Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat - By David Dosa Page 0,64
her out. He stopped when he saw Mary and me.
“Dr. Dosa, I need to speak with you,” he said breathlessly. His face was a study in anguish.
I directed him down the hall in the direction of their room while Mary went in search of Ruth. We entered her room and sat down next to each other on Ruth’s bed. Frank looked at me through eyes heavy with tears.
“Dr. Dosa, I need to tell you what happened today, but I need you to understand a little bit more about us first.”
“All right,” I said.
“Ruth and I were married shortly after the war. I don’t know if you are aware of this, but we met at a concentration camp.” He looked at me to gauge my response.
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“Dear God, I still remember it to this day. It was late October 1943. I had already been at the camp for a few months.” Mr. Rubenstein paused for a moment and became lost in his memories. A minute passed before he began again. This time his voice was low and uneven.
“They say when you get older that you forget. It’s not true. I remember the past more vividly every day. In some ways, I envy my wife—she doesn’t remember any of this anymore but I live with the memories every day. At night I dream about it: the humiliation, the suffering…” Frank paused briefly and looked at the floor before continuing.
“I remember the first moment I saw Ruth like it was yesterday,” he said. As he spoke his accent seemed to become more pronounced, the Eastern European inflections and inverted sentences bubbled up through time to the surface. “She must have just arrived at the camp. She was dressed in a brown dress, torn. Her overcoat…it was still new, but stained now from travel. This heavy suitcase through the mud she was pulling. I still remember her long dark hair: tangled and dirty but oh! it was beautiful. For some reason—maybe it was fate—our eyes met. Doctor, she had the most magnificent eyes I’d ever seen. Most important, there was no fear in her eyes. She was in this horrible new place but all she looked was determined: She was going to live!
“So like that I fell in love with her. I had to know her. I walked over and offered to carry her bag.”
Frank looked over at me, the hint of a smile coming to his face.
“She turned me down, but never once did I stop thinking of her. It was weeks before we met again. This may sound crazy, given our surroundings, but, Doctor, it was the happiest day of my life. From that day we were inseparable. For nine months we were together. Then suddenly, we were sent to different camps. Before we were separated we agreed that if we survived we would look for each other after the war. We chose a place to meet—a church in my hometown. Neither of us knew whether the other person survived.”
“Mr. Rubenstein,” I interrupted, “I can’t even imagine what you went through.”
He put his hand up to stop me from talking.
“Dr. Dosa, it was sixty-three years ago today that we met in the courtyard.” He paused to allow the news to sink in. “For the first time since that day, Ruth does not know who I am.”
As he spoke his tears poured down his cheeks. I looked at him in silence, unsure of what, if anything, I should say.
“When we came to the United States, we didn’t have a lot of money. All we had was each other. We couldn’t speak the language. Ruth cleaned rooms at the hospital and I went to school during the day to learn English. At nights, we would walk around New York City, looking in the store windows. Then we would go back to our little apartment and lay down together. That we could afford!
“Things got better. My English became not so bad and I got a job as a laboratory assistant. Ruth took a job as a nanny for a rich New York couple. She loved that job and those kids. Maybe because we couldn’t have kids ourselves.”
Frank began to tear up again.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He acknowledged my response with a quick nod before continuing. “We never had it easy but we made do. Our lives got better. I went back to school and finished my Ph.D. For my first real job we came here to New England.”