The World to Come

by Dara Horn

  “Ben, stop it.” Now his mother was watching him, her facing turning red.

  “—nobody is going to read those letters, nobody, it’s not like she’s going to get an answer from the other world or something—”

  “Ben, stop!”

  But Ben didn’t stop. Instead, he turned his head as best he could and aimed his voice down the hall, where Sara was in her room. “Hey, Sara,” he shouted, “haven’t you heard? Dad’s dead! Dead people don’t read their mail!”

  His mother’s face, burning, suddenly ignited in rage as she flung her right hand into the air.

  Ben cringed. The two of them froze, she with her eyes burning, he shrunken into his cage. Then he saw her eyes shift to his shoulder, where a strip of steel pushed beneath his shirt. The pity in her expression was more horrible than if she had hit him. Ben watched her as she slowly lowered her hand, and his own gut curled with the shame of being too crippled to be slapped.

  “Go to your room,” she said, her voice a cage confining a roar. “Just go to your room.”

  Ben tried to think of something to spit back at her, but it was over. Everything was over. She turned back to her drawing as he shuddered in his cage like an animal, humiliated, impotent. He walked away as slowly as possible, muttering under his breath, “Dead people don’t read their mail.”

  BUT LIVING PEOPLE don’t read their mail, either, as Ben was fast discovering. Months passed, and the bar mitzvah approached without any word from Leonid. Not that it particularly mattered, though. After all, for the purposes of the bar mitzvah, Leonid was just a symbol, an Oppressed Boy, a blurred figure floating above a white background. But in Ben’s mind Leonid grew more and more vivid, like an embryo or fetus that becomes more recognizable each day, fingers and lips and spine and eyes and hair coming slowly and smoothly into focus. In his brief moments each day outside of the cage, he borrowed Leonid’s body: small, lithe, gentle, yet quietly enduring, with the world’s straightest spine.

  And after discovering a mailbox near the school, he continued sending letters.

  Dear Leonid,

  I told you a little about myself in my last letter, but I thought I should tell you more about my family because you might think it is interesting.

  My mom says that our family has a long history of fighting for freedom. My mom came from the USSR when she was a little girl, which is still almost impossible, and my mom says it was even harder then. Her dad was put in prison in the USSR, not for killing anybody or anything but for no reason, which my mom says happened a lot in the USSR. My mom and my grandmother got out and they didn’t find out what happened to her dad right away but later they found out he was dead.

  My dad also has a history of fighting for freedom, because he served his Country in Viet Nam. If you want to know more about that I really can’t tell you, because that’s something else people don’t talk about much. I told you already how we never learn anything at school. We have to learn American History every year, but only up to 1945, because I guess nobody thinks that anything important ever happened after 1945. There are sometimes chapters in the back of the textbook from after 1945, but the school year always ends before we get to them. I found some books in the library about it, but when I try to bring them home my mom gets in a bad mood and yells at me for no reason.

  Once when I was eleven I found metal name tags in a drawer with my dad’s name on them. My mom told me they were for in case he got killed there and his face got blown apart and nobody could tell who he was. Luckily for you that didn’t happen, because then I wouldn’t have been born, and you wouldn’t be having a bar mitzvah.

  Your friend,

  Benjamin Ziskind

  Dear Leonid,

  I forgot to say in my last letter that my dad died a few years ago.

  I also forgot to say the most important thing, which is that our bar mitzvah was last week. As expected I read everything perfectly with no mistakes at all, the way you’re supposed to do it, and I read your part perfectly also, so you can tell everybody that you had a perfect bar mitzvah with no mistakes. Which is pretty good considering that I did all the work for it and you didn’t do anything. Afterwards there was a dumb lunch at our house, and that was pretty boring because everybody just said the same things again and again, congratulations, and you’re a real man now, and what a great job you did, and how proud your dad would have been, and how sorry they were that he couldn’t be with you today, over and over again. So you didn’t miss much.

  I am sorry you weren’t at the bar mitzvah but I have to say I missed my dad more than I missed you.

  Your friend,

  Benjamin Z.

  Dear Leonid,

  School is a terrible place, I have decided. There is nothing good about it except for math class. Everything else is a total waste of time. As I mentioned before I have done a lot of reading about prisons, and I notice that they always describe them as painted in very dull colors, and my school is also painted in these kinds of colors, with greenish lockers and brownish walls and grayish floors. Actually they recently fixed up one wing of the school, and now that part of the school is just the opposite—all the colors are really bright, with bright red and yellow lockers and blue doors and shiny white floors that are already all scuffed up. It’s funny because I thought the other colors were terrible but these are much worse, because they make it seem like it’s normal to be happy there when it isn’t.

  I am actually not sure if it is normal to be happy anywhere. I think that I used to feel happy most of the time, when I was little, but now I notice that being happy is more like an exception than what usually happens. Sometimes I feel like the time when I was happy was sort of like the time before I was born—like I wasn’t even born yet then, but I didn’t know it yet. I know I was happy living there, in some place I don’t remember anymore, but now I’ve been born already and there’s no way to go back.

  I was just wondering if you ever felt that way or not. But you don’t have to answer.

  Your friend,

  Ben Z.

  Two years passed, and Benjamin Ziskind’s unanswered letters continued. But then one day the Soviet Union collapsed, the exodus from the Red Sea commenced, and what seemed like half the Jewish population of Chernobyl was relocated by an American Jewish refugee agency to Benjamin Ziskind’s New Jersey town, including Leonid Shcharansky. And Ben’s mother, recognizing the name when she spotted it on the list of immigrants looking for host families to help ease them into their new lives (the list included both Leonid’s mother, who had been an English teacher in the USSR, and Leonid himself, who would be entering the ninth grade in Ben’s school), decided to call up Leonid and invite his family to dinner.

  When the doorbell rang, the Ziskind twins and their mother assembled in a row beside the door, and Ben was relieved to be wearing a new kind of brace that at least (merciful God) didn’t have a chin support and fit almost completely beneath his shirt. When the door opened, a large woman with dark hair and a brown dress stood on the threshold. Someone else stood outside on the porch, but Ben’s view was obstructed by Sara, who lately seemed to always have paint smudges on her cheeks and arms. She was still taller than him.

  Their mother stretched out her hand. “Hello, Mrs. Shcharanskaya.”

  “Please, call me Raisa,” the woman answered. She had a deep voice, and slurred her words.

  “You can call me Raisa, too,” their mother said with a smile. “That was my name, when I was a little girl.”

  Raisa Shcharanskaya opened her eyes wide, drawing up her heavy painted eyelids, and said something very loud, in Russian.

  Their mother laughed. “I used to know Russian, but I don’t anymore. I’m sorry,” she said. But Ben knew that was a lie, because he had noticed that their mother spoke Russian often—in wild shouts, late at night, in her dreams.

  Raisa made a noise that sounded something like a grunt. “It’s better to forget it,” she said. “Rats and thieves, all of them.”

  Their mother
smiled uncomfortably before turning to face Ben and Sara. “Let me introduce everyone,” she began, but Ben didn’t hear anything else she said, because at that moment, Leonid emerged.

  There are two kinds of fifteen-year-old boys in the world. The first are the kind that look like they are twelve, and the second are the kind that look like they are twenty-four. Benjamin Ziskind was the former. Leonid Ilych Shcharansky was the latter.

  Leonid was beyond big. Leonid was colossal. It was even possible, Ben reasoned as he tried to strain his neck against the shoulder straps of the cage to take in Leonid’s tremendous form, that Leonid was suffering from some sort of glandular condition that explained his massive size. Acromegaly, Ben thought to himself, his game-show buzzer finger twitching. Or cretinism. Marfan syndrome, perhaps. (Marfan syndrome, of course, was the disease Abraham Lincoln had suffered from. Its symptoms included abnormal height, an indented chest cavity, elongated digits, heart murmur, and premature death in one’s thirties or forties, though not usually at the hands of a Rebel assassin.) Or maybe even a mutation of some kind, from Chernobyl.

  Leonid was at least six and a half feet tall, perhaps even closer to seven. He had to duck his head to fit in the doorway, which his giant frame filled completely, since in addition to being tall, Leonid—as Ben quickly registered while the straps of the cage dug into the skin on the back of his neck—also had a tremendous physique. His massive arms were forced into a flannel shirt whose sleeves barely reached past his thick, hairy elbows, his chest was encased in a tight black T-shirt that seemed about to burst, and his monumental legs, one now inside the house and the other outside, straddled the threshold like (Ben thought, finger on the imaginary buzzer) the Colossus of Rhodes. On top of it all was a giant face crowned with flaming red hair like a burning halo, and drooping blue eyes that looked, more than anything else, bored.

  The face surveyed the Ziskinds, a slight smirk crossing its handsome lips as the droopy eyes paused on Sara, lingering with a strange curve of the lower lip that just might have been the shadow of a smile. When his glance came to rest on Ben, Ben stuck out his hand, uncertain as to how high he might have to reach to offer a handshake, and struggled to form a word. But just as Ben was about to squeeze out a hello, Leonid turned around and looked down at his own left foot, still outside the house. Ben peered over the threshold and watched as Leonid spat and crushed the butt of a cigarette on the Ziskinds’ front porch.

  “I DO NOT know what they feed him in the school, but all we eat in Chernobyl is cabbage all the time and he does not stop growing,” Raisa said as they sat down at the table. “Look what will happen to him when they give him American food. Who knew I would have a giant in my house?” Ben looked at Leonid, who grunted from the heights. “Of course, you know how boys are,” Raisa laughed, eyeing Ben across the table. “Little beasts. You are lucky not to have more men at home.”

  Ben saw his mother wince, a subtle gesture, a slight blinking of the left eye, a slight biting of the lower lip, that Raisa Shcharanskaya failed to notice. Leonid had settled into what used to be their father’s chair.

  “And is Leonid’s father here in America, too?” their mother asked delicately.

  Raisa snorted. “Lenya’s father is—I don’t know how you call it. A mamzer,” she said. “Two years ago he ran away with a Georgian whore.”

  Sara, who was in the middle of a sip of juice, suddenly inhaled the liquid, choked, and spewed it out through her nose onto the table. Then she began gagging until their mother and Raisa, both clearly thrilled by the distraction, simultaneously jumped up to beat her back and offer her water. Ben wondered if Sara had choked on purpose. Soon, to Raisa’s visible relief, everyone was laughing, except for Leonid, who at long last grinned.

  For the rest of the meal Ben watched Leonid closely. It was clear that Leonid understood English, because he responded to everything that was said with an appropriate snort or grunt. Meanwhile, he shoveled food into his mouth with reckless abandon. His hands were so large that they might more rightly have been called paws. There was no way, Ben thought, that this could be the same Leonid he had been imagining all these years. His Leonid was small, gentle, patient, daring. Not this behemoth. It couldn’t possibly be. Ben was so fascinated by Leonid that he barely heard most of the conversation—that is, until Raisa Shcharanskaya suddenly mentioned his name.

  “I read the beautiful letters Benjamin wrote to Lenya,” Raisa said. “Not all of them, only the recent ones.”

  “Recent ones?” Ben’s mother leaned forward. “But he was just writing to him for the bar mitzvah. That was two years ago.”

  Raisa laughed, the flabs of fat in her chin moving in slow waves. “Oh, no. Our last letter came only three days before we left. Maybe there are even more coming that we have missed.”

  Sara leaned over to look at Ben, who was trying as hard as he could to shrink himself into the cage concealed beneath his shirt.

  “I brought them all to my school to show my students,” Raisa continued, pausing to show off her dull little teeth in a wide smile. “It was such good experience for our class—to see how a true American boy writes English. And to learn about life in America, from the view of this true American boy, in this personal way—it was a very great opportunity for my students.” Ben felt himself turning redder than borscht. The room around him became blurry, sliding out of focus.

  “Didn’t Leonid read the letters?” he heard his mother ask through the haze.

  Raisa Shcharanskaya let out a theatrical laugh, five descending notes. “Oh, you know boys,” she said. “They would rather watch girls on television. Isn’t that right, Lenya? Lenya would rather look at girls.”

  Raisa bared her teeth again and turned to face Leonid, who gave what looked like a slight sneer. Ben’s mother, changing the subject, asked Raisa something about her language students as she got up to clear the dishes, and everyone followed with their own plates into the kitchen. This did not prevent Ben from wanting to crawl under the table and die.

  “I felt terrible to leave my students, but I know this was the right—the right decision,” Raisa said as they circulated between the kitchen and the dining room table, carrying coffee and fruit. “Now the whole country is corrupt.”

  Leonid had stopped midstream in the flow of food, his enormous body hovering by the desk in the kitchen where a pile of papers had accumulated under a loose photograph. Raisa stopped beside him, and Ben watched as Leonid whispered to his mother, picking up the photograph and pointing at it. Raisa quietly scolded him, slapping his hand until he put the photograph back down on the desk.

  “It’s a painting by Chagall,” Ben’s mother said, leaning over Raisa’s shoulder.

  Raisa crouched, ashamed. “I thought—yes, Chagall,” she muttered. “But I did not know he makes small pictures like this.” Ben stood on his toes and saw the picture over Raisa’s shoulder, a snapshot of the painting from the living room, with his mother’s hand along the side. Leonid slunk away into the dining room, sulking alone in his seat.

  “It’s small because it’s a study—a practice for a bigger painting,” Ben’s mother said, pointing at the picture. “And that’s my hand. See, that’s my wedding ring on that finger.”

  Raisa looked at their mother’s ring finger in the picture, then at the same finger alongside the photograph, and then looked up, alarmed. “You have a painting by Chagall?”

  Ben’s mother shook her head. “No, not anymore. It’s a long story,” his mother said. She seemed to suddenly regret mentioning it. She took the photograph and the pile of papers and quickly stuffed them into the desk drawer.

  Raisa let out a snort. “Rats and thieves, all of them,” she repeated as they returned to their seats around the table. “Now is only worse than before. Even my students there, now they are turning into thieves. Bad for Lenya, too. So many bad children. We try to make children good, but who can know? You cannot know how children will turn out. Parents, teachers can only do so much.”

  “So a
re you teaching here, too?” their mother asked, passing a bowl of grapes.

  Raisa sighed. “No, I am not. I am…I am…” She paused for a moment and bowed her head, closing her eyes and pinching them together with her thumb and forefinger, over her nose. She continued rubbing her eyes this way, long enough for the three Ziskinds to notice it, before raising her head. “I am working at beauty parlors,” she said, her lips tightly pursed between words. “Near the school. There is someone there from Russia who found this job for me.”

  For a moment no one spoke, until Sara broke the silence. “You could still teach here,” she said, speaking for the first time that evening. Ben marveled at how much she sounded like their mother, and suddenly felt more ashamed of his own high cracked voice. “You might have to go back to school or something, but I bet you still could—”

  “No, I am afraid, I think it is over for me,” Raisa said, looking down at her plate. Her breasts heaved under her dress before she looked up again. “Lenya, though, it is not over for him yet. He is smart, but more important, he is good. At least Lenya is a good boy.”

  Everyone looked across the table at Leonid, who was busy lighting a cigarette.

  As Leonid and his mother left the house that night, it occurred to Ben that he still had not heard Leonid’s voice.

  THAT WEEK, THE teachers at the high school announced that all the students in advanced-level math and science courses were now required to purchase TI-82 model scientific calculators. Most of the students in such classes had driver’s licenses, or at least friends who could drive them to the electronics discount store on the highway to buy one, but child prodigy Ben had to have his mother take him calculator shopping—only to discover that in the discount store, along with every other store they tried, the calculator was out of stock. The next day, Ben arrived at school early to find a crowd of students gathered in the hallway, and saw Leonid’s red hair towering above them. Ben remembered that Leonid had just been placed in precalculus—along with Ben, he was the only other ninth-grader in the class—and he wondered if Leonid had also had trouble buying the new calculator. He didn’t have to wonder long.