Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die: A Novel

BOOK ONE

The horror, gentlemen,

is that there is no horror.

—KUPRIN

1

ONE MORNING, TWO WEEKS before his wife’s departure for California, Judah Kramer was awakened by his three-year-old daughter, Sarah. She peered at him solemnly through her eyeglasses and said: A man called you, Da, on the telephone.

What man, darling? Jud asked, sleepily turning toward her.

I can’t say it. Mr. Talk-something.

Mr. Talk-something, Jud murmured. That’s not a name. He reached out and put his arm around her tiny waist. Opening his eyes, he saw her large, blue eyes, distorted by the lenses of the glasses. She had a simple muscle weakness the doctor said would be corrected as she grew up, but still, the sight of her little oval face dominated by the glasses always troubled him.

Where’s everybody? he said, swinging his feet over the side of the big bed.

Packing, she said, and ran out of the bedroom.

Be careful— Jud began, and stopped because the little girl was gone. The cool breeze from the park across the street ruffled the long yellow curtains. He stood before the window for a moment, looking out over Fifth Avenue and across to the park. The apartment was on the fifteenth floor, and the view on clear mornings included a great stretch of trees, gravel paths, and an arc of lake. This was an open-skied day in early November, and the aerial view of the park was clear. It cleared the sleep from Jud’s eyes. He closed the window and went inside to take a bath.

Marianne Kramer was closing the big trunk when Jud entered the living room. She straightened up slowly and rubbed her back vigorously. It was only ten o’clock, but she had been packing clothes since eight-thirty. Marianne was an actress and used to sleeping late.

Jud put his arms around her, taking her by surprise.

Oh, God! she exclaimed.

Be quiet, he whispered, and let me feel how much I’m going to miss you.

You scared me to death.

Not true. You’re breathing nicely.

No thanks to you.

Good. I haven’t scared you in years.

She struggled free of him and tugged at her blouse. Marianne was a pale-skinned girl with an intense gaze. Her figure was small and neat but had its lyrical indentations; her hair and skin were light. She presented a face and figure wholly American, in sharp contrast to Jud.

Jud was a short man, with a chunky build. He had a dark skin, black hair, and unexpected blue eyes. He could, it was true, look American enough to have come from a dozen different strains. But the strongest pull was clearly from Eastern Europe, while behind Marianne’s gray-eyed gaze might be the shadows of seventeenth-century Frenchmen exploring rivers in the Northeast; of English settlers following Penn to freedom, but still trusting no one but themselves.

Whatever elements previous centuries had planted in her make-up, by some alchemy of time they had resulted in a quality of blonde repose; while Jud was charged with a dark, restless impetus, amiable enough to the first glance, but beyond that dynamic, driven.

"These days you don’t have to scare me, Marianne said. I’m scared enough. I’m even packing two weeks before I have to leave."

That’s not fear, Jud said, smiling, that’s ambition. This one is a good script and you want to be sure to get to the coast on time.

Don’t be cynical, Jud. I want to do the picture. But I wish you were coming with me.

I don’t, Jud said. I’m too glad to have a play to do that I care about. You were glad up till a few days ago.

Marianne’s face took on a sullen look he knew well. Her eyes narrowed and her mouth tensed downward.

All right, she murmured. I am scared of the play. Ever since you took it on everything’s been getting scary.

What do you mean ‘scary’?

I guess because of what it’s about—it seems to make everything point backwards.

Wait a minute. I haven’t had breakfast yet, so I’m not as sharp as I should be. Do you mean what happened last night?

She nodded silently. Jud sighed, and taking her by the shoulders, he sat her down on the big couch that dominated the room in a green semicircle.

I had a bad dream, he said. I’ve had a few before. So has everybody.

You haven’t had one like that for three years. I held you for a few minutes before you could realize you were awake—and you could remember you were here. She shivered. You were soaking with sweat.

Were you very frightened?

I guess when I’m woken up suddenly I can’t quite remember I’m me for a while, either. She laughed her short, nervous little laugh, half throaty, half nasal. So there I was, in the middle of the night, not knowing who I was and holding a strange man in my arms. Then all of a sudden we were us again, and you stopped making sounds and fell asleep.

And you?

I had some vague idea of lying awake to protect you or something, but it was just the way it was when I was a little girl. One minute I was making up my mind to keep watch and the next thing the sunshine was waking me up, it was so bright.

We’ve been over this so much, Marianne. I’m fine now.

What was in the dream, Jud?

You know … He waved a hand in a vague gesture. It succeeded only in expressing a wish to change the subject.

No, I don’t. I guess I’m not supposed to, ever. She shook her head impatiently. The silence curtain is still up.

That again?

It would seem so.

It’s only a dream, my God!

If you think all I care about is analyzing your dreams, then let’s forget about it.

Okay.

Since the new play, it’s been eating away at you. I’ll bet you don’t know how much worse it is. It just came to me that you probably don’t know.

I do know, he admitted finally. But it’s not as bad as you think. And I can handle it.

Is it worth it, having to handle’ something like that?

I want to do this play. He paused. Don’t you want me to?

All right, she said. If you put it that way, of course I do.

He reached over and touched her face, stroking the corners of her mouth. She unfolded and bent toward him, a few strands of yellow hair falling over her broad forehead.

I should have made love to you last night, he said, smiling. Medicinally.

That wouldn’t have stopped the dream.

All right, sweet-face, how about a little humor? It’s only life or death.

She delivered a prepared, nasal attempt at a laugh and said, I can’t seem to control the tone of my laughter. And there are some important scenes in the picture where I need a good, husky laugh.

Don’t worry. It’s the movies. They can dub it.

Over my dead body.

In Hollywood anything can be arranged.

You mean my laughter or my dead body?

Either one.

All right, Marianne said. You’ve distracted me. I knew you were going to do the play. I just wanted to speak out. You know me.

I’m glad you did. Anxious to change the subject, he said, By the way, Sarah woke me up with something about a man calling. A Mr. Talk-something.

Marianne laughed. I got to the phone before he went out of his mind. Sarah is in love with the telephone this month. It was a man named Walkowitz.

What did he want?

He wouldn’t say. He said he knew you and you would want to see him.

Walkowitz, Jud murmured, puzzled. Who Walkowitz?

I don’t know. He’ll call later.

Jud shrugged. The first press release on the play went out the other day, he said. Suddenly I’ll have a new batch of old friends again. He put his arms around Marianne’s waist and hugged her to him, then moved his hands to her backside.

I started to say, let me feel how much I’m going to miss you.

That’s not what you’re feeling," she whispered.

After breakfast, Jud entered the study and went immediately to the large, round table in the center of the room. It was a battered maple piece he’d bought for five dollars when he’d first arrived in New York. On it, now, stood a cardboard replica of the set of At the Gates, the new play: a combined indoor and outdoor rendering of a stockade yard and barracks building. It was bleak and cold looking, even in the preliminary sketch version, and was dominated by a large gate on which were printed three German words.

Jud studied the model with dissatisfaction. It was too poetic looking, even in its coldness. The poetry would have to come out. He sat down in the brown leather chair near the desk and lit a cigarette. This was the important room. Along the walls were the books he had gathered from his first American schooling in the Los Angeles public schools to the present. Photographs of plays he had directed were scattered around the room—summer stock, off-Broadway, the first successful play on Broadway. Piles of scripts sat on the edges of chairs, some teetering precariously like the nervous authors who had sent them. And on the wall was a large photograph of Marianne in her first starring film role (a year and a half ago), as a Spanish peasant girl, dark and artificially sullen.

The stage director … It had been a goal, a destination, for so long; it seemed that the intensity and duration of a desire decreased its sense of reality once it was achieved. What would it be like, Jud wondered, in a world where you wished and—presto—it was true? Perhaps expectations and fantasies distorted dreams.

When he actually worked was it real; then it was not a role, it was characters, colors, a plastic stage on which to build. It didn’t matter then that it was so different from what a thin, sandy-haired boy of nine in a little Hungarian town had imagined it to be, jealously watching his sister playing Queen Esther in the Purim plays, year after year, dreaming of escape to the bright Molnar stages of Budapest.

The father of Sarah … How could this be so? Did one midnight spasm, plus a growing protective love, entitle him to be called father? His father, Max Kramer, had been a man who called forth that name: a massive frame and great tender hands; a small, reddish, well-trimmed beard, over which incongruously delicate lips smiled; and blue eyes, eyes of a determined expression.

The husband of Marianne … This role became more real every day. He had always thought of marriage as a sort of concrete, three-dimensional object. Marriage, like a table or a jug reflecting the light in a painting by Vermeer. But it was not so at all. It was more like one of those Chirico paintings he and Marianne used to gaze at on weekday afternoons at the Modern Museum—those long mysterious streets down which a child rolled a hoop, and which had no beginning, middle or end, only a sense of duration and change.

Jud stood up, clearing his mind for work. He picked up the notes he had made the day before and began to study the details of the model set. Then, suddenly, he experienced a flash of memory, the dream of the night before. It trailed in its wake terrible, half-lit images; an awful moment.

It was a recurrent dream, but had not appeared for a long while. This time it had taken a slightly different turn. It was always an arrival scene, not at any specific camp, rather a composite. The Auschwitz gates were grafted onto the countryside at the train station outside of Treblinka, and the guard who greeted him with a sly grin was the Blockführer, Stauffel. It was always the same. Stauffel would say, Well, so we’ve got you back now … And with that marvelous lucidity that is sometimes granted to dreamers, Jud would answer, No, it’s only a dream … That was how it went each time. But last night had been different. When he had said to the grinning Blockführer, It’s only a dream, Stauffel replied, Not so, Kramer. The other times it was a dream. This time it’s real. Then he had awakened, sweaty and unable for a moment to recognize Marianne, who had her arms around him.

The remembrance was over quickly, but it left Jud with an unfocused anger. Furiously, he struck out at the model of the stage set. It fell to the floor. He knelt swiftly and picked it up, feeling ashamed and foolish.

Luckily there was no damage done. Jud was still crouching on the floor by the desk when the phone rang. He stood up, set the piece of colored cardboard back on the table carefully, and picked up the phone. He heard Sarah’s voice piping something unintelligible over the extension.

Hang up, darling, he said. When the click came, Jud said, Hello, I’m sorry. Who is it?

A low and resonant voice with a European accent said: Mr. Kramer, if you please.

Speaking.

There was a pause on the other end as if the man were taking a deep breath, or gathering his strength. Then the voice said: Judah Kramer? I believe we have known each other. My name is Carl Walkowitz.

2

PAUL ROVIC MOVED LIKE a heavy cat from the kitchen, down the long foyer, to the living room. He carefully balanced his cup of coffee on its saucer as he walked. Sitting on the couch in a pool of sunlight, he sipped the unsweetened black coffee and set the cup down on the low table in front of him. Then he leaned back, resting his head on the nubby green material of the couch—a man gathering his loose and vagrant energies.

Rovic was fifty years old (and fond of joking, Half of my life is over). Thinning gray hair, a pale complexion, and the black-rimmed glasses he wore combined to give him a general appearance of sallow studiousness. This, together with a slow-burning passion about the arts of the theater, suggested to many people a kind of secular rabbinical style. Students at the Theater Workshop sometimes called him The Rabbi, but with an undertone of respect.

He yawned and closed his eyes for a moment. There was a flow of air from the half-opened window that fronted on the gray ribbon of the East River. The air was warmer than it had been all month; it carried a memory of spring. Last spring he had been taken ill. A mild coronary, the heart specialist had called it, causing a macabre burst of laughter from Rovic’s own physician.

I love that specialist’s jargon. You’ve had what they call a heart attack. You’re not an invalid, but—less work, some sedation, some anticoagulants, no stairs, and no cigarettes.

A sadness gripped him. For some time now the sensation of being on the outside had troubled him. It had started after he’d left the sickbed. A thickness of wintry glass seemed to separate him from the emotions of other people. He saw their drive, their intensity, but some crucial tone was missing. He could listen to his daughter Janet plead with him, or with Louise, about a part for which she cared so much, and would have no reaction other than a mildly curious interest.

Everything—his daughter’s growing pains, money discussions, the now infrequent times of making love to Louise—all were formal gestures; he wondered if all this was connected in some way with his illness.

‘And death,’ he quoted in a shame-faced murmur, ‘had touched him with a silver wing—upon his silver heart …’ The wave of self-pity receded, leaving him only with a yen for a cigarette. He inhaled deeply of the morning air and found it lightly perfumed with lilac. Opening his eyes, he saw his daughter Janet standing in front of him. Are you wearing a lilac-type perfume, by any chance?

Toilet water. She held a thin wrist, laced with visible veins, to his nose, and he sniffed the false spring.

I’m disappointed. I thought it was coming from outside.

Winter’s hardly started, Janet said, straightening her yellow wool dress with a matter-of-fact tug. She was a small, trim girl of nineteen destined, like most small people, always to look several years younger than she was. A childlike demureness was the enemy that pursued her. She fought it with weapons like low-cut dresses and heavy doses of toilet water (musky perfumes in the evening).

She asked him, Did you talk to Jud about the part?

Yes, dear. He’s not sure yet.

He’s cast most of the other parts already.

We’ve cast, Rovic corrected her gently. This is a Workshop production, not a Broadway circus.

Janet moaned, You know what I mean, Daddy. It’s a good part and I want it. Did he say I was too young?

No, but I imagine that will be the only problem.

Oh, please, she said, please don’t let the age thing kill my chances.

Rovic looked at her, watching her pretty oval face crinkle into unhappiness. I want you to play the girl, he said. I think you can do it beautifully. But Jud is the director, and you have to convince him.

Then at least promise me I can read for him.

I’ll try and exact that oath from Jud this afternoon. Now, can you get through the day?

He stood up and touched her black, shiny hair in dismissal.

Do you think Jud wants Marianne to play it instead of me? she murmured.

He grinned. If you’re trying to prove you’re a born actress, you’re doing splendidly, Janet. No, I don’t think so. Anyway, she’s going to make a movie.

Rovic listened to his daughter reply, trying to recall if years ago her voice had sounded more natural, more right for a young girl, than this breathy, actress’s sound that projected attitudes instead of feelings. He watched her as she stood in a characteristic young woman’s slouch (at least the posture was genuine): back curved inward, youthful belly pushed slightly forward. Since she was nervous this morning the slouch was exaggerated, her make-up was careless, and her low-lidded brown eyes seemed unable to focus on him.

She might change her mind, Janet was saying.

Subject closed, he said firmly.

All right. She smiled. I’ll go and cut flowers like a sad Chekhov heroine. Janet started to leave, then stopped and said, as an afterthought: How are you feeling?

Oh, get out, Rovic said.

She was gone, leaving a trace of lilac scent. Rovic took a cigarette from a box on the coffee table, placed it between his thin, pale lips, and puffed lightly, his way of trying to satisfy the old habit of years without breaking the doctor’s orders. It kept the mouth busy, and if he puffed hard enough he got a sniff, if not a taste, of the tobacco.

Outside, pigeon wings cast slippery shadows on the stone sill. The gulping sounds the birds made were usually familiar and pleasant. This morning they annoyed him. They seemed inappropriate to a morning in November, and they accentuated his feeling of being a convalescent. He dropped the cigarette and went to the window to look out at the chill rippling of the river.

His mind was taken up, suddenly, with Jud’s face—roundish, serious, with a grave, listening expression and clear, blue eyes. Jud had become his acting student five years ago. He was a bad actor, lacking a certain physicality, an identification with his own body, that a fine actor must have. But Jud and he were in immediate rapport about the theater. Running the Workshop and his private classes, Paul had gotten caught up in the mechanics of teaching, while Jud was living in a furnished room in the Village, night-clerking in a hotel and burning with ideas he wanted to put on a stage.

Louise took a certain pleasure in pointing out that it was a banal situation—the older teacher, the young director. It a was as if Jud had taken up in a direct line where he had left off when he’d begun to teach more and more for financial security, when he’d begun to turn down plays that seemed risky ventures, and when reviews sloughed off his work, or on occasion, failed to mention it at all.

There was more to it that Louise could not possibly know. Jud’s distaste for the superficial work all around them, and his ability to demonstrate in class productions that he had ways of getting at the truth under the skin of a play, had a direct reverberation in Paul’s memory. It was the way he himself thought, the driving thinking behind the few successes he had had as a young director in the early thirties.

It was flattering, too, the way Jud treated Paul—a mixture of friendship and respect and family feeling. This last was particularly important to Paul. It had been a great disappointment to him when, after giving birth to Janet, Louise was told she could not have any more children. The doctors had doubted the possibility of a successful birth the first time. So she had submitted to having her tubes tied off and Paul had been forced to forgo his desire to be the head of a big family. Then Jud came, his own family ashes and smoke over Europe, anxious to gather together a new family without delay.

Rovic thought again of Jud and what he had survived. And behind this thought there came a feeling that replaced the rootless sadness of a moment before; it was a fugitive feeling, but it was one of joy.

Louise, he won’t promise anything, Janet moaned.

Her mother took it calmly. Don’t sit on the bed just after it’s been made.

Oh, who cares about that? What am I going to do?

Louise smiled at her in genuine affection. Just fear God and do right. That’s an old motto—of the French kings, I think.

Well, it can’t have been such a good motto. They don’t have kings in France any more.

That’s true. You’d better forget that one.

And try Jud?

No-o-o. First let me try Joe Lear.

I don’t know, Louise. I think he’s supposed to be only for money. He’s not going to be involved on the production end.

Wait, my girl, just wait. The fever will strike Joe Lear. When a businessman catches fire for the theater, it makes Stanislavski’s passion look like an adolescent crush.

Janet grew excited. How should we approach it? Shall I come along? What are you going to say?

We’ll see. But in the meantime, get off that damned beautiful bedspread!

Janet jumped up. I don’t see what’s so important about the way a bedroom looks. Outside of sleeping, the only thing this big bed is there for is when we have people in, or when there’s a party, and then there’s always a thousand coats and furs and hats all over it. So why all the fuss about a brocaded bedspread?

For two people. Me, and that first person who comes in here to toss a coat down. Louise drew the Venetian blinds so that a half light colored the room. She paused to study the effect of the big four-poster, the white drapes that fell smartly to just an inch above the gray shag rug, and the overly delicate chaise longue.

These were some of the tangible results of the last few years, which had seen the growing success of Paul’s Theater Workshop and of his personal reputation as a teacher. Louise was enjoying it fiercely.

3

MARIANNE ANSWERED THE DOORBELL. Ginny was vacuuming one of the back rooms and hadn’t heard the ring. A tall man, wearing an olive-green raincoat much too light for the season, stood in the hall in an attitude of patient expectation. For some reason Marianne knew immediately who he was.

You must be Mr. Walkowitz, she said.

Yes, the man said. Mr. Kramer asked me to come by. I spoke to him on the telephone, earlier. There was a vaguely foreign lilt to his voice, a rhythm and inflection rather than a specific accent.

He told me, Marianne said. Please come in.

While she hung his coat in the hall closet, Walkowitz, hands in the pocket of his trousers, inspected the apartment and Marianne, without staring directly at him, inspected Walkowitz. He was impressive and disturbing at first sight. Tall, over six feet, he had a burly build and a face that was, in contrast, almost too poetic looking—the fine, narrow-bridged nose and high, prominent