The Houseguest (31 page)

“Look at this beautiful meal,” he said. “So beautiful it brings tears to the eyes. My cousins, my poor, persecuted cousins, were arrested in
Dresden two years ago. My uncle was a philosophy professor at the university. The last anyone heard from him, he was locked up someplace in Hinzert, some sort of collection point. He wrote that they were fed, but only one meal a day, cabbage soup and bread. This is a man with a voracious appetite for food, wine, women, conversation. According to family lore, he once devoured half a goose and a bottle of port for breakfast. Then forced to live on one bowl of cabbage soup. And months since his family's heard from him. God knows what he suffered, what he's become. And here I am before my roast beef, my beautiful roast beef, while my own uncle starves. What kind of man feasts while his relation starves? What kind of people? These are the questions Ana likes to ask of me. You know what I say? I look right at her and I say, ‘Ana, if we fasted . . . if we all sealed our lips and went on a hunger strike, would it do any good?' This is a question I posed to her, trying to bring her back to the world of the sane. ‘Would it really, truly, make a difference? Would the grumbling in my belly stop the rumbling of the German tanks? Would Herr Hitler or even Mr. Roosevelt duly note my wasting frame?' I think not. I think not. And for this conviction, she calls me an accomplice in the worst atrocity since the Inquisition. Well, I'm sorry,” he said.

He sighed then downed his scotch, set the glass firmly on the table, then leaned into Abe and said, “Tell me. Are you political? Another one of that Jewish army man's disciples? Ana didn't have a chance with a man like that. Exactly the sort to make her knees go weak. Are you part of his . . . Committee, whatever it is? Those tough guys with their militias and their ads? It's not a trick question. I'm curious is all. Honestly curious. Has she convinced you to run away with her to . . . do what again? Fight the British? Fight the Germans?”

“Maybe help save people like your cousin. Try to do something for them. More than you're doing.”

He raised his glass. “Touché,” he said. “Well, good for you. And good luck to both of you. Of course, by the time you get there, Ana will mostly likely be on to something else.”

Abe had begun to perspire. His stomach tightened and tensed. His pulse was pounding in his head. “You're not her brother, are you?”

Feinman raised his brow as he sipped his scotch. “No, sir. That, I am not. No, Ana and I are both only children in fact. She didn't tell you her whole autobiography up in Utica? I'd imagine without the usual distractions she'd do little else but talk about herself.”

“She told me you were her brother.”

“Well, I'm sure she had her reasons.”

“Who, then? How do you know her?”

“Oh, me and Ana go way back. We were married for about five minutes, twelve, no, thirteen years ago.”

Abe shook his head. “Her husband is trapped in Poland.”

“Her second husband, you mean. At least, I assume he's the second. Not entirely a safe assumption. Who knows how many she picked up in intervening years with all her travels? I used to save her postcards, you know. Kept them in a coffee tin by the window. I got a kick out of these little glimpses into her itinerant life. Let's see if I can remember. First, she ran away to Vilna not long after the two of us split. She had her reasons, of course, her grand rationalizations. There was no authentic Yiddish theater left in New York. The city wasn't big enough for her to escape her mother's shadow. So off she went to join the Vilna troupe, to rehearse in an old circus building and tour the surrounding country. Ana, a glamorous, exotic American, was treated like a queen, which is how she prefers things. Vilna lasted for a decent stretch, two, three years. Then she moved on. Where was it next? Petersburg? It must have been Petersburg. Then Paris. Then back to London. Then Warsaw. I could be confusing the order. . . . What does it matter? You get the picture.”

Abe pushed his plate away, looked over Feinman's shoulder, scanned the club.

“I see you're not impressed.”

“Her past is not my concern.”

“Sure it isn't. You care only about your shared future, your passion, and so on and so forth. Hey, you're not going to eat dinner? You don't like roast beef?”

“I'm not hungry.”

“You can't let Ana's disappearing acts kill your appetite. A man would waste away.”

The waiter appeared with more scotch, neat this time. Abe's limbs felt heavy, his tongue like lead. Across the club, a constellation of lights came on in the raftered ceiling. A man in a black suit sat down at a piano and began to play.

“Listen,” Feinman said. “Don't take it personally. She worked her spell on you. It's obvious—something in the eyes.”

“No she's not like that. She's . . .”

“I know, your houseguest. I heard you the first time. Ana brings that quality out in men, at first, anyway. She makes you want to be different and new, to be better than you've ever been, to want better things. She makes you disavow the person you were, to spit on your old life and values, curse them, and then she takes that new, noble part of you that she helped forge, and stomps all over it and runs off in some other direction so that all you want to do is to go back to being the putz you were before, only you can't, because you kissed it away, burned it up. She's a serial arsonist, Ana.”

“You know what I think?” Abe said. “I think you don't know anything about her. Maybe you knew her once, a long time ago. Maybe you even loved her. But that was then. People change. The world changes. I think you talk too much to know anything about anyone.”

“You want to insult me? Go ahead. I'm only telling you the truth.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Right. Because she's your great love. Because what passed between you two up in Utica was so special and magical and authentic. Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. But I'll tell you what; the woman won't remember your name come spring, and do you know why?
Because happiness bores her. Love and friendship and goodness bore her. Even success, in the end, bores her. The woman is sustained only by want and ruin. In that way, I guess, anti-Semitism is the perfect cause for her. The perfect inextinguishable cause. It took me many years, but I finally figured it out.”

Abe pushed his plate away, downed the remainder of his scotch. “And you're telling me all this out of the goodness of your heart?”

“I'm telling you because it's the truth. If you made her laugh, if you made her sigh or whisper sweet things in your ear, if you made her get that warm, faraway look in her eyes, you failed. You never had a chance. Take it for what it was and forget the rest. You two do a lot of screwing up in Utica? I suppose you did. It's something else she's good at. Take it for that.”

Abe rose.

“Where are you going?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out some bills, dropped them on the table. Feinman stood as well. “Come on,” he said. “Don't blame the messenger. We're having a good time. The evening is young. The roast beef is delicious. The booze is flowing. What else is there in life? Believe me. You won't find her out there. There's nothing out there but scum and sad ambition.”

“In here, too,” Abe said.

“There you go. You're getting the hang of it now.”

“Get out of my way.”

“Why?”

“So I can find her, with or without your help. Now move.”

“Or what? You going to call the maître d'? The cops?”

“No, I'm going to hit you.”

“Come on,” Feinman said. “You're sure you're not an actor?”

Abe looked around one last time, to see if anyone was looking. Then he hit him. Once. Not hard but straight on the nose. The man was smaller and lighter than Abe and stumbled back. It would have been
a small stumble if it weren't for the step behind him, which brought him not only off his feet but also onto a neighboring table that toppled over as he fell to the ground. Conversations went quiet. Music stopped. Gazes turned. The maître d' came toward them.

“Jacob,” he was saying. “Jacob, what's all the commotion? You know we can't have this here.”

Abe got down on the floor and hovered over the man. He grabbed onto his jacket, pulled him forward by it. Blood ran from one nostril. It looked brown against his skin but red against his shirt.

“You hit me,” he said. “I can't believe it. I'm trying to help you, and you hit me.”

“And you want to know what else?” Abe said, leaning in close.

“What?”

“You tell me where I can find her, or I'm going to hit you again.”

“You think I'm scared of you?”

Abe leaned closer. Feinman watched a pearl of sweat form at the edge of Abe's nose, twinkle resplendently for a second in the cafe's light, before falling and landing on his cheek, where it rested and burned.

FOR THREE MONTHS
, Shayke's name was not spoken inside their home. “He is dead to us,” Abe's father said. Abe's mother stopped sleeping. He'd hear her all through the night, pacing the length of the house, opening and closing cupboards, polishing silver, sweeping floors she'd swept clean that very day. Shayke was everywhere those months; they were never without him, even as his father insisted they banish him from their thoughts.

Then one night, Abe was woken by a barking dog. It was coming from a neighbor's yard. The barking grew louder, increasingly intense, then suddenly flattened into a whimper. There was a moment of silence. He heard his parents' voices down the hall. Cold air swept through the house. There was shouting and cursing outside, commotion in the
courtyard, then the thud of rifle butts against the door. “Open up! A search!” Abe noticed the neighbors' lights turning on then off.

The police shoved their way inside, five, six of them, working together at first and then spreading out. Abe's mother yelled up for him and his sister to stay in their room. Abe led her into a corner, pulled her close. “Why are they doing that?” his sister cried, covering her ears. “Mama, mama, what are they doing?” Two men came into the bedroom where they were standing but did not acknowledge their presence, maybe because Abe was crouching beside his sister and so seemed more of a child than he was. They tore apart pallets and pillows and eiderdown. Feathers flew and drifted across the room. They pulled out the dressers' drawers, emptied the bookshelves, shaking books by their spines and then tossing them onto the ground. Abe's father appeared in the hallway. “Please, please. We have nothing here. We are a quiet family.” They did not acknowledge him but continued with their search. They opened up the trunk where Abe's mother kept folded blankets, shook them out and tossed them on the ground. They cracked open the heads of Abe's sister's porcelain dolls, shook them over the carpet. Downstairs, one opened and then began to play the piano in the parlor. Abe's mother was beside them now, pressing his sister to her stomach.

When they were done, the house lay in shambles, the floors littered with pillow stuffing, shards of broken glass and china, trampled clothes. Every pamphlet they found stoked their search. Then, just when it seemed they were losing steam, one of the men grabbed Abe's father by the collar. “Where are they? Where are the weapons?”

His father held up his hands. “Please,” he said, but his begging only enraged them more.

“Get the light,” one of them called.

A match flickered in the dark. The blue flame of a kerosene lamp wavered in a doorway. Abe's father was trembling but trying to stand
tall. His mother and sister were crying softly. Two of the policemen were laughing. All of them seemed drunk, smelled of vodka and sweat and horse hides.

One of the policemen held the kerosene in front of his face and another led the group toward the back door. They headed toward the outhouse. There was nothing the Auers could do but stand there and wait. He remembered taking his sister's hand.

How long passed before the men returned, he could not say. Ten minutes. Twenty. The door had been propped open and the house turned as cold as the street. A bitter wind blew through his pajamas. There was a loud noise inside the outhouse. The men's voices grew hushed then took on volume. A moment later they were shuffling back to the house, barging through the door. The one who had grabbed Abe's father by the shoulders was carrying a large box. “Look what we found in a hole in the ground,” he said and tipped it forward, so Abe's father could see: Inside lay broken shotguns; old, rusty pistols and revolvers; knives; bayonets; a few sticks of dynamite. “Your son is quite a fixer, isn't he?” the detective said. “He must have been scrounging all around town to find these.”

“Please,” said Abe's father. “He is a good boy. Please, I'm begging you.”

“Where is he?”

“I have no idea. We haven't seen him in months.”

“An address? The names of his friends?”

“Even if I wanted to tell you, I couldn't.”

The detective took a step back, seemed to be considering it all, and then his arm swung back and he struck Abe's father in the face.

A week later, they received a notice that Shayke had been arrested and was being held in the town jail. He was living in a cell the size of a horse's stall with a small window. He spent the rest of the winter there. In his letters, he described sleeping on a straw pallet on an iron cot, but all the other details of his suffering he omitted. He survived there for
months mostly on the packages of food their mother sent or what was left of them after the guards picked off the best morsels. He stayed there until a brisk March morning when he and a dozen other political prisoners were transferred. Abe stood in a crowd of onlookers and watched his brother, half-starved and caked with filth, shackled and stooped, limp forward with a bent neck. He followed the other prisoners from the jail to the courtyard. A crowd stood by and watched this procession. Some wept. Some stood in silence. Some pleaded for their loved ones' release. Abe himself made no noise. He couldn't. He was too frightened, too sick with guilt. On every side, the prisoners were guarded by gendarmes on foot and Cossacks astride horses. The Cossacks herded them with whips toward a platform, forcing the prisoners into freight cars on groaning springs. The doors to the train cars opened, showing only darkness. The prisoners vanished into the darkness, one by one as a whistle blew. The doors were closed and chained. Steam hissed into the breaking dawn. The trains began to move. And like that, his only brother was gone, shipped to a work camp in the East.