The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin

  It was an unsurprising surprise. Klara knows what happens when you’re careless, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t. And it was more than that, it was the surge of it, dancing on the brink of causality—if this, then—with the man she loves. What is growing a baby if not making a flower appear from thin air, turning one scarf into two?

  She’s stopped drinking. By the third trimester, her mind is clear, never better—but that’s the problem, it’s too empty, miles and miles of space in which Klara sits and thinks. She distracts herself by imagining the baby. When he kicks, Klara sees his little boy feet. She’s told Raj they have to name him Simon. During the last month, when she’s so swollen her shoes don’t fit, when she can’t sleep more than thirty minutes at a time, she pictures Simon’s face and doesn’t resent the baby anymore. And so, when a doctor pulls the child from Klara’s body on a stormy night in May and Raj cries, “It’s a girl!” Klara knows that he must be mistaken.

  “That’s not right.” She is delirious with pain; it feels as though a bomb exploded in her body, and she—the empty structure—is on the verge of collapse.

  “Oh, Klara,” Raj says. “It is.”

  They swaddle the child and bring her to Klara. The baby’s face is florid, startled alive. Her eyes are dark as olive pits.

  “You were so sure,” Raj says. He’s laughing.

  • • •

  They call the girl Ruby. Klara remembers a friend of Varya’s by that name, a girl who lived above them at 72 Clinton. Rubina. It’s Hindi, which Raj’s mother would have appreciated. He moves into Klara’s apartment and coos to Ruby, sings lullabies in rusty Hindi. Soja baba Soja. Mackhan roti cheene.

  In June, Klara’s family comes to visit. She shows them the Castro, Gertie clutching her pocketbook as they pass a gaggle of drag queens, and takes them to a Corps performance. Klara sits beside Daniel with her stomach flipping—she doesn’t know how he’ll respond to seeing men do ballet—but when the dancers bow, he claps louder than anyone else. That night, while Gertie’s meat loaf is in the oven, Daniel tells Klara about Mira. They met in the university dining hall and have since spent long nights in Hyde Park’s dive bars and all-night diners, debating Gorbachev and the NASA explosion and the merits of E.T.

  “She challenges you,” Klara observes. Ruby is sleeping, her warm cheek stuck to Klara’s chest, and for once, Klara feels as though nothing is wrong in the world. “That’s good.”

  In the past, Daniel would have made some retort—Challenges me? What makes you think I need that?—but now, he nods.

  “That she does,” he says, with a sigh so contented that Klara is almost embarrassed to have heard it.

  Gertie adores the baby. She holds Ruby constantly, staring at her raspberry-sized nose, nibbling her miniature fingers. Klara searches for a resemblance between them and finds one: their ears! Petite and delicate, curling in like seashells. But when Gertie met Raj, she opened her mouth and closed it, silent as a fish. Klara watched her mother take inventory of Raj’s dark skin and work boots, his secular slouch. She pulled Gertie into the bathroom.

  “Ma,” Klara hissed. “Don’t be a bigot.”

  “A bigot?” asked Gertie, flushing. “Is it too much to ask for the child to be raised Jewish?”

  “Yes,” Klara said. “It is.”

  Varya is full of advice. “Have you tried warm milk?” she asks, when Ruby cries. “What about a walk in the stroller? Do you have an infant swing? Is she colicky? Where’s her binky?”

  Klara’s brain spirals. “What’s a binky?”

  “What’s a binky?” repeats Gertie.

  “You can’t be serious,” Varya says. “She doesn’t have a binky?”

  “And this apartment,” Gertie adds. “It’s not child-proofed. You wait until she starts walking: she could split her head on this table, take a tumble down the stairs.”

  “She’s fine,” says Raj. “She has everything she needs.”

  He takes the baby from Varya, who holds on a moment too long. “Hand her over!” Daniel teases, prodding Varya in the ribs, which incites a smack of rebuttal and accompanying howl so loud that Klara nearly orders them to leave. But when they do, the next day—Gertie trundling into the front seat of a cab, Varya and Daniel waving through the back window—she misses them desperately. While they were here, it was easier to ignore the fact that Simon and Saul were not. Her father had loved babies. Klara still remembers visiting the hospital after Simon was born breech, his umbilical cord wrapped like a necklace. Saul stood in front of the ICU as if to guard this half-blue, backward boy, his last. At home, he could hold the baby for hours. When Simon twitched in his sleep or puckered his lips, Saul chuckled with disproportionate delight.

  As children, the siblings believed Saul could answer any question they wished to know. But Klara and Simon grew to dislike his answers. They disdained his routine of work and Torah study, his uniform of gabardine slacks and trench and walking hat. Now, Klara has more sympathy for him. Saul came from immigrants, and Klara suspects he lived in fear of losing the life he’d been given. She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory—to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child. Ruby will come to Klara with questions. What will Klara tell her, with frantic and unheard insistence? To Ruby, Klara’s past will seem like a story, Saul and Simon no more than her mother’s ghosts.

  • • •

  By October, it’s been months since Klara and Raj performed. Klara couldn’t do the Jaws of Life while pregnant; now, nights awake with Ruby have turned her brain to fog, and she can’t count properly during the mind-reading act. They haven’t been able to recoup the costs of their materials. Their meager savings have gone to diapers and toys, clothes that Ruby outgrows by the hour. Raj walks from the Tenderloin to North Beach, pitching nightclubs and theaters, but most of them turn him away. The manager at Teatro ZinZanni can only give them four dates that fall.

  “We need to leave,” Raj says, at dinner. “Take this show on the road. San Francisco’s burned out. The people here, they’re robots, they’re computers. Death to ’em, man.” He boxes with an invisible computer.

  “Wait,” says Klara, raising a finger. “Did you hear that?”

  She’s pointed out Simon’s knocks to Raj before, but he always claims not to hear them. This time, he can’t have missed it. The knock was loud as a gunshot; even the baby yelped. She is five months old, with Raj’s silky black hair and Klara’s Cheshire cat grin.

  Raj puts his fork down. “There’s nothing there.”

  It pleases Klara, that Ruby can hear the knocks. She bounces the baby, kisses her pointy new teeth.

  “Ruby,” she sings. “Ruby knows.”

  “Focus, Klara. I’m talking about moving. Making money. Breathing new life into this thing.” Raj claps in front of her face. “The city’s over, baby. It’s dead. We’ve gotta hit it. Find gold somewhere else.”

  “Maybe we expanded too quickly,” says Klara as Ruby begins to cry; the clapping has scared her. “Maybe we need to slow down.”

  “Slow down? That’s the last thing we need to do.” Raj begins to pace. “We’ve gotta move. We’ve gotta keep moving. You stay too long in one place, you’ll burn out anywhere. That’s the secret, Klara. We can’t stop moving.”

  His face is lit up like a jack-o’-lantern. Raj has big ideas, just like Klara does; it’s one of the things she loves about him. She thinks of Ilya’s black box. It’s meant to be on the road, Ilya said. Maybe she is, too.

  “Where would we go?” she asks.

  “Vegas,” says Raj.

  Klara laughs. “Absolutely not.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s gaudy,” she says, counting off on her fingers. “It’s over-the-top and overdone. It’s cheap, but it’s ridiculously expensive. And there are never any female headliners.”

>   Vegas reminds her of the first and only magic convention she attended: a glitzy event in Atlantic City at which the line for the men’s bathroom was longer than the women’s.

  “Most of all,” she adds, “it’s fake. There’s nothing real about Vegas.”

  Raj raises his eyebrows. “You’re a magician.”

  “Damn straight. I’m a magician who’ll perform anywhere but Vegas.”

  “Anywhere but Vegas. It could be our new show title.”

  “Cute.” Ruby whimpers, and Klara maneuvers awkwardly out of her T-shirt. She used to walk naked through the apartment, but now she’s embarrassed by her body’s utility. “I’d rather live like nomads.”

  “Okay,” says Raj. “We’ll live like nomads, then. Stay a few months in each town. See the world.”

  Ruby unlatches, distracted. Klara pulls her shirt down, and Raj scoops Ruby up by the armpits. “San Francisco’s full of memories, Ruby-bean,” he says. “You stick around here, you’re messing with ghosts.”

  Does Klara imagine that he glances at her? His eyes are pencil points. But perhaps she’s wrong; when she looks again, he’s returned to the baby, blowing raspberries on her soft brown skin.

  Klara stands to clear the dishes. “Where would we stay?”

  “I know a guy,” Raj says.

  • • •

  That night, Raj and Ruby fall asleep easily, but Klara can’t. She climbs out of bed and walks past Ruby’s cradle to the closet, where she keeps Ilya’s black box. Inside it are her cards and steel rings, her balls and silk scarves. She doesn’t use them very often anymore, the flashier acts having overtaken her sleight-of-hand tricks, but now she brings two scarves to the round table in the kitchen. Raj’s old chili pepper lights are tacked around the window; to avoid his notice, she leaves them off. Before she sits down, she reaches for the bottle of vodka in the back of the freezer and pours herself a drink.

  She used to work late like this. As a teenager, she’d wait until she heard Simon’s steady breathing and Varya’s muffled dream sounds, until Daniel began to snore, and then she collected her tools from underneath the bed and snuck out to the living room. She relished the unusual quiet and the feeling that the entire apartment was hers. She kept the lights off then, too, setting up on the floor beside the living room window so as to see by the street lamps on Clinton. For months, these sessions were her secret. But one night in winter, she padded into the living room to find that her father had beaten her to it.

  For seconds, he did not notice her. He sat in his favorite armchair—tufted, upholstered in pea-colored velvet—and he was reading a book. There was a new fire in the hearth, the logs whole and glowing.

  Klara nearly turned around, but stopped herself. If he could sit here at one in the morning, why couldn’t she? She stepped out of the darkness of the hallway and over the threshold to the living room, where Saul noticed her at last.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” she asked.

  “No,” said Saul, and held up the book. He was learning, of course. Klara did not know how he had not become sick of it. By that time, he’d read it every which way: front to back, back to front, in tiny pieces chosen seemingly at random and in large chunks through which he worked his way over weeks. Sometimes, he stared at a single page for days.

  “Which part are you reading?” asked Klara—a question she usually avoided so as to also avoid a lecture about Jephthah’s sacrificial daughter, or the Babylonian men who refused to worship King Nebuchadnezzar’s golden statue and thus survived when thrown into a furnace.

  Saul hesitated. By then, he had mostly given up on family Torah study. Even Gertie fidgeted when he read from the books.

  “The story of Rabbi Eliezer and the oven,” he said. “He was the only sage to believe that an impure oven could be purified.”

  “Oh. That’s a good one,” said Klara, idiotically, as she did not recall the story at all. She expected Saul to continue, but instead he caught her eye and smiled in surprise, or in gladness at her reaction. She stepped farther into the room, holding a deck of cards in one hand. When she sat down by the window, Saul returned to the Talmud. They stayed like this until the log crumbled and both of them were yawning. When they walked back to their respective rooms, Klara slept better than she had in months.

  Gertie never approved of Klara’s magic. Surely, Gertie thought, Klara would outgrow it; surely she would go to college, like Varya, and get the degree that Gertie herself had never finished. But Saul was different. And this was why Klara could leave home weeks after his death, why she could do such a thing without hating herself: because it was not her mother who was gone but her father, who had stayed up with her on long nights in perfect quiet, and who, on the morning of his death, looked up from the Mishnah to see her turning a blue scarf into a red one.

  “That’s marvelous,” he said as the silk slipped through her hands, and chuckled in an impish way that reminded her of Ilya. “Do it again, will you?” And so she did it again and again until he put the great book down to cross a leg and really watch her, not in the vague way he often looked at his children but with true interest and wonder, the way he had looked at Simon as a baby. So he would have understood, wouldn’t he, her decision to leave? If nothing else, Judaism had taught her to keep running, no matter who tried to hold her hostage. It had taught her to create her own opportunities, to turn rock into water and water to blood. It had taught her that such things were possible.

  By four in the morning, Klara is woozy, her hands beset by the satisfying muscular pain caused by hours of work. She thinks of putting the scarves back in Ilya’s box, but instead she stuffs them into her left fist and then into a right thumb tip; when she opens her hands, the scarves have disappeared. She is thinking about what it means to leave San Francisco, whether being on the road will ever feel like home, and what comes to her is one of Saul’s stories. The year was 1948, the setting a kitchen in an apartment on Hester Street. A man and a boy sat on either side of a table, their heads touching over a Philco PT-44 radio. The boy was Saul Gold. The man was Lev, his father.

  When they heard that the British Mandate had expired, Lev cupped his hands over his mouth. His eyes were closed, and salt water dribbled into his beard.

  “For the first time, we the Jews will be in charge of our own destiny,” he said, grasping Saul’s narrow chin. “Do you know what that means? You will always have a place to go. Israel will always be your home.”

  In 1948, Saul was thirteen. Never before had he seen his father cry. Suddenly, he realized that what he took to be his home—a two-bedroom apartment in a newly renovated brick building above Gertel’s bakery—was to his father no more than a prop on someone else’s stage, which could at any moment be struck and carried into the wings. In its absence, home was in the rhythm of the halakhah: the daily prayer, the weekly Sabbath, the annual holy days. In time was their culture. In time, not in space, was their home.

  Klara tucks Ilya’s box back in the closet and climbs into bed. Propping herself up on one elbow, she reaches for the window blinds and creates a gap through which she sees a fingernail of moon. She’s always thought of home as a physical destination, but perhaps Raj and Ruby are home enough. Perhaps home, like the moon, will follow wherever she goes.

  15.

  They buy a motor home from Raj’s coworker. Klara expected it to be depressing, but Raj refinishes the wood table in the kitchen booth, rips out the orange plastic countertops and replaces them with laminate that looks like marble. “Hit the road, Jack,” he sings. He mounts shelves beside the bed, outfitting them with aluminum railings to prevent books from falling when the RV moves. During the day, their bed folds into a couch, revealing a wide swath of floor on which Ruby can play. Klara sews red velvet curtains and puts Ruby’s crib beside the back window so she can watch the world go by. They load their equipment into a storage unit attached to the back of the RV.

  On a cold, s
unny morning in November, they head north.

  Klara straps Ruby into her car seat. “Wave goodbye, Rubini,” says Raj, reaching back to lift her hand. “Wave goodbye to all that.”

  I love you all, Klara thinks, looking at the Taoist temple, the bakery below her apartment, the old women carrying boxes of dim sum in pink plastic bags. Goodbye to all that.

  They land two gigs at a casino in Santa Rosa, four at a resort in Lake Tahoe. The audiences smile at Raj—showman and family man—and at Ruby, large-eyed beneath a child-sized top hat, which Raj uses to collect tips after each show. He keeps the cash in a locked box beneath the driver’s seat. In Tahoe, he buys a car phone to use for bookings. Klara wants to call family, but Raj swats her away. “Bill’s enough as it is,” he says.

  When winter comes, they go south. LA is lousy with competition, but they do okay in the college towns and better at the desert casinos. But Klara hates the casinos. The managers always mistake her for Raj’s assistant. People amble over from card tables and slot machines because they want to see a young woman spin in a tight dress or because they’re too drunk to go home. They like Raj’s Indian Needle Trick, but they boo during the Vanishing Birdcage. “It’s up her sleeve!” someone bellows, as if the failure of the trick is a personal offense. Klara begins to look back at the small shows in San Francisco with nostalgia, remembering the dark battered stages but forgetting the hecklers, forgetting that nobody, there or here, has ever really wanted what she’s selling.

  During the day, while Raj is at pitch meetings, she reads to Ruby in the trailer. She admires the look of the desert, the blue mountains and sorbet sky, but she doesn’t like the feel of it, both languid and restless, or the heat that presses down on her like hands. She keeps miniature bottles of vodka in her makeup case, which she prefers for their clarity and smarting punch, for the way they tear her throat. In the morning, when Raj leaves, she pours two fingers into her instant coffee. Sometimes she walks Ruby to a nearby convenience store and gets a bottle of Coke, which does a better job of disguising the smell. Raj knows she stopped drinking during her pregnancy, but he also thinks she never started back up. It’s different now, though. The blackouts and retching have been replaced by something steadier, harder to detect: a low-grade but constant remove from the facts of her life. Before Raj comes home, she throws the bottles away. Back in the RV, she brushes her teeth and spits out the window.