The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction [1 ed.] 0814340555, 9780814340554

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The New Diaspora

publication supported by Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford. hobos and bums, fact and fiction, roam the earth. But which is which?

The New

Diaspora

The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction Edited by Victoria Aarons, Avinoam J. Patt, and Mark Shechner

Wayne State University Press Detroit

© 2015 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. ISBN 978-0-8143-4055-4 (paperback) / ISBN 978-0-8143-4056-1 (e-book) Library of Congress Control Number: 2014936568

For Dr. Irving and Frances Waltman

“A wonderful thing, Fanny,” Manischevitz said. “Believe me, there are Jews everywhere.” Bernard Malamud, “Angel Levine”

Contents

P re face  xi Int ro duct io n 

1

Part I Selections by Edward Lewis Wallant Award–Winning Authors 1.  Joshua Henkin, “Sex on the Brain”  21 Winner of 2012 award for The World Without You

2.  Edith Pearlman, “Purim Night”  37 Winner of 2011 award for Binocular Vision

3.  Julie Orringer, “The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones”  49 Winner of 2010 award for The Invisible Bridge

4.  Sara Houghteling, from Pictures at an Exhibition  71 Winner of 2009 award for Pictures at an Exhibition

5.  Eileen Pollack, “The Bris”  85 Winner of 2008 award for In the Mouth

6.  Ehud Havazelet, “Six Days”  111 Winner of 2007 award for Bearing the Body

7.  Jonathan Rosen, “The True World”  123 Winner of the 2004 award for Joy Comes in the Morning

8.  Joan Leegant, “The Baghdadi”  131 Winner of the 2003 award for An Hour in Paradise

9.  Dara Horn, from The World to Come  145 Winner of the 2002 award for In the Image

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10.  Myla Goldberg, “That’ll Be Two Dollars and Fifty Cents, Please”  165 Winner of the 2001 award for Bee Season

11.  Harvey Grossinger, “Dinosaurs”  173 Winner of the 1997 award for The Quarry

12.  Thane Rosenbaum, “The Day the Brooklyn Dodgers Finally Died”  195 Winner of the 1996 award for Elijah Visible

13.  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, “The Afterlife of Skeptics”  209 Winner of the 1995 award for Mazel

14.  Gerald Shapiro, “Mandelbaum, the Criminal”  219 Winner of the 1993 award for From Hunger

15.  Melvin Jules Bukiet, “The Two Franzes”  241 Winner of the 1992 award for Stories of an Imaginary Childhood

16.  Tova Reich, “Dedicated to the Dead”  261 Winner of the 1988 award for Master of the Return

17.  Steve Stern, “Heaven Is Full of Windows”  279 Winner of the 1987 award for Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven

18.  Francine Prose, “Electricity”  283 Winner of the 1983 award for Hungry Hearts

19.  Curt Leviant, “Say It Isn’t So, Mr. Yiddish”  299 Winner of the 1977 award for The Yemenite Girl

Part II The New Diaspora 20.  Peter Orner, “Nathan Leopold Writes to Mr. Felix Kleczka of 5383 S. Blackstone”  313 From The Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, 2013

21.  Joseph Skibell, from A Curable Romantic  317 From A Curable Romantic, 2012

22.  Jonathan Safran Foer, “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly”  335 From The New Yorker, June 14, 2012

23.  Nathan Englander, “Free Fruit for Young Widows”  339 From What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, 2012

contents  ix

24.  Scott Nadelson, “Oslo”  351 From Aftermath, 2011

25.  Joseph Epstein, “My Brother Eli”  363 From The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff, 2011

26.  Maxim D. Shrayer, “Yom Kippur in Amsterdam”  387 From Yom Kippur in Amsterdam, 2009

27.  Jonathon Keats, “Zayin the Profane”  399 From Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six, 2009

28.  Margot Singer, “Deir Yassin”  413 From The Pale of Settlement, 2008

29.  Nadia Kalman, “The Counterpart”  433 From The Walrus, July–August 2007

30.  Avner Mandelman, “Pity”  445 From Talking to the Enemy, 2006

31.  David Bezmozgis, “Minyan”  457 From Natasha and Other Stories, 2005

32.  Lara Vapnyar, “There Are Jews in My House”  469 From There Are Jews in My House, 2004

33.  Robert Majzels, from Apikoros Sleuth  495 From Apikoros Sleuth, 2004

34.  Aryeh Lev Stollman, “Mr. Mitochondria”  511 From The Dialogues of Time and Entropy, 2004

35.  Rachel Kadish, “The Argument”  523 From Zoetrope: All Story, Vol. 6, Number 2, 2002

36.  Tony Eprile, “Letters from Doreen”  541 From Temporary Sojourner and Other South African Stories, 1989

A ppendix: Hist ory o f the Edward Lewis Walla nt Award  Co nt ri but ors   559 Ackn ow le dg me nt s   575

555

Preface

This is a Jewish story, so it starts with food. It was April 2011, and the editors of this anthology were sitting around a table at Rizzuto’s Italian Restaurant in West Hartford, CT, having lunch and planning out that evening’s Edward Lewis Wallant Award ceremony. While not a kosher deli, Rizzuto’s is our favorite restaurant in West Hartford, one that we routinely frequent to kibbitz over the books and readings of the past year and anticipate the current year’s event. At Rizzuto’s, if your taste doesn’t run to Italian salamis and French cheeses, you can get a good vegetarian platter. This particular occasion was the forty-eighth annual presentation of the Wallant Award to the recipient for 2010, Julie Orringer, for her novel The Invisible Bridge. An intimate and painfully detailed story of the ordeal of Hungary’s Jews during the Shoah, and in particular those who were assigned to work on the forced labor battalions or Munkaszolgálat, Orringer’s novel had swept the judges away and emerged as the unambiguous winner for the previous year’s prize. The ceremonial presentation of the award was to be that evening at the University of Hartford. But beyond our discussions of the evening, we began looking ahead two years, to 2013 and the fiftieth anniversary of the Wallant Award, whose initial winner was Norman Fruchter, for his novel Coat Upon a Stick in 1963. We marveled at the longevity of the award and the determination of its sponsors to pursue it over almost five decades. The Wallant Award’s track record for persistence and devotion to literature, and for making so many inspired choices of writers who were scarcely known at the time, called for recognition. The Wallant Award has been, from the outset, a one-family show, the family being Dr. Irving Waltman and his wife Fran, who founded the award in 1963 and kept it going with their own funds, dedication, and labor, though it now has institutional support from the University of Hartford’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies and support from a small phalanx of judges, currently Victoria Aarons, Ezra Cappell, Thane Rosenbaum, and Mark Shechner. Still, the Waltmans remain after fifty years the durable backbones of the enterprise, and they still read fiction along with the judges. In all, with the fiftieth anniversary of the prize just two years away, we felt that acknowledgment was due, if not long overdue, to the Waltmans, and what better form of recognition than a book? And so we embarked on this project, which began xi

xii  preface

as a celebration of the Waltman family and their dedication to the life of literature, and that celebration gradually took on a life of its own. That life of its own, as we planned it, would divide the book into two sections. One would be a selection of former winners of the Wallant Award, presenting them through their more recent work. The other would be a selection of writing from the many other books that have crossed our desks in the course of our reading for the award. We believed that our reading had provided us with an overview of new fiction by Jewish writers in North America and that we had an obligation to share some of this abundance with others in order to, in effect, expand awareness of Jewish writing and celebrate it. Few people, other than the occasional book editor or reviewer or awards judge, are fortunate enough to see the bounty of writing that we do, and so we felt a responsibility to share at least some of our discoveries. In doing so, we wanted to try our hand at redefining what we talk about when we talk about Jews writing books in America. The more we have read, the less straightforward the work of definition has come to appear and, not surprisingly, the more multifaceted our discussions have grown. There is more first-rate writing in print than we have space for in this volume, and we have floated the idea among ourselves of a second volume. That is premature, we know, but we privately lament the works of fiction we had to rule out and the many important questions that we have left unasked. We know that we have only scratched the surface of the writing we would like to place before you and the conversations we would like to have. This volume, The New Diaspora, is a first step. By the end of lunch, we had a plan. Three and a half years later, you have a book. Enjoy.

Victoria Aarons, Avinoam Patt, Mark Shechner September 1, 2013

The New Diaspora

Introduction

For the past eight years, this volume’s editors, Victoria Aarons, Avinoam Patt, and Mark Shechner, have served as judges and administrators for the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Given annually to “an American writer, preferably unrecognized, whose published creative work of fiction is considered to have significance for the American Jew,” the Wallant Award was established fifty-one years ago by Dr. Irving and Fran Waltman in honor of the novelist Edward Lewis Wallant, who died in 1962 at the age of thirtysix. Inaugurated as a memorial book award at the Emanuel Synagogue in West Hartford, CT, the Wallant Award has been given institutional support by the University of Hartford’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies since 1986. The award historically has focused its attention on younger Jewish writers in America, frequently the authors of debut works of fiction. The initial Wallant Award in 1963, given to Norman Fruchter for his novel Coat Upon a Stick, has been given in subsequent years to writers including Chaim Potok, Cynthia Ozick, Arthur A. Cohen, Francine Prose, Daphne Merkin, Steve Stern, Dara Horn, Thane Rosenbaum, Jonathan Rosen, Allegra Goodman, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Nicole Krauss, Ehud Havazelet, Sara Houghteling, and Joshua Henkin. While not inclusive, this is a robust list of writers, many of whom have gone on to major careers in American letters. In the eight years since we began working together, the award’s judges have read more than one hundred works of fiction—novels and short story collections—by Jewish writers living in the United States. Recently, as Jewish writers have gained increasing prominence in Canada, we have begun to include them in our considerations as well. In our deliberations, we exclude such marquee writers as Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Lethem, preferring to introduce new writers and recognize those whose work has been relatively neglected. Authors who have drawn our attention include our most recent prize winners: Ehud Havazelet (2007), Eileen Pollack (2008), Sara Houghteling (2009), Julie Orringer (2010), Edith Pearlman (2011), Joshua Henkin (2012), and Kenneth Bonert (2013). Other writers we have read with appreciation include David Bezmozgis, Tony Eprile, Robert Majzels, Rachel Kadish, Avner Mandelman, Scott Nadelson, Lara Vapnyar, Nadia Kalman, Jonathon Keats, Maxim Shrayer, Margot Singer, Joseph Skibell, Nathan Englander, and many others whose fiction has called attention to the diversity of Jewish expression in America. 1

2  introduction

This is the tip of a vast continent of prose fiction whose full mass is still unmeasured, and this partial catalogue should give evidence to the shortsightedness of Irving Howe’s famous and now quaint prophecy that with the death of his generation of Jewish immigrant writers, “American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point. Insofar as this body of writing draws heavily from the immigrant experience, it must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning-out of materials and memories. Other than in books and sentiment, there just isn’t enough left of that experience.” The evidence is plain that Jews are writing and publishing in ever-greater numbers and that North America is one of the epicenters of this burgeoning productivity. And it isn’t just the volume of production that is distinctive about this literature, but its attitude and reach. This new writing has its own signature, no longer defined by such hyphenated titles as “Jewish-American writers” and “Jewish-American literature.” Those terms have always been fraught, and writers themselves have protested their indiscriminate, reductive, and marginalizing use. Such terms are weighed down with ill-defined meanings, implying hybridized consciousnesses and crises of identity. Such dividedness is now barely in evidence. Philip Roth has announced of late that he prefers to be called a “Newark-American” writer, suggesting an ironic fusion of terms rather than an antagonistic schism. The novels and stories we read for the Wallant Award suggest that “Jewish-American” was never a term for the ages, but rather an idiom of convenience for a moment when Jews were ascending in the ranks of American culture and viewed themselves as split personalities, divided in loyalty and spirit, as if they lived the title of one of Lionel Trilling’s essay collections: The Opposing Self (1955). In our own estimation, the hybridizing metaphors have lost their utility even as the literature they purport to describe has grown more vigorous. Not surprisingly, to abandon that historically laden term has been to redefine North American Jewish writing as a richly diverse body of pluralistic fiction, a “modern Jewish literary complex,” to quote literary historian Dan Miron, that is “vast, disorderly, and somewhat diffuse” and looks ahead to new forms of Jewish self-awareness as much as it looks back for history, sustenance, and collective memory. Significantly, since the turn of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of Jewish writers who reside in North America are not Americans by birth. The United States and Canada are the ports at which they have dropped anchor and established their careers, though they come from elsewhere, and sometimes from other languages, such as David Bezmozgis (Latvia, to Canada); Joseph Kertes (Hungary/Canada); David Unger and Francisco Goldman (Guatemala); Ilan Stavans (Mexico); Tony Eprile, Shira Nayman, and Kenneth Bonert (South Africa); Anouk Markovits (France); Gigi Anders and Achi Obejas (Cuba); Keith Gessen, Nadia Kalman, Lara Vapnyar, Maxim Shrayer, David Shrayer Petrov, Gary Shteyngart (Russia); Sana Krasikov (Georgia); André Aciman (Egypt); Dalia Sofer and Gina Nahai (Iran); Danit Brown and Avner Mandelman (Israel);

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Ayelet Tsabari (Yemen, Israel, Canada). There is another group of authors who live in the United States but continue to write in their original languages, such as Guatemalaborn Eduardo Halfon, whose El boxeador polaco has only recently been translated into English as The Polish Boxer. Emigrant writing in America is scarcely remarkable in itself, but the vast contribution at present by Jews surely can’t escape notice, and speaks to the intersection of cultures, histories, and identities that marks our time. This list of names may be a labor of pure demographics, a social history of literature, but it is a uniquely contemporary demographic: When have we seen anything like this influx of fresh voices and unique histories since the great migration of 1881–1924? The literature we regularly review in our judging does not appear to build solely or even primarily on the celebrated post–World War II fiction of Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth. Whatever else may have been true of that generation, those writers lived at both edges of their hyphens—American-Jewish—and defined themselves or found themselves defined through their incongruities. “I am an American, Chicago born,” declaims Saul Bellow’s Augie March. A celebratory gesture of identity such as Augie’s would seem archaic now. Contemporary literature by American Jews easily dispenses with these hyperbolic declarations. New Jewish writing seems to have more in common with the broad currents of contemporary American fiction, so much of which is the work of émigrés. The new population of Jewish writers appears to mirror a broader movement in American literature: writers come from afar to seek sanctuary in America and to find their voices in a country and a language that offers them protection and opportunity. From that point of view, immigrant Jews are less special cases than they are typical examples of new Americans putting down roots in an adopted land and a new language. They are part of a larger global movement, and their literature reflects both their commonality with other cultures and their distinctive history.

 Thus, formerly vital questions about identity have lost their traction, as an entire conceptual framework that once sustained them has begun to seem transient and inessential. Identity remains an issue, but often it metamorphoses into something else, ironized, detached from the traditional anxieties about acceptance and exposure. In our collection, the most candid instance of identity fiction is Eileen Pollack’s story “The Bris,” in which a father, nearing death, reveals to his son that he is not Jewish and begs the son to find him a mohel who will perform on him a deathbed bris so that, passing as a Jew, he can be buried in a Jewish cemetery beside his wife. The story is a classic identity-as-quandary fable upended, the Gentile in search of acceptance and self-validation now desiring to be a Jew.

4  introduction

The “self,” the grandly declared and anxiously defended “self” that once reigned as the dominant subject of earlier generations of Jewish writers in America, has all but disappeared. Once upon a time, an entire movement that stretches back to the early decades of the twentieth century could be epitomized by a phrase from Alfred Kazin’s memoir, A Walker in the City: “I was so happy I could not tell what I felt apart from the evenness of the heat in which I walked . . . . I was me, me, me, and it was summer.” From Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers through Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep to Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, with its plangent refrain of “I want, I want, I want,” and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint with its silent Dr. Spievogel taking notes in the background, the insistent “me, me, me” had a force and implacability that made the obsessional self virtually a cornerstone of Jewish writing in America. The writer’s freedom to reinvent himself as a larky (Saul Bellow’s term), or haunted American, was the measure of his initiation into the American republic of individuality. This New World agenda, however, could not have achieved its full expression without a dash of Old World sponsorship—specifically a Mitteleuropean import in the form of the feverish theories and daunting professional apparatus of psychoanalysis. While psychoanalytic theory in all its extravagant varieties—Freudian, Jungian, Reichian, Adlerian, and Kleinian—captured the imagination of so many American writers, the vast institutional network of analysts and clinics and institutes was on the ready to provide logistical support. Psychoanalysis promised not only to open the doors of perception for writers—“where id was, there ego shall be”—but also to lift the malaise of alienation from which they declared themselves to be suffering. Fiction absorbed psychoanalysis at a moment in history when a writer’s mission was to keep a fever chart of a character who was often a thinly disguised stand-in for himself: Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, Bellow’s Moses Herzog, Malamud’s Arthur Fidelman. Saul Bellow describes Von Humboldt Fleisher in Humboldt’s Gift as a man who “owned a set of Freud’s journals. Once you’ve read The Psychopathology of Everyday Life you knew that everyday life was psychopathology.” Saul Bellow’s novels and the self-lacerating heroes of Philip Roth answer most clearly to this preoccupation with mapping the unexplored catacombs of the American self by means of Mitteleuropean and Jewish theories of the unconscious. For critic Lionel Trilling, Freud served as one of the building blocks of his sturdy critical enterprise. Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg apprenticed themselves to the sexological principles of Wilhelm Reich. Bellow’s friend Isaac Rosenfeld spent hours in an orgone box. A mode of investigation that seemed so pioneering mere decades ago is now so far removed from Jewish writing in America as to seem as out of place as, say, Jewish stories about whaling. The therapist is as hard to find as a harpoon. By the first decades of the twenty-first century, Sigmund Freud has become something of an historical curiosity, a folk tale, a bobe mayse. Freud appears in Joseph Skibell’s A Curable Romantic as a disciple of Wilhelm Fliess’s oddball theories of the nasal reflex neurosis as the organic basis

introduction  5

for hysteria. The patient, Emma Eckstein, whom Fliess mistreated with history’s most famous nose job, turns out in Skibell’s book to have been in fact possessed by a dybbuk. Here ancient folklore trumps the modern. Freud appears as a narcissist and adulterer in Freud’s Mistress by Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman and as a stony-hearted brother who abandons his sisters to the Nazis in Freud’s Sister by Macedonian novelist Goce Smilevski. The inventor of the Oedipus complex who gave intellectual nourishment, not to say promise of remedy, to a generation of Jewish writers and thinkers in mid-twentieth century, has become himself a museum piece of intellectual history. And along with Freud has departed the “self” to which his theories had once given profound meanings. In much of the best newer fiction, the arias of “me, me, me” have faded into choruses of “us, us, us,” the Jews as a collective body embedded in history, culture, and a collective memory. Virtually all the writers in our anthology are not only uninterested in the self-analyzing and self-indulgent “oy vey” psychodramas of the past, but they also no longer question their connection to the tribe. Gone is the alienation that they once attributed to being strangers in a strange land, who could say with Cynthia Ozick “I am third generation American Jew, perfectly at home and yet perfectly insecure, perfectly acculturated and yet perfectly marginal.” We readers no longer encounter the self-irony associated with early Roth or the assimilation angst that characterized Abraham Cahan’s David Levinsky and his many descendants. Contemporary Jewish fiction writers take it as a given that they are Jews just as much as they are Americans, or, for that matter, Canadians, Russians, Latvians, or Israelis. Hyphens have given way to syntheses; they now look more like bridges than barriers. Left behind are Abraham Cahan’s Yekls who change their names to Jake. Somewhere in the dark backward and abysm of time are Saul Bellow’s philosopher clowns, with intellects to quote Heidegger and souls that say “quack” at the sight of women. Out on the margins are Ozick’s Jewish characters, perfectly acculturated yet perfectly marginal. In retreat are Henry Roth’s immigrants who tiptoe through America as if it were booby trapped with land mines. Missing from the new literature are disorders like Alex Portnoy’s, “in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” Gone are the anxious, phobic, dislocated Jewish protagonists for whom America is a landscape of frustrated desire. In their place, we find history.

 At no time before have Jewish writers in America turned so repeatedly to history for their visions and inventions. The prevailing time setting of Jewish writing in America, from Abraham Cahan through Philip Roth, had been the contemporary. “Seize the Day,” proclaims the title of one of Saul Bellow’s early novels, “the day” meaning this day,

6  introduction

the present, the “here and now,” in the words of Dr. Tamkin, the therapist-clown of Seize the Day. Capturing the moment was the collective mission of fiction in the previous century, as if authorship was a responsibility that called upon writers to witness the manners and morals of their own era. “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” the title of an influential 1940s essay by Lionel Trilling, argued that the novel’s first duty was that of observation and recording. The novel, according to Trilling, “delivers the news.” It tells us “about the look and feel of things, how things are done and what things are worth and what they cost and what the odds are.” A sense of duty to one’s time has not entirely disappeared from Jewish writing, as we discover in the novel that won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for 2012, The World Without You, by Joshua Henkin. A panorama of contemporary middle-class habits, manners, and conflicts, the novel resembles Jane Austen’s domestic family dramas, but here transported from England to the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. And in many of our anthology’s fictions, by, say, Eileen Pollack, Francine Prose, or Peter Orner, the routines and motives of daily life, “the look and feel of things,” remain under sharp scrutiny. Only in the case of Henkin’s novel, the Austenesque world of family intrigue is set against a background of a brutal political assassination elsewhere in the world, as one of the family is murdered, in the manner of Daniel Pearl, by Islamic radicals in Iraq. (The actual Daniel Pearl was murdered in Pakistan.) In Henkin’s novel, we have “the look and feel of things” in the Berkshires sharing the same stage, even the same page, with utter horror. However, as collective Jewish experience becomes increasingly the touchstone for significance, more writing grapples with history than ever before. The last decade of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first have seen a profusion of new, young Jewish writers for whom the Jewish experience— defined in a variety of ways—shows itself to be, as Allegra Goodman’s Ed Markowitz would have it, “unmistakable, not to be denied . . . the thundering of history” (“Mosquitoes,” from The Family Markowitz). In particular, the literary preoccupation with the Holocaust among Jewish writers, especially in the decades surrounding the turn of the twenty-first century, has taken on considerable momentum. Here the Holocaust has become the psychic and emotional site of an originating, defining moment of trauma. As Melvin Jules Bukiet, the child of survivors, says, “in the beginning was Auschwitz” (Nothing Makes You Free). For post-Holocaust writers of the second and third generations, the Holocaust has ineradicably shaped their lives, but as a kind of silhouette, for the memories of such defining events are “borrowed,” or, as the title of Thane Rosenbaum’s second novel, Second Hand Smoke, suggests, “second-hand.” As Jonathan Safran Foer’s narrator in the novel Everything is Illuminated insists, “The origin of a story is always an absence,” a gap in the narrative that one hopes to fill by looking back. From absent or imperfect memory emerge narratives of continuing trauma.

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As the Holocaust recedes in time and we face the end of direct, survivor testimony, the obligation to preserve the memory by other means becomes all the more critical. Thane Rosenbaum, Melvin Bukiet, Ehud Havazelet, Aryeh Lev Stollman, Harvey Grossinger, Joseph Skibell, Nicole Krauss, Julie Orringer, Sara Houghteling, Edith Pearlman, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, and many other writers not represented in this anthology engage either directly or indirectly with the Holocaust and its aftershocks. In doing so, they acknowledge a legacy of loss and accept an obligation to carry memory into the future. This is a past whose stories, as one of Julie Orringer’s characters says, from the very beginning, were “absorbed . . . through her skin, like medicine or poison” (The Invisible Bridge). The events of the Holocaust constitute an “unwanted inheritance,” as one of Thane Rosenbaum’s characters laments, but one impressed on the children of survivors, “the DNA . . . forever coded” (“An Act of Defiance,” in Elijah Visible). Such a past, as one of Ehud Havazelet’s characters puts it, “seeped across the walls and floor . . . no longer something to be recalled from a distance—it was there in front of him, to walk into if he dared” (“To Live in Tiflis in the Springtime,” in Like Never Before). For subsequent generations, dreams, visions, and memories, real and imagined, reemerge. In Nathan Englander’s story “Free Fruit for Young Widows” (in the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank) a young Israeli boy learns brutal lessons about when it is morally permissible to murder, even men who are innocently eating lunch, because failing to do so could result in your own death. Ehud Havazelet’s novel Bearing the Body, whose dramatic center is located in San Francisco, shows us how contemporary consciousness may yet be stalked and shadowed by the Shoah. Some approaches may rely on the symbolic and fantastical, while others draw from extensive archival research, documented chronicles, and recorded interviews in reconstructing a world that has been lost. Sara Houghteling’s Pictures at an Exhibition, set in Paris both before and after the Shoah, looks at the Nazi looting of museums and private art collections during the war. Houghteling documents the history of systematic and ruthless looting as if the war were waged from the beginning for plunder. As one absorbs her drama of paintings lost and found, one is tempted to see the Nazi passion for conquest in a new light entirely. Julie Orringer’s novel The Invisible Bridge painstakingly examines the Nazi occupation of Hungary and the fate of Hungarian Jews. Here Orringer shows the intersection of History—the war against the Jews—and personal histories through the confluence of exhaustive research and the penetrating radar of her own keen imagination. The Invisible Bridge follows the fate of a Hungarian Jewish family, the Lévis, from the individual, middle-class aspirations of their pre-war existences into the collective desperation of wartime, as Jewish men are forced to work in the labor

8  introduction

gangs behind the front lines in Hungary, the Munkaszolgálat, where conditions are as lethal as those at the front. This novel is a memorial to those who died. There is a stunning moment at the novel’s close when those Hungarian Jews who survived the war fill the synagogue searching for names of families and friends, and it is in the long recitation of names that the author recreates the devastation and enormity of loss that Hungary’s Jews experienced: There were thousands of them. Every day, on the wall outside the building, endless lists of names. Abraham. Almasy. Arany. Banki. Böhm. Braun. Breuer. Budai. Csato. Czitrom. Dániel. Diamant. Einstein. Eisenberger. Engel. Fischer. Goldman. Goldner. Goldstein. Hart. Hauszmann. Heller. Hirsch. Honig. Horovitz. Idesz. János. Jáskiseri. Kemény. Kepecs. Kertész. Klein. Kovacs. Langer. Lázár. Lindenfeld. Mirkovitz. Martón. Nussbaum. Ócsai. Paley. Pollák. Róna. Rosenthal. Roth. Rubiczek. Rubin. Schoenfeld. Sebestyen. Sebök. Steiner. Szanto. Toronyi. Ungar. Vadas. Vámos. Vertes. Vida. Weisz. Wolf. Zeller. Zindler. Zucker. An alphabet of loss, a catalogue of grief. Almost every time they went, they witnessed someone learning that a person they loved had died. . . . They looked day after day, every day, for so long that they almost forgot what they were looking for; after a while it seemed they were just looking, trying to memorize a new Kaddish composed entirely of names. This list itself, a solemn drumroll of names, speaks to the huge, almost unimaginable numbers murdered. The Invisible Bridge is a contemporary kaddish, a Yizkor Book, a chronicle of remembrance. Some other notable books we have read in our tenure as judges that foreground or background the Shoah include Gita Schwarz, Displaced Persons (2010); Margot Singer, Pale of Settlement (2009); Eugene Drucker, The Savior (2007); Ida Haettmer-Higgins, The History of History (2011); Norah Labiner, German for Travelers: A Novel in 95 Lessons (2010); Aryeh Lev Stollman, The Illuminated Soul (2003); David Unger, The Price of Escape (2011); Steve Stern, North of God (2008) and The Frozen Rabbi (2010); and Joseph Kertes, The Darkest Hour (2010). Examining a different but related disaster is Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases (2007), which explores the Argentinian “dirty war” of 1976–83 and the particular targeting of Jews by the military junta that ravaged Argentina during those years. Jewish historicism may also extend to the appropriation of historical forms and discourses, for Jewish writers pay homage to the past by resurrecting old and even ancient forms of storytelling. Folk tales and legends from the Jewish oral tradition supply endless forage for modern writers. Steve Stern, for example, finds inspiration for his Memphis stories in The Legends of the Jews, compiled over a century ago by Louis Ginzberg, and the method of Jewish lore and aggadah underlie the whimsical

introduction  9

tales of the Lamed Vov by Jonathon Keats in his Book of the Unknown. Dara Horn weaves the Jewish past, present, and future together in The World to Come, tracing the history of a Chagall painting over several generations of a Jewish family, while referencing the works of the Yiddish writer Pinkhas Kahanovitch, who wrote under the name of Der Nister, “The Hidden One.” Some of Pearl Abraham’s fictions (not included in this volume) are modern renderings of the tales of the great Hasidic master Nachman of Bratslav. See in particular her novel The Seventh Beggar, which replays in contemporary dress a famous unfinished parable by Nachman of Bratslav. Possibly the most ambitious use of historical forms to be found in this anthology involve the pages of Apikoros Sleuth by Robert Majzels, which mimic the layout of the Talmud page, complete with Mishnah, Gemara, commentary by Rashi, Tosefot, Mesoret Hashas, and other commentaries. Only, all voices are those of Majzels himself, who applies the Talmudic method to a modern detective story. Much of contemporary literature draws from the ancient tradition of Midrash, interpretive and explanatory narratives that both fill in the gaps and extend the stories of the past.

 So we are back around at the end to where we started—the startling resemblance of Jewish writing in America to a diaspora, though the preponderance of this literature is being written in a single language: English. And even that we can’t be certain of, since the full dimensions of Jewish genealogy and self-identification cannot be fully known. Those of us who live in a largely Ashkenazic world, and a post-Haskalah Ashkenazic world at that, know precious little about the Sephardic writers in our midst, or the Ashkenazim of Latin American origin, or the “crypto-Jews” of Mexico and the American Southwest, who may well be a vast population. Are Latino-Latina Jews in the continental United States writing fiction in Spanish? There must be some, perhaps many; their names are just not known to us. The same might be said of Russian, Arabic, and Farsi (Persian) emigrants, just to name a few, who have their own cénacles, their own journals, their own reading series, and perhaps even their own masters. Alan Mintz’s recent book on Hebrew poetry in America, Sanctuary in the Wilderness, reminds us that Hebrew had its own abundant literary life in the United States and still may. And Hana Wirth-Nesher, in Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature, argues that “an emphasis on the democratic value of speech . . . coupled with resistance to one uniform language, enabled Jewish Americans to shape English as well as to be shaped by it.” Writers come to our awareness through the print media and the Internet, which for the vast majority of us are available only in English. But who is to say for certain that fiction writing in other languages is not thriving in North America?

10  introduction

The marketing networks through which we get our literature are notoriously selective, and much, we have no doubt, does not pass through them. Nevertheless, we see emerging in the American literary scene a condition that roughly resembles the Jewish literary diaspora of a full century ago, during the great flowering of Jewish culture in a dozen languages, including Polish, Czech, Italian, German, Serbian, Russian, French, Hungarian, Spanish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Many writers wrote in two or more languages, like S. Y. Abramovitsch (popularly remembered as Mendele Mocher Sforim) and S. Y. Agnon. Many writers read as many as four or five languages. Such multilingualism might have provided a key to survival. Bruno Schulz translated Franz Kafka into Polish and both drew upon and extended Kafka in his own extravagant metamorphic fantasias (see Street of Crocodiles and Sanitarium Under the Sign of the Hour Glass, both published by Penguin Books in the Writers from the Other Europe series, edited by Philip Roth). Isaac Babel, fluent in Yiddish, French, and Russian, wrote one of his greatest stories in homage to French writer Guy de Maupassant. Babel’s inability to write of life convincingly in French, however, doomed him to return from France to the Soviet Union in 1933, where Stalin caught up with him. Danilo Kiš was utterly peripatetic, having been born in Serbia and hidden during the war by his mother in Hungary; he divided the last years of his life between Belgrade and Paris. A listing of the multilingual and displaced writers in the Jewish diaspora can go on for pages, but we need to mention in passing a writer who is not in this volume but whose life sums up the diasporic existence and the multilingual imagination. John Auerbach’s (1922–2002) childhood was lived in Polish and Yiddish, his young adulthood in German, and his middle age in Hebrew. After the Shoah, he lived on a maritime kibbutz in Israel, where he divided his time between seafaring and writing. He wrote only in English: meticulous, laser-clean literary English. He did so in imitation of the literary hero of his youth, Joseph Conrad. We have the testimony of Saul Bellow, in the prefaces to both of Auerbach’s books, Tales of Grabowski and The Owl and Other Stories, that Auerbach’s spoken English was flawless. As a youth in occupied Warsaw, Auerbach had the fortune to be allowed out of the ghetto on a work detail, a plakówka, and during one detail he tore off his Star of David armband and emerged from a men’s room as Wladislaw Grabowski (the fictionalized name). It was a Superman trick, but in real life. To make good on the transformation, he had to not simply pretend to be another, but, as he put it, he also had to change the wavelength of his brain, give over his books, his philosophy, his Kierkegaard, and become ruthless and insensitive to suffering, “free of remorse, of regret, of sorrow, of conscience” (Tales of Grabowski). He headed for Danzig (now Gdansk) to work in the shipyards as an indentured Polish laborer and miraculously survived the war and imprisonment in the Stutthof concentration camp, then emigrated to Israel. There he began to write fiction, but only in

introduction  11

English, and managed to get to America, where he married an American actress, Nola Chilton, and made the acquaintance of Saul Bellow. Why tell this story? We tell it here for the miracle of survival and the miracle of literature that was made possible by it, but also because it presents us with a writer who answers to no standardized rubrics and who has no textbook place in any national literature. Was Auerbach an Israeli writer? A Polish writer? A Jewish-Polish-IsraeliAmerican writer? Unhampered, but also unaided, by any of the above appellations, he was “just a writer” and a reminder that in order to for us to discover literature and allow it to affect us, we have to keep our ascriptions on a short leash. What captures him best perhaps was his hunger to write, indeed in his fourth or maybe fifth language (Yiddish, Polish, German, Hebrew, English), and to forge out of his implacable determination an English prose that rivals Conrad’s for grittiness and impact. We may think of Auerbach as a hero of survival, and he is certainly that. But for us, he is a hero of the word. Writers do not always belong either to where they came from or to where they wound up. They belong to the written word, which is its own kingdom. A recent book by Amos Oz and his daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, titled jewsandwords, reminds us of the paramount importance of words in Jewish culture. “Ours is not a bloodline but a textline,” they write. Their many examples converge upon the textuality of learning in all Jewish communities: [Jewish] children were made to inherit not only a faith, not only a collective fate, not only the irreversible mark of circumcision, but also the formative stamp of a library. It was not enough for the youngsters to follow the universal rites of passage—watch and emulate their elders, learn how to work or fight, and heed ancestral tales and songs by the fireside. Oral traditions and physical emulation could not suffice. You had to read from the books, too. Reading books as a customary part of Jewish education resonates throughout jewsandwords as a core ingredient of Jewish identity, not only as a marker of Jewish difference but also as a key to the axial lines of character and culture. This focus is particularly critical because the Ozes identify themselves as secular Israeli Jews and make an argument for the essential Jewishness, indeed the historically validated Jewishness, of people like themselves: Jews who have maintained a distance from rabbinic authority and the core theocentric precepts inscribed in Jewish liturgy and ritual. Yet they hold their secularity to be scripturally based—no Bible, no Jews, even for Jews who do not follow the path of Halakhah, the law: “Self-conscious seculars seek not tranquility but intellectual restlessness, and love questions better than answers. To secular Jews like us, the Hebrew Bible is a magnificent human creation. Solely human. We love it and we question it.”

12  introduction

The fiction in The New Diaspora is overwhelmingly secular, even if the private beliefs of some writers may be halakhically observant. The modes in which the stories are written—realistic, allegorical, folkloric, fabulistic, comical, romantic, agitprop, protest, confessional, stream-of-consciousness, historical, documentary, roman à clef, roman fleuve, epic, epistolary, or picaresque—are all secular literary genres that Jews have adapted to their expressive needs and values in modern times, beginning with Sholem Yankev Abramovitsch (Mendele Mocher Sforim) in the middle of the nineteenth century. Abramovitsch, “der Zeyde,” or grandfather, as Sholem Aleichem called him, opened the shuttered gates through which entered such Yiddish and Hebrew writers as Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, S. Y. Agnon, S. Ansky, H. N. Bialik, Israel Joshua, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, writers in European vernaculars like Isaac Babel, Bruno Schulz, Franz Kafka, and the vast number of writers who claimed the Enlightenment as an adopted patrimony and discovered within the Western literary canon a capacious array of forms in which to work. For this generation, with the possible exception of the latecomer Kafka, the habits of reading, writing, and commentary were nurtured by the Torah-based parent-child, question-and-response education, which “was spirited, it was playful, it was about ideas, it encouraged curiosity, and it required reading. It compelled very young children to read, and at the same time it showed them how compelling reading can be.” And yet this learning, in their view, did not possess the coercive power to compel a life according to Halakhah in all cases, but rather inspired habits of inquiry and exploration that allowed writers and intellectuals to propel themselves successfully into the world on their own terms—Isaac Babel becoming a journalist with the Red Army, for example—and to forge their own syntheses between the Jewish and the European, the Jewish and the Cossack, the Jewish and the German, the Jewish and the American parts of their lives. Even as the Jews were thrust into modernity by all the devastating means that Europe brought against them, there remained in all a residue of devotion. The bivalent Red Cavalry stories of Isaac Babel, who identifies with the brutal Cossacks he rides with but writes tenderly of the Jewish villages he finds himself bivouacked in, are productions of the collision of modernity with traditional observance among writers of his generation. Just as striking are the drawings of Bruno Schulz in which sadomasochistic motifs appear alongside portraits of devout rabbis at prayer. (See in particular the erotic drawings collected in The Book of Idolatry.) Here one sees plainly, even among those writers who had traveled farthest on the journey to modernity, that nucleus of reverence underlying their modern preoccupations. Most of the authors of the stories and excerpted book chapters in The New Diaspora are several generations removed from the world that cherished Talmud-Torah instruction for every male Jewish child, and some are descendants of the left-wing anti-rabbinic culture of Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers. Indeed, we have little doubt

introduction  13

that scattered among our authors are red-diaper grandchildren. If our writers represent a normal cross-section of American Jews, then that is bound to be the case. We do know that the Russian/Soviet born writers we have included—Bezmozgis, Kalman, Shrayer, and Vapnyar—grew up in an environment of compulsory secularization under Soviet Communism, but who can say how much traditional learning any of them absorbed at home sub rosa? Surreptitious learning can be bootlegged into any home, even if it is by way of Pushkin rather than Genesis. Surely, in many cases, the love of reading was nurtured by Yevgeniy Onegin and not the legends of the Jews. To be sure, some of our American-born writers did have Talmud-Torah educations, and one of the more spectacular productions of our writers in recent years is New American Haggadah (2012), translated afresh from Hebrew by Nathan Englander and edited by Jonathan Safran Foer. Though Englander has drifted away from his religious upbringing, he acknowledges that “the religion leaks into the writing. And I guess the writing leaks into the religion as well. I am a pro when it comes to ritualistic behavior, everything prescribed and timed and structured, everything right or wrong. And once I got serious about writing, I discovered that I’d adopted a lot of these forms. You write hard, every day, six days a week, and on the seventh you rest” (quoted in Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, edited by Paul Zakrzewski). Israeli-born Ehud Havazelet had a similarly observant upbringing: his father was a rabbi and a professor at Yeshiva University. While his break with religion was more bitter and convulsive than Englander’s, he does not look back to the earlier self with nostalgia for a lost unity of being: “And that’s why the traditional certainties are so alluring. If you know, ‘I’m a Jewish man and I behave this way,’ you’re supposed to have that solid identity. I don’t. I never did. I don’t believe most people do” (“An Interview with Ehud Havazelet,” Boswell magazine [online], October 2000). The very existence of this book is premised on a faith in the existence of deep historical textlines that bind all our writers into a Jewish complex of thought marked by some unity of practice, some unity of history, and some continuity of belief, however attenuated. The belief in wholeness, however, comes up against the shattered realities of Jewish life. Jewish history is a broken history, broken again and again since the fall of the Second Temple, until the idea of a continuum makes no sense apart from its discontinuities: its breaks, its flights, its catastrophic losses, its pogroms and inquisitions, its amnesias, its traumas, its multilingualism, its sectarian pluralities and apostasies, its ferocious polemical skirmishes, its intersections, its absorptions, its borrowings, its ideological splinterings and factional rivalries, its schismatic polarizations, its multiple exiles and irretrievable losses, its Kabbalistic mysteries and Sabbatian pilgrimages, its dispersions and its aliyahs. Any effort to make continuous sense of Jewish writing without factoring in a thousand fractures will face an impossible task. Jewish writing—not unlike Jewish history—might be

14  introduction

thought of in terms of its ruptures rather than its structures. And yet, in rejecting the “lachrymose history” of Jewish woe and affirming the potential for a fruitful Jewish diasporic existence, we find some of the periods of greatest Jewish literary productivity are precisely in the long periods of peace between those ruptures.

 So this anthology is built necessarily out of compromises. Half of it follows the founding rubrics of the literary prize that brought the editors together in a shared purpose, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Accordingly, the overwhelming numbers of the books we read for the prize even now are written by Americans born in the United States for American readers. Those selections that are keyed to the award reflect that original intention. However, a founding idea that suited the tidier and more compartmentalized literary horizon of 1963 is bound to prove too confining for the far more disorderly world we now inhabit, when fiction writing in the US is ever more the work of emigrants with their own stories to tell. Thus, the second part of our table of contents may be thought of as the more experimental, more open-ended half of the book, with three stories by authors born in Russia (Shrayer, Kalman, and Vapnyar), one by a Latvian-born writer (Bezmozgis), one by a South African-born writer (Tony Eprile), one by an Israeli now living in Canada (Avner Mandelman), one by a Canadian (Robert Majzels), who uses the form of the Talmud as the template for telling a detective story. Here indeed is the “vast, disorderly, and somewhat diffuse” literature we are looking for. The most spectacular of the emigrations is from Russia. And as we learn from the pioneering research of scholar Adrian Wanner, this isn’t just an American phenomenon, but one with corollaries in Germany, France, and Israel. A particular aspect of the Russian invasion that may prove vexing for some is that the Russians define themselves as Jewish, when they do at all, in cultural terms only. Indeed, none of them is religiously observant. But it is not just faith and observance that so many of these writers have turned their backs on, it is the very ascription of Jewishness that we as readers are keen to attribute to them. In an interview, Russian writer Anya Ulinich (not in this anthology) complained, pointedly: “What is ‘Jewish’ Fiction? Is there also ‘Jewish math’? ‘Jewish sculpture’? Or is it inadvertent, like having a big nose and curly hair? . . . I’d like to think that I just write fiction.” Those of us who assemble anthologies in the untroubled certainty that something called “Jewish fiction” exists, and that we are in the business of mapping its terrain, need to be aware that our map may be self-serving and revealing of our own idiosyncrasies and preoccupations, and that the boundaries we draw around our literature need to be flexible, porous, and endlessly open to question. We find it particularly helpful to invoke Miron’s “Jewish literary space, in which all sorts of literary phenomena, contiguous and non-contiguous, move, meet, separate and put more and

introduction  15

more distance among themselves.” “Nobody . . . possesses a monopoly over Jewishness,” he adds. “That includes ourselves.” And yet, within the broader boundary diffusion, we may see what appears to be a deep conversation between American and Israeli literary communities. Quite apart from the effects of the Russian emigrations, which have complementary effects on American and Israeli literatures, we can witness a fluent interchange of writers to and from each nation. In this anthology we’ve included Israeli-born Avner Mandelman now living in Canada, but headed the other way was Allen Hoffman, winner of the Wallant Award in 1981, who made aliyah to Israel soon thereafter and continued while there to write and publish fiction in English. We observe the easy academic interchanges in areas of literature and literary studies, according to which dozens of scholars on both sides either lecture or hold professorships in each other’s countries. Major Israeli writers like Amos Oz and David Grossman have developed solid audiences in the United States, thanks to the abilities of their translators, respectively Nicholas de Lange and Jessica Cohen. Nathan Englander is an English-language translator of Israeli writer Etgar Keret. This fluidity of intellectual/cultural interchange manifests itself in The New Diaspora through the numerous stories by American writers that are set in Israel, with characters who are tourists or adventurers: Joshua Henkin, “Sex on the Brain”; Joan Leegant, “The Baghdadi”; Curt Leviant, “Say It Isn’t So, Mr. Yiddish”; Scott Nadelson, “Oslo”; Tova Reich, “Dedicated to the Dead”; Margot Singer, “Deir Yassin”; and Aryeh Lev Stollman, “Mr. Mitochondria.” It is not premature to begin to speak of a fluently binational imagination that finds itself equally at home in Israel or the United States. Indeed, there are presently websites dedicated to the integration of Jewish writings from around the globe, though in practice the American and the Israeli are by far the dominant literatures. See in particular Nora Gold’s JewishFiction.net, which is dedicated to Jewish writing from wherever it may appear. This “raft of words,” to borrow a phrase from novelist Peter Manseau, between the Jewish Atlantic and the Mediterranean worlds, appears to be growing quite without friction on either side, as writers recognize their own stake in being part of a larger frame of discourse. We might even have among our writers an accomplished diaspora of one. Edith Pearlman, winner of the Wallant Award for 2011, locates her stories from anywhere on the map that she may inhabit with her capacious imagination, including Jerusalem, Central America, tsarist Russia, London during the Blitz, and locales across Europe and the United States, including the invented community of Godolphin, Massachusetts, a fictional suburb of Boston. Her characters are variously wanderers, tourists, missionaries, outcasts, refugees, desperate children of the Kindertransport, displaced persons, adopted children and their bewildered adoptive parents, Jews in search of a minyan on Yom Kippur in nameless banana republics, doomed civil servants in the employ of fading dictators somewhere south of Mexico and just north of Hell, Cambodians cooking

16  introduction

their meals on the floors of their Manhattan apartments, autodidact scholars who specialize in Dickens and Maimonides. “I’m not interested in Judaism,” says a character in her story “Settlers,” “only in Jews. They’re so complicated.” Such a phrase might serve as an epigraph both for her collection of stories and ours: not Judaism but Jews as they are, in their bewildering idiosyncrasy and variety, and in their perilous place in history. Two questions emerge: (1) Is there a story behind these stories? (2) Was our selection of texts determined by a story we wanted to tell? To the second question, the answer is a firm no. At no point in our considerations did the editors ever discuss a desire to shape the collection in any direction other than to show the writers through their best work. Our choices were dictated by (1) past Wallant Award winners whom we hoped to represent through their best writing and (2) the abundant other writing that has crossed our desks over the past eight years. We did desire to show the quality of craftsmanship that we found in the fiction being written in English in North America by Jews and for Jews. One of the very great pleasures of our work has been that of reading itself, abundantly, promiscuously, sometimes with scarcely a pause between books. It is a deep pleasure, a pleasure beyond the aesthetic appreciation of lapidary phrases artfully arranged into stunning paragraphs. We experienced also the satisfaction of touching down in a history that for us is always absorbing, in a textual tradition that begins with the written Torah and is alive in thought and dialectic, in a unique cast of mind that is at once blunt, fierce, contentious, earthy, pliable, worldly, utopian, and durable, and in a tradition of storytelling in which any story might prove to be a parable, a midrash, a lesson, a dream, a bobe mayse, or something perversely cryptic about metamorphoses and insects. If our book of stories is about anything at all, it is about the tradition of storytelling itself, aggadah, which, in all varieties of Jewish observance and culture—Ashkenazic and Sephardic, Hassidic and Yeshivist, Lubavitcher and Satmar, Reform and secular, Russian and Israeli, and all hybrid identities and schismatic communities in between—holds a special place as a center of gravity that gives weight and significance to individual lives. Working on this book has given us occasion to reflect on writing in our own emotional economies. In their book New American Haggadah, authors Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer reflect on the defining power of storytelling in Jewish ritual life: “We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human life—our lives—dignity” (v). Time and again, we hear stories of Jews who continued to write under circumstances that most of us would regard as impossible. We recall here the story of Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti, whose overcoat was found to contain his last poems when his body was exhumed from a mass grave after his death in 1944 in Hungary. We would also point to the story of Yiddish writer Naftali Herts Kon, whose poetry was burned in the Soviet Union, confiscated in Poland in 1960, and only recently restored to his family in 2011

introduction  17

after lengthy and expensive legal battles. So, too, Isaiah Spiegel, who wrote short stories and poems while incarcerated in the Lodz Ghetto, and after the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944, when he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon his fortuitous survival, he returned to Lodz to reclaim his hidden manuscripts so that they might be brought to light. Emanuel Ringelblum, the historian of the Warsaw Ghetto, wrote that the imperative to record events and feelings during the war was so strong that Jews kept diaries even under the most impossible conditions, writing memoirs even in forced labor camps. Franz Rosenzweig, author of The Star of Redemption, continued writing even though paralyzed by ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, by blinking his eyes as his wife pointed to letters. There may be thousands of such instances. Writing itself, for Jews, has been that center of gravity that has given weight and meaning to their lives. This anthology is more than anything a celebration of storytelling itself as the still point in the turning world for Jews—something we tacitly understood when we set out to assemble it more than three years ago.

Bibliographic Notes In the course of writing this introduction, the editors have made reference to a number of literary critics and historians. Rather than supply the formal apparatus of footnotes or bibliography, we will just provide here a narrative bibliographic account of our sources. Literary texts have been cited in-line in the text, while critical and historical source materials are cited in this supplement. Irving Howe’s quote is from his introduction to Jewish-American Stories (New York, Signet, 1977). Quotes from Israeli literary historian Dan Miron are primarily from From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). A handy summary of Miron’s book may be found in Shachar Pinsker’s review in The New Republic (December 8, 2011). The quotation attributed to Cynthia Ozick about being acculturated and marginal is from her essay “Towards a New Yiddish: Note,” in Art and Ardor: Essays by Cynthia Ozick (New York: Knopf, 1983). The phrase “strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings” is from the fictional Dr. Otto Spielvogel’s frontispiece to Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969). Lionel Trilling’s essay “Manners, Morals, and the Novel” is from his collection The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950). This book is presently available in the Harcourt Uniform Edition of Trilling’s work published in 1979. In that collection may also be found the two essays that outline Trilling’s positions on psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud: “Freud and Literature” and “Art and Neurosis.” The Opposing Self, published in 1955, a subsequent Trilling essay collection, is also now most easily available in the same Harcourt Uniform Edition. Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger’s jewsandwords was published by

18  introduction

Stanford University Press in 2012. Reference to Hana Wirth-Nesher is to her Call It English: The Languages of Jewish-American Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Alan Mintz’s Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry was published by Stanford University Press in 2012. New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer with new translation by Nathan Englander, was published by Little Brown in 2012. For the recent history of Russian writers in America, we’ve relied on Adrian Wanner’s Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011). A summary of Wanner’s basic arguments may be found in “Russian Jews as American Writers: A New Paradigm for American Multiculturalism?” in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. (Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer 2012). Wanner’s global perspective includes the effect of the Russian literary invasion on French, German, and Israeli literatures, as well as American. See also the testimony of Maxim Shrayer in Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013). The quote from Anya Ulinich is from the MELUS article. For Naftali Herz Kon, see Paul Berger’s article in the Jewish Daily Forward (forward.com/articles/180733/naftali-hertskons-works-wrenched-out-of-polands-c/). A brief introduction to John Auerbach’s writing can be found in the original Toby Press advertising blurb (www.tobypress.com/ books/grabowski.htm). An account of Auerbach’s American-born actress-wife Nola Chilton and her revolutionary work in Israeli theater can be found in the Haaretz story of her one-woman show produced in Israel at the age of 91: “One-Woman Show: At 91, Nola Chilton is not here to appease the audience” (Haaretz, April 12, 2013). Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo’s World of Our Fathers was published by Harcourt in 1976. Bruno Schulz, known to most readers as a story writer in the collections Street of Crocodiles (New York: Walker and Company, 1963) and Sanitarium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (New York: Penguin, 1988), was also an accomplished artist, and his drawings may be found in The Book of Idolatry (Warsaw, Poland: Interpress Publishers, 1983) and The Drawings of Bruno Schulz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990). Nora Gold’s online fiction blog can be found at JewishFiction.net (www.jewishfiction.net/index.php/currentissue). For Emanuel Ringelblum, see Joseph Kermish (ed.), To Live with Honor and Die with Honor! Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986).

PART I Selections by Edward Lewis Wallant Award–Winning Authors

1 Joshua Henkin

Sex on the Brain 1998 Men are praying on the airplane. Sara can see them from where she sits, skullcapped men, some with beards and payes, swaying in the aisles while the flight attendants roll their carts past them, pouring drinks. They’re over the Atlantic, the sky bright and clear through the window. In Israel, the sun has already set. The crowds have left the Wailing Wall, and downtown on King George Street soldiers loiter in front of the Mashbir and American teenagers lean against storefronts eating falafel and square slices of pizza. Everywhere in the world, Jews pray toward the Wailing Wall. Three times a day, morning, afternoon, and night. Except on an airplane God plays tricks with the sun. So when should a Jew pray on an airplane? Always? Never? Next to Sara a blond man sits impassively, reading a copy of Time. He may be a soldier, she thinks, the blond ones especially, the ones who look Swedish, the ones who read Time. Undercover Israeli soldiers on the airplane just in case. She thinks of Yossi, the guy who picked cantaloupe back on the kibbutz. Yossi was Swedish, a Swedish oleh who served in the Israeli Air Force and who later, everyone suspected, worked for Mossad. Her meal comes. It’s orange chicken stamped in Hebrew and English with rabbinic approval, and across the front are instructions not to unseal the package before giving it to the passenger. The silverware comes in plastic. Sara’s a vegetarian, and she’s ordered a special meal but the airline has forgotten it, so she slices the perforation on the tin foil and eats what she can, julienned carrots, a few stray peas not doused in gravy, a piece of sponge cake. She orders a club soda and sips from it. She tries to fall asleep. It’s morning when they land in Tel Aviv, and as Sara sets foot on the tarmac, the woman in front of her gets down on her knees to kiss the ground. This startles Sara, “Sex on the Brain” was originally published in Glimmer Train Stories, Issue 52, Fall 2004, pp. 115–33. Copyright © 2004 by Joshua Henkin. Reprinted with permission of the author.

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though the first time she visited Israel she kissed the ground, too. She’s here alone now; no one knows she’s coming. Last she heard, people were leaving the kibbutz. Socialism’s a failed experiment, everyone likes to say. Zionism is, too, she thinks, judging from the fact that everywhere she travels she sees Israelis. Israelis in the Louvre, Israelis in the Vatican, Israelis at the Great Wall of China. Israelis everywhere but in Israel, yet they return to the country they complain about, as she’s returning now. This is her first time here in eleven years. “Na’im ba’chutz,” she tells the taxi driver. “Mezeg avir na’im” Her Hebrew is more than rusty, it’s corroded, but she was fluent once, and she figures she’s safe talking about the weather. And the weather is good. The sun is rising above the date trees, spreading color across the land. Amnon used to tell her she had a perfect Israeli accent. “That’s because I studied drama,” Sara said. “I have a perfect Spanish accent, too, and I know only ten words of Spanish. Accents aren’t my problem. Vocabulary is.” But her accent, too, is a problem because the taxi driver has figured out she’s American. “Aich yadata?” “Because you speak like American. You fly from America.” “Right,” she says, and she laughs. “The airport.” She sits quietly in back and watches the signposts move past them. She’s not in a rush. But the taxi driver has boasted he’ll get her to Jerusalem in less than an hour. “Tezaher,” she says. “Why be careful?” “Because I want to return home alive. Because I have a fiancé. Because there are things I want to do.” “You married?” “Not yet. Once I marry my fiancé, then I’ll be married.” “Pretty girl like you should be married,” the driver says, and Sara doesn’t answer him because she doesn’t know what to say. The first time she was in Israel, when she was fifteen, she danced with an Israeli soldier at a nightclub, and when they were done dancing, he took her outside to the parking lot, dropped his pants, and said, “Kees it!” Amnon loved that story. Amnon’s family lived in the US for five years, and he liked to imitate Israelis trying to speak English. Kees it! Kees it! “Israeli men have sex on the brain,” Sara said. “Sex on the brain?” said Amnon. “You mean sex in the brain.” “That, too,” said Sara. “Sex on the brain. It’s an idiom.” The driver stops in front of her hotel. Gone for eleven years, and she’s forgotten the cardinal rule: negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. Regard every transaction as if you’re at the shuk. The driver didn’t have the meter on, and Sara isn’t sure what the exchange rate is. But she figures she’s on vacation. So she reaches into her bag, fishes out two hundred shekels, and tells the driver to keep the change.

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The hotel has been remodeled. Or maybe not; she isn’t sure. She walks through the long corridors to her room and lies down on the bed, her suitcase still unpacked. She takes the elevator down to the swimming pool and watches the other tourists lounging like seals next to the fake ferns. A teenage boy in flip-flops orders a garlic bagel with cream cheese from a passing waiter. The boy nods at Sara. She takes out a copy of Ha’aretz and tries to get through it. When she’s done, she falls asleep on the beach chair and dreams of the kibbutz, of the vineyards at five in the morning and her palms dark with grape juice in the growing heat, of her legs streaked purple with it. Upstairs, she asks the man behind the desk whether the hotel has been remodeled. “Not recently,” he says. “In the last eleven years?” “I’m not sure.” “It just looks different, that’s all.” The Israelis, too, look different. She’s heard it all back home, how Israelis have more per capita cell phones than anyone else in the world. And it’s true. In the hotel lobby, on the street, on Egged buses, everywhere Sara goes she sees Israelis talking on their cell phones, shouting into them, the same way they shout when they’re not talking on their cell phones. “It’s a country of shouting people,” Amnon liked to say. In bed, in the same hotel she’s staying in now, he would whisper in Sara’s ear. They’d make love looking down on the Old City. They’d come here every other week; a respite from the kibbutz was how Amnon thought of it. “Even a kibbutznik needs a little capitalism,” he told her. “A little capitalism for the kibbutznik and his capitalist girlfriend.” “I am not.” “You’re a socialist?” “Maybe not a socialist. But I vote Democrat and I don’t wear makeup and I’m living with you on the kibbutz, isn’t that so?” “Yes,” he agreed. The things she’d said when she was twenty-one. They’d met her first week on the kibbutz, Amnon and his brother Shai playing games in the chicken coop. Amnon and Shai would take the chickens out of the coop and bring them to where the volunteers stayed; they liked to scare the Americans. “Here,” Amnon said, thrusting a chicken in Sara’s face, “say hello to my friend.” “Say hello to the chicken,” Shai repeated. “Oh, Jesus,” Sara said. “Look what you do to that poor animal. And people wonder why I’m a vegetarian.” She wanders now around Jerusalem, downtown on Jaffa Street past the bakery where sufganiot are sold, the jelly oozing out of the donuts. She buys a peach at Machane Yehuda, looking around her. People are more careful now. A year ago a bomb exploded in Machane Yehuda, perhaps in the very spot she’s standing. There are soldiers on the

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streets, everyone carrying a gun. She has tried to explain this to Jeffrey, but he is unable to understand, or doesn’t wish to. “Who runs that country, anyway?” he said before she left. “The NRA? Are you telling me Charlton Heston’s the prime minister?” Jeffrey’s on a camping trip in Tennessee with friends. They’re bushwhacking in the backcountry. Jeffrey works hard and he plays hard. He offered to have Sara come along, but she declined. They’ll be spending the rest of their lives together; it is okay to be alone for a week. Jeffrey has a cell phone himself—he had one several years ago, long before everyone else was carrying them; it’s important for him to have the best gadgets—and he told her he’d take it camping so they could speak to each other. But Sara had convinced him not to. “You’ll look foolish,” she said, “there among the bears holding your cell phone. You‘ll look like something out of a Far Side cartoon.” She’ll leave messages for Jeffrey on their answering machine. She’s given him the hotel number in case of emergency. She heads toward Mount Scopus, to the campus of Hebrew University where she studied for a semester, then back into town, where she considers wandering through Meah She’arim, but thinks better of it. It’s hot out and she’s wearing shorts, and she remembers the huge banners in Meah She’arim put up by the ultra-Orthodox warning Jewish women to wear modest dress. You walk through Meah She’arim in shorts, Sara knows, and you might get spit at. So she strolls up Emek Re’faim past the landmarks she remembers, The Jerusalem Plaza and The Supersol and Gan Ha’paamon, the windmill rising from Yemin Moshe, the train tracks she crosses toward the German Quarter. She circles back and stops in front of the Great Synagogue. She’s not religious, and never has been. But she’s always considered this land holy, though holy isn’t a word she’s comfortable with. “Stay here,” Amnon said. “What do you need America for?” “It’s not America I need, it’s college. I’m twenty-one, Amnon. I need to go back and finish college.” “There are colleges here. I went to one.” “I know that.” “Well?” “Be patient. I’ll graduate soon and come back. We’ll have the rest of our lives together.” She’d meant it. She went back to the States, but in her heart she stayed Israeli, walking about campus her last year and a half of college with the haughtiness and indifference of a self-imposed exile. She refused to read the New York Times, opting for weekly editions of Ha’aretz, Maariv, and Yediot Acharonot, and keeping her watch on Israeli time, seven hours ahead, and translating back. Around her neck she wore an asimon for the Israeli pay telephones, and she kept the message on her answering machine in Hebrew as well as English—na l’hashir hoda’ah—despite the fact that she didn’t know many Hebrew speakers and lots of her friends weren’t even Jewish. She doesn’t talk about this now. It’s hard to explain this to the people in her life, especially

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to Jeffrey. There are things from her past he’ll never understand, and she’s grown accustomed to this. “Why Israel?” he asked her when she told him about her trip. “Because I like it there. It’ll be good to wander around.” “Whatever you want.” “Yes.” She’d told him about Amnon. “How many people live in Jerusalem, anyway?” “About half a million.” “Sounds like the population of White Plains. If I wanted to wander, I’d wander around Manhattan. I wouldn’t wander around White Plains.” “I know,” she said. “Whatever you want,” he said again. She heads back downtown and window-shops. Ben and Jerry’s has come to Jerusalem, and she orders two scoops of Cherry Garcia and eats it on a bench in front of the Mashbir.

She goes to the cinematheque to catch a movie. It’s in English, and a few seats away from her a late-fiftyish Israeli man laughs loudly at the jokes, too loudly, Sara thinks, as if he’s trying to show everyone he understands. The movie doesn’t especially interest Sara; it’s not one she’d go to in the States. But it was filmed in New York, in the neighborhood in which she and Jeffrey live, and she finds it comforting to watch it in Israel, as if she’s carried something from home with her. When the movie is over, she drinks cappuccino in the adjoining cafe, looking down at the walls of the Old City. She has a book in her knapsack, and she takes it out to read. She’s hoping to be left alone. But someone has approached her. It’s the man from the movie theater, the one with the too-loud laugh. “May I sit down?” “Sure,” Sara says. The man’s English is almost unaccented; he’s spent time in the States, she can tell. He takes out a book, too. “It’s nice here,” she says, looking out the window. She’s speaking as much to herself as to anyone else. “Yes,” says the man. The moon is half full and glows like meringue. She can make out a plane in the distance. She hears a sonic boom; she’s forgotten that sound. She used to fall asleep to sonic booms on the kibbutz, the hollow, tunnel-like whoosh of them. They’re like nothing she ever heard before, or since. Late at night she would look out the window and catch the taillight of a fighter jet. “The great penis in the sky,” she told Amnon. “The great Israeli penis.”

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“And you think we have sex on the brain?” “I’m going to sneak out of the country with your army uniform. You’ll have to come to America to find me.” “You and the rest of the American girls. All you American girls wearing soldiers’ madim at the Statue of Liberty.” “Oh, please.” They used to argue about this, Americans coming to Israel for their two-week gadna courses and going home thinking they’d been in the army. She taught Amnon the word for that. “Slumming,” she said. Except Amnon used to say she was slumming herself. “My girlfriend the anthropologist,” he called her. “That’s not true,” she said. “Really, it isn’t.” But Amnon wouldn’t listen to her. Neither would Shai. They would drive, the three of them, around the country with no destination in mind. Shai would sit in back, spinning a basketball on his middle finger; he always had that basketball with him. And whenever Sara spoke Hebrew, Shai would laugh at her. She hated the sound of his laugh. Other times she drove just with Amnon, down into the Negev, or all the way to Eilat, or up into Tiberias and the hills of Tsfat. Had she ever driven so much as when she was in Israel? And later, when she was back in America, back in college and Amnon got killed, shot down by mortar fire in Lebanon, even getting into a car reminded her of him. How had she gotten through that time? They’d broken up—the distance was too much—but in her heart it wasn’t over; she’d promised herself she’d go back. “Come to America,” she told him on the phone. “You can be my roommate. We’ll go to college basketball games. You love basketball.” “I’ll come,” he said. “I promise.” But he never did. She sits quietly now, staring at the man across from her; he’s still reading his book. She gets up to go. She’s almost out the door when the man calls out, “Your bag!” and she comes running back to him. It’s a mini-backpack with the words Israel Museum, Jerusalem, written across it in Hebrew and stick figures of two children above them. “I saved you from the bomb squad,” the man says. “And it has my passport in it. Thank you.” She smiles at him. “Well, so long,” she says, and she turns to leave. So long? Since when has she started to talk this way? She holds her bag like a football between her arm and chest and runs back to her hotel room. The next morning she has a premonition Jeffrey has called, but when she goes down to the front desk she doesn’t have messages. “Are you sure?” she asks. The man behind the desk checks again. “Nothing.”

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Back in her room, she calls her phone machine in New York. Jeffrey’s always changing their message. This time, he’s singing along with the Rolling Stones. Jeffrey can’t sing; and that’s the point. It’s a joke. Who has the energy to keep changing the phone message every few days? Jeffrey does. He has the energy of an entire fraternity, which explains why he was the president of his. Jeffrey likes large groups. Once, on his birthday, he got fifty-five of his closest friends together at a bar. Fifty-five of his closest friends! Jeffrey doesn’t understand that this is an oxymoron. He likes everything in bulk. He’s a walking all-you-can-eat steak dinner, and he has the energy of someone who’s just eaten one. “I was in the original test study for Ritalin,” he told Sara once. “You were?” “Joke,” he said. “Oh.” “It’s a joke, so you’re supposed to laugh.” Tell me a funny one, she thought. Tell me a funny one, and I’ll laugh. She’s read that men think you have a good sense of humor if you laugh at their jokes. Given a choice, eighty percent of men would rather be with a woman who laughs at their jokes than a woman who makes them laugh. That’s Jeffrey. He’s in the make-her-laugh club. He’s the make-her-laugh president. And sometimes he does. Now, for example, because Sara misses him, suddenly and strongly, and because it’s good to hear his voice, not just in his outgoing message singing the Rolling Stones, but in the message he’s left her from a pay phone in Tennessee where he’s gotten his friends to simulate bear growls. He tells her how many miles they’ve hiked, the places they’ve pitched tent and where they’ve gone skinny-dipping, and how, on a dare, he drank water from a stream he shouldn’t have drunk from, so she should be prepared to see him with a case of giardia. “And I’ve got poison ivy!” he says. Poison ivy! She’s never heard those words said with such enthusiasm. She leaves her own message, telling Jeffrey about the places she’s walked and how it’s good to be alone just to think her thoughts. “Everyone has a cell phone here,” she says. “And there’s Ben and Jerry’s in Jerusalem. The world really has shrunk. You should come here, Jeffrey. It doesn’t matter that you’re not Jewish. They’ve got great old buildings here. You like old buildings. You told me you took an architecture course once.” She hangs up the phone, and then realizes she’s forgotten to tell him she loves him. So she calls back. “I love you,” she says when the machine answers, and then she waits a second, thinking there’s something else to say. But she can’t think of it, so she says it again. “I love you, Jeffrey.” Then she hangs up.

She decides to go to the kibbutz. It’s not until she’s on the bus heading south that she realizes she’s dressed like a kibbutznik herself, or an American’s idea of a kibbutznik.

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She’s got sandals on, and cutoff dungarees. Does she think she’s going undercover? The fact is, she’s nervous—nervous people will recognize her, and nervous they won’t. She wants to be a fly on the wall. She’d like to see it all from a distance. The bus is crowded, and soon Israeli soldiers mount the bus to check the Arab IDs. She has forgotten about this, and it horrifies her now the way it did then, although she also remembers that she got used to it, that it seemed like nothing after a few months. “It’s disgusting,” Amnon said, “the stuff that happens in this country. The kind of animals we’ve become.” But if Sara said those things herself, or if she agreed with Amnon too vehemently, he would turn on her. “You think it’s different in America? Separate water fountains for blacks just twenty-five years ago? Having to ride in the back of the bus?” It’s late afternoon when she arrives at the kibbutz, and everything’s quiet around her; most of the day’s work is done. Under a palm tree a cluster of American volunteers plays hacky-sack, and Sara walks past them, then past the melon fields and through the vineyards, picking a few grapes along the way. Outside the machsan, two middle-aged women talk to each other. Sara thinks she recognizes them, but then she isn’t sure. A teenage boy tends to the cows in the refet. In the dining hall a few elderly men are playing cards, but none of them looks familiar to her. It’s Shai she recognizes first, Amnon’s brother, shooting baskets on the playground hoop, the way he had when she lived here, for hours each day. And an image comes to Sara that Shai has been shooting baskets for the last nine years, without rest, without sleep, that out of obstinacy, protest, or sheer rage he refused to stop shooting baskets since his brother died. She goes over behind the basket to where he can see her. “Hello, Shai.” He looks up at her and hesitates. “The American.” He’s impassive as he says this. And he doesn’t lose the concentration on his jump shot. If anything, his shooting improves. He sinks five foul shots in a row, then makes five more shots from the top of the key while Sara stands watching him. She’s never been able to get a reaction out of Shai. No one can, really. He considers it a weakness to acknowledge anything or anyone, especially his dead brother’s girlfriend. Shai was younger than Amnon, but he always intimidated her. He looks a little like Amnon—the same sloping nose and thick, dark eyelashes, the same long, angular face. He shares Amnon’s impatience and his distaste for America, but he has none of Amnon’s gentle grace. Shai’s a bull, Sara thinks, and Amnon was like an antelope. But Amnon and Shai were close to each other. Sara can see Amnon in Shai, and the feeling scares her. “Shai. It’s me. Sara. Don’t you recognize me?” “Of course,” he says, and for an instant he seems to soften. “Well, aren’t you going to come over and say hello?”

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“Hello.” He shoots another basket. Then, begrudgingly, he walks over to her and shakes her hand. Did she expect him to hug her? She isn’t sure what she expected. She didn’t even know he was still on the kibbutz. “How are you, Shai?” “I’m all right.” He twirls the basketball on his finger. “That’s it?” “What am I supposed to say? A lot has happened since you left.” “I know,” she says. He looks at her cross-eyed. She says, “Do you have time for me?” “Time?” “You know. Are you willing to spend time with me? Can you show me around?” “You know the kibbutz. You lived here.” “Still . . .” “The kibbutz is the kibbutz. It hasn’t expanded. If anything, it’s contracted. The universe expands while the kibbutz contracts.” “Shai,” she says, “I’ve gotten engaged.” This seems to get his attention, and he laces the basketball on the ground at his feet. For a moment, he appears shaken. Then he regains his poise. He looks up blankly at Sara, shielding his eyes. “I’m getting married,” she says. “It’s to be expected.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “It means I didn’t think you’d wait around.” “Wait around, Shai? For what? “Exactly.” He scoops up the basketball and tosses it to her. “You want me to take you around? I’ll take you around.” Shai walks fast, and Sara follows him. They tramp through the cornfields where the grass is wild and overgrown, and Sara can hear the crickets buzzing. One alights on her arm, and she brushes it away. She feels the sweat coalesce in her armpits. “You still play basketball, I see.” “Still.” Shai’s strides are purposeful and even, and he stares straight ahead of him, not answering her, as if he has a destination in mind. But there is no destination. There’s nothing in front of them but the date trees and the dark bare hills of the Negev. “How are your parents?” “They’re fine,” says Shai. “They’re in Tel Aviv now. They’ve gotten divorced.” “Oh, Shai. I’m so sorry.” “It happens. Statistically . . .”

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She starts to say something, but stops; he doesn’t want her sympathy. She hears a bird call overhead. “In America,” Shai says, “a young man gets killed and they form a presidential commission. Here it’s an everyday event. Life goes on.” “I know,” she says. Except Shai’s life hasn’t gone on. The last time she was here, Shai was planning to go to graduate school in mechanical engineering. But he hasn’t gone to graduate school, in mechanical engineering or anything else. He has stayed on the kibbutz working with the chickens (“Remember when you brought them to us?” she says now. “Remember when you and Amnon tried to scare us with the chickens?”), and as he talks to Sara, he has the distant look of a mystic, of someone living far away. He walks across the field, and Sara wonders if she’s supposed to follow him. Maybe he wants to be alone. “There’s just one thing I want to know,” Shai says. “What?” “Where were you all this time?” “Where?” “When Amnon died. Why didn’t we hear from you? Why didn’t you come to the funeral?” “Oh, Shai. I couldn’t have done that.” “You could have gotten on an airplane. We’d have delayed the funeral for you. It’s what Amnon would have wanted.” “That’s not true.” Shai stares at her. “We broke up six months before he died. He must have told you that. We couldn’t survive the long distance. Amnon had another girlfriend. He told me so himself.” “And you?” “I had another boyfriend, too.” “So . . .” She waits for him to say something. “Amnon still talked about you all the time. Sara this and Sara that. It was sickening. He told me he was thinking of going to America, and you know how much he hated America. He believed you two would get back together. He thought you’d get married.” “I did, too.” “Well?” She thinks she’s going to cry. But she won’t let herself. She doesn’t want Shai to see her this way. “You promised your life to him.”

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“I was a college kid,” she says. “What did I know then?” “And now? Now you know something?” She doesn’t answer him. She has no idea what to say. “You could have called us. You didn’t send us a letter. Not even a card.” “I’m sorry,” she says. She can tell him the truth, that when she got the telegram she thought about coming to the funeral, that she even called the airlines, once, twice, that in the weeks and months after that she picked up the phone to call a hundred times and, not knowing what to say, she hung up. Cowardice is no excuse, she realizes this now and she won’t pawn it off as one. Still, she needs to say something to Shai. She can tell him she was confused. She can tell him she was twenty-two and about to graduate from college. She can tell him she was looking for a job. “I thought about Amnon all the time,” she says. “I still do. Every day. I think about all of you. Amnon’s whole family.” “Well, we don’t think about you,” Shai says. “All these years, there hasn’t been a single time I’ve thought about you.”

She feels breathless as she heads back to Jerusalem, as if she’s sprinting along the highways, as if she’s carrying the bus on her back. Inside her hotel room, she takes a bath. She stays in the tub for almost an hour, submerged to her chin, and when the bath cools down she adds more hot water. The skin on her fingers has begun to wrinkle. She thinks she might fall asleep and drown. She imagines herself found by the hotel workers; Jeffrey called from home to identify her. Israel, a country of land mines and suicide bombers and katyusha rockets, a country of Scud missiles, and she drowns in the bathtub of a four-star hotel. The phone rings. She jumps out of the tub and runs naked across the room to answer it, but the connection is bad and the person on the other end keeps calling her Gary. “Gary?” the woman says, “Is that you, Gary?” “No,” says Sara, “It’s not. “ She wanders further around the city. She passes McDonald’s, the only kosher McDonald’s in the world, and for a second she thinks she sees Jeffrey waiting in line. Oh, Jeffrey! He’s taken a flight to Israel to surprise her! He’s come to Jerusalem and found the McDonald’s! He’s at home here! She waits for the person to turn around, and when he does, she sees he’s wearing an eye patch. Jeffrey with an eye patch. Jeffrey as Moshe Dayan. She decides to visit Yad Vashem. The greatest Holocaust museum in the world, and she’s never even been there; there seems something frivolous about flying across the world to do nothing but eat at Ben and Jerry’s. But when she gets to Yad Vashem

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and sees the exhibits of shoes and hair, the memorial to all those dead children, she decides she doesn’t want to be there after all. A trip to Israel doesn’t need the Holocaust. She tears up her admission ticket and leaves. Back in her hotel room, she calls her phone machine. Jeffrey picks up on the first ring. “Jeffrey,” she says.” You’re home.” “I’m home!” “Why?” “Because I live here. Because I help pay the rent.” “I thought you weren’t coming home till tomorrow.” “We decided to cut the trip a day short. We ran ourselves ragged. Burnt the candle at both ends.” “And now?” She thinks she can hear the TV in the background. It sounds like Jeffrey’s watching cartoons. “Now I sit around and wait for you. I’m lying here feasting on caviar, waiting for the giardia to kick in.” “I thought I saw you in McDonald’s today, Jeffrey. At the McDonald’s in Jerusalem.” “Nope,” he says. “Wasn’t me.” “You had an eye patch on.” Again she hears the television set. “There’s a McDonald’s in Jerusalem, Jeffrey.” “Yup,” he says. She tells him about the architecture of Jerusalem, sounding strangely like a tour guide, like a woman speaking from a microphone at the front of a bus, and when she comes to the Wailing Wall, she hears herself tell Jeffrey what a beautiful place it is, how she loves the Wailing Wall, loves it more than anything else in the world, though the fact is, despite being only a mile away, she hasn’t visited the Wailing Wall the whole trip.

The day before she’s supposed to leave, she takes the bus back to the kibbutz. She wanders through the vineyards and past a pen of sheep and finds Shai where he was last time, shooting jump shots on the basketball court. He even appears to be wearing the same clothes. “You never leave,” she says, “do you?” “Neither, apparently, do you.” He seems to have expected her to come back, which is strange, she thinks, because she didn’t know she was coming back herself. Yet here she is. “What will you do when you get too old to play basketball?” “I’ll play backgammon,” he says. “I’ll lie in the sun and rot.” “You’re wasting your life, Shai.”

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He puts the basketball down and again they walk, Sara leading this time, past the lul where the chickens squawk at her, squawk with familiarity and rage and continue to squawk as she and Shai walk on, past the wheat fields and fig trees and date trees and pomegranates, the grass growing ever higher. “You think this does you any good?” Sara says. “What?” “Your fury? Your indifference? Your refusal to get on with things? Do you think Amnon cares? Do you think Amnon, wherever he is right now, even gives a shit?” “So you’ve come here to save me,” Shai says. “Like the rabbis standing at the Wailing Wall. Like those Moonies you have at your American airports.” “Oh, please.” “So why are you here?” “I just am.” They’re in the melon fields now, walking past the cantaloupe, and it’s in the melon fields that Shai kisses her. There’s no seduction in this, no flirtation whatsoever. Shai’s not a seducer. He kisses her, and she kisses him back. And now he’s leading her to where he lives, or is she leading him? She feels nothing for him. Nothing at all. They move with a slow, unyielding purpose. Back in his room, Shai doesn’t touch her, not at first. He undresses slowly, meticulously, and now he sits on his bed folding his T-shirt and shorts and lining up his sneakers at the foot of the dresser as if he’s preparing the room for inspection. He seems to be trying to make Sara flinch. She lies naked beside him, and there’s something violent about the sex, something scary about it. It’s nothing she can pinpoint, but it’s there, she can feel it. Grudge fuck. She’s heard those words just once, used casually, happily, by an old friend of Jeffrey’s from his fraternity house, and afterward, she told Jeffrey she would never spend an evening with that friend again, with anyone who spoke or thought that way. Yet that’s what she thinks now. Grudge fuck. Except it’s hard for her to tell who bears the grudge. Shai stares at her with a vulpine fierceness. “So,” he says, “are you going to call me Amnon? Will you make that mistake? Will you do it on purpose?” “No,” she says. “Neither.” He lies naked on his back, quiet, his hands propped behind his head. He has the blinds open, and the sun beats down on them through the window. “Are you going to leave me the way you left him?” Before she can say, Leave you?, before she can say, I never was here, he emits a ferocious laugh, something so sustained and angry she fears he might hit her. But he doesn’t. And she doesn’t leave. Nothing’s stopping her, surely not Shai. Yet she stays lying next to him, silent, untouching, throughout the evening and into

34  1998

the night, and it’s not until midnight that she gets up to leave. She sneaks out quietly while Shai’s asleep and hitchhikes back to Jerusalem. When she wakes up the next morning, she knows she has to leave, put so much distance between her and that kibbutz it will be no more than a memory to her, a flickering, fluttering mirage. But where will she go? She’s heading home. Home to Jeffrey and his giardia. She should switch flights, she thinks; she should catch the next plane to Calcutta. Her plane is in three hours, and as she waits in front of the hotel for her taxi to arrive, she sees the man she met at the cafe the other night. It’s lunchtime, and he’s eating a falafel. He practically bumps into her on the sidewalk. “It’s a small country, isn’t it?” He seems genuinely happy to see her. “The size of Rhode Island,” Sara says. That’s what Amnon used to say. “A country like Rhode Island,” he said. “What a pathetic little state.” “I’m waiting for my taxi,” Sara tells the man. “I’m going to the airport.” She remembers the mistake Americans always make. In Hebrew, when you pluralize taxi it becomes bathroom. Hebrew. What a beautiful and ancient language, as old, it seems, as language itself, coming out of your throat strangling as a kiss, wrapping itself around you, getting into your pores. Amnon loved to be asked where a taxi was. He loved to send Americans to the bathroom. He hated America like someone who’d lived there. He hated it with the hatred of someone who knew what he’d seen. And right now, Sara hates it, too. She hates it for Amnon. She hates it for herself. She’ll spend the rest of her life in America. She won’t come back to Israel for fifteen years, not until she has children of her own, and only then for a short visit. She’ll marry an American, though not Jeffrey, marry someone she still hasn’t met. She’ll leave New York and move to Oregon. She’ll become someone who learns to forget. But right now she hates America, hates it with a hatred purer than anything she’s ever felt. “I hate America,” she tells the man. “Why?” he asks.” I like America.” Of course, she thinks. Of course you do. “Here,” he says, handing her his falafel. “You look hungry.” She is hungry, and she eats the falafel standing on the street. She consumes it. She’s as voracious as a wolf. “My fiancé’s allergic to falafel,” she says. “He can’t eat the techina. Even the smallest amount of sesame and he goes into anaphylactic shock.” She looks up at the man. “And he calls himself Israeli!” “Your fiancé’s Israeli?” “No,” she says. “American.” What in the world is she saying? She doesn’t understand the things that come out of her mouth. She’s lost, she thinks, disappeared into the terrible tower of her mind, in the crevices and nooks of it, in its austere and narrow halls.

SEX ON THE BRAIN  35

“You see?” she says. “They don’t do that in America. No one stops you on the street and gives you their lunch.” The man tries to object, but she won’t listen to him. She hums a Hebrew tune whose words she can’t remember, making them up as she goes along. She can see her taxi approaching, speeding along the street, bearing down. “No one does anything for you in America. Trust me, I know.”

2 Edith Pearlman

Purim Night

Camp Gruenwasser was preparing for Purim, that merry celebration when you must drink until you cannot distinguish the king from the villain, the queen from the village tart. “Purim?” Ludwig inquired. He was twelve—pale and thin like all the others. But Ludwig had been pale and thin before, during his pampered early boyhood in Hamburg. While hiding out with his uncle he had failed to become ruddy and fat. “Purim is a holiday,” Sonya said. She was fifty-six, also pale and thin by nature. She had spent the war in London; now that it was over she was co-director of this camp for Displaced Persons. What a euphemism: fugitives from cruelty, they were; homeless, they were; despised. “Purim celebrates the release of the Jewish people. From a wicked man.” “Release. Released by the Allied forces?” “No, no. This was in Shu, Shu, Shushan, long ago . . .” She said long ago in English. The rest of the conversation—all their conversations in the makeshift, crowded office where Ludwig often spent the afternoon—was conducted in German. Ludwig’s was the pedantic German of a precocious child, Sonya’s the execrable German of an American with no talent for languages. Her Yiddish was improving at Camp Gruenwasser, though. Yiddish was the camp’s lingua franca, cigarettes its stable currency. “Shu, Shu, Shushan,” Ludwig repeated. “A place of four syllables?” Sonya briefly closed her eyes. “I was repeating an old song, a line from an old song.” She opened them again and met his reddish­brown gaze. “Haman was the name of the wicked man. The heroine was a queen, Esther. Speaking of queens . . .” “Purim Night” from Binocular Vision. First published in Witness magazine, Summer 2004. Copyright © 2011 by Edith Pearlman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

37

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“We were not.” “We were not what?” “We were not speaking of queens.” “Even so,” Sonya said. “A set of chessmen came in with the allotments yesterday. It is lacking only a pawn. A stone—can you employ a stone?” “Yes. Also, my uncle keeps his corns in a box for just such purposes.” Sonya dragged a rickety chair to the wall underneath a shelf, and climbed up on it, and retrieved the box of chessmen. She gave it to Ludwig. He was scurrying off when Ida said, “Wait.” Ida was the secretary, a Person who had been a milliner Before. “I will tell about Purim, you should know, a Jewish boy like you.” He paused midflight, back against the wall, eyes wide as if under a searchlight. “In Shu, Shu, Shushan long ago,” Ida said in English, with a nod to Sonya, then continued in German, “there was a king, Ahasuerus; and a general, Haman; and Mordecai, a wise Jew who spent his time by the gates of the palace. King Ahasuerus’s queen offended him so he called for a new queen. Mordecai . . .” and she used an unfamiliar word. Sonya ruffled through her German-English dictionary. “Procured? I’m not sure . . .” “. . . procured his niece, Esther,” Ida said, her dark eyes insistent. “Mordecai refused to bow down to Haman. Haman arranged to murder the Jews. Esther, the new queen now, urged Ahasuerus to stop the murder. The Jews were saved.” “Procured . . .” Sonya still objected, and Ludwig, still pinned to the wall, said, “It was a miracle, then.” “A miracle,” Ida said, and nodded. “I do not believe in miracles, especially miracles accomplished by the fuck.” The word wedged its Anglo-Saxon bluntness into the German polysyllables. The vocabulary of children had been augmented by American servicemen. But the GIs were not responsible for the hasty and brutal lovemaking Ludwig had witnessed in forest huts, in barns by the side of the road, in damp Marseille basements. “A girl with good looks and a beautiful hat can work miracles,” Ida said. “Withholding the fuck. And that word, Ludwig, it is improper.” She returned to her typewriter. Ludwig ran away. Sonya, who had more to do today than three people could accomplish in a week, strolled to the narrow window. It was February, midafternoon. Shadows were deepening in the courtyard formed by the long wooden barracks so hastily abandoned by the Wehrmacht that Persons continued to find gun parts, buttons, medals, and fragments of letters (“Heinz, Leibling, Die Kinder . . .”). There was still a triangle of sunlight in the courtyard, though, and ragged children were playing within it, and Ludwig should be among them, would have been among them if he weren’t a peculiar child who preferred the company of adults.

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The year was 5707 by biblical reckoning and 1947 by the Christian calendar. The Purim party would begin after dinner. There would be pastries—hamantaschen: Haman’s hats. Without those pastries the holiday might as well be ignored; without those pastries, the megillah—the tale, written on a scroll—might as well be stuffed into a cistern. Tonight’s necessary hamantaschen—they would be a joke. Men who had been chefs Before knew how to bake Sacher tortes, Linzer tortes, all kinds of sweets; but where was the sugar, where were the nuts? Today, using coarse flour and butter substitute and thin smears of blackberry preserves, they would bake ersatz hamantaschen, one or two per individual. Sonya did not know whether the practical bakers considered babies individuals, though babies certainly counted to the Red Cross and the American command—each infant received its own vitamin-laced chocolate bars and its own Spam and its own cigarettes. Sonya could not procure sufficient tinned milk, however. . . . As for the meal preceding the party, it would consist of the usual dreck: watery spinach soup, potatoes, and black bread. Eisenhower had decreed that the Displaced Persons camps be awarded two thousand calories per Person per day; decent of him, but the general couldn’t keep count of newcomers, they came in so fast. “In my atelier I served the most distinguished and cosmopolitan women.” Ida mused, her hands at rest on the typewriter keyboard. “I fashioned turbans and cloches and toques.” “Cartwheels and mantillas,” encouraged Sonya, who had heard this reminiscence before. “I spoke five languages. I made—” “Sonya!” came the voice of Roland, Roland Rosenberg, Sonya’s co-director. “Sonya?” and he followed his voice into the office, his eyes flickering over the beauteous Ida and coming to rest on Sonya’s narrow visage. He still had a fat man’s grace, even a fat man’s circumference, though he was losing weight like all the staff. “Sonya, the Chasids in the north building refused to share their megillah. They boycotted the general service.” “The Enlightenment Society also boycotted.” Ida remarked. “They held a seminar on Spinoza.” “The blackberry jam—there’s so little of it. Goddamn!” Sonya said. She was subject to sudden ferocity these days. It was the Change, Ida told her knowingly, though Ida herself was only thirty­-five. “Poppy seeds—why couldn’t they send poppy seeds,” said Roland. “I requested poppy seeds.” Consulting a list, he left as unceremoniously as he had entered. “Roland, it’s all right,” Sonya called after him. “The kindly German farmers—they will certainly butcher some calves for our party.” She was in the doorway now, but he had rounded the corner. “Whipped cream will roll in like surf.” She raised her voice, though he was surely out of earshot. “General Eisenhower—he will personally attend.” “Sonya,” Ida said in a severe tone. “It is time for your walk.”

40  EDITH PEARLMAN

About Purim, Ludwig had dissembled. Feigning ignorance was always a good idea; know-it-alls, he’d observed, tended to get beaten up or otherwise punished. In fact, he’d already heard the story of Esther, several times. First from the young man in the room next door, the one with the radiant face. Ludwig, recognizing the radiance, predicted that the young man would get caught in the next X-ray roundup. Meanwhile, the feverish fellow did a lot of impromptu lecturing, even haranguing. Did he think he was the Messiah? grumbled Uncle Claud. One day last week he’d gathered a bunch of children around him and recited the Purim tale. He made a good thing of it, Ludwig thought from the periphery of the circle; he almost foamed at the mouth when reciting the finale, the hanging of Haman and his ten sons, the slaughter of the three hundred conspirators. Then the story had been taken up in the schoolroom on the second floor of the north building, where grimy windows overlooked in succession the one-storied kitchen and the grubby garden, all root vegetables—well, this was a stony patch, said Uncle Claud, his voice rumbling like a baron’s; we cannot expect the chanterelles we scraped from the rich soil in the south of France. Past the garden a road led between farms to the village of tiled roofs. Beyond the village green hills gently folded. The Judaica teacher, not looking through the window at this familiar view, had begun the Purim story by reading it in Hebrew, which maybe half a dozen kids could understand. He translated into Yiddish and also Russian. His version, a droning bore in all three languages, insisted that the Lord, not Esther, had intervened to save the Jews. The history teacher said that night that there was no justification for this interpretation in Scripture. A day later the philosophy professor referred to the story as a metaphor. “Metaphor?” Ludwig inquired, and presently learned the meaning of the term. He loved learning. He liked to hang around the office because Roland, without making a big thing of it, let fall so many bits of knowledge, farted them out like a horse. Sonya, too, was interesting to observe, hating to argue but having to argue, hating to persuade but having to persuade. She’d rather be by herself, reading or dreaming, Ludwig could tell; she reminded him of his mother. . . . And Ida with her deep, beautiful eyes and her passionate determination to go to Palestine; if only Uncle Claud would fuck her, maybe all three would end up in the Holy Land, well, not so holy, but not a barracks, either. He’d heard that people there lived in tents with camels dozing outside. But Uncle Claud preferred men. Even without the story, Ludwig would have noticed Purim. The Persons in the camp—those who were not disabled, paralyzed with despair, stuck in the TB hospital, too old, too young, or (by some mistake in assignment) Christian—the Persons were loudly occupied with the holiday. In the barrack rooms, behind the tarps and curtain strips that separated cubicle from cubicle, costumers rustled salvaged fabrics; in stairwells, humorists practiced skits; in the west building, raisins fermented

PURIM NIGHT  41

and a still bubbled. In the village, Persons were exchanging cigarettes and candy bars for the local wine. “Sour and thin,” sneered Uncle Claud, who hid among his belongings a bottle of cognac procured God knew how. Uncle Claud smoked most of his cigarette allotment and also Ludwig’s, and so he rarely had anything to barter. The cognac—Ludwig thought of it as a foretaste of the waters of Zion. “Zion has no waters,” Uncle Claud insisted. Every night he gave Ludwig a fiery thimbleful, after their last game. They owned a board. Sometimes they were able to borrow chessmen, but usually they rented those of a Lithuanian in the next room, the fervent Messiah’s room. The Lithuanian didn’t care for chess but happened to own the set of his brother, now ashes. He wouldn’t lend, wouldn’t sell, would only lease. Claud had to relinquish a cigarette for the nightly pleasure. But now . . . Ludwig parted the shredded canvas that was their door, sat down on the lower bunk beside his uncle. “Look!” he said, and shook the box Sonya had given him like a noisemaker. Claud smiled and coughed. “The Litvak—he can kiss my backside.” When Sonya left the office, Ida resumed typing. She was doing requisitions: for sulfa drugs; for books; for thread; for food, food, food. Dear Colonel Spaulding, You are correct that the 2,000 calories Per Person Per Day are Supplemented by Red Cross packages and purchases from the village. But the Red Cross packages come unpredictably. Some of our Persons will not eat Spam. And though we must turn a blind eye to the Black Market, it seems unwise to encourage its use. Our severest need now is dried fruit—our store of raisins is completely wiped out—and sanitary napkins. Yours Very Truly, Sonya Sofrankovich Ida ran a hand through her hair. It was as dense and dark as it had been ten years earlier, when she was captured, separated from the husband now known to be dead, oh Shmuel, and forced to work in a munitions factory. Not labor camp, not escape from labor camp, not the death in her arms of her best friend, oh Luba, not recapture, not liberation; not going unwashed for weeks, not living on berries in the woods, not the disappearance of her menses for almost a year and their violent return; not influenza lice odors suppurations; not the discovery in the forest of an infant’s remains, a baby buried shallowly, dug up by animals; not the one rape and the many beatings—nothing had conquered the springiness of her hair. Her hair

42  EDITH PEARLMAN

betrayed her expectance of happiness. And where would she find this happiness? Ah, b’eretz, in the Land. Milliners, she had been informed by the emissary from the Underground, barely concealing his disgust . . . Milliners were not precisely what the Land required. Do you think we wear chapeaux while feeding our chickens, Giverit? Perhaps you intend to drape our cows with silken garlands. Sitting on a wooden chair, hands folded in her lap, she told him that she would change careers with readiness, transform herself into a milkmaid, till the fields, draw water, shoot Arabs, blow up Englishmen. Then she leaned toward this lout of a pioneer. “But if cities arise b’eretz, and commerce, and romance—I’ll make hats again.” He looked at her for a long time. Then he wrote her name on his list. Now she was waiting for the summons. Meanwhile, she typed applications for other Persons. Belgium had recently announced that it would take some. Australia also. Canada, too. America was still dithering about its immigration laws, although the Lutheran Council of the American Midwest had volunteered to relocate fifty Persons, not specifying agricultural workers, not even specifying Lutherans. But how many tailors could this place Minnesota absorb? She typed an application, translating from the Yiddish handwriting. Name: Morris Losowitz; yes, she knew him as Mendel but Morris was the proper Anglicization. Age: 35; yes that was true. Dependents: Wife and three Children; yes that was true, too, though it ignored the infant on the way. Occupation: Electrical Engineer. In Poland he had taught in a cheder. Perhaps he knew how to change a light bulb. Languages Spoken in Order of Fluency: Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, English. Strictly true. He could say, “I want to go to America,” and maybe a dozen other words. His wife spoke better English, was more intelligent; but the application wasn’t curious about her. Ida typed on and on. The afternoon darkened further. Her own overhead light bulb shook on its noose. In the big hall above her ceiling raged a joyous battle: walls were being decorated; the camp’s orchestra was practicing, the Purim spielers were perfecting their skits. She stopped, and covered her typewriter with the remnants of a tallith. She locked the office and went into the courtyard. Two members of the DP police stood there, self-important noodles. They grinned at her. She passed children still playing in the chill dark. She entered the east building. What a din: groups of men, endlessly arguing. And those two Hungarian sisters, always together, their hands clasped or at least their knuckles touching. She’d heard that they accompanied each other into the toilet. In the first room there was a vent to the outdoors and somebody had installed a stove, and always a cabbage stew boiled, or a pot of onions, and always washed diapers hung near the steam, never getting entirely dry. Hers was the next room, hers the first cubicle, where a nice old lady slept in the bed above, preferring elevation to the

PURIM NIGHT  43

rats she believed infested the place, though there had been no rats since the visit of a sanitary squad from the British occupation zone. But the lady expected their return, and never left her straw mattress until midafternoon. She was up and about now, gossiping somewhere. From beneath the bed Ida dragged a sack and dumped its contents onto her own mattress—a silk blouse, silk underwear, sewing utensils, glue, and a Wehrmacht helmet, battered and cracked. And cellophane; cellophane wrappers; dozens of cellophane wrappers, hundreds; some crushed, some merely torn, some intact, slipped whole from the Lucky Strikes and Camels that they had once protected. . . . She began to work.

Sonya, ejected from her office by the solicitous Ida, had only pretended to be taking a walk. When out of range of the office window, she doubled back to the south building. Two women there were near their time, though neither was ready to be transported to the lying-in bungalow. In their room they were being entertained by three men rehearsing a Purim spiel: a Mordecai with a fat book, an Ahasuerus in a cloak, and a fool in a cap with a single bell. A fool? The Purim spiel had a long connection to the commedia dell’arte, Roland had mentioned. This fool played a harmonica, the king sang Yedeh hartz hot soides—Every heart has secrets—and Mordecai, his book open, rocked from side to side and uttered wise sayings. Sonya next went to the storehouse. Someone had stolen a carton of leftover Chanukah supplies donated by a congregation in New Jersey. Not a useful donation—the camp would be disbanded by next December, every resident knew that for a fact, all of them would be housed comfortably in Sydney, Toronto, New York, Tel Aviv. . . . Still, shouted the Person in charge, this is a crazy insult, stealing from ourselves; why don’t we rob the swine in the village? The TB hospital next, formerly the Wehrmacht’s stable. The military nurse who ran the place snapped that all was as usual, two admissions yesterday, no discharges, X-ray machine on its last legs, what else was new. Her assistants, female Persons who had been doctors Before, were more informative. “Ach, the people here now will sooner or later get better probably,” one said. “They’ll recover, nu, if God is willing, maybe if he isn’t, if he just looks the other way. Choose life. Isn’t it written?” Sonya went to her own bedroom. As camp directors, she and Roland occupied private quarters—a single narrow room with a triple-decker bed. Roland slept on the bottom, Sonya in the middle, once in a while an inspector from headquarters occupied the top, where else to put him? There was a sink and a two-drawer dresser. Sonya opened the lower drawer and reached into the back. Why should she, too, not dress up for the Purim party? Choose life, choose beauty, choose what all American women long for, a little black dress. She grabbed the rolled-up garment she had stashed there

44  EDITH PEARLMAN

two years ago and brought it into the weak light and raised it and shook it. It unfurled reluctantly. She took off her shirt, slipped the dress over her head, stepped out of her ski pants. The dress felt too large. There was a piece of mirror resting slantwise on the sink—Roland used it for shaving. She straightened it. Then she backed away. A witch peered at her from the jagged looking glass. A skinny, powerless witch with untamed gray hair wearing the costume of a bigger witch. She had been a free spirit once, she thought she recalled. At the young age of fifty she had dwelled on a Rhode Island beach; she had danced under the moon. She had known the Hurricane. She had lived in a bedsitter in London and had worked for the Joint Distribution Committee. She had saved some children. She had known the doodlebugs. In a damp pub in 1945, she had accepted Roland Rosenberg’s invitation to run Camp Gruenwasser with him. She had allowed his fat, freckled hand to rest on hers. She peered closer at the tiny witch in the glass. And then some disturbance in the currents of the air caused the mirror to hurl itself onto the wooden floor. There it splintered. Roland would have to shave without a mirror. Maybe he’d grow a beard. She was attempting to pick up the shards when he came in. “Sonya, stop.” He walked down the hall and fetched the communal broom and dustpan—a large thistle on a stick, a piece of tin. She was sucking her finger when he returned. He looked at the cut. “Run it under water for a long time.” She ran it under water for a long time. When she turned around, the damage was swept up, the implements had been returned, and he was lying on the lowest bed, eyes closed, as if it was this recent effort that had exhausted him, not two years of constant toil. She closed their door. She unbuckled his worn belt. She unbuttoned his flannel shirt. What color had it been originally? It had long ago faded to the yellowish green of his eyes. She unbuttoned the cuffs, too, but did not attempt to remove the shirt—it was up to him whether or not to take it off; he was a sentient being, wasn’t he? Was he? He had all the vitality of a corpse. But when she roughly rolled down his trousers and pulled them off and rolled down his undershorts and pulled them off, she saw that he was ready for her. When had they done this last—three months ago? Six? For them, as for the Persons, one gray day got sucked into the next. Yet there were joys: letters from relatives thought dead, meat sometimes in the soup, and tonight a party . . . She stood and lifted her little black dress over her witch’s body. It ruffled her witch’s coiffure. She left the dress lying on the floor. She straddled Roland’s erection, brushing him back and forth, side to side, until she felt a spurt of her own moisture, and he must have felt it, too, for, alert, he gripped her upper arms and turned them both over at once as if they were a single animal, a whale in green flannel maybe. She looked up at him. “Roland, I love you,” she said, for the first time ever. And she did, she loved the whole silly mess of him: the effeminate softness of his shoulders,

PURIM NIGHT  45

the loose flesh under his chin, the little eyes, the breath redolent of processed meats, the sparse eyebrows, the pudgy hands, the fondness for facts. Were these not things to love? Oh, and the kindness. He thrust, thrust . . . “Ah,” she said. And even in her pleasure, her witch’s pleasure, she heard the stealthy opening of the door. She turned her head and met Ludwig’s rodent gaze.

By the time Roland and Sonya arrived at the great hall—a big room with a little stage— the thrown-together orchestra was playing: strings, one trumpet, woodwinds, an accordion, a balalaika, three guitars, one drum. Candles in tin cans were burning side by side on the rim of the stage and on a ledge around the room and at the windows. Each thick candle, Sonya noticed, was made up of a clutch of little, twisted candles, the Chanukah kind. There were also several chanukkiyahs. A broad table held a mountain of hamantaschen. Another table sagged under bowls of liquid. “Let’s hope no one got hold of the methanol,” Roland said. At another camp, mostly Polish Persons, two men had gone blind from drinking the stuff. Roland was dressed, he claimed, as Dionysius—that is, two sprigs of juniper were pinned to his scant hair, one falling onto his forehead, the other nestling within his humble nape. Most costumes were equally rudimentary. Where could Persons get fabric, jewels, gauzy shawls? Yet some had indeed procured such items. A wife had made a royal garment for her husband. It was a short black silk cape, formerly the lining of their only coat. They wouldn’t need a lined coat in Palestine, this loving spouse explained to Sonya. She had adorned the cape with little white fur tails, which on close inspection turned out to be the inner stuff of sanitary napkins. Several young Mordecais wore, in front of their ears, scholarly coils: the strapping tape from Red Cross packages. One Esther had saved a beaded dress from her dead mother’s wardrobe. Another wore a dirndl skirt and a jersey shirt that said englewood high school. A Catholic family slipped in shyly wearing Easter finery; after years in a cardboard valise, the clothing, too, seemed to be cardboard. Ludwig and his uncle Claud had encased their upper bodies in splintery barrels that had held potatoes. Their heads were crowned by circlets of dry leaves. schwarz könig was painted on Ludwig’s barrel. Uncle Claud was the white queen. King, queen, wise man, and the occasional hero: cigar stubs identified Churchill, a cigarette holder Roosevelt. No one came dressed as Haman. Haman adorned the yellow walls, though. He was painted in green, painted in black tar, drawn in pencil, cut from brown paper. There were several Hamans in relief, made from a sturdy papiermâché. “What is this stuff?” Sonya asked the history teacher. “The Stars and Stripes, pulped.” he told her. Many Hamans were rendered feet up, head down. Each wore a little black mustache.

46  EDITH PEARLMAN

The orchestra fluted, blared, strummed. Persons danced, changed partners, danced again. The pile of hamantaschen diminished, was replenished. The two Hungarian sisters entered, hand in hand. A skit was performed in one corner. Ida entered, wearing a hat. A skit was performed on the stage. Someone sang, dreadfully. Three men dragged in the upright piano from the corridor, although the orchestra had specified that it did not require a piano, did not want a piano, certainly could not employ that piano, which was missing seventeen keys. The orchestra leader swiped at one of the three moving men with his baton, an umbrella spoke. Roland intervened. The piano, with bench but without pianist, remained, near the string section. The radiant young man from the south building entered, wrapped in a blueand-white tablecloth with permanent stains; Sonya guessed that it, too, came from Englewood, New Jersey. The philosophy teacher . . . Was that woman Ida? Sonya had never before seen her in lipstick. She must have been hoarding it forever; lucky it hadn’t pulverized. And that brilliant red silk blouse, how come it wasn’t dust . . . Ida blew a kiss to Sonya and asked Mendel to dance. Mendel’s wife, vastly pregnant, smiled acquiescence. Mendel was dressed in a long black jacket whose wide belt bore a buckle covered in silver foil. Sonya guessed his puritan garb was intended as Lutheran. Ida danced with others. Her hat glistened in one part of the room, glowed in another. It was a heavy cloche with a narrow brim, and it was covered with hundreds of shining bows, or perhaps butterflies, or perhaps ecstatic transparent birds. They caught the light of the candles, transforming that light into ruby twinkles, turquoise wings, flashes of green. Were they silk, those bows butterflies birds? Were they diamonds? Were they real winged creatures? Ida whirled by. Below the iridescent helmet, her hair thickly curled; some curls, damp and enticing, clung to her neck. “We have guests,” Roland said in Sonya’s ear. She had been ignoring the three American officers, though she had identified their rank, she had noticed their medals, she had recognized the famous grin. “Roland, I am exhausted. My charm—whatever there was of it is—used up. Would you take care of them for a while, Roland? And tell them that your wife will be with them shortly.” “Wife?” “Everybody thinks we’re married, why upset that cart . . .” “I wish you were my wife. I would like you to be my wife.” “Yes,” she said, acknowledging his wish, maybe even acceding to it; and then she backed up, backed up, until she collided with the accordionist moving forward. The Persons’ orchestra was taking a break. Sonya sat down at the ruined piano. She played “You and the Night and the Music.” The missing keys were mostly at either end; the absence of middle A and the B-flat below middle C was a nuisance, but she fudged. She played a Strauss waltz and the waltz from Faust. The smoke thickened

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like roux. The air in the room was clouded and warm and vital; life itself might have originated in these emanations from burning tobacco. She played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” She played “The Merry Widow.” The noise increased. There was some yelling: another skit. She saw Ida waltzing with the general. Ida looked up at him from under her hat. As they turned, Sonya saw an inquiring look on her lovely face. As they turned again, she saw the look change into one of admiration. As they turned again she saw the look become one of pleasure. “She’s fucking him,” Ludwig said, in English. He had taken off his black king’s barrel. He was seated on the bench beside her. He smelled of brandy. “I am employing a metaphor,” he explained. The general danced a two-step with Ida’s cubicle mate, the little old lady who came alive at dusk. He danced the Kozachok with a group of Ukrainians. He danced another waltz with Ida. And then, twenty minutes later, Sonya and Roland and Ludwig and Ida and a dozen others stood at the gates to wave good-bye to the jeep carrying the three officers. The general touched his cap—handsome headgear, really, with all that gold insignia, but no match for Ida’s. Sonya predicted that the camp’s rations would soon increase, but they did not. She hoped that Ida might get a private gift—silk stockings, maybe—but nothing appeared. She even thought that the new immigration act would be rushed through the United States Congress. “It was only a dance,” Ida said. “Two dances. And you were ravishing.” “He’s a soldier,” Ida said, sighing. “Not a king.” But then something did happen. The allotment of cigarettes per Person was officially increased. The augmented allotment, however, was not to be distributed (a formal letter ordered) but to remain in the disposition of the directors. And that, Sonya and the newly bearded Roland discovered, was enough to change things significantly— to get butter, milk, greens, sanitary napkins; to buy a sow, which enraged some but fed others; to pay a glazier from the village to fix broken windows; to procure gas for mendicant trips to Frankfurt, which resulted in more butter, milk, greens, and sanitary napkins; and finally, with the aid of a bundle of additional dollars contributed by Americans, to enable a sizable group of Displaced Persons, including Ida, to bribe its way overland to Brindisi, where waited a boat bound for Haifa. One day Mendel’s wife, who had replaced Ida as the directors’ secretary, handed Sonya a letter. We have reached Palestine, wrote Ludwig, in Hebrew. We have been saved, again.

3 Julie Orringer

The Smoothest Way is Full of Stones

We aren’t supposed to be swimming at all. It is Friday afternoon, and we’re supposed to be bringing groceries home to Esty’s mother so she can prepare Shabbos dinner. But it’s the middle of July, and heat radiates from every leaf and blade of grass along the lake road, from the tar-papered sides of the lake cottages, from the dust that hangs in the air like sheer curtains. We throw our bikes into the shade behind the Perelmans’ shed, take off our socks and shoes, and run through warm grass down to their slip of private beach, trespassing, unafraid of getting caught, because old Mr. and Mrs. Perelman won’t arrive at their cottage until August, according to my cousin. Esty and I stand at the edge of the lake in our long skirts and long-sleeved shirts, and when the water surrounds our ankles it is sweetly cold. Esty turns to me, grinning, and hikes her skirt. We walk into the water until our knees are submerged. The bottom is silty beneath our toes, slippery like clay, and tiny fish flash around our legs like sparks. We are forbidden to swim because it is immodest to show our bodies, but as far as I know there’s no law against wading fully clothed. My cousin lets the hem of her skirt fall into the water and walks in all the way up to her waist, and I follow her, glad to feel water against my skin. This is the kind of thing we used to do when we were little—the secret sneaking-off into the woods, the accidental wrecking of our clothes, things we were punished for later. That was when Esty was still called Erica, before her parents got divorced, before she and her mother moved to Israel for a year and became Orthodox. Now there is a new uncle, Uncle Shimon, and five little step-cousins. My Aunt Marla became Aunt Malka, and Erica became Esther. Erica used to talk back to her

“The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones.” From Orringer, How to Breathe Underwater. Copyright © 2003 by Julie Orringer. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, LLC and Penguin Books Ltd. All rights reserved.

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mother and throw bits of paper at the backs of old ladies’ necks in synagogue, but in Israel she spent months repenting her old life and taking on a new one. This summer we’ve done nothing but pray, study Torah, cook, clean the lake cottage, and help Aunt Malka take care of the children. As we walk into the lake, I wonder if Erica still exists inside this new pious cousin. I follow her deeper into the water, and the bottom falls away beneath us. It’s hard to swim, heavy and slow, and at times it feels almost like drowning. Our denim skirts make it impossible to kick. Ahead is the Perelmans’ old lake float, a raft of splintering boards suspended on orange plastic drums, and we pull hard all the way to the raft and hold onto the ladder. “We’re going to be killed when your mom sees our clothes,” I say, out of breath. “No, we won’t,” Esty says, pushing wet hair out of her face. “We’ll make up an excuse. We’ll say we fell in.” “Yeah, right,” I say. “Accidentally.” Far down below, at the bottom of the lake, boulders waver in the blue light. It’s exciting to think we’ve come this far in skirts. The slow-moving shadows of fish pass beneath us, and the sun is hot and brilliant-white. We climb onto the raft and lie down on the planks and let the sun dry our clothes. It is good just to lie there staring at the cottage with its sad vacant windows, no one inside to tell us what to do. In a few more weeks I will go home to Manhattan, back to a life in which my days are counted according to the American calendar and prayer is something we do once a year, on the High Holidays, when we visit my grandparents in Chicago.  Back in that other world, three hundred miles from here, my mother lies in a hospital bed still recovering from the birth and death of my brother. His name was Devon Michael. His birth weight was one pound, two ounces. My mother had a problem with low blood pressure, and they had to deliver him three months early, by C-section. It has been six weeks since Devon Michael lived and died, but my mother is still in the hospital fighting infection and depression. With my father working full time and me out of school, my parents decided it would be better for me to go to the Adelsteins’ until my mother was out of the hospital. I didn’t agree, but it seemed like a bad time to argue. My cousin says that when I go home I should encourage my parents to keep kosher, that we should always say b’rachot before and after eating, that my mother and I should wear long skirts and long-sleeved shirts every day. She says all this will help my mother recover, the way it helped her mother recover from the divorce. I try to tell her how long it’s been since we’ve even done the normal things, like go to the movies or make a big Chinese dinner in the wok. But Esty just watches me with a distant, enlightened look in her eyes and says we have to try to do what God wants. I have been here a month, and still I haven’t told her any of the bad things I’ve done this

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year—sneaked cigarettes from my friends’ mothers’ packs, stole naked-lady playing cards from a street vendor near Port Authority, kissed a boy from swim team behind the bleachers after a meet. I had planned to tell her all these things, thinking she’d be impressed, but soon I understood that she wouldn’t. Now Esty sits up beside me on the raft and looks toward shore. As she stares at the road beyond the Perelmans’ yard, her back tenses and her eyes narrow with concentration. “Someone’s coming,” she says. “Look.” I sit up. Through the bushes along the lake road, there is a flash of white, somebody’s shirt. Without a word we climb down into the water and swim underneath the raft, between the orange plastic drums. From the lapping shade there, we see a teenage boy with copper-colored hair and long curling peyos run from the road to the bushes beside the house. He drops to his knees and crawls through the tangle of vines, moving slowly, glancing back over his shoulder. When he reaches the backyard, he stands and brushes dead leaves from his clothes. He is tall and lanky, his long arms smooth and brown. Crouching beside the porch, he opens his backpack and takes out some kind of flat package, which he pushes deep under the porch steps. Then he gets up and runs for the road. From the shadow of the raft we can see the dust rising, and the receding flash of the boy’s white shirt. “That was Dovid Frankel,” Esty says.  “How could you tell?” “My mother bought him that green backpack in Toronto.” “Lots of people have green backpacks,” I say. “I know it was him. You’ll see. His family’s coming for Shabbos tonight.” She swims toward shore and I follow, my skirt heavy as an animal skin around my legs. When we drag ourselves onto the beach our clothes cling to our bodies and our hair hangs like weeds.  “You look shipwrecked,” I tell my cousin. “So do you,” she says, and laughs. We run across the Perelmans’ backyard to the screened-in porch. Kneeling down, we peer into the shadows beneath the porch steps. Planes of light slant through the cracks between the boards, and we can see the paper bag far back in the shadows. Esty reaches in and grabs the bag, then shakes its contents onto the grass. What falls out is a large softcover book called Essence of Persimmon: Eastern Sexual Secrets for Western Lives. On the cover is a drawing of an Indian woman draped in gold-and-green silk, reclining on cushions inside a tent. One hand disappears into the shadow between her legs, and in the other she holds a tiny vial of oil. Her breasts are high and round, her eyes tapered like two slender fish. Her lips are parted in a look of ecstasy. “Eastern sexual secrets,” Esty says. “Oh, my God.” I can’t speak. I can’t stop staring at the woman on the cover.

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My cousin opens the book and flips through the pages, some thick with text, others printed with illustrations. Moving closer to me, she begins to read aloud: “One may begin simply by pressing the flat of the hand against the open yoni, allowing heat and energy to travel into the woman’s body through this most intimate space.” “Wow,” I say. “The open yoni.” Esty closes the book and stuffs it into the brown paper bag. “This is obviously a sin,” she says. “We can’t leave it here. Dovid will come back for it.” “So?” “You’re not supposed to let your fellow Jew commit a sin.” “Is it really a sin?” “A terrible sin,” she says. “We have to hide it where no one will find it.” “Where?” “In our closet at home. The top shelf. No one will ever know.” “But we’ll know,” I say, eyeing her carefully. Hiding a book like this at the top of our own closet is something Erica might have suggested, long ago. “Of course, but we won’t look at it,” Esty says sternly, her brown eyes clear and fierce. “It’s tiuv, abomination. God forbid anyone should ever look at it again.” My cousin retrieves her bike from the shed and stows the book between a bag of lettuce and a carton of yogurt. It looks harmless there, almost wholesome, in its brown paper sack. We get on our bikes and ride for home, and by the time we get there our clothes are almost dry. Esty carries the book into the house as if it’s nothing, just another brown bag among many bags. This is the kind of ingenious technique she perfected back in her Erica days, and it works equally well now. Inside, everyone is too busy with Shabbos preparations to notice anything out of the ordinary. The little step-cousins are setting the table, arranging the Shabbos candles, picking up toys, dusting the bookshelves. Aunt Malka is baking challah. She punches down dough as she talks to us. “The children need baths,” she says. “The table has to be set. The Handelmans and the Frankels are coming at seven, and I’m running late on dinner, as you know. I’m not going to ask what took you so long.” She raises her eyes at us, large sharp-blue eyes identical to my mother’s, with deep creases at the corners and a fringe of jet-black lash. Unlike my mother, she is tall and big-boned. In her former life she was Marla Vincent, a set dresser for the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. Once I saw her at work, hanging purple velvet curtains at the windows of an Italian palazzo. “Sorry we took so long,” Esty says. “We’ll help.”

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“You’d better,” she says. “Shabbos is coming.” I follow my cousin down the hall and into our bedroom. On the whitewashed wall there is a picture of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson, with his long steely beard and his eyes like flecks of black glass. He’s on the east wall, the wall my cousin faces when she prays. His eyes seem to follow her as she drags the desk chair into the closet and stows Essence of Persimmon on the top shelf. “What do we say to Dovid Frankel tonight?” I ask her.  “Nothing,” she says. “We completely ignore him.” I make one last phone call to my mother before Shabbos. It’s always frightening to dial the number of the hospital room because there’s no telling what my mother will sound like when she answers. Sometimes she sounds like herself, quick and funny, and I can almost smell her olive-aloe soap. Other times, like today, she sounds just like she sounded when she told me Devon Michael had died.  “I can hardly hear you,” she says, her own voice small and faint, somewhere far off down the line. The phone crackles with static. “We went swimming today,” I tell her, trying to speak loud. “It was hot.” Far away, almost too quiet to hear, she sighs. “It’s almost Shabbos,” I say. “Aunt Malka’s baking challah.” “Is she?” my mother says.  “How are you feeling?” I ask her. “When can you come home?” “Soon, honey.” I have a sudden urge to tell her about the book we found, to ask her what we’re supposed to do with something like that, to find out if she thinks it’s a sin. I want to tell her about Dovid Frankel, how we saw him sneaking along the lake. I tell my mother things like this sometimes, and she seems to understand. But now she says to send her love to Aunt Malka and Uncle Shimon and Esty and all the step-cousins, and before I have a chance to really feel like her daughter again, we’re already saying good-bye. At six-thirty, the women and girls arrive. They bring steaming trays of potato kugel and berry cobbler, bottles of grape juice and sweet wine. The men are at shul, welcoming the Shabbos as if she were a bride, with the words bo’i kallah. Here the women do not go to synagogue on Fridays. Instead we arrange the platters of food and remove bread from the oven and fill cups with grape juice and wine. We are still working when the men and boys arrive, tromping through the kitchen and kissing their wives and daughters good Shabbos. My cousin, her hands full of raspberries, nudges me and nods toward a tall boy with penny-brown hair, and I know him to be Dovid Frankel, the boy from the lake, owner of Essence of Persimmon. I watch him as he kisses his mother,

54  JULIE ORRINGER

hoists his little sister onto his hip. He is tall and tanned, with small round glasses and a slender oval face. His mouth is almost girlish, bow shaped and flushed, and his hair is close-cropped, with the exception of his luxuriously curled, shoulder-length peyos. He wears a collarless blue shirt in a fabric that looks homemade. I don’t realize I’m staring at him until Esty nudges me again. Everyone gathers around the dinner table, which we’ve set up on the screen porch. The men begin singing “Shalom Aleichem,” swaying with the rise and fall of the melody. I feel safe, gathered in, with the song covering us like a prayer shawl and the Shabbos candles flickering on the sideboard. I pray for my mother and father. Dovid Frankel stands across from me, rocking his little sister as he sings. Uncle Shimon, in his loose white Israeli shirt and embroidered yarmulke, stands at the head of the table. His beard is streaked with silver, and his eyes burn with a quick blue fire. As he looks around the table at his friends, his children, his new wife, I can tell he believes himself to be a lucky man. I think about my previous uncle, Michael, who has moved to Hawaii to do his astronomy research at a giant telescope there. Once he brought the family to visit us at Christmastime, and in his honor my mother set up a tiny plastic tree on our coffee table. That night we were allowed to eat candy canes and hang stockings at the fireplace, and in the morning there were silver bracelets for Esty and me, with our names engraved. Esty’s bracelet said Erica, of course. I wonder if she still has it. I still have mine, though it is too small for me now. Beside me, Esty looks down at her plate and fingers the satin trim at the waist of her Shabbos skirt. I catch her looking at Dovid Frankel, too, who seems oblivious to us both. From the bedroom, Essence of Persimmon exerts a magnetic pull I can feel in my chest. I watch Esty as we serve the soup and the gefilte fish, as we lean over Dovid Frankel’s shoulder to replace his fork or remove his plates. My cousin’s cheeks are flushed and her eyes keep moving toward Dovid, though sometimes they stray toward pregnant Mrs. Handelman, her belly swollen beneath the white cotton of her dress. Mrs. Handelman is Dovid Frankel’s oldest sister. Her young husband, Lev, has a short blond beard and a nervous laugh. During the fish course, he tells the story of a set of false contractions that sent him and Mrs. Handelman running for the car. Mrs. Handelman, Esty whispers to me, is eighteen years old. Last year they went to school together. We eat our chicken and kugel, and then we serve the raspberry cobbler for dessert. The little step-cousins run screaming around the table and crawl underneath. There is something wild and wonderful about the disorder of it all, a feeling so different from the quiet rhythms of our dinner table at home, with my mother asking me about my day at school and my father offering more milk or peas. Here, when everyone has finished eating, we sing the Birkat HaMazon. By now I know all the Hebrew words. It’s strange to think that when I go home we will all just get up at the end of the meal and put our plates in the sink without singing anything, or thanking anyone.

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When the prayer is over, my uncle begins to tell a story about the Belkins, a Jewish family some thirty miles up the lake whose house burned down in June. “Everything destroyed,” he says. “Books, clothes, the children’s toys, everything. No one was hurt, thank God. They were all visiting the wife’s brother when it happened. An electrical short. Completely accidental. So when they go back to see if anything can be salvaged, the only thing not completely burnt up is the mezuzah. The doorframe? Completely burnt. But the mezuzah, fine. A little black, but fine. And so they send it to New York to have the paper checked, and you’ll never believe what they find.” All the men and women and children look at my uncle, their mouths open. They blink silently in the porch light as if he were about to perform some holy miracle. “There’s an imperfection in the text,” my uncle says. “In the word asher. The letters aleph-shin are smudged, misshapen.” Young Mr. Handelman looks stricken. “Aleph-shin,” he says. “Aish.” “That’s right. And who knows what that means?” Uncle Shimon looks at each of the children, but the children just sit staring, waiting for him to tell them.  “I know,” Dovid Frankel says. “It means fire.” “That’s right,” says Uncle Shimon. “Fire.” Around the table there is a murmur of amazement, but Dovid Frankel crosses his arms over his chest and raises an eyebrow at my uncle. “Aish,” he says. “That’s supposed to be what made their house burn down?” My uncle sits back in his chair, stroking his beard. “A man has to make sure his mezuzah is kosher,” he says. “That’s his responsibility. Who knows how the letters got smudged? Was it the scribe, just being lazy? Was it his assistant, touching the text as he moved it from one worktable to another? Maybe a drop of water fell from a cup of tea the scribe’s wife was bringing to her husband. Should we blame her?” “For God’s sake, don’t blame the wife,” my aunt says, and all the women laugh. “I like to have our mezuzot checked every year,” says my uncle. He leans back in his chair and looks at Dovid, crossing his fingers over his belly. “‘We alone are responsible for our relationship with Hashem.’ That’s what Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught us in the eighteenth century.” “We should have our mezuzah checked,” Mr. Handelman says, squeezing his wife’s hand. He looks with worry at her swollen belly. “I made a mezuzah at school,” says one of the little step-cousins, a red-haired boy. “You did not,” his older brother says. “You made a mezuzah cover.” Esty and I get up to clear the dessert plates from the table, and Dovid Frankel pushes his chair away from the table and stands. As we gather the plates, he opens the screen door and steps out into the night. My cousin shoots me a significant look, as if this proves that he has sinned against Hashem and is feeling the guilt. I take a stack of dessert plates into the kitchen, trying to catch a glimpse of Dovid through the

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window. But it is dark outside, and all I can see is the reflection of the kitchen, with its stacks and stacks of plates that we will have to wash. When the men’s voices rise again, I go to the front of the house and step outside. The night is all around me, dew-wet and smelling like milkweed and pine needles and lake wind, and the air vibrates with cicadas. The tall grass wets my ankles as I walk toward the backyard. Dovid is kicking at the clothesline frame, his sneaker making a dull hollow clong against the metal post. He looks up at me and says, “Hello, Esty’s cousin,” and then continues kicking.  “What are you doing?” I ask him. “Thinking,” he says, kicking the post. “Thinking what?” “Does a smudged mezuzah make a family’s house burn down?” “What do you think?” He doesn’t answer. Instead he picks up a white stone from the ground and hurls it into the dark. We hear it fall into the grass, out of sight.  “Don’t you believe in Hashem?” I ask him. He squints at me. “Do you?” “I don’t know,” I say. I stand silent in the dark, thinking about the one time I saw my brother before he died. He was lying in an incubator with tubes coming out of every part of his body, monitors tracing his breathing and heartbeat. His skin was transparent, his eyes closed, and all I could think was that he looked like a tiny skinny frog. Scrubbed, sterilized, gloved, I was allowed to reach in through a portal and touch his feverish skin. I felt terrible for him. Get better, grow, kick, I said to him silently. It was difficult to leave, knowing I might not see him again. But in the cab that night, on the way home with my father, I was imagining what might happen if he did live. The doctors had told us he could be sick forever, that he’d require constant care. I could already imagine my parents taking care of him every day, changing his tubes and diapers, measuring his tiny pulse, utterly forgetting about me. Just once, just for that instant, I wished he would die. If there is a God who can see inside mezuzahs, a God who burns people’s houses for two smudged letters, then He must know that secret, too. “Sometimes I hope there’s not a God,” I say. “I’m in a lot of trouble if there is.” “What trouble?” Dovid says.  “Bad trouble. I can’t talk about it.” “Some people around here are scared of you,” Dovid says. “Some of the mothers. They think you’re going to show their kids a fashion magazine or give them an unkosher cookie or tell them something they shouldn’t hear.” I have never considered this. I’ve only imagined the influence rolling from them to me, making me more Jewish, making me try to do what the Torah teaches. “I didn’t bring any magazines,” I tell him. “I’ve been keeping kosher all summer. I’ve been

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wearing these long-sleeved clothes. I can hardly remember what I’m like in my normal life.” “It was the same with your cousin,” he says. “When she and your aunt first came here, people didn’t trust them.” “I can’t believe anyone wouldn’t trust them,” I say. “Or be scared of me.”  “I’m not scared of you,” he says, and reaches out and touches my arm, his hand cool and dry against my skin. I know he is not supposed to touch any woman who is not his mother or his sister. I can smell raspberries and brown sugar on his breath. I don’t want to move or speak or do anything that will make him take his hand from my arm, though I know it is wrong for us to be touching and though I know he wouldn’t be touching me if I were an Orthodox girl. From the house comes the sound of men laughing. Dovid Frankel steps closer, and I can feel the warmth of his chest through his shirt. For a moment I think he will kiss me. Then we hear a screen door bang, and he moves away from me and walks back toward the house. That night, my cousin won’t talk to me. She knows I was outside with Dovid Frankel, and this makes her furious. In silence we get into our nightgowns and brush our teeth and climb into bed, and I can hear her wide-awake breathing, uneven and sharp. I lie there thinking about Dovid Frankel, the way his hand felt on my arm, the knowledge that he was doing something against the rules. It gives me a strange, rolling feeling in my stomach. For the first time I wonder if I’ve started to want to become the girl I’ve been pretending to be, whose prayers I’ve been saying, whose dietary laws I’ve been observing. A time or two, on Shabbos, I know I’ve felt a kind of holy swelling in my chest, a connection to something larger than myself. I wonder if this is proof of something, if this is God marking me somehow. In the middle of the night, I wake to find Esty gone from her bed. The closet door is closed, and from beneath the door comes a thin line of light, the light we leave on throughout Shabbos. From inside I can hear a shuffling and then a soft thump. I get out of bed and go to the closet door. “Esty,” I whisper. “Are you in there?” “Go away,” my cousin whispers back. “Open up,” I say.  “No.” “Do it now, or I’ll make a noise.” She opens the closet door just a crack. I slide in. The book is in her hand, open to a Japanese print of a man and woman embracing. The woman’s head is thrown back, her mouth open to reveal a sliver of tongue. The man holds her tiny birdlike hands in his own. Rising up from between his legs and entering her body is a plum-colored column of flesh.

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“Gross,” I say. My cousin closes the book. “I thought you said we were never going to look at it again,” I say. “We were going to ignore Dovid Frankel, too.” “So what?” My cousin’s eyes fill, and I understand: she is in love with Dovid Frankel. Things begin to make sense: our bringing the book home, her significant looks all evening, her anger. “Esty,” I say. “It’s okay. Nothing happened. We just talked.” “He was looking at you during dinner,” she cries. “He doesn’t like me,” I say. “We talked about you.” “About me?” She wipes her eyes with her nightgown sleeve. “That’s right.” “What did he say?” “He wanted to know if you’d ever mentioned him to me,” I lie. “And?” “I said you told me you went to school with his sister.” My cousin sighs. “Okay,” she says. “Safe answer.” “Okay,” I say. “Now you have to tell me what you’re doing, looking at that book.” My cousin glances down and her eyes widen, as if she’s surprised to find she’s been holding the book all this time. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says. “The book was here. I couldn’t sleep. Finally I just got up and started looking at it.” “It’s a sin,” I say. “That’s what you told me before.” “I know.” “So let’s go to bed, okay?” “Okay,” she says. We stand there looking at each other. Neither of us makes a move to go to bed. “Maybe we could just look at it for a little while,” I say. “A few minutes couldn’t hurt,” my cousin says. This decides it. We sit down on the wooden planking of the closet floor, and my cousin opens the book to the first chapter. We learn that we are too busy with work, domestic tasks, and social activity to remember that we must take the time to respect and enjoy our physical selves and our partners’ physical selves, to reap the benefits that come from regular, loving sexual fulfillment. The book seems not to care whether “the East” means Japan, China, or India; the drawings show all kinds of Eastern people in sexual positions whose names sound like poetry: “Bamboo Flute,” “The Galloping Horse,” “Silkworms Spinning a Cocoon.” My cousin’s forehead is creased in concentration as she reads, her eyebrows nearly meeting. “What’s the orgasm?” my cousin says. “They keep talking about the orgasm.” “I don’t know,” I say. “Check the index.”

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She flips to the index, and under orgasm there is a long list of page numbers. We choose one at random, page 83. My cousin reads in a whisper about how to touch oneself in order to achieve the word in question. We learn that one can use one’s own fingers or any object whose shape and texture one finds pleasing, though the use of electronic vibrating devices is not recommended. These can cause desensitization, the book tells us. But certain Eastern devices, such as ben wa balls or the String of Pearls, can greatly enhance a woman’s pleasure. “Sick,” my cousin says. “I still don’t get it,” I say. “What do you think they mean by the clitoris?”  Though I have a vague idea, I find myself at a loss for words. My cousin looks it up in the index, and when she learns what it is she is amazed. “I thought that was where you peed from,” she breathes. “How weird.” “It’s weird, all right,” I say. Then she says, “I can’t believe Dovid Frankel has read all this. His hands probably touched this page.” She lets the book fall into her lap. It opens to a glossy drawing of a woman suspended in a swinglike contraption from the roof of a pavilion, high above a turbaned man who gazes up at her with desire and love. Two servants in long robes hold the cords that keep the woman suspended. “Oh, my God,” my cousin says, and closes the book. She looks at me with serious eyes, her mother’s eyes, but deep brown, in the dim light of the closet. “We have to repent tomorrow,” she says. “When we say Shacharit in the morning. There’s a place where you can tell God what you did wrong.” “We’ll repent,” I say. We stow the book on its high shelf and leave the closet. Our room is cold, the light coming in from outside a ghostly blue. We climb into our twin beds and say the Shema, and then the V’ahavta. The V’ahavta is the same prayer that’s written inside a mezuzah, and when I say the word asher a sizzle of terror runs through me. Has God seen what we have just done? Are we being judged even now, as we lie in bed in the dark? I am awake for a long time, watching the cool air move the curtains, listening to the rushing of the grasses outside, the whir of the night insects. After some time I hear a change in the rhythm of breathing from my cousin’s bed, and a faint rustle beneath the sheet. I pretend to be asleep, listening to the metallic tick of her bedsprings. It seems to go on for hours, connected with the sound of insects outside, the shush of grass, the wind. The next morning, I am the first to wake. I say the Modeh Ani and wash my hands in the basin we leave on the nightstand, cleansing myself as I open my eyes to this Shabbos morning. My cousin sleeps nearly sideways, her long legs hanging off the bed, covers pushed back, nightgown around her thighs. Though her limbs have not seen the sun

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all summer, her skin is a deep olive. There is a bruise on her knee the size of an egg, newly purple, which I know she must have gotten as we climbed the metal ladder onto the Perelmans’ float. In sleep her face is slack and flushed, her lips parted. It has never occurred to me that my cousin may be beautiful the way a woman is beautiful. With her cropped brown hair and full cheeks, she has always looked to me like a tall, sturdy child. But this morning, as she sleeps, there is a womanliness to her body that makes me feel young and unripe. I dress quietly so as not to wake her, and tiptoe out to the kitchen to find my uncle standing on the screen porch, beside the table, folding his tallis into its velvet bag so he can go to shul for morning services. Sunlight falls in through the screen and covers him with its gold dust. He is facing Jerusalem, the city where he and Aunt Malka found each other. I open the screen door and step out onto the porch. “Rebecca,” he says. “Good morning, good Shabbos.” He smiles, smoothing his beard between both hands. “Good Shabbos,” I say. “I’ll be at Torah study this afternoon. After lunch.” “Okay.” “You look tired,” he says. “Did you sleep?” “I slept okay.” For a moment we stand looking at each other, my uncle still smiling. Before I can stop myself I’m asking the question that pushes its way to the front of my mind. “After a person dies,” I say, “is the family supposed to have the mezuzah checked?” My uncle’s hands fall from his beard. He regards me sadly, his eyes deep and glassed with sun. “When my first wife, Bluma Sarah, died,” he says, “I had everything checked. Our mezuzah, my tefillin, our ketubah. The rebbe found nothing. Finally I asked him to examine my soul, thinking I was the bearer of some imperfection. Do you know what the rebbe told me?” “No,” I say, looking at my feet, wishing I hadn’t asked. “He told me, ‘Sometimes bad things just happen. You’ll see why later. Or you won’t. Do we always know why Hashem does what He does? Neyn.’” “Oh.” “I think God wanted me to meet your aunt,” says Uncle Shimon. “Maybe He wanted me to meet you, too.” He tucks his tallis bag under his arm and reties his shoes. “Bluma Sarah had a saying: Der gleichster veg iz ful mit shtainer.”  “What’s it mean?” “The smoothest way is sometimes full of stones,” he says.

All day I keep the Shabbos. This means I do not turn on a light or tear paper or write or bathe or cook or sew or do any of the hundred kinds of work involved in building

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the Holy Temple. It is difficult to remember all the things one cannot do; sitting in the tall grass, playing a clumsy round of duck-duck-goose with the little step-cousins, I am tempted to pull a grass blade and split it down its fibrous center, or weave a clover chain for one of the girls. But the Shabbos is all around us, in the quiet along the road and the sound of families in their yards, and I remember and remember all day. My cousin spends most of the day alone. I see her praying in a sunlit patch of yard, swaying back and forth as she reads from her tiny Siddur; then she lies in the grass and studies Torah. When she disappears into the house I follow her. She’s closed herself into our closet again, the door wedged tight against intruders. I imagine her undoing this morning’s work of repentance, learning new body-part names, new positions. When I whisper through the door for her to come out, she tells me to go away. All day I’m not allowed to use the telephone to call my mother. I walk around and around the yard, waiting for the sun to dip toward the horizon. Aunt Malka watches me from the porch, looking worried, and then she calls me over. “What’s all this pacing?” she says. “I’m keeping Shabbos,” I say. “You can keep it right here with me,” she says, patting the step beside her. I sit down. Before us the older children are trying to teach the younger ones how to do cartwheels. They fly in awkward arcs through the long grass.  “Your mother sounds much better,” she says. “You’ll be going home soon.” “Probably,” I say. “There’s a lady I know who lives near you,” she says. “I’ll give you her number. She and some other women run a mikveh near your house, on 22nd and Third.” “What’s a mikveh?” “It’s the ritual bath,” she says. “It cleans us spiritually. All women go. Men, too. Your mother should go when she gets out of the hospital. You can go with her, just to watch. It’s lovely. You’ll see.” One of the little boys runs up and tosses a smooth black pebble into Aunt Malka’s lap, then runs away, laughing. “We’re commanded to go after childbirth,” she says. “Commanded by who?” “By Hashem,” she says, turning the pebble in her fingers. Through its center runs a translucent white ribbon of quartz. “Even if the baby dies?” I ask her. “Do you have to go then?” “Yes,” she says. “Especially then. It’s very important and beautiful. The bath is very clean, and this particular one is tiled all in pink. The women will help your mother undress and brush her hair, so the water will touch every part of her. Then she’ll step down into the bath—it’s very deep, and large, like a Jacuzzi—until she’s completely covered. They’ll tell her what b’rachot to say. Then she’ll be clean.” “Everyone’s supposed to do this?” I ask her.

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“We’re commanded to,” she says. “Adults, anyway. For women, it’s every month unless we’re pregnant. When I’m here I do it right in the lake. There’s a woman who had a special shed built on her property, and that’s where we go in.” “What if my mother doesn’t want to go?” I ask. “If you tell her how important it is, I’m sure she’ll go,” she says, and hands me the black pebble. I rub it with my thumb, tracing the quartz. My aunt gathers the little step-cousins for a walk down the lake road, tying their shoes and smoothing their hair, securing their kippot with metal clips. I imagine her walking into the lake, her dark curls spreading out behind her, and my skin prickles cold in the heat. When she invites me to come along on the walk, I tell her I will stay home. I lie down in the grass and watch her start off down the road, the little stepcousins circling her like honeybees. Real bees weave above me through the grass, their bodies so velvety I want to touch them. For what feels like the first time all summer, I am alone. I rub the pebble with my thumb, imagining it to be a magic stone that will make me smaller and smaller in the tall grass. I shrink to the size of a garter snake, a leaf, a speck of dust, until I am almost invisible. There is a presence gathering around me, an iridescent light I can see through my laced eyelashes. I lie still against the earth, faint with dread, and I feel the planet spinning through space, its dizzying momentum, its unstoppable speed. It is God who makes the shadows dissolve around me. He sharpens the scent of clover. He pushes the bees past my ears, directs the sun onto my back until my skin burns through the cotton of my Shabbos dress. I want to know what He wants and do what He wants, and I let my mind fall blank, waiting to be told.

When three stars come into the sky, the family gathers for Havdalah. We stand in a circle on the grass outside, all nine of us, and we light the braided candle and sing to God, thanking Him for creating fire, aish. According to the tradition, we examine our fingernails in the light of that candle, to remind us of the ways God causes us to grow. Then we smell spices and drink wine for a sweet week, and finally we sing the song about Eliyahu Hanavi, the prophet who will arrive someday soon to bring the Messiah. I stand with one arm around a little step-cousin and the other around Esty. As Havdalah ends, she drifts off toward the house, one hand trailing through the long grass. Now that Shabbos is over, the first thing I do is call my mother. Standing in the kitchen, I watch my aunt and uncle carrying children toward the house as I dial. For the first time, it occurs to me that it might be awful for my mother always to hear children in the background when I call her, and I wonder if I should wait until they go to bed. But by that time the phone’s ringing, and it’s my father who answers anyway.

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“Hey, son,” he says. It’s an old game between us: he calls me son and I call him Pa, like in the Old West. This is the first time we’ve done it since Devon Michael was born, though, and it sounds different now. “Hi, Pa,” I say, playing the game even so, because I miss him. “Still out on the range?” “Indeedy.” “How’s the grub?” “Grub’s not bad,” I say. “How’s Ma?” He sighs. “Sleeping.” “Not good?” I say. “I think she needs you home,” he says. “She’s not feeling well enough now to do much, but I’ll bet if she saw her kid, she’d shape up pretty fast.” “When can I come home?” “It looks like a couple of weeks,” he says. “She’s had some problems. Nothing serious, but the doctor thinks she might need IV antibiotics for a little while still.” “Aunt Malka says she should go to a ritual bath,” I say. “To get spiritually clean.” There’s a silence on my father’s end, and I wonder if I’ve said something wrong. In the background I hear a woman’s voice on the intercom but I can’t make out what she’s saying. “You there, Dad?” I say. “I’d like to talk to your aunt,” he says. “If she’s around.” Something about his tone gives me pause. Even though Aunt Malka’s just a few steps away, talking quietly out on the screen porch with Uncle Shimon, I tell my father she’s gone out for milk. Silently I promise myself to repent this lie tomorrow, during Shacharit. I can hear my father scratching his head, sharp and quick, the way he sometimes does. “You have her give me a call,” he says. “All right?” “All right,” I say. “Tell mom I love her. He says he will. That evening, my cousin disappears during dinner. We’re all eating tomatoes and cottage cheese and thick slices of rye bread with whipped butter, the kind of meal we always eat after Shabbos, and in the middle of spreading my third slice of bread I look over and Esty’s gone.  “Where’s your cousin?” Aunt Malka says. “She didn’t touch her food.” “I’ll find her,” I say. I go to our room and open the closet door, but the closet is empty. The book is gone from its high shelf. I glance around the room, and it takes me a few moments to see my cousin’s huddled shape beneath her bedclothes.  “Esty,” I say. “What are you doing?” She lifts her head and looks at me, her cheeks flushed. In her hand she holds a flashlight. “Reading,” she whispers.

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“You can’t just leave dinner,” I say. “I wanted to look something up.” “Your mom wants to know what’s wrong.” “Tell her I have a headache,” Esty says. “Say I took some aspirin and I’m lying down.” “You want me to lie?” She nods. “It’s against the Ten Commandments.” Esty rolls her eyes. “Like you’ve never lied,” she says. “Maybe I don’t anymore.” “Tonight you do,” she says, and pulls the bedclothes over her head, rolling toward the wall. I go out to the dinner table and sit down, pushing at my slice of rye with a tomato wedge. “Nu,” my aunt says. “What’s the story?” “She’s reading,” I say. “In the middle of dinner?” “It’s all right,” Uncle Shimon says. “Let her read. I wish some of these would read.” He casts a hand over the heads of his own children. “I read,” says one of the little girls. “I can read the whole aleph-bet.” “That’s right,” her father says, and gives her another slice of bread.  I finish my dinner, and then it’s left to me to do all the dishes while Aunt Malka bathes the step-cousins and gets them ready for bed. I stand there washing and looking out into the dark yard, seeing nothing, angry at my cousin and worried about her. I worry about my mother, too, lying in the hospital with intravenous antibiotics dripping into her arm, spiritually unclean. I’ve always assumed that my brother’s death was somehow meant to punish me, since I was the one who imagined it in the first place, but now I wonder if we are all guilty. After all, we’ve been walking around doing exactly what we want, day in and day out, as if what God wants doesn’t matter at all, as if God were as small and unimportant as the knickknacks on my grandmother’s shelves, the porcelain swans and milkmaids we see when we go to her house for the High Holidays.  A thin strand of fear moves through my chest, and for a moment I feel faint. Then, as I look out through the window, I see a white shape moving across the lawn, ghostly in the dark. I stare through the screen as the figure drifts toward the road, and when it hits the yellow streetlight glow I see it’s my cousin. Drying my hands on a dish towel, I run out into the yard. Esty is far away in the dark, but I run after her as fast as I can through the wet grass. When I get to the road, she hears me coming and turns around. “What are you doing?” I say, trying to catch my breath.

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“Nothing,” she says, but she’s keeping one hand behind her back. I grab for the hand but she twists it away from me. I see she’s holding a white envelope.  “What is it?” I say. “You’re going to the post office in the middle of the night?” “It’s not the middle of the night.” “You snuck out,” I say. “You don’t have to sneak out just to mail a letter.” “Go inside,” Esty says, giving me a little shove toward the house. “No,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll scream for your mother if you don’t tell me what you’re doing.” “You would,” she says, “wouldn’t you?” I open my mouth as if to do it. “It’s a note to Dovid Frankel,” she says. “It says if he wants to get his book back, he has to meet me at the Perelmans’ tomorrow night.” “But you can’t. It’s forbidden.” “So what?” my cousin says. “And if you tell anybody about it, you’re dead.” “You can’t do anything to me,” I say.  “Yes, I can,” she says. “I can tell my mother this was your book, that you brought it from New York and have been trying to get us to read it.” “But she’ll know you’re lying,” I say. “Dovid will tell her it’s a lie.” “No, he won’t.” I know she’s right, that Dovid would never own up to the book. In the end he would think about how much he has to lose, compared to me. And so I stand there on the road, my throat tightening, feeling again how young I am and how foolish. Esty smoothes the letter between her palms and takes a deep breath. “Now turn around,” she says, “and go back into that house and pretend I’m in bed. And when I come back, I don’t want to see you reading my book.” “Your book?” I say. “Mine for now.” I turn around and stomp back toward the house, but when I get to the screen door I creep in silently. The little cousins are sleeping, after all. There is a line of light beneath my aunt and uncle’s door, and I hear my uncle reading in Hebrew to Aunt Malka. I go to our bedroom and change into my nightgown and sit on the bed in the dark, trying to pray. The eyes of the Lubavitcher Rebbe stare down at me from the wall, old and fierce, and all I can think about is my cousin saying you would, wouldn’t you, her eyes slit with spite. I brush my teeth and get into bed, and then I say the Shema. Saying it alone for the first time, I imagine myself back at home in my own bed, whispering to God in the silence of my room, and the thought makes me feel so desolate I roll over and cry. But it isn’t long before I hear Esty climbing through the window and then getting ready for bed, and even though I still feel the

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sting of her threat, even though I know she’s ready to betray me, her presence is a comfort in the dark. I struggle awake the next morning to find that Esty is already out of bed. From the kitchen I can hear the clink of spoons against cereal bowls and the high, plaintive voices of the step-cousins. Aunt Malka’s voice rises over theirs, announcing that today we will all go blueberry picking. I sigh in relief. Blueberry picking is what I need. I say the Shema and wash my hands in the basin beside the bed. My cousin is in a fine mood today, her short bangs pulled back in two blue barrettes, a red bandanna at her throat. She sings in the van on the way to the blueberry farm, and all the little cousins sing with her. My aunt looks on with pleasure. At first, I’m only pretending to have a good time, too, but then I find I no longer have to pretend. It feels good to swing a plastic bucket and make my slow way down a row of blueberry shrubs, feeling between the leaves for the sun-hot berries. My cousin acts as if nothing happened between us last night, as if we never fought, as if she never went down the road to Dovid Frankel’s house in the dark. When her pail is full she helps me fill my pail, and we both eat handfuls of blueberries, staining our shirts and skirts and skin. Back at home the cousins study Torah with Uncle Shimon, and Aunt Malka and Esty and I bake blueberry cake. Esty keeps glancing at the clock, as if she might have to run out any minute to meet Dovid. When the telephone rings, she gives a jolt, then lunges to pick it up. “Oh, Uncle Alan,” she says. “Hi.”  Uncle Alan is my father. I stop stirring the cake batter and try to get the phone from my cousin, but she’s already handing it to Aunt Malka. “Hello, Alan,” Aunt Malka says. I watch her face for bad news, but none seems to be forthcoming. “Yes,” she says. “Yes. Yes. We certainly are.” Holding the phone between her cheek and shoulder, she walks out of the kitchen and into the little girls’ bedroom, then closes the door behind her. “What’s going on?” Esty says. “I don’t know.” I pour the cake batter into the floured pan Esty has prepared, and we slide it into the oven. Through the wall I can hear Aunt Malka’s voice rising and falling. “I think it has to do with the mikveh,” I say. “I told my dad yesterday that my mom should go, and he had a strange reaction.” “She does have to go,” my cousin says. “You’re supposed to go to the mikveh after you’ve given birth or had your period. Your husband can’t touch you until you do.” “Your mom already told me about that.” “There are hundreds of rules,” she says, sighing. “Things we’re supposed to do and not supposed to do. Maybe you’ll learn about them when you’re older.”

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“What rules?” I say. “I’m old enough.” “I can’t just say them here in the kitchen.” “Yes, you can. What are the rules? What are you supposed to do?” My cousin bends close to my ear. “You can’t do it sitting or standing,” she says. “You can’t do it outside. You can’t do it drunk. You can’t do it during the day, or with the lights on. You’re supposed to think about subjects of Torah while you do it. Things like that.”  “You’re supposed to think about subjects of Torah?” Esty shrugs. “That’s what they say.” Through the wall we hear Aunt Malka’s voice approaching, and my cousin moves away from me and begins wiping flour and sugar from the countertop. Aunt Malka comes out of the bedroom, her face flushed, her brows drawn together. She’s already hung up the phone. “How’s my mother?” I ask her. “Recovering,” she says, gathering the cup measures and mixing bowls.  “Am I in trouble?”  “No.” She sends hot water rolling into the sink and rubs soap into the dish sponge, then begins scrubbing a bowl. She looks as if she’s the one who’s been punished, her mouth drawn into a grim line. “You have to do what you think is right, Rebecca,” she says, “even when the people around you are doing otherwise.” “Okay,” I say. “It’s not a problem right now,” she says, “but when you go home it may be.” I glance at Esty. She’s looking at her mother intently. “Do you really believe that?” she says. “About doing what you think is right?” “Absolutely,” her mother says. “I’ve always told you that.”  Esty nods, and Aunt Malka continues washing dishes, unaware of what she’s just condoned.  At twelve-thirty that night my cousin dresses in a skirt and shirt and covers her hair with a black scarf. She wraps Essence of Persimmon in its brown paper bag and tucks it under her arm. The house is dark and quiet, everyone asleep. “Don’t do this, Esty,” I whisper from my bed. “Stay home.” “If you tell anyone I’m gone, you’re dead,” she says. “At least take me along,” I say. “You can’t come along.” “Try and stop me.” “You know how I can stop you.”

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The dread eyes of the Lubavitcher Rebbe stare down at me from the wall. Protect your cousin, he seems to say, and though I don’t know what I am supposed to protect her from, I climb out of bed and begin dressing. “What are you doing?” Esty says. “I’m coming along.” “This has nothing to do with you, Rebecca.” “I was with you when you found the book,” I say. Esty looks down at the brown paper bag in her hands. Her face, framed by the black scarf, is dark and serious. Finally she speaks. “You can come,” she says. “But there’s one condition.” “What condition?” “If we get caught, you have to take the blame. You have to take the blame for everything.” “But that’s not fair.” “That’s the way it is,” she says. “You decide.” We sit for a moment in the silence of our room. The curtains rise and fall at the window, beckoning us both into night. “All right,” I say. “Get dressed, then,” my cousin says. “We’re already late.” I finish dressing. My cousin slides the bedroom window as far as it will go, and we crawl out silently into the yard. We creep through the grass and out to the road, where no cars pass at this time of night. When I look back, the house is pale and small. I imagine Bluma Sarah hovering somewhere above the roof, keeping watch, marking our progress toward the lake. We walk in the long grass at the side of the road, keeping out of the yellow pools of light that spill from the streetlamps. In the grass there are rustlings, chatterings, sounds that make me pull my skirt around my legs and keep close to my cousin. We do not talk. The moon is bright overhead. The few houses we pass yield no sign of life. Tree frogs call in the dark, the rubber-band twang of their throats sounding to me like God, God, God. The road we walk is the same road we traversed on Friday afternoon, our bicycles heavy with Shabbos groceries. I can almost see the ghosts of us passing in the other direction, our faces luminous with the secret of the book, our clothes heavy and damp with lake water. Now we are different girls, it seems to me, carrying a different kind of weight. By the time we emerge into the Perelmans’ backyard, our skirts are wet with dew. Our sneakers squelch as we tiptoe toward the screen porch. We pause in a stand of bushes, listening for Dovid Frankel, hearing nothing. We wait. The hands on my cousin’s watch read twelve fifty-five. The lake lies quiet against the shore like a sleeping animal, and the shadows of bats move across the white arc of the moon. At one o’clock, we hear someone coming. We both suck breath, grab each other’s arms. We see the shadow of Frankel moving across the dew-silvered

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lawn. We wait until he comes up, breathing hard, and sits down on the porch steps. Then we come out of the bushes. Dovid jumps to his feet when he sees us. “Who’s that?” he says. “It’s okay,” my cousin whispers. “It’s just us. Esty and Rebecca.” “Quiet,” Dovid says. “Follow me.” We follow him up the steps and enter the moonlit darkness of the screen porch. For a long moment, no one says anything. It is utterly silent. All three of us seem to be holding our breath. Dovid looks at my cousin, then at me. “Where’s my book?” he says. Esty takes the brown paper bag from under her arm. She slides out Essence of Persimmon. Dovid lets out a long sigh. “You didn’t tell anyone, did you?” “Are you kidding?” Esty says. Dovid reaches for the book, but Esty holds it away from him. “It’s a sin,” she says. “Looking at pictures like these. You know you’re not supposed to do anything that would make you . . . that would give you . . .” “That would make you what?” Dovid says. “I mean, look at these people,” she says, stepping into a shaft of moonlight and opening the book. She takes Dovid’s flashlight and shines it on a drawing of two lovers intertwined on an open verandah, watching tigers wrestle in the tiled courtyard. She stares at the drawing as if she could will herself into the scene, touch the lovers’ garments, their skin, the tiles of the courtyard, the tigers’ pelts. “There are laws,” my cousin says. “You can’t just do it on a porch, with tigers there. You can’t do it in a garden.” “I know,” Dovid says. “I’m serious,” Esty says. She moves closer to Dovid. “There are rules for us. We have to be holy. We can’t act like animals. She looks up at him, so close their foreheads are almost touching. “We can’t have books like this.” “What do you want me to do?” he says. “What am I supposed to do?” My cousin rises onto her toes, and then she’s kissing Dovid Frankel, and he looks startled but he doesn’t pull away. The book falls from her hand. Quietly I pick it up, and I open the screen door and step out into the Perelmans’ backyard. I walk through the long grass to the edge of the water and take off my shoes and socks. The water is warmer than the air, its surface still. I take one step into the lake, then another. I am all alone. I pull off my long-sleeved shirt and feel the night air on my bare skin. Then I step out of my skirt. I throw my clothes onto the shore, onto the grass. Still holding the book, I walk into the water and feel it on all parts of my body, warm, like a mouth, taking me gently in. When the sandy bottom drops away I float on my back, looking up at the spray of stars, at the dense gauze of the Milky Way. The moon spreads its thin sheet across my limbs. In my hand the book is heavy with water, and I let it fall away toward the bottom.

4 Sara Houghteling

From Pictures at an Exhibition

Chapter One In the twilight of my life, I began to question if my childhood was a time of almost absurd languor, or if the violence that would strike us later had lurked there all along. I revisited certain of these memories, determined to find the hidden vein of savagery within them: the sticky hand, the scattered nuts, the gap-toothed girl grasping a firecracker, a cap floating on the Seine, flayed legs swinging between a pair of crutches, the tailor and his mouthful of pins. Some of these were immediately ominous, while others only later revealed themselves as such. However, whether or not another boy living my life would agree, I cannot say. Of the humble beginnings from which my father built his fame, I knew only a few details. My grandfather, Abraham Berenzon, born in 1865, had inherited an artists’ supply store. He sold tinctures, oil, canvases, palettes and palette knives, miniver brushes made from squirrel fur, purple-labeled bottles of turpentine, and easels, which my father described as stacked like a pile of bones. The shop was wedged between a cobbler’s and a dressmaker’s. Artists paid in paintings when they could not pay their bills. And as Renoir, Pissarro, and Courbet were far better with paint than with money, the family built up a collection. When the value of a painting exceeded the price of its paint, Abraham sold it and invested the money with the Count Moïses de Camondo, a Jew from Istanbul with an Italian title and a countinghouse that he named the Bank of Constantinople. Both men loved art, and they were fast friends. By 1900, Abraham could purchase an apartment on rue Lafitte, near Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, in a neighborhood known as the Excerpts from Houghteling, Pictures at an Exhibition. Copyright © 2009 by Sara Waisbren Houghteling. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Florence of Paris. Soon afterward, Moïses de Camondo recommended that my grandfather invest in the railroads. Coffers opened by the beauty of paint were lined with the spoils of steel, steam, and iron, and my grandfather did not have to sell any more of his paintings. As a teenager, I often passed by rue Lafitte and imagined the family home as it had once been, as my father had described it: each picture on the grand salon’s walls opening like a window—onto a wintry landscape, a tilted table with rolling apples, a ballet studio blooming with turquoise tulle. The salon’s chandelier shone onto the street through windows which, as was the case across the Continent, were made from high-quality crystal. On sunny afternoons, Grandfather’s gallery was so ablaze with prismatic light that schoolchildren returning home for lunch thought they saw angels fluttering down rue Lafitte. They reported their sightings to the choirmaster at Notre­-Dame-de-Lorette. When he could no longer bear to tell any more youngsters that they had not seen angels but just rainbows, and from a Jew’s house no less, the choirmaster hinted to some older boys that perhaps they should break the windows, which they did. At least that was how my father explained the attack on his childhood home in July of 1906. Then again, Dreyfus had just been exonerated, and there were many such outbursts across Paris. Abraham had followed the trial closely, nearly sleepless until the Jewish captain’s verdict was announced. Two days later, hoping to spare a dog that ran into the road, he drove his open-roofed Delage into an arbor of pollarded trees on avenue de Breteuil. My sixteen-year-old father, Daniel, was pinned between the tree trunk and the crushed hood as Abraham expired beside him. From then on, my father walked with a limp, which eight years later exempted him from service in the Great War. So whether he was lucky or unlucky, I could not exactly say. In 1917, my father purchased the building at 21, rue de La Boétie, after my mother Eva agreed to marry him. For this young Polish beauty, whom he hardly knew, and who spoke comically stilted French, he bought a house in a neighborhood known for its tolerance of the creative temperament. Yes, as if in anticipation of the utter bleakness that would eventually follow, that block was home not only to my father the collector and my mother the virtuoso pianist, but also to a choreographer renowned for his collaboration with Diaghilev; the Hungarian trumpeter most preferred by European conductors to perform the second of the Brandenburg Concertos; a sculptor known for his works in bronze and his clamorous machines; and, three years later, though without the same fanfare, me. From the well of my early childhood, only one half-lit event emerges: I am in the forest and a small girl shares a sweet bag of nuts with me. We dance on the mossy floor, and she holds my sticky fist in her own. Until late in my life, I supposed that the little girl in the white dress had been a dream, invented sometime in the crepuscular years before my seventh birthday. I remembered nothing at all before 1927, when Lindbergh

from pictures at an exhibition  73

landed at Le Bourget, on an airfield lit brighter than day. This absence of memory was natural, I imagined. I had no siblings with whom to compare my experience and was loath to press others into discussing my youth.

Unlike his own father, mine maintained no particular attachments to the paintings that found their way into his possession upon Abraham’s death. Father sold this collection as the first exhibition of the Daniel Berenzon Gallery in the early 1920s. He explained that, at the time, he had been under the influence of the German philosopher Goethe. “Remember the Theory of Colors, Max,” he said, as he paced the gallery. “When you stare steadfastly at an object, and then it is taken away, the spectrum of another color rises to your mind’s eye. This second image now belongs to the mind. The object’s absence or presence is irrelevant. They’re all up here”—he tapped his head—“so why worry about them out there?” He gestured to the carmine and gold gallery walls. “You’ll have a museum of the mind.” And for him this was true. To hear my father describe the paintings he had sold— which I thought of as lost—was as if their watery images, quivering and illuminated, were projected on the dark walls of the gallery from a slide carousel. These pictures possessed a certain patina—of regret, of time, of absence, of value—which lent my father’s descriptions a deeper beauty than I had been able to see when the paintings hung before me. Indeed, my father was among a tiny group, the heirs to the patron spirit of Catherine de Médicis and the savoir faire of Duveen or Vollard, whose genius was not in the handling of paint itself, but in the handling of men who painted. They encouraged the artists’ outrageous experiments so that they could paint without fear of financial ruin. They were not just rug merchants and moneymen. They were as devoted as monks to the beauty of their illuminated manuscripts. Or so my father said, in his most rhapsodic moments. And I believed him. Pablo Picasso was my father’s most famous artist, and he too came to live on rue de La Boétie, at number 23. When my father passed below on the street, Picasso would stand in the window and hold up canvases for my father’s approval, and approve he always did. Father encouraged the Spaniard’s experiments, understanding that Picasso’s genius resided not in a single style but in his ability to reinvent himself. He was, Father said, our Fountain of Youth. Since Monsieur Picasso’s art would never grow decrepit or stale, neither would Father and neither would their glorious world of paint. Yet Father kept not a single Picasso in our family collection; what hung over our dinner table would likely be sold the next week. Our walls were never bare, nor were they familiar. “We’re trying to give what we have away,” Father said. Though he hardly gave the paintings away, I wondered, sometimes, if he felt that he had.

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Beginning in my earliest years, each night before Father locked the doors to the art gallery, I was called downstairs from my bedroom and, with my eyes closed, was told the name of a past exhibition and made to recite each painting’s artist, title, and composition: a Morisot Woman in White looking like an angel with the dress slipping from her shoulder; the Vuillard odalisque Nude Hiding Her Face from 1904; an iridescent 1910 Bonnard, Breakfast, of woman, jam, and toast. After we reviewed the present exhibition, we would recollect past ones, of Sisley and Monet’s winter scenes; Toulouse-Lautrec’s portraits on cardboard with low-grade paint; the occasion on which Father had furnished the exhibition rooms with rococo settees and ormolu chiffoniers and then hung above them the most wild drawings by Braque, Miró, Gris, and Ernst, so as to indicate that modern art could indeed decorate a home. Though Father’s clients purchased mostly for this purpose, privately he scoffed at those who arrived with a scrap of drapery when choosing a painting. “The artist is an aristocrat, Max,” my father told me. “He has suffered for his art. And yet still he is generous, because he offers us a new language that permits us to converse outside of words.” I often wished that Father would not converse outside of words but, rather, raise other subjects during these meetings and guide me on boyhood matters, such as girls in sweaters or my birthday choice of alpine skis. Once or twice, I sensed that he tried to. I waited patiently, nearly holding my breath so as not to break the spell when Father began, “Over the years, I have wanted to tell you—” But this sentence, though repeated, was never finished, and eventually I gave up hope. Still, the nightly recitations were treasured occasions with my father, a man for whose attention many people, including my mother, had to fight. In my memory of those nights in the gallery with pictures orbiting around me, my father is splendid, luminous even. He had a brushy mustache, a neat chin, and a slim neck. He wore a white collar and a long tie the shade and sheen of obsidian: a lean, angular man, as if he had stepped out of a canvas by Modigliani and, dusting the paint from his dinner jacket, taken his place against the gallery’s doorjamb. He parted his black hair on the side and his eyebrows looked penciled in. His face might have seemed too small were it not for the significant ears, the plane of his cheekbones, and his long, sloping nose. As pictures were hoisted to the walls and then lowered, President Doumer was shot dead at a book fair, the Lindbergh son was kidnapped, and America choked in a cloud of dust. All of France seemed to be on strike. By eleven, I was expected to discuss various genres and artists. “On still lifes,” my father began, and walked to the back of the red divan. “The lowliest of genres,” I said. “Courbet painted his in prison.” “Yes.”

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“With landscape painting only slightly superior.” From upstairs, we heard Mother singing along with her piano playing. Sometimes she sang the orchestra parts to Brahms or Beethoven, or hummed along with the piano melody so as not to lose her place in it as her fingers whirled through their steps. If Father was rehearsing the art of recollection with me, we both knew that Mother, with her hundreds of hours of music committed to memory, reigned supreme. Whatever sensitivity Father and I might have possessed, Mother surpassed this too: she heard sharps in the opening and closing of my dresser drawers and an unpleasant A-flat when the telephone rang. She thanked Father for choosing an automobile whose motor played an excellent C. When Mother traveled to Zurich and London to perform, I was left in the care of our housekeeper, Lucie, and our chauffeur, Auguste. Both loved music and, fortunately, both loved me. I grew from a boy in pajamas to a young man who lit his father’s cigarette before smoking his own. The fixed point in Father’s collection was Manet’s Almonds, painted in the years between 1869 and 1871. It was the one painting from my youth that had never left 21, rue de La Boétie, not in the first auction nor in the dozens that would follow. When Father bought Manet’s The Bar at the Folies­-Bergère before lunch and sold it by dinnertime to a British sugar magnate, Almonds stayed behind; Picasso’s The Family of Saltimbanques was shipped to New York, but Almonds stayed behind. Even when Mrs. Guggenheim was on her campaign, as she told Father, to buy “a picture a day,” Almonds remained. Father claimed that no one offered him the right price for it, though later I came to understand otherwise. Father loved the painting, though he would not say why, except that it was painted by a humbled man nearing the end of his life, when Manet’s legs were weak with syphilis and the artist could no longer stand at his grand canvases, as he had done with The Execution of Maximilian or The Bar at the Folies-Bergère. The man whose life had begun to still began to paint still lifes. I did not consider Manet’s Almonds beautiful. I found it morbid and sad to look at in the morning hours, when the light was clear and bright. In comparison to Cezanne, who often had to replace his pyramids of apples with wax versions because the real fruit rotted after a fortnight of study, Manet’s almonds were the ones that had been passed over, deemed too inferior to eat, painted by someone who’d had his fill. Still, I averted my eyes from the painting with difficulty. When the time came to take my winter exams, Father explained that he could not “with good conscience” pass his beautiful gallery down to me. The day before, there was news of Kristallnacht in Berlin; Mother had said, “surely your courses will be canceled,” but they were not. For a year, we did not rehearse the paintings. Rather, I rehearsed Father’s sudden rejection: I lacked, he had said, the memory, the business acumen, the ruthlessness, and the lucidity of vision to predict what could be bought one spring and sold a dozen

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Junes hence. “I wish for you a stable life,” he said. “My father drove too fast.” This I did not hear. I was made to fill out the exams and forms for the schooling that would land me in the hospital, not as a patient like my father long ago, but as a doctor. I resolved to fail as brilliantly as I had once studied to inherit the gallery. Eventually, Father and I resumed our nightly study of the paintings, but it was never the same as before. I was seventeen years old.

Chapter Two I first learned of Rose Clément when I was nineteen and she was twenty-one. In the end, she will prove the most indispensable of us all. In January of 1939, however, I understood her only as the object of my envy. I did not understand that we were living on borrowed time. “Hide this from your mother,” Father said, and handed Paris Soir to me. He smoothed his mustache. “I have to interview a new assistant tomorrow. The boss”— this meant René Huyghe, curator of the Louvre’s department of paintings and sculpture—“says she’s got the best eye the museum’s seen since Louis Quatorze walked through the Salon Carré. That old adage. He insists she still work on some extravagant project of theirs for a few hours each week, stockpiling sandbags at the museum and refitting Notre-Dame’s stained glass windows with putty so they are easier to remove in case the bombing starts. I suppose I must learn to compromise.” Before I was of the age to work alongside my father, I had greeted the arrival of his new apprentices with glee. Every two years, he took on one of the Louvre’s young, underpaid curators. As a child, I enjoyed the uninterrupted stream of olderbrother figures. They were debonair. Some spoke French with an accent; one came from as far as Delhi. They had excellent taste in clothing, cigarettes, women, and—I realized later—men. I learned to blow smoke rings, to discern between interchangeable Braques and Picassos (they said Braque’s lines were blunter, Picasso’s more fluid), to iron a shirt, and to say, “The night is beautiful and so are you. Kiss me,” in Swedish. In the years between the wars, the curators-in-training traveled with my father from the Prado to the Uffizi and from the Rijksmuseum to the British. They went to the Hermitage to discuss the acceptable humidity ranges for Byzantine triptychs and to the Vatican to examine the separation of soot from fresco. I had a dusty collection of trinkets and snow globes, one from each city Father visited. The apprentices occupied an apartment off the gallery, inexplicably called the Nurse’s Room, which could be entered either from the gallery’s main floor or through a separate door in the courtyard. My father liked his trainees to challenge him, to suggest purchases and donations, and to worship Manet with a passion verging on the unsound. They visited

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artists’ studios alongside my father and decided which paintings to buy before they were finished and which finished paintings to buy, in order to ensure that the dross never reached the market. Apprentices learned to keep a silken scrim between the Berenzon Gallery and its clients. A buyer eager for a painting was not cause enough to sell it; rather, Father placed the paintings with owners who could add luster to the artist’s reputation. At my side that evening in January, my father resumed his ritual of recitation. “Sisley, 1926,” he said. I stood and began to walk around the room, pointing to the place on the wall where each painting had hung when I was six. “Watering Place at Marly in the Snow, Banks of the Seine in Snow, The Bridge of Auverssur-Oise.” My brain seized up. I couldn’t remember the rest. Father listed them quickly. He accused me, on that occasion and others, of possessing the ardor of an aristocratic art lover—once something was mine, I planned to keep it forever. Indeed, because I had to be removed from the gallery whenever my father sold a painting, I spent most of my childhood elsewhere, usually with Bertrand and Fanny Reinach, the grandchildren of the Count Moïses de Camondo and my favorite playmates. So that night, when, as I often had in the past, I asked why Father could not take me on as his assistant, he reminded me of my childhood temper. “All that wailing whenever we sold something, throwing a tantrum, pulling at your mother’s dress. We had to clear you out on the days the owners came to fetch their new paintings.” I began to speak, but he stopped me with a raised hand. “Don’t worry yourself so. Time for sleep, my boy. Check that the main entrance is locked.” He gestured toward it with his chin. I was dismissed. I wanted to pace the gallery’s green floor in my own tuxedo. I wanted to have a near-photographic memory like my father. But as I did not, I needed the gallery there to guide me. I raised my fist to strike the glass door. Yet because my father was not a man of violence, of sharp words or brutish action, I lowered my hand.

That next day, in expectation of my enemy’s arrival, I dawdled in the living room with its convenient heating vent. When she came, Mademoiselle Clément’s heels clicked a double staccato down the hallway. I peered into the gallery and glimpsed one slender leg, a high-arched foot, and the black shoe dangling from it. “Shall we discuss the influence of Spanish artists on French painters?” my father said. “In Spanish or French?” Mademoiselle Clément asked. “French will be fine.” The girl talked and talked. I imagined that she had a large gold key sticking out from between her shoulder blades like a pair of wings and that an attendant continually

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wound it. Father stifled a yawn. She instructed him on the details of Manet’s single visit to Spain in 1865. She informed my father of facts he already knew in a voice that did not take this into consideration. My irritation turned to curiosity. “My fascination lies primarily in Goya’s influence on Manet. Manet adopts the composition of Goya’s history paintings in order to layer his own critique of Napoleon’s regime with Goya’s condemnation of French barbarism in Spain. I’m thinking of the connection between The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico and Goya’s 3 May 1808.” Through the chute came Manet’s interest in eliminating the halftones of the palette and his lasting friendship with the painter Berthe Morisot, who was also his sister-in-law. Rose cited Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” and Zola’s defense of Olympia. “Bravo,” I whispered. I could not compete with the mind that belonged to the woman with the beautiful instep. I felt awe and envy, one of which registered in my ribs and the other in my stomach. Her voice reminded me of the flute solo in Daphnis and Chloé, the sound of waving scarves, diaphanous colors, a changeful pitch unwilling to rest on any note but returning often to the same theme. I think I must have fallen in love then. Lucie entered the room with a tray. The room was quiet, and I could hear the sounds of sipping and blowing across the hot tea. I leaned back from the heating vent, tropically warm. I opened the window on the hour and let the peal of bells drift in. While my father talked, I thought about the operating theater of the medical faculty. A female cadaver with its head shrouded lay greenly sweating formaldehyde on a table with a wobbly leg. The day’s discussion was on reproductive diseases, and as the surgeon pointed to the woman’s ovaries, I considered how my father’s artists must have attended lectures such as these. Down below, I heard my name. “Hard work, medicine,” Rose said. “Oh-ho, not for Max. Things come easily to that boy,” Father lied. I fished my heavy textbook out from underneath the sofa where I had thrown it, blew the dust off its cover, and tried to study for the next day’s class. The names of the bones in the skull slid around on the page each time I looked away, trying to re-create the picture in my mind. When I heard my father’s chair scrape back from his desk, I looked through the heating vent again. “Shall I speak with your son?” Rose asked. “No, no,” Father sang. “Valves, veins, tendons, hospitals, and moaning invalids, those are his passions. He prefers the morgue to the museum.” I stood at the top of the stairs while my father and Mademoiselle Clément commented on the rain outside. Rose said she was unprepared for this weather. Thinking

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of Humphrey Bogart, I descended the stairs and offered to accompany the young woman to her destination. “My gallant son, Max.” Father’s mustache twitched. “May I introduce to you the lovely Mademoiselle Rose Clément.” I took her hand in mine and she looked at the floor through a fan of black lashes. She was a woman as Ingres would have painted her: luminous skin, impossibly long limbs, and hair so fine it never stayed in its combs but found its maddening way to the sticky corners of her mouth. Her blouse revealed the bracket shape of her collarbone, and I imagined the white, lacy brassiere, with all its complicated hooks and straps, beneath. “You could walk me as far as the Métro,” Rose offered. “I’ve some distance to go underground after that.” She shook hands with my father, bending slightly at the waist. I plucked an umbrella from its stand and jabbed the tip out onto the street. It opened with the sound of a sail catching wind. Rose stepped under. As we walked the ten paces to the corner, rain ran down my collar. “So you’re the infamous son,” Rose said. Unsure how to respond, I lit a cigarette. She took one as well. The smoke hung low under the umbrella. “What is amiss here? I don’t mean to offend you when we’ve only just met. I like you instinctively. I have a good sense about people. Like a collie. It’s rather clear there’s a family situation, and even though I’d give anything to work with your father—to work with a legend—it seems like it could be a minefield, too. I don’t need any job that badly. I could keep working at the Louvre and eating my two tins of beans for supper.” “Only beans?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation from my father. “Unless I’ve been asked to dinner or I visit my aunt, who feeds me like I’m going into hibernation. Well, sometimes it’s a can of beans and a can of soup with the cheese that I keep out on the windowsill. It’s a dream come true. A freezing garret on Île Saint-Louis with a bathroom down the hall that I share with a constipated waiter and a nymphomaniac. I don’t have an oven, and it wouldn’t be much good if I did. It’s a struggle to convince myself to heat the beans.” Our shoulders jostled against each other as we tried to avoid colliding with a mother pushing a pram. Rose shifted her body so that it was directly in front of mine under the expanse of the umbrella. I could have kissed the curve of her neck. “Truly,” Rose continued, “why would anyone not want to inherit his gallery? It’s breathtaking. And lucrative beyond my wildest dreams. A goose that lays golden eggs.” “No idea,” I said. She looked skeptical. “He doesn’t think I’m cut out for it. I don’t have the eye, the taste, the memory, the savoir faire.” I ticked each trait off on a finger. The way Rose fixed her eyes on me made it hard to fit words together. “They corralled me into medical school. They

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want me to be a pediatrician, but I’ve failed at least one exam every semester, and I would have been expelled long ago if there weren’t so few pupils left. We’ll be halfway through this century by the time I’m finished. I’m not much of a student and don’t try to be one.” “That,” Rose said, “is a tired cliché, and surely there is some nice dark psychological explanation for your deliberate failure.” Although I was slightly uncomfortable with my psychological state as the topic of conversation, I was happy for anything that would keep her attention. “You know Ivan Benezet?” she asked. I nodded and pictured the back of the Breton student’s neck, his reddish hair and gingery freckles, the broad shoulders, and his shirt stretched across them. “He’s in your medical class.” Despite his size, or perhaps due to it, Benezet was a mild­mannered fellow. Though he did not know my name, he had invited me to several student outings. I never attended any. I could guess his importance by the way she mentioned him. “Is he your boyfriend?” I asked. Rose nodded. “Lucky chap,” I said. She shook her head and colored. “You could tell him that.” “I would,” I said, “but then I’d have to start going to Basics of Surgery again. I don’t have the stomach for it.” “Ivan loves that class,” Rose said. We laughed for no reason and then fell quiet, surprised by our loud voices under the humid umbrella. A trolley rolled by, bell clanging. Rose leaned toward me. “Do you like to dance?” she asked. I tried to say yes but did not succeed in touching wooden tongue to cottony palate. “You look like you would be a fine dancer. Fox-trot, Charleston, the dances they’re doing at Bal de la Musette?” “I haven’t been there in a long time,” I lied. On my last visit there, my companion and I spent the whole evening kissing in the corner, not dancing. She was of Czech extraction, and I had done my best to help her forget the sorrows of her homeland. “You seem like you would be a good dancer. Lanky, not a string bean but not a muscleman, either.” “Thank you—I think,” I said. “No, it’s a compliment,” Rose said. “I love to dance, but men are always afraid to ask me because chances are I’m taller than they are. And a girl’s legs look nicer in high heels, so what am I to do?” We walked west onto the Champs-Élysées, toward the Métro at Georges V. “Would you like to have some lunch?” I asked. “There’s an excellent place around the corner. Fast, first-rate pepper steak, and a dozen times better than anything they’re serving on white tablecloths around here.” “Sorry,” Rose said, and she did sound as if she meant it. “I’m helping Ivan review for an exam on the skull.”

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“So he’s in my Anatomy class as well,” I said. “Then you should get to work too.” She had a small birthmark above her mouth that moved when she smiled. “Though the word steak does make me hungry. Goodbye, Max.” She raised her hand to her ear, touched it to make sure the earring was in place, then smoothed her hair behind it. I wasn’t sure whether to kiss her cheeks or shake her hand. I felt my head and torso jerk in separate directions from each other. She leaned toward me, and I didn’t so much kiss her as press my cheek against hers. I watched the men on the street watch Rose descend into the Métro, shaking their heads at the way her hips swung as she shifted down each step in her black-heeled shoes. I felt an undeserved pride—they must have thought she was with me. By the time I returned home, the rain had stopped and the old women of the neighborhood had reappeared, walking their dogs. The old women wore winter coats, though the day was not cold, and muttered to their pets. A terrier scratched helplessly at the pavement. From behind his desk, my father called out, “So?” I sat down across from him. “She’s unusual,” I said. “Strident. An eccentric. Intent on the job. As am I.” Father pretended not to hear me. “Lovely to look at,” I added. “I didn’t notice,” Father said. He finished addressing an envelope—its second line read Élysée Palace—and pushed the bill away from him. “Max, the Berenzon Gallery needs to be ahead of the times, not with them.” He gestured with his pen in the air. “Women will have the vote any day now. Miss Clément is part of a new breed, the hungry, independent, middle-class, educated elite. You and I will be out of touch and stale without the likes of her. I’m canceling the rest of the interviews.” He punctuated this with a single clap. The crooked eyes of a Picasso nude stared at me piteously. “She knows her Goya, by God! Now there is only a single but significant obstacle in our path, Max.” Mother streamed across the gallery floor in her kimono, her face porcelain white without its paints, her eyes flashing and ready for one of her cherished fights with my father. Mother dressed only when she was satisfied with her practicing. It was then two o’clock in the afternoon. She played piano from eleven to two, and again from three to six, though some days she sat at the piano bench for barely an hour. She was fond of saying, “I practiced enough even as a child to last a lifetime.” “Auguste has told me all about your plan, Daniel,” Mother began. Our chauffeur was her special confidant. “A woman does not go to shul without a hat.” Father rolled his eyes at her Yiddish. “She does not go to the theater without a companion. She does not engage in commerce without her gloves. And she certainly does not move into the house of a strange art dealer if she is a decent lady. She’s unchaperoned. No proper parents would send their unmarried daughter into such a situation. If they cannot save her from disgrace, I will.”

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“Ma puce,” Father said. “For a woman to enter this field, she’d have to be plainer than a librarian. This is a curator, Eva, not a cancan dancer.” He poured a scotch and swirled it in his glass. “This business of yours, it does not have a kosher reputation. And what would people say about my son?” I cracked my knuckles and she slapped at my hands. “Not good for fingers,” she said. “Or my husband! Nikhil was perfection. Why not another young man like Nikhil?” “Of all the assistants, your mother only likes royals from the subcontinent,” Father said, and dabbed at my mother’s mouth with his napkin. “Or why not Max, for goodness’ sake, Daniel? You choose a girl over your own son.” Father gripped his glass as if he might throw it. Instead, he drained the liquor in a swallow. “You know why, Eva,” he said. From outside, the two-pitched whine of an ambulance covered his words. “Why?” I cried, standing up. “This is not the business for you, Max, any more than you are prepared to fly an airplane or perform surgery with your left hand.” The edge in his voice sounded like a knife touching its grindstone. “You’re a rich man’s son—” “Your son,” Mother said. “—and though it’s no fault of your own, you lack the hunger, the desire to hunt and chase.” I tried to protest, but Father drowned out my stammering. “Your morose face would depress the clients, make them feel all the sadness they’ve come here to escape.” My mother reached for my hand, but I snatched it away and walked up the stairs while my parents fought in whispers. Later that evening, I rang Bertrand Reinach, who said he could meet me in Pigalle, though not until ten o’clock. I looked at my watch, which told me I would have to wait three hours. I wandered around the city, eating a stale egg sandwich by the quay until it was time to walk to the Eighteenth. Bertrand never appeared at our meeting place. Later he explained that he had been experimenting with the sexual pleasures of self-strangulation and had fainted. As usual, I was neither sure what to believe nor what was stranger, his extravagant stories or the joy he took in telling them. I went into a brasserie and began talking to two nurses in white uniforms. I said I worked in a munitions factory. They had been raised in adjacent homes in Toulon and were hurt when I said I had never been there. “But I would love to visit,” I added.

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“Please tell me all about Toulon. What should I see when I go there?” While they reminisced about the miners’ museum, the maritime museum, the prison that Hugo described in Les Misérables, and the cafés along the waterfront, I procured them each several more drinks. When the bartender wiped down the counter and announced he was closing, I bought a bottle of wine and paid him what he asked. I tried to convince the two nurses to hurdle the wall of Père Lachaise with me, though only the less pretty one agreed. I figured out that she was Annette when her friend said, “Don’t make me say ‘I told you so,’ Annette.” However, Annette scraped her leg and tore her uniform on her descent from the wall and began to cry and insisted I take her home. It was much harder to get out of the cemetery than to get in it, we discovered, and the girl was sullen and weeping quietly and we were both sober and unhappy. I felt bad because of the ruined uniform. As we walked, I fished some money out of my wallet and offered to pay for a new one. Annette held the crumpled notes in her hand and shook the small stack twice. I could tell she wanted to take it, but since a monetary exchange with a man would have smacked of something else, she gave it back. We felt more kindly toward each other after that. Eventually, we found a ladder leaning against a crypt and used it to climb over a low point in the cemetery’s wall. It was four in the morning, and I hailed a taxicab and bought her daffodils from a merchant setting up his stand in Les Halles, near Annette’s apartment. This seemed to cheer the girl, and she gave me a kiss at her doorstep and said she would invite me upstairs if her roommate didn’t snore so loudly. I said I wouldn’t pay any attention to it, but Annette said no so vigorously that her curls bobbed against her cheeks. She shut the door and locked it quickly behind her. I knocked twice but she had, I supposed, already trotted upstairs. I walked toward home, crossed the Seine and back for good measure because the morning light was beautiful, smoked a cigarette with the policeman who patrolled our neighborhood, and drank a coffee in the café by our house. I arrived at school in time to stare briefly at my exam on the bones of the skull before falling asleep.

5 Eileen Pollack

The Bris

When Marcus packed for Florida, he harbored no illusions about what would happen when he got there. His father’s liver soon would fail, and, without a transplant, he couldn’t survive the week. “Why waste a miracle on an elderly man like me?” his father scoffed. He pooh-poohed the new liver as if it were a slightly used sports car Marcus insisted he buy. “At least let me put your name on the waiting list,” Marcus said, but his father blew raspberries through the phone. “Give that same liver to someone young, and he or she could get another fifty years out of the goddamn thing.” And so, with a heavy carry-on and an even heavier heart, Marcus flew to West Palm Beach. He rented a car and drove to the hospital in Boca Raton where his father had been taken after his last collapse. As he checked in at Registration and followed the arrows to the room, he prepared for the likelihood that in another few days he would be arranging his father’s funeral. What he couldn’t have predicted was that first he would be called on to arrange his father’s bris. “Your bris, Pop?” Marcus laughed, although his father rarely joked; for a former hotelkeeper in the Catskills, he was a singularly humorless man. His request that Marcus find a mohel who would circumcise him before he died could only be an effect of the drugs he was taking or the poison seeping from his liver. “Don’t worry, Pop. All of that was taken care of a long time ago.” His father waved a bloated yellow arm. Hooked up to an IV, he reminded Marcus of an inflated creature in the Thanksgiving Day parade. “A lie,” his father gasped. “Everything has been a lie.” “What, Pop? What lie?” If there was one thing Marcus knew, it was his father didn’t lie, any more than he ate shellfish or pork. When Marcus was a boy, his father made such a megillah about never telling lies or playing tricks that Marcus imagined he must have been “The Bris.” From Pollack, In the Mouth. First published in SubTropics, Winter/Spring 2006. Copyright © 2007 by Eileen Pollack. Reprinted with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.

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the victim of some terrible prank or hoax. That his guileless, defenseless father had been wounded by someone’s lie made Marcus resolve never to lie himself. When he started his first accounting job in Manhattan in the eighties, he couldn’t bring himself to fudge even the tiniest account his employer expected him to fudge. A quarter of a century later, he still had trouble living in the world of shaded truths most New Yorkers lived in. “Don’t talk to me about lying,” he told his dad. “You’re the most truthful man I know.” His father squinched his lips and shrugged, a gesture meant to convey he wasn’t the saint everyone took him to be. “They won’t let me be buried—” He sucked oxygen from the tube inside his nose. “In the plot. Beside your mother.” Marcus was seized by the premonition that his father was about to reveal a sordid and completely out-of-character affair with the woman who used to be the social director at the family’s hotel. While Marcus’s mother was still alive, his father treated Liddy Newman’s voluptuous advances as a burden to be endured rather than a pleasure to be pursued. But Marcus’s mother had dropped dead of a heart attack while working in the kitchen one particularly stressful night when Marcus was fifteen, and he’d never understood how or why his father found the self-control not to fool around with Liddy after that. When his father finally sold Lieberman’s—gave it away was more like it, to a group of Brooklyn Hasids who promised they would use it as a camp for retarded teens, then used it as a get­away for themselves—he moved to a retirement community in Boca, where the widows hounded him so ferociously he took a few to lunch. Maybe he took a few to bed. But how could that deny him the right to be buried with Marcus’s mother? “The cemetery,” his father rasped. In his younger days, he had been a tall, fair broomstick of a man, with mild blue eyes and a generous expression—he’d reminded Marcus of a scarecrow begging the crows to take his corn. But this last bout of hepatitis had puffed his face and limbs and turned his irises and skin such a bilious yelloworange he looked as if vandals had stuffed him with extra straw and jammed a rotting pumpkin on his neck. “The cemetery,” Marcus repeated dully, the reality sinking in that within a few days both his father and his mother would be lying in the ground. Although apparently not together. “The cemetery is only for Orthodox Jews.” Marcus’s father’s hand drifted to his groin, which he clutched as if it pained him. “And that is something I am not. Not only am I not an Orthodox Jew, I am not a Jew of any kind.” Marcus hadn’t been aware he’d been holding his breath until he let it out. “Pop, if you haven’t been a good enough Jew, no one ever has.” He recited his father’s acts of charity—his quiet beneficence to the poor, his selfless attentions to Marcus’s mother

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and her parents, the litany of favors he had extended to the guests, employees, and various hangers-on at Lieberman’s Mountain Rest. His father chopped off the recitation. “None of that is relevant. You might as well say actions such as these make a man a good Christian.” Marcus rubbed his eyes. He had been up late the night before deciding whether to propose to his girlfriend, Vicki, despite her desire to have a child, something Marcus was loath to promise. His flight from LaGuardia had left at six. On the plane he couldn’t sleep, mostly because the harried young man beside him couldn’t control his son. The boy kept vaulting Marcus’s knees and bounding down the aisle, colliding with the flight attendants; Marcus took this as a sign that he was too old to have a child. Not that Vicki had made having a child a prerequisite to getting married. But how could he live with the knowledge that he’d deprived the woman he loved of what she wanted most? “I wasn’t born a Jew,” his father cried. “And I never converted. It was such a little thing. But I couldn’t face the prospect of anyone coming near me with a knife. The very thought made me woozy.” The force of his father’s revelation set in. Short and solid as he was, Marcus swayed like a beachfront high-rise in a hurricane. He sat heavily on the bed. “This isn’t making sense. All these years and, what, you’ve only been pretending to be a Jew?” His father nodded and turned away. What little Marcus knew of his father’s early life came back to him. Orphaned young, he’d deserted his rural Texas town to escape “a lack of opportunities” that Marcus had always assumed to be the result of anti-Semitism. His father lied about his age, enlisted in the Army, spent two years overseas, and suffered a minor wound. A veteran at nineteen, he’d landed in New York and found a job in the garment district, winding ribbon on cardboard spools; he’d gone to school at night and earned his diploma, then used his GI loan to finance a few semesters at NYU, after which he’d taken a summer job waiting tables in the Catskills, where he fell hopelessly in love with the owners’ daughter, married her, and never left. Now, as Marcus listened to a revised and expanded version of those events, he understood that the astonishing gaps in his father’s history—Marcus never had seen a photo from the years before New York, never had met a Texas relative—disturbed him so much he’d never dared to ask for an explanation. In truth, his father had been the only child of narrow Baptist parents who were indifferent to his survival, let alone his desire to find a less restricted, warmer, more cosmopolitan way of life. “It was one of those Christian homes where the only book is the Bible. They were scornful of anything that brought comfort to a boy. Music. Art. A kind word. A pat on the shoulder. One time, my father found a drawing of a pretty girl, a classmate, I had sketched in a notebook. It wasn’t meant to be crude. I had never seen a naked female and I was trying to visualize . . . My father beat me and broke my

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hand.” He teared up even now. “To draw a beautiful girl is a sin, but breaking a young boy’s fingers isn’t?” He took another gasp of oxygen. “That was the first instance I ran away. I hid in the back of a bus to Lubbock, which was the nearest big town, and I sneaked in a theater to see my first show. I was so sick with guilt that before the picture started I needed to go to the men’s room and vomit. But it was entirely worth the fear. The movie was a Marx Brothers feature. Can you imagine what it was like for me to see those four brothers act in such a way? In the movie, the brothers live in a made-up country, but in my mind, they might have lived on Mars.” That his father had once had his hand broken for sketching a female classmate and run away to see Duck Soup filled Marcus with a pity so profound it nearly burst his chest. Certainly, this explained why his father used to drop whatever he was doing, even on the busiest weekend of the year, to turn on the little black-and-white set in Marcus’s room and spend two hours watching whatever Marx Brothers movie happened to be on. Until now, Marcus had attributed his father’s fondness for the Marx Brothers to the fact that only these four comedians could make him laugh. And yet, thinking back on those afternoons when he and his father had sat at the foot of Marcus’s bed watching Horse Feathers or A Night at the Opera, he felt sadly left out, as if his father and the Marx Brothers, instead of playing their tricks on some overly zealous cop or a wealthy snobbish matron, had been playing a trick on him. His father wiped his eyes. “You can imagine the beating I got when I returned home. My father could only think I had gone to town to visit a house of prostitution. Prostitutes! It had taken all my courage to sketch that naked girl! I can’t imagine how I made it through another year in that house. But where was I to go? This is a terrible thing to admit, but I was glad there was a war. How else could I have gotten away so young?” Here, the new version of his father’s autobiography merged with the version Marcus already knew. “I was so tall I had no trouble passing for two years older. But what a shock, meeting those older men. The way they cursed! What they said about women! Imagine what I felt, finding myself among people who believed Christ was no more than a carpenter who had lived in Galilee a long, long time ago.” Not that the conversion had been immediate. He’d simply felt so much more at home among the Jews he met in the army and in Manhattan that he absorbed their culture and religion, their love for music, art, and books. “I had been told that Jews were stingy. But to my way of thinking, they gave too much of everything. They talked too loudly, too much. They studied too hard, made too much fuss about their health, about everyone’s health, about this or that injustice. They made a lot of money, but they gave so much away. And food! The mountains of food they ate! It came to me that Christians lied about Jews to hide their own guilt at being so stingy, not only with their money but with their love.”

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He hadn’t taken the job at Lieberman’s with the intention of passing as a Jew. It was just that once he got there, everyone assumed he was one. “I told your mother. She knew the truth. And I would have converted. For your mother, I would have done anything. I wanted to be a Jew. In my heart, I already was one.” He rose from his pillow. “But every time I thought of being circumcised . . .” He turned a paler shade of yellow. Beads of oily sweat popped out on his brow. “Your mother, oleha ha sholem, took pity on my dilemma. She wanted to be married to a Jew, but she loved me too much to insist I suffer anything I couldn’t suffer willingly.” It came to Marcus that he’d never seen his father’s genitals. For all the years they’d shared a house, for all the times they’d changed together in a locker room, he’d never caught his father naked. If Marcus thought anything, it was that his father was excessively shy or afflicted with some embarrassing deformity—his balls were strangely shaped, his penis small or oddly bent. The realization that his father’s obsessive modesty had been a deliberate sham made Marcus feel as foolish as a shtetl wife who’s just learned that she’s been the dupe of a Yentl-like deceiver, so ignorant of the facts of life she couldn’t figure out that her “husband” was a woman dressed up as a man. His father’s eyes were closed. The tracings on the monitor flowed as quietly as the ripples on a pond. Marcus jostled his father’s hip. “Pop, it’s all right. Whatever it is, I forgive you.” Without opening his eyes, his father patted Marcus’s hand. “For your forgiveness, I thank you. But what I need from you now is not your forgiveness but your help.” Not ask his forgiveness? He remembered all those Saturdays when his father had carried him to shul, slipped a yarmulke on his head, wrapped him in a tallis, then sat beside him on the bench and helped him follow the Hebrew prayers. (Did his father even know how to read Hebrew? When would he have learned? More likely, he’d glanced at their neighbors’ books, spied the right page, and followed as best he could.) When Marcus had lost his faith and considered canceling his bar mitzvah, his father listened to his objections and quietly and persuasively reinstated his belief, if not in God, then at least in being Jewish. None of this had done Marcus any harm. Yet there seemed something unsavory about these acts having been performed by a gentile. It was as if a man pretending to be a doctor had removed Marcus’s appendix, and even though the operation had proved a complete success, Marcus couldn’t help but be shaken to learn that the surgeon had been a quack. “In other ways I’m not a coward,” his father said. “In the war, I ran across a field while bullets were being shot and dragged a man to safety. I saw terrible bloody sights a man ought never see.” A long time went by. The elderly man in the next bed passed gas so forcefully that Marcus jumped. “Oy, gevalt,” the man moaned. “Tell me, dear God, what I did to deserve such misery!” As if every human fart were under God’s control.

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Marcus plucked a Kleenex and wiped his father’s brow. His father opened his eyes and pressed Marcus’s palm to his lips. “You are a good boy, and I am sorry if I failed you. What little I know about being a parent I had to teach myself. My own father cared only that I never drink or dance. He died a few months after I ran away. My mother couldn’t be bothered to make inquiries. She died when you were four. Who was there to say I wasn’t actually a Jew?” The onslaught of revelations, including a gentile grandmother who’d still been alive in Texas when Marcus was a child, rendered him mute. He wanted to get away and think. Or rather, he wanted to call Vicki and ask her what he ought to be thinking. “Pop,” he said, “this isn’t doing either of us any good. Why not take a nap? I’ll drive to the condo and eat a bite, then I’ll come back and see you later.” His father grabbed his wrist—it felt as if Marcus were being touched by a rubber glove full of lukewarm water. “We don’t have much time.” “Time? Time for what? Don’t tell me that you intend to get circumcised now.” “That is exactly what I do intend.” “Oh, Pop, can’t we just get the folks who run the cemetery to make an exception? Would they actually refuse to allow you to be buried with Mom?” “Of course they would refuse! Ahavath Yisroel is only for Orthodox Jews. And to be an Orthodox Jew, a man must be circumcised. The night before the funeral, the members of the burial society must sit up and wash the body, and the individuals on that particular committee would immediately notice what was what. If they made an exception for me, why not make an exception for everyone?” He shook his head miserably, the plastic tube from the oxygen mask waving like a tusk. Marcus had never seen his father’s face so troubled. His lips were dry and rough and he kept licking them as he spoke. “Pop, I don’t get it. Why did you bury Mom in Bubbe and Zayde’s plot if you knew you wouldn’t be allowed to be buried there with her?” The tracings on the monitor erupted, as if a meteor had hit the pond. “You know how much your mother loved her parents! How could I deny her the right to spend eternity beside them?” And—what he didn’t mention—how much he’d loved them, too, the Jewish parents he’d never had. “They gave us those spaces as a wedding gift. If we’d refused to be buried in their plot, we would have needed to explain the reason. I was still a young man. I thought I had all the time in the world. I assumed there would be advances.” “Advances? You were expecting the doctors were going to come up with a pill you could swallow and your foreskin fell off? Believe me, Pop, that sort of research is not high on the list of medical priorities.” The mere mention of someone’s foreskin falling off caused his head to swim. The two times he’d been invited to a bris, Marcus had needed to sit on the stoop outside until the cutting part was over. “There’s no use discussing it. Your body couldn’t stand the shock.”

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His father wrapped his hands around the rail and pulled himself to sit. “I’m going to die anyway. I might as well die a Jew.” “Pop, I can’t.” “Have I ever asked anything? Have I ever, in all your years, asked you a single thing?” No, Marcus thought, he hadn’t. His father had taught him how to swim—albeit so Marcus could supervise the hotel pool—and his happiest memories were of his father and him washing off the stink of serving the evening meal by taking a midnight dip. His father had bought a book and used it to teach the two of them to hit a tennis ball on the single cracked court at Lieberman’s. True, this was partly so Marcus could provide a partner for the guests, but he and his dad had enjoyed many a cutthroat set in the mystical pre-dawn hour before the guests got up and started clamoring for their lox and eggs. His father had given Marcus everything a father could give—and what a mother could give as well. He had cooked for him and cleaned. He had nursed Marcus through the mumps, mononucleosis, diarrhea, and upset stomachs. Marcus felt like a gambler who could never repay his bookie. Better to change your name and run away, start a new life, put your debts behind you. Which, except for the name change, was exactly what Marcus had done. He’d moved to Manhattan, gotten his degree in accounting, and set up the kind of life in which he was free from obligations, even to himself. Rather than cook, he ate out. He sent his dirty clothes to a laundry and hired a maid to clean. He lived within his means and paid off his college loans. For Christ’s sake, he didn’t even own a cell phone. He owed nothing to anyone. Except, it seemed, his father. “Pop, if the people in the burial society see a recent scar, won’t they be suspicious?” His father held up a finger, as if Marcus had finally asked a question worth answering. “If the foreskin has been removed and the survivors of the deceased can provide a certificate of conversion, the officials must accept that the individual is a Jew. As it happens, I have a friend who is a rabbi. Twice a week I attend the services that Rabbi Dobrinsky conducts at the condo shul. Three times a week, we play tennis as partners. At first, he wasn’t so enthusiastic. But I kept speaking from the heart and he began to see my point. Also, I agreed to leave my money to his synagogue. If you add your plea to mine, he won’t refuse.” Marcus was incensed that his father had pledged his few hard-earned dollars to bribe some unscrupulous rabbi into performing a rite he ought to perform for free. He wondered if his father meant that he, Marcus, ought to add his own money to his father’s “donation” in the hope that this larger bribe would persuade the rabbi to do their bidding. “Once the rabbi is on board,” his father went on, “all that remains is finding a mohel who will perform the circumcision.”

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“Sure,” Marcus said, “that’s all. And who do you suppose is going to circumcise a dying man?” His father motioned toward the cart beside the bed. Marcus opened the little drawer and found a newspaper clipping about a pediatrician named David S. Schiffler, who, in his spare time, performed ritual circumcisions for the newborn Jewish males of Boca Raton. “That’s quite an interesting sideline,” Marcus said. “And lucrative as well.” “Don’t make fun. You think a man like this, a professional man, needs what he earns performing a bris? He donates his fee to the Boca March of Dimes. Also, he is performing a service for the community. He comes in the home, but he does the procedure in a sanitary modern way, the baby isn’t traumatized.” Marcus was about to remind his father that he wasn’t a baby when a nurse bustled in. “Now we will be having a soothing, refreshing bath,” the woman said with a Jamaican lilt. “We can’t let a man get all smelly, now can we?” “The rabbi,” his father said. “You can find him on the tennis court. He plays a doubles match at four.” The nurse drew the curtain around the bed. “First we will wash down as far as possible.” She dipped a sponge in a pan of soapy water and squeezed out the excess. “Then we will wash up as far as possible.” Giggling, she reached for his father’s gown. “And then we must wash possible!” As thoroughly as it irked him that a stranger would get to view what had been hidden from him for so long, Marcus was horrified at the prospect. In his mind, his father’s penis grew and grew until it was a pointy-headed rocket zooming toward outer space. Before the nurse could expose his father’s “possible,” he dashed out in the hall. Weaving to avoid the patients and their relatives, who hobbled along the corridors three and five abreast, he headed for the lobby. Outside, he found his car and reached for the key, only to find the clipping about Dr. Schiffler still crumpled inside his fist. During his father’s previous bouts with hepatitis, Marcus had become acquainted with the route from the hospital to the condo. Still, he lost his way. He pulled off on the shoulder near an intersection where a cheerless man in overalls was selling the Homeless Times and a girl in a green bikini hawked hot dogs from a cart. The father he had known for forty-eight years was dying, as was the father who’d grown up in a povertystricken Baptist town and had his hand broken for drawing a picture of a girl, then glimpsed redemption in a universe ruled by Groucho Marx. In the months and years to come, whenever a question about this gentile Texas father sprang to Marcus’s mind, there wouldn’t be a soul to answer it.

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How could such an honest man have lived such a whopping lie? And how could he have made such a tsimmes about the shame a lie could bring? Then again, who else was qualified to issue such a warning? For thirty-three years, the poor man had lived without sex to avoid the need to explain to a Jewish woman why he wasn’t circumcised. Marcus almost wished his father had been the kind of man who would sleep with a woman he had no intention of ever marrying. Oh, Pop, wasn’t the urge to make love stronger than your fear of having your foreskin cut off? He knew he ought to go. With the way the retirees down here drove, if he sat here long enough someone would plow into him. Bits of red plastic from an earlier victim’s taillights still littered the intersection. But Marcus couldn’t move. His poor mother! It must have made her sad to know she wasn’t married to a Jew. Or a man who loved her enough to face his worst fear for her sake. How isolated she must have felt, how cut off from her parents. Unless her parents knew. How could they not have known? Now that he thought about it, his father didn’t look Jewish. His name was James Sloan. What kind of Jew is named James Sloan? There had been so few available Jewish men during the war that Marcus’s mother was twenty-seven when she met his father, six years older than her suitor. How could his grandparents have objected to a handsome generous man who was willing to marry their spinster daughter, live a Jewish life, and run the hotel they all loved? The only detail they hadn’t guessed was that, unlike most American men, their son-in-law wasn’t circumcised. Marcus did the math. Was it possible his father had only been forty-three when Marcus’s mother died? Then again, Marcus had been so absorbed in pretending his mother’s death hadn’t nearly killed him that he’d barely noticed his father’s grief, let alone his age. Once a week, on Sunday, after the guests checked out, they’d driven to the little Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of town, where Marcus had shuffled down the path with the feigned indifference of an adolescent hiding his bitter urge to fall on his mother’s grave and weep. Even now, he sometimes rented a car and drove up to visit the plot where his mother and grandparents lay beneath a monument engraved with the family name. Most of the surrounding monuments also bore the names of Catskills resorts, which reinforced Marcus’s notion that owning a hotel and serving people killed you. Certainly it had killed his mother. She might have been overweight, but trying to feed two hundred and fifty guests without a salad man or a dishwasher would have killed a much thinner woman with a healthier, younger heart. Yet who was he to say? His mother had loved running Lieberman’s so much that if such interments had been permitted, she would have asked to be buried on the front lawn. Marcus missed the hotel, too. Whenever he visited his mother’s grave, he sat with his back to his grandfather’s headstone and imagined they were waiting for his

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father, the way they used to wait for him to finish some repair or settle a dispute and join them in the dining room for the erev Shabbos meal. And his father had screwed it up. He’d had thirty-three years to muster the courage to check into a hospital and allow the doctors to trim his foreskin—under anesthesia, after all—and he’d put it off and put it off. Maybe it wasn’t only the fear of the operation. Maybe he hadn’t been able to face the idea of giving up that last little bit of the man he used to be. But did his father actually believe this Dr. Schiffler would agree to perform a circumcision on a dying man? For a moment, Marcus wondered if a mohel would circumcise his father after he was dead, but the notion made him ill. The homeless man tapped on his window and Marcus shook his head to indicate he didn’t want to buy a paper. It bothered him that the guy wasn’t allowed to beg but had to pretend to sell a newspaper no one wanted to read. These days, no one was allowed to give anything away for free, not even charity. Marcus saw the girl in the green bikini pointing to her cart and miming the act of eating a hot dog, so he pulled onto the road again. He was hungry enough that he could have wolfed down several hot dogs, but he didn’t want anyone to think he was one of those men who would buy a woman’s wares so he could look down her cleavage when she leaned in the window and set his hot dogs in his lap. The condo development where his father lived was populated almost exclusively by Orthodox Jews. No rules excluded gentiles, but what Christian would want to settle in a place where the country club served heavy kosher meals and the tennis courts and pool were locked from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday and nearly all the residents attended services at the dumpy concrete synagogue within the development’s walls? While the guard checked Marcus’s name against a list, he felt the impulse to reveal his father’s lie. He couldn’t have said why. He felt no less Jewish than before. He had inherited his zayde Lieberman’s dark Hebraic looks. That his mother had been a Jew guaranteed that Marcus would be certified as a Jew by even the strictest rabbi. He had attended Hebrew School, well, religiously, and—thanks to his father—had been circumcised and bar mitzvahed. His father had lived a completely Jewish life for seven decades. How could this one act of sacrifice—which most Jewish men had undergone when they were eight days old and drunk on the Manischewitz the mohel had given them to suck from a bit of cloth—count for so much? The guard waved Marcus through. Of course he wouldn’t reveal his father’s origins. He didn’t wish him any harm. As for his father’s right to live in this development, God would be issuing His eviction notice soon enough.

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Marcus parked in his father’s space and let himself into the condo, which was stuffy and stank of mold. His father had never been a hoarder and, in recent years, had given away most of what he owned. Every time Marcus flew down for a visit, he flew back to New York with a moth-eaten cardigan or a set of wooden shoe-trees or a box of jellied fruit slices some kindly female neighbor had given his father for Passover the year before. Little remained on the condo’s shelves except the novels of Leon Uris, some kitschy figurines of Jewish peddlers, and his grandparents’ brass menorah. Marcus turned on the air conditioner, but the unit was so palsied his khakis and shirt were plastered to his skin before the place cooled down. The apartment, which until then had held only pleasant associations, now harbored a sinister possibility in every nook, as if the harmless geckos flitting here and there might suddenly hiss and bite. He looked up Dr. Schiffler’s number, picked up his father’s rotary phone, and dialed. When he finally got through, he told the receptionist he needed to discuss a circumcision. “There are . . . let’s call them complications,” Marcus said, and she agreed to let him speak to the pediatrician at 6:15, when his regular appointments were done. Marcus lingered by the phone. If only he could talk to Vicki. But he needed to get to the tennis courts in time to catch Rabbi Dobrinsky before his doubles match. The air was so humid Marcus could hardly catch his breath. He crossed the parking lot and reached the pool, which shimmered seductively in the sun, then walked along the path that skirted the development’s manmade lagoon. The water was a sludgy brown that concealed who-knew-what creatures. Alligators? Snakes? From earlier explorations, Marcus knew the shore was lined with mounds of fire ants. Yet he entertained the fantasy of running down the bank and diving in. Finally he reached the tennis club, whose palm-shaded courts and coolers of icy water beckoned like an oasis. Marcus had played his father here three times, and all three times he’d lost. As kind as his father was, he turned fiendish on a tennis court. No matter where Marcus hit the ball, his father, with his willowy arms and legs, managed to reach it and return it. Even in his seventies, when his ground strokes had lost their force, he could still slice a ball so deftly that it traced corkscrews in the air before landing just shy of Marcus’s racquet. He stepped into the clubhouse and the air conditioning froze his sodden clothes. Beyond the racks of colorful nylon shorts, he found a woman in her fifties standing behind a desk. She had brassy red hair and blue-framed glasses. Racquet-shaped earrings dangled from her ears. “Excuse me,” Marcus said. “I’m looking for Rabbi Dobrinsky. My father said he always plays a doubles match at four.”

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The woman startled Marcus by reaching across the counter and taking his hand in hers. “You must be James’s son. How is he? What a dear man. Please, next time you see him, tell him Rita Crookstein sends her love.” She wasn’t his father’s type, but it pained Marcus that Rita Crookstein probably felt real affection for his father and had little or no idea why he never asked her out. The clubhouse door swung open and three leathery, fit old men came in. All three wore white shorts, white polo shirts, white cotton knee-highs, and bandages and supports around their limbs. Two of the men had fluorescent-green yarmulkes bobbypinned to their hair. “Excuse me,” Marcus said, “I’m looking for Rabbi Dobrinsky.” The shortest of the three lifted the tinted lenses that were clipped to his regular frames. He looked Marcus up and down. “My father is in the hospital,” Marcus said. “He’s very ill. He sent me to ask a favor.” The rabbi took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “I’m sorry he’s in the hospital. But your father already asked his favor, and already I told him no.” Marcus rose to full height. Even at five foot six he was taller than the rabbi. What kind of spiritual leader would act in such a peremptory way to the son of a dying man? Extortionists like Dobrinsky were exactly the reason Marcus didn’t belong to a congregation. You joined, and right away someone demanded to see your tax returns and dunned you five percent, then hit you up for pledges to the building fund and the mortgage fund, donations to the UJA, service on committees. In return, all you got was a seat for Rosh Hashanah and a place to say kaddish when one of your parents died. Like Diogenes with his lamp, Marcus longed to find a spiritual leader who didn’t see his position as an opportunity to take advantage of a person in need. “My father told me you’d consented—” He glanced at the other men, who were making a show of examining a rack of shirts. “To do what he asked.” The rabbi unzipped his racquet. “Your father believes what he wants to believe.” He said this in such a loud voice the other men and Rita Crookstein couldn’t pretend they hadn’t heard. “What I told him was, I will come when he is dying and offer what prayers I can. If he takes this to mean I will issue some sort of paper that says he is a Jew, he is badly misinformed.” “But if a dying man wishes to convert to Judaism? If he wishes to be buried beside his wife? After all, my father lived most of his life as a Jew.” Dobrinsky bounced his racquet against his fist. “I have known your father nine years. We play tennis. We play golf. We discuss politics and theology. More than that, we are friends. So, you don’t think it’s a shock, all of a sudden he tells me he’s not a Jew? Against non-Jews I have nothing. But against non-­Jewish friends who pretend to be Jewish . . . Pardon me if I do not believe that the reward for so many years of

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deceit should be an easy deathbed conversion.” The rabbi flipped down his lenses and started toward the courts. “Rabbi Dobrinsky,” Marcus raised his voice. “My father is dying. You say he is your friend. Yet you can’t find it in your heart to stretch the rules?” Something came back to him from his years in Hebrew School. “I thought any rule could—and should— be broken to save a dying man.” Rabbi Dobrinsky stopped. “To save a dying man. Not hasten his death. If this truly were a matter of bringing about shalom biet, peace in the family . . . But it is only about allowing your father the convenience of being buried as a Jew.” “But think of the peace it will bring my mother. Think of the peace it will bring me!” “I am not entirely without sympathy for your case. Your case, not your father’s. But a conversion must come about as a complete change of heart. The act of circumcision, followed by immersion in the ritual bath, the mikveh, must be experienced by the convert as a blessing. Your father wants his conversion should entail a sleight of hand. He wants the mohel and I should say abracadabra while he’s lying there unconscious and suddenly he’s a Jew. And not just any kind of Jew, but an Orthodox Jew, an observant Jew—” The telephone rang and Rita Crookstein answered it. “Yes,” she said, “the three of them are here. I’m so sorry. I’ll let them know.” She hung up and primped her hair. “Rabbi Dobrinsky? That was Mr. Markowitz. His wife suffered another stroke. He’s calling from the hospital. He can’t make your doubles match today.” All three men looked as disappointed as if the messiah weren’t coming. Then they turned to Marcus. “If you are your father’s son,” Dobrinsky said, “you know your way around a tennis court.” Marcus almost said no, but his vanity wouldn’t allow it. “I play. But tennis wasn’t on my mind when I packed to come down here.” Nothing his father owned would fit. The sneakers would be too tight, and the ancient racquet his father still played with was made of some heavy metal Marcus could barely lift. Dobrinsky motioned to the desk. “Racquets she has plenty.” He looked at Marcus’s feet. “Size nine, a common size. There is a dress code at this club, but I am sure you will find a suitable shirt and shorts in Ms. Crookstein’s lost and found.” “You expect me to play tennis at a time like this?” “Let me put it this way. If you fill out our fourth, I will see what I can do about your father’s request.” It took Marcus a while to get the rabbi’s point. Already this Dobrinsky had extracted a donation to his shul from Marcus’s father. Now he was trying to extract a doubles game from Marcus. “Fine,” Marcus said, “but only for an hour.”

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“An hour is all we play. In case you hadn’t noticed, we are not such young men.” He introduced Marcus’s partner, Victor Eisen, and the rabbi’s partner, Isaac Karsh. Rita Crookstein loaned Marcus a shirt and shorts. The racquet’s frame was dented, as if someone had smashed it against the court, and the strings were strung too loose, but as keyed up as he was, Marcus felt confident he could beat the rabbi and Isaac Karsh with a flyswatter. Yet once they were on the court, he muffed shot after shot. The ball failed to clear the net or went sailing out of bounds. He dribbled in serves so weak they could have been returned by a crippled Girl Scout. Sweat cascaded down his brow and made the racquet slip inside his grip. He rarely played on clay, and this threw off his rhythm. His opponents’ yarmulkes were the same fluorescent green as the balls and misled his gaze. (No doubt this was intentional. Who had ever seen yarmulkes in such an obnoxious hue?) Worse, his mind was on his father. Marcus would have given anything— gallons of blood, a kidney, the very marrow from his bones—to save his father’s life. Instead, he had been asked to play a game of tennis in the Florida heat so his father could have a bris, and this he couldn’t do. In no time, Marcus and his partner were behind five games to love. Marcus found it difficult to hit his most powerful shots against two such frail old men. What if Rabbi Dobrinsky ran for a shot and fell? What if Isaac Karsh suffered a heart attack and died? Nor was Marcus’s partner in healthy shape. When Dobrinsky tossed up a lob, Eisen shaded his eyes, scuttled backward like a crab, then shrugged and let the ball drop without trying to smash it. “Stenosis of the spine,” he explained to Marcus. “I lean too far back, I could snap something in my neck and be paralyzed for life.” When Eisen played at net and a shot came whizzing toward him, he stepped aside and let it pass. Worse, he was nearly deaf and couldn’t hear the strategies for a comeback Marcus whispered in his ear when they switched sides between games. Karsh was no Rod Laver, but Dobrinsky must have known he was giving Marcus the weaker partner. Marcus suspected the rabbi would try to cheat, but if anything, he was a stickler for the rules. Repeatedly, he called foot faults on Marcus, which no one had ever done, and questioned his every call, demanding to see the skid marks for any shot that landed anywhere near a line. Marcus got so rattled he and his partner lost the first set six games to love, then started going under in the second set. “Either you’re not much of a player,” the rabbi gloated, “or you’re not trying your best. I won’t even consider doing what your father asks me to do unless you win two games.” Marcus was enraged. The rabbi had mentioned nothing about how many games he needed to win to fulfill their bargain. As Dobrinsky prepared to serve, Marcus bent low, weaving and bobbing, forgetting everything except his desire to smash the return of serve crosscourt as deep as possible. The rabbi tossed the ball, and the serve came

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looping high and wide with a devious slice. But Marcus had played enough games against his father, who used a similarly deceptive spin, to know what to do. He let the ball drop, drew his racquet back and down, then whipped it across his chest. The rabbi, who had come to net for what he assumed to be a winner, took Marcus’s return in his face. His glasses went flying—the tinted lenses came off, as if a bird had lost its wings in flight—and he dropped to his knees and screamed. Eisen helped him to a chair. Karsh doused a towel with water and laid it across the rabbi’s eyes. Marcus crouched beside the rabbi. “Are you all right? Can you see?” He was appalled at what he had done but couldn’t keep from glancing at his watch; there was less than an hour before he was due to meet Schiffler. “You have to admit, I satisfied what you asked. If I get a mohel to perform the bris, will you sign a certificate of conversion?” The rabbi raised his fist. “Not in a million years! This is the Almighty’s way of reminding me what happens to those who turn a blind eye to deception.” “Oh come on,” Marcus scoffed. “You can’t seriously believe—” The rabbi peeled off the towel, and Marcus could see red skid-marks above and below the eye. “No,” he said, “I don’t. But you knocked some sense back into me. I can’t be party to more betrayals. I love your father. He is a very good man. But I will not sign some phony document of conversion.” Squinting, he peered from the teary eye, moaned, and shook his head. “And now will someone please drive me to the emergency room before I lose what little sight God has seen fit to spare?”

Blinding a rabbi was no small matter. Had Marcus helped his father’s cause or ruined it? He didn’t have the time to carry out his usual calculation as to who owed what to whom. If Schiffler performed the circumcision, the burial society might assume the wound had been the result of a medical procedure in his father’s final days and see no reason to ask for a certificate of conversion. He removed his borrowed clothes, stepped into the shower, and lathered up. He soaped his belly and then his balls. How could the sight of his own circumcised prick not remind him of his father? What a little thing to have one’s foreskin snipped off. Then again, what if Vicki asked that he chop off his little finger? Would he be able to do it? No. Not even for Vicki. Did that mean he didn’t love her? What would Vicki do for him? He’d toyed with the idea of asking her to lose a few pounds. Paula, his ex-wife, had been Manhattan thin, which at the time had turned him on. He’d never imagined he could make love to an overweight woman. But Vicki’s extra weight served as an aphrodisiac. Marcus would catch himself thinking about all

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those rolls of flesh, the pillowed breasts and rounded thighs, the soft warm welcome of her vagina, and he would find that he was hard. Even now, his prick reared its foamy head. He worked it in his hand, then braced himself and came; a sad spurt of semen spattered the stall as Marcus wept and cursed. By that time, he had less than ten minutes to put on his clothes and drive across town in rush-hour traffic to speak to Dr. Schiffler. He arrived twenty minutes late, parked, and ran inside. The waiting room was full; the doctor had been delayed by an emergency and was running late. Marcus was glad he hadn’t missed his appointment, but it seemed a punishment that in a city reserved for the very old he should be compelled to spend an hour in a room full of kids. He took the one remaining seat. Scattered around the carpet were miniature trucks and buses with bobble-headed passengers that fit on the pegs inside. On a table the height of Marcus’s shin sat an elaborate wire structure along which a pixieish Hispanic child of indeterminate gender slid colorful wooden beads. When Marcus was young, doctors had provided nothing to keep a child amused except tattered copies of Highlights, whose goody-goody articles and harsh black-and-white illustrations had irritated him to tears; it wasn’t bad enough you needed to get a shot, you also had to be subjected to pious sermons by a poorly drawn bear. He tried to read a magazine, but the articles on newborn colic and toddlers’ tantrums made him sweat. His mind wandered to his daughter, who lived on Staten Island with her mother. He loved Michelle. But she was tied up in his mind with the grudge his ex-wife held against him for not providing enough help around the house or enough money to support them. Marcus had waited to marry until he’d found a wife as self-sufficient as he was, independent to the point of fierceness, a lawyer whose job it was to ferret out fraud in the banking system of New York State. But his plan had gone too far. The day they’d moved in together, Paula had tacked up a chart on which they could record how much time each of them spent doing chores. Likewise, she insisted they spend exactly the same amount on necessities for the apartment. Marcus could understand why a woman of Paula’s generation would fear that her talents might be wasted in the service of her husband’s career. But he wasn’t an ambitious man. He had grown up with a father who wasn’t ashamed to lift a mop. The very fact that Paula felt the need to keep track of what Marcus did or didn’t give made him surly and defensive. Strangely, after the divorce, Paula’s scorekeeping had grown even more precise. The amount for Michelle’s upkeep was deducted from Marcus’s bank account, but Paula—who earned as much as Marcus—demanded that he pay extra for his daughter’s ballet and karate lessons and her stays at summer camp, and she kept track of every minute he spent with their daughter, offering monthly statements of both

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accounts, until Marcus felt as if the girl were a commodity in which he had purchased so many shares. It struck him that his marriage, like most of his friends’ marriages, had failed because each member of the couple had been so wary of being asked to give more than his or her fair share. What he loved about Vicki was her generosity. Like Paula, she worked hard. She was the founder of a bakery that sold muffins and croissants to yuppie groceries around the city. (As her accountant, Marcus had advised her to use less expensive ingredients, to which Vicki had replied that she would rather not bake at all than sell pastries made with axle grease masquerading as a dairy product.) But her philosophy seemed to be that if two people loved each other, they did everything possible to make each other happy. She assumed that Marcus was as generous as she was, and her love and good opinion kindled in his heart a desire to give. “Mr. Sloan?” Marcus looked up. The waiting room was empty. The receptionist led Marcus to an office in which a weedy pop-eyed man sat behind a desk. The diplomas on the wall were surrounded by photos of Dr. Schiffler handing oversized checks to the chairpersons of Boca charities, snapshots of children’s circumcision ceremonies, and thankyou letters from grateful parents. The doctor shook Marcus’s hand. “I understand this has something to do with a circumcision. With complications, you said? An interfaith marriage, I take it? Perhaps your wife and in-laws are upset or confused about the ritual?” The pediatrician smoothed his tie, which was printed with those colorful costumed children found on products sold by UNICEF. “Tell me about your problem and I will do everything I can to make this event a simcha, even for the non-Jewish individuals involved.” Buoyed by Schiffler’s open-mindedness, Marcus related his quandary, although even as he spoke he wondered what kind of madman would be telling such a tale. Usually, when he entered a doctor’s office, it was in his capacity as an accountant and the doctor was the one who had something unsavory to explain. Now Marcus was the shnorrer. It wasn’t a position he favored. In high school, they’d read a play in which Marcus had found a line that encapsulated his own philosophy: Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Yet here he was, begging favors from everyone he met. Only the fact that he was begging these favors on his father’s behalf lent the begging some nobility. The pediatrician picked up a pencil and, to Marcus’s amazement, used it to clean his ears. He wiggled the pencil briskly, as if to dislodge the screwy request, then said he couldn’t possibly circumcise a dying man. “I would need to put your father under general anesthesia, and between that and the procedure, I would be hastening his death. I might even kill him outright. The hospital would never allow such a thing. And my conscience would not permit it.”

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Marcus was reluctant to push the matter further, but he had already invested so much time in his scheme, he tried another tack. Perhaps Dr. Schiffler might be willing to perform the circumcision on his father at home? “Not under general anesthetic, but the way you do it with babies. I mean, maybe we could get him drunk?” The doctor glanced around as if he expected Alan Funt to step out of a closet and ask him to smile. “You aren’t serious. Are you? What do you think I am? I could lose my license for a stunt like that!” Marcus raised his palms. “The joke of a desperate man. I appreciate your taking the time to listen.” He reached in his pocket and removed his checkbook. “I don’t suppose a donation would change your mind?” Schiffler looked around again. By now he seemed frantic, as if he were being set up for a sting. “What I mean is, in return for taking up your valuable time, I am happy to write a check to your favorite charity. But maybe you would prefer I send it directly to the March of Dimes rather than making it out to you?” The doctor smiled wanly. “Yes. Certainly. Thank you. I must have misunderstood.” He rose and held the door. “I’m afraid my receptionist has gone home for the day. Just follow the signs to the waiting room, then let yourself out.” Retracing his steps, Marcus passed a nurse’s station on the top of which sat a cardboard box of lollipops, a pad of the doctor’s letterhead, and a stack of bandages and gauze. He didn’t yet have a plan. But the moment he placed the lollipop, the letterhead, and the packet of gauze in his trouser pocket, the plan began to sprout.

He found his father sleeping. His skin glowed eerily against the sheets. “Mr. Sloan?” Marcus turned. His father’s gerontologist beckoned from the hall. “I’m glad you were able to get here in time.” Marcus was suspicious of any doctor who worked in Florida—they seemed a pack of jackals that had migrated south to take advantage of the dying Jews—but his father’s gerontologist, Dr. Persky, was a compassionate warmhearted man. Boyishly thin and sweet faced, with stooped shoulders and curly silver hair, he gave the impression of eternal youth combined with extreme old age, as if he had taken on himself the burdens of his patients. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but it doesn’t look good. We don’t usually suggest this, but if he continues to refuse the transplant, which, to be honest, I completely understand, there isn’t anything we can do for him here. I was wondering how you would feel about taking your father home.” Home to die, the doctor meant. Marcus’s stomach shrank. He had never seen anyone die. The night his mother’s heart gave out, he had been at a rock concert in Monticello, his parents having granted him the evening off from his job as headwaiter in the children’s dining room. At the time, he’d been relieved that he hadn’t seen his

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mother’s corpse, but later he regretted that he hadn’t had the chance to ask her forgiveness for all his snotty backtalk. And the chance to say good-bye. He wasn’t about to make the same mistake with his father. Good-bye, Pop, forgive me. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye. The doctor lifted his hands. “Of course, there’s always the hospice center. But in your father’s condition, it won’t be more than a few days. And having him die at home might have certain advantages.” Advantages, Marcus thought. “Yes, I would prefer that my father die at home.” The doctor seemed taken aback at how quickly Marcus had agreed to his suggestion. “If you’re sure. Perhaps you need a few days to consider all the options? Make certain you’re up to the strain? Although if you do choose to take your father home, a visiting nurse will stop by every afternoon to help you keep him comfortable.” He gripped Marcus’s hand, and Marcus was touched to see that the corners of his eyes were wet. Marcus went back inside the room and sat by his father’s bed, stroking his yellow arm. Just as he was about to leave, his father’s eyelids fluttered open. “Hey, Pop. It’s Marcus.” “Your mother . . .” He used his tongue to wet his lips. “I dreamed Claire was here. Beside me. In this bed.” Marcus shrugged to say who knew? “How would you like to go home?” He could see this information flatten his father’s face. “Of course, if you’d rather stay here . . . Or we could move you to a hospice.” His father shook his head. “Home. No hospice.” Again he licked his lips. “And the other? Dobrinsky? Schiffler?” Marcus fought his qualms and lied. “Everyone’s on board. When the time is right, they’ve all agreed to do what needs to be done.” His father sank back and closed his eyes. Marcus was surprised he didn’t ask for details. He probably didn’t want to know. The wife of the man in the next bed reminded her daughter-in-law to bring a box of cookies for the nurses. “What Mom is really saying,” the son chimed in, “is if you bribe them with cookies, they’ll come running faster if Dad needs help.” “And what’s wrong with that?” the mother asked. “Just don’t get the cheap ones from Publix. Go to that nice bakery in the mall. Get some elephant ears and a pound of rugelach. Don’t skimp, we shouldn’t look cheap.” Just as Marcus thought he could stand the conversation no longer, his father opened his eyes and asked, “What about the woman?” “Woman, Pop?” “The baker.”

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Marcus assumed his father was referring to the conversation about the cookies. But his father made a wavy shape in the air with one hand. “Zaftig,” he said, and Marcus knew he meant Vicki. It wasn’t hard to see why his father liked her. Marcus cooked so rarely he owned only two pots, but in honor of his father’s visit to Manhattan, Vicki had prepared a magnificent meal, beginning with a mushroom barley soup whose flavors brought tears to his father’s eyes and ending with a peach strudel so rich Marcus’s father had felt impelled to kiss Vicki’s hand. In Boca, Vicki had taken one peek in his father’s cupboard and immediately gone out shopping; she’d returned with six bags of staples and a selection of gourmet items that Marcus was sure his father would never eat, although the next time he came to visit, all these items were gone. “I like a woman who’s got some meat and potatoes on her bones,” his father had often said, a preference borne out by the fact that Marcus’s mother had been anything but svelte. Which, no doubt, was why Marcus used to be attracted to skinny women. Who wanted to think he was making love to his mother? “Marry her!” his father whispered hoarsely. “Marry that girl today!” And Marcus didn’t argue. Instead, he waited until his father’s eyes had closed, got in his car, and drove as quickly as he could back to the development. The drive seemed to take forever, as did placing the call to Vicki. Come on, he thought, come on, urging the signal north. “Sweetheart!” she cried, her voice clotted with whatever pastry she’d been tasting. “I’ve been thinking about you and your father all day. How did it go? How is he?” And out it all came, in a wholehearted, uncensored way that Paula never would have allowed. Not that she wouldn’t have cared. But she would have been waiting for her turn so she could tell him what had gone wrong at her office that day. “Oh, Marcus,” Vicki said, “I can’t think of anything more upsetting. Do you want me to come down there? I could hop on the next plane.” Oh no, he said, she shouldn’t even think of coming down. Whatever his father asked, Marcus had to be the one to do it. Still, Vicki’s willingness to listen calmed him. When they had exhausted every possibility for solving his father’s problem and had hashed out at least a few of the implications of his father’s revelation about not being Jewish, Marcus felt stable enough to ask what was new with her. “Nothing you need to worry about. That new guy I hired left a stack of towels too near the stove. You can imagine all the smoke. We lost most of a day before we could get back in the kitchen.” It touched him that to avoid upstaging his trials in Florida, she had minimized what must have been a frightening event and a serious financial strain. “I love you,” he said.

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“I love you, too,” she said, which was followed by a pause in which she must have been wondering what he had decided about getting married. “I miss you. Call me anytime.” He almost blurted out that if having fifteen children was the price he had to pay for keeping her in his life, then fifteen children they would have. But she took another bite, and the sound of her mastication prevented him from saying any more than “I’m sorry about the fire” before he hung up.

The next morning, the ambulance drove up and the EMTs unloaded Marcus’s father and carried him to his room. As his father lay in the musty condo drifting in and out of sleep, Marcus sat beside him, unable to think of anything except how much he owed this man and how little he could do to pay him back. Maybe that was the source of the resentment in so many families. The parents stewed about how much they had sacrificed for their kids while the children chafed at being saddled with all that guilt. What changed the equation for Marcus was his newfound understanding that his father hadn’t sacrificed quite as much as Marcus had always thought. For an entire day and night, his father barely surfaced from the depths. Marcus couldn’t focus enough to read Exodus or Reader’s Digest. He ripped the skin from a blister he must have gotten playing tennis. He bit the cuticles around his nails, peeled the calluses from his feet. To keep from giving himself a whole-body circumcision, he rummaged through the drawers. To find what, a cache of gay porn? A syringe and a vial of heroin? In the bathroom, Marcus found nothing more questionable than a pack of bubble-gum flavored floss; in the den, nothing but an envelope whose contents verified that his father had indeed left half of the few pennies in his account to Rabbi Dobrinsky’s shul. Marcus didn’t mind about the money. What made him feel cheated was the wealth of information his father would take to his grave. How had Marcus’s grandparents ended up in Texas? What country had they come from? Had any of Marcus’s ancestors fought in the Civil War, and, if they had, on the Northern or Southern side? What had his father’s baptism been like? Had he grown up eating pork, and, if so, had he liked it? In the kitchen drawers, Marcus found plastic forks and coupons and a stack of Christmas cards from a man who appeared to be his father’s buddy from the war. The man’s greetings seemed effusive. Had the sender of these cards been the soldier his father had saved? Marcus would need to let him know his father had passed away. But the cards were bare of envelopes. Hoping to find an address book, he emptied the drawer. At the bottom lay a directory of Jewish services in Boca Raton. Marcus thumbed the pages, and there, under ritual circumcisions, he saw a list of three mohels.

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The first number was disconnected, and whoever answered the second number didn’t have a clue what a mohel was—the directory, Marcus saw, was five years out of date. But the third mohel not only answered, he said he would be happy to meet with Marcus that afternoon. “To tell the truth,” he said in a heavy old-world accent, “business hasn’t been so good.” He laughed a wheezy laugh. “I have nothing on my agenda. I am not the type to play tennis or golf.” “I’ll be there in an hour,” Marcus said. When the visiting nurse stopped by, he was halfway out the door before she set down her bag. The address the mohel gave him was in the only shabby section of Boca that Marcus had ever seen. The crooked, mossy lanes were lined with stunted palms and flimsy pastel cottages that hadn’t been painted since the fifties. Marcus’s knock echoed, and when the old man let him in, the unconditioned air, laden with pipe smoke and the odor of salted fish, nearly knocked Marcus out. By the time the mohel had led him to his “study”—a tiny room with a folding metal chair, a child-size desk, and shelves and shelves of books in Hebrew—Marcus was already soaked. The man offered him a glass of hot tea, but the idea of drinking anything hot appalled him. “Nothing, I’m fine, but thank you.” The mohel sat heavily. “Mazel tov on the son.” He slapped his thighs, his rheumy eyes shining. But as Marcus explained the details of why he’d come, the mohel bowed his head—his beard brushed his chest, which was bare to the sternum, the shirt unbuttoned to either side. After Marcus finished, the mohel lifted his chin and stroked his beard. “So, this is quite a situation you’ve gotten yourself into. I suppose you would pay a considerable sum to convince me to perform this bris.” Why, the wily old bastard! Of course, given the man’s poverty, such a shakedown made sense. The mohel’s shirt was so old the fabric had turned as yellow as Marcus’s father’s skin. His trousers were threadbare, and he wasn’t wearing shoes; his cheap white cotton socks had a hole in each big toe. The old man grinned—gray teeth, gums an unhealthy brown. “I suppose a successful man like you has a fair amount of money in his wallet.” As a matter of fact, he did. On his way to the airport, Marcus had stopped at an ATM and withdrawn five hundred dollars, of which he’d spent only forty. He removed the wad of cash and held it toward the mohel. In a way, it would be a mitzvah to give a bribe to such a poor man. Pediatricians like Schiffler probably were putting their more traditional counterparts out of business. Slowly, the mohel stood. He held out a thick-nailed hand and made a gimmegimme motion. When Marcus didn’t move, the hand darted out and snatched the cash. Marcus jumped back, and the mohel startled him even more by dashing the money to the floor and stomping on it as if it were a roach. With one white-socked foot planted across the bills, the mohel began to shout. “To be a Jew there are no shortcuts! God

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demanded that Father Abraham be circumcised at ninety-nine, and because Abraham agreed, God told him that his seed would be as numerous as the sands on the beach. Abraham didn’t try to sneak out of the operation. He didn’t wait until he was dying and no longer conscious of the pain. Think of all the pain one child can cause. How should Abraham have become father to millions of Jews with no pain at all?” Shakily, the mohel bent, scooped the money in his fist, and shook it at Marcus. “Get out, and take your filthy money with you!” A moment later, Marcus stood by his car, holding the bills and trembling. It was a relief to be outside, but he was dizzy and out of breath. How was it fair to punish a person for handing over a bribe he’d been finagled into offering? And that speech about Father Abraham . . . He dropped to his knees. Oh, God, don’t let me pass out here. He glanced at the mohel’s house and saw the curtain flicker. The heat blared. A lizard skittered past his hand. He touched his forehead to the sidewalk, fighting the urge to crawl back to the mohel’s house, scratch at the door, and beg to be let back in. That’s when he heard the voice. Or rather, a wordless chant, a honeyed vibrating hum. He looked up at the sun, whose rays poured down and blinded him, wave after wave of light and heat and hum. He understood what he understood. Things were what they were. His father was what he was. Oh, God, he thought, thank you. He staggered to his feet, brushed the broken seashells from his palms, found a sprinkler on a ratty lawn a few houses down, wet his face, then drove back to his father’s condo to wait and let whatever might happen happen. He resumed his bedside vigil. And the longer he sat, the more he came to see that unless he took matters into his own hands—literally—neither he nor his father ever would have a chance to be at peace. He wanted desperately to talk to Vicki, but if he spoke to her now he would feel compelled to reveal his plan, and she would tell him that he was nuts. “Claire!” His father’s arm flailed across the mattress, groping for his wife. Then: “Reuven!” and “Hattie!”—Marcus’s grandparents’ names. “Reuven! Hattie! Claire!” Soon he would slip below the surface a final time. The visiting nurse arrived and left. The evening stretched ahead. Marcus got a tumbler from the kitchen, then found his father’s stash of Manischewitz and carried the bottle and cup to his father’s room. He shook his father’s arm. “Dad? It’s time. Wake up.” Remarkably, his father opened his eyes. “Time? Schiffler’s coming?” Marcus held out the cup. “He told me to get you good and drunk.” Though his father looked frightened, he tried his best to smile. “Sure, I’m a regular shikker,” he said, and Marcus had to laugh. Neither of his father’s two religions,

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the real or the adopted, encouraged the use of alcohol. But Jews allowed themselves a sip of candyish wine to commemorate important rites. His father gulped down the Manischewitz, then motioned for Marcus to pour another cup and slugged that one down, too. He closed his eyes and lay back, a purple mustache above his lip, and soon he was sound asleep. Marcus counted to a hundred, then clapped his hands by his father’s ear. When his father didn’t stir, he went to the den and rummaged through the trousers he had worn to visit Schiffler. He found the items he had pilfered from Schiffler’s office and laid them next to his father’s bed, then took a very long breath, peeled back his father’s sheet, and lifted his gown. There it was, neither overly large nor small, not so badly wrinkled, an orange-yellow mouse curled up in its nest of silky white hair. The foreskin dangled like the tip of an un-inflated condom. Intellectually, Marcus knew this was the natural state of the male organ, but the hood on his father’s penis seemed somehow devious, as if it were hiding something. And the penis as a whole was nothing like Marcus’s own. How can you be my father? How can I be your son? So it was with anger as well as love that he gripped his father’s cock and twisted it, this way, then that, and then for good measure he twisted it again, as if, by sheer force, he could twist off his father’s foreskin. Tears rose to his eyes. I’m sorry, Pop, he thought, then opened a pack of gauze. Clumsily, he stuck a pad to either side of his father’s cock, which was red now as well as yellow, and wrapped the whole thing in tape so it stood away from his father’s groin like an obscenely prominent erection. Marcus printed a few hasty lines on the pediatrician’s letterhead, then set it beside the lollipop. His father jerked awake. He looked up at Marcus with pleading, befuddled eyes. “So?” he said. “Is it done?” Gingerly, he caressed his swaddled cock. Marcus nodded. “The pediatrician? Schiffler?” Again Marcus nodded. Maybe, if he didn’t speak, he couldn’t be accused of lying. Then again, what was so awful about a lie? Maybe the immorality lay in whatever cowardice the lie was meant to hide. “It hurts,” his father said, “but not nearly as bad as I thought it would.” His father smiled—a genuine smile this time—and Marcus’s heart fluttered. He handed his father the lollipop. “Here. He said you were such a good patient you deserved a treat.” His father took the candy by the stick and waved it. “A fine man, didn’t I tell you? A real mensch.” A look of concern crossed his face. “What did he charge? I wouldn’t want the fee should come out of your pocket.”

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Marcus picked up the sheet of letterhead and passed it to his father, who passed it back and motioned that Marcus should read what it said aloud. “One adult circumcision, local anesthetic. Fee: contribution in the amount of $500 to the March of Dimes of Boca Raton, Florida.” His father beamed. “See? This is how a real Jew behaves.” He closed his eyes to savor the bliss not only of waking to find himself circumcised but also receiving proof the world held righteous men. Then he opened his eyes and moaned. “Did he by any chance leave something for the pain?” Marcus hadn’t planned another lie, but this one came out as if he’d scripted it. “Not with the shape your liver is in. Schiffler said even one Tylenol might finish you off.” His father shrugged. “My comeuppance for waiting so long. Soon the pain won’t matter.” He closed his eyes and, still smiling, drifted back to sleep. Marcus used the chance to call Dobrinsky. “You can come or not come, but there isn’t much time.” The rabbi’s answer was noncommittal. “I’m not forgetting you nearly blinded me.” “Rabbi Dobrinsky, my father is dying. I’m calling to inform you of his condition. If you can see your way toward coming, my father would be obliged. If you can’t, we’ll get along without you.” He hung up and went back in. His father was awake. “I was thinking. A convert is supposed to bathe in the mikveh. Of course, if it’s too much trouble . . . But even a dip in a tub or pool . . .” Marcus went to the window and peered between the jalousies. The sun was almost down, but the streetlights gave off the same yellowish glow as his father’s skin. “Sure, Pop. It won’t be official, but we’ll do the best we can.” Tenderly, he wrapped his father in the sheet and lifted him in his arms. His father was so full of fluids he nearly sloshed, but Marcus had little trouble carrying him across the lot. Unfortunately, the pool was locked. Marcus could have scaled the fence, but not while carrying his father. He continued along the path. His father looked up with a quizzical expression, then shrugged and turned his face against Marcus’s chest. Marcus saw the rabbi walking toward him. Dobrinsky wore a white shirt, dark pants, a white yarmulke, and street shoes, as if death, like tennis, had a dress code. If not for the eye patch, he might have looked like a rabbi. But the closer Dobrinsky came, the more Marcus felt pursued by a shifty old pirate determined to steal the treasure from his arms. Marcus veered off the path, his feet sliding on the stiff slick grass. Peering at the shadowy ground to avoid stepping in a nest of fire ants, he approached the lagoon. Something in the distance splashed—a frog, he hoped, or a turtle. To be a true mikveh, a body of water had to be free flowing, which Marcus doubted this lagoon to be. Then again, all water came from somewhere. And flowed to somewhere else.

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His shoes filled with sludge. Another step and he sank in to his calves. His father opened his eyes and looked up. Marcus looked up, too. The sky was wild with stars, the kind of spectacular array Marcus never saw in the city. He dipped his father in the lake and bathed him the way a parent bathes his child. The way, if all went well, Marcus would soon bathe the child to whom his wife gave birth. The sheet absorbed the sludge, and the burden in his arms grew so heavy he could barely lift it. What a bother it would be to disinter his mother and her parents from their plot at Ahavath Yisroel and move their remains to a more ecumenical cemetery where his father could join them, along with Marcus himself, and Vicki, and whatever children they might have, and, for all Marcus knew, his daughter and former wife. Let everyone in the world who wanted to be buried in the Sloan-Lieberman family plot be buried at his expense. The more guests checked in, the merrier it would be. Above him, on the bank, Dobrinsky slipped and cursed, although the curse, being in Yiddish, sounded more like a blessing. Dobrinsky limped down to the shore and stood beside Marcus, then he adjusted his eye patch and started chanting a Hebrew prayer whose melody and words Marcus had never heard. Nothing the rabbi said or did now would exert the slightest effect on his father’s religious status. But the simple fact of the rabbi’s presence might bring his father peace, and for that Marcus was glad. Oh Pop, Marcus thought, you were such a generous man. Why did you stop a few millimeters short of doing all you could? Because even if a person was asked to cut off his foreskin, or, for that matter, his entire cock, he needed to give and give and give, no matter how frightened the giving made him, no matter how much it hurt. Marcus raised his face to the star-drenched sky, and even as the rabbi sang whatever prayer he saw fit to sing, Marcus composed his own prayer of thanks for having been allowed to repay even a small part of the debt he owed his father. Although really, it didn’t make much sense to keep track of such matters, any more than it made sense to measure what the sun and stars gave a person as opposed to what that person gave to the sun and stars.

6 Ehud Havazelet

Six Days

Friday nights, after the services and the meal, while the women of the house finished in the kitchen and settled down with books, Birnbaum and his son walked. They headed west, up the boulevard toward the city, or east, deeper into Queens. They marked their passage by landmarks—the Midway Pharmacy, which bulged onto the boulevard; the flat gray edifice of the county courthouse; the bank, which was a replica of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. They recited the neighborhoods they passed into—Rego Park, Corona, Kew Gardens. From odd vantage points they could see bridges—the Verrazano, the green lights of the Throgs Neck; on clear nights, very far off, the GW, or maybe it was the Triborough—they could never be certain. Across Queens Boulevard they entered the shaded precinct of Forest Park, where the streets were softly lit by gas lamps and black, unmarred lawns lapped serene and elegant houses. Their conversation was muted, filled with a quiet and reluctant awe. Behind bay windows women held record-album covers as men poured wine. There was dancing, right in somebody’s living room. Mahogany bookshelves, a special ladder on wheels just for books; on their walls paintings, objects from foreign cultures, even their plates angled for display. His father never said a word but the boy understood that these people had what should be theirs, at least a portion of it, but that never would be. And it was a measure of the world’s perversity, the inherent unfairness of things, that this would always be so. They walked down the boulevard into the Italian section, past restaurants and bowling alleys and bars, people cruising, draped from car windows to call someone’s name. By the Trylon Theater, kids, not much older than David, boys in jeans and T-shirts, girls in short plaid skirts and leather jackets, out on their own, smoking cigarettes, kissing, touching each other in full view of whoever passed. Sometimes a bright “Six Days,” Copyright © 1998 by Ehud Havazelet. Reprinted with permission of the Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc. All rights reserved.

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glance sizing him up, a searing flash of invitation, then amused smiles all around at him stuck with his father. David tried to hurry through these streets but his father liked to take them slowly. Before the brick-fronted clubs with their neon signs in looping script, men in knit shirts stood smoking, rubbing down cars, overseeing the street. David kept his eyes averted, aware of their Shabbos clothing, strayed from their own neighborhood, while his father distributed Good evenings, How are yous, as if he knew these men. As if they might say, Good evening to you, sir, why not stop and have a drink with us?, and he could smile and say, No, no, my son and I are out walking, perhaps another time. They walked for hours, talking, not talking. Once they kept going, ended up in Whitestone, all the way to the water. In a park under the bridge they were the only people, the gray southern pylon towering over them like some ancient battlement, a fortress’s looming wall. Far out on the black water lights bobbed, fishing boats or buoys, the boy couldn’t be sure. After half an hour, the only ones in the park, Birnbaum said to his son, Did you see? That Friday they didn’t get home till past midnight. But their favorite spot was not far off, east on the boulevard, then south on Union Turnpike, a few blocks to the overpass. From here, they could see twenty-two roads, east, west, north, south. Four major highways converged at this spot, dumping cars onto service roads, trading traffic in a maze of interchanges and swooping ramps that circled high above their heads, doubled back, and fanned out into more highway. Close by was the IND subway yard, where trains done for the night would pull themselves across their own bridge with a faint metallic chatter the boy could make out, tracing the lit windows and the pink circle at the train’s back until it came to rest in the yard and went dark. It was loud here, a whirring background tumble of noise, and the boy liked tuning his ears to one road then another, to the trains, the sound effect of a truck passing above them, spiraling, then disappearing in a stream of taillights toward the east. With their hands on the cold steel rail, they stood and watched, slowly turning their heads, feeling the distant flutter of traffic through the tips of their fingers. His father pointed things out. “Those trucks drive out to the Long Island farms at night,” he would say. “The cabbies are lining up for La Guardia.” “From here you could go anywhere, anywhere on earth.” The high school where his father taught had once reminded David of a castle. Older, looking back, he retained the memory, though he could hardly understand what had given him the idea. There were two scarred cement columns at the top of a wide staircase, and if you stood across the street and looked, a certain symmetry to the tall windows above the entrance, the gilt lettering on black glass to either side of the portal, in Hebrew and English, giving the school’s name. It was a serious place—it even smelled serious, something deeper about its mustiness than in David’s school, as if no one here

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ever opened a window—and no matter what time he arrived there were always groups of boys huddled over Talmuds in the harshly lit rooms. There was no playground, no gym. This was a school for scholars, for future rabbis, and even the students wore suits and hats. David remembered running through these halls. A secretary who had long since died or retired gave him odd, sweet, coffee-flavored candies. Now he was shy and resentful coming here, fingering the baseball cards in his pocket, hurrying through the first floor, where boys swayed over books, murmuring. His father’s class was on the second floor, down the hallway to the back. On the walls no posters, no maps, not even the little grids by the stairwells telling you where to go in case of emergency or fire. Between two classrooms, portraits of the founder and his father, a famous learned man from the Old Country. The founder was dignified and humorless. The founder’s father was in a fur hat and faded striped coat, pictured from the waist up, smiling a smile somehow both kindly and insinuating. He had died protecting his school from the Germans. His eyes followed you wherever you went. The impression he always got approaching his father’s classroom was of books as an ocean, his father adrift among them, possibly going down. There were books on the sills, on the students’ wooden desks, on a long table near the window, books piled open-face on each other, threatening to spill onto the floor. There were books on his father’s desk, and beside it a worn wooden box, filled with more books. Sometimes David knocked, sometimes he walked straight in, so his father would look up and see him. Other times he stood at the door, playing a game he did not really enjoy, seeing how long it would be before his father, hunched over a smeary manuscript he was translating for some journal, would notice him. David felt uncomfortable standing there, as if he were spying on someone’s privacy, and sometimes he was, his father shifting in his chair to pass gas, picking his nose—but, uncomfortable or not, he did it anyway. He watched his father’s big head under its black yarmulke, watched his incomprehensible scrawl on the yellow writing paper, thought if he was an Arab terrorist or some crazed sniper like the man who shot Kennedy he could have picked him off twenty times by now. Still other times he just stood there and thought, This is his other world, when he’s not home with us. The response when it came, in any case, was always the same. His father would look up, startled, genuinely surprised to see him there, glad. He would check his watch. “Am I late?” he would say, knowing he was, enjoying the ritual, “Just one more second.” And David would bring out his cards to check for Yankees or loiter halfway up the hall, embarrassed in more ways than he could acknowledge, at his father’s absentmindedness—two, three times every week he had to come get him for dinner—at his own unwanted role as messenger, at the shabby familiarity of these rooms and halls, at the way, whether he was ten minutes or two hours late, whether it was snowing outside or blazing hot, his father would look up from his books every time like a man shocked from dreaming, alarmed, happy, smiling to see him.

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On the way out, students would nod at his father, occasionally—usually the younger ones—stop and ask a question about their work. There were night classes, and students stayed at least as long as evening prayers, some after that, for dinner. It was a world David was suspicious of, and scorned, but even here he would have liked an occasional wave or smile from one of these serious young men, would have felt then much eased in his faltering sense of worldliness and self-possession. Who wanted what they had? They didn’t even seem American. Older boys sat on the steps to argue, and they didn’t rise, as David didn’t for his teachers, as his father passed. They said good night in Yiddish or, not pausing in their conversations at all, simply raised their chins at his father, a bare acknowledgment in which David saw condescension, traces of contempt. It galled him that they knew his father in all his weaknesses—his dreamy­mindedness, his affection for puns, his penchant for flying off the handle and his killing remorse afterwards—they knew all these things as well as his own son did. He registered what he believed was the complacent derision in their faces, and recognized much the same in himself, which made him even angrier. He knew his father just that well, and of course he loved him. Did they? Did they love him, these pale boys with their earlocks and green suits, smugly arguing laws nobody but they cared about anyway? On the street, as his father pulled papers from his suit pocket or tried to relatch his briefcase, which had come undone, as he called, “Wait, David, tell me about your day,” the boy would tuck his chin into his neck and walk faster, willing himself deaf and blind. In Brooklyn, his father’s shul was a yellow brick building that, along with another shul next door, took up most of 50th Street between 13th and 14th Avenues. Birnbaum’s father had been rabbi here twenty years, was among the city’s prominent clergy, on school boards and planning commissions, knew aldermen, councilmen, deputy mayors. The script, though it had never been openly discussed, was that Birnbaum’s older brother, Rachmil, would take over one day. But he had not survived the war, the passage from Poland. The honor, the obligation, descended then to Birnbaum. But he was not his father, had other leanings, enjoyed his reading and translating medieval manuscripts, was uncomfortable speechifying, swaying crowds, being the center of everyone’s attention. Until the possibility had passed, however, Birnbaum did not himself realize that in idle moments he saw himself up there, dispensing kind wisdom from the podium, leading the congregation with his example of quiet dedication and good works. His father distantly encouraged his scholarship, had even helped him get the job at the boy’s high school in Queens—a favor, Birnbaum sometimes thought; other times, exile. Now another man, Alan Ostrow, was being groomed as his father’s successor, and Birnbaum, who had managed to publish only a handful of monographs and one article, was not nearly as happy in his choices

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as he had once hoped to be, as his father’s impassive approval made him avow he was. He was disappointed in himself, and disappointed, obscurely, in his father, for accepting him as he had turned out. At the shul his position was conspicuous if not eminent. He was in charge of organizing the study groups and classes that met during the week, though he taught only occasionally himself. He was on committees, headed, with his Uncle Simon, the charity drive for the orphanage in Jerusalem the shul sponsored. He was well liked, prized for his singing voice, his offhand humor. He sensed the congregation considered him one of them, approachable, one who could take a bit of ribbing, while the rabbi was grand, removed. This was true, and Birnbaum told himself it was all to the good. He tried to see himself as a simple Jew, a humble man who quietly did his duty to God and family and community. If he had doubts, he practiced keeping them to himself. And, if it was sometimes painful to admit this, given his relationship with his own father, he put great stock in his children. They were bright-eyed, affectionate, favorites among the congregation—it was a special thing to be the rabbi’s grandchildren (if not, he sometimes couldn’t help musing, the rabbi’s son) and they seemed partly everyone’s kids. David had his clear singing voice, and Rachel a laugh everyone recognized, turned to smile at. They did well in school and somehow the whole community knew their most recent grades, what their teachers had to say. People would introduce his children as if they were their own: This year he learned twelve blat of Talmud by heart, most in his class. She did half the cooking for the Seder, twenty-five people they fed. After the Torah reading David would climb the front steps to sit with his grandfather. As a young boy he had sat on his lap. Older, in his own suit and tie, he sat next to the rabbi, in a high-backed red-velvet chair identical to his and, across the velourdraped ark, the president of the congregation’s. You could hear him singing up there. Birnbaum would look over at Ruth, would try to catch his father’s attention—here was something they could all be proud of together. When he had finally moved his family to Queens, no one raised an eyebrow. It was nearer the job, after all. They had good schools for the children, the houses were newer, there was room for a man to prosper. It’s the right thing to do, people assured him. Brooklyn is finished, they all said. We’ll be joining you soon enough. But to Birnbaum there was defeat, a taint of abandonment in his leaving. He couldn’t put a name to it, didn’t allow himself to, but he had never thought to leave. All his adult life, when he looked into his future—well, he didn’t know anymore what he saw, but he never saw this. Nothing was clearer than the logic of the move, the necessity for it—a man couldn’t stay forever in his father’s shadow, after all—yet now that he was doing it he had trouble keeping his mind turned forward toward the bright new life he and Ruthie had planned. It was reckless, he feared, and there would be costs.

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And this foreboding, this bracing for grief was only confirmed for him two years later when he returned to follow his father in the funeral cortege, Borough Park’s crowded streets hushed for once, schoolchildren three deep on the curbs, storekeepers, merchants, housewives, everyone in Brooklyn, it seemed, gathered in the streets to pay final respects to the great man. What Birnbaum remembered was the body before him in the box, swaying gently in the hearse, the cold door handle which he wouldn’t let go of, all the long walk to the cemetery, the prayers and shattered apologies he offered under his breath. Sometimes, deep in prayer or late at night, leaning over a manuscript in his study, Birnbaum would get lost in the blunt shapes of the Hebrew letters, or in the incantatory rhythm the words made in his head. He would enter a kind of cottony doze, realize dimly he was wandering into his children’s future lives, where there were new children, laughter, spirited, friendly conversation, a sleepily indistinct but recognizable territory where the light was better and you could finally breathe. Other times his reveries were vivid and precise—his house engulfed in flames, past the gruff warnings of firemen he runs in to save a sleeping child; some serious but repairable medical condition in one of his kids, he has to donate something, a vital organ. They tell him how serious it will be. Without hesitating he signs his name to the paper; or less dramatic, closer to his heart—some childhood tragedy, some playground disaster that seems, to the child, the end of the world. Ruth is not home, only he is in the house when the grieving child returns. They sit at the kitchen table over a nourishing snack and talk it over. He believed, honestly, in the singularity of his children’s accomplishments, and he would say to his wife, after David had recited the Gettysburg Address, pointing at a book report Rachel had just completed, “Did you see?” “Very good,” Ruth would say, smiling. “Seriously. This is something special. Out of the ordinary.” And she would look over at the kids on the floor in front of the TV, seeing them in their pajamas, bathed, their hair brushed, laughing at that secret agent talking into his shoe, then back at her husband, wondering what it was he saw. “Yes. It’s very good.” “You think every child in that school is doing this?” “No. Certainly not everyone.” And she would go back to her book or her knitting, giving him a smile, a look or two that showed she loved him, though he was a bit comic, after all, a bit pathetic. It bothered him to be seen this way, made him feel small, their conversation ended, though he had more he would like to say—there was a sentence here, let him just find it, he would show her what he meant. But she had turned away, and from the carpet the children laughed at the television. He sighed and tried to tune out the noise, put his glasses back on to read the book report one more time.

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It was Yom Kippur, a day astonishingly hot for October, when they were back in Brooklyn for the Holy Day, and the inadequate air-conditioning failed entirely. The super, a black man who had a room in the basement, was allowed to interrupt the services to put fans up and down the aisles of the shul. Most of the congregation had been fasting eighteen hours; the cantor’s weak if beautiful voice could barely be heard over the drone and clatter of the fans. The air was overused, hanging. People stood near the back doors for a hint of breeze from the hallway, and when Mrs. Galinsky, one of the oldest worshippers, fainted and had to be carried out, Birnbaum’s father stopped the service to announce that younger children should be taken home, to remind those with medical conditions to tend them, remembering God looked for us to first care for each other, then worry about him. Birnbaum loved Yom Kippur for its pleasant self-abnegation, its clarifying of body and mind. Any day of the week suddenly made significant by the fasting and the ancient mournful tunes, the rising to chant your sins and grievances into the thick, absolving air. The endless hours of meditation, beating your breast as if beating on the door of God’s house until he finally listened. But today was a misery. Though a huge green fan on wheels was aimed directly at him, only its insistent thrumming reached him; he felt not a breath of coolness on his face. His hands were moist, smearing the pages of the prayer book, and droplets of sweat trickled down his back, pooling over his belt, tickling, as if to mock his frayed concentration. He closed his eyes to recite more fervently, opened them to see Louie Weisbrod, one row ahead, slip a sucking candy into his mouth, then turn to find Birnbaum watching. The effort of ignoring Weisbrod’s furtive, guilty smile, his blood-red ears, made meditation impossible. At the end of his row, Mort Sheinberg mopped his head and neck with a wad of paper towels he had soaked, telling everyone around him, “It’s ninety-five in here, maybe a hundred. The human body stops functioning at ninety-five.” He had allowed David to go outside for longer intervals than usual, given the heat, but the boy had been out there nearly two hours now, had not prayed more than a few squirming, distracted moments the entire day. Birnbaum had gone to see what had become of his son, and the boys were bouncing a ball high against the synagogue wall. The ball was small and dark and bounced with incredible force. Anyone walking by could see these Jewish boys, on the holiest day of the year, playing ball in the street. He had taken David aside and told him sternly that this was shameful, that he had two minutes to tell whoever owned the ball it was a disgrace and get himself inside. He had a hold on the boy’s thin arm, was twisting his sweaty face to his own. “Do you hear me?” he had said, and David, avid eyes on the game, was nodding fast, his hair pasted to his head, his tie turned into his collar, when the ball, thrown by another boy, took a crazy bounce—he had never seen a ball like this before—over a tree and into traffic,

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and David broke free to chase it. “I got it!” he called. “Two minutes,” Birnbaum had shouted after him, “I’m not kidding!” as the boys leapt to snatch the ricocheting ball from the air. That was nearly an hour ago. Over the lambent wail of the exhausted cantor and the rattle and hum of the fans, Birnbaum could still hear the boys in the street. And he was worried about his father. It was fine to implore everyone else to take care of themselves, another thing to do it yourself. He had a heart condition everyone knew about, blood pressure problems, still refused, against doctor’s orders, to take his medication on Fast Days. He sat before his small table, turning pages in his prayer book, not raising his voice like the others, but closing his eyes and moving his lips. He refused to take out his handkerchief and wipe his face, but Birnbaum could see sweat on it, his white collar growing dark. His pallor frightened Birnbaum, and as he watched he saw a fat drop of perspiration fall from the tip of his nose onto the page he was reading. His father looked at him and lifted his chin, a signal for Birnbaum to approach. “How are you feeling?” he said, once he’d climbed the stairs. “I’m fine.” “You don’t look . . .” “Fine, I just told you. Do you hear that?” “What?” “In the street, Maxim. Go out there and put a stop to it. In the street, on Yom Kippur.” “I know,” Birnbaum said, whispering so only his father could hear. “I already told them.” His father looked at him, his eyes swimming and his face wet, as if his shirt had grown too tight, and Birnbaum realized how useless and ineffectual his remark made him seem. “I’m going,” he was about to say, when there was a high tap in the room and he turned just in time to see one of the tall green windows, the second from the front of the hall, push inward as if in slow motion, expand in a network of fine white lines, then burst onto the heads of the women praying below. Behind it a hard blue ball fell in, landing first on the floor, then rebounding insanely above people’s heads in erratic arcs, like a cartoon version of a cannonball. People were shouting, running from the glass, his father was up on his feet. The cantor, stupefied, kept singing a moment, then went silent. At the back of the hall, Birnbaum saw David and two other boys run in, look around wildly. The two boys saw the ball, still bouncing, and immediately gave chase. Birnbaum moved up the aisle toward his son. David had his hands up as Birnbaum approached, but by then the boy was on the floor and Birnbaum was in a different place, a red universe where tinted shapes floated between him and the boy on the other side trying to cover himself with his arms and

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legs. The boy saw his father’s eyes, the look in them. He’s going to kill me, he thought. Birnbaum leaned over, grunting words he didn’t recognize. He tried to reach with his fists, but he couldn’t, so he began using his feet on the red-faced creature scuttling away from him on its back near the wall.

On Passover the Jews go to Yankee Stadium—their children have the week off, while the rest of the population trudges on in school. Birnbaum took his son, sometimes his daughter as well, to a doubleheader. He was not much interested in the game, barely understood its rules, and it was with some effort that he responded to the boy’s enthusiasm when a favorite—Mickey Mantle, Bobby Richardson—came up to hit, or when something exciting had just occurred and he had missed it, his nose buried in a book, but about which he needed, for the boy’s sake, to be surprised, willing on a moment’s read of his son’s face to be crestfallen or delighted. He liked the stadium. After two hours on the subway, after the gray, teeming streets outside, the echoing, dank maze of ramps and hallways, suddenly banners, open sky, the unaccountable burst of green field. He liked seeing the boy with his Yankees hat, his oversized “mitt,” the rowdy partisan calls that came from his throat, a different voice, deeper in the chest, male, public. The boy kept score, as he called it, leaned over to tell him Maris was due, he had lined deep to center the last time up, to watch White on first because he was known to take a base now and then. Birnbaum would nod, smile, look out at the costumed men on the field and see nothing. He would make an effort, remark of a towering fly caught near the outfield fence that that was some hit, or praise the exertion of a player who slid into base in a rising cloud of dust. But his son would look baffled at him, might say, It was an out, Abba, and Birnbaum would nod, edified, and return to his book, agreeably aware of the game around him, of people chanting and clapping their hands, the breeze that swirled through the grandstand. After the game red-vested ushers unlatched gates that opened from the box seats and they followed the patient crowd down, moved on the dirt ring edging the playing field in an orderly line past the three monuments far off by the flag. The boy knelt to fill a plastic bag—brought from home for the purpose—with red Yankee Stadium dirt, which he would add to the box he kept under his bed. Birnbaum thought of his grandfather, in Poland, the tiny leather bag of dust from the Holy Land which he had kept for years, had had buried under his head when he died. He thought collecting dirt from a public facility was unhygienic, also somehow a sacrilegious commentary on the old man’s faith. But he hadn’t thought of a way to speak of it to his son and, for now, let it go. One day a man in a striped shirt and undersized blue fedora took out a ballpoint and wrote something, signed his name perhaps, right across Babe Ruth’s bronze forehead. Birnbaum wasn’t surprised. The boy was stunned, talked about it for days.

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They sat far back in the reserved section, eating egg salad and tuna on matzoh, and he let the boy gorge himself on Cokes, because that was all he was allowed to buy. Birnbaum took out his pencil and underlined in his book, turned it sideways on his knees to make notations in the margins, references to other books he needed to consult. It was warm, bright and sunny out on the field, but they were in shade, and a breeze lifted past the crowd to cool their faces from time to time, and Birnbaum would look up to see the banners flickering in the blue sky above the stadium walls. Around him were other fathers, he could see boys in yarmulkes, Jewish families pulling out tomatoes, hardboiled eggs, disintegrated matzoh sandwiches in tinfoil. It was pleasant here on a leisurely spring day, pleasant to look up from his book at young men moving fluidly across a green field. On every hit, David stood, glove at the ready, to catch the ball. Suddenly there was commotion all around them. Birnbaum was alarmed, looked to see everyone standing, moving at once. A woman shrieked, a man spilled his beer and Birnbaum could smell the sour smell. A man with a cigar pushed David so that he fell against Birnbaum, who tried to hold him, but the boy wrenched free to stand on his wooden seat. Hands reached for David, alien, goyish faces, fists, teeth. They were in a mob. Birnbaum’s heart pushed into his throat as he reached for his boy to take him and run. Then, above their heads, a white streak, the ball, a few rows behind them a man with a hair-covered stomach bulging from an unbuttoned shirt catching it easily with an outstretched hand. People returning to their seats, a few remaining on their feet to clap. The fat man nodded, took a bow, held the ball aloft like a trophy. “Are you all right?” Birnbaum wanted to ask his son but the boy was already turned to him, all smiles, an American boy pounding his mitt. “Jeez, did you see that?” he said. “I almost had it! A home run by Norm Cash!” and Birnbaum reached out to briefly touch his son’s hair and they all sat back down to the game. But though it proved to be an exciting finish—the great Mickey Mantle won it in the ninth inning with a home run—Birnbaum could not relax, kept looking from his book to David to the people around them, thinking it would be dark when they left the stadium, then two hours on the subway, and the long walk home. On occasional Saturday nights, after the services that marked the end of Shabbos, the men of the congregation would take their prayer books out to the street and bless the new moon. In winter in their coats they would gather by the stoop to pray, in summer they would wait on the steps and smoke cigarettes someone had stashed in the shul, until the rabbi and cantor came out to join them. Spring was the best season, the wind, even in Queens, carried smells of ripening, of turned earth. The boys preceded the men, ran out before the services were properly over, craning their necks, the first to

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see the moon calling to the rest, until someone ran inside and announced it was there, all right, they were ready. David loved the incongruity of it, released after hours of prayer, the men lighting up cigarettes signaling the return of the normal week, soon home, TV, phone calls, tomorrow baseball. Somewhere a radio played dance music and ahead, on the boulevard, couples walked arm in arm toward the subway, mingled in festive groups as they waited for the bus. The moon wavered brightly in the high branches of a sycamore, winking silvery light through dark leaves. The cantor came out onto the steps, out of his white gown, a portly man who closed his eyes to sing. David’s father motioned him over, so they could share a prayer book, draping a hand lightly across his shoulder. He held the pages open before them and answered the cantor’s lead, but David never really mouthed the words, just chanted the melody along with the rest of the men, some bringing cigarettes to their lips, looking around them at the new season, come out to praise God’s world and ask his blessing for a few more days of good fortune and peace.

7 Jonathan Rosen

The True World No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world. I . B . Singer, Gimpel the Fool

When the magazine Omega asked me to interview Saul Bellow, I jumped at the chance. Bellow had been dead for less than a year and this would be his first major conversation since departing. I’d interviewed plenty of writers before, but there was no getting around the fact that they were alive. I was eager to reach a more mainstream audience. There were still a few old-fashioned periodicals that dismissed these pieces as “nobituaries,” but now that literature was finished, more and more magazines were realizing they couldn’t do without them. Clearly, the future was with the dead. Omega was paying me three dollars a word, plus travel expenses. There are writers for whom one can earn more—Pound, Celine, Dostoyevsky—but they’re all in Hell and I hear the trip is very uncomfortable. Besides, I’d interviewed Bellow while he was still alive so I thought there might be some continuity. It was with a light heart and a heavy suitcase (I always overpack) that I headed to Ellis Island. The departures terminal was on the far side of the island, out of sight of the museum and gift shop. It was in one of those buildings that had been ignored during the renovation. The outside of the building looked alarmingly shabby, with the word quarantine still chiseled above the door, though above it a sign with the words “Mental Flight” had been painted in faded yellow lettering on a length of wood that looked almost as old as the building. Inside, the vast building displayed the institutional grandeur of a bygone era. A high, coffered ceiling reminded me of the old Pennsylvania Station—which I had “The True World” was first published in Derek Rubin’s Promised Lands, Brandeis University Press, 2010. UPNE. Copyright © 2010 by Jonathan Rosen. Reprinted with permission of UPNE.

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never seen in person, since it was torn down in 1963, the year I was born—but I felt not the bustling energy of a train station but the lingering chill of life suspended, a whiff of illness, deportation, and sorrow that no doubt remained from the building’s original purpose. The day outside had been clear and bright, but, inside, the high windows scarcely admitted any sun. There was a long marble counter against the wall with ticket windows framed elegantly in gilt, as if they had once held Old Master paintings. There was no line and I approached the first window. A tall, stooped man behind the counter in shirtsleeves peered down at me through Ben Franklin glasses. “No baggage,” he said. “Not even carry-on?” I asked. “No baggage.” He nodded toward a great heap of suitcases at the far end of the big room; some of the trunks seemed positively ancient. He slid some tags under the window. “My bags are already labeled,” I said. “I travel a lot.” He shrugged and withdrew the tags. “You’re allowed a pencil and a small notebook. That’s all.” I took these out of my knapsack before placing it, along with my suitcase, on a cart that a short, slight man in a red cap had just wheeled over. The man seemed oddly familiar, like my uncle Eli, who used to run the Seders in Brooklyn before his death. He also looked a good deal like Bernard Malamud, with a small melancholy moustache and an expression of wry despondency. I wondered briefly if I was expected to tip him, but when I reached for my wallet the man suddenly began to move away, pushing the creaking cart before him. Turning back to the ticket window I cleared my throat and asked the question that had been on my mind since taking the assignment. “I was wondering,” I began. “My father . . .” He was already shaking his head. “I’m sorry. It’s not allowed.” “I just thought, while I’m there . . .” “Everybody asks,” he said. He was studying my ticket. “Why is it just writers?” I asked. He gave an odd shrug, a sort of nervous convulsion, but made no answer. He slammed a big old-fashioned rubber stamp down on my ticket and slid it back to me. “You understand that this ticket is good only for a conversation with Saul Bellow?” I told him I did. “You are not to wander. You are not to talk to strangers. No photographic equipment is permitted and no sound recording devices. If for some reason you see a

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familiar you are not to address him or her. The consequences for such contact will be severe. You are traveling at your own risk. Mental Flight bears no responsibility for injury, death, madness, loss of faith, or any other form of spiritual, emotional, or bodily harm.” I said that I understood the rules. “Sign here,” he told me, shoving a ledger towards me. I was hoping to see the names of other journalists, but he had opened to a blank page. “Your boat’s here,” he said. Somehow I had failed to notice a great open door, not ten feet from us. Beyond it you could see water and a wooden dock. A small, black boat, longer and slimmer than a rowboat, almost a gondola but with oars, was bumping gently against the dock. A hunched figure inside the boat was making it fast with a rope. “Where is everybody?” I asked, realizing somehow for the first time that the entire place was empty. “Am I the only traveler?” “Stop worrying.” “But surely others are going, too?” I felt a chill in my heart. “That boat is just for you,” said the man. He shut the big ledger with finality. It was cool outside, and I wished I’d brought a warmer jacket. The boat did not look very sturdy, and there was a filthy brown broth at the bottom. “Do you have life jackets?” I asked, as I settled myself onto the narrow thwart. The boatman did not answer but simply shoved off. His face was ghastly. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Marcel Proust, the orbits of his deep-set eyes were black, illuminating the pallor of his cheeks. He had a heavy overcoat and a thick maroon scarf wrapped around his slender neck, but he kept shivering with the cold. “Are we going far?” I asked. The boatman said nothing. He appeared unwell but he rowed with level, unhurried vigor, keeping his eyes on the receding shoreline. He never turned his head to see where we were going. We seemed to be headed straight for Liberty Island. I saw the great green lady rising up from the water, but as we approached, a sudden sweep of mist closed over us and I felt a sort of whirling in my soul. Though hardly a minute had passed since the mist descended, the little boat bumped against something solid. “Is this it?” I asked the boatman. “It ain’t Jersey,” said a voice above me. “Mr. Bellow?” I asked, standing up and almost capsizing the boat. There was a laugh. “You’ll meet him in a few minutes.” “Who are you?” “I’m your escort.”

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He was a short, stocky man wearing a work shirt, with a faded blue bandana tied around his neck. “I know you,” I said, following him along the rocky path away from the water. “You’re Henry Roth. You wrote Call It Sleep.” “Don’t ask me about books,” he said. “I don’t give a shit about them.” “How is that possible? You spent your whole life—” “Literature is for the living,” he said, cutting me off. “But surely—” “I don’t know why you’d want to come here at all,” he muttered in a grumbling undertone. “This place is not what it seems.” “What are you saying?” But he gave one of those shrugging shudders I’d noticed in the ticket seller and hurried me along the path. “Watch your step.” The path suddenly widened, and together we ascended a long flight of crumbling marble stairs. We paused before a great wooden door that he unlocked with a key hanging from a hoop attached to his belt. He paused for a minute with his hand on the knob. “Stay close now,” he said, “and keep your mouth shut.” With that, he opened the door and we stepped into an enormous room. As soon as we did a great wind began to blow and a deafening roar filled my ears. Roth grabbed my arm in a cold, hard grip and pushed me across the threshold. I became aware of throngs of spirits that flitted in and out of view, transparent as sea monkeys. Dickens seemed to be having an argument with someone who looked like James Joyce, except he wasn’t wearing glasses. I saw Virginia and Leonard Woolf talking quietly; I was glad they’d let Leonard in, even though he’d only written one novel. Hemingway and E. M. Forster whirled past, holding hands. I thought I recognized the Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz weeping in the corner. Roth drove me forward at a fearsome pace. Despite the din, I heard him muttering under his breath: “I did not know that literature had undone so many.” He chuckled grimly to himself. I felt somehow he was talking about me. “Why is it just writers?” I shouted. “My father . . .” But Roth put his fingers to his lips and gave me a furious look. We had come to a stop in front of another door that Roth unlocked. We entered a corridor, much more quiet than the big room, though every now and then a shadowy figure fled before us. There were doors lining the corridor, with numbers on them like in a motel. We stopped in front of number 1915 and Roth rummaged for another key. “Make good use of your time,” Roth said. “You won’t have a lot of it.” Suddenly he was gone and I was sitting in a chair. Across from me, in an elegant velvet dressing gown, with gold, vaguely Turkish bedroom slippers, sat Saul Bellow.

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He seemed neither old nor young, the Bellow of Henderson the Rain King or perhaps Herzog. The room was unfurnished except for a small sink, Bellow’s leather armchair, and my own cold folding chair. A shade was pulled down over the single window. It looked a lot like the examination room in Bernard Malamud’s short story “Take Pity.” I didn’t read Malamud much these days and had always disliked the dyspeptic righteousness of “Take Pity,” which takes place in the afterlife and features broken English, broken dreams, and a broken-down ex-coffee salesman named Rosen, but I was impressed that Malamud had been so prescient. “Mr. Bellow,” I began. “This is a very great honor. Perhaps you remember—” “That was in another country,” he cut me off. “And besides, the writer’s dead.” He laughed good-naturedly at his own joke. “I was planning to stay for a few days, but they didn’t let me bring my bags.” I hadn’t meant to complain. Bellow nodded sympathetically but looked, I thought, relieved. “Our time is not our own here,” he said. “Do you think much about your time on earth?” I asked, flipping open my notebook. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be Jewish was very heaven.” I scribbled down his words and added “jovial, jovian, Olympian, allusive.” I like to work on a piece while I’m taking notes. I added: “Look up Wordsworth.” “He’s here, you know,” said Bellow. “Wordsworth?” “Of course, but we go to different shuls. He had a Reform conversion. He thought they’d let him sleep with his sister.” I nodded and kept on jotting notes. “That’s a joke,” said Bellow. “Of course,” I said, crossing out what I’d written. “Wordsworth’s Orthodox. He sleeps with his sister anyway.” “Really?” “No,” said Bellow. “And if you print that I’m a dead man.” He gave another chuckle. “Don’t tell Roth I was making incest jokes.” I crossed out everything I had written down except for “vaguely Turkish bedroom slippers.” Somehow I’d been expecting more gravity from the dead. “So how does it feel to be here?” “It’s comfortable,” said Bellow. “Everyone’s an immigrant so nobody has anything on anybody.” “Kind of like America,” I said, hoping to start a conversation and show him how astute I was. Bellow ignored my observation. I’d been warned that the most exasperating thing about interviewing the dead was the way they seemed to wink out all of a

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sudden and seem only partially present, leading some to wonder if they weren’t in fact truly elsewhere and this was just a kind of conjurer’s trick. There were darker rumors too about who was in control. Bellow had a frozen smile on his face, as if he were posing for a photograph, but then he snapped out of it and looked at me with large, alert eyes. “You must have wonderful conversations about literature here,” I said. “Not really an interest anymore.” I found this hard to believe. “Then what are you interested in?” He gave one of those convulsive, shrugging shudders, like a jerked marionette. But he pulled himself together and leaned towards me. “Politics,” he whispered. “Really?” “The situation is very serious. Tolstoy talks of nothing but Israel. He’s quite convinced . . .” At that moment Bellow’s eyes darted to the corner of the room and I felt, rather than saw, a kind of shadow lurking behind him. For the first time, I had a sense that we weren’t alone. “Has your thinking changed since To Jerusalem and Back?” I asked inanely. “I should never have left,” he murmured, half to himself. It was unclear to me if he meant Jerusalem, Chicago, the earth itself, or wherever it was in the afterlife he spent his time before coming to this post-mortem motel room to meet me. His face had grown very grave and again he darted anxious eyes at the shadowy figure in the room, which had moved closer and appeared to have grown larger. Bellow seemed afraid. I realized that he was holding out a tiny folded scrap of paper, inching it towards me. My hand reached out and he thrust the piece of paper into my palm; instinctively my hand closed over it. At the same moment I heard sounds of struggle outside, the grunt of men grappling in the corridor. Someone cried out in Hebrew, though I couldn’t make out the words. I recognized my father’s voice, though it might have been Henry Roth or the wind, which had begun howling as it had in the room full of spirits. “Father,” I shouted, rising. “Is that you?” As soon as I uttered these words there was a blinding flash and I felt a jolt, as if a powerful current of electricity had shaken the room, the floor, the building, my body.

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When my vision cleared, Bellow, the shadowy figure, and the room itself were gone. I was staring into the pallid, impassive face of the boatman, who looked less like Proust than before. He was rowing us through the mist. Ellis Island came into view. It was bustling with tourists. A wave of sadness came over me. There were so many questions I’d meant to ask. What was it Tolstoy was convinced of ? And could that really have been my father’s voice? My notebook and pencil were gone. For a moment I wondered if the whole thing had been a dream, but then I realized that I was still clutching in my fist the note that Bellow had passed me. I hid the scrap of paper in the palm of one hand while I unfolded it with the fingers of the other, working stealthily though the boatman seemed not in the least interested. Printed in neat, tiny letters, were two words: “Go home.” That was all it said. What could such a note, delivered at such obvious risk, mean? The oars, with their swift mechanical dipping, seemed to speak the words aloud. The last shreds of mist cleared and I found myself looking beyond Ellis Island, towards the bold, wounded skyline of lower Manhattan. Somewhere, hidden beyond it, was my wife, my family, my future. It was time to get to work.

8 Joan Leegant

The Baghdadi

He was born in Baghdad and had come to Israel in 1962. But he was not one of those gung-ho Israelis who thought all Jews should live there—only those who had nowhere else to go, he said. This was the second thing he told me after giving his name, which was Murad. We were in a parched courtyard at the university, sipping lemonade, the steamy afternoon closing in on us like a cloak, the boxy apartment buildings of the Tel Aviv suburbs looming just beyond like so many Soviet-era rockets. An obscure novelist from Oxford had been invited to speak—experimental, unreadable—and I’d felt obligated to attend. An adjunct, a foreigner, I did what was necessary to keep the job. Refreshments were being served beforehand to fortify us. “I teach physics,” he said, fishing in his wallet and pulling out a business card. “I did my M.A. in the States. Michigan. I come to these lectures to keep up my English.” I read the card. Hebrew and English. Mural Shemtov, Faculty of Sciences, BenGurion University. “You drove all the way up from Be’er Sheva for this talk?” I said. I had to find something to say. I wasn’t interested in him, but I had nobody else to talk to. The lecture was scheduled to start in a few minutes. He tipped his head in the direction of the apartments. “I live over there. In Ramat Gan. I read about the talk in the newspaper. I like to meet Americans. It gets boring here.” I slipped the card into my bag where it would sink to the bottom with the linty tissues and broken pencils. I was a part-time lecturer in the English department filling in for someone who’d become ill. A lucky break. There were few jobs for someone like me, a foreigner with an underused PhD. “Would you like to have a coffee after the talk?” he said. I looked up. He was not attractive. Short, stocky; sixty-three, sixty-five. “The Baghdadi,” copyright © 2012 by Joan Leegant. Reprinted by permission of The Normal School: A Literary Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 2012).

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I hadn’t come to the country for encounters with novel and picturesque fellow Jews from all over the world whose wrenching life stories—persecution, monthslong treks across continents—would raise the hair on my arms. I was there because I needed a break from the dreaded winter in Boston and because my husband had left in July to take up with a dancer from Moldova who was twenty-six years younger than him. Than me. And because I hated the pitying looks I was getting from our friends at home, as if I’d contracted polio. “I don’t think so,” I said. I looked him square in the face. He had a thick mustache that made him look like Saddam Hussein. “All right,” he said, no trace of a smile. I paused, waiting for him to walk away or say something more, but he didn’t, and before I could muster the courage to walk off myself, someone came along and shepherded us into the auditorium. The lecture was long and tedious—the novelist reading from a prepared text that was excerpted from his forthcoming book of equally tedious criticism. The Baghdadi was waiting for me in the muggy October dusk. A full moon hung in the sky like a yellow coin. Construction machinery was silhouetted in the distance. New buildings were going up everywhere. “Last month,” he said, falling into step with me on my way to the bus, picking up the conversation as if it had never been interrupted, “the Americans brought the oldest Jew in Baghdad to Israel. Your soldiers accompanied him. I read about it in the newspaper. Fifteen Jews remaining in all of Baghdad, and they brought him. Eightynine years old. Did you know that Iraq is the oldest Jewish community in the world outside of here? In existence since the exile in 586 BC to Babylon. Which is, of course, now modern Iraq.” “No, I didn’t know that,” I said. I also didn’t know why I hadn’t told him to go away except that all the other people at the lecture had quickly dispersed, and I’d been left alone. I didn’t really know anyone in the department; my only acquaintance, the person who’d told me about the position, was on sabbatical abroad. Most of the other faculty weren’t aware I was even there. I came to the university twice a week to teach my classes and left. No meetings, no committees, no other responsibilities. “It’s true,” he said. “So now this man is stuck in an old-folks’ home. He was taken from his house, his neighborhood, his friends—all Muslim, but they treated him like one of their own. Therefore I telephone him and call on him. Because he is by himself, and the unpleasant facility in which he has been placed is not far from my flat.” He made a tsk-tsk sound. He carried a leather shoulder bag, like a woman, or an Italian. “These Americans. So impulsive. Or perhaps suffering from an excess of enthusiasm. They thought they were doing him a favor.” “It was a PR opportunity,” I found myself saying. I hadn’t meant to get involved in the conversation, but there it was, pulling me in. “A photo op,” I said. “Probably some

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dumb government reporter’s idea of good press. One of those embedded types trying to shore up public confidence in a tragically misbegotten war begun by our cowboy former president.” “I think this is so. Do you love your government? I do not think you do.” We were nearing the bus stop. It was deserted. I’d feared as much. I rode a special line that was attached to the university and ran only during daytime hours. Now I’d have to walk to the other side of the campus and hope for a cab. He said, “I loved the American government when I was in Michigan. I couldn’t believe it. No censorship. Separation of religion and state. A civilized parliament. In Israel they shout at one another in the Knesset and poke fingers in each other’s faces. The military until this day can censor newspaper articles. We did not have television until 1967. Ben-Gurion did not want it. He said it would make the population foolish and passive.” “Smart man.” I made a show of looking at the schedule posted in the bus shelter, though it was obvious nothing was coming. “Such a pity,” the Iraqi said. I glanced over at him. “What is?” “Your war. The old man from Baghdad. The Israelis encouraged his removal, I’m sure. A big coup for Jerusalem.” He took a handkerchief and wiped his forehead, which had been glistening slightly. A faint scent of mint emanated from his person. Maybe he used a minty detergent for his handkerchiefs, or kept gum in his pocket. Or a private supply of leaves for tea. I took a long look at him as he dabbed at his face. He was not appealing. But he was attentive. Ramat Gan was ten minutes away. There was no bus; no one was waiting for me at my apartment, my one child on junior year abroad in Athens and my forty-eight-year-old husband in Paris, strolling by the Seine and making French teenage love on satin sheets. “I’ll take that coffee after all,” I said. He tucked away the damp handkerchief. “Very good,” he said, as if he’d been expecting me to change my mind all along.

He called me two days later. I wasn’t surprised. The coffee had been brief and chaste— some talk about the construction boom in Tel Aviv, his recollection of winters in Michigan—and then he’d driven me home and asked for my number. He liked to use his English with native speakers, he said. When Israelis spoke it, he found the accent grating. My English was pure, he told me. Melodic, like the sound of a waterfall, or bells at a chapel. I must not be from New York, he added, where the tone is irritatingly nasal. Or Chicago, where it’s flat, like the landscape. He said this without smiling, without flattering; it was merely a fact, in his view. He was an amateur musician, a violinist who played in a chamber group in his apartment complex and had an ear for such things.

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“I thought you might want to meet the old man,” he said on the phone. “Why not? You have time, and you would find him interesting.” I said I didn’t see how I would find him interesting since I spoke neither Arabic nor enough Hebrew to sustain a conversation. Nor did I want to view the man as a spectacle, a sideshow: The Oldest Living Jew from Baghdad. The Oldest Living Jew from the Oldest Jewish Community. It sounded like one of those coffee-table books boys receive from distant relatives for their bar mitzvahs, the kind you don’t know what to do with for the next thirty years and keep packing and unpacking every time you move house. My husband had several. Jews and Baseball: Volume 1. A Pictorial History of the Jewish People. Jews in Many Lands. He had brought them to the marriage along with his stamp collection and volumes of Blake and Coleridge and a terror of deep middle age with its inevitable closing of doors. “I believe he speaks some English,” the Baghdadi said to me. “The British were in Iraq for some time, you surely know. He told me he also once studied French. An educated man. I glanced around my apartment, deciding. The owner was originally from London, working for the year in Toronto. We’d communicated only by e-mail, and she had left me extensive notes. The washing machine had a tendency to get chuffy. The building’s lift didn’t work reliably. Some of the cafés on the block had lovely takeaway. I pictured Maggie Smith or Judy Dench or some other grande dame of the English theater, and it made me feel crude and childish, as if we Americans had never grown up or learned any manners. “Well, then, what do you say? Are you terribly busy, or could you come along?” He had my number, as my husband used to say. That salesman really had your number. Like you were going to turn down an offer like that. Of course I wasn’t busy; no one would mistake me for overbooked. I wore my idleness on my sleeve. “All right, I’ll join you,” I said, though I knew he knew that would be my answer. I didn’t particularly like him, but there was something about him. He seemed to see through me. This made me slightly uneasy, men who presume, who think they have you pegged, but I went along with it. It’s not like I thought there would be any danger. Who hasn’t seen such places? The warehoused elderly lining the lobby in wheelchairs, the faint smell of urine, the bored-looking aides. The old man sat erect and alert in a small common room off the lobby. Someone had tried to cheer up the place with flowers. A radio played piano sonatas. The Baghdadi said something in Arabic to the old man, who nodded, glanced in my direction. His eyes were a surprising bright blue, and he was clean-shaven, though he bore a strong resemblance to the mustached Baghdadi nonetheless. Or perhaps he didn’t; perhaps it was my inability to tell the difference. Israelis often told me how much I resembled other Americans. Our body language, clothing, posture: we looked alike to them.

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The Baghdadi gestured to a chair: I should sit. We had brought a box of pastries. The old man looked in the box, looked away. Later we would have coffee, I was told. They would show me how they drank it in Iraq. Demitasse espresso, with a small spoon, a cube of sugar between the teeth. Someone turned off the radio. The sonatas melted into the air. The old man looked at me, sizing me up. He wore gray sweatpants with a Castro logo, a stylish brand of Israeli sportswear I’d seen in the shops. “Please tell him I’m not your wife.” “My wife? This is not what he thinks.” “I’ve seen this look before. Please inform him.” A shrug, then a cascade of Arabic. Apparently the old man had forgotten his English—if he’d ever had any. The old man laughed, and the Baghdadi smiled and chuckled. I hadn’t seen him smile before, and his teeth were shockingly white, as if he’d had them recently replaced or refinished, like Formica kitchen cabinets. “What’s so funny?” “Pardon?” “Why are you laughing? The two of you, you’re laughing.” “We aren’t laughing.” “Yes, you are.” The old man watched us through the volley. “He says you ought to have been my wife. Perhaps then you wouldn’t have left me for another man, like my actual wife did.” So. A kindred spirit. Had he sniffed me out? Like finding like? He gave the old man a French newspaper. French Jews were buying up real estate in Israel like there was no tomorrow. A decade of anti-Semitic violence had made them nervous; they wanted insurance policies. A place to run to, just in case. The man glanced down at the pages. Within a minute his eyes had closed. “Let’s get a coffee,” the Baghdadi said. So soon? I said. He saw my reluctance. “Don’t worry, he knows I’m coming back. They will take him to his room shortly and bring him his medications, help him change his clothes. He has occasional accidents. We should give him privacy.” In the café across the street he told me about his wife. They’d met in the Israeli army. She had come from Moroccan stock. “They’re unreliable, the Moroccan women. They are too beautiful, so they cannot remain faithful. They and the Yemenites. Next it will be the Ethiopians. Have you noticed? Their women are magnificent. Like the Queen of Sheba, every one of them.” He sipped his espresso. “And your husband? Where is he?” “Paris,” I said. “On a fling. A long fling.” He nodded as if it were nothing; as if a fling were part of marriage as usual. Business trips. Lecture tours. Flings. “With a dancer from Moldova. You know where that is? I looked it up. Eastern Europe. Between

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Romania and Ukraine. She’s a year older than our daughter. How transparent is that, chasing a woman the age of your children?” “And your daughter?” “Abroad for the year. Athens. Seven hundred and fifty miles from Tel Aviv. A two-hour plane flight.” I picked up my coffee. “I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting home alone in my cold house in Boston, but I couldn’t very well follow her to Greece. So I came here. I visit her, she visits me, it works out.” His expression was unchanged, and I wondered if he thought I was a rich, spoiled American who could hop countries just like that, on a whim. “The university position here was quite serendipitous,” I said. “Lucky,” I added, in case he didn’t know the word. “I ran into an Israeli colleague at a conference who told me about it. It’s not like I don’t need full-time work. I do. But my job was ending. Ordinarily I’m not idle. It’s important for women to have satisfying careers, don’t you agree? My daughter knows this.” “What does she think of her father’s behavior? With the dancer?” I watched him over the rim of my coffee cup. Why was I telling him about this? Since when did he deserve the truth when no one else—not my friends, not even my sister—did? “She’s horrified. The dancer was her friend from university. That’s how he met her. She was visiting us before returning to Moldova for the summer. They had sex in our guest room while my daughter and I were making strawberry shortcake for her farewell dinner.” An impassive nod. He reminded me of our accountant, a bland man who preferred to do the numbers in his head to using a calculator. It had taken me years to understand that the silences during our appointments meant only that he was running figures. I went on, unable to stop myself. “The girl’s an unbridled opportunist, my daughter has since learned. Sleeps with everything in pants. She wants a visa or green card or whatever it is one needs in order to stay in the States after college. So this is how she tries to get it. My husband is the latest in a string of such opportunities. Though apparently a very receptive one.” “Most unpleasant.” “Most. Do you have children?” “A son. He lives in Nice. He is married to a Gentile who calls me to harp and harangue. She favors the Palestinians. It is very fashionable in France to favor the Palestinians. They don’t see that the Arab leadership bears any responsibility for the situation here. Only Israel is to blame. I find it tiresome. I am not naïve about this government, but there are two sides. I have told my son not to come see me if they can’t say anything good about this country.” The old man was sleeping when we arrived at his room. We left the pastries, and the Baghdadi left a note.

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“Did you know that Babylon was the largest city in the world at one time?” he told me as we walked to his car. “Two hundred thousand people lived there in 1700 BC. It was the center of Jewish life for a thousand years. The Talmud was completed there in the year 700. It took three hundred years to compile.” He opened the passenger door for me, then walked to the other side, let himself in. “But the Iraqi Jews have always been in exile.” “I thought you said you were not that kind of gung-ho Israeli. The kind who says all Jews should live here,” I said. “I’m not. Jews should feel free to live wherever they please.” He started the ignition. “That doesn’t mean some are not still in exile.”

Three days later he was waiting for me on the concrete plaza outside my building at the university. It was during the half-time break for my first class; what was supposed to be fifteen minutes to stretch or use the facilities routinely bled into half an hour. Students here were not concerned with the rules; they were not cowed by authority. “The old man is very sick. I need your help,” he said before I could even open my mouth. I had wanted to express some indignation over his aggressiveness, showing up in the middle of my workday, but I couldn’t work up a sufficient froth. “The doctors don’t know what is wrong with him. Surely you must be acquainted with American physicians here who can diagnose the problem.” “How would I know any American doctors? I’ve been here two months; I hardly know anyone at all.” “You must think. I can pay for a private consultation. The physicians at his facility are the worst in the system. They don’t care about the residents. They treat them like cattle. Worse than cattle. They are happy to let them die.” One of my students was smoking a cigarette and watching us. I turned to her but she kept staring. I tipped my head, hinting that she should move off, but she stayed put. I wasn’t good with these young people; they were different from students at home. They required a bluntness, a directness I didn’t have and couldn’t appropriate. They found me vague and indecisive, overly polite; I allowed too many competing opinions in class and praised anyone who contributed. They wanted someone who was more forceful, someone with strong views. They thought I had no backbone. “I’m very sorry,” I said when the smoker hadn’t moved, “but I can’t help you.” “The Americans are to blame,” he said. “They brought him here. In Iraq he wasn’t sick. In Iraq his neighbors cared for him. You have a responsibility.” “I have a responsibility?” It was ridiculous. I wasn’t the US government, the US military. I didn’t authorize the airlift of the Oldest Living Jew in Baghdad. “Look, I appreciate that you’re concerned, but I have nothing to offer you. Why don’t you call

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your colleagues at Ben-Gurion? Or ask your chamber music friends? You’ve lived here for fifty years, you must know a million people. Why are you asking me?” He looked stunned, even—for the first time—silenced. As if no one had ever posed such a question. “Why wouldn’t I ask you?” he said. “I would ask everybody. That is what one does. You ask everyone. Then maybe you will get to the person who can help. Why are you Americans so afraid to ask for help, or to offer it? I remember this from Michigan. People told me: Murad, no one wants to get involved. I do not understand this.” I looked away, exhausted. My daughter had e-mailed that morning. Her father, my husband, wanted to fly to Athens this weekend to see her. She was furious and didn’t want him to come. She wanted to know what to do. I had limited patience at the moment. “Here is what you can do,” he said, and I turned back. “Call the American embassy and get a list of American physicians. They will give it to you. They will not give it to me.” His face was deeply lined and he looked like he hadn’t slept. Didn’t he have other responsibilities? I would need my passport, he instructed, when I called the embassy. Then he handed me his cell phone and a slip of paper with a number. We moved to a stone bench in the shade. The plaza had filled with students milling about between classes, lighting up and sipping from plastic water bottles. Two girls in tight jeans squeezed onto the bench beside us and unwrapped pungent-smelling cheese and tomato sandwiches. I took out my passport and dialed the number. With each name the clerk read to me, I repeated the information aloud while the Iraqi wrote it down in tiny, precise script on a small pad, the girls listening attentively. When I was done, I closed the phone and handed it to him. He hurried off in the direction of the parking lots, the girls calling out to wish him good luck. I phoned him that evening to ask about the old man. “Were you able to reach any of the doctors?” “I beseeched many answering machines. Now I am waiting for the physicians to ring me back.” “Then I won’t keep you. You must leave the line free.” “This is no problem,” he said. “It will beep if a call comes in.” I didn’t know what else to say. Yet I’d wanted to call. “My husband is asking to visit my daughter in Athens. She doesn’t want him to come.” “Tell her she must allow it. He is her father.” “But why? His behavior has been disgraceful. She’s entitled to be furious. Apparently he’s told this irresistible dancer that he was cornered into marriage and trapped into parenthood. Trapped. This is what my daughter now has to hear. Can you imagine? I can cope with the part about being cornered; the marriage has had problems,

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some of it my fault. But for my daughter? All her college friends know what’s going on. It’s humiliating.” “She must agree to see him. You must tell her.” “But that would be a complete denial of her feelings. Which is not how my daughter and I operate. I don’t dictate what she should do; I encourage her to make her own decisions.” I glanced around the British woman’s living room, agitated. It was arranged too carefully, too perfectly; I was afraid to move anything. There were crystal vases on the bookshelves and a set of gold-rimmed bone-china teacups on display. Everything seemed perilously close to breaking. One scream, and it would all come crashing to the floor. “This isn’t Afghanistan, where girls have to obey the patriarchal hierarchy. Or ancient Babylonia, for that matter.” “Those are not relevant. She is his daughter, she must let him visit her.” “But you told your own son not to visit you,” I said. “That was political. This is personal. It is different.” “That’s baloney.” Silence on the other end. “That means garbage in English. Bullshit, if you’ll pardon my crudeness.” Another pause. An elaborately framed painting of pears in a bowl that hung behind the couch was slightly askew. I wondered if I could bring myself to adjust it. Touching anything seemed fraught with the possibility of wreckage. “In 1900,” he said, “there were fifty thousand Jews in Baghdad, a quarter of the city’s population. Judges, professors, doctors. Then came the ’30s; the government sided with the Nazis. Anti-Jewish riots, a bloody pogrom. In 1948, when Israel was established, things got worse. Boycotts of Jewish businesses, destruction of property, arrests. One hundred and twenty thousand Jews were airlifted to Israel in 1951. The Israelis arranged it. It was very important to get out.” “You’ve changed the subject.” “I haven’t. You will see.” “All right. 1951. You told me you didn’t leave until 1962.” “Correct. My family was not ready in 1951. But ten years later I was a teenager. They were hanging Jews in the public squares, claiming they were Israeli spies. It was dangerous either way, staying or leaving. Escaping Jews were shot or kidnapped; if you succeeded in getting out, you would never be able to return. I made my escape plans with a friend whose father was so angry he was leaving that he could hardly speak to him the entire two weeks it took to make our preparations. Baghdad was his home, this boy’s father insisted. Our home. Jews had lived there for two thousand years. Things would improve, he said. We just had to wait it out. Israel was a backwater, a primitive wasteland for illiterates and farmers and the useless religious who prayed all day, and he wanted no part of it.” “So what happened?”

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“The boy and his father had words. Terrible words. My friend said vicious things, accusing his father of being too attached to his business and his possessions. He called his father a coward and a selfish bourgeois. He told him he was blind to the lessons of history and to the opportunity to be a free man. The father called my friend naïve and starry-eyed, unprepared for real life and influenced by Israeli agents pushing emigration just to have more bodies to populate Israel’s unlivable perimeter and fight its wars. Words hurled on both sides, like spears.” “And then what happened?” “The boy left and never saw or spoke to his father again.” “Never? Not even a phone call?” “Nothing. He was bitter and angry. So was his father. They held to their positions. Righteous indignation, I think is the term. And then it was too late to rectify matters. History conspired to keep them apart.” A beeping came on the line. “I must go. Please excuse me. Someone is trying to call.” I composed an e-mail to my daughter. Your father is a narcissistic child. He has no idea how hard this is for you. Forget about Sofia, she’s not worth a nanosecond of your attention. Do you want to come here for the weekend? We can have drinks at a café on the sand and then go to a museum so you will feel like it’s educational. I read it twice, then deleted it and stared at the empty screen before turning to the pile of student papers next to me. I didn’t want to tell my daughter to let her father visit. She shouldn’t have to allow it. I thumbed through the pile. “Romantic Love in the Early Sonnets of Elizabeth B. Browning.” “E. B. Browning: Poetess of Love or Loss?” “How Do I Love Thee, Mrs. Browning Counts the Ways.” I didn’t want to read these papers. I had stopped crying over my husband and didn’t want to think about love. Love made people miserable. It made them scream and smash things and leave their homes and friends and everything familiar just to get away. It made them run off to Paris for what they foolishly thought was a second chance, and arrange a career-killing transfer to their company’s European office so they could do it. It made other people conduct hours-long phone calls from Athens with their mothers, trying to figure out how they could have missed it, how the happily married lives they thought were going on around them turned out not to have been so happy. I leafed through the pages beside me, reading a sentence here, a sentence there. Elizabeth Browning is a good poet who gets very often sick. Elizabeth Brown was invalid, writing poems in bed. Elizabeth Barrett married Robert

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Browning who wrote romantic letters which her father did not approve, he did not want any of his children to be marry, so they are running off to Italy, no wonder she writes such strong love poems of feeling. I flipped through each one, checking to make sure there were no blank sheets inside, a nasty new trick sweeping American campuses perpetrated by bloodthirsty students eager to ferret out lazy professors, and when I was satisfied that their Israeli counterparts had no such cruel intentions, I gave everyone a B+, for trying. The old man, it turned out, had undiagnosed diabetes. This was why he had been so lethargic and sleepy, the Baghdadi told me over coffee on the patio of the university cafeteria, triumphant. The American doctor had diagnosed it in a snap, he said, raising his fingers in the air to demonstrate: snap! Just like that, the American physician knew. “How could it have gone undetected for so long?” I asked. “It was mistaken for exhaustion, old age. In Iraq it was less noticeable. He ate better there. More frequent meals with his neighbors. Food he was familiar with. So it was naturally controlled. But when he came here”—he waved around, drawing in the whole country with a sweep of his arm—“everything was disrupted. The condition became aggravated.” He picked up his coffee cup. “Now the American has saved the day. He will have medication and he will be all right.” “Who is this wizard doctor?” I asked, in case I might need one sometime. He withdrew a folded piece of paper from the leather shoulder bag and handed it to me. Jeffrey Goldstein, M.D., an address on Hayarkon Street, Tel Aviv. Near the big hotels. And the embassy. Convenient to diplomats and tourists. I read down to the diagnosis and recommendations. Everything was neatly typed in Hebrew and English. The old man’s age was listed as eighty-nine with a question mark. His name was Sasson Shemtov. Shemtov. Good name in Hebrew. As in good reputation. It was a name I would not have forgotten. I handed back the paper. “He’s your father, isn’t he?” I said. The Baghdadi carefully put the paper into his pocketbook. “Why would you say that? Shemtov is a common name among Iraqi Jews. It’s like Smith in America.” He looked up at me, his expression fastidiously neutral. “Half of Babylonian Jewry carries this appellation. Shemtov. It means He of a Good Name. Jews in Iraq, you must understand, did not have formal second names until my grandparents’ day. Before that, it was simply So-and-So son of So-and-So. You carried your father’s given name. It was a form of respect. When the authorities gave them the list of choices, everyone chose this because it was closest to what they were used to.”

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But I knew I was right. And I knew that he knew it. It was his life he’d been narrating, he who had fled and could never go back, who had had words with a father he would not see or speak to for fifty years. But now all that had changed. “Has your daughter decided what she will do?” he said, folding his hands, composing himself. “About your husband’s visit?” “No.” “Then you must tell her.” “I will tell her she doesn’t have to see him. That she should listen to her feelings.” “I think you are wrong.” “I didn’t ask for your opinion, thank you.” “But it is her father.” “Exactly. And that doesn’t give him a free pass. He needs to bear the consequences of his deeds. Actually, he needs to learn that there are consequences. This is not something he has in his repertoire.” He refolded his hands, his accountant face immovable. Light perspiration had gathered above the thick mustache. “You are making a mistake.” “You’re one to talk. What about your son?” “This is different.” “No, it isn’t.” I’d had enough. I was tired of his bullheaded insistence. I took my briefcase and got up to go to the bus. “I don’t understand you. You’re doing the same thing with your son that you did with your father. Repeating your own toxic history. Righteous indignation, I think you called it.” I stopped and looked at him a long minute. “And now you’re just projecting that onto me, trying to get me to do what you aren’t able to do yourself.” I turned and started to walk off. “Why is that wrong?” he called after me, but I pretended not to hear. Their photo appeared in the weekend edition of Ha’aretz. In the English-language version, the article was titled Father-Son Reunion: The Oldest Jew in Baghdad Comes Home. The old man sat in a straight-backed chair in the common room at the senior residence, the Baghdadi posed stiffly behind him. They had been separated half a century ago, the article said, and had been brought together courtesy of the US Central Command in Iraq. According to the reporter, the son, Murad, hadn’t passed a day in Israel without thinking of his father. And the father? the reporter asked. Fewer than fifteen Jews were said to still be living in Baghdad, not enough men for even a minyan. Was the father happy to be settled in Israel, finally among his people? Of course, his son answered for him. For his father, every day in Baghdad had been as the psalmist wrote: We sat by the rivers of Babylon and wept as we remembered Zion.

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And now? the reporter asked. Now we are both here, nobody in exile anymore. Not him, not me. You? the reporter asked. You’ve been here fifty years. There are many kinds of exile, the son said. That night, I closed my eyes but couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing the two of them, the old man in the chair, the weepy son with his hand on his father’s bony shoulder. I got up and turned on my computer and pulled up my daughter’s e-mail. You have to let him come see you, I wrote. Do it soon, as soon as you can. You need to listen to me, I know I am right. I read it twice, then hit Send. Later, when my daughter next came to visit, I would explain.

9 Dara Horn

From The World to Come

Boris Kulbak had been in the Jewish Boys’ Colony in Malakhovka just outside of Moscow for only three months, and he remembered very little from before then. It was 1920 and he was eleven years old, and from the entire first ten years of his life he could recall almost nothing but a single incident. One day long ago, in the town where he used to live—he could see, in the clarity of a single framed memory, that it was a beautiful day, one of those spring days when the air becomes like clear water rippled by a breeze and the ground loosens its grip and you feel as though you are not walking but swimming in air, flying, weightless, over the town—he had seen a group of boys beating a horse. The horse was old, a mare, and her right front leg was broken. Boris had just noticed her lying there when a group of boys, big boys, older than he was, strolled by, swinging big wooden sticks they must have been using for a game. When they noticed the horse, they approached her slowly, making gentle cooing noises. But then one of them suddenly raised his stick and struck the horse on her side. She neighed, a long, agonizing sound. Then the other boys each took a turn smacking the horse. One of them struck her in the eye, and a stream of blood oozed out. This excited the boys to the point where they began beating her in earnest, laughing and jeering as they clobbered her over and over until Boris, who until then had been riveted to his spot by morbid fascination, could no longer watch. Later, in Malakhovka, he remembered that the whole scene had confused him, upset him. But he could no longer remember why he had been upset or confused. Many of the orphans had brothers who lived with them in the Boys’ Colony, running around in pairs or trios or packs. These boys tended to be mean, fond of taunting outsiders, unwilling to play with anyone else. Boris envied them. He envied the boys who had sisters, too, girls who would visit from the girls’ home down the road, though Excerpt from Horn, The World to Come: A Novel. Copyright © 2006 by Dara Horn. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and Penguin Books Ltd.

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the girls’ home was much smaller, and the girls who lived there much younger; girls older than twelve or so being in a category with parents, people who no longer existed. When the other boys asked Boris, he told them that he had never had brothers or sisters, that he had always been an only child. But that wasn’t quite true. He remembered, in a thought that he could hold no tighter than one can grasp a stream of water, that there had once been a baby brother, years ago, a baby who hadn’t even learned to walk before he began coughing, and coughed and coughed and coughed all the way through summer and autumn and into the winter, when one cold night Boris heard the coughing stop; the dark house was silent for a moment in the dim kerosene light, a silence one could feel like the presence of a person in a room, and then the cough was replaced, suddenly, with his mother’s wail. And he was going to have another little brother, too, or a little sister. He had hoped for a boy, but he still wasn’t sure, when he saw it torn from his mother’s knifed-open belly and thrown through the smashed bedroom window, whether it was a boy or a girl. He had watched this with his hands tied to the bedpost and his mouth stuffed with a scrap of his mother’s underwear, his father already strangled in the next room. In the seconds before the man who had tied him up clubbed him across the forehead and left him for dead, he had seen it—the not-yet brother or sister, slick with water and blood, but with a fully formed head and limbs, its legs uncurling as it was pulled through the air. Before it took flight, he had seen its face, its tiny thumb wedged between its lips. After that everything turned into a long dream. Months of crawling around the city, stealing food, stealing money, stealing anything, sleeping in stables, sleeping in alleyways, eating trash. He joined a gang of boys he had known from his school, back when there was a school; they had bullied him then, and now it was worse. He would go on missions for them, stealing rolls and eggs, and they would beat him until he gave up the portions he had saved for himself. One night when winter came he ran away from them. He kept himself up deep into the night, until he knew they were dead asleep, and then raced to the city’s edge. He thought of going to the forest, but there were animals there, and bandits, and he was too afraid. Instead he went to the Jewish cemetery. He had once been afraid of the dead, but now they seemed benign to him, familiar. In the cemetery he stumbled in the premorning dimness between the stones until he found an empty grave. Boris lay down inside it, covered his arms and legs with dirt until he managed to stop shivering, and closed his eyes against the falling snow. At dawn he was discovered, half frozen, by someone from the burial society. The burial society paid his passage to Malakhovka. The Jewish Boys’ Colony in Malakhovka was like an enchanted island, a private Soviet republic where no one was over the age of sixteen. Fifty boys lived in a cluster of wooden huts where they ruled themselves, cooking their own meals, growing their own vegetables, chopping their own wood. They even had a little Soviet, a council of

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older boys who ruled the colony through a central command. Mornings were spent in the colony’s school, in classes taught by adults—math, science, socialism, literature, art—after which they would file out for the afternoon’s labor. Evenings were spent in one’s communal house, around the fire, debating chore divisions in the colony council and singing hymns of praise to the Red Army. All this amazed Boris, stunned him. He didn’t know how to talk to the other boys, and so he was silent, but no one seemed to make fun of him for it; there were a number of silent boys there, and no one seemed to mind. He moved from one moment to the next on this magical island dazzled by daylight, by the food that no one stole from him, by the warm blanket that wasn’t his coat, by his shaven head that was no longer full of fleas, and most of all by the boys around him, busy shaven-headed boys who buzzed away at their daily tasks as if nothing else had ever been. And in those busy days, he found, it was impossible to imagine that anything ever had. Except at night. Each night, the boys in Boris’s hut stood in rows beside their army­style bunks, sang the “Internationale,” and climbed into bed with military precision. Once the lights went out, silence would hover for a few moments like a cloud bearing down on the earth, waiting for release. And each night, slowly and steadily, the silence cracked and the rains came down. It usually began with a boy on the far end of the room, a small boy, much smaller than Boris, who over the course of several months had managed to reduce his bawling to a careful sniffle that began the evening’s performance. Then the smallest boys would start really crying, one by one, the sobs getting louder and louder like waves of rain slapping against the windows until the noise was so loud that the older ones would shout at them, insult them, even get out of bed and hit them, and then they would quickly shut up. But that was nothing compared to the real thunder and lightning of the evening. That happened with the older boys, after the little boys had finally stopped crying and everyone, including the older boys, had at last fallen asleep. Then the tempest would begin. First, one of the bigger boys would rise, still sleeping, and start shouting that the house was on fire. He usually kept shouting for several minutes, jumping up and grabbing his brothers from the neighboring bunks and dragging them toward the windows. On some nights he made it halfway out the window before he woke up, still shouting. Later another boy, who worshipped no god but Lenin by day, would stroll around the room in his sleep until he found the eastern wall, where he would stand in the humbled posture of his fathers, his back crooked and his shoulders hunched, chanting the entire Hebrew evening liturgy aloud until someone nearby found the energy to get out of bed in the cold night and slap him awake. A third boy would regularly get up in his sleep and attack people, shouting his older sisters’ names and vowing revenge, pummeling the boys in the beds near his and anyone else too stupid not to get out of his way. His victims would wake with bruises. But he was far from the worst. The worst, in Boris’s opinion, was a boy about Boris’s age, two beds down. This boy would fall asleep

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in perfect silence, an enviable peace hovering over his thin, motionless body, almost the sleep of the dead. He remained quiet each night until all of the other thundering had stopped, long past midnight. After the final incident of the night had come and gone, several minutes would pass in a deep, weary silence. And then, every single night, the boy would let out a high-pitched, blood-freezing shriek, after which he would scream, “Mommy! Mommy!” over and over without stopping until one of the boys next to him shook him awake. Then the dormitory would settle down again into the gentle sounds of small boys breathing in their beds, and Boris Kulbak would fight to stay awake for as long as he could until he was forced to surrender, as if cringing before a beating, to his own mangled dreams. And then he met Comrade Chagall.

Since Boris had arrived at Malakhovka, there had been no art class; the teacher had fallen ill, and had departed for Moscow. But that early spring day, for the first time, art classes were scheduled to resume. Boris had never been in the art room before, which doubled as a classroom space for boys older than him. When he entered that morning for his first art class, the artwork by the students from three months earlier still hung on the dirty walls. Their paintings were full of grinning workers, muscular boys and girls hauling bales of hay, Red Army soldiers waving proud fists in the air, a red dawn always rising in the background. Boris looked at the pictures and thought they were ugly. But he sensed that this might be a wrong thought, a bad thought, the kind of thought that—he had learned in his socialism class—led to things like horses and boys being beaten, though Boris could not understand the connection, and he tried to look at the pictures with an appropriate amount of awe as he filed into the room with the rest of his class. Boris sat near the back of the room, behind several long rows of shaven heads. Suddenly the boys in front of him jumped to attention, standing beside their seats. Between their heads, Boris saw that a man had come into the room. “Please, sit down. You make me nervous that way,” the man’s voice said. The boys sat down in unison, their backs straight. Now Boris could see the man clearly. He was a tall man, younger than most of Boris’s other teachers. He wore clothes that none of his other teachers wore—gray pants with thin white stripes on them, and bright-red suspenders over a dirty white shirt. His head was covered with dark curls, which made Boris jealous. He looked at the class, his eyes wide, then glanced at his own hands. He coughed once, and the noise was still bouncing off of the concrete floor when he began to speak. “Good morning, boys. You’ve probably guessed already that I’m your new art teacher for the term. I’m Comrade Chagall.” He coughed again, into his fist.

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The boys answered in a chorus, and Boris joined them: “Good morning, Comrade Chagall.” The teacher pressed his thick lips together and leaned back against the wall. A hiccup of air escaped his lips, and he quickly turned to the side, pretending to fix the cuff of his sleeve as he cupped his mouth with his palm. He glanced back at the class and stuck out his lower lip like a child, blowing air up so that a lock of hair on his forehead rose and quickly fell. Then he began to pace around the edge of the room, looking at the paintings on the walls. The boys watched him, motionless. “These,” he said suddenly, sweeping his arm across a broad wall of red dawns. “Who painted these?” The class was silent, unsure of what was coming next. Finally the boy directly in front of Boris raised a finger. “Students, Comrade Chagall.” “What students?” the man asked. “You students, or other students?” The boys glanced at one another, their eyes narrow. Was it a compliment? Boris leaned back slightly in his seat, relieved that he had never had an art class before. “Some are from us, some are from the other boys,” a big boy next to Boris volunteered. The man nodded slowly, still looking at the walls. “I asked,” he said, turning to face the class, “because I know that you can do better than this.” Boris watched as the pale neck of the boy in front of him turned red. The boys in his row squirmed in their seats, their eyes on the floor. “How many of you have had art class before?” the man asked. The boys looked at each other and bit their lips. A few raised their hands, carefully, as if afraid to disturb the air, staring into their own laps. “What did your last teacher tell you about how to paint?” A pause hung heavily in the air, until a boy Boris hated spoke—a cruel boy whose head sprouted the shaved beginnings of orange hair. Boris had seen him throwing rocks at stray dogs. “He just told us to paint what we see,” he said. “To paint what you see,” the teacher repeated, as if he were the student. “To paint what you see, or to paint what you look at?” The orange-headed boy looked at the teacher and opened his mouth, but said nothing. “Just because you look at something doesn’t mean you can really see it,” the man said, looking first at the boy and then at the class. “Look at my hand, for example,” he said, waving his left hand in the air. “If I were to cut myself, the blood that would come out of my hand would be red. Blood is red, right?” Boris cringed. There wasn’t a boy in the room who didn’t intimately know the color of blood. He glanced around quickly, noticing how the other boys hid their wincing—drawing their eyebrows together, rubbing their shaved heads, pressing their palms against their cheeks. The red-fuzzed boy looked down at his desk, his lower

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lip lodged between his teeth. No one spoke or even whispered. The entire room sat in silence, waiting. “But look at my hand right now,” the man was saying. With awkward, jerky motions, he rolled up his stained sleeve and revealed a pale left arm. “See the veins?” He traced a dirty finger along the back of his hand, holding it out to the class. “This blood isn’t red. It’s blue!” The man turned to the jars of paint resting on the table in front of him and chose a brush, dipping it first in blue, then in green. Boris leaned to one side to see around the head of the boy in front of him. While the boys stared, the man put the brush to the back of his hand and began running it along his skin, tracing branching rivers up from his fingers along his forearm, all the way onto the edge of his shirt cuff above his elbow. Boris watched as the man leaned forward with both hands on the table in front of him, his two arms like twins, one clothed and one naked. Boris’s eyes traced the paths of blue blood running up from the man’s knuckles like water through the roots of a tree, up through his forearm and elbow and shoulder and toward the man’s heart. “I don’t want you just to look, or even to imagine,” the man said. “I want you to see.” The man gathered a pile of large papers up in his arms and began quickly distributing them along the sides of the room, and then started passing out brushes and jars of paint. The boys, unable to understand the concept of someone doing something for them, got up out of their seats and began distributing the supplies themselves. “Today I want you to paint something you have seen yourself,” the man said. Boris glanced around the room again and saw the other boys—the ones passing out supplies and the ones still sitting down—avoiding each others’ eyes. He couldn’t think of anything he had ever seen that he would want to paint. But the man kept talking, and Boris saw a smile creeping up over his face as the boys in the front row began to wet their brushes. “Whether you saw it yesterday or years ago, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter what it is, either. Or how you paint it. It could be a person. A tree. A rectangle. I don’t care. So long as you paint what you really see.” Boris’s row finally got its supplies. There wasn’t much, and they would have to share the colors. The boy on Boris’s right began painting a thick blue stripe along the bottom of his paper. Then Boris thought of something he had seen that seemed to fit what the man had said, something inside, like the blue blood in the man’s veins. And he began to paint a picture of a womb. Most people have never seen the inside of a womb—or, rather, everyone has seen it, but almost no one remembers it. Boris had been reminded of what it looked like on that night the previous spring, but that was just red blood, like the man said. Instead he painted what he had seen, inside, before. He made an outline of a body, bulging at its center, remembering something his mother had told him. For the past three

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months at Malakhovka, he had remembered nothing, but now he discovered that his thoughts were like the man’s veins, suddenly and clearly rising to the surface. The baby had been kicking a lot that day, she said. He saw her very clearly now: she was sitting beside him on his bed, her heavy body pulling the blanket tight. It was a spring night, and cool. Her bulging blouse glowed gold in the light of the lamp. She took his hand in hers (did he see the blue blood flowing in her fingertips as she took his hand, or was he only imagining it?) and placed it on her stomach. “Feel it,” she said. Boris tried very hard, but felt nothing, and was so embarrassed to have felt nothing that he pretended that he had felt it. There was a quiet shame in lies like these, not-quite lies that were only not-quite lies because they would never be noticed. A silent shame. Afraid of the silence, Boris strained to say something, anything. “What’s the baby doing in there?” he asked, suddenly realizing that he did not know. “Why is he taking so long to come out?” And so his mother told him what happens to people who are waiting to be born. Before being born, his mother explained, babies go to school. Not a school like Boris’s, but a different kind of school, where all the teachers are angels. The angels teach each baby the entire Torah, along with all of the secrets of the universe. Then, just before each baby is born, an angel puts its finger right below the baby’s nose— here she paused to put her finger across his lips (could he see the blood under her skin, or did he only imagine it?)—and whispers to the child: Shh—don’t tell. And then the baby forgets. “Why does he have to forget?” Boris had asked, moving his lips beneath her finger. He didn’t want to know, not really. But his mother’s back had stiffened, and he could feel that she might get up at any moment, put out the light, walk away, and disappear. She pulled her hand away from his face, resting it on her own stomach. “So that for the rest of his life,” she said, “he will always have to pay attention to the world, and to everything that happens in it, to try to remember all the things he’s forgotten.” Boris thought about this for a moment, but his mother was already leaning forward, about to kiss him good night. Please, he thought, don’t leave. “Have you ever remembered anything?” Boris asked desperately. “I mean, any of the things you forgot?” “Only a few,” she whispered, brushing her lips on his ear. But before he could ask her what they were, she put out the light and vanished. The womb Boris painted was dark inside, cavelike, with painted stalactites dripping down from its sides, and illuminated only by a single ray of narrow painted light. But inside it was a treasure house, like the one he had once heard about that explorers had found in Egypt, an underground hideaway filled with everything necessary for the next world. Bookcases climbed up the back wall of the womb. Its bottom was cushioned with piles of old scrolls. In the middle of it all was a small table—it was difficult, Boris found,

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to make the table straight, with the brush trembling in his hand—where a little baby sat on a chair. A thick pink baby (Boris, by accident, had made him a little thicker than he should have been), bald, as if he were already an old man. (Boris wondered: Do some people grow young before they are born, the way some people grow old before they die?) The baby was sitting in front of a large book, but he was looking straight ahead, a gaze that was unintentionally unnerving. Next to the baby floated an angel. Not like the ones he had seen carved onto the doors of churches, with two wings, but like the ones his father had once described, with six wings: with two it covered its face, and with two it covered its legs, and with the final two it flew. In the womb on Boris’s crowded page, the angel hovered just to the left of the baby, a feathered cloud of white and blue paint. As he finished the angel’s final wings, Boris was annoyed to see that a drop of blue paint had fallen, by accident, just beneath the baby’s nose. “It’s marvelous,” a voice behind him said. Boris looked up. He hadn’t noticed everyone else leaving the room. Now the room was empty except for him and the teacher who stood behind him, blue paint wrinkling the skin of the hairy forearm that he leaned against Boris’s desk. Boris shivered. He hadn’t been alone with an adult since that morning in the cemetery, when someone had found him in the grave. The man leaned in closer over the table, examining the painting. To avoid looking at the man, Boris examined it, too, and realized that none of it had come out the way he wanted. The baby was far too fat; the beam of light looked more like a sheaf of straw; the angel looked more like a cloud than a bird. And then there was that blue mark below the baby’s nose, exactly where it shouldn’t be. The cheap paint had already begun to dry. Boris waited for the man to speak. The man kept looking, though, and suddenly he started whistling. Afraid to move, Boris listened to the thin blue melody rising from the man’s heavy lips. It sounded less like a whistle than a wail, crying condensed into a narrow beam of breath. Then Boris recognized it. It was the tune for the prayer El Maley Rachamim, “God Full of Mercy,” the one sung in cemeteries. In the past year Boris had often stolen money from the pockets of mourners at crowded funerals, while they listened, bawling, to cantors howling out that song. The whistling stopped. “Marvelous,” the man repeated. “What’s your name?” “Comrade Kulbak,” Boris answered. The man coughed, and in the cough Boris thought he could detect a hidden laugh. He felt his face becoming pinker than the fat baby’s. Noticing a blotch of paint on his own hand, he wondered if his face, too, was marked beneath the nose. He rubbed his upper lip. “Comrade Kulbak,” the teacher repeated. “I would love to have this painting, if I could. To put on the wall for the class.” Boris swallowed, and pressed his dirty hands down along the painting’s edges. “What’ll you give me for it?” he growled. This was what he always did, ever since his

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first beating, whenever someone wanted to take something from him. Months earlier, someone had asked for his shoes, and he had gotten four rolls and two pieces of candy for them. He still had no shoes, but it had been worth it. This time the teacher laughed openly. “Comrade Kulbak, you’re a little capitalist!” Boris kept his eyes on his painting, his grip fierce. He didn’t understand what the word meant, exactly, though it had been explained to him many times. All he knew was that it was something terrible. But the man didn’t seem to care. “You’re very smart, Comrade Kulbak,” the man said. “If it’s a trade you want, fine. That’s fair. Come with me, and we’ll see if I have anything to trade.” The man offered Boris his hand, the one with the blue-painted veins. Boris looked at the hand, then at the man’s face, and then back at his hand again, unsure of what to do with it. After a long time, the man laughed again and took hold of Boris’s hand. Boris felt his chapped palm rubbing against the man’s hard slab of a hand, like chalk writing on stone. The touch made him shiver. With his other hand Boris clung to the edge of his painting, careful not to drag it against his side. Silently, the man led him out of the room, across the muddy lawn, and toward the main road. As they walked across the mud, Boris looked at his own bare feet and saw the blue blood beneath his skin. He looked at the mud and saw the things it was made of: fallen leaves, bits of bark, melted snow, pieces of bone. In a few moments they were standing outside a large stone house that Boris had seen many times before, one that the younger boys said was haunted. But Boris wasn’t afraid of the dead.

“I’m sorry about the smell,” the man said as he pried open the wooden door. “We don’t use the ground floor. We keep the windows open all the time, to try to air it out. It’s still too dirty to live in.” Boris followed the man inside, his eyes growing wider to let in the feeble light. The man’s comment shocked him. Three months ago, he would have considered this a palace. There were two dark rooms, with a narrow wooden staircase between them. Empty medicine bottles were scattered over the floors, interspersed with heaps of animal dung. A cold breeze blew through the open windows, and the smell—a familiar smell from the streets where he once slept, sickness condensed into a breath—coated the air around him like a layer of paint. It smelled orange, and green. The man pinched his own nostrils closed as he led Boris up the stairs. “My wife and daughter aren’t here now,” he said, his voice ringing through his nose. “They went to visit my wife’s family in Vitebsk.” At the top of the stairs, he opened a door, and Boris followed, allowing the door to slam into the smell behind him. And suddenly Boris was standing in a place that reminded him of a womb.

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It was a long, narrow room, with light pouring in like a river of gold through a single window on one side. Under the window an easel was set up with a canvas propped on it, its white radiance untouched. Bookcases climbed up the back wall of the room, the middle and high shelves sagging with books of all colors and sizes, while the bottom shelves were taken up with rolls of canvas. There were two tables scattered with dozens of tubes of paint—real tubes, metal tubes, not like the watery jars they had used in class—and with drinking glasses filled with green and brown and orange water. Large paintings hung on the side walls one after another—a woman flying on a man’s hand like a flag, a man and woman flying together through the air, a bride and groom held together by an angel, the bride with a little person embedded in her cheek. Along the edges of the room, stacked canvases leaned against the walls, the uppermost of which were vertical portraits of people who looked to Boris like they had been broken into pieces—a man playing a violin, a fat woman clapping her hands, and last, an unfinished pale man in profile, writing on a scroll. In one corner was an iron bed like Boris’s, stretched to a width longer than its length by a stack of old wooden boards that were rotting like railway ties. There was a sink and a stove, and a few wooden chairs. Pink and yellow dolls’ clothes were strewn across the middle of the floor, which was stained with blotches of blue paint. Boris looked at the clothes and imagined—no, he didn’t imagine, he saw—the absent dolls (had there been many dolls, or just one well-dressed one?) lining up to leave the womb. The angel from the painting of the wedding came down from the wall and stood by the door as each of the dolls went by, pressing its finger into their little lips, to make them forget. Someone knocked at the door. Boris looked up at the teacher, who was rolling his eyes. “He never leaves me alone,” the teacher muttered under his breath. Then he shouted toward the door, “You know it’s open, so don’t pretend.” The door flew open with such force that it almost slammed into the wall. Behind it was a man about the teacher’s age, also with a head of dark hair. But this man was far shorter and even more shabbily dressed, in a dark suit worn to a shine. He had a long nose growing out of dark, furry eyebrows, a thick mustache like a third eyebrow that covered the dent below his nose, and a bristling smile. He noticed Boris, grinned at him, and then looked back at the teacher, waving a torn envelope in his hand. “You have a telegram from Shloyme Mikhoels,” he said, holding the envelope high in the air. “He needs you to come back to Moscow and finish the theater sets as soon as possible. He really means it this time, my friend. ‘As Soon as Possible.’ That doesn’t mean next month. That means as soon as possible.” “Thanks for reading my mail.” The teacher reached over and snatched the envelope, a gesture the short man took as an invitation to enter, which he did.

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“Always a pleasure, Comrade Chagall,” he sang as he strode into the room. Boris watched as he navigated around the dolls’ clothes until he reached an empty wooden chair. He plunked himself into the chair like a man in his own home, tipping backward against the bookcase. Suddenly he looked at Boris again and sat up straight, the chair’s two front legs landing with a thunk. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said. The teacher smiled a forced smile and turned to Boris, speaking in an overly loud voice and beating his chest with his fist. “Forgive me for failing to introduce our most honored, welcome guest. This,” the teacher said, with a theatrical bow in the short man’s direction, “is my upstairs neighbor, the illustrious Yiddish writer Pinkhas Kahanovitch, better known as Der Nister.” Der Nister, Boris thought. The Hidden One. Boris looked at the Hidden One, who seemed even shorter than before now that he was perched in the wooden chair, and imagined for a moment—or saw?—that this strange little man was actually hidden among the books and paintings behind him, his human form merely the dullest of the portraits. “He teaches literature in the colony, to the older boys,” the teacher explained. Der Nister smiled, his teeth poorly painted in layers of gray. “And this,” the teacher said, nudging Boris forward, “is Comrade Kulbak, an incredibly talented artist.” Boris felt that the room had suddenly become uncomfortably cold. He looked down at his feet, scratching his left foot with the toes of his right. “Show him your painting, Comrade Kulbak,” the teacher said, slapping him on the back. Boris brought forward his picture and reversed it so that Der Nister could see it. To him, it now looked far worse than before, not even the palest shadow of the paintings on the walls. He wondered if, in some deep, hidden way, he might actually be blind. “Stunning,” Der Nister said. Boris couldn’t tell whether he really meant it. Der Nister turned to the teacher and asked, “Why are children so much smarter than adults?” “The boys in Malakhovka are not really children,” the teacher said, his voice low. “They are adults trapped in children’s bodies.” “True,” the Hidden One said. He looked at the painting carefully, and then, even more carefully, at Boris, until Boris suspected that he could see beneath his skin, down to his blood, his brains, his breath inside his lungs. “My daughter is just a few years younger than you,” he said. Boris said nothing, holding his breath. “What is your real name, Comrade Kulbak?” Boris looked at him, confused. “Boris,” he tried. “No,” the man said. “I mean your real name, your Jewish name.” Boris thought a moment, frightened. Had he forgotten his own name? He stood in silence, almost for too long. “Benjamin,” he finally said. No one had called him that in over a year.

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“Benjamin,” Der Nister said. “What’s your full name? Benjamin son of who?” Boris thought again, even more frightened. What if he couldn’t remember? His mother had once told him that only with his full name would he be admitted to the world to come. What was it? “Benjamin son of Jacob,” he blurted, relieved. Der Nister smiled. “Benjamin and Jacob. Nafsho keshura benafsho. You know what that means?” Boris shuddered and shook his head. He was used to speaking Yiddish with his teachers, even though the boys usually spoke Russian among themselves. But Hebrew he had long forgotten. “It’s from Genesis, about Jacob and his son Benjamin,” Der Nister explained. “Nafsho keshura benafsho—‘His soul was bound to his.’ That’s how it is with a father and son. What happens to him, happens to you.” Boris froze. His body became rigid and numb, like that morning lying in the grave, as the smile dissolved from Der Nister’s face. He saw, without feeling it, the teacher’s blue-streaked hand on his shoulder. “Never mind him,” the teacher said to Boris with an uneasy laugh. “He enjoys being cryptic.” Slowly Boris began to thaw. He looked at the teacher standing above him, and at the Hidden One sitting almost below him, at the teacher’s forced grin and at Der Nister’s eyes that peered at him with pity. Their two faces—the sneering grin of one, the earnest sad smile of the other—confused and frightened him. It was as if he were looking at the faces of the other boys in the orphanage, or of the boys in his town before he was brought to Malakhovka. The teacher’s face suddenly reminded him of the mean boys, the ones who laughed at mean jokes and beat up the others, while the Hidden One’s face seemed to him like the faces of the boys who cried too easily and were invariably bullied and beaten, with no one to save them. It doesn’t change, he thought. He bowed his head, saw the blood inside his own bare feet, and trembled. “Comrade Kahanovitch and I collaborate sometimes,” the teacher said loudly, breaking the silence. “We write children’s books together—he writes the stories, and I make the pictures.” “That’s nice,” Boris said, in order to say something. He braced his feet against the floor. “Why don’t you show him one of our children’s books, Kahanovitch?” the teacher asked Der Nister, his voice a preternatural shade of bright green. “I have them all right on the shelf behind your head.” “But you said these boys aren’t really children,” Der Nister said, his mouth pulled down in concern as he contemplated Boris. Suddenly his eyes brightened. “Why don’t I read him one of my real stories instead? Here’s something I just wrote this week.”

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He got to his feet, pulling a few folded pages out of his inside pocket as the teacher groaned. “Oh, God, spare us. Not a performance,” the teacher begged. “I wrote it for a longer story, but this is part of it. Tell me what you think,” Der Nister said, unfolding the sheets. “There’s just no way to shut him up,” the teacher muttered to no one, and then sighed loudly, a deliberate, sharp puff of breath. The Hidden One carefully ignored this as he began, in a voice that seemed accustomed to lullabies and bedtime stories for a little girl about Boris’s age, to recite his tale. This is the story of the All-Bridge, the bridge which leads from the deepest depths of the abyss to the highest heights of heaven. Did you know there was such a bridge? “I don’t think you meant to write ‘bridge,’” the teacher interrupted. “It sounds more like a ladder to me. Don’t you think so, Comrade Kulbak?” Boris shrugged, pretending not to care. But he was intrigued. Was there really a bridge like that? He looked at Der Nister. A moment earlier, the writer had seemed commanding, powerful. But now he looked strangely embarrassed, folding and unfolding the pages between his fingers, wordlessly opening and closing his thin lips. The teacher sighed again, this time with a smile, and sat down on the floor. Boris lowered himself to the floor beside him as the story continued. Well, there’s a reason you’ve never heard of this bridge. The bridge was created at the very end of the week of creation, on Friday evening, at twilight—the very last thing God created before he completed the world and rested on the seventh day. But he didn’t spend much time on it. It was made hastily, and then immediately abandoned as God went off to celebrate the sabbath. So the bridge was alone on the very first night of the world. Its form stood silent in the darkness, its feet sunken into the abyss, and its head aloft in the bright heavenly shrine, where a sacred stillness rested. And in that heavenly shrine, there was a door that led into another door, and the second door was closed, and behind it, that night, God planned to celebrate the sabbath after his week of world-weariness, leaving the bridge alone. The bridge was very pleased with its head, which rested at the door of the heavenly shrine. But its feet were sunk into the abyss, where they rested amid cold, dark slime, and strange reptiles were swarming all over them. So the

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bridge began to complain. He complained so much that God hurried away from him right after creating him, retiring behind the heavenly door. And after hearing the complaints, Satan made his very first nighttime visit to the world. “So here you are,” Satan said to the bridge, “with nothing to do. It’s nighttime, it’s the sabbath, and God has shut himself up in his heavenly shrine. Why don’t you come with me, down into the abyss?” “That’s just where I don’t want to go,” the bridge said. “I’m already covered up to my feet in muck and slime. Why would I want the slime to reach up to my head?” “Because it’s going to happen anyway,” Satan told him. “What do you mean?” the bridge asked. “What,” Satan sneered, “haven’t you heard what your job is?” “My job?” the bridge asked. “Yes, your job. What, don’t you know what it is? It’s incredibly unfair! Why should everything in the whole world be created for its own sake, except for you? Why should you alone be created just for the purpose of others, so that everyone else gets to walk all over you?” And then Satan explained the bridge’s task: that from the very first generation of the world and for all the generations to follow, people would be traveling on him from the depths up to the heights. And all of the people ascending him would bring with them their damp and disgusting bodies, and drag their dirt and slime all over him, until he was so covered with muck that his entire body might as well have sunk into the abyss, enslaved to other people’s filth. The bridge listened and became nauseated. “So, aren’t you insulted?” Satan asked. The bridge shuddered, disgusted. “But what if I am? What can I do?” Satan stepped closer and whispered in his ear. “Break yourself! Right now! God won’t notice—he’s shut up in his shrine. And then you and I will establish our own kingdom in the depths, and you’ll be a regular bridge, just spanning the length of the depths, without connecting at all to the heavenly shrine. Who needs God and his heavenly shrine when we could rule ourselves?” The bridge listened, but didn’t answer. “I’ll let you decide on your own,” Satan said, and went away. The bridge wavered, hesitating. A cold shudder ran through his entire length, and his feet trembled in the abyss. The sabbath day passed, and when it ended, God appeared on the threshold of the heavenly shrine.

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“A good week!” God said to the bridge, using the post-sabbath greeting for the very first time. And the bridge felt filthy, and suddenly he pulled himself up and broke off the part of himself that was stuck in the abyss. Though he felt no more slime on his feet, the light of his head became dim, like the eyes of a beaten man. “A good week!” the bridge said, echoing God’s blessing. And his eyes were downcast and ashamed. Der Nister stopped reading, but Boris wasn’t sure that the story was actually over. How could that be the end of the story? Was there really no way out of the slime? Boris remembered something he had heard in school, not in Malakhovka, but a long time ago. The world was made of vessels (the teacher had said “vessels”; Boris, unsure what it meant, had always pictured clear glass jars), one within another, with God at the center. But God had to shrink himself to make more room for the world, and when he did, the vessels shattered into pieces. Standing among the paint stains and scattered dolls’ clothes, Boris felt like the foot of the ladder, a broken, abandoned piece of a dark and shattered world. “I’m telling you, Kahanovitch, stuff like that is a one-way ticket out of the USSR.” The Hidden One pursed his lips as he folded the story into his pocket. “It’s symbolic, you pest. Don’t you understand symbolism?” Boris looked at Der Nister and then at the teacher, wondering what “symbolism” meant. But the teacher only grunted, an inelegant sound, and scratched at the paint on his forearm. Bits of blue flaked to the floor like shards of pottery. The veins below the paint were dark, obscured by curly dark hair. “The symbolism isn’t even the problem, artistically,” the teacher said, his voice gruff. “The problem with your stories is that you start writing them with one little moment like that, but then you keep adding more and more pieces to it until it really stops making sense.” “That is exactly where you are wrong, Comrade Chagall. It is only after I put together the rest of the pieces that the story starts to make sense.” “Mmph,” the teacher said, still scratching his arm. The floor around his arm was now covered with shards of blue paint, as if his skin had shattered. Boris glanced to the right of Der Nister’s chair, at the portrait of the shattered musician and the pale unfinished man, who now seemed to Boris to be writing on a broken scroll, a scroll torn in two by a set of scored pencil lines below the paint. Suddenly the teacher leapt to his feet. “I almost forgot!” he said. “Comrade Kulbak was about to choose one of my paintings. I’m trading one of mine for his.” “A little capitalist art dealership,” Der Nister said, his eyebrows raised. “Does the colony council know about this?”

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“This is between me and Comrade Kulbak,” the teacher snapped. “It would have happened a long time ago, if you hadn’t barged in with your heavenly shrine routine.” He turned to Boris. “Take a look around.” Slightly startled, Boris began to wander around the room, dodging the dolls’ clothes, with the teacher’s voice following behind him. He eyed the painted wedding couple with visible envy. “I’m sorry, but I can’t give you any of the larger ones,” the teacher said behind him, throwing his hand across the bride’s face. “I need them for an exhibition. And the ones on top of those piles I can’t offer you, either,” he added, waving his hand at the portraits of the broken men with the violin and the scroll. “They’re for the State Jewish Theater. They’re being used for the play next month.” “Only if you actually answer that telegram,” Der Nister interjected, pointing to the envelope the teacher had set down on the table. The teacher ignored him, turning toward Boris. “It’s going to be very exciting,” he said. “They’re performing stories by Sholem Aleichem. Do you know his stories?” Boris thought hard, seeing his mother sitting with a book by his bed, struggling with something that would not become a memory. “There was a story about—about a goat?” he asked softly.” About a man whose goat keeps getting stolen, but the man doesn’t notice?” The teacher looked at him, his eyes blank. But the Hidden One’s voice soon filled the air. “Oh, yes, ‘The Haunted Tailor,’” he said, almost singing. “One of my favorites. Do you remember how it ends?” Boris shook his head. “Allow me to remind you,” Der Nister said. “Please, spare us, just this once,” the teacher begged. Unruffled, the Hidden One stood up and declaimed: “‘Don’t force it, kids. The ending is not a good one. The story started very happily, and turned out, like most happy stories, very sadly. And since you know the author of the story and know that he’s not the depressive type, and hates miserable stories and much prefers happy ones, and since you know that he hates stories with a “moral” and that preaching isn’t his thing—therefore the author will take leave of you laughing instead, and wishes for your sake that people all over the world would laugh more than they cry. Laughing is healthy. Doctors prescribe laughter.’” The words shrank as Der Nister recited them, becoming softer and softer until the final sentence came out almost under his breath. From someone else it would have seemed pompous, but Boris could see that Der Nister wasn’t doing it on purpose. It was simply as if he had for­gotten that any of them were there. He was speaking to himself. Boris watched in awe as Der Nister lowered himself, carefully, back into his seat.

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“Maybe they should do that one at the theater,” Der Nister said to the teacher, his voice still low. “It’s not so bourgeois like the others. Less likely to cause problems.” “But it doesn’t have a real ending,” the teacher protested. “People like real endings. Redemption, that sort of thing.” “How is that not a ‘real ending’?” Der Nister snorted. “There are no real endings in life, either. Since when do things end?” “I suppose it would be a good example of socialist realism,” the teacher said, and Boris heard something snide in his voice, a dark edge. “I’m telling you, this is as realistic as it gets. ‘Laughing is healthy. Doctors prescribe laughter.’ That’s the best way for anything to end.” Der Nister turned to Boris, his own story refolded in his hand. “What do you think, Comrade Kulbak?” “I—I don’t know,” Boris stuttered, though it seemed to him that in fact things did end, and that when they did, it wasn’t funny at all. He looked at the Hidden One, at the space below his nose where his thick mustache completely covered the dent in his upper lip. “Comrade Kulbak doesn’t care about those stories,” the teacher said loudly, resting his hand on Boris’s shoulder. “He’s here to pick one of my pictures.” He turned to look at Boris. “As I said, I can’t give you the larger ones. But I will let you have a study, since you’re giving me a study,” he said, leading Boris toward several piles of canvases beneath the portrait with the scroll. “Look through these studies and tell me which one you want.” Boris looked, and was surprised to find a series of miniatures of the larger paintings on the walls, as if the larger ones had been broken into pieces replicated on separate little canvases: the musician drawn individually, without his violin; the bride split apart from the groom. There were some that he lingered over, like the two women bathing a baby, and others that he flipped through quickly, like the cartoons of wounded soldiers. But most of them were too bright, the colors too imaginary to be real. And then his eye stopped on a tiny, dark painting, darker than all the others, a deep, brooding street that looked very much like the street where he used to live, with a man who looked very much like Boris’s own father hovering in the air over the town. This, he thought, was what he had once seen. “This one,” he whispered. “That one?” the teacher asked, and in the question, Boris thought he heard a tinge of disappointment. But then the teacher pulled it up from the ground, recognizing an old friend. He smiled. “I think of this one as Going Over the Houses,” he said, his voice soft, as if he were sharing a secret. “When I was a boy, beggars used to come to the house all the time, and people would call it ‘going over the houses.’ When they said that, this was what I saw.”

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“He loves to play with words,” the Hidden One said. “If you look, you’ll see that most of his painting are little jokes with words.” The teacher held Boris’s own painting up in the fading sunlight. “I would call yours El Maley Rechamim,” he said. That was the name of the Hebrew cemetery prayer he had been whistling earlier, Boris remembered. God Full of Mercy. Except the teacher had pronounced it wrong. “He loves to play with words,” the Hidden One repeated. “He should be the writer, not me. Rechamim instead of Rachamim—you understand?” Boris shook his head. “Rachamim means ‘mercy,’ but if you pronounce it rechamim, it means ‘wombs.’ God Full of Wombs.” Full of wombs? “So that’s it, then. Take it,” the teacher said, clamping his blue hand on Boris’s shoulder for the last time. “A fair trade. You’ll see your picture on the wall in class tomorrow morning.” Before Boris could take the painting, Der Nister leapt from his seat. “Wait,” he cried. “I’m not about to be the only unrepresented artist here. Take this, too.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the crumpled paper with his story, grabbing the painting from the teacher’s hands. “I have it all in my head, so you can keep this,” he said. Turning the painting around and balancing on a shelf behind him, he folded the paper into a long thin strip and then slipped it underneath the wood of the canvas frame. “Don’t stretch the canvas like that!” the teacher shrieked, and then blushed, lowering his voice. “It loosens the tacks. In twenty years the whole thing will fall apart.” Der Nister held it tight and laughed. “Don’t worry; I’m sure our apprentice artist will take even better care of a pregnant painting.” He grinned as he faced Boris, turning the painting back around and grandly presenting it to him. “I trust you will be an excellent curator of two works of art.” Boris took the canvas in his hands. “Thank you,” he said, and began edging his way toward the door. “Won’t you stay for supper?” Der Nister asked. But Boris looked at his smile and the teacher’s grin and saw the boys’ faces again. He suddenly needed to leave, to escape this strange clarity, which was becoming fiercer than a bad dream. “I have to—I have to go back,” he stuttered, acutely aware of his lie. “The council will be angry if I don’t get my chores done.” Der Nister frowned. “Spoken like a true Marxist. From each according to his ability. Workers of the world, unite and break the little artist’s back!”

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“Shut up, Kahanovitch,” the teacher hissed. He turned back to Boris, who was now clutching the painting in both hands. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, opening the door for him with laugh. “Thank you,” Boris murmured again, and stepped out of the room. “The pleasure was ours. You have a wonderful imagination,” Der Nister called behind him as the door swung shut. But Boris was already running down the stairs as fast as he possibly could, descending into the abyss of the house’s ground floor and the mud below, hoping the last of the stairs wouldn’t break beneath his feet. For what he had seen up above was now seared forever into his mind: the man who laughed at him, who he knew would last, and the man who praised his imagination, who he already saw disappearing.

10 Myla Goldberg

That’ll Be Two Dollars and Fifty Cents, Please

It’s not unusual for the line to the Birthplace to stretch all the way to the miniature pony farm. Launching a business around here used to mean selling methamphetamine or Amway, but with interest in the Birthplace taking off like it has, all a person has to do to get a bank loan is mention the name of our town. The Nelsons started in with the miniature ponies just this past April, and I hear that the Murch family is thinking about building a water slide, the kind that uses rubber mats. It only stands to reason that once people go to all the trouble to get here, they’re going to want more than one thing to do, the next closest attraction being the two-story outhouse over in Belle Plaine. Not to brag, but I was the first to grasp the potential of the situation, the first to see all those visitors and think concessions. I started out with bottled drinks that I brought over from the Sam’s Club and sold out of my car, but pretty soon I felt my old ambition kicking in, coming back like a long-lost friend. When I started to get creative, it was only natural that my thoughts turned to ice cream. The technology has changed a lot since I was a girl—I got the idea from those popsicles that look like cartoon characters—and it turns out you can get almost anything custom-made these days. Once the season kicks in, I get a shipment every month, trucked over from Wisconsin. They use blue gumballs for the eyes and then the rest of the face is done in different ice-cream flavors—strawberry for the lips, vanilla for the skin, lemon for the hair. The wrapper claims that every stick is autographed, and it’s true that her signature is on each one, but they’re printed by machine, of course, so they’re not true collector’s items. I’m still not used to seeing the very same people who have been waiting hours in line after traveling hundreds of miles to see the Birthplace of Little Darling, America’s Princess of Peace, biting into her face. “That’ll be Two Dollars and Fifty Cents, Please” was first published in Harper’s Magazine (March 2010). Copyright © Myla Goldberg.

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The scene outside the Birthplace used to be a lot more competitive. I won’t name names, but for a while there were people working the line selling hair ribbons they claimed had once decorated Little Darling’s head, or knee socks that they swore she had once worn, but the mayor has since cracked down on that sort of thing. Last year there was a big stink when someone on eBay tried to pass off a chicken vertebra as one of her little bones, but I had a hard time getting too upset over it since anyone who cares at all for Little Darling knows that her death wasn’t the sort to leave bones behind. Early on, an interested party could buy legitimate relics up at the house, and for prices that would make you want to cry nowadays, but those got snatched up pretty quick. I myself have a pair of Little Darling’s white Mary Janes, certified genuine, that I’m holding on to for my son Clyde’s college fund. Truth be told, I pinched them from her bedroom during all the craziness following her demise, which I suppose I should feel guilty about, but I don’t. A lot of us went through that house and took something. Considering the inconvenience and intrusion caused by the newspaper and television people, as well as everyone who’s coming around nowadays, I think we all deserve our own little piece. The mayor declared an amnesty. He said that folks who returned what they took would avoid prosecution and receive a $50 grocery certificate redeemable for anything but cigarettes or liquor, but I don’t think anyone took him up on it except for Wayne Kilborn, who thought he could use his amnesty to buy beer and took exception to the fact that by liquor the mayor had meant alcohol in general. Concession work isn’t exactly consciousness-expanding, but it sure beats waitressing. The markup on the bottled drinks and ice cream novelties blows any kind of tip situation out of the water, plus I’m my own boss and can wear whatever I want. My son Clyde is embarrassed by the extra effort I put into it, the song and dance stuff, but folks standing in line are grateful for any sort of entertainment, and it’s fun for me and good for sales. It didn’t start out as a planned thing. One day I was walking the line with my cart and a woman asked was I the Jordan Dairy Girl. I got this warm feeling inside, like someone had lit a sparkler behind my ribs. Around town, of course, the Dairy Girl situation is old news, but the woman must have been from a little farther out. Channel 12 goes north up to Hutchinson and south all the way to Kussuth County. That TV spot ran for a long time, basically until I was a high school sophomore and gunning to model bikinis across the hoods of Dodge Daytonas. In those last couple years, the Jordan Dairy Girl aired during all the latenight commercial breaks, which made for a decent drinking game standing around someone’s trashed living room after you’d run out of things to say but weren’t quite ready to choose between going home or going upstairs. When Mr. Jordan sold the business and retired to Arizona, those TV ads retired along with him, and that was the end of that. So I told the woman, That was me but it was a long time ago. And her

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face just opened up. I knew it, she said. I recognized those big round eyes of yours! Would you sing the song? she asked. By this point other people in the line were looking in my direction, and not in a bored way but in that way people have when they think someone might be important or famous. Feeling all those eyes on me was like being touched by a man at the end of a dry spell. In all the times since, that hasn’t changed. Jordan Ice Cream It’s a Treat, I sing, Bring It Home for Your Kids to Eat. Jor-dan Fresh. Jor-dan Good! Take It From Me, and then I wink just like I did back then, along with the little curtsy, and everybody claps. I can’t begin to say how good that feels. People aren’t expecting the Birthplace of Little Darling to be a perfectly ordinary white ranch house with a patch of front yard in a regular neighborhood of folks who keep their lawns trimmed and their garbage lids on, but that’s exactly what it is. The inside is no different. The dining room’s got the table she ate at; her bedroom’s got the bed she slept on. There’s an open bureau drawer with little nighties in it, but I’m pretty sure those are fake. I know there’s no way the half-written letter to the president sitting on her desk is bona fide, but I can see why they’d put it there. Someone who goes to all the trouble to visit doesn’t want to be told that anything that could fit inside a pocket or a handbag walked out of that place a long time before they got there. At night, once it’s too dark to see the signs, and the house’s porch light is on like all the other porch lights along that street, it’s still possible to see it as a normal house and think back on the eight years she lived among us without anyone suspecting her of being anything but a starstruck little girl with too much imagination and not enough to keep her entertained. People act surprised when I say that. I suppose it’s hard for most folks to imagine Little Darling ever not being famous, but everyone’s got to start out somewhere, and no one around here had a crystal ball. To be honest, I think we all found her kind of annoying at first—the way she would march down Main Street in her pink dresses, stopping people and asking them what they intended to do. I know I didn’t much care for it. Do about what? I’d ask, and she’d answer, All the fighting in the world, and then I’d ask her if she was selling candy or anything and that’s when she’d launch into “The Greatest Love of All” or “I Believe I Can Fly.” She couldn’t have been more than six at the time. Of course, when I was that age, I was doing song-and-dance numbers in front of the post office while my mother was inside buying stamps, so I should have understood her better than anyone. I guess I might have if I had been at some other place in my life, but I was working breakfast and lunch at the Happy Chef, and the last thing I felt like doing was dealing with a little girl prettier than I’d been at that age, singing at me while I was trying to cash my paycheck. At that time there were names going around for her: Little White Whitney Houston Wannabe, That Crazy Girl, Little Miss Incredibly Annoying. I may have come up with a few of them myself.

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Part of it was that Clyde wasn’t much older than she was, and even though I’d been raising him alone that whole time, I still wasn’t used to it. Back then Clyde was a cute little kid and I’d been prepared to offer him all the opportunities I’d had to fight for—auditions, dance lessons, head shots—but Clyde didn’t exhibit any natural inclination. And if there was one thing I didn’t want, it was to be one of those parents who pushed show biz on a child who didn’t al­ready have show biz in him. So in the very beginning, it was hard for me to witness that girl’s natural aptitude and not imagine what I would be doing for her if she was mine. I pictured national television ads, her face on a cereal box, a starring role in a family sitcom. It’s a testament to the scale of her talent that even then I was underestimating her. Little Darling’s father was a clerk down at the bank, and her mother worked parttime for an orthodontist. Paul and Jilly Kranz, whose daughter back then was still called Claire. They told her time and time again to stop going down to Main Street to torment folks who were just going about their business. If Paul or Jilly happened to see you in the grocery store or at the prescription counter, they’d go so far as to apologize about it. They even took Claire to see a doctor. It was supposed to be a secret, but Marcia Collins is Dr. D’Oraggio’s receptionist, and she can’t keep a thing to herself. According to Marcia, Dr. D’Oraggio spent a good, long time with Claire in his office and decided that while she was certainly an excitable and sensitive child, there was no reason to do anything more than keep an eye on her. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Dr. D’Oraggio had put Little Darling on any of those things doctors are feeding kids for ADD or HDTV, or whatever other bogus label they’re trying to slap on natural high-spiritedness. For better or for worse, I think it would have changed her destiny. My own near miss happened when I was eleven. I had decided that teaching myself to walk a tightrope was a good idea. I fell two stories from a tent cord I’d rigged between a tree and the chimney of the house and was lucky enough just to break my leg and get some sense knocked into me. I concentrated on singing and dancing after that, but I do wonder what might have happened if I’d been more gravely injured and my performing career had ended there, with the Jordan Dairy years behind me but before any of that stuff with Valleyfair Amusement Park or Windom Dodge. For one thing, I would have probably paid a lot more attention in school, and I expect I would have been exposed to a better class of person. There are those in town who, when they see me, will compare me with her. Our Own Original Little Darling, they’ll say, and I know they’re trying to be nice, but it’s just as phony as calling a middle-aged woman Miss. What that girl did was so much bigger than anything I ever dreamed of, that putting us together in the same breath is like serving foie gras on Wonder Bread. Looking back, what she did seems so obvious I feel stupid not to have thought of it for myself, but that was the genius of Claire Kranz. I suspect that

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the way she described it really was the way it happened: one day in the grocery store parking lot she saw a couple fighting in front of their child, and when she told them that their disharmony was hurting their baby, they stopped. This town has never been a hotbed of romantic tranquility. At certain times of the month—around payday, for example—domestic disturbance is basically a spectator sport. It’s perfectly believable to me that a girl too young to mind her own business and too pretty to be ignored might have had that kind of small influence and seen a bigger picture. The thing that distinguished Little Darling from 99.9 percent of people who end up in the public eye—myself included—was that she never lay at the center of her plans. Youth, talent, and beauty aside, I don’t believe it ever was Claire’s intention to become famous. For example, not even her parents knew about the letters she’d been writing. Apparently, she’d sent letters to Peru and all sorts of other countries before the Handawi school bombing, but none of those other places had possessed the good sense to write her back. I take issue with anyone who says that the Handawi Prime Minister’s response was based on political considerations. What matters is that when those pictures of burnt-up children appeared on the news, Claire took it to heart and the Handawi Prime Minister heeded her call. There’s no copy of the letter she wrote, but the Birth­place does have a facsimile of his reply, offering to pay airfare for the whole family and everything else. Anyone who reads it would have to see that her parents had no choice but to let her go. It certainly wasn’t their intention to embarrass our government, as some of the TV people claimed. Back then, not one of us around here knew anything about the ongoing debate in Washington over Handawi statehood, or Handawi’s role in the World Terrorist Equation. All we saw were those terrible pictures. And when an innocent child offers her generosity and that generosity is accepted, it’s the sort of thing a parent needs to encourage, now more than ever. The video in the Birthplace living room starts with the TV clip of Claire visiting the burnt children, followed by the press conference where she gets called Little Darling for the first time and then looks straight into the camera and asks for people everywhere to find peace in their hearts. From there it goes to her first appearance on The Tonight Show, where after singing “Children of the World,” wearing the green velvet dress, she climbs onto Mr. Leno’s lap. I’ve seen that clip I don’t know how many times and I still couldn’t tell you when the studio audience goes crazier: after she finishes the song or when she doesn’t sit in the chair beside Mr. Leno’s desk like everyone else who had ever come on that show. I have reason to believe that the shoes I’ve got are the ones she wore that night: if you look closely at the footage, you’ll see a darkish blur on the right instep that matches a black scuff mark on the corresponding Mary Jane in my possession. After that, it goes straight to her visit to the White House, where she holds the president’s hand and says that her mission in life is to be a friend to all children. By then, of course, the whole world knew her name.

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It would have been easy for her to put on airs. I know that once I became the Jordan Dairy Girl, there were certain kids I wouldn’t give the time of day to, and I tried to make my parents feel bad for the sort of house we lived in. I was sure it was only a matter of time before the world fell at my feet, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to start acting like it already had. But to talk to Little Darling, you’d never have known that she’d met world leaders and movie stars and that man from U2. You’d have been struck by her beauty and her presence, but she used those things to make you feel better about yourself instead of worse. Little Darling made me see my own shortcomings. I stopped feeling so bitter when I realized that I’d never had a real shot at the bigger opportunities. I pretty much went as far as I could have expected to go. My favorite place to visit is her bedroom. The rumor that she covered her walls with Jesus pictures just isn’t true. And I won’t even dignify the alien theory with an opinion. One time the sheriff’s office had to come to the Birthplace after hours to remove a man who was lying on her bed in a green velvet dress he’d had specially made, who said he was waiting to receive a transmission. I’ve stopped being shocked by the nonsense that people get up to. Anyone who wants to can check the hospital records and see she was a regular girl born to regular parents. Her bedroom looks just like any other little girl’s bedroom, with posters of horses, and a shelf for her stuffed animals, and a picture of one of those boy bands that I can’t remember the name of because I’ve only got Clyde and he’s not interested in such things. It’s easy to stand in that bedroom and imagine it belonging to your own daughter or to a younger version of yourself. The one difference is the world map next to her bed, where she kept track of all the countries she visited. There are little white pushpins on every continent except for Antarctica, which doesn’t contain any children so far as I know. Most people don’t stay to watch the video in this room through to the end, which is too bad, because if you ask me it lies at the core of what Little Darling stood for. The fact that it shows the same thing over and over again is exactly the point. Whether she’s in Chechnya or the West Bank or Ulan Bator, the people around her look the same way I imagine that first young couple looked when she spoke to them outside the Cub Foods. No matter how hot or dirty her surroundings—whether she’s in Darfur ladling out gruel to refugee children or holding the little hook hand of an Afghani mine victim—it’s almost impossible to see her and not want to agree to anything she’d ask you to do. I tried to get Clyde to take the tour with me once, bribed him with the offer of a free popsicle and a resident pass that would take us straight to the front of the line, but whenever he’s not using his skateboard to scrape his anatomy over any available concrete surface, he’s plugged into his computer games. He’s at that age where he’s angry about everything and blames me for most of it. This includes, but is not limited to, the town we live in, his only getting to spend a few weeks each summer with his

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dad, and my getting knocked up too young to have provided him with a more deluxe childhood. I’ve pointed out that my lousy timing was crucial to his drawing breath in the first place, but he disregards that the same as everything else that comes from my mouth. He’s called me names that would have gotten him slapped upside the head by almost any other self-respecting person. Aside from family dinners, which I still insist on, we pretty much try to avoid each other—though I’ve seen him showing off my old scrapbooks to his friends when he thinks I’m not looking, so I know he’s proud of me, even if he’s not at an age where he can let me know it. I tell myself that one day he’ll be civilized again. In the meantime, I’m doing the best I can, which these days means that I can supply Clyde and myself with a little more than the basics. I’ve even put something away for Clyde’s college education, assuming we both survive his being fourteen. An entire room could have easily been devoted to the events surrounding the death, but the Birthplace is intended as a celebration of Little Darling’s life and not its tragic interruption. In the far corner of the living room there’s a photo of her helicopter when they finally found it, all black and burnt up, along with a framed copy of the front-page headline and a local picture painted by Jerome Wilson that has drummed him up a fair amount of portraiture business, but that’s pretty much it. The town erected a gravestone for her and her parents down at the cemetery, but not many people visit it since they know nothing’s buried there. On their way out, folks will often ask me questions about her demise and I’m happy to answer. While I respect the Birthplace’s celebration decision, it’s only natural that people would want more, plus I’m a licensed seller of official commemorative items. Birthplace visitors already know the basics: they’ve read the O magazine memorial issue and they’ve seen the television specials. When they come to me, they’re looking for something more personal, and I do my best to supply it. Some want to know if I think our government had anything to do with it. This town has its fair share of conspiracy theories regarding the Little Darling tragedy, and while I certainly sympathize, I don’t count myself as a subscriber. Even though there were a few countries Little Darling visited that our government might have preferred her not to, I wouldn’t be able to call myself American if I thought our country could be that cold-blooded. That said, I think it’s shameful, the lack of official response when she was killed. The government statement compared Little Darling’s death to a foreign journalist’s getting caught in the line of fire, but that’s like saying Abraham Lincoln just happened to get in the way of John Wilkes Booth. There’s not a person living who could mistake Little Darling’s personal emblem: no enemy combatant on this earth carries a flag of a heart beneath a rainbow. Lots of wartorn nations had no trouble treating her with the respect she deserved. Everyone in Pakistan behaved themselves beautifully while she was there, and I’ve never seen a

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lovelier picture than the one of Little Darling holding hands with soldiers from both Koreas. Anyone who claims that her visits should have been timed to avoid fresh hostilities is missing Little Darling’s whole point. The world’s children were tired of waiting. A beautiful little girl offered herself up to the world, and the world shot her down like she was just anybody. In a way, I envy my son Clyde his pessimism. He’s never going to be in a position to be disappointed. It can get pretty emotional around the Birthplace exit. There aren’t a lot of dry eyes walking back to the shuttle-bus stop, and I’m talking men as well as women. I suppose spending as much time as I have around the place has made me philosophical, but if you ask me, how she went wasn’t such a bad way to go. It’s a pretty safe bet her life wasn’t going to get much better than it already had. For instance, I’m not a bad-looking woman, but I basically peaked in 1985 with Windom Dodge. Eventually Little Darling was going to hit her awkward phase, and the world’s countries were going to get tired of inviting her to visit their children, and she was going to find herself back here with no chartered flights, no television appearances, and not a whole lot of options. This isn’t something I tell people, but I think that was a big part of why she kept going. Anyone could see she was getting tired, that she was agreeing to visits that were more dangerous. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if she’d looked into her own crystal ball and decided that she might as well take what she was doing to its natural end. For those first few years when I was the Jordan Dairy Girl, there wasn’t a soul in greater metropolitan Mankato who didn’t know my face. I signed autographs, I did ribbon-cuttings, and I got free ice cream wherever I went. If I’d had the chance to go out in a blaze of fire, a hot orange bloom to cancel out all of life’s future regrets, I think I might have done it. It’s a pretty decent likeness, considering that it’s ice cream. Hold it up to her photo and you’ll see that they got the spacing of her eyes right, as well as the curve of her smile. Dollar for dollar, it is definitely the most economical option. The popsicle itself is awfully satisfying, and once that’s done you’ve still got something to take home and remember her by.

11 Harvey Grossinger

Dinosaurs Old age ain’t no place for sissies. Bette Davis

The birth of the solar system, the demise of the dinosaurs, the melting of the polar ice caps: haunting cosmic mysteries emerged from my grandfather Zolly’s mouth in a tone of grave wonderment. In the early fifties, when I was in the second grade, he’d tell me—sitting on a black leather club chair in his living room, puffing on a hand-rolled cigar, a cut-glass ashtray balanced in his lap—that the nighttime sky was sprinkled with diamonds, God’s diamonds. When I was in the fourth and fifth grade, a time when boys my age were busy building plastic Nautilus submarines and Flying Fortresses, Zolly was buying me dinosaur models and geological maps of the earth’s crust. If I had a heavy cold, he’d sit at the foot of my bed and spread Vicks VapoRub on my chest and nose. “Know where you come from, the sages of Israel advised,” he’d tell me, his pale, green irises as small as buttons. “The giant lizards are the blueprints of the past. Study them.” Zolly dropped by with library books for me to read when I was in bed with the mumps or chicken pox. He had me memorize the names of dinosaurs and the ages in which they lived, then he’d grill me whenever he and my grandmother Manya came over on the weekend in the summer for a swim in the oil-slicked Long Island Sound and some shish kebab or broiled swordfish steaks. He’d bolt his supper and then quiz me on the Mesozoic era or the Pleistocene period. He’d even slip me a few bucks when my father wasn’t looking. When I was six my grandparents sold their red-brick house in Pelham Bay and moved into an ornate, rent-controlled building near University Heights, a few blocks “Dinosaurs.” From Grossinger, The Quarry (1997). Copyright © 1997 by Harvey Grossinger. Reprinted by permission of the University of Georgia Press.

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from NYU and the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. They had a sunny top-floor apartment with parquet floors, a zinc stove, and a clothes wringer in the plant-filled kitchen. The place always smelled of simmering peaches and lemon oil. Zolly stacked heavy cases of seltzer bottles and celery tonic behind the dumbwaiter, and he wrapped his panatelas in white butcher paper and kept them in the cupboard. The stuffy, highceilinged rooms were filled with dark Oriental rugs, lamps with flame-shaped bulbs, heavy mahogany sideboards, and rose-colored tufted upholstery. Manya hid sachets of powdered viburnum in the wide walnut dressers. Zolly always liked to stand at the front of the first car when he took me by subway into Manhattan. In the morning we’d go to the Museum of Natural History, where we’d cruise luminous marble corridors filled with the osseous remains of saber-toothed tigers and iron-plated reptiles. A cathedral of bones, Zolly called it. I can remember him taking my picture with his old Polaroid Land camera as I stood in the pleated footprint of a woolly mammoth. Before leaving he’d fire questions at me, and if I answered them to his satisfaction we went straight to the gift shop, where he bought me fossil puzzles and stegosaurus piggy banks and pterodactyl mobiles. Tired and hungry after a few hours of walking and talking, we would go to the Horn & Hardart for lunch, or to a steamy dairy restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue where I always ordered latkes and tangy applesauce and watched the darkly dressed old Jews inhaling their cold borscht and eggplant and noodle farfel at crowded tables. It was my younger sister Delilah who phoned and told me that Zolly had died in his room while watching Hill Street Blues. I wondered aloud how he had felt the past week. “He sounded so-so last Sunday morning,” I said dolefully, as if that illuminated something. I heard Delilah’s breath catch. I was suddenly light-headed and felt a stabbing pain behind my eyes. “Lenny,” she asked gently, “are you still there?” “Why didn’t anyone call me last night?” I snapped at her. “Daddy phoned from the funeral home but your line was busy. Things were hectic; it must’ve slipped his mind.” I nodded tentatively, as if she could see me. I knew this had been coming, but that never made anything easier. “I’m thinking,” I finally said. “Was Zolly alone?” “I told you he was watching TV,” she said between coughs. She told me she had bronchitis. Her voice trailed away and I heard shouting in the background. My girlfriend Martha, curled naked and tanned in the water bed beside me, sighed. Her brassiere dangled from a hanging pot of African violets. “I’ll tell you something, Lenny,” Delilah said. “Don’t—tell me later.” I heard my stomach churn. “What are the arrangements?”

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She ignored me. “The blood flow to his brain had recently gotten worse. They think he might have died from a ruptured aneurysm. Some days he thought he was Eddie Cantor, then he had a spell doing David Dubinsky. He’d think he was at a Sacco and Vanzetti rally in Herald Square. He started walking through the house in the middle of the night, calling for Manya.” I pulled the quilt over Martha’s behind. Little gurgling noises were coming from her mouth. I could hear the traffic outside: the gears of plows and four-wheel-drive Jeeps, the horns and chains of passing cars and school buses. I peeked through the curtains; last night’s snow was powdery, like laundry suds. Then Leakey, my Great Dane, started barking to be let out. “How’s Dad doing?” “The way you’d expect, I guess. But it was a bummer for Bernice,” Delilah said. Bernice is our mother. “She found Zolly in his La-Z-Boy recliner when she went in to give him his pills.” The last time I saw Zolly was in LaGuardia Airport. It was getting on toward midnight and he couldn’t stop yawning. My father was on his knees undoing Zolly’s boots. On our way into the terminal, Zolly had slipped off the curb and freezing slush had filled his socks. His clawlike feet were the color of mackerel. My father reached a hand up and swept the damp, stringy hair from Zolly’s broad forehead. I massaged Zolly’s shoulders and teased, “You’ll be a new man soon, Papa.” He bowed beneath my hands. “Don’t humor me, Benny.” “It’s Lenny,” I said softly. “I’m right here, behind you.” He moved his head slowly from side to side. “Where the hell were you? Don’t hide from me next time.” My father turned to watch a poodle-haired stewardess in knee-high boots run past. “Hot stuff,” he said, rubbing his temples as if he had a headache. “Everyone’s in a big rush,” I said. “Lenny, you’ve got quite a pot on you. Would it hurt you to drop a few pounds? You need a heart condition at forty?” I touched my belly. “The doctor says I have a slow thyroid,” I said. He frowned. “Last year you said you were big-boned.” I crouched down and brushed mud off the cuffs of Zolly’s corduroy slacks, and he smiled, holding my hand in his for a moment. There were thin violet lines along his wrist, and his watery eyes burned with illness and decay. A black comb was sticking out of the breast pocket of his shirt. His gaze rested on my briefcase at his feet and he mouthed my name impressed into the burnished leather: “Leonard A. March.” My father squinted into the glare of a recessed light and gestured with his hands for me to say something. “Lenny, talk to him for God’s sake.”

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I touched Zolly’s thigh. “Are your legs cold, Papa?” He tilted his big head sideways and stroked his jaw. Spittle gleamed at the corners of his mouth. “I can’t tell anymore. My circulation is for the birds. Your father will explain how I sit in my pee since I can’t feel the wetness. I reminded myself last night that I’m going to give you a bit of money.” My father gripped my shoulder. “He wouldn’t be so sick if your grandmother had lived.” “He’s ninety-two, Dad,” I said. He squeezed the withered rabbit’s-foot key ring in his free hand. “It’s all been downhill since then. The guy used to be a goddamn powerhouse. He kept the most precise ledgers you’d ever want to see. Remember how he could swim in the ocean? Like a goddamn shark. Promise to shoot me if I get like this.” My father has an album of frayed sepia photographs of Zolly when he lived in Chicago that I’d thumbed through as a boy. They showed a young man riding the fierce Lake Michigan waves in the middle of the winter, his glossy black hair piled high on his head, alive in the brutal wind. When I was growing up, Zolly taught me how to swim in the gentle surf at Orchard Beach. Shmendricks swim in pools, he always told me; a mensch swims in the ocean. In the rest room, with his bathing trunks dropped to his ankles, he would clean the toilet seat with a single sheet of tissue paper. When I asked—as I always did—why he didn’t tear off more paper, he sighed like a man falling into a deep sleep and told me he was saving the city money. “I hate waste,” he’d say in a raw Slavic accent. At his bakery he copied phone orders with pencils sharpened down to their pink erasers. Zolly looked asleep, his head dropped to his chest. I checked the time on a digital clock suspended by wires above a treadmill and rowing machine on a revolving pedestal. A chinless man with soaking red hair and blue crescent earrings held out a folded sheet of paper and asked me for some spare change. It was a Jews for Jesus leaflet. I handed him a buck in dimes and quarters, and he gave me the peace sign. “Even at this hour,” my father said irritably, throwing his topcoat over his arm, “the shnorrers are earning a living.” “Why don’t you drive Zolly home and hit the sack?” I said. “He looks exhausted and this delay’ll probably take most of the night. I’ve got plenty of stuff to read.” He lifted the brim of his felt hat slightly and leaned close enough for me to smell cigar smoke on his breath. “Stay here,” he said directly into my ear, and left to see if my plane was still grounded in Pittsburgh due to the weather. Zolly stared at the baggage carousel and tapped his cane against the chrome base of a standing ashtray. It struck me that everything about him had dwindled. His once big hands were now starlike and matted with wiry gray hairs, and he had trouble catching his breath after walking short distances. Bending, my father told

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me, put a strain on his heart. A slim, spare woman with auburn curls sat down across from us and began humming “Memories” with her eyes closed. We could see the tops of her stockings when she crossed her legs. Zolly turned and winked at me. He clutched my wrist. “Where’ve you been hiding? I don’t care for being around strangers.” “I haven’t gone anywhere, Papa,” I said. “I’m right here.” I stooped beside him and tied his shoelaces. “And my Benny?” “He went to check on my flight.” “Again?” His breath smelled like boiled milk. “Again.” His face sagged. “With Benny everything’s an emergency. Did you have words?” “He lives to worry, Papa.” I kissed the top of his head. His cottony hair had thinned into the shape of a halo. The gray of his skull was visible beneath his skin. “Don’t give me a hard time,” I said, running my fingers over his hand. “I’m not his responsibility,” he said. His croupy breathing came in high, sharp wheezes. “You remember my cousin Milo? He lived in Chicago, near the stockyards, in a hole without a radiator. It gave me the whooping cough. I boarded with him when I first came over from Europe. Everything there stank like Poland.” With his heels drawn against each other, the taps on his wet saddle shoes scraped the concrete floor. Since Manya died fourteen years ago, he had hardly left the house. They were on a junket in the Bahamas—a sixtieth anniversary gift from their children—when she had a stroke. Zolly had been out of their stateroom since early morning, sunning himself and playing dominoes and three-card monte. When he went in to get Manya for the buffet lunch, he found her on top of the chenille bedspread, her lips having already turned blue. She’d been reading an Agatha Christie mystery, her finger poised to turn the page. She was airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in Nassau; then Zolly had insisted on hiring a nurse and chartering an executive Learjet and having her flown to Kennedy, so she could be treated by Jewish doctors. Manya was driven by private ambulance to Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, where she died from renal failure five days later. We buried her in an old cemetery a few miles from Crotona Park, in a family plot Zolly had purchased the day before they were married, and after the funeral he sat on a mourner’s stool in my parents’ house and stared out the kitchen window. He spoke to no one. I remember coming into the kitchen a few days after the funeral and asking him if he wanted company. He looked up at me and smiled sadly. His face was disbelieving and mottled, and his liquid eyes were wreathed with twisting hairs. I told him to eat something and I put water on to boil. I gave him a tangerine and watched him peel the rind in one long coil. When his tea was ready, he stirred two teaspoonfuls of sugar into

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his glass and tipped the tea into a saucer, sipping it through a lump of sugar wedged between his crooked yellow teeth. He traced the marbled grain of the wood in the maple breakfast table with his finger, and I remembered how he would stick that same finger inside my shirt collar and tickle my neck. The lines in his hands were like badly crumpled paper. When I turned to leave, he reached for me. “It’s all right if you want to stay, Lenny,” he said. “I like having you here.” I poured myself a glass of tea and sat down across from him. His eyes were restless in their milky, purple-veined sockets, and his fists were clenched. In profile, with his high, pointy cheekbones and his nose curled like a snail, he looked like I knew I would someday. People had always said our faces were exactly alike, Sephardic looking, troubled. Both Zolly and my father had ears like satellite dishes and palms as wide as saucers. When I was a child, I used to imagine that I could sleep in their hands. They were both six-two and swaybacked from years of braiding dough into challah and pumpernickel. The three of us had leathery complexions etched with fine, swordshaped fissures, coarse brown hair, and reddish-brown quill beards that stirred in a stiff breeze. The three Freuds, my ex called us. I cut him a slice of prune babka and we talked about the family. Zolly rarely reminisced about his childhood, and when he did he sounded angry. His father, a dairyman from a market town along the Dnieper, near Kiev, was mauled by a wild boar and died from rabies when Zolly was twelve years old, and he said he couldn’t remember much about him, except that he hardly ever spoke to him. “One time he told me about a pogrom, when the drunken Ukrainian peasants came with their dogs and whips and pitchforks and beat everyone with long sticks that had rusty nails in them. He said he hid with his baby sister in a boarded-up cellar filled with parsnips and mushrooms. His father lost an eye and his mother was violated by those pigs. Your great-grandfather was a hard man, Lenny, he didn’t even let me touch him. Kissing was for ninnies and mama’s boys. I hated him for that, and I still do. Can you imagine? All I’ve got left of him is the sound of his voice when he was hitting me with his strap. Nothing pleasant remains in my memory.” I felt suddenly bleak then—reminded of all the misunderstandings I’d had with my father, and the week-long silences which always ended in dubious truces orchestrated by Zolly, who told me to take back whatever I’d said if I didn’t want to suffer from a bad conscience later on, when I was a man. He rolled the band of his Longines wristwatch around his hand. I could almost hear him thinking about Manya. “Manya wouldn’t put up with your not eating and moping around,” I said. “I miss my wife already and it hasn’t even been a week,” he said, his voice cracking. “When I had a fever, she always made me marrow broth and apricot candy. Who’ll pick me out a decent tie to wear? Coming into her kitchen was like getting a hug.”

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He was constipated for weeks at a time, his grief settling in his colon. He relieved himself with stewed rhubarb and soap-water enemas. Finally he moved into my parents’ house, and spent his days listening to his Edith Piaf and Mario Lanza albums, his nose buried in the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s, or he languished in front of the Zenith, eating Swanson’s TV dinners and watching crime shows and Sixty Minutes. My father returned and cursed the airline. “We made the trip for nothing,” he said. He told me the plane wouldn’t be leaving Pittsburgh for at least another hour. I managed to convince him to head back home, and at the boarding gate he engulfed Zolly and me in his arms. I was distracted by a commotion over someone’s backpack that had set off the metal detector. I exhaled forcefully and turned to look out the tall arched window. All I could see was the blur of snow blowing across the sulfur beams of the runway. With my face slightly averted, both of them pressed against me, straining to kiss my cheeks, a plane taxied into view, letting in a blast of light. In the shadows of the smoked glass I was wearing what my ex called my haunted look. If someone had taken our picture, we’d have been caught—our smiles vaguely ethereal—in a pose of abject rigidity. I heard Zolly make a noise like a purr, and felt my father’s big warm hand around my back, squeezing my shoulders.

I phoned Northwestern and told the chairman of my department that I was going home for my grandfather’s funeral. While I packed, Martha picked up some dress shirts for me at the dry cleaners. At noon she drove me to O’Hare, where I waited almost three hours for my connecting flight out of Seattle in a noisy snack bar with a spectacular view of the runways. It snowed all during my trip. From the airport limo, my parents’ L-shaped house, nestled in a web of barren hawthorns and willows, appeared tranquil. A yortzeit candle burned in a glass on the screened-in porch. I paid the fare and tipped the scowling chauffeur—he’d ranted at other drivers and wore a plaid tablecloth on his head like Arafat. Delilah’s old Dodge Dart was parked in front of the fire hydrant across the street. Two boys in hiking boots and high-school varsity jackets were shoveling snow out of the driveway. The shovels made dull scraping sounds when they hit pavement. I nodded at the kids and the taller one gave me a thumbs-up gesture as I slipped and caught myself before falling on the flagstone footpath. It was as slick as a luge track. “What’s happening, man?” the shorter one shouted. My stomach was queasy from all the coffee I’d had on the plane. I took a few deep breaths and knocked. Bruce Zellner, my older sister Sylvia’s husband, opened the door and peered at me as if he couldn’t place my face. “Remember me, Zell?” I said.

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As soon as I stepped in the doorway my glasses fogged up. I fingered the silver wire of the frames as I wiped the lenses on a handkerchief. After I resettled them, I offered Zell my hand. He arched his back and made a clucking sound. Bruce was a head-and-neck surgeon with a thriving Westchester practice. He was one of those humorless fitness fanatics who always gave the impression that you were fortunate to be in their presence. Beneath a slate-blue blazer, his oxford shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, and a mezuzah, coiled in a patch of graying hair, dangled from a gold chain. His brass belt buckle looked like something that would go over the head of a horse. “Hey, buddy,” he said, pumping my hand. “Condolences.” “Thanks.” Before letting go of his hand I glanced at his knuckles; the horny joints looked as rutted as screws. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Len, you look pretty heavy. I know, you have no time for exercise and eat too much junk food. Am I right or am I right?” I left him standing there waiting for an answer. In the kitchen my mother was humming “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” as she shelled Brazil nuts over the sink. A lazy Susan filled with sour cream and chives, horseradish, and nubs of gefilte fish on colored toothpicks was on the butcher block table along with some half-filled bottles of Manischewitz. She stepped on the pedal of the garbage pail and groaned, seeing my damp pants and shoes. “Leonard, darling,” she said, waving. I tried to kiss her. “Don’t!” she yelled, covering her mouth. “You’ll catch my strep throat. We have an epidemic in Mamaroneck. How do you like this crazy weather? Trust me, we’ll have snow for Pesach.” I was startled at how pale she was—her skin looked as colorless as fluorescent light. She had freckled bags under her eyes and her minklike hair was brushed into a crooked part down the center of her scalp. It seemed to me that her washed-out gray eyes had moved closer together. Her nails were longer than a stripper’s. “Delilah said you found him. That must’ve been awful.” “I can’t get over it. It was like not having any air to breathe.” She reached up and smoothed my collar. “I called 911, but it didn’t matter. The poor thing was already among the dead when the paramedics came running in. It was a difficult few months; you cannot imagine how he had changed. Now, maybe your father and I can get some sleep. Come then, let’s find him. You know what a worrier he is. He’s probably convinced some terrorist’s hijacked your plane.” Everyone was downstairs in the finished rec room. Standing clumsily in the doorway, I felt like a piece of furniture. Delilah, in designer paratrooper clothes and turquoise aviator glasses, crouched by the ancient Betamax, flipping through tapes. She blew me a kiss. I worked my way through the family and neighbors, accepting their sympathies, dodging questions about my job and social life. My father was sitting on the black Naugahyde love seat with Sylvia, a magazine rolled in his hand. She

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was opening a pack of Salems. A hoop of blow-dried hair fell into her eyes when she reached for a lighter on the petrified-wood coffee table. She held the cigarette as if it were a joint. “What can I tell you, Lenny?” my father said, his voice rising. “When Zolly stopped eating smelts and herring two years ago, I could read the handwriting on the wall perfectly.” “You could?” I said. “Of course he could,” Sylvia insisted. He nodded at us, remembering the past two years. Steam from the kitchen had descended the stairs and spread like a soggy blanket over the crowded room. Heat rose from the ducts on the carpeted floor. A trio of men in herringbone overcoats came down the stairs. Each of them carried a pot of poinsettias on a plastic tray. My mother was making shame-shame with her fingers to a woman in a frosted hairdo with faint blue streaks flowing from the center of it. My father went to greet the men bringing in the plants. I motioned for Sylvia to stand up. “Where’re the twins?” I asked, putting my arms around her. She had always been a knockout, the most popular girl in her class from grammar school on. She’d lost weight since I’d last seen her, and small wrinkles, almost like embossed coins, had erupted at the corners of her mouth and eyes. “They’re spending an extended spring break in Delray Beach—at Bruce’s parents’ condo,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “They don’t need this at ten years old.” I glanced sideways at the bay window; the snow had stopped and the bottom of the sky was dimpled by the rising moon. People plodded across the front yard. “I miss him,” I said. She muffled a cough. “I’ve forgotten him. I mean, how often did we have anything to say to each other? He paid no attention to Delilah or me; you were the only one who was special to him. I don’t think he said more than hello and goodbye to me since I went away to college. He acted like he was on Valium.” “Don’t sound so bummed out, Syl,” I said derisively. “I’m the only one who had any time for him. I shared things with him. You and Delilah were always off somewhere.” Her eyebrows lifted. “Just be thankful he wasn’t leashed to some fucking machine for another year,” she said. “Or being fed through a gastric tube. That would have freaked you and Daddy out for good. I know you’d love for me to go through the motions of grief, but I deal with this kind of family crap all the time.” “My, my,” I said. “Haven’t we gotten terribly cynical in middle age?” She laughed, her eyes glinting, and kissed my lips. “Can you blame me? Oh, don’t be so serious, Lenny. By the way, speaking of family crap, have you heard from what’s-her-name?” “I bump into her at the library occasionally. She’s engaged to an orthodontist from Highland Park.”

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“I never warmed up to her,” Sylvia said, her shoulders slumping. She ran her fingers through her curls. “Zolly said she was some hot dish; he called her your tootsie. Jesus—I can remember when he used to call me a floozy. He said her knockers could drive a man crazy. All your babes turned him on.” An old woman came over and seized my hand. “Aunt Frieda?” She gave me the once-over and turned to Sylvia. “How do you like that? He doesn’t even recognize me.” She pinched my cheek and asked her, “Did you ever see such a handsome face?” Sylvia shook her head no, and Frieda waddled off. When Sylvia went to get a drink, I maneuvered myself through the milling relatives, making my way to Aunt Goldie, my father’s sister, who was sprawled on the corduroy chesterfield with the scroll-like arms and the lavender doilies fastened to its back. Her pink-fringed slip showed over her bruised knees, and her feet were wrapped in Ace bandages. She was holding a magnifying glass and fanning herself with Zolly’s obituary. My parents stepped behind me like a team of mountain climbers. “How’re you feeling, Goldie?” Her neck looked swollen. “Don’t ask, boychik,” she shouted in a tinny voice. “Goldie takes what, Ben,” my mother asked, “ten medicines a day?” “At least ten,” he said, counting with his blunt fingers. I followed my father’s back as it disappeared into a crowd of relatives. Cousin Helen, Goldie’s daughter, waved at me from the wet bar. Helen had once been a shapely woman. Now her legs were as thick as logs and clusters of veins ran in her shins like Roman numerals. Jed, Helen’s husband, blocked my father’s path. They squared off for a moment as if they were going to spar, then embraced. Jed had a flowing beard like Moses and could’ve passed for a biker. My mother and Goldie started talking about me as if I weren’t there. “Zolly used to take Lenny to the history museum and Hayden Planetarium,” Goldie said. “They loved going on the rides.” “The museum’s not the same as Coney Island,” I said. “How Lenny used to love his pot roast and kasha,” she said, ignoring me. “Just like my father. He was such a bashful man.” “Are you starting to cry?” my mother asked, searching Goldie’s puffy face. “Yes,” Goldie said. “I mean no. I cried plenty already.” “Please, Goldie. Don’t start up again. And for your information, my Leonard was a picky eater. Helen was the decent eater.” “But Zolly,” Goldie said proudly, her hair wild with grief, “may he rest in peace, was a wonderful eater. What a loss.” At my back I heard ice cubes rattling and fierce breathing. “Guess who?” my father thundered. He handed me a glass of cream soda.

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Sitting in a wheelchair was my Uncle Mickey, Zolly’s youngest brother. His legs were bundled in a woolen afghan and his hands were twisted in his lap like frozen mittens. On his swollen feet were penny loafers cut open near the front for his gout. He was wearing tiny earphones plugged into a Sony Walkman. “Say hello,” my father said, jingling change in his pocket. “I don’t need coaching,” I said. “Mickey,” my father yelled, “it’s your nephew.” He squatted down and pulled Mickey’s torso around in the wheelchair. Then he yanked the earphones out of his ears and I heard Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are.” Mickey looked baffled. I kneeled down and kissed his cheek; his breath reeked of smoked fish. He touched my wrist with trembling fingers and grinned; there were shreds of pipe tobacco on his blackened molars. “My brother wasn’t active in the shul, but he was a regular person, a good mixer. He never missed Gunsmoke.” “Mickey,” Goldie shouted, waving her cane in his face. “My rheumatism is killing me today.” My father whispered in my ear, “You look bushed. Go take a shower and unwind.” “I’d just like to talk,” I said wearily. “In private.” He blinked and poked my chest with his index finger. “After twenty years you’re in a hurry to talk? After supper we’ll go see Zolly and then we’ll talk, just you and me. Okay?” After showering and shaving and staring at the cracked fossil posters still tacked to the wall above my old desk and built-in bookcase, I lay on the hooked rug and meditated in the dark. After only a few minutes my metrical breathing grew shallow as my ex’s naked behind impinged upon my centering exercises. I recalled my yogi’s guidance on how to focus a wandering consciousness and tried to project myself onto a deserted Alaskan glacier. I wanted to masturbate but was terrified one of my aunts would blunder into my room in search of a toilet. When I told Zolly I was going to major in paleontology—I was a sophomore at Washington University—I felt sure he would be delighted. Instead, he started calling me one of the Luftmenschen—men who talk in the air, who don’t have their feet planted firmly on the ground. It turned out, much to my surprise, that he had always wanted me to go into business with him and my father, or if that wasn’t my cup of tea to at least become a doctor or a lawyer and make a good living. He seemed disheartened when I told him what my academic advisor had told me: that studying the past was, in the purest sense, an effort to uncover something lost in ourselves, a chance to literally walk in the footprints of all our ancestors. “Another one lost in the clouds,” Zolly said, shaking his head. “I thought I had already taught you that a Jew without a lot of history isn’t a Jew worth knowing. Now it’s time to behave like a grown man.” He

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left phone messages for me in my dorm requesting that the “Luftmensch” call back at his convenience. When he and Manya went on vacation—to Las Vegas, to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to Miami Beach every February, to Israel in 1973 (I was doing graduate work in Minneapolis by then), a few weeks after the Yom Kippur War—he addressed letters and postcards from Yad Vashem and Masada and the Eden Roc Hotel to the “Luftmensch,” care of my department. When I grew to lament a working life spent ruminating about the black hole of extinction, he had no easy advice to give me, and said that loss was what life was all about. It had pained him when my ex and I split up. He told me he thought she was a girl who seemed fairly crazy about herself, and that he liked immodesty in a woman. She was built like Cher, with glowing copper hair and large calico eyes primed to soar out of her face. She taught Russian and mail-ordered her clothes from an L.A. boutique. It blew me away when I found out that he’d been sending her perfume and flowers and plants—My Sin and black-eyed Susans and droopy philodendrons—every few weeks after we’d started dating. Around her he was vain, like a boy flexing his muscles. He taught her pinochle and casino and warned her about the diseases carried in nonkosher foods, in shellfish and pork. She was charmed by what she called his Old World manners. He flattered her, and she flirted with him, feeding on his admiration. My ex moved out of our lakefront townhouse two springs ago. I was on my way to a conference at the Smithsonian, and she was helping me pack. We were in the laundry room, folding underwear and rolling socks, when she suddenly announced that she felt trapped by my needs, sealed in coarse sand like one of my fossilized Gobi Desert lizards, petrified skeletons so small they could fit in your hand. She sounded furious when she told me how intense I was, and how bullied that had made her feel. She said I needed to be more laid-back, that I wasn’t a fair listener. When I reminded her of how she’d come home from departmental meetings so wired and bloated that only a belt of Maalox and a Xanax could calm her down, she broke down in sobs and had a migraine that lasted for the next two days. Finally, I was able to persuade her to see a marriage counselor, but the one she chose—a fish-eyed, cigarillo-smoking social worker whose campus office was filled with jazzy punk-art magazines and fluffy Amish pillows—traded snide, confidential-feminist lingo with her. She used the words “lifestyle” and” gendered” and “personality disorder” in every sentence. When my ex told her there was something wanting in me—that I spent more time thinking about the pathological conditions in long-extinct organisms than I spent thinking about her— the therapist concluded that I was paranoid and phobic because I was more interested in dead things than living ones. Still, it was her clinical opinion that couples who split up needed closure, and they could find that by remaining caring friends. When I told Martha that, she couldn’t stop laughing. The day I got tenure, my ex and I went out

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to dinner at her favorite Indian restaurant, and when I awoke the next morning with heartburn and the runs, she was gone. Zolly appeared at my door one evening about a week later—less than twelve hours after I’d told him over the phone that my wife and I had separated. He’d flown to Chicago without telling anyone, in order to find out firsthand what had happened to my marriage. “Just like that?” he said, when I told him she had left without even leaving me a note. “On the spur of the moment? What’s wrong with her?” “Why the hell not? She’s a very contemporary woman.” “What did your parents say?” he asked gravely. I lowered my voice. “I haven’t told them yet.” “Be calm, these things work out. Lousy times are to be expected in any marriage. You need to find a rabbi to talk to.” “A rabbi? Please—don’t make me laugh.” He hesitated. “What do you want from life, Lenny?” “Nothing,” I said, miserable. “Then I’m not surprised this happened.” To save face, I suddenly invented another man. He grabbed my shoulder. “Were you mean to her? I pray to God you don’t have any problems pulling your weight in the bedroom?” I shook my head. “Christ—if anything, she liked a little rough stuff. She just said she needed space, that she wanted to meet new people. She said we were getting boring.” He looked glum. “Boring? This is eppes some explanation! So she makes like a tomboy and monkeys around with a different fella? You weren’t two-timing her, were you? I told you a husband can’t ride two horses with one behind.” “That goes without saying,” I said, suddenly dismayed that I hadn’t cheated on her. “Lenny—I wish you would have had children.” “Knock it off, okay? Are you trying to make me feel worse?” “Your father would know what I’m driving at. We want to pass things down to another generation—I don’t know, wisdom, tricks, even money if we’re lucky enough to have saved some.” “There are certain things you just have to accept, Zolly. Thank God she hadn’t wanted any children yet. Imagine the headache that would have created.” “Well, it makes me feel terrible that you don’t have your own family. I don’t get it. I wish she would explain it to me.” “More than likely she would, but please don’t ask her to.” “I taught you to never leave a mess, didn’t I?” I shrugged pitiably.

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Zolly stayed in Chicago for a week. He paced around the house for couple of days, drinking Lipton’s tea and reading the draft of a paper on the eohippus—a fossil horse from the early Eocene epoch—I was planning to deliver at the Field Museum. I used some free passes I had won in a departmental Super Bowl pool and took him to a Bulls game on Sunday afternoon. He polished off a couple of Polish sausages and slept soundly during the entire second half and overtime. For weeks I’d had reservations at the Cape Cod Room of the Drake Hotel for my ex-wife’s thirty-seventh birthday. The night before he left, we went there for dinner. Zolly wasn’t all that impressed with the service. Our waiter, a fussy young man in a dark maroon jacket, looked steamed when Zolly asked him if the shrimp cocktail and turbot were fresh. Afterward, we saw Dustin Hoffman in a revival of Death of a Salesman at the Goodman Theatre with the tickets I’d bought to surprise my ex. Zolly kept whispering to me in the theater that guys like Willy Loman were shnooks who got exactly what was coming to them.

When I came downstairs, it was past seven and an argument had erupted between Uncle Micah, my mother’s younger brother, and Uncle Serge, my father’s older brother, a blowhard in a waxed flattop who had a nose and mouth shaped like wire pliers. After a few minutes, everyone jumped into the debate, citing newspaper and magazine articles they’d seen or heard about, quoting the opinions of celebrated professors and pundits remembered from Meet the Press and Face the Nation and MacNeil/ Lehrer. Before I sat down, Serge demanded to know if I sympathized with the PLO. I told him I thought the West Bank dilemma was hopeless, but that the diplomats were working night and day on it. “Working on it, my ass. You’re an educated man, and that’s all you got to contribute on the subject?” I nodded feebly. “They hate the Israelis in Washington,” he shouted. “And the news guys, they’re even worse. A bunch of self-hating Jews like that Robert Novak character.” “Don’t holler so much, Serge,” my father said. “Nobody in their right mind wants another war in the Middle East.” “Ha! The goddamn State Department is pure Ivy League. You think those Yalies want us in their country clubs eating whitefish and bialys? The crazy Arabs won’t be happy until they throw every last one of us into the sea. Even Zolly knew that.” “Serge—are you speaking for the Arabs now, too?” Uncle Micah said. “Or for yourself?” My mother had had enough food catered to feed a dozen grieving families: slabs of brisket and breasts of veal, casseroles of potato kugel and stuffed derma, side

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dishes of wax beans and sauerkraut. Sylvia and Bruce had left to go see a movie in town. A place had been reserved for me between Delilah and Ginger, her new boyfriend. Ginger worked in a drug-rehab center and wore a three-piece suit and a braided ponytail. I smiled and looked down. Circles of fat swam in the sour red-cabbage soup. “Can someone pass me the salt?” I said. “Salt,” Goldie cried, “is bad for your blood pressure. It ruins whatever decent metabolism you got.” “What isn’t bad for you nowadays?” my mother asked. “Are you aware, Lenny,” Goldie bellowed, “that your Zolly was the first man in his line to hire colored people? All the shvartzers loved him.” “Papa took nothing for granted,” my father said. “He thought of the future. He was a pioneer in his business.” “He should be in the World Book, if you ask me,” Cousin Milo said. Milo had flown in from Chicago only a few hours before I had. “What a story,” Serge said. “You make him sound like Albert Schweitzer. He was loaded, he could afford to be a big shot.” “He struggled and worked his tochis off,” my father said, pointing his finger at Serge. “Show some respect for a change.” “He was too good for this world,” Goldie said, sobbing. Uncle Mickey smacked his lips over a bowl of shtchav. He made noises in his throat like a dog coughing up a bone. “I’m not bad, but my brother was some pincher,” Aunt Frieda said, showing everyone her thick hand. “He had strong fingers like a kosher butcher.” “I had a little clothing store on the corner of Hoe Avenue and East 173rd Street,” Uncle Moe, Goldie’s husband, said. He was smearing white horseradish on a slice of challah. Moe was shaped like a cello—he had an enormous behind and a thin neck. His fuzzy eyebrows were like caterpillars. “I knew just how to take in Zolly’s pants, how he liked his cuffs should fall. He hated too much starch in his shirts. It gave him a rash under the arms. All the time we lived with him and Manya he never raised the rent on us. Never even a dime. And he was quite famous for being a heavy tipper at the big Chinese restaurant on Southern Boulevard. The Chinamen all called him Mr. Zolly.” Serge dropped his knife and fork and laughed. “Spare me.” “Please—enough already, Serge,” my father said. Serge’s face and crown glistened with sweat; his fingers were laced across his big stomach. “Don’t boss me around, Benny. You forget I’m your older brother.” “You just don’t want to hear any of this,” my father said. “Honey, tell them how handy Zolly was with a screwdriver,” Goldie said to Uncle Moe. Serge threw his napkin on his plate and left the table.

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“Serge—I wouldn’t trust that louse with a crummy nickel,” Leo Epstein said. He was Mickey’s brother-in-law, my deceased Aunt Ida’s brother. “Gussie, you went and married a real momzer.” Leo’s cataracts looked like panes of frosted window-glass. “Ben,” my mother said gently, “go say something to your brother.” “Say what? I don’t have to tolerate such foolishness from him. For more than fifty years, he’s resented his father and me and Goldie. The hell with him.” Aunt Gussie leaned over her plate and waved her hand at my mother. “Bernice— must I tell you that with Serge everything’s a production?” “People are people, darling,” Moe said. “Nothing adds up.” “I’m tired of being the one in the middle of everything,” my father said, glowering at everyone. He told my mother he had no room for cake and ice cream, and asked her to save him some rugelach. “I’m taking Lenny for a ride,” he said, tossing me my parka, and we started for the door. Once outside, my father put on a pair of black earmuffs. I turned around to look at him, but his face had disappeared into the collar of his dove-gray topcoat. He made harsh grunting noises behind me and slipped on the ice. Rock music—“Born in the U.S.A.”—blared from down the street. He pointed to the garage. “Let’s take the Bonneville,” he said. “The heater doesn’t work so well anymore in the Cutlass. Here, take these. You drive for a change.” He handed me his rabbit’s-foot key ring. The funeral home was a three-story, umbrella-shaped building linked by tunnels to a limestone pavilion full of tubbed bonsai trees and glaring cobalt floodlights. Con Edison repair crews were digging in the Boston Post Road; twisted cable lay everywhere. The neighborhood around Besser’s had changed in the past few years. All the residential side streets were named after poets. Goldlake’s Delicatessen was gone, as were the Rexall Drugstore and Robard’s soda fountain. Driving there we passed the House of Tahiti, a pagoda-shaped Polynesian restaurant on the site of the demolished Knights of Pythias lodge. Flanking the mortuary was a Century 21 franchise and a Subaru-Isuzu dealership. I backed the car into a diagonal space between an El Dorado and a hearse with lace curtains on its windows. My father went around it to the trunk and checked the bumper and tailpipes. He pulled his gloves off with his teeth and kicked snow off the tires. “I didn’t hit anything,” I said, “I hardly recognize the place.” He stood up. “Mamaroneck’s a regular city now; you can’t expect to see it all in one trip.” His face glowed in the jagged beams of the floodlights; his collar was spiky with snow. Down the street a neon sign flashed the time and temperature from the wall of a Pier 1. “Zolly called this the Jewish section of town since he got his lox and sable at Goldlake’s.” Inside, my father scribbled our names in a spiral ledger open on a rosewood secretary, as if we were visitors instead of immediate family. The place was decorated in

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solid shades of brown and gold, and smelled of soggy cigars and cologne. The odor of wilted flowers lingered in the air. “Flowers in a Jewish funeral home?” I said. He shook his head. “Nothing’s the same anymore.” We threaded our way through several dozen mourners grouped around a silver coffin and a wailing family. We passed three gray-faced men in overcoats talking casually in front of a room filled with caskets, as if they were merely browsing. A barrelchested man wearing soft shoes and a knitted yarmulke appeared out of a stairwell and directed us to an elevator whose walls were lined with velvet drapes. “Sunrise, Sunset” funneled through the concealed speakers. Zolly’s coffin was beneath three chandeliers dangling from parallel crossbeams. It was moored like a kayak on stilts. My father walked over to the heating vent and waved his hand in front of it, making sure that warm air was coming out. I drummed my fingers on the coffin lid. “Do you mind if I open it for a minute?” He took a deep breath. “Serge was out of town yesterday when I bought the coffin. I know he’ll make a stink about it. He’s not happy unless he makes a federal case out of everything.” “Screw Serge,” I said. “He’s not the Gestapo.” He shook his head. I opened the coffin. Zolly’s head lay on a light-blue pillow. He was closely shaved, and his face was powdered pink. His hands were dry and chalky; there was a speck of dirt beneath his left thumbnail. On one arthritic finger, almost smothered in hair, was his wedding ring. He had on his tortoiseshell wire-rim bifocals and was dressed in his royal-blue sharkskin suit, black suspenders, and the nut-brown tie dotted with tiny gold seahorses that I’d bought him for his birthday many years before. I leaned down to kiss his cheek; it was cold. “Christ. Sometimes I wish it was thirty years ago,” I said, looking over my shoulder at my father. “It won’t ever be thirty years ago, Lenny.” “I just wanted you to know how I was feeling.” He nodded. “And besides, what makes you think it was such a picnic then? You were a kid, what did you know? Your life is someplace else now, but we’ve all had a lot of time to get used to Papa’s death, watching him waste away on us the past year or so. He’d sit around in front of the TV and drift. He hated his useless body, Lenny. He had the works: kidney and prostate trouble, bleeding colitis, even a bum ticker. It’s funny, but I would have figured him for a killer stroke, or the big C. Someone dying of old age can put a family through the wringer, take my word on it. I only thank God he didn’t have a bad case of Alzheimer’s on top of everything else. I feel terribly responsible for some reason, like I should’ve done something.” “You shouldn’t blame yourself,” I said, closing the coffin. “You were a good son. Take my word on that.”

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He made a sour face. “It’ll be a relief when we get him in the ground tomorrow.” “I read the will before dinner,” I said. “It surprised me.” He sat down on the mourner’s bench and pressed his fists against the padded cushion as if to propel himself. He leaned toward me a little. “Can I ask you what you’re going to do with all your loot? First—follow my advice and find somebody you can trust. Those investment guys can take you to the cleaners.” “What loot?” He smiled and scratched at a mole beneath his eye. “What loot?” he said mordantly. “How come everything’s a question with you? Papa left his entire estate to you, including his portion of the business. We’re full partners now. I want your honest input, Lenny. I’m seriously thinking of merging with another line of bakeries. I’ve already fielded serious offers. We’ll be a chain, like McDonald’s.” I was flustered. “You must be kidding? I mean, the will simply said I got whatever he owned, and I just assumed he had a few dollars stowed away and maybe some life insurance. I thought you automatically got his share of the company. I’ll write it over to you—it’s all yours as far as I’m concerned. All I heard growing up was how you two busted your rear ends for years and barely managed to break even. How the overhead was crushing and the profits went into machinery; medical insurance, and the pension plan. Jesus—is there anything else I should know?” He flushed and ran his hands through his hair. “I make no bones about it, Lenny. I worked like a bloody horse, six days a week, sometimes sixteen hours a day. Not like some men I know with soft jobs and big paychecks. Most people break their asses for nothing all their lives. We’re not a wealthy family, but I’m not ashamed of being comfortable. I’ve earned it.” I could see snowflakes swirling into the parking lot. For a moment I wondered if he thought I was ashamed of him. He went over to the window. The moonlight shone through the slatted blinds and lay in curved stripes across his chest. I suddenly felt anxious, as if I were on display, and had a crazy notion that Zolly was watching my reaction from inside the coffin, through a one-way mirror, like the kind they have in police shows. He pivoted about gracefully. “I’m sure you remember Zelig Fuchs, Papa’s cousin? He lived in Mount Vernon when you were a boy.” I nodded. “The fat cop? He’s the one who had all those Dalmatians running around his backyard. He must be a hundred years old by now.” “Close, Lenny. Zelig’s way up in his nineties. He’s a filthy-rich ex-cop now, he lives like a sheik on a golf course in Boca Raton. He was a homicide detective, a powerful lieutenant with serious connections. We used to call him a fixer. Papa’s business—the small bakery on Tremont Avenue he ran with Mickey—was going under, and with Zelig’s influence he was able to get a big loan when the banks turned him down.

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Certain agreements had been made. He welcomed this opportunity, Lenny; he was ready to take advantage of a chance to get ahead of the game. In those days nobody could afford to be idealistic. You do a shmear to get a shmear. When Papa had some trouble paying back the vigorish, he drove a truck for Zelig’s friends and smuggled whiskey and molasses in from Quebec.” “What’s the score?” I said. “How much are we talking about?” He held his arms out. “A nice bundle, kid. Six figures, never mind the business, plus some beachfront property in Miami Beach and a thick pile of Israeli bonds.” “This is great,” I said. “The family will think we rooked them out of Zolly’s money. Who else knows about this?” He made a harsh, throat-clearing noise. “Don’t worry, Serge always talks like he’s piss-poor; he’ll sic his army of fancy ambulance chasers on us. There’s no way that bastard won’t contest the will.” I closed my eyes for a moment and felt my heart knocking about like a cornered bird inside my chest. My hands were clammy, and I was afraid I was on the verge of an anxiety attack. “I can’t deal with this,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “My grandfather in Dutch with the shylocks, running errands for bootleggers and crooked cops. It’s unbelievable.” “Believe it,” he mumbled, dropping his eyes. “Why was I kept in the dark about all this? Didn’t you try to convince him that his will would cause trouble between you and Serge?” He was looking off into space; his flannel shirt was stained with perspiration. “C’mon—what’s done is done; it’s all in the past now. Papa doesn’t need me defending him. He was a generous man and it was fortunate he had something for us to fall back on. Be proud of him, Lenny; what matters most is how much he loved you. There are things in our life—mine and Zolly’s—that are none of your business. Why do you want to open old wounds?” The skin on my skull was so tight I had trouble blinking. “Because I want to know the whole truth, that’s why,” I said. He squinched his face and patted the air between us. “The whole truth, is it?” he said nervously. “Well, there are two reasons why I didn’t mind that he left everything to you. First, for starters, there’s no law against it. And second, it made him happy, it’s what he wanted. Serge can go to hell as far as I’m concerned. As for Zolly’s days smuggling booze and running with racketeers, he wished that part of his life be kept a secret. Despite what you may think, he was a tyrant, and he treated your grandmother like she was his maid. He always wanted his way, and no matter how much money he made, it was never enough to make him feel secure. For sixty years he acted like he couldn’t afford a shoeshine. All his life Zolly griped that the competition was breathing down his neck, trying to knock him out of business. He had a closed mind and was

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always climbing all over my back. He smothered me, and for a long time I hated him. You always put him on a pedestal, and he adored you for it. It’s taken me a lifetime and many disappointments to realize that fathers are not above the weaknesses of their children.” He paused to blow his nose into a monogrammed handkerchief. I went over to the window and watched a pair of crows bathe themselves in the snow on a burled telephone pole. He started talking again, this time in a measured, subdued tone—about the risks Zolly had shouldered in order for our family to grow and prosper—and I couldn’t shake the feeling that my father wished he were talking about me, as if I were the one who had died and left behind a past richer and more daring than the timid and ordinary life I had always led. “We’re driving Papa to the cemetery tomorrow,” he said. “A rabbi’s going to say Kaddish over him. I want you to join us at the shul first.” “What for?” I said. “The last time Zolly went to temple was for Delilah’s Bas Mitzvah. He used to tell me that the God of Abraham and Isaac was like a blind umpire calling balls and strikes.” “Grow up,” he said, his voice lowering. “You know nothing of the world’s compassion. Everything is so belittled in your way of looking at things. You’re not doing this for Papa, but for me.” “I can’t—it’s a sham,” I said. “It wouldn’t feel right.” “You were always such a bad sport,” he said, a shadow of disgust crossing his face. “I blame my father for that.” On the way out of the funeral home, he told me I should look at the pile of clothes Zolly had left. When a blast of cold air hit me, I panicked and stumbled; something hard melted in my will. I felt like a little boy, the snow frigid against my pants. He helped me up and whistled slowly, checking my face for bruises. I told him in a shaky voice that I would accept his judgment on all matters relating to the burial and Zolly’s estate. He put his arm around my hips and squeezed. He began removing snow from the windshield with his bare hands. I started the engine and put the defroster on; then I got the ice scrapers out from under the front passenger seat. “Don’t knock yourself out,” I shouted. “I’ll do that.” A light fringe of snow lay like a tallis on the shoulders of his coat; white steam puffed from his mouth. “Put that thing down,” he said, “and look at the stars.” An icy wind bored into my face. “It’s freezing, Dad.” “I know. But tell me, Lenny. What do you see?” I blew on my hands and studied the murky sky. “It’s pretty cloudy. There’s the Big Dipper, I guess. Is that Venus or Jupiter?” He threw his arms up in a pleading gesture, his palms cupped, grasping at the falling snow. “Nah, nah,” he said impatiently. “I mean—what do you see?”

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I braced myself for his pained look. “I give up. Tell me.” He pressed his hands against my ribs and tucked me under his arm. “A wonderful mystery,” he whispered, pinching my cheek between his thumb and pinkie like he’d done when I was a boy. We buried Zolly next to my grandmother in a Bronx cemetery surrounded by a wilderness of empty warehouses and vacant lots. It was almost noon before we arrived, a convoy of flatbed trailers bearing Army field artillery having slowed traffic down on the Hutchinson River Parkway to a crawl. It had snowed during the night, and the rock salt crackled under our boots as we picked our way along the pathways to their plot. The misty air tingled with the bite of winter. Two gravediggers sat on the hood of a dump truck, leafing through a Penthouse. The interment lasted no time at all. Outlined in a circle against the tinted bronze light, the rabbi, an arthritis sufferer with a wreath of red hair—who glided across the snow-washed ground with metal sticks, as if he were cross-country skiing—led us in the mourner’s prayer, and then my father, with rime forming on his goatee and a blank expression on his pale, oval face, asked if anyone wanted to say anything. Uncle Micah choked back tears and told everyone that Zolly took people as he found them, and in his opinion that was a marvelous quality to have had. Uncle Micah’s eyes, cloudy through his thick glasses, were bathed in clear liquid. I felt dazed, my knees buckled slightly, and for a few seconds I wanted to yield to my anxiety and flee. To keep my balance, I focused on the speckled granite and cutstone tablets, their wind-bleached Hebrew letters like brittle bones. The women were wrapped in furs and shawls, the men in black skullcaps and leather-palmed driving gloves, camel’s hair and navy overcoats ballooning behind them. Moving forward in slow, plodding steps, delicately placing pebbles on the casket, the mourners were like figures in a snowy paperweight. The following morning I watched the silent snowflakes settle against the skeletal trees. Defying the weather, a few of the branches were alive with buds. My face, reflected in the small, rain-streaked glass, seemed to float above the house. In the windows, what appeared to be tears on my cheeks were merely beads of snow. I climbed stiffly out of bed and went across the darkened landing. I stood at the edge of Zolly’s room, staring at his bed, and saw my fingernail scratches of thirty-five years ago on the walnut headboard. I entered on tiptoe and peered into the walk-in closet; it smelled of talcum and mothballs. Dead flies were handing in a spider web from the ceiling, and paint was flaking off the walls. On the floor, besides his beach thongs and Weejuns, were some of Manya’s hatboxes, a copper samovar, a can of Butcher’s wax, a beauty-parlor hair dryer, a bundle of racetrack tout sheet, and a stack of paint-by-number dinosaurs I’d

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done as a child. A pair of his false teeth floated in a glass of baking soda on a nightstand next to his bed. I stripped off my pajamas and stared at myself in the full-length mirror nailed to the back of the bedroom door. I looked blabby and battered, with a maze of violet stretch marks across my thickened hips and belly, patches of psoriasis, like frost, on my elbows and knees. Zolly’s smudged fingerprints on the glass were like splintered fossils petrified in quartz. I changed into one of Zolly’s long-sleeved white shirts, the collar stiff as bone, and found a paisley silk necktie and a pair of woolen argyle socks in the cedar bureau with the cut-glass knobs. From a shelf below his trousers and belts, I took a pair of oxblood wing tips. Next came the suit, a bested blue Hickey-Freeman with a narrow gray pinstripe and a missing button, and a wide-brimmed felt hat. When I finished, I stared somberly at my reflection in the mirror and had the eerie sensation that I was two people. My pulse was racing so fast I had trouble focusing. I stood in the silver glow of the window and couldn’t shake the knowledge that Zolly’s life had been superior to mine—that he had made things happen, provided for a family, had seized his life somehow. The realization that what little I knew about the dinosaurs was more than I knew about my own family struck me like a permanent burden, and a wave of bitterness passed over my heart. I stood there for a long time, as still as the gathering snow streaming blindly from the veiled translucent sky, and strained to hear myself make a sound like living breath flowing down a current of time—watchful, feeling as if the world were just about to turn.

12 Thane Rosenbaum

The Day the Brooklyn Dodgers Finally Died

It was a Brooklyn crime. You know, half-baked, second best; the kind you might just forget, or worse, never even hear about. Manhattan is an island of headlines. Wall Street hustlers get carted off in handcuffs. A Muslim sheik stands trial for terror. Mafia men named Rocco become quick studies on RICO. A jogger in Central Park gets raped. The crimes of Brooklyn lie low, like its buildings, the stone clock tower on Hanson Place, the borough’s one skyscraper, overlooking Manhattan like granite with a grudge. It’s not that the crimes are all petty. Bad things do happen in Brooklyn. But there is a legal ranking to mischief. Not everything that is felonious is a felony. Murder, for instance, in the eyes of the law where justice is purportedly blind, is worse than attempted murder. Criminals, apparently, receive a break for failure. Society deems some crimes more odious than others. And our culture regards some crimes as simply more newsworthy. And so in the public imagination, the crimes of Brooklyn are all misdemeanors, all boldface and tabloid, the Page Six of no consequence, a New York City afterthought, always a river away from a bigger story. But not a lesser moral lesson. The New Year was young, still January, and a present arrived in the form of prejudice. 2003 announced itself in Brooklyn as some deranged New Year’s resolution. Returning home from synagogue on Saturday, January 25, Max Birnbaum walked slowly, his usual speed, hand over wrist and behind his back, cufflinks as handcuffs, a prisoner only to himself. He was wearing a long charcoal gray winter coat and a beige hat with a brown ribbon trim, tilted to the side like a gangster from the ’40s. “The Day the Brooklyn Dodgers Finally Died” was first published in JewishFiction.net. Copyright © Thane Rosenbaum 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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Max glanced at his car. Because it was shabbos, he gave no thought to driving. But there was no breach in looking out for what was his. Max came from a world where possessions easily changed hands, where title was trivial and thugs respectable. Looting was the order of the day. Pickpockets had long, larcenous fingers, and reached for valuables that didn’t fit inside pockets. Max liked keeping an eye on the things he owned, just in case. He was cautious, methodical and mannered, a European refinement dulled by his experience with far too much death. No wonder he was caught so off guard by what he saw, especially on his day of rest. “Vey iz mir!” he shouted, his face, aged, now looking even older. “What is this?” He knew what it was. He had seen this symbol before. He just had never seen it on his Honda before, a decidedly non-Bavarian motor work. Later that day, when the sight of the swastika downshifted from traumatic to tranquil, he realized he hadn’t seen one in all his years living in America. The Stars and Stripes had shielded him from the black flag of his past. But now, spray-painted in silver on the window of his green Accord like a lurid tattoo, was the Nazi symbol and what it came to represent—the swastika as flash card, the Rorschach test recognizable to everyone, but lethal to Jews. “In Brooklyn,” he muttered while his body trembled. “After all these years it follows me to Midwood. I feel sick.” Alternate side of the street parking was not in effect; otherwise it would have sickened him earlier. On weekdays, Avenue L and East 29th Street, Max’s block, resembled a showroom of jalopies, cars lined up two-by-two, pointing in the same direction as if revving up for a demolition. Most of the cars were beat-up from fender-benders and errant attempts at parallel parking. But the insult to Max’s car was no dent, no standard Geico claim. A bird dropping would have been far more welcome. His morning at shul spared him the indignity for a few hours. There was prayer before the pain. The same was true of his neighbors. His was not the only car. A Saturday morning swastika special awaited nine other Jews, in addition to Max, as they emerged from synagogue. A minyan of hate crime victims returned home to find their cars defaced, reduced to haunted billboards, the most violent provocation in the Jewish galaxy. Brooklyn became center stage for a post-Holocaust crime caper. There was desecration of property. And there was insult to the already injured. Harsh winds turned scarves into zigzagging streamers—flying confetti and ticker tape, like the kind that floated upon Fulton Avenue when the Brooklyn Dodgers won the 1955 World Series. Fishing boats glided warily on the icy currents of Sheepshead Bay, trying to find their sea legs. With propellers churning the water resembled the whipped chocolate syrup and white-capped froth of an authentic Brooklyn egg cream. Nine days earlier, in this Brooklyn neighborhood, 26 cars were vandalized in the same way—red swastikas spray-painted on car hoods by Brooklyn hoods.

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“Who would do such a thing?” cried Sally Rabinowitz, an Auschwitz survivor, upon seeing the window of her Ford Taurus, the windows fogged up by someone who was so undeniably fucked up. She affectionately called her car tsouris, which in Yiddish meant trouble. Now she finally knew why. “What kind of a person wants to be a Nazi? This is an ambition?” she raged. “It’s like wanting to be a Hun.” “The Huns would be better,” Max said jokingly. “They were more civilized.” He was trying to calm his friend, but there was no use. This rant had been in rehearsal since 1945. She had been liberated from the camp, but not the rage. “Sally, my dear, we know there are people in this world who do nothing but hate,” Max continued. “That’s what they live for; that’s what gives them their greatest pleasure. Hate is comfort food, like chocolate or ice cream. And, even with so many varieties, Jews are always everyone’s favorite flavor.” “Even here, Max?” Sally said, already knowing the answer, but there was comfort in the possibility that she might be wrong. “After the Holocaust you’d think that the world would be nauseous from anti-Semitism already. It’s like the Nathan’s Fourth of July hot dog eating contest on Coney Island. Who wants to look at a hot dog after that?” “Sally,” Max said with both a lowered tone and downcast eyes, “this is a free country. You can eat as much as you want, and you can hate until it gives you a stomachache. The haters have rights here, too, you know.” “God bless America,” Sally sighed. The spectacle of swastikas continued, like a Passover plague that parked itself in Brooklyn, conveniently on its unmoving cars. All of the Jewish neighborhoods became targets: Midwood, Sheepshead Bay, Borough Park, and Crown Heights. Williamsburg, with its Hasidim and hipsters, was naturally not spared the torment, either. Whoever was responsible for this Holocaust mind-fuck knew what they were doing. Brooklyn, after all, was the mother lode of Jewish martyrdom. It was a graveyard, even for the living. The four-pointed symbol of the Nazi menace was pointedly directed at where one-third of all Holocaust survivors in the United States lived. Swastikas had followed the survivors like homing pigeons, crossing the ocean, nesting in Brooklyn, reminding the survivors that they would never truly be home. And not all the graffiti was scrawled on cars. Synagogues, doorposts, and stairwells also became canvases for this graphic and graphical assault. A swastika was burned into the ceiling of an apartment building. The words Kill the Jews were painted on the walls of another building like a twisted rap lyric. Kristallnacht had come to Brooklyn. The glass remained intact, the riot was modestly restrained; the only sound from the street was the creepy, gaseous hiss of an aerosol can. “Never again!” Stanley Leiblich bellowed when he came upon his Chevy minivan and saw the new exterior design. He spoke those words as if they were his own, as if

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they were not already a mass-produced slogan of Jewish smack talk. But he was one Jew who could say it and back it up. He loved his car, but he respected his past even more. “Not on my street! Whoever did this will pay!” Stanley was a beefy man not known to bluster. Everything about him was solid. A former meat packer, he had enormous hands and broad shoulders, a wide back and a stomach that entered a room before he did. Even at his advanced age, he still played in a summer softball game in Prospect Park with much younger athletes who deferred to his slugger swing and granted him the cleanup spot. Later that day, the Jews of Midwood gathered on the street corners of Ocean Parkway, with its wide, oceanic street traffic, flanked by park benches and cars buzzing in either direction. Other than the Crown Heights riots of 1991, the swastikas of 2003 were the next closest thing to a Brooklyn pogrom. The neighborhood shtetls were growing anxious, as if America afforded no greater protection for its Jewish citizens than Czarist Russia. “There are now Nazis in Midwood?” Stanley howled. He buttoned his coat and, like a space heater, raised the temperature around him. “How can that be?” “Not Nazi Nazis,” Max said dismissively. “These people have Brooklyn accents, not German ones. They’re homegrown, American made, as Brooklyn as mustard on a soft pretzel. They don’t goose-step up and down Flatbush or Atlantic Avenues. They’re silent Nazis, cowards. The real ones carried nightsticks, not spray-paint. What we have here is probably a bunch of confused juvenile delinquents with nothing else to do.” “Not nothing to do,” Sally interrupted. “They found time to do this.” Her dark eyes turned red, sleepless even though the day had not yet ended and it was too early to sleep. Her forehead creased from the pressure of raised eyebrows. “And I’m tired of giving excuses to anti-Semites. All kinds of people are unemployed and still don’t spray-paint swastikas or burn crosses. Why do these people get a pass because they are bitter or have too much free time? Let them play a video game if they’re bored; just don’t paint a swastika on my car.” Such pockets of whispered panic and outrage spread everywhere. Max, Sally, and Stanley were Brooklyn friends, united by neighborhood and a common past. Their spouses had died and now all they had left was each other and their memories. They knew the secret handshakes, the paper-thin sensitivities, the rare knowledge that was ultimately too raw to share. They met in Brooklyn but their bond was Poland and what had happened there. Max was from Radom; Sally came from Warsaw; Stanley was a former Lublin Yeshiva boy who had been expelled for fighting. Now, nearly sixty years later they were trying to reconcile how all that had brought them to Brooklyn had somehow followed them, and taunted them, jolting their memories like a cattle prod and reviving all their fears.

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“I won’t be able to sleep tonight,” Sally continued. “Who knows what memories and demons will come.” For these people, nightmares didn’t depend on sleep, or night. “My young wife, Elka,” Max said, “killed by the Nazis before we were taken from the ghetto. She died in my arms, and our baby died in her womb. And these people now paint swastikas in our neighborhood? Don’t they know about my wife? What did they prove: that a Jew is never safe from his memories?” Sally and Stanley simply stared at their friend. They knew his ghosts. All of their ghosts were intimates, on a first-name basis and with licenses to haunt freely. But in seeing Max wilt and shrink, Stanley wondered whether these swastikas were actually making the shrieks louder. “My dead older brothers, Shmulek and Haskell,” Stanley sobbed, “hid me in a farmhouse. That was the last time I saw them. And how are they remembered: empty graves in Europe, a museum in Washington, and now swastikas in Midwood?” “I lost my parents,” Sally said. “I came here an orphan. And, today, because of these Brooklyn Nazis, I feel like an orphan all over again, still alone.” “I don’t care whether they are real Nazis or Neo-Nazis or fake Nazis,” Stanley thundered. “Brooklyn isn’t big enough for Holocaust survivors and the rejects from a Halloween party.” His big mitts were clenched into a boxer’s fists; his ears coughed steam like a freight train. “I want vengeance. Let’s take back the streets and honor the dead.” “But shouldn’t we wait first to see what the police do?” Max wondered. “It’s their job. They won’t neglect this.” “We are American citizens,” Sally said. “They will want to help us. They will want to show that such a thing cannot happen in America. They will find these bastards and punish them.” “I’m not so sure,” Stanley said, sulking, deflating like the Hindenburg. Two United States senators, a congressman, and local politicians, including the borough president, a state senator, a state assemblywoman and assemblyman, and a city council member, held community meetings, the largest at a Brooklyn YMHA. The police commissioner was there, joined by the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force, and officers from the 61st, 63rd, and 70th police precincts. The Holocaust had improbably become a campaign issue in Brooklyn, sixty years later and in a geography far removed from Germany. Unlike what the deniers deny, this was one crime that was not only true, but it was also seemingly never going away. The Brooklyn district attorney issued search warrants. A number of Brooklyn civic leaders offered an $8,500 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those connected to the crime. There was a procession of platitudes. Everyone knew what to say; every photo-op was a free-for-all of elected officials trying to fit in the

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fame. For all the attention showered on these incidents, one would have thought that Hitler himself had returned from the bunker and resettled in the borough. “One of our greatest strengths is our religious and ethnic diversity,” the borough president reassured the audience at a community meeting. “Brooklynites will never, ever tolerate these kinds of cowardly actions.” All the evidence pointed to a copycat crime. With each swastika episode, the police declared that the events were disconnected. There was no lone Nazi-loving graffiti artist. Instead, the experts surmised the possibility of swastika sleeper cells. “Copycat Nazis?” Sally ruminated. “Voos is a copycat Nazi?” “Sounds like a fancy way to warn us that they won’t be able to catch these animals,” Max said dejectedly. “I’m losing patience,” Stanley threatened once more. “If they can’t find them, I’ll do it myself. I’ve already gotten all of my baseball bats out of storage—the aluminum and the wood. Smashing Nazi heads is a good way to take batting practice before spring training.” In the meantime, police detectives canvassed the neighborhood like census takers. They interviewed victims. They gathered evidence. They sniffed for DNA using German Shepherds. Up and down the streets of Ocean Parkway the cops patrolled, knocking on the stylish, sometimes Moorish, often garish, large brick homes owned by the vast number of Syrian Jews who presided over the neighborhood like a ruling class. Much of their wealth came from blue jeans—Jordache, Sassoon, and all kinds of knockoffs that might as well have fallen off the back of a truck. Midwood was ground zero for Levi Strauss’s decline. Yeshivas dotted the neighborhood like Starbucks, caffeinating teenagers with Talmud. In and out of kosher restaurants and auto repair shops on Coney Island Avenue detectives stopped to talk to young Orthodox Jewish families with their entourage of children. Pale, nervous faces belonged to parents too young to be parents. “Have you noticed any suspicious-looking people lately, anyone who doesn’t fit in?” a gruff, yellow-toothed, pockmarked detective asked, finding the Jews themselves strange-looking at the very least. The Orthodox blinked, finding him equally alien. Task forces went into action. There was talk of reclassifying the property desecration laws. Defaced property would no longer be deemed just a misdemeanor. If the damage was due to religious, ethnic, or racial hatred, the crime would be elevated to a felony. Everyone cheered this newly proposed decree. Brooklyn became consumed with bias-crime mania. “Look,” the police detective began calmly at one of the many meetings between the NYPD and the shaken community. His name was Podolak. He was Polish-American, born after the war. He didn’t know his history, and worse, he didn’t know their history.

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Because of that, he wasn’t the best dot connecter around. The Jews had their own biases. They didn’t necessarily trust a shiny badge and a Polish surname. “Him? We’re expecting him to protect us?” Stanley scoffed within earshot of the detective, but Podolak pretended not to hear and continued with his questioning. “I know there are sensitivities,” Detective Podolak reassured them. He was tall with a pink, angular face, blazing blue eyes and roadmap veins in his nose, the combined assault of sun and scotch. “Don’t worry. We know what we’re doing, and we know how to find these guys.” “But you won’t know what you’re looking for,” Sally said firmly. “It takes a certain kind of person to paint a swastika.” She was a short woman who looked decidedly shorter when surrounded by so many plainclothes detectives. Her dark hair was hoisted up in a bell-tower bun as if she were trying to pick-up signals from the NYPD dispatch. With her loose-fitting outfit she looked like a Jewish genie that had just been released from a bottle of Manischewitz. “You won’t solve this crime by comparing it to others,” Max joined in. “It’s not the same. When it comes to the Holocaust, nothing is the same.” “They are right,” Stanley said, bouncing on the balls of his feet as if he was about to dash out and return with a Louisville slugger. “You have to listen to us. You know from regular criminals, but we know from Nazis.” “Maybe you would like for us to help you?” Max suggested. “Help with what?” the detective wondered. “The investigation,” Stanley replied. “You know, catching these guys.” “Oh, I see,” Podolak said with a smirk. “Well, it’s not like we wouldn’t appreciate it. We really would. But we don’t want to encourage citizens to get too personally involved. What you’re doing right here is more than enough—you know, providing us with information.” “But we haven’t told you anything yet,” Sally said. “Not true, ma’am, you’ve been invaluable so far,” Detective Podolak said while heaving up his pants. A pack of cigarettes inched out of his shirt pocket like a periscope. “The main thing is for you folks to remain calm and let the NYPD do our job. You have to trust us. We can’t very well have vigilantes out there impeding the efforts of law enforcement, can we?” The survivors looked at one another as if he was speaking to them in a foreign language, perhaps Polish. As it turned out, the police were getting nowhere. They were no closer to making an arrest than Nazi hunters had gotten to apprehending Joseph Mengele. For such an otherwise audacious and flamboyant group, Nazis do tend to disappear like vapor, not unlike their favorite killing substance. The NYPD was stumped, and the Holocaust survivors were steamed.

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“They wouldn’t even listen to us,” Sally said. “They treated us like children,” Max said. “I think they just want this to go away and to make nice,” Stanley concluded. With each week, the New York Daily News and the New York Post reported on the unsolved mystery of the Brooklyn swastikas. The official report from 1 Police Plaza was that all leads were being investigated, but there were very few clues. The police were waiting for the vandals to make their next move. “What,” Stanley scoffed, “solving this crime depends on a tip from Home Depot? Nothing happens until someone walks in and makes a large purchase of spray paint?” “I’m afraid Stanley is right,” Max relented. “I think it’s time we do something.” “You sure?” Stanley salivated. “Deal me in,” Sally said, borrowing a phrase from her Tuesday night poker game at the East Midwood Jewish Center. And so they organized, like partisans of Hungarian and Polish forests, which isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds. The original Dutch settlers who founded this borough named it “Brueckelen,” and Midwood comes from “Midwout,” because of the dense, tangled forest that separated the center of this borough from Long Island. Today, fewer trees grow in Brooklyn, and Midwood is now a misnomer. These Holocaust survivor saboteurs would have to operate from less vernal confines, an urban cityscape where camouflage was found only inside concrete—more like the IRA than the Vilna partisans. Max, Sally, and Stanley formed their own band of Brooklyn bandits, an auxiliary police force working without a permit or portfolio. This made sense. After all, these once-wretched refugees came to America and settled in a section of New York City that named its Major League Baseball team the Dodgers. Could a more suitable refuge have been found? With Slavic accents and Old World pasts, the survivors would never become true Yankees; nor, given what they had endured, would they ever grow to be Giants. But Dodgers they had been, and Dodgers they would always continue to be. By the sheer happenstance of a sports mascot, Brooklyn had revealed itself as a borough of impermanence, of mercurial ways and wavering character—of shifty characters—of people on the run, of people who knew when to run, and how to dodge. Ironically, the baseball team would earn its nickname by abandoning the borough not long after the Jewish refugees arrived. It would be remembered as the ultimate Brooklyn betrayal, a world-weary example of fleeting loyalties and broken trust. Yet, these were lessons that the Jewish refugees had themselves so recently and cruelly learned. The Brooklyn Dodgers left for LA. Big deal. Not very surprising to survivors. If the Holocaust had taught them anything, it was that no one was to be trusted, not even the home team—especially not the home team. In Brooklyn, as elsewhere, everyone is a flight risk.

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Even many of the Holocaust survivors would leave Brooklyn, chasing the sun and retiring to Boca, Boynton, and Miami Beach. But not Max, Sally, and Stanley. They planted themselves firmly in the bedrock of Brooklyn, a strategically unwise move for people who knew to travel light and to minimize all attachments. Yet, after fifty years, the borough of Brooklyn was in their bones, which is why they insisted that it cleanse itself of this shameful swastika stain. “We should call ourselves the Dodgers,” Stanley suggested during their first underground meeting, which was, in fact, held in the basement of his brownstone just off of Kings Highway. “We can even wear caps. I have some vintage ones, from 1955, when ‘dem bums’ won the World Series. You see, look, Dodger blue.” “I’m not wearing a hat,” Max, a yekke, a European intellectual, said. “I think it’s a great idea,” Sally said. “Calling ourselves the Dodgers is an act of memory. And besides, they named the team for the trolley cars of Brooklyn over a hundred years ago. They were so dangerous, going in every direction, Brooklynites had to dodge them.” “But what we dodged was cattle cars, not trolley cars,” Max remembered bitterly. In taking matters into their own hands, they created their own sensation. With their Brooklyn baseball caps and faux camouflage fatigues, they patrolled the neighborhoods of Brooklyn like a crack team of stakeout artists. From Canarsie to Park Slope, Red Hook to Sunset Park, Bed-Stuy to Brownsville, they plowed through the borough, eavesdropping on conversations, interviewing possible suspects, infiltrating dangerous areas, fearlessly penetrating the seedy side of this City of Kings—the drug dens and the mobster hangouts, the gangbangers and the dead enders. In order to ingratiate themselves to the neighborhoods, they gabbed with gangsters at the site of the old bathhouses in Brighton Beach. “Meyer Lansky was a Jewish mobster, too, you know, but he wasn’t from Odessa,” Sally said to two men, both named Vladimir, who ran the rackets out of a restaurant underneath the D train on Brighton Beach Avenue. Stanley interrupted a pickup basketball game in a Coney Island housing project, asking whether any of these hoopsters knew anything about swastikas. Eleven elevated brothers gathered around this wide-bodied Polish Jew as if he was scouting talent for St. Johns. At one point Stanley seized the ball from a surly point guard and demonstrated a fabulous crossover dribble. Max, dressed like an undercover cop with hideous fashion sense, spoke with drug dealers in Fort Greene Park. They offered to sell him ecstasy and heroin, and in some hip-slang that Max was unable to translate, they claimed to know nothing about Nazi paraphernalia. Discouraged and heartbroken, Max popped a dissolvable nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue.

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“Does that get you high, motherfucker?” a doo-ragged, hopped-up homeboy asked the amiable Holocaust survivor. “And what’s that shit on your arm?” He was pointing at Max’s Auschwitz tattoo. “I got me some badass, sick motherfucking tattoos right here. You want to see this shit?” “No, thank you,” Max replied. “You forgot your ATM numbers or something? Yo, word up, dog, you shouldn’t go be telegraphing personal financial information like that, grandpa.” “What do you mean?” Max asked. “Shit! Them numbers on your arm, those blue digits, dog,” the would-be hip-hop, rapper warned his new Holocaust honky friend. Max stared at his exposed forearm. His sleeve was rolled up as if this brother from another part of the borough was about to give him his fix. “These numbers are not for a bank account,” Max glanced up and replied. “So what then?” the young man whose blue jeans hanging illegally low, worn more over his knees than on his waist, asked gruffly, raising his sunglasses to get a better look, even at night. “They were my prison numbers.” “No, shit,” the gangbanger said. “Yo, motherfucker, you don’t look like you’ve done time, like you’re from Oz or some shit like that. And I know, because I’ve been to Oz, you hear what I am sayin’. I’ve done me some time. And I tell you what, they don’t put that shit on your arm like that! What’d you do? Where’d you get it? That’s not from Sing Sing.” “No, it is not,” Max spoke in fatherly way. “But it is my bling bling. I have not been to Oz, but I was at Auschwitz.” While it was true that the numbers came from a prison much farther away than Ossining, they were useful and valuable in Brooklyn, too. The survivors insisted on leaving their mark, their own trace of evidence that no one would actually be able to trace. The government had given them social security numbers, but in return they didn’t have to trade in their concentration camp IDs. The numbers were theirs to keep. And now they had a purpose. Wherever Max, Sally, and Stanley went, through each of the bastions of Brooklyn, wherever their fact-finding would lead them, they would locate an appropriately abandoned wall, or the blank slate of a sidewalk, or even the morning snowfall that blanketed cars like a writing tablet, and scrawl with either chalk or with an index finger: The 2003 Brooklyn Dodgers Were Here

And then they would sign off with their tattoos, a single row of dizzying digits, unaccountable numbers adding up to nothing at all.

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A112169 A395877 A284954 It was not an act of defacement, but defiance. The signatures were, after all, erasable and harmless. They offended no one. It was nothing but a calling card from the survivors of concentration camps. The true survivors. Not like those clowns on “reality TV”—you know, the apprentices and runway models—but real survival, where Arbeit Macht Frei was a far more eternal and serious sendoff than being voted off of Fiji, or being told: “You’re fired!” Brooklynites didn’t awake the next morning in terror. This wasn’t an act of bias, although in some sense it was a crime of passion. All it did was drive everyone in the borough crazy with curiosity. What Dodgers? The team left for LA almost fifty years earlier. And what about those numbers: a lineup card, batting averages, a secret code to some treasure buried underneath Ebbets Field? The 2003 Dodgers didn’t solve the crime either. The swastika vandals went undiscovered and unpunished. They proved to be masterminds at mimicking the Master Race, most of whom escaped capture, too. So this became yet another of the many unsolved crimes of Brooklyn. It was a cold case that was made even colder because the underlying crime, the Holocaust itself, was receding in memory even though no crime on earth ever depended on so much hellfire heat. Soon the entire swastika saga died out. Newspapers tired of the story and how it stalled, without any criminal prosecution, without any Jerry Springer-esque, trailertrash drama. Something new would become more newsworthy. The Brooklyn Nazis disappeared and made room for the return of the new-look Brooklyn Dodgers. The spirit of Brooklyn’s past and the post-Holocaust present had merged. The ghosts of “dem bums” were improbably called upon on behalf of the dead. It was an act of righteous homage, the consequence of cops who couldn’t crack a crime of extreme prejudice. And best of all, this auxiliary police force of concentration camp survivors came with their own uniforms—not zebra stripes, or even Yankee stripes, but an immaculate Dodger white. A photograph of the three Holocaust survivors appeared in all the New York newspapers. Even the sports pages got into the act with the Sun doing a piece on Stanley’s summer softball team. New Yorkers may recall a far more lasting and memorable photo op that took place in the 1970s. The Guardian Angels were a ragtag, rainbow coalition that patrolled the streets and subways of the city with their red berets and reassuring presence in an effort to curb crime. Such spontaneous acts of vigilantism are what always happens when the law fails and when justice is undone.

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Max, Sally, and Stanley didn’t mind that their private investigations led to no public arrests. It would have been great to catch the Nazi wanabees. But it was equally rewarding to feel the sensation of their own relevance. Ignored and dismissed by the police, they had taken charge of the crime that had been committed against them, and expanded their crime scene investigation into a borough-wide manhunt—from the Wonder Wheel on Coney Island to the dormant cherry trees at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. But a year later, as a postscript to this Brooklyn tale, a different post-Holocaust crime occurred. And, yes, it happened once again in Brooklyn. This time, however, there were no swastikas. And there was no shabbos surprise. What was done took place in broad daylight, in a public building, with witnesses present and a court reporter recording the moment for posterity. The vandals wore vests, carried attaché cases, and one donned a robe. And the damage was not to property, but to pride. Like all major crimes that linger and labor until they result in a re-injury, the genesis of this offense took place earlier. Both before and during the Holocaust, Jews had purchased life insurance policies and opened Swiss bank accounts—all in anticipation of an impending nightmare. They were looking for protection, hedging their bets. Governments had already failed them. Perhaps corporations were more likely to honor their customers than disgrace and defraud them. Or so they had believed. After the war, the survivors and their beneficiaries submitted claims to the insurance companies, which refused to pay on the policies. The Swiss banks, similarly, did not allow the depositors to reclaim their money. “Death certificates! You want us to show death certificates?” the survivors shouted. Yes, there was a legal loophole. As long as there are lawyers, there will always be ways for respectable people to capitalize on their inner lout. The Nazis had little tolerance for senseless paperwork that didn’t advance the Final Solution. Why issue death certificates, and to whom? The Swiss and the insurance companies insisted on seeing the one document they knew didn’t exist. But it was even worse than that. It always is. A new wrinkle in history began to unfold. The truth about Switzerland was finally revealed. It seems that the Swiss were not “neutral” during the war as they had wanted everyone to believe. They had not, in fact, stood up to the Nazis. Their courage was a myth. The story of Swiss valor had about as many holes in it as their cheese. Believing in Swiss virtue was as cuckoo as one of their clocks. The Swiss banks bargained away their honor on the way to making a buck. They bought their safety by fencing the Nazis’ wartime booty. The Germans and the Swiss actually were allies. As the Nazis conquered land and blackened the sky with smoke

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and ash, the vaults of Swiss banks swelled with stolen artwork, gold bullion from state treasuries, and gold teeth from dead Jews. Over fifty years later, American government negotiators, banking regulators, and class-action lawyers muscled the Swiss banks to finally, and reluctantly, own up to their crimes. They were no longer able to yodel their way out of it. A small settlement fund was established of $1.2 billion. But no one asked the Holocaust survivors how they thought the money should be distributed. No one included them in the negotiations; they never got a chance to confront the Swiss—face-to-face, depositor to despoiler. Decisions were once again being made on their behalf and without their input. Their opinions didn’t much matter. A federal judge in Brooklyn, where the class action lawsuit had been filed, decided to divert a significant, disproportionate amount of the Swiss bank settlement to Jews living in the former Soviet Union, even though there were Holocaust survivors living below the poverty line in the United States and the case was brought in Brooklyn, not Kiev. Class action lawyers in these and other restitution cases got rich without ever having to meet with the clients whose interests they were purportedly serving. Bleak House had come to Brooklyn. And so a perfunctory hearing was scheduled in federal court, on Cadman Plaza East, just over the Brooklyn Bridge. The federal judge had already decided to reject the wishes of the Holocaust survivors, but he scheduled a hearing anyway, as an act of phony listening, the illusion that someone was actually paying attention. With the lesson of the swastikas still fresh in everyone’s mind, the Dodgers organized once again. Only this time their numbers grew, as if a farm system of greeners was now feeding so much unsettled, pent-up fury. Stanley made sure to order more caps. Sally chartered a bus to haul survivors to the courthouse. Everyone made placards and signs. Max worked the press. A lawyer from Miami righteously stood up and argued on behalf of those who no one actually wanted to hear. And he gave his clients a chance to speak, too, with audible accents, broken English, and broken hearts. It was a sunny spring day, April in Brooklyn, with flowers blooming on Pierrepont Street and strollers shuttling toddlers on the Brooklyn Promenade. The federal courthouse was filled with survivors, lawyers, and onlookers. All the emotion sucked the chill out of the air-conditioning. Every seat was taken, and every lap was possessed by a ghost. Outside the building hundreds of Holocaust survivors gathered and held signs, written in magic marker and, of course, spray paint. “You can’t steal money that was already stolen and returned!” a bushy-bearded survivor exclaimed. “We want to take care of our own!” a chirpy woman with blue makeup and a bad platinum dye-job shouted from the fray.

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“No respect for the survivors!” a crescendo of voices picked up the chant. Inside the courtroom, standing before a podium with wrinkled hands and clutching fingers, Max, his face sweating, his mind turning over words like a blackjack dealer, searched for the right ones that would express all the indignity that he and his fellow survivors had come to say. “And worst of all, with all due respect, judge,” Max sneered, “who are you to ignore us, to not listen to us, to assume that you know better when it was we who saw these crimes firsthand because they happened to us. You allowed the Swiss to settle too cheaply, and now you have cheapened us all by pretending that we are not here and do not matter.” “Look,” the white-haired judge, a Brooklyn Law School graduate, interrupted the survivor, “many of you don’t even have bank account numbers. The money I am distributing is discretionary. It doesn’t belong to anyone in particular.” And with that remark the judge aligned himself more with the Swiss than with the forces of history. Rows of Holocaust survivors stood up in the gallery of the courtroom, shuffling like senior citizens, disordering the court. And in one simultaneous, unscripted yet graceful move, they revealed their left arms. It was not some mass donation of blood. The judge was faced with numbers that didn’t match any bank records, but were as good a claim as any to Swiss bank accounts that were no longer in anyone’s name. Outside the protestors all wore blue Dodger caps, a great ensemble for the sky and the mood. Without knowing what was happening inside the courtroom, their forearms itched, as if the tattoos were sending signals, as if the numbers were not so random after all. There are all kinds of crimes. Some damage and destroy, others merely scar. By the end of the day, the judge’s gavel pounded like a drum signaling defeat. Everyone was dismissed. Holocaust survivors poured out from the courthouse like curdled milk. They greeted their fellow protestors, who had already dropped their signs like white towels. There was no sadness. The outcome was expected. These were old people, after all. They would soon be dead. The judge’s ruling was surely not the worst thing that had ever happened to them. It was not so much about the result as the respect, of which there was none. That was the truest crime of all. And little wonder that this all took place in Brooklyn, the second city inside the city. Respect did not come easy here. The borough is a tribute to bad treatment. There are always snide remarks and the frown of an unfashionable address. It is a cliché of all that underachieves, always overshadowed by an island that knows enough to stay away from swastikas and the Swiss.

13 Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

The Afterlife of Skeptics

Max Besserling awoke into a complicated thought. His meeting with Jakob Binder was imminent, and he had not managed to finish reading Binder’s manuscript, The Ontology of Doubt. The only words that Max retained from his reading: For E. M. Besserling. Binder, for reasons unfathomable, had dedicated the work to him. This made it even more imperative that he greet the author with some insights, preferably trenchant. The unbound pages were heaped on his desk in a disquieting disorder. They must have spilled from his limp hands while he slept. Was there still time? Apparently, he had dropped off just like that, sitting bolt upright as he read. The light from the floor lamp, its amber-glass globe just directly to the left of his head, cascaded down over his massive head of thick white hair. His author photos, always a headshot, were commanding. He was not a large man, but he had the head of someone large. He had worn his hair long enough to cover his cauliflower ears ever since Nina had made the suggestion. This had been in the earliest days of their courtship, and he had been elated. It had suggested genuine sentiment on her part. His office used to get the morning light, but no more. The university, in its continuous eastward march, had floated the campus straight over Amsterdam Avenue. His office sat in the shadow of the overpass. Draped with an extra layer of dimness, the external world appeared today even more problematic. He had perhaps slept longer than he knew. His left arm was dead numb. He must have fallen asleep on it. His watch he could not locate on either wrist. It was even possible that Binder had already come and gone. Though the door was closed, it was unlocked. It would be just like Binder to seat himself without ceremony, his arms serenely folded behind his head and his feet up on Max’s desk, maybe “The Afterlife of Skeptics” was published in Derek Rubin’s Promised Lands, Brandeis University Press, 2010. UPNE. Copyright © 2010 by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Reprinted with permission of UPNE.

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moving the papers out of the way, maybe not. If not, then Max had real cause for vexation. A man must not put his feet upon another man’s papers! Even though he disapproved of Plato as an errant metaphysician who had much to answer for in the history of Western philosophy, Max shared Plato’s indifference toward material objects. The particulars of the perceptual realm did not speak to him the way ideas did. He did not understand their language. He listened to how others described their properties, the evaluative terminology applied and the emotional colorations received, and he felt stark wonder. For an entire week, Nina had served him dinner on a new set of fine bone china until finally asking him whether he noticed anything at all that was different. A new hairstyle, he had guessed, since that had been the correct answer to a previous question along the same lines. And yet for some reason, he harbored a sentimental attachment toward the lamp at his side. To his mind it was beautiful, and he took a certain pride in his appreciation. Like one of the multitudes, he, too, could feel the influence exerted by things. Its glow was burnished and antique. Old it certainly was. It had been converted to electricity from the original oil. His sentimentality perhaps stemmed from all the reading and writing he had done by its light. The glass globe was etched with griffins and unicorns. Allegra, his daughter, used to copy them with her crayons. A princess with an abundance of brown curls and a tiara always dominated the picture discreetly from the corner. This was when she was small and her greatest pleasure was to accompany her Papa to his office, which happened to coincide with her Papa’s pleasure, too. Though Allegra had been a child bursting with energy—never would she sit if she could walk and never would she walk if she could run—still here in his office she sat drawing. One could not say that she sat drawing quietly. She woke up talking and fell asleep still talking. In his office, too, she had spoken softly to herself the whole time, making up adventures for herself and the fantastical beings. Sometimes he would pause in his own reading or writing and ask her to tell him, and always he was amazed. He could never have invented such elaborate make-believe. He had an impulse now to reach out his arm and trace the creatures with his fingers. There were two pull chains descending beneath the lamp’s globe, tiny strung brass beads dangling delicate as a woman’s earrings. He should bestir himself and make the lamp go brighter. The scattered pages of Binder’s manuscript awaited. Nina had surprised him with the lamp. He had complained to her of how the university’s lust for Lebensraum had cast his otherwise fine office into perpetual gloom. She had tsk-tsked in sympathy, a wifely sound, though how far down the sympathy extended he would forever remain in doubt. The next day she had shown up at his office, twirling the handsome lamp over the threshold on its embossed brass base, her dancing partner, she in her high heels. Always she had worn high heels, because of her height. It offended her that she was not taller, her elegance cut short by several inches.

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It was not that she had been a frivolous person. Her book reviews, written with rare intelligence, appeared in Commentary and The New Republic. She had read Max’s manuscripts with a red pencil. Quite often, there was not a sentence she had left as he had written it. Her style, certainly in English, was superior to his, and he had always acknowledged her efforts. Last, but not least, I wish to thank my wife, who has read every draft of my manuscript and offered useful comments. It must have been difficult for her to transport the heavy lamp across the campus. Perhaps if he got up and moved about, a little then the numbness would dissipate. Like the lead cape they drape over you when they take your X-rays, so the lassitude lay over him. It was likely that someone had helped her with the lamp. Dormant gallantry had aroused itself around her. She had waltzed it into his office, and he had told her its illumination was more conducive to the natural light of reason, the lumens naturalis, than the natural light of Amsterdam Avenue had ever been. Quite often he had played the pedant for Nina. It was the least he could do for her. Her father, too, had been a professor, a philologist at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, and she had grown up basking in male scholarship. The Ontology of Doubt. What did it even mean? Nothing at all was suggested to Max by the title. How could doubt, an activity of the mind that withstands the beguilement of answers, have its own ontology? Binder was still confoundedly, incurably obscure. His style was like a blind man’s cane, tapping out the contours of a landscape that none but the blind could know. There had come a time in their relationship when the eloquent incoherence had made Max want to gnash his teeth in exasperation. And to dedicate the work to him! Max had published nine much-cited works: not to speak of numerous scholarly articles. His typed curriculum vitae, which included eight honorary doctorates, framed and hung on the wall behind him, ran a full twelve pages. From Jagiellonian, too, he had received an honorary degree. He and Nina had returned together to their city of their births. Nina had not wanted to go. Not honoris causa she had said. Horribilis causa. And not once had he thought of dedicating anything to Jakob Binder. The thought had never crossed his mind. It was not as if Binder had exhausted dedicatees. This was his first book. Yes, what had it all come to, the magniloquence of the metaphysician. To wait until one was nearly eighty to publish. It was true. Arithmetic does not lie. Binder would be an old man now. There is always solace to be taken in the sobriety of numbers. Who had said that? Possibly Max himself. So Binder, through all these years of silence, had been thinking of him. Max could not deny that he, too, had thought often of Binder. Perhaps not so much these last few years, but certainly when Nina had still been alive. Binder had been then a frequent uninvited presence in their lives. They had all met as students at university. Binder was younger than Max by two years. Their philosophical orientations had diverged, both of them striding off like two duelers before turning and firing.

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Had they been then such ardent friends that Binder should dedicate a manuscript to him? Yes, once upon a time, it was true, warm feelings had flowed between them. Binder, suffused with sentiment, had made declarations of eternal friendship. But to declarations, most especially those alluding to eternity, Binder had been predisposed. It was his religious past that was to blame. Unlike Max’s and Nina’s enlightened families, Binder’s had been pious. He prided himself in having abandoned the old superstition, but it dragged behind him like a vestigial tail. The world to him was not an impersonal proposition. Ideas emerged from Binder like water that drips brown from rusting pipes. Of pure, clear logic there was none. Instead he propounded upon the totality of existence, of whose infinite attributes, each of which expresses infinitude, we can grasp only the sublime and tragic sympathy in which the totality of existence beholds the totality of existence. That was how he spoke. In other words, he had a strong preference for meaningless assertions. In Binder’s enthusiasms Max had once seen a profligate generosity, and he had been initially charmed, though also, philosophically speaking, alarmed. A tendency toward meaninglessness is not to be encouraged. It is, philosophically speaking, a variety of vice. Unreason parading as reason can have deadly consequences. Who better than they to know? Was it so surprising that a philosopher of the likes of Martin Heidegger, capable of propounding such portentous nonsense as that the Nothing nihilates, had also proven capable of accommodating himself to the regulations of the new regime? Thought and deed: If you are less than fastidious in the one, then why should we expect you are any better in the other? But untenable premises had occluded Binder’s vision. He was unable to apprehend “the promised land of the new philosophy, the swamplands of speculation drained of cant and Kant.” This was a line from Max’s “The Eradication of Metaphysics through the Rigorous Application of Logic to Language.” It was perhaps a bit too fanciful a phrase for such a paper, and yet it was his most quoted. It had been Nina who had suggested it—for respite from the arid style, in her words. In a drawer not far from his knees were all the manuscripts chronologically filed, Nina’s comments in their fading red. A red pencil, its eraser worn down to the metal clamp, a feeble artifact to flail against time, its markings had outlived her. Binder’s excesses had helped Max to develop his own outlook in opposition. If not for Binder’s rhapsodizing on the totality of existence, Max might never have clarified the empirical criteria for what can and cannot be meaningfully expressed. Max’s ideas had proved influential, most especially in the bracing pragmaticism of his adopted country. He had at least been able to vouchsafe that much to Nina, who had grown up basking in male scholarship. At the least it could be said that her husband had received his fair share of academic recognition. Binder would not have prospered in America as Max had. Max had felt compelled to remind Nina of this fact. Here they did not indulge those suffering from advanced

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cases of metaphysical dementia. With time, their relationship had taken on more the nature of a rivalry than friendship. There had come a point when Max could barely tolerate the sound of Binder’s throaty voice, transparent with its throbbing emotion, or the sight of his face, towering half a head above Max’s and flushed with the rapture of some pseudo-insight. For Nina Orlofsky, too, they had been rivals. Their speeches to one another were obliquely directed at her, their eyes irresistibly drawn to hers as the only meaningful measure of the soundness of their reasoning. Binder’s eyes were a child’s blue. He and Nina were among the few in their crowd who did not wear spectacles. No doubt he had preserved his eyesight by possessing a mind sufficient unto itself for the deduction of the world. From first principles, of course! Nothing less than first principles would do for Jakob Binder. And yet it was Max who had done so much better for himself. Binder had loved with hope, vindicated by the totality of existence, as Max had loved without hope, convinced by the testimony of his senses. Binder was a handsome man, and even Max had once confused the grandiloquent web of his nonsense for the exuberance of a generous soul. “Try to say it clearly, Binder,” he had chided, a forefinger wagging in a way he intended to be playful, his eyes glancing quickly at Nina to take the measure. “Anything that can be said at all can be said clearly!” “So you say.” “And I say it clearly!” “As also clearly false.” It was incumbent on Max to laugh, and he did, and Nina, too, was smiling. Binder would no doubt have liked to let the matter rest right there, and why not? He had delivered a touché, and Nina looked as if she were lit from within. She seemed to Max not quite made of flesh, so slight a girl and blonde, with soft glows pooling in her eyes and in her smiles. In her very skin the photons danced. “So you maintain that there are truths that, in their very nature, so to speak, cannot be expressed clearly?” “All the most important things.” “Such as?” “How can I say, when the whole point is that one can’t?” Binder laughed easily. “We say by saying but also by not saying, by gesturing in the direction of the sublimities.” Max had turned to Nina, smiling. “Can you understand him? Do you know what he’s going on about? How can silence speak of anything, much less of sublimities? Is there a perceived distinction between silences that express sublimities and silences that express, say, dumb stupidity? Really, you speak the most interesting nonsense, Binder. Doesn’t he?”

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But Nina Orlofsky had turned her miraculous eyes, mosaics of green and blue, on Binder. “I think it’s like music, Jakob?” It was said more as a question than a pronouncement. Just hearing Binder’s name in her mouth caused a sickening motion in Max, and Binder’s eager look was repulsive. “Music, too, is something more than the notes. And the sublimity is not in the notes . . .” She paused, seeking encouragement in the foam of her beer, and her pale lashes touched down on the poetic line that was etched along the edge of her cheeks. “It’s in the music.” “Yes!” Jakob had declared, simultaneously with Max’s “Exactly so!” “Exactly so, Max?” Binder’s face had the blandness of handsomeness, but his eyebrows could be highly expressive, punctuating his statements with an irony otherwise missing. “Don’t you see, Binder? The game’s up! Nina has just proved that you metaphysicians are simply musicians manqué. If you could compose like a Bach, you wouldn’t need to try to maintain that the totality of existence conforms to some mysterious harmony. If you could compose like a Beethoven, you wouldn’t harangue us on the tragic sympathy echoing in inaudible chords throughout the infinite universe.” “Perhaps,” Binder had murmured deep in his throat, also looking down into his foam, on his lips the enigmatic smile with which he often brought such arguments to a close. Was he conceding or simply seceding from further discussion? And what did it profit Max that his logic was unspotted, when Nina, too, was smiling enigmatically into her beer? And what nonsense had Max been thinking to himself just a moment ago, weighing the possibility that Binder may have already come and gone? In youth it is one’s selfimage that is easily shattered, in old age it is one’s sleep. The conclusion was undeniable: Binder had not yet arrived. It was childish of Max to keep picturing Binder as he had been when he had last seen him, two young men alone in a courtyard of the university, the ancient stones catching fire from the setting sun. Pillars and arches: Who would imagine the pain that lived on in such images, pressing down without mercy on his anguished chest? With great effort he tried to draw a breath and then another. Beloved archways and stairways and the end of summer, a ball of fire sinking below the medieval skyline. They had been walking with swift even strides and had stopped abruptly, at the same precise moment, as if their conversation had come with its own choreography. Binder had turned and gestured to the lit sky, sprayed with saffron and gold from the vanishing sun. Was it the totality of existence again? Could he still have been insisting, even at that late date, all the doors of escape clanging shut on them, on the sympathetic sublimity of the universe? Let the transporting spirit then spirit them out of Cracow. Let it transport all the doomed of Europe. The reddish curls that swept off of Binder’s high-minded forehead had caught the last light. His right arm was extended straight out before him, pointing to something in the western skies. The emotion on his face had made Max turn away in shame. He could still remember the intense purity of his eyes.

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Allegra’s eyes had been just that shade of night-tinged blue, full of infinity. Sometime in the course of her first year of life, the color had changed. They’re exactly your eyes, Nina had announced. My eyes are that color? His wonder had made him sound like a child even to his ears. Don’t you know the color of your own eyes? she had laughed, ruffling his hair, playfully exposing the ears she had taught him how to hide. No, he hadn’t known, but now he knew. Looking into his daughter’s eyes, he learned his eyes were the color of caramel. Allegra. They had both been so proud when they had come up with the name. Let us not give her any of the names of the dead. They had agreed on the point. None of the heaviness of the past. Allegra. Music floating on light-filled air, harmonies triumphant, the first syllable shared with the new homeland, the lilt ascendant, swift and sweet, as she had ascended swift and sweet, allegra, allegra. Allegra. The pink tutu and tiny dancing slippers: How old had she been when she had made the demand? Nina had searched up and down wide Broadway to find slippers to fit a ballerina so small. Allegra had wanted pink, but there were no pink in that size, only white, and she had pounced on them with no sign of disappointment. For weeks, months, until the weather turned too cold, that was all she would wear, pirouetting down Broadway to general acclaim. Max and she would make the rounds. Any sitters she considered her audience, congregated for the purpose of watching her. Quickly she had worn out the dancing slippers. Nina had to keep replacing them. A constant supply of tiny slippers. The old people sunning themselves on the benches that ran down the center of Broadway had dubbed her their own Anna Pavlova. On certain afternoons, when the thick sun drizzled the world in a slowness like syrup, then Max, too, had partaken of the illusion. It was not that he and his daughter were chosen, but rather that everything in all the world had been chosen. Even Mrs. Projansky’s anarchism had seemed a necessary part of the totality of existence. Her eyes, pressed into a Tartar tilt between the fatty pouches, had glittered with gratuitous well-wishing, and her overflowing bosom had heaved in time with the tumultuous Russian songs she sang to Allegra’s dancing. The voice had been a rich contralto, sobbing with vibrato, and the songs were in a minor key, all the world’s sorrow, but Mrs. Projansky would glance with a sly mischief before plucking the tax-payers’ flowers and tossing them at Allegra’s toes with a lusty brava. Did Allegra recall anything from the sweetness of those days? Many times, he had tried to call her, but he was betrayed by his own emotions. He had her number programmed into the elaborate phone system the university had installed, the only such number, the fist at his heart now grabbing away all his breath. Socrates, dying from his quaff of hemlock, had described how the coldness was climbing up his body. When it reaches his heart, the jailer told the gathered grievers, he will die. The wife and little boy had been removed from the room, so that the philosophical

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conversation could proceed unimpeded by sentiment, but Appolodorus had broken down and sobbed like a woman, which had set all of them to weeping. It was unseemly, and Socrates had reprimanded them. But also it was right that the philosopher’s death should cause those who loved him to behave as they did, and even it was right for the philosopher to know what his loss would mean to his many mourners, disapprove though he may. At some age beyond the tiny slippers, at nine or ten, she had switched allegiances. He had said something belittling to her mother, and an expression he had never seen before had come onto the child’s face, the first sign that something irrevocable had transpired, that she had become Nina’s rather than his, without Nina having said a thing to persuade her, of this he was certain. In Nina’s character it would not have been to influence the child against him. It seemed sometimes he could hear a chorus of accusations, but whose were the voices? Could they all belong to Allegra? Adolescents are known to be difficult, but Allegra had not shown difficulties toward anyone but Max. Had not Nina’s mother, too, filled her husband’s water glass when he raised it empty without his needing to utter a word? Was such a trifle sufficient cause to make a daughter rise up and hurl recriminations against a father and knock the glass from his hands, and when Nina had rushed to get the broom and shovel, Allegra had blocked her way, her voice terrible, “No him! Let him sweep up his fucking glass!” Even for the accident she blamed him, Nina stumbling while she was crossing Broadway, a pothole the city hadn’t gotten around to fixing after another harsh winter, her arms laden with grocery bags from Fairway. For weeks she lay unconscious, and when she had awoken no words but two Pomóżcie nam. Help us. Ah, Nina Orlofsky, to whom were you calling out for help, and for whom? This I would like to know who was this us? Over and over, Pomóżcie nam. Max had spent the day in his office, unable to bear the sound of her plea, but Allegra had moved herself from her downtown loft into their apartment, giving notice at her work without a thought to her own future. Help us, help us, help us. Who could listen to those words, see the look in her eyes, and still keep hold of one’s sanity? And yet: Was this, too, entirely his fault? Why not blame the pothole, the grocery bags? Why not blame the high heels? Nina Orlofsky, combing her fingers distractedly through the ends of the lock of hair that nestled her shoulder as she concentrated on the questions swarming around them: Max had inferred a sensuous nature. He had loved without hope, but had he been a more experienced student of human nature he might have seen in the steadiness of her gaze her capacity for secrecy and suffering, and the late and dark afternoon in December, another snow storm just begun, an unforgiving winter, new flakes coming to rest on the snow already lying in soiled piles along either curb. The portentous skies having called him home early, he might have foreseen his stamping of boots on the front mat, calling out to Nina and hearing only a noise like someone being

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strangled. She was sitting on their bed, and he had gasped to see such grief, her face stripped bare. Allegra, Allegra, had something happened to their little girl? No, no, it was not Allegra, she made a motion as if to push away the air, the apartment, the totality of existence. To push away Max. Her eyelashes were white. He pictured her letting them catch the snowflakes, hanging her head out the window in unnamed despair. He leaned down over her and examined the crystals. They were not of snow but of salt. Her long lashes were encrusted in salt that had precipitated out of her tears. Seeing his wife’s eyelashes sagging beneath the precipitate of her tears, he needed no further evidence. He left the room, pulling back on his snow boots to go and pick Allegra up from school, stopping for a treat of hot chocolate so as to postpone going back too soon, the child’s chatter dropping unheard into his despair. And still he could not let it go. “Metaphysicians are musicians without musical talent. That was Binder. That was Binder down to the last sour note.” He was determined to make her see. “He would never have found a place here. He would have known only failure.” He watched her face, remembering the smile as Binder had spoken, a flight of the luminous never seen again. Not even Allegra, with her tutu and her chirping, had brought forth that smile. To inspire it for himself, that he would not have dared to imagine. But still to see his wife’s face arranged as it was now, a look that was something like terror rising up in her drowning eyes. That, too, he could not have imagined. “Are you completely mad then? You pursue your rivalry beyond the grave?” For himself, he had needed no further recourse to evidence. She had tsk-tsked in wifely sympathy and gone through the motions of a life of intimacy, and all the while she had been searching to find out how Jakob Binder had died. She had pursued the proper channels, made her inquiries in duplicate and triplicate. Binder had died, one way or another. There had been so many opportunities for death in those days. Nina had pursued the details, her passion far from the life they had seemed to share. He saw himself in her eyes, a man both small and foolish, his illusions looming larger than his life, thinking to himself that she basked in his insignificant accomplishments, and how can one defeat such a rival, how can one vanquish the remembered dead? Allegra, I have had such a dream. It was only a dream, Papa. I cannot see how to go on after such a dream. Don’t be frightened, Papa. It was a dream about a friend of your mother’s and mine, a friend long dead. I dreamed he had dedicated a manuscript to me. I’ll tell you a story, Papa, and it will make the pain in your heart go away. But the pain won’t let him go, and the numbness in his arm and in his jaw and in his head is swallowed up in the pain that has his heart in its unforgiving fist, his

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suffering chest is collapsing into it, crushing all the air out of him, so that he fights to take in the breath that he doesn’t want to breathe except for the necessity of forcing some air into the words so that she will be able to hear how it was that he had made a mistake, your stupid Papa, he did not know the place for what it was, had never called it by its name, though Jakob had gestured to me in the courtyard, turning away to show me the place so that I might find my way there, and I should have said the name aloud, and blessed the place where I had stood, but I looked away, forgive forgive, from that blessed place, my Allegra, my Nina, I turned my face, forgive forgive. Like a miracle from the old religion, the page bearing the dedication has floated to the top of the scattered pages. For E. M. Besserling. It is an immensity that Max could never have imagined for himself. Against such largeness it is impossible to preserve oneself. He hears the fatal tear as he stretches himself out to reach for it, while Allegra, summoned by the voiceless call, runs out into the street to hail a cab.

14 Gerald Shapiro

Mandelbaum, the Criminal

In a hospital in Kansas City, Stan Wachtel’s wife Celia was dying. Outside it was the middle of February, raw and blustery, but in her hospital room the air was thick and warm, perhaps heated by the glow of all the machines monitoring her bodily functions. Her heart, that wretched fist, pumped listlessly, as if it had better things to do. Her doctors made a big show of shrugging and throwing their hands in the air. Que sera, sera— that was their theme song. None of their unpronounceable procedures, their mysterious protocols, the array of pills and fluids they pushed down her throat and dripped into her veins seemed to do Celia any good at all. Modern technology: a nightmare. Wachtel had long ago turned his back on the amazing march of progress; anything more complicated than a toaster made him queasy. He could grasp the purpose of a toaster: you put in bread, it came out toast. All the rest of it, the pint-sized gadgets of the computer age, seemed to him like so much crap: the promise of ease, of recovery, of everlasting life, and it was all worth nothing. These quacks might as well have put leeches on her back, sacrificed a cat at the foot of her bed. Wachtel stared at the television bolted to the wall of her room. On CNN the pope—not the new one, whatever his name was, the old one, the Polack, the cherubic Polack who played the guitar—was washing the feet of the Turkish bastard who’d tried to kill him so many years ago. The sound was muted, so Wachtel didn’t know what was going on. Maybe this was the anniversary of the old pope’s death, or the anniversary of the attempted assassination. Who keeps track of such things? It was a nice gesture, washing the feet of the jerk who pumped a dozen bullets into you, but the pope, the poor guy, was a total mess, crippled up by Parkinson’s disease; he could hardly get down on his knees so he could wash this fanatic’s feet; he had to be helped by his aides, and how the hell were they going to get him back up on “Mandelbaum, the Criminal” was first published in Ploughshares, Spring 2008. Reprinted by permission of Judith Shapiro.

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his feet when he was done? They’d need heavy equipment to lift the guy. He’d be deadweight. Wachtel tried to imagine their rabbi, Silberberg, now a senile wreck, trying to wash anyone’s feet. Silberberg, still handsome at eighty-two and natty in his Italian suit, had been by to see Celia twice so far. The second time he’d come, he’d forgotten her name in the middle of the visit. He seemed bewildered, as if he didn’t know where he was. Every fifteen minutes the cuff on Celia’s arm automatically registered her disastrously high blood pressure, and the dismal results were flashed to the nurses’ station down the hall. Doctors arrived in swarms once or twice a day on their rounds, crowding the room, accompanied by a roving gang of bleary-eyed medical students, most of them so young they might have been teenagers dressed in doctor’s outfits. They flipped through her charts, these overgrown children, they made clucking noises, thumbed through soiled reference manuals, played with their stethoscopes, whispered furtively in the far corner of her hospital room. Once he grabbed the lapel of one of the older doctors and managed to establish eye contact. “Stan, what can I tell you?” the fellow said. “Things aren’t looking all that good.” He was a small man, bald and humpbacked, with a long, pink-tipped, aquiline nose. He wore an inappropriately festive floral bowtie. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She’s just old. Her heart’s tired.” This was hardly news to Wachtel. The woman was eighty-five years old, and they hadn’t been easy years. Long ago, another lifetime it often seemed, a son, Arnold, their only child, a boy of enormous promise, had been the joy of their existence. He’d risen through life like a shooting star: valedictorian of his high school class, scholarships to Berkeley, a PhD from Michigan in Anthropology and Psychology; his first book (published when he was all of twenty-six), The Sneering Chimp: Facial Expressions and What They Tell Us, won a major prize, ensuring his tenure at Princeton. He was interviewed repeatedly on PBS; his views on contemporary culture were often quoted in Newsweek; a new adjective entered the world of current psycho-anthropological theory: Wachtelian. The pride his parents had felt! The sheer bursting joy of simply being able to claim him as their own! But then tragedy beat the life out of them: on a research trip to the jungle of Belize, exploring the varieties of laughter among a remote, previously undocumented tribe, Arnold had wandered away from his colleagues one morning and was never seen again. For years Celia had waited by the phone; she’d broken her heart over this lost boy, had wept over him until there were no more tears left to cry. What was there to say about such a life? Her parents, immigrants who’d never learned English, were of course long dead. She was estranged from her fractious, undistinguished siblings back East; her working years had been spent in a series of lackluster clerical positions; she’d lost her looks long ago. Now, seemingly oblivious to the daily

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parade of doctors and nurses, she lay quietly in her hospital bed, her shins wrapped in inflatable plastic leggings to keep the swelling at bay. February lurched by a day at a time, each moment more dreadful than the last; she shrank into herself, retreating closer and closer to death. To keep her edema in check, her doctors cut off her fluid intake, and Wachtel, sitting at her bedside, mute with grief, swabbed her cracked lips with a tiny sponge soaked in water. She’d had a small stroke shortly after arriving at the hospital (she’d choked momentarily on a bit of food, a nurse told him; that’s all it took), and one half of her face had fallen, so her expression seemed perpetually ironic. What would Arnie have made of this? How did his study of facial expressions cope with the disfigurement of stroke victims? She’d never been an ironic woman, so this was something new. Wachtel looked at her. Was this his wife? Was this Celia? “Maybe a week,” the bowtied doctor told him one morning. Wachtel had been reading his Kansas City Star, and put it down in his lap, folded it into thirds. “A week?” he asked softly. “It’s a guess. Don’t quote me, Stan. I don’t know.”

Late that afternoon an elderly pear-shaped man shuffled into the room and sat down heavily in a chair by Celia’s bed. The chair sighed as air leaked out of the cushions. He wore a pale blue windbreaker, white slacks, and gray orthopedic walking shoes with velcro snaps at the instep. His face, dominated by enormous sunglasses, was cast into a puffy, mournful sack; his mouth hung open as if he might be expecting a spoonful of pudding. After a moment he took off his glasses, put his head in his hands and began to weep. He shuddered and wailed, beat his fat fists against his temples. This all happened so suddenly that Wachtel didn’t even have time to say hello. He sat frozen in the lounge chair by the window. Though Celia had been in the hospital for ten days already, she hadn’t had many visitors besides dotty old Rabbi Silberberg—most of their friends, the doddering couples they sat with at shul, their bridge partners, Wachtel’s old business associates, were in Florida or Arizona this time of year—and now this, out of the blue, a total stranger comes into the room and has a nervous breakdown. From across the room he could smell the man’s cologne. The wailing tapered off at last, and the visitor straightened up in his chair. He put his sunglasses on again and looked around the room. “Oh,” he said when he saw Wachtel by the window. “It’s you. Stanley, am I correct?” Wachtel was taken aback. “Excuse me? Do we know each other?” The visitor’s plump fingers were festooned with costume jewelry, the stones looking like something he might have gotten from a box of Cracker Jacks. He twisted one of the rings now, rotating it as though trying to unscrew his finger from his hand. “I’m Cheeky. Celia’s brother.”

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Wachtel couldn’t believe it. But of course, yes, he saw the resemblance. The nose, the predatory cast of the lips, the chin. “No,” he said, but he knew it was true. “It’s me.” This Cheeky Mandelbaum was a legend in their family. He’d gone to prison (Attica, Sing Sing, Wachtel couldn’t remember which one, or maybe it was both) in the long-ago past. Celia never mentioned the crime, and Wachtel, too timid to probe into something so painful, had never asked. Something white-collar, he imagined— embezzlement, check-kiting, mail fraud. A Jew wouldn’t have got involved in anything violent. But then he thought of Meyer Lansky, Longy Zwillman, Bugsy Siegel: murderers, all of them. Well, who knew? They were desperate times back then, the Lower East Side was a fetid slum, the most overcrowded square mile on earth; people who wouldn’t have turned to crime under normal circumstances did what they could to get ahead or stay afloat. He’d heard the story again and again, how Celia’s saintly mother had died in the kitchen of their tenement flat, clutching the telegram that had brought her the news of Cheeky’s conviction. “Hersheleh! Gevalt!” she moaned, and slumped to the floor, felled by a massive heart attack. Celia had told him this story so often that he could see the scene played out inside his head, could hear the thump of the woman’s body hitting the cheap linoleum. This Cheeky, this mamzer, this nothing. Now here he was, the bastard, sitting across the room. What a pathetic piece of garbage. He didn’t look like an ex-con. He looked like a retired insurance salesman down on his luck. This was Cheeky Mandelbaum, the criminal? “What are you doing here?” Wachtel said. “My sister’s dying, ain’t she?” Cheeky kept his head down; he seemed to be gazing at the Velcro snaps on his shoes. “So how’d you hear about it?” asked Wachtel. “Where’d you come from? The moon?” “They said a Mi Sheberakh for her in shul yesterday.” “You go to shul?” “Teferith Israel. Out on Metcalf.” “You live here? In Kansas City?” Wachtel felt his blood pressure taking off like a bottle rocket. “How could you live here?” “For forty years. You don’t remember running into me at the Brooklyn Deli on Troost?” “So that was you!” Wachtel remembered the scene vividly. A Sunday morning, early, he and Celia were there to buy lox, smoked sable, some whitefish salad, a few bagels, some cream cheese. It was an extravagance, but they only did it once or twice a month, and what other pleasures did they give themselves? This would have been around the time their son, Arnold, was starting to rise into the stratosphere. Three, four nights a week

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Arnold got calls from college recruiters pitching their wares. Amherst one night, the University of Chicago the next, dangling full scholarships, stipends to cover research and travel, winter trimesters in the Loire Valley, summer programs trekking through the Himalayas. Arnie had started smoking cigarettes at night in his room, had raided the small cache of alcohol in the sideboard in the dining room. He’d been watering the bourbon, sneaking a shot now and then, and the truth was, who could tell him to knock it off? Every time Wachtel tried to speak to the boy, he felt his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. His business was going down the tubes, there were arguments, recriminations, evenings spent in silence. Now Celia tugged at his sleeve as they stood in the Brooklyn Deli waiting for their number to be called by one of the tattooed workers behind the counter, Holocaust survivors, all of them, the women with their hair dyed garish shades of red, the men sallow, yellow-toothed, their haunted eyes rimmed by dark circles. “What?” Wachtel said to her. “What is it?” They’d argued that morning in bed, something about the house, the gutters, money for this or that, he couldn’t remember, he’d been half-asleep; but all their arguments, no matter what the subject, were arguments about Arnold, what college would be best for him, what trajectory his brilliance might mark in the night sky. “Over there,” she whispered in his ear. “By the pickles.” He turned his head. “Don’t look!” she hissed. “Don’t look. Just listen to me. That’s my brother.” “Your brother,” he echoed, his tone cynical. Celia had three brothers: Moe, a dimwit who ran a sandwich stand near Times Square; Julius, a Flatbush costume-jewelry salesman with an eye for the ladies; and Cheeky, the brilliant eldest son, the one with all the promise, the black sheep of the family, who’d gone to prison. “Cheeky,” she whispered. “It’s him. I swear to God it’s him. I haven’t seen him in twenty-two years, but it’s him.” “What are you talking about? How could your brother Cheeky be standing there by the pickles? This is Kansas City, for crying out loud; he’s in prison in New York State.” “He got out.” Wachtel looked at the numbered slip of paper in his hand. “You’re telling me that’s your brother Cheeky over by the pickles.” “Go over there, Stanley, and talk to him,” she said. “Celia. Why would I do that?” She tugged on his sleeve again. “Go over there.” Tears welled in her eyes. He handed her the numbered slip. “Remember, poppy seed bagels, not the sesame. And the scallion cream cheese. And don’t forget the sable, the lox. We’ll have a spread.” “Just go over there.”

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“Smoked whitefish salad. And some halvah. Just a little piece. And get a loaf of the seeded rye. And some pastrami, half a pound, tell them not too lean for a change.” “Ask him if he’s my brother. He owes me ten dollars. It was all the money I had in the world, I gave it to him and he disappeared. I want my money back.” “And if you get pickles, get the half-sour. I like the half-sour.” He was about to add to the list, but he saw that she was crying now, so he squeezed her arm and walked over to the man by the pickles. He was an ordinary-looking guy, round-shouldered, slack-jawed, a little broad in the beam—Jewish of course, as was everyone else in the deli on this Sunday morning. He wore a Lacoste shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts, though the temperature outside was brisk. A pair of sunglasses rode atop his balding head. “Excuse me,” Wachtel said when he reached the pickle barrel. “My wife over there—” he pointed over his shoulder—“thinks you’re her brother. Celia. Celia Mandelbaum, that was her maiden name. Stanton Street, Lower East Side.” The man stared at him impassively for a long moment in silence. “I don’t have any family,” he said. Wachtel waited a beat, expecting the man to add something to his pronouncement, but when nothing more was forthcoming, he shrugged and returned to Celia, squeezed her shoulder, then took the numbered slip back from her just as their number was called. At home he laid out the spread, the smoked fish, the bagels, the cream cheese, all of it, but she refused to eat. She went into the bedroom and shut the door and didn’t come out until evening. It was a full day before she asked him what the man by the pickle barrel had said. That was forty years ago, and now across the room from him sat Cheeky Mandelbaum in the flesh. It was like being in the same room with Frank Sinatra, Wachtel told himself, then shook off the thought. No, it wasn’t like being in the same room with Frank Sinatra. It was like being in the same room with a 160-pound pile of garbage. “You broke your sister’s heart,” Wachtel told him. “You killed your own mother.” “People die. Don’t put that off on me. My mother was a heart attack waiting to happen.” “What are you doing here?” “You know what she ate for dinner most nights, my mother? A slice of rye bread rubbed with garlic then smeared with chicken fat, a little salt, with a slice of onion on top. That was what killed her. Chicken fat. Schmaltz.” “She was poor. It wasn’t her fault.” “She was a good woman. Bessie the Good, that’s what they called her around the neighborhood. I loved her, everybody loved her. She wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer but she had a heart of gold. Any shnorrer who knocked on the door, she gave him a potato. But she didn’t care take of herself. So what happened, happened.”

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“She was poor!” “You think that woman ever ate an orange in her life? She must have weighed two hundred pounds, she wasn’t even five feet tall. What I’m saying is, what I’m telling you, she didn’t take care of herself.” “Lots of poor people are fat.” An awkward moment of silence ensued. The two men stared at each other balefully. At last Cheeky sighed, exhausted, as if pushing a raft of memories out to sea. He nodded toward Celia, who lay semi-comatose in her bed. “What’s the word on my sister?” he asked. “Nothing. A week, maybe.” “She’s dying? That’s what they’re telling you?” “They can’t do anything for her,” Wachtel said with a shrug. “Her heart’s giving out.” Celia moaned softly in her bed. Wachtel swabbed her lips with the moist sponge. “You’d think they’d let her have a drink of water,” said Cheeky. “She had a stroke. She can’t swallow anything. She’d choke. It’d go right to her lungs, she’d be dead.” “You said yourself she’s dying, Stan. What’s the difference?” “Dying ain’t the same as dead,” Wachtel said, and rolled the sponge from one side of Celia’s lips to the other. In the cafeteria downstairs, rows of gigantic hearts made of construction paper hung from the ceiling, with happy valentine’s day! in bright, sequined letters painted on each one. Valentine’s Day? Wachtel hadn’t even thought about its impending arrival. Who thought about such things when a wife was in the hospital? He bought two cups of tea and a cheese danish for the two of them. He pushed Cheeky’s tea to his side of the table, then cut the pastry neatly in half. Valentine’s Day. He thought of elementary school, the foolishness of Valentine’s Day, Arnie coming home so happy because the Blumkin girl had given him a Valentine’s Day card with her lipstick on it, a seven-year-old girl, mind you, wearing lipstick and planting a kiss on a piece of paper. He sipped his tea. Around them, morbidly obese nurses moved in bovine, placid herds, carrying trays loaded with the detritus of their meals. Wachtel stared at them. How could people in the health-care industry let themselves go like that? “At least now she’s in a private room,” he said to Cheeky. “The first week, she was in a double, with a woman dying of colon cancer. Poor woman was so doped up she didn’t know what county she was in. Her children sat there crying. That was no day at the beach.” “I knew a guy once,” Cheeky began, and took a tentative sip of his tea. “He told me he was sitting on a toilet, on a train. I don’t know when this would have been. Fifteen

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years ago, twenty maybe. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, he flushes the toilet while he’s still sitting on it, and the suction of the flush, it sucks his colon—his colon!—right out of his body. You believe that?” “That’s disgusting.” “He had to wear a bag. You know.” “That’s impossible. It’s ridiculous.” “I’m just saying this is what the guy told me.” Cheeky sipped his tea delicately, one pinky extended. “He sued Amtrak, won a bundle.” He ate a small bite of his half of the cheese danish, then pushed the rest of the piece into his mouth and swallowed it without chewing. “Why would you even repeat a story like that?” said Wachtel. Cheeky shrugged. “It’s called making conversation.” He paused, took another sip of his tea. “This is cold,” he said, and moved the tea cup away with the back of his hand. “My father loved tea. He used to drink his tea out of a glass. He’d put a cube of sugar in his mouth, he’d hold it there between his teeth and sip the tea through it. Like they did in the old country.” “I’ve heard many stories about your father.” “He was a nothing,” Cheeky said. “The man had the imagination of a doorknob.” “Celia adored him. She’d start to talk about her father, tears would come to her eyes.” “His favorite word was no. He got this from God, he told me. Saying no was his way of imitating The Almighty. He never had an original thought in his entire life.” Now it was Wachtel’s turn to shrug. “So what. You didn’t get along. It happens. Fathers and sons.” “This was different, Stan. Take my word for it.” “You were a bum,” said Wachtel. He leaned closer over the table. “What are you doing here? What’d you come for?” “I can’t come see my baby sister, she’s on her deathbed?” “You had forty years to come see us, you never darkened our door.” “I didn’t think she’d want to see me.” “She didn’t!” Cheeky spread his arms in a gesture of surrender. “That’s what I’m saying.” “Why should she want to see you? You left her and the rest of the family high and dry. You were the one with all the promise! You were the genius! Some genius. Look at you!” “I didn’t turn out so bad.” “You borrowed ten bucks from her, she told me all about it, I know what I’m talking about. This was 1930, it was all the money she had in the world, she gave it to you, her older brother Cheeky, wonderful, brilliant Cheeky, Mr. Charming, with the flower in his lapel.”

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“I don’t recall.” “Don’t give me that line. You know what ten bucks was back then?” “I’m telling you the truth, I don’t remember what you’re talking about.” “She was saving that money. You told her you’d pay her back the next week. What’d you do with it?” “How would I know? It was a long time ago. Bet it on a pony, maybe. ” “Her father told her not to do it.” “That was Pop. Whatever the question was, his answer was no.” “So she disobeyed him, she did it anyway and what did you do? You flew the coop.” “I was young, I made mistakes. You’re lucky, you never made a mistake in your life.” Cheeky examined his fingernails and buffed them on his sleeve. Wachtel fell silent. His mistakes crowded the room, they took up all the oxygen, they yammered in his ears like a pack of hyenas. At home there was a closet stuffed with twenty-five thousand feet of moldering Super-8 film stock, so many reels of it he’d never bothered to count them. This was one of his biggest mistakes: getting into the tourist souvenir film business just as videotape cameras were making their way into the marketplace. Videotape! The bane of his existence. His life savings were in that closet, all that film turning to toxic sludge in those canisters, each one the size of a can of tuna. He still remembered Greenstein, the bastard who sold him the business, the line of crap he’d bought from this old joskie, the handshakes, the assurances, the absolute iron-clad money-back guarantees that had been mentioned in passing, but somehow never made it into the multi-paged contracts that Wachtel had signed. Greenstein sauntered off into retirement, his bald head buffed to a high sheen, having divested himself of his entire stock of Super-8 film, camera equipment, developing chemicals, the whole shmear, just in time. For Wachtel there was nothing to do but watch as tourists, yokels from no place, disembarked from the giant paddle-wheel steamers at Kansas City’s riverfront, whole gangs of them, videotaping themselves as if they’d been doing it all their lives, mugging for their tiny cameras, singing and whooping, their appetites up for barbecue and shopping on the Country Club Plaza. They passed by Wachtel’s little stand (“Take Home a Souvenir Film of Yourself in Kansas City! $10 For Five Minutes of Film! Developed and Shipped to Your Home Address!”) without even giving it a glance—he might as well have been invisible—and within a year, he’d lost everything. “So what are you here for, really?” he asked Cheeky. “You borrowed ten bucks in 1930, now you’re coming back for more?” “What do I look like, a panhandler? Of course not. What are you talking about?” “We don’t have a dime. You say you’ve been living in Kansas City forty years—” “Off and on. Not the whole time. I traveled. I went places you’ve never heard of.”

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“—it never occurred to you to stop by and say hello? So what are you showing up now for? You think you’re in her will? What will? Forget about it. She doesn’t have anything.” “I’m not asking for anything. I’m a retired businessman. I don’t need anybody’s money. I have investments. Half the checks I get in the mail, I don’t even cash them, they sit in a drawer.” Cheeky brushed crumbs off his shirt. “You think this was easy for me? Coming here like this, after all these years? I was so scared, I stopped in the toilet down the hallway before I went to Celia’s room, they had one of those electric eye urinals? You make a move the thing flushes on you? I had the shakes so bad, it flushed five times before I could get my fly unzipped. I don’t like that electric eye. The thing’s looking at you while you’re taking a leak.” “It’s not looking at you.” “Why do they call it an electric eye, then?”

When they returned to Celia’s room—they’d been gone no more than half an hour— she was dead. She lay in her bed in exactly the same position she’d been in when they’d left; a casual observer wouldn’t have seen a bit of difference, but Wachtel knew immediately that she was gone; the body of an old woman was still beneath the covers, but Celia had flown away. He hovered by her bed for a long moment, waiting to see her chest rise, and then waited another long moment, and then another. He touched her skin, which had turned a pale yellow, like the color of milk gone bad. Her cheek was cold. He went to the door and shouted, “Nurse!” and in a moment a pair of nurses came bustling in to confirm the news. One of them scribbled information onto a form while the other lifted Celia’s wrists one by one, then moved her head back and forth and opened and closed her eyes. It was all over very quickly. After so many desperate days of watching her slip away an inch at a time, Wachtel now wanted nothing more than to sit back and watch her slip away a bit more, just one more day of watching her die; he would have given anything to have the chance. An hour later he’d signed all the forms. Cheeky sat slumped in a chair by the door, his eyes half-closed. Wachtel stared at him: was the man napping? Catching a few winks in the aftermath of his sister’s death? There was no bottom to this man. There was no decency. He walked down the hall to the nurses’ station and said his goodbyes. He’d come to know some of them, the more garrulous ones with stories to tell. They squeezed his hand now, patted his shoulder, murmured unintelligible phrases of regret, but it was all gibberish to him. They might as well have been speaking in tongues. Wachtel gathered Celia’s personal items from the shallow closet in her room. He stuffed her shoes, her stockings, her underwear, her dress into a plastic bag, then

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dropped her purse in, too. He thought of her the summer they met, the dress she was wearing the night they’d danced together at the Tip Top Tap on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, two weeks before he shipped out. Dukey Willingham’s Orchestra played. It was hot up there, steamy, something wrong with the ventilation, too many people and not enough air. That dress was something. Blue, something silky, not silk, though. Silk was going into parachutes at the time. It didn’t amount to much, that dress. It must have weighed two ounces. She was small, slim, very young, she wore her hair like the Andrews Sisters, he could feel her heart pounding when they danced. He kicked Cheeky in the ankle. “Hey. Wake up. It’s over.” “What?” “She’s dead. Your sister’s dead. Celia. She passed away.” Cheeky ran a hand roughly over his face. “That’s impossible. My baby sister?” “Don’t start with that.” “My baby sister? Dead?” Cheeky lurched out of his chair. He could move quickly for an old man. He must have learned that in prison, Wachtel told himself. Knife fights in the exercise yard and all the rest of it. You had to be fast on your feet. “C’mon,” he said, and pulled at Cheeky’s elbow. “It’s over. We gotta go now. They need the room.” Downstairs in the lobby, he didn’t know what to say. “You need a ride?” he asked. “I’m not going anywhere in particular,” Cheeky muttered. Wachtel looked at him, one eyebrow arched. “I don’t have anywhere to go,” said Cheeky. He ran his tongue over his lower lip. “I’m between places right now.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” Cheeky regarded him silently for a long moment. “I had a couple of setbacks lately. Minor setbacks, temporary, Stan. I’ll get back on my feet.” “You’re broke, aren’t you. That’s why you showed up here. Celia was right. You’re nothing but a thief. You’re a criminal. You were a criminal when you were a kid, you’re a criminal now. What’s wrong with you? Do you have some sort of screw loose in your head?” A middle-aged couple passed them, and as they went by, the woman clutched her purse to her bosom tightly, as if afraid of being mugged. Wachtel noted this and realized that he and Cheeky were making a scene here in the hospital. He’d lived his whole life trying to be decent, trying to keep his head above water and his picture out of the newspaper, and look how things had turned out. He’d wanted to own a small business, employ a few people, meet a payroll, pay his bills, prosper, leave something behind. After the tourist Super-8 fiasco he’d worked a series of dead-end retail jobs for years, selling crap, hating his bosses, saving every extra penny. Arnie was already gone by this time, his brilliant star having risen and exploded. His name was still mentioned

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now and then in journals of Psychology and Anthropology, but not often. Friends at shul asked questions occasionally. Any word? Of course there was no word. Eaten, by piranhas or leopards or cannibals, felled by mosquitoes, a poison dart, dysentery. Who knew? Arnie was a memory, a brief montage of scenes, snippets of dialogue. Wachtel couldn’t remember his son’s voice anymore. In the house, Arnie’s ghost was faint, just a certain cast of light and shadow that played in the corner of his peripheral vision. Wachtel was well into his seventies at the time, too old for new business ventures, but he was desperate to do something with his life, to make one final effort to leave something of himself behind. His impulse was toward immortality, as is anyone’s, though he wouldn’t have been willing or able to speak of it in those terms. With Celia’s blessing he quit his wretched job selling chemical supplies to hotel chains and put the family’s savings into a one-hour photo developing business, a great location in a busy strip mall in the suburbs, next to a popular buffet restaurant, lots of foot traffic, the place would practically run itself. The creep who sold him the business assured him it was a cash cow. You set up the developing chemicals in the back room, you kept the machines oiled and serviced, you put on a cheery smile every time a customer walked in the door, what could be simpler? People loved to take pictures, they loved to get them developed, they loved their memories frozen like that, everything perfect, the day at the beach, the ride on the roller coaster, the merry-go-round, Sundays at Grandma’s, graduation day, first communions, Bar Mitzvahs, the picnic on the July Fourth, everything about it was a total can’t-fail no-brainer, don’t waste your time worrying about this one, you’re home free. The first two years were a dream. Celia quit her clerical job and came to work at the store. Yes, it was true, the hours were killing, and they were too old to be doing this kind of thing, but what else did they have to do? The house was so empty, and neither one of them had developed hobbies to pass the time. So they worked, side by side, they made business decisions together, they hired and fired, they toyed with the idea of opening a second store. Then Celia happened to spot an advertisement for a new kind of a camera, something called a digital camera—you could take your own pictures with it, and print them out on your own Apple computer. No film, no developing costs, no nothing. Who needed one-hour film developing when they didn’t even need film anymore? Sure enough, by the end of the year the one-hour photo business was floundering, and by the end of the next year, they’d had to lay off every worker, even those who’d been with the store for several years. One fellow wept and clutched Celia’s sleeve, begging. Another grew threatening, muttered darkly about torching the place, but did nothing. Eventually Wachtel sold the equipment, the chemicals, the display units, his inventory of film and photographic equipment—everything went. He got pennies on the dollar, walked away with his head in his hands. Celia, at her age, took a job as a file clerk at a bank. They stopped speaking to one another. Wachtel was

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alone in his life, and she was alone in her life, too. They lived like that, isolated from one another, for years. She’d suffered, and he’d suffered. And for what? So that now he could stand in the lobby of a hospital and make a scene with his brother-in-law, that criminal? This was what his life had come to? “You showed up, Celia died,” he told Cheeky. He couldn’t help himself. “She was holding her own. She had life left in her.” “You said yourself the doctors gave her a week.” “So a week, then! A week! That’s something!” Cheeky sniffed and looked away. “Stay away from me,” said Wachtel. “You come near me, I don’t know what I’ll do.” “C’mon, Stanley. Let’s have dinner together.” “You just had a cup of tea and a cheese danish.” “I’m hungry. What can I tell you? Grief does strange things to a guy.” “So go get yourself something to eat.” “I thought maybe we could get a bite together.” “You ate plenty of meals the past forty years, you never called us and said let’s go have dinner.” “I’m trying to make up for that now.” “You’re too late.” “I know a great place. C’mon. My treat.” “Five minutes ago, you didn’t have a place to stay!” “These people owe me.” Cheeky put a hand on Wachtel’s shoulder. “Let me do this. It’s all I can do. I can’t do anything for Celia anymore. You can’t do anything for her either. But don’t you think she would have wanted the two of us to break bread together after she was gone? Wouldn’t she have wanted that?”

The Danforth Grill, Kansas City’s oldest restaurant, occupied a walnut-paneled warren of rooms just off the marble-tiled lobby of the sumptuous Danforth Hotel, which had seen every president since William McKinley pass through its doors. This was old money, the kind of place Wachtel had spent a lifetime avoiding. Who needed this kind of aggravation? What kind of honest work was there in the world that paid out bucks sufficient for this kind of luxury? He’d heard about the Danforth Grill, had seen their ads occasionally on television. “A Kansas City Tradition since 1890,” and so on. Aged black waiters in crisp white dinner jackets, men who’d waited tables at the Danforth Grill since their youth, who’d grown old carrying platters of iced oysters on the half shell to pink-cheeked swells in country-club attire—that sort of place. The menu was unchanged from the 1930s: cracked crab, oysters Rockefeller, grilled lobster with drawn butter, rack of lamb with those funny white chef’s hats stuck on the end of each

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rib bone. Steak Diane, caesar salad, crepes Suzette, all of them done table side with great skill and flourish, flames jumping into the air. He’d thought of taking Celia and Arnie here once, when the scholarship from Berkeley came through, but Arnie nixed the idea—the Danforth Grill represented everything he despised in American culture, he informed his parents—and a good thing he had, too, because who had the money for this kind of extravagance? They’d gone to Shakey’s for pizza instead. He pulled up in the temporary parking zone in front of the hotel, and immediately a uniformed black fellow opened the driver’s side door. “Welcome to the Danforth Hotel,” the man said in a soft, refined tone. “Will you be dining with us tonight?” “Ask him,” Wachtel said, pointing a thumb at Cheeky. The attendant handed him a slip of paper, and another black fellow, this one younger but no less elegant in his uniform, slid behind the wheel, and in a moment the car was gone. “Don’t you worry,” the older black fellow said to Wachtel, noticing the look on his face. “Latrelle will take very good care of your car.” “Did you hear that? Where do they get these names?” Cheeky muttered as they walked through the heavy, brass-plated revolving door into the hotel’s lobby. “I’m not dressed for this,” Wachtel said. “Look at me. What are we doing here? This place is formal. I’m wearing—I don’t even have a tie.” “Would you just leave this to me?” A small crowd, elegantly dressed, mostly couples, milled around the maître d’s lectern, where a sallow, middle-aged man with a boutonniere in his lapel anxiously scrutinized a thick ledger, shaking his head and frowning. A trim young man nearby fielded phone calls on a cell phone. “No, I’m sorry,” the young man said. “We’re totally booked. The entire evening. It’s Valentine’s Day, you know.” He clicked off, and the phone rang again immediately. “No, not this evening,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Kemper. We always love to see you. But tonight it’s simply impossible. We’re booked to the rafters. Not an empty table all night.” “You hear that?” Wachtel whispered to Cheeky. “They’re booked. It’s Valentine’s Day.” “Let me ask you something, Stanley,” Cheeky said. “Have you ever tucked into Shrimp Newberg made by a professional, somebody who knows what they’re doing, damn the calories, full speed ahead?” “No. I haven’t. And I’m not going to.” “Says you.” Cheeky pushed his way to the maître d’s lectern, pulling Wachtel behind him by the sleeve. “Excuse me!” he said to the maître d’. “My good man.” The man behind the lectern pushed his reading glasses down on his nose and gazed at Cheeky. “Yes?” “Okay. I know you’re booked for dinner tonight. But I was—,” Cheeky began. “Yes, we’re booked all evening. I’m sorry.”

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“Is that right?” “I’m afraid so.” The maître d’ shrugged apologetically and went back to his intense study of the thick ledger spread out on the lectern. “See, the thing is,” said Cheeky, “my brother-in-law here just lost his wife. My sister, Celia. She died today.” There was an audible catch in his voice. “Valentine’s Day, if you can believe that. They’ve been married sixty years—longer. He’s a wreck. He’s . . . distraught.” “I’m terribly sorry.” “So here’s what I’m thinking. You’ve got a table free. I know you do. You know it, I know it. There’s a table back there. Little table back by the kitchen, I bet.” The maître d’ lifted the ledger and held it out to Cheeky. It looked like an oldfashioned accounting ledger. “Tell me if you see any free tables, sir,” the man said. His voice was cold now, brittle as ice. “You idiot,” Wachtel said into Cheeky’s ear. “Can we get the hell out of here?” “Give me a minute!” said Cheeky, and then turned back to the maître d’. “Get Ricardo out here. Tell him Cheeky wants to say hello.” “Ricardo’s off this evening. Sir, we’re fully booked.” “This is a nightmare,” Wachtel said. He said this to the ceiling, which was beautifully painted, panels of a light, airy blue bisected by beams of mustard yellow. “I just want to go home. I want to be by myself. My wife just died.” It was as if he were talking directly to God. Cheeky pulled out his wallet, which was tattered and old. He withdrew a twentydollar bill. “The man’s wife just died. Are you absolutely positive you don’t see a table you could give us tonight?” “Please. Put your money away. We’re booked. There’s nothing I can do.” Cheeky rolled the bill into a cigar. “Do you know who I am?” he demanded. “I’m Cheeky Mandelbaum! That name mean anything to you?” “No sir, I’m afraid it doesn’t.” “Time was, I could have walked in here, snapped my fingers, you’d have put us at the best table in the house. Like that!” He snapped his fingers for theatrical effect. “Sir?” the maître d’ said. “You’re going to have to step away from the lectern. There are others waiting to speak to me.” Cheeky turned around. There were, indeed, several well-dressed patrons standing behind him, and he stared at them their gazes shifted uneasily toward the door. He turned back to the lectern. “Okey-dokey,” Cheeky said. “Number one, I’m finished with this place. You can forget about my patronage. Number two, you’re not so fancy. I’ve eaten at places that make this joint look like a toilet. And number three—you never knew my sister, but let me tell you something. She was a great person. Make a long story short, we went our separate ways a long time ago, but when she was little she was something else.”

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“I’m going to have to ask you to stand aside,” the maître d’ said. “You don’t get it, do you! You little prick! I’m Cheeky Mandelbaum!” The young man with the cell phone, who’d watched the exchange between Cheeky and his supervisor with an open mouth, leaned over to Wachtel. “Take him home or something, will you?” he asked. “I don’t want to call the police. Take him someplace, buy him a drink.” “You stay out of this,” Wachtel said. “What do you know about it.” Suddenly he felt indignant, as if they’d made a reservation and now were being denied their table. “You people,” he said, and then he stopped. What people? He couldn’t help himself: he thought of Arnie, and immediately a hole bloomed in the middle of his heart, the same black hole he’d felt every day of his life since his son’s tragic disappearance. This hole had its own specific gravity, the force of a vacuum cleaner, and now it threatened to suck him into its nothingness, into the absence of everything, the darkness which was its essence. This was the day of Celia’s death. Shouldn’t he be somewhere sitting on a stool, tearing his clothing? Shouldn’t he be weeping, blowing his nose, chanting the prayer for the dead? Instead, here he was, standing among strangers in a restaurant where he and Celia had never eaten, where they’d never even come to gawk at how the other half lived. He put a firm hand on Cheeky’s shoulder. “Cheeky. C’mon. We’re leaving,” he said.

The lighting at Town Topic on Broadway managed to be both dim and garish at the same time. How did they do that? Wachtel wondered about this as he ate his hamburger with grilled onions at the counter. He’d never seen anything like it anywhere. Cheeky, sitting beside him, was too busy shoving his double cheeseburger into his face to notice the lighting in this greasy spoon, or anything else about the place, for that matter—the thick haze of grease and cigarette smoke in the air, the semi-derelict elderly couple in a booth by the window sipping tea and sharing a pastry, or the big blank-faced white-blonde fellow at the other end of the counter, his hair twisted into cornrows, a blood-red tattoo snaking up the side of his face. He was wolfing down a double order of french fries doused in ketchup, humming to himself as he ate. Cheeky took enormous bites of his double cheeseburger, barely swallowing one before putting the next in his mouth, but seemed oddly unaware of the food itself, as if he might be feeding it to someone else, not himself. They were only a few blocks south of the Danforth Grill, though this seemed like a different city, a different world. It was darker here, the lighting seemed more menacing. A pale young woman with a sleeping infant in her arms came in, and the cook, a bone-thin black man wearing a brightly colored knit skullcap, came around the counter to embrace her. “When’d you get out?” he asked her. He peeled back the shawl

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covering the infant’s head and beamed at the puckered, sleeping face, its features dark and drawn into a scowl. “Just today,” she said. “I get off at one. I’ll stop by.” “I’ll be up.” Wachtel watched all of this, listened to it, imagined the life this young couple might have, the husband a short-order cook at this dive, the woman just out—what, just out of jail? Just off work? No, who was he trying to kid, it was jail, no doubt about it, just released today, something minor, just a week or two behind bars and now she’s free again. Who could tell if they were married? They had a child together—this was what Wachtel surmised, this scowling infant was theirs together. The young woman’s face already bore the weight, the gravity of failure, a burden Wachtel knew only too well. Her eyes were heavy and dark-rimmed, and the lines bracketing her mouth were deeply etched. He wasn’t the philosophical type. He didn’t have the time or the inclination to ruminate on the meaning of life, had never given himself the chance to think about the big questions. That was Rabbi Silberberg’s territory. Wachtel had always thought of the big questions as nothing more than the mud that children played with on a rainy day. Arnie had played in the mud as a child, making mud castles and then letting the rain wash them away to nothing. Wachtel had no time for such nonsense. But on the day of his wife’s death, the day his life had turned, was still in the process of turning, into something new, something darker and grimmer than anything he’d ever known before, he allowed himself the momentary luxury of considering the imponderables. He thought of Celia in her dress, the Tip Top Tap Room, that dress, blue, something silky, so many years ago, it could have weighed two ounces, so long ago when everything seemed possible. What could it have meant, all their years together? What could it have possibly signified? If they’d known it would all come down to this, would they have fallen in love? Would they have bothered to dance at all? He watched the pale young woman with the infant walk out the door, watched the short-order cook gaze at them for a moment, his bony face blank with longing, before turning back to the grill. They understood already what was at stake, this young couple. Whatever innocence they’d been born with was gone, and they saw the world clearly, Wachtel imagined. Good for them. Let them figure it out now, while they’re young and strong. He’d waited his whole life to understand what was happening to him, and even now, an old man with dewlaps and dentures, he felt he didn’t have a clue. When the cook slid their check down the counter toward them, Cheeky looked away. Wachtel pushed the check—the total came to just over eight dollars—toward him. “You wanted to buy me dinner,” he said. “So buy.” Cheeky studied his nails. “That other place,” he said after a moment, “I know some people there. Ricardo, he’s the pastry chef, we go back a long way. I knew him

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back east. We were in business together for a while. You and me, we could have had dinner on the house.” “I don’t care about any of that. Pay up. I saw that twenty you flashed at the maître d’.” “I don’t know where I put it.” Cheeky made a show of patting his pockets. “You’ve got some chutzpah. You were a con artist when you were a kid, and you’re a con artist now.” “Con artist! I’m ninety years old,” said Cheeky. “I got peripheral neuropathy. You know what that is? Everything hurts! I’m all played out. It’s been a long day. I’m upset!” “You’re upset,” Wachtel said. “My sister died! Stake me to a cheeseburger for crissake, will you?” Wachtel sucked on his dentures as he pulled a ten-dollar bill out of his wallet. He laid it carefully on the counter, and called the short-order cook over. “Keep the change.” He watched carefully as the cook took the bill, rang up the sale, and put the change into a glass jar by the register. Outside, the air had turned blustery again. The air was thin and brittle. Spring seemed a year away, though the weatherman on TV, that putz, kept saying each night that it would be arriving in five weeks, maybe sooner. This was a bad neighborhood, there was no use in denying it. Trash was piled in the gutters. Garbage. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked angrily. Across the street, a dark woman stood beneath a streetlight under a sign that advertised a school specializing in air conditioner repair courses. Her dress was torn at the shoulder, and she looked exhausted, punch-drunk, as if she’d just gone five rounds with someone. “This is where we say goodbye,” Wachtel said. He thought about going home, about turning the key and walking into the house alone. What was that going to be like? What was anything going to be like now that Celia was dead? For years the house had been haunted not only by the ghost of Arnie, but the ghost of their dreams for him and for themselves. Now there would be Celia’s ghost wandering the hallways as well, making noise in the night. He held out a hand to Cheeky. He didn’t want to do it, but Celia would have wanted him to. Shake the man’s hand and be done with it. It was an empty gesture, anyway. What was a handshake? It was nothing. It meant nothing. It was one of those things we all did out of habit. One of the tribes Arnie had lived with for a time in New Guinea while he researched his first book said goodbye to each other by laughing hysterically, falling on the ground, kicking their feet as if in the midst of a fit of some kind. Wachtel stared at his hand, but Cheeky didn’t take it. “Put me up for the night,” Cheeky said. He looked away. His chin was quivering. Wachtel could see it in the dim light of a streetlamp. The man was on the verge of tears again.

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“One night,” said Cheeky. “That’s all I’m asking.” “You’ve got to be kidding.” “I’m ninety years old, Stanley. We’re mishpuchah. We’re family. You got a spare room? It’d be a mitzvah.” “Don’t give me that mishpuchah crap. Don’t talk mitzvahs with me. My wife just died. I need some time to myself. Don’t you have any pity in you?” “I got plenty of pity.” “Yeah, for yourself you got plenty. Ninety years old! I saw you put away that burger.” “I shouldn’t have eaten it. My gut’s ruined. That stuff’s going to kill me.” “So why’d you eat it, then? Who put a gun to your head?” A long pause ensued. Finally Cheeky said, “I don’t know what to tell you. Can you put me up for the night or not? If you can’t do it, you can’t do it. Just drop me off at the mission on your way home.” “What mission? What are you talking about?” “I don’t know. Any mission.” “How’m I supposed to know where there’s a mission? You think I hang out with bums?” “Just drop me off.” “Do you ever know what you’re talking about?” “Now you’re making me mad,” Cheeky said. “You’re insulting my intelligence.” “To hell with your intelligence. A lot of good it did you. My son, Arnie, could think rings around you. He scored perfect 800s on his SATs.” “I know. I read about it in the paper. In the Kansas City Star. It made the front page.” “You read about it, you didn’t think to call us up? You were too good to drop by and pay your respects to your sister?” “That was a long time ago. Things were different.” “You didn’t think, ‘That’s my nephew’? You didn’t think, ‘Maybe I’ll write him a card, tell him congratulations from his uncle’?” “I thought about it.” Cheeky turned away and coughed wetly into a cupped fist. “You ever think I might have been ashamed?” he asked. “That ever occur to you?” When he turned back to face Wachtel, his eyes were glittering. “All right, then. One night,” said Wachtel with a groan. He was overcome by a wave of pity, suddenly awash in it, drowning, scarcely able to breathe. The house was cold. He’d left the thermostat set at sixty-seven that morning. There was mail in the foyer, shoved through by the postman. Bills. Thank God they had insurance. The house was paid for, he had a Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy that filled in the gaps in Medicare, and after the second business failed, he and Celia had

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managed to eke out a living from the scraps of their savings and Social Security put together. A Mexican woman came once a week to mop and vacuum, so the place looked okay. It smelled like old people, Wachtel knew that, he couldn’t help it. He didn’t know what he meant by that: the cleanser he used on his dentures; moldy cheese; furniture polish. It smelled old, but it was an old house, and not in good repair, to be honest about it. Anyway, he felt at home here, it was where they’d raised their son, their lives were in the walls of this place, bound up in the carpeting, the furniture, the drapes. In the kitchen, to the left of the window that looked over the back yard, hung a cast-iron medallion that read, The opinions expressed by the husband of this house are not necessarily those of the management. Celia had bought that at a craft fair in Sedalia forty-five years ago, and it had hung there by the window ever since. Wachtel had never liked it, had been tempted to take it down and throw it away on more than one occasion, and now he considered the possibility of getting rid of the thing at last. Then he realized that he’d come to love it. Who could explain such a thing? “Your room’s down the hall,” he said to Cheeky. “It was Arnie’s room.” “I really appreciate this, Stan,” said Cheeky. “I get back on my feet, I’m going to pay you back for this. Every penny.” “Shut up about that. I don’t want to hear any of it.” He led Cheeky into Arnie’s old bedroom and turned on the bedside reading lamp. The room looked exactly as it had for the past forty-five years: a narrow single bed, its navy-blue coverlet straight and flat as an iron; a tattered, multicolored oval hooked rug, a crafts project Arnie had completed in the Cub Scouts; a Gustav Klimt poster on one wall; a framed black-and-white portrait of the Beatles on another. The chest of drawers was empty, as was the drawer of the small student’s desk in the corner. Arnie’s electric typewriter still sat at the ready, though—the lightweight Corona he’d been given as a graduation gift by the principal of his high school and had carried with him through Berkeley and Michigan. He’d written his dissertation on this typewriter, then the book. Every once in a while over the years, after Arnie had disappeared and hope for his return had faded away, Wachtel had come in here and turned on the machine, listened to its quiet, steady hum for a moment or two before turning it off and shutting the door again. It was as close as he could come to communing with the dead boy, as close as he allowed himself to anything that smacked of sentimentality. Cheeky landed hard on the bed. In the warm glow of the bedside lamp he looked ruddy, but Wachtel could see that the man was on the verge of collapse. “Get some sleep,” he said. “In the morning we’ll talk.” “I need some help.” “We’ll talk in the morning.”

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“No, I mean now—I need some help right now.” With some effort, Cheeky pulled the velcro tabs on his shoes and slid his feet free. He rolled down his socks, which were white and full of holes. His feet were awful. Two toes on the right foot were black, three on the left were a deep brown. The rest of the flesh was a pasty white, mottled by angry red welts. Exposed to the air, they suddenly smelled like rotten meat. “Jesus Christ,” said Wachtel. “What’s wrong with you?” “I don’t know.” Cheeky looked at his feet impassively, a blank stare, as if he didn’t actually see them. “I get a cut or something, a blister, it don’t heal.” “Doesn’t it hurt, for crissake?” “Everything hurts. I told you already. Peripheral neuropathy.” “You got diabetes or something?” “I don’t know. It runs in the family. My brother Julius had it, I think.” He shrugged. “I don’t remember. We’re out of touch.” “You’re a grown man, you’re supposed to take care of yourself. You’ve seen a doctor?” “How’m I going to see a doctor? To hell with them. Bunch of high-and-mighty pricks. Overpaid plumbers.” “Tomorrow I’ll call around, try to get you in to see somebody.” “Says you. I don’t want to go to a doctor.” “Well, you’re going. You don’t watch out, you’re going to lose your feet, you know that? We’ll have to sell you to the circus. Cheeky Mandelbaum, the guy with no feet.” “You trying to scare me, don’t bother. I don’t scare so easy.” “I’m trying to get you some help, you dumb ox. You need help.” “I don’t need anything.” Celia had soaked her feet in Epsom salts from time to time, and there was a box of the stuff, plus the basin she used for the soaking, under the sink in the bathroom down the hall. “Okay. Wait a minute,” Wachtel said. “I’ll get you something that’ll make you feel better. Just hold your horses.” He went down the hall to the bathroom, squatted on painful knees in front of the sink, and retrieved the basin and the box of Epsom salts. He read the instructions on the back (Celia had always done this for herself, even near the end, when her breath came in gasps and she could no longer handle stairs). He took the basin into the kitchen, where the sink was bigger, and filled it with hot water, sprinkled in the Epsom salts, then he lifted the basin carefully and carried it into Cheeky’s room. It was heavy, the cloudy water moved in waves, he walked slowly, aware of every step, every swing of his hips. “Here you go,” he said, and put the basin down by Cheeky’s feet. He’d tried to be careful, but despite his efforts a little of the water sloshed out onto the hooked rug by the bed. “Soak in this awhile. It’ll make you feel better.” “What’s that?” Cheeky said.

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“Epsom salts.” “What the hell is that supposed to do?” “Put your feet in. You’ll thank me.” Cheeky hesitated. “That water’s hot,” he complained. “Of course it’s hot. It’s supposed to be hot. Put your feet in there, you’ll feel like a million bucks.” “I can’t lift my feet.” “What do you mean, you can’t lift your feet? You were walking two minutes ago.” “I’m tired.” “You’re tired,” said Wachtel, and slowly, not without pain, he sank to his knees on the hooked rug. “All right,” he said. “Now just relax.” He gently lifted Cheeky’s feet, first one and then the other, into the basin. “There. That ought to feel pretty good.” Cheeky winced. “I told you that water was too hot,” he said through clenched teeth. “Ah, for the love of Mike. Will you ever shut up?” Wachtel had meant the question to come out gruffly, but the tone of his voice was soft and bone-weary, more like a plea, like a prayer at the end of a very long day.

15 Melvin Jules Bukiet

The Two Franzes The four men I consider to be my true blood-relations (without comparing myself to them either in power or in range), Dostoevski, Kleist, Flaubert, and Grillparzer. Letter from Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer from Kafka’s Other Trial by Elias Canetti

Pilfering the runt of the litter of pink marzipan bunnies from an open display case in Stern’s Bakery off Staromestske Nemesti Square, the boy with a sweet tooth and an empty pocket didn’t notice an elderly man purchasing a chocolate ganache. The boy’s fingers trembled as he slipped the tiny almond-flavored rodent into his short pants and sidled toward the door as the man extracted a crisp new hundred-krone note from his kidskin wallet. The image of the emperor on the bill fluttered between the prosperous chocolate lover and the proprietress of the bakery, a heavyset woman whose waist and cleavage bore eloquent testimony to her establishment’s riches. Girth she had in abundance, mirth none. She was torn between conflicting impulses, greed for the white-whiskered image on the banknote and outrage at the boy whose hand reached for the knob. Outrage triumphed. Besides, the thief would be gone in a second, the money would remain. She was around the counter in a flash, and grabbed the large ears of the young culprit. “I’ve told you that I never want to see you again,” she shrieked as tears started down his cheeks as if a spigot behind his dark eyes had been turned on full. “May I . . .” The gentleman began to speak with calm disdain for the shabby affair that appeared to offend his delicate aesthetic sensibility. “The Two Franzes.” From Bukiet, A Faker’s Dozen. Copyright © 2003 by Melvin Jules Bukiet. Used by Permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and the author.

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“Every week he comes in,” the proprietress explained to her refined customer. “Every week he steals,” she continued. “Every week a charade,” she cursed as she dragged the boy across the bakery’s tiled floor, skinning his knees, leaving a thin red smear. “This time the police.” “No, please,” the boy wailed. “If my father finds out, he’ll kill me.” “I’ll kill you myself.” “May I . . . ,” the gentleman repeated as he tapped his steel­-tipped cane at a spot of the boy’s blood and rustled the bill. Franz Joseph seemed to wink. “Certainly, of course. Terribly sorry. You, sit,” she ordered the sobbing boy in the corner, and reached for the bill. “That will be three kronen for the ganache.” “And how much,” the gentleman added, almost as an afterthought, “is the marzipan for my friend?” “What?” Frau Stern didn’t understand. “He’s with me,” the gentleman replied. She looked at the boy suspiciously. “Are you?” The boy looked at the man, who smiled to himself and nibbled off a corner of the lush brown pastry. Avoiding the proprietress’s wrath and the gentleman’s cool humor, the boy tried to effect a quick calculation between the trouble he was already in and the trouble he might be letting himself in for, gulped and lied. “Yes.” “B . . . b . . . but . . .” she stammered. “But what?” The gentleman rapped his cane on the display case. “But nothing, sir.” She curtsied awkwardly. “Sorry for the misunderstanding.” Again he tapped the cane, more peremptorily. “The cost?” Still suspicious and frustrated, but unable to do anything about her suspicion or her frustration, she returned to her post behind the glass case where the handlettered sign above the remaining rabbits read, “Two kronen a dozen.” She smiled now, a twitching at the sinister corner of her thick lips, and said, “Fifty.” He dropped the hundred-krone bill to the counter and said, “Keep the change.” “Thank you, sir,” she said, but he ignored her. He was already holding the door open for his newly purchased dependent. “Dirty little Yid,” Miss Stern muttered under her breath while tucking the bill into her blouse.

“I like charades,” the gentleman said as he finished the chocolate and tossed its wax paper wrapper into the street. “I like bunnies,” the boy said, savoring the marzipan. “They make me so . . . so . . .” He was at a loss for words.

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“Hungry?” “Yes. I stare at the glass, and sometimes I think that I could starve to death right there.” “Really?” The gentleman looked at him with even greater curiosity. “Tell me about it.” As the boy explained his fantasy of wasting away on the bakery floor, he hardly noticed that a notebook had appeared, and that the gentleman wrote swiftly on its tiny bound pages as they walked together, as if either of them knew where they were going. He kept writing until the narrow, twisting lanes opened into a plaza approaching a long low bridge. “My hotel is in Mala Strana,” the man said, gesturing to the far side of the Vltava. “I don’t leave the Old City without telling my father.” “But there are other things you don’t tell your father.” The man dabbed his handkerchief at the boy’s mouth to wipe away the last few crumbs of pink rabbit ears. They started up the gentle ramp onto the pedestrian walkway that arched over the blue-gray river beside the ranks of clattering carriages. They left the dank air of the medieval quarter behind, and, as they strode, attained views of the enormous Castle that loomed in the distance to the north. On the same shore as the Castle, but way beneath its position atop the Hradcany district, another cluster of somewhat newer but still ancient gray-stuccoed buildings once again enveloped the odd duo. Yet the alleys were a wee bit broader, and trees and water were visible between the buildings. “It’s very pretty here,” the man said. “Where do you come from?” “Vien.” “The capital?” the boy gasped. So exotic was the notion that his companion and savior might as well have said London or Paris or the moon. “Of course.” He shrugged. “What’s it like?” “Well, you see that building there?” He pointed up past a funicular that ratcheted skyward to the vast walled enclosure that had governed Prague for a thousand years. “Of course.” “Well, in Vien the Emperor’s stables are that large.” “No!” “Yes,” he said. “Your Castle is for minor aristocracy, dukes and countesses and the like.” As if the thought of such rabble were too demeaning to contemplate, he turned away from the Castle into a building guarded by a mustachioed doorman. A polished brass sign to the left of the entry read Pensione Opera. He said, “Come in. I always stay here when I’m in Prague.”

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Agog, the boy passed beneath the jaded eyes of the doorman into a small but elegant lobby set about with brocade sofas and marble-topped tea tables. “Have a seat.” The gentleman plopped into a wing chair and gestured to another one. “Well, Okay.” Immediately, a waiter dressed like a major to the doorman’s general hovered beside them. “Can I get you anything?” the waiter asked. “Coffee for myself,” the gentleman said, clearly accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed. “And . . . will another marzipan be acceptable?” he addressed his companion. The boy smiled. “You’re certain it’s not too much?” “Not at all.” “Bunnies if you have them,” he instructed the waiter. “I’ll do my best, sir.” The two of them sat, the gentleman flipping through his notebook while the boy pivoted restlessly in his seat, avid to take in every aspect of the extraordinary scene, beautifully dressed ladies and other gentlemen sipping tea, occasionally a trill of laughter rising above like a hummingbird, until the waiter returned and deposited their orders like offerings before tribal gods. The man took a sip of his coffee and said, “Good, now we can get to business.” “Business?” “Yes, I will require an assistant of ingenuity and integrity, someone I can trust absolutely to serve me while I am in town. Can you suggest anyone?” The boy may have been naive, but he wasn’t stupid. He leapt to the bait. “I would be delighted to be that assistant, sir.” “I thought so.” The boy nodded. “I will pay generously.” The boy may not have been stupid, but he was naive. He piped, “Oh, you needn’t.” “Yes, indeed, I need. Only then, when money passes hands, will our relationship be clear. I appreciate clarity.” The boy, son of merchants and grandson of merchants, had never met anyone so remarkable in his life. He felt as if he were dreaming. But a response was clearly required, and he knew that a wrong answer would be fatal. Less naively, he ventured, “I appreciate clarity, too.” “Good. Then we think alike.” The man took another sip of coffee. The boy bit into his marzipan. “What’s your name, boy?” “Franz.”

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For the first time, the man’s mask of aplomb slipped. He said, “Well, this is auspicious. My name is also Franz.” “Glad to meet you,” the boy spoke with the greatest sophistication he could muster. A decade and a quarter of drudgery—mathematics and Hebrew homework and unremunerated labor after school selling towels and sheets and pillowcases in his family’s store—had not prepared him for this. Only his infrequent bouts of shoplifting pastries and, if the whole truth was known, magazines with bawdy lithographs and other sundries from the various shops of Prague might have developed in the child the resources to deal with the unexpected. Of course, it was these extracurricular activities that had led his benefactor to him. The gentleman required an aide of proven abilities, and what better way to determine ability than through criminal intent and criminal activity, though perhaps criminal success would have been an even better indication. So be it; concessions were made. “Very well,” the elder Franz went on. “Very well, indeed. One pauses for a pastry and ends up with a protégé. Life is full of odd twists, don’t you think? In any case,” he continued without giving the younger Franz an opportunity to voice his own world­view, “Now that we have a business relationship, here’s what you must do.” He explained the job he had in mind—it was simple—and then concluded, “And from now on, you will address me as Herr Grillparzer.”

When F. Junior arrived back home after his amazing interlude, his parents were in a tizzy. They had just obtained tickets to the hottest show in town. Hermann Kafka was so excited that he stacked a pile of beige towels together with whites. Waving the slim tickets in front of her flushed face like a miniature fan, Madame K. gushed, “One of your father’s customers just gave them to us. Imagine. The play is set to open in Vien in two months and they wish to try it out here. It’s called The Poor Minstrel and it’s playing at . . . at . . . oh, let me look . . . at . . .” “The Luria Theater,” Franz helped. She squinted at the tickets. “Why, um, yes. How did you know?” “I . . . I . . .” Now it was his turn to stumble over his words, not daring to admit that he was scheduled to meet the playwright in back of the theater after the performance. “Everyone knows. It’s in the newspaper.” “Of course,” his mother said, though his father peered at Franz a bit inquisitively. “I have to take a bath.” Franz scurried out of the showroom and up the rear staircase to the family’s quarters over the shop. Neither upstairs nor down could he find any peace. Nearly caught by parents in the shop, he had to contend with siblings, sisters, above. The second he lowered himself into the pool of lukewarm water he had drawn, he heard a ferocious knocking at

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the door. He slipped down the ceramic incline until the water plugged his ears, but the knocking came through in a series of dull thuds punctuated by fifteen-year-old Elli’s screechy complaint. “In a minute,” he called. “Now,” she demanded. “Just a minute,” he begged. “I have a date and have to get ready. Now open the door this second, you little insect, or I’ll smash it down.” Dripping, he stood up, looked regretfully at the welcoming pool and wrapped himself in one of the ragged seconds from H. Kafka Emporium that H. Kafka insisted the K. family make do with for their own domestic use, and undid the latch. Before he could escape from the room, his sister had barged in and started removing her clothes. “What are you looking at?” she hissed as she slipped a brassiere strap off her shoulder, and he fled. Still twelve, not yet a Bar Mitzvah, Franz owned one pair of long pants that he wore only on special occasions. He waited until the house was empty before removing the trousers from his closet and donning them along with a checkered waistcoat and his best blazer, a deep-navy blend with silvery buttons. Alone in the flat, he tiptoed into the bathroom, which still smelled of his sister’s toilette, and slicked back his dark hair with a dab of pomade from his father’s medicine chest. Examining himself in the mirror, he approved of what he saw except for the windmill ears, Perhaps someday, when he was older, he could have them surgically altered. He timed his arrival at the theater across the square by the astronomical clock on the facade of the Old Town Hall. The show was scheduled to end at ten minutes after ten, so he was able to watch as the skeletal figure of Death raised and inverted his ominous hourglass to signify the relentless passage of time. Though he saw it daily, he was mesmerized by the performance, and waited until the last gong faded to hasten into the alley by the theater just as the audience, including his parents, began to flood down the marble steps. The alley was dark, and a single silhouetted figure stood underneath the lantern at the far end. Franz picked up his pace, but he was so eager to make his appointment, and his eyes were so riveted to the figure, that when the figure turned into the light, revealing not the playwright he had expected, but an unmistakably female countenance dressed in a man’s long overcoat and homburg, he tripped on an uneven paving stone and sprawled at the woman’s feet. She wore men’s shoes of a very small size. “Hermes, I presume.” She laughed and, when he didn’t respond, explained, “Messenger of the gods. It’s a joke.”

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“I’m sorry, I don’t joke.” She examined the boy at her feet. “No, I guess you don’t. It’s a pity. Life is quite humorous.” She said this so dolefully that he felt like sobbing as she extended a delicate hand to help him up. It was the second time that day that he found himself on the floor. He looked at the welcoming hand. It was slim and its painted fingers with blunt-cut nails smelled faintly of tobacco. “Or do you prefer a position of humiliation?” she asked. He scrambled to his feet, noting with horror a hole in the right knee of his precious long trousers, “I am—” he started. “Franz,” she said. “Of course, you’re Franz. I’ve been told you’re Franz; I can’t escape that name, I’m a prisoner of Franzes. Between yourself and the renowned Grillparzer and, actually, my husband’s name is Franz, too, but he is . . .” She paused and waved her fingers. “Irrelevant. Of course, I mean that in a humorous fashion.” He didn’t know what to say. “Here.” She extracted a thin envelope from her sleeve like a magician revealing a hidden playing card. “Deliver this.” As soon as he touched the envelope, she let go and walked swiftly to the square at the entrance to the alley. He watched her with a feeling of inexplicable yearning, and his heart nearly exploded when she turned and pressed one of her carmine-­tipped fingers to her pale lips. Ten minutes that seemed like ten decades later, Franz was still standing alone under the flickering lantern when the stage door opened and Franz Senior appeared. “Hello, Herr Grillparzer.” “You have something for me?” “Here, sir.” The messenger was a tiny bit reluctant to part with the message that still bore the imprint of the mysterious woman’s scent. He tendered it hesitantly, only to have the play­wright grab it out of his fist and rip off the top as heedlessly as if it were wax paper from a ganache. Grillparzer squinted under the flickering light and snorted. “Humph, tell her that it is absolutely impossible.” “But . . .” “But what?” “But how shall I tell her, sir? I don’t know where she is.”

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“The Castle, you fool. Here.” He whipped a pad and pen of his own from his pocket, scribbled furiously, tucked it into his own envelope, and pressed a dab of sealing wax to the flap. “Ask for Madame Elena.” “The Castle, sir?” “Do I have to tell you where it is?” “No, sir, but it’s nearly eleven o’clock.” “Lesson number one, little Franz: love knows no curfew.” He flung several banknotes at the boy. “Take a carriage. Hurry!”

Whether the linen emporium was at sixes and sevens because the son of the house was missing, he didn’t know. Whether his parents enjoyed the play or not, he didn’t know. He only knew that he was at the mercy of implacable forces, bouncing from the enormous courtyard of the Castle, where he had stood waiting for what seemed an interminable length of time, back to the theater, and thence again to the Castle, and yet again to the theater. What the dialogue he conveyed was, who was importuning whom, he didn’t know, but twice an hour for the succeeding two hours he was flung between the twin institutions like a shuttlecock. After the first round trip, he learned to keep the carriage and driver, who must have been entertained by his pint-sized passenger who ran up a tab that would sustain the driver and his six children for a week. “Back to the Castle, yer ’ighness?” he laughed in a Hungarian cockney accent. The man had thin, pointy ears that Franz envied and a wisp of a moustache. He reminded Franz of a mouse, a curious notion that the boy tucked away in the crevasses of his mind for later consideration. He often had ideas that he didn’t know what to do with. He remembered Herr Grillparzer’s notebook and thought about it while the carriage jolted up the switchback trail to the Castle. Only as the carriage crested the hill onto the plateau above the city did he realize, in a blaze of moonlit illumination, what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. All of his schoolmates were bound to enter into their families’ small businesses. One would sell another cheese; the cheesemonger would buy shoes from a third; the cobbler rent a room from a fourth; and, should Franz wish it, the landlord would come to him for linens, which he would buy from the sons of his father’s suppliers in order to sell at a profit to enable him to buy cheese. It was such an endless, dreary cycle. Even the most ambitious of his peers saw only accounting and the law as grand opportunities for escape. Accounting and the law made Franz gag. He thought they sucked. Now, inspired by the great man, he saw a different path open in front of him. He would write sophisticated drawing-room comedies. He envied how diligently Grillparzer set his own blazing inspiration to paper. First thing tomorrow, young Franz would

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shoplift a notebook from Brodzki’s Stationery. In the meantime, he had a mission to fulfill. “Continue,” he told the coachman with the air of one to hired transport born. He was almost disappointed when Madame Elena, whom he had already deemed the “Countess” in his head, said, “I’ll be retiring now. You can relay that to your namesake as well as this,” and gave him her last envelope of the night. “Bitch!” Grillparzer growled after he read the message. Franz was shocked. “If that will be all, sir, I have to get home and do some mending.” “Mending? What are you, a seamstress?” The better Franz knew Franz, the harsher his remarks. “No, I’m not . . . sir.” The better Franz knew Franz, the more cautious his response. “But earlier, when I first met the Countess . . . I mean Madame Elena, my pants ripped. If my father finds out that I ruined them, he’ll kill me.” “That’s the second time you said that.” Young Franz shrugged and gazed at the light of the square. Old Franz pursued his inquiry. “How would your father perform the execution?” “Well, maybe he wouldn’t really kill me. Just punish me horribly. He’d probably make me write down ‘I will take care of my clothing’ five hundred times. Or worse, he’d—” “What?” Grillparzer’s pen was poised and his mouth was salivating as if he were unwrapping a chocolate ganache. “He’d write it on me himself,” Franz laughed, noting that he was capable of making a joke. Not a very funny one, perhaps, but a start on the road to repartee and literary renown. “Take care of your clothing. Take care of your clothing. Take—” “Care of your clothing,” Grillparzer murmured as he wrote the line down in his notebook as carefully as young Franz imagined it being written on his body. Young Franz felt something eerie that he couldn’t quite grasp in the elderly playwright’s repetition. It was as if the writer were siphoning the ideas from his head. He said, “I’ve got to go home.” “Yes,” murmured the playwright. “Same time tomorrow.” He was already so immersed in his writing that he hardly noticed his . . . his what? his gofer, errand boy, secretary, amanuensis . . . his muse. Fortunately, one of the windows in the storeroom behind H. Kafka Emporium was permanently ajar, and Franz, for all his perhaps preternatural instincts, was still twelve enough to have frequent need of secret egress from—and subsequent ingress to—the household. He pulled up a garbage can and bellied through the window, knocking over a stack of feather pillows—all the better to leap onto from the ledge.

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He tiptoed between the storeroom’s linens-filled shelves and up the staircase, into the bathroom, where he swiftly removed his pants and set to work with a needle and thread that the store also stocked. There he was, sitting on the edge of the tub in his blazer and vest, thin legs exposed, frustrated with the thread that kept slipping from its eye—impossible to rethread in the moonlight—when the door swung wide and a sarcastic voice asked, “Need help?” “What? I . . .” He tried to hide the pants, but impaled his thumb on the needle. “Ouch!” The next day, having stanched the flow of blood and paid his second sister, Valli, a week’s allowance in return for the promise of silence and five minutes of sewing, Franz wore his normal short pants to his appointment at the theater. He wondered if either Madame Elena or Herr Grillparzer would notice, and was both relieved and disappointed when neither did, at least not until two very late nights later. This time, the romantic game—more intricate than chess, more physical than wrestling—played itself out between different venues, and, more vitally, to entirely different effect than the night before. This time, when Madame cracked open the great riveted door of the Castle to read Monsieur’s message, her mouth turned up in a wry smile, and her eyes glowed. Franz furtively tried to read the text that had melted the Countess’s minor aristocratic heart, but all he could discern through the parchment was a line that seemed to repeat itself over and over down the length of the page. What the line was, he couldn’t tell, yet the obsessive repetition seemed familiar. He was trying to pin it down, figure out where he had come across such a deliberate pattern before, but just as he felt understanding tickle the edge of his brain, she spoke and eliminated all thought from his head. “Yes,” she sighed. “Yes, ma’am?” “Humph, oh, you. Well, yes. Tell Herr Grillparzer that I will be at the U Tri Pstrosu at midnight. Or, better yet, let me write that down. Come.” Suddenly, without warning, she swung back the thick door. If the courtyard flanked by the three wings of the Castle felt like some natural wonder—a vast cobbled steppe, perhaps—it was, at least, outside where immensity was in order, but the inside was so vast that Franz didn’t know what to compare it to. It was larger than the Jewish Quarter synagogue, larger than the Luria Street Theater. Salons that each appeared the size of Staromestske Nemesti Square sprawled to the left and right of a hallway that could have contained a dozen soldiers marching abreast. He saw pianos and harpsichords awaiting a ghostly orchestra in one room and a dining table that stretched into the distant recesses of another, and Oriental

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rugs and a life-sized mural of an ancient battle at the city gate that practically rang with the clash of bloody sabers. Did she live here? He hastened to follow her clicking heels through corridors under chandeliers, each lit with a hundred gleaming tapers, until she arrived at a comparatively intimate study rather like the main reading room of the Prague Library, where she sat at an inlaid desk, removed a sheaf of paper from a drawer, dipped a fountain pen into an inset inkwell, and set to composing her own letter. Did she live here alone? As her brow furrowed, Franz felt the gaze of scores of painted lords and ladies on the walls between bookcases filled with thousands of leather volumes. They stared down at him as if scoffing at his intrusion into their realm. Yet he also felt the ghostly presence of an army of servants who must have lit the candles and dusted the books and mopped the marble floors to a supernatural gleam. He thought he heard the laugh of children at the top of an enormous, curving staircase. “Drat,” she said, and crumpled the paper into a ball. “Drat and drat again.” She dropped another unsatisfactory effort into a garbage can made out of a hollowed elephant’s foot. She turned to the boy and said, “How do you. . .” “How do I what, madame?” “How do you manage to live with this, this . . .” Her eyes fixed on the letter from Grillparzer, which she suddenly grabbed and kissed. “This sorrow, this splendor, this . . .” “Well, I don’t really live with—” “Shut up. Never mind. I meant to say, ‘How do you do?’” “Fine, madame.” “Fine, indeed. Fine it shall have to be. I cannot match His Worship’s words, so I can only offer myself in return. Tell him I shall meet him at midnight at U Tri Pstrosu.” “U Tri Pstrosu,” he repeated. “The Three Ostriches. At midnight.” Gong! Gong! Gong! Just as the astronomical clock chimed eleven, the lead in The Poor Minstrel tripped over a prop in his eagerness to depart the Luria Theater for his own tryst with an obliging Bohemian waitress. Actually, it was the prop he was supposed to trip over to uproarious laughter in the second act, but this time he really broke his foot. Immediately, the stage manager called a rehearsal with the understudy, and the playwright was compelled to stay because the main reviewer from the Prazske Noviny had reserved two on the aisle for the next day. Hermes arrived a moment later. “Alas,” Grillparzer wailed as he heard Franz’s good news. “Lesson number two,” he said. “Never trust the theater. It will always break your heart.”

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In a rush, he scribbled a note for Franz to deliver to the cafe in his stead. Surely the lady would understand the delay, a matter of minutes. And so the boy who had assumed that his duties were concluded for the night set forth once again into the darkened city. He had heard of The Three Ostriches—it was notorious—but had never ventured inside the cafe located in the cellar of a sixteenth century townhouse. At a bar beneath the mottled fresco that gave name to the place, and in dimly lit banquettes, men dressed in formal evening jackets sat, laughed, and publicly cuddled with women whose dresses glittered with metallic threads and sequins. The women freely drank from bottles of champagne that sat in ice-filled silver buckets by each table. As one large man spread his arms, like wings, to possess two women on either side of him, a gun was visible beneath his tuxedo. Franz recalled the cramped, third-floor schoolroom he wasted forty hours a week in together with forty other little boys, and thought, “Now, this is an education.” As he was gaping at the scene, however, a tall, angular, stork­-like man interrupted his thoughts. “May I help you?” “Oh, yes, sir. I have a message for Madame Elena.” The man bowed abruptly as if he were about to peck. “I will deliver it to her.” Franz felt the envelope in his pocket and was about to pass it along when he heard himself reply, “No. I must deliver it myself.” This was not part of his instructions, but he said it with determination. “Hmm.” The man made a sound entirely devoid of pleasure. “Follow me.” Striding with the same mechanical motion with which he had welcomed Franz, he led the boy between the tables of the sophisticated club, and similarly pulled back a curtain to an even more private alcove within this extremely private domain. There, the Countess sat on a red leather settee, reading a book by the light from a bronze wall sconce. The title was French. “You?” she said. “I am sorry, ma’am.” Franz handed over the missive. “Sorry for what?” “Sorry that it’s myself here rather than . . . him.” “And he is not coming?” “I believe the letter will explain everything, ma’am.” “His letters do more than explain; they illuminate,” she said as she slid a knife into the flap and sliced it open as delicately as a surgeon might sever human tissue. And yet her response changed as soon as she read the first words. No, the lady did not understand the delay, at least not as Herr Grillparzer described it. Franz was amazed by the immediate, palpable power of words. The Countess was transformed. She trembled with barely restrained fury and stood so abruptly that a vase of ostrich feathers on her table wobbled. Had the playwright deliberately insulted her?

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“Shall I . . . ?” Franz hesitated. “Shall you what?” she snapped. “Shall I tell Herr Grillparzer anything?” “Yes. Tell him to take this trite claptrap back to the popular stage where it belongs.” She tore the offending letter to shreds and dropped them in her wake. Franz followed her out of the restaurant as the maître d’ commented to the bartender, “Filthy Jew.” “The woman will drive me mad!” Grillparzer continued the tirade he had begun the moment young Kafka entered the theater. It was the following afternoon, and the two Franzes hadn’t seen each other since the boy had left the disconsolate playwright chewing up the Luria stage. Nor had Franz’s been a night to cherish. He had walked home alone through Prague’s twisty maze, as frightened of the shadows that burly brown rats scurried into as he was of the rats that scurried into the shadows. Finally, at last, he had climbed through the familiar storeroom window, where, he should have known, both of his evil sisters were waiting for him. There went his next two weeks’ allowance to purchase their silence. Actually, it wasn’t a bad deal. If only he had enough cash left to take care of his parents, he would have had a happier childhood. Now he was back at the theater and Grillparzer picked up his soliloquy without missing a beat. “Mad, I tell you, mad!” the playwright boomed. “I’m sorry, sir.” “You’re sorry! I’m the one who suffers. Lesson three: never trust a woman.” And the creator of parlor dramas that could not have been more convoluted than his own life muttered to himself, “What to do? What to do? She makes me feel like . . .” He pulled his beard in frustration and peered long and inquisitively at his assistant. “What was it you said your sister called you yesterday?” “Me?” “You, you little . . .” “Insect?” “Yes, precisely. Grotesque. That won’t do at all. Absolutely impossible.” He paced back and forth across the empty stage while Franz cowered in the wings. “What sort of insect?” “I don’t know. I suppose a fairly large one, sir.” And as Franz told Franz his awful fantasies, Grillparzer grew rapt, started writing and only occasionally said, “Slow down. What was that part about crawling on the ceiling, let’s say the ceiling of her boudoir? Yes, that’s a nice touch.” Clutching the letter he didn’t know he had dictated, Franz returned to the Castle, where he cooled his heels for an hour in the now-familiar courtyard. Only after the

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sun began to set in pink and gold splendor across the Vltava did Madame Elena deign to make an appearance. “Oh, you again.” She yawned with theatrical ennui. “Yes, ma’am.” “Don’t you get tired?” “No, ma’am.” “Very well.” She opened the new envelope, and yet again she changed before she finished reading the salutation. Her lips quivered, and she sought to calm herself by fumbling in a beaded bag for a cigarette. Clearly, the message Franz conveyed from Grillparzer was acceptable in the way that the previous was not. Adults had always been mysterious to Franz. His Hebrew school teacher was a vicious martinet who occasionally read the students dreadful sentimental poetry he wrote about an imaginary city he must have picked off a map of America. “New Ark” he called it, after Noah. The man was nuts, and so were the customers at H. Kafka Emporium who returned a bath towel when it got wet. And Adela, the Kafka family maid, who slept half the day and then woke and turned into a frenzied cleaning machine, she, too, was driven by obscure compulsions. As for Franz’s parents, the boy had no idea what made them tick. But the Countess and the playwright took the cake. Talk about running hot and cold. If the Madame’s response to Grillparzer’s letters were to be taken seriously, one sentence was genius, the next rubbish. Fortunately for Franz’s employer, this text was apparently the former. She said, “The Hotel Europa.” “At what hour, ma’am?” “Immediately.” “But—” “We shall take separate conveyances. Call it a nod to bourgeois convention. Your . . .” she sought the correct word, “master will appreciate that . . .”

Back at the Luria, Grillparzer wasn’t taking any chances that another theatrically unlucky broken foot might keep him from his assignation. He flagged down the carriage at the entrance to the alley beneath a newly installed electric marquee that made it seem as if the moon were merely one more light in the firmament of blinking bulbs spelling out its message against the empire sky: The Poor Minstrel. Franz obligingly opened the lacquered door of the carriage and stepped down. “Where are you going?” “Why, home, sir,” Franz expected another long, lonely walk. “Oh, come on. Come with me, instead.” “What?” “And wait.” “Wait?”

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Grillparzer patted the seat. “Good things happen when you’re in the picture. You’re my talisman.” But perhaps he ought to have found a more portable charm, one he could wear around his wrinkled neck or tuck into his pocket like a gold watch, because minutes after they arrived amid the hurly-burly of Prague’s finest, most ornate temporary residence for bankers and generals and miscellaneous foreign diplomats and dignitaries who had business in the provincial capital, and deposited his talisman in the shadow of an enormous potted fern, probably seconds after he opened his mouth, he blew it again. Across the gilded lobby, Franz heard Madame Elena cursing like a fishwife among the ambassadors. “How dare you?” she screamed. “You fraud! You turd!” A maître d’ stood at attention beside the table. Franz recognized the type. He might have been bred for the occupation on some farm together with his cousin from The Three Ostriches. Young Kafka wondered what he himself was bred for besides bafflement and dismay. The Countess extended her arm toward Grillparzer and commanded the maître d’, “Remove him.” “Humph.” The object of her disdain stood his ground. “I am not an ottoman.” Franz wondered why she called the playwright a Turk, or if he was one, and why that mattered. Nonetheless, the maître d’ gripped the elbow of the obstreperous playwright, who suddenly seemed more frail and elderly than he would have preferred. “I . . . I demand to see the manager,” he sputtered. “I’m afraid that will not do any good, sir.” “And why not?” “Because the lady owns the hotel, sir.” Grillparzer gasped like a fish on the floor of a rowboat as he tried to maintain a trace of dignity in the midst of clear debacle. “The door, sir.” Oddly, the only individual who appeared mature in the elegant room full of badly acting grown-ups was a twelve-year-old wearing short pants. Little Franz sympathetically led Grillparzer to the carriage, and, because he knew no better remedy for heartbreak, directed the driver to Staromestske Nemesti Square, where Stern’s Bakery was redolent with pastry baking for the next day. Fortunately, the witch who owned the place was not nocturnal, and a cheerful, plump waitress served them. Franz paid out of the money he had hidden from his sisters. “Why does she treat me like this?” the playwright moaned. “Me, Grillparzer, author of Hero and Leander, The Jewess of Toledo, and Life is a Dream.” The more credits he listed, the meagerer they sounded. “The Poor Minstrel is going to be huge.”

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“I’m sure it will, sir.” “Huge, I tell you.” “It must be a real trial, sir.” The author halted midwhine. Like the Countess, he knew when he heard something notable, and needed to pursue it. “Explain.” Young Franz improvised. “Well, it sort of sounds like you’re accused of a crime, but you don’t even know what the crime is.” “Yes, that’s it precisely.” “And then you get to a judge, but he won’t tell you anything either.” The more the boy said, the more fervent the playwright grew, so the more the boy elaborated. His shaggy-dog story didn’t particularly go anywhere, but if it kept his mentor from dwelling on his own sorrows, the boy would oblige. He could do this with his eyes closed. His eyes closed. He was in a trance, and didn’t notice when the famous author started scribbling on napkin after napkin from the chrome container on the table. Every word out of young Franz’s mouth since he had met old Franz had struck a note, and together the notes formed chords that had touched both Grillparzer and Madame Elena’s heart, but this was grander than his earlier songs about insects and mice. Sitting with his bare knees crossed over each other, he conducted a symphony of misery, anxiety, and regret. Somewhere in the middle of the recital, the playwright began taking care of the waiter, purchasing more and more marzipan bunnies every time Franz paused, until the sugary hutch was empty and the tale had been told.

“My lord requests one last opportunity, ma’am.” “Why should I give it to him?” she scoffed. “He said that if you do him the great honor to read this, he will promise to never open his mouth again if that is your decree. I will sit here and wait.” Stiffly, since he hadn’t gotten much sleep the previous night, Franz set himself on the ground. He looked at the enclosure that defined the Castle and the wall that gave way to the city beyond. He looked up at the Countess and didn’t know how he had such presumption. “Only to keep you from catching a cold,” she laughed. After all, life was quite humorous. Fine, he thought; let her think what she wished for now, but he could predict her next words, which came an hour after she began flipping the napkins, which dampened with the first of her teardrops, which ultimately coursed down her cheeks as if a spigot had been turned on behind her deep green eyes. “At last. At last. He understands everything in my soul. How could such a vulgar, tawdry . . . Ach, I do not care if he is a bourgeois boor. If the man is capable of this

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poetry, then he is my soul mate.” She dabbed at her eyes with the final napkin and smeared a mixture of ink and mascara across her face. “Should I tell him the door will open, madame?” “Yes.” She smiled, “all doors will open.” “Maybe, but sometimes a doorway can be open and you still can’t enter.” Say what you will, Madame Elena was attuned to language and usage. She knew an image when she saw one, a metaphor when it hit her, a perception that could only come from a particular set of mind. She stopped like a clock with a jammed gear. “Come again?” “And sometimes you don’t even know what you’re waiting for.” “How interesting.” “Really?” “Yes, really. Do you have any other interesting ideas, young man?” “What do you mean, ma’am?” “Have you ever mentioned anything like this to Herr Grillparzer?” “Anything like what, ma’am?” “Oh, any similarly curious little notion. What have your conversations been like?” “What conversations, ma’am?” He wasn’t exactly avoiding her question, but the boy didn’t have it in him to avow himself. She had to lead in their intimate verbal dance. “The conversations you’ve had regarding . . . me.” “Rather like a dream, ma’am.” “A dream perhaps of insects?” “How did you know?” “Or hunger so fierce that you felt like dying in a cage?” “Why, yes, that too.” “And what about a judicial proceeding?” “You’re reading my mind.” “Or you’re reading mine,” she sighed. “Life is a dream,” he quoted the title the playwright borrowed from Lope de Vega. “But sometimes you wake up, and suddenly you see the truth that you could never have imagined. Come with me, Franz.” “But Herr Grillparzer is waiting.” “Let him wait. One Franz is as good as another. In fact, one Franz may be better than another.” She opened the door to the Castle and he entered. Together, they walked along the endless corridors and eventually up the carpeted staircase and through another long hall, until she opened one last door to a room painted blushing pink. Inside was a bed, bathed in the glow of a single candle.

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Before she drew him down, the son of a shopkeeper noticed the quality of the linens.

Ten Years Later Young Kafka never saw the playwright or the Countess again. He grew up, and, though he briefly attempted to write drawing-room comedies, he succumbed to his destiny and became a clerk. He was hard at work on the fourth floor of the Workman’s Accident Insurance Institute, wrestling with a thorny actuarial problem concerning tubercular diagnoses, when he received a certified letter. Sent by one Herr Martin Prager, attorney, it requested his presence at 1414 Na Prikope near Wenceslaus Square. Terror overwhelmed the minor functionary. What could he have possibly done to draw the attention of an attorney? Authority of all sorts was unnerving to him, and none more so than the law. For the first time since he had joined the institute five years earlier, he left work before the end of the day, and, for the first time in ten years, he hailed one of the city’s black carriages. Dreading the moment, he reknotted his thin black tie and combed his hair behind his ludicrous ears in the attorney’s waiting room before he gave the secretary his name. Instead of sneering at him, however, she said, “Right this way, sir,” and ushered him straight into a wood-paneled suite that smelled of responsibility. Behind a sleek modern desk sat Herr Prager. He was a clean-shaven man with small ears and thin wire spectacles. The attorney got directly to business. “Herr Kafka?” “Yes?” “I apologize, but I must ask, do you have any identification?” More worried than ever, Kafka showed his passport as well as the letter he had received. “Hm. Yes, indeed. This will do. Please have a seat.” He gestured to one of the chairs in front of his desk. Kafka felt as if he were being called before a tribunal. “As you may or may not know,” Prager commenced, “the renowned playwright, Franz Grillparzer, died last Tuesday in Vien. Most of Herr Grillparzer’s estate has been probated in the capital, but I have summoned you here as local executor for a fairly unusual bequest. I am empowered to convey to you the contents herein.” He pushed a heavy cardboard box across the desk. Franz reached forward. Inside the box were several reams of typed manuscript pages. “But first,” the attorney said, “I am to read you the following letter.”

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Franz sat back, remembering only faintly the one episode of his youth that was ever worth anything. The attorney cleared his throat and began, “Dear Franz, I believe you will recognize the pages inside this box. Alas, I could never publish them under my own name, because my audience—fools—would never tolerate their likes from the author of The Poor Minstrel and other poor excuses for drama. Also, they are not really, or not entirely, mine, although I have worked on them to the full extent of my power and range for the last years of my life. Now I am dead, as all shall be, and I intend to make small recompense to the one who gave me the greatest gift of my life. You may do as you wish with these pages, but I strongly suggest that before you do anything so rash as publish them you seriously consider burning them instead. They are a weight that I could not bear. But you are stronger, and will do as you must. Sincerely yours, Franz “Humph.” The lawyer cleared his throat. “Extraordinary. In all the years I have managed Herr Grillparzer’s affairs in this province, I never once had the sense of a private life. That is out­side various, shall we say, affairs of the heart. But this is not my business. The box is yours.” “Thank you,” Kafka said. “Oh, and one more thing.” “Yes?” “I have also been instructed to give you one hundred kronen to be used for the exclusive purpose of purchasing . . .” He hesitated, so absurd was the very last wish of the greatest artist in the empire. But Franz already knew what the money was for. As an adult, he had developed the sense of humor he had lacked as a child. He finished the sentence. “Marzipan bunnies.” “Um, yes, how did you know?” “Lesson number one, Herr Prager. Sometimes you get cockroaches and sometimes you get bunnies. If you’d like to accompany me, I will treat you to the best bakery in Prague.”

16 Tova Reich

Dedicated to the Dead

Not long after Jack Gallagher realized that, in his previous life, he had been the Jew Yankel Galitzianer, murdered during the war in one of the death camps of Poland, he changed his name to Jacob Gilguli to affirm his reincarnated state, and set out to Jerusalem to find himself. His girlfriend at the time, Bathsheba Finkelkraut, a former drill sergeant in the Israeli army of a physical type to which he had always been guiltily drawn—full-bodied with mighty thighs and a visible mustache, a type in which he indulged as a secret vice unsuitable to his Wall Street connections and Episcopalian bloodline—accompanied him on this first stage of his journey of selfrenewal. She was the one, after all, who had guided him to the insight that he was the gilgul of Yankel Galitzianer when she showed him an ad in a Hebrew newspaper, a language he could at that point neither read nor understand, for the New Jersey burial society of the Polish shtetl of Przemysl, offering plots to fellow survivors. Immediately he recited the names and described down to the last detail the physical characteristics of his two boyhood comrades, Jacek Lustiger and Henryk Pfefferkorn, who had escaped into the forest three days before the roundups in the town, while he, Yankel Galitzianer, had been herded with whips into a cattle car by blackbooted guards, and he rode for a week on the rails in darkness without water or food and nowhere to relieve himself decently until he arrived at a death camp—which camp it was, he could not yet specify—where his fate was to be gassed and cremated. For Jacob Gilguli, this was the absolute recognition of who he was that he had been seeking all his life; not for one minute did he doubt its truth. It fully explained his recurrent nightmares featuring the lashing of whips and high polished black leather jackboots and sealed freight cars packed with wailing women and children, and yes, men too, young and old, weighed down with pathetic bundles and satchels, “Dedicated to the Dead” was first published in Agni, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Tova Reich. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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and it clarified, too, his lifelong obsession with Holocaust movies such as Ilsa: SheWolf of the SS and others, which were included in his personal collection and which he would flick on at four in the morning as he lay naked in the darkness between the crisp white sheets of his platform bed in his Tribeca loft, his heart pounding, startled into wakefulness by his terrifying dreams. In Jerusalem, he let his lank blond hair grow long, parted in the middle like two curtains flounced on either side to present his face with its strong horizontals and vertical—the parallel lines of his thin lips and long eyebrows, the straight drop of his refined nose. His beard came in almost platinum in color, coiled and sparse—“Like your poobic hair,” Bathsheba commented as she wove her raw fingers through it in bed one night in the room he had taken at the King David Hotel. Soon after, as the last service he required of her, Bathsheba located a shop for him operated by a Muslim known as Abu Shahid, which specialized in outfitting fresh recruits and returnees to the Jewish faith. Gilguli made his way there through the Damascus Gate, into the winding alleyways and arcades of the shuk of the walled Old City. At Abu Shahid’s, he bought without haggling a long white cotton tunic manufactured in India, matching loose white drawstring trousers, brown leather Old Testament sandals, and a fringed garment to pull over his shirt like a double-sided bib, with a cluster of silken strings in each of its four corners threaded with celestial blue that lit up the pale blueness of his eyes. To cover his head, he selected a large, closefitting skullcap crocheted in shades of red, to which he affixed, with small, fine stitches, a yellow star with the word “Jude” inscribed on it that he acquired from Abu Shahid’s exclusive private collection of genuine Holocaust relics at a staggering cost, though the merchant, placing hand over heart, swore over and over again on the life of his mother that he was practically giving it away. Even so, despite this economic setback, still unable to resist, he accessorized with a small shofar, which he spotted in a dusty heap in a corner and which, right there in Abu Shahid’s stall, he raised to his lips to let out a shattering blast without straining at all, thanks to years of French horn lessons that were among the fringe benefits of his entitled upbringing. All of these items, as well as his room at the King David, he paid for with money from his trust fund, established about a century after his ancestors stepped onto American soil, and which, to his glee, his family could not touch even in the face of their severe disapproval of the unexpected trajectory his career had taken. The yellow Jude badge was his second most costly purchase after the white donkey with its luminous Persian-rug saddlebags, which he acquired from a cousin of Abu Shahid’s, and upon which he made his way around the city of Jerusalem and its environs, stabling it at night in special quarters established by the municipality for the white donkeys of other penitents, the self-proclaimed Messiahs and the newly enlightened. Yet, notwithstanding this carefully considered equipage and

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the serious financial outlays it entailed, inevitably, every single Israeli he met would in short order inquire, with a jolting brazenness to which he was entirely unaccustomed by class or breeding, if he was really a Jew, that is, a Jew by birth. And even as he struggled to explain the complicated proposition that his lineage was even purer and more aristocratic than that, that he was a Jew by pre-birth, they would smirk knowingly and smugly proclaim, I knew it, you definitely don’t look Jewish, I could tell right away. There was simply nothing he could do to convince them. This was a stubborn, ill-mannered, arrogant, obnoxious lot he had fallen in among, but what could he do? It was his karma to be one of them. It had also been through Bathsheba, albeit indirectly, that he had the rare privilege of meeting the legendary holy man and guru Shmuel Himmelhoch, who, according to knowledgeable sources, took upon himself extraordinary acts of penance for what must have been spectacular sins in a cave outside the walls of the city, near Absalom’s tomb. Gilguli was astride his white donkey coming up from the direction of Hezekiah’s tunnel and the pool of Siloam, with Bathsheba pacing sullenly some distance behind him as he had been obliged to demand due to the unseemly and immodest and, it might also be noted, unbecoming costume of tight khaki shorts and plunging halter top she insisted it was her right to wear, which reflected so negatively upon him, so discredited his mission, so compromised him in his new emanation. Not surprisingly, two Arab boys, justifiably concluding her to be loose and available, leapt from the crags to grab the choicest parts. And though Bathsheba would have been fully capable of dispatching them thanks to her rigorous training in the elite Israel Defense Forces, at that moment Himmelhoch in his spectral white robes, his wild unshorn hair and beard flying, emerged from his cave, waving one arm in agitation while screwing his other hand against his ear in what looked to be intense spiritual pain, startling the boys like crows off a carcass and scattering them in horror. Gilguli and Bathsheba watched in awed silence from their respective stations as Himmelhoch completed his labors—Gilguli insisted afterward that there was no question that the holy man was in ardent communication with the One Above—removed his cell phone from his ear, glared at it reproachfully, and shook it in resignation before turning to enter once again the enveloping dead zone of his cave. The first words that Himmelhoch spoke to him were in the form of numbers—167277. This happened after months during which Gilguli sat in the cave at the feet of the sage six days a week not including the Sabbath, dredging up from his very depths all of the woes and longings and griefs that oppressed his heart and soul, to be answered only with a weighty silence laced with subtext. Gilguli did not

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immediately realize that when Himmelhoch uttered those first words his intention was to pass on to his disciple his cell phone number, with the implicit suggestion that Gilguli might save himself a trip and spare his donkey the rocky climb simply by telephoning to continue his outpourings, even unburdening himself into the answering machine should he, Himmelhoch, not be available to take the call. Those first sounds coming directly to his ears from the mouth of the holy man shocked Gilguli for their precious rarity, they hit him as so auspicious and resonant that he instantly knew them to be the numbers that had been branded into his forearm in his past life, when he was the Jew Yankel Galitzianer. That very day he took the bus to Tel Aviv, to a tattoo parlor on Shenkin Street, and submitted himself once again to the ordeal as, in the very molecules of his being beyond time, he remembered having been forced to submit when he was a prisoner in the death camp. It is true that he also had another tattoo, at the summit of his natal crease, acquired in his Gallagher life, during his last year at St. Paul’s after a long wretched night of beer and despair—the image of a heart dripping blood pierced by a sword with the name Morgan carved into the hilt. Where was Morgan now? At Bloomingdale’s, no doubt, shopping in intimate wear. Of that tattoo he was ashamed, it goes without saying, but of this one on his forearm he remained defiantly proud. He believed with a full faith that some day soon it would be irrefutably shown that, through the collision of mystical forces, the holy man’s number was one and the same as his own when he was the doomed slave Yankel Galitzianer, and that through this miraculous confluence of digits a direct line to God was unfurled. Then one day Himmelhoch took two metal sticks that had been propped in an alcove of his cave and led Gilguli out into the blinding sunlight. Gripping a stick in each gnarled fist by its curved cane-like handle and straining with all his strength to hold them out about a foot apart straight in front of him, Himmelhoch began to speak for the first time in complete sentences and paragraphs in a colloquial though heavily accented English. These were specialized divining rods, the holy man instructed, specifically endowed with the power to pick up auras from the energy field of the dead. Gilguli must stretch out the rods, exactly as shown, and ask them the question, Are there dead in this ground? When the rods crossed, the answer was yes. Then he must remember to say, Thank you, rods, and repeat the operation. He must speak to the rods nicely, Himmelhoch cautioned, never lash out or strike with them, and in this way, if in no other, he would surpass—no comparison intended, God forbid— even Moses our teacher who transgressed with his staff by smiting the rock. Even as Himmelhoch was explaining, the rods were crossing furiously under their own power, no matter how strenuously the holy man struggled to keep them apart,

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clanking together again and again as they picked up the frequencies and vibrations emanating from the dead in every direction. This, of course, was not surprising, as the two men were wielding the rods in the neighborhood of the ancient cemetery descending along the slope of the Mount of Olives, which overflowed with the righteous departed awaiting resurrection, longing through eternity for the sound of the shofar that would signal the final roll down the hill to the Golden Gate cast wide open at last and onto the restored Temple Mount toward blissful redemption. Himmelhoch passed the rods to Gilguli and gave him the assignment to go forth and practice his technique until the next morning, when he must return to his master to recount all that he had learned. What he had learned, Gilguli reported the next day, was that, although admittedly out of shape as befitted his new incarnation as a Jew, not even with all the upperbody strength he had acquired from years of crew and wrestling and lacrosse in his renounced life at prep school and Princeton could he keep the rods from crossing like crazy—every step he took, no matter where he walked, notwithstanding all of his exertions, the rods crossed. He could do nothing to stop them. Himmelhoch nodded his head mournfully; the boy had done his homework at least. This phenomenon was to be expected, the holy man elucidated, due to the fact that the entire country, from Metullah to Eilat, from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, was a graveyard. Since time immemorial people have come here to die, Himmelhoch went on, and that includes those who come with the conscious intention of dying as well as those who come with the illusion that they might live, while the rest have their remains shipped in pine boxes in the bellies of the great jets. Israel, as everyone must have heard by now, is a land that devours its inhabitants. Then Himmelhoch commanded Gilguli to take the rods and set out for Poland. There he would find the ashes of Yankel Galitzianer. That is where he would find himself. It was late July when Jacob Gilguli landed in Warsaw. With his knapsack on his back and the two metal rods erect and quivering before him, he embarked by foot on a pilgrimage to the death camps, fasting all day until sunset and concentrating his brain waves on the mantras of the Jewish prayers, Shema Yisrael, Kaddish, Dayenu, a few others, which he had memorized on the Sabbath in the meditation hall of a charismatic shepherd who gathered his flock of lost souls at the Western Wall. He headed first in the direction of Treblinka, where, according to the Never Again guidebook he carried in his fanny pack along with his passport and credit cards and zlotys, over three-quarters of a million Jews were exterminated. Of course the rods went berserk when he arrived there, but it was also the case, he could not deny it,

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that however hard he tried to restrain them they kept on crossing, they had a will of their own, they crossed almost every step of the way, on every superficially neutral road and highway he traversed, though when he set foot on the killing grounds he believed there was a difference in degree—there they went into an absolute off-the-charts frenzy of crossing, he believed. Still, how might Himmelhoch in the enlightenment of his cave have interpreted this riddle of chronic rod activity even in the lands of the gentiles? The holy man, Gilguli told himself, would have taught that tragedy and atrocity, suffering and death are fermenting just below the surface everywhere, leaving no trace, offering no meaning, wherever there was once life—and gentiles, too, may be considered a life form, Himmelhoch might have glossed, also God’s creatures whether we like it or not, never mind if they saw fit to classify Jews as subhuman, Jewish blood as racially inferior, Jewish life as unworthy of life. Hadn’t the Master of the Universe sent his own prophet Jonah to save the more than 120,000 idolaters of Nineveh who could not tell their right from their left, not to mention all of the animals?

Gilguli proceeded southward with rods pointing valiantly in the direction of Sobibor (a quarter-million gassed, cf. Never Again, including, it must be conceded, some non-Jews with mothers). Streams of gleaming buses with banners—Holocaust Experience, Heritage Mission, Back to the Source, The Nation of Israel Lives, We Are Here!—passed him by, conveying tourists he recognized as Jews not only by features and costume and loud complaints about the air-conditioning, which he could make out through the opening windows, but also, to his mortification, by the inevitable gesture of pausing mid-greeting, freezing midwave, and then the shouts, Hey, wait a minute—that guy’s not Jewish, it’s some kind of hippie or something—Hey pal, what’s with the sticks? Only the German youth groups on their required mass guilt trip in a bus labeled Roots Kanal, the straps of their lederhosen and the feathers of their Tyrolean hats visible through the panes, howling Ja, ja, ja, ja at the tops of their lungs, hailed him warmly and fraternally as they hurtled obediently onward to do the next death camp. At the entrance to Majdanek (215,000 from starvation, torture, and disease, 145,000 by gassing or shooting—were the words “numbers” and “numbing” derived from the same root, Gilguli wondered), he was stopped by the dark-skinned, gold-chained Israeli proprietor of a kiosk selling death camp T-shirts and postcards, Holocaust trinkets and knickknacks, who drew out from a secret compartment under his table a pile of authentic artifacts and memorabilia— Only for our most discriminating customers, he confided—and hustled Gilguli into buying a yellow badge with the word “Juif ” imprinted on it to attach to the other side of his skullcap—So that they’ll recognize you from the front and the rear. Even

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as Gilguli demurred, another product was flashed, a 100% genuine knockoff, much cheaper, a yellow star stamped with the word “Jew” for an English-speaking market. And that was when, with the peddler hissing in disgust after him that he could go around with a sack on his head decorated all over with yellow stars like some kind of wizard, he’d still never pass—And by the way, chaver, what’s with the sticks?— that was when Gilguli realized that if he was ever to connect with the remains of his former life, he needed to get off the beaten track, he needed to ask the rods the correct question, he needed a sign. The first sign came in the form of Never Again opening of itself to the words “out of the way,” “practically in Ukraine,” “end of the earth,” “neglected,” “forgotten”— “God forsaken.” Jacob Gilguli surrendered to the sign, setting out to the southeast as if pulled down by ropes. That was how he arrived on a bright morning toward the end of summer at what he hoped might be his final destination, as the airline pilots like to say: the Belzec death camp in the far depths of Poland, where, consulting Never Again, from March to December of 1942, 600,000 Jews, mostly from southern Poland, including quite plausibly his former self when he was Yankel Galitzianer of Przemysl, were offloaded from cattle cars, gassed with carbon monoxide, dumped into great pits, then dug up again, haphazardly cremated, and reburied in the rush to blot out the evidence. Gilguli lowered his eyes and took off his shoes before treading upon camp ground. He stepped onto the gray ash that stretched endlessly before him like the remnants of a cosmic bonfire; a hard white substance was strewn everywhere, reminding him of sea shells, cutting into the soles of his feet. “Will these bones live?” Gilguli spoke out loud. That was the question for the rods, and it burst from his throat on its own, the way an animal squeal leaps spontaneously from a person who recalls something shameful. It was as if he had been seized by the shock of prophetic madness. Raising his eyes from the ash-and-bone-blanketed soil, he was rewarded at once with the second sign. Figures in the foreground with metal rods outstretched were roaming the devastated landscape, multiple shapes like his own, almost floating in the early morning light, divining for the dead. How could Jacob Gilguli doubt for one moment that this astonishing replication of his own mission, men everywhere dowsing for corpses, was the definitive sign he had been praying for? This was what he took in at once, his image mirrored, as a man’s gaze originating from deep within his consciousness and obsessions will settle first upon his own reflection and only then turn to take in what surrounds it. Only then did he see the mounds of freshly excavated earth rising everywhere, swirling into focus, the upheaval of a construction site—he saw a

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bulldozer, a cement mixer, a crane, earth-moving trucks, and farther back, the green cubicle of a portable toilet. Struggling like the other seekers to hold out his rods against the overwhelming crossing force rising from the stirred-up dead, Gilguli made his way deeper into the camp, a dog at his heels leaping exuberantly to sniff at his warm parts. Would it be sacrilege, he wondered, to use one of these rods to get rid of the dog? Here and there he noticed men sitting on camp stools with buckets at their sides, bandanas wrapped around their heads to sop up the percolating heat of this late-summer’s day, jiving on their perches to the beat from their headphones, pushing down between their spread legs on drills probing deep into the earth. From one of these drillers, a Polish kid transmitting in video English, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth bobbing dryly, spilling ashes to ashes, Gilguli learned that what they were doing here—the rod wielders, the drillers, and so on—was knocking themselves out to pinpoint the locations of the remains, the bodies, the corpses, the mass graves, the burial pits, yadayada, in order to cover their rears against charges of plowing through the dead in the process of creating a memorial in their honor. The memorial was slated to be a narrow pathway cutting through the entire camp, starting at ground level, then slowly, slowly descending to, say, ten meters deep before dead-ending at a wall—Very major chills and thrills for the visitor walking this walk, the driller said, goose pimples big-time, you feel like trapped, suffocation, buried alive, can’t breathe, get me out of here, but after you’ve done the tour, you feel good, you feel very, very good, you go into town, you look for something to eat, something to buy, go on, treat yourself, do something nice for yourself, you deserve it, you are on the side of the good. Gilguli was shaking with emotion. He felt himself almost physically overcome by the noble concept underlying this memorial—of vicarious suffering, of sympathetic dying, of entering this constricting passageway, penetrating the space of the dead, the victims pressing in against you from both sides with flattened palms and frozen screams, he could almost see them as through the glass walls of a fish tank, and yes, feeling their pain, experiencing what it must have been like to be them. It took everything in Gilguli’s power to refrain from lowering himself then and there into the ash-and-bone-laced depths that had been exposed even at that stage of the digging in order to achieve the blessed state of becoming one with the dead. What could this uneducated Polish kid from this anus mirabilis of the world possibly understand about aesthetics? This was not your usual kitsch, it was not schlock, it was a shattering memorial concept, a brilliant design, moving beyond words—if this didn’t force you to feel something, nothing ever would, you were a lost cause. Problem is, the kid was now saying, the dead are everywhere, you can’t dig this ditch without smashing into them,

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shaking them up—above ground, below ground, it’s bodies all over the place, bodies all the way down. He gestured at the contents of one of the buckets beside him. Gilguli noted a portion of a skull sprouting a tuft of hair cushioned in ash, a piece of femur on a bed of bone fragments. The kid drew his drill out of the ground and indicated a chunk of waxy black stuff in its scoop. “Fat,” he said, and plopped it into a bucket. Coming toward them now was a delegation of four men in suits and ties, all wrestling with the rods. From a distance they appeared almost identical: short, squat, bald, the three older ones with cardboard yarmulkes peaking on top of their heads, the younger, slightly taller one with a glossy black beard clearly set apart, the leader, the guide, sporting on his head a well-worn crocheted model with the phrase “Belzec, My Little Village, Belzec” worked into the rim—Rabbi Heshie Lemberger, American-born from Brooklyn, New York, the driller informed Gilguli, as Virgil is said to have informed Dante, recently condemned to be chief rabbi of greater Poland with a congregation of more or less three thousand souls above ground, moonlighting here as fundraiser for the Belzec memorial project, giving the grand tour to prospective donors, those three little fat guys with the tepees on their heads, survivors of the Holocaust from southern Poland, Galicia, morphed into real-estate titans from Florida, Miami.  Translating this as the third sign, Gilguli instantly attached himself to this contingent, sticking fast even in the face of unconcealed irritation from the three little moguls— they didn’t even bother to lower their voices when inquiring of each other in choppedliver accents, Who let in this guy, did he bought a ticket or what, didn’t they told us it was a private red-carpet tour what we was getting? Still, Gilguli hung on relentlessly, tagging along behind as the rabbi patiently instructed them in correct rod technique— Do sticks like this, boys—demonstrating how and vigorously asserting that, cutting-edge scientific advances notwithstanding, nothing, not even all the systematic drilling along a mathematical grid and so forth and so on, has yet proved as effective as two simple divination rods in finding the dead. “This is not mumbo jumbo, friends, it is not hocus pocus or black magic or voodoo or witchcraft or idolatry, God forbid, avodah zarah, no way—this is an ancient method, the wisdom of the ages, tried and true like chicken soup, like pearls from the lips of your bubbes and zeydes, may they rest in peace.” His gaze took in the desolation of the old folks’ resting place surrounding him, the churned-up topography of where they lay beneath his feet.  Turning sharply, the rabbi marched his troops, with Gilguli bringing up the rear, to a forlorn tree standing apart and wrapped both arms around it in a rapturous embrace. “You see this tree, my friends?” the rabbi cried. “This tree was here during the killings.

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The younger trees we chop down, naturally, to make room for the memorial, but this one is holy, this one we let stand. Why? Because it bore witness. So we call it a Witness Tree. It’s a very great mitzvah to sustain such a sacred tree—he who performs a good deed of this magnitude will not only earn a place in the world to come, munching on leviathan and wild ox, sipping honey mead and enjoying the luxury of having his wife as his personal footstool, but he will also be privileged in this life to have the tree named in his honor, with a beautiful engraved plaque in solid brass affixed to it so attesting.” Reflexively, the three donors began to grope inside their jackets for their checkbooks. “Relax, friends, it’s all right, you can pay on the way out, we trust you completely. And even if you happen to forget, don’t worry, it’s okay—we’ll just lock you in here for the night until you send us the check, that’s all—ha ha, just kidding, just kidding.” With an indulgent laugh, the rabbi then went on to reassure his three willing contributors that in addition to the witness trees there were plenty of other ways they could support the Belzec memorial project; for example, by endowing a position in one of their names, like a chair at a university, for an assistant who could fill in for him in supervising the memorial construction on site when he was called away by his pastoral duties elsewhere in greater Poland or was obliged to travel abroad for fundraising or other purposes, as was so often the case. He already had someone in mind for this assistant job, as it happened, but unfortunately he had not yet been able to raise the necessary funds, however modest, to cover the stipend— “Not some fancy expert or anything, this fellow I’m thinking about, not a scholar in Jewish law and ritual pertaining to the handling of the dead and so on, no big genius, but between you and me, businessman to businessman, exactly right for our purposes—a warm body, a fact on the ground we can put in place and point to when the protesters and fanatics out there, the destroyers, my friends, not the builders like you, start up again like clockwork with their yelling and hollering: Desecration of the Dead, Violation of Victims’ Remains, and so on and so forth. With God’s help and yours, friends, I’ve found just the right man for the job, and believe me, it wasn’t so easy, not too many normal human beings would be willing to work in a place like this, a haunted house, a ghost town, a hell hole, a terrible place, of course, terrible, terrible—we should never forget for one minute, it goes without saying.” Then, sweeping his arm in the direction of Jacob Gilguli, the rabbi requested him to step forward and introduce himself. The three donors turned in unison, their necks craning audibly, to bestow an appraising look on the face hovering like a strange fruit more than a foot above them. Gilguli nodded formally to the rabbi, like a junior partner acknowledging his boss before starting a presentation, and

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crossed his metal rods ceremoniously in front of his chest. “Yankel Galitzianer,” Gilguli said, “the rabbi’s assistant”—and a moment later had the satisfaction, albeit not unalloyed, of hearing one of his new patrons remark, “Go on, a Galitzianer no less. And the whole time I’m thinking he’s just some dumb goy. Who would believe? Live and learn!” And so Jacob Gilguli dedicated himself to the dead. He took a room in the nearby town of Belzec, in the home of a widow called Kaczka. He never learned if this was her given name or her family name; in accordance with the proper manner in which he had been brought up to address an older person of the female persuasion, he respectfully called her Ma’am, including in bed. It was at the Belzec railway station, the terminus that had, after all, made the transports to the death camp so convenient and efficient, that the ancient dispatcher directed him to Kaczka’s for lodging, an ideal match for this American, as the widow was famous locally for her mastery of the English language, having spent much of her adult life in Chicago, where she and her husband, the late Bolek, had operated a Polish deli. After Bolek’s passing, fortified by his life insurance policy and a monthly Social Security check, she signed over the business to her son, Bolek the younger, and made her way back to end her days where they had begun, in her childhood village of Belzec, where she supplemented her income with boarders in the house and chickens and pigs in the yard. That was where Gilguli saw her for the first time—in the yard, mucking out the chicken coops in a flowered housecoat and rubber galoshes, her broad, ruddy, babushka-framed face reminding him at once of the Polish pope—the same sturdy peasant stock. She turned to him, as he approached with his knapsack on his back and his rods in his hands, as if she had been expecting him all along, and shook her head sadly, pointing to the wornout, bedraggled hens. “That old cock he is killing them for sure, he don’t leave them in peace for one minute even,” she said. Those were her first words to him, delivered in a Slavic-accented no-frills Midwestern American. A feminist for my sins, Gilguli thought; his instinct was they could do business. Every morning, with Kaczka’s blessings, he mounted the ancient bicycle that he found leaning in her shed, and with his rods tied to his back like arrows in the quiver of a hunter-gatherer, and the shofar that he had purchased from Abu Shahid cradled in the shredded wicker basket tied to the handlebars, he pedaled off to the death camp. His responsibilities were twofold, as the rabbi had outlined them that first day while the three donors sat in the limousine and refreshed themselves with slivovitz poured by the Polish driver. Number one, first and foremost, he must be vigilantly on guard against the protesters, our own people unfortunately, the rabbi was sorry to say, who could descend on them unannounced, at any moment, like biological warfare so to

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speak, with their self-righteous accusations of desecration of the dead blah-blah-blah, occupying the site, planting their bodies in the path of the construction, sabotaging the works, creating a hullabaloo and ruckus and scandal that would reek far and wide—obviously not a good thing for the Jews, not to mention the repercussions for their financial investment in this memorial, already considerable, already well into the millions. To deal with this very real threat, the rabbi armed Gilguli with a cell phone and specific instructions to immediately alert not only him, wherever in the world he might happen to be, but above all the relevant Polish officials who were equipped to move in fast in the event of a raid by the Jewish lunatics and take the necessary action, the less said on this subject the better; in such a case, the rabbi decreed with the full weight of the divine authority vested in him, it was not only permissible to remain a silent bystander while the storm troopers did what they had to do, it was actually a mitzvah. Gilguli’s second task, the rabbi went on, was to keep his eyes peeled for human remains, but in that department, the rabbi cautioned him, he must use his common sense, he must be extremely careful not to insult the Polish workers, who could become very touchy and sensitive as a result of the slightest critical innuendo. If, for example, he happened to notice body parts being dumped out with the garbage or crushed under the wheels of a truck or soiled by the foreman’s dog Bogdan, the thing to do was to quietly and discreetly gather them up on a piece of newspaper or something, dispose of them in one of the officially marked burial mounds, and maybe whisper a little prayer if he happened to know one by heart, but by all means do not make a big show of it, please. Beyond that, visitors should be kept strictly off the premises during the construction phase due to the attendant hazards, and this includes not only the idly curious, but also relatives of the victims who might show up on pilgrimages to pay their respects, no matter what distances they have traveled to this blighted corner of the planet; however much they may beg and cajole, politely but firmly he must bar them from approaching or viewing the operation in progress, the way a patient is prevented, for his own good, in the interest of ultimate healing, of sparing him unnecessary psychological trauma, from seeing his own entrails exposed and the organs or tissues, solid or liquid, being extracted from his insides during a surgical procedure. At the end of each day’s shift, when dark descended upon the death camp and all the workers went home, the rabbi expected to receive a full report by e-mail—a duty that Gilguli took pains to execute every evening from a rundown little Internet café in the heart of the town of Belzec, where the screen saver showed a collage of multiple, identical stooped figures with hooked noses and lascivious lips and rubbing hands clutching money bags, who, he had to admit, really did not resemble him at all. The rabbi looked up into Gilguli’s blue-blooded eyes in an effort to probe the level of comprehension of this alien creature. “So, have we covered all the ground?” he asked with an awkward laugh, gesturing in spite of himself at the expanse of the

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death camp stretching behind them. Without waiting for an answer, the rabbi clapped his new assistant on the bicep and swiveled abruptly to join his donors in the waiting limousine, its engine already growling. That was the last time Gilguli saw him, except for one other occasion, in a large appliance store some years later, when the rabbi showed up on the screens of several dozen floor-model television sets, one of three experts on a panel offering insights on the topic “Holocausts—Yours, Mine, Ours.” The rabbi had put on considerable weight, even from his talking heads that was manifest, and had shaved off his beard; nevertheless, Gilguli fingered him in the lineup again and again, no problem, he was not fooled for a minute.

From the internet café, he made his way each evening back to Kaczka’s, where a hot supper awaited him: potato soup with black bread, kasha and mushrooms, vodka and tea. He had declared himself a vegetarian that first day when he followed her into her kitchen and saw the knives and cleavers and the empty casings hanging like an old lady’s stockings and the great tubs of blood on the table and the butcher boards heaped with the chopped-up fat and intestines to stuff the winter sausages. Kaczka only laughed and observed that she had heard somewhere that Hitler was a vegetarian too, but hey, you’re the customer, mister. As the nights grew longer and colder, as the savage onset of their unacknowledged gropings glided into a kind of comfortable comradeship, they would lie side by side beneath the great mound of the goose-down quilt and talk quietly, sometimes until the rooster took a break and dismounted from the hens to give out a crow. Gilguli opened his heart to her, told her everything, poured out all of his sufferings and humiliations and doubts, held nothing back—emptying himself in the dark without shame, without fear of consequences, into this old woman who did not matter, after all, who was invisible even in daylight and would soon disappear altogether from this cursed and barren edge of the universe, taking his secrets with her to eternal cold storage. He told her about his past lives and his present, about his days standing watch against the protesters, the self-proclaimed Jewish guardians of the dead, the extremists and obstructionists, who could swoop down any minute without warning and park themselves like ghosts with their white prayer shawls hooded over their heads, clogging up the memorial works. He told her about the Polish diggers tunneling out the underground walkway, tossing ash and bone over the sides, stuffing a hunk of jawbone in a pocket to bring to a girlfriend for a souvenir. Passionately he strove to explain to her how pierced to the very core he was by the idea of communing with the dead through descent into the depths of this memorial pathway; this was not a ghoulish concept, it was not sick, this was as close to the real thing as one who had not been privileged to be there in this life could get, it was almost too

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much to take in—all he wanted was to go down and curl up in that crevice forever, sex was nothing in comparison, this was a full-body-penetration experience, the birth canal transformed into death canal. Gilguli could feel Kaczka nodding her approval in the darkness beside him. Like the tube, she said—which, she told him, was what they called the narrow path the naked Jews were herded through in the death camp, between the undressing room and the gas chamber. When she was a small girl during the war, she used to play tube with her little friends. It was their second-favorite game, after doctor. Yes, just like the tube, Kaczka said—and therefore, for Belzec, a very appropriate memorial idea.

She could see the construction equipment from a distance, she said, the cranes especially. It looked from a distance like a very major project, very impressive, but personally she’d rather not get too close, she did not like to go into the camp anymore, she was too old for that now, though the truth is, for years after the war, when the Communists took over from the Nazis, all the kids used to sneak out there at night—what else was there for a young person with hormones to do in this miserable place? We would make bonfires there, roast chunks of meat on sticks, drink beer, dance to the transistor radio, make out— necking and petting like they used to say in the States, until they skipped over that stage for good—go all the way. Yes, she too, she had to confess. It was so creepy, so sexy, and our parents could never find us, they would never dare go in after us to the camp at night, guaranteed. It was just lay back and enjoy. But even if she personally at this stage in her life had outgrown the camp, she was glad to see the cranes in there, glad about this memorial project, Kaczka said. Of course, she could not predict what the local hooligans might take it into their heads to do to the memorial once it was completed, they were already pretty pissed at the Jews for everything that happened to them, and frankly, she couldn’t imagine who in his right mind would be willing to trek all the way out to this bunghole of the world just to take a stroll through one morbid crack in the ground and hit a stone wall—but who knows? Maybe a death camp is a great natural resource after all, maybe the memorial will be good for the town, bring down the tourists and sightseers and shoppers and eaters, maybe business will finally go boom. The cranes in there now, to build this memorial, Kaczka told Gilguli, reminded her of the ones she used to see during the war, when she was still a small girl—you know how children everywhere are so interested in giant machines, girls too for your information, for some reason they find this fascinating, like dragons, like dinosaurs, her grandchildren are crazy about them also, Kaczka said with a fond laugh. Yes, during the war, before they finally left for good, the Germans also brought cranes into the camp, she told Gilguli, to lift the dead bodies out of the burial pits. At first, they used Jewish prisoners for this filthy job, to dig up the bodies and cremate them, but then with all the pressure to finish up and get out fast, they brought in the heavy machinery, they

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brought in the cranes. They would lift the rotting corpses out of the pits with these cranes, the Germans, and roast them on great bonfires. She could see the flames leaping up night after night when she was a small girl during the war, the black smoke rising. Some of the bodies were so swollen and decayed they had turned into liquid, that’s what her father told her, like a Black Forest fairy tale—imagine telling such horror stories to an innocent child, a baby almost, but, hey, this was in the time before mental health. The smell for miles around was unbearable. We all walked around like outlaws in the cowboy movies in those days, with handkerchiefs tied across our faces because of the terrible stink when the Germans were burning the corpses, just before they left town for good. Everyone blamed the Jews for polluting the air. Then, as soon as those lousy Germans were gone, Kaczka told Gilguli, the whole town descended on the death camp to search for treasure. It was like a public holiday— schools closed, people took off from work, everyone felt justified, we had a right, we deserved it, nothing could stop us, not even the swarms of flies that formed a black canopy over our heads, this was our reparations for how we had been humiliated, for all we had suffered. And what we found among the remains of the dead was beyond imagining, unbelievable what the Jews had managed to bring along with them in the cattle cars, my own father invested in a metal detector to poke for valuables among the ashes and the bones and the fat and the half-burned corpses in the burial pits. There were pots and pans, cutlery, dentures, luggage, artificial limbs, musical instruments, tools, even some sewing machines, furniture, picture frames, eyeglasses, pocketknives and pens, toiletry articles, sports equipment for recreation, including skis and, believe it or not, a bicycle, and also silver and gold, not to mention the hundreds of gold teeth that the corpse-dentists had missed, and coins from all over the world, and jewelry, jewelry, jewelry; when she was living in America during the Seventies and Eighties, Kaczka said, there used to be signs in front of all the synagogues, Save Soviet Jewelry, Jews are very big on jewelry in case you haven’t noticed. And the gems we found in the death camp, it was like the road to paradise, a fortune in stones: diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, pearls buried in the ashes, they must have been hidden inside the bodies in unmentionable places, even the Germans with all their efficiency missed more than you could ever dream of during their inspections of the private parts of the corpses, but they had a point after all, those lousy Germans, they weren’t imagining things, the Jews were walking treasure chests—it took the fires of cremation to get them to give up their jewels once and for all. It was still wartime when this happened, Kaczka told Gilguli, and you can imagine how embarrassing it was for the Germans—after all the trouble they’d gone to, getting rid

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of the incriminating evidence and all—when they got wind of how we were swarming all over the place, picking it clean. So one day they closed off the death camp—just like that, they closed it off, declared it off-limits. They stuck in some trees and bushes to give it a nice peaceful look, and handed it over as a present to one of their Ukrainian guards to farm with his family. That was the last straw, the final insult, handing over Polish soil to a Ukrainian—primitives, barbarians, animals, every last one of them, not a single one of them is any damn good. The Germans, at least, are a cultured nation, civilized; at night after a hard day’s work they would sit down like members of the human race to listen to classical music played by the orchestra of Jewish prisoners, Schubert, Beethoven, sometimes we could hear it, too, when it wasn’t being drowned out by one of their drunken orgies—but hey, who could begrudge them a little relaxation? They were a long way from home after all, they missed their mamas and their pretty little Schatzis and their little doggie Putzi, all day long they were killing themselves processing Jews with only Ukrainians for company—whipping, beating, torturing, shooting, unloading the cattle cars and sending the cargo straight from the undressing rooms through the tube into the gas chambers, and after the gassing, there was the nasty business of removing the bodies to make room for the next load, it wasn’t so easy dragging those Jews out of the gas chambers, that’s what everyone said, they were frozen solid, whole families were stuck together, you could tell them apart, even in death they were still holding hands. Kaczka reached over in the darkness and took Gilguli’s hand, gliding her fingers up to the tender underside of his forearm where his number was tattooed and tracing it familiarly. No way you got this in Belzec in your past life, darling, Kaczka said. In Belzec, it was straight off the cattle cars and into the gas chambers. In Belzec, the Ukrainians and Germans didn’t fool around. In Belzec, it was one hundred percent anonymous, one hundred percent assembly line, one hundred percent death factory. No tattoo for you in Belzec, mister—sorry. If you’re looking for tattoos, try Auschwitz, that’s my recommendation. Yes, in Belzec it was trains all the time, trains coming in through the night, twenty, forty, sixty cars long, engines screeching in the dark, dogs and Ukrainians barking, Germans shouting, Jews wailing. No one could ever get any sleep. Everyone blamed the Jews for keeping them up all night long. He woke in the night with his heart pounding, because of the screams. The protesters were there, he realized this at once. Fumbling in the dark for his cell phone, he could only put his hands on his rods and the ram’s horn. He staggered out into the yard with nothing more than a sheet wrapped around his body. In her black rubber galoshes, illuminated by the headlights of her old pickup truck, Kaczka was

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plunging a knife into the heart of a pig. The pig was trussed up with ropes, screaming human screams. Desperate, terrified shrieks. Gilguli began to run, first toward the train station, and from there, half a kilometer further to the point of the railway spur inside the death camp where the cattle cars were unloaded. Yes, the protesters had come out, it was just as he had thought, they had appeared at last, he had been waiting so long, he had expected them sooner. They had congregated in the night—it was guerrilla theater cunningly plotted, ruthlessly staged, hundreds of thousands of protesters in diaphanous white shrouds, refracting their own cold light, their faces hollow and unforgiving, emitting a low hum that thickened the air, filling every space of the death camp to its distant edge. The rods in Gilguli’s hands were shaking uncontrollably. They fell to the ground and slithered away. He followed behind them, cutting through the massed protesters as if they were cobwebs, clouds, smoke, into the invading fissure that had stirred them up on this night. The protesters were closing in on him, he could feel them behind him along the entire length of his body, like the shades and spirits that had pursued him down the long, dark hallways of his childhood. Without daring to turn around, he fled into the excavation, slid down the slope of the ravaged grave, into the heart of the disturbance in the field, down to its lowest depths. There he crouched down, naked among the snakes and the scorpions, huddling against the cold, his hands clamped against his ears. The protesters were bearing in on him from all sides, letting out their otherworldly hum that penetrated his head without passing through his ears, raging, raging, demanding the final sustained blast of the shofar that would bring down the heavens on all their tormentors.

17 Steve Stern

Heaven is Full of Windows

Had Gussie Panken looked up from her machine, a movement that could get her salary docked a dollar, she would have seen what the lazy Sadie Kupla saw in the window overlooking Washington Place. The late-March breeze was causing the orange curtains to billow, the serrated orange curtains, though the open windows along Washington Place had never had any curtains. Then the wisps of orange turned into waves, a rumbling swell that poured over the sills into the shop, engulfing the bins of scraps, torching the bales of unfinished waists heaped atop the oil-soaked tables. By the time Gussie had turned to see what Sadie was screeching about—her shrieks echoed in a chorus all up and down the long rows of worktables—the fire was advancing like a mob of ragged hooligans. Gussie’s first impulse was to do nothing; she was tired and this wasn’t the first time she’d been the victim of hooligans. Hadn’t they driven her family out of their home back in Dlugacsz, forced them to cross an ocean to a rat-hole flat on Broome Street, where she lived with a crippled father and her bedwetting little brother who must nevertheless be honored as a prince? She felt her charging heart secrete a poison that paralyzed her limbs, but only momentarily, until she too was swept up in the hysteria that harried her fellow seamstresses from one end of the shop to the other, like sticks in a box tilted this way and that. At the door to the Greene Street stairwell, which opened inwardly, the knot of workers rushing to escape was stalled, and unable to squeeze through the narrow gap they began in the thickening smoke to claw and flail at one another. Then the crowd had reversed itself, stampeding through eddies of flame past wicker baskets combusting in horse-fart poofs, and Gussie found herself carried along in “Heaven Is Full of Windows.” From Stern, The Book of Mischief: New and Selected Stories. Copyright © 2012 by Steve Stern. Reprinted with permission of the Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

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the tide. At the door on the Washington Place side of the shop, which was always kept locked by management for reasons known only to them, a burly fellow with a handlebar mustache hurled his weight against the metal plating, leaving it concave though the door never budged from its jamb. Others pounded the door with their fists, a shuddering that reverberated in Gussie’s gut until she retched, sinking to her knees. From the floor, her eyes smarting, lungs beginning to wheeze in pain, she groped among the remnants on the table above her for a swatch of lawn to cover her face. Showers of sparks seemed to blend with the curses and cries for help like flights of hornets making an eerie drone. Windowpanes above a nearby airshaft splintered in popgun bursts, and a party of workers swarmed through their ruined frames out onto the fire escape. Then in seconds the whole rusted structure had pulled away from the wall, and the people, releasing a noise like a sepulchral moan, dropped out of sight as on a raft sinking below waves. “Mama,” said Gussie, unable to hear the sound of her own voice, not beckoning her mother so much as scolding her for having died of diphtheria three years ago back in Dlugacsz. Somehow she was on her feet again, blundering blindly alongside the tables on top of which the more athletic girls hopped and jigged in an effort to elude the sawtoothed conflagration. Rearrived at the Greene Street vestibule just in time to see the freight elevator descending, she blinked through stinging tears at what was at once real and not real: a clutch of employees who hadn’t made it on board the elevator thrust aside the accordion grate and, licked from behind by tongues of flame, plunged after the departed car into the yawning shaft. She saw a pretty girl spinning like a top to try and unravel the fiery helix of fabric she’d wound about her for protection, and another with a torch in place of her hair. One shouted something in broken English about having to meet Gaspar behind Bottle Alley; another crooned idiotically in Yiddish: “Ev’ry little movement has a meaning all its own.” Unaware that her own skirt had started to smolder, Gussie now wanted only to breathe. A wall of fire flapped like sheets on a line then blew apart in a dragon’s exhalation that chased the seamstress back toward the windows along Washington Place. In each of them were figures silhouetted against the failing afternoon light, who disappeared only to be replaced by others who also instantly disappeared. Jostled and caromed against from all sides in the choking atmosphere, Gussie half-stumbled, half-fell in the direction of the tall windows. Unconscious of having made a decision, she avoided the casement in which the girls tussled as if vying with one another to board a packed trolley; the window from which a tangle of girls tumbled like a flickering pinwheel over the ledge. Instead she elected to mount the sill upon which a young man in a waistcoat stood helping the girls to step one by one into space. With sleeves rolled, he bussed them tenderly on the cheek then lifted them under their arms, as in a dance, before letting them drop.

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Now it was Gussie’s turn, and with the aid of the gallant young man, she had mounted the sill, stepped onto the ledge, and stood vaguely aware of the sirens, the roar of the multitude below, their howls of alarm indistinguishable from cheers. She saw the ladders extending several stories shy of the ninth floor, the plumes of water spraying so far from their marks. Letting go of the lawn hankie, which the wind carried over the sooty skylights and water tanks etched against a cobalt sky, Gussie imbibed the cool evening air of her oblivion, and felt her fear abruptly dispelled. In its place was pure rage. Plain Gussie Panken, born to be a spinster, dried up and unshtupped at twentythree: “What did I have? Mama’s carbuncle brooch when it wasn’t in hock, and her dog-eared copy of The Duties of the Heart. Freda Fine has a beau plus a book signed by the theater idols Tomashevsky and Kalisch, and my pious papa tells her, ‘Our Gussie will get in paradise her Duties from the Heart autographed by God.’” Over her shoulder the shop was a garden of flame, every flywheel, driveshaft, and burning maiden limned in undulant gold. “Ptui on God,” spat Gussie, feeding the blaze. It came then, the gingerly peck on the cheek from the young man, a fresh-faced boy really despite his tarnished brow, with downcast eyes and a shock of sable hair; he kissed her and endeavored to lift her under her sweat-soaked arms. “That’s it? she asked, still immovable. Then wiping the drool from her lips, she clapped her hands over his cheeks and kissed him full on the mouth: a scandal! She grinned at his astonishment, impish Gussie, who also blushed, then heaved a sigh over the ineffectual husband he would make—a pisher who stole kisses from ladies in extremity. She sighed as well at the dingy hall they would rent for their wedding, the tallis shop they would open on Orchard Street and later set fire to for the insurance, the hungry baby mauling her breast and the dim one lolling underfoot on the greasy floorboards, the extra weight she’d put on fore and aft that added to her burden, the shoes she had to cut slits in to relieve the pressure on her bunions, the silver hairs that would come to signify this frustration and that disappointment and the joys (surely there would be a little joy) that she’d survived. Then Gussie, decked out now in an incandescent gown, wrapped her fingers—perforated by a thousand needles but still very strong—about the hand of the chivalrous boy and leapt from the ledge without the help of anyone on earth. A cop covering the broken bodies with a tarpaulin noted the half-incinerated girl with her goggle eyes and crooked mouth holding hands with a dark-haired lad, and observed ironically to his mate, “A match made in heaven.”

18 Francine Prose

Electricity

Anita sails the baby over her head. “Earth to Spaceship Bertie,” she says. “Earth to Spaceship Bertie. Can you read me?” The baby’s laugh sounds forced, like Johnny Carson when he’s blown a joke. Last week she caught Bertie practicing smiles in the mirror over his crib, phony social smiles for the ladies who goo-goo him in the street, noticeably different from his real smile. It occurs to her that the baby is embarrassed for her. Lately she’s often embarrassed for herself. This feeling takes her back fifteen years to her early teens, when she and her parents and her younger sister Lynne used to go places—Jones Beach, Prospect Park—and she’d see groups of kids her own age. At the time she had felt that being with her family made her horribly conspicuous; now she realizes that it probably made her invisible. The house is quiet. Now since she’s back is the first time Anita can remember being in her parents’ home without the television going. She thinks of the years her father spent trailing her and Lynne from room to room, switching lights off behind them, asking who they thought was paying the electric bills. Yet he never turned the TV off; he’d fall asleep to the Late Show. Now the TV is dark, the house is lit up like a birthday cake, and her father is down in the finished basement, silenced by the acoustical ceiling as he claps his hands, leaps into the air, and sings hymns in praise of God and the Baal Shem Tov. In the morning, when Anita’s father goes off to the bet hamidrash, the house of study, Anita and her mother and the baby watch Donahue. Today the panel is made up of parents whose children have run away and joined cults. The week Anita came home, there was a show about grown children moving back in with their parents. It reminds Anita of how in high school, and later when she used to take acid, the radio always “Electricity.” Copyright © 1993 by Francine Prose. Reprinted with permission of the Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc. All rights reserved.

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seemed to play oddly appropriate songs. Hearing the Miracles sing “What’s So Good about Goodbye?” when she was breaking up with a boyfriend had made her feel connected with lovers breaking up everywhere. But now she hates to think that her life is one of those stories that make Donahue go all dewy-eyed with concern. The twice-divorced mother of a Moonie is blaming everything on broken homes. “Don’t you ever become a Moonie,” Anita whispers, pressing her lips against the back of the baby’s neck. Another mother is describing how her daughter calls herself Prem Ananda, wears only orange clothes, has married a boy the guru’s chosen for her, and, with her doctorate in philosophy, works decorating cakes in the ashram bakery. “Cakes?” says Anita’s mother. “That’s nothing. Only my Sam waits till he’s fiftyseven to join a cult. After thirty-three years of marriage, he’ll only make love through a hole in the sheet.” “A hole in the sheet?” Repeating this, Anita imagines Donahue repeating it, then realizes: incredibly, she and her mother have never talked about sex. Not ever. Imagining her mother on Donahue, Anita sees only close-ups, because if the camera pulled back, it would see up her mother’s housedress to where the pale veined thighs dimple over the tops of her support hose. Anita goes over and hugs her mother so hard that Bertie, squeezed between them, squawks like one of his bath toys. The baby starts to cry, her mother starts to cry, and Anita, not knowing what else to do, presses Bertie against her mother and pats and rubs them as if trying to burp both of them at once. Anita takes nothing for granted. When she lifts her foot to take a step, she no longer trusts the ground to be there when she puts it down. She used to say that you could never really tell about people: now she knows it’s true. She never once doubted that Jamie loved her, that he wanted the baby. When he came to visit her and Bertie in the hospital and began crying, she was so sure it was from happiness that she literally did not hear him say he’d fallen in love with somebody else. She’d made him repeat it till he was almost shouting and remembered who this Lizzie was: another lawyer in his office. At a garden party that summer Lizzie had asked to touch Anita’s belly. Just as Jamie was offering to move out of the house they had rented for its view, for their vision of children standing at the Victorian bay window watching boats slip up the Hudson, a nurse wheeled the baby in, in a futuristic clear plastic cart. “Spaceship Bertie,” said Jamie. Anita’s sister Lynne says that men do this all the time: Jamie’s acting out his ambivalence about fatherhood, his jealousy of mother-infant bond. This sounds to Anita like something from Family Circle or Ladies’ Home Journal. Lynne has read those magazines all her life, but now that she’s going for her master’s in women’s

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studies, she refers to it as “keeping up.” Lynne can’t believe that Anita never had the tiniest suspicion. A year ago, Anita would have said the same thing, but now she knows it’s possible. Whenever she thinks about last summer, she feels like a Kennedy assassination buff examining the Zapruder film. But no matter many times she rewinds it, frame by frame, she can’t see the smoking gun, the face at the warehouse window. All she sees is that suddenly, everyone in the car starts moving very strangely. Anita’s mother believes her. Overnight, her husband turned into a born-again Hasid. Perhaps that’s why she hardly sounded surprised when on the day she and Anita’s father were supposed to drive up to Nyack to see the baby, Anita called to say that she and Bertie were coming to Brooklyn. Over the phone, her mother had warned her to expect changes. Daddy wasn’t himself. No, he wasn’t sick. Working too hard as usual, but otherwise fine. Her tone had suggested something shameful. Had he, too, fallen in love with somebody else? Pulling into her parents’ driveway, Anita thought: He looks the same. He opened the door for her and waited while she unstrapped Bertie from his car seat, then sidestepped her embrace. He’d never been a comfortable hugger, but now she missed his pat-pat-pat. She held Bertie out to him; he shook his head. “Bertie, this is your grandpa,” she said. “Grandpa, this is Bertie.” “Has he been circumcised?” asked her father. “Of course,” said Anita. “Are you kidding? My doctor did it in the hospital.” “Then we’ll have to have it done again,” said her father. “By a mohel.” “Again!” yelled Anita. “Are you out of your mind?” Attracted by the noise, her mother came flying out of the house. “Sam!” She grabbed the baby from Anita. “Can’t you see she’s upset?” The commotion had comforted Anita. Everything was familiar—their voices, the pressure of her mother’s plump shoulder pushing her into the house, the way she said, “Coffee?” before they’d even sat down. “I’ll get it,” said Anita. “You hold the baby.” But her mother headed her off at the kitchen door. “It’s arranged a little different now,” she explained. “Those dishes over there by the fridge are for meat. These here by the stove are for milk.” That night they couldn’t eat till her father had blessed the half grapefruits, the maraschino cherries, the boiled flank steak, the potatoes and carrots, the horseradish, the unopened jar of applesauce, the kosher orange gelatin with sliced bananas. During the meal, Bertie began to fuss, and Anita guided his head up under her shirt. “Is it all right if the baby drinks milk while I eat meat?” she asked. Her mother laughed. “Edna,” said her father, “don’t encourage her.”

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Bertie cried when Anita tried to set him down, so she was left alone with her father while her mother did the dishes. “What is this?” she asked him. “You never went to shul in your life. Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Ron didn’t speak to us for a year because on the Saturday of Cousin Simon’s bar mitzvah, you forgot—you said—and took us all to Rip Van Winkle’s Storybook Village.” “I did forget.” Her father laughed. “Anyhow, we didn’t miss anything. Simon was bar-mitzvahed in the Reform temple. The church.” “The church,” repeated Anita. “Dad, what’s the story?” “The story, Anita?” Her father took a deep breath. Then he said: “Once upon a time, a jeweler was taking the subway home to East Flatbush from his shop on Forty-sixth Street. At Nostrand, he finally got a seat and opened his Post when he heard loud voices at the far end of the car. Looking up, he saw three Puerto Rican kids in sneakers, jeans, and hot pink silk jackets which said ‘Men Working’ on the fronts, backs, and sleeves. When he realized that the jackets had been stitched together from the flags Con Ed put near excavations, he found this so interesting that it took a while to notice that the kids had knives and were working their way through the car, taking money and jewelry from the passengers, dropping them into a bowling bag. Then he thought: Only in New York do thieves wear clothes which glow in the dark. The boys didn’t seem to be hurting anyone, but it still didn’t make the jeweler comfortable. He thought: Is this how it happens? One night you pick the wrong subway car, and bingo! you’re an item in the newspaper. “Halfway down the car, they reached an old lady who started to scream. Then suddenly, the lights began to flash on and off in a definite pattern: three long blinks, three short blinks, three long blinks. By the fourth SOS the muggers had their noses pressed against the door, and when it opened at the station, they ran. ‘Thank God, it’s a miracle!’ cried the old lady. “Meanwhile the jeweler had his head between his knees. He was trying to breathe, thinking he must have been more scared than he’d known. Then he looked up and saw a young Hasidic man watching him from across the aisle. “‘It wasn’t a miracle,’ said the Hasid. ‘I did it. Follow me out at the next stop.’ “Normally, this jeweler wasn’t the type to follow a Hasid out onto the Eastern Parkway station. But all he could think of was, had his wallet been stolen, he’d have had to spend all the next day at the Motor Vehicles Bureau replacing his license and registration. He felt that he owed somebody something, and if this Hasid was taking credit, keeping him company was the least he could do. “On the platform, the Hasid pointed to a bare light bulb and said, ‘Look,’ the light blinked on and off. Then he waved at a buzzing fluorescent light. It blinked too. ‘I lied before,’ said the Hasid. ‘It wasn’t my doing. Everything is the rebbe’s. . . .’”

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Anita’s father stopped when her mother came in, drying her hands. “Bertie!” Anita’s mother cried, picking the baby up and waltzing him into the kitchen. “Don’t listen to this nonsense! A whole life ruined for one blinky light bulb!” “It wasn’t the light,” said Anita’s father. Anita wanted to ask if his story really happened or if he’d made it up as a metaphor for what happened. She thought: Something must have happened. In the old days, her father didn’t make up stories. But she forgot her questions when she heard her mother in the kitchen singing “Music, Music, Music” to Bertie, singing “Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon,” sounding just like Teresa Brewer.

Now, five months later, watching the parents of cult members on Donahue, Anita decides that her father’s story left out all the important parts. Such as: why he really joined. There’s no overlooking the obvious reasons: old age, sickness, death. If they’d been Protestant and he’d converted to Catholicism, no one would have wondered why. She remembers a weekend this past summer when Jamie was away on business— with Lizzie, she thinks now—and her parents came up to see her. Her father drove her to the supermarket to shop for their visit and for Jamie’s return. At the checkout stand, the kid who packed their order insisted, over her father’s protests, on wheeling the cart out and loading the bags into their—the old man’s, the pregnant woman’s—car. Like her father, Anita was angry at the kid. Couldn’t he see that her father could have done it? Not for nothing did he swim fifteen laps at the JCC pool every Sunday morning. But the crazy thing was, for the whole way home, Anita was mad at her father. Her father is still in shape. And despite all the rushing to shul every morning and from there to work, he seems pretty relaxed. What’s hurting her family, Anita decides, is the unpredictability, the shaky sense that everyone is finally unreliable. What’s bothering her mother is that the man she’s shared her bed with for thirty-three years has suddenly and without warning rolled to the opposite side. She must wonder if the sheet with the hole in it has been there all along. Anita wants to tell her mother that there’s no guarantee; you can’t know anything about anyone. She wants to ask: What’s so strange about a man wanting to sing and dance his way into heaven? But if they’ve never even talked about sex, how can they talk about this? Anita bundles Bertie up in so many layers that he does look like a spaceman, and takes him to the library. On the subway, she notices that the lights flash on and off. The train is almost empty and she thinks about muggers in hot pink Con Ed jackets, but feels Bertie is a kind of protection. Babies are unpredictable, like crazy people; she’s heard you can sometimes scare muggers away by pretending to be crazy.

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The librarians in the Judaica section eye Bertie so suspiciously that he exhausts himself trying to charm them and falls asleep in Anita’s arms. Juggling baby and purse, she pulls out some reference books on Hasidism and sits down. She’s surprised at how much she already knows, what she has picked up from growing up in New York, from college, reading, and sheer osmosis. She starts Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, then decides she must have read it or else heard the stories somewhere. She thinks of Jamie’s friend Ira who’d visited once a year from his Orthodox commune in Cambridge, bringing his own food in an Empire Kosher Poultry shopping bag. She can’t remember him telling stories. For information about her father’s sect, she’s directed to the microfilm section. The librarian hands her a flat box, then seeing that it’s impossible for her to thread the machine while holding Bertie, gives her a sour smile and does it for her. For some reason, they’ve microfilmed whole editions of the city papers. Anita likes flipping back through the pages; it’s like reading a story when you already know the end, only eerier. Meanwhile she learns that fifteen years ago, her father’s group came from Hungary via Israel to their present home in Brooklyn. In the centerfold of the Daily News, there’s a photo of the rebbe walking from Kennedy airport to Brooklyn because his plane from Jerusalem had landed on the Sabbath, when he wasn’t allowed to ride. Taken at night, the picture is blurred, hard to read. The rebbe is all white hair and white beard, Mr. Natural in a beaver hat. On the next page is an ad for leather boots from Best and Co. — thirty dollars, fifteen years ago, an outrageously low price. Ironically, the reason Anita can’t concentrate is that she’s being distracted by the noise from the Mitzvahmobile parked on Forty­second Street, blaring military-sounding music from its loudspeakers. She pictures the Hasidim darting from one pedestrian to another, asking, “Excuse me, are you Jewish?” One afternoon, not long after she and Jamie first fell in love, they were approached by the Mitzvahmobilers, and Jamie said yes, he was Jewish. They dragged him—literally dragged him—into the trailer. The weather was nice, and nothing in those days seemed like an imposition, so Anita had waited on the library steps till Jamie emerged, looking pale. Apparently, the Hasidim had tried to teach him how to lay tefillin, but he just couldn’t get the hang of it. He froze, his hands wouldn’t work. Finally they gave up. They put the phylacteries in his hands, then covered his hands with theirs and just held them, one on his forehead, and one on his arm near his heart.

On Friday nights, Anita’s father sleeps at the bet hamidrash so he won’t have to travel on the Sabbath, and her sister Lynne comes for dinner.

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As children, Anita and Lynne fought, as their mother says, tooth and nail. Now it’s simpler: they love one another—so Anita feels disloyal for thinking that Lynne is just like Valerie Harper playing Rhoda. But it’s true, and it’s not just the curly hair, the tinted glasses, the running shoes, and the tight designer jeans. It’s Lynn’s master’s thesis, “The Changing Role of Women as Reflected in Women’s Magazines, 1930–1960.” It’s her job as a social worker in a family-planning clinic and her boyfriend Arnie, who’s almost got his degree as a therapist and is already practicing on the Upper West Side. Lynne and Anita kiss hello. Then Lynne puts her arms around their mother, who’s stirring something at the stove, and hugs her for so long that Anita starts feeling uncomfortable. Finally she zeroes in on Bertie, ensconced in his yellow plastic recliner chair on the kitchen table. “Look how he holds his head up!” says Lynne. Bertie’s been holding his head up since he was two weeks old, and Lynne’s seen it, but Anita refrains from pointing this out. Together they set the table, then Lynne pulls her into a corner and asks what she hears from Jamie. “Oh, he’s coming to see Bertie tomorrow.” Lynne stares at Anita, trying to ascertain if this “means” anything. Then she gets her purse and starts rummaging around. She takes out a tortoiseshell case, brushes tobacco dust off it, and gives it to Anita, who knows what it is before she opens it: eye shadow, a palette of different colors. “Thanks,” says Anita. The gift moves her and reminds her of what she’s always known: her sister is less of a feminist or a Rhoda than a real magazine reader, a girl who believes in her heart that eye shadow can change your luck. For Lynne, their mother has cooked the same company dinner she made when Anita first came home. But without their father’s blessing, the meat tastes greasy, the potatoes lukewarm; the gelatin has a rubbery skin. His absence should free them, thinks Anita, but he’s all they talk about, in voices so low he might as well be downstairs. With Lynne’s coaching, their mother talks, and Anita sees she’s been wrong: her mother’s unhappiness isn’t philosophical, it’s practical. Imagine being forced to start keeping a kosher home at the age of fifty-three! Two sets of dishes! The doctor says salting the meat is bad for her heart. The smallest details of life now have rules which Sam won’t let her break; she has to take the train to Essex Street to buy special soap for him. If it gets much worse, Lynne suggests, she might consider a separation. “Who would it help?” their mother asks. “Would it make me happier? Would it make Daddy happier?” “I doubt it,” says Anita. “What would make me happy,” their mother says, “is for Daddy to turn back into his normal self.”

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Anita wonders what would make her happy. Lately she’s not sure. Bertie makes her happy, but it seems important to remember: he’ll grow up and leave her. If you can count on anything, she thinks, it’s that. She senses that Lynne is talking less about happiness than about punishment. Lynne feels that their father is responsible for their mother’s troubles, just as Jamie is for hers. Anita thinks that no one’s to blame for her parents’ situation; and in her own case, she’s partly at fault. Her first mistake was to gain so much weight when she was pregnant. Why should Jamie have faith she’d lose it when her own doctor didn’t? Now she has, but, clearly, it’s too late. Her second mistake was to quit her job, even if it was the lowest editorial job in the world, the slush pile at Reader’s Digest. Most of the submissions were for “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met,” and most of these had never done one unforgettable thing except die slowly of some horrible cancer. Jamie liked hearing about them; he said they made him feel better about his day. And after she quit and took to reading long novels—anything, so long as it went on for more than four hundred pages—it wasn’t the same. She’d try to tell Jamie about the Baron Charlus or Garp’s mother and he’d be staring past her. Once, to test him, she said, “My doctor said it’s going to be triplets,” and he just kept gazing beyond her out the dark kitchen window at the lights moving slowly up the Hudson. Which reminds her of her third mistake: they never argued. Lynne, who fights with Arnie over every little thing, has told her that she and Jamie were afraid of their anger. Maybe so. Even when Jamie told her he was leaving, Bertie was there, listening to what for him was their first conversation. How could they have fought? Anita wonders what happened to that part of her that used to fight tooth and nail with Lynne. She imagines Jamie and Lizzie litigating over every avocado in the supermarket. It’s the only way she can stand thinking of him in the supermarket with somebody else. Once, visiting friends in Berkeley, Anita and Jamie went to an all-night supermarket for orange juice. They took a joint for the ride and got so stoned that, when they got there, they couldn’t move. They just stood near the vegetable bins, talking, laughing, marveling over the vegetables, those California vegetables! Once more, Anita feels like she’s watching the Zapruder film. She’s the only assassination buff who can’t even handle a magnifying glass, who wouldn’t know a smoking gun if she saw one. Anita’s wasted the morning trying to imagine her conversation with Jamie. She’s afraid she’ll have nothing interesting to say. She blames this on living in her parents’ house, where nothing interesting ever happens. She feels that living there marks her as a boring person with no interesting friends she could have stayed with. But that’s

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not true. She and Bertie would have been welcome in the editing room of Irene’s SoHo loft, on the couch in Jeanie’s Park Slope floor-through. But being home is easier, she doesn’t have to be a good guest. If Bertie cries at night, her mother comes in and offers to sing him Teresa Brewer. One thing she could tell Jamie is what she’s noticed at the Pathmark: more and more people seem to be buying huge quantities of specialty items, whole shopping carts full of apricot yogurt, frozen tacos, Sprite in liter plastic jugs. She’s heard that American families hardly ever sit down to dinner together. So who knows, maybe there are millions of people out there, each eating only one thing. She could tell him how she took Bertie to the park to see some other babies. He slept the whole time, leaving her with the other mothers, none of whom even smiled at her. At one point, a little boy threw sand at a little girl. The girl’s mother ran over, grabbed the boy’s ankles, and turned him upside down. Anita expected coins to rain out of his pockets like in the movies, but none did. After a while the boy’s mother came over, and, instead of yelling at the mother who was shaking her upside-down son, said, “I’m glad it’s you and not me.” Anita felt as if she’d stumbled in on a game in progress, like polo or a new kind of poker with complicated rules which no one would stop to explain. But the last thing she wants is to sound like some pitiful housewife drifting back and forth between the supermarket and the playground. She wonders what sort of lawyer Lizzie is. Corporate taxes, she hopes, but fears it’s probably the most interesting cases: mad bombings, ax murders, billion-dollar swindles. She’s tempted to tell Jamie about her father, how for a week or so last month he’d been instructed by his rebbe: instead of saying grace, he should clap his hands whenever the spirit of thanksgiving moved him. In the hour and a half it took to eat—with her father dropping his silverware, clapping, shutting his eyes as if smelling something sweet—Anita tried to predict these outbursts, but couldn’t; she thought of the retarded people one heard sometimes in movie theaters, shouting out randomly, for no reason. She could tell Jamie how her father came home in a green velvet Tyrolean hat with a feather; apparently, the rebbe had given out dozens of hats to illustrate his sermon: the righteous man must climb this world like a mountain. But she knows that telling Jamie would only make her angry at him for not being around tomorrow when she’ll need to tell the next installment. Nor does it make her happy right now to think that Jamie knows her father well enough to know that in the old days, he wouldn’t have been caught dead in a Tyrolean hat. The obvious subject is Bertie. Everything he does interests her; she thinks he’s a genius. Why can’t she tell Jamie about his practiced smiles, about his picking up his own Cheerios? Why? Because what could be more pitiful than thinking that anyone cares if your five-­month-old can pick up his own Cheerios?

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Bertie’s victory over Cheerios should be their victory. Instead, she can hardly talk about Bertie; it’s as if she’s accusing Jamie. Bertie should be the mortar cementing them; as it is, he’s part of the wall. When Jamie rings the doorbell, Anita half hopes that Bertie, who hasn’t seen his father for two weeks, will not recognize him and scream. Bertie looks at Jamie, then at Anita, then at Jamie, then smiles a smile which anyone could tell is his real one. Anita’s mother says, “Jamie! There’s apple cake in the fridge if you kids get hungry.” Then she backs out of the room. It’s so uncomfortable they could be high-schoolers dating—except for the presence of Bertie and the fact that Anita and Jamie didn’t know each other in high school. “Can we go for a walk somewhere?” Jamie is staring to the side of Anita’s head, at Bertie. Anita feels as if he’s asking Bertie out and is one of those guys who’s scared to be alone with his date. She’s the friend he drags along, the chaperone. “Sure,” says Anita. Bertie’s wriggling so hard his feet jam halfway down the legs of his snowsuit and Anita has to thread them through. She knows she’s making herself look incompetent, making the process of dressing Bertie look harder than it is. On the way to the park she can’t think of anything to say. She doesn’t want to discuss specialty items at the Pathmark or the upside-down boy. Of course she’s done this before, rehearsed whole conversations that turned out to be inappropriate. But never with Jamie. The playground is chilly, almost deserted. In one corner, two five-year-old boys are playing soccer while their parents—all four of them in ponytails—hunker on the ground, passing a joint. There’s a dressed-up Orthodox family sitting in a row on a bench. By the swings, a young mother says to her daughter, “Okay, ten more pushes and we’re going home.” And finally there are some boys—ten, eleven, twelve—playing very hard and punishingly on the jungle gym and slide, as if it’s the playground equipment’s fault that they’ve grown too big for it. “When is Bertie going to be old enough for the slide?” asks Jamie. “Tomorrow,” says Anita. The mother by the swings counts to ten, and when the little girl says “Ten more!” grabs her daughter’s hand and pulls her out of the park. Jamie sits down on one of the swings and stretches his arms out for Bertie. Holding the baby on his lap, Jamie pushes off. Anita can’t look till she reassures herself: she trusts Jamie that much—not to drop Bertie. She sits on the other swing and watches Bertie, who is leaning forward to see where they’re going before they get there. “Look how he holds his head up,” says Jamie. “That’s my boy.” “He’s been doing that for four months,” says Anita.

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Jamie trails his long legs in the sand and stops with a bump. “Anita,” he says, “just what am I supposed to do? What do you want?” Anita wonders what she does want. She’s not sure she wants to be back with Jamie. Bertie or no Bertie, it’s too late. Something’s happened that can’t be fixed. Basically, she wants what her mother wants: for everything to be the way it was before everything changed. “I want to know one thing,” she says. “Remember that garden party at Mel’s?” “What about it?” says Jamie. Anita remembers a buffet of elegant, salty things—sun-dried tomatoes, smoked salmon—which by then she wasn’t allowed to eat. “I want to know if you and Lizzie were already . . .” She thinks: If a woman could walk clear across a party to feel her lover’s wife’s belly; her lover’s unborn child inside it, well then, you really can’t know anything about people. Jamie says, “Of course not,” but in a tone that makes Anita suspect it began at that party, or thereabouts. She wonders: Did their fingers brush accidentally over a Lebanese olive? A long look near the pesto and sour-cream dip? “It wasn’t Lizzie.” Jamie’s swinging again, distractedly. “It wasn’t you.” “Who was it?” she says.” Don’t blame Bertie, he wasn’t born yet.” “It wasn’t the baby. It was me. Listen—” Jamie stops himself by grabbing the chain on her swing together with his. The seats tilt together crazily. “When I was in the seventh grade, there was a kid in my class named Mitchell Pearlman. One day we got to talking about our dads, and Mitchell said that his was a photographer. He’d been everywhere, done everything. Had he fought with the Mau Maus? Sure. Sipped tea with Queen Elizabeth? Of course. Lived with the Eskimos, crossed the Sahara on a camel? You bet. “Naturally we thought he was lying till we went to his house for his birthday. The minute we met Mitchell Pearlman’s father—mustache, jeans, big silver belt buckle— we began to think Mitchell was telling the truth. After the cake and ice cream, his father brought out the pictures of himself in front of the igloo, the camel, arm in arm with Jomo Kenyatta, dandling the baby Prince Charles on his knee. And for months after that, for years, I hated my own father. I wouldn’t speak to him.” “So?” says Anita. “I don’t get it.” “So, when Bertie was born, I suddenly thought: In a couple of years, he’ll be me in the seventh grade. And I’ll be my father. And he’ll go out and find his own Mitchell Pearlman’s father. And he’ll hate me. I thought: We’ve made a terrible mistake! We should have waited to have Bertie till I was Mitchell Pearlman’s father! Does this make any sense?” There are tears in Jamie’s eyes. Anita thinks: Not much. For one thing, the chronology’s wrong. Jamie fell in love before Bertie was born. For another, Bertie isn’t Jamie and Jamie isn’t his father. Jamie’s

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father owns a dry cleaners, while Jamie is a labor lawyer with interesting cases. She wants to shout at him that exchanging long looks with a lady lawyer over the pesto is nothing—nothing at all—like fighting with the Mau Maus. But she doesn’t. She’s beginning to see that her sister’s right: this is something some men do. Jamie himself doesn’t understand, any more than Mitchell Pearlman’s father understood why he found it so easy to leave the wife and kids and take off across the Sahara. She imagines Jamie ten years hence, taking Bertie out for the afternoon. He’s one of those weekend fathers she never really noticed till she was pregnant, and then she saw them everywhere. She could always tell how uneasy it made them to take their kids places whole families went. Recently she read in the Times: there’s a health club in Manhattan which, on Saturdays and Sundays, caters exclusively to single fathers and their children. Ten years from now, there will be hundreds of these places. She imagines men and children lolling in a steamy pool, pumping exercycles, straining on Nautilus machines. There are no women in her vision, it’s as if all the mothers have died of some plague. She hears the cries of the children, sees the shoulders of the fathers rounded as if from the weight of the children tugging their arms. The only thing she can’t picture is how Bertie will look in ten years’ time. For weeks, her father has been asking her to come to a service in his shul. “The worst that’ll happen is that you’ll have fun,” he says. It’s made Anita a little nervous, like having a Moonie ask her to go away for the weekend. But the day after Jamie’s visit, she agrees. There’s nothing but football on TV. “Can me and Bertie sit in the same section?” she asks. “Don’t be smart,” says her father. When she comes downstairs in a turtleneck and good brown corduroy jeans, she sees him really suffering with embarrassment. She goes and changes into a long skirt from the back of her closet, Indian print from the sixties. On the drive down Eastern Parkway, Anita and her father don’t talk. Again she has the peculiar feeling of being on a date. There’s not much traffic on this Sunday, and everything seems so slowed down that she’s slow to notice: her father’s whole driving style has changed. He used to zip around like a cabbie, teeth grinding, swerving, cursing. Now he keeps to his lane, he’s got all the time in the world. His elbow is out the side window, and cold air is rushing into the car. “Can you shut that?” says Anita. “The baby.” “Sure,” says her father. “Sorry.” “What kind of service are we going to?” “A wedding.” “Turn the car around,” says Anita.

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“Don’t be stupid,” says her father. “Would you have preferred a funeral? All right—next time, a funeral.” “What next time?” says Anita. “You’ll be interested,” says her father. “The ceremony is outside, under the stars.” “Stars you can see from Crown Heights?” says Anita. “I’ll be interested.” In the old days, her father used to start looking for parking places miles in advance. She remembers hours of accelerating, then falling forward as the brakes squealed in the search for a spot in Chinatown. Now as they pull up to the block in which hundreds of Hasidim are milling around, her father cruises smoothly into an empty space. The short winter afternoon is darkening. The streetlights come on. The air is crisp and clear. The men wear nearly identical black coats, the women’s are of various subdued hues. Most of the women are in high, good leather boots which remind Anita of the ad on the microfilm. It’s easy to spot the converts like her father in his fur­collared car coat, the young men in denim and down; it annoys her that several young women wear paisley skirts much like hers. The crowd spills off the sidewalk, blocking the northbound lane, but the two cops parked in their squad car ignore it. Leaning on other cars, Puerto Rican kids in sweatshirts and down vests idly hump their girlfriends as they watch the Hasidim assemble. The wedding canopy is already up, held by four men who keep switching the pole from hand to hand so they can warm the free hand in their pockets. Suddenly everyone’s buzzing like bees. Anita’s father leans forward and says, “The rebbe.” Anita stands on tiptoe. But from a quarter block away, the rebbe looks pretty much like the photo: Mr. Natural. That’s another reason she could never join this sect: being female, she’d never get closer to the rebbe than this. She turns to say this to her father, but he’s gone—drawn, she imagines, toward his rebbe. The crowd buzzes again when the bride and groom appear. The bride’s leaning on some women, the groom on some men. They both look ready to drop. When Anita gets a good look at the groom—gangly, skin the color of skim milk—she understands why the bride can hardly walk. How could anyone marry that? Nearly rigid in his quilted snowsuit, Bertie’s getting heavy. Anita holds him up though she knows he’s too young to focus on the center of attention, too young to know there is a center. To Bertie, everything’s the center: the scarf of the woman in front of him, his own inaccessible fist. Anita thinks: the bride must be freezing. Maybe that’s why she’s so hunched over as the women lead her in circles around the groom. Under the veil, she could be anything—old, ugly, sick, some covered-up temple idol. No wonder the groom is so panicky!

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Even with all the Hebrew prayers, the ceremony is over in no time. They always are, thinks Anita, except when people write their own. Real religions and even the state seem to know: if it drags on too long, somebody will faint. Anita and Jamie got married impulsively in a small town on the California-Nevada border. What she mostly remembers is sitting in a diner in Truckee, writing postcards to all their friends saying that she’d just been married in the Donner Pass by a one-armed justice of the peace. Her thoughts are interrupted by cheers; the groom has broken the glass. Then bride and groom and wedding canopy disappear in the crowd bearing them—and Anita and Bertie—into the hall. Just inside the door, the men and women peel off in opposite directions. Anita follows the women into a large room with a wooden dance floor surrounded by round tables, set with centerpieces of pink carnations in squat crystal vases and groupings of ginger ale and seltzer bottles. No one’s saving places or jockeying to be near friends. The ladies just sit. Anita stands for a minute or so, then sees two women beckoning and patting the chair between them, so she goes and sits down. She soon understands why the women have found places so quickly: it doesn’t matter where they sit, no one stays put for more than two seconds. They kiss and gab, then get up, sit next to a friend at another table, kiss and gab some more. Meanwhile the waiters are weaving through with bowls of hot soup, shouting to the women to get out of their way. But no one’s paying attention. The woman to Anita’s right is middle-aged and kind of pretty. She’s Mrs. Lesser. When the waiter brings Anita’s soup, Mrs. Lesser pushes it away so Anita won’t spill it in her struggle with Bertie’s zipper. “Your first baby?” asks Mrs. Lesser. “Yes,” says Anita. “I had my first when I was sixteen. Can you believe I’m a grandmother?” Anita might not have thought it, but she can believe it; she doesn’t know quite what to say. “Can you believe it?” Mrs. Lesser puts her big face near Bertie’s little one, and Bertie rewards her with his most radiant, sweetest, and most inauthentic social smile. “Look at this baby smile!” Mrs. Lesser says to the whole table. “Look at this sweetheart!” It’s Anita’s introduction to the room at large, and all at once it’s open season on Bertie. Mrs. Lesser gets up and someone else sits down and starts stroking Bertie’s cheek. These women have children and grandchildren of their own, thinks Anita. Why are they so interested? But they are, they’re full of questions. How old is he? What’s his name? Does he sleep through the night? Is he always so good? Anita feels like Bertie’s ventriloquist. She has to make an effort to speak in her normal voice as she says, “His name’s Bertie. He’s five months old. He can pick up his own Cheerios.”

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“Cheerios?” cry the women. “At five months? He’s a genius!” The partition separating the men’s and women’s sections stops a few feet from the ceiling. Anita’s facing it when suddenly she sees three furry brown things fly up, then plummet, then fly again. Just as she figures out someone’s juggling hats, she hears applause from the other side of the plywood. With each course, a different woman is making Bertie smile and nibbling from whatever plate the waiter has put down. First comes stuffed derma, then a platter of thick roast beef, little round potatoes, canned peas. Anita picks up a forkful of peas. She isn’t very hungry, it isn’t very good. No one’s eating much; even the fleshiest ladies are just tasting. But every woman who sits down offers to hold Bertie for Anita, or to cut her roast beef. They say to Bertie, “Too bad you can’t eat roast beef, pussycat,” and “Next year at this time you’ll be munching little brown potatoes.” Slowly at first, the men begin dancing. Anita feels it through the floor before she hears it. Stamp, stamp. Soon the silverware is rattling, the peas are jumping on her plate. The stamping gets faster, there are shouts. Anita wonders if her father is dancing. Probably he is. The door between the two sections is open, children are running back and forth. No one would stop her from looking. But she doesn’t, she just doesn’t. Singing, clapping, the men make their own music. The women have help. Two men come in with an accordion and a mandolin. The women dance sweetly in couples, a dance that seems part waltz, part foxtrot, part polka. Mrs. Lesser reappears, and when a sprightly gray-haired lady to the far side of her makes swaying motions with her arms, Mrs. Lesser says, “If you’re asking, I’m dancing,” and away they go. A tiny old woman approaches Anita and says, “Would the baby care to dance?” All the women want to dance with Bertie. Young and old, they keep cutting in, passing him around. Anita catches glimpses of him, first with this one, then with that, sailing, swaying to the music, resting his cheek on their billowy breasts. When Mrs. Lesser sits back down, she asks where the baby is. “Dancing,” says Anita. Mrs. Lesser cranes her neck. “He’s smiling,” she says. “He’s the belle of the ball!” Suddenly there’s a whoop from the other room, and Anita sees the groom’s head and shoulders over the partition. From the angle of his head, the stricken expression, she knows that this is the part where the men hoist the groom up in a chair and dance. Then the women gather and raise the bride’s chair. The music gets louder, and the women begin circling the bride, dancing with such intensity that Anita goes and finds Bertie and takes him back. At last the bride’s head is nearly touching the ceiling. Above the partition, she and the groom look at each other. Anita wants to study this look. She thinks it’s something

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she should pay close attention to. But she’s only half-watching. Mostly she’s concentrating on not dropping Bertie, whom she’s holding up above her head. “Look, sweetheart,” she’s saying. “Look at the lady in the chair!” Bertie sings when he nurses, a sweet, satisfied gulping and humming high in his nose. That night, after the wedding, Anita falls asleep while he’s nursing, and his song turns into the song in her dream. In her dream, Bertie’s singing “Music, Music, Music” just like Teresa Brewer. He’s still baby Bertie, but he’s up on stage, smiling one of his phony smiles, making big stagey gestures like Shirley Temple or those awful children in Annie. One of these gestures is the “okay” sign, thumb and forefinger joined. The circle his fingers make reminds her of the Buddha. It reminds her of a Cheerio. Anita wakes up laughing, wondering how a little baby could know words like “nickelodeon.” She gets up, and without detaching Bertie from her breast, slips a bathrobe over both of them and goes downstairs. Except for her parents’ bedroom, where earlier she heard her mother preparing for sleep, every room is lit up. In the kitchen, light is shining from around the edges of the cellar door. Anita and Bertie go down. Opening the door to the family room, she sees her father sitting cross-legged on the cork tiled floor. His eyes are shut and tears are shining on his cheeks. But he’s not so out of it that he doesn’t hear her come in. Looking up, he seems frail and embarrassed, an old man caught doing something he’s not supposed to do. Anita wants to apologize and leave. Then it dawns on her that she’s not down there to bother him. There’s something she wants to ask, but she’s not sure what it is. She wants to ask why all the lights in the house are always on. She wants to ask who he thinks is paying the electric bills. Anita’s father stands up and dries his eyes with his palm. Then he says, “Hold up your hand.” Anita holds up her hand and he lifts his, palm facing hers, a few inches away. He asks if she feels anything. She feels something. A pressure. She remembers how when she was in labor with Bertie, she held Jamie’s hand. Just before the nurses let her start pushing, she turned to Jamie and said, “I don’t think I can do this.” “Sure you can,” he said, and squeezed her hand so hard she’d thought it was broken. By the time it stopped hurting, the contraction was over and she knew she could go on. Now she sees that Jamie didn’t mean to hurt her. He was scared too. Her father’s hand is still a few inches away, but its grip feels as tight as Jamie’s. She can almost feel electrons jumping over the space between them, electricity drawing them as close as she is to Bertie, who just at that moment lets go of her breast and sits up, watching them.

19 Curt Leviant

Say It Isn’t So, Mr. Yiddish

Jerusalem, it was known all over Jerusalem, the holy city, that Shmulik Gafni, Overlyfull Professor, Chairman and Distinguished University Researcher of Yiddish Language, Literature, Culture, and Folklore on the Mendl and Sadie-Yentl Eizenbahn Chair of Yiddish Studies at the University of Israel, the most famous scholar of Yiddish in the world, not only by his own estimation but in the estimation of others, for instance a fellow scholar, Sh. Meichl-Rukzak, who was himself a leading candidate for that honorific, in an interview with the New York Times (with the help of a translator) called Shmulik Gafni “Mister Yiddish” (but everyone, aware of their rivalry, said it was just a sarcastic jibe), married for more than forty years was he, forty not being the mythical forty of the Bible, a ubiquitous Biblical cipher, but a metaphor for a long, long stretch of time, which by all objective accounts a forty-year marriage truly is, married not to two or three women, mind you, like most non-Yiddish scholars, with a graduate assistant and/or secretary on the side (the female side, to be sure), for Yiddish scholars tend to be more conservative (one to one-and-a-half wives at most), forty not being an aggregate of marriage years, a sum of various unions, but the number of years he’d been with one woman, Batsheva was her name, and for her there was only one man too, a good-looking, bright, and witty man was Shmulik, who had attained the Biblical three score and ten (he loved Biblical numbers, and names too, witness his choice of mate) in good health more or less (the less was a minor heart attack some years back, for which he briefly took medications and, reluctantly, after much coaxing by Batsheva, now grumblingly wore an electric monitor called the Chaver, or friend, based on the American model known as the “Companion,” which he never yet had to use, didn’t know the workings of, except maybe press a button), with “Say It Isn’t So, Mr. Yiddish.” From Leviant, Zix Zexy Ztories. Copyright © 2012 by Curt Leviant. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Texas Tech University Press.

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sparkling gray eyes compressing a gleam that could be ironic, sardonic, impatient, and disarmingly affectionate in rather quick order, a mellifluous baritone speaking voice, which even when he spoke privately at home rang out with a lecturer’s boom whose authority, charm, and fluidity of nuance excited all his girl students, especially when he smiled and his powerful teeth shone and the laugh lines at the corner of his wolf-gray eyes crinkled and he ran his hand through his full head of wavy steel-graysprinkled hair, hair that once years back when he was on a research trip an old Italian barber in New York held up like a bunch of asparagus and said to him, “You gotta healthy heada hair, you never ever gonna getta balda,” a prognostication that held true, even forty years later, and a look in his eyes that combined boyish shyness, even at seventy, and worldly assurance, with a thirty-four-year-old son, Yosef, twin daughters, Rivka and Rachel, forty-three, and twin granddaughters, Penina and Zehava (one from each daughter, explanation coming), one of whom, the elder, though both were born precisely at the same second, now had a one-year-old son, which made a greatgrandfather of Shmulik Gafni, a name he hadn’t had of course back home in Warsaw, his pre-World War II hometown, but which he changed from Weingarten, “wine garden” (easy enough, right? who says you don’t know Yiddish?), an imposing name with rhythm and élan, with trisyllabic balance and a triad of different vowel neumes, even a tone-deaf man saying “Weingarten” sounded as though he’d just finished rehearsing for a lieder recital, Shmulik dropping the Weingarten after being told privately, discreetly, but in no uncertain terms that the authorities in Israeli higher education, 1950 was the year, just two years after Independence, not too keen on Yiddish in the first place, in fact, truth to say, because we offer here no make-believe, but the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as American court clerks state with such grandiloquence, the Israel bureaucrats (all born in Eastern Europe and Yiddish speaking) looking down their quintessential Jewish noses at this Diasporic Yiddish language that threatened (so they asseverated) to compete with the ancient Hebrew, even though all the founding fathers of Israel were born into that supple, juicy, evocative, folk-saturated, wise, witty and image-laden Yiddish tongue, and greedily imbibed, yes, sucked it in with their mama’s milk, and spoke it more naturally and felicitously than Hebrew, which was strong on verbs but weak on modern nouns and the subtleties of adverbs and adjectives, and how can you run a nation just on verbs anyway?, but run it they did, in fact race and gallop in it, around it and through it with verbs, moxie, faith, and smuggled weapons too, Shmulik was told that these higher-ed officials would look more kindly on his efforts to establish Yiddish studies at the University of Israel if he wouldn’t have such a blatantly potch-in-pawnim (slap-in-the-face, for the handful of you out in the boondocks who haven’t yet mastered Yiddish) Diasporic Jewish name but a more acceptable Hebraized one, Gafni, for instance, remember this was two years after Independence when nationalism was so intense it bordered on jingoism,

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although in Israel they hadn’t heard of the word and wouldn’t know what it meant even if they heard it, but words are created for situations, movements, and moods and not vice versa, and the mood then in Israel rejected all foreign-sounding (read: Jewishsounding) names, hiding it under the protective purple cloak of Hebrew, when everyone knew that Weingarten had been around for 200 years or more and Gafni hadn’t even been around the block yet much less around the corner, and anyone who ever met a Gafni would at once say, “You used to be Weingarten, right?” just like if anyone met a phony concoction of a name like Har-paz, he’d smirk and say, “Ah, né Goldberg, hill of gold,” but you know that from Bach’s famous Variations, but Gafni it was, folks, and Gafni it had to be, Gafni, meaning “my vine”—close enough, but that wasn’t what was known all over Jerusalem, it won’t be too long before you do know what was known, or rather “known,” all over Jerusalem, and a juicy bit of knowledge it was close enough to his paternal family name, but this Gafni business, as far as Shmulik Weingarten was concerned, was merely part of the “i” suffix name syndrome that most Israelis succumbed to and that most Europeans assumed were Italian, surnames like Gafni, Magdani, Zehavi, Caspi, Crispi, and Crunchi, modern stand-ins for all the delicious, age-old, authentic Jewish names that the goyim had imposed upon the Jews and that the Jewish goyim in Israel were imposing on Ashkenazi names. (Question: What was the difference between the goyim there in Europe in the 1700s forcing you to take a name and the Jews here gently twisting your forearm to take a Hebrewsounding name? Answer: Here you didn’t have to pay for it.) But there was a price, mind you, a mighty awful price to pay anyway, far costlier than the gold the Jews had to fork over to Christian authorities 250 years ago for their new Jewish family names, for now if a family member, let’s say a Holocaust survivor or a Russian immigrant, came to Israel and sought you out in the telephone book or on the population list of the Interior Ministry, he would never find you, for fine old Jewish names like Ginsburg, Brandenburg, Silverberg, Goldberg, and Iceberg all became Hebraified, deracinated, a kind of nose job on the paterfamilias moniker, but Shmulik Weingarten reluctantly agreed to gafnify his name if it would help, and indeed it did, for Yiddish studies, due to him and his Polish Jewish obstinacy and his passion for everything Yiddish, and thanks to the Yiddish supporters he mustered all over the land, the University of Israel Global Yiddish Department developed into a world center, perhaps the world center for Yiddish, competing with and even superseding the superb one at the Hebrew University, an “address” as he laughingly called it one day many years ago during his own interview with a foreign correspondent for the New York Times as he held his little twin daughters (one of whom, grown up now of course, had become a grandmother just a year ago) on his knees, but it was the other twins, a score of so years later, who were called a medical miracle, still being written up by doctors and parapsychologists and of course photographed, for they were two daughters born,

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one each to Shmulik’s twin girls, Rivka and Rachel, at precisely the same time, at 7:16 a.m., which aroused the curiosity of geneticists, who found that the little sweetie pies had the same DNA, hence they were twins, even though emanating from two different wombs, which were presumably inseminated at the same time by two different men, but enough of medicine and magic and the hocus-pocus of DNA, which science, important as it is, impertinent wags and wits have dubbed Don’t Know Anything, for it is Yiddish and sex—not as unlikely a twinning, or coupling, by your grace, as you might assume—that here interests us, entwines us, betweens us, to coin a wordploy, which by the way is what fiction is all about, wordploy, although what is being said here, what was known all over Jerusalem, and remember, what’s known isn’t always true and what’s true isn’t always known, so what was “known” all over Jerusalem is neither fictive speculation nor imaginative rumination, but pure unadulterous truth (truth in the sense that it truly was known but not necessarily true) that Shmulik Gafni was reportedly plucking grapes from a wine garden not truly his own, having been seriously involved, so it was stage whispered all over Jerusalem, which in fact meant all over Israel, via telephone, fax, telex, rooftop shouts, and tell-all-over-café-au-laittongue-wagging that zipped all over town quicker than all the modern miracles of communication and, inter alia, let’s not forget the Internet nor short-sell e-mail, which is only a trice slower than the pre-electronic instant mode of communication, you guessed it, it rhymes with e-mail and speaks in a higher-pitched voice and laughs when tickled; or, if the preceding obfuscates rather than clarifies, then let a hint to the wise suffice, so let’s not beat around the bush (no offense to the former Prez Pere or junior), we’re happy to repeat, let’s not forget the Internet, email, and female, which was quicker? hard to say, which is more reliable? let’s not play dumb, okay? that Gafni was involved, envalved, invulved with a blonde, full-chested, slim-waisted Polish Catholic shikse exactly half his age, thank God she had a couple of flaws, including pencil-thin eyebrows and vermicelli lips and slightly uneven teeth on an otherwise attractive face, because if she’d been perfect people would have jumped out of their skins, which in any case were already stained a deep envy green, but what Shmulik Gafni, né Weingarten, was thoroughly raked over the coals for was not that he was old enough to be her father (and maybe was), not that she wasn’t Jewish (but could become), not that she was Polish, although her Polishness was an awfully bitter pill to swallow (given the Poles’ endemic anti-Semitism and how, with few exceptions, they helped the Germans and did no small amount of killing themselves, during and even long after the war, a fact that Gafni knew only too well, and was one of the reasons he went back to Poland so often—about this more, much more, later—but accident of birth wasn’t her fault), individually her flaws were excusable and even taken in toto they (that amorphous “they” out there) didn’t mind that she was a young, pretty blonde (the fact that she was interested in Jewish history just made them roll their

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eyes), very busty, how busty? a straining-at-­the-sweater busty, a lump-in-the-throat, swallowing-with-difficulty chesty Polish shikse busty, and not even that she was young enough to be his daughter, which we’ve already mentioned in inverso fashion, but that for God’s sake, how could you do this to us, Shmulik Weingarten, because that’s who you really are, forget that glib Gafni disguise, Shmulik Weingarten, guardian of Yiddish, laureate of the Yiddish language, faithful amanuensis of Yiddish folklore, editor of Yiddish drama, anthologist and preserver of Yiddish poetry and prose, harvester of Yiddish humor and expert on earthy Yiddish expletives, for God’s sake, Shmulik, the blonde bitch, to quote her own surfside confession after the linguistics conference in Nice, a remark that was typed, faxed, whispered, and shouted in all the above-mentioned natural, artificial, and telecommunication modes hitherto listed: the blonde bitch doesn’t even know a word of Yiddish!

True, Shmulik Gafni didn’t want it known all over Jerusalem that he was involved with a Poilishe. Because the truth was—never mind the gossip, the malicious palmover-mouth sotto voce that went from office to market to bus stop to e-mail to female (quicker than e-mail, see supra) but slower than light (Question: Was there anything that traveled quicker than light? Answer: Yes! Lies!), and what was quicker than lies? Rumors of sex—that he was not involved with her. Let’s repeat that, given the interruption of long parenthesis and double dashes: he, Shmulik Gafni, was not involved with her. To those skeptics, mockers, and doubters who think Gafni was after Malina (now you know her name) know ye that for years he had dreams that he was not married to Batsheva, but for Gafni they weren’t dreams, oh no, they were nightmares in which he felt an awful depression, an emptiness that could only be sensed, never described, an irredeemable loss. In those dreams he was single, alone, lonely, and he felt a discomfit of mysterious origin, a disequilibrium, his wholeness compromised. Salvation came like sunshine breaking suddenly through clouds, only when he woke up to find that he was indeed whole, two halves perfectly melded, Batsheva his. Still, there was no doubt in Shmulik’s mind and in the minds of others that Malina was an attractive woman. The mystery in the rumor mill was why this lady named Malina Przeskovska (anyone who pronounced her name correctly was assured of her loyalty and friendship and 5,000 bonus miles on the other Polish national airline, Less, which had no frequent flyer mileage plan), who already had a PhD in Polish linguistics from Lodz University, was interested in studying Jewish history in Jerusalem. Was it because she had met Gafni at the International Linguistics Conference in Nice and later, as gossip had it, continued their discussions about the niceties and subtleties of comparative linguistics on the finely pebbled beach of Nice where 80% of the women were 50% naked 100% of the time and the other 20%

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were 100% naked 10% of the time, engaging in their disquisitions in the international lingua franca (pace, France and French), English? English? Actually, all this wasn’t precisely so. Don’t believe all you read, less what you hear, and certainly not what you see. It began this way. At the conference Malina gave her paper in English as if she had lived in London for years; actually, she had never set foot either in that country or in the USA. She even took questions in English. So when Gafni approached her in person with a question he didn’t want to ask publicly (no, not What’s your phone number?) and began at once in Polish, accompanied by his engaging smile, he noticed her surprise, astonishment, pleasure. There was no joy like the joy of hearing your language far away from home, and there was no surprise like the surprise of hearing your native tongue when you did not expect it. She smiled with pleasure at the sound of his words even before she digested the tenor of his remarks. And even as he spoke he saw she was just as pretty up close as she was far away, for beauty at a distance can vanish when blemishes are seen up close. Gafni studied her face, not for its innate, broad-boned prettiness—she had a large face, with everything in proportion, big eyes and flaring nostrils, which for him was always a sign of womanliness, even overt eroticism, an animal hunger—but also for its air of familiarity. “Your face looks familiar. I think I’ve seen it before.” She thought for a moment. “Perhaps at a previous linguistics conference.” “Perhaps,” he said. But if so, he would have remembered the face and dispensed with that vague ill-at-ease feeling akin to a metaphysical headache. No, he decided, he hadn’t seen her at a conference, and the fluttery feeling that her face or a likeness of her face, or a likeness of a likeness, had made an impression on him somewhere remained imprinted on his memory. Let’s get the facts straight. Their chat did not begin on the beach. It began by one of those stone ledges behind the beach, by the promenade. After the conference, when Shmulik still wore jacket and tie and she a business suit, Malina merrily told him she hoped he wouldn’t mind if she sunbathed. “I have a bathing suit on under all this,” she said in her Polish-accented English, gesturing balletically. Remembering how she brightened when he spoke Polish to her, Gafni courteously suggested speaking Polish, but she, hurt, countered with: “Is my English that poor?” which made him feel bad and prompted him to say that her English was excellent, much better than his, in fact. Gafni confessed that he read English but did not lecture in English. Then wondered aloud if perhaps his unused, perhaps even outmoded, Polish offended her ears. But looking at her made him quickly forget about the language; he only half heard her protestation about his magnificent, literary Polish. Later, upon reflection, Gafni

SAY IT ISN’T SO, MR. YIDDISH  305

realized that the slow, demure striptease she did for him was a kind of non-avian mating dance. She turned modestly and took off her jacket and stepped out of her skirt, rolled down her panty hose, unbuttoned her blouse, still her back to him, doing the sort of undressing gestures done in a hotel room and not on a beach, then, her back still to him, she took out a terrycloth tunic from her bag, put it on, popped her clothes in a plastic bag that emerged from her pocketbook, and lo, she stood before him, turning to face him now, practically naked in her bikini, and her nakedness was all the more stark against his full sartorial elegance and she girlishly said to him, taking him by the hand (if indeed she did take his hand and he gave his to her. But if she did extend her hand to him, which still is problematic, and if he took it [even more of a question], if both these suppositions are true and questions of fact, veracity and malicious rumors are resolved and all doubts undone), then Gafni felt a brief electric thrum in his body, an inexplicable warm jolt that sent a message of no specific linguistic content running in all directions, for she had a firm, assertive clasp that he at once interpreted as goyish, it was a gentile hand clasp, a strong shikse womanly hold, and he followed, seeing and not seeing the half-naked girls sunbathing, even older ones who instead of baring their sagging, wrinkled dugs should have covered them in shame with layers of clothing, but even so, despite her bikini and the nakedness of the girls on the beach, Gafni felt that she was nakeder than they, it was hard to explain, but if pressed and if he thought about it, the word “sexy” would have come into play, for in the bared breasts there was stasis, nothing provocative or sexy, but in Malina, in that raspberry-colored bikini, Malina bikini, there was something sexy, taking him by the hand for a moment with a flirtatious tilt of her head, “Come to the water,” and he followed her, undoing first his tie jerkily as he walked toward the water, left and right, a difficult manipulation when you’re working only with one hand, as the whitecaps rolled closer and closer, lapping over the sunning ultramarine sea, the whitecaps breaking here and there like a cupped hand, and then his jacket and shirt, with two hands now, for he thought he’d look funny with only half his jacket and half his shirt off and finally he rolled up his cuffs until at least in spirit, if not in fact, his nakedness matched hers. He didn’t realize she’d put his tie into her bag until she’d done it. “I need sun,” Malina sang. “I need sun and light, especially after that gloomy darkness in the lecture halls.” And she removed her little terrycloth tunic. Shmulik remembered reading once in an American novel a description of a woman with a “luscious body,” and he recalled the phrase perhaps because the first syllable of “luscious”—lush—was the first syllable too of loshn, the Yiddish word for “tongue” and “language,” and he repeated to himself, “What a luscious body.” Heads turned when Malina took off her terrycloth tunic and the sun shone on her deep-raspberry red bikini top. Traffic stopped. The Nice-Monte Carlo helicopter shuttle hovered in midair. Storks carrying babies on their way over the Alps to nest

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in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains swooped down, leaving some half-dozen Eskimo tykes homeless. For a moment Shmulik was blinded by the size, shape, pitch, timbre, mode, and musicality of the large ripe Galilee melons, first image that came to his Israeli mind, recalling the stacks of melons in the Jerusalem outdoor market, fruits that were popping out of their baskets, so small were the restraints—we’re back to Malina’s melons now— so large the countervailing force. And all this in contrast to her slim waist. Women of intellect weren’t supposed to have bodies like that, Gafni thought, rubbing the sunlight from his eyes. His loshn cleaved to the roof of his mouth, as the phrase in the Psalms had it (“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth”), and even though he hadn’t forgotten Jerusalem he was, temporarily, as the Yiddish proverb had it: ohn loshn, without tongue, or speechless. He swallowed, although swallowing was difficult, what with his tongue stuck up there somewhere on his palate (I guess he had forgotten Jerusalem), and the everlasting springs of spittle as dry as the Negev Desert in August. Temptation was like a snake slithering in the grass, ready to strike, then retreating into serpentine slumber: temptation flashed its venomous wet fangs. Temptation, blood-filled, pounded its hammers on both sides of Shmulik’s head, no syncopation here, rather perfectly timed right and left. He looked away, looked to the calm blue sea; tried to breathe in the blue of the water, the azure of the sky. In the lecture hall he had seen her in a business suit where she wasn’t exactly flat-chested, but he attributed some of the fullness to the cut of the jacket. He couldn’t imagine then that he would see later what he was seeing now. Rather than say something stupid, he sought to steer the conversation back to linguistics. In such situations, loshn (hope you haven’t forgotten, loshn, like lingua in Italian, means both “tongue” and “language”) always comes in handy. “Do you know what your name means in Yiddish?” “No. I don’t know. I don’t even know one word of Yiddish,” she said apologetically, but with a seductive little tilt of her head. The slight musical whine of her words declared: Teach me. I’m willing to learn. “It means berry.” “Ah,” Malina brightened. “Also in Polish and Russian.” “Yes, of course.” She frowned. “How could it be the same in Yiddish and Polish?” How could “telephone” be the same in Russian, Yiddish, Polish, English, Dutch, Swahili, and Hebrew? He was about to lecture her, but then supposed it was a purposely naïve question, a come-on. She had a degree in linguistics, for goodness sake. Surely she knew. So without condescension he told her, “Because Yiddish has influences from many language groupings, including Slavic.”

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And so all these rumors of “what was known all over Jerusalem” (“I mean, you know,” folks would say, “it’s known all over town.”) were utter and absolute nonsense. They were colleagues and friends, Malina and Shmulik. She said she had always had a fascination with Jewish history, like many of her post-War-born, intellectually minded friends. And since there were advanced fellowships available, it wasn’t hard for Malina, that pretty little berry—once her name became known, it was the subject of a whole series of, God preserve us, fruity jocular concoctions—to get admitted to the Jewish history graduate program for a second PhD at the University of Israel. And guess who was helping her with beginners’ Hebrew and Yiddish? We think you also ought to know that Shmulik’s Batsheva was not well. She was ailing, in fact, at home, diabetic, and Shmulik would not compromise his affection for his wife by carrying on with another woman, luscious very berry though she was. In fact, Gafni hadn’t wanted to go to the Nice Conference, but Batsheva urged him to go. You were looking forward to this trip, she said. Go to Nice. Don’t worry. I’ll be all right. Strange. In short, Gafni went to Nice. If he hadn’t gone, he wouldn’t have met Malina and the rumors would not have begun. But Malina or no Malina, with Gafni there was always room for gossip. He knew of course that women looked admiringly at him. Although he was not tall, he was of robust appearance, solidly built, no flab. He swam, he could walk backward quicker than most people could walk forward, played tennis in a city that hadn’t developed the sport, even skied when he went to winter conferences in Switzerland. His grandfather lived to his ninety-third birthday; his father would have too, had he not been murdered by them. So the chances were good for Shmulik Gafni, too, and he worked hard on his longevity. And, of course, his mental acuity matched—what do you mean “matched”? It easily surpassed—his physical vigor. By the age of seventy, when he had been awarded Israel’s highest honor, the Israel Prize, for his life’s work, presented at the President of Israel’s residence, Shmulik had already won the Bialik Prize for his study of Alsatian Yiddish; the Tel Aviv Prize for his book on 19th-century Yiddish in Jerusalem; and an honorary doctorate from Oxford for his edition of the collected works of a hitherto unknown 16th-century Venetian master of Yiddish. In addition, among his 111 books and monographs, there was a rather slim anthology of Yiddish jokes in Sicily; an edition of neglected 20th-century Yiddish writers in Albania and Herzegovina; a study of early Swiss variants of the verb “to be,” which he proved were derivatives of Old Yiddish. Gafni’s Latin-Yiddish, Yiddish-Latin dictionary was a tour de force. And his Latin translation of one of Sholem Aleichem’s comic monologues was the hit of the International Latin Scholars Conference, the famous ILSC, held on Capri, for Latin conventions, like Yiddish conferences, always chose perfect locations and ideal weather for

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their week-long festa festorae. It put Yiddish on the map. When Gafni quotes Cicero’s “A room without books is like a body without a soul” in his Yiddish—“a tzimmer awn a sefer is azoy vi a guf awn a neshomeh”—it sounds natural, homey, heimish. You would have thought Cicero grew up in a shtetl, and perhaps he did. Of course, such productivity and fame sparked envy, and envy gave birth to criticism that soon degenerated to petty carping. (You see what I mean. Malina or no Malina, the carps are always there to nibble and quibble.) They criticized Gafni for his frequent trips abroad (trips they’d rather have taken). Why can’t he stay home and teach? They skewered him for publishing so much. Why didn’t we think of this first? Why doesn’t he rein in his pen (creating in their envy a mixed metaphor)? Why doesn’t he get writer’s block, writer’s cramp? Why does he dance all over the globe? Sicily, Alsace-Lorraine, Switzerland, Tirana, Shanghai. Next thing we know he’ll be writing about Yiddish in Timbuktu. (Which, incidentally, he was working on already.) Again lies and malignation. He did stay home and teach. But the carps would not cease nibbling, the piranhas their petty carping: Why did he, that is Shmulik Gafni, always manage to find a Yiddish connection in world-class resorts? No one else but pleasure-garden-seeking, wine-bibbing Weingarten; no one but globe-­hopping Gafni could find Yiddish in the Canary Islands, the Azores, Palma di Majorca, or Malta, where the last Yiddish speaker had died peacefully in his sleep in the year 22 of the Common Era, a total, unwarranted exaggeration. And what possible link could there be between Yiddish, continued the carpers, or anything remotely Jewish for that matter, and the Taj Mahal, yet Gafni was able to come up with an article only semi-tongue-in-cheek entitled, “The Taj Mahal, the Pink Elephant, and the Jewish Question.” Success breeds envy, period. What next, Gafni? Yiddish in Yemen? Jargon in Azerbaijan? Mame-loshn in Mozambique? But how about fairness, balance, eh? That’s the Jewish way. His students thought he was a gifted instructor. His teaching assistants adored him. He always took one or two along and managed to find international grants and fellowships for them. And ask the members of the various Polish landsmanshaftn in Israel how often Shmulik would appear before their groups and reminisce with them about prewar Jewish life in Warsaw and other cities and never charge a lecturer’s fee. Given all of the above, it is no wonder that Shmulik Gafni did not want known all over Jerusalem what was known all over Jerusalem, a so-called “known” that, according to Gafni, had no connection to fact, but facts, as is well known, no quotes around that word, facts had as much connection to truth as cabbies to cabbage or cribs to cribbage. You’ve heard this before, but a truism—like a juicy lie—is worth repeating (in fact, Gafni himself liked to use this line and would ascribe it to various 18th-century philosophes): a truism, like a lie, gets better with each repetition. Mere fact, mere access to truth, did not prevent lies from growing like a golem out of control.

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The truth was that Shmulik Gafni was never alone with Malina. Giving her an occasional lift home in his car—a six-minute ride to save her a forty-minute bus ride— does not count. He drove; she sat next to him. Gafni looked down at her short skirt and bare, pretty legs and in his mind he stretched out his hands and touched, stroked her smooth, tanned skin, a tan and a bare that reminded him of the tan and the bare when he walked with her on the Nice beach to the water of the Great Sea, as the Bible called the blue Mediterranean, and even though she was partially clothed then she was nakeder than the 98% naked women on the beach. But all this was in his head; his hands on his lap he kept (and if I were Chaucer I would add: and Shmulik Gafni was he yclept). Looking at his calm hands and tranquil fingers, one would never have imagined the tremble in his fingers, the quake in his heart, the shake in his soul, the agitas in all of Gafni. So then, Gafni was never really alone with Malina. Even when he traveled with his assistants, male and female, he never stayed at the same hotel with them. Of course, when he was invited by various conferences, he was always lodged in the best hotel, which perk, alas, could not be offered to his assistants. And even when by pure coincidence Malina registered (who her sponsor was no one knew) for the same conference, she always stayed at a different hotel. But this didn’t satisfy them (the “them” out there previously cited as “they”). They figured that precisely, davke, because the two of them were in different hotels it actually confirmed their suspicions. Why different hotels? Just because it’s different hotels, they argued Talmudically, was all the more reason to believe that something was going on. It was such a transparent ruse, that different­hotels ploy (there’s that “ploy” again), even more revealing than if they’d been in the same hotel. Who are they (a different “they” this time) fooling with that two hotels monkey business? If vox populi makes up its mind, even truth can’t come to interfere, as Cicero sagely observed. And so with this—we now paraphrase a remark in one of Kafka’s metafictions—we have come to the end of our investigation as to what was known (remember Pascal’s apothegm: all knowledge is either Platonic arrogance or wishful thought) and not known in the holy city of Jerusalem, may it speedily be rebuilt in our day, Amen, by presenting all the facts as we know them.

PART II The New Diaspora

20 Peter Orner

Nathan Leopold Writes to Mr. Felix Kleczka of 5383 S. Blackstone

Castaner, Puerto Rico (Associated Press, April 7, 1958) Nathan Leopold is learning the technique of his ten-dollar-a-month laboratory job in the hospital here and using most of his spare time to answer his voluminous mail. One hospital official said the paroled Chicago slayer has received 2,800 letters in the three weeks he has been here, from all parts of the United States. He has expressed his intentions to answer every letter. The room is not as bare as you might imagine. In fact, it’s crowded. A distant relative in the furniture business shipped a load of overstock from the Merchandise Mart. Sofas, love seats, end tables, floor lamps, a pool table. It took three trucks to deliver it all from San Juan. Nathan, home from work, sits at a large oak desk, big as a banker’s. He takes off his shoes. He rubs his feet awhile. He watches his canaries. The birds are, for a change, silent. He leaves their cage door open. He likes to watch them sleep, their heads up, their eyes vaguely open, as if on a whim they could fly in their dreams. He takes another letter from the pile and sets it in front of him. He puts on his glasses. He reads. When he’s finished, he brings his hand to his face and gently rests his index finger on the tip of his nose. The room has a single window that looks out upon the village and, beyond it, a small mountain. When he first arrived here, it was heaven. The spell was short-lived. He no longer feels the urge to walk across the village to the mountain and climb it. “Nathan Leopold Writes to Mrs. Felix Kleczka of 5383 S. Blackstone.” From Orner, The Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge. Copyright © 2013 by Peter Orner. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

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314  PETER ORNER

Dear Mr. Kleczka, I received your correspondence two weeks ago. Please accept my most sincere apologies. I receive a great many letters and am doing my best to reply with a reasonable degree of promptness. Also, note that the mail delivery services here in the hills outside San Juan leave a bit to be desired. Among other things, you call me God’s revulsion and express the wish that I choke on my poisonous froth. You write that my employment in a hospital is the ghastliest joke Satan ever played and, as a veteran of Hitler’s war, you know from whence you speak. I do not doubt you, Mr. Felix Kleczka. You write from what you describe as the old neighborhood. Let’s not indulge ourselves. I am not going to tell you about the last thirty-three years. I want you to know that I believe—I am sure this is something even we can agree on—I am the luckiest man in the world. I am free and nothing you could imagine is more delirious. Yet, delirium, I might add, always gives way to a fog that never lifts. This said, allow me to describe a bit of my work at the hospital. I met a woman today. She is dying of a rare disease. It is not pancreatic cancer, the doctor assured me, but something far more uncommon. The disease is untreatable, and the most that can be done for this woman is to prescribe painkillers and ensure a constant supply of nutrients to the bloodstream, because, apparently— this is the way I understand it—her body rejects those fluids necessary for the survival of her vital organs. In other words, the patient is leaking away. Her name is Maya de Hostas and she has two children, Javier and Theresa. There is no husband to speak of. Maya de Hostas is dying, Mr. Kleczka, but it is a slow process. The doctor says it could take more than six months, perhaps a year. Do you scoff? Do you tear at this paper? Do your hands flutter with rage? Nathan Leopold is telling a story. Nathan Leopold is telling a story of other people suffering. You remember my youthful arrogance like it was yesterday. All the brains they said I had. All the books I’d read, all the languages they said I spoke. Russian, Greek, Arabic. They say I even knew Sanskrit! My famous attorney glibly talking away the rope. I still repeat his speech like a prayer. The easy and the popular thing to do is to hang my clients. It is men like you, men with long memories, that make our—your—city great. You sweep the streets of scum like me. This is no defense, Mr. Kleczka of 5383 S. Blackstone, but allow me to tell you I love you. I love you for keeping the torch lit, for taking the time to write to me. I am deadly serious, oh deadly serious, and as I sit here—the waning moments of light purpling the mountains—I imagine you. I imagine you reading of my parole with such beautiful fury. You want to come here yourself and mete out justice. Don’t you want to get on a plane and come and murder me with your own bare hands? No gloves for such a fiend. And then take a vacation. Why not? Bring the wife and kids. It’s Puerto Rico. But your wife says an eye for an eye wouldn’t help anybody and certainly wouldn’t make any difference to Bobby Franks. It wouldn’t bring that angel back, and they’d only throw the key away on you. (Though, of course, your defense would have much to say by way

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of mitigation.) But the fiend, you cried. Animal! Your wife is a wise woman but you, Sir, are wiser. There are times, of course, when only blood will suffice. Should you make the trip, know that my door is always open. I live in a two-room flat. If I’m absent at my employment, please wait for me. Make yourself at home. Don’t mind the chatter of the canaries. I feed them in the morning. I keep whiskey, though the conditions of my parole forbid spirits, in my third desk drawer. Why not pour yourself a glass? And know that as you strangle me or slash my throat or simply blow my head off, I’ll love you. As I bleed onto this unswept floor (the maid comes only on Tuesdays), I’ll love you. Mr. Felix Kleczka of the old neighborhood. What else can I say to you? Do not for a moment think I say any of this slyly. I have been waiting with open eyes and open arms for the last thirty-three years, prepared to die the same death as Dickie Loeb, whose rank flesh is only less tainted than mine for being done away with sooner. Only maggots know the truth. Well, I am here. I will never hide from you. I get a great deal of mail, as I said. Much of it is supportive of my new life. This week alone I received three marriage proposals. Your letter reminded me very starkly of who and what I am. Even so, I must ask you: Are there still old neighborhoods? Are there still people who knew us when? And should you decide not to come and take up the knife against me, know that I think no less of you. Your cowardice, more than anything, this I understand. Once, a young man bludgeoned a child with a chisel. To make certain, I stuffed my fist in his mouth. My hands are rather plump now. Still, I recognize them for what they are, some days. Sincerely, N. Leopold Dark outside the window now. Night heartens. He’d lived so long craving light. Those first few weeks, it was the light, all that immortal light. Now he’s satisfied with a lamp. He flicks it on for comfort. He watches his face in the window. His laugh begins softly, like a murmur. Eventually it will be loud enough to wake the birds.

21 Joseph Skibell

from A Curable Romantic

Finally, on the day we were to depart for Boulogne, Fraŭlino Bernfeld and I found ourselves standing near each other on the platform of the train station. With a distracted air, as though she were trying to recall who I was, she explained to me that she’d decided not to ride in third class with the Zamenhofs, but to continue on in first class, blaming a headache. “Besides they don’t need me looking out after them anymore. They’ve quite arrived, haven’t they? After a week in Paris, they’re as famous as Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves!” “Fraŭlino Bernfeld,” I began to plead with her. “Dr. Sammelsohn?” she addressed me in a formal tone, as though we had not spent years courting, but had only recently met. The look of remoteness was so innocently and yet so furiously displayed upon her face that for a moment I found myself believing it as well, or if not believing it then at least behaving as though we were strangers. So although I wanted to say, Fraŭlino Bernfeld, my darling, let us tear up our tickets and find a rabbi and persuade him to marry us immediately, all I in fact said was: “Can I help you with your bags or at least summon a porter for you?” “I can manage quite well on my own, Dr. Sammelsohn, thank you very much,” she said, turning on her heels. “Ĝis la revido!” ĜIS LA REVIDO? Were these to be the final words Fraŭlino Bernfeld addressed to me, a jocund-sounding lie uttered in the language of universal truth? Ĝis la revido. She had no intention of ever seeing me again. If our paths crossed at the congress, as they were certain to—these were not yet as well attended as they would become in later years—she would no doubt From Skibell, A Curable Romantic, chapter 9. Copyright © 2011 by Joseph Skibell. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.

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confront me from behind a similarly unbreachable fortress of elegant manners and amiable words. As I took my small, uncomfortable seat in third class, I did so unresigned to my fate: Fraŭlino Bernfeld was no longer, if she had ever been, mine. Everything had come about exactly as her father had predicted. (Or perhaps even mandated.) But it was true: for all my fopperies, I remained a backward Galitsyaner, unschooled in the gay sciences, a novice in the matters of the heart. Had I learned nothing of women since my father revealed the mysteries of sex to me, without the aid of helpful diagrams, by quoting the Hebrew scriptures? I slumped in my seat, or as much as the cramped space permitted me to, and sighed. No one took notice. Sinjorino Zamenhof was busily teasing a cooing Lidja. Dr. Zamenhof was working away, his briefcase serving again as a makeshift desk. I had to wonder: Was Fraŭlino Bernfeld merely elongating the emotional distance between us so that I would be forced to cross it, striding resolutely toward her in order to unelongate it, or did she truly wish never to see me again? I sighed a second time, so lost in my own thoughts that I must have been staring at Dr. Zamenhof for a long minute or two before realizing he was looking back at me. “Daydreaming,” I explained. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.” “Ne, ne, ne,” he said, chuckling. “I was staring into space as well.” The train shook us from side to side, and for a moment we said nothing further. Though I couldn’t bear to bring it up myself, I wanted nothing more than for Dr. Zamenhof to inquire after the state of Fraŭlino Bernfeld and my romance. On the one hand, I’d had enough of older men—my father, Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s father, Drs. Freud and Fliess—meddling into my affairs; on the other, I felt so terribly hungry for even a morsel of paternal advice. Sinjorino Zamenhof took from her large handbag three ham sandwiches wrapped in butcher paper and offered one to her husband and one to me. I shook my head. Though years out of Galicia, I still couldn’t bring myself to eat pig of any kind. (Ita’s fate had convinced me that there was indeed a God in Heaven and that despite Heine’s famous assertion, forgiveness might not be His métier. It was one thing to shake off the yoke of the Commandments, quite another to appear before the Heavenly Courts with spicy kielbasa on your breath.) Dr. Zamenhof, however, accepted the sandwich absentmindedly, chewed a few bites before wrapping it up carefully and returning it to his wife. She rewrapped it even more carefully before tucking it inside her purse. I watched Dr. Zamenhof working. He seemed oddly calm for a man who stood on the razor’s edge between success and failure: here, in Boulogne, his life’s work would be validated or found wanting. Or perhaps he merely appeared calm in comparison to me. As our train finally pulled into the little station, my heart began to race. I pressed my head against the window, planning my dash out of the train, so that I did not miss Fraŭlino Bernfeld.

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Somehow, however, she managed to leave the train, hire a coach, check into her hotel room, and disappear among the townspeople without letting me spy her even once. The deskman had been given strict orders not to reveal the number of her room to anyone who might inquire after it. “Especially,” he added, referring to a note Fraŭlino Bernfeld had obviously given him, “‘a man of medium build, pince-nez, and a messily out-of-date bouffant,’ a description that, I’m afraid, Monsieur, fits you perfectly,” after saying which, he had the nerve to unfold his palm in search of a gratuity! With little else to occupy me, I changed into the white linen suit and the white straw boater Fraŭlino Loë had purchased for me, and walked the tiered streets of Boulogne down to the beach. My pant cuffs rolled up, my socks in my pocket, I strolled along the sea, carrying my shoes in my hand. The sky was a summer blue with a pyramid of clouds stacked far out beyond the seawall. There was only one thing to do, really, or so I told myself. I must break with Fraŭlino Bernfeld immediately and free her of the emotional entanglements remaining between us. As the sea licked my feet, I knew with absolute clarity that this was the manly course to take. I’d wasted too much of her time, drawn too heavily against her emotional reserves with no hope now of ever repaying her. There were two problems, rising like mountains between me and this goal, however. First: in order to carry out my plan, I’d have to communicate it to Fraŭlino Bernfeld, an occurrence she seemed too skilled at preventing. Not including our encounter in the train station, I hadn’t seen her from a distance of under ten meters for the better part of the week! How could I break off relations with her if she refused to acknowledge my person? (By note, I supposed: handwritten, sealed, entrusted to the concierge who would ferry it to her rooms or hold it for her at his station.) Against the horizon of this plan rose the second mountain: the simple fact that breaking off with the Fraŭlino was the last thing I wished to achieve by declaring myself in support of such a resolution. Indeed, I only wanted to suggest a parting of the ways in order to have her talk me out of it. Which is why a letter wouldn’t do. In epistolary form, I could be crumpled up, torn to pieces, shredded to bits, passed from hand to hand between scornful girlfriends, or worse, discarded unread. No, my only hope was to stand before her in person and to appeal to as many of her senses as possible, trusting not alone in sight, but also in smell, taste, hearing, and (I trembled to consider it) touch. Then when I offered, like a man, to release her from our unofficial bonds, the intimacy of the moment would call to mind other such moments, and she, in tears, could make a great show of appealing to my sentiments. Once she had fallen to her knees and wetted the hem of my trousers with her tears, I could descend (as would any man not fashioned of stone) from the

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high rock of my noble intentions, in order to reconsider my resolve and reconcile with the poor creature. But first, of course, she’d have to relent and agree to meet me! I looked ahead at the shoreline curving off into the distance. All about me, French families were frolicking with their children. What my father had maintained appeared to be true: even when they were scolding them, the French sounded as though they were instructing their children in the most sublime of philosophies. I couldn’t help thinking how different my life might have been had I been raised in this milieu! Stumbling late into work, tumbling out of the bed of my lust-crazed wife, downing the darkest of coffees with good pals at the local cafe, putting in a few carefree hours attending to my patients (most of whom, blinded by syphilis, accepted their fates, ne regretting pas), I’d lunch on red wines and creamy cheeses and spirally mollusks before engaging in a session of dizzying lovemaking with my underaged mistress, never for a moment feeling the slightest pang of guilt, never anxious that my sybaritic ways might be a hollow, shallow waste of life. And why should I, when the long history of rebukes received from my parents, from my teachers, from my headmasters, from my employers, from my lovers, from my spouses sounded as sweet as an air by Couperin? Addressed in this way from childhood on, who wouldn’t become a lovable scoundrel, an endearing rogue helpless against his own endearing rogueries? But instead, I was a God-bedeviled Jew, burdened with so many commandments, it didn’t matter whether I kept them or not, I was always falling behind in my accounts.

I’d stayed longer on the beach than I’d intended, and by the time I thought to return, the sky was already darkening. My hotel was a tiny building, indiscernible in the distant landscape above me. The air was chilling gradually, and I shivered a little inside my sea-bespattered clothes. My muscles ached, my stomach groused, and I had no choice but to tramp back to my hotel, wending through the tiered streets of the little city. My mood was lightened somewhat when, nearing the hotel, I crossed a town square and saw an unworldly sight. Flying, it seemed, from every flagpole and hanging from the balconies of every building, was the Esperanto flag with its green star of hope. Though the opening ceremonies were hours away, outside the City Theater where we would be meeting later in the evening, crowds had already begun to gather, forming themselves into smaller groups, little knots of new and instantly intimate friends, all (as I could hear more clearly with each step I took) speaking Esperanto! I stopped beneath an electric lamp and took in the amazing sight: here were Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Poles, Russians, Danes, Dutchmen, Turks, Latvians, and Letts chatting away. Three fellows with a guitar, a fiddle, and a bass were even

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singing songs in Esperanto! Surely, this isn’t France, I told myself, but the very Gates of Heaven! My joy in the moment could only have been greater if, according to the cliché belonging to every solitary person, I’d had someone to share it with. Knowing there was no chance of locating either Fraŭlino Bernfeld or her room, or of persuading the one, if I happened to find both, to let me into the other so that we might step out onto its balcony and take in the gratifying scene, I decided upon alerting the only other person I knew who might enjoy the spectacle as much as I, if not more so. I slapped my forehead. But of course! Dr. Zamenhof must experience this! I wasted so little time throwing on my shoes that I neglected to roll down my pant cuffs. What a sight I must have made, rushing through the austere lobbies of the Hotel Boulogne with my boater on the back of my head and my pants nearly as high as a boy’s knickers. I didn’t care, however. I felt as larky as a schoolboy on his birthday, bounding up the stairs. The door to Dr. Zamenhof’s suite was open, and as a colloquium of voices issued from it, my knocking apparently went unheard. Torn between twin rudenesses—the rudeness of barging in or of knocking again, loudly enough this time to be heard—I chose the middle ground: to walk away and to return later, when the heat of the conversation had died down. I hesitated long enough to permit myself to overhear some of the conversation. I was only human, after all. Indeed, holding my breath, I even pushed the door in a bit, or enough at least to get a view of the room’s inhabitants: these were Dr. Zamenhof and six or seven of the French Esperantists. His tie hanging loosely around his unsprung collar, Dr. Zamenhof looked small and tired, defending his position against the blows of this illustrious armada of French intellectuals. “Please please please!” one of them was saying. “No one is telling you what you can and cannot do, nor what you can and cannot say.” “You are the Majstro!” “Certainement!” “But, however . . .” “I would hate to think I left Russia and came to France only to be censored by enlightened Frenchmen.” (Though I strained at first to identify the other speakers, I could easily discern Dr. Zamenhof’s voice, not only because it was familiar to me but also because of its sad tones and its soft lisp.) “Heaven forbid!” someone said. “It’s just that when, last week, we discussed the matter, before your arrival, all of us at Professor Cart’s apartments—” “You’ve already discussed this?” “In good faith.”

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“You sent us a copy of your speech, and naturally we read it, and naturally having read it, we met to discuss it. There is nothing devious in that.” This was Michaux, I believe. “And on the assumption, I might add, that that’s exactly what you had meant for us to do with it all along.” “If you didn’t wish for our advice, why consult us beforehand?” “You’ve no idea how the Dreyfus case continues to divide all of France.” I recognized the voice of Dr. Javal. “Emile, no one has said anything against you Jews,” Professor Cart said, meaning both Dr. Javal and Dr. Zamenhof, I supposed. “Dreyfus is an individual, we understand that, and not a representative of his . . .” Professor Cart searched for the appropriate word, with how much repugnance, I couldn’t tell, before offering “race.” “Guilty or innocent as he may be,” someone else cut in. “Guilty or innocent? Of course, he’s guilty!” “Oh, and where’s the evidence of that?” “A man needn’t be pardoned for crimes he didn’t commit!” “He’s petitioned for a retrial. Does that sound like a guilty man to you?” “No, only a foolish one. Captain Dreyfus is a fool.” “At last, we agree on something!” “Having been twice traduced by so-called French justice—” “How dare you speak in this way!” “—he puts his hopes in it for a third try? For what reason? To wind up again on Devil’s Island!” “Where, I should say, he belongs!” “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” “You can see, Dr. Zamenhof, that even among ourselves the matter is highly combustive.” Standing in the hallway, I remembered my first tarock game with Dr. Freud and how obsessed the pediatrician Rosenberg was by the fate of poor Alfred Dreyfus, at that time still pacing the rocks of Devil’s Island. By 1905, Captain Dreyfus had been court-martialed, publicly degraded, deported, imprisoned, conspired against, defended (most audibly and to his eternal credit by the novelist Emile Zola), rioted over, retried, reconvicted, and pardoned (as were all those who had conspired against him). Did he have any idea how his figure still haunted our continent? “Javal, speak up! Tell him. You’re a Jew as well and know the dangers,” General Sébert prompted his friend. “Public opinion—against you, against the movement— will be stirred up in a moment if the general population realizes who you actually are, Dr. Zamenhof.” “All we’re asking is that you drop the final stanza of the prayer.” “I think the entire prayer is a poor idea.”

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I heard an exasperated sigh, followed by a buzzing conspiracy, murmured on the side en français. “Now you’re being extreme,” someone said. “Extreme? We are men of science. Esperanto is a scientific endeavor! Let us leave the God of Israel out of it entirely!” “If I may. Please,” Dr. Zamenhof said in his small, piping voice. “Let him do as he wishes.” “We’ve spoken and I hope not out of turn,” one of the men said to Dr. Zamenhof. “‘Do as he wishes?’ We know what he wishes, which is precisely what we’re here to prevent him from doing!” I’d heard enough and slipped down the passage way and up the stairs to my own room. Dr. Zamenhof had read us a draft of his speech on the train, and we had found nothing offensive about the speech or the prayer. It wasn’t even a prayer, really, but a poem, addressed to “Vi,” the powerful and incorporeal You of the Universe, ending with what I thought was a final, stirring sentiment: “Kristanoj, hebreoj aŭ mahometanoj / Ni ĉiuj de Di’ estas filoj.” But apparently the Kristanoj wanted little to do, publicly at least, with la hebreoj.

Needless to say, the joy I’d felt in the town square ebbed away. I stood before the full-length mirror, drawing on my formal clothes, newly purchased. Gazing at my reflection, I began to wonder if I were being too naive. Did I imagine everything Dr. Zamenhof hoped to achieve could be won without a fight? (Of course, had I imagined a war around Esperanto, I would never have imagined a civil war fought between brothers on the same side.) Perhaps this wasn’t a war at all, I told myself, but simply a case of the French, natives here, offering sound advice to a conquering foreigner. Perhaps an invocation of universal brotherhood among Jews, Christians, and Muslims would rankle to the point of offense. Still, hadn’t Dr. Zamenhof been clear from the start that Esperanto was not and could never be simply a useful tool for international scientific and cultural and mercantile exchanges? No, without the “inner idea,” it was nothing at all. The time was late, and I’d had nothing to eat. A woven basket in the shape of a wunderhorn had been delivered to my room with chocolates, pears, and a small bottle of brandy inside. I wolfed down a pear, eating over my cupped hand, my back hunched over like a question mark, in order not to spill its juices onto the satiny fabric of my suit. I should have eaten the pear first and dressed afterward, but I didn’t think of this in time. It seemed ridiculous to dress, undress, eat, and dress again. I hid the chocolates inside a kerchief, which I stuffed into my jacket pocket, hoping they wouldn’t melt. Realizing that they would, I unwrapped them and popped them—one!

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two! three!—into my mouth. “Pah!” I said, licking my lips. I daubed at my mustache with a hand towel, took up my top hat, and departed the room. The brandy could wait until I returned. All four galleries were full, and I was among the last to squeeze into a seat near the back of the auditorium on the ground floor. I was hoping, vis-à-vis Fraŭlino Bernfeld, to repeat the incredible good fortune I’d had with Fraulein Eckstein when I found myself in the Brahms-Sail of the Musikverein sitting directly behind her. However, I put no stock in this hope. I had no idea if Fraŭlino Bernfeld had even remained in France for the congress. I felt I hardly knew her anymore and could no longer anticipate any of her decisions. And certainly, if an Esperantist as essential as the Marquis de Beaufront could stay away, Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s premature departure needn’t signal to anyone a lessening in her ardor for the cause. Everyone was in evening dress, including some red-fezed Turks. The crowd was growing not restless, but restive, from a giddy sense of anticipation. I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat, peering over the shoulders of the people in front of me, trying to get a look at the dais, although nothing upon it had changed since I’d entered the hall. Though I couldn’t see him, I assumed the orchestra leader must have entered the pit, because the first few rows broke into an applause that undulated over the auditorium until even the back rows, myself included, were applauding—not so much in response to the conductor, I think, but as a form of insistence that the proceedings begin. Finally, the notes of the “Marseillaise” were enunciated by a solo bassoon, accompanied, after a measure, by a cello, before the sound of everyone rising drowned out this odd arrangement. By the time we were all on our feet and could hear again, the anthem was all brassy and polished, as one usually hears it. We remained standing, at its conclusion, as the luminaries ascended the stage, led by the quite tall Michaux. He was followed by Dr. Zamenhof, who, naturally, looked even more like a child next to him; then Professor Cart, Dr. Bourlet, and Rector Boirac in full academic regalia; General Sébert with a chestful of war medals; Dr. Javal with his blindman’s switch; and three or four local dignitaries: the mayor, a town councilor, the president of the chamber of commerce. The mayor, a tall man with a shock of white hair, was the first to address the crowd—disappointingly in French, with Dr. Bourlet translating. Tears welled up in my eyes: I felt as though I were witnessing a piece of metal rusting at the beginning of the Bronze Age. Never again will one man need to translate for another before a third! The world in which such things happen is as doomed as the Mayan Empire! The president of the chamber of commerce stood next, a portly man with a black beard and the closely cropped hair of a recently freed convict. Unlike the mayor, he welcomed the crowd in Esperanto, and the crowd roared back its approval.

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When he was done, all heads turned toward Dr. Zamenhof. Six hundred and eighty-eight pairs of eyes, half as many pairs of glasses, pincenez, and lorgnettes, half again as many monocles were raised to get a better look at this little elfin man whose odd preoccupation with boundless love had somehow radiated out of the dingy court on Dzika Street to all points of the globe, and in response to which we were all here now, laughing good-naturedly, as the giant Michaux placed a wooden crate behind the flag-draped lectern and returned again from his seat to drastically lower the height of the carbon microphone. Despite the grey in his beard, Dr. Zamenhof looked like a studious eight-year-old as he peered into the assembly. Even with the aid of the crate, he seemed to struggle to look over the lectern, the lights glittering off his spectacles. This was the first time many in the audience would hear la lingvon internacian spoken in an accent other than their own. It’s one thing to converse with your neighbor in an international auxiliary language, quite another to speak to a man not from half a block, but half the world away. Dr. Zamenhof cleared his throat. He seemed on the point of speaking, when he twisted his body away from the lectern to pick up a glass of water someone had left for him inside the hollow of the stand. Sipping, he spilled a line of water into his beard and had to pat it dry with a kerchief he pulled from the breast pocket of his evening suit. Evidently, the top of the lectern was raked, and having attempted to balance the water there, Dr. Zamenhof thought better of it and, corkscrewing his body again, returned it to its place inside the lectern. He looked into the audience, his eyebrows rising even higher than usual. “Estimataj sinjorinoj kaj sinjoroj,” he said and, at the sound of his high, slightly shrill voice, a thrilled cry of greeting rose to meet him. Dr. Zamenhof smiled. The ferocity of the crowd’s affection had evidently taken him by surprise. “I greet you, dear colleagues,” he said slowly, enunciating clearly, seemingly looking into everyone’s face, “brothers and sisters from the great worldwide human family, who have come together from near and far, from the most diverse nations on earth, to clasp hands in the name of the one great idea, which unites us all.” Clearly calming his own nerves, Dr. Zamenhof let the next roar of applause crest and die away. He took another sip of water, his hand trembling, then raised his head and peered over the tops of his glasses at the people seated above him in the galleries. “I greet you also, glorious land of France”—here, a chauvinistic whoop was raised— “and the beautiful town of Boulogne-sur-Mer”—the same, if not quite as forceful— “both of which have graciously offered to host our congress.” Dr. Zamenhof bowed towards the row of officials seated behind him—as though caught in a white-hot spotlight, these men straightened up in their chairs and, with nods, acknowledged the audience—and the applause revved up again.

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“I express also my heartfelt thanks to those persons and institutions in Paris who, during my journey through that glorious city, expressed to me personally their sympathy for our cause, namely the minister of public education”—boisterous applause—“the City Council of Paris”—louder—“the League of Language Instruction”—wildly—“and many eminent men of science.” The man in front of me, nodding his head and clapping enthusiastically, leaned over to explain something to the woman seated next to him, and that was, of course, when I saw her. Seemingly as thrilled as I by the moment, Fraŭlino Bernfeld had turned back in her seat. I saw her caramel-colored hair first and her gracious slender neck. She was scanning the crowd, searching for someone. Certainly not me, I thought, until her gaze fell on mine, and she nodded a hello that seemed as sweet as those I’d received from her when we were at our happiest. She scowled slightly in a question, as though asking me, Why are you sitting so far in the back? to which I shrugged and pointed at my new Parisian wristwatch and shrugged again, indicating that I’d come too late. The man in front of me leaned back and directed his attention again toward the stage, blocking the Fraŭlino from my view. But at least I knew she was here, still in France, still in Boulogne, here in this auditorium now, not more than ten rows in front of me. “This present day is holy,” Dr. Zamenhof was saying, and I noticed the French Esperantists on the dais shift unhappily at the mention of this word. “Our congress is modest,” he admitted. “The outside world knows little about us, and the words we speak here tonight and in the coming days will not fly via telegraph to every city and town in the world.” He shook his head, smiling benevolently, as though congratulating us for the courage and the prescience that had brought us here, long before the rest of the world had even heard of Esperanto. “No crowned heads or prime ministers have come here to change the political map of the world, no luxurious clothes or impressive decorations shine in this room, no gun salutes resound around the modest building in which we find ourselves; and yet”—he let a caesura dangle tantalizingly— “through the air of this auditorium fly mysterious sounds, quiet sounds, inaudible to the ear, but sensible to every sensitive soul.” The chamber grew hushed, as though each of us were listening for these quiet noises. “It is the sound of something grand that is now being born,” Dr. Zamenhof assured us. “Through the air fly mysterious phantoms!” He made a fluttering motion with his hands, and I thought I saw Dr. Javal sigh. Rector Boirac and General Sébert’s eyes met discreetly: the cause has been lost, surrendered to mysticism. “The eye does not see them,” Dr. Zamenhof said, “but the soul senses them. They are images of a time yet to be. These phantoms fly through the world, taking on form and strength, and our children and grandchildren will see them, will sense them, and rejoice.”

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I peered, as discreetly as I could, at the people sitting near me. No one seemed offended. On the contrary, a kind of light seemed to be beaming from everyone’s face. Dr. Zamenhof brought his fist to his lips and cleared his throat. “In the ancient past,” he continued, one hand caressing the other, “which has long disappeared from the memory of humankind and about which history has preserved nothing, not even the smallest document, the human family separated, and its members ceased understanding one another. Brothers created in one image, brothers possessing the same ideas, brothers carrying the same God in their hearts, brothers who should have helped each other and worked together for the happiness and the glory of their family became foreign to each other. Separated seemingly for all time into enemy camps, they began waging an eternal war.” (Here, I stopped listening for a moment. Dr. Zamenhof’s description of the ancient family had made me think too much, and too uncomfortably, of my own. Hadn’t we separated and ceased understanding one another, exactly as had the family of man? In our case, however, there seemed little hope of reconciliation.) “Prophets and poets dreamt about that nebulous time in which we would again understand each other, again join together in one family; but this was only a dream. One spoke about it as though about some sweet fantasy, but no one took it seriously, no one believed in it. And yet, now, for the first time, the dream of a million years begins to become real. In a small city on the French seashore, people from diverse nations have come together and are encountering one another on an equal footing, not mute and deaf, but truly understanding one another, speaking like brothers, like members of one nation. Yes”—he stamped his foot—“often people from different countries meet and understand one another; but what a great difference between that understanding and ours. In our coming together, there exists neither strong nor weak nations, nor privileged and unprivileged, no one is humiliated, and no one embarrasses himself. For the first time in human history, we, members of very different peoples, meet, not like strangers, nor like rivals, but like brothers who understand each other mutually, man to man. Today inside the welcoming walls of Boulogne-sur-Mer, we meet not as Frenchmen and Englishmen, not as Russians and Poles, but as human beings. Blessed be this day, and great and glorious its consequences!” Not another blessing, I could almost see Professor Cart thinking, as he rolled his eyes, dropped his patrician nose into his hand, and stared at the floor. And yet, of all those in the auditorium, the Frenchmen on the dais seemed to be the only people fidgeting. Despite his high, thin voice, Dr. Zamenhof had mesmerized the entire room. “We met today,” he said, bearing down on his theme, “to show the world, through irrefutable fact, that which until now it has refused to believe.” Behind his shining spectacles, his eyes were enflamed with what I can only describe as a sort of divine madness. I felt I was listening to the words of an ancient prophet or seer. “We will

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show the world that mutual conversation between people of different nations is not some fantastic dream, but a beautiful reality!” he nearly shouted. “Our grandchildren will not believe that it was once otherwise.” As he picked up his pace, his cadences grew more rhythmic. “Whoever says that a neutral artificial language is not possible, let him come to us, let him walk the streets of Boulogne-sur-Mer in the coming days, and if he is an honest man, he will go out into the world and he will loudly repeat that Yes! A universal language is possible. Not only possible but easy, very easy, to learn!” A knowing laughter, from several corners of the auditorium, reached Dr. Zamenhof, and its gentle sound seemed to calm him. “It’s true,” he admitted, “that many of us still possess our language imperfectly. But compare a novice’s stammering with the perfectly fluent speech of a more experienced person, and an honest observer will see that the cause of this stammering lies not in the language itself, but only in the insufficient practice of the speakers.” His demeanor grew solemn, and the audience, attuned to his every mood, seemed to grow somber as well. “Eighteen years have passed since the day Esperanto appeared in the world. Eighteen years is a long time—oy vey!—a very long time.” At the sound of these words— ho ve! in Esperanto—I watched a collective chill run through the men on the dais. “In this great space of time, death has stolen a great many of our most fervent campaigners. Since citing each name would be an impossible task, I will list only a few.” Dr. Zamenhof mentioned specifically Leopoldo Einstein, Josefo Wasniewski, and “the unforgettable” W. H. Trompeter. “Beside these three, there is also a great—oy vey!—a very great number of people”—again, the Frenchmen trembled—“who are not able to see the fruits of their labors.” (What was Dr. Zamenhof doing, I wondered? Deliberately rubbing his Jewishness in their noses? Did it matter that he had pronounced the phrase in an Esperanticized fashion as ho ve?) “They have physically died,” he said, “but they have not died in our memory. I propose, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, that we honor their memory by rising from our seats.” Dr. Zamenhof raised his voice, as though offering a toast. “To the shades of each fallen Esperantan warrior, the First Esperanto Congress expresses its respect and a pious salute!” We all stood and took in the moment in silence. At a nod of his head, Dr. Zamenhof indicated that we had stood enough, and we sat. Nervously, he seemed to turn completely away from the luminaries on the dais, easing them out of his purview, positioning himself fully towards his audience, his voice once again trembling. “Soon the labors of our congress, dedicated to the brotherhood of mankind, will commence, but in this solemn moment, I feel the desire to make my heart light through a prayer, to turn to a certain very high force, invoking its help and its blessing. At this moment, I’m not from a specific nation, but am simply a human being; in this moment,

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I’m not a member of one particular religion, but am only a man. And in the present moment before my soul’s eyes stands only this very high moral Force, which each human being senses in his heart, and to this unknowable Power I now turn with my prayer.” Dr. Zamenhof gazed towards the ceiling. The men on the dais crossed their legs and shifted unhappily in their seats. With his eyes closed, Dr. Zamenhof recited his poem from memory: “To You, oh powerful and bodiless mystery, most powerful ruler of the world, great fountain of love and truth and of everlasting life . . .” To the Vi of the Universe, to the Cosmic You, Dr. Zamenhof pledged to work for the reunification of mankind, beseeching this Mysterious Power for His blessing and promising that, under the green flag of Esperanto, we will tear at the walls separating people until they crack and fall, and love and truth rule the world. For a moment, I wasn’t certain if Dr. Zamenhof had finished. He stood perfectly still, not looking at his text. He seemed to be reconsidering ending his prayer where he had and moving onto the final stanza. After all the ho ves and the blessed be this days and the invocation of mysterious invisible phantoms, would a call to unity among monotheists really have exposed him as a Jew? He gazed at the audience in a sort of sorrowful way, as though certain he had transgressed against their affection for him. But no, he had only to move an inch away from the lectern to signal that he was done, and the applause was a wild and inspiring roar of love and approval. Cheers rang out, shouts of “Vivu Zamenhof!” and “Vivu Esperanto!” People were weeping openly, and yet the ferocity of the response didn’t undo the holy-seeming atmosphere in the hall. The French Esperantists stood and congratulated one another, their postures and physical attitudes broadcasting broad relief, as though we’d all dodged a bullet. After acknowledging the crowd’s response, Dr. Zamenhof turned to the Frenchmen. I saw him nod subtly to the auditorium, shrugging, his eyes twinkling in triumph, as though to say, These people seem to have no problem whatsoever with my prayer.

“Kaĉjo! Kaĉjo!” Fraŭlino Bernfeld called to me through the ecstatic, departing crowd. “Fraŭlino! Here I am!” I cried. She ran up the aisles, oblivious to the angry looks she was receiving from people as eager to depart the hall as she, oblivious as well to the indulgent nods surrounding her: here was clearly a woman in love. Even I could see that (though I admit, at one point, turning to look behind myself, imagining, if only for a moment, that she might be calling to a person, improbably also nicknamed Kaĉjo, who was, by some extraordinary coincidence, standing behind me). “Wasn’t he marvelous!” she said breathlessly. Without hesitation, she laced her fingers through mine. “Absolutely!” I said. “Absolutely marvelous!”

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“And to think, we were here. We were here, Kaĉjo, alive today, to see it!” “Alive to see it, yes,” I repeated, as though I were the village idiot, unable to speak my own thoughts but only repeat the words she had addressed to me. We were in the lobby now, no longer surrounded so tightly by others, and soon we were outside in the square among the jubilant throngs. “I’ve been a fool,” she said. “No, it’s I who have been foolish, fraŭlino.” “I was so sad, Kaĉjo, so sad, but now I’m so happy. I’m so happy, I could . . . I don’t know . . .” “What, fraŭlino?” “Kiss someone! I don’t know . . .” She blushed. Though I realized she was all but inviting me to kiss her, I wasn’t entirely sure. Perhaps she was merely reporting a fact concerning the quality of her happiness, describing it in a piquant way, never imagining that the metaphorical kiss she claimed to want should come from me, but rather, less improbably—for sake of example—from her mother and, if so, placed not upon her mouth, but upon her forehead; or upon her cheek, if from a father or an uncle; and in an extreme case, upon her hand, if by a rogue like me who really wanted nothing more than to devour her whole, beginning with her mouth. Out of fear or perhaps to mask my own lustful affections, I looked at her idiotically, as though I were not her lover, but her best girlfriend, sympathizing with this desire of hers without understanding how she expected me to fulfill it. She took hold of my hands and said, “Let’s take a walk,” and so we did, wandering away from the theater and through the tiered streets of Boulogne, leaning into each other, recounting the highlights of Dr. Zamenhof’s triumph. (“Lutek should never have compromised his visionary idea for their practical concerns,” she said. “The French understand nothing about what the world thinks of them.”) The pressure of her arm against mine was such an agreeable sensation that I resolved to volunteer myself immediately should Fraŭlino Bernfeld again mention a desire to kiss someone. Unfortunately, the question never came up, and eventually we found ourselves in the sand, along the shoreline, the surge of the ocean more virile than I recalled it being during the afternoon. The rising moon bisected the sea with a shimmering band of phosphorescence, the moving crest of each wave sparkling with reflected starlight. We strolled past the statue of Victory straining to offer a laurel wreath to San Martin enthroned upon his horse. Fraŭlino Bernfeld was shivering, and I offered her my jacket. “Cold?” I asked. “No, no, I’m fine,” she said. However, I insisted, and she allowed me to drape my coat about her shoulders. “That’s better, yes, thank you very much.” She turned up the collar, and her white hands held the jacket front together from inside, the tips of two fingers crooking out.

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“Fraŭlino Bernfeld.” I cleared my throat. “Hmn?” she murmured questioningly, looking at the sea. “I was wondering,” I said, “earlier when . . . you mentioned being sufficiently happy to . . . to . . .” “Kiss someone?” “I was wondering, yes: did you have anyone specifically in—” Before I could finish my sentence, her arms had staked out from beneath my jacket and her hands were grasping the back of my neck. With a gentle tugging, she brought my head down to hers. My coat slid off her shoulders and fell into the sand. I had opened my mouth and was on the point of protesting in order to rescue the jacket—it was brand new, after all—when Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s upper lip filled it. (My mouth, I mean.) Her bottom lip slid wetly across my chin, and as it did, I thought it best to ignore the jacket, for the time being at least, lest I miss what, in my state of idiocy, I imagined would be a celebratory and thus solitary kiss, and not the first in an endless banquet of kisses. Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s lips were soft and pillowy, and my lips seemed to sink into hers with the slow dulcet movement of a cherry blossom falling into a pot of honey. Because I didn’t wish her to think I possessed any notions of taking advantage of her—though in a public place, we were, as far as I could tell, completely alone and blocked from view by the colorful fence surrounding the children’s playground we were sheltering in—I began to pull away. Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s hands tightened about the back of my neck, and she brought me to her again. Her mouth widened, gnawing at my own. A soft, purring murmur juddered inside her throat, and in truth, I nearly swooned at the sound of it. Though we were hardly moving, our two heads seemed to be lunging at one another rhythmically, until my hat fell off. I don’t know where my hands were before this, but Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s hands somehow found them and placed them upon her lower back. She pulled me toward her, until my chest was pressed into the soft upholstery of her upper torso. Still devouring my mouth, she dropped her chin, so that my chin was now nearly grazing the upward-thrust pillows of her bosom. Her head dropped back and some sort of instinctual knowledge took over in me. Without hesitation, I kissed her along the inside of her neck. Her hands, rising across my back, found my hair. Her fingers entangled themselves in my locks and, yanking on my hair, she forced my head down until the buttons of her blouse raked against my cheeks. My pince-nez, for a while sitting askew, fell off the bridge of my nose and dangled between the columns of our bodies. With my mouth pressed against the fabric concealing her breasts, l allowed my hand to spider its way up her midsection, thinking she might at any moment, in a fit of modesty, brush it aside, as, of course, it was her absolute right to do. A gentleman, I felt it only correct to give her fair and ample warning of my intentions. Counter to my growing disbelief, my hand however was allowed to proceed unimpeded, until at last it attained the desired summit.

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Fraŭlino Bernfeld shuddered. Her mouth again found mine, her tongue licentiously searching mine out. Our knees gave way, and we were standing upon them. I could feel her hands working frantically, and when she once again forced my head onto her breast, I was surprised to find her bodice unbuttoned. As I (quite presumptuously, I felt) licked along the line where her bare chest met the cups of her brassiere, her hands, knotted into jittery fists, pummeled my sternum as she worked to unbutton the rest of her dress’s front. Unable to wait, she yanked the two halves apart. Three buttons flew off with little percussive sounds and were lost in the sand. Kissing me still, she reached blindly across the sand for my jacket, and when she had it in her hands, she broke off from me. I looked into her eyes, questioningly. Keeping my gaze, she stood and retreated a step or two. She looked back toward the high cliffs and the little town. No one could be seen. Except for ourselves, the beach was uninhabited. While I remained on my knees, Fraŭlino Bernfeld pulled her dress off her shoulders. She let the top of her corset fall and climbed into my jacket, sliding her arms into its arms. In the moonlight, I could see a brace of sand falling from its shiny black satin. Covered now with the jacket, Fraŭlino Bernfeld let the top of her dress fall to her waist. She returned to me with a sultry air that was, quite frankly, alarming. Kneeling beside me, she locked her mouth onto mine and pressed her weight against me until I had no choice but to fall backwards onto the sand, moving my legs, with difficulty, from beneath me. She laughed with her lips still hard on mine, and I could feel her teeth. When I laughed in response, our teeth ground together. Her nipples emerged from beneath the lapels of my evening coat, and the black satin sliding against their extended flesh was nearly more than I could withstand. She removed whatever it was that was fastening her hair and threw it—a metallic glint in the moonlight—into the mouth of her shoe. She shook out her hair, the milk-chocolaty tresses falling onto the shoulders of my evening coat. “Now where were we?” she said. “I believe I was offering to kiss you,” I said, “if, in your happiness, you still feel the need.” Again she knelt beside me, her skirt and long underskirt a bell of fabric surrounding her legs. With her arm on my shoulder, she distracted me with a kiss, while with her other hand she fiddled with the buttons of my braces and with those of my trousers. Stupid! I thought. You should have unbuttoned them yourself while she had moved away to retrieve your jacket! But I’d been afraid of seeming too forward, of appearing to push myself upon her. What if I were misreading her signals? She dug, like a child digging in sand, through the various fabrics of my crotch, until she found at last what had been long buried there. Almost painfully, my manhood stood, uncustomarily erect. I couldn’t help gasping out a high, helpless, breathy gasp, and Fraŭlino Bernfeld smiled shyly. Schooled at her father’s expense from an early age

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in the equestrian arts, she dispatched one leg across my supine body and straddled me before I’d completely anticipated her intentions. She settled herself upon me as though she were settling into a hot bath—slowly, degree by exquisite degree, her face contorting in a momentary grimace, until she sighed and seemed, at least provisionally, to relax. Lying on the sand, I held myself upright using my elbows as supports. Bending low, Fraŭlino Bernfeld pressed her breasts against my chest, kissing me in the crook of my neck, her breath blossoming against my skin, concealing us, as it were, behind the curtain of my jacket above and of her skirts below. If we were, Heaven forbid it, espied from a distance, I’ve no doubt we would have resembled either a man in a formal jacket raping a young maiden or a sartorial hermaphrodite falling to its knees on the beach, sobbing at some unimaginable tragedy. Now I understood the presence of the book I’d seen her stashing so furtively inside her traveling case, Dr. Albrecht’s notorious Mysteries of Females or, The Secrets of Nature. She had wisely prepared for the moment, researching it, while I, as ignorant as I had been after my father’s frank talk, found myself still in the dark. I couldn’t even say for certain what exactly I was feeling underneath her skirts. Cobbling a mosaic out of various sculptures and monuments I’d seen in museums, stops on a recent sightseeing tour, and the collection of pornographic postcards Otto once left inside his evening coat, I tried to conjure a picture of what might be going on between the straining obelisk of my lap and the Arc du Triomphe of Fraŭlino Bernfeld’s, but of the images of the female nude I kept inside my head, none were specific enough to satisfy my current needs. Everything seemed soft, wet, and enfolding, but was that simply her sweatbedewed thigh or actually, in fact, the soft and encompassing caresses of her vulva, the thought of penetrating which was enough to prematurely release the wellsprings of my masculinity. I was alarmed to hear a garbled, strangled growl flying from my throat. My feet and head seemed to be pulling apart, trying to dash down the beach simultaneously in opposite directions. I may even have fainted before instantaneously coming to. “Oh?” Fraŭlino Bernfeld said, raising herself up and looking perplexed as though, having come for the first time to the end of this sticky business, she couldn’t quite understand what had earned the enterprise its exalted reputation. Her look of confusion was immediately covered by one of benediction as she came near me and kissed my eyelids, my forehead, my nose, and finally my mouth. Groggily, I accepted and returned these kisses, feeling somewhat humiliated. One of her breasts grazed my mouth, and I tried to suckle at it sleepily, but it moved past too quickly as she stood. She turned her back and dressed. I lay in the sand and let my head fall into it. I gazed up at the stars, a galaxy of brilliant points in a black shroud. I staggered up, intuiting that it was not gentlemanly to exult in my own deliquescence while Fraŭlino Bernfeld apparently could not in hers. (I’d learned enough from reading Freud to know this little.) I

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buttoned my pants and my braces. Fraŭlino Bernfeld was once again fully clothed with my jacket over her shoulders. I walked the beach the few paces towards her and stood behind her, kissing her neck and cupping her breast in my hands. She closed her eyes and leaned against me, before removing my hands, firmly and decisively. Lowering her head, she covered her eyes and began to weep. “Ne, ne, mia karulino, ne, ne,” I said soothingly. I turned her around, so that she was facing me, and she collapsed against my chest. I enfolded her into my arms. I felt horrible. She had given me her maidenhood, but clearly I was the only one who had profited from the exchange, and now she was ruined. Had I forced her into this? Perhaps by withholding a marriage proposal for so long, I had driven her into degrading herself, simply to secure my attention. I never felt lower or meaner in all my days, and I recoiled against the heartless cad I’d become. A creation of my own era—who isn’t?—there was but one thing I could do. “Fraŭlino Bernfeld,” I said. “Loë. Ŝa, ŝa, ŝa, mia kara, mia dolĉa knabino . . .” My words, however, only seemed to make her cry harder. I held her by her shoulders, so that she faced me squarely. I took a breath, and at last I said the words I’d been meaning to say for so very long: “Karulino, edziniĝu al mi.” “Kio?” “Estu mia edzino. Mi petas!” “Ho, Kaĉjo!” She lifted both hands to my face and covered me with her soft, sweet kisses. “Jes,” she said. “Vere?” “Jes, mi diris, jes, mi volas, jes!”

22 Jonathan Safran Foer

Here We Aren’t, So Quickly

I was not good at drawing faces. I was just joking most of the time. I was not decisive in changing rooms or anywhere. I was so late because I was looking for flowers. I was just going through a tunnel whenever my mother called. I was not able to make toast without the radio. I was not able to tell if compliments were backhanded. I was not as tired as I said. You were not able to ignore furniture imperfections. You were too light to arm the airbag. You were not able to open most jars. You were not sure how you should wear your hair, and so, ten minutes late and halfway down the stairs, you would examine your reflection in a framed picture of dead family. You were not angry, just protecting your dignity. I was not able to run long distances. You were so kind to my sister when I didn’t know how to be kind. I was just trying to remove a stain; I made a bigger stain. You were just asking a simple question. I was almost always at home, but I was not always at home at home. You were not able to cope with a stack of more than three books on my bedside table, or mixed currencies in the change dish, or plastic. I was not afraid of being alone; I just hated it. You were just admiring the progress of someone else’s garden. I was so tired of food. We went to the Atacama. We went to Sarajevo. We went to Tobey Pond every year until we didn’t. We braved thirteen inches of snow to attend a lecture in a planetarium. We tried having dinner parties. We tried owning nothing. We left handprints in a moss garden in Kyoto, and got each other off under a towel in Jaffa. We braved my parents’ for Thanksgiving and yours for the rest, and how did it happen that we were suddenly at my father’s side while he drowned in his own body? I lay beside him on “Here We Aren’t So Quickly” was first published in The New Yorker. Copyright © 2010 by Jonathan Safran Foer. Reprinted by permission Aragi Inc.

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the bed, observed my hand reaching for his brow, said, “Despite everything—” “What everything?” he asked, so I said, “Nothing,” or nothing. I was always destroying my passport in the wash. You were always awful at estimating. You were never willing to think of my habits as charming. I was just insisting that it was already too late to master an instrument or anything. You were never one to mention physical pain. I couldn’t explain the cycles of the moon without pen and paper, or with. You didn’t know where e-mails were. I wouldn’t congratulate a woman until she explicitly said she was pregnant. You spent a few minutes every day secretly regretting your laziness that didn’t exist. I should have forgiven you for all that wasn’t your fault. You were terrible in emergencies. You were wonderful in “The Cherry Orchard.” I was always never complaining, because confrontation was death to me, and because everything was pretty much always pretty much OK with me. You were not able to approach the ocean at night. I didn’t know where my voice was between my phone and yours. You were never standing by the window at parties, but you were always by the window. I was so paranoid about kind words. I was just not watching the news in the basement. You were just making a heroic effort to make things look easy. I was terrible about acknowledging anyone else’s efforts. You were not green-thumbed, but you were not content to be not content. I was always in need of just one good dress shirt, or just one something that I never had. You were too injured by things that happened in the distant past for anything to be effortless in the present. I was always struggling to be natural with my hands. You were never immune to unexpected gifts. I was mostly just joking. I was not neurotic, just apocalyptic. You were always copying keys and looking up words. I was not afraid of quiet; I just hated it. So my hand was always in my pocket, around a phone I never answered. You were not cheap or handy with tools, just hurt by my distance. I was never indifferent to the children of strangers, just frustrated by my own unrelenting optimism. You were not unsurprised when, that last night in Norfolk, I drove you to Tobey Pond, led you by the hand down the slope of brambles and across the rotting planks to the constellations in the water. Sharing our happiness diminished your happiness. I was not going to dance at our wedding, and you were not going to speak. No part of me was nervous that morning. When you screamed at no one, I sang to you. When you finally fell asleep, the nurse took him to bathe him, and, still sleeping, you reached out your arms. He was not a terrible sleeper. I acknowledged to no one my inability to be still with him or anyone. You were not overwhelmed but overtired. I was never afraid of rolling over onto him in my sleep, but I awoke many nights sure that he was underwater on the floor. I loved collapsing things. You loved the tiny socks. You were not depressed, but you were unhappy. Your unhappiness didn’t make me defensive; I just hated it.

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He was never happy unless held. I loved hammering things into walls. You hated having no inner life. I secretly wondered if he was deaf. I hated the gnawing longing that accompanied having everything. We were learning to see each other’s blindnesses. I Googled questions that I couldn’t ask our doctor or you. They encouraged us to buy insurance. We had sex to have orgasms. You loved reupholstering. I went to the gym to go somewhere, and looked in the mirror when there was something I was hoping not to see. You hated our bed. He could stand himself up, but not get himself down. They fined us for our neighbor’s garbage. We couldn’t wait for the beginnings and ends of vacations. I was not able to look at a blueprint and see a renovated kitchen, so I stayed out of it. They came to our door during meals, but I talked to them and gave. I counted the seconds backward until he fell asleep, and then started counting the seconds backward until he woke up. We took the same walks again and again, and again and again ate at the same easy restaurants. They said he looked like them. I was always watching movie trailers on my computer. You were always wiping surfaces. I was always hearing my father’s laugh and never remembering his face. You broke everyone’s heart until you suddenly couldn’t. He suddenly drew, suddenly spoke, suddenly wrote, suddenly reasoned. One night I couldn’t help him with his math. He got married. We went to London to see a play. We tried putting aside time to do nothing but read, but we did nothing but sleep. We were always never mentioning it, because we didn’t know what it was. I did nothing but look for you for twenty-seven years. I didn’t even know how electricity worked. We tried spending more time not together. I was not defensive about your boredom, but my happiness had nothing to do with happiness. I loved it when people who worked for me genuinely liked me. We were always moving furniture and never making eye contact. I hated my inability to visit a foreign city without fantasizing about real estate. And then your father was dead. I often wasn’t reading the book that I was holding. You were never not in someone’s garden. Our mothers were dying to talk about nothing. At a certain point you became convinced that you were always reading yesterday’s newspaper. At a certain point I stopped agonizing over being understood, and became over-reliant on my car’s GPS. You couldn’t tolerate trace amounts of jelly in the peanut-butter jar. I couldn’t tolerate gratuitously boisterous laughter. At a certain point I could stare without pretext or apology. Isn’t it funny that if God were to reveal and explain Himself, the majority of the world would necessarily be disappointed? At a certain point you stopped wearing sunscreen. How can I explain the way I shrugged off nuclear annihilation but mortally feared a small fall? You couldn’t tolerate people who couldn’t tolerate babies on planes. I couldn’t tolerate people who insisted that having a coffee after lunch would keep

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them up all night. At a certain point I could hear my knees and felt no need to correct other people’s grammar. How can I explain why foreign cities came to mean so much to me? At a certain point you stopped agonizing over your ambitiousness, but at a certain point you stopped trying. I couldn’t tolerate magicians who did things that someone who actually had magical powers would never do. We were all doing well. I was still in love with the Olympics. The smaller the matter, the more I allowed your approval to mean to me. They kept producing new things that we didn’t need that we needed. I needed your approval more than I needed anything. My sister died at a restaurant. My mother promised anyone who would listen that she was fine. They changed our filters. You wanted to see the northern lights. I wanted to learn a dead language. You were in the garden, not planting, but standing there. You dropped two handfuls of soil. And here we aren’t, so quickly: I’m not twenty-six and you’re not sixty. I’m not fortyfive or eighty-three, not being hoisted onto the shoulders of anybody wading into any sea. I’m not learning chess, and you’re not losing your virginity. You’re not stacking pebbles on gravestones; I’m not being stolen from my resting mother’s arms. Why didn’t you lose your virginity to me? Why didn’t we enter the intersection one thousandth of a second sooner, and die instead of die laughing? Everything else happened—why not the things that could have? I am not unrealistic anymore. You are not unemotional. I am not interested in the news anymore, but I was never interested in the news. What’s more, I am probably ambidextrous. I was probably meant to be effortless. You look like yourself right now. I was so slow to change, but I changed. I was probably a natural tennis player, just like my father used to say over and over and over. I changed and changed, and with more time I will change more. I’m not disappointed, just quiet. Not unthinking, just reckless. Not willfully unclear, just trying to say it as it wasn’t. The more I remember, the more distant I feel. We reached the middle so quickly. After everything it’s like nothing. I have always never been here. What a shame it wasn’t easy. What a waste of what? What a joke. But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere: on the split stools of this bar, by the edge of this cliff, in the seats of this borrowed car, at the prow of this ship, on the all-forgiving cushions of this threadbare sofa in this one-story copper-crying fixer-upper whose windows we once squinted through for hours before coming to our senses: “What would we even do with such a house?”

23 Nathan Englander

free fruit for young widows

When the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser took control of the Suez Canal, threatening Western access to that vital route, an agitated France shifted allegiances, joining forces with Britain and Israel against Egypt. This is a fact neither here nor there, except that during the 1956 Sinai Campaign there were soldiers in the Israeli army and soldiers in the Egyptian army who ended up wearing identical French-supplied uniforms to battle. Not long into the fighting, an Israeli platoon came to rest at a captured Egyptian camp to the east of Bir Gafgafa, in the Sinai Desert. There Private Shimmy Gezer (formerly Shimon Bibberblat, of Warsaw, Poland) sat down to eat at a makeshift outdoor mess. Four armed commandos sat down with him. He grunted. They grunted. Shimmy dug into his lunch. A squad mate of Shimmy came over to join them. Professor Tendler (who was then only Private Tendler, not yet a professor, and not yet even in possession of a high school degree) placed the tin cup that he was carrying on the edge of the table, taking care not to spill his tea. Then he took up his gun and shot each of the commandos in the head. They fell quite neatly. The first two, who had been facing Professor Tendler, tipped back off the bench into the sand. The second pair, who had their backs to the Professor and were still staring openmouthed at their dead friends, fell facedown, the sound of their skulls hitting the table somehow more violent than the report of the gun. Shocked by the murder of four fellow soldiers, Shimmy Gezer tackled his friend. To Professor Tendler, who was much bigger than Shimmy, the attack was more startling than threatening. Tendler grabbed hold of Shimmy’s hands while screaming, “Free Fruit for Young Widows.” From Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories. Copyright © 2012 by Nathan Englander. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, LLC; and Orion Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

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“Egyptians! Egyptians!” in Hebrew. He was using the same word about the same people in the same desert that had been used thousands of years before. The main difference, if the old stories are to be believed, was that God no longer raised His own fist in the fight. Professor Tendler quickly managed to contain Shimmy in a bear hug. “Egyptian commandos—confused,” Tendler said, switching to Yiddish. “The enemy. The enemy joined you for lunch.” Shimmy listened. Shimmy calmed down. Professor Tendler, thinking the matter was settled, let Shimmy go. As soon as he did, Shimmy swung wildly. He continued attacking, because who cared who those four men were? They were people. They were human beings who had sat down at the wrong table for lunch. They were dead people who had not had to die. “You could have taken them prisoner!” Shimmy yelled. “Halt!” he screamed in German. “That’s all—Halt!” Then, with tears streaming and fists flying, Shimmy said, “You didn’t have to shoot.” By then, Professor Tendler had had enough. He proceeded to beat Shimmy Gezer. He didn’t just defend himself. He didn’t subdue his friend. He flipped Shimmy over, straddled his body, and pounded it down until it was level with the sand. He beat his friend until his friend couldn’t take any more beating, and then he beat him some more. Finally, he climbed off Shimmy, looked up into the hot sun, and pushed through the crowd of soldiers who had assembled in the minutes since the Egyptians sat down to their fate. Tendler went off to have a smoke. For those who had come running at the sound of gunfire and found five bodies in the sand, it was the consensus that a pummeled Shimmy Gezer looked to be in the worst condition of the bunch.

At the fruit-and-vegetable stand that Shimmy Gezer eventually opened in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda Market, his son, little Etgar, asked about the story of Professor Tendler again and again. From the time he was six, Etgar had worked the duchan at his father’s side whenever he wasn’t in school. At that age, knowing only a child’s version of the story—that Tendler had done something in one of the wars that upset Etgar’s father, and Etgar’s father had jumped on the man, and the man had (his father never hesitated to admit) beat him up very badly—Etgar couldn’t understand why his father was so nice to the Professor now. Reared, as he was, on the laws of the small family business, Etgar couldn’t grasp why he was forbidden to accept a single lira from Tendler. The Professor got his vegetables free. After Etgar weighed the tomatoes and the cucumbers, his father would take up the bag, stick in a nice fat eggplant, unasked, and pass it over to Professor Tendler.

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“Kach,” his father would say. “Take it. And wish your wife well.” As Etgar turned nine and ten and eleven, the story began to fill out. He was told about the commandos and the uniforms, about shipping routes and the Suez, and the Americans and the British and the French. He learned about the shots to the head. He learned about all the wars his father had fought in—’73, ’67, ’56, ’48—though Shimmy Gezer still stopped short of the one he’d first been swept up in, the war that ran from 1939 to 1945. Etgar’s father explained the hazy morality of combat, the split-second decisions, the assessment of threat and response, the nature of percentages and absolutes. Shimmy did his best to make clear to his son that Israelis—in their nation of unfinished borders and unwritten constitution—were trapped in a gray space that was called real life. In this gray space, he explained, even absolutes could maintain more than one position, reflect more than one truth. “You, too,” he said to his son, “may someday face a decision such as Professor Tendler’s—may you never know from it.” He pointed at the bloody stall across from theirs, pointed at a fish below the mallet, flopping on the block. “God forbid you should have to live with the consequences of decisions, permanent, eternal, that will chase you in your head, turning from this side to that, tossing between wrong and right.” But Etgar still couldn’t comprehend how his father saw the story to be that of a fish flip-flopping, when it was, in his eyes, only ever about that mallet coming down. Etgar wasn’t one for the gray. He was a tiny, thoughtful, bucktoothed boy of certainties. And, every Friday when Tendler came by the stand, Etgar would pack up the man’s produce and then run through the story again, searching for black and white. This man had saved his father’s life, but maybe he hadn’t. He’d done what was necessary, but maybe he could have done it another way. And even if the basic schoolyard rule applied in adult life—that a beating delivered earns a beating in return—did it ever justify one as fierce as the beating his father had described? A pummeling so severe that Shimmy, while telling the story, would run Etgar’s fingers along his left cheek to show him where Professor Tendler had flattened the bone. Even if the violence had been justified, even if his father didn’t always say, “You must risk your friend’s life, your family’s, your own, you must be willing to die—even to save the life of your enemy—if ever, of two deeds, the humane one may be done,” it was not his father’s act of forgiveness, but his kindness that baffled Etgar. Shimmy would send him running across Agrippas Street to bring back two cups of coffee or two glasses of tea to welcome Professor Tendler, telling Etgar to snatch a

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good-size handful of pistachios from Eizenberg’s cart along the way. This treatment his father reserved only for his oldest friends. And absolutely no one but the war widows got their produce free. Quietly and with dignity, so as to cause these women no shame, Etgar’s father would send them off with fresh fruit and big bags of vegetables, sometimes for years after their losses. He always took care of the young widows. When they protested, he’d say, “You sacrifice, I sacrifice. All in all, what’s a bag of apples?” “It’s all for one country,” he’d say. When it came to Professor Tendler, so clear an answer never came. When Etgar was twelve, his father acknowledged the complexities of Tendler’s tale. “Do you want to know why I can care for a man who once beat me? Because to a story, there is context. There is always context in life.” “That’s it?” Etgar asked. “That’s it.” At thirteen, he was told a different story. Because at thirteen, Etgar was a man. “You know I was in the war,” Shimmy said to his son. The way he said it, Etgar knew that he didn’t mean ’48 or ’56, ’67 or ’73. He did not mean the Jewish wars, in all of which he had fought. He meant the big one. The war that no one in his family but Shimmy had survived, which was also the case for Etgar’s mother. This was why they had taken a new name, Shimmy explained. In the whole world, the Gezers were three. “Yes,” Etgar said. “I know.” “Professor Tendler was also in that war,” Shimmy said. “Yes,” Etgar said. “It was hard on him,” Shimmy said. “And that is why, why I am always nice.” Etgar thought. Etgar spoke. “But you were there, too. You’ve had the same life as him. And you’d never have shot four men, even the enemy, if you could have taken them prisoner, if you could have spared a life. Even if you were in danger, you’d risk—” Etgar’s father smiled, and stopped him. “Kodem kol,” he said, “a similar life is not a same life. There is a difference.” Here Shimmy’s face turned serious, the lightness gone. “In that first war, in that big war, I was the lucky one,” he said. “In the Shoah, I survived.” “But he’s here,” Etgar said. “He survived, just the same as you.” “No,” Etgar’s father said. “He made it through the camps. He walks, he breathes, and he was very close to making it out of Europe alive. But they killed him. After the war, we still lost people. They killed what was left of him in the end.”

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For the first time, without Professor Tendler there, without one of Shimmy’s friends from the ghetto who stopped by to talk in Yiddish, without one of the soldier buddies from his unit in the reserves or one of the kibbutzniks from whom he bought his fruits and his vegetables, Etgar’s father sent Etgar across Agrippas Street to get two glasses of tea. One for Etgar and one for him. “Hurry,” Shimmy said, sending Etgar off with a slap on his behind. Before Etgar had taken a step, his father grabbed his collar and popped open the register, handing him a brand-new ten-shekel bill. “And buy us a nice big bag of seeds from Eizenberg. Tell him to keep the change. You and I, we are going to sit awhile.” Shimmy took out the second folding chair from behind the register. It would also be the first time that father and son had ever sat down in the store together. Another rule of good business: A customer should always find you standing. Always there’s something you can be doing—sweeping, stacking, polishing apples. The customers will come to a place where there is pride.

This is why Professor Tendler got his tomatoes free, why the sight of the man who beat Shimmy made his gaze go soft with kindness in the way that it did when one of the miskenot came by—why it took on what Etgar called his father’s Free-Fruit-forYoung-Widows eyes. This is the story that Shimmy told Etgar when he felt that his boy was a man: The first thing Professor Tendler saw when his death camp was liberated were two big, tough American soldiers fainting dead away. The pair (presumably war-hardened) stood before the immense, heretofore unimaginable brutality of modern extermination, frozen, slack-jawed before a mountain of putrid, naked corpses, a hill of men. And from this pile of broken bodies that had been—prior to the American invasion—set to be burned, a rickety, skeletal Tendler stared back. Professor Tendler stared and studied, and when he was sure that those soldiers were not Nazi soldiers, he crawled out from his hiding place among the corpses, pushing and shoving those balsa-wood arms and legs aside. It was this hill of bodies that had protected Tendler day after day. The poor Sonderkommando who dumped the bodies, as well as those who came to cart them to the ovens, knew that the boy was inside. They brought him the crumbs of their crumbs to keep him going. And though it was certain death for these prisoners to protect him, it allowed them a sliver of humanity in their inhuman jobs. This was what Shimmy was trying to explain to his son—that these palest shadows of kindness were enough to keep a dead man alive. When Tendler finally got to his feet, straightening his body out, when the corpse that was Professor Tendler at age thirteen—“your age”—came crawling from that

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nightmare, he looked at the two Yankee soldiers, who looked at him and then hit the ground with a thud. Professor Tendler had already seen so much in life that this was not worth even a pause, and so he walked on. He walked on naked through the gates of the camp, walked on until he got some food and some clothes, walked on until he had shoes and then a coat. He walked on until he had a little bread and a potato in his pocket—a surplus. Soon there was also in that pocket a cigarette and then a second, a coin and then a second. Surviving in this way, Tendler walked across borders until he was able to stand straight and tall, until he showed up in his childhood town in a matching suit of clothes, with a few bills in his pocket and, in his waistband, a six-shooter with five bullets chambered, in order to protect himself during the nights that he slept by the side of the road. Professor Tendler was expecting no surprises, no reunions. He’d seen his mother killed in front of him, his father, his three sisters, his grandparents, and, after some months in the camp, the two boys he knew from back home. But home—that was the thing he held on to. Maybe his house was still there, and his bed. Maybe the cow was still giving milk, and the goats still chewing garbage, and his dog still barking at the chickens as before. And maybe his other family—the nurse at whose breast he had become strong (before weakened), her husband, who had farmed his father’s field, and their son (his age), and another (two years younger), boys with whom he had played like a brother—maybe this family was still there waiting. Waiting for him to come home. Tendler could make a new family in that house. He could call every child he might one day have by his dead loved ones’ names. The town looked as it had when he’d left. The streets were his streets, the linden trees in the square taller but laid out as before. And when Tendler turned down the dirt road that led to his gate, he fought to keep himself from running, and he fought to keep himself from crying, because, after what he had seen, he knew that to survive in this world he must always act like a man. So Tendler buttoned his coat and walked quietly toward the fence, wishing that he had a hat to take off as he passed through the gate—just the way the man of the house would when coming home to what was his. But when he saw her in the yard—when he saw Fanushka, his nurse, their maid— the tears came anyway. Tendler popped a precious button from his coat as he ran to her and threw himself into her arms, and he cried for the first time since the trains. With her husband at her side, Fanushka said to him, “Welcome home, son,” and “Welcome home, child,” and “We prayed,” “We lit candles,” “We dreamed of your return.”

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When they asked, “Are your parents also coming? Are your sisters and your grandparents far behind?” and when they asked after all the old neighbors, house by house, Tendler answered, not by metaphor, and not by insinuation. When he knew the fate, he stated it as it was: beaten or starved, shot, cut in half, the front of the head caved in. All this he related without feeling—matters, each, of fact. All this he shared before venturing a step through his front door. Looking through that open door, Tendler decided that he would live with these people as family until he had a family of his own. He would grow old in this house. Free to be free, he would gate himself up again. But it would be his gate, his lock, his world. A hand on his hand pulled him from his reverie. It was Fanushka talking, a sad smile on her face. “Time to fatten you up,” she said. “A feast for first dinner.” And she grabbed the chicken at her feet and twisted its neck right there in the yard. “Come in,” she said while the animal twitched. “The master of the house has returned.” “Just as you left it,” she said. “Only a few of our things.” Tendler stepped inside. It was exactly as he remembered it—the table, the chairs—except that all that was personal was gone. Fanushka’s two sons came in, and Tendler understood what time had done. These boys, fed and housed, warmed and loved, were fully twice his size. He felt, then, something he had never known in the camps, a civilized emotion that would have served no use. Tendler felt ashamed. He turned red, clenched his jaw tight, and felt his gums bleeding into his mouth. “You have to understand,” Etgar’s father said to his son. “These boys, his brothers, they were now twice his size and strangers to him.” The boys, prodded, shook hands with Tendler. They did not know him anymore. “Still, it is a nice story,” Etgar said. “Sad. But also happy. He makes it home to a home. It’s what you always say. Survival, that’s what matters. Surviving to start again.” Etgar’s father held up a sunflower seed, thinking about this. He cracked it between his front teeth. “So they are all making a dinner for Professor Tendler,” he said. “And he is sitting on the kitchen floor, legs crossed, as he did when he was a boy, and he is watching. Watching happily, drinking a glass of goat’s milk, still warm. And then the father goes out to slaughter that goat. ‘A feast for dinner,’ he says. ‘A chicken’s not enough.’ Professor Tendler, who has not had meat in years, looks at him, and the father, running a nail along his knife, says, ‘I remember the kosher way.’” Tendler was so happy that he could not bear it. So happy and so sad. And, with the cup of warm milk and the warm feeling, Tendler had to pee. But he didn’t want

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to move now that he was there with his other mother and, resting on her shoulder, a baby sister. A year and a half old and one curl on the head. A little girl, fat and happy. Fat in the ankle, fat in the wrist. Professor Tendler rushed out at the last second, out of the warm kitchen, out from under his roof. Professor Tendler, a man whom other men had tried to turn into an animal, did not race to the outhouse. It didn’t cross his mind. He stood right under the kitchen window to smell the kitchen smells, to stay close. And he took a piss. Over the sound of the stream, he heard his nurse lamenting. He knew what she must be lamenting—the Tendler family destroyed. He listened to what she was saying. And he heard. “He will take everything” is what she said. “He will take it all from us—our house, our field. He’ll snatch away all we’ve built and protected, everything that has been— for so long—ours.” There outside the window, pissing and listening, and also “disassociating,” as Professor Tendler would call it (though he did not then have the word), he knew only that he was watching himself from above, that he could see himself feeling all the disappointment as he felt it, until he was keenly and wildly aware that he had felt nothing all those years, felt nothing when his father and mother were shot, felt nothing while in the camps, nothing, in fact, from the moment he was driven from his home to the moment he returned. In that instant, Tendler’s guilt was sharper than any sensation he had ever known. And here, in response to his precocious son, Shimmy said, “Yes, yes, of course it was about survival—Tendler’s way of coping. Of course he’d been feeling all along.” But Tendler—a boy who had stepped over his mother’s body and kept walking— had, for those peasants, opened up. It was right then, Professor Tendler later told Shimmy, that he became a philosopher. “He will steal it all away,” Fanushka said. “Everything. He has come for our lives.” And her son, whom Tendler had considered a brother, said, “No.” And Tendler’s other almost brother said, “No.” “We will eat,” Fanushka said. “We will celebrate. And when he sleeps, we will kill him.” To one of the sons, she said, “Go. Tell your father to keep that knife sharp.” To the other, she said “You get to sleep early, and you get up early, and before you grab the first tit on that cow, I want his throat slit. Ours. Ours, not to be taken away.” Tendler ran. Not toward the street, but back toward the outhouse in time to turn around as the kitchen door flew open, in time to smile at the younger brother on his way to find his father, in time for Tendler to be heading back the right way. “Do you want to hear what was shared at such a dinner?”

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Shimmy asked his son. “The memories roused and oaths sworn? There was wine, I know. ‘Drink, drink,’ the mother said. There was the chicken and a pot of goat stew. And, in a time of great deprivation, there was also sugar for the tea.” At this, Shimmy pointed at the bounty of their stand. “And, as if nothing, next to the baby’s basket on the kitchen floor sat a basket of apples. Tendler hadn’t had an apple in who knows how long.” Tendler brought the basket to the table. The family laughed as he peeled the apples with a knife, first eating the peels, then the flesh, and savoring even the seeds and the cores. It was a celebration, a joyous night. So much so that Professor Tendler could not by its end, belly distended, eyes crossed with drink, believe what he knew to have been said. There were hugs and there were kisses, and Tendler—the master of the house— was given his parents’ bedroom upstairs, the two boys across the hall, and below, in the kitchen (“It will be warmest”), slept the mother and the father and the fat-ankled girl. “Sleep well,” Fanushka said. “Welcome home, my son.” And, sweetly, she kissed Tendler on both eyes. Tendler climbed the stairs. He took off his suit and went to bed. And that was where he was when Fanushka popped through the door and asked him if he was warm enough, if he needed a lamp by which to read. “No, thank you,” he said. “So formal? No thanks necessary,” Fanushka said. “Only ‘Yes, Mother,’ or ‘No, Mother,’ my poor reclaimed orphan son.” “No light, Mother,” Tendler said, and Fanushka closed the door. Tendler got out of bed. He put on his suit. Once again without any shame to his actions, Tendler searched the room for anything of value, robbing his own home. Then he waited. He waited until the house had settled into itself, the last creak slipping from the floorboards as the walls pushed back against the wind. He waited until his mother, his Fanushka, must surely sleep, until a brother intent on staying up for the night—a brother who had never once fought for his life—convinced himself that it would be all right to close his eyes. Tendler waited until he, too, had to sleep, and that’s when he tied the laces of his shoes together and hung them over his shoulder. That’s when he took his pillow with one hand and, with the other, quietly cocked his gun. Then, with goose feathers flying, Tendler moved through the house. A bullet for each brother, one for the father and one for the mother. Tendler fired until he found himself standing in the warmth of the kitchen, one bullet left to protect him on the nights when he would sleep by the side of the road.

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That last bullet Tendler left in the fat baby girl, because he did not know from mercy, and did not need to leave another of that family to grow to kill him at some future time. “He murdered them,” Etgar said. “A murderer.” “No,” his father told him. “There was no such notion at the time.” “Even so, it is murder,” Etgar said. “If it is, then it’s only fair. They killed him first. It was his right.” “But you always say—” “Context.” “But the baby. The girl.” “The baby is hardest, I admit. But these are questions for the philosopher. These are the theoretical instances put into flesh and blood.” “But it’s not a question. These people, they are not the ones who murdered his family.” “They were coming for him that night.” “He could have escaped. He could have run for the gate when he overheard. He didn’t need to race back toward the outhouse, race to face the brother as he came the other way.” “Maybe there was no more running in him. Anyway, do you understand ‘an eye for an eye’? Can you imagine a broader meaning of self-defense?” “You always forgive him,” Etgar said. “You suffered the same things—but you aren’t that way. You would not have done what he did.” “It is hard to know what a person would and wouldn’t do in any specific instance. And you, spoiled child, apply the rules of civilization to a boy who had seen only its opposite. Maybe the fault for those deaths lies in a system designed for the killing of Tendlers that failed to do its job. An error, a slip that allowed a Tendler, no longer fit, back loose in the world.” “Is that what you think?” “It’s what I ask. And I ask you, my Etgar, what you would have done if you were Tendler that night?” “Not kill.” “Then you die.” “Only the grown-ups.” “But it was a boy who was sent to cut Tendler’s throat.” “How about killing only those who would do harm?” “Still it’s murder. Still it is killing people who have yet to act, murdering them in their sleep.”

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“I guess,” Etgar said. “I can see how they deserved it, the four. How I might, if I were him, have killed them.” Shimmy shook his head, looking sad. “And whoever are we, my son, to decide who should die?” It was on that day that Etgar Gezer became a philosopher himself. Not in the manner of Professor Tendler, who taught theories up at the university on the mountain, but, like his father, practical and concrete. Etgar would not finish high school or go to college, and, except for his three years in the army, he would spend his life—happily— working the stand in the shuk. He’d stack the fruit into pyramids and contemplate weighty questions with a seriousness of thought. And when there were answers, Etgar would try employing them to make for himself and others, in whatever small way, a better life. It was on that day, too, that Etgar decided Professor Tendler was both a murderer and, at the same time, a misken. He believed he understood how and why Professor Tendler had come to kill that peasant family, and how men sent to battle in uniform— even in the same uniform—would find no mercy at his hand. Etgar also came to see how Tendler’s story could just as easily have ended for the Professor that first night, back in his parents’ room, in his parents’ bed, a gun with four bullets held in a suicide’s hand—how the first bullet Tendler ever fired might have been into his own head. Still, every Friday, Etgar packed up Tendler’s fruit and vegetables. And in that bag Etgar would add, when he had them, a pineapple or a few fat mangoes dripping honey. Handing it to Tendler, Etgar would say, “Kach, Professor. Take it.” This, even after his father had died.

24 Scott Nadelson

Oslo

Jerusalem, August 1995 The orange soda was too gassy for Joel to gulp. He’d wanted orange juice but had made the mistake of letting his grandfather order for him. His grandmother had made the same mistake, and now the waitress brought out coffee in tiny ceramic cups. His grandfather took one sip, said, “Awful,” and pushed the entire saucer away. His grandmother winced but managed to swallow. “It’s Turkish,” she said. “If we want regular, I think we have to order ‘filtered.’” “Awful,” his grandfather repeated. His white hair stuck up an inch from his scalp all around, so thick it was hard to see how a brush could make its way through. His skin seemed thick, too, but darker and leathery from the Florida sun, the wrinkles circling his eyes like cracks in a punctured windshield. Joel knew something about windshield cracks, having shot a BB at his mother’s boyfriend’s Mustang a week before they’d left on this trip. His grandfather wore a white golf shirt, white linen slacks, white socks and tennis shoes, and in his back pocket was a white cloth hat he’d put on when he started to overheat. He flipped through the guidebook he hadn’t let go of once in the last two days, holding it at arm’s length to read. “The tour starts at ten-thirty.” “You told us already,” Joel said. “You told us yesterday.” “Why don’t you put your glasses on,” his grandmother said. “You’ll strain your eyes.” “We should get going,” his grandfather said. “We’ve got half an hour,” his grandmother said. “We’re always early,” Joel said. His grandmother lifted her cup to her lips, balancing it between both thumbs and forefingers. “I’d like to finish my coffee. It’s lovely once you get used to the grit.” “Oslo.” From Nadelson, Aftermath: Stories (Hawthorne Books, September 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Scott Nadelson. The story originally appeared in the journal upstreet: a literary magazine, No. 5 (2009). Reprinted with permission of Hawthorne Books.

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The cafe was on Ben Yehuda Street, their table so far out into the pedestrian lane that twice now, a passing tourist had bumped Joel’s arm. “Good for people watching,” his grandmother had said, but Joel watched only his fingers in the mesh of the wrought iron table top, his pinkie able to wriggle through one of the holes. He was thirteen, three months past his bar mitzvah, a sunken-chested boy with long twig arms that suggested he might, one day, grow taller than his grandfather, who claimed to be five-foot-nine but couldn’t have been more than five-seven, Joel was sure. Joel’s father was five-nine, but since Joel hadn’t seen him since his bar mitzvah reception three months ago, it was hard to remember exactly how tall that looked. His mother’s boyfriend was six-three, too tall for his mother, Joel thought. Too loud for his mother, too, with a booming voice that bubbled up from his round belly. His mother had been going out with Dennis for nearly a year now, her soft words drowned out by Dennis’s constant yammering, his snorting laugh. Dennis knew something about everything and didn’t let anyone else talk, ever. You could say, “I ate a yeti for lunch today,” and Dennis would twist the end of his mustache and answer, “Funny story about yetis. When I was backpacking through Nepal and Pakistan—” And then he’d be off, talking for an hour straight about climbing to base camp at K2, about how he thought his ear was frostbitten and ready to fall off, about his friend who went snow-blind and nearly dropped into a crevasse, but not another word about yetis. It was impossible not to hate him, and all summer Joel had tried to make Dennis hate him back. He’d hidden his wallet for a whole week, returning it only when Dennis said, “Look, pal, I’m about to run out of gas. You let me have my Visa, I’ll buy you a guitar. I started playing when I was about your age. First guitar I had was a beat-up Les Paul—” Then he was off again, talking about his band, the time he’d gotten thrown off the stage at the Fillmore, and to shut him up, Joel brought him his wallet. Later, he let the air out of all the Mustang’s tires. After his mother lectured him for half an hour, Joel shook Dennis’s hand and muttered an apology. “A truce, huh?” Dennis said. “Just like Grant and Lee at Appomattox. ‘The Gentlemen’s Agreement.’ Most people think that was the end of the war, but it wasn’t. Did you know the last Confederate general to surrender was the Cherokee Stand White—” Truces were made to be broken, though he knew the BB had been going too far. He’d borrowed the gun from a neighbor kid and then swore he’d had nothing to do with the hole in the windshield. His mother had promised to punish him as soon as she had enough evidence. It was only a matter of time before she found out where he’d gotten the gun, one of the few things that made him thankful to be spending the next three weeks halfway around the world. The windshield would be fixed by the time he got home, the whole thing, with luck, forgotten. This trip was his bar mitzvah present from his grandparents, though he’d asked for a computer or cash. His grandmother had kept it secret until after the reception, when

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only a few family members were left at his mother’s house. Joel had already been in a lousy mood by then, because his father had just left, on his way back to Seattle, where he sold medical equipment and lived in a converted warehouse. Joel hadn’t been out to see him yet, and could only imagine him walking around in an open, echoing space, cardboard boxes stacked in one corner, a forklift in another. Before he drove to the airport, his father had clapped him on the back and said, “Way to go, kiddo. You really nailed that haftarah.” But Dennis had been close by, and though he wasn’t even Jewish, started talking about the origins of the Kabbalah. Joel wanted to pull his father away, talk to him in private, ask him about the warehouse and when he might visit, but his father seemed interested in what Dennis was saying, nodding often and encouraging him with a mumbled, “Is that so?” and “I had no idea.” Didn’t he know better than to humor the guy? Didn’t he want to knock him on his ass for the nerve of dating his ex-wife? Soon his father checked his watch and said, “I’d love to hear more, but it’ll have to wait till next time. Come give me a hug, JoJo. Have fun opening your presents.” Then his grandmother came to him with an envelope, smiling in a tense, close-lipped way that tried to hide her excitement but couldn’t. She looked much younger than his grandfather, partly because she dyed her hair a reddish brown and kept it up in a wispy sort of perm, partly because her skin, though slack over cheeks and chin, was the softest he’d ever felt. When she kissed him he smelled baby oil. The envelope wasn’t heavy, which meant most likely there was a check inside, not cash. A check would go straight into his bank account, not to be seen again until college, but he’d already pocketed three hundred­dollar bills his Uncle Ron, a dentist, had slipped him on the sly. But now, instead of a check, he pulled out a plane ticket. Seattle, he thought, and got ready to hug his grandmother. But then he saw the airline: El Al. “We leave on August first!” his grandmother squealed, and his grandfather said to people around him, “It nearly killed the woman to keep a secret this long. It’s all I’ve heard about for six months.” Joel missed his father already and wanted to cry, but his grandmother was smiling so brightly, the relatives saying what a wonderful gift it was, especially now with all the recent developments, peace finally within reach, that he did hug her and said thanks to his grandfather, who took the ticket from him, saying he’d keep it safe until they left. “The thing about Israel,” Dennis said. “It’s not just the history that’s complicated, or the politics, but the people who live there—” And that’s when Joel had had it, heading up to his room, leaving the rest of his presents for another day. Now he finished his orange soda and tried to belch, but the gas just rattled around his chest and leaked out silently. His grandmother smiled at him, black grounds caught between her front teeth, top and bottom. It was still morning and already too hot, hotter even than Fort Lauderdale, where his grandparents lived between a golf course and a

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pond shared by exotic birds and an alligator. Already his grandfather had the scowling, impatient look that for the past three days hadn’t shown up until afternoon. All around them were air-conditioned buildings, but here they were, sitting under the broiling sun like morons. Across the street was McDavid’s, a name Joel found less funny than curious, wondering what the Jewish version of the Big Mac would taste like, whether there was a Ronald McDavid with a beard and sidelocks. Twice so far he’d asked if they could eat there, but his grandfather said fast food would clog your arteries whether it was kosher or not. Joel had never thought much about coming to Israel, though his Hebrew school teacher, Mrs. Nachman, had talked about it constantly, closing her eyes and saying wistfully, “Next year in Jerusalem,” even when it was six months until Passover. The walls of her classrooms were covered in maps made between 1967 and 1978, none with the Green Line printed in, just a solid mass from the Golan to Sinai. “If we give up land for peace, the six million die in vain,” she told the class. “When the next Holocaust comes, you’ll be glad there’s enough room for all of us.” Another time she said, “The Arabs, they breed like vermin. That’s why you have to have as many children as you can.” She called Rabin a traitor, Clinton a fool, Arafat the spawn of demons. Joel didn’t question what she said, didn’t care one way or another, until she started talking about intermarriage. “If you want to get divorced, go ahead, marry a gentile. If you want to destroy three thousand years of history. If you want to spit on the graves of the six million.” The Jewish girls Joel knew were all flat chested and loudmouthed, and he had no intention of marrying any of them. At his bar mitzvah he’d danced with three girls from his middle school, all blonde, all Christian, all giggling at the blessings over the wine and bread. Afterward, Dennis said, “You’ve got an eye for the shiksas, huh, pal? You know about Portnoy’s complaint?” Before he could go on, Joel said, “I’m not complaining,” and all the adults around him laughed. He knew he should be grateful to his grandparents for bringing him here, knew he should feel a connection to the land Mrs. Nachman called his birthright. But all they did was take tours of one part of the city or another, and it was like being around Dennis for hours on end, getting piled with dates and details when all he wanted was to let his head be empty for a change. It was a hundred degrees and he had to wear long pants everywhere or else get turned away from the churches and synagogues and mosques. They had three weeks of tours planned, to the Galilee, to the Negev, to the Mediterranean coast, and he thought he’d go crazy. The only place he wanted to go was the Dead Sea, to find out if he really could float because of all the salt, but that trip wasn’t planned until their last week, and by then he’d just want to stay at the hotel, floating in the pool. All he liked so far were the shops, the ones here on Ben Yehuda Street with silver and ceramic menorahs, the ones in the Arab bazaar that sold spices and

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pungent meat and strangely shaped pipes. He’d already gotten his grandfather to buy him a pair of sandals and a T-shirt: The Grateful Dead Play the Dead Sea. He wore the shirt now. Last summer he’d had a camp counselor who’d worn Grateful Dead T-shirts every day, and though he’d never heard the music, Joel mimicked the lazy way the counselor had walked, swinging his arms loosely from the shoulders. He liked the picture on the front, a skeleton wrapped in robes, riding a camel. His grandfather hadn’t wanted to buy it and peered at it disdainfully now. “You look like the Grim Reaper,” he said. “The Grim Reaper doesn’t ride a camel,” Joel said. “How do you know? Ever seen him?” “He carries a scythe,” Joel said. “Maybe he’s got it hidden under his robes,” his grandfather said. “I think it’s an interesting shirt,” his grandmother said. Now, along with coffee grounds, lipstick had smeared on her teeth. “It’s clever.” “It doesn’t make any sense,” his grandfather said. “Why would a dead person be grateful?” “How would you know?” Joel asked. “Ever met one?” “Drink up already,” his grandfather said. “It’s time to go.” A group of soldiers was passing as they stood, his grandfather puzzling over the bill, holding each coin up to one eye before laying it on the tray. There were five of them, and two were girls. Joel’s grandfather had said he could never get used to seeing guns everywhere he turned, but Joel couldn’t get over the sight of girls carrying them, the rifles almost half their size, their green uniforms calling attention to tan skin and big dark eyes. If he lived here, he thought, maybe he’d change his mind about intermarriage. His grandmother turned her smile on them, and Joel flinched at the sight of her stained teeth. She held up her camera and said, “Would you mind?” They gathered together and grinned patiently, one of the boys making a face, another holding two fingers over one of the girls’ heads. “No, no,” his grandmother said. “Be serious. I want you to look like soldiers.” The tallest of the boys winked at Joel and said, “Yes, yes, be serious. No time for jokes.” He called out a command in Hebrew, and all of them stood at attention. “Couldn’t one of you hold your gun in front?” his grandmother asked. The two girls unslung their rifles, gripping black metal in tiny brown hands. “Joel, go stand with them.” He shook his head. “Go on.” “Yes, come,” one of the girls said. The tall boy said, “Come, Mr. Grateful Dead. We’ll make a soldier of you.” His face burned. His grandmother’s teeth were repulsive, her eyebrows arched over the top of the camera. His grandfather was looking at his watch. One of the girls put a hand on his shoulder, and he tried to smile. “You couldn’t give him a gun to hold,

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could you?” his grandmother asked. “No, of course not. Just another second. Okay. Now smile. Wait, no, don’t smile. Be serious.” “Just take it already,” Joel said. The camera snapped while his mouth was open. One of the girls squeezed his chin between two fingers, the other tugged his ear. “Have a nice day, Captain Groovy,” the darker of the two said. “Watch out for the brown acid.” “A souvenir,” the prettier one said, and handed him a golden rifle shell, the length and width of his forefinger. “Let’s go,” his grandfather said. “If we’re late, I’m not talking to either of you for the rest of the day.” Yesterday’s tour had been called “Archaeological Wonders of the Old City.” Today’s was “Religious Communities of Jerusalem,” and they looked at the same stone walls, the same churches and synagogues and mosques. But Joel liked today’s tour guide better than yesterday’s, a mumbly woman with a thick accent he could hardly understand. Today’s guide was Lou, a man as old as his grandfather, only taller, almost as tall as Dennis, with a limp and a nasal voice like that of Joel’s Uncle Ron, who lived in the Bronx. “I came over in ’48,” Lou said. “Wanted to be a big-shot hero.” He patted his thigh. “Careful what you ask for.” Lou asked Joel his name, and for the rest of the tour called him, “Mr. Schreiber.” He talked about history, and just as Joel’s head began to swim with facts, with images of Dennis’s mustache, of the Mustang and the hole in its windshield, said, “It’s not boring at all, is it, Mr. Schreiber. It’s the reason you’re here.” And Joel nodded. Half the people on the tour were European, and they squinted and strained to understand what Lou was saying. Three young men from Nicaragua fingered crucifixes hanging around their necks and asked every few minutes, “Via Dolorosa?” “Not yet,” Lou said. “First, we’re going to visit—” He lowered his voice and finished dramatically, “The Armenian Quarter!” The Nicaraguans shrugged and shuffled their feet. Lou pointed out bullet holes above the Zion Gate, some as wide around as Joel’s wrist and deep enough for him to put his whole fist in, and said, “The last ones we’ll ever have here, right, Mr. Schreiber?” “How come you didn’t come over in ’48?” Joel asked his grandfather. “Didn’t you want to be a hero?” His grandfather forced his hat down over his springy hair. “I had a family to take care of.” “Big deal,” Joel said. “I’m not like some people—” “Charlie,” his grandmother said, and his grandfather shoved his hands in his pockets and looked away.

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At the Western Wall, Joel thought about sticking a note between the cracks as he saw others doing, something like “Get rid of Dennis,” but he knew God didn’t make things so easy. If anything He’d make Joel suffer through another year of Dennis just for asking. Instead he tried to measure how big each stone block was—his whole arm span, plus half another. He spent some time staring up at pigeons roosting on the stones above, and wondered whether it would be a secret blessing or an omen of disaster to get crapped on at the holiest place in the world. When he rejoined the group, Lou said, “You’re quite the mystic, huh, Mr. Schreiber?” Joel didn’t know how to answer, so he shrugged. “I know what you mean,” Lou said. “I don’t have a religious bone in my body, but when I saw that wall for the first time in ’67, man, I fell down on my knees and cried. Okay, everybody. Now we’re about to enter—” Again the pause, the lowering of his voice. “The Muslim Quarter!” “I still can’t believe where we are,” his grandmother said for the third time today, and maybe the twentieth since their plane had landed. “Believe it already,” his grandfather said. “Because there’s nowhere else we could possibly be.” But Joel couldn’t, either. Even after three days, he couldn’t. In his mind he pictured a globe, the little strip of land no more than half the size of his thumbnail. He pictured his trajectory, from New Jersey to the JFK Airport, and then out over the ocean, but where did they go from there? Across Europe? Straight down the length of the Mediterranean? He pictured Mrs. Nachman’s maps, but in no way could he connect them with the crowded bazaar, the racks of rugs and leather purses, the strange smells of spices and rotting meat, the sound of a kitten crying soon drowned out by a boy shouting, “Alo, alo, alo!” before barreling past them with an oversized wheelbarrow. He had the same trouble when he located Seattle on the globe in his bedroom and tried to link the word with his father. He had to spread his thumb and forefinger as far apart as they would stretch to bridge the distance between them. The only time he ever listened to Dennis was when Dennis described Seattle, which of course he’d been to a dozen times. Occasionally Joel would even prompt him, asking how tall was the Space Needle, how far away was Mount Rainier. “Your dad picked one of the prettiest places in the world to live,” Dennis said, and for a minute Joel thought maybe he could actually like the man, that they could be something short of friends. But then Dennis went on, “When you go visit him, you’ll have to take the ferry to the San Juans. You might see some Orcas. Did you know that Orcas are probably the smartest animals in the world? Some people think dolphins are smarter, but—” Joel had called his father the night before he’d left and asked if he could come visit when he got home. “Doesn’t school start right after?” his father asked. “I don’t care,” Joel said. “I’m sure your teachers care. We’ll get you out here sometime soon.”

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“Thanksgiving?” “Maybe,” his father said. “I’ll check out my schedule, and we’ll talk about it when you get back. I gotta go now, JoJo. You have a great time with all the zealots. Send me some postcards. And don’t let your grandparents drive you too nuts.” That night at dinner he spilled a full glass of Coke on Dennis’s lap. His mother lectured him in the same tired voice she used to use with his father those late nights Joel stayed up listening at the door of his room, the words lost to him, the tone clear and hopeless. Her eyes were full of tears. He would have taken it back then if he could have. “It was an accident,” he said when she told him to apologize. He repeated it enough times that he began to believe it himself. Tears formed in his own eyes. “I swear.” From the sink, where he was mopping up his crotch with a dishtowel, Dennis said, “If he says it was an accident, then I believe him.” His voice was softer than usual, almost as tired as Joel’s mother’s, with a little tremble to it that made Joel furious. The last thing in the world he wanted was to feel sorry for the man. Dennis kept his back to them, fanning the wet spot with a pot lid. “No need to apologize. We’ll just let it go, okay, pal?” It was lunchtime now, and his grandmother handed him a pita stuffed with falafel. He’d eaten falafel three days in a row now and didn’t see how it was any better for his arteries than McDavid’s. This one tasted sour, maybe because he was eating it standing up, staring at a row of hanging goat heads, no skin but eyes intact. Beneath the sound of sizzling oil he heard the kitten still but couldn’t spot it. His own sweat stunk worse than the rotting meat, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to wear the Grateful Dead T-shirt again until after he’d gotten home and washed it, and then only when Dennis wasn’t around to see it and start in about rock concerts and the Fillmore. The soda can his grandmother handed him had a lemon on its side, but what came out of it tasted like licorice. “It’s really remarkable,” his grandmother said. “Don’t you think? That they can all live together like this?” “Anyone can live together when soldiers are walking around with machine guns,” his grandfather said. “I don’t see how you can trust these people. Doesn’t anyone remember the Olympics? The whole team, slaughtered.” “These are our friends,” Lou said, and just then, as if to prove it, a shopkeeper stepped out of a stone alcove choked with shelves of silver trinkets, grabbed Lou’s hand, and pumped it vigorously. “My friend!” the shopkeeper said. “My friend! It’s too long, too long. When are you coming to see us?” He was as short as Joel, mostly bald, with a patchy mustache that seemed to grow straight out of his wide nostrils. He turned to the group and said, “You like Mr. Lou’s tour? The best tour. The best man. Yes.” “Get outta here,” Lou said, brushing away the compliment with a backhanded wave.

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The shopkeeper’s smile, surprisingly white teeth fringed by the gray hairs of his mustache, turned toward Joel. “You are Jew?” he asked. Joel blinked. Was he supposed to answer? He glanced at Lou, at his grandparents, looking for a sign, but found none. He thought of Mrs. Nachman, who warned that anti-Semitism lurked around every corner, who told the class over and over, “Never apologize for who you are.” He nodded. The shopkeeper threw open his arms, hugged him, and said, “I am Arab! We are brothers!” Then he fixed a kufiya on Joel’s head, borrowed his grandmother’s camera, and took a picture of him standing next to Lou. Joel wondered what Mrs. Nachman would think when she saw it—spawn of demons! —and felt some kind of pleasure at the thought of her horror. When Joel tried to return the cloth, the shopkeeper shook his head. “For you, for you.” To Joel’s grandfather he said, “Twenty shekels.” Lou herded them out of the bazaar and announced, finally, “Via Dolorosa!” The three Nicaraguans dropped to their knees and crawled. Lou greeted a monk in a brown robe and rope sandals, who was renting man-sized crosses for Christians to carry. Joel’s grandfather tugged on his hat and said, “I don’t trust any of them.” “So?” Joel said. “Why didn’t you come do something about it in ’48?” “I told you already,” his grandfather said. “I had a family to take care of.” “Charlie,” his grandmother warned again, but this time his grandfather went on. “I’m not like some people. Move to Seattle. Abandon their families. Try to forget they ever had kids. I always knew he was a louse, from the first time I met him.” “Charlie, please,” his grandmother said. “You think he paid a dime for that fancy reception of yours, for that awful DJ with the music so loud?” His grandfather took off his hat and smacked it against a thigh. “You think he sends the checks for support like he’s required by law? If it weren’t for me and that big doofus who loves your mother so much you’d both be in the poorhouse. No grim reaper T-shirts or anything else to wear.” Now it was Joel’s turn to shove his hands in his pockets. He fingered the bullet the girl soldier had given him, along with a pair of loose shekels. He tasted the sour falafel again, and his stomach gave a sudden roll. Above him was a stone arch bridging the street, a window in the middle from which tinny dance music trickled down, the beat unexpectedly in rhythm with the sound of a power drill he could hear but couldn’t see. He could already picture the hole the rifle cartridge would make in the Mustang’s windshield, gaping next to the BBs. There were no such things as truces. Lou said, “All right, folks. Now it’s on to—the Christian Quarter!”

The last stop on the tour was Mea She’arim. It was a relief to get out of the Old City, the dusty air held in by dusty walls, but outside Joel didn’t have any easier time breathing.

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His insides felt shaky, with anger, he guessed, though it bothered him that being angry made him want to cry. He hung back from the group, as far away from his grandfather as he could get. The Nicaraguans had stayed behind at the Holy Sepulcher, and somehow this, too, bothered him—everything, it seemed, was falling apart. Lou called, “Mr. Schreiber, you’re missing out back there. I’ve got important stuff to tell you.” His grandmother said, “Joel, honey, your grandfather didn’t mean it.” “Let him pout,” his grandfather said. They crossed a busy arterial clogged with traffic, drivers honking and shouting as Lou waved the group across. Out here he couldn’t tell Jews from Arabs—everyone looked dark and enraged, and without clothes to distinguish them they might as well have been the same people. “Better cover your shoulders before we go in,” Lou told a pair of European women, who draped themselves with silk scarves. “They take modesty pretty seriously.” He talked about the different sects of Haredim and pointed out more synagogues and yeshivas. Rickety balconies sagged from the back of a crumbling tenement. An ultra-Orthodox man in a long coat and wide felt hat saw them, turned, and hurried off in another direction. Mrs. Nachman didn’t think any better of these people than she did the Arabs. She called them “the black hats,” and said they were traitors for refusing to join the army. Some didn’t even believe in the state of Israel, she told the class, preferring instead to wait for the Messiah to come and give them their homeland. “They can wait all they want,” she said. “In the meantime, we have to defend ourselves against the next Hitler.” In a courtyard strung with flapping laundry, a pair of women bald beneath headscarves shouted at them and made angry gestures. “They don’t approve of women wearing trousers,” Lou said. He tried to pacify them, but before long another tour group followed them in, blocking the way out. Pebbles rained down from a nearby rooftop. Joel had seen enough images on TV to think of them now, dirty children hurling fist-sized rocks and Molotov cocktails at soldiers who responded with rubber bullets and live rounds. His grandfather was right—they shouldn’t have trusted anyone. Shading his eyes he could see half a dozen boys on the roof, with wispy sidelocks and yarmulkes, wiping their dusty hands on white dress shirts, then picking up more pebbles and tossing. “Get back!” Lou cried, but with the other group behind them, there was nowhere to go. Several of the European women had taken refuge in a doorway, but Joel and his grandparents were left exposed against a bare wall. A few larger stones pinged against the roof of a parked car, its windshield clouding with chips. “Animals,” Joel’s grandfather said. “They’re Jewish!” his grandmother cried. The pebbles kept coming. Two or three hit Lou around the face and neck. Joel’s grandfather tried to edge into the doorway behind the European women. His grandmother stood her ground, spreading her arms in front of Joel, her back to the falling

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stones. She whispered in a strange, exhilarated voice, “I can’t believe where we are!” The women in headscarves yelled louder. And Lou was yelling now, too, not at the boys on the roof but at the other tour guide, a bewildered-looking woman Joel’s mother’s age, wearing a floppy yellow sun hat. “She should know better,” Lou said. “Bringing them in here wearing shorts and tank tops.” Something ugly was happening in Joel’s stomach. He had the rifle cartridge out of his pocket, gripped in a fist, the metal slick in his sweaty palm. Why couldn’t he be in Seattle, or at home, or anywhere other than here? Why couldn’t there be a war, so he wouldn’t have had to come? He cursed the peace accords the way Mrs. Nachman did— to hell with Arafat and Rabin and Clinton, to hell with Dennis, his mother, his father. He was going to be sick. The falafel was poison. The shopkeeper’s grin, his patchy mustache, had hidden malicious intentions. The skeleton on his T-shirt was laughing. Everyone hated him—Arabs, Jews, it didn’t matter. And his father hated him most. “As soon as I’m settled,” he’d told Joel the day he’d moved, and that night his mother had said in her tired, tear-filled voice, “Don’t hold your breath.” For his bar mitzvah present his father had given him a savings bond, a hundred dollars that wouldn’t mature until Joel was twenty-three. Everyone hated him except his grandmother, whose eyes were wild now as pebbles drummed her back, and Dennis, who’d given him the guitar he’d promised, a Les Paul like the one he’d played at the Fillmore. Joel would never forgive him for it. He dropped to his knees and heaved, splattering the cuffs of his grandfather’s pants and the thighs of his own. “I think he’ll be all right now,” his grandmother said. “Just make sure he gets lots of water,” Lou said, and ruffled Joel’s hair. They were back on Jaffa Street, the whizzing traffic making Joel dizzy. The sun reflecting from sand-colored buildings stung his eyes. His grandmother had a welt on her neck where a pebble had struck, but her face was shining, her teeth clean and bright now, free of coffee grounds and lipstick when she smiled. His grandfather looked stricken, gaze darting about the street, shoulders flinching at every sound, his cloth hat missing. “Sorry about the ruckus,” Lou said and patted his bad leg. “I guess you got the full Israel experience.” “It was the best tour I’ve ever been on,” Joel’s grandmother said. “Get outta here,” Lou said, with another backhanded wave. “You take care of yourself, Mr. Schreiber. Stick with hamburgers for a while.” The thought of hamburgers nearly made him retch again, but he managed to breathe and settle his guts. Lou hobbled onto a bus and disappeared. “I don’t see why anyone would want to come here,” his grandfather said hoarsely. “It’s a third-world

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country. They’re all barbarians.” It was strange to see him looking so jittery and embarrassed, his clothes so bright in the crowd of dark faces. That he was a coward wasn’t a surprise, but Joel didn’t feel up to reveling in it now. He’d lost the bullet the pretty soldier had given him. All that was left in his pockets were a pair of shekels and the kufiya from the bazaar, which he’d used to wipe vomit from his mouth and chin. He didn’t know if he would have come in ’48, either. They were all the way back to Ben Yehuda Street before his stomach rebelled, and he had to run into the bathroom at McDavid’s. There was no bearded Ronald McDavid in here, nothing to distinguish the place from any fast-food joint at home. The air-conditioning and the familiar smell of burgers and fries calmed him, and he sat on the toilet looking at graffiti in three languages. He could read only two lines: “I like kosher meat,” in black print, and beneath, in slanting red cursive, “Jewish faggot.” The night before they’d left, Dennis had told him about the joys of traveling, the strange experiences that were what made life worth living. Joel had pretended to read a magazine, trying not to listen. “I’ve told you about that hike up K2,” Dennis said. “About halfway to base camp I got so cold I thought I was finished. But then I looked behind me, to see how far I’d come. Right then the fog lifted, and the whole range opened up. Mountains peaks in all directions, and I was higher than any of them. Suddenly I didn’t care anymore if I made it to the top. Didn’t care if I made it home. Didn’t care if I lived or died. That’s when I knew I’d done something worthwhile.” “What’s taking so long?” his grandfather called from outside the stall. “Are you sick?” Joel didn’t answer. As long as he didn’t move, he thought, his insides would keep from surging. Through his thin pants, the ceramic cooled his legs. The illegible writing on the door might have told important secrets if only he could read it. He could sound out some familiar letters but couldn’t put meaning to any of the words. He had the feeling that he shouldn’t leave until he knew what they said. His grandfather knocked. “Did you fall in or what?”

25 Joseph Epstein

My Brother Eli

Never let it be said that my kid brother Eli failed to give me anything: he gave me five ex-sisters-in-laws and seven (I think I have the number right) nephews and nieces, three of whom I met for the first time at his funeral. (My wife and I are childless.) At a memorial service I attended a few months afterward, a number of professors and writers and, yes, even the mayor of the City of Chicago talked about the struggles, sensitivity, and soulfulness of a man bearing Eli’s name but who, tell you the truth, I wasn’t able to recognize in any of these tributes. My brother Eli is, make that was, the famous novelist, winner of all the literary prizes, national and international, a guy who scooped up most of the world’s rewards (by which I mean money, women eager to sleep with him, praise from every quarter, international celebrity) without ever seeming particularly happy about any of them. Eli took his life at the age of seventy-nine. You read about it, I’m sure. The official word was that he killed himself because he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but I’m not so sure something else wasn’t behind my brother’s putting a Beretta in his mouth and pulling the trigger. All the obituaries mentioned the Beretta, a nice detail that my brother himself would have appreciated. Eli always wore Borsolino hats; I wonder if he bought the Beretta in the same neighborhood in Rome where he bought his expensive hats, which, befitting the rake he became, he always wore at a rakish angle. There were three of us: I was the firstborn, our sister Arlene came two years later, and then Eli (whose real name was Eliezer Schwartz) four years after that. Our old man worked for a man named Schinberg in the produce market on Fulton Street. An immigrant, unable to read English, he came to this country at sixteen from Bialystok, and, contrary to the standard American success story, never really made it. I don’t “My Brother Eli.” From Epstein, The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff (Mariner Books, 2011). Copyright © 2006, 2011 by Joseph Epstein. First published in The Hudson Review, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Autumn 2006). Reprinted with permission of the author.

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think he ever felt at home here. He was stubborn, argumentative, a difficult character in almost every way, the old man. I call him “the old man” because I can’t remember him young. He left for work at 3:00 a.m., took two different streetcars to Fulton Street, returned at 4:00 p.m., ate, and went to bed early. None of his children was sorry not to have seen more of him. He died at work, our father, outdoors, unloading cases of Texas apples from the back of a truck on a blustery February morning when he was forty-nine years old. Unlike the case with Eli, at the old man’s funeral no one knew what to say on his behalf. Our mother was the hero of the family. She was from Kiev. I don’t ever remember her other than without makeup, gray hair pulled back in a bun. She worked a sixteenhour day: cooking and washing and cleaning for her family, then after supper taking out her Singer sewing machine, which she set up on the kitchen table, doing piecework for Hart, Shaffner & Marx, the men’s clothier, then on Franklin Street. In the few minutes she had for herself, she read novels in Yiddish. She died, worn-out, at fiftyfour. Eli once told me that he thought our mother never loved him. I told him I didn’t know when she would have found time, which wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. The six years’ difference in Eli’s and my age was enough to keep us from ever establishing any real closeness. And then we led such different lives. I went to work in high school for Ben Belinsky, the used auto-parts king, on Western Avenue, near Augusta Boulevard, and never left. I worked for a few years out in the yard, with the Polacks and the colored guys, and then Mr. Belinsky, who was childless, took a shine to me. He was tough but straight, no crap about him, and he gave me a sense of what was honorable conduct, even in a competitive business like auto parts. If you worked hard for him—and I did—he took care of you. He must have seen something in me. He had me to his home for dinner on Jewish holidays. When I was eighteen, he brought me inside, into the office, and began to teach me the business. “Where you make your dough is in buying,” he used to tell me. “Any schmageggi can move the goods if the price is right.” When I graduated from Marshall High School, I thought about going to college, maybe studying accounting. “What do you need to study accounting?” Mr. Belinsky said. “You don’t become an accountant, Louis. You hire an accountant. Forget about accounting. Stick with me. You won’t be sorry.” And I wasn’t. At twenty, I was making more money than my old man. In my middle twenties, Mr. Belinsky told me that, if I wanted it, really wanted it, someday his business would be mine. I wanted it, all right. None of this was ever put on paper, you understand. It didn’t have to be. He was solid, Ben, though I never called him that. I always called him Mr. Belinsky, even when I was in my thirties and he was in his early eighties, still coming down five days a week, working half a day

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on Saturday. Not long before he died, I arrived one morning and saw a new neon sign across the front of the place reading Belinsky & Son, Auto Parts. “That Son on the sign, Louis,” he said, “that’s you.” I excused myself, went into the bathroom, and wept. When Eli was in high school, I arranged for him to work in the yard at Belinsky Auto Parts. You could see right off his heart wasn’t in it. Heavy lifting wasn’t in my kid brother’s line. He didn’t like to get dirty. He was dreamy. He’d bring a book to work, which he read on breaks and which didn’t at all please Mr. Belinsky. What Eli didn’t get in affection from our mother, he got from our sister Arlene. Eli was what you might call a sister’s boy. Everything a person could do for another person without money, Arlene did for Eli: ironed his shirts, helped him buy his clothes, cooked special treats for him, slipped him an extra buck or two when she had it. Arlene and Eli looked a little alike. They both had our mother’s fine features. I resembled more the old man, I have his large feet, thick wrists, big chest, black hair. Arlene didn’t have an easy life. Something in her eyes, in the way she carried herself, suggested vulnerability. She had two bad marriages, no children. Her second husband, a car salesman named Ralph Singer, used to beat her up. I didn’t know about it until one day she turns up at our house for Passover with a black eye. I called Singer, asked him to come to my office the following Monday. When he showed up, I handed him an envelope with five grand in it, told him I wanted him to return home and get his things out of my sister’s apartment, and that I never wanted him to bother my sister again. To show him I was sincere, right there in my office I broke his fuckin’ nose. Eli probably had no bigger fan than Arlene, who, later in life, used to keep scrapbooks filled with the reviews of his novels and the interviews he gave and everything else she found in the papers about him, which was quite a lot. I may not be the most careful reader of my brother’s novels, but I did try my best to follow his career and his life, even if always from a distance. And I noticed a pattern over the decades, which was that Eli seemed to betray everyone who ever loved him. He never betrayed me, not really, but then maybe that was because I got off the love train for my brother fairly early. What I sensed from the beginning was that Eli was in business for himself, and in a way that didn’t make family love any easier. Maybe our father was unfeeling and our mother was certainly preoccupied. But in my mother’s case at least we all knew that she would do everything she could for us, that as best she was able she was in our corner. Of course it wasn’t like today, when if you don’t tell your kid you love him every twenty minutes you could go to jail for child abuse. I always felt close to my sister, close to her and sorry for her both. But for Eli, as I say, I ran out of love fairly soon. I suppose I sensed that he didn’t have much feeling for me, either.

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When he graduated from Marshall, Eli came to tell me that he had a partial scholarship to Columbia University in New York, but he would need my help to pay his way. If I told you how little he needed, you’d laugh, because the sum today would sound trifling. Yet in those days, it wasn’t; it seemed like a fairly big ticket. Still, a brother is a brother, and I said sure, why not, and every month I sent him a check to cover part of his tuition and his living expenses. I never expected a regular thank-you note. But I did make a small mental note in later years, when Eli was making big money, that it never occurred to him to offer to pay me any of that money back, or to say thanks for helping him out when he needed it. Maybe I was supposed to feel privileged to have contributed to the education of the great novelist, though I note that none of Eli’s three biographers ever mentioned how this poor kid from the West Side of Chicago found the money to go off to school in New York. Because so much is known about my brother’s life, I don’t have to connect all the dots about how he fell in with the New York writers he met when he lived there, how he met his first wife, his trips to Europe, things of that nature. But I first knew something was up when Eli published his second novel—I was still reading everything he wrote in those days—the book called The Packard’s Running Board. I’m the so-called hero of that book, in which I’m called Eugene Siegel, and to Mr. Belinsky he gave the name Fred Armitage and made him a Gentile. I don’t read a lot of fiction. I tried, especially when my kid brother was gaining a reputation for turning the stuff out, but I never found the payoff was there, if you know what I mean. I like to read books about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and about the periods in history I’ve lived through myself, like the Depression and World War II. Eli’s first novel, about a young guy growing up in a neighborhood where no one understood his sensitivity, was tough for me to get through at all. I had to drag my eyes across every page, thinking who could possibly give a damn about all this. So the hero of the book is sensitive and the people he’s forced to live among aren’t. I didn’t see the big deal. In The Packard’s Running Board, the character Eugene—me, that is—is on fire with ambition and wanting to impress his boss, who runs a large auto-parts store. (Eli, far as I can see, never did invent a hell of a lot.) So his boss, Mr. Armitage, who is an antiSemite amused at his employee’s eagerness to get ahead, assigns him the job of finding a running board, driver’s side, for a 1942 Packard. Eugene goes scurrying all over the city, trying every scrap yard in the county, but no luck. Then one day he spots a ’42 Packard parked on the street in Oak Park and waits outside to see who owns it. The owner turns out to be one of those old dames with blue-rinse white hair. Eugene follows her home to a mansion in River Forest. He hangs around the neighborhood. He finds out that the old broad’s name is Emily Thornborough, and that she’s the widow of a successful architect. Although the car is old—the novel is set sometime in the late

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1950s—the woman loves it, treats it like a baby, or so Eugene discovers by asking the mechanic at a nearby garage where she takes it in for servicing. To make a long story short, Eugene realizes that he is going to have to steal the goddamn running board. And the rest of the book is about the complications of his finally doing it. A lot of comic hijinks follow: he nearly gets caught, he has the problem of how to get the unwieldy running board back into Chicago on public transportation. When he finally brings it to his boss, the man is unimpressed and says something like “You boys will do anything to get ahead”—“you boys,” we are meant to understand, are Jews—and he fires Eugene on the spot, calling him a thief. End of story. I took this book to represent Eli’s opinion of me, his older brother, who was dedicated to the idea of getting ahead and willing to do anything to do so. Eugene is me, down to the gap between my front teeth, the hair covering the knuckles on my large hands, the way my face sweats when I’m under pressure. In the novel, I’m resourceful but also a major schmuck—and, when you get right down to it, a crook, too. For me the book wasn’t exactly what you’d call easy reading. I don’t know why, but I never confronted Eli with his portrait of his older brother. I wonder if I wouldn’t have done better to call him on it right then and there. I suppose I could have said, “Eli, where do you get off making me out to be such an obnoxious putz in your book? Is this what you really think of me? Explain this—and now.” I was young enough in those days to put the hint—and maybe more than a hint—of menace in my voice. Maybe if I had done this, I might have saved a number of other people Eli later put into his books a lot of grief. Eli’s first marriage was at City Hall in Jersey City, New Jersey. My sister and I heard of it after the fact. He married a girl named Elise Lensky, whose family were big in the socialist movement. Jews went in for this left-wing stuff more in New York than in Chicago. Here we’re happy just to make a living and get some kind of fix on reality. Our hands are full trying to cope with the world as it is. We don’t waste a lot of time on the world as it ought to be. Around this time, Eli himself turned socialist, with a big interest in Leon Trotsky. I learned this from his wife, who called me one day to tell me that she was pregnant, in her sixth month, and that Eli and a pal had gone off to tour all the Communist countries of Eastern Europe to view at firsthand how Trotsky’s teachings had been perverted under Stalin. She had medical and other expenses, and Eli had told her to get in touch with me if she ran out of the money he had left with her. The money was gone, and now she had nowhere else to turn. I sent her a grand, by Western Union. I have no idea why Eli needed to leave a pregnant wife the way he did, but when he returned two months later, he called to thank me for coming through with the money. He said that he had a new book in the works that his publisher thought might make some serious dough, and that he would repay me as soon as he could. I can’t remember

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how I found out that he and his wife had had a son named David; probably through Arlene, who kept in better touch with Eli than I did. But less than a year later, he broke up his marriage to the Lensky girl. Five or so years must have passed before I next saw my brother. The book his publishers had thought would make some money for him apparently did well, and it also evidently increased his reputation, putting him, as Arlene said, in the front rank of contemporary writers. He had a new wife, a painter of abstract art whose name was Felicia, and he had taken to wearing expensive, somewhat gaudy clothes: suits with tight trousers, shirts with bold stripes, loud ties, pointy shoes. He was losing his hair, which may have explained why he was increasingly being photographed wearing a hat. He was in town to pick up a literary prize and give a talk at Roosevelt University. I went with Arlene to hear the talk. The auditorium was filled. Eli was introduced as a writer who had changed the nature of modern writing. The talk was about an Irishman named James Joyce, who was evidently a great man for my brother. I couldn’t make out a lot of it, but I did get that Eli admired this Joyce because he let nothing stand in his way of his writing, not the welfare of his family, nothing, even, I couldn’t help note, continually borrowing from a brother, Stanislaus, I think the guy’s name was, whom he never repaid. Eli came up to Arlene and me at the reception after the talk. He embraced Arlene, put out his hand to me. “How goes it, Lou?” “Not too bad, Eli,” I said, “but not so good as it seems to be going for you. This is a nice crowd you drew tonight.” “I provide artificial pearls for real swine,” he said, looking around the room. He was wearing some sort of sharkskin suit, light grey, with high pockets in the trousers, a belt of matching material, and a silky green tie with a thick knot under a spread collar. I couldn’t remember if he always had this drugstore wise-guy air about him. Or had it come with his success? “How’s auto parts?” he asked me. “It’s a living,” I said, adding, “and a hell of a lot easier now that no one’s asking for old running boards.” “Who’d have thought my big brother read my books?” he said with a smile. “Lou, you please me more than you can know. You astonish me, in fact.” I was about to tell him my opinion about that particular book but then thought better of it. He was my brother, after all, and I’m not good at telling people off. I tend to go too far, and I really didn’t want to break things off with Eli, not yet anyhow. The young woman who had introduced Eli, a Professor Shansky—Jewish, zaftig, in her mid-thirties—came up, excused herself for taking Eli off, but the president of the university and some of its larger donors were expecting him for a small dinner party.

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Eli smiled at her in a way that implied if not possible past intimacies certainly future ones to come. He was then married to his second wife. “I better run,” he said. He kissed Arlene on both cheeks and gripped my upper right arm. “Stay well, both of you. I’ll be in touch.” “You know, Lou,” Arlene said to me on the way home, “he’s not really our brother anymore. He belongs to the world now. He’s a famous man, our little Eli.” “I suppose that’s so,” I said. “But I wish I liked him a little more.” “What’s not to like?” Arlene said. “He’s our brother.” “My guess is that he doesn’t harbor many brotherly feelings about either of us, though probably more toward you than me. Eli’s going to take what he wants and do what he wants, with very little obligation felt on his side. Eli’s one of life’s takers.” “I wonder, Lou, if you aren’t being too hard on him. He’s not like the rest of us, you know. Eli’s an artist.” “I see where your brother’s got his ass in a sling,” Al Hirsch said, smiling the kind of smile lawyers do when they discover fresh news of greed or other human depravity of the kind off which they make their living. “What for?” I asked. “As you probably know, he’s going through his third divorce, and it seems that he left falsified tax documents around the marital apartment, to make it look as if he’s been earning a lot less money than he’s actually been earning. It’s an old trick, and an extremely dumb one, if I may say so.” As a matter of fact, I didn’t know that Eli was going through another divorce. I’d met his third wife twice. Her name was Sharon Lefkowitz, and she was a striking-looking woman, dark good looks, terrific figure, all-year-round suntan. Formidable, a tiger of a woman, is how I’d describe her. Unlike Eli’s first two wives, she was no socialist or artist, but the daughter of a Chicago dentist known for his cleverness at real-estate deals. She didn’t figure to be a girl who would take divorce lightly. She must have scared Eli good with her demands for him to hoke up fake tax documents. But now that he’s done it, my poor schmuck little brother had apparently really put his head in the tiger’s mouth. “Who’s my brother’s attorney?” “A moron named Morty Silverman. He has an office on Washington off LaSalle. A flamboyant guy who’s known to bang his female clients and who’s never really made his nut.” I remember Morty Silverman from the old neighborhood. His father had a dry cleaner’s on Roosevelt Road. Morty was a little guy, dressed flashy, wore porkpie hats. Funny that Eli would use Morty Silverman when serious things were at stake. It showed a kind of loyalty, I guess. “I thought your kid brother’s supposed to be a genius,” Al said.

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“A limited genius,” I said. “He’s mostly a genius at telling other people what’s wrong with the way they live. Not so smart, though, when it comes to his own life.” Eli had moved back to Chicago a few years before. In an interview he gave to the New York Times, which Arlene had sent to me, he said that he no longer needed to live in New York, its rhythms weren’t his, he needed Chicago where the grit of reality was in the air. Well, from what Al Hirsch said, Eli must by now have had a mouth full of this grit. Arlene, always the family peacemaker, gave a dinner to which she invited me, my wife Gerry, Eli and a new lady friend of his, a professor of some kind at the University of Chicago. She also invited another couple, named Wertheimer, who lived in her building. They were both shrinks, Arlene said, foreign-born, a little nutty, but nice. They were fans of Eli’s novels and wanted to meet him. Eli arrived after the rest of us. His lady friend, he explained, couldn’t make it. “Illness in the family” is all he offered in the way of an excuse. We sat in Arlene’s living room, the six of us. Eli seemed harried, tired; his face was pouchier than I remembered. He had dark circles under his eyes. He was wearing a tan suit with an emphatic Gleneagle plaid. He had a silk handkerchief in his jacket pocket, purple to match his wide necktie. Before Eli had arrived, the Wertheimers asked me a number of questions about my brother. The Wertheimers were Jews who had escaped Germany and spoke with strong accents, Henrietta Wertheimer’s stronger than her husband Karl’s. Henrietta said that one of her special interests was in the childhood of artists, and she wanted to know what I could tell her about my brother’s upbringing, particularly anything that might have contributed to his impressive career. The truth was, I couldn’t think of a damn thing. A shame our father wasn’t in the room, I thought; his gruff presence would have given the Wertheimers a lot to think about in connection with what Karl Wertheimer called “the developmental aspect of the artist’s early years.” I could have told them that Eli’s father never gave him or any of his children the time of day, and he thought his mother didn’t love him. Let them chew on that for a while. But I said very little, except that my brother’s talent had not shown up early, at least that I was aware. He just seemed a very bright kid. “You were an adherent of the doctrines of Wilhelm Reich, no?” Henrietta Wertheimer asked Eli. “Are you still?” Eli laughed. “That was a long while ago,” he said. “My brother Lou here, who is in used-auto parts, probably never heard of an orgone box, but I had my very own such appliance. Kept it in a large closet in an apartment I lived in on West 106th Street in the late 1940s. Spent hours in it brooding in the hope of increasing my sexual energy, but mostly I sat there thinking of ways to advance the plots in my novels.” “Reich was of course a fascist,” said Karl Wertheimer.

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“I gather he was,” Eli said, “but not so great a totalitarian as your man Sigmundo the Freud.” I didn’t know what the hell Eli was talking about, but you had to be a dope not to recognize that he didn’t like the Wertheimers. “Well, totalitarian, I don’t know,” Karl Wertheimer said. “Freud was in possession of the most powerful ideas of the age, and I think it unfair to consider him more than judicious in guarding them from those who might dilute or otherwise corrupt them.” “Powerful ideas?” You mean like the unrelenting desire of children to sleep with their parents? Lou,” Eli said, turning to me, “funny but I can’t ever recall your mentioning your ardent desire to mount up on Ma. Or am I wrong about this?” I didn’t answer. Things didn’t get better at dinner, for which Arlene had obviously gone to a lot of trouble. Between the vegetable soup and the salad, Karl Wertheimer asked if anyone at the table had read Shakespeare in German. I felt like saying that I couldn’t make him out so easy in English—except the play Julius Caesar, which they made us read in high school—but I clammed up. Dr. Wertheimer then went on to say that there is a school of thought that held that Shakespeare, in the Schiller or Schlegel or some other kraut’s translation, was even better in German. I was watching Eli, who, up till now, I thought was trying, if not very hard, not to wreck his sister’s dinner party completely. “You know,” Eli said, “I think I’ve had just about enough of this German-Jewish bullshit.” You’d think that after making a remark like that he’d toss his napkin on the table, get out of his chair, and ask for his hat and coat. But Eli did nothing of the kind. He just sat there. Which meant that the Wertheimers had to get up and leave. They did so without much fuss, I’ll give them that. “Perhaps this meeting was a mistake, Arlene,” Karl Wertheimer said. “I hope you will forgive us if we depart early.” On the way out, Henrietta Wertheimer mumbled something about how nice it was nice to meet my wife Gerry and me. I shook Karl Wertheimer’s small, soft hand. Eli sat there, finishing his soup. When they left the room, Arlene followed them to the door, offering God knows what excuse for her brother’s behavior. “I’ve heard it said,” Eli noted, “that if you dislike a person, it always helps to imagine that person as German. And if you really dislike him, it’s best of all to imagine him as a German woman. I’ll say this for Henrietta Wertheimer, under this arrangement she doesn’t force the imagination into a lot of extra exercise.” “You were pretty tough on those people,” I said. “Lou,” he said, “I’ve come to an age and stage in life where I no longer feel it incumbent upon me to listen to crap, and if there are greater purveyors of crap than intellectuals, then it is people with pretensions to knowledge of the soul, like Arlene’s good German neighbors.”

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“A little hard on Arlene, though, wouldn’t you say, Eli?” my wife said. “I mean these people were her guests.” “I don’t worry about Arlene,” he said. “Arlene’ll understand.” When Arlene returned, I was a little surprised to discover that she didn’t say a word to Eli about his treatment of the Wertheimers. She just served the rest of the meal as if nothing unusual had happened, and we talked about the old days on the West Side and, of course, about Eli. “Is your new lady friend all right?” Arlene asked him. “She’s fine,” Eli said. “We had an argument. She wants me to marry her. Her name’s Karen Wilkinson, by the way. She’s an astronomer at the University of Chicago. Not having had very good luck with wives in the humanities—and in the case of Sharon, my last wife, in the inhumanities—I thought I’d shop the sciences for a while.” “And you’re not interested in remarrying?” Gerry asked him, with an unmistaken note of wonder in her voice. “God, no. I’m already a three-time loser. And besides, it’s 1974, and, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, it isn’t such a hot time for marrying. Sex is hanging everywhere, like salamis in a delicatessen. The country’s gone nuts. Everything’s up for grabs. A man would have to be insane to marry today.” On the drive home, my wife said that she didn’t understand why any woman would want to marry her brother-in-law, since he was so obviously a bad risk, certain to bring unhappiness to any wife, not to mention his being a certifiably lousy father. “And I would have killed your brother if he ever did anything like what he did to the Wertheimers to any guests of mine,” Gerry said. “I don’t get Arlene’s being so calm about it.” “Arlene is devoted to Eli. She’s sure he’s a genius. She accepts his own idea of himself as a great man.” “And you, what do you think?” “I think something’s wrong with him. He may be talented, like everyone says, but I think he’s got a screw loose. Something’s missing in him.” “Maybe he’s beginning to believe all the things that are written about him,” Gerry said. “Maybe, except I think Eli believed them even before they were written.” Three weeks later we learned through Arlene, our usual source, that, despite all his talk about society and sex and salami and the rest of it, Eli had married his astronomer. I had another sister-in-law, my fourth. As I said earlier, I didn’t have much luck reading my brother’s novels. I tried, but it was no-go. They weren’t about a world I knew, nor did I find myself caring very much about how things worked out in them. Near as I could make out, they seemed to be mostly about Jewish intellectuals who thought that life had dealt

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them a bad hand and that reality was hard for them to locate. Gerry read them, and while she wasn’t crazy about them, either, she felt forcing her eyes across the pages to finish them was part of her duty as a sister-in-law. Occasionally, she would call my attention to a passage or section, where she thought I might know if Eli was writing about something or someone from the old neighborhood. She was usually right about this. In the most recent book of my brother’s, called Kaiserman’s Kiss of Death, Gerry pointed out some rough passages about a character he called Leo Kaiserman, a failed lawyer, a little guy in a porkpie hat. He’s unethical in every way possible. This Kaiserman is also sex-crazed, not to be trusted around any skirt. He uses the same methods of seducing every woman he confronts. He quotes poetry to them and also a Russian named Berdaev. When Kaiserman at one point goes into the hospital, Eli has him flash himself in front of nurses. Kaiserman is Morty Silverman, there can’t be any doubt about it, and my brother has made his old pal out to be a real creep. Why would Eli do this? Maybe he was paying Morty back for the stupid advice he gave him about faking his tax forms. This seemed a pretty stiff payback. I wondered if Morty himself would read it—I was fairly sure he would—and how he would react? Gerry told me that Eli had done much worse with Elise, his first wife. In a novel with the title Skolnik, which I never got around to reading, he painted her as betraying him with another man and running off with him and their three-year-old son. This isn’t the way I heard the story. I was told that Eli had left Elise because he said that an artist can’t be tied down to a family, with a baby carriage in the hallway and the rest of it. I don’t know the real story. What is true is that Eli made his first wife out to be a real nafke. What must she have thought of it? What would be the effect on their child in real life, who by now must be in his twenties? I recall being pissed off when my brother had written about me, and I felt all the more strongly that I should’ve kicked his ass and put a stop to this kind of thing right then and there. What amazed me is that no one seemed much to mind Eli’s behavior. His fame spread. Gerry was always calling my attention to some item about him in the Chicago papers. He gave a lot of interviews, Eli did, but he always seemed to do so reluctantly, almost as if he were being forced into it. I noticed, too, that whenever he won a prize, many of them involving fairly heavy cash, he would accept it with a slight grudgingness. “I am very pleased to have been awarded this prize, if only . . .” “I’m grateful to be the recipient of this prize, though I have to say that while it pleases me greatly it also makes me dubious of . . .” There was something phony about the whole deal, but it seemed to be working. I can’t speak about the importance of my brother’s writing, but he was a real public-relations genius. Maybe Eli thought I was insufficiently impressed by him, or thought that, unlike the rest of the world, I didn’t praise him enough, tell him how proud I was of him

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every other day, but then Gerry and I didn’t see much of him, even though we were now living in the same city, we on Lake Shore Drive, Eli and his new wife in Hyde Park. One day we get an invitation from the Mayor’s Office for an event at which Eli was going to be presented with a medal from the City of Chicago. There was a dinner involved and an award ceremony at Navy Pier. It was black-tie. What the hell, I said to Gerry, let’s see how the other half lives. “Which half is that?” she said. This turned out to be not so dumb a question. At the reception before the dinner, every tuchas lecher in town was on display. One of the first sights I saw after entering the hall was the gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet hug a small guy named Walter Jacobson, used to be a batboy for the Cubs, who now does the local evening news. While hugging each other, I notice each of them is looking over the shoulder of the other to see if there isn’t someone more important in the room. A strange little guy named Studs Terkel, who has a radio interview show on the classical music station, is racing around pressing the flesh of everyone in the place. I don’t know much about him, but I remember Eli once calling him “a cracker-barrel Stalinist” and his laughing at the pleasure the phrase gave him. Gerry once asked me if I ever noticed that Eli seemed to laugh a lot but rarely smiled. Lots of women from the Gold Coast, the high-maintenance kind, were there with their tired-looking husbands, who’d probably be happier if left to stay home to watch the Bulls-Lakers game. I recognized a number of aldermen who, they don’t steal enough as it is, can always be counted on to show up for a free meal. Mike Ditka, the former coach of the Bears with his thick features, was talking to the mayor. Gerry spotted Jesse Jackson leaning in close to talk to a striking black woman who does the evening news on Channel 9. Then Eli walked in with his wife, who, after four years of marriage to my brother, already looked exhausted. There was something dark and haunted in her eyes. She seemed thinner than I remembered when I first met her. In her red gown and high heels, she was a few inches taller than Eli. Eli was wearing a tux with an especially wide sateen collar, a shirt with lots of big ruffles, and a red cummerbund and an enormous red bow tie, of the kind which, if, when you shook his hand, it flashed “Kiss Me,” you wouldn’t be in the least surprised. He looked like a Jewish trombone player in the old Xavier Cougat orchestra. His wispy, now completely white, hair was combed over and patted down to cover his baldness. He got the family talent, wherever in the hell it came from originally, but I got our old man’s thick hair, which maybe was the better deal. The dinner was first class: large platters of seafood to start, choice of prime rib or salmon, lots of wine, cherries jubilee to end. When the dishes were cleared, the mayor, who wasn’t known for fancy language, rose to say that culture has always been

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important to the City of Chicago, and then he reeled off a number of names of writers who had lived here, and he said that Eli was continuing in their line. In honoring Eli, he said, a man who had been born and grew up in Chicago and was now its greatest writer, the city was honoring one of its own, and he was proud to bestow the city’s medal for literature on him, which he then did. Eli stood at the podium, the heavy medal dangling from his neck on a red-whiteand-blue ribbon, the large red bow tie just above it. He looked clownish. He waited for the applause to end. He grinned. I looked over at Karen, his wife, who was sitting across from me. She was staring down at the tablecloth. “Well,” Eli began, “this is quite an honor. I want to thank the mayor for his kind words. I want to thank Lois Weisberg and others in the city’s office of culture. My big brother’s here tonight, so I have to be careful what I say. He’s a tough guy, and, should I step out of line, he’s sure to let me have it. Isn’t that so, Lou? “The relation of writers to power is a subject with a long and often squalid history,” he continued. “I can’t help wondering if, in accepting this handsome medal and eating this luscious food, I’ve not become part of that history. Literature is supposed to represent truth, and, as such, to tell truth to power, if only because everyone else is frightened to do so.” Here Eli looked over to the mayor. “How’re you doing, kiddo?” he said. “Yes,” he went on, “truth speaks to power, but the question is, does power ever really listen? Or does it instead merely pretend to listen and honor it with occasions such as this evening’s gala? In Communist countries, they take writers very seriously—so seriously that they often kill them. Here in the United States, in the city of Chicago specifically, they offer them a choice of roast beef or salmon. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take the salmon over a firing squad any day. Still, it would be nice to be taken seriously, too.” And then Eli just stopped. That was it. Done. Finished. At first people didn’t know what to do. Everyone looked at the mayor, who, after an interval of maybe ten seconds, began to applaud, which allowed everyone else in the room to do so, though the clapping was polite at best. I looked over at Eli’s wife, who, returning my look, rolled her eyes back in her head, as if to say, “Here’s your brother, you figure him out.” “So,” Eli, now back at our table, leaned over and said to me, “how did I do?” “I’d have to say that you didn’t exactly knock ’em dead, kid.” “That’s OK,” he said, “the main thing is that I knocked ’em.” Gerry took a cab home; she had an early morning appointment the next day, and I stuck around a little longer. When I was getting ready to leave, Eli asked me if I would mind taking his wife home. He had some business to attend to after the party. I said of course, why not? I had been around my sister-in-law maybe four times, and never alone. I wasn’t sure what we’d have to talk about, but it turned out that it didn’t matter much because she did most of the talking.

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“You know, Louis,” she said, as I pulled out of the garage at Navy Pier, “Eli and I are splitting up. He’s an impossible person, which you must already know.” “I’ve had some strong hints,” I said. “He needs to flirt with all kinds of women. His fame as a writer gives him some strange aphrodisiac quality for them, or so I suppose. They like to sleep with a famous writer. What I find hard to understand is that he, Eli, doesn’t seem to have all that much interest in what really, you know, goes on in bed. He’s a very impatient lover, Eli. Forgive my not saying this more politely, but your brother doesn’t know a clitoris from a kneecap.” I nearly drove over the median into onrushing Outer Drive traffic. “It was a serious mistake on my part ever to start up with your brother. He humiliates me in public. He ignores me in private. I’m sure that someday he’ll put me in one of his novels as a witch and whore and add a few bad hygienic habits at no extra charge. I don’t care. I don’t need money from him. To be free from him is gift enough. I’ll be very happy no longer to be Mrs. Eli Black, the fourth. I’m sure there’ll be a few more Mrs. Eli Blacks, all with numbers after their names, like ennobling suffixes.” When I let her out of the car in front of her and Eli’s apartment at the Cloisters, before opening the door, she said, “Your brother thinks that because he’s an artist he can do what he wants, hurt people whenever he likes. Everything is justified by his books. As an astronomer, I don’t think Eli knows how small, how truly insignificant, he really is. Maybe someday he’ll find out. Good-bye, Louis.” She shook my hand as she left the car, and I never saw her again. Maybe it was a year after this that Gerry and I went to a United Jewish Fund dinner and found ourselves seated at the same table with a young guy named Rick Feldrow. He was a lawyer who also wrote novels; all of them were made into movies, and damn good movies, too. He was a small guy, bald, but he looked firm, like he must’ve spent some time on treadmills. When we were introduced, he said he’d heard that I was Eli Black’s brother. When I told him I was, he opened up to me in a way that took me a little by surprise. “I can’t tell you how much I admire your brother’s writing,” he said. “He’s my personal hero, make that my household god.” “Why’s that?” I asked. “Because he writes like an angel. Because he understands what is really going on in the country. Because his novels will live forever.” “How’s it you’re so sure of all this?” “Well,” he said, “I can’t of course be sure. But right now, of everyone who’s scribbling away, he looks like the top contender to be read fifty or a hundred years from now.” “Have you met my brother?”

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“Never,” he said. “I’d still be daunted to meet him. When I was young, I used to imagine that Eli Black was my father, that I had inherited his talent, that he would guide me through the rocky places in life. My own father, who was a physician, never had much time for me, and when he did, he was hypercritical.” “Sorry to hear that,” I said. “But I don’t think you’d have had much luck with my brother Eli as a father, either.” “Really?” he said “Why’s that?” I felt a light kick under the table from Gerry. “It’s complicated,” I said, and turned to the woman sitting on my left.

Eli and I were never in anything like regular touch. Six, eight months might go by without either of us calling the other. Sometimes we’d meet at the funeral of a cousin—Eli had a touch of family sentimentality—though not that often. But one day he calls and says that he has to meet me on urgent business. How’s tomorrow for lunch? he wants to know. We met at the Standard Club. Eli was waiting in the foyer, dressed in one of his racy suits, this one black-and-white checks, wearing a shirt with thick red stripes, white collar and cuffs, and a yellow necktie. As we walked to our table in the main dining room, I sensed people staring at us—at my brother, for Eli’s picture was fairly often in the papers and he qualified around town as a celebrity. After the waiter took our order, Eli, looking around the room, smiled, and said, “Wouldn’t the old man be amused to see us having lunch in this joint? We’ve both come a long way from Roosevelt Road and Kedzie.” “You a lot way farther than me,” I said. “But what’s on your mind?” “I need a loan of a quarter of a million dollars,” he said. “That’s a pretty serious number. For what, may I ask?” “You may. I’m in deep water with a man named Sid Gusio on a bad deal I made in an investment in nursing homes.” “Where do you come to know a thug like Gusio?” I asked. “I met him at the Riviera Club, where I play racquetball,” Eli said. “A very amiable fellow, or so he at first seems.” Sid Gusio was the Chicago Syndicate’s man in charge of gambling and prostitution, and, as that job description implies, not a man to fool with. Eli had no more business with a man like Gusio than a mouse walking into the den of a lion. “He’s a dangerous character, Eli.” “Tell me about it,” Eli said. “He was, he said, putting me onto a good thing. For a hundred grand investment in a nursing-home complex being built in Oak Lawn, I’d get triple my investment back within two years, or so he claimed. Only now he tells me

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that they vastly underestimated costs. I need to come up with another two-hundredand-fifty grand to protect my original investment. Except that Gusio made it evident that I didn’t have much choice in the matter. It wasn’t, he made it fairly plain, an entirely voluntary matter. I couldn’t just walk away and lose my original investment of a hundred thousand, though at this point this is what I wouldn’t so much mind doing. But walking away, I strongly suspect, isn’t really an option.” I couldn’t help thinking, Eli, my schmuck brother, gets his pecker in a wringer every time he ventures away from his desk, Eli, who wouldn’t know reality if it bit him in the ass, the man who writes books telling everyone else they’re living badly, Eli going up against Sid Gusio was no contest. “What makes you sure he won’t come back to you for still more money?” “Nothing,” Eli said. I could sense his fear. Also his embarrassment. Always so goddamn knowing about everything, Eli was reduced to coming to his big brother for help. “You don’t have any of this money yourself?” I asked. “I have a high nut, Lou, lots of ex-wives, kids, school bills, you don’t know the half of it.” “Christ, Eli, every time I open the paper someone’s giving you a new prize. You must get ten or twenty grand a shot for talks. And what about the dough your books bring in? How broke can you be?” “Look, Lou, without going into details, all I can tell you is that I don’t have the money and no prospects of getting it except from you.” I had already made up my mind to lend Eli the money, but, for some reason, I didn’t want to make it easy for him. I hate to admit it, but I found myself enjoying this. “Suppose I loan you the money,” I said. “What’re you offering in collateral? The Pulitzer Prize?” “How about I give you the continuing royalties for my first three novels?” he said, quite serious. “An IOU will do, with a schedule of repayment,” I said. “But Eli, maybe you’ll take a little free literary advice. Don’t ever put Sid Gusio into one of your novels. Unless you want a couple of knee-replacement operations.” One day at the office, my secretary tells me that David Black is on the phone. I don’t recall knowing any David Black, but I pick up the phone anyway. “Hello, Uncle Lou,” a voice says, “I’m your brother Eli’s son, and I’m in Chicago for a couple of days and I wonder if we could maybe meet.” Then it clicked in. David was Eli’s son by his first marriage. I remember him only as a child. He must be in his thirties by now. He lived in northern California, Santa Rosa, if I remembered correctly. “Where are you?” I asked. “Staying with your dad?”

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“No,” he said, “it turns out that my father’s out of town. I’m here on business, staying at the Continental Hotel on Michigan Avenue. I don’t really know Chicago at all. But is it possible we could meet for lunch or a drink?” “Sure, kid,” I said. “It’d be fine.” We arranged to meet the next day at a bar in the Drake Hotel called the Coq d’Or, which served good sandwiches and which, if you arrived after the lunch rush, provided a certain amount of privacy, though I wasn’t sure what this boy and I had to talk about. The first thing I discovered was that my nephew was no kid. He was balding, slightly paunchy, with his father’s nose and slightly flared nostrils. He was taller than Eli and darker. Something a little soft about him, vulnerable, but something, too, that made my heart go out to him. It was probably his having grown up without a father. “Thanks for meeting me,” he said, putting out his hand. We took a table against the far wall, ordered beers and hamburgers, and I asked him what brought him to Chicago. “I’m here for a conference,” he said. “I’m a civil engineer and work for the California highway system. The conference is about state highway funding. Dull stuff to most people, I suppose, but important in my line of work.” “Have you seen your father recently?” “I called him before coming to town, but he told me that he was going to be in London.” “Are you in regular touch with him?” “Irregular touch would be closer to it. Sometimes a year or two will go by without our meeting. Usually I call him on his birthday.” Eli had divorced David’s mother when he was three years old. She took him to California and remarried a few years later. Eli hadn’t much money in those days and saw his son probably no more than once a year, if that. When he remarried and had other children, he saw him even less. “I learned to get on without my father,” David said. “When I was a teenager, I sort of followed his career in the newspapers. At school nobody knew that my father was the famous writer, which was fine by me. My stepfather, who died two years ago, was a decent man. My mother had two other children with him, but he always treated me fairly. I have no complaints.” David told me that he had three children of his own. Eli had not yet seen the youngest, a boy who was four years old. I thought how much my own wife missed having grandchildren. “I suppose the one grudge I hold against my father is the way he portrayed my mother in one of his novels, where he makes her out to be so vengeful and little more than an obstacle to his own career. I’ve always wanted to say something to him about

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the meanness of that but I’ve never had the guts. When it comes to his writing, he can be very touchy, my father.” “I haven’t had much luck reading your dad’s novels,” I said. “Maybe it’s because they don’t have plots. I’m just an engineer, what do I know, but my father’s books seem to be mostly about men like him, Jewish intellectuals who feel the world has screwed them in some deep yet not entirely clear way. His main points, near as I can make out, is that nobody understands the modern artist and just about everyone is an anti-Semite. But his books seem to charm lots of people. I don’t think there’s a prize left he hasn’t won. And he’s been translated in all kinds of languages.” David went on to talk about his wife, who is a graphic artist, and his children and how he came to study engineering. When he asked me about my own family and business, he listened carefully as I told him about my life. He seemed a solid kid, my nephew, and I wished I could do something for him, something to make up for all the things that my brother didn’t do. Eli’s and Arlene’s and my father wasn’t much, but at least he was on the premises, and he sure as hell didn’t attack our mother in public. Thank God for small blessings. Out on the street in front of the Drake, David and I exchanged business cards, and he said he hoped I would visit him and my grand-nephews and niece if I should ever find myself in Santa Rosa. “It’s the wine country, you know, Sonoma Valley,” he said. I told him I’d try to stay in touch, but life being what it is, I was fairly sure that we probably wouldn’t meet again. A few weeks later, I called my brother to tell him about my meeting with his son and what a fine young man I thought he is. “You’re lucky to have such a kid,” I said. “It’s none of my business, but you probably ought to see him more than you do.” “You’re right, Lou,” Eli said. “It isn’t any of your business. Look, I don’t expect you to understand this, but all the energy I have goes into my books—all of it. There isn’t anything left for anything else.” “Whaddaya writing, the Bible?” I said. “They’re only novels, Eli. We’re talking about human beings here, a son and grandchildren.” “What the hell do you know about the life of an artist?” he said and hung up on me.

My sister Arlene had had a bout with breast cancer, and now, four years later, she called one night in tears to tell us that the cancer had returned, metastasized to the brain. It was inoperable. Arlene’s two marriages, like my own marriage, produced no children. She hadn’t gone to college and worked for many years as the bookkeeper at Zimmerman’s Liquors in the Loop. I helped her out a bit financially when her building went condo and she wanted to buy her apartment; I also gave her some investment

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advice that worked out well. But she had no one in the world except Gerry and me, who loved her, and Eli. She was given between six to eight months to live. Arlene was the most generous-spirited person I ever knew. She had no meanness, no anger, no envy—at least none that I ever saw. When I went with her to see Al Hirsch to discuss her will, she decided to divide everything she had between Eli’s grandchildren. I learned then that she had a list of their birthdays and every year sent each one of them a card with a $50 bill in it. She made me promise not to tell Eli about the return of her cancer. “He hates death,” she said. “He can’t stand hearing about it. I’ll tell him when the time gets nearer.” Arlene had also arranged another dinner with her neighbors the Wertheimers. She had a bad conscience about the way the previous one had turned out, and she hoped that we would come again. Of course we said yes. She told us, too, that she hadn’t told the Wertheimers about the return of her cancer, and we were instructed not to mention it. The going was much easier without Eli there. We talked about the Wertheimers’ and Arlene’s neighbors, about the American infatuation with sports, about their foreigners’ view of American politics. “Too much virtue in American politics,” Karl Wertheimer said. “I prefer a straighter kind of political engagement. I mean one in which one votes one’s interests and beliefs and doesn’t think people who vote otherwise are monsters or idiots.” Arlene was a good cook, and the dinner was excellent. It was only at dessert— a pineapple upside-down cake—and coffee that Henrietta Wertheimer asked if we minded talking about Eli. No one seemed to object. “Your brother, you know, is a peculiar but not entirely unknown type,” she said. “Nothing, it seems, makes him happy. Not his successes, not his wives and children, not all the world’s lavish praise of his work. Psychotherapy doesn’t really have a label for such a condition. He isn’t a depressive, nothing so simple as that. Yet, one could tell from a single meeting with him, and from the many seemingly grudging interviews he has given to the press, that the world—how to say this?—the world disappoints him. It isn’t, somehow, good enough for him.” “I note from a recent interview,” Karl Wertheimer joined in, “that your brother has begun a dalliance with the doctrines of Rudolf Steiner. Perhaps you know of this man Steiner?” None of us did. “A quack not even of the first order,” he continued. “In his doctrine, spirits are aloft, souls join in the empyrean, all sorts of other—how do you Americans say?—fun and games. But what I find interesting in all this is your brother’s need for a higher doctrine, for a system of ideas, no matter how foolish. He was a Trotskyist, I understand, as a young man, then there is the Wilhelm Reich period, which we talked about

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earlier, now there is Rudolf Steiner. Perhaps, who knows, in the end he will die, your brother, as a Catholic.” I didn’t know how to respond. The Wertheimers knew a lot more about the intellectual side of Eli than I did. But what I took from their account of my brother’s adventures among the quacks was his basic unreality. He grew up on the same streets I did. We had the same parents. How could two people be so different? “What do you make of all my brother-in-law’s marriages?” Gerry asked. “A number of possible ways of viewing this,” Henrietta Wertheimer said. “Perhaps they express a yearning for the settled life that he thinks he wants but does not really want. Perhaps he operates, your brother-in-law, under a theory of muses, like the painter Picasso or the choreographer Balanchine, who had different wives and mistresses for different phases of their respective careers. This, too, is possible.” “What seems clear to me,” Karl Wertheimer joined in, “is that Eli Black believes in the myth of the artist. This is a myth that holds that everything must be sacrificed for art. It may not be a foolish myth if one is, say, Michelangelo or Beethoven. But if one is less than that, then the myth of the artist is very destructive, sadly so for the people who become too closely involved with him.” When it finally came time to tell Eli about the return of Arlene’s cancer, he did come to visit. He had by this time moved to Washington, planning, he said, to write a political novel, though he never did. (Instead, Gerry tells me, he wrote a novel attacking his fourth wife for not understanding the condition of the artist and for her unconscious anti-Semitism.) He stayed at Arlene’s apartment over a long weekend. I never found out what they spent their time talking about, but I’d bet it wasn’t about death. When I tried to talk to Eli about hospice and other arrangements for Arlene, he seemed very uncomfortable. Nobody likes death, but Eli seemed to take death personally. He didn’t quite see why death should one day have to happen to him, too. He seemed to feel there was something unfair about it, at least in his case. Now that he was near seventy, he did what he could to fight it. When he came over for dinner at our apartment, he told Gerry beforehand that he no longer ate meat. He spent a lot of time in gyms. He took up yoga. He became thin, which only made him look older. A picture of him published in the Chicago Tribune Magazine shows his skin sagging, his hooded eyes looking wrinkled like a lizard’s, his nose larger, wearing one of his crazy suits (blue-grey with red stripes outlined faintly in yellow), a pink shirt, a bandana around what appeared to be his goiterish neck. He looked, Gerry said, like an ancient Jewish parrot.

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I also noted a strong strain of sentimentality in my brother. Although Eli didn’t come to Arlene’s funeral—he said it would have been too much for him—once she was dead he spoke of her as if she were a saint. “She was the only person who ever truly loved me,” he told me, “who took me exactly as I am, no questions asked.” He even had kind words for our father. He was supercritical of other writers, but if one of them died, he spoke more kindly about him. To earn Eli’s respect, apparently you have to die first. That seemed to me a very steep price to have to pay. Eli had repaid my quarter of a million loan, right on schedule. His life seemed, at least as far as I could tell, on a firmer basis. He was married to the same woman, the dean of a university in Washington, where he now lived, for eight or so years. He published a new novel. As a writer, he was respected more than ever, or so Gerry reported from reading the reviews of this latest book. I was headed toward eighty; my brother was seventy-three. And then I hear that Eli had left his wife to marry a graduate student at Georgetown University, a woman not yet thirty. Which means she was more than forty years younger than he was. Something in my brother evidently can’t stand peace and quiet. I knew nothing about the girl, but I could imagine what her parents must have felt when she told them she was going to marry a man older than they were. I shouldn’t be surprised if Eli, in his vanity, felt his sexual attraction was still there, he was still in the game, still a player. Gerry jokingly wondered if her brother-in-law and his new bride were registered at Marshall Fields. I felt sorry for the girl. I felt even sorrier when, a year or so later, Eli’s son David called to tell me that his father and his young wife had had a Down syndrome child, a boy they named Frederick. What the hell was Eli thinking! No doubt jacked up on Viagra, was he going to show the world he was still virile? Hadn’t he already proved he was a misery as a father? Why prove it again? Gerry thought that a child probably wasn’t Eli’s idea but his young wife’s. She said that it sounded like the notion of a young woman to want the child of the much older husband, something to have after he had gone. A part of me felt sorry for Eli. I found it hard to imagine the life he led with a young wife, with whom he couldn’t have all that much in common, and now a retarded son. Eli never called to tell me that he had remarried or that he had had a child, and this time the lapse in our relations ran four or so years. I sold my business. Gerry and I now lived half the year in a condo we purchased in Boca Raton. Our health had held up fairly well, though I had begun to have arthritis in my elbows and ankles, about which there isn’t much to be done but grin and bear it. I try to find pleasure in each day. The truth is that I feel myself damn lucky: I’d always made a good living, I wasn’t dependent on anyone my whole life, and I still enjoy my wife’s company.

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I’d pretty much lost touch with Eli’s son David—his other kids I can’t say I really ever knew to begin with—when one day I decided to call David to see how things were going with him. “Things aren’t too bad, Uncle Lou,” he said. “I’ve had a promotion. My kids are in good shape. We bought a larger house. Can’t complain.” “How’s your father?” And then David told me that his father was suffering from dementia. “How bad?” I asked. “I guess it tends to be day to day—that is, some days he’s better than others. I went out to visit him in Washington. He sleeps a lot. He knows who everyone is, but his sense of time is way out of whack. He sometimes thinks people who died years ago are still alive. Maybe you ought to try to see him before things get a lot worse.” The next day I called Eli’s young wife and asked when it might be convenient to see my brother. Anytime I wished, she said. When I asked how he was, she said, “Some days he’s pretty good. Today happens to be one of his bad days.” I took a cab from Reagan Airport to Eli’s house, on Hoban Road. His wife greeted me at the door, saying that her husband was sleeping. She was not a beautiful woman, my new sister-in-law, but she had an intelligent face. When I addressed her as Mrs. Black, she said, “Call me Sandy, please.” She made coffee, which we drank sitting in the large kitchen. Her son, she said, was off at something called Playschool. She wanted to know if I knew anything about Down’s syndrome kids. “They have their own charms, you know,” she said. “Frederick is very dear.” “How is my brother with him?” “Before his illness, he was marvelous with him, though at first he was shocked, and blamed himself, his being so old, for the child’s not being normal.” Eli now entered the kitchen. He was in slippers, pajama bottoms, an undershirt with a V-neck. He looked tired; his skin sagged badly; his left eye was almost closed. If you hadn’t known him and someone told you he was ninety, you’d have believed it. “Lou,” he said. “What a nice surprise! Did Arlene come along? Arlene always loved me, you know. She was my first and best friend.” I thought to tell him that Arlene had died more than a decade ago, but then figured that it would only agitate him to do so and so said nothing. “No, Eli,” I said. “Arlene couldn’t make it this trip. Why don’t you join us for some coffee?” “A good idea, Louie, sure, why not?” He never called me Louie before; nobody ever called me Louie. “We have a son, Louie. Frederick the Great, I call him. Cute kid. You’ll like him. So tell me, Louie, how’s the old man? Still working for Schinberg on Fulton Street?”

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“He’s fine, Eli. He still doesn’t say much. What do you suppose he’s thinking? You’re the novelist. You probably know.” “He’s thinking, what I am doing in this damn country? He’s thinking, who needs this goddamn English language? He’s thinking, life is full of dirty tricks. It really is full of dirty tricks, Louie, an endless variety of them, I’m here to tell you. But then you probably noticed on your own.” “Hard not to notice, Eli.” “Take me,” he said. “Take me, Louie. Somewhere along the way I slipped off the track. Could never get back on. Not good. Wrote the books, though. That must stand for something with someone or other. Only one life to live, I’m afraid, and it’s getting obvious that I’m not going to be allowed to live mine as a blond.” He put a hand to the few fluffy white hairs that remained on his head. “Think I’ll take a pass on that coffee,” he said. “Wake me when Frederick gets home, Sandy. There’s lots of things I have to tell him. Next time bring Arlene, Louie. She’s my true friend, always was, always will be.” And then he shuffled out of the room, my kid brother, and I never saw him again. I don’t know how Eli got the gun, the Beretta, he killed himself with. And of course I don’t know what the exact motives for his suicide were. It may be that he was terrified of slipping any further down into the dark hole of his dementia. Maybe he found he lived his life so badly that he wanted to end it. When I remember how much he feared death, I shudder at the picture of him getting up the courage to put the gun in his mouth and then pulling the trigger. He slipped off the track and couldn’t get back on, he told me that morning in his house on Hoban Road. What in the hell did he mean? I’ll never understand him, my kid brother, Eli.

26 Maxim D. Shrayer

Yom Kippur in Amsterdam

On a late September afternoon that looked misty from inside the Schiphol terminal, Jake Glaz got off the Nice flight and decided to have lunch before taking the train into Amsterdam. Although it was only two o’clock, he was already worried about not getting enough to eat before sunset: it was the eve of Yom Kippur. His sole reason for stopping in Amsterdam was to avoid having to atone while in flight over fathomless waters. Jake Glaz, who used to be called Yasha Glazman, wasn’t too keen on a two-day delay in his return home to Baltimore, where he ran a division of an international travel company. But there was nothing he could do: Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, was the only holiday that Jake observed “religiously.” Devouring his second sandwich with Dutch herring that tasted nostalgically like “red fish,” the cured salmon from his Soviet childhood and youth, and washing it down with Groelsch, Jake recalled the vacation he had just spent with friends on the beach and promenade in Nice during the mornings and at the roulette tables in Monte Carlo in the evenings. He and Erin had come up with the idea of a September trip to the Riviera during one of their weekend trips to Annapolis. Fluttering flags over the bay, oysters and blue crabs, cadets in celestial uniforms, yachts striating the horizon. Attributes of summer by the sea always made Jake yearn for a Riviera vacation during the “velvet season,” when the Mediterranean heat has subsided and the French vacationers have already gone back home after their annual August respite. “Sweetums,” Erin had said to him in her voice that was playful and yet knew no irony. “Weren’t you recently reading something about Nice? A story—by Mr. Chekhov, or was it by Mr. Nabakov?” They had been together for almost two years, and Jake loved her terminal innocence. He thought Erin was a classic American girl: German Irish, smiley and lighthearted, thin “Yom Kippur in Amsterdam.” From Shrayer, Yom Kippur in Amsterdam: Stories (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009). Copyright © 2004 by Maxim D. Shrayer. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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and freckle-faced, all long legs and small breasts, sneakers, jeans, and big sweaters. He marveled at her capacity to live by common sense alone. He never fully understood how she could comfortably combine an in-depth knowledge of her immediate surroundings, her hometown, her fashion magazines, her government job with a languid indifference to the larger picture of the world. It’s not that Erin didn’t want to learn. She actually managed to memorize all the occasional bits of Jewish history that he would share with her while driving someplace or in bed after lovemaking. Yet she was always content with the small slice of life that had been served her on a green paper plate. This trip was to have been Erin’s first time on the Riviera, and Jake had wanted the trip to be an eye-opener. A travel expert that he was, he had never planned his own vacations as thoroughly as he did this time. Every day was to be a novelty for Erin: lemon groves in Menton, high society in Monte Carlo, Picasso at Cape d’Antibe and Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer, movies in Cannes, perfumes in Grass, fishing in SaintTropez. Jake had reserved a room in a quiet four-star hotel, the former residence of the Russian imperial consul, only a five-minute walk from promenade des Anglais. By the end of April every detail of their fortnight on the Riviera had been meticulously planned; tickets and reservations had already been deposited in Jake’s top desk drawer at work. And then came summer, even hotter and swampier than usual in the Baltimore area, and the closer they got to their departure date in September, the more he felt trapped in his own doubts. The whole thing all finally came together—like a simple geographic jigsaw puzzle on his computer screen—after a trip to Erin’s hometown in Central Pennsylvania. Erin’s uncle pestered Jake with idiotic, kindly questions about Schindler’s List. Her elder sister referred to the yarmulkes of Hasidic Jews she had seen in Pittsburgh as “beanies.” And then came Sunday, when he spent the morning alone in the house playing with Nicky the dachshund while the entire family was in church. Erin had never shoved her Catholicism down his throat; she knew he would choke. Nor did Jake ever try to proselytize—he found the notion intellectually offensive and very un-Jewish. Yet the personal experiences of his friends who married non-Jews as well as the various statistics he had obtained suggested that Erin would be likely to convert were he to ask her. He did finally ask her in the car on the way back to Baltimore, only to discover Erin’s stern loyalty to her faith—a loyalty that he had never imagined to be so absolute. Bovine tears glistening in her eyes, a ponytail pulled through the back of her Navy baseball cap, Erin stroked his hand on the gearshift and kept repeating again and again: “Jake, I’ll give you children, I’ll help you raise them Jewish, I’ll learn things, but I can’t leave my faith. Why can’t you accept me?” Jake drove on silently, shaking inwardly with anger, tossing over in his head images of the pope greeting a Sunday crowd in the Vatican; black and green plaid skirts on the subway in D.C.; half-a-dozen Catholic weddings he had attended. He had previously lived his life believing that in a Christian world a Jew ought to honor the

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ways of the majority without losing his own face. And now he had found himself so enraged with, so antagonistic toward the church, as though it was somehow its fault that his future happiness now lay in ruins. “Why can’t you accept me for what I am?” Erin asked him again on the phone, a few days later. “I do love you, Erin, but I just can’t marry you. We are a small people. The mother of my children has to be Jewish, no matter how you slice it,” Jake choked on his words. “No pun intended,” he added after a pause. Four or five days after that, on a Saturday morning, a lanky UPS lady delivered a box for a twenty-inch television set. Inside the box Jake found all two years’ worth of his presents to Erin returned in what looked like their original gift wrappings. It’s some sort of a joke, he thought for an instant, unwrapping the half-full vial of the French perfume from Thanksgiving, unfolding the dark-green wool wrap he had bought for her in London. His hands finally reached a thick pile at the bottom of the box. All his letters and even printed out e-mails, the faxes he liked to send her from work or sometimes from aboard the plane, and at least twenty postcards, mailed from the destinations of his regular trips—Singapore, Naples, Moscow, and São Paolo. Each mailing accurately torn in two. The whole thick pile tied with a blue silk ribbon. And a note on top: “Jake, I loved you more than anything, but not more than Jesus. One day you’ll understand. Please don’t try to contact me. I’ve changed my phone number. Bye, Er.” On the floor, he sat amid presents now twice opened, gaping at the ceiling the way an insomniac gapes at his blowsy wakefulness. Fortunately for Jake, his dearest Moscow friend, Mulya Borisov, even though a father of two girls and a paterfamilias, was still as adventurous as he was when he and Jake (still Yasha Glazman then) had their youth and studenthood in common. Mulya and his wife, Nadya—also an old friend from their high school Moscow gang— had quickly found cheap tickets and an inexpensive hotel in Nice, left their kids with dacha-owning grandparents, and met Yasha for a week-long reunion on the Riviera. Jake was able to change the return date of the vacation he had planned with Erin to five days earlier, which ended up putting him in Amsterdam on the eve of Yom Kippur. Jake must have switched planes at Schiphol a couple dozen times but had never stayed in Amsterdam before. Here in Amsterdam, outside the central station littered with raggedy British and Australian youths, the air was dense with fog. All colors were dimmed. There were more bicycles than pedestrians in the streets. Seagulls circled around garbage bins. And yet there was something about this city that struck Jake right away as extremely livable and free-spirited. As he walked slowly to his hotel-boat anchored on the Amstel, he kept bumping into the signs of an old city culture. He observed to himself that the citizens of Amsterdam looked bourgeois, but not at all philistine. He also gladly

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noted and later wrote down in his journal that young Dutch women in the afternoon crowd returned his inquisitive looks with a sensual readiness that revealed no fear of a stranger. What a beautiful place for a Jew to atone, Jake thought to himself and smiled. After checking into his hotel-boat, Jake went to a cozy, glass-enclosed restaurant on Damrak and gorged on a delightfully unhealthy veal cutlet with thick slabs of fried potatoes. It was four o’clock, and he decided to start fasting at six-thirty. That left him with more than two hours to sort out his many thoughts in anticipation of the annual Day of Atonement. So it’s Yom Kippur, Jake told himself, finishing a second beer. Have I sinned? Was breaking up with Erin a sin? Or was it a mitzvah? How can I atone if I haven’t sinned? Am I a Jew only because I couldn’t, wouldn’t marry Erin? Jake knew he wasn’t thinking straight after the sleepless night he had spent partying and parting with his Russian friends in Nice, the early morning flight, and the beer he had drunk since having arrived in Amsterdam. He knew he wasn’t aiming his mind in the right direction, but couldn’t help it. What he wanted from this nearing Yom Kippur were some real answers. He began to blame himself for ending it with Erin so abruptly. I should’ve taken it slower, given her more time to come to grips with my reasons. The foggy air outside the restaurant changed color from blue to putty. Jake asked for a cup of coffee. Maybe I should’ve simply married her—and to hell with the whole Jewish thing. He remembered his first dinner date with Erin, in a seafood place in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. She didn’t sleep with him for an entire month, and he almost didn’t mind the deferring of sex, so much did she make him relish the prolonged foreplay. Jake suddenly felt all alone in the city of Amsterdam, craving a woman’s company. He summoned the bulbous waiter and, acting a lot more drunk, asked, “Where is your vicious red-light district? I’ve gotta check it out!” Not one bit surprised, the waiter came back with a pocket map of central Amsterdam, resembling a page from the atlas of human anatomy: blue veins of canals, black nerves of main streets, red muscles of bridges. “Cross Damrak and go straight. You can’t miss it.” The waiter bowed, accepting Jake’s payment and tip. Some incomprehensible magnetism navigated Jake’s body through an evening crowd on main streets, then down a long deserted alley laid with cobblestones. A few minutes later he found himself strolling along a narrow, seedy canal in the company of other men, walking by themselves or in groups of two or three. A couple would occasionally flit by; Jake even spotted a family of tourists with two children, a boy and a girl dressed in yellow rain jackets. Some visitors took pictures, flashes from their cameras sinking to the bottom of the canal. On both sides of the canal stood Gothic-looking buildings, murky and narrow. Each had several glass doors. Jake was initially embarrassed to peer closely at those doors. He walked back and forth for a while, observing what seemed to be a nightly routine in this extraordinary neighborhood. He had read and heard about Amsterdam’s

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red light district, but never imagined it to be so peaceful, so devoid of the filth and crime that he would attribute to such areas in most other cities. Some of the glass doors had screens or blinds, and burgundy red lanterns shone from behind the doors—an indication that the hostess was busy with a customer. It was chilly and dank out, so only occasionally did he see an open door and a woman in lacy lingerie standing in the doorway. For the most part, the women stood behind closed glass doors, smiling and waving, enticing the visitors. Streetlamps alongside the canal gave out yellow gassy light. Framed by the glass doors, the women’s figures looked like fading old portraits. Jake identified the local business code: a light tap, the door half opens, bargaining if any, the curtain falls, and the red magic lantern comes alight, visible through the chinks in the blinds. He could make out his own reflection on the canal: a large meaty chin, reddish stubble, aquiline nose, thick, curly eyebrows, deep-set brown eyes. He finally made his choice. The brass knob looked like it had just been polished. A good omen, Jake said to himself. He leaned against the door, licking his dry lips and wiping his perspiring forehead with a white handkerchief. Inside, from beyond the glass, a blonde woman in her midtwenties studied her next customer. She then pursed her thin lips and unlocked the door. “Come upstairs, it’s chilly down here. I’ve turned the heat up.” The prostitute spoke clean English with just a residue of a Germanic accent that dulled her consonants. She wore white silk panties and a bra adorned with oxblood lace. Jake watched her ascend the stairs like a slinky Siamese cat. She had slim hips and a small, boyish behind. Her breasts were ample for her height and figure, and her hair was dyed. “It’s seventy guilders for a fuck or a suck. You pay first.” Jake was amazed by the sheer automatism with which this pale face commanded him. He opened his wallet and paid. The woman stashed the money away, rolled down her underwear, then undid her bra and laid it out carefully on a wooden chair. The room was lit by four large red candles, each burning in a corner. The bed was narrow and covered with an Oriental bedspread. A glass-topped coffee table. Two chairs. Bare painted walls. A mirror mounted on the ceiling above the bed. Jake stepped in place, unsure of what was next. “What are you waiting for? You can take your clothes off.” Jake blushed to the roots of his hair. “May I have some water? My mouth is very dry.” He sounded like a teenager buying cigarettes. “I don’t usually do that for customers, but I’ll make an exception for you. Please don’t break the cup.” The prostitute filled a blue porcelain cup with tap water. “It’s a gift.” Jake greedily gulped the water down. “Water tastes good here. Thank you.” He was now sitting on the edge of the bed, she—in the chair directly across—having a smoke.

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“Listen, I don’t quite know how to tell you this,” Jake interrupted the silence. “I don’t really want to have sex. I’m feeling kind of lonely. Do you think we could just talk for a while?” “I knew you were one of those from the way you stared. It’s the same if we talk or fuck, as long as the money keeps coming. If you want to stay for thirty minutes, that would be a hundred guilders more.” “That’s pretty steep,” Jake took out his wallet again and counted the foreign bills twice. The prostitute put on a purple sweatshirt and set an alarm clock. “What’s your name?” Jake asked, now feeling more at ease with his hostess. “It’s Annette.” “You’re Dutch?” “No, German, from Hamburg.” “What brings you to Amsterdam? Sorry, dumb question, I take it back.” Jake shrugged his shoulders, which was his way of showing regret. “And what brings you to Amsterdam?” Annette retorted. Jake’s first instinct was to tell her about Erin, his trip to Nice, and about spending Yom Kippur in Amsterdam. But something stopped him. “I’m doing a piece on tourism in this city. I’m a writer.” Jake was surprised by the ease with which this almost-lie came out. “It seems that half of my clients are writers. Can’t you come up with a better lie?” “Actually—” “It’s not my business,” the prostitute interrupted him. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” she said and looked him straight in the eyes. “How did you know?” “You look Jewish.” “How can you tell? Back in the States very few can.” “My father was Jewish. You have the same sadness in your eyes, even when you smile. My father used to say it came from many centuries of being outcasts.” “Is your mother German?” “Yes. She and my dad are circus gymnasts. I used to perform until age seventeen.” “I want to ask you something, Annette. How can you do this?” “Do what?” she lit another cigarette and parted her legs. “Well, this, I mean, doesn’t it bother you that you sleep with all sorts of strange men for money? Please don’t get me wrong, I am not a moralist, but still.” “What’s there to understand? It’s a job. The money’s good. Living is cheaper in Amsterdam. I’m saving a lot.” “What are you going to do with it?”

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“First of all, I’d like to buy a nice apartment in the south of France. There’s a lot I want.” The alarm went off, sounding like a firemen’s siren. Jake got up and put on his long raincoat. “Well, many thanks for your time.” He stopped in the middle of the room and wanted to shake her hand. “I don’t shake hands with men at work. No offense.” She smiled for the first time. “Well, then, let me ask you one last question.” “Okay, but make it short.” “Did your parents have a good marriage? I mean did it matter to them that one was Jewish and the other wasn’t?” “I’m afraid you will have to come again if you want to know more. Plus, I’m not sure I wish to talk about it. Just remember: difference is only good when you can comprehend it.” Annette opened the door and turned the staircase lights on. “Don’t forget your umbrella. It’s pouring outside.” She was right; squalls of rain washed over the cobblestones, filling the canals with autumn quicksilver. The next morning Jake slept until ten o’clock. Waking up in a narrow bed in his second-class cabin, trying to toss his body back into sleep, he felt the first calls of hunger. He had to hold out until evening. In an outdoor cafe with wet chairs, Jake asked for a cup of tea with lemon; on Yom Kippur he always allowed himself to drink tea with lemon but without sugar. The young waitress had bright copper hair. She offered him a piece of freshly baked apple cake. “Honestly, I’d love to, but I can’t. I have to fast today.” “I see,” the waitress smiled sympathetically. A Baedeker map in hand, Jake headed south, first down Rokin, then along Vijzelstraat. He traversed half-a-dozen canals, stopping to examine the old railings and reliefs. His eyes spotted now a baby lion, now a cupid, now a dragon. He turned right onto Wetering and soon found himself facing the Rijksmuseum square. He went inside the massive arch where street painters offered their wares and a band of four jazzmen played Glen Miller. From Gleb, a bearded artist from St. Petersburg, he bought a tiny framed lithograph: a houseboat resembling Jake’s hotel, a bridge casting a convex shadow, and a stray bicycle. Jake liked it in Amsterdam; he liked the warm, foggy air, the young mothers pushing their strollers, the elm leaves gyrating on the surface of the canals. He felt wanted and accepted here, wanted by the elderly gentleman, probably a banker, whom he asked for directions to the Film Museum; wanted by the two shop assistants at a shoe

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store where he ended up buying a pair of black rubber soles. He liked his unprescribed way of atoning in the streets of Amsterdam, his head more and more transparent with hunger, his body ready to levitate. Around four it started raining again, first a drizzle, then a downpour, and he went back to the hotel to change into good clothes. I could be happy here, he said to himself while walking back. I could really be happy here just being nobody, a man in the crowd, a bright yellow leaf traveling to the sea down one of the waterways. Having left his umbrella at the hotel, he was soon completely soaked, feeling like Jonah in the whale’s wet womb. “Bridge, bicycle, behemoth, baritone, Bilderdijkstraat, burgomaster”—under his breath Jake gibbered a variation on his day’s impressions and Old Testament heroic narratives. “Can you lift a behemoth from the swamp, ha, can you? Can you marry a non-Jewish girl? How’s that for a question?” Jake showered, dried himself off, and, wrapped only in a towel from the waist down, made an entry in his journal. He then put on his clothes, including a tie and jacket, examined himself in the mirror, pulled a raincoat on, and went out into the downpour. He headed east, to the old Portuguese synagogue in the former Jewish quarter. “The Sephardic synagogue,” Jake remembered his father’s dear crowing voice at the end of the line, “was built in the seventeenth century. It is one of the grandest synagogues in the entire world. You must visit it, son.” His father went on and on about the proud Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam, about the way the synagogue’s courtyard was supposed to resemble the Temple of Solomon. Now, plowing through the rain, Jake tried to picture in his head the building where he was to hear that year’s shofar. Probably because of the associations with Sephardic Jews, he envisioned a Moorish-style building. The synagogue was marked on his map, he knew the exact address, L. E. Visserplein, corner of Muiderstraat, but what he saw did not look at all like what he had expected. It was a cubic form made of dark brick, with a balustrade all but hiding the roof from view. Taller than any of its neighbors, the massive structure reminded Jake of an old bank or an armory or a mint. He walked around it, found the main entrance, and tried to open the heavy door, above which a stone pelican was feeding three young birds. It was locked. He knocked. No answer. What the hell is going on? How can a shul not be open on Yom Kippur? he thought as he banged at the door. This must be a different building—and the architecture isn’t Moorish, Jake reasoned with himself. He walked a few hundred yards, hoping to ask for directions, but there was no one in sight. He found himself in a neighborhood of brownstones with high porches, white columns, and porticoes. As he turned to head back to the main street, a door opened, and two women and a girl of five or six walked out into the rain. Walking slowly and proudly in the direction from which he had just come, the three of them looked perfectly middle-class Dutch to Jake, with their light hair, pale skin, and solid, respectable clothes. But when he peered closer, one thing seemed odd: all three, even

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the little girl, wore long wool skirts. The women’s hats had black veils. Are they going to a funeral? On Thursday night and at this hour? Jake wondered as he followed the procession of three long skirts. They brought him back to the dark cubic building with high windows and a balustrade. One of the women knocked at the main door, but there was no answer. The three waited for a few minutes, musing, then Jake heard a long squeaky sound. A gate opened on the side of the building, and a male voice said something in Dutch. Jake rushed to the gate and peeked inside. He saw several athletically built men with dark beards and curly hair, in yarmulkes, smoking and quietly conversing. He came in and addressed one of the “guards,” as he immediately labeled them. “Shalom, excuse me, can I get inside the shul?” “Shalom, my friend, you must be American,” replied one of the guards, offering Jake a plain black skullcap. “Thanks, I brought mine,” Jake said, reaching for his pocket. The squeaky gate was locked, and Jake heard the clanking of a heavy latch. He walked up several white steps and saw two doors, on the left and on the right. The right one must be for the women’s gallery, Jake thought. He entered a huge sanctuary. Diffuse light fell in through bow-shaped windows. The cubic space was divided into three aisles. Rows of marble columns supported the vaulting of the roof. There were additional smaller columns laid out against the walls. Separate half columns supported the upstairs gallery. Jake liked the arrangement of seats downstairs: brackets of dark wooden benches placed opposite each other on either side of the space. This way, men in the congregation faced each other as they prayed. The Holy Ark was in the far wall, the elevated rostrum opposite it stood in the near end of the room. Jake sat in the corner of a bench and began eyeing the congregation. It was about five in the evening, and there were altogether about two hundred people. The sanctuary gradually fell into semidarkness, the windows changing color from blue-gray to smoky gray to the color of an overcast night sky. More and more people arrived the closer it came to the blowing of the shofar. Two hours later the synagogue was nearly full. Jake didn’t care to follow the service; he knew little Hebrew and on High Holy Days at home went to Reform services. Instead, he was preoccupied with studying the members of the congregation, men and boys. He could distinguish two types of faces. One was angular, olive-skinned, distinctly Mediterranean. Those men for the most part were thickset and not very tall; their eyes were dark, their distinct noses crooked, their hair black or occasionally reddish. They were the descendants of the Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain, the founders of this Amsterdam community. Beside them, outnumbering the Sephardic faces, sat what looked to Jake like typical Dutchmen or northern Germans. These men were tall and had fair skin, light hair, and oblong faces with small, sharp noses. “These are the Ashkenazim; they have some German, Polish, and Lithuanian genes,” Jake imagined his father saying.

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Among the men of the congregation Jake found four especially intriguing. One looked like Mr. Pickwick: fat, with pudgy cheeks and a triple chin, a gentle smile and bulging, humor-filled eyes. Along with about thirty other men in the congregation, including the cantor, “Mr. Pickwick” was dressed in tails and a top hat. Then there was a grim Jew with an impressive nose and a spade-shaped beard. He had two teenage boys with him, both with Negroid features and premature black shadows on their upper lips. With the tassels of their prayer shawls they were tickling the neck of a boy who was praying in the next row. Jake also observed a tall, slender gentleman, a lawyer or a financier, he conjectured, very calm, very sure of himself, with cold green eyes and reading spectacles on the tip of his pointed nose. Finally, there was an old Jew in a three-piece navy suit shiny with age and wear, who prayed zealously; his face was bristly, his back was hunched, and his large pink ears jutted out. The cantor came up to the rostrum. He looked like a retired infantry colonel, with short silvery hair, a neatly trimmed, small mustache, and a square jaw. In contrast to his severe appearance, his voice was soft and enveloping. “Oh it melts butter, it really melts butter,” Jake recalled his mother’s excitement after hearing Richard Tucker in La Bohème at the Met. While the cantor sang, the temple became completely dark, inviting the night in. Only the rostrum remained well lit. Two men went around the walls and columns, lighting candles. They moved quietly and slowly so as not to disturb the cantor and congregation now joined in the mystery of atonement. The temple gradually began to glow with hundreds of flames. Candlelight and guttural singing focused Jake’s thoughts and lifted him from a wearing-on drowsiness. Although he didn’t feel alien to this tightly knit congregation, he still felt alone. Besides, the absence of women on the floor made him think of the wives of all the praying men. Were they upstairs preparing to reunite with their husbands and sons? Every Jew shall marry and have a wife, ran through Jake’s mind. Here he was, thirty-six and nowhere near marriage. Erin came to his mind, along with the two years of what he used to think was happiness. Then their sudden separation. How can we love someone and not stay with that person? he thought, now rocking and swaying to the cantor’s chant. With his eyes closed and his fingers interlocked, he revisited in his mind some of the places he had gone together with Erin. Annapolis, their regular haunt. Key West in March. The Sun Valley for skiing. Then he recalled that village in the mountains of northern Vermont where they had spent a week during their first summer together. The edges of the meadow had glittered with wild strawberries. Tired of picking with their hands, they had crawled on their knees, eating the small devilishly sweet berries right off the stems. They were all alone on their meadow. Fringes of mountains, some shadowed, some lit by the ripening sun. Humming of bees. Gradually they had moved to the far side of the meadow, away from a dirt road. They were lying in

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the shade underneath rustling trees—Jake in a pair of denim shorts, Erin in a tank top and faded cotton leggings. “Jake, do you know what I’m thinking?” Erin touched his chest. “Tell me.” “This is how I want our life to be: a long meadow with wild strawberries.” “That would be nice. Long. And weekends without any work.” “Yes, and we would all go to church together, you, me, the kids.” Jake felt a cold hollow forming inside the chest. “Erin, you know that I don’t go to church,” he said dryly. Dismay was scattered in Erin’s eyes. Her cheeks turned scarlet. “I mean . . . go somewhere spiritual as a family, not necessarily to church. Sweetums, what’s wrong?” “Nothing is wrong. Everything’s fine.” She rolled over and kissed his stomach. Jake didn’t stop her. Her right hand moved down his shorts. Then she brought her head down. As he slipped closer and closer to the boundary of life and that other, bodiless realm, he lifted up his head. Letting his eyes take in the far mountains, he shut them and did not open them until afterwards. He stared at the cloudless blue sky over his head. He felt with such intensity and verity that as his body had remained lying on the warm grass alongside his girlfriend’s, some other part of him—the soul? the spirit? the breath?—had separated and flung itself to the zenith of the sky. He knew that Erin needed his words and caresses, but he couldn’t find anything within him to offer her. He had felt utterly alone at that moment. Then, right there, on that Vermont meadow, he had already known that something was amiss. Except that it took him another year to put that something into words. The shrill sound of the shofar brought Jake back to Amsterdam. Looking around, he noticed two little girls in frilly dresses dash across one of the aisles. Laughing the jolliest of laughs, they ran up to the man Jake had earlier called “Mr. Pickwick.” All Jake could make out in their prattle were “papa” and “shofar.” Smiling with his watering eyes, the father of the little girls pressed a fat finger to his lips and then lifted them in turn and placed them on his lap. Both girls kissed their father and put their thin arms around his bulging neck. Didn’t I already know back then in Vermont that I could never marry her? That I couldn’t bear the thought of Sunday church with Erin and little boys or girls? Jake looked up at the vaulting dome of the temple, and a sudden joy of having atoned overcame him. Like the end of a long illness. A release. Members of the congregation greeted each other, some hugging and kissing, some shaking hands. Jake, too, shook hands with the men to his left and right, and hurried across the aisle toward the exit. He found a restaurant around the corner from the Portuguese synagogue. Its interior resembled a ship’s hold, with barrels used as tables. Jake ordered a double vodka,

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herring on toast, fish soup, and grilled liver with broccoli for the main course. “To your health,” he smiled at the waitress. “Be always happy!” In a state nearing bliss, he swallowed all the food, left a large tip on the barrel, and went outside, inhaling the evening’s briny moisture. On the way back to his hotel-boat, Jake became aware of the piercing clarity with which he was seeing and remembering the buildings and objects he was passing and leaving behind: the charcoal silhouettes of the gable roofs, the moon gliding along and sliding down the wet luminous tiles, the shadows of barges gently swaying on the canals. A resplendence of being, a sensation of taking it all in. All of it was writing itself, coming to him in its completely revealed form. Jake was no longer thinking of Yom Kippur, of Erin, of Jewishness and Christianity. Those matters he had already understood, if not fully resolved in his heart, and this knowledge comforted him. He arrived at a plan—in the streets of Amsterdam: he would return to Baltimore, where after seventeen years his immigrant family had rooted themselves; they had even brought back from Moscow and reburied the remains of his father’s parents. In four years, when Jake turned forty, he would have lived in America for half his life. Leaving Russia at nineteen, he had carried with him on the plane baggage so heavy that it took him years to unload it and so lofty that there were still times he couldn’t stand solidly on American ground. That first flight over the Atlantic was also a flight from all the demons, monsters, and sirens a Jew can never seem to escape. It had stopped raining, and Jake Glaz could smell the sweet mixture of leaves, of rotting leaves and gasoline and marijuana. As he stood on the lower deck of the hotelboat, he gazed at flickering orange lights on the Amstel, and breathed the night of Amsterdam, and gently stroked it. He thought about tomorrow’s flight back home to Baltimore, and with delight he pictured his American life that destiny held firm and tight and fondled in her deep blue pocket.

27 Jonathon Keats

Zayin the Profane

Zayin never asked to be the Messiah. Daughter of the village apothecary, a widower named Menashe, she already had plenty of responsibility for a thirteen-year-old girl. For example, she had to wake up every morning at dawn, to dust and sweep her father’s little shop. And in the afternoon, while he napped upstairs, she had to stand on tiptoe at the counter, taking orders. Zayin was a good girl. She didn’t complain, even when her father sent her to houses where boys tormented her with unsolicited kisses, and taunted her for spurning their advances with accusations that she and her papa were too affectionate. She didn’t understand, quite, what they meant, but she knew that she loved him alone in the world, and would do anything at all for his sake, as he’d done everything for her. She intended to be his helpmeet forever, as young girls will, and her efforts played no small part in the prosperity of his shop: His prescriptions were as effective as could be expected, never deadly, yet it was her light step as she delivered those medications, her still voice and gentle smile, that nursed folks most. Nobody liked to pass a whole winter without a head cold. And, in summer, when she wore flowers in her hair, there was a veritable epidemic of hay fever. Illness lost its stigma in the village on account of young Zayin. People even looked forward to new ailments, as a gourmand longs for the pangs of hunger. How else to explain the town’s attitude toward rumors of a great plague sweeping the countryside? At first the news came from shiftless old cadgers, flea-bitten beggars peddling rat-eaten clothes swindled from the dead. They swore that they’d seen whole cities extinguished in a breath, and had endured the crush, escaped the holocaust, only because death prefers to em­brace fresh youth. Ordinarily, local rowdies “Zayin the Profane.” From Keats, The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six. © 2009 by Jonathon Keats. Used by permission of Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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would have ousted those filthy old men with sticks and stones, and the village aldermen would have taken the additional precaution of barring the town’s gates, but the reputation of Menashe the apothecary made folks confident that there was nothing to worry about–and perhaps a visit from Zayin to anticipate. Even the initial influx of refugee families from the east the following day merely made villagers wonder why every town couldn’t have a good druggist with a pretty daughter to assuage their cares. Only Menashe was distraught. He cautioned that his medicines could not cure a plague, but folks were too keenly occupied, watching refugees arrive and die, to hear what he had to say. And then it was too late. An eighteen-year-old peasant named Fayvel was the first villager to complain. He claimed that a devil sat on his chest while he slept, stealing his breath. His brothers wanted to know what the dybbuk looked like, but he didn’t know because the creature vanished the moment he awoke. After a few days, the demon came up with a cleverer idea: Instead of floating off at dawn–devils naturally lose their mortal weight in daylight–the beast climbed down inside Fayvel’s lungs. There it was always dark; the night never ended, and Fayvel, become but a second skin for the demon, always slept. Unable to rouse him with pinpricks or lamp burns, his brothers visited the apothecary. Menashe’s shop was already crowded with relatives of folks who, while not yet as ill as poor Fayvel, already couldn’t breathe in their sleep. They begged the druggist for an elixir that would lift this evil. They reached out hands heavy with silver, but he simply stood behind his counter, arms in the air, hollering over the din that, medically speaking, there was nothing to be done. Upstairs, Zayin listened to the commotion. She’d never heard such noise in the shop, but strangest to her of all sounds was the voice of her own father. In her thirteen years, she hadn’t once heard him shout, or turn someone down. After several hours, Menashe cleared out his shop. He came up to take a nap. Zayin wished to ask him many questions, but her fear that he’d yell at her, as he’d shouted at his patients, made her quiet. She kept out of his way. From the corner, she watched him haul his body into bed. He called her over. Shutting his eyes, he murmured that she didn’t need to tend the shop, as he’d already locked it up. Then he folded his hands over his belly, and fell into a heavy sleep. After a while, Zayin grew tired of being idle. Intending to sweep the floors, she wandered downstairs, where she saw some men at the door. She let them in. Fayvel’s three brothers crowded around her, all at once trying to explain what was the matter. – Fayvel will die if the devil inside him isn’t doused. – I’m sure my father can fix a tonic. I’ll bring it tonight. – There’s no money for anything fancy. – I’ll tell Papa not to make you pay. He’ll understand. He’s good that way.

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She sent them home and started to clean, pleased to be doing more than was expected of her. She dusted the sills, and was about to polish the countertop when her father came to her. – Were those men’s voices I heard? – Fayvel’s brothers were here. He needs a tonic to get the devil out of him. – It isn’t a dybbuk, Zayin. It’s a plague. – Whatever it is, Fayvel needs some medicine. I promised to bring a draft to him tonight. – You don’t understand. I closed the shop for a reason. I haven’t got a remedy for Fayvel. I can’t make one. – Because of his money? – Stupid girl! Listen to me. A plague is deadly. I have a cure for nobody. – Papa, you can do anything. You’re an apothecary. Why are you yelling at me? He shook his head and led her up a ladder to the attic laboratory. She had never been there before, amid his bottled secrets, shelved alphabetically according to arcane names pronounced by no one since the fall from Eden. Ancient roots and pollens smuggled from that model garden into the mortal world. Like every apothecary, Zayin’s father trafficked in sacred contraband, distillations of eternity that, administered in the right combination and quantity, were said to lend a body grace with which to clear the evils of disease, but that, drunken gratuitously, might disburden soul of flesh. Menashe watched his daughter peer into his stone crucible, tap on the copper basin of his still, lift the heavy bronze pestle from its mortar, and set it down again. When at last she’d satisfied her curiosity, and could appreciate what he did, he told her that nothing she saw there, neither equipment nor stock, made the least medicinal difference. Naturally, the girl was perplexed. Was this not his only laboratory? Was there another ladder yet to climb? Were there attics and ladders stacked, invisible except from within, all the way to the heavens? She wondered if her father might be more than just a druggist, but before she could inquire, Menashe had uncorked one of the priceless powdered mysteries on his shelf, and held it out to her. Confectioners’ sugar, he said, and, when she didn’t believe him, he had her taste for herself. With the utmost care, she pointed a slender finger into the powder, and touched it to her tongue. The uncut sweetness burned. Before she could pose a question, he let his daughter know the whole formula. He said that the antidote to an illness wasn’t the product of a laboratory, nor did it grow in a garden. It came from within the patient. The active ingredient, so to speak, was hope. If folks believed that his pills and tonics worked miracles, they sometimes indirectly did–more often than the harsh chemicals with which city doctors routinely massacred the sick. The city doctors claimed to practice science, but Menashe had studied enough

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to know what they didn’t, and to acknowledge what they wouldn’t. He said that, given a chance, the body was a finer apothecary than the most learned chemist, but that people placed their faith elsewhere, in elixirs. His nontoxic pills and tonics simply concentrated folks’ faith, the belief that they were entitled to another draft of life, and directed it back inside, where it belonged. Zayin took in her father’s words, and knew that he was wise. Only one matter confused her. – If it’s that simple, why can’t I just bring Fayvel a tincture of sugar water? If he thinks that it’s a remedy . . . – The body is a good apothecary, Zayin, but a plague cannot be cured. Fayvel won’t survive. Everyone who catches it will die. If I waste my reputation on hopeless cases, my medicines won’t be as potent against lesser disease. Be practical, and don’t go outside, or let anyone in. The plague will pass in a few weeks, but for now there’s no knowing who’s sick.

Fayvel’s brothers were preparing for another all-night vigil, loading the hearth with coal, when the apothecary’s daughter arrived at their hovel. In her hushed voice, she asked if the patient was still alive. They pointed to his bed by the fire. She smiled. She asked to be left alone with him, and, because the estimable Menashe was her father, they went off to sleep in the hayloft. The girl was gone before dawn. Fayvel’s brothers didn’t see her leave. They gathered around him. One of them leaned on his chest, to feel if he was breathing. He gasped. Sighed. He opened his eyes. He asked for Zayin. They didn’t know what to tell him. – I asked her to marry me. She wouldn’t do it. – Because you’re dying, Fayvel. – Not anymore. Do I seem sick still? While Fayvel hardly looked prepared to plow a field, his brothers had to admit that even his ability to talk bespoke progress. They wanted to know which of Menashe’s drugs the girl had given him. He swore that she’d brought none, yet he couldn’t say what she’d done to bring about his unexpected recovery. He could recollect only that she’d been clutching his hands for a long time and talking to him, whispering, really, when the demon in his chest released him, or, perhaps, he released the demon. – What was she saying? Was she praying? Did she cast a spell? – I don’t know what she told me, but there was sense in her murmuring, and something more, a singing from elsewhere. I was scared to open my eyes, that she’d disappear forever. I held her hands tight. I looked at her. It was like staring into a sunrise. I asked her to marry me, but I knew she wouldn’t. She isn’t one of us.

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His brothers weren’t sure exactly what he meant by that. But they knew that he was right, because her voice scarcely stirred the air when she spoke and her feet barely touched the earth where she walked. She had, almost, the substance of light. Several days passed. As Fayvel convalesced, other folks got worse. The plague threatened to suffocate whole families. Given another week, the town itself might have ceased to breathe, had Fayvel’s brothers not confided to a grain merchant, whose wife lay ill, Zayin’s extraordinary visitation. – But Menashe himself pronounced that there’s no earthly remedy. He’s closed up shop. – It wasn’t one of his drugs that made Fayvel better. It’s Zayin herself you see, she isn’t one of us. On his way to fetch her, the grain merchant repeated what he’d heard to the miller, whose employees were too sick to work, and the miller mentioned it to the sawyer and the cooper’s wife and several journeyman carpenters, and soon the whole town shared the same secret. A crowd swelled around the apothecary’s door. Menashe had spent the past couple of days securing his building against the incurable sickness and those who carried it. He’d boarded over the windows and doors of his shop with lumber, and had little Zayin climb up into the chimney flue, to pack it tight with rags. Then he’d sent her down to the basement, to see what provisions they had, and what she could make from them in days and weeks to come. It was while she was down there that Menashe heard the clamor outdoors, louder than it had been in days, since the first tremor of the plague. For a moment he listened, but he didn’t hear people shouting his name. They were calling for Zayin. Menashe peered through the one attic window he hadn’t yet boarded and sealed. He saw burghers and tradesmen and peasants, many of whom carried saws and axes in their hands. He opened the casement and leaned out over the sill. – What do you want from me? I’ve told you this plague is deadly. I have no cure. – We want your daughter. – You want to kill her? – We want her to save us, Menashe. – Has the plague made you crazy? She’s just a little girl. – She revived Fayvel. – She didn’t. She couldn’t. – Zayin isn’t of this world. Menashe hurried down to the cellar. He grabbed his daughter, and demanded to know what she’d done. She told him that she’d tallied up all the carrots and beets, but not yet the onions. – That’s not what I mean. There are people outside saying that you revived Fayvel. – Is he really feeling better?

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– Is Fayvel your lover? I ordered you not to go outdoors. – I haven’t been out in days. Papa, I love only you. You taught me to care for others. How could I be true to you and let Fayvel suffer? – You stole my medicines. You faked my prescriptions. – I gave him no pills. I only stood by him awhile. I held his hands, in case he was in pain. I told him not to place such faith in demons. I said that I was there for him. I said that I had hope, and asked him if he’d believe in me. Then I was going to try to explain about the body being an apothecary, so he wouldn’t feel bad that I hadn’t brought him drugs, but he interrupted by proposing marriage to me. – You accepted? – Papa! – Do you have any idea what you’ve done, Zayin? Can you even try to understand? Folks think you’re some kind of Messiah. The girl couldn’t tell if he was proud or disgusted or simply incredulous. In silence, he led her to the attic, and pointed her to the window. More people had gathered below, and, when they saw her, their voices lifted up on her name and soared. Zayin looked at her father, and said she had to go to them. Menashe saw that it was true. If she didn’t, they’d tear the house down. He turned away, and let her leave him. For seven days and nights, Zayin did not sleep. Straight through the sabbath she worked, tending the sick, holding their hands and murmuring her hope, insisting that they could get better, begging them to believe in her. They did, one after another. They believed that this lightning girl in long golden braids and white gossamer slip was the savior. And, one after another, they were healed by her. Of course, religious authorities were skeptical. The head rabbi, undisputed leader of the community, several times sent his beadle to seize her, in order that there might be a proper inquisition regarding her irregular behavior, but the people wouldn’t let her go. Then the old rabbi got ill. He was put to bed by his wife, a zaftig woman half his age who all but breathed for him as he lay dying. At last she called for the beadle. Leading him into a room where nobody would hear, she asked the man to tell Zayin that the rabbi needed her. The beadle had no difficulty locating the girl. Even from the steps of the shul, he could see the crowd of tradesmen and farmers surrounding the shack where she was reviving a stricken beggar. Having one and all pledged themselves to her, they called themselves her followers—despite her efforts to send them away—and also considered themselves her protectors, earthly guardians of the miracle that had saved them and their families. They halted the beadle as he approached. He tried to explain why he’d come, how it wasn’t the same as the last time, but they shouted him down.

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Zayin emerged into the commotion. She asked what was wrong. The beadle held up a hand and called out to her. Fayvel and his brothers knocked him over. The mob prepared to lynch him. But as they closed in on their victim, they found that they were facing Zayin. She was standing over the rabbi’s man. She wouldn’t move until the mob lost its will to be one. Then she knelt down and let the beadle speak. He repeated what the rabbi’s wife had said to him, and implored her, on his own behalf as well, to save the holy man. She took a deep breath. She vowed to do what she could, and, against the advice of her self-appointed disciples, who predicted that it was a trap, accompanied the beadle to the rabbi’s private quarters behind the shul. Several feverish acolytes, men with eager beards, were praying there, but stopped short when they saw Zayin standing, radiant, at the door. Into the sudden silence rose the rabbi’s wife, embracing the girl and saying, loud enough for all to hear, that she believed in her. Then she brought Zayin to the bed where the rabbi lay sleeping, and, chasing away the acolytes like vermin, left the two of them alone. For the first time, Zayin faced the great man unseparated by the distance of ritual, the ordained space between altar and balcony. Up close he appeared more ancient than the patriarchs. Had she not seen him leading the town in worship just a few weeks before, she’d have believed that he’d been dug from the ground like an antediluvian fossil. His skin was the cast of dust, his flesh as cold as clay. She clasped his hands anyway, and, kneeling over him, laid her head on his chest. Her words came unprepared. In her mouth, the language softened, melting into song she couldn’t comprehend. The sick man began to hum. Zayin lifted her head. Her lips were no longer moving. It was always this way when her work was done. Her song was being sung by him. The rabbi opened an eye, and regarded her. – How do you know these words, child of Menashe? – I don’t know them, rabbi. They just come to me. – You don’t know them? They aren’t known to me, either, but when you chant them . . . they must be sacred. – They come to me when I heal someone. Folks live when they accept my words as their own. – You speak this way to a rabbi? I suppose that you have the right. But please answer me this: Why does the savior come here in the body of a girl? – With all due respect, rabbi, I don’t think I’m the savior. I’m just good at letting people get better. – You are the Messiah, then. This is how you test us. You come without priestly lineage or learning, and in the flesh of the flawed sex. I’d have ordered you dead for sacrilege. You choose to revive me. What is your reason, Zayin? Won’t you please tell me?

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He’d closed his eyes while he spoke, to hold in the emotion. When he opened them, to look at her again, the little girl had fallen asleep, folded up at his feet. It is said that the Messiah has been here before, more times than any mortal can imagine. Everyday, the Messiah comes and goes again, and always will, until the world is fit for redemption. This phenomenon is not arcane. It has been observed by everyone who has witnessed a sunrise, when the Messiah’s heavenly robe drapes the earthly threshold, or seen a sunset, as the last vestiges pass, haltingly, overhead. As Zayin’s name became known across the land, people observed that the sky was different. Dusk wasn’t as vivid with color as they remembered, nor was dawn as intense. A cosmic change had taken place. Folks no longer looked up for grace, but began to search in their own midst. They were looking for a girl with golden braids and a gossamer slip. They were looking for a girl whose feet didn’t touch the earth and whose voice didn’t stir the air. Synagogues and yeshivas sent envoys imploring her to pass through this village or that city, for every place touched by plague suffers in myriad ways. Zayin didn’t want to go. Already she hadn’t seen her father in many days, and, with the pestilence exorcised at last, she knew that he’d soon be needing her in his shop, to sweep the floors and deliver balms for ordinary aches and pains. Yet when she told the rabbi this, he demanded to know what business the Messiah had pushing a mop. He was willing to accept that the savior had breasts, but wasn’t it a bit much for her to test folks’ faith by keeping house for misanthropic Menashe while the whole world struggled? Uncertain as she was that she was who he believed her to be, she had to admit that, on the chance that he was right, she was wrong to behave so selfishly. Late at night, while her disciples slept, she left. In the first village she reached, everyone was mourning the dead. That’s all they did, day and night, since the plague had churlishly taken away parents and children and sisters and brothers and wives and husbands and lovers and friends, leaving the lives of those who remained desperately incomplete. Rain was falling when Zayin arrived, so much that the streets were flooded, yet, as soon as she spoke, scores of people came outside, arms outstretched, to greet her through their tears. While ceaseless hours of saline sorrow had washed away their vision–a mercy for those who no longer had family to see–her unwavering voice told them that the Messiah was in their midst, to answer their prayers by ending their anguish. They wanted to bring her into the great hall, where they’d prepared a banquet with the last of their harvest, but she declined. For a while she stood, silent and still, in the town square. Rain flowed through her cotton frock, and down her pale skin, as she waited until everyone was quiet, and a voice came to her.

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She asked if folks didn’t notice the water pouring down from the sky. They did, and again urged her to come inside. She shook her head, and then, because they were blind, she said: – Don’t you people know what it is, this storm above, and why it won’t end? Don’t you recognize the cry of your dead? – What have they got to be upset about? – They’re mourning. – Mourning who? – Mourning all of you. – We’re still alive. – You don’t look it, from their point of view. You don’t farm. You don’t trade. Today is one of your festivals but you don’t dance or feast. The dead are gone, and cannot return. How can they know if you live, that all is not lost, when you pass your lives in secret? If you want this downpour to stop, be done with your own tears first. She led them to their great hall. The banquet began. Hesitantly at first, folks drank and ate. Timidly at first, they sang and danced. Gradually their revelry filled the night, poured over into the new day. In sunlight, they found that they could see again. They saw that there was no more rain. They looked for Zayin, savior of the living and dead. They searched everywhere for a girl with golden hair, but their Messiah, good work done, was gone. She arrived that day in a city where everyone constantly fought. They’d been warring ever since the plague had decimated their population, taking away the powerful and rich, leaving a wealth of opportunity for those who endured, and, with it, an epidemic of greed. Folks didn’t pick up on Zayin right away—incessant bickering had deafened them— but from the moment that she was noticed, every man and woman demanded a private appointment. Each claimed personally to have invited her to the city, in order that she might resolve their conflict before the shouting crumbled buildings. Beholden to her faithful as a king is to his subjects, she did as she was bidden. She met with each person alone, and by everyone was told why opportunity couldn’t be shared by the many, and what uniquely gave him or her—and not another soul—exclusive claim to the chance at hand. She listened with sympathy, and was unsettled to find that everyone was in agreement. Were the men and women correct, one and all, that chance didn’t divide evenly, and opportunity, unless exploited individually, was just an empty promise? Wise Menashe would have known the answer, but of course Zayin couldn’t rely on her father anymore. A Messiah is sui generis. She straightened her shoulders, took a breath, and, as ever, let the words swell within her. You’re right, she told each claimant, slowly so her lips could be read, but the opportunity is not yours to take. – Whose is it, then?

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– You must listen: It belongs to the first person whose words you hear. Folks shut their mouths after that. They cleaned their ears. There were advantages to be had simply by knowing who’d been chosen, opportunity within occasion, like the seeds inside an orange. And so it came to pass, after many months of quiet calm, that people heard again. Yet it didn’t happen all at once, to the sound of a single voice. On the contrary, each person heard opportunity in somebody different. Everyone was chosen by someone. Epidemic greed gave way to contagious cooperation. They rebuilt the city. They built to honor Zayin. By then, she was long gone. She had been to a hundred cities and towns. Folks reported miracles wherever her gaze fell. Her voice made plague-ruined villages flourish. Old ghosts were vanquished. Mothers had new children. People sought to worship Zayin, and she permitted it, as long as it was done by grazing livestock or tilling the soil. Some grumbled that such profane activities had nothing to do with her eternal glory. Patiently, she reminded them that the world was the Messiah’s twin, born of the same creation, and to treat either well was to honor the other. They did what she asked. They tended the earth, and, when they prospered, they knew that Zayin had blessed them in turn.

One day, Menashe fell ill. Several years had passed since he’d last seen Zayin, and the burden of running his shop had become wholly his own. They’d not been easy years. Folks had forgiven his churlishness during the pestilence only because the Messiah was—at least according to birth records—his own daughter. Even so, he sold far fewer elixirs than before. For the state of his business, he’d a bitter diagnosis, from which he drew a sort of long-suffering comfort. Zayin’s little savior shtick had cured the land of hypochondria, patron ailment of his trade, by drugging people silly with hope. Abandoned by his prodigal daughter, unable to afford help, he had to go out, an old man, in the chill of winter, peddling balms no one wanted anymore. He caught cold. He took to bed. He would have no medicine. Drugs were as false to him as Zayin. On the third day of Menashe’s illness, the old rabbi came to his house. The apothecary was sleeping, and couldn’t be roused. The rabbi tried to recollect the benediction that Zayin had given when he’d been sick, words as certain yet unfamiliar to him as his own birth. How could a scholar who was able to recite the entire Kabbalah not retain those few simple sounds? And why did the effort to remember them make him forget, for a trembling moment, even how to breathe? If he kept up the attempt, he knew he’d be lost to it. Forgetting birth is the price of life; were it not forgotten, nothing else would make an impression.

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He surrendered. Instead of playing prophet, he wrote a letter imploring Zayin, wherever in the world she was, to come home before her father—the one who had raised her—was dead and gone. He copied his missive ten times, and sent it to ten other rabbis. He requested that each do the same. Then he returned to Menashe, and waited while his words radiated across the continent. There wasn’t yet any snow on the ground that winter, but, within days, the countryside was white with paper. Whole forests fell as letters begat letters, cascading from town to town, touching down in urgent flurries, rising up in a storm front. Zayin had been in the same village for several days, the longest she’d spent in one place since she began her sojourn. The town wasn’t especially sick or damaged, in want of complicated miracles, and she might not have spent a single night there were it not for a man she’d seen on the street and been unable to forget. He was a peddler, young yet well-worn like his old copper wares, a wanderer like she’d become, except that, while she was celebrated by folks who had yet to meet her, he was anonymous even among people to whom he was familiar. Zayin could not stop looking at him. She wondered if she’d met him before, if she’d saved him and was drawn to him protectively, as mother to son. She wondered if she was somehow related to him, if they shared the same blood, a continent apart, as distant cousins. She wondered a hundred wonders, but nothing she had known, or even imagined, could explain the intensity of his presence, his absolute singularity in a marketplace crowded with men and donkeys. A glimpse of him made her lose sight of all humanity. In his dawn-blue eyes, the girl Messiah perceived all that she had never thought to desire. The first time that she saw the man, she tried to approach him, but found that many dozen of her devotees stood between them, awaiting her care. For a moment she didn’t—care, that is—wouldn’t have been bothered to see them slaughtered, if only they weren’t in her way. She attempted to push past the hordes, yet couldn’t move a limb. She looked down. She couldn’t even see her legs and arms, so fiercely were folks grasping them, in want of her ministrations. Their troubles overwhelmed her. Their expectations overcame her. She yielded. Zayin was a good girl. Did it matter that she hadn’t asked to be the Messiah? Her followers hadn’t asked to suffer. She returned to the marketplace the next day and the day after. Folks gathered around her with small aches and abrasions, but she couldn’t find her peddler among them. She wanted to ask about him, wished she had his name. What could she say? She worked and she waited. It was on the fourth day that news of Zayin’s father at last found her, early morning in the marketplace. In the time that it took her to read the letter, ten more came, and then a hundred, a thousand. Before the blizzard of paper could smother her, the fastest horse was fetched from the mayor’s stables and saddled. A man lifted her up

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by the waist. In his grip, she felt a shimmer, like first light, within her. She caught his dawn-blue eyes, their blaze. His cheek brushed hers. He whispered some words in her ear. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he said, I’m here for you, Zayin. Then the horse carried her across a landscape, smooth with fallen paper, to the next town, where she changed to a fresh horse, and so forth, all the way home. The rabbi received her in an embrace, and took her to Menashe. The apothecary hadn’t been awake in days, the rabbi told her. He didn’t drink or eat. His emaciated body rattled with death whenever he breathed. Zayin mounted the stairs and entered his bedchamber alone. From the window, she saw that the whole town had gathered below. She turned away from them. She knelt on the floor beside Menashe’s cot, and, beneath the blankets, found his hands. The nails were already long and sharp like a cadaver’s subterranean claws, yet she didn’t wince, so often had she done this before, drawing men and women back into the world for another day or year. She began chanting. She put her ear to his chest to hear her words hum within him. They didn’t. Instead there was a rumbling: Menashe, clearing his throat, coughing. – Enough with the singing, Zayin. – Hush, Papa. It’s good for you. This is how I save people. – First you run away from home and make me old because I can’t rely on you. Now I’m dying and you’re telling me what to do. – You won’t die. – I’m an apothecary. I know these things. – I’m the Messiah. Things are as I say. – No, daughter, you’re delusional. You’re just an ordinary girl. I’m your father, Zayin. I’d have noticed if you had the wings of an angel. I’d have seen if you’d fallen from the heavens. – What about my miracles? – Don’t you recall what I told you about my medicines? Do you remember how I said that they don’t do anything on their own, but sometimes they work wonders just because people believe in them? – Since the body is the best apothecary? – Yes, Zayin. Your miracles are like my elixirs: the tricks of a charlatan. – You’re certain? – As certain as you will be, shortly, when, in spite of your magical intervention, this sickness finally kills me. Find love, Zayin. Make a family. Life is the only miracle, and it’s brief. – At least may I sing to you? – Sing me a lullaby, child.

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As she chanted, he shut his eyes and hummed along. When she could no longer hear him, he was gone. In the realm of human experience, only watching your parents die is more terrible than seeing your Messiah cry. After many hours, Zayin went to the window, bathed in tears, to share what had happened, and what she now knew. My father is dead, she exclaimed. I am not the Messiah. Please go home. But how could they possibly believe Zayin? There was too much evidence against her blasphemous claims, evidence carried in their own bones: Were she not the Messiah, they wouldn’t be there to be forsaken by her. Why would she save them from the demon plague, only to abandon them? What sin had they committed to bring her to tears? What evil had they done to make her take Menashe’s life and leave them? They demanded that she at least condemn them, requested the small justice of knowing the crime for which they were punished. Zayin came down to them. Even in her anguish, she recognized that the only sin had been her messianic arrogance, and that the atonement must be her silence. She would simply let folks believe about her what they had to believe: Her crime would become her punishment. A placebo Messiah, the apothecary’s orphan wandered the land. She no longer performed miracles, nor expected them, but rather watched, breathless, as they happened, seemingly spontaneously, wherever she went. In her presence, folks found health and wealth, wisdom, even. Families ended feuds, and countries brought wars to truce. The miracles appeared more incredible than before, as if to test her, to taunt her, to torment her with the awareness she alone possessed, that she’d nothing whatsoever to do with the world in its mystery. Zayin felt like a scapegoat, except her burden wasn’t blame, but credit. She had to keep moving, to escape the wrath of acclaim. She traveled in silence for a year, and witnessed every possible astonishment, save for the one that might have moved her: the wonder of being embraced again by the man with eyes of dawn. Every day she doubted more the words she thought he’d whispered. She realized that he couldn’t be there for her if she was everywhere and nowhere, a placebo human. Zayin, false Messiah, had become entirely what she was not, at the expense of who she’d once been. When miracles happened in her midst, she no longer knew who was being acclaimed. She felt neither pride nor shame. She lost all delusions, could neither see nor hear. The air gave way around her. Zayin fainted. She’d been standing in a pasture. Folks set her on a bed of straw there. The villagers didn’t know what else to do, for they’d never seen a Messiah before, much less one who was ill.

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The town had neither rabbi nor shul. The mayor sent his sons to the three nearest cities. Each returned leading a veritable country. Aldermen and holy men, tradesmen and peasants. If this was the apocalypse, who didn’t want to be in the midst of it? The crush to see Zayin on her cot was suffocating. She was barely breathing. She responded to nobody, nothing. Her eyes were open, unblinking. Her lips were parted, unmoving. Her skin, radiant white, began to blue. Or so some claimed. Others insisted that the change came from up above, as the afternoon sky darkened overhead—enfolding Zayin in deepest ultramarine—and the last light vanished under a fringe of fiery red. Zayin was swept away in the light. She cast off her body like a slip as she was carried through the night. At last she came to rest, she knew not where, only that it was not a world she had traveled before. Still she felt no fear, for she was in the grasp of something long wanting, cradling her, easing her to sleep. Sometime later, the dawn awoke her. She looked up—into the blue eyes of her lost peddler. He wore a mantle woven of the sun’s spectrum, in which he held her. She heard herself speak. – What are you doing here? – Don’t you know, Zayin? I’m the Messiah. – But you were a peddler before. – It was something to do. The world didn’t need me while you were alive. – I needed you. – You have me now. – Will you never leave me again? – I’ll leave you every day, to cross the sky. At night, you’ll be my bride. Holding her tight, he pierced her with light. Then he left, to lead in the new morning. She watched as folks awoke and looked around, each finding that the apocalypse had not happened. One by one, they then gazed up into the dawn, and smiled. It was well that a Messiah passed above, now that Zayin, their savior, had shown them how to live.

28 Margot Singer

Deir Yassin

As Dawn Splits All the way from New York to Tel Aviv, she keeps the box beneath the seat in front of her. She slips off her sandals and touches it with her toes. A movie flickers overhead; the darkened shades are rimmed with static slits of light. The man next to her guffaws into his headphones. Thirty-six thousand feet up, she’s thinking about the many possibilities of return. In a Tibetan air burial, bodies are left naked on a rock for vultures to pick to bones. In India, pyres smolder along the Ganges, ashes and marigolds drifting with the stream. Maybe she’ll just leave the box at Ben Gurion, revolving like a planet on a baggage carousel. Maybe she’ll drop it inside the Damascus Gate, ticking like a bomb. Or maybe she’ll take it to a café deep inside the souk and stir the ashes, a teaspoonful at a time, into a cup of Arabic coffee, boiled sweet. She’ll turn the cup over, twist it three times, read the prophecy etched into the grinds. As dawn splits over the Mediterranean, three men in black suits and rumpled shirts shuffle past her and place themselves in the space between the galley and the lavatories, behind her seat. They wind phylacteries around their arms and foreheads, drape prayer shawls over their heads, and daven toward the streaks of light. She feels the chanted words bending, bobbing, against her neck. The words keep the hurtling plane miraculously aloft. Susan touches the box with her toes and listens to the praying men. She’s thinking that bodies, like words, dissolve, dry up, fly into the air. They fly away and are gone.

Here Buried Avraham Bar-On wakes at dawn. As he buttons his shirt, he looks out the window at the Jerusalem pines and flat rooftops of Givat Shaul. The early light is flat and gray. He boils coffee at the stove, tosses yesterday’s bread to the pigeons waiting on the “Deir Yassin.” From Singer, Pale of Settlement. Copyright © 2009. Used by permission of the University of Georgia Press.

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windowsill. He is thinking about the town where he was born, pigeons pecking at the cobbled square at dawn, the women setting up their market stalls, their heads wrapped in flowered scarves, squat burlap sacks filled with barley and corn and rye, or in summer, buckets of lilies and gladiolas from the fields. Avraham takes off his glasses, wipes them with a dishrag. He knows these images may not really be memories at all, but just the sediment of stories he’s been told, or photographs he’s seen in books. He was just a child when he left Poland, and he has never returned. He was Abie Borodsky then, another person in another world. Here, too, beneath his feet, lie other lives, other worlds. Here buried under layers of broken stone and dirt and dust lie, perhaps, some potsherds, a Roman coin, a cistern, abandoned graves. Two thousand years from now, he thinks, everything will still be much the same. The indifferent sun will still appear each day, though little will remain to show that he was ever here—an aluminum can, a splinter of bone. Maybe it’s the news of his brother Zalman’s death that has done it—lately everything around him has started to recede, as if he were on a banking plane watching the green-brown squares of cultivated earth curve out and slip away. He thinks of his wife Eva strapped to her chair in the hospital ward, her memory gone, her mind as blank as air. Avraham doesn’t pick up the paper lying outside his door; he doesn’t listen to the morning news. He stands by the stove, sipping his coffee, bitter and black, as the light grows sharp over the stones.

A Sky Blue Marble Susan carries the box containing the ashes of her dead uncle off the plane, through immigration, past the baggage carousels, and out the lane marked nothing to declare, into the light. People push and wave and shout, pressing against the barricades outside the sliding doors. No one is here to greet her. There’s the smell of too many bodies, of flesh and sweat. Susan has been to Israel many times, but this time everything looks strange, as if illuminated by a too-bright light. She’s struck by the rising cadence of language she does not understand, by the Hebrew letters surrounding her on billboards, blocky and obscure. She notices the soldiers, M16s swinging at their sides, the Mizrahi men with gold chains around their necks, Arab families tugging enormous suitcases on wheels, Haredim in black with side-curls at their ears. Almost no tourists. Susan holds the box on her lap as the sherut winds up the road to Jerusalem. She winds down her window and breathes the hot dry air that smells of diesel exhaust and pine: familiar, foreign smells. A burnt-out armored van tilts on the verge, a relic of the first war. New trees line the hillsides, rows of saplings orderly as military graves. She is the last passenger to be dropped off. The driver does not want to take her to

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East Jerusalem. He lectures her in a Russian-inflected Hebrew, waving his hands and glaring at her in the rear-view mirror, from which an amulet swings, a sky blue marble against the evil eye. She makes out the word intifada, the words Aravim and Yehudim, Arabs and Jews. The American Colony Hotel, once a pasha’s palace, is a favorite of journalists and diplomats who don’t mind its location in the Arab part of town. The lobby is cool and dim, with vaulted arches and floors of time-worn stone. In these troubled times, it is quiet as a tomb. Past the lobby, Susan can see the empty tables in the courtyard café, the Turkish fountain burbling beneath an orange tree. Susan does not give the box to the bellboy who leads her to her room. She carries it before her like a gift, feeling the rasp of sediment shifting inside.

Pigeon On the morning before the day he died, Zalman Bar-On lay awake behind hazy slats of light and tried to remember his dream. A pigeon had flown in through the bedroom window—although it was not this bedroom, but another one that reminded him of their first apartment in Chicago, the one with the smell of gas in the hallway and a rust-rimmed sink. The pigeon flew in through the window and his ex-wife Shula carried the bird out to the fire escape and let it go. It flapped up into the yellow sky and was gone. Then Zalman was alone and he was holding the pigeon on his finger, its knotty talons piercing his skin. The bird led him through the rutted streets of a village both familiar and strange, with old stone houses and olive trees trembling in the rain. The dream annoyed him. He shook it off with the sheets and got out of bed. The floor felt cold underfoot. The water ran cold in the bathroom sink.

The Second Hand In the flat on Amram Gaon Street the second hand of Avraham Bar-On’s kitchen clock is stuck between the three and the four. It quivers and gives out a low hum like a moan before springing reluctantly ahead. Avraham has washed his cup and plate and is trying to decide what to do next. In the old days, he’d be at the university by now his work spread out like a fan inside his head. But these days, time keeps getting stuck like this clock whose batteries probably need to be replaced.

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Patrimony Susan’s room looks out over a too-blue swimming pool where one lone hotel guest reclines oily in the sun. She sets the box on the table next to the complimentary basket of fruit and stack of glossy tourist magazines, and sits down on the bed. It is her first trip to Jerusalem in years. Now her grandparents are dead; this time it is the other side of the family she has come to see: her mother’s oldest brother, Avraham Bar-On, a man she hardly knows. She has brought him the box. Susan often feels related only to her father. People always say she looks just like her mother, with her thick-lashed eyes and long dark hair, but Susan’s good sense of direction, her reporter’s desire for the story, her crooked little toe, are all his. Susan’s mother has always promoted the myth of Susan’s lack of relation to her own family, whose women (she said) were prone to nervous disorders, hypertension, leaky heart valves, and untimely death. Susan’s mother had tried to evade her legacy the old-fashioned way, trading one patrimony for another in marriage, but who was to say what she’d passed along to her daughter, this lone girl among brothers and cousins, uncles and sons, and sometimes Susan wondered what weakness lay on her X chromosomes, like a point of metal fatigue on the wing of a plane. Susan narrows her eyes and considers the box. She tries to imagine the rush of heat—the yellow roar—the residue of bone and ash. She tries to imagine her own body, shadowed behind a screen of flames. She imagines herself as weightless as air, the whisper of release.

Jerusalem Syndrome Avraham takes his cap and cane and walks south along Amram Gaon Street before turning onto Kanfei Nesharim in the direction of Har Nof. To avoid tripping, he walks in the road, preferring the idea of sudden death beneath a car’s wheels to the lingering decline of broken bones. A driver swears out his window, leaning on his horn. Avraham passes a clutch of religious boys from the yeshiva, shouting at each other and scuffing their black shoes in the dust. He passes two small children squatting beneath the broad boughs of a pine, cracking open snobarim with a chalky stone. The sun presses white and hot like the palm of a hand. Halfway up the hill, Avraham pauses to rest in the thin shade of a eucalyptus tree. The pavement shimmers in the heat. Just beyond the crest, Avraham knows, is the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center, a cluster of stone buildings surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, an olive grove, pine and almond trees, heaps of cracked concrete and tumbled stone. Before the battles of 1948, it was an Arab village. Even now, Palestinians still call it Deir Yassin, although it isn’t marked on any map. After the war, they built a mental hospital there to care for Holocaust survivors gone mad; now it’s where

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they bring people afflicted with the Jerusalem Syndrome—tourists, usually, found ranting or dressed in robes, claiming to be Elijah or Christ and shouting warnings of the apocalypse. Sometimes, close by the gate, you could hear the false prophets shouting or crying—it was impossible to tell. Avraham himself prefers to look to the past, not the future: his stories run like memory, from back to front, the answers written at the beginning, not the end.

What Zalman Remembered What Zalman remembered many years later was a thin disk of sun burning through the ashen sky the wind out of the Judean hills hissing through the pines the metallic taste of fear like blood in his mouth a woman pouring coffee in the cold static time before the fighting began, talking about the Jews murdered at Gush Etzion, the thirty-five martyrs of the Lamed-Heh. The woman said, You give those Arabs something they’ll remember this time. Zalman remembered the loudspeaker truck sent to warn the villagers, stuck in a rut blaring like Cassandra into the flat blank dawn Evacuate! Evacuate! but nobody heard. He remembered low stone houses chickens children Arabs dust machine gun fire an exploding grenade the boom of the two-inch mortar sent by the Palmach when the fighting turned bad the smell of burning the shouting the screams a boy of no more than nine or ten, hurling a homemade bomb an old man cowering, knock-kneed, dressed in a woman’s clothes. Later, witnesses said the Jewish fighters’ eyes were glazed as if in ecstasy, but Zalman doesn’t remember any ecstasy but fear. Pain, of course, was the one thing that evaded memory— he remembered only the sensation of falling and later great thirst. The bullet nicked the femur of his left leg but missed the artery; they gave it to him afterward in a paper bag. A trophy or a souvenir. The only thing that still remained was the scar on the outside of his left thigh, a pink shiny patch like a small, exploded star.

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Evening Bells In the early evening, Susan phones Avraham from her room. She sits on the edge of the bed, listening to the clicks as the call goes through. Six rings before he picks up. Hallo? he hollers, as if she must be very far away. It’s Leah’s daughter, Susan, she says, from the States. Mi zeh? he yells. More slowly, she repeats: Ha bat shel Leah. Leah’s daughter. (How do you say “your niece”? She isn’t sure.) Ah yes, he says in English. Of course. A gritty voice, a European not Israeli accent, with a British tinge. In the distance, Susan hears the evening bells: Armenian, Anglican, Latin, Abyssinian, Russian, Greek. The sound radiates like ripples in a pool. You are at a hotel? her uncle says. This I cannot allow. Tomorrow you will come to me. I will fetch you in the morning. No, no, it is impossible. With the situation as it is now. Ha matzav. Susan looks out the window. The city is cooling from white to goldenpink in the slanting sun. She has no desire to leave this beautiful hotel. The old man’s flat is in that religious neighborhood, Givat Shaul, and almost certainly has no air conditioning and a cold-water shower or the kind of water heater you have to ignite with a match. It’s probably filled with piles of paper, or potsherds—he was an archeologist—and she recalls that his wife has Alzheimer’s and is in a home. She thinks of the last time she saw her dead uncle Zalman’s apartment in Chicago, with the smell of cooking in the halls, the soot that seeped in at the edges of the window frames. He would offer her hard candies from a bowl, the plastic wrappers glued to peppermints gummy with age. Take, take, he’d insist. And when the woman hadn’t come to clean there would be scabs of food on the forks, for he never wore his glasses when he washed the dishes. Now Avraham is going on about how one no longer goes to King George Street or the Jaffa Road. One must not walk alone at night. Do not take the yellow Arab cabs. His warnings annoy her, though they make her wonder how much things really have changed since she last was here, before the Al-Aqsa intifada began. Even her parents said she was crazy to come. Still. She will hand over the box and be done.

Words Because her Hebrew is not good, in Israel Susan’s always a tourist, or if not exactly a tourist, someone who can’t exactly pass for a sabra, even though this is the place her family is from, or if not exactly from, the closest thing to it (closer anyway than New York or Berlin or Vienna or Lwów). Everyone speaks English here in any case, and even if not, Susan can usually get by in her limping Hebrew restricted to a few dozen nouns and the present tense. It’s a troublesome language that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda resurrected

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from biblical ossification with its absence of vowels and no verb “to be.” The sequence of consonants gimel, lamed and shin, Susan knows, can be read as golesh (to overflow like hot frothy milk or streaming wet hair), or as its opposite, gelesh (baldness), or even as le-haglish (to publish, in the sense of words flowing to light, like the skin on a newly bald scalp). The root gimel-lamed-shin also forms the words maglesha, miglasha, miglashayim, golesh, gilshon, gelisha: a slide, a sled, a pair of skis, a surfer, a hang glider, an avalanche. The way letters slip around it’s not surprising that the Kabbalists tried to shake loose the letters of God’s very name from their usual signification, as if meaning itself could overflow and slip away like a pot boiling over, wet hair fanning out in a pool, a sparkler’s shower of light.

Where Her Blood Jangles Now she’s sitting in the cellar bar twisting the stem of her wine glass between her forefinger and thumb, feeling that strange way you feel sometimes when you travel alone—an echoing inside your head as if the words in there have no place to go but just bump around like a bluebottle fly on a windowpane. Two fair-haired men are sitting at a table in the corner, speaking some lilting language, Swedish perhaps, eating roasted peanuts out of their palms. The bartender is a young fellow with jutting elbows and eyebrows that meet in an arc at the bridge of his nose and skin pockmarked like orange rind. He refills her glass, not quite looking at her but not quite looking away, and when she thanks him, he says: Please. He could be an Israeli Arab or a Mizrahi Jew or a Druze: he has features she can’t read. Susan herself is the kind of person to whom people sometimes say, But you don’t look Jewish! She has long, straight hair, amber-flecked eyes, a nose that tapers to a bump. The truth is that inside, where her blood jangles and her breath beats against her ears, she doesn’t exactly feel Jewish either. She feels hollow, like a knotty gourd.

Night Sounds Avraham sits on the terrace and listens to the night sounds in the dark— engines revving at the stop light, a cat wailing like a colicky child, the drone of the nine o’clock news on someone’s TV. The economic outlook’s even worse. Tomorrow, hot, khamsin. But right now it’s cool—he’s wrapped himself in a shawl like an old woman and is listening to the cicadas’ creak. Someone is shouting—Avi Avi—a mother

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calling for her child to come in. So once his mother called to him, too—Avi Avi— as dusk dropped over the bald hills. He remembers racing up the three stone steps from the garden, slippery with pine needles, the smells of thistles, goat dung, apricots rotting on the rocky ground. There were still jackals in the wadi then, hyenas too. It doesn’t seem possible that breathless boy in khaki shorts could really have been him. He has never thought much of Freud’s interest in archeology, his likening of the tumbled ruins of the past to the unconscious mind, as if memory were something you could excavate, analyze, piece together, solve, instead of a story you invent in the shape of your desire. Take his brother Zalman, that other phantom boy he hasn’t seen in years. Lately he’s begun to confuse Zalman in his memory with their father. He sees them both as bearded old men with cloudy eyes, bent like Polish rabbis over Torah scrolls. Only his father was the religious one, not Zalman. Zalman was a different kind of zealot. A patriot. A pioneer. He remembers his father and Zalman arguing, hardheaded, at the kitchen table in the old flat in Sanhedria, after Zalman told them he was joining the Irgun. Those terrorists? their father yelled. The bread knife jumped. Or has he made this memory up, too?

Zalman Wondered Near the end, Zalman wondered how it was that he was still here, here in America, in this place he’d only intended to stay a year or two or five at most, until the situation back home, the flap over the Irgun, settled down. It was Shula who suggested it, who wrote to her cousin in the wonderful-sounding Champagne, Illinois. Just for a year or two, they said. Then we’ll see. They took only three suitcases and left the cat behind, that odd gray cat with yellow eyes that vanished, they found out later, on the very day they decided to stay on in the States another year. Cats know things, Shula said. She was mystical about animals, though not about much else. He himself kept half-expecting that cat to turn up one day in Chicago, having followed them there the way pets sometimes did. He’d find himself peering behind the trashcans in the alley, listening for her cry at night. Eventually, they took in a stray instead, a blind old tabby with one torn ear. Now the cat and Shula both were gone, and here he was still. But never for a moment had he meant to stay for good. Even now, whenever he said home, he still always meant there.

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Here At 2:17 a.m. she opens her eyes, wide-awake. For a moment the bed tilts, the grainy darkness swirls. The door and the window have changed places. Then she remembers. Here she is. Here. She remembers a night when she was maybe eight or nine or ten, lying awake in a hard unfamiliar darkness her first night in a flat rented for the summer with a strange stretched feeling at the back of her throat like the memory of a yawn that wouldn’t come. She remembers running in a panic barefoot across the cold floor to her parents’ room, and her mother soft and dozy in her loose nightgown giving her a glass of milk and a quarter of a Darvon to help her sleep. Here take this. Here. She remembers once her brothers and cousins, digging in the garden behind her grandparents’ flat, turned up beneath the stony dirt the skeleton of a cat. Maggots had left the bones bright and clean. There was a one-legged Russian, their grandmother said, who lived next door and kept two dozen cats. At night they’d scream like infants in pain. He fed them fish heads from a canvas bag, stumping on his wooden peg. He died maybe ten years ago, she said, and the cats ran off, thank G-d. Good riddance to them all. The boys covered the bones with fresh dirt and said kaddish for the cat. They said, Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’meyh rabbah. There sits the box, heavy-gauge cardboard labeled cremated remains. Cremations are forbidden here. The Orthodox say the body belongs to God alone, that this spinning world is neither the beginning nor the end of man. So what remains? Nothing. She believes nothing, and yet here she is, carrying out a dead man’s will. Maybe the word for it is just nostalgia. She’s starting to feel a little sleepy again. She turns the pillow over to the cool side. Now sleep.

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He Who Has Spent His Life Digging Avraham, having fallen asleep in his chair on the terrace, wakes at exactly 2:17 a.m. according to the kitchen clock (which might or might not still be stopped or running slow) and stumbles in to bed. The breeze has died and the air is still and dense as sand. He switches off the light and as he lies back he tries to imagine what it would be like to be buried alive, the weight on his chest, the pressure in his lungs, the smothering blackness the same with your eyes open or closed. He opens and closes his eyes now and, perceiving no difference, wonders if he’s suddenly gone blind. But slowly the outline of the wardrobe floats toward him, then the faint stripes of the blinds. He thinks of Zalman. Fifty years he’s been away and now he wants his ashes scattered here. His ashes! Leave it to Zalman to desire such an outrageous thing. It is fitting, he supposes, that he, Avraham, who has spent his life digging dead things out of the ground, should now be the one to add another body to this necropolis Jerusalem. But where? In the parklands of Hinnom, where the Canaanites sacrificed their children to the gods? On Ha-Ofel, by the Jebusite graves or the false tomb of Absalom? Or right here in the cemetery in Givat Shaul? Avraham feels a certain chill at the thought of Zalman’s ashes mingling with the nearby dead of Deir Yassin. I told that boy not to join those bandits the Irgun, their father had said when the telephone call came to say that Zalman had been shot. Bloody terrorists, he said, spitting over his shoulder, pthew, pthew, when they heard that open carts of Arab prisoners from the village had been paraded down King George V Street before a cheering crowd. Later, they heard other stories, too, that the Arabs were taken to a quarry behind the village and shot—a hundred or two hundred or even more. They tried to bury the story, but there were those who remembered still. Those who saw. Their frozen eyes. Their bloodstained clothes.

Khamsin Khamsin is the Arabic word for fifty: the fifty days of hot wind from the east blowing dust and grit through a yellow sky like a last exhalation of exhaust out of the throat of the Sahara sphinx. The old men say that when the khamsin blows for five days straight it can drive a man to kill as if such hot murders should be excused. In Hebrew, the word for “wind,” ruach, is the same as the word for “soul.” But in Arabic there are more than fifty different words for “wind,” just as

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in the Koran alone there are more than one hundred and fifty different ways of saying “God.”

A Cyclops’s Eye In the morning when the sun is slant, she walks along the Nablus Road, through the Damascus Gate, toward the place the Jews call the Temple Mount and the Arabs call Haram Esh-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. In the Old City, she strides through the Muslim Quarter along El-Wad, her Nikon swinging against her ribs. Already it is very hot and the air is ripe with smells of dust and dung. A jet traces a chalk line across the sky, the far end blown to haze. It is good to shoot the Old City in this yellow light. The shutter clicks, clicks: a Cyclops’s eye. She shoots buttresses arching across an alleyway, a wooden door braced with rusting iron stays, a grimy-faced child crouching like a cat, curls of red graffiti along a concrete wall, an old man in a kaffiyeh setting out tourist wares, a translucent sickle moon. It is not easy to get past the clichés. She is not far now from the Wailing Wall, from the crowds of swaying men in black, davening to the stones. She could go there now—she would have to cover her bare head and arms, of course, with the blue rectangle of cloth the guard would hand her at the barricade—and write a prayer on a shred of paper, press it into a crack between the Herodian foundation stones. Weeds take root in those spaces, transforming prayers into leaves, into oxygen, into breath. But Susan has no prayers now. She puts the lens cap back on her camera and turns away.

Avraham Waits Avraham waits in the courtyard of the hotel at a table in the thin shade of a palm. He waves the waiter away, checks his watch: the girl is late. He hopes she’s had the sense not to go wandering about the Old City alone. He can’t imagine why she would have wanted to stay in East Jerusalem; even he’s not comfortable here. He fingers a ridge of bristles along his jaw that he must have missed shaving. Lately he’s been having an argument in his head with Udi Azrieli, the schlepper who took over the Biblical job when he retired. He can see Udi now, sitting across the table from him, fat and smug, his shirt half-untucked, his kippa bobby-pinned to a tuft of hair. They’ve been arguing over a book that’s just come out, blowing up the old Zionist myths about ’48, arguing that the Palestinians didn’t simply flee at the urging of the Arab League, but were terrorized by the Jews and driven off their land, that Ben Gurion gave up the best hopes for peace right at the start. What remains when a myth explodes? Avraham should know better than to argue with Udi, but he can’t help himself. He says occupation; Udi says liberation. He says apartheid; Udi says return. Udi smirks, picking his ear with a matchstick. He says,

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We’ve been waiting for this for two thousand years. Avraham can’t remember what he was going to say. The vision vanishes. At this very moment, the real Udi is probably sitting at Avraham’s old desk, in his old office on Mount Scopus, looking out at his old beautiful view. Avraham checks his watch again. The girl is more than fifteen minutes late. He’s about to get up and call her room when suddenly he looks up and she is there. He hasn’t seen her in he doesn’t know how many years but there can be no mistaking Leah’s daughter. In fact, it could be Leah herself—the way the girl walks, the way she holds her head and narrows her eyes in a kind of squint. And before he can stand she is holding out her hand, American style, and saying, Hey, I’m Susan, and he is clasping her slim fingers in his and he is glad that she is here.

Artifacts In the flat on Amram Gaon Street, Susan sits at the kitchen table as Avraham chops cucumbers and tomatoes and onions for a salad. Fanta? he asks. It takes a minute before she understands that he’s talking about orange soda. No, no, she says, just water please. The knife thwaks against the cutting board. She admires the tiny cubes of vegetables he flicks into the bowl. All Israelis seemed to know how to chop at a prodigious rate of speed. Yellow-handled utensils hang from suction cups along the tiled wall above the sink—a sieve, a whisk, a slotted spoon. A woman’s touch. Susan only vaguely remembers Avraham’s wife Eva, a small soft woman with a puff of white hair and the swish of a Hungarian accent. The clock on the wall appears to have stopped at 2:17. Perhaps that’s what happens, Susan thinks, when you get older: you get stuck in time. Her own closets are filled with artifacts from the past—her old violin in its battered case, a bracelet from an ex-boyfriend, her mother’s linen tablecloths. She never uses any of these things, but she can’t bear to get rid of them, either. She thinks of her grandmother’s gold watch, lost in Kathmandu, with a painful twinge. She remembers reading once about a man who put all of his possessions— furniture, CDs, socks, everything—up for auction on eBay. She could see how it would be a relief. Avraham sets out on the dining table the salad, bread, a plate of cheese, two foil-topped containers of leben, and they move into the next room. The flat is less depressing than Susan had imagined, and not too hot even on this stifling day. The dislocated feeling she had at the bar the night before is gone. Behind Avraham, on the sideboard, she studies the array of photographs—Eitan’s children, Susan guesses, in Purim costumes and swaddling wraps and naked in the bath. She notices another photograph, too, tucked into the edge of the frame of a larger one: a black-and-white of three children posed in the old-fashioned way, a taller boy standing with one hand on the shoulder of a smaller one, and beside them, propped on a chair, a baby with a bow tied around its hairless head. It comes to Susan that the boys must be her uncles,

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the baby her mother, Leah. She points, and Avraham says, Yes, it was taken not long after we came to Palestine. Susan stands to look closer and now she can see clearly in the boys’ youthful faces her uncles’ determined lips and intense round eyes. But the baby, her mother, she does not recognize. It is a baby as boneless and unblinking as any other who holds her in its gaze.

Hazor Now Avraham has gone to lie down for his midday nap—he has brought the newspaper in with him but it rests folded across his chest, rustling with his breath. No air moves through the open trissim. It is hot, hot, hot. In the next room, he can hear the girl moving about—the rasp of a drawer, the screech of a chair—and he thinks how long it’s been since he’s heard the sounds of another person, a woman, in this house. Then he realizes that what he’s hearing is not the girl but the sound of a pickaxe striking stone and he is standing at the brink of a staircase cut deep into the limestone like the one they uncovered at Hazor, leading to a system of water tunnels underground. Yadin is there, a surgical mask strapped over his mouth against the choking dust—or is it a gas mask?—but then Avraham sees that it isn’t dust at all but ash from when the Israelites burned the Canaanite city to the ground in the late Bronze Age. And then Avraham feels himself falling, falling without weight or gravity, and when he comes to a stop he is curled like a dead infant inside a burial jug, tipped sideways underground. He reaches out and his fingertips touch an arrowhead, a bead, a sharp fragment of bone. Then he opens his eyes and once again he is on his bed, the newspaper open on his chest, fluttering softly above his heart.

Revisionist History Okay listen, Avraham says to Udi, who in his imagination has settled himself on the chaise longue on Avraham’s terrace and is cracking his knuckles, one at a time, while the girl bangs around in the kitchen, tidying up. Listen: don’t you think we owe it to our children to go back and get the story straight? Don’t you think they deserve to know the truth? History schmistory, Udi answers. Just because they call it revisionist you think it has to be the truth? You think you can just go and dig up the truth like some potsherds or Roman coins? Udi’s fingers are thick as bratwurst, the nails bitten to the quick. Avraham looks down at his own hands and for a moment does not recognize the mottled skin lumpy with blue veins. But do you understand what happens, Avraham says, when memory fails? Avraham is thinking of the moment he first saw his wife, thirty-seven years ago, in the main reading room of the library at Givat Ram, in that light blue shirt dress with her hair

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tied back at the neck, even though she always told the story differently, insisting that they met at a party the week before. Even though she’s still alive, he can no longer exactly picture her face—her real face, the way it used to be. He tends to superimpose an image from a photograph instead. So is memory a thorn in the sole of your foot? Avraham says out loud. Or is it a lie? Udi laces his fingers together and bends them back. His forehead shines in the heat. Now perhaps you are beginning to understand, he says.

The Impression of Words The box is still sitting on the table by the telephone. The telephone is black and next to it there is a pad of paper from Bank Hapoalim and three pencils chewed on the ends. On the pad Susan can make out the faint impression of words although the writing itself has been torn off and thrown away. Avraham has taken out a box of photographs which has been accumulating for more than fifty years and they are sifting through them, one by one. There are recent color prints mixed with snapshots from the ’60s and deckle-edged black-and-whites from earlier than that. Some have dates and names noted on the back, others are of smiling people whose names Avraham cannot recall. They even find a few pictures of Susan and her brothers, which her mother must have sent. Look, Avraham says, handing Susan a snapshot of herself at three in a party dress and patent leather shoes, posing with her mother before a birthday cake. How young her mother seems! In her minidress with long dark hair she looks so young that Susan has to run the numbers twice in her head before accepting that she is nearly ten years older now than her mother was then. Avraham puts the box of photographs away and offers Susan a piece of chocolate. She holds the bittersweet chocolate in her mouth and looks again at the box, which sits waiting by the phone, like a reproach. Zalman left only a handwritten note sealed in an envelope in the top drawer of his desk. Scatter my ashes in Jerusalem. A dead man’s words. And what words will there be when the moment comes? No rabbi will chant a valediction, say a prayer. No rabbi will consecrate a heap of crematorium ash. No one will chant the mourner’s kaddish, which does not even mention death, but appeals instead for the sanctification of God’s name. Kadosh: He is holy, holy, holy, beyond anything that can be put in words.

What the Leaving Was Like Among the things Avraham cannot remember is what the leaving was like— how the cases were packed with the good Pesach dishes,

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the eiderdown quilts, the Meissen figurine of a boy and his mother, framed photographs, a mantle clock, loose sheets of piano music, and all those other belongings that would prove quite useless here in this desert here in this promised land. He cannot imagine how the decision was made to leave everything and go, with two small children and another barely on the way; how they said goodbye to grandparents, cousins, neighbors, friends; how they walked out of the house and looked back that one last time, or maybe didn’t look back at all, thinking this leaving would only be a temporary thing. He cannot remember the journey by sea to Haifa, if they passed checkpoints or soldiers along the way, or if it was just like going on a summer vacation— a train ride, a boat trip, an adventure. It was no Eden they left behind, but still he feels himself an exile. He cannot remember a single word of Polish now except for a lullaby his mother used to sing— something about a street, a house, a beautiful girl who once was loved.

What a Scant Residue What does Susan know about her uncle Zalman? That he was seventy when he died of a heart attack in his sleep in the Chicago apartment where he’d lived alone for twenty-two years— That he never went to synagogue and had only disdain for God— That he kept a subscription to the symphony where each year he sat in the same center-left orchestra seat to ensure a view of the pianists’ hands— That he had a crooked eyetooth, hairy nostrils and ears, a fondness for hummus and olives and sweet mint tea— That he fought and was wounded in the War of Independence (and so she pictures him then as Ari Ben-Canaan in Exodus, romantic and bold, in khaki with a two-day growth of stubble rough on his strong chin)— That he brought her the kind of presents a childless uncle chooses for a little girl: a Chinese necklace in the shape of a fish, a denim purse appliquéd with a heart— And she thinks what a scant residue a life leaves— a fistful of facts both random and worn that hardly add up to an entire man the way eyes, a nose, ears, and teeth do not add up to a face.

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Nostalgia In the morning, while the girl sleeps, Avraham stands in the kitchen, watching the pigeons pecking in the gritty light. Already it is hot. He collects a place mat, a cup, a plate, and silverware, lays them out on the dining table for the girl when she wakes up, the way Eva used to do when Eitan came home from the army or university. The box sits on the table by the phone. How different, he wonders, are its contents from the stuff he’s sifted through so many times in excavating the destruction layer of a tell, the debris of ancient fire. Often you found the best things there, buried in the ash, the most telling clues: abandoned vessels, cult objects, tablets, seals, bits of carbonized wood and bone. He loved the way it all came together on a dig, the way you had to turn and twist the pieces in your head until they fit. He used to laugh at the volunteers who’d arrive at the site filled with visions of ancient splendor and grow so quickly disappointed when they saw only piles of dirt and rubble, half-dug holes. But where’s the city? they’d complain. Look, he’d point out, here’s a foundation stone, here’s a cistern, here’s a retaining wall. But they saw nothing but destruction, a heap of broken stone. Tesknota: the Polish word for nostalgia comes to him suddenly, a word he didn’t even know he knew, with overtones of sadness and longing the Hebrew did not have. But whatever Avraham might be nostalgic for remains as deeply buried as the rest of his mother tongue he has forgotten or repressed. He considers nostalgia an unnecessary indulgence, like too much chocolate or cigarettes. He pushes his glasses up his nose. Perhaps Zalman was the smart one, to leave it all behind. Perhaps he’d had no regrets, after all.

Life Was Beautiful There Every Saturday, Zalman went down to the corner to the Nablus Café, where the owner Nabil served him hummus and olives and cups of nana tea and sometimes sat with him and smoked a cigarette and talked about whether business was good, when the weather would break, whether Sharon or Arafat was the greater fool. Nabil had a brushy moustache like Stalin’s and tired, wrinkled eyes. His eighty-six-year-old mother sat in the back and supervised the cook. Zalman felt at home there, among the smells of cardamom and roasted lamb, the drone of Arabic music, the photographs of old Beirut that lined the walls. He was born in a village in the hills west of Jerusalem, Nabil told Zalman once, a village with stone houses and hardscrabble fields and groves of olive trees,

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a village that no longer existed. His old mother still had the deed to the land, a slip stamped and lined like a grocery receipt, given to her grandfather in 1931, which she kept in an embroidered purse in her night table drawer. She had the key to her grandfather’s house, an iron skeleton key the size of a hand, which hung from a chain looped like a noose around the post of her bed. Nabil cracked the word key between his teeth like a sunflower seed, blowing two streams of smoke out his nose. Life was beautiful there, he told Zalman, before ’48, before An Naqba—your War of Independence, our Catastrophe. Then they shook hands and clapped each other on the back like two old friends and joked that they were a two-man delegation of peace, shaking their heads over how they’d both come to be in a storefront café in Chicago, Illinois.

Susan Imagines And now he’s serving her breakfast, boiling an egg, pouring coffee, setting out half a grapefruit with a serrated spoon, and she sits with her washed hair dripping onto her shoulders feeling light and childlike as if he were her mother trying to get her to eat a good breakfast before going off to school. Just like the American Colony Hotel, yes? he jokes. Really, please don’t go to all this trouble, she says, and he says, Nonsense, you must eat. And so she eats, the toast and jam, the soft-boiled egg, the grapefruit, the coffee, the juice. He comes and sits opposite her, folds back the morning newspaper, adjusts his bifocals on his nose. The fingerprints on the lenses glint in the sunlight, obscuring his eyes. You need to clean your glasses, she says, and he frowns and says, For this dirty news dirty glasses are alright. Then he takes them off and wipes them on his shirt. Now she sees him as he would appear in a photograph she might take, the round lines of his skull and his magnified eyes and his large, expressive hands. How sad, she thinks, to be so alone, but it occurs to her that he could well be thinking the same thing about her, wondering what hidden flaw or twist of fate has kept her unattached as well. And for a moment, she tries to imagine what it would be like simply to stay here, right here in this flat on Amram Gaon Street in Givat Shaul. She could stay in Eitan’s old room, sleep in Eitan’s old bed. Every night she would sleep the same amnesic sleep she slept last night. Avraham would cook and she would clean the flat and do the wash. In the evenings, they’d sit on the terrace and listen to the sounds of the night. It would be so easy, really, not to go back. She watches Avraham as he reads the paper, and shakes off the fantasy. Probably he is perfectly happy living

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here the way he is. Probably she would miss her own life after a short while. Still, she wishes she were the kind of person who could change her life just like that.

On the Front Page On the front page, another bus bombing. More than fifty wounded, eighteen dead, including the bus driver and his child. The photos show the roof peeled back like skin, a mangled exoskeleton of steel, a medic running beside a stretcher, a flag of plasma hoisted in his hand. Volunteers with beards and garbage bags search for shreds of flesh or shards of bone. Even those who escape dismemberment will suffer from an endless ringing in their ears. In Hebron, the photographs show fireworks and throngs of people rejoicing, dancing in the streets around a burning car. The face of the twenty-year-old martyr bobs on placards above the crowd. In all this noise you cannot hear the sound of tears, only a requiem of rage.

Avraham Decides It is not until they are already in the car and on their way that Avraham decides this is the place. He pulls the car over at a bend in the hillside road and for a moment they sit, looking out. There is Har Nof, he tells the girl, Panorama Hill, and it is beautiful, the view from here of the Jerusalem forest on this yellow afternoon: there, across the crease of the wadi, Mount Herzl, terraced with military graves, and a bit further on, Har Hazikaron and Yad Vashem. To every hilltop in Jerusalem a monument to the dead. There the concrete apartment blocks of Givat Shaul shine white in the sun, although from here he cannot make out which one is his. Not far away is the compound at Deir Yassin—stone buildings, the barbed wire fence, the heaps of concrete rubble and stone. What’s that, over there? the girl asks, pointing, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand. A psychiatric clinic, Avraham responds. A mental hospital. There is much this girl does not know. Although, in fairness, he thinks, many Israelis also probably don’t remember what happened there, and he wonders whether it is better to have forgotten

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or, like the Palestinians, to be unable to forget. He opens the car door, steps out into the heat. The girl joins him, and for a moment they stand, looking out at the knobby hills, the eggshell sky. Behind them, the hot engine clicks. The ground is soft with pine needles and chalky yellow-white stones. Yes, here, he says. He knows he should bury the box but he is afraid someone will see them if he takes the time to dig. The girl hands him the box and he holds it to his chest as he slits the seal with his car key. The box is surprisingly heavy. Two or three kilos of pulverized tissue and bone. cremated human remains, the label says. A riddle. What remains? To this riddle, he knows the answer: only the sky and wind and earth and stones. Shouldn’t we say something? Susan asks. Avraham looks at the girl, her amber eyes, the uncanny tilt of her head. And then, suddenly, rising all around them, there comes a rustling and a rush like beating wings. The boughs of the pine trees tremble and sway. The wind. It rises at Avraham’s back like the exhalation of a long-held breath. The wind has shifted to the north; now the heat will break. Shouldn’t we say something? the girl repeats. No, he says. He looks around again to make sure no one is there to see. Then he shakes the box and the dust and ash fly up, up into the sky.

Eva From her wheelchair in the geriatric ward of Ezrath Nashim reserved for the most advanced victims of Alzheimer’s disease, Eva Bar-On sits with her head tipped forward against her chest, her glasses crooked on her nose, one blue eye askance. Her hands are strapped to the arms of the chair, and there is another strap about her chest. Shalom, Avraham says, and she twists her head and gives him a look as if to say, Who the hell are you? Today is not such a good day. Sometimes she still recognizes him, although usually she does not, and mostly she will speak only in Hungarian, which he does not understand. Our earliest memories are the last to go; the doctors say they’ve worn the deepest grooves inside our brains. Avraham bends and straightens Eva’s glasses, brushes back her too-short hair with his hand. He has brought some fruit, a tin of jam-filled cakes, which he offers to the girl, who has pulled up a chair and is stroking Eva’s crooked hand. Leah, Eva says suddenly, what’s she doing here? But as he starts to explain, Susan holds up her hand and says, Shhh. Eva tilts her head and says in Hebrew, Mah pitom. Metzuyan. Mea achuz. What’s the problem. Outstanding. One hundred percent. Ken, Susan says. Yes. Avraham watches the girl’s fingers touch his wife’s wasted arm the way a different girl, his wife, once in another life, touched him. Eva glares at him out of one cloudy eye. In its center, he can see only the reflection of his own face.

If In the first light of dawn, the doves call to their mates, three hollow notes of a descending wail.

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The flat white sky peels back to blue. In her hospital room, Eva Bar-On lies bewildered by the white sheets, the four white walls, the straps that hold her in her bed. Outside her window, in a flowering ash, the doves call coo-coo-coo. If she could rise from bed and go to the window she would see the white-flowered tree, the stony hillside, the scrubby green of the Jerusalem pines, and across the wadi, the orange sun striking the windows of the mental hospital at Kfar Shaul, once an Arab stonecutters’ village called Deir Yassin. The sun flares like fire in the windows of the stone houses. It flares and fades. Each day the village burns again. But Eva Bar-On lays no claim to history. She remembers nothing. Instead she floats in exile from memory, from herself, furious as wind. She is there in the darkest dreams you don’t remember: a pressure on your chest, a flapping of wings, the faintest tinkling of bells.

29 Nadia Kalman

The Counterpart

Aleksey Alexandrovich Smoletkin—the former Gorky Professor of Arts and Letters at Leningrad State, the father of a twelve-year-old daughter in ribbons and brown uniform in Moscow, the destroyer of a beautiful old grand piano, the owner of a first edition of Pushkin’s The Stone Guest, the renter of a garage apartment in the Massachusetts house of Todd Elkin, the recipient of a Writer’s Union silver medal, the beneficiary of hickeys the purplish-chestnut color of Tatiana Elkin’s hair, and the reluctant overseer of a bulbous nose whose presence had made him first the laughingstock of his old petty-noble family and later the butt of anti-Semitic remarks to which it had been useless to protest his Christianity. That nose! One winter morning in 1991 Aleksey Alexandrovich Smoletkin woke to discover that this last and least valuable of all his possessions, like so many of the others, was gone. He needed no mirror, no hand feeling the flatness, the simian holes through which he now breathed, for confirmation. He knew in the way he’d known his wife would leave him for the idiot Cossack Malkov, with his yearly trips to Lenin’s tomb “to feel the history in my gizzard,” before his wife had even met that blathering Slavophile. He knew in the way he’d known he wouldn’t get tenure at Thomas Paine University, though he hadn’t guessed at the reason—according to the dean, his criticisms of students’ work was hurting their self-esteem. He knew but he didn’t want to know, so he looked for a mirror, prepared to shake off this strange idea as he had shaken off so many others. No force had been involved in the taking of his nose. The flesh where it had been was childishly smooth, small-pored, and pale. He stroked it with a hairy finger and found it no more or less sensitive than the skin on his cheek. His brain, that tired telephone operator, had unplugged from emotion and intellect both, willing only to “The Counterpart” was first published in The Walrus, 2007. Copyright © 2007 by Nadia Kalman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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connect him to his sen­ses. As when he made love (in English), or occupied himself with sex (in Russian), he breathed heavily through his great stomach. Abruptly, he hit the mirror with the flat of his hand and the telephone operator came to life. What had he done last night? What had they—he and Tatiana—done? Standing in his loose briefs, scratching at the hair around his bellybutton, Aleksey could remember no injury, no pain, and of course it would not have healed so quickly. Two empty bottles of Polish vodka stood on a wobbly pile of dishes and paper towels, idiot twin brothers, still around the morning after, panting to tell stories about how much he’d had. Chekh­ov and all those country doctors had used vodka to dull the pain of operations. There was a method by which he could discover what happened. A list must be written, or perhaps a chart on his computer. Best not to get overambitious; best to open one of the fourteen legal pads with which he’d absconded from Paine. 1. Translations. Before Tatiana came over, Aleksey had been doing another translation for the Russian publishing house Uyutniy Dom, or Cozy House, not that either he or Tatiana had any qualms about interrupting his work. Here in the United States, Aleksey himself was translating Gone with the Tesseract, which featured the adventures of a time-travelling Southern heroine with “a husband in one century and a lover in another,” a convenient arrangement. The husband was a civil-rights lawyer; the lover, a Confederate soldier; Aleksey, the unfortunate conduit through which “Oh, my sweet baby” became, in its nearest Russian approximation, “My darling crumb (moya dorogaya kroshka).” 2. Tatiana—over—8 prompto. Todd Elkin had an evening seminar: Edgar Allan Poe and the Absurdity of Fear. Tatiana came to his room wearing a red skirt and wooden beaded necklace that left bruises on his chest when they embraced. She had brought over some new drawings she’d done of herself nude, slightly shapelier than she was in actual life, her legs splayed hither and thither. “This is the last time you’ll have to do this,” Tatiana had said, throwing the pages of Gone with the Tesseract on the floor. “After tomorrow, you’ll be a powerful biznessman.” By this, she meant he’d be a real estate agent like herself. That way, they could see each other during the day, with less of the sneaky-sneaky. And they’d have money, and would go to conferences together, and swim naked in the hotel pools. Sex in the water, Tatiana had said, was like sex on cocaine. Aleksey had never tried either one— what a linty, boiled-chicken life he’d had until now, never even invited to a single one of the famous geology department orgies back in Leningrad! 3. Tatiana = barber. In preparation for his real estate interview, Tatiana had shaved Aleksey’s beard and cut some of the shagginess out of his head, leaving a bowl-like arrangement of waves that reminded him of a children’s puppet, meant to represent Anna Karenina’s husband, that he’d watched with his daughter and wife in Leningrad. 4. Salad and napoleon; vodka commences. Tatiana was trying to lose weight.

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5. Making love. Satisfactory for Tatiana; less so for Aleksey, who was worried about his interview. 6. Sleep. Had Tatiana cut off his nose? But to what end? To what end?

He pulled back the window curtain, almost expecting the sky to be red, the street to be dust—a nuclear holocaust took his nose! But everything was as usual. Todd Elkin, who had been first his American colleague and counterpart, then his sponsor at Paine, and was now simply his landlord, was pulling out of the driveway in his vintage Corvette. Todd was a man not easily satisfied. It wasn’t enough for him to be a professor of nineteenth-century American literature. Todd was also a painter! A skier! A sailor! The lover of an athletic little lady from the registrar’s office! And six years ago, Todd had been the only member of that American delegatory cabal who had done more than stare, as if through a glass, brightly, at the sorry smoking Russians from Leningrad State University. This was the man who, in a moment when the escorts weren’t watching, had pulled out a dictionary and fiercely pointed to the words, ya pomogu tebe, I’ll help you. Todd had gotten him out, had rented him the garage, had gotten him his first and, Aleksey was beginning to fear, his last professorial job in the US. Soon, too soon, after their customary fifteen minutes, Tatiana would come a-knocking on his door and he would have to say, “Who’s there?” but knowing all the time that here she was, the woman who expected a real man, a full man, hairy and bearded and bellied, and who would find instead a nozentity, a nostrato. What to do? He rushed on wobbly legs around the apartment, furiously straightening it up, sweeping vodka and glasses and shirt into his kitchen cabinets. When had his nose gone? When? When? A knock on the door. “It’s not a good time . . .” “Guess who!” “I’m very sick, I might infect you . . .” “What?” She opened the door and came in. Aleksey spun around so that his back was facing her. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. He grabbed a page from his desk and covered his face in it. “I don’t know, maybe you do,” he said. It was the page, he couldn’t help noticing, on which the Confederate soldier explains his reasons for going into battle. “I like to keep what’s mine,” the soldier says. Aleksey said, “Did you perhaps take something from the apartment?” “Take something? Are you drunk?”

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“Part of my face. I’m just asking, did you perhaps cut off part of my face and take it with you? Perhaps by accident?” Aleksey turned slowly around, the page still over the bottom half of his face. “What’s happened to you? Are you playing bandit now?” Tatiana was impatient. She’d been quick to immigrate from Byelorussia, quick to change from engineer to real-estate agent, quick to marry Professor Todd, and would be quick to drop the noseless mutant he’d become. “Just a little accident, baby,” he said in Russian. “Nothing terrible.” “Show me!” She pulled the paper out of his hands and threw it on the floor. She stared at his face and crossed herself—nipple, nipple, belly button. She hadn’t taken it, he knew that instantly. How could he have been so crazy as to suspect her? “See, but it’s fine, I’m not bleeding . . .” “But how did it happen?” “Well,” Aleksey said, nodding, “something will resolve itself.” “But the interview!” Aleksey was finding some bravery, bravery he’d last had in St. Petersburg when, drunk, he’d challenged his wife’s Slavophile to a duel, “if you like the old ways so much!” Now, he said, “It’ll be fine, I’m not interviewing for the job of a fashion model,” and pranced for a few steps. “Now you’re a homosexual, too, as well as a Gogol character?” “No.” He sighed. “If only we’d thought to let you keep that moustache,” she said darkly. “It could have hidden everything. All right, let’s just think about this together for a minute.” “But that’s not even what’s important!” he cried, trying for some romantic-lead insouciance. “I mean, do you still love me, for example?” She put a hand on his cheek. “Of course it doesn’t matter to me. What we have is deeper than that, isn’t it? It’s spiritual, isn’t it? Even though you don’t believe in God, it still is.” She sighed and sat abruptly on a kitchen stool, propping her head in her hands with their hot-pink nails. “All right. Well.” “Yes?” he said. “First of all, your interview isn’t until five. That gives us a lot of time, doesn’t it? And also—” “Also?” “Also, maybe—maybe your nose is there, but it just got crushed,” she said. “You do like to sleep on your stomach, you know it’s very unhealthy, I keep telling you, and still you flop down onto it like a walrus. Maybe if we just—” She reached up and tried to take hold of the flat skin in the center of his face. “Oy,” he said, trying to twist away.

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“That’s good, create some pressure for it. Now—we’ll just hold it for a minute— okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.” She released him. “Yes, it does look better.” She took a compact from her bag and held the mirror up to him. In the mirror, he saw his face, the red imprints of Tatiana’s nails making a circle like a bull’s-eye in the middle. “I don’t see a change,” he said, turning away. “But maybe, Tatianachka, you’re right, I shouldn’t go to the interview?” “No, you can’t let something like this keep you from a meeting with your future. Don’t be such a fatalist.” She began speaking in English, something she always did when it was time to be businesslike. “I must meet a client in North Hills. So you go, pick up résumé—and call me.” “Okay, that is cheering. I now have wonderful privilege to walk outside, alone, and have the little children crying and the big children throwing the rocks at me,” he said. “I’ll drive you there. You only have to walk back, okay, my big theatre queen?” It was early winter and there were many possibilities—opportunities!—for concealment. They tried an old ski mask of Todd’s, a handkerchief, a tissue, a bandage, a scarf, a jumbo Band-Aid, and, last but not least, embarrassingly, contouring makeup. “Listen,” Tatiana said at the end, “there probably will not be anyone there anyway.” When she dropped him off at the copy shop, he tried to kiss her, and she tried to kiss him, but somehow it didn’t work out. He ended up licking her chin, then, giving a brave smile, got out of the car and walked rapidly, head down, into the store. As if to taunt him, the clerk had a huge Stalinist moustache of sufficient length to hide anything that might need hiding. His large, bald head moved in rhythm to a song about people who liked to rock all night. “I’m picking up, please, under Smoletkin?” Aleksey said. The clerk gave him his copies, told him the price, and took his money, all without ceasing the motion of his neck or looking at Aleksey. Back in St. Petersburg, the same kind of young man would have yelled out in surprise, apologized, told him about his friend who lost a leg in a construction accident, pulled a bottle from under the counter, and a flotilla of interesting questions and confessions would have wafted in on the waves of vodka. Eventually Aleksey would know about the clerk’s sinus problems—his slobbering slut of an ex-wife, and his desire to someday become a medical type of person or otherwise help those in Aleksey’s situation, perhaps by taking them to houses of prostitution. The thought of this entire wretched scene made Aleksey ask himself, did his nostalgia now extend to nosy drunks? Nostalgia, that sodden field— had he fallen that far? He walked home, noting the cleanliness of the sidewalk and the disrepair of his shoes. People seemed to be giving him a wide berth, he gathered, based on the glimpses he caught of their feet. Aleksey had an excellent sense of direction, but eventually he

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had to raise his eyes to make sure he was going the right way. And it was then, as he confirmed that Whiting Lane was exactly where he’d expected it to be, that he collided with a man in a dark coat and yarmulke, with Aleksey’s very nose right in the center of his surprised face. “Please forgive me,” Aleksey said, transfixed. “Excuse me,” the man said, and walked off in the direction of the park. Aleksey pivoted like a music-box doll and followed the man, ever ready to conceal himself behind a telephone pole or a parked car, but in fact the man never turned around. He strode through the park and to—why hadn’t Aleksey guessed it?—the town synagogue. Had his nose now found its rightful home on a rabbi? Aleksey stood on a pile of snow in the empty park square, watching the black coat mount the steps, open the door, and disappear into the warm yellow light of the synagogue’s interior. Aleksey stood there, his feet burning with cold in the dirty snow, watching his own breath dissipate, trying not to remember that it was coming from two holes the size of pencil erasers embedded in his face. Back at the Elkin house, Tatiana met him at the door with a look of cracked merriment on her face. “Todd’s here for lunch,” she sang out, “guess what he has?” She dragged him into the kitchen, where Todd sat smiling up from a ham-and-cheese sandwich. “Hey, buddy,” Todd said. “Sorry about your accident.” “But show him,” Tatiana said, still tugging on Aleksey’s arm. Todd took out what looked like a collection of tissues. “The strangest thing,” he said, “I found it on top of my computer, right next to my trekking compass.” Here, he began to lift something pink out of the tissues. Like Venus rising from foam, Aleksey’s nose emerged, naked and proud, profuse and purple-veined. “Maybe it’s a prosthetic or something? Anyway, when Tatiana told me about you, I said, ‘You never know. I’ve always been a very lucky guy.’ Maybe this is just the thing to help you.” “Thank you,” Aleksey said, reaching for it and cradling it in the palm of his hand. It was cold and when he stroked it with one finger, felt waxier than he’d remembered. “And then I said,” Tatiana put in, “‘Remember that plastic surgeon who did—do— my eyes in one hour only and I look so different and good when she is finished?’” “So we called and made an appointment. You and Tatiana are off to see her right now. Don’t even take your coat off.” “Come, come,” Tatiana said, pulling Aleksey out the back door while blowing Todd a kiss. A capricious yet oddly self-righteous driver at the best of times, Tatiana now steered the car with an Ophelia-like rapture, careening down streets and speeding through red lights, saying, “Isn’t it wonderful how we can get things back?” So, Aleksey thought, she has been lying to me about loving me the same whether I had a nose or not. Obviously, this woman is as shallow as I thought she was when we

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first met. But this thought did not make him feel any less unhappy, because he read in the blurred building awnings, and heard in the horns and shouts aimed at their car, the clear message that his nose was dead and so was Tatiana’s love for him. Tatiana bumped into a parking spot and they took the elevator upstairs to the plastic surgeon’s office. The plastic surgeon, a dark, tiny young woman, her face shining smoothly like a boxing glove, touched his face with white-nailed fingers. “I’ve seen better,” she said in her rough voice. “Then again, I’ve seen worse. Much worse, let me tell you.” She and Tatiana shared a conspiratorial smile. “Let me take a look at the nose again.” Holding the dead creature to Aleksey’s face, she said, “It’s proportional to his head, I’ll give you that.” “So when will be the operation?” Tatiana asked. “Here’s the thing: no qualified plastic surgeon would be willing to do an operation like this. Right now, everything is functional and you can breathe normally. If I try to mess around with that nose, we don’t really know what could happen.” “But, we must try,” Tatiana said. “No, no. ‘First, do no harm.’ Surgery might rupture his paranasal sinuses, not to mention his tear ducts, his nasopharynx. You don’t want to be responsible for that, do you? I can’t do it, and any other surgeon would tell you the same thing.” She was using the nose to gesture as she made her point; then, finished, she handed it to Tatiana, who dropped it into her purse without any attempt to wrap it.

Driving home, Tatiana was silent. She turned the radio to a dance station that played a song about two hearts. There was a word between “two” and “hearts” that Aleksey could not make out. To take his mind off his nose, bumping against keys and jagged coins in Tatiana’s purse, Aleksey tried to sing along: “Two, uh, hearts, two hearts that beat as one . . .” Tatiana gave him a look and he stopped. He remembered singing his daughter to sleep in Leningrad. His deep bass was not ideal­ly suited to lullabies, but Natalia loved hearing him, especially when he sang a song he’d learned from a movie about a mixed-race baby, who miraculously escaped from lynch-happy America and was brought to the USSR to be raised by a circus: “The bears and elephants are sleeping, The men and women are sleeping, At night, everyone should sleep, But not if they are at work!” His wife would come in while he was singing and caress the five hairs on Natalia’s head (she’d heard that scalp massages made babies’ hair grow in faster). Aleksey’s voice would swell, filling both rooms up to the chandeliers, because look at what he had! A wife, a child, a piano, two rooms, and that was just the start. Soon there’d be

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more children, more rooms, a piano in each room! A piano in the communal bathroom for the neighbors to share! Back at the house, Tatiana pulled herself together a bit to help Aleksey with the suit she’d bought him. “It’s a suit like Richard Gere was wearing in Pretty Woman. You even look like him a little bit.” “Oh, really?” he said, making a foolhardy attempt to flirt as he put on the pinstriped jacket. “His face is also a little bit flat, but who notices that?” “Are you my pretty woman?” Aleksey touched her breast with a sleeve-covered hand. “Sure, okay.” She turned away and went to Todd’s closet for a tie. “Okay,” Tatiana said, pulling up to the Century First office. “Neither one of us expected it to be this hard. But”—brightening—“maybe this is a handicapped disability situation, and they have to hire you because you are deformed? What do you think? Maybe I should bring it up, even, to Mr. Gess?” “Tatianachka, if you love me even a bit, you will not do that,” Aleksey said. The whole drive over, he’d been looking at himself in the passenger-side mirror, trying to find some angle of his head to lessen the effect of that which was gone. Now, he swatted the mirror away and scratched his right leg in its unfamiliar navy-and-pink pinstripe. They walked in together. Mr. Gess was waiting for them behind the glass door, half-hidden by some advertisements for condominiums, wearing a pinstriped suit much like Aleksey’s. The similarity did not end there. Mr. Gess was, in fact, Aleksey’s very own nose, writ very large. Aleksey steadied himself against the doorframe as Tatiana sauntered in and kissed the nose, just to the left of a slight discoloration from an old sunburn on its bridge. “And this is my famous friend Aleksey, very good with the conversation, especially with people from the univer­sity,” she said. “He will be big asset.” Aleksey turned to her, horrified by her normalcy, but she was already going, jaunt­ily waving at the two of them. “So,” his nose said, “Let’s go to my office and we’ll see what we can do.” “I have myself some ideas. For what we can do,” Aleksey said with morose significance, then instantly regretted it. Already he was making a bad impression! He promised himself to smile every time he said anything—besides eradi­cating the bad impression, it would give his voice extra richness, according to Tatiana. The nose sat behind a desk and gestured Aleksey into a slightly lower chair than its own, so that Aleksey was face to face with the shiny bump on its end, from which several hairs were growing. At least, he thought, the nose would not notice his deformity,

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for it—he?—did not seem to have any eyes. “So,” Aleksey said, “we know each other, perhaps?” “I don’t think so,” the nose said. “Were you at Who’s Who LM: Aruba?” “No, but I have once travelled to Cuba,” Aleksey said. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Hardly any of the new guys go, can’t afford it, most of the time. You know what LM stands for?” Large Medals? Large Metals? Forget the large—that’s Sovetskiy thinking. Here they know there’s more to life than large. Likes Meetings? Meeting people is important in this field. “No, I am not familiar.” “Luxury Markets. The only kind I sell to.” “Yes, very good,” Aleksey said, trying to sound like he wore silk underwear and took saunas at his dacha. “Some great scuba diving there. You scuba dive?” “No, unfortunately.” In his nervousness, Aleksey was forgetting the noseness of the nose. In its fine suit—of a better fabric than his own, and with a more delicate pinstripe, and beautiful shoes, now crossed at an angle from his desk, the nose looked like a better kind of human being, a human being with fewer distracting features, a human being more solid and more ready to fight, no soft spots on him. There is no Achilles heel on a nose, Aleksey thought dizzily. “Yeah, I was wondering,” the nose said. “I noticed, in your resumé, you don’t have any hobbies. Where’s your hobbies section?” “My what?” “See here . . .” The nose pushed a paper at him, “On this resumé, the hobbies are golf and, and—what’s the rest?” Aleksey read, “body building, and of course Monopoly.” “You see how adding a section like that, something a little fun, you can show the world you’re not just a professor from a very messed-up place—you know, I read the news. You put in a hobbies section, I say, ‘Hey, this guy isn’t so boring, I can work with this guy, maybe teach him some street smarts.’” Here the nose made some karatechopping movements with the attenuated, doll-like arms that protruded from either side of its bridge. It must, Aleksey realized, have gotten its suit specially tailored. “So hit me with some hobbies.” “I like reading and also I like many winter sports, for example, skiing, and also I like the Monopoly . . .” At least, he had seen a Monopoly game in Tatiana and Todd’s garage. “Look, Al, I’ll give you the real deal here. Half of all agents are gone in two years. Why?” “Why?”

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Cause they don’t know thing one about commitment. This business owns you for the first two years. Owns. You. And if you can’t handle that, if you want to be all”—here the nose affected a high, sexually indeterminate voice—“‘Oh, what about my books’ or ‘What about my family?’—well then, Al, you might as well just walk out that door.” “All right,” Aleksey said. “I understand.” The nose leaned back in its chair. “You got any questions for me?” Aleksey, of course, did have questions: how much money could he expect to make? How many hours would he have to work? Would the nose ever come back and sit on his face, or was it finding the real-estate business too lucrative? But Tatiana had told him not to ask the first two questions—they made it sound like he cared too much about those things, whereas you were supposed to care about this real-estate agency because it was the best. Pay and hours be damned—you’d work there for free, gladly! That was how you got a job in America. As for the last question, well, you didn’t need a Tatiana yelling at you to know it was wrong. It implied that he thought he was in charge of the nose and reflected badly on his ability to respect his superiors. Subservience, subservience, subservience—that lesson Aleksey had learned for himself in Russia. He took his leave of the nose. But not without peeking back through the window at its tottering, almost hen-like progress between the empty desks.

Dazed, Aleksey wandered back in the direction of the house, no longer caring whether anyone saw him. And in fact, it seemed that people did not see anything amiss. In Leningrad, not even one second would have elapsed before some babushka demanded to know what had happened to his face—was it hooligans?—and suggested a cucumber poultice. But here, people expected to see a nose on every face and that was what they saw. But this thought, though probably true, didn’t really make its way through the pillow that seemed to be lining Aleksey’s mind. It was a goose-down pillow, the same one he’d had from birth to emigration, with a few feather stems poking through the thin cloth. He was sitting on a suitcase, waiting for them to call his train. He was watching his daughter read a gigantic book, only her legs visible, until she peeked around the side of the cover and said, “How do you do?” in a voice she considered at once extremely grown-up and hilarious. He was in the corridor waiting to take his last Moscow State entrance exam, an interview, sweating even down to his ankles, horrified upon realizing he’d forgotten all but one of the lines in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, the one about walking hand in hand into the grave. What kind of place was this, really? You woke up one morning, just like any other day, except “yo”—as they said here—an essential organ was missing, and that very

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afternoon, that very organ was interviewing you for a job. He was unable to think more on this and went to bed as soon as he got to the Elkins’. In the middle of the night, he awoke from a dream in which his nose had formed a motorcycle gang and was chasing him down the highway. Wiping sweat from his forehead, Aleksey stood up, let the sheet fall from him, and shivered. He went to the window. The streetlights made the snow blue, and it reminded him of snow in Leningrad, in the almost uninhabitable winters, when residents asked each other just how crazy Peter the Great had been, “to even have had the thought of building here!” The front-door light came on and Todd stepped outside, carrying a duffle bag that was larger than he was. Tatiana’s voice came from inside the house, “He is nothing, Toddzik! If you’d just come home more often . . .” Todd slammed his trunk closed. Aleksey realized that he wasn’t dressed, just wearing a ski jacket over some plaid pajamas and sneakers. “Remember, I didn’t have to tell you,” Tatiana called out. “Get inside,” Todd said, in a voice Aleksey had never heard him use before but had heard in some films he’d seen shortly after immigrating—the voice of Chuck Norris, enraged to have found himself tiny, betrayed, and pajama-clad on this freezing night. The door slammed. Todd looked up at the second floor, and, seeing Aleksey there, shouted, “Fucker! Loser! Jerkwad!” He paused briefly to gather some snow into snowballs, and then began throwing them at Aleksey’s window. With each toss, he called him by a different name. “Broomhead! Fuckwit! Deserter! Greenhorn!” After a few minutes, he began pausing to simply glare. Aleksey thought perhaps he was running out of names, but then another barrage came: “Carpetbagger! Homo! Pissant! Letch!” At “Letch,” a snowball broke through the glass and Aleksey jumped back, snow scattering everywhere. Encouraged, Todd and the names and the snowballs went on and on; it was as if Todd was marshaling all the memories of his American life—of playgrounds, of sports fields, of bars, of, indeed, his academic specialty, nineteenth-century American literature. He threw the snowballs with a good strong pitcher’s arm. “Whelp! Squatter! Square! Retard!” Finally, he got in his car, accidentally turning on the interior light as well as the headlights, opened his window, shouted, “Chump!” and rolled away, silhouetted by the glow. Aleksey stumbled back a few more paces, breathing hard, and flipped the light switch. His reflection in what remained of the window looked surprisingly normal—if only everyone else could see that reflection instead of his real self! After a few seconds, hope formed, and to extinguish it, Aleksey walked to the bathroom and stared hard into the mirror. And saw his prodigal nose, right where it was supposed to be, just as if nothing had happened. His vein was there, his hairs were there, and when it had all come back, he did not know. He did not know, nor did he want to know. He

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wanted to sit on his floor. He wanted to have a drink and think about the future that he suddenly saw before him, just past the tip of his newly restored nose. Tatiana would come up the stairs. He would sell houses and—why not?—make a million dollars. He and Tatiana would marry. They would have a baby, and the baby would know neither Barkov nor babka, would wonder neither What Must Be Done? (Chto Delat?) nor Whose Fault? (Kto Vinovat?). More power to the baby! All power to the baby! He heard Tatiana’s shoes on the stairs and their clip-clop sound told him that he would forget that the past day had ever happened. Aren’t immigrants like horses? Don’t we need our blinders to move? What’s a professorship, what’s a piano, what’s a daughter, compared to our desire to just get out? In fact, let’s not discuss these barely remembered losses anymore. It doesn't do any of us any good.

30 Avner Mandelman

Pity

We’ve been watching him for two weeks, Léon and I, from inside a shop across the avenue Foch. It belonged to a local Jew who helped the Mossad every now and then, and didn’t ask any questions. This time he closed his shop for us—I didn’t ask how much it was costing him. It was a posh boutique, with chinchilla and astrakhan coats hanging under Tiffany lamps and mink jackets in the corners, and Léon and I made ourselves at home, taking turns at the Zeiss monoscope behind the curtain. We watched the second-floor apartment across the avenue, where the man who called himself Charles LeGrand now lived. Until the month before we weren’t even sure it was he; but then the local Mossad katsa broke into the office of LeGrand’s dentist in Neuilly, made copies of his X-rays and sent them to the archive of Yad Vashem, and after a week the answer came back that it was indeed he, Karl Joachim Gross, The Smiler himself. In ’43, he had personally supervised the killing of five, maybe six thousand Jews in the Lodz ghetto, two thousand of them children, and who knows how many more in Maidanek. Not a very big fish, compared to Eichmann and Mengele, but a fish just the same. Took us five years to locate him, once it was decided to go one level down, since we had gotten all the ones above him already. The funny thing is, the HQ for catching Nazi fugitives was in Paris, and Gross was number three on our list, yet it took us that long to find him. We had looked for him in Rio, and La Paz, even in Santiago, and here he was all the time in avenue Foch, right between our legs, 400 meters away from our own consul’s apartment. This Gross, he now owned a little newspaper by the name of Vents Neufs, New Winds, a liberal paper, supportive of Israel, culture, art, shit like that. Most probably as camouflage, because fuckers like him never change. It’s in the blood, whatever it is. He was old now, more than 70, though he carried himself as erect as if “Pity.” From Mandelman, Talking to the Enemy. Copyright © 1998, 2003, 2005 by Avner Mandelman. Reprinted with permission of the Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Seven Stories Press.

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he were De Gaulle, or something, and he lived on the second floor of a grey apartment building on the good side of the avenue, the north side, with two poodles, a little girl (his grand-daughter, maybe, or a niece), and a blond Swedish nurse or a nanny—whatever she was, that took care of the girl, maybe of him, too. We didn’t care about her, or the girl. Only him. I especially. My grandparents went in the Lodz ghetto, also two uncles, three aunts, and all my cousins. Only my father escaped. At first, after I had tracked Gross down in Paris, the Memuneh, the Mossad’s chief, got cold feet and wanted to take me off the case. But then my father intervened and said I was a pro, he had trained me himself, I could handle it, they shouldn’t insult me, this and that. So they let me continue, but they glued Léon Aboulafia to me, a Moroccan Jew from Casablanca, who knew Nazis only from the movies, from Tach’kemoni high school, and maybe also from Yad Vashem, but that’s it. Eichmann, too, they had let only Moroccan Jews guard him. I mean, we are all good soldiers and obey orders, but why take chances. So we had been watching this Gross for two weeks, pigging out on boeuf en croûte and croissants and fancy cheeses that the local Shadowers who kept a backup team in a café nearby left us every morning at the back door, when we finally got the go-ahead, straight from the Midrasha in Tel Aviv. The embassy bodel, a short, fat woman by the name of Varda, came by one evening and slid an envelope into the mail slot in the front door, just like that, with the code word Sun in Giv’on, which meant we could take him, and it was up to us how to do it. The orders, when we had left Tel Aviv, were to take Gross alive, bring him to Yerushalayim for a trial, but if anything went wrong, not to think twice, to take him down immediately, silent or noisy, then scram to London via Calais, where two DST border guards were on our payroll. It went without saying that taking down Gross would look bad for me, what with my father’s intervention, and the Memuneh breaking the rules for me, and everything. “But better this than headlines,” my father said, when right after Léon and I had landed in Paris, I called him from a hookers’ cafe in Pigalle, going through one of our Zurich lines. “If you got to take him down, do it.” “No, I’ll bring him alive, don’t worry,” I said. “But don’t take chances. I don’t want to see you with tzitzes on your back.” Which meant, “I don’t want to see you on the front cover of Ha’Olam HaZeh.” Ha’Olam HaZeh is the yellow rag of Israel. The back pages show women with exposed tzitzes, the front cover exposes the political scandal of the day. “Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll bring him. Nobody’ll know anything until he’s in the glass booth.”

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The glass booth was where Eichmann had sat for his trial, so a crazed survivor of some camp couldn’t shoot him or something. There was a little pause. All around me were hookers, cackling in argot. “Don’t worry,” I said again. “He’ll be there soon.” “With God’s help,” my father said. (He had become religious in his old age, after he had retired.) “With God’s help.” “With, without, you get the cage ready,” I said, “he’ll be there.” This was two weeks before. Now it was Friday night. I had been watching the literary program “Apostrophes” on the small television, using the earphones, and Léon was at the ’scope, when the envelope slid in. We both knew what it was, even before Léon clicked open his katsa knife and slit it open. It took him two minutes to decipher the message with his Tzadi-Aleph. “Mother’s cunt,” Léon said to me in Hebrew, after finishing the computation. “We go.” Usually we spoke French, in case someone heard voices inside. But I guess he got excited. Takedowns he had done already, two, maybe three, but this was his first abduction, and a Nazi, too. I myself had done three abductions before, two of them in Europe, one in Cairo. None was a Nazi, but so what. Nazis, Arabs, they are all the same to me. Haters of Yisrael, destroyers of Ya’acov, as the Bible said, it is a mitzvah to persecute them, to exterminate them to the tenth generation, like King Shaul was supposed to do to the Amalekite, by the order of God, when he foolishly took pity on his enemy and so lost his kingship. We learned about this, in the Midrasha, in the katsa course; about the dangers of having a soft heart. No pity or compassion for these fuckers. None. Not that I had any fear, now, of this. If anything, it was just the opposite. I knew the stories as well as anyone, what the old hands said, that there was nothing like catching a Nazi—it’s better than sex, getting your hands on one of them, a real live one, being part of God’s own Sword of Vengeance, so to speak. Even experienced katsas sometimes went crazy, when they saw a Nazi up close. Six years ago in Buenos Aires, two katsas from Eytanim department, the Russian shadowers, with fifteen years service between them, slit the throat of an old hag they were supposed to bring in, some Austrian nurse who was said to have helped Mengele do selections. Her trial in Yerushalayim was ready to begin, with documents stacked a meter high, Golda’s speech to the Knesset already printed in large type, so she could read it to the TV cameras without glasses, the editors’ committee already briefed, everything, when suddenly, the night before shipment, the Nazi hag said a few words to one of them, maybe spit in his face, something, and they slit her throat. Just like that, both of them, one after the other. They were not even Ashkenazi Jews, or anything. One a Moroccan, like Léon, the other a Jerusalemite, his parents originally from Turkey, both sets of grandparents still living, even; still they did her, not a second thought.

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Go learn why. Maybe it’s in the genes, now, this hatred. Like men and snakes, forever and ever, with no forgiveness possible. Later the two were demoted of course, but after less than six months they both got their ranks back, after Golda personally intervened on their behalf with my father, who was the Memuneh then. Because who can say he would have behaved differently? she said. Who can say he would have stayed his hand? Orders are orders, but sometimes there’s a limit. A week in that furrier boutique, still waiting for the go-ahead, that’s exactly what I had begun to feel. Ten days, and still nothing. By then I was really beginning to worry, because you never know, someone might have gotten it into his head to cancel. Who knows what goes on in the corridors in the Q’irya, in Tel Aviv, or in the Knesset committees, in Yerushalayim, with all these soft-hearted kibbutzniks. I even suggested to Léon, once, to do it before any orders arrived, then tell the Midrasha we were faced with f.c.r.i., field-circumstances-requiring initiative. But Léon said no. It was too this, it was too that, and I didn’t argue with him too much, because, let’s face it, I didn’t want to make more of a mess than we had to, and also because of my father, and the Memuneh, and everything. But with every day that passed, my obedience was weakening, because I was getting sicker and sicker of seeing this Gross strolling down the avenue with the poodle leash in one hand, the little girl’s hand in the other, the nurse behind. Every time I saw him ambling by, happy and smiling and pink, not more than five meters away, I had to stop myself from rushing out to stick a tape over his white smile, throw him in the VW van, then drive the parcel to the Israeli embassy and let the resident katsa take care of the rest. I mean, the consul would have plotzed, since it would have made him directly involved. But what the hell, we could, if we had to. In such matters, we outranked him and he knew it. Anyway, the orders came, so the only thing left to do, beside the actual job, was decide when and how to do it, and how to ship him over. Finally (it took three hours of arguing), we decided to bag Gross on Sunday. (Sunday mornings he went with his little granddaughter, or niece, or whatever she was, to La Madeleine church, without the nurse.) We would then ship him out to Israel the very same night, no delay. Now, normally, shipping him would have been an Aleph-Aleph problem, because after Switzerland, which is a complete police state, where the SSHD always knows when every foreigner farts, France is the worst place in Europe. In Switzerland they are at least polite to you, and also are honest and stay bribed, once you pay them off. But these French fuckers—everybody, flics, DST, SDECE, CRS—they’ll all happily take whatever you slip them, stick it in their ass-pocket, then go and haul you in anyway and divide the loot with the boss. That’s the national character. Whores from birth, is what they

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are. No wonder they all collaborated with the Nazis in the forties, helped them ship the Jews to the camps, also managed some of the local camps for them, from Vichy. Fucking bastards, the Nazis and the French both. I once saw the train station on the outskirts of Paris, near the Port de Clignancourt, from where they had sent the Jews east—a crumbling structure and rusty rails, not even a sign of what had once happened there. Not a plaque, not a note, nothing. Sometimes I wish I had been born then, so I could fight the fuckers when they were still young, like my father did, after he got out of the Polish forests and roamed all over Europe with a pair of knives and a Luger, and a little notebook where he kept score in Rashi Hebrew script. But we can’t all be lucky. This time, though, it seemed we were: two of our missile boats were docked in Marseille, for installation of these new CW radars from Dassault, and Thomson CSF digital sonar, that the local katsa had bribed out of the Defense Ministry, and by chance I knew the captain of one of them—also a Tel Avivi boy, by the name of Amirav Feiglin, who had once been with me in Young Maccabi, and also later, in Flight Course, which we both flunked. Years before, in Wormaiza Street, he had once stolen my bike, and when I caught him I of course beat him up, but I also let him beat me back a little, and we remained friends. So now, when Saturday morning Varda arrived for last-minute instructions, I asked her to send Ami a message in Tzadi-Tzadi, regular IDF MilCode, bypassing the embassy katsa, and ask him if he would take a live package with him on the boat to Haifa, in a large box, and also us, Léon and me, without passports. Varda made a face when I asked her to bypass the embassy katsa, but she agreed, as I knew she would. I used to fuck her, two years before, when she was new in the Paris station and not yet so fat from all this Parisian butter. I was stationed in Paris then for a series of takedowns of some local PLO shawishes, who had helped blow up two El Al offices, and she was the decoy, masquerading as a hooker. Old business, this, doesn’t matter. The main thing is, she agreed to give Ami the message, and also help drive the van. “You need anything else?” she asked, after I had finished telling her what I wanted. She had entered the boutique via the side door, and now sat in the purple armchair of the furrier’s customers, rubbing her cheek on a white astrakhan coat that cost maybe 200,000 francs, maybe more. Her freckled face, under the thick makeup, was still pretty, also her tits were still upright; only her flanks had begun to go flabby and her ankles had thickened, maybe from all this walking, trailing people, eating on the run. Also, two years ago, she was told to put on weight, because Arabs like them fat, and now it was probably hard to take it off. It’s not the healthiest thing, being a junior embassy katsa. But what do you want, there are worse things than giving your youth to your people. At least there’s still a people to give it to. “Yes,” said Léon, “syringes, tapes, sack, everything.”

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He, too, had fucked her once or twice, I am sure, for form’s sake, when he had arrived in Paris. But of course it was no big deal. In the Mossad, fucking is like a handshake. It’s a greeting to a colleague. It’s even sort of encouraged, so you don’t have people falling in love with each other, or something, screwing up the operational chain of command. If everyone screws everyone, it doesn’t matter anymore, and you can direct your mind to more important stuff. Anyway, that’s the theory. I remember how after fucking Varda exclusively for more than a year, I was told several times to look around, there were more women in the Mossad, a new crop every year coming from the Midrasha, what did I get stuck on this fat broad for. (She wasn’t that fat, then.) Finally, I got the hint and stopped it; or maybe she did, I can’t remember. Maybe she got the hint, too. This was just after the business with the PLO shawishes. Anyway, it was a long while back. She said now, “Maybe you need more people?” I saw she was eager to get in on the thing, not just to drive. Catching a live Nazi, it doesn’t come up every day. “No,” I said. “Léon and I are enough, for this.” “Sure,” Léon said. “It’s a small job.” His first abduction, already an expert. “No, I can help, too,” Varda said. “Really.” I saw she didn’t get it, so I said, “You are also a Polack, a Bilavsky, they won’t let you.” Couldn’t she see it? The orders were to bring him alive, that’s why there were only two of us, in a job that required four at least. To minimize the chances of a repeat of the Buenos Aires fuckup. “Only on my father’s side,” Varda said. “My mother was from Greece.” “Same thing.” The Nazis had also killed half the Jews of Greece, and sent the other half to Auschwitz. I was once in Salonika with a small backup team from Kardomm, on a takedown job of a PLO mechanic. On my day off I went to the local Jewish cemetery. It was so full of headstones, you could hardly walk. If Tito hadn’t stopped them in Yugoslavia, and Montgomery in EI Alamein, these fuckers would have done the same in Tel Aviv, brought down the Third Temple. Touch and go, it was. Touch and go. Varda said, “No, I got my Authorization last month. Really.” “Congratulations,” Léon drawled. “Commander.” The Authorization is a permission to kill without having your life or the life of a colleague threatened, based on f.c.r.i. It’s roughly equivalent to an officer’s commission in the Army. Varda’s nose turned red. “No, really. So if you need someone.” I began to say it was okay by me, but Léon said quickly it was not something he wanted to take on. Maybe because she was half a Polack, or maybe because he did not

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want a woman on the job. Moroccans are like that. Women for them are good only for one thing—babies. Maybe for fucking, too, but even for this they prefer each other. “Authorization, shmauthorization,” Léon said. “You want to help drive, fine, drive, but this thing, Mickey and I do it.” He said it as if he was giving the orders all of a sudden, and I got mad. I said if she wanted to help, let her help, why not? Maybe we could use a woman. “Like how, use?” Léon said. “We don’t need anybody else. Two is enough for this, mother’s cunt, an old man and a little girl!” I said, “But if, I don’t know, the little girl shouts, or something.” “So what? Mother’s cunt! She shouts, he shouts, anyone shouts, it’s the same thing. Anything goes wrong, we take him down, ten seconds, we are gone.” “You or me?” I said. “Who will do him? If we have to.” Léon got all red in the neck. He knew very well that the one who took down Gross would have it on his file forever. The Panicker, the one who had screwed up The Smiler’s trial. But if he now said I should do it, if we had to, it would be like admitting he didn’t have the stomach for it. Varda looked at me with professional admiration, at how I had hemmed Léon in. But I didn’t give a shit about that, now. “So who would do him?” I asked again. “We won’t have to,” Léon said at last, his voice sandy. “And if he fights?” I don’t know why I was so mad at Léon all of a sudden. “So he fights!” Léon snarled. “So he fights! Lift some weights tonight, so you can bend his arm!” Varda said pacifically, “This Swedish nurse, she could make trouble, if she comes, or the girl, what do I know.” Léon snapped at her that he would ask for her opinion if he wanted it. “Fuck you,” Varda snapped back at him. “Fuck you, ya Aboulafia, you speak nicely or I’ll take off your left ball.” I liked her again, now. That’s the way. “It’s too big for you,” Léon said. “An olive, I bet,” Varda said, which was nice of her, too, implying she had never seen it. There was a short silence while we regrouped, so to speak, picking at the cheese, pouring Chambertin, passing napkins. Finally, Léon said the nurse never came on Sundays. The shadowers had told us so. I said nothing. Both he and I knew that this did not mean a thing. The shadowers fucked up half the time. A bunch of Yemenite boys good for nothing. Only because of the coalition agreement did they take them in at all.

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“Yeah,” I said at last, not wishing to restart anything. It would all go on our report anyway, every word of this, from the tape recorder, which we had to leave open by standing orders. “But I can take care of her,” Varda said, not making clear whether she had meant the nurse, if she came, or the girl. “No, no,” Léon said. “Mickey and I will do it. It’ll be a breeze.” “So anyway, if you need me.” “Fine, fine,” Léon snapped. “We heard you.” But of course it wasn’t a breeze. I had the first inkling of this the next morning, when we parked the VW van on rue Blé, a quiet side street forking off the north end of avenue Foch, waiting for Gross to appear. Half an hour and he hadn’t come yet. “Abort,” I said to Léon. “He’s late. Late! Something is wrong. Abort, Léon, abort!” Taking down Gross, each one of us could decide on his own and justify later. But aborting on lateness, for this we needed a consensus. “Nah,” Léon said. “Don’t be a yachne. He had diarrhea, from too much cheese, or maybe a hangover. Something.” Fifteen minutes more. Still nothing. “Abort!” I said. “You want to veto?” Léon said. “On your head.” I thought about it. Aborting on a hunch was permissible, but if it came out later it was nothing, I would be a yachne forever. An old woman. Not in my file, but where it counts. In the Midrasha’s cafeteria, in the Sayeret’s summer camp, in the hotel safe rooms. “It’s a Nazi,” Varda said. Her face had become puffy, as if air was blowing through it, from within. “A fucking Nazi. You won’t wait for him a half-hour?” “All right,” I said at last. “For a Nazi, I’ll wait.” Ten minutes more. Fifty minutes late. “Relax,” Léon said to me. “It’s still quiet.” Indeed, rue Blé was deserted. Even avenue Foch had almost no cars. Maybe a cab or two going to Neuilly. “Yeah,” I said, grudgingly. “It’s quiet.” Maybe it would still be all right. But when Gross finally came around the comer, embalmed in a black suit and sporting a dark Tyrolean hat, it was plain for all to see that it was an Aleph-Aleph fuckup.

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He was holding the girl in one hand, the Swedish nurse in the other, and behind the nurse, all holding hands, were a bunch of little girls all dressed in black, squeaking and chirping like blackbirds. (Later we learned it was the niece’s birthday, and her lycée friends had all come along, for church.) “Shit in yoghurt!” Varda said in Hebrew. I said nothing, but it was obviously a disaster. Without looking at me, Léon said we should abort. “Just let him go, we’ll come back next week.” But now I, all of a sudden, was hot to trot. Maybe because, I don’t know, I saw him now before me. The bright smile, the upturned old nose, the soft white hands. “No,” I said to Léon. “Let’s get him.” Léon, crouching near his own eyehole, at the van’s door, shook his head, so I grabbed his shoulders and said the missile boats were leaving Marseille the next day. If we postponed, we’d have to wait another week, dump Gross in the embassy, to be sent on El Al as diplomatic cargo, in a box, then he might die en route, there’d be no trial, nothing, only bureaucratic shit forever and ever. “You want Bleiman telexing Glilot for the next hundred years?” Yoram Bleiman was our consul in Paris—his daughter was married to the PM’s younger son, the one who avoided military service by going to a Yeshiva. I knew for a fact the PM could stand none of the three; but did I want my fuck-ups coming up at Friday eve meals at the PM’s table for the next five years? Also, I could see my own father giving me that pained look, across our own Friday table. (After my mother died I went to live with him, in our old apartment, on Wormaiza Street.) “So he’ll telex,” Léon said. “Let him telex.” “All right, sure,” I said. “Let’s go back, have one more croissant, wait another week, maybe they’ll send another team, an experienced one. Maybe a bunch of Yemenites they’d pull off some tail-job, in Cyprus.” Léon got all white around the nose. For a brief moment I thought he would punch me. Then he got up from the floor. “All right, fuck it, let’s go.” Even this late on a Sunday morning, perhaps ten o’clock already, rue Blé was still deserted as a lane in Yerushalayim on Yom Kippur. The café-tabacs were all shuttered, the lottery office closed, not even pigeons on the sidewalks. Aside from the squealing little girls, it was calm and quiet. We might even have had the required thirty seconds to do it—rush out when he was passing the patisserie, grab him, inject him, and throw him in, all in one movement (a dozen times we had practiced this, before we left Tel Aviv), but because we had hesitated and argued, Gross had already passed us by. So when we finally jumped out, clanging the van’s door open in our haste, he turned, and stared at us. His cheeks got all tight and military—he knew in an instant—and then his face fell

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apart and he screamed. It was a scream the likes of which I had never heard before, worse than if someone had slit his throat open. And then everything got fucked up all to hell. The Swedish nurse, as if she had practiced this before, bashed Léon on the back of the head with both fists, twice, and he fell as if he was made of wood, straight forward, mashing his nose on the pavement: there was a loud crack, like a piece of lumber breaking, and blood squirted out of his face as if a faucet had burst. All the little girls began to scream, the whole lot of them, and scurry about like crazed mice, and by that time Gross was running down rue Blé—72 years old, but loping ahead like a deer toward avenue Foch. Then the Swedish nurse threw herself on me, tugging at the roots of my hair, spitting and hissing, in Swedish and German and French. For a full minute I battled with her, first punching her ample solar plexus, then between her legs, all the while trying to inject her in various parts, when all at once she tore away from me and threw herself upon Varda, who was for some reason struggling with the little girl. “My angel!” the nurse screeched in German. “No one is going to take you if I—” Varda let go of the girl and grabbed the nurse by the hair, and in a second had her on the sidewalk in a reverse Nelson. I wanted to shout at her, to tell her to go easy, but I had no time to talk, because right then two little girls in lace-trimmed black dresses raced past me, screeching, and as one tripped, both of them fell upon each other and somehow got tangled between my legs, just as I was trying to hoist Léon on my shoulder. I was knocked down again, with Léon on top of me; and as I kept trying to peer from between the skinny white socks dancing and scampering before my eyes, with Léon’s blood dripping on my eyebrows, I saw the nurse lying on the sidewalk, like a large blonde chicken with neck bent sideways, oddly elongated. Varda’s pink face swam into my view. “I had to!” she screeched. “I had to!” “Get into the van and let’s go!” I said, struggling again to my feet, feeling Léon’s blood dripping on my neck. But Varda was already gone, racing toward avenue Foch, Gross’s little girl dragging behind her, legs akimbo. “Mathilde!” I hollered. (This was Varda’s codename). “Mathilde! Let’s go!” But she kept running, dragging the girl behind her. “Halt!” she shouted at Gross in German, and I saw that she had grabbed his little niece by the throat, with her own katsa knife under the little ear. “Come back, you fucker!” Madness!

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Through Léon’s blood, I saw Varda jerking the little girl’s head back, the white neck arching upward. Madness! Madness! One look at a Nazi, and we forgot everything. Everything! Then, as in a slow dream, I saw that the girl was not Gross’s niece at all, but one of the other girls, whom Varda had grabbed by mistake. The girl’s eyes, frozen with terror, looked up into Varda’s chin, as if something was growing out of it. I wanted to shout, to tell Varda that she had got the wrong girl, that she had made a dreadful error, that The Smiler would never come back for a stranger, that the flics would be upon us in a second, but an invisible fist seemed to have been rammed down my throat and not a word came out. “Halt!” Varda screamed across the avenue. “Ha-a-lt!” Then, to my dull astonishment, as in a silent movie, I saw Gross halt in mid-stride. He turned around, honking cars flowing to his right and left, like water unfurling before a reed growing in the Yarkon River, and for a brief second he looked at Varda, then at me, smiling crookedly. “Haaalt!” Varda howled, in a voice like an animal’s, “Come heeere!” Madness! As I tugged my Beretta out of its plastic holster at the small of my back and hoisted it up, Gross kept staring at me with that peculiar little smile. Then his smile widened and softened and turned radiant. And as Varda’s knife began to move, I felt my bladder loosen; and all at once, with my index finger already searching for the soft triggerspot, I found myself hoping that the man floating in the V of my gun sight would dash away from me, hoping beyond hope.

31 David Bezmozgis

Minyan

After my grandmother’s death, my grandfather announced he wanted to move out of the apartment they had shared for ten years. Too many memories, and also, for one person, it was expensive. My mother and aunt filled out forms for subsidized housing, and my grand­father was placed on a waiting list. If a spot opened up, he would be able to save hundreds of dollars each month. Of course, the money wouldn’t change his life. His needs were minimal. Tea, potatoes, cottage cheese, black bread, chicken, milk, preserves. My mother and aunt bought him his clothes at Moore’s—a discount chain whose labels read: Made in Canada. He never traveled, never went to concerts or movies, and had no hobbies aside from the synagogue. That he had no immediate use for the money wasn’t the point. When he was gone, the grandchildren would have more. My grandmother’s yahrtzheit came and went, and my grandfather was still no closer to getting an apartment. Thousands were on the waiting list, and there was no way of knowing how much longer he would have to wait. My mother told me a year wasn’t that long, she had heard of others who had waited three or five. The waiting list outlived more applicants than she cared to mention. Shalom Zeydenbaum’s son, Minka, received a letter a month after Shalom’s death. Minka said he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. When he told the story, he laughed. The system was inscrutable. At least in Russia you knew who to bribe. But, unable to give up, my family sought angles. My mother made inquiries in the community. Apartments had been had. Others had experienced success. No doubt an apartment existed, and waited, like America, to be discovered. My father canvassed his patients in search of a lead. Many patients were the children of Polish Jews who had made their money in real estate. They owned buildings all over the city. Surely one of them could find a suitable place for an honest man, a war hero and a pious Jew. “Minyan.” From Bezmozgis, Natasha and Other Stories. Copyright © 2005 by David Bezmozgis. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and the author.

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My uncle played his trump card and exploited a political connection from his days doing business with the new Russia. The man had been an ambassador, the man had served on the city council. Such a man must be able to help. My aunt wondered why it had to be so hard. Didn’t all these people have parents of their own? Were their hearts made of stone? My uncle informed her that these people did indeed have parents of their own and that their parents were probably the reason why my grandfather couldn’t get an apartment. More months passed. A possibility here and a potential opportunity there. All of them came to nothing and my grandfather, never an optimist by nature, resigned himself to the fact that it was a lost cause. Some people had a talent for making things happen, he was not one of them. Once, during the war, he had had a chance to make some money. A man in Kyrgyzstan had a load of hats he wanted to move. Good woolen hats of a very desirable fashion. My grandfather and his brother had the inside track on the hats. One railway car to Moscow and they could have made a fortune. They could have been extremely wealthy men in Russia, but their father wouldn’t let them do it. He was a very honest man. He never invited trouble. So the hats went to someone else—who naturally made a fortune—and my grandfather worked with his hands for the rest of his life. Like the hats, so the apartment. My grandfather entertained no illusions, unless, of course, they were illusions of exaggerated bleakness. All along, at the margins of the apartment search, there was one possibility that neither fully materialized nor completely disappeared. A building owned by the B’nai B’rith was in fact subsidized. It was only a short bus ride from my grandfather’s current building. It faced a park. Most of the people in the building were either widows or widowers. On the ground floor was a common room where concerts were occasionally held. My grandfather had a few acquaintances who lived there, and he felt the building would present him with more social opportunities. Since my grandmother’s death, he had seen less and less of their old friends. My grandmother had always been the one to make the phone calls and the arrangements, and now that she was gone, he felt that most of their friends had indeed been her friends. On his own, my grandfather found it hard to break the old patterns. The B’nai B’rith building seemed the perfect solution. And it appeared that there was a slim chance that he could gain a preferential place on their waiting list. Word had spread at the tiny Russian community synagogue that my grand­father was looking to find an apartment. This word had reached a popular and well-respected rabbi who knew my grandfather to be a pious man and regular synagogue attendee. This very fact made him an attractive candidate since the B’nai B’rith building had its own one-room synagogue which was no longer drawing a minyan for Friday night and Saturday morning services. I couldn’t believe that, in a building whose entire population

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consisted of old Jews, they couldn’t find ten men, but my grandfather insisted that it was true. Even though the building was Jewish, the people were old. Some were sick, some were atheists, and more than half of the residents were women. It was a serious problem. The synagogue was Orthodox, and without ten Jewish men, they could not hold proper services. Since I was conveniently between jobs, it was my responsibility to drive my grandfather to the B’nai B’rith building to meet with Zalman, the synagogue’s gabbai. Zalman was a Romanian Jew who spoke Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and quite a lot of English. For years he had overseen the day-to-day running of the synagogue. If my grandfather could impress upon him his level of religious commitment, then Zalman would be able to use his influence with the building’s manager. The manager was sympathetic to the synagogue’s plight and might be willing to manipulate the waiting list in order to bring in the right kind of resident. In other words, a spiritual ringer. On the way to meet with Zalman, my grandfather repeated that it probably wouldn’t do any good. If Zalman could do anything, he would have done it long ago. The trip was a waste of time. Nevertheless, he clutched the letter of recommendation that the rabbi had written for him. I told him not to worry. He replied that when you got to be his age there was no longer much to worry about. Everything was in God’s hands. Who are we to know His plans? What is getting or not getting an apartment compared to losing a wife? God does what He does for His own reasons. If it was meant for us to get the apartment, then it would happen; if not, then not. What could anyone do? I said he could pray, but he didn’t get the joke. The synagogue was indeed one room, which was divided into two sections by a flimsy latticework partition. On the left was the women’s section; on the right the men’s. Each side could hold thirty people. Zalman pointed out what went where. Here the prayer books, there the tallisim are folded, over there the ark and the Torah. He opened up the doors so that we could take a look at the scrolls in their velvet cover. My grandfather said it was a very good synagogue and gave Zalman the rabbi’s letter. Zalman promised to do what he could, so long as we understood that there was no telling when an apartment might open up. Did we understand what it meant for an apartment to become available in such a place? Unfortunately, my grandfather said, he understood very well. On the way out, Zalman escorted us through the lobby. We passed two Russian seniors who studied us with unconcealed malice. Zalman explained that these were two of the ones who wouldn’t come. Atheists, Zalman said. One a product of Stalin, the other of Hitler. But what do you say to a man who asks you where was God when the Germans were shooting his parents and throwing them in a hole? It isn’t a pleasant conversation. And who here didn’t lose someone to the Nazis? I lost my grandparents, three beautiful sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins. So what

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am I supposed to do, let the bastards win? Because who wins if a Jew doesn’t go to synagogue? I’ll tell you who: Hitler. Three Russians who didn’t understand Hebrew sat in the back of the synagogue. One was missing an arm. Two Polish Jews sat in front of them. One had his place by the partition so that he could stretch his bad leg, the other kept his walker near for emergency trips to the washroom. I was between them and the front row where my grandfather sat with two other men. Herschel, a Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, sat beside my grandfather, and Itzik, a taxi driver from Odessa, sat beside Herschel. Zalman was at a small table beside the ark. On the other side of the partition were half a dozen women. There was no rabbi, and so the responsibilities for the service were divided between Zalman, my grandfather, and Herschel. The task of lifting the heavy scrolls fell to me, as I was the only one with the strength to do it. The Saturday morning services started at nine and lasted for three hours. Most of the old Jews came because they were drawn by the nostalgia for ancient cadences. I came because I was drawn by the nostalgia for old Jews. In each case, the motivation was not tradition but history. After services, everyone went to the common room for a kiddush. Zalman brought a bottle of kosher sweet wine and a honey cake. The Russian man with one arm contributed a mickey of cheap vodka. It takes only one arm to pour and only one arm to drink. Thank God, he said, at least here it is no disadvantage to be a one-armed man. One of the women distributed the wine in small paper cups and also circulated a dish with the slices of cake. When everyone had drunk their wine and munched their cake, they wished one another a gut Shabbos and wandered alone or in small groups back to their particular lives. On those mornings I accompanied my grandfather back to his new apartment, where we drank tea and played checkers. The new apartment was slightly smaller than the old. The brown sofa had been sold and replaced with a blue one. The brown sofa hadn’t folded out; the blue one did. (Now, in the event of familial tragedy, my mother and aunt wouldn’t have to spend the accursed nights on the living-room floor.) The bedroom remained identical, and in the kitchen were the same chipped plates and the same enamel Soviet bowls good for warming soup. I would spend a few hours with my grandfather, his only visitor all week. The change of locale hadn’t done much to improve his social situation. For every reason to leave his apartment, he could always find ten to stay where he was. My grandfather had expected Zalman to make more of an effort, but Zalman was always preoccupied with unspecified concerns. He also had a wife. Only Herschel, the survivor who sat beside my grandfather, had extended invitations—to come over for tea, to read some Yiddish poetry, to play cards, to go for a walk in the park. He is a very intellectual man, my grandfather said. A professor.

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Despite this, my grandfather had yet to accept any of Herschel’s invitations. He would go, he said, it was only that every time he was invited, something needed to be done. Once he had been salting pickles, another time he had needed to mend a pair of shoes, yet another time he had had an appointment to get his toenails cut. But when the time was good, he planned to go. Other people said things about Herschel and Itzik, but he had lived a long life without listening to those kinds of people. Who can know about the truth between two people? Both had had wives. Itzik had two children. What’s to say that they aren’t even cousins? Who knows? Would someone think to say a word if two cousins shared an apartment? The following Saturday, I noticed how, when Itzik coughed, Herschel placed a hand on his shoulder. I also noticed an undercurrent of disapproval emanating from the back of the room. After Herschel read from the Torah, the other men took his outstretched hand without enthusiasm. Previously undetected signals were everywhere. It seemed less like a coincidence when Itzik and Herschel were the last to receive their paper cups of wine. It was evident that the one-armed man barely acknowledged Herschel as he happily made an observation in Yiddish. Itzik sat alone at a table, his thick chest spasmodically wracked by terrible hacking. Young person, he said, could you bring me some water? The devil has me by the throat. When I returned from the water fountain with a paper cup, Herschel was standing beside Itzik. At the front of the room, Zalman was announcing a Chanukah party. I handed the cup to Itzik. Herschel asked me how tall I was. In his shtetl I would have been a giant. You can only get so big on cabbage, he said. His brother, a Communist before it was a good idea to be one, had been big for a Jew. He’d broken the arm of a Pole who had cracked Herschel’s skull. The Pole was a blacksmith’s apprentice. He had arms like legs. Herschel wondered if I would be able to come to their apartment and change a light bulb. Itzik used to do it, but it wasn’t such a good idea for him now that he wasn’t feeling well. And even standing on their tallest chair, Herschel wasn’t big enough to reach. You could only sit in the dark for so long. Herschel spoke to me in English. Itzik, when he spoke, spoke to me in Russian. They spoke Yiddish to each other. While beating me twice at checkers, my grandfather told me what he knew about Herschel and Itzik. They had been neighbors in another building. Their wives had been friends. Herschel had come to Canada in 1950. During the war, Herschel’s wife hid in a cellar; Herschel was sent to Auschwitz. Like our family, Itzik left the Soviet Union in 1979. He had been a successful man in Odessa. He drove a cab. He had his own car. Sometimes he went for long trips with a full trunk, and when he came back the trunk was empty. People said he brought dollars with him from Odessa. How else could he have bought his own taxi so soon after coming to Canada? Later he had three cars and rented them out. He wasn’t like my

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grandfather and the other old men. On the first of the month, he didn’t have his nose in a mailbox sniffing for government envelopes. Four years ago, Itzik’s wife died. He put himself on a waiting list for a subsidized apartment. The next year Herschel’s wife also died. Herschel also put himself on a waiting list. But unlike Itzik, Herschel couldn’t sit and wait. Even though he was no newcomer to the country, he had no money. He was an intellectual, a man of ideas. Not a practical man. Without his wife’s check, he could barely afford to pay for the apartment. So Herschel moved into Itzik’s apartment. Maybe Itzik did it as a mitzvah, because everyone knew he didn’t need the money. But then again, a man loses a wife, another man loses a wife—this is an unimaginable loneliness. Who knows who is helping who? One hand washes the other. So when Itzik finally got this subsidized apartment Herschel came too. Again, what choice did he have? To pay for Itzik’s apartment was no different than paying for his old apartment. In other words, impossible. And by then they had been living together for two years. They move in here and people talk. Two men in a one-bedroom apartment. Old people are no better than children. Worse, because they should know better. But what can you expect from old Jews? We come from little villages; we come from poor families. What kind of education did we get? How many of us finished school? By fourteen, you start working. You get maybe eight years of school. The rest you learn from life.

I knocked and Herschel opened the door. He was wearing a white cotton undershirt and a pair of faded trousers. His body showed the effects of prostate treatment. The hormones had atrophied his muscles and made his breasts grow. They hung loosely beneath his undershirt. He invited me in. He had a pair of slippers ready for me. The slippers were probably a little small, Herschel said, they weren’t accustomed to giant visitors. Itzik sat on the couch in front of the television. He was seized by another fit of coughing and then strained to catch his breath. Look, the workman is here, he said. He is joking with you, Herschel said, this is how he jokes. When you’re done with the light, Itzik said, you could take a look at the toilet. I helped Herschel carry a chair from the kitchen. He held it as I removed the fixture and unscrewed the dead bulb. Can you believe we had no light here for three weeks, Herschel said. If you can do something, it only takes a minute, but if you can’t do it, it stays like that forever. He threw the switch and marveled at the light. Wonderful, he said. I trailed after Herschel as he went into the bedroom. There were two night tables flanking the queen-size bed. Each one supported a night-lamp. A small stack of books was piled on one of them. A glass of water rested on the other. Herschel went over

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to the one with the books and retrieved his wallet. He returned to me holding a fivedollar bill, which I refused to take. It was late in the afternoon, and I could also not accept his offer of tea. He thanked me repeatedly as he escorted me out into the hallway. As Herschel closed the door, Itzik clutched his knees and steadied himself against another barrage of coughs. The next Saturday was Chanukah, and Itzik did not come down for the service. Without Itzik, there were only nine men, and so Zalman stood in front of the building and attempted to convince Semitic-looking passersby to come inside. He spent a half hour in the cold before two blackhats, a father and son, agreed to come in and help. When Zalman returned, the three Russians in the back were already putting on their coats. Zalman glared at them and they sat back down. Because of the delay, everyone was anxious. The service lurched, Zalman stumbled through the Torah reading, the women kibitzed behind their partition, the Russians in the back complained about the time. When it was Herschel’s turn to approach the Torah, he asked Zalman to say a prayer for Itzik. He pledged eighteen dollars to the synagogue and stood solemnly, his hands shaking, as Zalman asked God to deliver Itzik from his illness and provide him with a full recovery. The events of the morning put a damper on the Chanukah party. Nevertheless, Zalman’s wife brought jelly donuts and the women passed them around on greasy napkins. I sat with my grandfather and Herschel as Zalman sang Chanukah songs. A few of the women joined in, although some could only hum the melody. Most of the others sat in their coats, their lips gleaming with oil and speckled with sugar, waiting for the opportunity to leave. Herschel asked if he could have a second donut to take upstairs to Itzik. Not that Itzik could eat it. It was hard to imagine, Herschel said, such a man. A real Odessa character, right out of the pages of Babel. He had even grown up on Babel’s street. As a young boy, Itzik had carted watermelons for Babel’s uncle. What hadn’t he done in his life? At thirteen, he was working two shifts in a munitions factory. At seventeen, he was at the front. He fought the Germans, he survived the Communists, he had an appetite for the world—and now, he didn’t even have the strength to eat a donut. As Itzik lay dying, strange and not-so-strange visitors appeared at Zalman’s door. Zalman’s apartment was on the same floor as Itzik’s, and these visitors no doubt heard the sound of coughing and rasping as it echoed through the hallway. In the last days, Itzik’s son came from New Jersey to sit at his father’s bedside. Many years had passed since he had seen or spoken with his father. Herschel stayed mostly in the kitchen cooking their meals and reading at the table. To allow Itzik and his son some privacy, Herschel spent several hours each day at my grandfather’s. As he waited for the elevator to ride the four floors up to my grandfather’s apartment, Herschel saw the people who knocked on Zalman’s door. Those who knew him avoided his eyes.

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Seated at my grandfather’s table, Herschel seemed oblivious to the conspiracies that were threatening to turn his tragedy into disaster. He spoke about how wonderful it was that Itzik’s son had finally returned to his father. No matter what happens, in the end a father is a father and a son is a son. His own regret was never having children. But after the Holocaust there were two types of people. There were those who felt a responsibility to ensure the future of the Jewish people, and then there were those, like Herschel’s wife, who had been convinced that the world was irrefutably evil. Those were the two kinds, Herschel said, and as always he was neither one nor the other. For him, the world held neither mission nor meaning, only the possibility of joy. But because of the way he was, for the same reasons that he never had any money or became an important man, he allowed his wife to decide for them. He had rationalized that if joy existed in the world, then joy would continue to exist even if he didn’t have a child. He was capable of these rationalizations, he said. His wife wasn’t. She had made a decision in a Polish cellar, and no amount of America could change her mind. He could understand her, Herschel said. He could also understand Itzik’s son, and the people in the building who wouldn’t meet his eyes. He could understand all of them. That was his problem, he said, he could understand everybody. Itzik died on a Friday night and the funeral was held on Sunday. To ensure a minyan at the gravesite, Zalman insisted that all of the synagogue regulars attend. I drove my grandfather, Herschel, and two of the old women to the chapel. Zalman came with his wife and the two Polish Jews. Itzik’s son called Itzik’s three cabbies and they brought everyone else. Aside from the people from the synagogue and the cabbies, almost nobody else came. Itzik had lived in Toronto for twenty years but hadn’t had much to do with anyone after his wife died. The rabbi who had written my grandfather the letter of recommendation delivered the eulogy. He had not known Itzik well and made no secret of it. Zalman wrote some notes on a loose piece of paper and the rabbi studied the sheet before speaking. Itzik had been an unusual man, the rabbi said. He came to this country already an old man and had become successful. He had his own business and never asked anyone for anything. He supported his family and always gave money to the Jewish Russian community. In his last years he rediscovered his Jewish roots. For two years, he never missed a Saturday service. Not looking at the sheet, the rabbi added that with the passing of Itzik the world lost another piece of the old Jewish life. His death was a tragedy not only for the people who loved Itzik but for all Jews everywhere. After the rabbi spoke, he asked if there was anyone who wanted to say anything more about Itzik. Herschel, who sat between me and my grandfather, wiped his eyes and looked over at Itzik’s son. Itzik’s son did not look up from the floor. Nobody moved and the rabbi shifted nervously beside Itzik’s coffin. He looked around the room and asked again if there wasn’t someone who had a few words to say about Itzik’s life. If

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someone had something to say and sat in silence, they would regret it. Such a time is not the time for shyness. Itzik’s spirit was in the room. To speak a kind word about the man would be a mitzvah. Finally, using my knee for support, Herschel raised himself from the pew and slowly made his way to the front of the chapel. Each of Herschel’s steps punctuated silence. His worn tweed jacket and crooked back delivered a eulogy before he reached the coffin. His posture was unspeakable grief. What could he say that could compare with the eulogy of his wretched back? Facing the room, Herschel composed himself and spoke clearly. Itzik was my last and dearest friend. Hitler killed my family and I never had children. When my wife died, I thought I would be alone until God decided it was finally time to take me also. That Itzik was my dear friend these last years was the blessing of my old age. Without him I don’t know what would have become of me. He was a wonderful man. He was an honest man. He was a strong man. He said not one word he didn’t mean. I will miss him like I would miss my right arm. Living a long life is both a blessing and a curse. Today it is a curse. I don’t know if it will ever again feel like a blessing. At the cemetery, there were two-foot-high snowbanks. The earth from Itzik’s grave was frozen in clumps and piled slightly higher than the snowbanks. The gravediggers had cleared a semicircle around the grave. Herschel stood by himself. Itzik’s son held a shovel, another shovel was lodged in the frozen mound. The old people stamped their feet and wiped their noses. Zalman sang the prayer for the dead and the rabbi said some other prayers. Everyone dropped a hard earthen clod onto the lowered coffin. Then the rabbi, Itzik’s son, and I filled the grave. Digging into the mound was like striking concrete. Each thrust sent a shock through my shoulders. Itzik’s son stopped to rest but never relinquished his shovel. The rabbi and I would each dig for a minute and rest for a minute. It took nearly twenty minutes to finish the job. By the end sweat had stiffened my hair and milky icicles hung from the rabbi’s beard. As everyone stomped back through the snow toward the cars, Itzik’s son thanked me for helping to bury his father. He hadn’t said a word to me before. The only time I heard him speak was when he had asked the rabbi how he was to pay him for the service. Ahead of us the old people tottered through the snow. They walked in twos and threes, their arms linked to steady one another. Itzik’s son stopped and watched them. Look at them, he said, who knows how many they robbed and cheated and screwed? He turned back toward Itzik’s grave. He spent seven years in jail, my father, did you know that? I have brothers and sisters all over Russia. I don’t even know how many. For him nothing was forbidden. That was my father, you understand? He raised his fist to his face. He was like this, Itzik’s son said. He drove his fist into a snowbank. He looked at me to see if I understood. I nodded that I understood. Like this, he repeated, his fist in the snowbank. No death in the building went unnoticed and Itzik’s was anticipated. The people who had knocked on Zalman’s apartment now slipped envelopes under the door. A

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bottle of vodka was left on his threshold. There were many in the building who disapproved of this behavior. My grandfather overheard conversations. But even those who disapproved felt they had no choice but to act. Everyone knew someone on the waiting list. Not to act was to guarantee that only people without principles would succeed in getting Itzik’s apartment. The people with principles came to see Herschel as he sat shivah for Itzik. They brought eggs and bagels and honey cake and apologized for what they had to do. Herschel said he understood. He understood it had nothing to do with him. For the week Herschel sat shivah, Zalman refused to make any decisions. Still, everywhere he went that week, Zalman was oppressed with desperate stories. He had to understand. The list was, figuratively speaking, a cage, old Jews peered out through its bars and stretched their plaintive hands out to Zalman for salvation. It was no longer a secret that Zalman had the manager’s ear and that soon enough the manager would come to him looking for a suggestion. Everyone also knew that Zalman needed to fill another place at the synagogue. With Itzik’s death and not counting me, he was down to eight regulars. All kinds of pressure were being applied. The one­-armed Russian man swore he would stop attending services if his brother-in-law was not allowed to take Itzik’s apartment. His brother-in-law was a good Jew. He lived in an overpriced apartment. His building was full of blacks. He had diabetes. Why should he have to suffer because of Herschel? Just because this one shared a bed with another man he should be re­warded with an apartment? In Russia he would have been given ten years! And if this was the kind of synagogue Zalman was running, he’d sooner go to church than sit through another service. Others appealed to Zalman with dubious temptations. Word had spread. Men who had never set foot inside the synagogue pledged regular attendance if only Zalman helped their deserving relatives. Zalman should do the math. In one move he would fill two spots. Sure, they hadn’t come before, but now they would repay Zalman’s mitzvah with one of their own. It was only fair. They had nothing against Herschel, but what right did he have to the apartment? Was he Itzik’s wife? Is this the kind of world we were living in? On Saturday morning more than twenty men appeared for the service. Almost as many women settled in behind the partition. Despite the air of sinister motivations, the room was transformed and Zalman walked through the aisles with a sense of purpose. He threw himself into the service with exceptional vigor. He sang out page numbers in Russian and Yiddish. He called the new attendees up to the Torah. Everyone made an effort at making an effort. Zalman. The new attendees. Voices battled each other for distinction. Herschel sat as usual beside my grandfather. He sang loud, his voice mingling with those of the others. The synagogue swelled with beautiful and conflicting prayer. God in His heaven was left to sort it out.

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After the service Herschel followed me to my grandfather’s apartment. My grandfather brought out the checkerboard and Herschel watched as we played. He preferred chess, he said, but he had always liked that all the pieces in checkers looked the same. It appealed to his socialist sensibilities. As if there was nothing else to talk about, Herschel looked over my shoulder as I contemplated moves. He dunked crackers into his tea and hummed a vague Yiddish-sounding melody. We played one game and then another. Herschel watched as if engrossed. He applauded clever moves and clucked his tongue at my mistakes. I finally asked him what he intended to do. He said he didn’t know. What could he do? He’d lived a long life. So many things had happened. God had always watched over him. Why would He desert him now? He was on the waiting list like everyone else. Maybe his name would come up? What was the point of talking about it? You lived as you lived while you lived. Today he was drinking tea and watching checkers, why ruin a nice afternoon worrying about tomorrow? I left Herschel with my grandfather. They were setting up the board for a game. Herschel was remembering how, so many years ago, his brother carved beautiful birch checker pieces. The Sabbath elevator arrived and I climbed aboard. The elevator descended, stopping automatically on every floor. Two floors down, Zalman joined me in the elevator. He thanked me again for coming to the services. If he had more people like me, he wouldn’t have any problems. I told him I was sorry about his problems. The laws were clear, he said. The old rabbis weren’t fools. What do you need for a minyan? Ten Jewish men. The elevator stopped on his floor. Zalman stepped out. He had more to say. I followed him to his apartment and told him I wanted to know what he would do with Herschel. Zalman looked up and down the hall to make sure we were alone. His eyes shone with intensity. Let me tell you, I am not a stupid man. I have my own opinions, but I am in charge of the synagogue. Do you think I liked the business with Itzik and Herschel? You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but Itzik was a difficult man. And there are people who say they know very well why Herschel has no children. But for two years they came. I never said a word. Because my job is to have ten Jewish men. Good, bad, it doesn’t matter. Ten Jewish men. Only God can judge good from bad. Here the only question is Jew or not. And now I am asked by people here who never stepped into a synagogue to do them a favor. They all have friends, relatives who need an apartment. Each and every one a good Jew. Promises left and right about how they will come to synagogue. I’ve heard these promises before. And they say, with so many good Jews who need apartments, why should Herschel be allowed to stay? This is not my concern. My concern is ten Jewish men. If you want ten Jewish saints, good luck. You want to know what will happen to Herschel? This. They should know I don’t put a Jew who comes to synagogue in the street. Homosexuals, murderers, liars, and thieves! Take them all. Without them, we would never have a minyan.

32 Lara Vapnyar

There Are Jews in My House

Galina carried in an aluminum pot of boiled potatoes, holding it by the handles with a kitchen towel. She put it on a wooden holder in the middle of a round table covered with a beige oilcloth. She opened the lid and, turning her face away from the steam, ladled coarse, unpeeled potatoes onto each of the four plates. The plates were beautiful: delicate, white, with a golden rim and little forget-me-nots in the center. For the past six weeks, they’d been eating in the living room, where the heavy darkbrown curtains covered the only window. For the past two weeks, they’d been eating in silence. From time to time, somebody coughed or sneezed, the girls might whisper something to each other, or even giggle, after which they glanced guiltily at their mothers, but mostly they heard only themselves blowing on their food and the clatter of heavy silver forks. Galina didn’t mind the silence. It was better than having to talk, to keep up a forced conversation, as she did a few weeks before. Even the room itself was best suited for silence. It was large and square, empty and spotless. The sparse furniture was drawn close to the walls, and there was only a massive dinner table in the middle, rising like an island on the dark brown floorboards. Since they dined on potatoes every day, Galina was used to everybody’s eating habits. Her seven-year-old daughter, Tanya, cut the potato in half and bit the insides out of the skin hurriedly, then ate the skins too. Raya, sitting across from Galina, peeled potatoes for herself and her eight-year­old daughter, Leeza. “Two princesses,” Galina thought. Raya peeled potatoes with her hands, using her delicate fingernails to hook the skins. She bent her head so low that her dingy hair almost touched her plate. Raya and Leeza broke their peeled potatoes into small pieces and ate, picking them up with a fork.

“There Are Jews in My House.” From Vapnyar, There Are Jews in My House. Copyright © 2003 by Lara Vapnyar. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, LLC; and the author. All rights reserved.

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Raya’s hands were often shaking, and then the fork clutched in her fingers was shaking too, knocking on the plate with an unnerving tinkling sound. Galina had the urge to catch that trembling fork and hold it tight, not to let it shake. “Chew, chew!” Galina kept saying to Tanya, who tended to swallow big chunks in a hungry rush. “You’re wasting your food when you’re not chewing.” Galina herself ate slowly. She picked up a whole potato on a fork and ate it with the skin, biting off pieces with her strong, wide teeth. She chewed zealously, careful not to waste food and also trying to prolong dinner as much as possible, because the hours between dinner and going to bed were the most unbearable. Six weeks ago, when Raya and Leeza first came to live at Galina’s place, it had been different. Galina and Raya spent the evenings talking, mostly about the prewar life that seemed now unreal and perfect. They retold some minor episodes in meticulous detail, as if the precision of their memories could turn that prewar life into something real, and failure to remember something could unlock the door of Galina’s apartment and let the war in. If one of them was unsure of a detail, she relied on the memory of the other. “I used to buy Moscow rolls every Saturday. Remember Moscow rolls, the small ones with the striped crust? They were six kopecks each. Were they six kopecks?” “I think they were seven—the ones with poppy seeds cost six.” Often, their conversations went on well into the night, after the girls had fallen asleep. Then they moved closer to each other and talked in whispers. Now, right after dinner, Raya went into the back room, where she and Leeza slept, and sat there on the bed with her back to Galina. Sometimes, Raya bent over the nightstand and started a letter—to her husband no doubt—but after a few lines she always stopped and crumpled the paper. At other times, Raya had a book in her hands, but she didn’t turn the pages. Through the opened door—Raya never shut the door— Galina saw Raya’s pale, unclean neck, so thin that you could count every vertebra. Galina couldn’t concentrate on a book either. She would follow the lines to the bottom of the page and only then realize that the letters didn’t form words and sentences, but simply passed in front of her eyes like endless rows of black beads. Galina dried the dishes and stacked them in the cupboard above her head. She put the aluminum pot on the lower shelf, shoving it deeper with her foot, then shut the cupboard door with a bang. She wondered if Raya heard the clatter. Sharp sounds made Raya shudder. Everything. A fork falling on the floor, a door’s squeak, somebody’s sneezing, the toilet flushing. For a long time, Galina had tried to do everything as quietly as possible. Now she didn’t care. Raya herself was quiet as a mouse. That’s what she told Galina when she came: “I’ll be quiet as a mouse.” Galina wondered then where this expression came from, why mice were considered so quiet. Because they weren’t. Galina grew up in the country, and there were a lot of mice in their house. At

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night, they made these distinctive mice sounds—scratching and nibbling and knocking against the floor with their tiny claws when they ran from one corner to another. Little Galina lay in bed thinking that if she opened her eyes she would see a mouse with crooked yellow teeth and moist eyes staring right at her. Galina went into the living room, removing her wet apron. The usual picture: the girls were on the sofa, making a dress for Leeza’s doll from some scraps. As always, Tanya was doing all the work and Leeza giving instructions, Galina thought with annoyance. The doll’s pink, shiny body was turning swiftly in Tanya’s hands as she dressed her. It was a beautiful, expensive doll with the torso made from hard plastic and the head and limbs from some other, softer kind. It had blond hair shaped into long, springy curls and round light blue eyes that seemed to stare right at you. Galina didn’t have toys like that as a child, and she couldn’t afford to buy them for Tanya. Galina peeked into the back room. Raya didn’t turn to her, only bent lower. She was scribbling something with Galina’s rusty ink pen. The pen was almost dry and made heartrending sounds, scratching the paper. Galina covered her ears and looked around. She had always liked that her room was so plain. There weren’t any crocheted doilies, marble elephants, or crystal vases. The windowsills weren’t decorated with pots of geraniums, the floors with rugs, or the walls with framed paintings. She didn’t even have an image of the Madonna in the corner where it always hung in her mother’s house. The only thing on the wall was a framed black-and-white photograph of Galina’s mother. Now, Galina wished they had a painting–any painting, something to rest her gaze on. She uncovered her ears and immediately heard the awful scratching sound of Raya’s pen, Leeza’s troubled breathing, the snapping of the big tailor’s scissors in Tanya’s hands, Leeza’s cackling cough. Galina wanted to scream, open her mouth and scream at the top of her lungs. She rushed to the hall, mumbling that she was going to get some air before the curfew. She wondered if Raya heard her. She probably didn’t. Because if she did, she would have darted out of the back room, asking: “What? What did you just say? You’re going where?” Her face would have been distorted and her voice faltering. During the last few days, it happened every time Galina went out of the house. Every time. When Galina went to the market in the morning, when she left to talk with one of the neighbors or their former coworkers, when she simply went out for a breath of fresh air, like today. Every time, when Galina touched the doorknob of the exit door, she felt Raya’s begging stare on her. She saw that Raya wanted to fall on her knees, to clutch at the edge of Galina’s dress and not let her go. But she didn’t do it, she just stood in the doorway, shifting from one foot to the other, clasping the doorframe with yellowed fingers, clearing her throat to ask in her thin, trembling voice again and again: “Where’re you going? When will you be back?”

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Galina opened the door and glanced in the direction of the back room. Raya hadn’t moved. Galina walked downstairs, trying to resist an urge to run. Part of her was expecting Raya to rush out the door and grab her by the sleeve. A ridiculous thought. Galina knew that Raya would never so much as stick her head out. She walked to the door and pushed the cold iron handle down. The door gave in slowly, scratching the stone floor and making a tired screech, the last sound before the silence of the outside. It was beginning to get dark, but still the contrast between the soft, dusky light of the street and the semidarkness of the staircase was great. Galina had to shield her eyes for a moment. Their deserted street with a few pale stone buildings, a few leafless trees, and broad rough sidewalks, was wide and airy. Galina threw her head back and inhaled hungrily. At last, she could breathe! The declaration of war with Germany three months ago, in June, although completely unexpected, didn’t shake Galina. Somehow she didn’t see the war as a great tragedy, as a disaster rushing into their lives and destroying everything. For her, it was more like an unwelcome change in her daily life, requiring some practical adjustments. Galina made her husband, Sergey, dig a big hole in the empty plot of land behind their building and construct a little cellar there, while she was buying potatoes, drying them in sheets of newspapers, and storing them in big sacks. Galina also bought large quantities of salt, soap, oil, and matches; glued stripes of paper to the windows to protect them from shells; made sure that she and Tanya had enough warm clothes; and determined the shortest route to the air-raid shelter, counting the number of steps. She didn’t feel shaken—on the contrary, she felt energetic and alive, something that hadn’t happened to her in a very long time. She also felt proud of being able to keep calm and make rational decisions at the time, while everybody else seemed to lose his head. Galina didn’t feel shaken even when she saw her husband off to the front. They were stuck in the middle of the crowd of men going to the front and the howling children and women who were clutching the men’s coats. Sergey was silent. The only words he said were about Tanya, that it was good that Galina didn’t let her come along, that it would have been too upsetting. Galina thought it was good too. She saw a glimpse of Raya nearby, howling like the others, with her hands tightly locked on her husband’s back. “Don’t they understand?” Galina thought, starting to feel annoyed. “It’s war, men are supposed to go.” Toward the end of the summer, when there was a clear prospect of the town being occupied, the evacuation started. The factory equipment was packed hastily in plywood boxes and put on freight trains along with valuable workers and the families of those soldiers who were members of the Communist Party. All the others (families of nonCommunist soldiers, retired workers, and invalids) were supposed to follow in a few

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days. But in a few days, the town was cut off. Galina and Raya stayed, because neither of their husbands was a Communist. The prospect of staying in the occupied town seemed uncomfortable to Galina, but not catastrophic, especially since Soviet newspapers said that the Germans treated the civilian population with decency. She had read it just a few weeks before the war. Galina made more practical adjustments: she buried all her modest valuables in the ground next to the potato sacks, she bought more soap and matches, she got rid of Tanya’s red tie and a folder full of newspaper clippings about Stalin. Galina managed to keep her calm. Raya was another matter. As soon as it was announced that the town would be cut off, she went into a feverish, panicky state. She spent the whole first day running around the station, grasping at anyone who would talk to her, begging the railroad officials to take her and Leeza on a freight train, trying to convince them that trains must run, simply because she, Raya, must leave. She continued to do that until she was forced away from the station along with the crowd of other desperate people. But, unlike them, Raya didn’t give up after that. The following days she spent running around the town, attempting unthinkable measures to get her and Leeza out of town. She tried to bribe some truck drivers to drive them east. She tried to bribe a clerk in the city passport office to forge documents for them. She walked to the small villages to the south of town and asked everybody there if they could take her and Leeza out on horseback. When she came home from her day trips, the soles of her shoes were worn through and her feet rubbed raw. She slumped onto a couch and burst into hysterical sobs, unable to calm herself even in front of Leeza. Raya was Jewish. That explained a lot of things, Galina thought. The war had been going on for a few months, and rumors became the only source of more or less credible information. The rumors about Jews differed. Some said that when Germans occupied a new town, the first thing they did was to put all the Jews on cattle trains and ship them away. Others said that Germans didn’t bother to ship Jews anywhere; they just drove them together to the edge of a town or to a big ravine and shot them all. Everyone: men, women, and children. A few refugees from Kiev, where Raya’s parents lived, added more ghastly details. Tanya began asking Galina: “Do they make Jews take off all their clothes? Underpants too? Do they throw all the Jews into a big pit and then burn them alive? Have they burned Leeza’s grandma?” Galina told her to stop listening to nonsense. But Tanya wouldn’t stop: “Do they also burn kids? Will they burn Leeza?” Galina told her to shut up. Raya also couldn’t stop talking about that. She was running around town, looking for refugees and asking them more and more questions. She said she was sure that they were telling the truth. She said she could feel that her mother was dead. It was hard to imagine Raya’s mother dead. Galina had met her once or twice when she came to visit Raya. She was a very vivacious old woman—too vivacious in Galina’s

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opinion. She wore silly hats and painted her lips, even though her face looked so obviously old, all wrinkled and puffy. She laughed a lot, showing her gold caps, and kissed Leeza in public. Galina tried to imagine Raya’s mother as part of a gray, screaming crowd. She tried to imagine her naked, trying to cover her fat, wrinkled body, her silly hat still on. Did the hat fall off her head when they shot her, or did it stay, and Raya’s mother’s dead body was lying in a pit still attached to the hat? It was Galina who found a solution for Raya. A peasant from a nearby village, a relative of Sergey, agreed to take Raya and Leeza in his wagon as far as the next town toward the eastern border. On the night they were supposed to leave, Galina came to see Raya off. Only then, seeing Raya and Leeza both dressed in their winter coats through it was a warm Indian summer night, seeing Raya’s bursting-at-the-seams suitcase and Leeza’s doll sticking out of her backpack, seeing their sturdy shoes and their grave faces, did Galina understand how real it was. Raya was leaving, leaving their town and leaving Galina all alone. Galina had an urge to grab Raya’s hand and hold it, squeezing it harder and harder. She actually made a step toward Raya, but instead of taking her hand, Galina took the suitcase and carried it downstairs, clutching its cold leather handle. The road led Galina to the deserted tramlines. German officers and soldiers—there were only a few of them in their town—occupied brick buildings in the center, close to the City Hall. Here, in this remote part of town, the reality of the war wasn’t so evident. There wasn’t a grocery store or a movie theater nearby, and the area had always been deserted at that hour, after people had returned home from work. It was very quiet. Galina had always associated war with noise: the swishing of missiles, explosions, the rumble of passing artillery, screams. But now it seemed that the outside world had been silenced around her. There were more disturbing signs of war inside Galina’s apartment: the unplugged radio, the unpeeled potatoes, the traces of white paper on the windows, Raya’s wary eyes, Raya’s shaking hands, the sound of Raya’s pen, the whole of Raya’s being. Galina would never have imagined that it could be so hard to stand her presence. Galina and Raya met three years earlier, when Raya had moved into the town with her family and gotten a job as a junior librarian in the central library. It was the same position that Galina held. They sat at adjacent desks, went to lunch at the same little cafe on the corner, shopped in the same grocery store, and took the same tram to get home. They couldn’t help but become friends. At the beginning, their main topic of conversation was the similarities in their lives. They loved to find more and more of them and then laugh in amazement. They lived on the same street in identical

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two-room apartments. They had daughters of almost the same age. Their husbands worked as engineers in the town’s big textile factory. They were both outsiders in this town, having moved here because of their husbands’ jobs. Neither had relatives or friends here. Raya had lived all her life in Kiev; Galina was born in a small village, but she went to school in Moscow and later lived there. So they were both used to life in big cities and found the town and their neighbors and coworkers very dull. They both were born in the beginning of March. They even looked alike: pretty, slender women of medium height, with blue eyes and wavy blond hair. Library customers often asked if they were sisters, making Raya shake with laughter and say that she had always wanted to have a sister. Once Raya talked Galina into buying identical dresses. They put them on in the Central Clothing Store’s dressing room and stood staring at each other in the large mirror. “We are twins!” Raya cried. Another similarity was that they both passionately loved novels and often read them during working hours, causing puzzled looks from other library employees, who used working hours for knitting and chatting. Their favorite novel was Anna Karenina and, unlike everybody else, neither of them found the ending depressing. Raya said that for her the saddest part was the scene where Anna talked to her little son for the last time. “I cried for three hours straight,” she said. “I would stop for a few minutes and then cry and cry again. My mother became panicky and wanted to run for the doctor,” she added, laughing. “After that scene the rest of the novel simply couldn’t touch me.” Galina didn’t cry when she read that scene or Anna’s suicide scene. Galina felt paralyzed for days—paralyzed with envy for Anna Karenina. Anna could live a normal, stable life, but she chose not to. She opened the door and found a new, different life, where everything, even her suffering and death, was better than in her old life. Galina could almost visualize Anna opening the door—it was a heavy, rusty door, and Anna was pushing on it with her round shoulder. In Galina’s life, there were no doors. Galina wondered if Raya could understand that. Raya seemed to understand a lot of things. She understood when Galina told her about Sergey’s drinking. Everybody else refused to understand how his drinking was a problem. “Does he beat you?” Other women asked, “Does he beat your daughter?” “Does he smash furniture and throw vases out of the window?” “Has he ever been found sleeping in a ditch?” No, Sergey had never done any of that. He was a quiet drunk—he came home every night, walked to his bed, shaking and staggering, and slumped down. The next morning, he woke up with a headache, and then he had an empty, dead expression in his eyes the whole day. He was also a shy, guilty drunk. When Galina asked where the money was that she had saved for Tanya’s winter coat, his lips quivered and he turned away and swore in a trembling voice that it would never happen again. Other women didn’t understand, maybe because their own husbands also drank and they weren’t as shy and guilty as Sergey about it. Raya understood. She

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sat next to Galina and let her talk and cry, never interrupting her, never suggesting anything, only patting Galina’s back from time to time and smiling at her softly. Raya also understood things that Galina had always considered private, her own, hidden from everybody else, nonexistent for other people. There often were sparks of recognition, when Raya described feelings and thoughts that Galina also secretly had. That pleased Galina—she wasn’t alone. But at the same time, it frightened and appalled her—she didn’t want to be faced with the reflection of herself in Raya. Once Raya said that she didn’t love her husband. “I mean I love him very much,” she corrected herself hurriedly. “But I don’t . . . really love him.” “I often have this uneasy feeling when I am around Leeza,” Raya said another time. “Often I see that she is forcing herself to talk to me. She’s never like that with her father. Sometimes, I wonder if she loves me.” Galina had wondered if her daughter loved her too. She seemed to be so much closer to her father. When Sergey was sober, they spent time making model airplanes, or playing chess or talking, bursting with laughter from time to time, but when Galina entered the room, their laughter always stopped abruptly. Galina tried to do things with Tanya too, but something always went wrong—Tanya became restless in a few minutes and Galina annoyed. “Do you love your daughter?” Galina wanted to ask Raya, but she didn’t. She was afraid to hear the answer. They didn’t always talk about serious matters. Often they got together to chat about their lives, to share family anecdotes, stories about their adolescent crushes, cooking recipes, and makeup secrets. Or rather it was Raya who shared her makeup secrets, because Galina didn’t know much about that kind of thing. Raya also knew a lot of tricks about underwear: “Galina, darling, don’t stuff the whole thing in, bras are not for hiding your breasts—they are for pushing them up”; or about feminine hygiene: “You see, this way it will never leak, it will never stain your skirt again.” Galina’s fascination at these remarks was mixed with embarrassment—she’d never had anybody talk to her that way before. They began spending more and more time together. Raya would drop by on weekends or after work, before her husband came home. Sometimes she brought Leeza and left her to play with Tanya in the living room while she and Galina talked in the kitchen. Galina often had things to do, and Raya sat at the kitchen table with a teacup in her hands. Galina was moving about, wiping counters, scrubbing floors, cleaning carrots covered with layers of dirt, chopping gray chicken carcasses, or frying potatoes in a hissing skillet. When Sergey came home drunk, Galina got Tanya and they went to Raya’s place to spend the evening. There they sat in Raya’s messy kitchen and talked, often for hours. Raya never seemed to worry about cooking or cleaning. Galina thought that nothing, not even fire or flood, could distract Raya from talking. Once, Raya had a pot of soup boiling away on the stove. The white froth was pushing from under the lid, Raya saw it, but she didn’t go to turn off the gas until she had

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finished her sentence. While they talked at Raya’s place, the girls were usually playing in the back room, and Misha, Raya’s husband, was lying on the living room couch with a book. Sometimes, Misha came out into the kitchen and asked apologetically if there was something to eat. Raya would jump off her chair and say that she was sorry and that she had forgotten all about dinner. She then began running around the kitchen trying to fix a meal—something very different from what was served in Galina’s house. Dishes clattered, packages fell out of cupboards, and pieces of food dropped onto the floor. Sometimes, Galina stayed to help, and they cooked a meal together and then ate dinner together—all five of them. The sidewalk was scattered with piles of slimy autumn leaves. They gave out a strange, sweetish smell when Galina touched them with her foot. Her toes were slowly getting chilly. Galina stepped over the glistening tram rails and started walking between the wooden ties. The dry gravel rustled under the thin soles of her boots. She had a pleasant prickly sensation in her feet every time she stepped on a little pebble. She didn’t know where she was walking, just away from home, away from Raya. Galina had never liked their dinners at Raya’s place. She sensed that Raya and Misha were tense, tense and maybe a little embarrassed, because they had cheese and salami and canned sardines and early tomatoes on their table—things that Galina couldn’t afford. Galina felt uncomfortable. Tanya’s behavior made her feel even worse. She grabbed slices of salami from the plate—several slices at once—and said with her mouth full that she never thought “sausage” could be so delicious. She stuffed quartered tomatoes into her mouth, spurting red juice along with the seeds, and smiled happily. All of that in contrast with Leeza, who ate slowly, reluctantly, after being begged by Raya: “Darling, please, one more piece.” Galina often felt the urge to smack Tanya on the back of her head, smack her hard, so that damned slice of salami would fall out of her mouth. Misha’s presence also made Galina uncomfortable. She avoided looking at him, probably because he was so unattractive, even ugly. Galina remembered now how stricken she was when she saw Misha for the first time. Raya and Leeza had come over for Sergey’s birthday, but Misha was late. When he came in, the apartment was already packed with people. He entered timidly, towering above the sea of heads and clouds of tobacco smoke. He searched the room with his eyes, looking lost, and Galina for a second thought that he’d come there by mistake, he looked so different from everybody else. Misha had a small torso and a small head and very long, clumsy limbs. His neck was also very long, his nose large and wide. Raya called him “my ugly gosling.” Misha was a quiet man; while others were yelling, laughing, and later

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singing drunkenly, he sat in the corner with one of Sergey’s technical magazines. When Raya appeared next to him, always out of nowhere, all flushed, intoxicated by the party atmosphere, he put his hand around her waist in a shy but at the same time proprietary way. She stroked his back, rubbed her face against his bony shoulder, said “You’re my ugly gosling,” and kissed him, making him blush and smile. Apparently, Galina thought, the ugliness in a man was something you could get used to. Otherwise, Raya wouldn’t be able to kiss him, or stroke his back, or go to bed with him and enjoy it. “Well, I enjoy it,” Raya had once said, sitting in Galina’s kitchen. “Misha’s not bad . . . he does everything to give me pleasure.” Raya sat on the windowsill with her feet dangling. Galina was on her knees, scrubbing her chipped wooden floor. The stirring of Raya’s shoes in front of her face was very annoying. Then Raya bent down to Galina and said in a slow whisper, “But, you see, something’s missing.” Galina caught herself blushing all over. She mumbled something like “Really?” and dived under the table to continue scrubbing there. “How is yours?” Raya asked once. Galina wasn’t surprised by her question. She could feel that Raya longed to talk about that every time they chatted about the kids, shopping, and underwear. Galina had even prepared her answer. Deep sigh and shy smile. “I bet,” Raya said. “Your husband is so handsome!” Galina heard this a lot. She used to think him handsome too. But with time, Galina started noticing the drawbacks in Sergey’s appearance, more and more of them each year, and then nothing but drawbacks. Recently, she’d noticed that with his slightly protruding eyes and meaty lips, Sergey looked like a cow. “He tries to give her pleasure,” Galina often thought, while sitting across from Misha in Raya’s kitchen. The very idea of trying to give each other pleasure was strange to Galina. Neither she nor her husband had ever had that intention. At first, when there was passion, they just did it in a way that seemed to be the simplest and the most obvious. They were like two hungry animals that gobble up their food, not bothering to enhance the flavors or to serve it beautifully. And after a few years of marriage, especially since Sergey’s drinking had intensified, their infrequent sex had been hardly about pleasure or even simple enjoyment. Sergey usually crawled into bed, sighed, and whispered, “Let’s put the stick in.” “Some stick!” Galina thought. It was limp and looked more like a wrinkled old sock. It hurt when Sergey struggled to put it in. “Help me,” he said plaintively. Galina helped him, trying not to look at his neck, reddened with effort, and his damp hair, unnaturally yellow in the moonlight. After that the bedsprings started squeaking with resentment, and Galina lay, squished by Sergey’s heavy body, feeling his unshaven chin rubbing against her skin somewhere above her ear. She sometimes threw worried looks in the direction of Tanya’s bed, but Tanya always slept soundly with her face buried between the pillow and the

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wall. In a few minutes, the squeaking was over and Galina hurried to the bathroom. When she returned, Sergey was fast asleep. The high point of Galina’s sex life came in the gynecologist’s office, where she went for her annual checkups. The doctor, an unsmiling woman with a thin bun of greasy dark hair, never looked at her patients. She checked them quickly with a slightly disgusted expression, then sat down at her desk and buried herself in her papers. Galina knew that at some point the doctor would cough and ask, “Do you live . . . ?”—inquiring in this modest manner, whether a patient was sexually active. Galina always said yes. She did. She lived.

Galina’s legs were aching—she must have walked a long distance. A few feet away, she saw the bright red letters in the sign of the Central Clothing Store. odezhda. Actually, the letters D and E had fallen off, and the sign looked like a mouth with missing teeth. Galina walked to the entrance, stepping over the shards of broken glass. The store’s glass window had been broken, and what had been inside stolen or ravaged— the work of looters. She peeked inside, careful not to cut herself on the shards of glass. Torn boxes, pieces of cloth, a few metal dress racks, plastic hangers, and buttons— hundreds of buttons—were scattered all over the stone floor. White plastic dummies stripped of clothes, with their bold heads and gray felt torsos, were lying on their backs by the gaping holes that had once been windows. Further into the store, Galina saw the door to the fitting room hanging on one hinge, and inside the fitting room, a shattered mirror. That day when Galina and Raya were changing into the identical new dresses in that very fitting room, Galina had been in a hurry to put her dress on, because she didn’t want Raya to see her ugly woolen underwear. She threw the dress over her head and wiggled her body to pull it down. The zipper got stuck, and Raya, who was still in her underwear, came up to help. Galina felt Raya’s sharp little fingernails tickling her back as she was yanking up the zipper. It was chilly in there, and they were giggling from cold and excitement. The dresses were made of light cotton, dark blue with specks of white and red. They had short sleeves, low necklines, and fringed hems. “We are twins!” Raya cried when they both looked in the mirror, but Galina saw that the identical dresses, instead of making them more alike, pointed out the differences. Raya’s face had more color. Her skin was very white, her cheeks rosy, her blond hair lighter than Galina’s, and her eyes were of a brighter shade of blue—Galina’s were almost gray. Or maybe it was Raya’s beautiful turquoise earrings that made her eyes seem so blue. Galina saw that her own features were regular and well defined, when everything on Raya’s face

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was smooth and diffused: puffy eyelids, plump cheeks without a cheekbone line, soft mouth. Galina tried to figure out what the shape of Raya’s nose reminded her of. Then she saw it: a big raindrop, narrow at the top, rounded and wide at the tip. Galina smoothed the folds of fabric over her chest and straightened her back. Her breasts were firm, her shoulders broad, her legs shapely and muscular. Her whole body was finely molded, if a little square. Raya’s figure seemed to be made of imperfections. She had thin legs and forearms, but her upper arms and thighs were plump. In addition to that, Galina had seen a glimpse of belly hanging above Raya’s silk underpants when they were changing. No matter how elegant and expensive those underpants were, they couldn’t conceal the soft white bags of excessive flesh. Galina was called beautiful more often than Raya. One man in the library even said that she was a pure example of Slavic beauty and that he had seen a painting that looked exactly like Galina in one of the art books. The man was very old. His fluffy white beard touched the pages of the book when he was leafing through it, trying to find the painting for Galina. When he found the page, they saw that it wasn’t a painting, but a marble sculpture called simply A Slavic Woman. Galina agreed that there was a striking resemblance. The same hard upturned nose, the same prominent cheekbones, the same firm, finely carved lips. The woman from the book was beautiful, and so was Galina. But men always noticed imperfect Raya first. Raya smiled a lot, Raya shrieked, Raya squinted her eyes, Raya painted her lips bright red, Raya rocked her hips, Raya talked sweetly to every man that walked into the library, Raya wore high heels and shiny narrow belts fastened too tight on her plump waist. “A little whore,” as Galina’s mother would have said. For some reason, Galina’s mother had been turning up in her thoughts more often since the war began. Galina didn’t think about her with defiance, the way she used to before her mother’s death and for a long time after that; now instead she tried to imagine how her mother would have reacted to one event or another in Galina’s life. Galina tried to bring up the memories of the time that they spent together, to recall her mother’s words, the sound of her voice, her facial expressions. Most often, she thought of their Easter walks to the cemetery, maybe because that holiday seemed to soften her mother, and that was when Galina felt closest to her. Galina was holding her mother’s hand as they walked to the village cemetery along with the cheerful crowd of smartly dressed, drunk, overheated people, who carried brightly colored paper flowers, dyed eggs, bottles of vodka and Easter cakes. The crowd squeezed through the iron gates, then spilled into the cemetery to eat and drink on the graves of their relatives. The grave she and her mother visited was in the last row, by the fence. There were very few other people in their corner. They spread their food on a little bench set into the soil where Galina’s grandparents, her father, and her baby brother had been buried. Galina didn’t remember any of them, and she wasn’t sad; she liked the gay colors of dyed eggs

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and paper flowers, the taste of sweet, crumbling cake, the quiet of the place. Galina’s mother didn’t talk much, except this one time, when she had had a little more to drink. “Look there, Galina,” she said, pointing her rough brown hand in the direction of the fence that separated the Christian cemetery from the Jewish. Her face was flushed and her eyes glistened. “Those are Jewish graves. Look at them. And then look at ours.” Galina stood up, shaking the crumbs off her starched Easter dress, and walked to the fence. There she moved the dense branches of a young maple tree away from her face and looked. “Look what Jews have, daughter,” Galina’s mother repeated. She saw iron fences painted black, and inside the fences, fragile shoots of young violets and forgetme-nots struggling through the heavy, dark soil. She saw gravestones—they were small, but made of real stone, each of them with a crooked, wrongly shaped star. “Now look what we have.” Galina stepped away from the fence and looked around: lopsided crosses made of rotting wood, paper wreaths, and eggshell, a sea of colored eggshell. On the way back, Galina was tired and sleepy and had to lean on her mother’s hip. Her mother’s words were coming from above and seemed to bundle up Galina’s head like a heavy, warm shawl. “Remember, Galina. Jews get everything. They have ways.” Galina wondered what her mother would have thought if she knew that Galina was hiding Jews in her own home.

On the night when Raya was supposed to leave with the peasant, she appeared at Galina’s door at about 3 a.m. She stood in the doorway in her boots caked with country mud, soaked with sweat under her winter coat and shivering. She said that they had come to the road crossing as had been agreed and had waited there until two, but the peasant didn’t come. Galina tried hard to hide her initial happy reaction on seeing Raya again. She could barely listen to Raya’s words: “I saw Russian troops. They were running. Running!” They were jumping over the fences, she said; most of them didn’t even have their guns or rifles. They were trying to tear their uniforms off as they ran. “This is the end,” Raya said. “We’re going to die.” There was a weird, agitated expression on her face. She seemed to be waiting for something. Her eyelids were twitching, and she was rubbing them with the back of her hand. “Calm down. This is not the end,” Galina said. They stood in silence for a few minutes. There were dabs of mud on Galina’s spotless doormat after Raya left. Galina picked it up and went to the sink to wash it. “The Germans will be in town soon, very soon,” Galina thought as thin streams of brown water ran into the sink off the doormat. “They may even come today. If you believe the refugees, it will be a matter of days before they’ll round up the Jews.” Her hands were getting cold; she shook the water off the doormat and carried it back to the hall. “Raya may be dead in a few days,” she thought. Both Raya and Leeza. Galina sat down, making

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the chair screech. Tanya shifted in her sleep, and Galina rose to pull up her blanket. They will be dead unless they come here. Galina’s heart was pounding, but her mind suddenly became very clear. Everybody they knew thought that Raya was going to leave with the peasant. Just a few families remained on their street since the evacuation, and there was very little chance that somebody had seen Raya returning tonight. If Raya and Leeza stayed in Galina’s back room and never left her apartment, nobody would ever see them. Tanya was very smart for her age; Galina knew that she wouldn’t talk. The people who used to drop by Galina’s place before the war—mostly Sergey’s friends—were all gone. Nobody could inform on them to the Germans. And if the Germans decided to look for Jews in houses, they would hardly make it to Galina’s remote part of the town. There still was danger, of course. Great danger. But the thought of the danger didn’t dampen Galina’s ardor; on the contrary, it made her all the more enthusiastic. Galina didn’t remember ever being as excited as she was, running to Raya’s place. They had to make it to her place before dawn. “Grab your things and come to my place. We have to make it before morning,” she said breathlessly to Raya as soon as she entered her dark hall. Raya, still fully dressed, but without her coat, rushed up to Galina and burst out sobbing. She mumbled something rapidly while clenching Galina’s shoulders. The words coming from her mouth seemed to be drenched with snot. They were hard to make out. They were about the great risk for Galina and Tanya, and that Raya couldn’t accept this, that she and Leeza had better try to sneak out of the town, walk to the woods and hide there, and then again about the sacrifice, the great risk for Galina and that she couldn’t accept it. Galina felt Raya’s sharp chin and sticky tears on her shoulder. She had the urge to dry herself, but she had to wait until Raya was through. She knew that Raya’s tears were sincere, but at the same time she sensed that her little speech had been prepared. She glanced around the room and saw Raya’s unpacked suitcase by the door, her coat, dropped on the chair, and Leeza, also still fully clothed, hunched in the corner of the sofa. Galina saw that her invitation had been expected for a long time and already accepted. She felt her excitement fading. Later, Raya and Leeza stood silently in the hall of Galina’s apartment. Raya had been at Galina’s place hundreds of times before and knew her way around it. When Galina threw birthday parties, Raya, who always came early to help, was rushing from the kitchen to the living room and back, helping Galina to set the table and bring the dishes in. And when the guests came, Raya met them in the hall and told them where to put their coats and led them cheerfully into the living room. Now she stood barefoot on the knitted doormat—she had just taken off her boots—asking where to put Leeza’s and her coats. Galina gave them slippers and led them to the back room. They went there timidly and sat on the bed. Tanya, who had been woken up and told everything, sat in her bed, trying hard to look serious and adultlike. Nobody knew what to do next. Galina looked at Leeza’s sharp shoulders under a checkered dress, Raya’s hands folded between her

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knees. These two lives were now completely dependent on her; their very existence was in her hands. Galina desperately wanted to back out, to say, “No, no, you can’t stay here. It’s not for me. I am the wrong type of person. I am not prepared.” But it was too late to change anything.

Galina walked away from the clothing store. Her legs and back had become stiff. She made a few hard, quick steps to warm her feet. As she was stomping her feet on the rough surface of the sidewalk, Galina had an unnerving feeling that Raya was somewhere nearby. That she had followed her all the way from home and was standing, hidden somewhere, behind a lamppost or a former beer stall. Galina even took a quick look around, but of course there was nobody there. A few feet further down, she saw an abandoned tramcar. It stood on the rails with the doors open, as if it had just stopped and was waiting for the passengers to get in. There was something very peaceful about it. Galina walked to the closest door and climbed inside. It didn’t bother her that all the light bulbs had been unscrewed and the windows removed, along with most of the seats. Galina made her way to the back and sat there on one of the remaining seats. She thought that if she closed her eyes, she might hear the tramcar’s bell and it would start off with a jolt. And then Raya would start talking. For some reason, when they used to ride together, Raya talked only when the tram was in motion. When the tram made stops, Raya also stopped abruptly and waited until it resumed. That was how Galina heard about Raya’s love affair, between tram stops. “I think that man likes me,” Raya said. Her feverish whisper was mingled with the rattling wheels and the crackling of the tram’s wires. “That man, from the library, did you notice him?” Galina had noticed. A man had come to their corner and asked if they had some reference books on hydromechanics. A new face in town, probably an engineer on a business trip. A rather unimpressive man, in his late forties, short, balding, with a neat, round belly rising above his trousers belt. Raya blushed and offered to show him the shelf. She walked ahead of him, and Galina could see that Raya tried a little too hard to straighten her back and make her hips rock smoothly. The reference books were on the upper shelf. Raya had to climb up the ladder. When she stepped down, the man gave her his hand, but she stumbled (on purpose, Galina was sure of that) and laughed as playfully as she could. Raya wiggled in her seat and sighed: “He has beautiful eyes, doesn’t he? And his mouth . . . ” Ordinary eyes, Galina thought. Small, dark. She tried to remember his mouth. He had full, bright lips, the kind that were usually described as sensual in novels. Did that

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make him a good kisser? “I wonder how his kisses feel,” said Raya, and Galina flinched at the similarity of their thoughts. And then, when they were squeezing through the crowd to the exit, Raya whispered: “You know what he said to me?” Galina shrugged. Raya leaned close to her and Galina could hear her fast, excited breathing and feel the faint, unpleasant smell of her lipstick. “He said that, when I was standing on the ladder, he could see the contours of my underpants through my dress, and he couldn’t take his eyes off them!” Galina was stunned. She couldn’t stop thinking about that all the way home from the tram stop, and later, while she was preparing dinner and waiting for Sergey to come home. Her roommates in college used to talk about their boyfriends all the time, but their talk was coarse and direct: “He came by last night. We fucked.” That didn’t move or embarrass Galina. This was different. Galina couldn’t quite understand how it was different, but she knew that she didn’t want to hear it. She couldn’t avoid it though. Whenever they got together, at work, during lunch hour, when Raya dropped in for a cup of tea, while riding the tram, Raya talked about her engineer. There were times when she caught Galina’s disapproving look, or grin, or flinch. Galina couldn’t hide her attitude completely, and Raya wasn’t so insensitive as to ignore it, but she simply couldn’t stop: she was bursting with stories and details she had to tell; she’d become addicted to telling. One of Raya’s last revelations was made in a tiny cafe called Meat Patties, where Galina and Raya went on their lunch break. Galina remembered every detail about that day. They stood at the tall, round table with one iron leg—there were no chairs in the café—in front of the big dirty window. Galina had a thick glass in front of her filled with “coffee beverage”—a sweet grayish liquid lacking both coffee flavor and aroma. Raya was holding an identical glass, but filled with beef broth. There was a chipped white plate with two patties on the table along with Raya’s shiny black purse. Raya nibbled on her patty, having just told Galina the latest developments in her affair. Then she put the patty down and licked the crumbs off her lips with a dreamy smile. “You know what he told me yesterday?” she asked. Galina silently groaned, preparing to hear another sloppy compliment, but she wasn’t prepared for this. “He said”—Raya said it slowly, emphasizing every word—“that my ‘you know’”—she glanced down at those words—“tastes like red currant jelly.” Then she laughed. Galina felt her whole body go down as if somebody very strong were dragging her to the floor, and at the same time she felt that the heavy, round table was tilting in her direction along with the patties, the glasses, and Raya’s purse. She grabbed her glass instinctively, and when her dizzy spell—she figured later that it must have been a dizzy spell—began receding, she found herself still holding tight to her drink and Raya still laughing. The sensation couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but Galina felt ill and disoriented. She couldn’t bear the sight of laughing Raya with her crooked teeth and

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the blue slits of her eyes. She suddenly felt an irresistible urge to throw her hot coffee into Raya’s face, to hear her laughter replaced by a scream, to see her delicate features distorted by shock and horror, and see the streams of dirty liquid running down her pale cheeks. The urge was so strong that Galina caught herself raising her glass and pointing it in Raya’s direction. She didn’t throw it; instead, she found herself asking in a strange, coarse voice, feeling that her words weren’t her own but dropped out of her mouth like heavy rocks: “Does it?” Raya stopped laughing. “Does it what?” “Taste like red currant jelly?” Raya laughed again, quieter this time: “How would I know?” she said. That night, it was too hot to sleep. Galina lay in bed on top of the covers, fanning herself with the lacy ruff of her thin cotton nightgown. She could hear her daughter making quiet whistling sounds in her sleep and her husband snoring next to her. Galina tried to imagine how it would feel if a man did all those things to her. She tried to picture the boys who’d courted her in college, but she couldn’t remember anything about them. All she saw were blurry gray figures without faces, wearing cheap student clothes. Yet she had a vivid image of Raya’s lover, painfully clear as if he were right here in bed with her. Everything that seemed ugly and revolting about him before was arousing now. She could feel his shameless red lips pressing into hers and crawling down her neck, she could feel his big, soft, hairy stomach touching her legs. She could feel herself inhaling his unfamiliar breath and pushing up her nightgown for him. She could see his head—balding crown, framed with dark, wiry hair—moving between her legs. Galina slipped her hand down. She hadn’t done so in a long time, not since she was fifteen and her mother caught her at it. She still remembered her mother’s coarse scream and her hard, very cold fingers groping her shoulder. She pushed Galina off the bed and dragged her, shivering and stumbling, to their big stone oven, where she grabbed Galina by the wrists and pressed her palms to the red-hot iron door. Galina remembered how afterward she sat on her bed, too shocked to cry, and her mother was greasing her burned palms with lard, crying and saying again and again, “Galina, I don’t want you to become a whore.” Galina’s eyes were closed, but she felt her mother staring at her now from her picture on the wall. “Yes, Mother, yes,” Galina thought, “look what I am doing! Maybe I want to be a whore. Maybe that’s what I’ve always wanted!” When it was over, Galina pushed back the damp bangs that stuck to her face and wiped the beads of sweat from her nose. Her hands were trembling and her heart was beating so fast that it nauseated her. Her mother’s picture was barely visible in the moonlight, but still Galina could make out her tightly pressed thin lips, her carefully combed hair parted in the middle, and her eyes. She suddenly noticed that her mother didn’t have her usual severe expression in that photograph. She looked bewildered, as if a photographer had taken her by surprise; she looked frightened. Galina turned

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onto her side. The whistling sounds that her daughter made drove her crazy, like the buzzing of a bunch of mosquitoes. So did Sergey’s bursts of snoring. He lay on his back now. His mouth was agape. He reeked of onions and vodka. Galina buried her head under a pillow and sobbed. The next morning, she was late for work. She woke up on time, but she lingered at home trying to put off the moment when she would have to see Raya. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to listen to her stories today. Galina saw Sergey off to work and Tanya off to school, then went back to bed. She lay wrapped in a thick woolen blanket and thought about Raya. Her thoughts were different than before. They were full of hatred. She had felt some resentment or envy or maybe even anger before, but never this. She lay and wished that the most horrible things would happen to Raya. She wished that her husband would know about her affair and throw her out. She imagined Misha’s long, awkward body shaking with sobs. She imagined pale, scrawny Leeza holding her father’s hand, trying to comfort him. And she imagined Raya, on her knees in a doorway, begging them to let her stay. Misha wouldn’t even look in her direction, and Leeza would only shake her head no. Maybe Misha would receive a letter from somebody telling him about the affair, or a phone call. A phone call would be better. Somebody should call him. It was so easy to pick up the phone and dial the number . . . Galina felt a cold sweat breaking out on her forehead. Maybe she was simply coming down with something. Maybe she had a fever. She took a little thermometer out of the bedside drawer, shook it, and stuck it under her arm. Five minutes later, she inspected it and saw that her temperature was normal. Galina climbed off the bed and dragged herself to the bathroom. She turned on cold water and held her face under the tap for a few seconds, then she began dressing for work. Raya wasn’t at her desk. It was the first thing that Galina noticed when she walked into the library. The desk looked deserted, with Raya’s broken pencils in the pink plastic cup and a small family photo, but without her scattered lollipops, the shiny purse, and her knitted cardigan thrown on the chair’s back. For a second, Galina thought that her wishes had come true, that something horrible happened, that Raya’s husband found out and that somehow it was all Galina’s fault. Then the women in the library told her that Raya was okay, just taking a sick day to sit with her daughter. Galina felt relief at first, but then it became relief mixed with disappointment. Raya wasn’t punished. “She got away,” Galina thought. “She can have all she wants and get away with it.” A few days later, Raya came back. She looked thinner, had dark circles under her eyes, and smiled less. She said that her daughter had had a bad cold and the doctors suspected pneumonia, but the diagnosis wasn’t confirmed. Then Raya added matterof-factly that the engineer had gone back to Moscow and that she didn’t care. “When your child is sick, you can’t be bothered with this stuff.” Galina could see that Raya

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was lying. She could see how tense Raya became every time the phone rang in the library, how she stared at the same spot on her desk until somebody answered the call and she heard that it wasn’t for her. Raya didn’t laugh as much as she had before. She didn’t flirt with men—when they walked up to her table, she gave them a quick, sulky look the way all the library employees did. “He dumped her,” Galina thought, liking the sound of the word. “Dumped, dumped, dumped.” A rubber ball bouncing against the ground. The resentment and hatred were fading away. Galina felt as if she had recovered from a bad, exhausting illness. She could breathe again, she could look at Raya, she could talk to her again.

Galina got out of the tramcar. She didn’t know where she wanted to go. She thought of turning right and continuing to walk on tree-lined Chkalov Street, and she even took a few steps in that direction, but something made her change her mind and continue walking along the tramline, toward the City Hall. The street ran down the hill; it was easier to walk and Galina walked faster. Was there a single moment when this present chilliness between her and Raya had started? Now it seemed that their relationship wasn’t descending smoothly, but lurching downward by tugs the way a rusty old elevator does. A lurch—a stop—a lurch—a stop. The first lurch happened because of that ridiculous business of praying for their husbands. There had been no news or letters from the front. The girls asked questions at first, but then they stopped. They understood. They didn’t mention their fathers, and if they did, accidentally, they immediately stopped and exchanged panicky looks, as if they thought that the lives of their fathers were so fragile right now that anything, even saying their names aloud, could destroy them. Galina and Raya did not mention their husbands either. They agreed that the subject would be too upsetting. But Galina wondered if the true reason for their silence was the fear of insincerity. The prayers had been started by the girls. Galina didn’t know who had the idea, Tanya or Leeza. Neither of them knew how to pray. They had never been in church and never heard anybody pray at home. Their pleas sounded more like Christmas wishes: “Kind, dear God, please, don’t let my father die.” For a few evenings, Galina and Raya just watched the girls. They watched their little bodies rocking softly, while their mouths eagerly breathed out naive words of prayer. Their eyes were directed somewhere upward, as if there, on Galina’s whitewashed ceiling, was the figure of God, visible only to them. One evening, after the girls had gone to sleep, Raya suggested that she and Galina pray too. She looked embarrassed when she said it. She was playing with the fringe on the tablecloth and avoided looking at Galina. Raya said that she didn’t believe in God and didn’t know how to pray, but maybe it would make her feel better. Galina shrugged.

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They got down on their knees, making the rough floorboards creak, and stayed in these awkward poses, not knowing what to say. Raya was the first to begin; she started the way the girls did. “Dear God . . .” Galina had often heard her mother pray, and she’d even been in church with her once or twice, but she couldn’t remember any words—just “Amen,” which her mother used at the end, before she got up from her knees, groaning and crossing herself. Galina had to fill the gap between “Dear God” and “Amen” somehow. She tried to invoke warm feelings about her husband, but instead she caught herself blaming him. She thought that it was his fault that they had stayed in the town. It was his fault that he’d been kicked out of the Party. “Engaged in inappropriate behavior! Some rebel!” Galina thought. She knew that he had simply showed up drunk at one of the Party committee meetings and that it wasn’t the first time. She remembered how he spent all their money on vodka. She remembered how, when he couldn’t find the money, he took things from home and sold them at the flea market. He sold Galina’s favorite lamp, the one with a blue velvet shade. She tried harder to find some forgiveness. She tried to think about Sergey the way Tanya did. Tanya, who always rushed to her father when he came home drunk, helped him to undress, stroked his puffy, apologetic face, and said, when he slipped and fell, “It’s okay, Daddy, the floor is slippery. We just washed it.” How could Tanya treat him this way, when it was the money for her coat that he stole and spent? He would come back from the front and steal more money, and they would have to continue living like that. Galina felt bitter, angry tears coming up her throat. Could it be that she didn’t want Sergey to come back? Could it be that she wanted him to die? The thought startled her. She felt her heart pounding heavily against her rib cage, hurting her, as if it were made of stone. She turned to look at Raya. She was kneeling with her head bent low. Her tightly shut eyelids were trembling, her chapped lips moving eagerly; she licked them with a swift movement from time to time. Galina watched her, feeling that her own guilt was fading, making a place for her resentment of Raya: “Some faithful little wife!” The next night, Galina said that she didn’t feel like praying. So they didn’t do it again. And soon their prewar recollections stopped too. That was when Raya began writing letters to her husband every night. Just a few tortured lines, with words crossed out, written over, then crossed out again. She often turned to glance in Galina’s direction, and it was then that her expression became frightened. But they were still talking. Not as much as before and not as easily, but not yet the complete silence of recent weeks. Galina felt that something sharp was in her right boot. It was rolling under her foot, hurting her when she occasionally stepped on it. She limped to a lamppost. There she leaned on the cold concrete pole and removed her boot, reaching with her hand into the boot’s warm, damp inside to pull out a tiny jagged rock. It must have been a piece of gravel from her walk along the rails. She pulled the boot back on and moved her numbed toes.

THERE ARE JEWS IN MY HOUSE  489

She knew why they had stopped talking. It was because of Raya’s earrings. Galina could close her eyes and see them now. They were the most beautiful things she had ever seen. Small, elongated pieces of turquoise, shaped like large raindrops, hanging on thin golden threads with tiny curved golden petals connecting the turquoise drop to the thread. Raya used to wear them every day, even with the clothes that didn’t match their exquisite blue color. She said that without the earrings she looked naked. “And ugly, and old,” she added, laughing. She had taken them off that night when she and Leeza were supposed to leave town with the peasant. And it was true that without them Raya’s face looked naked and drawn of color. Without the earrings, Galina could see that Raya’s pale skin had a grayish tone and that her ears were too big for her face. Galina wondered what had happened to the earrings—had Raya hidden them somewhere, or did she have them with her. Until the day she saw them again. It happened a few days after their attempt at praying. Raya came out of the back room with a tiny bundle, something gray and fuzzy. She was holding it carefully on her outstretched palm as if it were a baby bird. When she got closer to Galina, Galina saw that it was not a bundle but an old woolen mitten. Raya reached inside and pulled out a faded matchbox. Galina guessed what was inside before Raya opened it, but still, seeing the earrings in all their brilliance here, against the shabby surface of the matchbox, was shocking. Galina could see that it was shocking to Raya too. They stared at the earrings for a few seconds, then Raya said, stretching her lips into a smile: “I thought maybe you could exchange them for milk? Or cream? Leeza’s cough has been bad lately.” She touched the earrings, running her translucent fingers along the thin veins in the turquoise. “It’s light turquoise and gold—they used to be expensive.” So Galina took them to their little town market. She carried them the same way, in a matchbox wrapped in the mitten. She squeezed past rows of peasant women in long, thick skirts and gray shawls. They were holding bushels of eggs with dried-up chicken droppings stuck to them, coarse gray loaves of bread, and shriveled potatoes. They had sleek faces and shrewd little eyes. And there were rows of women in urban clothes with pitiful pieces of jewelry dangling in their pale fingers. Earrings, cheap necklaces, thin wedding rings, men’s watches. These women had long faces and desperate, begging eyes. Galina passed them quickly and went to the end of the row, where she often saw a farmer woman selling milk. There she was, a short woman with a fat, oily face under a filthy headscarf. There were two big aluminum milk cans by her feet and a clay jar covered with a piece of cloth in her hands. “Cream,” said the woman to Galina in an intimate whisper. Galina looked at the woman’s hands; she had cutoff woolen gloves on, and her fingers were fat and red, with dirt under the fingernails. Galina imagined Raya’s earrings in these hands, and how the woman would try to fasten them with her swollen fingers. Then she imagined the earrings dangling on their golden threads next to the woman’s greasy cheeks. She knew it was unlikely that the

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woman would wear the earrings herself; she would probably wait for better times and sell them, but still she felt that she wouldn’t be able to bear seeing the earrings in the woman’s hands even during the brief moment of transaction. She put her hand into her coat pocket and pushed the mitten with the earrings further down. She acquired the jar of cream in exchange for a bar of soap that she carried in her other pocket. As she walked back from the market, Galina knew that she wouldn’t tell Raya about the earrings. She would tell her that she had sold them. She would come home and hide them in her drawer between stacks of her flannel sheets. There was one woman in the market selling a mirror. Galina stopped there, unwrapped the package quickly, and held the earrings against her ears. She was in such a hurry to wrap them back up that she only saw a glimpse of her reflection, her rigid face instantly brightened by two light­ blue spots. All the way home, Galina told herself that she hadn’t done anything wrong. After all, Raya and Leeza ate her supplies of food. And they lived at her home. And she had paid for the cream with her bar of soap. The earrings were a small price. She had the right to them. Galina kept fingering the package all the way home. Every time she touched the soft, fuzzy surface of the mitten and the hard edge of the matchbox underneath, she felt a thrill, a titillating feeling of getting away with something. Her elevated mood vanished as soon as she saw Raya’s face. As soon as she saw that Raya knew. Raya rushed to the jar of cream, showering Galina with praises, repeating that the cream would save Leeza’s life, displaying exaggerated gratitude to the point where it began making Galina dizzy. Raya’s behavior was made up of two strands, contradictory and sickening. The first was to show that she never, not for a moment, could suppose that Galina hadn’t sold the earrings. The second was to show that if Galina did take the earrings, Raya didn’t mind; on the contrary, she was happy that Galina might have done that, it was Galina’s right to do that, Galina risked her life for them and the earrings were such a small price. Galina went to the kitchen, pretending that she had things to do there. She began scrubbing the pots that she hadn’t used in months with her trembling hands. If only Raya could shut up! Later that day, Galina came to a realization. She watched how Raya tried to feed the warmed-up cream to Leeza. “Please, darling, please, it’ll make you feel better.” Leeza swallowed it spoon by spoon slowly, reluctantly. At one moment she choked and began coughing, and Raya patted her on the back, while throwing a nervous glance in Galina’s direction. She wanted Galina to take the earrings! Maybe she had even made it all up— made up the whole story about milk for Leeza—to make Galina take the earrings. Galina felt a heavy, cold wave of nausea. She had to grab a doorframe to keep her balance. Raya wanted to bribe her. Galina went back to the kitchen and sank down on the low stool. She wanted to bribe her! Why? Because she was afraid that Galina would ask her to go? Or worse, because she was afraid that Galina would walk downtown and tell the Germans that there were Jews in her house. No, that was ridiculous, the Germans would kill her and

THERE ARE JEWS IN MY HOUSE  491

Tanya if they knew that they were giving shelter to Jews. Or would they? She could always say that they had been hiding somewhere else, that they had just come to her place to ask for shelter or for food, and she immediately went to report it. Nobody would be interested in finding out the truth, and nobody there would listen to Raya. These thoughts startled Galina. What was happening? Was she just trying to unravel Raya’s way of thinking, or was she really considering going to the Germans? She took a cold teakettle off the stove and began drinking hungrily right out of its rough tin spout. The streams of water ran down her chin and her neck, causing her skin to break out in goose bumps.

The tramline made a sharp turn on the crossing. It was the first time since the beginning of the occupation that Galina had gone so far downtown. It had gotten considerably darker since she left the house; soon she would have to turn back to make it on time before the curfew. Or she could walk the last two or three blocks toward the City Hall. Lately, whenever she went to the market, which was not so far from downtown, she had the urge to turn in the City Hall direction. She couldn’t understand what it was that attracted her to that place. Galina had no desire to see the Germans. She despised all those women who rushed to the center in the first days of occupation to see what Germans looked like. They even looked up some German words in a dictionary so they would be able to introduce themselves. Galina saw one girl from the library, a freckled Masha, bending over a German phrasebook and repeating over and over, “Ich heisse Mascha,” her thin lips making a funny circle when she said “Ich.” Galina wondered how much German she remembered. She had good grades in high school, but it had been more than ten years since she’d held a German textbook in her hands. “Hier ist ein Tisch.” “Das Wetter ist schön heute.” It was strange how these expressions, buried in her memory for so many years, were now coming to surface. Galina made another effort. “Gretchen geht nach Schule.” She smiled. German words were rolling under her tongue like sucking candies. She tried to apply some of the expressions to herself. “Ich heisse Galina”; “Galina geht nach Schule.” She wondered if her lips looked as funny as Masha’s. How did they say “How are you”? “Ich geht . . .” No, no . . . “Wie geht es Ihnen?” Something like that. Galina forgot about her tired, aching legs. She walked briskly to the brightly lit City Hall plaza. The German words were floating up in her head one after another, forming sentences and whole conversations:

Hello. Wie geht es Ihnen? Danke gut. Und Ihnen? Danke auch gut. Ich heisse Galina. Es gibt Juden in mein Haus.

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Galina’s heart skipped a beat, then began pounding wildly. She took off her headscarf and unbuttoned her jacket. Es gibt Juden in mein Haus. Es gibt Juden in mein Haus. Es gibt Juden in mein Haus. The words seemed glued to her lips. They were burning her, scorching the inside of her mouth and further down her throat. She didn’t really want to say those words. She couldn’t. But what if she could? Galina saw that she was very close to the City Hall plaza now. She could see lights coming from the shabby brick building of the former City Hall. She could see German vehicles. She could hear the whirring of motors. If she took just a few more steps, she would have been able to hear real German speech, not just the textbook variations. Galina turned around and started running in the opposite direction. She ran very fast, as if the Germans were chasing her, her white headscarf streaming in the wind like a flag. She couldn’t want to do that. It wasn’t true. It was all because of Raya! Raya had pushed her. Raya was distrustful and ungrateful. Raya would have never done for Galina what Galina was doing for her. Galina was a good person. She was risking her own and her daughter’s life to save Raya and Leeza. Galina felt that she couldn’t run anymore, she was out of breath. Somehow words about risking her life never moved her. She couldn’t make herself feel that she was doing something heroic. Maybe that was because she didn’t feel fear. She knew how dangerous it was to hide Jews in her house; she knew that there was a war going on and that people in occupied towns could be killed for lesser crimes; but something prevented her from imagining that she or Tanya could be killed or even hurt. And she couldn’t fear anything that she couldn’t vividly imagine. She wished that she could. Their staircase was completely dark, and Galina had to fumble with her hand on the wall to find the door. She hoped that Raya wouldn’t come out of her room. If Raya saw Galina’s face, she would guess her thoughts, the same way she knew about the earrings. She would know about “Es gibt Juden in mein Haus.” Galina knocked on the wooden frame four times before opening the door with her key. Raya had asked Galina to do that. It was very quiet inside. There was only Tanya in the room playing with the doll at the table. The door of the back room was closed. “They’re sleeping,” Galina thought with relief and went to the sink to wash the mud off her boots. Only when she came out of the bathroom did Galina notice Tanya’s blank stare and that she wasn’t playing with the doll but simply holding it in her hands, upside down. “Why are you not in bed? Are they sleeping?” Galina asked. Tanya shook her head. “They’re gone,” she said. Galina walked to the table, the dripping boots still clutched in her hands. The foolish, irrational questions were pouring out of her mouth: “What do you mean ‘gone’? Where? When did they leave? Why do you have the doll? Did they say any­thing?” Then she heard herself

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screaming: “What do you mean ‘gone’?!” Tanya walked to her bed and began undressing. She spoke in an odd, tired voice: “They got dressed and left right after you left. Leeza said she wouldn’t need the doll anymore.” Tanya paused. “What did she mean? What did Aunt Raya say? Did Raya say anything? Why wouldn’t Leeza need the doll?” Tanya stood by the bed in her white underpants and white undershirt, silently folding her clothes. Then she put her dress on a chair, her ribbed brown tights on top of it, and turned off the light. Galina slumped on a chair in the dark and sat listening to the creaking of Tanya’s wooden bed as she climbed in, to the rustle of the sheets, to Tanya’s long, muffled sobbing—she must have had a pillow over her head—and then to the sounds of her breathing gradually getting soft and quiet. Galina thought of the questions that Tanya couldn’t stop asking before Raya and Leeza came to live with them. “How do they catch Jews? Do they chase them? Do they use ropes? Does it hurt when they burn them? Do they become all black and shriveled like burned firewood? Does it hurt a lot?” Galina stood up and tiptoed to Tanya’s bed. The pillow was still on her head. Galina gently lifted up her head and put the pillow under it. She looked at Tanya’s shoulders– strong tanned shoulders, so much like her own. Galina looked at the round white scar on Tanya’s upper arm, just below her shoulder bone. She reached out with her hand and stroked her daughter awkwardly. Tanya flinched in her sleep and pulled her shoulder under the blanket. Galina tiptoed away from the bed. She stumbled on something by the table. Something that made her heart stop beating. Something cold, both hard and soft, with hair. “A dead child,” flashed the thought in Galina’s head. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t bring herself to look down, she couldn’t move her foot. Then she looked down and saw the contours of Leeza’s doll, barely visible in the dark.

33 Robert Majzels

From Apikoros Sleuth

Extract from Apikoros Sleuth. Copyright © 2004 by Robert Majzels. First published by Mercury Press; limited edition by Moveable Inc., 2004. Reprinted with permission of the author.

495

496  ROBERT MAJZELS

15b Chapter Eighteen

� How did

He produce and create this world? By zimzum: like a man who gathers in and contracts his breath, so that the smaller might contain the larger. � In the siege and in the straits with which your enemy puts-youin-straits. Deuteronomy 28:55 � Only in North America. � That cur-

tain, called Pargod, hangs before the Throne of Glory. It is the abode of all those souls returned from below. The souls of the wicked will find no place in it. � You will become an example of desolation, a proverb and a byword among all the peoples to which

YHWH

drives you. Deuteronomy 28:37 � This is also

dog time (Dr. Hu). � I meant the hardware store.

W

Zimzum

L

Apikoros Sleuth

hen does a man go out to confront the et us say he wandered through that place of shopkeepers? After gathering in and condi√culties until he found a hanging garden of tracting his breath, so that the smaller might shower curtains. There were bright orange curcontain the larger.� He gathered in his solitude and licues, purple ducks and yellow fishies.� A moment contracted his grief. Yet nothing would be contained, not hesitated between his mind and the matter. He looked large or small. What drives a sinner out once more to this side and he looked to this side. Those curtains to confront the shophung in rows. Some dekeepers?� Neither cramps clared a royal flourish nor the hunger in spite of pompoms and a nude darkness within. A paof the cramps. Rather rade marched between a torn shower curtain. A torn curtain casts one that moment and his out into the world like doubts. He selected a a stone. Sans curtain, a clear sheet of brilliant floor is a flood of contensouls. It occurred to him tion, a shower becomes that he had come a long a contrite man’s burden.� way to return singleThings from which benehanded. He subtracted fit is forbidden. Anyone and added and expounwill shower behind a ded.� Seized by the fear curtain of souls� before of a woman sneezing we go out into the world. on a Number 231 bus, In measured amounts. he himself sneezed and Not that he wished to go seized another curtain out into the world. But and another. He felt his to replace a torn shower su¬ering slide beneath curtain one must go out the definition of any into the world and conmental condition. What front the shopkeepers, am I wasting?� He purchased twelve curtains they wipe their hands pinkly, they subtract and and 231 gates. In this add and expound, and mk ny cu ix pz jv qh rd >g tk ba way, he felt his life, what little there remained of no one wishes to go out ml nk cy iu px jz qv rh >d tg ga into the world without it, would be free of long nl ck iy pu jx qz rv >h td gb ra rides under the arms of a shower. Furthermore (how very hard he thinks, the Other’s arms. This nm cl ik py ju qx rz >v th db ha and in time’s shadow), is called making proviif he did go out into the cm il pk jy qu rx >z tv dg hb va sions.� At such a moment, world, would he not want it occurs to us, as it did a shower when he returned? Anyone would want a shower in exchange to him, that his was a mission of fruitfor a dirty world.� Le visage de l’autre. He plunged that way. And which less desperation. How long had his life shopkeeper will o¬er a curtain of souls? Will we find a curtain of souls been sliding whereas he thought it among a host of tuna? A fistful of bananas? Perhaps you cannot possibly already lay still and quiet at the low think so. Was he obliged to take a bus and ride, ride, ride amidst those point of that barrel? In winter he was Other arms and noses? A woman sneezes on a Number 231 bus. To risk a wool mouse. Now he was a race a calculation. Chant on suit away as in. He plugged his ears with bubble- of damage. And yet. He gathered his gum. He rode and rode and rode. There is no earlier and later in the twelve curtains and 231 gates, paid as Torah.� Still, it was a long time before he arrived at a place of di√culties � : : much as a vertiginous shopkeeper in a skirt and glasses dangling on a chain would take, and escaped. I mean, he transformed an exit into a sympathetic route. He may have had a brief moment of happiness, in the street outside that place of hardship, his ears plugged again, his arms full of curtains, his future blank, but for one final ride on a Number 231 bus. He teaches an exaggeration. Sympathy, we have already said so, is a piano, and your machine (the realistic code) a diet of excess. On the bus there was much sweat and snot, and did he not join in? When he entered the lobby between street and self, his head swollen with the arrogance of minuscule achievement, he was not, consequently, prepared for yet another plot point � : : � And are you complaining of a lack of story?

� Is the

writer so lazy he returns to a forgotten City?

� If n is

the number of points in a circle, and L is the number of lines, then: L=n(n–1)/2

� Time.

What am I underlining? Time.

� We say

this is ours and this is ours and this is ours, until our feet hurt and we go home to surround ourselves in another man’s labour and put our feet up on his broken back.

from apikoros sleuth  497

Apikoros Sleuth

Zomemin

Chapter Nineteen 16a

A

� Have we begun an exhalation after a contraction? Here come ten of them. � To have a door and lock but no key is so near and yet so far.

� He had become that person awake at night, and walking along a road alone, and thinking idle thoughts. � The first

of twelve. I mean curtains, not showers. � It might occur to you to say, being out among the shopkeepers, he could have, should have, picked up a newspaper, une demibaguette, a can of tuna, a fistful of bananas. How could you possibly think so? Have we learned nothing? Remove, delete! His mind was not a heavy desk planner, a stone that kills twice. And are not twelve curtains su√cient to return to a room and a half?

nd what should we expect – he entered, his Ourmoney suit. Was Giltgestalt murdering the false arms full of curtains, the lobby between the witnesses� of his grandiose theft auto? His Corinthian world and a room and a half, between the street car crimes? His splendacious hanky-panky? And what and self? Shall we say “only to find” and raise the might a Welshish gardener have seen or heard or spectre of narrative? � Did he expect another Shtick in told or threatened to see and hear and tell that would the lobby to beat the dog of his anticipation? Perhaps cost him his life and a letter of his name? � Between floors, let us reflect on a Ukrainian janitor with the key to that room Owley’s missing letter. and a half across the hall Which we opened and from another room and read so briefly with a a half? � There was no drink of water. Try now Ukrainian. No Giltgestalt. to suck the gist of that Only a chamber empty hard candy. Something of numbers: neither fish about a dentist, death, nor fowl nor fig. Nor a host of names, a Comghost of narrative. Only mon Factor, � Legrand, Mustapha, Betty Boop, the antechamber of his desolation. He carried all within a fortnight.� a dozen curtains into a They were all linked by toothless elevator and hekeish: the laws of one turned his thoughts in applied to the others. It the direction of the upoccurred to him that, having read Owley’s missing per floors. An intake of breath. Did he contemletter, he too might know plate his languorous solsomething worthy of � itude? And count those mk ny cu ix pz jv qh rd >g tk ba losing his own. Life, not letter. But he did not floors without a glance ml nk cy iu px jz qv rh >d tg ga at the ascending light? know what he knew.� It nl ck iy pu jx qz rv >h td gb ra isn’t always that way. Anticipate a shower behind a curtain of souls,� Often we know less than nm cl ik py ju qx rz >v th db ha and a bit of a liedown that.� He only knew he before a bite to eat (eat cm il pk jy qu rx >z tv dg hb va was between floors, his what? �)? Or none of the bladder and something cn im pl jk qy ru >x tz hg vb za above. Something else. else already twinging in in pm jl qk ry >u tx hd vg zb xa anticipation. Perhaps that Giltgestalt. Shall we say he rode the elevator of Shtick figure was wiping ic pn jm ql rk >y tu vd zg xb ua idle speculation? He beat the pinkishness of his about the garden bushes pc jn qm rl >k ty vh zd xg ub ya youth (and theirs) from his brow with murderwith a Shtick of surmise. Idly. If a Shtick could shteal a letter ous accuracy. Perhaps, to forget one’s past, one makes a clean sweep it might sherve for shtrangulation. of the people in it. They had written leaflets, “Arise!” but no one had. In the garden by the gate of a terrible Perhaps in those final days of finger pointing, false witnesses and kiss. Howley before he lost a letter. fields of acrimony, damage had been done to the blunt end of Shtick’s Shtick had become a sign for death. self-image.� Had Shtick nurtured a grudge by some garden gate? And And before that Welshish gardener, if a deadly grudge was Shtick’s operation, who deserved the end Mustapha, Legrand, a dentist with too of it more than someone who had delivered a letter of expulsion? many teeth in his name? And Betty And that elevator, when it came to a halt in the middle of this sentence Boop? All beaten to death by the Shtick of consolation? Did he fumble for motive between the sixth and seventh floors? Shtick’s? His own? In the case of Howley and a woman, he found it in a hurry; jealousy is a dish we serve warmed over. But what might drive a Shtick down the path of the other’s death? Again and again. As for Pigafetta, anyone who still has one or two of his own teeth would surely kill a dentist. Legrand buckled his belt over a pork belly. He imported and exported. Mustapha mostly imported. Had they traded their lives for a shticky share of Shtick’s? All had returned to the suburbs of the self.� And to where had Giltgestalt returned? Slender Armani, hair once red, red, red, arched lip, a wink, and that periphrastic manner. Perhaps it was a case of more cars: grand theft auto in an � Can you see a crime. No not I. Because after all to live and die, what makes them shy, nothing much, because they will have as much as then and deny.

O please try. G. Stein, Blood on the Dining Room Floor

� If wit-

nesses are discovered to be zomemin, they are to su¬er the consequences inflicted on the person they falsely accused. Sanhedrin 84b � In the

end, and to begin with, a letter is what’s in a name. � No, not

the mailman. � And we

all know how quickly that passes. � Perhaps

you are thinking, can it be that he’s sleuthing at last? Remove, delete! Have you learned nothing? This is elevator music. Nothing more. � Now is

the time when no one knows more than in twos and threes. Say which you like. G. Stein Blood on the Dining Room Floor � Perhaps an

Ourmoney suit would suit him better.

498  ROBERT MAJZELS

16b Chapter Twenty

� There

was no dining room, hence no dining room floor; hence the blood on a hallway carpet. “Oh, Lizzie, do you understand?” � Unlike its

opposite number, this door had all its hinges. And yet it complained so bitterly. � Must you churn this into butter?

� Why

should a novel walk?

� A student

of Marx can earn a good living after the revolution; he need only forget an eschatological footnote or two.

A Horse of Charm

Apikoros Sleuth

I

n the hallway between a room and a half and a they schemed a season of numbers. Shall we say they room and a half his ears swimming in nature’s call he worked between the rate and the rate, traded beads for turned away from a door swinging on its hinges and condominiums in the republic of bananas, exported a footprint of blood on the carpet’s tattered failure.� ear plugs to a vociferant Red China. I mean, they sold Who mentioned this item which is being cited now as a legend of nothing, they girded their loins in pork if it had already been mentioned? He swung instead bellies.� Will this make their death less painful? In retrothrough the mirror of spect. And shall we knit another door.� Any lock a tie to Giltgestalt’s neck? Are you casting one man without a key is so near against another? Did they and yet so far. He poured out of his shoes and undergo a less than pure pants and into the half chance encounter with room of the body, the an old comrade? Did they thing itself. He produced ride the horse of charm? several minutes of far Did a Shtick o¬er to beat their swords into shares?� less than perfect excreAmbition paused only ment and a sheen of perspiration on the forebriefly on that narrow road. But let us move on; head of his intellect.� Did he reflect on a bloody mk ny cu ix pz jv qh rd >g tk ba to occur costs time. What footprint in the hallway am I wasting? Yours. Let ml nk cy iu px jz qv rh >d tg ga between a room and a us say time passed, they nl ck iy pu jx qz rv >h td gb ra were discovered.� Were half and a room and the half he sat in? Or should their heads severed from nm cl ik py ju qx rz >v th db ha he rather recall Mustapha their bodies, the one long, and Legrand? So far, these cm il pk jy qu rx >z tv dg hb va the other hirsute? Will are merely nouns. And this make their deaths cn im pl jk qy ru >x tz hg vb za what good is more or less more painful? In hindvg zb xa sight. Their grave: your getting to know them in pm jl qk ry >u tx hd grave? A hundred horses when both are already ic pn jm ql rk >y tu vd zg xb ua of charm could not undead? � Characters are only nouns in dresses. pc jn qm rl >k ty vh zd xg ub ya derestimate so black a But let us call Legrand murder. Had he tied a pi jc qn rm >l tk zh xd ug yb ka thin – in spite of those Shtick to Mustapha and zv xh ud yg kb la Legrand in a knot of cirpork bellies – and say he ji qc rn >m tl cumstance?� And Betty folded his height on the jp qi rc >n tm xv uh yd kg lb ma Boop and Owley and Owstoop of his adolescence. Mustapha grew hair and qp ri >c tn xz uv yh kd lg mb na ley’s letter? The dentist with too many teeth in a medallion in the space of his open shirt. Being shorter, he pu¬ed and bristled. Certain descrip- his name? The nature of this case is tions confront a suitcase of clichés. Were they good comrades? For not like the nature of this case and a while. Let us say they did not pause long in the silence after the the nature of this case is not like the revolution failed.� Legrand and Mustapha studied capital with a fine nature of this case. He felt his su¬erline. They walked a fine line between an uncommon denomination, ing slide beneath an argument.� Let us between the memory of a French Catholic schoolyard and Allah’s compare the mechanism of the toilet blessing. On Thursdays they ploughed through couscous at somebody’s in a room and a half across from a uncle’s restaurant. Sunday on déjeune chez la mère. Monday to Monday room and a half to the progress of this narrative. He cursed it. No sooner did he pull a chain than there was silence. Can you imagine someone washing his hands with his leg bent and a � foot up on the lever to flush a turbulence of fine greenery? He longed to wrap his legs in the events of a day. To whittle the space of a room and a half into a narrow cot. To return to his murderous solitude. But something he had passed over in the hallway between a room and a half and a room and a half in his haste to be seated in the half room of a room and a half recalled him. A foot of blood on a hallway carpet between a door with a broken lock and a door he could not lock. He returned to the scene of that grime. His knees knocked at a door o¬ its hinges. He thrust a reluctant gaze into a room and a half. Shall we pause here for cause and a¬ect? He certainly did. On that floor lay a headless horse of charm, an Ourmoney, the blunt end of which lay in the purple tarn of someone’s death : : � Our thanks to Doctor Hu: he learned this from her.

� A hypo-

typosis makes a bush of envy behind which to hide.

� All

this on the stone of idle speculation. They got shtuck with Shtick’s shares. � Whether

you count yourself a continent or a person, to be discovered is never a sign of good health.

� Had

his head provided a circumstance of evil? Increasingly, Shtick made a fine shushpect. � He wiped speculation from his mind, sweat from his brow, and shit from his ass.

from apikoros sleuth  499

Apikoros Sleuth

� Miserable

observation which again is certainly the result of something artificially constructed whose lower end is swinging in emptiness somewhere... F. Kafka Diaries

� Here the sound of horse hooves: plot, plot, plot, plot.

� Death is

the death of the mystery of the other person’s mysterious death. E. Lévinas (pas tout à fait) Time and the Other

Hands

A

Chapter Twenty-one 17a

headless Ourmoney will lose much of its charm, blood. He had made a clean break with his past.� One not to mention its blood.� In such a case, our thing was apparent: death was a refutation of guilt. morbid fascination is nevertheless tempted Shtick’s that is. Unless murder was on the rise with to look away. He yielded to that temptation. Turned a trend toward execution.� He wandered in a case of to the broken hinges of the door. There was the brief anamorphosis. Not only this but also this. In the face suggestion of peristaltic reversal. A bad death staggers of death he found his solitude bordering the edge of the legs of one’s imagmystery.� He was sleuthing. Had he banished ination. Let us say he staggered through a broall hospitality� from his ken door, past a bloody home only to have death footprint in the hallway enter on the other side of of his horror, and into the cracked mirror of a the cracked mirror of a room and a half? Let us room and a half. Shall mk ny cu ix pz jv qh rd >g tk ba say or shall we say? How we pause to breathe the much more so! He cursed ml nk cy iu px jz qv rh >d tg ga it. And yet, Owley’s misfamiliar scent of our old nl ck iy pu jx qz rv >h td gb ra sing letter. Did we say clothes still fresh with the excretions of a livOwley’s missing letter? nm cl ik py ju qx rz >v th db ha That unwanted child tugs ing body? Not for long. Events gallop.� What did cm il pk jy qu rx >z tv dg hb va at my staggered leg. He you see then that you wanted the letter but cn im pl jk qy ru >x tz hg vb za missed coming in earlier, not the idea of it. Shall vg zb xa we return to the other your eyes swimming in in pm jl qk ry >u tx hd nature’s call? A cracked scene of the same crime? ic pn jm ql rk >y tu vd zg xb ua mirror was bleeding. On Let us say he turned the cot of where shall pc jn qm rl >k ty vh zd xg ub ya from the crime scene of I lie down now, on the a Shticky mind to the pi jc qn rm >l tk zh xd ug yb ka bleeding news of the mindless violence of a zv xh ud yg kb la body. He eyed the eyeworld, a severed Shticky ji qc rn >m tl head, his red red hair, less pockets of an Ourjp qi rc >n tm xv uh yd kg lb ma money suit, imagined his teeth and tongue, the unbroken gaze in a qp ri >c tn xz uv yh kd lg mb na the missing H in Owley. broken head. Once more, Shall we say he longed qj rp >i tc uz yv kh ld mg nb ca for that brief letter? Did briefly, he revisited the yz kv lh md ng cb ia he bend over a severelunch he had not taken. rj >p ti ux ly severed suit? Did his He strongly objected to rq >j tp yx kz lv mh nd cg ib pa own pinkish grocer’s it, and almost spoke ill of the dead. But in the >q tj yu kx lz mv nh cd ig pb ja hands violate the tent over a dead body in a end, morbid fascination will triumph over anyone’s lunch. search for a dead letter? Not to mention the alphabet. Did he commit Gazing into the face of the trace of the the father of the father of all impurities? Did he search a dead suit? utterly bygone, he beheld an utterly Did he smear a hand (the right one) in the blood of Ourmoney? What absent Shtick. From this it was impos- did he learn? Those Ourmoney pockets were as empty of letters as the sible to learn anything.� He sought bloody head on the other side of the other side of a hallway.� He might consolation in memory. Shtick’s wink have learned more, but our interrogation of death was interrupted in the triangular grin of a Chevrolet’s by the siren song of a vehicle halting in the canyon below the window open hood. A happy moment. They’d of what had once (too recently) been his room and a half. What now? : : stolen it that night. The vehicle, I mean. And the moment, for that matter. But no memory could follow the trace of this past. Or Shtick’s passing. Meanwhile. Shtick’s unbroken gaze from the other side of the other side of a room and a half. The other side is the place of the future that never becomes present. How should we act in the face of the face of the other’s death? Not everything is in our power. To the other, we are already obligated and never su√ciently obligated. Only a page ago, we were branding Giltgestalt a murderer. An hour ago, he was practicing strangulation in the park, fingering Owley’s missing letter in the still warm pocket of his Ourmoney suit; now he held our gaze in the gaze of his bloody gaze, which lay in a room and a half, neatly severed from the equally neat set of his suit, which lay in another room. And a half. Shtick’s mind had been separated from his body� in two pools of his own � How shall we judge him now? By replacing that bloody head upon his blind shoulders.

� Here, if

not in the orchard, at last the mind and body split. � We all

died in Lublin. In Lublin we gave the Torah back. Dead men don’t praise God. J. Glatstein � And

what is the place of solitude in the general economy of being? � I meant

language.

� He

learned: In death we are freed from language (this is not necessarily so).

500  ROBERT MAJZELS

17b Chapter Twenty-two

W

� He wore,

to say the least, an open collar.

� The father

of fathers of ritual impurities. � I meant he was not thinking, though it may be thoughtless to say so. � Go this way! Just the opposite! A sudden passage. Marks or a mark. � Four di¬erent methods of execution are delegated to the court. In descending order of severity these are: stoning, burning, beheading and strangulation. Sanhedrin 49b � I mean a connection between murders, not the severed connection of Shtick’s mind and Shtick’s body.

Pargod

Apikoros Sleuth

L

hat cries out in the canyon of cars below et us return to the scene(s) of the crime. Shall we say the murder weapon was a very sharp tongue? the window of a broken room and a half if Whereas, in Howley’s case, it was strangulation not the siren’s song of a severely severed Shtick? Nevertheless, kneeling at the foot of an Our- (not to mention a broken cu¬ and a shoe) under the money suit,� he heard the periphrastic wail of the police- not-so-burning bush by the garden gate. The nature of man’s magic. Such a full-time word is curdling. Well, this case is not like the nature of this case and the nature who called the cops? Had of this case is not like a murderer hightailed it, mk ny cu ix pz jv qh rd >g tk ba the nature of this case.� The question was: what pausing only to deposit ml nk cy iu px jz qv rh >d tg ga an anonymous coin in is the o¬ense of one that nl ck iy pu jx qz rv >h td gb ra he should be strangled, the pay phone of impliand of the other that he cation? But why had a nm cl ik py ju qx rz >v th db ha killer operated? Shall would lose his head over we think beneath the cm il pk jy qu rx >z tv dg hb va it?� And what of those moment? He was being who had gone before: cn im pl jk qy ru >x tz hg vb za framed in the cracked Mustapha and Legrand? vg zb xa Betty Boop? And the denmirror of his room and a in pm jl qk ry >u tx hd tist with too many teeth half. He rose confusedly, ic pn jm ql rk >y tu vd zg xb ua in his name? � What was glanced at his right hand moist with the blood of pc jn qm rl >k ty vh zd xg ub ya the method of execution in each case? And the shticky circumstance.� In pi jc qn rm >l tk zh xd ug yb ka crime? What was there such a case an automatic zv xh ud yg kb la between them? The comgesture seeks to cast o¬ ji qc rn >m tl the o¬ending member. mon factor. Just as there, jp qi rc >n tm xv uh yd kg lb ma Let us say, without thinkso here too. In either � ing, he bent and wiped qp ri >c tn xz uv yh kd lg mb na case, no matter what. that o¬ensive hand on the Answer, resolve, relate, qj rp >i tc uz yv kh ld mg nb ca now superfluous crease object. And was he sudyz kv lh md ng cb ia denly become, in the face of a dead man’s trousers. rj >p ti ux Did he recoil from his of the face of death, a rq >j tp yx kz lv mh nd cg ib pa own solecistic gesture? shopkeeper, to add thus Straighten up. And race� >q tj yu kx lz mv nh cd ig pb ja and subtract and ex– what was he carrying? pound? He would have >r tq km lk mz nv ch id pg jb qa that hand on the end preferred to slip away nz cv ih pd jg qb ra from it. To deepen the of an arm he may have tr ky lu mk wished longer – across a notion of solitude. If he t> ly mu nk cz iv ph jd qg rb >a had had time, he would staggering hallway back to the scene, the other lk my nu ck iz pv jh qd rg >b ta have considered the opportunities that time may one, of the same crime. To stand. Agape. Abashed. Aghast. Face to face with the face of the offer to solitude. But there was no man who lay in another room and a half? Do you follow? I mean, shall consolation there. In his solitude he we follow him in there? To add what? What was there about it? The felt his self made heavy by itself, a siren’s call of justice closer now. The manner of execution?� Shall we viscous, heavy, stupid double.� And consider the manner of execution? There, at least, a pretext. To ratio- there was no time. Not for Shtick. Nor cinate. To turn one’s own mind from the body in two parts (why do we for him. No dreaming in the present need two?). Or should I say the body on the one part and the mind on of being in the presence of death. Now the other. The knowledge that. If there were a connection.� But Shtick’s the policeman’s song filled a canyon death was a command that disrupted any possibility of knowledge, below. A song knows how to demand. disrupted the significance of signification. Break, fracture : : The time was high. That is, it was high time, high time to get down from the height of his twenty-second floor. I mean it was that time to absquatulate. There was no longer safety in numbness. And yet. Not yet. He could not tear himself away from the torn head of a broken Shtick. Not to mention his headless body. That Shtick was a mast and he was tied to it.� Nor could he sever the ties that bound him to the disembodied recollection of a Giltgestaltian grin in the rearview mirror of someone else’s Pontiac memory. That car was also a memory to its former owner. How he disagrees with himself. He must, but he has no remedy : : � Not that he was particularly drawn to the siren call in the street below. What could the police promise? At most, a half room less.

� A de-

tective proceeds by hyperbaton: he inverts the idiom of death. � These

are the ones who are strangled: one who strikes his father or his mother, one who kidnaps, a rebellious sage, a false prophet, one who commits adultery, the zomemin witnesses of the daughter of a Kohen. Sanhedrin 84b � All these

are linked by hekeish: the laws of one are applied to the other.

� M. Blanchot

Aminadab

from apikoros sleuth  501

Apikoros Sleuth

� I meant

he who circled recalled; that shticky head was empty. � Now they were empty too. � Or should we say Panchoistic. � That letter was a missing H.

� Those

were second thoughts.

� Before

the law, a man is always considered forewarned by a siren. � He wanted Ulysses, he’d get Abraham.

� Had there been a dining room, there would have been blood on a dining room floor, Lizzie.

Pargod

Chapter Twenty-three 18a

S

hall we say he gazed into a crimson pool of regret? tractate of Talmudic argument, the blunt pencil of his No, better not go that way. Rather, he circled a solitude.� Let us stand before the elevator, the right one, shticky head, recalling his own shticky past.� Who if possible. No, the left. No, the right. From here, we learned: to steal requires dedication? Who, his pockets can watch two strings of lights mount together. He bet full� of beautiful early figs, had once recruited a Bara- on the right, no, yes the right. There was creaking and basic� teacher in an Ourmoney suit to the politics of sighing of metal on metal, the doors parted on the one rage? Who had taught hand and the doors partthe horse of charm to mk ny cu ix pz jv qh rd >g tk ba ed on the other hand. serve the people before He stepped into the right ml nk cy iu px jz qv rh >d tg ga he served himself? When chamber, where we were nl ck iy pu jx qz rv >h td gb ra prepared to bump the you can’t teach an old horse new tricks, he will policeman of language. nm cl ik py ju qx rz >v th db ha return to his old tricks. There was only a faint Who delivered a letter cm il pk jy qu rx >z tv dg hb va trace of someone’s lunch. of banishment? � Who In this case the right one cn im pl jk qy ru >x tz hg vb za poured years of silence was the right one. That vg zb xa mouth was toothless.� into a friend’s ear and in pm jl qk ry >u tx hd left him standing in the Out from the other came ic pn jm ql rk >y tu vd zg xb ua vestibule between the pouring uniforms of guilt world and self? Who sus- pc jn qm rl >k ty vh zd xg ub ya and the teeth of justice. pected a Shtick of stranTwo.� Before the gate pi jc qn rm >l tk zh xd ug yb ka was that gang. He waited gulation? As the blood zv xh ud yg kb la an eternity of palms and dried, language vanish- ji qc rn >m tl ed from a Shticky head. underarms for the doors jp qi rc >n tm xv uh yd kg lb ma Nor did he find letters of to slide shut. Shall we expulsion in a Shticky qp ri >c tn xz uv yh kd lg mb na say there was a passing pocket. He thought for a glance from the head qj rp >i tc uz yv kh ld mg nb ca second.� Something had on a uniform of guilt, an yz kv lh md ng cb ia eye-to-eye with a man turned silent. I mean rj >p ti ux aside from Giltgestalt. already itching to press rq >j tp yx kz lv mh nd cg ib pa Something in the street shoulder-to-shoulder was silent. That siren >q tj yu kx lz mv nh cd ig pb ja with the sketch artist? � song.� Can there be imIn that man’s eyes he saw >r tq km lk mz nv ch id pg jb qa pediments to the ear? He the grey-blue pages of nz cv ih pd jg qb ra the evening papers.� He was suddenly freed from tr ky lu mk the mast of memory in saw the hand on the arm t> ly mu nk cz iv ph jd qg rb >a a policeman’s siren.� Did of the Law rise from the he listen for nightsticks lk my nu ck iz pv jh qd rg >b ta cu¬ of justice, and begin in the corridor? The doubthe slow movement that led doors of doubled elevators? Had becomes a wave when the accordion of escape does not press between someone framed him in a mirror of them. He, for his part, began a more than gradual descent. Or should circumstance? In the silence of the we say less than gradual? � Can you imagine a uniform reception in the hallway a parade marched between a lobby? Did you spot a radio on a policeman’s belt? Had the passenger room and a half and a room and a half broken? Was hope dying? He laboured with his breathing. Studied a of doubt. He lowered his gaze to a breathtaking view of numbers in descending order. His heart bumped bloody footprint.� And another. Two!? against the lobby. Upstairs they measured a corpse.� Meanwhile our Why do I need two? And yet. Not vertiginous clerk escaped : : yet. Perhaps you dimly recall arriving earlier, our arms full of curtains, to read a single red tread on the carpet of our anticipation. Perhaps you do not. Had he promoted some failure of narrative? He glanced inward at his own sole (let us say the right one). Which bore the mark of Shticky blood. Blood, like events, will spread. He’d carried a curtain (or a dozen) of souls over a sole of blood. Now he’d doubled the prints. To worry is the border of experience. He was there now. Your papers, please. He heard the shuddering rise of elevators. There were two and two half rooms, a Shtick broken in two, two elevators rising, two footprints of blood, and two fistfuls of seconds between him and disaster. Did he pause to take hold of a precious possession or three? Did he grab the first thing(s) to fall into his hand(s)? A curtain, a final � From which part of the corpse would they measure the distance to the nearest city? From his

navel? From his nose? From the place that he became a corpse? From his neck? Sanhedrin 88a

� Clearly,

here he had thought far below the moment. At such times we long for a standing suitcase and a rear exit. He forgot the radio.

� That

vehicle was a fortuitous train of thought. � Did you

expect another number, more or less?

� A wet

vase can paint a genius. � Later,

he might wrap himself in his own guilt. � The speed

of an elevator is inversely proportional to the fear (or intestinal urge, or redolence of a fellow traveller) within.

502  ROBERT MAJZELS

18b Chapter Twenty-four

B � On reading Charles Dickens: I can’t understand it and can’t believe it. I live only here and there in a small word in whose vowel I lose my useless head for a moment. The first and last letters are the beginning and end of my fishlike emotion. F. Kafka Diaries � If the relationship with the other involves more than relationships with mystery, it is because one has accosted the other in everyday life where the solitude and fundamental alterity of the other are already veiled by decency. E. Lévinas Time and the Other

Two!

Apikoros Sleuth

H

efore we were narrative, we were boots and vere turned his toes the way he had come. To look tigo. We leapt across a canyon of tra√c. We flung across at the twenty-second floor. The native is on the ground and the stranger is in the sky.� What ourselves into the net of language. A horse was an inch of music. Dogs danced, wings gathered rock. droned in the chapel of his stomach? Must we churn Now we are the small brown pigtail of a mystery this? From where he had come, a war of charm had trailing behind its solution. We pour murder out of a underestimated black murder. Now, any act was great. tenement and lay the limp He gazed back across and soggy rag of story in cm il pk jy qu rx >z tv dg hb va from where he had gazed the street.� The police across at the cross for cn im pl jk qy ru >x tz hg vb za have parked the realistic so many years. Into the vg zb xa cracked mirror of a cancode (always straddling a in pm jl qk ry >u tx hd yon of tra√c. He saw sidewalk) beneath their ic pn jm ql rk >y tu vd zg xb ua uniforms (two) bending lights flashing. They are an empty vehicle crack- pc jn qm rl >k ty vh zd xg ub ya and unbending in a room and a half of stooping ling speech in a canyon pi jc qn rm >l tk zh xd ug yb ka and unstooping. What of tra√c. He crawled past zv xh ud yg kb la were these detectives of it. That tale is a parade ji qc rn >m tl deadly sin retrieving? � marching on someone’s jp qi rc >n tm xv uh yd kg lb ma Now that we have come borrowed crutches. All the more di√cult to cross qp ri >c tn xz uv yh kd lg mb na to this. We sit upon a the highway. A passerby volume of argumentation qj rp >i tc uz yv kh ld mg nb ca and clutch a curtain of will pause and look from a bristling police car to rj >p ti ux yz kv lh md ng cb ia souls. Shall we say he that doorway pregnant thought of his mother?� rq >j tp yx kz lv mh nd cg ib pa with disaster and to a And yet. Not yet. He was shifty-eyed mule under >q tj yu kx lz mv nh cd ig pb ja not prepared to be driva load of curtained text. en into that countryside. >r tq km lk mz nv ch id pg jb qa I struggled for a visible He counted his options expression. I tried to read tr ky lu mk nz cv ih pd jg qb ra on the fingers of his nose. I mean, there were the nervous lip beneath t> ly mu nk cz iv ph jd qg rb >a none. The landscape his bushy moustache and above a shouting shirt. If lk my nu ck iz pv jh qd rg >b ta paused. The hearse of failure pulled up behind there is a di√culty, this the flashing blood of the is the di√culty. To pracLaw. More time gathered tice exegesis in the street among the weeds. He mutcomes to identify a crimitered to himself in the nal. How should we act? � Someone else is always language of sleep. Somean anticipation. Wonderthing � was calling him ing if we can continue in this way. We can crawl past it. We can edge back to the scene(s) of the crime. Having into Cratylus’s river of tra√c,� but can we cross it? Panic snaps the mind; already come this far, the journey deto walk repairs it. The street was a long poem; he went down to the end manded repetition. Shall we descend of the verse. He thought how assiduously a murder obeys the rules of that bitter slope of disappointment? the road. On the other side the mountain poured greenish weeds into the At the corner light, he paused to recogcity. He was inclined to go up. A ways. He flexed his ankles, his knees nize a Ukrainian janitor’s head momenblazed on ahead. Someone’s sweat, perhaps even his, gathered in the tarily filling the open door. Still he small of his back. He earned it. Until he paused on the slope to extinguish crawled back along the way he had fled. his lungs. A chestnut tree leaned hard against him. It might have been He pulled that outer door in time to raining. Instead, the sun piled warmly globules of irony upon his head : : hold it open for a bookish front-end bearer of a stretcher followed by the stretcher and the other bookend. Whereas his heart took him by the throat and flung him back along the sidewalk, his knees would not flee. They drew him toward that stretcher. Death disappearing into the hole in the rear of an ambulance will draw a crowd. The living jostle with each other’s anonymous odours in anticipation of the inevitable momentary glimpse when the sheet slips away from the Other’s face. He jostled with the best of them. He peered and paled. What did he see-saw? A face, bloodless, but still recognizable. His own. Gazing skyward : : � Cratylus’ version of the river, in which one cannot bathe even once; where the very fixity of unity, the form of every existent, cannot be constituted;

the river wherein the last element of fixity, in relation to which becoming is understood, disappears. E. Lévinas, Time and the Other

� One

who sees his past always thinks: because of; or but this is not so; or just as, so too; or the event that happened happened that way; or act, deed, event, precedent. � When

is a tenement not a home? When you can no longer return there. � At times

like this we often think of our mothers. And mine too, for that matter. Performing rites, such as eating, washing, drinking, sacrificing.

� Perhaps

a horsey habit, perhaps the lure of disaster, perhaps the refusal to believe he had not been dreaming, or merely the familiar comfort of a damp cot.

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Apikoros Sleuth

� The

soul flies in the air like a bird; the body is a stony grave.

� Sans his letter, Owley met a lethal finisher.

� Did his sins set him apart from the masses of his people? If so, he was a flagrant sinner: iwr

� It is not your death which you see here. Nor did you ever truly carry that Shtick. � Well, we are pressed for time; perhaps a gesture will su√ce. A fact. A face.

W

Earlier and Later

Chapter Twenty-five 19a

S

e were gazing skyward. Into the cracked mirhall we solve this death or that one? Having failed ror of the other’s face. That face was a cloud to solve, or represent, or think those millions. This or lack of understanding. I was stretched in cannot enter your mind. Death is become a probtwo on the stretcher of finality. Freed from my soul� and lem of degrees. How shall we dispose of it? The question, that attendant’s pain. I was my body, a silent stone gravely the di√culty, returned to its place. Where is a qualitative swaying, no longer able to sin. I thought, under accusa- leap? Qu’est-ce qu’un simple meurtre? Chaque mort tion of murder, one’s guilt ne porte-t-il pas la trace vibrates. Who recruited pc jn qm rl >k ty vh zd xg ub ya des autres? How shall we a Shtick from an orchard describe it?� In my story? pi jc qn rm >l tk zh xd ug yb ka of last year’s Pontiac In mystery? In the midst Sports? Who delivered a ji qc rn >m tl zv xh ud yg kb la of it, there is no end to it. letter of expulsion? And Nor beginning. Yes and jp qi rc >n tm xv uh yd kg lb ma the same for Howley, cast no and it is unsteady in out of steel casting for a qp ri >c tn xz uv yh kd lg mb na his hand. Shall we scribble the unrepresentable, pinkish group. Who did qj rp >i tc uz yv kh ld mg nb ca knee-deep in that black not attend a meeting in yz kv lh md ng cb ia and white trench?� This the garden by the gate?� rj >p ti ux Who did not love Betty is the di√culty. Shall we rq >j tp yx kz lv mh nd cg ib pa testify to the limits of Boop enough? Who did not wish her well? These >q tj yu kx lz mv nh cd ig pb ja what can be said, knowing there is something were the pencil shavings >r tq km lk mz nv ch id pg jb qa of guilt.� But they were which cannot be said, his, and he fingered them tr ky lu mk nz cv ih pd jg qb ra but is trying to be said?� daily. Now, shall he die We all bend to look t> ly mu nk cz iv ph jd qg rb >a for them? Death floats on more closely at a trench. that phrase. A person is lk my nu ck iz pv jh qd rg >b ta We calculate length and depth. In this way he murdered. Shall a reader goes on reckoning like care? Perhaps not. A gena peddler. He subtracts eralization needs a detail. Generalization and detail. and adds and expounds. And are you still at this? Detail and generalization. What e¬ect there could Here a word about my have been is lost.� The mother. A terrible imperstory stumbles onward; ative drove that hearse into the countryside.� that one is already dead. We have provided no And if this cannot enter details. They say in the your mind, only the opposite way is reasonWest, the art of characterization requires the able! An elenctic. Who careful accumulation of detail.� Shall mentioned its name? What did you see? They laughed at it in the West. we attempt a parthenogenetic leap? Is it necessary? Reach up to extend a hypotyposic hand. From the Giltgestalt had a lisp. There. That’s beginning, at the outset, a story to contradict. Just as in. From where? done. Can we move on now? Am I a A retraction. Practical di¬erence. Up to here there is no. How much more peddler? Must I go on like a peddler? so. It might occur to you. It is di√cult. To cast them. Should we rely Not a thick comic lisp; that is the on answers such as these? And furthermore. Now he was a body, freed speech impediment of crayons. There from his soul.� He had cast himself out of this world like a stone. His was no whitish spittle. No fine spray. head lay on the stretcher of his luxurious exit under his arm. He gazed Rather let us say it was a feathery at the roof of an ambulance.� We have had a lifetime of that. Repulsive whistle and perhaps endear him to eternity swims there. It continues to do so : : you. Is it su√cient? Shall we make his death matter after the fact, and send him into heaven? Do I make claim to a depth of sentiment? Let us plunge in there. How could I? I’ve already killed him. In a manner of speaking. I mean, in the manner I spoke of him. So there it is: a lisp and nothing more. Better late than never. Perhaps you cannot possibly think so. In any case, now we have killed him. And how many more? Mustapha, Legrand and Betty Boop, that dentist with too many teeth in his name. Owley sans that letter. And yet. Not yet. They lifted me skyward. I ascended a hearse. Will you lie in my place? : : � That was no ambulance; an ambulance is a hearse in a hurry.

� In black

and white.

� Were we

hoping in this way to deliver a parcel of redemption? Perhaps you cannot possibly think so. What meaning would you bury in a black and white trench? � Go and

learn the meaning of this verse according to one of R’ Yishmael’s thirteen methods of exegesis through which the Torah is expounded. Sanhedrin 86a � Number

a5591. Not to mention 61991. And the others. � I meant,

free from that footprint of blood.

504  ROBERT MAJZELS

19b Chapter Twenty-six

� I meant,

to stand mutely. Not that silence in the face of death is easily tolerated. � Shall we

say I was the nag of fiction, the mouse of drama.

� See Chapter Eight; we were Homeless in Tutonaguy.

� Any horseman in the park is policing squirrels, or a squirrelly policeman.

A Mute Imperative

S

H

Apikoros Sleuth

htick was a headless hearseman whose hearse e could not wait for that horse’s head to go was my neck. Nevertheless, one cannot continue ahead, give his mount its head, and head home. Whereas now. Whereas he. Whereas I. Carried to stand a mute witness to one’s own death.� Mine was the face to be picked out of a crowd. I felt a sti¬ my bladder through the park, and the student ghetto.� Ukrainian wind on my neck. I turned my back on the An unrelenting string of disasters filed into the cinema familiar face of a mysterious death and a familiar door of his rememoration. The terror of understanding froze his tears. Shall we have to a room and a half, and brushed my heels against qp ri >c tn xz uv yh kd lg mb na a touch of self-restraint? the pavement of indifUnderstanding fell from qj rp >i tc uz yv kh ld mg nb ca ference. That street was a the trees: the closed door yz kv lh md ng cb ia behind him,� the darklong poem.� Let us go to rj >p ti ux ness ahead, the taste of the end of the verse, turn rq >j tp yx kz lv mh nd cg ib pa broken syllables. What is the corner of our old life, and find dusk in the alley >q tj yu kx lz mv nh cd ig pb ja it like? The preterit past. He had wanted someof everybody’s refuse. A >r tq km lk mz nv ch id pg jb qa sudden recollection of the thing better. He’d not darkness after the dark- tr ky lu mk nz cv ih pd jg qb ra found it.� Now we search the streets for an open ness, the movie after the t> ly mu nk cz iv ph jd qg rb >a movie. Did I recall saydoorway. Or a darkened ing, nothing I could do lk my nu ck iz pv jh qd rg >b ta one. To lower his keyless� could make it any worse? pockets down around We made it worse.� And his ankles. He came upwhat will one who finds on the gates to the garhim or herself in the den of higher yearning.� alley of everyone’s refuse Hear from this, learn from this, conclude from reflect? How should we act? Shall we begin to this. He walked in the sleuth? To gnaw on the dark evening of universal mystery of murder in the knowledge. Let us say a mirror of a room and a willow teared up, wherehalf? Shall we consider as flowers slept in their our place in a string of beds before a library, a deaths strung together? faculty club and a toilet. A missing letter. A Shtick He sought the latter. In waits in the vestibule the library his cloacic between the world and anxiety met with a uniself. Or should we rather form denial. Have we not look. He should have rejected this once? Just been looking. For what? as there, so here too. Something better? I have not found it. But more immediately, he should What now? Shall we say he wiped his have been looking for shelter. For the night, I mean. Because dusk will brow? And head south into the monied soon spill into any city. Did he sleuth? Or did he search? Let us say he streets of money, pigs, leprosy and sexsearched. But not for shelter. Because he had forgotten the radio and his ual relations. A full bladder is a child: ears were swimming (again!?) in the call of nature. There could be no having momentarily fallen silent, it greater precision. This is the di√culty. O, happy group, you healthy will once more take up the cry. A bowel defecators. He could not count himself among them. A bladder drove denied will harden its heart.� He made him into the park. Between the trees. The body, the thing itself. But considerable headway in a street of among the trees in the shadows a horseman.� He buttoned his fly and freestanding architects. What was he turned to the public toilets. They were locked. To him. For the night : : carrying that his reason could not drain? A tractate of verbs, a curtain of souls, the blunt pencil of his past. An ambitious colon. Let us scrape together a skyscraper, a glass finger to scrape the heavens. He entered the vestibule of monied pigs and financial relations. A mirror elevated his emergency. He did not pause to reflect on it. Which one beckoned? He took that one. Consulted a panel of proper nouns. Here surprise might have called a halt to an operation were it not for an internal hue and cry. The word he saw was a dentist with too many teeth in his name. Hard-pressed he pressed a Pigafetta practice : : � A university is a place of higher yearning. Perhaps you cannot possibly think so. � La vérité n’est que la solidification d’anciennes métaphores. F. Nietzsche

� Il traver-

sa moins légèrement la nuit réactionnaire.

� My own

door, I mean, not to mention the public wasrooms.

� Perhaps

it was no longer to be had. Or never had been. A Halakhah for the Time of the Messiah. � God said

to Elijah: There are three keys that were not entrusted to an agent: the key of childbirth, the key of rain, and the key of resurrection. One key I have already made an exception and given you – the key of rain. Now you request a second key, the key of resurrection. Is it proper that people should say: Two keys are in the hands of the student and only one is in the hands of the teacher? Sanhedrin 113a

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H � Those trousers are an interpellation and a sexual injunction.

� When

we defecate, our soul flies in the air like a bird.

� And his pants deflated around his ankles.

� They

were standing side-byurinaryside in a manly expression of their inner selves.

� The marks of homelessness, once it takes hold, multiply exponentially.

A Hue and Cry

Chapter Twenty-seven 20a

T

ow long will an elevator contain one man and o wait for an elevator is an experiment in his bladder? Go ask the mystagogues. The fuller anguish. He heard the soft footsteps of a screamthe organ the longer the ride. On the tenth floor ing shirt lay a carpet beneath his scalp. He felt he burst forth onto a carpeted corridor. The plumber’s a bushy moustache on the back of his neck, the breath paradise was down the hall. He poured past a row of a nervous lip. Let us say the elevator pinged. Not of doors into a small stick figure in trousers� and, drop- once but twice!� He played the silent periphrastic shuffle game. An open palm ping his keyless pockets, leapt into the cubicle of >q tj yu kx lz mv nh cd ig pb ja below the belt is that noplease-after-you-I-insist. gratitude to produce a >r tq km lk mz nv ch id pg jb qa great emancipatory moan. He worked the split.� A But there was no time tr ky lu mk nz cv ih pd jg qb ra shouting shirt went one to bask in a momentary way and he t’other. Let t> ly mu nk cz iv ph jd qg rb >a freedom from the body, us say, however, that he � the thing itself. What is lk my nu ck iz pv jh qd rg >b ta rose whereas he would there seated between a have much preferred to door and the self? He descend?� Did he press heard the door of trourepeatedly on a letter in sers exercise its hinges a nest of numbers? Do and a conversation enter you imagine a nervous the room. How should lip rising in the chamwe act? Shall we remain ber next to ours. He did. silent and closeted with The doors opened in inky water, allowing only our darkness.� His nose was shoes coated with the running away with him. dust of our transgresOn the back of his hand � sions to represent us? it produced a watery pink liquid.� He did not He heard: Shall we go to the brasserie across linger. Rather he pressed the square? And a voice hard hard hard. A monreplied: Or that new ied elevator is like love place just opened up on at first. It flutters your belly and thrusts your the boulevard, a nice review in the papers.� He heart in your throat.� He sat, meanwhile, his knees slipped away from it. He bent, his back to the cast his eye to one side waters, trying to withand to the other. Did he hold an outpouring of his seek out a vociferous own less than excellent shirt? � Or did he turtle self-expression. Did they instead through a door pause long at the sinks to dip their of paned glass. Outside, the stick of night was in full swing. He thrust hands in a cursory nod before pour- himself into that dark city’s illuminated letter. A curtain of ghoulish ing silence back into the room? Long faces.� My forehead drenched, my already fragile digestion. Perhaps this enough. Let us wait for silence to cannot enter your mind. Shelter is the first gear of anyone’s engine. thicken the walls of his solitude before Where shall we seek it? In the darkness after the movie. Then, we were disentangling his ankles. Before a sink stupidly sixteen. Now, we were simply stupid. That was then. This was of comforts, he stood in the mirror now.� In the preterit past. On the pavement, between this century and of his homelessness.� He splashed cold an unfortunate verdict, a beggar’s outstretched hand. He almost took it. hard facts on the face of his predica- For now, in the darkened street, a beggar was become a fount of knowlment. Pushed a useless finger through edge and a mentor in cheap’s clothing. I was so much less than that : : the mirror’s thinning tangle of curls. He toyed with regret. Do not try this at home. The radio. A razor. What remained of the fruit of his labours. I mean a banana. Shall we say he would have remained there, in a cocoon of running water, if he had not heard soft footsteps in the corridor. He pulled the door and brushed past an encounter. Briefly, a nervous lip, a bushy moustache, a glimpse of a shouting shirt. What is being cited here as though it had been mentioned before? He tossed his stone down the hall without pausing to ponder a name with too many teeth on the second door to the left : : � In the street, he was the rust of years on a narrow cot in a room and a half.

� Two! Yes,

yes, I do need two! Two is the democratic promise of two chambers. � Here was

a practice in which he was practiced. � Have we

not already, once before, climbed la Sierra Maestra in search of a verb? � Form

breaks up, the letter begins to blur and fade. This is the level of Chakmah consciousness. � Perhaps

this was merely what remained of a headless Shtick in a room and a half? � It floats

above an abyss of nothingness. � So full-

time a word is curdling. � Once the

tents of night are well planted, there is no more imagining morning.

506  ROBERT MAJZELS

20b Chapter Twenty-eight

Home Again

A

� Here we

meant to provide the profluence of the murder mystery. Can’t you feel sharply the edge of your seat?

� I mean, you having failed him.

� Or, in the siege and in the straits in which his enemy had put him in straits, perhaps he merely sought the solace of a newspaper in which to wrap his legs?

Apikoros Sleuth

cross a canyon of tra√c beckons a tumbleweed toes pointing across a canyon of tra√c, at the twentyof information. The inky exhalation. To be second floor of a tenement become the scene of the crime wrapped in newspapers is best of all. Did his that had adopted his name.� Will certain descriptions legs imagine a thick cot of fine print in a room and a confront silence? Perhaps a criminal returns to the half? He crossed. And glanced. Into the blackened mirror scene of his new identity in search of the old one. This of his own proleptic guilt sketched on the front page of is the di√culty. How can you find it?� Shall we say he did not cross that bridge murder, mystery and the news of the day.� Below, lk my nu ck iz pv jh qd rg >b ta until it collapsed beneath the headless sheet over a him. He cooled his heels and the sweat on his broken Shtick. Now was back. He tried to think a good time to turtle. He but nothing happened.� let those three hairs on his chin grow, tied his A hearse would have scarf over his ears, and been a way back. But not even the dim light of a prayed, now the condiuniform remained betion had taken hold, for the exponential multifore that door. He was plication of the marks of drawn by the lack of that homelessness. He translight. By the promise ferred a text and a curtain of a warm cot on which to a pale, bloodless hand he could first wrap and so as to finger a coin then lay his legs down in his keyless pockets. in a room and a half.� Would you spare him Shall we say he followed a dime? Such feeling his heels across a canyon refuses us. Failing that,� of tra√c, parsed a long he spent his last on poem to the end of the that bellowing newspaverse, and entered the per. Why? Did he wish vestibule between the to cover up, to remove street and what had once his face from the face been his self? Two chambers gaped. A meaningof the darkly illuminated face of the street? The less choice. Why do I need mirror of his image lay two? His anticipation piled beneath the one mk ny cu ix pz jv qh rd >g tk ba was a third elevator; it he bought and paid for.� rose. And since we have ml nk cy iu px jz qv rh >d tg ga A glance, an eye-to-eye come to this. Now that with the fish-soaked vennl ck iy pu jx qz rv >h td gb ra we have come to this. dor, my already fragile Having come to this. He digestion. He fled the illuminated page of the street and plunged back sought a good hand-washing.� To be into the park, that small brown mutt of mystery nipping at his heels. Fear released from subsidiary judgment. He gusted in the branches. We sweat beneath the moon. Something rustling had whittled a long time, subtracted and in the burning bushes will get your knees moving. Where? If you’re not subtracted, thought hard to be released thinking, back whence you came. Oh, how he doublecrossed that park. from it. Until his shtick had grown too Sacrificed his calves to the altar of his panic. Too shaken to be thinking. large to carry. He would wash his hands Events had roughly escaped any reasonable vessel of containment. He of himself and lie in the cot of his desowould have lain down on a cot in a room and a half, wrapped his feet lation. That elevator was a chamber of in the news of the day. When the protestations of his calves slowed his hewn stone. It railed and rattled to a knees to a halt, he found himself. He was standing on a slippery slope, his halt. Tossed him into the scene of a crime. A coroner will stretch yellow� ribbons across the door to a room and a half and across the door across the hall in the cracked mirror of a room and a half. If it had ever been there, beyond the vestibule, between the street and a room and a half, or in the cracked mirror of that room and a half, what had once served as self was gone now.� Had he returned in search of it? Without a roof, without so much as the promise of une demi-baguette, anyone’s self is distantly a memory. Behind him he heard the gears of power grind beneath the twin of the elevator whence he’d come. He turned to greet what he already knew was emerging there: a shouting shirt and that nervous lip beneath the burning bush of a moustache : : � Perhaps he would have done better to find a new one. In the local crime pages of the evening news.

� In such

a case, we say, the native is on the ground and the stranger is in the sky. � If the

true self is already gone, or was never there to begin with? � Curly Joe.

� A parable

for the story of Elijah: To what can this be compared? To a man who locked his gate and then lost his key. Sanhedrin 113a

� tlyun :,ydy

laws regarding the ritual impurity of and washing of hands.

� Shall we say qOry, yellow as in the yolk of an egg?

from apikoros sleuth  507

Apikoros Sleuth

� Now

we’ve lost our grammatical superstition.

� Here’s a better place for such a dialogue.

� Wouldn’t

you?

� If you have run with the foot soldiers, and they have wearied you, how can you contend with horses? Jeremiah 12:5 � Where were you?

� One who

kidnaps a Jew is not liable to strangulation unless he takes him into his possession. Sanhedrin 85b � Thanks

to Erin Mouré, who took us there. � I mean the royal pee.

H

Pink

L

Chapter Twenty-nine 21a

aving come this far, now we have come this far, et us say I achieved, at that moment, a perfect we are plunged into an anacoluthonic life.� expression of powerlessness. And swam in that Caught between the yellow ribbon of someone’s moment, floating on the surface of my lack of death and a shouting shirt. In the hallway between options.� At last. I could err no more. My elbow was a room and a half and a room and a half. I considered no longer my own; it lay wrapped in a Cafgu’s grip. a nervous lip, a bushy moustache. Here, remembrance There was no question how should we act? Nothing of something. A shoutwas in his power. There was only the hard round ing shirt speaks softly in nut of fear in the face a mutter of factual tone of voice. Hello, he said, of the face of his own � and after all these years. death.� But he found reI was the purpose of pose in the dissolution silence. I see, the shirt of that self. It flowed out continued, declining to from him like so much be abated, the you I am coloured water. A suspenthinking of remains the sion. A brackish phlegm.� you I think of as you, But I digress. We were as I speak to the you to rising. Shall we disembark whom I am speaking. I from that chamber of held my tongue between hewn stone into another my knees.� Do you not chamber of stone, onto a recall, he argued, the me carpet of Persian labour, overlooking the illumiI once called myself? His nated letters of the city? name was Joey Cafgu. A foot soldier in the army Here Joey Cafgu released of soteriology. � Let us mk ny cu ix pz jv qh rd >g tk ba the elbow he’d been gripgive him a round face ping – which was mine – ml nk cy iu px jz qv rh >d tg ga and eyes like buzzers. with a push so gentle it nl ck iy pu jx qz rv >h td gb ra is possible there was no Here’s a clue. We had been, once, in our youth, push at all, and retreated nm cl ik py ju qx rz >v th db ha together in that group into the shadow of the of which we are not cm il pk jy qu rx >z tv dg hb va shadow of the way we speaking.� He took my had come. At the desk, cn im pl jk qy ru >x tz hg vb za elbow, removed it from shall we say, benevolence vg zb xa greeted me as a smiling the scenes of the crime. in pm jl qk ry >u tx hd And what else that matmouthful of Booger Rooic pn jm ql rk >y tu vd zg xb ua tered was muttered in ney? There was no escapthat tone? Best not to pc jn qm rl >k ty vh zd xg ub ya ing the remembrance of remain here. It was said a Booger.� I fingered it.� thus and it was said thus. Shall we say He had been a general in that army of soteriology. In our youth. Not it was impossible to ascertain if the everyone called him Booger. His mother, for example, did not. Nor did hand on the arm (I mean his hand, those who were his subalterns. Now he’d paid o¬ that antonomasial my arm) was friendly or forceful? � mortgage in full. He had invested in democracy. He was a lion in the What does a Cafgu do? And, more to electoral arena, a rising star in the murky way, a fine set of teeth on the point, how large are his shoulders? the front page of the news of the day. Ourmoney was not too good for His neck? The fingers on my arm? I him. Come in, come in, long time, make yourself. There being no chair, mean his fingers, my arm. Friendly or I hovered between the cat and the smile, my nose running away with forceful? In either case, I had no place me. Shall we wipe a pinkish hue from the back of our reddish hand? : : to pass the night. In the streets I was all rust, the rust of a room and a half without a cot. He o¬ered to carry neither my curtain nor my prayers. In the lobby, fleetingly, a Ukrainian boy’s pink face and rotten teeth. Thinking, perhaps, new country, same story, same bushy moustache in the night. In the park the wind propelled us through the branches. A fleeting sensation of the ride to Fuente Grande.� There was no Andalusian olive tree, no fertile fields lying fallow. Only the towering glassy eye of money. That same skyscraper where we� so recently spent a small portion of happiness in a bladder’s momentary release. It is not necessary for a Cafgu to loosen his grip on someone’s elbow in order to press as bluntly and firmly on a button. This I learned. Also this: that one floor above a Pigafetta practice is the Number 32 : :

� The

sudden release from responsibility at the moment of complete powerlessness teaches us the extent of the tension under which we have been labouring until then. � The body,

the thing itself. � It is in

the nature of the self that when we are rid of it we are not necessarily also rid of our cramps. Nor for that matter of our other aches and pains. This too is unfortunate.

� If Shtick

Giltgestalt was a ben sorer umoreh who had reciprocated, Booger Rooney was a zakein mamrei. � Here I

mean the memory, not the booger.

508  ROBERT MAJZELS

21b Chapter Thirty

Things from which Benefit Is Forbidden

T

� This word is free on both sides.

� His was close to degree zero.

� Have you seen a politician scurry across the field of his constituency?

� The deadly mystery beneath the manner.

S

Apikoros Sleuth

he wave in Booger’s do, once a dark flying hall we say it was said thus and thus? To be preWallenda, had sti¬ened a silvery hue. He wore cise, Shtick Giltgestalt was a ben sorer umoreh� the lapels of power. With teeth whiter than who had reciprocated? Those boys! (Sigh.) Listen the whites of his eyes, and eyes more eyelike than I, to them. Who flogged Shtick in a manner of speaking? he eyed his old comrade eyeishly. He rose fully to Didn’t he receive a tongue-lashing? And did he not reciphis lack of height. Behind me, a Cafgu stood by the rocate until mind and body split? If Shtick Giltgestalt proverbial door. “Now,” was a ben sorer umoreh Booger scholiated,� “old who had reciprocated, comrades are once more Booger Rooney was a come together.” For my zakein mamrei, an Instipart, I was present in gator, and a Rebellious body, more or less. Not Sage.� But perhaps you cannot possibly think so. to mention spirit. There followed a commentary Perhaps you would preon antiquation and climafer leniency in a case of tology and a mention of youthful zeal. To relax, somebody’s complexion mk ny cu ix pz jv qh rd >g tk ba after all, is just another doctrine. And yet, didn’t (almost certainly mine). ml nk cy iu px jz qv rh >d tg ga He spoke at length, but he promise restoration nl ck iy pu jx qz rv >h td gb ra of the shattered elements not for long (he was a busy man), the tiniest of the world? And did nm cl ik py ju qx rz >v th db ha of small talk. Soon the we not all (where were alphabet of murders and cm il pk jy qu rx >z tv dg hb va you?) glimpse final redemption just around the memory unfolded across cn im pl jk qy ru >x tz hg vb za corner? Were we not prethe desk of our di¬ering in pm jl qk ry >u tx hd vg zb xa pared to pass through the degrees of destitution.� He cast us back to Muslast flaming stages of sacic pn jm ql rk >y tu vd zg xb ua tapha and Legrand, to a rifice and repentance to dentist with too many pc jn qm rl >k ty vh zd xg ub ya attain a world of tikkun? � teeth in his name and Burn, baby, burn. One surpi jc qn rm >l tk zh xd ug yb ka Owley with too few, to renders one’s load, and yet zv xh ud yg kb la vanishing refuses. For tikBetty Boop and a freshly ji qc rn >m tl encorpsulated Giltgestalt. kun, one gladly reclines jp qi rc >n tm xv uh yd kg lb ma Regarding all of this he on the pea of midnight. urged what? Silence. For qp ri >c tn xz uv yh kd lg mb na But will you swallow it? his part, he was simulAnd did a Booger commit qj rp >i tc uz yv kh ld mg nb ca taneously standing and strange and paradoxical yz kv lh md ng cb ia acts counter to someone’s running for o√ce.� He rj >p ti ux law, religious or othersaw benefit neither in mystery nor murder. And what was my part? He suggested I could wise? Did he pronounce the Ine¬able benefit from a lack of general interest, having buried my own toes Name, did he speak the Tetragrambeneath the stone of Giltgestalt’s body, which lay, for the most part, maton, did he pro¬er blasphemous in a room and a half of my own dwelling, not to mention the other benedictions and sanction the forbidpart in a room and a half across the hall. I had dabbled in his pockets. den? Perhaps now, he wanted byBeen all thumbs all over his Ourmoney. My bloody footprints in the gones to be gone. A bloody hand hall between a room and a half and a room and a half. Booger beat had wiped that pinkish hue. In a the dog of stress hard. His speech was a massive alphabetical enterprise. war of charm we may easily He took no mercy on sentences. He dabbled in dark suggestion.� So total underestimate black mura suggestion will soon eat someone. But whom were we eliminating? : : der. Their grave: your grave. Shall we say, I poured silence into the open trough? Silence is not enough. And yet. Not yet. In silence, one may reflect on the Other’s guilt. I roughly calculated Booger Rooney’s guilt. What were his past sins in light of more recent electoral events? Had Booger campaigned in strangulation? Did his sharp tongue silence a Shtick? Did he steal Owley’s missing letter? Mustapha and Legrand, Betty Boop, that dentist with too many teeth in his name : : � We are speaking here of both a process by which the shattered elements of the world would be

restored to harmony, and of the final result – a Messianic time. Kabbalah

� There

are four categories of people who require proclamation after their sentences are carried out: a ben sorer umoreh, a Rebellious Sage, the Instigator, and zomemin witnesses. A ben sorer umoreh is one who stole money in certain specific circumstances, and ate specific quantities of meat and wine that he bought with the stolen money. The first time he commits this o¬ence, he is brought to court and flogged. If he repeats the o¬ense, he is liable to execution. Sanhedrin 87a � A zakein

mamrei is a false prophet. An Instigator is one who instigates a fellow to commit idolatry. A Rebellious Sage is a sage who preaches against the rulings of the Sanhedrin Court.

from apikoros sleuth  509

Apikoros Sleuth

 Some

time later, someone suggests: perhaps that time we name the Time of the Messiah is not specifically located in historical time, but is rather a possibility intersecting with the day to day.

T

A Legend of Nothing

hat red Shabbatean was a false prophet. Shall we laugh at it in the West? What makes us follow a Shabbatai into cultish isolation? Did he prophesy the Time of the Messiah? Did he promise a reversal of halakhic precepts? Were there ribaldry and concubines? Or was it simply the manner of his manner? Someone’s hair is dark and waves appealingly over a brow where the rest of us bang foreheads. His speech pours sweetly from a gorgeous gorge while we pause in our thinking to slosh a vessel of greyish matter between our ears. Will a manner and a do su√ce to make us lemmings? Or is it rather a time for lemmings that selects a Shabbatai to lead the way? Worse than the terror of that lemming time are the recriminations in the wake of the inevitable rude awakening that must follow : :

Chapter Thirty-one 22a

34 Aryeh Lev Stollman

Mr. Mitochondria

We were having breakfast on the spring day before the locusts arrived. My family lived on the outskirts of Beersheba in one of those large white boxlike structures that bloomed in the sands of the Negev in the fifties and sixties. My parents, emigrants from Canada, had lovingly planted the yard with flowering succulents, brilliant desert varieties that filled their winter-bred souls with wonder and upon which they bestowed allegorical names. Outside the kitchen lay heavy rolls of transparent plastic between the purple pinnacles of Sarah’s Handmaiden and the waxy crimson blossoms of Job’s Wife. For the last several days, the radio and newspapers were full of terrifying reports on the desert grasshopper, “the largest infestation of the century,” swarming over the Arabian Peninsula to the east, and ready to migrate across the Red Sea. Adar, nine at the time, had spent several afternoons after school drawing all the plants in his sketchbook “so when they get killed, we can remember them.” When he said this, Mother covered her ears with her hands. “Oh, God, please don’t be so morbid. They’re my special babies! I couldn’t bear to lose a single one.” Under each meticulous depiction of fleshy trunk, flower, and seed, Adar wrote the species’ Latin name. To the side he drew a hovering, glowering figure, six-winged and brandishing a fiery staff—the threatened plant’s guardian angel. “See, Tishrei,” Adar said, pointing to one of the figures, “they all have curly red hair like you.” That morning, as usual, Father was preoccupied with his whole-grain cereal, weighing exactly 55 grams, 180 calories, of organically grown cracked wheat and bulgur, and measuring exactly 250 milliliters of nonfat milk, 9.2 grams of protein. Father, who had always been perfectly healthy and lean, had recently begun to mistrust the innate brilliance of human physiology. He now stood guard against its errors, discounting the “Mr. Mitochondria.” Copyright © 2000 by Aryeh Lev Stollman. Reprinted with permission of The Susan Golomb Literary Agency.

511

512  ARYEH LEV STOLLMAN

experience of his own well-functioning kidneys in keeping his bodily fluids and electrolytes balanced, or the wisdom of his liver and pancreas to metabolize the varying amounts and types of amino acids and sugars that a normal person might chance to take in from day to day. “Honey, you really ought to try and have more faith,” Mother would say. “Faith keeps our atoms from flying apart and has restored us in this wilderness.” Father answered with a half smile, “Kayla, I have faith, but it’s not an antidote to reality.” That morning as Adar came into the kitchen, Father put down the graduated cup he used to measure his milk. Adar looked less like a child than like a miniature man, a small, skinny replica of our father with the same smooth black hair and the same pale gray eyes. “Alien eyes,” Mother called them, “windows to the alien soul.” “Well, Adar, I had a chance to read your report last night.” Father held up the draft of Adar’s entry into the National Science Institute’s contest for schoolchildren. “It’s outstanding. And your research proposal is brilliant. After all, imagination is the secret to all great discoveries. You’re going to win.” After a long pause Father continued solemnly, “I’m proud of you, Adar. You’re a prodigy.” “A prodigy? Where? In my kitchen?” Mother, in a narrow white caftan and sandals, stood by the stove, her red hair tied in a long ponytail. After moving to the desert, Mother still practiced the cuisine of her snowy Toronto childhood. Holding a skillet, she flipped a blueberry pancake high into the air, her intense gaze never leaving the revolving spotted disc. “A prodigy? That’s quite a heavy label!” Adar was hurt at this implied negation of his new status. He stared at his lap. The pancake completed its brief parabolic flight and landed in the skillet, raw side down, with a faint sizzle. Mother, eventually, if not instantly, sensitive to the effects of her words, made a clumsy retreat. “Of course, he’s prodigiously smart.” She slid the pancake onto Adar’s dish. “The women of the planet Ichalob are extremely jealous of me”—Mother had been working on her epic trilogy, The Ichalob Chronicles—“despite the fact that the mothers are preoccupied, what with all the upsetting prophecies emanating from their moons, and their children being killed fighting the Uranites. Well, no matter what anyone says, I wouldn’t trade in my children for all the particle transformers in Galaxy Five.” Father looked at her, alarmed. “What are you talking about?” “Talking about? The particle transformers? It’s just something I made up.” Father took a long breath, looked at us with his pale gray eyes, the eyes that Adar shared. “What I was trying to say, Kayla, is that you should not dismiss the fact that Adar might be more than very smart. The boy has something extra in him. An undeveloped, an unconventional genius. I don’t know why I overlooked this before. He sees things differently. It should be encouraged.”

MR. MITOCHONDRIA  513

Mother rolled her eyes, then leaned over Adar. “Why aren’t you eating your pancake?” “I can’t. It’s made with squished insects. Their purple blood is leaking out.” “You’ve eaten plenty of blueberries in plenty of pancakes before.” “I’m fasting so the locusts won’t come.” Mother took away Adar’s plate. “Well, I suppose we should all be fasting as the people of Nineveh did, or Queen Esther when trouble was brewing. God does appreciate a fast, but I have the feeling it’s already too late and the locusts will eat everything and you’ll be starving to death.” My brother and I were named for the lunar months in which we were born: Tishrei, the autumn month when the world was created and is repeatedly judged, and Adar, the last month of the rainy season, when God is especially gracious to His People, the month before Spring waves her fertile wand across the land. Adar was clearly very smart, but to be a real live prodigy, one had to accomplish some incredible feat at an extremely young, postfetal age. Like the Sage of Vilna, who as an infant recited the correct blessing for milk at his mother’s breast. That was a prodigy. Or John Stuart Mill, who read the Greek classics at three. Adar was no John Stuart Mill. He was no little Mozart composing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Father was a researcher at an experimental nuclear station in the desert. Mother often told the story of their “great migration” from Canada to this faraway and unlikely scientific outpost. While Father was still a postdoctoral fellow in Toronto and already married to Mother, he wrote his first monograph, Theoretical Deuterium Fusion in Enhanced Magnetic Fields. Soon after its publication, he was approached by emissaries from the Negev Nuclear Authority, who was scouting the world for new scientific talent. “They courted your father more persistently and, I might add, more romantically than he courted me. They made extravagant predictions, ‘You will help shape the destiny of your people and ensure the survival of their children.’ And they made a wonderful promise, music to any scientist’s ears: ‘You can do whatever research you want.’ They took both of us on a secret trip halfway across the world to see the desert and the facility, to help us think things over. I was still very sad then, and I suddenly felt like I had traveled to another planet. That’s when I had my first vision of Ichalob. And I understood even then that despite appearances, Ichalob was not a lifeless world. You know, it had very lush botanical life during its watery epoch that endured into the imperial desert age as well. But anyway it was a good thing that I became so inspired to write my trilogy, because otherwise I would have gone crazy.”

514  ARYEH LEV STOLLMAN

Father rarely discussed his work, and when he did, only in the vaguest terms. “I’m working hard on this new project,” or “My experiments are going very well,” he might tell Mother on those frequent nights when he came home late. We were led to understand that Father’s work was very important and of a secret, restricted nature. Sometimes we were allowed to visit him at the low-rise outer buildings of the research facility. There he had an office filled with bulky computer equipment and large blackboards covered with the endless and incomprehensible chatter of equations. We were never allowed in the domed complex that housed the nuclear reactor. “I’m sorry, I’d like to but it’s not a tourist attraction.” In contrast to the secretive Negev Nuclear Authority, the National Science Institute was open to the public and a source of great pride and prestige to the country. The Institute, with its yearly contest, sought to encourage creative thinking from schoolchildren in the realm of research. Adar’s entry, “Mitochondria, the Powerhouses of the Cell: How We Should Study Them Better,” was, per the contest instructions, part science report and part proposal for innovative research. Mitochondria, the microscopic organelles that dwell within all living cells, are, in reality, ancient bacteria, tiny specks of life that invaded our ancestral cells and made their home there. In exchange for lodging, they provide energy for life processes. Father acted as if Adar had discovered mitochondria himself instead of having gleaned known facts from the encyclopedia and the many scientific journals and magazines that filled huge bookcases throughout our house. Adar, in his own words, had proposed an original avenue for cellular research that impressed Father, and, as it turned out, the National Science Institute as well: “We should study the mitochondria of the locusts that are coming, because they travel very far and need lots of energy, so they must have many mitochondria. It would be like a human person walking a million miles after eating only a sandwich. It may be important to wear gloves when touching the insects in case they are poisonous or have contagious and fatal diseases.” Adar submitted several drawings of a migratory locust he had copied from the encyclopedia with small arrows pointing to the hypermetabolic wing muscles. “You know, Tishrei,” Adar said in the bedroom the night of his elevation to prodigyhood, the night before the locusts arrived, “it’s creepy to think we have these parasites in our cells and would die without them. Maybe someone could destroy the mitochondria in the locusts and they would all die.” There was a faint and nervous quaver in his voice. “And you know what else, Tishrei? You only inherit them from your mother, never your father. Mitochondria have their own separate DNA.” “How do you know? Did you ever see one? It’s just a theory.” “It’s not a theory, Tishrei. It’s a scientific fact. I read it.” “It’s a sci-en-tif-ic faaact! It’s a sci-en-tif-ic faaact! I read it! I read it! ‘I’m so smart! I’m a prodigy!’”

MR. MITOCHONDRIA  515

Adar was on the verge of tears. “Don’t be jealous, Tishrei, I never said that. You’re two years older. You’re smarter than me.” Just then Mother, the source of all our mitochondria, came into the room. “What’s going on? I thought I heard talking!” “Hi, Mom,” Adar said, trying to sound calm. Mother walked toward the window. “Why aren’t you asleep? Are you too hot? It’s already cool outside, so I’ve turned off the air conditioner. I’ll open this window some more. Tomorrow we have to get up extra early–we have a lot of work to do.” She hesitated at the doorway. “You know, maybe we should read something together to prepare us.” She came back a moment later and began reading from the Book of Yo’el. “‘That which the cutting locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten; and that which the hopping locust has left, the destroying locust has eaten.’” Adar suddenly grabbed her arm. “Mom, please stop reading. I’m tired.” “Oh, I’m sorry. You must be exhausted.” She stayed awhile longer to say the bedtime prayers: “On my right is Michoel, on my left Gavriel, before me Uriel, and behind me Refael.” After she left the room Adar called out softly as he always did when he was very frightened, “Tishrei, look at me. Okay? Watch me until I fall asleep, Okay? Please.”

Next morning our father woke everyone up before sunrise. “Mother Nature is on the march!” On the radio we heard that the locusts had begun crossing the Red Sea at twenty kilometers per hour. Schools were closed in the southern half of the country and the population was urged to remain indoors. The air force was on alert, ready to spray the invading clouds of insects with tons of insecticides. The radio explained how the pilots would have to fly around and then above the swarms in order to avoid clogging their engines with locusts. The government warned that the spraying would only decrease but not eliminate the terrible pest. At first Adar would not come out of the house until Father reassured him that the locusts would not arrive for several hours. In the cool dawn light Mother handed out kerchiefs to wear around our mouths and noses to prevent inhalation of the insecticides, even though the spraying had not yet begun. We looked like bandits from a western. We placed dozens of tall metal stakes at equal intervals in the ground, and Father hammered them in for supports. We spread the thin, clear plastic above the plants, tying the edges of the material to the stakes with string. The yard resembled a great tabernacle. “It’s like a wedding canopy for plants,” Father said, taking hold of Mother. They drew close and danced awkwardly for a few moments, brushing against the covered blue flowers of Joseph Is Not. Mother began singing “The Voice of the Bridegroom, the Voice of the Bride.” Father laughed. I thought Mother was laughing, too, but

516  ARYEH LEV STOLLMAN

then I realized she had begun crying. She seemed to me as delicate and vulnerable as any of the wonders in our garden. Father broke off from dancing. He smoothed her hair back from her face. “Everything will be fine, Kayla. Like you say, we need to have faith. We’d better finish now. I almost knocked something over. And I still have to go to the lab.” Mother had stopped crying. “You shouldn’t have to be driving in the open today with them spraying chemicals. You should be indoors. You’re the one who’s become so health-conscious.” “I’m in the middle of a project. I can’t just stop. Besides, I’m sorry to inform you, all these precautions are useless. They’ll be spraying the stuff for miles and way up in the air. It will be everywhere. Like strontium 90.” Adar turned pale. He pulled the fingers of one small hand with the other. “Is there really strontium 90 in this desert? I thought it was only in America. It gives you cancer and makes your bones fall apart!” “I was just kidding. Don’t worry.” “What about all the insect poisons, Dad, They’re nerve poisons, aren’t they? Mom says—” “You and your mother worry too much. The spray quickly dissipates. The wind will blow it all out to sea in a day.” Father began walking toward the car, removing the kerchief from his face. After Father drove off, we went indoors. “‘Worry too much!’” Mother said. “As if I didn’t have reason. If I had better sense and hadn’t been so preoccupied with the goings-on on Ichalob, I would have taken us back to Toronto until this plague was over! Well, maybe I’ll get some new ideas for The Ichalob Chronicles.” Mother went haphazardly around the house, closing windows. “Please, leave them shut. I don’t want any contaminated air in here. I don’t want to be poisoned.” “We’ll run out of oxygen!” Adar said. Even though we were indoors, he would not take his kerchief off his mouth and nose. “Don’t be silly. Besides, we can still leave the central air conditioning on. It has a new filter. Now I’d better get some real work done. The slave Queen of Ichalob and her retinue are in secret revolt against the evil King and have declared a solemn fast to ensure its success. They are going to destroy the particle transformer by releasing millions of scientifically created pseudoseraphs from their force-field clouds. The children must be saved!” As she closed her writing room door behind her we could still hear her: “Yes, thank God, all the children will be saved.” Adar went to his desk and looked over his drawings of the garden plants with their Latin names and their guardian angels. He fussed over each and every one of them, adding some details here, a bit of color there. He even drew additional guardian angels, larger and more ominous than the previous. Finally he said he was tired. “I’m going to take a nap, Tishrei.”

MR. MITOCHONDRIA  517

“I’m tired, too, Adar, but you know I can’t fall back asleep in the daytime. And the house is so stuffy even with the air conditioning on. I wish we could open a window. Dad says it doesn’t matter, and it’s still cool outside. Mom likes to exaggerate everything.” “I have to go to sleep now, Tishrei. I’m really tired.” Only then did Adar take off his kerchief.

In the early afternoon the sky on the eastern horizon darkened with thick approaching clouds, as it did before a terrible desert storm. “Look, Tishrei!” Adar shouted. An insect had landed on the sill of the living-room picture window. The creature’s hind legs were brown-green and jointed like a frog’s, its translucent wings vibrating. Adar ran back to the bedroom to get his magnifying glass. Suddenly he began screaming. “The window’s open!” Mother came running from her studio. “What’s happening! Adar! Adar! Where are you?” Adar came back into the living room, crying and trembling. “You left the window open! You left the window open!” Mother tried to calm him down. “It’s all right, Adar. It’s all right. I must have overlooked it. I thought I shut the window in your room. I’m sorry. I thought I shut it.” She went into the bedroom and came back. “It was hardly open. Now it’s closed, Please stop crying.” Adar began whispering to himself, “She left the window open. It was open the whole time. She left the window open in our room.” After Adar calmed down, he held the magnifying glass near the locust that still clung to the windowsill. We all crouched down and took turns watching the exhausted locust move its head slowly back and forth, looking at us with one, then the other black-green polyhedral eye. “Oh, it looks so sad and lonely.” Mother said. She smiled nervously. “I guess its friends, our other little guests, will arrive soon enough to keep it company. I wish your father were home for the party.” “It looks sick,” Adar said. “It can barely move.” “Maybe he’s just resting,” Mother said. “He’s been traveling a long time. He’s come a very long distance.” “It’s dying,” Adar said. “It’s dying.” We heard planes flying overhead. Mother said, “They’ve just started spraying. See, Adar, we closed the window just in time.” The sky overhead was now a starless, moonless night. A light pitter-patter began on the plastic canopies over the garden and on the roof of our house. The noise quickly grew in intensity like hail. All afternoon we heard the planes flying overhead and the locusts raining steadily from the sky. The fallen creatures covered the plastic tabernacles in the yard. They covered our neighbors’ houses and they covered the road that led in one direction into town and in

518  ARYEH LEV STOLLMAN

the other, over twenty kilometers away, to the research facility where Father worked. Soon the invaders covered all the windows of the house so we could barely look out. Mother got a spatula and went throughout the house banging at all the glass panes to frighten off the locusts, but this did not work. After a few hours the hail noise stopped but there was still the low, sad moaning of the locusts. On the radio we heard that the locusts that had fallen in the Negev would die within twenty-four hours. The vast majority of the invaders, however, moved on overhead in apocalyptic formations, each several miles long, threatening the lush settlements in the north and west. The government said that people and farms in the south had been relatively spared but the threat to the northern settlements was still great. The rabbinate had finally declared a fast, and prescribed psalms, prayers, and readings from the Bible.

In the late evening, when Father returned, he skidded on the road in front of the house but then regained control of the car. “It happened three times on my way home,” he later told us. “The roads are all slippery with locusts. They’re like little capsules of grease.” He entered the screened-in porch. Mother met him there and helped him brush off the locusts that started clinging to him when he got out of the car. “At least they don’t bite,” he said. “They just tickle.” Mother inspected his clothes one final time and with her fingers picked off a few remaining creatures from his shoulder, his zipper, and his cuff. “Okay, you’re ready to come out of the decompression chamber. I will turn off the force field.” And she led him into the house. Overnight, while we slept, the great tabernacle protecting the garden collapsed under the sighing weight of the locusts. In the morning my parents went outside to try and salvage what they could, but the task was near impossible. Piles of locusts were everywhere, on the collapsed plastic sheets, on the ground, on the house. Under the twisted plastic, most of the plants were severely damaged, their fleshy bodies ruptured, their flowered branches fragmented. Mother began crying uncontrollably. “My little babies,” she kept saying. “Oh, God, my poor little babies.” Adar watched from the protection of the screen porch. Adar started crying, too. Father began telling Mother that he would plant everything again. “Every single one, Kayla. Every single one.” He put out his hand to caress her shoulder but she shrugged him off. “My little babies! My special babies! I should sit shiva!” With both hands she pulled on the collar of her caftan, rending it. Suddenly Father’s face turned red. His eyes became dark. In a low choking voice that carried over to the porch he rebuked her. “Kayla . . . Even to say such a thing! They’re plants . . . have you already forgotten? We sat shiva for a real boy . . . Kayla . . . you will not sit shiva for plants.” I was so shocked that for a moment I could not catch my breath.

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Mother headed toward the house, heedlessly trodding over the crunching mounds of insects. She passed through the screen porch. As she entered the house, Adar, still crying, reached up and tried to pat down her torn collar. With an absentminded look, she pushed him away and continued through the living room. Adar watched as the door of her writing room closed behind her. He stopped crying. At lunchtime, Adar went over to Father, who had stayed home. “My bones hurt. I’m achy.” Father checked his temperature. It was normal. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you, Adar. Maybe there’s been too much excitement.” Father went to get Mother, who had not yet come out of her writing room. When she came out she acted as if nothing had happened, as if her special babies had not died, as if she had not been rebuked by Father. As if she had never mourned a real child. “Well, everything’s been topsy-turvy in Galaxy Five. Now let’s see what’s happening on Earth.” She touched Adar’s forehead with her lips. “Hmm, I’m not sure.” She took his temperature again with a thermometer. It was normal. “Well, you’re lucky. I bet the locusts all have a temperature!” The next morning Adar woke up screaming. “Tishrei, I can’t move my right side. I can’t move my right side!” His cries woke my parents in their bedroom. A moment later they came running. When they saw Adar they became terrified. Adar was moaning. “Oh, my God,” Mother kept saying. “Oh, my God.” Father lifted Adar out of bed. His right arm and leg stretched out from his body, they floated out in the bedroom air as if weighing no more than feathers. It seemed as if he might drift out of Father’s arms and become a ghost. My parents covered him in a blanket and went out to drive him to the hospital. Mother and Father stayed overnight in the hospital with Adar. The next morning they all came home. Father carried Adar from the car to the house wrapped in a light blanket. “I’ve been poisoned, Tishrei, I almost died, Tishrei,” Adar whispered as Father carried him through the living room to the bedroom. My parents stared at each other for a long moment. They were pale and exhausted as if they had not slept in weeks. Mother’s eyes began blinking and twitching, something that had never happened before. She stood aside trembling while Father put Adar in bed. She glanced at the floor, at her hands, out a window. She did not speak. Adar’s convalescence was brief. The doctors prescribed a regimen of exercises that Mother and Father did with him several times every day. They stretched out the joints of his arm or his leg, coaxing the paralyzed limb to move.

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At the same time Father began the task of replanting and renaming the garden. He ordered plants from nurseries across the country and even took several days off from his research to make sorties into the wilderness. One afternoon, a week after the locusts arrived, Father brought home two strange waist­high specimens. They were almost identical. We had never seen such beautiful plants before. “I found them near each other in a rock formation. It was hard to dig them out. Look at the shape of their flowers.” Mother watched as Father transplanted the shallow roots into our soil. Father looked up and smiled at Mother. “It looks like they came from Ichalob, Kayla.” She didn’t answer. “It looks like these plants came from Ichalob,” Father repeated, still smiling. “They’re highly evolved.” “I really wouldn’t know anymore.” She turned away and went back into the house. The following day Adar fully recovered the use of his right hand. He sat in his wheelchair in the yard and copied the new succulents in his sketchbook. He drew the graceful, weeping branches and the tiny yellow flowers of Elisha’s Cure. The following week Adar was able to walk normally again. “I’m real lucky I got better from all that nerve poison,” he said one night at bedtime. “I could have died or been paralyzed. It’s still in my system but I adjusted. You never really get rid of it completely, Tishrei, That’s the scary part. You could die at any time.” In the beginning of the summer, Adar received a letter from the National Science Institute. He had, as Father predicted, won first prize in the elementary school category. That afternoon, as a surprise, Mother baked an oval, cell-shaped chocolate cake. In the evening after dinner, she brought it quietly out to the table. On top, in white icing, she had written, “Congratulations, Mr. Mitochondria!” Adar climbed up and knelt on his chair. He stared at the cake. “Who is Mr. Mitochondria?” My parents hesitated and looked at each other. A new uncertainty had overtaken them. “You are,” Father finally said. “Yes, of course, you are, Adar,” Mother repeated. “The one and only.” And then she added carefully, slowly, as if she had been practicing for a very long time. “Tishrei would have been so proud of you.” “Yes. Tishrei would be very proud of you,” Father said. Adar smiled. “Really? He would?” “Of course he would.”

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Adar leaned forward before the great celebration of the cake. Mother handed him a knife. “Please, Adar, do the honors. It’s your cake.” Father said, “Yes. It’s your cake, Adar.” “Okay.” Adar stretched out his right hand to cut the first piece. In the strange healing grace of that moment, a faint tremor, a slight vibration moved up his arm. My parents did not seem to notice this. I thought I might fall over, but I didn’t. I just knelt there, leaning forward, staring at my cake, my right arm outstretched. From that moment onward, I no longer needed to keep imagining my lost brother. “Oh, Adar,” I heard my parents say to me. They both spoke in the exact same voice, in the exact same breath. My mother and father had suddenly become indistinguishable to me. “Oh, Adar,” they said to me, and I realized they were crying. “Oh, Adar, don’t you know? We are all so proud of you.”

35 Rachel Kadish

The Argument

Kreutzer reads in the newspaper. Sipping coffee that is lukewarm, he reads about a thing called False Memory Syndrome. This is a new syndrome, just discovered. It happens when something terrible a person thinks they remember turns out not to have happened after all. Kreutzer sighs. Imagine. Such relief. The quote from one of the girls interviewed in the paper reminds him of someone, he can’t think who. “But if it never happened,” the girl says, “why do I feel so terrible?” Jacobson’s room in the nursing home is decorated in pastels. He wears a stained powderblue sweater; there is a yellow scarf across his legs. The colors of springtime. Today Jacobson’s mind has turned to opposites. “What is the opposite of a curtain?” he asks his guest. Leaning heavily against the wall, Kreutzer breathes. The long flight of stairs has tired him. He looks at the sun-filled curtains. “A carpet,” Jacobson answers. He bobs his bald head at Kreutzer. There are crumbs in his beard. Kreutzer clears his throat. He is not a cruel man, but he has a job to do. There is a reason Kreutzer needs to quiz Jacobson: in his former life Jacobson was also known as Rabbi Harold Jacobson. And a rabbi never stops being a rabbi, even when he thinks the president of the Women’s Division is her dead great-grandmother. Even when he tells the sexton in front of the man’s entire family: I always liked you more than I liked your wife. You have a sense of humor, but she is wretched. Even ten years after his congregation and his own weary brain have fired him, a rabbi is still a rabbi. Especially when he knows the location of the deed to the land the synagogue stands on. “The Argument” was first published in Zoetrope, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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Which paperwork the synagogue needs if it is to avoid extra legal fees for the new building. The congregation is ready to give up on the deed. It is digging into its pockets and hiring a lawyer. A search of the synagogue’s files has revealed nothing. This is no surprise; the rabbi made it his habit to hide important documents in places known only to him. Now Jacobson’s mind has sailed to the highest branch of a tree and will not be coaxed back to earth. Even the rabbi’s oldest friends have given up, not only on deeds but on words—it is impossible to have a conversation with the man. Kreutzer, standing in his bathrobe in the kitchen while the president of the congregation made his plea over the telephone, toyed with this notion: the congregation was asking him to visit Jacobson in the hope it would spur Kreutzer, widower that he is, to become active in the synagogue once more. After brief reflection, however, Kreutzer found it unlikely the congregation hoped this. He finds it more likely the congregants think that because he and Jacobson are the same age, Kreutzer can enter the maze of the rabbi’s mind. Kreutzer is not certain whether to be insulted. But he agreed. And now he must do, although it will not be pleasant. The rabbi, as the president of the congregation informed him, is unaccustomed to visitors. Only the rebbetzin still comes, she knits beside her husband’s bed; wife and husband do not always, Kreutzer knows, need words. As for the rabbi’s son, he lives too far to visit—so says the rebbetzin who loves her boy. The son, everyone knows, lives someplace far from Jersey City, someplace where there is snow that he skis on. Worse, the son moved to this someplace with a black girl. His wife. Together they ski. Kreutzer tries to imagine. Black people should not ski. They have no camouflage. Jews also, Kreutzer thinks, should not ski. If God meant them to ski, He would have chosen Norway for a promised land. He would have written it in one of His books. The Book of Skis. “What is the opposite of a potato chip?” Jacobson picks a chip from his lunch tray. The man was a rabbi, thinks Kreutzer. He had conversations with God. Rabbi Jacobson turns the chip in his palm, forlorn. “Jacobson.” Kreutzer leans forward, hands on his knees. Jacobson’s gaze drifts in his direction like a rudderless ship. “Rabbi.” The rabbi’s face registers alarm. Then, as Kreutzer waits, the rabbi grows solemn. “You may be seated,” he says. “Rabbi, I have a question for you.” But it is no good asking. The rabbi’s head refuses to crack open like an oyster, revealing the tiniest pearl of information. The rabbi has never heard of a deed. He has never heard, it turns out, of a synagogue. Kreutzer takes out the book he has brought: a holy book. Perhaps with some study of familiar words he will lull Jacobson into memory. All those years of training,

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of devout study, surely are lodged somewhere in the rabbi’s mind. And if the rabbi can summon these memories, perhaps he will summon others. Unless—the thought gives Kreutzer pause—this contemplation of opposites is a code. Could it be that the rabbi has become a mystic? He has chosen forgetfulness—abandoned his Talmudic training and fooled them all, tiptoed beyond the everyday and vanished into the forests of kabbalah. Kreutzer eyes the rabbi. The rabbi, eyeing Kreutzer, passes wind noisily. Kreutzer opens the book. In as patient a tone as he can muster, he addresses the rabbi. “We begin with the laws of kashrut.” Kreutzer knows now who he was reminded of. The girl in the newspaper reminded him of his daughter Marjorie. Marjorie who used also words like “terrible.” The pollution of the environment? It was “terrible.” The attitudes of Kreutzer and Kreutzer’s wife and everyone they knew: “terrible.” Also, always, the war in Vietnam. He thinks of Marjorie in high school with her terribles. He thinks of her the summer she was twenty-two years old. That was the summer she packed her things in borrowed suitcases and left. Jersey City wasn’t close enough for her, she had to move right up in its face and breathe its polluted breath: Manhattan. She stopped seeing movies and started seeing films. She met people named Portia and Nikita, and within two years she married a violinist. A violinist. And now, this. Marjorie, with news. This reunion with the rabbi is bitter, thinks Kreutzer as he watches Jacobson pick through his cup of fruit cocktail with a gritty teaspoon. Bitter not because of the man’s health; the rabbi is not in pain. Today Jacobson is eight years old. Hitler has not come to power, the Brooklyn Dodgers sign baseballs even when handed to them by Jewish boys. Jacobson is happy. Bitter because unfair. Rabbi Jacobson was a learned man. Few people know Kreutzer appreciated this; out loud, Kreutzer spoke only of the rabbi’s faults. But for twenty years, Kreutzer relished his Sunday morning ritual. His wife swept in the kitchen, his daughter Marjorie sat upstairs listening to her radio; Gabriel, Kreutzer’s studious son, read the newspaper as Kreutzer passed it to him, section by section. And when Kreutzer had read the news, he sat at the coffee table and began his letter. To Rabbi Jacobson with regards, he wrote. Sometimes he read aloud to Gabriel as he composed. I attended your sermon this Sabbath. And although I respect your intentions in choosing your subject, I believe you have erred in the following manner.

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It was certain omissions of detail, certain liberal tendencies with the text, that irked Kreutzer. You of all people will agree, Kreutzer scratched onto the paper, our nature as Jews is to preserve. It bothered him when Jacobson did not mention minor commentators who had dissented in an interpretation, even if all agreed that the majority was clearly in the right. The rabbi should have mentioned the dissenters in his sermon, for sake of thoroughness. And then there were their disagreements over the state of Israel—not, Kreutzer admitted, true disagreements. But in the formation of a state every nuance counts, and so he took it as his responsibility to correct Rabbi Jacobson when the rabbi strayed. When Kreutzer argued, he felt his muscles tense and the blood breathe in his veins. It felt right. Life was not easy and neither was argument, but both necessary. When Kreutzer was a boy in heder, the rabbis talked to him about his soul. The rabbis did not use this word, but Kreutzer knew when they encouraged the boys to debate one line of the Bible for hours, this is what they were after. Souls are not easy to talk about, even for rabbis. In the public school hallway when lockers slammed and gymclass teammates cursed him, he was Kreutzer. But in the softening evening hours of heder, he was David. The rabbis rounded his name, added the diminutive. Duvidl. Gently Duvidl was instructed in the proper posture for highest prayer: the three bows, the backward step at the prayer’s finish, for one must never turn one’s back to God. Paired with another boy—for a Jew must study with a partner, a co-counsel in the court of the One True Judge—Duvidl was instructed in the skills of debate. When God’s people debate His tradition, He knows they love Him. True faith, the rabbis taught, was an unresolved argument. Jews argued; in His heavens God laughed and was satisfied. And how He loved their labor. For a week once, the heder boys were made to write essays not in regular Hebrew script, but in the cockeyed alphabet of the great sage Rashi. Even the learned man’s handwriting, the rabbis intoned as the boys worked, even the slightest twist he put on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in his rush to commit his thoughts to parchment, must be preserved. God rewarded vigilance; God rewarded devotion; not a single nuance must be forgotten. A block from the heder, the Italian and black boys from Leonard Young Elementary School waited to pound a Jewish soul until it bled from the nose and cried hot, shaming tears. Kreutzer could not ask for help at home; evenings he tiptoed through the entry so as not to distract his father, seated at the kitchen table worrying over the books of his faltering real-estate office. Kreutzer’s mother was easily frightened, and if she knew she would insist on walking him home from heder; the other boys would see. David Kreutzer turned to God. He looked in the Torah and saw that Moses defended his people against the slave driver. He understood that God wanted him to hit back. Kreutzer was eleven years old. He whispered his prayer and stepped out the heder door. Better their faces should break my hand

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than God should be disappointed in one of His people. Kreutzer repeated this to himself as the boys approached. And God guided his fist to the face of Anthony Marcetti. After that, the Italian and black boys left him alone. God was good in other ways also. Duvidl was not the smartest boy, the rabbis said, but he worked. Kreutzer’s father came to pick him up early for a rare weekend outing, and the rabbi turned to the man fidgeting in the entryway waiting for his son and said the compliment loud enough for all to hear: the boy thinks. Kreutzer was not saying, he explained to his son Gabriel while folding his letter to Rabbi Jacobson, that writing an essay in the handwriting of a man dead nine centuries was the only way to learn. Simply that it taught a principle. On Wednesdays came the rabbi’s replies. In haste, they began. In haste was Rabbi Jacobson, in haste enough to warn Kreutzer this would be a short letter, but not so much as to prevent his defending himself on each point. Rebuttal filled a page of the synagogue’s stationery, sometimes both sides. There was a period of years when the rabbi responded mildly—I have reread the text as you suggest. And while I believe you are mistaken, I do see whence your interpretation arises. Other times, particularly the year the rabbi’s son brought home his fiancée as well as a handful of Black Panther pamphlets, the rabbi’s letters were longer than Kreutzer’s. Will you contradict the wisdom of our great sages? Must you mock the tradition? The rabbi’s thick script cried out on the paper in Kreutzer’s hands. In person he and the rabbi were polite, although it was not lost on Kreutzer that the rabbi managed to position himself across the room from him at synagogue gatherings. This did not concern Kreutzer; a rabbi needed someone to keep him on his toes. Jews studied in pairs. This was the nature of the world. Kreutzer came to understand it as a duty. He stayed home from backyard barbeques and poker games to write his letters. Now Rabbi Harold Jacobson, his old sparring partner, was sprung from memory like a schoolboy on holiday. It was indecent—a coward’s way out of an argument. The disgrace was not that the rabbi had skipped out on an argument with Kreutzer. The disgrace was the other argument the rabbi was trying to escape: with God. Sitting opposite the rabbi, book open on the table between them, Kreutzer pauses. For the past hour he has led the rabbi through legal reasoning. Now he ventures a test. “When a kosher pot is accidentally touched by non-kosher metal, what is the ruling?” “If the metal is cold, kosher,” the rabbi responds without hesitation. “If hot, the pot must be repurified.” Kreutzer is elated. With patience he has cajoled the rabbi into precious memory. Now he will make him confess the whereabouts of the deed. They have closed the book; Kreutzer makes a solemn nod to Jacobson. “What is the opposite of a spider,” the rabbi asks Kreutzer happily.

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Kreutzer places a hand to his chest. This sudden beating against his ribs, can it be a heart attack? He thinks he cannot bear this cresting tension another minute. He thinks he hates the rabbi. He hadn’t meant any disrespect to the shiksas. He was simply stating a fact. It was the shiksas that killed Moe Roth, who was the next-door neighbor when Marjorie was a girl. Marjorie had asked, What ever happened to the next-door family from all those years ago? So Kreutzer was telling. The shiksas in Moe’s factory unionized, and it was the stress of it what killed Moe. Moe was a good boss. There wasn’t any need for union. But Marjorie, who they had named for Iris’s mother Malka, got mad. “Your racism is staggering,” Marjorie told him. Kreutzer had thought racism was shvartzes and white people. He was careful about shvartzes. About Negroes, he corrected himself. Black people. But no one told him shiksas counted. “Do you have any plans whatsoever to even visit the modern era?” Marjorie was not finished. “I certainly hope you’ll let us know if you’re coming. We’ll leave a light on for you.” Marjorie had a mouth. Always she wanted something different from what you put in front of her. Extracurricular activities. Guitar lessons. Food with seaweed in it, like a person ate in Japan. Food that looked like the Japanese person already ate it. When Iris was alive, she would defend it. It’s a new world, Iris said. Let’s give our daughter a chance to explore it. “It’s a new world.” Marjorie stood with her hands on her hips. “In case you haven’t noticed. In case you haven’t noticed, Dad, you’re a dinosaur.” And Yuri, Yuri the violinist who converted to Judaism just in order that Kreutzer’s daughter can now ignore everything she knew all her life about Jewish customs—can even have a Christmas tree in her living room and still Marjorie calls the house Jewish, because officially both the people who live there are. Dad, I do have a Jewish home. Like a home was a thing you circumcised and then no matter what it did, it was still part of the tribe; even if the house went out and ate pork sausages with milk all night long, still when it dropped its pants to take a leak, right there carved on its doorpost was the message: still a Jew. Yuri the violinist took Marjorie by the shoulder. “Easy, sweetheart,” he said. Marjorie closed her mouth. Kreutzer does not know what women see in violinists. And now suddenly he cannot sleep. Kreutzer who always could fall into dreams like a baby instead lies looking at shadows. His brain is a fountain; all what he knows pools in his head. He cannot stop the fountain’s spigot from running. Details threaten to overflow his mind. The address of a man he once did business with. Names of a couple he met who said they would invite him for a dinner. Surely he copied their

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telephone number into his address book? By the light of the bedlamp his pajama legs look shabby. The stripes remind him of prison uniforms; he stops this thought but cannot keep his brain from pivoting elsewhere. There in his own handwriting in his address book is the number of the couple. Should he? Accept a social invitation, get out into circulation as everyone urged him after Iris’s death? If Iris were still alive, she would tell him to stop worrying and call. David, she would say, It’s no shame for a man to reach out for company. No, Kreutzer corrects himself: She would not say this. She would have called already. The clock flips a papery card: three twenty-five in the a.m. Maybe in the daylight he will call. When at last Kreutzer sleeps, he cannot dream a regular dream. He can only dream what was real, what he will not allow himself to think in waking hours. Thoughts that punch through darkness to torment. He does not know why suddenly this should be happening, yet there is no denying it: these dreams have visited him nightly since he heard Marjorie’s news. In his dream his son Gabriel is once more seventeen years old and tells Kreutzer he is thinking of being a rabbi. Kreutzer can imagine his son at the pulpit; his son the rabbi’s words sing out. The congregation sits rapt. But to Gabriel he says only, So. So everybody thinks they can be rabbi. He does not let Gabriel know it would please him. Same as he never shows his disappointment when Gabriel chooses doctor instead. Kreutzer slips from sleep, he presses a heavy palm to his forehead, he is not dreaming but remembering. In his waking remembering mind, a fountain has spilled over, now he is unable to keep the thoughts away. Of his son Gabriel, a doctor in the war in Asia. Kreutzer sees once more Marjorie. Marjorie protesting on a college campus while Gabriel finishes his medical school training and applies for air force commission. “It’s that or get drafted,” Gabriel says to his sister’s turned back. “At least this way, I have some choice about where I end up.” Marjorie will not speak. “Run away to Canada,” she writes on the piece of paper she throws at her brother before stalking out of the room. “Defect to Russia. Have some imagination.” “Thailand is beautiful,” Gabriel’s letter reads that spring. “Although smelly if you get close to the canals.”

The legs of the chair Kreutzer sits in are spindly. He imagines them breaking, his weight crashing to the floor. A sack of flour, Kreutzer is. A sack of meal. He can’t think what he is a sack of. Something soft, heavier than is reasonable. He imagines the nursing home aides running to help. In his imagination, the rabbi sits watching Kreutzer swimming on the floor. Belly and liver spots and gray tired face. The rabbi’s expression

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is thoughtful. “Your letters,” says Kreutzer now to the rabbi, “ended always the same. Thank you for your response to my ministry. Tell me, Jacobson. Did they teach you to say this in rabbinical school?” The rabbi looks at Kreutzer as at a form spied through a wall of glass brick. Three weeks of visits and such is Kreutzer’s reward: Today Jacobson refuses even to recognize him. Kreutzer halves his donut and passes a portion across the table. The rabbi mutters a blessing—the correct one—and bites, scattering shards of glazed sugar over his sweater. “Did you wonder,” Kreutzer asks, “why I stopped writing to you?” The rabbi picks the pieces of sugar off his sweater with care and deposits them on his tongue. “Did you wonder why I stopped coming to synagogue except on highest holidays?” Pleasantly, the rabbi nods. On Jacobson’s windowsill, an envelope from a state where there is skiing. A son, even a son who defies his father, sends a letter now and again. They are perplexing, such rebellious, tenacious children. This son and Marjorie would have made a good pair. Just as Kreutzer thinks to tell the rabbi this, he notices that the son’s letter is unopened, and at the same moment he is assaulted by a rapid slide-show: shutting his burning eyes he sees his own son Gabriel leaving for Thailand without even a good-bye from his sister. He sees Gabriel’s airmail letters to Marjorie crumpled unopened in the wastebasket. Since there is no satisfaction in not speaking to someone who’s far away, now Marjorie, a freshman in college, refuses to speak to Kreutzer. Forcing his eyes open, Kreutzer thinks: Young people can afford to believe their parents know nothing. They can afford to cram their heads with liberal ideas. They marry people who play violin on ski slopes. They run through the woods eating marijuana. Kreutzer pictures young people stirring marijuana into their coffee at breakfast. He and the rabbi know better. They know that life is no joke. They have argued commentary together. They have argued six presidents, three wars in the Mideast. Kreutzer has in his house two letters of condolence from the rabbi. Together they have seen life. Yet now Kreutzer does not understand what is happening to him. He can feel the weight of the air in the room, pressing down. Air denser than any air he has ever felt. “I am a dinosaur,” he says to Jacobson. The rabbi gives an amiable smile. “I also.” “Perhaps,” Kreutzer concedes. “But tomorrow you will be a butterfly. Tuesday a horse or woodpecker. And I? Again a dinosaur.” The rabbi pulls on his beard.

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Kreutzer thinks he knows the reason he cannot sleep. Why his daughter Marjorie has not had children before now is a mystery to Kreutzer. Iris would have asked, but Iris has been gone since before anyone noticed Marjorie forgot to have children. Because he does not know why there have been no children all this time, the reason Marjorie has decided to have a child now, at the age of forty, is also a mystery to Kreutzer. But now she is pregnant. It has been over a week since she and the violinist drove to Jersey City to inform him. There is something about Marjorie’s pregnancy that seems significant. Momentous. The pregnancy is like a verse of Torah; it cries out for interpretation. For days Kreutzer has been trying in vain to figure out what it means. It means—he has been able to proceed no farther than this—she is going to have a baby. For no reason he can fathom, he cleans his attic. In a box beneath a trunk he discovers a notebook Iris must have saved from the garbage, a memento from his boyhood. In the margins in painstaking hand is the script of the great sage Rashi. “And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a sacrifice in place of his son.” Rashi teaches: The ram had been waiting for this duty ever since the six days of creation. Kreutzer takes the notebook downstairs. He takes it into his bed. A foolish postulate: it might help him sleep. Before shutting the light, he peers once more into the notebook, furtive like a spy. Inside, handwriting inscribed centuries ago. Bit by bit, without his being aware, Kreutzer’s own boyhood has receded, now it is as ancient to him as this argument nine centuries past. Yet there is no denying: once he was a boy. Before Sputnik, before Hitler, before the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Then a skinny teenager. He was a virgin when he married Iris, and she, too. That night she was so shy, he had to learn boldness or they would never have been man and wife. How he loved her, her gray eyes, her pale shy hands, that night and after. Later, he became a father. He became a man in the world. Those years are lost to him. When he tries to think of them, he can remember little more than finishing his morning prayers: unwrapping his tefillin, buttoning his shirt. Walking out the front door. He does not understand how this can have happened. He does not understand why his wife and his growing children are not vivid in the pictures he summons from those years when they were all young. Only the hardships are real to him this last week: memories he has banished so forcefully they have come back to haunt him. With the greatest of will, he tries to summon his wife’s face; instead, he sees before him the one face in this world that most resembles hers. Helpless as if watching a film on a screen before him, Kreutzer is witness to the single time he nearly hit Marjorie, weeks after the solemn visit from the air force officer. Nineteen seventy-one. Marjorie is twenty; letting herself into the house at midnight, she stumbles into the door. Kreutzer and his wife, roused from sleeplessness, hurry silent into the living room to discover her kicking

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the door, cursing the pain. Their daughter is foul-mouthed in her rage, she is made up as though she would give herself to any man for a nickel. It freezes Kreutzer to his heartstrings. He wants to shake her, wake her out of this madness that has reigned in his home since the news from Thailand. He calls Marjorie’s name; she looks at him with wild, flat eyes he does not recognize, a distorted mirror of Iris’s gray eyes, and he is certain now of the worst, he is certain it is marijuana. Kreutzer turns to his wife. And a thing happens that has never happened before: Iris gazes back at him as if she can look through him. Kreutzer does not recognize his own wife’s eyes. There is nothing in this world he can control. Suddenly, Iris cries out. She huddles Marjorie in her arms, she will not let him near. Kreutzer hears his daughter’s muffled words as she sobs against her mother’s blouse: I hate him. That week he reads in Marjorie’s diary. Shooting up with James and Portia at Portia’s apartment. Late afternoon. Kreutzer cannot force himself to close the diary. That feeling when it takes command of your pulse and your body fights at first but then after a while you submit to that new rhythm and just feel quieted. I said to James, Isn’t it spooky the way it makes your heart jump in its cage, like playing jazz on the car radio with the bass cranked, windows sealed tight. James said, That’s it, exactly. I think James likes me. For once this afternoon I didn’t think about opening a vein. Kreutzer closes the diary. He is not a father. He is not a man. He is nothing. There is a knock on his door; Rabbi Harold Jacobson wanting to plan a memorial service for the one-month anniversary of Gabriel’s death. Kreutzer shuts the door in the rabbi’s face. He does not understand who James is or where his daughter is spending her time, but he wants to cry out to Marjorie, Your mother has lost already. I myself am beyond forgiveness but you are young. Don’t do the one thing that cannot be forgiven. Don’t break your mother’s heart. Memory is cruel. The days Kreutzer would like to relive, the sweet days, are lost to him. How can the good years have disappeared? How can a man disappear from himself? Yet it is true: this ancient heder notebook and the letters from Rabbi Jacobson are the sole evidence Kreutzer has of a life vanished. Now, in the mornings, the night’s visions swirl about him; the stubble on his face is white. He is an old man. How he longs for a single thread of argument to shepherd him past his sleeplessness—the clear pulse of debate in which he used to feel the murmuring of God. He would like to bring a case before the ancient court of rabbis; he imagines assembling the Sanhedrin to hear his argument. If Kreutzer cannot summon the good times, if he cannot recall the years of innocence, he would like to murder the bad. Would it be so wrong? If a man kills a year, Kreutzer would petition the assembled sages, what is his punishment? If he murders the day of a rasping doorbell chime, the day of an air force officer on his stoop, what penalty? Opinions vary. If a day kills a man, the sages say two thousand souls have been lost. A first rabbi poses the question, Who has been killed: The day or the man? If either, says another rabbi, a goat must be sacrificed. If both, a third rabbi insists,

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slaughter the man’s ox and divide the value among the family. Price an uninjured day in the marketplace and compensate the wronged party for the loss of value. Kreutzer cannot sleep. At dawn he dials. “I wanted to know, is there anything you need for the baby?” There is a long pause. “Dad?” says Marjorie. Immediately, Kreutzer regrets his foolishness. He has insulted her. His daughter is a grown woman. She will soon be, in fact, an enormous woman. Why would she need from him? “I’m sure there is nothing you need,” he says. In the background is the sound of the violinist yawning. “Who is it, honey?” Marjorie’s voice sounds strange. “No, Dad,” she says. “I guess there isn’t.” Kreutzer dozes. The sun is pressing a pink radiance through his swollen lids when Gabriel visits. Dad, he begins. Kreutzer plugs his ears. Gabriel is trying to forgive him. Kreutzer will not be forgiven. With his fingers in his ears, he gazes upon his son trying in vain to address him. The boy is suntanned. His eyes, green-brown like Kreutzer’s own, were always so gentle Kreutzer worried for the boy. Now these eyes, they refuse to convict. You are my father, Gabriel tells him. You are my son. He wakes in a sweat. The telephone is ringing. It is Marjorie calling back. Holding the receiver, Kreutzer glances at the clock and realizes it is time for prayers. His thoughts lurch. If his daughter learns he no longer prays, she will think he has admitted she was right to marry the violinist. So Kreutzer tells her, “I will call you back. I have to pray.” He watches the clock. After twenty minutes, he calls. “I’m wondering,” Marjorie says, “what time will you be at the cemetery tomorrow?” Something about Marjorie’s question is not right. Kreutzer has a feeling in his gut. Marjorie should not be in the cemetery. He isn’t yet certain why, but he is sure she must not go—not now that she is pregnant. Kreutzer remains rational. “You could fall,” he says. “I’m fine,” Marjorie says. “I’m stronger than you are.” “We’re not going this year,” he insists. “It’s dangerous.” Marjorie sighs heavily to be sure Kreutzer knows he is frustrating her. “I’ll call you back when you’ve had time to come to your senses. Will you be home this afternoon?” “I’m visiting with the rabbi.” “Jesus, Dad. You tormented the poor man all his professional life. Can’t you let him retire in peace?”

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“We enjoy each other’s company; it’s a fact.” Kreutzer is surprised at the anger in his voice. “We study Torah together.” “Dad, if he recognized you, he’d bolt for the door. Even Rabbi Jacobson didn’t care about every dot and comma of the Bible. You were a thorn in his side.” “I won’t be home this afternoon,” he enunciates. “I have to visit the rabbi.” “Fine, so this evening.” Marjorie hesitates. “Dad. Why do you hate him so much?” “Hate?” “You’re obsessed with him, and you’re obsessed with digging up that deed. Look, what’s lost is lost, okay? It’s lost, Dad. They’ve already had another deed made up, they’ve broken ground on the new building.” He tries to shave before going to see the rabbi. Iris would tell him to. He lathers but cannot bring himself to lift the razor. He gazes at it, heavy in his hand. The words float through his mind: An old man’s blood. Afraid, he looks in the mirror. Clear as day he sees the scribes fluttering around him with wings of ink; each brush against the walls leaves a searing paragraph. Kreutzer blinks at the black spots floating in his mirror. Bit by bit, his bathroom walls are being covered in tiny script like birdprints. “I am ashamed,” he tells the scribes scaling the reflected bathroom walls. They write down his words, and immediately surround them with interpretation: miniscule lettering that stretches from ceiling to floor. “I should not be alive,” Kreutzer says. The scribes, angry, stop writing and are gone. After a while, he towels the shaving cream from his face, leaves the towel folded neatly over the lip of the sink. At the nursing home, under the rabbi’s gaze, Kreutzer produces the clipping from the previous day’s paper. His hands are shaking. He points to the phrase on the newsprint. “See here,” he says. It is an article about politics in today’s Israel, but that is not the important thing. What is important is this reference to the time of Palestine under British Mandate. Mandatory Palestine, the newspaper says. When Kreutzer first read these two words, they meant only 1930s Palestine, Palestine when it flew British flags. But by the time he set down the paper to rummage for scissors, he understood the words meant more. “Mandatory Palestine”: now that was Jewish. Palestine because you had to. Palestine because Jews owed allegiance there and no place else. Jewish wasn’t marijuana and oblivion and T-shirts telling you to drop out. Jewish wasn’t a Christmas tree in a living room. Jewish was Jewish. Was holding on tight. What was so bad about guilt? Why was everyone so eager to bury hatchets, forget deeds? So what if

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the rest of the world thought guilt was a nasty word? Jews proudly fought a War of Atonement. Jews had memory even if it hurt. “Banana?” Jacobson offers the fruit. On the rabbi’s windowsill is the envelope from the son with the black wife. The son who still lives, breathes, wants communication with his father. The envelope is unopened. Kreutzer’s head feels swollen as if someone banged on it through the night. All those precious letters from Gabriel, he thinks. Envelope after envelope, white with red and blue stripes, each holding one of his son’s carefully penned pages. Kreutzer must tell the rabbi something. “A son’s letters are important,” he says. “My son wrote to me every week during the war.” “War?” The banana waves slowly in the air. Kreutzer is nauseous. “The war in Vietnam.” “There is a war?” Kreutzer stands. The room reels about him. Pastel fabrics swirl, a field of fluttering flowers; he staggers against the wall. He wants to murder the rabbi. He wants to punch the rabbi until he bleeds from his nose. “Gabriel was a good boy!” he shouts at Jacobson. The rabbi cowers in his chair. His eyes widen, then begin to tear. In the doorway appears a nurse. Holding one hand to his temple, Kreutzer nods to her. From the corner come soft whimpering noises: Jacobson crying, his arms wrapped around his waist, a quivering cocoon. The nurse watches Kreutzer put on his jacket. Leaving, Kreutzer pauses beside Jacobson’s doubled form. He sets a heavy hand on the back of the rabbi’s chair. “What is the opposite of Alzheimer’s?” Kreutzer demands. The rabbi’s gaze wavers in confusion. “Jewish,” Kreutzer curses him.

In the parking lot and on the access ramp to the highway, Kreutzer’s anger is so great he cannot concentrate on his driving. That he, Kreutzer, should be trapped by memory, while the rabbi—a rabbi, who has chosen to shoulder the suffering of the Jewish people—is excused, is too much to bear. But as he passes the airport, planes thundering into the sky, Kreutzer thinks. He is not a mystical man but it occurs to him that maybe the rabbi is showing him something. On the way home the thought grows in Kreutzer’s mind. He is so excited he nearly drives past his exit. What if the rabbi has found the answer, not only for himself but for everyone? What if God has sent the rabbi to show Kreutzer the truth? If you can’t forget, at least you can forgive, Iris used to say. David, I forgive you. Kreutzer never knew how his wife could say this. He will never forgive himself for his son’s death. But there is—he now sees—another option.

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Reaching home, he composes his first letter to Jacobson in over twenty years. Dear Rabbi, at last I understand: Word and deed are dispensable to you. You have defeated suffering. Others linger in yesterday; you soar past. Kreutzer is so excited he feels feverish. He will not be selfish and save this discovery for his own sole benefit. He will bring the world’s Jews to Rabbi Jacobson’s feet, let them learn oblivion under the rabbi’s instruction. Never forget was a mistaken rallying cry; together they would erase the painful memory of Inquisitions, of the Holocaust. Kreutzer tries to picture it: his whole people with Alzheimer’s, millennia of troubles gone in a flash. What couldn’t the Jews be without the last two thousand years? And beneath all, Kreutzer is a compassionate man; he will see to it that not only the Jews benefit. If the shiksas and shvartzes and Italians need, Kreutzer will bring them to the rabbi also. Kreutzer will lead the parade of forgetfulness, all who have suffered thronging at his heels. Together they will become innocents, babes, far from any reminder of sorrow. And now Kreutzer knows he must call his daughter. His finger swerves over the dial; the telephone is too slow. Marjorie is right—he is a dinosaur. He with his rotary telephone. Kreutzer laughs at the folly of his life. “You can go to the cemetery,” he explains when Marjorie picks up her telephone. “But not the baby.” During the few seconds’ silence, he thinks he has convinced her. “Funny thing is, Dad, right now the baby and I are rather inseparable. If I go to the cemetery, she has to go, too.” “She?” Marjorie giggles. Kreutzer is almost certain it is a giggle. “I wasn’t going to tell.” She meets him at the gate. Together they walk to the grave. She is bundled in a jacket and her belly sticks out. “You’re staring at me.” He cannot deny. He needs to tell her what he understands now about her pregnancy. But first he must explain to her why they need the rabbi’s help. “Do you ever think about Gabriel?” he asks. “Do I think about him?” Now Marjorie stares. “Dad, I think about him every single day.” Kreutzer is so surprised he does not utter a word. That Marjorie should also think of Gabriel at every turn? Marjorie who refused to hear his name after he went to Thailand, Marjorie who called her brother Traitor? Marjorie who wears now a serious expression on her face. A hopeful expression. As if for the first time in her life maybe, her father said something not entirely terrible. Standing beside her brother’s gravestone, she speaks. “I think about everything. I think about the stupid fake advice he used to give me about boys. I think about

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the time he convinced me to put Alka-Seltzer up my nose. I think about the day we heard about the plane crash, when the captain came to our house.” There is more that Marjorie thinks. There is, it turns out, no end to her thoughts. Every detail of Gabriel she recalls, the blond hair that darkened as he grew older, the A’s on his homework, his tears the time he received a C. Marjorie dredges up the names of both girls her brother asked to his senior promenade—the one who refused and the one who agreed. Things Kreutzer never knew about his son. Kreutzer is drowning. He cannot breathe. At this very moment, when he has determined to shed all, his contrary, bewildering daughter insists on parading her memories. She insists on remembering how she refused to speak to her brother. She refused to speak to him and then he died. Marjorie is crying. It has never occurred to him that Marjorie might have guilt. Not in all the years since he pleaded with her silently at the dinner table, Help your mother; and his daughter looked out at the world through stringy bangs and would not speak. And Iris grew silent and Marjorie was silent and the great silence that engulfed Kreutzer’s home drove him to silences of his own until he could no longer speak even the most intimate speech of all: he could no longer pray. And why now? Now that he has at last decided that there will be no more memories, nor guilt, nor struggle, now that he has decided to embrace oblivion with all his being? Why now should his daughter speak? “I was high for years after Gabriel died. If not for Yuri, I’d be dead in a gutter somewhere.” Suddenly, Kreutzer sees. Tears threaten to overflow his own lids; blinking them back, he tells himself for the first time since Gabriel’s death: I am a father. Joy floods his heart—there is something, after all these years, he can give to his daughter. For his mission will bring peace not only to himself, but to Marjorie as well. Quickly, before the baby is born, they both will learn to forget. All their guilt will be absolved. And Marjorie will share Kreutzer’s joy at what he has foreseen: her baby will be a new generation, protected from sorrow, raised according to the wisdom of the rabbi. Marjorie has finished. They stand together on the grass. Kreutzer regards his daughter, wind blowing her jacket against her belly. There are fine lines around her eyes. Kreutzer is overwhelmed with a love so powerful he cannot move a muscle. He knows his daughter cannot feel the same way about him. How could she? “Will you come for lunch tomorrow?” Marjorie says. If he could speak, he would tell her that by tomorrow noon everything will be different. But a nod is all he can muster. “Dad,” she says. Then she does something. She stands heavily on her toes, and kisses him on the cheek. “I’m glad we had this talk.”

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Dear Iris, Kreutzer would say, if he could. I bid farewell to you tonight, because soon I will no longer remember. And I want you to know I am sorry to lose these things. Your quiet and your loveliness. He lies awake, tears slide down both cheeks and pool in his ears. With all his strength, he will endure this last night of memory. Dear Iris, he would say. You told me I did not cause Gabriel to die. But in this one matter you were wrong. There are things between a man and his son. There are things. Sometimes, when he is frightened, a son turns to his father. A son comes to his father in wartime. A son—a son who is close to his father—does not make an important decision like this without consulting. “It’s a choice,” Gabriel tells him. Gabriel in jeans and a T-shirt, pale from his medical studies. Gabriel with a buzzed haircut that makes his ears stick out. “Either I accept this commission in Thailand, Dad, or I refuse it. If I accept it, I’ll be working in a hospital far from the fighting.” If not, he will be drafted. The next assignment, the one he will be forced to accept, might be a base in Europe. It might be Plattsburgh: a couple of dull years in upstate New York, not too far from home. Or it might be Vietnam. Gabriel knows a surgeon who refused an air force assignment in Thailand; at this very moment he is on a plane to the heart of combat in Vietnam. They sit in the living room. The sunset is stretched across the carpeted floor. Outside, the evening newspaper lands on the doorstep with a thump. Slowly, irregularly, thumps recede down the street. “If Thailand is safe,” says Kreutzer. Rabbi Jacobson beside the window, under a blanket of pink and yellow. Braiding the tassels of the blanket like fringes on a prayer shawl. Kreutzer is nervous, and excited. Who will he be once oblivion descends? What will it feel like to learn the rabbi’s secret? He is willing to lose his mind. He will forget the soft voices of long-dead teachers who called him Duvidl, forget his own father’s shadowed tired face; he will sacrifice the years of earning his family’s livelihood, the curl of the great sage’s pen, everything that makes him David Kreutzer. And along with it will disappear all that makes his daughter Marjorie weep. Marjorie will forget guilt, she will forget fury, she will forget wanting to drown her own heartbeat in some other hot, jarring rhythm. She will change her mind about naming the baby Gabrielle; the rabbi, in his wisdom, will not

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permit such a tribute, for the child must not bear a single old sorrow. Such they will be: old man, mother, child, all washed of memory. “Rabbi,” Kreutzer breathes. The rabbi smiles a cordial smile. Kreutzer opens his mouth to tell Jacobson about the baby, how she will be born into forgetfulness. But he sees something on the floor. It is an envelope, fallen from the sunlit windowsill. Unopened. “Jacobson,” he stumbles. “Have you not reconciled with your son?” “My son,” says the rabbi, “married a wonderful girl.” “So you have forgiven his intermarriage.” “My son married a Jewish girl. The whole congregation danced at the wedding.” The rabbi pats his stomach, pleased. “There was almond soup.” Kreutzer remembers that soup. Iris so wanted the recipe, she went on the sly into the kitchen to ask. The cook, preparing dessert in a rush of steam and barked orders, ejected her back onto the dance floor with a flurry of curses. Iris was embarrassed and they left early; Kreutzer remembers that almond soup well. “That was your nephew’s wedding,” Kreutzer says. “Not your son’s.” Jacobson beams. “My son’s wedding.” What matters a detail from the past? Forgetfulness is best; how sweet its honey will taste on his eager tongue. Yet he cannot let it rest. “Your nephew’s,” says Kreutzer. “No,” says the rabbi gently. He sighs. It is the moment Kreutzer has awaited. But something in this conversation is not right. A son has written a letter; it must be answered. The son is loyal despite transgressions, he is waiting for the father to forgive. How can the rabbi excuse himself for condemning his boy? Whatever a man feels, mustn’t he be mindful of his children? Kreutzer pictures Marjorie standing in the cemetery with her belly. He pictures Marjorie with her terribles. The smile on Kreutzer’s face tumbles; it feels to him it will never stop tumbling. Forgiveness. There is no escaping it. Marjorie has forgiven him; this Kreutzer is forced to see. In the cemetery she peered at him through tears as if to say: A child needs a grandfather. Even one who rails about Christmas trees. And a daughter, a daughter needs a father. She looked at him with eyes that were, after all these years, Iris’s eyes. Telling him: Forgive. Yet if he absolves himself? For years, he has known he mustn’t. Because if Kreutzer admits his own powerlessness, if he admits there was nothing he could have done different, then there is only one other to blame for what should never have happened—for an airplane failing mid-landing; smashing into the single building along the base’s air strip that was occupied. The building in which David Kreutzer’s son lay on his cot reading.

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He looks at the rabbi. The sweetness of oblivion is so near, Kreutzer is lightheaded. But the muddy business of life will not be ignored. A wrong has been done and it must be righted. Not all may ever be well between a man and his family once there has been difficulty. But a father has a responsibility to try. “We are old men,” he tells Jacobson. “We have little to offer. But what we can, we must.” The rabbi considers Kreutzer. “Forgive him,” Kreutzer says. “Forgive your son.” The rabbi makes no answer. Shifting his attention to his blanket, he unbraids a single tassel, then rebraids. Kreutzer lifts weary eyes to the clock. It is noon. His daughter has invited him to lunch. He stands. He is an old man, the chains of gravity are heavy. For years he has made the greatest sacrifice, a sacrifice worthy of the sages: He has blamed himself and spared another his rage. Now he will forgive himself; David Kreutzer will rejoin the world as best as he—dinosaur, racist, fool—is able. But at what cost. For now he must call to account the one with whom he has held the longest silence. Dreadful words form in his mouth: words to which there can be no rebuttal. As Kreutzer steps past Jacobson’s chair, the rabbi stretches a hand to touch Kreutzer’s sleeve. He does not reach it; his fingers plait empty air. He chants quietly. “The responsive reading is on page one hundred and five. The Torah remains in the ark.” Kreutzer’s voice is empty. “And the deed to the synagogue’s land?” “In the storage room of Temple Beth Shalom, beneath a box of Hagaddahs. Twelve Grove Street second floor.” The rabbi purses his lips, meditative. “We turn to page one hundred and five for the responsive reading. We begin with blessings for a sweet new year.” With a wave Kreutzer deflects Jacobson’s piety. The rabbi follows his gaze. In tandem they face the sharp haze of the window, blinding as the brightness of heaven. “No blessings without atonement,” says Kreutzer. “Atonement,” echoes the rabbi. His head bobs slightly as in prayer. “At the new year, atonement must be made for both types of sin. Two categories: man against man, man against God.” “You are wrong,” says Kreutzer. “There is a third category of sin.” “Two only,” murmurs the rabbi. An anxious flicker of his eyes says to Kreutzer, Stay. Kreutzer stares: at the luminous window, at the spare furnishings, at the rabbi wrapped in a tassled blanket, mottled neck tremoring. With a leaden step, he turns his back. “Rabbi,” Kreutzer says. The corridor before him is silent. He drapes his jacket over his arms. “God has picked my pocket.”

36 Tony Eprile

Letters from Doreen

Let us begin this story where it ends. Mark Spiegelman is visiting his parents in San Diego one summer—he is out on the West Coast for a friend’s wedding—and, as always, he asks about the news from South Africa. At the time, he and his mother are in the kitchen putting away the dishes. She does not answer him immediately, but instead hands him the gravy boat and says, “Here, you’re tall. You put it away.” Mark stretches to slide the gravy boat, still hot from the dishwashing machine, onto the topmost shelf. Its warmth—as if the dish is some living thing—is transferred to his hand. “We think Doreen passed away,” his mother says. Mark knew his parents had been worried about Doreen because this past year there had been no Christmas card from her and no response to the eighty rand they’d sent as a Christmas present. “We got a letter from Irmgard,” his mother continues. “She called the Gillins, who said that they hadn’t heard from Doreen and that she must have died.” The Gillins were the people who moved into the Spiegelmans’ flat when they left the country. “We could use a decent girl,” Mrs. Gillin had said. “Can you recommend Doreen?” So Doreen went to work for them and stayed with them until about a year ago. Since she worked for his family for nine years and Mark had been eleven when they left the country, he calculated that Doreen must have worked almost twice as long for the Gillins. Still, in a recent letter to his mother, she had voiced her old complaint about Mrs. Gillin: “She never talks to me like you used to . . .” “Did Irmgard say anything else?” Mark asks. “Just the usual—prices are going up because of all the boycotts—especially food. It’s not so easy for someone living on a pension anymore. Now that Max is dead, “Letters from Doreen” first appeared in Eprile, Temporary Sojourner, published by Simon and Schuster, Fireside Books (1989) and subsequently published as a new edition by PFP Publishing/Ajar Contemporaries (Georgetown, MA: 2011). Reprinted by permission of PFP Publishing.

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542  TONY EPRILE

Irmgard really doesn’t have much reason to stay in South Africa. She thinks she’ll probably move back to Baden-Baden.” A number of his mother’s contemporaries, German Jews who fled to South Africa at more or less the same time she did, have been going back to the fatherland to live. Many of them get a generous pension from the German government, as well as money to simply come and visit. The German word for reparation is Wiedergutmachung, which translated literally means “making good again.” Mark finds this term absurd, a bit of linguistic black humor. There are some things that can not be made good again. They become part of the past, and the world is forever changed by them. Dearest Mam and Master: I am keeping fine and family. I got the money at last now they tell me the money is dollars so this end is less in S.A. they gave me R.36.59 that’s what they gave me. So I say thanks again Sorry I could not send you a card for Pasach I could not even go to town to get one . . . I don’t know how long I will still be with the Gillin’s as the work is too much for me now as they are trying to decrease the staff the days they don’t come in the servants must do the fiat they just to sweep do the bathroom windows. You must do the stove wash doors walls, This is what I am doing washing daily ironing, baking biscuits once a week silver (you didn’t have a lot of silver) there’s no lunch hour you must be ready when they get home with supper, cook for the daughter she eats here whenever they want to come. My thumb does not come right from the soap pad all the other fingers are alright. I hope you are well and family. Love Dor. Lately Mark has found himself asking the young white South Africans whom he meets everywhere these days, in New York, the Midwest, Washington, DC: “What happened to your nanny?” It is safe to assume that they all had one. The usual response is to dismiss the question. It is one of those things of childhood that have been set aside. Some of his South African peers classify themselves as Marxists and try endlessly to convince him that the real issue in South Africa is not race but capitalism, rule by elites. Late one night, Mark is standing on a street corner in Manhattan’s Upper West Side talking to one of them, Peter—whom Mark likes mainly because he has the same squarish head and mole on the left cheek as Nigel Asheroff, a childhood friend. “Of course there were some excesses in the Cultural Revolution, but that’s not the point,” Peter expostulates. “The revolution had been subverted by the intellectuals, and they had to be dealt with somehow. You shouldn’t swallow everything in the capitalist press, all those crocodile tears about violinists planting rice.”

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While they are talking, they are constantly approached by beggars. “D’you want me to starve, is that it? You want me to starve!” says one lurching drunk who has just been dismissed by Peter with a wave of the hand. The drunk is beginning to get belligerent, but he sees other prospects and staggers off in their direction. Mark asks Peter about the black woman who brought him up: Where is she now? How long was she with them? The question annoys Peter. “I don’t know,” he responds. “We had one woman, Bertha, who took care of us as kids, but she’s gone back to the homelands now. Everyone had servants growing up; that’s not the problem.” A ragged-looking man approaches them. He fits the category of beggars to whom Mark usually tries to give money: his shoes are much worse than Mark’s troddendown sneakers. They are a size too small and he has worn down the backs with the heel of his foot. “Go away,” Peter says. “We’re not giving you money.” But the beggar had noticed the barely perceptible motion of Mark’s hand toward his pocket and says to him. “You would have given me money, man. Come on.” “No,” Mark responds. “You’re letting him control you,” the beggar cries, pointing toward Peter. “He’s stronger than you.” Dearest Madam, My self & family are keeping well. How are you & the family hope you are all fine. Wishing you all a Happy New Year & well over the fast. I last time wrote to you that I dont know how long will I still be here at Gardens I am still hanging on as times are so bad. Food, clothing are so expensive that you hardly have enough for a second helping for the kids I mean Lenora’s kids they only have one meal a day, and thats in the evening when she comes home from work. She’s divorced last year, her husband left his job 2 years back, does not even support the kids the law does not do anything they keep telling her to hang on. The Mainzers are on holiday oversea but I dont know where, they left the end of August I think they went for 3 or 2 months. Shes stooping since she had the operation . . . When, at the age of sixteen, Mark returned to South Africa after four years’ absence, he immediately got in touch with Doreen. “Hullo, Mutt,” he says in their first phone conversation. “When am I going to see you?” As a child, Mark was always a slow eater, often forgetting the food on his plate while he immersed himself in reverie. Doreen would sit with him, as his mother did not have the patience to watch him toy with his food. As if to make up for his lack of progress in nourishing himself, Mark had learned to read very early on, and he would read aloud to Doreen from some comic book while she periodically interjected: “Ag, man, just eat a little of that pineapple.” Doreen’s favorite was Mutt and Jeff, and she

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never got tired of the way little aggressive Jeff would lure his tall friend into some new misadventure. They came to call each other Mutt or Jeff interchangeably; sometimes Doreen was Mutt, sometimes Mark.

. . . I have been home for the holiday Johburg is hot but out there is boiling you open the windows at 4 AM but still its the same by 6. you open the doors you are perspiring you are wet. I am glad you found a nice apartment, I didn’t know how to write to you as I thought you moved knowing you were looking for a place Mrs. Mainzers had an op. she’s much better now She’s swimming daily only she stoops a little. there’s nothing happening at Eden Gardens it’s all quiet My family is keeping very well the 2 kids are at school, only the little at home because he’s only 4. Mutt must be a good cook you know he used to ask what’s that you are adding now only he must not add too much salt & swear . . . . What amazed him in retrospect was the warmth with which African adults, almost any African adult, would respond to him as a child. Walking past throngs of black men and women in the late afternoon, his overstuffed schoolbag banging against his bare calves, Mark never felt any trace of fear . . . even when these same adults were waiting patiently, handcuffed, in line to be pushed into the next available kwela-kwela wagon for some pass infraction. There would invariably be friendly comments about any new possessions or items of clothing. “Very nice, little master.” “Sawubona, umfana.” “You give me that bag, yesss?” Doreen, on the other hand, would mock all new acquisitions with the Afrikaans phrase, Skilpad het a nuwe doek. Tortoise has a new hat. Although Doreen was officially classified as a Colored and so was exempt from carrying a pass, it was not safe for her to leave the apartment building without some form of identification. When Mark was five, she disappeared without warning for an entire weekend, returning on Monday morning sour and subdued. She had gone across the road to talk to a friend and had been picked up by policemen who did not believe she was Colored; they thoughtfully kept her from disturbing her employers with a phone call on the weekend. Even the African gangsters were friendly. A group of them used to regularly play dice in the backseat of an old and commodious car parked in the quiet cul-de-sac below Eden Gardens. The gamblers would give Mark and his friend from the apartment building, Lenny Mainzer, each a tickey—the thin, sensual 2-½–penny coins of that era—to go play elsewhere and not draw attention by staring at them. Bribery had its drawbacks, however, for whenever the sharp-eyed Lenny spotted the car in the distance he wanted to go by and claim his tickey, and it was only with difficulty that Mark could draw him away.

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One day they saw the police break up a similar group of gamblers who were playing excitedly beneath an oak tree beside an empty lot. A car slowed down and suddenly all four doors were flung open and athletic young policemen were upon the gamblers, who scattered in all directions. They watched as one policeman chased after a wiry African who was running “hell for leather” still clutching several pound notes. The policeman caught up with him near where the boys were standing, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and doubled him up with a quick blow to the solar plexus. “Hell,” Lenny had said, “I want to join the police when I’m grown up.” Mark had seen the smiling policeman give the handcuffed gambler an additional sharp punch to the neck. In the brown cardboard accordion file where Mrs. Spiegelman keeps her correspondence, Doreen’s letters are easily recognizable. She always wrote on official blue aerograms, with their prominent injunctions against insluitings and the customary reproduction of the Provincial Buildings in Pretoria. On his last visit to his homeland, Mark had visited these buildings, where enormous tapestries depict the conquering of Southern Africa by the white man, and where a sculpture of a man wrestling a bull gives rise in the accompanying free catalogue to eloquent musings on “Liberty Curbed.” It was odd to think of an elderly colored woman spending one percent of a week’s income on such stationery. . . . we don’t have a caretaker any more that old Missus Vogel she got killed a boy hit her on the head with an axe she was taking money from all the boy’s paypacket, and Efroom too was doing it. The police caught the boy who killed her it was 6:30 in the morning. You remember how Voggie used to shout at the children when they played near the flowerbeds she was always cross but it was not nice to die like that. Shame . . . Mark remembers telling his mother one day how he hated Mrs. Vogel. “She’s a lonely old woman,” his mother had said. “She doesn’t have a husband or any children.” What about Efroom, he had asked, isn’t he her husband? Efroom was the black bossboy, a ramrod-straight older man with a gray mustache and steel-wool hair. He had the military bearing of a pukka Englishman and had been “up North” during the Second World War. He issued harsh, peremptory orders to the servants employed by the apartment building, punctuating his commands with a flourish of the stout wooden cane that he always carried. One day when the family was chatting in the kitchen, the evening paper was thrust through the partially open door, leaving a bloody smear on the stove and landing on the floor with a thud. Mrs. Spiegelman pulled open the door and the newsboy half tumbled in, apologizing profusely. He had ridden upstairs in the elevator instead of taking the back stairs, and Efroom had hit him on the head to

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teach him a lesson. Mark’s mother washed his head with a cloth that she dipped in an enamel basin filled with warm water and Dettol. The water turned red and had to be emptied twice. She finally located the cut—“A tiny cut, really. But there’s always so much blood from the head”—and closed the wound with a sticking plaster. . . . you remember Grace who used to work upstairs for Mrs. Mainzer she’s left now also the Harmon’s girl left there’s mainly young ones now they drink and go out with tsotsis they don’t like me because I don’t drink with them they poured water under my door. Why don’t you come to our parties they ask, There a lot of rubbish they cut up my uniforms when I was out, make noise all night I can’t sleep I have a headache the next day . . . Christmas. Africans shuffle along, singing, spitting as they yell filthy imprecations that make Mark and his younger brother giggle from their hiding place on the balcony. The doorbell rings constantly as Africans arrive to claim their “Christmas Box.” They know his mother to be a soft touch, and Africans from as far away as the pharmacy in Rosebank somehow find themselves at the Spiegelmans’ door. Years later, Mark can always make his parents laugh with his imitation of an African his mother doesn’t recognize demanding a present. “Hau, missis. I’m the boy for carry-it the groceries. Is me, Esteban, missis, for putting-it the food inna car. How you don’t know me?” Whenever I think of the kids I take out my Album and I have a look at the pictures I do miss you a lot but you are faraway I cant even come & visit, money’s the problem. The Mainzers also went on a holiday they left the end of October. Its only the 2 of them at home here, Johnny lives in Isreal, Lenny is also still aboard its only Ray who still lives here. Did I send you a recipe of cabbage white and red with nuts? The family are all well Lenora always asks after you she got a job at last. She’s by herself & the kids the husband left he’s really useless he drinks too much does not see to the kids she’s saving to get a divorce. Mam please when you write to Joel give him my regards Tell Jeff I will write to him soon. Love to all the family. PS I will be visiting you someday When they used to go to the seaside, Doreen would ask the children to bring her back some ocean water in a jar. When they asked her why, Doreen told them that she liked to drink it. “It keeps her regular,” Mrs. Spiegelman explained.

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Mark would neglect to fill the empty mayonnaise jar until the last day of the holiday, remembering it only occasionally as he peered into the mesmerizing depths of tide pools, butterfly net near at hand. The closing ritual of the holiday was always that before-breakfast dash down the cliffside past the narrow-gauge railway to the beach. There be would take off his shoes and wade knee-deep into the surf to fill the jar, being careful not to get too much sand along with the seawater. Then Mark would climb slowly up the footpath back to the hotel, pausing to dig his bare feet deep into the cool red dust. When he held the jar to the sun, he would see tiny particles floating in the clear water, some of them minute living creatures that propelled themselves to and fro. They went to the same hotel every year. The first year, when Mark was seven and Joel five, was the only time Doreen had gone away with them. The first few days had been miserable, Mark and his brother having to eat in the Children’s Diningroom, which was crowded and noisy with squalling children barely contained by their African nannies who simply raised their voices to converse above the appalling din. Mr. Spiegelman talked to the Indian headwaiter, who said the children could eat in the adult dining room provided they “behaved like grownups.” It meant dressing properly for each meal: tight shirt collars and wet hair brushed hard down on sensitive scalps, but the rewards were real food and the affectionate admiration of the waiters. Bobbie, the Indian headwaiter, would come by at each meal, raise three fingers to his lips with a smacking sound, and say, “Good eating, yes?” while the children tried to suppress their giggles. When they came home from holiday, they would regale Doreen with the tales of their adventures. Mrs. Spiegelman would tell her how, when told that a favorite waiter had been fired because he drank, little Joel responded: “Well, maybe he was thirsty.” “I remember that boy,” Doreen had laughed. “He used to always tell the children dirty stories.” Mark would tell her all about the multicolored fish he had seen in the tide pools and how he almost stepped on a brown mamba while walking on the river path. “Why doesn’t Doreen come with us? We miss her,” he had asked his mother during their holiday. “Because sometimes Doreen likes to see her own family,” his mother had replied. Mark vaguely remembered meeting Doreen’s daughter, Lenora. She was lanky and thin and bore little resemblance to her mother. In her arms she had carried a small child with a running nose, his head shaved against ringworm. On his first return visit to South Africa, Mark stayed with his older sister, who lived in a Spanish-style house in the suburb of Melrose with her husband and two children.

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One Thursday, the two of them went to pick up Doreen on her “day off.” Mark, now a gangly teenager, towered over Doreen. “Now we’re really Mutt and Jeff, hey, Dor?” he said. Doreen seemed embarrassed and uneasy in his presence. She seemed even more so when they sat and had tea under his sister’s pleasantly shaded veranda by the swimming pool. “Yes, missis. Thank you, missis,” Doreen said to Eileen’s offer of another biscuit with her tea. The ensuing silence was broken only by the sound of the birds thrashing among the branches of the mulberry tree. As far as Mark could remember, Doreen had always called his sister by the pet name he had given her: Dixie. Mark told Doreen all about his job working on a bus survey for a market-research firm. Basically, the job consisted of standing on the street all day, stopping buses, and counting the number of people on each of the two decks. “When I got the job,” he said, “they told me that if there are Coloreds on the back of the bus, I should count them as people.” “That’s nice,” Doreen said. She stood up and began to stack the dishes nearly on the tray. “Leave it, Dor—” Dixie started to say, but her attention was distracted by her twoyear-old, who was waddling toward them foaming at the mouth. She reached her fingers into his mouth and disgustedly pulled out a partially masticated garden snail, which she flicked into the bushes. The child began to wail with great heartbroken sobs, while Mark ineffectually tried to wash out its mouth with cold tea. “He’s like you, Mutt,” Doreen said happily. “You was always putting everything in your mouth.” Mark and Dixie took the tea things into the kitchen, Mark almost dropping the full tray as his eyes adjusted from the bright sunlight of the garden to the cool darkness of the house’s interior. “Yuck, a snail,” Dixie said as she ran hot water over the dishes in the sink. When they returned outside, Avi was sitting on Doreen’s capacious lap staring at her with wondering eyes as she sang softly to him in Afrikaans. While in college in the United States, Mark studies Modern Poetry with the thought that someday he would like to be a poet. The first poem he ever memorized was a ditty in “Kitchen Dutch” and was taught to him by Doreen. It goes like this: Ouma en Oupa sit op die stoep, Oupa let off a helluva poep, Ouma sê: Wat maker? Oupa sê: My maag is seer. This ditty about Oupa’s stomach ailments resurfaces at inappropriate times in Mark’s life—during an exam, in the middle of a serious conversation, while making

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love. For no reason at all, he will find himself waking up in the middle of the night chortling, “My maag is seer.” (My stomach hurts.) He remembers how when he would come home tearful from a fall, knees badly scraped from crashing his bike in some daredevil game, Doreen would start him laughing by asking in Afrikaans what was wrong: Wat maker? . . . I have to wash doors, walls, do washing. the boy only does the stove, windows and sweep. . . . I really enjoyed my holiday at Potch even though it was so hot. Here in Joburg, it rain now & again even now its raining. Killarney is no more save, too many muggings, Robbery & Killings going on, nearby all the flats are & buildings are fenced with boys guards during the day & night they are busy here now. . . . tell Dixie I am happy she’s well and about again. I am earning R.90 now but things clothing, food is too expensive plus tax. Hope the family Master you and the Boys are all fine. Good night Love to all the family Love also from the family. Mark is watching television in his apartment in New York City. On the news there is a brief feature on a demonstration at the University of Cape Town. The censors have been forced to temporarily let up, thanks to a court order, and this is the first live footage in a while. We see some students shouting slogans, marching around with banners. Suddenly we see the police firing tear gas, running forward. A young girl drops her banner and starts to run. A policeman quickly catches up with her and begins to beat her in that near-comic slow motion of real violence. We see the whip rise and fall, rise and fall. The girl is slim and blond. She sits down, hugs herself as if she is cold. The policeman runs on. The scene changes to another riot in a township. Small black children dart out from between shacks and toss stones with the accuracy of champion cricketers. Howzat! A policeman crumples to the ground and is hustled into a truck. A spider web appears across the windshield of the photographers’ van. End of footage. I dont know will I be able to move back to Potch when I leave the Gillins the government says you are too dark you have to live in the bantustan. I went to see your friend Mr Bernstein you know the one whose a lawyer his brother is in the same office. He said Doreen its nonsense you can live there if you want they cant stop you. I don’t know what it means I can live with Lenora but she has the kids her place is too small . . .

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Mark goes to visit his former roommate, Saul, on 95th Street, where, coincidentally, another South African has moved into the room Mark vacated. “Give these South African Jews a foothold and you can’t get rid of them,” Saul joked. “Hey, how’s it?” Danny, the replacement South African, says. “You’ve got to see this book. A friend of mine at Ravan just sent it to me.” The book is a collection of drawings done by children in Soweto. Like most children’s drawings, these are crude: stick figures, the perspective misjudged so that people are larger than houses. And what are the children of Soweto drawing today? Look, this is a policeman shooting at your brother. Here are children crying from tear gas. Here some children play with the nice police dog. See how sharp his teeth are. Here is a policeman being “throwed on with stones.” Here is a Casspir armored vehicle in the schoolyard. Here is a funeral. Here is a funeral. Here is a funeral. Dearest Madam & fam. Thanks very much for the letter and contents which is 20 rand thanks again it came in very handy I am going to buy myself something very nice. The weather is very hot its really boiling you can hardly sleep at night. I had a lovely Xmas & a very happy New Year only it was too short, I didn’t see everybody I wanted to see but I enjoyed it anyhow. I am alright now, you know the doctor was wrong I havent got heart trouble thats what the doctor said at the hospital he’s a German. What I really have is high blood pressure I go to the hospital once a month for tablets. I am happy that you are nearer to Dixie. The kids must be big. Eden Mews the Mews, Gardens are all sold out only some of the old tenants move out, but nearly everyone bought his own flat. I am happy that you’re all still well especially Master . . . . Mark’s sister, Dixie, also lives in San Diego now. Mark is visiting her when some other South Africans come over to spend the afternoon. One who is just visiting the area is Beryl, Dixie’s childhood friend, who has children the same age as her own. Beryl is slim and attractive, though her skin is a little dry and taut across her face and lines crinkle outward from the comers of her eyes, the legacy of years of playing tennis in the sun. Avi, who is now nine, always liked Beryl’s maid, and he asks: “How is Selma?” “I’ve got another Selma now,” Beryl replies, turning to arrange food on a tray. Mark winks at his nephew, who is looking nonplussed and twists his index finger in the direction of his forehead. The child grins, understanding now. Mark joins his parents out on the veranda where they are telling his brother-inlaw, Arthur, about Doreen. “I don’t know,” Arthur muses. “I’d hate to think people assumed I was dead every time I haven’t written to them for a while. Maybe she just got tired of writing to her

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old master and misses. Maybe her daughter told her to stop. Lots of things could have happened.” His parents are indignant at this idea. After all, they have been corresponding with her for almost twenty years, and this is the first time she has failed to send a Christmas card or acknowledge the money they have sent her. “And besides,” his mother says, “we sent her a fair amount of money every year. I’m sure it came in very handy. How can we go on sending her money if she doesn’t write back to us?” . . . Master must be happy with the swimming pool as he likes to swim you know that old lady at Eden Mansions remember the one who looks like she’s got a hunch I dont know if shes German or Hollander she always talked to you at the swimming pool she died 2 weeks back the husband died a year ago. Love to Dixie and the family. . . . There is quite a community of South Africans living in this part of Southern California. In the manner of immigrants everywhere, all it takes is a couple of families to establish a foothold for others to quickly follow. And then, the weather is almost identical to that of Johannesburg, allowing for a lifestyle in which swimming and tennis-playing feature prominently. Dixie invites Mark to a “citizenship party” held at the home of one such resident, Beryl’s sister, Shareen. “You’ve never been to the Stillmans’ place, have you?” Dixie asks. “Well, there’ll be a little surprise for you there.” The surprise turns out to be that the Stillmans have brought their colored servant Sofi with them to America. Sitting on the attractive outdoor patio with its swimming pool and view of a sagebrush-and scrub-filled canyon, Mark watches Sofi move among the guests with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. “It’s déjà vu all over again,” he says to his father. As if on cue, the hostess calls out: “Sofi, my girl, just bring me one of those cold drinks, quick now.” Mark wonders where Sofi stays. Does she have a little room to herself in the house or are there some servants’ quarters on the grounds? Does she perhaps live in the Mexican neighborhood and ride a bus to her missis’ house? He remembers how he and Lenny had once gone over to the servants’ quarters in The Mews, the oldest section of flats in the Eden complex. They had noticed an open window in one of the rooms and had climbed up the drainpipe to peer inside. The interior of the servant’s room was disappointing; it smelled musty and stale and there was no mystery to the cramped space with its iron bedstead, humble bedside table and ancient radio. Their expedition was not a complete failure, though. A maid from The Mews spotted them and she chased them several hundred yards, swatting at them with a rolled-up magazine and calling them cockroaches.

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Mark finds himself in conversation with a pasty-faced South African girl of about his own age who works in advertising. She tells him she is not really worried about events in South Africa. “You see, my parents have a flat in London. So if things get really bad, they can always move there.” She confides that she herself left because “you just can’t make money there any­ more.” Luckily the host is calling everybody to gather around him, and Mark is able to extricate himself from having to make further polite conversation. The party is in honor of the fact that the Stillmans have just been granted US citizenship, and now an enormous three-tier cake in the colors of the American flag is brought out. The guests’ doubts as to whether to salute the cake or eat it are quickly dispelled by the host carving triangular shaped wedges in it with a large knife. Mark takes a piece of what turns out to be mainly vanilla ice cream and goes to sit with his mother, who is deep in conversation with Sofi. “I’m saving money so’s I can buy one of those little houses in Dube,” Sofi is saying. “But it’s lonely here, missis. I wish I could leave tomorrow.” Later, Sofi shows Lena Spiegelman some black-and-white snapshots of her grandchildren. Mark glances over their shoulders to get a glimpse of a tall, thin African child looking shyly to the right of the camera, his hand resting on his smaller brother’s shoulder. “And this one must be Vusi?” his mother is saying while Sofi beams with pleasure. Mark’s father is amused. The previous night he and his wife had argued for a long time over the fact that a friend of theirs was extremely upset that her son had married a Zulu woman. Charles had remarked that the woman was just being prejudiced; as long as the son’s wife was a decent person, what did it matter what color she was? Mark’s mother had disagreed. She felt that there were always problems when people of different backgrounds married. “You know,” Charles says now, “your mother is the only person I know who can spend the afternoon talking to the maid without making it seem like condescension. “I think she can get away with it,” he adds, after some thought, “because she’s really not a liberal.” Dearest Mam &Master, I hope this letter to find you in good health. Wishing you a very happy Pasach holiday over the week and a happy Easter. Sorry for having delayed so long to write and say thanks for what you are doing for me. Its because I have been in hospital for 3 weeks I went for a check up and they kept me there saying my high blood was too low they kept me from the 27 March I only got discharged on Saturday 14th April They gave me tablets for my high blood. I was alright all of a sudden the nurses gave me different tablets till I left. they gave the right ones and the other 2 kinds which they gave me there which I dont know I know which is the right ones, on arriving home they phoned

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I must throw the other 2 pks away as they are the wrong ones. I went to hosp. again I went to the physiartricist yesterday I still do not feel right. I only hope for the best. Please thank Joel, Mark, Master not forgetting yourself for everything you are doing for me. Mrs Giffin got me the money from the Standard Bank. Thanks also to master for the note he enclosed for me. When phoning to Dixie, Joel give them my regards. . . . Mark’s parents are told about a low-priced package tour and they make their first trip back to South Africa in fifteen years. On their first night back in the States, Mark talks to them on the telephone. They sound hoarse and exhausted; the tour was “an absolute whirlwind, no time to even catch our breath,” they tell him. “I’d forgotten how beautiful the country is,” his father says. “And we saw the most magnificent game at Kruger. You would have loved it.” “We went back to Eden Gardens,” his mother chimes in from another extension. “It was very different, everything was locked up and you had to ring a bell at the main entrance just to get in. So we rang the bell, and this huge African with a bald head opened it and says: ‘What do you want?’ Then he looks at us and yells ‘One-Oh-Five,’ and he throws his arms around your father.” “It was Suleiman,” Mr. Spiegelman says. This was the day watchman who used to shout at Mark for riding a bicycle in the parking garage, back when they lived in 105 Eden Gardens. “Oh, he was so happy to see us. He kept asking, ‘How’s Mark? How’s Joel?’ It was quite touching.” “I asked him about Doreen,” Mark’s mother adds. “He also thought she must have died. He said she went funny in the head toward the end, but I’m not sure I believe him. Suleiman was always such a liar.” . . . Winter is closing in we only get rain now some days its hot some days cold The kids are wearing jerseys to school already coming home trying them around their waists. They are all keeping well I am going to buy myself warm underwear and a coat with my present you know I am always cold in winter although I like winter because in summer I always get those hot flashes. Thank you for all you are doing for me love to master not forgetting yourself tell Mutt to not be so lazy and write the money was R.89.60. Love Dor.

Appendix History of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award

The Edward Lewis Wallant Award was established in 1963 by Irving and Fran Waltman of West Hartford to honor the memory of the author shortly after his untimely death in December 1962 at the age of 36. Wallant was the author of The Human Season (1960) and The Pawnbroker (1961); his last two books, The Tenants of Moonbloom and The Children at the Gate, were published after his death. Born in New Haven, Wallant served in the US Navy during World War II and later studied art at the Pratt Institute in New York. At the time of his death, he was art director of the McCann-Erickson advertising agency in New York and a resident of Norwalk, CT. Wallant was survived by his widow, Joyce Franklin Wallant; his mother, Anna Mendel Wallant of New Haven; and three children, Scott, Leslie, and Kim. A member of the New York Writers Guild, he had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship the year he died and had been the recipient of the Daroff Memorial Fiction Award of the Jewish Book Council for The Human Season in 1960. Fran Waltman started a book club in West Hartford in the 1950s to read works important to American Jews, compiling a reading list from the New York Times Book Review and other sources. In 1960, her book club read their first Wallant novel, The Human Season, and after that, The Pawnbroker. On December 5, 1962, Wallant died of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. “Our book group was deeply touched by these books, and when I read of Wallant’s untimely death at the age of 36, I felt impelled to do something to memorialize this writer,” Fran Waltman recalled in an interview conducted in 2003 upon the fortieth anniversary of the award. Waltman placed an ad in the January 17, 1963, newsletter of the Emanuel Synagogue in West Hartford, where she and her family were members: Many of us read with disbelief of the recent tragic passing of Edward Lewis Wallant of Norwalk. Those of us who admired this gifted young author only 38 years of age [sic], would like to perpetuate his memory by establishing a living 555

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memorial in our Emanuel Library. It is hoped we may have a shelf bearing his name and that each year on his Yahrtzeit we will purchase a singular book of fiction, a book worthy of being placed on this particular shelf. The first award judges were Rabbi Samuel Dresner of Congregation Beth El in Springfield, MA, Chana Rosen, a teacher and book reviewer, and Dr. Lothar Kahn, professor of modern languages at Central Connecticut State College (now University) in New Britain. Later judges included Dr. Sanford Pinsker (Franklin and Marshall), Dr. Daniel Walden (Pennsylvania State University), and Dr. Lillian Kremer (Kansas State University). The award was set up to recognize an American writer whose published creative work of fiction is considered to have significance for the American Jew. The panel of judges annually seeks an author, preferably younger and unrecognized, whose fiction bears a kinship to the work of Wallant. The first award was granted to Norman Fruchter for his novel, Coat Upon a Stick, on March 22, 1964, at the Greater Hartford Jewish Community Center (now the Mandell Jewish Community Center). When the University of Hartford established the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies in 1986, the Waltmans moved administration of the award to the school. The award is today one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish literary awards in the United States. The current judges are Victoria Aarons, the O. R. & Eva Mitchell Endowed Chair in Literature at Trinity University (San Antonio), where she is chair of the English Department; Mark Shechner, emeritus professor of English at the University at Buffalo; Ezra Cappell, associate professor of English and director of the Inter-American Jewish Studies Program at the University of Texas at El Paso; and Thane Rosenbaum, essayist, novelist, and John Whelan Distinguished Lecturer in Law at Fordham Law School. The award is now coordinated by Avinoam Patt, the Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, University of Hartford.

Past Recipients (by year of award) 2013. Kenneth Bonert, The Lion Seeker 2012. Joshua Henkin, The World Without You 2011. Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision 2010. Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge 2009. Sara Houghteling, Pictures at an Exhibition 2008. Eileen Pollack, In the Mouth 2007. Ehud Havazelet, Bearing the Body 2006. No Award

appendix  557

2005. Nicole Krauss, The History of Love 2004. Jonathan Rosen, Joy Comes in the Morning 2003. Joan Leegant, An Hour in Paradise 2002. Dara Horn, In the Image 2001. Myla Goldberg, Bee Season 2000. Judy Budnitz, If I Told You Once 1999. Allegra Goodman, Kaaterskill Falls 1998. No Award 1997. Harvey Grossinger, The Quarry 1996. Thane Rosenbaum, Elijah Visible 1995. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Mazel 1994. No Award 1993. Gerald Shapiro, From Hunger 1992. Melvin Jules Bukiet, Stories of an Imaginary Childhood 1991. No Award 1990. No Award 1989. Jerome Badanes, The Final Opus of Leon Solomon 1988. Tova Reich, Master of the Return 1987. Steve Stern, Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven 1986. Daphne Merkin, Enchantment 1985. Jay Neugeboren, Before My Life Began 1984. No Award 1983. Francine Prose, Hungry Hearts 1982. No Award 1981. Allen Hoffman, Kagan’s Superfecta 1980. Johanna Kaplan, Oh My America! 1979. No Award 1978. No Award 1977. Curt Leviant, The Yemenite Girl 1976. No Award 1975. Anne Bernays, Growing Up Rich 1974. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Anya 1973. Arthur A. Cohen, In the Days of Simon Stern 1972. Robert Kotlowitz, Somewhere Else 1971. Cynthia Ozick, The Pagan Rabbi 1970. No Award 1969. Leo Litwak, Waiting for the News 1968. No Award. 1967. Chaim Potok, The Chosen

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1966. 1965. 1964. 1963.

Gene Horowitz, Home is Where You Start From Hugh Nissenson, A Pile of Stones Seymour Epstein, Leah Norman Fruchter, Coat Upon a Stick

Contributors

Editors Victoria Aarons holds the position of O. R. and Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature and chair of the English Department at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. She is the author of A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction and What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction, both recipients of the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book. She is a contributor to the two-volume compendium Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work, and she has been an invited speaker on a variety of programs devoted to Jewish studies, including the eightieth birthday celebration/symposium for Elie Wiesel, and “Philip Roth Between Past and Future: Literature, History and Ethics,” an international symposium sponsored by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. Her work has appeared in a number of scholarly venues, and she is on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal, and the Saul Bellow Journal. She is the recipient of the Piper Professor Award for Outstanding Scholarly and Academic Achievement and the Z. T. Scott Faculty Fellowship for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching and Advising. She is currently working on a book on third-generation Holocaust representation.

Avinoam J. Patt is the Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, where he is also director of the Museum of Jewish Civilization. Previously, he worked as the Miles Lerman Applied Research Scholar for Jewish Life and Culture at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). He received his Ph.D. in Modern European History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University. His first book, Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (published by Wayne State University Press, May 2009) examines the appeal of Zionism for young survivors in Europe in the aftermath of the Holocaust and their role in the creation of the 559

560  contributors

state of Israel. He is also the co-editor (with Michael Berkowitz) of a collected volume on Jewish Displaced Persons, titled We are Here: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Wayne State University Press, February 2010). He is a contributor to several projects at the USHMM, and is co-author of the source volume, Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938–1940 (USHMM/Alta Mira Press, September 2011). He has also published articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia articles on various topics related to Jewish life and culture before, during, and after the Holocaust. Patt teaches courses on modern Jewish history, American Jewish history, Jewish responses to the Holocaust, the history of Zionism and the State of Israel, Jewish film, and modern Jewish literature, among others.

Mark Shechner is Professor Emeritus at the University at Buffalo. He is author of After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish American Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); The Conversion of the Jews and Other Essays (London: The Macmillan Press, 1990), and Up Society’s Ass, Copper: The Fiction of Philip Roth (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2003). He is editor of Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), and, with Jean Carney, Jewish Writers and The Deep Places of the Imagination, selected essays by Mark Krupnick (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2005). His essays and reviews have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Salmagundi, Tikkun, and numerous anthologies and collections. He has been since 2007 one of the judges of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award.

Contributors David Bezmozgis is a writer and filmmaker whose stories have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Zoetrope All-Story, and The Walrus. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, was published in 2004 in the US and Canada and was subsequently translated into fifteen languages. Natasha was a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award (UK), the Los Angeles First Book Award (US), and the Governor General’s Award (Canada). It won the Toronto Book Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for a First Book. The Free World, David’s first novel, was published in 2011 in the US, Canada, the UK, Holland, Germany, Italy, France, Israel, and Spain. It was a New York Times Notable Book for 2011 and a Globe and Mail Best Books Title for 2011. It was also shortlisted for the Scotiabank/Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Prize, and won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Bezmozgis has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, and a Radcliffe Fellow. Born in Riga, Latvia, David lives in Toronto.

contributors  561

Melvin Jules Bukiet is the author of seven books of fiction and the editor of three anthologies. His books include Sandman’s Dust (1985), Stories of an Imaginary Childhood (1992), After (1997), While the Messiah Tarries (stories, 1997), Signs and Wonders (2000), Strange Fire (2002), and A Faker’s Dozen (2003). He has edited the collections Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex (2000), Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors (2003), and Scribblers on the Roof: Contemporary Jewish Fiction (2006), and was winner of the 1992 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Stories of an Imaginary Childhood. His writing has been translated into a dozen languages. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and other magazines. His occasional nonfiction has appeared in The American Scholar and other magazines. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times and other newspapers, his book reviews in the Washington Post and other newspapers. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

Nathan Englander is the author of the story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2012), as well as the internationally bestselling story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999), and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases (2007). His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and the Washington Post, as well as The O. Henry Prize Stories and numerous editions of The Best American Short Stories. Translated into more than a dozen languages, Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He has been a fellow at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and at The American Academy of Berlin. He teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Hunter College along with Peter Carey and Colum McCann, and, in the summer, he teaches a course for NYU’s Writers in Paris program. In 2012, Englander’s play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at The Public Theater, and his translation New American Haggadah (edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2012) was published by Little Brown. He also co-translated Etgar Keret’s Suddenly A Knock at the Door (2012). He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin.

Tony Eprile is a South African writer now living in Vermont. He is the author of Temporary Sojourner and Other South African Stories (1989), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Persistence of Memory (2004), which won the Koret Jewish Book Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was listed as a best book of 2004 by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at BarIlan University, Northwestern University, Williams College, Bennington College, and

562  contributors

the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he is currently on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing.

Joseph Epstein, the editor of the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s The American Scholar magazine from 1974 to 1998, is an essayist, editor, and fiction writer. A partial list of his books includes Divorced in America: Marriage in an Age of Possibility (1974), Ambition: The Secret Passion (1980), Snobbery: The American Version (2002), Envy (2003), Friendship: An Exposé (2006), Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy’s Guide (2006), Fred Astaire (2008), and Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit (2011). Essay collections include Middle of My Tether: Familiar Essays (1983), Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing (1985), Once More Around the Block: Familiar Essays (1987), Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives (1988), A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays (1991), Pertinent Players: Essays on the Literary Life (1993), With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays (1995), Life Sentences: Literary Essays (1997), Narcissus Leaves the Pool: Familiar Essays (1999, paperback 2007), In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage (2007), and most recently Essays in Biography (2012). His fiction has been collected in The Goldin Boys: Stories (1991), Fabulous Small Jews (2003), and The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff and Other Stories (2010), and he is the author, most recently, of Essays in Biography (2012) and, with Frederic Raphael, of Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (2013). A new collection of his essays, A Literary Education, will be published in 2014 by Axios Press.

Jonathan Safran Foer was born in 1977. Foer has had stories published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Conjunctions. He is the editor of an anthology inspired by the bird boxes of Joseph Cornell, A Convergence of Birds (D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2002), which won the V&A Illustration Award 2007. His libretto “Seven Attempted Escapes from Silence” was performed by the Berlin State Opera House in September 2005, and he collaborated on a book called Joe with Hiroshi Sugimoto and Richard Serra. Foer’s first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin), was published when he was twenty-five in 2002; an extract appeared in The New Yorker’s annual Début Fiction Issue, and the novel quickly established itself as an international bestseller. The paperback edition was published in April 2003 with ten different-colored jackets and has gone through over thirty printings. A movie based on the book was released by Warner Independent (September 2005), starring Elijah Wood as Jonathan Safran Foer, Eugene Hutz as Alex, with Peter Saraf as producer and Liev Schreiber directing. Foer’s next novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was published by Houghton Mifflin (2005) and went straight onto national and international bestseller lists. In 2007, he was selected by Granta for their “Best of Young American Novelists II” issue, and in 2010 he was included on The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list of the best young writers in

contributors  563

the US. A movie based on the book was released by Warner/Scott Rudin Productions in December 2012. This was followed by a work of nonfiction, Eating Animals (November 2009), an instant New York Times and international bestseller in both hardback and paperback and currently under option as a documentary. His next book, his edition of The New American Haggadah, with a new translation by Nathan Englander (Little, Brown and Company, 2012), has been reprinted many times. He is now working on a novel, forthcoming in 2014, from Little, Brown.

Myla Goldberg is the author of the bestselling Bee Season, which was a New York Times Notable Book for 2000, winner of the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Borders New Voices Prize, and a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/ PEN Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Bee Season has been adapted to film and widely translated. Her essay collection, Time’s Magpie (2004), explores all her favorite places in Prague, where she lived for a year in the early nineties. Her novel Wickett’s Remedy (2006) grew out of her fascination with the 1918 influenza epidemic and explores the nature of human ambition and the frailty of individual and collective memory. Her third novel, The False Friend, was published in 2010. Her short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and Failbetter, among other places. Her book reviews have appeared in the New York Times and Bookforum, and her illustrated children’s book, Catching the Moon (2007), was recently released in paperback. She writes and teaches in New York City.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. Her work in philosophy includes Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (2005), which was chosen by Discover Magazine as one of the best ten science books published in 2005, and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006), which won the 2006 Koret International Award for Jewish Thought. Plato in the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away will be published in 2014. Her second career is as a novelist. Her first novel was the critically acclaimed bestseller The Mind-Body Problem (1993), and there have been six more works of fiction since, including a collection of stories, Strange Attractors (1993); Mazel (1995), which won the National Jewish Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award; Properties of Light: A Novel of Love; Betrayal and Quantum Physics (2000); and The Dark Sister (2004), which won the Whiting Writers Award. Her latest novel is Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (2010). Goldstein has received numerous awards and fellowships for her scholarship and fiction. In 1996, Goldstein received the MacArthur “Genius” Prize for her ability to “dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling.” She was elected into the Academy of American Arts and Sciences

564  contributors

in 2005 and was named the Humanist of the Year in 2010 by the American Humanist Association.

Harvey Grossinger received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for his novella and short story collection, The Quarry (1997). He also has won the Nelson Algren Award, and his short fiction publications include New England Review, Mid-American Review, Western Humanities Review, Cimarron Review, and The Chicago Tribune. Grossinger earned a BA in English from NYU, an MA (and ABD) in English from Indiana University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. He has taught fiction in the Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University since 1999, and has taught in the Literature Department at American University since 1990. He also has taught at the Honors College at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the cofounder and administrator of Moment magazine’s Annual Short Story Contest, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and reviews literary fiction for The Houston Chronicle. He lives in the Washington, DC, area.

Ehud Havazelet has published two story collections: What Is It Then Between Us? (1988) and Like Never Before (1998), and the novel Bearing the Body (2007). The latter two were named New York Times Notable Books. His work has been published in many literary journals, the New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and Pushcart Prize collections. Awards include California and Oregon Book Awards, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for 2007 (Bearing the Body), and fellowships from Stanford, the Whiting, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundations. The recipient of an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, he became a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, from 1985 to 1989, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He taught creative writing at Oregon State University from 1989 to 1999. Since 1999, he has taught at the University of Oregon, where he holds the position of Professor of Creative Writing and lives with his family in Corvallis, Oregon.

Joshua Henkin is the author of the novels Swimming Across the Hudson (1997), a Los Angeles Times Notable Book, and Matrimony (2007), a New York Times Notable Book. His most recent novel, The World Without You (2012), was named an Editors’ Choice Book by The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune and is the winner of the 2012 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction. It is also a finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award. His short stories have been published widely, cited for distinction in Best American Short Stories, and broadcast on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and directs the MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College.

contributors  565

Dara Horn was born in New Jersey in 1977 and received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University in 2006, studying Hebrew and Yiddish. In 2007 she was chosen by Granta magazine as one of the Best Young American Novelists. Her first novel, In the Image, published by W. W. Norton when she was twenty-five, received a 2003 National Jewish Book Award, the 2002 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the 2003 Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The World to Come, published by W. W. Norton in 2006, received a 2006 National Jewish Book Award, the 2007 Harold U. Ribalow Prize, was an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times Book Review, and one of the Best Books of 2006 in The San Francisco Chronicle, and has been translated into eleven languages. Her third novel, All Other Nights, published in 2009 by W. W. Norton, was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review and was one of Booklist’s 25 Best Books of the Decade. In 2012, her nonfiction e-book The Rescuer was published by Tablet magazine and became a Kindle bestseller. Her fourth novel, A Guide for the Perplexed, was published by W. W. Norton in 2013. She has taught courses in Jewish literature and Israeli history at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence College, and City University of New York, and has lectured at over two hundred universities and cultural institutions throughout North America and in Israel. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.

Sara Houghteling is the author of Pictures at An Exhibition (Knopf, 2009), a New York Times Editors’ Pick, San Francisco Chronicle Best of 2009 Book, the 2009 Edward Lewis Wallant Award recipient, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She holds a BA from Harvard and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, a Camargo Fellowship, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is currently the Nancy Packer Lecturer in Continuing Studies at Stanford, and lives in Palo Alto with her husband and their son.

Rachel Kadish is the author of the novels From a Sealed Room (1998) and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story (2006). Her short fiction has been read on National Public Radio and has appeared in journals including Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Prairie Schooner, and BOMB, in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and in various other anthologies. Her essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, The Good Men Project, Tin House, and Babble, as well as in anthologies such as The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt and Who We Are: On Being (And Not Being) a Jewish Writer in America. She is a graduate of Princeton University and holds an MA in creative writing from New York University, has been a fiction fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Harvard/Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute, is the recipient of the John Gardner Fiction Award as well as the Koret Foundation’s Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award, and

566  contributors

was a writer-in-residence at Stanford University. She lives outside Boston, where she teaches fiction in Lesley University’s MFA program and is a Research Associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.

Nadia Kalman is a former fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a current fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts. Her first novel was The Cosmopolitans (2010), which drew upon her family’s experiences as Soviet immigrants in suburban Connecticut. It won the Emerging Writer Award from Moment magazine and was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature. An excerpt from Kalman’s novel-in-progress, The Skeptical Alchemist, was published in PEN America this fall. She lives in Brooklyn.

Jonathon Keats is a critic, journalist, novelist, and artist. He is the art critic for San Francisco Magazine, writes a weekly art column for Forbes.com, and has contributed art criticism to Art & Antiques, Art + Auction, Art in America, and Salon. His writing on the arts and sciences has also appeared in Wired Magazine, the Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. He is most recently the author of Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age, published by Oxford University Press in 2013, and Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology, published by Oxford University Press in 2011. His fiction includes The Pathology of Lies (1999) and The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six (2009), an imaginative adventure into Jewish lore and old world village life, which was awarded the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal in 2010. His conceptual art has been exhibited at venues including the Berkeley Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the Wellcome Collection. Keats has been awarded fellowships by Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the MacNamara Foundation, and the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona, and has chaired the National Book Critics Circle fiction award committee. He lives in San Francisco.

Joan Leegant is the author of two books of fiction. Her novel, Wherever You Go (W. W. Norton, 2010), set in Israel and about Jewish religious and political extremism, was named by the Union for Reform Judaism as one of its Significant Jewish Books for 2010. Her story collection, An Hour in Paradise (W. W. Norton, 2003), in addition to winning the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, won the Winship/PEN New England Book Award and was a Selection for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Series and finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Recent story prizes include the Nelligan Prize from Colorado Review, the Moment magazine­–Karma Foundation Fiction Award, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. From 2007 to 2013, Leegant lived in Tel Aviv for half of

contributors  567

each year, where she was the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University and lectured widely for the US Embassy on American literature and writing. She is a graduate of Harvard College, Boston University School of Law, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program. For eight years she taught writing at Harvard. For the academic year 2013–2014, she is a visiting assistant professor at Oklahoma State University. When not in some other part of the world, she makes her home in Newton, Massachusetts.

Curt Leviant was born in Vienna in 1932 and came to the United States in 1938. He received his BA from CUNY (Brooklyn), his MA from Columbia, and his Ph.D. from Rutgers, where he taught Jewish studies from 1960. He is the author of The Yemenite Girl (1978), a recipient of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award; Passion in the Desert (1980); The Man Who Thought He Was Messiah (1990); Partita in Venice (1999); Diary of an Adulterous Woman: A Novel: Including an ABC Dictionary That Offers Alphabetical Tidbits and Surprises (2001); Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet; Weekend in Mustara: Two Novellas (2002), and most recently, A Novel of Klass (2008), and Zix Zexy Ztories (2012). He is also a prolific translator and has translated from Yiddish to English many books from noted authors such as Sholem Aleichem, Chaim Grade, Lamed Shapiro, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. His stories have appeared in many American magazines and have been included in Best American Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and other anthologies.

Robert Majzels, born in 1950 in Montreal, is a Canadian novelist, poet, playwright, and translator. In 1986, he graduated with a Master’s degree in English Literature from Concordia University in Montreal, where he then taught creative writing for several years. Between 2000 and 2002, he lived in Beijing, China, and studied Chinese. He presently lives in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada and teaches at the University of Calgary. Majzels’s works explore both the limits of language and narrative forms and their ethical repercussions. His novels highlight the artificiality of Western literary language, especially its linearity, archetypal narratives, and the ways in which it works to establish characters as believable personae. Apikoros Sleuth (2003) experiments with a Talmudic form, noted for its polyphonic, discursive, and digressive qualities. Majzels’s publications include the novels Hellman’s Scrapbook (1992), City of Forgetting (1997), and The Humbugs Diet (2007). With Erín Moure, he has translated several books of poetry by the Québec francophone poet Nicole Brossard--Installations (2000), Museum of Bone and Water (2002), Notebook of Roses and Civilization (2007), and The White Piano (2013). He has also translated the following novels by Acadian author France Daigle: 1953: Chronicle of a Birth Foretold (1997), Just Fine (1999), A Fine Passage (2002), Life’s Little Difficulties (2004), and For Sure (2013). His most recent publication, entitled

568  contributors

85 (2013), is a collaboration with sinologist Claire Huot. The work is a set of five books, each containing seventeen visual poems. Four of the books are based on Chinese texts (canonical Tang dynasty poets, seventeenth-century inkbrush painter Bada Shanren, Tang dynasty female poet Xue Tao, and Mao Zedong’s Quotations). The fifth book is based on “The Song of Songs.”

Avner Mandelman was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War. His literary thriller The Debba (2011) won the Canadian Ellis Award for the best first Canadian crime novel, and was long listed for the Canadian Giller prize. Two of Mandelman’s story collections have been published in Canada. The US story collection Talking to the Enemy (2005) was chosen by Kirkus as one of the twenty-five best books of 2005, and by the ALA as the first recipient of the Sophie Brody Medal for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature. Several of his stories have won awards in the US, Canada, and Israel, including being selected for the Pushcart Prize and the Journey Prize. His short story, “Pity,” was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 1995. Avner Mandelman has a BS from the Israeli Technion, an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and an MA in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. He lives in Toronto and is working on another novel: The Undertaker (Tel Aviv Noir).

Scott Nadelson is the author of a memoir, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress (2013); and three story collections, Aftermath (2011), The Cantor’s Daughter (2006), and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories (2004). A winner of the Oregon Book Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, and the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Prize for Jewish Fiction, he teaches creative writing at Willamette University and in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Peter Orner, a native of Chicago, has seen both his fiction and nonfiction published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Granta, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, The Forward, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Ploughshares. His first collection, Esther Stories (2001), was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a finalist for the Hemingway/ PEN Award and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. The novel The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (2006) is set in Namibia, where Orner lived and worked in the early 1990s and was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. He is also the author of the

contributors  569

novel Love and Shame and Love (2011) and a second collection of stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge (2013) and is the editor of two nonfiction books, Underground America (2008) and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives (co-editor Annie Holmes, 2010), both published by McSweeney’s/​Voice of Witness, an imprint devoted to using oral history to illuminate human-rights crises around the world. His short stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice won a Pushcart Prize. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), as well as the two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship (2007–2008). Orner is a longtime permanent faculty member at San Francisco State, where he is a professor.

Julie Orringer is the author of The Invisible Bridge (Knopf, 2010), a novel and winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and How to Breathe Underwater, a short-story collection (Knopf, 2003). Her stories have been published in The Yale Review, where they’ve twice been awarded the Editors’ Prize for best story of the year; The Paris Review, which awarded her the Discovery Prize in 1998; Ploughshares, which selected her work for the Cohen Award for Best Fiction; Zoetrope All-Story, which nominated her for a National Magazine Award; and in the Washington Post Magazine. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction. She is a 1996 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a two-year Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford from 1999–2001, and was Stanford’s Marsh McCall Lecturer in Fiction from 2001–2003. Orringer has been the Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary’s College of California and California College of the Arts, and was the Helen Herzog Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. From 2008–2009, she was the Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and in the fall of 2009 she taught at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer Ryan Harty, and she is at work on a novel about Varian Fry.

Edith Pearlman has published more than 250 works of short fiction and short nonfiction in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies, and online publications. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Collection, New Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize Collection—Best of the Small Presses. Her first collection of stories, Vaquita (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), won the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature. Her second, Love Among The Greats (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002), won the Spokane Annual Fiction Prize. Her third collection, How to Fall (Sarabande Press, 2005), won the

570  contributors

Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her fourth collection Binocular Vision (2011), received several awards including the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. It was published in the UK by Pushkin Press in 2013. She is the recipient of the 2011 PEN/ Malamud award for excellence in short fiction, honoring her four collections of stories. Recent Pearlman stories have or will appear in, among other places, The American Scholar, The Antioch Review, Ecotone, and Orion. She grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and now lives with her husband in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Eileen Pollack grew up in Liberty, NY, the heart of the Jewish Catskills, where her grandparents operated a small hotel and her father was the town dentist. Her most recent novel, Breaking and Entering (Four Way Books, 2012), was awarded the Grub Street National Book Prize and named a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. In the Mouth (Four Way Books, 2008), a collection of short fiction and novellas, was named the winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, in addition to being shortlisted for the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish literature. Eileen’s earlier books include the novel Paradise, New York (Temple University Press, 1998) and the story collection The Rabbi in the Attic (Delphinium Press, 1991). Her novella “The Bris” was chosen to appear in the Best American Short Stories 2007 anthology, edited by Stephen King. She is the former director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, where she still teaches.

Francine Prose is the author of many bestselling books of fiction, including Judah the Pious (1973), The Glorious Ones (1974), Marie Laveau (1977), Animal Magnetism (1978), Household Saints (1981), Hungry Hearts (1983), Bigfoot Dreams (1986), Women and Children First (1988), Primitive People (1992), Hunters and Gatherers (1995), Guided Tours of Hell (1997), The Peaceable Kingdom (1998), Blue Angel (2000), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, After (2003), A Changed Man (2005), Goldengrove (2008), Touch (2009), My New American Life (2011), and The Turning (2012). Among her nonfiction works, Reading Like a Writer (2006) was a New York Times bestseller. Her novel Household Saints was adapted for a movie by Nancy Savoca. Another novel, The Glorious Ones, has been adapted into a musical of the same name by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, which ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York City in the Fall of 2007. She is the president of PEN American Center and lives in New York City.

Tova Reich is the author of the novels The Jewish War (Pantheon, 1995), Master of the Return (Harcourt, 1999), Mara (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001) and My Holocaust (Harper, 2008), Her most recent novel is One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (Counterpoint, 2013). Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, AGNI, and elsewhere. She has written essays and reviews for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Leader,

contributors  571

Wilson Quarterly, and other publications. In addition to the Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award, she is the recipient of the National Magazine Award for Fiction as well as other prizes. She lives on the fringe of Washington, DC.

Jonathan Rosen is the author, most recently, of The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature (2008). He is the author of an earlier work of nonfiction, The Talmud and the Internet (2001), and of two novels, Eve’s Apple (2004) and Joy Comes in the Morning (2005), for which he was the recipient of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and numerous anthologies. He created the culture section of the Forward newspaper, which he oversaw for ten years. He is currently the editorial director of Nextbook Inc, where he created the “Jewish Encounters” series, which he edits, and which is published by Schocken Books in collaboration with Nextbook.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, and law professor, the author of novel-instories, the novels Elijah Visible (1999), Second Hand Smoke (2000), and The Golems of Gotham (2003), and, most recently, the novel for young adults, The Stranger Within Sarah Stein (2012). His articles, reviews, and essays appear frequently in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, and The Daily Beast, among other national publications. He moderates an annual series of discussions on culture and politics at the 92nd Street Y called “The Talk Show.” He is the John Whelan Distinguished Lecturer in Law at Fordham Law School, where he directs the Forum on Law, Culture & Society. He is the author of The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What’s Right (2005), and the editor of the anthology, Law Lit: From Atticus Finch to “The Practice”: A Collection of Great Writing about the Law (2007). His most recent book of nonfiction is entitled Payback: The Case for Revenge (2013).

Gerald Shapiro was the author of From Hunger: Stories (1993), for which he received the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, Bad Jews and Other Stories (2000), and Little Men: Novellas and Stories (2004). He was editor of American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories (1998) and was Cather Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Shapiro received a BA and MA from the University of Kansas; an MFA from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Shapiro lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife, the writer Judith Slater before his untimely death in October 2011.

572  contributors

Maxim D. Shrayer, bilingual author and scholar, was born in Moscow, in 1967, to a Jewish-Russian family, and spent nine years as a refusenik. He and his parents left the USSR and immigrated to the United States in 1987. Shrayer is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College, where he co-founded the Jewish Studies Program. He has authored and edited over ten books of criticism, biography, nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and translation, among them the critical studies The World of Nabokov’s Stories (2000) and Russian Poet/Soviet Jew (2000). He is the author of the literary memoir Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration (2007), which chronicles the experience of Soviet Jewish refugees in Austria and Italy, and of the story collection Yom Kippur in Amsterdam (2009). He has also edited and co-translated three books of fiction by his father, David Shrayer-Petrov. Shrayer won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award for his two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, and in 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research on Jewish-Russian poets bearing witness to the Shoah. Shrayer’s most recent books, I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah and Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story, appeared in 2013. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife and their two daughters.

Margot Singer is the author of a collection of linked stories, The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, and the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. She is also the co-editor of Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (Bloomsbury, 2013). Her most recent stories and essays have appeared in The Normal School, The New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the Thomas H. Carter Prize for the Essay and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose. A graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Utah, Singer is currently the Dominic Consolo Professor of English at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, where she directs the creative writing program.

Joseph Skibell is the author of three novels. His first, A Blessing on the Moon (1997), received the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His second, The English Disease (2003), received the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and his third, A Curable Romantic (2011), received the Sami Rohr Award in Jewish Literature. His short stories and essays have appeared in Story, Tikkun, the New York Times, and Poets & Writers, among other periodicals, and he has written or translated essays for three books of photographs: Loli Kantor’s There was a Forest, Neil Folberg’s The Serpent’s Chronicle, and Fred Stein: Paris New York. He is the author of a one-man play titled 10 Faces, and he collaborated on the libretto for an opera based on A Blessing on the Moon with the composer Andy Teirstein. Widely

contributors  573

anthologized, his work has been translated into numerous languages, most recently Ido and Chinese. A recipient of a Halls Fellowship, a Michener Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Skibell was inducted into the Sami Rohr Literary Institute in 2011. He has taught at the Michener Center for Writers, the University of Wisconsin, the Humber School for Writers, the Taos Summer Writers Conference, and Bar-Ilan University. A professor of English at Emory University, he is the director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. A fourth book, Six Memos from the Fifth Millennium, a mythopoetic meditation on the Talmud, is forthcoming.

Steve Stern was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1947, the son of a grocer. He studied writing in the graduate program at the University of Arkansas and subsequently moved to London before returning to Memphis in his thirties to accept a job at a local folklore center. He published his first book, the story collection Isaac and the Undertaker’s Daughter, which was based in the old Jewish quarter of Memphis, in 1983. It won the Pushcart Writers’ Choice Award and acclaim from notable critics. He subsequently published the collections The Moon and Ruben Shein (1984) and Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (1986), which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, as well as two children’s books, Mickey and the Golem (1986) and Hershel and the Beast (1986), the novel Harry Kaplan’s Adventures Underground (1991), and A Plague of Dreamers: Three Novellas (1994). His collection The Wedding Jester (1999) won the National Jewish Book Award, and his novel The Angel of Forgetfulness was named one of the best books of 2005 by the Washington Post. He has also been the recipient of the O. Henry Award and two Pushcart Prize awards. Stern, who teaches at Skidmore College, has been the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright and the Guggenheim foundations. He currently lives in Ballston Spa, New York, and his latest works include the novel The Frozen Rabbi, published in 2010, and the short story collection, The Book of Mischief (2012).

Aryeh Lev Stollman is a neuroradiologist at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City and the author of the novel The Far Euphrates (1997), which was named an American Library Association Notable Book of 1997, a Los Angeles Times Book Review Recommended Book of the Year and National Book Critics Circle Notable Book of 1997. The Far Euphrates has been translated into German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, and Hebrew. His second novel, The Illuminated Soul (2003), is a winner of Hadassah Magazine’s 2003 Harold U. Ribalow Prize. Stollman’s short fiction has appeared in Story, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, and The Southwest Review. His story collection The Dialogues of Time and Entropy was also published in 2003. “Lotte Returns!” a story commissioned by National Public Radio, was broadcast on their Hanukkah Lights 2008 series. He is currently working on a new novel.

574  contributors

Lara Vapnyar came to the United States from Russia in 1994. She is the author of two collections of short stories, There Are Jews in My House (2004) and Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love (2009), as well as the acclaimed novel Memoirs of a Muse (2006). She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Goldberg Prize for Jewish fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s, and The New Republic. Her most recent novel is The Scent of Pine (2014).

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments can cover such an expanse of ground that once you’ve started you can’t be certain of where you are supposed to stop. You want to be able to thank people for inspiration, for encouragement, for problem solving, for leads and contributions, for unexpected labor, for all the essential extras that make a wide-ranging project of this kind possible. The actual labor that the editors devoted to the book, even while maintaining our normal teaching and research commitments, our lives outside the seminar and the office, and our steady routine of reading for the Wallant Award, came to a bit under three and a half years. During that time, our paths intersected those of so many others who left their marks on the project. For inspiration, we thank the Waltmans, Dr. Irving and his wife Fran, who established the Edward Lewis Wallant Award in 1963 and pursued it decade after decade with vigor and persistence, as well as uncanny foresight into what careers were likely to make a sustained impact upon literature. For those of us who have been involved in the award, their zeal has been contagious, and their hosting of each year’s recipient and guests at the annual banquet and ceremony has been both gracious and haimish. They embody in their own lives the phrase “people of the book.” Without them, our work on this book, not to say our annual reading and judging, could not exist. To them belongs our profoundest gratitude. Every year, Waltman family members attend the Wallant Awards ceremony, and they, too, have accepted the judges into their extended family. They include Laurence Waltman, Chia Waltman, Richard Waltman, and Marjorie Feldman, whose original painting, Where We Lived, adorns the front cover of this volume. Our thanks to Marjorie for her collaboration with us and for permitting us to use that painting for The New Diaspora. We offer our profound thanks to the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford and to its chair, Professor Richard Freund, for their support. We enjoy similar support and goodwill from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Hartford and its dean, Professor Joseph Voelker, an English professor who has a keen appreciation for the Award and its importance to literature. And we gratefully thank the Greenberg Center’s administrative assistant, Susan Gottlieb, for all the many tasks and services she provides with good cheer to make our work easier. 575

576  acknowledgments

None of this would be possible had not Kathryn Wildfong, Editor-in-Chief of Wayne State University Press, agreed to accept this book sight unseen. In a time when books of this kind, collections of fiction, may go begging from door to door for years, her ready acceptance came as a gift, and we can only hope that the book we have produced repays her confidence. It would strain our memory and the reader’s patience to attempt to acknowledge individually the editors and their representatives and authors and their agents who offered permissions, encouragement, and leads to other literature. We are grateful to them; the book would not exist without their generosity, goodwill, and support.