Dear Fang, with Love

by Rufi Thorpe

  “Where would she sleep?” Katya asked.

  “Well, I would get an apartment down here,” I said. It hadn’t really occurred to me that Vera would need her own bed and bedroom. I felt sick even thinking about how I would pay for a two-bedroom, if that was what Katya was suggesting.

  “Lucas,” Katya said, then faltered.

  “It isn’t unreasonable,” I said, “for me to be part of her life. Come on, I’m her father.”

  Katya set her fork down, struggling for words. “Lucas,” she said, “you know nothing about children. You don’t know when a fever is serious and when it’s not. You don’t know what is safe and what is not. I don’t even trust you to feed her regularly! You think you can just take a little girl and put her in your grad-student apartment and she will be happy?”

  “I could learn all that—I could read books, and I could—”

  “Books?” Katya laughed.

  “Yes, parenting books,” I said.

  “Lucas,” she said, leaning forward. “You stink of booze. Do you realize that? Do you think we can’t smell you at this tiny table? You show up for the first time you ever meet your daughter, and you’re still obviously drunk. And then you think that I am going to let her come live with you on weekends?”

  “It was New Year’s Eve,” I started, trying to explain.

  “Yes, it was New Year’s Eve last night in my world too, but I have a daughter, so I didn’t go out and get wasted like an animal and not even bother to shower! Lucas, you don’t understand what being a parent means. You just don’t get it,” she said.

  “You could teach me,” I said. “I could learn.”

  Katya didn’t say anything, just crumpled her napkin in her hand, shaking her head.

  “Can we go now?” Vera asked.

  Katya said something to her in Russian, leaned over and kissed her on the head, then got up to leave. “I assume you are fine with paying for breakfast?” she said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Say goodbye,” Katya instructed our daughter.

  “Bye bye,” Vera said, and handed the purple bear back to me. They left and I sat, waiting to get the check, holding that stupid purple bear, its fur still wet.

  When I was accepted by NYU’s comparative literature program, I went.

  During graduate school, I didn’t see Vera at all. What little money I didn’t send to Katya, I spent on beer, which was about pleasure and revelry to be sure, but which was also a form of penance. There was something about being hungover that I sought out, that I needed. I would watch ESPN all day, skipping class, drinking warm blue Gatorade, feeling deep in my guts that nothing was okay and that I was a horrible person.

  I spent the next seven years in New York. It was during this period that my mother began her bicoastal career path, doing Shakespeare in the Park during the summers in New York, and then making her real money by filming commercials and bit parts on TV during the winters in LA. We shared a tiny studio apartment during the summer, and I lived in it alone during the school year. I learned to be many things during those years: a scholar and a writer of research papers, a rider of subways, an eater of squid, an estimator of danger, a buyer of marijuana and sometimes other things, a seducer of women, and a reader of books. Oh, above all else, I learned in those years how to be a reader. My life was worth nothing except the books I read, and I spent years, literal years, reading in that studio apartment.

  What I did not learn was how to finish my dissertation.

  What I did not learn was how to become a father.

  When I returned to California, after finally confessing to my adviser that my dissertation was not “almost done” and in fact would probably never be done, Vera was almost twelve. Katya had changed. When I asked to see Vera, she said, “Please do. She is constantly asking questions about you.” Vera was allowed to come stay with me without even a cursory inspection of my apartment. Evidently, the idea of a thirty-year-old man taking care of a twelve-year-old was less problematic than a twenty-two-year-old man taking care of a four-year-old. I didn’t have to buy toys or car seats or learn about fevers. All I had to do was be myself.

  And from the start, Vera absolutely terrified me. She was like Katya on steroids, dark and funny and biting and capricious.

  “So,” she said, the first time she came to my apartment, “you’re poor.”

  “So,” she said, over dinner, “why didn’t you ever want to meet me?”

  “So,” she said, before we went to bed, “my mom says you’re an alcoholic.”

  It was exhausting and thrilling, and I was also very relieved to drop her off at her mother’s the next day. After that we saw each other on and off, sometimes every weekend, sometimes not seeing each other for a whole month. I always tried to let Vera’s enthusiasm be our guide. If she had plans with her girlfriends for the weekend, I stepped aside. I didn’t want her to feel like time with me was an obligation. I wanted her to like me.

  But she never really did start liking me. Maybe she couldn’t forgive me for not being part of her childhood. Maybe it would take not just years but decades to make up for the time I had lost. Or maybe, I sometimes thought, compared to her violent, moody world, I was a little boring. Vera and Kat were painted in bright acrylics, and I was in washed-out watercolor. They could barely see me. I was like a ghost wandering through their world.

  —

  I decided to go ahead and see the genealogist after all. Even though I had failed to take the proper steps to make an appointment, Johnny Depp was able to get me in. It was Friday, the end of the first week of our tour, though it felt like we had been there much longer. I left Vera with Judith in the apartment, eating farmer’s cheese and discussing the possibility of love at first sight, and went to the Vilnius University library to meet the genealogist, whose name was Justine.

  Justine was not what I was expecting. For one thing, she was young, perhaps in her late twenties, and she had a narrow, officious face with a lean beauty and dark hair cut close to her scalp. She was also the only black person I had seen in the entire city of Vilnius. I guess I was expecting a more grandmotherly type. I associated genealogy with the elderly for some reason.

  We sat together at a table in the large echoing hall. I gave her Grandma Sylvia’s full name and date of birth, as well as the names of her parents. I explained that Sylvia was Polish and that her father was a journalist who was perceived as a threat to the Reich, which is why the family was interned at Stutthof instead of being taken to the pits at Ponary, where most of the Vilnius Jews had been executed. I didn’t know much more about it than that, I told her.

  “That’s fine,” she said, continuing to scribble in her notebook. She had an accent that sounded vaguely French, but I wasn’t expert enough to tell if she was from France or a Francophone country in Africa. I wanted to ask her how she had wound up here, but worried this would be invasive. She was not a chatty sort of person and was really just trying to do her job.

  I felt bad that I didn’t have the name of Grandma Sylvia’s sister, the one who died in the gas chamber, but I was able to tell her that Grandma Sylvia’s brother’s name was Henryk.

  “And he also went to Stutthof?”

  “No,” I explained, “my grandmother and her sister got separated from their mother and brother on the train. They never found them at the camp. We don’t know what happened to them.”

  “And your grandmother died in Stutthof?” Justine asked.

  “No, she escaped,” I said.

  Justine set down her pen. “How exactly did she do that?”

  I paused. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would wind up telling this particular story today, and I wasn’t geared up for it, but the moment I set my mind to telling it, the old words came back to me. I always told the story the exact same way, using the very words and phrases that my mother used when she would tell it to me. It was something memorized, deep in my bones, like the Lord’s Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance.

  When I was d
one, Justine tapped her pen tip on the page in a fine constellation of dots. “Rape birthday,” she said.

  “She would buy a cake and everything,” I said.

  “What did she do when she got to the forest?” Justine asked. And so I explained about fleeing Germany and the years spent as a part of the Home Army in the forests outside of Warsaw. I even told the story of the baby who had to be killed so the Nazis wouldn’t find them.

  “Who was the father?”

  “She had a forest husband.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  I admitted I did not.

  “And the child died. Did it have a name?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  “Hmm…” Justine set down her pen and briefly massaged her temples. “It’s a very odd story,” she said. “The gas chambers at Stutthof were small and they tended only to gas those who were too weak or sick to continue working. Which makes your grandmother’s story harder to believe.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t understand exactly what she meant.

  “I’m just saying, women who have already been in a camp for months, women who have had the last of their vital essence drained from them, women no longer able to work—are typically not terribly sexually attractive. Or beautiful, as you say.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this. Grandma Sylvia’s beauty had always been presented to me as the reason for her salvation. I had never questioned it. But now, as I sat there with Justine, a more horrifying prospect presented itself to me: that maybe the guard’s desire had been awakened not by admiration, but by pity. Perhaps some internal calibration in him had been rewired by his work in the camps, so that desire and pity were one and the same. I thought, involuntarily, of the boy who masturbated onto images of stars. Of Vera’s question: “What else could cause God to feel desire?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said finally. “That was always the story I was told.”

  “I’ll see what I can dig up,” Justine said, concluding our brief meeting with a smile so formal it gave me the shivers.

  As I walked home through the winding streets, I kept thinking of her phrase “what I can dig up.” Maybe because we had just come back from a trip to the cemetery with Darius, the phrase seemed to have a sinister, grave-robbing ring to it. The morning had been foggy and the graveyard eerie. Darius pointed out that some of the Christian headstones in the shape of crosses were carved to look like tree branches. Stone transmuted into wood transmuted into a cross. Almost as though the cross wouldn’t mean anything if it weren’t made of wood. And this too had to do with life and death and resurrection: trees, the way they lost their leaves and then were reborn each spring. It was a pagan thing, Darius said, the love of trees.

  That was another part of the puzzle of Vilnius: its pagan roots. “The pagans of Lithuania were really appalling to our first visitors,” Darius had said, laughing. “A priest from Italy claimed that there were people in the forest outside of Vilna who worshipped fat black lizards as gods and kept them in their homes as pets. And of course, most of the houses were built without chimneys and so blindness was almost an epidemic, from all the smoke. They used to say that nowhere in the world were there as many blind people as in Vilnius. Well!”

  I wondered if Grandma Sylvia had had any lingering pagan sentiment, even though she was a Pole. I thought of the way she devoted herself to the garden, the way she preferred the company of plants to the company of most people. She’d had a real drinking problem when my mother was young, but all of that was over by the time I was a child. By then she was just a cranky old woman obsessed with her rosebushes. I had never wondered before why she had named my mother Rose, but now it seemed possible that the name was terribly literal: Perhaps she had just really liked roses. Maybe Grandma Sylvia was secretly a pagan. It was a comforting idea. Maybe her fierce pagan heart was what made it so easy for her to let the fabric of Catholicism slip from her hands, like a curtain that was simply drawn away. We had never needed it. We had only ever been pretending to believe. Or maybe what she had learned fighting in the forests had made the nicety of God an impossibility for her. And after God, what was there besides the simple beauty of plants?

  On the bus on the way back from the cemetery, I had wound up next to Darius, standing in the aisle, clinging to the straps as the bus navigated the narrow curves of the old streets. I said something, something stupid, about how the tour was sometimes depressing, so much death.

  “But imagine,” Darius had said, in that clipped, strange accent, “without death, there would still be so many Nazis. Death is wonderful in that way.”

  I nodded, unsure whether he was being serious or making a joke.

  “Like a magic eraser! Well! And how lucky for the Nazis if there is reincarnation! Now they are all clean little babies who do not have to remember what they’ve done. Little babies with a chance to start over. Isn’t that nice to think about?”

  I agreed that it was. I tried to imagine Grandma Sylvia reborn as a clean little baby, a baby with no memory. I imagined the grim reaper taking his scythe and scraping the grooves off the record of her life until it was all completely blank, until there was nothing. Once my mother had suggested to me that perhaps it was Grandma Sylvia’s sister who was the lucky one.

  I had been such a young man at the time that the idea appalled me. What could she possibly mean, I demanded. My mother shrugged. “There is a certain kind of poison to being beautiful,” she said. “There is a weight to it. I don’t know. Being alive is very difficult, Lucas. It takes energy. It’s messy. That’s all. There is a kind of agony to it. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

  I hadn’t understood her then, but her words came back to me as I wandered after my meeting with Justine, head down, toward our apartment on Žydų gatvė. Once, I had broken one of Grandma Sylvia’s glasses, I suddenly remembered, when I was five or six, just an ordinary water glass. She had yelled at me and I had started crying and she had looked at me, disgusted, repulsed by my weakness. But I had only been a child. I could not figure out now why she had been so upset with me. Where had my mother been? Had Grandma Sylvia been babysitting me? She must have been, but I found I had no recollection of whether that was a regular thing. It reminded me of something my mother had always said, but that I had never thought deeply about, which was that Grandma Sylvia didn’t like children very much.

  I shivered. Coming to Vilnius was making me feel closer to Grandma Sylvia, but getting closer to Grandma Sylvia wasn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy experience.

  Chapter 5

  Date: 7/13/2014 9:33 PM

  From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

  To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

  Subject: Ho Ho Ho

  Dear Fang,

  If you are going to cheat on me with other girls, you should try harder to make sure no one fucking takes a picture and then posts it on Facebook and fucking tags you in it. Also, Stephanie Garrison? Are you fucking serious? She has no lips and her mouth looks wobbly like she just got back from the dentist.

  I am guessing you already know that we are no longer together.

  Fuck you,

  V

  Date: 7/13/2014 9:50 PM

  From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

  To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

  Subject: Re: Ho Ho Ho

  So you just randomly had your arm around her in a friendly way—that’s your argument? You think I am an idiot. You have always underestimated my intelligence. Have fun. Enjoy her. I hope she does anal. Mazel tov.

  V

  PS: You should never begin a letter to a woman with “Calm down.” It’s insulting. I will decide when I am calm and you know I am sensitive about that anyway so it comes as a double fucking whammy.

  Date: 7/13/2014 9:53 PM

  From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

  To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

  Subject: Re: re: Ho Ho Ho

  NO. NO. FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU. You’re heartless. Do you even know what that means, to be so heartle
ss? You are disgusting. With your lies. You are filthy. It is unclean, what you are doing.

  Date: 7/14/2014 12:43 AM

  From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

  To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

  Subject: Re: re: re: Ho Ho Ho

  Dear Fang,

  I was talking to Judith Winter yesterday and she said an interesting thing, she said, “Well, the major lesson from the Holocaust was that the rest of the world will talk a good game, but they won’t do anything to save you. Your neighbors, people you’ve known for years, will just watch as you are systematically exterminated.” Imagine how surreal it must have been. As the ghettos were created, as your belongings were confiscated, as it was announced that you must wear a patch, or a badge, that you could only shop in the market at certain times of day. Imagine watching your Christian neighbors and thinking: Really? You aren’t going to say a thing? This madness, this madness seems fine to you? By the time it came to the death camps, the Jews must have been completely unsurprised. They had already learned everything there was to know about human nature.

  That’s the thing, Fang. You can’t know anything about a person by looking into their eyes. You say, “Trust me.” You say, “When have I ever lied to you?” You say, “If I had video footage of every second you’ve been away, you would see that I’m innocent. But there is no way for me to defend myself if you are determined to believe I cheated.” You say all these things, but who can trust anyone? Who would even believe the things humans are capable of?

  Deep in the seam of being there is an evil, evil splinter. The garden of life is filled with rotten apples breaking apart into seeds. You can take a bite of anything, even a bite of young love, and there will be a seed, a little something extra, a tiny pebble of evil, of something that can kill you. I know you love me, Fang. Whether you fucked Stephanie Garrison, whether you just kissed her, or whether as you say it was just a photo where you happened to have your arm around her—whatever the truth is, I know it doesn’t change the fact that you love me. Or at least that you think you love me.