Make It Concrete

by Miryam Sivan

  “I still don’t understand why this upsets you so much.” Dave moved to the next diorama with bison on a Wyoming plain. His voice rose to match hers. “The world’s cynical. Nothing new under the sun. Enough with the horrors, with the past. It’s a sinking ship, Issie. Move forward or be left behind. The future’s a blank screen. Write your own script.”

  “It’s not that simple.” Isabel glared at him.

  “Oh yes it is.” He faced her. “Moving to Israel is a return to the ghetto.”

  “Israel’s not a relic, Dave. It’s alive, it’s now, it’s dynamic, it’s . . .”

  “Dangerous.” He turned away triumphant. Israel had just become embroiled in Lebanon and it was clear to so many, except the powers that be in Israel’s government, that this military operation was not a good idea.

  Isabel began to cry. Suri took her in her arms, stroked her head and back. She gave her semi-estranged husband a sad look. He glared at them.

  “Dave, you don’t know what it’s like to be stateless and at the mercy of history,” Suri said quietly. She looked at a squaw with a papoose strapped to her back. The woman gathered berries from a bush on a steep cliff of the Hudson Palisades. “I wanted to go to Palestine too, but in 1945 the British didn’t allow the refugees in.”

  Dave’s shoulders drooped. Suri never spoke from the moral high ground of a Holocaust survivor. But now that she had, what could he say? For Suri history was real enough. She couldn’t choose, no matter how hard she wished, to not be part of the script of Germany’s incursion into Kamenets-Podolski. The blank screen of her future would forever contain terrible scenes from her past.

  Isabel held her mother tighter and hated Dave then—for resisting her, for hurting Suri. And she wasn’t sorry when he left New York after a few days. Only Suri accompanied Isabel to the airport three weeks later when she flew to Israel, to Alon, her suitcases and heart bulging with love and hope, pride and longing. One year later, almost to the day, Dave had a massive heart attack and crashed the car he was driving on Highway One. A hotel reservation in Monterey never reached. A young woman in the car beside him died as well. Isabel was pregnant with Lia and didn’t travel back for the funeral.

  3

  Isabel left the synagogue and its backward crawl. She texted Suri not to worry, that she was walking the city and loving it. She headed north along the park, walking out of her childhood neighborhood into the nineties and continuing into the low hundreds. The cold crisp air sparred with car exhaust. Isabel took long slow breaths anyway, as she did in the fields by her home. She cut west on 104th Street, passed her old apartment on Broadway, and then went uptown again through the Columbia-Barnard campus. She continued down the hill to Manhattan Valley, stopped to look at 125th Street filled with people shopping and going places, and pushed up the long incline into West Harlem, moving from her college to her high school neighborhood. On the corner of 133th street she stopped to catch her breath. Suddenly an image of Mr. Melamed, her plastic arts teacher in eleventh grade, came to her. She hadn’t thought of him in decades.

  “Real walk down memory lane today,” Isabel said snidely and out loud. She was not comfortable inside herself. And not just today.

  It was Mr. Melamed who one late winter afternoon started everything. Not fair to blame him. He thought he was helping and Isabel didn’t have to take the bait he set out before her. The sun had come in to the art room that afternoon at a low sharp angle. The class worked intently on a still life. It was quiet and concentrated. Mr. Melamed placed an open art book beside the drawing Isabel was working on. She looked away from her drawing to the open page. She didn’t recognize the artist. A woman’s portrait, the Virgin Mary she assumed by the white halo around her hooded head. And then she knew, simply knew because of the resemblance: olive skin, dark heavy lidded eyes, high cheek bones, narrow chin, and prominent nose. A Spanish woman. A Spanish Jew. Isabel stared at the face and looked for words to give the hurt a context: Mater Dolorosa the painter called his woman in the painting, a face so close to Isabel’s own, a face from the Toledo line, a face lost to murder, conversion, exile.

  “Anusim,” Mr. Melamed said. “The ones who disappeared. Converts from Judaism to Christianity. El Greco liked to paint them when he lived in Toledo.”

  That painting flung Isabel from one ghetto to another. From Toledo to Kamenets-Podolski. From Spain to Spanish Harlem. She knew then that she was trapped inside a name that reeked of the geometry of horror. Queen Isabella of Castile on one side. Bella and her German and Ukrainian thugs on the other. 1492/1942.

  Once Isabel passed 135th Street, her high school neighborhood, her body knew where it wanted to go. One block after another, twenty passed quickly, and then she stood by the main gates of the museum complex on 155th Street and Broadway, once known as the Acropolis of the Heights. A cultural oasis that had none of the draw that went along with a downtown address. The Hispanic Society of America was still here. It had not moved downtown as had a number of the other museums and prestigious institutions that were once housed inside these gates. But Isabel had come for it specifically and peered in tentatively through the bars. Then, as if easing herself into a large body of water, Isabel passed through the main gates and entered the complex slowly. Here were the elegant McKim, Mead, and White buildings. Here the water fountain, dry as usual on this ordinary day, but turned on once a year when the American Academy of Letters presented its awards.

  El Cid was still high on his horse in the middle of the dry fountain carrying the unfurled flag of Valencia. Beneath him small statues of naked men guarded their genitalia with swords and shields. Petite deer pranced among them. El Cid Campeador. Born Christian Rodrigo Diaz, he fought for King Alfonso VI of Castile against the Moors. Then he became Al Sayyid, the Lord, and fought for the Moors against Alfonso. Then he fought for himself until he conquered Valencia and named himself King. A hybrid, a soldier of fortune. The Lord Champion. 1000.

  All knowledge connected to this place flooded Isabel’s mind. She hadn’t visited in decades but it was totally familiar to her. She nodded at the guard sitting inside the entrance to The Hispanic Society. A stack of brochures beside him. The usual hush and hollowness inhabited the building as she climbed toward El Greco’s Jews, letting her hand trail along the yellow and blue geometric tiles lining the walls of the circular staircase. She stopped at the top, looked around the second floor, and made note that except for a young guard at a small table by the balcony railing, she was alone in the museum. Just as it had been in high school. The guard looked up, smiled briefly, and returned to her cell phone.

  Isabel went left as if by rote. But with trepidation. She studied each painting on the wall before The Greek’s, pausing in front of Luis de Morales’s Ecce Homo. 1560–1570. Behold the man, Pontius Pilate called out when he presented Jesus to his fellow Jews. Hanging next to this painting was Jesus and an Accuser. Also by Morales. Jesus’s eyes were closed. He had a soft reddish beard. His long nose had a bump in it. His accuser looked exactly like Alec Guinness playing Fagin in David Lean’s Oliver Twist. 1948. Would ironies never desist? Three years after Allied forces stilled German ovens, anti-Semitic stereotypes were fodder for the British film industry. She would include that in her book. Yes, it wasn’t just America.

  As she did yesterday when she arrived to her childhood home, Isabel walked slowly and ambivalently toward El Greco’s oils. Something known. A memory of comfort. A question of welcome. The paintings hung as she remembered them: Saint Jude, Saint Dominic, Saint James the Great, Pietà, The Holy Family, The Penitent Saint Jerome. The walls on which they hung were a freshly painted clementine orange. But unlike in high school, it was not the Pietà that captured her. Now The Holy Family drew her eye. Mary’s face was not elongated and sallow. This Mary’s hydrated cheeks and olive skin sang of life. Her large dark eyes shone. She looked like Isabel had come to look since adolescence. And the face of Joseph standing behind her holding their infant
son was similar to Dave’s. Behind them stormy clouds were basted onto a grey-blue sky. Surreal wallpaper to human myth.

  Domenikos Theotocopoulos always signed his paintings in Greek characters. He lived for nearly forty years in Toledo, a city once as famous for its Jews as it was for marzipan. By the time El Greco moved there to paint the altarpieces for the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, most Jews were New Christians. 1577. Within two years he completed nine paintings, launching the successful stage of his career. Why did El Greco chose to live among these people? Why did he fill his religious portraits with them?

  They were known as conversos, those who converted. Anusim, those who disappeared. Marranos, pigs who managed to wiggle their filthy ways around the scrupulous Inquisitors. What was it about these very same people that inspired Rembrandt to paint them when he lived in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district one hundred years later? Same people. Same destiny. Christian Europe’s dark minority had fled Spain and Portugal and in Flanders were free to live openly as Jews.

  The day after Mr. Melamed told Isabel about the El Greco paintings that hung on the walls of The Hispanic Society twenty blocks north of their school, she walked north to see them. She went dozens of times after that and immersed herself in Spain of the Middle Ages, the Golden Age, and beyond. She studied the lives of Jews from Castile, Seville, Granada, Cordoba, and Toledo. She read documents from the Inquisition and sentences handed down from the Autos General de Fé in Toledo: Don Pedro Diaz, alias Henriquez, Portuguese, money changer of Madrid, burned alive; Joan Berrio, bigamist, 200 lashes, nine years exile, seven in the galleys; Ana de Cazzeza of Madridejos, sorcerer and trickster, sentenced to wear the dunce’s cap, lashes, and exiled; Jacinto Vasquez Arauso, relapsed to Judaism, burned; Isabel Ruiz Gutiezzer, relapsed to Judaism, burned. Isabel tried sharing all this with Dave on his rare visits to New York but he would cut her off.

  “Such old news, Issie,” he’d say. “Let’s go to the movies.”

  Isabel sat on a low wood bench in the museum and stared at the Holy Family. Here was a Mary full of love and awe for the naked baby her body had produced. Here was a mother whose beauty and subdued libidinal energy were enlivened by her fat healthy child. Isabel had spent hours focused on the mourning Marys, on the suffering Marys, a reflection of her adolescent state of mind no doubt. But right next to them hung a joyful contented Madre. Here she was, Isabel’s doppelgänger, captured in oil paint, 1580–1585, provoking Isabel to take up Jaim Benjamin’s challenge. To take on Spain. Bring Emanuel fully into her life. Celebrate life. Isabel’s head fell heavy into her hands. Her eyes closed.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” The guard startled her.

  Isabel raised her head slowly. How boring for the young guard who spent hours alone in a museum with few visitors.

  “Yes, very much.” Isabel shifted on the bench.

  “If you’re interested, in the library downstairs you can see the first edition of Don Quixote. You know, like the Broadway show, Man of La Mancha.”

  “I know,” she said even though she didn’t. About the musical, yes, of course, scored by Mitch Leigh, née Irwin Michnik. He won Songwriter’s Hall of Fame Award for “The Impossible Dream.” But the first edition manuscript of Don Quixote? No. Nothing. She had spent all her time on these benches and never stepped foot in the museum’s library. Cervantes and his fictional historian narrator Cide Hamete Benengeli who translated the Arabic into Spanish and told the tale of a knight and his windmills in the waning days of Empire. A hero soft in the brain. An unthreatening critic. Rumor had it that Cervantes had Jew maybe even Moor in him. Rumor had it that the novel was not penned by Cervantes but by a Jew yet to be outed by the Inquisition. Why else have Don Quixote remain silent when Sancho Panza boasted of being free of Jewish or Moorish blood or when Dulcinea described her expert salting of pork? His compatriots championed their Christian credentials while Don Quixote said nothing.

  ✶

  And in the end, hearsay. Cervantes wrote the first modern novel about a knight whose quest for lost chivalry conjured a flying carpet of social criticisms and comedies. Martyr, idealist, satirist, fatalist, victim of his own mind, victim of the regime’s unjust definitions of morality and vocation, Don Quixote, the anti-hero, maybe a New Christian, maybe not. Quixote, Cervantes’ golem, like his compatriot Yosele fashioned by Rabbi Loewe in the Prague ghetto just twenty-five years earlier. 1580.

  The guard, sensing their brief conversation was over, walked back to her chair. Isabel got up and went over to glass cases filled with green, blue, red, and yellow tiles. She scanned description cards listlessly and stopped when she read in faint print: El Transito Synagogue, Toledo.

  Cuenca, the index card explained, were mosaic tiles constructed much more quickly than the traditional labor-intensive aliceres. The older method of mosaic art entailed making careful geometric cuts from large ceramic pieces. The small pieces were fitted together in the desired pattern, fixed securely with a bonding agent, and their sharp edges filed smooth. Finally the gaps between the small pieces were filled with a thick layer of grout. Five time consuming steps.

  In the cuenca process another index card explained, a layer of plaster was spread on the entire surface and molded into a pattern of raised lines. The hollows were then filled with colored glazes and baked. Four quick steps.

  Cuenca tiles developed at the end of the fifteenth century when the deadline of the Expulsion loomed before the Jews of Toledo and Seville. What choice did they have but to construct quickly. Cuenca, the matzah of tiles.

  The Keys

  1

  Exhausted, Isabel took a bus down Broadway from the museum to Suri’s apartment. She was also suffering antiphonal angst—the Holocaust in one corner, Spain in another. Desiccated, desperate for food, alcohol, and sex, she got to Suri’s to find a note. Home late. All Bartok program at Lincoln Center. Food on stove. Chilled wine in fridge.

  Isabel took a long bath. She ate and drank. She melted into the comfortable large cushions of the living room couch, closed her eyes, and waited for a sleep that didn’t come. She went into her old room but couldn’t face the bed. It mocked her need for sleep. She stared through the window at the black river, at the Boat Basin’s sampling of lights. Isabel retreated from the window and sat on the bed. She jumped up and sat back down. Jumped up again and ripped off the sweatpants and flannel shirt she was wearing. She put on a dress, stockings, heels, necklace, drop earrings, and perfume. Out. She needed to go out. She left a note, Don’t wait up. Catch up with you in the morning, and placed it on top of Suri’s.

  The cab took Isabel to the bar on Houston where she met Jiri months ago. Crowded, noisy, sex in the air like last time. Like she liked it. She found a seat by the bar.

  “Extra dry vodka martini,” Isabel told the bartender. “Olives.”

  She looked around. What would it be like to live in New York all the time? So many eager men. So many handsome ones. The bartender brought her the drink and smiled. He too was handsome. Very. Younger than Zakhi. No way. One young man was enough. Or at least one at a time. Isabel took a long sip. It went down smooth and sharp.

  “Hi.”

  She looked to her right. A woman talked animatedly to her girlfriend. Not her. She twisted in her chair and looked left. A man about her age waited for a response.

  “Hi.”

  “How are you this evening?”

  He had a European accent. What were the chances of this happening again? Months later. Same bar, same Isabel, and a European.

  “Okay, not great. You?” Where was he from?

  “Better now that I’m talking to you.” He had a very nice smile. “What happened to make your day just okay?”

  She couldn’t place the accent. “Too much to get into, believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  Dutch? Hungarian? Polish? Find someone else she chided herself. Find an American. Twist away. Show your back.
But she couldn’t. He’s not them: soldier, police, concentration guard age. He was her age. Maybe a bit younger.

  “Hmm?” he persisted.

  “There’s a lovely museum at the northern edge of Harlem that most people don’t even know about. The Hispanic Society. Worth visiting. You live here or passing through?”

  “Business. I guess that means passing through, though I seem to come here quite a lot.”

  He moved closer to her. He was very handsome and didn’t take his light blue eyes off hers. Isabel could take him into the bathroom now. She could kiss him and feel if he was worth pursuing. She could fuck him in his hotel room. Get back to life. Get back at the ghosts. Choking her. Circling her.

  “What kind of business?”

  “Banking. And you?”

  “Ghostwriting.”

  “For whom?” He didn’t miss a beat. Didn’t raise an eyebrow.

  “Mostly old people. About ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “In The Hispanic Society they have works by Velázquez and El Greco. Goya’s too, And an incredible full room mural by Sorolla.”

  “I’ll try and go. Would you like to go dancing?”

  Isabel downed the rest of her drink. Dancing?

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure.”

  “Great.” He put money down on the bar and helped her with her coat.

  They waited curbside for a cab. He leaned down and kissed her on the mouth. Okay. Here they went. She leaned into him. He smelled good. His hands were on her ass. They felt good. A cab stopped. They climbed in. He named a club. The driver floored it.

  “You have an accent,” he said to Isabel.

  “An accent? Me? I’m American. I’m from here, New York.”