The Holocaust Kid

by Sonia Pilcer

  I had been pregnant once before. The father was Ludwig, whom I had perhaps loved more than anyone else. “I can control myself,” he promised as he pulled out of me eighteen years ago. Coitus interruptus. What did I know?

  “Are you positive?” I had asked Dr. Klotchkoff in naïve wonder.

  For several days, I let the miracle wash over me. I walked the streets of Manhattan in a maternal haze, filled with the thick, fecund sensation of being female, carrying a new life. I imagined a beautiful boy with a rosebud penis, Ludwig’s straight brown hair, and my mother’s green eyes. A girl with his lustrous doe eyes; my dark, unruly hair; my father’s cleft chin.

  It would have been a baby of love, begotten of youthful passion. I had imagined that Lud and I, son of a German and daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors, could heal a terrible world. Swords to ploughshares, Ludwig said. Tikkun olam.

  It was impossible, of course. I was nineteen, in my second year of college. The illegal abortion was performed by a Queens obstetrician while his waiting room filled with mothers and wailing babies. He gave me a shot of morphine for the pain and threatened to stop if I continued to scream. The procedure cost eight hundred dollars, which I paid for with my savings. Ludwig had no money. We broke up soon afterward.

  Sometimes I thought of Ludwig. Wondered what his life turned out to be. I thought of the child too. Adolescent now. A boy? A girl? A high school senior. And I would have been a mother, as I had assumed over the years I would never be.

  Yet I had been raised to have babies. To give them names of murdered family members. Perele, Rutka, after my father’s sisters. Zalmen, his father. Jesse, my mother’s beloved brother. I couldn’t possibly have enough children to carry the names of all the dead. So I had none.

  How could it have been so easy?

  My mother had aborted twice in Germany before I was born, and a third time afterward, though recently she had mentioned a fourth. “You know, every time your Dad looked at me, I got pregnant,” she explained.

  So it was a tradition, if you could call two females in a family line a tradition. This careless disregard for human life. A paradox, really. As if the dead martyrs, who were revered, were more important than the living. My mother, so pretty, opening her Vivien Leigh eyes wide so that all could see her beauty. As if life were so very casual, when she had survived by a hangnail.

  For me, death was a pure abstraction. There had been no one left to die. I had never even been to a funeral.

  The first time I met Avi was in his yellow cab. He had picked me up with my rolling suitcase at La Guardia Airport. I had just returned from several months of living at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, where I was working on a script about a girl’s street gang in the early 1960s for Universal Studios.

  Once, I had been Dr. Shlock, concocting bubbe meises about movie stars, fanciful fictions about Liz and Dick, Cher, Jackie, and Elvis’s last words from the grave. Still a freelancer, I was now more gainfully employed by several studios as a script doctor. They sent me screenplays in overnight pouches, often as awesome in their awfulness as was the money involved in pre-production. My job was to try to create characters from stereotyped notions of human nature molded entirely from decades of sitcom-watching by mostly young, mostly male writers. I was so glad to be back in New York I could have kissed the cabbie.

  “Avi Ben-Tzion.” I read his license aloud as we drove along the Long Island Expressway. “Israeli?”

  He nodded without turning around.

  “How long have you lived in New York?”

  “Many years,” he answered in his lightly accented English. “I’ll take the Queensboro, okay? There shouldn’t be any traffic.”

  “I visited Israel in nineteen sixty-seven,” I remarked. “Right after the war.”

  “That was a high time for us.”

  “What about now?”

  “Israelis are too busy spending money, buying electronic junk. Imitating you Americans.”

  I let it pass, rejoicing to myself: I hadn’t come across a rude Israeli cab driver in some time. “Have you been driving for a long time?”

  He shrugged. “Look, I’m an artist. I do my work. I have my shows. Occasionally, when I need money for paint and canvas, I drive for a few days.”

  “Were you born in Israel?”

  “Europe,” he answered impatiently. “Poland, if you want to know.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Right after the war,” he added. “Nineteen forty-six.”

  “Your parents were in the camps,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Mine too,” I responded. “But I was born in Germany.”

  “Shoah.” Avi pronounced the single word as if it explained everything.

  “Your parents went directly to Israel?”

  “What are you doing? Interviewing me?” he asked.

  For the rest of the ride, neither of us spoke. It seemed we’d exhausted our capacity for conversation, or at least I had exhausted his. But when we got to my street, he turned around and gave me something. “Here.”

  “I don’t need a receipt.”

  “Why don’t you look at it?”

  I was surprised to discover a business card. Studio Bentzion was printed in a jagged type with his name and phone number.

  Avi Ben-Tzion. I had a chance to look at him for the first time. Thick brown hair streaked with gray, fair complexion, a good, strong face. A paper-cut scar arced the skin under his left eye, continuing in a diagonal across his cheek.

  “I thought I had really turned you off,” I said. “My American talking.”

  “You’re not an American.”

  “I came here when I was one and a half.”

  ”It doesn’t matter. Come and see my work if you like,” he said. “Then we can talk.”

  Several nights later, we met at China de Cuba in Chelsea.

  A wave of Chinese immigrants had arrived in Cuba during the 1920s. Their offspring invented this perfect combination for the restless New York palate: ropa vieja (old clothes) with egg rolls, shrimp lo mein, yellow rice and black beans, and wonton soup. Salsa and soy. Fortune cookies too.

  He chose a red booth by the window. I shimmied in next to him. The Cuban-Chinese decor was as schizo as the food. Bright fluorescent lights with red paper lanterns, Chinese calendars, red paper mats, gold lettering, enormous, unnegotiable red menus with Cuban dishes listed first, in Spanish and English, followed by Chinese dishes.

  “I can’t deal with this menu,” he said, putting it aside.

  “I don’t mind ordering for us,” I suggested.

  “Good.” He seemed to relax.

  A plate of steamed dumplings arrived, followed by fried plantains. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said, dipping a dumpling into the hot sauce. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something.”

  He looked at me curiously.

  “How did you get—this?” I pointed to the scar.

  “You want to know? Nothing big. A car accident. The windshield exploded in my face.” He looked at me. “Does it repel you?”

  I reached out to touch his scar, my finger tracing its path on his face, under his eye. “It feels so smooth.”

  We drove to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where Avi had a studio on a scary, empty block in an abandoned glass factory. He operated the industrial elevator by turning a key. The iron doors clanged open on the sixth floor.

  He turned on a board of switches. Suddenly, thousands of electrical watts flooded the room. And everywhere, there were canvases on white walls.

  I moved around the room slowly, still partly blinded by the light. The living area was separated from the studio by a rice-paper screen. Once my eyes grew accustomed, I saw black-outlined figures painted on vividly colored canvases. Strong, familiar, but unexpected images. Then I recognized these were biblical characters, taken out of the desert of thousands of years ago and placed in modern Israel. Jacob wrestling with the angel on Ben Yehuda Square in Jerusalem as couples sit and flirt at Café A
tar. Sarah and Hagar portrayed as two haggling women, pulling each other’s hair in the Mehane Yehuda market. King David as a young man, streaking across Dizengoff in Tel-Aviv, amid sexy billboards.

  Polaroids were taped next to the paintings on the walls as well as slips of paper with sketches and handwritten jottings. There were stacks of books in Hebrew and English.

  “You’re good!” I declared, relieved that I could be honest.

  “Good enough to drive a taxi.” His voice sounded rueful.

  “And get me to come to Brooklyn to see what you do when you’re not driving a taxi,” I said. “What are these?”

  There were several eight-foot oil canvases with a single naked, gaunt specter suspended in the center in a kind of agonized limbo.

  “These are ancestors too,” he said. “I recognize them.”

  “I don’t show these, though.”

  “Why?”

  “I was raised in a country of Jews, of survivors who had emigrated after the war. Formed in the image of strength—gevura—and self-discipline. Don’t look back. Everyone a soldier. One day a year, Yom Hashoah, we remembered the Holocaust.”

  “That was it?”

  “That was it. Otherwise, we didn’t indulge in psychology and we made fun of America’s Shoah business with all its wealthy survivors.”

  “You know, there were no such thing as survivors when I was growing up,” I told him. “I heard the word refugees or victims. Martyrs, even. Never survivors.”

  “Everyone’s a survivor nowadays,” he remarked. “My parents rarely mentioned the war. But whenever a yortzeit came up, and they had many, they lit candles, getting this other-world look in their eyes. But if you asked them about it, they just shook their heads.”

  Then he looked intently at me. “And then there were the real things that were happening around us. Bus stations and cafes blowing up in your face, stores on Dizengoff, our Broadway, exploding with glass and fire,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s how I got this.” He pointed to the scar. “When a bomb blew up in the Jerusalem bus station.”

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  “I don’t like to get into it.”

  I ran my finger gently over the scar.

  I watched, that first night, as he stripped down to purple bikini briefs. Avi was muscular, built close to the ground, long waist, narrow hips, thick chest hair with silver curls. Before he turned the lights off, he lit a candle. A white Sabbath candle.

  “Is it Shabbos?” I asked.

  “For me it is,” he answered.

  “And for me,” I agreed. “You should only know.” It had been longer than I cared to remember since I’d been intimate with a man.

  Avi pulled off my sweater, unhooked my bra, his fingers exploring. I lay down next to him. His eyes were closed. I kissed his face, gently touching his scar with my lips. It was taut as a guitar string.

  Oh! I cried out in pleasure as Avi moved over my body with his fingertips. How he outlined me, brushstrokes filling in large areas, then fine-tuning with his lips over the canvas of my skin. I reached out for him.

  Over the next few months, we spent most of his nights off together. There was fire in our bed and great affection, but we never mentioned the future. What I knew was that he had been married for a short time, had a son, Yonah, who was now grown. He had been living alone in New York for seven years.

  “Why did you leave?” I asked one evening after we had polished off several cartons of Chinese food at his loft. Now we drank beer, Chinese, of course, from a wine-sized bottle.

  “That’s very sensitive for most Israelis,” he said. “There’s a Hebrew word. Yordim. It means ‘gone down,’ one who has left Eretz Yisrael.”

  “Talk about guilt manipulation.”

  “If you want to know, it’s because I had to,” he went on tensely. “After the accident, I got a bad case of nerves. I couldn’t ride the bus anymore. I kept thinking I saw bombs in paper bags. It was just someone’s lunch. I was too anxious to drive. I thought I was leaving for a short time, but I never went back.”

  I reached over, starting to rub his shoulders.

  “Oh, that feels sweet.” He poured more beer into our glasses.

  Why is this night different from all other nights?

  I stood transfixed before the bathroom mirror several weeks later. What if? What if I didn’t put it in? The door to possibility sprang open before my eyes. I could have a child. A Jewish child. I would be a mother. Me! I opened the blue plastic case and stared at the rubber disc in the plastic case, in the shape of a yarmulke.

  A reverie of names spun in my head. A baby girl called Pearl. Zalmen, if he was a boy, except I’d change it to Sam. Or maybe Jesse.

  “Did you drown in there?” Avi called.

  “I’ll be right out.” I snapped the blue plastic case shut.

  He lay naked, waiting for me. I got into bed, next to him. Avi placed a green satin pillow under my hips. “Are you ready?”

  “Make me ready.”

  That night, millions of spermatozoa, whipping their long tails, spiraled upstream to find a solitary waiting ovum. While Avi and I slept in each other’s arms, a microscopic cell, inscribed with our genetic cuneiform, began its exponential split.

  Several weeks later, when nausea overcame me. I plunked down fourteen dollars for a plastic cup and dipstick. What a rip. Later, I slowly submerged the white stick into my humble cup of piss.

  Nothing happened.

  Then, suddenly, a slow reddening like a blush. I held my breath. The dawn of man! It spread across the plastic tip, turning the nib a bright baby pink.

  I held it up like a thermometer, then reread the instructions on the package. “These tests are not 100% reliable.” It had happened. I was with child.

  I thought of my cousin Lusia, who had married Greg, a gentle Catholic man, and was childless. She said that she thought the universe was too evil a place to bring children into. She knew, having watched her mother starve to death in Auschwitz. “We love our dogs,” she said fondly. “They are our babies.”

  Maryse Ehrlich, fellow 2G and performance artist, confided, “I know my limitations, Zoe. I’m too narcissistic to have children. I’m just too depressive. I won’t even have a dog. Besides, I like to travel.”

  “How can I be anybody’s mother?” I implored Christine, my good friend from our movie fanzine days.

  “Why not?” she asked me over coffee at one of the last remaining Broadway diners, where I. B. Singer used to drink tea and write his stories.

  “It’s not me.” I shook my head vehemently. “I wish it were, but it’s not. I don’t have those kinds of instincts.”

  “Zoe, wait a minute,” she urged. “You didn’t use anything, right?”

  I nodded sheepishly. “What an idiot I am.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t want to. At that moment I wanted a baby. I must have been crazy.”

  “Maybe you weren’t crazy. Maybe you were perfectly, calculatedly sane, making a decision for your future. You could surrender, Zoe,” she said. “Join the human race.”

  I paced nervously as Avi walked into my apartment that evening.“I got some ganja from this Jamaican at work,” he said. “Do you want to light up?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s not like you, Zoe.”

  “I’m not in the mood.”

  “What’s up?”

  I handed him the pink-tipped plastic dipstick.

  “A Popsicle stick?” He turned it around in his delicate fingers.

  “A pregnancy test,” I said.

  His eyes grew large. “You aren’t?”

  I nodded.

  His face registered shock. “Weren’t you using your—?”

  “I don’t remember,” I answered, avoiding his eyes.

  “It matters to me,” he said. When I didn’t answer, he finally asked softly, “Why?”

  “I want to have a baby, I guess.”

  “But we didn’t even
talk about it.”

  “You’re right.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t need this, Zoe. It’s what happened with Chen. She got pregnant, we got married, then we had a real mess.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I need some air,” he said, standing up.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “Not now,” he said, closing the door behind him.

  Lady in waiting, lap-clap, loaded, looking piggy, lumpy, lusty, pillowed, pizened, poddy, poisoned, preggy, pumped, sewed-up, short-skirted, shot in the giblets, in the tail, storked, stung by a serpent, swallowed a watermelon seed . . .

  Avi didn’t return. It was a hard night. As I tried to sleep, voices of the ghosts cried out. Name me. Give me your child. Resurrect our lost lives. Breathe life into your life, Zosha.

  Sunday morning. I woke up slowly, then, startled, I remembered! I rubbed my belly like a chimpanzee. A house was being built here for new life. I could feel it. As I stepped out of the shower, the doorbell rang.

  Avi stood in my doorway, holding a brown bag of warm H & H bagels like an offering.

  “I know I should’ve called,” he said. “I went back to my studio last night and stared at the walls.” He reached out for me. I held back.

  “What can I say?” He shifted his weight. “I needed some time.”

  “Come in.”

  For several moments, we looked at each other uncomfortably. Finally, I broke the silence. “Avi, I’ve decided that I’m going to have this baby.”

  “Oh?”

  Then added quickly. “By myself.”

  “Not so fast,” he said.

  “Avi, you don’t have to go through this again.”

  “Who knows? Maybe it’s bashert.” He took my hand in his. “Do you know what that is?’

  “Meant to be?”

  He nodded. Then Avi lowered himself slowly, crouching, his head against my belly. “Shema Yisrael adonoi elo-haynu,” he began to recite. “Adonoi ehad.”