Galerie Page 2

  “Prosim,” she stuttered in Czech. “Please….”

  As the two men closed in on Vanesa, the remaining inky light left the fetid room like a final solemn breath.

  Wisconsin, 1981

  When I first met Vanesa Neuman, she had more questions than answers, and a clear willingness to ask them. I once joked that her truly insatiable curiosity made her a sort of bottomless intellectual sinkhole, swallowing anything thrown into her. She lived her interrogatory life in a kind of stream-of-consciousness, one question inevitably leading to another. A discussion about peeling paint could easily unravel into the Allegory of the Shadows, meander back to the inner life of mosquitoes, flit to the merits of that evening’s dining hall fare, and roost thereafter on the branch of Mongolian falconry.

  As the years passed, Vanesa’s question-to-answer ratio slowly tipped. In the way of zealots, technocrats, taxi drivers, and the clinically insane, she gained too many answers. They pushed her questions aside, as if her intellectual storeroom had finite volume. And she grew further and further away from me.

  Nonetheless, the touch of some people who intersect your life never completely fades. In the summer of 1981, more than a decade before I’d even heard the word “Galerie,” Vanesa became one such person.

  I was an oh-so-serious nineteen-year-old college student, working as a counselor for high school-aged kids, in a sleepover camp tucked back in the woods two hours north of Chicago. The camp’s ample grounds snuggled at the edge of a still wooded but increasingly urbane subdivision that had sprung up uninvited on one side. On its other side ran a copse of dense forest whose depths even the most adventurous camper dared not plumb. To the east, the property hugged a mud-bottomed lake with a trucked-in sand beach, which boasted a speedboat and small catamaran, not to mention a number of canoes and paddle boats renowned for providing only the illusion of movement.

  Donna, the waterfront director, lorded over the lake. Her word, inevitably reinforced by an eardrum-piercing whistle, was absolute—as absolute, it was irreverently rumored, as her prodigious posterior, which was said to have once crushed an errant kitten that made the regrettable life choice of napping on the lifeguard chair.

  Vanesa was a quintessential sixteen-year-old, a camper in the oldest group in which I was a co-counselor for a boys cabin. She stood 162 centimeters in her All-Stars, shorter and slightly chubby compared to the Madonna wannabes in her cabin. But you could feel the fire in her at a glance—in the way her eyes met yours without a shred of hesitation, without an inkling of self-consciousness, probing you like a district attorney and then delivering judgment like a Wild West hanging judge. She had a way of tossing her dark, shoulder-length curls when she argued, of leaning her small-chested figure in to engage you when she spoke—as if not just her mind, but her whole body tried to prove her point.

  I was instantly smitten, and remain so today—less with what she’s become than with what she still is to me, which is, of course, sixteen years old.

  My pimple-faced, hyper-hormonal yet laudably under-experienced campers—this was the 1980s, after all—lived for the duration of each month-long camp session in a rickety wooden cabin, together with my co-counselor and myself. The cabin—the camp brochure called it “rustic”—boasted screen-only windows quite effective at keeping the mosquitoes in the cabin, gaps in the floorboards wide enough to accommodate the entrance of almost any spider or vermin, and a screen door whose industrial-strength spring slammed it closed with a bang loud enough to grace the finale of the 1812 Overture.

  Teenage boys being teenage boys, my campers lacked interest in much beyond sports and girls. So I was drawn to chatting with the girl campers during my free time. They were strictly off-limits romantically, and I maintained the propriety of the camp rules, but what nineteen-year-old straight male would not enjoy the fawning admiration, chaste though it may be, of a gaggle of boy-struck teenage girls?

  Vanesa did not penetrate the inner circle of the girls’ cabin intrigue. Neither did she linger on the fringes. Instead, she struck me as standing some three meters above. She sat apart reading, writing in a journal she kept in a simple spiral notebook—not a pretentiously locked and frilly girl-diary—or just gazing at the sky, with a gently curving nose flaring out to meet cheeks that retained just the right accent of baby fat. Sixteen, perfect, and untouchable—I was staff, after all—and she was a visiting Israeli camper.

  We had no hope romantically. Or so I thought that summer.

  Vanesa was born in Israel, a true sabra, which made her all the more beguiling to a young American Jew like me. Her father, Michael Neuman, was a Czech immigrant to Israel, which explained her impressive command of not only Hebrew and English but also Czech, which she spoke at home. It also explained her real name, Limor, which she used only in Israel—or so she told me at the time. Vanesa was actually her mother’s name. She said she’d adopted it because “it’s easier on your American ears and tongues.”

  Later, I learned the real reason, but she has always remained Vanesa to me.

  Prague, December 1991

  With his belt opened and his fly now unzipped, Garlic continued. “In accordance with rule number one—which, you’ll recall, is that in Prague, pissing people off has consequences—we have a message for you. An important message,” he continued. He nodded to Vodka, who followed Garlic’s lead and unbuckled his own belt. “You see, in Prague, if you piss off the wrong people, you can end up in a whole world of mess.” He chuckled and nodded in Vodka’s direction. “And not just any mess, but, in fact, a whole world of piss.”

  At this, both men, having unzipped and taken themselves in hand, began urinating on Vanesa. Steam rose from the horse-like streams as they sprayed her and laughed.

  She cowered silently, scooting away from them, squeezing into the corner of the room, trying to shelter her face and head from the relentless, sickly-warm torrent. It was no use. Her face, hair and torso were soaked in a matter of seconds. An incongruous passing thought of how much these two must have had to drink before meeting her flashed through her brain, defying both the gravity of the situation and her gagging disgust.

  When the drenching waned and stopped, she raised her dripping head to look defiantly at her attackers, wiping the liquid from her eyes with the back of one garbage-congealed hand. As she did so, Vodka hocked and spat directly onto her forehead. The viscous liquid ran down over her eyebrows and dripped onto both cheeks.

  Now it was Vodka’s turn to speak. He leaned in and raised a hand as if to backhand her, and she shrank from him. “Bitch! Go home. If you don’t, there will be worse for you next time.” Satisfied, he re-zipped his trousers and joined Garlic at the mesh metal door.

  They chuckled and exited the garbage room, leaving Vanesa’s sodden, steaming, gasping figure on the floor in the corner.

  Kladno, 1941

  My Vanesa’s mother—I took to calling her Vanesa Sr. when we spoke of her, which was infrequently—was born Vanesa Rokeach in 1930 in Kladno, a medium-sized industrial and mining town north of Prague. Both sides of her family had lived for more than four generations in Kladno. Her father’s surname still reflected the fact that, some one hundred years prior to her birth, her great-grandfather had been a noted apothecary, serving both Jews and Gentiles, despite being officially limited to doing business in the Jewish section of the town. Like thousands of Jewish communities across Europe, Bohemia’s Jews—the Kladno Jews among them—had for centuries been regarded with suspicion and dislike, at best. Tolerated for their commercial usefulness, they were treated with varying degrees of severity and persecution, depending on the whim of the current ruler and fickle public sentiment.

  Vanesa Sr., dark-haired with warm eyes that carried the precursor of the fire that blazed in my Vanesa’s eyes, was the daughter of a seamstress and a machinist. Her father’s profession was unusual for a Czech Jew, but less so in Kladno, the center of Bohemia’s industrial heartland—a heartland later coveted by the German war machine for its iron and stee
l works. Vanesa Sr. left Kladno once, when she was twelve, and never returned. Kladno was, to the day of her death, the very embodiment of betrayal—much as Prague became for her future husband, Michael, my Vanesa’s father. Every memory that Vanesa Sr. related to her daughter, every happy moment, every personal childhood triumph, every family achievement, was tainted, inevitably qualified with “…but that was, of course, before they….”

  The “they” Vanesa Sr. referenced constantly was amorphous and nameless, but terrified my Vanesa as a child. Were “they” also the menace who had attacked Israel on Yom Kippur of 1973, when my Vanesa was just eight—old enough to still remember both the scary sirens and the sweets the kind man next door had shared with her during their hours in the neighborhood bomb shelter? Were “they” the menace against whom Vanesa Sr. double-locked the doors of the small Tel Aviv flat, refusing to leave the apartment unless absolutely necessary so “they” wouldn’t come and take, burn, destroy, or worse? Certainly, “they” were the menace against whom my Vanesa contrived her bedroom’s childhood guardian force, comprised of conscripted teddy bears and warrior dolls armed with popsicle-stick swords. “They” had made Vanesa Sr.’s childhood itself seem like poison to her daughter, something to be put away on the back of a high shelf, toxic to the touch.

  Vanesa Sr.’s memory, like wood smoke in a winter forest, floated wispy yet pungent in my Vanesa’s mind. My Vanesa carried mental snapshots of her mother that sparkled, soundbites that crackled, and grainy videos that wept. Mostly wept. For my Vanesa’s overwhelming memory of her mother was of crying, tears in endless permutations of liquid grief. In the open, and more often behind closed doors, she’d let flow tears of frustration, tears of longing, tears of remembrance, tears of remorse, and later, tears of fear. At the end, as Vanesa Sr.’s body shut down, the tears had dried up, and her deathbed weeping had been dry, inconsolable and empty.

  Vanesa Sr. was nine years old when she stood on Kleinerova Street on a rainy March day in 1939, looking up wide-eyed, huddled between her parents’ overlapping umbrellas. Her brother’s chubby hand, clutched tightly in her own, was so clammy that she had to keep releasing it to dry her own hand on her skirt. Vanesa Sr. watched her parents, far more interested in their stony faces than in the seemingly endless line of grey tanks and troop transports rolling into Kladno, shaking the ground, clouding the air with diesel fumes. She did look up, however, as several cars and troop transports stopped first—as they would later do in Prague—at the looming limestone façade of local Czechoslovak Central Bank, where they made a one-sided, cripplingly large transaction.

  In Prague, the German Reichsbank special commissioner accompanying the invading forces “persuaded” the directors of the Central Bank there, at gunpoint, to transfer some twenty-three tons of gold to Reichsbank accounts. In Kladno, the withdrawal was smaller, but monstrous nonetheless.

  “We often forget,” my Vanesa told me one evening in her best university-lecturer voice, “the strictly economic considerations of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, and indeed of all Europe. In today’s popular consciousness, the Nazi period doesn’t carry the stain of pillage. Of terror, certainly. Of genocide. Of betrayals and petty reprisals. But the fact was that Germany stole billions of dollars from the countries they invaded—just plain stole, like sticking up a convenience store, but on a national scale.”

  Vanesa Sr. understood that the Nazis’ coming was a bad thing. She recalled her father’s fury the previous year when he read of Chamberlain’s cowardly Munich Agreement, in which Czechoslovakia’s most loyal allies sacrificed her on the altar of Nazi appeasement. She understood and feared the armed troops, with their large black guns, fierce helmets, long coats, and uncaring eyes. What she never understood, even after numerous and patient parental explanations, was the nature and purpose of that second Nazi army, armed to the teeth with boxes and boxes of pens, papers, forms, and regulations. Vanesa Sr. could understand guns, but over the next ten months, every time she waited in an endless line with her mother or father for some bespectacled clerk to examine, sign, stamp, or reject in angry guttural German yet another piece of paper, she wondered how it was that this strange army’s power to change her life was so vastly superior to the first’s.

  This army of bureaucrats had changed her very identity. Whereas before she’d just been Vanesa Rokeach, a Kladno schoolgirl who’d never lit a Sabbath candle in her life and never seen the inside of a synagogue; now their papers and their forms had transformed her. She was no longer a nine-year-old girl that liked lollipops, loved to play Pesek, and tried to avoid brushing her hair before bed.

  Now, she had become this “Jude” word. It was written on the yellow star that her mother had sewn to her coat with such tight, small stitches. At first, she didn’t really understand what this word was, but she quickly learned what it meant. It meant she couldn’t go to her school anymore, that she couldn’t play in the park with the high slide, and that there was no meat for dinner. It meant Father stayed home more frequently, unshaven and often cross.

  Soon it would come to mean much, much more.

  In 1941, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, under the personal supervision of the notorious Adolf Eichmann, changed gears. The office and its bureaucratic procedures had been created, first in Vienna and later in Prague, to “assist” Jewish families in leaving the Reich. This was allowed following payment of all relevant levies and taxes—generally amounting to well over 80% of a given family’s net worth. Now, the office focused primarily on systematically relocating the Jews of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia into a 150-year-old, sparsely-populated but sprawling garrison town named after the mother of Austrian emperor Joseph II, Maria Theresa. The Jews of Kladno, Vanesa Sr. and her family among them, would be some of first offered “relocation” to this new Jewish Reichsaltersheim, paradise ghetto, in Terezin—better known today by its German name, Theresienstadt.

  Prague, December 1991

  Tears or no tears, horrific yet mute wartime experiences notwithstanding, my Vanesa knew that her mother’s strident European sensibilities would have been gravely offended at her current state—hair matted, coat smeared with garbage floor grime, reeking of urine. She almost laughed at the thought, but the laugh came out as a muffled sob, which she choked back with no small effort as she passed a couple walking arm in arm in the arctic Prague dusk. This was decidedly not how she had expected this evening to turn out.

  She had expected to find answers. Like a porter carrying a load up endless flights of steep stairs, she had fervently hoped to finally set down the list of questions she’d been accruing since childhood. It was a list that had ballooned since her father’s death a month previously, since she’d inherited the shop, since she’d received the diary.

  She walked on with increasing urgency, occasionally breaking into a stumbling, shivering trot. She tripped on the stairs of her nondescript hotel, looking up as she caught her balance at the façade whose architectural glory was intact yet well concealed under decades of Soviet-era grime, as was much of the city. Prague’s most notable color in 1991 was grey. The bright colors of centuries past had faded with the neglect of collective ownership and the exhaust from two-cycle engines in East German Trabants, the cars with the quasi-cardboard body that had descended on Czechoslovakia in recent years.

  It brought to mind the story about Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody: there was an important job to be done, and Everybody and Anybody were asked to pitch in. However, since Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it, in the end Nobody did. Until the Velvet Revolution of 1989, only two years previously, Nobody had done much in the way of preserving Prague’s architectural heritage because, after all, it was Everybody’s responsibility.

  The night clerk barely acknowledged her as she brushed through the lobby. Far worse than the corruption, oppression and poverty the Soviets had brought with them from the East was the uniquely Russian ability to utterly ignore anyone they didn’t feel like seeing.

&nb
sp; Vanesa recalled her foray to the Information desk of the Intourist section of the Prague airport after she landed at 3 a.m. Intourist had been the Soviet agency responsible for handling incoming tourism to the empire. Among the agency’s goals had been to minimize exposure of Soviet citizens to decadent Western influences. This had been accomplished in Prague, as in many other Soviet airports, by completely segregating Westerners. In Prague, they used a separate wing of the airport. In less central Soviet-era airports, they literally herded foreigners into corrals populated by rough wooden benches and surrounded by three-meter high corrugated metal walls, often erected right in the middle of a busy terminal hall.

  The green-uniformed Information attendant, blowing on tea steaming in a clear glass embraced by a metal cup holder, pored over a newspaper and simultaneously sucked on a smelly Belomorkanal cigarette. She’d looked up with one apathetic eye as Vanesa approached to inquire about traveling into the city. Without putting down her cigarette or spilling a drop of tea, in a gesture as clearly practiced as blowing her nose or cupping her hands against the wind to light a cigarette, the attendant had reached up with one hand, slammed the office reception window down, and flipped the handwritten sign dangling on the frayed string from Otevreno— open—to Zavreno—closed. Vanesa’s entreaties, first verbal and then increasingly percussive on the office window, had not even caused the woman to look up. If Vanesa had spontaneously self-combusted right there in front of the window, she felt sure that the attendant would have laconically and tiredly reached up and tripped the fire alarm, still cradling her tea cup in one hand, and then gone back to her newspaper.

  If she’d noticed at all.

  Passing by the night clerk, one part of her briefly wondered if he was even breathing. She ran up the two floors of steep and carpeted stairs to her room, and fumbled with her key, almost breaking it off in the lock. After entering the room, she threw herself into the white sterility of the bathroom, stripping clothes desperately off her body in layers, some already dried and crusted, others still wet and sticky. She left the reeking pile of clothes in a corner and climbed into the tub. She turned the water on full force, and didn’t even wait for the shower to run hot before immersing herself in the cleansing, stinging stream.