We Are Gathered

by Jamie Weisman

  It was hazy in the woods, partly because the sun is so strong in America. I know the world is round, but the rays of the sun seem to have decided to concentrate their glare here. It is colder and hotter. The sun turns away, crosses her arms, won’t even consider a glance until summer when she pivots back, slit eyes and furrowed brow, and concentrates on nothing but this part of the world. Or that’s how it feels to the foreigner. Some of the haze was due to the growing moonstones in my eyes. Don’t make it pretty, Rachel, my husband would say. They are cataracts. When the doctor told me, I couldn’t understand what he said, but it is rude to keep asking someone to repeat themselves, so I asked Annette to write it down. I have a dictionary. It was my Simon’s when he was in high school. It has a red binder, and inside I found a valentine there once, from a girl who said she loved him, and I wondered if he loved her back. Susan was her name, and I never heard that name before, so was it a secret he kept from me or maybe he didn’t care for her. I looked up the word cataract, and the book said it was a waterfall, a cascade. I have a waterfall in my eye? It sounded rather nice, a waterfall in my eye, a cascade in my ear, blocking out all the terrible things I have seen and heard.

  As I walked away, away, the trees grew thicker, the clouds heavier, the sun softer so there was a blur between earth and sky, and it seemed to me that if I wanted to I could walk up the sides of the edges of the universe, a little bit of a steep climb, but one I might be able to do if I could find a walking stick. I saw the sides of the Earth slope upward, and it seemed to me that the top of that slope was my destination, though now I am too old, too frail, to get there even with a walking stick. I would need someone to help me, and there was no one. Still, I focused on the edge of the world and decided to walk there. What else did I have to do? It grew silent. I could not even hear my own footsteps. Again, the soft leaf floor might have been sucking in the sound, but my antiquity was also to blame. I had left my hearing aids back in the nursing home. Nursing home was a terrible name for that place. It had nothing to do with nursing. English is a language of meshuga people where nursing can mean the baby at the breast, the lady in white who tends to the wounded, and a place to hide the half dead and forgotten, where they light the halls with a blazing light that screams, You’re still here! Don’t go anywhere! We’ve got you!

  It was a relief to be in the half darkness of the woods even if it was only a degree or two cooler. What does a breeze in hell get you? Someone asked that question once. I can’t remember the context, although I can imagine quite a few, a crumb for the starving, a piece of cotton on a gaping wound, a kiss for the dying, a breeze in hell. Julius and I, we knew what it meant to be offered too little, but the people at this wedding—whose wedding was it?—they did not know that. They would say thank you to be polite and toss the breeze, the cotton, the kiss, over their shoulders, smile conspiratorially, acknowledging the effort as if it were charming.

  It never really got hot in Hesse. I didn’t know heat until I came to America and burned my skin one day at the beach in New Jersey. In Hesse, there was a river outside of town with a rocky beach and tiny purple snail shells where we used to go to for swimming. The goyim ate snails, not the Jews, but these snails were too tiny to be eaten by anything but the hungriest and most desperate birds. The water was cold. Ai was it cold! It never bothered my brothers, but Eva made a great show of dashing in and running out. David coaxed us in, his arm outstretched; he held Eva with one hand and Levi with the other, because Levi was deaf and my mother assumed this made other things difficult for him. In fact, once he was in, Levi was a great swimmer. A regular fish, the one word of English I spoke when I came to America because it is the same in Yiddish. Fisch. Fish.

  Once at dinner in a Chinese restaurant in New York, I saw a little boy tapping on a tank full of orange fish. He tapped and tapped and tapped and made faces, and Julius finally had to get up and stop him. I asked him, Why, was it bothering him? And he said, No, it was bothering the fish. How would it bother the fish? I asked. They’re deaf. Fish are not deaf, Rachel. They hear things we can’t hear, movement and the shift of waves, and that boy’s fingers on the glass were probably like an earthquake to them. I was embarrassed; I stopped going to school when the war started when I was eight years old, so what do I know from books? I did go to some classes here and there in the displaced persons camp after the war, but by then, I was a teenager and—like when I rode a bicycle, something else I learned too late in life—I was never very comfortable with reading and writing, especially in English, which was my fifth language after Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, and German. If I had gone to school, I would have known that fish could hear. I would have known that Bach was a German but Mendelssohn was a Jew. I would have known that the heart does not actually control our emotions and that when we feel it breaking that’s the brain telling the heart to ache because we are knowing sadness.

  Levi was a fish. He swam strongly, and Eva, once in the water, bobbed and danced there, but it was too cold for me, as small and skinny as I was. The water cut into me, and the stones were sharp on my feet. I hurried out, and the air was like a cold cage because it never got that hot in Hesse even in July under a cloudless sky with the sun as yellow as an egg yolk. It was hot now, though, and I found a little stream, not a river, not even a creek. It was a gash in my path to the end of the world, but it seemed to have been put there just for me, a chance to rest and cool off before I continued on my journey. It was down a gully, but someone had been kind enough to put steps here, made of stone, with a railing of a twisted green vine. I held on and lowered myself down. The water was clear, but at the bottom, despite the waterfall in my eye, I could see mud and bubbles so I knew something was living there, deep and buried. I took my shoes off and stepped in, watched the cool water make eddies around my ankles. The bottom of the stream was sandy and it glittered in the weak sun. The woods were absolutely silent. When I looked up, I could still see my destination, the end of the world, sloping upward, not down over a horizon but up to a white sky that would lead me, not to heaven, there is no heaven, but to rest. Standing in the stream with my feet sinking deeper so now I felt the sand around my ankles, I could have been anywhere: America where airplanes soar overhead and cars honk, or in the north of Israel where the desert turns to mountains and forest, or in Germany where the tree trunks are so thick that Eva, Levi, and I would have to link hands and stretch out our arms to get around one. This was a trap. I knew it. Something was pulling me down, deeper than my ankles, almost past my calves. The hem of my dress was wet. It was a pink dress. I found it in my closet one day. I would never buy myself such a dress. When I was a little girl, I always wanted a pink dress, or a red one, or a yellow one, but it was not practical. My mother bought me dresses in navy blue and gray, and when I said they were ugly, my mother said, The dress should be ugly because the girl is so pretty. She tied my hair back, and said, Maybe I will buy you a beautiful dress, like a princess would wear, but then I would have to cut off your hair because too much beauty brings the evil eye. Too much beauty brings the evil eye. It’s too lovely here to be real.

  There was music coming from somewhere. Bach or the Jew Mendelssohn who wrote the “Wedding March.” I looked up through the trees to see black birds crawling across the white sky. Their talons shredded the sky. The sky is paper. The earth is nothing but sand and water, stone and salt, as are we humans. Julius once told me that the body is almost all water; throw in a little salt, some minerals and electricity, and that’s all it takes to make a human being. God made us from the water, dirt, and salt of the earth, and we go back to the earth. In these trees and leaves and animals are the souls of the dead. If I wait long enough, they will pull their roots from the ground and come for me. Come to me dancing. I am going to wait here for that moment. Julius will find me here. So will my mother and my sister, my father and my brothers. Find me here, please. I have been waiting for so long.

  I abandoned my quest for the highway. It was too hard. The streets all had the same na
me. River Place, River Edge, River Drive, the place of rivers, the edge of rivers, the drive of rivers. I kept making wrong turns, kept reaching dead ends, cul-de-sacs, coal-de-sacs, sacks of coal. I found myself walking in circles under the blazing hot sun while a sprinkler made fun of me: fool, fool, fool, fooooooool. I screamed, and two kids ran inside the house, banged the door shut so loudly that the mailboxes shook. My shirt was soaked with sweat. I took off my coat, threw it into someone’s yard, then the tie, a new blue tie my mom gave me to wear to Elizabeth’s wedding. My feet were sloshing in my shoes. I had to take them off too. I stuffed them into a mailbox that stood at the end of a long driveway leading up to a redbrick house. I wondered what the people who lived there would think when they found the shoes—because they were nice shoes, expensive, Johnston & Murphy. They’d have to think that whoever wore these shoes was a lucky guy. Someone loved him enough to buy him expensive shoes, or maybe that the son of a bitch was just plain rich, not the type who has to worry when he hands over his credit card. Rich enough that when he gets a scuff on these shoes or steps in dog shit he can just throw them away and buy another pair. There wasn’t any dog shit on the shoes when I stuffed them in the mailbox. I’m not that big of an asshole.

  People were staring at me. Cars slowed down to check me out. A black Mercedes followed me for several minutes, then pretended to turn into a driveway. The windows were tinted. I couldn’t look in, but I knew they were watching me. I heard a siren far away. The Mercedes guy must have called the police. They would never believe I was innocent. The sirens were far away. How stupid were the cops to turn on their sirens and let me know they were coming! I ducked into the woods. I knew those woods. I used to go there when I was a kid. The other boys in the neighborhood and I used to take off our shirts, paint stripes on our chests and faces with red clay, and whoop like warriors. We would divide up, stalk each other, tackle from behind, roll down over the dead leaves and pinecones, and crash into trees and mud puddles and anthills. War was our default game. When did it stop being war? Never, really. The boys were men, but we were all still locked in battle, fighting for the pretty girl, the house, the car, the home, to say I’ve got the biggest dick and the hottest chick. If you didn’t want to fight, you’d get tackled unless you ran home and locked the door or found a really, really good hiding place and stayed there until dusk, when the streetlights came on and the warriors had been called home and scrubbed clean.

  Then you could come out. Then you could watch the fireflies float in the inky blue sky, higher and higher until they blended in with the stars. Someone told me once that stars were made of fireflies. I was a little boy. I think it was one of my babysitters, one of those pretty girls who used to tuck me in at night, and then I would sneak out and watch her brush her hair and talk on the phone. Not every firefly became a star, but there were anointed ones, chosen ones, whose tiny phosphorescent wings could ascend high enough, past the clouds into the darkness of space, through the millions and millions of miles into the galaxy, until they came across a sticky piece of the velvety sky, and there they stayed, beaming down at us for what might as well be eternity for human beings but was not eternity because every fucking thing dies, the sun, the stars, and the world as we know it.

  I took girls into the woods. We all did. The basement worked sometimes, but your mom or your sister could come home anytime. Your sister could come downstairs and tell you she wanted to watch TV with her friend Elizabeth, and you and Jenna Cook would have to snap to attention. You’d have to take your hands out of her pants and resist the sensation that everyone could tell your fingers smelled like Jenna’s pussy, and your mom was pretty good. She smiled as if she were happy you had gotten to third base, and she smiled sweetly, but she knew; she had to know because everyone could see the shame, read your mind, know that your dick was so hard it hurt. Still, Mom smiled because she just wanted her little boy to be happy, so she backed away hoping that Jenna would at least give you a hand job. Your sister. She wasn’t so nice. She looked the girl you were with up and down, sized her up. Laughed. Crinkled her nose at the smell on your fingers. Then she and her friend sat down on the sofa, took out nail polish and lipstick, and started putting on clown faces, smacking their lips, batting their eyelashes. And then, of course, Jenna or Suzanne or Lori weren’t in the mood anymore. Her shirt was buttoned. She’d scooped up her schoolbooks and was headed for the door. So we made a fort in the woods at a spot where the rocks came together. We laid down some Astroturf we stole when the high school was renovating the gym, then ringed it with stones and painted one stone red. If the red stone was sitting on the tree stump, the fort was taken. When we graduated and went to college, Stan Hammond willed the spot to his younger brother. Some friend of Stan’s brother must have passed on the favor, and so it was likely, almost certain, that the fort was still there, and I was pretty sure that if I could find the creek and follow it I would be able to find it.

  I knew there wouldn’t be a girl there waiting for me. I’d be thrown in jail if some high school girl was there, some girl half my age, waiting to do it with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend or left there, passed out and half-dressed, splayed out on a rock, and offering to the gods what you might have the hubris to take and for which you would be eternally punished. But maybe I’d get lucky, maybe some fantasy of a girl, half fairy, half sorority sister in a diaphanous gown, would be lying on a bed of rose petals. I’m not crazy. I knew there wouldn’t be any princesses or fairies, but I figured it would be a good place to rest, maybe even live like those hermits in ancient times. Despite all the pollution and the fact that sometimes the river bubbled orange with sewage, I still saw people fishing there once in a while. They caught tiny bass, probably three-eyed bass and finless trout, but who wants to live forever? I could live on radioactive fish and berries for a while, and maybe one day a girl would appear, a fairy, to save me. A beautiful fairy in a white gown would carry me up on the wings of some giant mutant firefly. A fairy with huge tits and no underwear—it’s a known fact that fairies don’t wear underwear. Under those gowns, there was nothing, and if you were ever to see one—you never would, asshole, fairies don’t exist—but if they did and you came across one in the woods and she flew high enough, you could look right up her dress, and if you survived the act of seeing a fairy’s pussy, you’d probably be changed forever, and in a good way. The world would suddenly make sense.

  I found a trickle of water that had to be the beginning of the creek. It wasn’t much, but everything starts small and gets big, or the other way around, right? Maybe this was all that was left of the creek; by thirty, I had come to realize that everything was shallow and shrunken now compared to my memory of it. Barefoot, I stepped into the water. It barely covered my hairy feet, but it cooled me, and I watched my sweat blend into the water and drift away in a spiral. There were snakes in the creek, or there used to be, water moccasins and cottonmouths. I saw one once with Jenna, and I threw a stick at it, and she jumped closer to me, though actually at the time I was scared shitless myself. Standing in the trickle of water that passed for a creek, I wasn’t scared of the snakes. If a water moccasin bit me, or a copperhead, or even a rattlesnake, and I died here, that would be God’s plan. That would be the way things were supposed to be, my punishment for taking what wasn’t mine, the naked girl on the rock, the half-dressed girl on the dorm-room bed. I was not supposed to find a fairy; I was supposed to get poison injected into my foot that would travel to my heart and brain; I was supposed to die a very painful death alone.

  Elias Auerbach was running toward me. Splashing water as he ran, Eva’s lover had his arms stretched out to me. Handsome Elias, truly the most handsome young man in our village, who loved the prettiest girl. The picture of him I saw after the war did not do him justice. I showed it to Julius, and said, Elias was more beautiful than a movie star, tall and thin, a little like Gregory Peck but with skin the color of strong tea. What was he doing here? No one ever knew exactly what happened to Elias. We left Hesse;
he stayed. When the SS came, he ran into the woods and was never seen again. His sister told me that she thought he joined the partisans, but others said a peasant kept him as slave labor and turned him in for money after he had worked him nearly to death. Others said wild animals had killed him. Nothing was confirmed, but I never imagined he had come to America. How had he stayed so young? Was it true, what my Simon said, that there were tiny, tiny slits in the universe, holes in time—What did he call them? Bug holes, worm holes?—and you could take yourself out for a minute and a lifetime would pass on Earth and you could return only one minute older? That’s what happened to Elias! He had done it. I called Simon my little heder boy, nezer in the bikhl he was, nose in the book always. Full of meshuga ideas, maybe not so meshuga. Here was Elias Auerbach, who should have been dead, and if not dead, then old, as old as I was, running toward me, toward Rachel Rosenblatt. Did he think I was Eva? No, you couldn’t confuse dark-haired skinny Rachel with graceful blond Eva, Eva with her full lips and full breasts and eyes so big and soft that it was said half the village was in love with her, including the German boys who were taught there was no such thing as a pretty Jew, who were taught that under her clothes she was covered in sharp silver scales. He must see Eva somewhere. He is calling to her—Hey, he shouts. Don’t move! When did Elias learn English? Where has he been all these years? Has he been in hiding, and only just now, when he heard the music, the “Wedding March” written by a Jew, did he realize that it was safe to come out? The birds tore the paper of the sky open, and Elias came through. I understood now. He must have saved Eva too. He was running toward her, not me. I looked all around for my sister, tried to see past the trees up into the paper sky, all the way to the edge of the world where the Earth turned upward like the lip of a bowl. Nothing would focus, but it was Levi and Michael that needed glasses, not me. Thank God, my mother said. A boy in glasses looks like a scholar, but a girl—no.