The UnAmericans: Stories

by Antopol, Molly

  Larry came behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders, keeping them there as the first cry, and then the second, escaped her throat. “It’s halfway across the world,” he said. “And you just got back. The museum would understand if you said you were busy.”

  “Right,” Wendy said, swallowing. “I am busy,” and everyone nodded, though just a few weeks before she’d been talking about how unnerving it was to have both her children grown and married, and to only be working halftime now—that it felt strange and decadent, at fifty-six, to begin cultivating hobbies. But as soon as she said it, it turned out everyone was busy. Mira, of course, was out of the question—no one had heard from her in days. Larry couldn’t leave his grad students last-minute, and Hannah couldn’t pull the kids out of school so early in the year—it was only October. There would be other events, they reasoned, in which to honor Eva—many other events, they were certain—and since construction on the museum wing and the absorption centers wouldn’t be completed until summer at the earliest, it made sense, they decided, to wait until then. They could fly out for the ribbon-cutting ceremonies and turn it into a big family trip, maybe rent that apartment in Baka they’d liked so much for Larry’s sixtieth, and enroll Hannah and Peter’s girls, now that they were old enough, in kibbutz camp in the north. So they’d miss this one event, they said. What was the harm, and really, who at this point was keeping tabs?

  Unless—and that was when Wendy turned to her son-in-law Boaz, who had been silent the entire night, sitting at the end of the dining table. Unless he wanted to go. He could treat it as a free vacation, Wendy said, make a quick appearance at the museum, then relax in Jerusalem for a couple weeks. Or get some free research out of it, spend time with that Ladino poet he loved whose name they were always forgetting. And when Boaz, surrounded by all of his in-laws except his wife Mira herself, who, only six weeks along, had up and left him for another man last Monday, calling him and saying she was sorry, but she needed some time away—when Boaz, who had been wondering if there was something seriously wrong with him for obsessing over the life and death of a woman he barely knew, poring over every obituary he could find, then driving here tonight, as if he too had a stake in the matter—when Boaz said he felt a little funny being the only one to attend given, you know, the circumstances, all four present members of the Eva Kaplan Foundation turned to him and said that he was family, always and forever, and that they all just had to be patient while Mira got this last tantrum out of her system before the baby came and she finally had to start acting like an adult.

  THAT NIGHT, the calls and emails from Israel kept coming. It seemed Eva had given every organization she’d donated to a sneak preview of her will and they all wanted to be the first to extend their gratitude. The director of the Israel Museum, one of Eva’s closest friends, offered to pick Boaz up from the airport; the absorption center’s development officer wanted to take him to lunch; the youth village coordinator invited him to Afula to tour the grounds. And on and on. By the time he said good night to his in-laws and began the long and silent drive up I-89 back home to Vermont, he’d agreed to eight site visits for the foundation, as well as meetings with the lawyer and the real estate broker and a full morning at Eden Storage, where Eva had an extra unit no one had known about, filled with cast-off belongings Boaz had somehow agreed to sort through. He’d also agreed to stay at Eva’s house, however creepy that might be, to keep an eye on the contractors’ work before the place went on the market. Most of her furniture had already been sold, but he told Wendy he was happy to sleep on the mattress they’d left for him, that he was happy to do it all. He’d suggested he fly out as soon as possible, and while Wendy kept thanking him for taking the brunt, Boaz knew it was tacitly understood why he was so eager to get on that plane: anything to flee his present situation.

  But when he pulled into the driveway, when he saw the darkened windows of his and Mira’s little white house, when he opened the door and yelled “Hello?” and nothing came back, he wondered if he wasn’t traveling to the one place that might make him feel worse. Not because he’d grown up in Israel—he’d been back half a dozen times since moving to the States—but because Mira had accompanied him on every one of those trips. That was where they’d met, a decade ago, on a graduate translation fellowship in Jerusalem. He was twenty-five, Mira twenty-two. He’d met Eva that year as well—he remembered Mira dragging him along on what she called “the obligatory visit to her royal highness.” Boaz had been excited by the invitation—they’d only been together a couple months and this was the first of Mira’s relatives he was meeting—but as they walked through the hills of Talbieh and onto Hovevei Tzion Street, every home more coiffed than the last, he’d felt a stab of panic. He was from Kiryat Gat, a tiny city in southern Israel that Mira, who considered herself an expert on Middle East geography, had never heard of and had, only half-jokingly, accused him of making up—and until that day, Boaz hadn’t known streets like Eva’s existed: not even the prime minister lived like that. Jerusalem had seemed to him a city where people didn’t simply live on top of each other, they lived right on you, sitting on your stomach, pinning you down by the arms so you had no choice but to smell the soup on their breath and hear their opinions on the bus strikes, the housing crisis, your career choice. And yet here were old stone homes with rosebushes and sculpted citrus trees and gleaming cars visible only through electric gates—not apartments but actual houses, perched so high above the city that even the garbage fumes no longer existed, as if the mayor had allotted these people better air.

  Mira must have sensed his discomfort, because right outside her grandmother’s house, beige stucco and relatively modest from the street, she turned to him and said, “Fine. They’re rich. But that doesn’t mean I am.” And then she did a strange thing: she patted her jeans, as if her entire life’s worth could fit within those frayed, faded pockets, and Boaz wondered if only people comfortable around money felt the need to prove to the world that they had gone without it.

  Then Eva opened the door and Boaz stood there staring: it was Mira exactly, if he were to fast-forward fifty years. The same wide brown eyes and tall, muscular frame and cheeks that would never, it appeared, thin with age. The same face (not pretty, exactly, but stately) and the same proud, purposeful stance—shoulders back, head up—even as she kissed both their cheeks, took their coats and flung them across the mail table.

  “Sy!” she yelled down the hall. “The kids are here.”

  Inside, the house had more of an aged than intimidating glamour, the sofas and armchairs faded by the sun, all the heavy mahogany furniture that had probably looked just right in their previous apartment on Central Park West a little stuffy and out of place in the Mediterranean climate, like seeing someone show up at a barbecue in a suit. The really outstanding thing was the art. It covered the walls from the ceiling all the way to the floor, with pieces he recognized—Picasso’s pencil sketches, Magritte’s bulky nudes—hanging right next to paintings that didn’t so much look like paintings but squiggles on playing cards and tablecloths and sugar sacks.

  “That’s a Rubashkin,” Eva said, putting an arm around him. “They threw him in a psychiatric prison to ‘shape up ideologically,’” she said, making air quotes. “So he did a portrait of a guard he met there.” Eva pointed at what clearly depicted a man being birthed from an anus. She smelled of powder and peroxide, as if she’d just that second returned from the beauty parlor. While Boaz had never been a fan of assumed intimacy, he suddenly wanted to stay there a very long time, listening to stories about artists he’d never heard of, whose fates he’d never considered, as Eva led him from painting to painting, leaning in close as if sharing a secret.

  “Eva!” her husband yelled, coming out of the study, the sounds of a soccer game drifting into the hall. He was heavy and balding and wearing a dress shirt and slacks so rumpled he reminded Boaz of an overstuffed drawer. “You’re gossiping,” he said, and Eva said, “It’s not gossip if it’s true,”
and he smiled at Boaz, as if they’d had that exchange a million times and he knew when to concede, and then all four of them walked out to the terrace, where cups and saucers and a tower of little frosted cakes were laid out. Eva poured Boaz a cup of tea and said, in English, “Hebrew or English?” and when he said, “Either,” she said, in impeccable, unaccented Hebrew, “You’re the only boy this one’s ever brought by, so I know you’re better than the others. Tell me about yourself.”

  “I’m a translator,” Boaz said. Sy’s arm was draped over Eva’s shoulder, her hand on his leg. They held each other with such effortlessness that Boaz was touched: there was clearly so much love between them, even after fifty-plus years of marriage. He felt as if he were getting a privileged view into the future, seeing how the girl he loved would look as an old woman, her own lined and papery hand clutching his knee. “Well,” Boaz corrected, believing he should only call himself a translator once his work was out in the world, “I’m studying to be one.”

  “Oh please,” Eva said. “Say you’re one and act like one! I’m sure you’re brilliant. What are you working on?”

  “A couple stories, from Hebrew to English. And Mira and I are taking a class on Ben Yehuda.”

  “Ah,” Eva said. “You know he built a house forever ago near our old place on Ein Gedi Street, a big stone monstrosity, then died before he moved in.”

  “Right,” Boaz said, shocked that Eva could be so blasé about the inventor of the modern Hebrew language—that to her, Ben Yehuda wasn’t a brilliant, revered linguist but some show-off who’d raised the property taxes in her neighborhood. Boaz was trying to take it all in without gawking: the house, the art, the view, which everyone at the table seemed immune to, as if it were perfectly natural to gaze out at the classic postcard shot of the Old City’s stone walls, the glittery gold dome and the hills beyond, the cars snaking up the Mount of Olives looking, from that vantage, as tiny and insignificant as toys. This was the first time Boaz had lived in Jerusalem, the first time he had lived outside the Negev, and he’d felt, when he first arrived at Hebrew University that fall, that all his years of working hard had paid off, that he’d gotten the translation scholarship he’d dreamed of, that it could lead so easily to a book, a career, a life—that, in his own private way, he had made it. He’d found that everything, even walking outside his dorm on Mount Scopus and buying a coffee and a roll in the morning, felt thrilling and significant, as if something inside him had caught fire.

  But then he’d met Mira, who saw her year there as nothing but another planned rest stop on the map of her life, which had already included a junior year in Cairo and nearly every summer since childhood in Israel, the distance of traveling halfway around the world as trivial to her as the field trips Boaz had taken, as a boy, to the kibbutz water park. It was both exciting and unnerving being with someone like Mira, who talked about Jerusalem with the ease of a native he himself couldn’t fake, loving the architecture, the history, the bookshops and cafés near her apartment and the sweet old couple who ran the produce market on her block, but so sick of the traffic, the noise, the religious lady on the bus who yelled at her for wearing a tank top, wishing Tel Aviv University had as strong a translation program, wondering why Jerusalem couldn’t have one decent restaurant open on Shabbat—no, scratch that, one decent restaurant, period. Sitting out on the terrace, Boaz was aware his excitement at being there made him seem as eager and unsophisticated as a little boy, and so he sipped his tea and tried to act as though none of this were a big deal, though all of it was, in fact, a very big deal.

  Then Eva shifted her attention to Mira, as if she were hosting a talk show and Boaz’s segment had ended. Mira set down her cup and began, to Boaz’s amazement, performing for her grandmother. Sy was between them, his arm still on Eva’s shoulder, piping in now and then, but the spotlight never moved, not even for a second, from Eva. There was Mira, perched on her chair, suddenly talking with her hands, her eyes, her feet jiggling nervously, all that confidence Boaz had assumed was as intrinsic as her breath and hair and freckles, magically evaporated around her grandmother: the one person, he realized, Mira felt she still needed to court. This was so different from the way he’d later learn she operated with her immediate family back in Boston, where she’d walk right through the front door and skulk into the kitchen, finally yelling hello to everyone only after she’d scrutinized the contents of the refrigerator and begun picking at a plate of leftover chicken with her bare hands.

  But there, on Eva’s terrace, Boaz fell a little more in love with her, seeing, for the first time, that vulnerability. There she was, trying to charm Eva with stories, making their year out to be a little brighter, a little more exciting, than it had been so far, describing her apartment in Rehavia as louder and smaller than it actually was, her project with the Arab poet more dramatic than the reality, as if their meetings entailed some dangerous, illicit journey over the Green Line, rather than just across campus in the literature department, where the poet had been teaching for nearly fifteen years.

  Then Eva stood up. She took Boaz’s arm and whispered that he was a keeper, and he was so warmed by those words, and by Eva herself, that as she led him through the living room and into the hall, he hadn’t even realized she was kicking them out until he and Mira were back on the street, clutching their coats, on the other side of the door.

  IT WAS still dark outside when the red-eye descended into Israel and taxied along the runway. Boaz hadn’t slept a minute on the flight, had spent the entire ten hours with the foundation’s site visit materials unopened on his lap, watching terrible movie after terrible movie without even plugging in his headphones, and now, shoving his tiny, useless airplane pillow against the window, he tried to rest for the remaining minutes before the seat-belt sign went off. Only nobody would be quiet. The teenager beside him seemed to be calling everyone on her speed-dial to let them know she’d arrived, though Boaz couldn’t imagine who would welcome that call at five-thirty. Across the aisle, a religious man was having a conversation on his own cell while his children piled onto his wife’s lap, a toddler on one leg and a baby in her arms, the wife nodding yes, yes to a third child tugging her hand, though everything in her face seemed to be screaming no, no, no. That all used to comfort Boaz, being thrust back home before even walking through customs. But now it felt claustrophobic and overwhelming, and Boaz wondered if he was simply in a terrible mood or if he was beginning to crave space like a New Englander.

  Outside baggage claim, the director of the Israel Museum was waiting by the fountain. She was sixtyish and attractive in a stern, no-nonsense way, with cropped gray hair, red plastic glasses and chunky geometric jewelry that could only have come from the museum gift shop. “Roni Ben Ami,” she said, extending her hand and grabbing his suitcase with the other.

  “It’s okay,” Boaz said, trying to take his suitcase back, but she was already pushing her way outside, where her driver was waiting. Boaz slid in beside Roni, and as her car pulled away from the curb, she turned to him and said, “I’ve never picked up a donor at the airport. But I couldn’t let an intern do it—not for Eva.” The sky was lightening, and the familiar cluster of billboards advertising cell phone plans and yogurt sprang into view. It didn’t seem possible that he was halfway around the world now, just four days after Wendy had first opened the will. He still hadn’t heard from Mira—and if Wendy and Larry had, they weren’t letting on. And though Mira had promised the last time they’d spoken that she was staying at her colleague Sharon’s house in Hardwick, Boaz couldn’t stop picturing her at his house, Eric’s house, in Albany. Boaz had no idea what Eric looked like, but he kept seeing someone brawny and suntanned, the type of guy who woke at dawn to do yard work, then came into the bedroom scratched and sweaty with a mug of coffee for Mira, slow and groggy in the morning, her dark hair fanned out against the pillow.

  “You should see the collection,” Roni was saying. “You know how she displayed everything, in that Eva-haphazard way. So yes
terday at work I start lining them up chronologically, and that’s when I realized she hadn’t just been collecting art from that period—her collection is that period. It’s a complete retrospective,” she said, a little breathlessly, and checked her BlackBerry. It kept going off, and Boaz suddenly sensed how important this woman was: so many people working for her, presumably from all over the globe given how early it was, and there she was, carting him around before breakfast.

  “Of course some of it’s terrible,” Roni continued. “Those Rubashkins? But you know your grandmother—all she cared was that it was dissident, outrageous. People might not get that now.” She squinted at Boaz, as if to see whether he got it, and he wondered what she saw: a thirty-five-year-old with bed-head and tired eyes, looking a bit like a delivery boy in jeans and a hoodie, having forgotten, as he’d dressed for the flight back in Vermont, that he’d be meeting people like Roni before getting a chance to shower. “Boaz, forgive me,” she said, “but which one are you again?”

  “Mira’s husband.” He coughed, wondering if those words were even true anymore.

  “The anthropologist?”

  “The family has no anthropologists.”

  “Oh,” Roni said slowly, as if flipping through a mental Rolodex. “The architect.”

  “That’s Hannah. Mira’s the translator.” There was an ugly part of him that wished Mira were there to hear how little her grandmother’s friends knew of her, just so he could see the pain shoot past her eyes. But Mira had always suspected it anyway. It’s like she’s so obsessed with charming the world that there’s nothing left for her own family, Mira had told him once—and Boaz remembered just where they were when she’d said it, that first year together in Jerusalem, during those early months of dating when they’d lie in bed talking through the morning.