Too Many Men (33 page)

“Just a guess,” Ruth said. “Why did you want to see me?”

“I don’t know,” Martina said. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” said Ruth. “I was feeling quite miserable, and I feel much better now. I’m sorry I’m not Gerhard.”

“It is over between me and Gerhard,” Martina said. “But you do look very much like him. I wish I had a photograph of him. You would be very surprised yourself, at this resemblance.”

“I’ve seen lots of people I thought I looked like,” Ruth said.

“Really?” said Martina.

“They’re all dead,” said Ruth. “I had no relatives other than my mother and father. All of their families were murdered by the Nazis.”

“I am so very sorry,” Martina said. She looked overwhelmed.

“I didn’t tell you so you would feel sorry for me,” Ruth said. “I was just explaining to you that I see images of myself in photographs of Jews, in Poland, before the war.”

“I was not saying sorry because I felt sorry for you,” Martina said. “I was saying sorry for what we did to you. But perhaps it is better to say nothing. Sorry is not the right word for this sort of apology.” Martina stopped talking. “Would you like me to leave?” she said to Ruth.

“Because you’re German?” Ruth said. “Of course not.”

“I am very sorry,” Martina said.

“You didn’t do anything,” Ruth said.

“Neither did the Jews,” said Martina.

They sat in the lobby in silence for a minute or two. “Is this the reason you are in Poland?” Martina said.

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L I L Y B R E T T

“Yes,” said Ruth. “My father and I are looking for something. At least I’m looking for something, and he agreed to come here with me.”

“What are you looking for?” Martina said.

“I don’t know,” Ruth answered.

It was the truth. She didn’t know what she was doing here. She didn’t know why she had dragged her father here. Why she had wanted to be here with him. Was she looking for something? If she was, what was it? She seemed to have found some china. Was that what she came here for? She didn’t think so.

“Maybe you have heard of my ex-husband?” Martina said. “He is a playwright. Quite well known in Germany. Gerhard Schmidt. He writes about Jews?”

Ruth shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t heard of him.”

“He is really only well known in Germany.” Martina said. “Many people think he is obsessed with the Jews.”

“Germans might think that any thought about Jews is excessive,” Ruth said.

“Perhaps,” said Martina.

“Why did you split up if you were so in love with him?” Ruth said.

“I was too German for him,” Martina said.

“But he’s German, isn’t he?” Ruth said.

“Yes,” she said. “But he doesn’t like Germans. He doesn’t like any Germans. I felt sorry for his parents. They gave him everything money could buy. And still he was not happy with them. He called his mother and father anti-Semites.”

“Were they?” Ruth said.

“I don’t think so,” said Martina. “They are very kind people.”

“The kindest Germans could be anti-Semitic,” Ruth said.

“I suppose so,” said Martina.

Ruth wasn’t sure if a German who called his parents anti-Semitic was any better than any other kind of German.

“Gerhard is wonderful,” Martina said. “But he is tormented. His new play is about a wealthy German who finds he was adopted as a child. He turns on his parents until they admit he was adopted from Jews. Gerhard’s mother is ninety-three. She couldn’t stop crying when she saw that play.

Gerhard’s trouble is that he wishes he was a Jew.”

T O O M A N Y M E N

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“I’d agree that that is troubling,” Ruth said.

“It is a very strange thing,” Martina said.

“Maybe all writers are strange,” said Ruth.

“He was always telling me how German I was,” Martina said. “Of course I was German. I am German. He made me feel bad about being a German. I can’t do anything about the fact that I am a German.”

“Of course not,” said Ruth. “You can’t suddenly become Nigerian.”

Martina laughed. “Gerhard wished that he was a Jew from the time he was a boy,” she said. “His parents thought it was a teenage rebellion. But he is fifty-two now, and he is still the same. He still wants to be a Jew.”

“Lots of Jews would hand their Jewishness over to him,” Ruth said.

“Lots of Jews aren’t thrilled to be Jewish. If he wants to be a Jew why doesn’t he convert?”

“He doesn’t want to be a Jew in the religious sense,” Martina said. “He wants to be a Jew in the cultural and traditional sense.”

“That does sound a bit crazy,” Ruth said.

“I think his parents were not strict enough with him when he was a child,” Martina said. “They treated him like he was made from glass. He was very ill when he was a baby and I think that made them very nervous of him.”

“Why did you love him?” Ruth said.

“I loved him because I saw a sadness in him that I thought I could take away,” Martina said. “And for a few years, I think I took that sadness away.” She looked miserable. “Gerhard is a very fine, very talented, wonderful man,” she said. “He just fell out of love with me because I am German. For two years I dyed my hair brown so I would not look so German.

But it was not enough. It was like a sickness with him. ‘We can’t change what we are,’ I said to him. ‘We can try,’ he said. I don’t know why Gerhard was so unhappy with what he was,” Martina said. “He had everything. He had the love of two devoted parents. He had money. The Schmidts were very rich.” She paused. She looked sad.

“He doesn’t sound very attractive,” Ruth said.

“That’s the trouble,” Martina said. “If he was a terrible person I wouldn’t have loved him. But he is not, he is wonderful.”

Women were crazy, Ruth thought. They could justify any amount of intolerable behavior, in the name of love.

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L I L Y B R E T T

“People thought I married Gerhard for his money,” Martina said. “But I didn’t, I married him for his sadness.”

“Why do women do that?” Ruth said. “Why are they suckers for sadness?”

“I don’t know,” said Martina.

“Men don’t feel that way,” Ruth said. “Men don’t find themselves grav-itating to sadness, do they?”

“I think not,” said Martina, and she laughed at the thought.

It was a strange thought. Ruth imagined groups of men banding together to scour the world looking for sad women.

“Men are looking for cheerfulness, I think,” Ruth said. She thought that, on the whole, she had done pretty well for a cheerless person. She had had three husbands. Maybe she wasn’t all that cheerless. Whatever she was, she thought, she was sure that she fell quite a bit short of cheerful.

“What a strange story,” Ruth said to Martina.

“It is very strange,” said Martina. “Gerhard looks Jewish.”

“Do his parents?” Ruth said.

“No, not at all,” Martina said.

“I think you’re better off without him,” Ruth said.

“I miss him,” Martina said. “He was clever, and witty and sensitive.”

“There are not that many clever, witty and sensitive men around,” Ruth said. “But why did you have to choose a German who wanted to be a Jew?”

Gerhard sounded bizarre, Ruth thought. Although maybe it wasn’t so bizarre. She herself almost avoided Jews. She belonged to no Jewish groups or organizations. She never went to synagogue. She felt nervous on those rare occasions when she had been in a group of Jews. Groups of Jews seemed dangerous, to her. They were so blunt. So direct. They asked questions and questioned answers. They drew attention to themselves. As though that was not dangerous. American Jews seemed less aware of the peril of being Jewish.

All of her life Ruth had chosen non-Jewish friends. Waspish men and women she had felt safe with. Safe from what? She didn’t know. It was often a struggle to maintain the friendships. Ruth felt that she was too intense, too intrusive, too curious, too extreme for the moderate and restrained friends she chose. She was too much for these non-Jews. She saw T O O M A N Y M E N

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it in their responses and their expressions and their gestures. In the last few years she had tried to make friends with some Jews.

She had married non-Jews, too. Edek and Rooshka had been bothered by this when Ruth had married her first husband. By the time Ruth had left husband number two, her parents were more concerned with the turnover in husbands than the husband’s particular religion. The fact that Garth wasn’t Jewish didn’t bother Edek at all. Ruth’s two divorces seemed to have rendered obsolete Edek’s desire for a Jewish partner for her. Edek just wished Ruth could stay married. Ruth couldn’t imagine being married to a Jew. Jewish men seemed soft to her. She thought that, possibly, she had a counterphobic attraction to Gentiles. That seemed as lunatic to her as any of Gerhard Schmidt’s actions.

“My mother was very upset when I left Gerhard,” Martina said. “She thought he was wonderful. She said that most marriages are not perfect so why should I expect perfection? She could not accept that I knew that Gerhard no longer loved me. My mother adored him. She liked his concerns with Jewish people.”

“Well, she must be unusual for a German,” Ruth said. She hoped she wasn’t being offensive.

“When I was growing up,” Martina said, “we had people from Israel staying with us. Five or six times a year guests from Israel would arrive. My mother never explained anything about these visitors to me, but I somehow got the impression that we personally had done something terrible to these people.”

“Where did your mother find the Israelis?” Ruth said.

“I don’t know,” said Martina. “They would just appear. We lived in Munich at the time.”

“How weird,” said Ruth.

“I felt responsible myself,” Martina said. “I remember saying I was very sorry to one woman. She seemed an older woman to me but maybe she was only about forty. She patted me on the head and said, ‘You have nothing to be sorry for. You did not do anything to us.’ I thought she was only being nice to me.”

“I think it must have been tough for so many German children who were born after the war,” Ruth said. “It must be a terrible burden to won-

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der what evil your mother or father or your grandparents might have per-petrated. It must make adolescence and the subsequent separation of children from their parents very complicated.” Martina nodded.

“Did anyone else you knew have Jewish people to stay?” Ruth said.

“No,” Martina said. “At school the others didn’t even know what a Jew was. I worried for many years that my mother and father must have done something very wrong to many people,” Martina said.

“I doubt it,” Ruth said. “If they had, they wouldn’t have been trying to make up for it.”

“That is not quite logical,” Martina said.

“It’s logical enough,” said Ruth.

She didn’t want to dwell on this subject. “My parents didn’t want me to leave either of my husbands,” she said. “They preferred me to be married in a less than perfect marriage, than unmarried. They saw an unmarried female as being in a very imperfect state.”

“I’m afraid so do I,” Martina said. “I know it is not very modern or progressive of me to think this way.”

“You’ll find someone else,” Ruth said. “You’re so gorgeous. You won’t be on your own for long.”

“Thank you,” said Martina. “I think my attitude toward marriage comes from my mother,” she said. “She believed in love forever. She is still mourning my father, who has been dead for eleven years.”

“Your mother is a widow?” Ruth said.

She liked the sound of Martina’s mother. Maybe Martina’s mother would like to meet Edek? Ruth suddenly realized the drawback to this potential matchmaking. Martina Schmidt’s mother was German. She wasn’t sure Edek would be interested in a German woman, even a German who felt sympathetic to Jews. It was hard enough for Ruth to get her father to agree to meet any woman, let alone a German. Maybe Martina Schmidt’s mother wouldn’t really be keen to meet a Jew as a potential partner either.

“Do you have children from your marriages?” Martina said.

“No,” Ruth said.

“Neither do I,” said Martina. “I saw from the beginning that it is very difficult to have a working life and to have children. I watched my mother struggle. She was a schoolteacher but she felt all the time that she was not T O O M A N Y M E N

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paying enough attention to me. And I always went to the same school where she was teaching.”

“What do you get back when you have a child?” Ruth said. “As far as I can see, you get very little. It’s not like the old days when children eventually supported you.”

Martina laughed. “You are right,” she said. “Not many children today think about supporting their parents.”

“All over New York,” Ruth said, “parents are paying large sums of money for their children to be able to complain about them. They pay therapists every month for this privilege. Why pay money for someone to unravel what you’ve done to them? Why not avoid doing it in the first place?”

“In Germany, it is not quite like this,” Martina said. “But it is beginning.

Middle-class parents are beginning to look to therapy as a solution for their children.”

“It is no sacrifice to choose a career over children,” Ruth said. “Those women who think it is have clearly never had children.”

“Gerhard said something very similar to this when we first met,” said Martina. “I thought it was a very refreshing view for a man. You would like Gerhard very much. You would recognize something about yourself in him. I cannot explain exactly what.”

“I hope I’m not as confused and demented as Gerhard sounds,” Ruth said.

“He is confused, but not demented,” Martina said.

“Which foot does he tap?” Ruth said.

“His right foot,” Martina said. Ruth was very quiet. What a peculiar mixture of events and circumstances she was encountering, she thought.

Here she was, in Lódz, hearing about a middle-aged German man who resembled her and tapped his right foot ten times. And wished he was a Jew. Life was strange. She decided against asking Martina if she knew what occasioned the right-footed taps of her ex-husband.