“This was Christmas Eve. Jurgen and I we split up our take, which was considerable. Very considerable. It was late and he took me home. I had the rug of course.
“I went upstairs with all my things. My wife, Sarah, was waiting. My children, David and Judith, were sleeping. I kissed my wife and then went, right away, just as your father does with you, to see my sleeping children. There is something about coming home and finding your children safe and sound, healthy, asleep in their beds, blankets tucked around them, that is better, I think than almost anything else in the world. Ask your father if this is not true?”
David looks at me. Moira likes this part. She beams. “Yes,” I say, “it’s true.” It’s true, and yet there are fathers, and mothers, who give it up. Or who give up a lot of it — except for alternate weekends, a week in the summer, and practically never on Christmas — because baser emotions like lust and anger are stronger than the sentimentalities of our higher feelings.
“I kissed them on their foreheads,” my grandfather says. “Then I added their extra gifts, those I had picked up from rich people’s homes in the course of the night, to the ones we already had. I put them under the tree, just like you have here. Then I sat with my wife and we counted our blessings. Our children being the chief ones.
“Not long after we went to bed there was a commotion in the street. Noise downstairs. Then at the door. It sounded like someone was kicking the door down.”
“Was it the cops?” David asks.
“I thought so. But I was ready for that. I was prepared, I had a plan, I had an escape route.
“We lived on the top floor. I always kept the stolen stuff, the valuable stolen stuff, if it was in the house at all, in one bag. I could get out to the roof from the window. Once I was on the roof, I was free and clear. Remember, I was the cat. I went from our roof to the next building, then the next, and down the drainpipes into the alley. From the alley I could get into the basement of the apartment building across the way. And soon I would disappear.
“So I turned to Sarah and I said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s me they want. You just tell them I’m not home. You haven’t seen me.’ I looked at the rug. I wondered if it would give me away. The thing about Persian rugs is, for the most part you have to know something about them to know if it’s a good one or a bad one or real one or a fake one. So, quickly, even as we heard the footsteps on the stairs, we spread it across the floor. It was a little bit too big so we just folded the end under. I was certain that no one would recognize its value or recognize it as stolen.
“Then, just as the knock on the door came, I went out the window, with my bag of swag, and took off across the roof tops.”
“Did you get away?” David asks.
“Yes,” my grandfather says. “I got away.”
“Is that the end of the story?” my wife asks.
“It can’t be,” David says. “What about the rug?”
My father smiles. Or rather his mouth twitches toward a smile and the smile, that smirk that used to so infuriate me, dies, still born. As well it should.
“I went back in the morning.”
“Christmas,” my wife says.
“Yes. Christmas. Sarah, and David and Judith were gone.”
“Where? Where did they go?” my son asks.
“The knock on the door. That wasn’t the police looking for a thief. It was the brownshirts, the Nazis, looking for Jews. And they found some. Two of them sleeping, waiting to wake in the morning to see what gifts Father Christmas had brought them in the night. Two of them and their mother. They took them away.”
“What happened to them?” David asks.
“Immediately? I don’t know,” my father says. “In the end, the camps. The ovens. I don’t know. Disappeared. Never to be seen again.”
My son looks at me. He’s not following this. He doesn’t have enough information to know what the camps and the ovens mean. To him camp is a place to go and play. Summer camp, arts and crafts, learning to swim, dodge ball. Ovens are where cakes are made and bread is baked. So now I have to tell him.
Which I try to do as simply as possible. “Not very long ago,” I say, “When your grandfather was a young man, the people of Germany decided they wanted to get rid of all the Jews. To kill all the Jews. They did this very methodically. As if they were building cars. It was a very terrible thing.”
“Why?” my son asks.
“People do terrible things,” I say. “Very terrible things. This was one of the worst. But there are others.” It is one of those things, of course, for which my father will never forgive God. I tend to agree with him.
“Was that your mommy?” David asks.
“No,” I say. “Grandpa married another woman later.”
“They took the children’s toys, all the Christmas gifts. They left our little tree. And the rug.”
Now what’s odd is that my father finishes the story there. He hasn’t really told the story of the rug. And there is a story of the rug and it’s quite a tale. Like many other Jews, especially assimilated Jews who thought of themselves as more German than most of the Germans they knew, he thought that this anti-Semitism was just a bulge in the political hieroglyphics of history and that, like many other excesses, it would reach a high tide and recede. At that point he suddenly understood that things were much, much worse and much more permanent than that.
He, and his friend Jurgen, who adamantly did not want to be drafted, decided to escape Germany for Switzerland. It was not so easy then as it is now to cross a border. Also neither of them wanted to arrive in a new country totally broke. They wanted to get away with their loot. Jurgen had at one point worked for an industrialist who had a vacation chateau on Lake Lucerne. Then they thought of the rug. They could put their loot — and Isidore — in the rug, the rug in a truck and claim they were delivering it to the Chateau.
This they proceeded to do.
I’ve heard my father tell this tale more than once. Sometimes there is a policeman in it. A German cop who catches them at a roadside inn just at the moment when Jurgen is bringing food out to the truck and Isidore is crawling out of the rug.
They kill the cop.
They are afraid that the corpse will be found and that they will be caught in the ensuing hue and cry. So they drive off with the corpse, looking for a place to dispose of it.
Somehow, when you’re looking to do something like that, there never seems to be a right moment at the right place. At every right place there are people present. Whenever you’re alone there’s no place. The nightmare continued, hour after hour as they approached the Swiss border. Finally they were out of time and out of possible places to dump the dead. They wrapped the cop in the rug — along with Izzy — and crossed into Switzerland, the dead German lying snug beside the running Jew.
That is the story of the rug. Usually.
But my father doesn’t say any of that. He ends it there and says, “A funny story, no?”
“No,” Moira says. “I don’t see anything funny about it at all.”
“Well, it’s a Jewish story,” Grandpop says. He shrugs. “Some people don’t get them.” But that’s because he has not laid the punch line on us yet.
He gets up from his sitting position, to his knees, on the rug, and puts his big, old, veined and spotted hands on my son, touching his shoulders and the fine, soft hairs on his head, which still, sometimes, even now, on the odd and special day, have the sweet smell of puppy fur. “I was a very wild young man,” he says. “I did many, many things that were bad. Things that you should never do. If only because I don’t think... I don’t think the rewards are worth the risk.