requisition
[noun]
1. The act of formally requiring or calling upon someone to perform an action
2. A demand or application made, usually with authority
3. The state of being in demand or use
From Latin, requisitio, act of searching; from requirere, to seek, to ask
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
1. a boy at a bookshelf
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.
—WH Auden, “September 1 1939”
When the sirens begin, the professor is sitting at the Astoria Café. Professor Viktor Bauman’s clean-shaven face accentuates his smile. Though he’s only a figment of my imagination, he reminds me of myself as a child, sliding the crystal pepper shaker back and forth between his hands atop the white linen tablecloth. Today, like yesterday, the waiter has forgotten the salt. This is when Viktor first sees her, the young woman in the red dress, smiling at him from across the terrace.
Her name is Elsa Dietrich. She is of my imagination, too, and she is just about to receive some troubling news about her estranged fiancé, Carl. I can hear the clinking of teaspoons on serving plates and the conversations at the bar. Elsa listens to a bald man with a gruff voice criticize Professor Bauman’s optimism about the situation. It is September 1, 1939, and black smoke is billowing on the horizon, but for some reason, Professor Viktor Bauman is not afraid.
The Astoria Café really did exist. It was a haven for artists and thinkers during the 1930s in the otherwise industrial town of Łódź, Poland. My mother often told me the story of how my obsession with this history began: I was an eight-year-old boy, no taller than a fire hydrant, when I first looked up at the bookshelf. It was tall and white, and it lorded over wooden cabinets that my mother filled with trinkets and old toys. As the story goes, I climbed onto the cabinets and stood on my tiptoes to reach the bookshelf, pulling down a thick black book with red ink scrawled on the spine, William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
From that moment onwards, I became obsessed. I collected books, action figures, DVDs, military medals, and anything that might help me understand how such a calamity could happen. I watched (and re-watched) Nuit et Brouillard, Life is Beautiful, Schindler’s List, and Saving Private Ryan. I played every video game I could find and mastered Medal of Honor and Company of Heroes and Brothers in Arms, hoping that sooner or later I’d understand what it was like to live through those times. The obsession stayed with me through university and graduate school—a degree in Holocaust studies, another in the psychology of genocide—but the more I studied, the less I understood. What did that little boy at the bookshelf know that I could no longer remember?
Another memory of me peering at that bookshelf, this time as a twenty-eight-year-old grad student home for Christmas. I’d woken up early that morning before the real-estate appraisers came to help my mother sort through the cabinets beneath the bookshelf. My mother was bankrupt and had to sell the house; the measly family fortune had all been spent treating her mother’s Alzheimer’s. The trouble was my mom tended towards hoarding. I knew she couldn’t move out alone because if she did, she’d hold onto everything. I agreed, begrudgingly, to spend the days between Christmas and New Year’s sorting through it all.
That morning, I sat on the living room floor surrounded by boxes. I sifted through old memories of stiff plastic action figures, faded Lincoln Logs, chewed-up Legos, and dog-eared textbooks, trying to be as categorical as possible while my mother cleared out pots and pans in the kitchen. Her long-term memory was faltering, but few people are more attuned to primordial wisdom than mothers. She’d forget the name of the film she’d just watched but would remember the exact minute I ran downstairs to watch Saturday morning cartoons as a kid.
“You sure you don’t want to keep that?” She pointed at a clay sculpture of a dog.
“It’s broken.”
“You made it at art camp in the Great Smoky Mountains.”
“Wasn’t it in Maine?”
“No,” she picked up the three-legged dog. “I’d like to hold onto this if you don’t mind. It’s the first piece of art you ever made. One day, your grandchildren will thank me.”
“We’ve already talked about this. I don’t want children.”
The words cast a shadow on her face. “I’d like to keep it anyway. Someday, you might want to remember.”
“What do you mean, remember what?”
“This sculpture is a totem, son. It’s evidence of who you were—of who you are. You’re too categorical about the past—you think it’s finished. No, don’t put it there. Thank you, I’ll keep it. You can be so dismissive. There’s still something you need to remember.”
My mother looked at the growing discard pile and picked up an old set of dominoes in a red leather case. She shook her head and pulled out three ivory pieces that rattled in her hand as she contemplated their weight.
“These used to belong to your grandfather, you know. He fought for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Do you know the story of the night Franco’s police came knocking at his friend’s door? The euphemism was simple enough: dar un paseo. Most who were ‘given a walk’ never came home.”
“But Granddad survived the war.”
“Yes. Because of these dominoes,” she held out her hand. “When your grandfather was arrested, he was allowed one personal item. For some reason, he brought the dominoes to the station. One of his captors recognized it—he’d had one just like it in grade school. They got to talking. Eventually, he let your grandfather go.”
My mother returned the ivory pieces to the red leather case and snapped it shut. “Son, be careful what you decide to forget. Getting it back isn’t as easy as you might think.”
Barely aware of what she was trying to tell me, we continued sorting through the artefacts of my childhood, moving from the cabinets up to the bookshelf, where she pulled down the tattered copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and put it in a trash bag.
“We can’t give that one away,” I said.
“Don’t you have a copy?”
“Yes, but this one’s different,” I pulled it out.
“Oh, is it?” She grinned. “I remember you standing on the cabinets on your tiptoes, holding that very book in your hands, just like you’re doing now. I’d never seen anything like it, a little boy wanting to read about that.”
I turned the book over in my hand. “Why’d I choose this one?”
“You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“You said they needed your help.”
“Who?”
And that’s when they came back to me, Viktor and Elsa.
Viktor’s eyes are obscured by a black suede hat that complements the colorful scarf he’s looped around his neck for warmth and display. Here on the terrace, he feels a world away from the industrial sprawl of unpaved roads, textile plants, and rundown tenements to the north of the city.
My copy of the book has arrived and I'm thrilled--because I so much want to read on!