the tape broke the silence and said: The leader you’re talking about is Yossele Rosensaft, isn’t it?
A sudden rustle and thud: Her mother jumping up in her chair?
What do you mean? said Michal. How do you know about Yossele Rosensaft?
I told you, I’m not an idiot. I told you I did research, that I read about Bergen-Belsen. And so of course I’d find out about Yossele Rosensaft. And your description fits him: compact, charismatic, steely.
No! said her mother. It wasn’t Rosensaft. Not him! There were other leaders. He wasn’t the only one.
So which one was my father? the patient asked her mother. Rosensaft? Another “leader”? The Hungarian guard? Some kapo right before you were put on the transport? Maybe even someone on the train? Don’t you think I can do the math? Math, the one thing you know I’m good at. I can count the months from April 18th, 1945, the third day after liberation, and get close to December 26th, 1945.
She paused.
My birthday.
90.
Another long silence ensued. The recorder whined; the tape hissed. In the therapist’s office, neither patient nor doctor moved.
Then a faint sound emanated from the tape, which might have been a whimper—whose?
Finally there was a cry, and Michal’s voice saying:
Oh, my dear! Can you forgive me? I am describing events I have not even allowed myself to think of for many years. Of course you would want to know who your father was. It is natural, yes. Natural that you would want to know.
The tape stopped with a click.
And did she finally tell you? asked Dr. Schussler.
Tell me—?
Who your father was.
No, said the patient. She wept. She said she was sorry she didn’t know, couldn’t know. That I had it right. There were four men she had to have sex with right around the time of my conception—and the one man she did want, the “leader”—and she could not be sure which was my father. She kept weeping. But I did not apologize for making her cry: one victory at least. I didn’t “take care of her feelings.” I let her cry. And after a while she looked up, her eyes puffy, her cheeks wet, her beautiful skin slicked with tears, and she asked again if I would forgive her. And if I could leave and come back the next day.
She paused.
I did, and I left.
We only have a minute, said the therapist, but did you believe her? That she really doesn’t know?
I did then. But now …
Now?
I still think that when she saw me for the first time, she was stricken with a bad memory. She saw in me someone she didn’t ever want to see again, or someone who hurt her deeply. It couldn’t have been her sister that she saw in me—you’re right. She would have cried with delight if I looked like her sister.
She paused.
So I’m probably the child of some rapist. Or else of a hero, maybe Rosensaft. Or maybe not.
Does it matter?
Of course it does.
What difference does it make? It does not change you.
Dr. Schussler’s voice had slipped into the tone that invariably tells the patient, The hour is over.
91.
Does it matter? Does it matter who your father is? Your mother? Who are the exact people who dropped their blood into the container that is you?
The patient and therapist had come to the dreadful nub of the matter, the awful question that had haunted my soul since I had become a conscious being at twelve years of age; the question that had hovered over the patient since the moment she had tried, and failed, to defend her declaration I am not adopted! I have mysterious origins! For if it mattered who had spawned us, and mattered too much, I was doomed; and if the patient’s unknown and unknowable ancestor possessed the sort of genes that predominated, resonated, indeed conquered all opposing chromosomal challengers—everyone knows of such individuals, whose unlikely red hair, for example, reappears generation after generation—if her father were of that variety, she was consigned to a lifetime of fearing what resided within her: the heart of a rapist? A hero? A brute?
Tuesday morning I awoke with the feeling that something was wrong. I had a sudden, strange headache. And when it passed, I noticed that the edges of things were more rounded than they ought to have been. The window frames were bowed, the doors had gone concave. The light was dusty, chalky. The base of my skull went numb, as did the bridge of my nose: such odd