The Forgotten

  “I’m burning up, aren’t I? Aren’t I burning?”

  “You have a fever. The doctor said it was a touch of pneumonia. It will run its course.”

  “Is the whole city burning, too?”

  “It’s snowing out.”

  “And in Berlin?”

  “I don’t know, Father.”

  “Isn’t Berlin burning?”

  “It’s wintertime, Father.”

  “What were you doing in Berlin?”

  “Covering a story,” Malkiel lied.

  A lie, a shameless lie. Malkiel had spent a few weeks in Berlin because—because a young German reporter, a woman, was there. Love at first sight? More like a fleeting madness over a stupid quarrel with Tamar. In a rage she’d shouted, “It’s all over between us!” All he did was nod stupidly. Tamar rushed out, slamming the door, and Malkiel did nothing to hold her back. Days of depression, nights of gloom. “Couldn’t you send me on assignment somewhere?” he asked his boss. “I need to clear my head.” “How about a trip to Germany?” the sage answered. “Germany! Never! Anywhere but Germany.” He preferred not to think about Germany. For him, Germany was pained Jewish memory. And he had had enough of that. Enough of living in the shadow of Silesian smokestacks. Enough of remembering those Jews beaten and destroyed, those children incinerated, those women shamed, those starving old men whose huge eyes stared out at a cold and cynical universe. Enough of moving about under the gaze of the dead. Let them vanish, let them leave the living alone.…

  By a bizarre coincidence he met Inge on the ninth day of the month of Av, on Tisha-b’ Av, a day of mourning and commemoration, of fasting and affliction: on that day we remember the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Inge and Malkiel met in the elevator at the newspaper. They walked along together in Times Square, made small talk and introduced themselves. “Inge Edelstein, German.”

  “Malkiel Rosenbaum, Jewish.”

  She threw him a startled glance. “It doesn’t bother you to be walking with a German girl?” No, it didn’t upset him; a reporter can’t always choose his companions. “Shall we stop for a cup of coffee?” Why not? He was about to take a sip when he remembered his father: Elhanan was fasting until sundown. “You won’t drink it?” No, he wouldn’t drink it. “It’s not good coffee?” No, it wasn’t that. “Then what is it?”

  He explained to her.

  “No,” she cried. “You can’t be serious. Your temple was destroyed two thousand years ago and you’re grieving today?” Yes, as if it had happened only yesterday. “A lot of people have told me the Jews were crazy,” she said. “They were right.” Yes, we’re crazy. “It’s human nature to forget what hurts you, isn’t it? Wasn’t forgetfulness a gift of the gods to the ancient world? Without it, life would be intolerable, wouldn’t it?” Yes, but the Jews live by other rules. For a Jew, nothing is more important than memory. He is bound to his origins by memory. It is memory that connects him to Abraham, Moses and Rabbi Akiba. If he denies memory he will have denied his own honor. “So you insist on keeping all your wounds open?” Those wounds exist; it is therefore forbidden and unhealthy to pretend that they don’t.

  They met again the following Sunday. And Monday. And Thursday. They loved each other.…

  “Fever, my son. I feel the mists rising again. Exhausted, the body can do no more. Defeated, the spirit listens in vain for even a bitter music. How can I put the world together again? Those hands holding me down are not my own; how can I cast them off?”

  Tamar, Malkiel thought; Tamar would have known how to cast them off. Reconstruct a whole world? Tamar would have known how to do that, too. Why did I follow Inge to Berlin? Didn’t I know it would bring unhappiness to my father?

  Like an idiot, he had gone knocking on the boss’s door. “I’ll do it. I’ll go to Berlin if you want me to.”

  “A good idea,” said the sage, scrutinizing him. “Isn’t the Jewish cemetery in Berlin one of the largest in the world? Readers will go for that.”

  The sage was no fool. He knew it wasn’t the cemetery that drew me to Berlin. And my father in all this? Left alone, and sick. Nothing serious? Nothing that antibiotics wouldn’t cure? Nothing linked to the disease that would destroy him later? Such excuses were too convenient. I was wrong to go.

  “The mists are rising,” Elhanan said. “I see Jerusalem. Would you like to know what I see?”

  “Yes, Father. What do you see?”

  “Near our home in Jerusalem, in the Mea Shearim neighborhood, was a garden where old men came to live out their last days. They spent hours sitting there motionless, like statues. Sometimes I went up to them and asked questions. ‘What did you do before you came here?’ They looked at me in a daze. The word ‘before’ stunned them. But among them was a woman of incomparable sweetness. She invited me to sit down beside her, and said to me, ‘We have a whole life to live, just as you have, even if it only lasts one hour, the last hour—and no flowers to pick.’ The next morning I went back to the garden with a bouquet I’d promised myself I would give her. Only … she was no longer there.”

  Did he come down with that stupid fever because of me? Loretta, Loretta, why didn’t you pay more attention, keep a closer eye on him? And Tamar, why did you send me away?

  I should never have gone. I was wrong to follow Inge, wrong to leave my father alone, wrong to lie to him, wrong to begin an affair with that German girl.

  And yet Malkiel had fallen in love with her. And she with him. In Berlin their love seemed even more miraculous than in New York. Each embrace brought them new discovery of their bodies, new potential, a flight of each beyond the other, within the other. Together they bridged the gap between Jew and German, promise and threat, happiness and suffering. Together they defied fate, lending it an innocent face, the smiling face of reconciliation if not forgiveness. Hand in hand they strolled the lively streets of the Third Reich’s former capital, lingered at elegant shopwindows, visited museums, public gardens, libraries, admired rebuilt neighborhoods, applauded at the theater and at concerts, laughed with the schoolchildren they passed in early morning or late afternoon. It was so simple to attract happiness; all they had to do was set aside the past, turn the page. All Malkiel needed to be happy was not to think of his father. But … he thought of him. Even more than before. The man who changed his money at the bank—where was he during the war? And this bureaucrat explaining Berlin’s municipal politics—how old was he in 1943? Was he old enough to have served in the SS special units? And Inge—did she have parents? Who were they? Slowly, bit by bit, Malkiel felt his happiness drain away. In the end Inge noticed the change. She wanted to be clear in her own mind about it. It’s my father, Malkiel confessed. My father keeps me from forgetting. And, the height of paradox, she said that Elhanan was right. I know, she told Malkiel; none of it must be forgotten. I love you because I don’t want to forget; you can’t love me because you have to remember. Intelligent, Inge. Honest and demanding. It’s because I think of your father, she told Malkiel, and of his father, and of all the Jewish fathers that our fathers murdered, that I love you with a love that is doomed. Muddled, torn apart by urges and loyalties, Malkiel sank into despair.

  On the eve of Yom Kippur, Inge went to synagogue with him. Old men were chanting the Kol Nidre, that overwhelming poem by which the Marranos had reaffirmed their loyalty to the covenant. Seated among the women, Inge could not watch Malkiel. He was weeping like a child. Like the child within him that had not wept at his mother’s death. As he did every year, he fasted until Yom Kippur was over, and attended all the services. Inge, too. “Do you still love me?” he asked her when they met in the evening. “More than ever,” she answered. “Do you know,” he asked, “that the most common word in our Yom Kippur prayers doesn’t relate to forgiveness, or expiation, but remembrance?” She did not know that. They spent the night rediscovering each other.

  That was long ago and far away.

  “You’re doing better,” Malkiel said. “You’ll be fine now.”

/>   A fresh wave of fever racked his father’s body. Elhanan had to make an effort to speak. “One day in Kolomey … did I ever tell you what I saw in Kolomey?”

  “No. But don’t talk anymore now. Tomorrow, all right?”

  “In Kolomey I saw what I see now: a woman slipping into shadow, another writhing in pain under a blazing sun. I want to know them, tear off their veils, but I’m afraid to see them close up; I’m afraid I’ll discover death’s claw marks. Still, isn’t it worth trying? Even if it hurts? Even if it scares me?”

  “The will to live is always worth it.”

  “That’s what your mother always told me. Did I tell you about your mother, Malkiel?”

  “Not enough, Father.”

  “You must never forget her. I must never forget her.”

  Did he already sense that an illness of another kind would transform his mind to heartbreak?

  Outside, on the Hudson, a thousand shadows huddled beneath the rain.

  “So, Malkiel my son, you’ve finally made up your mind?”

  “Yes, Father, I’m leaving.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “Nonstop?”

  “One stop in Paris.”

  “You’ll be careful?”

  “I promise.”

  “You won’t forget?”

  “Forget what?”

  “Keep your eyes and ears open, look and listen: you must represent me. I want to see everything with your eyes, and hear everything with your ears.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “And then …”

  “Yes?”

  “There is one point which is essential.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s at the core of my blurring memories; thanks to it, the memories are still mine.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ll know at the right time.”

  “When? Where? Over there?”

  “Yes. Over there. Or when you come back. But to know it, you must first go there.”

  “You can’t tell me now?”

  “I must not, Malkiel.”

  “And if I come home empty-handed?”

  “You will not come home empty-handed.”

  Why had Elhanan Rosenbaum insisted that his son, Malkiel, visit his hometown? To dig up what secret? To meet what phantom? To do what ritual penance?

  It was only to oblige his already sick father that Malkiel had agreed to leave him for a few weeks. He could not refuse him this favor, perhaps the last he could do for him.

  “You must go,” Elhanan repeated, more and more obsessed. “Believe me, you must.”

  “Are you hoping I’ll find you there, as a child or a young man? Think again, Father. You’re not over there but here. Entirely.”

  Entirely? Not really. Day by day Elhanan Rosenbaum deteriorated. Each morning new regions of his past seemed to have been detached from him, to have vanished. “What are you waiting for, Malkiel? For the last spark to die? For the last door to close?”

  Malkiel had no choice.

  He had made another journey, several years earlier, far from the excitement of New York, far from his father, who was flourishing as a teacher and psychotherapist.

  In Asia, the earth—or rather history—was trembling. Gigantic mass graves had been discovered in Cambodia. The phrase “boat people” had entered the language. “I want to go over there,” Malkiel told his boss. “I have to.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. But I have to.”

  The sage, chin resting on one hand, studied him for a moment. “Because of Tamar? To put some distance between you?”

  “No.”

  “Because of your father?”

  “Not that either.”

  “We have Henry over there. He’s doing a good job. He doesn’t need help, as far as I know.”

  “He’s willing to have me come over,” Malkiel said.

  The sage sounded annoyed. “You spoke to him before speaking to me?”

  “We’re friends.”

  There followed a lecture on journalistic protocol and ethics, which ended in a handshake. “If I understand correctly, you already have your visa?”

  Malkiel nodded.

  He rushed to tell Tamar; to telephone his father. That very night he left for Bangkok. Henry was waiting for him at the airport. “What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing here?”

  “Just looking,” Malkiel answered. Of course Henry knew why Malkiel was there.

  “I didn’t book you into a hotel. You’ll stay with me.”

  “What I’d like to do—”

  “I know. You’d like to leave for the border right away. Let me take care of things. Tomorrow morning we’ll go up together. First you’re going to take a shower. And change. I have tropical clothes for you.”

  Good old Henry. The perfect friend. A great reporter, with a Pulitzer Prize, at home everywhere. And ready for anything.

  Next morning they entered the camp at Aranyaprathet, not far from the Cambodian border. Thousands of eyes followed their every move. Eyes burning from sunlight, exhaustion, suffering. Malkiel would never forget those eyes, or the devastating smiles of starving children.

  “I look at them and I want the whole world to look at them,” Henry said.

  “I look at them,” Malkiel said, “and they look back at me. And I think of other children in other places, after the war in Europe.”

  They trudged through the camp’s streets and alleys.

  “Your pieces are the best you’ve ever written,” Malkiel said. “Nobody can read them without a sharp pang of guilt.”

  Day after day, Henry’s dispatches appeared on the front page of The New York Times, describing men and women whom the Khmer Rouge, in their murderous insanity, had deprived of all hope and joy. One piece ended, “How can this outrage be happening? Can a whole people die?”

  “How did this madman Pol Pot persuade so many people to kill so many others?” Malkiel asked.

  “You know the pattern,” Henry said. “Pol Pot calls himself a revolutionary. You can justify anything in the name of revolution. He was hoping to bring history back to zero.”

  “To begin again? Like God?”

  “Great killers want to be gods.”

  “And they just let him do it?”

  “Apparently, yes.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand? And your father doesn’t understand either?”

  Malkiel gulped. “Yes. My father understands.”

  A sun at once leaden and coppery beat down like a curse on the tents and barracks. Women passed out in the heat; nurses brought water.

  “Come along,” Henry said. He led Malkiel into a special barracks apart from the others, where two hundred young men lived. They seemed to be infantrymen and noncoms. They were disciplined, doing calisthenics, training rigorously—for what purpose? They refused to talk to strangers.

  “Take a good look at them,” Henry said. “They’re Khmer Rouge.”

  These killers were fourteen or fifteen. The word was that they’d tortured their own parents and executed their own brothers and sisters, always in the name of their revolutionary ideal. Hangings, drownings, shootings: Malkiel searched for traces of violence in their impassive faces.

  In nearby tents, Cambodians talked about their agonies.

  Henry translated. Terror, flight through the forest, life and death in the swamps. Could anyone imagine a whole country transformed into a hermetically sealed ghetto? I can now, Henry said. Could anyone even conceive of a regime, in 1980, for which remaining human is a crime punishable by death? I can now, Malkiel thought.

  In his mind he saw his father and talked with him: “You see? The Jews aren’t the only ones to suffer.”

  “I never said they were.”

  “But to hear them you’d think only their suffering mattered.”

  “You weren’t listening closely, Malkiel. When a Jew talks about su
ffering, he’s talking about other people’s suffering, too.”

  “In that case they don’t talk about it enough.”

  “Possibly. They are timid; they refuse self-pity. Try to understand them. If they talk too much, people resent it. If they don’t, people resent them for that.”

  When I come back to New York we’ll continue this discussion, Malkiel promised himself.

  He would spend several weeks in Aranyaprathet. Khao I Dang: one hundred ten thousand people jammed into a compound that might house a quarter of that number. Sa Keo: thirty thousand refugees … Malkiel wanted to know everything, to take it all in. He spent his evenings with French, Israeli and American volunteers; he visited the infirmaries, the schools, the kitchens. Henry spared him none of this education: he too remembered. In 1938 his father fled Hitler’s Germany. Fifty thousand visas could have saved all the Jews in Germany.

  Malkiel interrupted his investigations and turned volunteer, working for a rescue committee. He helped some refugees fill out emigration forms, others to find vanished relatives. He played with children, taught them a few words of English; he slept little and hardly ate. Henry warned him: “You want to help them, of course you do. But you’d help them a lot more with a good piece on all this.”

  “Logically you’re right,” Malkiel said, “but I checked my logic at the door.”

  Was he thinking of his grandfather, the benefactor whom he resembled so? Elhanan spoke of it one day: “You know, my father—whose name you bear—did much for the Jewish people.”

  A Thai doctor, young still and refined, watched discreetly over Malkiel’s health. One night he collapsed, fell to the ground; she was there to have him carried to the infirmary. “Overwork and exhaustion,” she said. Malkiel was given an injection and woke up forty-eight hours later.

  “Well, my friend,” Henry said, “I have a telex from the sage, may God grant him long life. He demands that you take the first flight out. They’re waiting for your copy.” He winked. “Not to mention Tamar; she’s impatient, too.”

  The Thai doctor also urged him to leave. “If you stay with us you’ll work yourself into the ground; will the refugees be any better off? Go home and tell them what you saw here; find the right words, and we’ll all be grateful.”