Death Had Two Sons Read online

  ‘Do you amputate, doctor?’

  The doctor was eating roast chicken, a wing. He looked at it as if it had to do with the question.

  ‘Yes. I have to. Needless to say, it’s not my favourite surgical experience.’

  ‘Don’t you become immune after a while, say after the hundredth leg, doesn’t it become just a piece of flesh which has to be separated from another, an independent bone to be sliced and sawed?’

  ‘Not when you have to see the patient the next morning. Not even when it has to do with a malignant tumour and you know you are saving a life by amputating. Why these questions?’

  ‘Just so. I had a friend. His legs were amputated and he died the same day and I thought he would have been better off dying with his legs, silly, I know. The myth of wholeness of the body.’

  The doctor did not find a suitable remark to add to the story.

  ‘Have you just been to the movies?’

  ‘Yes. Across the street.’

  ‘Any good?’

  ‘Nothing special.’

  A girl on high heels entered the restaurant. She walked to their table and was introduced to Daniel as Ruthy. Her legs were fat and hairy but her plump face reflected amusement and kindness. Her hair was tied back and her V-neck cotton dress proudly exposed the slopes of her round soft breasts.

  ‘We go?’ she asked, and explained to Daniel that they were going to the movies.

  The doctor looked boyish now. He wiped his mouth quickly and fumbled in his pocket for money and keys. The girl excited him and he was shy with her and although he did not touch her there was something very sensual in the way he opened the door for her. Daniel remained there until the movement of people outside receded. He was jealous of the doctor and he smiled at the thought. Since Nili left him on a spring day in a room in Tel-Aviv, he had not thought of women’s breasts. He envied the doctor’s shyness. His hand, which was steady and strong in the rubber glove making an incision, was probably clumsy and hesitant touching Ruthy’s skin.

  He was thinking of Kalinsky’s tests looking again at the window – standing now in his own flat realizing it was too early to go to sleep.

  What do they do with the tissue they extract Kalinsky? After the biopsy, do they keep it in the lab so that it continues to live on after you? Do they burn it the way they burned witches and prophets? Will the X-rays be on file when you are gone, so we can add them to the family album as ‘the last photograph taken of our father before he died’? The doctor said they tested bronchial secretions, he was eating while he told me but that was my fault – I asked him. I am your son and if I cough now it will be clean and healthy, and one day you began to cough and there were the germs of death in what you spat out. You never believed in God, did you? Not even on holidays when we went to Synagogue. You didn’t lie to me and when I asked you if you were praying you told me you were reciting a Mickiewicz poem. Is that what you do now when you are in pain, or do you learn to pray? Do you pray for it all to end or do you pray to God to renew your life? Perhaps this is the only thing I really want to ask you.

  The doctor, Daniel imagined, was not really watching the film. He was holding Ruthy and breathing in the freshness of her hair and neck. Tomorrow it would be the smell of ether and a mask on his face, the smell of talcum on his hands before he slips on the gloves, the smell of blood. Now he squeezes her shoulder and it responds, alive. What do they do with the limbs they cut off? Do they bury them, burn them, keep them in jars, use them for experiments, ask the patients whether they want them as souvenirs?

  Sound is amplified on desert nights. Did he imagine he heard coughing from the hospital? Sleep father, sleep. An aria on a neighbour’s radio, Othello. Nili loved jazz, she said when they first met. He loved opera. The cough stopped and the aria came to an end and silence resumed. They asked me – ‘Suppose he is alive, Kalinsky’ – and the tall blond man entered my life. I let him in because he was dead, he was a dream, he was my creation and I could live with him or dispose of him. They were truly concerned, and Rina wanted to write letters and find out more. Did they envy my pastlessness? Did they want me to be an equal, with memories of a house and home cooking and a reproduction on the wall? She once asked me if I were ever spanked and I could not remember. I should ask you when I see you, did you ever slap my face? When they planted the doubt in my mind, do you know what my first thought was? Suppose mother did not die, I thought, and while Rina described to me the elegant tall man, I was reconstructing a beautiful woman who was my mother. I knew you to be dead and I hoped she were alive.

  Chapter Four

  Haim Kalinsky had never been a tall blond man. He was of average height and looks and habits and temper. He displayed neither particular talent nor ambition and when his parents decided he should attend university he consented and even acquired a mild taste for poetry and literature in which class he met the girl who was to be his wife later. He joined his father’s business which was a small firm handling imports from Germany. He was not a lazy man and when his father died – of a heart attack during his sleep – he took over and doubled the turnover, married Mina and had two sons. Routine dominated his life, and if he could not remember any moments of hilarious laughter and joy, neither could he complain of great sorrows. He was considered an honest man, and was never faced with the necessity to lie or cheat to test this opinion. He was not a pillar of the community, he was kind to the poor and to the Synagogue but his own soul needed very little in the way of ceremony and at times he even thought he would rather his boys spoke Polish than Yiddish. A few years before the war he managed to buy a new house and not being a sentimental man he was not sorry to leave his father’s house which was too small and rather old-fashioned. Zion was associated in his mind with several stories in the Bible, heat and flies and a good friend who left Warsaw and became a farmer there.

  When war broke out he made vague plans to move his family to one of the villages where he had customers but on the first of October Hitler entered Warsaw and events moved swiftly which made him realize his inability to cope with quick decisions. He buried some gold in the garden before being moved to the Ghetto and when his wife was taken away he resigned himself to his fate, being helped somewhat by the knowledge that he was sharing it with hundreds of thousands which made him feel somehow safer.

  On a winter day, in the camp, when he was told to choose between his two sons he experienced agony for the first time – he was still digesting the loss of his wife, a loss unclear and mingled with self-pity and remote hope – and his actions on that day were motivated in a way unknown to him. He could never explain why he clasped Shmuel to him and let them lead Daniel away. Were he asked in his Warsaw house to give up one of his sons he would never have been able to decide or to face the choice. There, in the snow, things just happened and he dared not look back, or cry out, or think. Two months earlier the hearts of his sons were replaced by yellow badges and they looked like so many other lambs to be slaughtered. A few days later, they came for the children and he noticed they took the boys who sobbed. He put his trembling palm to Shmuel’s mouth and whispered to him to keep quiet. He covered his son with his weak body and a strange sensation of gentle love and dependence flooded him when he touched the thin limbs. He had never before fondled his sons, nor had he spanked them. It was their mother who had bestowed upon them both kisses and slaps. They left Shrauel with him that night and when he had to share his own portion of bread with the hungry boy he wanted Daniel to be there, and somehow the loss of the young boy settled in him like a physical pain, a numbness at the edges of nerves which were hungry now for the tuft of blond hair.

  For Shmuel he did fight. He offered his own life instead and for a moment it seemed that no human force could unclasp Haim’s embracing arms. Shmuel did not cry, he trembled violently and the tears gathered in his eyes and when they took him away Haim was still embracing the cold narrow emptiness which had been filled with the young body. Someone told him to pray and he uttered a curse, thus c
ursing and weeping for the first time since he was a young child, and his tears were the lonely tears of an orphan rather than those of a bereaved father.

  He was taken to another camp where definite news of his wife’s death was merely a confirmation which did not result in a new wave of mourning.

  How some people survived the war, what it was that made them be among the elected to live while millions evaporated in the darkest of smoke that covered Europe, is a divine riddle. Haim worked hard, suffered silently, and time, which had stopped for him when Daniel was taken, resumed its count of seconds when one day it was all over and softly-pronounced Russian words were heard in the camp.

  He followed the army of Marshal Rokossovsky and when Warsaw capitulated he set out to look for his house, which he found in ruins. The gold was still there but he reburied it and joined the groups of people looking for shelter, for food, for firewood, for a piece of clothing, for a sign from somewhere that life was really to resume its old pace and acquire the meaning and content it used to have.

  Dora Wishnevsky was working in a soup kitchen and managed to find a room in a half-destroyed house. A wall was missing and she was helped by some men who managed to reconstruct one from plywood. She was allowed to take home some left-overs from the kitchen and one day when Haim could not pay for soup she asked him to her room for dinner. She was never married and being rather unattractive she had given up all thoughts of a companion. That night Haim stayed in the little room and when he was about to leave she suggested he might stay as long as he was looking for work. With the same gentle sense of duty that made him sleep with his wife, he found himself making love to Dora one night.

  She thought he was asleep. The candle was put out and she sat there, a virgin were it not for the Germans, and watched the features of this stranger relax into sleep. He was sleeping on a mat on the floor and she watched him from her low bed. He shivered and pulled up the thin cover, exposing his feet to the cold. Suddenly she desired him. She slipped off her gown and not sensing the cold slid in next to him. He mumbled something and she took his hand and placed it on her warm breast feeling for his body with her hands. She did not speak and when he opened his eyes he met her smile, which transformed her face. After he made love to her, he wanted her again, this time not with a remembrance of a forgotten sensation but with a new passion. Not with the rediscovery of his own body but with a sense of pleasure, a physical pleasure, new and mounting and explosive.

  The little room never enjoyed the sun and only Dora’s watch indicated the fact that a new day had begun. She dressed to go to work and he went to look for wood, looking forward to the night. They talked little. Their past lives were not mentioned and they each preferred to carry their own burden of the war years, a vacuum or a hunch separately. He did not kiss her when she entered the room, or stroke her hair or caress her skin as she moved about preparing a soup and slicing the bread. Only when the room was darkened and the outside with its painful scarred face was locked away he was thrown towards her, feeling as intensely ashamed of his desire as she felt proud of it.

  When she told him she was pregnant he was relieved. His desire was no more a forbidden pleasure, it took a form he knew. It was acceptable and normal and he offered to marry her and told her about the gold in the yard.

  Dora Wishnevsky and Haim Kalinsky were married by a Rabbi who frequented the soup-kitchen. She bought a cheap ring which he placed on her finger and she took the day off. It was the first spring after the war. The air was brisk and the Vistula flew by with vigour carrying with it some of the war memories. Children were allowed to cry now and people emerged every day from the ruins heroic and stubborn and hopeful to rebuild their erased city.

  Haim took Dora to the Muranov quarter to the site of his old house. They dug out the gold and looked among the ruins.

  ‘What were your children like?’ she asked for the first time.

  ‘They were good children.’

  ‘Do you want a son?’

  He did not care, and towards the end of the summer Miriam was born. Miriam grew with the city, she learned to talk as the last tuft of smoke from the crematoriums disappeared and she said, ‘Mommy’, as the large graveyard gradually gave way to the shaping new metropolis. Haim was working, in partnership with two others, and when Dora suspected he had something to do with the black market she did not mention it. They had two rooms now in a new block of flats, and food, and toys for the baby, and a few friends and a fresh layer of memories separated from other layers by sensations unmentioned, horrors untalked about, pain without details or shape and perhaps dreams forgotten with dawn.

  Dora grew fat after she had Miriam, and Haim was losing his hair. The baby was pretty and joyous and Haim spent many hours talking to her and playing with her on the floor, something he never did with his sons.

  They were not going to stay in Warsaw. The city gave them what it could, but it would never be home again and they were wondering whether to move to Germany, to go overseas to America where Dora had some relations or simply move to another town in Poland.

  They applied to the communal service for advice and it was there that for the first time the idea of going to Israel was suggested. Haim wanted to go to Germany. There were opportunities there, he argued. They could save money and then go to America or Israel. At night, in bed, Dora spoke up. First gently and meekly, and then with strength and enthusiasm.

  They should go to Israel, she said. Nothing else was safe, and Miriam could grow up without yellow clouds over her curly head. The country of oranges and prophets and freedom and sun. They had enough money to start and she could work too. She squeezed his hand as she talked and he knew she really wanted it and said he would find out more about it.

  They went on living in Warsaw. Occasionally they referred to the possibility of leaving but Miriam was now wearing a school uniform. They moved to a larger flat, Haim was a partner in a few shops in town and there was no hurry.

  Rumours from Israel suggested that life was tough and demanding and several people returned after a few years and resettled in Poland, criticizing everything to do with Israel in spite of the glee in their children’s eyes whenever the name was mentioned.

  One day a young man, well-dressed and smiling, knocked on the door. The Kalinskys were having supper, expecting a few friends to come in later for a card game. The man introduced himself as a Jewish Agency clerk and politely apologised for coming unannounced. Miriam, whose best friend was a girl who had been to Israel for a few months, watched him with admiring eyes and Haim offered him a seat.

  ‘I need some details about your previous family,’ the man explained. ‘There are many reunions and relatives find each other even after years of separation. If you suspect any of your people are still alive, they might be traced and found.’

  ‘They are all dead. The ones I cared for.’

  ‘Your wife is listed as dead, and this was verified. What about the boys?’

  ‘One was taken first. They said they would shoot him. The other, Shmuel, was left with me for a while and was taken later.’

  He wanted to ask Miriam to leave the room, but did not quite know how to do it.

  ‘How old was the first one?’

  ‘Six, Daniel.’

  ‘Do you have a photograph of the boys?’

  He had none. The young man figured Daniel should be about twenty-five now, and a photograph would not help much anyway.

  ‘Were the boys born in Warsaw?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What language did you speak at home?’

  ‘Yiddish and Polish.’

  ‘Did you ever think of going to Israel? We can help you, many people left and they are very happy there.’

  ‘I know. We thought about it. But we are growing too old to start anew.’

  ‘Do you mind if we try and find out about the boys? You never know.’

  The young man told them several stories of meetings between parents and children, brothers, sisters … He was almost boas
ting when he talked, as if he had the power of a God to give people the unexpected, the greatest of joys, as if he were in charge of resurrections and the announcer of redemption.

  Before he left Haim sighed.

  ‘No use, they are all dead.’ And the man looked at Miriam as if in her eyes he was to find the hope her father’s lacked.

  ‘Do I have brothers, father?’ Miriam asked.

  She went to sleep that night thinking of her two brothers, tanned and handsome and protective. How she wanted to have a brother! And Dora asked Haim if he believed there was a chance, and when he embraced her in the large bed he remembered Shmuel’s body clinging to life.

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ Dora whispered.

  Suppose they are alive, he found himself thinking. Are they honest? Are they strong? What language do they speak? How tall are they? Would he recognize them? Do they know each other? And again, for a brief moment he was an orphan, a middle-aged orphan holding on to his fat comforting wife.

  A few months later the young man from the agency knocked at the door.

  Along the banks of the Vistula Warsaw was executing its motto, Loutemnit Procellas, while the Jordan flew south feeding green-blue fresh water to the Dead Sea. Daniel was lying on his back reading one day, when Stash, his Polish class-mate, burst into the room waving a letter. His face was red and he could not contain his excitement.

  ‘Read it!’

  It was a short letter. It simply said that there was a chance that members of Stash’s family were alive and to be found. The agency needed several details to verify the connection and would he please send a resumé of all he remembered and a photograph. Daniel never cared much for Stash, who was a year younger. He did not care to share a past or a present with him, and he was rather surprised to be approached in such a passionate way with what for the boy was a cause for a tremendous excitement.

  ‘Just write them. Do you remember a great deal?’

  ‘Not really. I had a sister, an older sister. She was blond, like you. I had a large green car. My sister’s name was Katia. They left us with a farmer away from town and I cried, then she went away with a nun dressed in gray.’