Edited by, p.34
Edited By, page 34
Except that I wasn’t sure he was acting anything but normal, for him. He didn’t generally speak during our afternoon walks to the ice cream shop, either. When we arrived at the adobe, he leaned across me to push my door open, and I grabbed his hand.
“Dad. At least tell me what the bat is for.”
My father sat up, moved the air-conditioning lever right, then hard back to the left, as though he could surprise it into working. He always did this. It never worked. My father and his routines. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s a symbol.”
“For what?”
“Lucy will tell you.”
“But you know.” I was almost snarling at him now.
“Only what Lucy told me. It stands for the skin at the tip of the tongue. It’s the Talking God. Or associated with it. Or something. It goes where nothing else can go. Or helps someone else go there. I think. I’m sorry.”
Gently, hand on my shoulder, he eased me out of the car before it occurred to me to wonder what he was apologizing for. “I promise you this, Seth,” he murmured. “This is the last time in your life that you’ll have to come here. Shut the door.”
Too stunned and confused and scared to do anything else, I shut it, then watched as my father’s car disintegrated into the first, far-off shadows of twilight. Already, too soon, I felt the change in the air, the night chill seeping through the gauze-dry day like blood through a bandage.
My grandfather and Lucy were waiting on the patio. She had her hand on his shoulder, her long hair gathered on her head, and without its dark frame, her face looked much older. And his—fully exposed now, without its protective shawl—looked like a rubber mask on a hook, with no bones inside to support it.
Slowly, my grandfather’s wheelchair squeaked over the patio onto the hard sand as Lucy propelled it. I could do nothing but watch. The wheelchair stopped, and my grandfather studied me.
“Ruach,” he said. There was still no tone in his voice. But there were no holes in it, either, no gaps where last night his breath had failed him. “Bring it to me.”
It was my imagination, surely, or the first hint of breeze, that made the bag seem to squirm in my hands. This would be the last time, my father had said. I stumbled forward and dropped the paper bag in my grandfather’s lap.
Faster than I’d ever seen him move, but still not fast, my grandfather crushed the bag against his chest. His head tilted forward, and I had the insane idea that he was about to sing to it, like a baby. But all he did was close his eyes and hold it.
“Alright, that’s enough, I told you it doesn’t work like that,” Lucy said, and took the bag from him. She touched him gently on the back but didn’t look at me.
“What did he just do?” I asked, challenging her. “What did the bat do?”
Once more, Lucy smiled her slow, nasty smile. “Wait and see.”
Then she was gone, and my grandfather and I were alone in the yard. The dark came drifting down the distant mountainsides like a fog bank, but faster. When it reached us, I closed my eyes and felt nothing except an instantaneous chill. I opened my eyes, and my grandfather was still watching me, head cocked a little on his neck.
“Digging,” he said. “All we did, at first. Making pits deeper. The dirt so black. So soft. Like sticking your hands…inside an animal. All those trees leaning over us. Pines. Great white birches. Bark, smooth as baby skin. The Nazis gave…nothing to drink. Nothing to eat. But they paid…no attention, either. I sat next to the gypsy I had slept beside all…through the war. On a single slab of rotted wood. We had shared body heat. Blood from…each other’s wounds. Infections. Lice.
“I never…even knew his name. Four years six inches from each other…never knew it. Couldn’t understand each other. Never really tried. He’d saved—” a cough rattled my grandfather’s entire body, and his eyes got wilder, began to bulge, and I thought he wasn’t breathing and almost yelled for Lucy again, but he gathered himself and went on. “Buttons,” he said. “You understand? From somewhere. Rubbed their edges on rocks. Posts. Anything handy. Until they were…sharp. Not to kill. Not as a weapon.” More coughing. “As a tool. To whittle.”
“Whittle,” I said automatically, as though talking in my sleep.
“When he was starving. When he…woke up screaming. When we had to watch children’s…bodies dangle from gallows…until the first crows came for their eyes. When it was snowing, and…we had to march…barefoot…or stand outside all night. The gypsy whittled.”
Again, my grandfather’s eyes ballooned in their sockets as though they would burst. Again came the cough, shaking him so hard that he almost fell from the chair. And again, he fought his body to stillness.
“Wait,”he gasped. “You will wait. You must.”
I waited. What else could I do?
A long while later, he said, “Two little girls.”
I stared at him. His words wrapped me like strands of a cocoon. “What?”
“Listen. Two girls. The same ones, over and over. That’s what…the gypsy…whittled.”
Dimly, in the part of my brain that still felt alert, I wondered how anyone could tell if two figures carved in God knows what with the sharpened edge of a button were the same girls.
But my grandfather just nodded. “Even at the end. Even at Chelmno. In the woods. In the moments…when we weren’t digging, and the rest of us…sat. He went straight for the trees. Put his hands on them like they were warm. Wept. First time, all war. Despite everything we saw. Everything we knew…no tears from him, until then. When he came back, he had…strips of pine bark in his hands. And while everyone else slept…or froze…or died…he worked. All night. Under the trees.”
“Every few hours…shipments came. Of people, you understand? Jews. We heard trains. Then, later, we saw creatures…between tree trunks. Thin. Awful. Like dead saplings walking. When the Nazis…began shooting…they fell with no sound. Poppoppop from the guns. Then silence. Things lying in leaves. In the wet.
“The killing wasn’t…enough fun…for the Nazis, of course. They made us roll bodies…into the pits, with our hands. Then bury them. With our hands. Or our mouths. Sometimes our mouths. Dirt and blood. Bits of person in your teeth. A few of us lay down. Died on the ground. The Nazis didn’t have…to tell us. We just…pushed anything dead…into the nearest pit. No prayers. No last look to see who it was. It was no one. Do you see? No one. Burying. Or buried. No difference.
“And still, all night, the gypsy whittled.
“For the dawn…shipment…the Nazis tried…something new. Stripped the newcomers…then lined them up…on the lip of a pit…twenty, thirty at a time. Then they played…perforation games. Shoot up the body…down it…see if you could get it…to flap apart…before it fell. Open up, like a flower.
“All through the next day. And all the next night. Digging. Waiting. Whittling. Killing. Burying. Over and over. Sometime…late second day, maybe…I got angry. Not at the Nazis. For what? Being angry at human beings…for killing…for cruelty…like being mad at ice for freezing. It’s just…what to expect. So I got angry…at the trees. For standing there. For being green, and alive. For not falling when bullets hit them.
“I started…screaming. Trying to. In Hebrew. In Polish. The Nazis looked up, and I thought they would shoot me. They laughed instead. One began to clap. A rhythm. See?”
Somehow, my grandfather lifted his limp hands from the arms of the wheelchair and brought them together. They met with a sort of crackle, like dry twigs crumbling.
“The gypsy…just watched. Still weeping. But also…after a while…nodding.”
All this time, my grandfather’s eyes had seemed to swell, as though there was too much air being pumped into his body. But now the air went out of him in a rush, and the eyes went dark, and the lids came down. I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep again, the way he had last night. But I still couldn’t move. Dimly, I realized that the sweat from my long day’s walking had cooled on my skin, and that I was freezing.
My grandfather’s lids opened, a little. He seemed to be peering at me from inside a trunk, or a coffin.
“I don’t know how the gypsy knew…that it was ending. That it was time. Maybe just because…it had been hours…half a day…between shipments. The world had gone…quiet. Us. Nazis. Trees. Corpses. There had been worse places…I thought…to stop living. Despite the smell.
“Probably, I was sleeping. I must have been, because the gypsy shook me…by the shoulder. Then held out…what he’d made. He had it…balanced…on a stick he’d bent. So the carving moved. Back and forth. Up and down.”
My mouth opened and then hung there. I was rock, sand, and the air moved through me and left me nothing.
“‘Life,’ the gypsy said to me, in Polish. First Polish I ever heard him speak. ‘Life. You see?’
“I shook…my head. He said it again. ‘Life.’ And then…I don’t know how…but I did…see.
“I asked him… ‘Why not you?’ He took…from his pocket…one of his old carvings. The two girls. Holding hands. I hadn’t noticed…the hands before. And I understood.
“‘My girls,’ he said. Polish, again. ‘Smoke. No more. Five years ago.’ I understood that, too.
“I took the carving from him. We waited. We slept, side by side. One last time. Then the Nazis came.
“They made us stand. Hardly any of them, now. The rest gone. Fifteen of us. Maybe less. They said something. German. None of us knew German. But to me…at least…the word meant…run.
“The gypsy…just stood there. Died where he was. Under the trees. The rest…I don’t know. The Nazi who caught me…laughing…a boy. Not much…older than you. Laughing. Awkward with his gun. Too big for him. I looked at my hand. Holding…the carving. The wooden man. ‘Life,’ I found myself chanting…instead of Shma. ‘Life.’ Then the Nazi shot me in the head. Bang.”
And with that single word, my grandfather clicked off, as though a switch had been thrown. He slumped in his chair. My paralysis lasted a few more seconds, and then I started waving my hands in front of me, as if I could ward off what he’d told me, and I was so busy doing that that I didn’t notice, at first, the way my grandfather’s torso heaved and rattled. Whimpering, I lowered my hands, but by then, my grandfather wasn’t heaving anymore, and he’d slumped forward further, and nothing on him was moving.
“LUCY!” I screamed, but she was already out of the house, wrestling my grandfather out of his chair to the ground. Her head dove down on my grandfather’s as she shoved the mask up his face, but before their mouths even met, my grandfather coughed, and Lucy fell back, sobbing, tugging the mask back into place.
My grandfather lay where he’d been thrown, a scatter of bones in the dirt. He didn’t open his eyes. The oxygen tank hissed, and the blue tube stretching to his mask filled with wet mist.
“How?” I whispered
Lucy swept tears from her eyes. “What?”
“He said he got shot in the head.” And even as I said that, I felt it for the first time, that cold slithering up my intestines into my stomach, then my throat.
“Stop it,” I said. But Lucy slid forward so that her knees were under my grandfather’s head and ignored me. Overhead, I saw the moon half-embedded in the ridged black of the sky like the lidded eye of a gila monster. I stumbled around the side of the house and, without thinking about it, slipped into the hogan.
Once inside, I jerked the curtain down to block out the sight of Lucy and my grandfather and that moon, then drew my knees tight against my chest to pin that freezing feeling where it was. I stayed that way a long while, but whenever I closed my eyes, I saw people splitting open like peeled bananas, limbs strewn across bare, black ground like tree branches after a lightning storm, pits full of naked dead people.
I’d wished him dead, I realized. At the moment he tumbled forward in his chair, I’d hoped he was dead. And for what, exactly? For being in the camps? For telling me about it? For getting sick and making me confront it?
But with astonishing, disturbing speed, the guilt over those thoughts passed. And when it was gone, I realized that the cold had seeped down my legs and up to my neck. It clogged my ears, coated my tongue like a paste, sealing the world out. All I could hear was my grandfather’s voice, like blown sand against the inside of my skull. Life. He was inside me, I thought. He had absorbed me, taken my place. He was becoming me.
I threw my hands over my ears, which had no effect. My thoughts flashed through the last two days, the drumming and chanting, the dead Talking God-bat in the paper bag, my father’s goodbye, while that voice beat in my ears, attaching itself to my pulse. Life. And finally, I realized that I’d trapped myself. I was alone in the hogan in the dark. When I turned around, I would see the Dancing Man. It would be floating over me with its mouth wide open. And then it would be over, too late. It might already be.
Flinging my hands behind me, I grabbed the Dancing Man around its thin, black neck. I could feel it bob on its branch, and I half-expected it to squirm as I fought to my feet. It didn’t, but its wooden skin gave where I pressed it, like real skin. Inside my head, the new voice kept beating.
At my feet on the floor lay the matches Lucy had used to light her ceremonial candles. I snatched up the matchbook, then threw the carved thing to the ground, where it smacked on its base and tipped over, face up, staring at me. I broke a match against the matchbox, then another. The third match lit.
For one moment, I held the flame over the Dancing Man. The heat felt wonderful crawling toward my fingers, a blazing, living thing, chasing back the cold inside me. I dropped the match, and the Dancing Man disintegrated in a spasm of white-orange flame.
And then, abruptly, there was nothing to be done. The hogan was a dirt and wood shelter, the night outside the plain old desert night, the Dancing Man a puddle of red and black ash I scattered with my foot. Still cold, but mostly tired, I staggered back outside and sat down hard against the side of the hogan and closed my eyes.
Footsteps woke me, and I sat up and found, to my amazement, that it was daylight. I waited, tense, afraid to look up, and then I did.
My father was kneeling beside me on the ground.
“You’re here already?” I asked.
“Your grandpa died, Seth,” he said. In his zombie-Dad voice, though he touched my hand the way a real father would. “I’ve come to take you home.”
4
The familiar commotion in the hallway of the pension alerted me to my students’ return. One of them, but only one, stopped outside my door. I waited, holding my breath, wishing I’d snapped out the light. But Penny didn’t knock, and after a few seconds, I heard her careful, precise footfall continuing toward her room. And so I was alone with my puppets and my memories and my horrible suspicions, the way I have always been.
The way I am now, one month later, in my plain, posterless Ohio apartment with its cable-less television and nearly bare cupboards and single shelf stacked with textbooks, on the eve of the new school year. I’m remembering rousing myself out of the malaise I couldn’t quite seem to shake—have never, for one instant, shaken since—during that last ride home from my grandfather’s. “I killed him,” I told my father, and when he glanced at me, expressionless, I told him all of it, my grandfather’s gypsy and the Dancing Man and the Way and the thoughts I’d had.
My father didn’t laugh. He also didn’t touch me. All he said was, “That’s silly, Seth” And for a while, I thought it was.
But today, I am thinking of Rabbi Loew and his golem, the creature he infected with a sort of life. A creature that walked, talked, thought, saw, but couldn’t taste. Couldn’t feel. I’m thinking of my father, the way he always was. If I’m right, then of course it had been done to him, too. And I’m thinking of the way I only seem all the way real, even to me, when I see myself in the vividly reflective faces of my students.
It’s possible, I realize, that nothing happened to me during those last days at my grandfather’s. It could have happened years before I was born. The gypsy had offered what he offered, and my grandfather had accepted, and as a result became what he was. Might have been. If that was true, then my father and I were unexceptional, in a way. Natural progeny. We’d simply inherited our natures, and our limitations, the way all earthly creatures do.
But I can’t help thinking about the graves I saw on this summer’s trip, and the millions of people in them. And the millions more without graves. The ones who are smoke.
And I find that I can feel it, at last. Or that I’ve always felt it, without knowing what it was: the Holocaust, roaring down the generations like a wave of radiation, eradicating in everyone it touches the ability to trust people, experience joy, fall in love, believe in love when you see it in others.
And I wonder what difference it makes, in the end, whether it really was my grandfather, or the golem-grandfather that the gypsy made, who finally crawled out of the woods of Chelmno.
Dancing Men
The Dark, published in 2003, was the first ghost story anthology I edited. In the early 2000s I realized that some of my favorite stories were extraordinarily moving, excellent ghost stories such as “Dust Motes” by P. D. Cacek, “Things I Didn’t Know My Father Knew” by Peter Crowther, and “Each Night, Every Year” by Kathryn Ptacek, to name just a few. So in my contrary fashion, I decided I wanted to edit a new ghost story anthology that was filled exclusively with ghost stories that would create a sense of unease. Nothing heart-warming.
I freely admit that Glen Hirshberg’s multi-layered “Dancing Men,” is one of my all time favorite stories. Both it and the anthology won the International Horror Guild Award.
The Office of Doom
by Richard Bowes
(From Lovecraft Unbound, 2009)
The view from the University Science Reference Desk is all about dark and light. It looks out over a balcony into an illuminated twelve story atrium. The front of the library building has ranks of tall windows. Outside are the dark trees of New York’s Washington Square and beyond them the lights of the brownstones and skyscrapers on the far side of the park.
