“He [Peter] said life would have been much easier if he’d been a Christian or could become one after the war. I asked if he wanted to be baptized, but that wasn’t what he meant either. He said he’d never be able to feel like a Christian.”
—The Diary of a Young Girl,
by Anne Frank, February 16, 1944
I THOUGHT OF GOING BACK to Amsterdam, just for a week or two. I told myself I would put the ghosts to rest. What I really wanted was to bring them back to life. I lay in bed at three in the morning, that treacherous hour when everything comes crawling back, hearing my mother threaten suicide because she is so afraid of dying; and my father rage because we have no money left to give Miep to buy us food; and me apologize for forgetting to unbolt the door to the street. At night, after the workers are gone, we creep out of the cramped annex down to the offices and warehouse on the lower floors. For a few hours, we have the run of the building, but we always lock the door to the street to be safe. It is my job to unlock it before we go back into hiding, but that night I forget, and the next morning the men cannot get in. I lay in bed now, swearing I would return. I would unbolt the door. I would right the wrongs. I would save them.
But when dawn streaked the windows, I knew I would not go back. I could not return to that world. Miep, and her husband Jan, and Kleiman, and Kugler had risked their lives to save ours, but there were others. I remembered the words some good Dutch citizen had scrawled on the bridge across the canal from the windows we were not supposed to look out of. Keep your dirty hands off our dirty Jews. From what I had heard in the DP camp, things were no better since the war. People came home from the camps to find neighbors sleeping in their beds, and eating at their tables, and forgetting they had ever known them, let alone agreed to take care of their cherished possessions until they could reclaim them. Haven’t you caused enough trouble? the good people of Amsterdam asked. We had our own hardship, they insisted. If they killed so many in the camps, they wanted to know, how come so many are returning? German Jews had the worst of both worlds. The Dutch government rescinded the Nazi laws against Jews, then designated German Jews enemy nationals. I would not go back to that, even as a gentile.
It came to me in another three-A.M. wide-awake nightmare. I would go to church. I would embrace my new self more fully.
I had my pick of Episcopalian and Presbyterian and Lutheran and Catholic and probably half a dozen others I had not even noticed in my travels about the area. Madeleine would think it strange. Neither of us believed. We had agreed to raise the children without superstition. But she had seen me return from a trip to the office looking as if I had been worked over by a handful of hoodlums, and stumbled upon me taking food out of the baby’s mouth, and spotted my car lurking in the station parking lot, though I had denied that. Surely she could take an uncharacteristic visit to church in her stride.
I cruised past Christ Church, which was only a few minutes from the house, but did not stop. I parked in front of St. Michael’s, but the statue of Jesus on the cross, where I, if the taunts of my youth were to be believed, had put him, warned me away. When I noticed a police car approaching in the rearview mirror, as I sat in front of All Souls, I turned the key in the ignition, threw the gearshift into first, and almost collided with another car in my haste to get away.
IT WAS barely light when I backed the car down the driveway the next morning. Madeleine was still asleep. I had kissed her tangled hair and whispered that I had an early meeting I had forgotten to mention.
“Don’t wake the baby,” she murmured and burrowed into another few minutes of sweet unconsciousness.
A slick of fallen leaves turned the driveway treacherous beneath the tires. When I reached the highway, I glanced down at the speedometer. I was going fifteen miles above the speed limit. I did not brake. I put the dun-colored marshes and hulking oil tanks of New Jersey behind me, crossed the Goethals Bridge, and kept going east. I had not been back in years, but I still knew the way. When I had passed the building in those days, I had always quickened my step to get by as fast as possible.
I found a parking space a little way down the block. The rain had turned to mist. It rose from the street carrying the ripe rank smell of the sewers. A man walked a three-legged dog. Two boys splashed through a puddle. A woman, bundled into a raincoat and kerchief, made her way around it. None of them so much as glanced at me. Doors turned suspicious faces to the street. Mind-your-own-business hung in the wet morning air. I was a long way from Indian Hills.
The red brick façade, streaked black by the rain, needed pointing, and a sheet of cardboard covered a hole in one window. The heavy wooden door gave easily, though from the look of it, I had thought it would stick. The smell of old books and camphor and cabbage assailed me. I did not understand the cabbage.
From where I stood, I could look down a narrow aisle to the front of the synagogue. It ran past rows of pews, separated about a third of the way down by a dusty purple curtain. I had forgotten the curtain. On Friday nights and Saturdays and holidays, it would be drawn across to separate the men from the women.
I started down the aisle, past the curtain, toward the front of the long narrow room. The ark stood open. The Torah lay on a tall wooden table. A group of men, swathed in prayer shawls, huddled around it, chanting. Though I did not understand the words, something in me responded to the inconsolable cadence, but what soul does not keen to a minor-key dirge? As they chanted, they bent their knees, then straightened to pitch their bodies forward. The motion too was familiar, though I had never emulated it. The thought that it might be in my blood chilled me. That would prove them right. But was that not why I was here?
One of the men detached himself from the group and began backing up the aisle toward me, dipping and bobbing and chanting as he came. When he reached me and turned, I was surprised. From a distance, wrapped in their prayer shawls, crowned with skullcaps, they all looked old, but this man was about my age. His black cap sat jauntily on a mass of wiry carrot-colored hair. Beneath leather straps that bound a small black box to his forehead, rusty freckles sprinkled his milky skin. The hair, it occurred to me, would have saved him, if it didn’t kill him first. They would have done experiments, in the interest of science, to find out about this minor curiosity, a redheaded Jew. He dipped again. I was not sure whether it was part of the dance or if he was bowing to me. He held a black-bound book out to me. As he did, his prayer shawl fell away. Straps binding another black leather box to his arm dug into the flesh and distorted the tattooed number. He went on holding the book out to me, just as the customs officer on the pier that morning had held out my papers. I took it from him.
He nudged me into the pew and followed. Though he was holding an open book in one hand, he did not look at it. As he went on praying, he kept his eyes on me. I focused mine straight ahead. He reached over, flipped open the book I was holding, rifled through it, then looked at me and nodded toward the open pages. I looked down at it. Strange characters scuttled across the surface. I recognized the shapes, but I did not comprehend the meaning. I did not even know the sounds they signified. I lifted my eyes to the open ark. My gaze rose, but my spirit did not follow. I felt nothing. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the lament of the praying men. I bent my knees and tried to pitch my shoulders forward, but something strong as a steel wire from the heavens held me straight. I waited for a reaction. I wanted my stomach to churn with hunger. I hoped the hairs would stand up on the back of my neck. But it was no good. The sight of Anne’s diary had stricken me mute. These half-recollected objects and rituals did not even give me goose bumps.
I waited until the worshippers shouted their last amens and began taking off their prayer shawls, then started up the aisle. The man with the red hair followed me, as I knew he would. He caught up as I reached the door and leaned close to say something. I caught a powerful whiff of mothballs. Mothball cookies, Anne called them as my mother took them out of the tin, because they had been stored in a mothproofed closet. Standing in that alien synagogue, I could taste the sweet stickiness melting on my tongue.
“You’re a Jew?” he asked.
I stood staring at the old-looking young man. His hair stood out on his head as if an electric current had run through it. His threadbare sleeveless sweater bagged over a frayed flannel shirt, his dusty trousers drooped onto scuffed shoes.
“I am an American,” I said.
“Me also. I was anything else, you think I could be standing here in shul? Downtown Warsaw, I wouldn’t have it so good. Germany, I wouldn’t even talk about. I know you’re an American, Mr. Yankee Doodle Dandy, but are you a Jew?”
I did not answer him.
“It’s a simple question. Like the song says, is you is or is you ain’t?”
I had not told my wife, or her sister before her, or my partner. I would never tell my children. I had done it partly for them. So why should I tell this stranger, this greenie who was sticking to me like a fly to paper?
“I am.”
He nodded.
“But not a believer.”
He parted his thin lips in a feral smile. “About believing, I didn’t ask.” He leaned closer. I caught the scent of mothballs again and tasted the cookies. “So tell me, you’ll be back? Men like you, we need.”
“Men like me?”
“A minyan.”
For a moment I thought he said minion. I was going to tell him I was not that. Then another word I had forgotten came back. He wanted me to make up a minyan, the quorum of ten men required for prayer.
I told him I would be back, though I was sure I would not.