LIGHT SHIMMERED IN THE trees, whose leaves, when the wind ran through them, sighed like the gods after a long and boozy lunch. The air was balmy and brackish and here and there carried a whiff of pinesap bubbling under the sun. Alice dove into water that he kept heated to a temperature approaching that of blood and after torpedoing half a length surfaced to settle into thirty laps of an unhurried breaststroke: legs froglike, hands coming almost together before swiveling away again and again, always the right reaching forward to touch down between the insects that crawled along the flagstone edge, always the left folding close to wipe her nose before the next lap commenced. Some days, it could even seem to her that she was making a kind of progress with this routine—as though the laps she swam were not the selfsame distance traveled and untraveled over and over, but lengths laid like pipe end-to-end and that would someday deliver her to a destination as far away as their great sum. Coming almost together and then pulling apart, her hands looked to her like the hands of someone once tempted by prayer but who had since renounced it for other means of mollifying herself: someone learned, someone liberal, someone literate. Someone enlightened. The pumphouse hummed.
In the evenings, they listened to Music for A Weekend to Remember, which was like Jonathan only cornier, and took their plates out to the screenhouse, or, if there was a game on, into the pink-glowing den. On the mantelpiece, next to a glass pyramid that threw quivering rainbows onto the wall, sat an antique wooden calendar with three windows in its face and dowels that rolled the linen scrolls inside ahead to the correct weekday, date, and month:
SATURDAY
2
AUGUST
The dowels were pale and smooth and whenever passing Alice could not resist twisting one ever so slightly . . . although she never dared shift SATURDAY all the way to SUNDAY, or 2 to 3, or AUGUST to SEPTEMBER, for fear of not being able to shift them back.
Behind the sofa stood a narrow marble console stacked to her elbows’ height with books. Many were by prominent writers, others by names she knew as friends. The friend who called her The Kid, for example, had written a book about Auschwitz that Ezra had given a guardedly favorable quote. There were also several galleys, including one of a biography of Arthur Miller and another of a novel scheduled for publication that fall by Alice’s own employer, a letter from her boss tucked crisply inside:
Dear Mr. Blazer,
As you’ll see in my introduction, Allatoona! is a very special novel, not to mention a subtle, respectful, and ultimately triumphant tribute to your influence. I’m not asking for an endorsement, only that you might enjoy the book as much as all of us here at Gryphon have done, with surprise and delight at its confidence, its exquisite calibration, its searing wit—
Alice shut the galley and took the Auschwitz book out to the porch.
Some dinnertimes, an elderly neighbor would drop by, bearing eggs from his henhouse along with the local hearsay. Other nights she and Ezra played cards, or read, or took a flashlight down to his dock to look up at the stars. One Saturday they walked all the way to the Ram’s Head, where a wedding party was still going strong: men wielding croquet mallets chased barefoot bridesmaids around the lawn while a jazz quintet rolled out big band standards in the bar. “No,” Ezra said firmly, when Alice pulled teasingly on his arms. But then the tribal rat-a-rat of “Sing Sing Sing” started up and a moment later he was percussing the air as if possessed by Lionel Hampton. A bit of finger snapping here, heel swiveling there; at one point he even got up on his toes and dared a brief accordioning of the knees. He’d taken Alice’s hand and was spinning her through Spirograph designs that became longer and looser with each rotation when a woman wearing an upside-down corsage shimmied over to announce: “You know, everyone says you look just like my husband.” “I am your husband,” replied Ezra, before proceeding to dip Alice almost horizontal and leading her up toward the band.
His bedroom was at the top of the house, where the floors creaked sedately and the gnarled branches of an old oak tree filled the windows with undulating green. In the mornings, as she lay facing him, staring into the radiating brown of his irises and marveling at how unworn they looked, how limpid and alert, even after so many birthdays and wars and marriages and presidents and assassinations and operations and prizes and books, Alice sighed. Ninety-seven years they’d lived between them, and the longer it went on the more she confused his for her own. Outside, the birds gossiped blithely. When the sun reached her face, Alice sat up and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. Her cheek was still creased with the pillowcase’s wrinkles. Solemnly, she touched a finger to her nose, then her chin, then her elbow, the tip of her nose again, and tugged on one ear. “Bunt,” Ezra said hoarsely. Yes! Nose, chin, elbow, thigh, earlobe, earlobe, tip of her nose again, three quick claps. “Steal.” Good! Chin, thigh, earlobe, earlobe, elbow, elbow, imaginary visor. “Hit and run.” When it was his turn, Ezra mirrored what she had done, but in double time, and with a deadpan face, and every sequence ended with him pointing at her belly button. Laughing, Alice fell back to the pillow. Ezra gathered her in and kissed her hair. “Sweetest girl. You are the sweetest girl.” The words were like a hot feather in her ear. In her other ear, with a tone that sounded almost apologetic for having to remind them, his watch beeped noon.
• • •
“I follow my course with the precision and security of a sleepwalker.” And yet a sleepwalker’s course is anything but precise and secure. It is the uncertain leader who strains to reassure his subjects and perhaps above all himself that his objectives are sound and pure. Of only one thing does he feel certain: that he would like to lead. He would like to have power; he would like to be worshipped; he would like to be obeyed. To an extent these desires are felt by all politicians, or else they would have chosen another, less authoritarian profession. But in some cases the desires are extreme, borne of a compulsion to compensate for past humiliations—an illegitimate father, maybe, or rejection by an academic institution one aspired to attend. There chafes a sense that the world does not understand him, does not appreciate him, and so he must remake it into a world that does. Domination is not merely a fantasy but also a form of revenge for his status as a failure, a subordinate, “an outcast among outcasts”—as The New York Times would put it in an obituary of the Führer running to no fewer than thirteen thousand words.
In the kitchen stood three half bottles of Pinot Noir, a jug of Stolichnaya, and an unopened bottle of Knob Creek. Looking out the window down to the pool, where Clete was skimming impurities off the surface with a long-handled net, Alice uncapped the vodka, tipped it up for a swig, and returned to the porch.
But megalomania is not the word. Both suffix and prefix imply an excess, an incongruent sense of one’s own influence, delusion. Yet Hitler was not deluded as to the magnitude of his power. He was deluded as to the worthiness of his objectives, yes, but it does not seem possible that he could have overestimated his impact on the history of humanity. When, then, does one man’s delusion become the world’s reality? Is it every generation’s destiny to contend with a dictator’s whims? “By shrewd and constant application of propaganda,” we read in Mein Kampf, “heaven can be presented to the people as hell and, vice versa, the wretchedest experience as a paradise.” But only when the people in question fail in their duty toward vigilance. Only when through inaction we are complicit. Only when we are sleepwalking ourselves.
“Baby? Baby, where are you?”
A radio came on. A toilet flushed. Feet crossed the old floorboards and treaded boyishly down the stairs. Alice watched through the porch window as he went over to what looked like an old wooden munitions box, selected an album from the stack inside, and slid it ceremoniously from its sheath. A moment later there was an abrupt, furry blurting sound, followed by the tropical strains of what sounded like a luau.
Beyond the blue horizon
Waits a beautiful day
Goodbye to things that bore me
Joy is waiting for me!
Between verses he shouted through the window: “Want a drink?”
They were in the screenhouse, licking barbecue sauce from their fingers and watching a canoe glide across the glassy harbor, when a figure appeared on the lawn, approaching unsteadily through the dusk. “Virgil!” Ezra called out. “What’s the good word?”
“Mole got under my toolshed this morning but I took care of him.”
“You took care of him?”
“I took care of him.” The old man coughed, lifted the screenhouse’s door, and stooped warily to enter.
“Listen, Virgil; I’ve got a favor to ask. You know this lot over the road? The one that goes down to North Cartwright?”
“Yup.”
“Do you know who owns it?”
“Lady down in Cape Coral’s had it for years.”
“What sort of a lady?”
“My age about. Stokes, her name is. Uncle used to live in that little gray clapboard over on Williette. When he died his kids sold it to those musical fellows.”
“Well, I’d like to get in touch with Miss Stokes, if I can, because I’ve been thinking I’d like to buy that lot before someone else comes along and puts up a car wash.”
Virgil nodded, coughing again, his shoulders convulsing and the skin around his liver spots flushing a vivid shade of plum. “Darling,” Ezra said quietly. Alice nodded and went into the house; when she’d returned and handed Virgil a glass of water, Virgil said, “Thanks, Samantha.”
Later, she and Ezra were in the kitchen playing gin rummy when Alice inquired casually what one “should do out here, in case of an emergency.”
Calmly reordering his hand, Ezra replied, “You mean what should you do if we’re in the middle of doing it and my cigarette lighter goes off?”
“That sort of a thing, yes.”
“Call Virgil.”
“Ha.”
“I’m serious. Virgil’s the local EMT.”
“The local EMT is a hundred years old?”
“He’s seventy-nine years old, and he was an ambulance medic in World War Two. He was there when Patton said, ‘We’re training you bastards to kick the butts of the Japanese.’ Not that you should know who Patton was. Gin.”
He got up to go to the bathroom and came back looking impressed. “I’d almost forgotten we had asparagus.”
“So . . . there’s no hospital on the island?”
“There’s a hospital in Greenport. And another one in Southampton. But don’t worry. Virgil knows what he’s doing. And anyway”—he flung out a hand—“look at me. I’m fine.” After blinking at her thoughtfully for a moment, he brought his hand back in to look at his watch.
“Have you read this?” She held up the Auschwitz book.
Ezra shook his head. “It’s no good.”
“What do you mean?”
“Too much toilet training.”
“Excuse me?”
“Hitler was toilet-trained too early, Mussolini was left on the pot too long. It’s all Freudian speculation that has nothing to do with anything. If you want to learn about the Holocaust I’ll show you what to read.”
On Sundays, she brooded. How dreary it would be, back in the city, five more days of answering phones, hustling blurbs, unjamming staplers. When Ezra went down to the pool for his Aqua Fitness, Alice stood by the window and watched as he descended to wade back and forth across the sun-dappled shallow end, savoring its resistance. Then the wind picked up, erasing him from view, and the rest of the morning she spent drifting from room to room, picking up books and putting them down again, pouring glasses of lemonade and sitting at the kitchen table to drink them, listening to the bees. The clock over the sink ticked loudly.
He came in a little after two to find her lying on the sofa, a forearm over her eyes.
“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“Don’t you want to use the pool?”
“I will, in a bit.”
“What time’s your train?”
“Six eleven.”
“I should be home by nine thirty.”
“Clete’ll take you to the ferry. As for me . . .” He looked around, as though the room were a mess and he didn’t know where to start. “I’m going to stay out here for a while. At least until the end of September. I’ve got to finish this draft.”
“Okay.”
“It’s giving me trouble.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I have something for you.” From his shirt pocket he pulled a sheet of paper with three ring holes in it, folded neatly into fourths:
GITTA SERENY, INTO THAT DARKNESS
PRIMO LEVI, SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ
HANNAH ARENDT, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM
“Thank you,” said Alice.
“You’re velcome,” he said.
• • •
He was born in Altmünster, a small town in Austria, on March 26, 1908. His only sister was then ten, his mother still young and pretty, but his father was already an ageing man.
“He was a nightwatchman by the time I was born, but all he could ever think or talk about were his days in the Dragoons [one of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial élite regiments]. His dragoon uniform, always carefully brushed and pressed, hung in the wardrobe. I was so sick of it, I got to hate uniforms. I knew since I was very small, I don’t remember exactly when, that my father hadn’t really wanted me. I heard them talk. He thought I wasn’t really his. He thought my mother . . . you know. . . .”
“Even so, was he kind to you?”
He laughed without mirth. “He was a Dragoon. Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him. I remember one day—I was about four or five and I’d just been given new slippers. It was a cold winter morning. The people next door to us were moving. The moving van had come—a horse-drawn carriage then, of course. The driver had gone into the house to help get the furniture and there was this wonderful carriage and no one about.
“I ran out through the snow, new slippers and all. The snow came half-way up my legs but I didn’t care. I climbed up and I sat in the driver’s seat, high above the ground. Everything as far as I could see was quiet and white and still. Only far in the distance there was a black spot moving in the whiteness of the new snow. I watched it but I couldn’t recognize what it was until suddenly I realized it was my father coming home. I got down as fast as I could and raced back through the deep snow into the kitchen and hid behind my mother. But he got there almost as fast as I. ‘Where is the boy?’ he asked, and I had to come out. He put me over his knees and leathered me. He had cut his finger some days before and wore a bandage. He thrashed me so hard, his cut opened and blood poured out. I heard my mother scream, ‘Stop it, you are splashing blood all over the clean walls.’ ”
• • •
Her boss was on the phone, feet on his desk, rolling a piece of Scotch tape between his fingers.
“What about Blazer? Why don’t we publish Ezra Blazer anymore? Hilly wouldn’t know literature if it went down on him.”
Alice dropped a file into the wire tray outside his door and kneeled to fiddle with the strap on her shoe.
“No. No! I didn’t say that. Hilly’s full of shit. I said we’d do a million for the new book plus two-fifty for the backlist, even though it’s unearned by more than the value of your house in fucking Montauk. Does that sound ‘prudent’ to you?”
• • •
In Germany today, this notion of “prominent” Jews has not yet been forgotten. While the veterans and other privileged groups are no longer mentioned, the fate of “famous” Jews is still deplored at the expense of all others. There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.
• • •
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Hello.”
“How are you, Mary-Alice?”
“I’m all right. You?”
“I’m fine. I just wanted to check on you.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“You sure you’re all right? You sound a little blue.”
“I am a little blue. But it’s nothing. Don’t worry. How’s your book?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Who knows if it’s any good. It’s a funny business, this. Making things up. Describing things. Describing the door someone just walked through. It’s brown, the hinges are squeaky . . . Who gives a shit? It’s a door.”
“ ‘Endeavors in art require a lot of patience,’ ” Alice said finally. She could hear the frogs croaking.
“Memory like a steel trap, Mealy Potatoes.”
• • •
The camp was between forty and fifty acres (six hundred metres by four hundred) and was divided into two main sections and four subsections. The “upper camp”—or Camp II—included the gas chambers, the installations for the disposal of the corpses (lime-pits at first, then huge iron racks for burning, known as “roasts”), and the barracks for the Totenjuden, the Jewish work-groups. One of the barracks was for males, another, later, for females. The men carried and burned the bodies; the twelve girls cooked and washed.
The “lower camp” or Camp I was subdivided into three sections, rigidly separated by barbed-wire fences, which, like the outer fences, were interwoven with pine branches for camouflage. The first section contained the unloading ramp and the square—Sortierungsplatz—where the first selections were made; the fake hospital (the Lazarett) where the old and sick were shot instead of gassed; the undressing barracks where the victims stripped, left their clothes, had their hair cut off if they were women, and were internally searched for hidden valuables; and finally the “Road to Heaven”. This, starting at the exit from the women’s and children’s undressing barrack, was a path ten-feet wide with ten-foot fences of barbed wire on each side (again thickly camouflaged with branches, constantly renewed, through which one could neither see out nor in), through which the naked prisoners, in rows of five, had to run the hundred metres up the hill to the “baths”—the gas chambers—and where, when, as happened frequently, the gassing mechanism broke down, they had to stand waiting their turn for hours at a time.
• • •
She was about to send off an email rejecting another novel written in the second person when her screen went black and the air-conditioning sputtered out, leaving behind a dim, primordial silence.
“Fuck,” said her boss, down the hall.
An hour later she and her colleagues were still bent over stalled paperwork in the dank-growing air when he came around scowling and told them all that they could go home, if they could get there.
Twenty-one flights down in the lobby, firefighters milled around the sealed elevator bank, eyes raised to the halted dials. On Fifty-Seventh Street, cars jockeyed for a path through the lightless intersections while the number of pedestrians seemed to have quadrupled since morning. Just north of Columbus Circle, where a self-appointed traffic conductor worked in mirrored sunglasses and shirtsleeves rolled up to his biceps, the line for Mister Softee ran the length of the block. Longer still were the lines to use the old-fashioned phone booths earning another stay of execution: people approached them warily, even sheepishly, as if entering confessionals right there on the street. At Sixty-Eighth and Seventy-Second shuffling throngs pushed onto buses already sagging from the load. At Seventy-Eighth World of Nuts and Ice Cream was giving cones away. Another block up, the neon harp outside the Dublin House appeared drained of all its color, and heat that was only average began to feel, under these mysterious circumstances, extraordinary: seeping and sinister and ineludible, like gas filling a cell. Outside Filene’s Basement two women with four bags and five children between them haggled with the driver of a limousine pointed uptown. On the opposite corner, looking more hunchbacked than ever under his hundred coats, the homeless man rested his elbows on a newspaper dispenser and, taking it all in, yawned.
At Anna’s door there was no answer. Inside her own apartment Alice shed her shoes, her blouse, her three-hundred-dollar skirt, poured herself a glass of Luxardo, and slept. When she awoke it was to a fathomless blackness and the plaintive beeping of her phone. Immediately outside her front door a fifth flight of stairs led up to the roof, or rather to a door bearing warning of an alarm that in two years she’d never heard go off; ignoring it now she ascended through the purple rhomboid of sky and in the relief of a feeble breeze walked across the ceiling of her own apartment to stand at the building’s prow and look down into the street. A car turning off Amsterdam accelerated west, its headlights pushing through the dark with a new and precious intensity. Candlelight flickered on a fire escape two facades away. To the right, beyond the ribbon of river black as ink, the shore of New Jersey was illuminated as sparsely as if by campfires in the wild. “Cold beer here,” a man’s voice floated up from Broadway. “Still got some cold beer here. Three dollars.”
Her phone sounded another dire beep. Without the subway rumbling, without trains hurtling up the Hudson and the hum of air conditioners and refrigerators and Laundromats three to a block, it was as though a mammoth heartbeat had ceased. Alice sat down and a moment later looked up to confront the stars. They seemed much brighter without the usual competition from below—brighter and more triumphant now, their supremacy in the cosmos reaffirmed. From the direction of the flickering fire escape came a few noncommittal chords on a guitar. The beer seller gave up or ran out. The moon, too, looked sharper and more luminous than usual, such that all at once it was no longer Céline’s moon, nor Hemingway’s, nor Genet’s, but Alice’s, which she vowed to describe one day as all it really was: the received light of the sun. A fire engine Dopplered north. A helicopter changed its direction like a locust shooed by giant fingers slicing through the sky. In her own hand Alice’s phone sounded three final exasperated beeps and died.
• • •
. . . there comes to light the existence of two particularly well differentiated categories among men—the saved and the drowned. Other pairs of opposites (the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the cowards and the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are considerably less distinct, they seem less essential, and above all they allow for more numerous and complex intermediary gradations.
This division is much less evident in ordinary life; for there it rarely happens that a man loses himself. A man is normally not alone, and in his rise or fall is tied to the destinies of his neighbors; so that it is exceptional for anyone to acquire unlimited power, or to fall by a succession of defeats into utter ruin. Moreover, everyone is normally in possession of such spiritual, physical and even financial resources that the probabilities of a shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life, are relatively small. And one must take into account a definite cushioning effect exercised both by the law, and by the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law; for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.
• • •
“The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2003 has been awarded to the South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee, who, in the committee’s words, ‘in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider.’ ”
Alice turned off the radio and went back to bed.
• • •
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
Beep.
He hung up.
• • •
At her door again:
Shave and a haircut, two bits.
Sighing, Alice picked up her keys and her phone and followed the old woman shuffling eagerly down the hall. The vacuum cleaner stood agape in a large dining room with floor-to-ceiling curios and a fireplace whose delicate molding had not yet been smothered over by their landlord’s indiscriminate brush. Behind them stretched a shadowy maze of yet more rooms, one after another all the way to the street, and in the air hung a stale, savory smell—half a century’s worth of latkes and sauerkraut, Alice guessed. On the mantelpiece lay a rent slip gritting its teeth for $728.69.
“Have you changed your clocks yet, Anna?”
“Have you changed your—”
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
The words flashed like a heartbeat resuscitated in her hand. “I’ll be right back, Anna, okay?”
He sounded woozy, as if he’d recently woken up from a long nap, and in the background she could hear an aria diminuendoing. “What are you doing, Mary-Alice?”
“I was just helping the old lady on my floor replace the bag in her vacuum cleaner.”
“How old?”
“Old. Older than you. And her apartment is bigger than both of ours combined.”
“Maybe you should be fucking her.”
“Maybe I am.”
Back down the hall Anna was trying to wedge the vacuum’s bag out of its recess with a carving fork. “I’ll do it,” offered Alice.
“What?”
“I said I’ll do it for you.”
“Oh, thank you dear. My granddaughter gave it to me. I don’t know what for.”
“Have you changed your clocks yet?” Alice asked, standing.
“What?”
“I said did you remember to change your clocks back this morning?”
Anna’s eyes watered. “My clocks?”
“Daylight Saving Time,” Alice said loudly.
• • •
Culled from the mail:
A Symphony Space flyer on which he’d circled the Kurosawa films he thought she should see, specifically Rashomon and, if she were able to stay for the double bill, Sanjuro.
A Film Forum postcard on which he’d circled the Charlie Chaplin films he thought she would enjoy: The Great Dictator, City Lights, and Modern Times.
A MoMA Film brochure featuring a photograph of an actress drinking from a coupe glass in Rosenstrasse and whose hairstyle he suggested she try, should she ever decide to cut hers short.
His back was bothering him again, so she went to the Film Forum alone.
“When he twists the lady’s nipples with his wrenches!”—and she ran around the room, tightening the air with invisible wrenches. “And when he salts his prison food with cocaine!”—and she bugged her eyes and put up her dukes. “And when he roller-skates in the department store! . . . And when he runs down the up escalator! . . . And when he gets drunk on the shot-up barrel of rum!” Flinging out her arms, so that an imaginary pair of shirt cuffs flew off, Alice did a sort of slow-motion moonwalk around him in his reading chair, and sang:
Se bella giu satore
Je notre so cafore
Je notre si cavore
Je la tu la ti la twaaaaah!
“Señora?”
“Pilasina!”
“Voulez-vous?”
“Le taximeter!”
“Eat your tart.”
“Tu la tu la tu la waaaaaaaah!”
“Oh, Mary-Alice,” he laughed, wiping an eye and reeling her in to kiss her fingers. “My darling, funny, cuckoo Mary-Alice! I’m afraid you’re going to be very lonely in life.”