After Auschwitz: A Love Story by Brenda Webster Page B

showers where people were being gassed. The only thing Hannah would let me film was her life “before,” in an impoverished Romanian village that would have been of little interest if we didn’t inevitably imagine the box cars waiting with their open doors.
    In those transports, people died every day. I’m sure I would have gotten a cough or a stomach ailment—shit out my insides. I was always something of a sissy. Even when I had a headache or a bad tooth I was afraid, complained, needed to be tended. My only danger now is my failing brain. Looking up at the huge worm-eaten beams above my head, I wonder if my dreams are messages. Watch out, they are telling me, you are about to fall. Notice how you shuffle off balance when you walk, almost falling when you hit a tiny crack in the pavement. The well, the mud, show me where it will end. All my efforts to remain alert, to be vigilant—will fail.
    What matters to me now are the things that nourish love, the rest is the victory of stone and the enemy and death—the victory of stone and the mud and the terrible ground.
    Hannah enrolled me in a film club of some sort and I started going through some of the films that inspired me in my early days when I was still an assistant director, when Fellini’s masterpieces
La Strada
and
Le Notti di Cabiria
exploded like bombshells. I still thought of myself as a Communist but I had something of a double standard. Communist in politics, but never able to stand doctrinal art. I found it exhilarating that film didn’t have to be only about social problems. Fellini kept some of the best of neo-realism’s heritage, the sincerity and belief in humanistic values, but his own vision was metaphorical, mysterious, poetic.
La Strada
was about an inner journey. Its ending so profound you couldn’t put it into words. I played it over and over, each time seeing new things. It makes me happythat I still can feel its power. It even infuses me with a temporary strength. Every time I get to the part where Giulietta Masina, running away from the circus, stops to examine a bug—she has a curious enigmatic smile—I start to cry. I know what is coming. As if by magic a troop of musicians appears and she follows them into town where a religious ceremony is taking place. It is a mysterious event that suggests her faith in life and makes her a sort of secular saint. Masina was Fellini’s wife, of course. I wonder whether the circus strongman’s complete inability to understand and value her character related to Fellini’s marriage. He places her next to a circus strongman, a brutal and unsympathetic character. But Fellini allows even this creature a moment of truth when he cries at the end, after she dies. He finally understands her worth.
    I am circling around a subject that frightens me. How to die without faith. Isn’t it the main role of religion to help us accept our mortality? Going on to a better place with a loving father and, if you are a Catholic, a Virgin Mother who will always plead your case with the supreme authority. It sounds boring, frankly.
    I want, need, long for the love of people here, of my Hannah.
    We are having a weekend in the country. I am in the living room on the small sofa that was in Mother’s room in Todi, with the fur rug over my knees. Hannah comes up from the rustic kitchen with a glass of juice. She won’t let me drink wine anymore because it makes my memory worse. That’s a real loss. She sits next to me and snuggles close to make it up to me. We are watching
La Strada.
After a while the film’s words tire me and I turn the sound down low, but I still get pleasure from the images, especially the ever-changing expressions on Masina’s face. I like to think I’d have recognized the love there, seen how special it was. I put my arm around Hannah and pat herhip, my favorite part of her. It’s as though all her womanliness resides