The Houseguest (29 page)

An image: a ship, lazing across an unbroken sea. Ana tied to the mast, dead and laughing and naked and glowing, the rope around her neck red silk, the bullet hole in her temple cleaned and perfumed. The ship's hold filled with dead Jews stacked on one another, all of them clutching loaded rifles, their trigger fingers twitching, twitching. Bloat-faced dead Max Hoffman swimming beside them, waving, cheering, finally smiling. Spiro himself at the helm of the ship, desperate for land, any land, a port to call at and discharge this dismal cargo.

Spiro didn't speak. He didn't nod or make any gesture of understanding. Field turned his back on Spiro, toward the black pool of the park, which was just as well as Spiro himself turned and walked out, not even bothering to close the door to the apartment, moving down
in the clattering elevator whose operator sang softly—
You're going to walk that lonesome valley, you've got to go there by yourself
—and past the doorman, just an angry Great Dane in a red overcoat, a pretend Cossack who put himself in Spiro's way because anyone who could come under such odd circumstances and leave so quickly was clearly up to no good, clearly deserved a well-timed shoulder that Spiro received dispassionately, regaining his step immediately and pirouetting out the door and into the first cab he saw. He gave the driver an address on the other side of the park, close to the Hudson. He still felt the reverberation of bone against bone while they crossed, wondered if Field might see the light of this cab darting beneath him, a tiny glowing bug scooting through the unforgiving night.

Tired. Very tired. Climbing the steps to his apartment (the elevator had been out of service since the Hoover administration), rubbing clanged shoulder, cursing the bolt of pain he felt reaching into his pocket for the key, cursing again when he saw the door wasn't even locked.

“I'm not going to remind you again, you have to lock the fucking door,” he said in the darkened hallway of his apartment. “If I come home to an unlocked door again I'm changing the locks.”

“You can't afford a locksmith,” she said. “Don't come after me with hollow threats.”

Spiro's was a railroad flat and Ana Beidler was in the kitchen, the last car on the train, seated at the table where he had left her that morning. He wasn't sure if the coffee cup in front of her was the same one she was drinking out of when he left.

“Went the day well?” she said. “Have we secured passage to bring all Jews to the moon?”

He rooted around the icebox for something to eat, found only a pair of eggs of questionable provenance that he tossed onto a frying pan anyway. He had no appetite but the eggs gave him something to look at that wasn't Ana.

“There was a death notice for Max Hoffman today. In the
Daily News
,” she said.

“Please do not speak his name.”

“Of all the people. Of all the—”

“Please.”

He heard Ana slump in her chair. She had terrible posture when she wasn't in public. Her neck drooped, she faced the world with her shoulders. She was practically a cephalophore, one of the saints who carried around their own heads. But not a saint.

“Field knows,” he said, flipping the eggs with a fork. “He knows we were involved with the fire.”

He waited for Ana to respond.

“There was a federal investigation when it happened,” he said to her silence. “A small one, more of a token. I assume he will now send them our way.”

“And you'll serve me up to them without a second thought,” she said.

He dumped the eggs onto a plate, added a heap of tomato ketchup. He sat across from her at the small table. She still slouched; her face was unmoved. The sight of her brought up something in him that was both repulsed and aroused.

“You'll have to go down through Mexico. We'll work things from Nicaragua or British Honduras. Shipping you straight to Ankara won't work anymore.”

“Why bother with all of that?” she said, pushing herself forward. “Turn me in, say I was crazy, save your reputation, save your time.”

“No,” he said, taking a large bite of egg that he did not want. “I'm not doing that.”

“Why? It makes perfect sense.”

“Because you weren't crazy. Because we will be seen as synagogue-burners.” He didn't raise his voice and continued to eat. He wanted her
to disappear. He wanted some agent of God to descend and make her into dust, into a cloud. “Because we will be kaput.”

She relaxed again and smiled. It was a victorious smile; she had gotten something out of him, not just a refusal to turn her in but something more.

“Stand quietly behind the curtain, Shmuel. Wait for the show to end. Wait for the applause.”

It was all a show, wasn't it? Spiro had believed what they were doing was different, was played on a stage with no removal from everyday life. To Ana there was still a spotlight, still an audience, characters whose fates were instruments, a story that demanded an ending. She understood it and he had not. He had believed in an abiding chaos that one needed to wrestle to shape, to comprehend. But you couldn't impose order when it was already there. You couldn't claim to have any control over actions whose outcomes had been settled long before you arrived. The burning of Field's temple was a stage direction. Utica was a set. Max Hoffman was . . . Spiro stopped himself before he could reduce Hoffman to part of Ana's vision of the world. The dead were the dead were the dead and no license could be taken with that fact.

She sat across from him in his kitchen, arms folded, body limp, smiling.

“Somewhere in the Bronx right now, someone is looking up the phone number of the Committee and is going to call first thing in the morning. Because of what I did. Months ago.”

And what, Spiro wondered, would that person in the Bronx do if the body of a star of the Yiddish stage turned Jewish army supporter were found tomorrow morning in the middle of Riverside Drive?

He finished his eggs, washed the dishes, found a bottle of whiskey at the back of a cupboard, took a long swig.

“I'll have some of that, thank you. You've forgotten your manners, Shmuel.”

She took the bottle and drank. She was reckless like a man and she drank like a man, too, and not a Jewish one. The liquor didn't faze her. He stood and watched her as she crossed to his gramophone in the corner, and then there was Chopin. She drank some more. She was looking at him expectantly. “Talk to me,” she said. He didn't want to talk anymore. He stood up and felt dizzy, reached for the chair. “I think I'll lie down on the floor for a while. Do you mind?” He got down on the ground. He wanted to be a body on the ground. Max. A useless body. Weightless.

“What are you doing?”

“Sometimes it feels good to lie on the floor. Chairs are so confining.”

He liked talking to her from this position, talking and staring up at the gray ceiling, her voice disembodied, floating as she cleared the dishes.

The music whorled above him. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, she was sitting beside him, smoking.

“What time is it?” he asked.

She didn't answer. She had taken off her skirt, was sitting on the ground in her blouse and her black stockings, and without knowing why, he began to trace the silk line up the back of her leg. Stockings were fascinating to him, the illusion of shadow on flesh. He gazed up at her. Ana Beidler. Actress. Zionist. Expatriate. A lost child of the stage. A mad woman. Perhaps a genius. She had seen what needed doing and she had done it. She lacked inhibitions and remorse. This was a quality of monsters. But also, there was freedom in it. He envied her this freedom. He watched her through the haze of whiskey. He hated her, but also, found her enlivening. He was repelled and drawn to her all at once, had been from the moment he saw her. No matter what she said; he saw the truth. She lacked the capacity for true conviction or ideology. He saw through the artifice to her core, and there was no core to see. She was a projection of his own desires. She fed on chaos.
She was not made of flesh and blood but shadow and light. Now she leaned over him.

“Shall we make love?” she asked. “For old times' sake?” He didn't answer, but he didn't stop her, either. She lifted off her blouse and dropped it on the floor. Her breasts were small and perfect, perfectly smooth and dark with nipples like sea stones. She unbuttoned his shirt, his pants. His arms and legs felt heavy. His head was underwater. He tried to shake himself clear. He let her kiss him. She'd had him guessing from the beginning: who was she and what did she want? He supposed he was infatuated with her, but at the same time, he wished he'd never met her. He wanted to tame her, to subdue her, to take that volatility and passion that made her so remarkable, and temper it somehow, mold it. He was listening to the faint thumping of her heart beneath her breastbone when her voice broke through. “Shmuel,” she said.

He closed his eyes and pictured Devorah lying in the small bedroom of their cottage. His old life was slipping, fading. The only clear thing was Ana's voice, the movement of her silhouette across the dark. He pushed her off of him, rose to standing.

“Good night,” he said, walking back to his bedroom. She would have to pass through his room when she crossed the flat to the couch where she slept. He prayed she would wait until he was asleep, that she would move in silence.

29.

T
HE TRAIN WAS
scheduled to leave Utica at 7:34 in the morning, but Abe arrived a little after six, stood there in the dim, predawn light, his suitcase beside him. At first it was only he and the vendor behind the newsstand. The man had spread out a napkin on his lap, was eating a grapefruit and a hard roll that crumbled in his hand. He smiled as he chewed. “You want your
Forward
?” he asked Abe as he approached.

“Not today,” he said. “Today I want an American paper. I want good news today.”

He put a section of grapefruit in his mouth, rubbed the white pulp on his fingertips onto his pants. When he'd finished eating he added, “Well good for you. Why not? We're in America after all. We should read like Americans.”

Abe squinted at the sun.

“I didn't tell you. I finally heard from my family. Five letters came all at once. It was true what you said, the post doesn't work during war. I was expecting the worst but the news was good. Both of my brothers and their families escaped ahead of the Germans. They're in France now, safe.”

“That's wonderful news.
Lomir hern nor gute bsures
.” May we hear only more good news.

They both looked out at the track. A bird landed on a crossbeam, hopped around in a circle, plucking. The old man took out a short, brown cigar and puffed into the sky. “You're here so early,” he said. “The train doesn't come for another hour.”

Abe shrugged. “I had nowhere else to be.”

“You're going downstate on business? To visit family?” He pulled on the cigar and the tip contracted, red to orange.

“Yes,” he said.

The fringes of the mountains were warming with morning light. There was a distant vibration of thunder. The old man smiled at no one, tapped his ashes to the ground.

“You think it'll rain?” Abe asked.

On this, he had no opinion. “The future,” he said. “
Very veyst?
” Who can tell?

An hour later, Abe boarded the train. The car was nearly empty, as though it had been cleared for him, everything pushed aside to make way for this journey. He sat by a window and watched the sun rise higher over the still-slumbering city, a town that could fit in the palm of a hand. How charming it had seemed when he'd first arrived, straight out of the throngs and stench and sewer steam and hungry fevers of the Lower East Side. Now he had allowed all that charm to peel and chip away. What he saw now was not potential but the place itself: mud-crusted fields surrounding the city, then a string of paper mills and salt refineries, then nothing, just empty fields and windy highways. For this, he'd left all his childhood memories, his language, the town his family had lived in for two hundred years, the Europe of his youth. It had seemed a fair bargain at the time. Anything to escape the memory of Shayke, of what he'd done to his brother.

“
TELL ME ABOUT
your brother,” Sonia said to Abe one afternoon under the bridge. She had a friend who was a member of Dror, the Socialist-Zionist youth movement. She'd gone to a meeting and seen
him there, admired the way he spoke. “I want to meet him,” she said to Abe. “Would you arrange it?”

“He wouldn't like you,” Abe answered.

“No? Why not?” She sat back, pretended to be considering this while he pulled up his pants. She acted the same as always, cool, unbothered, but he could tell he'd hurt her.

“It's because he knows about us,” he went on. “How I feel about you.”

“And?” she said, rolling up her stockings. “What did he say? Was he scandalized? Or does he want me for himself?”

“Don't joke. I'd kill him if he touched you.”

She laughed. “For me, you'd kill your own brother? You are a strange, strange boy. Don't you know brothers and sisters are supposed to love and be good to each other?”

“He hardly knows I exist. He's never had much time for me.”

“Perhaps he'll change. No one's perfect, not even older brothers.”

Except he was. That was the problem. Shayke had always been the good one, the perfect one. Taller, more clever, better at sports, better with girls. He got them so easily. They followed him around. He could have anyone, do anything, but all he wanted to do was to go to Palestine and work on a kibbutz and marry an ugly girl with wide hips so they could make a hundred babies to settle the land of Israel. But Abe didn't tell Sonia any of this. Instead, he simply said, “He told me I shouldn't see you anymore.”

“He's probably right. . . . Give me one of those cigarettes, will you?” She brushed the dirt from her legs. “Look what you did to my slip.” She stood up and stretched. Her body in the sunlight. Her skirt rising over her thighs as she yawned, arched her back. The sound of the river behind her. He loved her, even as he saw what was coming.

“He's not right about us,” Abe told her.

“What does it matter? Some things are more important. I remember the day my little sister was born. My mother handed her to me. I
couldn't believe how small her hands and feet were, and her little lips. I kissed her, and she puckered, and I loved her instantly but also felt this weight being strung around my neck.”

“It's different with girls.”

“Maybe,” Sonia said, looking off toward the place where the river widened. A gnat landed on her thigh and she slapped it once, smeared the blood over her skin. “Still,” she said, “You shouldn't kill him.”

At first, Abe tried to forget Sonia's curiosity about his brother. He convinced himself that their missed rendezvous were unrelated. But then, a few weeks after their last meeting under the bridge, he spotted her walking across the town square on Shayke's arm, laughing, smiling, pressing herself close. And the worst part was that just as Abe had predicted, Shayke seemed embarrassed by her affection. Exactly like Shayke, he thought. Always too distracted by his own importance, the grandness of his cause, to see what was right next to him.

So that night, while Shayke was attending a rally in a nearby town, Abe did something he'd never done before. He crept into his brother's room while his parents read after dinner, and, as quietly as he could, rifled through Shayke's belongings, looking for what he had never seen but knew Shayke surely possessed, a pile of pamphlets and flyers promoting Zionism and workers' rights and Jewish self-defense. By modern standards, they were hardly shocking: There was decrying of the exploitation of peasant labor, a demand for international solidarity among workers, a call for demonstrations, labor strikes, and the like. It was the sort of agitation every line worker or college boy got earfuls of nowadays. But at that time it was forbidden; it was revolution, life-and-death danger right under his brother's bed.

He gathered up all the pamphlets and left them where his father would find them. That same night, he was awakened by his father's fury. “We have given you everything: a happy home, a loving family, food in your belly, clothes on your back, and you throw it in our faces, endangering us all.”

Abe's sister came into his room, holding her hands over her ears. “What's wrong with him?” she asked.

Abe told her to go back to sleep, then got out of bed and walked to the doorway, pushed it open a crack, and watched his father pacing, his moth
e
r sitting in a chair by the stove, weeping, his brother leaning back in another chair, looking at neither of them, his face scowling.

“How did you find them?” he asked.

“How we found them is irrelevant,” said Abe's father. “You should thank God we did, that it was us and not the police. You're a smart boy, Shayke. Do I have to tell you what they do to Jews keeping forbidden proclamations in their home—what they did to the Raveshelfsky boy down the street? Ten broken fingers before they even took him to the jail. Now he's in prison. Twelve years of solitary confinement. His mother's gone mad. I see her at the market talking to herself.”

Abe's mother began to weep.

“Look at your mother. Look at her. She's given her life to you and your brother and sister. And how do you thank her? By putting us all in danger.”

There was a loud crash. Shayke had gotten to his feet and thrown his chair across the room. “Danger!” he said. “You cannot hide from danger in this life.”

Abe's father went to pick up the chair, and his mother tried to approach Shayke, but his brother recoiled, turned down the hallway toward his bedroom. A few minutes later, he came out carrying a small knapsack.

“Where are you going?” Abe's mother called to him. “Please, stop,” she said. “Go back to your room. Go to sleep. Everything will make sense in the morning.”

But he would not stop. He went to the pantry, put some potatoes and some carrots in his sack, scooped up the pamphlets on the table. Their mother was pleading now. “Please, please. Let us all go back to sleep.”

When his bag was full, he walked up to his mother and embraced her. He kissed her on the cheek and looked around their home once more, and then he left.

AN HOUR OUTSIDE
Utica, he bought a cup of coffee, willed himself to read the paper, first the
Dispatch-Observer
and then the
Times,
really just holding it up to keep his hands busy. A bit downstate, the car filled up. A young woman in a cloche hat sat beside him, peeled and ate an orange, wrote a letter on her lap, but she did not look at him. He could smell the orange bitters on her fingers mixed with her perfume. He closed his eyes and replayed the sensation of holding Ana's wrists, pressing his mouth against her cheeks, her hair. She had said things to him . . . words that made him feel like he mattered, like he could make his life mean something. Was that no longer real? Was it all pretend? The newspaper sat open and unread in his lap, these questions pushing away the print, until he looked down and saw the latest ad by the Committee. To 5,000,000 J
EWS IN THE
N
AZI
D
EATH
-T
RAP THE
B
ERMUDA
C
ONFERENCE
W
AS A
“C
RUEL
M
OCKERY
.” W
HEN
W
ILL
T
HE
U
NITED
N
ATIONS
E
STABLISH AN
A
GENCY TO
D
EAL
W
ITH THE
P
ROBLEM OF
H
ITLER
'
S
W
AR ON A
W
HOLE
P
EOPLE
? He read it, closed the paper, closed his eyes.

Judith and Irene would be awake now, making coffee, dressing. He shook himself free from them, and then the rest of the trip passed quickly. Before long, everyone around him was standing. The train sped south. He tapped his pocket to make sure his wallet was inside, folded up his newspaper and clutched at the handle of his suitcase as he stood. Slowly, off-balance due to a sideways sway across the tracks and low, forward rumbling, he made his way down the aisle.

The guesthouse where he'd reserved a room was on Rivington and Ludlow, a six-story building of pale, painted brick, a strangely ornate building, windows capped in broken pediments. It was two blocks east of the Municipal Bath House where he remembered going his first
week in America, yet nothing about the street or the neighborhood now seemed familiar. He checked in with an old man behind a marble counter, put his suitcase in the fourth-floor room, then came down through a common parlor where four men and a woman sat in corners, acknowledging no one. There was a dusty carpet, an old, wooden clock on the wall. The walls themselves were painted a pale yellow like custard left too long on the counter. A palace it was not, but the guests seemed content with these surroundings. The woman, knitting away at an orange afghan, tugged from an unseen spool of yarn hidden in some nook of her massive person. The men, plainly dressed but well groomed, read newspapers in such stillness it seemed as though the pages turned themselves.

The man behind the desk watched Abe watching. “First time visiting the city?” he said.

He turned, shook his head. “I used to live here . . . a long time ago.”

“Lots of changes lately. You'll need a map.” The man reached beneath the counter and produced one. Lean and white-haired and bespectacled, he wore a gray vest, a blue tie, a carefully tailored white shirt adorned with silver cufflinks. He spoke with no other accent than that of old New York, rounding his vowels and shortening his Rs. “You'll want to see the Empire State Building. Times Square. Radio City Music Hall.”

“I'm not here to sightsee,” he said. “I'm here to find someone.”

“Where does this someone live? You need directions? You know where is the subway?”

He thinks I'm a greenhorn, thought Abe. There was no point in correcting him. He dropped his suitcase in the room, washed the grime of the train off his hands and face, then left the hotel, making his way west along Canal Street, taking in the avalanche of sound—the shrieks of children, their taunts and laughter, the calls of cart men, the rumbling of beer wagons, garbage carts, and coal trucks, all of it rising in
volume and intensity as he left the hotelier's New York behind and descended into the heart of things.

Where the sweatshops had been when he first arrived in this country (one factory crammed into a four-floor building), five small businesses now operated. Gone were the hundreds of women lining up, shivering in filthy dresses and babushkas, crowding the alleys between the shirt factories. Where had they all gone? Brooklyn? Queens? Back to Europe? Upstate, like him? Up into ashes in factory fires they couldn't escape? Beaten down by drunken husbands, by poverty and disease, by hunger or hungry children? It had been real. He had seen it. He had been there with them. And now gone, gone. Everything passed.