What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories Read online

  “Are you saying your marriage is better than ours?” Deb says. “Really? Just because of the rules you live by? That makes a marriage stronger—just between any two random people?”

  “I’m saying your husband would not have the long face, worried over if his wife is keeping secrets. And your son, he would not get into the business of smoking without first coming to you. Because the relationships, they are defined. They are clear.”

  “Because they are welded together,” I say, “and not glued.”

  “Yes,” he says. “And I bet Shoshana agrees.” But Shoshana is distracted. She is working carefully with an apple and a knife. She is making a little apple pipe, all the tampons done.

  “Did your daughters?” Deb says. “If they tell you everything, did they come to you first, before they smoked?”

  “Our daughters do not have the taint of the world we grew up in. They have no interest in such things.”

  “So you think,” I say.

  “So I know,” he says. “Our concerns are different, our worries.”

  “Let’s hear ’em,” Deb says.

  “Let’s not,” Shoshana says. “Honestly, we’re drunk, we’re high, we are having a lovely reunion.”

  “Every time you tell him not to talk,” I say, “it makes me want to hear what he’s got to say more.”

  “Our concern,” Mark says, “is not the past Holocaust. It is the current one. The one that takes more than fifty percent of the Jews this generation. Our concern is intermarriage. It is the Holocaust that’s happening now. You don’t need to be worrying about some Mormons doing hocus-pocus on the murdered six million. You need to worry that your son marries a Jew.”

  “Oh my God,” Deb says. “Oh my God. Are you calling intermarriage a Holocaust? You can’t really—I mean, Shoshana. I mean, don’t … Are you really comparing?”

  “You ask my feeling, that’s my feeling. But this, no, it does not exactly apply to you, except in the example you set for the boy. Because you’re Jewish, your son, he is as Jewish as me. No more, no less.”

  “I went to yeshiva, too, Born-Again Harry! You don’t need to explain the rules to me.”

  “Did you call me ‘Born-Again Harry’?” Mark asks.

  “I did,” Deb says. And she and he, they start to laugh at that. They think “Born-Again Harry” is the funniest thing they’ve heard in awhile. And Shoshana then laughs, and then I laugh, because laughter is infectious—and it is doubly so when you’re high.

  “You don’t really think our family, my lovely, beautiful son, is headed for a Holocaust, do you?” Deb says. “Because that would really hurt. That would really cast a pall on this beautiful day.”

  “No, I don’t,” Mark says. “It is a lovely house and a lovely family, a beautiful home that you’ve made for that strapping young man. You’re a real balabusta,” Mark says. “I mean it.”

  “That makes me happy,” Deb says. And she tilts her head nearly ninety degrees to show her happy, sweet smile. “Can I hug you?” Deb says. “I’d really like to give you a hug.”

  “No,” Mark says, though he says it really, really politely. “But you can hug my wife. How about that?”

  “That’s a great idea,” Deb says. Shoshana hands the loaded apple to me, and I smoke from the apple as the two women hug a tight, deep, dancing-back-and-forth hug, tilting this way and that, so, once again, I’m afraid they might fall.

  “It is a beautiful day,” I say.

  “It is,” Mark says. And both of us look out the window, and both of us watch the perfect clouds in a perfect sky. We are watching this and enjoying this, and so we are staring out, too, as the sky darkens in an instant. It is a change so abrupt that the ladies undo their hug to watch, so sharp is the sudden change of light.

  “It is like that here,” Deb says. And then the skies open up and torrential tropical rain drops straight down, battering. It is loud against the roof, and loud against the windows, and the fronds of the palm trees bend, and the floaties in the pool jump as the water boils.

  Shoshana goes to the window. And Mark passes Deb the apple and goes to the window. “Really, it’s always like this here?” Shoshana says.

  “Sure,” I say. “Every day like that. Stops as quick as it starts.”

  And both of them have their hands pressed up against the window. And they stay like that for some time, and when Mark turns around, harsh guy, tough guy, we see that he is weeping. Weeping from the rain.

  “You do not know,” he says. “I forget what it’s like to live in a place rich with water. This is a blessing above all others.”

  “If you had what we had,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says, wiping his eyes.

  “Can we go out?” Shoshana says. “In the rain?”

  “Of course,” Deb says. And then Shoshana tells me to close my eyes. To close them tight. Only me. And I swear, I think she’s going to be stark naked when she calls, “Open up.”

  She’s taken off her wig is all, and she’s wearing one of Trev’s baseball hats in its place.

  “I’ve only got the one wig this trip,” she says. “If Trev wouldn’t mind.”

  “He wouldn’t mind,” Deb says. And this is how the four of us move out into the rain. How we find ourselves in the backyard, on a searingly hot day, getting pounded by all this cool, cool rain. It is, with the weather, and the being high, and being drunk, and after all that conversation, it is just about the best feeling in the world. And I have to say, Shoshana looks twenty years younger in that hat.

  We do not talk. We are too busy frolicking and laughing and jumping around. And that’s how it happens, that I’m holding Mark’s hand and sort of dancing, and Deb is holding Shoshana’s hand, and also, they’re doing their own kind of jig. And when I take Deb’s hand, though neither of those two is touching the other, somehow we’ve formed a broken circle. We’ve started dancing our own kind of hora in the rain.

  It is the most glorious, and silliest, and freest I can remember feeling in years. Who would think that’s what I’d be saying with these strict, suffocatingly austere people come to visit our house. And then my Deb, my love, once again she is thinking what I’m thinking and she says, face up into the rain, all of us spinning, “Are you sure this is okay, Shoshana? That it’s not mixed dancing? That this is allowed? I don’t want anyone feeling bad after.”

  “We’ll be just fine,” Shoshana says. “We will live with the consequences.” The question slows us, and stops us, though no one has yet let go.

  “It’s like the old joke,” I say. And without waiting for anyone to ask which one, I say, “Why don’t Hassidim have sex standing up?”

  “Why?” Shoshana says.

  “Because it might lead to mixed dancing.”

  Deb and Shoshana pretend to be horrified as we let go of hands, as we recognize that the moment is over, the rain disappearing as quickly as it came. Mark stands there staring into the sky, lips pressed tight. “That joke is very, very old,” he says. And then he says, “Mixed dancing makes me think of mixed nuts, and mixed grill, and insalata mista. The sound of ‘mixed dancing’ has made me wildly hungry. And I’m going to panic if the only kosher thing in the house is that loaf of bleached American bread.”

  “You have the munchies,” I say.

  “Diagnosis correct,” he says.

  Deb starts clapping at that, tiny claps, her hands held to her chest in prayer. “You will not,” Deb says to him, absolutely beaming, “even believe what riches await.”

  · · ·

  The four of us stand in the pantry, soaking wet, hunting through the shelves and dripping on the floor. “Have you ever seen such a pantry?” Shoshana says. “It’s gigantic,” she says, reaching her arms out from side to side. It is indeed large, and it is indeed stocked, an enormous amount of food, and an enormous selection of sweets, befitting a home that is often host to a swarm of teenage boys.

  “Are you expecting a nuclear winter?” Shoshana says.

  “I’ll tell you
what she’s expecting,” I say. “You want to know how obsessed she really is? You want to understand how much she truly talks about the Holocaust? I mean, how serious it is—to what degree?”

  “To no degree,” Deb says. “We are done with the Holocaust.”

  “Tell us,” Shoshana says.

  “She’s always plotting our secret hiding place,” I say.

  “No kidding,” Shoshana says.

  “Like, look at this. At the pantry, and a bathroom next to it, and the door to the garage. If you just sealed it all up—like put drywall at the entrance to the den—you’d never know. You’d never suspect. If you covered that door inside the garage up good with, I don’t know, if you hung your tools in front of it and hid hinges behind, maybe leaned the bikes and the mower up against it, you’d have this closed area, with running water and a toilet and all this food. I mean, if someone sneaked into the garage to replenish things, you could rent out the house, you know? Put in another family without even any idea.”

  “Oh my God,” Shoshana says. “My short-term memory may be gone from having all those children—”

  “And from the smoking,” I say.

  “And from that, too. But I remember. I remember from when we were kids, she was always,” Shoshana says, turning to Deb, “you were always getting me to play games like that. To pick out spaces. And even worse, even darker—”

  “Don’t,” Deb says.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” I tell her, and I’m honestly excited. “The game, yes? She played that crazy game with you?”

  “No,” Deb says. “Enough. Let it go.”

  And Mark—who is just utterly absorbed in studying kosher certifications, who is tearing through hundred-calorie snack packs and eating handfuls of roasted peanuts from a jar, and who has said nothing since we entered the pantry except “What’s a Fig Newman?”—he stops and says, “I want to play this game.”

  “It’s not a game,” Deb says.

  And I’m happy to hear her say that, as that’s just what I’ve been trying to get her to admit for years. That it’s not a game. That it’s dead serious, and a kind of preparation, and an active pathology that I prefer not to indulge.

  “It’s the Anne Frank game,” Shoshana says. “Right?”

  Seeing how upset my wife is, I do my best to defend her. I say, “No, it’s not a game. It’s just what we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank.”

  “How do we play this non-game?” Mark says. “What do we do?”

  “It’s the Righteous Gentile game,” Shoshana says.

  “It’s Who Will Hide Me?” I say.

  “In the event of a second Holocaust,” Deb says, giving in, speaking tentatively. “It’s a serious exploration, a thought experiment that we engage in.”

  “That you play,” Shoshana says.

  “That, in the event of an American Holocaust, we sometimes talk about which of our Christian friends would hide us.”

  “I don’t get it,” Mark says.

  “Of course you do,” Shoshana says. “You absolutely do. It’s like this. If there was a Shoah, if it happened again, say we were in Jerusalem, and it’s 1941 and the Grand Mufti got his way, what would your friend Jebediah do?”

  “What could he do?” Mark says.

  “He could hide us. He could risk his life and his family’s and everyone’s around him. That’s what the game is: Would he—for real—would he do that for you?”

  “He’d be good for that, a Mormon,” Mark says. “Forget this pantry. They have to keep a year of food stored in case of the Rapture, or something like that. Water, too. A year of supplies. Or maybe it’s that they have sex through a sheet. No, wait,” Mark says, “I think that’s supposed to be us.”

  “All right,” Deb says, “let’s not play. Really, let’s go back to the kitchen. I can order in from the glatt kosher place. We can eat outside on the grass, and have a real dinner and not just junk.”

  “No, no,” Mark says, “I’ll play. I’ll take it seriously.”

  “So would the guy hide you?” I say.

  “And the kids, too?” Mark says. “I’m supposed to pretend that in Jerusalem he’s got a hidden motel or something where he can put the twelve of us?”

  “Yes,” Shoshana says. “In their seminary or something. Sure.”

  Mark thinks about this for a long, long time. He eats Fig Newmans and considers, and you can tell from the way he’s staring that he’s gotten into it, that he’s taking it real seriously—serious to the extreme.

  “Yes,” Mark says, and he looks honestly choked up. “I think, yes, Jeb would do that for us. He would hide us. He would risk it all.”

  “I think so, too,” Shoshana says, and smiles. “Wow, it makes you—as an adult—it makes you appreciate people more.”

  “Yes,” Mark says. “Jeb’s a good man.”

  “Now you go,” Shoshana says to us. “You take a turn.”

  “But we don’t know any of the same people anymore,” Deb says. “We usually just talk about the neighbors.”

  “Our across-the-street neighbors,” I tell them. “They’re the perfect example. Because the husband, Mitch, he would hide us. I know it. He’d lay down his life for what’s right. But that wife of his …” I say.

  “Yes,” Deb says, “he’s right. Mitch would hide us, but Gloria, she’d buckle. When he was at work one day, she’d turn us in.”

  “You could play against yourselves, then,” Shoshana says. “What if one of you wasn’t Jewish? Would you hide the other?”

  “I’ll do it,” I say. “I’ll be the Gentile, because I could pass best. A grown woman who still has an ankle-length denim skirt in her closet—they’d catch you in a flash.”

  “Fine,” Deb says. And I stand up straight, put my shoulders back, like maybe I’m in a lineup. I stand there with my chin raised so my wife can study me. So she can really get a look in, and get a think in, and decide if her husband really has what it takes. Would I really have the strength, would I care enough—and it is not a light question, not a throwaway question—to risk my life to save her and our son?

  Deb stares, and Deb smiles, and gives me a little push to my chest. “Of course he would,” Deb says. And she takes the half stride that’s between us and gives me a tight hug that she doesn’t release. “Now you,” Deb says. “You and Yuri go.”

  “How does that even make sense?” Mark says. “Even for imagining.”

  “Shhh,” Shoshana says. “Just stand over there and be a good Gentile while I look.”

  “But if I weren’t Jewish, I wouldn’t be me.”

  “That’s for sure,” I say.

  “He agrees,” Mark says. “We wouldn’t even be married. We wouldn’t have kids.”

  “Of course you can imagine it,” Shoshana says. “Look,” she says, and goes over and closes the pantry door. “Here we are, caught in South Florida for the second Holocaust. You’re not Jewish, and you’ve got the three of us hiding in your pantry.”

  “But look at me!” he says.

  “I’ve got a fix,” I say. “You’re a background singer for ZZ Top. You know them? You know that band?”

  Deb lets go of me, just so she can give my arm a slap.

  “Really,” Shoshana says. “Try to look at the three of us like that, like it’s your house and we’re your charges, locked up in this room.”

  “And what’re you going to do while I do that?” Mark says.

  “I’m going to look at you looking at us. I’m going to imagine.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Nu, get to it. I will stand, you imagine.”

  And that’s what we do, the four of us. We stand there playing our roles, and we really get into it. We really all imagine it. I can see Deb seeing him, and him seeing us, and Shoshana just staring and staring at her husband.

  We stand there so long, I really can’t tell how much time has passed, though the light changes ever so slightly—the sun outside again dampening—in that crack under the pantry door.
/>   “So would I hide you?” he says, serious. And for the first time that day, he reaches out, as my Deb would, and puts his hand to her hand. “Would I, Shoshi?”

  And you can tell Shoshana is thinking of her kids, though that’s not part of the scenario. You can tell that she’s changed part of the imagining. And she says, after a pause, yes, but she’s not laughing. She says, yes, but to him it sounds as it does to us, so that he is now asking and asking. But wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I hide you? Even if it was life and death—if it would spare you, and they’d kill me alone for doing it? Wouldn’t I?

  Shoshana pulls back her hand.

  She does not say it. And he does not say it. And from the four of us, no one will say what cannot be said—that this wife believes her husband would not hide her. What to do? What would come of it? And so we stand like that, the four of us trapped in that pantry. Afraid to open the door and let out what we’ve locked inside.

  Sister Hills

  I: 1973

  On a hilltop not many miles east of Jerusalem, Hanan Cohen watched the dust rising up in the distance and knew they were having a war. The roads remain empty on the Day of Atonement, and the cloud from a convoy barreling down toward the desert could mean only one thing. Hanan put a hand to his eyes to block the sun, hoping to see better. Holding that position, with his beard blowing, and his long white robe, and the tallit on his shoulders, he looked—poised among those ancient hills—like a man outside of time.

  He walked back into the one-room shack where he lived with his wife and his three teenage sons. He undressed, put on his uniform, and took up his gun so that no one needed to ask what he had seen.

  The boys said, “We will come, too. There will be some way to help.”

  “Stay with your mother,” Hanan said.