I left the hospital. I walked out with the blue paper shoe covers on my feet, in my bouffant cap, down the halls where all the people were dying, into an elevator full of people who were innocent and ignorant of our purpose there, out into the bright sunlight of Boston in July. It was crowded in the street, lots of people in suits and doctors in white coats and nurses carrying cups of coffee, smiling and laughing and talking on cell phones. It was brutally hot outside, especially compared to the cold freeze of the hospital, and as I walked, I got hotter and hotter. I took off the hat and threw it in the street, but I was still hot. I took off my shirt. I fully expected the Charles River to be in a full rolling boil when I got to its banks, but it wasn’t. It looked cool and dirty. A beer can floated by. I took off my shoes and my scrub pants, and I jumped in.
A car is honking at me. A giant metal thing on wheels with big glowing eyes. It has been following me for some time, but I am going to ignore it. I am almost to the highway. I want to be one of those mysterious and brave people who walk along the highway, who say, Fuck you, cars and trucks, I have two legs and I can walk all the way to fucking Canada if I want to. The car pulls up next to me. I can feel its hot breath, but I won’t look at it. I hear the door open, and someone calls my name. It is my mother. She reaches over and opens the door for me. She says, Steven, get in. Please. I look away from her.
A car honks at her, then realizing she has stopped, goes around. She crawls over the center of the car and gets out on the passenger side. She says, Steven, come back to the party. Or I will take you home if you are ready to go. If you have had enough, I will take you home. I tell her I have somewhere I have to be. She says, Where? Where do you have to be? I say, Somewhere. I cannot tell her. I know it and I don’t know it. I am certain that I will know it when I get there. I tell her I can walk home. It isn’t far. She says, It’s five miles. I say, I can walk five miles. I smile and tell her that it will be good for me. She says, I will walk with you. Suit yourself, I say. I start walking, and she is tottering next to me in her high heels. She can’t keep up. I can hear the highway. She says, Steven, I can’t walk five miles in these shoes. Please get in the car. Where are all those people going? I wonder. The world is so cruel and wonderful, with all its millions and millions of places that one can disappear into. My mother calls my name loudly. My whole name. Steven Joseph Shapiro, like she used to say when I was little and in trouble. I turn to look at her. She is old. I think she wants to help me. I think she loves me, but she’s so old. No one that old and frail can help me, not without magic powers. I need a superhero. Someone who can fly and turn back time. Someone who knows the secrets of the universe and can forgive me for the terrible things I have done. A car drives by and honks, and she jumps, teeters, catches herself. Even from where I am standing, I can see the veins throbbing in her neck, and I have the sudden, certain thought that she won’t live much longer. She holds an arm out to me. I wave to her, the same wave I gave when they got in the rental car to go to the Boston airport. I know that I need to get away from her. I turn into the woods, away from the honks and screeches of the highway.
It’s a hot day, and the pine straw feels like lava under my feet. There is nothing that can hurt you in these woods, just chipmunks, squirrels, blue jays, crows, and copperheads whose bites will wound but not deal a mortal blow. The bears and wolves and rattlesnakes have been chased from Atlanta. It would be better for us if they were still here, so we could know who the enemy is. The vilest thing here is the sun, and it chases me from tree to tree. I know it’s following me, the sun, other things too. There’s a squirrel with half a tail, wounded I guess by another animal or hit by a car, and it keeps disappearing under ferns and behind trees, and popping up again in front of me. Part of me knows that squirrel isn’t following me, but then again, how many half-tailed squirrels can there be? Animals do not like me. Serena had a cat that peed in my shoes and hissed at me whenever I came over. She said he was jealous. I told her that was stupid—unless she fucked the cat too. As I walk, the blue jays squawk louder. Asshole blue jays that take whatever nest they want and push out the eggs of the other birds. They eat their young. That was something people used to say about senior residents at Mass Gen, watch out for them, they eat their young. The crows are loud with their ugly caws; black and shining, they are following me too, spreading their wings and watching me as if they know where I am going. I have gone in the wrong direction. Again. I have lost the sound of cars, the smell of asphalt. But that’s okay. Somewhere in these woods is a creek that flows to a river. I’ll follow that instead of the highway, see where it takes me, maybe all the way to the Mississippi River or the Gulf of Mexico.
Someone is walking toward me. Something. Frail and unbending as if it were made of sticks. It makes a sound, a squeak, a groan. I try to remember what we learned in Boy Scouts—stay still or run? That was for bears and mountain lions, not the supernatural. For the supernatural, it probably doesn’t make a difference what you do. Right? They’ll find you, like God. I think I am pretty well hidden behind a bush, but the next thing I know, it’s looking up at me. There are hands on my arms, and it’s at least part human. It looks up at me with an ancient face, wrinkled, almost reptilian except for the gray hair in a bun, and it smiles joyously. “We looked for you for years. We thought you were lost. But you were here all along.”
I say, “Where is here?”
And she answers, “Here.”
Mushrooms
The woods behind our house in Hesse, in Germany, were darker than any I have seen since. The dirt was black and soft, like crumbled velvet, and the tops of the trees were knit together so tightly that even in the middle of the day, after just a few steps, I could hardly see anything at all. The spruce trees were fat, with thick dark green needles, and among them grew elms and ash, with heavy leaves that would tear free, one at a time, and fall silently to the ground. It seemed to me, as a child, that there must have been some rule in the forest. Things happened singly, all alone. That is how I remember it. The ominous caw of a crow. Then silence. Then the rapid terrified scuttle of a small animal, a rodent of some kind. Silence. An owl hoots. A wolf howls. Silence. The rat-a-tat of a woodpecker.
My sister, Eva, took me to the woods. The last time we went there, we were searching for mushrooms. I was six and she was seventeen. She held my hand tightly. I was afraid of the woods, and she knew it. I think she was also a little afraid. I could feel the blood pulsing in her wrist. She breathed rapidly. We stepped into the darkness. She was carrying a basket. It was springtime, and it had been raining, and the forest smelled wet and ancient, the smell I always associated with mushrooms; the air was warm, but the ground was still cold when I dug my hand under the wet leaves. Eva read fairy tales to me at night, usually the Brothers Grimm, but when we walked into the forest, she always reminded me that they were nothing but stories. She told me no father would ever leave his children in that darkness, no silent princesses sat alone weeping in the trees. There was an abandoned castle in the forest—years later, when I went back at the invitation of the mayor of Lauterbach, I saw that it was less a castle than a small estate crumbling with only a remote air of aristocracy—but at the time it seemed like a castle, and I always chose to believe that an exiled princess had once lived there, that her father had found his way to her through a magical ball of yarn, that a prince, cursed to be a baby deer, was rescued by that princess and eventually saved her from her exile, so one day her sad father followed his ball of yarn to an empty castle and never saw her again. It would be nice to believe that the people who are taken from us have run off to different kingdoms to marry princes. It would be a much nicer ending than what happened. To my mother and father and two of my three brothers. And to Eva.
Before we had even started digging for mushrooms, someone stepped out of the darkness of the woods, and my heart stopped. Eva and I stood perfectly still, and the sounds of the forest, one by one, ticked off, howl, chirp, snapping twig. I could see by the outline that it wa
s a man, tall and young; his feet pounded the forest floor and interrupted the order of sounds. He was running in our direction, but I was not sure if he was running toward us or away from something else. He came close enough for us to see his black eyes, and then my sister froze. She said, “You scared me.”
The man stopped in front of her. I squeezed her hand because for a moment I thought I might have become invisible. He said, “You’re late. I’ve been here for hours.”
“Not hours,” she said. “Rachel needed to finish some schoolwork first.” When I heard my name, I was relieved. She had not forgotten me.
He said, “You should have come alone.”
“I wouldn’t be allowed to come alone. There can be strangers in the woods.”
He touched her waist. “Am I a stranger?” he said. A shaft of light broke through a tree and lit his face. He had a light beard and mustache, and I thought he was very handsome. His hand was big, and her back seemed small. It seemed so big that it looked like it had crashed into her back and flattened there, and like it would be there forever now, so I was relieved when she reached back and peeled it away.
She bent down so that we were face-to-face. “Rachel,” my sister said. “I am going to show you a good spot to look for mushrooms, and I want you to stay there and look and promise me you will not leave. I am going to be very nearby, also looking for mushrooms.”
“I want you to look with me,” I said.
She said, “We need to find a lot of mushrooms, and it will be better if we look in two places.” She brought me to a spot we had been to a few times in the last year. We had pulled two fallen logs together to make a place to sit and eat the snacks we packed, just an apple and bread. The logs were still there. There was a small creek nearby, and sometimes deer came there to drink. If I was quiet enough, I could hear their tongues lapping and then the swallowing as the cold water rolled down their throats. She left me there, and I found a basketful of mushrooms in no time, and then sat on the log, scratching two bites on my ankle until they bled. I looked up at the ceiling of trees. In that spot, there were a few breaks, and the sunlight came down in cones and highlighted a tree stump covered in dark green moss, a stone in the river that created an eddy of seething water, a small white flower. When my sister finally came back, her hair was messy, and the collar of her shirt was crooked. She was alone. She examined my basket of mushrooms and told me I had done a marvelous job. Eva always chose superlatives. She would not say good when she could say marvelous. She would not say love when she could say adore. She would not say scary when she could say terrifying.
Eva was going to marry that boy. I met his sister two dec-ades later in a small café in Washington Heights. She said that she doubted I could be related to the girl her brother had loved, but she had lost everyone and was looking for any kind of connection. When I told her that Eva was my older sister and that I remembered her brother, she trembled all over. Although the war had been over for more than ten years, she was still terribly thin, and her hair grew only in clumps, leaving patches of pale skin. It was a faint red color; she had tried to tame it into a bun. I could see scars on her scalp, but most people had scars, and I did not try to imagine where they had come from, because imagining was never worse than reality. When she stopped shaking, she asked me if my sister had survived. I told her that Eva was dead, and she started trembling again. She then asked me if I looked at all like my sister. I told her my sister looked like my father—tall and thin, with light hair and blue eyes—and I looked like my mother. She could see for herself what I looked like—slanted black eyes, small pointed nose, jet-black hair, and not much bigger than a coffee table, though some of that was due to malnutrition. In my first year in the displaced persons camp, I grew six inches; I could almost feel my bones stretching, painful and exhilarating at the same time.
Her name was Miriam Solarz. She lived in Sweden. She gave me the address of her house and told me to call her if I was ever in Sweden. Before she left, she showed me a picture of my sister with the boy from the woods. His name was Elias Auerbach.
My sister never got to have a wedding. I didn’t want one. I married my husband, Julius, also a survivor, in front of a rabbi and two strangers while we were still living in the DP camp. We had two sons, David and Simon. Simon died of a cerebral hemorrhage when he was twenty-six years old. David married a girl from Miami in an elaborate wedding in a synagogue that looked more like a church, with a choir and a gold-plated bimah and gigantic flowers. He lives in Miami in a house with a pool, and he has two children who call me Grandma and are too busy to say much more than that.
When Julius died, I stayed in New York for several years, but after I had a mini stroke, David insisted I had to move to Miami. I did not want to go to a place where I knew no one, but then friends started to move, to Florida, to California, to places where their children lived, or worse—they died—and when I realized I knew more of the dead than the living, I agreed to move, but not to Miami. I knew what life would be like in Miami. They would put me in the most expensive nursing home and leave me there. My niece Annette was always sweet to me, and she told David I would like it in Atlanta. She invited me to come here. At first, I lived with her, but I saw I was a nuisance, so I moved to the Jewish tower, where I could have friends. It’s like when the boys were little and I sent them to preschool so they could make friends their own age. Now I live where all the other old Jews live. Officially, it is called Zaban Tower, but my friend Agnes calls it Zombie Tower for all the old men clomping along with their walkers, the clomps admittedly softened by tennis balls on the legs so it is more of a thump. Thump, shuffle, thump, shuffle. I am glad Julius died before he was reduced to such a state. Annette is a good girl, but she is busy, so I’ve learned how to fill the days. We play mah-jongg and bridge, and talk about the grandchildren we never see and the husbands who have died. The husbands—they have become more wonderful with each year since they left the earth. To hear Agnes tell it, her husband could fly. I am not complaining. Annette could just as easily do nothing, like the children of many of my friends. We have Shabbat dinner together almost every week, though sometimes it is just Chinese food arranged on plates, and sometimes it’s just the two of us, sometimes the children are in town. I know it isn’t easy. Annette has to pick me up, driving through terrible traffic since they live on the other side of town and I now limit my driving to a three-mile area, which includes my synagogue, the drugstore, the grocer, and the YMCA swimming pool where I do water aerobics.
Julius died twenty-one years ago, when he was seventy-two. He was twenty-three years older than I was. He lost his wife and two children in the war, and then he lost another son. But he never complained. He had been a pediatrician in Poland, and he became a pediatrician in New York. At first, all his patients were Jews and Italians, but later there were more blacks and Mexicans. He still loved it. A baby is a baby, he said. Julius loved all forms of celebration: a bris, a birthday party, a bar mitzvah, a wedding, even that thing the Mexicans do when the girl turns fifteen. He never turned down an invitation. I would say, What are we going to say to these people?
He would say, Put on something pretty, Rachel. What are we going to say? What everyone else says, Congratulations. Then we eat some cake, maybe we dance. What could be wrong with that?
Once we went to one of the blacks’ weddings. I was used to black people by then, but when I was in the DP camp and I saw black American soldiers, I had never seen a black person before. I tried to look up their sleeves to see if they were black all the way up. I changed colors in the summer so why shouldn’t they? The wedding was in Harlem. I thought we would be killed, but Julius said he had known the boy since he was born. The boy had had something wrong with him—a kidney problem, I think—and Julius said weddings are not just a celebration of love, they also mean a boy has become a man, and for this boy in particular, that alone was reason for a big celebration. Julius drove. I wanted to take a cab, but Julius said it would be a waste of money. There
were burned-out buildings and bums everywhere, huddled under newspapers and wrapped in plastic bags. Loud music came out of the buildings, and girls, almost naked, danced on the street corners, a scared and defiant dance I recognized as desperation. They were prostitutes, I knew, like the ones I used to see after the war trying to get the American soldiers to give them something. I said, Why is this happening in America? And Julius said, There have always been people left behind. There were whores in Germany too, even before the war, and drunks and crazy people.
I thought our car would be stolen, but there was a parking lot behind the church and two men in tuxedos were helping people out of their cars and up the sidewalk. One of them, a giant of a man, recognized my husband. He said, What’s up, Doc Rosenblatt? Julius looked at him strangely, and then smiled. Ah, Deshawn, I told your mother you would be more than six feet. You had the biggest feet of any six-year-old boy I have ever seen.
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