Make It Concrete

by Miryam Sivan

  “Nevertheless, you have an accent.” And he lunged at her again and stuck his tongue into her mouth. She opened it wider. His hands were on her breasts. Her hand was on his crotch. She needed another drink.

  In the club, Isabel downed a martini and ordered another right away. The alcohol made everything softer, easier. The man with the light blue eyes and a well-cut jacket took her out into the middle of the dance floor. The music was loud. He pulled her close. They ground against one another half time to the beat. He kissed her neck. She softened some more.

  She couldn’t remember leaving the club. Or the cab to his hotel room. Suddenly they were there. He undressed her quickly. She was drunk. Energy sizzled between them.

  “Ja. Sie sind sehr schön. Sehr lecker.”

  “You’re German.”

  “Ja.”

  “I can’t . . .” Isabel pushed away from him. Stumbled to the chair. Dizzy. Weak. She dropped her head between her knees. What was she doing? It wasn’t working this time. And not because he was German. That was just the cosmos making sure she got the message.

  “You okay?” he sat down on the floor beside her and took her hand.

  “No.”

  “Water? You’re very lovely.” He stroked her leg to bring her back to a boil.

  She was lost though. No return. She stood and started pulling on her clothes.

  “I’m really sorry. I don’t know your name.”

  “Walter.” He brought her a glass of water.

  A gentleman.

  “Walter.” Isabel drank the water and pulled on her coat. “I really am sorry. I’m usually good at this kind of thing, but something’s . . . well . . . it’s not something I can talk about.”

  “Can I see you tomorrow? Dinner?”

  “I’m sorry, no. I’m busy and then I fly home.”

  “Home?”

  “Israel.”

  “Oh. Okay. I’ve been there. Many times. Love Tel Aviv.” He dressed quickly. “I’ll get you a taxi.”

  He insisted she take his number as they waited for a cab in case she changed her mind about dinner tomorrow night. Or if she wanted to meet in Tel Aviv. He hugged her warmly. A lovely man. Should she try and stay? She looked at him and thought she could swim in those blue eyes of his. But then Zakhi appeared. And Emanuel. Especially Emanuel. Molly said Isabel used sex to ground down the pain of Suri’s detachment and Dave’s antipathy. Boker tov, as they said in Israel, good morning, meaning this was not news to Isabel. But now that her habitual refuge felt compromised she felt herself completely at a loss. What did it mean? Who was she suddenly? How come sex didn’t veil the pain but had become its own source of discomfort and dislodging?

  “Thank you, Walter, you’ve been very generous and kind,” she said when he closed the cab door for her. She looked straight ahead as it drove off.

  In the morning the apartment was empty again. Another note from Suri. She was at aqua aerobics. Isabel sat at the kitchen table with a large mug of coffee and The New York Times reading a front page piece on the Israeli army’s buildup of troops on the Gaza border. A photograph of a tank making its way down a dirt road took up half the lower section. A far more interesting image than Hezbollah’s small rocket launchers on the other side of the border. Tanks moved slowly. They were dramatic. They seemed to tell their own story. Though what happened when and why and how was always only part of the story. Scenes constantly splintered and slipped. Everyone claimed his perspective was right. And everyone was right of course. And wrong.

  How wonderful if a newspaper could be laid out like a page of Talmud. The barest of facts in a small box in the middle: six rockets launched into Israel from houses near Gaza border. No injuries. Israeli tanks mobilized on border. Holding fire. Then all around this central box would be a patchwork of rectangles with different interpretations of these details. From far left to far right. From utterly secular to fundamentally religious. From Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Arab, Israeli, American, European, male, female points of view. From the historical to predictions of future implications. That tablet would invite discussion. That format would resist didacticism.

  But it wouldn’t happen. People were too wedded to their points of view to make room for others. Isabel turned the page. An unemployed factory worker let his semi-automatic rifle rip in a do-it-yourself chain store in the Midwest. Pieces of big stories—especially those with violence—made headlines. Sold papers.

  Suri returned from exercise class with bagels, lox, cream cheese with chives, and olives.

  Isabel set the table. “I went into the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue yesterday.” She began the conversation.

  “Beautiful space.” Suri brought more coffee and the two women sat down. She watched Isabel spread a bagel with cheese. Food: the first rule of survival.

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Of course. Your father and I were married there.”

  “What?”

  “You knew that.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Isabel put the knife down.

  “It’s no big deal, anyway. More important than a wedding is the marriage, and ours was not as luminous as the synagogue. Though we managed.” Suri put her hand through her light brown hair. It was still thick and shiny and framed her shadowed grey eyes. Isabel’s beautiful sad mother.

  “Tell me.”

  “What?”

  “About your marriage.”

  “Not now, Issie.”

  Isabel sulked into the steamed milk in her coffee mug.

  Suri put her hand on Isabel’s. “I’m enjoying myself too much and we have so little time together. Look, the sun’s out. Such a beautiful morning, I feel warm all over. I don’t want to go to a cold place, darling.”

  Isabel looked at the brown spots on Suri’s hand and the fight in her melted. She fell back into her familiar posture: protect, protect, protect. This woman knew famine, terror, abandonment, and a whole host of unnamed horrors. Let it go, Isabel told herself, let her be.

  “Okay, mama.” Isabel brought Suri’s hand to her lips. How she missed her sometimes, so much of their lives spent apart.

  Suri took a long sip of coffee and when she put the cup back carefully on the saucer she smiled.

  “But I still want to know something about Siberia, Suri,” Isabel blurted out suddenly, surprising herself. She couldn’t contain the split—part of her chanted protect protect protect while the other raged tear down the barricades. “Just a little more than the bare bones outline you’ve thrown my way over the years.” And the words themselves, pushing to emerge, showed Isabel which side of the split was stronger.

  She needed words. Plain simple words. She had always needed words. They made it concrete for her. The agony, the damage, history. And now more than ever she needed Suri’s words to slam the brakes on using the Holocaust as her measuring stick in the world. Last night’s bar scene rose in her gullet. She could no longer abide the dark freefall of these past few months, and her decades-long obsession.

  “You can spend your life on morbidity, Isabel, that’s your choice.” Suri pushed away her plate. “An unfortunate choice in my opinion.”

  “It’s not a matter of choice, or morbidity. I need to know.”

  Suri gave her an impatient wave of her hand. “All you need to know is right in front of your eyes. Look out the window. See the beauty and delight of each and every day.” A person who at the age of eleven managed to keep two out of three younger siblings alive in Siberia was tough, if nothing else. But if she were tough enough to survive Siberia, Isabel told herself at that moment, she was tough enough to talk.

  “Okay. Can you tell me if I was also named after a relative of Dave’s? Not only after Bella?” Isabel leaned towards her. “Is Isabel also about the Inquisition, not just the Holocaust?”

  Suri stood abruptly. “I wasn’t paying homage to history, if that’s
what you mean.” She brought the dishes to the sink. “I lost my mother as a child and named you after her. It’s that simple.”

  “Is it?”

  “Issie, honey, it’s not enough that you immerse yourself in the nightmare with those books you write? Gevalt, are you going to start up again with Spain and the Inquisition? I thought you finished with that in high school. Life’s too short to worry about the evils of history. There’s so many of them.” Suri started to put the food away.

  Isabel got up from the table and walked to the window. On this sunny morning the Hudson was grey-blue.

  “It’s not just about the past and its pains, Suri.” Boats rocked in the Boat Basin. Further upriver a tugboat pulled a large ship. “For me history has always been about the individual. I wrote Rosa Levi’s story because I cared for her.” She turned to face Suri. “Anyway, I’m thinking of giving up ghosting.” She should have said this first before asking about Siberia. How had she forgotten about the strategy she concocted on the plane ride over?

  “Excellent,” Suri said.

  “For whom? Not for those who still want to tell their stories.”

  “For you. Why don’t you write stories or articles about life in Israel? Or take up painting again. You did such beautiful work in high school.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This news makes me happy.”

  Isabel looked back at the river. A bank of slate grey clouds collected. The water darkened. She faced Suri. “What happened in Siberia, Suri, please tell me?” Isabel couldn’t stop herself. The words erupted, the hurt seared. She was desperate to know.

  Suri closed the dishwasher and stood slowly. “Now’s not the time. Jaim Benjamin’s expecting you, isn’t he?” Suri turned to leave the kitchen.

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Suri. Nothing I won’t under-stand. Don’t I have a right to know?”

  Suri looked stunned. Isabel took two steps towards her mother.

  “I don’t think repression is the correct prescription for trauma. You’re smart enough to understand what I mean. It’s for your sake, mama, but also for mine. Please.” Letting Suri retreat with her practiced facility would maroon Isabel once again.

  “I should revisit the past for your sake?” Suri took two steps back. “I see now what they mean by the age of narcissism,” and she walked out of the room.

  Isabel was not accustomed to Suri being so sharp with her. She went back to the window. There was expanse—water, clouds, nature, release, relief. Her tears obscured the boats. Still she imagined the tugboat pulling straight. In a few minutes it would drop anchor in the river’s mouth near the Statue of Liberty and the large vessel it pulled would disengage and set sail for Europe.

  “The Holocaust is not a life, Isabel, it’s death,” Suri said gently. She had re-entered the kitchen and came over and put a soft hand on Isabel’s back. “My grandfather was a rabbi. He advised his grandsons not to become doctors. Doctors spend their days with sick people, he said. Choose a profession where you see life and beauty every day.” She leaned against Isabel. Her cheek against her back. “You’re not even a doctor and yet you choose ugliness and sickness and death. I don’t understand. Isn’t it enough that I went through it?”

  Isabel turned from the window and pulled Suri towards her and held her tight. How small Suri’s body had become. A cub. A motherless child.

  2

  Two hours later Isabel sat with Jaim. He was in even better spirits than the day before. An uncommon reaction to a project’s close. Most people experienced a down turn at the end of the project. The buoyancy of telling giving way to a re-experience of loss. Sometimes accompanied by a sudden self-consciousness: how would the book be received? What they never voiced, but Isabel imagined they asked themselves, was whether she had done a good enough job. These fits of insecurity passed with the book’s publication. For inevitably, from family and friends, the feedback was positive. Jaim Benjamin’s reaction though was jubilation. He was not at all concerned about peoples’ responses.

  “Talking about it has done me a world of good. There it is,” he pointed to the stack of manuscript pages. “I don’t have to hold it any longer. I’m free.”

  “What section would you like to go over?”

  “Nothing. Good the way it is.”

  “No language that grated on your nerves? Maybe I got something wrong?”

  “It’s wonderful. Gracias escritora.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Isabel was relieved. She could go home now to do a final gleaning through the rows of sentences then send the book to Schine. She looked forward to a respite from his pages, Isabel, I need pages, pages. Until the next book.

  “Did you know, Isabel, niña, according to rabbinical order, since the Inquisition Jews have been forbidden to step foot on Spanish soil?”

  She shook her head no. What next?

  “In 1968, the Spanish Justice Minister, Antonio Oriol, presented the official annulment of Ferdinand and Isabella’s Expulsion Decree to Samuel Toledano, President of the Federation of Spanish Jewish Communities.”

  “In 1968 the movie version of The Fixer came out. Malamud’s version of the Beiliss blood-libel trial,” Isabel said reflexively not sure Jaim could follow her, though she wasn’t sure she could follow herself. Just another coincidence. Seemed she was compiling an addendum to her book on Hollywood and the Holocaust. Coincidences meant nothing, they meant everything.

  Jaim gave her a strange look and continued. “In response, after what I like to think of as a twenty-four year sigh, in 1992, the 500 year anniversary of the actual Expulsion order, the Chief Rabbis of Israel revoked the ban.”

  “So now I can go to Spain?” They laughed. “Imagine,” her words slowed down, “a comparable ban on Germany, Austria, Poland, France, Croatia, Greece, the Ukraine, Belgium, Belarus, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Holland, Norway, Italy, Hungary, and the rest. A 500 hundred year boycott of the continent. Starting now. Europe dead to the Jews.”

  “Imagine.” Jaim got up from the table and removed a small object from the top drawer of a small bureau. “Here.” Jaim unfolded the cloth covering a large black metal key with an ornate curlicue head. “Take it.”

  Isabel placed the key in her palm. Her fingers curled around it. She knew without being told that it belonged to Jaim Benjamin’s ancestral home in Andalucia.

  “It’s been passed from father to son for over 500 years. I want you to have it now. Go to Seville, Isabel, open the door.”

  Isabel closed her eyes and tried not to see a narrow cobbled street. A small wood door in a high stone wall.

  “Please, whenever you can, even if it takes years. And afterwards, when you’ve turned the lock, give the key to my son. And he will give it to his.”

  “Why not let Marc do it himself?” Isabel opened her eyes. Jaim looked sad.

  “Because Marc’s a doctor, not a writer. I want you to be there, I want you to feel it. You need to remember that you too were there, you, Isabel Toledo, there, just look at you. Then write what was done.”

  “I don’t know.” Her spirit bent low. She didn’t want the key or the mission.

  “My name is Jaim.” He put his hand gently on her forearm. It burned. “The Spanish version of Chaim, though we haven’t lived in Spain for hundreds of years. I speak Ladino and pray as we prayed in Spain. When my family was sent to Auschwitz, they spoke to Jews from Rhodes, Salonica, and the Peloponnesia in Ladino. In Auschwitz, Isabel, songs of Spain.”

  ✶

  Isabel left Jaim and started to walk. Again. Her head swirled. A faint outline of a sidewalk appeared in front of her. Mechanically her feet pressed down on concrete and asphalt, one block after another. Street numbers dropped. She looked up and saw she had passed Soho and was already in Tribeca.

  The temperature dropped too. A snow flurry began. She should take a bus, a train
, a cab, and go somewhere. Where? Back to Suri’s. Or a museum, bookstore, someplace warm. Indoors until her meeting later in the day with Schine. She walked past last night’s bar. It lacked all charm in daylight. She continued to steer herself downtown. The cold penetrated her coat as she waited at a curb for the light to turn green. She tightened the scarf around her neck and buried her hands in her pockets. A man covered his gyro cart with thick clear plastic. The smell of burning flesh turned her stomach and she sprinted through the red light. Burnt flesh. White ash. White flakes. She ran for a whole block. Breathing heavily she stopped in front of a brick wall covered in a black and blue graffiti tag. NED. It was beautiful. And then she saw a red swastika in the upper right corner. No control, no finesse. A red gash demanding attention. Clearly not Ned’s hand. She didn’t move. Maybe it was meant as just geometry. Maybe a Hindu reference. No. It was pivoted, rested on the tip of one leg. Nazi swastikas in New York?

  Isabel forced herself to keep walking, head tucked into the small collar of her coat, feet crunching on the slowly accumulating snow. She didn’t look up. She didn’t want to note or be noticed. Two blocks later she stopped for a red light and quite unexpectedly saw the Herrera Print Shop sign. Leon Herrera. Dave’s boyhood friend. Their parents grew up together. And their grandparents before that. Part of the old Sephardic community of New York. Early Saturday mornings Dave and Isabel would drive down to Tribeca, to Leon’s printing business. The streets were empty. Sidewalks quiet. The West Side Highway clear except for them gliding along in Dave’s silver Cadillac. At Leon’s, as the men talked, Isabel played with a stack of stock and a manual print block. Setting her own text that ran no more than two or three lines: I love Suri. I love Dave. Leon’s our friend. Even as a child Isabel called her parents by their first names.

  Suri had not mentioned Leon in years. Isabel assumed, actually she assumed nothing. But here she was, and here he was. She rang the bell.

  “It’s Isabel, Isabel Toledo,” she said to the intercom. The door buzzed immediately and there was Leon waiting for her with open arms and a huge smile.