After Auschwitz: A Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

stressed the “once in awhile.”
    After she left I thought about how it often happens that when we are most frantic about losing love, we do just the thing calculated to irritate or even drive away the loved one. Write the letter, send an envoy, call up on one pretext or another. Hannah was no different.
    When she first found out about me and Claudia—which was just after we’d bought a vacation home on the beach at Forte de Marmi—she was driven mad by the idea that I took Claudia there and that I had stopped making love to her, Hannah, because Claudia provided better sex. She would sit on the sofa in provocative poses or I’d find her in bed in a tight corset or lacy underwear with a slit at the crotch.
    â€œWhy do you wear this silly thing?” I asked her annoyed that she was ruining the spontaneity I prized. And she started to cry. When I mentioned this to Claudia she rebuked me for humiliating Hannah. And of course Hannah was right, in a way. Claudia
did
give me another kind of sex. Sex that had no strings attached, that wasn’t a declaration of eternal love or even of love that was going to last until next week. It was just a good fuck with an easy-going woman, whereas sex with Hannah involved recriminations, tears, and always a nagging sense of guilt that would make me review all the things I had done for her and how I would always love her.
    â€œWhy are you leaving me?” she asked over and over.
    â€œI’m not leaving. I want to live in two houses that’s all. I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I want you both. That’s just how I am.”
    This was the era of my power over Hannah. All her being was concentrated on bringing me home. Before, she had alwaysbeen loving; now she had a sort of desperation that made her eyes shine and her cheeks redden. I liked the way, when I called to tell her I wanted to see her, she dropped everything, even threw people out of the apartment. I hated myself for indulging myself this way but I was virtually addicted. I kept telling her to forget me though I knew she couldn’t.
    I am still fascinated by splits between kindness and hate, whether among Hannah’s villagers, soft-spoken American Southerners, or myself. I used to try and talk to Claudia about this.
    â€œOf course people are capable of both,” Claudia snorted, “why do you worry about such things. Don’t be naïve. Aren’t there enough things to worry about? Wait until you are kidnapped like Aldo Moro.”
    Claudia was obsessed by his capture. Every night she was glued to the television while talking heads described the position the government should take. Should they negotiate with the
Brigate Rosse,
pay them what they asked, or should Moro himself urge them to stand firm and if necessary die a martyr? When he was assassinated she was horrified. I think she was convinced it was an elaborate game of chicken.
    Now that I’m nearly ninety years old, I wake up in the late morning when the sun enters directly and I’m not sure where I am: in her old apartment or mine. For a moment after waking up, I’m not sure. But then I take ownership again of the terraces loaded with flowering plants, pots of geraniums, huge soft ferns, cacti, and the view over the city, the rooftops. I watch the gulls circling, crying out like children, or sometimes like cats in heat on a summer night. A gull has laid her eggs on the jutting roof just below us, protected by a raised drain.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Hannah asks from the terrace door, “I didn’t know where you were.”
    â€œDid you think I had vanished, flown away?” Jumping off the terrace does have its attractions, doing away with myself before I lose the ability to remember.
    A week later the eggs hatch and three fluffy balls of gray tumble over each other, trying to walk on the curved roof tiles. I can watch for hours, feeling the warmth of the late spring sun on my back.