Book of Numbers: A Novel (79 page)

My father. I’d hardly mentioned him in all my pages. Because Moms’s account of their meeting had demoted him into a handsome uniform that acted swiftly. My father was like a new character introduced at the end of a book, as the end of a book—a Daddy ex machina, maybe. And it’s been on my mind ever since, or—I’m trying for honesty—what’d then been a guilty notion I was in no psychological state to pursue is recurring only now, the notion that if there were to be any reissue or updated edition I would write an afterword to it, an afterword about him. And hey, a girl can dream, can’t she? a girl can flashback????

David Cohen, Private First Class, US First Army, had liberated Buchenwald, where the Yiddish competency he demonstrated so impressed the OSS officers he debriefed that they took him along to interrogations at Dachau, Mauthausen, and after V-E Day, here, to Vienna, where he
was attached to command—according to the oldsters I was meeting with, my father’s former colleagues.

To be totally accurate, Cal, the guy who’d read my book and initially contacted me was this decorous epitomist Connecticut WASP, from rep tie to bucks with the blueblood suit between, and it was only after he’d vetted me over lunch at the Union Club that he sent the other guys my way, his octogenarian Jewish subordinates who claimed they recalled me coming up to their knees, their knees since replaced, at my father’s funeral—there was a Prussian yecca type with spoon up his ass posture who as a policy refused to eat and talk or even be talked to at the same time, and then two widowers who resembled Dad biographically, being the sons of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw who grew up south of Delancey speaking Yiddish. That language had bound them together, and brought them to the captain—the WASP had retired from the OSS as a captain—for whom they interpreted interrogations of, and translated testimonies by, survivors of concentration and labor camps, which were cited extensively in the subsequent war crimes tribunals.

Cal, they were filling in a man I had never known. A man my mother, reciting the shameless sanitized version of this story, the Story, had never known either—or had forgotten with her arrival in Jersey, her renaming as Gloria, her infirmities (avitaminosis) (stomatitis), and lack of baby, her spats with my father’s parents, attempts to master cooking and English by reading
Ladies’ Home Journal
recipes and cooking through the irreconcilable fascinations of
The Honeymooners
and
Bonanza
.

Vienna, 1945, the latter winter of a year that’d felt all winter—my father left US Army HQ, the former Hotel Bristol, located on the Ring (after the war it became a hotel again, and now its rooms cost north of €308/night). In one direction was the recently unnamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz, in the other the recently renamed Josef-Stalin-Platz—Vienna, like Berlin, was divided into zones. But my father headed for neither. Nor did he stop at his lodgings off Kärntner Straße. Instead, he went on toward the river—Why? The downtown Jews said, Why? Because word had come in that the Danube had just frozen over, and my father wanted to check. The downtown Jews told me this as if it was unimpeachably logical, and it was, because that’s who Dad was: the type of man who if
you told him the river’s frozen was going to want to check. There by the riverbank he met a woman—a woman who’d just walked in gaiters taken off a Wehrmacht soldier, which meant off a Wehrmacht corpse, from Poland to Žilina to Brno to Vienna (I’m in no position to record the numbers just now, Cal, but consult the book or imagine around 600 kilometers or 400 miles), and was starving and feverish and out in the incipient snow begging—Moms would never admit to begging—and who called out to him in Yiddish,
Zeit moychel,
because Dad had a face like one of her brothers, who’d died in Theresienstadt, or Auschwitz. Dad gave her chewinggum, took her for a sawdusty schnitzel at a basement café. And then maybe to his room, the downtown Jews said. Then again, maybe not. Because she was icicle skinny like a Muselmann, they said. That’s what they called the people in the camps not gas exterminated but exterminated by hunger, Muselmänner. My mother was named Yocha then—did I mention that? Is this what senility is like? It was illegal to marry her. The downtown Jews said the Army might’ve courtmartialed my father under the GI ban on fraternization, which tended to treat brides unable to provide evidence of their identities as enemy nationals until proven innocent. But the captain said they wouldn’t have dared. The yecca, that scooped asshole Prussian, who just before I closed our tab at French Roast ordered fries for takeout, said that he was the one who’d forged her papers—though, he noted, it might not have been forgery because it was done on the captain’s orders—and not a Nansen Displaced Persons document either but a straight Shipley US passport that characterized the bearer as a secretarial assistant in the office of the special advisor on Austrian affairs, and falsified her age. My father was 21 and had an honorable discharge pending, Moms was—she guessed she was—16. They married, 4/16/1946, in the synagogue on Seitenstettengasse, the sole shul to survive in Vienna, in a ceremony officiated by Chaplain Rabbi Daniel S. Daniels of Worcester, MA, who died in a car wreck on I-95 in the late 1980s, on Shabbos. Back in civilian life, Dad studied actuarial science at Newark Technical School. In the gaps between assignments and a Bamberger’s shift he set about tracking down Moms’s relatives. Yetta had become the Hebraicized Idit, after Birkenau, but Menashe, who’d fled to Argentina, was still just Menashe—did I mention that? Am I confusing you, Cal? Moms
and Dad visited them regularly in Israel—because, Moms liked to say, the Tel Avivniks were always too poor to visit us—and after I was born they brought me with them, though they went less and less, until we moved from Newark out to Shoregirt and they got up the confidence to fly without me maybe twice, because Shoregirt had a yard and picket fence and Jewish neighbors in the insurance business for me to stay by, the Tannenbaums. The last time my parents made the trip I wasn’t yet 12, and I’d worked out this compromise by which I was able to spend the afterschool day at my own house all alone, but had to report to the Tannenbaums’ house at dinnertime each night, for boiled chicken “cacciatore,” kugel “moussaka,” a dessert review of my bar mitzvah portion, and bed. Then my parents returned, and the back muscle that Dad had strained—from having lifted their suitcases loaded with a copy of Walt Whitman’s
Bletlekh groz
for Menashe and bras for Idit and cameras and camcorders for all their children and grandchildren—was diagnosed as a lung sarcoma, and all the traveling they did after that was to Sloan Kettering. My father refused to die only because it meant leaving my mother, but what was truly remarkable was that he’d lived that way too, which was why he’d never attended the reunions, and only met his army friends on worktrips to NY, and at his funeral—he had to be there anyway.

\

You can’t fly anywhere, anywhen, from Vienna.

Or you can, but it’s never cheap. To JFK, Washington-Dulles, Chicago-O’Hare. Connections in Amsterdam, Brussels, or Frankfurt knock a schilling off the price. There was also a layover option via Budapest. Layovernight. Tuesdays were the most affordable days to fly. Still, I was barely able to afford London on a Tuesday, noon. Vienna–London–Toronto–LaGuardia, more than 20 hours, eight procedurals, six sitcoms, four films with their plane fatalities edited out, four meals (or “snackboxes”).

I wasn’t checking luggage but if the clerk found that suspicious she didn’t say.

Let her just try and check this prose, let everyone.

Vienna—I slotted Principal’s passport into an aperture fit for
transacting with an ulcerous deli clerk out on a drug corner. The guard took it and swiped it and flipped his interest through, in a way that convinced me of his scrutiny, so I said, “I get that all the time,” and either he didn’t find that hilarious or it wasn’t hilarious or he was just keeping busy for the surveillance scrutinizing him, then waved me through.

On the other side, in the immigration zigzag in NY—CNNing all around with Afghan dronestrikes, and then as a teaser before commercial break, which realityshow celeb really and showily got tossed out of a Manhattan Gopal store for cutting in line?

But then it was my turn to passport the officer, so I said, “I get that all the time,” which got a grin. “You must be the 10th guy who’s said that today.”

Just then I recalled how I always used to like having my passport stamped. It fixed my persona. Nailed my being down. So I asked the officer for a stamp.

And he answered by saying, “I’d love to, friend, but they’re phasing out that ink stuff.”

Customs was/were: spit thrice over your shoulder when anyone praises you, knock wood twice when praising yourself. Another line, another form handed over, smudged with Moms’s addy, permanent addy.

I went out into the chill, cab exhaust.

I joined the queue, waited, though I guess I could’ve called the agency, collect, could’ve had Lisabeth or Seth spring for a livery out of pity, shave and a haircut, suite at the Plaza, a sandwich. But I wanted to continue on my own—wanted Jersey, mother, buffer.

The expediter was a deadringer for La Guardia, the mayor, but with cornrows—“Where you going?”

“Jersey,” I said.

She sneered borough cred, directed me with her middlefinger down the idlers.

Aar, leaving a client’s afterafterparty, a launch, or reading—he’d get into a cab and say to the driver, “Take me to work with you,” or “Take me somewhere we can be alone,” and I miss that something wretched.

I, with my no balls, just told the driver how to drive but he demanded the addy and knucked it into his GPS, which calculated the same
distance and time and directions that I had, and then he said how much, off meter, and that was as much as he said.

Nasty habit. It used to be that every time I’d take a cab there would come this moment, this intersection, and Rach hated it—when I couldn’t help but talk, couldn’t help but engage the driver, and some of that is a Jew thing, but some certainly was all that white baggage, which won’t fit in any trunk—wanting to show the driver that I held by what that Berber slave playwright once wrote, nothing human was alien to me, nothing was strange, or rattling, wanting to show respect by talking politics domestic and foreign, I’d be honored by his opinions, because they came from a land in which opinions were criminal, a land I’d never get any closer to than now—a mangled divider between us.

But for whatever reason, this trip—for two hours in gutimpacting traffic—I didn’t.

After the negotiation only the GPS talked, voicing my welcome homescape in Arabic. Every lanechange or so a familiarity would surface, Semitic fricatives, faucal honkings of phlegm, and then “I-95, NJ Turnpike.” The rusting midtide marsh, dead fish methane waft, an egret balanced onefooted out in that muck like it’d have to be crazy to step full in. A Canaanite hairball, then “Garden State Parkway.”

Through the Pinebarrens saying nothing and with nothing said unmechanical—maybe that, just that, was dignity.

Or I did say something, once we got to the house.

Some things like “I got your money inside,” OK, “Come in and use the bathroom, if you have to,” no thanks.

Which spared him having to witness me begging my mother for money (the hug, the kiss, the beg). I was embarrassed, sure, but only because she was embarrassed for me, and disapproved, and disapproved of what I was being charged, went for her clutch, and that earthenware bowl for tzedakah I’d forgotten, and finally outside to beat down the price. I collapsed. Never even got the driver’s face.

11/15 or 16, everything broke. The
Post
headline was punny enough, “Balk-Mail!” The
Daily News
went with “Tetraitors!” You know the rest—everyone knows.

Moms paid for my two Heinekens and Camels. The only thought I
had I thought daily, twice—what a beautiful name for a convenience store, Wawa.

\

Basically at that point it ends.

And then the phone rang.

Moms said it hadn’t rung like that since September. I had mail from back then too and I signed the enclosed papers and got an envelope and stamp from Moms and included a note to Rach asking what I owed her, and promising her that whatever else had to be done, she’d be able to find me. I walked over to the postoffice. And by the time I’d walked back they were outside, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NY1, and our porch was on the TV in the livingroom and Moms was having a fit about how the stoop was chipped and leaves were clogging the gutters. Leaksmen—the organization that claimed responsibility for releasing the recording files, my transcriptions of them, my attempts at shaping them into Principal’s life, and the diary I kept of my own life in the Emirates—was headed by a dual Australian Swiss citizen by the name of Anders Maleksen. Descramble Maleksen—get Leaksmen.

An anonymous source of the senior American intelligence official type stated that the organization was a Russian front, and that Maleksen was the field alias of FSB agent Daniil Kalemov, who’d been assigned to infiltrate b-Leaks by providing documents regarding Israeli nuclear capability that now appear to be Kremlin forgeries. Whether he entrapped Balk in the rape charges or not, he certainly arranged for the flight from Copenhagen and asylum in the Russian embassy in Reykjavík. No comment from b-Leaks. Which is to say, no comment from Balk.

People kept knocking at the door asking to help or be helped, to share their findings about how the C band electromagnetic range used for wifi transmissions stimulated the growth of or even implanted parasitic worms called “cestodians,” which track our movements, diets, cyberchondria. Moms said that a person in a Jersey Central Power & Light uniform who’d resembled Kalemov or Maleksen but was maybe shorter and with a bit of a stomach and very polite and so maybe it wasn’t him,
had stopped by about two weeks or even a month ago now “to read the meter.”

She wouldn’t trust any news that would trust me as a source.

A body was hauled out of the river Ganges, Varanasi, India, 11/19 or 20, apparently. This was just downstream from the Manikarnika Ghat, the main crematorium ghat, a perpetual stream of burning bodies plunging down the stairs but not plashing at bottom because by the bottom all was ash, a cloud of flies scattering across the waters.