Hope: A Tragedy (18 page)

You should see the other guy, said Kugel.

The UPS man laughed and handed Kugel the scanner and a stylus he pulled from the pocket of his brown shirt.

That’s far enough, said Mother.

Kugel glanced at her.

Sure getting a lot of books these days, said the UPS man.

I’m a reader, said Kugel.

Oh, me, too, said the UPS man. Thing of the past, though, I’m afraid. Wife got me one of those e-reader things for the holidays this year. It’s something else.

That’s what I hear, said Kugel as he signed for the packages.

Noticed you blacked out your windows up top, said the UPS man.

Mother nudged Kugel.

Drafty, said Kugel.

Yep, said the UPS man. Got to save every penny these days, I’m afraid. Well, I’ll see you folks tomorrow.

I’ll see you, said Kugel.

The UPS man got back in his truck, waved, and headed down the driveway.

He knows, said Mother.

He doesn’t know anything.

He’s probably already reported us.

To who?

Whoever.

Mother, please.

She turned and went back inside. Kugel watched the UPS truck turn down the road with a friendly toot of its horn.

Kugel smiled and waved.

He sure did ask a lot of questions, though, didn’t he?

21.

MOTHER DECIDED TO JOIN Bree on her trip to town. Hannah and Pinkus were coming for dinner, and Bree needed to stop for groceries and meat; Anne Frank needed printing paper, said Mother.

And a microwave, she added.

Kugel walked them to the front door; he was relieved to be getting them out of the house, and to have some time alone with Jonah. It had been a while.

We’re not getting Anne Frank a microwave, said Kugel.

Do you know what she eats? asked Mother.

The thought of it still haunted him.

I’m aware of what she eats, he said.

So?

So we’re not getting her a microwave.

Then get her a bed.

A bed?

That woman, said Mother, pointing at the ceiling, sleeps on
rags
. That will be Anne Frank’s deathbed, thanks to you, will it? A pile of soiled rags?

Bree pressed by without a word and headed for the car.

Mother, said Kugel, we don’t have money for a bed.

She looked at Kugel with great sadness in her eyes.

My mother, she said. Do you know what
her
deathbed was? A wooden board in Auschwitz. But what could I do? I was a child, you understand, just an innocent child. I wanted to bring her food, but where would I find it? We were all starving, all of us.

Kugel stamped the end of his cane on the wooden floor.

Mother, he said through clenched teeth, surprising even himself, you weren’t in Auschwitz. And neither was Grandma. She died in the cardiac unit at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City, surrounded by her husband and children.

Mother looked at him for a moment, stunned, and then she began to weep. Kugel sighed.

The past, she sobbed. It’s disappearing like so much gossamer before my failing eyes, like a child’s writing is wiped from a . . . from the . . .

She shook her head, trying to jog her memory. Kugel waited a moment before offering, Blackboard?

Mother nodded.

Bree tapped on the car horn.

It’s all disappearing, Mother sobbed.

Lucky you, thought Kugel. He could go for some of that forgetting stuff right about now. Forget her, forget Father, forget it all, just for a day, a weekend. Heaven is a place with no memory, no history, no past; sure, some warm memories would be sacrificed along with the bad, but all in all, an improvement. A step in the right directionlessness.

There’s no money for a bed, Mother.

How can there be no money? Mother asked. She’s Anne Frank. Thirty-two million copies, that’s not exactly small potatoes.

She can’t touch it, Mother.

Why not?

Because she’s dead.

Bree leaned on the horn.

Mother wagged a finger in his face.

When I get home, she said, I’m phoning Alan Dershowitz.

You’re not phoning Alan Dershowitz.

The hell I’m not, Mother called back as she headed for the car. Spineless, just like your father. If you had even half the courage in your whole body as Alan Dershowitz has in one finger.

Mother, Kugel shouted back, you’re not calling Alan Dershowitz. And if you get Anne Frank a microwave, I’m bringing it back.

Which is exactly, Mother said, cinching her coat belt before getting into the car, what Alan Dershowitz would
not
say.

Kugel gave Jonah a quick lunch of peanut butter and jelly and chocolate milk, and after a couple of cookies, took him out back to have a catch.

I’ll be the Yankees, said Jonah, you be the Mets.

Why do I have to be the Mets? asked Kugel. The Mets stink.

Jonah laughed.

Though Jonah was still young, it was obvious to everyone that he was an exceedingly bright child, and his intelligence only exacerbated the guilt Kugel felt for bringing him into the world. It was one thing to have condemned a child to life, that was criminal enough, but life was a sentence more easily served by fools.

Congratulations, the obstetrician should say, your child is an idiot.

Oh, thank you, Doctor. We were so worried.

Not at all. He’s a schmuck.

Too much brain, wrote Gogol, is sometimes worse than none at all.

Perhaps, wrote Dostoyevsky, the normal man should be stupid. Perhaps it is very beautiful, in fact.

Perhaps, thought Kugel, Smiling Man was stupid. Perhaps he was smiling because he was too blessedly dumb to know how completely fucked he was. You wouldn’t call anyone in Buchenwald lucky, but the dumb ones were luckier than the smart ones, the sensitive ones, the aware ones, of that much you could be sure. You didn’t want to be in Auschwitz at all, but you sure as hell didn’t want to be a poet in Auschwitz.

Or Chelmno. Chelmno was bad, too.

With the vegetable garden behind Jonah acting as their backstop, Kugel tossed him the ball. He watched Jonah’s little legs as he ran and chased it into the weeds.

I should have dropped him, thought Kugel. When he was a baby. If I really loved him, I would have picked him up, turned him over, and dropped him on his delicate eggshell skull. I would’ve shaken him. A truly good father, a caring father, a protective father, would sit that child in front of the television set all day and let that sharp, curious mind turn to spongy, uncomprehending, witless mush. It would have been the least I could do. I brought him into this world, didn’t I? I should at least have the courtesy to ensure he go through it in a mindless, drooling stupor like the rest of the goddamned species. Two and a half thousand years later, it was becoming undeniably apparent that an
un
examined life is the only one worth living. Examined lives tended to end hanging by the neck in the shower. Life examiners tended to go out sucking on the barrel of a shotgun.

Life: examine at your own risk.

Last words?

Not bad.

The ball hit Kugel in the crotch, and Jonah squealed with glee.

Shh
, Kugel said, glancing up quickly at the attic windows.

He didn’t want Anne Frank to hear them, and his concern for her surprised him. He worried that their happiness would make her sad, and wanted to spare her what he imagined was the pain of his joy.

Come on, buddy, said Kugel, let’s go to the side lawn.

Jonah grabbed the ball and ran ahead of him, disappearing around the corner of the house. Kugel wondered why Anne Frank hadn’t contacted her father after the war, once she’d learned that he’d survived. Would he contact his own father if he’d discovered he was alive? He thought that he might. And that Professor Jove would be against it.

The north side of the house was the only side completely hidden from Anne Frank’s view. There was nothing much on this side of the house, though, just a few bramble bushes and a small patch of grass, and Jonah wanted to return to where they had been playing before.

Jonah grabbed the ball and ran, shouting, to the backyard.

Not so loud, called Kugel after him. The neighbors . . .

No poetry after Auschwitz, said Theodor Adorno. How about laughing, though, Ted? How about giggling? How about fucking? Those are much worse than poetry, and poetry was dead anyway (there was a death, at last, you couldn’t pin on the Nazis). Kugel doubted that Anne Frank would mind very much if Jonah sat outside and read a sonnet or two aloud, but he was sure that child’s laughter would cut her to the bone. Perhaps it would remind her of happier days. Whether there had been happier days or whether she could recall them any longer, he was unable to say with any certainty. He didn’t even know that she was unhappy now—disfigured, sure, half-mad, perhaps, but sanity has never been a prerequisite for happiness; it often seemed to be its biggest hurdle—so he couldn’t say for certain that overhearing other people’s happiness would cause her sadness. But he didn’t want to take the chance.

Dad, called Jonah. Hey, Dad, come here.

Kugel walked around the corner of the house, and Jonah motioned him over to something he’d found in the grass. Kugel went over and knelt beside it.

Don’t touch it, said Kugel. Don’t touch it.

There in the tall grass at the side of the house, as if napping peacefully, was the severed head of Sunshine, the neighbor’s missing cat. Kugel looked up at Anne’s window, directly overhead.

Where’s the rest of her? Jonah asked.

I don’t know, said Kugel.

What happened?

Kugel shook his head.

Something must have killed her, he said.

Did they hate her?

Kugel shook his head.

Just hungry, he said.

Using a pair of sticks they found lying in the grass nearby, Kugel and Jonah dug a small hole in the ground in which to bury Sunshine’s head. Jonah squatted down beside the cat’s head and lifted it up by its ear.

I don’t want you to die, said Jonah, looking at Sunshine’s face.

I’m not going to die, said Kugel.

Jonah dropped Sunshine’s head into the shallow grave, and together they covered her up. They sat there for a while, talking; Jonah asked Kugel what happened when you died, and where you went, and what it was like. Kugel answered as best he could, covering Sunshine’s head while explaining that some people believe there’s a world after this one where we all meet, and other people believe in reincarnation, where we all come back to life as something else. Jonah looked upset.

Someone once said, Kugel said to Jonah, that a free man thinks of death least of all things.

What does that mean?

How should I know? said Kugel with a smile. Go ask the guy who said it.

Jonah laughed—You’re silly, Dad—and placed a small stone on the grave of Sunshine’s head.

I want to come back as candy, said Jonah.

Candy?

Jonah shrugged.

Everyone likes candy, he said.

When children aren’t saying something incredibly stupid that we in our need for answers decide is incredibly wise, they are saying something that makes you want to lift them up, hold them tightly in your arms, climb up inside an attic, and never, ever come back down.

Joney wouldn’t make it in Auschwitz either, thought Kugel. Not a chance.

22.

AFTER SIX YEARS TOGETHER, Hannah and Pinkus were still childless, though it wasn’t for a lack of dogged, relentless trying; regardless of company or occasion, they were unashamedly physical with each other—perhaps this was because they were still attempting to have children (said Kugel), perhaps it was because they were ashamed of their pathetic previous failures (said Mother)—and it was difficult to find a time when one wasn’t touching the other in some overtly sexual manner, standing close together, adjusting the other’s clothing or playing with the other’s hair. Family members or anyone else unlucky enough to witness these public acts of fore-foreplay either attempted to pretend not to notice or, more commonly, attempted distraction by engaging Pinkus or Hannah in unrelated, prosaic conversation.

Purely natural behavior, Pinkus, ever the evolutionary biologist, would proclaim as he grabbed Hannah in the kitchen, nuzzled her neck, and ran his hands over her hips and legs. I’m simply a male of the species obeying his natural imperative.

How about those Yankees, Kugel would say.

As desperate as they were to conceive, neither of them wished for a child of their own as much as Kugel wished one for them, as their unfortunate childlessness made Jonah the sole focus of Mother’s intense melodrama. When Jonah was still an infant, Mother would hold him in her arms, look into his eyes, shake her head, and whisper, The last Kugel.

What she meant was Jew.

She used to say the same thing to Kugel when he was younger.

The last Kugel.

They had cousins, of course, and uncles and nephews all over the world. But somehow, for thousands of years, every Kugel was the last Kugel, just as every Jew was the last Jew; Tevye the Terminal, every single one. Yet, Kugel couldn’t help but observe, in all that time—no last Jew. There had been a last Assyrian. There had been a last Ammonite. There had been a last Babylonian, a last Mesopotamian, a last of the Mohicans. But no last Jew. There had been a final Aztec, a departing Mayan, a Phoenician of Completion, an ultimate Ottoman, a conclusive Akkadian. There had been an Incan who closed the lights and shut the door on his or her way out. But no last Jew. Rocky Balboa took a beating, sure, but the story is: he won. Or tied. Or just: didn’t lose. Ask an Arawak about who lost and who won, ask a Pequot, ask a Herero. Where were the stories of the
non
-last Jews, he wondered—the ones who thrived; the ones who prospered; the ones who married, had children, and died not of pogroms and Zyklon B and Inquisitions, but of old age? Surely some Jews died of old age; that’s what Florida was for.

Pinkus had written a number of books attempting to prove, historically and mathematically, how much better the world was getting. We were becoming, his last book insisted, better people—more humane, more caring, less violent. The book, titled
You’ve Got to Admit It’s Getting Better, A Little Better All the Time
, was a tremendous best seller. Professor Jove had written a book on the futility of hope entitled
Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend
. He was still sending out query letters.

As Bree passed the potatoes to Mother, and Mother passed the chicken to Kugel, Pinkus explained to everyone how things were taking a turn for the better, and had been for hundreds of years. It was the subject of his forthcoming book,
Here Comes the Sun, and I Say It’s All
Right
.

It would seem absurd, Pinkus said, to suggest so, no? It would seem insane to suggest such a thing in the face of Rwanda, in the face of Darfur, of Cambodia, of the Holocaust; naive at best, criminal at worst. But those
are
the facts, you see. Those are the
numbers
; it is something we can measure, a knowable thing: are we more or less violent now than a hundred years ago, five hundred years ago, a thousand years ago? Are we getting worse, or are we getting better? The answer is, we’re getting better. Nobody wants to hear that answer, which is fascinating in its own right, but we don’t have more killing now than then, that is the fact—we simply have more reporting.

Bree asked Hannah: How’s your writing coming?

Hannah said: I haven’t had much time.

My great-grandparents, continued Pinkus, lived through the Armenian genocide, I know how inhuman these events were. I’m not suggesting they weren’t. But compared to life in the past—the everyday brutality and violence, the endless conflicts and bloodshed—well, the Holocaust wasn’t so bad.

Kugel glanced nervously at the heating vent in the floor beside his feet.

I should thank the Nazis, Mother said to Pinkus, for being so evolved.

Pinkus, said Hannah, you’re upsetting Mother.

My point, said Pinkus, is that we’re doing something right. Why should that be upsetting? I know about Auschwitz and Hiroshima and My Lai and the Killing Fields, I know. But the numbers tell the real story, no? We are getting better. We are more caring, more giving, more moral. We are less violent, less callous, less hateful. Ten thousand years ago the odds of a simple hunter-gatherer dying at the hands of another—through wars, territorial disputes, tribal conflict—could be as high as sixty percent. That is a fact. In the last century, though, the supposedly worst century of war ever, it was less than one percent. That includes two world wars, mind you. And just look at the homicide numbers, the numbers of random killings due to crime or foul play: in Europe, in the Middle Ages, there were a hundred murders per every hundred thousand people. Today, in modern Europe, that’s down to less than one per every hundred thousand. Less than one. Shouldn’t we be asking why? Shouldn’t we be trying to understand the nature of this progress, to ensure it continues?

That wonderful European soil, said Mother, is soaked with the blood of my parents.

Pinkus shook his head.

Bree said to Hannah: Williamsburg must be fun.

Hannah said: Yes, but here you have the trees.

Which is precisely what fascinates me, Mother, Pinkus continued. We’re doing something
right
. We
are
getting better. We should be trying to figure out why, and how, but to even suggest that we are getting better makes people furious, no? It is as if mankind
needs
the world to be getting worse, even if it happens to be getting better. Of course we’ll happily admit that it’s getting better for other people, but we’ll adamantly refuse to include ourselves in that group. No, no—for us, it’s always getting worse. Here’s what I believe: we dream of utopia, but could never bear one. The impossibility of heaven is less a function of theology, in my opinion, than it is a problem of nature—
our
nature. How many days in the eternal sphere of goodness will it take before you complain, before you find someone that hates you, that oppresses you? One day? A week, tops. Pursue happiness all you want, but may God help us if we achieve it. Nothing would make us more miserable than joy. What would we have done without Hitler?

Kugel glanced again at the vent in the floor. He let his napkin fall from his lap and pushed it with his foot onto the vent.

Mother threw her napkin onto her plate in disgust.

I’ve heard enough of this, said Mother.

Listen, said Pinkus, nobody’s saying it wasn’t horrific. I wrote a paper on the effects of the Rwandan genocide years after it was over . . .

Genocide? said Mother with a dismissive wave of her hand, please. It was a summer. A few bad months. The UN calls everything genocide. The Holocaust lasted years, years of suffering and systematic murder.
That
was genocide.

Mother, said Kugel.

Pinkus, said Hannah.

What about the Armenian genocide, then? asked Pinkus. That lasted years, too. Does that make it as bad as the Nazi genocide?

Armenian genocide? said Mother. How many people died? A million?

A million and a half, said Pinkus.

Call me when you break three million, said Mother, then we’ll talk. Genocide, my eye.

She stood and pointed her finger at Pinkus.

Maybe you need to suffer yourself, she said, before you determine so casually that things are getting better. What a fine example you are of the arrogance of science, of the audacity of math. Perhaps if you had spent three years with me, hiding in a darkened attic from the bloody hands of those damned Germans, perhaps then you wouldn’t see life through the rosy glasses you have strapped to your head. A child I was, nothing more, trembling in fear in a cold, bare annex, never knowing which hour death would come but knowing, yes, knowing that it would.

Tap, heard Kugel. Tap-tap.

Kugel took Mother’s napkin from her plate and dropped it, too, over the heating vent.

Tap, tap-tap.

But there you sit, Mother continued, having trembled in darkness over what—grades? degrees?—in your fancy dormitory room at MIT or Stanford or Harvard, and you dare to tell me that life is getting better?
Feh!

And with that, Mother stormed from the room.

Mother, called Hannah, and looked to Kugel for help.

You see? said Pinkus to the rest of the family. This is why I’m writing this book. It’s fascinating! It’s as if a man goes to his doctor and, upon hearing his tests are negative, that not only isn’t he unwell, but that he is in fact in perfect health, he flies into a violent rage.
Liar! Quack! Can’t you see I’m bleeding, can’t you see I’ve bled? Can’t you see the scars? The damage?
I have the temerity to suggest that the human patient is not as hopelessly consumptive as we thought, and they call for my head. We’re sick! they say. We’re not so bad, I say. We’re dying! they cry. What would we have done without gas chambers and ovens?

Tap, tap-tap.

What would we have done, Pinkus continued, without Dresden, without Srebrenica, without the Katyn Forest and the Killing Fields? I’ll tell you my worry: my worry is not that we are becoming more violent. On the contrary, my worry is that we will someday reach such an unsettling level of peace, such a level of happiness and joy, that we’ll engage in the most brutal war of all, a thousand Holocausts rolled into one, because peace frightens us. Expecting hell, we’re ill prepared for heaven. It is like watching two men carry a pane of glass across a busy highway: we expect it to break, we know it will, the situation itself is so precarious that we almost
want
to see a car drive through it, we pick up a rock and shatter it ourselves. Smash it already! I know it’s going to fall to pieces, I know it can’t remain, stop getting my hopes up, stop letting me believe!

Tap, tap-tap.

Mother, called Kugel as he stood and hurried from the room. Once out of view of the dining table, though, he turned from her bedroom and headed upstairs.

One morning, he recalled as he climbed the stairs, a few weeks after Jonah’s illness, Kugel found himself on a subway, late for an appointment with Professor Jove, when the train came to a screeching halt. The anger inside the train was palpable. Fuck, muttered the man to Kugel’s left. Fucking bullshit, Kugel had replied. After a moment, an announcement was made by the conductor: the train, tragically, had struck a waiting passenger, and they were going to be stopped a while as police and emergency workers arrived and saw to the passenger’s health. The mood in the subway car now changed considerably, and everyone, including Kugel, seemed ashamed for having been so callous and rash. Soon more facts became known: the victim was an elderly blind woman; she worked at the station for years; she had gotten disoriented and stepped off the platform just as the train was arriving.

F Train?
Kugel imagined her thinking.
That’s how I die? The F train?

The horrific news deepened the passengers’ solemnity; some wished her well, some prayed, others told stories of similar tragedies: of the friend who died in the World Trade Center attack, of the family member who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina, of the child struck down by swine flu. It annoyed Kugel, this wallowing, this cheap pseudo-mourning. Shut up, all of you, he thought, keep your damned horror stories to yourself.

There was no need to confront them, though; their compassion lasted only as long as their patience, which wasn’t very long, and as the minutes ticked by, their sympathy slowly turned back to anger. They began to grumble about missed meetings and angry clients. After fifteen minutes, the mood in the train returned to the same indignant, griping space it had occupied before. What is taking so long? someone muttered. Ridiculous, sighed another. Kugel, late now for his expensive Jove appointment, thought, Just move the train, for fuck’s sake, she’s not getting any deader. At last the train lurched forward, and the passengers, Kugel included, sighed with relief.

Kugel pulled down the attic door and warily climbed up the stairs, worried about being met by flying borscht bottles and jars of herring. He was relieved to hear Anne Frank typing away behind her wall.

I’m sorry about that, he said to Anne Frank as he approached the wall. He’s a scientist, you know, his world is facts, not feelings.

The typing stopped. Kugel looked over the wall, and Anne turned to face him. The stack of manuscript pages beside her computer had grown.

What is she, said Anne Frank, stealing my bit?

What?

Your mother, said Anne Frank. What’s with all the attic crap?

Kugel’s immediate concern became Jonah; if Anne Frank could hear Mother, so could he.