Daggers Drawn

Funny Story Larry Beinhart

My father is visiting for the holidays. He’s an old man now. I’m not exactly young either. At least not the way they used to measure men. Pushing fifty. Pushing it quite hard actually.

My son is six, pushing seven. At that age you can’t push hard enough. Time flows like treacle, black, sweet, slow, thick and sticky. You can’t move it fast enough. If you charge into it you just get tangled up and slowed down, then you end up having to take a bath.

At my age, when you would give whatever there is to give to slow the metronome down, it seems an enviable state. But try telling that to a kid racing to be a race driver, fireman, policeman, wrestler, Power Ranger, space scientist, karate fighter. Generation upon generation tries to tell their kids that, and each aging parent sounds like a jerk when he does. Even my father did. I don’t mention that however.

David, my son, spills his juice on the rug. His mother, my wife, starts scolding and I go to get paper towels to sop it up. “I told you to be careful of the rug,” she says. “It’s a valuable, very valuable piece. How many times have I told you never to bring drinks on that rug.”

“It’s an old rug,” David says. Which is true.

My father, looks at me with something less than a wink. Possibly a twinkle. As if to say, listen to this, this is how mothers and sons talk, for all time, what a pleasure to hear this.

“The rug was a gift from your grandfather. It’s from the old country, and it’s a very valuable piece.” What a curious expression, the old country. It makes it sound as if we came from one of those rustic peasanty nations that Mercantilism and the Industrial Revolution had more or less bypassed, someplace like Rumania, Albania, Ireland or the Ukraine.

“Is it as old as Grandpop?” David says, awe in his voice, that lets us know that Grandpop is about as old a thing, let alone as old a person, as he can imagine. Grandpop is pretty old, and he looks old, with wrinkles and liver spots and wisps of hair to highlight the baldness of his liver spotted, wrinkly dome. Big veins stand out on his hands and his fingers move stiffly and painfully, arthritic, as well as just old.

“Older,” Grandpop says.

“Did you get it new?” David asks.

It’s a big old rug, 12’ × 18’, a Persian. Handmade, hand knotted, with an intricate pattern. I’ve been told how many knots per square inch, but I’ve forgotten and experts, when they look at it, instantly exclaim things about the pattern and the clan and, most of all, about its probable price. I can’t. I just know it’s the second most valuable thing we own. It’s worth less than the house, but more than the car, a five-year-old Lexus. But, like the good old Persian it is, in a house with a son and a daughter and a dog and a cat and, from time to time, rabbits, gerbils and wounded birds, it looks old and faded and worn and as comfortable as a home.

“No, not really,” Grandpop says.

“Did you get it at like a garage sale, or an auction?” David asks. He’s been to lots and lots of both. We’ve furnished the house, except for the rug and one or two other bits, from garage sales and auctions. This is not to say that it looks like Levittown leftovers. My wife is a woman of terrific taste which she combines with immense ferocity in her search for true value. For her, anything short of getting a $1400 chair for $225 is a furnishing defeat.

“Would you like me to tell you a story about that rug?” Grandpop says.

David looks doubtful. Furniture acquisition stories don’t thrill him. He’s really had his fill of them. When my wife does make a furnishing score she not only brings the item home, she brings the tale of its purchase with it: the days, weeks, months of searching; the revelatory moment of finding; the strategy and tactics of the negotiation and a blow by blow of the bargaining.

“You’ll like it, it’s a funny story,” his grandfather says.

David is not convinced. Then I, like a schmuck, which means jewel in German but means schmuck in English, say, “That’s not a good story for him.”

“Tell me, Grandpop,” David says.

“Pop,” I say. Why I imagine I can still head this off, I don’t know. Maybe I don’t really expect to stop him and I just think it is the responsible, parental thing to try.

“What? The boy shouldn’t know?”

Maybe he shouldn’t. “He’s a little young.”

“Maybe I won’t be here next year to tell him.”

Try to argue with that. But, nonetheless, I did. “You will. I say he’s not ready. If, God forbid, you’re not here, I’ll tell him. When the time comes.”

“Tell me,” David says. Of course. “I want to know.”

“What’s this God forbid stuff,” my father asks me.

“It’s a turn of phrase.”

“It’s superstition,” he says, more fiercely than seems called for.

“OK, it’s superstition. I’m superstitious, I would like you to come back next year and for many years to come.”

“How did you get the rug, Grandpop?”

His grandfather gets out of his chair with creaks and groans and sighs. Not the furniture, the man. And gets down on his knees on the floor. He rolls back a corner of the rug. “Look at this,” he says. “This is fine, fine wool. Strong wool. It wears like iron. Woven by hand, the threads are tied by hand. The dyes they use in this, they’ll last hundreds of years. Today they make millions of everything, carpets, cars, toys, pens, books, chairs, glasses, silverware, they make it fast, they make it cheap. I’m not saying that’s bad, or that the stuff they make is bad. I’m not an old curmudgeon, can’t move with the times, stuck in the past, can’t appreciate progress. I like progress, I like to see everybody, every working man, and woman, with washers and dryers and summer clothes and sports clothes and ski clothes and running shoes, walking shoes, aerobic shoes, tennis shoes, dress shoes, shoes with winking red lights in the heel. Them I like especially.

“But, you should understand, boy, that once upon a time, not everything came out of a plastic extruder by the twenty millions. Once things were made by hand. One at a time. And there weren’t so many, many, many things. There were just a few things. Even for rich people, there weren’t so very many things. So each thing became more important. Can you imagine going to the pawn shop... does he know what a pawn shop is?”

“Ask him, not me,” I say.

“What’s a pawn shop, David?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s a place where you leave something valuable and they loan you money.”

“Dad just uses his card at the bank.”

‘Right,” Grandpop says, “I understand. Me too. But once, they didn’t do that. When you borrowed money, you had to leave something tangible behind. Something that the person who loaned you the money could hold onto, even sell, if you didn’t pay back. In the old days, you could leave a coat and borrow money.”

“A coat?” David says, incredulous. As well he might in these days of cheap, and truth to be told, disposable clothing.

“Right, exactly. Material things, they had value. Not just big things like cars, but watches and jackets, even hats. And rugs.”

“How did you get the rug, Grandpop?”

I just sighed and shook my head.

“I stole it,” he says.

I throw up my hands, make the sound of exasperation, drop my hands and shake my head.

“You stole it?”

“Pop, do you have to do this?”

“Yes, I stole it,” David’s grandfather says without a trace of shame. Even embarrassment. Without a thought of discretion.

“What kind of role model, what kind of ideas are you putting in my son’s head?”

“Just truth,” he says.

“It’s not funny,” I say.

“There’s funny and there’s funny,” he says.

“My dad says not to steal things. He makes me give things back when I steal them,” my wonderful son says.

“Your father is absolutely right,” the subversive old man says without a hint of sincerity.

“Did you steal a lot of things?” my son asks.

“You bet,” his grandfather says.

“Great, just great,” I say.

“Really, Grandpop,” David says, as wide eyed and fascinated as you would expect.

“Really, David,” Grandpop says. “I was a thief.”

I suspect that damage is being done here that will take me years to undo. A rogue, an absolute rogue.

“I was more than a thief. I was about the best thief in Munich. Which was a very great place to be a thief because it was then, as it is now, a very rich city. With many rich people who loved expensive things. As they do now. Even though then there was a depression and what is called hyper-inflation. Do you know what hyper-inflation is?”

“He’s six, for God’s sake,” I point out.

“Like in Brazil,” my son says. What does he know about Brazil. The kid hardly knows how to buy a candy bar and get correct change.

“It means that every day the money is worth less. Yesterday a candy bar is fifty cents, tomorrow it costs a dollar. A week later, you need two dollars. Than five dollars. In two, three weeks, a candy bar costs ten dollars. Then twenty. That’s hyper-inflation. So it was better to have things than to have money. I never stole money. You understand why?”

“Stealing money is bad?” my son offers as a reason not to steal money. That’s the reason he learned at home.

“Because when you have hyperinflation money is worthless. It’s junk. It’s garbage.”

My wife, listening to this begins to gesture at me frantically. This is a conversation I’m not looking forward to. I’m a fairly weak-willed fellow, or, if you wish to be polite, easy-going, and I tend to go whichever way the wind blows. What it is, I’m actually pretty resilient and self-satisfied, so a lot of things just don’t matter to me because there is something at the center that stays fairly pleased with itself even when the weather changes. And they are both, my father and my wife, very strong-willed people. I have never been able to silence either one of them or stop either one of them from saying what they thought needed saying, however little it actually needed saying.

“I’ll make some tea,” I said. Why? Why not say, Pop, I’m going into the kitchen so my wife can tell me to tell you to shut up because this is most emphatically not a story for a six-year old boy. Theft is just the beginning. There’s violence and despair and murder.

“He’s six years old, for God’s sake,” my wife says. Severely.

“No shit,” I say.

“Well, aren’t you going to stop him?”

“Why don’t you stop him?” I say.

“He’s your grandfather,” she says. This is marital tennis. Not a match game by any means, really just a warm-up, stroking matters back and forth.

“He knows David is six. So maybe he has some reason for telling it now.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, what reason could there be for telling a six-year old his grandfather was a thief, a professional thief.”

“He was, to hear him tell it, the prince of thieves. He was a cat burglar. Actually, he rather relishes himself as Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief.”

“That doesn’t make it better,” my wife says.

I say, “Achievement is always to be admired.”

She is not amused. She says so. She is frequently not amused. I frequently dream about being away from news of non-amusement.

“Maybe he wants to tell David to always be the best you can be, no, the best there is, no matter what your field of endeavor. And do it with style and panache. I mean my father was no worse, or not much worse, than D’Artagnan.” David and I are reading The Three Musketeers together. What a revelation to rediscover them. Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan were appalling by contemporary standards. They’re all common brawlers who go around drinking in bars, then refusing to pay, then getting into knife fights and stabbing people, sometimes to death. Alright, the knives are really big and they call them swords, but I can’t see the difference. On the moral plane at any rate. Porthos and Aramis both live off of women. D’Artagnan claims to be in love with one woman, makes love to another, without a moment’s hesitation, then jumps all over the second woman’s maid, not even out of lust, but so he can use her. I am more than faintly envious. Athos, the most noble and sensitive and aristocratic of the bunch, murders his wife. Twice. Why? Because he discovered that she had once been convicted of a crime, had been branded, as in having a brand burnt into her flesh with a hot iron just like they do to cows in cowboy movies. The only remotely moral message implicit in these events seems to be get it right the first time.

“Tell him to stop,” she says.

“No.”

“Tell him,” she commands. Demands. Requires.

“Why don’t you tell him?” I suggest, sensibly, thoughtfully, fairly.

“He’s your father,” she says.

I resist the temptation to say, I knew that. I say, “Exactly.”

“So? You have to stand up for your family, and this is your family, your wife and your child...” This is just the wind-up, a prepositional phrase, as it were, for a lengthy and major statement which will be delivered with such fervor and eloquence that, right or wrong, I will certainly feel that her position is unassailable and not to be denied.

There is only one chance and that is to head her off at the pass, fire off a few shots, spook the lead animal and turn the stampede in a different direction.

“It’s because he’s my father that you should tell him,” I said. “My emotional involvement, and his, the roles, father and son, parent and child, are permanent you know. They never go away. You can’t unravel them with your parents — in spite of four years of therapy. I’m not criticizing you,” I hasten to add. Though I probably am. Though I couldn’t say what I need to say without saying it. So what do you do with that? It is a huge amount of work to have a conversation with my wife. I’m tired of it. “I’m just saying that if I say it we get involved in a whole to do about the parent-child relationship and lots of emotional shit. If you tell him, you can tell him adult to adult, in fact you will probably assume the dominant role as parent, which you are to David, and since my father is really playing a boy to boy thing with David, that puts you in a superior position.”

“It’s your responsibility,” she says.

“Morally, that’s true. I agree with you a hundred percent.” That’s one of my best tactics with her. It’s very important to her to be right and morally correct. “However, pragmatically, if we want him to stop, he’s more likely to listen to you.”

Her mouth opens. She wants more to come out.

“You’re absolutely correct,” I tell her, before more comes out. “It is my responsibility. But, if I do it, it won’t work. If you do it, it will.”

“Alright,” she says. Disdainful of my ineffectuality — but not unbearably so, this time — she goes back into the living room.

As we go back in we hear David ask, “Why did you steal? Was it because you were hungry and your children were starving?” He has heard that some people steal because they must. This is the legacy of liberalism in our immediate culture and in our house: criminality comes from deprivation. When, and if, it is ever true, I suppose it imparts more than an excuse, a certain legitimacy, even nobility, to theft. ‘I would steal before I would let my family starve.’ Don Corleone morality. However, it is rarely true. The starving tend to just go on and starve and to the degree they steal it is to snatch the bread off the plates of those starving beside them, not by launching daring raids on the manor house on the hill.

“I stole because I wanted to,” my grandfather tells my son.

“Isidore,” my wife says, commandingly.

“One minute,” Izzy says. “You see, I came from a fine family. My grandfather — you see, I had a father and he had a father, I know that you know that but to think about it and see it in your mind, that’s something else. My grandfather was a Rabbi. And he had three sons and one daughter.

“His youngest son was a doctor...”

My wife doesn’t interrupt, even though her command has gone unheeded. Perhaps because this part is alright, this is sort of noble family history, roots, capable of generating lots of sentiment, and she likes that sort of thing.

“That doctor was my father. He was very scientific, very secular and very assimilated. Do you know what assimilated means?”

“Or secular for that matter,” I put in.

“No,” my son says.

“Do you know what a Rabbi is?” my grandfather asks.

“Yes,” my son says. “He’s like a priest. For Jewish people. And I’m part Jewish.”

“Right,” my wife says. She’s the one who’s brought him to temple, though she’s not Jewish at all. I’m totally secular. As was my father. Totally. Even adamantly.

“And assimilated, it means that we became, as much as we could, just like the other people around us. You are completely American. We were as German as Germans could be. We loved Bach and Wagner and read Goethe and respected learning and orderliness. Except...”

“Except what?”

“Except for me,” Grandpop says. “My father had three sons. One became a medical doctor, as he was. One became a professor of chemistry, and the third, became the black sheep of the family.”

“And that was you!” David cries with delight.

“Isidore, would you come into the kitchen. Now.” My wife says.

“What for?”

“I don’t know how you like your tea.”

“A little bit of cream, two sugars,” he says. “Cubes, if you have them. I like sugar cubes.”

“Because I want to talk to you,” she says.

“Alright,” he says, getting up off the floor with even more creaks and sighs than he required to get down there. “There was so much goodness and orderliness around,” he says. “And I had so much sap in me, I just couldn’t stand it.”

“Now, please,” my wife says.

“Is mom going to let Grandpop finish his story?” David asks me as they disappear into the kitchen-conference room.

“I wouldn’t like to bet on it either way,” I say. I’m curious myself, who’s going to win this little to-do.

“Dad, can we go to the video store,” he says.

“Sure.”

“I want to get a movie called To Catch a Thief,” he says. “Have you ever seen it?”

“Yes.”

“Will I like it?”

“Well, if I remember, it’s got a lot of love stuff in it...”

“Yuchey.”

“...but aside from that you should like it.”

They return from the kitchen. My son and I look toward them, searching their faces for clues as to what will ensue. It’s real clear. My father has a slight smile on his face. If you’re in a bad mood it can look like a sneer. I remember it well from growing up. And how it used to infuriate me. My wife, on the other hand, looks pale and chastened. I wonder what he could possibly have said to her. I’ve never achieved that effect. I guess I still have something to learn from the old man.

Isidore lowers himself slowly down to the floor. More creaks, groans, sighs. My wife goes back into the kitchen, hastening, it turns out, to bring him his tea, as he likes it, though not with sugar cubes. We’ve never had them around. I suspect we are about to start stocking them. She also brings a plate of some not very sweet, adult sort of cookies for Grandpop to share with David.

From where I sit the Christmas tree more or less frames them. Strings of light, little wooden sleds and Santas and elves all made cheaply in China hanging from the branches, along with glass balls and an eclectic assortment of thisment and thatment of ornaments assembled over the years. Presents in patterned paper and glittery ribbons are spread out on the floor behind them.

“Christmas was our best season,” Grandpop says. “I had a partner. A young man named Jurgen. This was a very strange time. Germany had its Jew laws, these were laws that were separating out the Jews from the German people. For us, this was very confusing because we saw ourselves as Germans, as Jews hardly at all. But Jurgen and I had become friends before all that and we stayed friends, chasing girls together, you’re too young for that, yes?”

“I like girls,” David says.

“But not like that,” I explain. Though it should not need explanation. “He means he hasn’t reached the age where he won’t play with girls, not that he’s reached the age, which comes after that, where all he wants to do is play with girls.”

“Of course,” Grandpop says. “We liked, what kids nowadays call life in the fast lane. Cash, clothes, cars.” As if suddenly remembering who is in his audience, he adds, with an admonishing finger, a gesture he has surely copied from somewhere because I know it is not innate to him, when he wanted to make a point, a hit, though openhanded and mild, was more his style, “Of course, I would be very unhappy if you were to be that way. You should be more like my brothers. Students. Men of learning. Respected. You understand?”

“Sure,” David says, tuning right into his grandfather’s conspiracy to commit hypocrisy. In his short life, the only things he has ever expressed a desire to be when he grows up are things that are defined as testosterone-driven activities, things with fighting, fires, vehicles, guns. From today we can add stealing.

“Jurgen was the outside man. I was the inside man. He had a way with serving girls that you would not believe. They loved him. They had but to meet him and their eyes would get big and round like cows’ eyes and they would look up at him like this.” He rolls his head around with a motion quite definitely evokes mooing and cud chewing. “And they would tell him everything. What the family they worked for was buying as presents, when they were going visiting, when the houses would be empty. I was helping Jewish families sell their jewelry so I knew a lot of the jewelers. I would get information from them about people buying expensive jewelry. Also there were several that were not so honest who would buy the jewelry we stole from us.

“Finally there were a few who worked with us. When they sold expensive pieces, they would tell us. Then we would steal it and we would sell it back to them.”

“Cool,” David said.

“Isidore,” my wife said, very sternly. It is a tone of voice I have come to loathe.

“Sorry,” Grandpop said, sounding just like I do when I’m making a meaningless pro forma acknowledgement. My wife glared at me. Of course.

“Anyway, Christmas would come, and we would have our houses picked out. We would know what was inside, or enough to know it was worthwhile, taking the risk. And how to get in and when the house would be empty. The maid’s rooms in big houses were usually way up on top and sometimes a window would be left open for us.

“I was the cat,” he says, leaning forward, smiling and immensely pleased with himself. “I could climb, I could get my fingertips into the smallest crack, I could stand on the narrowest ledge. And I could jump from one hold to the next. To do this you have to be two things: fearless and skinny. I was both.

“Other times I would pick the lock...” he looks down at his cramped old hands and sighs for the dexterity that they once had and the youth that it represented and all that went with that youth. “Or cut the glass. There were many ways. None of which a well-brought-up young man like yourself should know,” he adds. No need to mention that he had been as well brought up as David. Better in fact. Isidore was the son of a doctor, grandson of a Rabbi. David was the son of a composer of advertising jingles, grandson of a thief.

“Anyway, we had costumes. Jurgen would dress as Father Christmas, Santa Claus. I would dress in very dark, dark green. Almost black so that I would be invisible in the dark, and smear dark green make-up on my face so even the white of my face would not catch the light, but, but, if a policeman were to stop us, I would say that I was one of the elves from the Black Forest, one of Father Christmas’s helpers. Most of the things we stole would still be wrapped, you see, so we would say we were going to a party and bringing the gifts.”

“Did that actually work?” I blurt out, incredulous.

“Only once was it put to the test,” he says.

“Why are you filling our son’s head with this, this, terrible nonsense?” my wife says.

“It’s the story of the rug,” he says. Innocently. “It’s a funny story.”

“Is this true?” she asks.

“As God is my witness,” my father says. And who knows what that means. To whatever degree he believes in God, he is very, very angry with Him. And finds His deeds unforgiveable. At least that’s what he’s told me.

“Can we at least not wallow in the details,” my wife says.

“Of course, Moira,” he says. “Not an unnecessary word. I will cut to the chase.”

“Thank you,” she says.

“So, on this particular Christmas, we are doing pretty well. We get into this big mansion that is close to the Englischer Gardens, which is a big park in Munich, like Central Park in New York or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. What I’m there for is a diamond bracelet, I forget now the details of carats and number of diamonds, but this was worth, today, $50,000, $60,000. Lots of diamonds, lots of glitter, a real show piece. Also there was hidden away, a lessor piece, worth maybe fifteen, twenty thousand. One was for the wife, one was for the mistress. Plus there were many other things, the silver, small art pieces, whatever was small and valuable. Plus they had children. Close to the ages of my children then, who were, one was younger than you and one the girl, was exactly your age. Very pretty she was, and like you she had blond hair. So did I, when I was young and I had hair. Not these white wisps...”

The phone rang. I went to answer it. I knew the next bit. My father saw the rug there. He recognized it. It had belonged to a very rich Jewish banker in Munich, someone very well-known at the time, but whose name meant nothing to me and would mean nothing to David. My father recognized it because he had robbed the previous owner some years earlier. He had admired it then. It was, he said, the best Persian he had ever seen. Now he could not resist it.

The phone call was from one of our neighbors, a sweet young woman named Elaine. She’s a widow, but reasonably well off, very attractive, with dark eyes, black hair and a full figure. Our daughter is visiting her daughter and Elaine is calling to find out if I will be coming over to pick Susan up or if she should deliver her. I say I’ll come over, which I know is what she wants to hear. It’s easier for her and means that we might be able to spend a few adult minutes together. I tell her it will be an hour or so. Elaine says to come whenever I can, when I can will be all alright.

When I hang up the phone Moira is standing there. She has that I-have-things-to-say look in her eye. Actually, it is a look that is rarely absent, even when she is saying the things.

“What,” I ask her, pre-emptively, “did my father say to you? To blackmail you into letting him finish telling this tale of the Yiddisher-Deutcher Robin Hood?”

“He said that he had been to the doctor and that he doubted he would be here another year and that he wanted David to know his story, from his lips.”

“Can’t argue with that,” I say, somewhat surprised. He hasn’t said anything to me about exceptionally imminent death. He looks pretty damn good. For his age. And, of course, he is prone to dramatization and exaggeration. Especially when he wants to get his way.

“No,” she says.

“I have to confess,” my father says as we walk back into the room, “that although I had a very lovely wife, who was incidentally a perfect mother to my two children...”

“Is that my grandmother?” David asks.

“No. That was my first wife,” my father says. “The banker, who originally owned the rug, had a very beautiful daughter. Like a princess in a fairy tale. She had spurned me, and I thought it would impress her for me to have the rug.”

“Do we have to go into that?” my wife asks.

“It’s the story of the rug,” my father says as if the rug has its own life, its own fervent history, crying out to be told, a tale that it needs to pass on to posterity. “I’m just trying to be fully honest here.”

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t overdo it.”

“Okay,” he says. “I can see that it is time to make a long story short. I will not thrill you, little David, with how I slipped out the back door, crept through the bushes and trees on the ground, carrying not just my usual swag, but this huge rug on my back. And how Jurgen, my partner swore at me as a madman when I brought it to the car. How I was adamant that we take it. Why? I don’t know why. We all need a little mystery in what we do. Isn’t that correct?

“This was Christmas Eve. Jurgen and I we split up our take, which was considerable. Very considerable. It was late and he took me home. I had the rug of course.

“I went upstairs with all my things. My wife, Sarah, was waiting. My children, David and Judith, were sleeping. I kissed my wife and then went, right away, just as your father does with you, to see my sleeping children. There is something about coming home and finding your children safe and sound, healthy, asleep in their beds, blankets tucked around them, that is better, I think than almost anything else in the world. Ask your father if this is not true?”

David looks at me. Moira likes this part. She beams. “Yes,” I say, “it’s true.” It’s true, and yet there are fathers, and mothers, who give it up. Or who give up a lot of it — except for alternate weekends, a week in the summer, and practically never on Christmas — because baser emotions like lust and anger are stronger than the sentimentalities of our higher feelings.

“I kissed them on their foreheads,” my grandfather says. “Then I added their extra gifts, those I had picked up from rich people’s homes in the course of the night, to the ones we already had. I put them under the tree, just like you have here. Then I sat with my wife and we counted our blessings. Our children being the chief ones.

“Not long after we went to bed there was a commotion in the street. Noise downstairs. Then at the door. It sounded like someone was kicking the door down.”

“Was it the cops?” David asks.

“I thought so. But I was ready for that. I was prepared, I had a plan, I had an escape route.

“We lived on the top floor. I always kept the stolen stuff, the valuable stolen stuff, if it was in the house at all, in one bag. I could get out to the roof from the window. Once I was on the roof, I was free and clear. Remember, I was the cat. I went from our roof to the next building, then the next, and down the drainpipes into the alley. From the alley I could get into the basement of the apartment building across the way. And soon I would disappear.

“So I turned to Sarah and I said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s me they want. You just tell them I’m not home. You haven’t seen me.’ I looked at the rug. I wondered if it would give me away. The thing about Persian rugs is, for the most part you have to know something about them to know if it’s a good one or a bad one or real one or a fake one. So, quickly, even as we heard the footsteps on the stairs, we spread it across the floor. It was a little bit too big so we just folded the end under. I was certain that no one would recognize its value or recognize it as stolen.

“Then, just as the knock on the door came, I went out the window, with my bag of swag, and took off across the roof tops.”

“Did you get away?” David asks.

“Yes,” my grandfather says. “I got away.”

“Is that the end of the story?” my wife asks.

“It can’t be,” David says. “What about the rug?”

My father smiles. Or rather his mouth twitches toward a smile and the smile, that smirk that used to so infuriate me, dies, still born. As well it should.

“I went back in the morning.”

“Christmas,” my wife says.

“Yes. Christmas. Sarah, and David and Judith were gone.”

“Where? Where did they go?” my son asks.

“The knock on the door. That wasn’t the police looking for a thief. It was the brownshirts, the Nazis, looking for Jews. And they found some. Two of them sleeping, waiting to wake in the morning to see what gifts Father Christmas had brought them in the night. Two of them and their mother. They took them away.”

“What happened to them?” David asks.

“Immediately? I don’t know,” my father says. “In the end, the camps. The ovens. I don’t know. Disappeared. Never to be seen again.”

My son looks at me. He’s not following this. He doesn’t have enough information to know what the camps and the ovens mean. To him camp is a place to go and play. Summer camp, arts and crafts, learning to swim, dodge ball. Ovens are where cakes are made and bread is baked. So now I have to tell him.

Which I try to do as simply as possible. “Not very long ago,” I say, “When your grandfather was a young man, the people of Germany decided they wanted to get rid of all the Jews. To kill all the Jews. They did this very methodically. As if they were building cars. It was a very terrible thing.”

“Why?” my son asks.

“People do terrible things,” I say. “Very terrible things. This was one of the worst. But there are others.” It is one of those things, of course, for which my father will never forgive God. I tend to agree with him.

“Was that your mommy?” David asks.

“No,” I say. “Grandpa married another woman later.”

“They took the children’s toys, all the Christmas gifts. They left our little tree. And the rug.”

Now what’s odd is that my father finishes the story there. He hasn’t really told the story of the rug. And there is a story of the rug and it’s quite a tale. Like many other Jews, especially assimilated Jews who thought of themselves as more German than most of the Germans they knew, he thought that this anti-Semitism was just a bulge in the political hieroglyphics of history and that, like many other excesses, it would reach a high tide and recede. At that point he suddenly understood that things were much, much worse and much more permanent than that.

He, and his friend Jurgen, who adamantly did not want to be drafted, decided to escape Germany for Switzerland. It was not so easy then as it is now to cross a border. Also neither of them wanted to arrive in a new country totally broke. They wanted to get away with their loot. Jurgen had at one point worked for an industrialist who had a vacation chateau on Lake Lucerne. Then they thought of the rug. They could put their loot — and Isidore — in the rug, the rug in a truck and claim they were delivering it to the Chateau.

This they proceeded to do.

I’ve heard my father tell this tale more than once. Sometimes there is a policeman in it. A German cop who catches them at a roadside inn just at the moment when Jurgen is bringing food out to the truck and Isidore is crawling out of the rug.

They kill the cop.

They are afraid that the corpse will be found and that they will be caught in the ensuing hue and cry. So they drive off with the corpse, looking for a place to dispose of it.

Somehow, when you’re looking to do something like that, there never seems to be a right moment at the right place. At every right place there are people present. Whenever you’re alone there’s no place. The nightmare continued, hour after hour as they approached the Swiss border. Finally they were out of time and out of possible places to dump the dead. They wrapped the cop in the rug — along with Izzy — and crossed into Switzerland, the dead German lying snug beside the running Jew.

That is the story of the rug. Usually.

But my father doesn’t say any of that. He ends it there and says, “A funny story, no?”

“No,” Moira says. “I don’t see anything funny about it at all.”

“Well, it’s a Jewish story,” Grandpop says. He shrugs. “Some people don’t get them.” But that’s because he has not laid the punch line on us yet.

He gets up from his sitting position, to his knees, on the rug, and puts his big, old, veined and spotted hands on my son, touching his shoulders and the fine, soft hairs on his head, which still, sometimes, even now, on the odd and special day, have the sweet smell of puppy fur. “I was a very wild young man,” he says. “I did many, many things that were bad. Things that you should never do. If only because I don’t think... I don’t think the rewards are worth the risk.

“Still, I don’t regret them.

“I regret only one thing. That I abandoned my wife and my children. I pretend to excuse it in that I couldn’t know what would happen. But really, you see, the statement should go the other way. If you are a man, a real man, you should never leave your wife and children alone, exactly because you do not know what will happen.

“In this,” he tells David, “you are very lucky. Because your father is a better man than I am. He will never abandon you. He will never leave you alone. This I know.”

My father is a wily old man. As well as having been a wicked one. But how has he divined that that is exactly what I want most to do in the world? Is his telling the tale this way, with this moral, some random event that I am, in my guilt, very attuned to? Is he a messenger, sent by fate, not knowing what he is really saying, sent to warn me of the consequences of my action? Or is this David’s grandfather, quite conscious of what he is doing, wily and manipulative, cleverly herding David’s father back into line.

I had gathered my strength, my strength for coping, once again, just to make it through the holidays, planning my escape for the cold clarity that I anticipate for January. There’s a sweeter woman who flushes with warmth when she sees me and welcomes me in, into her arms, into her heart, into her body. Dark eyes that seem to swallow me whole and flood me with endorphins or whatever chemicals the chemistry of love consists of, so that I feel free of pain and fear. Away from the spats and the sniping and the sword that lies down the middle of the bed where my heart and Moira’s used to lie entwined.

My father, who brought this rug to America — where he gave up his thieving ways, he says, and opened a jewelry store — and gave it to me as a wedding gift, has come about the other gifts he has given me.

Among those other gifts that he has given me are loyalty, love of family, and the cherishing of children. I didn’t know that those gifts came with an enforcer. Who would show up at the crucial moment with a warning parable. He has put a kinehara on me. I suddenly feel that if I leave them, the evil that men do will come and steal them away and kill them, leaving the weight of their fate on my soul, a curse for which I can never forgive God.

I look at Moira and wonder if there is any way, any way whatsoever back to the garden?

I look at my father, expecting that infuriating smile to be on his lips and see, instead, only pleading eyes and I know that I will stay at home. With my family and the god damn rug.