Voices of the Dead (6 page)

“Look at him,” the woman said to her husband. “He is from the camp. My God, what did they do to you?”

Harry was wondering where to begin.

“How old are you?”

“Fourteen.” He was big for his age, already five foot nine, but skinny after meager rations for six months.

“Where are your parents?”

“Dead.”

She came across the room, eyes fixed on him, put her arms around him, pulled his skinny frame against her heavy bosom, holding him. Harry looking over her shoulder at the husband, wondering what he was thinking.

The woman released him and opened a drawer, took out a towel, wet it under the faucet and touched his face. It was cool and felt good on his swollen cheek. She washed his face, rinsed the towel and washed it again. She took him to the table and sat him in a chair. Served him chicken and dumplings, bread and milk. The husband telling her in hushed tones that helping a Jew could get them killed. The woman, whose name was Margot Schmidt, telling him to go to bed, she was going to look after the boy. She sat with him while he ate. Told him to slow down, there was no hurry, he could have as much as he wanted.

“Of course we knew what was happening at the camp. We heard the trains arriving. Saw the work details, prisoners in striped uniforms like the one you are wearing. Heard the rumors of medical experiments and firing squads killing political prisoners and Jews. We are farmers. We have nothing against you.”

When he finished eating she took him to the bathroom, filled the tub and closed the door behind her. Harry dipped his toe in, getting used to the heat, and then lay down in water up to his chin, the water turning brown.

When he was finished she gave him clothes and shoes that she told him had been her son’s. The son had enlisted and was killed in action during the French invasion. She was angry, bitter, didn’t understand why Germany had gone to war in the first place.

She took his blood-stained camp uniform downstairs, burned it in the fireplace. Harry slept in a bed for the first time in six months, nervous, getting up every few minutes, looking out the window, expecting to see Nazis.

He was dreaming of food‚ seeing a plate of bratwurst and sauerkraut and potatoes, when he felt someone shaking him and thought he was back in the barracks, block 21. He opened his eyes and saw the woman. She put her hand over his mouth. Told him there were Nazis outside, looking for prisoners that had escaped. They were searching the barn. He could hear the dogs barking.

The farmer stood in the doorway and said, “If they find him they will kill us too.”

Harry got out of bed, ducked down and went to the window. He looked out and saw two open military vehicles parked in the yard. Four SS soldiers were walking toward the barn and four more coming toward the house. He recognized the young SS officer from the massacre in the woods.

“Get away from there. If they see you—” Her words trailed off.

She took him down to the kitchen, opened a trap door that led to the cellar. He climbed down a ladder into the musty darkness and waited.

Soon he heard the heavy sound of footsteps above him and voices. Then the trap door was pulled open. Light from the kitchen shone down illuminating the ladder and a section of cellar floor. Harry moved back and bumped sausages hanging on ropes from the ceiling, sent them swinging. Moved back farther and felt glass containers of fruits and vegetables stored on shelves. Harry worried the husband had told them where he was.

He saw black boots coming down the ladder, and the gray jodhpurs of an SS soldier. Harry moved to the far corner of the cellar, going to his knees behind bins of apples and squash, he touched them, onions and garlic, he smelled them. Harry going down on his chest as the SS soldier’s feet landed on the dirt floor. The soldier moved to the right, training the flashlight over the contents of the cellar, the light lingering and holding on objects and then sweeping across the back wall, coming toward him, light reflecting off the glass containers on the shelves, then tracing a line where the walls met, going from dirt floor to beamed ceiling. Then moving across the sidewall, and over the bins, Harry holding his breath, curling up, making himself smaller.

He heard a click and the beam disappeared and the soldier was on the ladder climbing back up.

“Nothing,” the soldier said.

The trap door was put back into position and it was dark again. He heard the soldiers leave the house. Heard the vehicles start up and drive out of the yard and let out a breath.

Margot Schmidt, against her better judgment and the protests of her husband, drove Harry to the outskirts of Munich in a rickety old truck that backfired and burned oil. She told him he was crazy. He should stay with them at the farmhouse. They would hide him until the insanity was over, until it was safe. Harry knew the husband didn’t want him. That was obvious, and sooner or later someone would find out he was there and tell the SS.

She pulled off the road and gave him bread and sausage wrapped in butcher paper tied with string. He put it in the pocket of the coat that had been her son’s. She leaned across the bench seat and hugged him. Harry thanked her and got out of the truck. He pulled the brim of the cap down over his eyes and headed for the towers of Altstadt.

Twenty minutes later he was across the street from the building his father owned at Sendlinger Strasse 43. The bottom floor had been rented to a pharmacist who appeared to still be in business. Harry and his parents lived in the top two floors. He crossed the street and tried the door. It was locked. He remembered his father kept a spare key on the stone ledge over the rear entrance. Was it still there? Even so, if someone were living in the house they would have changed the locks, wouldn’t they?

Harry walked around the block behind the building. Stood in front of the door. He jumped up and felt the key and knocked it off the ledge, heard it hit the cobblestone entranceway. He picked it up, slid it in the lock and opened the door.

Detroit, Michigan. 1971.

Harry glanced at the row of black Cadillacs parked on the street, a group of friends and relatives around him at Sara’s casket, waiting for it to be lowered into the ground next to her mother. Rabbi Rosenbaum delivering the Mourner’s Kaddish.

“May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified.”

“Amen” from the mourners.

“May He give reign to His kingship in your lifetimes and in your days, and in the lifetimes of the entire family of Israel, swiftly and soon. Now say: Amen. May His great name be blessed forever and ever. Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled, mighty, upraised, and lauded be the Name of the Holy One.”

And now everyone said, “Blessed is He.”

Harry felt like he had slipped out of his body, watching himself in a black suit, white shirt, black tie and black yarmulke, hands clasped together, holding them over his groin, solemn expression, mind flashing snapshots of Sara like frames in a slide show.

An hour later Harry was sitting in his crowded living room, Aunt Netta, an Orthodox Jew, holding his face in her hands.

“Harry, did you shave? You are not supposed to shave or get a haircut. Harry, don’t you know this?”

“It’s okay,” Harry said.

“It’s not okay. You should be sitting in a low chair.”

“I don’t have a low chair,” Harry said.

She glanced at his shoes, black ankle-high Bally boots with a zipper on the side. “And no leather. You should know better, Harry. It’s rabbinically mandated.”

Telling him what a mourner should do during shiva. Netta was short and wide like his mother, about five two. She pinned a piece of ribbon, a keriah, on his shirt pocket.

After the Nazis murdered his parents, Harry doubted the existence of God, and stopped practicing the rituals and traditions of the faith.

“Harry, I arranged a minyan for tonight’s service,” Netta said. Which meant ten men from Temple would arrive about 7:00 p.m. to recite Kaddish.

Most of Harry’s family had emigrated from Germany in the late thirties. His father’s side of the family was tall, thin and good-looking. His mother’s side was short and stocky. The men had round faces and thinning hair and wore glasses, black horn rims with lenses so thick you got dizzy if you looked through them.

Harry’s uncle and former business partner, his dad’s younger brother, sat next to him and grinned. Sam was seventy-one and always had a gleam in his eye.

“A Polish terrorist was sent to blow up a car,” Sam said. “He burned his mouth on the exhaust pipe.”

Harry grinned.

“Two Jews, Saul and Sheldon, were walking past a church. They saw a sign that said:
Become Catholic. We pay $100.
Sheldon says, “I’m going to do it.” “No,” says Saul. “Yes, I am,” says Sheldon. “You can’t. Your family, your friends, they’re all Jewish. You go to shul for the High Holidays.” “I’m doing it,” says Sheldon walking into the church. Saul paces back and forth until Sheldon walks out with a big smile on his face. “No,” says Saul. “You didn’t.” “Yes, I did,” says Sheldon. “I’m baptized. I’ve become Catholic.” Saul says, “Tell me, did you get the hundred dollars?” Sheldon looks at him and says, “Why is it always the money with you people?” Sam laughed, patted Harry’s cheek. “So how you doing?”

“Holding up,” Harry said.

“What choice do you have?”

“I miss her,” Harry said, feeling a heavy sadness like he might break down, took a deep breath and it calmed him.

Sam put his arm around Harry’s shoulder. “We all do. That kid was something special.”

Harry saw Phyllis and Jerry, dressed up, standing in the foyer. “Excuse me, will you?” he said to Sam, got up and went over to them. They’d never been in his house and looked nervous. “Thanks for coming,” Harry said.

“Harry, why didn’t you tell me?” Phyllis said. “I’m so sorry.” She hugged him and handed him a glass canning jar. “I made this for you. Salsa, extra spicy, the way you like it.”

He took it and put it on a table and helped Phyllis off with her coat. “Come in, have something to eat.”

Jerry shook his hand. “Harry, I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I can’t stay long,” Phyllis said, out of her comfort zone, ready to leave right then if she could’ve.

“There’re no rules,” Harry said. “Go whenever you want.” He escorted them into the dining room, people moving around the table, filling their plates. “But first have something to eat.” A tall dark-haired kid with a beard and glasses with silver rims appeared next to him.

“Mr. Levin, I’m Richard Gold, friend of Sara’s.”

“She mentioned you,” Harry said.

The boyfriend. Clearly uncomfortable, palms clamped together, but it was an uncomfortable situation.

“We were going out, seeing each other,” Richard Gold said. “I was in love with her. Sara was going to introduce us the next time you came to visit.”

Richard was choked up, and Harry was too. He could hear Sam behind him firing off more jokes.

“Doctor, my leg hurts. What can I do? The doctor says: Limp!” People were laughing.

He patted Richard on the back. “I appreciate you being here. Excuse me.” He walked past him into the kitchen and there was Galina. She had just come in the door, carrying a family-size bowl of borscht and a platter of gefilte fish covered in cellophane. She put the food down on the kitchen table.

“Come here,” she said, moving toward him, hugging Harry, pulling him to her, whispering, “I can come back later, give you back rub.”

Her euphemism for going to bed with him. He hoped Aunt Netta wasn’t listening. She would have said, “Harry, no sexual relations during shiva.”

Harry said, “What happened to your boyfriend?”

“Is over,” Galina said. “The man is a schmuck.”

The idea of sex with Galina, being smothered by her massive earth-momma breasts, appealed to him. It would take the edge off, take his mind out of the funk he was in.

At 9:30, after everyone had gone, Harry went in the kitchen and made himself a vodka tonic with a slice of lime. All the leftover food had been put in the refrigerator. All the dishes and glasses and silver had been washed and put away. He realized he hadn’t eaten anything all day but wasn’t hungry.

Harry took his drink and went upstairs, walked in his daughter’s room, turned on the light and looked around, the room telling a lot about eighteen-year-old Sara Levin, revealing a curious blend of girl-woman. Harry sat on the bed, knowing he was never going to see her again, felt tears come down his face, staring at the posters on the walls: the Beatles in black and white, shot on a TV sound stage, could’ve been
The Ed Sullivan Show,
a color close-up of Jimi Hendrix playing guitar at Woodstock, Bob Dylan wearing a hat in a dark moody shot. He got up, wiped his eyes with his shirt sleeves, looking at tennis trophies on top of the bookshelves, and under the trophies books lined up: the
Nancy Drew
mystery series,
The Sun Also Rises
,
Of Mice and Men
,
The Catcher in the Rye
, and
The Bell Jar
. On the desk was a framed photo of Harry and Sara posing in their white judo outfits. He walked out of the room and turned off the light.