The Incessant Unfurling of Story and Truth

By BETH GREENBAUM

WAR STORY
By Gwen Edelman.
168 pp. Riverhead Books. $21.95.

War Story by Gwen Edelman is just that: a war story, told in the heat of a love affair. Joseph's story pours forth as he and Kitty drink tea, slather schmaltz on dark bread, lick fingers greasy with salami. Theirs is a May-December affaire de coeur between a man who lived (and loved) through the Holocaust and a woman born almost twenty years later—who wants to hear, and probably write about, his story.

As the book begins, Kitty is on a train from Paris to Joseph's funeral in Amsterdam. The writing is beautiful and compelling: "Out the train window lie the endless fields of northern France, fallow, the spiky stubble dusted with frost. Everything is tinged with white, even the flat wintry sky and the pale face of the moon which rushes headlong through the white sky although it is only noon."

Quickly, the present segues into the past, "The country makes me nervous, Joseph used to say. One night with the darkness and the baying of hounds and I'm ready to pack up and leave right away." Edelman has written a brilliant portrait of the psychic frenzy of a survivor—how in the midst simple pleasures—the drinking of tea, the eating of bread, even in the passion of love—the past intrudes and controls.

Kitty and Joseph meet in a bookstore in New York. Joseph is sixty, handsome and charismatic. She is thirty-two, introspective, not interested. Joseph woos her with coffee and his stories and leads her back to his room. Soon, Kitty finds herself looking forward to a future with him; Joseph, who has been married twice and lost both his sons, knows he can only love in the present:

Maybe you could begin again, said Kitty. Are you crazy? He said heavily. There is no escape. Like some kind of beetle dragging three times its weight we all carry our pasts strapped on our backs. No putting it down. No stopping at an inn and laying down the burden for a night. He sat at the table and poured out a drink. His white hair was as dry as leaves. His eyelids sagged. Kitty sat down across with him. At the sides of his eyes was a weave of small lines. She waited. After a while he reached across and took her hand in his. Never mind darling, he said. We're alive, aren't we?

The story moves through Kitty's mind like the rhythm and urgency of the train she is on as it plows through France toward Amsterdam—and Joseph's funeral. There are no quotation marks delineating speakers. Abruptly Kitty shifts in her thoughts from her cloistered days in New York with Joseph to Joseph's story of his days before, during, and after the war to her husband in France to anticipating her arrival in Amsterdam. Edelman's writing echoes the process of Kitty's thinking and reminiscing—how memory intrudes, is replaced by the present and then is superseded once again.

Joseph cannot understand Kitty's fascination with his past, and yet he cannot stop himself from telling it. He hides his madness in the arms of his young lover who feels the beating of his heart against her.

"But the war's over," she panted, trying to enclose him, "the war is over."

"My poor darling," he said sorrowfully, "the war will never be over."

The bare truth of the survivor and of memory. There is no forgetting. Scenes of loss and separation and terror play over and over. And even as the survivor speaks, he cannot rid himself of the war which lives as vibrantly in the present as it once did in the past. The stories do not stop—the incessant unfurling of story and truth. "I'm tired of the war," Kitty says at last. "Ho, ho," he would cry, knocking his spoon against his cup. "You're tired of the war? You?" The spoon rang out. "Born after it was all over? How tired do you think I am?" And yet, he cannot stop. He won't even let Kitty open the shutters of his apartment. He likes the dark. He says he has seen quite enough as it is. Only their love making seems to relieve him, only there can he hide.

When Kitty looks at a picture of a dark-haired, even more handsome Joseph taken thirty years before she wonders wearily about the meaning of it all. "She no longer knows the difference between past and present. And one day her train trip will be a memory and the frozen fields green."

Joseph asks Kitty during one of their talks, "What axis does the world turn on?" And he answers his own question: "None at all. At any moment it can turn upside down and inside out. Can and does."

A brilliant, engaging, and—in light of current events—prescient book.