Problems With People: Stories Page 10

  They drove toward Wannsee while his father, incensed, offered a familiar litany. “The last thing I’d do is buy anything German—not a car, nothing, not even a pencil, and if this guy next to me hadn’t popped for my ticket, I never would have flown on Lufthansa.” Next he told Erika that he hated Volkswagens, and that “when my wife, who’s gone, got me a Braun shaver, I traded it in for a Schick.” Also, when he watched the Olympics on television, he hoped all the Germans would come in “dead last,” and when he saw them on the news drinking beer at Oktoberfest, he gave his television the finger. Germany didn’t have any artists or writers because Germans lacked souls. Their so-called philosophers were fascist pigs. And they were such thorough dummkopfs they kicked out the Jews, who then went ahead and invented the bomb, “but in America,” said his father. “What idiots!”

  Erika remained silent in the face of this harangue, as if she had steeled herself to it. Today she wore a different coat—long, belted, and double-breasted—and had captured her hair in a loose ballerina bun, out of which splayed a spiral of loose ends; she drove, always, with two hands on the wheel and with her seat pulled close to the pedals. All of this made her look vulnerable somehow, and also, he thought, a little undernourished—Erika appeared, to his eyes, gray and frail, too small for her coat and overbundled for the weather, which at noon, as they passed through leafy forest, was sunny and fair, as if the world were blown clean—no sign, anywhere, of the impossible past, of a past that couldn’t really have happened.

  At Wannsee they visited the villa above the lake where, as Erika explained—standing by the roses on the circular drive—“the Final Solution was planned, in 1942, by fifteen Germans, including Adolf Eichmann, who was only thirty-five at the time.”

  “And do you know what became of Eichmann?” asked his father. “For eight years he was a free man in Argentina, until the Mossad threw him into the back of a car, and then they put that pig on the stand and hung him by the neck in Israel. And too bad they couldn’t hang him twice!”

  They went in. They stood in the conference room—actually a dining room—where the plans had been hatched. The sun-room looked out onto yet more roses. The museum was divided into fourteen sections, and in each his father bent over display cases, zeroing in on the fine print intently for two hours and forty-five minutes.

  It was invasive, really, but in the circular foyer—where they waited while his father took his time in the toilet—he asked for forgiveness in prelude to his question, then said that her former work sounded interesting but that he had to wonder why she had quit, and also, what came next.

  Erika, with her car keys in hand, belted her coat a little tighter. “Of course, you can ask me anything,” she said. “For me, the next step is law school.”

  “I’m a retired attorney,” he told her. “Mostly my practice was pretty mundane, but at any rate I applaud your choice. Although I should warn you that the law is all-consuming and that a lawyer almost never stops. You’re either all the way in or you’re out.”

  “Yes,” said Erika. “And as for the Deutsches Historisches Museum, I found myself very frustrated there. So much work I put in for them to establish who owned the Friedrich Hagedorn or the Grosz or the Knaus or the Diefenbach, and then their lawyers establish doubt so the museum can keep these works in its collection. What I made clear, they clouded over. And they were very, very good at it,” she added.

  The Herren door opened and his father stepped out. “One thing about this country,” he said. “I gotta give ’em credit for their bathrooms.”

  Back in Berlin they visited Café Einstein, because his father needed to rest for a bit, and because, in the wind that had stirred in the afternoon, the city had begun to grow cold again. Inside the café, however, it was warm—warm to the point of languorously cozy—and bustling, too, with lingering coffee drinkers, and with people eating large wedges of cheesecake and the specialty of the house, apple strudel. The strudel, its smell, awakened in his father a memory of strudel, and so Erika ordered it for him with a cup of drip coffee, and a piece of cheesecake with a cappuccino—why not?—but only, for herself, black tea, since she didn’t want to eat, even though he said it would be on him in the paternal tone he’d deployed toward her since the evening before, when, in the cold, at dusk, at Grunewald, they’d stood on the platform keeping watch over his father.

  Refreshed, they walked to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a battery of “stelae” in the middle of Berlin that rose like concrete tombs or chimneys, faceless and without inscription. These were arranged in claustrophobic rows that dipped into increasing darkness, and into which his father disappeared. Here, in the low light of midafternoon, with their faces flushed by exertion and flirtation, a group of schoolchildren, oblivious to history, were playing tag among the stelae. Erika said sternly, “This is not right—where is their teacher?” and “Germans simply go on with their lives as if they had every right to be ignorant,” and “We don’t have the right to be eating our strudel, and there should not be Somali women serving us at tables. I’m sorry, you don’t do what Germans did and just go on always talking about your guilt and building more museums and memorials. What you do is, you do your own dishes, and also you give every single thing back, all of the linens and the townhouses stolen, you give back the strudel, you teach your children to give back the strudel, this is the punishment, and we should serve the long sentence, not a single German should be indifferent, and let those who say I am guilt-obsessed tell it to the murdered six million.”

  “Agreed,” he said. “But they’re dead.”

  They stood beside a row of trees, near where the children were being called to their school bus; his father was nowhere to be seen. Erika, frowning, said, “Believe me, I know all the counterarguments. I’ve read the Goldhagen, the Christopher Browning, the Karl Jaspers, the Carl Jung, and in school of course The Burden of Guilt, which is a famous book here in Germany.” Now she frowned at two boys running past. “Today,” she said, “there are all these people my age who are conflicted about joining German society because then they can no longer say to themselves, ‘I am a child, and a child is not responsible.’ That is something I won’t do,” she said. “Everybody has to grow up.”

  In the wind and the gradually failing light, she looked to him, though wan, committed—committed in the sense of idealists he’d known, like his daughter, the pediatric epidemiologist. He himself had just made money. Not that money was bad. You could only give it away if you had it. But this Erika Wolf, from a city of German banks, from a family of rich Germans, wanted something else from life.

  For three more days they made pilgrimages together, always on behalf of his father. They drove to Potsdam and toured the Cecilienhof Palace, where Stalin, Churchill, and Truman carved up Europe—something, his father said, they heard about in Shanghai a month after it happened. On a morning of rain, they visited Berlin’s Jewish Museum, which was so enormous and complicated, and so perplexing and unnerving, that they ended up spending nearly the day there, after which his father said he’d like to visit cemeteries. On their last day, then, Erika drove them to Weissensee, where she called their attention to the Art Nouveau mausoleums and to a plaque commemorating Herbert Baum, who, she explained, “was a prominent member of the resistance to Nazism and somebody I wrote on at university.” There was another cemetery on Heerstrasse, close to the Olympic Park, and a third on Schönhauser Allee that, beside its hoary wrought-iron gates, had a lapidarium displaying damaged headstones. He and his father wore the mandatory Schädeldecke to wander, in silence, among the graves.

  At their farewell in front of the Brandenburger Hof, his father tried to give Erika a hundred euros—“a little something, not much, a gratuity”—but she wore him down about taking it from him until his father stuffed it back in his wallet, shrugged, and said, “Have it your way.” For his own part, he shook their tour guide’s hand with a formal distance he didn’t really feel; what he wanted was to hug her affectionately, b
ut he didn’t feel right about doing that; for him, a lot of rules were in play that he did not want to abridge. He said, “It has certainly been a very great pleasure to spend these last five days with you, and my father and I both thank you from the bottoms of our hearts for everything you’ve done. We mean it.”

  At this, his father hit him on the shoulder. “What kind of a goodbye is that?” he asked. “Come here,” he said to Erika, and hugged her.

  They were in the air, just taking off, when his father observed, looking out the window, “I’ll never see Berlin again, you can bet your bottom dollar on that!”

  Hours later, over the Atlantic, his father leaned in close to say, “That was a very nice girl we had. With a very nice tuchus, by the way.”

  He had to laugh. His father touched his arm. “Wolf,” said his father. “Erika Wolf. You went to temple with kids named Wolf. You gotta remember—Danny Wolf? Danny, I think, was the one your age. His mother and father I knew a long time. His father was the one who screwed everything up when he worked for the city or the county in the sixties and almost had to serve jail time.” Now his father put a hand to his chin. The plane bumped a little, into the wind. “I think Danny is the one who ended up a lawyer. One of the boys is a lawyer, I know that. I can’t keep the Wolfs straight. There’s so many Wolfs. You look in the phone book and there’s hundreds of these Wolfs that used to be there, coming to temple. Anyway, that company didn’t send a goy, baruch HaShem. We got the real deal—a Wolf—in Berlin! And this one such a krassavitseh—which in the old days we called a first-class Jewish woman, top of the line, someone to be respected. A krassavitseh toured us around Berlin! A Jewish woman showed us Berlin!”

  Shadow

  He went in for tests that revealed changes in his frontal lobes. A battery of interviews yielded the conclusion that his short-term memory had declined. His ability to act serially was compromised, and he’d lost what a doctor called “executive function.” All of this within three months of retiring—not what he’d had in mind.

  He and his wife took a cruise after that. Endless eating, talking, and milling. Disgruntled, and determined not to participate, he looked for corners in which to read magazines. At night, he placated his wife with a little dancing. One evening, an entertainer called three couples to a stage, including them, because his wife raised both hands. In front of everyone, so everyone could laugh, the entertainer accosted them with intimate questions, but he wouldn’t be pulled into innuendo, he wouldn’t be pulled into anything for idiots, and, most of all, he would scrupulously say the right thing, to keep his wife from his throat. Yet the cruise ended on a bad note anyway, with his wife upset because, obviously, he loathed cruising.

  Retirement wasn’t going very well. But then his youngest son called, after eight long months, saying, “Hey, it’s me. Remember me?”

  He panicked. He had no words. This son was so flaky, hard to fathom, unsteady. In his mid-twenties, he’d floated with a backpack. Then he became a war correspondent in Bosnia. They didn’t hear from him much after that, and when they did, he was far away. He married a Bosnian, then a Kenyan—possibly he was still married to both. If he had kids, they didn’t know about it. They’d pinned him down, finally, in 2002, by flying to Nairobi and getting a room at the Hilton, where they’d confronted him by a pool. He looked terrible. Some disease or other had ravaged his complexion, but he didn’t want to go into the details. They suspected he had AIDS. The boy’s mother made a desperate push to fathom her son, but the most he would say was that he loved his work and enjoyed his travels. He didn’t characterize it exactly that way, but it was what they told his siblings by telephone from their room in the Hilton, in an effort to paint the picture with at least a few bright colors. Actually, the Africa trip was exhausting and depressing, but between himself and his son … was the word “affinity”? He felt an affinity for this son of his, yes. He cheered for him. Defended him against his mother. And, with surprising frequency, he dreamed about him.

  Usually when his son called he sounded blurry and distant, but this time he might have been right next door, that’s how normal the connection was. It was good the boy’s mother was out of the house—having told him not to touch anything, to wait until she got back from Target—because otherwise he would have had to yell for her right now so she could get on the line and take over. “Hey,” he said, “it’s you! Great!”

  And it was great. Whereas his other three kids had been born in quick succession when he was too young to know what was going on, this one had arrived after a hiatus of ten years, when he was better established in his line of work—law—better able to support his family, and generally wiser and more mature—that is, mature enough to know that life passes by while you keep your nose to the grindstone. Was that trite? He didn’t care if it was trite. He was a sentimentalist—he knew that about himself. He was sentimental about this boy, his baby, who’d been an independent soul from the start.

  His son explained that he was in Alabama, but only for a few days before flying to Cameroon. “Alabama?” he asked. “Isn’t that where those Jewish boys were killed? In June of ’64? One named Schwimmer? Along with a black individual as well? It was in that movie Mississippi Burning. They nominated it for the Academy Award, but Driving Miss Daisy beat it out.”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “You were born in ’64. Three days after Johnson drubbed Goldwater. It was terrible timing. I was in the middle of a trial. I had to juggle so many things.…” He became aware that he was speaking nonsense and said, “What are you doing in Alabama?”

  “Interviewing people. But—do you want to come down, Dad, and pay me a visit? We could visit a few of the sites.”

  “The sites?”

  “Where things happened. During the civil rights movement. We could go to Montgomery and Birmingham. You get a ticket into Atlanta, and I’ll drive over there and pick you up.”

  Actually, that sounded good. Most travel sounded bad, but that sounded good. After all, civil rights was up his alley. In his early thirties, he’d been the county chair of the Anti-Defamation League, and in his mid-thirties, the president of his B’nai B’rith chapter—both groups interested in civil rights. Yes, this was his cup of tea, except that it meant going to the South, where, as a child, he’d decided never to go because of anti-Semitism. He took seriously the tales of people who were stopped by sheriffs because a taillight was out, then thrown in a backwater jail until they’d paid an absurdly hefty fine and endured right-wing abuse. No, it wasn’t worth the risk, visiting the South. The South wasn’t for Jews. Besides, there were things on his calendar—two doctor appointments, his mother’s yarhzeit, a play he’d agreed to go to with his wife—and it seemed to him he should get past all those things before adding anything more. How had he ever had time to work? He couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten it all done. Alabama? That couldn’t happen. How could it happen? What would his wife say? She would say that he wanted to go to Alabama but not on a cruise. Just bringing up Alabama, a broaching, a mention, would rock her boat, throw her for a loop. And anyway, he was on a picky-eating regimen, because if he didn’t eat the right food the bathroom was impossible. Would they have what he needed in Alabama? Not only that, but since 9/11 you couldn’t take cuticle scissors or razors on an airplane. And even if you did get your razors through, it was difficult to shave in a hotel mirror, because the lights weren’t right, or the water wasn’t hot enough, or the sink was too far back or too shallow or had a complicated stopper. So what should he say now? Into the phone? He’d been silent for so long, without an answer for his son, it could reasonably corroborate the dementia diagnosis. Had one of his other kids contacted this one to say that their father was enfeebled by dementia and could use a pick-me-up invitation to Alabama? Did the kids sneak around behind his back that way? Probably they did, in a silent conspiracy—although, he knew, they were well intended. But he didn’t want to be a charity case. He didn’t think he needed their concern or assistance. H
e was a man who still knew how to operate in the world. So what was wrong with everybody? Talking about him as if he was a baby, talking about him to his face that way, talking about him as if he weren’t there, about his driving, clothing, eating habits, etc.… “Hey,” he said to his son, “you know what I think? I think that sounds good. Civil rights tourism in Alabama—fantastic! Great! Let me check on it with your mother.”

  “Right,” said his son. “Check with her and call me back.”

  She came home from Target. He checked on it with her, but she berated him for even thinking about it. “You’re not going to Alabama,” she said. “How would you find your way around?”

  “You’re treating me like a child again,” he said, throwing up his hands. “Until a few months ago, I was downtown every day, Monday through Friday, eight until six, doing all sorts of things on my own.”

  “It’s mean of him to invite you and not me,” she replied. “He doesn’t want to see me. I’m his mother, and he doesn’t want to see me.”

  “It’s wrong,” he agreed. “After all, you’re his mother.” And then, lawyer that he was, or had been for a long time, he said that it was important to connect with their son and that their son had laid down his terms for a connection, so what choice did they have? He had to go. She caved after that and—reluctantly, full of warnings—went to her computer and bought his tickets, which included a plane change in St. Louis. Next, finding their son’s number on the caller ID, she called him and, with hurt in her voice, left a message with the flight numbers. “Meet him in baggage claim,” she added, and hung up.

  His oldest son, a lawyer, too, drove him, the next day, to Sea-Tac Airport. En route in this son’s brand new “Smart Car,” he wished his son wouldn’t tool along in the slow lane. Nevertheless, they were 105 minutes early, which should have given him plenty of extra time, except that his son thought it necessary to park, roll his suitcase for him, and read signs the way you’d read them to a three-year-old, instead of, more efficiently, just dropping him at Departures. What could he do? His son handled the seat assignments, boarding passes, and baggage tag. He led the way down the concourse. They hugged, and then they were separated by Security. He took his place at the end of a long line that very quickly got longer behind him. His son waved and receded, and then he was alone. He waited his turn, but when his turn came, he’d failed to understand about his shoes and belt and had to wrestle, in a time crunch, with these wardrobe items. After some trouble with his shoelaces (he’d double-knotted that morning, at his wife’s insistence), he was told to empty his pockets into what looked like a dog bowl, and in so doing spilled change. A lucky thing next—in a switch from what was normal, he made it through the metal detector without a hitch. Then back to normal: the X-ray machine picked out his razors, so he had to wait while a security guard unpacked and examined everything in his bag. In the end, he was admonished for his razors, and lost his razors, and had to hear the rule about razors, which he already knew but had hoped to circumvent, and now feigned surprise at. “Really?” he said to his tormentor, innocently. “Is that true?”