Lucena

by Mois Benarroch

  Then there were weeks of our getting along unusually well, a tranquility that seemed would last forever but it never lasted. And I am afraid of breaking down like you. Sometimes my head feels like it is going to explode without stopping: boom, boom, boom and then I only feel like going out to kill people. I’m afraid one day I will not be able to control myself and I’ll grab a weapon or a kitchen knife and kill some people like you tried to do one time. Fortunately your neighbor saw you and they caught you. You were at the point of killing a child out in the street. A five year old who will for the rest of his life carry a scar and will walk down the street being afraid of knives. They hospitalized you for two weeks but the next day you were perfectly calm. You were a very noble woman. You never talked about Poland. Only when you were sleeping I would hear you pronounce the word Breslau, and then you would say something in Polish I didn’t understand anything. You didn’t want me to know that language in which they had burned your family. You also didn’t want me to know German, the language in which you read most books. You didn’t want me to know the language in which you were shouted at and humiliated.

  Mama, I don’t know if I can ever learn what happened to you before age thirty. What happened before the Holocaust? Perhaps for you there was nothing before the Holocaust. It was wiped from your memory. Were you married? Did you have children? You didn’t talk about that. I was a man without a past, without family, the dead man. Only in the last years in the Elder care residence, you said all kinds of strange things, in delirium or perhaps it was true. One time you asked me why my brother did not come to see you. I said what brother, what brother? But you didn’t answer. That is how our conversations went. Then you talked about your husband but one named Samuel, not the name of my father. Maybe it was a mistake, or insanity, or the life you had, or the one you wished you had had. In your sleep you would also scream the name of a girl Josephine. I remember you would shout “Josephine, you are so small, so small...”

  Sometimes you would talk about a trip to Paris. I will never learn nor will I be able to reconstruct our life with what you said or with what you didn’t want to say. Probably they were imaginations of a little girl which got mixed up in the life of a poor old lady. Probably they were real memories that you didn’t want to talk about. Maybe they were memories of your sister that got mixed up with yours, perhaps a twin sister. Maybe you had a twin sister named Josephine. When you were alive you didn’t want to talk about it. Perhaps now you will talk to me from the tomb. I always thought that one day when I would come to see you, you would tell me something. On a sunny day, in the elder care residence, in the garden when I would come to visit you, you would tell me things: what happened there, the siblings you had, what kind of family you came from, where the money came from, where the endless riches, until ten years ago, when you told me the Swiss bank account was depleted. Now you had to be stronger. You said that the money had been depleted and it was the truth. You had always had the prettiest dresses. At age eighteen you bought me a car. In those days that was very rare. In the year sixty six not even the rich kids had cars, and not an ordinary car, but the best car they made back then a Peugeot 404. All the kids envied me although they always said I was always the strange kid in class. The one nobody wanted to talk to. Not only did they not talk to the poor kids, the cross-eyed, the lame, or the sick mama they also marginalized the richest kid in class. But I didn’t care. I had my world. Up to now you and I were my world. There was nothing outside the walls of our house that interested me. Now I come every day to your tomb trying to reconstruct that world of ours with words, or at least trying to disappear as slowly as possible. Because it was a marvelous world. In it I could imagine what you would not tell me. Once I dreamed that in Warsaw you had been a whore but not an ordinary whore, but an elite whore, whose favors were sought by all the Ritchie Rich folks in the city. In the dream I felt proud but on waking I realized I had overstepped – and even making my own mother into a whore – made me ashamed and for two days I couldn’t even look at you. I’m sure you thought it was a problem of adolescence but I got over it many times. I imagined you being part of a very rich family. It must have been that way before the Swiss account money ran out only ten years ago. With that money you bought me the house in Rehavia, you took me to the best school. You gave me private lessons and piano lessons. You wanted to buy me security even knowing that money would no longer give us security, not to you or to me, just as it had not in the concentration camp. The money that the Jews hoped so much to be able to use again one day to save their lives, as it had been for hundreds of years, suddenly had no value, not for the Jews, not even the possibility of selling their bodies, and you knew that. Perhaps it went better for us than for the rest, perhaps thanks to that you could maintain your pride and not beg for any financial compensation from the Germans in spite of attempts by the neighbors to persuade you and acquaintances, including your Yemenite assistant who I remember would tell you: “What happened, happened. Now you must live in the present. They also stole my son but I continue living for the rest.” I don’t know what she was trying to tell you with this nor what son they stole. Maybe they stole the son of a survivor of the Holocaust like you. Maybe you thought she told you this to console you. Nowadays they talk a lot about the Yemenite children but back then we all thought she was crazy and you didn’t understand what she was saying. “If they stole your child, ask for compensation from Germany but I don’t have any intention of speaking to those people by letter or telephone.”

  At seventeen, I took my first girlfriend home. Claire, you remember, don’t you? Her mother was also a survivor of the Holocaust. You liked her a lot. You would hug her and lavished so much attention on her that one day she ran off and fled and left me. Perhaps it was your way to preserve our relationship, inverse to what you really wanted.Perhaps you thought that hugging a woman to your breast that could form part of my life. What makes me laugh so much is when people take me for being so independent that I don’t need anybody or anything. No one around me can know to what degree my life has depended on you. Everyone sees me as the lucky guy who lives in the opera building, and has no interest in seeing anything not coming from his own hands, such as the machines I design. They have no idea I did it all for you. Now I don’t care about anything. I wanted so much for you to be proud of your child for yourself of course, because you didn’t have many friends. Simply that you feel proud of me and with me. Now I have enough money. I am leaving the company that I built and managed. Nobody knows that yet. But surely if I go once a week, and in the most isolated corners of the planet, I look for a buyer of shares of the Company, or several, I think I’ll get a good price then I can spend the days sitting in front of your tomb and I will write about your life every day. I will write something different about Warsaw and about you about the Warsaw that I do not know and where I am prohibited from touching ground. And about you. I don’t know you, but you are the closest person to me every day you will be a different person, thus you will never die in your tomb. The new account and the new personality have to exist somewhere, and with that existence you will exist or perhaps when I die if anyone reads these tales their imagination will be my children and if not, at least I will know that I kept you alive here each day for an hour or two or eight, that I kept you alive in my imagination I, the boy who was born dead in 1947.

  IN CYPRUS

  I could not believe that I would return here and that words would flow like this. Except for that short story for which I received a prize at school: A story of an encounter between Little Red Riding Hood and Kafka, I don’t remember having written anything. Maybe two or three poems when I was fifteen. And now I come here every day and this notebook is ceaselessly filling with words, as though they had a very important function. As though they were soldiers called up to war who had to line up in a certain order. And since it is about the war of their existence they do it very well, perhaps professionally. But also, in the most efficient manner, that is how I write, and I wri
te about your life.

  I again am here thinking about Josephine, about how old she would have been when she died. Eight perhaps. There you saw her for the last time. You left on the train. Perhaps you left her in a convent. You knew she had died. You saw her burning and right away I ask myself how you managed to escape, without a scratch. Perhaps your beauty is what saved you. Maybe an old disgusting SS officer hid you in his room or in his office and took care of you in exchange for you submitting. Perhaps your beauty saved you, or your courage. Perhaps you fled to the forest with Josephine until she could not go any farther. I remember that sometimes you would mistake my name and instead of calling me Yosef you would call me Joseph and then I would ask you who is Joseph. Then you sunk into one of those long silences that could last even all day until I learned there were things one must not ask. Because I knew if I asked you about anything related to your past, in the time before I was born, you would right away immerse yourself in your bubble and disappear. And I knew it caused you immense pain.

  But today, here at your recent tomb and our marvelous old age, I think about Josephine, my beloved sister. Did she have big, green eyes like yours, or brown, like mine and my father’s? Was she tall? Did she have brown, or black hair?

  Perhaps she was funny and you laughed for the last time in your life? A laugh that, compared with any other, only reminded you of her. A laugh that, when compared with any other, seemed to be a sob. That full laugh, the authentic laugh before you lost your innocence and your dreams for the world. Because I could see that you dreamed a lot, that you lived a dream, a dream that was transformed in a few moments of the universe, a few foolish moments in history, was transformed into a nightmare in a nightmare so enormous that you never knew how to dream again.

  With increasing age, Josephine appeared more and more frequently in our dreams. You would see her dressed in white with a long white dress running through the passageways of the great mansion and laughing. Sometimes I see you two in my dreams, you and her. She greets me and she always gives me something, an umbrella, a handkerchief or a ball and you tell me, without saying a word, “She’s my daughter.” and I am so happy to have a lovely little sister, and I love her very much, Josephine, and I like her laugh so much.

  But perhaps Josephine was your sister, and not mine. Maybe you both were hidden in a basement, in the mountains. And one day they found her but not you. Or perhaps you both traveled toward death, hand in hand, on that gloomy train and you cannot forgive yourself that you are alive and she is not. If so many died, why continue living? How many people can be remembered and how many forgotten? Surely, some time ago you forgot some relative, and now there is no one left who remembers them.

  LUNCH WITH GRANDMA

  “Twenty six coins,” he said. “Gold. Five-franc French coins.”

  “Twenty six? Are you sure?”

  “That is what he said.”

  Yes, gold. French francs as well, but twenty six?”

  “That is what he said. And I remember it well. Also I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it. Look: I have it written here: 26.”

  “Well,”

  “Why, Were there less?”

  “Eighteen. It would be interesting to know where the other eight ended up. Someone stole them. I always suspected that someone had stolen some coins. Masoud’s sons were always richer than the others and nobody knew where the money had come from. Although perhaps the grandmother gave it to them. But one can’t suspect the dead.”

  “These things happen. So you believe that it is him, that he is a thousand years old. Should I believe him?

  He also talked about the vessel. He said it came from Lucena, that the family takes it with them no matter where they go. He also knew that I had grabbed the key to the house in Tetuán. We always take the keys to the houses but I made a copy of one.”

  “I also took the key from the house in Tetuán. We always take the keys before anything else and he surely knows it. We and the Moors always take the keys before anything else as if that proves something, but what?”

  “I suppose it shows that we take the keys. I never thought it necessary to prove anything.”

  “Maybe it is him.”

  “Can I trust him?”

  “What for? I hope you haven’t. But if what he wants is to tell you stories about keys from Grenada and vessels from Lucena, let him do it. I knew a few crazies like him in Tetuán who always talked about the great possessions they had in Granada and said that after Franco it would all be returned. They wanted me to marry them for that. I listened to them and I married your grandfather who already had property in Tetuán and in Tangier even in Jerusalem. Have you brought me any magazines or something else? You are really going crazy with that Lucena fellow.”

  “I didn’t bring anything. I came straight here after saying goodbye to him but I would like to eat something.”

  “In the freezer there is chicken, and it’s kosher. I don’t eat in some houses that I know real well.”

  “Splendid! Because now I’m going to eat only kosher. By the way, sometimes I have seen shrimps in your house, haven’t I?”

  “Yes, shrimps yes, but there has never been pork in my freezer.”

  “One is unclean and the other is not kosher. What’s the difference?”

  “Pork is a double sin. Shrimps come from the sea and the sea is pure. Also shrimp is delicious and pork is not. Besides, my kitchen has been kosher for a long time. After years, everything tastes the same. So why eat non-kosher food?”

  “You have an interesting concept of kosher.”

  “What do you want me to say? In Tetuán we ate shrimp. That’s the way it was.”

  Samuel ate chicken at his grandmother’s house, a flavorless chicken for young folks or old folks. He was able to choke it down by drowning it with mustard and mayonnaise.

  Samuel arrived at his parents’ house. His mother was waiting with dinner ready.

  “I have fixed you kosher chicken.”

  “I already had kosher chicken at grandma’s house, although I’m already beginning to ask myself if it’s any use. Maybe I’ll go back to eating squids. I always liked them.”

  “NOW you’ve decided to go to your grandmother’s house,” shouted his father from the table where he was seated with a glass of Chivas Regal and a few olives. “I hope you haven’t

  taken her more issues of Playboy and that you haven’t kept scaring her with mafia stories. Once you almost caused her a heart attack and she nearly died.”

  “You would have liked that, wouldn’t you? You would have received all her inheritance. She told me you took her daughters out of her will and that uncle Masoud and you will keep everything.”

  It was probably false as the grandmother had never said anything of the kind but he knew that this is what happens with inheritances. He had heard one of his uncle’s sons say that.

  “How can you talk to me like that? Get out of here! Go to your room! What? That I would like to see my mother dead? Youth today have no boundaries! I told you not to pamper him so much. Look what he’s become! Besides being paunchy he’s impertinent beyond all limits!”

  The mother: “Come on, Samuel, that’s no way to talk to your father.”

  “It was only a joke.”

  “Hateful joke,” said Muriel.

  “Let’s sit at the table. Even if you have already eaten at your grandmother’s house, you can sit with us.”

  This lunch went on calmly. Everyone ate and laughed. It seemed that this time the whiskey had done his father some good, and his mother was glowing, like a couple who had made love the previous night. Samuel was always surprised when peaceful meals occurred unexpectedly but he was also astounded that the majority of the times they were the scene of pointless arguments with no purpose and shouts all around without any intention of listening to one another. For dessert they had flan.

  THE RAGE CAFE