Sunrise West (23 page)

I looked out once more. The train was already pulling into Flinders Street station, though it seemed to me that I had boarded it just moments before. We said goodbye and he quickly vanished into the surging tide of people.

Imagine my astonishment when, on the following Sunday, while visiting an acquaintance who had had half his stomach removed at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Esther and I came across the very same man. He was standing next to the patient's bed, dressed in a beige suit and a shirt trimmed with an emerald tie.

‘A pleasure to see you again,' he greeted me. ‘I was still on holiday last time we met.'

‘That must explain your overalls and fishing gear,' I ventured.

‘Precisely. As a rule I travel to work by car, properly dressed for the part.' To my surprise he said this in Yiddish. It put me instantly at ease.

‘And what part is that?' I asked.

The man stretched out his hand. ‘My name is Feldman. I'm a teacher of Semitic languages. What about you two?'

‘We don't teach,' I replied, after introducing him to my wife. ‘We barely escaped with our lives from Germany's foremost academy.'

Professor Feldman proved to be a man of friendliness and charm. After a while the three of us departed together; when we reached the hospital exit he offered us a lift and invited us to join him for a cup of coffee downtown. He was large and bulky, and could hardly squeeze himself into the driver's seat. His car, the colour of dirty red bricks, he called ‘Surcia' — from
Sara
, he explained, turning the key in the ignition. ‘Now, my darling Surcia, show your master what you can do.'

At the café he scrutinized our faces meaningfully. We felt uneasy, tried to avoid his gaze. At last he spoke.

‘I know what you've been through,' he began. ‘Just as we all once stood together at Sinai, so did we all, one way or another, stand in the roll-calls at Auschwitz.'

‘I understand your metaphor, Professor,' I said, ‘but you are fortunate that you were there only metaphorically.'

‘I know. I didn't mean to offend.' He sat back. ‘On the other hand, I believe that the heavy chains you have to wear belong, in a sense, to all of us. Yet we must also move on. In time, everything will pass.'

‘It depends for whom,' said Esther.

‘For everybody.' He smiled warmly. ‘Trust me, there is nothing more inevitable than the inevitable. Time takes care of everything.'

Somehow we were not reassured.

 

 
At the Feldmans'
 

Several weeks later the telephone rang. It was an inclement Sunday morning. The cold southerly buffeting the numb streetlamps, echoed in the telegraph wires' melancholy whisper, evoked memories of roll-calls in muddy snows, of resigned hands waving a last goodbye.

Esther had picked up the receiver. She turned to me, covering the mouthpiece with her palm. ‘We're invited for next Saturday to Professor and Mrs Feldman for afternoon tea. Can we go?'

They lived in North Carlton. A tiny hallway led into their small but warmly furnished first-floor flat. Across each of the two lead-light windows opposite the threshold hung a white translucent gauze curtain, like a shy bride's veil. The walls spoke of academia, and of art. To our pleasant surprise the mutual friend we had visited at the hospital, David Nissen, was also invited; he and his wife Miriam had already arrived.

Lemon tea was served in ornate glasses, Russian-style, and there were tasty sandwiches and freshly-baked cheese blintzes covered in marmalade, which our corpulent host swallowed like vitamin pills.

‘Yes,' said the professor, turning towards me. ‘I owe you an apology, young fellow. I was rather callous last time when we talked about remembrance, and you were unquestionably right. Pain by proxy carries a fake sense of melodrama. There is, and will always remain, a gulf between Holocaust survivors and the rest of mankind — a separateness which no outsider can fathom.'

‘You are partly right,' I replied, a little ungraciously perhaps. ‘One
can
understand and feel with those who survived, but what outsiders cannot grasp is that sense of
inner
destruction felt by survivors. Once you've been tortured, you're forever tortured.'

‘I agree,' David Nissen chimed in. ‘The senseless murder of our people is something of a pathological enigma. Hitler, in my opinion, was a slave to his own vulgarity, a simpleton, a failed artist. His suspicion that his father was half-Jewish drove him to a maniacal hatred, and only a man who hates himself is capable of hating like that.'

‘Bravo, David, bravo!' our host almost shouted.

Mrs Feldman, after refilling our glasses with fresh tea, beckoned Miriam and Esther into an adjoining room. All at once, despite the presence of the two other men, I felt alone. For a moment I thought I could sense warm fingers journeying over my jacket, and a voice, the voice of a man I loved but had so miserably betrayed.
Son, be careful,
whispered the voice of my father.
You've lost your yellow patch.

I swivelled round and saw Aaron Feldman leaning against a wall, next to David Nissen, and they looked to me so strange, complete strangers. But then Aaron's words wrenched me out of my reverie. ‘Yes, yes,' he was saying. ‘We must strive to eliminate hatred — and we
can
do it, surely we can. Teaching, education is the key to everything.'

His words snapped me back to myself. ‘Education?' I retorted. ‘Education can't teach love, decency, justice. Hatred, on the other hand, can certainly be taught. Many of the top Nazis were highly educated. David, you mentioned Hitler. Didn't he attend the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna?'

‘Not quite, but nearly. The director of painting, Griepenkerl, rejected his application twice! If he had been a bit less critical, Hitler would probably have ended up as some pathetic obscure landscapist, and our recent history would have an entirely different landscape.'

‘Who can tell?' said Feldman. ‘If anything, that would seem to support my argument! I still bank on education.'

‘I'm not surprised,' I agreed. ‘After all, you spent the war years in academies and libraries, teaching languages, working with words, while people like me lived very different realities. Even you, David, who became so intimately acquainted with the colour and size of Siberian lice, and emerged from the Soviet gulag with a ruined stomach, even you can not conceive in a million years the horror of what
we
lived through — the horror of standing to be counted in front of the gas chambers, day in, day out.'

The three of us fell silent. I found myself descending once more into my earlier crowded solitude.

A full moon peeped through a lead-light window and played like a nocturnal rainbow across David's sickly face. The wind outside had subsided. The women had rejoined us. Miriam gently nudged her husband that they should make a move; they soon left. We too were ready to call it a night, but our host insisted that Esther and I should tarry a while longer.

‘I've heard that you write,' he said. ‘Yes, I do.'

‘What about?'

‘My experiences.'

‘It must be hard to record everything.'

‘The need to tell is hard to overcome.'

He nodded. ‘Could we meet again?'

‘Of course.'

‘I'm working on a paper,' Feldman confided, almost shyly. ‘I hope one day to teach the Holocaust story to my students.'

‘The death of Abel can only be told, not taught,' I replied.

‘Why?'

I shook my head. ‘When we meet again,' I said.

 

 
Dialogue
 

We met again in a restaurant-bar in the city, on the corner of Bourke and McKillop. I arrived a few minutes before the appointed time, and when the professor walked in I thought the place had shrunk. There were pearls of sweat on Aaron Feldman's forehead, and he panted for air like an expiring fish. Squeezing his immense frame between table and bench he ordered two beers. Amid delighted and sonorous sips he asked me how I was, and before long had invited me to have dinner with him there and then. I accepted and phoned Esther; she wasn't too happy but didn't object.

‘So,' he settled back, ‘you're a writer who believes we shouldn't teach the Holocaust.'

‘I didn't exactly say that, Aaron. I said that it can only be told, not taught. I meant that teaching involves clarifying, a need to explain. In my opinion there is nothing to
explain. How can one explain something that lies outside all human logic? What is there to clarify, what is there to understand? Understanding comes too close to forgiveness.'

‘Not necessarily.'

‘Well, I'm sceptical. You may know better — after all, you've been teaching for most of your life.'

‘Yes, that's true. I've been involved in education, in scholarship. To me, scholarship is a very important tool. What sort of hope can we have of building a better world if we don't learn from the mistakes of the past?'

‘I remember my father saying that if we analyse our tragic history too much, we can lose sight of the pain, the heartache. He didn't deny that scholarship had its benefits, but he argued that it made our sufferings more palatable. At school, when young people were taught about the Great War they were not, as a rule, horrified by those bloody events, but rather fascinated. Some even romanticized the brutality, so that human suffering became no more than a backdrop to the saga of mankind.'

‘All right, but what still puzzles me is this: if you don't believe in
teaching
the Holocaust, how exactly would you go about
telling
it? Doesn't the difference become a little... academic? Did your father advocate some other, more effective way of imparting the disasters of history to the young?'

‘We didn't discuss the subject all that often, or in very great depth. It wasn't always easy to juggle metaphysical questions in a ghetto where people were dying
en masse
, where every second home was a private morgue, where the
threat of being “resettled”, meaning
killed
, was a daily reality. But I do recall one particular chat I had with my father. He pointed out that there is more history in the
poetry
of our prophets, more tragedy in Lamentations, than in the whole biblical narrative.'