Not Me Read online

  Each of the journals was dated in large penned script on the cover. I set them out on the floor until I found the oldest one, dated June 1978. I knew immediately why he had begun to write. That was my before, too.

  I put the other volumes back in the box, arranged my paperback Cassell’s English-German Dictionary on the table beside me, reclined the La-Z-Boy into a comfortable position, and opened the dry, powdery, cheap leather cover of Journal #1.

  I already guessed how it would begin.

  We buried Karen today, in the plot I had purchased for myself and Lily. She was 18 years old. 18 years old. Who buys a plot for an 18 year old? Lulled. I was lulled into thinking everything would be all right. I thought, oh yes! we do have a future! But oh! How I have cursed this family!!!!

  As soon as I read these words, the scene came rushing back to me. Speeding home from NYU to find my mother at Karen’s hospital bedside, weeping, too late. She was gone. So was my father. He wasn’t there. I held my mother as best I could. It was awkward, somehow, to do it. It was a reversal of roles, a role I had yet to learn, one that gave me no pleasure, and only distanced me from my own feelings. I had always protected my sister as a kid. She hung out with us older guys, even dated some of my friends in my last year of high school. She was only two years behind us, and she was beautiful and smart and funny. We smoked a little dope together, too. If you want to know the truth, she was funnier than me. I mean, I could make people laugh—but she could just cross her eyes and everyone would crack up. When she died, I think it made me funnier. I stole her style. Not on purpose. It just came over me, and every so often I’d notice—hey, that’s how Karen would do it.

  I recalled now that my father had disappeared from the scene, emerging only late that night from the attic where he had gone to be alone with his collection of stamps—he collected Israeli stamps—and quietly made his way downstairs to drink a cup of tea. A lot of people had shown up that day, but they were all gone now. Mom was asleep with a Miltown the doctor had given her. I was sitting in the sun parlor, wondering what was next, and I saw him steal down the stairs in the darkness and put on the kettle without turning on the kitchen light. It was really at that moment that I knew everything had changed, that I had not been dreaming all this, that Karen would never be coming home, and that I had lost something irretrievable, something even beyond the loss of my sister. In fact, now that I thought about it, I recalled that we didn’t stop the lessons because of Ella, or because I changed majors. It was because there was no one to come home to. I remembered trying to start them up again a few weeks after the funeral. He just looked at me with a mixture of pity and contempt, patted my shoulder and said, not today. Maybe next week. But next week never seemed to come. And then I stopped trying. And then, only then, did I switch my major to psych.

  From that moment on my father seemed to slip further away from me, drowning himself, as I saw it, in good works for the Jews. For my part, I began to have a physical reaction against Jews and anything Jewish. I quit Hillel, I ate bread on Passover, I had bacon in my refrigerator, and if it weren’t for the fact that I was in love with a Jewish girl, I would have gone out of my way to date Gentiles. I even put up a Christmas tree my senior year, but when I brought one home that first year to Ella’s, she actually threw it out the window. It was only one of those little desktop acrylic things with all the ornaments already attached and it made hardly a sound as it landed in the snow, but well into spring and summer you could still find tinsel here and there in the courtyard, stuck between cracks in the pavement, or hanging from the droopy arm of a crocus.

  Sure, I’d go home for the High Holidays, for the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement—the Days of Awe—of Awe, my father would intone pointedly. When I was little he would look down at me and say, “You know what ‘awe’ is? It’s the feeling you get when your mother walks in the room carrying a brisket!”—and then he’d laugh and scruff up my hair with his knuckles. But when I returned to that synagogue, either alone or later with Ella and once or twice even with Josh—a synagogue I had known all my life (I knew every detail of the stained-glass windows, every name on the memorial plaques; I knew that the Abramses sat to our right, and the Glassmans to our left)—I writhed in discomfort, especially when they came to the part where they recited every possible sin a person could do—just in case, as my father would say; just in case what? And the thing was, you knew you had committed almost every single one of them. For the sin we have sinned with impure thoughts. For the sin we have sinned by wanton looks. For the sin we have sinned by telling lies. And here was my favorite: For the sin we have sinned by folly of the mouth. That was my vocation, for gosh sakes. That’s what I was going to do for a living. I was guilty! Guilty! For the sin we have sinned by stealing someone else’s material. For the sin we have sinned by screwing up the timing. And worse: For the sin we have sinned by following Ella after she left the library to see if she was still sleeping with Larry Pressman! And there I was, beating my chest with the rest of them, hating every minute of it, unable to stop. I would touch the fringes of my tallis and adjust my skullcap and wonder, who is this person I am pretending to be?

  On some level I found the whole thing funny. I used a lot of it in my early stand-up routines, which I did first at a little club for NYU students, and then at open mikes around the city. My life at that time apparently was hilarious. I began to have success. The only people who didn’t find me all that amusing were my parents. But what could be funny to them? After you lose a child, what’s funny?

  I went back to reading my father’s journal, though with renewed trepidation. I reminded myself that I didn’t want to know what his secrets were. And I certainly didn’t want to revisit certain events in my own life. I hadn’t thought seriously about my sister in years. Karen equaled: “You have any brothers or sisters?” “Yes, but my sister died when I was twenty.” Karen was just a name, a time marker in my story, a closed case, an answer at a cocktail party. “Oh, I’m sorry,” they’d say. But reading even just the first paragraphs of my father’s diary—or whatever this was going to turn out to be—had created turmoil inside my heart. She had risen from the dead, as if, as they say, at the end of days God breathes life into the bones of the righteous, and they walk the earth once more. That’s what it was beginning to feel like. The end of days.

  Dad did not write very much more about Karen though. Apparently she was not the real subject matter, or maybe it was just too painful for him.

  I now know, he wrote, that I can run away no longer. Like Jonah, trying to escape the will of God, I have caused the storm to rise, and like him, must be thrown overboard, lest all around me die on my account. One cannot hide from God’s wrath, no more than from His grace. He will find you! And all your works are naught! Is my great love for the Jewish People not enough? Of course not enough! Never enough! Just vanity! Why should He care for my feeble gestures? Why should He care about my feelings? They count for nothing in His eyes, and rightly so.

  I had to put it down. This was ridiculous. It didn’t sound quite as bad in German as it does in English, because German tends to be high flown and fanciful, but my God! All that biblical crap. All that hair pulling. All that rending of clothes. Jonah? Please! I mean, I understood he was upset because of Karen, and even somewhat hysterical, sure, of course, but twenty-four volumes of this?

  I skipped down several paragraphs until I saw my own name. What would he have said to me? I wondered. We who never talked about it—about Karen—about his life in the camps—about anything except the fact that he didn’t want me to go into show business and the fact that I was a shonda—a shame—for denying my Jewish heritage. I remember telling him, being born something is just an accident, but how you live your life is your choice. And I don’t choose to be Jewish! I had said that in my mother’s presence I now recalled, and even then I was ashamed, because her face grew red, yet she said nothing, and did not allow herself to cry. My father as usual stormed out of the room and called me a
Nazi. When I looked over to my mother, she had her back to me, clearing off the table, but I could see that her hands were shaking. I went off and watched TV.

  But here, in the day of crisis, he had written to me.

  And so now, my Michael, my firstborn, my young hero with the sharp tongue, my beloved son, my hope, the time has come to tell my story. You will assume that I have thought about this for a long time—but you must be assured that it is not because of you that I have withheld—not because of anything about you, not even because I wanted to protect you. Rather, I have tried so desperately to reinvent myself, to cast off the past like a rotten coat, to never, ever even think of it, lest God hear my thoughts and somehow punish me again. That was cowardice, I admit it. But over time, it became something else—love. I am a Jew, first and foremost. I embrace it with all my heart and soul. I yearn for all that is Jewish in the world to rise from the depths and purify the air around us—to spring clean our souls! That is the power of the Jewish life—cleansing and hopeful and joyous. So why go back in time to another world, a dark and gruesome world, a world of hatred and pain?

  But God will not let me alone. I am punished for my sins through my beautiful and innocent daughter. And if I do not now confess, will you be next?

  Whatever you learn of me, from this day forth, remember, man is nothing but a vessel of God’s will—even so—he must bear the responsibility of his actions, as if they were his own.

  He put a mark under these paragraphs, like this =========, and I realized that he was done writing for that day.

  After that there were several blank pages, a page or two with some scribblings that had been violently crossed out and obliterated, and finally what looked like a title page.

  It read, simply,

  A Story

  And when I turned the page, I was surprised to see not the continuation of the diary, or journal, but what appeared to be the first paragraphs of a novel.

  CHAPTER 4

  Heinrich Mueller joined the SS in 1939, largely because his cousin, SS-Obersturmführer Hans Mueller, of Special Unit 4, had returned from the front, that is, from Poland, and told him he was a fool if he let himself be drafted into the regular army.

  “And anyway,” Hans had said, “everyone thinks you’re head of the Gestapo already.”

  He was referring of course to Heinrich Müller, the chief of the Gestapo, because of the similarity between their names. But Heinrich did not wish to be a policeman. So he signed up with the Waffen-SS, thinking he would be a war hero. Instead, he was trained as an accountant, and attached to the Budget and Construction Office, but not in Berlin. He was given his silver death’s-head for his cap, had his rank raised to second lieutenant, and was sent to do the books in Bergen-Belsen. He was well suited for the work. He liked numbers. He also enjoyed the study of language. He spent his spare time reading English, and found, much to his amusement, that he had also picked up a great deal of the Jewish dialect as well, simply from interacting with the few inmates he had impressed into service as bookkeepers, and with whom he found himself conversing almost as if it were a normal day at the office. In fact, he took special pleasure in aping their ways and amusing his friends in the officers’ club—the self-deprecating shuffle, the unpleasant singsong cadence, the curiously convoluted logic. Still, he would never have considered this knowledge of Jewish worthwhile, for he could not regard it as a language. It was just a bastardized mixture of tongues. Just a joke to amuse his friends.

  Two years later, he found himself transferred to the East, namely to the Majdanek Concentration Camp, near Lublin. The job was similar, but more depressing. By comparison, Bergen was a spa. For here the smell of burning flesh was constant, and in the blocks themselves the stench of excrement and rot overwhelming. It made him hate the Jew even more. He was lucky though. He rarely had to leave the relative comfort of the SS compound, which was far across the highway. And in any case, his responsibilities were for Camp B, the labor camp, and not the other operation, to which he decided he had no connection at all. He worked in his office, taking his meals in town. Lublin was but walking distance, except on very cold nights. It was not that he agreed or disagreed. He saw its necessity. And frankly, he was too busy to worry about it. There was so much to account for: clothing, jewelry, artifacts, furs. Plus the cost of new construction, of food, of supplies, which were, by the way, very hard to get, and even harder to keep track of. However, he could tell you exactly how to derive the utmost profit from a human being, given the cost of his ration and general upkeep, and taking into account his initial age, health, height, weight, and national origin.

  In 1945 Heinrich Mueller found himself back in Bergen-Belsen when Majdanek was abandoned under pressure of the Soviet advance. It was there, in Bergen-Belsen, in April of that year, that he was liberated by the British.

  This occurred in the following way. Heinrich, sensing the end was near—it was not a difficult calculation, after all—starved himself for three weeks. When the day approached and many of the Germans fled, only, he assumed, to be caught and hanged, he instead shaved his head, exchanged his uniform for the rags—which he carefully deloused—of a dead prisoner, rolled himself in the mud, and waited. While he was lying there in a trench, surrounded by—but not touching—dead bodies, he had noticed that many of the prisoners had been tattooed with numbers. They had not done this at Majdanek, but he saw no reason not to ice the cake. At night, he slipped back into the officers’ compound, and with a needle dipped in ink, he tattooed a number into his forearm. He had copied the number from a corpse that had been lying next to him. Then he hurried back to the trench.

  When the troops arrived, he crawled out from among the dead bodies, and was saved. They fed him a little Spam.

  They asked him who he was. He held out his arm.

  No, they said, your name.

  He looked at them with the blank stare of the walking dead. A young soldier walked up to him and took his hands. It’s all right, he said in Yiddish. I’m Jewish, too. What’s your name?

  He realized with panic that he hadn’t thought of any name. They looked at each other for what seemed to him an eternity.

  Heshel Rosenheim, he suddenly said.

  It was the name of one of the Jewish bookkeepers from whom he had gleaned so many Yiddish words. It was the first name that popped into his head.

  He did not know if the real Heshel Rosenheim was alive or dead, but it really didn’t matter—unless of course he ran into him. But other than Rosenheim and a few of his other Kapos, there was almost no one who could recognize him. For one thing there were sixty thousand prisoners here, and most of them had just arrived from somewhere else, spirited away from death camps farther east. He was in a position to know this, after all. He was the bean counter. So, he reasoned, he could be from anywhere. Who would question him? He thought about things now, about how things work out. For years he secretly despised himself for doing so little for the Fatherland, stuck in that office doing calculations. Yes, yes, he knew how important his task was—still, he had only been a bürohengst—a pencil pusher. But now, he realized with a kind of joy, he had actually been fortunate! And indeed he was pleased with himself. Pleased that he had had the foresight to stay away from the main camps, pleased that he had so little to do with—well—anything. For one thing, he wasn’t the type to go out and shoot people. And he almost never frequented the brothel. The filthy Jewish women held little interest for him. And thus there were few prisoners, if any, who might recognize him. And those who could—why they were almost certainly dead. As for Rosenheim, surely he was dead too. No one could survive that long. Such a thing would have been economically unfeasible.

  In any case, his main worry right now was to avoid the typhus that had spread throughout the camp. He kept to himself. He drank only from the army water tanks. And he watched carefully for every opportunity to help himself, staying as close as he could to the British soldiers. But something happened in those first two days that struck him as hila
rious. The stupid British in their zeal to help these insects, these roaches, plied them with rations. The greedy Jews stuffed themselves with food, and soon were convulsed in the dirt, screaming their guts out, puking and shitting at the same time, and in an hour or so they were dead. They had eaten themselves to death.

  But Rosenheim—for that is the name he now knew himself by—had starved only a few weeks, not a few years. His bowels had not yet shriveled to the size of a pencil lead. Nevertheless, he ate carefully, and sparingly. The British merely thought he was simply too far gone to care about food.

  They sent him to a hospital in Lübeck, and from there to a D.P. camp near Geringshof, in the American Zone.

  Not surprisingly, he recovered his health more quickly than most.

  I literally jumped up from the La-Z-Boy, as if suddenly it was on fire. I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking, yet I could not put the journal down. It was glued to my fingers, like when you touch something really cold, like an ice cube or a metal pole that sticks to your skin—and it burns like hell, but you can’t let go. It seemed like it was leeching the blood right out of me, because I was completely dizzy, light-headed, I thought I might faint, and my heart was racing, and everything in the room was spinning. What in God’s name is he talking about? I cried. What, what, what? It was like pressure inside me rising, like a wave of vomit. What? I cried. What?