Books by DAR

Hiding Places

Excerpts: The Shoulders Speak

The cuffs of my shirt are hardly dry from the wine stains when we ascend from the Brussels metro in an updraft of cellophane cigarette wrappers. J. P.’s neighborhood feels like a different country from Shasha’s. Arabic lettering festoons the tobacco shops. Arabic music wafts from falafel stands. An old Arab with leathery skin holds his cigarette with four fingers while unfolding flower-colored rugs on the street. Shops hawk incongruous combinations: clocks and sneakers, tangerines and Firestone tires. Even this main thoroughfare is so teeming with idle men that it has the flavor of an alley.

But around the corner the side streets are even smaller. Here it’s not Arab but black enough to be the Belgian Congo. Instead of the little dachshunds of Shasha’s elegant neighborhood, the sinister face of a Doberman snarls out of one doorway. Double-parked so as to block the street, an antique VW bus chugs a great plume of blue exhaust into the air before stalling out mid-gasp and two Africans, their skin as luminously purple as eggplants, slide out from beneath on a dolly licking lemon Popsicles.

A slinky black woman with beautiful skinny arms is leaning on her elbows out a first floor window, smoking a Turkish cigarette and watching us. We come closer to her, go past, back up, and finally ask, “Do you know where there’s an old man who’s lived here since World War II?”

An expulsion of Turkish smoke. “World War quoi?”

“The Second World War. Y’know, Hitler, Auschwitz, six million ...?”

Flick of the ash: She never heard of any of it.

“Do you know where number 52 is?”

“Chez moi. The Restaurant Ubundu.”

J. P.’s building now houses this African restaurant on the first floor, a little cave of a private eating club from Zaire. Her name is Maudeek and she lets the boys peek in her window. The sole customer, an Idi Amin-sized man in a sheeny gray suit, seems amused by the boys’ faces in the window, sitting there flossing his teeth at his table with a frozen silent grin. It’s dark and cool; Coltrane is playing quietly and the mood is one of alert languor – a place of shade out of the African sun.

Unhurriedly, Maudeek moves to buzz us in the front door. We walk through the lobby, the boys’ sneakers squeaking across the tiles the way they always seem to do in Europe, as though all the Continent is one giant stone church and we are rubberized Americans. Closing the rickety gate of the tiny elevator, we start to go up when Maudeek shouts through the lobby: “Keep your hands inside, a child lost her arm last week!”

On the fourth floor landing, we knock. Standing outside J. P.’s door, even the air seems to vibrate to a different cultural rhythm from the street scene down below. None of the cool torpor here of the Restaurant Ubundu; the hall is a heated, intense space, thick with mental busywork from the resident within. I don’t know how I sense this; maybe it’s the crazed paint on the door, a complexity of tiny cracks and cross hatching. The reek of boiled socks hangs in the air.

I clear my throat nervously. It echoes down the line from Alex to Marshall. The locks clank open. And as usual, it’s the shoulders that speak to me first. Nu? they say, half hoisted, suspicious but ready to deal. What menace is here now?

I introduce the three of us, prompting J. P. to cock his shoulders belligerently. Nothing doing! they say, moving to nudge the door closed in our faces.

“Wait!”

Not giving an inch in the doorway, J. P. squints at me through eyes that are half-closed but as alert as those of any small hunted animal in the forest. This was the radical? The diamond-smuggling athlete? The Casanova skirt-chaser whose charm could knock a bird out of the sky? He’s dressed in polyester brown leisure suit pants with a deep permanent crease running down the middle to the orange socks that he wears with no shoes. His fly is half-open. A bit of cottage cheese trembles on his upper lip. His chin is sweating from the exertion of eating; that we’ve interrupted his lunch is apparent from the fork in his hand that has harpooned several strands of egg noodles and is dripping butter to the linoleum floor as he fidgets.

“Have we caught you at a bad time?” I ask. “Maudeek downstairs was kind enough to buzz us in ...”

But before I get her name out, I realize my mistake. Maudeek? He has no more truck with Maudeek and her Zairian eating club than she has with him and some ancient European event called World War Quoi. “Should we come back later?”

J. P.’s shoulders are noncommittal, neither hostile nor inquisitive, merely tilted slightly as though weighing the odds: whether to flee or finish shutting the door against us. Who wants to know? is what the shoulders are saying.

I address this question as directly as if it had been spoken aloud. “We’re family from America,” I explain. “We got your address from Shasha and we’d like to ask some questions about how you managed to survive the war.”

“How you didn’t die like a sheep!” puts in Marshall.

Startled, J. P. focuses his attention on the boys with half-closed eyes. It seems to pain him to take in their presence. J. P. remembers the fork he’s holding aloft, and surmounts the saliva mung in his mouth to speak out loud with his voice for the first time. “I don’t want my banquet to get cold here so I am keeping on eating,” he apologizes in a voice that’s surprisingly fine for such a rough figure.

“May we come in?”

Impatiently, the shoulders say: Of course, what are you waiting for? Obsequiously, they say: Sure, why not, let me get out of your way. Defiantly, they say: If you think I’m gonna give you squat, you got another think coming.

Still, they give way.

Inside, we case the joint while our eyes adjust. As we’d been warned, the one-room apartment is poorly lit because he’s a cheapskate who doesn’t believe in wasting electricity during daylight hours. Even in the gloom, however, it’s apparent that my mother’s second cousin doesn’t subscribe to the same school of interior design as my great uncles do. Not for him the shelves lined floor to ceiling with leather-spined classics, the oak-paneled walls plastered with abstract oils. No. For him a swimsuit calendar is plenty, with a round tag glued on the front: “Reduction de cinqaunte pourcent!” – it apparently being one of J. P.’s ploys to save four dollars by waiting till March to buy. A clunky black rotary dial phone, circa 1938 – all models since the War being deemed too extravagant. A 1940’s model typewriter on which he pecks out his shopping lists the old-fashioned way, with T’s that don’t quite line up with Z’s, with B’s and Q’s whose cavities are shaded. A space heater hooked up in front of wallpaper the shade of grandfather’s pajamas. Only thirty seconds into the apartment and our main impression is one of dire and irremediable miserliness: threadbare Persian rug, grimy gray windows, a film of profound and defiant parsimony over all.

But – blink! – everywhere there are diamonds. Little heaps of them in the maw of a green cast iron safe squatting in the fireplace. Tiny mounds of them in the pan of an antique balance scale propped on the radiator. From soft crinkly paper pouches on every available surface spill forth cascades of diamonds sparkling carelessly in the dim light, glittering on the place mats like puddles of desiccated fire. In the middle of all this dinginess, such dazzle, like an oyster producing a pearl.

Without a word, J. P. scuttles back to his chair with small shuffling steps as though he’s placed newspaper pages on the floor and is stepping them forward in order to soak up a dog’s piddle. He hunches before a mini TV propped on two telephone books in the middle of a card table. On Oprah, Arnold Schwarzenegger is playing drums; quite atrociously, as it happens, pursing his lips and closing his eyes with concentration. The volume is turned down low, another money-saving measure, no doubt; J. P. likely figures it uses less electricity to have the sound where he can barely hear it. From a distance of six inches he studies its screen like the Talmud, sitting here with tufts of white chest hair poking through the button holes of his undershirt while he resumes slurping his egg noodles a little nervously because we are here. And this – his nervousness – is the only concession he makes to our presence. No invitation to sit down or join him in his meal-taking. Yet I am not put out. I find J. P. to be both more schnooky and more powerful than I imagined. He radiates energy, and it’s a rascally energy besides. I’m charmed. He’s not good looking, surely some of his women must have admitted he looked a little like a bullfrog with dandruff, but there’s no discounting an allure, the complex allure of the frog perhaps, irascible but fascinating, with eyes that are in equal parts shrewd and soulful so that when you think you’re going to fall for the latter, the former keeps you on guard. Yes, I can see how he could seduce the wife of a Gestapo commandant. In his own schleppy, skinflinting way, he’s mesmerizing.

Standing there in the flickering TV dusk, the boys and I raise our eyebrows to each other. And as usual, it’s the seven-year-old who gets the ball rolling. “Did you really shoot yourself in the foot?”

“Oh, that’s a whole kettle of fish!” J. P. mutters wearily, reaching for a freebie ketchup packet from McDonald’s and squirting it into his noodles. His English is of the sort that uses only obsolete idioms and imbues them with a Yiddish flavor. “Kettle” comes out “kyeddle,” like some sort of whole grain Passover dish.

I cut to the chase. “Do you ever speak of your experiences during the war?”

He sighs through his nose, making a chirping noise, and stirs the mishmash in his bowl before noodling it into his mouth. Clearly he’d rather relish his disgusting meal of pasta and ketchup than attend to us. He sits there gloomily watching Schwarzenegger laugh with Oprah, slapping his lips together as he chews.

Just as I look away to consider my options, he jabs me with a gnarly old-Testament finger – ouch! in the ribs! – and speaks.

“You can ask about Germany.”

I’m startled. Is he really giving us permission to question him? “Germany?”
Still watching the TV he says: “Did you know more Jews died defending Germany in World War I than all Israelis have died in Middle Eastern wars to date? Did you know this? It is an historical fact. That many Jews were patriots to Germany. And still Mr. Hitler said we were traitors.”

“I didn’t know this,” I say carefully.

“It is an historical fact.”

He reaches one swollen-jointed hand to fidget with the antenna, his lips working even after his words have stopped. And pokes me again.

“You can ask about France.”

I’m getting the hang of it. “OK, France,” I say.

“No other country cooperated with the Nazis the way France did. Not only did they write their own anti-Semitic legislation, they also provided French police to deport Jews from the south of France. 80% of the French were on the side of Nazis during the war, then 80% claimed they were in the Resistance afterwards.”

He busies himself tearing open a freebie packet of Sweet n Sour from KFC with his teeth and drizzles that, too, over his noodles. “This is not strictly facts, it is some facts and some opinion thrown in free of charge,” he concludes.

“Well the French,” I chime in, “you know what Saul Bellow says about the French, don’t you? ‘They are so wonderful, they are so disagreeable.’”

Oops. It’s clearly not my place to express an opinion. This is his apartment! I’m going to use up all the talk! Fortunately he forgives me as he gnaws the inside of a cream cheese packet from Dunkin Donuts. “You can ask about America.”

So this is the secret to warming him up: Let him take the ball and run with it. In electrical engineering they talk of a certain kind of oscillator being self-exciting – it makes itself go. So it seems are certain Jews self-exciters. “Shoot,” I say judiciously.

“Two times American bombers flew over Auschwitz on their way to bomb targets five miles away and they couldn’t spare a single bomb to close it down,” he says. “In 1942 your media was carrying stories that two million had already been killed, and did FDR lift a finger? Even though 90% of American Jews voted for him. But your State Department was such a bunch of anti-Semites they turned away a boatload of Jews off the coast of Florida, they could see already the bathing beauties on the beach!”

“But of course there’s no forgetting,” I point out, “it was America who won the –”
“And now look,” he says, pointing his middle finger to Schwarzenegger on the TV. “Who is now your super hero? A Nazi!”

“Well, that’s not quite fair,” I say.

“So who is wanting to be fair?” he posits, with a look of mischief on his face. This is indignant mischief, I see, deep-grained impishness that hankers for nothing so much as a good fight, and it finds its truest expression in his shoulders, suspended long enough for me to read the addendum: The world is so fair to me I have to be fair back? And with that, he plunks the noodles in his mouth and chews happily with his lips not touching.

“So,” says Alex, “you hate America?”

“I love America!” J. P. replies at once. “I hate nothing! People are only people doing the best they can – in Germany and France, too – and if they screw up all the time, like clockwork round the clock, this is merely the way we are made, God help us.”

This declaration seems to fire him up anew, and now he takes a sudden shine to the boys. His mood changing like quicksilver, he springs from the table and spreads his arms wide. “Hug! Hug!” he cries with his eyes closed. And what follows is one of the most astonishing sights of my life: This virtual stranger J. P., this mythic tightwad with his open fly and halo of dandruff, clutching my sons in a ferocious hug and exclaiming in a hiss: “I lost both my babies in the war!”

And so I understand at last. It hurts him to witness the health of my two sons. From the time we arrived at his door, he would have liked nothing more than to squeeze the stuffing out of them, but it would have pained him too much to feel their life.

In his bear hug, his glasses have slipped down his damp little nose, exposing his round blue eyes naked. “Strong boys! Strong!” he says, pulling himself away with an effort and popping his biceps in the boys’ faces for them to squeeze “I also am strong! Feel here!”

“Wow!” say the boys – and they wouldn’t say it if they didn’t mean it.

His arms are as sinewy as they are freckled. “Feel here!” he is saying now, inviting them to finger his gluts, his delts, his abs. “Not feel like a piece of glass, punch!” he says, and one after the other the boys delight in hauling back and punching this eighty-eight year old man in his gut. I can’t believe it, they’re digging him and he’s digging them. And now I see what I didn’t see before – that beneath J. P.’s reserve he’s buoyantly, irrepressibly cheerful. It takes a cheerful man to live through what he’s lived through: A sourpuss wouldn’t have made it.

“OK, that’s enough,” I tell the boys, but am immediately overruled by all three.

“No, it’s good!” J. P. says, for he’s in his element. He’s enjoying this. Why shouldn’t he enjoy? These are his kindelich relatives and he’s showing off. I get the feeling J. P. could survive any environment you threw him in. Hardboiled American kids? No problem. Hong Kong terrorists? Not to sweat it. The man is wired. If he were tossed in with cannibals, he’d come out king because no one would want his scrawny tough meat while he’d eat everybody. White, black, Jewish, gentile – he’d be an equal opportunity cannibal. Why is he so strong? Simple, he tells the boys: He works out three times a week at the Yimcha.

“What’s the Yimcha?” Alex asks, panting from the exertion of belting the old man, who is merely beaming.

“The Yimcha! Everyone knows the Yimcha. It’s an American club mit branches.”

“Mit branches?”

“All over the world. Different clubs you can go in sometimes downtown, sometimes the suburbs.” He appears an inch before my nose to direct his ire at me. Breath, spittle, sinew: He was born to be in your face! “What kind of American father are you, you don’t take your boys to the Yimcha?”

Dutifully, I furrow my brows. “The Yimcha,” I say with caution. “How do you spell it?”

“Sure: Y. M. C. A.”

“Oh, the Y,” I say.

And now, regarding me with his hooded glittering eyes so that he registers me for the first time, he pounces to sweep a moldering cardboard box to the side of the table with his bare forearm and gestures us to join him. “Come! Sit! Sit!”

As Hogan’s Heroes comes on (“the most popular show in Germany today,” he informs us), J. P. pivots to produce three bowls from a cupboard behind him and an enormous pot he’s been hoarding out of sight till now. “You hungry want eat? Noodles and ketchup, delicious. I was going to freeze the rest but you can have?”

Noodles and ketchup? I don’t think so. But Marshall is game as always and in no time has dug in to his elbows, squirting packages of ketchup on his noodles and talking with his mouth full. “Dad, you ought to try it. It’s great!”

J. P. beams at him. He’s made a convert. He touches Marshall on the wrist. “You can ask about diamonds.”

Even in the caloric upheaval he’s undergoing, the seven-year-old is always open to his main chance. “Are they free to the family?”

J. P. winks at me. “A shrewd businessman,” he says approvingly.

Marshall is dead-serious. “Well are they?” he pursues.

J. P. sidesteps the question. “These are nothing, tiddlywinks only. Better you ask: Why are Jews in diamonds in the first place?”

“I don’t know. Why?” asks Marshall.

J. P. swipes at the sweat running down his sideburns, happy to divulge himself. “OK, I shall tell you. A diamond is not just a diamond. This is the first thing to understand. A diamond is a loaf of bread. For if you have a diamond you can buy a loaf of bread in a concentration camp. A diamond is also false papers, for if you have a lot of them you can buy papers to Spain, to Portugal, to freedom. Why do Jews put all their fortune in buying a diamond instead of for instance a grand piano? Because a grand piano you can’t sew into your pocket and run through a sewer pipe to freedom,” he says with a sly wink, patting his pocket. “So now you know something about diamonds you didn’t know before, eh?” he says, and pinches Marshall’s cheek.

Never before having been pinched on his cheek, Marshall thinks this is a game. He reaches out and pinches J. P.’s cheek back.

“Good, little one!” J. P. says. “Good spirit.”

“But why do you always point with your middle finger?” Marshall asks.

“Oh man!” says Alex, rolling his eyes.

J. P. isn’t offended. “Why? Because I am old! When you are old, you too will point your middle finger.”

“You smell like salami,” Marshall notes.

“Marshall!” Alex says, but J. P. only gestures for Marshall to lean closer, as he leans across the table himself to deliver his reply in a stage whisper. “This also is because I am old. You want to know how we get so old?” He leans closer to Marshall’s ear. “You just hold in there, and plufff! you’re old!”

With a grimace, he pulls a tiny diamond out of Marshall’s ear and puts it back on the place mat.

Marshall grins, his eyes gleaming.

J. P. pokes Alex in the rib cage. “You can ask about the Resistance.”

“Okeedoke,” Alex obliges. “Tell about the Resistance.”

“We had the best Resistance in Europe, right here in Belgium,” he says proudly.

“Me, I was only a tiddlywink in the Resistance. My brother Schloime in Antwerp, he was the big shot!”

With another sleight of hand he produces a pair of old battle headphones from out of the moldering cardboard box. Also part of an old parachute, remnants of food rations, machine gun casings. He’s living here in a kind of museum of war curios, playing soldier with artifacts from the underground. And off he goes again.

“My brother distributed an underground newspaper, he and two girls delivered it on foot every night. One time he was approached by Germans and he starts kissing both girls, and the Germans don’t bother them. It was very good for him to be in the Resistance, always a chance to be mit girls.”

“Did he French them?” Marshall asks.

“What is?” inquires J. P., his face big and round next to Marshall’s.

“Of course he didn’t French!” Alex snarls. “This was in Belgium!”

While I’m plotting how to rescue JP from this blizzardy conversation, I get another jab! in the ribs. Clutch! Grope! Grip! Grab! Every gesture he makes hurts.

“You can ask about concentration camps in France.” “In France?” I say. “You mean the ones in Poland, right? I never heard of a concentration camp in France.”

“Sure in France. Sometimes they called them detention or transit camps, holding everyone till they went to Auschwitz. ‘The little hell before the big hell,’ they called them.”

I look skeptical, which seems to put J. P. on a playful track.

“It wasn’t so bad, really, we had a doctor who would carry an aspirin on a string. And if you were very sick, you would fold your hands behind your back and lick it once.”

“Why’d you have to fold your hands?”

“So we wouldn’t grab the aspirin and run away. Not that we’d get very far, but.”

“But what if you were dying?” Marshall asks.

“Oh, well this was a different matter. Then you get to lick it twice!”

The boys look at me for verification. I raise my eyebrows: Don’t ask me ...

“We had one bucket for eating,” J. P. goes on, “and for crapping.”

The boys pursue him without tittering. “You mean ...the same bucket? How’d you wash it?”

“Ho ho!” he says. “We didn’t!” With the precision of small distances shared by all diamond cutters, he adjusts his dinner bowl half an inch and gestures again toward the box. “We had only one layer of clothes. We stuffed paper inside to keep us warm. No heat to sleep, no pillows. Only one blanket, voila.”

Flashing his palm to show there’s nothing in his hand, nothing up his sleeve, he reaches into the box and withdraws a piece of blanket for us to feel. The touch is rougher than a horse blanket; it would rub like a hair shirt next to your skin. But we have only an instant to take this in before J. P. steers the conversation in a new direction. “Why did we hide and keep going, this is a good question to ask,” he says.

OK, fine, I allow as how it’s a good question.

“Oy, is that a good question to ask,” he says. “Not because we thought we could get away, I’ll tell you that. Not even because we wanted to, after a while, we were so heartsick. But we hide because we didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, Mr. Hitler. We hide because it was the only thing we can do to say to him, fuck you, Mister Hitler.”

He points a tapered Old Testament finger to us, the nail as yellow as old glue, to show that he uses the curse with care. “You can ask why I call him Mister Hitler and I’ll tell you why. Because it should not be forgotten he was a man. Calling him ‘Hitler’ sounds like ‘Frankenstein,’ ya? But he was not a monster. Thinking that is letting the human species off the hook.”

“How’d you smuggle diamonds in knife stems and chocolates, that’s what I don’t get,” asks Alex.

“You don’t get because you don’t eat,” J. P. says, ladling Alex up with noodles. Hovering over both boys’ plates now, making additions and subtractions as he tastes, he produces patties of fast-food butter and packets of mayo. And it was only fifteen minutes ago that he wouldn’t let us in the door.

“Dad, he’s right, it is good,” Alex informs me after one bite. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

But J. P. is placing gnarled rugged fingers to the roof of his mouth, now, and tugging. “Even in my mouth I smuggle,” he says, popping off his front tooth. With a lisping gap in the front of his smirk he drops the tooth into my hand and points to the space inside it. Sure enough, big enough for a diamond.

“Always I was using something like Chapstick to stick it back on,” he says, snatching the tooth back and wiggling it into place.

“They had Chapstick in those days?” Alex asks.

“And corn flakes and Chrysler cars, too! You think this is ancient Greece we’re talking about?”

The boys have a million questions. “How long did you hide under the bed? Why did you play billiards with the Gestapo? When did you last speak to your son in Paris?”

J. P. puts up his hand like a traffic cop in the flickering light. “To answer all your questions would take as long as the war,” he says. “Enough to say I was not only a diamond dealer. I was also a mahar, you know what is? A go-between, a finagler, someone who figures all the angles.”

“An operator,” I offer.

“Sure sure,” he nods, bored by my word. They have a technique for rendering you superfluous, these survivors. When they’re struggling to verbalize a concept and you come up with the perfect way to do it, they turn dismissive on you. “Sure, a mahar! Someone who gets you bleacher seats to the Yankees when the Red Sox are playing!”

“Like a scalper,” Alex offers.

His eyebrows bob flirtatiously. “A little bit scalper, a little bit barber, and I throw in a foot massage, too, free of charge. What’s it gonna hurt? They used to say, during the war, that for every Jew the Nazis catched, another mahar was born. God help me, if that’s the way Mr. Hitler was going to play it, I was going to become a mahar. And I did too! I was a mahar supreme, a mahar par excellence, I was the best god damn mahar –”

Here J. P. sparks a fugue of self-congratulation so lavish we have to turn away. The spittle is flying as fast as he can foam it forth. I look over at my boys who smile and shrug their shoulders as if to say, Sure, let him go on, he’s having a good time, what could it hurt?

I try to bring him back on track. “Your Jewish star, what did you do with that?” I ask, noticing that I’m mixing up the syntax, Jewish style.

Closing his eyes, J. P. takes off his glasses and folds them in his hand, no doubt to preserve their focus. “It was the first way we disobeyed!” he says. “If you wore a star like the Germans told you to, you had no chance. If you put your star in your pocket, you had not much of a chance, but some.” Fondly he pats his pocket, a place that apparently came in handy during the war. “Mine is the story of those Jews who did not do what the Germans told them to do,” he explains. “Who put their stars in their pockets and vamoose!”

And like quicksilver it’s time to turn the tables. Enough with our questions, already. He has questions of his own. “So you are here to make a conquest of my hiding places,” he says.

I’m surprised how fast it’s been leaked to him. “How do you know this?”

He waves the air, a hand near his ear. “I know, I sense. On many matters I am an expert. Not only history, also psychology, parapsychology, popular mechanics, did I say this? Sure, it’s a fact.”

“We want very much to find your hiding places,” I say. “Not making a conquest but a quest, I guess, if anything. Have you gone back to see what’s become of them?”

He chuckles, not an altogether pleasant sound. “Why would I go to see them? I am happy right here,” he gestures with a sly glance to his apartment, to his second-hand Sunbeam toaster with the dial turned to extra light (pennies add up!), “in my castle.”

“Do you think they’re still there? The hiding places?”

His raises his shoulders. Translation: Who knows? If you can find them they’re still there. “Besides,” he says aloud, “this is a hiding place.”

“In what sense?”

He snorts at this, choking on his own phlegm. “The physical sense, what else!”

Seeing my confusion, he elaborates. “Not for me, myself. But for my cousin Yudl, your great uncle. He lived here an entire winter, in that chimney there.”

The boys are bug-eyed. “This is the chimney where Yudl hid?”

“The very one.”

It’s like meeting a movie star. Shyly I touch the mantle, the grayish brick, making its acquaintance.

“Sure. And that’s the window he wiggled out.”

“Yudl wiggled?! Out a window!?”

“When the Gestapo comes, you wiggle.”

Lifting up the dusty Venetian blinds, Marshall peeks out the window “But there’s no fire escape …”

“A drainpipe, yes?”

“Kind of,” Marshall says. “But it’s so shaky, the hinges are no good.”

“It was either that or Auschwitz.”

Leaning out the window, Marshall rattles the copper drainpipe to test its reliability, while Alex peers down four floors to the street below and whistles with new respect. I meanwhile feel that the wind has been knocked out of all the Passover jokes I ever made at Yudl’s expense. Maybe he could windsurf ….

“So tell me,” he resumes, grimacing and swiping his mouth, failing to get the bit of cottage cheese. “You are an anti-Semite?”

“No,” I say, shifting in my seat uncomfortably. “At least, what do you mean? Would I be taking this trip if I were?”

“How do I know mit-out I ask?” he says.

Still surprised at the way this conversation has turned, I say: “I mean I have problems with Jews like anyone else ...”

“You are a recovering anti-Semite, then?”

“You mean, like an anti-Semite in remission?” I say with a smile, but he’s dead serious, taking the measure of me. “No. I want to take this trip to find out what happened to our people ...”

“And you are confident you can do this?”

“I’m the opposite of confident,” I confess. “I’m in awe of this material. I pray for the clarity to do it justice.”

He chirps through his nose, taking stock. “Answer me this,” he continues. “Your wife, she was a nice person?”

“She still is,” I reply. “Just because she left doesn’t put her in the past tense.”

But he’s waving away my words like so much bad air. What, I think life lasts forever that I should go on yapping so? We have important business to discuss!

“These beautiful children,” he asks. “You have been gypped of them? Robbed of your family?”

The kids blink at me, wondering how I’m going to field this one.

“In some ways,” I admit. “But in others, I’ve been able to cherish them more than I would otherwise. They’re a gift I prize more profoundly.”

J. P. grunts assent. This also he understands. “Answer me this,” he continues. “You have girlfriends?”

“Sure.”

“You expose these children to your girlfriends?”

“Sometimes I introduce them, sure. This is the 20th century.”

If this is an impertinent thing for me to say, it seems only to enliven J. P. In fact, the subject seems to be one dear to his heart. He clumps his shoulders forward, the shoulder equivalent of a chuckle, and puts his glasses back on.

“I also am boinking the womens,” he declares.

“Come again?” I ask, hoping I heard him wrong. The boys register disbelief and start to muzzle laughter into their hands.

“You know what I am boinking last year?” J. P. says, turning to the boys and slapping his thigh as though he still can’t believe his good fortune. “A Christian Scientist! Sure! And the year before that, a cashier for a health food stores! Even in the war I am boinking the womens!” he tells the boys as pats his pants pocket, the site of his favorite adventures.

He’s demented, I decide, as he stares smiling at us, the light from the mini TV glinting off his eyeglasses. But the boys are eating it up with a spoon. They love the male camaraderie, even if they’re not certain of the technical end of things. J. P. giggles with them, his big magnified eyes glittering with perspiration.

“Eat! Eat!” he tells me. And such is my state of astonishment that I do. How do you like that: Noodles and ketchup aren’t bad, I decide. I’m laughing but I’m also wincing a bit. J. P. picks up on it.

“I see you are shocked,” he says. “Even as you laugh you are thinking, sex in the Holocaust? This is not supposed to be said in the same breath, sex and Holocaust. Well this is too bad. I am sorry to disturb you. You have a delicate constitution. But you came here to ask me and so I will tell you –”

“Yes?”

“You have the wrong idea.”

“Excuse me?”

“About the Holocaust. The wrong idea! The wrong idea!”

“I’m sorry. What do you mean?”

He slams his palm down on the table suddenly, making the diamonds jounce, and fixes me with a fierce twinkling eye to burn this thought into our brains.

“Where did you get the idea that the Holocaust was a Disney movie?” he demands. “For everybody to cry boo hoo and then everybody to feel better? Why do you think of it like a holy experience, so everyone has a nice cry and then blows their nose and forget about it! That’s why maybe,” he says, and here he grips my knee with iron fingers, hucking up an angry wad of phlegm from the base of his tonsils – hawk! hawk! – “maybe you should go home! Maybe you should forget the whole business unless you can stop mit the boo-hoo –”

“Stop mit the –?”

“Stop mit the boo-hoo and talk about the real holocaust, not the holy Holocaust but the one full of love and sex and passion because that’s what it was! And hope and desire, too! Do you know in the refugee camps after the war, there was the highest birthrate in the world! It’s a fact! Survival is not for sissies!”

Silence in the dark apartment. We’re quiet, the diamonds are quiet, even Colonel Klink on the TV is quiet. Only J. P.’s breathing is audible. But such rhetorical breathing: you can hear every verb in his breath. It’s not frugal breathing but extravagant wrathful breathing, laden with pious obscenities that blue the air. The breathing of an Old Testament prophet who’s been wronged.

And still he’s got his hand on my knee. There’s no release from the iron grip. The gesture is intimate and it hurts.

I’m blown away by his speech. Maybe it’s perverted. Maybe it’s wise. I don’t know anymore whether he’s demented or the sanest person I’ve ever met. All I know is that at this moment, with J. P.’s salami breath in my face and the sweat winding down his sideburns and his halo of dandruff splintering in all directions, I feel confused and unworthy. Maybe the warning at Shasha’s was right. It is a goose chase. I’m stumbling like a blind man through a room of folded chairs.

And then I look at my two sons staring at me, and I know that what I’m doing is sound. And so with gentleness in my uncertainty I tell J. P. this: That I need to do this. I may louse it up, and I may get nowhere, but I’m doing it the best way I can because it’s my responsibility to show them how some survived, when six million died ...

But to this J. P. looks as if he’s been smacked in the face with a dead flower. Slowly he releases me, straightening up by degrees as he unclenches his hand from my knee. And grows an expression I never thought I’d see on his face: shyness.

Almost apologetically he says softly, “Here I have a problem.” He studies his fingernails quietly. “Six million ...

“You see, I don’t know from six million,” he says. “Six million is for me too big a number. Also a very common number. Both at the same time: Too big, and too common. Do you know that the number of cigarettes smoked by teenager smokers each month is six million. Unbelievable, yes? But the scientists tell us so. On an average summer day the number of people playing tennis in America is six million. Also unbelievable? But I read it in the paper. It is not such a big number when you look at it this way. It is not so special. Six million is cigarettes, is tennis players. Only in one way to me is it special ...”

And suddenly his face turns red, his eyeballs bulge and turn shiny for an instant, before he blinks twice and tries staring at the TV.

“It is my twin girls.”

And an odd thing happens. Because he won’t allow his eyes to fill up, my eyes fill up. I look over at my pre-adolescents and their eyes are filling up, too.

Still staring at the TV with his eyes filmy and red, he says in a thick voice: “So this is why I say finally, it is a good thing what you are doing. To find my places.”

“Yes? You approve?”

“Alex and Marshall, you are detectives?” he asks. “You have a head for clues?”

They nod vehement assent.

“Then help your father, together you shall find.” He points his finger at them, an injunction from the bible. “So!”

And with that, he slings a book across the table to Marshall.

“What is it?” Marshall says. “Berlitz Guide to French, 1938 ...”

“You can use it maybe to pick up girls,” J. P. says. “As for you ...” he says to Alex, slinging an old leather notebook across the table to him with such violence the pages flutter. “This could maybe help.”

“What is it, your journal?” Alex asks.

“Something like.”

“Thank you!” I say, taken aback by the big black swastika across its front. “We’ll make sure everything gets back to you in good condition.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, yanking me to my feet suddenly and nudging me to the door. His shoulders slump. His hands wearily wave us ahead. Opening up to us has drained him and he’s done. He can’t afford to feel anymore of what we make him feel.

Even without opening it, I see the journal is crammed with scraps of mail, old phone bills, expired pawn shop vouchers. The pages are scrambled out of order, with little spider-like scrawls in a watery purple pen. Also a sepia print of two little girls, angelic and mischievous, which J. P. plucks back and puts in his pocket.

“What is, I mean, who are –?”

“Go now. It is enough,” he says. He shuffles us towards the door in silence.

“Are those your –?”

With his finger to his lips, he keeps shuffling us door-wards. His shoulders, heaving softly, are saying something but I’m too rushed to read their message. “Enough. Stop mit the boo hoo,” he says. “Goodbye.”

It’s only after the door is closed in our faces, after we turn in the hall and silently descend in the rickety elevator, that I understand. This the shoulders were saying, softly:

Let me grieve.