by Dara Horn
Raisya closed her eyes again. “I bet you miss them a lot,” she said.
Boris didn’t move. Tatiana must have told her they were dead, he thought, maybe during their last visit to Tatiana’s mother. Or else she simply knew. He cleared his throat.
“I don’t need to miss them anymore,” Boris said softly. “I have you.”
He leaned down to kiss her good night, but she had already fallen asleep.
IT IS DIFFICULT to sleep alone. Boris lay in bed for three hours, trying to sleep and failing, before someone finally knocked on his door.
“Tanya?” he whispered, afraid to wake Raisya. Tatiana must have forgotten her key, he thought. Or her hands were full. At least she was here.
“No, not her,” a man’s voice said behind the door. Boris sat up. Before he could rise from the bed, a key turned in the lock and four men came into the room: the old man Semyon from their shared apartment, two large men he had never seen before, and Sergei Popov. It took a long time for Boris to realize that he was not dreaming.
“I had wondered if you really had a wife. It seems you do,” Sergei said. He took a snapshot out of his pocket, turning it quickly toward Boris. It was the picture from under his mattress, of him and Tatiana at the beach. Boris jumped out of bed in his pajamas, staring at the mattress as if it were alive.
“You are under arrest in capital violation of Article 64-A of the Soviet Criminal Code,” he heard Sergei say. “The charge is treason, for your role in the Zionist conspiracy to bring down the Soviet state.”
“Conspiracy?” Boris repeated. He heard Sergei’s words slowly, as if listening underwater.
“Yes, for your activity on your Zionist committee, where you conspired with the Americans to destroy the USSR.”
Suddenly Boris’s brain began working again. The Anti-Fascist Committee?
Sergei turned to Semyon. “Do we need to look around here anymore?”
Semyon shook his head as Boris stared. “I already cleaned everything out. We turned in the evidence this morning.”
“Evidence,” Boris whispered. He looked again at Sergei’s hand, which had rolled the picture of him and Tatiana into a small scroll.
“We don’t have time to discuss this now,” Sergei said quickly. “Your wife will be home soon, and I imagine you’d prefer if she didn’t have to see you this way. Unless you’d like to make this harder for her, I suggest you allow these gentlemen to bring you downstairs.”
The two large men approached Boris, moving slowly, as if in a dream. Like a dream, Boris tried to raise his arms quickly, but they moved only slowly, as if shackled by weights. The men with their slow movements seized his arms and twisted them, slowly, backward, shackled them, slowly, behind his back. Boris struggled, slowly, shoved one of the men with his shoulder, slowly, until the other man slowly, very slowly, punched him in the eye.
“Let’s go,” Sergei said, glancing at his watch. And then a still, small voice shuddered in the room.
“Daddy?”
From where Boris stood slumped against one of the men, he could just see Raisya standing next to the bookcase. She squinted in the light, her threadbare nightgown trailing on the floor. She squinted again, then opened her eyes wide, seeing Boris with his left eye swelling shut, seeing the two large men, seeing the old man Semyon from down the hall, and then, suddenly, seeing Sergei Popov.
“Daddy!”
Sergei turned to face her, and Boris watched as his little daughter backed herself against the wall. “Raisya, your father has done something very bad, so he has to go away for a while. Go back to bed and wait for your mother.”
Boris tried to speak. “Raisya, I—” But the man next to him slowly raised his hand, and Boris fell silent, because even though his daughter could see everything, that was one thing he couldn’t let her see.
Raisya turned to Sergei, and through his good eye Boris could see her trembling. “Are you going to run over him with a truck?”
“We’re leaving. Now.” Sergei opened the door of the room.
“Please don’t run over him with a truck!”
Sergei turned to Semyon. “Lock it from the outside. Her mother has the key.” The men began pulling Boris toward the door.
“Daddy, don’t go!” Raisya screamed.
What do you say to a child you will never see again? That there really is an abyss? That it is easy to fall into it? That the only way to stay out of the filth is to learn how to fly, or to collect the broken rungs of that ladder and build them back again? That the whole world is nothing more than a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid? Boris could think of nothing; his imagination failed him. He looked at Raisya and said only what he saw.
“Baby,” he whispered. And walked out the door.
AFTER YOU WALK out that door, the veil of imagination vanishes and you become like a child. You don’t think about anything, you don’t remember anything, you don’t predict anything, you don’t imagine anything. You just see the walls, the bars, the floor, the pliers, the strap, the club, the knife, the wires, the acid bath, the electric spark, the revolving sword, and then after that you stop seeing, stop seeing, and you only feel, feel your hair, your scalp, your skull, your skin, your nails, your eyes, your groin, your legs. And when the time arrives, a year and a half later, for everything to end (because things do end, in the end), you still think of nothing—not your wife, not your daughter, not even your mother or father—except perhaps of a baby you once saw flying through the air, or of the secrets that that baby had not yet forgotten, or of a God who is not full of mercy but rather full of wombs, or of your own blood, which, when it bursts from your chest onto the front of your shirt, is no longer blue.
But what happens after doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens before. Boris Kulbak’s life ended when he stepped through that door, but when that door closed, with a five-year-old girl left standing behind it—standing still, eyes open, in an empty room—his daughter’s life began.
18
BEN WAS racked by guilt. He had done it. Sara’s forgery—dried under a heat lamp to “age” the paint, annotated with stains and a bit of clear nail polish in one corner, worn down gently with sandpaper and salt, and otherwise perfected—had been mailed back to the museum from a busy New Jersey post office with a fake return address. He knew Erica had believed it, because it was all over the newspapers a few days later: the miraculous recovery of the stolen work, the experts called in to ascertain its authenticity, the decisive announcement that it was the real thing. Sara and Leonid were thrilled, relieved. But Ben was despondent. He still felt the imprint of her lips on his neck.
For days he couldn’t sleep. Late at night he lay in bed in agony, remembering that evening in the basement. What he imagined far exceeded the mere taste that had really happened, but it didn’t matter. In his blind waking dreams, she pressed him against the paintings and drank him in the dark. When he opened his eyes, he remembered how he had tricked her, and the disgrace of it hung like a lead weight in his gut. His mother’s books lay in a pile by his bed, and sometimes between bouts of madness he leafed through them, to distract himself. But Erica permeated every page. In the mornings he avoided looking in the mirror. At work he read through encyclopedia entries blindly, writing questions to himself on scraps of paper on his desk. He had promised her that he would find her—but what did that mean? Should he call her? Write to her? Wait for her at the museum door? But how could he do any of that, after what he and Sara had done? Shame hung before his eyes like a veil.
One day, after a week of Ben’s suffering, Sara and Leonid asked him if he would like to join them to see the Chagall exhibit at the museum. To Ben’s astonishment, they weren’t joking. They hadn’t been there yet, and Leonid was curious to see Sara’s work hanging in the gallery. The suggestion sickened Ben. But Sara pressed him, persisted.
“I read that the paintings are going back to Russia next week. Sunday is the last day,” Sara said. Ben detected a tremor i
n her voice, and realized that she knew what he was feeling. She always did. “Come with us on Sunday,” she pleaded.
Ben was about to say no, when he suddenly remembered something from that evening in the basement. Erica had mentioned that she worked at the museum on Sundays. Perhaps it was an open door. He had promised her—but what could he say to her when he saw her? And how could he ever say it?
Before he knew it, he had told his sister he would be there.
SUNDAY WAS STUNNING. Almost autumn, but still warm; a day when the tips of the leaves on the few city trees were just beginning to dip themselves into the gold light of early evenings, but before those evenings could stain them dark. At the entrance to the museum, Ben walked by the security camera quickly, but he found that the camera didn’t even make him nervous anymore. He was afraid only of Erica, and he was drawn into the building by his fear. Sara and Leonid followed close behind him, as if this visit were the most normal thing in the world, smiling and laughing as they moved through the metal detectors and into the gallery.
The three of them passed most of the pictures slowly, until they came upon a picture that forced them to a halt. The Wedding, 1918, was a black-and-white image of a bride and groom, held together from above by a deep red angel. A tiny image of a baby lay embedded in the bride’s cheek. Leonid, Sara, and Ben formed a careful semicircle around it, looking. Silence fell and deepened as each of them imagined themselves as one of the figures in the painting—the groom, the bride, the angel pushing them together, the not-yet person in the body of the bride. They looked and saw, each sunken into his own private dreams.
“I saw an exhibit like this when I was little,” Leonid suddenly said.
The silence dissipated like wisps of smoke. “You were never little,” Ben retorted. He smiled when Sara laughed.
“No, I’m serious,” Leonid stammered. “They had a show like this once in Moscow. We were visiting from Chernobyl, and I saw the exhibit with my grandmother. I remember these,” he added, jutting his giant chin at the paintings on the wall. “I was nine or ten, I think. It was a big deal. We had to wait on line for hours just to see it.”
“You also had to wait on line for hours just to buy toilet paper,” Sara said.
Leonid laughed, but Ben had turned back to look at the painting again, distracted. Everything was making him think of Erica, of how he had lied. He looked at the bride and groom in the picture and suddenly remembered the shame of his own divorce. There had been a humiliating divorce ceremony in a rabbi’s office, where he had tried to avoid eye contact with his wife for forty-five minutes while the two of them and three rabbis watched a scribe write out the bill of divorce with a quill pen. The ink took a long time to dry, giving Ben ample time to imagine his wife naked in her lover’s bed. Then Ben had to roll up the bill of divorce and throw it into his wife’s hands, and once she had caught it, he had to watch her walk across the room with it before he could leave. As he saw her walk away from him, he told himself that he wouldn’t ever make the same mistakes again. With each step she took, he had silently repeated his new vow for the future: don’t assume, don’t believe, don’t trust. But now he thought of Erica—and of his astonishment when he realized that she wasn’t going to turn him in—and wondered if he had been wrong: if, just maybe, the entire world wasn’t bent on betrayal, if, just possibly, every person he had ever met wasn’t actually out to destroy him. If nothing ever became of him and Erica, he suddenly knew, then at least she had made him see his own mistake. He wanted to thank her.
But how would he find her? He had hoped that he would see her in the gallery, that coincidence would be on his side, but so far there was no trace of her. She must be in the basement. But to go there he would need to make up a reason, or ask for her by name, and he was hesitant. Maybe he could wait outside afterward, stop her before she left. But what would he tell her? He looked around the gallery and saw a painting he remembered from the night of the theft, a small square canvas with a man and a woman against a deep blue background, their faces blending into the luminous colors of the sky. Beauty was the property of the loved.
“Ben, are you done looking here? We want to go upstairs,” he heard Leonid say through his thoughts.
“Sure,” he muttered. Maybe Erica was in the upstairs gallery, where he had first met her, but he doubted it. Suddenly he remembered the first thing she had ever said to him, on the night of the theft: And what about you, Benjamin Ziskind? When he thought of it now, it sounded like a challenge, a harder question than any question he had ever written. He followed his sister and brother-in-law up to the second floor of the exhibit like a sleepwalker, obsessed with something no one but he could see.
Upstairs, they wandered into a large room where all of the paintings—the text on the wall explained—had once hung as murals in the Moscow State Jewish Theater, enormous canvases painted with figures representing theater, music, dance, and literature. The man in the literature mural was writing on a long blank scroll.
“Look at this.” Sara pointed at the lower edge of mural, near the man’s foot. “Sag marks.”
Ben and Leonid bent down to look, and saw that she was right. The canvas bulged just slightly a few inches from the bottom edge, the way their own painting had. Something had been stuffed into the frame.
“Erica told me about this,” Ben said, suddenly excited. “She said they found hundreds of manuscript pages stuffed behind it.” He had mailed the stories from his mother’s painting back to Erica, too, with another fake return address, after making copies for himself. When he read the handwritten one, he still couldn’t figure out what it was or where it had come from. It maddened him to know that the secret had died with his mother. He looked again at the mural. “I should ask her if anyone translated them yet,” he added, then felt himself blush. Sara smiled. Suddenly he was very aware of the floor beneath his feet, of the gallery below him, and of the basement below that. He could feel her presence in the building. She was under this roof, he thought—under this roof! His father had gone halfway around the world for his mother, into the pits of hell, but Ben couldn’t walk down the steps to the basement. He was too afraid.
Most of the other visitors were chained to their audio guides, looking only at what their little headsets told them was worth seeing. But in the back of the museum, in a small room usually reserved for the final text of the exhibit and a few leftover works, Sara’s painting hung centered on the wall, alone. A few laminated sheets of paper describing the theft and recovery were tacked to the wall beside it, next to a bright red exit sign above a stairwell door.
The three of them stood in a ring around it, afraid to dip their toes into the holy of holies. The painting looked almost exactly as it had on their living room wall, Ben thought. But only almost. A shudder ran through his stomach as he realized that he liked Sara’s painting better than the original. In Sara’s version, the lines were more supple, the motion more alive.
“Sara, it’s beautiful,” Leonid said.
The three of them were alone in the room, and Ben watched as Leonid reached for Sara’s shoulders, folding her into his arms. Leonid almost never held her like this in front of him, Ben realized. Since Ben’s divorce, Sara always shrugged her husband away in front of Ben, embarrassed for her brother. But now Ben watched Leonid’s enormous arms embrace his sister and didn’t feel jealousy, but wonder and awe. Here was the hand that had once punched him in the chest, and now it was caressing his sister’s shoulders, wiping his sister’s tears, holding his parents’ future grandchild as it clasped her around her waist. It was possible, probable even, that the world could be rebuilt.
“I’m going to go downstairs,” Ben said.
Sara and Leonid released each other, and Ben saw the outline of the floating man between them. “What?” Sara asked.
“I want to tell Erica,” Ben stammered, and pointed carefully at the painting. He glanced over his shoulder, but no one was there. He lowered his voice. “I want to bring the real one back.”
Leonid’s jaw drooped. “Why?”
Sara stared at him. “Ben, are you crazy?” she whispered. “She’ll turn you in.”
“No, she won’t,” he said. “I trust her.”
Leonid and Sara looked at each other, then at him. They opened their mouths to stop him, but Ben didn’t hear it. The air around him seemed to be rising, quivering with a sudden freedom. Ben’s body loosened and lightened the way it had years ago, when he removed his brace for the very last time. He was floating on air. He stepped toward the exit, and reached out to push open the stairwell door. And then all three of them were thrown to the floor by the force of the bomb.
IT DETONATED AT the museum’s main entrance, one story down on the other side of the building: a truck packed with explosives that drove straight through the museum’s front doors and then blasted through walls, floors, ceilings, paintings, sculptures, scrolls, books, records, and the eyes, brains, limbs, and bones of thirty-six people who were admiring the Chagall exhibit on the ground floor of the Museum of Hebraic Art.
There was silence for a moment, a hard, leaden silence, before people started screaming. After that it was hard to tell apart the human screams from the alarms. When Ben raised his face from where he had been thrown to the floor, the lights in the windowless gallery blinked out and the room went dark. The air stood still. Ben struggled to breathe. In the blind blackness an acrid smell seeped into the dead air around him—a chemical smell, tar and ash like thin threads pulled through his nostrils. The room was growing hot.
“What was—what was—what was—what was—” someone began stammering in the dark, burbling between the moans from downstairs. A few seconds passed before Ben recognized that it was his own voice, distorted—the high boy’s voice that had once cried when his mother and sister locked him into his brace.