The Cafeteria

In this mystical short story, the author recalls frequenting a Broadway cafeteria where he would meet other Polish and Russian immigrants. In the fifties, a woman named Esther became part of their group. Although she had been in a Russian prison camp and now had taken a menial job to support her cripple father, she was cheerful and outgoing. She and the author became good friends, but each time he saw her, she looked more disenchanted; her father died, she was often ill, and she worried about her sanity. Several years after their first meeting, she called the author and came to his apartment to tell him that she had seen Hitler, surrounded by Nazis in the Broadway cafeteria the night it burned down. The author tried to reassure her that she had had a vision, but he was convinced that she was mad. One night he saw her in the subway, looking happy and prosperous, on the arm of an ancient man he had thought was long dead. He was upset by seeing her with the old man, and reappraised her story of seeing Hitler, realizing that if, as Kant argues, time and space are only forms of perception, then she might really have seen Hitler. The next day he learned that she had killed herself some time before he saw her in the subway.