by Dara Horn
But Sara was still shocked. “You can’t just—you can’t just—”
“Why not?” Ben asked. “You mean it’s wrong for me to steal it, but when it gets stolen from us, then that’s perfectly—”
“You know we can’t prove that,” Sara interrupted. “And even if we could—”
Suddenly Ben slammed the side of the painting down against the floor. The man in the painting lay prone, rattled but intact. “Sara, I’m sick of it!” he shouted. The pitch of his voice surprised even him. It was the way he should have shouted at his wife, but he had never had the courage. “I am sick, sick, sick of having things taken from me. Don’t you get it? Our family is finished, Sara. This is the one thing we have left.” He took a breath, and the man in the painting shuddered. “You know you only came here to talk to me about selling the house. There’s nothing left anymore.”
The man in the painting trembled beyond Ben’s squinting eyelids. But Sara’s body was solid and steady, barely moving as she tilted her head back against the wall. “I didn’t come here to talk about the house,” she said.
Ben swallowed, feeling blood thumping in his neck. “What do you mean?”
“I came to tell you that I’m having a baby, my dear dumb brother.” She smiled, and then, when Ben didn’t say anything, began to laugh.
Ben stared at her, watching her laugh and wondering if it was some kind of joke. But as he raised his eyebrows at her, he saw her nodding her head, her lips trembling.
“Leonid is working late tonight, but I couldn’t wait to tell you. I’m due right after Passover.”
It was a long time before Ben was able to speak. His shock slowly dissipated into a thin, wavering jealousy, blurring the air in the room. The whole world was leaving him behind. When his voice finally came loose from his throat, he tried to congratulate her. Instead he blurted, “But Sara, are you—are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
He stuttered, choked, struggling to find something to say, anything that would hide how he really felt. “No, I know, but it’s just—I mean, you just got married, Sara. Are you sure you wanted—”
Sara looked up at the ceiling, and Ben suddenly noticed a drop of pale blue paint in the dent below her nose. “We planned it that way,” she said softly. “I was hoping that Mom would—” She looked at her hands. “Well.”
Ben looked at his sister’s hands, and then glanced again at the painting. God, he thought, a baby. And their parents, who would never see it. But a baby. For all of them.
Still sitting on the floor, the two of them embraced—or, really, the three of them embraced. In her arms Ben stammered his congratulations and then fell silent, sensing the presence of the new person, the not-yet person within her. The three of them held each other, dreaming unborn dreams.
Sara stood up, as if breaking a spell. She picked up the painting and placed it carefully on the bed. “They’re going to come after you for this,” she said. “You need to take it out of your apartment. Stash it somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere, just not here. I don’t want you in jail when the baby comes.” The baby. “Don’t worry, we’re going to figure out a way to get you out of this.”
Ben grimaced. “It’s our painting. You can tell me whatever you want, but I’m not going to turn anything in—not the painting and not myself. Just try and make me.” But already all he could think about was the baby.
“Just try and stay out of jail,” Sara said.
Long after she left, Ben lay on his bed and suddenly found that he couldn’t sleep. Instead he imagined himself flying, gazing at the ground far below and seeing, from his aerial view, two paths out of the necropolis that might not be dead ends.
4
BENJAMIN ZISKIND did not become intelligent until he was eleven years old. Well, naturally that wasn’t quite true (studies have shown, Ben knew, that people’s characters are more or less fixed from the age of six), but at the age of eleven, two things happened to Benjamin Ziskind. First, his father died, and second, he was locked into a cage for the next six years of his life.
The cage was actually called the Milwaukee Model Orthotic Brace, but from the moment Ben saw it—or, more accurately, from the moment the doctor and his mother helped him into it, a process that took almost half an hour, immediately after which the doctor broke the news that Ben would have to wear it for twenty-two hours a day, every day, for the next six years—he might as well have been handed a life sentence in solitary confinement. Ben had been a smart boy, in the casual way that eleven-year-old boys are called smart for always winning board games, but he had never been able to sit still, always running in mad circles around the house and, since their father died, testing the flammability of various aerosol bathroom cleaners in the backyard. During their father’s illness—twelve weeks, start to finish—no one had noticed how Ben had begun walking around with his right shoulder slightly lower than his left. After his father’s death, everyone and everything slumped, and once again no one noticed. It was only several weeks later, when Sara started drawing people walking crooked on her sketch paper and performing elaborate imitations of her brother’s Neanderthal clopping around the house, that their mother realized that something was wrong. Some people are uncomfortable in their own skin, but Ben was uncomfortable far deeper than his skin. He was uncomfortable in his own bones.
His very first day in the cage began with forty-five minutes of humiliation as his mother tried to help him put it on, until she had to take a phone call from the life insurance agent. Ben struggled alone until Sara wandered into the bathroom where he was standing between the sink and the toilet, naked except for his underwear and the half-adjusted brace.
“Mom told me to help you,” Sara muttered dutifully, standing in the bathroom doorway. She was already dressed for school, avoiding Ben’s eyes.
“I don’t need help,” Ben snorted, and turned away from her. Sara was ten minutes younger than he was, but this was the first year when he could no longer feel the power of those ten minutes. Since their father died, she had become taller than Ben and, to his astonishment, seemed to suddenly have the beginnings of breasts, while he was still short, beardless, scrawny, and now, standing in front of his twin sister in his underwear, trapped inside his scrap-metal cage. He bit his lip and tried again to connect the brace collar that he had already given up on, reaching for the thumb bolt at the back of his neck and ignoring Sara’s face in the mirror. The chin support dug into his jaw, and soon he began to feel as if someone were choking him. He stole a glance in the mirror and saw himself imprisoned. The steel bars of the cage—one in the front, two in the back—ran up and down his torso, from his neck to his stomach, with a plastic plate gagging him beneath his chin. His waist was encased in steel-lined plastic, and additional bars of plastic and steel ran underneath one arm. He didn’t have the courage to look at his own face.
“Let me help you,” Sara said behind him. Her tangled hair brushed against his cheek as she reached for the bolt at the back of his neck.
“I DON’T NEED HELP!” he screamed. He tried again to tighten it himself, contorting his arms behind his head, but it was hopeless. She watched him struggle for a moment, wincing. Then her hand moved in silence across his neck and snapped the bolt into place.
Ben could no longer turn, bend, or even slightly move his head. He looked straight ahead in the mirror because he had no other choice. He was helpless now. Just above the metal scaffolding, his face was bright red, streaked with tears.
“You’re like a knight wearing armor, Ben. Now nobody can hurt you,” Sara said, her voice almost a whisper. Ben saw her face beside his in the mirror and squeezed his eyes shut. His skin itched and seethed beneath the plastic sheath.
“Ben, everything is going to get better,” he heard her say in the void. “Really. It has to get better, because it can’t get worse.”
Ben opened his eyes with a jolt, staring at himself in the mirror. That’s not true, he sud
denly thought. It can definitely get worse. As he nodded at Sara and pretended to smile, he understood that it was the first intelligent thought he had ever had.
WHEN HIS MOTHER finally locked him up properly the next day and left him alone, Ben took advantage of the moment of solitude to steal the newspaper articles she had saved about Soviet Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, who had recently been released from the gulag, and he began reading over and over about Sharansky’s days and nights in the punishment cell, blocked off from the world by freezing cement. It was around then that he started taking books out of the library about jails and gulags and prison camps and even the Hanoi Hilton, though his mother returned that one the next day, claiming that she had found it in his room and it was overdue, which was a blatant lie, of course, so Ben had to read that one secretly in the library while pretending to be researching a school report about coral. Those books led him to others, and soon he had given up on burning bathroom cleaners and lived entirely in his room filled with books. It was during his first year in the cage that Sara sent a letter to the local TV station proposing a new game show about “grown-ups challenging a nerd with a heart of gold.” Ben’s heart may have been golden, but it felt more to him like stone, encased in a steel and plastic cage. But that didn’t matter once they aired the pilot episode of Beat the Wizkind, in which the twelve-year-old prodigy, in a face-off with a tenured professor of political philosophy from Princeton, trounced his opponent by over three hundred points.
At school, his fame as a Wizkind only made things worse. Few people had spoken to him before, but now he was positively taunted, tortured in ways only twelve-and thirteen-year-olds know how to torture each other. On several occasions he came to school to find his locker coated with a mosaic of used chewing gum, more of which was thrown at him as he sat in the lunchroom, praying for Tuesdays, when the two seventh-grade classes ate lunch together and he could at least take refuge with Sara, who also didn’t have any friends. That stopped the flying gum wads, but not the passed notes about him that always seemed to get “accidentally” passed to him, or the burping campaign that erupted in one particular class every time Ben tried to speak (a correlation that his teacher failed to notice), or the chants of “Wizkind takes a whiz” that met him every day at the bus stop. The only reason no one tried to beat him up was because they had learned—in a school assembly about scoliosis that was held while Ben was being fitted for his cage—that the Wizkind was a cripple.
Nights were worse. Ben couldn’t sleep in the cage, and no one else was really sleeping, either. His mother had taken to wandering around the house all night, pulling open their father’s file drawers and emptying their contents onto the floor. Sara sometimes would sob all night long, crying for hours before giving in and going to their mother’s room, climbing into their parents’ bed, and falling asleep on their father’s pillow. More recently, as Ben discovered when he sneaked into her bedroom late one night to retrieve a book, Sara had taken to sleeping with her eyes open, waiting for disaster to strike again. As for Ben, he would simply lie in bed in his brace as if stretched on a torture rack, fighting as hard as he could not to be crushed by the weight that he felt resting on the steel-reinforced cage above his breastbone: the horrible feeling of knowing that this wasn’t a cruel joke or dream or even a misfortune of any rarity, but rather that this was simply the cost of loving, that this misery was how things were meant to be and that it could never be otherwise—and that this was only the beginning, that it would happen again and again, with his mother, with his twin sister, with everyone—that no one is anything more than the cloud that vanishes, and the best anyone could hope for was not to be the last.
And so it was two years later, while the Wizkind blossomed on local TV and the Ziskind festered in his cage, that Leonid Ilych Shcharansky first came into Ben’s life.
FOUR MONTHS BEFORE his bar mitzvah, Ben was assigned to Leonid Ilych Shcharansky of Chernobyl, Ukraine, USSR—an unfortunate Jewish boy living in terror behind the Iron Curtain and forbidden from celebrating a bar mitzvah—as his own personal Soviet bar mitzvah “twin.” On the day of his own bar mitzvah, Ben would be called to the Torah not only for himself, but a second time in Leonid Ilych Shcharansky’s name, so that Leonid would have the opportunity to celebrate a bar mitzvah even if he couldn’t be there himself. It was the same kind of pairing that had been given to Jewish children all over America for the previous ten years. Generally the bar mitzvah boy or bat mitzvah girl was provided with an address and told to write a letter, without expecting a reply. The previous year, for Sara’s bat mitzvah (which, as a girl, she celebrated at the age of twelve instead of thirteen, just another step in the process of leaving her twin behind), Sara had mailed off a friendly greeting card to her assigned victim of religious intolerance and then threw away the address. An hour later, she couldn’t even remember the Russian girl’s name.
But when Ben received the address of Leonid Ilych Shcharansky, he thought of his horrible school, where nothing had changed in the two years since he had lived in the cage, and then looked again at the address, which was printed on a piece of paper with a logo from a Soviet Jewry activist group, a Star of David intertwined with a hammer and sickle, along with the words “If Not Now, When?” And he was determined that he would write to Leonid Shcharansky until Leonid Shcharansky wrote back.
Dear Leonid,
Greetings from the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. I am Benjamin Ziskind, your bar mitzvah “twin.” I am looking forward to our bar mitzvah, and I am sorry you cannot be here with us. The Torah portion I will be reading for us is about the freeing of the Israelites from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea. I hope that you will also make it out of the Red Sea and cross to the Promised Land.
Your friend,
Benjamin Ziskind
Ben was very proud of his subtle reference to the “Red Sea.” He had considered creating a more elaborate code to foil the Soviet censors but decided against it, since he couldn’t be sure how perspicacious Leonid might be at reading these things, or even how good his English was. So he signed it, sealed it, sent it off, and waited.
Leonid didn’t respond.
When he didn’t hear from Leonid, Ben wondered if the letter had gotten Leonid and his family in trouble. His mother assured him that that sort of thing didn’t happen anymore, but still, Ben feared for Leonid’s safety. After entertaining various scenarios in his mind in which Soviet mailmen confiscated the letter, presented it to the KGB, and had thirteen-year-old Leonid arrested and exiled to the far outskirts of Novosibirsk (the city with the ninth lowest mean daily temperature in the world, selected from cities of over a million inhabitants), Ben dismissed the idea and began to wonder if perhaps Leonid simply didn’t understand English, even though Ben had tried very hard to use only short, easy words in his letter. At the risk of having Leonid’s entire family dragged off to the gulag, he decided to try again.
Dear Leonid,
Greetings again from your bar mitzvah “twin,” Benjamin Ziskind. I wrote to you a while ago, but I don’t know if you got my last letter. I know that it might be hard for you to write to me, so I don’t mind if you cannot write back.
I wanted to tell you a little about myself. I am in seventh grade. I guess you are in seventh grade also, if they have seventh grade in the USSR. I have read a lot of books about the USSR but none of the books ever explained if they have grades in school there the same way we do. You probably think I am reading these books about the USSR in school. Actually school is very easy for me, and mostly I learn things outside of school. I am on a TV show called “Beat the Wizkind” where I have to go against grown-ups and answer quiz questions.
Last night at the taping I won, as usual. One of the questions near the beginning was, “Which of the following was the cause of the nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl?” I have read a lot about Chernobyl since I got your address, so I kind of should thank you for knowing the right answer. I figure you probably don’t have the opportun
ity in the USSR to have your own personal game show on TV, so instead of just being your bar mitzvah twin, I can also be your game show twin. So congratulations for living in Chernobyl and getting the question right.
I was wondering if you have any mutations from living there.
Your friend,
Benjamin Ziskind
Leonid still did not respond.
After watching him checking the mailbox every day, Ben’s mother suggested that he stop writing to Leonid. “There’s no point in writing letters to someone who doesn’t write back,” she told him one afternoon, inking the drawings she had penciled onto the page. In between other projects, he knew, she had been working on her own children’s book, something that she had taken up and thrown away many times. It had pictures of a town filled with slimy-looking mud, and a little boy in the town square at night, holding a fading lantern. The boy was mired up to his waist in mud, waving the lantern for help.
“But Sara sticks letters to Dad in the mailbox every day,” Ben said. “Every day for two years, and counting.”
His mother sighed. “That’s different,” she muttered, and continued inking the picture. On the drawing’s dark horizon, Ben noticed, a man on horseback was approaching.
Ben could see that she was too tired to argue. But he didn’t care. “The only difference is that Sara’s letters are a real waste of stamps,” Ben said. He knew he was walking along the edge of a cliff, but he felt bold. “I mean, at least with my letters, it’s possible that this Leonid guy might write back someday, right? But as for Sara’s letters, I can absolutely guarantee that—”