by Lily Brett
She wasn’t sure of this. Maps were not her forte. She considered it an accomplishment that she could now read a map. Maps used to give her a headache. For years all maps looked like mazes. Crisscrossed, clashing, colored lines.
“Geography is complicated for you,” her first analyst had said. “You don’t want to know about other places. For you, catastrophes happen in other places.”
“But I travel,” she had said.
“Only to places you know or know about, you are frightened of the unknown,” the analyst had replied. The unknown that her analyst had been referring to was not a location. It was her parents’ pasts. Ruth had tackled quite a bit of that unknown since then. She had asked her parents quesT O O M A N Y M E N
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tions. She had read books, and now, here she was, in Lódz, able to read a map. What an accomplishment, she thought.
“Why did you not remember you had such a map?” Edek said to her.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said. She handed him the maps. Edek leaned against a shop window and studied the maps.
“You are right,” he said. “The names of the streets are not the names what I was used to. They have changed the names. I told you, I would for sure know where I am. And I know where I am. Fifty-eight years and I did forget nothing.” He looked excited. He listed a long list of streets they would be passing on their way to Kamedulska and ran ahead of her. She could hear him listing the streets to himself as he ran.
The area began to look familiar to Ruth. She remembered some of the streets from her last trip. The Jewish areas were all quite close to the center of Lódz. The buildings, like most of the rest of Lódz, were run-down. They looked old and decayed. Crumbling walls, dark, cracked windows. Everything about these dwellings spoke of departure, past lives, lack of life.
Tiles and beams and pieces of plaster and chunks of concrete were missing from building after building. Windows were wired shut and doors patched up. The Poles had not taken care of the buildings. They had taken care not to care about the Jews they had replaced when they moved into these apartments. The Poles were happy, then. Happy with the apartments, the furniture, the china, the clothes, and all the other accoutrements of life that the Jews had left behind. There was not much life left in these fully occupied dwellings now.
Ruth caught up with Edek. He didn’t look tired. He looked well. She felt worn out. Exhausted. Maybe she was suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. Seasonal Affective Disorder was a popular disorder in America at the moment. SAD, as it was called, was a deprivation of daylight, which resulted in lethargy and depression. The winter light here in Poland was particularly weak. She was sure it contained none of what she needed to stave off lethargy or depression.
“Did you call the Jewish Center?” she said to Edek. She had asked him to call the Jewish Center on Zachodnia Street. The keys for the Jewish Cemetery had to be picked up from the Jewish Center. Ruth was interested in seeing the center anyway.
“I did call,” Edek said. “I did say we was interested in seeing the center.
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The man I did speak to did say he was very busy. Then he did hang up the phone.”
“Busy?” said Ruth. “There are seven Jews left in Lódz. How busy can he be? I’ll call myself tomorrow.”
Ruth knew that the Jewish Center in Lódz looked after only a handful of Jews. All old men. It was set up to maintain the religious and cultural traditions of the Jews of Lódz. Edek was a Jew from Lódz. Why would the director of the center say he was busy? The center had another purpose. To revive Jewish life in Poland. To reclaim Jewish culture. To give an identity to people who were surfacing, now, in Poland, who thought they might be Jewish. Jews who weren’t sure about their pasts. People who had a grandparent who was Jewish. People who were adopted. People whose parents seemed more Jewish than the parents would admit. Edek was a real Jew.
Not like some of the newly discovered Jews who were beginning to turn up in the few synagogues left in Poland. Jews who looked very Polish to Ruth.
Maybe the director of the center was tired of old Jews passing through Lódz? Maybe he was interested only in those who were staying. She hadn’t expected to be embraced by the Jewish Center of Lódz, but she hadn’t expected to be rejected. Too busy. She felt annoyed. Why hadn’t he just said he wasn’t interested? She was sure that his “too busy” was a lie. Why did he have to lie? She felt angry. She caught herself. Why was she so outraged about the man who ran the Jewish Center of Lódz? She was obviously overtired. She was glad that she hadn’t heard from Max this morning.
Having to deal with Mr. Newton or Mr. Long would have been more than she could handle.
Ruth thought about Max’s married lover. Max was sure that he was not lying to her. “He’s got no need to lie to me,” she had said to Ruth. “I’m not his wife.” Max hadn’t seemed to see the lack of logic in her thinking. But then maybe logic played no part in affairs. “I see him three or four times a week,” Max had said to Ruth. “He’s so supportive of me. He spends weekends with his wife. And I don’t mind that. She doesn’t seem to mind if he’s out on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. But he’s got to be back with her on Saturday and Sunday.”
“I probably help his marriage,” Max had added when Ruth hadn’t replied. “Good sex with me probably helps him tolerate routine sex with T O O M A N Y M E N
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her.” Ruth had remained silent. “Okay,” Max had said. “Maybe sex isn’t so routine with her. Shit, why am I thinking about her?”
“I guess you share something pretty intimate,” Ruth had said.
“Pretty and intimate,” said Max. “His you-know-what.” They had both laughed.
Morality was such a complicated question. Ruth dealt with minuscule aspects of it in her work life every day. A client she hardly knew had asked Ruth if it would be dishonest of her to become pregnant without telling her partner what she was planning.
“How are you going to carry out that plan?” Ruth had said.
“I would inseminate myself after sex, with the contents of the condom,”
the client had said. “It’s always my job to throw it out.”
“Well, he wouldn’t have had any further use for it,” Ruth had said.
“You’d be using up something that would have just been thrown away.”
They had laughed.
“Would it be dishonest of me?” the client had asked again.
“Dishonest?” Ruth had said. “I don’t know. The world is full of men who manipulate women in the name of the law, the government, and God.
I don’t know if it would be dishonest.”
Afterward, she had thought that she had been cowardly. Of course it was dishonest. There were degrees of dishonesty in everyone’s life, of course. She herself felt a vague discomfort when clients cried at certain things she had written. She had caught one of her clients weeping pro-fusely, in the office, after he had picked up a condolence letter. “I thought you didn’t like your uncle?” Ruth had said to him. “I never saw this side of him,” the client said. Ruth had seen no point in pointing out that she hadn’t known his uncle. “Everything you’ve said in this letter is true,” the client had said, and left the office, still weeping.
What was the truth and what wasn’t was often impossible to detect. The truth had appeared obscure to Ruth, from the time she was a child. She used to lie a lot. She made things up. As a six-year-old she spun whole stories around her lies. Stories of poverty and hardship. The Rothwaxes were poor, but in Ruth’s tales they had to endure extreme deprivation. She and her mother and father had to share one blanket, Ruth told her school friends, and they slept on old newspapers, on the floor. Her school friends
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were riveted by her stories. The school Ruth attended was in an inner-suburban area populated with migrants and refugees. Most of the children had no trouble imag
ining Ruth’s poverty. The stories became more elaborate as Ruth got older. They became more complex, with a better sense of structure and better timing.
Ruth lied as an adult, too. Stupid, harmless lies. As though no reality was worthy of repetition. Everything had to be expanded and enhanced.
She couldn’t help it. She was often shocked herself at her lies. Surprised and bewildered at the words which she knew not to be true that came out of her mouth. The shock didn’t last long.
Ruth’s elaborations and embroideries were intricate and authentic, to her. No sooner had she uttered them than she began to believe that what she was saying was the truth. A good liar had to be efficient and organized, Ruth discovered. Lies were too difficult to keep track of otherwise. And a good memory was essential. Good liars had to be able to retain the facts of their own existence and the facts of their lies. It wasn’t easy.
Ruth rarely let herself spin off into meticulously constructed lies or fantasies anymore. She had paid a lot of money to several analysts in order to give up this trait. She was happy she was no longer a big liar. The lies had entangled and snared and confused Ruth as well as their recipients.
As a child Ruth’s lies had been intricate enough. She had made up relatives. Aunts, uncles, cousins. She made up cousins she loved and cousins she disliked. She had made up favorite aunties, and favorite grandparents.
She had invented eight grandparents. She knew nothing about grandparents. She had eliminated four of the grandparents when she was old enough to know that people rarely possessed more than four. She had explained the extraneous grandparents as adoptions. Then she had whisked them, briskly, out of the picture. She had known, even then, that credibility was a crucial component of storytelling.
Attention to detail was also critical. Ruth knew the physical characteristics and personality quirks of all of the fabricated aunts and uncles and cousins. She had populated her world with so many made-up people. She had best friends and second-best friends and casual boyfriends and serious boyfriends she had invented. She had never been lonely.
Sometimes when she thought of the past, she couldn’t remember which friends she had really had and which friends she had imagined. At least T O O M A N Y M E N
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now she had a better use for her imagination. She made up letters all day.
Six days a week. From 8:30 A.M. to 7 P.M. By the end of each day, she had had her fill of invention and fabrication.
The subject of relatives, her relatives, still occupied her from time to time. When she visited museums or Holocaust memorials, she saw herself in many of the photographs on display. Ruth knew, of course, that it wasn’t her in the photographs, but it seemed reasonable to think that she might be looking at relatives. She looked at photographs of Jews in the streets of the ghettos. Photographs of Jews being liberated from concentration camps. Photographs of Jewish families before the war. She saw herself in all of them.
She had asked an official in the Wiesenthal Center, in Los Angeles, if he had known the identity of a young woman in a photograph taken in the Lódz ghetto. Anyone who knew Ruth could have identified her right there in the center of that photograph. The official didn’t know who the young woman was. Ruth had given the official a list of people she was related to.
The Buchbinders, the Spindlers, the Knobels, and the Brajtsztajns were all related to the Rothwaxes. They were all from Lódz. And they were all dead.
Ruth had asked the man if it was possible to see if any of those names appeared in any of the photographs they had on display in the center. He had explained that it was an impossible task.
Edek had stopped running. He was walking beside Ruth. They walked past a young woman and her child. The mother looked about thirty. She was hitting the child. Smacking the small boy hard. Ruth flinched at the sound of the slaps. What had the child done? she wondered. Something that bothered his mother. The mother was red-faced and grim. She kept on hitting him. He screamed and screamed. Why did people like this have children?
Was beating a child one of the pleasures of parenthood? Enough parents beat their children.
“We did never smack you,” Edek said. “Never.”
“Jews on the whole don’t use physical violence,” Ruth said. She immediately worried that Edek may have interpreted her reply as offensive. As though she had insinuated that Jews were prone to emotional violence. She looked at Edek. He didn’t look disturbed.
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The boy continued to scream. The mother noticed Edek and Ruth. She motioned for the boy to be quiet. He kept crying.
“You did never want a child,” Edek said to Ruth. “Even when you was a teenager.”
“I still don’t,” Ruth said. “All of my nightmares are about children. My children. I lose them. I leave them on trains and buses and other public places. I forget to feed them. I forget I have them. In my dreams, I have a baby who is born damaged and he disappears, right after the birth.” Edek stopped walking.
“What is wrong with the baby?” he said.
“What baby?” she said.
“The baby in your dream, of course,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s never clear. In the last dream someone took the baby away from me.” Edek stared at her. “What’s wrong?” she said to him. “Nothing,” he said.
Something she had said had disturbed Edek. But what? Ruth had no idea what it was. She had no idea what much of her communications with her mother and father had meant. Things were said to her in short ambigu-ous sentences and semi-indecipherable phrases. Brief bursts of almost-comprehensible advice and guidance, warnings and orders. Nothing was explained at length. Everything was in quick, oblique English. Edek and Rooshka were always stumbling and floundering in English, a language that was foreign to both of them.
“Why didn’t you speak Yiddish to me? Or Polish? Or German?” Ruth said to Edek. “Why did you and Mum only speak English to me, instead of one of the languages you were really comfortable in?”
“Mum was very comfortable in English and I am very comfortable in English,” said Edek.
“You weren’t when you had me,” Ruth said. “You were almost forty, and you weren’t in a position to go to English classes.”
“That is true. I was working in factories and so was Mum,” Edek said.
“So why didn’t you speak to me in a language that was easy for you?”
said Ruth.
“Mum wanted for you to learn English,” Edek said.
“I couldn’t have avoided learning English. We were living in Australia,”
Ruth said.
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“It is not so important what language you speak to a child,” Edek said.
“Of course it is,” Ruth said. “How can you speak intimately to a child when your words are limited?”
“As a matter of fact,” Edek said, “It was Mum’s idea. I was not so keen on it myself. Mum said, ‘We will speak English to this child.’ ”
“To this child?” said Ruth. “The other two didn’t last long enough to catch on to language, did they?” Why had she phrased that so harshly? She hadn’t meant to. “I guess Yiddish could have reminded Mum of the babies she lost, or the past, in general,” she said quickly.
“Mum said she did not want the baby to learn a language of the past,”
Edek said. “She did mean Yiddish. And she did not want the baby to learn the language of the Polish people. She said this baby is not Polish. And she is not German. I did not want to speak to a baby in German, in any case.
What Jew would speak to a baby in German?”
“But Mum insisted I learn German at school,” Ruth said.
“That was different,” Edek said. “She did not speak German with you.
German was not spoken in our house.”
“Yes it was,” Ruth said. “I was always reciting lines from Goethe. I had to memorize them for my Germa
n classes. Remember I won a prize for reciting Goethe? Mum was thrilled.”
“I remember,” said Edek.
“Mum thought that if the Nazis arrived in Australia, I would at least be able to communicate with them,” she said.
“That is not so funny,” Edek said. “That is what Mum did feel.”
“I didn’t say it was funny,” she said.
The mother and child were walking behind Edek and Ruth. The child was still crying, but it was a quiet cry now, a whimper. “I want to say something to that mother,” Ruth said. “How do you say ‘bully’ in Polish?” “Are you crazy?” said Edek. He scurried ahead of Ruth. Ruth turned around and glared at the mother. The mother looked startled. She smiled at Ruth.
Ruth shook her head in what she hoped was a gesture of admonition. Why did most mothers become mothers? Ruth thought. They looked so unhappy in the job.
Occasionally Ruth liked a burst of mothering. Mothering other people’s adult children in very small bursts. Sometimes you could experience an exchange of intimacy and understanding with a stranger’s child. This was a
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mothering of sorts. A transferring of wisdom, however menial the subject matter. Ruth had been buying a petticoat in Kmart on Cooper Union Square, when a young woman, a girl really, she looked about nineteen, had asked her advice about a black dress that she was trying on. “Does it look okay on me?” the girl had said. “It looks gorgeous,” Ruth had said. And it did. Kmart contained some surprising merchandise. “Is it suitable for a formal dinner?” the girl had asked Ruth. “Or is it too formal?”
“It’s just the right degree of formal to be formally formal or formally casual,” Ruth had replied. She had helped the girl choose a pair of shoes, as well. They had both left the encounter, glowing. “Thanks so much for all your help,” the girl had said. Ruth had almost leaned over to kiss the young girl good-bye. Instead, she blew her a kiss. “Have a wonderful evening,”
she said to her.
Ruth loved Kmart. It was open until 10 P.M. every night, and she often went there to unwind. Kmart kept her grounded. It showed her how real people lived. At Kmart you could buy mops and buckets and plastic fly swatters. Kmart had detergent in huge containers, and racks and racks of rubber gloves. You could buy car jacks and screwdrivers and brooms and brushes and irons and ironing boards.
