by Josh Weil
I managed to make my head shake no. Though out of my mouth there came, unbidden, “Why?”
Outside, the rain drummed at the door, ran down the windows, made the shadows on that side of his face appear to move. “I received,” he started, “a letter—”
“From …?” I watched him wonder: hadn’t he just told me? Or did I think the name had been who it was addressed to?
“Yankel,” he said.
I tried to make my face a picture about which, had I been peering at it, I could not have found anything to write.
“Shimel,” he said.
And I could see on his face that I was failing.
“Do either of these names—”
“Two?” I said. “You received two? To each?” He released the umbrella handle. I released the knob. My hand was shaking. “Show them to me,” I pleaded. “Fima”—it was the only time I ever used the familiar form of his first name—“will you?”
“That depends,” he said, “on who I’m showing them to.”
And so I told him, watching his eyes narrow, as if he was trying to bring something out of focus into sharpness, until, by the time that I was done, his lids had shut almost entirely, and I knew that I had been wrong to.
“So,” he said, “you are a deserter.”
I should have caught the strange lack of surprise, as if I’d simply confirmed something he’d heard, but I was too intent on trying to paint for him a picture of why: the death sentence that is conscription for a Jew, the friends I’d seen succumb to officers’ demands, suicide posts, unsurvivable conditions, the impossibility of staying alive for the mandated twenty-five years.
To which he said, “You are a Jew.”
“I am,” I told him, “the same man who, for a quarter of a year, has greeted you each morning, who guards your shop at night.”
He lifted the umbrella out of the stand. “Who did.”
From under his other reaching hand, I grabbed the knob, held the door. “At least,” I begged, “give me the letters.”
He set his fingers on top of mine. Such an unexpected touch: my hand, without his on it, would have slipped off the brass. “The only letter I received,” he said, “was from the military police. Telling me they had come across another from your family. Addressed to here.” Where, he said, his voice soft as his artists’ fingers felt, he would, out of respect for the time we had spent in each other’s company, allow me to remain till morning, till the usual hour that he would open the store, when he would return with the police.
Already, it is almost tomorrow. Long ago, the last droshkies passed by Talevu Street, left the avenue that is just visible at its far end empty of all but the gas lamps’ glow, gone still but for the shifting of the few remaining leaves.
I know that I should try to sleep. But I cannot stop thinking about the police. Not the ones Stepashin will bring. But the ones who already must have come to you. Mamme, did they wake you at night, break in, destroy your drawings looking for letters from me? Or by then were you already gone?
No, there will be no sleep for me tonight. This last night beneath the sky we still share. Where I am going, your night will be my day, my day your night. And with each passing one I will become less your brother, less your son. Until I am someone so far from you in a life so different from this that these words will be the last not just to you, but from me. Mamme, you will say I will always be your son. Tatte, you will tell me it is only an ocean, another country, a few more miles. But I have already traveled more than a few from you. And I know that this is different. By this time tomorrow I will be far out on the sea, deep in a shaking hull, surrounded by the sounds of sleeping others, mouthing into the steerage dark a single syllable—‘new’—trying to get it right—‘new’—the first sound of the name of the place in which I will never again be called meyn breuder or meyn zun.
Outside, the street seems to have already begun to disappear. There are only burning lamps, cobblestones fading away beneath their glow, gaps of blackness between. And my lantern in this window. Lighting me. I will let it burn all night. I will let the chimney blacken. I will wander among the cameras on their stands, touching all the knobs, turning the rings, making their rubber bellows creak. I will set a match to the magnesium, watch the flash explode. And in the darker darkness after, the acrid scent of smoke, I will push open the velvet curtains, step into the backdrop, sit on the chair, stare into the lens.
Well, in fact, other than keeping the flame lit, I have passed these last hours tossing in my blankets, trying to imagine what I could write here at the end. Now, the blankets are folded. My valise is packed. Outside, the night is growing thin. And through the shop windows I can see it: the first faint waves of daylight reaching down into the street, ricocheting off wheel spokes, shutter slats, showing a flutter of wings, first slight stirrings in the aether. I like to think of it, there all night, waiting for a ripple of light to come and give the things of the world shape, abiding, always, everywhere. Even when there is no one to see it.
For the past hour, watching the window light lift out of the lantern’s flicker all the devices that fill this room, I have been thinking about this century’s beginning. How back then no one had so much as conceived a camera. How a mere fifty years ago the journey I am about to make would have taken twice as many days. How barely fifteen years before today not one soul had ever seen an electric light. And fifteen years from now? In the new century? Maybe by then we will have cut the ocean crossing in half again. Maybe we will have found a way to send light around the earth, and I will once again be able to see your face. And you mine. But until then, all the time that we are hidden from each other, I will know that you are there, in the dark, as there as the spokes, the shutter, the street outside—its cobblestones, abandoned carts, the tops of hitching posts painted white by perching gulls—that, lost to me all night, has returned.
And here he comes again: the lamplighter, crossing from one side of the street to the other, unlatching the panes, reaching up, snuffing the flames. Watching him it seems as if he might have just kept walking. Followed the night around the globe, lighting lanterns until the dark crossed into day and, coming upon the flames already lit, he flipped his pole to its snuffing end, simply kept on. Maybe, some night in another city in another country I will see him coming down another street. I will call him over. I will ask him to bring a message back to you. “Tell them,” I will say, “hello from here.”
He nears. A nod. I nod back. Reaching his pole to the lamp above me, he says, “They’ll be up all night reading it, too,” and I wish I had another hundred pages. I wish I had something more than this to send. If I had learned to use the contraptions that all these nights have kept me company, paid more attention to practical things Stepashin said—how to load the plates, train a lens on where I’d sit, focus it on myself, somehow trigger the shutter—if I knew the way to free the captured light and imprint it on a piece of paper, I would do it for you. But all I know to do is this:
His skin is puffy from lack of sleep. His hair sticks out from beneath the hat his mother knit, wild, unwashed. The same color as his brother’s. But his mustache has grown in a little darker, a little more full. Almost, now, as thick as his tatte’s. His tatte whose beard he used to like to squeeze in his small child’s fists, just to see his fingers disappear. He wishes now he had such a beard to hide his own face. The puffiness of his lower lip, raw from biting it. The shaking of his upper, delicate—always, he thought, too like a girl’s, too like his mother’s—its shape as deeply pinched as the pie crusts that she makes. He can feel her fingers on his mouth. Pressing it. He shuts his eyes. With them closed he can see yours better. If he could he would stay like that forever, remembering his father’s, his brother’s, his mother’s. But when he opens his eyes again, there is just him, sitting by a still-burning lamp, watching, in the window glass, his own reflection. Your oldest son, your only sibling, your once was Shimel saying good-bye. Good-bye, Yankel. Good-bye, Tatte. Good-bye, Mamme. I
wish for you a light in the dark.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The eight stories in this collection were written over an entire decade of my life. In them, I see not only earlier iterations of myself, but the mark of so many others who helped me along the way:
My first readers and longtime friends: Mike Harvkey, Johanna Lane, Elizabeth Kadetsky, Meghan Kenny, Robin Kirman, Suzanne Rivecca, Laura van den Berg, Jennifer Sheffield (now Weil), and my brother, Ben.
The talented and generous editors who first brought these stories to print: Hannah Tinti at One Story; Ralph Eubanks at Virginia Quarterly Review; Ladette Randolph at Ploughshares; Tom Jenks at Narrative; Cheston Knapp at Tin House; Bill Pierce at Agni; and Stacey Swann at American Short Fiction.
The team at Grove, who, over these years and three books has become so important to me: Elisabeth Schmitz, Morgan Entrekin, Katie Raissian, and all the rest.
PJ Mark: agent, friend, indefatigable guide, and guardian of my work.
Others, too: Henia Lewen helped me with Yiddish in “No Flies, No Folly”; Naomi Williams (and her mother) translated the Japanese in “Long Bright Line”; Jeremy Mohawk translated the Mohican in “The Point of Roughness”; my sister-in-law, Lisa Rasco, helped me understand autism for the same story; Adam Day, through the Baltic Writing Residency, helped get me to Riga, in which “Hello from Here” is set; quotes from Mike Horn’s North Pole winter expedition log appear in “Beautiful Ground”; and the acts of resistance by residents of four rural counties in Pennsylvania—Adams, York, Franklin, and Cumberland—almost eighty years ago inspired the events in “The Essential Constituents of Modern Living Standards.”
To all of them—and to my always supportive parents, inlaws, and grandmother; to my children, Sadie and Cody, who fill my days with light; to the love of my life, Jen, who carries me through the darkness—thank you.