Theater

Scene One

SON One summer day in forty-four, a vintage year for death, my mother put on her good black dress with the lace collar, the one she always wore, as befits a lady, for her weekly gin game at her sister Martha’s. It was 10:30 A.M.—Ah, these little attempts at accuracy. She also put on her black hat, wax flowers around the rim, and a pair of white gloves, the left thumb mended. God resides in small details.

MOTHER Wax flowers around the rim?

SON Correct me if I’m wrong.

MOTHER I can’t remember wax flowers around the rim. (Pause.) Black straw with a white silk ribbon.

SON Wax flowers around the rim sounds better.

MOTHER Yes, my darling, it does.

SON There she stood, looking at herself in the mirror with those incomparable blue eyes of hers—

MOTHER (Protesting.) Na, na, na, na, na, na.

SON —which were to save her life that day, and let out a groan as was her custom. Give us an example of that famous groan.

The MOTHER groans obligingly.

SON There was always something to groan about (The MOTHER keeps groaning.)—debts, measles, infidelities, a cousin’s bronchitis, burned meat, the absence of two sons. Only this time she had greater reasons for groaning: her husband (She stops groaning.)—who happened to be my father—had recently been arrested for being what he was, a Jew and a Marxist of the reformist movement; a man caught between doors as it were, languishing [End Page 109] six weeks in a jail temporarily set up at a girls’ school. Ours—no, theirs!—was a poor man’s fascism, quite shabby in comparison to the neighboring pomp. The Green Shirts of our local thugs were greasy at the collar, their boots unpolished, and their guns frequently jammed when dug into the neck of their victims.

MOTHER Usicky, for instance, used to wear a mixed pair of boots, one brown, one black, as he kicked your father down the stairs. (She had started to cry.)

SON Having groaned and blown a wisp of hair out of her eyes—another habit—my mother packed her purse with her customary objects: keys, a hanky, chapstick, a snapshot of her two exiled sons grinning under an almond tree in a London backyard, a postcard from her husband, written in jail, asking for clean underwear and Pascal’s Pensées, ten pengös in case she should lose at gin, and an apple for emergencies.

MOTHER An apple, me with my poor teeth?

SON Correct me if I’m wrong.

MOTHER Plums, more likely. They were sweet that season.

SON Then she left quietly through the back door, in order to avoid the Csibotniks, a fish-faced family of Fascists who were occupying, by government decree, three of the four rooms of our apartment, including the boy’s room in the back, where I had lost my virginity to a saxophonist’s chubby wife. “People of this sort,” Csibotnik had said on arrival, as he and his fish-faced brood were standing awkwardly about crates and boxes, “do not deserve such luxury.” He was referring to the spaciousness of the apartment, not my initiation into manhood. His wife, though she believed that Jews were fond of drinking Christian babies’ blood, would sometimes show small signs of charity, leaving a pot of geese fat or a few apples outside my mother’s door.

MOTHER Plums.

A piano can be heard.

MOTHER What’s that?

SON A modest musical effect.

A song can now be heard from the piano. Louder.

MOTHER Ah!

SON The piano, which stayed in the confiscated part of the apartment, was used by the Csibotniks for storing canned food. My mother, however, had used it for as long as I can remember to express some love and hope. Correct me if I’m wrong, but in all the years that I’ve known you, Mother, you learned to play with difficulty only one song, a German one, vaguely as the years went by, my last memory of it being a one-finger version in the dusk. (The one-finger version is heard, with the MOTHER singing.) In times of stress, when I had scarlet fever, or your husband came back from the war frostbitten, you sang this German song sometimes unaccompanied. (She does.) You held my hand, or his, until one day, the day, I believe, when you sewed the yellow star on the breast of your good black coat, you stopped singing it altogether.

She stops singing.

SON When she walked out into the sun of the open corridor crossing the courtyard of the tenement, she was aware of little eyes peering at her from behind curtains, still curious at her transformation, officially decreed, from “dear neighbor” into “stinking Jew.” The only person who let loose her hatred with verbal insults was the janitor’s wife, a froggy creature who croaked the latest fashionable curses from the gloom of her lodge, like “Red cunt!” or “Jewish [End Page 110] pig!” My mother’s response was merely a Semitic sigh, as if to say: “Well, what do you expect?” or “That’s the way it goes!” Curse words followed her into the street like a putrid smell—

JANITOR’S WIFE (A faint but prolonged echo.) Stink-ing—Jew!

SON —and evaporated in the sun. She stopped for a moment to enjoy the summer on her face, and continued past the grocer’s. He no longer waved at her through the window, and the barber’s, where I had gotten my first professional haircut, and the draper’s, now shuttered, for he too had been recently arrested. By the time she had crossed the patch of grass along the Café Baross, at whose bar I once wept teenage tears on the velvet lap of my first true love, she was followed by two policemen called by the barber to check her out. “Tábori?” said one of them, dropping the Mrs. so as to assert his authority.

MOTHER Yes.

FIRST POLICEMAN Follow us and don’t cause any trouble.

MOTHER (With true innocence.) Anything wrong?

SECOND POLICEMAN You’re under arrest.

MOTHER Whatever for? [End Page 111]

FIRST POLICEMAN Whatever for? You’re being deported.

SON “Now?” my mother asked, implying the absurdity of all arrests and, in particular, this one, on a sunny day, en route to a weekly gin game.

FIRST POLICEMAN Yes, now.

MOTHER (To herself.) Well, what do you expect?

SON That’s the way they were those days in my hometown, Jews and non-Jews alike, people facing disaster with equanimity. There was no place for panic or indignation there. Not after so many sunny days of disaster.

FIRST POLICEMAN That’s the way it goes.

SON The three of them stood for a moment in the sun, looking away from each other. Klapka and Iglódi, the two policeman, were in their seventies, recently recalled from retirement, for theirs—no, ours!—was an understaffed kind of fascism, nervous about the fact that there were more Jews, Reds, liberals, faggots, and other criminals than policemen. These two should never have been called back into service. Klapka had asthma, Iglódi the gout. [End Page 112] Besides, they had never been any good as policemen. Klapka had bungled several easy arrests, and Iglódi, while beating up a communist girl, had broken his thumb and thus became the laughingstock of the force. They coughed and smelled like mothballs. They were dressed in the turn-of-the-century manner of detectives, with bowlers and heavy canes and hornlike moustaches waxed to fine points like the late kaiser’s. They stood for several seconds without saying a word. Finally, my mother looked around for the police car but there was none to be seen. Klapka and Iglódi, not to mention my mother, were too unimportant to be provided with such luxury. So, they escorted her to the tram stop to catch the Number Six that would take them to the West Station, where a train had already been assembled with twenty-odd cattle cars to accommodate some four thousand deportees. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

MOTHER Ah yes, the weather.

SON The tram was crowded, and nobody got off. The policemen, not knowing how to be both inconspicuous and assertive, gaped at the woman conductor, who was leaning casually against the door. “Stand back there!” said Klapka, not very loudly. “Stand back where?” asked the conductor and did not move, until my mother looked up at her with her incomparable blue eyes. The conductor responded by bumping some of the riders with her hips, opening a gap, and helped my mother up the steps. She squeezed into the crowd that stood stiffly entwined, as if in a vertical mass grave. Klapka, snapping for air, could already sense disaster. Iglódi, who had never forgotten the mockery of his colleagues, decided to abandon the instructions about acting inconspicuously, so he fumbled in his pockets and produced the handcuffs, his credentials as it were, and said after a while: “Police!” But the conductor had already rung the bell and the tram began to move. Iglódi, rattling the handcuffs, put a big foot on the moving step and stumbled against a lamppost; Klapka, trotting after the tram, stuck out the curved top of his cane. My mother, never able to resist a gesture for help, grabbed hold of the cane. The tram was gathering speed, Klapka’s hat flew off. He let go of the cane and, wheezing with asthma, called out like an elderly lover.

KLAPKA Wait for me at the next stop!

SON Holding high the detective’s cane, my mother turned to look at the crowd for advice. Rigid, blank, shifty, their eyes were turned away, squinting down at the floor or gaping through her as though she were made of glass. The word police had condemned her to a sort of leprosy. True, no one tried to push her off the tram, but she had become dirty to them or, what was worse, invisible. Only the conductor moved, handing her a ticket without waiting for instructions, and said lethargically, “Hüvösvölgy,” naming the last stop, and my mother realized that she had been given, free of charge, an invitation to escape! Instead of waiting for her over-the-hill persecutors at the next stop, she was free to ride on and go into hiding. But how does one go into hiding at the age of sixty when you’re a lady wearing a good black dress with a good black hat, wax flowers around the rim, and where? In the hills? Under a bridge? Her sister’s house, where she could easily be tracked down and endanger even more innocent people? Most of the family had already been dispersed or deported. Some, like Cousin Clara and her diabetic child, had already been turned into smoke over Poland. My mother had long since given up asking for help from her Aryan friends. After her husband’s arrest they had ceased to be friends in her eyes. They had become contaminated accomplices to the [End Page 113] abomination one Tuesday morning when her husband’s arm had been wrenched behind his back, his gold-rimmed spectacles hanging from an ear, as they led him out of the bedroom, where I was born, and kicked him downstairs. “Don’t worry,” was all he had said, a remark both heroic and stupid.

MOTHER That was not all he said.

SON Correct me if I’m wrong.

MOTHER He also said (a long shout), “Elsa-a-a!”

SON Elsa-a-a?

MOTHER No. Like a child.

Pause.

SON Embarrassing, wasn’t it?

MOTHER Not to me.

SON The woman conductor whistled a popular tune as she shouldered her way through the crowd. (The conductor is heard whistling a popular tune.) My mother stood, ticket in one hand, cane in the other, paralyzed by what her husband would have called the Incompetence of Good. Here was an adventure that demanded guile and strength, but my mother had never had an adventure, except for the one with her “Golden Lover,” as she would call the cavalier lieutenant who, years before her marriage, kissed her after a dance on the eyelids.

MOTHER And on the mouth.

SON Oh.

MOTHER On my open mouth.

SON All her life, even as a child, she was a mother, seeing to it (ah yes, these filial legends of innocence) that the apartment was warm, the coffee strong, the meat tender, the body properly dressed. But these skills were of little use now when she would have had to behave like Lenin or, better yet, like Douglas Fairbanks, her idol, who could spring from roof to roof as the “Thief of Baghdad” and fence with an army of villains. And so, at the next stop, she said, “See you again!” to the blank staring riders and got off to wait for the detectives under the big clock, a favorite meeting place for lovers. They arrived on the next tram, certain that she had gone into hiding. “That was a wise decision,” Klapka said, handcuffing her. “Tell me,” my mother said, embarrassed by the attention they were getting under the big clock, “where are you actually taking me?”

KLAPKA Auschwitz.

MOTHER Where?

IGLODI (Jokingly.) To the Jewish bakery.

MOTHER Oh.

Scene Two

Sound of steam hissing out of a locomotive.

SON Under the great glass dome of the West Station, crisscrossed by the sort of sunrays seen in cathedrals, my mother was cast into a hysterical mass ballet whose choreographer, a German officer, was seated incongruously in a plush armchair, reading a book and paying no visible attention to the inefficiency of his servile workers: the Green Shirts, policemen, plainclothesmen, and railwaymen were going berserk trying to organize the exodus. The deportees, snatched out of some blessedly trivial activity, like my mother, found themselves transferred to a cacophonic nightmare they had been haunted by for some time. (In the background, a hubbub of incoherent voices rising.) There was, for example, a ritual butcher, his cleaver still dripping blood; a group of schoolgirls in shorts and track shoes, snapped from the middle of a gym class; a young man [End Page 114] in pajamas, his lips rimmed by toothpaste; four or five wide-eyed patients wearing the bleached garb of an insane asylum; a rabbi with a buttered roll and no shoes. Having recovered from their first shock, they were driving their tormentors crazy by requests and questions that sounded insane because they were so normal. The lawmen rushed up and down the platform and tried to push, shove, and kick the crowd into a straight line, so they could be pressed inside the cattle cars whose sidewalls had already been lowered.

VOICES

Excuse me, sir. May I use the telephone to inform my wife?

Forget it!

Where could I fill this thermos bottle with tea?

No idea.

Have you any idea, sir, how long it would take us to get there?

No.

Do you have a pencil, sir?

One at a time, you rats.

Would you be kind enough to mail this letter to the chief rabbi of New York?

Kiss my ass!

Is there a dining car on this train?

Not so loud, you dog’s cunt!

Might I borrow your hat, sir, so I could pray?

(Someone screams.) Shut up, shut up, shut up!

(Someone screams.) I’m not a Jew!

Voices rise to a shrill crescendo of barks, yells, and screams mixed with the hysterical “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Then a shot is fired.

GERMAN OFFICER Quiet down! [End Page 115]

Silence.

SON What happened was that the chinless wonder of a Green Shirt actually freaked out, screaming on top of a baggage cart, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” and fired a shot into the air. The German officer, who had been unraveling a handkerchief, blew his nose, got up, and said not very loudly, “Quiet down!” which went like a wind through the crowd and hushed everyone.

Silence.

MOTHER A fine, lyrical observation, my darling.

SON Are you making fun of me?

MOTHER Not at all. Only, well, I told you a story, and now you’re telling a story. How can two stories be the same?

SON So why don’t you tell it.

A murmuring prayer in the background.

SON Try it.

MOTHER Even as a child you would turn things, I mean, life, into stories. I always admired you for that. How could a person, especially a child, live his life and at the very same time turn it into a story? I always admired you for that. I can’t tell you my story. What I did remember, for your sake, so that you could turn it into a story, I’ve already forgotten. All I can do is to correct you now and again, if that is what you want, because you do tend to exaggerate and embellish, my darling, and only very little of it was as beautiful as you now make it sound. For example, I can’t say much about sunrays and cathedrals at the West Station. I just stood there quietly, looking around for some friends, minding my own business, and hoping that my good behavior would be favorably noticed and perhaps assure my release, a very foolish hope.

SON “If you’re a good little girl, everything will turn out all right” was the golden rule of her life, a rule as realistic as the prayer of the little old man who, for want of an apartment, was covering his head with an aged, speckled hand. My mother tried to ignore him. What eventually caught her attention with a pang was another train. Two tracks away, about to leave with passengers on vacation. Another more familiar chaos was shaping the scene over there. Overpacked carts followed by suspicious [End Page 116] fathers bullying their way into crowded compartments; panicky mothers, wondering whether they had turned off the gas; children with sailboats and beach balls and stuffed dolls, with parents screaming at them or slapping them. “Partir c’est mourir un peu,” the only French my mother knew. She found herself sunk in reveries: vacation images of the past came to her mind, and she thought she saw her husband, wearing a cocky boating cap, a cigar aslant in his mouth, trying to cover up his incapacity for travel by bellowing at porters, ambling about, losing track of the luggage, leading the family to a carriage reserved for the clergy. She envisioned the two boys in their sailor suits, getting lost and found in the nick of time in a first-class compartment, swapping fantastic stories of high adventure. She pictured all the long summers by the lake, with peeling noses, mosquito-infested suppers in the garden, afternoon promenades, and making love on a sandy sheet. Then, from one minute to the next, so it seemed, she was inside a cattle car—how time flies, my darling—squeezed together with some two hundred fellow travelers, her feet slightly off the floor and, as the sidewall was hoisted and bolted shut, in darkness, except for a straight line of sunlight filtering through between two loose planks.

Sounds of train starting to move and gathering speed.

MOTHER What’s that?

SON Sound effects from the archives.

MOTHER It was dark in the cattle car.

SON Yes, but the rays of sun between the loose planks lit up a few human parts, as if the deportees had already been dismembered: a hat, a hand, a hooked nose, a pair of wet eyes, fluttering hair, all of it belonging to different people, yet embodied by a single mutilated giant. As the train had settled down to an even trot and the foul air was freshened up by a country breeze, this fairly unison breathing changed to a different kind of gasping. “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases,” someone remarked humorously and was rewarded by a giggle, which conjured up the atmosphere of a children’s room at night, with the children enjoying furtive jokes under the covers while the grown-ups danced above. A fairy tale, and no one would be saved from getting baked in the oven, except for one.

VOICES (Cheerful.)

Would whoever has his elbow in my solar plexus please remove it?

He-he-he!

Would the lady on whose foot I happen to be standing reveal her identity and signify her displeasure?

Hi-hi-hi!

Any objections if I smoke?

Yes!

Ha-ha-ha!

Take your hand off my hip, young man! Not you!

Ho-ho-ho!

(A baritone sings.) Oh, I’ve only kissed her on her shoulder . . .

Some God you are! Where were you this morning at eleven when they broke my glasses? Out for a snack? Taking a nap? Well, I’m through with you, boy! Do me a favor and choose some other people the next time!

SON Unwilling to pray, my mother was relaxing by then. The darkness surrounding her began to assume a shape. The fragmented pieces could be observed. Someone to her left smelled of floor wax; another had wiry hair; a third wore bleached rough linen; a fourth was sweating through his shirt. But where were the children? Up to then my mother seemed [End Page 117] to stand on the bottom of muddy waters—another one of those wretched metaphors. Now there were buttons, knuckles, earlobes, shins about her. And then, to her astonishment, a hand was moving up her good black dress . . .

MOTHER Now comes what you call the love story?

SON Yes, now comes what I call the love story.

MOTHER Aren’t you ashamed of telling it?

SON Yes I am, and that’s why I’m telling it.

MOTHER But I’m your mother.

SON One night, if I may go off on a short tangent, I must have been ten or eleven and we were spending the summer on the Wörther Lake, the three of us sharing a room, I was wakened by what would politely be called the “primal scene”—you and your husband were copulating.

She slaps his face.

SON That’s the first time you’ve ever hit me.

MOTHER How can you use such vulgar language in public?

SON Is it, or isn’t it true that in the darkness of the cattle car a hand was moving up inside your good black dress? [End Page 118]

MOTHER Do you mind if I leave for a minute?

SON No.

A door is heard closing.

SON This hand was moving, as I said before, up her good black dress and stopped shyly before rounding her left breast. At the same time, a chin settled on her shoulder and stayed there. She blushed and moved an inch forward, but the hand, with its arm cornering her from behind, clasped her breast firmly and pulled her back. There was a body belonging to the hand, leaning humbly against her backside. As she made her last attempt to free herself, a voice whispered into her hair.

LOVER’S VOICE Please. It will be the last time.

SON The hand released her breast to show its respect, waited and rested on the breast again, two fingers caressing her nipple. “Well, such is life,” my mother had almost said. But she said nothing, for the hand was pleading in a childlike manner, asking for help rather than seeking to make conquest. My mother could not remember when her nipple had last been played with. She was almost sixty then, and sex to her had become an unpleasant chore that she had put aside with other childish things. For a moment she thought about her husband languishing in prison. What would he say? They had never discussed such things. He was a prude. One time he had ordered a cousin out of the apartment for using the word testicles in front of my mother. The last time he had slept with her was eight years before, I think, in a Carinthian spa on the squeaking mattress of a white hotel set in the middle of fir trees. I say “I think” because, as a rule, sons have a peculiarly romantic idea about their parents’ sex life. At least that’s what my son tells me. She liked to feel her husband’s weight, I think, and the way he called her, “My little Elsie.” His bald pate burrowed into the pillow, when he came, I think. She had never had another man in her life, I think, and now in the cattle car the body belonging to the tender but anonymous hand was pressed against her buttocks seeking entry and release. No one had ever made love to my mother standing, from behind, not even her husband, I think. She wasn’t quite sure, in the cattle car on the way to Auschwitz, how it could be done, if at all, through her good black dress; and yet the two bodies picked up the rolling rhythm of the train, and her breath also had quickened. Above his chin, resting on her shoulder, there came appreciative gasps, and another plea: “It’s the last time.” So she bent her knees and opened her bony hind-cheeks to a warm spray that stained her good black dress. The little rabbi’s prayer had never ceased. After a while, the hand released her breast, the arm and the chin parted from her, her hair was blessed with a kiss, and the body behind her wriggled away.

Scene Three

SON She never found out who her lover was. (A door is heard opening quietly.) When they had stopped near the border, “at the gate to death,” as the saying went, to change to a German cattle train, much cleaner than their own, my mother was surprised by the strong rays of the sun.

MOTHER I thought it had already become night.

A dog is heard barking in the distance.

SON But no, it was still day, and the travelers, four thousand and thirty-one, my research shows, plopped out of their confinement into a lazy afternoon. The train had shifted to a sidetrack next to a golden field. Peasants were [End Page 119] loading hay. A horse buggy was kicking up the dust of a lane. No one paid attention to the travelers except for a barefoot child behind a bush, sucking her thumb. There was no terror in that landscape. The weather was fine. The work going well. A bird flew from a tree. It would be a pleasant evening, and the doomed passengers passed by like characters who had wandered into the wrong play. True, an invisible dog was barking hysterically; it must have been chained to a post. A metallic clang accompanied the barking, and that barking, my mother says, could be heard throughout the rest of the afternoon. “Let me go!” the dog was saying.

MOTHER Aptly put, my darling.

SON For a while nothing happened, and no one spoke. Then, a young man, squirming as if his crotch had been wet, stepped forward to pick some red poppies and was shot. He fell down and died quickly, only his fingers moved a bit like a baby groping for a nipple. (Now the shot is heard.) My mother had never seen a man being shot, and the shot was sufficient to restore perfect discipline. The message was clear: no more of the hysteria that had prevailed at the West Station. A quiet command was heard from the direction of the engine. The deportees began to walk obediently, their steps crunching the gravel, passing the same German officer who had been sitting in the plush armchair at departure time with his back turned to the travelers; he watched the loading of a hay cart; three Green Shirts surrounded him, puzzled by his interest in the hay. “Hurry, hurry!” one of them shouted to demonstrate his efficiency. The German put up a gloved hand to hush him, as though he were anxious not to have the peace of the afternoon disturbed. The deportees walked around the engine, crossed the tracks, passing the German train. They seemed to be led by no one but themselves, and they continued to the country lane bordered by more red poppies on both sides, until they got to a gray rectangular building with a tall chimney. That building did not blend into the landscape and ruined the view. It was a ruin itself and turned out to be an abandoned brick factory with weeds and goat manure all over, broken windows gaping down into an open courtyard the size of a football field, where a dog, chained to a post, was barking. This courtyard was like a stage that was set up in the heat of the day by the three Green Shirts, who placed a table and armchair in the middle, a pile of dossiers on the table and a rubber stamp. They waited restlessly, one of them threatened the dog and finally kicked it, but the dog did not stop barking. Finally, the German officer made his entrance, chewing something, sauntered to the table but did not immediately sit down. His audience was all around, peering down through the broken windows of the plant. The deportees, having milled around in the empty storerooms and bakeries, past crumbling [End Page 120] shelves and ovens, were finally drawn to the windows and stayed there, staring down into the yard, waiting in the wings as it were, for they knew in their bowels that they would not remain spectators for long and would sooner or later have to make their entrances. (Ah yes, there is nothing like stretching a metaphor until it snaps.) The German sat down and took off his gloves. His hands seemed exceptionally white. He picked up a dossier. One of the Green Shirts tried to explain something and was hushed. The officer began to read; he was reading, the spectators knew, about them. Occasionally he looked up, as if trying to connect a face with a name. But how could one identify a Mrs. Kraus or a Mr. Altshul among four-thousand-odd faces, mere blotches behind grime and spiderweb? Yet every time he did look up, many felt personally looked at and stepped away from the window.

MOTHER Very perceptive, my darling.

SON It must have been about three in the afternoon. My mother, not easily entertained, began to feel bored and had somewhat of a guilty feeling about being bored: how can one dare to be bored outside the gates of hell? She started to walk around, hoping to drum up a gin game or at least a piece of paper, so she could kill time by writing an explanatory note to her husband. Curiously she wasn’t worried, as was her custom, about “being away from home.” Now here is a nice little psychological detail—I mean, as a rule she did not like being away from home on a holiday, for instance, fearing that her world and the people, the objects, the heartaches in it would not survive without her orderly touch. What on earth would happen in her absence to Cornelius, or Cornelius’s socks, or Clara’s bronchitis, or the dust on the windowsills? But her arrest made her a victim, so to speak, freeing her from the obligations of her daily existence. For example, she always felt a little guilty about playing cards in the middle of the day, just as she would never allow herself the luxury of a cup of coffee or a movie or a nap until after she had done her best to protect her tiny world from chaos. But now, as she walked around the crumbling factory and finally descended to the ground floor, a decision that was to save her life, she thought she had the right to enjoy the frivolity of a card game. There were more people downstairs, and they stood in crowded rows by the windows, watching the yard. She picked her way through them, muttering apologies, like a latecomer at the theater, and found herself in what used to be the staff entrance, an empty hallway with nothing in it except for the faded security instructions on a wall. She read them for lack of other entertainment: “No Smoking. No Spitting. No Noise.” She kept reading until a shadow fell on her and, turning around, she bumped into one Alfredo Keleman.

KELEMAN Good God! Is this Mrs. Tábori that I see before me? I don’t believe my eyes.

SON This Keleman was one of my father’s followers, a prominent member of what was known as Tábori’s Pity Club and, like all the other members, not only unsuccessful but untalented as well. “What are these no-goodniks doing dropping ashes on your best rug?” her sister Martha would quite rightly ask. Out of liberal guilt, my father had always pursued a career of charity. During the course of the years, long past the days of his firm belief in Marxism, he collected a bunch of nebbishes whose claim for charity lay precisely in their being undeserving of it. No one else had paid attention to these unworthies, and that was sufficient for my father to stick up for them with the impeccable instinct of a professional Samaritan. Once on a Sunday walk, while he [End Page 121] was making devastating remarks about the excesses of art nouveau architecture (he liked clean lines), I asked him why he wasted his time on those bums, and he said, “Only the unloved deserve loving.” Keleman was the worst of the lot: a fat little zombie, goo-goo-eyed, with a cold cigar rotating in his toothless mouth. His farts would stink before they could be heard. He called himself an artist-scientist, a Renaissance man no less, but it was never clear where exactly his lack of skills lay. For a while he sculpted hideous medallions of the rich and the famous, who never bought such terrible stuff. He also passed himself off as a hypnotist but could not put anyone into a trance, not even my somnolent grandmother. One time he told us that he was a black-belt karate master and extended as proof his “iron stomach” for a blow. I was a stringy twelve-year-old at that time, and when I hit him, he fell down like a bowling pin. The moment he recognized my mother, he turned pale out of fright.

KELEMAN Mrs. Tábori! Good heavens! I don’t believe my eyes! What are you doing here?

MOTHER What do you think I’m doing here, taking a vacation?

KELEMAN But you’re not supposed to be here!

MOTHER (Good-naturedly.) I know I’m not supposed to be here. No one’s supposed to be here.

KELEMAN (Hysterically.) No, no, no! Never mind the others! But you, Mrs. Tábori, the wife of the Cornelius Tábori, what are you doing in these shitty surroundings? Look around for yourself! Is this an appropriate dwelling place for a lady with incomparable blue eyes? It’s filthy! It’s inhuman! The toilet facilities are appalling! The catering is beyond contempt! How could you permit yourself to be handled in such a manner? How dare they? What has got into them to put the wife of such an eminent humanist into this pigsty?

MOTHER How could I permit them? What do you mean, Keleman, how could I permit them?

KELEMAN This is insane. You must go immediately and lodge a protest! Tell them in no uncertain terms! Insist on being released and returned to your home at once. With a written apology!

MOTHER Now see here, Keleman . . .

KELEMAN (Interrupting.) No more excuses! Go on out there into the yard and tell that German officer, what’s enough is enough! The time for pussyfooting is over! Your patience is exhausted! Make him crawl in the dirt.

MOTHER But Keleman . . .

SON My mother was getting annoyed at his naïveté until she realized that his eyes glimmered with insanity. Using his not so iron-hard stomach he gave her fast little shoves toward the glass door that opened into the sun. “Tell him,” he yelled, “the whole thing is a mistake. Tell him to let you go, dear madam, or he’ll end up in Siberia!” He had already opened the door, pushed her out, closed the door behind her, and leaned against it with all his weight to stop her from coming back. There she stood at the edge of the yard, a cruelly long way from the table and the chair in the middle. She could feel the eyes of four-thousand-odd people upon her. She was quite alone in the sun. She had never felt lonelier. So she began to walk in her good black dress and her good black hat, wax flowers around the rim, and her white gloves, the left thumb mended, clutching her purse with the apple in it.

MOTHER Plums, my darling. [End Page 122]

Scene Four

SON I have seen a few acts of courage in that war. For instance, the Paddington charwoman trapped in a basement window after the first attack of V2 bombers, four stories of brick and mortar crushing her slowly to death, her one free hand, the only thing of hers that was free, wiggling through the window as we were trying to dig her out. “No ‘urry, boys, I’ve been ‘olding up this bloomin’ ‘ouse all my loife,” she kept saying till dawn when the bloomin’ ‘ouse finally buckled over and buried her, her free fingers dying a worm’s death. Or of Sergeant Kaufman, unlikely name for a hero, who would cross the English Channel twice weekly in order to collect samples of German concrete along the Normandy coast. He was caught and literally skinned alive and yet refused to say a thing to his torturers, except “You’re wasting your time, gentlemen.” His bravest time came after the Liberation, back in East Grinsted, suffering seventy-seven skin grafts until he looked like a rotting turkey. “I’m told that tomorrow,” he told me before he died, “they will replace my upper lip with a piece of my asshole. Something like this shouldn’t happen to a master of Hegelian dialectics like me.” (One more of his oblique jokes, referring to Marx’s desire to turn Hegel upside down.) Those two come to my mind now. I’ve forgotten many others, but I must [End Page 123] praise my mother’s courage as she walked away from the safety of numbers, separated herself from the anonymity of being one of four thousand, four million, forty million warm bodies. We have all stopped counting the dead though they make the earth explode. Among them she had felt safe. She could hang on to them in ultimate solidarity even though they would be led into the fire. Walking toward the table and the chair, the three Green Shirts still hovering around the German, their backs to her, the dog still barking, the sun still fierce, she felt she had left the banality of life and was traipsing duck footed toward some incredible punishment which now, for the first time, was as tangible and stinking as the goat shit beneath her shoes. Eight thousand and sixty eyes accompanied her walk and condemned it, she felt. She had abandoned them, albeit by Keleman’s push and shove, and had become a traitor. Anyone who has survived these dead people is a traitor. She felt as if she were naked, and I can now see her walking naked, and this nakedness becomes the measure of her courage. Who has ever seen my mother’s nakedness? Not even her husband, who preferred to make love in the dark. As for me, the only time I saw her naked was the time of my birth, and my eyes were closed. She was deep inside the yard when the German saw her approaching between the Green Shirts. Their eyes joined together miraculously. True, my mother felt like ducking and hiding, but the only safe place in the world was in his eyes. Her head felt empty; she had no idea what to say to excuse her brazenness. The Green Shirts noticed that the German’s gaze had become stuck in the distance. They turned. The smaller of the Green Shirts, whose moustache hung like snot under his nose, began to bark: “Goddamn Jew bitch, what d’you think you’re doing out here?” My mother did not know how to stop. “Excuse me, sir,” she said to the German. “Get back in there!” Snotface screamed. “Now just a minute,” the German interrupted him, but the Green Shirt did not know how to stop either: all his life he had wanted to scream at women like my mother and take orders from no one, but all that day he had been taking orders from this German who smelled of lavender and never raised his voice. Now both of them had enough of each other, and in that tug-of-war my mother began to sense her salvation.

SNOTFACE Get out of here, you cunt, or I’ll blow your stinking head off!

GERMAN OFFICER One moment, please. If anyone’s going to scream around here, it will be me.

SNOTFACE She has no business out here, sir.

GERMAN OFFICER Let me decide that. (To my MOTHER, with pointed courtesy.) What can I do for you?

SON Their eyes, held together by some invisible cord, had not broken off contact for one moment. [End Page 124]

MOTHER (Improvising.) I’m not supposed to be here.

The Green Shirts giggle.

GERMAN OFFICER (Politely.) Now what do you mean, you’re not supposed to be here?

MOTHER I have a protective passport issued by the Red Cross.

GERMAN OFFICER Oh really?

SON The Green Shirts burst out laughing. Snotface was knocking on his forehead to illustrate that my mother had flipped out. Some of these passports had indeed been issued a month before and were recognized by the Gestapo, but soon the underground forgers had set to work, and by the end of the first week some forty thousand of these passports were circulating and nullified the valid passports.

SNOTFACE (Laughing.) That’s a good one!

GERMAN OFFICER What’s so funny? (The laughter stops.) If the lady has a valid passport, she shouldn’t have been arrested.

MOTHER (Her voice high like a girl.) That’s what I mean, sir.

SNOTFACE Those passports! Those passports are all phoney!

GERMAN OFFICER We’ll soon find out. May I please see yours.

MOTHER (Like a girl of twelve.) Unfortunately, I don’t have it with me.

SON Snotface let out a guffaw and sprung triumphantly into the air, slapping his knee, a Hitler caricature.

GERMAN OFFICER (Snapping.) Stop that at once! (Silence.) But, madam, if you do have a passport, you’re supposed to have it on you at all times.

MOTHER I know. I’m very sorry about it, but it couldn’t be helped.

GERMAN OFFICER Now what do you mean, it couldn’t be helped?

SNOTFACE (Sarcastically.) Yeah, what’d you mean, it couldn’t be helped?

MOTHER Well, it’s like this. My husband and I have been issued a single passport. My husband is in jail, another misunderstanding, but let’s not go into that. He has the passport with him. I hardly ever go out. I wouldn’t dare, not without the passport. But this morning my sister Martha called. She was not feeling well and has been suffering from epilepsy. She asked me to visit her and play a little gin, and I couldn’t very well refuse. I mean, who would let her only sister suffer a fit without the comfort of a little gin game, which happens to be the only thing that calms her down?

SNOTFACE (Interrupting.) Anybody can say that.

GERMAN OFFICER (Losing his temper.) This lady is not anybody. Nobody is anybody. Everybody is somebody, clear?

SNOTFACE (Cowed.) Yessir, clear.

SON And then this German came around the table and peered into my mother’s eyes as if through a keyhole.

GERMAN OFFICER Are you telling the truth?

MOTHER Yes.

GERMAN OFFICER Do you realize what will happen to you if you’ve told a lie?

SON Yes, she said, and peered back into his eyes as if through the same keyhole. Now the entire situation was reduced to these two pairs of eyes, and her gaze, clouding over with some ancient anguish, tried to signal to him: Well, [End Page 125] son, what can you do to me? Cut off my breasts? Hang me up for the birds to pluck out my eyes? Burn me alive? What could anyone do to me that would be worse than my naked walk across this yard?

GERMAN OFFICER All right. Put this lady back on the train and let her return to the city. See that she gets something warm to eat.

SON He could not bear the gratitude in her eyes, so he turned away quickly.

MOTHER Yes, that’s right.

Scene Five

SON Next to the engine of the cattle train there stood a plain and ordinary train. She was put into the first-class compartment. The moment she was left alone, her legs began to tremble, and she wet her panties but did not dare go to the toilet. She leaned her head against the lace doilies covering the back of the red plush seat. Facing her was a photograph of a spa. She looked at the white hotel in the sea of fir trees. “Well, that sort of life is also possible,” she thought, remembering her last night of love on the squeaking mattress. “Does anyone have the right to make love in a white hotel while dogs are chained to a post?” Goddamn Jews, like my mother, never stop moralizing. Ten years later, under the almond tree in a London backyard, she began to write all of this down on paper. Her spelling was never any good. I had always thought of her as lovable but somewhat simple. Yet she proved capable of thoughts like these.

MOTHER (As if to herself.) Once you’ve been to hell, and it is always around the corner, a place of nakedness where you are at the mercy of others, well, in this hell you don’t give a damn about hair curlers and wet panties and reconciliation with the enemy. All my life I thought I enjoyed reconciliation, especially with the nastiest of my enemies. I never had many, hardly any, who would bother to hate or hurt me, but I constantly dreamed of shaking hands with or hugging someone I despised. Well, to hell with all that. Beware of looking at the enemy in the eyes, my darling, or you might stop hating him and thus betray the dead. I’m now a bad little girl. Earlier I had been a good little girl, always helping those in need, for instance my father, who was kicked out of Ischl and other sea resorts. Although he was an excellent father and physician, he could not help seducing his female patients, even as they lay like chicken on his examination table. Now I might help my father by cutting his toenails, and that German officer with the true blue eyes behaved like a father to me, or a son, no difference. Yet I hate him for having to love him, which I do. After all, he and his brothers burned my Cornelius and my Martha and eighty others of my flesh and blood. I can never forgive them. May God strike me dead if I do. And the next time around—oh I hope I’ll be dead by then and out of this confusion of hearts—but the next time around I will smash their German faces with a hammer. I’m a weak and stupid woman, afraid of slight aches, who wanted to be nice to everybody. My darling, beware of weak and stupid women. Once they lose their dread of hair curlers or slight aches or their need to be nice, they become holy monsters. Sitting in that first-class compartment in my wet panties, I wished I had been a witch. Oh dear, where do these thoughts come from?

SON The door of the compartment was wrenched open, and another enemy came in, a German soldier. He was very young. Why were they sending these children to the wars? And he brought my mother cabbage soup and [End Page 126] a piece of gray bread. He sat down in a corner by the door and watched her eating. Chopped-up bits of sausage were swimming in the grease. “German cooking,” my mother thought, ladling the brew. She wasn’t half-finished when she saw the other cattle train starting off towards Auschwitz. She could not see any of the deportees, but she knew they were there, all her children, and she looked away in guilt, silently saying farewell to them, adding crazy little admonitions as befits a mother.

MOTHER Take care of yourselves, all right? Get enough sleep and fresh air. Don’t drink water from the tap! Eat slowly! And don’t forget to write, children, even if it’s only a postcard!

SON Tell a dead child to write a postcard! She was nuts at that moment, absolutely nuts! And her tears came, like her urine, against her will, but they filled her incomparable blue eyes and made her blind before rolling into the German soup. Ah yes, that goddamn Jewish sentimentality! Instead of staying cool and factual as befits a lady, she thought of the four thousand and thirty who would be dead and sprayed her juice all over that clean German compartment in grief over her so-called children. But what’s the use of grief? Who is ever helped by grief except the veil makers? Well, I’ll tell you who is helped by it, or rather the lack of it, my mother once said, the murderers, that’s who, for let me tell you, my darling, murder begins where grief has ceased to wet your pants or your eyes.

SOLDIER Don’t you like the soup?

MOTHER Oh yes, I do, I do.

SON Yet she gagged on it and dozed off. When she awoke, she saw her savior, the officer, sitting in the opposite seat and polishing a plum, one of hers.

GERMAN OFFICER Forgive me for going through your purse, I was hungry.

MOTHER Be my guest.

SON Away from the courtyard, he looked different, smaller somehow, more normal. He had taken off his cap, revealing his balding pate.

GERMAN OFFICER Did you see? The cabbage soup had some cut-up sausage in it, or didn’t you notice? I’m a vegetarian, a recent habit. Odd thing, but the idea of eating the flesh of the dead repulses me.

MOTHER You don’t say so.

GERMAN OFFICER Started in Hamburg after a firestorm. Do you know Hamburg? I was in a restaurant and a chopped steak was served to me, rather artfully arranged, when suddenly I could see what it really was—a piece of a calf that once had grazed in a field, and the calf seemed to be looking at me. Now how could anyone stoop so low, I said to myself, as to butcher a calf, chop it up, and eat it? [End Page 127]

MOTHER Well, that’s one way of looking at it.

GERMAN OFFICER Of course, one ought to go even farther. Does a plum feel pain as one chews it?

MOTHER Oh, I don’t think so.

GERMAN OFFICER You’re very kind. But I’ve read somewhere that if you plucked a lily, she would, if she had a voice, let out a scream. Sometimes I think I can hear all the lilies in the field screaming, and the cabbages, too. How far does one have to go to be one of the righteous before God?

MOTHER A what?

GERMAN OFFICER There was a priest in the village I come from. A rather unsuccessful one. His congregation kept dwindling. On certain Sundays there were hardly more than five people lounging in the pews, bored to tears with his sermons. Well, he would comfort himself at night when he could not sleep; Jesus loves the losers. He himself was a loser as befits a god. The message of love is an outcry against vanity and success. All religion is grounded in failure, or, let us say, since failure belongs to life, it must be sanctified. What I like about Christianity, and Judaism of course, is that they are so realistic. They allow for failure. That is, they tolerate sin. They accept the weakness of man, the sweat of fear, for instance, in a garden before an arrest. What else have we got but our weakness? We can’t even follow any of the famous commandments, and they really are not so hard to follow, are they? I mean, what is so difficult about resisting the temptation to murder? Do you agree?

MOTHER Oh yes.

GERMAN OFFICER Then one day—this plum tastes really good—something nasty happened in the village, the local draper, a Jew, was caught, not by thugs but precisely by those five faithful who still attended the services, and he was beaten to death with Alpine walking sticks. They buried him hastily on the sewage farm. Only his widow was allowed to attend, but his grave was found open the following Saturday and the body gone. That same night the priest’s chimney was belching smoke, a remarkable thing, for his housekeeper was known to be away, and the priest, who had very white hands, could not cook. The man was incapable of menial tasks. On that Sunday, Maria’s ascension, the church was reasonably full: a dozen little girls or so were receiving their confirmation. They wore white lace, but it wasn’t white for long. As soon as they had received his body and his blood, they began to throw up over themselves, vomiting not bread and wine but what had been served to them, namely, real chunks of flesh and real blood. [End Page 128] Instead of a sermon celebrating transubstantiation, the priest yelled at the congregation: “If you want to eat God, then by God I’ll make you eat his flesh and drink his blood, the real thing, the real thing!” A terrible story, isn’t it?

MOTHER Yes.

SON Night was falling unnoticeably. The light of the day lingered on, refusing to yield to the dark. When the first lamps of the city appeared, the German finally swallowed the plum.

GERMAN OFFICER (Full mouthed.) When we get there, I’ll have to turn you over to the local police, so they can check out your passport, and you’ll be deported again. I don’t believe I can save you more than once. Meanwhile, however, I must go to the toilet.

MOTHER (Embarrassed.) Good luck.

GERMAN OFFICER Plums never fail, as Saint Paul might say. The way things are, I’ll be staying on the toilet for quite a while.

MOTHER Is that so?

GERMAN OFFICER If I’m not back before we get there, make yourself scarce; Jesus resides in my bowels, if you’ll pardon the expression.

SON She never saw him again, though she waited a full five minutes after the train had come to a stop at the West Station. No one paid attention to her. So she took a tram to her sister Martha. It was late. “Where have you been?” her sister cried out. Instead of replying, my mother asked for a cup of coffee. “It’s ten o’clock,” the sister’s husband bellowed from his bed and came into the living room, wearing striped pajamas. Uncle Julius was card-crazy and choleric.

UNCLE JULIUS What the hell d’you mean by turning up so late? Had I known, I would have asked Samu Österreicher to play instead of you.

SON My mother had already sat down, taking off her good black hat and gloves for the first time that day.

MARTHA Where have you been all day?

MOTHER Well, I’ll tell you . . .

UNCLE JULIUS The hell you will! I’ve had enough of your stories from you and your crazy son George, who swindled his way into emigration to London, where he now sits, telling lies over the BBC and buggering virgins.

MARTHA No, no, something’s happened to her. But Julius, my dear husband, not partial to the tragic sense in life, what else can you expect from a banker, half his stomach eaten by bleeding ulcers? He was already at the table, wiping off crumbs, cutting a cigarette in half, putting the stub into his holder, and lighting it.

UNCLE JULIUS Shut up, ladies, and start dealing.

SON They played gin for a couple of hours. By midnight, when they paused for a cold supper with tea, my mother had won thirty-five pengös. So she had every reason to be pleased.