Hope: A Tragedy: A Novel

by Shalom Auslander

  Maybe I could just kill her? Who would know? Who would care? If she actually was Anne Frank, everyone thought she was dead anyway.

  He stopped at the hallway closet and took out his toolbox. If there was anything he’d learned from all the damned books he’d read in his life—and he was becoming more and more certain that he hadn’t learned very much at all—it was that you never let the monster get away. Whatever you do, you do not take pity on the monster. And even if it isn’t a monster—let’s say it isn’t, let’s say the monster is, ludicrous as it may seem, Anne Frank. Then what? Let it live? What did those fool Samsas gain by waiting all that time to kill the giant pest they’d discovered in their house? Okay, sure, it was their son, or it had been, and this was Anne Frank, or might be, but how about a thought or two for the living, folks? Exactly how long were the poor Samsas obligated to keep that arthropodan pain in the ass in their home? A year? Two? Ten? Sixty? Were they supposed to find him a giant bug wife, and let them have giant bug children before they could finally, without judgment, move on with their already miserable lives? Or were they never supposed to? Were they supposed to hang pictures of vermin and lice on the walls and warn their grandchildren about how they, too, might someday turn into giant bugs?

  Kugel yanked down the attic door.

  There was a good case to be made, in fact, when you stopped to consider it, that a family who truly loved their son, who deeply cared for his well-being, would, if they found him one morning turned into a hideous bug, have killed him right away; just gone out, found a giant boot somewhere, lifted it up over him and squashed him out of his misery. Gregor’s sister could have saved the whole family—not the least of whom was Gregor himself—a world of anguish and trouble if she’d just gone into his room, day one, with a giant can of Raid and gotten it over with.

  Foosh. Aaargh. The End.

  You move on.

  Kugel unfolded the stairs and took a deep, calming breath.

  Already he could smell her.

  He would reason with her, that’s what he would do. There is nothing higher than reason, said Kant.

  Or Spinoza.

  Or Pascal.

  Pascal’s last words were: May God never abandon me.

  A moment later, God did.

  She was damaged, surely, who wouldn’t be? But that didn’t mean she was a lunatic, it didn’t mean he couldn’t discuss the issue with her coolly, with at least some degree of lucidity. Half-crazy meant half-sane, didn’t it? She couldn’t expect him to let her stay in his attic indefinitely, after all; a day or two, sure, just to get her things together, but no more than that. Three, tops. There was Jonah to think about; surely she, once a child herself, would understand that.

  Kugel wondered, as he climbed the stairs, how Jonah would react to having to hide one day in their attic.

  In the event of what, you maniac?

  In the event of whatever.

  Would Jonah cry? Of course he would, who wouldn’t? What would Kugel tell him? How do you explain a thing like that, like hatred, like genocide? It’s not you, it’s them? It’s going to be okay, when you know perfectly well that it isn’t? Do you bring toys? All of Jonah’s toys made loud, unpredictable noise—bells, sirens, engines, music. The toys, Kugel decided, would have to stay behind. He could probably bring the iPod and some headphones; assuming the wireless wasn’t down, Jonah would be able to download movies and games. Would the wireless be down in a genocide? Would it matter? Who would help them? Who would report on them? He didn’t know the neighbors very well—maybe he should get to know them better. Maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe keeping to your damned self was the best idea.

  Kugel wouldn’t survive, he knew it. He’d last a week in that attic and kill himself. Freddie Prinze killed himself. In his suicide note, he wrote this:

  I’ll be at peace.

  Professor Jove was opposed to suicide. It wasn’t that he considered it an act of cowardice; it was that he saw it as irresponsibly hopeful to imagine a better world existed after this one, in some unnamed, unknown, unproved plane of existence. As foolish as it was to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds, said Professor Jove, it was a thousand times more foolish to believe in a best possible Afterworld.

  George Eastman’s suicide note read: Why wait?

  Well, yeah.

  Sure.

  There was always that.

  Hello? Kugel whispered as he climbed into the attic.

  Maybe, thought Kugel, I should get a gun. A small one. Everyone else has a gun. It would be stupid not to.

  Kugel stood, and though he was prepared this time for the heat and the stench, they nearly felled him.

  Hello? he whispered.

  Maybe he’d imagined it.

  Maybe it had been mice.

  The boxes he had toppled the night before remained on the floor, their contents spilled out, and he stepped over them as he slowly approached what remained of the western wall of boxes and crates. He peered over the top.

  Her bed.

  Empty.

  Not a dream, then.

  Not mice.

  Where the hell was she?

  Had she left?

  Kugel smiled and shook his head. Yes. Of course she had. She’d been “discovered,” the crazy old bag. She probably crept out just after he had gone back to bed, fled all night from some imaginary pursuers, from ghost hounds and silent gunfire, through the woods, avoiding the streets, ducking from headlights; this morning she’ll wait behind a row of shrubs for some other poor bastard to turn his back, to head off to work or take his kids to school, before creeping into his attic, huddling again in those dark, dank corners where she felt so comfortable, waiting for the cessation of atrocities that never ceased. He felt sorry for her, but she was someone else’s problem now, and for that, for his family’s sake, he was relieved.

  It was daytime now, and in the sunlight that streamed through the dormer windows and slashed through the gable vents, Kugel could see more clearly than he had been able to the night before, and what he saw, there behind the walls of crates and crypts, was a remarkably devised, thoroughly hidden living space.

  Whoever the hell she was, she’d clearly hidden in attics before.

  Someone—say, Himmler—entering from the attic stairs wouldn’t have noticed a thing; the U-shaped walls of cardboard boxes and plastic storage tubs she’d arranged around the perimeter of the attic were stacked a number of feet away from the gable and eaves, creating a hidden narrow gangway that also provided lookout views in three directions. Behind the westernmost wall were her bed and workspace, where he supposed she had spent most of her time; through the dormer window behind her she would have a watchtower guard’s view of the road, driveway, and front yard. She would have known at all times who was arriving and leaving, who was home, and who was away.

  Good riddance, he thought.

  Standing in front of the westernmost wall, he followed it and the trail of wires to the left, around the corner to the southern gable side of the house, where, it seemed, back behind the wall, she had set up something of a kitchen; in her rush to leave, she had left behind her appliances, such as they were: a small dented hotplate, a rusty kettle, a blowtorch, some old rusted pots and pans. A four-pane window in the gable wall—small and cloudy with age, but clear enough in places to see through—would have given her a view of the secondary parking space at the end of the driveway and the small gravel pathway that led to the back of the house.

  The trail of wires ended there, but Kugel continued to follow the wall to the left, around the corner again to the eastern side of the house, where the dormer windows provided a full view of the backyard: of Mother’s vegetable garden, the swing set, the sandbox, all the way to the edge of the dark, heavy woods, where the lawn ended. He wondered what else she might have used this portion of the hiding space for, and that was when, peering farther over the top of the wall, he noticed her cloudy yellow eye, watching him from the dark depths of the attic eaves.

 
Jesus, he hissed, jumping backward. Christ.

  In the sunlight, faint as it was, she was even more hideous than he’d gathered the night before. Her hair, wiry and unkempt, hung over her face; her gnarled hands were capped with yellowed, talonlike fingernails; the floorboards behind the boxes, he noticed, were crisscrossed with long scratches and deep gouges, places where she had dragged herself, back and forth, by those very same fingernails.

  Her voice, when it came, was a low growl.

  I’m out of matzoh, she said.

  Were you banging on the vents? asked Kugel.

  I’m out of matzoh.

  Don’t bang on the vents.

  I’m out of matzoh. I can’t work without matzoh.

  Don’t bang on the fucking vents.

  Kugel walked back to the western wall of boxes and examined her bed and workspace. His back to the old woman, he reached into his pocket, and placed the apple on top of the remaining boxes.

  How long have you been up here? he asked.

  A while.

  What’s a while?

  A while.

  A week? Ten days?

  Thirty years, she said.

  Thirty years?

  Kugel returned to the eastern wall in time to see her scurrying, insectlike, along the floor and around the corner.

  Or forty, she grumbled from the darkness. Give or take.

  Kugel could hear, through the heating return vent in the center of the attic floor, the sounds of breakfast being cleared downstairs in the kitchen: of the kitchen sink running as Bree rinsed the dishes; of silverware clinking; of Jonah’s feet as he stomped, squealing, about the kitchen. Down there, thought Kugel, all was sunshine and beauty and life and possibility; and yet here he stood in this attic, in darkness and suffocating gloom, surrounded by misery and death. It was as if the cosmos had flipped, or perhaps we’d simply had it wrong all along, the rapture of heaven below, the agony of hell above. The streets of the afterlife, he thought, had better be clearly marked.

  You’ll be glad to know, Kugel said aloud, that I’ve decided not to involve the police.

  She was moving behind the western wall now, her breathing labored as she shuffled about in the darkness. She stopped, and he saw her hand reach up, take the apple, and replace it, a moment later, with a folded piece of paper.

  What’s that? he asked.

  A shopping list, she said.

  Then again, he thought, maybe she really was insane.

  Do you know why? he continued, ignoring the list.

  Why what?

  Why I’m not going to call the police.

  Because you’re German, she said, and you feel guilty for committing atrocities.

  I am not German, said Kugel.

  Just then she emerged from behind the boxes at the open end of the western wall, a black mass, lumpish and dust-covered and trailing spiderwebs from her back and hair. Kugel stepped back; when he was a small boy, he would cry from fright at the sight of the mentally handicapped, certain he was going to catch whatever it was they had.

  Slowly, with what seemed like great effort, the old woman brought one foot up beneath her, then the other, until she could push herself up to as upright a position as Kugel imagined she could attain. Perhaps she truly had spent the past forty years in this attic, he thought, as she had seemingly come to resemble it; her body had adapted, or evolved, or devolved, into a shape most suitable for attic life: her knees seemed permanently bent at just the right angle to keep her head from hitting the rafters, and her spine and hips inclined forward at very nearly the same degree of slope as that of the roof.

  She took a moment, winded from the hard work of achieving verticality, and then cocked her head sideways, fixing that hideous yellow eye of hers on Kugel’s, the whiteness of which he was suddenly ashamed. She looked him up and down.

  Because you’re Jewish, she said, and you feel guilty for not suffering atrocities.

  There was something familiar about her, Kugel thought, and when he realized what it was, he wondered if perhaps he was mad, too—it was something about the shape of her eyes, wide and curious; the high hairline, the cheeks, the strong chin; something, if you accounted for advanced age, decades of torment, multiple vitamin deficiencies, and a fair degree of decay, something undeniably, disturbingly . . . Anne Frankish.

  Kugel backed away again as she passed him on her way to the overturned boxes in the middle of the attic floor.

  What about the Messerschmidts? he asked. They knew you were up here?

  She knelt beside one of the boxes, repeating in reverse order the same slow, laborious process by which she had just risen, and nodded her head.

  It hardly seemed worth it, Kugel thought, all that effort just to take a few steps. But he remembered reading that prisoners, locked in tiny cells, often walked in circles for hours, either trying not to become infirm or trying—this was the greater challenge—to remain normal, human.

  The Messerschmidts, she said, were good people. Germans, mind you, but self-hating. The best kind. I prefer the self-hating. Self-hating Germans, self-hating Jews, self-hating French, self-hating Americans. We’d have far fewer problems in this world if more people had the courage to be self-hating.

  Sol? Kugel heard Bree call.

  He spun to face the well of the attic door; from the sound of it, she was right at the foot of the stairs.

  It’s eight thirty, she called up. You’re going to be late for work.

  In the weeks to follow, Kugel would consider that if he’d only let her come upstairs and see the old lady, then and there, it might have ended everything much more simply. If only Bree had walked up, seen her, and thrown her out, it all would have been over before it began.

  If only Grete had crushed Gregor.

  If only Kugel had found shit.

  But Bree didn’t come up, not immediately, and Kugel turned back to look at the old lady, caught there in the vulnerable open space of the middle of the attic—drawn out of hiding and safety, by him, to straighten the very boxes he had felled—and he called out to Bree: Hang on, hang on, I’m coming down.

  Kugel made his way down the stairs, explaining to Bree as he did that, given the degraded condition of the interior valves on the heating-flange exhaust tubes, he was simply going to have to take the day off from work.

  Another day off? she asked.

  She was concerned that the company would not take kindly to this—Kugel had already taken a week off when they moved in—but Kugel insisted there was simply no choice; it was one of those problems that were easy to ignore but soon became very expensive.

  Better to just get rid of it now, he said.

  Get rid of it?

  Fix it.

  Bree asked him to call the office as soon as he could, and told him not to work all day—maybe they can have an evening together tonight? she asked. Sure, sure, said Kugel. Maybe once Jonah’s asleep we can sneak up there for some privacy, she said, indicating the attic. Sure, sure, said Kugel—and with a quick kiss, she left to drive Jonah to day care.

  Kugel climbed back up to the attic and stood by the side of the dormer window that overlooked the front porch and driveway. The old lady had already gone back to repacking the boxes. Kugel heard the front door close, and a moment later Bree appeared in the driveway, carrying Jonah to the car.

  How small they looked from up here. How fragile. How vulnerable. How mortal.

  How unlikely.

  To be. To continue to be.

  There was something nice about it, this hiding. This invisibility. This being and not being. This nothingness.

  Jean-Paul Sartre’s last words: I failed.

  Who didn’t?

  He glanced over at the old woman, kneeling on the floor and heaving his books and belongings back into the boxes.

  There was definitely something Anne Frankish about her.

  I’m not calling the police, he said, turning back to the window, because you’re going to leave on your own.

  I certainly hope
so, she replied.

  Fantastic. I’ll help you pack.

  Great, she said. As soon as I’m done with it.

  Bree had secured Jonah in his car seat and was climbing behind the wheel. It seemed the height of irresponsibility, putting a child into a car, strapping him like a fighter pilot into a three-ton box of steel and glass. Their car had air bags in the front and side; it had air bags, no doubt, everywhere the other car wouldn’t strike it. You could line the perimeter of the damned thing with air bags—doors, windows, beams, wheels—and a tree would fall on the roof, crushing them, snuffing them out like a match light in a squall. Kugel had put safety locks on all the kitchen cabinet handles, foam bumpers on all the sharp corners, outlet covers on all the sockets. Maybe he should relax a bit. Maybe he was sending Jonah the wrong message; he didn’t want him to grow into the fearful man his father was.

  As soon as you’re done with what? he asked her.

  With my book.

  Naturally, said Kugel. Of course. Because you’re Anne Frank.

  Because, she said, I am a writer.

  Bree backed the car out, and Kugel watched her drive away, dust kicking up behind them.

  We should get a bigger car. A truck, maybe. Everyone else has one. Yukons, Hummers, Tahoes. It was no longer a matter of keeping up with the Joneses; it was a matter of not getting crushed by them.

  Been working on it long? Kugel asked.

  Sixty years, she said. Give or take.

  Well, lady, said Kugel, you really get into a role, I’ll give you that.

  He walked across the attic and looked out the window to the backyard. Mother was inside her vegetable garden. He watched as she pulled on a section of the fence for a few moments, then stopped, moved to the next section, and began pulling on that one.

  She was stuck again.

  She could never seem to find the gate, and when she did, she pushed instead of pulled, and determined thus that the gate must be elsewhere. She would slowly work herself into a panic. Kugel was certain she performed the whole tragicomic burlesque on purpose; that she liked the feeling of being trapped; that she liked needing help; that she liked suffering; that she believed she deserved it. Agony was ecstasy, ecstasy was agony.