by Hilary Zaid
“I have been so unlucky,” Mrs. Weiner murmured. “To lose them all—my father, my brothers, my sisters. All except for me.”
Mrs. Weiner had begun her story, like many, at the end.
I hefted the camera to my tripod. “Mrs. Weiner, could you tell me your maiden name?”
“My name? Was Hannah Schwarz. I came from Lvov, Poland.” Mrs. Weiner came around the corner of the kitchenette, forgetting the tea kettle and the tea. She picked up a paper napkin, which she folded, unfolded, then refolded into a perfect square. “Very big city, there. Factories. Both of my parents worked during the day. We were not having much money, you see. I stay home to take care of my sisters and brothers. My parents, they can’t afford a person to care for the little ones so we older children could go to school. We all learn together at home, in the evenings, until I get my first job.”
“What was that?”
“What?”
“What was your first job?”
“Cleaning. I clean houses for other people. Other people’s houses.” Mrs. Weiner pressed her lips firmly together. Crowds of wrinkles huddled around her mouth, drawing it down. She had survived. But she looked beaten. Cancer, I reminded myself.
“Even after I’m married, I stay with my parents and my sisters and brothers at home.”
“When did you get married?” I set the camera in the tripod, grateful that Mrs. Weiner had sat down facing the full light of the window. Her features were sallow and drawn. I’ve been so unlucky. (“We like our survivors cheerful,” Wendy had observed, smiling wryly, after an especially depressing speakers’ bureau event at a large public high school. The principal, a stocky man with a silver whistle around his neck, had pulled her aside afterward and said, “We were hoping for something more . . . inspirational.”)
I took a breath.
“I’m one of the last—one of the oldest and the last. But, you know, we can’t afford to all get married and have children so young.”
The white walls of the apartment filled with silence. Mrs. Weiner stared straight into the camera. She cocked her head, waiting.
“What was your husband’s name?”
“Aaron?” It came out as a question.
“Aaron?” I prompted her. “Do you remember Aaron’s last name?”
Mrs. Weiner smiled nervously, pulling her hair back off her forehead. She looked down, away from the camera. Presumably, Aaron’s last name had become her own.
“Do you remember,” I asked more gently, “what Aaron did? For a living?”
Mrs. Weiner stared at the camera, spittle gathering at the corners of her lips. She seemed mesmerized by the cool, dark witness of the lens. She shook her head minutely.
I nodded. Mrs. Weiner and I sat, again, in silence. I felt my initial irritation at her tone of complaint slipping away, dissolving to nothingness. Next door, through the walls, a telephone rang. “We all work. My parents, they worked at the factory for nothing. And so many Jews coming in. Even after we were married, we waited to have children so that I can work.”
“You had children?” I asked, my tone solicitous, detached. I considered the daughter who called to arrange her interview; I hadn’t realized she was born during the War. I wondered how it could be that not only Mrs. Weiner, but a small child had survived both the Lvov ghetto and Janowska. Miracles, I reminded myself, were possible.
“A beautiful daughter,” Mrs. Weiner said. She smiled. Her eyes filled. “A perfect girl, so beautiful. 1939.” Mrs. Weiner looked at me, for the first time, gravely. “And then,” her voice grew thick, “they came. Oooh,” she shook her head, “then they came.” I made sure that I looked at her without flinching, through the violence she described as relentless and inexorable as waves: Soviets. Nazis. Pogroms. Beatings. Murders. “My father they march with the old, the sick,” she said, “over the Peltewna bridge, to the ghetto. That’s where they shoot them all, on the bridge to the ghetto.”
We pass by the corpse of her father. She has not mentioned Aaron. By the time she reaches the ghetto, she and her daughter are alone. “It is good to have each other. To look out for each other. It is essential.” I nodded. Mrs. Weiner nodded, smiling bitterly. “Filthy, cold, no food. But. We get by.
“So, you know. They stop us in the street there. Soldiers. Nazi police. He orders her: Come! My daughter. So young. And small. She was frightened. She hung on me. ‘Please,’ I tell her. ‘Go to the man. Go.’ Because if she did not—
“She would not go. My daughter. She cry so hard. The soldier take her from me. And then—”
Mrs. Weiner looked up, past the camera, past my face, out the glass sliders, past the low porch wall into the pale blue of the fading sky. “They shoot her.”
Mrs. Weiner’s face closed in concentration, the way the aperture of a camera closes, from the edges to the center. “‘We should shoot you, too,’ he says to me. ‘For raise your child so badly.’”
She stood abruptly, and turned to the kitchen, the linoleum counter lined with old, matched tins labeled “Coffee,” “Flour,” “Bread.” Unlatching the largest of these, Mrs. Weiner extracted a bag of cookies, its top wrinkled soft from folding and unfolding, pinched shut with a wooden clothespin. Her worn fingers pressed, clothespin-like, against it. She shook out six butter cookies, one by one, onto a small blue plate.
“Her name?” I asked, as gently as I could. My voice, like the afternoon light, had grown soft. “What was your daughter’s name?”
The tea kettle shrieked. Mrs. Weiner shook her head. Then she carefully refolded and clipped the bag.
When at last I walked out of the apartment and shut the door, the camcorder packed back in its padded bag, the mugs from tea rinsed by the sink, the thing that felt surreal was the sound of voices in the hall, the little ding of the elevator arriving, the BART ticket still tucked, perfectly straight, in my jacket pocket: the evidence of the world, still going on everywhere around me. So it was unsurprising, in a way, when the elevator opened on the downstairs lobby and there, among a group of women waiting at the door of the big, mauve dining room, stood Anya Kamenets, laughing. “Ellen!” she greeted me like an overdue guest. She acted like she already knew me. She seemed so glad to see me. “So!” She reached for my hand and gripped it, hard, in hers. “I was waiting,” she murmured, mysterious as a fortune-teller, “for you to come.”
Even her elusiveness felt very familiar. At that moment, I was tired, wiped out after Mrs. Weiner’s testimony, by the idea of a world evil enough to make a mother forget her daughter’s name. I was glad, at that moment, to be with someone who recognized me, someone who wanted me to be there. I didn’t pull away.
Anya introduced me to the women standing with her: Mrs. Shaeffer, who nodded politely, glancing through the double doors of the dining room, where old people, mostly women, sat murmuring and adjusting silverware, waiting for baskets of rolls. She introduced me to Mrs. Gilbert, who appraised me frankly, from the pleated black pants Sam used to call my lesbian uniform to the tips of my frizzy curls. “Ellen what?” Mrs. Gilbert wanted to know, looking from me to Anya Kamenets, her blond hair held back today with a fabric band above the forehead. Anya regarded me with suppressed amusement, her mouth a frowning smile, revealing nothing. “Margolis,” I answered. And then, even though I guessed from her avoidance of the Foundation that Anya probably hadn’t wanted me to, I added, “I’m from the Foundation for the Preservation of Memory.” When Mrs. Gilbert looked at me as if I had uttered a phrase in Mandarin, I translated, “Holocaust testimonies.”
The hand Mrs. Gilbert had put out toward my cheek dropped to her side. “I was just telling these ladies,” Mrs. Gilbert began, “about my grandson Liam.” Anya’s eyebrows, her parentheses, lifted almost imperceptibly. I told you so, they seemed to say. Mrs. Gilbert resumed what I could only guess had already been a long monologue, whose particulars blurred away into the perfectly familiar buzz of something normal. I listened without hearing the words, and noticed as the colors returned to what I saw: Mrs. Shaef
fer’s dusty, rouged cheeks, Anya’s blond hair. “Well,” Mrs. Gilbert’s carefully set head bobbed indulgently, “boys will be boys.” A male nursing aide, sleek in his blue uniform and clogs, his brown hair pulled back in a smooth, shining ponytail, pushed a bent woman in a wheelchair noiselessly through the dining-room doors. Mrs. Gilbert raised her chin as they passed. “Except when they’re girls,” she murmured; the corner of her lips curled down.
Mrs. Gilbert, Mrs. Shaeffer and Anya Kamenets all gazed after the wake of the Puerto Rican nurse as if to pick up the trace of his gender-defiant scent; Mrs. Sheaffer’s chuckle sounded like a cough you try to hold in.
Here we were again.
My last semester of college, I’d come home for spring break, a ghost in the house. Gramma Sophie sat out on the patio in her robe, the crossword in her lap, her eyes closed behind her glasses, her round knees flashing white under the hot pink hem of her short cotton robe, the tips of her toes a familiar collection of corns and bunions, just touching the pink velour slippers she’d let drop onto the bricks beneath her chair. “Mechiadich,” she murmured. Delightful. Her hand fell on my thigh, squeezed it. “What’s that?” Gramma Sophie jabbed a painted fingernail into the leg of my pants. I was wearing a pair of Levi’s on which Sam had ballpointed a triangle tattooed, “Gay ’90s.”
“Nothing.” I shifted in my chair, twisting slightly away. Gramma Sophie wore thick glasses. She always held the TV Guide close to her face. And yet she saw this, blue-on-blue at twenty paces: “Gay.”
“It’s just an expression,” I fudged, my face warming. “For the ’90s.”
“What kind of expression is that?”
Mrs. Shaeffer looked after the nurse. “If that one helped me, I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”
What was I doing here, talking to Anya? What had I expected? “It’s nice to meet you,” I told the ladies gathered around her. I had always been drawn to the elderly, but I would never fit in with them. Except as a child. Except as a sexless child. I told Anya Kamenets I was sorry; I needed to go. I stepped away from Anya Kamenets and her friends. But Anya took hold of my arm. “We need to talk. More,” she encouraged me, as if she were spooning me porridge. More? Was she admitting she was the one who had called me at home?
I looked toward the dining room, which smelled of white rolls and disinfectant.
Anya wrinkled her nose. “The food,” she whispered, “is terrible. Come.” She tugged at my sleeve. “I have food in my room.” I glanced at Anya’s purse. The idea of the food Anya Kamanets might have squirreled away in her room horrified me, the thought of going up in those elevators, into another one of those apartments and listening, once again, to one of those godforsaken testimonies . . .
But Anya wouldn’t let me see her as one of the others. “Come up,” she urged me. “Now, you are here,” she reminded me that she’d been waiting for me to come to her, that, to her, I wasn’t just a recording device. She couldn’t know how enticing she was. Taking me by the sleeve of my shirt, she turned back toward the elevators and, while the rest of the Rose of Sharon Towers descended, buzzing innumerably behind the white double doors, clawing at the hems of white-clothed tables, reaching for the soft, white-floured puffs of packaged dinner rolls, I followed her up to her room.
Anya’s apartment on the eleventh floor was the mirror-image twin of Mrs. Weiner’s and, remarkably, not a thing like it. Opening to the right, instead of the left, the apartment gave way to the same kitchenette, the same sitting room and veranda, the same glass sliding doors. But Anya’s porch framed a different sky, a big, flat Hockney sky, a wide, rising Georgia O’Keeffe sky. A sky without history, but without possibility, either. Just openness, emptiness, endless.
Anya had decorated the apartment as if to frame the sky. The furniture she’d assembled—a marble-edged glass table, pale, veined; leather couch, polished, sober, circumspect—didn’t look like the accumulation of a life, nor like the stripping away of it, either (Mrs. Weiner’s pieces still smelled of the parlor), but like the stylish installation of the new Museum of Modern Art, as if, like the museum, she’d started again, right at this moment. Stepping into her apartment, I realized that Anya Kamanets was the first person I’d met for whom moving into the high towers of a senior independent living facility was not an act of culmination, or resignation, but simply another iteration of self.
I stood in front of the sofa and gazed, marveling, at the sky.
“Sit.”
Why not? I reminded myself that I hadn’t sought her out, that I was only here at the Rose of Sharon Towers because of my job. But I didn’t take out my camera. Anya set two pieces of cake on the glass tabletop, slices pink and precise as a Thiebaud. We were sitting down together over food. Between the sweet, moist layers of sponge and buttercream, sharp red fruit burst with startling tartness, both disconcerting and joyful. We didn’t speak until we had scraped the last smears of buttercream up with the sides of our forks. Then, as if setting a record needle down on a familiar groove, Anya began to tell her story, the same one she had recorded with Wendy, the one I had watched five or six times. These were the words she knew how to share.
It was like listening, once again, to a long and complicated composition, like Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. At first, all of it had sounded to me like breaking glass. Then, gradually, I had learned to hear the patterns. Obbligato: dark, rhythmic movements, intercut with the frantic complaint of strings, the staccato of machine-gun rounds. Kovno. Sloboka. The words made a brutal poetry. I liked the sound of her voice; her consonants were as rich as cake. It was the oddest of seductions—this old woman, the sweetness of dessert, the softness of her voice. There was the story of the War. And underneath it, around it, between it, there was the quiet minuet of our glances, of our hands moving across the same tabletop, of our being here together. The Ninth Fort, the Seventh Fort, the Fourth Fort. Ghettoize. Deport. Exterminate. Two thousand, three thousand. Hunt, burn, gas, shoot. In the close, clean space between us, her voice, and not her words, drew us together.
Anya’s lullaby led me down into the forest, with the partisans. Damp peat. The crackle of pine boughs mingling with the crackle of machine-gun fire. The sounds of death spattering the dripping green sounds of the primeval, concealing forest. Anya had been blond and young. There were ways, if you were lucky enough, and clever enough, to pass. “We’d come back with food.” Who did she come back for? Anya didn’t say. She had made compromises she didn’t wish to describe. Anya was twenty-two years old when the war ended. “I was lucky,” she said.
Lucky.
Because it was early in the summer, the high, framed sky stayed light a bit longer. Still, the color washed out of our faces. Anya’s window faced east. It faced the same sad, hopeful light in which my mother used to sit, waiting for the mail.
Anya had stopped talking. I glanced at the camera bag, untouched, at my feet. I had been hypnotized. So, when she startled me with the question, I felt defenseless, exposed. “You’re not married.” Anya prompted me with a slight incline of the head toward my left hand. When she smiled, her face was all parentheses, the eyebrows, the eyes, the closed, upturning mouth, the cupped demitasses of her cheeks. It was the same old, impossible question. But I had learned my lesson. These were questions I knew very well how to deflect.
“Were you ever married? Did you have children?” I leaned forward in my seat.
Anya hadn’t mentioned a husband. Not before the war and, more atypically, not after. Marriage, children, normalcy: Those were the antidote.
“You’re a very pretty girl. Do you have a boyfriend?”
She was persistent. But why should I answer her? I had answered Mr. Freund, to no good end. Were Anya and I more intimate, because of a secret phone call, a glance in the museum, tea and cake? There were things I had never talked about with my own family. What did I owe to this person, this stranger? This wasn’t how this relationship was supposed to work.
I turned from Anya, considered her high, framed sky. “W
ell . . .” I said. I stood up, pulled down the legs of my slacks.
“Just a moment.” She tapped her fingers together gently and then I could see, from out of nowhere, she held something in her hand. A small, warped square. A photo. She didn’t want me to leave.
I glanced at the photo with careful interest, as if it were a prize butterfly that might disappear on the breeze. Survivors of the Holocaust left Europe with nothing but their skin. But I had read that, in Kaunas, a man named George Kadish had taken photographs through the buttonhole of his coat. I wanted to leap from my seat and, in a single neat bound, swipe the photo clean out of her hands. She cradled it like a bird in the nest of her fingers. She held it face down. There would be a price to pay.
As Anya cradled the photo, I understood that this must be the reason she had lured me here. And I wondered: Why hadn’t she shown it to Wendy? Had she just discovered it? Or had she been keeping it for some secret purpose? Had she been waiting for this moment??
Anya looked out the big windows toward the sky. “I knew a woman in the ghetto. A woman from Kaunas. She worked the kitchen. Food a dog shouldn’t eat. ‘Rations,’ they called them—only potatoes. Black, moldy, potatoes. Potatoes breakfast, lunch, dinner. If there was dinner. But hardly potatoes. More like lumps of earth. No one could survive on such a ration, mind you. But that’s how it was: Work to death. Starve to death. Both at once,” Anya pursed her lips and blew the Nazis’ casual unconcern for human life into the air, “even better. One day something came over this woman—God knows what came over her; some people just went mad—but something came over her. Sometimes it happened. She put one—” Anya made a quick gesture with her hand, and the photo disappeared, “right into her pocket. A potato no person could eat. But she took it. That same night they took her. The woman. And for no reason at all, they took her sister.”
