The Whore and the Fire Eater
Norman Danzig
Late August in New York, hot, humid, people stuck in the asphalt up to their ankles as the temperature climbed past 100 degrees, and the screaming that came from the top floor of a hundred-year-old, walk-up on Avenue A and Sixth penetrated the street. A young man and woman stopped in front of the building. The man gesticulated to the top floor. “They’re nuts.”
“You know them?
“Yeah, happens all the time.”
~ ~ ~
“You are nothing but a whore. Any man who looks good. Put a black uniform on him with those silver lightning bolts you love to suck, and you’ll shag him till the end of times.”
“For sixty years, since we left the DP camp, you’ve said crap like that to me. I’m sick of it. You sucked fire. Played dentist with the bodies. You were the hairstylist: ‘Sure I’ll cut off your hair madam before you go up the chimney.’ Get out. GET OUT.”
With the door open Nathan said, “Yeah, I knew fire, but you knew who to fuck to make your life easier.” As he left, Celia grabbed the door and followed him into the narrow hallway. The stairway was across from their apartment door. She called, “Hey.” He turned. Palms up she shoved him down the stairs, glaring while her hair exploded in different directions. A snap of bone, a cry of pain. He rolled over and stared, unable to get up.
~ ~ ~
When they returned home from the hospital, with Nathan’s arm in a cast, they climbed what felt like a windowless tower that had black stairs and dark brown walls to the sixth floor.
Outside their door, she bumped his hand with the cast. He screamed.
“Shit, that fucking hurt.”
His arms tensed, she knew he wanted to punch her, but he didn’t. He never did.
Celia didn’t apologize. She never did. “At least our shitty neighbors didn’t call the cops this time.”
In the apartment he went to the bathroom with the pull chain and washed his hands in the kitchen sink. He loved the ads for these railroad apartments: “Sixth-floor walkup, with the convenience of the bathtub in the kitchen.” Nathan loved to open a window wide and scream out. “Rent controlled since 1967, eat your heart out. This landlord ain’t never getting us out.”
As usual, after his grand proclamation, Celia slammed the window shut—once she caught his fingers. She laughed.
Borscht with two dollops of sour cream, and a big hunk of black bread on the side was their meal.
“The chances that I get half of it into my mouth are four to one. I told you I wanted a sandwich.” He raised his right hand in a cast. “Remember this? Like everything else you recall what suits you. But I’ll bet you haven’t forgotten even half of those guards."
“Fuck off. Eat your borscht.”
The full spoon of soup shook when he raised it, spilling it over the bowl and onto the table. She ignored the splattered soup.
“Even though my birthday is in two days, I invited Benjamin for a celebration tomorrow,” she said.
“Celebration—that you survived another year with me.”
“Something like that. Eighty, talk about the odds. You still want to go through with this?”
“We agreed,” Nathan said. “Remember, my cousin came to visit. When he said goodbye, he left with ‘Zolst lebn a hundert un tzvantzik,’ You should live to be a hundred and twenty. We just stared at him—like we would want to. afterwards you said, since there are two of us, divide one-hundred twenty in half, and sixty is the number. So, it’s this year, sixty years since we left the lager.
“In all these years what changed? You don’t sleep. You scream every night. It’s like you get ready, take a deep breath, and then expel it in a scream of indecipherable words, except for one thing: ‘Pliers, give me the pliers.’ Nathan, I can’t take it anymore.”
“And you. You remember every fucking kraut you fucked, or just the commandant and his aide?”
She hissed and bared her teeth.
“I take it Benjamin accepted your offer. After the last time he came to see us, I thought he meant it that he would never come back,” Nathan said.
“I told him I was having a rough time and mentioned you in the same sentence. I let him fill in the blanks.”
“He’s forty-two,” Nathan said.
“So?”
“You’re a manipulative bitch.”
When she arrived in Auschwitz and survived the selection, her head was shaved and she was sure she was doomed. Her German was excellent, that and her smile and long legs got her a job with the chubby adjutant in the basement of the Commandant’s office totaling the number of inmates twice a day. Nathan, at eighty-four, had broad shoulders. His jaw, broken twice, jutted out. He hunched over while he walked. His voice was gravelly like he was chewing small stones. At two hundred twenty, he looked like the professional Yugoslavian wrestler he had trained to be.
“Are you going to tell him?” Nathan said.
“Depends: if he’s pissy, I won’t; if he’s a mensch, I will.”
“The longer you wait the more pissed off he’ll be.”
“It’s already six months. What does another few weeks or months matter? That of course depends on how we celebrate my birthday.”
“If you told him, he’d come over more.”
He took half a spoonful and got most of the borscht into his mouth.
“You think breast cancer will bring my son closer to me. And, you’re talking like the clock isn’t ticking for us.”
“Nothing else has worked.” He slammed his spoon down. “I can’t eat this. I’ll cut some cheese.”
“And you’ll cut your finger off. I’ll do it.”
“Tell him!”
“OK.”
~ ~ ~
The next day, Benjamin arrived with a bottle of red and one of white, a sign his mother had not told him what she would serve, even though she had already planned Coq au Vin.
“Where’s Alice?” Celia said.
He flicked his hand as if his appendage was a flipper in a pinball machine. “You’ve got to be kidding. She’s not coming back here after that stunt you pulled last time.”
“Your father said something he shouldn’t have.”
“A little joke. Always so serious,” Nathan said.
“I should get a bikini. Asshole!”
“Don’t start again.”
Her right hand balled up; she drew her thumb across her chest. “We’ll see how funny it is when they chop off my tits.”
“WHAT?” Even for a son who had heard many outrageous things from his parents, this was the strangest.
“What your mother means to say--”
“Don’t fucking talk for me.”
“Then, God damn it, tell him.”
As if the host dropped the birthday cake with lit candles, no one moved.
“OK.” She took a deep breath. “I have stage four breast cancer. I finished chemo and radiation three weeks ago. Now I’m on a bunch of pills every day while they evaluate.”
“Ma.” Benjamin got out of his chair. He walked towards her and put his arm out. She pulled back. He lightly touched her face. She turned away.
“How bad is the prognosis?”
“Bad. They have some new stuff in their bag of tricks but nothing that they know works.
“Where are you being treated?”
“Sloan, because your father insisted.”
“What’s wrong with that? They’re one of the top cancer hospitals in the world,” Nathan said.
“This is horrible,” Benjamin said.
“I beat death before, maybe I’ll find a way to get through.”
“Even with your charms there aren’t enough men in the world to beat this,” Nathan said.
“Fuck you.” She picked up a knife from the table, held the blade, and like a knife thrower who never misses threw it at Nathan. She missed him by half a foot.
“Holy crap,” Benjamin said. “This is worse than usual. And you ask about my wife not coming. One day, you’ll kill him.”
Nathan growled. “You’ll have to do better if you’re going to kill me. Remember, you need me. Once this cast comes off, I’ll be your primary caregiver—as they say.”
“Oh, you’ll love that.”
“Get a grip, Dad. She’s sick.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“You don’t sound like you do. Business as usual for the two of you. Throw things, punch, tear hair out, push you down a flight of stairs.”
“Yes, that’s what your mother does. Not me.”
“Nasty doesn’t begin to tell the story. You’re vicious. You say the shittiest things to her about sleeping with Nazis.”
“The next generation speaks. Are you sympathetic to Alice? I’ll bet you can be a real shit,” Nathan said.
“I learned from the best.”
“What was that crack having all the men in the world?” Benjamin said.
“Your mother’s appetites produced a sumptuous buffet.”
“What are you talking about?” Benjamin said. He placed his hand on Celia’s. She didn’t pull away, but didn’t answer him.
The aromas in the kitchen foretold the tasty Coq au Vin dinner that awaited them. One handed Nathan got plates down, Benjamin uncorked the wine, and put out the silverware. Celia brought out the large bright yellow stew pot and placed it in the middle of the table. She set a bowl of steaming boiled potatoes with garlic and butter next to it.
She said, “Benjamin take a portion.” He did and passed the serving spoon to his father. With their plates full, the chicken, and the scent of the wine filled the air with the mixture of aromas as if they had stumbled into a bubba’s kitchen. They ate quietly trying to regain an easy manner between them. Since this had rarely been the case, they pretended politeness rather than delineating what was happening. Benjamin, yet again, smoothed things over with his parents. He was rarely their target and they had never ganged up on him. Each had fights with Benjamin growing up, but nothing out of the ordinary. When Benjamin was ten, he came home from school as his mother hurled a pot of boiling water at his father. Only Nathan’s leg was burned, but Benjamin ran to his room and didn’t come out until the next morning. The next evening, when Nathan returned home from selling kitchen appliances, he told Benjamin he had bought tickets for the two of them to see a Yankee-Boston game. Benjamin hugged him. Celia had nothing to say.
“Tell him what we’ve planned for my birthday.”
“No. You do it.” Nathan’s face collapsed. He stared at his food. It was clear to Celia, even sitting at the table with her family, Nathan was pulled back to the Auschwitz two-step—hauling the bodies out. He used the cane method. Grab a neck, an ankle, some limb you could gain purchase to move the body to the elevator. Or, when he cut into the food on his plate, he was opening a dead mouth, checking for gold.
Nathan clicked back in.
“Fitting isn’t it. I ate fire, she blew the SS.”
Celia picked up her plate and flung it at him. It bounced off his shoulder, hit the table and dropped to the floor.
He rubbed his arm. “Satisfied. Bitch.”
“Every damn time I think you two can’t get any worse you manage to pull it off and become more horrible. Ma, this time you threw a plate and knife at him.” He looked at his mother with his eyebrows raised. “Was this for my benefit?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Celia said.
My wife was right. I shouldn’t have come.” He threw his napkin onto his plate and got up so fast his chair fell backward.
“Thanks for inviting me to remind me that there’s nothing here for me. Ma, I’m sorry you have stage four breast cancer. If there is something you want me to do, let me know. Otherwise, don’t call. This time I’m done.”
Celia stood up. “Your father only facilitated death in the lager. Without him and all the others, who would have done it? If all the Jews had refused then what?”
“They would have taken all the Jewish whores and made them do it. What’s the difference? Fuck a Nazi or drag a Jew out of the gas chamber,” Nathan said.
“Why do you keep doing this? You never allow your suffering to calm down, to, excuse the expression, die down. You’ve made a life, but you torture each other. Make the other one suffer so there can never be any healing. There’s no forgetting—that I understand—but figuring out how to live with it. No. You never wanted to and you still don’t want to. So, death is the way out. Please, don’t leave a note.”
At the door, Benjamin hesitated, as if realizing what he had said. They sat frozen by the truth of all the horrors.
“You two are stuck in a time warp where all goodness has been erased and only hurt and pain remain. Ma, how much time do you have left? Is hating each other the only way you can stay connected? How much more is there to say about what happened in the lager sixty years ago? Nathan, you had to pry people out of the gas chamber, cut off women’s hair, and pull out gold teeth before you sent them up the chimney. Ma, what did you do? I know you worked for the second in command at Auschwitz, Hauptsturmführer Hanshaft and you slept with him. For that you got your own quarters, more food, and had little to do with anyone in the camp. But Nathan keeps accusing you of sleeping with a lot of Nazis. Is that true?
“Both of you did and saw horrible things that have haunted you all these years. Perhaps there is no way to excuse what you did. That is what each of you thinks of the other, but I’ve seen those rare moments of tenderness between you that most couples would use to make their relationship flourish. You use your past to pummel the other into admitting that both of you are terrible people. Be mean and hateful and your spouse will not have to forgive you, to admit that your only other choice was to throw yourself against the electric fence and end it.”
“This isn’t as easy as you make it seem,” Nathan said. “You make us sound horrible.”
Benjamin did a double take. “What would you call it: relaxing at home with the survivors? For me, how was I supposed to know this wasn’t normal? I grew up thinking that everyone’s parents were crazy. Perhaps true, but my folks took the blue ribbon. It’s hard for me to know which one of you is worse. You beat the crap out of him, and you say the nastiest shit imaginable. You torture each other for what you had to do sixty years ago. When is it enough? Is there, can there ever be forgiveness?”
“What your father did is unforgivable. He pushed people into the gas chamber and then had to pry them out after it was done. Cut their hair. Rip out their teeth to get the gold. Shove them onto the lift that brought the bodies up to the crematories, and burn them. Each time he opened the furnace doors the fire called. ‘More meat.’ All the Sonderkommandos ate fire every day. If the ovens hadn’t cooled off enough you saw the human fat drip, collecting in a pool at the bottom of the crematoria. Every day they waited to hear if a train was coming. They never knew in advance when the next transport was due to arrive. The Nazis kept them in the dark.”
“Now cancer will finish you Ma.” He turned to Nathan, “And you will die an old, bitter man, with no one to scream at.” In the doorway, Benjamin, shook his head, and as he closed the door, said softly, “Goodbye.”
~ ~ ~
The next day Celia turned eighty. She was up early to prepare Nathan’s white powder potassium cyanide coffee before he got up. She wanted his death to be quick and painless. At her work in the jewelry factory, cyanide was kept in a locked cabinet that she had access to. No one questioned her when she took a small vial that had enough poison to kill ten people. She had decided to give him his coffee in bed, on a tray, with a red rose in a bud vase, hold his hand, and kiss him on the forehead. From everything she had read, three or four sips would do it.
At 8:15, she heard Nathan clunking around in the bedroom. She had his poisoned coffee ready. A few minutes later when he came into the kitchen, her plan changed. He hummed a tune she recognized from her youth: Anim Zimiros, a Sabbath song that he dredged up from his childhood. Was he, the atheist, reminding her today was Friday: this evening erev Shabbos? And if so, what was she supposed to do? Light Sabbath candles? Why? He kissed her, went to the closet took out a large wrapped box and handed it to her. Like a little kid, she tore off the paper and took out a luxurious red, yellow, and purple silk jacket festooned with sparkles. It fit her perfectly. She looked in the mirror, approved, twirled around, and hugged herself. Would she go through with his murder? Had he changed his mind? He couldn’t have forgotten it. He knew what they had decided and couldn’t back out of it now. The jacket was beautiful. She turned this way and that, admiring how she looked. Nathan smiled. She poured herself a cup of coffee and handed the poisoned drink to him.
She patted the back of the bentwood kitchen chair, “Rest my love. Let me sit on your lap and show you my eighty-year-old charms.” She placed herself on his thighs and rested one arm on the back of the chair. He clinked her coffee mug. She said, “L’chayim,” and laughed. She stared at him. He wrinkled his brow as if to wonder why she had positioned herself as she had.
He drank his coffee. “I’m glad you like your present…What did you put in this? Tastes awful. I feel woozy." He started shaking. His arms went rigid at his side. He leaned forward and she held him not letting him fall. “Oh…now I get it… It’s your birthday and you’re in control of this day… Are you joining me?”
As if a quick jolt of electricity ran through him, he jerked straight up.
Struggling to talk, “Switch coffee cups and then we’ll say goodbye together.”
“Afraid not. I was all set to join you and then when I woke up this morning, I wanted to fly. Now with my jacket spread open I can jump off a mountain and soar, inhaling the blue sky, making figure eights, letting the breeze take me. Remember when we went to the Catskills and watched hang gliders soar overhead, turn, go higher, head towards the sun, and turn back. Did they ever come down? Wasn’t that beautiful? Yes, it’s all about freedom.”
“I can’t keep my head up…You’re not coming with me?... After all this time.”
“I am. I want a little time to myself. Is that so terrible?”
His arms relaxed. “Can’t argue. Hard to breathe. I never meant all the things I said to you. I don’t know why I did that, but year after year I enraged you.” He fell forward and she held him. She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed. Hard, and harder still.
“Nathan, what would I have done without you?” She didn’t want to let go but knew she had to figure out a way so he wouldn’t fall over and she could get up.
“Nathan! Oh my God. You stopped breathing. I hated what you had done in the lager. I willed myself not to think of it. Pulling the gold out of a freshly dead mouth. Why did that feel like the worst? Vile work. Each part worse than the next. But how do you say the dentist part was the worst? What about prying the bodies apart after the gas chamber door opened? How did you do that? I hated you. How could you do that? All I had to do was fuck some Nazi functionary. He was a piece of shit. My body was no longer important. I had a chance, as long as I didn’t look at what I was doing or let myself feel when that little dicked piece of filth pushed inside me. I wanted him to die. Instead, look what happened to me, to you. Even after sixty years of living together, bearing a child, seeking absolution. But you never forgave me. You knew what it had done to me. Why did you sleep with me? I was spoiled goods. I could have said no to that piece of shit. Yes, Nathan, there were others, but that was the icing on the cake. I know that doesn’t make sense. You see, if I fucked the functionary, Hanshaft, you could find a way to forgive me for that, but if I slept with random pieces of Nazi shit, you wouldn’t be able to. I never told you that I fucked the Commandant. Hoss was all business. You see he loved the idea, not so much screwing me, but to do it so his underling would know. That was the power he had. It was his little secret, except there were a couple of times when Hoss came in to see Hanshaft, stood next to me, and placed his hand on my shoulder. I knew my part. I looked up at the Commandant and smiled. Oh, that was juicy for Hoss. I could see he had convinced himself that I had enjoyed it. He had gotten away with it, held power over me, and knew that his aide was a silly little man who was useless.
She held her palm against his chest, got up from him, and rested his head on one arm. “Now, I must fly.” She made sure she had positioned Nathan not to fall over. Dressed in her new silk jacket, she opened the front window as wide as possible and maneuvered herself to sit on the window ledge with her feet dangling out. “At least now I will have a few moments of freedom. There’s nothing for Benjamin to clean up. The thought of that made me want to throw up. I know you wanted us to die together perhaps holding each other, but that was never going to happen. Not after everything we had done to each other. Nathan, did I ever tell you I loved you?”
She took a deep breath, held her beautiful new jacket open, and pushed off from the windowsill.
Norman Danzig
Late August in New York, hot, humid, people stuck in the asphalt up to their ankles as the temperature climbed past 100 degrees, and the screaming that came from the top floor of a hundred-year-old, walk-up on Avenue A and Sixth penetrated the street. A young man and woman stopped in front of the building. The man gesticulated to the top floor. “They’re nuts.”
“You know them?
“Yeah, happens all the time.”
~ ~ ~
“You are nothing but a whore. Any man who looks good. Put a black uniform on him with those silver lightning bolts you love to suck, and you’ll shag him till the end of times.”
“For sixty years, since we left the DP camp, you’ve said crap like that to me. I’m sick of it. You sucked fire. Played dentist with the bodies. You were the hairstylist: ‘Sure I’ll cut off your hair madam before you go up the chimney.’ Get out. GET OUT.”
With the door open Nathan said, “Yeah, I knew fire, but you knew who to fuck to make your life easier.” As he left, Celia grabbed the door and followed him into the narrow hallway. The stairway was across from their apartment door. She called, “Hey.” He turned. Palms up she shoved him down the stairs, glaring while her hair exploded in different directions. A snap of bone, a cry of pain. He rolled over and stared, unable to get up.
~ ~ ~
When they returned home from the hospital, with Nathan’s arm in a cast, they climbed what felt like a windowless tower that had black stairs and dark brown walls to the sixth floor.
Outside their door, she bumped his hand with the cast. He screamed.
“Shit, that fucking hurt.”
His arms tensed, she knew he wanted to punch her, but he didn’t. He never did.
Celia didn’t apologize. She never did. “At least our shitty neighbors didn’t call the cops this time.”
In the apartment he went to the bathroom with the pull chain and washed his hands in the kitchen sink. He loved the ads for these railroad apartments: “Sixth-floor walkup, with the convenience of the bathtub in the kitchen.” Nathan loved to open a window wide and scream out. “Rent controlled since 1967, eat your heart out. This landlord ain’t never getting us out.”
As usual, after his grand proclamation, Celia slammed the window shut—once she caught his fingers. She laughed.
Borscht with two dollops of sour cream, and a big hunk of black bread on the side was their meal.
“The chances that I get half of it into my mouth are four to one. I told you I wanted a sandwich.” He raised his right hand in a cast. “Remember this? Like everything else you recall what suits you. But I’ll bet you haven’t forgotten even half of those guards."
“Fuck off. Eat your borscht.”
The full spoon of soup shook when he raised it, spilling it over the bowl and onto the table. She ignored the splattered soup.
“Even though my birthday is in two days, I invited Benjamin for a celebration tomorrow,” she said.
“Celebration—that you survived another year with me.”
“Something like that. Eighty, talk about the odds. You still want to go through with this?”
“We agreed,” Nathan said. “Remember, my cousin came to visit. When he said goodbye, he left with ‘Zolst lebn a hundert un tzvantzik,’ You should live to be a hundred and twenty. We just stared at him—like we would want to. afterwards you said, since there are two of us, divide one-hundred twenty in half, and sixty is the number. So, it’s this year, sixty years since we left the lager.
“In all these years what changed? You don’t sleep. You scream every night. It’s like you get ready, take a deep breath, and then expel it in a scream of indecipherable words, except for one thing: ‘Pliers, give me the pliers.’ Nathan, I can’t take it anymore.”
“And you. You remember every fucking kraut you fucked, or just the commandant and his aide?”
She hissed and bared her teeth.
“I take it Benjamin accepted your offer. After the last time he came to see us, I thought he meant it that he would never come back,” Nathan said.
“I told him I was having a rough time and mentioned you in the same sentence. I let him fill in the blanks.”
“He’s forty-two,” Nathan said.
“So?”
“You’re a manipulative bitch.”
When she arrived in Auschwitz and survived the selection, her head was shaved and she was sure she was doomed. Her German was excellent, that and her smile and long legs got her a job with the chubby adjutant in the basement of the Commandant’s office totaling the number of inmates twice a day. Nathan, at eighty-four, had broad shoulders. His jaw, broken twice, jutted out. He hunched over while he walked. His voice was gravelly like he was chewing small stones. At two hundred twenty, he looked like the professional Yugoslavian wrestler he had trained to be.
“Are you going to tell him?” Nathan said.
“Depends: if he’s pissy, I won’t; if he’s a mensch, I will.”
“The longer you wait the more pissed off he’ll be.”
“It’s already six months. What does another few weeks or months matter? That of course depends on how we celebrate my birthday.”
“If you told him, he’d come over more.”
He took half a spoonful and got most of the borscht into his mouth.
“You think breast cancer will bring my son closer to me. And, you’re talking like the clock isn’t ticking for us.”
“Nothing else has worked.” He slammed his spoon down. “I can’t eat this. I’ll cut some cheese.”
“And you’ll cut your finger off. I’ll do it.”
“Tell him!”
“OK.”
~ ~ ~
The next day, Benjamin arrived with a bottle of red and one of white, a sign his mother had not told him what she would serve, even though she had already planned Coq au Vin.
“Where’s Alice?” Celia said.
He flicked his hand as if his appendage was a flipper in a pinball machine. “You’ve got to be kidding. She’s not coming back here after that stunt you pulled last time.”
“Your father said something he shouldn’t have.”
“A little joke. Always so serious,” Nathan said.
“I should get a bikini. Asshole!”
“Don’t start again.”
Her right hand balled up; she drew her thumb across her chest. “We’ll see how funny it is when they chop off my tits.”
“WHAT?” Even for a son who had heard many outrageous things from his parents, this was the strangest.
“What your mother means to say--”
“Don’t fucking talk for me.”
“Then, God damn it, tell him.”
As if the host dropped the birthday cake with lit candles, no one moved.
“OK.” She took a deep breath. “I have stage four breast cancer. I finished chemo and radiation three weeks ago. Now I’m on a bunch of pills every day while they evaluate.”
“Ma.” Benjamin got out of his chair. He walked towards her and put his arm out. She pulled back. He lightly touched her face. She turned away.
“How bad is the prognosis?”
“Bad. They have some new stuff in their bag of tricks but nothing that they know works.
“Where are you being treated?”
“Sloan, because your father insisted.”
“What’s wrong with that? They’re one of the top cancer hospitals in the world,” Nathan said.
“This is horrible,” Benjamin said.
“I beat death before, maybe I’ll find a way to get through.”
“Even with your charms there aren’t enough men in the world to beat this,” Nathan said.
“Fuck you.” She picked up a knife from the table, held the blade, and like a knife thrower who never misses threw it at Nathan. She missed him by half a foot.
“Holy crap,” Benjamin said. “This is worse than usual. And you ask about my wife not coming. One day, you’ll kill him.”
Nathan growled. “You’ll have to do better if you’re going to kill me. Remember, you need me. Once this cast comes off, I’ll be your primary caregiver—as they say.”
“Oh, you’ll love that.”
“Get a grip, Dad. She’s sick.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“You don’t sound like you do. Business as usual for the two of you. Throw things, punch, tear hair out, push you down a flight of stairs.”
“Yes, that’s what your mother does. Not me.”
“Nasty doesn’t begin to tell the story. You’re vicious. You say the shittiest things to her about sleeping with Nazis.”
“The next generation speaks. Are you sympathetic to Alice? I’ll bet you can be a real shit,” Nathan said.
“I learned from the best.”
“What was that crack having all the men in the world?” Benjamin said.
“Your mother’s appetites produced a sumptuous buffet.”
“What are you talking about?” Benjamin said. He placed his hand on Celia’s. She didn’t pull away, but didn’t answer him.
The aromas in the kitchen foretold the tasty Coq au Vin dinner that awaited them. One handed Nathan got plates down, Benjamin uncorked the wine, and put out the silverware. Celia brought out the large bright yellow stew pot and placed it in the middle of the table. She set a bowl of steaming boiled potatoes with garlic and butter next to it.
She said, “Benjamin take a portion.” He did and passed the serving spoon to his father. With their plates full, the chicken, and the scent of the wine filled the air with the mixture of aromas as if they had stumbled into a bubba’s kitchen. They ate quietly trying to regain an easy manner between them. Since this had rarely been the case, they pretended politeness rather than delineating what was happening. Benjamin, yet again, smoothed things over with his parents. He was rarely their target and they had never ganged up on him. Each had fights with Benjamin growing up, but nothing out of the ordinary. When Benjamin was ten, he came home from school as his mother hurled a pot of boiling water at his father. Only Nathan’s leg was burned, but Benjamin ran to his room and didn’t come out until the next morning. The next evening, when Nathan returned home from selling kitchen appliances, he told Benjamin he had bought tickets for the two of them to see a Yankee-Boston game. Benjamin hugged him. Celia had nothing to say.
“Tell him what we’ve planned for my birthday.”
“No. You do it.” Nathan’s face collapsed. He stared at his food. It was clear to Celia, even sitting at the table with her family, Nathan was pulled back to the Auschwitz two-step—hauling the bodies out. He used the cane method. Grab a neck, an ankle, some limb you could gain purchase to move the body to the elevator. Or, when he cut into the food on his plate, he was opening a dead mouth, checking for gold.
Nathan clicked back in.
“Fitting isn’t it. I ate fire, she blew the SS.”
Celia picked up her plate and flung it at him. It bounced off his shoulder, hit the table and dropped to the floor.
He rubbed his arm. “Satisfied. Bitch.”
“Every damn time I think you two can’t get any worse you manage to pull it off and become more horrible. Ma, this time you threw a plate and knife at him.” He looked at his mother with his eyebrows raised. “Was this for my benefit?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Celia said.
My wife was right. I shouldn’t have come.” He threw his napkin onto his plate and got up so fast his chair fell backward.
“Thanks for inviting me to remind me that there’s nothing here for me. Ma, I’m sorry you have stage four breast cancer. If there is something you want me to do, let me know. Otherwise, don’t call. This time I’m done.”
Celia stood up. “Your father only facilitated death in the lager. Without him and all the others, who would have done it? If all the Jews had refused then what?”
“They would have taken all the Jewish whores and made them do it. What’s the difference? Fuck a Nazi or drag a Jew out of the gas chamber,” Nathan said.
“Why do you keep doing this? You never allow your suffering to calm down, to, excuse the expression, die down. You’ve made a life, but you torture each other. Make the other one suffer so there can never be any healing. There’s no forgetting—that I understand—but figuring out how to live with it. No. You never wanted to and you still don’t want to. So, death is the way out. Please, don’t leave a note.”
At the door, Benjamin hesitated, as if realizing what he had said. They sat frozen by the truth of all the horrors.
“You two are stuck in a time warp where all goodness has been erased and only hurt and pain remain. Ma, how much time do you have left? Is hating each other the only way you can stay connected? How much more is there to say about what happened in the lager sixty years ago? Nathan, you had to pry people out of the gas chamber, cut off women’s hair, and pull out gold teeth before you sent them up the chimney. Ma, what did you do? I know you worked for the second in command at Auschwitz, Hauptsturmführer Hanshaft and you slept with him. For that you got your own quarters, more food, and had little to do with anyone in the camp. But Nathan keeps accusing you of sleeping with a lot of Nazis. Is that true?
“Both of you did and saw horrible things that have haunted you all these years. Perhaps there is no way to excuse what you did. That is what each of you thinks of the other, but I’ve seen those rare moments of tenderness between you that most couples would use to make their relationship flourish. You use your past to pummel the other into admitting that both of you are terrible people. Be mean and hateful and your spouse will not have to forgive you, to admit that your only other choice was to throw yourself against the electric fence and end it.”
“This isn’t as easy as you make it seem,” Nathan said. “You make us sound horrible.”
Benjamin did a double take. “What would you call it: relaxing at home with the survivors? For me, how was I supposed to know this wasn’t normal? I grew up thinking that everyone’s parents were crazy. Perhaps true, but my folks took the blue ribbon. It’s hard for me to know which one of you is worse. You beat the crap out of him, and you say the nastiest shit imaginable. You torture each other for what you had to do sixty years ago. When is it enough? Is there, can there ever be forgiveness?”
“What your father did is unforgivable. He pushed people into the gas chamber and then had to pry them out after it was done. Cut their hair. Rip out their teeth to get the gold. Shove them onto the lift that brought the bodies up to the crematories, and burn them. Each time he opened the furnace doors the fire called. ‘More meat.’ All the Sonderkommandos ate fire every day. If the ovens hadn’t cooled off enough you saw the human fat drip, collecting in a pool at the bottom of the crematoria. Every day they waited to hear if a train was coming. They never knew in advance when the next transport was due to arrive. The Nazis kept them in the dark.”
“Now cancer will finish you Ma.” He turned to Nathan, “And you will die an old, bitter man, with no one to scream at.” In the doorway, Benjamin, shook his head, and as he closed the door, said softly, “Goodbye.”
~ ~ ~
The next day Celia turned eighty. She was up early to prepare Nathan’s white powder potassium cyanide coffee before he got up. She wanted his death to be quick and painless. At her work in the jewelry factory, cyanide was kept in a locked cabinet that she had access to. No one questioned her when she took a small vial that had enough poison to kill ten people. She had decided to give him his coffee in bed, on a tray, with a red rose in a bud vase, hold his hand, and kiss him on the forehead. From everything she had read, three or four sips would do it.
At 8:15, she heard Nathan clunking around in the bedroom. She had his poisoned coffee ready. A few minutes later when he came into the kitchen, her plan changed. He hummed a tune she recognized from her youth: Anim Zimiros, a Sabbath song that he dredged up from his childhood. Was he, the atheist, reminding her today was Friday: this evening erev Shabbos? And if so, what was she supposed to do? Light Sabbath candles? Why? He kissed her, went to the closet took out a large wrapped box and handed it to her. Like a little kid, she tore off the paper and took out a luxurious red, yellow, and purple silk jacket festooned with sparkles. It fit her perfectly. She looked in the mirror, approved, twirled around, and hugged herself. Would she go through with his murder? Had he changed his mind? He couldn’t have forgotten it. He knew what they had decided and couldn’t back out of it now. The jacket was beautiful. She turned this way and that, admiring how she looked. Nathan smiled. She poured herself a cup of coffee and handed the poisoned drink to him.
She patted the back of the bentwood kitchen chair, “Rest my love. Let me sit on your lap and show you my eighty-year-old charms.” She placed herself on his thighs and rested one arm on the back of the chair. He clinked her coffee mug. She said, “L’chayim,” and laughed. She stared at him. He wrinkled his brow as if to wonder why she had positioned herself as she had.
He drank his coffee. “I’m glad you like your present…What did you put in this? Tastes awful. I feel woozy." He started shaking. His arms went rigid at his side. He leaned forward and she held him not letting him fall. “Oh…now I get it… It’s your birthday and you’re in control of this day… Are you joining me?”
As if a quick jolt of electricity ran through him, he jerked straight up.
Struggling to talk, “Switch coffee cups and then we’ll say goodbye together.”
“Afraid not. I was all set to join you and then when I woke up this morning, I wanted to fly. Now with my jacket spread open I can jump off a mountain and soar, inhaling the blue sky, making figure eights, letting the breeze take me. Remember when we went to the Catskills and watched hang gliders soar overhead, turn, go higher, head towards the sun, and turn back. Did they ever come down? Wasn’t that beautiful? Yes, it’s all about freedom.”
“I can’t keep my head up…You’re not coming with me?... After all this time.”
“I am. I want a little time to myself. Is that so terrible?”
His arms relaxed. “Can’t argue. Hard to breathe. I never meant all the things I said to you. I don’t know why I did that, but year after year I enraged you.” He fell forward and she held him. She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed. Hard, and harder still.
“Nathan, what would I have done without you?” She didn’t want to let go but knew she had to figure out a way so he wouldn’t fall over and she could get up.
“Nathan! Oh my God. You stopped breathing. I hated what you had done in the lager. I willed myself not to think of it. Pulling the gold out of a freshly dead mouth. Why did that feel like the worst? Vile work. Each part worse than the next. But how do you say the dentist part was the worst? What about prying the bodies apart after the gas chamber door opened? How did you do that? I hated you. How could you do that? All I had to do was fuck some Nazi functionary. He was a piece of shit. My body was no longer important. I had a chance, as long as I didn’t look at what I was doing or let myself feel when that little dicked piece of filth pushed inside me. I wanted him to die. Instead, look what happened to me, to you. Even after sixty years of living together, bearing a child, seeking absolution. But you never forgave me. You knew what it had done to me. Why did you sleep with me? I was spoiled goods. I could have said no to that piece of shit. Yes, Nathan, there were others, but that was the icing on the cake. I know that doesn’t make sense. You see, if I fucked the functionary, Hanshaft, you could find a way to forgive me for that, but if I slept with random pieces of Nazi shit, you wouldn’t be able to. I never told you that I fucked the Commandant. Hoss was all business. You see he loved the idea, not so much screwing me, but to do it so his underling would know. That was the power he had. It was his little secret, except there were a couple of times when Hoss came in to see Hanshaft, stood next to me, and placed his hand on my shoulder. I knew my part. I looked up at the Commandant and smiled. Oh, that was juicy for Hoss. I could see he had convinced himself that I had enjoyed it. He had gotten away with it, held power over me, and knew that his aide was a silly little man who was useless.
She held her palm against his chest, got up from him, and rested his head on one arm. “Now, I must fly.” She made sure she had positioned Nathan not to fall over. Dressed in her new silk jacket, she opened the front window as wide as possible and maneuvered herself to sit on the window ledge with her feet dangling out. “At least now I will have a few moments of freedom. There’s nothing for Benjamin to clean up. The thought of that made me want to throw up. I know you wanted us to die together perhaps holding each other, but that was never going to happen. Not after everything we had done to each other. Nathan, did I ever tell you I loved you?”
She took a deep breath, held her beautiful new jacket open, and pushed off from the windowsill.
