by Michael Oren
And they went, but not far. A kilometer or so out of town, while gliding past some tired wheat fields, Dudu noticed something. A farmhouse with what looked like a boarded-up barn. “Stop,” he ordered the driver and indicated where to turn. Steinbesser chuckled, “Let me guess, a photo with chickens. Great for the farmers’ lobby.”
Dudu remained silent, though. He emerged from the car and solemnly approached the barn. The planks were rotten, the locks rusted solid. Through any of the myriad of cracks he could peer inside but all he saw was ash. It didn’t matter. Without being told, without understanding quite how he knew, he was sure what this structure was and who had dwelt in it. He saw the dreams filtering through the broken shingles and sailing over them.
He was still pawing the splintered wood, increasingly annoying Steinbesser, when the property’s owner appeared. In filthy overalls, unshaven, and with fewer teeth than notions of what this stranger was doing in his yard, he glowered. But the driver explained something to him, and a twenty Euro note from Dudu further clarified the issue. He just wanted a look in the house.
The room was spare. Crucifixes, mock antique clocks, a rustic table set with fruit. Dudu looked around and pointed toward the floor. The owner, perplexed, shook his head. So did Steinbesser and the driver. Dudu pointed again, more emphatically, and this time succeeded. The owner opened a grate set into a bare wall and led them, flashlight in hand, down crudely etched steps, into a miasma of dust motes and mold.
The wan beam swept across a brick wall decorated—incongruously—with arches. Dudu gazed at them, inhaling the soot. Internalizing the past. Somehow, he had come from here, emerged and survived while others hadn’t. Yet he still carried the madness and the pain. He plodded on, searching for something he could not begin to define.
Only when exiting the house, squinting into a smudgy sun, did Dudu receive a hint. Not far from where the shtetl stood, a tree line beckoned. In rows of royal black and white, they waited. And steadily, sleepily, he approached them.
“There’s no time for this, Dudu!” Steinbesser shouted. “We’re due back at the airport in an hour!”
But Dudu kept striding. He did not stop to tie his Oxfords or worry about empty refrigerators. No sneeze triggered horrid predictions. Rather, he fled deeper and deeper into the forest. Moss muffled his footsteps. His spokesman’s hollers could no longer be heard. Singing birds lured him inward. Butterflies, like the hands of luminous children, beckoned. “Come,” they called to him, “come.”
Primus inter Pares
The “oohs” Connie was used to from visitors this age, followed by the almost sensual “ahhs.” In fact, she depended on them, as an actress might as the curtain rose on her, act one. She could feed off the enthusiasm during the less stirring parts of the tour—the china sets, for example, hardly riveting for ten-year-olds, and the ceremonial silver. But the starburst of banners, the sword-gifts from Arabian kings, and, of course, the sweeping staircase that even children see in movies—all brought out the gasps. The “oohs” and “ahhs” were expected, but not the glass-pinged clang that Connie in all her years guiding had never heard.
“What?” she asked the class without meaning to, such was her shock. And yet they expressed no surprise whatsoever, but merely rolled their eyes and lifted their chins, motioning behind them.
On heel-tips, she peered over the rims of neatly plaited and product-ed hair toward the back of the hall, near the paintings of native peoples now extinct. There, indeed, lingered a single student. A girl, slight and ponytailed, had managed to tip over a bronze of a rifleman presumably taking aim at those natives. Its weight alone was enough to crack the display case of arrowheads beneath.
“You…” she began and a girl in the front, in a nice pleated skirt and pumps, whispered “Kayla.” The buttoned-up boys mouthed it, too. “Kayla.”
“Kayla!” Connie shouted, and the shrillness of her own voice, echoing in that hallowed space, shocked her. But Kayla seemed unperturbed. Instead, with a strength even greater than that needed to upend the piece, she righted it and set the rifleman back to shooting. Then, slapping her hands on the butt of her jeans, pivoting on her sneakers, she turned toward Connie with a look of studied innocence.
“Ooh,” she exclaimed and shrugged. “Ahh?”
Straightening her powder blue dress, patting a platinum coif, Connie continued the tour. In view of the disturbance, she thought it best to skip the library—books no longer interested the young—and proceed to the gallery. Here, at least, there were stories to tell. Lessons that every citizen, above all children, must learn.
“He was a fine leader,” Connie began at the foot of one of the giant portraits. She mentioned the man’s name, cautiously, though there was little danger than any of them would recognize it, not even from the schools and airports from which it had been erased. “Did much for poor people, for the environment. But…”
Like flowers to sunlight, the entire class leaned forward. “But he had some personal problems—weaknesses, we might say—both here and before his election, that simply wouldn’t do. Unfortunately, he had to resign.”
She angled toward the next canvas and almost managed to speak when a snarky voice cut in. “What weaknesses?”
Connie paused and glared. Kayla, of course, her hands in fists and her mouth implacably scrunched. A dark girl—South Asian, possibly, or Black—tomboyish and clearly stamped with trouble.
“And if he was so good at things, why did he have to quit?”
Connie’s own complexion ran pale to buttery, but she suddenly felt it redden. “Because, Kayla—it is, Kayla, isn’t it?—we must expect more from our leaders. We must be able to look up to them.”
Kayla closed a skeptical eye, but Connie decided to ignore her. “And this,” she declared, “was the very first woman to hold this office.” The students gaped. The woman was indeed impressive—firm-faced but sensitive, intelligent and proud. Not only the girls, but also the boys in the group might see as her someone to emulate.
“And she earned it. Fighting for equal rights, defending the victims of hatred.” She pointed to a medallion mounted on the woman’s wall. “Does anyone know what this is?”
Kayla raised her hand, still clenched, but Connie called on the pinafored girl in front, pigtails bouncing. “Yes, Miss…”
“Ivy, ma’am, and that’s the Nobel Prize.”
“Right you are, Ivy. And she won it for ending a very destructive war.” She pointed at the name emblazoned at the bottom of the frame, confident that no one would recognize it. “How sad it was when she had to leave.”
“Weakness?” That same caustic tone.
Connie scowled. “Not weakness. Strength. She had too much of it, you see. Too much power. People were frightened.”
“Well maybe the people were weak,” Kayla insisted in a tone that reverberated around the gallery. A chevroned guard took notice. “Maybe the people should’ve quit.”
“Oh, Kayla, please…” The girl in the pigtails whimpered, and the boy next to her, in chinos and a V-neck agreed. “You’re ruining it for everybody.”
“Shut up, Tom. Shut up, Ivy,” Kayla snapped back. Her arms made an X over her t-shirt.
“Where,” Connie quietly grumbled, “where is their teacher?” Probably off catching a smoke outside or, more likely, in one of the capital’s bars. Fortunately, such influences were dying off, the tour guide consoled herself, and this new generation was growing up unmarred. Well-mannered and pure and largely thanks to the example set here. A leader at last that folks could look up to, a role-model with an impeccable future, installed with an immaculate past.
She continued, “Unlike this one, the worst.” The students looked flummoxed, and Connie realized that they hadn’t been privy to her thoughts. “I’d tell you his name, but you’d have to wash out your ears,” she joked but the bewildered expressions remained. But not on Kayla. Glaring now, teeth gritted, and hands plumbed in her pockets, she was clearly geared up to spar.
“This one, how s
hould I say, dipped into the till.” The line usually evoked a shudder in audiences, but this time passed unremarked. Connie tried again, “He stole, kids. From the rich and the poor, he stole, day and night. From you and me.” This, finally, left the students breathless, flattened hands pressed to their hearts, mouths open fish-like.
“How did you know?”
She hadn’t asked for questions, yet here was Kayla raising one and Connie debated whether or not to answer. But she didn’t have to. “You didn’t,” the wispy girl went on. “You never do. You just had to say so, and that’s enough to get rid of him.”
Now the docent was baffled, her pop-eyed, limp-lipped expression contrasting with the placid smile of the man in the painting, an inkling of sadness in his gaze. He seemed to know what was waiting for him—for them all.
Connie prepared to respond, though unsure of what would come out, a patient reprimand or a rant. She hated smart-alecks like Kayla, thinking they were better than the rest, placing themselves above. Her druthers were to ban them from the capital altogether, perhaps even from the country. People like Kayla had caused the crisis to begin with and had opposed its flawless solution.
She was going to say all that, calmly perhaps, but another’s words stopped her.
“Good morning, everyone! And what a perfect morning it is!”
Connie’s jaw widened to a gawp even as she came to attention. The chevroned guard went stiff. The children merely stared. There was no need for introductions—the chiseled features, the hair still sandy and slightly salted at the temples. No photograph, though, could prepare them for the size of the man, so tall and broad-shouldered as he loomed imposingly over the group, or for the eyes. Deep-set and glimmering, they appeared not only to see but to evaluate, to take in and store.
“Enjoying our little rogues’ gallery? You…” He turned to a clean-cut boy in the front row, “Tom? And you…” The pigtails levitated. “Ivy?”
“Yes, sir,” they simultaneously chimed.
“It’s their best tour ever,” Connie gushed in. “They couldn’t be happier.”
The monumental head nodded, but gravely. “For everyone, of course.” His eyes found the back of the hall. “Except for Kayla.”
She responded with arms akimbo. A long-lashed girl with tapered cheeks and lips naturally carmine, she scrunched her face into an obstinate mask.
“Except for Kayla who should be careful about what she watches on the internet. The treasonous lies she reads online.” His smile was as flat and dry as the paintings, as lifeless as the native peoples. “Kayla, who doesn’t know why this country is great.”
With this, his neck extended—a full foot high, perhaps—and those all-knowing eyes went blank. But only for a moment before they filled with images of fighter jets, undulating wheat fields, mountains, lakes, and sky. Finally, there was the flag rippling while the national anthem boomed. Always a favorite with the visitors, kids especially, just as the founders had planned.
“Ooh,” the pupils murmured—Connie, too. “Ahh.”
Kayla, alone, stayed silent. Her smirk was defiant, her glowering fierce. A girl who would never be anything but difficult, destined for a womanhood of dissent. Framed between the portraits, she posed, sneakers planted, head thrown back, ready to defend her foibles.
The Blind Man
Accursed is he who leads a blind man astray on the road
—Deuteronomy 27:18
Autumns, Adam walked home at sunset. Leaving the office at precisely 6:30, he kept a brisk pace throughout the one-mile hike, much of it uphill. It was good exercise, he reasoned, and a good opportunity to clear his head after a day of often stultifying work. This season, especially, he enjoyed the burnt-orange horizons, the balm of dying leaves. The colors, the scents, could lure him into a trance-like state that ended only at the intersection into his neighborhood. That is when Adam saw him.
It was not the first time. On several occasions recently the same blind man stood at the junction. About Adam’s age, neatly dressed in a windbreaker, he waited, tapping the curb with his cane. The compassionate type, Adam considered assisting him across the busy street, but hesitated. The pedestrian signal beeped loudly on green and the crosswalk was clearly lit. And, anyway, for the blind man, wasn’t it always night?
So Adam paused while the blind man tapped, his face pitched forward as if to peer through his blackened glasses. But then, inexplicably, he stepped off straight into oncoming headlights. Geometry and physics careened through Adam’s mind, calculating that walker and car would collide in less than a second. Without thinking, he leapt. Abandoning his briefcase mid-flight, he spread his arms and collapsed them again around the man’s surprisingly slender shoulders. The full body thrust sent the two of them tumbling onto the opposite sidewalk. A whoosh of wheels brushed the seats of their pants.
“Are you alright?” Adam gasped, already blushing from the praise sure to be showered. Instead, with the flail of his free arm, the blind man shoved him away.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” The white aluminum stick, rapier-like, jiggled at Adam’s belly. “Did I ask for your help? You think I can’t cross a fucking street?”
Adam mumbled an apology, turned, and fled into his neighborhood. He felt, at first, embarrassed, caught out for being a do-gooder when no good needed doing. Later, just before reaching his house, the shame turned to fury. “Ingrate,” he inwardly growled. “I should have just let him die.” But, by the time he started climbing his stairs, the ire and discomfiture had melded into confusion. It was obvious on his face as his wife, Iris, immediately said to him, “Now what with Teitelbaum?”
He scowled at the mention of his boss, but only momentarily. And he would have been happy to join their three kids at the dinner table and talk about anything—rap music—rather than relate the incident that left him so flummoxed. Yet such secrets could never be hidden from Iris. Out of their children’s earshot, he told her.
“What did you expect,” she upbraided him kindly. “You humiliated him.”
“I saved him!”
Iris, finished seasoning the vegetables, wiped her hand on a dishcloth. “Maybe. Maybe not. But if you did, then what does it matter what he said?” That same hand both touched and slapped his cheek. “Stop taking everything so seriously.”
Still, he remained sullen at the table. The children—Dina, Naomi, and Tom, pre-teens with four years between them—jabbered for a while before noticing. “What’s got into Dad?” Iris, accustomed to answering for him, explained.
“What an asshole,” Tom sneered and was immediately chastened. “Not Dad, Mom, the blind man.”
Dina recalled, “Dad likes rescuing people. The old lady and the flood. It made the papers.”
“And the dog from the fire,” Naomi, the youngest, added, unsure if the hero was in fact her father or a cartoon she’d seen on TV.
Nobody corrected her, though, or had time, for Iris was ladling the main course and thinking out loud, “unless…he didn’t want to be rescued.”
Mid-ladle, she realized that her family was gawking at her. “I mean, being blind is hard,” she shrugged, “Maybe he wanted to get hit…”
“Ewww,” the children responded, remarkably in tune. Only Adam remained silent, not eating. He saw his kids’ freckles and their tussled strawberry hair. That was Iris’s color when he met her, now brown and graying. He saw Iris, still heart-faced but fuller beneath the neck, ever nurturing. He should feel thankful, Adam thought, he had his family, he had his life. He, at least, could see.
The next day at work, while struggling with a rush job from Teitelbaum, Adam experienced a chill. Inclined to the hypochondriac, he immediately concluded he was coming down with something. He’d tossed most of the night, hounded by fractured dreams linked by car beams bearing down. He also had a headache. Rifling through the mess in a bottom drawer, he exhumed an old aspirin bottle and, before opening it, glanced at the date.
This was a habit he’d cultivated over the years wi
thout ever considering its source. But today, perhaps because of the dust encrusting the cap, he paused and remembered a similar container years ago. The shape was different—not cylindrical but vaguely humanoid with sloping shoulders, and pink rather than white. Adam looked different as well. Thinner, longer-haired, and with a look not of numb resignation but of intense naïveté, of recklessness.
* * * * *
That was the hankering he showed when she opened the first of the crates and showed him row after row of those bottles. “Aspirin,” he said and instantly felt stupid. Any idiot could see it was aspirin.
“Ah,” Taji laughed. “But these are not just any aspirin.” She held a vial up to the grimy light and pointed at its label. “These are expired aspirin.”
So clueless was he at this age that she had to explain expiration dates to him and the fact that these tens of thousands of perfectly good medicines were, financially if not pharmaceutically, worthless. “And that, my sweet Adam, is where we come in.”
Where they came in, Taji continued, though she’d been through this with him several times before, was in delivering the crates to a certain Akram she knew not far from the northern border. From there, they passed into a series of stealthy hands that stamped the contents with new labels and updated dates, destined for foreign shelves.
“But that’s illegal,” Adam muttered, more with frisson than fear.
Taji chortled. “Illegal there, maybe. Not here. Here it’s only”—she winced as if inserting something painful—“naughty.”
They had met at a reflexology class, the kind taken by people with expendable time and uncertain futures. Partnered, they massaged each other’s feet, pressing him into unchartered emotions. Adam blushed at the ungainliness of his toes but was aroused by the delicacy of hers. The softest rub sent her thighs shivering. A graduate of a select college, he had never spoken to someone like her. Head shaved from temple to nape with a sandy profusion on top. A brow, a nostril pierced, and arms not merely tattooed but festooned, hinting at hidden murals. Her name was Taji—“From the Taj Mahal. My mother hitchhiked there”—and she was beautiful in an unexceptional way. Little pink mouth, puckish nose, her eyes feldspar-speckled. A body vacuum-packed into jeans.