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

by Nathan Englander

  And from this pile of broken bodies that had been—prior to the American invasion—set to be burned, a rickety, skeletal Tendler stared back. Professor Tendler stared and studied, and when he was sure that those soldiers were not Nazi soldiers, he crawled out from his hiding place among the corpses, pushing and shoving those balsa-wood arms and legs aside.

  It was this hill of bodies that had protected Tendler day after day. The poor Sonderkommando who dumped the bodies, as well as those who came to cart them to the ovens, knew that the boy was inside. They brought him the crumbs of their crumbs to keep him going. And though it was certain death for these prisoners to protect him, it allowed them a sliver of humanity in their inhuman jobs. This was what Shimmy was trying to explain to his son—that these palest shadows of kindness were enough to keep a dead man alive.

  When Tendler finally got to his feet, straightening his body out, when the corpse that was Professor Tendler at age thirteen—“your age”—came crawling from that nightmare, he looked at the two Yankee soldiers, who looked at him and then hit the ground with a thud.

  Professor Tendler had already seen so much in life that this was not worth even a pause, and so he walked on. He walked on naked through the gates of the camp, walked on until he got some food and some clothes, walked on until he had shoes and then a coat. He walked on until he had a little bread and a potato in his pocket—a surplus.

  Soon there was also in that pocket a cigarette and then a second, a coin and then a second. Surviving in this way, Tendler walked across borders until he was able to stand straight and tall, until he showed up in his childhood town in a matching suit of clothes, with a few bills in his pocket and, in his waistband, a six-shooter with five bullets chambered, in order to protect himself during the nights that he slept by the side of the road.

  Professor Tendler was expecting no surprises, no reunions. He’d seen his mother killed in front of him, his father, his three sisters, his grandparents, and, after some months in the camp, the two boys he knew from back home.

  But home—that was the thing he held on to. Maybe his house was still there, and his bed. Maybe the cow was still giving milk, and the goats still chewing garbage, and his dog still barking at the chickens as before. And maybe his other family—the nurse at whose breast he had become strong (before weakened), her husband, who had farmed his father’s field, and their son (his age), and another (two years younger), boys with whom he had played like a brother—maybe this family was still there waiting. Waiting for him to come home.

  Tendler could make a new family in that house. He could call every child he might one day have by his dead loved ones’ names.

  The town looked as it had when he’d left. The streets were his streets, the linden trees in the square taller but laid out as before. And when Tendler turned down the dirt road that led to his gate, he fought to keep himself from running, and he fought to keep himself from crying, because, after what he had seen, he knew that to survive in this world he must always act like a man.

  So Tendler buttoned his coat and walked quietly toward the fence, wishing that he had a hat to take off as he passed through the gate—just the way the man of the house would when coming home to what was his.

  But when he saw her in the yard—when he saw Fanushka, his nurse, their maid—the tears came anyway. Tendler popped a precious button from his coat as he ran to her and threw himself into her arms, and he cried for the first time since the trains.

  With her husband at her side, Fanushka said to him, “Welcome home, son,” and “Welcome home, child,” and “We prayed,” “We lit candles,” “We dreamed of your return.”

  When they asked, “Are your parents also coming? Are your sisters and your grandparents far behind?” and when they asked after all the old neighbors, house by house, Tendler answered, not by metaphor, and not by insinuation. When he knew the fate, he stated it as it was: beaten or starved, shot, cut in half, the front of the head caved in. All this he related without feeling—matters, each, of fact. All this he shared before venturing a step through his front door.

  Looking through that open door, Tendler decided that he would live with these people as family until he had a family of his own. He would grow old in this house. Free to be free, he would gate himself up again. But it would be his gate, his lock, his world.

  A hand on his hand pulled him from his reverie. It was Fanushka talking, a sad smile on her face. “Time to fatten you up,” she said. “A feast for first dinner.” And she grabbed the chicken at her feet and twisted its neck right there in the yard. “Come in,” she said while the animal twitched. “The master of the house has returned.”

  “Just as you left it,” she said. “Only a few of our things.”

  Tendler stepped inside.

  It was exactly as he remembered it—the table, the chairs—except that all that was personal was gone.

  Fanushka’s two sons came in, and Tendler understood what time had done. These boys, fed and housed, warmed and loved, were fully twice his size. He felt, then, something he had never known in the camps, a civilized emotion that would have served no use. Tendler felt ashamed. He turned red, clenched his jaw tight, and felt his gums bleeding into his mouth.

  “You have to understand,” Etgar’s father said to his son. “These boys, his brothers, they were now twice his size and strangers to him.”

  The boys, prodded, shook hands with Tendler. They did not know him anymore.

  · · ·

  “Still, it is a nice story,” Etgar said. “Sad. But also happy. He makes it home to a home. It’s what you always say. Survival, that’s what matters. Surviving to start again.”

  Etgar’s father held up a sunflower seed, thinking about this. He cracked it between his front teeth.

  “So they are all making a dinner for Professor Tendler,” he said. “And he is sitting on the kitchen floor, legs crossed, as he did when he was a boy, and he is watching. Watching happily, drinking a glass of goat’s milk, still warm. And then the father goes out to slaughter that goat. ‘A feast for dinner,’ he says. ‘A chicken’s not enough.’ Professor Tendler, who has not had meat in years, looks at him, and the father, running a nail along his knife, says, ‘I remember the kosher way.’ ”

  Tendler was so happy that he could not bear it. So happy and so sad. And, with the cup of warm milk and the warm feeling, Tendler had to pee. But he didn’t want to move now that he was there with his other mother and, resting on her shoulder, a baby sister. A year and a half old and one curl on the head. A little girl, fat and happy. Fat in the ankle, fat in the wrist.

  Professor Tendler rushed out at the last second, out of the warm kitchen, out from under his roof. Professor Tendler, a man whom other men had tried to turn into an animal, did not race to the outhouse. It didn’t cross his mind. He stood right under the kitchen window to smell the kitchen smells, to stay close. And he took a piss. Over the sound of the stream, he heard his nurse lamenting.

  He knew what she must be lamenting—the Tendler family destroyed.

  He listened to what she was saying. And he heard.

  “He will take everything” is what she said. “He will take it all from us—our house, our field. He’ll snatch away all we’ve built and protected, everything that has been—for so long—ours.”

  There outside the window, pissing and listening, and also “disassociating,” as Professor Tendler would call it (though he did not then have the word), he knew only that he was watching himself from above, that he could see himself feeling all the disappointment as he felt it, until he was keenly and wildly aware that he had felt nothing all those years, felt nothing when his father and mother were shot, felt nothing while in the camps, nothing, in fact, from the moment he was driven from his home to the moment he returned.

  In that instant, Tendler’s guilt was sharper than any sensation he had ever known.

  And here, in response to his precocious son, Shimmy said, “Yes, yes, of course it was about survival—Tendler’s way
of coping. Of course he’d been feeling all along.” But Tendler—a boy who had stepped over his mother’s body and kept walking—had, for those peasants, opened up.

  It was right then, Professor Tendler later told Shimmy, that he became a philosopher.

  “He will steal it all away,” Fanushka said. “Everything. He has come for our lives.”

  And her son, whom Tendler had considered a brother, said, “No.” And Tendler’s other almost brother said, “No.”

  “We will eat,” Fanushka said. “We will celebrate. And when he sleeps, we will kill him.” To one of the sons, she said, “Go. Tell your father to keep that knife sharp.” To the other, she said, “You get to sleep early, and you get up early, and before you grab the first tit on that cow, I want his throat slit. Ours. Ours, not to be taken away.”

  Tendler ran. Not toward the street, but back toward the outhouse in time to turn around as the kitchen door flew open, in time to smile at the younger brother on his way to find his father, in time for Tendler to be heading back the right way.

  “Do you want to hear what was shared at such a dinner?” Shimmy asked his son. “The memories roused and oaths sworn? There was wine, I know. ‘Drink, drink,’ the mother said. There was the chicken and a pot of goat stew. And, in a time of great deprivation, there was also sugar for the tea.” At this, Shimmy pointed at the bounty of their stand. “And, as if nothing, next to the baby’s basket on the kitchen floor sat a basket of apples. Tendler hadn’t had an apple in who knows how long.”

  Tendler brought the basket to the table. The family laughed as he peeled the apples with a knife, first eating the peels, then the flesh, and savoring even the seeds and the cores. It was a celebration, a joyous night. So much so that Professor Tendler could not by its end, belly distended, eyes crossed with drink, believe what he knew to have been said.

  There were hugs and there were kisses, and Tendler—the master of the house—was given his parents’ bedroom upstairs, the two boys across the hall, and below, in the kitchen (“It will be warmest”), slept the mother and the father and the fat-ankled girl.

  “Sleep well,” Fanushka said. “Welcome home, my son.” And, sweetly, she kissed Tendler on both eyes.

  Tendler climbed the stairs. He took off his suit and went to bed. And that was where he was when Fanushka popped through the door and asked him if he was warm enough, if he needed a lamp by which to read.

  “No, thank you,” he said.

  “So formal? No thanks necessary,” Fanushka said. “Only ‘Yes, Mother,’ or ‘No, Mother,’ my poor reclaimed orphan son.”

  “No light, Mother,” Tendler said, and Fanushka closed the door.

  Tendler got out of bed. He put on his suit. Once again without any shame to his actions, Tendler searched the room for anything of value, robbing his own home.

  Then he waited. He waited until the house had settled into itself, the last creak slipping from the floorboards as the walls pushed back against the wind. He waited until his mother, his Fanushka, must surely sleep, until a brother intent on staying up for the night—a brother who had never once fought for his life—convinced himself that it would be all right to close his eyes.

  Tendler waited until he, too, had to sleep, and that’s when he tied the laces of his shoes together and hung them over his shoulder. That’s when he took his pillow with one hand and, with the other, quietly cocked his gun.

  Then, with goose feathers flying, Tendler moved through the house. A bullet for each brother, one for the father and one for the mother. Tendler fired until he found himself standing in the warmth of the kitchen, one bullet left to protect him on the nights when he would sleep by the side of the road.

  That last bullet Tendler left in the fat baby girl, because he did not know from mercy, and did not need to leave another of that family to grow to kill him at some future time.

  · · ·

  “He murdered them,” Etgar said. “A murderer.”

  “No,” his father told him. “There was no such notion at the time.”

  “Even so, it is murder,” Etgar said.

  “If it is, then it’s only fair. They killed him first. It was his right.”

  “But you always say—”

  “Context.”

  “But the baby. The girl.”

  “The baby is hardest, I admit. But these are questions for the philosopher. These are the theoretical instances put into flesh and blood.”

  “But it’s not a question. These people, they are not the ones who murdered his family.”

  “They were coming for him that night.”

  “He could have escaped. He could have run for the gate when he overheard. He didn’t need to race back toward the outhouse, race to face the brother as he came the other way.”

  “Maybe there was no more running in him. Anyway, do you understand ‘an eye for an eye’? Can you imagine a broader meaning of self-defense?”

  “You always forgive him,” Etgar said. “You suffered the same things—but you aren’t that way. You would not have done what he did.”

  “It is hard to know what a person would and wouldn’t do in any specific instance. And you, spoiled child, apply the rules of civilization to a boy who had seen only its opposite. Maybe the fault for those deaths lies in a system designed for the killing of Tendlers that failed to do its job. An error, a slip that allowed a Tendler, no longer fit, back loose in the world.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “It’s what I ask. And I ask you, my Etgar, what you would have done if you were Tendler that night?”

  “Not kill.”

  “Then you die.”

  “Only the grown-ups.”

  “But it was a boy who was sent to cut Tendler’s throat.”

  “How about killing only those who would do harm?”

  “Still it’s murder. Still it is killing people who have yet to act, murdering them in their sleep.”

  “I guess,” Etgar said. “I can see how they deserved it, the four. How I might, if I were him, have killed them.”

  Shimmy shook his head, looking sad.

  “And whoever are we, my son, to decide who should die?”

  · · ·

  It was on that day that Etgar Gezer became a philosopher himself. Not in the manner of Professor Tendler, who taught theories up at the university on the mountain, but, like his father, practical and concrete. Etgar would not finish high school or go to college, and, except for his three years in the army, he would spend his life—happily—working the stand in the shuk. He’d stack the fruit into pyramids and contemplate weighty questions with a seriousness of thought. And when there were answers, Etgar would try employing them to make for himself and others, in whatever small way, a better life.

  It was on that day, too, that Etgar decided Professor Tendler was both a murderer and, at the same time, a misken. He believed he understood how and why Professor Tendler had come to kill that peasant family, and how men sent to battle in uniform—even in the same uniform—would find no mercy at his hand. Etgar also came to see how Tendler’s story could just as easily have ended for the Professor that first night, back in his parents’ room, in his parents’ bed, a gun with four bullets held in a suicide’s hand—how the first bullet Tendler ever fired might have been into his own head.

  Still, every Friday, Etgar packed up Tendler’s fruit and vegetables. And in that bag Etgar would add, when he had them, a pineapple or a few fat mangoes dripping honey. Handing it to Tendler, Etgar would say, “Kach, Professor. Take it.” This, even after his father had died.

  Acknowledgments

  With deepest gratitude, I’d like to thank my truly-limitless-in-her-faith-and-inexhaustible-in-her-patience agent, Nicole Aragi, and the trusty Robin to her Batman, one Ms. Christie Hauser. Equally abundant thanks go to my amazing editor, Jordan Pavlin, who came to my first-ever reading and has offered a golden ear ever since. I’m much obliged to editorial assistant Leslie Levine, as well as all the fine folk at Knopf, e
specially Barbara de Wilde (who has designed all three covers) and Sara Eagle (spelled like the bird, as her voice mail attests). A huge thanks to Merle Englander, who read these stories forward and back, and who can spot a missing comma at a thousand yards. The same with Rachel Silver, who has the book’s dedication, but belongs here, too. To my personal physician, Daniel Brodie; and to my first reader (and second opinion), Chris Adrian—a debt of gratitude is owed. And likewise to a truly generous soul, and my hairiest muse, Etgar Keret, who inspired not one story in this book but two. Finally, if you leave Etgar’s apartment in Tel Aviv, head over to the central bus station, and take the #405 up the mountain to Jerusalem, you’ll reach the man farthest away that I’d like to acknowledge, and that is Joel Weiss, who, when it comes to facts Hebraic, puts Google to shame.

  Nathan Englander is the author of the internationally bestselling story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases. Translated into more than a dozen languages, Englander was selected as one of 20 Writers for the 21st Century by The New Yorker and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Also by Nathan Englander

  For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

  The Ministry of Special Cases

  Copyright

  A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook

  First published in Great Britain in 2012

  by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  This ebook first published in 2012

  by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  Copyright © 2012 Nathan Englander

  The right of Nathan Englander to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.