The Houseguest (21 page)

“Max,” he began. Then he let out a long exhalation of breath and put his face in his hands. He rubbed his eyes with the bottoms of his palms.

“Max, war is very tiring,” he said. “It takes up residence inside of your head and makes so, so much noise.”

“I'm here to help,” said Max. “I am here . . . to fight.”

“What about Utica, Max?”

“Don't talk to me about Utica.”

“There are people there who need you. Whom you serve.”

“Fuck them. Fuck every last one of them.”

“Max.”

He leaned back and forgot he was on a stool. It was only the room's smallness that kept him from falling to the floor. Instead the back of his head met the wall with a quiet thud. The impact didn't bother him as much as he would have imagined. He repeated it a few times.

“No, I didn't mean that,” he said softly.

“Oh,” said Spiro. “I might've hoped you did.”

“What I mean is that I cannot help them. The way they live, the particular problems their lives churn up, the way they think, I don't know it. They've been bred to think that anyone who calls himself a rabbi is a living answer to every one of their problems. And I know none of it, Shmuel. They are crying on the shoulder of a machine who says things that sound more or less appropriate.”

“I think you grossly undersell the strength of your compassion. Your problem isn't that you don't care, it's that you care too much.”

Max sparked to life.

“That is precisely it and this”—violently slapping Spiro's desk—“is what I care about. There is one thing and one thing only and that thing is life. There is not love, there is not illness, there is not money or children or the weather or a failed business or an ache in the soul. There is just life, life, life.
Das Leben alles ist
.”

“
Jedem das seine
,” Spiro said, perhaps a little too softly.

It was a very old expression, one Max recalled from Heidelberg that got kicked around in taverns and parks frequented by elderly Germans or those with implacably self-destructive dispositions. You get the life you deserve, basically. It enlivened Max even further.

“What do you mean by that?”

Spiro shrugged and shook his head. It was a defeated gesture, one that suggested that whatever he had meant was something very different than what Max heard.

“I've steered myself straight into Utica, is that what you mean? Exile was my fate not my punishment. Right? No.” A punch of the table this time. “I'm not going to dissolve there. I will not melt into that
earth. Let me fight, Shmuel. You've said you need all the help you can get. I am here. Use me. Send me to Washington or London or to the godforsaken Mandate. Give me a sandwich board and I'll walk up and down Madison Avenue asking for donations.”

None of Max's remonstrance seemed to have had any effect on Spiro at all. In fact he looked entirely elsewhere. His mind was on work, his own work, and here was Max, chewing up his time in a cramped room.

“Causes, Max. Causes, motives, drives, compulsions. All dangerous, dangerous things. Purpose frightens me, do you know that? I'm not scared of the SS man with a Mauser. I'm scared of the child in Dusseldorf cheering him on.”

He stopped speaking and started to organize the papers on his desk. He moved slowly, sloppily; things slipped from his fingers and he replaced them haphazardly. He was stalling. Max knew that whatever he said when he looked up was not going to be pleasant.

“You and I,” he said at last, “we never talked about the Irgun, did we?”

Max shook his head. “No.”

“I too was a volunteer. I'd got myself into Jerusalem and talked my way into their ranks. Granted, I didn't need to put on such a show as this to have them take me on but still, it mattered to me. I cared. And because they knew I cared they put me to work on their most dangerous activities. We wanted to bomb the British out. We wanted to blow them up, two by two or six by six until they had enough and left the desert to us. But first I had to learn. A bomb's a fiercely complicated thing and you don't do much good dropping them in open ground or too loosely packed.”

As if spurred by the memory of flame he took out a cigarette. He smoked to calm himself. Max had noticed how he switched from the third to the first person, them to us, as soon as he brought the subject to bombs.

“They sent me to Jaffa. There was a cafe that was popular with the British and their families. The owner was a Syrian, a Copt. I never met him. I had nothing to do with the operation except to observe. I waited across the street. I remember watching a girl walking in. She wore flat sandals, a pleated skirt, and a white blouse. She was holding a book under her arm that looked heavy against her elbow. What else? Her arms were dark against the white blouse. Sometimes, now, I dream about her, the girl with the book, dream of her hands, her fingers turning pages. I could see her through the cafe's window. I saw her raise a hand to her head, slide a barrette from her hair, and slip it between the book's pages to mark her place. I watched her place it, this small gesture, right before she stepped inside the cafe. I remembered it because the gesture was familiar to me. I'd seen another woman use a barrette as a bookmark in this same way . . . my mother or my sister, perhaps.

“And then we blew her to bits. The girl with the barrette and everyone else who happened to be in the cafe.
Kaboom.
An arm skidded across the road and landed just a few feet from me. I wanted a closer look, to see if it was her arm, the girl's arm, but then I saw my comrades running in opposite directions, as they'd been assigned, and knew I had to leave.”

Smoke had filled the tiny room. The light from the lone bulb was poor and had a burnt quality. Spiro's face was obscured but Max could still see his gaze fixed on him. What haunted Max most about the anecdote was not the gore, or the revelation of violence. It was that he knew it had no moral. Destruction on that base a level, witnessed so closely, could not come alone, not in Max's conception. There couldn't be horror without meaning. Spiro had lain it out as a sheer matter of history, with nothing wider to be extrapolated. Max knew he was supposed to think about the actness of the act, its singular habit of being, and whether that scared him off or drew him in or left him in knots of doubt was up to him.

Spiro stubbed out the cigarette and said the name of a movie star, asked if Max had ever heard of him.

“He's a yid from Minsk, though there are people in Hollywood who'd kill you if you ever said that. I think he might be queer too but that's not relevant. I'm due at his apartment on 12th and Fifth in half an hour. I'm close to talking him out of quite a few dollars. So if we may.”

He followed Spiro outside, into the dry, hot day.

“One final question,” Spiro said, squinting. “In Germany, did you ever visit the Ettersburg?”

Max hadn't but he knew of it, a supposedly lovely little mountain near Weimar.

“The Germans have built a camp there. They call it Buchenwald. Jews from all over Europe are being shipped in.” Spiro paused. “
Jedem das seine.
Evidently that's what they've written on the gates.”

You get the life you deserve. He gave the same defeated shrug he had earlier, then tipped his hat to Max. Spiro walked off, a short, ragged figure, swallowed quickly by the city.

THE THOUGHT OF
walking to Penn Station and catching a train back to Utica came to Max but it entered his brain like an alien, foreign presence, scratching against his skull, the backs of his eyes. His reaction to it was so physical, so violent, that he stopped and leaned against a lamppost, giving himself time to expel it.

Instead of going back he wandered Manhattan. He was aware, like shadows at the edge of his vision, of people he knew, people whose addresses he could have conjured up. Friends who would give him a place to clean himself up, get a decent sleep, maybe a change of clothes. He had lived here. He had inhabited a life here. But it no longer felt connected to the person moving sluggishly across the sidewalks now. A skin he had shed long ago, no more meaningful than a shirt he'd given away, a pair of frayed trousers tossed into the garbage can.

By the time the first hints of evening slipped into the western sky he was uptown. He could not deny the weariness or the hunger he felt but neither carried the discomforts they did ordinarily. Instead he told himself, I am tired, I am hungry, and let those declarations stand in for real feeling.

The sidewalks were lively with couples on their way to dinner, families outside, enjoying the late summer night. Max kept as far away as he could. He walked at the edges of the curb or against walls. He wanted to keep his eyes upward, at the cliff faces of the apartment buildings, the glimmering beacons of the skyline, the easy rustling of the few elms and hawthorns that lined the streets.

At a certain point he became aware of an absence in the landscape, an opening in the rows of buildings where one wasn't meant to be. There was too much space in front of the next building to the north, too much of its brick siding was exposed. Something had stood in front of it and was gone.

It was space where the Free Synagogue had been. Now a complete emptiness, blocked off from the sidewalk with orange hoardings. Any sign that this ground had once held something was stripped away. Max leaned over the barriers, searching for what, a scorched prayer book, the leg of a pew, a cup, a spoon, a scrap of paper, anything that suggested that this blankness wrongly pressed into the landscape of the city had ever been anything else, had not come into the earth fully formed as a lot filled with carefully tended dirt.

To be this devoid of remnants was a conscious undertaking. After the official investigation was finished, someone had come and sifted through, collecting whatever the fire had not incinerated. Max could not think of any theological or Talmudic imperative for this. From what he knew of the fire, the destruction had been total; he could not imagine there would be anything worth salvaging for when the synagogue was rebuilt—and of course it would be rebuilt, between insurance and the resources of its congregants they could build the
world's first skyscraper synagogue if they wanted. But first they had to announce their decimation as utter, unsparing, complete.

He went east through the park, feeling slightly sick to his stomach. In Yorkville, he found a flophouse where he was able to get a bed for the night with the two dollars he had in his pocket by haggling with the owner in German.

The room he was given had cots for several men but for the moment was Max's alone. For that he was grateful. He took off his shoes and lay down and immediately there was a knock at the door.

Standing in the hallway was a white-haired Negro, almost precisely Max's height, dressed in clothes for much colder weather, a bulky woolen cardigan, heavy wool slacks gone thin at the knees.

“Traveler, have you come far?” he said in German.

“No, not especially,” Max said, slightly bewildered.

“You look weary. You have come to a good place.” His German was immaculate, the accent sounding of Frankfurt or otherwise Hessian, only traces of American floating in the lumpier compounds.

“Thank you,” said Max. “I am quite tired. Your German is excellent,” he added. “Where did you learn?”

The Negro smiled pleasantly. “I took part in the Herero uprising in German South-West Africa,” he said. “As one of the few survivors I was kept on by the Colonial League as a coolie.”

As Max began to do the chronological and logistical arithmetic the claim prompted, the Negro's smile widened.

“Friend, I'm joking,” he said, switching to English. “I was Army Military Police, part of a detachment in Fort Douglas, Utah, where we guarded German prisoners following the war. My captives were far more willing to talk to me than my brothers-at-arms. I learned the language from them.”

He gestured around the room but seemed to mean the whole of Yorkville. “I find plenty of speakers to converse with but few of them want to talk to an
afrikanisch.
I heard you downstairs speaking to Herr
Rodl and thought you seemed like a good soul with whom I might converse in the
Muttersprache
.”

It was odd to Max that he would refer to German as his mother tongue. It clearly was not. As tired as he was—the fatigue he had denied for so long had begun creeping up his body, gradually stiffening him from toes to tongue—and as glad as he had been for the empty room, it didn't feel right sending the Negro away. He seemed both hopeful and lonesome. His appearance at Max's door had an air of desperation to it. It cleaved at something deep inside of Max, a part of him that abhorred the loneliness of others. So Max, giving half of himself over to sleep, began a meaningless conversation in German with the Negro, who introduced himself as Frederick. They talked about the war in Europe, about baseball, about life in New York City. Max found that he did not need to pay any attention to what he said. The words, somehow catching whatever cues Frederick left, simply left his mouth. As far as Max could tell the conversation never veered too close to himself.

The feeling of partial wakefulness was as pleasant as anything he could recall experiencing. The beige walls breathed and contracted; the crucifix beside his bed receded into the wall. From the closed window came a current of cool air that blanketed him. Nothing had felt so physically soothing since those moments with Hirschler in Chicago—and as soon as he flashed through Max's consciousness he was there, in the room, on the bed next to where Frederick sat. They sat in twinned poses, hands on knees, hunched forward slightly; but whereas Frederick nattered away in German, Hirschler just smirked, the tightening of his lips that he got away with calling a smile. Max smiled back and joy surged through him, as if to remind him that it did, in fact, exist in nature.

I die and I continue to die, killed and reborn, re-birthed for the slaughter, yoked to the iniquities of the living so that I may see
the grief of the dead, neither survivor nor victim, neither witness nor bystander but the chaff of history's thresher, spun and tossed and hacked and unseen and trodden upon through the entire unceasing winter.