The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg (20 page)

Journal Entries,
November 3–5

It is a concrete smokestack on the outside. Concrete blocks, but inside the floors are wood and covered in Persian rugs. Still, it is spooky. Cold. You are sleeping in the bedroom where your father slept. There's still an IV drip in the corner.

Liver cancer.

Pani Jadwiga and Paulina share a room in this mausoleum.

God, she is hateful. Wakes you up by throwing a shoebox on your chest. “Wake up, sleepy,” she says after the box hits you. You've slept for two days. The cough is deep. Dirty French river water in your lungs. She's been waiting for Pani Jadwiga to leave so she can attack you. Now she throws a box on your sick chest. Nice sister.

You look in the box. Are you dreaming? He wrote, “Spit out of a river, nothing. I've been shot and my brothers torn to pieces.” Who was spit out of a river?

The man was obsessed. There are hundreds of letters and notes and scraps covered in writing. Crazy man wrote to Brett Favre dozens of times. What old European Jewish man writes to a quarterback? Crazy father. “Interceptions are nothing. They just show you live on that tightrope!” Crazy man.

There is a note to Charlie. Dad tells him to say yes.

You make a big show of how your father was crazy. Pani Jadwiga eyeballs you from her chair, while she cuts a picture of a bird out of the newspaper. “He wrote letters to football players!” You shake your head.

“I look in your packet,” says Paulina.

“What packet?” you ask.

“For your back,” says Paulina.

“You read my notebooks?” you shout.

“You write suicide letter to Madonna. Tell me about crazy father.”

Okay.

Letter 57
November 5, 2004

Dear Brett Favre,

I am not the kind of guy who travels halfway around the world to find his father alive.

A couple of days ago, Mr. Favre, I was lying on a cot in a cold Polish jail cell where I hadn't slept for three days, because of coughing. Without sleeping, I began to hallucinate. Often, I'd hallucinate you throwing footballs and me and my sister watching from the sidelines cheering. That's ridiculous.

I was dreaming of you when I heard the cell door open. I was dreaming of you when an animal attacked me, except it wasn't an animal, it was my sable coat, which was thrown on top of me by a guard. I didn't struggle under the weight of the coat. I figured my number was up and the animal could eat me and I'd die. But then my angry sister entered the jail cell and without saying hello pulled me to standing and helped me put on the sable coat. Then she grabbed my backpack and she walked me out of the jail. Nobody said goodbye. Nobody answered my question, which was: “What is going on?”

My sister, Paulina, walked me to her car, this odd-looking French car with a faded orange paint job. She stuck me in the backseat, threw my backpack on top of me, and drove to a flower shop. While she was in the flower shop, the sun was bright and I found my Jim Morrison shades, which had gotten bent, in my coat pocket. I put them on. I was still half asleep, blurry, dizzy, and I heard voices. A gang of kids surrounded the car. They pressed their faces to the windows and shouted at me in Polish, which is a horrible language. Then Paulina returned carrying bags and bags of noxious flowers. She yelled at the kids, which made them scatter. She opened the squeaky car door and threw the flowers on me. Inside the car she said, “These childrens should be at cemetery. Not harassing infirm American.”

Exactly what I was thinking, Mr. Favre. Why would kids want to hang out at a cemetery?

We drove out of the city and I had to go to the bathroom, which made Paulina glare. We stopped at a bar with chicken wire on the walls, which apparently was hung there to keep plaster from falling all over the floor. Men in the bar shouted at me, because I looked funny. Paulina shouted at the men and they fell silent.

Back in the car, we continued to drive. I asked where. Paulina said nothing.

The sun was setting, the sky coloring orange, darkening the orange of the car. We drove down a road lined with tall birch trees and into a line of cars that moved slowly. We ended up at a cemetery and parked just outside it with hundreds of other cars. There was a line of cars stretching as far as I could see behind us. We parked. And I asked, “Is this Dad's funeral?” Paulina shook her head, no.

I knew my father was dead.

Paulina climbed out. She carried candles she'd had on the front seat, and instructed me to carry the bags of flowers. I did and followed her into the cemetery as the sky was getting dark. I took off my shades and saw we were surrounded by tall trees, orange sky decaying into streaks of blue and purple, the sun coloring everything, as it went down. We crunched over dead leaves, the smell of their decay thick in the air. We waded through crowds of people surrounding graves covered in flowers and lit candles, which made pools of light. People whispered; there were no loud voices, like a mass funeral for everybody.

We came to the family plot. Mitsunori Watanabe, my sister Paulina's husband, was one grave. She put down some candles around Mitsunori's grave. She lit them. Then she took the flowers from my arms and arranged them delicately around the candles. Then she started to sob and then she fell over onto the ground.

I stood there.

The Polish are obsessed with the dead, Mr. Favre. Instead of harassing infirm Americans, most of them spend November 1 at the cemetery.

For Paulina, it's easy to remember—her memories haven't faded, because her husband died only six months ago. She and Mitsunori were both biologists. They met in the mountains on the Czech border. Paulina, still a student, was on vacation and was hiking, and Mitsunori, a Japanese mountain climber, was traveling. They fell in love. Mitsunori moved to Warsaw and opened a bookstore. Last spring, for their second anniversary, they went to Indonesia to do some kind of ecotourism in the pristine rainforests. Mitsunori was shot by thieves in their rental car. He died on Paulina's lap. That's all I know. I've known my sister for less than ten days.

Mr. Favre, I watched Paulina while she sobbed, then I couldn't take it—my chest ached, too, from the dirty water I'd inhaled in Paris and also from sadness for my sister. Then I looked up and saw Pani Jadwiga, Paulina's mother, my dad's partner for twenty-five years, and she was standing there surrounded by the depleting fall light, and she was crying real softly, I knew, for my dad. I walked to her and asked her where Dad's grave was. She hugged me and said, “No grave.”

My dad died on August 23 of this year, about eight months after your dad died. My dad had liver cancer, so it took him a while to go. Nothing shocking like the sudden heart attack your dad had. Except I didn't know my dad was sick until I found out that he's dead—I've come all the way from Minnesota to see him.

The last night I was fully part of my own family, fully with my wife and kids, was the night after your dad died, when you played that Monday night football game against the Raiders. Me and Mary (my wife, who would start divorce proceedings against me a few weeks later) let our kids stay up to watch. You were so amazing, Mr. Favre, throwing four touchdown passes in the first half, flinging the ball between defenders, completing everything. It did seem like your dad was up there in the heavens guiding all your throws to perfection. It was incredible, Mr. Favre. At halftime, Mary and I cried and hugged, because everything we believed about ourselves was turning out false and your dad had died and you were so raw and emotional and perfect.

Christmas was a few days later and I behaved horribly and that sealed my family's fate.

So just a few days ago, on November 1, I found myself sitting cross-legged on the ground in this Polish cemetery, back against a birch tree, watching my sister Paulina crying on the ground in front of her husband's gravestone. I watched her mother, Pani Jadwiga, my father's lover, bend over her to rub her back while whispering to her. I found myself thinking of you. And inexplicably, the whole scene filled with light.

My father loved you, Brett. He was your biggest fan (although I didn't know that yet when I sat in the cemetery). And just like me, he was not a good communicator except on paper—letter after letter he wrote, to you and everybody else, by far the lion's share of which he never sent. I don't send letters, either. But I'm writing you a letter to tell you my dad loved your interceptions as much as your touchdown passes. He loved that you take such great joy in doing what you do best. I'm communicating for him, even though he's gone.

With much respect,

T. Rimberg

Day Eleven:
Transcript 2

I didn't know Brett Favre's life had gotten so traumatic again last year.

You know, I was in the home in Antwerp when his brother-in-law died, and I was dying in Poland when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. I figured that out later, back in June, when I was at Motel 6 in Milwaukee with all that time on my hands.

Dad scribbled on everything. He had scraps and scraps of paper filled with tiny words in this boot-sized shoebox. More writing than I've ever done.

Same kinds of things I found in the inheritance envelope I got in Minneapolis. Odd pictures with writing all over the back. Napkins, receipts, newspapers with marker writing over the top. Lots I couldn't read at all.

Yes, I know. I am my father's son.

Most in English, yeah. He learned it early and was in the U.S. by the time he was fourteen, so he communicated in English.

I am far more organized with my writing. Especially after Pani

Jadwiga put my notebooks back together.

Dad had been expecting me. Paulina told me when we were leaving the cemetery.

Right. He died August 23. It was the sixtieth anniversary of the last gassings at Auschwitz.

He went into a coma on August 19, my thirty-fifth birthday, the day both I and Paulina first dreamt of each other.

No. Not there. Dad certainly wasn't in the cemetery.

Do you really want to know?

He was cremated. He's out on the interstate where I hit that bus.

Journal Entries,
November 6–9

In the middle of a dream of Chelsea's living room. You are making love. Then Dad taps your shoulder. You turn to look at him. He's orange. He stands over you, slaps your face. “So that is your action? That is your love? You schtup your secretary and call it love?”

“She isn't my secretary,” you shout at him.

“Jadwiga was my secretary,” Dad says.

Behind him, Paulina as a little girl shakes her head at you.

In the morning, Paulina shouts, “You are here. Stay out of my dreams.”

“I can't even get laid,” you shout back.

“What is laid?” Paulina asks.

I am disgusting, you think.

Breakfast. You've just read a note to Paulina from Dad. In it he wrote, “You are not alone, my girl. You have two brothers, two nieces, and three nephews. They should know you.”

Paulina sits across from you, glaring. “You have wife. He told me you have wife and left her. I read in your notebook how you treat wife.”

“No,” you say. “Not wife. My wife divorced me.”

“And childrens? He said I am auntie. I see you write childrens.”

“Stop reading my goddamn notebooks,” you say.

“You are like father,” she nods. “Disappeared, and no good.” She nods again.

“No,” you say.

“Yes,” she sneers. She stands from the table, says, “Like him. You disappear.”

You can almost hear the growl in the scrawled words on the paper. He and Paulina were fighting. He's angry. It's so hard to read his shaky hand.

“You think it's about what you get? You think this between us should have been a transaction? Me giving something to you? Human life isn't tit for this, tat for that. We are connected. We are for each other. We are more than our transaction. This is love, daughter. I made you. That's what I did. And what good was I to you after? I chased money. I know you think he won't come. But he will, and then you can ask Theodore what good I am to him. Better for him I'm not there. Better for him to love me as he does. Now you stop shouting at me. I'm not a well man!”

You and Paulina are alike. You and your father were alike. You are assholes.

Today you walked outside with Pani Jadwiga. She treats you like a little boy. She bought you a chocolate. Outside were tall concrete apartment blocks surrounded by gray parking lots and dirty cars and long brown grass around a dirty pond. Perfect blue sky. You imagine the Baltic. Ice cold air felt good in your lungs. There was a layer of ice across the pond. Jadwiga talked and talked in Polish. Babbled away, as if you could understand. She pointed at birds and hooted, called to them. Laughed at her own jokes. Grabbed your arm so she could hold it as you walked together. Bubbling Pani Jadwiga. Paulina will not look at you. How can her mother be so sweet?

Why are you not in jail? Why are you here? They will come. Paulina will call them and they will put you back in that jail and you will die. He is dead. His body is rotting. They never gave you back the suitcase he stole from you. There are pictures of your children. Little faces staring up from school photos, buried in a Polish trash pit. He's dead. He's dead. It's too dark in this fucking room.

Dad wrote to you, but didn't send it.

“When everything is gone, you want it back. My father. My mother. I wanted back what we had lost and I built it. But only the money. And now it's too late, Theodore, to give it to you. I don't want you to have to build back. I want you to be free of this. But you aren't here. God damn it, tell your brother I don't want to die without us talking, Theodore. Tell David. Unforgiving boy. He should forgive.”

It's the only time he's addressed David. Your father sounds confused.

David will not forgive.

You, after much fretting, after thinking about what Dad wanted to give but didn't, call David at his office to tell him the news of your father's death. You have to travel with Paulina to the post office to make an international call that won't be collect.

“You're where?” David growls.

You say where.

“With Dad?”

You tell him not with Dad, because Dad is dead.

“This family is completely ridiculous. I thought you were dead. Mary thought you were dead. She called me panicking. I tracked you to Holland. I mean, the police tracked you to Holland, you missing person.”

You tell him you were searching for Dad.

“Perfect. Irresponsible, loser son chases down asshole father. World is a better place, huh? Harmonic convergence.”

You say again, putting emphasis on dead, that Dad is DEAD.

David says good riddance. David tells you he'll call Mary. David tells you you're not welcome to contact him again. He hangs up the phone.

You look over at Paulina, who is leaning against another bank of phones. You tell her, “David says goodbye.”

This is funny. A letter to you written on an old receipt roll, purple numbers printed on the opposite side from the handwriting, like it was pulled from a cash register. Funny, or not so funny.

“You think you want to know truth? Fine. Your grandfather was attacked by a mob in Holland after he escaped Antwerp. The underground tracked him over there, where he was living as a Catholic. They worked him over, beat him, and dragged him around for two hours before they strung him up. They strung up my mother, too. That's how well he was liked. Not very much.

“Some of this I knew. I heard things after the war before your Uncle Solly brought me to the States.

“Some I found out just in 1979 when Lev Goldstein wanted to apologize to me in Chicago. Lev was part of this mob in Holland when he was sixteen. Lev, who owned some retail shop in a fancy suburb north of the city with his nice tie and jacket, helped murder my father. I know my father had it coming, but not my mother, Theodore. Not your grandmother. Lev said she wouldn't get out of the way and she kicked and scratched those guys. Lev told me he was haunted by this, the murder of my mother, and had to apologize. I broke Lev's nose in a restaurant when he told me my father died screaming curses and my mother died sobbing and screaming for my father. I was in such a state, I had too much to drink. I phoned Jadwiga and told her I needed to see her, because we'd been out to dinner many times on my trips to Chicago and she was a good secretary and I knew she loved me, despite my circumstances, and I needed her. I only came home one more time to say goodbye to you, Theodore. And here I am at the end, and I want to curse life like my father? This I don't want to give to you, my son, curses. I don't want us to curse life.”

Dad ran home to Europe with Jadwiga but wouldn't live with her, even after she had his child. Not pretty.

Dreamed last night of James Lofton catching a pass on a sunny day at Lambeau Field. You and Dad and Paulina were down on the sidelines and the sun was high and the football blotted out the sun, then James Lofton jumped twenty feet in the air and pulled it down before being tackled.

At breakfast, Paulina comes late and says, “I might like tanks and Nazis more than watching these sports.” She smiles, though. Sends shivers through your body.

“Football?” Pani Jadwiga asks. “Chicago Bears. Walter Payton! Nice smile.”

“You do not speak English,” Paulina snarls at her.

“Walter Payton is dead,” you mumble.

Pani Jadwiga cries, “Oh!” She leaves the table, crying.

So much crap in this box and you can't stay awake to read it all. Some letters are not addressed, but seem to be to you. At night, Paulina paces around the apartment, and you can't sleep unless she does, but are too tired to read. And then all day you both sleep and dream of Green Bay. Tonight is Kristallnacht, Paulina informs you. You never drink with her, but agree you will drink tonight, because, apparently, Kristallnacht was important to Dad. Kristallnacht is important. November 9.

First you will finish reading these things.

One last note is glued to the back of a newspaper filled with soccer scores. You had to peel it away slowly to not damage it.

Then this.

“Theodore, I mailed you that letter. I made it plain to you that I am dying and you should come visit me here in Warsaw, but it doesn't matter what I say, because you won't come in time. I have maybe five minutes and I will be out again with this dripping medicine. I dream and I'm awake but never completely awake again. You know I know your children? I know Charlie and Sylvie and Kara. I know their names and even have had pictures of them your mother sent to me. I want to tell you that your mother invited me to come visit when Charlie was born. She invited me, but I didn't. I told her no. I told her I had too much business and you wouldn't want to see me after all this time. Don't be upset with your mother, because she tried. Even with all her depression and craziness, she tried hard for you and invited me to come meet my grandson. Now when I sleep I hear echoes of these children. I dream them, too. I dream them playing on the floor in front of me, just like I was a good grandpa, and I tell them how beautiful they are. I'm afraid that too late I realized I am like my father who put business in front of people. I always thought that I'm not like him. I used my dreams to feel close to my family and he used his to frighten people, to gain advantage. I am not like him, I said. He worked for Nazis and I set his victims free. I am not like him. But even if I was treated as some kind of hero, it was only one train, Theodore. It was only one action. I let it go to my head, that I wasn't like my father, because I risked everything to save people. But it was only one train on one day. And my good family was only a dream.

“I dream of my grandchildren and they are good kids, but time changes everything, and they might not stay good kids. You have to tell them I love them.

“Theodore, when I'm not asleep, I feel Jadwiga's hand on my head and she says, 'Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh, nyeh.' That means no over and over. I tell her to speak in English, because she can. You have to watch out what you say in front of her, because she has some big ears and she lived in Chicago two years, so she plays dumb, but she understands and she listens. She doesn't want to speak English. She only ever wants to speak French with me because English makes her feel guilty that she broke up my marriage, which she didn't. And now she says in Polish, ‘No.' I tell her to stop saying no when I have the energy. I want her to say yes. But that makes no sense to her. Theodore, I want you to say yes. Do you understand what I'm telling you? You say yes to your children. You say yes to Paulina. You say yes whenever you should say yes. Paulina will have to say yes, too, even though her poor Japanese is dead. Losing someone you love is quite a shock. I know. You know it too. But I'm telling you right now, you can't say no, Theodore. You have no excuse. I want you to say yes. That's it.

“Today I don't have good dreams. Today I dream I am a stormtrooper breaking up furniture, setting fire, while a whole family of Jews cowers and cries. This is Kristallnacht in my dream. I'll tell you what, if I wasn't so sick, I would fight that dream. I would turn myself into a good guy and I would fight. I'm very sick, Theodore. Too sick, I'm afraid to say.

“So goodbye, Theodore.

Your Father”

Kristallnacht is tonight.

In the first sentence of that last gluey note, Dad says his letter is too late? The inheritance notes gave no indication he was dying, no indication where he was, no indication you should visit. Was there another letter? You ask Paulina, who is already drunk, if he means the notes you received with the inheritance back in Minneapolis. She shakes her head no. You tell her to stop saying no. She shouts, “The letter he wrote you that you don't listen to for two months!”

You say, “As God is my witness, I did not receive another letter other than what was in the inheritance envelope.”

“I do not believe in God,” Paulina shouts back.

You and Paulina glare at each other. You push the gluey final note into Paulina's face. She grabs it from your hand. She reads. She pauses. She says, “Yes. There is other letter. You don't know this letter? We send.”

You shake your head no.

“I am sorry, Theodore,” she says. “I am sorry.” There is so much empathy in her eyes. She passes you the bottle. Then you begin to drink.

“To our father,” you say.

“To Father,” she nods.

And soon everything is slow with booze. From the bedroom Pani Jadwiga's deep snores shake. And Paulina, now sitting on the floor, says, “Brother, if you do not know last letter, why do you come to Warsaw?”

You squint at her, thoughts muddled, unsteady. You squint at your sister and say, “I don't know.”

Paulina nods and smiles.