by Dara Horn
Sara looked out the window, watching the weedy lawns of the houses by the highway before glancing back at her mother. “Why are we selling it?” she asked. It was strange, this use of the word “we.” She liked the way it sounded. Very grown-up.
Her mother grimaced, clutching the wheel. “Because the artist just died last year, and now it’s worth a lot of money, that’s why,” she said. “This way we can keep the house and you and Ben can still go to college.”
This was more than Sara wanted to know. Pretending to be bored, she examined herself in the passenger-side mirror and noticed how curly her hair had become in recent months, the subtle changes in the shape of her jaw and cheeks. Already she looked different than she had when her father died. After a few years, she thought, he wouldn’t even recognize her. She glanced back at her mother, whose mouth was hanging slightly open, and remembered the painting. “Don’t you like that picture?” she asked.
Her mother paused a moment. “Yes, I do,” she said, her voice stiff.
“So why can’t we just keep it?”
Sara’s mother stuck out her bottom lip, blowing a strand of hair away from her face. “People don’t always get to keep what they like,” she said, staring out at the road in front of her. “Sometimes you can only have something you like for a short time, and after that you just have to be happy to have had it when you did, and enjoy the memory of it. Like—like a library book,” she finished.
Or like a person, Sara thought. She bit her lip and looked out the window. They were on the ugliest part of the highway now, the part that passed through miles and miles of nothing but brown swamps and abandoned buildings. The sky had changed color, from blanched gray to the sort of sad blue that shines forth on cloudy days just before the day dies, a burnished brassy color that laughs at the ugly day behind it and at the long nighttime to come. Seeing the sky getting dark so soon after school ended made Sara feel sick, and thinking of how the days would continue shriveling up into nights, each day shorter than the last, made her feel even sicker. And it didn’t matter that eventually the days would get longer, either, Sara thought, because all that meant was that eventually they would also get shorter, and shrivel and die again.
It was a long time before she wanted to speak. When she did, she practiced her question to herself first, in her head, making sure it would come out the way she wanted it to. Few things did, now.
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” Sara asked. She had first heard the idea when someone in her class had talked about it. It was a few days after the field trip to the museum, where they had also seen an exhibit about knights and armor. The boy had explained to his friend that he was really Sir Galahad, a famous knight, who had been born again in a different body. He was a smart boy, liked by teachers and despised by students, and Sara was inclined to believe him.
“No,” her mother said.
“Why not?”
“Well, it doesn’t work, if you think about it,” her mother said.
Sara thought about it, but she couldn’t understand what her mother meant. Still, an unexpected excitement coursed through her body at her mother’s answer. She hadn’t had a real grown-up conversation with her mother since her father got sick. Here, now, sitting in the passenger seat at the front of the car, the place of honor, she almost didn’t care that she didn’t understand. Her mother had taken her seriously. “Why doesn’t it work?” she asked. She tried to make her voice sound curious, but she could barely contain her joy, a joy that surged ever so slightly above the sorrow of the weeks that had swollen into months, just to be alone with her mother, to sit beside her and drink in her words.
“Well, let’s say the whole world started with Adam and Eve,” her mother began, drumming her fingers once on the steering wheel.
“Okay,” Sara said, hesitant. The boy who said he was really Sir Galahad had also told his friend that the Bible was made up.
Her mother moved the car quickly into another lane. “Or if you don’t like that, then at least the world started with fewer people than we have now. Right?”
“Right,” Sara agreed, wondering what might be coming next.
“Well, if that’s true, then how can people’s souls come back to life, if we only started with two souls? Or even if we only started with a few dozen, or a few hundred, or even a few thousand? There wouldn’t be enough to go around.”
Sara thought for a moment. This was becoming complicated, far more complicated than the boy at school had made it sound. The conversation was turning into a math problem. “But for the people who get the old souls,” Sara objected, plotting it out in her head, “for them, it would still be the same—”
Her mother gripped the steering wheel. “But the same what?” her mother asked. “What makes the soul who it is, if not the choices the person makes while he’s alive? Isn’t part of who I am that I’m your mother? If I wasn’t your mom, and Ben’s mom, if I was someone else’s mom, or nobody’s mom, do you think I’d be the same person?”
“I—I don’t know,” Sara said, although it occurred to her that her mother hadn’t always been her mother, and before she was her mother she was the same person. Or was she? Sara suddenly realized that she had no way to know, that even the photographs of her mother from before she was her mother were mostly black and white, and besides they only started when her mother was about five or so, the earlier ones having been lost, and anyway even color pictures didn’t include things like the way a person’s voice sounds, and even if they had had home movies then, it still wouldn’t be good enough, because they still would be missing the way a person would answer a particular question, or the smell of the person, or the taste, or the touch.
“Let’s say that every time the soul gets born into another life, it has another chance to make better choices,” Sara’s mother was saying. “But then how can a person’s life mean anything at all? How can the first chance matter, if you always get a second chance? How can anything you do in your life matter, if it’s always just a rehearsal, just another try, if it’s never the real thing?”
Somewhere along the road, Sara had gotten confused. It had sounded simple to her the way the boy had explained it, but for some reason it seemed to upset her mother and she couldn’t understand why. She was sorry she had mentioned it.
“Sara, do you remember why people were kicked out of paradise?” her mother suddenly asked.
Her mother was beginning to frighten her. The boy from school clearly could no longer be trusted; better to go with what she knew. “Because of eating from that tree?” Sara asked.
“That’s what most people think,” her mother said. “But I once found something in that story that no one seems to notice. It doesn’t actually say that they were kicked out of paradise for eating from the tree of knowledge. Not at all! Instead, after they eat from that tree, God says, ‘Oh, no, they just ate from the tree of knowledge—now what if they also eat from the tree of life, and live forever?’ So he kicks the people out of paradise, and then he puts a bright, revolving sword in front of the path to the tree of life. Just to keep people from living forever!”
A revolving sword?
“No one can live forever, see? Not even in someone else’s body. No one can get past that sword. There are no second chances, Sara,” her mother said, staring straight ahead. “I want you to remember that. Everything counts. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you’re just rehearsing for your life.”
They were entering the tunnel now, the car edging slowly between the rows of bathroomlike tiles and orange filmy lights. Usually the tunnel was Sara’s favorite part of the drive—watching for the distance markers and the big mosaic “New Jersey/New York” dividing line, guessing when they would finally reach the curve in the road where the light from the other end would come streaming in, and best of all, her father explaining to them how the tunnel had been built, describing the pumps and pylons and air compressors that had been used to help displace thousands of pounds of dirt to construct the path beneath
the riverbed. She had never really paid attention to the details, but it amazed her just to listen to him, to imagine how all of the secrets of what seemed like every road in the world were packed into her father’s head. But now she sat in the dark of the orange lights, thinking about that revolving sword. If God thought no one could find a way past the sword and on through to the tree of life, he clearly hadn’t met her father.
Her mother rubbed her own right eye, tracing her finger along the edge of her eyelid, where she was wearing makeup for the first time in many weeks. “No, I don’t believe in reincarnation,” she said. “You want to know what I believe?”
“Okay,” Sara said, although she suspected that her mother was no longer talking to her, but rather to herself, or to someone else entirely, someone who wasn’t in the car at all.
“I believe that when people die, they go to the same place as all the people who haven’t yet been born. That’s why it’s called the world to come, because that’s where they make the new souls for the future. And the reward when good people die”—her mother paused, swallowed, paused again—“the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven’t been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have—they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it’s up to the new ones, once they’re born, what they’ll use and what they won’t, but that’s what everyone who dies is doing, I think. They get to decide what kind of people the new ones might be able to become.” She brushed a loose bit of hair away from her face. “That’s why your children will be lucky, Sara, because Dad is going to help make them who they’re going to be—just like my father helped make you.”
They emerged from the tunnel and into the city. Sara and her mother sat in silence for a long time after that, as her mother navigated through the streets and then searched for a place to park. Since the last time Sara had been to the city with her mother—months and months ago, before her father got sick, when they had all gone to see the circus—the city had lost its gleam. Outside the tunnel, men holding little mops tried to clean the car’s windows and wouldn’t go away, no matter how many times Sara’s mother leaned on the horn. As they drove through the streets, Sara looked out the car’s sponged windows at the buildings tattooed with scribbled nonsense words, storefronts clouded with the black breath of spray paint. Later, when they got out of the car, all Sara noticed were the dark splotches on the sidewalk, and the piles of garbage bags on the curbsides, and the trash blowing in the cold wind, and the bundled dirty old people with beards filled with bits of food, lying curled up like babies over metal grates. She followed her mother into a tall building, where her mother had to sign her name in a book at the front door, and then into an elevator where it was so warm that both she and her mother took off their coats. And then they entered a series of rooms that reminded Sara of a tomb.
THE ROOMS WERE small and dark, and crammed with all sorts of things, weird furniture and fancy tables and chairs, but mostly they were filled, like the tomb, with sculptures and paintings. Sara looked around in awe. Every inch of every wall was covered with pictures, some of nothing, just colors and shapes, but many of them of people. Most of the people in the pictures were weird and distorted, with baggy watery bodies or bodies that were divided into circles and squares, but some of them had the kind of accuracy she had been trying so hard to achieve in the tomb. The same was true of the sculptures that crammed the floor. Some of them were just shapes, twisted bits of stone or metal or wood like one of the construction sets she used to play with, but she could see that some of them were twisted versions of people, people with nothing but blobs for heads, or plastic cylinders for legs. Others, the ones she like the best, looked like real people—ugly people, yes, but real people, ready for the underworld. Sara had barely had time to look around before a short man with a thick mustache and a big smile came into the room.
“Rosalie!” his voice boomed. “We were worried you wouldn’t make it. And you brought a guest!”
“This is my daughter Sara,” her mother announced, and then, to Sara, “This is Mr. Komornik. He’s the man I told you about.”
“It’s good to meet you, Sara,” the short man said, and stuck out his hand for her to shake. “Your mom talks about you and your brother all the time. I hear you two are real troopers,” he said.
Sara wasn’t sure what he meant, but she shook his hand and nodded. The skin on the man’s palm was warm and taut, like her father’s. “Are you from Russia?” she asked. He didn’t sound like he was, but then neither did her mother.
The man looked confused for a moment, then laughed. “Russia? No, I’m not from Russia. But if you want to meet someone from Russia, look no further,” he said, and began to walk toward a doorway on the opposite side of the room, taking hold of her other hand. She almost had to skip to keep up with him. It felt strange, holding hands with a man who could walk faster than she could. Her mother followed close behind.
The second room looked to Sara even more like a tomb. Every corner was piled high with sculptures and paintings, the walls lined with pictures so old-looking that she was sure they were from dead people, pictures of things that had happened to dead people while they were living, like the paintings on a tomb’s walls. There were faces everywhere. Sara looked around the room, her eyes so occupied with all the different heads—heads carved in stone, heads in bronze, heads in oils, heads in watercolors, heads in ink—that she jumped when one of the heads moved, attached to a large body seated in a chair.
“Sergei, this is Rosalie Ziskind, whom I’ve told you about. Rosalie, this is Sergei Popov.”
The old man stood up, rising from his chair as if facing great resistance. When he drew himself to his full height, Sara saw that he was not merely old but mountainous, one of those older people who seem to accumulate mass over their years. His head was like a cragged, whitened peak above his enormous brown-suited body, avalanches of flesh sliding down over his immense white-shirted waist. His tie was short over his massive stomach.
“Mrs. Ziskind,” the old man said, his voice deep and his accent heavy as he extended his hand to Sara’s mother. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you.”
The short man dropped Sara’s hand and stepped to the side, angling himself between the old man and Sara’s mother. Sara watched as her mother took the old man’s hand. Then the old man stooped down, his body moving in waves as he lowered himself to squat in front of her. His large, wrinkled face was red under his thick white hair. Sara noticed, once he was at her eye level, that his eyebrows moved independently of each other, like hairy caterpillars crawling above his eyes. “And what’s your name?” he asked, singing the words in a high voice, like a little girl.
Sara didn’t answer or even smile. She never answered when people talked to her like a baby. Besides, the man exuded a faint odor, like how the bathroom sometimes smelled after Ben had come out of the shower now that he was wearing the brace, the dense rotten flavor of sweat and plastic still lingering on the bathroom counter. She could hear the man breathe.
Sara glared at him, waiting for her mother’s prompting. Usually, when she refused to talk to someone, it was a matter of seconds before her mother reprimanded her for being rude. But when she glanced up at her mother, she saw that her mother wasn’t even looking at her. Instead, she stood staring at the old man, a deep line drawn between her eyebrows, her lips tight.
“Popov,” her mother said. “I thought I recognized that name.”
Sara saw the short man walk across the room, turning his head back briefly when he heard her mother’s voice. But soon he was standing by a table in the corner, his back to them, flicking switches on a coffee machine and casting jittery glances around the room. Earlier he had made Sara think of her father, but now she saw that he was more like Ben: jumpy, distracted, trying his hardest to look the other way. He fumbled with a tower of styrofoam cups.
&n
bsp; The old man straightened up, squinting as he looked at Sara’s mother. “Have we met before?” he asked.
Sara’s mother shook her head. But her head moved back and forth a few too many times, changing from an answer to a motion, a swaying movement that gradually slowed to a stop. Her mouth opened slightly, her tongue edging out between her teeth. Still staring at the man, she murmured, “Sara.”
Sara jumped but didn’t answer, unsure of whether her mother had really said her name. Then, without looking at her, her mother spoke even more softly, in Yiddish. “Sorele, zog zey az mir darfn geyn—itst,” she said, her eyes still focused on the man. Tell them we have to go—now. He had taken off his jacket, and now Sara noticed how the man’s shirt was stained dark in the underarms, damp from sweat. It had been freezing on the street, but now Sara suddenly felt uncomfortably warm, as if the room were running out of air.
“Why?” asked Sara. And why was her mother speaking Yiddish? Sara glanced across the room at the short man. His hands were filled with coffee cups.
“Zog zey,” her mother answered, “zog zey az ikh khalesh.”
“Really?” Sara asked. Her mother felt faint? If she was, then why couldn’t she tell them in English, herself? But then she looked at her mother and saw that she was standing paralyzed, her eyes hard, wide, preoccupied—as if someone else had occupied her body, showing her something more than what her own eyes would see. And someone else had also borrowed her voice.