A Change of Skin
She smiled shyly and at last spoke: “It’s … it’s that I’ve seen you every time there’s been a concert in the Wallenstein gardens.” She hesitated, then continued haltingly, “Do you … do you have a season ticket?”
He laughed and said yes, he did, but she was already going on: “It’s … Well, I saw you always alone and I realized that after the concert you would walk the streets and … Forgive me … I never know what to do after the concert and I thought … you seem so … so immersed in the music, and I…”
“You thought that…”
“Yes. Yes, that maybe if I walked the streets too, like you…”
“The music might be prolonged a little?”
“Yes, that too. And…”
“And we could walk together?”
She blushed and smiled and timidly extended her hand.
“Hanna. Hanna Werner.”
“Franz Jellinek. Would you like me to walk you home?”
“No, please, that would be too much trouble. I’m going to the other side, to the old city.”
“That’s where I live too.”
The Karlsbrücke is long and beautiful. In the summer night its lamps are less luminous than the sky and succeed only in creating shadows from the columns of clouds and cherubim, the great baroque dance of sultans with scimitars, of dogs and horses and monks and souls from purgatory stirring behind a spiked fence guarded by pagans. St. George, St. Anthony, and St. Francis gaze upon the golden crowns of the Virgin and the Holy Child. Gold on black. St. Sigismund and St. Wenceslaus and the Patriarch Norbert observe the crowned skeleton that lies on a cushion and holds a metal scepter.
They walked on, slowly.
“What do you study, Hanna?”
“Music. Composition. And you?”
“Some day I want to be an architect.”
“Good! Now we have something to talk about.”
She laughed and with both hands caressed her black shining hair. The bridge seemed to float on the summer mist. Out of the mist rose Mary and her Child with a kneeling monk. Happy cherubim climbed the cross, converting its seriousness into graceful gaiety. Which, Franz reflected, was the very soul of the baroque. Now lives of the saints in black and the central statues of the Crucifixion and the Pietà, facing each other. Franz and Hanna looked over the balustrade. Fishermen, as always, the younger men standing in boats, the older sitting bundled up on the green barges.
They said goodbye to each other under the arch of the bridge tower. Hanna took a deep breath and looked toward an avenue of fragile trees.
“Will you be at the concert next Friday?”
“Yes, but I’d like to see you sooner than that.”
“I take my lessons in Professor Maher’s studio. We passed by it. Write it down. Loretanzka 12.”
“Thank you. I’ll come one afternoon.”
“Yes, I’ll be so happy … I mean, I’ll be very pleased to … Goodbye.”
She ran down the passageway and went on running past the arcades and the National Theater.
* * *
Δ Here’s something for you, Elizabeth. Something ripe. Yesterday fourteen women in their sixties wearing fashionable hats of felt and velvet and fur-trimmed winter coats sat in a Munich courtroom in the leather chairs provided for the accused and awaited the court’s verdict. Fourteen middle-aged ladies with red noses, bifocals, and scarves. Between 1942 and 1945 they were employed as nurses in the insane asylum at Obrawalde and the charge is that during that time they murdered some eight hundred persons who were neither inmates of the asylum nor patients but had been sent there precisely to be murdered. There’s a picture of the asylum, too. Very handsome. Large buildings, a surrounding park. Each patient was examined when he arrived. The sturdier ones were dispatched to Department 19, the forced labor camp. Those who were feebler went to Department 20 to be liquidated. The method was simple and direct: a massive intravenous injection of barbiturate. For the children something a bit more humane: spoonfuls of jelly with the drug mixed into it. Those who resisted were tubed, orally or anally. They were all defectives: retarded mentally or physically deformed. At Obrawalde alone, eight thousand of them were murdered in the program of euthanasian extermination decreed by the Third Reich. The secret was known: a group of children peeked through a keyhole and saw and told the asylum dentist. But it went no further, for the dentist knew that, after all, the good nurses were merely carrying out orders, and orders are orders. Several of the ladies had balls of yarn in their laps and knitted as they awaited the verdict. One of them testified that she administered the children’s little spoonfuls lovingly, and the children always smiled at her. “If it wasn’t legal,” protested another, “why didn’t the police come and forbid it?” The judge set them free. “They were mere automatons,” he pronounced. “They were simple-minded women incapable of understanding what they were doing.” By way of celebration, the fourteen ladies went from the courtroom to a teahouse around the corner and there ordered coffee, chocolate, and slices of pie topped with whipped cream.
* * *
Δ Franz looked in the rearview mirror and saw Isabel’s face half hidden by the orange gauze that secured her Italian straw hat. He could not see but imagined her green eyes, her long neck, her tanned shoulders, her sleeveless dress of yellow shantung. Then her face was concealed entirely as Javier kissed her. Javier’s shaved cheeks. His sad dark eyes, closed now. His thick eyebrows and his thinning, graying hair.
“I can’t wait to get where it’s hot,” Isabel whispered.
“We’ll be in Veracruz tomorrow.”
“That’s not soon enough. Why can’t we drive all night? I can take turns with Franz.”
“Our plan was to loaf along slowly and see everything. It was your idea.”
“We can see everything on the way back. Now I want to be in the heat and the sun as soon as I can. I want to be in the sea. Don’t you?”
“No, I want to kiss you. Why did you open the door?”
“How will we manage tonight?”
“I’ll think of a way.”
You laughed softly, Pussycat, and tickled Javier’s ears.
* * *
Δ As he released you and fell exhausted on the bed, you remained there on all fours, shaking your loose hair like a lioness. You would have liked to be able to roar at him. Instead you said curtly: “So now there’s nothing left, eh?”
“What do you mean?”
“That was all that was missing.”
“When it’s all over, anything left is surprising,” said Javier.
“Don’t babble. Oh, you’ll use it.”
“Yes? Just how?”
“To get rid of another illusion. Go on, Proffy. I can Freudianize you as far as you want.”
“You speak the damnedest Spanish I’ve ever heard, Isabel.”
“Never mind what kind of Spanish I speak. It’s a living Spanish, at least, and you can use a little life, Professor. That’s why you don’t write anything.”
“Just what do you know about it?”
“Plenty, my love, plenty. I’ve got a nose that can smell some stinks a mile away and against the wind.”
“May God bless you and your perceptive nose, Isabel.”
“You’re impulsive, my love. That’s what you are.”
“Yes, I may be impulsive. And you, aren’t you tired of standing there humped like a camel?”
“Leave me alone. It still burns. Look, Javier, you just can’t be a middle-aged beatnik. It’s out of the question. So for Christ’s sake stop playing games. If you’re a son of the age of Don Porfirio and Queen Victoria, that’s what you are, don’t you understand, and you better stop fooling yourself. Face up to the truth. Stop losing sleep. You’re not a romantic, so forget it. So … No, Javier! No, no, stay still. Javier, Javier, not that way…”
* * *
Δ You sat in the rocker for several minutes, Elizabeth, your eyes still not adjusted to the darkness. The small glowing hands of your watch showed 8:15.
r /> “So you still don’t want to answer me. I’ve startled you and you haven’t had time yet to think what to say. Or maybe it’s just that you aren’t here. Are you here, Javier? Really and completely here? Okay, okay, don’t talk to me. I wouldn’t listen if you did. I would think about something to avoid hearing you. The Virginian, for example. Richard Arlen and Mary Brian, but Gary Cooper and Walter Huston had the leads. At the end they shot it out in the street while everyone ducked for cover. The good guy and the bad guy. Gary Cooper.”
When you say that, smile, pardner.
Sure, smile, Dragoness. Laugh. And when you and Jake hid in the closet you had to put your hands to your mouth and nose to keep from laughing. At first her voice was as calm as usual. “Beth, Jake, come on, we have to go out.” She was making an effort to control herself, you could tell that. You held back your laughter. “I’m telling you to come on. They’re waiting for us. We shouldn’t be late.” Jake pinched you and you shook silently. “Children, children, where are you? It is Friday evening and they are waiting us. The food will get cold. Be good now. There’s going to be matzo balls and gefilte fish. Don’t that sound good? Children, come on out now. It’s late already and they’re waiting.” Jake pinched your thigh and you tugged on your braids to keep from laughing and your mother’s voice rose and began to tremble. “They’re not here? Out with their father, that’s where they must have gone. I bet they went out with their father! Bethele, Yankele, where are you? You are tormenting me, stop it! Come on out! The Mendelssohns will be insulted! On time we can never be now, please, please!” You and Jake held hands, waiting, calm now, quite certain of what she would yell next. “Beth! Jake! You’re scaring me! You’re making me afraid! I’m afraid, don’t you hear me? I’m afraid!” With your eyes closed in the darkness of the closet you could see her clearly, her hair drawn severely back but as always wavy and electric with tones of copper, a few rebellious wisps surrounding her pale, transparent, veinless face. Her thick arms and her knotty hands extended beseechingly.
“Beth, make the light.”
She would never turn on the light herself. She always asked someone. And when the light went on, her hands would move absently to her forehead as if she were brushing something away. One Friday a month you were invited to the Mendelssohns. The Mendelssohns who had known Rebecca’s parents in the old country and here were successful, already well-to-do, and Rebecca when she came in from the street, from the half darkness of that thirteen-block walk, would put her hand to her forehead, brushing the light away.
“Gershon took them with him.”
You and Jake stood laughing beside Gershon at his stand in the street. He sharpened his razors and now and then shouted: “Razors! Good honest razors!”
You laughed hardest once when he reached out and stopped a man with long hair and a curly beard and asked him: “You still are going to shul?” The man nodded and your father laughed and by the lapels of his coat pulled him closer. With a swift movement of a razor, he cut off a lock of the man’s long hair. He laughed. “See how good they cut? Razors, razors, fine sharp razors!” And the man stood there, stupefied, first touching his shorn hair, then grabbing the oily lock from your father’s hands while howling incomprehensibly in Polish. You and Jake rocked with laughter and Gershon frowned and shouted: “Now he is trying to insult me! Not yet has anyone ever been able to insult me, and now he is trying! How much is it worth to you, eh? Two cents? Three? For three cents’ worth of hair he’s calling me names! Listen, my friend, the man who can insult me has not yet been born! Razors! Razors!” And the Polish Jew walked away caressing his lock of hair and muttering and you and Jake and your father laughed and the man in the next stand, who sold neckties, held his wares up to his customers’ throats and Gershon shouted: “Mordecai, those are ties you are selling, or sausages? Mister, let me tell you, to buy a tie from Mordecai is like to buy a rope from the hangman. Those ties have been stolen.”
Mordecai curses and at the ceremonial meals one Friday a month Mr. Mendelssohn says sadly: “Complaints, complaints, always he has only complaints, Mrs. Jonas. Everything fails him. I have to tell you, Mrs. Jonas, your husband is a schlemiel. There is no point for me to waste my time and my money to try to help him.”
“Mama, what is a schlemiel?” asks Jake as you walk home that night. Rebecca moans. Her felt hat is crooked and sticks out too far over her forehead, making her face of anguish look foolish; her figure, yellow and black, pale in the half-light, look absurd.
“And so long I have known you, I could be wrong? Just a bum, wasting his time with other bums who are there only waiting that a tenth man should be called for prayer. Not from faith. From pure laziness. Without even believing in the words! Waiting, always waiting ever since his teens, for a handout to come along, for the sky to drop easy money.”
You and Jake came out of the closet holding hands, laughing, shivering. Becky stopped in the darkness of the living room, paralyzed, as if she didn’t believe her eyes. But the surface of normality had always to be preserved. She hid her surprise and said only, “Good, it’s late already, they are waiting us, there’ll be pumpernickel, Mr. Mendelssohn knows how much you like pumpernickel. My hat, Bethele, where’s my hat? Please get it for me. I thought you had gone out with your father. So now let’s be going.”
Mr. Mendelssohn talked. Only Mr. Mendelssohn. A shame, Mrs. Jonas, an eternal shame. And the very Jewish merchants who sell these products have been the worst enemies of the kosher laws. An eternal shame, I say. You and Jake ate greedily, rye bread and bagel, your eyes staring at the way Mr. Mendelssohn’s wing collar moved as he swallowed. Mrs. Jonas, the Reform Jew is no less than a renegade. It is good that you at least stand fast. Your children should owe you more than they will suspect. With tears in her eyes, Rebecca nodded.
“You will not make renegades of my children!”
Gershon shrugged. “Renegades? No. Invisible, yes. Just invisible, Becky. Can you understand that?”
“Superstitio et perfidia Judaica.”
Invisible, Dragoness. Ah, yes, all of you.
Franz listened and you lay face down on the hard bed and told him everything. The pillow you had pulled over your head muffled your words. You told him that you loved your beautiful Northeast. Fertile, ripe New England. White winter when you can hear sleigh bells and the old men smoke their corncob pipes standing around the iron stove in the general store, and the children make snowmen with lumps of coal for eyes and a carrot for a nose. The hills with their silver fir trees, silhouettes drawn in lean ink, the ice-encased poplars. The pond frozen over, couples skating on it wearing red scarves and wool caps, thick stockings and tweed skirts and earmuffs. And the brief afternoons around the open fire are lovely.
That’s what you told Franz, Dragoness?
Yes. Night comes suddenly and you lock yourself in your room to read, lying on old cushions in the seat of a window that looks out on the red barn fences, the undulating low hills striped and spotted with rich black earth, the stables where the horses breathe white vapor. Your brother Jake gives you a ride on his sled from the top of the highest hill. You’re afraid. He laughs at you. He makes you sit on the sled and tells you to hold tight, Lizzie, hold tight, his hobnailed boots kick the hard and lumpy snow and down you go, your arms wrapped around his waist, while flakes of snow, those dancing jewels, arc in two waves of frozen dust on either side, whitening your caps, yours of blue wool, his of black leather with a black celluloid visor, down you go, the wind whipping your cheeks, your nose and your ears and your fingers numb, dodging fence posts, the naked trunks of fir trees, the hummocks of snow-covered bushes.
“Yes, so I took them to Macy’s to see Santa Claus. That bothers you?”
Jake puts the sled away. He drags it sadly to the shed where it will rest until next winter. The shining sled, just painted, with your name on it: LIZ. Now it is rust and peeling paint and your name has long ago disappeared. Puddles of water from melting snow surround the farmhouse. Though a cold win
d still lashes the shutters, your mother sets out to paint the house white, the pine siding, the gables, and to paper the rooms within with scenes of old-time country merrymaking, shepherdesses in crinoline carrying crooked staves and surrounded by sheep and by young men who lean against the cypresses and toot on flutes.
“Mr. Mendelssohn’s children spent Christmas on a farm in Connecticut.”
And now, Franz, spring comes. Fine gray rain turns all the country roads to mud and forces us to wear our rubber boots as we tramp around the chicken yard throwing fistfuls of oats to the chickens that run away from us, clucking, with their feathers made smooth and lustrous by the rain.
“In Prague, in 1473, the Jews living outside the Judenstadt decided to move into it and join their brethren. No one forced them. They went into the ghetto voluntarily.”
Spring, the season when your mother sells the hogs she has fattened all winter in their protected pen, feeding them yellow corn and oats, sells them to Mr. Duggan, the owner of the general store (Duggan? Duggan, Dragoness? Well, why not? Duggan), and you and Jake on your way home from school pass the store and sadly look at Porky, Fats, and Beulah lying in the window with red apples in their mouths.
“Can Beth spend the weekend at the farm with us, Mrs. Jonas?”
Restlessness enters through the open windows of the classroom and the attentiveness of winter vanishes. Miss Longfellow (Longfellow, Dragoness? Okay, Longfellow) wears a look of impatience and again and again, rapping the desk with her ruler, orders them to keep their eyes on their books. But she herself, rosy in her print dress and new permanent, can’t keep from glancing at the cherry tree that grows outside the window, and one day, after reading aloud (“The Mississippi is well worth our attention, children. It is not an ordinary river but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable”), she suggests that all of you look at the cherry buds, the most beautiful and softest of all buds, that little by little have sprouted and opened and now, in April, fill the window with whiteness.