Everything Is Illuminated

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  Next came Rovno's float, which was covered from end to end in green butterflies. Then the floats from Lutsk, Sarny, Kivertsy, Sokeretchy, and Kovel. They were each covered with color, thousands of butterflies drawn to bloody carcasses: brown butterflies, purple butterflies, yellow butterflies, pink butterflies, white. The crowd lining the parade route hollered with so much excitement and so little humanity that an impenetrable wall of noise was erected, a common wail so pervasive and constant that it could be mistaken for a common silence.

  The Trachimbrod float was covered in blue butterflies. Brod sat on a raised platform in the middle, surrounded by the young float princesses of the shtetl, dressed in blue lace, waving their arms about like waves. A quartet of fiddlers played Polish national songs from a stand in the front of the float while a different quartet played Ukrainian traditionals from the back, and the interference between the two produced a third, dissonant song, heard only by the float princesses and Brod. Yankel watched from his window, fingering the bead that seemed to have gained all the weight he had lost in the last sixty years.

  When the Trachimbrod float reached the toy and pastry stands, Brod was given the signal by the Tolerable Rabbi to throw the sacks into the water. Up, up ... The arc of the collective gaze—from Brod's palm to the river's—was the only thing in the universe that existed at that moment: a single indelible rainbow. Down, down ... It was not until the Tolerable Rabbi was relatively sure that the sacks had reached the river's bottom that the men were given permission—another of his dramatic nods—to dive after them.

  It was impossible to see what was going on in the water with all of the splashing. Women and children cheered furiously while men stroked furiously, grabbing and tugging at one another's limbs to gain advantage. They surfaced in waves, sometimes with bags in their mouths or hands, and then plunged back down with all the vigor they could summon. The water leapt, the trees swayed in expectation, the sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

  And then:

  I've got it! a man shouted from the far end of the river. I've got it! The other divers sighed in disappointment and backstroked to the river's bank or floated in place while they cursed the winner's good fortune. My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather swam back to shore, pumping the golden sack above his head. A large crowd was waiting for him when he fell to his knees and poured the contents onto the mud. Eighteen gold coins. Half a year's salary.

  WHAT'S YOUR NAME? the Tolerable Rabbi asked.

  I am Shalom, he said. I am from Kolki.

  THE KOLKER HAS WON THE DAY! the Rabbi proclaimed, losing his yarmulke in all the excitement.

  As the hum of crickets summoned the darkness, Brod remained on the float to watch the beginning of the festival without the pestering of men. The paraders and shtetl folk were already drunk—arms around one another, hands on one another, fingers probing, thighs accommodating, all thinking only of her. The strings were beginning to sag (birds landed, depressing the middles; winds blew, swinging them side to side like waves), and the princesses had run to the shore to see the gold and lean against the visiting men.

  Mist came first, then rain, so slow that the drops could be followed as they fell. The men and women continued their groping dance as the klezmer bands poured their music through the streets. Young girls captured fireflies in cheesecloth nets. They peeled open the bulbs and painted their eyelids with the phosphorescence. Boys squashed ants between fingers, not knowing why.

  The rain intensified, and paraders drank themselves sick on homemade vodka and beer. People made wild, urgent love in the dark corners where houses met and under the hanging canopies of weeping willows. Couples cut their backs on the shells, twigs, and pebbles of the Brod's shallow waters. They pulled at one another in the grass: brassy young men driven with lust, jaded women less wet than breath on glass, virgin boys moving like blind boys, widows lifting their veils, spreading their legs, pleading—to whom?

  From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be mistaken for light—a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes.

  In about one and a half centuries—after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs—metropolises will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Shtetls will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples, invisible.

  The glow is born from the sum of thousands of loves: newlyweds and teenagers who spark like lighters out of butane, pairs of men who burn fast and bright, pairs of women who illuminate for hours with soft multiple glows, orgies like rock and flint toys sold at festivals, couples trying unsuccessfully to have children who burn their frustrated image on the continent like the bloom a bright light leaves on the eye after you turn away from it.

  Some nights, some places are a little brighter. It's difficult to stare at New York City on Valentine's Day, or Dublin on St. Patrick's. The old walled city of Jerusalem lights up like a candle on each of Chanukah's eight nights. Trachimday is the only time all year when the tiny village of Trachimbrod can be seen from space, when enough copulative voltage is generated to sex the Polish-Ukrainian skies electric. We're here, the glow of 1804 will say in one and a half centuries. We're here, and we're alive.

  But Brod was not a point of this special kind of light, not adding her current to the collective voltage. She climbed down from the float, pools of rainwater collected in the channels between her ribs, and walked the Jewish/Human fault line back toward her house, where the noise and revelry could be observed from a distance. Women sneered at her, and men used their drunkenness as an excuse to bump into her, to brush against her and stick their faces close enough to her face to smell her or kiss her cheek.

  Brod, you are a dirty river girl!

  Wouldn't you like to hold my hand, Brod?

  Your father is a shameful man, Brod.

  Come on, you can do it. One little shout out of pleasure.

  She ignored them all. Ignored them when they spat at her feet or pinched her backside. Ignored them when they cursed and kissed her, and cursed her with their kisses. Ignored them even when they made a woman out of her, ignored them as she had learned to ignore everything in the world that was not once-removed.

  Yankel! she said, opening the door. Yankel, I'm home. Let's watch the dancing from the roof and eat pineapple with our hands!

  She walked through the den with the hobble of a man six times her age, and through the kitchen pulling off her mermaid suit, and through the bedroom searching for her father. The house was filled with the odor of wetness and decay, as if a window had been left open as an invitation for all the ghosts of eastern Europe. But it was the water that had seeped through the spaces between shingles, like breath between the teeth of a closed mouth. And the odor of death.

  Yankel! she called, pulling her skinny legs from the mermaid's tail, revealing her tightly wound pubic hair, which was still new enough to trace out a sharp triangle.

  Outside: Lips locked lips on hay in barns and fingers met thighs met lips met ears met undersides of knees on quilts on lawns of strangers, all thinking of Brod, everyone thinking only of Brod.

  Yankel? Are you home? she called, walking naked from room to room, her nipples hard and purple from the cold, her skin pale and goose-bumped, her eyelashes holding pearls of rainwater at their ends.

  Outside: Breasts were kneaded in callused hands. Many buttons were undone. Sentences became words became sighs became groans became grunts became light.

  Yankel? You said we could watch from the roof.

  She found him in the library. But he was not asleep in his favorite chair, as she suspected he might be, with the wings of a half-finished book spread across his chest. He was on the floor, fetal, clutching a balled-up slip of paper. Otherwise the room was in perfect order. He had tried not to make a mess when he felt the first flash of heat
across his scalp. He was embarrassed when his legs gave out beneath him, ashamed when he realized he would die on the floor, alone in the magnitude of his grief when he understood that he would die before he could tell Brod how beautiful she was that day, and that she had a good heart (which was worth more than a good brain), and that he was not her real father but wished with every blessing, every day and night of his life, that he was; before he could tell her of his dream of eternal life with her, of dying with her, or never dying. He died with the crumpled slip of paper clutched in one hand and the abacus bead in the other.

  The water seeped through the shingles as if the house were a cavern. Yankel's lipstick autobiography came flaking off his bedroom ceiling, falling gently like blood-stained snow to his bed and floor. You are Yankel ... You love Brod ... You are a Sloucher ... You were once married, but she left you ... You don't believe in an afterlife... Brod was afraid any tears of her own would cause the walls of the old house to give way, so she sandbagged them behind her eyes, exiled them to someplace deeper, safer.

  She took the paper from Yankel's hand, which was damp with rain, and fear of death, and death. Scrawled in a child's writing: Everything for Brod.

  A wink of lightning illuminated the Kolker at the window. He was strong, with a heavy brow protruding over his maple-bark eyes. Brod had seen him when he surfaced with the coins, when he spilt them onto the shore like golden vomit from the sack, but took little notice.

  Go away! she cried, covering her bare chest with her arms and turning back toward Yankel, protecting their bodies from the Kolker's gaze. But he did not leave.

  Go away!

  I won't go without you, he called to her through the window.

  Go away! Go away!

  The rain dripped from his upper lip. Not without you.

  I'll kill myself! she hollered.

  Then I'll take your body with me, he said, palms against the glass.

  Go away!

  I won't!

  Yankel jerked in rigor mortis, knocking over the oil lamp, which blew itself out on its way to the floor, leaving the room completely dark. His cheeks pulled into a tight smile, revealing, to the banished shadows, a contentedness. Brod let her arms brush down her skin to her sides and turned to face my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

  Then you must do something for me, she said.

  Her belly lit up like a firefly's bulb—brighter than a hundred thousand virgins making love for the first time.

  ***

  Get en heyar! my grandmother calls to my mother. Hurry! My mother is twenty-one. My age as I write these words. She lives at home, goes to school at night, has three jobs, wants to find and marry my father, wants to create and love and sing to and die many times every day for me. Look et diz, my grandmother says into the television's glow. Look. She puts her hand on my mother's hand and feels her own blood flow through the veins, and the blood of my grandfather (who died only five weeks after coming to the States, just half a year after my mother was born), and my mother's blood, and my blood, and the blood of my children and grandchildren. A crackling: That's one small step for man ... They stare at a blue marble floating in the void—a homecoming from so far away. My grandmother, trying to control her voice, says, Yer fadder vood bef luffed ta see diz. The blue marble is replaced with an anchorman, who has removed his glasses and is rubbing his eyes. Ladies and gentlemen, America has put a man on the moon tonight. My grandmother struggles to her feet—old, even then—and says, with many different kinds of tears in her eyes, Etz vunderful! She kisses my mother, hides her hands in my mother's hair, and says, Etz vunderrful! My mother is also crying, each tear unique. They cry together, cheek to cheek. And neither of them hears the astronaut whisper, I see something, while gazing over the lunar horizon at the tiny village of Trachimbrod. There's definitely something out there.

  28 October 1997

  Dear Jonathan,

  I luxuriated the receipt of your letter. You are always so rapid to write to me. This will be a lucrative thing for when you are a real writer and not an apprentice. Mazel tov!

  Grandfather ordered me to thank you for the duplicate photograph. It was benevolent of you to post it and not to demand him for any currency. In truth, he does not possess very much. I was certain that Father did not disperse him any for the voyage, because Grandfather often mentions that he has no currency, and I know Father well around manners like this. This made me very wrathful (not spleened or on nerves, as you have informed me that these are not befitting words how often I use them), and I went to Father. He hollered at me, "I ATTEMPTED TO DISPERSE GRANDFATHER CURRENCY, BUT HE WOULD NOT RECEIVE IT." I told him that I did not believe him, and he pushed me and ordered that I should interrogate Grandfather on the matter, but of course I cannot do that. When I was on the floor, he told me that I do not know everything, as I think I do. (But I will tell you, Jonathan, I do not think I know everything.) This made me feel like a schmendrik for receiving the currency. But I was constrained to receive it, because as I have informed you, I have a dream of one day changing residences to America. Grandfather does not have any dreams like this, and so does not need currency. Then I became very biled at Grandfather, because why was it impossible for him to receive the currency from Father and present it to me?

  Do not inform one soul, but I keep all of my reserves of currency in a cookie box in the kitchen. It is a place that nobody investigates, because it has been ten years since Mother manufactured a cookie. I reason that when the cookie box is full, I will have a sufficient quantity to change residences to America. I am being a cautious person, because I desire to be cocksure that I have enough for a luxurious apartment in Times Square, vast enough for both me and Little Igor. We will have a large-screen television to watch basketball, a jacuzzi, and a hi-fi to write home about, although we will already be home. Little Igor must go forth with me, of course, whatever occurs.

  It appeared that you did not have very many arguments with the previous division. I ask leniency if it angered you in any manner, but I wanted to be truthful and humorous, as you counseled. Do you think that I am a humorous person? I signify humorous with intentions, not humorous because I do foolish things. Mother once said that I was humorous, but that was when I asked her to purchase a Ferrari Testarossa on my behalf. Not desiring to be laughed upon in the wrong way, I revised my offer to hubcaps.

  I fashioned the very sparse changes that you posted to me. I altered the division about the hotel in Lutsk. Now you only pay once. "I will not be treated like a second-class citizen!"you apprise to the hotel owner, and while I am obligated (thank you, Jonathan) to inform you that you are not a second-, third-, or fourth-class citizen, it does sound very potent. The owner says, "You win. You win. I tried to pull a fast one" (what does it mean to pull a fast one?), "but you win. OK. You will pay only once." This is now an excellent scene. I have considered making you speak Ukrainian, so that you could have more scenes like this, but that would make me a useless person, because if you spoke Ukrainian, you would still have need for a driver, but not for a translator. I ruminated exterminating Grandfather from the story, so that I would be the driver, but if he ever ascertained this, I am certain that he would be injured, and nor of us desire that, yes? Also, I do not possess a license.

  Finally, I altered the division about Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior's fondness for you. I will iterate again, I do not think that the befitting settlement is to amputate her from the story, or to have her "killed in a tragicomic accident while crossing the road to the hotel," as you counsel. To appease you, I modified the scene so that the two of you appear more as friends and less as lovers or nemesises. For one example, she no longer rotates to do a sixty-nine with you. It is now merely a blowjob.

  It is very difficult for me to write about Grandfather, just as you said it is very difficult for you to write about your grandmother. I desire to know more about her, if it would not distress you. It might make it less rigid for me to speak about Grandfather. You have not enlightened her
about our voyage, have you? I am certain that you would have told me if you had. You know my thinkings on this matter.

  As for Grandfather, he is always becoming worse. When I think he is worstest, he becomes worse. Something must occur. He does not conceal his melancholy with mastery anymore. I have witnessed him crying three times this week, each very tardy at night when I was returning from roosting at the beach. I will tell you (because you are the only person I have to tell) that I occasionally KGB on him from behind the corner amid the kitchen and the television room. The first night I witnessed him crying he was investigating an aged leather bag, brimmed with many photographs and pieces of paper, like one of Augustine's boxes. The photographs were yellow, and so were the papers. I am certain that he was having memories for when he was only a boy, and not an old man. The second night he was crying he had the photograph of Augustine in his hands. The weather program was on, but it was so late that they only presented a map of planet Earth, without any weather on it. "Augustine," I could hear him say. "Augustine." The third night he was crying he had a photograph of you in his hands. It is only possible that he secured it from my desk where I keep all of the photographs that you posted me. Again he was saying "Augustine," although I do not understand why.

  Little Igor wanted me to utter hello to you from him. He does not know you, of course, but I have informed him very much about you. I informed him about how you are so funny, and so intelligent, and also how we can speak about momentous matters as well as farts. I even informed him about how you made bags of dirt when we were in Trachimbrod. Everything I could remember about you I informed him, because I want him to know you, and because it makes it feel that you are yet near, that you did not go away. You will laugh, but I presented him with one of the photographs of us that you posted. He is a very good boy, better even than me, and he still has a chance to be a very good man. I am certain that you would be appeased by him.