The World to Come

by Dara Horn

  He raced to the door, struggling with the three different locks; his hands shook, and it took far too long to let himself out. Once he was free, he hurried to the building’s entrance. But their apartment was at the end of the hall, and the entrance was on a different street, around the corner. As he ran, he felt demons blocking his way, tripping him, dragging him down, and making him stumble three times on his mad run to the building’s door. When at last he reached the front of the building, no one was there but an old man lying on the sidewalk, grumbling in his sleep. He paused, baffled. Had he dreamed it? He raced in mad circles, running down the streets nearby, ripping around every block, venturing as far as he could before circling back to his own building and then into the alley that ran alongside it, shouting her name before glancing at his own window. Someone had closed the curtain.

  He ran back around the building, tripping on the sleeping man as he desperately barreled down the sidewalk and through the main entrance. The door to his room was locked. He pounded on the door, afraid to tap it, but no one answered. Shaking, he fished his keys out of his pocket and opened the locks slowly, as if solving a puzzle piece by piece.

  When he edged the door open, he saw a small dark shape curled into a ball, shivering on the mattress in the corner. He moved toward her slowly, measuring the room with his steps. When he finally crouched over her, the way he had on his sleepless nights, she rolled over to face him. He saw her clutching together the sides of her ragged coat, trying to cover the stumps of thread where the buttons had been torn from her blouse, pinching the cloth closed over her scraped red skin. A small circle of blood lay in the dent below her nose. She tried to speak, mouthing words, but he couldn’t understand her. What did his daughter mean?

  “I want to go home,” she said.

  REPORTS OF THE Soviet promised land proved to be greatly exaggerated. Chagall had been right: once Der Nister moved his family back to Russia, he had no chance at all of publishing his stories. Only “socialist realism” was permitted. Such was the price of dancing with the bear. His previously published work was panned, denounced in all the journals as decadent and absurd. Even the children’s books he had written with Chagall were gathered up and destroyed.

  For ten long years he wrote almost nothing, struggled to find odd jobs, nearly starved. And then he began writing something realistic, a novel that the censors would approve. While Chagall ensconced himself in France, befriending Picasso and Matisse and painting pictures of bright green Jews, crucified Jesuses, flowers, and fruit, the Hidden One started writing the only story in the world.

  It was called The Family Crisis.

  9

  THROUGH HIS own private family crisis, Ben and Sara’s father Daniel Ziskind had once learned that time is created through deeds of true kindness. Days and hours and years are not time, but merely vessels for it, and too often they are empty. The world stands still, timeless and empty, until an act of generosity changes it in an instant and sends it soaring through arcs of rich seasons, moment after spinning moment of racing beauty. And then, with a single unkind deed, a single withheld hand, time ceases to exist.

  Daniel Ziskind was only twenty-one years old in 1965, but he could already count several instances in which he had witnessed the creation of time, or its destruction. The first came when he was twelve years old and sick of the world. He and his parents had just moved out of Newark, New Jersey, to a town farther away from the city, living for the first time in a real house, with real trees—a whole forest’s worth—in its backyard. It was a small house his mother’s father had owned before his death, and Daniel paced the rooms nervously, wondering whether his grandfather might have died right where he was standing. But even with the move, Daniel noticed, time didn’t pass. No matter how old he became, he still remained a child—short, smooth-faced, soprano-voiced, and perpetually afraid. No matter how long his mother stayed in the hospital, she still remained ill. And no matter how many years went by, his father still was and had always been a member of the Communist Party who insisted on sending Daniel to Yiddish afternoon schools run by his comrades at the Workmen’s Circle in Newark while he hung framed pictures of Stalin on his walls. After the move, though, there was no more Yiddish school—just Daniel’s father’s daily harangues about the plight of the workers, and his angry letters to the editor, and his endless tirades (Daniel was forbidden to repeat them in public, since his uncle had lost his job) against the neighbors, and his bosses, and the schools, and the corporations, and the doctors, and the banks, and the television studios, and the hospitals, and the government, and the country, and his good-for-nothing twelve-year-old son, instead of against the illness that had debilitated his wife. And then, one afternoon when Daniel decided to wander into the woods behind the house, time was created.

  Daniel had never seen so many trees. His whole life had been spent on grimy sidewalks, or in the pathetic city park where anemic maples huddled in sad clumps. Even when they had visited his grandfather, he had rarely strayed far from the house. But that afternoon he entered the gate of the forest, looking up at the ancient trees towering like the columns of a temple above his head. The muddy floor sank beneath his feet as if he were a tree taking root. He moved in soft, cautious steps along the roots and rocks as his head reeled at the branches in the sky. How long could he walk through the woods? How far did the trees go? Would his father return from the hospital before Daniel found his way back? If he did, he would be furious, Daniel thought. His thin twelve-year-old chest constricted out of habit. But then he looked up again at the tree trunks towering overhead, and breathed out. Fine, let him, he thought. It’s not like anything will change. Daniel walked until he came to a clearing, surprised to see how quickly the vast new continent dwindled. Beyond the last few trees, he could just make out a house. It was an old, rotting, broken-down house with a divided back porch—for two families, probably, or even three or four, like the way the houses were in the poorer neighborhoods back in Newark, grass growing between the cracks in the porch steps, abandoned by the world. And then he saw the little girl.

  She was sitting with her back to him, under a crabapple tree whose branches scraped at the broken windows, her hair hanging in a thick black braid like a shining rope down her back. She was singing to a doll that she held in the air. When he saw her, he froze, frightened. The thick braid swung against her back like a pull for a theater curtain, closing before him, and she seemed about to turn around. He turned quickly, finding his footing to run away. But then, for a fraction of an instant that divided what was from what would be, he listened, and recognized the song.

  It was a Yiddish song called “Reyzele,” about a boy who circles a girl’s house, waiting for a sign from her. Daniel stood at the edge of the forest and slowly turned around. He had never heard a girl so small sing in Yiddish.

  He knelt behind a tree and watched her as she sang. He could see her face now, from the side, but she didn’t notice him. He held his breath. Now he was staring at how the sun was scattering little drops of light through the leaves of the tree, dripping light down on her thin pale neck and the dark hair slipping out of her braid onto her skin. The dirty broken house behind her seemed to disappear. He watched her as she moved, just barely moving, swaying in place almost like praying, and he couldn’t stop looking at her. There was something about her face, about her whole body, about the way she breathed, that made her different from any little girl he had ever seen. He noticed it in the tone of her voice, in the way she cast her eyes down in her lap, in the slight trembling of her little lower lip. And then he knew what it was. She’s sad, he thought. It was the kind of sorrow he had never seen in any child’s face, except in the mirror. He leaned forward, peering through the back gate of the world. A fallen branch snapped beneath his knee.

  She stopped singing. He ducked, but it was too late: she had seen him. She dropped the doll and stared. He waited for her to run into the house, but to his surprise, she smiled—and time was created.

  In the
created moment Daniel stood up, and stepped out of the woods onto the weedy grass of the girl’s backyard. She was still smiling at him, watching him carefully. Her lower lip gleamed in the daylight, and the glimmer of light on her little lip confused him so much that he forgot to say hello. Instead he stood on the grass in front of her, looked down at her lip, and asked, “How do you know that song?”

  She looked at him, still smiling, but said nothing. She had dark eyes, he noticed, and pale little fingers that trembled like her lower lip. The doll in the grass stared into the sky.

  “There’s hardly anybody who knows that song,” he stuttered. Hearing his own high voice shamed him, but the girl was listening. “And definitely hardly any kids. You have to tell me—where’d you learn it?”

  Now she frowned, pulling her delicate eyebrows together and glancing at the ground. She pointed to herself. “No English,” she said. She swung her head forward until her hair landed over her shoulder, and tugged at her braid.

  The theater curtain had been drawn closed. He stared at her shining braid and felt the way he often felt now around girls at school, as if a thick screen hung between him and them, impassable. She was getting up from the grass now, picking up her doll. Please, he begged her silently, don’t go! But then he thought of something.

  “Vi heystu?” he stammered. He had never spoken Yiddish to someone younger than him before.

  She stopped moving, kneeling on the grass. Her dark eyes glowed, and the curtain opened. “Reyzele,” she said.

  He laughed. “That’s really your name?” he asked. Only after it was out of his mouth did he realize he had asked in English.

  But this time the girl seemed to understand, or at least to have something to add. “In school,” she stuttered in English, “they say Rosalie.”

  Rosalie. Reyzele. He rolled the words under his tongue. “Ikh heys Daniyl,” he told her. She was standing now, her head up to his chin. Her face blossomed before him, radiant eyes, luminous lips, soft skin like petals. Her nostrils curled like the pink surfaces of a seashell. But look how short she was! “Vi alt bistu?” he asked.

  She held up nine fingers. God, he thought. Was he allowed to become friends with a nine-year-old girl?

  He pointed to himself, trying hard to keep his hand from shaking. He didn’t have enough fingers anymore. “Tsvelf,” he said. She nodded, smiled. Her lips glowed. “Fun vanen shtamstu?” he asked. She must be one of those Jewish refugee kids from Germany, he thought, like the ones his friends used to make fun of in Newark a few years back. But all of those kids had learned English by now. And they were older.

  “Moskve,” she said.

  She was from—Moscow? But how could that be? He thought of his father and started to sweat. “Are you here with—with your mom and dad?” he asked, sliding into English again.

  “Mother,” she said, and pointed to the house.

  “What about your dad?” he asked, and immediately regretted it. Maybe she won’t understand, he hoped.

  She frowned, and looked down at her doll. “I do not know how to say,” she stammered in English. He was about to tell her she didn’t have to, when she suddenly said: “Geharget.”

  He stared at her, jolted by shock. He turned the word over in his mind, searching for the slightest possibility that it could mean something other than what he thought it meant, but there was none. When he spoke, his mouth was dry. He whispered: “Killed?”

  Suddenly a woman’s voice bellowed from inside the house: “RAISYA!”

  The r rolled and trilled into the backyard, flattening the grass. The girl glanced at the house and bent down to pick up her doll. She straightened, doll in hand, and looked at him, her lower lip trembling. “A dank, Daniyl,” she said softly. Before Daniel could speak, she rose on her tiptoes in the grass and pressed her trembling lips against his cheek.

  Daniel stood, stunned. His body shook with beauty. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said quickly, fighting to control his shaking tongue. His voice was lower this time, deeper. “I’ll teach you English. I will. I promise I’ll come back. Vart af mir.” Wait for me.

  The girl smiled, and ran into the house. Daniel watched her until she had passed through the door, and then backed away from the yard. He retreated without turning, slowly, as if exiting the holy of holies. When he reached the trees, he lingered in the afternoon shadows, staring at the dirty little house with its broken shutters, searching for some sign of the beauty within. But the house and yard were silent, encircled by a magic ring.

  In the created moments the woods had grown dark, and Daniel had trouble finding his way back. But by the time he stepped onto his own back porch, he knew that he didn’t want to do anything for the rest of his life except stand in that backyard beyond the woods, and if that meant that he would have to spend the next seven years of his life waiting for her to grow up, then he would. When his father heard him enter, he screamed at Daniel for being late, for being “lost,” and then slapped him across the face. But to Daniel even the slap didn’t matter in the least. There were moments beyond it to look forward to, because time had just been created.

  THE SECOND INSTANCE of time’s creation and destruction came seven years later—seven years during which time rumbled high in the heavens, shaking the wilderness in Daniel’s backyard. Rosalie was sixteen, and had kissed him many more times. At one point he had taken her to meet his parents. She had entered their living room, with its stacks of Party newspapers and portrait of Stalin on the walls, turned pale, and made an excuse to leave. It was a long time before she came back. By then Daniel was nineteen, in college already, and there was no avoiding it. One lonely night at dinner (his mother was home but sleeping, drugged, upstairs), he decided to mention what had happened to Rosalie’s father. His father flew into an unprecedented rage.

  “Either that girl is a liar or her father was a criminal,” he shouted, throwing his fork to the floor. She had stopped being Rosalie; she had become That Girl. “Either way, I don’t want to see you with that girl ever again.”

  “Fine,” Daniel shouted back. He was bigger now, and his voice was lower, and louder. “You don’t have to see her. That doesn’t mean I won’t.”

  “Yes, it does,” his father growled, confining a roar.

  “It’s a free country. I can see whoever I want.”

  His father stood up. “Only you would think it’s a free country,” he hissed. “You’re nineteen years old, Daniel. By now you ought to know that nothing is free.” He walked over to the desk in the corner of the kitchen, with its stack of unpaid bills. He flipped furiously through the stack, shedding notices on the floor until he picked out an envelope, already addressed and stamped. He waved it in the air like a flag. “Do you know what this is?”

  Daniel was silent, although he could see the address on the front. This can’t be happening, he thought. Mom will wake up, she’ll talk him out of it. It was a fantasy he had often had since he was a boy, a dream. But his mother didn’t wake up. She rarely did anymore. And when she did, she didn’t speak.

  “This is the check for your tuition next semester,” his father announced. He tore it in half, then in quarters, then in tiny shreds that scattered in the air. “There won’t be any more of them. See how you like it when it’s free.”

  “You’re joking,” Daniel whispered.

  “You can decide for yourself which one is the joke—that girl, or your future.”

  At first Daniel gave in. “Please don’t ruin your own life because of me,” Rosalie begged him later that night, when he sneaked out to their meeting place in the woods after his father was asleep. There was snow on the ground, and she trembled between kisses in her thin coat. “We’ve already waited this long. College is just a few years—it will be over sooner than you think. I’ll wait for you.” But when Daniel went back to his engineering classes, miserably maintaining his promise not to see her anymore, he found that time had evaporated. The months and years simply refused to pass, or even to exist. Then he realized
that he wouldn’t need his father to pay for college if he joined the army. When Rosalie turned eighteen, he asked her to marry him, and time was created again: thirteen whole months of it before their wedding, which he would spend waiting for her on his tour of duty in Vietnam.

  THREE WEEKS AFTER Daniel’s arrival in Da Nang, he received a large envelope in the mail containing five of his own letters, unopened, and a short typewritten note from his father claiming that he would rather rot in prison like Daniel’s dead criminal soon-to-be-father-in-law than read a single letter Daniel sent from Vietnam, or write to him again. At the base in Da Nang, where the city streets were filled with thousands of men and women riding bicycles with live pigs strapped over the back wheels, Daniel was perpetually exhausted from the heat. He waited, bored, for his assignment, hoping he would be sent into active combat, if only to further insult his father. He was crushed when he heard where he had been assigned: a mobile army construction unit charged with building a road over a dirt track, euphemistically called Highway One, that ran from Da Nang up into the mountains, through a treacherous mountain pass—the Pass of the Ocean Clouds—and on to a place called Hue. The city of Hue (“pronounced ‘Hway’”), Daniel read in one of the pamphlets published by MACV, was “an important cultural and strategic center, one province removed from the demilitarized zone. An imperial capital of Vietnam, it is known for its elaborate tombs, final resting places of the rulers of the ancient Vietnamese empire.” Big shit, Daniel thought. There was only one empire he was here to send down to the grave, and it wasn’t ancient Vietnamese.