Bruce Bauman: Broken Sleep

Nazi jackboots rain down from the sweltering Berlin summer sky, the troopers’ stomp trembles the halls and stairwells and young Malcolm glances to the window. A helmeted SS officer sprays piss from his uncircumcised dick over Jewish graves, saving the last drops for his father, cowering on the ground. His sister Magda holds her dog Toffee close to her chest. A baby-faced soldier lances Toffee with his bayonet. He bleeds, squirms, squeals, and dies slowly as Magda sobs, thrust down the staircase. The slaughter cars rumble to Theresienstadt, and Magda is raped repeatedly. He swears he will never die like Kafka’s K., like Magda’s dog. Licking snow as manna, he questions the god who allows the human incinerator filled with melted flesh, aging women beaten for uttering a wrong syllable, babies tossed in the air like clay pigeons and shot for fun. Some who survive grow larger. More human. More generous .

He is not one of them .

Hate consumes him. All other emotions have been exterminated …

“I … can’t … Ugh.”

He knows it is cruel ,

“Hold … Jay …”

yet it is less cruel

than if he had come …

Jay, feeling him slip away, hurriedly finished alone.

… home .

They lay silently side by side, holding hands. “Let’s drive over there now,” Jay said. “Let’s surprise him.”

While Jay dressed, Moses stood in the shower thinking, I’m finally going to confront him . His excitement was tinged with trepidation. The anguish he’d carried for so long like an empty sarcophagus, which he’d believed he’d discarded, returned.

What would he tell Malcolm Teumer? How, because of him, in his late teens he’d become obsessed with the literature and films of the Holocaust: Levi, Wiesel, Appelfeld, Furstenblum, Shoah, The Sorrow and the Pity , and countless others? That he’d moved to Israel after graduating from Columbia and played Abbie Hoffman with a yarmulke on a radical kibbutz? That sojourn ended after two years when he attended a debate between two spittle-tongued kibbutzniks whose only disagreement was whether to nuke all of Israel if they knew the Arabs would win a war or just the Arab capitals and oil fields. For him, too many Israelis remained hopelessly embedded in a mind-set circa Masada A.D. 72. He moved from Israel to L.A. in 1982 to attend USC grad school, where he wrote his dissertation on “Divorce Rates Among Children of Holocaust Survivors.” He would relate to his father how he had begun researching a book before the onset of his illness, Children of Holocaust Survivors and Their Relations to God , studying the problems of survivors, their family problems, their marriages and divorces, their suicides, their depressions and guilts. How this immersion had served up unending sources of excuses for his father’s behavior.

Instead of falling into emotional paralysis — Moses’s customary reaction to any mention of his father — he excitedly grabbed his L.A. Dodgers baseball cap. Moses didn’t like baseball, in fact he considered sports an opiate of the masses, but he had started wearing hats all the time after the chemotherapy. His pate was still patchy.

With Jay driving their Honda, they headed from their cozy home on Marco Place in Venice to Santa Monica, Ocean Avenue and Alta. They parked across the street by Palisades Park in front of a high-rise condo overlooking the Pacific. Moses and Jay had strolled past this building scores of times gazing at sunsets. As they sat in the car, Moses remembered how, when he first moved to L.A., as he had in Israel, he’d scoured his surroundings for men he imagined were about his father’s age: in bookstores; along Venice Beach; in delis like Canter’s or Nate ’n Al; in movie theaters like the old Fox, Nuart, or the Egyptian that showed foreign films; at the Melrose galleries; and more often than any other place, in the supermarkets, fantasizing that any of them — one of them — could be him. Now he knew that in this very park, as he and Jay had lolled hand in hand, his father could have been standing right beside him. This knowledge calmed Moses’s roiling emotions. No sweaty palms, no heart palpitations. No waves of desire to melt into easeful death. Nothing like he’d expected.

Jay got out and looked up at the terraces. She came around to Moses’s side of the car and knocked on the window. “C’mon. Let’s get this over with.” They walked across the street, where a well-dressed doorman opened the glass doors and stopped them.

“We’re here to see Malcolm Teumer, 1 °C,” Moses said in a monotone.

“Who should I say is calling?” asked the doorman from behind a four-foot-high glass vestibule and in front of a second-rate Sam Francis imitation canvas.

“His son, Moses.”

He raised his eyebrows ever so slightly. “I’m not sure if Mr. Teumer is in.”

“I saw someone on the terrace,” Jay said spontaneously.

“It must’ve been his friend Mr. Lively.”

“Just buzz, please,” Moses said politely, but with as much authority as his voice could muster.

The doorman turned his back so they didn’t hear the few words that were exchanged over the intercom. An elevator man escorted them to the tenth floor.

When they exited, a man at the end of the hall leaned against a half-open door. He stood a few inches over six feet tall, with a body frame better suited to a creaky wicker chair than human flesh. Under his wide shoulders, he hunched over as if stones in his jacket pockets weighed him down. His big hands cupped the handle of a wooden cane. His thinning brown hair, with touches of gray, was combed back and high and held in place by a gusher of hair cream. On his large feet were scuffed cowboy boots. This, Moses assumed, was not his father.

At the doorway, the man reached out to shake Moses’s hand. A huge high-school championship ring glistened on his finger. Moses introduced Jay. The man did not introduce himself.

In a Texas drawl, he politely invited them inside. “Please sit yourselfs down in the living room.” Up close, the man’s face was withered like a worn-out overcoat, with too many and too large yellowed teeth. Wolfish eyebrows with no visible skin between and big triangular sideburns, leftover from the Elvis era, framed a face as inviolable as an icon atop a pharaoh’s tomb. His bland brown eyes added softness to his otherwise harsh expression. “Your father is not here, but we can talk.”

They followed him deeper into the living room. Cabinets filled with Hummel statuettes of boys and girls drumming and marching, and sets of multicolored Fiestaware lined the hallway and much of the living room. Two shelves in a credenza were stocked with books that had the look of the unread. Movie posters dating from the 1920s to the present hung on the walls. From the largest poster, framed in gaudy gold leaf and reading Gösta Berling’s Saga , loomed an imposing photograph of the unsullied yet sullen Greta Garbo. No photos of any real people were visible anywhere.

Off-white drapes covered windows and a door that opened to the eighteen-foot-long terrace. Beige pole lamps stood in the corners of the room. Moses and Jay sat on a beige sofa. Moses noticed half-filled shelves of cassette tapes, DVDs, and CDs but saw no sign of a TV or audio system.

The man positioned himself in the chair with his back to the drapes. The chair was four inches higher off the ground than the sofa so that he always seemed to peer down at them.

“My name is Laban Lively, and I’ve been a friend and business partner of your father’s for decades.”

“Are you his special friend?”

“Boy,” Lively said, his voice dripping with an even-toned I’ll-drop-you-dead-right-here brusqueness, “let’s be straight. Your father is many things, but he is not a sodomite.” Moses couldn’t help thinking, Who the hell is this Bible-thumping cowboy?