“How will it be when the children come for Christmas,” he worries; he wants to see them of course, but the disorder—“Will you cook? I won’t be able to live here! I’ll have to find a room in a hotel for the time...” he resolves mock seriously.
What will happen to them, he pursues; Joshua is almost fourteen, “When I was that age...The world has changed.” And he carries on with a troubled insistence, in a tone of bewilderment as he asks, “Will Joshua go to college? Will Toby get married and have children? Will Jonathan be drafted if there is a war in xx years?” And in a tone of impotent resignation, “Joshua will go to college. Toby will get married. Jonathan will be drafted if there is a war. This is how it must be.” But he is not reconciled. “How will it be?” he continues asking childishly. Everything should be under his control; everything should be known and settled.
“Why do you worry?” she asks.
“I don’t worry; I want to know; I want everything to be in order.”
He knows how alone he stands in his commitment to order; that men are irrational and violent, “You too,” he observes sadly. The fact that he has failed with his own child hurts anew. “Why?” he asks, and speaks about the intrinsic tendency for order in every living cell—why not the mind? He must have a reason for the disorder of the human mind. Is there a death instinct? Is it a by-product of language?
Wouldn’t it be better for him to be putting on tefillin and wailing in the synagogue, she wonders, instead of carrying on like this? If his father had remained in his village...then Sophie wouldn’t exist. For an instant the world lights up in the heavenly splendor of that possibility, true and eternal as pure possibility, a world unblemished by the marriage of Rudolf Landsmann to Kamilla Ripper, and their offspring; a world where those three people living together in embarrassment didn’t happen, nor the journey of the father with the daughter, terminating at this table; for a moment longer she covets that happier world in which her father would have lived the life of a provincial rabbi, and she wouldn’t have been born, while he, her father, rambling on, concludes on a hopeful note, “Chemistry will provide the answer.” And as they start walking toward the grocery store, his arm around her, he tells how he loved her as a child, loved, cared, provided for her; “But sometimes I feel guilty that you were born,” he confesses, not for the first time; and asks her, “What do you think, am I wrong? Should I not feel guilty?”
Her silent smile, faintly amused, indifferent, secretive, answers him. The child to whom he keeps addressing his questions, his child, has refused to exist for him so long ago, she reflects, or rather has continued to exist only in this act of refusal.
Once again father and daughter walk arm in arm along Clinton Avenue, he speaking, she silent. It could be during the war years or when she returned from college, or after she was married; the same stories told, the same questions addressed to her, himself, to life. The same bleak parking lots and garish billboards rising over two- and three-story frame houses with cluttered shop fronts blinking their neon signs. “I saw my mother work from daybreak late into the night; working for nine children. And why? Was it worthwhile? Worthwhile to be born for this? For her? For me? I told her once when we were alone, ‘You could have skipped me.’ But then you wouldn’t exist. And so what?”
It could be ten years ago, or fifteen. It is not now. It is in a book. Her father’s conversations with himself always had the quality of some obscure rite in which she was incomprehensibly involved.
As she was walking along Clinton Avenue with her father in the evening during the war, “Can you imagine yourself,” he asked, “a young girl married to a man she had not exchanged a word with till after the wedding; and then children, one after another—what would you have done?” he asked strangely. “Can you imagine yourself—” he continued about his mother, then about Sophie and her mother. Part of a long monologue which she never interrupted, not in answer to her question, growing out of some troubled preoccupation of his own: concern for his family in Budapest, his daughter’s future, his fear of being forgotten by his daughter when she married; the conversation beginning or ending with Auschwitz.
From her father’s rambling discourse she picked out a fairy tale: it was beautiful and mysterious, the story of the young girl married to a man chosen for her by her father, a stranger from another town; the marriage arranged on the basis of a sermon.
“It was not how he imagined it.” Her father tells once more the story of how her grandfather became the chief rabbi of Budapest. “He never intended to become a rabbi. He came from a well-to-do family whose other members went into trade, finance, administration of land; he had received a secular education. It was not unusual for a young man from an orthodox Jewish family to distinguish himself in Talmudic learning and then afterward settle down in some profession.”
“Why did he become a rabbi if he didn’t want to?” she asks. Her father replies with a sigh and a gesture of helplessness, perhaps repeating the answer he received from his father.
Of the life his father imagined before his fateful encounter with Simon of Nyitra, and his decision to marry Simon’s daughter, her father does not speak. What he imagined on the train to Galanta, or what he imagined on the train back to his home town in Pazdics to take leave of his parents, no one shall ever know; only his disappointment. “It was not the life that he imagined,” her father repeats.
•
Back in the
