What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories

by Nathan Englander

  This, the book buyer doesn’t miss. “Would you listen to that?” he says. “Your public calling.” Before he says more, the author, hangdog, turns and heads downstairs.

  · · ·

  The reading is starting, but no one from the café comes in. Conversations continue. The music blares. It takes no small effort on the part of the buyer to convince the barista to turn the sound system down. There is—Author hears it—a low round of boos.

  The old man sits in the front row in the tiny three-row back room. Small as it is, there’s still a plywood stage, a foot high and not much deeper, with a little lectern perched at an angle, from which the author will read.

  The emotion on Author’s face is clear. And the buyer waits for him to compose himself, though it’s quickly becoming obvious that Author’s despair is anything but subsiding. It seems to be frothing into a rage aimed, inexplicably, at the frail little man.

  “Buddy,” the buyer says, trying to steer Author to the stage, “how about you just give the guy five minutes and then we’ll grab us that drink?” The buyer, without even noticing, is kneading Author’s shoulders and patting his back, as if coaxing him into the ring.

  “Yes, five minutes,” the old man says. “Now up! Up on that stage. Time to start.”

  This sets the author off.

  “Stalker!” Author screams.

  “Patron!”

  “Do you understand how crazy it is?” Author says.

  “Do you understand how crazy it is—you?”

  Author stands silent, visibly shaking. The old man turns to the buyer, assuming he’s taken the author’s side.

  “Tell me, why is the artist a romantic for surviving on a glimmer of hope? Why not the same for the reader? Why is my commitment a weaker thing? I came,” the old man says, “he reads!”

  The author, as if the two men are alone in the world, screams back. “I won’t. Devil! Devilish, devilish old man.”

  The old man is laughing. To the buyer, he says, “He’ll read, you’ll see.” And to Author, adamant, demanding: “Tell this bookman so he understands. Tell him what’s really at stake in your heart and mine.”

  Author does not want to cry. He can feel his eyes wet, and goes as far as tipping his head back, praying a tear won’t fall.

  “What? What?” the old man says, a hand cupped to his ear.

  Author says, “It will not, aloud, sound so good.”

  “Tell him!” the old man yells, pointing to the buyer. “Tell him why a man like you does what he does.”

  “I write,” Author says, his face twisted into a wince, “to touch people in the way that I, as a reader, have been touched.” And here his expression unwinds. “And if I were still any good at all, it wouldn’t be just you two here listening. A failure, I admit it. Now you,” he says to the old man, “admit it, too.”

  “Self-pity. The lament of the aging beauty queen. No,” the reader says, “I won’t admit failure for a book written for the ages.”

  The two men stand there facing each other, Author now openly weeping. They are caught in a moment so large and so raw that they do not notice that the cell-phone ringers have gone silent and the coffee machine has lost its terrible hiss, that the chatter is missing from the next room as the whole of that coffee shop, drawn by the screaming, now crowds around the doorway, watching their fight.

  It’s the woman from behind the counter, pierced and tatted and hair streaked blue. “Come on, read,” she says, her call immediately backed up by another. “Get up there,” someone yells. And another screams, “Hey, one old guy, give the other old guy his due.” A sizable audience is forming. Gunged up with all his blubbering and sniffling, Author takes his book and a stiff-kneed step up to the stage. He will read tonight to a mob.

  “Oh, no!” the old man yells. “Not this way.” He gets behind the door and, with feet dug in, he pushes hard against it, attempting to close it on the assembled hipsters, who do not immediately retreat. “Out!” he yells. “Out, out, stylish young people!”

  The old man frees a hand and points at Author onstage, so that only the pointing hand is visible to those on the café side of the door. “This man, a legend! Not a trained cat from a Russian circus,” he yells. “You listen for the right reasons. This is not a monkey who will ride a dog for a show.” And when the old man says, “Russian,” Author, watching from the stage, thinks, “Russian,” and remembers the story of a promised dovecot. He sees a pair of Babel’s bloody birds broken at his feet.

  The old man keeps on with his pushing until the door is shut. During the scuffle, his black, black hair has somehow flipped in the wrong direction, his part reversed. That miraculous hair, which Author was sure was left untouched by time, reveals itself to be a separate color underneath. It is the sick yellow of straw. Author’s reader for once looks his properly petrified age. And the reader, somehow sensing this, hurriedly flips his hair back to where it belongs. His hand, so much worse than Author’s, spills over with tremors.

  “Me and him,” the old man says to Author while pulling the bookseller toward him. “Why not read for this nice pair, who both know and understand?”

  Author opens his novel to a random page—symbolic. He gets ready to read from memory, to recite for his relentless pursuer. He will read the old man’s favorite part. Author starts in, unintelligible, with the echoes of all his hemming and crying and a rattle to his voice.

  He has not read two lines when he stops. He puts a hand up to signal that he’s only pausing, and Author pulls from his back pocket a small, soft notebook, its spiral gone. It is where Author, secretly, involuntarily, and against better judgment, makes his endless notes. It is where he sketches a new book, for which no one will wait, and of which no one will hear. Pulling the rubber band off, he knows his reader won’t live to see it, even if Author soldiers on to see it done.

  “Something new I’ve been working on,” Author says. And the old man nods, full of respect. And the bookseller, who has been standing until now, nods as well, taking a seat at the reader’s side.

  And Author, who has played bigger and larger, who has, under all the pressure in the world, executed such evenings with aplomb, wipes his nose on his sleeve, takes a deep breath, and—leaning down close to the little book—reads on with all he’s got.

  Author reads for Seattle; it has always been his city. He reads for the buyer, who has always believed. Author reads one more time to his old man. He smiles at his reader, and reads on through the tears. Author reads on. And Author reads on.

  Free Fruit

  for Young Widows

  When the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser took control of the Suez Canal, threatening Western access to that vital route, an agitated France shifted allegiances, joining forces with Britain and Israel against Egypt. This is a fact neither here nor there, except that during the 1956 Sinai Campaign there were soldiers in the Israeli army and soldiers in the Egyptian army who ended up wearing identical French-supplied uniforms to battle.

  Not long into the fighting, an Israeli platoon came to rest at a captured Egyptian camp to the east of Bir Gafgafa, in the Sinai Desert. There Private Shimmy Gezer (formerly Shimon Bibberblat, of Warsaw, Poland) sat down to eat at a makeshift outdoor mess. Four armed commandos sat down with him. He grunted. They grunted. Shimmy dug into his lunch.

  A squad mate of Shimmy came over to join them. Professor Tendler (who was then only Private Tendler, not yet a professor, and not yet even in possession of a high school degree) placed the tin cup that he was carrying on the edge of the table, taking care not to spill his tea. Then he took up his gun and shot each of the commandos in the head.

  They fell quite neatly. The first two, who had been facing Professor Tendler, tipped back off the bench into the sand. The second pair, who had their backs to the Professor and were still staring openmouthed at their dead friends, fell facedown, the sound of their skulls hitting the table somehow more violent than the report of the gun.

  Shocked by the murder of fo
ur fellow soldiers, Shimmy Gezer tackled his friend. To Professor Tendler, who was much bigger than Shimmy, the attack was more startling than threatening. Tendler grabbed hold of Shimmy’s hands while screaming, “Egyptians! Egyptians!” in Hebrew. He was using the same word about the same people in the same desert that had been used thousands of years before. The main difference, if the old stories are to be believed, was that God no longer raised His own fist in the fight.

  Professor Tendler quickly managed to contain Shimmy in a bear hug. “Egyptian commandos—confused,” Tendler said, switching to Yiddish. “The enemy. The enemy joined you for lunch.”

  Shimmy listened. Shimmy calmed down.

  Professor Tendler, thinking the matter was settled, let Shimmy go. As soon as he did, Shimmy swung wildly. He continued attacking, because who cared who those four men were? They were people. They were human beings who had sat down at the wrong table for lunch. They were dead people who had not had to die.

  “You could have taken them prisoner!” Shimmy yelled. “Halt!” he screamed in German. “That’s all—Halt!” Then, with tears streaming and fists flying, Shimmy said, “You didn’t have to shoot.”

  By then, Professor Tendler had had enough. He proceeded to beat Shimmy Gezer. He didn’t just defend himself. He didn’t subdue his friend. He flipped Shimmy over, straddled his body, and pounded it down until it was level with the sand. He beat his friend until his friend couldn’t take any more beating, and then he beat him some more. Finally, he climbed off Shimmy, looked up into the hot sun, and pushed through the crowd of soldiers who had assembled in the minutes since the Egyptians sat down to their fate. Tendler went off to have a smoke.

  For those who had come running at the sound of gunfire and found five bodies in the sand, it was the consensus that a pummeled Shimmy Gezer looked to be in the worst condition of the bunch.

  · · ·

  At the fruit-and-vegetable stand that Shimmy Gezer eventually opened in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda Market, his son, little Etgar, asked about the story of Professor Tendler again and again. From the time he was six, Etgar had worked the duchan at his father’s side whenever he wasn’t in school. At that age, knowing only a child’s version of the story—that Tendler had done something in one of the wars that upset Etgar’s father, and Etgar’s father had jumped on the man, and the man had (his father never hesitated to admit) beat him up very badly—Etgar couldn’t understand why his father was so nice to the Professor now. Reared, as he was, on the laws of the small family business, Etgar couldn’t grasp why he was forbidden to accept a single lira from Tendler. The Professor got his vegetables free.

  After Etgar weighed the tomatoes and the cucumbers, his father would take up the bag, stick in a nice fat eggplant, unasked, and pass it over to Professor Tendler.

  “Kach,” his father would say. “Take it. And wish your wife well.”

  · · ·

  As Etgar turned nine and ten and eleven, the story began to fill out. He was told about the commandos and the uniforms, about shipping routes and the Suez, and the Americans and the British and the French. He learned about the shots to the head. He learned about all the wars his father had fought in—’73, ’67, ’56, ’48—though Shimmy Gezer still stopped short of the one he’d first been swept up in, the war that ran from 1939 to 1945.

  Etgar’s father explained the hazy morality of combat, the split-second decisions, the assessment of threat and response, the nature of percentages and absolutes. Shimmy did his best to make clear to his son that Israelis—in their nation of unfinished borders and unwritten constitution—were trapped in a gray space that was called real life.

  In this gray space, he explained, even absolutes could maintain more than one position, reflect more than one truth. “You, too,” he said to his son, “may someday face a decision such as Professor Tendler’s—may you never know from it.” He pointed at the bloody stall across from theirs, pointed at a fish below the mallet, flopping on the block. “God forbid you should have to live with the consequences of decisions, permanent, eternal, that will chase you in your head, turning from this side to that, tossing between wrong and right.”

  But Etgar still couldn’t comprehend how his father saw the story to be that of a fish flip-flopping, when it was, in his eyes, only ever about that mallet coming down.

  · · ·

  Etgar wasn’t one for the gray. He was a tiny, thoughtful, bucktoothed boy of certainties. And, every Friday when Tendler came by the stand, Etgar would pack up the man’s produce and then run through the story again, searching for black and white.

  This man had saved his father’s life, but maybe he hadn’t. He’d done what was necessary, but maybe he could have done it another way. And even if the basic school-yard rule applied in adult life—that a beating delivered earns a beating in return—did it ever justify one as fierce as the beating his father had described? A pummeling so severe that Shimmy, while telling the story, would run Etgar’s fingers along his left cheek to show him where Professor Tendler had flattened the bone.

  Even if the violence had been justified, even if his father didn’t always say, “You must risk your friend’s life, your family’s, your own, you must be willing to die—even to save the life of your enemy—if ever, of two deeds, the humane one may be done,” it was not his father’s act of forgiveness, but his kindness that baffled Etgar.

  Shimmy would send him running across Agrippas Street to bring back two cups of coffee or two glasses of tea to welcome Professor Tendler, telling Etgar to snatch a good-size handful of pistachios from Eizenberg’s cart along the way. This treatment his father reserved only for his oldest friends.

  And absolutely no one but the war widows got their produce free. Quietly and with dignity, so as to cause these women no shame, Etgar’s father would send them off with fresh fruit and big bags of vegetables, sometimes for years after their losses. He always took care of the young widows. When they protested, he’d say, “You sacrifice, I sacrifice. All in all, what’s a bag of apples?”

  “It’s all for one country,” he’d say.

  When it came to Professor Tendler, so clear an answer never came.

  · · ·

  When Etgar was twelve, his father acknowledged the complexities of Tendler’s tale.

  “Do you want to know why I can care for a man who once beat me? Because to a story, there is context. There is always context in life.”

  “That’s it?” Etgar asked.

  “That’s it.”

  · · ·

  At thirteen, he was told a different story. Because at thirteen, Etgar was a man.

  “You know I was in the war,” Shimmy said to his son. The way he said it, Etgar knew that he didn’t mean ’48 or ’56, ’67 or ’73. He did not mean the Jewish wars, in all of which he had fought. He meant the big one. The war that no one in his family but Shimmy had survived, which was also the case for Etgar’s mother. This was why they had taken a new name, Shimmy explained. In the whole world, the Gezers were three.

  “Yes,” Etgar said. “I know.”

  “Professor Tendler was also in that war,” Shimmy said.

  “Yes,” Etgar said.

  “It was hard on him,” Shimmy said. “And that is why, why I am always nice.”

  Etgar thought. Etgar spoke.

  “But you were there, too. You’ve had the same life as him. And you’d never have shot four men, even the enemy, if you could have taken them prisoner, if you could have spared a life. Even if you were in danger, you’d risk—” Etgar’s father smiled, and stopped him.

  “Kodem kol,” he said, “a similar life is not a same life. There is a difference.” Here Shimmy’s face turned serious, the lightness gone. “In that first war, in that big war, I was the lucky one,” he said. “In the Shoah, I survived.”

  “But he’s here,” Etgar said. “He survived, just the same as you.”

  “No,” Etgar’s father said. “He made it through the camps. He walks, he breathes, and he was ver
y close to making it out of Europe alive. But they killed him. After the war, we still lost people. They killed what was left of him in the end.”

  For the first time, without Professor Tendler there, without one of Shimmy’s friends from the ghetto who stopped by to talk in Yiddish, without one of the soldier buddies from his unit in the reserves or one of the kibbutzniks from whom he bought his fruits and his vegetables, Etgar’s father sent Etgar across Agrippas Street to get two glasses of tea. One for Etgar and one for him.

  “Hurry,” Shimmy said, sending Etgar off with a slap on his behind. Before Etgar had taken a step, his father grabbed his collar and popped open the register, handing him a brand-new ten-shekel bill. “And buy us a nice big bag of seeds from Eizenberg. Tell him to keep the change. You and I, we are going to sit awhile.”

  Shimmy took out the second folding chair from behind the register. It would also be the first time that father and son had ever sat down in the store together. Another rule of good business: A customer should always find you standing. Always there’s something you can be doing—sweeping, stacking, polishing apples. The customers will come to a place where there is pride.

  · · ·

  This is why Professor Tendler got his tomatoes free, why the sight of the man who beat Shimmy made his gaze go soft with kindness in the way that it did when one of the miskenot came by—why it took on what Etgar called his father’s Free-Fruit-for-Young-Widows eyes. This is the story that Shimmy told Etgar when he felt that his boy was a man:

  The first thing Professor Tendler saw when his death camp was liberated were two big, tough American soldiers fainting dead away. The pair (presumably war-hardened) stood before the immense, heretofore unimaginable brutality of modern extermination, frozen, slack-jawed before a mountain of putrid, naked corpses, a hill of men.