanted to marry Marianne was no problem. He could hardly recall what he’d imagined the problem to be. That she wasn’t Jewish? Suddenly their reaction to that was a matter of indifference. Best of all he knew that, though the meaning of the line was not something he could communicate to them, he didn’t care.

  He went to the phone when he finished shaving, dialed the Long Distance operator, and put in the call (collect, of course, in those days). When he hung up, Marianne was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, staring at him in wonderment. He kissed her delightedly and said: “If Long Distance operators are allowed to marry people, you and I were just married.” But it wasn’t till six months after their marriage, on a night when he’d suffered a nightmare and had awakened Marianne with his cries, that he was able to tell her about the line from Othello.

  5

  JUD SAT AT THE desk, his sleeves rolled up; they had been dirtied by his scuffle with Walkowitz. In front of him lay, side by side, the Players’ Guide, a copy of Aristotle’s Poetics, a rumpled issue of the past week’s Variety, and a script of At the Gates.

  His chest muscles ached and he was finding it difficult to recapture the sealed-off atmosphere that the little backstage office, like his study at home, usually provided. The anger he’d felt at being forced into the crazy tussle with Walkowitz had come and gone while he scrubbed his face. After all, when you probed you couldn’t predict the result. If you could, there would be no need to probe. He’d done similar things, though less dangerous, with actors during rehearsals, to try to understand the actor’s temperament and how it related to the character he was playing. Once you learned something of this, you learned how to direct the actor, or more often, how not to direct him, what areas to leave alone.

  But what had he learned this afternoon? His chest muscles had learned never to underestimate the strength of a man who appeared weak and injured. Perhaps he’d also learned that this prematurely gray-haired wraith, with his limping gait and tightly poised manner, was sitting on a volcano of memories. For a moment Jud leaned his forehead on his arm and wondered if it was a mistake to take Walkowitz into the project. He quickly thrust the thought away. The two of them had been through the same mess that so many others had. (About a year ago, one night while taking the car to his garage, a mechanic had called out: “Hey, Judah, remember me?” It was a boy, or so Jud remembered him, who’d come to America five years ago with no family or friends, but who seemed in good condition and happy. In every city of the world this secret-public club must exist. In good condition and happy—but what of the nights, what of the Walkowitz nights?)

  The one precise fact Walkowitz had told him was the way he received his injuries: “a needle inserted, ever so gently, into your eyeball and left there to—”

  Jud found himself unable to raise his head from his arm. He was exhausted. Then, from the uncontrolled whorls of his memory, came the ringing sound of the public address system: “Corpse carriers to the gatehouse … corpse carriers to the gatehouse.” And his head grew heavier, his whole body now weighted with a fatigue he hadn’t known in years.

  … Crouched on their bent knees, arms stretched out in front of them … the snow-packed yard area filled with hundreds of them all in the same position … a few feet from him someone fell … a bloody crunch of the neck, two, three … How many hours? How freezing was the wind? Could the arms be felt any more as limbs, or just as a disembodied tingling and incessant burning. The legs were stiff and trembling. And, finally, what gave the most pain was the mout
h and teeth, gritted like a vise in the determination not to fall.

  And the rainy, mist-shrouded morning when the naked old man, Leo Gross’s father, bathed his body and face in the coolness of the rain-filled trough … Blockführer Kris’s boot on his neck … then the bloody knees, the knees scratched by the gravel, remained in Jud’s eyes. And Leo Gross, the joking Hungarian, safeguarding his ridiculous pince-nez by every possible subterfuge, so he could continue to see—what? The bloody knees of his father on the ground … Walkowitz … all our fathers … “Selections.” Right, to the left, to the right, to the left … Zvi, his dark eyes wide with fear.

  Jud spoke aloud, still without the strength to raise his head. “All right, Judah Kramer, enough!” he said. “Enough. That was then, this is now. He raised his head. “Enough with your American problem of too much food, gaining weight … must watch out or else heart condition, diabetes, higher insurance rates. Lose weight, work, and shut up. Enough!”

  He looked up at the poster on the wall facing the desk. It was a seamen’s roster of many years ago. It read:

  IT WAS AGREED BETWEEN THE MASTER, JOHN BROCKHURST (OR WHOSOEVER SHALL GO FOR MASTER), SEAMEN AND MARINERS OF THE BRIG America, OF PHILADELPHIA, NOW BOUND FROM THE PORT OF PHILADELPHIA TO THE PORT OF ST. THOMAS DUE TO ARRIVE 9TH OCTOBER, 1820, TO SERVE THE ENTIRE VOYAGE FOR THE AGREED WAGES STATED ABOVE. (signed)

  John Brockhurst, Master—Joseph Monk, Mate—(etc.)

  In his second year in America, still tripping his tongue over English syllables at Hollywood High School, a dusty bookshop had yielded this treasure to Jud, for fifty cents. It was many things—his connection with the American and a shaking off of the European past, but most of all it was his fantasy of Jud Kramer, the voyager.

  9th October, 1820. The times, then, had been fresh and early. Young men, many of them still children, duffel bags heavy on their shoulders, signing on for trips as unknown and exciting as the first voyages made by any young man, owning nothing but a still uncharted life and his own freedom of decision.