by Lily Brett
“That wasn’t so little,” said Ruth.
“It is enough of this stuff,” Edek said. He turned back to the driver.
They were almost on the outskirts of Lódz, now. “We’re getting close to Lódz,” Ruth said to Edek. “I do not recognize it yet,” he said. His voice sounded frighteningly flat.
“We’re going to be all right, Dad,” she said.
“Of course,” he said.
She wished that the driver would start chatting to Edek. As though he had read her mind, the driver said something to Edek. Edek answered him.
Soon another conversation was under way. It seemed to be about cars and mileage. And Mercedeses. Edek started to sound like himself, again.
“Jesus, look, more graffiti,” Ruth said. They had passed a wall with several Stars of David crisscrossed with the LKS initials of the losing Polish soccer team. As soon as she had spoken, she had regretted interrupting Edek and the driver. “I do not think you should say Jesus,” Edek said.
“Children do this. It is just children,” the driver said, looking back at the graffiti.
They were in Lódz proper now. Ruth didn’t want to cause another disturbance by announcing that they had arrived. Edek seemed unmoved. He had opened the glovebox of the Mercedes and was admiring the smooth way it opened and shut. Edek and the driver were agreeing that the precision of German engineering was hard to beat.
Lódz looked as bleak and as grim as Ruth remembered it. They were in the center of the city. In the streets people had pallid faces and blank expressions. Lódz, an industrial city built on the textile industry, was often called the Manchester of Poland. Lódz, Ruth thought, made Manchester look like Monte Carlo.
They pulled up outside the Grand Victoria Hotel. The doorman rushed up to open the car doors. He collided with the driver, who was also in a hurry to open the car doors. The doorman opened Ruth’s door with a flour-
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ish. He peered inside. “Please let me help you with anything that you need,” he said to her. He was revolting. She hunched her shoulders so that she would be as far from him as possible while she got out of the car. He hovered around the car door. “It is a pleasure to be of help to such a beautiful woman,” he said as Ruth was halfway out.
He really was repulsive, she thought. He had a very thick neck on top of a very thick body. Several thick gold chains hung around his thick neck, and revolting wads of hair were growing out of his ears and nostrils. Ruth flinched. How could men like this not realize how unattractive they were?
Maybe it took a lot to make a man feel unattractive.
“I shall come to your room, personally, to make sure that everything is in order for you,” he said to Ruth. “No, thank you,” she said loudly. He really was disgusting. Awful enough to make anyone change his mind about the value of genocide. Someone should have shot him, years ago. She smiled to herself at the outrageousness of that thought.
Ruth looked at her father. He was handing over what looked like volu-minous amounts of zlotys to the driver and shaking his hand. He said his final good-bye to the driver and followed Ruth into the hotel. Edek smiled at the doorman and introduced himself. “Dad, I’ve just got rid of him,”
Ruth hissed into Edek’s ear. “He’s revolting.” Edek glared at Ruth and moved away from her. He started talking to the porter. Ruth went to the reception desk. She requested rooms close together. She heard Edek laughing.
The Grand Victoria Hotel had seen grander days. There was wear and tear and a general shabbiness everywhere. Even in the lobby. The porter came up to take her bags. His collar was covered with dandruff. His hair was filthy. Slicked in its own grease. Ruth grimaced and moved a foot farther away from him. It was funny, she thought, that you could tell the difference between dirty hair and hair that was designed to look dirty, with layers of gel, mousse, thickeners, relaxers, styling creams, and foaming strengtheners.
She felt her own hair. All the curls were curling the way she liked them to curl, into little ringlets. Her hair had been looking good lately. These good looks came at a price. A hundred and fifty dollars a haircut, to be precise. Geoffrey, at the John Frieda salon on Madison Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street, always did a good job on her hair. He was English, and she T O O M A N Y M E N
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liked the familiarity of his accent and his phrases. He was playful with her.
He was the youngest of ten children, and handled her hair with the confi-dence and intimacy of a man who has always been around women.
Geoffrey was always asking her if she was in love. No, she would say.
“Neither am I,” he would reply. “Here I am, in New York, in gay heaven, and I can’t get a date,” he would say. “It’s a city in which it’s impossible to meet real people,” she would say. Sometimes she went to the movies with Geoffrey. Ruth had her hair colored at the John Frieda salon, too. Bryan, her colorist, was one of the most relaxing men she had ever met. She almost went into a coma when Bryan colored her hair. She had her hair colored every three weeks. That way she need never know if she was going gray.
Hair was complicated for most women. Ruth had had her long curly hair cut by the local barber when she was twelve. Her mother had taken her to Mr. Brown, who had a barbershop across the street from them in Carlton. Mr. Brown cut and cut. Ruth emerged with a short back and sides. Mr. Brown had even clipped the back of her neck with his clippers.
With her new haircut, Ruth looked like a pinhead. She had looked in the mirror when she had got home and known that Rooshka hadn’t meant to make her ugly. Something out of her mother’s control had driven Rooshka to have Ruth’s hair cut off. Ruth knew that it must have been connected with the chopping off of her mother’s own long, thick plaits, in Auschwitz.
When they emptied Auschwitz, there were fifteen thousand pounds of human hair left behind. The Nazis were too busy in the last days of the war to ship this particular shipment of hair. The hair was packed in fifty-five-pound bags, ready to be shipped to Bavaria to the factories that processed the hair. The factories converted the hair into fabric. Lining to be used in men’s overcoats. The factories paid twenty-five pfennigs a pound for this hair, which reemerged as rolls of lining. Tailors stitched the hair into men’s suits as well. Somewhere in Germany, men had walked to work wearing her mother’s hair. The hair contained traces of hydrogen cyanide, Zyklon B, the gas they used to kill the owners of the hair, but the Germans weren’t bothered by that. After all, this hair didn’t touch German skin.
It was big business, this crating and shipping of people’s bits and pieces.
Gold and platinum pulled from teeth were melted and molded into ingots.
Watches were sent to Oranienburg and spectacles were shipped to the SS
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Sanitary Office. An office that didn’t appear to have been too sanitary.
Clothes were forwarded to the Ministry of Finance. When the Germans fled Auschwitz they left behind eight hundred and thirty-six thousand, five hundred and twenty-five women’s dresses, among other things.
Ruth felt trapped and restless in her room at the Grand Victoria Hotel. She needed to get out. It was four o’clock, and almost dark. She thought that she would probably feel better, even if she only sat in the lobby. She picked up her bag and walked to the door. The door handle wouldn’t turn. It was stuck.
She called Edek’s room. “I’m stuck,” she said. “I can’t get out of my room.”
“What happened?” he said.
“The door handle won’t budge,” she said. Edek started to laugh.
“It is not such a good hotel what the Bristol is, that is for sure,” he said.
“It has seen grander days, the Grand Victoria,” she said. He laughed again.
“You was always clever with words,” he said.
“Dad, can you call the porter and explain the problem to him, in Polish?” she said.
“Of course,” he said.
> “The porter, not the doorman,” Ruth said.
“You want me to come and see if I can fix it?” Edek said.
“No, just call the porter,” she said.
“You are right,” said Edek. “I am not so good in such things. As a matter of fact Garth did come and help me when I needed to put such a rail what you hold on to, on my bath.”
“Garth put a bath rail in for you? Why?” Ruth said.
“He wanted to,” Edek said. “I was going to get a handyman, but Garth said he was coming to Melbourne and he would do it. As a matter of fact he is not such a good handyman. The bar what he put in is three foot long. It looks pretty stupid.”
“You shouldn’t have let him,” Ruth said. “I’m sure he’s got plenty to do when he comes to Melbourne.”
“It did take him only two or three hours and then we did go to T O O M A N Y M E N
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Scheherezade for a cholent, ” Edek said. “He is the only goy I know who does like a cholent. Then we did have a piece of apple cake each.”
“You don’t need him to fix things in your apartment,” Ruth said.
“I do not need him to fix things,” Edek said. “But I like to be with him.
And to tell you the truth, he likes to be with me. I can feel it.”
Ruth knew that Garth was no handyman. He had the large, broad hands of a handyman, but he was hopeless. Things he built fell apart. Although he worked with his hands every day, he just didn’t have a knack for renovations or repairs. Ruth thought about Garth’s hands. Sometimes she remembered moments of their lovemaking. She remembered their sex with extraordinary clarity. Maybe because it had made her feel so good. Nourished, whole, replete. On the whole, she didn’t think about sex much.
Maybe she just wasn’t a highly sexual person. Or, maybe sexual thoughts had to come attached to love, for her.
She caught herself. How could she be thinking about sex, with her father on the other end of the line?
“Let’s go for a walk, Dad,” she said. “Ring the porter and get me out of here, and let’s go for a walk.” Edek hesitated. “Okay,” he finally said.
“Okay, let’s walk a bit. I did see a McDonald’s not far away. McDonald’s does do a very good chocolate thickshake.”
“I can’t believe you’ve spotted a McDonald’s already,” Ruth said. “I thought you were busy talking to the driver.”
“I did talk to the driver and I did see a McDonald’s,” Edek said.
“Can you believe a McDonald’s, in Lódz?” Ruth said. “It is something hard to believe,” Edek said.
It took the porter fifteen minutes to unstick the stuck door handle. Ruth was looking for a couple of zlotys with which to tip the porter when the phone rang. It was Max.
“Where are you?” Ruth said to Max. “You can’t be in the office. It’s Saturday morning.”
“I’m at home,” Max said.
“We have to be brief,” Ruth said. “I’m just about to go out with my father, and it’s going to be the first time he’s walked in the streets of Lódz since he was twenty-three.”
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“Okay,” Max said. “I’ve only got one question. I wouldn’t have called you except that this seemed to be something you would want to know about. I haven’t wanted to intrude on your very emotional time with your father.”
“Max, ask the question,” Ruth said.
“Mr. Kendall wants to know if he can buy the copyright to the refusal-to-lend-his-name-to-the-fund-raising letter we did for him,” Max said. “He said it was such a brilliant tactic to praise the charity lavishly in the first paragraph.”
“He wants to own the rights to that letter?” Ruth said.
“Yes,” said Max.
“I’m not sure about that,” Ruth said. “I should have thought about this issue before, really. Possibly he already owns the copyright as it’s his letter.”
“But you wrote it,” Max said.
“I know,” said Ruth. “Nothing is simple anymore. Not even owning your own letters.”
“But whose letter is it?” Max said. “Yours or his?”
“It’s his letter and my letter,” Ruth said. “Why does he want to own it anyway?”
“He said he doesn’t want anyone else to use exactly the same letter,”
said Max. “I told him it would be very expensive. He said that was fine.”
“Tell him he’ll have to wait until I get back,” Ruth said.
“By the way, Mr. Newton was very pleased with the thanks-for-your-thoughts-while-I-was-ill letters,” Max said. “You faxed me sixteen, so I gave him the extra one for no charge.”
“I’m glad he was pleased,” said Ruth.
“He sounded in very good shape for someone who has just had bypass surgery,” Max said. “In better shape than my neighbor’s dog.”
“What are you talking about?” Ruth said. As soon as Max started answering her, Ruth regretted that she had asked the question.
“My neighbor’s Labrador had a bypass operation,” Max said. “It was done at Michigan State University’s Veterinary Hospital, which is recognized for the quality of its open-heart surgery.”
“Open-heart surgery for dogs?” Ruth said.
“Of course. It’s a veterinary hospital,” Max said. “You can have dialysis for cats and pacemakers for dogs. This Labrador was on Prozac for months T O O M A N Y M E N
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before he underwent his surgery. You can get your cat’s teeth straightened, too. Orthodontics for dogs and cats is big at the moment.”
“How do you know all of this?” Ruth said.
“My neighbor who owns the Labrador told me,” said Max.
“I have to go,” Ruth said.
“Take care,” said Max.
“I’m trying,” Ruth said. She called Edek’s room. “I’m ready,” she said.
Ruth and Edek walked along Piotrkowska Street. Not many people were out. Ruth felt flat. They walked without speaking. She resisted asking her father how he felt. She didn’t want to annoy him. There was a blank passiv-ity in the faces of the people in the street. Ruth found it depressing. It was five o’clock on Saturday night. “Let’s go to McDonald’s,” she said to Edek.
They walked in the direction of McDonald’s.
The acrid smell of coal smoke filled the air. Ruth’s eyes began to sting.
“Are your eyes hurting?” she asked Edek. “Nothing is hurting,” he said.
Every second person who passed them seemed to be coughing, and spit-ting. It must be the smoke from the coal fires, Ruth thought. Lódz really was an oppressive city, she thought. It was dark, now. Very dark. And still.
The black air hardly moved.
Where was the moon? Ruth wondered. In mourning? There was not much sign of life in the streets, as though Lódz had swallowed its people for the night. Squat, gray buildings sat on either side of the black tram tracks. There seemed to be a lot of dog shit in the streets. “Be careful you don’t step in dog shit,” she said to Edek.
“Look,” he said. “The McDonald’s.” The McDonald’s in Piotrkowska Street was as garish as any McDonald’s anywhere. Ruth was so happy to see it.
Edek sipped his chocolate thickshake. She and Edek were the oldest people in McDonald’s. The rest of the customers seemed to be teenagers.
Ruth didn’t mind the teenagers. She had never been in a McDonald’s. She felt oddly at home.
“This chocolate thickshake is very good,” Edek said.
“I’m pleased,” she said.
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“Maybe I will try an ice cream tomorrow,” Edek said. “In Polish ice cream is lody. The lody in Poland was always very good.”
Ruth had heard this from him before. She had heard it in stories about Edek hiring a doroszka to take him to the ice-cream shop. And stories about Edek buying ice creams for all of his friends. He must have been such a playboy, Ruth thoug
ht. She looked at him. He looked so happy with his chocolate thickshake. She wanted to cry. “We’ll buy lots of lody tomorrow,” she said.
“Piotrkowska Street used to be full of people on Saturday night,” Edek said. “People walking up and down. It was such an excitement in the feeling of the street. Young boys and girls walked together. Couples walked together. Everybody was talking. Everybody was happy. Look outside now.
No one is there. There is nobody.” He was quiet for a minute. He looked out at the street. “You cannot imagine what Piotrkowska Street was like,”
he said to Ruth. “Everybody was dressed up. Girls went to meet boys. Boys went to meet girls. Who is there now? Nobody.”
“Did you go there on a Saturday night?” Ruth said.
“Of course I did,” he said. “All the young people did.” He looked sad.
“The most beautiful girls were the Jewish girls,” he said. “And your mum was the most beautiful of them all.”
Thinking about her mother on Piotrkowska Street on a Saturday night was too much for Ruth. She started to cry. She tried to hide her tears from Edek. Maybe this trip was a mistake, after all.
“There is no Jews here, now,” Edek said, and shook his head.
Chapter Six
I t is funny, is it not, how many of our names begin with the letter ‘H,’ ” Rudolf Höss said.
Ruth was in a café directly across the road from the Grand Victoria Hotel. “I can’t believe it’s you again,” she said.
“I am referring, of course, to my colleagues. To my former colleagues, of course,” Höss said. “It is of great interest to me this preponderance of names among us beginning with the letter ‘H.’ Höss, Hess, Hanfstängl, Harlan, Hauptmann, Heyde, Heydrich, Himmler, Hoffman, Hugenberg, Hossbach, and the most obvious one, naturally, Hitler.”
“I can’t believe it’s you again,” Ruth said. “I thought you must have been a figment of my imagination, or a bad dream.”
“Both of these could be said to be correct,” said Höss.
“Are you trying to be mystical?” said Ruth. She felt miserable. This was Rudolf Höss and she, Ruth Rothwax, could hear him.
“You do not believe in mysticism?” Höss said.
“I don’t believe in you,” said Ruth. “I was sure I had made the whole thing up. I was sure I had imagined it. I thought it must have been my lack of sleep that made me think I had spoken to you. Or too much stress. Or something I ate.”
