THE CITY ELECTRICITY remained off all night in my neighborhood. The local streets were still closed the next morning and a worse than usual traffic jam ensued, so I arrived almost half an hour late at Chanayakapuri. A researcher, who impressed me as a spy and who needed a simple blood test for his high cholesterol, paced in the corridor outside my office. Waiting in the outer office was a woman who worked with the cultural attaché. She suffered from ulcerative colitis and had an appointment for a flexible sigmoidoscopy. In two adjacent chairs sat a woman and her teenage daughter talking in waiting-room quiet tones to each other, neither of whom I knew, but who received the Schlipssi OK. The daughter had an infected spider bite on her leg that needed to be drained. On the cushioned sofa, peeking out from behind The Times of India, eyes unseeable behind dark glasses, sat Levi Furstenblum.
After getting Charlie’s OK, I called Levi and asked him to come in the afternoon when it was less busy. Obviously, he didn’t listen.
“There was a fire in my neighborhood,” I said as I went straight to Levi. His presence forbade any grand or even formal welcoming. “I have to take care of these people first.”
“I can wait. I have my newspapers,” which he rustled in the air. As he did I spotted the two headlines—“Bollywood Hot Bods” and beside that, “Woman Dies in Kitchen Electrical Fire.” Underneath were photos of one actor, one actress, and another of a street close to my home.
“That’s the one,” I managed to say both rather feebly and a bit too emphatically as I pointed to the newspaper. No one reacted in any special fashion and I started the day’s business.
It took over an hour before I got to Levi. He’d fallen while walking in his apartment and bruised himself; he’d become more worried that his bones were deteriorating faster now. Life in a wheelchair did not suit him.
I, not Donna, accompanied him into the examining room. He scoffed when I asked if he needed help changing into his gown. I left the room. When I returned, Levi almost snarled. He looked quite miserable. The sleeves on the gown flowed around the chaffed skin of his arms. I came closer to take his blood pressure and I saw the numbers.
“Another gift I couldn’t return.” My eyes, against my will, flashed away. Levi said, voice without rancor, “You haven’t seen this before?”
“Yeah, a long time ago. One of my Hebrew School teachers, but he always wore long-sleeved shirts, even in the hot weather.”
Poor Mr. Hershkovitz. I’d caught him by accident in the seedy Hebrew School bathroom one afternoon when he had his sleeves rolled up as he washed his face. He bowed his head as I gawked like an idiot at his incredibly muscular forearms marred by those numbers. We had not liked each other. I’d been a troublemaker, he a cranky disciplinarian. After that day, I became a model student of quietness, if not studiousness.
“Too bad for him.” Levi’s past was his future, and he possessed no shame. With his burial, he would unashamedly take the signature of earthly depravity to his grave. Which would be, judging by the results of his EKG, blood pressure, chest x-ray, and complete blood chemistry, some time in the not-so-near future for he was in remarkably good health. After the exam we sat in my office. He sat stiffly in a slightly worn tan leather-cushioned chair. I sat behind my desk in a leather swivel chair. My desk exemplified my personal chaos with papers disseminated in no order. Donna tried to keep the files in order for her sake as well as mine, but it was a futile attempt.
Levi scanned the small room and saw I had in no way personalized it with pictures, paintings, diplomas, or knickknacks. It looked pretty much the way I found it.
I told him I felt confident he would survive the long recovery of double knee replacement surgery. The x-rays showed a complete degradation of the bone and I imagined he had almost no cartilage, which would make the operation difficult, but still manageable.
I offered to call Privat Hospital where he could get MRIs of each knee, as well as a bone density test, after which we’d then meet. He agreed. He asked me for pain pills. “The pain is more formidable than ever and I am no masochist.” Tylenol with codeine was not strong enough, made him sweat, and gave him constipation. I wrote scrips for Darvocet and Vicodin. He nodded as I warned him to get the drugs from specific hospitals or pharmacies. Although you could get almost any drug with a prescription from any street pharmacy and most were straight, some knowingly and some not gave out dummies or potentially dangerous versions of the drugs. I handed him the prescriptions and he took them from me. “Be careful with them,” I warned again. He nodded and his hand shook slightly, but he noticed my nerves. “Are you having more unsettling problems? Today you seem, perhaps more visibly tormented than before.”
“Do I really seem worse than before?”
“Yes, pale with that unmistakable ache of incompleteness that is not visible but can be seen.” There was the note of the mystical in Levi’s insight, but he was right.
“I’ve been talking to my wife and making plans for my son’s unveiling instead of his Bar Mitzvah.” I stared at the floor. Suddenly, I felt the heavy sadness of unwanted tears but did not want to cry in front of him. I inhaled and raised my eyes. “I still feel lost. And if I can’t stop the voices in my head—especially that rabbi’s—of people saying ‘It was meant to be, it was god’s will,’ I will lose what’s left of my sanity.”
“Yes, that absurd phrase was one most often heard at Terezin and Auschwitz. I once thought it trite or facile, but the camps reduced everyone to an almost childlike begging for answers.”
“I’m still waiting for my answer.”
“I remember the day when it became so clear to me, when I rejected god forever. It was not long after the murder of Leah and Ottla. I had been interned for a week in a tiny cubicle without food, a bed, anything, not even a hole for my excrement. I was always wet from the water continually dripping into that hellhole.”
“How fucking sick.” I couldn’t think of a word evil enough, but “sick” had to suffice. “I feel like such a self-indulgent wimp.”
“Stop. You must know how I feel about the art of comparison suffering.” Levi had written that the Holocaust was an emblem of evil and cruelty, which is a chart of human history. That to deny any individual his or her tragedy is to cheat each individual person his unique humanity; that no human’s loss is any greater, in any way more severe, than yours because it occurred in a monstrous fashion or unprecedented number. That Hitler’s trying to erase the Jews from history was the same as someone trying to erase your single lineage and history on earth. “There is no need to downplay your pain.”
I nodded. I wondered for a moment if he were coddling me.
“Now, one morning soon after I got out of that cubicle, Schneerman and I watched helplessly as a boy who was turning thirteen that week—the time he should have been Bar Mitzvahed—who could no longer work, was being taken away to be gassed to death. Schneerman, then this man of no particular faith, looking helpless toward the ashen smoke in the unforgiving sky, touched my shoulder with his skeletal hand. He asked me, ‘Levi, it can’t get any worse, can it?’
“I removed his hand from my shoulder and told him, ‘Adolph, there is one undeniable fact I have learned since the moment I was taken to Terezin: it can always get worse.’
“From that moment I knew what choices I had to make and which choices Schneerman would make. I do not know you well enough to know what choices you will make. If you choose to go on, it might get worse and it might get better. I can give you no more wisdom than that. And you will choose to go on or not.” There was no emotion, no pleading to live through the pain, promises that it would get better, only his stark truth.
Any sense that I had that he was humoring me was gone.
“You know, I have written of the empty spaces after each one—my wife, my daughter, my siblings, and my friends—was tortured and murdered by the Nazis. That is an easily understood human hurt: how they never leave me and I remain incomplete.”
Yes. I remembered that from Mystical Mistakes.
“What you have not read is that sometimes I feel like a hologram. I am always whole but pieces of me keep crumbling off. With each person with whom I have shared a smile, a night, a discovery, a sip of water, a train ride to death, a torture, a last drink, a bit of body warmth in the frozen hell we call Auschwitz, a confidence that one has given, a lunch with someone I hardly knew—a piece of me was taken from my whole. Yet in some fashion I knew I remained whole, only seen from a new angle. Complete yet not.
“When, after the war I recommenced my search, my aim was to feel whole without god. Yet god was now impossible so I asked, If not in science and not in god, where?
“I cannot give you my answer the way you give me a diagnosis for my knees. That is one question no one, no one but you can answer.”
“Levi, I understand that and I’m so grateful to you for your honesty.” He nodded imperceptibly. I had one more question. “Do you ever feel whole as you once did?”
He only shook his head.