our role in it. This self-lacerating attitude drove me crazy, almost as much as your crying and carrying on. One night, in the middle of you throwing a fit about the bathwater not reaching exactly the level you liked, I grabbed you from under your arms and held you naked and dripping above the floor. When I was your age, I shouted, shaking you so hard your head wobbled sickeningly on your neck, there was nothing to eat, and no money for toys, the house was always cold, but we went outside and played and made games out of nothing and lived because we had our lives, while the others were being murdered in the pogroms we could go out and feel the sun and run around and kick a ball! And look at you! You have everything in the world, and all you do is shriek your head off and make everyone’s life miserable! Enough already! Do you hear me? I’ve had enough! You looked at me, your eyes enormous, and reflected in your pupils, small and far away, I saw the image of myself.
Seventy years ago I was a child, too. Seventy years? Seventy? How? Pass over it.
NOW YOU stood holding your suitcase. There was nothing to say. You seemed no longer to need my help. Once you had perhaps, but no longer. I have a terrible headache, you said at last. The light is hurting my eyes. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go lie down. We can talk later.
And just like that you walked back into the house that you had left so long ago. I heard your footsteps slowly ascend the stairs.
Were they the lepers, Dov, those other kids? Is that why you held yourself apart? Or was it you? And the two of us, closed up together in this house—are we the saved or the condemned?
A long silence while you must have stood at the threshold of your old room. Then the creak of the floorboards, and the sound of your door closing again after twenty-five years.
SWIMMING HOLES
THAT EVENING WE WERE READING TOGETHER, as we always did. It was one of those winter nights in England when the darkness that falls at three makes nine feel like midnight, reminding one of how far north one has staked one’s life. The doorbell rang. We looked up at each other. It was rare for anyone to visit us unannounced. Lotte put her book down in her lap. I went to the door. A young man was standing there holding a briefcase. It’s possible that the moment before I opened the door he had extinguished his cigarette, because I thought I saw a trail of smoke slip out of the corner of his mouth. Then again, it could have been just his breath in the cold. For a minute I thought it was one of my students—they all shared a certain knowing look, as if they were trying to smuggle something in or out of an unnamed country. There was a car waiting by the curb, the motor still running, and he glanced back at it. Someone—man or woman, I couldn’t say—was hunched over the steering wheel.
Is Lotte Berg home? he asked. He had a strong accent, but I couldn’t place it immediately. May I ask who would like to see her? The young man thought, just for a moment really, but long enough for me to notice a slight twitch at the corners of his mouth. My name is Daniel, he said. I assumed it was one of her readers. She wasn’t widely known; to say she was known at all in those days would be generous. Of course it always made her happy to receive a letter from someone who admired her work, but a letter was one thing, and a stranger at the door at that hour was another. It’s a bit late—perhaps if you called or wrote first, I said, immediately regretting the lack of kindness I thought this Daniel must have heard in my words. But then he shifted something he’d been holding inside his cheek from one side to the other and swallowed. I noticed then that he had quite a large Adam’s apple in his throat. It crossed my mind that he wasn’t one of Lotte’s readers at all. I glanced down at the darkness gathered in the folds of the leather jacket where it fell around his hips. I don’t know what I thought I might see concealed.