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Tel Aviv, May 13, 1943
“I have a story to write. Would you like to comment, in an unofficial capacity? Yes, that’s right, anonymously.... Sorry, it’s not my fault that you’re so low-level that your name is primarily familiar to the janitorial staff.... Uh, yes, it is. But you do work in Kofer HaYishuv, which technically makes you a source, even if you’re a dick. So listen, here’s what I’m leading with: ‘Tide Turns in North Africa: Allies Triumph in Tunis, 150,000 Axis POWs, Von Arnim Surrenders’. I’d like an insider quote from within the Yishuv leadership, so what have you got for me? Wait... did you just fart? I could hear that, you know. Jesus, the acoustics in your office must be miraculous. You could stage a fucking symphony in there. God, what a pig.”
Five minutes later and I have my quote, and hang up with my brother. I turn my attention back to the Polish language typewriter on my desk. I’ve become reasonably adept at one-handed pecking, but am still trying to convince Henryk—Henryk Rosmarin, former Polish Consul General to Palestine and now my employer—to hire a typist. He claims that Nowiny Dnia—Daily News, Palestine’s first Polish-language newspaper—has a limited circulation, comes out only three times a week, and primarily regurgitates translated news from the wires. Thus, by his logic, there’s no need for staff beyond myself. It’s hard to argue with this logic, but I persist.
I persist because, despite being in Tel Aviv for just six months, and only actually living a life of any consequence for three of them, I’ve figured out how things work here. I have the right combination of balls, brains, and shitty typing skills that one needs to make a real splash in our budding journalistic community. To be honest, the prosthetic hand doesn’t hurt. It gives me a certain wartime panache—eliciting a winning mix of admiration and pity that I’m not ashamed to exploit to the maximum.
The Polish newspaper job, which I owe to my brother’s connections in the burgeoning Polish immigrant community, is a good foot in the door. Still, I have my eyes on the Hebrew-language press, where the real future is. I’m taking Hebrew lessons three times a week with the indominable Hava, whose strictness is mitigated only by her fantastic cup size. I insist on speaking, reading, and writing Hebrew at every possible opportunity. The key to learning a new language, I quickly realized, is not to be ashamed of looking like a complete ass. Yes, I call window boxes tomatoes, and loudly. Yes, I did publicly ask for a vagina of water from a waitress. Nonetheless, these instances are diminishing—notably the vagina incident, which really only could happen once.
I wasn’t angry with Aron. More accurately, I was angry, but my anger dissipated so quickly that it may as well never have existed. Our meeting in January, when he came into his spotless flat looking ready to hug me sloppily and cry, was anticlimactic. We’d both arrived at the conclusion that, yes, the other had been an asshole for twenty years, but that our own personal asshole-ness had been of equal measure. The asshole coefficient of the universe having thus balanced out, we were rapidly able to move on with the occasionally messy yet largely fun business of being adult brothers.
Let me correct myself: I am angry. I’m angry that, despite over a thousand years of rich Jewish history in Poland, the Poles turned on us so viciously and wholeheartedly—making it impossible for Jews to live in Poland as full human beings. I’m angry at how people who were once our neighbors played such a prominent role in helping the Nazis hunt us down—even as they themselves suffered at Nazi hands. I’m angry that the society in which we were raised made it triply difficult for my brother to find his way. Being a Jew in Poland was daunting, being a homosexual Jew was impossible, and being a homosexual Jew living in a home where the futile hope of ever fitting in—‘integrationism,’ in my father’s lexicon—was a supreme value, was simply inhuman.
Would I have fared better as an adolescent, under such strains? I fear not, and by a long shot. So, I’m angry, but not at Aron, and I’m committed to doing my small part to ensure that this new society which we are building on the shores of the Mediterranean treats its Jews, its homosexuals, and, indeed, its one-handed widower journalists, far better.
Aron and Sean are still thankfully, discretely, together—thankfully, owing to the fact that I like Sean, but mostly to the fact that Aron would be insufferable without Sean’s mitigating, calming presence; discretely, since theirs is still not an enviable arrangement. Sean is still a British soldier, and although his previous demotion and punitive transfer quashed the promise of a sterling military career, and he is essentially a mid-level bureaucratic functionary, his ‘unnatural’ liaison with a Zionist is still illicit and officially forbidden. As is Aron’s relationship with a representative of His Majesty’s Government in Palestine, despite his low-level status in the Zionist hierarchy. They’re cautious, however, and Aron’s neighbors are considerate and understanding. They manage to spend nearly every night together.
Much has changed for me. One thing has not: along the moon path I travel, I am still accompanied by four ghosts.
Jacek visits me weekly in dreams that begin with him still in his ammunition crate. “Hey malpeczko,” he calls. “You gonna let me out of here, or do I have to get my three-year-old niece to beat you up?” These dreams end less humorously, usually with his hands on my throat, much as my own hands—yes, they were mine—once encircled the throat of an anonymous prisoner on the Pechora River.
Igor and Viktor visit, too. They float in partially inflated life preservers, sink beneath the surface of black water, and constantly re-emerge to call each other “butt face” and “shit-breath” before sinking again. I watch them appear and disappear, until one or the other finally tells me to stop wallowing and get on with it.
Danuta, of course... not a day passes that I don’t hear her wise voice at least once. Not a night falls that she is not with me. I no longer suffer phantom pain from my missing right hand, yet I constantly feel her hand caressing my invisible appendage. The silent hall of the small flat I rent on Bugrashov Street knows the rustle of her silk nightgown well. She is both here and not here, and I am alternatingly confused, devastated, and charmed by her presence and absence.
Even in my devastation, however, I persist.
I persist and I write. By day, I write in Nowiny Dnia. By night, I painstakingly reconstruct the play I started so long ago in Warsaw. I do this because I am my words. I am Samuel Katz, and I was not born of great words. I was not born of a writer whose words illuminated thousands of nescient eyes. I was born of a man who had thoughts of inherent value and the eloquence to express them, yet chose to remain unheard. It is this, I believe, that drives me to be heard in his stead. If I don’t express my truth, one thing is certain: no one will hear it. For me, there is nothing worse than not being heard, For if no one hears me, if no one follows me along this illusive moon path that I so relentlessly pursue, who am I?
—-THE END—-
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