The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  DEDICATION

  for my family

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Part One

  Lieder

  Spices

  Books, Seeds

  In the Geniza

  Milk or Meat

  The Bride

  Part Two

  Vineyard

  The Little Astonishments

  Faith Is the Bird

  This Is Not a Sermon

  New Shantiniketan

  Steal This Book

  Part Three

  There Is a Boat

  The Fourth Night

  The Bracelet

  The Kiss

  Casa Rosalie

  Awe and Wonder

  All the Walters

  Inside the Web

  Dear Madeline

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . . * About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Praise

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  When my mother and I would enter the paneled sanctuary on Shabbat mornings my father would peer down from his red velvet rabbi’s chair and bite his lip. It was a wink of recognition, barely a gesture. I would fold my hand in hers and we would swing our arms in a proclamation of private joy. The congregants would turn toward the aisle, gaze at their sultry rebbetzin in her wide-brimmed hat, and behold her as if she were a queen.

  My mother’s body was a source of pleasure to me: the strawberry scent of her face cream, the delicate veins on the backs of her hands, the satiny texture of her summer Shabbat dresses. One dress was made of crisp white cotton, patterned with red bricks. The sleeves ended at her elbow, huge flower-shaped buttons ran down the front, a thick patent leather belt cinched her waist. I would sit next to her in the front row and lay my cheek against the bricks that covered her upper arm. My father would read from the Torah and deliver his sermon and I would twirl the buttons of my mother’s dress as if they were radio dials and I controlled the frequency.

  The synagogue stairwell was my first jungle gym; its parking lot my first hopscotch course. I was the congregants’ flower child, their little pet. Come sit on my lap, Maya! Point out the words to me; have a lollipop; sing me a little song. As soon as I learned Hebrew, my father taught me how to move my fingers around a page of Talmud as if I were a blind person reading Braille. I once believed all the words of the Torah were true, just as I once assumed that my mother and father belonged to each other in the way of ordinary married people.

  I was Sol and Rosalie Kerem’s late-life consolation prize: accident, miracle, and redemption rolled into the form of a lanky girl whose bangs reached her nose. Whenever my mother invited me to make a birthday wish, I would close my eyes and imagine things already present in this world: a white flower, an arched doorway, a footpath crossing a river. I lip-synced my favorite songs in front of a mirror, and when no one was watching I would peek into the ancient books on my father’s shelves, hungry for a phrase to swirl on my tongue and taste its meaning.

  At night my parents would sit on the sofa in my father’s study and listen to records. Fly me to the moon, sang Frank. Dance me to the end of love, sang Leonard. I say a little prayer, sang Dionne. I would spy them studying the liner notes as if the lyrics were sacred texts, yet something about their marriage always eluded me. Our house was a palace of stories—the ancient ones in the books, the love stories in the songs, the secrets my mother whispered into the phone late at night. At times, I would drift off to sleep and imagine how all the stories were part of one great book that hummed with sadness and longing.

  I was once content with my flower, my doorway, my footpath. What I had was more than enough. I did not know that I was also written into this great book, and that my parents were entangled in a web of desire that began long before I was born.

  PART ONE

  All the streams flow into the sea—

  the wisdom of a person comes from the heart.

  Yet the sea is never full—but the heart can never be filled.

  —ECCLESIASTES RABBAH 1:4

  LIEDER

  November 1938

  Walter awakens to the smell of burning paper. With the bedroom shades drawn, the late afternoon street sounds are muffled. He untangles Sonia’s hair from his hand, steps to the door and peeks. His father kneels before the fireplace, feeding the flames with rolled-up sheet music. Josef rips the pages from their bindings and shapes them into logs, the edges cinched tight. Walter winces at the sight of his father’s fuel supply. Maybe the fire will release some kind of strange music, he thinks. A prompt, a sign, a directive. Leave this place; embrace your future. But a flute étude cackles like ordinary paper, heats the living room for a brief spell, and then flickers out.

  Josef lights a cigar with the last embers and steps over to his typewriter. He taps a few keys slowly, then attacks the whole alphabet with ardor. Here he goes again, thinks Walter. Another afternoon of futility for the father; another afternoon of love for the son. He listens to the keys explode under Josef’s fingers and knows his father is writing yet another letter to his former colleagues at the university that no longer employs him, claiming that Josef Westhaus educated a generation of Berliners to understand Plato and Aristotle and this defrocked professor is not like other Jews. For a while Josef mailed these but now he doesn’t even address the envelopes.

  Walter would give themselves another two weeks. Enough time to convince his father that he could teach philosophy and make music in Palestine, that he could survive the heat and possibly again know happiness. Two weeks would be enough time for Walter to arrange for their visas and pack up the whole traveling circus: Josef, Sonia, her parents in Leipzig, their embroidered tablecloths and Sabbath samovar, his father’s flute, the unburnt sheet music—and himself, an eighteen-year-old student who needs no luggage of his own, a man who memorizes all the poems he loves. Walter imagines a caravan of loaded camels meandering through the streets of Berlin, Sonia riding in the lead, wearing a white veil, her long blond hair brushing the camel’s skin.

  “What’s the plan?” asks Sonia, her voice thin and hoarse.

  Walter returns to the bed and spoons behind her.

  “My father’s burning up his études,” he whispers.

  Sonia presses her nose to his hand and inhales the faint smell of vodka they drank sometime that morning, in between the lines of poetry, the languid sex, the hours he spent sketching her toes, her incessant question: when, schatzi, when?

  He pulls at her long curtain of hair and sniffs the ends.

  “Cardamom?”

  “Cheap perfume.”

  “I could smell you forever.”

  “Palestine will be our forever.”

  Sonia winces, thinking of the flute études burning on the other side of the wall.

  She once believed every piece of sheet music was holy, that the pages filled with Italian words—con brio, andante, agitato, subito piano—were her cues for how to shape time with her voice. Even if Sonia had memorized Brahms lieder she would hold the sheet music in her hand and fix her eyes on its elegant code. She misses the nights she sang in a café, and longs for the moments after the applause when a stranger would approach her with words of praise.

  If Billie Holiday sang Brahms she would be you.

  “I asked you about the plan, Walter.”

  “What?”

  “Stop dreaming, schatzi. The currency of real life. Certificates and visas. We can’t live in your childhood bedroom forever, waiting for your father to pack his bags. I can’t breathe in here. His cigars, the burning—”

  “Think of us standing on the deck of the boat,” says Walter.
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  Sonia points to her wrist. “When?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Promise?”

  He holds up two fingers and presses them against her lips.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank God,” says Sonia. “The minute we arrive, let’s buy your father new music.”

  Walter tries to imagine his father crossing an arid desert in Palestine with a folio of études under his arm, but he can’t picture him anywhere except this apartment, or laying flowers at his wife’s grave, or delivering lectures at the university, speaking the only language he knows. No new verb forms lie ahead for Josef Westhaus; no tender pangs of a life marked by change.

  “And if he won’t come?” asks Walter. “I can’t leave him behind.”

  Sonia springs up and sits on her heels. “We will convince him! There will be orchestras and cafés and Arabs selling rugs so we can buy him one that doesn’t stink of old smoke. He will be happy again; he will remarry! And he will find new students, even if he has to stand before them wearing short sleeves for the first time in his life.”

  “And us? What will we do over there?”

  “I’ll sing lieder in the cafés.”

  Walter’s friends talk about this haven called Palestine but he can only imagine the words from the Bible he learned in poetry classes. Sonia’s café would be built from a pile of stones, a dish of gold, and a measure of barley.

  “You won’t be singing lieder over there.”

  “But everyone loves Brahms.”

  Walter maps her gaze. He can tell when her thoughts careen into a private fog, and he waits until she finds her way back.

  “What are you remembering?”

  “Nothing important.” She shakes out her hair, piles it on top of her head and lets it down again.

  “I’ll sing a new kind of lieder then. I’ll set the Song of Songs to music and we’ll play it at our wedding.”

  “And me? What will I do?”

  “You will sketch Mediterranean beauties and become a professor of world religions. It’s your destiny! How many men your age see their work translated into English and then published in a journal?”

  “A silly joke. I only wrote that paper to impress you.”

  “My seducer. ‘The words of the texts echo in the lives of the people who read them.’ If I had told you I was in love with the Book of Lamentations and not the Song of Songs would you have written a paper on that?”

  “I’m glad you didn’t try me,” says Walter.

  “I wouldn’t have. I’m not one for sorrow.”

  “Then you were born into the wrong time.”

  Sonia sits up and straddles her legs around his. “A few more weeks and life with you will be beautiful.”

  Walter runs his hands through her hair.

  “I could swear it’s cardamom.” He inhales. “One day I will rub spices on your belly.”

  “And?”

  “We will pluck dates from our own trees—”

  “And—”

  “Stand in a wadi—”

  “And—”

  “With our children—”

  Sonia wraps her palm around Walter’s wrist, shaping her hand into a bracelet. “We will make the beautiful possible.” She closes her eyes and shudders.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Not really,” she says. “Toss me a line, please.”

  “Tagore or Heine?”

  “Oh, Tagore. And say it slowly.”

  “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”

  “Now Whitman.”

  “The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer.”

  “You and your faithless American poet! How can you believe that?”

  “Poetry is my god, Sonia. My one and only.”

  “When I read your paper on the Song of Songs, I honestly thought you were religious in some way.”

  “The Song is a poem. Nothing more. Are you disappointed?”

  “You never disappoint.”

  “Two weeks. All of us. I promise,” he says.

  “One more line and maybe I can trust you.”

  “Tagore? Whitman?”

  She smiles. “Ours. The Song.”

  “His belly is an ivory tablet on a sapphire stone.”

  “Sounds like you. Only they didn’t have spritzkuchen back then. You, schatzi, have an excuse for your untableted belly.”

  She rubs her cheek along Walter’s chest, draws circles around his torso.

  “Promise we’ll go to Palestine?”

  “Promise,” he says.

  The fire has gone out. The cackling from the living room has stopped, along with the thrum of the typewriter keys. Walter pulls the blanket over their shoulders, and Sonia closes her eyes, listening to Josef warm up with a minor scale, then an arpeggio, then the first movement of the Bach Flute Sonata, unaccompanied.

  “Your father sounds good today. Softer. I feel as if I’m underwater.”

  Walter slithers to the edge of the bed. “Need anything from the kitchen?”

  “We finished the crackers last night,” she says. “Every crumb.”

  “I’ll look.”

  “No, Walter. Let me. I’ll go crazy if I spend another minute inside this love cave.”

  “Check for vodka too. There may be a drop left.”

  She reaches for a slip and laughs. “Will your father faint from the sight of me?”

  “Possibly.” Walter passes Sonia his sweater. She wraps it around her shoulders, twirls, and winks.

  Her face will never age, he thinks. One day we will both be old and I will brush her long white hair and remember her standing before me like this, half-dressed, fully ripe, smelling like cardamom.

  “Better, yes?”

  “When you come back, stay just as you are so I can sketch you.”

  She winks again.

  The bedroom door closes behind her and Walter reaches for his pad and charcoal. He gazes at a blank piece of paper and imagines Sonia in the center of it, his sweater wrapped around her breasts, a glass in her hand. This time he will sketch with focus, committing this moment with her to a kind of permanence. Everything is backwards, he thinks. His world is ending and he and Sonia stand on the edge of a new story to be lived in a new land. Sonia’s love will keep him safe and when she gets lost in the tangle of her thoughts he will recite lines of poetry, surround her with words of comfort.

  “Scheiss!” yells Josef.

  Parading herself in a slip was a mistake, thinks Walter. Forget the crackers! Come back! Glass breaks, shatters, the front door pops, the music stops, Josef screams. From the bed, Walter smells gunmetal and grime, stench from another world. An icy shrill passes from Sonia’s throat, then a shot rings out, then another, another. The flute crashes to the floor, two bodies fall. Walter reaches for a shirt—save them!—but then freezes and slips under the bed, lies facedown, his arms wrapped tightly around his head. Save them, you coward! Save them—

  The bedroom door cracks open, that stench!

  The profile of a man’s boot is close enough for him to touch, gleaming, black. A bloody footprint. Another pair of boots casts a shadow at the door. Walter flinches.

  “Lass uns gehen!”

  Hands press on the bed above him; a man sniffs the sheets like a crazed dog.

  “Kardamom. Das fraülein—”

  The boot pivots.

  “Gehen!”

  A sharp inhale; a groan.

  “Gehen!”

  The men gallop down the back stairs, a door flails on its hinge, a woman shouts in the street. Breaking glass, a gunshot, more glass.

  The living room is silent; his father’s cigar is ash. The radiator hisses, stops, and hisses once more. Walter lies under his bed, facedown in his own vomit, shit oozing between his legs. He slithers on his belly, reaches for the bed frame, and stops himself. Sonia. His father. One more body left to fall. Too soon to get out of here alone; too late to save them. It should have been me, he thinks. It was meant
for me. Walter pulls his arm close to his torso, his body a rolled-up rug.

  He hears nothing, just the rasp of his breathing and the rodent sound of his teeth chewing off his thumbnail. Come back to me, Sonia. Forget the crackers. Forget the vodka. His tongue finds his lips and just before Walter fades out he tastes the last remains of cardamom, and there he finds her, climbing a mountain where spices grow, and she takes his hand and pulls him onto a slab of rock. The words echo in our lives now, just like you wrote in your paper, she says. And then Sonia lets go of his hand and runs onto the hills where hyssop grows alongside mint and she runs and runs and then she is gone.

  SPICES

  December 1938

  The alabaster moon brightens the surface of the Mediterranean and Walter leans against the rail of the Conte Rosso, staring at the shimmering light. His jacket rests loosely on his shoulders and his body feels untethered, a feather in free fall. He could jump, he thinks; his body would float in the vastness like a swirl of seaweed and then descend. As a child, Walter loved swimming across Lake Wannsee, caressed by buoyancy. His father would wait at the shore and Walter would propel his arms and reach him in a few strokes. But now he has been washed into the ocean by sorrow, saved so he can live out his days in mourning. The passengers babble about the mysterious destination called Shanghai. What a shithole! Illness and poverty await us all! But Shanghai is the promised land! Silks! Opium! Tea! The sound of laughter wafts from the ship’s bar and cackles like fireworks against the night sky.

  Walter has not spoken to anyone on board and he wonders if he has gone mute. The lights of Brindisi flicker in the distance and he holds up his hands. The left is steadier than the right, even though he has chewed off his thumbnail and the raw skin throbs. Perhaps in Shanghai he will see a doctor.

  Sorry, Sonia. No promise kept. This boat isn’t sailing to Palestine. Only a month ago he had promised her they would live the words of the Song in the place where they were written.

  Nard and saffron, fragrant reed and cinnamon, with all aromatic woods, myrrh and aloes—all the choice perfumes.

  As if poetry would save them.

  At night, the boisterous chatter of cocktail parties fills the decks. Every kiss is welcomed; every stranger’s touch encouraged. Women paint their lips red and invite men to rest their palms at the small of their backs; older couples lie in each other’s arms on narrow chairs and gaze up at the stars. To Walter it all seems like a display of relief or a vast delusion. When the Aga Khan and his wife board at Djibouti Walter peers at their elegant costumes as if he is standing on the other side of a painted screen. Life has two shades of color: muted grays that cover some kind of pain, and vivid primary hues that strain to defy death. Walter can intuit how each person on the Conte Rosso is either wounded or miraculously unscathed.