The Archivist (8 page)

Their daughter entered their world as proof — the largest, brightest proof — of the rightness of their choices. With emigration and conversion everything had changed. The war years were an inexplicable lapse from the grace to which they had been restored as followers of Christ. Loss was a caesura in a larger rhythm of gain and growth, of prosperity.

Roberta stressed to me that her parents were quiet people, disinclined to proselytize. The war had taught them to keep to themselves — a habit of being that altered, in America, only insofar as they allowed themselves to join in the activities of their congregation. They had almost no friends or acquaintances outside that safe circle. Their expressions of faith took the form of practical acts centered on the maintenance of the house of worship itself — an unconscious throwback, Roberta felt, to their experience in that other holy place that had sheltered them against all odds. Every third year Kurt painted the church and its rectory, and Trudy designed beautiful altar cloths and choir gowns.

Yet their Christianity was not confined wholly to the narrow locus of the church building and its congregants. They understood that they had larger responsibilities, ones that rippled out to the world they had left. They read the New Testament every day and subscribed to several periodicals dealing with the urgent theological questions that Bonhoeffer’s writing had initially raised for them — ethical and political questions about which they held strong if silent opinions. They considered themselves both politically aware and liberal. Theirs was an intellectual Christianity, but they believed deeply that Christ was the guarantor of all human survival. The absurdity of their own survival had at last been made bearable.

Roberta grew up surrounded by Dutch, Irish, and Italian immigrants. The decade after the war’s end brought Germans and Eastern Europeans to Hoboken, including some Jews. One childless couple, the Rosens, lived above a small market they owned on Washington Street, across from the first apartment Kurt and Trudy had rented. As a girl Roberta went into the market every day. Mr. Rosen stood behind the meat counter; he had thick hands covered with curly grey hair, and on his left forearm was a number in dull blue ink. Mrs. Rosen gave Roberta hard candy and spoke to her mother in German. Between the two women Roberta sensed a strong affinity and an equally strong tension. It was not until many years later that she realized that their bond was the result of a recognition that neither woman could express, and the tension an outcome of what one woman suspected and the other denied.

Denial was necessary. Kurt and Trudy Spire treated the tangled threads of history and identity as if they had always been and would always be separate, two skeins that did not braid. What had happened to them had nothing to do, now that it was over, with the individuals they had become. Conversion meant not that they had once been Jewish and were now Protestants, but rather that their having been Jewish was — and here Roberta quoted Eliot as she struggled for the right words — an unattended moment, a moment in and out of time.

“But any shrink will tell you,” Roberta added at this point in her narration, “that while denial is useful, it has its price. There’s no such thing as identity without history. My parents think they’re living in the present, but actually they live in a dream of the present — a dream that their past continually threatens to break open.”

She rubbed her eyes briefly; the gesture suggested her tension. “Maintaining that level of denial would take a fair bit of energy, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, noting the creases at the corners of her eyes. “I guess it would.”

“You know, my parents are tired so much of the time. Upbeat, deliberately cheery and upbeat, yet tired … Their kind of optimism is exhausting.”

Roberta’s account of her parents’ conversion wound down at dusk. We were sitting at a table near one of the windows. The fading light entered the room at a slant, mingling with the smoke from Roberta’s cigarette. I helped myself to one from her pack. I’d taken to smoking occasionally with her and found the activity enjoyable, untinged by even a hint of the remorse I might have expected to feel after relapsing into a habit broken years earlier. There is something about being in one’s sixties that vitiates such guilt. I didn’t want to resume smoking; I merely wished to have a cigarette, now and then, in Roberta’s presence.

“So,” she said, “you wanted to hear about my parents, how they got here, all that stuff. Is your curiosity satisfied?”

“Well,” I said, exhaling, “what interests me is that I asked for the story of their emigration, but what I got is the story of their conversion from Judaism to Christianity.”

“It’s the same story. And you’ve put it slightly wrong: they converted from the identity of Jewishness to the identity of Christian-ness, if that makes any sense.”

“In a way,” I said. “I mean, I understand that they had no belief in Judaism, and in that sense naturally they didn’t convert from it to another faith. I gather they turned from a life with no faith toward one in which faith could play a part. From darkness to light, one might say.”

“One might. I wouldn’t.”

I decided to push a little. “Who knows what it was like for your parents? You can only speculate.”

I waited for her to continue, but she was quiet. After a minute I broke the silence.

“Not long after we met,” I said, “you indicated that you found your parents’ conversion distasteful.”

She smiled, but her face reddened slightly. “One of those understatements I use with strangers,” she said.

“So try something else. I’ve ceased being a stranger.”

Her color deepened. She reached for another cigarette.

“Enraging,” she said after lighting up. “Enraging.”

I didn’t know where to go, in which direction to urge her. At various points during her narrative I’d detected anger, the veiled kind that displays itself in certain turns of phrase, certain ironies. Yet I hadn’t expected her to admit to feeling it, and its sudden expression was like the presence of a third party. I noted the signals: Roberta’s sharp exhalations of smoke, a rapid flicking of ash, the sliding of one black-shoed foot to the carpeted floor, where it tapped out a muted staccato. Her anger lay just under the surface, and it governed. I was foolish to think I could urge or lead her anywhere.

“You confuse me,” I said as blandly as possible.

She snorted, then turned and looked directly at me. Even in that oblique light, her eyes were a crisp green.

“Do I?” There was a pause; when she spoke again, her voice was somewhat less sharp. “I confuse myself, too. I mean, I’m thirty-five, did you know that? — you’d probably guessed something close, hm? And still locked in combat with my mother and father. Oh, we get along, at least on the surface. But I haven’t talked with them about anything serious for at least two years — since just before I came back here to do graduate work, in fact.”

“Why?” I said.

“We had a large fight. I was working at the time, in Manhattan, for a small poetry press. I’d gone to visit my parents, and I was looking through some photo albums when I came across a couple of pictures of my grandparents — both sets, the Lansmanns and the Spiers. I’d known those photos since I was little. There were several of the Spiers, all taken on Marienburger Allee in Charlottenburg — right in front of their house. But the one photo of the Lansmanns, the only one my parents had kept, was taken in another neighborhood of Berlin. I began wondering where. At first I thought Kreuzberg, which is close to Charlottenburg, but then I remembered my mother telling me that her parents’ house had sat on a steep side street — Kreuzberg is quite hilly — and I figured the photo must’ve been taken somewhere else, because the background wasn’t right. My grandparents were standing to one side of some kind of big building. It had the look of a church — and it had obviously been badly damaged. All its windows were busted and there was a lot of fire damage. The picture was taken from across the street — a wide one, like a boulevard — so the Lansmanns themselves were small and not too distinct. But the building was so big that it didn’t all fit into the picture. I was staring at it, wondering. Then I flipped it over and saw that my mother had written ‘November 1938’ on the back. With parentheses around it.

“And I got it. Something about the date, in parentheses — it was those parentheses that did it. I had this weird feeling inside my rib cage. For a minute I had trouble inhaling, I felt a little dizzy. Suddenly this possibility had entered my mind, this suspicion, and it was such an immense thing with so many implications that my body kind of seized up, like a clutch you shift too fast and the gears lock, you know, and the engine stalls. I felt stalled.

“My mother came into the room just as I was sitting there, holding this photo. My parents had told me lots of stories about my grandparents, about life in Berlin. My mother’s stories were of walking along the Spree, of long Sunday-afternoon picnics in the Tiergarten after church. My father’s stories were of the Schleicher children, his playmates in Marienburger Allee, and their uncle Dietrich in jail, murdered for his Christian ideals. And I’d believed everything: the church stories, picnic stories, the stories of how both my grandfathers — men in their early fifties — had managed to evade military service by faking illnesses; the stories of Berlin bombed, of electricity blackouts and coal shortages and the constant hunger. And the stories of my parents’ move to Holland after the war finally ended, to make a better life. And of how they’d heard about the deaths of their parents, my four grandparents, between 1946 and 1949. All four died of natural causes, my mother had said.

“All of it — I’d swallowed every word, and suddenly here was this familiar photograph with a date in parentheses on the back, written in pencil by my mother. The whole house of cards came tumbling down. I looked up at her. She must’ve noticed something was wrong because she said
what?
quietly, and then again
what?
, and I kept staring at her. Finally I was able to use my mouth, which had gone all gummy and dry.

“Kristallnacht
, I said.
This is that synagogue in all the history books. On Orianenburger Strasse.
And after a moment, she said
yes
.

“You were
, I said — and I was shaking my head in disbelief but I knew I was right —
no, are, you are Jewish. No
, she said,
were, we were but that was in another life.

“I looked away for a minute and the room sort of lurched and I looked back. My mother was very pale.

“Why didn’t you
, I started to say, but she cut in with something like
why should we, what’s the point, it’s all past, over, don’t you see, we made a new life here —
and then her face crumpled and she started crying, and something in me snapped and I began to scream, like in a movie. My father came running in. He saw me holding the photo, back-side up, and he figured it all out fast. He started trying to talk to me in his warm voice that always used to calm me down, but I kept yelling and flailing my arms around. He couldn’t get near me.

“I’d never felt such pure shock. They’d tricked me. I couldn’t trust anything they’d told me: all their stories were lies. I pushed the photo in my mother’s face, but she had her hands cupped over her eyes; and I said
where, where did they die!
And finally my father said
we were told they died in the camp in Flossenburg
, and I said
and yours, your parents
and he whispered
Flossenburg, we heard they also were sent there
.

“I left the house. The next day I came back, and they told me some of what had really happened to them during the war. A part of me still didn’t believe they were telling me the truth, but if it wasn’t the truth it was perhaps something close to it — the version I just told you. And I said nothing. They begged me to forgive them, they’d only tried to spare me from hurtful things. This went on for hours, it seemed, while I sat there unable to say anything at all.

“It’s been polite between us, but not much more, since that day. I go back to Hoboken a few times a year. Never around any of the holidays, theirs or mine —”

“— what do you mean by that?” I interrupted.

“Just what I said. Theirs — the Christian ones — and mine — the Jewish ones. I’m Jewish. I haven’t made that clear?”

I raised my hands, palms up. “It depends on what you mean by Jewish, doesn’t it?” I asked. “I understand the birthright part of it, I get the facts. But you haven’t said anything about what being Jewish means for you, so I can only guess.”

“Guess, then,” she said.

“No, Roberta,” I said. “Why make me put the pieces together? What’s the problem with telling me straight out?”

She looked a bit taken aback, perhaps as much at the heat of my words as at their substance.

“Well,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “I figured you’re an archivist, you probably enjoy a little guesswork.”

“Archivists aren’t detectives,” I said. My face felt hot. “You’ve set it up so that if I say something about your being Jewish that you consider wrongheaded, you’re likely to become irritated with me. And I can do without that. A little straightforwardness —”

“— all right, Matthias,” she said, taking in a long draught of cigarette.

I waited a beat or two, watching her, watching myself watch her.

“Good,” I said. “I like it when you see my point.” “Have a smoke,” she said, extending the pack and holding a lit match between her second and third fingers. “Too much heaviness, hm? As to my Jewishness —”

I broke in again, waving away the cigarette. “Wait,” I said. “It’s getting on toward dinner, and I’m hungry. I take you out, you talk. I listen. I even pay. Is it a deal?”

The look on her face was one I couldn’t then or now describe except as a peculiar mixture of fear and relief, with an underlay of what might’ve been amusement. I couldn’t pretend to myself that I trusted her, or deny that I wanted her company intensely — wanted to continue watching her eyes crease at the corners, her fingers spin her cigarettes to dislodge the ash, her feet tap out their tension like a code.