I smile my warmest smile and step forward, welcoming him, taking his hand in mine. What a beautiful handshake. Like running my fingers along a silken tie and then having, sadly, to let go.
He nods his thick head of hair and smiles at me, professionally. He says a few polite things about the house—that it’s such a surprise, the way it seems to rise, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, out of the fields. He reassures me he doesn’t want to keep me waiting; but by the fidgeting of his fingers on the handle of his satchel I can tell he’s the one impatient to get going. He asks me where we’d be comfortable sitting down.
I smile. “That’s usually my question,” I say, and toss my scarf a little farther over my shoulder. “Why don’t we sit right here?” I point to a pair of deep wing chairs in good light near the living room window, turning so that he’ll settle down on the side of my good ear. A few things I learned, as an attorney: one, that you always want to give your clients good light; two, that you will want them to be comfortable, but not so comfortable that they feel free to walk away; three, that you ask and answer questions both as though nothing about them and everything about them potentially meant everything and nothing; and four, that you offer them a drink, but perhaps not right away, not until they’ve grown warm and thirsty and, in some ways, to depend on you.
This nice young doctoral student appears so cool and independent, however, setting his stylish leather bag at his feet, crossing his legs in his black jeans, that it’s hard to imagine him depending on anything or anyone but himself. Again, it’s not what I expected. Most young people, most students—and I’ve had several as my assistants over the years—are like Maia: hungry, jobless, their nails bitten to the quick. This cool person is however (I have to remind myself) the one that I have invited into my home, to whom I’ve chosen to tell my story. So I must make do. If I had chosen to, I could have talked to any newspaper reporter. But reporters aren’t scholars (I know from having slept with one). Reporters think only of the moment, of what’s in front of them. A scholar reaches back, sees history. And so I sit here, in my winged chair mirroring this young man’s, and face his formal pair of eyes and his long, narrow nose, and I inhale and think, ah, I hope you will see, yes? And I wonder: Why must it be that in spite of all the gadgets people have these days it still isn’t possible to travel back in time? To make things more clear? Why must it still be that the only thing we ever have to move through, in any direction, is each other?
*
HE SITS BACK AND rests his notepad on his lap. His voice crosses the short distance between us with an easy, confident lilt. Bardawil. When I read it I thought it sounded like bide-a-while. But he is not Scottish. No, not that.
“Your assistant just told me it’s your birthday.” He smiles and gestures to the flowers and the cards on the mantel. “Congratulations. And thank you for having me out today.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. Bardawil. Absolutely. I wanted you to be here. It’s a funny thing, though, isn’t it? To say congratulations on a birthday, I mean. It’s not as though we generally accomplish anything on the day.” Although on this one I would try to.
“Except to go on breathing.” He smiles.
“True enough.”
“But I do need to thank you again for helping me with my project. Your assistant mentioned that you sometimes have trouble… Ah, you do understand why I’m here?”
“Yes. Of course. You want to get into contact with people who believe they have been reincarnated. But as I told you in my e-mail, I do not believe I have been reincarnated. I believe I have simply rediscovered myself.”
“Yes. And has anyone come to visit you before about this ‘discovery’ that you have made? Have you talked to anyone about your recovered past life?”
“No, as I mentioned in my e-mail. They couldn’t. I only discovered myself a few weeks ago.”
“I see. Do you mind if I start recording now?” He takes something slim as a cigarette lighter out of his jacket pocket. Another one of those modern phones.
“Oh.” I make a show of leaning forward, over my glasses, for a better look. “Please do.” Let us start. Remake history. Ignite.
“If you’re ready and comfortable then, why don’t we begin, since your assistant explained you have a party to host later on. Lots of people coming?” he asks easily, adjusting the phone on the table between us. “Do you have lots of family?”
He pulls a mechanical pencil out of his breast pocket. How nice, I think, that they still use both the pencil and the recorder. Just as my reporter-lover used to do. Because they are afraid, afraid that they won’t remember properly. Or that something will happen to the words.
“No. I have no immediate family, Mr. Bardawil. Not living, in any case.”
“You were adopted, as you told me in your e-mail.”
“Yes.”
“I was able to do a bit of background work on you before I came today. I pulled a bit about you from the Times archives. You were once very well known, the only survivor of a major disaster. As someone very, very lucky. And now you believe you have been born again.”
“No. Not exactly. Not born again. After all these years, my memory has finally returned to me, from before that time, before that disaster. And when you find your memory, you see, you want to share it. You want to produce evidence of it. I was a lawyer.” A believer in evidence.
“You said you suffered trauma during the Second World War. You were found after it was over, in a refugee camp, with no memory.”
“You are almost right. Not a refugee camp. A kibbutz. There were many refugees there, however.” I fold my hands in my lap and tip my good ear to him, giving him my warm-the-jury nod. We need to become good friends, and quickly. If he is going to work for me. If he is going to be my advocate, out there. “Even then, though, I—it—wasn’t all a blank. I remember my birthday, for instance. The date and year, June 12, 1929. Like a little drumbeat, pounding in my head. And I knew my first language. Dutch. An identity is like spit, you see. Once you have it, you can’t get rid of it. You’re tasting it all the time, even if you don’t know you’re tasting it; you can’t feel it. But once you do know, you can’t ignore it. That’s what’s happened to me. Three weeks ago.”
“Three weeks ago.”
“Yes. My memories came back, or at least some of them, right out of the blue.”
“Do you mean nothing precipitated this belief? This…discovery?”
“Well, there was something. A moment. A feeling. Of illumination. I was lighting a candle at the time.”
“And why were you doing that?”
“I mean, it was Shavuot, but my family was never observant, so it wasn’t really that. It’s just a candle is a lovely thing.”
“So you were lighting a candle. And perhaps looking into its flame.” He makes some quick notes.
“Yes, exactly! I was looking into its flame, and then suddenly after all these years I remembered who I was. How I made it. How I got away from Belsen. How I landed on that beach.” I watch him, scribbling, while I roll my tongue around in my mouth. Oh, that salty beach. The smell of char, of burned rubber, mixed together with the stink of fish and cooked flesh. My cheek lodged in sand, my deaf ear clogged with it. My head hidden under a woven basket. My first sight of that beach, when the screen was lifted off, was pieces of blue sky crowded with the heads of men carrying guns.
Time to turn and swim back to my interviewer.
I smile at his bowed, curled head. “You take notes like a newspaperman. I used to know a newspaperman very well.” I wait while his wrist—he’s left-handed, how interesting—undulates around a shorthand I don’t recognize. I wonder if he’s writing down more than I’m saying. Perhaps he’s jotting down what I look like, sitting in this chair, with my skirt ballooned over my knees and my scarf draped over my shoulder and my hair so composed. To be seen is to be captured. But to speak, to speak is to move.
“Palestine is where you were found and adopted by your Jewish parents.”
/> “Yes. But my mother and father didn’t really take to being pioneers, kibbutzniks. They were too much city people. Have you been to Palestine, Mr. Bardawil?”
He looks up. “I am Palestinian, as it happens.”
“Oh. What a coincidence.” I adjust my red scarf, a little embarrassed to have been so wrong about his name. “Then you will understand! Do you remember the air?”
“No. I’ve never lived there.”
So white and hot, I remember, suddenly, intensely—the air around that kibbutz. Around the small, clean houses, and the chicken coops knitted with staring eyes, and the vegetable gardens, and the lean-to goat sheds. A little damp inside the communal kitchen, where they let me eat anything I wanted, where they brought me back to life, gave me a home. But maybe it isn’t the right time to say so just now.
“I didn’t feel myself to be really there, though. I mean, I didn’t belong, Mr. Bardawil. No one knew what to do with me, you see. I was a complete mystery to them. I spoke several languages. I couldn’t remember what town or city I came from. I was all the time walking around with a bucket on my head. Then my parents adopted me and took me in.”
He considers me with those young, critical, student-ish eyes. The left hand isn’t moving now. Only the finger stroking the pen.
Bardawil. Bide a while.
“I was a little mad, then,” I explain.” But I soon stopped behaving that way. Mostly, to be honest, to please my new parents. They had been through so much even before they started to help me, Mr. Bardawil. They didn’t expect the hardships of kibbutz life to be so—well, hard. They were city people, and they wanted to be good after the war, they wanted to help build—but in the end, the life didn’t suit them. And my father, who was a lawyer, didn’t like it that if they adopted me there as a refugee child, they’d have to share me in common with the kibbutz. Which was a normal practice at that time. So they decided I needed quiet and cool air, and a good Jewish doctor, and my own home and bedroom. And my father worked things out quietly so that they could bring me here.”
I flew. In an airplane. I saw. Opening my eyes very wide, over the white wing. At my cheek the leather seat smelled of coffee. The covered pillow at my back was embroidered in a fine thread, pale blue mixed with darker. I remember the ocean, even bigger than the one the rifle-toting soldiers said had tried to drown me, far down below, outside the little oval of my window, shaking, a harmless carpet. And then, then oh, how big the coast of America was! And when I stepped out of the plane and was placed in a car—how long its roads! And how white the house in the country, and how perfect the bedroom of an American teenager. With a record player and a lace canopy and a mirrored vanity. You will have everything you want and deserve, these new people had looked at me lovingly and pityingly and said. You will go to college, you will get married, you will have your own family, and health and happiness and prosperity forever and ever. Don’t worry. This is America. This is your house.
“My parents were very good and kind people,” I explain. “I want that recorded, for posterity. But they were under a great deal of pressure. They were criticized—well, they were more than criticized—for taking me away from the Yishuv. Even though they were doing it for me, and for the best of reasons. They were never anything but practical people. My father was a secular man, a caring man, a man of high hopes, Mr. Bardawil. I wanted to be just like him. And my mother was a kind, reserved, patient, understanding woman. They couldn’t have any children, so they took me in instead. To me that has always been a small miracle.” Along with this beautiful house, this land of milk and honey. And in the city, unbelievably, yet another home, an apartment with gleaming, wood-paneled walls, and another fitted bedroom, plush with stuffed animals. Although it would be much better, the doctors had all agreed and decided, to keep me in the country at first for an extended period of time. Away from overstimulation. From overdramatization. And so I lived for months on the farm, as my new family called this place, and I studied English and got my American high school diploma via correspondence course. Father stayed in the city at his practice, but made the drive to be with us twice a week. Mother’s face lit up whenever he walked in a room. It was amazing to see—like watching a match striking against solid stone—the way these two married people fell together, as though in this world their love was its only intended consequence.
Once a week, I was driven back to the city. I wore my best clothes, rehearsed what I would say to the psychiatrist, and marveled at Park Avenue, its buildings gold in the sun, charms strung along a bracelet. After my sessions Father, for a treat, would take me to Zabar’s or to the automat, which I couldn’t comprehend at first. How could it be possible that one minute you could be starving and the next standing in front of an entire bank of windows that only needed a coin and a button pressed for you to grab at whatever you wanted? People imagine Heaven as a wide, expansive place; I’ve always imagined it full of tiny slots.
I went running back so many times the other customers laughed, charmed. Meanwhile, Father, spotting a hungry man out on the street, took a handful of coins and pulled a sandwich and a piece of fruit from behind the glass. Then he took the wrapped food outside, and through the picture window I watched that beggar take the lunch in his hands and lift the sandwich and apple, astonished, as though he were looking at the sun and the moon. That was how I felt, too.
Like the astronauts who later flew by stages, I learned to do things very slowly. And did them later than other girls my age. I eventually learned how to ride the subway to Columbus Circle, and to use taxis. I sometimes stopped by my father’s office on the way home from my studies at Columbia, so that I could read in his quiet, totem-lined waiting area while the housekeeper cleaned our city apartment. I avoided the library and most of the other university students because they gave me strange looks; I was certain they thought I talked too much, or thought I was showing off, me, a girl, for the male professors, when all I was doing was raising my hand at every opportunity because I wanted to seem quick and alert and awake and smart enough so that I wouldn’t be sent back to that ashy beach, to that heavy bucket…
My interviewer turns the sheet on his notepad. I hope he’s been able to keep up with me. I wonder if we’re going to go through quite a few sheets today. I hope so. I have so much weight to shed.
“So you were brought to this country as an amnesiac and never recovered any of your memory prior to 1946. But you managed to attend school and create a coherent narrative,” he reviews, formally. “And after you completed your undergraduate work, you went to law school. You constructed an identity, aided of course by racial and cultural narratives and by your family’s class status.” He bends and makes more notes. He seems to be speaking to himself. As if he doesn’t need me. As I’ve seen other students do. “But now this narrative has been altered, and a past identity recovered. Thanks to possible autohypnosis,” he notes and adds under his breath.
This is the way Maia talks too, or at least used to, about her thesis. Scholar-speak. So interesting. As though what is dust, gossamer, can be recast as blocks of concrete.
“But why the law?” He looks up.
“I became a lawyer in part because I wanted to do good the way my father did. Also, I wanted to do something…difficult. I always wanted…I always needed to do things that kept me very focused. Allowed me to forget that I didn’t remember things, my past. The law is all about memory, Mr. Bardawil. Precedent. It’s a story that depends on all the stories that have come before, but that at some point had to begin with a story invented out of thin air. ‘This is right while this is wrong.’ If you go far enough back, there is only invention. Do you see? Anyway,” I lean back in my chair, “as it happens, women had an easier time breaking into certain kinds of jobs, certain kinds of law, in those days. It was thought we were all natural do-gooders. And my father worked on civil liberties cases. He helped people jailed for being Communists. People punished for speaking, or not speaking. So that was an obvious path for me to take, too. I be
came a defense attorney. I was good at it. But I wasn’t so brave as some.”
I look down at this young man’s satchel, so like the cases the young lawyers used to carry to Alabama. I had wanted to be good, to be brave; but I was afraid of what might happen to me. That I might disappear again. Be the wrong person in the wrong place, yet again.
“At that point in my life,” is all I say, “what I most wanted was to make the people who had taken me in decently proud of me.”
“And did your parents help you in this? Did they help you construct the narrative you needed to construct?”
What a strange way to speak about living, or about trying to! I look, puzzled, into the corner of the living room at the nailed-leather chair where my father used to sit and smoke his pipe and read his journals, at the ottoman where my mother used to sit and rub his feet. Their love was helpful, so generous, yes. Yet it sometimes excluded me. My heart was grateful—but sometimes it excluded them.
“Yes, Mr. Bardawil. But adopted children aren’t always easy to raise, I’m bound to say. It wasn’t always easy for us. The doctors say that the bonding doesn’t always… And my parents were fairly old when they adopted me. But they were very, very kind people, and once they’d chosen a path they didn’t veer from it.” And in the end the same bright sun had shone on the mornings of both their funerals, crawling across a wintry sky. So many people at my father’s funeral, the first one, standing everywhere, you couldn’t see the grass. Mother holding herself apart from all of them, the spade in her hand. Two months later she was gone, and it was my turn. And then I was an orphan again. You can have, it turns out, too much practice at some things.
After sitting shiva in the family apartment, I went back to my own and sank into a hot bath. And lay there, holding my breath, longing for my nosy Irish newspaperman. It had been months since we were last together on the bed in the next room, sweating because my air conditioner had been on the fritz; months since our last fight, when, hapless non-Jew that he was, and a hapless lapsed Catholic too, and always, always unstoppably the reporter, he’d gone on and on and on with his serious questions, always wanting to know something more about me. He’d wanted to know my relationship to my faith, to my watchful God. I’d told him I wasn’t religious, but I liked the line from the Torah that said: surely God would ransom our soul from the grave.
The Wedding of Anna F. Page 2