The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  11.

  Eventually my friend turned on a few more of the house lights and seemed to loosen up. He told silly stories to his girls, and I drank a second beer. The television was switched on. His daughters described their favorite late-night television show to me. They said Jimmy Kimmel was “kank,” but he was also a little bit “smunt.” Neither could have been more than six. My friend looked at me and shrugged.

  Then I noticed that my friend’s wife had materialized in the kitchen, in a blue robe. She was holding a beer. She stood at the edge of the kitchen, just where the kitchen met the living room. She asked what time we’d gotten home. My friend didn’t answer, so I told her. I told her it was nice to see her again.

  Yeah? she said.

  Then she asked me about my wife. I asked her about her lawn. I complained about the housing market. She said she knew it was strange but she loved crabgrass. We went on like this for a few minutes, talking small, my friend playing with his daughters by the television. She had come over to me and sat on the arm of my chair. She seemed entirely easy. She only looked in her husband’s direction a few times.

  Well, I said. I stood up to leave.

  She looked surprised. Oh, she said. You don’t have to go anywhere.

  No, I said.

  Have another beer, she said.

  She got up and went to the fridge, even as I was saying I shouldn’t drink any more, and she opened that beer, twisting the cap off with her bare hands, and brought it back to me. Then she went back to the fridge, opened another bottle, and gave it to her husband. Then she told her husband, my friend, to sit on the sofa.

  And he did. He got up from the floor and threw himself onto the sofa. She sat on his lap. What else is new? she asked me.

  I hear you’re getting divorced, I wanted to say.

  Very little, I said.

  My wife is still sleeping as I tell her this. I tell her that when I looked up again, I saw the two of them—my friend and his wife—kissing on the sofa and I presumed, at first, it was a quick and conciliatory kind of thing. I looked at their girls, who were also looking at my friend and his wife.

  They kept kissing. I looked again at the girls. The TV went on commercial. I saw my friend’s wife’s tongue, and his hand slipped inside her robe. They were both still holding their beers. As soon as he dropped his beer on the carpet, I stood up. I patted the girls on the head. They took this as a sort of signal. They left the room with me, as if they were going to walk me to the door. Instead they went straight up the stairs to their bedrooms. Good night, I whispered to them, and they turned around.

  12.

  My cardiologist took particular care of me during my heart attack and subsequent surgery. He visited my room often. He said little, but he checked my stats with a sort of earnest determination, flipping papers, hammering things into his computer. The night before my surgery, after everyone had left, he came to my room and closed the door. He sat on the edge of my bed. He said, You know what you need?

  A hug?

  He looked at his watch. I find most heart patients, he said, need someone to scare the shit out of them.

  Okay, I said.

  If you are not going to change your lifestyle, he said. He looked at me, and then he produced a plastic model of the human heart from his coat pocket, and he stuck his fingers into the model and started pulling it apart. He scattered the rubber pieces across my bedsheets and left.

  13.

  C’mon, the older daughter said. She summoned me up. I followed. At the top of the stairs, we turned to the right and went into a room lit only by candles. Inside, the walls were lined with mounted game. I stared at a zebra head. Jesus, I said. The older daughter told me the zebra’s name was Beverly. The fox was Lenny, the pheasant Jennifer. And the wild turkey had no name at all, because they had just killed it that morning.

  14.

  I take my head off my wife’s lap and I sit up. I upset the sofa cushions a bit, bounce a little, so that she will wake up. I touch her shoulder. She wakes up. She smiles. She wipes her face. She reaches into a stretch, and she brings her hands to her stomach, to our bursting child inside there. She tells me she feels like hell, and I say I know what she means. She rolls her eyes. Take me upstairs, she says. I consider this. I consider carrying her. I consider her weight. C’mon, she says. I put my arm under her legs. I support her back. I lift her. Her eyes close. Her mouth sags. It’s chilly. The gravel path is lit only by dull moonlight. There’s a breeze. The crickets are calling. I hear the waves lapping at the shore. I hear my boat rubbing the wooden pier. The rope moorings are aching. The cabin is dark. I put my wife down on our creaking bed. I stand upright and look at her form. It’s no easy journey getting her here. I wish we lived closer.

  Molly Antopol

  My Grandmother Tells Me This Story

  SOME SAY THE STORY begins in Europe, and your mother would no doubt interrupt and say it begins in New York, but that’s just because she can’t imagine the world before she entered it. And yes, I know you think it begins specifically in Belarus, because that’s what your grandfather tells you. I’ve heard him describing those black sedans speeding down Pinsker Street. I’ve been married to the man almost sixty years and know how he is with you—he makes every word sound like a secret. But he wasn’t even there. He was with his youth group by then and even though I was there I don’t remember being scared. Even when they knocked on our door, I didn’t know what was happening. Even when they dragged us outside with our overstuffed suitcases spilling into the street, shouting through megaphones to walk in the road with the livestock, I still didn’t know. I was thirteen.

  The story really starts in the sewers. Everybody in the uniform factory whispered about them, and everybody had a different theory. Some said they were an escape route a plumber had spent years charting, an underground system of tunnels running from Poland to Belarus to Lithuania. Others said they were an impossible maze with no way out. But when my mother pulled me aside after only six days in the factory and whispered that she’d worked out a plan for me—smuggled vodka for the guards, a shoulder bared (my poor father, a lifetime of loving a woman who knew just how to spark another man’s sympathy)—I simply stood there, taking notes in my head. After dinner, she said, I’d slip past the guards and down the street, around two corners and up a road where I’d see the slats of a sewer. The grate would slide off easily, she said, and she and my father would find me soon. I had no reason not to believe that was true, no way of knowing the sewers would lead me to the forest. That night all I knew, as I climbed inside the manhole and down the metal ladder, was that it smelled worse than anything I’d imagined, of shit and piss and garbage all together.

  It was black in there, and dank and cool, the ceiling so low I sank to my knees and crawled. I just kept following the crowd of voices speaking in Yiddish, which was both comforting and horrible, hearing that language forbidden in the factory. Then there was a rumble, and water rushed in and knocked me down. I gasped and tried to wade forward. The sewer started filling up, and I felt around in the slimy water for the person in front of me. But everybody seemed far ahead, and it took me a minute to realize dinner must have been ending aboveground, everybody washing dishes and taking baths and pouring water down the drain all at once.

  Soon I had no sense of how long I’d been underground. My eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and I saw the shapes around me: The woman up ahead, the hunched slope of her back. The walls of the sewer. The shadow of a rat before it ran across my arm. Then my whole body started to shake, and I knew I wouldn’t make it through a wave of morning dishwashing, so when I saw lines of light through the grate, I stopped.

  Keep going, the woman behind me whispered.

  But I couldn’t. I waited for the group to pass, and when I heard nothing above, I slowly lifted the grate and climbed onto the streets of a village that looked as if it had been completely passed over by the war. I wasn’t used to the sun after an entire night in the sewers—it was just rol
ling up over the houses, and the forest beyond was so bright it looked painted. Dirt, barns, sky—everything stunned me. That the wooden cottages lining the road were still intact, that people were feeding their horses and selling vegetables and sweeping leaves into the gutter.

  A man passed with his young daughter and she stared. The father took one look at me, yanked her arm, and hurried down the road. I knew then not to spend another minute standing there in the daylight, so I crossed the road and entered the forest. It was cold and dim, and when I leaned against a tree trunk, exhaustion came right at me.

  I wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep when I heard footsteps. I opened my eyes and stared up—into the barrel of a gun. I swallowed, hard, refusing to make eye contact. That much I knew to do. I looked at the sticks and pinecones littering the forest floor and thought up a story. I was lost, searching for mushrooms, and could he help me find my way back? But how to explain the smell, or my work uniform, and before I opened my mouth, the boy put down the gun and said my name.

  How odd that the first word I heard in that forest was my own name, and for a minute I wondered if that night in the sewers had made me crazy. Then I looked at him. I know how you see your grandfather, sweet and smiling, always insisting that we put on a movie after dinner and then dozing on the sofa halfway through. Your chess partner, your theater date, the man who checks out the minute your mother and I start up. You wouldn’t have recognized him. His long, bony face splotchy and pink from the sun, his light brown beard growing in sparse, threadbare patches—he was only fifteen—and his straight hair obviously hacked off with a knife. But even with that terrible haircut, even with a rifle over one shoulder and paper sacks swinging from the other, he still looked like the same Leon Moscowitz I’d grown up with.

  It was one of the great miracles of my life, finding someone from home, right there, in the middle of the woods. But I won’t lie and say he was the person I’d wanted to see. I barely knew him back in our village. He was two grades above me and had struck me as bigheaded and bossy, one of those boys who always raised his hand in class. I hadn’t been the shining student he was but had been a good girl, a rule-follower. Your grandfather had not only seemed the opposite—it was like he saw anyone not challenging every point made in class as a weakling. His whole family was like that. His father had been a professor, and the one time I’d gone to his house to make a delivery from my parents’ tailor shop, I remember how dark and dusty it was: books pulled from the shelves and strewn on the floor in a way that must have made his family feel intellectual but to me just looked sloppy, brown drapes so thick you immediately forgot about the sun outside. That past year your grandfather had stopped coming to school one day, but I wasn’t surprised—so many were fleeing by then that I hadn’t spent much time wondering where the Moscowitzes had gone to hide.

  You look like shit, Raya, he told me then.

  I know, I said.

  No, he said, eyeing me more closely. You have actual shit on you.

  I came from the sewers, I said.

  He nodded, as if I wasn’t the first he knew who had, then said, And your family?

  Back home. In the uniform factory.

  Your grandfather nodded again. He reached into a paper sack, and when he handed me a loaf of bread, it was so heavy I almost dropped it.

  When’s the last time you ate? he said. I had no idea. I didn’t know what time it was, or even where I was. As I followed your grandfather through the forest, he talked. His family had escaped to a city in the North that past winter, he said—this was all happening in September—where he and his three younger brothers had trained with a youth group. The entire family had gone from there to Palestine, but he had met a plumber, Yosef Zanivyer, who’d seen something special in him (I couldn’t help but roll my eyes that even then, in those silent, deserted woods, your grandfather had to let me know how fabulous he was) and asked him to stay. Yosef was the plumber who’d engineered the sewer route I’d just come through, he said. For the past few months, your grandfather and his group had been roaming a labyrinth of tunnels, committing them to memory for an evacuation and supply route they’d use to smuggle weapons and food into the forest.

  He led me in a zigzag through uncleared scrub and over so many marshes and creeks I couldn’t count, until finally we reached the densest part, a cluster of trees so tall and thick it suddenly felt like evening—an area protected sufficiently by branches, he told me, that no military plane could spot us from the air. He took my hand, and we elbowed our way around trees and bushes until an entire village emerged. There were blanket tents held up by logs, what looked like an infirmary, a makeshift kitchen surrounding a fire pit. About forty people, all teenagers, almost all boys, unbathed and bedraggled, were at work in different stations. Everybody was speaking Yiddish, and the whole scene was so stunning I didn’t know what to look at first. But your grandfather just kept leading me forward, as nonchalant as if he were giving a tour of our school back home.

  This is Yussel, he said, pointing to a squat, suntanned boy. He was a medical student and runs the infirmary here. And this is the kitchen—here he handed me a potato, still hot from the fire—and this is where we run drills after dinner. He waved to a bigger kid, this one fifteen or sixteen, oafish and freckled with red flyaway hair, the parts of a gun spread out on his lap. That’s Isaac from Antopol, he told me.

  Isaac, your grandfather said, meet Raya. We grew up together.

  I’m trying to concentrate, Isaac grunted without even shooting me a sideways look, and your grandfather shrugged and said, He’ll grow on you.

  Then your grandfather stopped. Can you cook?

  Not really. My mother cooks. I could barely say it.

  What can you do, then?

  I thought about it. I can do ballet, I said. I can play the flute.

  That was when your grandfather started laughing. Wow, he said, throwing his hands in the air, thank God you’re here, and I wanted to smack him. But your parents are tailors, right? he said. So I’m guessing you can sew, and I can’t tell you how much it meant to me right then that there, in the middle of the forest, someone knew this basic fact about my family.

  Yeah, I can sew.

  Good, he said. We already have a tailor, but if you’re quick with your fingers, you can go in the armory.

  So that afternoon I went to work, learning how to repair broken rifles and pistols, mending cracked stocks and replacing worn parts. He was right: All my years helping my parents sew on buttons and rip out seams made the job come easy. I was grateful I was good at it, and for many hours I sat alone, a little relieved I didn’t have to talk to grumpy Isaac. Your grandfather was running around, stopping at every station. It seemed obvious he was the leader, which I learned for certain that night at dinner, when five new boys arrived at the campfire.

  They were young, your grandfather’s age, and had just come back from a mission. Your grandfather crouched beside me and explained. Everyone here was part of a brigade, he said, called the Yiddish Underground. He’d started it back with his youth group, doing combat training in basements around the city. In the beginning, they’d slipped into nearby villages and robbed peasants for food and tools and weapons. But every day the war seemed to be getting worse, he said, and now the brigade was traveling farther to carry out attacks. They torched cottages and stole guns. When they ran out of bullets, they sneaked into cities with empty shotguns and long, straight branches, which, from a distance, could pass as rifles. They chopped down telephone poles, attacked supply depots, burned bridges to disrupt military routes—and that night, the five boys at the campfire had just returned from dislodging two hundred meters of rail line.

  And? your grandfather said then, turning to one of the boys.

  And the conductor stopped the train, the boy said, spearing a sausage from the fire. And I walked right on and shot four soldiers in the dining car. They didn’t even have time to put down their forks.

  Your grandfather clapped the boy’s shoulde
r like a proud parent, and I just sat there swallowing.

  I told the other passengers to tell the police the Yiddish Underground was responsible, the boy continued, and your grandfather nodded. Everyone on the train was so scared, the boy said, and I just kept saying it as I walked through the cars. I took all of this, he said, gesturing at the suitcases and sacks of vegetables and bread by his feet.

  Perfect, your grandfather said, and when he flicked on his radio, everyone put down their food to listen. He tuned through static until an announcer came on with word of the day’s casualties. But when the announcer described the ambush, he said it was the work of Russian guerrilla fighters, Communists camping out in the woods. The Yiddish Underground wasn’t mentioned at all. All around us were these kids, huddled together in stolen coats, waiting for their commander to speak. Your grandfather cleared his throat. He looked his age for that second, wide-eyed and serious and more than a little frightened, and I had a flash of that same boy in the schoolyard, the market, walking his younger brothers down Pinsker Street. I knew that whatever he said, inside he felt as lost as every one of his fighters. But he stood up. He switched off the radio and said the only way they couldn’t ignore us was to plan bigger. We have to let them know, he said, that there’s a secret army they can’t touch, soldiers fighting back with weapons taken from them, then retreating deep into the forest to plan their next attack.