He was standing a step below her and looked up and said: Auschwitz. Und danach Flossenburg.
They were married less than four months later, and lived together in the walk-up apartment. She brought a woman’s touch. She cooked German, and made Liebmann buy a radio. They figured out the game of baseball and were regulars at Senators home games, sitting in their favorite spot above the third base line. She got him started with the long neighborhood walks around Shepherd Park.
He was not swept away by her, not at first, did not fall in love the way lovers do who meet and capsize together into the heat and surprise and mystery of discovering each other. But it was a mystery nonetheless, his love building for her like slowly painting a picture of something he had never seen and could never have imagined. All they needed to know was where they had been and that they had found their way to this place and to each other. They were companions. Affection anchored them. They worked the store together. They saved to buy a house. His wife wanted to live on Morningside Drive — she took him walking there and admired the big four-square homes with their precise lawns and the satisfying geometry of their flower beds and careful flagstone walks.
They imagined together what it would be like when they could afford to move.
When she was sick and it was clear her time was short, Liebmann sometimes could not sleep and got up at night o sit beside the bedroom window in the apartment, looking down on Georgia Avenue. He touched the tattoo on his left forearm.
There was nothing anyone could do.
He was transferred from Auschwitz to the camp at Flossenburg to work in the granite quarry there. The Nazis had killed off most of the older prisoners with overwork and starvation and random executions by that point in the war. Liebmann was young and still able to stand on his feet and swing a pick. When the Americans liberated Flossenburg, he was among the few left alive. In the holding settlement where he was clothed and fed and gained twenty pounds in as many days, Liebmann made it clear that he wanted to come to America, that he never wanted to see Germany again. Refugees were assigned to cities when they arrived in America, and Liebmann was given Washington, D.C., a part of town called Shepherd Park. An apartment was held in his name, where he lived rent-free for a year, after which time he was expected to support himself and pay his own way.
Twenty-two years later and Liebmann was still there, a four-room walk-up at 7701 Georgia Avenue. It met his needs.
Shepherd Park cornered into the northern edge of the District of Columbia and up against the Maryland town of Silver Spring. A few blocks to the west of Liebmann’s apartment building was a sylvan grid of tranquil streets with redbrick colonials and tudors and substantial brownstone duplexes, the part of the neighborhood where his wife wanted to move. Further west, along 16th Street, there were pillared mansions on half-acre lots arching down to Rock Creek Park. But where Liebmann lived, at the corner of Georgia and Juniper Street, the area was failing. He had watched his six or seven blocks ebb and drift in a long collapse, falling faster and harder in the last few years. Stores and cafés and the bakery and the pharmacy and the neighborhood dry cleaner had all closed or moved to the suburbs. There was an open-air shopping mall out in Wheaton, a new invention of commerce drawing shoppers like nothing before, and merchants were moving north to Maryland and the money.
Liebmann was robbed once as the neighborhood faltered, held up by a frenzied black man with one clouded eye. The thief yelled and waved a gun around. Liebmann emptied the contents of the register into a paper sack and the man took it and bolted. Four mortified customers left quickly without purchasing anything. Liebmann filed a police report; one of the young officers who answered the call suggested he buy a handgun, for protection. In case this happens again. And the way things’re going around here, it will.
A few of Liebmann’s friends urged him to sell and move. They would stop in for a couple bottles of Mogan David or Manischewitz and talk to him as they paid. Jacob, they’d say, it’s time to go. Rent a place in Wheaton. Your business won’t miss a beat. But Liebmann didn’t see it. Liquor sold everywhere and on any day. His wife was gone. He had no children. There was nobody he cared about who needed a different kind of life. He saw no reason to make any change at all. He took the policeman’s advice and bought a.22 caliber pistol, a little revolver with white plastic grips that cost fifty dollars used. He got a quick tutorial on the pistol’s operation from the gun store owner. Took the gun back to the store, loaded it and spun the cylinder and set the safety, and locked it in the lower left drawer of his desk in the office cubicle.
The war had left him appalled by firearms. He abruptly realized he could not imagine using this one.
He was forty-one years old and felt twice that age most of the time.
He did not own a car, had never thought to buy one, although he could easily afford anything on the road. He walked where he needed to go, or took the streetcar and later the bus. He ate most of his meals next door at Jimmy’s Café or sometimes at Crisfield’s, just over the District line in Silver Spring. And after the nights when images of his sister and parents came back too plainly in his dreams, he would take the longer walk to the synagogue on 16th Street and sit in the back and try to locate comfort in the rituals of his people.
On Sundays, the only day he closed the store, Liebmann rode the bus without any particular destination, his excursions a way past the dismay that could still run under his thoughts at any given moment, memory rivering through and working, down beneath the ordinary rhythms of his shopkeeper life.
On this Sunday in the middle of November, he crossed the street to catch the downtown bus, stepped up and greeted the driver and dropped the fare, and found his seat midway back. He preferred sitting on the right side of the bus although he could not explain the preference. Washington’s decline slid past the smeared window, the boarded store-fronts of Petworth and the catastrophe of Shaw, the choked streets around Howard University gone to every manner of destitution and loss.
The bus wheezed into downtown and hit the turnaround at Federal Triangle and gave up the last two passengers. Liebmann kept his seat. The driver scouted back down the aisle, picking up trash and the crumpled transfers left on seats or tossed on the floor. He stopped and sat in the seat across from Liebmann.
“Mr. Liebmann,” he said. He sighed heavily as he lowered himself against the red vinyl. He was a big man, overweight from the hours passed behind the wheel.
“How are you today, my friend?” Liebmann asked.
“Not too bad,” the driver said. He was perhaps fifty years old and had the practiced mix of resentment and acceptance that Liebmann noticed in many of the black men who lived in the neighborhood. “You out for your weekly pleasure trip?”
Liebmann said yes.
“Well,” the driver said, “that’s good. ’Course, for me it’s the same as ever. No pleasure about it. The job I do. I’m just happy the damn rain’s let up.”
The Nazis came when Liebmann was seventeen. His family lived in Berlin, in a yellowing apartment building filled with other Jewish families. Later, after his family was lost, he would wonder that his and so many other families continued to live together, in the same neighborhoods, the same buildings, huddling on the same streets, long after they understood what the Nazis were doing, after so many others had been taken.
He had not understood then what little his father or any of the fathers could have done — Germany’s borders closed and the jobs gone and the food gone and the possibility of hiding or shelter or refuge little more than fragrant wishes and the net pulling tighter day by day. The SS finally came in 1943, at dawn, stomping up the stairwells of the building, pounding on doors and shouting, and the staccato barking of the leashed shepherds in the hallways.