Asher Schwimmer opened his eyes. I smiled at him.
(Leave. Leave now. There is nothing for me here. It doesn’t matter if he slaps people. It doesn’t matter what happened in Gräditz. Leave. The bridge is starting to crumble.)
I gently shook Asher Schwimmer’s hand. “I’ll come and visit again. Grandpa Yosef will come too.”
“Pass the salt, please,” said Asher Schwimmer, his mouth slowly plucking out the letters.
And his teacher, Mr. Ber, beamed. “See? He’s learning! We’ll bring back all the Hebrew! All the Hebrew!” He pats Asher Schwimmer’s shoulder. “God willing, before we die we’ll be reading new verses! Poems by Asher Schwimmer! Here! In Zion! Begone with your feeble poets — long live Asher Schwimmer! Rage on!” He grabbed my hand as it held Asher Schwimmer’s. I gently disengaged my hand and turned to leave. As I said goodbye to them both, Mr. Ber helped Asher Schwimmer stand up. “We’ll go and sit in the sun. He likes the sun very much!”
(Roaming opposite your fields / fading / opposite the houses of wine and bread, from evil departing. / She alone yields crops — my soul implored / stalks of grain for her alone / Make golden my maternal sky — wheat of radiance).
In the Vauxhall, the blender still sat on the back seat. I took it out and ran back. I found Mr. Ber and Asher Schwimmer on their way to the sun. “Here, a little gift. I almost forgot,” I said, out of breath.
Mr. Ber was moved. “A blender! A food processor!” He grasped Grandpa Lolek’s gift (I would have to come up with an excuse and buy something else for him), waving it at Asher Schwimmer. “A food processor! A food processor!”
We both waited silently to see if the drooping mouth would form the necessary words. But no. Mr. Ber covered for his silence, instantly trampling the failure with his words. “He’s tired today. He’s just tired!”
Asher Schwimmer stood up — perhaps about to slap me. But no. He ambled over to the shade, fleeing the sun, and Mr. Ber hurried after him to correct his error. I walked back to the Vauxhall. I had to tell Grandpa Yosef to visit.
When I got home, Anat said, “Yakov the assistant called. Attorney Perl passed away.”
The next day they carried him on a black stretcher, wrapped in burial shrouds.
1900–1993.
They put his body down in front of us, beneath a sheet. As if this were the proper way to explain, to make us understand. I thought, with us, the ones we need don’t die (like Brandy, like Linow Community, who some say has already died, it’s just Sarkow Community who makes her keep walking to the grocery every day.) With us people last. But Attorney Perl died.
His body was covered with earth, and I realized that despite the gathered crowds, he was a solitary man. I never asked him about children. Why weren’t there any? His life with Laura was not talked of much. Everything that, in his memory, had contained the beautiful days of their married life, shrunk in my memory to a wife led away to Belzec, living ever after in the house at 7 Leonarda Street. Now there was only me, and the remainder of her life would be shut up in train cars, on a slow voyage that would continue on with me. And children? Why weren’t there any children? Hadn’t he talked once about the eternity of procreation? He had glorified fertility. Like an elaborate agricultural plan in which he was not to participate, only to admire. Why didn’t he have any children? I considered infertility, random happenstance, or perhaps a joint decision, or simply the fruits of bad luck. Reasons. Then I thought, And if he had had children? If they had grown up to be Dad’s age during the Shoah, would they have survived? They would have been around ten in 1939, and would have fallen into the hands of Hermine Braunsteiner, “the Stomping Mare,” or Kurt Franz, “Doll,” or all the hands that had waited unknowingly from the moment the children of the thirties were conceived. Anat and I had Yariv. Eternity was ours. And Attorney Perl? His eternity was broken down on little index cards, and I could already envision them as crumbling shreds in a crate stored in a faraway basement. Seventy years on, someone nosy would find the swollen box and investigate the round handwriting. Hermine Braunsteiner, “the Stomping Mare,” was charged with the sadistic murder of children and infants at Majdanek. She shot children at close range and whipped their eyes. She managed to immigrate to the United States, was exposed in the early seventies, extradited to Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment. Attorney Perl’s eternity was assigned by topic, separated in drawers, hopeless. Why did he not have children?
Anat and I had already discussed having more children, and we probably would (the castles they convince us to build). I thought about the madness of procreation. The families who at the beginning of the century raised children who would become inmates of concentration camps. The families who raised children who would become SS officers. Pitted against one another. At the beginning of the century, on both sides, families feared for the fates of their loved ones on the front of the First World War. My family sent four sons to the war. Four sons who fought for Germany, shoulder to shoulder with people who would one day join the SS and participate in the extermination. Dad’s father, Ze’ev, marched all the way to the Italian front. His brother, Dr. Anatol, served in a military hospital. Moshe Gutfreund, aged nineteen, was killed on the Carpathian front, and Leon Gutfreund was taken hostage by the Russians and came home after many years; in World War II he was taken to Belzec. Among those who guarded them, among the jailors, the commanders, the shooters, were the war veterans who-could-be-trusted, the people who didn’t flinch at a few heaps of women and children.
When I documented them, I recalled, sometimes they looked at me as if to say, “We are documented. Now we are eternalized. And you? Your child, is that your eternity? We had children too, but it was not enough.” I thought and thought. Behind the thoughts lurked a fear of sorts; it did not move, but it threatened to cave in, held together only by the thoughts.
The rabbi prayed. A lot of people came to Attorney Perl’s funeral. The many assistants he had employed over the years came, including predecessors of the predecessors. A trail of Yakovs scattered throughout the crowd, prominent in name, visible to strangers. The rabbi had apparently been expecting a quick funeral for a solitary man, and was surprised by the crowds. He prolonged and drew out and glorified the ceremony, trying to catch the relatives’ eyes, surprised again, and somewhat vexed, when he invited an orphan to recite the kaddish and there was none. Nor was there a brother, or any relatives at all. He looked around sharply to show he wasn’t joking around, and Grandpa Yosef came to his rescue. The outcome of their quiet convening was an appropriate kaddish prayer.
For a moment it seemed that a true lamentation erupted from the rabbi. The deceased man described in his notes as “a solitary man with no relatives,” who had surprised him with a large, grieving crowd, wrung sorrow from his heart. Something stole into his prayers and nested in the routine words and took hold. His voice changed. He recited the letters of the deceased’s name, adding a small prayer for each letter, and his anxiety was perceptible (he looked into my eyes — if there was no orphan, he would make do with me). At the end of the ceremony, the mourners filed past me is if I were a relative. They sweltered on the April asphalt (talking about Attorney Perl, about Bochnia, about the city of Stanislaw, about yesterday’s news, about the new couch, which had cost a fortune, about a new immigrant technician who repairs televisions, good and cheap, about the uncomfortable shoes, they said it would take a week to wear them in but it’s been two weeks and they still hurt). The rabbi shook my hand and bid me farewell. The Yakovs passed me by, their faces familiar. Memories, like a breeze, blew all the way to the deep days of the past. At the end of the row, like a uniter of them all, Yakov the current assistant came up to me. He said he would take care of “all the necessary payments,” but he needed to talk to me about something. He asked me to come to the store. Then a figure appeared on the edge of the landscape like a ghostly apparition, six-foot-three-sapphire-blue-eyes-golden-locks. Effi and Hans Oderman had come straight from the airport to meet Grandpa Yosef. What could they do, who could plan on a funeral? Hans Oderman, the artiste of awkwardness, marched behind Effi, passing cautiously among the tombstones. He came up and shook my hand heartily. He pressed Dad’s hand too, and Grandpa Yosef’s, but our handshake was resonant — the other shakes could not push away a truly gloomy impression. Hans Oderman came back to me and shook my hand again, as if to close the circle of all his impressions of the moment. He stood tensely above the mounds of earth, looking down. The irony could not be ignored: Six-foot-three-sapphire-blue-eyes-golden-locks standing above the lonesome grave of Attorney Perl.