After Auschwitz: A Love Story (9 page)

Love, hate, vulnerability, dependence.
I write the words and make circlets of flowers around them. How hard to chart the mixtures. No recipe for love.

Sometimes I think I see the curl of her lip, a slight hint of a smile that isn't all friendly. And who is to blame her?

After I moved out all those years ago, I tried to make my absence tolerable by seeing Hannah daily and bringing her small presents when I went off on my trips. But actually my daily visits only made things worse, reminding her that I had chosen not to be with her. At one particularly unfortunate lunch—I'd come back from seeing a season's worth of new work by young German directors—she told me she had just gotten a part in a film. The director wanted her to play a Jewish woman. He thought she'd be perfect.

Did I have to tell her that the director was a nobody without any talent? I had been lecturing Hannah that she needed to be independent. Why wasn't I pleased when she made the first small steps? But I wasn't pleased. Anymore than
my mother was pleased when I found a friend who invited me over to play, whose mother caressed my curls and told me what a handsome, good boy I was. That same day, over roast chicken, I criticized Hannah for not really enjoying her liberty.

“No, I don't,” she said, “I hate it. It would be different if you hadn't loved me, though even then I can't imagine liking to be alone.”

“You have more friends than I do. Lovers too, if you want to get down to it. It doesn't seem to stop you. And I've never objected. I'm afraid you just want me to feel guilty, to feel that I've damaged you beyond repair.”

“I don't mean to make you feel bad,” she said. “You haven't destroyed me—maybe made me lose a few pounds—see, I'm functioning.” She moved her arms up and down like a bird ready to take off. She gave me a lopsided smile, “As for enjoying my liberty, I'm even beginning to like having the bathroom to myself.”

“About time,” I said. “It's been months. And you act as if I'd left you and flown off to Tahiti. I haven't vanished. You can pick up the phone anytime day or night and call me.” I ground to a halt. Damn. How did she always manage to put me on the defensive? “I just can't put you at the center anymore. You've got to stop thinking of me as your grand
amor
.”

“Admit it, you are repelled by me.”

“Oh, sweetheart! Please don't make such a drama of it. You must know I love you. I am just trying to live honestly.” She had meant to draw me close but her accusations had the opposite effect. Why did she have to insist on what wasn't there anymore? At least not in the same way. She saw I was withdrawing and turned to stone, a heavy dark basalt half-hidden in dirt. Brooding, eyebrows pulled together. I could see she wasn't listening anymore. But what should I have done? The only thing that would soften her would be to take her home, go upstairs with her, and put her to bed the way I used to in our first days together. Tucking her in, kissing her gently. But now
I sensed that wouldn't be enough. My offhand response had offended her need to be special. She was like a dog worrying a bone. She needed to consume me.

She had found a psychoanalyst who listened patiently while week after week she complained about me. He said that I was too vulnerable for the sort of love she wanted. It's true I've never had an all-consuming passion, though I was with Hannah and close to her much longer than I had been with anyone else.

Leafing through my journal to jog my short-term memory, I see that I've given the impression of devoting myself entirely to Hannah until, finally drained, I turned to Claudia. It's certainly true that I cared for Hannah, soothed and nurtured her, but I also had time for brief flings with attractive women.

I wonder if her shrink told her I am a Don Juan, one of those whose desire always outruns what a lover can give them. Does he rip away my fleecy lamb's coat and offer me up to Hannah's understanding as a ravenous wolf? Will she succumb to his view of me? I hope not. I thought of my adventures as giving me an ego massage—not to speak of a physical one. Otherwise, I couldn't have kept up as well as I did. Going to bed with someone for the first time opens up a whole new territory—a lush Edenic landscape. I was an inveterate traveler. Just like any other addict, I had to have my fix.

But it was never serious. Never before Claudia was I tempted to leave Hannah. Though several of my mistresses urged me to rid myself of her, I always succeeded in slipping away. I prided myself on remaining friends with them after I broke off, listening to their troubles, advising them. If they were really distraught, I would care for them for weeks with the devotion of a mother. I thought of myself as a trusted friend. Did Hannah know? Maybe she guessed. She certainly was always jealous. Hated my independence even when I wasn't up to anything.

I think of it as a token of my delicacy that afterwards my mistresses were always glad to have me visit. Even Claudia—who had most reason for resentment because I had broken up her marriage—said there would always be a room for me in her house. When I visited I brought candy for Leila.

But there was no way Hannah was going to settle for that back then. When she found out about Claudia, she fought tooth and nail. Then suddenly she caved in, stopped insisting on my dropping Claudia, begged me to come home.

And now finally she has me.

After I moved out, Hannah couldn't stand being alone in the apartment. She invited her older sister Leah, who lived in Israel, to come and bring her niece to stay with her awhile. She hadn't seen her for years and hadn't told her of our troubles.

At one time they had been extremely close. Leah had been with her in Auschwitz. She protected her, stole food for her, shared her plank and bedding, did more to keep Hannah alive than her mother would have done. Hannah once told me that she might have died if her mother had lived instead of being sent immediately to the gas. Her mother would have been looking desperately for a bit of candle to light on Shabbat and would have failed to see the scrap of food that Hannah needed to survive.

That had sent chills up my spine. What impressed me most was Hannah's courage in telling the truth completely, without sentiment, though she added that her mother had lost her glasses and that Hannah's last glimpse of her was moving towards the gas chamber, peering nearsightedly at the men's line for her husband and son. To me there is so much love in that image. Her mother even at the last wanting to keep her family together. At the same time, I remember that Hannah told me a neighbor offered to hide her in her cellar before the roundup of Jews but her mother wouldn't think of splitting the family up. Kept looking up at the sky and praying to the Almighty. Hannah blamed her for that.

I add
ambivalence
to my list of words defining love and draw vines around it—clinging vines.

But if Auschwitz was the mold that shaped Hannah and her sister, Leah had come out totally different. I think I've said before that her sister had become a clone of their mother. Orthodox. Totally bound up in her family. Her daughter Sarah, following the law that children must rebel against their parents' ideas, was like Hannah in many ways. She fought constantly over Israel and Zionism with her orthodox mother, replaying Hannah's own history in contemporary dress. Like Hannah, Sarah questioned everything her mother believed in. She hung out with a group of young extremists and flaunted her connection to them, accusing her mother with a sneer of being a bourgeois Fascist.

Really the only thing that Sarah and Leah agreed on was their affection for me. Without waiting to hear our story, Leah blamed Hannah for driving me away—a stance that turned Hannah livid with rage, though I couldn't help being pleased that they thought me such a treasure. Hannah's sister had always attracted me. Jet-black hair, huge dark eyes and a tendency to passionate outbursts. I wouldn't have liked to live with her extremes of emotion, but they suggested what she might be capable of in the bedroom. Leah was terrified that Hannah wouldn't have enough money to live, but Hannah explained that we would share each other's last penny if necessary but that she had decided to make a living by writing. Her sister apparently didn't take that as an economically wise choice.

Leah and Sarah had come to visit Hannah a few months after I began to live with Claudia. They shared Hannah's spare room, the library, the only one in our flowing attic space that had a door and a bathroom. I had found Hannah a lovely small apartment above a monastery garden and planned to help her with the rent, but after that terrible night-visit to my bed, I realized she couldn't be the one to move out. She had done too much moving already. No, though it hurt me to give it up, I
realized she had to stay in our place.

“She obviously wanted us to get back together,” Hannah told me when I called to ask how the visit was going. “She kept prodding me to see if I still loved you. And of course she saw that I did. I told her that it was you whose love was doubtful.”

Relaying this to me over the phone, Hannah started to cry. All this took place months later. She had been so anguished at first that our friends would call me, frightened that she might harm herself. Gradually she became able to talk about something else when she saw them. Less like Niobe, all tears, delirious with grief. She hadn't been able to tell her sister about Claudia because she didn't want the story to turn into a narrative of “the other woman.” But she also didn't want her sister to put the blame squarely on her. So she told Leah that though I seemed so amiable and caring, I had my share of neuroses, my need to be alone, for example.

Another trait Hannah's therapist might call neurotic is my own deep wish not to be blamed. I wrote her dozens of letters telling her I didn't blame her for anything and hoped she wouldn't blame me. I wrote her that, paradoxically, our happy years together were too comfortable for someone of my temperament. I pleaded with her to understand.

There was a sense in which she unmanned me, made me her pampered child. And I had a terrific sense of debt that I could never repay. It tormented me and was worst with people close to me. I found it easier to care for strangers. I couldn't be normal with her—fight and then make up—anymore than I could have been with a man whose legs had been amputated. Like the schizophrenic girl with her therapist, Hannah only felt the world was real when she was next to me, touching me, drinking me in with her eyes. Without that she wasn't really living. She felt like a sleepwalker.

But I wouldn't accept that. I kept pointing out—and making her agree with me—that she was better now than she'd
been when I first moved out. She still seemed nervous but not crazy. Though sometimes I could see that, I had to believe she was better, that like Hamlet, she was only mad north-northwest and could snap out of it if she wanted to. She confessed to me how she spent time in my old closet smelling the things I had left behind. Things she had helped me shop for. Even my shit reassured her with its familiar odor. It got to the point where it was intolerable to listen to her pain. I thought making a movie about the schizophrenic girl was going to help me understand Hannah, but it just succeeded in scaring the pants off me. Madness turns out to be as elusive as love.

I can still enjoy short articles in the
Corriere Della Sera,
though my attention wanders if they have too many names of people in them. Hannah went out to get me my newspaper and espresso. I didn't feel well enough today for our café. There is a short piece about Berlusconi and a photo of him waving out the window of his black limo—his guards stationed at the four corners looking intense, brows furrowed. The newspaper has gotten some new audiotapes of him ordering prostitutes and complaining that he has to see the French president and the pope this week, so he won't have a chance to meet his mistress Francesca Pascale. He runs Italy like a Renaissance prince. If it weren't so awful, it would be funny. Sex used to be private. Now news about sex has gotten all-pervasive. Every day you hear about rapes or at least groping by highly placed politicians, even in America with the Evangelicals braying about damnation—maybe more so.

Hannah told me that there are sites on the net where they hook you up for a night, but you have to pretend that it didn't happen. If one of you begins to get attached, then it is time to move on. Hannah thinks there is a dangerous disconnect between sex and love. She can be prim sometimes but this time she may be right. People—particularly young people in our Capitalistic culture—are learning to treat each other as commodities, disposable and easily replaceable.

I look at my journal, where Hannah accused me of being repelled by her. Something about the way I described that night doesn't seem right. I treated her as abnormal, a little crazy, even psychotic. But in the beginning wasn't it that intensity that I loved? She was rightly infuriated when I told her to stop being who she was. She was totally wrapped up in me just as she'd always been, never sparing herself the danger of losing her boundaries, of not knowing where she stopped and I began. And it wasn't that she was weak. My God, how strong she must have been to survive the camps, what a sense of self! No, she opened herself, took down her defenses voluntarily. I have no right to castigate her. For a while when we were first together, I felt that all-encompassing love too. It was as though we penetrated each other's skin, breathed as one, interpenetrated, laced together. I had never had such love except maybe with my mother when I was very young, though my mother disappointed me in small ways, making me live in fear of betrayal, like the young Proust waiting for his mother's good-night kiss.

After Claudia came into my life, Hannah lived for my brief visits, always hoping that I would come back to her. I could call her anytime day or night, and she would agree to meet me rather than run the danger of not seeing me for a day or two. I might have encouraged her in words to value her separate life, but I also expected her never to say no. I could complain about how uncomfortable her total concentration on me made me feel. But obviously I liked it. I kept on meeting her, hearing every detail of her life not just for months but for years. It was bearable only when I could walk away, say I had an appointment, disappear. Otherwise it frightened me the way she asked and asked. I felt as though I'd scream if she asked me to do another thing. And when I didn't respond the way she wanted me to, she'd be overcome by a towering rage and would have to restrain herself from kicking or biting—wanting to destroy me the way she felt I destroyed her. More often she
restrained herself when she was with me but wrote me long furious letters afterwards.