Postscripts Page 3

But the old man hadn’t noticed, had just sat there hunched over his coffee and doughnut at the tall counter, talking and talking. And because there were no other customers there, just half an hour before closing time at the coffee shop, Abner had had to stand and listen to him, had to stand there in his short white coat and stupid round white hat that barely stayed in place on his over-exuberant curly hair, had to hear how he’d been cheated of his childhood. Had to hear it from a stranger.

  Because he had been cheated — robbed, spoiled, left with huge blanks in his self-knowledge, because they had never told him anything of what had happened to them. Weren’t their lives part of his heritage? he’d asked himself with a vast and painful passion as the old man went on and on about Hyman and Frieda in their labour camp. Hadn’t he a right to share their pain, help them to assuage it? To be seventeen and aching to change the world and then discover from a stranger, who happens to walk into the coffee shop where you’re earning a few dollars at night for your college funds, that your own parents had suffered so. What could be worse?

  And the anger had boiled and steamed in him, almost enough to overwhelm the other feeling, the guilt, cold sick guilt to have lived so soft, so easy, if so lonely and remote from his parents, when they had suffered so. To find them both so very unlovable when they had gone through such hell simply so that he could exist — seventeen-year-old Abner had needed so much to weep and had been so unable to do so. They had been wrong, wrong, wrong. Wicked even, to treat him so.

  So he had mouthed to himself, walking the city blocks back to the apartment he had lived in all his life and had thought the be-all and end-all of his parents’ existence. He would make them tell him, make them explain, all of it — not just the bald admission he’d heard earlier this evening — and he had gone into the apartment and slammed the door loudly behind him, to show that he meant business, and walked heavily into the living room to face them both, screwing up his anger tightly in case it ran out of him and left him speechless.

  Only to find Hyman, his father, alone. She had gone out without him: Frieda, who never went anywhere except sometimes to their club where the other Polish people went, and certainly never without Hyman, who sat and twisted her hands silently, staring dead-eyed at the wall, when Hyman was only five minutes later than he usually was coming back from work, Frieda out, alone?

  But so it was, and Hyman had told him she had gone specially so that she wouldn’t have to talk to her son.

  ‘She can’t, Abner,’ the old man had said, sitting there in the armchair under the lamp with the scarf thrown over it so that it didn’t tire his eyes. He worried a lot about his eyes, Hyman. ‘She wants me to talk to you.’

  ‘She wants you to — ’ Abner had stopped and then realised he was still in his heavy overcoat and had taken it off and, daringly, dropped it on the sofa. She always looked at him if he did things like that, looked with those heavy dead eyes that filled him with so much guilt, and so he had always put it away in the closet, for her passionate need for perfect order was stronger than he was. But he had left it there that night in a gesture of defiance as pointless as it was pitiful, and turned to look at the old man and had opened his mouth to speak, then stopped and stared and thought — he’s not so old, after all.

  That had been the second great shock of the evening, and in some ways it made his world reel under his heels even more than the first had.

  ‘How old are you, Pa?’ he’d said abruptly, and his father had looked up at him from beneath his grey brows and said, ‘How old? Who remembers? I suppose, forty-eight. As if I could forget. November 30th I’ll be forty-eight.’

  ‘I never knew when your birthday was,’ Abner had said and gone round the table to sit in the shadow so that he could stare at his father without being stared at in return. Not that the old man would. ‘You never said.’

  But he wasn’t old, that was the trouble. The thin straggle of grey hair and the eyebrows were a lie. So were the lines running from nose to mouth to throat in deep ravines, and scoring his forehead to split his face into segments. The tired sagging skin, the wattles of the neck, all of them were too soon. It should have been another twenty years before they appeared. And he said sharply, ‘And Ma? How old is she? And does she have a birthday? Or is that a dirty secret, too?’

  Hyman had winced a little at the word dirty, but had said only, ‘Frieda is older than I am. Not that it matters to her or to me. But she’s older. She has a birthday. April. April 9th. She was fifty-two last April.’

  ‘Why do you behave so old, goddammit?’ the boy Abner had burst out, aware of the youth and spring in his own bones and hating the lack of them in the only two people he had to call his own. If they were so old so young, what hope was there for him? ‘Christ, there are people twenty, thirty years more than you who don’t look so crabby — ’

  ‘It’s not something you choose, Abner,’ Hyman had said. ‘It’s something that happens to you. It won’t happen to you, though. To me and your mother it happened. It won’t happen to you. Not here in Newark.’

  At once he had felt the guilt come down on him, like a great cold blanket. He could hardly breathe for it, and he pushed it away, twisted it in his mind and forced it to become anger.

  ‘How could you lie to me for so long? I’m your son. How could you lie to me that way?’

  Hyman had lifted his brows at him, half comically. ‘Who lied? To say nothing is now to tell lies? Oy, have we got problems if that’s the way of it.’

  ‘You know what I mean!’ Abner had roared. ‘You know what the fuck I mean — ’ and then had reddened as Hyman had winced.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he had said more quietly. ‘I asked you, the times I asked you! “Why no relations, Pa?” I’d say, six, seven years old I was and I’d ask you. And you? You’d look at me and you’d say nothing! Neither of you ever said a goddamned word.’ That at least was a safe adjective, and he revelled in it, needing to swear, unable to find other words to show the depth of his pain. ‘You sat there like some dumb sonofabitch and said nothing when I asked you.’

  Hyman had gone suddenly white and leaned forwards into the light, his eyes very bright. ‘Never say that to me, you hear me? My mother was — she died in that place, you hear me? Never use such words to me again.’

  That had been the relief. At last he had wept, great big seventeen-year-old Abner, all six foot two of him, had sat in the shadow of his father’s lamp and knuckled his eyes and felt his nose running as he wept, and the old man had got to his feet and come and stood behind him and set his hands on his shoulders and held him until the tears stopped. And then he had sat down and told him, answered all the questions, every one of them. And Abner had listened and asked questions and listened again, and afterwards, as soon as he could, had made his arrangements to go to City University in New York. Not too far away, but far enough. He had never lived in the apartment ever again.

  There were messages for him at the hotel, and the very young girl on the desk gave them to him with a goggle-eyed pride in being part of so important a transaction, and he smiled at her and took the faxes away to his room. It wasn’t much of a hotel, the West Park. He’d been sent a list of recommended places by the NFT when they’d invited him over, making it clear that they could only provide the air fare (and he had a shrewd notion that they’d made some sort of special arrangement over that with the airline) and could not pay any more of his expenses, and he’d assured them that that wasn’t a problem. But, of course, it was. There was never enough money, and that didn’t apply only to making movies. It applied to living, too, and he had looked at his bank book and called Irving Sasha, who’d been at school with him in Newark and now had his own travel agency there, and got him to advise him. So now here he sat in a dull little place, full of dusty plastic plants and smelling of tired over-cooked food and elderly beer, and was grateful it was so cheap. Comparatively cheap, that was; he had looked at the prices of other London hotels and been horrified. If things worked out the way he hope
d, he’d have to do something about finding an apartment maybe, just for the time he was here. Hotel life was out of the question. Even though it did double as a sort of office for him; and he looked down at the piece of paper in his hands, grateful that the place had at least its own fax machine.

  And then the tiredness that had been crawling ever closer to the centre of him receded a little. There was one closely written sheet and he looked down at it and thought — she did do it then. Frieda had done it.

  He always tried not to think about his mother. Hyman had been hard enough but at least he was dead. Abner had been able to draw a line under him and live with what there was. But she, so very much alive still — and he dodged away from the implications of that thought in his head — she was a different matter. Yet she had asked him if she could help and when he’d said shortly that all he needed was to talk to people who had shared the same experiences she and Hyman had had, she had shrugged and, as always, said nothing. Yet here it was in his hand; a list of names. And he stared at it and he thought — I’ll have to go back to see these people. Isn’t it like her, to send me this after I’ve gone to London? Too late to use it; always she gives me information when it’s too late.

  But this time she hadn’t. He peered again at the fax and saw the addresses and his face smoothed out in amazement. He felt it happen. There were several names here and matching addresses, and all of them were in London.

  Three

  He slept dreamlessly for over ten hours, crawling out of the depths to blink at the thin morning sunshine spilling in through the dusty window and to gawp at the clock on the side table. Gone ten? Christ, what had happened to him? And he rolled over in the rather lumpy bed and dragged himself out, aware that he’d be sleeping yet if it hadn’t been for the insistence of his bladder. God, he’d been tired! For the first time he understood what people meant when they yammered on about jet lag; he’d always thought those people who talked about it were only bragging about how widely travelled they were; now he knew it was a real problem.

  But by the time he’d shaved and bathed — no shower in this hotel’s bathroom — and eaten a vast English breakfast, which was a great deal better than the quality of the hotel might have led him to hope, he felt better, and went back to his room to sit on the crumpled bed and look at the list of names and addresses Frieda had sent him.

  No phone numbers; well, that shouldn’t be a major problem, and he pulled the phone towards him. Half an hour later he was realising just how very much abroad he was. Dealing with British phone operators was no ball game; they were slow and unhelpful, and the systems they used were not at all what he was used to. But at length he had numbers for five of the people on Frieda’s list. The other two would need letters, he decided. Add to those five the seven names and numbers he had brought with him from New York and Los Angeles on his own account, of academics in the field, and film people, and he had a long morning ahead of him.

  He started with Frieda’s numbers, feeling an obscure need to get them out of the way, and drew a blank with the first two. A Mr Joseph Hempel was dead. The daughter who answered his call seemed uninterested in the fact that someone with an American accent was calling; she said merely that her father had died six months ago and what did he want? And when Abner tried to explain that he was doing research for a film she had said flatly, ‘Well, you’re too late,’ and had hung up. And he had sat with the phone in his hand as it buzzed dumbly at him and thought — what would I have done if someone had called me to speak to my father about a movie, had had an English accent, and explained as I had explained? Would I have just hung up in that brusque fashion, showed no further interest? I might have done, he thought then, as he cradled the phone and drew a line through Joseph Hempel’s name on his list. I might have done.

  The second blank came at the home of Mrs Marie Morgearn. A tremulous voice answered, an old man, Abner thought, and his heart sank as he struggled to explain what he wanted to someone who was clearly very deaf — for he kept asking for words to be repeated — and equally clearly agitated. At dealing with the phone call? Perhaps. Some old people, he knew, didn’t like the instrument. But when he shouted that he wanted to speak to Mrs Morgearn, the old voice shook even more and said, ‘Hospital. She’s gone to hospital.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Abner said, trying to sound sympathetic while shouting at full blast. ‘Will she be home soon, do you think?’

  ‘Kept wandering, you see,’ the frail voice said fretfully. ‘Wandering. And wouldn’t eat — and the laundry — I can’t do laundry, can I? Not at my time of life. So I got the meals-on-wheels and the home-help comes in and Marie’s in hospital and I go when I can, once a week they try to take me, but she don’t know me, so what does it matter? And she wanders, you see…’

  He drew a second line on his list. One dead, one demented. A great way to start. Already it was approaching noon and he’d have to make the calls he’d promised he would before lunch; how long was lunch in London? Did it start early or late? He’d try one more of Frieda’s list and then abandon it for a while.

  This time he struck oil. Hilda Fraister answered the phone herself and seemed not at all surprised to hear from an American.

  ‘Who sent you? Frieda Wiseman? Nah, this one I didn’t know. Where from? Newark? Ah, well now, you should ha’ said! Newark, I know. Got mechutanim there — my son’s wife, you understand, her people. He married a girl from New Jersey, and punkt! It turns out her father came from the haim. My town in Poland, you understand.’

  His pulse actually quickened. This sounded hopeful. She was a vigorous woman — he could tell that by the bounce in her voice — with only a trace of an un-English accent, and talking to her should be easy. ‘I’m doing some research, Mrs Fraister,’ he said. ‘For a film.’

  ‘On the telly?’ Her voice grew bouncier still. ‘Get away!’

  ‘For the cinema, but maybe it could be on TV.’ Goddamned TV. The way it always made eyes light up made him sick. ‘I hope you can help me.’

  ‘Me help you? So tell me how!’

  ‘The film’s to be about what happened after the camps. In Europe. In America, too. What happened to people who were in the camps, and to their children and grandchildren.’

  There was a silence, and then she said with a sharp note in her voice, ‘Children? Grandchildren? What can they know about the camps? Who wants them to know?’

  ‘That’s my point.’ He became eager. ‘I want people to — to understand how long the shadow is. They know there was a Holocaust, they know the camps happened. They know there were people who came out, started to live again. But how was it not just for them but for the children they had? It had to affect them — ’

  ‘Listen, the children they had — they’re fine. I know, believe me. They’re fine.’ She was truculent now and Abner felt the familiar frustration welling up in him. He could hear remote notes of Frieda’s stubborn silence in this woman, for all her volubility.

  ‘You don’t want to go sniffing around the children,’ she said then, hectoring now, a matron embattled. ‘Enough’s enough already. We got to get on with the future, you understand? I got seven grandchildren, lovely kids — why should their heads be verdrainischt with such stuff? For me, its over — ’

  ‘But I needn’t talk to your children or grandchildren, Mrs Fraister,’ he said, mendaciously. Let me get to you, lady, just let me get to you. Later, who knows what will happen? ‘It’s you I’d be interested in. You were in the camps?’

  There was a long silence and then he said almost despairingly, ‘You must have suffered.’

  ‘Suffered?’ she said sharply as though she’d been stung. ‘Stupid word. Doesn’t mean anything. I was there. Say that and you’ve said enough.’

  ‘How long were you there?’ Let me get what I can. Later maybe she’ll relax, tell me more. Who knows? ‘A long time?’

  ‘All my life,’ her voice had changed. No bounce now, but still strong. ‘That was what it felt like, I never re
membered a time before — listen mister, I know you know Hetty and Jack, but — ’

  He was startled. ‘Hetty and Jack?’

  ‘My daughter-in-law’s people. Isn’t that who sent you?’ Her voice had sharpened even more. ‘You said that was why you called. Hetty and Jack in Newark, they gave you my name and number — ’

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said and then had to tell her, hating having to do it. ‘It was my mother who did. She was — she belongs to the same club they do. I asked her to find me people who could help me and she sent me this list. You’re on it.’

  ‘Your mother — your mother’s in the same club? Then she’s from the camps, too.’ Not a question, that. A statement.

  He took a deep breath. It was like stripping them naked in public, talking this way. All those years when they refused to talk about it, and now he was using them to open his own doors. Hateful. But he’d have to get used to it. It wasn’t going to get any easier if he put it off. ‘Treblinka,’ he said.

  ‘Ah!’ A soft sound, not a sigh, but the breath of recognition. Whatever it sprang from, it made her voluble again. ‘Your own mother, hmm? So she told you all about it, hey? You’ve shared it with her — ’

  ‘No.’ He couldn’t let that ride. ‘No, she — they preferred not to speak of it.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘My father — ’

  ‘Ch-ch-ch.’ Another soft sound, almost a croon this time. ‘Two in one family. Well, maybe it helps. My husband, he could never deal with it, you know? Didn’t understand. Even though I was so young. I mean, I got out, I was only five. I don’t remember a time before. Only a little time at the end of it all.’

  Disappointment thickened in him. ‘You were five when the war ended?’

  ‘That’s it. Five I was. A baby! But I remember — ’

  ‘Do you?’ He let himself become hopeful again. ‘How much?’ He could almost see her shrugging at the end of the phone.