by Anne Raeff
“‘What are you doing?’ I asked her.
“‘Nothing,’ she answered, pulling the needle out of her arm and applying pressure to the vein with a tissue as we had taught her.
“‘Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?’ I asked.
“‘I know the limit. I looked it up.’
“‘I don’t want you to do this again. Is that clear?’ I spoke sternly but did not raise my voice because I never raised my voice with Clara. Since infancy, she has been sensitive to noise. And then I left her alone because I was afraid to ask her about the glass and the candle.
“I did not tell Karl what I had seen because I knew how much he enjoyed her help at the clinic, so Clara helped us until she finished high school and went to City College. I think Karl was somewhat surprised when she announced that she was going to be a teacher, but he never pressured her about studying medicine. That was not in his nature.
“Clara’s depressions began soon after I found her drawing her own blood—on her fourteenth birthday—and they continued to fall each year around her birthday. She would lock herself in her room around the ninth or tenth of February and not emerge until the day after her birthday, which is the twelfth. She wouldn’t eat or wash. She kept a bedpan under the bed, which I discovered once while cleaning her room about a week after one of her bouts. She had forgotten to wash it out, so her urine and feces were still in it, encrusted and stinking. I cleaned it thoroughly and returned it to its place underneath the bed without saying a word to her about it. I wonder whether she noticed that it had been cleaned or whether she had forgotten that she had left it there. I can’t imagine, though, why she wouldn’t have noticed the smell. Maybe the smell was part of what she was trying to create. During these rituals, she also turned the radiator off and kept the windows wide open, so you could see your breath in the room. Otherwise, we never knew what she did in there all those days. We put our ears up against the wall to listen for clues, but it was always silent. No crying.
“We decided not to harp on these yearly observances. Perhaps that was a mistake too. Was it that she wanted us to knock the door down with our bare fists? Did she want us to cry and scream, to plead with her? Yet she always emerged from her room rejuvenated, full of energy, eager to get back to her books. She would go shopping then, birthday shopping, I suppose, bringing back an expensive suit from Bergdorf Goodman’s. We always bought her books for her birthday—German literature, mostly. She read them all, all the classics—Goethe, Schiller, Heine. Do you know German literature, Tommy?”
“When I was a young man, I read Rilke, but that was a long time ago,” Tommy said without a hint of nostalgia.
“Yes, Rilke, a poet for one’s youth. I would be afraid to read Rilke today.”
“If you are afraid to read Rilke, Mrs. Mondschein, then that is precisely what you should do,” Tommy said. “Look at me, afraid of dying, and that is what I will have to do. But I’m being self-indulgent. Now it is your turn to forgive me. Please, continue,” he said, propping himself higher up on his pillows.
“We wanted to be sure she had nothing against the German language and those who had died long before the insanity of the twentieth century. So many of our compatriots refuse to utter a word in German—still, to this day, not even a word. It is as if they believe the language itself were to blame. But we were not able to convince Clara about German. On the contrary, the more we insisted, the more she resisted until we gave up, left her to her British poets and Italian composers. She became, at a very young age, like those poor old people who, in their youths, braved all their adolescent fears and anxieties accompanied by Mozart or Beethoven or Mahler or Bach, yet, in their lonely old age, wait out their last days in drafty apartments, reading mystery novels and listening to Puccini. Can you imagine dying to Puccini?”
“I can imagine it, Mrs. Mondschein, very vividly in fact, although I agree with you—the German masters are better for pain.”
“I’m sorry, Tommy. I hope you don’t feel I’m being insensitive, but if I am going to continue, I have to be perfectly frank.”
“I wouldn’t want anything short of frankness, Mrs. Mondschein.” Tommy laughed.
“Good, because that’s what you’re going to get,” I said, laughing along with him. “I’ve tried to talk to Clara about the music, especially since my granddaughter is a cellist. Karl and I were never like that. Once a month we would make a special trip to Bremen Haus in Yorkville to stock up on German chocolates and marzipan. I think we loved Mozart, especially Mozart, even more in exile. But where was I? The depressions. Yes, the depressions. Perhaps you would prefer to listen to another CD?”
“I can listen to a CD when you’re gone. Please continue.”
“Are you sure? Well, if you insist. Shall I continue?” I asked eagerly.
“Please do, Mrs. Mondschein. Please do,” Tommy said, bowing in his bed.
“It was only after Clara’s marriage that the long bouts of depression began, the long bouts that lasted for an entire year—an entire year of lying in bed. Her marriage surprised us. We did not even know that she and Simon were . . . what is the term they use today? Involved? He seemed to us more like a brother or friend for Clara. They studied together and he taught her Hebrew and Talmud, two subjects that Kar l and I knew very little about. We all called him the Tutor, even Clara. In those days he still wore a yarmulke, which made him look like both a boy and an old man.
“Then one evening when we were all eating dinner together, Clara announced that they had gotten married that afternoon, and Simon shyly told us that they had rented a small apartment farther uptown. After dinner they sat next to each other on the sofa holding hands and we drank a toast to their life together. It was about half a year afterwards that Simon came to tell us about Clara’s depression. She had stopped going to her classes, stopped bathing, stopped talking. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days and he needed a bath as well. We sat him down at the kitchen table and gave him some tea, but when he lifted the cup to his lips, his hand shook so much that he spilled it all over the table. This made him even more distraught. Though I assured him that it was not important, he kept apologizing for spilling the tea and interrupting our ‘quiet evening.’ Then he put his hands over his eyes and started weeping. After a few minutes, Karl and I both got up and stood near him, one on each side, and this seemed to calm him down. Then he stood up and put his hands on the table and addressed us. I remember thinking that he looked like a professor about to begin a lecture. He told us about the bedpan and about how he emptied it every morning and about how she refused to let him change the sheets and how he slept on the floor next to the bed and about the smell that came from her mouth and from other places. We should have stopped him because the details were not the point, but we listened like students until he was finished. And then he looked at his watch and jumped up, frantic—it was late and Clara would be worried—and then he thanked us for the tea and he was gone. That was the only time that Simon ever came to us for help. I suppose he realized that he was better suited for Clara than we were, and we did not want to interfere because Simon was so very patient.
“Still, years later, when Deborah was born, we thought that Clara might change and we tried to impress upon her that a child was a great responsibility. ‘Think of Deborah,’ Karl and I used to say, but she would always say that she was thinking of her. She didn’t want her daughter to grow up with a false impression of life. ‘Then move to the city,’ I would argue. ‘No, the schools are better in the suburbs,’ she would reply, but that’s an excuse they all use out there. They really do want to give their children and themselves the wrong impression of life—clipped lawns with Japanese shrubbery, Formica countertops, driveways, computerized alarm systems to keep the city at bay.
“Clara is always trying to get me to move out of my apartment, especially now that Karl is gone, and I haven’t even to
ld her that just last month someone followed me up the stairs, pushed into the apartment with me, stole my television and cash, and locked me in the closet. It took me three hours to bash the door down, and my shoulder was bruised for weeks afterwards. It seems they’re selling crack up on the roof now, so there are all sorts of unsavory people tramping in and out of the building at all hours of the day and night. I didn’t bother reporting it to the police since I know it doesn’t do any good. The only person who knows about it is Mr. Claromundo, my friend next door. He’s been living here almost as long as I have, and we’re the only ones who appear at court about the lack of heat and the holes in the ceiling and the cracks on the stairs. Mr. Claromundo loves to tell me about his son who lives in New Jersey too, and about his grandchildren and his little village in the Dominican Republic. Every Christmas he goes back. He often talks about building a little house in the Dominican Republic and staying there for good, but I think he knows he has come to need New York as so many of us immigrants do.
“Of course, Clara will never know that my television was stolen since she never comes here anymore. And I don’t mind—it’s better if I go there. I like the trip—a nice walk to the George Washington Bridge Bus Station and then the half an hour on the bus. Sometimes I make a bet at the OTB office even though I have no idea what I’m doing. I just like waiting on line with all the men analyzing the racing section of the newspaper, smoking cigarettes and cigars. I like the smell of smoke every once in a while; it reminds me of Vienna, the cafés, the wine cellars. Karl and I used to smoke in those days, which scandalized my father and sisters; in their eyes, it was almost worse than eating pork, which we did too, though I never told my family that. And would Clara’s life have been so different if we hadn’t told her about her beginnings? Would she instead have run off to Israel to live on a Kibbutz and marry a Sephardi with whom she would have had loads of children? Would one of my grandchildren have been killed by a suicide bomber? Would she have had the strength to go without us? Or perhaps the depressions are just genetic, a legacy of the Second District, of my father and my two sisters. Though sometimes I think my sisters were the prophets, and I the fool who could not knit calmly in the dark sitting room where my father lay for over a year, dying of an incomprehensible illness that Karl called melancholia, for lack of a better word.
“That’s how Karl and I met. He was my father’s doctor and he came to check up on him religiously though he always said there was nothing wrong with him except for the melancholia. In those days, Karl was extremely interested in psychology. He knew Freud. Can you imagine? But my father’s death discouraged him terribly, particularly because Karl had even tried hypnosis and begged my father to see Dr. Freud. Karl insisted that he could make the appointments himself, pay for everything, but my father simply shook his head. He already had lost his desire to speak. Of course, it was not only my father’s death that changed Karl. That was just the beginning.
“In the months before his death, my father would lie on the couch staring at the clock, crying quietly, always shivering, while my sisters knitted numerous blankets and piled them high on top of him. Still, the shivering never stopped. Sometimes my father would mutter something about how our time was coming soon. My sisters refused to leave the house, refused to leave his bedside. ‘When he dies, we will no longer be able to live,’ they said, and it sounded almost biblical to me. When I entered the apartment, trying to stifle the sound of my heels on the floor, they would shake their heads sadly. They muttered about the smell of cigarette smoke in my hair and the books they found by my bedside. ‘You should spend more time with your father,’ they said as if he weren’t their father, too. ‘There is so little time left.’
“It seemed they never slept, neither Sarah, the middle one, nor Clara, the youngest, nor my father. They did not leave the sitting room, and they did not sleep either. The day my father died, the blankets had reached almost to the dusty chandelier.
“We never told Clara about my father and my sisters, not exactly, just that they all died, but not that my father had actually died just before the Anschluss. You know what the Anschluss is, of course? When the Germans annexed Austria in 1938?”
Tommy nods.
“She knows my sisters died in the camps. What if we had told her all the yellowed details of their lives instead? Would that have made it better? Was there a part of us that could predict how she would take our gift to her, a part of us that hoped it would not give her hope, a part of us that was sick of hope, that watched the enslavement of the Palestinians with disgust, that believed that hope was the scourge of humanity? And perhaps it is. Do you think so?”
When he didn’t answer, I looked over at Tommy. “Finally you’re sleeping,” I said, dropping my voice to a whisper. “I’m sorry. I know I talk too much, and you, don’t you have anything to say ever? Tomorrow, no Wednesday, on Wednesday when I visit, you will tell me things. I didn’t mean to make you so tired. I should not be talking to you of such things.”
“Mrs. Mondschein, I’m not sleeping, just closing my eyes,” Tommy said dreamily.
“Are you sure you were just relaxing, not sleeping?”
“Absolutely positive. Please continue.”
“Very well,” I said, beginning slowly, making sure Tommy really was listening. “Karl did come to believe that it was a mistake to have told Clara about the circumstances of her birth. The night before he died, he even said that we should have known she would take it the wrong way. Was that why he worked eleven or twelve, sometimes even fifteen or sixteen, hours a day, seven days a week? Was he trying to convince himself that his work made a difference, that prolonging life made a difference? But there are so many things we never allowed ourselves to discuss, not even at the end. It was as if Clara’s birth in that cold bunker in Pribor had been enough to keep us together all those years. It was as if the miracle of her birth—and we always saw it as a miracle, had to see it that way or it would have torn everything apart, ripped it all to shreds until there was nothing left—it was as if the simple fact that I had given birth in a concentration camp, and that neither I nor Clara had died, was enough. It was as if the fact that Clara never cried, despite the cold and my dried-up breasts, the fact that she took the bread I chewed for her in my own mouth without a complaint, without even a twitch, despite the fact that she lived practically soaked in excrement the first week of her life because we could not risk cleaning the blankets in which she lay, the fact that they did not discover her, that she was not taken away, the fact that they believed we had murdered her as the prisoners had murdered all the other babies born in that terrible place, as if all that was enough. But I am tired now, and this time you are surely sleeping.”
I stayed with Tommy a little longer, watching him sleep, listening to his tired breathing, rubbing his hand to warm him up, softly so as not to wake him.
Deborah Gelb in New Jersey
February 1996
When I was younger, I wished I had been born in a concentration camp like my mother, instead of in boring Englewood Hospital. I used to imagine all the prisoners crying mutely with joy while my grandmother lay swallowing her screams so the guards wouldn’t hear. But that was before we spent this past summer in Madrid, before I befriended George Liddy, whom I still consider my best friend even though I haven’t seen or heard from him in half a year and even if he is about three times my age and can’t go for more than one or two hours without a drink.
“Deborah,” he said when I told him about my mother’s miraculous birth. “When I was a child, I wanted to be Jesus Christ. That was before I discovered Yeats and my next-door neighbor Frankie Farley, of course.” George Liddy is a poet, a prose poet who has published what he describes as “a few slim volumes.”
“During Maths class while the other children daydreamed of riding their bicycles, I longed to be hanging from the cross, my hands and feet bleeding, my lips parched, wallo
wing in the taste of vinegar.”
“There’s a girl in my school who mutilates herself. She has scars on her arms and legs and on the back of her neck like some Africans have,” I said.
“Ah, Deborah, suffering is ultimately so unimaginative. Poor Jesus. He thought his suffering could save the world, when, in fact, it has nearly destroyed it.”
The circumstances of my own birth were, in comparison to my mother’s, completely uneventful except that my father could not be present because he was giving a lecture at NYU about the importance of Abraham and Isaac in both Jewish and Islamic theology. My father has devoted his life to studying the intrinsic similarities between Judaism and Islam and thinks that pointing out these similarities to others contributes to what he calls the Peace Process. If you ask me, all religions are intrinsically the same, and we would all be much better off without any of them. My father says most people have a need for religion and that it is unrealistic to try to convince them to give up on religion altogether, but I think that’s because he envies people who can believe. I think he thinks that if he devotes his whole life to studying religion, something might happen, he might make that leap of faith, have an epiphany or whatever you call it. I guess all I can do is hope that it never happens.
Anyway, to continue the story of my birth, my mother wasn’t even conscious because they had to do a Caesarean section since I was breached. “Doing everything upside down right from the beginning,” my grandmother likes to say. When I was little, maybe until I was in middle school, I used to believe my mother when she told me about how she remembered the first week of her life—the cold, the smell, the hunger pangs. And when I was in the fourth and fifth grades, at least two or three times a week, I would sit on the bare floor in the bathroom with my legs crossed and my palms upward like the Buddhas in the Metropolitan Museum, trying to remember the first week of my own life. I had read that meditation could help bring back the most distant memories, even memories of past lives. That was when I believed in reincarnation because my fourth-grade teacher told us that she had been a Navajo weaver in her past life. Apparently this had been revealed to her in a dream. She had gone to New Mexico during Christmas vacation that year, which is where she had the dream, and, when we returned from break, we started a unit on the Navajos. She had us make little looms out of sticks and she pushed all the desks and chairs up against the wall and made us do all our work sitting on the floor. Every morning after the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance, we played little mournful tunes on our recorders. In any case, I tried meditating, but I could never recall anything before the day the raccoon fell down our chimney and was running loose and scared in the house until my father finally lured it out into the garage. I had wanted to keep it as a pet, but my parents said that it might have rabies, which made me scared of raccoons for years. I was three when that happened.
