The Forgotten Page 4

  Actually Malkiel was thrilled to be with her. He liked everything about her: the way she dressed, did her hair, gave orders—she knew how to make herself heard. Naturally, he was in love with her; naturally, he hoped she wouldn’t notice; naturally, he was wrong. Too bright, Tamar. A penetrating intelligence. And beneath her professional cool she was rather romantic.

  Why was she showing such an interest in her colleague? Because he wasn’t competing with her? Or trying to impress her? Because he behaved like a lost boy with her? The others on the editorial staff were men and women of the world; they knew how to open doors. Not Malkiel. Shy and retiring, he listened in silence like a good boy, observed in silence, retreated into silence. Tamar suspected a secret within him. And Tamar loved secrets. She knew he had grown up without a mother. The poor boy. Tamar loved the sufferings of others. She came from a family where humor drove out sadness. Ah—she recalled that she had never heard Malkiel laugh. Never mind that; she’d teach him.

  Their first night in Washington. After a long dinner with a local reporter, who boasted of keeping his ear to the ground, they went up to their rooms, but she paused at her door. “Are you sleepy?” Tamar asked. “Not really,” Malkiel said, and averted his eyes. “We could work a little,” she said. “Do you want to?” He did want to; he wanted whatever she wanted.

  She opened the door; they went in. Sitting side by side on a couch, they went over their notes, elaborated on various strategies for the investigation, compared impressions, uncertainties, possibilities; it was midnight, and they couldn’t seem to finish. It was two in the morning, and they lay in an embrace.

  How did it happen? Who dared take the first step? Malkiel. He rose above his inhibitions and took the initiative. He had never in his life felt so whole or so real. Simply, without a word, he took her in his arms; and she submitted. Neither spoke. Yet he felt a powerful urge to talk, to dissipate silence and doubt. He had to make an enormous effort not to say what men always say in that situation: “I’m in love with you, Tamar, and always have been. You’re the woman of my life. I’ve waited for you since I was born; only now am I starting to live.” Other times, at the edge of abandon, at the heart of ecstasy, he knew a faintly bitter taste of farewell, of nothingness. At the eye of the storm, he sensed death guarding all the exits; as soon as one dipped beneath the surface of things, death was there, with open arms. Sadness heralded it; joy disguised it and staved it off.

  Tamar asked, “What are you thinking about?”

  Tell her? Tell her that he had a father who’d never recovered from the death of his wife, whose whole being was suffused with melancholy, who helped others triumph over theirs by listening, just by listening? “I’m thinking of my father,” he said.

  His father was not yet ill. He was passing through cycles of depression, that was all. Was his disease already working within him? If so, no one had yet noticed the first signs of it.

  “I’d like to meet him.”

  “You will.”

  “Do you think he’ll like me?”

  “He’ll like you.”

  Malkiel wondered, How can we come to terms with our own destinies? Two beings joined their desires, their movements, and became a crossroads where drives and dreams converge; and yet it is not this victory that floods my soul, but death—my mother’s, my own. One day the last flash of intelligence and desire and light will drown in death. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

  “Your father.”

  He was suddenly frightened, and did not know why. Waves of fear swept over him, rising and swelling before they tore apart.

  “Let’s sleep,” Tamar said.

  “You’re right.”

  She kissed him.

  “I thought you wanted to sleep,” he said.

  “You think too much.”

  For Malkiel and Tamar, life became an unquenchable spring of gratitude. Their bodies were as finely attuned in yearning as in joy, in desire as in fulfillment; neither needed to protect his loneliness by silence.

  Glorious days and festive nights. They were in love, and they exhilarated each other. The presence of the one never weighed on the other. At the very core of their union they had found a creative freedom that constantly renewed itself and enriched their every night. But all Malkiel had to do was think of his father, and time and space began to vibrate again.

  “I’m afraid,” Tamar said once, when they had become one as never before.

  “You? Afraid? But of what?”

  “Of happiness. Happiness changes people. It makes them better or worse. Pure or mean. Some people aren’t made for happiness. Are you?”

  Malkiel made no reply. His father was not; he knew that. His father’s natural element was suffering and the memory of suffering.

  “We’ll have to do all we can to be happy, Malkiel. It won’t be easy. Happiness is a jealous god. He possesses you but won’t let himself be possessed. We’ll have to fight. Will you fight?”

  “I don’t know,” Malkiel said.

  “I’ll teach you.”

  Did they have the same notions of this battle? Of his chances for winning? Malkiel’s heart grew heavy. Living for someone else is sometimes easier than living with someone else. What is a blessing for the one may be a curse for the other. “When will I meet your father?” she asked.

  “Soon.”

  “And I want you to meet my parents.” They lived in Chicago. “Suppose we went there for Thanksgiving?”

  “All right,” said Malkiel.

  “But—your father?”

  “He’ll understand.”

  “He won’t feel too lonely?”

  “He has his patients.”

  A big family in a suburb of Chicago. Lots of commotion. Little ones stumbling, tumbling and grumbling, snacking, screaming for drinks. Tamar was the heroine, the princess. The small children clung to her skirts and wanted only her. For this festive dinner they all demanded to sit beside her. Malkiel occupied the place of honor, to the right of the lady of the house. She had roasted the traditional turkey. Unfortunately, Malkiel detested turkey. “Eat, eat, you’ll enjoy it,” Tamar’s mother insisted, a true Jewish mother. “I’m a vegetarian,” Malkiel said in apology. “Tamar!” her mother cried. “You never told me you were marrying a vegetarian.… What is that, a vegetarian? What religion is that?” Malkiel blushed in confusion; he was ashamed for Tamar and ashamed of himself. “Don’t make a fuss, Mother,” Tamar said. “You can be Jewish and vegetarian at the same time.” Relieved, her mother explained, “But turkey is kosher, I swear it!” “Leave him alone,” Tamar said. “He’s not much of an eater.” Thanks, Tamar. “Ay, ay,” her mother said, “I feel for you. Men who don’t eat well don’t make good husbands.” “Mother!” Tamar protested. Thanks, Tamar.

  The following week Tamar accompanied Malkiel to his father’s house. It was a Sunday in December, and the first snow was falling on the city. The Hudson’s waves flowed slower. Tamar was quiet.

  The moment Elhanan saw her he went rigid. His breath stopped. He muttered, “Not possible, not possible!”

  Tamar went straight to him and kissed him on both cheeks. She’d hardly arrived but felt at home, in spite of his agitation. “Not possible, not possible,” Elhanan repeated.

  “What’s not possible?” she asked.

  “The resemblance,” Elhanan murmured. “The quality of your beauty.”

  “Now, don’t tell me you want to marry me.” Tamar smiled. Lost to the world, Elhanan did not hear her. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like me?”

  Malkiel spoke up immediately. “Father, this is Tamar. My colleague. You’ve read her articles.”

  Elhanan seemed to wake up. “Ah yes, of course. I remember. How happy I am to see you in my home!”

  Elhanan had worn his blue suit. He wanted her to like him; she liked him. Tamar knew how to draw people out; soon she had him talking. About his students and his patients. She admired his erudition and his gift for analysis and introspection. A glowing Loret
ta served coffee. Tamar complimented her and meant it: “It’s better than what they serve at the White House.” “Tell the President,” Loretta replied, “that I’ll come give him a hand when he has important dinner guests.” Malkiel excused himself to phone the newspaper. Elhanan took advantage of his absence to repeat, “Not possible, it’s really not possible. You’re beautiful, very beautiful … as my wife was once.” Malkiel was back, and Elhanan spoke to him: “What are you waiting for, my son? Marry her! Hurry up!”

  “I adore him, you know,” Tamar told Malkiel when they were in the street again. “He’s someone very special.”

  Thank you, Tamar.

  “Do you see?” Tamar said, as they walked arm in arm down Broadway, looking for a cab. “Our parents consent. When shall we marry?”

  “And your work?”

  “I know myself: I’ll be a good wife and a good reporter at the same time.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “I want children, lots of children.”

  “And your work?”

  “Don’t be a nuisance. I can be a good mother, a faithful wife and a great reporter.”

  “But—my father?”

  “We’ll take care of him. I can be a good daughter-in-law, a good wife—”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Well, then? All right? All right with you? You’ll give me babies? Five? Ten? If you knew how I love children … I love to watch them run along the sand, and dirty their hands, and make funny faces while they eat ice cream cones; I love them even when they’re not really lovable. Promise me we’ll make a lot of them.”

  “I don’t promise anything.” Children! By what right do we bring them into the world? And what a world! Can we be sure they won’t curse us for having given them life? “I knew a man,” Malkiel said, “who didn’t want children. Not because he didn’t care for them, but because he loved them; he felt sorry for them. He thought of their future and said, ‘Better let it come without them.’ ”

  Tamar blazed into anger. “Stop it! That’s too stupid!”

  In his apartment he tried to take her in his arms; she slipped away. “Listen,” she told him. “Do you think I’m not afraid? I’m afraid of growing old, and ugly, and sick; I’m afraid of dying. But as long as I’m young I want my youth to make me happy; as long as I’m beautiful I want my beauty to intoxicate you. Of course everything’s ephemeral in this life. But to say that because the future is threatening and death exists we have no right to love, and to life, is to resign yourself to defeat and shame, and I won’t do that, ever.”

  “But—”

  “Be quiet. I know: you think of your father and you despair. From now on I’ll think of him, too, but I’ll think of him so as not to despair. He’s alone? But he’s alive. He’s melancholy? But he reacts, light gleams in his eyes. He’s sinking into old age? We’ll remember what he used to be.”

  Thank you, Tamar.

  Malkiel had taken a studio downtown, halfway between the newspaper and his father. He spent the Sabbath and the holy days close to Elhanan, a custom that answered a deep need of his own: if the week’s activities separated them, the special times reunited them. Every Friday night Elhanan lighted the candles and blessed them. Together father and son chanted Shalom aleichem malakhei hashalom in honor of the two angels that accompany every man and woman to the palace of the Sabbath Queen, to find joy and serenity there. Then Elhanan recited the kiddush, drank a sip of wine and held the cup to his son. Malkiel cut the challah and offered a slice to his father and another to Loretta, who went into raptures every time over its taste: “See that? My challah is better than any Jewish baker’s. Admit it!”

  It was during a Sabbath dinner that Malkiel caught the first indication of the disease that would ravage his father’s mind. An apparently trivial incident marred the ceremony. Having begun the kiddush, Elhanan interrupted himself in midverse. Malkiel saw the veins swell in his temples, sweat bead on his forehead, his hands clutch the silver cup. He did not understand at first: “Do you feel sick, Father?” No, Elhanan did not feel sick. There was simply a gap in his memory.

  (Only later, much later, did Malkiel feel pain and pity in recalling the scene.) What should he do? Prompt him on the next line? Fortunately, Elhanan found a solution: “Do me a favor, Malkiel, and bring me the prayer book; it’s in the living room.”

  Elhanan never again recited the kiddush from memory.

  When he told Tamar about it, Malkiel could not erase the image of his father’s crumpled face: “You can’t imagine what he looked like. You would have thought he was a child who had misbehaved or a lost old man. He didn’t understand what was happening to him. For him, forgetting the kiddush is like forgetting my mother’s smile, or yours.”

  Another incident. Tamar was in California, and Malkiel took his father to Carnegie Hall. The soloist played divinely, people said; in his hands the violin sang. Eyes shut tight, the artist withdrew from everything but the piece he was playing. He seemed to be flowing through a universe of sound where fragmented melodies fled, sought one another, flowed together, tore themselves apart in order to say what the soul had been trying to tell us in its own language for an eternity: of its pain, its first and last yearning.

  “Bravo! Encore!” shouted an enthusiastic, almost hysterical audience. “A triumph,” wrote the Post’s critic. “He has surpassed himself,” his colleague on the Times prudently agreed.

  The young violinist let the audience plead, and finally reappeared for a short, light encore, demonstrating that his virtuosity was varied if not unlimited. Again the house gave him a standing ovation.

  Malkiel was thinking he must mention this in his piece about the musician. He had a passion for music but had not come to this concert in the capacity of music critic. Personal curiosity or professional obligation toward the readers of his obituary page? He had to meet personalities of whom he would one day write. Sometimes while he was watching someone important, he would find himself thinking of his death. Not tonight. Tonight he was carried away by the artist’s contained violence and dizzying perfection. “Did you like it?” he asked his father.

  “Very much.”

  Outside Carnegie Hall, jostled by the crowd, they headed for Seventh Avenue, where the usual traffic jam blessed pedestrians with a pleasant feeling of revenge. How lucky I am not to own a car, Malkiel thought. “Are we walking?” Malkiel asked.

  “Why not,” said Elhanan. “It’s a perfect, mild April evening.”

  Suddenly Elhanan stopped. Someone had called his name. He turned. A middle-aged gentleman approached him, hand outstretched. “Did you enjoy it, Professor Rosenbaum?” Elhanan said, “Yes, it was great.” The man chattered on, and Malkiel noticed that his father was upset. Back in the apartment, Elhanan explained: “I know that man, but I can’t remember his name.”

  “A colleague, maybe?”

  “Maybe. I just don’t know. All I know is that I know him, or rather I used to know him. While he was talking I identified him, but I couldn’t dredge up his name. Brauer? Saftig? I had the strange feeling that it had simply vanished from my brain. Some ruthless criminal hand had snatched away my memory. I knew certain things without remembering them. Didn’t you notice me trying to lead the conversation so he’d tell me his name? One single haunting question lashed my mind: Who is this man? My thoughts scattered, and roamed through my entire past. Nothing. I felt a sharp pain in my head. The phrase ‘my head is bursting’ became real to me. At that moment the man’s identity seemed a more important question to me, more essential than all the metaphysical problems of all the world’s philosophers put together. I felt real panic.… Wait! I remember. His name is Rubinstein, Sender Rubinstein! He teaches mathematics at Hunter College. His people were Belgian.”

  “There! You see? You were wrong to be upset.”

  “You can’t imagine what it was like, Malkiel. I was afraid of falling into a bottomless well, where the laughter of the Tempter was waiting for me.…”

  And that,
too, alas, was to happen. It was decreed on high that Elhanan ben Malkiel would be spared nothing.

  In his moments of lucidity, which would later become increasingly rare and painful, he suggested an explanation of what was happening to him: “I am a guilty man. That is why I am being punished. Like Abuya’s heretical sons, I gazed when I should not have gazed and turned my eyes away when I should not have. I saw a sin committed … a crime.… I could have, I should have, done something, called out, shouted, struck a blow. I forgot our precepts, our laws, that require an individual to struggle against evil wherever it appears. I forgot that we can never simply remain spectators, we have no right to stand aside, to keep silent, to let the victim fight the aggressor alone. I forgot so many things that day.… That is why I am forgetting other things now. Can there be anything worse than that?”

  Yes, there was worse, there is worse: to forget that one has forgotten.

  Malkiel was jumpy, out of breath, couldn’t sit still.

  Elhanan asked, “You won a Pulitzer Prize?”

  Malkiel handed him an AP story. They were in the living room. Elhanan was in his armchair near the window, loosening his necktie. He was worn out, dissatisfied with the hour of therapy he had just administered. A couple of survivors, childless. They were very much in love, and that was why they wanted to separate. Each was suffering for himself and the other at the same time, and the load was too heavy.

  “The OSI—the Office of Special Investigation—has turned up a former SS man who supervised the liquidation of the ghetto in Feherfalu. His trial starts next week. Tamar’s going to cover the story, and I want to go there. It should be a big story. How about coming with me?”

  Elhanan rubbed his brow with his hand, as if considering the matter closely.

  “Why are you hesitating?” Malkiel pressed him. “Don’t you care about learning how your own town—and mine—prepared for death?”

  “I already know that,” Elhanan said without looking up.

  “But that SS man may tell us something you don’t know!”