A Brief Lunacy Read online

  My Jess returns to the couch and adjusts the blanket, pulls her bare feet under her. His couch. Where he lay watching the videos. I try to make myself look at her, to reassure her that everything will be all right, that Jonah will go away, that I will dress her gently and make tea and warm biscuits. But I’m ashamed. I make myself look at my hands. They are swelling from the tight tape, from their own culpability.

  The car engine coughs and chokes and then dies. Out of gas. That’s no solution for escape now. We all wait for Sylvie. Is she coming? My family is in ruins. What if she comes? What if she doesn’t? Perhaps it’s almost over, n’est-ce pas? Jonah sits quietly at the kitchen table, leafing through our old photo albums, the gun placed in front of him as if it were a water glass. My arms are held firm against the arms of the chair. If I stand I could whack him with it, but he will shoot. The tape crosses the belly of the fish on my arm. I order God to intervene. I haven’t believed in God since Poland, but what else can I do?

  From his pocket, Jonah takes more pills, swallows them with tea. My pharmacology information on that kind of drug dates back to medical school. It’s probably amphetamines. More and more.

  “Carl? What ya looking at? I like the album.”

  “Please. You’ve done enough. Just go and we won’t call the police.”

  “But Sylvie. What about Sylvie? I’ve come to prepare everything. I can’t leave.”

  His clothes hang off him as if they were meant for someone larger. He’s scared. He doesn’t want to do this. His dull eyes drift from Jessie to me as if he’s pleading to be comforted, but then his leg begins to jiggle again, banging on the underside of the table.

  “I love her. Do you think she’s found a motel?”

  We don’t answer. I think Jessie is too terrified and I have no idea what to say to him. He slams the album shut and tucks the revolver into his pants before he paces again, hugging the album to his chest. When he shoves it into its place next to the others, he hesitates, glances at me, opens the closet. He bends toward the violin, picks it up, turns it over, brings the back close to his eyes.

  “I see it,” Jonah says. “The ‘Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei,’ the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. I studied some German in high school. You could sand the writing off, Carl.” He looks at Carl when he makes his suggestion, like a child with a good idea.

  What is he going to do with it? He wipes the dried rosin along the frayed bow and tucks the violin under his chin. When he slides the bow across the strings, he tightens the pegs at the neck. I try to connect with Jessie. Now. We could escape. She could escape. She watches Jonah.

  Jonah is indeed familiar with the violin. He knows how to tune. The string stretched over the damaged part of the bridge sounds tinny but it is tuned. He plays Chopin. Just snippets of pieces, one into the other. When he plays, his face softens, and his fingers are delicate on the strings. His eyes close while he plays. He changes to Vivaldi. Did his father really take him to violin lessons? I rise, try to pull the heavy chair with me, try to move my feet, but the tape pulls them too close together. He hears me and stops.

  “Carl. Here. You play.”

  “I can’t. My arms are taped.”

  “I’ll fix that,” he says. “Oh, Sylvie’s mother? Please unwrap Carl’s arms. And check his legs. Make sure that tape is tight. Can’t have him going off willy-nilly.”

  “What about the chicken?” I say. “You said we would have dinner.”

  “Shut up about chicken. I’ll decide when we’ll eat.”

  Jessie drags the blanket with her, tries to keep it wrapped around herself. Her feet have bunions. I never really noticed that before. When she bends to untape my arms, I stroke her hair with my fingers. She keeps her head close enough to me. She stays at my side, leans her head on my hand. Her face is flushed. Hot. I make a quiet hum in my throat just to let her know. Know what? That I love her? That I’m going to fix everything?

  “Where is she? I need her. She’s the reason I’m here. Sylvie. My pretty Sylvie. I need to be where she is.”

  Jonah’s hand pats the revolver butt protruding from his waistband. He seems to gather strength from it. Jessie returns to her place on the couch, and Jonah passes me my violin.

  I haven’t played in years. I haven’t held a violin under my chin since I left Europe. The sound of the bow across the strings shrieks into the otherwise-still air. Jessie pulls the blanket up around her neck. It’s a good violin. Although I barely remember playing before the camp, I know intellectually that I played with my family in front of royalty and for friends, played dance music and symphonies, folk tunes and our own music, but my fingers seem to remember only regimented Nazi patriot tunes. I play the scale. I play “Happy Birthday,” and then it comes slowly, something from the past before the camp. I think it’s Hungarian.

  “I need to stand up,” I say. “I can’t play in the chair.”

  “Play. Tell him to play in the chair,” he says to Jessie. “Play something fast. Gypsy music.”

  My fingers weren’t so big then, when I played fast Gypsy music. They move as if in molasses, playing something from my memory, sad, melancholy.

  “I need to go where she is. I need to go where she was.”

  Jonah paces back and forth while I play. When I stop, he touches the gun stuck in his waistband. I begin again. He takes more of the small white pills from his pocket, swallows them dry. Spittle gathers at the edges of his lips, and the stink of his sweat makes me hesitate. When I close my eyes, I see my uncle, his genitals shot off, naked in the frozen mud of Auschwitz, the smell of fear and excitement mingled, one stink for all of us, guards and prisoners. We all smelled the same. Do I smell my own fear? Jessie’s? Jonah’s?

  “We don’t know where she is,” Jessie says. Her voice is full, strong. I stop playing to listen. “If you let us call, we can find out.”

  “She’s been here. In this room.” Jonah touches the walls, the drawings of Jessie, the side table, the wrought-iron lamp in the corner of the room. “Here,” he says, “and here.” He touches Jessie’s stomach through her blanket. “And here. Play, you son of a bitch. Play or I’ll kill her.”

  He kneels in front of Jessie. I play because I don’t know what else to do. I play slowly, pushing my fingers to move up and down the neck, softly so that I can hear what she says over the harsh sound of the strings.

  “Sylvie’s been here, hasn’t she? On you. Inside you. She’s sucked at you.” He tugs the blanket down, exposing her shoulders. Jessie grabs at the edge to hold it up. He slaps her cheek, not hard, but enough to turn her head and cut into the sound of the music.

  “Jess,” I say. “My Jess.”

  Jessie curls up tight into herself. She isn’t crying. Her jaw sets hard and I know she can take it, whatever Jonah gives her. She has a new resolve. He jerks the blanket again and it slides down over her breasts onto her lap. She makes no effort to cover herself.

  “Let me say this. You two will do exactly what I tell you. Do you understand that? God is with me. It is my mission. Answer me. Do you get it?”

  “I hear you,” Jessie says.

  I nod, murmur something.

  “And you. Play. And don’t stop. When you stop, I will have to hurt your wife. Do you hear me? I don’t want to be doing this. But I have to be obedient. God has mandated. ‘Know them,’ God said. ‘Know.’ Do you understand? You. Carl. Answer me.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  Jonah pulls the gun out of his pants and holds it to my head while he removes the blanket from Jessie, throws it across the room into the kitchen. She doesn’t flinch when he lifts her empty breast to his mouth and covers her nipple with his lips. The urge to turn away is almost more than I can resist, but I watch and play because I must. I can’t rise to my feet while I’m playing. I have no balance. And besides, what could I do? Throw the violin at him? That’s like trying to kill someone with feathers. Nothing I think of doing to him is possible because of the blasted gun pointing at my h
ead, so I play something my father taught me, for my mother. I see her naked, too, walking barefoot in front of the guard, Hans, who swipes at her bottom with a small whip. “We’ll see where he’s hiding now, won’t we?” he said. “We’ll see if little Veshi can watch his own dear mother beaten.” And then the crack of the whip hard on her back. It’s my punishment. To watch. At that time, all I could see was her feet, her ankles, bare and dirty. My mother, dirty. But I heard everything from underneath that truck. And what I couldn’t see with my eyes became vivid in my mind. And as many times as I try to remember her before, in the caravan, dressed in her red dress dotted with mirrors, silver bangles around her wrist, one lone bangle around her ankle, all I see is her bare, dusty feet.

  The barrel of the gun rests on Jessie’s bare shoulder, the trajectory through her delicate neck, through the thick gray braid that hangs halfway down her back. Even past the notes of the tune, I hear the sucking sounds he makes on her breast. Jessie looks far away, past him through the kitchen window, to the gulls who have come back to the rock and face the lowering sun.

  “She did that, didn’t she? Didn’t she?”

  “Yes. Yes, she did.”

  “I knew it. I feel her with us. Right here.” The hand holding the gun relaxes a bit and the muzzle points into the back of the couch until my playing slows almost to a halt; then he moves the gun back to her neck. His hand is gentle on her, cupping her breast in his palm, stroking the skin. “This is what I want. To be close to her. To be where she was. God said, ‘Know them. Know her. The mother.’”

  He pulls back and grips her ankle, pulls her leg from underneath her, grips the other. Jessie sits up on the couch. I can see she tries not to show her fear by covering herself. Jonah stands in front of her before he fumbles with his pants, with the button of his jeans. With his other hand he points the gun from me to Jess and back and forth. No. He can’t do that. She’s not young. She can’t take it. Not Jess. When I hear the zipper noise, I stop playing.

  “So help me God, I’ll kill her if you don’t play. Don’t you believe me?”

  “Carl. Play. Please. I’ll cope with this.”

  “And I want you watching, Carl. W-a-t-c-h-i-n-g. Oh. Wait a minute. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Mr. Carl? You want to watch? Well, we’ll see about that.”

  “Carl. Please,” she says. “Don’t watch.”

  “I want you looking at the TV. That’s right, Carl. Play. Watch the TV.”

  “But it’s not on.”

  “Shut up. Watch the screen, stupid. If you look at us, she’s . . . Well, you guess.”

  I begin to play and watch the blank screen of the television, try to drown out the quiet fumbling of clothing.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, mother of Sylvie, only to go there, where she was, where she grew. Now. On the floor. Keep playing, Carl. Open them. Open your legs.”

  I imagine I hear her whispering to me, I love you, I love you, I love you. Does she love me after all this? I move through the tune, measure by measure, wondering if I will remember the next, but I do. The memory comes from somewhere I can’t go, oozes out into my fingers, and I imagine I watch Dorothy skipping down her yellow brick road on the gray screen.

  Jonah grunts. He grunts. There is no sound from Jessie, the whispering vanishes, and all the while I play a little tune, a child’s tune. For Jessie. For my mother.

  16

  JESSIE

  MOST OF ALL, I’m afraid of the gun going off into my neck. He wouldn’t mean to, but it could go off by mistake if he moved too fast or if I turned my head without warning. He’s been inside Sylvie, too. I’m sure of that now. I think of my Sylvie underneath him, wonder if she cried out.

  I’m alone in this. I don’t think Carl can help me. He is only a shell of a man, slumped in the chair, running the frayed bow across the strings of a violin he hasn’t played in many years, watching a TV that is not on.

  Carl plays a child’s tune. I’ve heard it before. Perhaps he has sung it. Does it have words? Did his mother sing to him when he was a young Gypsy boy? I hum along in my head to distract myself, to keep myself from thinking about what is inside me, to keep myself from that dark, crazy place.

  He finishes. Thank God his clothes are on, that his skin doesn’t have to touch mine. He grunts, collapses on me, turns his head toward me, closes his eyes. I am afraid to move because the gun is still jammed against my neck. But if he shoots, maybe he’ll shoot right through himself, too.

  We all breathe together, quick shallow breaths. I feel the metal leave my neck, hear Carl’s breath stop. Jonah has moved the gun. It’s no longer on me. Carl holds his breath, his lips tight together. I hear a low moan from his throat. Jonah doesn’t hear. He doesn’t move.

  I hear the whoosh before anything else. The violin lands just short of us, slides across the wood floor past us. Carl throws himself toward Jonah, still taped to the heavy wooden chair that was my grandfather’s. Jonah scrambles out of me, off me, kneels beside me. Carl heaves himself like a seal toward us, his face red, his mouth open, a wail emitting from his lips. My hand gropes for the base of the floor lamp. It is too heavy to move from the bottom? Where is the rock? The chunk of granite? I dropped it on the floor. Where is it? Carl’s screams become higher and louder. Jonah’s hand touches my hip when he clambers to get up. I see the rock. I turn onto my belly and scoot toward it. I’ll throw it. It will kill him. My fingers touch the rough edge, and the shot rings out. All at once. My fingers on the granite and the blast of the pistol. What has he shot? Carl? Me? I don’t know. The pain I felt has disappeared. I have no pain anywhere. It must be Carl.

  “You stupid shit. I told you not to do that. Would you defy the will of God?”

  I look at Carl’s head first. There is no blood and his eyes are open, focused on me. He isn’t dead. Then I see his arm. Blood covers the blue fish. Was that on purpose? Or just a bad shot? I crawl toward the blanket. Jonah pays no attention to me while I wrap it around my shoulders. Should I try to run? Jonah kicks at Carl’s chair and I hear a groan. We’re old. We’re too old to win.

  “You’ve shot him. Don’t you see?”

  Jonah seems disturbed by the blood. He bends toward Carl, places the gun on the floor, dabs at Carl’s bloody arm with a tissue he’s taken from his pocket. If I hit him with the granite, I’d better kill him, and I’m not sure I can. Kill him, I mean. Not sure I can bash him hard enough to kill. I need my clothes on. I wrap my fingers firmly around the rock, pull it toward me. Jonah lifts Carl’s arm from the chair, turns it to look at the underside. Carl rants in foreign languages, paying no attention to his bloodied arm.

  “Get up,” Jonah says. “Can’t you get up?”

  Carl continues to yell. In French. In German. And in another language. Some I understand. Most I don’t.

  “You can’t get up, can you, Carl?”

  “May I help him?” I say.

  He retrieves the pistol from the floor, tucks it into his pants. “Come on,” he says. “We’ll get him up.”

  I try to avoid touching him when we work to lift Carl and the chair upright, but twice my hand brushes Jonah’s. His zipper is still unzipped. Does he know? We rock Carl in the chair, strain against the weight. Carl ceases to yell and helps us by shifting his body.

  “He needs a doctor,” I say.

  “He is a doctor,” Jonah says. “Physician, heal thyself.”

  “It’s superficial,” Carl says. “It went right past. Grazed the skin.”

  Carl has not gone to that crazy place, although I thought he might. When we have straightened the chair, I notice that his legs are almost freed from the duct tape, although he keeps them in place. He examines his arm. I can’t remember where I left the rock. Then I see it. On the floor by the couch leg, next to our missing set of car keys. Why hadn’t I noticed them before? I’ve searched everywhere for those keys.

  “Do you have something?” Jonah says. “For the wound?”

  “In the bathroom,” I say. “The cabinet.”
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  When he turns toward the bathroom, I creep closer to the rock and the keys. What good are the keys? The car is out of gas. Is there some gas in the garage? Sometimes we keep a can out there just in case. The car. That’s it. I could lock myself in and push the horn until someone hears. But what about Carl while I’m in the car?

  My clothes are where I dropped them. I don’t take the time to put on the underwear. I quickly clean myself with it and toss it into the corner. My T-shirt is inside out but I leave it that way, shove my hands into the sweater arms. I slip the keys into the pocket of my jeans before I pull them on. My legs feel raw as the jeans slip over them. Pain is now everywhere my clothing touches. I hear Jonah rummaging through the medicine cabinet.

  “Try some of this,” he says when he returns. “Peroxide. And here’s a bandage.” He doesn’t seem to notice that I’m dressed. How could he not notice?

  Carl pours the peroxide over his arm. It fizzes at the wound. Would Jonah kill us if he is helping tend to Carl’s wound? It doesn’t make sense. I don’t know. How can I know? Jonah paces, inhales sharply, takes another of the white pills. He stops, presses his hand against his chest.

  “Your heart racing, Jonah?” Carl says. “Something wrong with your heart?”

  “No. Nothing. Let’s have that dinner. Now you know I’ll shoot, so watch what you do.”

  Dinner will give me the opportunity to do something. What? I can’t seem to think of anything else except for the rock. I’ll make baked potatoes. That will give me some time. I turn the oven on and reach underneath the counter into the potato bag. Is six potatoes too many? I rinse them under the cold water until my hands are numb, and I prick them with a fork before I put them in the oven. The chicken is thawed. I did that yesterday. I’ll slice a whole package of mushrooms. I bring the cleaver down over the first batch of mushrooms and realize that Jonah isn’t even paying attention to me. I watch the blue veins on the backs of my hands pulse underneath my thin skin. It’s hard to remember what my hands looked like when I was young. I’m sure the veins didn’t protrude so much. And I think the knuckles were more delicate. They’ve become coarse, knobby. Is it from cracking my knuckles so much? That’s what my father used to say.