Hope: A Tragedy Read Online Free PDF

headlines? Can you imagine the outrage?
    Local Man Evicts Anne
Frank
.
    Jew Drops Dime on Holocaust Survivor
.
    Brutalized by Nazis, Tossed Out by a Jew: One Survivor’s Tragic Story of Something.
    If he’d heard the story, he would join in the outcry himself; if he were watching TV one night and the news came on and they reported, with all their practiced shock and disgust, that a man had thrown an elderly, broken Holocaust survivor out of his home, would he not share in the outrage? And wouldn’t he be right to do so?
    The story gets weirder
, the smiley anchorwoman would say:
the homeowner was a
Jew
.
    Boy, oh, boy
, the smiling anchorman would add.
Now I’ve heard everything. Now I have heard everything
.
    This was a hell of a way to start anew. He’d never received any love from his mother; it would have been nice to be accepted, even if only for a while, by a community. But if he turned her in, they would never forgive him. And why should they? Hi, we’re from the community welcome wagon; here’s a flaming bag of dog shit. They would have to move yet again.
    But what could he do? Let this crazy old woman live in his attic? It was absurd. For how long? A week? A month? A year? Until whatever Holocaust she thought she was hiding from came to whatever end she thought it would come to? Until she dropped dead?
    And what if she really was Anne Frank? It wasn’t impossible—they’d found former Nazi officers in Rio, hadn’t they, ex-camp commandants in New Jersey. Why not a famous survivor in Stockton? Could he take that chance? What if he called the police, and they came over and cuffed her and dragged her out of his house and discovered that, my goodness, my God, she really is Anne Frank. She’s alive. He would forever be known as the person—the
Jewish
person—that reported Anne Frank to the authorities. Even if he could survive the shame, even if he could weather the ignominy of it all, he could never survive the look on Mother’s face when she found out. He had a better chance of surviving the Holocaust itself.
    My own son, she would say, ratting out Anne Frank.
    You had to call the police, she would say. What’s the matter, you didn’t have Dr. Mengele’s number? He doesn’t make house calls?
    You want Elie Wiesel’s address? Maybe you could turn him in, too?
    No. No, no. Hell no. There would be no police, of that much Kugel was certain. He would find another way. The old lady would die soon, from the looks of it, maybe he could wait it out. But then what?
Hello, police? There’s a dead woman in my attic. Her name? Well, uh, funny story . . .
    Kugel gently placed the phone back in its cradle and, sliding quietly from bed, knelt down beside the vent on the floor.
    He listened.
    Maybe he’d dreamt it.
    Maybe she’d gone.
    The forced-air heating system the Messerschmidts had retrofitted into the farmhouse had been usual in design for the times, but unusually poor in construction. The system pulled in fresh air through a large duct that ran from the attic to the heater in the cellar; from there, a network of secondary ducts carried the heated air through the walls, to every room in the house, where it emerged through metal vents in the floor. The better systems employed fiberglass-insulated ducts to carry the air through the walls; the Messerschmidts had gone with the cheaper steel materials, and as a result, the ducts carried sound at least as well as they did heat. It wasn’t long after settling into the new home that Kugel realized he could hear every sound, from every room, of every floor in the house, clear as a bell, through the vents in the floor, a ghostly intercom system he didn’t want and could never silence.
    He pressed his ear against the vent.
    Mother moaning.
    The television laughing.
    And the typing.
    From the attic.
    Ceaseless.
    Desperate.
    If only I’d found shit, thought Kugel. If only I’d found an arsonist.
    It dawned on Kugel as he knelt on the cold floor of his bedroom that