A Brief Lunacy Read online

  “See?” Jonah says. “I was right. He’s a fucking Nazi. Did you know that, Mrs. Carl?”

  Jonah sits as though he is watching a play, and I am embarrassed to be talking in front of him about private things. He looks back and forth, from the blanket-covered nude on the exploded couch to the cadaverous mound taped to his chair. It’s funny. Is it? How could it be funny? I suppress the giggle that pounds at my throat to come out. I’m no longer who I thought I was. Am I Jessie Reyes? What kind of a name is that?

  “A Jew, Carl?” Jonah asks. “A Pole? A Russian? A German? What’s the answer, Carl?”

  “No, I’m not a Jew. Why does it matter what I am? I made a good life for my family.”

  “Your family?” Jonah asks. “Your mother? Your family? Your neighbors? Did you turn them in? You made a good life for them?”

  “No. I mean my wife. My children. I’m a doctor. A good doctor. I’m known all over the world. I’m a good doctor.” His voice breaks. “What does it matter?”

  Does it matter? If Jonah weren’t here, I’d rush to Carl, kiss the top of his head, cut the tape on his legs. But I’m almost grateful that I have no choice. I don’t know him. Veshi Reyes?

  “It matters to me, Carl,” Jonah says. “We can’t have secrets. Now. Your mother. Did you make a good life for her?”

  “I was a child. I was only seventeen, Jess.”

  “And I was only four,” Jonah says. “What did I know? It was dark down there. And wet. And I kept so quiet. No one knew I was down there for hours and hours. I remember it. They say I couldn’t remember something from when I was four. But I do.”

  “My family’s dead. That’s all.”

  “Not all. Who killed them? God? Rats? Who, Carl? Did you turn her in?”

  “It was a war. Crazy things happened during the war.”

  “You’re making me angry, Carl. And what happens when I get angry? Do you want to find out?”

  “I am a Gypsy,” Carl says. “A Rom. A Gypsy, my Jess. And I was ashamed. It was easier not to be one. What did it matter? My family was all dead. Everyone.”

  “A Gypsy?” Jonah says. “I thought you were a German. A Nazi. I thought that was the secret.”

  “A Rom. A Gitan. A French Gypsy.”

  “What happened, Carl?” I say. “Tell us what happened.”

  We sit, silent, waiting for Carl to speak. I want to know, too. I want to know the father of my children. I want to know why his back looks like a chessboard. I want to know how he escaped. I want to know about Valentina and Stefan and Nonni. Was Nonni young? Pretty? Did someone shoot her in the back? And why has he kept a Nazi violin? But I can’t ask the questions aloud because I’m afraid Carl will disappear. And Carl’s right. What difference does it make? Is he a different man? No. But. Well, yes. He is a different man.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Carl says. “It’s another man’s story. A man who was just a boy. It’s a boy’s story.”

  “Tell me the story,” Jonah says. “And when Sylvie comes, we’ll tell it again, won’t we, Carl? She’d like to hear the story, too.”

  “Do you promise to let us go?”

  “Of course. We’ll have dinner. The chicken, remember?”

  Carl begins his story, which is for me, not Jonah. For me, because I don’t know who I am. I need to hear it.

  “This is a relief of sorts,” Carl says. “It’s been a solitary story for so many years. I’m sorry, Jessie. I wanted to tell you but I thought it would be a burden to you. It seemed easier not to tell.”

  “Could you cut the tape?” I ask.

  “When he’s finished.”

  “We traveled with other Gitans, Gypsy people, in a kind of a family. We were musicians. Violin. And my father sang like an angel. My mother didn’t dance, like some of the other women. She played the concertina. My sister, Nonni. She danced. She was only twelve when they came to take us away. They shot our horses. They carved away a section of rump from my father’s horse while he yelled its name over and over. Carmen. That was the horse’s name. The flies swarmed into the carcass before we left. The buzzing. Loud. Loud.”

  “That’s good, Carl,” Jonah says. “But there’s more.”

  “Could you shut the window?” Carl asks.

  Jonah almost forgets the gun on the side of the chair when he goes to the window. I could have taken it. I could have. But he knows that. I see it in his eyes. He closes the window without a sound, as if he were a guest and had been asked to do a favor. I thank him and he nods toward me. His mother must have loved him. At least when he was a tiny boy.

  “One young German—he couldn’t have been more than seventeen—shot Nonni’s dog in the face while he watched her reaction. Just for fun. There was no meat on the dog. It was thin and old, almost dead anyway. There were police and soldiers there with the Germans. It was in southern France. The French hated us, too. My cousin jumped on his horse and rode off into the marsh of the Camargue while they raped his mother. She didn’t utter a sound, perhaps for fear her only son would come back to try to save her. I don’t know whether the bullets reached him or not. I never saw him again. Perhaps he’s still alive. His name was Charles.

  “They pushed over our caravans and lit them on fire. My uncle wouldn’t touch his wife because of the fluids the other men had left in her and because she was naked in front of all of us. We rode in the back of a truck away from the marsh. My sister never cried over her dog. My father sobbed all the way about Carmen. That’s all we had to eat for over a week, that raw hunk of meat from Carmen’s rump. My father didn’t touch it except for pulling off a piece for his old mother. They let us bring a change of clothes and the violins. I played all the way to the camp. Nonni danced. I remember that. She sat on the floor of that filthy truck and danced with her arms and her face while I played the violin. The women sat around her because she had begun her menarche. They circled Nonni and my aunt who was raped, to keep the marimé, the unclean, from spreading to the men while they chewed off small pieces of Carmen to feed to the children. We were taken from one camp to another, still in France, I think, although I’m not sure.

  “The last journey was to Birkenau, to the Gypsy family camp. That’s where they tattooed my arm. Then they took our violins. Doesn’t that sound nice? A family camp. The younger children thought there would be games and dancing and kittens to play with. There were thousands of us from all over Europe. But they kept us together in families, just as they said. We had to sleep touching and bathe from the same foul bowl, men and women together, and my uncle Luis couldn’t touch his wife because of the marimé and went on the fence.”

  “On the fence?”

  “Against the wires. Threw himself on the electric wires. Oh, Jess, this is a horrible story. I didn’t want you to hear this story. They left him there, jerking with each pulse of the voltage until he was black and leatherlike. Then they took him off. The night before, he had told her he was sorry, but he couldn’t touch her. He loved her but he couldn’t touch her ever again.”

  “Carl,” I say. “Carl. This marimé. It’s about unclean things. When a man touches a woman? Is that it?”

  “It’s complicated. It sounds foolish. But my people—”

  “Your people? They are my people, too. I want to know. Please.”

  “We can’t touch certain parts of other people. We can’t wash upper body and lower body in the same basin. There are many things. If you violate them, you are unclean. It is very serious. Very serious. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I’m Jessie, remember? I’m your wife.”

  I’m sure Carl won’t retell this story and I wish I had a pen and paper. What would Jonah do if I retrieved Carl’s sketch pad and charcoal? I seem to be settling into a comfortable corner of the couch while I listen to a story told by a man I don’t know. My fingers encircle the end of my braid, pick at the elastic as if to find something familiar. My shoulders are bare but my feet are warming up against my thighs. After this is finished, I’ll cook the chicken and fin
d some way to stop him. And then what of Sylvie? If I harm her lover, will she hate me? I can’t hurt anyone. But I almost threw the rock. If I had the gun in my hand, could I shoot him? In the arm? In the head? I don’t know. I look at Jonah. He’s slumped in a chair watching us. He looks young, scared. And he’s still holding the gun.

  “Terrible things happened at that camp,” Carl says.

  I search his face for something. Why do I find it astonishing? I knew he was in some kind of camp. Did I think it was like the summer camp where the children went? What in the hell did I think it was?

  “We were there for almost two years. We kept track of the seasons and the days. Blistering heat in the summer and razor-sharp frozen mud for months, slicing the soles of our bare feet. I was one of the lucky ones, my father and I. We didn’t move rocks back and forth from one pile to the other like some did. They gave us violins to play in the orchestra. One of the others traded instruments with me when I realized that he had received my old one. They had written ‘Property of the party’ on the back in black ink, but it was mine. Not a Nazi violin. Mine. We played our violins while rows of Jews walked methodically toward the showers. We played marches and military tunes and sometimes lullabies disguised as dances.

  “During the day, if I wasn’t required to play, they carved up my back, one square at a time, sewed on skins from dogs and cats and horses and hedgehogs and God knows what. They allowed a week for the graft to either take or slough off. I think they grafted the square of skin that they cut off my back onto another man’s back. There was no anesthetic and when I called out, they beat the soles of my feet with rods. None of the pieces stayed on longer than a month. They left my private parts alone. But Nonni. They put her under a machine. To kill her eggs. She was only twelve.

  “My grandmother. They broke her arm because she hid a small piece of bread under her hair. She was no longer of any use. My father tried to turn away when they stripped her clothes from her and marched her to the gas, but they forced us to play, turned his head toward her with their truncheons.” Carl’s voice is soft, as if he is telling a bedtime story.

  “Sometimes we wore our clothes. Sometimes we were naked. For a Gypsy, that is very difficult. We tried not to look but the guards knew how hard it was for us and whipped us if we closed our eyes. But we were in a family camp. We stayed together. Some of the couples still had relations in the dark of the night. I heard them whispering to each other, felt the bunk creak.”

  “How did you get out? Why are you still alive, Mr. Carl? Why you, when all the others died?”

  “I was sixteen, and then seventeen. They were going to kill us all. Everyone knew that.”

  “Well? Why didn’t they kill you?”

  “Carl. You don’t have to continue,” I say. How could I have not known this? How could I think he lived in a nice bunkhouse, with soup for lunch and stew for supper, and repaired shoes during the day?

  “Sometimes they brought me out to the village of Auschwitz to play for a wedding or a large party. They lent me a pair of shoes and a waistcoat. Not the whole orchestra. Never both Father and me together, although at times he went alone, too. Usually four or five of us, singers, violinists, horn players.

  “I got to know the truck driver, Marcel, who was a conscripted young Pole, not even eighteen. I don’t know what happened to him. He spoke French. I think his mother was French. He’d lost track of his girlfriend, Inga, I think her name was, until the day she arrived by train at Birkenau with her suitcase and danced all the way to the gas, listening to me playing a gavotte with the orchestra. He was grateful to me for that. She loved to dance. He said she never knew where she was going because of the violins. He rigged up some gear underneath the truck for a person to hang on to, a strap to go around the waist. I think he had done it before. We’d heard rumors that we would be gassed. I was seventeen.”

  “And what, Carl?” I ask. “What happened?”

  “He put my violin in the cab of the truck. No one would question him. He often transported the musicians.

  “I crept underneath in the early morning before daylight, and no one saw me. My arms encircled metal bars, and my bare, blistered feet lay along the exhaust pipe. The belt clipped around my waist cut into a skin graft that had become infected. I could smell the pus. I hung under that truck for hours while I waited for it to leave for supplies. It was parked near our barracks all day in the heat of August. Marcel said he had no idea when it would leave, that I had to trust him. I promised to send him money after the war. I sent it to the address he gave me, but it came back. You see? That’s how I escaped.”

  “Why the story?” I ask. “Why the crazy made-up story of running away and your family being shot in the back? Did they follow you? Were they shot?”

  “It was two days before the whole camp went to the ovens. Thousands of people. I’ve read about it at the library. They took them, orchestra playing, until they took the orchestra. They all died. There were no Gypsies left in Birkenau. And then they moved in more Jews. I think they needed the room. I don’t know.”

  “That the right story? You got it right this time? You got a lot of stories, Mr. Carl.”

  “I didn’t want to leave my family but I was so young. I was small. Not like I am now. Small and thin. Starving. Stinking with infection.”

  “That long day,” I say. “So, the truck left?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, Carl? Yes? That’s all?” I ask.

  “My father was playing in the orchestra by the time they realized that I was missing. But my mother. They brought her out. I wish you could have met my mother. And my sister. Thank God my grandmother had gone already.”

  Carl speaks between sobs, when he can. He sits with his face in his hands, raising his head only to speak the next words. He is broken. Am I the only one not crying? I cannot imagine tears. It is all too hideous. I tuck my arms underneath the blanket, touch my belly, where my children grew.

  “They were naked. Both of them. I could see only their feet and halfway up their legs, but I saw enough to know what happened. I saw too much. They whipped Nonni bent over a stool until she ceased crying out. I couldn’t see much but I heard everything. I watched her feet jerk with each stroke from underneath the truck. Why they didn’t catch me I’ll never know. They shouted at my mother to tell where I was or they would beat Nonni again.”

  “Did she know, your mother?”

  “My mother knew nothing. How could she? She couldn’t see me. They sent for my father. I watched his clothes drop to the dusty ground. He helped my mother hold Nonni up so she wouldn’t fall, wouldn’t be shot. I could see her useless feet and lower legs, bloody from the beating. When I closed my eyes, I saw her in that truck, dancing with her face, her eyes, her arms. They shouted at my father, ‘Where is he? Where is he? Where is your useless son?’ I almost revealed myself. But I was seventeen. They would have killed us all.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Carl,” I say.

  Carl weeps quietly in his chair. He doesn’t respond. When he finally looks up at me, I see more than sadness in his face. A kind of horror that I know I will never entirely forget.

  “There’s more, isn’t there? Is that why you stopped?” Jonah seems fueled by the story. He talks faster, paces, his head down. “It’s too painful? Carl? Are you awake? Remember the chicken dinner. I promised. When you’re finished your story. But you’re not finished, are you, Carl?”

  “No.”

  I can barely understand him. “Enough,” I say. “No more. He can’t stand any more. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Intimacy through art. Through stories. Intimacy through honesty. Don’t you get it, mother of Sylvie? Don’t you understand? God said to know you. How can I know Carl if he won’t tell the truth? There’s more. I can tell.”

  “Please. He’s told you everything. How could there be any more?”

  “There’s more. There’s more, isn’t there, Carl? Do you want me to whip the little lady? Don’t make me do that.”


  “They held a pistol to my mother’s mouth, made her open her mouth, close her lips around the barrel. I couldn’t see. But I heard them shout the orders, heard my father groan, heard my sister call out, ‘Mama.’ My God, why didn’t I show myself? Oh, my God. The rest of it, I saw, with my own eyes. I saw it all. My sister. Blood dripped down her chin from where she bit herself.”

  “Well,” Jonah says, “I guess that’s enough, Carl.”

  “No. It’s not enough. You wanted to hear it. I can’t stop now. The others. They tried to turn away. Three were shot. My aunt was one of them. My father loved my mother. He did what he had to do. He thought she would be saved. My sister did it for me. She spread herself on the Nazi dirt and let our father do what he had to do. They made him lie naked on her, his own daughter. The shame. They laughed.

  “Before he could stand up, the guard pulled the trigger on the pistol that was in my mother. They left Nonni there in the dirt. Hours later when the truck began to roll out the gates, Nonni still lay on that hard dirt alone. I tried to speak words she could understand on my mouth, but her eyes were vacant and so dark, dark like a raven’s eyes. That’s the last I saw of her.”

  “Your father?” Jonah asks.

  “They took him away. I don’t know what happened to him. Perhaps he lived to go with the others to the gas.”

  “Tape his arms,” Jonah says. “Just while you cook the chicken.”

  “I’d like to get dressed,” I say. “I can’t cook with the blanket around me.”

  “First tape his arms.”

  15

  CARL

  I FEEL NAKED although it is Jessie who wears no clothes. This time the tape is tight around my arms. Was it yesterday that Jessie pressed the old skin on the back of my hand? Then I had never hurt her, never used my hands against her. But what now? He has hung the drawings up all around the room with thumbtacks, even the ones of the pine tree. But the drawings of Jessie. God. Where are the saviors? Where are Hans and Marte? Doesn’t someone know we are suffering?