“Yes.” I get the analogy. I get what she means. But Effi is enthusiastic about the idea and wants to keep explaining it. So what if I get it.
“That’s what people do. They need bridges. See, no one is telling you to stop feeling what you’re feeling. Just build a bridge. So you can cross over. You can even stand on the bridge and look down at the river, just without being inside it. Do you know how many bridges I’ve built?”
A bridge. I’m already taking measurements for the first supports, and Effi says, “Or maybe you could punish her.”
“Punish?”
“Punish Anat, you know, maybe that’s what you need.”
“What do you mean, punish?”
“It has to be something you choose. Like you do with kids.”
Punish Anat. Why should I punish Anat?
Effi comes to life. “For instance, another woman. Yes, something like that, so it won’t be easy. Another woman, at least once, yes.” (She is falling in love with the idea. She talks quickly, thinking, another woman, that’s what will help.)
“What are you talking about?”
“Then think of something else.”
“But why would I be with another woman?”
She gets annoyed. “Okay, you find something then. You’re the child. Figure out what will make you feel that it’s over and done with.”
Another woman? Where did she get that peculiar idea? Anat is the only one, I’m not attracted to other women. Why would I be with another woman?
(There is one, oddly. We met not long ago at Yariv’s kindergarten. I went to pick him up and it started raining. We stood beneath a small cornice that leaked; we were the last people in the kindergarten except for one of the teaching assistants, who jingled a large bunch of keys, put it in her bag, and stood next to us. She asked if I was Yariv’s dad. I said, no, I was the infamous child-kidnapper, Heinrik Chapinski. She laughed and said, “Why didn’t you say so? We give top honors to child-kidnappers around here!” I looked at her and wondered when kindergarten assistants got so pretty. Mine, Chana, was a half-mad dwarf who only liked quiet children, but she didn’t like me even though I was quiet. I plucked up the courage to ask if she really was the teaching assistant. She laughed again and said actually she wasn’t the assistant, she was also a child-kidnapper. In fact, Yariv was in her sights too because he was the cutest kid, but I, Heinrik Chapinski, had got to him first. I was surprised at how she had picked up the name and repeated it correctly. She didn’t even know that Heinrik Chapinski was tried after the war for the sadistic extermination of Jews in the Bochnia ghetto. She smiled and said that if we were both child-kidnappers then we should get together some time to discuss professional hazards. I told her I was married. Happily, I stressed. I pointed to Yariv: “That’s the result.” She looked hurt and said she hadn’t meant anything, she was just being nice. I wanted to say something friendly, to take it back, but Yariv started crying and tugged my hand. He wailed as only he knows how, without sentences, only words, leaving me responsible for the syntax. Half the words he was saying were “Itzik.” Itzik was a daunting entity in Yariv’s world, a kid who hit other kids and lorded over the sandbox and told all the other kids what to do. A kapo. Ever since that day, every time I come to pick Yariv up, I’m the embarrassed one. She seems quite cheerful. (“Hello, Heinrik!” She smiles prettily.)
Nothing will happen. There is love between Anat and me, six years of ever-growing love. I have no friends. Only Anat. I can’t understand how other people keep up with their friends from the army. Effi is family. There are no other friends. Why would I punish her?
Just before Purim I come home to find Anat sitting with gift baskets for the poor scattered all over the living room. She conducts her campaigns from our little headquarters, all the rooms filled with cardboard boxes, items and notes. Everything has to fit in the packages and be sent off. Not everything is straightforward. There are different types of recipients, three sizes of boxes (the size of the package corresponds to the extent of the recipient’s misfortune). She sits exhausted among the items. Yariv sits with her, curled up, obedient. He is as big as one of the packages. He doesn’t try to reach into the gifts and sabotage them. A well bred and polite child.
I stand in the doorway and say, “Over there, just so you don’t get mixed up, is our son. Should I mark him for you?”
She laughs, exhausted.
(Deep inside us our married life continues. Caution and apology and fragile affection. “Forget it” and “So what?” and “Go on.”)
She smiles at me so that I will smile back at her. (How angry I was when she bought a German washing machine. For months I lay in wait, hoping for it to break, hoping for one non-German instant to penetrate the mechanism, the wrong kind of soap to tear up its innards — even if it meant our clothes would be ruined. I was angry at the machine, not at Anat, and I waited for a short, a blockage, knitwear washed too hot, even an electrical fire right here in my home. But that died down too, and the machine kept working quietly, became something that simply washed our clothes.) I have to smile, this needs to be over, this thing between us that slowly slinks and does not rest. Someone has to bridge the banks and I am the only one who can, I am the one who has to stop thinking it’s important. But I was the one who saw Eva Lanczer on the lawn outside 12 Katznelson, and I saw Mr. Pepperman coming to Grandpa Yosef with his old bills to make sure his name was listed only to make sure he paid his bills. And I remember Finkelstein’s gold, Finkelstein who knew everything back in 1939 and whose letter is still hidden in Grandpa Lolek’s basement. I am the one who asks, why did Asher Schwimmer start slapping people? What did they do to him there, that made him forget all his Hebrew? Attorney Perl tries to calm me, to cancel out the affair, saying, “You have a good wife.” Yet at the same time he stokes the engine with hot coals, saying, “Here, read this.”
Orders issued by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler concerning retaliation for the murder of six SS officers by Partisans near Kiev:
“I order that in the district of Kiev, ten thousand Jews shall die without regard to sex and age, for each of the six officers. Even a babe in the cradle must be trampled down like a poisonous toad…. We are living in an iron age, and there is no escape from using an iron broom.”
Karl Jäger, commanding officer of Einsatzkommando 3, from a report summarizing his activities in Lithuania, dated December 1, 1941:
“I can confirm today that Einsatzkommando 3 has achieved the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania. There are no more Jews in Lithuania, apart from working Jews and their families…. I am of the opinion that the male working Jews should be sterilized immediately to prevent reproduction. Should any Jewess nevertheless become pregnant, she is to be liquidated.”
I take the Karl Jäger index cards out of the drawers. What was his fate? The cards say nothing.
“Don’t worry about him. I don’t know how I could have forgotten to put it on the cards. After the war he hid, posing as a farmer. He was only exposed in 1959 and he committed suicide before his trial.”
Don’t worry about him. But there are others, and they cover the earth like weeds.
We finally took Grandpa Lolek to Hadassah Hospital. They promised he would only remain for a short while after the surgery, and then he could go home and be watched by Effi. The Lion of Life recited the terms to us and reminded me about the broken blender — what about my friend who fixed things for cheap? His blue eyes hinted at how lovely it would be if the repaired blender was waiting for him when he got back from his dangerous surgery.