Raymond thought a moment, shrugged. “Guess someone needs to be keeping an eye on the place seeing how Mr. Jesler’s mind’s been elsewhere. Make sure everything’s okay. No trouble, really. Maybe I just like the quiet, too.”
The sound of a car passing in the alley broke through and Goldah said, “Abe didn’t send you, then … to check up on me?”
Raymond’s confusion lasted only a few seconds. “Mr. Abe knows you down here?”
“I don’t think so — no.”
“Well then he don’t, ’cause I come down on my own.”
Goldah nodded. Best to let it go.
“You okay, Mr. Ike?”
Goldah set his glass on the floor. “You’re a good man, Raymond. I’m glad Abe realizes what he has with you.”
Raymond’s concern became something more pointed. “Mr. Abe say something to you?”
“To me? About what?”
“About me and my place here?”
Goldah heard the change in tone. It seemed a strange question. “He appreciates you very much, if that’s what you mean.”
“He told you that?”
“He did, yes.”
“ ’Cause he said we wasn’t going to be talking to no one about my percent.”
Goldah realized he had overstepped. He had no idea what Raymond was talking about. Hirsch and Cohan flooded back and Goldah nodded and said, “I imagine he did,” hoping it would be enough.
Raymond took another moment before saying, “Makes sense, I guess, you being family and such. You got a stake in the business, too.” He nodded in a way that seemed more to convince himself than Goldah. “You best get back to your boxes. I got to get myself over to Mary’s. You have a good night, Mr. Ike.”
Goldah listened for the door, then hoisted himself back up onto the ladder with a new set of boxes in tow, all the while unaware that Jacob, tonight quiet on his cot, lay staring coldly into the darkness.
15
IT WAS ANOTHER DAY before Goldah was summoned. He rang twice, then knocked before Jesler came to the door. At first Abe looked puzzled — distracted by something, a cold sheen across his brow and cheeks — until, with a sudden recollection, he snapped himself into focus.
“Oh … sure. Here you are.”
Jesler had telephoned this morning, but it was Malke who was calling out to him.
Jesler ran a hand across his slick forehead and ushered Goldah in. Halfway down the hallway, he took hold of Goldah’s arm and stopped him. The look in his eyes was equally jarring. Jesler said, “I know you’re here to see her … I don’t want to get in the way of anything and I suppose this might sound a little crazy, but you haven’t mentioned Hirsch to anyone, have you? I mean … I can’t see how you would have, but just in case I wanted to ask. If you had … in passing or something?”
Goldah kept his gaze level, careful not to show even a hint of recognition. He owed Jesler that much. “No, Abe, I don’t recognize the name. You’ve never mentioned a Hirsch to me. Is everything all right?”
Goldah watched as the eyes ticked through some unseen list before the head gave way to a reassuring nod. “No — sure. That’s right. You don’t know him. How could you?” Jesler let go of Goldah’s arm. “That’s all right. Okay. You go on up. She’s in her bedroom.”
“Is everything all right?”
The moisture on Jesler’s face seemed to gather in his eyes — the expression confused, lost, then broken. Ever so slightly Jesler shook his head and a faint shade of life returned. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.
“It’s okay, Abe. Everything will be okay.”
An unnerving calm swept over Jesler. He tried a smile and patted a hand on Goldah’s shoulder. “You go on up. She’s waiting. Hard to say what for but … Take care of yourself, Ike. That’s the most important thing.” For some reason Jesler nodded again before moving off. Goldah had no choice but to head for the steps.
Upstairs, her voice was faint through the door, stronger with a second stab at it.
“Come in.”
Goldah pushed through. The room was dark. “I’m here, by the desk,” she said, though Goldah struggled to find her. “I prefer it without the lamp. You can sit on the bed.”
He waited for her outline to grow clearer. A few shards of sunlight broke through the drapes and he sat.
“You see,” she said. “Isn’t this more pleasant?”
Goldah felt as if he had lived through this summoning before, not with Malke but with his father: childhood essays submitted for approval, hours waiting outside a door in anticipation of the verdict — final and absolute. Goldah could recall nothing of kindness from those sessions by the desk, no indication of pride or love, only a search for the truth, the frustration and the humiliation scrawled across each line in his father’s pen, and shredding what little of himself he had put on the page. Goldah had always received top marks for his writing, but he had never once considered the work his own. To still live with that sense of deceit …
“Much more pleasant,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
“They’ve let me sleep a good deal. The medicine has been good for that. A bit woozy.” He thought she might be drinking something at the desk but he couldn’t be certain. She said, “I can’t stay here anymore, Yitzi.”
“No, of course not.” He had been anticipating this. “We’ll find you some rooms.”
“No. I can’t stay here … in this place … with these people. Any of these people. I feel the shame too much.”
“I know,” he said. “It will pass. No one sees what happened on the beach as anything other than what it was. You had a reaction. How couldn’t you?”
“What are you talking about?” Her tone was suddenly more strident. “I don’t care what these people think.”
Goldah tried to gauge her expression but the shadows were falling across her face. He said, “I don’t understand.”
“Yes you do. Of course you do. You know exactly what I mean. The shame. For being here. For being here at all. They can’t understand that. They never will.”
She was taking them back to the camp, but he knew full well it was Eva who was causing her shame.
She said, “Don’t tell me it isn’t there with you every moment. The things we did … the things no one should know you’re capable of doing … and yet here we are, and you think a bit of shouting at the water has anything to do with that? Don’t sit there so quietly and think I don’t know.”
“And what is it you think you know?”
“Plenty, Yitzi, I know plenty. Trust me.” She leaned forward and her eyes caught the light; he saw how empty and unwavering they had become.
He said, “Why don’t we talk about finding you some rooms of your own?”
“Would that be easier for you? Would that make this place real, have them all thinking you’re just as real? But of course you’re not, and I’m the only one who knows it.”
She had always taken aim at him with a willingness to wound, but this … he could feel the depth of her hatred.
He said, “You’re upset. I’ve put you … us … in a difficult position. I’m sorry for that.”
“I’m not upset, Yitzi. I simply know what we both live with.”
“And if I see it differently?”
“Because of this woman? You think because of her?”
“Why not?”
“ ‘Why not?’ ” He heard the disdain in her voice. “Should I laugh? Where was this man before the war … before the Lager? Does he exist even now? When the guards came, when they moved through the bunks one by one, girls screaming until they had given everything of themselves, even as the guards would beat them to death afterward. The guards couldn’t let anyone know how they had defiled themselves with a little Jewess … the shame of it. But I never screamed. Not once. I chose not to and my beatings were easier. And when they made me pregnant, I found someone to kill the baby inside me because you couldn’t have the guards finding that. There was always someone to kill a baby in t
he blockhouse … always someone who knew. The women laid me on the ground and held me down and covered my mouth so I wouldn’t give myself away with my own screams. And when they were done, this face … it was a blessing because the guards saw what I had become and they no longer wanted me. Then they beat me … my cheek, my nose … shattered them because they had so liked my face before and now it was gone. And if ever I said anything … A blessing, the palsy. We all had such blessings, didn’t we? And now you have this woman.”
She spoke without life, the words cold, and only then did Goldah see the wet creases along her cheeks.
He said, “You want me to say I regret living through it? I won’t.”
“Good — why should I want that? I don’t. It’s only the moments when I chose to survive — the hundreds and hundreds of them when I couldn’t let myself die — that I regret, not the surviving. The instinct to live … It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it, unless you give in to it among those who understand how truly terrible it is. In there, in the Lager … no one cared to be forgiven for living. No one saw it as life. But here … It’s not their pity I can’t stand, Yitzi. It’s their innocence. These are the ones who would have screamed and died and been freed from it all. They can’t know the shame and it’s too much for me to see them every day.”
Goldah felt nothing at hearing her story. This was his lingering horror. To feel nothing for such things. And if this atrocity could stir nothing in him … was all feeling just a shadow?
“No,” he said aloud, hardly aware that he had spoken.
“So you do see?”
He had lost himself in the shifting light on the floor, a scattering of narrow spikes, each one tapering to the darkness by the door. Even they, it seemed, could find no escape.
“What?” he said.
“I can’t stay here.”
“I know. And where will you go?”
“You?” For the first time she spoke with surprise. “Is that what you think? No, Yitzi — it’s where will we go.” Her face came full from the shadows. “Even if you love this woman, it won’t change a thing. You’d see your shame in her every day. Can you imagine that, the loneliness of it? I’m saving you from that by taking you away.”
“You think Palestine will be any different?”
“No one there will see us this way. No one will have lived this easy life of a Jew. We won’t see ourselves this way and we’ll live again. Here … here we have no chance at life, not the way we knew it. Is your love worth so much more to you than that?”
Jesler had been through the desk drawers, the filing cabinets, even the safe by the back wall. Nothing in any of them mentioned Hirsch by name, save for a page here and there that made vague reference to an import/export company out of Baltimore called Hoover and Son. It was Hirsch’s coy nod to the storefront operation in Atlanta. Hirsch had been very clear on its necessity: “If someone should ask, and God forbid, Abe, I’m not saying anyone would, but if someone should — someone with a badge or a cheap suit or smelling of Pinaud and Barbicide, you know the type — you need something … something official-looking to wave in a face. Baltimore? Please. Who’s schlepping all the way up to Baltimore? They look, you’re fine, end of story.” The pages were untouched; nothing had gone missing.
How, then, had Thomas mentioned Hirsch by name over the phone?
He moved back to the drawers — along with his third glass of whiskey — and anxiously started sifting through a stack of receipts when he saw Jacob standing the other side of the desk. Jesler didn’t know how long the boy had been there or what he might have overheard — Jesler had been mumbling to himself — but Jacob continued to stand there.
“Hey,” Jesler said, trying to sound offhand. “I’m in the middle of something here. You can see that, can’t you?” He moved down to the second drawer. “I told you yesterday, we’ll get to whatever it is once I sort this through. Okay? If it’s about the pay” — Jesler began to flip through the pages of last week’s Jacksonville run — “I said I can do a nickel, maybe a dime more an hour … we can talk about it, but right now … why don’t you go and grab yourself a Coke and I’ll see you later.” Jesler set the stack haphazardly on the desk. He started in on the central drawer and noticed the state the boy was in: hair mussed, T-shirt stained and dingy. Jesler said, “You get yourself in a fight or something?”
Jacob arched his slim shoulders. He meant to show defiance but the awkwardness of the gesture came across as the too-eager pose of a raw recruit awaiting orders. He said coldly, “When’d you start giving Raymond a percent?”
Venom, in the voice of one so young, carries less menace than histrionics. Had Jesler been a little more clearheaded he might have recalled the way genuine hatred manifests itself in a deeper, more resonant timbre. Instead, all he felt was his own frenzy melting away in the face of it. He said, “What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. Raymond’s in on some deal and I ain’t a part of it.”
Jesler stared across at the boy — at the pale skin and the probing eyes — and saw the pieces slowly fall into place: How they lined up was of no consequence; he knew Raymond would never have said anything. Neither would Ike. Who else could it be? Jesler thought: The boy — it’s been the boy all along who’s brought me to this. He expected his own voice to erupt in anger but his words came calmly when he spoke: “It’s not ‘ain’t,’ son. It’s ‘I’m not a part of it.’ We’ve got to get that right. You need to keep working on it.”
“I said I know Raymond’s getting a percent. I said I know that.”
“Yes, I heard you. We still need to work on the language. Who’d you tell, son?”
Jacob refused to buckle. “Tell about what?”
“Let’s not play it that way, okay? No reason to waste either of our time. About whatever it is you think you know … Raymond, the docks, Atlanta.” Jesler saw the shoulders inch ever so slightly downward; he knew this was well beyond the boy’s grasp. “You make a choice like that you’ve got to live with what comes from it. You talked to the newspaperman, didn’t you? You told him things you thought you knew. It’s all right. I just need to know what you said. You want a glass of water? You need to sit down?” The boy was angling his shoulders back but his chest had begun to shake. “When did you talk to him, son?”
Jacob stared straight ahead.
Jesler said, “That newspaperman’s got ideas of what’s going on here and he needs someone to tell him he’s got it right, even if that someone doesn’t know all of it. Which you don’t. But that was to protect you. It’s always been to protect you.”
Jacob had never looked quite so young as he did now. Whatever hardness he had crafted from a man’s expression faded into the gentle features of a boy — the eyebrows too delicate to sustain a glare, the jaw too smooth to express contempt.
Jesler said, “Your percent, son … that comes when you’re sixteen. It’s how I set it up last year when I worked it through with the lawyer, but that’s not something you needed to know about.” He saw the instant of shock and remorse register in the boy’s face, the tears beginning to form; to his credit, Jacob refused to break down. “I don’t have a son of my own and … well … I’m not likely to have one unless Mrs. Jesler knows something I don’t. You see what I’m saying? As for Raymond, he’s a grown man and maybe I wasn’t always thinking about him and his future, but that’s not a concern of yours. It’s all right, son. My mind’s been elsewhere so I guess I didn’t see it. And maybe I’m a little relieved to find it’s been you.”
Jesler stood and moved around the desk. Jacob was trying so hard to keep himself upright. Maybe it would have been better, thought Jesler, to have railed away at him, raised a hand. Anger has a way of keeping up defenses, but comfort …
“I know what you know,” said Jesler, “and I know what you think you know, and there’s a difference. But son …” He let the boy lean into his chest. He held him there and let him weep. “You’re going to need to tell me what
you told him.”
Eva ducked into Pinkussohn’s pharmacy to pick up a prescription for her mother. She had given herself an endless list of these little tasks, anything to keep her mind from ticking through the permutations that seemed always to leave her drifting and alone. Not alone, of course — she would always have Jules — but the waiting for her husband, Charles, had carried something noble with it, an idea of sacrifice or the will of God or whatever other comforts people had thrown her way. But here … this was simply a slow grinding down of hope until, with a little sputter, she knew Ike would come to her and say how sorry he was, but …
Eva was so focused on not running into anyone she might know that she nearly missed Mrs. Jesler and the Posner woman sitting at a table by the window. They were having coffee, and a few cookies were on a plate between them. They looked happy. Eva knew she could slip by unnoticed, but she thought: Why not put an end to it now, save herself that miserable goodbye from Ike? How much easier on everyone.
She stepped over and said, “Hello there, Mrs. Jesler. Miss Posner. Do you mind if I sit for a few moments?”
Pearl had no choice but to be gracious. Malke’s face made it more difficult to gauge her expression.
Eva said in German, “I’m so sorry we haven’t had a chance to meet before this, Miss Posner.” She turned to Pearl. “Is it all right if I speak to Miss Posner in her native tongue? I don’t mean to be rude.”
Pearl was only too glad to be kept at a distance. “Of course … I didn’t know you spoke … yes of course. I’ll order us some more coffees.” Pearl called over the waitress and Eva said to Malke, “I see you’re feeling much better. That’s good.”
“You speak German,” Malke said without a hint of appreciation.
“I studied it at college. I wanted to help with the war effort if I could.”
“How very ambitious of you. Do you speak German with Yitzi, then … with Ike?”
“No. We haven’t done that. I think he enjoys working on his English.”
Among the Living Page 23
