by Anne Raeff
“Gradually it became Karl who would wake up in the middle of the night to feed her. It became Karl who sat with her in the warm afternoon sun, pointing out things he found amusing—‘There goes the future Miss Israel,’ he would say more loudly than was polite, pointing at a youngish woman with frizzy red hair and thick calves. When we first arrived at the refugee camp, Clara was the only baby among us, but when we left almost two years later the place was swarming with babies. Every time a baby was born, there was a party, and we were all expected to attend, drink thin coffee, eat bad American chocolate, and then cry tears of joy because the world would be a better place now. They were all convinced of that, so they made new babies to replace the dead ones and Clara was the mascot of all the new babies, the first, the prototype. Wherever she went, women would smother her with kisses and cry if she so much as looked at them. Karl indulged people their fantasies. He would parade Clara around, taking her for a sip of tea here, a few kisses there. Up and down the camp they wandered and Karl would cheerfully tip his hat at them all.
“But then Karl began helping the overworked medical staff, and I was the one who spent the long days with her, changing her diapers, walking round and round the periphery of the camp, trying to stick as close to the edge as possible. I could have walked on the other side of the fence too. Nothing kept us locked in. There was a gate and a road, and surrounding the camp were fields, and in the distance you could see the rooftops of a village, but we never left the camp. Not once, although sometimes I stood at the gate looking out for hours.
“‘Ruth,’ Karl used to say to me after I had come home from one of my long walks, ‘we will look back on this time as the freest period of our lives.’ And perhaps it was, but everyone has a different definition of freedom. I cannot blame him for enjoying our little island of safety. But I couldn’t relax, despite the fact that we had all the diapers we needed and all the bad white bread we could eat. I kept trying to imagine what our lives would be like in New York, because we were going to New York; that much was sure. We just didn’t know when. Every morning I went to the mailbox hoping for our visas, and every morning when I came back empty-handed, Karl would smile and say, ‘Patience is the mother of all virtues.’
“‘You only say that because you don’t have to be patient, because all you do is work, save lives, save minds,’ I would say, and he would just shake his head and say that it was not so simple anymore. I waited for him to ask me to help him with his work, but, in all fairness, I don’t think he knew I wanted to help and I didn’t ask him, so maybe I didn’t really want to work at curing then. Maybe I thought it was hopeless to patch people up and send them on their way. Maybe I thought it would have been better to die from gangrene or hepatitis. But Karl they needed. The doctors had gone home, exhausted from the war. They had gone home to houses with cars and garages and bathrooms and to children with ear infections and the mumps. They didn’t need another attentive woman because there was an overabundance of nurses. Maybe if they had really needed me, it would have made more sense to me to inoculate and sterilize and bandage and wash and soothe than to walk around and around in the gray air. Then I might have been able to leave Clara with one of the many groups of female knitters who sat in circles near heaters, knitting blankets and socks and sweaters for all the new babies. They could have used Clara as a model. But there were all those nurses, all those young women afraid to return to prewar fiancés and widowed mothers and future children, clamoring for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and dogs.
“‘Enjoy this time with Clara,’ he said, ‘because when we get to New York, we will have to struggle.’ And I tried to enjoy my time with Clara, but how can you enjoy walking round and round and round a refugee camp all day long until your feet hurt?
“‘There are plenty of books in the library,’ Karl would tell me, but I couldn’t concentrate on books. ‘And why don’t you try to make some friends?’ But I had no interest in friends, so I walked and walked and Karl worried that Clara would catch cold when it rained or snowed, but she was never sick. I think Karl would have stayed there forever or at least until the last DP had been placed. All he had to do was work and the rest was taken care of. He could work twenty hours a day if he felt like it.
“Herr Doktor, all the nurses called him, and he would call them gnädiges Fräulein, and they would titter and blush. I’m sure every last one of them lay in their cots at night wishing they could go home to a man like Karl, a man who called them gnädiges Fräulein and looked straight into their eyes. I’m sure they wondered what horrors those eyes had seen and wept when they tried to imagine them.
“One of Karl’s patients was a middle-aged Ukrainian man who complained that the devil resided in his brain. All night long the devil would tell him pornographic jokes, so he could not sleep. If he tried to tune them out, the devil would bang on the inside of his skull until he agreed to listen. The devil only needed about two hours of sleep a day and preferred to take his rest in the late morning. That was the only time the devil left him alone. Throughout the day the devil would command the man to do strange and sometimes terrible things like walk around the camp naked holding his penis, or eat his own excrement, or whisper obscenities at the female refugees.
“One day he tried to bite off a cat’s leg, but the cat lashed out at him and he and the cat were brought to the infirmary a bloody mess. It took four large men to keep the Ukrainian from banging his head against the wall and smashing his skull. ‘Doctor,’ he begged Karl, ‘take the devil out of my head! Take the devil out of my head!’ So Karl, with the help of the gnädigen Fräulein, performed a devil-removing operation. They gave him a full anesthesia and made a small incision in his scalp and then sewed it right up again. When the man awoke, the devil was gone and he kissed Karl’s hands and he kissed the nurses’ hands and they brought him chicken broth and then he slept again. They kept him in the hospital for three days and made a big to-do about dressing his wound, and then they released him.
“After his release, the Ukrainian visited Karl at our bunker regularly. He would sit in a chair facing Karl, smiling, and Karl smiled back at him. They talked a little but not much because they didn’t have a common language. If I came into the room when he was there, he would start humming and tapping his foot nervously, so I always left them alone. He loved Clara, though. Karl would let him hold Clara on his lap and play horse and rider with her, and Clara would bob up and down, expressionless. ‘It’s good for him to be around children,’ Karl would say, but it made me nervous. He was a fleshy man whose name I never knew, not because it was kept from me, but because I never asked. Karl always referred to him as my Ukrainian. When he held Clara on his lap, she looked even tinier than she was—his large, red hands covered most of her body. I asked Karl once not to let him hold her and he got angry with me. ‘Don’t be so selfish. Clara calms him, helps him laugh,’ he said.
“‘But he makes her nervous. I can feel it.’
“‘He makes you nervous’ was Karl’s reply and he refused to say any more. Sometimes he and Karl would talk in low voices so I couldn’t hear them, but when I asked Karl what they talked about, he said, ‘About food and things like that.’
“‘What do you mean by things like that?’
“‘Insignificant things. He teaches me how to say chicken and cabbage and such things in Ukrainian and I teach him the same words in German, and then we talk a little bit about chicken and cabbage.’ Still, I always had the feeling there was more to it than that.”
“More between him and Karl?” Tommy asked.
“Not in that way, Tommy.”
“How do you know? Things between men can happen so easily.”
“He was crazy, psychotic. He was capable of doing terrible things.”
“I just have a feeling. I don’t mean to upset you, but I have that feeling, which is rarely wrong.”
“It doesn’t upset me, but
it would have been cruel of Karl to use him in that way. Karl wouldn’t do that.”
“Why do you call it using? Maybe that’s what he needed more than anything else. Human contact. He used Clara, didn’t he, used her to help the Ukrainian?”
“That was different.”
“Why? The Ukrainian must have gotten attached to her too. How did he feel when you left or when he left? He would have come to think of Clara as his daughter or perhaps his niece.”
“In the end, he was sent away. The devil kept coming back. Karl had to operate more and more often, making deeper and deeper incisions, but then the Ukrainian started believing that instead of extracting the devil, Karl was adding a new devil every time he operated. One day it would be the devil from India that spoke to him and the next it was the devil from China and then the devil from Russia and the devil from France. Every country had a devil and sometimes they would fight on top of his brain, and then he felt as if he were going to explode and he would hit himself on the head with a rock until he passed out. So they had to put him in an insane asylum in Regensburg.”
“You see. He was in love with Karl,” Tommy said.
“He was psychotic, Tommy. He was incapable of love.”
“How do you know such a thing?”
“You didn’t know him, didn’t see the way he sat in that chair with Clara on his lap smiling stupidly, no, not stupidly, but smiling without feeling. If you had seen him, you would agree.”
“Don’t feel bad about Karl, Mrs. Mondschein. He was trying to help. Even after all he had been through, he thought he could help. There are not many people like that in the world.”
“He just made things worse, Tommy.”
“Maybe not. Maybe while the Ukrainian was staring out of the window of the Regensburg insane asylum on a beautiful sunny day or on a dismal winter day, he would think of Karl and of Clara’s tiny hands and he would smile, and maybe it would be a real smile.”
“And what about the devil? Would the devil ever let him think such thoughts?”
“Even the devil rested for two hours every day.”
“Yes, but not after the other devils joined him.”
“Still, even with the devils, he could remember other things, better times in his life, like chicken and cabbage and Karl.”
“Do you really think . . .?”
“Yes.”
“But he was monstrous, Tommy. His hands were so big. They were the kind of hands that could snap your neck in two.”
“Men crave that kind of strength,” Tommy said.
“I see.”
“Maybe we should listen to the Brandenberg Concerti now,” Tommy said.
So I put on the CD and I could tell Tommy was trying very hard not to think of anything, trying to separate the notes and then string them back together again, but he couldn’t do it. He stared straight ahead, concentrating with all his might on not focusing, but I knew what he was seeing—Karl and his large Ukrainian. I knew that’s what he was seeing because that’s what I saw—his pink, flabby stomach pressing on Karl’s slight frame. Only I didn’t try not to see it. On the contrary, as the harpsichord plucked away its melody, crisp like a sunny October day, I watched Karl and the Ukrainian until they were both tired and the Ukrainian lay peacefully on Karl’s chest as Karl stroked his thinning hair. And then I saw him in the insane asylum in Regensburg, looking out the window with a vague memory of Karl buried deep in his brain as the devils from all around the world did battle in his head.
And Tommy slowly let himself be taken in by Karl and his Ukrainian. His expression was no longer vacant but was as if he himself were looking into the Ukrainian’s watery green eyes. What did he see there? How could he even bear to look?
“Tommy,” I said softly so as not to startle him.
He did not respond.
“Tommy,” I repeated more forcefully. Still no answer, so I sat very still, completely oblivious to the Brandenberg Concerti, focusing only on Tommy, waiting for him to return.
He didn’t return. His hand fumbled for his crotch and he pulled. Faster and faster, and I didn’t leave the room. When it was over, he slumped back on his pillows, wiped his sticky hand on the sheets, closed his eyes, and slept. Then I continued my story because I did not want to leave him and I had no book to read, no crossword puzzle to solve. Perhaps I should have waited, listened to some music, stretched out on the plastic couch in the waiting room, but I was compelled to go on and I believed that, if nothing else, the sound of my voice would soothe Tommy’s restless body that gasped for air and flailed and flinched until dawn.
The Dentist of 148th Street
The bus pulled into the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal and I had no idea what I should do. I thought of going to the Village, but it was getting late and I didn’t feel like being around a lot of people, so I sat in the plastic orange chairs at the terminal for a while, trying to decide where to go. A drunk sat down in the seat next to me and then asked me, “Do you mind if I sit down?”
“You’ve already sat down,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, but he didn’t make any move to get up. He just sat there staring straight ahead as if he were watching a ballgame. I decided, just as another not-so-steady character was heading towards me, that a walk would be good, so I headed downtown, passing the Museum of the American Indian on 157th Street where my grandparents used to take me when I stayed with them. We must have gone there at least thirty times, but I don’t remember much about the exhibits. There were lots of dimly lit dioramas with Indian families canoeing and grinding corn, that much I can picture, but I don’t remember the individual scenes the way I can picture whole rooms in the Met. We used to go to the Museum of the American Indian in the winter and it was always really hot inside and my grandparents made me carry my own coat, so sometimes I kept it on and I would get sweaty and tired. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember much about it. I remember trying to seem more interested than I was and feeling bad that I didn’t really like the place. And I was slightly embarrassed because my grandfather always carried my grandmother’s pocketbook. I feel stupid for feeling embarrassed about that. It’s actually touching that he never cared what other people would think. Maybe that’s one of the things that happens when you get old—you can carry your wife’s pocketbook. After the museum we usually picked up pastries and went back to their apartment to have coffee and dessert instead of dinner—napoleons, éclairs, cream puffs, marble cake, cheesecake. I’ve never been a really big fan of sweets, but there was something exciting about eating pastries for dinner. They told me not to tell my parents, which I never did.
Afterward my grandfather quizzed me on anatomy. He had three categories of questions—function, location, size and shape—and if I got all of them right, I got to have one more napoleon before I went to bed even though I was usually full, but I would eat it with relish anyway while he watched. When I was really little, I thought they ate dessert every night for dinner, that they survived on pastries, but later I realized it was their way of doing something special.
It was really hard to sleep at their apartment. In the summer, it was both muggy and noisy; my grandparents didn’t even have a fan. In the winter, the radiators hissed out way too much heat, and I would wake up in the middle of the night to banging pipes and a throat so dry I could hardly swallow.
Before sixth grade my grandparents used to come out to New Jersey every Sunday afternoon because Sunday was the only day they didn’t work. They worked more than full-time until I was in sixth grade, and then they had to retire because the building where my grandfather had his office burned down. I think towards the end of his career, he was as busy as ever because word got out that he only charged five dollars per visit or whatever you could afford, so he would have throngs of people lined up every day. The kitchen cabinets are still filled with b
ottles of liquor that their patients brought as payment. I don’t think my grandparents ever opened even one bottle. Over time they had lost most of the older patients they had started out with—Jewish people who had hung onto their apartments on the Grand Concourse. As the patients died or moved to nursing homes, my grandparents began treating the new inhabitants of the Grand Concourse—Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans, but mainly Puerto Ricans. My grandmother took Spanish classes at City College in order to be able to talk to their new clientele. Once when I was in fourth or fifth grade, they got held up at gunpoint and my parents tried to convince them to close up shop, retire, but they said you couldn’t judge a neighborhood based on two young hoodlums, so they kept on going, six days a week, and then on Sundays they came out to New Jersey. They came on the two o’clock bus and left on the five o’clock bus, and never stayed for dinner. Before sixth grade I used to spend the weekends there every few months or so when my parents were out of town, but after they had to retire, they stopped coming every Sunday and my parents only had me stay over there a couple times a year. We would all go there to dinner sometimes and my grandmother would make chicken soup with potatoes, carrots, and parsley, and cucumber salad, and they always had Wild’s black bread.
I guess they just got really slowed down after they had to close the practice. They stopped going to concerts and the theater, but they said they were working on rereading all their favorite books and didn’t have time to go out. From what I could tell, though, they spent most of their time listening to music, not reading. There were never really any books lying around that looked like they were being read. They listened to records on an old Panasonic record player and sometimes they took a trip downtown to buy CDs, which they played on a state-of-the-art CD player my parents bought for them. Then my grandfather had a heart attack in his sleep and died. Everyone said it was best that he died painlessly in his sleep, that he didn’t suffer, but I don’t want to die in my sleep. I want to know that my consciousness is about to be extinguished. I want to feel that fear because I know it is fear, not peace, that the dying experience. Unless they are robbed of it like my grandfather was. At the funeral the rabbi kept talking about how, after having come so close to dying a horrible death at a young age, my grandfather was blessed with a peaceful death at an old age, but rabbis just say things like that to make everyone feel better, only it makes it worse. I think maybe my mother is right after all—maybe that moment in the gas chamber when people realized they were being massacred was the most intense experience a human being can ever have.
