Jacob's Oath (12 page)

Jacob sat awkwardly on the hard sofa and looked around, at the framed photos on the
mantelpiece, the pictures on the wall, the books and candlesticks. There was nothing
familiar. It had been six years and there wasn’t a trace of his family in the home
they had lived in for generations. Dr. Berger kept asking questions—where have you
been, what was it like, how did you get here, what have you seen—but Jacob could only
answer with a few quiet words. Why, could he tell them what he had been through? Over
a cup of tea? Who could believe it? They would think him a lunatic. Frau Berger offered
some dry cookies while Schmutzig had disappeared. Probably to get his friends and
some big rocks.

Why had he come? Did he think he’d come home and the Germans would just move out?
Actually, yes, something like that. But now he understood what a forlorn hope that
was. His home had become someone else’s home. They’d as good as stolen it, but there
it was. He thought, Maybe they’ll pay for it? and he laughed inside. Now what? His
only feeling was extreme fatigue. He’d reached his goal only to find a nice enough
couple who didn’t know what to do with him. In a town that seemed from another continent.
And how strange; to be in his own home and see nothing of his own, no sign of his
family’s existence. What happened to their things? It was dawning on him. What does
it mean, to return? If what you left no longer exists, has been rubbed out of existence,
like a drawing erased leaving a blank sheet of paper. To what have you returned? And
why?

Jacob sighed. “Nice cookies,” he said.

“I made them. You can’t get much these days,” Frau Berger said. “It’s been hard for
us.” She shook her head and sighed. “Very hard. The planes, you know. Flying overhead,
we never knew if they would drop bombs on us or not. And the food. Sometimes we couldn’t
get fresh fish.” She caught herself. “Well, mustn’t complain, you know better than
us, it has been hard for everybody.”

“I suppose so,” said Jacob. He couldn’t help himself. “What happened to all our things?
Our furniture? Our photographs? All our stuff?” Before she answered, he remembered:
the Nazis had auctioned it all.

Dr. Berger came back, holding a pair of shoes. “Here, Jacob, try these, we’re about
the same size. I think you could do with these, yes?”

It was Jacob’s first laugh. He had forgotten how strange he must look, his legs crossed,
a torn black shoe on his left foot and a green hiker’s boot on his right. “You noticed,”
he said.

The doctor smiled. “Do they fit?”

As Jacob took off his shoes and said a silent thank-you that he had washed his feet
and changed his socks that day, Dr. Berger remained standing and said, “It is so good
that you have come home in one piece. Those were bad days. It was hard for all of
us who did not like what the National Socialists were doing. But now that is over,
thank God, and we have been liberated by the American soldiers.”

Frau Berger poured some more tea and nodded hard in agreement.

Dr. Berger said again, “It has been a very difficult time for all of us.”

Jacob thought, Yes, right, for all of us. He said, “The shoes fit well, a little big
but thank you, thank you very much, I would like to pay you for them but unfortunately…”

“Don’t even think of it,” Dr. Berger said. After some polite chatter he rose, “Well,
it’s getting on…”

Jacob said, “I’ll find some money and come back to pay you. I would never take anything
for nothing.”
Unlike some
. He went on, “I wonder, would you mind if I take a look around…”

Frau Berger interrupted, “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly … I haven’t dusted today, I
haven’t made the beds…”

Dr. Berger said, “I’m afraid it’s getting late. There is one thing, though. I suddenly
remembered.” He left the room and went upstairs. Jacob could hear his footsteps above
and heard him rummaging and a door closing. Frau Berger smiled at Jacob and poured
more tea. “Sugar?” she asked. “Our last bit of rations.”

With an inward smile, Jacob said, “Three, please.”

The doctor returned with a battered dark green leather-bound book. He handed it to
Jacob. “I believe this was your father’s? His client book?”

Jacob started. His eyes darted to the corner of the living room where the Bergers
had a side table. There, at the end of each day, Papi had sat at his desk, hunched
over his accounts, noting the day’s sales and measurements. He could almost see him
now. How many times did his father chuckle about a loyal client, “His belly has grown
and his neck has shrunk.” Jacob’s eyes drifted back and his hands closed around the
book, all that remained of his father. He hadn’t even a photo. His hands trembled.

“I only came across it last year. I found it behind the bookshelves,” Dr. Berger was
saying. Jacob held the volume out in both hands as if it might disintegrate, as if
it were the first Gutenberg bible, the finest Meissen porcelain, a stem of delicate
Bohemian glass. He tried to steady his hands as he opened it and read on the first
page in black ink:

Solomon Klein

Kundenliste

He turned to the next page and the next, gazing at the columns of names and numbers,
sighing. He glanced up with shiny eyes and Dr. and Frau Berger tiptoed from the room.

Tears came as he read his father’s almost illegible handwriting. His father would
always try to make Jacob write more clearly and Jacob would retort: You can talk!
Isaak Mendelsohn; Jonas Brenner; Robert Feinstein, who taught literature at school;
Robert Mueller; Wolfgang Niederland, who bought three suits each Christmas; Samuel
Kohn from over the road … pages and pages, hundreds of names, some familiar, noting
the length of their inner legs, their arms, their shoulder span, their neck size.
When Jacob was a little boy, Papi would call out the precise measurements and Jacob
would jot them down. He could see Papi on his knees now, with a tape measure and his
bald spot.

And sometimes there was a deliberate, childish writing: here, and here; that must
be his own.

Jacob wasn’t much for religion but he knew that God inscribes the fate of each Jew
in the Book of Life.

And Papi had written the names and sizes of each client in his own book of names.
And after the Jews had met their fate this was all that remained of them: their measurements.

Jacob didn’t look up. A wave of fatigue rolled over him and he began to slump. “Excuse
me,” he murmured to the empty room. Light was fading and his head felt heavy. He shifted
on the sofa and felt his neck drooping. The book grew heavy and rested in his lap.
His last thought was of God, who waits until Yom Kippur to seal his verdict. Until
then, the Days of Awe, a Jew can mend his ways and seek forgiveness to avoid God’s
judgment. Papi didn’t find a way, and nor did those in his book of names.

Jacob fell into a deep sleep, the sleep of the reprieved.

TEN

Frankfurt,
May 10, 1945

In the recovery ward of the U.S. army’s 123rd Field Hospital in Frankfurt, Sarah had
her own little curtained-off space. She was the only woman among dozens of male soldiers,
the lightly wounded. The more serious—the amputations, the skin grafts, the multiple
shrapnel wounds—were across the yard in the main buildings. Fed, cleaned, and clothed,
the American doctors had tended her every physical need. Her soul was another matter.

She was straining forward, her eyes fixed and intense as she told the rabbi her dream.

“I could see her beautiful smiling face and I wanted her and I stretched out my arms
but I couldn’t reach her and every step I took toward her she faded away a bit more
until I reached where she was but she was gone. And then I was walking into water,
into a lake, I was going in up to my knees and then my chest, and then my chin, and
just as the water covered my head I saw her ahead of me again, in the water. She had
silky black hair and she smelled so clean and sweet and she was smiling at me with
her little round face. And I kept walking with my arms stretched before me, like I
was sleepwalking in the water, it was cold, very cold, but I wasn’t.” Her eyes filled
with tears. “I wanted my baby, but I couldn’t reach her, and I called to her and then
Hoppi, Hoppi, her father, he was calling and shouting my name, it sounded like an
echo, Saaaraaah, Saaaraah, it went on for a long time, in the middle of a forest,
I was surrounded by trees, big ones, it was dark, I was lost, and I didn’t know where
he was, I could just hear him calling me, and then there was a face, a big baby face,
it was smiling, smiling at me, from the top of a tree, and then it was gone, it exploded,
there was a bang, and then Hoppi shouted, Help, and then, and then…”

With tears streaming down her face, dripping from the curves of her cheeks, her eyes
red, shivering, Sarah gripped the rabbi’s hand even tighter. “And then, then…”

The curtain rustled and an American nurse pushed in a steel cart laden with meals
on tin trays. “Here you are, honey,” she said, “eat up for once. You haven’t been
touching your food. Doctor says to tell you he has the final test results, and there’s
just one important thing he needs to talk to you about and then you can leave in a
few days. You’ve been an angel, you really have.”

U.S. Army Chaplain Rabbi Michael Bohmer gave Sarah’s hand a gentle squeeze as they
waited for the nurse to rearrange the pillow and leave. “Thank you,” he said to the
nurse.

“It was awful,” Sarah said, when they were alone again, enclosed in a box of white
curtains. “I’ve been having lots of bad dreams.”

The rabbi nodded. He was a young man, recently ordained, yet he had an older man’s
serious face, with thin lips, a straggly mustache, and round glasses. His hair was
receding fast. Sarah liked him. He spoke fluent German. He had learned at home from
his parents, who emigrated from Stuttgart to Pennsylvania the year he was born. “What
do you think it means?” she asked.

“The dream, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of trees were they?”

Glancing at him, she pulled herself up to a sitting position. “That’s a funny question,
why do you ask?”

The rabbi stopped himself. He was about to say that Jews believe if a man appears
in a dream among fruit trees then he is in paradise. But that would mean that the
man in Sarah’s dream was dead. And he didn’t want to say the wrong thing. “I was just
wondering. You know, dreams are an important part of our lives. Hisda the Babylonian
said that every dream means something, apart from those that occur during fasting.”

“Well, I haven’t eaten much the last few days. Years, really.”

“Then maybe it doesn’t mean anything. In those days the most common way to prevent
bad dreams was through fasting. But if you’re fasting, and you have a bad dream anyway,
then I guess Hisda isn’t too relevant today. That was some time ago. In the third
century.” He smiled at Sarah. “Tell me. Have you been having this dream a lot?” In
Jewish lore, a recurring dream means that it will soon come to pass.

“Yes. No. Well, dreams like it.”

“What do you mean? Or rather, maybe, tell me what the dream means to you.”

He had been around damaged souls long enough to know that his role was not to interpret
dreams but to give hope. He had accompanied the U.S. Third Army for eighteen months
as they fought their way through Europe. Much of that time had been spent comforting
the wounded and the sick, soldiers of any denomination. But now that the fighting
was dying out, here at least, he was beginning to see different kinds of people, with
different issues. Civilians, even though this was Frankfurt’s military hospital. This
young woman was not the first Jewish woman he had come across. How many more like
her were there, filling Europe’s roads, trying to go home? He’d seen the smashed towns.
And the columns of refugees traipsing in circles. They were like homing pigeons with
no homes. Sarah had been lucky. He knew only that an American driver had brought her
to the hospital after bringing her from the north. She had been bleeding heavily from
between her legs. He never asked about a patient’s medical condition unless he or
she volunteered information.

Sarah had told him a little about herself. But the man in her dream. The baby. Did
they exist? Who were they?

Gently, taking Sarah’s hand again, he asked, “The baby … in your dream…”

That’s all it took. His caring touch, his warm eyes, his gentle inquiry. Tears flowed
again as she talked. All she had held in for so long poured out: the years of terror
in Berlin, afraid of every stranger’s glance. Her years as a submarine when she ran
out of friends to hide her. And most agonizing of all, her sobs as she told how she
lost her baby in the cemetery at night. Through her hand he felt her trembling, and
she trembled for as long as she spoke.

The man’s name was Hoppi, just a nickname, of course. She started to say how he got
it, but stopped herself. She just knew he was dead, she had such a sense of absence
and loss. But she had promised to meet him in Heidelberg, their home, and she had
to keep her promise. It was a holy oath. Now her tears stopped, her gaze went icy,
as she gripped the rabbi’s hand and fixed him with her eyes, withholding nothing,
recounting the rape, her desecration, her sense that her body was no longer hers.
How hard it was to be alone. In her pain, without knowing, she stroked his hand, as
if willing him to make things better.

As Rabbi Bohmer listened, struck yet again by how unequipped he was, despite his post,
to offer real solace, another interpretation of her dream occurred to him. A more
recent school held that to see a dead baby in your dream symbolized the ending of
something that was once a part of you. He wondered what part of Sarah’s life was over.
A good part? Or a bad part? Her tragic life under the Nazis? Her happy life with Hoppi?
Something to do with her baby? If the part of her life that was ending was bad, then
the part that was beginning could be good. What good thing was about to happen?