Tenure Track (49 page)

The webisode ended with a still montage of happy scenes from last summer, played to Lewis’s awful singing. The bit produced tears of both joy and laughter, but only added to her confused emotions. She sat for almost an hour in the dark, replaying the webisode and just thinking.

She went to her jewelry box and found a simple gold chain that would hold the ring, slipping it around her neck. She finally went back to bed, but for the longest time just stared into nothingness as her fingers twirled the chain. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed about him. It was a strange dream. In it, she took him back and everything seemed wonderful again, until he cruelly dumped her once more. She could hear her mother’s voice warning that a woman should never take back a man who broke her heart. Then, from some deeper place, she heard her father’s voice, singing the Don Henley song “Forgiveness.” Then Katherine hunted down Darryl and shot him in mid-song. That was all Mandy could recall about the dream when she awoke.

That Spring Break proved to be eventful for many members of the faculty. While Lewis was trying to win back Mandy, Jane’s family was enjoying a Passover reprieve in the form of Mark’s visiting mother. They had agreed not to argue during the week or to tell Bubbe about Dana’s revelation. Mark promised to tell her eventually, in his own way.

One afternoon, Mrs. Straussman sent the men out with a list of items that she still needed for the family’s Seder dinner while she worked in the kitchen with Dana and Jane. Dana always enjoyed these “girls only” times in the kitchen with Bubbe, who wanted to pass her cooking knowledge along to the younger generation before the details faded from memory. Since Dana knew Bubbe often shared stories while cooking, she had left the video recorder running while they worked.

As they chopped, mixed and stirred, the older woman talked about the traditions of the old country, noting how Seder for Ukrainian Jews differed from that of Western Europeans. Bubbe set the girl to work chopping apples for the charoset, reminding her, “Not too small. It mus’ be like paste when we mix wit’ the walnuts.”

“
Yes, Ma’am,” Dana obeyed, then asked, “Bubbe, did you celebrate the holidays during the war? Like, when you were living with the Resistance?”

“Eh,” the old woman shrugged as she checked a pot. “When we could. Often, we didn’t even know what day it was, but we tried. I remember once, someone told our group that the first night of Passover was coming. Of course, we had very little. We picked some bitter herbs, found some fruit to make a paste. It was not like this charoset, but it would do. We had no wine, so we used vodka. Someone else had a little unleavened bread, a few candles. We had no meat. Then, on the day of the Seder, God provided a miracle. One of the men found a farm that still had some sheep, so he stole a lamb. Oh, it was such joy. We had a real feast that night.”

A few moments later, as she tossed beets into the borscht
,
Dana asked a question that surprised even her mother. “Bubbe, I know that during the Holocaust the Nazis sent gay men to concentration camps, but did they also arrest lesbians?”

“Ach! What a question!” Danya exclaimed.

“I was just curious. That’s not something they teach us in school,” the teenager explained, trying to deflect the cautious stare from her mother.

Bubbe focused on stirring her soup. “There is a lot they don’ teach you about in school! Now, the borscht, it mus’ heat, then simmer about 45 minutes. Yah? So, let us work on the macaroons!” She began assembling the ingredients to make flour-free coconut macaroons, a special treat the twins loved. Thinking her grandmother preferred not to answer her question, Dana dropped the subject. But several minutes later, Bubbe spoke up, as if she had been passing the time gathering eggs and sugar to formulate an answer.

“Hitler, he don’t like the homosexuals, the men,” she explained. “The women, I don’ think he so much cared. But the thing was, Hitler and Mussolini, all the Fascists, they think women’s main job was to have babies. To be a good Fascist, women mus’ have lots of perfect babies. So, if you were a woman who was not married, you might be considered a bad citizen or mentally deficient, which could get you sent to the camps. But you would not be made to wear the pink triangle. That was for the
faygelahs.
”

Dana nodded silently, trying to understand the implications of this double standard as she cracked eggs into a bowl. “So, let’s say Dennis and I lived in Germany and we were both gay. Dennis would get sent off to a concentration camp, but I wouldn’t?” she asked.

“Dana—,” Jane began.

“Ach! . . . Watch the shells!” Bubbe nodded towards the bowl of eggs. “You and Dennis, you would both be sent to a concentration camp because your father is Jewish. That was much worse, much worse, than being homosexual, girl or boy.”

“Didn’t they let some people off if their mother was Christian?” Dana continued before Jane could stop her.

“Sometimes, but to Hitler, you would be a Jew!” Bubbe insisted. “He had a plan. First, get rid of all the pure Jews, then work down. I know, eventually, he would have killed all who had a drop of Jewish blood in them.”

“Wasn’t Hitler part Jewish?” the teen asked, surprising Jane with her awareness of this historical speculation.

Bubbe smiled coyly. “Ah, that is what some claim! Self hatred is a bad thing, so Freud would say.”

Dana chuckled. “You studied Freud, Bubbe?”

“Eh, I read a lot. He made more sense than Marx! Both Jews, by the way, but very flawed ideas!” Jane was tempted to jump in with her academic analysis of the conversation, but resisted again, so as not to spoil this special moment of cross-generational communication.

As the women mixed cookies and waited for a batch to bake, they took a break around the dining room table to share some hot tea and let Bubbe rest from the kitchen work. It was beginning to get dark in the house, but they left all the lights off save for one overhead bulb in the kitchen. Their faces half shaded by darkness, Dana brought up an uncomfortable subject once again. By this time they had forgotten about the video camera, which was still focused on the kitchen, but within sound range.

“Bubbe, what do you think the Germans were thinking when they killed Jews?” Dana asked innocently. “I don’t mean the big Nazis who gave the orders, I mean the soldiers who actually did the shooting. What was goin’ on in their heads?”

Bubbe sipped her tea. “That is one of the great mysteries of the Shoah. The soldiers, they were ordinary men who carried out evil. I think, they did not think of the Jews as human beings. We were like animals.”

“Is that what it’s like for all soldiers?” the teenager pressed. “To kill people you have to think of them like animals?”

“The word is ‘dehumanize,’” Jane interjected, before catching herself behaving like a professor.

The old woman’s eyes narrowed. Deciding that Dana was old enough to hear some hard truths, Bubbe began: “I can’t speak for all soldiers, but I tell you, during the bad times I carried a gun many times. I’m sure my bullets hit people, yes, but it was necessary. It was war. I try not to think about those I hurt. I pray for them.” She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose as the smell of the baking cookies filled the room. Jane and Dana sat rapt, waiting for her next words.

“
But there was one; one I remember,” Bubbe recalled. “Him, I could never forget. Winter was ending, but there was still snow on the ground. I was out with another girl, Ester, looking for food. The famines had taught me how to forage well. I had a large knife, tucked under my coat. She carried a rifle, in case we saw an animal, even a boar. No one was concerned wit’ keeping kosher at this point. We found a few winter onions, some frozen beets. We talked like all young girls. There was a boy in the camp she liked. We laughed together.”

Jane and Dana practically held their breath as they listened attentively.

“Then, we heard a noise. We thought it was a deer. He came up behind us, a German soldier. By this time we knew about the Jews, about the killings, but he was not SS, just a foot soldier, a young boy, so beautiful. Blonde hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones, very Aryan. Hitler would have liked him. He looked as scared as we were. I don’ know why he was alone. Perhaps he was separated from his unit; perhaps he had wandered off; maybe deserted, I don’t know. He wore no overcoat.”

“
He told us to drop the gun and put our hands up. By this time I knew some German words. I tried to tell him we were jus’ farm girls, looking for food. He asked why we had the gun. I said, ‘to shoot meat.’ He looked hungry, so we offered to share what we had already gathered with him. He wasn’t sure he could trust us. I lied. I said, ‘We are Ukrainians. You are our liberators, you freed us from the Communists! Please, let us show our thanks.’ He took the onions and ate like a starving animal. Still, he had the gun up. After his belly was full, he started to relax a bit. He thanked us, said we were pretty, that it had been a long time since he had seen any pretty girls. He seemed like a nice boy. But he was a German soldier, our enemy.”

“
I asked if I could kiss him on the cheek, to show our thanks for what the Germans had done for our people. He nodded. So, I walked over, put my hand on his shoulder, and leaned in. His gun was now pointed down. Just as I kissed his cheek, I pulled the knife from my coat and struck him across the belly, just like gutting an animal. He grabbed my shoulder with one hand, pulled close, as if to embrace my body, and looked at me wit’ this surprised look. Then he fell to the ground. Ester just watched. The snow, it turned pink and melted as the warm blood ran across it. We took his gun, boots, trousers, anything that could be of use to our men. We hid the body in a thicket and tried to wipe away the pink snow. Luckily, it started snowing again, to help cover up.”

Bubbe’s face took on a serious, puzzled expression. “I don’ know if he was ever found. When we got back to camp, we told our leader what had happened. He divided up the goods. I tried to wash the blood out of my coat, but it would not come out. It never came out.” Her voice trailed off as she stared into space.

Dana’s eyes were moist, her mouth hanging open in stunned silence. “I’m sorry, Bubbe.”

Bubbe’s eyes expressed little remorse as she took a calming sip of tea. “I did what I needed to do. Yah. It was best. But I must still live with the look in that boy’s eyes, the feel of his body as he died. Every day. Every night. That is my punishment.” Just then, the cookie timer went off, causing Dana and her mother to jump. Just as quickly, the spell of her memories broken, young freedom fighter Danya Kamenetsky turned back into Bubbe Straussman, a loving grandmother checking her treats.

As the women tasted the freshly baked cookies, they heard the sounds of Mark and Dennis returning from their errand. Nothing more was mentioned about the conversation between the women.

The next evening, after Bubbe had retired to bed and Mark was out for an evening run, the twins approached their mother with worried looks on their faces.

“
Mom, did you mess with the video recorder today?” Dana asked. When Jane answered in the negative, her daughter explained that, earlier in the day, she had shown the video from her previous day’s conversation with Bubbe to Mark. When she and Dennis went to inspect it this evening, the scene had been deleted from the camera’s memory.

Jane inspected for herself. Indeed, the entire scene was gone, a development that visibly upset Dana. Jane advised her daughter to write down everything she recalled from the conversation and she would do the same, so that a record would still exist. “Perhaps you and Dennis can figure out a way to work the information back into the documentary,” she advised. “I’d rather not make Bubbe tell it again.”

While the twins worked on recreating the story, Jane mulled the mystery of the edited conversation. When Mark returned from his evening run, she asked him about it as he prepared to enter the shower.

Trying not to sound accusing, she asked, “Were you doing anything with the kids’ camera today?”

“
Uh, I don’t know,” he said, absentmindedly untying his shoes. “I might have.”

“
Dana said she showed you a piece she recorded last night.”

“
Yeah, she did,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“
It was some pretty powerful stuff,” she noted.

“
I guess that’s one way of putting it.” He removed his sweaty socks, which failed to mask the smell of subterfuge in the room.

“
Mark,” she asked bluntly, “did you delete the file from last night, the one with Bubbe talking to Dana?”

After a moment’s pause, he admitted, “Yes I did.”

“
How could you erase it?” she insisted, the scholar in her taking over from the mother. “It’s a part of the historical record. That’s what this project is all about.”

“
I’m sorry, I’m not as wedded to the ‘historical record’ as you are, Jane,” he said, making air quotes. “I don’t want a record of my mother talking about murdering somebody, especially if it might wind up on the Internet. Other people wouldn’t understand.”

The historian in Jane continued to object, “But Mark, she knew the recorder was on. She told us that story for a reason. Don’t you see what it teaches us? People can be very good at heart and still do terrible things in dire circumstances. It was war; the Holocaust. If she had been captured, she would’ve been killed immediately or sent to a camp to die later. Instead, she struck the first blow. And thank God she did, or you wouldn’t be here to argue with me about this. That’s part of the price your mother paid for your existence and the existence of our children. It’s called survival!”