The Houseguest (11 page)

“Of course you do, Max,” she said. It was the first time she'd used his name. The sound of it caught him.

“Why of course?”

“Because that's what you do, isn't it? You try to help. You're not like the others, are you?”

“What others?”

She raised her hands, gestured toward the diners in the cafe, the crowds of shoppers moving past and around it. “These others,” she said. “All these people living their small and pleasant and meaningless lives. Eating their tomato soup and their ice cream and thinking that because they have food in their stomachs and fancy clothes and enough
money to go to the movies, that all is well with the world, not feeling the need to do anything bigger. I watch them sometimes, and I can't understand it. They're a mystery to me. They frighten me.” She seemed to grow pale. She pushed away her food, raised her hand to her face.

“Miss Beidler, are you feeling ill?”

“The noise,” she said. “The lights. Sometimes it's too much for me.” He looked around and for a moment he could see and hear it as she must have: a shrill and swirling force, cyclonic, unrelenting, a storm of voices and lights.

“Come with me,” he said. He put money down onto the table without waiting for a check, helped her to her feet. She leaned into him as they made their way toward the exit, past the glass cases of silver trinkets and silk scarves, past the counters of cosmetics, fat men buying gifts for their wives and the shop girls lording over their bottles of perfume.

They found a patch of grass near a bench on the edge of the park, a shaded spot next to a small pond where lily pads, green and wide and oily, floated on top of the dark water. There were ducks drifting toward them, the sound of children playing in the distance, a willow tree with a couple beneath it, stealing moments. See, he wanted to say, there are good things about this place. Good and tranquil things. You can find safety here. He didn't say any of this out loud but he could sense that she was relaxing.

“This is better, isn't it?” she said.

“Much. I never cared for crowded restaurants, either, to tell you the truth.”

“They used to be my livelihood, large crowds. I depended on them as an actress. They never used to bother me when I was on stage, when everyone was watching, waiting for a misstep, when it would have made sense to be bothered. No, then, I loved them, the sea of faces. In fact I sometimes feel as though they were what was keeping me afloat, lifting me up into the role, carrying me through the show.”

She looked off in the direction of the playing children.

“Of late I have come to feel that whenever I am around more than just a few people, four or five, that I am an intruder or an imposter. And this is something people can see. They know what I am.”

“This is a decent place, Ana. It's not without its faults but I can assure you that most people here are happy that we've helped someone in a situation like yours.”

“Are they? Just before I arrived I read about a synagogue in New York, burned to cinders. There is a place, Washington Heights, they knocked out the windows, painted unspeakable things on the walls. Jewish children beaten up on the streets. Jewish children beaten in Munich, Jewish children beaten in Lodz, Jewish children beaten in Manhattan.”

“These are terrible acts, but they are isolated. And they are far from Utica. And what you have to remember is that when synagogues catch fire in this country, we put them out.”

“For now you do. In Warsaw, Jews speak of the Americans coming to save them, all two million of them, as though it were inevitable. It is the
Traumland.
But they are not going to be saved, Max. There is no help for them, for us. The Jews of this country are so lucky, so protected. Nothing happening in Europe is real to them. I see that, even with the Auers. The ones who knew violence before they came here. The ones who saw the putsches and pogroms. America has washed the memory from them. Things they learned with their blood and bones are not real to them any longer. Europe is your
Alptraumland,
Max.”

He tried reading her face to see if she had meant it as an insult, for that was how Max took it. There was no way she could know, no way she could know that Max, sensitive as a burn, would take having Europe called “Nightmare Land” as an affront. It implied he did not understand enough to be anguished. It presumed that he did not scour the JTA, the American papers, even the BBC by shortwave radio, for every tiny scrap of information that could escape that place,
which
was
a nightmare but not one he ignored or wrote off or could even sleep through. She was simply making her own observations. Life with the Auers probably could suggest a certain historical amnesia had set in. But that wasn't him. He hadn't fled the Pale as Abe had, he couldn't claim that, and lacking that common currency that Abe and Ana shared, he couldn't contradict her, not in that moment.

He stood, brushed the dirt and twigs from his pants, took a deep breath of the grassy air.

“Did you have a copy of Halmoli's
Solution of Dreams
?” he said.

“I am sorry, what?”

“The dream book?” He looked down at her. She held her knees to her chest and watched the pond.

“I know it was once quite popular, almost a household item for my classmates' parents in Heidelberg. In Yiddish, of course. Your family didn't keep a copy?”

“No.”

“I'm sorry. I thought it might have been familiar. It held all of the Talmudic interpretations of dreams, if I may reuse a phrase from one of our more psychoanalytically oriented coreligionists. If you had dreams of a tree outside your house with dead cats hanging from the branches, for instance, it might tell you that the Berakot of the third century suggests that there are wild dogs loose in your neighborhood and you would be well-served to be rid of them.”

“My family were not superstitious people,” she said after a moment. Something about the question had upset her.

“I don't mean to stir up difficult memories. The only reason I mention it is that you keep talking about dreams and nightmares and, forgive the example, these things don't exist as specters alone. There are ways of making life out of them.”

He extended a hand down to her.

“You yourself,” he went on, “you got to
Traumland
.”

He felt her hand in his, her grip surprisingly strong.

They walked through the park at a distance where they might have been mistaken for a bickering husband and wife. The daylight was failing, larks were taking to the sky in curling formations.

“There are people,” Max said to her back, “there are people who want to act.”

“Who? Tell me,” she said without turning around.

“Well, Shmuel Spiro, for one.”

She stopped. Her shoulders slumped.

“Shmuel Spiro. I cannot speak ill of a man who is responsible for my safety but if he believes he can do for all Jews what he did for me . . .”

“He seems to be trying. He seems to think if he can get people's attention, wake them . . .”

He thought she was crying at first, but when he looked, she was laughing, an almost girlish giggle. “Wake them? From their coma? One little Palestinian Jew and his dozen followers, half of them washed-up Hollywood actors or crooked politicians or charlatans or thugs.” The laughter took hold of her. She stopped walking, put her hand to her face to stem the sound. “I'm sorry. It's funny.”

“I'm glad my optimism is so amusing.”

She shook her head as though to say, no, he shouldn't take offense. But she was still smiling, a weary, patient smile.

“It's touching,” she said. “It makes me like you even more than I did a few minutes ago. But Max, my dear Max. The people here, the Jews in charge here, the
machers
in their fancy suits and fancy cars, they hate Shmuel Spiro almost as much as they hate Hitler. Don't you know that? They find him crass, uncivilized, shrill, a political outcast, coming from where he does. They think he's a fascist, a Jewish terrorist. They won't listen to him, Max. They certainly won't help him. And without help, without a foot inside that world of money and influence, what is he—one crazy Palestinian Jew with a funny mustache, shouting from the rooftops, ‘The world is on fire, the world is on fire!' Who will believe what one man from across the sea has to say?”

“I believe him.” He didn't know it until he said it. It was in speaking that the feeling was made real.

She noticed the change in him, a sudden charge in the air that hadn't been there a moment before. She leaned closer. Her smile softened. And then she did something he wasn't expecting, something that so surprised him that for a brief moment he lost his bearings, forgot exactly how or why he'd come to walk beside this pond with a refugee actress. He spoke the words, and a moment later, she reached out and took his hand in her own, kindly, almost sisterly. “Of course you do,” she said. “Of course you believe in him. You believe in him because you're not like the others, are you, Max? The other Americans in charge. You're different. You've always been different. It's the most important thing about you. We've only just met, but I can see it so clearly. I see how you're better.”

He shook his head, felt a warmth rising in his neck. It had been so long since someone had spoken to him with such intensity and certainty and depth of feeling, spoken as though she knew who and what he was at his essence, beneath all the bells and ribbons and good intentions. What made her think she could get away with it, speaking as though she already knew him?
You're different, Max. You've always been different. It's the most important thing about you.
It was nonsense talk, the talk of an unmoored woman, a woman untethered, floating between worlds. He tried to shake free of it, to keep his head clear, his feet grounded, but found he could not. Her words cast a spell on him. That was how he'd think of it later. She cast a spell with her voice, a voice both foreign and familiar, a voice that stayed with him all that day, into the next morning. It was still with him when he called Spiro back and told him that yes, he would do what needed to be done for him, for his Committee for a Jewish Army. He would go to this rescue conference in Chicago.

8.

F
OR AN HOUR
Abe feigned sleep, lying beside his wife, who really was asleep, out like a light, as they say. Her body had a soft and indeterminate presence, like someone had left a pile of blankets on the bed. He eased himself away from her in tiny movements. When he wasn't inching toward the edge of the bed he held himself stiff, trying to imagine the way a sleeping body was supposed to look. But his eyes were open. They took in strange bits of light through the window, the unfamiliar shadows that occupied the room when he wasn't usually looking. At 11:45, Abe pulled himself up and stood trembling in front of his dresser. He pulled his trousers on and buttoned his shirt in the dark. The buttons had a strange and heavy texture. In his fingers they were like bolts. He could hear Irene breathing across the room. If she woke, what would he tell her?

“Abe?” she said. “
Vos tustu?
What are you doing?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“Everything all right?”

“Fine, fine.” He stood very still, hoping she wouldn't sit up and see him in his clothes. “A little hungry.”

She mumbled something, turned onto her side.

He waited until her breath slowed again, then he walked softly out of the room, closing the door behind him. Down the stairs. Stopping at the bottom. Like an idiot, searching for something in his own house.
Seeing only the furniture's bleary outlines, the moonlight on the walls, then, in the far corner, two long slashes of white, crossed at the ankles, a curl of smoke.

“You came,” she said. She spoke like she was acknowledging the inevitable, without surprise, without doubt.

He opened his mouth to speak but stopped, then moved himself across the room in small, boyish steps that made him feel ridiculous, away from the stairs, and even when he reached her, could make out the entirety of her shape, could only speak in a something just beyond a whisper.

“It sounded nice to me, an evening walk.” She did something with her eyes he couldn't decipher in the dark. “Fresh air,” he went on. “Summer won't last forever.”

“It's true,” she said, a small smile on her lips. “We can't waste any time.”

He followed her to the front door, out onto the lawn. The grass was wet with dew. It squished beneath his shoes as he and Ana crossed over to the sidewalk. Over the mountains to the north the moon waited, not quite half full. The neighborhood was silent. Even the crickets had gone to sleep. Every noise they made, their steps, her humming, the rhythm-less jangle of his keys in his pocket, it all sounded discordant in the silence. It was hard for him to imagine they wouldn't wake someone with their footsteps, their hushed voices, and yet when she began to walk and called back to him, she spoke as though it were noon.

“Hurry up, don't be a
shleper
.”

“You didn't tell me it was a race,” he said, speaking as loudly as she had. “And do we have a destination?”

“Don't ask me. I'm the stranger in this town, remember?”

Remember,
he repeated to himself. She slid the word out cleanly, not making the same glottal indentations with the Rs as he still did.

“I can show you where I work,” he said. “It's a bit of a walk, but it will take us through town. I can give you a tour of the junkyard.”

“I've never been to a junkyard. Is it dangerous at night?”

“Very.”

He led her along Summit Street into the center of town, past the park and cemetery, past the stoplight at the intersection at Oneida that broke at least once a month, past the steep hill where he'd taken Judith sledding every winter, up onto the marble steps of the library. Their shadows overlapped against the sidewalk, black on gray. Occasionally, she leapt across the cracks of the pavement as though skipping rooftops. Along the riverbank they stood, listening to the water's lapping without seeing it. Sometimes they talked and sometimes they walked in silence, but always slowly, easily, as though they were not really walking but being carried by some gentle, unseen current.

The unlit city demanded nothing. Its inarticulate landscape felt more like the endless fields no more than a few minutes run from his house as a boy than a place of commerce, of human action. The asphalt was sleek with reflected light. The shuttered shops and the dead cars seemed to withdraw everything they insisted on during the day, turning inward. Even the few signs of life—the lit window, the passing Buick, the Negro coming up the sidewalk, doffing his hat to Ana—had nothing in common with what transpired in the same place during the day. These were weightless events. Their only impression was mystery, the question of what they were doing out at that hour. Ana fit seamlessly into it all. A graceful wraith in a robe. Abe could only wonder what kind of figure he cut, what kinds of questions trailed him for the eyes he couldn't see.

“Here we are,” he said as they approached the entrance to the yard. “My heaven of garbage.”

He'd been there many evenings after dark, but never so late, and now, the quality of the darkness, its totality, seemed different, made the whole place new and strange. During daylight, what struck the eye were the largest heaps, the gutted cars and grand pianos, the mountains of metal scrap, the contents of an entire house crushed and smashed
and spat out like broken teeth into a single pile. But now, in the dark, these larger objects were the least visible, as though their gravity swallowed what little light there was to see. They appeared more shadow than substance, more like bodies of water one could sense without being able to make out their location. Ana held her arms out in front of her as she walked forward. Abe knew his way by heart and placed a hand on her shoulder to guide her and catch her if she stumbled. More visible than the car frames, the towers of gouged mattresses and scattered sofas, were the smaller bits and pieces everywhere that coated the ground and captured traces of light. It was a carpeting of junk, the jagged texture of this peculiar place he'd built for himself.

They descended deeper into the yard, away from the office.

“I feel as though I'm on a beach,” she said to him, “walking toward the water. I can't say why it seems that way to me but it does. Perhaps I'm dreaming. This would be a very good setting for a dream.”

Abe reached into his pocket for a cigarette, stood there smoking, following the woman's voice. For so many years this place, this world of his work and his family, had seemed solid and real to him, while that other world of Russia, the world he had left, the world of his parents and his brother and sister and their small home, had seemed unreal, far away. But now, standing beside Ana Beidler, it was the objects around them, the present and visible world, that seemed distant and dreamlike, while the life he had left behind thirty years before felt so close, so present. He felt if he closed his eyes and reached out his arms, he might touch it.

There was a radio on the ground. She walked to it, turned the brass knobs. “Shall we dance, Mr. Auer?”

“Definitely not,” he said. “I have two left feet, and you, in case you haven't noticed, are still wearing your night robe. If someone sees us, they'll call the asylum.”

“But who would see us?” She slipped out of the robe. She was wearing something silk beneath it, a gown, a negligee, something through
which he could see the lines of her torso, the curve of her breasts. She rounded her shoulders and lifted her arms, encircling a partner who wasn't there, tilting her head as she began to sway and twirl across the gravel.
She's mad,
he thought. And yet her madness seemed natural and right, his own sanity a handicap. The moon slid behind a cloud. His life felt light, his heart unburdened. He moved toward her in the darkness.

“You're going to join me?” she asked. “This song I've saved for my dear one, my great love. But the night is young and there are many more songs.”

“I prefer to watch,” he called out.

And yet even watching, he could imagine what her arms would feel like, their warmth, their softness, their graceful curves. Watching her, he could feel her, the same way he could sometimes feel his brother. So maybe Judith was right. Maybe she
was
a ghost. Her skin shone palely in the moonlight while the rubble around them glinted, a harsh patchwork of surface and shadow. They danced across this broken landscape to music no one else could hear.

By the time they returned to the house, only a few hours remained before dawn. They climbed the steps of the front porch, and she leaned against the railing.

“Careful,” he said, reaching out to steady her.

“That,” she said, “would make a very nice scene on stage. I could practically feel the steeple slopes beneath my feet.” She paused, then pushed up onto her toes like a ballet dancer, then fell flatfooted against the planks. He realized for the first time that she'd never put on shoes; her feet were bare.

“You could have hurt yourself, shredded your toes. It's a miracle you didn't.”

“You must believe me, Abe, when I tell you I sometimes feel as though nothing can hurt me anymore.”

“A piece of glass in the ball of your foot would do the job.”

“You're so practical. A practical, American man.”

“I'm not American. I'm
fun der alter heym,
from the other world, like you.”

“Maybe so. But you hide it well. You act as though you've been here a million years.”

“I'm good at pretending.”

He unlatched the front door, holding it open for her. Not a light on upstairs. Not a sound. No one had awoken. No one had noticed.

“Is there time to finish our vodka?” she asked.

“There's always time for that.”

He had only just sat down on the sofa when he felt an unexpected courage rise up in him. “May I ask you something?”

“Anything,” she said, sitting beside him.

“Tell me who you really are.”

Her smile didn't fade. It seemed to go on against her will.

“Your accent,” he continued. “It's lovely. It's like a poem. But I grew up in that part of the world. You sound like you come from . . .”

“From where, Abe?”

“I can't say exactly. Someplace else.”

She didn't answer. There was a single cube of ice in her glass. She spilled it into her palm, held it between her fingers, letting it melt through them onto the table. He listened for what seemed a long time to the ticking of the clock, to her quiet breath. “Perhaps that's for the best,” she said. “Because the truth is, I don't come from anyplace anymore. The place and people I'm from will be gone soon. Vanished. Dissolved. It will slip away just like this ice between my fingers.”

“You shouldn't say that.”

“Why not? It's the truth. Why shouldn't we say what is true? Do we think that if we keep quiet, that if we don't say it, not even to ourselves, we can stop it from happening?” She laughed. “We're like small children who think we can make a person disappear by closing our eyes.”

“Maybe we can. Maybe it's better not to know, to sleep through it.”

“Hold out your hand,” she said.

He did as she said, held it there as she dropped the sliver of ice against his palm. “I know you don't believe that,” she said softly. “It's only that you've been numb for so long, you've forgotten how useful pain can be.” She was about to say more when a clattering sounded from the neighbor's yard.

“What's that?” she said, shaken. “Who's there?” She leaned across him, peering out the darkened window with wide eyes. Abe looked through the glass, over her shoulder. She was trembling slightly, breathing quickly. He shushed her, leaned toward the window for a closer look. The neighbor's light was on, its electric beam illuminating the movements of a family of raccoons gorging themselves on garbage. “Raccoons,” he said. “Our neighbor forgets to chain the trash can. That's all.”

“Raccoons,” she repeated.

“Here, in Utica, in our house, it will never be more than that. I can promise you. You're safe here. No one can hurt you.”

“I want to believe it,” she said, two large tears gathering in her lashes. “You're so kind.” She thanked him once more, nonchalantly, as though he'd handed her a handkerchief or passed her the salt. Then she cried quietly and smiled at him through her tears while he sat beside her, not speaking, not moving, one hand lain firmly on her shoulder.

“All is as it should be,” he promised her. And yet how strange it seemed to him that in a few hours, his wife would be cracking eggs into a frying pan, his Irene and Judith arguing over who would shower first. How odd it was that the neighbor's dog would be barking at the milkman, the men of Corn Hill tying their shoelaces and hurrying down porch steps to begin the day's work. All common things seemed strange and unlikely. At the same time, the feelings he had for this woman, this houseguest, seemed natural and familiar. He couldn't account for it. He couldn't do anything but sit beside her.

So they sat there for a long time. He sighed and she smiled and neither stood to leave. In a few hours, it would be dawn and regular life would proceed. But not now. For now, they were together in the dark, quite still, fingers touching. Instead of speaking, they sat and listened to the raccoons' rampage of his neighbor's yard: claws on metal, flesh in debris, the inhuman pitch of animals rifling, a frenzied, disordered noise amid the quiet.