Auschwitz and the Rectification of History

Illustrations by Jason Eckhardt

“The memory dogs! The fangs! The spit!”

I “Take it easy, Goldeh,” I said. She was lying on the cold floor of the I dumpster, losing more than blood. I cradled her head in my hand, I her grey hair matted like a discarded mop head, spooled round my fingers. We could hear them coming through the square. The dogs, the real ones, were clawing at the sides of the dumpster, leaping and yelping. Jerry was dead, but Weiskopf and her other thugs were close.

Echoing outside—breathless voices: “There. The dumpster. Take your time. They’re not going anywhere.” Past fractured crates, rotting cabbages, and moldering, stinking meat, and along the hard, rust-flaked walls I looked for a way out.

“You’re too clever, Al,” Goldeh whispered. “Don’t be clever. Don’t be an actor. Just die well.”

I remember with perfect clarity Goldeh’s reaction on hearing that the Dalai Lama was visiting Auschwitz. I, a vegetarian and a paid-up member of the White Plains Zen Center, was up to my elbows in chicken fat, eggs, and chopped liver fresh from Goldeh’s grinder. She was telling me what to do, step by step, even though I’d done it the day before; I couldn’t seem to retain the recipe—passive aggression against the carnivores, I guess. The radio was blasting through the kitchen at Wolf’s Delicatessen, when the newscaster mentioned the holy man’s trip, as a tag before the commercial, and Goldeh said:

“He’s too late.”

She wiped the grease off her fingers and, without asking, reached past the new dishwasher to turn off the radio the man kept on a shelf above the sink. Then she rolled down her cuffs, covering the number tattooed across her wrist. She stood perfectly still—so did we—until the sigh she was hiding dwindled to a shudder in her breath, and Goldeh left the kitchen.

The dishwasher, a heavy metal shavepate with a small ring through his nose, looked to me across the kitchen, terrified that he had somehow offended her.

I shrugged. “It’s her period.”

He nodded. “Hey, Al, who’s the Dalai Lama?”

“A singer,” I said, “like Dalai Parton.”

“Mm hmm.” Another minute or two passed. I spooned liver into plastic tubs and snapped the lids on, one by one. “What’s Auschwitz?”

“A ballpark, Jerry. Central European League.”

“Oh.”

Goldeh skirted through the kitchen, staring at her shoelaces. “I got to go home early.” She lifted her chin to tie the babushka she wore, summer and winter, around her ruddy, peasant’s face, in Westchester County as in Lithuania forty-five years before. Her eyes were puffy red.

I’d known Goldeh before Wolf’s; her son Sam had been a childhood pal of mine, and that’s how I got the job. It was just to tide me over, mind you, until my ship came in. I am an actor—enough said.

I opened the freezer door without dropping the half dozen containers of chopped liver. I’m Charles Blondin crossing Niagara on a high wire. Below me, the Horseshoe Falls are roaring. I feel the tension in my stomach, in my shoulders, in my face. I crossed the freezer without mishap and deposited the chopped liver on a shelf next to the dead, wrapped chickens. Ta daa! And some folks think theater training isn’t practical!

When I came out, Mr. Wolf was there interrogating Jerry. “What happened? What’s the matter with Goldeh?”

“It’s her period, Mr. Wolf,” he said. I winced. “And there was something on the radio, I think.”

“On the radio?”

“Some singer went to a ballpark.”

“A ballpark?”

“Over in Europe, Mr. Wolf.”

“Oh.” Mr. Wolf shook his head and went back in front.

Jerry was perturbed. “Who’s gonna make the cheese things, now? Wolf’s famous special whaddayacallits?”

“Blintzes, you mean. I’m gonna let you in on a secret. C’mere.”

Jerry snapped off his rubber gloves and followed me back into the cooler. I showed him the stacks of Mrs. Schwartz’s Homestyle Brand Blintzes, both cheese and cherry, in the Glen plaid four-packs—“Made in Canada.”

“Those liars!” Jerry said. “It’s just like the Doc told me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Jews. They even he about blintzes.”

“Listen, Al.” A week had passed since the Dalai Lama’s visit to Auschwitz. Jerry was filling me in on some confidential stuff while Goldeh kibitzed with a customer. “I’m only staying here because the Doc wants me to. I’ve got my ear to the ground, boy.”

“And you can still wash dishes?” I’m George. Jerry’s Gracie. I’m smoking a fat cigar and doing takes to the audience. The freezer door is the audience. They love me. They’ve always loved me. I’m the funniest guy in vaudeville.

“I know what’s going on around here, Al, and you should know it too.”

“Tell me.”

“First off, Auschwitz isn’t a ballpark.”

“It’s not?”

“No! It’s one of those places in Poland where the Jews claim all those people were gassed.”

“Claim?” “Yeah. It’s a lot of bull, and she knows it. That’s why she got upset.”

“No!”

Yeah. Have you seen that number on her arm?”

“Sure.”

“It’s a tattoo.”

You don’t say!”

“Yeah. Her pals put it there. Some other Jews.”

“What for?”

“To make it look like the Nazis did it. In Poland. The Doc has it all worked out. She’s got piles of evidence, and it’s all gonna come out pretty soon. That’s why Goldeh was crying. It wasn’t her period, Al. She’s too old, don’t you see?”

“Gee, I guess you’re right.”

“She was worried because of what that Dalai gal might have seen. You know. That nobody really died there.”

“It was a hoax, you mean.”

“That’s it. The Zionists. Shh! Here she comes.”

“Hey,” I whispered, “can you introduce me to this doc?” I figured she would make a good character study.

“Sure thing,” Jerry said. “You know what else?”

“What?”

“That singer, Dalai Lama, she’s gonna be right here in town. I got a ticket to see her at the Zinn Center.”

“You mean Zen Center. The Dalai Lama’s coming here?”

“You want me to get you a ticket?”

“So what are you meshuginers whispering about?” Goldeh asked, rolling up her sleeves.

“Baseball,” I said. I flicked a big ash off my cigar and bowed to the freezer door. Say good night, Grade.

Lydia Weiskopf had four doctorates, actually—neuropsychology, physics, history, and electrical engineering, all of them mail order. She didn’t mind telling me that the State of Massachusetts, under pressure from Zionists, had suspended her license to practice engineering there, and she was similarly impeded from using her credentials in New York State. As a result, she had to live in this garage—what realtors call a “granny unit”—and subsist on donations and grants to her Institute for Historical Integrity.

You would be surprised,” she said, “if I told you the names of some of the organizations supporting my work.” Albeit in a small way. Across the table, Jerry smirked and nodded. We three were polishing off nearly thawed cheesecake and instant coffee after a meal of blintzes furnished by Jerry. The doctor indicated the rough panelboard partition bisecting the garage. “On the other side of that wall is the reason for their generosity.” She pointed, but I didn’t look; I was too fascinated by the graham cracker crumbs lining her upper lip, pasted there by cheesecake.

Weiskopf was twenty years older than I, in her mid-forties, lean, birdlike, nerves on her skin. She was afflicted with a face incapable of expressing affection; a sallow oblong, its brows pinched up the flesh of the forehead in permanent inquisition, while the lips, even in repose, were pursed and wry. Her accent was upstate New York, hard on the short A’s, nasal and ugly.

If you were to do her on stage, I think you would emphasize the arms, though. You would want to make her all arms, like a spider. Everywhere you went, the arms would go first, clearing the way or grabbing things. When you talked, the arms would do it, flapping like tongues, all the way from the shoulders. Then the audience would understand what she was about.

“So what have you got there, Doctor Weiskopf? Some kind of invention?”

Jerry said, “Come on, Doc, show him. Al’s okay.”

Weiskopf smiled. “Jerry tells me you’re an actor. Is that true?”

“Yeah, when I can get work.”

Eyes like lancets, Weiskopf leaned toward me over her half-eaten cheesecake. “I’m very interested in acting. I’m interested in what Stanislavski called sense memory.”

“Hmm.”

“You recover your own sensations and feelings, don’t you, actual memories? You invoke them inside yourself on stage, and that’s what makes the character real. Am I right?”

“Well, yes and no.”

Weiskopf sat back in her chair, deflated. “What do you mean, yes and no?”

“It doesn’t work that way, really. I mean, yes, you have to use sense memory, but that’s not enough. It won’t sustain you very long on stage. You’ve got to focus on your objective in the scene, and in the play as a whole. It’s your character’s objective that makes the real difference— that’s his life, not just some private experience.”

“I think you’re wrong,” Weiskopf said. “I think that the objective is secondary. It is the inner experience that makes something true or false.”

“You’ll never get beyond amateur theater that way.”

“We’ll see.” She stood up. “Come on. I’ll show you what’s on the other side of the wall.”

She hadn’t bothered to put in a door. With Jerry’s help, Weiskopf simply removed one of the four-by-eights tacked against the uprights, and invited me to step between the beams into the dark side of the garage. “You’re a friend of Goldeh’s, aren’t you? Jerry seems to think so. I know her from someplace else, actually.” I smelled pine first, then oil and ozone. I couldn’t see much; Weiskopf still hadn’t turned on the light. “She’s not originally from Poland or Germany, you know. She’s a Lithuanian Jew, from Kovno.”

“So what?”

The pull cord she tugged was a piece of twine with a large hex nut tied to the end. Weak yellow light stained the room. The shadow of the filament flickered across Weiskopf’s machine. It looked like an ancient, polished astrolabe, lapis lazuli and silver, set on a sundial with electronics mounted at six o’clock. Three red pinlights were already glowing. There was a console with meters, plugs, printed circuits, switches, a tiny keyboard, and one pair of earphones. I would not have thought someone at remedial eating level capable of such a work.

Before it sat a space-age swivel chair with arm supports and leg supports and adjustment knobs at every joint. The luster of her machine was so otherworldly that I thought for a moment that it was a trick, a holographic projection, or undigested cheesecake befuddling my senses; I didn’t notice anything else in the room for a long time. The light came from bare, unfrosted bulbs hanging from cords along the rafters. When I did notice the rest of the room, which was not until just before we all left, I saw that it consisted only of card tables full of hand tools and metal junk flowing over onto the floor, broken concrete stained with motor oil.

Jerry smiled so broadly the nose ring transited his upper lip. He gave my shoulder a puppy shove. “What do you think?”

“What does it do?” I stuttered. Weiskopf was pleased. Jerry pranced around the machine, admiring it from different angles, sometimes nearly touching it but never quite daring; he cackled the whole time we were there, like a baby googling at a pretty rattle.

“It rectifies history,” Weiskopf said. “It’s a sort of time machine.” She was very good. She was underplaying everything now. She knew she had me, like a skillful lover easing me into the finish with winks and twitches, using my own energy to explode me. “I can’t say it’s completely original. I picked up bits and pieces everywhere I’ve worked, the Brain Research Center at the University of Rochester, Bell Labs, the Livermore of course…”

“You’ve worked at all those places?”

“In menial capacities, yes. When Jews didn’t keep me out, men did. So I typed, cleaned, assisted, whatever gave me access to the data and to the thought processes involved. They were intimidated by my intellect. You men don’t like that in women, do you?”

Relax. I am intelligent, urbane, a great conversationalist, looks like Clark Gable’s. Women flock to me like moths around a flame… or something. “I love it,” I said, and she smiled—most of the cheesecake mustache was gone now. “But what do you mean, ‘rectifies history’?”

“Sit down.” I sat in her swivel chair as she cranked up or down my head, my feet, my pelvis. “How’s that? Comfortable? Is that good?” I thought of dentists’ chairs and catafalques. “Now tell me,” she said, “as an actor, you must have explored your childhood experience to some degree.”

“For character background, sure.”

“I thought so. In your memories of childhood, have you found any irrational events? For example, I myself have recalled finding the same teddy bear at the bottom of a toy chest three times in a row—this is when I was four, I think—removing it each time and putting it on a table, without ever putting it back. I know that’s impossible, but up until a year ago, I had a very clear image of it.”

“What happened a year ago?”

“That’s what I’m going to show you. Do you have any memories like that, crazy childhood images you know to be false, but that are in your mind anyway?”

“Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact I do. Once, when I was three or four— I mean, this is how I recall it—I saw a friend of mine fly up into a loft, not jump, fly. I used that one in a Saroyan one-act.”

“Crazy, isn’t it?”

“Who knows?”

“Now watch. This is perfectly safe.”

“It really is!”—Jerry from the shadows—“I’ve done it. It’s great, Al!”

Weiskopf stabbed two buttons, then typed. There was a monitor, but it wasn’t responding directly to the keystrokes; it look more like an oscilloscope or an electroencephalograph. “Please put on the earphones,” she said, “if you’re game.” I put them on, and the pattern on the monitor immediately shifted. The doctor typed, and the wave pattern split into a dozen horizontal waves; actually, there were more—Weiskopf scrolled through scores of them, selecting the ones that interested her, and preserving them on the screen.

“Is that me?” I said.

“Look!” Jerry squealed, delighted. He bobbed in and out of view like a poltergeist in the harsh light and deep shadows of the naked light bulbs and the monitor’s green glow.

Whenever I spoke, a pattern on the screen changed. In fact, as I thought, the pattern changed. “I don’t like this.”

“Oh, it’s nothing.” Weiskopf was busy. “Don’t worry. I can’t read your mind, if that’s what you think. But I can tell you are relaxing very quickly.”

That was the right thing to say to an actor. Appeal to the ego, even in small things. Like a dentist praising you for opening your mouth well. Modestly: “I meditate.”

“Oh yes?” Upstage, back to the audience, the dentist is selecting her drill.

“There’s a big center in White Plains.”

“I’ve been there. They have a speakers’ series. Elie Weisel came, and of course I had to hear him.”

Jerry, brightly: “We carried signs.”

Weiskopf spoke as she scanned the monitor and fiddled with some tiny switches. She spoke by rote, with a generic inflection characteristic of tour guides and over-the-hill thespians, the kind of delivery that tells you that you should have gotten your ticket earlier in the run. I wasn’t her first, or even her twenty-first. “By now you have gathered that the earphones are not exactly earphones. They do what was once accomplished by electrode implants and then by scanning tunnels. They create a magnetic field around your brain. The hemoglobin in the veins is more oxygen-rich at the points where there is neuronal activity, and it resonates differently to the field. This resonance can be read to form a picture of exactly where the activity is—well, not a picture, actually, because my computer lacks the memory. So I select the areas I want to look at. But this is just the beginning. This is still the realm of conventional, analytical science. Now comes the leap.” A fifties newsreel. Progress of science. Brass and percussion background, Stravinski maybe.

“Isn’t this fantastic?” Jerry brushed the console with a proprietary glee, until Weiskopf snapped, “Don’t touch those!” Insufficiently motivated, I thought; sometimes reality is less convincing than theater. Quite suddenly angry, she pushed his hand away from a bank of knife-blade switches enameled fire-engine red. “They have to be on all the time! If you interrupt the power, I’ll kill you!”

“Sorry, Doc. I forgot. On all the time. I was just monkeying around.”

“Now, Al,”—with spokesmodel aplomb—“see if you can think about that childhood memory you mentioned. Focus on the image of your friend flying up into the loft, as if by magic. Up, up and away!” And there he was, right before my mind’s eye, Howard Guminiak, levitating.

“Got it,” Weiskopf crowed. “But go on. I didn’t mean to distract you.” On the monitor, the dozen lines of waves were replaced by merely three, enlarged. “Isn’t it ridiculous what the mind will fabricate! Flying! Now concentrate on your little friend’s movement upward, just the movement, nothing else—do you understand?—not your friend himself but only his movement through space, up, up… Got it!” She pounced on the keyboard, making an audible “clack!”

There was a rat gnawing at my heel. I jerked my leg away and looked down. It was gone. It had never been there. I threw off the “earphones” and stood up. My eyes moved over the tables full of junk, their shadows swinging as the light bulbs swung. “It’s a lot of baloney, that’s all. That machine doesn’t do anything.”

Jerry was laughing. He pressed his hands against his hips to keep himself from clapping. “Come on, Al, try to remember that thing you said, the guy flying up. Try to picture it.”

I looked at him. I looked at Weiskopf. They were grinning—one thin line running across both faces. I closed my eyes and concentrated. There was the loft. There was Howard Guminiak standing beside me. Then he was in the loft. But I didn’t know how he got there. The image of his flying was gone! I opened my eyes in shock, and they both burst out laughing.

Weiskopf laid a hand on my shoulder. “You see?” she said. “That’s what my angels are investing in. Very soon we take to the air waves. Wait till we get it on cable. Wait till we bounce signals off a communications satellite and rectify world history cranium by cranium! Let the Zionists try to stop us then.”

“The truth will out, Al,” Jerry said. He turned toward Weiskopf, and she gave him a smile.

“Now,” she said to me, “I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the Jew from Kovno, our mutual friend Goldeh.”

It’s the Buddhist line, of course. They say it at my Zen Center just the way the Dalai Lama says it: “All beings suffer.” Goldeh wouldn’t talk about it till now. Now, in our dumpster, waiting for Weiskopf, Goldeh wants to spill everything before the memory dogs gouge it out of her— that’s what she calls them, Weiskopf’s invisible minions, gnawing at her from inside her skull, more vicious and sharp-toothed than the pit bulls echoing across the square.

“Just before the Germans invaded Lithuania—1941 it was—the good people of Kovno killed my mother and father with three hundred others. Me also the Nazis would have liquidated, just for being an orphan, but some kind Lithuanians lied for me.

“Two months later it came the ‘Great Action’; ten thousand Jews the Nazis slaughtered at the Ninth Fort outside the Kovno Ghetto, ten thousand, but not me. Then, two years after that, October 26, 1943, they called us together two thousand eight hundred, me with the rest, what they sent to Auschwitz to be gassed.

“This I remember, although I was a child. This is hard and true. What you run toward, you don’t know from nothing; it might be a wishful thinking. But the things you run away from it, they are real, and this you can be sure, because you wish they were not. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you, Goldeh.”

“Listen to me and remember, Al. You will make maybe a deposition, if I die from this mishugas. In the trial against the mayor of Kovno, Kazys Matsok, they want I should testify to confirm some diaries what a man buried there. This mayor was a murderer, and now they have found him in Chicago. Remember what I say. He threw my sister into a pit at Ponar, and Al, she never came out again. Many others like her he threw in the earth. I saw.” “I’ll remember, Goldeh.”

Then the voices and the dogs.

“Listen, Lydia,” I said, “I’m not a major scientific mind like you. I have to work for a living. Don’t call me here, okay? I have to tear the heads off some chickens for Goldeh.” I was taking the call by the little employees’ lockers next to the punch clock. Nobody was near, but I felt I had to guard my voice.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure you were all right after the rectification. No dreams? No mental confusion?”

“I thought a rat bit me just at the end.”

“That’s interesting. Jerry hallucinated a pit viper at a similar moment. He’d never even heard of them before. Strange, but why not? If an infection like rabies can give you so specific a hallucination as the fear of water, why shouldn’t a neural stimulation…”

“Yeah, well, it was nothing, Doc. I found the conversation about Goldeh more disturbing than the machine, frankly.”

“Goldeh has a problem, Al. Naturally, I’m concerned about her.”

“It’s not her problem, Lydia. It’s your problem. Yours and your high-rolling friends.”

“It’s no problem for my friends, Al. Everything’s covered. The truth is on our side. We just don’t want Goldeh to perjure herself.”

“She’s not a liar.”

“Who’s talking lies? Did your friend fly? Did you he about that? It’s just a confusion, that’s all. Why don’t you put her on? Can you get Goldeh to the phone? I want to talk to her.”

“We’ve got to make lunch here.”

“In a minute I’m going to start thinking you’re one of them.”

“One of who?”

“You know what I mean, Al. Think of your relationship with Goldeh. Think of her son, Sam, your friend. Think of how you used to go over to his house and watch TV. Can you remember that?” There was a blast of noise on the line. A mosquito the size of a hummingbird was sucking blood from my shoulder. I reached to swat it, but it was gone. My shoulder itched like crazy, but there had been no mosquito. Weiskopf had hung up.

And I couldn’t remember Sam. I couldn’t remember who he was to me, what I felt about him, or why we’d done anything together; all I had left of Sam was empty words. Then, without the feelings to color them, the facts themselves began to drop away; I ceased believing them. I could see the whole process unfold in my mind between the time I hung up the phone and washed my hands until I reentered the kitchen and took my place at the butcher block. Stanislavski in reverse—a draining away of meanings! Goldeh looked different, but it wasn’t her; the eye through which I saw her had changed.

“My ears are burning,” she said. “Someone has been talking about me.” From his station at the sink Jerry turned to me and winked. His radio was blasting the Horst Wessel Song, or so I imagined. “Screw you,” I said. “And turn that thing off.” He looked hurt, more than hurt, afflicted.

I was sweating. My heart was racing, and I couldn’t keep the walls vertical. I sat down on the floor and put my head between my knees. She can change anything. She can rectify anything. I can’t ever pick up the phone again. I can’t turn on the radio or the TV. My own memory is a ball of clay. I don’t know who the hell I am.

“Al…” Goldeh was bending over me. “Are you sick? Do you want maybe a glass water?”

“He’s all right,” Jerry said. “Same thing happened to me.”

“I’m not all right,” I said.

I punched out early and took the bus home. Actually, I got out a few blocks from my place and walked the rest of the way. A standee down the aisle had been listening to a small transistor radio, and I didn’t dare let myself hear it. My home answering machine had four messages tallied on it—call-backs for auditions?—but I couldn’t take the chance. I took the phone off the hook, pulled down the shades and went to bed.

In the dream, the judge asked me, “Do you know someone named Sam Yudelson?”

“No,” I said.

“You’re not acquainted with Sam Yudelson?”

“Well,” I said, “I may be acquainted with him, but I don’t actually know him. I know his mother, Goldeh, though, from work.”

“Then you can’t tell us anything about Sam Yudelson?”

“Well, I guess I could, this and that, nothing important. You know, you’re acquainted with lots of people. It’s all pretty much the same.”

Like a trap springing shut, I sat up in bed, hyperventilating. I was straining to focus inward on things no longer there. I had to call Goldeh. It was six o’clock. The phone book was full of names and pages, and I kept forgetting the order of the letters. At last—“Hello, can I speak to Goldeh?”

“Al, is that you?”

“Yes. Can I speak to her?”

“This is Sam.”

“I know it is. I need to speak to Goldeh.”

“This is Sam Yudelson. What’s the matter? You sound funny.”

“I know who you are. I need to talk to Goldeh.”

“Screw you too.”

Goldeh got on the phone: “Hallo?”

“Goldeh, this is Al. Listen to me carefully. Do you know about an outfit called the Institute for Historical Integrity?”

“What are you, kidding? Those mamzers? What do you want, I should give you a contribution? You’re a member? You should go and get cholera. This Institution is a liar what hates a Jew and kills a Jew.”

“Goldeh, I know. I know. I’m not one of them. I’m not a Jew hater. You know me. You gave me cookies and milk when I was still watching Mickey Mouse Club.” Sam had been there when I watched Mickey Mouse Club—I think. Sam had eaten cookies and milk with me—I think. They had stolen a part of my life.

“You watch too much TV, Al.”

“Listen to me. They’re after you.”

“After me? Who? What for?”

“The Institute. A pal of Jerry’s named Lydia Weiskopf. And it has something to do with the mayor of Kovno.”

“Matzok!”

“What?”

“Matzok! Oh my God! He knows who I am! He knows where I am!”

“Goldeh…”

“I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to know any more. I don’t want to die any more.”

“They’re not trying to kill you, Goldeh.” I said this to comfort her, but I knew that what they were after was really much worse. “Listen to me. Don’t pick up the phone. This has to be the last time you talk to anybody on the phone. And don’t watch TV or listen to the radio either.”

She hung up. I had to make sure that Goldeh understood, that she would not pick up the phone. A while later I called again.

“Hallo?”

“Goldeh, I told you not to answer.”

“Who is this?”

“It’s me, Al.”

“It’s who?”

I hung up. So it was already too late!

They go from house to house, looking for signs prophesied by the previous Dalai Lama. Maybe the infant has a birthmark on the sole of one foot, or some peculiar mannerism. Maybe the parents hve under a certain cliff in a certain village or have a certain unusual surname. The previous Dalai Lama is ashes now, but he soon reincarnates as a human infant. The holy men find the infant—“tulku.” They take him away to tutor him about his past incarnations; eventually, he “remembers” everything. Memory is such a malleable and fragile thing, and yet, a dozen incarnations from now—what’s that, a thousand years?—the Dalai Lama may “remember” his visit to Auschwitz. I wonder if the Institute has thought of that.

I raced downstairs to see if I couldn’t pull Goldeh’s mind out of the fire. I hailed a cab and gave the cabby too much money to take me straight to Goldeh’s, because I couldn’t be bothered to wait for change. “Shut off the radio,” I barked.

“Whatever you say, boss.”

There was a commotion outside Goldeh’s apartment building. An ambulance blocked our way, and policemen with notebooks and walkie-talkies were scurrying around, pushing back the crowd and making self-important noises. I just managed to see a man and a woman in white lift the mangled body off the cobblestones and onto a stretcher before they covered its face and slid it into the ambulance. I knew him.

Choking back tears, I found my way through the crowd, slipped into the security door when someone came out, and pounded up four flights of stairs to Goldeh’s little place. I beat my fist against it. “Goldeh! Open up. It’s me, Al.”

A rotund little man with curly red hair and thick bifocals opened the door. “Nu?” he said.

It took me a moment to remember his name, and that we were supposed to be intimates. I combed my memory for information. Nothing was missing, but it took a Herculean effort to invest any of it with meaning. Then I performed one of the most challenging thespian exercises I’ve ever essayed: I had to invent within myself the truth of something I already knew to be true—that Sam Yudelson was my very old friend—and I had to act appropriately through gesture and intonation.

“Sam, I’m sorry I acted so funny on the phone, but I’ve got to talk to your mom. There are some people who want to hurt her.”

“What’s happening outside?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. “Did anybody call after I called? Was anybody here to see her?”

“Yeah. Both. What’s going on? Who the hell would want to hurt my mother?”

“Who was here?”

“Some little punk. I don’t know. What is this, some role you’re working up? Come in and watch TV, have a soda pop.” He threw open the door, and I could see the television screen next to the window, its glare competing with the late afternoon sun and its sound just audible above the sirens and voices from the street. I couldn’t see Goldeh.

“Where is she?”

“Get your ass in here. What is this?”

There were U-boats and goose-stepping mobs on TV, cinematic collages of newspaper headlines, General Eisenhower waving from a jeep, Nazi officers in stiff-shouldered coats with crossing leather straps, raising their hands over their heads with a look of doom, then scenes of the international diamond trade, greenbacks rolling off the presses, old men with rotted teeth and bulging purses smiling downstage center. I was transfixed.

Sam kept watching me. He didn’t see any of it. “You okay?” he said. “You want a glass of water or something?” I yelled and fell against him. A pit bull had clamped its teeth on my calf—no, it wasn’t there. There was nothing there. Sam grasped my shoulders and held me at arm’s length, regarding me with concern.

How many people had seen that broadcast? How many more such broadcasts would there be, on how many stations, in how many countries? I couldn’t remember what Auschwitz was, or Dachau or Treblinka. But something bad was going on, and Goldeh was in trouble. “You have to tell me what happened with Goldeh.”

“There was that call after your first one. She acted funny. Then the kid came and talked to her. They went in her bedroom. He was bawling, apologizing for something, I dunno. I couldn’t hear much, because I was watching TV. You know. Then he left. Then my mother left. What’s going on?”

“Where did she go?”

“To schul, to see the rabbi about something. I dunno.”

“Sam, you’ve got to turn off the TV right now, and don’t watch it, and don’t listen to the radio or answer the telephone until I tell you.”

“You’re crazy, goddamnit! You were always crazy, you know that? Goddamn actor!”

I was running down the stairs. There was a synagogue two blocks away, down an alley and across a small square, and I didn’t know, but I was betting that that was where Goldeh was headed. The ambulance carrying Jerry’s body had gone, and the crowd was dissipating. Only one cop remained. “Hey, you! Where you running?”

In a clearer state of mind, I would not have stopped, or, having stopped, I wouldn’t have gotten into the car with him. The police radio was haywire with snippets of news, music, and imperious voices speaking half sentences; one of the voices was Weiskopf’s, and I thought I heard Mr. Matsok’s name mentioned, the name that Goldeh had spoken with such horror.

The cop ignored the noise and started talking at me as if we were already in the middle of a long conversation. “First off, there was only two hundred thousand, tops, not six million, like they say. Most of them died of typhus, and they weren’t the only ones, but boy, they made those Germans pay through the nose, didn’t they? You gotta hand it to ’em. Only it isn’t true. None of it. You should watch who you hang around with. Your friend’s a Zionist whore. She’s not going to testify.”

I exploded out the door and started running again. The policeman was laughing, “Hey, you’re not a suspect, you know; it was hit and run! They’ll never catch the guy. You, some highly placed individuals just want to wise up, get it?”

“Forget it!” I don’t think he heard me. Panting between coughs, I covered the two blocks to the square and decided to give up smoking for good. I galloped down the alley and across the park, certain my heart would explode any second. Goldeh was trudging through a grove of trees near the old plaster-domed amphitheater on the far edge. I came closer and saw that she was limping. When I called out to her, she ignored me.

I ran alongside her, and at last she stopped. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“Don’t you know me, Goldeh?”

She looked all around the square. Except for us two, it was empty. “Do you want to kill me?” she whispered. “Do you want to kill yourself? Get away from me, Al. Go home!”

“Jerry told you,” I said.

“Yeah, he told me, and now he’s dead, poor boy. But don’t you think they can change that? Don’t be surprised if tomorrow, kaboom! he was never there to die. No dishwasher! No ring in the nose! Even his mother wouldn’t remember.”

“They didn’t get to you, Goldeh. You still know everything. What about the phone call, the one after mine? Wasn’t it Weiskopf?”

“Yeah, it was Weiskopf. Walk with me, if you’re not going to go. I have to get to the schul, the rabbi, the lawyer.”

We walked. “Here’s hoping they’re not listening to the radio,” I said, “or the TV or a telephone. Why didn’t it work with you, Goldeh?”

“I’m dried up, that’s why. I’m a turtle in a turtle in a turtle.” She pressed her forefinger against her heart. “There’s nothing in here to take away. Ever since I left Kovno in 1943, my heart is nothing but numbers and words. They can’t take a thing from me.”

“You’re a kind, warm, loving person, Goldeh.”

“I’m a better actor than you are, Al.”

“No, Goldeh.”

“You’re a naar, a fool.” She stopped to catch her breath. The muscles in her left leg were trembling in spasm.

“What’s wrong with your leg? Why are you limping?”

“You don’t see them?” she said.

“See what?”

“The dogs, Al! The memory dogs. They can’t take a bite out of me, but they won’t let go.”

We had crossed behind the amphitheater and were standing between it and a dumpster next to the rear loading dock. Goldeh’s synagogue was just down the block, but we had to wait for her leg to regain a little strength. Then the men with the black gloves were coming through the trees and down the block, and Lydia Weiskopf herself was standing across the street with a tall, gaunt old man in a tuxedo jacket. He was holding two pit bulls, muscles and teeth, at the end of chain leashes.

“Goldeh, forgive me, but I think we have to hide in the dumpster.”

“So what else is new?”

Shielded from view by the dumpster itself, we mounted the loading dock, and from there, staying low, I helped Goldeh slide in. She stumbled and hit her head against the inside wall as she fell to the bottom. Now there was blood spreading on her kerchief. “It’s nothing,” but she had to sit down. I climbed in after her and spread a few sheets of corrugated cardboard for Goldeh to sit on.

“I better tell you this,” she said. “Maybe it will do some good in case they finish me, but you live.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Just before the Germans invaded Lithuania—1941 it was—the good people of Kovno…”

Weiskopf spoke for the mayor of Kovno. “Al, you are being extremely silly. We know you are in there. I don’t know why you think you’re putting Goldeh through all this insanity.” I didn’t answer. In a lower voice, I heard her say, “For God’s sake, Kazys, pull your dogs back.”

“I’ve spent a lot of money on you, Doctor, to have you order me around.”—The voice of someone who had been smoking non-filters a lot longer than I had.

“You’ve spent a lot of money to have it all be wasted. Get the dogs out of here and tell your men to bring the van round. And make sure they keep it idling, for God’s sake, as long as we’re feeding off the engine.”

The barking and scratching abated. “Al, Goldeh, for heaven’s sake! I don’t know what kind of a monster you think I am. Are you going to stay in that garbage until nightfall? I’m going to come up onto the loading dock. Let me help you out of there.”

Goldeh whispered, “Al, don’t let her. This is the one from the telephone. This is the one from the dogs on my leg.”

I shouted, “Go to hell, Lydia.”

I heard some men trying to dissuade her, but Weiskopf went up onto the loading dock, and we saw her come to the edge of the dumpster. She looked down at us among the cabbages, bottles and crushed boxes. Frightened as I was, I felt ridiculous.

She said, “Mrs. Yudelson, what on earth did Jerry tell you, to make you want to put up with this?”

“You sent your dogs through the telephone line,” Goldeh said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t be cute, Lydia,” I said. “You did it to me too, remember? Three times, Lydia—through the earphones, the telephone, and then the TV with how many thousands of other people, Lydia? How many others’ memories are you rectifying?”

“I don’t believe this,” Weiskopf said. “Dogs through the phone line? You must be crazy. As for the TV, frankly, I wish we could get that kind of air time, but the Cohens and Levis have it all sewn up. Mrs. Yudelson, what kind of fairy stories has Al been telling you?”

“What about that night at your garage,” I said. “Was that a fairy story, Lydia?”

Weiskopf threw up her arms. “Really, Al, I don’t know what I can say to you if you are going to let your imagination run wild this way. I showed you my little device. I did a demonstration, and I mentioned to you that I thought it could have eventual applications over various media—eventual, Al, eventual—for historical research and so on. Did you think I was going satellite tomorrow? This is Lydia Weiskopf talking, for heaven’s sake, not AT&T!”

The shadows, like rising water, were climbing up the sides of the dumpster as the sun went down. Goldeh’s bleeding had stopped; it was only a scrape, after all, though it might take a stitch or two. Lydia isn’t AT&T. AT&T doesn’t have a cheesecake mustache, doesn’t serve instant coffee, doesn’t live in a garage with tacked-up panelboard and tables full of junk. The rat, the mosquito, Sam’s TV, the police radio—side effects of the charge to my brain from her electro-dingsboomps. “Maybe we should get out of here, Goldeh,” I said.

“When she takes off the dogs I’ll go. They killed the boy, don’t forget.”

“What?” said Weiskopf. “What boy?”

“Jerry,” I said. “He got hit by a car a little while ago outside Goldeh’s.”

“I didn’t know! How horrible! I’m… I’m shocked. He was my friend, you know.”

“She is a liar.” Goldeh shook me. “She is a killer. What is she doing following us?”

No. Everything Lydia says makes sense. She’s like my Aunt Elaine, my kind Aunt Elaine, eccentric but honest to a fault. I believe her fully and deeply. And I want to please her. If there is something wrong with somebody, it’s me, not her. I feel it in my stomach, in my shoulders, in my face.

“Maybe I got carried away,” I said. “So they’re anti-Semites! The world is full of their kind; that doesn’t make them all murderers. I think maybe I went a little crazy. What about you, Goldeh?”

Weiskopf crouched down to speak to us more intimately. “Matsok and I want to talk, that’s all. He’s willing to take his chances in court, to take his stand on the truth. We don’t have to kill anybody. Come out and be reasonable.”

A pohceman peeked in. “What’s going on here?… Oh, Dr. Weiskopf, Mr. Matsok! Excuse me.”

“That’s all right,” Matsok said. “Let your friends know we have her, will you?”

“Of course, sir. You better hurry, though. Not all the guys are on board, y’know.”

Goldeh’s all right. She’s just confused now. That’s why she’s backing away from me. “Lydia, help us out of here.”

Weiskopf offered us her arm. I grabbed it. She leaned back, and I scrambled up the dumpster wall, shck with grease. As I edged up onto the loading dock, I saw the Mayor of Kovno, an elegant man with a skeletal face, standing at Weiskopf’s side, tapping and tapping his foot. “Come on, Doctor, the van is waiting.”

One of the men in black gloves was on the loading dock too. “Do you want me to hook in the rectifier, Doc? It’s going, don’t worry, but we have to rev her up, and it’s gonna take a minute.”

I set my feet against the lip of the dumpster and yanked backward, catapulting Weiskopf down into the garbage. She flailed and slipped several times before managing to stand up, covered with slime. I was still hanging onto the edge.

Above, Matsok blurted out, “I don’t like this. Bring the van over.”

The van screeched near. The side door slid open. Inside, I saw Weiskopf’s rectifier, the screen, the meters and keyboard, the bank of knife-blade switches Weiskopf had chased poor Jerry from. Two technicians sat before it, riding the dials. Matsok climbed down from the loading dock and into the van.

I’m William S. Hart, cowboy hero of the silent screen, leaping car-to-car atop a moving train. My six-gun smoking, its chambers emptied, I throw it away and hurl myself at the robbers. In fact, it was a half-eaten beef jerky caught in my cuff. I bellied onto the dock and leapt toward the rectifier.

Matsok and the two techies were so astounded to have company—no more astounded than the company, truth to tell—that they offered no resistance. They fell out of my way, covering their heads as if I were swinging nunchuks. I dived for Jerry’s knife-blade switches—fire-engine red—as Matsok scrambled toward the front of the van, shouting, “Go! Go! Drive!” I braced myself against the ceiling and one techy’s face.

We heard someone outside shout as the van pulled away: “Wait for me!” Then a crash—glass breaking, metal bending. In his haste, the driver had sideswiped the dumpster. Someone between had been knocked to the ground—we heard him groan, and a dog piteously squealed.

“Stop! It’s my Schnookyputz!”—Matsok’s voice.

“Mr. Matsok…”—an underling—“we have to leave him. We’ve been spotted. It’s on the open frequency. There’ll be others here soon, not ours.”

I hit the red switches. Weiskopf’s machine went dead, and at the same instant there was a loud scream from inside the dumpster.

I jumped out and slammed the side door shut against the techies, who were just coming to the conclusion that I was more Woody Allen than John Wayne. I slid through a stream of oil issuing from the van and scrabbled onto the loading dock as the van clanked away.

Down in the dumpster, Weiskopf was yelling. She pulled at the flesh of her thighs, calves, neck. It was the dogs, Goldeh’s dogs. “Get them off me!”

“They’re your dogs, Doctor.” Goldeh stood as Weiskopf slipped and fell into a mass of spoiled picnic leavings and disintegrating newspapers.

I didn’t see the dogs, and yet, for the loudness of their barking, the dumpster must have been their throat. Then other noises crowded in, hissing, growling, roaring, trumpeting, coming from all directions and converging on the steel box.

I could hear them bounding and fighting. There was the thick smell of zoos, kennels, pet stores—of wild animals in civilized places. Now Weiskopf, with her four doctorates, was spread-eagled against the wall of the dumpster, eyes shocked wide, every muscle quivering as she screamed and screamed. “My face! Get them off my face, my arms, my stomach, my neck…!”

I reached down for Goldeh. She held my hand and chinned out as I pulled.

Just beyond the square, I heard sirens and distorted, amplified voices—work-a-day good guys casing an abandoned Ford Econoline Van with a bashed front end and a strange interior. The square looked empty except for a small, bearded man in a yarmulkeh. He had just come from the nearby street and was running toward us. “Goldeh, voos gevenn? Who is this man? What’s going on?”

“You don’t hear them, all the animals, the memory dogs?”

“I hear it in a garbage can a crazy woman screaming.”

“Ah! You have excellent ears,” Goldeh said. “Everyone should have such ears!”

Then I saw the man in black gloves sitting next to a dead, mangled pit bull on the spalled concrete beyond the dumpster. His face was buried in his hands, his clothes in tatters. “It’s all true. It’s all true. Please, God, I don’t want it to come back to me, not this way. I want it to be the other way.”

Suddenly I remembered Howard Guminiak. It had been a rope! There was a rope from the rafters. He had swung up to the loft! I remembered Sam Yudelson. I remembered Auschwitz.

Weiskopf, exhausted, was sobbing now. The rabbi eyed the dumpster as if it were a strange predator. “I don’t understand any of this. I was on my way to see the Dalai Lama.”

“A rock concert?” said Goldeh.

“Look! Police cars! What is this tumml, Goldeleh? The Dalai Lama is going to talk about suffering, and I’ll miss it.”

“He’s too late.” Goldeh sighed. She looked down at her coat, shook her head, and busied herself picking bits of trash off the fabric. “Now that everything was the way it was again, I’m going home. Al, you’ll walk me?”

“Sure, Goldeh.”

“I want to rest. I’m going to Chicago to testify day after tomorrow.”

“Was the way it was?” The rabbi was perplexed.

“And Al,” said Goldeh, “you’ll remember how to make chopped liver without me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll remember.”

She was laughing. “Go! Go to your Dalai before the police come!”—little pushes to the rabbi’s sleeve. To me: “Actor! You’re maybe not so bad after all! You’ll make a living to remember what never was!”

“Yeah,” I said, “but only on stage. And what was, Goldeh, I won’t forget.”