Elizabeth
Dr Josef Bernhardt handed his resignation in a sealed envelope to Dr Jenkins’s secretary at 9:50 a.m., knowing that it would not be read until after the morning’s surgery. With the vial of succinylcholine and a little bottle of Librium rattling in an otherwise empty briefcase, he walked out the tower entrance of the University Hospital feeling, somehow, lighter, and, squinting against the dazzling sunshine of the brilliant October day, hurried across the emerald lawn to Student Health for his ten o’clock appointment with Dr Elizabeth Duncan.
Although he knew Elizabeth was always late, he arrived at her office exactly on time. “Would you mind,” he asked her nurse, “if I waited in one of the examining rooms?”
“Not at all, doctor.”
The nurse led him down the hallway, pushed open a door, and flicked on the fluorescent light: a tiny moss-green room, sink in the corner, small desk and chair, the window completely darkened by olive-green Venetian blinds. The examining table lay beneath the window.
The nurse glanced circumspectly at his face. “Would you like to lie down, Dr Bernhardt? It might be some time.”
“Yes, thank you.”
Deftly, she pulled white paper sheeting from the roll at the head and covered the table. From the cabinet beneath she took a little pillow and plumped it. “Can I get you anything?”
“No. And thank you very much.”
“You’re quite welcome.” The nurse left, closing the door but leaving the light on.
Josef leaned the brown leather briefcase against the wall, removed his dark gray suit jacket, hung it on a hook, kicked off his black oxfords, and lay down. He felt somewhat better: his head still ached, he was nauseated, each respiration was a rasping wheeze—but he could breathe. And still he felt on the verge of tears.
To wrench his mind away from his physical symptoms, Josef willed his thoughts to the beauty of the day: the vivid colors, yellow and red against the blue sky and the green grass . . . alas . . . the geese rising from their noon apple-dreams.
The poem again, the little elegy. He scanned his memory for the words, feeling pressed and then panicked by his inability to remember something he had known so well. Josef sat up, inhaled deeply, pushed the breath out by tightening and releasing his diaphragm—three times—and lay down again. As with a name on the tip of the tongue, it is often best to trick it into floating to the surface. He closed his eyes and permitted his mind to free-associate: green grass . . . alas . . . white geese . . . snow goose who cried in goose alas against the green grass.
Still it did not ring a bell.
He tried again: green grass . . . goose . . . alas . . . beauty . . . brown study . . . body . . . little bodies . . . His body was cushioned by the bodies of others whom he could not identify. He smashed them to bits. The trolley or the train—he couldn’t remember—yes, he remembered. It was a train and it was cut open with a carpenter’s ax and he was lifted out. Saved. But the unremembered others were mashed and broken, crushed and dismembered from the impact of his body—not beheaded—but their skulls smashed and their brains spilling out into pools of their own gore. Little Hans Levy and his grandmother, the button lady, were taken in July 1942, but the others, so many others, were not taken until nearly the end of the war, after the Normandy invasion in June 1944 and the liberation of Paris in August 1945. The Americans just stopped. Stopped! They could easily have marched through Germany, almost without resistance, and saved so many! But Eisenhower seemed more interested in humoring his prima donnas—Montgomery et al.—and in refereeing the little war between the Allies than in concluding the big one. His delay provoked unimaginable despair. Unimaginable! The Russians. Josef, lying on his back on the examining table, breathed deep, rasping breaths.
And yet, during a war there is hope. One can hope, always, that the war will be over and that life will be better. It is only after one is “liberated” that he realizes there is no hope at all and no reason at all. That is when the true emptiness begins.
His meditation was interrupted by Elizabeth Duncan, who, at half past ten, burst into the examining room clutching a large handbag and a grocery sack reeking so of garlic pastrami that Josef’s nausea momentarily escalated into another dimension. He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the table.
“My life is running three weeks late,” she said breathlessly. “Don’t get up.” But Josef was already on his feet. Elizabeth dropped her purse and brown paper bag onto the table, and, as he helped her with her coat, began her inevitable apology. “I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting. I’ve a really sick one over at Mercy. Diabetes complicated by LSD.” She shook her head. “And it’s such an incredibly beautiful day that I stopped at the deli on the way back and picked up some sandwiches for us. I thought we might find a minute or two to wander down to the river and have a picnic. It’s so beautiful out,” she repeated, “so warm that I didn’t even need my coat. Oh, no!” Elizabeth pointed to the grocery bag. “What on earth was I thinking? I bought pastrami on rye and potato chips. And with your blood pressure!”
“It’s quite all right. I’m not the least hungry.”
“Salt,” she murmured.
They stood awkwardly, Elizabeth leaning against the examining table scrutinizing Josef dangling in the center of the little room. Although she denied it vehemently, Elizabeth was a striking woman. He had thought so since the day he met her when he was only nine and she, seventeen, had come with her father to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. His Uncle Philip, who had just completed his residency in pediatrics that spring, was taken with her, too, and Josef would stand at the high window of his third-floor bedroom and observe the two of them as they walked together about the garden. She was to have stayed in Germany for several years, to study nursing, but the political climate was such that her father, wisely, took her home with him—back to Iowa. Who in his right mind would elect to leave his child in Germany during those dreadful years? During the visit to Germany, Josef’s mother had convinced her to become a physician—not just a nurse.
“You look terrible,” Elizabeth said, finally. “Seff, I know you’re not going to listen to me, but please, you should go to someone a little more removed, more objective—and more qualified.”
He shook his head.
“Bob Ericksen. He’s a top-flight internist. Honestly, the only ills I get to work with around here are V.D.s, O.D.s, and final exams.” She searched for cigarettes in her bag, offered Josef one. He refused but took the matches from her hand, lit her cigarette, and stepped back again to the center of the room. “I’ve got to cut down on these,” she said, inhaling deeply. “Ah, doctors. We know too much. Do you want me to examine you?”
He nodded.
“I suppose we should get some tests to eliminate the nasties: pheochromocytoma, kidney problems. Do you want to arrange it, or should I?”
“Don’t you bother.”
“EKG, too, and a chest x-ray. Your breathing. I can hear it from here. It sounds as though you’ve got quite a bit of music in your chest.”
“An entire orchestra.”
“Here,” she said, moving her handbag, grocery sack, and coat from the table and laying them on the little desk. “Take off your shirt and sit up here and tell me your symptoms.”
While Josef divested himself of white shirt and tie, Elizabeth picked up the telephone, dialed one number, said, “Hold my calls,” and hung up.
Josef, perched on the edge of the examining table, began his recitation: “Recurring headache, getting more severe. Blurring of vision. Tingling in fingers and lips. Runs of extrasystoles. Short spells of disorientation and panic.”
“Panic?”
“Panic. Nycturia.”
“Heart,” she said. “I don’t like it.”
“Respiratory distress with and without congestion. Sudden onset of an irresistible tiredness without being able to fall asleep.”
“How do you sleep generally?”
“Poorly. I wake up exhausted.”
“How’s your stamina?”
“I need more and more will to maintain it.”
“Any disturbance in walking, in equilibrium?”
“Dizzy spells after physical exertion.”
“What kind of physical exertion?”
“Running. Heavy lifting . . .”
“How is your sex life?”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“Hmpff. Take off your shoes and pants and lie back.”
Elizabeth washed her hands and began a thorough, old-fashioned physical examination, saving further questions until it was over.
“You know what I’ve found,” she said when she was through. “The blood pressure is right up there—hundred eighty over hundred and ten. You have frequent extrasystoles, pulmonary congestion, bronchospasms. I want to put you in the hospital this afternoon, call Bob Ericksen, and do a complete workup.”
“No.” Josef reached for his clothes and dressed while she talked to him.
Elizabeth lit another cigarette, sat behind the little desk in the only chair in the room. “How long have these acute symptoms been with you, my friend?”
“Since Kristallnacht.”
“Crystal Night? You were just a child. What—nineteen thirty-seven, thirty-eight?”
“Nineteen sixty-seven. Crystal Night in Montréal this spring, when the national soul of Canada erupted over the decision of a referee in a hockey game.”
“Oh, yes. It made the news here. That was awful.”
“I was on call. The injured were brought to the hospital. One had hopes that such behavior was indigenous to the Germans, that the Americans and the Canadians would not indulge in senseless, sadistic—”
“That’s not fair!” Elizabeth cut him short. “You know there have always been mobs, even in America. Read Huckleberry Finn.”
“That’s just the point, Eliza. It hit me that the Nazis are not unique. Don’t you see?”
“Josef, I just can’t let this pass. Crystal Night in Germany in—when was it?”
“November ninth, nineteen thirty-eight.”
“That was different. It was planned by the government, by Hitler and his cohorts. It didn’t just happen.”
“Ah, yes. You are right. They organized, as they used to call it, ‘a spontaneous demonstration of the German people.’”
“Wasn’t it in reaction to something? The assassination of some official?”
“An embassy official in Paris.”
“By a Jewish man?”
“He was seventeen. His father and ten thousand other Jews had been shipped off in boxcars. His name was Grynszpan.”
“But, Seff—”
“They killed him, of course. Then they burned over a hundred synagogues, destroyed businesses—broken glass all over. The Nazis called it ‘The Week of the Broken Glass,’ a real problem for the insurance companies.”
“Seff—”
“And they arrested twenty thousand Jews. Twenty thousand. And carted them off to God-knows-where.”
“That is just the point! You must admit to me that you see the difference between a drunken mob rioting after a football game—”
“Hockey.”
“After a hockey game and a planned pogrom of the Nazis.”
“You didn’t see their faces. I did. I was walking along Côte Sainte Catherine on my way to the hospital, and I saw the faces of those people shattering the windows. Twisted. My God! Don’t you realize, Eliza, that before the planned ‘spontaneous demonstrations,’ the Brownshirts in Germany had been running amuck—spontaneously—like rabid dogs? They murdered, tortured . . . broken glass. It all began with mobs.”
“Of course, it’s all indefensible, Seff—Montréal or Germany—but the Québecois were terribly ashamed by the next day. That’s the difference!”
“Don’t you think the German people were ashamed the day after Kristallnacht? And what did they do about it? Nothing! Nothing!” Josef was shouting. “I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” he said quietly, his voice trembling. “I hadn’t meant to give a speech. But I was sickened. And after a night at the hospital patching up the cuts and bruises, I felt ill. I took my blood pressure. It was up and hasn’t come down since. Of course, it could have been up before that. I hadn’t checked it for some time.”
“How had you been feeling before then—say, for the past five years?”
“I was functioning. The only major problem has been with kidney stones—I’m a stone maker. If I drink enough fluids, I’m O.K. But this past summer, this fall, I’ve felt increasingly worse.”
“When’s the last bout you had with kidney stones?”
“Half a year or so ago—in the spring. I checked myself into the hospital, gave myself a shot of Demerol, and was able to pass it.” He shook his head at the memory. “That pain is unbelievable.”
“So I’ve been told. Did that happen after the hockey game episode?”
Josef thought for a moment. “Yes, I think it was after that.”
“Why is it you decided to do something about your health today?”
He shrugged and looked away from her. “I don’t know. I felt quite ill this morning—dizzy, headache—could hardly get out of bed. Thought perhaps I had the flu, but my temperature was normal. I shouldn’t have gone to work. I am not fit.”
“Did you dream last night?”
“No . . . yes. I . . . I rarely dream; that is, I don’t remember my dreams.”
“And last night? Do you remember?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Hmm. Is today anything special? An anniversary, someone’s birthday?”
“Today? October tenth? Tuesday?” His breathing became more labored. He took a deep breath. “No,” he said in a choked whisper. “I can’t think of anything significant.” Josef could not exhale. Bronchospasms again. He turned and bent over the table, back arched, mouth open wide, and tried to force the air out.
Elizabeth asked, calmly, “Does this happen often?”
He shook his head, all the while straining and pushing his neck and abdominal muscles to pull the air out of his lungs. “Once in a while,” he whispered harshly. “But today—heavy.”
“Do you do anything about it?”
“It goes away,” he whispered, relaxing slightly as the constrictions diminished and he was able to take a shaky, quick breath and exhale. Quivering and sweating—but breathing—he turned to her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“How do you feel right now?”
“Headache.” He covered his eyes with his hand, shaking his head.
“That bad?”
“Not good.”
“Here.” She rummaged in her purse. “Let me give you some aspirin.”
“I’d better not,” he said.
“Nonsense! Take these. You’ll feel better.” Elizabeth took a paper cone from the dispenser above the sink, filled it with water, and gave it to Josef.
He swallowed the two aspirin, crushed the empty cone, and threw it into the wastebasket.
“How’s your sex life?” she asked once more.
“I’m not complaining.”
“Why are you avoiding that question?”
He did not answer.
“Are you and Tanya lovers?”
“No, but it doesn’t matter.”
“How long has that been going on?”
“Lizzy, don’t pull that psychological crap on me. I just want a physical checkup.”
“Since when hasn’t sex been physical? How you could marry a cold soul like Tanya, I’ll never understand.”
“Don’t blame my failure on Tatiana. And I married her to please my mother.”
“Your mother? Did she know her?”
“No. They never met.”
“Then what you are saying makes no sense.”
“Yes, it does, Eliza. Maybe I married her because I wanted someone just like my mother.” He was dressed now—all but his suit jacket and tie.
Elizabeth was on her feet. “Your mother!” She lost all objectivity. “Your mother was the most sympathetic person I have ever known. Your wife is nothing like her. Nothing! And never will be. Do you mistake Tatiana’s coldness for strength and your mother’s strength for coldness?”
Mother. Standing beside her desk, holding the black telephone receiver in one hand, beckoning to Josef, firmly, with the other, a strong motion pulling him to her. She wore a white lab coat over her black dress, and her hair was dark, almost black.
Josef felt uneasy, lightheaded, a throbbing in his ears. He could hear and feel his heart—palpitations—and his entire body was becoming one agonizing itch. “Elizabeth, I’m allergic to aspirin.”
“You are flushed and developing hives. And your breathing—again.”
“You’d better get me some epinephrine: one tenth of a cc of the one-to-thousand solution. No more. I’m very reactive to drugs.”
Elizabeth raced from the room. Josef doubled over with abdominal cramps, unable to breathe, in an acute reaction to the aspirin. His mother lingered in the periphery but was kept at a distance by his physical symptoms. Elizabeth was back with the syringe.
“Don’t give me too much,” he begged.
She injected the Adrenalin subcutaneously in his arm; within seconds he could breathe freely, his cramps relaxed, and he felt the blood rushing to the upper part of his body. He sat on the edge of the examining table. Elizabeth wrapped the cuff around his arm and took his blood pressure. “Two hundred ten over one hundred and twenty,” she reported. “How are you?”
“Better.” He took a deep, trembling breath and was able to exhale. “But now I really have a headache.”
“We have to consider following this up with cortisone.”
“Let’s wait. The emergency is over.” He lay back on the table and closed his eyes. She stood beside him checking his blood pressure until, within five minutes, he opened his eyes. “I’m better,” he whispered.
Tears welled up in Elizabeth’s eyes, overflowed, and ran freely down her face.
Josef winced and turned away. “I’m sorry.”
She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “My dear, I am the one who is sorry.” The telephone buzzed. She answered, “Dr Duncan . . . yes?” She looked at her watch. “Tell him to wait—ten minutes.” She hung up and turned to Josef. “It’s my fault. I pushed you too far. I had no idea the shape you were in. We’ve been so busy, John and I. We should have made it a point to see you.”
“Elizabeth, please. I’m better. You’ve got patients to see—”
“They can wait! I shouldn’t have insisted you take those aspirin.”
Josef put his hand on her arm. “Listen to me. I’m better. But I’m very tired. Would it disturb you if I rested here for a while?”
“Of course not. Are you sure you’re all right?”
He nodded. “If you’d turn off the overhead light? And you needn’t stay. I’m all right.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“It’s almost eleven thirty. I’ve got some patients to see. But I’ll leave the door open a crack so my nurse and I can stick our heads in to check on you.”
“Not necessary,” he murmured, his eyes closed.
“It’ll make me feel better. Will you shout if you need anything?”
Josef nodded. “Elizabeth, would you mind taking the pastrami with you? I can’t take the smell of garlic just now.”
“Here,” she said, untying his shoes, “let’s take these off.” She covered him with a sheet, leaned over, and kissed his forehead. “I’m going to leave the blood pressure cuff on your arm.”
He nodded.
Elizabeth picked up the grocery bag, her purse and coat, turned off the overhead light, and left the room.
The itching had lessened and was tolerable, the headache bearable. Josef was exhausted and felt he could sleep. But the moment he allowed himself to drift off, his mother, willful as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, appeared again. As before, she was in her office, on the second floor of their house in Gartenfeld. Josef made one last attempt to rally his will, to push her away, but all he succeeded in doing was stiffening his body. He lay on his back, rigid, sweating. Consciously, he began to relax each part of his petrified frame, starting with the smallest toe on his left foot and moving up his trunk. As he did this, his mother marched through his broken defenses. But still—he could breathe. She, in her long white coat, was talking on the telephone to their next-door neighbor, the Bavarian Baron. It must have been 1932 or 1933. She was still in practice and seeing patients that day, and Josef, by the door, was quite young—six or seven. He was not at all afraid of her. He was curious. With a gesture of one hand, his mother summoned him to her. “Josef, Baron von Chiemsee reports that on many days you enter his back garden and climb his apple tree. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“What do you do there?” She put her arm, protectively, about his shoulders.
“Nothing, Mutti.”
“One never does nothing. You must do something. What is it you do?” She was not being unkind. Her manner was always brusque in those days.
“I think.”
“Baron,” she said into the telephone, “has my son harmed your tree or your garden in any way, or does he disturb you with noise? . . . No? . . . Then what is your complaint?” She hung up in her firm way, not a slam, but a motion with enough force to carry emphatically to the Baron’s ear, then she leaned over and kissed Josef on the forehead. “I would suggest, Butzelman, that you do your thinking someplace other than the Baron’s apple tree.”
When her medical license was revoked, she was forty-one, just the age he was now. Her hair was still dark brown, as was his, and although she pulled it back in a bun, there were always softly curling wisps about her face. He realized now that she was almost pretty, and she looked so young! Why had he always thought of her as being old and plain—and weak? As a young woman she’d had the nerve to defy her parents and go to medical school and defy them again and marry a Gentile. When did her nerve desert her? How long did it take Adolf Hitler to break her down? Mein Kampf.
I understand the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly in the bourgeoise, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks. At a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down.
Josef stirred and open his eyes. Wearing a white lab coat now, Elizabeth, flashlight in hand, was checking his blood pressure.
“You can turn on the light,” he said.
She did and returned to his side. “It’s a little lower than when you came in—one eighty over ninety-five.” With a shake of her head, she pulled the stethoscope from her ears and let it drop around her neck.
Josef rubbed his eyes against the light. “I must have dozed off.”
“You slept an hour and a half. It’s after one.”
“Good Lord. I’ve got to get to the bank.” He sat up abruptly, swinging his legs over the side of the table, and found that he had to steady himself by pressing his hands firmly on the table.
“How are you?”
“A little vertigo. But I’m all right.” He shook his head. “I must have really been out.” He yawned and stretched.
“We were in and out of here five or six times, and you didn’t stir.”
“I feel better. Almost rested.” He stood. “I’ll run along. I’ve taken up enough of your time.”
“Please. Don’t go.”
“I’ve got to get to my safety box.”
“You’ve got time.” She pushed him gently backward.
Reluctantly, he leaned against the table.
“Seff, my dear, don’t you know anything about yourself?”
He looked down.
“The aspirin. Didn’t you know you were allergic? Why did you take it?”
The phone buzzed.
“Damn!” she said.
Josef leaned over and picked up his shoes.
“Don’t go.”
The phone buzzed again. “Dr Duncan here . . . Yes . . . Oh, yes.”
Josef, shoes on, lifted his jacket from the hook.
Elizabeth put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Please.”
“Bathroom.” He pointed to the door.
She pointed. “Down the hall—that-a-way.”
Josef threw his suit jacket onto the examining table and left the room. As he started down the hall, he could hear her say, “Just a minute,” and, very softly, “he’s just leaving the room.”
Carlos! Damn it. Josef stopped to listen, but Elizabeth shut the door and he could no longer hear. He hesitated, then ambled down the hallway to the men’s room. He’d known the second he’d revealed that he was seeing Elizabeth that Carlos would call her. And there was nothing Josef could do to stop them from talking about him, to stop Carlos from meddling in his affairs. After the first delay of his resident’s visa by the American Embassy, Josef wanted to give up his move to the U.S. But Carlos kept pushing, insisting, wouldn’t give up. And Josef allowed himself to be carried along like a child, without a will of his own. He shoved open the door: MEN.
The morning surgery would be over, and the noon staff meeting of the Department of Anesthesiology, and, most likely, Carlos had heard from an irate Dr Jenkins of Josef’s resignation. As he stood at the urinal, Josef realized that he would not have to go to any more daily, interminable scheduling meetings—ever again. He breathed a deep, musical sigh of relief. It was easier.
A broad ribbon of sun shone through a south window of the lavatory, illuminating the sink. Josef rolled up his shirt sleeves and ejected three times the green liquid he needed from the soap dispenser, working it into a thick lather. The soap bubbles, like multiple lenses, refracted the sunlight in all directions; he was caught by the ever-moving, ever-changing rainbow of colors he held on his hands—multiple spectrums of all sizes and shapes. He rinsed, splashed cool water onto his face, and, as he patted it dry with a paper towel, looked at himself in the mirror above the sink. Mein Kampf.
The Germans are the highest species of humanity on the earth and will remain so if they care for the purity of their own blood and produce images of the Lord and not cross-breed monstrosities halfway between man and ape.
Josef studied his reflection: his father’s facial shape, the strong nose, the chin cleft almost in half. But his dark eyes, large and set wide apart, his curly brown hair—they were his mother’s.
He blotted his hands carefully with two paper towels; his skin was sensitive, and his hands often red and sore from scrubbing up. But he would not have to scrub up again—ever. He completed the drying under the electric blower, then walked swiftly out the door and down the hallway.
Elizabeth, sitting at the little desk, smoked a cigarette and still talked on the telephone. She looked up when Josef entered and raised an index finger to indicate she was almost through. “Yes . . . I agree . . . I will . . . Yes . . . Good idea. Give me that number.” She jotted a number on a prescription pad. “Yes, I’ve got it . . . I’ll call you at about two fifty . . . All right, I’ll make it a point, exactly ten minutes to three.” She hung up.
“En punto?” said Josef.
Elizabeth looked up sharply. “In what?”
“Ten minutes to three en punto. It’s Spanish, and it means ‘on the dot.’”
“Did you know all along I was talking to Carlos?” She jabbed out the cigarette in the ashtray.
Josef nodded. “He’s the most predictable man I’ve ever met. Also the most intrusive. I don’t know how he does it. I had no intention of telling Charley I was coming to see you.”
“If you didn’t want him to know, you wouldn’t have told him.”
“Lizzy, please cut the psychology.”
“I will if you’ll stop calling me Lizzy. You know I hate that.” She frowned. “Seff, he’s very worried about you.”
“Good Lord, I envy him. He’s the only man I’ve ever known who has his life absolutely under his control. That’s why you must call him at exactly two fifty. His driver picks him up at the hospital at exactly two ten; they arrive at the farm at two twenty-five; he drinks a Scotch—only the best unblended malt—and nibbles hors d’oeuvres for twenty minutes while he reads the Wall Street Journal, and at exactly three—en punto—he eats a magnificent dinner prepared by his Spanish housekeeper, Camila: soup, fish, meat—”
Elizabeth took another cigarette and held out the pack to Josef.
“No, thank you. Salad, vegetables, dessert—postre, he calls it.”
“You must really be feeling dreadful. I’ve never known you to refuse cigarettes before.”
“Oh? Didn’t Charley tell you? I’ve quit smoking.”
“Congratulations. How long has it been?”
Josef looked at his wristwatch. “Exactly four hours and twenty minutes. I quit at nine o’clock this morning.”
“Just about the time you wrote your resignation to Dr Jenkins?”
He hesitated. “Just about.”
“Dr Jenkins wants to see you.”
“I have nothing more to say to him—or to Charley.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes and rested her forehead in her hand. Josef put on his suit jacket, stuffed his necktie in a pocket, and leaned over to pick up his brown leather briefcase.
She looked him directly in the eyes. “Carlos thinks you are suicidal.”
Josef shrugged.
Elizabeth scrutinized his face. “No. If you wanted to kill yourself, you wouldn’t have come to see me.”
“Is that what you told Charley?”
She did not answer.
“Maybe I came to say good-bye.”
“No, Seff. I don’t think so. I told Carlos that if you wanted to kill yourself you would not have written a letter of resignation. It’s a red flag.” She looked up at Josef; he stood near the examining table, poised for flight. “I understand it. You know I do. We’ve talked about it. The daughter of a Calvinist minister—I carry the guilt of the universe on my shoulders. I am responsible for every leaf that falls from every tree. My fault. Every morning I have to make the decision to live another day.”
“That is why I knew you would understand.”
“But you? You haven’t the right. You haven’t thought it through; you are in no condition to make such a decision.”
“I have thought about it. For over twenty years I’ve been thinking about it.”
She shook her head. “Looking at you, listening to you, my dearest friend, I would say that you are sliding into a serious depression.”
“Most likely,” he said, “I am sliding out of one.”
“And the worst thing you can do in your mental state is to quit working.”
“I have quit.”
“They are not accepting your resignation.”
“My God!” It was a wail. “Having a medical degree is the wrath of God! They have no choice! I am not well! I am not fit! Understand me and do me the favor of telling that intrusive bastard when you talk to him at exactly two fifty this afternoon that I have quit! I am through!”
She held her breath and waited.
“I am not a good doctor, Lizzy.” He was begging now, imploring her. “I am not like you. I do not have the healing instinct. I never wanted to be a physician. I have always hated it. I do not like people.”
“That is not true.” She stopped him. “You are like your mother. You are a warm and loving human being.”
“I am an impotent bum. I am nothing. And don’t blame Tanya for my failure. I knew what she was when I married her. I never loved her.”
“I don’t believe for a minute that you are impotent. She’s a cold fish and you know it. When is the last time you two made love?”
“Elizabeth, she didn’t come down with me. Tanya is in Berlin.”
“My God. You’re here alone?”
He nodded.
“How long?”
“She left in the spring. May.”
“You’ve been alone for six months?”
“More or less. Five months.”
“Have you had another woman?”
He looked intently at her but said nothing. On trial for his life, he waited for her to continue.
“You are a sexual man, Seff. You need a lover. I can tell by the way you look—even at me—that you are a sensual man.”
“You are a beautiful woman, Lizzy.”
“I am not! I never have been. And please stop calling me Lizzy.”
“No, it’s true. I have always thought you beautiful. And so did my Uncle Philip.”
“Philip,” she whispered. “You have a gift for stopping any real conversation. But I will not let you. Those years—the war years—you never talk about them, and you hide behind a wall so thick that even those of us who love you—dearly”—Elizabeth was trembling, near tears—“even we dare not ask. It must have been terrible for you. Horrible! You have got to come to terms—”
“You miss the point completely.” Josef’s voice was cold and hard. “They were not horrible for me. It seems impossible for you Americans to believe that there were a few Jews and half-breed Jews surviving outside of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. Those last years of the war were—in a way—the best years of my life.”
“That cannot be true!”
“You see? You don’t know what you’re talking about. God!”
“How can I know? You never talk about it. After the war my father and I sent request after request for information about Philip, about your family: to the Red Cross, to the Jewish Agency, to the American Christian Committee for Refugees, to the Army, Navy, and Marines. And finally, months and months later, my father received a letter from the First Airborne Division of the United States Army. I memorized it. You want to hear?”
He nodded.
Elizabeth closed her eyes and recited in a voice trembling with emotion:
“Dear Reverend Duncan:
“In answer to your inquiry regarding the whereabouts of your friends, we have compiled the following information:
“We very much regret that as yet we have found no trace of the following: Anna Bernhardt née Jacoby, Philip Jacoby, Otto Jacoby, Greta Jacoby née Braunstein. These names will be broadcast over the widest possible network with the request that any person who has information will forward it to the Central Tracing Bureau.
“Lothar Bernhardt, attorney, and son Josef Bernhardt have been discovered at the following address: Berlin-Gartenfeld, Kastanien Strasse 95.
“They request that the following message be sent:
“‘Dear Reverend Duncan. Many thanks for your inquiry. We were very glad about it. We survived all the hardships of war and we also hope to get through the winter. Our lodgings are nearly undamaged. Whether Anna, Philip, Otto, and Greta are living we do not know. We urgently hope to see you again. Kindest regards from Lothar and Josef.’”
“Kindest regards!” she said tremulously, and then, again, “Kindest regards. I assumed you have been in—a camp. All I know is that somehow you survived.”
“Somehow!” Josef snorted, his mouth twisted. “I was ‘arrested,’ you might say, toward the end of the war. But I was treated well. Before then, until the beginning of 1945, I was—quite comfortable.”
“You weren’t in a concentration camp?”
“Does that disappoint you? How on earth do you think I would have survived that? By skinning the bodies of my relatives for lampshades? By pulling out the gold teeth of the button lady, Frau Levy, and her grandson, Hans? That’s what the American consul in Berlin assumed when I applied for a visa after the war. I had a scholarship to M.I.T., Elizabeth, to study physics and mathematics, but they would not give me a visa because I survived the war. No, Eliza, I did not lift a finger to save myself—or anybody else. I was preserved for almost three years in a lunatic asylum run by the inmates, kept pickled in vodka thanks to the brains of the Gunther Rathkes who were unlucky enough to have crashed in their Luftwaffe airplanes.”
“You talk in riddles! You let no one in! I don’t care if you were hidden in the Garden of Eden”—her voice was resonant, ringing—“it was horrible for you. Listen to yourself. You are angry. Angry and depressed. You have to come to terms with it. And then! Then you can kill yourself. But not now. You have no right!” The tears were gone, replaced by her anger. She tapped a cigarette out of the pack, struck a match so violently that it snapped in half, struck another to light her cigarette, leaned against the desk.
Josef, standing now at the foot of the examining table, dropped his briefcase on the table and turned again to the olive-green blinds. But this time he jerked the cord and rolled them up. The tiny room was ground level, and he faced—directly outside the window—a sturdy young maple, every leaf a vivid red.
“Elizabeth, do you remember a poem—I think it was some kind of an elegy about the death of childhood?”
“Can you give me more to go on?”
Still facing the window, he said, “It was in the anthology of American poetry you sent me when I first came to McGill. I can’t remember the poet or the title, but it had some images of a day like this: white geese against green grass and blue sky, an apple orchard.”
“‘Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,’” she said. “John Crowe Ransom.”
He turned. “That’s it. I’ve been trying to remember it all day.”
“It’s about a wonderfully naughty little child chasing after the geese in an apple orchard. It’s about her death—a letter of condolence.”
Josef, excited at remembering, recited the first four lines:
“There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder my brown study
Astonishes us all.”
He was unaware that he had switched to the first person in the third line. “But I can’t remember the rest,” he said.
Elizabeth turned to him, her face and her voice tender. “You will, my dear, if you’ll give yourself time. Seff, is there any way I can convince you to see an analyst?”
He shook his head vehemently. “You know I don’t believe in that.”
“Remember what Santayana said? ‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.’”
‘Remember what Shakespeare said? Those who summon up remembrance of things past ‘grieve at grievances foregone.’”
“What happened,” she said, her voice tense, her words quick, “to your Uncle Philip? He wrote me that he had his visa in his hand and was on his way.”
Josef, his face a storm, did not answer her.
“His things came,” she said. “All his household goods, medical equipment—books.”
“Elizabeth, I have to get to the bank before it closes.”
“You at least owe it to me to tell me about Philip.”
Josef’s lips were strained taut in a sardonic grin. “He went through a red light.”
“There you go again. Riddles! How can you do this to me? You are not being fair.”
His mouth still twisted in a grimaced grin but now trembling, he said, “You are the one who is angry.”
“Angry is not the term for it: wrath—rage.” Her voice softened. “But not with you, my dear. Not with you.”
“Elizabeth, he went through a red light!” Josef’s contorted smile came undone, and his eyes filled with tears. “It is not a riddle.” He was weeping now. “In 1938 one could take out household goods—including one car—but no money.”
She nodded.
“Do you remember that my father had two cars, a Duesenberg and a Willys Overland convertible?”
“Yes, I do remember.”
“Uncle Philip bought the Willys Overland from Father. All the papers came through. The day he was leaving. Uncle Philip, on the way to the ship to load the car—”
“Oh, no,” she moaned.
“He was so excited,”Josef sobbed, “he went through a red light.”
“And that was that?”
Josef nodded, wiped his eyes, took a deep, shaking breath. “Bad luck. They caught him; he was ‘taken into protective custody,’ as it was euphemistically phrased. And later . . .”
“Yes, my God.”
Josef, leaning against the table, and she against the desk, lost in their own thoughts, were silent for some moments. Then she looked hard at him as though gauging the strength of her next assault.
“Did something happen today?” Her voice shook. “One makes mistakes . . .”
“No . . . no.”
“In surgery?”
He brushed her words away. “It’s nothing like that,” he said. “Elizabeth, I’ve got to go.”
“Carlos said you blew up at a resident.”
Josef grimaced.
“He said you over-reacted.”
“Over-reacted! Good Lord!” Josef exploded, pounding his fist so hard on the desk that the ashtray jumped, dumping the butts all over. “My God, Elizabeth, I couldn’t have been down the hall for more than five minutes, and you two seem to have covered my entire history. What else did that shiny ape tell you?”
“He told me—” She stopped.
“Yes! Yes! Why stop now?”
“He said that he never knew you were Jewish.”
“You told him I was a Jew?”
She nodded, her eyes wide. “He said he worked with you for five years at McGill—that he thought the two of you were quite close—and that he always assumed you were a German.”
“A German!” Josef glared at her contemptuously.
“I would never have said anything—but I assumed, being so close to you, that he knew.”
“Knew what? That I am a Jew? Am I, Elizabeth? Am I not a German? After all, my father’s family are Prussians—Christians—from way back. And my mother’s lived on ‘German soil’ since the late fifteenth century—almost five hundred years. Doesn’t that make me a German? They were Spanish Jews, my mother’s family. They lived in Spain for centuries—that is, until Charley Borbon’s ancestors financed the Inquisition and they had to flee to Germany—1492, just about the time Christopher Columbus was discovering America, the land of the free. So you see, Elizabeth, maybe I’m really a Spaniard like Charley, who, by the way, was born in New York City and raised on a farm in Iowa, and who is discriminated against because some people here consider him a Hispano–American, not a nice thing to be in this country of liberty.
“But I’m lucky; with my name and face, no one can tell what I am—that I’m really nothing at all, or, if anything, that I’m a cross-breed, a monstrosity halfway between man and ape.” Clutching the briefcase with the succinylocholine and Librium tightly under his arm, Josef opened the door of the examining room.
“Josef.”
He turned to her. “But Auguste LaRivière—that dear man—there is no hiding what he is.”
“Who is Auguste LaRivière?”
“A chemist who took his doctorate at the Sorbonne.”
Josef stepped into the hall and slammed the door shut.
“Josef,” he could hear her call as he hurried down the corridor. He had lost track of time. It was one forty-five and the banks closed at two. He mapped out the route in his mind: the little ravine, the overpass over Riverside Drive, the Iowa Avenue bridge over the river, up the steps of Old Capitol, and a cut through the Pentacrest. Twelve minutes, he estimated—if he ran—getting him to the bank three minutes before closing. Once he was inside, they would have to let him into his safety-deposit box. Elizabeth, he was certain, would not wait until two fifty en punto to telephone Carlos but would track him down at once, ruining, most likely, the rest of Carlos’s day.