The document is a memoir written by Toni Mehler about her childhood growing up in South America as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. As a young woman, she is recruited by Amir, a friend from her youth, to secretly raise money for the Israeli army by visiting Jewish communities in South America composed of Holocaust survivors. She finds the communities hidden behind thick walls and the survivors eagerly donate what money they can, seeing her as proof of their own survival.

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Toni Mehler
2848 South Lakeridge Trail
Boulder, Colorado 80302
720.519.0949
tonimehler@comcast.net
Through a Glass, Darkly
For now I see through a glass, darkly
but then face to face. Now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known.
1 Corinthians 13:12
One warm early spring morning of 1962 my mother and I toured New York
University. The alumna who took us around promised, through improbably white teeth,
that N.Y.U. would place me squarely in the capital of the world and offer the best in
libraries, museums, galleries and theater...and A Case of Libel is opening at the Longacre
a month after you get here and Van Heflin is in it. I love Van Heflin, don’t you?
After the visit my mother and I went back to our hotel for (despite the mild
weather) the gloves and scarves and hats she had made and wrapped in tissue months
before my acceptance letter arrived.
I had pretended not to watch her hands weaving row into row of baby-blue wool. Or to
hear her long needles clicking against each other. Not to resent the lamp she lit when it
got too dark to keep at her errand. Still, I could not keep from muttering: It’ll be too

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warm for those things – and anyway, this is the tropics; where did you even get that
wool?
Now here we were.
Changing out of our tour clothes. Did my mother’s repeated sighs signal the relief of
unfastening her girdle? Satisfaction in the knowledge that I would be a freshman at a
great university in the fall? My too-tight high heels had made the prospect painfully real.
I yanked them off and slipped on a pair of old black flats. My mother put on one of the
wool hats she made, flicked its pom-pom once or twice, pirouetted in front of the mirror
and danced the other hat toward me. She pulled her handiwork over my ears and,
laughing, turned me to the mirror. Did I look like her or was it the identical hats?
As we left our Greenwich Village hotel room she patted my cheek. Adjusted my baby-
blue scarf.
And we went for a walk in Washington Square Park, among the defenseless whites
and pinks and yellows exploding on the wintered-over twigs. She could not keep her
touch from the quivering blossoms or from the raw green leaves that sprouted around
them and wiped her eyes urgently, almost savagely: They are so...unmarked, she
whimpered, feeling the tender petals. Dreadfully embarrassed, I took a step away from
her and scanned the passers-by. Did they notice her crying? But I needn’t have worried. It
was New York, after all.
Four years later, at the small house on stilts she rented on the Ecuadorian coast, not
far from where our apartment had been, my mother prepared a special tea to celebrate my
graduation. She effervesced with plans for my future. I had just come from a swim in the
ocean. Still lost in the pleasure of water droplets trickling down my towel-wrapped body,

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I wasn’t really listening. So I didn’t notice when her voice lost its froth or hear her quiet
plea. Her hand on my arm, she asked it again. She would like to explain why she had
cried that day.
What day, Mama?
The day...of the tour. Before you started at the university.
Her chin rested on her chest and several seconds passed before she lifted it. When she
did, the pain in her eyes made my own burn. I reached for her hand and as I usually do in
wretched situations, opted for humor.
Maybe it was just an allergy, Mama.
She laughed. Yes, she said.
I laughed too. To spring flowers, Mama.
To wanting.
Instantly chastened, I said: I’m sorry.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
She poured coffee and cut slices of the nut and raisin and chocolate filled strudel that
she had baked. Handed me a white napkin she had embroidered. Smiled.
It doesn’t matter because they couldn’t make me stop wanting, in the end. I just
started wanting it all for you.
Yes. She had underlined that wanting every day of my childhood.
You could be an Olympic athlete, maybe a champion diver who jumps from the high
board and does pirouettes in the air, Tobi. Or: A concert pianist, Tobi. Did you learn the
new piece yet? No? Practice. Practice. Or: Good marks, Tobi. If you work at it you could
be a scholar and discover something to benefit all humankind. Wouldn’t you like that?

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Study. You have to study hard. Harder than anyone in your class if you want to be great.
And I want you to be great. You want to be great, right, Tobi?
Nothing ever deterred her from pressing me to stand out, not my mediocre musical
and athletic talents, or the fact that I was not studious and especially not that I considered
her demands a burden. I was sure she didn’t love me. I was wrong. She loved me fiercely,
just as I was. But she was bound by a past that imposed a levy on those who had lived it.
And on their children, too.
I don’t recall a time when I didn’t know that before they found their way to the small
South American country where I grew up, my parents had crossed an unnamable chasm. I
also knew they did it alone; their parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters and
uncles and aunts and cousins all remained behind. But it was not until I was eight years
old and started to attend to the odd combinations of words I sometimes overheard (camp
and gas, Japan and bomb, Hitler and horror) that I developed a vague grasp of what the
abyss might have been. As it happens, it was just then that my mother, against my
father’s wishes, took in a boarder. I don’t remember his name anymore but I remember
his sad gaze, his polka-dot bowties and the freckled scalp made shinier by the brilliantine
he assiduously applied to his few thin hairs. And his radio. He had a short wave radio in
his room on which he listened to the news, always after lunch, always from London.
Every chance I got I eavesdropped on the long vowels that issued, seemingly bereft of
consonants, from that shiny brown box. Whenever I could, I stood outside his room and
practiced twisting my own tongue into the peculiar sounds. One day he opened the door.
Do you want listen to radio? he asked in his heavily accented Spanish.
I nodded.

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Come in. They giving news now. But afterward is music.
Certain of my mother’s disapproval and all the more determined because of it, I
stepped into a cool dimness that smelled very faintly of mothballs. He took some
newspapers from a chair, dropped them on the cluttered desk on which the radio sat and
motioned with his arm. Thank you, I whispered as I balanced myself on the edge of the
seat. A sudden crackling broke up the announcer’s mellifluous voice and our boarder
moved the tuning dial slightly from side to side.
Static, he explained.
When the program was over (I understood BBC and Good Bye For Now) he said:
Now comes music. He adjusted the dial again and moved the antenna.
To the strains of Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude, I asked him: What was the man saying?
He looked at me a long time before he answered: The man...saying...was
talking...about finish of war in Europe.
Our boarder invited me to anytime come so after that first visit, as soon as lunch was
over (families still gathered for the midday meal then) I asked to be excused from the
table, ostensibly to read a while before going back to school.
Nestäkchen? my mother asked, smiling, approving. You like it, yes?
She had, at great expense, procured that German children’s series for me. My father,
much less confident of the benefits afforded by German culture, nodded absently and
lifted his espresso in my direction.
Our boarder’s room was just past my own.
In his halting Spanish, during visits that grew longer once the dry hot days of summer
tumbled in – freeing me from having to return to school – he explained about Japan and

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bomb and camp and gas and Hitler and horror.
My dreams understood the relationship between what he said and what happened to
my family long before my waking self did and I started having nightmares. Frequently
the same one: Lead-like clouds surrounded a collapsing wood structure in which I hid.
Huge numbers of people no bigger than grains of rice darted out of the dirty haze seeking
refuge from something that throbbed and threatened but that remained invisible. The tiny
creatures hovered and circled and swarmed, looking for me. And then they ran. Ran until
they found me. Ran until they ran into my eyes.
My mother rushed to my screams. Untangled the mosquito netting and sang and
soothed and talked and talked and talked. Sometimes my father came and although he
never said anything but his great hands, his lion paws, stroked my hair, my face, my
hands, my feet.
I found that the most effective thing I could do to keep from dreaming was lifting the
mosquito netting. Giving the tiny vampires access to my skin. I put my pillow over my
head so they would have to satisfy themselves with my arms and legs, concealed the
reddened and swollen eruptions under long sleeves and knee socks and tried to go about
my business – but the broken nights and the constant itching and the self-enforced
discomfort of too many clothes exhausted me. Once the school year began again I began
nodding off in class, especially history. Its sleep-inducing recitations of fact. The
metronome-like accents of the teacher’s pointer. The same pointer that struck my desk
and slashed through the air. I will punish you, she warned. But she did not – perhaps
because it was an expensive private school and the administration expected a certain
forbearance from its well-paid staff. Or maybe, in her kindness, the woman suspected my

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dozing was not a punishable offense. In any case, it was not an issue for long. As fate
would have it, she became ill before the month was out and had to take a leave of
absence.
The substitute teacher, tall and good-looking, proved a welcome distraction from the
usual droning of dates and places and at first, made it easier for me to stay awake. For
good measure he had a limp, a feature that instantly turned him into the romantic hero of
the stories I scribbled – but after a week the novelty wore off and my fatigue threatened
to take over again. Sonia, the girl who sat next to me in class, came to my rescue with the
promise of an unusual diversion (her four brothers were already men, so she knew
whereof she spoke).
Watch his thing, she said. It’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen.
Sonia was right. His thing was long and thick and clearly outlined against the leg he
dragged. She had promised it would swing back and forth as he drew himself along but it
didn’t. Had he tied it up? Were his pants too tight? Somewhere across my concerted
attention to his groin I heard him say:
Adolf Hitler.
Followed by:
Adolf Hitler was a great leader.
He expanded on it:
Many people, a whole nation full of people, did what Hitler said. And he conquered
country after country. Boys and girls, a great leader,
A great butcher you mean, I said loudly, more awake than I’d been in weeks.
Yes, that too, the teacher answered.

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Would you have done what he said? I challenged, getting on my feet, his penis
forgotten. Are you a Nazi?
Sit down, Tobi, the teacher said. And calm down.
But I didn’t sit down. My “Aunt” Hagar had two kids, Ruth and her twin brother,
Aaron. They were in my grade. They always sat side by side. I went to them.
Let’s go.
Hesitantly and hand in hand, they followed. We made a small triangle in the
playground and stood there kicking at the sawdust.
We won’t go back to class until they fire that Nazi, I announced.
That night I didn’t invite the mosquitoes into my bed.
There was no nightmare. There was none the next night either, or the one after, or
even the week after that. The horrid dream didn’t return for a long time. Not until after
my father died. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
*
Probably at least in part a result of the late-night parental conversations that certainly
followed the dismissal of the substitute teacher, a young Israeli man (the scuttlebutt had it
that he was a spy and had a gun) came to be our youth leader. Tall and blond and blue-
eyed. Trembling hands. Played the flute. Amir was to teach us children of Holocaust
survivors (we were all children of Holocaust survivors) Hebrew words and Israeli songs
and Jewish history and traditions. And protect us. And although no one admitted to it,
least of all Amir, he was to make Zionists of us all. My mother didn’t like him. One night
I thought I heard her tell my father: I didn’t survive Hitler to lose Tobi to a bunch of
Communists. My parents’ room was far from mine, though. Maybe I misunderstood.

9. 9
A year later, Amir’s tour of duty in Ecuador was over. There was talk of a
replacement but the idea went by the wayside. It hardly seemed worth it anymore, since
more and more people sent their children to boarding schools in the U.S. My mother
wanted me to go too, but not without her, so she and my father talked about our going as
a family – emigrating – but it came to nothing.
Amir and I stayed in touch. Eight years later, I did go to the United States. To N.Y.U.
By then Amir and I were, despite the twelve years between us, friends. And we soon
became comrades in arms.
Just after Thanksgiving he enlisted me into a clandestine organization that raised
money for the Israeli army. It wasn’t really a secret group, he said. It was just not openly
acknowledged. It had begun as a postscript to an errand undertaken a few years before by
a Jewish woman, a survivor of Theriesenstadt. Amir had been one of their first recruits.
The woman had encouraged her friends to collect as much money as they could; then
she took it all to the nearest Israeli Embassy along with a letter signed The Friends,
explaining that the money was for rifles.
They gave me a task that did not require even my rudimentary people skills.
The men with the wounded eyes they sent me to see, the restless, half-sitting, half-
standing men unconsciously reaching into pockets that hid the dollar bills they had
rescued from beneath their mattresses and behind loose boards and under their wives’
underwear, did not need my entreaties or my charm. They thrust themselves forward to
pour out what they had into the basket I held. As Amir had known, to them I was not a
hesitant young woman asking for their fledging savings to support a distant struggle. I
was the straight, dark-haired, daring proof of their own improbable survival.

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Like my parents, they had lived through concentration camps: Auschwitz, Dachau,
Bergen-Belsen.
Like my parents they had found a safe haven in South America. Like my parents they
were foreigners here. Extranjeros. And in a way I did not understand then, not only were
they strangers to this new world but alien to the spit of desert I asked them to defend.
They would not fit, they said when I suggested they go to Israel: No. Not me. It’s too late
for me. For us.
Still, they valued its promise for other younger, stronger, unbroken ones. So it was
there that their offerings found their way – in a scuffed leather attaché case that for all but
the last leg of its trip, was handcuffed to my wrist.
The Jewish communities I visited (they rarely had more than five hundred members)
gathered in an odd collection of run-down places that concealed themselves behind thick
walls. Sometimes the walls also hid colorful patches of garden. They beckoned not only
to me but to passers-by whose felt hats and headscarves often bounded up and down the
other side of the crumbling adobe. Perhaps those people were curious about the green
tendrils that sprouted among the broken bottles cemented in the walls. Or perhaps, like
me, they sensed the deep-rooted courage that pulsed in the vines twisting their way out of
those ugly, old, dilapidated barricades.
I usually got to whatever town the Friends sent me on Friday afternoon, to be met at
the airport by my contact. He (for it was always a young, Semitic he) briefed me on what
would follow: who would be at that evening’s meeting, how much they were hoping I
could raise and, finally, what my exit strategy was if for some reason my contact should
not, later that night, be able to get me safely on the plane that would take me on the

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second of my trip’s three legs, usually to Brussels.
That only happened once. Despite the leather briefcase holding fifty thousand dollars
handcuffed to my wrist, I reacted like any stranded eighteen-year old girl. I tried to call
my father. Phones didn’t work then as effortlessly as they do now and international calls
after hours were not typically possible on the spur of the moment. It was just as well they
weren’t. My father would have ended my clandestine career on the spot.
In Brussels (or sometimes London) I was met by another young Semitic man who
after a volley of signs and countersigns produced a key, unlocked the handcuff, relieved
me of the briefcase and put me on a plane back to New York, where Amir waited.
*
I learned the visit Amir made to my mother before he recruited me twenty-five years
later. I don’t know why she chose that day to finally tell me about her past. Perhaps
because it was sunny and warm in my Bronxville garden. My teenage son ran up and
down the grass throwing watermelon cubes into the sky and trying to catch them in his
open mouth. The wild cardinal flowers and bee balm bloomed. I had made lemonade and
put the impossible amount of sugar she liked in hers. She began by saying that she had
been Lebensunwertes Leben – life unworthy of life. And followed it with a tale that was
clear, complete, emotionless, well remembered. And too horrible to believe.
When she finished I said, lightly: Thank God it was a long time ago, Mama.
The rage of her wordless answer forced the air from my lungs as if she had struck my
chest. But before I could catch my breath she was Mother again and had her arms around
me – and as she did during the nightmare nights of my childhood, stroked me with her
voice like my father had with his hands. A roar like an engine idling too fast rushed up in

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my ears and garbled her words. The minutes ticked by. The metallic howl quieted. Little
by little, it waned into the hum that from that day on, underscored it all.
In any case, when I was again able to hear what she was saying I realized she was
talking about Amir. About courage, really. His. And hers. And obliquely, my own:
…Just as I returned from taking you to the airport…after your first visit back from
college…he showed up wrapped in a trenchcoat and carrying his small case… You and I
fought the whole four days you were home, Tobi – and God forgive me, I was glad you
were gone. Your father and I had fought too and he went to his office straight from the
airport. I went home alone. The doorbell rang before I could hang up my coat and I
thought it was the maid coming back from the market but it was Amir. I hadn’t seen him
for years, you know. I didn’t recognize him at first and by the time I did he’d walked past
me into the apartment.
Señora Rosita, I’m going to ask Tobi to raise funds for the Israel Defense Forces, he
said. Nothing else. Not even hello.
He set his case on the floor.
It’s a small, narrow country, Doña Rosita. A car can go from the Mediterranean to the
Dead Sea in an hour and a half. And in about six hours from Metulla to Eilat. So the day
that Israel declared its independence and the Arabs invaded us – Push all the Jews into
the sea, the Mufti said – should have been our last. But we survived. And after, there
were the Fedayeen and then a few years ago the Suez Crisis. When we captured the Sinai
Peninsula we thought it would help to keep us safe but we returned it... And now...
Amir, Amir. Stop. I know all that, my mother said. I don’t need you to tell me. I
already know all that. But Tobi’s in school. She... You can’t have Tobi.

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Another war is coming, Doña Rosita. And the Arabs will push all the Jews into the sea
if they win. So we need to win. We need to win every time. Because they only need to
win once. We need guns, Doña Rosita. And Tobi can help us get them. People will give
her money because she’s your daughter. But only if she feels it on her own skin. Or she
will not… Or nobody will…
Give her a cent, my mother finished, cheerfully. She lit a cigarette. Inhaled. Flicked
the nonexistent ashes from its tip.
The tired hardness in Amir’s eyes said much more than the words he uttered: If you
don’t tell her, I will.
And how do you know what to tell my daughter?
The hearing.
It was a mistake. There was proof.
I know. It’s what the American records said. The ones they used to clear you. About
the concentration camp. About your first husband and your two sons. About...
I stopped him then, my mother said. She covered her face with her hands. Her
shoulders shook.
She took the cigarette I gave her but before lifting it to her lips burst into a hoarse and
angry whisper: And Tobi, you lived in New York, for God’s sakes. What did Amir expect
me to do? Scream my life over the static of a long distance call? And you were just a
child. You couldn’t... I didn’t want you to. You were seventeen, Tobi. I told him that. I
told him that you were just seventeen. You know what he said?
The kids fighting for our home are no older.
*

14. 14
Amir flew straight to New York from that visit and took a cab to my place in the
Village. Same trench coat. Same battered suitcase. He left the case by the front door. I
hung up his trench coat. He dropped himself into the stained armchair I had inherited
from the apartment’s previous tenants and lit his ever-present cigarette. My two
roommates were both there, pretending not to be interested in the handsome man made
all the more striking by of his day-old beard – never mind having obviously slept in his
clothes.
I wanted to touch him.
Amir. I had held his flute against my breast those humid summer evenings he walked
me home. One rainy night we got to my house dripping wet. Laughing, he hugged me
and buried my face in his sodden coat, forever filling my nostrils with those years of our
lives and the secrets they held.
I wanted to touch him but I didn’t.
After he said what he’d come to say he added: Your mother knows I’m here. And
why.
What’s her story, anyway? You know, don’t you?
He looked into the distance as if he saw something I didn’t know was there.
Whatever you mother’s story, it’s hers to tell, he said with the defiance that had
always characterized him. Then he shrugged. The sad little gesture betrayed a diffidence I
had never seen before. He got up and went into the kitchen, for coffee, he said, but came
back with an empty cup. He sat down again, breathed in deeply and took his time
exhaling.

15. 15
I can tell you my story, he said, his grimace making it clear that he did not want to. Do
you have a cigarette?
I lit one for him.
I was five, he began. When they took my family to the ghetto. The war hadn’t started
yet.
He stopped to pick tobacco from his lower lip.
The village blacksmith had hidden me among his own sons. He’s the only father I
remember. My Tatal. He died of pneumonia the winter before the war was over. Mamă a
few months later. Maybe it was a broken heart. We hadn’t heard from my frații – my
brothers – since they’d been called up. Years. I buried her next to my Tatal. Knotted two
sticks into a cross and stuck it in the ground. Tied all the food I could find into her
blanket and wandered the countryside for a while.
I ended up in Bucharest at the Jassy Trade School. When the door opened I smelled
food and almost fainted. They fed me. The next morning they assigned me a dormitory.
There were, er, urinals in the bathroom. Mamă had made it very clear that I was not to
pull my pants down in front of anyone. Not ever. That my pulă was damaged.
See? she said, showing me my frațiis’.
So I stood there in front of the urinals and kept my underpants on. Boys ran in and out.
Naked. All their penises were damaged like mine. They were Jewish kids, it turned out.
Circumcised. Like me.
I was twelve. Almost thirteen.
Four years later, in March of 1949, my Mamă’s blanket on my shoulder, I entered the
port of Haifa standing on the prow of a ship among the cheers of the other survivors, the

16. 16
sounds of a language I didn’t understand and the oranges, still warm from the sun, that
the Israeli soldiers who climbed on the boat handed out.
They took us to an immigration camp made up of army tents. There was a sudden
downpour and within minutes we were wallowing in mud. We rubbed it on our faces. It
was our mud. The next morning I was called to the office and there, khaki shirts rolled up
over their suntanned arms, was a young couple I didn’t know. The husband was my
cousin. He had been sent to Palestine just before the war. I didn’t remember him, of
course. Hell, I didn’t remember my parents. But he had a picture. I was in it.
My cousins were in charge of the vegetable garden for a block of buildings that
housed refugees in Tel Aviv. It had been raised almost overnight, they said. It’s still
there, I think.
Within weeks I had learned the difference between weeds and tomato seedlings. Some
Hebrew, too. I had a new name. Amir. Amir Amichai. The following year I was in the
army. We battled the Fedayeen who exploded our water lines and uprooted our trees and
murdered the orchard workers and their families. We fought back hard. Some people said
too hard. But a third of the people still alive when Hitler was stopped had come to Israel.
Made new families. My cousins had a son by then.
My army service was over in 1953, and three years later – a year before I came to
Ecuador, remember? I was recalled to active duty. More than one hundred thousand
reservists were mobilized in less than seventy-two hours. Three days from when I got the
call my squad landed in the Sinai and headed to the Suez Canal.

17. 17
I marched behind one of our officers. As we walked, he muttered to himself in
Yiddish. I don’t understand Yiddish, but just before we got to the front lines he spoke in
Hebrew. To me. He spoke to me:
They were led to the gas chambers on a white gravel path, he said. In winter the gravel
froze to the ground and the children’s feet froze to the gravel. It was my job to wash the
blood before the next group was sent down.
Amir took another cigarette from the pack of Lucky’s I’d left on the table. His body
dug itself into my frayed old armchair: You know the rest, he finished.
My roommates were nowhere to be seen.
Whatever it is that you want me to do, Amir, I’ll do it, I said
*
Amir and I are grandparents now.
Do you remember Zvi? he asked me a few years ago while we walked in Central
Park, our grandsons running ahead.
Yes, I said.
He died last year.
Although I had only seen him once, I remembered Zvi quite well. Him and everything
else about that weekend.
It was cold even though winter had ended two months before. The meeting (in
Concepción, now the second largest city in Chile, but then a quiet, sleepy town) had been
particularly long and well attended. As I left, Zvi, lithe, weather-beaten, not much older
than I, followed me at a small distance carrying the briefcase that held the men’s
donations. One of the men walked past me to a peddler hawking apples and bought two.

18. 18
He wiped them on his coat and as I approached tossed me one. I caught it and laughed.
He laughed too.
Your laughter reminds me of someone, he said.
Really? I asked, looking back at Zvi and wishing I hadn’t taken a bite of the apple the
man gave me.
Yes.
Oh.
Her name is, well, was Guta.
That’s a beautiful name, I said, and tried to recover my composure.
Do you know anyone called Guta?
No. No, I don’t.
Was she your wife? I asked, not knowing what else to say.
My sister. My older sister.
We walked on, quietly.
My mother’s name is Rose, I volunteered. Everybody calls her Rosita.
He nodded.
Zvi came up to us and cleared his throat.
Excuse me, sir, he said. The car is here. I need to take Tobi to the airport.
Yes, of course, the man said, and offered me his hand. I shook it. Then, in a sudden
flood of feeling, I embraced him.
The flight seemed longer than usual, the airplane seat narrower and harder. The man’s
face appeared each time I drifted off and by morning, not asleep, but not awake either, I
was sure that he resembled my mother. That he was my uncle.

19. 19
We landed in Brussels and the plane made harsh contact with the tarmac. My contact
was waiting for me. After we finished our identification routine he unlocked the
handcuff, manacled the case to his own wrist and walked me to my gate. We hugged
good-bye. He waited until I boarded the plane to New York and went to meet his own,
back to Tel Aviv.
My would-be uncle reappeared in my thoughts before I had even fastened my seatbelt.
What if he really was my mother’s brother? I knew nothing about her family. Not about
my father’s, either. My mother refused to talk about it. My father shook his head. Why
hadn’t I asked the man’s name? And had my mother always been Rose?
Just before we landed, I fell asleep. I dreamt that the stranger in Concepción was in
fact my uncle and that Zvi, his strong arms protecting us both, took us to my parents’
apartment. I can still see the scenes that played over and over in my mind: My mother
embracing my uncle. My father embracing my uncle. My mother my father and my uncle
embracing me.
The man hanged himself.
He was a priest, Amir said amidst the mournful blur of Idlewild. It was only days, a
week maybe, since Kennedy had been buried. Jackie in her blood-spattered dress and
little John-John saluting his father’s coffin were in everyone’s heart. Mine too.
He wasn’t Jewish? I asked.
Not anymore. He was born into a Jewish family before the war, though. In Poland.
Anybody else survive, Amir? A sister, maybe? An older sister?
I don’t know. The agencies are looking now. Why do you ask about an older sister?
No, nothing.

20. 20
It was a miracle that he survived you know, because he was so young when the Nazis
took him. They say he was rescued from a transit camp and taken to a nearby monastery.
The monks raised him and he was ordained a priest. They sent him to Chile to do
missionary work.
But last night... He wasn’t wearing his uniform...his...cassock. What was he doing
there, a Catholic priest?
Amir shook his head. I’m sorry I have to tell you this now, he murmured.
Now? I thought. What does he mean, now?
But I just said: I’m sorry too. Poor man. What am I supposed to say if someone asks?
I don’t think that anybody will.
We found a taxi back to Greenwich Village. It was a silent ride and Amir held my
hand, from time to time stroking my wrist where the handcuff had bruised it. Tears
glazed his eyes and darkened his lashes.
I tightened my hand around his.
Maybe I had heard my father call my mother Guta. Wishful thinking, I reproached
myself. Still, even a dead family is a family, I thought. Even a Catholic priest who kills
himself is an uncle.
*
The car turned on to Jane Street and Amir directed the driver to The White Horse
where we went after each trip and where, over cups of black coffee, I gave him the details
of the assignment I had just completed. I had introduced him to this place. I was already
planning the Great American Novel and this tavern, an evocative high temple of drink
and creativity, was the place where Dylan Thomas and his cronies, even if at times

21. 21
excessively, had oiled their talents. His portrait hung in a middle room and on each of our
visits I found a way there and breathed deeply of the air around it.
We walked in and headed toward our usual table. A somewhat disheveled woman had
already taken it. A man, his face hidden in shadow, stood by her.
The table behind hers is empty Amir, I whispered.
When we were close enough to the woman’s table to see that the liquid in her cup
was black coffee, I recognized her.
In a move so fragmented she knocked off the baby-blue hat askew on her head, she
lifted her arms in an odd gesture that both asked for help and offered comfort.
I made myself lean into her embrace.
Tobi. Mein kleines schatz.
Before I could ask my mother what she was doing here the man standing behind her
stepped forward, weeping, arms outstretched. He was my parents’ good friend, Abram –
Tío Abram to me.
And all at once I knew.
Something fluttered in my chest and pressed and pressed until, quietly, it slipped
away. I looked at my hands for the thing that I had lost, but I saw only, listing to one side
of my ring finger, the little turquoise on its gold circlet that had been my father’s last
birthday gift. I twisted it until the stone disappeared. Happy birthday, daughter, he had
said.
Amir pulled a chair from the table and guided me toward it, then sat down himself.
Tío Abram sat down too. The waitress came. Somehow, Amir found the words needed to
order coffee.

22. 22
Your Papa...my mother said and stopped.
Your Papa had a heart attack, Tío Abram finished for her. He spoke softly but when
he finished opened his mouth so wide I was sure he was going to scream. I stared into the
gaping cavity, waiting. But all that fell into our silence was the small clattering his false
teeth made as they fell out and skittered across the table. I caught them, gave them back
to him. Something I did not recognize rose within me. Laughter? Horror? I clamped a
hand to my mouth.
My mother took my chin between her hands, turned my face to hers and I was forced
to look at her.
Her lips trembled. Her cheeks were as scarred as if long ago a hundred Lilliputian
soldiers had stabbed her over and over and over again.
During my childhood she had suffered from acne so virulent she went to a witch
doctor once, looking for a cure. After cutting an onion in half, praying over it and
infusing it with the smoke of her cigar, the old woman rubbed the vegetable on my
mother’s cheeks. I watched from the doorway of the hut wanting desperately to hold my
nose against the unpleasant smells within but not daring to move. The magic rite didn’t
help my mother. The pustules continued coming and leaving small depressions behind.
What had pulled her scars into this dismal sharpness? Was it a trick of the light in the
tavern? Had I just not noticed it before?
She whimpered small rabbit-like whimpers so evenly spaced that they might have
come from some mechanical device hidden in her body. Her hands were clenched into
fists so tight her knuckles were bloodless. She was missing a shoe.
I swallowed. Hard. Harder. And harder still. I swallowed and swallowed until I forced

23. 23
my heart back into the void in my chest. I gulped one last mouthful of air. Dylan Thomas
air, I remember thinking.
Then I embraced her. Touched my lips to her unkempt hair. Whispered:
Lean on me.
When her sobs quieted, I helped her to stand, picked her hat up from the floor and
shook the dirt that clung to it against my leg.
Amir put a ten-dollar bill on the table, waited until Tío Abram blew his nose and
replaced his teeth, then helped him from his chair.
The flight leaves in three hours, Amir said. We bury him tomorrow.
On the sidewalk, he hailed a cab and we all climbed in.
Amir sat in the front.
- end -