“Gershon, how do you know when you need to go to the hospital? Do you feel it? Can anyone feel it when they need to?”
“Gershon, is Adella Greuner really a whore, or did she just do it once of her own free will?”
And the questions branched off:
“Gershon, what’s it like to be a whore?” (Effi.)
“Gershon, what exactly is a whore?” (Me. Whispered into his ear at an opportune moment when Effi wasn’t around.)
“Whore” wasn’t an entry in the Tarbut encyclopedia, despite illustrations of Cleopatra and pictures of amazingly curvaceous Romans, and an exciting picture of the French revolutionary Charlotte Corday murdering Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub. Her stretched out hand, as it brandished the knife, revealed the curves of her breast beneath her blouse.
We investigated the Holocaust. Twelve years old, we charged into the barren wilderness, the murderous expanses in which Gershon Klima stood as a lone tree, and only rarely at that. We did not know how terrible and hostile the expanses were — we could not have imagined. We watched Grandpa Lolek play rummy with Holocaust survivors, winning money out of their compensation payments, and assumed the expanses were not all that hostile. We could step into their depths.
The case of Eva Lanczer exposed their true nature.
It was springtime, during Passover vacation. We were sleeping over at Grandpa Yosef’s on the night Eva Lanczer couldn’t bear it anymore. We were in bed by then, playing a game of “ten strokes for ten strokes,” when a massive scream pierced the darkness. The lights did not come on — one scream was not enough for that in this neighborhood — but a second scream, right on Katznelson, alerted Grandpa Yosef. We followed him.
Before they made us leave we had time to see, or so we imagined, Eva Lanczer on fire — almost on fire — in a dress turned orange by the light, her bare feet glistening on the lawn and her two arms, in sleeves of flames, clutching her shoulders as her painted fingernails dug into her flesh. Her lips were painted too and there was a smudge of lipstick on her cheek. Small white earrings hung from her lobes, their dangling more kinetic than anything that moved and bustled on the lawn — the people, the lights from the windows, and the shouting. Neighbors came out in their white night-shirts and hovered like moths by the lamp in crazed circles. Exclamations of “Oy vey, oy vey” punctuated their sentences. A confused Gershon Klima came down with his bag and sat on the bench. Grandpa Yosef tried to impose order and calm, almost succeeding, until an ambulance arrived and drove over the lawn and Eva Lanczer screamed again. We wouldn’t leave. We didn’t want to move and didn’t want to be in the world while this was happening. With our reasonably good grades and our teachers’ notes about good behavior and the Passover vacation, everything should have been fine in the world. But nothing was.
The orderlies stepped out of the ambulance, skipped over Gershon Klima, and Eva Lanczer’s mouth took control of her and screamed and scratched and bit. The orderlies grabbed her with stubborn hands, grasping her bubbling flesh. It was hard to discern a face and a body within the whirlwind — only her usual fey flickering and her mouth that seemed to grow and expand. Her screams rang back from the woods, pleas emerged from the puddles. Eva Lanczer’s flesh was taken into the ambulance and her blood boiled on the path and on the orderlies’ white coats and in her fingernails. When the doors were slammed closed, one last scream escaped and the whole world clapped its hands for a moment — the mouths of its lakes cried out, its birds turned to owls and its bats took to the sky.
And then, silence. They took Eva Lanczer away. Forever.
We tried to sleep that night, shutting our eyes tightly. Beneath my closed eyelids I glimpsed shapes of darkness, hovering stains. Letters, instructions, laws. That night, I think, my hatred of Germany was quadrupled. I hated Germans, hated Germany, would never go there. Effi, in bed next to me, shut her eyes tight as well. She wet the bed too, a thin trickle that spread through the mattress and over the sheets all the way to me. In the morning, Grandpa Yosef would have trouble deciding who was to blame. We should have woken up identical, both hating Germany. One night, one conclusion. When morning came we brushed our teeth without protest and ate what Grandpa Yosef served us without complaint. A silence had befallen the whole neighborhood. It was a day no one felt like starting. But Effi, who was quiet like I was and looked like I did, as if she too had spent all night studying by the light of Eva Lanczer, awoke carefree and forgiving. I learned years later that she had not thought about Germany that night, nor about Germans. She had not seen stains of darkness in the form of Eva Lanczer, had not read letters and laws, instructing: Do not forgive the Germans.
In the morning we roamed the neighborhood aimlessly, almost without touching the ground. Two little hovercrafts with reasonably good grades — what was it all for? We wandered this way and that, not knowing what to do about Eva Lanczer. We wanted the story to go on. We couldn’t accept the first ending, could not conceive that it would be the final ending, with no sequels. We waited many days for Eva Lanczer to come back, watched her window often, trying to persuade it to produce her. We came at daytime, on Saturdays, and sometimes when it was dark. We wanted to surprise her apartment and find it with Eva Lanczer outside, half-smiling, pale.
On one of our night-time excursions we discovered that we were not alone outside the dark houses. In the middle of the path we found a hunched character dressed in black.
“It’s the Angel of Death, come for Eva Lanczer’s soul,” Effi said.
And indeed, the burglar turned to Eva Lanczer’s house, although it turned out he was after more material assets than Eva’s soul. Opposite, Adella Greuner opened her blinds and like a large cuckoo clock in a huge white night-dress, yelled out, “Kalman, vi geystu? Vi geystu?” just as usual. The burglar fled, half-cat half-bird, rolled over the flowerbed at the foot of the scarecrow and broke into a mad dash. He took all of Katznelson — which I could do in fourteen seconds wearing shorts and cheating the start gun just a little — in less than six seconds. Just before the end of Katznelson, he turned off into a side alley and was gone.
Autumn came. The days grew shorter. More tea was sipped behind the blinds, more memories. The sky waited for the rain to finish off autumn. “The splendor of Carmel falls / Bows / To the ends of autumns whose first rains are severed,” wrote Asher Schwimmer back in Poland. In November a thuggish guava tree awoke from its slumber and flooded the neighborhood with its scent. The elderly neighbors seemed pleased. Guavas smelled of health, they claimed. And no less important, the aroma aroused their senses, emboldening their belief that not everything had weakened in them. All they needed was for someone to make a proper effort and everything would work fine. They tended to take their glasses off during guava days, dared to leave their walking sticks at home, reconsidered medication dosages. The guava flowed and flowed in a great stream. Hearing aids were cautiously removed, jaws moved in unabashed appetite. Once in a while, in random conversations, they expressed opinions and demonstrated knowledge.
“Lots of vitamin C in guavas,” they would say. To show that modernity had not passed them by. That they too were in the twentieth century.