The Dream Jew

A Story

A young man sits close by, already connected to the machine that pumps his blood into the old man’s veins. The technician finishes with the tubes. The old man leans back and studies the boy, who is used to being ignored during these sessions.

“Have you heard of the blood libel?”

“A false accusation?” the boy answers.

The old man hears the question hidden inside the reply. “Passover is soon,” he says. “I need your blood for matza.”

The boy doesn’t flinch. “Matza is flour and water.”

“Correct. That was the libel – that Jews murdered Christian children to mix their blood into the flour to make their unleavened bread. What I need from you is simpler. I need you to listen to what I am about to tell you.”

The boy considers this, then nods once. He is ready to listen.

The old man begins.

I am ninety-four in two days. Even with your blood I have little time left, but my real life ended in Budapest in 1944. I was fourteen. She was sixteen. Her name was Eva.

I worked in my father’s bakery. I looked older than my age, moved fast, understood people. Clients trusted me. I was, if you can imagine it, handsome the way film stars used to be. One afternoon I knocked at the back door of a restaurant with my new bicycle propped against the wall. Eva opened the door. I blurted the first words that came to mind: “You are beautiful.” To this day, a truer utterance has never left my mouth.

She and her identical twin Flora worked for their uncle. They had been sent by their father to live with their uncle’s family and to work in his restaurant. They would earn their own keep and have something to send back to their family. This was the custom in those days.

They worked the day shift. Before leaving they prepared the place before the rough evening crowd arrived, then were sent home. That day I was early. Thirty seconds – no more – and I knew the world had changed.

The next day she held the order slip a moment longer than necessary. Her eyes told me everything I needed to know.

For two months that was our entire courtship: a glance, a few whispered words, a piece of paper passed from her fingers to mine. We both understood duty. My duty was to my father; hers was to her family. We waited. Love like that can wait.

Then the Nazis came.

My father had contacts. Within weeks he smuggled us out along back roads and somehow, we made it to wartime London. I assumed Eva’s family had escaped the same way. The war ended. I learned the truth: Eva and Flora had been selected at Auschwitz for medical experiments. Twins. I searched for her but slowly came to understand that if she were still alive, she did not want to be found.

I studied economics in England, but mostly I studied people. I learned that money is a confidence trick on a grand scale. I became very good at the trick.

One desperate country came to me hours away from bankruptcy. They came to their desperation through my machinations. I could have ruined them. Instead I saved them – and walked away a billionaire. Every government on earth suddenly understood how fragile the system was. They came to me begging, then threatening, then begging again. I let them live. They left me alone.

I had everything. Still I felt invisible. The world called me genius, predator, wizard – never once “Jew.” That absence gnawed at me as did Eva’s absence. In my mind they were of the same cloth: Eva swallowed up by a great evil because she was a Jew, and my success.

So I did the most irrational thing of my life. I hired a surgeon and ordered a nose large enough that any casual antisemite would nod and say, “Yes, that looks about right.” I told no one why.

While it healed I hid in the woods of New Hampshire. Yes, where you grew up. Wait, listen. I walked the same snowy path every day to the little town library. At the edge of the library lawn stood a gardener’s shed someone had turned into a house. I never looked closely.

Spring arrived. I decided I was ready to return to the world – this time to do good, openly as a Jew, a big-nosed Jew at that.

One April afternoon I truly looked at the hut for the first time. Someone had taped a black-and-white photograph to the window — a pale face in profile, one eye staring straight out at me. I walked on, but ten paces later another photo had appeared on the opposite pane: the same face, mirror-reversed. Together they formed a terrible symmetry.

I stopped breathing.

The two faces were no longer photographs. They were Eva and Flora, older, paper-thin, their bodies flayed by Mengele’s knives, their mouths permanently open in silent screams. I raised a hand to my new nose — ashamed that I had chosen mutilation of my own free will. They disappeared.

A few moments later a woman came around the corner of the shed – calm, radiant, unmistakably New England. This was your mother. You knew this house, yes? You knew the twins your mother cared for. She handed me an envelope and waited.

Inside, in handwriting I remembered from order slips:

“Anton, you found us. We knew you would. Do not try to come in. You know what was done to twins. Remember us beautiful.

Two requests:

1. Find the monster and anyone who helped him. You know what to do.

2. Take care of the woman standing in front of you. She has kept us alive for thirty-five years.

We watched your rise. We rejoiced when you vanished and reappeared in our backyard. Now do what must be done.”

I embraced the woman – your mother – and promised.

I found Mengele’s last assistant and every living person who had held a scalpel for him. I took my time. When it was finished I sent the film to Israel and told them the hunt was over.

Then I went back to the library path one last time, tore up my plans for Jewish hospitals and universities, and made a different covenant.

The antisemite insists the Jew is satanic, that he secretly controls the world in order to destroy it. Very well. They willed me into that shape. I accepted the role.

Look out the window.

See that neighborhood burning? By tomorrow four more will join it – here, Paris, São Paulo, Lagos. Nothing can stop the spread now except a sudden outbreak of human decency. There is no sign of that happening.

He reaches over and stops the machine.

The old man stands.

“You were never random,” he says. “Your mother asked me to keep you ignorant of this until the hour I needed clean blood one final time. I kept my word.”

He places a heavy briefcase in the young man’s lap.

“Tickets, coordinates, funds. My compound outside Queenstown. My son is already there. You and your family will be safe for thirty years. After that, whatever is left will belong to whoever still knows how to be kind.”

He walks to the door. The guards step aside.

“Tell me one thing,” the young man says, voice steady for the first time. “When you mentioned the blood libel, why weren’t you trying to frighten me?”

The old man smiles without warmth.

“Because I looked at you and saw a boy who would hear the whole truth without running. I needed to know if such a boy still existed.”

He pauses on the threshold.

“Shabbat shalom,” he says to the burning city. “Though it is only Tuesday.”

The door closes.

Outside, the sirens begin to sing.