Hope: A Tragedy: A Novel

by Shalom Auslander

  Purely natural behavior, Pinkus, ever the evolutionary biologist, would proclaim as he grabbed Hannah in the kitchen, nuzzled her neck, and ran his hands over her hips and legs. I’m simply a male of the species obeying his natural imperative.

  How about those Yankees, Kugel would say.

  As desperate as they were to conceive, neither of them wished for a child of their own as much as Kugel wished one for them, as their unfortunate childlessness made Jonah the sole focus of Mother’s intense melodrama. When Jonah was still an infant, Mother would hold him in her arms, look into his eyes, shake her head, and whisper, The last Kugel.

  What she meant was Jew.

  She used to say the same thing to Kugel when he was younger.

  The last Kugel.

  They had cousins, of course, and uncles and nephews all over the world. But somehow, for thousands of years, every Kugel was the last Kugel, just as every Jew was the last Jew; Tevye the Terminal, every single one. Yet, Kugel couldn’t help but observe, in all that time—no last Jew. There had been a last Assyrian. There had been a last Ammonite. There had been a last Babylonian, a last Mesopotamian, a last of the Mohicans. But no last Jew. There had been a final Aztec, a departing Mayan, a Phoenician of Completion, an ultimate Ottoman, a conclusive Akkadian. There had been an Incan who closed the lights and shut the door on his or her way out. But no last Jew. Rocky Balboa took a beating, sure, but the story is: he won. Or tied. Or just: didn’t lose. Ask an Arawak about who lost and who won, ask a Pequot, ask a Herero. Where were the stories of the non-last Jews, he wondered—the ones who thrived; the ones who prospered; the ones who married, had children, and died not of pogroms and Zyklon B and Inquisitions, but of old age? Surely some Jews died of old age; that’s what Florida was for.

  Pinkus had written a number of books attempting to prove, historically and mathematically, how much better the world was getting. We were becoming, his last book insisted, better people—more humane, more caring, less violent. The book, titled You’ve Got to Admit It’s Getting Better, A Little Better All the Time, was a tremendous best seller. Professor Jove had written a book on the futility of hope entitled Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend. He was still sending out query letters.

  As Bree passed the potatoes to Mother, and Mother passed the chicken to Kugel, Pinkus explained to everyone how things were taking a turn for the better, and had been for hundreds of years. It was the subject of his forthcoming book, Here Comes the Sun, and I Say It’s All Right.

  It would seem absurd, Pinkus said, to suggest so, no? It would seem insane to suggest such a thing in the face of Rwanda, in the face of Darfur, of Cambodia, of the Holocaust; naive at best, criminal at worst. But those are the facts, you see. Those are the numbers; it is something we can measure, a knowable thing: are we more or less violent now than a hundred years ago, five hundred years ago, a thousand years ago? Are we getting worse, or are we getting better? The answer is, we’re getting better. Nobody wants to hear that answer, which is fascinating in its own right, but we don’t have more killing now than then, that is the fact—we simply have more reporting.

  Bree asked Hannah: How’s your writing coming?

  Hannah said: I haven’t had much time.

  My great-grandparents, continued Pinkus, lived through the Armenian genocide, I know how inhuman these events were. I’m not suggesting they weren’t. But compared to life in the past—the everyday brutality and violence, the endless conflicts and bloodshed—well, the Holocaust wasn’t so bad.

  Kugel glanced nervously at the heating vent in the floor beside his feet.

  I should thank the Nazis, Mother said to Pinkus, for being so evolved.

  Pinkus, said Hannah, you’re upsetting Mother.

  My point, said Pinkus, is that we’re doing something right. Why should that be upsetting? I know about Auschwitz and Hiroshima and My Lai and the Killing Fields, I know. But the numbers tell the real story, no? We are getting better. We are more caring, more giving, more moral. We are less violent, less callous, less hateful. Ten thousand years ago the odds of a simple hunter-gatherer dying at the hands of another—through wars, territorial disputes, tribal conflict—could be as high as sixty percent. That is a fact. In the last century, though, the supposedly worst century of war ever, it was less than one percent. That includes two world wars, mind you. And just look at the homicide numbers, the numbers of random killings due to crime or foul play: in Europe, in the Middle Ages, there were a hundred murders per every hundred thousand people. Today, in modern Europe, that’s down to less than one per every hundred thousand. Less than one. Shouldn’t we be asking why? Shouldn’t we be trying to understand the nature of this progress, to ensure it continues?

  That wonderful European soil, said Mother, is soaked with the blood of my parents.

  Pinkus shook his head.

  Bree said to Hannah: Williamsburg must be fun.

  Hannah said: Yes, but here you have the trees.

  Which is precisely what fascinates me, Mother, Pinkus continued. We’re doing something right. We are getting better. We should be trying to figure out why, and how, but to even suggest that we are getting better makes people furious, no? It is as if mankind needs the world to be getting worse, even if it happens to be getting better. Of course we’ll happily admit that it’s getting better for other people, but we’ll adamantly refuse to include ourselves in that group. No, no—for us, it’s always getting worse. Here’s what I believe: we dream of utopia, but could never bear one. The impossibility of heaven is less a function of theology, in my opinion, than it is a problem of nature—our nature. How many days in the eternal sphere of goodness will it take before you complain, before you find someone that hates you, that oppresses you? One day? A week, tops. Pursue happiness all you want, but may God help us if we achieve it. Nothing would make us more miserable than joy. What would we have done without Hitler?

  Kugel glanced again at the vent in the floor. He let his napkin fall from his lap and pushed it with his foot onto the vent.

  Mother threw her napkin onto her plate in disgust.

  I’ve heard enough of this, said Mother.

  Listen, said Pinkus, nobody’s saying it wasn’t horrific. I wrote a paper on the effects of the Rwandan genocide years after it was over . . .

  Genocide? said Mother with a dismissive wave of her hand, please. It was a summer. A few bad months. The UN calls everything genocide. The Holocaust lasted years, years of suffering and systematic murder. That was genocide.

  Mother, said Kugel.

  Pinkus, said Hannah.

  What about the Armenian genocide, then? asked Pinkus. That lasted years, too. Does that make it as bad as the Nazi genocide?

  Armenian genocide? said Mother. How many people died? A million?

  A million and a half, said Pinkus.

  Call me when you break three million, said Mother, then we’ll talk. Genocide, my eye.

  She stood and pointed her finger at Pinkus.

  Maybe you need to suffer yourself, she said, before you determine so casually that things are getting better. What a fine example you are of the arrogance of science, of the audacity of math. Perhaps if you had spent three years with me, hiding in a darkened attic from the bloody hands of those damned Germans, perhaps then you wouldn’t see life through the rosy glasses you have strapped to your head. A child I was, nothing more, trembling in fear in a cold, bare annex, never knowing which hour death would come but knowing, yes, knowing that it would.

  Tap, heard Kugel. Tap-tap.

  Kugel took Mother’s napkin from her plate and dropped it, too, over the heating vent.

  Tap, tap-tap.

  But there you sit, Mother continued, having trembled in darkness over what—grades? degrees?—in your fancy dormitory room at MIT or Stanford or Harvard, and you dare to tell me that life is getting better? Feh!

  And with that, Mother stormed from the room.

  Mother, called Hannah, and looked to Kugel for help.

  You see? said
Pinkus to the rest of the family. This is why I’m writing this book. It’s fascinating! It’s as if a man goes to his doctor and, upon hearing his tests are negative, that not only isn’t he unwell, but that he is in fact in perfect health, he flies into a violent rage. Liar! Quack! Can’t you see I’m bleeding, can’t you see I’ve bled? Can’t you see the scars? The damage? I have the temerity to suggest that the human patient is not as hopelessly consumptive as we thought, and they call for my head. We’re sick! they say. We’re not so bad, I say. We’re dying! they cry. What would we have done without gas chambers and ovens?

  Tap, tap-tap.

  What would we have done, Pinkus continued, without Dresden, without Srebrenica, without the Katyn Forest and the Killing Fields? I’ll tell you my worry: my worry is not that we are becoming more violent. On the contrary, my worry is that we will someday reach such an unsettling level of peace, such a level of happiness and joy, that we’ll engage in the most brutal war of all, a thousand Holocausts rolled into one, because peace frightens us. Expecting hell, we’re ill prepared for heaven. It is like watching two men carry a pane of glass across a busy highway: we expect it to break, we know it will, the situation itself is so precarious that we almost want to see a car drive through it, we pick up a rock and shatter it ourselves. Smash it already! I know it’s going to fall to pieces, I know it can’t remain, stop getting my hopes up, stop letting me believe!

  Tap, tap-tap.

  Mother, called Kugel as he stood and hurried from the room. Once out of view of the dining table, though, he turned from her bedroom and headed upstairs.

  One morning, he recalled as he climbed the stairs, a few weeks after Jonah’s illness, Kugel found himself on a subway, late for an appointment with Professor Jove, when the train came to a screeching halt. The anger inside the train was palpable. Fuck, muttered the man to Kugel’s left. Fucking bullshit, Kugel had replied. After a moment, an announcement was made by the conductor: the train, tragically, had struck a waiting passenger, and they were going to be stopped a while as police and emergency workers arrived and saw to the passenger’s health. The mood in the subway car now changed considerably, and everyone, including Kugel, seemed ashamed for having been so callous and rash. Soon more facts became known: the victim was an elderly blind woman; she worked at the station for years; she had gotten disoriented and stepped off the platform just as the train was arriving.

  F Train? Kugel imagined her thinking. That’s how I die? The F train?

  The horrific news deepened the passengers’ solemnity; some wished her well, some prayed, others told stories of similar tragedies: of the friend who died in the World Trade Center attack, of the family member who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina, of the child struck down by swine flu. It annoyed Kugel, this wallowing, this cheap pseudo-mourning. Shut up, all of you, he thought, keep your damned horror stories to yourself.

  There was no need to confront them, though; their compassion lasted only as long as their patience, which wasn’t very long, and as the minutes ticked by, their sympathy slowly turned back to anger. They began to grumble about missed meetings and angry clients. After fifteen minutes, the mood in the train returned to the same indignant, griping space it had occupied before. What is taking so long? someone muttered. Ridiculous, sighed another. Kugel, late now for his expensive Jove appointment, thought, Just move the train, for fuck’s sake, she’s not getting any deader. At last the train lurched forward, and the passengers, Kugel included, sighed with relief.

  Kugel pulled down the attic door and warily climbed up the stairs, worried about being met by flying borscht bottles and jars of herring. He was relieved to hear Anne Frank typing away behind her wall.

  I’m sorry about that, he said to Anne Frank as he approached the wall. He’s a scientist, you know, his world is facts, not feelings.

  The typing stopped. Kugel looked over the wall, and Anne turned to face him. The stack of manuscript pages beside her computer had grown.

  What is she, said Anne Frank, stealing my bit?

  What?

  Your mother, said Anne Frank. What’s with all the attic crap?

  Kugel’s immediate concern became Jonah; if Anne Frank could hear Mother, so could he.

  If she wants to steal something, said Anne Frank, let her steal from Wiesel.

  How much more does the little guy need to know, anyway? thought Kugel. Burying one severed cat head a week was enough, wasn’t it? Did he have to get into attics and Nazis?

  I don’t know what’s worse, Mr. Kugel, continued Anne Frank, your mother’s auto-hagiography or the people like you who permit it to be written.

  She began typing again.

  The Brothers Grimm, she muttered, were never so grim.

  Kugel often wondered how he would explain it all to Jonah. Other fathers worried about the Big Talk, but sex would be easier to explain than mass murder. How was he to do that? In terms he can understand, advised the books he’d purchased on talking to young children about death. Well, Jonah, he would say, you like SpongeBob, right? Well, some people don’t like SpongeBob, like Plankton. Plankton hates SpongeBob, right? Now, imagine if there was a whole bunch of Planktons, and a whole bunch of SpongeBobs, and the Planktons all got together and said, Things in Bikini Bottom would be better for everyone if we got rid of the SpongeBobs. Do you know what an optimist is? Anyway, one day, the Planktons rounded up all the SpongeBobs, and put them in, well, a sort of a camp. What kind of camp? Well, a death camp. And what happened was, you see, the Planktons tried to exterminate the SpongeBobs. What does exterminate mean? Do you know what annihilate means? Anyway, one very brave SpongeBob managed to hide from the Planktons in Mr. Krabs’s attic. Was it a happy ending? Well, that’s where it gets a little tricky, son . . .

  I have to check on Jonah, he said.

  Anne began typing again.

  Have you told him about me? asked Anne Frank.

  I was going to talk to him about fucking first, said Kugel, preparing to go back down the stairs.

  Protecting a child from the outside world is easy, said Anne Frank as Kugel struggled to descend; his leg ached and he could only hold on, awkwardly, with his one good hand.

  Protecting him from his inner world, Anne Frank continued, is quite a bit more complicated.

  And other parenting tips, said Kugel, from hideous lunatic shut-ins.

  Some terrible parents before the war were great parents during it, said Anne Frank. The convenience of an enemy, Mr. Kugel; no nation has more enemies abroad than the one failing at home; no father yells more loudly at the Little League coach—He was safe!—than the father of the child who is utterly unsafe at home.

  How’s the book coming? he asked.

  But there was no reply.

  Kugel made his way down the attic stairs.

  The train incident, or rather his reactions and those of his fellow passengers to it, had bothered Kugel, so he mentioned it to Professor Jove when he arrived at his office later that morning.

  Why did it bother you? Professor Jove had asked.

  It was awful, said Kugel, we were awful. In our anger we were unfeeling, and in our sympathy we were self-involved.

  So?

  So we should be better.

  But we’re not.

  But we should be.

  What, Professor Jove asked Kugel, did the bartender say to the homosexual?

  Goddamn it, thought Kugel.

  I don’t know, he said, what did the bartender say to the homosexual?

  He said we don’t serve faggots.

  I don’t get it, said Kugel.

  He stood upright, Professor Jove continued, pointed to the door and said, Get out. Other customers likely joined in. The poor man agreed to leave, didn’t want any trouble, just wanted a beer, but it was too late. They beat him half to death. They broke his teeth. They stripped him bare. They shoved a plunger up his ass. They wrote Fag on his back with the point of a knife and left him to die in the gutter.

  I still don’t get it
.

  There’s nothing to get. We’re ugly. Have you been to the zoo lately? You should go. Take Jonah with you, it will be good for him. See the placid zebra strolling in his field. Witness the mighty lion lazing in the sun. Smile at the droopy-eyed camel enjoying a mouthful of grass. Then go to the monkey house. Go see your forefathers. They are, by far, the most dangerous creatures in the zoo. They rape, they kill, they form gangs. They’re terrifying, your greatest-grandparents. Look at the warnings they post on the monkey cages, warnings not posted anywhere else: Do Not Taunt the Monkeys; Do Not Stare at the Gorilla; Do Not Put Hands in Cage. No other species requires such caution as the one from which we came. They’re missing only one sign, the most important sign of all: Do Not Evolve From This Species.

  That’s depressing, said Kugel.

  Only, said Professor Jove, if you thought we’d be better. Stop expecting more from us than we can possibly provide, and you’ll stop being so disappointed.

  Jonah was sound asleep, and Kugel returned to the dining room.

  How is she? asked Hannah.

  She?

  Mother.

  Oh. Okay.

  Soon after, Mother, too, returned to the dining room; in her hands, she held the lamp shade she had given Kugel when he was a boy.

  Goddamn it, thought Kugel.

  Mother walked mournfully to the head of the table, a look of dignified grievance on her face.

  We stayed in that annex for as long as we could, said Mother.

  Kugel placed his foot over the heating vent.

  But a man we considered a friend, Mother continued, soon turned us in. I don’t blame him; he was protecting his own family. What’s another dead Jew in the grand scheme of things?

  She held the lamp shade in both hands, and presented it to Pinkus, as one presents a crown to a king.

  Of thorns, thought Kugel.

  This, my dear Pinkus, said Mother, is my aunt.

  Kugel shook his head.

  Pinkus took the lamp shade in his hand.