The Beautiful Possible

by Amy Gottlieb

  “I read that sentence aloud when I dumped his ashes.”

  “Dumped—”

  “In the Ganges. He was cremated, of course.”

  “That was his epitaph,” she says.

  Paul jabs his finger in Maya’s face. “You are his epitaph.”

  “I’m practically a stranger.”

  “Then go, baby girl. Like I said, I don’t need visitors.”

  “Please understand how confusing this is. Be patient with me. I’m unenlightened.”

  “Clearly.”

  Paul bows his head, rests his chin in his hands.

  “Early 1938. I was in Berlin on fellowship, researching common religious themes in Heine’s and Tagore’s poetry. Heady stuff. Good material for a brash young man. It became the foundation of my career, for all it was worth. And then I heard her sing in a café.”

  “Who?”

  “Sonia. She had an endless mane of blond hair. Down to her waist. And a voice like Billie Holiday. You know Billie Holiday or is she another mystery to you, like Tagore?”

  “Don’t insult me. My parents listened to her recordings.”

  “Your parents.”

  “Yes. Rabbi Sol and Rosalie Kerem.”

  Paul leans forward in his chair. “Get out, baby girl!”

  “But—”

  “Your father was a great man. He may have been an appendage to your family but he deserved more.”

  Maya shudders.

  “She sang Brahms. Sonia had the kind of smoky voice you hear once in a lifetime, maybe twice if you’re lucky. I waited for her to finish and bought her a drink. She told me she was Jewish, and that she was learning Hebrew, and she had a crazy fascination with the Song of Songs.

  “If Billie Holiday sang Brahms she would be you—

  “I assume that’s a compliment.

  “The highest. Come to England with me, and then to America—

  “My fiancé and I are going to Palestine.

  “Your homeland?

  “Yes.

  “She got this faraway look in her eyes, as if she were listening to music inside her body. I waited for her to come back to my gaze.

  “You are breaking my heart.

  “But I am already in love.

  “I should have been the first.

  “And then we kissed. Spent the night. A single sleepless night. I’ll leave the details to your imagination, baby girl. I’ll never forget how her long blond hair cascaded down my arm like a curtain, how she winked at me. I wanted to save her, grow old with her. She showed me a photo of Walter and said, One day you’ll come to Palestine and I’ll introduce you. She told me how they had certificates in hand; they just had to convince his father that his public denouncements of the Nazis had branded him a target, and a new life in Palestine was preferable to no life at all. And then Sonia reached into a bag and handed me a brown felt hat. I was going to give it to my fiancé, she said, but I’d like you to have it. And take this too. She gave me Walter’s paper on religious desire in the Song of Songs. He wrote this for me and it’s very good. Maybe you can translate it into English.”

  Maya remembers the time she asked her mother why they chose Sonia for her middle name.

  Your father and I liked it, Maya. Not all of our choices are imbued with deep meaning.

  “I translated the paper and got it published. She sent me a simple note: You can’t have me but the words you translated for Walter will link us together. And that was it. She was shot, along with his father. It was all backwards.”

  Maya reaches for Paul’s hands.

  “You loved her.”

  “Were you born yesterday, baby cakes? Of course I loved her. And whomever Sonia loved would connect me to her again. I was due to leave Berlin when a mutual friend told me that Walter was on his way to Trieste. I tracked him down and then shadowed him around the port, like an undercover agent. And when he boarded the Conte Rosso, so did I.”

  “He never made it to Palestine.”

  “Walter wasn’t meant to live there without Sonia, I suppose. Karma, divine providence, the alignment of stars—call it what you like. But throughout his life, your father told all his students how he followed a man off the ship in Bombay. A man who wore a brown felt hat. It became his little mantra.”

  Your father. She may want to know everything but she can’t build a bridge between the barefoot man named Walter and the words your father.

  “I was the man wearing the brown felt hat.”

  Maya tries to imagine a younger Paul moving through a ship like a spy, a brown brim shading his eyes.

  “Do you still have the hat?”

  “You want souvenirs, baby girl? Life isn’t a gift shop. I lost the hat a long time ago. I lost everything but my words.”

  Paul leans in close and grabs Maya’s arm, almost twisting it. She winces.

  “Will my words be enough for you?”

  She nods.

  “I boarded the Conte Rosso because I wanted to watch over him, coax him into disembarking at Bombay with me. That part was easy; he was eager to follow a man he didn’t know. But then he got swallowed up in a crowd, and I lost him. I searched for a few days and was just about to give up when I found him at a market stall, getting high on spices.

  “At first I needed to be connected to the man Sonia loved because it was the only way I could keep her alive. Walter was the living link to Sonia, just like I’m the living link to Walter—for you, now. It’s why you’ve come, isn’t it? But when I talked to him for the first time I felt that we somehow belonged to each other. I wanted to save him for myself.”

  “What was he like?”

  “A wreck! Your father was a forlorn vagabond from a world that was quickly being destroyed.”

  Paul coughs.

  “I never told him.”

  “Told him what?”

  “That I was in love with his fiancée. I needed to keep it a secret, something for myself. But after a while Sonia didn’t matter. Walter needed me to save him and I needed him to love me as a student loves his teacher. We completed each other; we translated Tagore’s work as if we shared a brain. We could go to the symphony and hear the music in the same way. We could speak to the students at Eden Ranch about the price of laundry detergent and if we called it dharma they would cry over our words and declare that we changed their lives. Walter didn’t need to know how our own story began.”

  “What about his time at the Seminary?”

  “I arranged it through my university connections; an administrator wanted to help a refugee like him. I made the introduction, then let him find his way.

  “Your father was a broken man. You should have seen him wearing his green kurta with that black yarmulke they popped on his long greasy hair. He was skinny and handsome and frightened and foolish and so very brilliant. That defined Walter Westhaus: never one thing or another; he was always all of the above. When I walked away from the Seminary without him beside me, I wondered how he would make out among those young rabbis, but I had immense faith in him.”

  “He met my parents there.”

  “He brought your mother to Eden Ranch.” Paul laughs. “She looked so out of place among our disheveled tribe, but I could see how she loved him.”

  Maya closes her eyes.

  “Is this too much for you?”

  “As long as you feel up to it,” she says. “Please.”

  “Walter always had women falling at his feet. No one permanent, baby doll. And after you were born he told me he had a secret daughter, a child who belonged to another family.”

  Maya wipes tears from her face and looks at the pile of books. My father wrote those, she thinks. My sad father. My second sad father.

  Paul coughs again and Maya pours him a cup of water. She watches him sip from a straw, one tiny drop at a time.

  “Is there anything else?” she asks.

  “There are lifetimes of anything elses, baby doll! Infinite realities! Warped memories and flawed interpretations! If this is too
much for you, go to a photo booth, sit behind the curtain, and say ‘capture.’ You’d still be all wrong, but at least you’d have the photo to keep as a souvenir.

  “When I found him in Shantiniketan, he was resting in the shade of the date palm trees. We talked, your father and I. He learned English at the ashram and he was eager to try out his new vocabulary words. He told me his dreams. The books he wanted to write. The places he would live, the women he would love, and that one day he would have a daughter who would track me down in a shit factory near the Pacific Ocean and she would—”

  Paul’s voice booms and he begins to sob.

  “He told me that you would come to me near the end of my life and we would hold each other tight and you would save me from the shadows that linger in the bingo parlor where the old broads steal my chips and turn my words into salt and—”

  Paul’s forehead is beaded with sweat and Maya thinks about calling the social worker but then stops herself and holds both his hands, tightly. Paul lets go, pounds the air with his arms, and then drops them. He leans against her, whimpers for a while, and then stops.

  “Better now, baby girl.” His chin drops to his neck and he begins to snore.

  “I was named for her,” Maya whispers. “For your Sonia.”

  She watches him sleep and thinks about the story that circles around in the past, addled and confused in an old man’s mind, yet perfectly clear. Two men had loved Sonia and Sonia chose Walter and then she was killed. Rosalie had loved two men and she chose both; her mother built an entire life around that choice. Maya doesn’t know if she loves Jase and what she longs for is greater than what any man can offer. The world is an immense garden of desire, a tangle of muddled love stories that wind around each other in an endless spiral.

  She thinks of Paul’s story as soft clay between her fingers, history that changes shape under her touch. Where would it end? Touch the web any place and it ripples and flows like an ocean current, beginning with the story of one person who longed for another, body and soul.

  Maya tears a page out of a notebook and writes:

  Thank you for saving my father.

  Be well,

  Maya Sonia Kerem

  On Maya’s flight back to New York, she dreams of Walter in his studio, lean and fit, practicing headstands. He offers her a whiff of sweet coriander and she sniffs. Then she places her palms flat on the floor, steadies herself, and slowly pulls up her legs. Walter grabs Adelaide and Liberace and places them on the soles of her feet and laughs.

  Maya wakes up thirsty. She longs to pick up the thread of Walter’s life that was torn away by a car on a Bombay road in 1987. Had he lived. Had he made it back to America for an airport rendezvous with her and her mother. I’d like you to meet an old friend of mine, Rosalie would have said. Walter, this is Maya. I know, she would have said. I met you before. This time Walter would have been wearing shoes and she would have looked at his face and understood. The dream of their reunion would have been real this time, not like the dreamlike encounter that seems so hazy to her now. And this time Walter would have asked her to read something he had written. What do you think of my newest work on the sacred? Or maybe he would have brushed his eyes with the back of his hand because he wouldn’t want Rosalie to see that he was crying. Or maybe he would have reached out to touch Maya and she would have flinched and said, This is awkward, please understand. Or then. Or then. There were so many routes her imagination could take. She could no more finish their thoughts than she could create a quilt out of the frayed threads of their lives. All she could do was touch the edges and listen.

  Maya remembers sitting in her father’s study when she was small. He had taught her some Hebrew letters and then she handed him her copy of The Velveteen Rabbit. “Read it, Abba,” she said. He read to her slowly and when he closed the book she covered the T on Rabbit with her little finger.

  “That’s Velveteen Rabbi,” said Sol.

  “That’s what I’d like to be when I grow up,” she said. And Sol looked into her eyes and said, “You will be a very real rabbi, Maya. But I am the original Velveteen Rabbi. Not real unless loved into existence. I need people to listen to my sermons, purchase my wares, feed my ego. Don’t tell this to anyone—let it be our little secret.”

  And it happened. Maya fell in love with the texts, with every word that began as a seed and then flowered into sentences, paragraphs, tractates, commentaries—infinite interpretations that spiral around each other in a symphonic web. Its authors are long dead but the words in the web are always alive, thriving with possibility, begging for connection. And Maya wasn’t velveteen at all; without a congregation, she was free to travel through the web, explore its underbelly, welcome its seductions, dance with its mystery. Free to choose the people whose lives are woven into the filament. Free to unravel the storylines and follow each thread back to its kernel. For her first time out she would begin with her parents. All three of them. A woman and a man and another man, braided together.

  Back in New York, Maya keeps the box open at the foot of her bed. She sleeps fitfully and then wakes up with a burning question—Where was my mother when? And what did Sol know?—and forages through the box to search for clues. But the box only contains fragments. Maya calls Madeline and asks if she has anything else.

  “I have some journals. Quite a few, actually. It’s overwhelming.”

  “I’d love to read what you wrote about them.”

  Madeline hesitates. “I could make photocopies, but it’s just so—”

  “Personal?”

  “I’m afraid so. I was a shameless diarist in those days. I had a notebook for every occasion; I even wrote when I was sitting on the toilet. Your mother’s story claimed my imagination; at times it took over my life.”

  “Yenta.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “I’ll forgive you on their behalf.”

  “Are you still furious at me, Maya?”

  “The cat’s out of the bag, Madeline. At times I wish you’d never told me but now I can’t concentrate on anything that isn’t about them. I don’t return Jase’s calls and I forget to buy groceries. I spend entire days in the apartment, unshowered, half-dressed, thinking about Walter and Sonia and how one thing led to another. And yes, I resent this intrusion terribly, but it’s too late now.”

  “What’s your address?”

  Within a week an envelope arrives from Mexico, stuffed with photocopied pages from Madeline’s journals from the ’60s and the ’70s, the words written out in tiny, perfect script, every detail of he said, she said etched on lined paper. She sorts through the unopened boxes of papers that had been stored in Charlie’s house and finds more letters between Sol and Walter and Rosalie. Maya pores over the purple binder filled with sermons and marginal aphorisms, and with Madeline’s journal as a navigation tool, she deciphers how these words were composed. She reads all of Walter’s books and academic papers, and buys her own volume of Tagore’s poetry and a translation of Hindu scriptures. And she continues to delve into the Mei HaShiloach, trying to understand how the Ishbitzer’s teachings wove into her parents’ lives.

  Philip mails Maya a book he found in their grandparents’ kitchen cabinet after Ida moved to a nursing home—a volume of the Song of Songs, translated into Yiddish, inscribed:

  To my butterfly Ida,

  Beloved in touch and in word and in deed. This book tells the story of how we yearn. There is only one desire, butterfly, and it begins with our kiss.

  Love,

  Shmuel

  Maya calls Philip and asks if he ever told Rosalie about the book he found tucked away behind their grandparents’ dairy dishes. “I always meant to tell her,” he said. “But I forgot and then it was too late.” Was the Song of Songs a love poem for her grandparents, just as it was a love poem for Walter and Sonia? Why did they all get off on this ancient poem when she, an Ecclesiastes girl, never did? Every book, every letter, every piece of paper is a fractal of another story; every crack of
light conceals a deeper mystery. Maya fills a notebook with questions and answers, each one labeled she’elah and teshuvah. She lies awake at night and thinks about how her three parents created something together that she could never understand.

  In rabbinical school, Maya was taught that if she wanted to fully comprehend the Torah she would need to know seventy languages. But even seventy languages would not be enough to truly comprehend the Torah of her parents. She would need to know how the words they carried and quoted and taught and translated echoed in their lives, just as Walter had written in his paper. She would have to know why her grandmother hid her inscribed copy of the Song of Songs in the kitchen cabinet—was it because of Ida and Shmuel’s own intimacy, or was it because Ida didn’t want Rosalie to know the language of desire when she was perched on the edge of her married life with Sol?

  Maya would need to find Walter and Sonia in a Berlin bedroom—this Sonia whose name she carries, this woman whom Paul loved, this woman who might have lived instead of Walter had she not left the bed to look for crackers. Maya imagines herself walking in Jerusalem on a Shabbat afternoon, an elderly survivor named Sonia holding her arm for balance. The Sonia who would have survived would be wearing a tweed suit that covered the numbers on her arm and she would be on her way to her granddaughter’s house for lunch. Survivor Sonia would hold Maya’s arm and faintly remember the young man she once loved, how he soothed her with the words of Tagore and Whitman and the Song of Songs, just minutes before he was murdered. Thank you for walking with me, Rabbi Maya, survivor Sonia would have said, except that had Sonia lived and not Walter, Maya would be as fictional as survivor Sonia.

  The details would matter: How the shade of the date palm trees soothed Walter in Shantiniketan. How the path of his dreams was somehow connected to the astonishments conjured by Madame Sylvie. How the thread woven on one side of the story could surface on the other, peacock blue to the blue of her mother’s silk tallit. How a butterfly imagined by Tagore could emerge in Walter’s description of a haiku, in her grandmother’s pet name, in a style of chair in her brother’s room. How the smells of turmeric, coriander, and cardamom wafted through their lives—sometimes hidden, sometimes pungent—just like they filled Kalustyan’s Spices and Sweets on Lexington Avenue on the afternoon Maya went there to buy turmeric root so she could understand Walter and how he woke up to life in Bombay.