Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander Read Free Book Online Page A

your mother going to be screaming like that every morning?
    The room grew silent.
    Kugel sighed and shook his head.
    Ever since the war, said Kugel softly.
    Mother had never been in a war. She’d never been anywhere near a war, unless you count the holiday sales at Bamberger’s the morning after Thanksgiving.
    I am rapidly . . . began the tenant, but at that very moment, Mother entered through the garden door, her arms full of bright fruits and shiny vegetables. She was beaming.
    There’s still more out there, she said breathlessly to Kugel, a triumphant smile on her face. Even the cantaloupes came in!
    She placed the bounty on the counter, still beaming, until she turned and saw the tenant, whereupon her face darkened.
    Mother disliked the tenant even more than Kugel did, and with far less actual cause. She suspected him of nefarious thoughts, devious plots, sexual perversion; she thought him, alternately, a Muslim, a Negro, a Sicilian; whenever she saw him, she held shut her blouse collar with one hand, and pulled down on her skirt hem with the other. And she had been, much to Bree’s dismay, openly antagonistic toward the tenant from the start.
    Those, she said, glaring at the tenant as she held closed her blouse collar, are for
family
.
    Tap.
    Tap-tap.
    There, said Bree to Kugel. You must have heard that.
    The taps were getting louder now.
    Exhaust flange, said Kugel. Getting worse, too.
    TAP, TAP-TAP.
    Mr. Kugel, the tenant said firmly, coming around the table and standing at the kitchen doorway, arms folded across his chest. I signed a lease with you for a period of twelve months, but given the situation here, I don’t think I would have too difficult a time finding a judge who would allow me to break that contract—and to recoup my deposit, along with any and all past monies paid.
    So now he’s an attorney, Mother said to Bree.
    Mother, said Bree. And then, to the tenant, she said, I’m terribly sorry.
    Much as it had so long ago with Mother and Mr. Rosner, it angered Kugel to see Bree placating this ingrate—history repeats itself, it seems, with very little concern about whether we learn anything from it or not—but Bree and Kugel knew that they could ill afford to have the tenant leave. Mother, meanwhile, took a step toward the tenant, pointing her finger at his chest.
    You wouldn’t be talking like
that
, Mother said to him, if Mr. Alan Morton Dershowitz was here, I assure you of that.
    Mother, said Kugel.
    TAP.
    TAP-TAP.
    Pardon me, said Kugel, pressing past the tenant and hurrying out the kitchen door. We’ll pick this up later, he said as he went.
    Mr. Kugel, the tenant called after him. Mr. Kugel, you promised me space in the attic—space for which I am
paying
, Mr. Kugel.
    I’m so sorry, Kugel could hear Bree saying, and then, as the tapping continued and he hurried up the stairs, he could hear Mother taunting the tenant again: No, sir, she said, no, sir. You wouldn’t be pushing us around if the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University were here. I bet you wouldn’t be so smart then, would you?
    If only I’d found mouse shit, thought Kugel as he stomped up the stairs. If only I’d found an arsonist.
    Maybe I could just kill her? Who would know? Who would care? If she actually was Anne Frank, everyone thought she was dead anyway.
    He stopped at the hallway closet and took out his toolbox. If there was anything he’d learned from all the damned books he’d read in his life—and he was becoming more and more certain that he hadn’t learned very much at all—it was that you never let the monster get away. Whatever you do, you do
not
take pity on the monster. And even if it isn’t a monster—let’s say it isn’t, let’s say the monster is, ludicrous as it may seem, Anne Frank. Then what? Let it live? What did those fool Samsas gain by waiting all that time to kill the giant pest they’d discovered in their house? Okay, sure, it was their son, or it had been, and this