When they’re done with the barracks, everyone is puffy faced and quiet. The hand-holding escalates to indiscriminate hugging. Everyone embraces and switches partners so that every possible permutation of couple has embraced.
“They’re like swingers in suburbia,” Heather says. No one tries to hug Heather, and because of her proximity to Heather, no one tries to hug Shayna either. And, needless to say, Heather and Shayna do not hug.
Most of them are wearing their We Are the Living! windbreakers over their We Are the Living! sweatshirts (or stretch flare tracksuits), and the sight of them, a small swarm of Living, all in blue, is truly obnoxious. It’s as if they’re gloating. Isn’t it enough that they’re here, at Auschwitz, alive, sixty years later, without having to proclaim their aLiveness so repeatedly? We Are the Living, and all of you who perished here (suckas!) are NOT! Take that, you hapless victims! Eat it! Look at us, alive, you vanished people. If you’d found a way to emigrate when you’d had the chance then maybe you’d have something to show for your sorry asses, some grandchildren wearing two-hundred-dollar velour tracksuits and with excellent sexual prospects for this very evening!
Jonah approaches Shayna and holds her for what feels like too long, so she’s not sure what to do with her arms. When he’s done he holds his face really close to hers and asks how she’s doing.
“Okay,” she says. He looks at her some more, like he’s going to ask the judges if they can accept that answer, and then pulls her back into him for more hugging.
“You’re okay?” he asks when round two is over.
“Yeah.” But with every move she makes she gets a head rush, and when she closes her eyes she sees Max’s words, wondering How many people died exactly where I stood today? And it’s not until Jonah has embraced a squirming Heather and they’ve moved on to death row, between barracks ten and eleven, to light memorial candles and sing, haltingly, the Israeli national anthem, that it occurs to Shayna to say, “Um, no.” To tap Jonah on the shoulder and fall into his waiting arms and tell him that she is not at all okay, tell him about the gray braid and the Auschwitz Orchestra and all her preordained feelings and having to follow Max here, having to have all the stupid feelings that had been felt before and that had been felt better.
They have lunch before the death march. Rolls and butter and Kit-Kats, which they eat in relative quiet on the bus. The impetus to offer some of her date-nut bar to Jessica is gone, and Shayna sinks into her seat and chews, chews, chews until it’s all gone. With her bottled water she swallows the third of Jamie’s Zoloft, closes her eyes, and waits for it to kick in.
“Help me find some good rocks,” Heather says as they walk. She scans the ground, bending down every few minutes to pick up a handful of gravel or a small stone, which she then mostly throws back down, unsatisfied. “I’m gonna make me a death march mosaic when I get home.” When she finds stones she likes she deposits them in a little plastic baggie. So everyone but Shayna has a trauma-assimilation game plan, it appears; a way to feel what they feel, felt, will feel.
They are a blue river of Living, winding their way along the tracks from Auschwitz to Birkenau, on a most horrifically well-worn path. Shayna digs her right thumbnail into her left palm, grinding it mercilessly. Feel! Feel! Horror! When that doesn’t work she goes to work yanking out some hair at the base of her neck. Jessica and Jamie and Rose-Ling and Ari and Robbie and Jon have linked arms and walk as a unit, and watching them, Shayna is filled with a burst of unparalleled hatred, the third thing to catch her by surprise today.
The walk takes only a half hour. They’re greeted at Birkenau by more barracks, and the destroyed crematoria at the far end of the camp. Sonja tells them that the United States knew where all the crematoria were, and could have bombed them any time it wanted to. Shayna knows this, of course, knows all about it, but Jamie is incredulous.
“So why didn’t it? I mean we?” No one has an answer, obviously, and now it’s Jamie’s turn to burst into tears.
“Because fuck the Jews,” Heather says. Sonja nods slightly.
“Kind of.”
Sonja talks for a while about her experiences with a detachment that Shayna wholly appreciates but can’t fully understand. How is it possible that someone could live through such things, then stand around calmly telling people about them? How is it possible for Sonja to be standing on this spot and still be breathing? Was this the secret knowledge to be gleaned? Was this what Max had understood and then alluded, in his journal, to understanding for the first time? Was this living with a capital L?
They light memorial candles, mumble their collective way through a mourner’s kaddish.
On the walk back Rabbi Amy attempts to involve them in a rousing chorus of “Am Yisrael Chai” (the Jewish people live!), but the sky is threatening a downpour, and they book it back to the bus so as not to get drenched. It starts coming down hard once they’re back at Auschwitz and the girls sprint to the bus, but Shayna welcomes the rain, wants to get wet and be made really uncomfortable, wants to be cold and damp and understand, finally, what they felt. And she gets what she wants, but only partially. When she falls into her seat next to Zoe, her clothes and hair are cold and wet and she’s pretty uncomfortable, but there’s nothing else there: no new, deeper understanding of anything but plain cold, wet, discomfort. As the bus pulls away, though, Ari treats them to an impromptu guitar performance of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which is very intense, very moving, and very, very sad, indeed.
Hotline
When the hotline phone rings it makes my shift partner, Miranda, and me both jump. I had a roommate last year who had the same exact phone, left over from the fluorescent eighties, the plastic cover see-through with all the incoherent mechanisms of telecommunication visible underneath. Its ring, shrill and indefatigable, would startle me in the most unpleasant way whenever someone called her, which was not often; she had few friends. It is not often that we get calls here, either, lately. Miranda and I and the rest of the counselors speculate on the reasons for this. We do a poor job publicizing, perhaps, or people are embarrassed to call their peers (some of whom they probably know, have classes with, see in the student center, glare at in passing, avoid altogether), or antidepressants have taken over. We sarcastically bemoan the apparent lack of desperation on campus. Kids today and all that. We are not needed by the people we want to need us. Like old, ugly whores, though, we have our regulars.
The ring makes us shiver in recognition, our senses in upheaval, and then drops us back into ourselves carelessly, so we don’t know quite what to do. There is always that rushing, Quick, answer it! the scramble to remember our words, careful to present empathy, the breathless wanting to please: “Hello, Nightline.” It is mellifluous and brimming with what we hope are comfort and ease.
Tonight when it rings Miranda is reading a magazine on a couch worn down by expectation. Behind her the wall stands indignant with amateur artwork: vines like telephone cords with sick-looking leaves and absurdly colored flowers, people’s names, quotes. There are unidentifiable swirls and waves that look like whoever painted them just did so for the sake of it, giving up on anything concrete before they even started, not sure what they wanted to say.