Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel (28 page)

Read Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel Online

Authors: Thaisa Frank

BOOK: Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel
13.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Elie Kowaleski, said a voice in the cloth. Is that you?
Elie couldn’t stop looking at Asher’s face while he sat on the cobblestone street, staring at the pretend sky. It wasn’t a real face, but grey skin stretched over bones, an assemblage of angles and hollows, a vehicle for exhaustion and starvation—but not a face. The flesh beneath it was gone. His eyes were the only thing that seemed alive. Yet Elie could see everything in that face—every gunshot he’d heard at Auschwitz, every moment he’d seen people die. And the person she’d known at Freiburg, she could see that too: The man who worried about his wife and gave exhilarating lectures about Leibniz. The man who read late at night.
She and Lodenstein were pulling crates from the storage room Gitka had shown Maria hours before. It would be a bedroom for Asher and Daniel. They bent and swayed with the rhythm of people who are used to working together, as though they’d never been apart—and this surprised Elie. She remembered Lodenstein’s strength. How crates seemed weightless when he lifted them. And the characteristic way he pushed back his hair—quickly, as if he didn’t have a moment to waste. The stack got top-heavy, and he moved crates near the
trompe l’oeil
that led to the tunnel. Elie found mattresses, blankets, lanterns, and a Tiffany lamp for the one wall socket. She stopped at the Solomons to look in on Dimitri. Then she and Lodenstein went to the kitchen.
My God, I was afraid I’d never see you again, said Elie, handing him a glass of water.
I was afraid too. You don’t know how much.
Are you upset that he knows me?
Not now. I’m just glad to see you.
Are you saying that to be nice? Or do you mean it?
For the most part, said Lodenstein.
Asher began to cough, and Elie brought him a glass of water. Daniel was still in the street looking at the paralyzed sky. Asher had moved to a mattress in the storage room.
Don’t ever say my last name here, she said to him. I’m Elie Schacten now.
Asher smiled. So you found yourself an alias. Like everyone else in this war. Did you just get new papers—or were you baptized?
Elie said she’d gotten new papers, and realized she couldn’t remember the way she and Asher used to talk. It was a language of nuances, irony, and double meanings. Now she spoke a language of crisis that was urgent, truncated, and literal. Sometimes it surged with intimacy and shared revelations—the way people confide when they’re never going to see each other again. But beyond moments of peril and exhilaration, she’d never spent much time in the company of someone she’d helped rescue. Finally she said:
Was it safe for you on the train?
I doubt it. I tried to sleep, but I kept wondering if we’d all be shot. The only thing that made it bearable was Gerhardt Lodenstein. I think he’s some kind of angel, and I don’t even believe in them.
I do too, said Elie. And I don’t believe in them either.
But where did he bring us? To a heaven that’s run by pulleys?
He brought you to a place where we answer letters from people who are probably dead by now.
Asher flinched. They must have a lot of work then.
Elie wished she could remember how to joke, if only to erase the look she saw on his face.
They only write to people whose letters are returned, she said. These—she pointed at the crates—are where they put the answers.
Returned from where? said Asher.
From the camps, said Elie.
Did you ever get a letter from me?
No, said Elie. But we got a letter for you, along with your prescription for Heidegger’s glasses. It’s a small part of why you’re here.
They were interrupted by Stumpf, who walked past them with mincing steps and arranged crates near the
trompe l’oeil
.
Asher noticed Stumpf’s uniform and edged toward the wall. You have guards here, he said.
He’s a lackey, said Elie.
I don’t think so, said Asher. I think this place is just like Theresienstadt.
He was talking about a camp in Czechoslovakia with a few pleasant streets and decent houses that were facades for visits from the Red Cross. Children sang in an opera and were sent to Auschwitz to be gassed the next day.
Nobody dies here, said Elie.
What a comfort.
Elie looked at Asher directly. And there they were: the same blue eyes she’d seen at Freiburg.
Did you really go to Auschwitz? she asked.
Asher stared at her the way he once stared when Elie said she was sure his wife was safe. Elie looked at her hands. They were dappled with red and white light from the Tiffany lamp, and she turned them at different angles until Lodenstein arrived with two bowls of soup. Only two bowls of soup? Where was the sausage and knäckebrot?
That night, Elie and Lodenstein stayed in Mueller’s old room so they could be close to Asher and Daniel, who were resting in the room that once stored crates. They were near the main part of the Compound and could hear Scribes cry out in sleep—a sound Lodenstein once found eerie and now found comforting because they were familiar and human, not the clinking of a jailer’s keys or the shots at Auschwitz. He’d felt close to Elie when they said goodnight to Asher and Daniel. And he felt close to her when they said goodnight to Dimitri. They’d spoken softly, the way they’d say goodnight to children. But now he felt an uncanny tension, as though the air between them was vibrating with taut string. He leaned over and opened the duffel bag he had brought back from Auschwitz.
Elie, I have a surprise for you. You know all the food you get? I’ve gotten some too.
My God. You’ve already done enough.
Lodenstein uncorked a bottle of wine.
The best, he said. And now people who deserve it can drink it.
Elie smiled and leaned against him.
I’m sorry I never told you my real name.
It’s a long name, said Lodenstein. I would never have remembered it.
Are you trying to be nice?
Only a little. But I just want to know—were you two lovers?
Elie hesitated. Then she said:
At Freiburg. His wife was gone. The Party was starting. And both of us were lonely.
Lodenstein took a long drink of wine and rubbed a hand over his face.
It doesn’t matter anymore, he said finally. We saved two people.
He reached for Elie in the dark. But Elie sat up and hugged her knees.
That’s not the least of it, she whispered.
The least of what?
The least of anything. Mueller knows.
Knows what?
Mueller knows that you left Auschwitz with two fugitives. He says it’s all over the Reich. People are gossiping.
People gossip all the time, and nothing comes of it, said Lodenstein. Don’t think about it. Have some more wine.
But he even saw Dimitri.
Don’t worry, said Lodenstein. Dimitri’s safe. Asher and Daniel are safe. We’re all safe.
He set down the wine and repeated the words—
Don’t worry, Don’t worry
—so often they seemed like a lullaby. Elie opened the covers, and he fell against her. It had been so long since he’d felt her supple strength. And so long since he’d felt that sensation of light, binding them together. Making love felt like the long culmination of all the moments when he’d thought about her—in the brick-laden jail, in the vast bed in the Reich holding her rose, traveling on an empty train from Auschwitz. Elie fell asleep. He stroked her hair and began to drift, feeling the tension from his body ease out onto the floor. But just as he came to the edge of sleep, he clamored awake. In his exuberance at being with Elie—hearing her voice, sharing wine, making love—he’d forgotten they were in Mueller’s old room. Now he saw the posts of the rosewood bed like masts of a ghost ship. He saw Mueller’s knife. He felt his huge leather glove. He heard Mueller’s voice talking about fugitives.
An unspeakable act of treason
, he could hear him saying.
An arrow of death pointing to everything below the ground.
Lodenstein threw off the covers. Here, in the heart of the Compound, he felt buried under ten meters of dirt. He’d gone to jail, weathered Goebbels, traveled to Auschwitz, endured Heidegger, rescued two people. But the danger was boundless, infinite. He had no idea what to do. He only knew he had to breathe.
Lodenstein took the mineshaft and passed Lars, who looked untroubled asleep on a pallet, into the freezing night. At that moment he despised everything about the Compound: the fake hut, the cobblestone street, the playing cards from people who’d been gassed. He despised the front path with stones broken purposefully because Hans Ewigkeit wanted them to look old. He despised the fact that something that never should have been there in the first place had been made to look like it belonged.
He heard his own boots break the ice that filled the brittle field and climbed the narrow ladder to the watchtower. It was dark, and the stars were faraway, small white flies he could never touch. He looked for cigarettes on the platform and found a stub. Thank God he had matches.
All at once he became aware of his hands, his legs, his whole body. He hadn’t been alone since he’d driven to Berlin, and the sensation was familiar and unsettling. His breathing slowed. He touched the wooden railing and looked at the wide night sky. It was clear, with a panoply of stars. He looked at the ground where mounds of snow billowed in the moonlight. Then back at the sky, shot through with distant light.
It occurred to him that stars had always fallen in and out of the world. Sometimes they were lights. Sometimes they were angels, animals, or gods. Sometimes they were dazzling. Sometimes he couldn’t see them at all. He took a deep breath, watched thin smoke float from his mouth, and decided that Heidegger probably understood what it felt like to fall out of a world made safe by human meaning. A fragile world, he thought. Poised to fall apart.
This sense of union with Heidegger’s philosophy, however tenuous, and however much he disliked Heidegger, made him feel sure nothing would ever get worse than it already was. But his sad sense of tranquility was destroyed as soon as he finished the cigarette. He pawed the wooden platform for more discarded butts and got splinters in his hands.

Other books

Wounded by Percival Everett
La hija del Nilo by Javier Negrete
The Human Age by Diane Ackerman