Clara Mondschein's Melancholia Read online

  CLARA MONDSCHEIN’S MELANCHOLIA

  a novel by Anne Raeff

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-870-1

  M P Publishing Limited

  12 Strathallan Crescent

  Douglas

  Isle of Man

  IM2 4NR

  via United Kingdom

  Telephone: +44 (0)1624 618672

  email: [email protected]

  Originally published by:

  MacAdam/Cage Publishing

  155 Sansome Street, Suite 550

  San Francisco, CA 94104

  www.macadamcage.com

  Copyright © 2002 by Anne Raeff

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Raeff, Anne, 1959 —

  Clara Mondschein’s melancholia / by Anne Raeff.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-931561-16-8 (hardback: alk. paper)

  1. Children of Holocaust survivors–Fiction.

  2. Mothers and daughters–Fiction. 3. Holocaust survivors–Fiction. I.

  4. New York (N.Y.)–Fiction. 5. Teenage girls–Fiction. 6. Suburban

  life–Fiction. 7. Jewish women–Fiction. 8. New Jersey–Fiction. I.Title.

  PS3618.A36 C53 2002

  813’.6–dc21

  2002005120

  Book and jacket design by Dorothy Carico Smith.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corp for permission to reprint three lines from “Dreamwork Three” by Jerome Rothenberg from Khurbn & Other Poems, Copyright © 1989 by Jerome Rothenberg. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To Lori Ostlund, my harshest critic:

  For her honesty, her friendship, and her love.

  Enough said.

  Author’s Note

  Pribor is a small village in the former Czechoslovakia about fifty miles (or approximately 80 kilometers) from Auschwitz (the Polish town of Oswiecim). I have chosen this village as the site of my fictional concentration camp so I could pull together the events and circumstances of various camps without tampering with historical facts.

  The man with a fish between his teeth dreams of famine for

  Forty-five days

  The man dressed in white dreams of a potato

  -From “Dreamwork Three”

  Khurbn & Other Poems

  Jerome Rothenberg

  CLARA MONDSCHEIN’S MELANCHOLIA

  A Novel by Anne Raeff

  Contents

  1. MRS. MONDSCHEIN AND TOMMY AT THE CHRISTOPHER STREET AIDS HOSPICE

  2. DEBORAH GELB IN NEW JERSEY

  3. A HUSBAND AND A DOCTOR

  4. OLD PHOTOS AND A FRIEND

  5. THE CABARET AND THE OPERA

  6. ST. TERESA’S FINGER

  7. THE WIZARD

  8. THE TWINS

  9. THE SANATORIUM

  10. THE ECLAIR

  11. WHAT SIMON GELB WAS WRITING ON THE OLD OLYMPIA

  12. PRIBOR

  13. DOMESTIC ANXIETY

  14. THE UKRAINIAN

  15. THE DENTIST OF 148TH STREET

  16. NEW YORK

  17. JUDITH AND HOLOFERNES

  18. THE TYPEWRITER IS SILENT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PART I

  The Sonata

  of the

  Broken-Footed

  Soldiers

  Mrs. Mondschein and Tommy

  at the Christopher Street

  AIDS Hospice

  February 1996

  One sloppy step, one tiny obstacle like a used syringe or a cigarette butt (people have fallen over even smaller objects) and it could be the end. One more flight and I’ll be safe. Safe until tomorrow. My daughter Clara thinks I’m crazy for insisting on making this journey—the six flights of stairs down and up everyday, no matter what the weather. She tells me she’ll bring me groceries and the newspaper, but I don’t take on the stairs for the groceries or the newspaper. Why do people climb Mount Everest or jump out of airplanes during peacetime? It’s not because they have nothing better to do. I like my stairs. I like the worn-out marble covered with years of soot and urine and spilled beer. I like the cracks and chips, and the wobbly banister makes the climb particularly thrilling, for it could never be counted on to break a fall or reestablish balance. Ironic, isn’t it, that I spent a good ten years in court trying to get us an elevator, and now I’m happy I failed? My stairs are a familiar reminder—life should never be too easy.

  Last year on my eighty-fifth birthday, Clara took me to visit what she calls a very nice retirement community just five minutes from her house in New Jersey. Everyone had his own studio apartment and there was a music room, and gardens, and a library, and apparently all sorts of educated people too although I didn’t see anyone reading a book or even having a conversation. But I have an apartment, the same one we’ve had since my husband, daughter, and I came to this country in 1947—a large two-bedroom with a view of the Hudson. Why would I trade this for a little box in New Jersey? If I ended up breaking my hip or losing my mind in the Colonial Manor, I would be stuck. Here, a fall would be fatal, so I won’t have to worry about sitting in a wheelchair, a wool blanket covering my legs, with nothing to do but stare out the window.

  Luckily for me, Clara hasn’t been trying to convince me of the Colonial Manor’s virtues too much lately. She is in one of her depressions again, so she has been doing a lot of staring out of the window herself. She just watches the cars go by their house. She says she likes the sound of cars on wet asphalt. But when I hear them—swish, swish—all I can think of are women in fancy dresses waltzing. Waltzes never intrigued me much, not even when I was a young girl in Vienna, and my sisters and their friends dreamed of going to the Opernball. They would have died for an opportunity to go even though none of us from the hunched, kosher Second District would have ever been allowed in the door. It’s funny that I was the one who ended up learning to waltz and wear fancy dresses while they stayed, unmarried and drab, in our almost windowless apartment, nursing my father through his long, debilitating illness. And when he was finally dead, my two sisters had run out of time. It was 1938, so in fact we all had run out of time.

  So how can my daughter sit there day after day, not even dressed for life in an old robe and slippers, watching the cars go by? She does not know what it is like to wait. Yesterday on the phone she told me that she wished she were an old woman so she wouldn’t have to worry about doing meaningful things. I hung up on her and she didn’t call back. Does she think my life has no meaning? Who spends Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at the Christopher Street AIDS Hospice? Who is heading for the hospice at this very moment after having braved the stairs? Who is sitting on the IRT squooshed between two sullen businessmen, probably from New Jersey, with their legs wide apart so there’s hardly any room for me to sit? Who reads the New York Times every day and keeps lists upon lists of new words and idioms? (English is such a rich and mind-confounding language.)

  I started coming to the hospice about a year ago, just after Karl died. He had set aside some money for AIDS causes and asked me to find the best place for it. It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t just a little either. It gave me something to do in those first months after he died. Every day I went to a different place, asked them about their services, spoke
to people. I decided on the hospice because they needed the money the most. It seems people would rather donate money to research or education. There is something about hopeless cases that does not attract large donations. It surprised me, actually. I thought our human sense of pity would be most moved by those who were so visibly sick, so on the edge of death.

  You get to know people fast here at the hospice, I suppose since there’s not much time. The dying tell me their life stories in a few hours and then in a week they’re dead. It’s as if they haven’t ever told anyone anything about themselves, so eager are they to tell me—a stranger. Of course there are some patients who always have a lot of visitors. I rarely talk to them, but since I am a nurse by training, I help the nurses attend to their medical needs. I’m glad I didn’t have to give up working. All those years of working from dawn to dusk and it’s hard to get used to being idle. I wonder if some of the patients, some of whom are only a quarter my age, resent being ministered to by an eighty-five-year-old woman. But I don’t think so. Why would they tell me so much if they resented me?

  There’s a new patient, Tommy, who doesn’t talk much and doesn’t get any visitors as far as I can tell. He has three suitcases full of CDs, which he listens to morning, afternoon, and night on a CD Walkman. Today I’ve brought him a new CD—some late Haydn symphonies played by the Vienna Philharmonic. The only things I know about Tommy are that he likes music and he’s not demented; I can tell by his eyes.

  Tommy was very happy with the Haydn CD, and before I could say anything else, he insisted on plugging us both into his Walkman—me into one side and him into the other—so by the time the CD was finished, it was time for lunch. I fed him very carefully and slowly. He only ate twenty bites. I counted.

  After lunch, I thought Tommy would want some sleep, but he said he was not at all tired—“feeling kind of chipper” was how he put it. Then he asked me if I had any good stories to tell him. “I’m in the mood for a good story,” he said. “But I want it to be something moving and true.”

  “How are you going to know if I’m telling you the truth?” I asked.

  “I won’t,” and then he got a sly grin on his face, “but you wouldn’t want to fool a dying man, would you?”

  “No, of course not, though I’m afraid I don’t have any interesting stories that I feel like telling right now.”

  “So you do have interesting stories, but you just don’t feel like telling me them?”

  “Not exactly.” He was right; it’s almost impossible to lie to an AIDS patient. “I only have one story really, but it’s very long and melodramatic, I’m afraid.”

  “Aren’t all good stories long and melodramatic? I mean, just look at Dickens. What a bunch of long and melodramatic swill, but I love it. Do you like Dickens?” he asked me.

  “Yes, of course, but sentimentality was cultivated in the nineteenth century. Our own century is so intolerant by comparison.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m a faggot, remember, and faggots love a good tearjerker, so please, Mrs. Mondschein, without further ado, I’m all ears.” And I pulled my chair up close to the bed so that only Tommy would be able to hear my words.

  I realize now that there were plenty of stories to tell: about my neighbors, about the children of the Korean fruit-stand owners, about the old woman I met the other day who was trying to carry a door, which I helped her do without questioning her purpose. We carried the door up four flights of stairs. No one asked whether we needed help. We left the door in the middle of her apartment amidst heaps of red milk cartons, doorknobs, half a dozen mangled shopping carts. But I didn’t mention any of that, since every true New Yorker has dozens of similar stories. I had no choice but to tell Tommy the only real story I knew. Perhaps I thought my story would have a kind of cathartic effect on Tommy, like a good play or novel, but it would be dishonest and arrogant to insist that my main purpose for speaking was to help him, for, in fact, as soon as I began to speak, I felt a calm that I have not felt since Karl’s death. Tommy’s company made me think of sitting in the living room with Karl at dusk, talking quietly about the day’s events or not talking at all, just sitting next to each other at the end of a day. And thinking of Karl made me think of Clara and how she could never appreciate such a simple thing as sitting in a room at dusk. I guess Clara and her depressions were on my mind because she had been going through a particularly bad phase since her return from Spain at the end of the summer. In any case, it was with Clara that I found myself beginning.

  “Karl used to say it was our fault that Clara has these bouts with depression.”

  “Hold on a minute now. Who’s Karl?” Tommy said, putting his hand gently on mine. It was freezing. I guess that’s why they always keep the heat turned up.

  “I’m sorry. How silly of me. My husband. Karl’s my husband, was my husband. He died about a year ago.”

  “And who’s Clara?”

  “My daughter.”

  “Okay, now you can continue.”

  “Thank you,” I said rather formally. “‘We never should have told her,’ he would say, and sometimes we would argue about it. But what could we have done after the fact? We had both agreed; we believed in telling the truth. And we both thought it would make her strong, give her a sense of pride, of hope.”

  “What would make her strong?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Since Karl’s death, I haven’t spoken much. It has been a very private tale, one I know so well that I forget I have to explain. You see, my daughter Clara was born in a concentration camp—Pribor. Karl, my husband . . .”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Karl and I were hiding for most of the war, at a sanatorium. His friend was the director. But I’m getting ahead of things. I don’t want to get ahead of things.”

  “I can understand. Sorry I interrupted.”

  “No, I wasn’t being clear. I’ll try to be clearer,” I said and paused for a moment, trying to think where to start. “Okay, when Clara was old enough, eight or nine, we told her, ‘Your birth was a symbol of our rebirth,’ and, at first, we thought she understood. She started reading the Old Testament; she insisted on Hebrew lessons, and later she begged us for a bat mitzvah. If it had been up to us, we would have abandoned religion altogether, but rituals seemed to give Clara a sense of purpose, so we joined a synagogue, let her have the bat mitzvah. It wasn’t difficult, really.

  “For a while Clara tried to get us to move to Israel. She left little notes all around the apartment—in our underwear drawers, in the sugar bowl, in the coffeepot. Everywhere we turned, there was a note about Israel. If it had not been for New York, we would have gone. If we had settled in Cleveland or even Philadelphia, we might have given in, but Karl and I could not leave New York—not the concerts and our favorite hall at the Metropolitan Museum. The room with Bruegel’s Winter Scene was as close as we could get to the old Vienna, to those few years we had between my dreary childhood in the Second District and the War. In New York there was the Eclair, where you still can get the only good Wienerschnitzel in town, even if it is cooked by Hungarians. Have you ever been there?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “Well, I will just have to take you one day.”

  “Please, Mrs. Mondschein. I can only stand listening to the truth.”

  “I’m sorry, Tommy. I was trying to be polite, which, I realize, is a great insult. Please forgive me.”

  “Forgiven,” Tommy said. “Please continue.”

  “So we waited out Clara’s Israel campaign. By the time she was in high school, she hardly spoke of it at all, and by the time she started City College, she had apparently forgotten about Israel completely. She studied to be an English teacher at City College, but she also had quite a bit of promise as a poet. When she was still a very young child, maybe seven or eight, she started her first po
etry notebook and every evening she would read her latest creation to us. She was best when she wrote about the city and the people in our neighborhood, whom she knew but not well, like the super and the man and woman who owned the stationery store. She made up little lives for them. Once when she had the flu, she wrote a series of poems from the points of view of various parts of her body—the aching those parts felt and what they would do when they were better and could return to running in the park and eating chocolate. But when she was thirteen, right after her bat mitzvah, she stopped showing us her poetry, and we thought that she had lost interest in writing even though she always had a book of poetry by her desk.

  “At about that time, when we thought she had stopped writing poetry, she asked whether she could help us at our clinic. Karl was a general practitioner in the Bronx. Every week, it seemed, he got ten new patients. They loved him. He was gentle and didn’t charge much if there was no insurance. Karl was pleased that she was interested in our work and he agreed that, after school, she would take the subway to our clinic, where she would help us until we left, which was often not until eight or nine at night. Karl often let her observe when he was attending patients. He taught her to listen to the heart and look into ears and eyes and noses and to take blood pressure and even draw blood, which she did so naturally, finding the vein and slipping the needle in before the patient even knew she had done so. She was very proud of her blood-drawing abilities and we were amazed at how quickly she learned to do it, and Karl started dropping hints about how she would make a good surgeon, but she would never acknowledge his compliments. Then one night I caught her practicing on herself. I had been up late reading and, on my way to the bedroom, I noticed that her light was still on, so I knocked and entered without waiting for her to respond, which is what I should have done. She was sitting on the edge of her bed with the needle in her arm. On the night table a candle was burning and in front of the candle was a glass filled with blood.