by Daniel Stern
The rain stopped entirely, and the sun glistened on the wet leaves of the birch trees.
At five minutes to eight Judah Kramer entered the S.S. orderly room. He checked several lists of supplies and a list of labor details, then filed them in the metal cabinets against the wall. A Blockführer walked past the desk, and he turned his head sideways and down so that all he saw was the polished leather of the German’s boots. After the man was gone from sight, Kramer’s lips formed the words, one, two, three, at rhythmic intervals. Then he raised his head. The man was gone. Two desks away Klempner, the round-faced Kapo, started to type something the Blockführer had given him. He typed slowly, his mouth chewing with intense concentration. A moment later he stopped in disgust and instructed Kramer to finish the job. He handed him a master list of prisoners by number, plus the daily list of those placed on shipment orders—a euphemism for extermination.
Before he began typing, Kramer scanned the list and recognized his own number at once. Almost immediately he recognized his mother’s number and that of his little sister, Sarah. For a time his eyes did not move from the page; his body remained absolutely still. Then his head turned in a tiny arc to the right and to the left. On his right, an S.S. sergeant was tipping back his wooden chair, smearing some lotion on his hands. He paused now and then to sniff at them with apparent pleasure. Behind him, the door to the Major’s office was open, and the indistinct sounds of music from a radio could be heard. To the left, Klempner was measuring half a dozen cigarette butts in the palm of one hand. No one was looking in Kramer’s direction.
Without hesitation he typed the list, removing the three Kramers and replacing them with the next three numbers in numerical order. When he had finished he put the lists on the Kapo’s desk. Everything in the office was the same. The S.S. sergeant was capping the bottle of lotion, Klempner was placing the cigarette butts in a small tin box, and from the open door of the Major’s office still came the sounds of blurred and distant music.
BOOK ONE
The horror, gentlemen,
is that there is no horror.
—KUPRIN
1
ONE MORNING, TWO WEEKS before his wife’s departure for California, Judah Kramer was awakened by his three-year-old daughter, Sarah. She peered at him solemnly through her eyeglasses and said: “A man called you, Da, on the telephone.”
“What man, darling?” Jud asked, sleepily turning toward her.
“I can’t say it. Mr. Talk-something.”
“Mr. Talk-something,” Jud murmured. “That’s not a name.” He reached out and put his arm around her tiny waist. Opening his eyes, he saw her large, blue eyes, distorted by the lenses of the glasses. She had a simple muscle weakness the doctor said would be corrected as she grew up, but still, the sight of her little oval face dominated by the glasses always troubled him.
“Where’s everybody?” he said, swinging his feet over the side of the big bed.
“Packing,” she said, and ran out of the bedroom.
“Be careful—” Jud began, and stopped because the little girl was gone. The cool breeze from the park across the street ruffled the long yellow curtains. He stood before the window for a moment, looking out over Fifth Avenue and across to the park. The apartment was on the fifteenth floor, and the view on clear mornings included a great stretch of trees, gravel paths, and an arc of lake. This was an open-skied day in early November, and the aerial view of the park was clear. It cleared the sleep from Jud’s eyes. He closed the window and went inside to take a bath.
Marianne Kramer was closing the big trunk when Jud entered the living room. She straightened up slowly and rubbed her back vigorously. It was only ten o’clock, but she had been packing clothes since eight-thirty. Marianne was an actress and used to sleeping late.
Jud put his arms around her, taking her by surprise.
“Oh, God!” she exclaimed.
“Be quiet,” he whispered, “and let me feel how much I’m going to miss you.”
“You scared me to death.”
“Not true. You’re breathing nicely.”
“No thanks to you.”
“Good. I haven’t scared you in years.”
She struggled free of him and tugged at her blouse. Marianne was a pale-skinned girl with an intense gaze. Her figure was small and neat but had its lyrical indentations; her hair and skin were light. She presented a face and figure wholly American, in sharp contrast to Jud.
Jud was a short man, with a chunky build. He had a dark skin, black hair, and unexpected blue eyes. He could, it was true, look “American” enough to have come from a dozen different strains. But the strongest pull was clearly from Eastern Europe, while behind Marianne’s gray-eyed gaze might be the shadows of seventeenth-century Frenchmen exploring rivers in the Northeast; of English settlers following Penn to freedom, but still trusting no one but themselves.
Whatever elements previous centuries had planted in her make-up, by some alchemy of time they had resulted in a quality of blonde repose; while Jud was charged with a dark, restless impetus, amiable enough to the first glance, but beyond that dynamic, driven.
“These days you don’t have to scare me,” Marianne said. “I’m scared enough. I’m even packing two weeks before I have to leave.”
“That’s not fear,” Jud said, smiling, “that’s ambition. This one is a good script and you want to be sure to get to the coast on time.”
“Don’t be cynical, Jud. I want to do the picture. But I wish you were coming with me.”
“I don’t,” Jud said. “I’m too glad to have a play to do that I care about. You were glad up till a few days ago.”
Marianne’s face took on a sullen look he knew well. Her eyes narrowed and her mouth tensed downward.
“All right,” she murmured. “I am scared of the play. Ever since you took it on everything’s been getting scary.”
“What do you mean ‘scary’?”
“I guess because of what it’s about—it seems to make everything point backwards.”
“Wait a minute. I haven’t had breakfast yet, so I’m not as sharp as I should be. Do you mean what happened last night?”
She nodded silently. Jud sighed, and taking her by the shoulders, he sat her down on the big couch that dominated the room in a green semicircle.
“I had a bad dream,” he said. “I’ve had a few before. So has everybody.”
“You haven’t had one like that for three years. I held you for a few minutes before you could realize you were awake—and you could remember you were here.” She shivered. “You were soaking with sweat.”
“Were you very frightened?”
“I guess when I’m woken up suddenly I can’t quite remember I’m me for a while, either.” She laughed her short, nervous little laugh, half throaty, half nasal. “So there I was, in the middle of the night, not knowing who I was and holding a strange man in my arms. Then all of a sudden we were us again, and you stopped making sounds and fell asleep.”
“And you?”
“I had some vague idea of lying awake to protect you or something, but it was just the way it was when I was a little girl. One minute I was making up my mind to keep watch and the next thing the sunshine was waking me up, it was so bright.”
“We’ve been over this so much, Marianne. I’m fine now.”
“What was in the dream, Jud?”
“You know …” He waved a hand in a vague gesture. It succeeded only in expressing a wish to change the subject.
“No, I don’t. I guess I’m not supposed to, ever.” She shook her head impatiently. “The silence curtain is still up.”
“That again?”
“It would seem so.”
“It’s only a dream, my God!”
“If you think all I care about is analyzing your dreams, then let’s forget about it.”
“Okay.”
“Since the new play, it’s been eating away at you. I’ll bet you don’t know how much worse it is. It just came to me
that you probably don’t know.”
“I do know,” he admitted finally. “But it’s not as bad as you think. And I can handle it.”
“Is it worth it, having to handle’ something like that?”
“I want to do this play.” He paused. “Don’t you want me to?”
“All right,” she said. “If you put it that way, of course I do.”
He reached over and touched her face, stroking the corners of her mouth. She unfolded and bent toward him, a few strands of yellow hair falling over her broad forehead.
“I should have made love to you last night,” he said, smiling. “Medicinally.”
“That wouldn’t have stopped the dream.”
“All right, sweet-face, how about a little humor? It’s only life or death.”
She delivered a prepared, nasal attempt at a laugh and said, “I can’t seem to control the tone of my laughter. And there are some important scenes in the picture where I need a good, husky laugh.”
“Don’t worry. It’s the movies. They can dub it.”
“Over my dead body.”
“In Hollywood anything can be arranged.”
“You mean my laughter or my dead body?”
“Either one.”
“All right,” Marianne said. “You’ve distracted me. I knew you were going to do the play. I just wanted to speak out. You know me.”
“I’m glad you did.” Anxious to change the subject, he said, “By the way, Sarah woke me up with something about a man calling. A Mr. Talk-something.”
Marianne laughed. “I got to the phone before he went out of his mind. Sarah is in love with the telephone this month. It was a man named Walkowitz.”
“What did he want?”
“He wouldn’t say. He said he knew you and you would want to see him.”
“Walkowitz,” Jud murmured, puzzled. “Who Walkowitz?”
“I don’t know. He’ll call later.”
Jud shrugged. “The first press release on the play went out the other day,” he said. “Suddenly I’ll have a new batch of old friends again.” He put his arms around Marianne’s waist and hugged her to him, then moved his hands to her backside.
“I started to say, let me feel how much I’m going to miss you.”
That’s not what you’re feeling,” she whispered.
After breakfast, Jud entered the study and went immediately to the large, round table in the center of the room. It was a battered maple piece he’d bought for five dollars when he’d first arrived in New York. On it, now, stood a cardboard replica of the set of At the Gates, the new play: a combined indoor and outdoor rendering of a stockade yard and barracks building. It was bleak and cold looking, even in the preliminary sketch version, and was dominated by a large gate on which were printed three German words.
Jud studied the model with dissatisfaction. It was too poetic looking, even in its coldness. The poetry would have to come out. He sat down in the brown leather chair near the desk and lit a cigarette. This was the important room. Along the walls were the books he had gathered from his first American schooling in the Los Angeles public schools to the present. Photographs of plays he had directed were scattered around the room—summer stock, off-Broadway, the first successful play on Broadway. Piles of scripts sat on the edges of chairs, some teetering precariously like the nervous authors who had sent them. And on the wall was a large photograph of Marianne in her first starring film role (a year and a half ago), as a Spanish peasant girl, dark and artificially sullen.
The stage director … It had been a goal, a destination, for so long; it seemed that the intensity and duration of a desire decreased its sense of reality once it was achieved. What would it be like, Jud wondered, in a world where you wished and—presto—it was true? Perhaps expectations and fantasies distorted dreams.
When he actually worked was it real; then it was not a role, it was characters, colors, a plastic stage on which to build. It didn’t matter then that it was so different from what a thin, sandy-haired boy of nine in a little Hungarian town had imagined it to be, jealously watching his sister playing Queen Esther in the Purim plays, year after year, dreaming of escape to the bright Molnar stages of Budapest.
The father of Sarah … How could this be so? Did one midnight spasm, plus a growing protective love, entitle him to be called “father”? His father, Max Kramer, had been a man who called forth that name: a massive frame and great tender hands; a small, reddish, well-trimmed beard, over which incongruously delicate lips smiled; and blue eyes, eyes of a determined expression.
The husband of Marianne … This role became more real every day. He had always thought of marriage as a sort of concrete, three-dimensional object. Marriage, like a table or a jug reflecting the light in a painting by Vermeer. But it was not so at all. It was more like one of those Chirico paintings he and Marianne used to gaze at on weekday afternoons at the Modern Museum—those long mysterious streets down which a child rolled a hoop, and which had no beginning, middle or end, only a sense of duration and change.
Jud stood up, clearing his mind for work. He picked up the notes he had made the day before and began to study the details of the model set. Then, suddenly, he experienced a flash of memory, the dream of the night before. It trailed in its wake terrible, half-lit images; an awful moment.
It was a recurrent dream, but had not appeared for a long while. This time it had taken a slightly different turn. It was always an arrival scene, not at any specific camp, rather a composite. The Auschwitz gates were grafted onto the countryside at the train station outside of Treblinka, and the guard who greeted him with a sly grin was the Blockführer, Stauffel. It was always the same. Stauffel would say, “Well, so we’ve got you back now …” And with that marvelous lucidity that is sometimes granted to dreamers, Jud would answer, “No, it’s only a dream …” That was how it went each time. But last night had been different. When he had said to the grinning Blockführer, “It’s only a dream,” Stauffel replied, “Not so, Kramer. The other times it was a dream. This time it’s real.” Then he had awakened, sweaty and unable for a moment to recognize Marianne, who had her arms around him.
The remembrance was over quickly, but it left Jud with an unfocused anger. Furiously, he struck out at the model of the stage set. It fell to the floor. He knelt swiftly and picked it up, feeling ashamed and foolish.
Luckily there was no damage done. Jud was still crouching on the floor by the desk when the phone rang. He stood up, set the piece of colored cardboard back on the table carefully, and picked up the phone. He heard Sarah’s voice piping something unintelligible over the extension.
“Hang up, darling,” he said. When the click came, Jud said, “Hello, I’m sorry. Who is it?”
A low and resonant voice with a European accent said: “Mr. Kramer, if you please.”
“Speaking.”
There was a pause on the other end as if the man were taking a deep breath, or gathering his strength. Then the voice said: “Judah Kramer? I believe we have known each other. My name is Carl Walkowitz.”
2
PAUL ROVIC MOVED LIKE a heavy cat from the kitchen, down the long foyer, to the living room. He carefully balanced his cup of coffee on its saucer as he walked. Sitting on the couch in a pool of sunlight, he sipped the unsweetened black coffee and set the cup down on the low table in front of him. Then he leaned back, resting his head on the nubby green material of the couch—a man gathering his loose and vagrant energies.
Rovic was fifty years old (and fond of joking, “Half of my life is over”). Thinning gray hair, a pale complexion, and the black-rimmed glasses he wore combined to give him a general appearance of sallow studiousness. This, together with a slow-burning passion about the arts of the theater, suggested to many people a kind of secular rabbinical style. Students at the Theater Workshop sometimes called him “The Rabbi,” but with an undertone of respect.
He yawned and closed his eyes for a moment. There was a flow of air from the half-opened windo
w that fronted on the gray ribbon of the East River. The air was warmer than it had been all month; it carried a memory of spring. Last spring he had been taken ill. A “mild coronary,” the heart specialist had called it, causing a macabre burst of laughter from Rovic’s own physician.
“I love that specialist’s jargon. You’ve had what they call a heart attack. You’re not an invalid, but—less work, some sedation, some anticoagulants, no stairs, and no cigarettes.”
A sadness gripped him. For some time now the sensation of being on the outside had troubled him. It had started after he’d left the sickbed. A thickness of wintry glass seemed to separate him from the emotions of other people. He saw their drive, their intensity, but some crucial tone was missing. He could listen to his daughter Janet plead with him, or with Louise, about a part for which she cared so much, and would have no reaction other than a mildly curious interest.
Everything—his daughter’s growing pains, money discussions, the now infrequent times of making love to Louise—all were formal gestures; he wondered if all this was connected in some way with his illness.
“‘And death,’” he quoted in a shame-faced murmur, “‘had touched him with a silver wing—upon his silver heart …’” The wave of self-pity receded, leaving him only with a yen for a cigarette. He inhaled deeply of the morning air and found it lightly perfumed with lilac. Opening his eyes, he saw his daughter Janet standing in front of him. “Are you wearing a lilac-type perfume, by any chance?”
“Toilet water.” She held a thin wrist, laced with visible veins, to his nose, and he sniffed the false spring.
“I’m disappointed. I thought it was coming from outside.”
“Winter’s hardly started,” Janet said, straightening her yellow wool dress with a matter-of-fact tug. She was a small, trim girl of nineteen destined, like most small people, always to look several years younger than she was. A childlike demureness was the enemy that pursued her. She fought it with weapons like low-cut dresses and heavy doses of toilet water (musky perfumes in the evening).
