Eventually, they left the kitchen. Probably to the dining room to have the dinner they’d made. And then to the bedroom in a buzzed glaze, half-dream, half-reality, the mellowness of body next to body, until they fell asleep, laughably early, the television chattering softly, the bed light carelessly on till the morning.
Around the courtyard, windows were blinking on. Arianna hadn’t called. Strange to be together every weeknight but apart on Saturday. Slava dialed her cell phone, but it rang until voice mail. The evening was his, just as he’d asked.
He pictured Arianna in the ghetto instead of Grandmother. Arianna in the midst of a dusty ghetto street flanked by flower beds outside the windows and small gardens in the backyard—homes, somehow, even if inside a ghetto. How effortlessly Arianna objected to having Grandmother’s money rerouted to Grandfather. (Did she object? She actually prohibited it—gently, chidingly: You can’t.) Not a glimmer of doubt passed over her face. But what if Arianna had eaten potato peels for breakfast and dinner (no lunch) for a year? If she had watched the pale skin come off her beautiful legs from wading in swamps day after day? Would she be of two minds then? Could she go sixty years without mentioning what had been taken, six years without complaining as her body undid itself? And if, in turn, Grandmother had been born in America, would she object in Arianna’s fashion? Here his imagination did not dare to go, a sacrilege to imagine so casually the undoing of so many deaths.
He had what Grandfather had said: a factory, a raid, bodies in a basement, a dead child, a bottle of milk. He had what the books in front of him said. He had what he had about Grandmother. The rest would have to find itself as he went. There was an extra layer of confusion in that his protagonist would have to be concealed as Israel Abramson, but that was just a name on top of the page. Was there a reason Israel couldn’t have a sister? Was the beauty of invention not that he very much could?
Please describe, in as much detail as you can, where the Subject was during the years 1939 to 1945.
Israel Abramson
It was after the four-day pogrom in July 1942 that I decided I would try to escape from the ghetto, come what may. In truth, it was my sister who decided.
Our job in the ghetto was to sort through the clothes of the murdered. Skirts here, pants here. After a while, the Germans wised up and made people undress first. By the end of ’42, the clothes had no holes or blood. You could still smell the people in the fabric, though: sweat and hay and sour milk and something else that must have been fear. It became ordinary to hold a dead person’s clothes in your hand, to see a dead body in the street. One time Sonya—that was my sister—saw an infant trying to get milk out of its mother’s breast, but the mother was dead, completely dead. And you had to walk by, keep going.
One day we were returning home from the warehouse where I sorted the clothes. It was me, Sonya, two other girls, and a guard in the back of the truck. When we were turning onto Komsomol’skaya, the guard leaned into me and said, “There will be a raid tonight. Don’t go home. Hide somewhere.” I said I couldn’t leave without Sonya, but he made clear the offer was only for me. I didn’t know what to do, but Sonya bulged her eyes and mouthed GO. “Now,” the guard said. So I jumped. I will always remember him. Herr Karitko. He was old. Thin, wrinkled face. Not tall. Maybe he liked boys. You had different kinds of Germans.
Already, there were bodies in the streets. The Belarusians who worked as policemen for the Germans, they were even more sadistic. Tables had been set out in the streets. They went from street to street, sitting down for a glass of beer and a plate of drumsticks between executions. You know what a drumstick looks like after you haven’t seen one in a year? I had scurvy; I’d lost half the teeth in my mouth. I always kept it closed and mumbled because they shot you on sight if you weren’t healthy.
My mind was racing because where was Sonya? War makes you make decisions no person should have to make. But also she was the kind of girl who, if she told you to jump from the truck, you jumped. She was steelier than all us boys in the yard. In fact, she was the only girl allowed to play with the boys, not that she asked anyone’s permission. One time the boys from the next street were over for a soccer game, and they tripped Khema something awful. He had snot and blood coming out of his nose. Sonya went to the boy who had done it, a real lunk, a meter eighty and not even thirteen, and said, “Watch out for the branch,” and pointed up. When he looked up, she kneed him in the groin and kicked him in the shin. While he wailed, she brought him over to Khema by the ear and held him like that until he apologized and wiped up Khema’s snot with his own jersey. So she was like that.
I didn’t know where to go except our neighbor Isaac because Mother and Father weren’t home yet from the factory. (They sewed German uniforms.) Isaac lived with his young wife and a child. They had a double cellar, and said we were welcome there whenever we needed it, may G-d spare us from needing it.
When I got there, Sonya was tapping her foot on the floorboard. “You take your time, brother,” she said, and winked. I was about to ask, but there was no time.
We had just closed the door to Isaac’s house when the Germans appeared on the street. We were in such a rush to get inside the cellar that Isaac closed the floor latch poorly. By then it was too late to pull it shut; they were entering the house. But what our luck was—one of them jumped in through the window. And he landed on the floor latch, closing it all the way.
We heard them upstairs. “Come out, Juden, cheepi-cheepi.” I wasn’t breathing and clutched Sonya’s hand. I could barely see, in the darkness, how many of us were edged into the cellar. A dozen, maybe. Isaac’s wife, Shulamit, was next to me, holding their baby. Somebody wept into a fist.
When I heard the sound, my blood stopped. At first it was soft, colicky, like a whine, but then it got louder, pained. Shulamit covered her child’s face with hers and began kissing its lips frantically to stop the noise. “Hush, mein liebe, hush, ikh bet dir, hush.” I can hear her saying it now. She would have swallowed that child if she could. But the baby continued to bawl. It became quiet upstairs. For a moment, there was only one sound in the world.
By now, my eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I could see Sonya staring at Shulamit. It frightened me to see that look on her face, to see her capable of that look. I can’t say how much of what happened next is because Sonya stared at Shulamit as only Sonya could stare. Would she have torn the child from Shulamit’s bosom and done it herself if Shulamit hadn’t? Maybe my eyes were merely playing tricks. Maybe I was so afraid that I imagined Sonya had something to do with it. I have never told this story to anyone, and I am telling it now only because Sonya is dead, as my parents——are dead. As all my friends are dead. I am the Last Mohican, as my grandchildren call me.
I didn’t see Shulamit do it. She was right next to me, so I couldn’t have missed it. I must have shut my eyes, unable to watch. When I opened them, the crying had stopped. Shulamit held a white square pillow over the child. It had stopped moving.
Eventually, the soldiers brought every pot crashing to the floor and stormed out. When darkness fell, some of us crawled out to the small garden on the other side of the cellar and buried the child, Isaac scooping out the loam with his hands, his eyes blank. Shulamit didn’t respond even to Isaac. She lost her mind. She survived the war, but she was never right in her mind again.
We ate from the garden for four days, beets and carrots, one meter away from the dead child. The garden kept us alive.
After four days, we peered outside. It was quiet. Everywhere, bodies. Both of the families who shared the house where my family lived had been killed. The pogrom had started during the workday, so Mother and Father had remained in the factory, hiding in a steel bunker. When they returned to our street and saw the murdered neighbors, my father fell on his knees, thinking his children were among them. Isaac walked to him, barely sentient, and touched his shoulder. “Yours are alive,” he said.
They had to pull us out of the cellar by the armpits. I was e
mbarrassed to need so much help. Somebody had given Father a liter of milk. In his hands, it was as white and clean as fresh snow. He gave it to me first as the boy, but I gave it to Sonya, though I couldn’t look her in the eyes as I did. She drank from the bottle with the hunger of an animal. I hated her in that moment.
When she was finished, she looked at me and said: “We have to get out. It doesn’t matter if we die doing it.” The Germans were spreading stories that the Jews escaping from the ghetto were Nazi plants, infected with VD, so the partisans, who didn’t exactly need help disliking Jews, were sometimes executing escaped ghetto inmates on sight. But if we were going to die, she said, we were going to die by a Russian hand, not a German. She would persuade Mother and Father as well.
I wanted to disagree, but listening to her also made me want to be more of a man. I had closed my eyes when Shulamit placed the pillow over her child, but I wouldn’t close my eyes now. Whatever it took, we would escape.
–9–
MONDAY, JULY 31, 2006
Slava was at the office early on Monday, his only companion Mr. Grayson dipping his bow tie into a buttered bagel. He waved cheerfully at Slava.
When he heard Arianna arrive, he crawled above the divider. She looked up and smiled.
“We didn’t talk yesterday,” he said.
“I wasn’t really around for yesterday,” she said. “I went at it too hard on Saturday night. I got home at four? I slept till noon.”
“Oh,” he said. In his mind, Arianna had waited at home for him to be ready to see her again. He disparaged his callowness.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
“Nothing, nothing,” he rushed to say. They shared an awkward silence.
A cough sounded beside them. Avi Liss was standing by Slava’s desk clutching a pile of printouts. “I’m sorry, lovebirds,” he said. “May I speak? Layout wants to know if Sheila’s going to let you cut the Vatican section. Then baseball can run long.”
“Sheila’s in the desert doing a detox,” Arianna said matter-of-factly. “There’s an infinity pool.”
“I’m sure you know all about it,” Avi said.
“They have this massage?” Arianna went on. “Six people work on you at the same time. Twelve hands.”
“When you figure it out, just let them know directly?” Avi said.
“And Louboutin is opening a boutique there next fall,” Arianna said. “Do you know, with the red sole?” She disappeared from view and lifted one of her heels above the divider, the sole demonically red. That was all you could see: the heel with its vanishing tip, the pale knob of the ankle, and the web of the toes pinched by the toe box. She was wearing a dress—anyone passing by Arianna’s cubicle could get an eyeful.
Avi and Slava remained rooted in place, bovine. The heel disappeared and Arianna vaulted back into view.
“I have to go,” Avi said hoarsely and stalked off.
Slava tried to tamp down the system-wide expansion in his groin. “What was that about?” he said, a little hoarse himself.
“Avi the Jew thinks I’m a JAP. I don’t want to disabuse him.” Her eyes flashed insolently. He was learning the meaning of her expressions. This one meant: I don’t care, but I do. He felt a tweak of satisfaction at this penetration of her invincibility, then instantly felt guilty for it.
“Thanks for defending me,” she winked.
Slava stared, dumbfounded. It hadn’t occurred to him that she could require defending. She held her expression a moment, then laughed. She was joking.
Slava had spent Sunday translating his letter for Israel into Russian, so Israel could hear what Slava had written. “Well, you certainly don’t know how to speak Russian,” Israel said, “but it sounds like you might know what you’re doing with English. It’s beautiful. Who’s the girl?”
“Your sister,” Slava said. “So to speak.”
“I’m saying who is the real-life model.”
“No one,” Slava said. “My imagination.”
“She sounds fierce. Must be one of ours.”
“She’s not one of ours,” Slava said.
“So it is someone!” Israel laughed. “Got you. Oh, you snot-nose. I can barely walk the block, but I can still run circles around you.”
“There’s an American expression, Israel: ‘You get more by honey than vinegar.’ Try it sometime.”
“My God, you’re a stiff berry. I hope you find an American girl, Slava. It’s easier for you than it is for us, but it’s hopeless for you all the same. But less so for your children, especially if you go with an American girl. And then your grandchildren won’t even know where Minsk is, good riddance.”
Slava acknowledged the lecture.
“So, did you talk to your grandmother?” Israel said. “It was her: staring at Shulamit, gulping the milk.”
“In a way,” Slava said.
“Next time you see her, say hello from me. You tell her that before that hooligan Yevgeny Gelman got his claws into her, she had another admirer on Karastoyanova. I wish you to find a woman like her, Slava.”
“And what is that like?” Slava said.
“She wasn’t an easy person. She held grudges for decades. People she didn’t like? She minced no words. And she never did anything she didn’t want to. But her heart was big. I’ve never met a woman who loved that way, and I include in that assessment my dear departed Raisa. There wasn’t a false bone in your grandmother’s body. For better and worse.”
“That is the opposite of my grandfather,” Slava said. “What did they see in each other?”
“Marriage is a mystery,” Israel said. “In the end, logical explanation is impossible. Tolstoy was wrong: It’s the happy families that are happy in all different ways, and the unhappy families that are unhappy in the same depressing, predictable fashion. It’s a small miracle, every time, when two people can make one life.”
“So it’s out of your hands,” Slava said.
“No, no,” Israel said. “Quite the opposite. You have to work at it.”
“Then I don’t understand,” Slava said.
“I am almost dead,” Israel said, “and I still don’t understand.”
Throughout the day, Arianna a suddenly awkward presence on the other side of the divider, Slava glanced at the telephone, willing it to ring with Grandfather’s number. By now he would know that Slava had written a letter for Israel. So, call. When you didn’t want to hear from him, he found you, and when you did, he was mum.
Slava lifted the receiver, listened to the dial tone, returned it to the cradle. The phone looked like something Grandfather would appreciate: a spaceship console dressed up as a regular old touch-dial. Slava didn’t know what function most of its buttons performed. Conference, transfer, something called ABS. Was that the button for phone records? His limited purview at the magazine was sufficiently served by one through nine. He snapped the phone out of its nest and bashed the buttons.
“How is he?” Slava asked Berta when she picked up.
“He talks at night,” she said impassively.
“Saying what?”
“Negotiating, counting. I don’t know. It’s impolite to listen.”
“I’m sorry it keeps you up,” he said.
“It’s my job,” she said. “We honor our old people.”
They stalled in an uncomfortable silence. After an eternity, Grandfather picked up the bedroom phone. “So?” he said. “Hello.”
“Nothing. How are you?”
“The doctor says it’s normal.”
“What’s normal?”
“Talking to God in your dreams after . . . you know. A passing. I wake up, I don’t know what planet I’m on. It’s like I have two bodies. Everything falls from my hands. Easy for him to say normal, he’s not the one feeling it.”
“I’m sure it’s temporary,” Slava said.
“That’s what he said, ‘temporary,’” Grandfather said. “As temporary as life or what? Tfoo, may these doctors get covered up to their head
s. I heard you wrote something for Israel.”
Slava smiled to himself. “I did,” he said.
“That poor man. His wife—isn’t. His son—the roof went on his head. Man has two valor medals, shrapnel in his body, and he lives alone in an underground cubbyhole. You can’t compare his apartment with mine.”
“Yes, he didn’t pretend to be a vegetable,” Slava said. “It’s cozy, actually. Like The Master and Margarita.” He mentioned the book as an alliance with Israel. His grandfather didn’t read.
“I read the first and last page of that one. His apartment isn’t as nice as this one. Look at the size of my kitchen.”
“And you’ve got a woman cooking your meals. He heats soup from a can.”
“Exactly.”
“You live much better than he does.”
“We do what we can, Slava, we do what we can.”
“You’re really clever and he’s dumb,” Slava said. He upbraided himself for his orneriness. Not practical if he was calling with a need. He had to think like Grandfather.
“I always tell him at the doctor’s office, ‘Let me help you think about these things.’ But he doesn’t have the mind for it, he says.”
“You think he’s telling the truth?” Slava said.
“Why wouldn’t he be telling the truth?”
“Does everyone tell the truth?” Slava said.
“I do. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Oh, I see,” Slava said.
“Listen, a little birdie flew in here today,” Grandfather said.
Slava brightened. Maybe he wouldn’t have to ask.
“Said Vera Rudinsky is meeting some friends for dinner.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised to hear Vera’s name. Since the funeral party, Arianna had filled his mind. “And what kind of bird was this?”
“The kind that knows what it needs to know. She wants you to meet them. The friends.”
“She’s a vulgarian,” Slava said unconvincingly.
“She’s not Bulgarian, she’s one of us. That girl has an ass like a tomato. I saw the way you were looking at her—everyone saw. I’m not saying you have to marry her. Go spend an evening together. Do you know how to do that?”
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