Heidegger's Glasses: A Novel (41 page)

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Authors: Thaisa Frank

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It’s a magic trunk, he said to her. There will always be one more thing left to find. And one more thing after that.
Zoë turned into a wispy teenager and majored in philosophy of science to the mixed reviews of her grandfather, who said to her, more than once:
Philosophers engage in endless arguments. They have principles but never live by them.
Like Martin Heidegger? said Zoë.
Like everybody, said Asher.
Zoë was no longer interested in the trunk, and Asher never mentioned it. But when he was closing his shop, he summoned Zoë. She floated in with the same distracted authority she’d had as a child, except she had a diamond in her nose and purple streaks in her hair. Asher took her to the back of the shop and pulled out the trunk.
I want you to have this, he said.
I haven’t thought about it in years, said Zoë.
But you used to love it as a child, said Asher. Maybe you’d even like to archive this world someday.
Why didn’t you?
You know why I didn’t, Asher said. I never wanted to be another found object from the Holocaust. Neither did your mother and father.
Zoë, who’d heard all this before, didn’t say anything. She opened the trunk, was overcome by the smell of mold, closed it and took it by taxi to her Lower East Side apartment. When she opened the trunk again, she couldn’t remember what she once found so compelling. Its contents, once mysterious and totemic, now bristled with darkness, captivity, and reproach. She picked up a letter in German—a language she could read now—and saw that it extolled conditions in the camps. She picked up a letter in Polish, which she couldn’t read, and sensed terror in the short, hurried script. She knew she was reading lies.
Besides letters there were diaries, concealing old photographs. Zoë saw the illuminated face of a red-haired man named Benyami Nachtgarten. The slightly bewildered face of a baby named Shalhevet Nafissian. The studious face of a teenager named Alexei Markova. The whimsically elongated face of a woman named Miriam La Toya, who looked like she was laughing at a party. It was clear these people had died because there were two dates on the back of the photographs. Zoë assembled them and imagined these people in a country of their own. They looked alive, curious, happy together.
She also looked at the old letters—to a 19th-century dressmaker in Alsace, a button dealer in Dresden, a coach-maker in Stuttgart. Letters from the time
before
the time that mattered; a time when no one ever thought about writing to make false records; a time when the dead didn’t need letters to stop the world from falling apart; a time when people didn’t depend on knowing languages to save their lives; a time when letters brought the living together, sentenced no one to live below the earth, and weren’t used as weapons to rewrite history.
Because most of the letters were just that. And, like things that one didn’t want to see but saw anyway, they reminded Zoë of the numbers on the arms of her father and grandfather. Even worse, the letters conveyed terrible news because of what they left out. They reminded her of silences she’d felt as a child when grown-ups pretended there wasn’t tension while she knew—sitting at the dinner table, at her desk at school—that something unspeakable was in the air. They even reminded her of silences now, when people hardly mentioned anything difficult—in their own lives, in the lives of other people. The last time she’d heard about anything painful was when a neighbor said that he’d told his son to see the world—meaning he should visit relatives in Italy, not join the Marines and take a piss by the banks of the Euphrates. But that, in fact, was just what he was going to do.
Holy places
, he’d said.
Bombed to ruin
s.
What’s the use of talking about what’s difficult, if people aren’t going to listen? Zoë asked her grandfather when she visited his book-strewn apartment. And what good would it do to archive a trunk?
Maybe no good at all, said Asher. But don’t ever get rid of it.
When Asher died at ninety-five, Zoë was living on the Upper West Side in an apartment that had been chopped into three smaller apartments. She lived in the part that had a maid’s room, and she gave the trunk to it so she’d never have to look at it. After his memorial service, where she’d shaken hands with innumerable people, she went to the maid’s room and spent some time looking at the trunk, but she did not open it. It was the most vibrant link to her grandfather. At the very least she should look at the letters. Instead, she shut the door.
A few mornings later, she got a call from a man with a German accent who said his name was Gerhardt Lodenstein. His English was precise, and he apologized for intruding. He said he’d just read her grandfather’s obituary—they’d corresponded for a while. And he wasn’t calling from below the earth but from Germany.
It took Zoë a moment to believe she was hearing from someone who had lived in that place. And before she was able to say she was glad to hear from him, Lodenstein said he understood her grandfather had given her the trunk, and there were a few more photographs he’d like to send. He also asked if she’d consider exhibiting the contents.
Zoë knew her grandfather would like this. He’d telegraphed his desire when he gave her the trunk. And he’d always made what happened to him clear by the way he kept his shirtsleeves rolled up, even in winter—so anyone who came into the shop could see the numbers on his arm. But Zoë had come to loathe the trunk. So she told Lodenstein she would have to think about it—sure her final answer would be no—and surprised herself by bringing a few letters to the public library the same evening. People with stacks of five-by-eight cards looked curiously at the wispy woman with purple streaks in her hair. The letters emanated the dank mineral smell of the mine, as if determined to broadcast their history to the library.
That night Zoë went back into the maid’s room and opened the trunk slowly. Here was an empty bottle. She could almost smell the tea-rose. And here was a red woolen glove. She could see the ragged edges where someone had cut off the fingers. And here were Heidegger’s glasses—an object of such fascination when she was a child. She remembered putting them on, seeing the world in soft edges, her grandfather’s consternation. And here was a blue and white coffee mug.
She took each letter to the laundry room of her apartment building and hung them on a clothesline. But they still smelled of dank minerals and mold—and emanated so much reproach Zoë started to believe that the dead really did expect answers.
As if they could see her dismay, people in the library began to give her things. A man studying bonding behavior in primates bought her an eraser that glowed in the dark. A woman doing a thesis on number sequence gave her pens with red and silver ink. Zoë got arrows for marking pages, paper clips, translucent folders. She took everything, whether she needed it or not.
Lodenstein kept sending things too—more than a few photographs: He sent typewriter spools, braided candles, diaries decoded by relatives of Scribes, more velvet roses, blue cashmere wool, another red fingerless glove. German detective stories from the 1930s, a recipe for soup, a spade. There was no more room in the trunk. Zoë began to pile things on her couch. They reminded her of a jumble shop, and she covered them with blankets.
He also sent letters from raided houses—obviously interrupted while they were being written. They talked about lengthening hems on children’s clothes, vacations to the Alps. Each letter pointed to a life far back in time—a life Zoë could never reach. Sometimes she stared at the fabric on her sweater and thought she could see people from the Compound in the tufts. Sometimes she toyed with the idea of answering the letters—as if this would bring people back to life or at least would silence their voices. And once, when she was visiting her parents, she started to talk about the number of unanswered letters in the world.
Are you doing something with that trunk? Maria said.
Yes.
I knew we should have thrown it away, said Maria. It belongs at the bottom of the Hudson.
They were in the kitchen, and Maria was making dinner. Zoë watched her pour spices into leek-and-potato soup and make dressing with three different kinds of vinegar. She said that Maria shouldn’t go to all that trouble for a salad.
You might if you’d been in that place, said Maria. People worked hard to make good food. And they were always kind. I was lucky to be there during the war.
So you don’t want that trunk at the bottom of the Hudson? said Zoë.
No, I suppose I don’t, said Maria. And neither does your father. So do what you want with it.
One morning in May, over sixty years after Berlin surrendered, Zoë ran her hands along the trunk. She felt the same splintered wood on the top that she’d felt as a child—and the rough ridges on the bottom that her grandfather said didn’t exist. The trunk was finally empty.
The man who studied primates had found a small museum in Manhattan—called The Museum of Tolerance—that wanted to exhibit the contents of the trunk. The head of the museum helped Zoë catalog and found translators for the letters and diaries. Two of the translators, with numbers on their arms, said they would have given anything to have been in that place.
Zoë had annotated everything. She had even traced the origins of the Tiffany lamp and—on the promise that she’d never tell—gotten Lodenstein to confess that he’d broken the wool carder when he was angry. And now the objects and letters were ready for the exhibit. A brochure said that the Compound was one of the few places in the war that had sheltered survivors from Auschwitz. It also said the Scribes were, in a sense, bred for their languages. Maria and Daniel thought this was an exaggeration—as did Zoë, who had written that the Scribes were chosen at deportations because they knew languages besides German. But the head of the museum had transformed this and put it in the brochure. It was the first time Zoë noticed how someone turned her words around to make a different sentence. She remembered how deeply her grandfather distrusted newspapers and history.
Lodenstein, who knew about the exhibit, hadn’t sent anything for a month. That morning Zoë sent him the brochure and enclosed a note, asking whether he’d like the trunk back.
His answer—that he would not—came two weeks later with a package that included her grandfather’s original prescription for Heidegger’s glasses, a dark red notebook, and a photograph of a woman near a stand of trees. The woman had delicate features, penetrating eyes, and wore a white blouse with a rose pinned to the collar. Her blond hair was drawn back with a bow and a tangle of curls spilled around her shoulders. Her face was lit by sun.

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