How to Fall

by Edith Pearlman

  The entire family knew of this lady: Mama’s young confidante, who set out for Haifa, and ended up in Salonika, and after that Istanbul, which we still called Constantinople. “Regina Guralnik, the prettiest woman in Antwerp,” Helene often said. In fact, she hardly remembered Regina Guralnik in her heyday, but a photograph assisted memory or maybe replaced it. Madame Guralnik gazed tenderly into the wings of some photographer’s studio; against the drapery her girlish profile glowed. A small, tiered hat leaned forward over the blonde bangs as if about to pitch itself onto the enchanting nose.

  “Madame Guralnik must be a great age now,” said Angelica.

  “Very old, very wise, all that stuff.”

  “What does Madame live on these days?” asked Toby. It was two o’clock. They were waiting on the sidewalk for the cab.

  “She deals in spices.”

  “Commodities?”

  “A little shop, cheri. In Antwerp her father sold tinned fish,” and then the white van pulled up. They had to circle the trash to get to its door. Helene motioned to the young people to go first. She followed, clutching an alligator overnight case. She wore a long black silk coat; scarf, shoes, and gloves were black too. Black mascara. How brilliant this early spring, she thought, just before ducking her champagne head to enter the cab—the almond trees had recently puffed into blossom.

  The trash, their trash, had acquired a basket of rotting vegetables.

  Helene slammed the door; the cab sped down the street. In the overheated interior dozing passengers were awakened by Angelica’s good looks. A father and son stared. Two middle-aged women sniffed; for a moment Helene saw Papa’s older sisters, imperiously waving away claimants for their valuable hands. An old man in a skullcap withdrew into his coat; and where did he think he was going on Erev Shabbat—was plane travel all of a sudden permitted? He was hopping to Cyprus, maybe; he’d get there before sundown and pray for the safe conclusion of his business whatever it was; probably computers; these days the Orthodox were deserting diamonds for electronics. One chip, another chip, they all made money.

  At the airport Toby paid the fares. “A good deal, this shared cab,” he commended with the thrift of a millionaire. Her father, his great-grandfather, would have agreed. “The greatest bargain, Helene, is the thing you don’t buy,” Papa liked to say. He was too large for bargains, too large for haggling. He had a weakness for fancies, though—pink marquises, yellow brilliants. “I bought them. I hid them. They escaped with us. Powerful stones, Lenya.”

  “Yes,” she’d said, obedient as always to the suffering in his voice. Her own voice echoed in the stone vault of the Jerusalem bank. She was then eighteen.

  “The green one, it’s lucky. It rode in your muff.”

  “On the ship . . . I thought we were taking a vacation,” she remembered wonderingly.

  “Keep it always.”

  “In this bank? As if it didn’t exist?”

  He shrugged. “Who exists?”

  Airport security lasted an age; what else was new. Angelica, despite her French passport, was asked about India, and about Pakistan, too. Perhaps she had a bomb in that sac, documents in the lining of her cape . . .

  Helene next. No fuss. “Good luck,” offered the security agent, her eyes already caressing Toby.

  A crowd of Rumanians had commandeered the waiting area. The men’s hair hung in greasy spirals, the women’s wrists and fingers sparkled with colored glass. “God has a soft spot for the vulgar,” Papa had told her. The whole crowd was already drunk, and on the plane they fought over the space in the overhead rack: you’d think it was the Golan. Helene stowed her own case under the chair in front. Seated, she slowly unwound her scarf; then, as if in an afterthought, she pulled off her gloves, finger by finger, and dreamily placed them in the bottom of her handbag. She fingered the cameo under her blouse. She buckled up and closed her eyes. She heard the roar of take-off; the calm tones of the pilot; the tinkle of the bar cart; the Rumanians, arguing . . . She opened her eyes.

  And met Toby’s blue ones. “Monsieur Guralnik?” he inquired.

  She blinked and swallowed. “Died in Salonika.”

  “She is alone, then.”

  “Not any more. For the second husband she took a Turk.”

  “Adaptable,” said Toby.

  “We Belgians,” sighed Helene.

  They gambled that night, stretching modest investments into an hour of pleasure. Toby was the last to lose. Angelica and Helene stood behind him as the croupier raked away his final chip. Then the three left, smiling—handsome Toby, gorgeous Angelica, blackgloved Helene, each poorer now by a few dollars, rupees, shekels. The Turks would not recoup their investment in this threesome. But two Rumanians were sitting at the bar with their heads in their hands.

  “Anything is better than the priests,” said their guide. She was a university student, poorly dressed. “Yes, I can tolerate the military; we suffered worse under God. Would you like to know about the Blue Mosque?”

  They visited the Blue Mosque. They visited Topkapi Palace and the marketplace. The guide urged them into the premises of a rug merchant. They sipped mint tea while the merchant commanded his employees to unroll complicated carpets. The family next door in Antwerp had filled its apartment with such rugs, and Helene somersaulted on them with the little daughter, what was her name, she perished with the rest. . . This merchant failed to persuade. They left him growling at his lackeys.

  A boat slid through liquid lapiz. The wind lifted Angelica’s hair. The sun glittered on Toby’s mustache. The tour guide nattered on, and then wound up her spiel; and the boat sailed back to the port in silence, passing ruined villas. They disembarked, and Toby tipped the guide. They wandered through winding streets and found a garden café. “Shall we have tea here, Tante Helene?” asked Toby.

  She lifted the sleeve of her glove to look at her watch. “You shall have tea here. The hour has come for Madame Guralnik.”

  “We’ll see her too?”

  “Ah . . . no. She has scandals to tell me, old Antwerp gossip. The dead are alive to her. But in front of you . . . Regina Guralnik would fall silent.” She produced her best twinkle and left them, managing as much of a stride as a small woman could, her black coat swinging, her handbag swinging, her gloved hands in her pockets.

  The building she entered could have been found in the poor quarter of any European city—a lobby of chipped tiles, a stairway missing half its wrought iron, an elevator big enough for two thin persons. She noted the details as she had noted them on previous occasions: with severe distaste.

  The elevator strained upwards. Its gates creaked open. She walked down a hall and knocked on a door: number Thirty-three.

  He opened it.

  He had aged a little in the past five years. But his lips were full in his dark face, and his suit was as grave as a diplomat’s. He still had the air of a family solicitor. Well, he was a lawyer, wasn’t he, whatever other trade he practiced . . . His voice had the deliberate gravity she remembered. She wondered what enterprise his sober firm washed money for these days—guns, girls, drugs, maybe all three.

  They seated themselves on either side of a table. They observed a brief silence. Then: “Shall I show you?” she said.

  “Please.”

  She took off her scarf. She took off her gloves. She unzipped a pocket within her handbag and extracted a miniature knife. Laying the left glove flat on the table she picked at the almost invisible stitches attaching a piece of black leather to the palm. Soon only a few remained in place. She raised the glove. The flap she had released hung down. She shook the glove without impatience. Several small diamonds fell onto the table, followed by a large jewel.

  It was square cut, and to an untrained eye it might have seemed an emerald, very pale. But these two knew it for the rare thing it was: Papa’s green diamond.

  It lay between them like a sweetmeat. After several moments the man put a loupe against his eye and picked up the gem and examined it. “Beautiful,” he
sighed. “Carbon: always hard to believe when you see one like this.”

  “Yes,” she said, resigned to the necessary palaver. “I was brought up on that lesson: the same molecules in our pencils and our fireplaces and the crown jewels. My father wanted us to understand what we were living on . . .”

  She saw him again in the dark Antwerp office, her small self curled in his lap. The chartreuse nugget glowed on the mahogany desk. And thirteen years later, in the vault of that Jerusalem bank, the strong stone gleamed in the drawer, gleamed on his palm. “The exact color of your eyes,” he said.

  The man examined the small diamonds.

  “You are holding the remains of my inheritance,” she said. “This is my final visit to room Thirty-three.”

  “You have kept the green beauty for a long time.”

  She must let it go. The apartment must be maintained, the wardrobe replenished, the arts patronized, the charities supported. The children’s children would keep coming to Jerusalem; she could not allow them to find a straitened old woman. What could you do.

  She picked up the jewel. Now her hand cradled its power, her skin reflected its lucky color. . . He named a price, greater than she had expected.

  She nodded, briefly unable to speak. She tipped her hand like a ladle; the green ran out. Then: “Please deposit the money in the usual accounts.”

  “Of course.”

  Her fingers slid between the buttons of her blouse. She yanked at the cameo; its chain broke. “This goes with the lot,” she said, and dropped the thing onto the diamonds.

  He glanced down. “Thank you,” he said politely.

  She gripped the edge of the table, and stood. He stood too. They shook hands.

  At the corner a taxi was idling. She curled her fingers to conceal the flapping palm of the glove and then raised her forefinger. The driver had the unwholesome face of the shammas in her girlhood shul, the one who had been caught fondling somebody’s child . . . But he drove peaceably to the hotel. She crossed the lobby quickly; thank God no one was on the elevator to observe her streaked face.

  At dinner Toby and Angelica asked for Madame Guralnik.

  “She smells of cardamom. It’s in every pore, every wrinkle.”

  At the tables she bet on Thirty-three until her small stake was exhausted.

  On the return flight the Rumanians didn’t talk at all. They must have lost all the money they came with; they had probably bet their silly earrings and lost them too. She had only cheated her country. Greased some syndicate. Disobeyed her father. Thrown away the last of the fortune.

  In the cab Helene nestled between Angelica and Toby; beside Toby sat a bearded American. They sped along the highway. They entered Jerusalem. They dropped a passenger on a street off Boulevard Herzl, and Toby remarked that there was no rubbish to be seen. “The Mayor and Sanitation made a deal,” said a man in the back seat.

  They swerved onto the Jaffa Road. Helene took Toby’s hand in her right one and Angelica’s in her left. How numb her own hands felt, her arms too. Obediently her relatives turned toward her. They would always turn toward her. But she would slip away from them, wouldn’t she . . .

  “Tante, your glove is ripped,” said Angelica.

  . . . like Papa, Mama, the spinster aunts; the girl next door tumbling on the patterned rug, the schnorrers, the naughty shammas; like . . .

  She disengaged her hands. Beyond Toby’s profile and the profile of the American next to him she saw King George Street, Ben Maimon Street, all the familiar ghostly streets. The cab paused at a traffic light.

  In front of an apartment building stood a slope-shouldered form. Its tattered, shiny dress, reflecting the setting sun, cast a greenish glow. Its brown-paper head was topped by an ancient cloche. “The trash collectors missed that creation,” said the American.

  “The kids who made it must have had fun,” said Toby.

  “Regina,” Helene called. “Regina!”

  “Tante . . .” whispered Angelica.

  Helene leaned forward, elbowing the bewildered girl. All these years! All these years dealing with thieves in a thievish city. All these years sustaining the weary fable of Salonika, Constantinople, a Turkish husband, a spice shop. Pretending that the goose Guralnik had not stayed in Antwerp. Had not been carted off with the others.

  She threw herself across Toby’s lap and clutched the American’s shoulder. Rapidly she opened the window. She waved her emptied glove again and again at the figure in the ridiculous hat.

  The light changed. The cab moved forward. She let go of the American and sank back between Toby and Angelica. She patted their arms with hands that had regained their strength, hands good for a few more years of cleaning house, writing checks, coolly caressing the youngest young visitors. “I’ll mend the glove,” she promised.

  The Message

  On a small stone balcony in Jerusalem, across a round glass table, Carolyn was guardedly looking at Terence. Terence was looking at his bowl of yoghurt and apricots; he was not complaining; he was practicing his customary comfortable silence while his mind whirred.

  She leaned forward. “I should have bought cereal.”

  “That’s all right.” His eyeglasses glinted at her. “The coffee is delicious.”

  It was Terence’s first visit to the city that Carolyn knew well. There was a further imbalance: she spoke serviceable Hebrew, whereas he spoke only English, French, and German, though he read both Latin and Greek. And the weather had made itself his enemy the moment he stepped off the plane. Carolyn knew the weather. She spent every October in Jerusalem, renting the same apartment—it was the pied-à-terre of a Tel Aviv family, complete with two sets of dishes and even two sets of ashtrays—and she always packed for a burst of autumn warmth. This hot Saturday morning her skin caught whatever breeze there was; her arms and throat were bare in a gauzy halter that was almost the same golden brown as her recently dyed hair. But Terence had flown in unexpectedly from a conference on epistemology in Zurich, bringing only his professor’s wardrobe. He’d inherited a taste for drab clothing from his Methodist forefathers—their daughter teased that he’d inherited the clothing itself. Last night he’d worn a dark suit and tie to a restaurant where every other male patron had on a short-sleeved shirt buttoning imperfectly over a paunch. He had gone to bed in his underwear—he would have melted in his flannel pajamas—and this morning his face seemed almost as white as his round-necked undershirt. A man with a malady, she’d suddenly thought, her composure sagging. But no: Terence was always pale, just as he was always thin. When they’d met, thirty years ago, he was already slightly stooped.

  “I’m used to your hair being gray,” he said mildly. “Is this what they call henna?”

  She caressed her nape. “Cognac is the official name. In Jerusalem all women of a certain age dye their hair.”

  “Cognac . . . I didn’t know anthropologists could go native.”

  “Well, no. But I’m not a professional anthropologist.” She smiled, trying to lighten the exchange. “I’m not a professional anything; remember?” She had a couple of Master’s degrees: certificates but no status. She currently held a grant to study the residents of East Talpiot, one of the oldest Jerusalem suburbs. Once a year she squeezed airfare out of the little grant, and paid a month’s rent on this apartment in the leafy Emek Refaim neighborhood. During the other eleven months she lived in Boston with Terence, and taught sociology in an adult center, and wrote a paper or two, and attended a few seminars. “I’m a bronze-crested dilettante,” she said now. “Maybe somebody should get a grant to study me.”

  He looked at her with a brief intensity, as if studying her might be a good idea. She knew that look. It meant that he was thinking about Wittgenstein, or maybe Kant.

  He had arrived yesterday, Friday. He would leave tomorrow. “The conference is wretched,” he’d said over the telephone on Thursday morning. “I’ll skip the banquet, come spend the weekend with you. If my arrival won’t be an inconvenience,” he’d added, not
ironic, merely considerate.

  It would be a great inconvenience. “Wonderful!” Carolyn had said to Terence, south warming north, wife deceiving husband, Mediterranean splashing onto Swiss shrubbery. “I’ll meet you at the airport.”

  “Not necessary.”

  “The cabbies would skin you. I’ll be there!”

  Then she’d had to climb the stone stairs, to knock on Natan’s door, to explain the situation, to endure his immediate fury.

  “Twenty-eight days a year we have together; and now you rob me of three of them!” He held her by the forearms and shook her slightly. “And Saturday night, we have tickets for the quartet!” he remembered.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. What a bellow! “You go to the concert.”

  “Alone? Bite your tongue! You are sans merci, like all lovely women. Without compassion. L’lo rachmim!” he wound up, though he usually spoke Hebrew to her only when within earshot of American tourists. “Carolyn?” he then inquired, signaling the end of his outburst.

  She was silent.

  “Oh, your Christian tolerance,” he sighed. “A Jewish woman would have already told me to shut up. I’ll visit my daughter this weekend. I haven’t been to Haifa for three months. I’ll play with my granddaughter. Little Miriam is a beauty, too. Okay?”

  He scowled at her and then grinned. Gold flashed from the brownish mouth that always smelled of tobacco, though he smoked only five cigarettes a day in her presence, numbering each one aloud. She figured that he consumed fifteen or twenty when she was out conducting interviews. Their aroma had seeped into her apartment. Luckily she found it aphrodisiac.