After Auschwitz: A Love Story (21 page)

As soon as I step inside I see that I'm not alone and jump back in alarm. There is a tall slender man with bushy eyebrows staring out at me with green eyes.

“Who are you?” I lash out at him. “What do you think you're doing?” It occurs to me that he is an addict stealing our pills. I try to call out but my voice sounds as if it's coming out of a deep well and Hannah doesn't hear me. Then I notice that the intruder is wrinkled and stooped. No need to get help, I could probably push him over. “Who are you?” I asked again. He seems about to answer. His lips move but if he says anything, I don't hear him. I reach out and touch cold glass. The intruder is me.

Shaken, I retreat to the shower. I want it hard, like a waterfall plummeting down around me, hiding me inside, but as usual it only trickles, an old man's shower. I know I can't hide inside it forever, but at least for a few minutes I can stand there, water warm on my shoulders, and think about what I can say to Hannah. She doesn't come right away, so I get out and dry myself, glancing every few minutes at the horror in the mirror. Finally I hear a light knocking at the door.

“What's happening in here,” she asks, cracking the door. “I thought I heard you call. Are you alright?”

I mumble a yes and she opens the door and comes in.

“I know you can't help it,” she says coming close and rubbing my shoulders, “but you can stop trembling. You're safe now. Better here with me than outside.” She tries a smile. “But we do have to think about our landlady problem. You know she's a very nervous woman.”

“I hadn't really noticed,” I muttered.

“Remember what a fuss she made about your watering the plants too much? She was sure the water would come through her ceiling and wanted to make us put in a whole drip system. Came over one night when her husband was away and there was a thunderstorm. But even if she weren't afraid of everything, having a new child arrive from one day to the next without any warning, being responsible for him and a new baby. Oh, what's the point?” She said suddenly.

“I'm sorry,” I murmured low. “I should have asked her permission.”

“She's our landlady,” Hannah said, and I saw her hand shake. “Her family owns half the building; she could evict us!”

“I didn't think of that.” Whether I could have thought of it hung in the air.

Hannah looked at me hard. “We need to have someone here with you. At least in the mornings when I am working or shopping. I can't work if I'm worrying about you or about losing the apartment”—she lowers her voice—“about losing my home. You must see that.” She lit a cigarette. “Don't worry. I'll find someone suitable but you have to help. You can't harass them like you did that woman from Guatemala.”

“I just asked her what she was doing here and told her politely there was nothing I needed.”

Hannah's face puckers up as if she were going to cry.

“You weren't polite; you yelled at her—‘Why are you here? Who are you? I don't know you.' You screamed when she tried to wash your hair and after a week she left.”

“I don't want some strange woman picking out my clothes for me, dressing me. It's humiliating, seeing me naked, can't you understand?”

She doesn't want to answer me. Instead she goes on with her thoughts. “That's why I've been helping you myself, this year and last year too. But after I help you dress in clean clothes and comb your hair just so, the way you like it, then when I go in to work you ask me when I'll be finished. Isn't that so? And then you ask me for a coffee and just when I am catching the thread again, another coffee and then the bathroom.”

Her voice softens.

“And you say I should spoil you, do you remember? You don't leave me alone for five minutes, and if I say wait, you don't care.”

I hang my head. I do remember, but I pictured myself charming and suave the way I was when Hannah's French
friend was visiting and I spoke French easily, drank wine with them, and joked. Afterwards I heard her friend whisper that I seemed fine, coherent, full of talk as usual.

“I remember,” I say. “But I don't think my judgment is impaired. I just wanted to take the boy out for ice cream.”

“We have to get someone new, at least someone to help get you up in the morning, shower, go for a walk…”

“I'm not a dog,” I say, getting louder, “needing to be walked.”

“There's no choice anymore. We have to have someone, can't you see? Roberto's mother said you needed to be somewhere else, somewhere where you'd be cared for. If we don't get you this kind of help and you're on your own, something else will happen and she'll throw us out.”

““Why don't you just put me on an ice floe and let me starve?” I heard myself yelling, and I couldn't stop. I wanted to shake her. Thank God I didn't. I just started to cry, my image of myself crumbling. “I'm just so frightened,” I said.

“I know, I know,” she said, and put her arms around me.

“Will you send me away?” I asked her.

I started to cry. I wanted to kneel at her feet, kiss her feet. I slumped to the floor and held on to her legs. She snuffed out her cigarette and pulled me up.

“No I won't,” she said. “Never … ever.”

I looked deep into her eyes and decided, at least for now, to believe her.

The End

B
renda Webster
was born in New York City, educated at Swarthmore, Barnard, Columbia, and Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D. She is a novelist, freelance writer, playwright, critic and translator who splits her time between Berkeley and Rome. Webster has written two controversial and oft-anthologized critical studies,
Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study
(Stanford) and
Blake's Prophetic Psychology
(Macmillan). She has translated poetry from the Italian for
The Other Voice
(Norton) and
The Penguin Book of Women Poets.
She is co-editor of the journals of the abstract expressionist painter (and Webster's mother) Ethel Schwabacher,
Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher
(Indiana 1993). She is the author of four previous novels,
Sins of the Mothers
(Baskerville 1993),
Paradise Farm
(SUNY, 1999),
The Beheading Game
(Wings Press, 2006), which was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, and
Vienna Triangle
(Wings Press, 2009). Her memoir,
The Last Good Freudian
(Holmes and Meier, 2000) received considerable critical praise. The Modern Language Association published Webster's translation of Edith Bruck's Holocaust novel,
Lettera alla Madre,
in 2007. Webster's novel,
Vienna Triangle,
“navigates between the late Sixties and
fin de siecle
Vienna in a dramatic exploration of family romances inside and outside the circle that so famously gathered around the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud” (Sandra Gilbert). Her new play, “The Murder Trial of Sigmund Freud,” was inspired by
Vienna Triangle,
but goes beyond the story of Tausk and Freud to chronicle Freud's relationships with women patients, disciples and his family. “The Murder Trial of Sigmund Freud” was written in collaboration with Meridee Stein, who conceived the idea of a play and brought to the table many stimulating ideas and twenty years of experience in the theater. Webster is the president of PEN West.

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