VERY EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, the limousine pulled up in front of the imposing red brick administration building of the Auschwitz I death camp. Painstakingly reminding the driver for perhaps the fifth time to inform the others that he would meet up with them when they arrived at the Auschwitz II–Birkenau killing center following their exclusive lunch with a top-ranking Polish diplomat at Cyrano de Bergerac, winner of the Zlota Kawka prize for best restaurant in all of Galicia, which unfortunately he would have to miss, Norman stepped out, dispatching the car back to Krakow.
It was a beautiful day at Auschwitz, a mild spring breeze carrying the hopeful smell of abundant young grass, a few innocent clouds in an otherwise heartless blue sky. His old man would never contemplate bringing fat cats to this place in winter, Norman reflected condescendingly, their soft, spoiled fingers would have gotten too frozen stiff to write the check; springtime in Auschwitz was just about the limit of spoon-fed, feel-good horror they could handle. Obviously no one, not even a janitor peasant, was around yet this morning, but Norman nevertheless marched straight up to the door of this former brothel for camp guards, this erstwhile processing and delousing center for Jews who had been temporarily reprieved from gassing in order to be worked to death, and pounded insistently with both fists. He didn’t even really know what he would have asked had some administrator actually opened the door; most likely he would have just accommodatingly made a fool of himself by falling inside flat on his face, as in some predictable old farce, utterly stunned to be getting some attention. It was simply a procrastinating maneuver, he was fully aware, this busy work of going first through administration, following the official route—to bolster himself with the feeling that he was doing something, anything at all, toward the ultimate goal of penetrating that convent. Meanwhile, though, he still had no idea whatsoever how he was going to go about it, his brain was still swarming with fantasies of feats of personal daring and rescue and public outcry too absurd, too childish, to merit repeating, but he had no realistic strategy at all, no plan of action. He had come to the administration building first partly because he didn’t know where else to go; he could not very well have had the limo deposit him right in front of the convent, with the nuns sitting with binoculars spying through the windows, waiting in ambush day and night. And what could the administrators have done for him in any case, even if they had been around? The Carmelites weren’t even in that old Zyklon B storehouse inside the camp anymore. They had packed up on the orders of the pope and moved a couple of hundred meters away to the new convent outside the camp’s jurisdiction, leaving behind, so that no one should ever forget their existence, that mess of a cross for others to wipe up. Even so, Norman’s wrath mushroomed by the minute as he stood there, neglected and ignored, banging on that door. This place belonged to him; he had earned it with family blood and suffering. They had always been around when it was an urgent matter of tattooing and shaving and humiliating and robbing and torturing. So where were they now when he really needed them? He demanded—he deserved—service.
He understood, however, that he could not wait there indefinitely until the staff strolled leisurely in, belching their breakfasts of black bread and blood sausage, to continue their cynical diversion of the profits from the spoils of this mind-boggling Jew-killing project in which every last one of them was directly or indirectly complicit. He wanted at least to be able to truthfully report to Arlene, and have witnesses who could corroborate his story, that he had tried—that he had gotten past the gate of the convent and maybe through the front door, even if he never actually succeeded in seeing Nechama. And what if by some miracle he did get to see her? He was on a very tight schedule, with a commitment in concrete to meet the others by two in Birkenau. So, giving that stubborn door a furious kick, which, he recognized instantly, hurt him more than it would ever hurt them, he hobbled around to the back of the administration building, where, suddenly, rising to his right, he was confronted by the wrought-iron entrance gate to the original camp with that terrific old sick joke immortalized on top, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” and its underlying meaning, Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate, showing through like the sepia cartoon of the creator’s true intention and design. Beyond that gate he could see the black wooden kitchen alongside of which the camp orchestra used to be stationed morning and night, setting the beat—adagio, andante, allegretto, allegro, presto—the highest cultural expression of the most advanced civilized nation on earth, playing Beethoven and Schubert for the self-improvement and edification not to mention the enjoyment of the slaves as they marched in their wooden clogs through the gate to and from the work that the motto above promised would set them free. Who is the bigot who claims that Huns have no sense of humor?
The Arbeit Macht Frei gate was padlocked, Norman could see, but the orchestra space was filled with dazed creatures who had been overcome by the subtext, who had entered there and abandoned all hope, wandering about lost and aimless like a fresh crop of the dead newly delivered to the Inferno. This was Mickey Fisher’s crowd, Norman realized—Buddhists, Hare Krishnas, Christian monks and nuns, Sufis, New Age Jews, Rastafarians, Native Americans, Vietnam veterans, holistic healers, hippies, Rainbow Family and spiritual seekers of all ages. They were locked into the death camp, while he, Norman, clutching the iron stakes of the gate in both translucent white-knuckled fists, was locked out. A young spectacularly freckled woman wearing a long ruffled gauzy orange skirt and nothing else other than a wreath of wildflowers in her tangled red hair approached. “I just want to say that I’m wearing this skirt out of deference to the dead,” she felt it necessary to explain, assuming, in her endearing self-absorption, which reminded him so poignantly of Nechama when she was younger, that Norman had recognized at once that she was compromising her principles as an ideological nudist. “Like, I’m into the Body-Image Holocaust? But they said I can’t go all the way here at Auschwitz, it would offend too many people? So, like, I just wanted you to know?” Norman nodded; he was cool. He was straining not to let his eyes descend below the speckled tip of her nose, though an earlier glance had impressed him with the rich density of her freckles, which seemed almost like a pointillist mantle thrown modestly over her shoulders, her pale brown nipples merely somewhat larger spots, barely noticeable. Jutting his jaw in the direction of the throng milling about on her side of the gate, floating in that early-morning ether like the damned, he asked, “What’s happening?” “Oh, we’re like just hanging out—waiting for someone to come and open the gate so that we can go to Birkenau to meditate? Everyone’s all spaced out—you know? We’ve been up all night—because of that shofar? It was so, like, yeah—it just blew our minds.”
Amazingly, it was only then, when she mentioned the shofar, that Norman became aware that the high-pitched wail that had been irritating him so acutely from the minute he had arrived at the camp that morning and that had been making him, he now realized, so excruciatingly tense, as if a string stretched too tightly inside his head had been plucked and would not stop vibrating, was not the screeching of a kind of internal alarm that had jammed, but rather an actual ram’s horn that was such an integral part of his tribal references—how could he have missed it?—and it was coming piercingly and relentlessly from outside of him. He shook his head in disbelief at his own obtuseness. He had not questioned that sound; he had just accepted it, endured it as the subliminal undertone of Auschwitz, the keening of the massing dead that had penetrated him, a thing that came with the territory. “Who’s blowing?” Norman asked the girl, peering over her head into the depths of the camp as if to search out for himself the source of those shofar blasts. “Oh, Jake. Jake Gilguli? You know him? Over at Execution Wall? Like, he’s trying to raise the dead? He was killed here once, during the Holocaust—in the gas chamber? But now he’s been reincarnated, and he wants to get all the others resurrected too? It’s, like, way out of sight, yeah—way way far out.”
Norman would have truly wanted to find out more, not only about Gilguli but also about the elusive Marano who had teased and tormented him so cruelly yesterday, but he was growing increasingly uncomfortable conversing here of all places with this half-naked girl. What if some dignitary or member of the press who happened to be on a VIP tour of the death camp today walked by and recognized him from his international, high-profile Holocaust work? How would it look with him standing here chatting so familiarly with this topless—over-the-top!—exhibitionist? It could cause a major scandal, it could be very damaging not only to himself personally and to his family, but also to the museum and, above all, to the Holocaust and the six million. If only that emaciated Hare Krishna fellow over there with the shaved head and the saffron-colored robe would come over, or that turned-on-looking priest in the collar and jeans, so that he could talk to them instead. But no, they showed no signs at all of knowing who he was, they seemed not even to notice him at all. Not that it mattered one way or another. He had no time at the moment to spare for these dropouts or to satisfy his recreational curiosity regarding Gilguli or Marano or any other freak. The morning had been set aside for Nechama; it was his only chance to accomplish something constructive with regard to her case. They were leaving that evening for Warsaw, and tomorrow it was back to the States.
Giving the ideological nudist a jaunty little salute and mumbling a neutral, impersonal, impeccably unincriminating good-bye, Norman turned away from this potential big problem that he needed like a hole in the head, luring him from inside the camp like a siren, planted there to entrap him, and walked back around administration and across the parking lot, resolved to waste no more time. He would head straight to the convent now. Once there, he would just play it by ear and hope for the best, it was all he could do. Arlene would just have to take it or leave it, let’s see if she could do better. As he emerged from the main entrance of the camp into the street that ran along its perimeter, however, he noticed a small stand draped in a skirt of red and white plastic streamers, the colors of the Polish flag, that he was one hundred percent sure had not been there when he had been driven up in the limo just a short while earlier. Behind the stand, the lanky, olive-complexioned proprietor with dark curly hair, wearing a lavender shirt made from some shimmery synthetic material open to mid-chest to reveal festoons of bright gold chains—Turkish or North African or Iberian Peninsula or thereabouts, Norman figured, guest worker type, in other words—was unpacking his merchandise from two worn black plastic garbage bags patched with duct tape and laying it out on the tabletop. Apart from your usual tourist souvenirs, T-shirts, buttons, bumper stickers, postcards, guide booklets, and so forth, there were also faith-specific paraphernalia and trinkets, such as prayer books, memorial candles, and yarmulkes for the Jews, and for the Christians, crosses, rosaries, and glossy holy pictures that shifted from a depiction of Jesus to Mary depending on how you angled them, and a similar one in that line that slid back and forth hypnotically between the images of the two local Auschwitz saints, Father Maximilian Kolbe, the anti-Semitic pamphleteer, prisoner number 16670, and Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, the Jewish girl Edith Stein, number 44070. This, of course, was all kitsch, junk, which Norman dismissed at once. Not so that dusty, forsaken-looking pile of rags in the corner over there, which caught his eye immediately. An astute shopper with an expertise in the area of Holocaust art (the daring piece My Mother’s Holocaust Quilt VI, a real collector’s item by abstract artist Sherri Shapiro-Pecker, had pride of place in his study—Arlene refused to let it into the living room) and memorabilia, Norman instantly recognized these strips of cloth as genuine ghetto and concentration-camp artifacts, extremely rare and of excellent quality, with a value that, he was certain, this hustler could in no way appreciate. Here was an opportunity to pick up an incredible bargain, perhaps even something that could eventually be incorporated into the museum’s permanent exhibition after the usual curator-and-committee red tape runaround, with a discreet and dignified plaque affixed to the display case honoring him as the collector and donor. There was even an original blue-and-white-striped concentration camp uniform including matching cap, in perfect condition, complete with certificate of authenticity, which Norman was sorely tempted to buy, picturing himself showing up at the convent costumed in this—the ghost of crimes past, the nuns would have to let him in if only as a small down payment on atonement. But he rejected it as too large an object, too bulky and cumbersome to lug about with the busy schedule ahead of him; he couldn’t very well walk around wearing it all day either, turning the place into some kind of ossified theme park, nor could he trust this sleazebag vendor to ship it if he paid in advance, as the guy would no doubt demand.
Although Norman knew that it was imperative that he hurry and get to Nechama and take care of his affairs at the convent in order to meet the others in Birkenau by two, he rationalized his delay as he casually flipped through the cloths in that pile, shrewdly taking pains to conceal his throbbing excitement over this fantastic find, by telling himself that he was performing the necessary and obligatory function of buying gifts for his family to bring home from the trip. He pulled out four armbands—a kapo armband for his father, ghetto police for his mother, pink homosexual triangle for Arlene, and the yellow Star of David with the word Jude for Nechama, which would have the added bonus of transmitting to Sister Consolatia of the Cross a very subtle message concerning her roots, he decided—and pushed them across the counter. “How much?” he inquired with a show of nonchalance. “Ten thousand dollars,” the vendor replied with a suave Mediterranean inflection, in a tone that implied that these goods were meant for a customer of a higher class and a deeper pocket than the one blocking his view at the moment. Norman’s eyebrows arced up and his jaw bowed down; this fellow was far more formidable than he had given him credit for, he needed to be alert. They began to haggle, an activity, like spotting a metziyah such as these rare artifacts, at which Norman reckoned himself to be singularly adept, closing the deal finally at three thousand dollars, which Norman regarded as a personal triumph. Already he was congratulating himself, already he was itching to tell someone about it, picturing how he would prod Arlene to guess how much he had paid—go on, honey, take a guess.
“Do you take credit cards?” Norman inquired.
Credit cards! The vendor looked around expressively at their bizarre environs, the dilapidated Zasole commercial district of the Polish town of Oswiecim, the anus of the world, well within the contaminated zone of the Auschwitz slave labor and death camp where they happened to be situated at the moment, and then he turned his attention back to Norman as if to an extraterrestrial that had just alit from a spaceship from some distant planet, and answered in one word: “Green.” Norman complied by peeling the dollar bills out from the special robbery-proof travel security pouches hidden under his clothing—one thousand strapped to each calf and another thousand secreted frontally inside the waistband of his pants—and paying in full; the amount was just about all the cash he had left to his name at this final leg of the trip. Almost as an afterthought, he asked the peddler if he happened to have a business card for future reference. He was immediately handed the one the fellow had been using throughout their transaction to pick his teeth, soggy and dog-eared. Norman read out loud: “Tommy Messiah, Specialist.”
“You Jewish?” Norman asked.
“I am a Jew,” Tommy Messiah said. “I don’t know anything about ish.”
What kind of specialist? Norman was thinking of asking, but dismissed the question as pointless and idle for a nonentity like this who most likely just plucked the word specialist from the airwaves, imagining it sounded impressive. Instead, as he was about to set off again for the dreaded showdown at the Carmelite convent, Norman inquired if there might be anything else of historic or antiquarian interest worth looking at. He had been so intensely, so exquisitely focused on consummating the deal involving those precious armbands to the exclusion of everything else around him that it was not until then, not until Tommy Messiah bent down behind his stand and drew out from under it a pile of steel Nazi helmets, one nestled cozily inside the other like teacups, that Norman registered the presence of the pregnant woman sitting in a striped collapsible beach chair off to the side in the shadow of the scraggly trees growing along the camp fence. “Hiya, Normie,” she said softly in her unplaceable accent.
Shaken, Norman appealed to Tommy Messiah for support. “You know her?” he entreated.
“Everyone knows Marano,” Tommy Messiah answered enigmatically, dumping the helmets on the table with a raucous clatter.
“I don’t know her,” Norman insisted. “She seems to know me, but I never saw her in my life—until yesterday.”
“Oh, c’mon, Normie, don’t be such a drag. Of course you know me. Wait, I’ll give you a hint.” Removing her round, steel-framed glasses and lifting her necklaces of silver, turquoise, and amber beads over her head, she leaned over with difficulty and set them down under her beach chair. She braced her two hands on the plastic armrests, planted her feet firmly apart on the ground, heaving her massively pregnant body in its capacious Indian embroidered and mirrored caftan to a standing position. Without further ado, with the death camp crouched behind her like a stalking beast waiting to pounce, she launched into her routine. “Bo-bo skee wotten-dotten, hey hey hey!” she sang out the cheer with infectious vim, vigor, and vitality, her arms with fingers fluttering like pompoms shooting up into the air, first to one side of her head, then to the other. “Ees-ke wotten, bees-ke dotten, hey hey hey!” Her expansive hips, hands framing them for flirtatious emphasis, swung right, left, right. “Boom-a-lay, Bam-a-lay, wah wah wah!” One swollen, purple-veined leg sprang out in a peppy kick, followed snappily by the other. “Camp Ziona, rah rah rah!” With arms jackknifing up and out in a stirring V for victory, she leaped into the air so precipitously that Norman nearly collapsed in terror.
“Baby pops out at Auschwitz,” Tommy Messiah commented blandly. He applauded ironically, “Brava Marano!” But Norman only shook his head in slow, discomfited recognition. “Camp Ziona, of course,” he enunciated like a new dawning, “Mara Lieb of the rousing bo-bo-skee-wotten-dotten cheer—how could I not have known? But, of course, you were just a little brat in Tadpoles then while I was already a big-man junior counselor. Still, who would have ever thought we’d one day have a camp reunion, here of all places? All roads lead to Auschwitz, as they say. So—how ya doin’, Mara?”
But she turned on him suddenly, poking a finger in imperious censure. “Do not call me Mara,” she declared with passion. “Call me Mara-no. I am not Mara anymore. Mara is bitterness, Mara is delusion. I have rejected and shed that past life. I am now in a negative transition stage, working on myself toward the next stage, toward my rebirth, toward no longer being Mara but her permutation—toward evolving into Rama.” Breathless with agitation, she squatted on the ground, groped around among the weeds and rubbish for her glasses and necklaces, rearmed herself in them, and then, as if deflating in a full-body sigh, sank back down into her beach chair.
Norman cleared his throat. “Well, you’re definitely cryptic, I was right about that at least,” he pronounced syllable by syllable with an ingratiating grin, anticipating a reward for his witticism. “Okay, so let’s see now. You’re not Mara and you’re not really Marrano—neither a crypto-Jew, according to the accepted usage of the word, and certainly not a swine, which of course is what Marrano means literally, it was a pejorative,” he expounded pedantically, showing off perversely. But he was thinking, too, that she was also not from anywhere, she spoke no language without a foreign accent, not even her native tongue. “So what are you, if I may ask?”
She was a Buddhist past-life therapist, she told him after she had caught her breath and calmed down. What she did was help clients to heal and renew themselves by excavating their former lives in order to pinpoint the impact, both positive and negative, in terms of obsessions and compulsions, repetitive patterns and cycles, on the present. “You mean, like Gilguli?” Norman asked. She did not seem at all surprised at this reference, or curious as to how he had so effortlessly drawn the connection. “Jake’s the real thing,” she said, nodding her head with satisfaction, “a genuine gilgul, one of our great reincarnation success stories. He used to be Jack Gallagher, raking in a whole lot of bread as an investment banker in New York. One day, he showed up at our zendo, totally bummed out, an awful mess, on a really bad trip. But with a lot of very hard work on everyone’s part, we uncovered his past life as Yankel Galitzianer, gassed and cremated right here at Auschwitz, and now he has returned to search for his ashes so as to put everything to rest and move on. It’s been a really heavy journey for him, he’s Roshi’s prize disciple, a real phenomen.”
But even though her life’s work focused on the past, Marano was stubbornly reluctant to fill Norman in on her own, though she was ready, it is true, even avid, to share updates on some of the people they knew in common. Norman offered her the latest on Camp Ziona’s head counselor, Jerry Goldberg, the owner’s charismatic son. He had mutated into a world famous zealot known as Yehudi HaGoel, Norman reported, a notorious settlement leader on Israel’s West Bank, a polygamist in the Old Testament mold who had been anointed king of the secessionist realm of Judea and Samaria, prompting the remainder of the state of Israel to petition the Arabs to hurl their stones exclusively at Yehudi’s fanatic kingdom and leave the rest of them alone—“a shondeh and disgrace to our people,” Norman concluded, shaking his head in disgust. Marano smiled complacently. “You just really have to dig it, though,” she marveled from the depths of her mysterious Eastern wisdom, “the way human beings are so cyclic in their behavior. Look at Jerry Goldberg, for example. Check him out, and what do you see? Still a head counselor after all these years—on the wheel of life, even in the Holy Land, always and forever, the once and future head counselor, he can’t escape it, it’s his karma.” For her part, though, Marano wondered how it had happened that Norman had failed to recognize Mickey Fisher-roshi. “Don’t you remember him from Camp Ziona?” she asked with a superior smile of mild reproach. “The lifeguard, Moish Fisher—how could you have missed him? But then again, you didn’t recognize me either. You’re too into yourself to really see out, that’s your problem, Normie, you were probably a carthorse with blinders pulling a junk wagon in one of your past lives; you should come to the zendo, we can work on you. But really—how could you forget Moish Fisher the lifeguard? He was the big man on campus at Ziona! And isn’t it really heavy—I mean, talk about cyclic patterns? Just like in those days he would float around the pool with a net on a pole, fishing out the turds that the campers dropped in the water, so too today, in his present incarnation, he cleanses our impurities, he continues the holy holy work of guarding our lives.” She wove her fingers over her taut belly, which was visibly undulating like the waves of a rocking sea, and smiled with calm mysterious wisdom. Norman was inspired to ask if what was struggling and kicking inside that animate belly was Fisher’s, but he was suddenly struck silent, seized by shyness, unable to enter so private a zone. He recalled how in the Auschwitz museum Fisher had introduced her as “one name, like Madonna,” which perhaps was not, as Norman had at first assumed, a reference to the celebrity and superstar, but, rather, a scriptural hint that this conception was meant to be accepted on faith as immaculate, and probing was forbidden. So the question he asked instead was, “Is that how Fisher landed in a wheelchair—because of a swimming accident?”
Marano eyed him peremptorily. “It’s too heavy to talk about,” she cautioned by way of an answer. “Suffice it to say that Roshi chooses to view his present life from a sitting position.”
Norman wanted to find out more—for example, whatever happened to that suspiciously dark-skinned hippie she had run off with, provoking such a scandal in their circles from Riverside Drive to Park Avenue, and also, how in the world had she, an elite Ziona alumna, crossed paths with such a low-caste type like this Tommy Messiah? But Marano drew in her lips, sealing them defiantly, until Norman let drop with tantalizing disingenuousness that he happened to possess some extraordinarily fascinating news about her mother, which she evidently appeared not to know.
“My mother’s been dead for over fifteen years,” Marano reminded him frostily.
Norman was well aware of that, of course, but in terms of giving off vital signs, surely the fact that a person is dead should not be a hindrance, to Marano, of all people, it should be meaningless, especially in her line of work as a past-life therapist. This, as it happened, was news about her mother’s present incarnation. At first Marano stared at him as at some benighted primitive caught up in a dark-age web of voodoo and superstition, but then she remembered her position; he possessed information that she wanted, she was his hostage, and she reconsidered, capitulated. The last she had heard, she told him, her ex-husband was a convert to Islam, fulfilling the commandment of jihad in Afghanistan, earning a small living on the side by giving private tai chi lessons to the children of terrorist sheikhs dwelling sumptuously in their mountain complexes, with a separate cave for each wife. As for Tommy Mashiach, as she referred to him, she knew him from when she was living in Israel, when she was crashing in an alcove in the Western Wall tunnels, surviving by hawking her poems for a shekel a piece at the Dung Gate. At the time, Tommy had a heavy metal club called the Holy Rock Café where he specialized in trance music and making people happy, in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, as close as you could get to the Temple Mount, the most sacred piece of real estate on earth, from where the golden age of redemption and nirvana will someday be ushered in—even as a Buddhist she believed this.
“Now what about my mother?” Marano asked, a bit like a woman who had just been violated and was demanding compensation.
“I’m surprised you didn’t realize it yesterday when we met you in the hair room at the Auschwitz museum,” Norman began with almost unbearable deliberateness, stretching out every syllable, holding her captive. “Your problem is that you’re too rigid and dogmatic, too fixated on your latest ism, which makes you, I’m afraid, remarkably clueless. You must have been a mule in one of your past lives, butting your hard head against a stone wall.” He glanced at her face vindictively, imagining that she looked properly insulted. Good, he thought, he had gotten her back. Then he went on to inform her that that very attractive older woman who was part of their group—Gloria, the blonde, had Marano despite her meditative state bothered to notice?—this blond chick was, for Marano’s information, her mother’s successor, none other than Mrs. Leon Lieb, her father’s second wife, which made her, if Norman had this figured out correctly, Marano’s wicked stepmother. And, what was more, to add to the festivities, that dumpy woman with the short hair and red-framed glasses—Bunny?—she was Gloria’s daughter from a previous marriage, which made her—you got it!—Marano’s wicked stepsister. “Isn’t this all so heartwarming?” Norman was winding up, like someone far too urbane for such mawkish family togetherness. “It’s like the happy ending of a Victorian novel, when all the characters discover that they’re related to each other through an incredible windfall of coincidences. But really, how is it possible that you didn’t know who they were? Don’t tell me you’ve never met them. As far as I recall, your father’s been married to Gloria for ten years at least.”
Marano lowered her head. “I’d heard he remarried,” she whispered flatly, as if to strengthen and restore herself. “I haven’t seen him for years, since before my mother’s funeral. I was living with wild dogs in a cave in Ibiza, and they couldn’t find me in time. So that’s his new wife. Well, she’s thin—at least he finally got himself someone thin. She doesn’t look religious, though. It’s hard to believe that my father would ever have married someone who isn’t religious.”
“No, she’s not religious, that’s for sure,” Norman drawled out snidely, “definitely not religious, trust me.” Then, taking on the role of newly anointed counselor and comforter, he very slowly and ostentatiously went on to dish out his trove wrapped up as sage reflections. “In a way, I think you can say that your father has shifted denominations—from Orthodox Judaism to Holocaust Judaism, which has emerged as the main branch of Judaism nowadays in any case. He’s been very active in our museum in Washington, a mega donor, right up there on the wall at the head of the pack, for over a million bucks. He actually competed against my father for the chairmanship of the museum, he wanted it pretty badly, but then, of course, he had to withdraw his candidacy because of his legal problems—you know, the nursing home scandals? Somehow that old story got out—God alone knows who leaked it. Anyway, don’t worry, there are no hard feelings at all between our dads—mine actually just named yours chairman of the first annual ten-thousand-dollars-a-plate partisan and resistance fighters dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. You’ll be happy to hear that your father has made tremendous strides with respect to coming out of the closet about his Holocaust past, opening up and talking about what happened to him during the war.”
“What are you saying? My father came to the States in 1939—before the war.”
“I know that’s what you think. That’s what we all thought, as a matter of fact—because your father, like so many other survivors, could not talk about the past, it was not only much too painful but the subject was also taboo. There was a conspiracy of silence. But thanks to the whole exciting and supportive Back to the Holocaust movement, he has become a shining example of recovered memory. If you can cheer on Jack Gallagher as he morphs into Yankel Galitzianer on the path to becoming Jake Gilguli, how can you begrudge your own father the well-earned rewards of his brave saga during the Holocaust, when, for your information, as a resistance fighter, he courageously dressed up in women’s clothing to smuggle ammunition into the Warsaw Ghetto in the most perilous and life-threatening of circumstances? Really, Marano, you should be very proud to be the child of such a Holocaust hero, just as I am. My father, as it happens, was also a partisan, who, in his particular case, fought against the Nazis in the woods. Our dads are comrades in arms, so to speak, or whatever—the Holocaust can make pretty strange bedfellows, you know. And don’t think there aren’t any benefits from all this for you. I’m happy to inform you that you are now fully eligible and qualified to join the Second Generation Club. I’m the president. Give me your address at the zendo, and I’ll send you an application. We 2-Gers need to close ranks and stick together for the moral betterment of all mankind. The simple fact is, we’re more human than other people because of what our parents went through.”
Marano began fishing in a pouch of her caftan for something, which Norman truly wanted to believe was pen and paper to write down her address as he had requested, were it not for the fact that her shoulders were heaving so uncontrollably. He grew acutely concerned that, because of him, she had been dangerously overcome with grief at the awakening of these painful family memories—she, a woman in such a vulnerable physical state—it would be disastrous if she went into labor right here of all vile places on earth, right now when he was on such an exacting schedule, he had to get to Nechama, and then off to Birkenau by two, they were expecting him. Drawing a limp tissue out of his pants pocket and dangling it squeamishly from the pincer of two fingertips, he tried to shove it at her. She pushed his hand away. Lifting her head, she sputtered, “My father dressed up as a woman—that is so far out!” Great spasmodic brays of hilarious laughter were coming out of her, hysterical tears of delight streaming down her cheeks. Norman was inexpressibly relieved that he had succeeded so brilliantly at amusing her, that she was, thanks to him, so obviously entertained, so deliriously happy, when, all of the sudden, in a flash, for which he was totally unprepared, the howls of laughter shifted to howls of lamentation so convulsive and terrible, so splitting and cataclysmic, it was as if she were being torn in two. Instinctively, Norman clapped his hands to the sides of his head to cover his ears.
“My poor, poor, poor mommy,” Marano wailed.
Tommy Messiah ambled over from his stand, along with Shimshon ben-Yishai, the kibbutznik teacher, who must have made an appearance, Norman calculated, while he and Marano were catching up on old times. Both cowboys were smoking marijuana, and Tommy Messiah passed his joint to Marano. “Is this what you’re looking for?” he asked. “Here, take—you need it.” “Are you crazy?” Norman screamed. “This is against the law!” Then, abruptly switching tactics in an attempt to sway them through blunt self-interest, he added, “What about the baby?” Marano took a long toke, relaxing instantly, as if washed gently under a spell. “Oh, don’t worry, Normie,” she said, her composure astonishingly restored, “Rumi’s used to it.” “Rumi?” Norman cried, beside himself. “The baby’s Rumi? How do you know it’s a boy?” “Boy or girl,” Marano asserted with conviction, “it’s Rumi. I don’t ever need to know what it is. I’m channeling Rumi.”
Norman was furious. They were trying to destroy him with their contraband, their filthy cannabis; pot was illegal in Eastern Europe, plain and simple, open-and-shut. What if a local Oswiecim cop just happened to stroll by right at that moment, whistling his favorite Jew-baiting tune, his paws clasped behind his back swinging a caveman cudgel? They could be arrested on the spot, thrown into some sort of primitive rat-infested Polish dungeon with a stinking hole in the ground for a latrine, they would be disappeared, no one would ever hear from them again. And if by some miracle the Poles discovered what kind of colossal big fish they had caught—Norman Messer himself, president of Holocaust Connections, Inc., only son of the chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, et cetera and so forth—all hell would break loose, the shit would hit the fan, a scandal would erupt of major diplomatic and international proportions on the front pages of every newspaper across the globe, it would be a field day for the world’s anti-Semitic cartel, not only his own reputation was on the line but the future of the entire museum, of the Holocaust itself, of the six million, of all Jews dead and alive. He glared poisonously at the three of them as they mindlessly, insolently passed the dope back and forth right in front of Auschwitz, of all places. They had not one iota of respect, what did they care? They had nothing left to lose, they were already bandits, outlaws, renegades; even Marano, once a registered card-carrying member of the Jewish aristocracy, was now an outcast, a dropout, a nonentity, she had burned all her bridges behind her. But why drag him into their smelly little losers’ circle? They were spitefully plotting to get him into big-time trouble, that was for sure, they were trying to ruin him, but he would not allow it, he would not let it happen. He zoomed in on Shimshon. “What are you doing here?” he lashed out. “Who’s minding the kids? Where are the little darlings?”
Shimshon treated himself to another long and satisfying drag on a joint, and then, with a cordial dip of his shaven head, graciously offered it to Tommy Messiah. “Eh, to answer your friendly questions in the order they were asked, as our sages advise, I am here, as you can see for yourself, hanging out on a beautiful day in Auschwitz, the largest Jewish cemetery in the world minus the insignificant convenience of graves, partaking of some weed with my old comrade, Tommy Mashiach. With regard to who is minding my kids—eh, I am happy to report that they have minds of their own, thank you very much. Finally, as to where they are at the moment—they are in the fresh air and wide open spaces of Birkenau park, running freely around among the ashes and bones. They need the exercise, they are all pent up from this unwholesome trip. Eh, we hired a stripper last night to give them some release, but it did not work, I regret to say.”
“Is this guy for real?” Norman was practically screeching in consternation, turning to Marano, his only hope, however feeble, of an ally in this impossible situation.
“Normie?” she said, drawing in the last precious bit of essence of grass from the roach of her joint, which she brought smoldering up to her lips pincered at the tip of a pair of rusty tweezers that Tommy Messiah had provided. “Chill—okay? Nobody’s going to get busted. We’re all cool here. Everything’s under control—okay?”
“Okay, okay,” Norman said, straining every neuron to map out a plan of action—and then to figure out a backup plan just in case. His heart in his chest was pounding so violently he thought it would burst from its cage. “So, okay, if we’re arrested, I’ll just tell them that my daughter’s a nun at the Carmelite convent here. Then they’ll have to let me go. They’ll have to hush it up—to avoid a major embarrassment to the Catholic church.”
“Your daughter’s a nun?” Marano exclaimed. “Normie, that’s the coolest thing! Who would have ever thought? Normie Messer, the biggest schlump, schmegegie, and schlemiel at Camp Ziona, the most uptight, pompous jerk-off on the scene, that insufferable, mean-spirited suck-up who made all the girls gag—and he would be the one to grow up to have a daughter a nun! Way to go, Normie!”
For the first time in a very long time, Norman was again filled with that indescribably satisfying sensation of nachas, of pride in one’s child, of which he had been so sorely deprived for far too long. He put off dealing for the meantime with the palpable affronts directed against him personally, to which he was of course painfully alive—he would get her back for them later, you could depend on it—choosing instead to bask vicariously in the reflected glory of the compliments to his daughter. He smiled with radiant parental pleasure. “Yes,” he confirmed, “Nechama’s a nun, Sister Consolatia of the Cross, right here at the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz. I’ve been trying to get there all morning.”
“The Carmelite convent? I know exactly where that is,” Marano said. “It’s right next door to the interfaith center where I’m staying with Roshi.”
“You’re staying at the interfaith center?” Norman was truly perplexed. “I thought you were staying in the camp itself. I was wondering how you got out here—since all the others were locked in. I saw them behind the gate myself, they were like prisoners.”
Marano shook her head. “That’s so ridiculous,” she said. “There are a million ways to get out. They probably just got a charge out of pretending to be prisoners—it’s a radical turn-on, for sure. Of course Roshi and I aren’t staying in the camp itself, the vibes are much too heavy there. We’ve been doing this horror-healing tour for years. We’re way past that scene. The camp is for—campers.”
Norman decided then and there to abandon all pretense and claims to dignity, to bare himself in his pressing if temporary and uncharacteristic neediness to this inconsequential person whom, in any case, he would probably never see again in his entire life. “The thing is,” he explained, “I have to get into that convent to see Nechama. Arlene—that’s my wife—she’ll kill me if I don’t get in, but I don’t have a clue how to go about it.”
“Piece of cake, Normie,” Marano assured him, “piece of cake! You should have said something before. Tommy’s on very intimate terms with the nuns. He does business with them all the time. He’ll get you in—and it won’t be that expensive either, don’t worry. He’ll probably even be willing to take a check this time since he knows you’re out of cash. I’m pretty sure he feels he can trust you by now. And you know what? I can walk you over most of the way. I’ve got to split anyhow, I’ve got to get back to the center. Roshi’s probably still sleeping. I have to go wake him up now and help him get ready so that he can get to Birkenau to lead a meditation session.” Sighing the tamed, domesticated sigh of a beset, put-upon but withal tolerant and fulfilled personal assistant to an important player voluptuous with power, Marano began the task of extricating herself from that too-low chair, rising with difficulty to her edematous feet in their embroidered Chinese slippers and turning to Tommy Messiah, who had wandered off a short distance for a private consultation with Shimshon. “Tommy,” she called out, “can you get Normie into the convent?”
Tommy Messiah cupped his ear with an exaggerated flourish. “The coven?” he echoed.
“The convent, Tommy, the convent!”
He took a few steps closer. “The covenant?” he made another stab, his face screwed in uncertainty.
“Tommy, please, just pay attention for a minute.” Marano pronounced exactly: “The convent, the Carmelite convent—you know, the nuns? Can you get Normie in?”
“Ah, the fucking convent!” Tommy Messiah gave an angelic smile. “No problem! Five thousand bucks. Make it out to ‘Cash.’”
When Norman handed him the check—a museum check, unfortunately, but it was all he had with him at the moment, it made him very uneasy to use it but this was an emergency, it was his only chance to get in to see Nechama, he would reimburse it the minute he got home—Tommy Messiah stood there scrutinizing it for too long, like a doctor mulling over the X-ray of a fatal diagnosis. Maybe he doesn’t read English very well, Norman reassured himself, trying to quell his simmering anxiety. Then, apparently satisfied, Tommy Messiah folded the check carefully and slipped it into one of his glowing new running shoes, which he wore without socks. He had to be at the convent that day anyway, he advised Norman, to deliver an order to the nuns—“a splinter from the true cross,” he added with a grin. From his pocket, he produced a small black velvet jewelry box, snapped it open, and, like an illusionist about to perform an amazing trick, showed each of them in turn how it was absolutely empty, there was nothing in there at all. With the same tweezers that he had loaned to Marano to squeeze the last drop from her joint, he picked up a tiny wood sliver from the ground and set it down with a minor flourish, like a priceless gem, on the plush black cushion of the box, displaying it all around again, this time to demonstrate the wondrous phenomenon of the splinter’s appearance for their universal gasps and applause. Then he clicked the box shut, slipped it back into his pocket, and, pleased with his performance, executed a sweeping bow.
While Norman was struggling to convince himself that whereas Tommy Messiah might quite properly be ready to cheat a bunch of ignorant and unenlightened nuns, he would certainly draw the line at ripping off a fellow Jew, especially such a savvy Jew as Norman Messer who would never let him get away with it in the end, and especially when it involved sacred relics pertaining to the Holocaust, the sound of a siren, so distant and ignorable at first, someone else’s headache, grew steadily louder and more searing. “Oh, my God!” Norman cried, as if vaulting out of a trance, “it’s the cops! This is a disaster! Get rid of the grass! Get me out of here!” Yet even in the grip of his panic and distress, Norman was struck by how similar the sound was to the sirens featured in every single World War II and Nazi movie he had ever seen—pulsating, ominous, mounting and then subsiding in intensity, a new wave rising as the old wave faded out, a menacing descent into inescapable doom. For Norman, it rendered everything that was happening to him at that moment cinematic, unreal, fictional, slow-motion, and dreamlike. “Time to split,” Tommy Messiah announced.
In the next frame, as if they had carried out this emergency routine a thousand times before, like the crew of a submarine fathoms deep in the ocean in dozens of thrillers that he had also seen, Norman watched with detached interest as each of them swung into action, performing what looked like assigned, well-rehearsed roles in a planned maneuver. Marano shoved the minuscule remnants of the cannabis into a cleft in her loincloth. She calmly folded her chair, scooped up in her arms all the Nazi helmets, firmly placed one on her own head, and distributed three of the others to the three men. “Walla!” she exclaimed at the completion of these tasks, personalizing Voilà! as she did every other word, and she took her designated place alongside the cart, clutching the two remaining helmets along with her portable chair. Meanwhile, Tommy Messiah and Shimshon swept all of the merchandise off the stand into the two patched garbage bags and tied them securely. Shimshon handed one bag to Norman, stationing him on the side of the cart opposite to where Marano was waiting, and with the second bag over his shoulder, he single-handedly, in a truly dazzling feat of strength, hoisted Marano and child, plus helmets and chair, onto the tabletop. Holding Marano securely in place from that side, he indicated to Norman to do the same from his. At this point, Tommy Messiah, already positioned at the head of the stand, began to push, which was when Norman first realized with the pop of a quiet, interior O, that the entire shop was on wheels. In this way they ran for their lives—four Jews in Nazi helmets, two carrying a bundle over a shoulder with one hand, trotting on either side of the cart, holding on to it and its passenger with the other, the third bent over straining and pushing energetically with both hands, and the fourth, a stupendously pregnant woman, perched on top with two Nazi helmets upside down nestled in the bowl of her lap and a flattened beach chair like a lid over it all. Panting and sweating, Norman both ran along and watched himself running at one and the same time. Shimshon was bellowing out enthusiastically, “Onward Christian soldiers, marching hup, hup, hup!” to spur on and goad their pursuers, as the Polish police in their vehicle with its throbbing, oscillating siren flashing its heart-clamping red light drew nearer and nearer until the tires screeched to a halt on that provincial street pitted with potholes. Tommy Messiah stopped short, whirled around, and rocketed the erect middle finger of his right hand triumphantly into the air. “One hundred meters, kurwa twoja mac, you sons of whores!” he yelled. Then, turning to his comrades, he announced, “We have crossed the line. They can’t touch us now.”
From that point on it was a companionable stroll on that balmy June day in the gravitational field of the Auschwitz death camp, as they went on taking in the overrich air of this cloaca of the universe on their promenade in the direction of the interfaith center and the Carmelite convent, Lady Marano still being conveyed like a prize melon or a blue-ribbon sow on the way to the fair on the pinnacle of the cart by her three gallant musketeers, Athos, Porthos, and Norman. Tommy Messiah tersely allowed that the invigorating chase episode that had just done them all so much good in the exercise and physical fitness department had no connection whatsoever to the smoke curling upward from their illegal substance, as some might have rashly supposed. Rather, it was one of the byproducts of restraints imposed on the free-market system, which banned within one hundred meters of the death camp complex kiosks, stalls, and other forms of commercial competition that would cut into the profits of the Auschwitz museum’s own souvenir, tchotchke, and Nazi and Holocaust memento and memorabilia reproduction and knockoff shop. This was information for all of them, but especially for Norman, to absorb and ponder as they walked on in silence. When they reached the new red brick Center of Information, Meetings, Dialogue, Education, and Prayer in Auschwitz, Shimshon effortlessly lifted Marano off the cart, with both hands this time, and set her lightly down on the ground. “I better go see how my kids are doing in Birkenau,” he said. “Eh, it was very nice running for dear life from a Polish pogrom again, along with my fellow Jews, thank you very much for the déjà vu. Eh, I think the time has come to get my dreamers ready for the return to Zion.” Marano, looking now like a chastened and reformed little girl, sang out in her unique and elusive accent, “See ya, Normie,” and turned to take up the personal assistant duties that awaited her in the interfaith center. Norman and Tommy Messiah then set off again, pushing the cart, now loaded with both bags of merchandise, the beach chair, and all the helmets except for the one still on Norman’s head, toward the new Carmelite convent, which very soon loomed up in front of them with its overhanging roof and eaves draped like the coif and veil of a nun—a giant, monster, nightmare nun, Norman thought, and she has swallowed up my Nechama.
As they waited at the door of the convent for someone to admit them, Norman took off his Nazi helmet and handed it back to Tommy Messiah. “Keep it,” Tommy Messiah said, “it’s worthless.” Norman, who really did appreciate a freebie, especially one with a value that a philistine and a nobody like Tommy Messiah was in no way qualified to assess, stood there holding the helmet in front of him with both hands, like a proper suitor who had respectfully removed his hat coming to pay a call. The door was opened by a nun in a brown habit, with head lowered and eyes chastely cast down beneath the shade of her veil. Norman’s heart leapt—could this one be his Nechama?—but she betrayed no sign of recognition, perhaps under threat to her life, Norman speculated. “I have a delivery for Mother Flagelatta,” Tommy Messiah said, “two items.” First, from his pocket he drew out the small black velvet box and handed it to the nun. Next, pushing Norman like an oversize package into the darkened building, he added, “And the Holocaust Museum American.”
“Sign here, please,” Norman heard Tommy Messiah request of the nun. Turning toward the light for a farewell glimpse of the outside world, Norman watched as the hustler extracted from another pocket an Etch-a-Sketch key chain that he held like a small slate in the palm of one hand for the nun to affix her signature, stroking her cheek with the hairy backs of the fingers of his other hand as she labored with the tip of her tongue between her teeth. Get your filthy paws off my daughter, you scumbag, Norman was thinking, fuming within—don’t you have any respect at all for a woman who has dedicated her life to prayer and contemplation?
He was led into a long, high-ceilinged reception area with a stone-tiled floor, paneled in dark wood and furnished very sparsely with a few rough tables and scattered straight-backed, uncomfortable-looking chairs, on one of which, almost exactly in the center of the room, the nun who was perhaps Nechama but who was restrained from communicating with him, her own father, on pain of dire punishment, indicated he should sit. She did not linger but noiselessly left him almost at once, sitting there alone on that ungenerous chair in the middle of that long room with his legs squeezed tightly together, the Nazi helmet resting in his lap like a codpiece, like the sole article of clothing left for reasons of modesty to a patient who, with heart pounding, awaits the momentous entry of the examining physician. Extending the length of the room along two walls, a little higher than halfway up to the beamed ceiling, was a narrow gallery with a wooden balustrade, along which ran a row of open archways, with corresponding open archways in a row along both lengths of the walls of the ground floor, where he had been ordered to remain seated. Through those openings he could see identical nuns in brown habits moving silently, floating dizzyingly, flickering in the archways like distress signals at sea and then vanishing. Perhaps there were many nuns—he had read somewhere, though, that they rarely kept much more than twenty at any one time in a convent, which, he reminded himself as he kvelled and gloated inwardly, rendered all the more impressive Nechama’s acceptance by the Auschwitz Carmelites, the Harvard of convents—or perhaps it was just one nun passing swiftly through those mysterious inner chambers, creating the impression that she was many, just one busy little brown bird of a nun with a luminous white breast flitting softly from nest to nest, an optical illusion. Then, emerging from one of the ground-floor archways, bending her head, stooping because of her great height, an Amazon nun was dieseling toward him like a truck driver, which signified to Norman that there had to be at least two nuns. By a process of elimination the second, normal-sized nun desperately letting herself be glimpsed in those openings and then frantically disappearing was surely his Nechama.
The towering nun, no doubt the inspiration for the terrifying abstraction on the prow of the building’s roof, was looking not at him as she surged ahead confidently toward his chair in the center of the room, but rather with evident pleasure down at the contents of the small black-velvet jewelry box, which she held open before her as she made her way forward. This giant must be Mother Flagelatta, then, the prioress for whom the box was intended, Norman reasoned as he stood up abruptly, the Nazi helmet striking the stone floor with a sharp clang that reverberated alarmingly throughout that silent cavernous hall. Hovering over him, Mother Flagelatta displayed the contents of the velvet box for his admiration. In the no-frills English of her native Chicago, she delivered a short welcoming homily. “The Holy Father has called Auschwitz the Golgotha of the modern world. The meaning of this is that like our Lord Jesus at Golgotha, all Jews murdered at Auschwitz carried on their shoulders Christ’s cross and endured the agonies of crucifixion. It follows then that every Jew crucified at Auschwitz awaits salvation, redemption, and resurrection through our prayers. Thus, every piece of wood in the vicinity of Auschwitz-Golgotha is holy, and may be regarded as a fragment of the true cross upon which a Jew was crucified, especially blessed when brought to us by a fellow Jew. So do not imagine for one minute that we have been taken in or duped or deceived by your Pan Messiah.” Her face, framed by the starched white linen of her stiff coif and wimple, Norman noted as he glanced furtively from beneath his brows up at her, was shocking in its coarse redness. He could see directly into the dark, swampy underbrush of her fleshy nose, and her breath that poured down upon him reeked of old cheese and garlic. Over her shoulders she wore the brown scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel to shield her from the eternal fires. He was powerless against her.
With two thick fingers, Mother Flagelatta casually flicked off that splinter of wood displayed to such advantage on the black velvet cushion and sent it flying across the room to oblivion, and then buried the box somewhere within the folds of her ample brown habit. She raised her commanding arm in a sweeping gesture to take in the great chamber in which they were standing, and by implication the entire structure. “We built this without the help of a single zloty from the Jews,” she declared. “If the Jews had even one drop of decency and gratitude, they would have financed it entirely, as it was they who forced us to move five hundred meters from the camp, it was they who exiled us from our convent where we were best situated to offer our prayers on behalf of the souls of their dead brethren of the Jewish persuasion.” She paused to take Norman in for the first time, probing him with her gaze; a few seconds later, having apparently seen her fill, she went on from her intimidating heights. “I regret that it is not possible to show you around, Pan Messer. The sisters are cloistered. We would disturb them in their devotions, and soon it will be time for the noon prayers of the sixth canonical hour. Yet you in particular, as a member of the Jewish persuasion, a tribe with legendary moneymaking facility, and as the ex-father of a young professed who has reached almost the end of her third and last year of temporary vows as she grows toward the fullness of her vocation—you in particular have the responsibility to put an end to this stubbornness that has turned you Jews into little more than ungrateful barking dogs molesting everything in their path. You must lead the way and set an example by making a substantial contribution to our convent, no different than if your daughter were a student at a great university and you were quite properly the recipient of a solicitation. And when you return home you must also organize a telephone campaign to raise funds in our behalf. We are in need of so many things. We have almost nothing at all, only these bare rooms and our two Teresas.”
She indicated the two paintings high on the wall at either end of the room, one of a woman robed in a draped, flowing garment, reclining in an ecstatic pose with head thrown back, eyes closed and mouth open rapturously, presenting to be pierced by the spear of the winged male figure erect over her—Teresa of Avila, founder of the Discalced Carmelites, fun-loving mystic with a bias against sullen saints. The other was a portrait of a Jewish girl who, as usual, was having much less fun, Norman noted despondently, too serious, too intense, in brown nun’s habit and white wimple, dark shadows from staying up nights studying circling her formidably intelligent eyes, no doubt first in her class in every faculty at the university—Teresa Benedicta, born Edith Stein of Breslau, Germany, a nice Jewish girl gassed at Auschwitz.
What was the deal here? Norman was anxiously struggling to figure it out. This pituitary wonder who insulted him so unforgivably by referring to his people as dogs and to himself as his own daughter’s “ex-father,” whatever that meant, this big brother cross-dressing as big sister who knew without benefit of introduction not only exactly who he was but also evidently everything there was to know about him—was this hideous extortionist intimating rather crudely to him that if he wrote a major check right this minute she would let him see Nechama, novitiate and postulancy, cloister and contemplation, be damned? God help him, what was he to do? All he had on him were museum checks. It was bad enough that he had already used one to pay off a blackmailer like Tommy Messiah. But if it ever got out that he had made a mega-donation with a United States Holocaust Museum check to the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, of all places—to the notorious nuns who had once taken over the camp’s Zyklon B storehouse, who prayed every canonical hour for the conversion of the Jewish dead, who when they moved to these new quarters left behind inside the death camp that twenty-six-foot cross like a finger in the eye of the Jews—all hell would break loose, it would be the end of the party, the end of the Holocaust. If only he still had cash on him; cash could always be finessed, laundered, camouflaged from the authorities. But of course she would want far more than he would ever have carried around, even if he had bedecked himself in secret traveling pouches from clavicle to anklebone; she probably would accept no less than fifty thousand at the minimum just for starters. Maybe what he should do is to give her the kapo and Jude and gay and ghetto-police armbands as a down payment, as a kind of security, as a token of goodwill, and at the same time make a pledge for fifty grand to be sent as soon as he got home by Federal Express in cash that left no fingerprints, on condition that she would allow him to see Nechama now. He was formulating in his mind how to segue into the negotiations—Does FedEx deliver to Auschwitz? he was thinking of asking, but it came out instead, Does Auschwitz deliver to Fed-Cross?—which set her off again, like a firecracker igniting under her seat, like a gunshot at the starting line. “The cross? Your mind is still stuck on the cross? The cross, I would have you know, was blessed by the Holy Father before a million of his faithful compatriots, at a solemn mass in an open field in Krakow, and carried by the nuns to its present spot in Auschwitz, planted in the holy soil in front of our old convent, where it shall remain forever. You can tell your people of the Jewish persuasion that although they may have succeeded in getting the Carmelite sisters out of the camp temporarily, they will never uproot the cross even for one minute—never! Why do you people of the Jewish persuasion insist on acting as if you were the only victims at Auschwitz? Seventy-five thousand Polish Catholics were martyred there too. Let there be equality of worship, I say. You can have a little synagogue, and we shall have our churches. You Jews—why must you always demand special treatment and privileges? Why must you pride yourselves on being the chosen people of suffering?”
Somewhere a bell was tolling twelve, and Norman understood very clearly, as if an antiphonal bell were pealing inside his own head, that this anti-Semite held in her merciless hands not only his own immediate fate, not only whether or not he would get to see Nechama in the small window of time allotted on this June afternoon, but also the fate, twenty-four hours of every day, of his hostage child—her essential survival. This was not a person to antagonize. There was no advantage to him on the face of this earth in engaging in a competitive victims’ match with this terrorist and abductor by pointing out to her that seventy-five thousand dead Polish prisoners of war were small potatoes compared to over one million Jews, men, women, and children, gassed and incinerated at Auschwitz alone for no reason other than that they were Jews—we Jews, madam, are still the undisputed winners and champions in this category, I’ll have you know. Why were the Poles trying to elbow in so crassly on the rewards of victimhood, such as they were? What was the meaning of all these sordid attempts to Christianize the camp with churches and convents and crosses if not blatant historical revisionism, to disguise the pope’s complicity in Hitler’s grand scheme, to skew the future perception of Auschwitz by establishing it as a place of Christian martyrdom? But there was nothing for him to gain by hammering all this bile and bitterness through the thick crust of her Polack head, Norman recognized, and what is more, there was everything to lose in terms of safeguarding his Nechama. Instead, he foraged desperately in the dregs of his brain for a sop to offer to this implacable enemy, a deal of some sort. We of the Jewish persuasion are famous for making deals, he would say to her, a compromise with something for everybody—for example, why not replace the twenty-six-foot wooden cross, which was perishable after all and would one day rot, with a circle of permanent time and weatherproof stone slabs embedded forever in the ground in concrete, each one engraved with a quote, from a Catholic pope, from a Jewish rabbi, from a Muslim imam, from a Buddhist monk, and so on, a regular convention of equal-opportunity, religiously correct, pluralistic diversity staking an eternal claim right in the heart of the death camp. But just as he was about to propose this creative solution of which he was certain that his father, in his lust for a deal, would have signed off on with a huge gala and media extravaganza, and his daughter also would have approved in the spirit of shared ecumenical victimhood, the pure sound of women’s voices lifted in song bathed his ears. Mother Flagelatta announced, “It is the hour of Sext, the hour that Jesus was nailed to the cross.” A procession of nuns clutching rosaries at their breasts, Nechama from the shtetls surely among them, with heads bowed and pale faces tunneled deep within their brown hoods, appeared at the far end of the room from beneath the portrait of Saint Teresa of Avila, chanting “Gloria Patri” with crystalline sweetness, “Kyrie Christie Kyrie” as they crossed the center of the hall past Norman standing in the shadow of the prioress, “Ave Maria” as they disappeared at the other end under the vigilant eye of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, that headstrong Jewess, Edith Stein.
He was desperate to know—which of these hollowed-out faces, these wistful, enigmatic voices calling to him, which one was his daughter? It was too cruel to go on tormenting him like this. He was ready to debase himself, to fall on his knees, which in most cases a good Jew would rather die than do, especially before an overgrown Christian of questionable gender dressed in nun’s drag, but, as he fervently hoped, at least no one he knew was watching him at this moment, and even if someone were, as a father he was still nevertheless prepared to prostrate himself in supplication at the jumbo-size feet of this torturer for the simple grace of an answer to his question—which of these worshippers is my daughter? But gazing down with contempt upon him, the prioress replied to his thoughts as if he had already uttered them out loud: “Sister Consolatia is a daughter of the Church. Your daughter no longer exists.” An anguished plea then burst impulsively, wildly, out of him from some uncharted internal wellspring of self-degradation. “I must see her, you have to let me see her,” Norman cried deliriously. “I’m being eaten up alive. I’ve been diagnosed with terminal cancer. It has spread all over my body. I’ve come from my deathbed for one last glimpse of my child. The doctors say I have just a few weeks left to live.” She must have thought he was raving, but—who could say?—maybe he was unwittingly speaking the truth. Cancer was a stealth operator. Maybe he had already been invaded, maybe, unbeknownst to him, sentence had already been passed.
“Cancer is as a grasshopper in the eyes of the true Church,” Mother Flagelatta somberly intoned. From the folds of her habit, she extracted a card, which she lowered to him. “This is our Web site. When you get home, you may log on. Go directly to the prayer and blessing reservoir link. Check off ‘For Better Health, Physical and Mental,’ with a double check for Mental. It is my opinion based on long experience with those of your persuasion that you would also benefit from ‘For Overcoming Temptation,’ ‘For a Conversion,’ ‘For a Good Confession,’ ‘For the Grace to Bear My Cross,’ and ‘For a Happy Death,’ which I advise you to check off as well while you’re at it, since although the prices vary depending upon the request, there is also a special package deal for three or more prayers and blessings ordered at the same time. Then just type in your credit card information and your expiration date—and send. Within three days’ time you will receive confirmation that we have offered the requested prayers for you. It’s as easy as that, much less expensive and painful and time-consuming than surgery or chemotherapy or radiation, I might add, and no less effective. You can also send us an e-mail. The address is on the card. As you can see, Pan Messer, in this day and age, cancer is no excuse, it will get you nowhere.”
So they had a computer. This interesting piece of information registered deeply with Norman. It turned out that the Carmelite nuns of Auschwitz were on the technological cutting edge, just like the death camp they had targeted in the heyday of its killing operations. He wondered if they might even have more than one computer, perhaps an entire roomful. And here she had just a short while earlier pleaded poverty, lamented that their convent had nothing, put the squeeze on him for a dole-out, set him up for a major fund-raising sting. Still, what would have been the value now of throwing all of her hypocrisy and conniving right back up into her face? She had his Nechama in the vise of her hands, it was much too risky. Instead, with an exaggerated show of humility, he implored obsequiously: Out of the gracious goodness of her heart and in the spirit of Christian charity of which she was the premier exemplar, would it be at all possible for her to allow him to be in occasional, even monitored and censored, sporadic e-mail contact with his daughter? In response, she gestured up to the balconies where once again identical nuns indistinguishable from one another were sailing from archway to archway in their billowing brown habits with now and then the bright flash of white coif and wimple appearing and disappearing in the openings. “Your daughter?” she said. “All of our sisters are your daughters, and at the same time none of our sisters is your daughter. There is no identity or self in our convent, no individual in the e-mail. The individual and self are erased in all forms of expression. The author of every message is Anonymous.” She gripped his elbow forcefully and began to steer him firmly across the room in the direction of the exit—he was practically levitating. “What’s your problem, Pan Messer—you can’t tell us apart?” she inquired caustically. “Or is it that you can no longer recognize who your own daughter is? But, for that matter, you never really knew who she was—did you? For a person with such limited insight and understanding as yourself, I strongly recommend that you resolve your dilemma in the simplest way—by regarding all of us, myself included, as your daughters, and also that you make your peace with the fact that you no longer have a daughter. This is a paradox and a seeming contradiction, I know, but it is one that a poor soul with inborn handicaps like yourself must learn to live with.”
Norman wrestled himself free from her hold, hit solid ground hard, planted himself just inside the door like a dead weight, refusing to budge, poised to go limp like a noodle in nonviolent passive resistance using the method he had honed during his heady student protest days at the university. “I refuse to accept that,” he said boldly, liberated at last from her tyranny now that he had gotten such a negative evaluation, been extinguished as both a parent and a human being, not to mention the terminal diagnosis and fatal prognosis that he had inflicted upon himself; there was nothing left to lose. “I need to know right now,” he insisted, his composure as well as his resolve now fully restored. “When will I see my Nechama again?”
Mother Flagelatta, in the semiotics of piety, clasped her hands on the ledge of her imposing chest over the image of the Virgin on her scapular. “Most likely never,” she replied evenly. “Then again, perhaps one day soon we might deem it useful to release Sister Consolatia from cloister for short periods to serve as the public relations representative of our convent and our cross at Auschwitz—on television and other image-and-opinion-shaping media outlets controlled entirely by persons of the Jewish persuasion. It will be a daunting task, but she has taken a vow to obey and she will do whatever is necessary. As a convert from Judaism who has become a Carmelite nun at Auschwitz, and as the granddaughter of little Mr. Holocaust himself of the famous United States Holocaust Museum, she can be a most effective spokeswoman on our behalf. But of course that will never happen as long as your museum exhibition continues in its present form, especially your libelous anti-Christian film on the origins and sources of anti-Semitism, which has offended us so deeply. Until that film viewed by millions of visitors and impressionable youth is revised and corrected or, better still, burned with all of its clones and copies in a blazing auto-da-fé, I can assure you, Sister Consolatia of the Cross will remain profoundly cloistered, unavailable, and incommunicado, you may consider her case closed, she is dead to you.”
The prioress pulled out a sheet of paper from the bottomless cache within her habit. Norman could see the words “Holocaust Museum American” scrawled in red letters on top. Reading directly from this, she listed, frame by frame, her charges against the movie, but what it all boiled down to, as far as Norman could tell, was a nonnegotiable demand to cut out any and all narrative and imagery, overt or implied, that linked Christianity to anti-Semitic persecution or to Nazism or to Hitler himself if he ever wanted to see Nechama again. “Is it absolutely necessary to mention so gratuitously the irrelevant fact that the Führer was baptized a Catholic?” she demanded, her voice spiraling shrilly. “Does the only quote that you use of the Führer’s have to be something about finishing the job that the Church had begun? Are you not aware that the Führer’s anti-Semitism was racially motivated, the product of the godless Enlightenment, a neo-pagan manifestation with no connection whatsoever to Christianity, which has always been a moral and civilizing force throughout the ages? Is there no gratitude at all in the hearts of you people of the Jewish persuasion to the righteous gentiles, almost all of them Christians, who made such enormous sacrifices in your behalf in the Holocaust? How could I ever allow Sister Consolatia of the Cross, with her delicate and refined sensibility, to go out into a world where such lies and propaganda are promulgated—and by her former biological family no less!”
What’s the big deal? Norman was thinking. Though he had not one single smidgen of doubt that two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism and crusades and pogroms and blood libels and wall-to-wall persecution and oppression had led directly to the Holocaust, prepared the ground, and ripened the mindset, what difference did it make one way or another whether or not that point was rammed home in their stupid little museum movie when it was already written in blood, enshrined in hundreds of authoritative history texts, and was common knowledge throughout the universe? It struck Norman as monumentally absurd that this old battle-ax hovering above him armed with the mighty weight of the Church should care so much about an inconsequential little flick, and especially because, as a museum insider, he was fully aware of what a sloppy piece of work that movie was, put together by Monty Pincus in his usual botched, half-assed, it’s-good-enough-for-the-goyim way—that “finishing the job” Hitler quote, for example, plucked from some obscure, questionable source that could never be verified, those particular choice words might actually never have been spoken at all, at least by the “Führer,” and then spliced to another quote from Mein Kampf with which it was in no way connected. As a matter of fact, that film had always troubled Norman, he was reminded now very crisply. He had always felt that something ought to be done about that film because of Monty’s cavalier inaccuracies. He had always maintained that the ethical thing would be to compel that slob Monty to publicly own up to his crappy scholarship and take the heat despite the scandal it would bring down on the museum, which would give his father a conniption for sure. But the old man would get over it. It was the right thing to do. If the Holocaust had taught even one lesson at all, Norman now reminded himself vehemently, it was that to remain a silent bystander as the perpetrator assaults the victim is just plain wrong. He could no longer remain a silent bystander as Monty perpetrated his deception against an innocent victim—the trusting public. It was a matter of personal conscience.
Norman gazed up at the chin bristles of Mother Flagelatta. Really, what he ought to do right now was to leak to this odious nun, off the record and not for attribution of course, the real inside poop about the film. He would be her deep throat. He would provide her with the ammunition so that she could follow through and do what was necessary and take Monty out. What did it matter if history was falsified in this film because he gave in to the demands of this fanatic nun, when it had already been so disdainfully tampered with by Monty? How many times had he obsessed to Arlene about his deeply held moral concerns with regard to that movie? She was his witness. Now when he returned home, he would be able to say to her that, at long last, although the job had not yet been completed, something was going to be done. There was hope.
From somewhere behind him, a nun with lowered head under her brown veil appeared without a sound and breathed softly for a moment at his side. His hand brushed lightly against hers as she gave him back his helmet. He longed to pull out his gift of the Jude armband and slip it to her like a secret message, like a password, but she flew off far too quickly, his Nechama—because she was Nechama, he believed this with full faith. He lifted his eyes to the mother superior. “I’ll take care of her,” he said. Then he corrected himself. “I beg your pardon, Sister. It—I meant it—your movie. I’ll take care of it. Consider it done.”