The Houseguest (17 page)

“I'm going for a swim,” he said, patting his chest. Irene and Judith neither acknowledged nor protested. The water was the color of liquid mercury, a bracing, brittle cold as he waded out. It stung his legs, waist, chest. When the water reached above his shoulders, he took a big breath and pushed himself down. The coldness was bright and clear against his open eyes. He wanted to see how long he could stand
on the bottom without coming up for air, so he let himself sink, shot up, took a breath, tried again. On his third try down, something felt different. His head was light. His spirits calmed. This was surely how life was meant to be lived: immersed, submerged. He held his eyes open, hoped to see fish, an old tire, anything interesting. Instead, he saw a dark form, a human form. He swam toward it and saw it was his brother Shayke floating a few feet away, his body youthful, undulating in the unseen current, strong and whole as it had been before. Shayke had arms and legs and lungs that worked, that expelled bubbles small as pearls, up from his mouth and nose to the light at the surface above. Abe pushed his feet hard against the rocks below and shot to the surface, gasping at the top.

He treaded water, looked back toward the beach. His wife and daughter were barely visible—he could sense them more than see them. He should swim back, dry off, but he didn't want to. There was a bend in the lake around which he could swim, and he knew from experience that far on the other side there was a small dam on which he could walk, an anchored raft next to it. It was a good swim, a half-mile at least. At the height of his fitness it had left him exhausted and panting, but he would try it just the same. He remembered Ana's voice, low and sultry in his ear:
valuing one's own life so greatly seems a bit absurd.
Shayke had known this, too. Danger nourished the soul.

OLD FORGE—ANOTHER
one of those American names that made no sense; what could be built in this tub of silt?—had the sole redeeming quality of being broad enough that one could locate zones of tranquility around it. Ana, more than the sunlight, the warmth, the heat on her body, wanted to seize this peacefulness. It was a rarity, a commodity, something to be gathered and hoarded. Didn't these sun-drunk Americans realize that? Of course they didn't. All they knew was space, even the tenement mules could ride the train to Coney Island, and space was peace.

If one of these supposed pioneers could have seen Lake Balaton as Ana recalled, they would have gone raging back into their locked homes and never ventured into the sun again. When Ana and Szymon and their friends visited Balaton it was impossible to tiptoe from shale to surf without tripping over a couple fucking or drunken revolutionary face down in his own sick. On their first visits she wanted to seem composed for Szymon, unimpressed, unmoved by hips thrusting in the water, though she could tell by the way he looked at her he knew she was discomfited. It wasn't the lack of modesty that threw her but the volume of the debauchery. Under pine trees and in row boats, in parked cars, at the dusty roadside, in the lake well past dark: moral uprightness was kneecapped by anyone who could.

Eventually the scene around her became less stirring, more serene. This was Poland before the storm, a year after she arrived there from—she couldn't even remember what came before.
What's wrong? Don't you swim?
Szymon had asked her. She'd been standing on a pier, watching a kite rise in the distance. It somehow seemed a certainty that it would falter. “Of course I swim,” she answered. “What do you take me for?”

“Exactly what you are.”

He'd grabbed her above the hips. She indulged him for a moment then slapped his hands away, shooed him back. Then she'd stepped to the very end of the pier, curling her toes over the edge. She'd straightened her back, lifted her arms above her head, raised her gaze to the still-rising balloon, and then leapt, a swan dive into the shimmering blue drink.

“Please, Ana. Don't. Don't jump.”

Abe yelled after she'd already leapt. She didn't understand what he was saying at first, had already forgotten what she'd told them in the car, the little lie she'd hoped would help her detach herself from the Auers. When she came up for air, he had stopped shouting and was swimming toward her with great speed. The water frothed around him
as he slapped and kicked the surface, swimming as though his own life, not hers, depended on it. “Hold on, hold on,” he said as he made contact. At first she fought, straining against his grasp, against the hands running under her back, along her sides. It was an unnatural sensation, to let your body go limp, to be dragged through water, but eventually she relaxed, let herself be carried.

She was carried by a voice that said her name. That said her name over and over.

On shore they both sat panting. The earth beneath was slick and muddy. She fell to the ground, pulled him down with her.

“Ana. Ana. No. Ana.”

Abe tried to hold her still, but the firmer he held her the harder she thrashed. Free from his grasp she fell into the mud. Her white suit blackened with it, her arms and legs coated with mud. Her hair dripped onto her shoulders. She pushed the hair out of her face and got mud onto her forehead. And then her panting turned to laughing.

“Why are you laughing, Ana? You could have killed us both.”

She laughed even harder. “It would have been romantic to drown together,” she said. “Don't you think so?”

“No,” he said, but then added, “I don't know. I don't know, Ana.”

He moved toward her, lowered himself onto his knees. One of her bathing suit straps had slipped from her shoulder. He pushed the strap down farther. Her nipple was dark and firm, the color of bark.

She spoke his name. “I'm sorry, Abe. Can you forgive me?” He hardly heard her. Instead of answering, he put his finger to her lips. He told her that everything would be well, that he would keep her safe from herself.

“It's what I've always wanted most,” she told him.

He nodded, then kissed her, holding her shoulders, her face, her chin. He swallowed her breath as it moved in and out of her. She was something brutal and delicious, something both cruel and unavoidable, the angel putting out Isaac's hip, the guards pummeling Shayke with
their clubs, the nightmare stories he read in the papers. She was all that he feared, all that he denied, everything that had to happen. He pulled her closer, brought his mouth to hers.

Everything would collapse and be covered in mud. He held her body in it as he kissed her. He did not stop because he could not. He only paused for the time it took to breathe, to notice she had opened her eyes and they were filled with an emotion he could not quite name. It was less than joy and more than pleasure. In her eyes, he saw his own abandon, his own not caring. And so he kissed her again.

III.

THE HOTEL UTICA

13.

H
E WANTED A
metaphor for Hirschler's body. It wasn't like other bodies he had known. He wanted a proper metaphor to define it.

Each day, when the conference ended, or rather when the shouting and cursing and poorly thrown punches all began to collapse into a slurry of incomprehensible cant and petty name calling, Max searched the ballroom until he found Hirschler, usually surrounded by five or seven different men, all of them arguing their own individual cases while Hirschler fended them off one by one. He couldn't tell what they wanted from Hirschler, but Max enjoyed watching him deflect and deflate. He knew the freckles on the elbows he used to keep a pocket of air between himself and his furies. He knew the coarse stubble on the knees he shifted his weight on. These men knew him as a rhetorical object, an instrument in a coming war, but Max knew his body, his hands, his voice.

Once Hirschler freed himself he would give a sign, indirect, barely perceptible, that meant it was time for Max to follow him to the apartment on Belle Plaine. A movement of the lips toward the exit. A quiet thought that ended with a glance in Max's general direction. Then he was gone.

Max was not allowed to travel with him.

His body was a boundary, a series of demarcations and fortifications and disputed territories.

The day after their first night together, Max approached him, found himself caught in the throng of appellants. The subject was ships. Boats full of Jews that had sailed from Europe and were now looking for safe harbor. Nobody was allowing them to dock. Cárdenas in Mexico, Vargas in Brazil, especially Brú in Cuba, whom everyone was certain was going to exit office via a coup but probably too late to hope for a useful successor. They managed the Atlantic without being torpedoed and were stuck in international waters. “Screw America,” a man with a goatee and rust-rimmed pince-nez said. “We need to be lobbying the Dominicans, the Colombians, the Cubans. Anyone facing the Atlantic who isn't part of the Commonwealth or the French Republic. That's our best bet, David. That's our only bet.”

“You don't think we haven't cashed in our life insurance policies to send men to Santo Domingo, to Bogotá? They're all scared shitless of Franco and are afraid they'll have battalions of Falangists at their doorstep if they piss off Hitler.”

His body was an encyclopedia of messianic literature.

“They know liberation movements,” said pince-nez. “They understand. The Haitians, David. The Mexicans.”

Hirschler looked down at him and spoke very slowly. “They understand that they don't need thousands of penniless, stateless foreigners they can't afford to feed or house stumbling in, muttering thanks in Yiddish.”

“So where do they go, David?” said pince-nez. “Do we send them to Palestine? Let them fight off the Turks for a patch of desert?”

“They come here. We camp them all right in this fucking ballroom.”

He saw Max staring from the middle of the pack. “What?” he said to him, sneering, and turned and marched off.

It wasn't until Max wandered outside, stunned, bereft, that he saw, halfway up the block, Hirschler leaning against a wall with a cigarette. He nodded at Max. Before Max could approach, Hirschler got into a
cab and Max was left to retrace their drunken El ride. The train knifed through the city at dusk and Max could only wonder what he would find, if he could find the place at all.

The answer was Hirschler, sitting on the apartment's dirty sofa, a glass of bourbon in his hand, his pants unbuttoned.

His body was the moment dusk turned to night.

“The Jews in this country have nothing to fear and all of them are afraid,” said Hirschler, naked on top of the sheets. “They're afraid of offending their Christian neighbors. They're afraid of offending the British. The French. They want to be so goddamn innocuous, they'd rather pretend there isn't a slaughter of their families going on in Europe than risk making some people uncomfortable.”

“When I saw 15,000 brownshirts march at Madison Square Garden, I was afraid,” said Max.

Hirschler scoffed. “That's a kid plugging his ears in a thunderstorm.”

He went on and Max, wearied, battered in a way that was lovely, drifted into half-sleep before Hirschler brought him back into the world of the living by stroking him, still bemoaning frightened Jews.

His body was the Minotaur's. The Satyr's.

The conference staggered along. Max willed all his attention onto it even though he knew nothing would come out of it. The debate about ships raged pointlessly. A fistfight broke out between men from the Zionist Organization and the AJC about whether or not it was worth it to make a public enemy of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a useless old man who'd allied himself with Hitler. Real Jews were dying real deaths in Europe while they ate lunch. He wired Spiro to say he should have saved the money for his train ticket and Spiro wired back:
Keep listening.

“Did you hear, DiMaggio got another hit today,” said Hirschler. “What is that, forty games in a row now?”

On the El in the mornings, he felt a rising pressure as downtown grew closer. It started at the bottom of his spine and traveled upward
until it felt as though a hand was wrapped tightly around his torso, his chest, his neck. It's these stupid train seats, he thought. It's from sleeping in an unfamiliar bed. It's from Hirschler. He shifted and stretched and tried to find comfort in the small space he had, and all he did was earn bitter looks from the men seated beside him.

Why was he even here? What had he come to Chicago for? He was there at Spiro's behest, the head of an army that nobody wanted to arm, nobody even wanted to exist. He dropped the name of the army in conversation one afternoon and heard a chorus of derision, of scorn that roiled into disgust and mockery. They called Spiro a fascist, agitator, yid. “Those nuts can take their fifth column and fuck themselves in the ass with it.” He might as well have suggested Mussolini as a viable savior. But who was he? What right did he have to question when he was there as a cipher, a wandering ear? The angel asked Jacob what his name was before renaming him Israel. From now on I will be known as Max Hoffman. That is all I will ever be known as.

Hirschler's body was the angel's wrestling Jacob.

In the men's room he overheard someone say that deep inside Poland the Nazis had built camps with no worksites attached. No IG Farben. No Krupp. Just places that rail cars rolled into. And stopped.

This he wired to Spiro and got no reply.

The city in July was hot, not a heat like he remembered in Manhattan, where heat was dense and bodily. In Chicago the heat was something unraveled, an accumulation of forces in the atmosphere that were unscrolled and laid across the city in sheets. He felt it rise and undulate, he saw the wind ruffle it, he saw it descend in the afternoons when he left the conference just for the sake of leaving.

They had to stretch as far apart from each other as they could on the bed. Max always wanted beds to be places of inherent closeness, no matter how vast or wide, if another body was there you found it and made it close. These heated nights the presence of another body nearby
was too oppressive to sleep. Hirschler let Max have the side closest to the window. It made no difference.

“This city,” Max said, “is so quiet at night.”

“The parties go until dawn in Buffalo?”

“Utica,” said Max. “I live in Utica. But really I was just thinking back to New York. If you left the windows open and the curtains drawn all the time you wouldn't know midnight from noon. But here, night is obeyed. Same as in Utica. Buffalo too, probably.”

Hirschler turned to face him.

“This is all very hard for you, isn't it?”

The question hit him fast and hard.

“You mean, what, you and I?”

Hirschler saw his panic and smiled. “No, no.” He put a hand on Max's shoulder, then removed it. “Well, no and yes. You and I but also the conference. The noise. The confusion. The . . .” He briefly shook Max's body with two hands to communicate whatever idea he hadn't the words for. “You're rattled. It's fine. You're surrounded by people yelling at death and it doesn't sit right on you. It isn't a defect in your character. Not many can tolerate people standing around yelling at annihilation for days on end.”

He kissed Max, a conciliatory gesture.

“You belong in Utica more than you think.”

His body was the conference. Yelling at annihilation for days on end.

May God strike us down before we're old enough to see how this all looks to history,
he told his sister from a phone booth, while a little boy threw rocks at a dog outside.

There was more talk of boats. Boats that tried to dock in Florida. In Brazil. No one knew what to do. No one had any contacts in the Navy or the Coast Guard. The lawyers present pretended not to be violently ignorant of maritime law. Boats. Surely the oldest form of flight for the wretched and abused. The sea was refuge. It carried you to safety or swallowed you whole but it didn't send you back. This
wasn't supposed to happen. Virgil knew this. No one crossed a sea to be sent home.

It was the last day of the conference. The time for joint demands that would be made to the highest powers they could collectively reach. By one in the morning they had a ninety-three-word letter addressed to all ninety-six members of the Senate.

Max did not follow Hirschler back to the apartment. He walked along the lake. Gusts leapt off it and jostled him. He moved among drunks and lovers. He understood nothing. He thought if he looked out at the strong black expanse of water he would see the unwanted boats, all of them, jammed with bodies, edging up against the city. As if, by some deep, excavated instinct, he began to chant the Mourner's Kaddish. He said the words over and over.

Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba

b'al'ma di v'ra khir'utei

in the world that He created as He willed

A cop told him to shut up or he'd arrest him, and Max took a cab back to the apartment.

Hirschler was still awake. He greeted Max with a mixture of relief and resignation. They made love one last time, slowly, in half-time; Max couldn't tell if this was through lethargy or the heat or a desire to absorb as much of each other as they could.

His body was his body.

“All of this is just playground stuff until we get close to Roosevelt. We need to get through to Morgenthau. Once he's listening, once he's heard us and told FDR, then things will begin to happen. And even then we'll be up to our eyeballs in the Jews-control-Washington bullshit but at least—”

“Enough,” said Max.

Hirschler's stare was empty.

“Please, just for one night, can we not . . .”

In the morning they packed in silence. Hirschler showered and emerged from the bathroom clean-shaven, beginning to transform himself back into the gleaming machine he was during the day.

“Got time for breakfast before your train?”

Max shook his head.

“You look hungry. Let me buy you a plate of eggs.”

“I've got one more meeting,” said Max. “It isn't one I can dodge.”

The closest thing to humility he could muster crossed Hirschler's face.

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

HE LUGGED HIS
suitcase through downtown. The day was chokingly humid. A thunderstorm was almost certainly coming. The sidewalks were clogged with men with their heads down, their strides slowed.

In his nervousness, Max forgot the address of the restaurant. He spent thirty minutes circling identical-looking streets. Each intersection seemed like it would be the one to open up on to the place he was looking for, or rather it felt that way, that the grid of the city somehow owed him the favor of momentarily reordering itself so Max could cease being lost. The buildings looked the same. The faces began to duplicate. He had no idea what time it was. The lunch could be finished by now. His train could be pulling out of the station. He leaned against a lamppost and posited two possible outcomes: asking for help or spending eternity lost beneath the elevated tracks.

He raised his arm for a cab. One pulled up immediately. Max hauled in his suitcase and sat down heavily, letting out a deep sigh.

“Where to?” said the hack.

Max gave him the address. The hack rolled his eyes and pointed to the opposite side of the street.

“Where you're looking for is right there.”

A wave of shame hit him. And he hadn't even seen his father yet. Max gave the driver a dollar for his troubles and got out of the cab.

“Both ways you gotta look before crossing,” the hack called, pretending to smile.

He entered the restaurant with his head down. He had known he would be defeated by his father but hadn't imagined the capitulation taking place before they had even greeted one another. What had happened in the days preceding left him open, raw.

He gave the hat-check girl his things and moved through the deep crimson and gold dining room. His father, by himself at a table in the corner, armed with several newspapers, looked as though Max's presence were wholly optional. He could have wheeled around, taken his things, begged Hirschler for eggs, and the old man might have noticed in a few weeks.

Instead Max trudged to the edge of the table.

“How are the stateless persons?” his father asked. This was how he began, his first face-to-face words with the son he hadn't seen in years. Not hello, how are you my boy, my flesh, my only son at last returned? None of that conversational shuffling. Max's father had no patience for small talk. Even greetings came across as interrogation.

Max sat down. The table was already laden with food. He wondered if his father was expecting anyone else. The collision of scents made him feel ill.

“You know you have people you are related to by blood who are being killed. If you think it's good, jokey, lunchtime talk, I'd be happy to share with you the various ways in which they're apparently being dispatched.”