New Stories from the Midwest

The Houseguest

112 the houseguest ■ Kim Brooks The Jews of Europe were disappearing. This was what the rabbi of Abraham Auer’s congregation, Rabbi Kaufman, a great spiritual leader and also his partner at bridge, told him one Wednesday afternoon while Auer mended the hem of the old man’s coat. Congregants who’d been receiving regular correspondence for years from loved ones in Warsaw, Vienna, Lvov, everywhere, were suddenly left wringing their hands beside empty mailboxes. Pleas for help with papers and money for passage and bribes grew increasingly intense, desperate, and then fell silent. Hitler was a madman , but he wasn’t disingenuous. It didn’t take a genius to figure the rest; they were disappearing, all of them, tinder in this great raze sweeping Europe. “You’re full of it,” said Auer. “If only I were.” They were standing in the back room of Auer’s shop, a dim but impeccably decorated corridor with comfortable leather chairs, gilt-framed mirrors, and an oriental rug, bought from an Armenian, on which Auer was constantly losing pins and needles. He’d fought with his wife for years over the lighting, tried to install more lamps, stronger bulbs, but she’d stomp her foot and tell him to mind his own business. “This is my business.” “The sewing is your business. The decorating is mine.” “I can’t see, Bertha. I can’t sew if I can’t see.” “Low lighting is elegant.” “I’ll go blind for your elegance.” And so now he stood squinting at Rabbi Kaufman’s seam, trying to get his mind around what he was being told. Kaufman was not one to exaggerate or even embellish, yet still it made no sense to Auer, this hypothesis. He had lived through a pogrom, after all; a small one, he knew, in the grander scheme, but still . . . he knew how these The Houseguest ■ 113 things worked. Decades earlier, a few years before he’d left his family’s village at the age of sixteen, a blacksmith’s son had thrown a rock at a Cossack who called his sister “puppy cunt”; the rock made a dent in the soldier’s skull, and the dent brought an end to the Cossack’s life. After that, the police came and took the blacksmith’s son away. No one put up a fight—but just the same, the broken windows and raided shops came with meteorological regularity: the windows of the synagogue smashed, houses burned (one with a family yet to flee), and then from Moscow came the order that the Cossacks had gone too far. A little Jew-hating was good for one’s health, but no need to get carried away. The torrent of abuse slowed, then stopped, and from that point on pretty girls who flirted with Cossacks were beaten by their fathers until no man, Jewish or Russian, would give them a second look. That was the way it had worked for hundreds of years. The hatred swelled until someone in an official capacity gave way to it, then it poured forth without foreseeable end, and then it dissipated, fizzled, and everyone went about the business of getting by. Auer knew from his own life how difficult it was to sustain anger, to sustain anything . How was it possible for one man, one nation, to sustain an evil of the magnitude of which Rabbi Kaufman spoke? Evil was at least as exhausting as virtue, if not more so. “Entire families are being forced from their homes, from their countries, God knows what else.” “Stand up straight, please.” “It’s a catastrophe, and of course the rest of the world sits dumb.” Auer held up a part of the coat where the fabric was damaged. “You’ve been catching this in your car door again.” “Are you listening to anything I’m saying?” “To tell you the truth, I’m doing my best not to. This is a horrible world and there’s nothing to be done about it. Especially not by me. I’d expect recognition from the Nobels if I could keep my family from lynching one another. Deutschland is beyond my pale. You’ve never lived in that part of the world. Forget your rationales, your causes; you hate a Jew the way you catch a fish. Equally rewarding.” “Fatalism won’t excuse you from responsibility.” “I have a responsibility to mend this coat. That, Rabbi, is my responsibility. And when I finish, to take out...