The Journal I Did Not Keep Page 10

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  That was the day the fountain of the great deep broke up and the windows of heaven opened. Noah’s daughter saw the cattle not destined for a place in the ark, saw all the dead creeping things and many fowl carried down the roiling rapids that covered the place where Methuselah’s tent used to stand. Now it was her mother shouting for the women to get their stuff, right away.

  “Just as soon,” cried Noah’s daughter, “as I do my memo over. This is the final draft!” But her father stood in the opening of the tent saying “NOW!” and there was nothing to do but follow him out, crossing the puddles that had joined into a second waterway. They stood in the downpour waiting for what had to be the last of the animals: two naked, pink earthworms inching up the ramp into the ark. But here came the two water bugs and two mosquitoes, a male and a female; and the maggots who, sans sex, sans color, sans legs, mouths, or eyes, always know when to turn up and where; and those black mites, like the living dots in the bag of all-purpose flour that you have kept in your kitchen past the “best used by” date, they too went into the ark to keep their kind alive; and behind them must have queued the myriad instances of life which no eye, male or female, would see until the invention of the microscope; and when the least of these had gone into the ark, Noah and his sons with him, and his wife and his sons’ wives went in as God had commanded him, and the Lord shut them in.

  And now it was forever too late to prevent the catastrophe. Never, in the overpopulated ark, would Noah’s daughter find a corner of her own. It was in the tablets of her mind that she inscribed the story of the Flood as we read it to this day, how the waters increased and bore up the ark and it was lifted and went upon the face of the waters, and the water prevailed. All the high hills and the mountains were covered. All flesh died upon the earth, both of fowl and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every man died.

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  It says that when the waters had covered the earth for one hundred and fifty days, the fountain of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped. Noah’s daughter notes the date (it was in the seventh month) on which the ark came to rest on Ararat. She tells the story of the raven and the story of the dove and the olive branch, and records the day in the tenth month, when the water had so far receded that Noah and his wife and his sons and their wives came out, and so did every one of the cattle and every creeping thing and all the birds that had been in the ark with Noah.

  We wonder and we worry: Which of every clean beast and every clean fowl, of all that had been in the ark all that time, did Noah pick for a burnt offering on the altar that he built to the Lord?

  When the Lord smelled the sweet savor, He said, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake,” for He saw what Noah’s daughter’s memo (oh, if she had only finished getting it written!) could have told Him—that the imagination of man’s heart would go right on being evil from his youth; and that Ham was going to sneak a peek at his father’s nakedness—everybody going right on being who they were!

  The Lord made a covenant with Noah and set His rainbow in the sky as a sign that He would not again smite any more everything living, as He had done. What the Lord must have meant was that He was never again going to destroy every living thing all at one and the same time, because ever since the Flood, the tsunamis, the avalanches, the mudslides and blizzards, the plagues, the droughts and famines, the world wars and genocides, and the Holocaust have happened only here and there and now and then, and seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night have not ceased, while the earth remains.

  SELECTED FICTION

  FROM OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES

  THE CHILDREN’S TRANSPORT

  The children were due to assemble at nine in the evening on Thursday, December 10, 1938.

  “She can take my best crocodile belt,” said my father, wanting to give me something.

  “Igo! She can’t use your belt! And we’ve been asked to pack as little as possible. The children have to carry their own luggage. Pick up the suitcase,” she said to me. “Can you lift it?”

  I lifted the suitcase against my leg and leaned my weight against it. “I can carry it,” I said.

  “I have to pack her enough food to last till they get to England,” my mother said. “How can I pack enough food to keep two days?” Her face was red. All that day my mother’s face looked dark and hot, as if she had a fever, but she moved about as on any ordinary day and her voice sounded ordinary; she even joked. She said we were going to pretend it was the first day of the month. Before my father had lost his job, the first of the month had been payday and the day I was allowed to choose my own fanciful supper, against a promise that there would be no fussing about food during the rest of the month. But today my appetite had no imagination. I said I didn’t want anything. “I don’t mean for now. I mean to take with you,” said my mother. She was wanting me to need something that she could give me. I searched around in my mind, wanting to oblige her. “Knackwurst?” I said, though I could not at the moment remember exactly what kind of sausage that was.

  “Not without bread,” said my father.

  “Knackwurst,” said my mother. “You like that? I’ll go down this minute and get you one.” But at that moment the doorbell rang.

  All day the room was full of people coming to say goodbye, friends of the family, and aunts and uncles and cousins. Everyone brought me bonbons, candied fruit, dates, sour sweets, and chocolates we called cat’s tongues, and homemade cookies, and Sacher torte. Even my Tante Grete came, though she was angry with my parents because I had been sneaked onto the transport and her twins were to be left behind.

  My father tried to explain. “This is just an experimental transport, don’t you see. They don’t even know if they can get across the German border, and Lore only got on because Karl’s fiancée happens to work on the Committee and did us a favor. I could hardly ask her for more.”

  “Naturally. How could you be expected to ask for help to save someone else’s children?” Tante Grete said. She had a long and bitter face. “But maybe Lore can ask people once she gets to England. She can tell about her cousins Ilse and Erica, who had to stay behind in Vienna while she got away. Maybe she can find a sponsor for them.”

  My father said, “I’ve given her a list of names to write to when she gets to England. There are some cousins of Franzi’s who’ve lived in America for years who might sponsor us. She’s going to write to them, aren’t you? And there are Eugen and Gusti in Paris, who have business connections, and in London Hans and Trude…”

  “Whom I called a cow,” my mother said.

  “There’s a family in London who might be related to us, though they spell their name G-R-O-S-S-M-A-N-N and ours is G-R-O-S-Z-M-A-N-N. And there is the Jewish Refugee Committee there. You’ll write to them, won’t you?”

  I stood in the center of my circle of relatives, nodding solemnly. I said I would write letters to everybody, and I would tell the Engländer about everything that was happening and would get sponsors for my parents and my grandparents and for everybody.

  “Well, well,” my aunt said. “She can certainly talk, can’t she!” and she got up. She embraced me and kissed me and, despite being mad at me, she wept bitterly.

  (I met Erica in 1946 in London, where she had a job as a nursemaid to an English family. She told me that Ilse had got to Palestine illegally and was in a kibbutz. They had both tried to get a sponsor for their mother, but Tante Grete had been arrested in her hallway early in 1940 and sent to Poland.)

  When Tante Grete left the apartment it was after seven, and my nervous father said we should be going, but my mother cried out; she had forgotten to get the knackwurst. “I’m going to run down,” she said, and already she had flung her coat about her, but my father blocked her way.

  “Are you an idiot? Do you want her to miss her train?”

  “She wants a knackwurst!” my mother cried.

 
“Do you know what time it is? Suppose you get arrested while you’re out!”

  I had never before seen my parents standing shouting into each other’s faces. I kept saying, “I don’t really want any knackwurst,” but they took no notice of me.

  “She likes knackwurst.” My mother wept. She skipped around my large, slow-moving father, and she ran out through the door.

  My father still ignored me. He stood by the window. He went to the bathroom. He opened the hall door and looked out. He checked his watch.

  My mother came back with her triumphant, beaming, sad red face. Nothing had happened—no one had even seen her. She had got a whole sausage and had made the man give her an extra paper bag. She called me to come and look where she was putting it in my rucksack, between my sandwiches and the cake.

  “Let’s go, for God’s sake,” said my father.

  We went over the Stefanie Bridge on foot. I walked between my parents. Each held a hand. My father talked to my mother about going to the Chinese Consulate in the morning.

  “Daddy,” I said. “Daddy, look!”

  My mother was saying to my father, “Grete mentioned something about getting into Holland.”

  I tugged at my mother’s hand. “Look at the moon,” I insisted. There was a white moon shivering in the black water of the Danube underneath us, along with a thousand pretty lights from the bridge.

  My father said, “Holland is too close, but I’ll go and see, if there’s time. I’ll do the Chinese Consulate first thing.”

  They kept talking to each other over my head. I was hurt. They were making plans for a tomorrow in which I would have no part. Already they seemed to be getting on very well without me and I was angry. I withdrew my hands and walked by myself.

  We got into a tram. Across the aisle there was another little Jewish girl with a rucksack and a suitcase, sitting between her parents. I tried to catch her eye in order to flirt up a new friend for myself, but she took no notice of me. She was crying. I said to my mother, “I’m not crying like that little girl.”

  My mother said, “No, you are being very good, very brave. I’m proud how good you are being.”

  But I had misgivings; I rather thought I ought to be crying, too.

  The assembly point was a huge empty lot behind the railway station in the outskirts of Vienna. I looked among the hundreds of children milling in the darkness for the girl who had cried in the tram, but I never saw her again, or perhaps did not recognize her. Along a wire fence, members of the Committee stood holding long poles bearing placards; flashlights lit the numbers painted on them. Someone came over to me and checked my papers and made me stand with the group of children collecting around the placard that read “150–199.” He hung a cardboard label with the number 152 strung on a shoelace around my neck, and tied corresponding numbers to my suitcase and rucksack.

  I remember that I clowned and talked a good deal. I remember feeling, This is me going to England. My parents stood with the other parents, on the right, at the edge of the darkness. I have no clear recollection of my father’s being there—perhaps his head was too high and out of the circle of the lights. I do remember his greatcoat standing next to my mother’s black pony fur, but every time I looked toward them it was my mother’s tiny face, crumpled and feverish inside her fox collar, that I saw smiling steadily toward me.

  We were arranged in a long column four deep, according to numbers. The rucksack was strapped on my back. There was a confusion of kissing parents—my father bending down, my mother’s face burning against mine. Before I could get a proper grip on my suitcase, the line set in motion so that the suitcase kept slipping from my hand and bumping against my legs. Panic-stricken, I looked to the right, but my mother was there, walking beside me. She took the suitcase, keeping at my side, and she was smiling so that it seemed a gay thing, like a joke we were having together. Someone from the Committee, checking the line, took the suitcase from my mother, checked it with the number around my neck, and gave it to me to carry. “Go on, move,” the children behind me said. We were passing through great doors. I looked to my right; my mother’s face was nowhere to be seen. I dragged and shoved the heavy suitcase across the station floor and bumped it down a flight of stairs and along a platform where the train stood waiting.

  There was a young woman in charge inside our carriage. She was slight and soft-spoken. She walked the corridors outside the compartments and put her head in and told us to settle down. We asked her when we were going to leave. She said, “Very soon. Why don’t you all try to go to sleep? It’s past eleven.” Still the train stood in the station. I saw Onkel Karl’s fiancée on the platform, looking in the window. I remember standing on my head for her. She smiled upside down and mouthed something. I wiggled my toes.

  It was after midnight when the train left the station. There was only room enough for four of the eight girls in the compartment to stretch out on the seats. I was the smallest one. I remember that I had the place by the window and I kept trying to bend my neck into the corner and at the same time shield my eyes with an arm, a hand, or in the crook of an elbow against the electric bulb in the corridor, which burned through my closed lids. The chattering of the children subsided little by little until there was no sound except the noise of the train. I have no notion that I went to sleep, except that I was awakened by a flashlight shining into my face. In its light, behind it and lit like a negative, was a girl’s face. She said it was time for someone else to lie down in my place. And before I had altogether picked my stiff limbs out of my corner, this other person was creeping into it. The girl who had wakened me was pretty. She said I could sit with her on her suitcase. I liked her awfully. I copied the way she sat with her elbows braced on her knees, her chin cupped in her hands, quite still. I thought, This is me, awake, watching the children sleeping. I watched the black outside the window turn a queer, beautiful blue that faded into gray and presently lightened to a dead white. The bulbs in the corridor still burned a foolish orange. The sleepers humped shoulders to hide their faces from the light. In the next compartment someone was whispering. Someone let out a laugh and was quickly shushed. A girl in my compartment sat straight up, stared for a moment, and seemed to go back to sleep, except that her eyes stayed open.

  The girl on the suitcase asked me if I wanted to go to the lavatory and wash my face. I wandered down the corridor, peering into every compartment door to see people sleeping. In the lavatory there was a glass sphere over the washbowl. If you turned it upside down, green liquid soap squirted out. If you stepped on the pedal that flushed the toilet, a hole opened and you could look through it at the ground tearing away underneath. I played until the knocking at the door became so violently impatient I had to let the others in.

  By the time I got back to my compartment, everyone was up. Everyone was talking. The children were eating breakfast out of their paper bags. I didn’t feel like knackwurst for breakfast and it was too much trouble to eat a sandwich, so I had candied pear and three cat’s tongues and a piece of Sacher torte. A big girl said we had left Austria during the night and were actually in Germany. I looked out, wanting to hate, but there was nothing out the window but cows and fields. I said maybe we were still in Austria. It was important to me, because I was collecting countries. Born in Austria, I had vacationed in Hungary and visited relatives in Czechoslovakia, which was three countries I had been in, and Germany would make four. The big girls said it was so Germany, and it puzzled me.

  As the morning advanced, the noise swelled. Everyone seemed to be jumping. In the next compartment, a tall, vivacious girl had organized a game. I went in and found a place to sit, but I couldn’t understand the rules, so after a bit I organized the small girl sitting beside me into playing tick-tack-toe on the outside of her paper food bag. Just as we were getting interested, the morning was over and we had to go to our own compartments to eat lunch. I made her promise faithfully that she would stay right there and play with me after lunch, but I never went back to find her.


  The train had become deadly hot. A trance fell. We ate silently. I had bitten into the sausage and found I couldn’t bear the taste, and I thought I would eat it for supper. The sandwiches had become too dry to eat, so I had some dates and cat’s tongues and a piece of cake and then I sat and sucked some candy. I noticed again the noise of the train, which had been quite drowned out in the commotion of the morning, and I fell asleep.

  I woke in the late afternoon. I blamed myself for having slept all kinds of sights away. Now I would stay awake and watch. I concentrated on the little girl sitting opposite me. She held a suitcase on her lap. Her snub-nosed profile was outlined against the gray of the window. I kept my eyes on her for such a long time that her face looked as if I had known it forever. She would not talk with me, and I went back to sleep.

  I looked for the little girl when I awoke, but I couldn’t tell which one she was. I studied all the children in the compartment. None held a suitcase on her lap. The lights in the compartment had been put on and the window was black again. I went back to sleep.

  I started up as the train rode into a station and stopped. The big girl said this was the border and now the Nazis would decide what to do with us. She told us to sit as quiet as we could. There was much walking about outside. We saw uniforms under the lights on the platform. They entered the train in front. I held myself so still that my head vibrated on my neck and my knees cramped. Half an hour, an hour. We knew when they were in our carriage, which seemed to settle under their added weight. They were coming toward us down the corridor, stopping at each compartment door. Then one of them stood in our doorway. His uniform had many buttons. We saw the young woman who was in charge of our carriage behind his shoulder. The Nazi signed to one of the children to come with him, and she followed him out. The young woman turned back to tell us not to worry—they were taking one child from each carriage to check papers and look for contraband.