My Holocaust Page 4

  Maurice now stroked the luscious fabric of Gloria Bacon Lieb’s jacket sleeve, shaking his head at Monty’s bad telephone manners—such a wise guy, that Monty!—while gazing adoringly and forgivingly at him. He truly had a passion for Monty, wishing in his heart at times that his Norman could have been even half so bold and confident and inventive, though naturally he would never have uttered such a thought out loud even to his own wife Blanche. Not to imply that Norman was a nothing, of course, and especially now with Maurice “very romantically involved mit the museum,” as he liked to say, he, Norman, was the de facto big chief of their business, Holocaust Connections, Inc., ran the whole shop himself, “hook, crook, and shtinker,” while Maurice was the silent partner—“well, maybe not so silent,” as his Blanchie would lovingly remind him. Still, Monty—Monty was truly “hoo-hah, he was something, a shuper shtar!” “Mine Monty,” Maurice elaborated to Gloria, “absolutely brilliant, a creative genius par excellence! You see that can over there?” He indicated the Zyklon B in the display. “Nu, so the Auschwitz museum here out from the goodness of its heart breaks down and loans to us a couple of cans for our place in Washington from the thousands left behind here like garbage by the Nazi criminals and murderers, they should rot in hell. But what happens next? When we try to get it through customs into the good old U.S.A.—such problems, you shouldn’t know from it, such aggravation! EPA, ShmeePA, they’re all making us crazy. Where are we going to store it? That’s all what these geniuses wanted to know. What precautions are we taking it shouldn’t explode? Maybe it will be the end from the world, maybe it will give gas to the whole Congress as if we would ever notice the difference anyway, maybe—who knows what else maybe? Environmental! You know why the word environmental has mental in it? Now you know why! But mine Monty here—he solves everything. Mine crazy Monty! Chutzpah mit charisma—that’s mine Monty in a nut’s shell. This boy never met a rule he wouldn’t break, never met a risk he wouldn’t take, a little reckless maybe, sometimes we have to hold him back mit wild horses, but the trut’ is, Gloria darling—an incredible talent, a true visionary. Believe me, when it comes to making the Holocaust a household word—Nobel Prize material!”

  Gloria stepped forward and pressed her cool palm over the place where Maurice’s heart was hammering passionately, drawing her molded bosom in its expensively tailored suit up to him, her face so close to his he could inhale her gourmet mouthwash. “Now listen up, Mr. Chairman,” she whispered, “if you know what’s good for you, you had better tell me right this minute how your little genius boychik did it.” She must really have wanted to know. “Ah, Gloria darling,” Maurice said, sandwiching that creamy hand of hers between his two pudgy ones with those anomalously manicured fingernails, and rubbing it up and down rhythmically, “the answer to that question will cost you a minimum five million from Mel’s foundation. But seriously speaking, darling, even if you gave to me ten million, I wouldn’t tell to you, because of mine love for you, Gloria, not to mention mine respect for your mind—for your own good, darling, in case the G-men torture you mit dripping prune juice on top of your beautiful hairdo or mit shticking pins and needles under your gorgeous manicure God forbid to get out from you the information. Better for your own health you shouldn’t know what kind of finaglings and problems we had to go through in the name of creating our sacred institution!”

  Krystyna was now enumerating that gruesome litany regarding the disposal of the corpses following twenty minutes or so of torture in the gas—the extracting of the gold teeth, the probing of the orifices for concealed treasure, the cutting off of the women’s hair—ad nauseam, literally and figuratively, though there were a lot of perverts and sadists out there who always got a big charge from it all, Norman knew. Ah Krystyna, our Lady of Brzezinka—she gives good Shoah! He observed her as she pumped on relentlessly, totally on automatic like an old hooker, staring blankly into the contaminated space of this barrack where who knows what suffering had once been endured, her fingers raking unconsciously through her champagne-colored hair, teasing it out even fuller. What with everyone but himself ignoring her—Monty still hollering into his telephone, his father conducting museum business with Gloria, and now Bunny foaming at the mouth over something or other—well, if by some miracle Krystyna wasn’t already an anti-Semite like every other single Pole he had ever met, Norman reflected, and especially with her close personal contact with particularly obnoxious Jewish types in her job as the museum’s acquisitions agent in Warsaw and occasional VIP tour guide for fund-raising junkets such as this one, which enabled her to get to know the species intimately and, from her point of view, no doubt gave her open-and-shut grounds and justification to despise them even more, she would definitely turn into a flaming Jew-hater now. “Maurice, look,” Gloria was saying, jutting her chin toward Bunny, “Barbara is very upset about something. Stand up straight, Barbara,” she added reflexively.

  “What’s the matter, Bunny honey?” Maurice appealed with sincere concern, turning in alarm from the mother to the daughter. Bunny furiously jabbed a finger toward Monty, who was still braying into the telephone. “I really really find it offensive the way he swears and takes the Lord’s name in vain,” she responded. With the same accusatory pointer she pushed up the bridge of her eyeglasses, but she had hooked even Monty’s attention for a second. “I consider such language very very inappropriate in this place of holy Christian and Jewish martyrs,” she elaborated. Uh-oh, Monty thought, I’m in big trouble; this chick has really fallen for me hard.

  “Mrs. Lieb?” Maurice looked admiringly from Bunny to Gloria. “I must compliment you on bringing up such a sensitive daughter. Such antennas she has, such rabbit’s ears, you should excuse me, and she is still only a Holocaust virgin! Need I say more? Amazing!” Then walking a few paces up to Monty, he hissed into his free ear, “Get off the goddamn telephone, you schmuck, before I kill you. You gonna cost me a couple of million, imbecile!”

  Monty contemplated Maurice disdainfully. “Okay, Honey,” he rasped at last into the phone so that only Maurice could hear him, resigned under the circumstances to leaving his message on the machine, “you win this time. But I’m telling you right now, Honey, you’d just better not fuck me over if that reporter from the Post shows up at the house—you hear me, Honey?—the one I told you about, the guy who’s doing a profile on me in connection with the museum? I’m warning you! You’d better not give him any information at all. Don’t let him in. Don’t show him anything—no scrapbooks, no pictures, no nothing. Don’t take him around—you hear?—no upstairs, no downstairs, no attic, no cellar, no garage. The operative phrase is ‘No comment’—get it, Honey? If you screw me, you’re finished—and that’s a promise. I’ll take everything, every last goddamn thing, including the kids. I’ll call a press conference, I’ll tell the media what a nutcase you are, I’ll get the museum lawyer pro bono in court on my side and I’ll wipe you out, Honey, if you mess with me—you have my word on that!” He was out of control. “Moron!” Maurice ejaculated. “Such a message you leave on a tape? For evidence for later? Idiot!”

  “Shut up, Mr. Honorable Asshole Partisan!” Monty shot back, and, stuffing the phone in disgust into his pocket, he pivoted sharply, heading straight toward the next room, Room Five, with the others following instinctively behind like a tribe of ducklings—despite everything, Maurice once again recognized in awe, despite the fact that he let such vile words out of his dirty, filthy pisk and was so fresh and ungrateful and even cruel, despite the fact that he was blowing all his chances of ever being named the director of their moral-beacon museum much less surviving the vetting process and media scrutiny with all his scandals and cowboy shenanigans and fooling around, despite the fact that he, Maurice, so many times felt like wringing out the boy’s neck good and hard like a chicken, he could not deny the truth staring him now as always right in the face—that his Monty was a true leader, just look how everyone else spontaneously and docilely followed him like sheep, a born trailblazer, he was a n
atural, a latter-day hero of our Holocaust.

  As they all filed behind Monty into Room Five, however, Maurice could feel the rage rising once again like a hot bolus in his throat. Madame Jadwiga Switon, the top potato of this State Museum in Auschwitz-Birkenau, had personally sworn to him on everything that’s holy—ha!—that they would have the entire place to themselves. He had patiently struggled to drill into her thick Polack head how important these donors could be to him, how essential it was that they feel they are getting the exclusive, red-carpet, five-star treatment, and she had promised—yes, promised!—that during their tour the premises would be closed to the general public. “You have my word of honor, Pan Messer,” she had assured him. So how did you explain, then, the presence in this chamber of horrors of those three creatures in the corner over there who could loosely be classified as human? Maybe they looked like statues, maybe they resembled some kind of conceptual sculpture installation iconography in the museum-speak Maurice was beginning to absorb, the way they sat there perfectly still, frozen like the dead, but Maurice wasn’t tricked. He knew this place inside out, he knew they were aliens here, they didn’t belong, whether they were animate or whether they were so-called art, and when he marched right up to them to tell them in no uncertain terms where to go, he could see that they were alive all right, their chests were rising and falling evenly, their eyeballs were rolling gently behind their drawn lids, a low underwaterish buzz was coming regularly from somewhere deep down inside them.

  “Excuse me, mister,” Maurice said, giving a deliberate cough and addressing the one sitting erect in a wheelchair in the middle who seemed like the boss—the fat one with that merry cushion of a gut, the long gray beard like dry straw, the shaved head with that ridiculous little ponytail in the back like a misplaced pupik, dolled up in a long white embroidered blouse like some sort of swami salami. Slipping his hand into the back pocket of the trousers of his made-to-order suit, Maurice extracted an ornate silver case, clicked it open, took out his chairman’s card embossed in gold with the seal of the museum, and waved it in front of the impassive face. But, to his shock and embarrassment before potential donors, the reflexive deference that his position invariably evoked in normal people, which he had come to expect, did not materialize, not from this kook in the wheelchair who didn’t even bother to open his eyes, and not from the other two freaks sitting on the floor there with their legs curled under them like a contortionist Indians, or, you should excuse me, Native Americans at a powwow—the pregnant girl in all those gypsy schmattehs, rows and rows of beads, and small round steel-rimmed glasses, and, on the other side of the cripple, a tall—you could tell he was a giant even though he was all folded up—clean-cut fellow who was definitely a goy, maybe even a goy with a trust fund who gets a kick out of giving the finger to his ancestors by pledging to Jewish causes—who knows?—the last of the WASPs; the other two, the guru and the hippie, they were Jews, no question about it, most probably penniless worthless Jews, you couldn’t fool Maurice in a million years, he could smell it. “What do we have here?” Maurice demanded, turning to Krystyna, his paid employee, for an explanation. “The three stooges? The ganze holy mishpoche, the virgin mother mit her two husbands, including the holy ghost?” “It’s called meditation, Pop,” Norman volunteered wearily, depositing this information with a sigh from the depths of his sullen sophistication. His father waved him away impatiently, though Norman had wanted to say more, but the words just could not be dredged up fast enough. “Don’t give me no meditation!” Maurice barked. “Get the bums out from here. They’re trespassing on mine Holocaust!”

  “Um, Maurice?” Bunny Bacon now stepped forward purposefully to make a point. “Don’t you think there’s enough Holocaust to go around for everyone? I mean, I really really like this diversity.” Her eyes like fishes behind the bowls of her glasses shifted from the weird threesome, still unavailable in their trance, then back to Maurice. “And, you know,” she went on, flashing her encouraging pedagogic smile, “I really really appreciate it that Auschwitz is wheelchair-accessible. You know what I mean? Was it always that way—I mean, even at the time of the Holocaust?”

  Then, feeling reinforced about having voiced her position on this matter, Bunny turned her attention to the main exhibit in the room, which extended behind a glass partition along one entire wall about the length of her kindergarten classroom in New York City where the miniature rainbow-colored cubbies were lined up. “What’s that?” she asked Norman, her personal docent. “Some kind of installation art?” By way of an answer, Norman signaled with a look in the direction of Krystyna, who was duly delivering what the American taxpayer was paying her for. “Two tons of human hair,” Krystyna was reciting for the thousandth time, “from the seven tons found by Soviet troops when they liberated Auschwitz in 1945, shorn from the heads of the gassed female corpses, baled and labeled for shipment to Germany for use in the war industry—for cloth, carpets, insulation, et cetera et cetera.”

  “A hair mountain? Oh my God, this is so gross!” Bunny exclaimed. And finding some amusement in hearing herself sound like one of her five-year-olds staring down into a plate of snot-green brussels sprouts in the lunchroom of the exclusive private school where she taught, she went on for good effect: “A humongous hairball! Yuck!” She turned to face Monty. “I really really hope you don’t make your visitors do hair at your Washington museum!”

  Monty was opening his mouth to reply when Maurice leapt, with a spryness impressive for his age, in front of him and seized both of Bunny’s nail-gnawed hands, kissing them lavishly. “What a soul! I’m telling you”—and he beamed at Gloria—“your daughter is sensitive like the proverbial open sore. We survivors said this very same thing, ditto ditto—no hair! It’s a part from the human body! This could be hair from the head of mine mama, mine bubbe, mine tante, mine schwester! We Jews, we bury in the ground the body parts and we say a Kaddish, we respect the dead, not like these Polish anti-Semitten here who get a thrill you shouldn’t know about from showing the physical remains from dead Jews.” Then, smiling proudly at Bunny, he added, “I can assure you, Miss Bunny honey, that not even one single hair from the head from even one single murdered Jewish lady is on display at our museum in Washington to defile our temple to the Holocaust. This was a battle that I led personally and that we survivors fought on principle and won. And”—here he gave a pause like a fanfare before proceeding—“because of your beautiful and sensitive soul that you let me have a tiny peek today, I want to say that it gives me great pleasure here and now in this factory of death we call Auschwitz to hereby award you mit the official title of Honorary Survivor mit all the rights and privileges thereof and thereto.”

  Monty kept his mouth shut in solidarity with Maurice as the old man went on like this, spinning his revisionist history of the hair war in which he now fully believed. Monty stood transfixed, overflowing with respect for the shameless guile and gall of the old rogue—they were as alike, Maurice used to say, like two foxes in a foxhole, and Monty recognized this as the ultimate compliment—remembering how ruthlessly Maurice had fought some of the other survivors, Lipman Krakowski and Henny Soskis, for instance, in the battle over the hair, swearing on all that is holy that he would destroy them, how imperiously Maurice had insisted that they display the real thing due to the proven ghoulish popularity and drawing power of this exhibit at the Auschwitz museum, how doggedly he had even arranged to have a couple of hundred pounds of the stuff schlepped home from Poland in laundry sacks that were now buried in storage somewhere out in the malls of Maryland, how in the end he had been forced to retreat and give in only because he had gotten that call directly from the White House—Henny had a granddaughter who was an intern there with face time—advising him that he’d better back off on the hair business if he ever wanted to be renamed to the museum council much less be reappointed chair.

  “You don’t know how right you are, Maurice,” Gloria was saying. “Barbara is extremely sensitive. Thank you so much for
noticing.” She was thinking about all those years of analysis, starting when Bunny was three years old, right down to the present day—exactly forty years of psychiatric treatment so far; maybe they should throw an anniversary party. Even from Poland, Bunny faithfully kept her appointments by daily scheduled telephone calls; minus her shrink, she would turn into an absolute wreck like that hair over there, she would let herself go, fall apart, it was as critical as that. With such a high-strung and neurotic daughter, phobic and panicked about everything from mice to men, requiring couturier designer care, could anyone in all fairness fault Gloria for protecting her assets, sticking only to millionaires? It was a practical necessity, a survival thing. All that dieting because the Nazi was within, the endless shopping like a life sentence with no possibility of parole, the brain damage that comes from a lifelong career of pleasing men—she did it all out of maternal love. She was sensitive too, she too was a survivor. Why didn’t anyone give her an award?