“Yes. That would make me happy. Remember, it’s as simple to love a rich man as a poor man.” He doesn’t smile when he says this, but he hands me a butterscotch candy from his pocket.
“I would be contented if you behaved like a good girl and not like your wild mater.”
“I won’t behave like my wild mother. I’ll be a good girl.” I’m certain I know what he’s worried about. I look him in the eye. “I won’t get in trouble like my mother.”
He finally smiles. “You’re still on your own if you study to be artist.”
“Fine. I’d rather do it on my own anyway.”
“You are like your mother. Stubborn and proud.”
“No, Grandpa. I have more pride than my mother. I don’t expect anyone to take care of me. I want to take care of myself. I’m ready to take care of myself.”
“Good. That’s what you receive. Nothing.”
He stands up abruptly and stalks out of the room. I hear the door open and close as he leaves the apartment. I sit there reeling until my grandmother comes home.
When she asks me where my grandfather is, I say he’s gone out for a walk.
He comes back about an hour later and acts like nothing’s happened between us. We spend the day doing puzzles. Later we go out for ice cream.
I’m starting to understand why Wendy went nuts.
I have the nightmare that night. It’s the same as always, except the person in my dream who is drowning, who I swim to save, is my grandfather.
I don’t understand why he appeared in the dream or what it means. I know it means something, though.
Thirty-three
Jules, 18 years | August, 1979
ENDING WITH A BEGINNING
LAST NIGHT I dreamed Moses and I were rowing underwater. We could breathe and talk to one another. We rowed past schools of fish and sea anemones and Moses named them for me.
In two weeks I’m driving the Mustang into Boston to start college at the School of the Arts.
Things here in Withensea seem to be changing. Last year’s blizzard turned out to be the worst in Massachusetts’s history, and the town was declared a national disaster area. The full tides literally swept homes into the ocean and left most others with severe damage.
The relief money people received to rebuild homes and businesses has gone a long way toward giving the town the facelift it needs. Insurance claims were made—a few were sketchy, but many allowed people to tear down termite-hollowed, weather-beaten homes that would otherwise have fallen down.
My grandfather has never mentioned the conversation we had about Wendy and college again. I’m curious about what he said to me that day, especially the statement regarding Wendy being his sister’s daughter, but I know I can’t ask more questions for a while—even though I have so many it makes me feel crazy.
A few days after I left his and Ruth’s apartment, I called and asked him if he’d write all the family history down so I can read it someday. I especially want to know what his boyhood was like and how he and his family decided to come to America. He said he would try.
I’m certain he communicated what he intended to about college. We have reached what feels like détente. I’ve managed to escape his permanent wrath by vowing to marry a doctor if I can and teaching if I fail as an independent artist. These ideas feel like fairy tales to me, but they make him feel good. I wonder if he knows they’re fairy tales.
I’m leaving with the knowledge that I’m on my own financially, which isn’t what I’d expected, but is, ultimately, I think, exactly what I want.
Timothy and I hang out on all our days off. I’m working through the summer at my new job at the library. He has a research job working in the marshes around Withensea studying the phytoplankton. I’m impressed with how much time he actually spends studying the stuff. He tells me if we don’t make sure the phytoplankton algae stays healthy, then basically all the marsh plants will die off, and if that happens all the fish and shellfish will die. I have no idea what he means when he goes off about the nitrogen exchange and things, but he makes me care about it and want to be involved. I spend my free days hanging out at the salt marshes with him and Crikey, cleaning up trash and examining algae samples.
We’ve had a blast all summer and plan to see each other on the weekends when I go to school.
Oh, and …
This is the part where Timothy and I camped out in the marsh one night and watched the Perseid meteor shower and had sex.
It was the first time for both of us. We laugh when we talk about it because we know later, when we’re old, we can say we saw stars.
Leigh lives with her boyfriend in Duxbury now, and she came back to visit her family for a few days this summer. We got together one night and hung out at the bar Howard used to own. It’s called McGillicuddy’s now, and the brother of a guy we graduated with owns it. We sat at the old, oak bar underneath the gold-leaf mirror. The spot above the mirror, where the wooden woman had once been, was empty. We drank Shirley Temples because Massachusetts raised the legal drinking age to twenty a month before my eighteenth birthday. I don’t care. I don’t care if I never drink a beer my whole life.
All Leigh talked about when we hung out was her wedding in December. She has no plans to go to college. She’s always been so smart, but now it’s like all she wants is to marry this guy and have babies. It feels hopeless to me. She got out of Withensea, though, and for that I’m happy for her. Not a lot of people leave this place. If it doesn’t suck you in, like an undertow, you’re lucky. We’ve grown so far apart. We didn’t make any plans to see each other before the wedding, and I wonder if I’ll even go. Still, I’ll miss her. Her leaving feels like another death I can’t understand.
I’ve been thinking about what my grandfather said about every life having a little sorrow. I picture my grandfather’s life. I imagine what it must have felt like for him to lose members of his family when he was young and be separated from the rest for such a long time. Being an immigrant and having no money and no real prospects.
Comparatively, I’ve had a decent life. But still, we share sorrow.
I wonder if my grandfather feels like I do—like outliving his brother and sisters deserves punishment. Like somehow we’d caused our own sorrow. I wonder if our sorrow is an inheritance, like the blue eyes I know Moses got from him. Can it somehow be genetic?
Or how about survival? Have we been born with a gene that makes us stronger than the other members of our family? Like a spiritual power gene?
Maybe there are angels. Maybe my Grandfather Samuel and I have an angel. Maybe the same angel protects us because she wants us to keep living for a specific reason. Like writing a great book or curing cancer.
But why us? Why not Moses? Why not my grandfather’s family members who died young? Where were their angels? Maybe angels can fail too. Maybe angels are human after all.
So I’m not complaining, but I’m having difficulty processing everything that’s happened in my life so far. And sometimes I believe in angels more than I believe in all the bad stuff I’ve experienced.
Withensea is beautiful, but my life here has been mostly ugly. I’m not counting on an angel to rescue me. I’m lifting myself out of here, and I’m not coming back. I don’t have to. I’m taking it with me. Every bit of skin and hair, every pore, every cell in my body is built of Withensea matter.
Wendy can visit me in my new life if she wants. I’m still angry she didn’t tell David about his real father, and she forbids me from telling the truth. I’ve decided not to say anything to her about her real mother … yet, because of my promise to my grandfather, but I’m going to find a way to make sure all this family’s secrets are eventually told. They have to if we’re ever going to build a different legacy. I need more time to figure out how to make this possible. I believe it’s possible.
Time.
My story will push on from here. I have an ending in mind now, but I’m not sure I’ll want the same ending in sixty years, or ten years, or even next yea
r.
I’m hopeful my grandfather will understand my choices someday, but I can understand why he might not. He’s a man with a brain from a different country. From a different century, even. And he’s a man with many secrets. Most of them I will never know.
Secrets drive people crazy, though. I think secrets add up to more secrets that keep truths stuffed deep inside them.
Secrets helped make Wendy nuts. She’s had a rough go of it, and I’m willing to cut her some slack. Actually I’m going to cut her some slack, but only because I want to give myself room to escape without feeling a tug.
I’m going to try to forgive Howard for the things he’s done, but I’m not going to cut him any slack. I’m going to cut the tether entirely. I’m certain it’s the best way for me to go forward into a new life. I don’t think he’s going to change. I don’t want to have to be tied to him in any way that might make me remember him except in the ways I want to. I want to remember birthday parades with paper hats. I want to remember piggyback rides and trips to the zoo. I want to look at old photos of all of us smiling and imagine we smiled because we were happy, or at least untroubled, in those moments.
I wish things had been different for us growing up. I know it sounds like a simplistic statement about my circumstances, but it’s countered with an acceptance, maybe also simplistic, that things go as they go.
Still, I wish David and I had become friends sooner than we did. Sooner than his last year of high school. I hope we’ll become better friends in the years ahead. I’m glad he’s my brother. I don’t think I would have survived without a witness, even if my witness was a person who turned up the volume on the television set while the house caved in.
Moses witnessed everything while he remained on earth, and he’s become a witness to the chaos even now that he’s left. Every time I dream the drowning dream. Every time I think about him.
His death is evidence of the things that went missing in my life.
I wish Moses were alive. I wish Moses were alive so much it hurts. I understand why all the descriptions of lost loved ones are physically descriptive. Lovesick, heart-broken, grief-stricken. I can feel the loss of Moses in my marrow, my joints, my tissues. It aches inside-out when I think of him. I miss him every day. Sometimes it’s all I can think about. It’s a good thing I miss him, though, because it means I’m feeling things, and I think feeling things is a good way to stay present. Much of the time I feel guilt. I wonder what I can possibly do in my life to somehow make up for the fact that we didn’t protect him better. At times it feels like a test of resilience. Other times I feel incredibly small and insignificant and I marvel how anything survives within a world of such seemingly random chaos.
Sometimes my feelings are so strong they terrify me. But I’m grateful for the terrifying feelings as well. I’ve found a kind of beauty in them.
And I can live with these feelings.
I’ve decided I can live with this.
Epilogue
Szaja Trautman, 34 years | August 5th, 1944
THE BLACK SEA
A few moments before 1:00 a.m., twenty-five miles northeast of Igneada, Turkey I CARRIED PIETER’S body from the hospital like a stick and piled it in a ditch with a thousand other sticks. This became my job in those last days. We piled them precisely, like railroad ties alongside a track bed.
My mind had already split so many times I knew nothing remained inside my head but tiny bits. I lay down there in the ditch, in the dusk, with the dead Russian soldier Pieter, praying for my own death. I expected the guards to discover and kill me, but the guards had gone on. They had failed to notice my presence in the pile. There is no surprise in this, only an empty acceptance. They wouldn’t notice. The guards’ eyes crawled away from what is left of our faces—our bones. Without fat and muscle we all looked so similar.
Most of the Jews and other prisoners had been killed or marched away to other camps months before.
There in the ditch, the smell of rotting flesh filled my nostrils. The frozen, muddy earth chilled my body to a numb weightlessness. Time opened and I became lost, but Pieter’s voice pulled me back to awareness.
Here, he said.
Pieter’s mind remained whole, even after the typhoid delirium, even in death. He could conceive and grow an idea.
He shared his thoughts—at first whispers, then fully-sounded words.
The voice of a man who still craved life.
He spoke directly to me. He knew my name. He knew my family. He knew everything I had forgotten.
We made our deal. In exchange for my body, I let him gather and sort the bits of my mind that remained. He told me he would invent the pieces that had been lost. He would direct my thoughts.
My body is a coffin for my soul, Pieter informed me.
It is his idea to hide his naked body under another’s after I had clothed my body in his uniform. He directed me to take off the bandage on his foot and wrap my own. The Russians had butchered Pieter’s foot when he defected.
I climbed, with Pieter’s whole mind, out of the ditch.
At any second, I expected, I would be shouted at, found out—killed on my way back to the camp hospital in Field II. I waited for the bullets as I found my way, as I entered the hospital door. No bullets came. No one noticed that Pieter’s hospital uniform had returned from the pile of sticks.
Then I lay in a moldy hospital bed, listening as the machine guns kill the last of the Jews. Hundreds of starving Jews are shot in those last days. These are the same Jews who had piled the dead bodies of other Jews, the Russian prisoners who are dying of typhus, and the German guards, who started to turn on each other in those last days.
I should have been one of them.
I found Pieter Aleksandrov’s name on the papers in his hospital uniform. But I know he may have been another man. Most of the Russian soldiers there in the camp hospital are defectors like me.
War changes a man’s name.
It changes like blood congealing, Pieter thought.
Names change, just as allegiances change, during war.
Iberkumen—survival. My father’s word. A word from another lifetime. Another past.
But I have no past. Only one goal. Survival.
I stand on the deck of the Mefkura. On this ship are Jewish refugees, most of them camp survivors and war orphans. I have been free a few weeks.
The Mefkura set off from Constanta. We are headed to Palestine by way of Istanbul.
By way of any means now.
It is past midnight. We are fourteen miles off the coast of Turkey. I still call myself Pieter.
I am an officer on this ship.
I wear another uniform and hold a position. I have become a Romanian crew-member.
I am fluid as the water we are floating on.
I am thinking what must be done now to survive.
We have mere minutes to save ourselves from the attack.
To my right several officers lower the boat.
The lifeboat.
To the left … the stairs lead down to the hold, to the sleeping ones who won’t have lifeboats, who don’t know what we are about to do.
The ones who don’t know what is about to happen.
The boat is life.
I am choosing life, Pieter thinks as I step down the ladder rung by rung.
I help to row now. I am rowing away from death.
I wonder how many strokes to safety.
My heart—no, the place where my heart should be—has phantom pains. My heart lies in a ditch with a thousand sticks. It is beating there still. It could be rescued at another time by another person, but not by me.
This thought makes me want to retch. I do, quietly and swiftly, over the edge of the lifeboat. The officer next to me leans in. “Seasick, eh?”
Isaak. I think the man’s name is Isaak.
Is this a Jewish name? Or German?
Save yourself. Save yourself.
Then another voice. A woman’s voice.
; Save the part of yourself you need to stay alive.
The Mefkura floats on the horizon, a ghostly gray silhouette shimmering in the light of a full moon. How beautiful the ship looks floating there.
There are two more schooner ships somewhere out there, traveling with us on our voyage to the Promised Land.
Two ships also filled with survivors.
I taste bile on my tongue again.
Then it happens.
A flare illuminates the boat beneath the moon. The quiet of the oars’ in … out … shatters.
First the scream.
A piercing scream flies by us and crashes out against the ship with a huge booming and splintering.
The sound of a thousand sticks breaking.
The sight is terrifying. The explosion lights up the shards of boat that are their own missiles now, shooting out in every direction. Firelit and flying, sending arcs of death shooting out into the sea.
The sudden movement of the rowboat.
Geferlekh—too close.
The boat hurtles backward from the blast and blows apart.
Slamming into the back of the rowboat, I feel bones breaking.
In this moment of shattering pain Pieter abandons me. He is, after all, a defector.
I feel the life painfully ripping out of me and imagine I see other, smaller boats around us.
I imagine I see soldiers in them, with their guns.
Then I see nothing.
I hear sounds of machine guns and people screaming.
The SS. They have found me again. I died in the blast. I am back in the camp.
After the confinement of my soul, the bargain made with Pieter, all my survivals through the murders, the pogroms, the work camps, the trains, my imprisonment in Majdanek, and the escape, I am back in the blackness with the SS.
I knew I would be punished for living through those horrors, but this? This is my punishment? My Hell?
Ah, so it is.
Then, I hear nothing.
September, 1944, Constanta, Turkey
The smell of something astringent.
Like the tonic my foter used to shave many years ago.
The Belief in Angels Page 34