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Eugene, who was walking briskly, a few steps ahead of the guide, had not noticed either the partition itself or its symbolic meaning. The crash was unsettling and painful. Blood trickled out of his nostrils. Rachel whispered that it didn’t look good and maybe they should go back to the hotel, but he just crammed a wad of tissue up each nostril and said it was nothing and that they should just keep going. “If we don’t put some ice on it, it’s going to get all swollen,” Rachel tried again. “Let’s go. You don’t have to . . .” Then she stopped in mid-sentence, took a breath, and added: “It’s your nose. If you want us to keep going, we’ll keep going.”
Eugene and Rachel caught up with the group at the corner, where the Nuremberg Laws were explained. As he listened to the guide, with her thick South African accent, Eugene tried to work out in his mind what Rachel would have said if she had kept going: “You don’t have to turn everything into such a drama, Eugene. It’s so tedious.” Or “You don’t have to do it for me, sweetheart. I love you anyway.” Or maybe simply, “You don’t have to put ice on it, but it’ll probably help.” Which of those sentences, if any, had she begun to say?
Many thoughts ran through Eugene’s head when he first decided to surprise Rachel with two tickets to Israel. He was thinking: Mediterranean. He was thinking: desert. He was thinking: Rachel smiling again. He was thinking: making love in a suite at the hotel as the sun was beginning to set beyond the walls of Jerusalem behind them. And in this entire ocean of thoughts there hadn’t been even the slightest thought about nosebleeds or about Rachel starting sentences and not finishing them in a way that always drove him crazy. If he were anywhere else in the universe, he probably would have started to feel sorry for himself, but not here.
The guide was showing them pictures of Jews stripped naked in the snow, at gunpoint. The temperature there, said the guide, was fifteen below zero. A moment after those photos were taken, everyone in the picture—every single one of them, women, the elderly, and children—was forced to get into a pit in the ground and was shot dead. When she finished the sentence, she looked at him for a moment with a vacant stare and said nothing more. Eugene couldn’t figure out why she was looking at him, of all people. The first thing that crossed his mind was that he was the only one in the group who wasn’t Jewish, but even before that thought had formed fully in his mind he realized it made no sense. “You’ve got blood on your shirt,” the guide said in a detached voice. He looked down at the little spot on his light blue shirt and then up again at a picture of an elderly couple, naked. The woman in the picture was covering her privates with her right hand, trying to retain a bit of dignity. The husband was clutching her left hand in his large palm. How would he and Rachel react if they were ever taken from their cozy Upper West Side apartment, led to the nearby park, and ordered to strip naked and get into a pit? Would they, too, end their lives holding hands? “The blood, sir,” the guide said, interrupting his line of thought. “It’s still dripping.” Eugene crammed the wad of toilet paper deeper into his nostril and tried to give her one of those “everything’s under control” smiles.
It began beside a very large picture of six women with their heads shaven. To tell the truth, it had begun four weeks earlier, when he threatened to sue her gynecologist. They were sitting together in the elderly doctor’s clinic, and in the middle of Eugene’s half-menacing rant at the doctor, she said, “Eugene, you’re shouting.” The look in her eyes was distant and indifferent. It was a look he hadn’t seen before. He really must have been talking loudly, because the receptionist entered the clinic room without knocking and asked the doctor if everything was okay. It had started then and only went further downhill as they stood beside the picture of the women with the shaven heads, thousands of miles away from Rachel’s doctor’s office. The guide told them that women who arrived in Auschwitz pregnant had to abort before they began to show. Because pregnancy in the camp was nothing short of death. In the middle of this explanation, Rachel turned her back to the guide and moved away from the group. The guide watched her move away and then looked at Eugene, who blurted out, almost instinctively, “I’m sorry. We just lost a baby.” He said it loud enough for the guide to hear and softly enough for Rachel not to. Rachel kept moving away from the group, but even from a distance, Eugene could detect the tremor running down her back when he spoke.
The most moving and poignant place at Yad Vashem was the Children’s Memorial. The ceiling of this underground cavern was studded with countless memorial candles that were trying—not very successfully—to offset the darkness that seemed to work its way everywhere. In the background was a soundtrack reciting the names of children who had died in the Holocaust. The guide said there were so many of them that it took more than a year to read off all the names in succession. The group started to make its way out of the hall, but Rachel didn’t budge. Eugene stood beside her, frozen, listening to the names being read off, one by one, in a flat drone. He patted her back through her coat. She didn’t react. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said it the way I did, in front of everyone. It’s something private. Something that’s only our own.” “Eugene,” Rachel said, and continued staring at the dim lights above her, “we did not lose a baby. I had an abortion. That’s not the same thing.” “It was a terrible mistake,” Eugene said. “You were emotionally vulnerable, and instead of trying to help you, I sank into my work. I abandoned you.” Rachel looked at Eugene. Her eyes looked like the eyes of someone who’d been crying, but there were no tears. “I was fine emotionally,” she said. “I had the abortion because I didn’t want the child.” The voice in the background was saying, “Shoshana Kaufman.” Many years earlier, when Eugene was in elementary school, he’d known a chubby little girl by that name. He knew this wasn’t the same one, but the picture of her lying dead in the snow flashed before his eyes for a second anyway. “You’re saying things now that you don’t really mean,” he told Rachel. “You’re saying them because you’re going through a tough time, because you’re depressed. Our relationship isn’t doing well right now, it’s true, and I’m to blame for much of this, but—” “I’m not depressed, Eugene,” Rachel interrupted. “I’m just not happy being with you.”
Eugene kept silent. They listened to a few more names of dead children, and then Rachel said she was going outside to smoke. The place was so dark that it was hard to make out who was there. Other than an older Japanese woman standing close by, Eugene couldn’t see anyone. The first time he found out Rachel was pregnant was when she told him she’d had an abortion. It made him furious. Furious that she hadn’t given them even a minute in which to imagine their baby together. That she hadn’t given him the chance to rest his head on her soft stomach and try to listen to what was happening inside. The rage was so overpowering, he remembered, that it frightened him. Rachel told him then that it was the first time she’d seen him cry.
If she’d stayed a few more minutes in that memorial hall, she might have seen him cry a second time. He felt a warm hand on his neck, and when he looked up he saw the older Japanese woman standing right next to him. Despite the darkness and her thick lenses he could see that she was crying, too. “It’s awful,” she said to Eugene with a heavy accent. “It’s awful what people are capable of doing to one another.”
TO: Sefi.Moreh
FROM: Michael.Warshavski
RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: “Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy” query
Dear Mr. Moreh,
Based on your surname, it is difficult to determine what your roots are. (With a surname meaning “teacher,” I wonder: Was it Hebraicized from the Ashkenazi “Lehrer,” or the Arabic “Moalim”?) In my case, the situation is much simpler. My name is Warshavski because my family came from Warsaw, and my mother is in a wheelchair because the Nazis put her in it. Holocaust Remembrance Days are especially difficult for her. They flood her brain with memories that any human being would be happy to forget. Since my mother likes riddles and astronomy, I h
oped that going to your escape room would distract her a bit and ease her pain. But, if I have understood your worldview correctly, Holocaust Remembrance Day, apart from being an enjoyable day off for you and your business partners, is a day on which survivors are forbidden to find respite from their agonizing memories. And so, as Israelis, our role is to jab an insensitive finger into my mother’s bleeding Holocaust wound and twist it around a bit, making sure that her scream of pain is perfectly synchronized with the siren that marks our collective mourning on that day.
Wishing you a meaningful Holocaust Day,
Michael Warshavski
TO: Michael.Warshavski
FROM: Sefi.Moreh
RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: “Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy” query
Dear Mr. Warshavski,
I apologize if my words upset your mother or you, and I would like to clarify the facts: According to municipal bylaws, all entertainment centers must close their doors on national mourning days, including Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day. It was not a judgment call on my part or on that of my partners to close the escape room on that date, but rather our wish to obey the law.
I sincerely hope that your mother finds some solace on such a sad day. We would be glad to see you in our escape room before or after Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Respectfully,
Sefi Moreh
THE BIRTHDAY OF A FAILED REVOLUTIONARY
Once there was a rich man. A very rich man. Too rich, some said. Many years ago he invented something or stole someone else’s invention. It was so long ago that he himself couldn’t remember anymore. But his invention was sold to a huge conglomerate for a lot of money, and the man invested all the money in land and water. On the land he bought, he built lots of tiny concrete cubicles, which he sold to people who were hungry for walls and a roof, and he poured the water into bottles and sold them to people who were thirsty. When he finished selling everything at exorbitant prices, he went back to his enormous, beautiful home and thought about what to do with all the money he’d made. Of course, he could have thought about what he’d do with his life, a question no less interesting, but people with that much money are usually too busy to find time for that kind of thinking.
The rich man sat in his huge house and tried to think of more things he could buy for small change and sell for big money, and also about other things that might make him happy. He was lonely and very much in need of things that could make him happy. He wasn’t lonely because he wasn’t a nice guy. He was a very nice guy, and very popular, too, and lots of people sought out his company. But since he was also sensitive and suspicious, he thought people only wanted to be with him because of his money. And so he chose to stay away from everyone.
The truth is that the man was right. All the people around him, except for one, did like him, but they also sought him out because of the money. They didn’t have enough, or they thought they didn’t have enough, and at the same time, they thought he had too much. All the people around him (except for one) believed that if he gave them a little bit of his money, he wouldn’t miss it, and their lives would improve drastically. And it was that one person who didn’t take the slightest interest in the rich man’s money and the future it could buy for him who committed suicide.
The rich man lay on his white marble living room floor, feeling sorry for himself. It was a pleasant spring day and the marble floor cooled his body, but this did nothing to keep him from feeling sorry for himself. The man thought, “There must be something in the world that I want, that could make me happy. Something another person might have to spend his whole life trying to acquire but that I could buy without any effort.” But nothing came to mind. He had been lying on the floor for four entire days when his cell phone rang. His mother was on the other end, calling to wish him a happy birthday. She was very old and had so few memory cells left in her brain that she could only store the names of her close relatives and a few important dates. The rich man was glad to hear her voice, and just as their conversation ended, the doorbell rang. Standing in the doorway was a delivery boy wearing a motorcycle helmet, holding a bouquet of fragrant flowers with a birthday card attached. Though the person who had sent him the flowers was not at all nice, the flowers themselves were lovely and they made the man even happier. All that happiness triggered an entrepreneurial thought in the man’s mind: If a birthday causes such joy, then why settle for only one a year?
The man decided to put a large ad in the paper offering to buy people’s birthdays. Of course, not the actual birthday, which can’t really be bought, but everything that comes along with it: presents, greetings, parties, etc. The response was amazing. Maybe it was because of the economic depression at the time, or the fact that people didn’t think their birthdays were very important or worth very much, but whatever the reason, in less than a week, the rich man found that his diary was almost completely full with scheduled birthdays.
Most birthday sellers were honest. Except for one elderly man who tried secretly to save for himself a few wet kisses and an ugly painting his grandchildren gave him, all the other sellers followed the contract to the letter and sent the rich man all the profits from their birthday without having to be threatened or sued.
And so, the rich man received many friendly calls every day wishing him happiness, and all sorts of children and old women he didn’t know sang “Happy Birthday to You” to him over the phone. His e-mail box was always full of birthday greetings, and gift-wrapped presents arrived at his home nonstop. He still had a few holes in his schedule, especially around February, but his people showed him an endless number of Excel charts explaining that it was only a matter of time before those empty dates were filled.
The rich man was happy. One newspaper published an op-ed piece by some bleeding heart who objected to the rich man’s purchase of birthdays, calling it unethical, but even that couldn’t ruin his great mood. On that day, he celebrated an eighteen-year-old girl’s birthday, and all the heartwarming notes from her best friends made him feel that he had an unknown, exciting future before him.
That wonderful time ended on March 1. The rich man was scheduled to celebrate the birthday of an angry widower, but when he woke up that morning, he discovered that he hadn’t received a single card or phone call, and felt slightly cheated. Being such a resourceful man, he decided not to let it get him down, but to do something different. The rich man looked at his calendar again and saw that March 1 was the anniversary of the date the only man who didn’t want anything from him had committed suicide, and he decided to go to the cemetery. When he reached the grave of his dead friend, he saw that many other people had come to the annual memorial service. They cried and put red flowers on the grave. They hugged one another and talked about how much they missed the man whose death had left a hole in their lives.
The rich man thought, “Maybe there’s something here. Dead people can’t enjoy all the love showered on them, but I can. Maybe I can buy the anniversary of people’s death, too? Not from the people themselves, of course, but from their heirs. That way I can place a bed covered with dark, one-way glass on the grave, lie inside it, and hear people cry and say how much they miss me.”
It was an interesting idea, but the rich man didn’t live to act on it. He died the next morning, and like many of the events he had recently celebrated, his death was also meant for someone else. His body was found among the torn wrappings of presents he’d received for a birthday he’d purchased from a failed revolutionary. Later, it was discovered that one of the presents had been booby-trapped and sent by a ruthless, tyrannical regime.
Thousands attended the rich man’s funeral. All the mourners wanted his money, but they also liked him very much. They eulogized him for hours, sang sad songs, and placed small stones on the open grave. It was so moving that even the young Chinese billionaire who had bought the rights to the funeral from the dead man’s legal heirs and watched it all from his dark cub
icle at the bottom of the grave shed a tear.
TO: Sefi.Moreh
FROM: Michael.Warshavski
RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: “Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy” query
Dear Mr. Moreh,
In your last e-mail, you speak about obedience and refraining from making a judgment call, two extremely weighty issues for anyone who wishes to delve into the memory of the Holocaust and learn a lesson from it. I can hardly say that I was surprised to discover that helping an old, disabled Jewish woman is less important to you than obeying municipal bylaws. I can only imagine what your position would be if future bylaws demanded, for example, that you hand over my mother and me to those same authorities. It is superfluous to point out that, based on our e-mail correspondence, you do not seem to be the sort of person who would hide a persecuted minority in his attic.
Well done!
Michael Warshavski
ALLERGIES
The dog was actually my idea. We were on our way back from the gynecologist’s office. Rakefet was crying, and the cabdriver, who was, for once, a nice guy, dropped us off on the corner of Arlozorov Street, because Ibn Gvirol Street was closed for a demonstration. We started walking home. The street was crowded and humid and people around us were shouting into loudspeakers. A giant scarecrow with the face of the minister of the treasury on it was planted on a traffic island. People were stacking bills around it. Right when we walked past, someone set fire to the bills and the scarecrow began to burn.