Galerie

by Steven Greenberg

  I’d been in the courtroom when the judge made his decision. I simply couldn’t resist my yetzer hara—‘evil impulse’—to see this man’s demise in person. I was confident in my dislike—to put it mildly—of the man, but still didn’t know why.

  As the judge spoke, it was clear that Tomas was quite lucid. He understood, and was strenuously upset by the events taking place.

  I recognized but couldn’t understand the horror in his eyes as his “sentence” was pronounced, his hands jerking against the wheelchair armrests, drool flying from his mouth as he shook his head violently, ineffectually, from side to side. He was wheeled out of the courtroom, and I went back to the hospital. I hadn’t seen him since.

  I held Vanesa’s hand tightly as I told her she could visit him when she was well enough. “The facility in Pardesiya is supposed to nice, and the staff has kept Tomas informed of your progress. He seems to understand, although he can’t communicate. I haven’t been to see him,” I admitted, squeezing her hand, “because I’ve been more concerned with you.” I didn’t mention the vicious argument I’d had with Tomas the evening before his stroke—an argument that had almost come to blows.

  I’d spent a good part of that first horrific week, while Vanesa hung between life and death, reading with Tomas the long pages of crumpled legal pad notes that were in the briefcase found by her side in Terezin. Amazingly, what appeared at first glance to be just cramped, handwritten scribbles turned out to encompass all the findings of her decade-long research into her family, methodically written and exactingly cross-referenced.

  Tomas and I said our cold but cordial good evenings, and he walked stiffly out the door of the ICU room, sliding the heavy glass partition shut behind him.

  The knowledge that Vanesa was here because of what he had done, or not done, or said, or not said, had been simmering in me for days. The pot inevitably came to a boil, and steam forced its way dangerously from beneath the lid.

  I followed him out into the hallway. “I hope you’re happy. You know she wouldn’t have been over there if it weren’t for you, don’t you?” My calm voice belied the adrenalin shakes traveling from my spine to my shoulders, down my arms, and back up my neck. “Whatever it was, I hope to hell it was worth it to you, because you did this, as sure as if you’d stabbed her yourself. And you know it. I can see it in your eyes. So don’t bother to explain yourself to me, because I could give a shit whether or not you were with Vanesa’s grandfather in Theresienstadt—which apparently you weren’t. I could care less about your exact connection to Michael, or why he put up with your presence for all these years when he so clearly despised you. But Vanesa cares. She does want to know, and you clearly have answers she was—still is, likely—so desperate to find. But you let her go look in Prague instead of just giving them to her. What the fuck are you hiding? What the fuck did you do? And was keeping it secret really worth what it did to her?”

  Tomas remained silent throughout my whispered tirade, backing away unconsciously as the extent of what Vanesa had known about him, and what I now knew, became clear. Panic flashed across his eyes, giving him the brief appearance of a cornered alley cat. Then his stoic veil of charm slithered icily down. He turned silently, his back straight, and walked slowly, deliberately away from me.

  The vestiges of my love for Vanesa, the flames of angst over her uncertain future, and the burning outrage that had always scorched my bowels whenever I encountered blatant injustice, combined explosively.

  “You bastard! You fucking bastard!” I heard myself yelling, giving up any pretense of trying to maintain the silence of the hospital corridor. “She loves you like a father! Do you hear me, you piece of shit? What is wrong with you? What did you do?”

  A kind-faced orderly, hearing the fracas from a nearby room, restrained me from running after him.

  His footsteps echoed for several seconds, and as the other patients’ family members shuffled tiredly back from their rubber-necking to the bedsides of mothers, fathers, and wives, the only sound remaining in the hallway was that of my sobs.

  The winter of 1992 was the wettest in Israel since 1968. The Sea of Galilee, having sadly withered in the preceding years, swelled to bursting like an overripe gourd. Thousands of Israelis flocked to its shores as the lake’s caretakers opened the floodgates of the Degania Dam for the first time since its construction, to avoid imminent flooding in Tiberias and other lakeside communities. After years of drought, thousands cheered the sheer ostentation of countless cubes of excess water rushing down the lower Jordan River to the stillness and evaporative mortality of the Dead Sea.

  In Tomas’ absence, Vanesa’s own floodgates remained closed throughout the weeks of her Ichilov Hospital stay, and for the agonizing months spent in the Beit Levinstein rehabilitation hospital in Ra’anana. Amazingly, she channeled the immense pressure building up behind her personal Degania Dam into secondary, productive channels, whose water wheels of inquisition began to spin furiously right after she awoke.

  Two days after she opened her eyes to look past me—something she really never stopped doing—she was already on the phone to Marek. It was a lengthy and clearly emotionally-charged conversation in Czech, of which I understood nothing, but her manner was as intensely businesslike as her hospital gown, peaked visage, and weak voice would allow.

  She had not yet shared with me the details of the trip to Terezin, which were of course missing from her meticulous notes. She’d already written, in an astonishingly matter-of-fact style and repugnant detail—as if she had been a mere observer—about her attack in Prague. She’d also covered the ransacking of her hotel room, the contents of which had been collected and returned to Israel by the helpful Israeli consul.

  Thus, I knew what her theory had been going into Terezin, but knew nothing of her findings leading up to the stabbing. I patiently waited to speak to her about this, my own floodgates barely containing the torrents of anguish that had been swelling inside me at the obvious, yet still unvocalized, change that had occurred between us. Something had changed, and the extent of the transformation grew clearer daily, as I settled again into the hospital routine. Still, I reasoned, she needed to focus on healing. I could rise above, and do what needed to be done. There was time. There was no cause to burden her. I was strong enough.

  I stayed in the hospital every day with her, and most nights. I wheeled her up to physical therapy and down to x-ray, helped her to the plastic chair in the shower, and waited patiently outside the door as she demurely washed a scarred body to whose nakedness I was no longer privy. I held her elbow as she painfully and determinedly walked the hallways of the ward for hours a day. I watched, silent and strong, as the simple and calorie-rich hospital fare began to reconstruct the curves that had faded away, curves that were now, in my new role as chaste caregiver, relevant only on the convalescent, rather than carnal, level.

  Three times a day, the stainless steel cart rolled into the room on squeaky wheels, bearing the Kosher color-coded plastic plates and squat coffee cups ubiquitous in the Israeli army and other government institutions—blue for dairy breakfasts and dinners, and orange-tan for meat lunches. She ate with relish, cleaned her plate, and often requested seconds. She knew what her body needed, and was determined to get past the pesky physical limitations that were keeping her from satisfying the more pressing demands of her soul.

  She spent hours scribbling notes, which she did not share with me, and even longer hours lost in thought, eyes fixed on the parking lot below the window next to the bed she now occupied in the three-person room. She liked watching the Subarus, Peugeots, and Fords jockey for the few parking spaces, and smiled at the frequent parking spot battles that usually involved enough light-flashing, hand-waving, and horn-honking to make them clearly identifiable, even from five stories up.

  I read, searched for nurses in the halls when it was time for her pain medication, chased down rehabilitation specialists for consultations, and tried to avoid thinking about what would happen when sh
e got out of the hospital.

  Tel Aviv, February 1992

  On a sunny afternoon some three weeks after she awoke, Vanesa and I had ‘the talk.’ It had rained that morning, and we walked slowly to the solarium at the end of the hallway. The sun sparkled sorrowfully on the raindrops clinging to the windows, from which you could see, between two buildings and through the thin winter foliage of a tree, the distant slice of blue that was the Mediterranean. I longed to be on the shore, watching the bruised purple sky of the next storm front skipping merrily across the whitecaps—immune to consequences, ignorant of fear.

  Breathing hard, Vanesa plunked down on the faux-wood Formica bench and turned to me. Her eyes narrowed in concern or sympathy, she took a deep breath, and said simply, “I’m sorry you’re unhappy. You deserve to be loved. I truly appreciate everything you’re doing for me. We should talk about what’s next.”

  It could have been a seminal moment, a scene of Hollywood intensity. It could have been the opportunity to smash both our floodgates and cling to each other in the violence of the deluge.

  Instead, I nodded a polite acknowledgement of her gesture, and retorted flatly, “I read your notes while you were unconscious. Tell me what happened in Terezin, and what you’re planning to do when you’re released?”

  She nodded back, as if in professional courtesy, as if I were a colleague whose skill at emotional sublimation she recognized and appreciated. Then, she told me everything, up to and including her current thoughts.

  “…so, now, we just don’t know. Why would anyone want to hide this underground railroad for Jews, almost 50 years after it stopped functioning? Are they protecting hidden money or stolen property? It’s obviously something worth killing over, to whoever’s responsible. What was my grandfather’s exact role, and Uncle Tomas’, for that matter? Marek has some ideas, and would like to help me find out once he’s settled in a permanent living arrangement. So, after I’m done with all this….” She gestured to the hospital hallway and the IV still running into her arm. “I’m going to see Uncle Tomas, then I’m going to sell the store, take a leave of absence from the university, and go back to Prague to find out.”

  I nodded, unsurprised, and then countered, letting my well-contained belligerence peek out just a bit. “And what if it’s not what you think it is? What if you’re wrong about this mysterious Nazi organization and your grandfather’s part in it? What if you’re wrong about the people in your father’s stories? What if it’s something bigger, something far less well-intentioned or, for that matter, nothing at all? What if the next time whoever attacks you doesn’t fuck it up?”

  She looked me directly in the eyes, the corners of her mouth upturned in the hint of an ironic smile, sunlight catching and holding the shine of her just-washed hair. “Honey,” she said, condescendingly yet without rancor, “some questions are simply worth pursuing to whatever end they may lead.”

  Pardesiya, June 1992

  Vanesa slowly alighted the faded and dusty Egged bus at the Pardesiya Junction, after a 45-minute crawl from Tel Aviv in choked traffic. The one-kilometer walk from the bus stop to the government-run Holocaust Survivors Hostel took significantly less time than it had the first time she’d come here by herself. Once she’d reestablished the lost trust in the stability of her own legs, the walk had measurably shortened. Now, she walked with a non-specific limping gait, the pace of determined recovery, far from the cane-reliant shuffle with which she moved out the doors of the Beit Levinstein Rehabilitation Hospital just two months earlier.

  The highway noise faded as she walked, further muted by a loving June sun which caressed the red-soiled fields with one hand and the back of her neck with the other. Raucous green Rose-Ringed Parakeets screamed as she entered the cool shade of a row of majestic Eucalyptus trees, their calls a patterned curtain that fluttered lightly in the breeze, dancing with the branches and leaves.

  When she’d first ridden there with me, she had been shocked at the entrance to the Lev HaSharon Holocaust Survivors Hostel. As we approached the gates, she’d given voice to her thoughts in an awestruck whisper. “God help me for even thinking this, but this looks like the entrance to a goddamn labor camp.”

  Now, just starting to sweat in the early summer heat, she noted only that the place actually looked more like part of a dilapidated British Mandate-era army base, which it once was, than the “advanced mental health facility” touted in the Ministry of Health literature.

  From the broad gate that dissected the rusting metal mesh fence surrounding the property, she could see the collection of squat white buildings, some wooden and topped with roofs of faded corrugated metal, and some concrete with roofs sagging under slate tiles that had once been a warm red. The residential portion of the compound was a tidy, recently whitewashed quadrangle of concrete buildings, garnished with ample greenery and peppered with peeling yet serviceable wooden benches.

  The wings of the building huddled around a central hub with a white-framed glass door that seemed welcoming, if institutionally bland, until she was actually standing before it. That’s when the smell hit her, seeping out from the unsealed crack between the doorjamb and the door. The sad, sickening smell of bleach struggled valiantly but in vain to conceal the reek of unwashed bodies, excrement, damp mold, and unacknowledged yet unforgiving despair.

  The entrance door stuck on the uneven floor tiles, its aluminum frame giving out a metal-on-stone screech that made Vanesa cringe. She closed the door behind her, eliciting a companion screech. The grey Formica-covered reception desk sat empty, its fiberboard showing through at floor level, where decades of washing had swelled the wood and split the covering. A wheelchair moped forlornly in the center of the entranceway, its blue seat cover asserting with ineffectual dignity that it was the “Property of Sorroca Hospital, Beer Sheva.”

  A voice scratchy with age reverberated through the hallway, repeating “Don’t want! Don’t want! Don’t want!” in a never-ending loop, until it was cut off with, “Then what do you want? Shut up!” in heavily Russian-accented Hebrew.

  Vanesa made her slow way to the three-person room where Tomas lay in a low and rusting metal bed, situated farthest from the door near a window that opened onto a bare courtyard. The bed sagged in the center from his weight. His eyes were open, and as she moved into his field of view, he clearly recognized her, although the expression on his face—permanently frozen in a look somewhere between heavy-lidded boredom and bemusement—did not change. She nodded to the patient in the bed closest to the door, who looked up from his rocking back and forth, stopped mumbling momentarily, then looked back at his blue-veined feet and resumed rocking.

  She took a rickety plastic chair from the empty bedside next to Tomas, dragged it close, and sat down heavily with a light grunt and a tired sigh. From a room down the hall, a voice called out in Polish, an insistent and loud matronly bellow, “Moishe! Moishe! Dinner time! Come home! Come home now!” One of the staff had translated this recurring call for Vanesa, explaining that Henya was calling her son, who had been murdered in Sobibor.

  She waited for the voice to quiet, and smiled at Tomas warmly, genuinely happy to see him. “That walk should be getting shorter, but instead I seem to be more tired every time. And how are you today, Uncle? I see your roommate is out. Has he been a little quieter this week?”

  Tomas blinked once, their signal for “yes,” a primitive but effective system, and necessary given his continued paralysis.

  She continued to chat lightly, speaking of the weather, the university, and politics as she looked him over, her eyes running from his greasy unwashed hair, to the wrinkled linen on his bed, to the bulging deep yellow catheter bag tied to the bed rail with a scrap of bandage. The sour smell of inert sweat emanated from him. She rose with difficulty, still chatting, and went to the room door.

  Henya’s voice rose again, echoing in the hall, “Mooooiiiishee! Come home this instant! Your dinner is getting cold!”

  No staff were in sight. She shuffle
d back, and resumed her place beside Tomas.

  “I’ll go find someone to straighten you up, but first I want to tell you something, okay?”

  Tomas responded with a blink and a barely-perceptible narrowing of the eyes.

  She took a breath, exhaled at length, and began. “Do you remember Mitsy, the cat? The white one?”

  A blink.

  “Do you remember what you told me the day she was run over? I was ten years old and I’d found her near the entrance to the store, where she usually waited for me to come home from school. But she wouldn’t wake up. I wasn’t heartbroken, even though she was the first living thing that I ever loved and lost. I remember lying on my bed, just… empty. I wasn’t overcome by feelings; I was overcome by the absence of feelings. Father was down in the shop. He hadn’t known what to say beyond a mumbled ‘sorry,’ and mother was in the bathroom, crying alone, like she always did when anything bad happened. You came in and sat down next to me, and then I cried, because then, in your presence, I felt. You let me cry, and when I was finished, you dried my tears and said, ‘Kotě, many things in your life will leave you, but we never really lose anything as long as we remember. Your memories, the good and the bad, will never abandon you.’”

  Vanesa smiled and wiped away a tear that had trickled down one cheek.

  Tomas stared impassively as Henya’s voice, now angry, again bounded into the room, accompanied by a rhythmic metallic banging of bedpan-on-bedrail. “Moishe, if you’re not back in one minute, there will be HELL to pay!”

  “I know you were comforting me, but I also know now that you were talking about yourself, about your memories. I never asked you, or Father, about the past. When I was little, I pretended that one day, when I was old enough, you would both share your stories with me. When I was older, I tried to pretend that it wasn’t important. I thought that I shouldn’t care, that I should respect your right to silence, and that what we had today was more than sufficient. I should be grateful to have a real mother and father—and you—when so many of my friends had no one. But it didn’t work, because the knowledge of the memories you wouldn’t share with me became to me a persistent memory itself.”