It isn’t so bad here, is it? decent enough?
My hometown town was a town; there were mountains, a river, good bread; these towns are chicken coops; these towns are slower than ooze; they have no inner character.
You mean no binding beliefs, Mother, don’t you?
No binding beliefs, that’s right.
Just like parochial Catholicism, Mother, like anti-Semitism, Mother — they bind more than sheaves.
Joey, you are American and have no convictions.
I was almost arrested.
But not convicted.
I was blamed. A blame not unremembered, Mother. Anyway, Joey said, it’s the binding I can’t bear — the joining, the brotherly embrace — because if one anti-Semite is a curiosity, three in a room are a zoo, and any more than that are a plague.
Joey, what do you see in Jews they shouldn’t be singled out?
Not any more than in anybody.
Still, she said, someone should be singled out.
Then let it be your Jesus. He wanted to be singled out.
Ach, you have gone so far to the bad in your beliefs …
In my disbeliefs, dear, little and light like puffballs from the cotton trees.
Dandelions, you mean, Miriam said with satisfaction, and they’re weeds.
So, Mother, why do you think he left us?
For none of the usual reasons.
You mean he didn’t leave us for a woman?
Not for a woman, not for a life of crime, not for freedom from his duties.
You’re sure?
He wasn’t a man’s man or a ladies’ man; he was a soft sweet steady man; we held hands; he didn’t walk fast; a lot of the time he smelled of ink, not bad; but then he changed, became an actor on the stage; we weren’t who we’d been to him, or he to us either, because he became afraid, and we were safe in the theater, maybe, he thought, because the audience was going to play out the tragedy, not the actors; anyway, we were better off being somebody else — imagine, Joey — being somebody else.
Maybe, Mother, it was money.
Gelt? why?
I mean, maybe he was ready to go off a lot of times, just as he left your land for England it seemed all of a sudden, but maybe, the way he thought about it, it had been in his mind for months or years, he just hadn’t known what to do till he found out how the Jews were leaving, and maybe he took us with him because at first when the wanderlust overwhelmed him he didn’t know it was so private a feeling, so personal a journey; he didn’t know that taking us made his hope impossible to realize like trying to fashion a fresh look to surprise a mirror while still wearing the same old hat and coat; so naturally when he ran away to England he took us with him only to find out after he’d been there awhile that it was the family all along he was running from, not Jew haters, not Germans, but the hat, the scarf, the dog, the coat, the sound of some voices — you know — always there, the same voices saying the same things in his ear, maybe, and then money all of a sudden came along, fit in his pocket like a bar of candy, so he could completely and entirely go, do what he’d always wanted to do, leave his self behind like a footprint in the snow … where they have real snow … in Austria.
Miriam sat with her arms over her eyes, the worse to see the world, the better to see the past.
Your father didn’t leave you, Joey, or your sister either; he left me, left me and my soap smell, just because he was unhappy with himself, sleeping, eating with a disinfector, working at a stupid lowlife job with lowlifes coming and going in and out of his own lowlife life, nothing to go to work for, nothing to brag about to the boys, nothing to come home to but a sterilized room in a cinder-block building near a neighborhood where he’d be snubbed every day he was seen, a no-account squalorman himself because he worked in a betting parlor, and lowlife, too, because of me, a laundry lady, the lowest of life, washing dirt off the dirty drawers of dirty people, tired in our legs and in our hearts, when he knew, Joey, what he’d done, how he’d pulled us up out of our own earth so that now we had nowhere to grow, nowhere to flourish, losing our looks, our youth, our energies, our dreams, for nothing, in order to live in other people’s catastrophes as if they were summer camps for the city poor.
Guilt is very Jewish, Mother.
Die Schuld … no … not me … now Jews do nasty naughty things and are as black with Schuld as a stove with soot and still go on burning with their business as if they had no more breast to beat. The guilt goes up the flue. Schuld bore your father down, Joey, I could see his knees in a bend like an old bow that can’t return to straight, nor did I help him with his load because I added to it every day, I complained whenever I saw him, back turned or not, dressed or not, asleep or not, I said I am not a Jew, Rudi, I want to go back to Graz, the war is over, there’s no reason to remain here, in this country where people ski down the slopes of their noses, in this ruin of a city, in this mountainless town where every window’s broken and they boil only big roots.
How could Father disappear so … like a smoked cigar?
Your father didn’t smoke, Joey, he was a good man in his habits, he didn’t overdrink either, or pinch bottoms.
He gambled.
Oh, that was a shock, when they told me, because he never bet even on a fight among roosters.
Well, he bet on the ponies one time, Mother — and won — it must have felt as though he’d been touched by the gods.
He never said a word, he never showed me a happy face, all that time while he must have been waiting for his forgers to forge a passport for him, steal a vehicle permit, make a birth avowal — whatever it was, his money, his winnings — what do they say? — burning a hole in his socks, he never let on to anybody that he’d bet or, having bet, that he’d won, or having won that he was going to leave us like we were not people but a place, like Graz, an embarrassment to him — old ways, old folks, old days — those of us he’d said he loved and held tight in a dark Tube — a cellar that shook as if it were solid but not solid enough — a piece of us broke off like shaken brick — he wasn’t solid enough — he divided himself from his family and sailed away as if we were the shore and he a so-long ship.
We can’t be sure of that, though, Mother.
I should have known, I should have known, because Rudi changed; he, who was soft like a patch of moss, grew hard and harsh as bark; he’d glare at me full of rage all up in his face; not that he ever hit me, but where a smile once went the boils of a pot were; and there was anger also in his throat, his eyes; his eyes never brimmed anymore or went wide to take things in; his silence scared me into silence, too; I couldn’t say a clear word.
He changed before he won his bet, you mean, not after?
Rudi thought of himself as a prophet, not as a modest decent printer with a wife who let him do what he wanted with her, to be happy in her arms, and calm after, snoring as softly as a purr.
Father just disappeared, Mother, that’s all anyone knows: he was here, he was there, then he was nowhere at all.
They told me — the police did — that he was seen collecting his bet, so we know he had some money on him; then they told me — those detective men — that one of the crooks — those counterfeiters of Canadians the police had taken in — admitted selling Rudi a passport as well as a black-market steamship ticket, and another officer later told the father—
Him?
• about a license, Joey, the father guessed it was, that Rudi had also wanted.
He?
• the holy father, yes, he liked my round face, I think.
• So Rudi had the money, the passport, and the ticket …?
• Das Gelt — der Passkarte — der Zettel … he had them while he was living with us still and sometimes kissing me on the mouth.