by Hilary Zaid
My mind flashed on Anya’s apartment, the photo framed behind the glass; when I’d visited last week, the twining plant that trailed along the tabletop had been in bloom, a dense forest crawling with blossoms more animal than plant: wide, petaled mouths burst open; long, sticky, tongues thrust out into the air, toward the photo, toward the blank, wide sky, toward anything within their grasp. Anya had been telling me about the upcoming Calder exhibit at SFMOMA. “To stand still, and yet to move; Calder is the genius of this paradox,” Anya said, tracing a finger through the air; she leaned in confidentially. “We are the geniuses of the other paradox.” She lifted her chin. “To move and yet remain firm—this is our story.” It was the first time I’d heard her even suggest a kinship with the Jews.
Vicky cleared her throat. “Yad Vashem has a page of testimony submitted by Betsheva Singer . . .” my heart leapt—submitted by; she’d survived. I heard Vicky riffle through sheets of paper. “. . . recording the life of Anya Kamenets . . .” Vicky paused. “Here we go. Born 1923, Kaunas. Daughter of Rafael and Dina. Lived, Kaunas, Lithuania. Died 1944, Kaunas Ghetto.”
I was confused. “The death of Anya Kamenets?” Something in my brain didn’t seem to be working. Anya dead? Batsheva living? Batsheva must have survived and assumed, because Anya had stayed behind, that Anya hadn’t. By finding Sheva—alive!—that was a tragic misunderstanding that I could clear up. “Would you mind sending that to me?”
( )
I went to find Anya at the Museum of Modern Art. Before she’d retired, she told me, she’d owned a small gallery, “specializing,” she said, “in masterworks out of Europe.” She didn’t like to talk about that, but she did like to talk about painting, and, in the course of our recent visits, she’d set me a rigorous course of study. A course of study that I supposed was meant to keep me from asking more about Betsheva. She could think what she liked.
SFMOMA’s great striped oculus shone back the sky. I moved through the big, open lobby, the shifting forms overhead like spirits on the bridge to the World to Come, and found Anya upstairs in a second-floor gallery.
When she saw me, Anya held up her hands in surrender. “Ellen,” she pronounced my name like the pleading part of a prayer before looking me up and down. “Tennis shoes!” she tapped her hand against her temple in dismay. Behind her, a blue painting, divided up into rectangles and squares, windows of blue through which light seemed to shine, reminded me of Anya’s apartment. “You like Diebenkorn?” Anya turned to the painting, looking at me sideways, eyes asquint. It was an expression I recognized: her eyebrows down-turned arcs, her cheeks parentheses, everything curved, everything hidden.
Did I like it? I liked the color blue. I liked the layers of light. Anya knew I had grown up by the ocean. “My father used to take us to Santa Monica on New Year’s Eve, me and my sister,” I told her. We’d plodded along in the crisp, end-of-December air, the postcard-wide beach empty, the waves drawing back, our fists in our pockets. It still felt strange, telling Anya something so personal. I wasn’t used to talking to anyone this way, anyone beside Francine. But it felt good, too.
“You recognize the light,” Anya smiled mysteriously. She turned to the painting and pointed to the label. “Ocean Park #54,” it read, “Santa Monica.” Anya seemed pleased to know the little details about me, the facts that connected this painting to my life. It gave me courage. Maybe she would be happy that I had discovered something about her, too?
“It’s pretty. But a little flat,” I protested, gesturing to the blues of Ocean Park. It wasn’t how the world looked to me, the world always, it seemed, composed of so many layers—so many of them, I thought, glancing at Anya’s parenthetical features, hidden. I hoped she understood what I was trying to say: that it was time for us to move beyond the surface.
“The lines that look to you so flat,” she opened her palms, “reveal something else, out of sight.” I searched Anya’s closed face. Was she telling me that she agreed? “There is a painting,” she gestured toward the Diebenkorn—“behind this painting.”
I glanced at the canvas for a clue. The paint looked so pale, the blue scraped so thin that it looked like the light actually shone through it. Did she mean that there was a painting hidden on the canvas, behind this one? A hidden painting you could only see with x-rays? Famous paintings had been hidden this way, smuggled out of Europe. I thought of Anya’s gallery, and I remembered the Gandras.
“Not in space. In time. Come.” We wound through a narrow passage, back toward a private office where Anya found the book she wanted. As she shuffled through its pages, I noticed that here Anya had no photos on her desk.
Anya pointed to a glossy photo of a blue painting by Matisse, a field of blue intersected with lines, something more solid in it than the pure light of Diebenkorn, sort of like a castle floating there. “A painting behind the painting,” Anya repeated. “You think paint is flat,” Anya accused me, “but the visual world speaks a language that has been spoken for tens of thousands of years.” She touched the picture. “Entire worlds before your very eyes,”—she reached out to touch my cheek; it was the first time she had ever touched me affectionately—“that you cannot see.”
“Anya,” I said, as she looked, frowning, into my face, “have you ever thought about looking for Batsheva . . . ?” I started, looking for a place to begin, a rationale to explain what I’d done.
Anya shut the book. “Whatever happened to your friend from the Foundation? The dark-haired one. The student.” Jill? It was just like Anya to deflect a direct question with another question, but this one was a doozy, something she must have been hiding up her sleeve for just the right moment, a moment when she felt I’d gotten too close to something. I had never told Anya about Jill. I had told Jill about Anya. And that had felt inappropriate enough. Had Anya been spying on me?
“Someone you saw me with at the Foundation?” I asked, as if I didn’t know who she meant.
Anya nodded. “Your friend.” My friend. That was what Anya had called Batsheva. Batsheva, the dark-haired beauty. Friend. A word overburdened with hidden meanings, from a past in which so much had remained hidden. Maybe I was wrong about Batsheva. Could I have been?
“Jill went to Boston,” I told Anya. “We were just friends,” I insisted, aware, even as I said it, that I sounded too defensive, that there were so many things that word could mean.
Anya assessed me from the corner of her eyes. “I see,” she said.
( )
“You should write to her.”
“I’m not going to write to her.” Sol shook his head.
“Your father got a letter today from his old flame,” Betty reported.
She was working the puzzle in the Sunday Times.
Sol sat kitty-corner, the latest issue of Wired folded back in his lap. “That was before the War. Marion Silver.” He waved Marion Silver away with his hand. “Listen to this.” Sol wore glasses when he read, half-moons he bought from the rack at Long’s. “A clock that will tell time from January 1, 2001, to the year 12,000. Twelve thousand!” Sol put his finger under the digits and studied them. “Stonehenge is only five thousand years old.”
“That’s a sturdy clock,” I said.
“Forget about the clock,” Sol said. “How would you communicate our understanding of Time to people for whom our fundamental concepts might no longer have any meaning?”
It didn’t seem so far-fetched to me. Wasn’t that the same problem the Foundation sets out to solve, Yad Vashem, all of them? To preserve forever a truth away from which Time has shifted so far as to find it inconceivable? Would it be the same for me and Francine, I wondered: Would there ever be a time when people found it unremarkable that Francine and I had gotten married, that they would have to have it explained to them that in 1998 we were living in a different world? It seemed impossible.
Betty cleared her throat. “Your father almost married her.” She gripped the gold lozenge that hung around her neck between her thumb and fingers, rubbing it lik
e a talisman as she kept her eyes on her puzzle. “Marion Silver.”
Betty was making me uncomfortable and, as I often did when I was uncomfortable, I didn’t change the subject, but I pivoted it. “I interviewed a woman recently,” I told Francine, turning the present into the past, “whose old flame was another girl.” There was an entire group devoted to the Lesbian Daughters of Holocaust Survivors, but Francine knew I had never encountered a lesbian survivor. I watched Francine chew another almond. Her brow wrinkled, clearly puzzled that I had never mentioned this before.
“They were lovers?” Francine licked salt from her fingertips. “Did she tell you that?”
“Not exactly. After we talked, I sort of figured it out.”
Francine’s head tilted. ”You figured it out?”
I hadn’t seen the photograph in months, but, in my memory, Sheva’s eyes smoldered for Anya. “I sensed a spark.”
Betty, still working her puzzle, cleared her throat. “Ellen, I think you’re leaking.” Leaking? “Letting your work affect you.” How couldn’t it? “Failing to hold up the boundaries between your work and your private life.” I imagined my dark thoughts seeping out, the slow hiss of gas.
Betty worked with battered women. She knew something about leaking, I guessed, but I didn’t think that was what this was. “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to think about moving on?”
“From this client?” As I said it, I felt how jarring it was to think of Anya as a “client,” let alone to think about “moving on.”
”From the Foundation.” Betty’s pencil hung, sharp, above her page. “Leaving this job.”
Betty could be hard, I knew, but her comment stunned me. It was so hard-line. Maybe it was the line Wendy would take, when she found out what was going on between me and Anya, but it surprised me to hear it coming from Betty, who didn’t even know about the secret visits; it was such an extraordinary reaction to a manageable problem—to up and disappear just because you had some complicated feelings, when there were so many reasons to stay. Many more reasons than Anya. Was it possible that Betty didn’t understand the magnitude of my sense of responsibility for what I did? I bristled thinking it.
“When I was fourteen,” I told Betty, “my parents went on a trip to Europe. France, Italy, Spain. Before they left, my father took me into his closet.” My father’s locked closet, where he kept his file cabinets full of deeds, tax returns, personal papers. “He pulled out an envelope with three safe deposit keys in it. ‘If something happens,’ he told me, ‘go to the bank right away.’ He pointed to the address. ‘Once they get notified of a death, they have to seal the boxes, and they can get tied up in probate for months.’”
“That’s pretty morbid,” Francine murmured, with the mild contempt a woman can only have for her future in-laws.
I shook my head again. “That was the first time I realized: They’re going to be gone and all of it—all this stuff my father kept in his closet—whether or not I knew what it was, whether it was then or thirty years from then; all of it was going to be up to me. To us.” Because it wasn’t just me. A thousand voices, the voices of our generation, were rising up, one by one, thin as sacrifice, twining wreaths of memory.
“That’s right,” Betty quietly consented. “You’re not the only one.” In her words, I thought I heard that faint, parental whiff of dismay, the dismay of my parents, of an entire generation of parents, the ones who’d carpooled us to religious school, who felt real shock when we showed signs of believing in God. But unlike my parents, Betty was a person to whom I could give an honest answer. That was part of marrying Francine.
“Me. Me and my generation,” I told Betty—because it was Betty’s generation, and my parents’, who could afford to be complacent, who could choose to believe that, when it came to the big things, silence was best. “We know that, after they die, after you die, we will be the only ones left in the world to have seen them.”
“Do you think it’s really possible,” Betty narrowed her eyes behind her magnifying glasses, but she wasn’t looking up at me as she penciled an answer into her crossword, “for people to tell the truth about their lives?”
The conversation had taken a rather pointed turn. “I hope so,” I answered, a little shocked, a little offended.
“Oh. Not to you, dear.” Betty brandished her pencil, erasing. “To themselves.”
When we got ready to go, Francine picked something off the hem of my jacket. It was a pale green sticker from SFMOMA. I was sure, this time, I had peeled it off and thrown it away, but like my bad conscience it had followed me home. “You went to the museum? Again?” Francine frowned.
“Huh?” I shrugged, scrunching my nose at the sticker as if I had no idea how it happened to be stuck to my clothing. “That’s weird.” It wasn’t, technically, a lie.
( )
“I understand, Ms. Janowicz.” Wendy tucked the phone between her chin and her chest. “I’ll come out myself this evening.” She jotted down a note on her big desk calendar in green: “Mr. Kaye, Rose of Sharon, 6 p.m., 8th Floor West.”
A frozen yogurt, spun ornately as a conch, going slick and blurry at her elbow, Wendy pecked frantically at her keyboard. As her pregnancy advanced, all of her tasks seemed to take on an increasing sense of urgency, her due date like a D-Day, beyond which the future fate of the world seemed wholly unknown.
“I can take that,” I offered. “The interview. Today. At the Rose of Sharon.” An opportunity to see Anya that I didn’t have to cook up or cover up. I still planned to tell Wendy about Anya before the baby came. But not too much before. Just before she went on maternity leave with a distracting new baby.
Wendy studied me, hesitating. She’d told me that, since she’d gotten pregnant, she could scent a slice of Chicago pizza three blocks away. I wondered if she could smell a fishy reason, too. “All right.” She shrugged. “Thanks.”
I found Mr. Kaye on the eighth floor of the West tower of the Rose of Sharon. As retirement communities go—and I’d seen a few— the Rose of Sharon seemed fairly benign: a whole community of old people, living in their own apartments, eating together in the big dining hall, wandering past trailing ficus leaves and burbling fish tanks. But, go up into the West tower, I discovered, stepping off the elevator into a hospital wing—walls, desks and floors variations on a single shade of maroon—and you enter the waiting room of the Angel of Death. Room after curtained room of bodies, lumpen in front of dark TVs, lined the hall. In a fluorescent-lit communal room, gowned figures slouched in wheelchairs around a Formica table. Brown eyes, filmed blue, stared, vacant. I blinked hard and moved past. Wendy had warned me: There may not be much time left.
But, when I saw Mr. Kaye, I realized quickly that there was no time left at all. “Mr. Kaye?” From the bed, the rail-thin figure stirred under the blanket just enough to show that it heard. But Mr. Kaye’s eyes, open without seeing, didn’t shift to my face. “Mr. Kaye?” He groaned, a faint, guttural cry, like the moan of an animal.
“Oh.” I turned to the wall. What did they want me to do—Ms. Janowicz?—extract some nugget of truth, like a gold filling, before the body was gone?
I collected myself, turned back, leaned down.
“Mr. Kaye,” I said. I wanted to whisper, but I doubted he would hear me, so I said it loudly. “Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Kaye?”
Mr. Kaye’s hands had been tucked neatly into the closely tucked blanket, but his mouth fell open. “Unhh.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kaye,” I told him. “I don’t understand.” Ms. Janowicz had told Wendy that Mr. Kaye had survived the medical experiments. He’d had severe TB. I considered Mr. Kaye, immobile in his bed, and wondered how much of those horrific moments came alive with each rattling breath.
Mr. Kaye’s tongue heaved in his mouth. The ground, yellowed teeth parted, revealing something soft, gray, some unrecognizable pap. Mr. Kaye’s tongue pushed the mass into his cheek.
I dashed into the hall, intercepted a woman in clogs with a cart ful
l of pills. “Mr. Kaye, in here. There’s something in his mouth.”
The woman looked up, unhurried. “Who are you?”
“I’m visiting Mr. Kaye. He’s got something in his mouth. Can you take it out?”
“Who are you?” the nurse pressed me. “Are you his daughter?”
I’d stepped back into the room, trying to lead her behind me. “Look.”
“Are you family?”
I stood by Mr. Kaye’s bed, gestured toward his rolling lips.
Despite herself, she glanced at Mr. Kaye. “Pouching,” she commented. “It’s one of the signs.” The signs? Mr. Kaye’s chest rattled with each breath.
“Can you get it out?” Was this woman a nurse, or a spectator?
“I’m sorry,” she said, not sorry at all. “Who did you say you are?”
“I’m Ellen Margolis,” I said, loud enough for Mr. Kaye to hear. “I’m here from the Foundation for the Preservation of Memory. I’m here, Mr. Kaye,” I knelt by the bed, “so that the world will remember your name.”
“Miss, unless you’re family or social services, you’re going to have to leave.” No amount of explaining satisfied her. (If Francine were ever hospitalized, I realized with dread, it would be the same; I’d have no legal status as her spouse. The idea gave me the chills.) “I’m going to have to get a supervisor in here,” the nurse warned me. When she disappeared down the hall, I slipped my hand over Mr. Kaye’s blankets. There was nothing I could do here; I’d come too late. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kaye,” I told him. “I’m so sorry.”
I reached the South tower in a state, eager to see Anya. The doors opened on the eleventh floor. Even before I passed Mrs. Linde’s door, halfway down the hall, the sickening smell surrounded me. Burned food—burned flesh. I covered my nose with my hands as I pressed toward Anya’s door. No one answered. But the knob turned easily in my hand.