The UnAmericans: Stories

by Antopol, Molly

That was the night she’d told him Eva’s story: leaving her native Prague to study art in Paris in the thirties and falling in love with Mikhail Borovsky, the famous Russian painter who wasn’t yet famous. They lived together for many years. Then his father died and he had to go back to Moscow to sort things out for his mother. He said he’d return in a month. But that summer, Germany captured Paris. Eva escaped on a cargo ship to New York. Her entire family in Prague—never heard from again. Mikhail—still in Russia, impossible to reach. In New York she had nothing, knew no one, but she was like you with languages, Mira told Boaz—they came easily to her and she collected them like badges. So with her English, she finagled her way into the secretarial pool at the Frick, and from there, Eva being Eva, began curating shows at small galleries around the city, until the bigger places started taking notice. Then in the early fifties she met Sy, who at that time was enjoying a bit of fame for that book he’d written, the first to so openly criticize Senator McCarthy’s policies, maybe Boaz had heard of it? (He hadn’t.) Together they started organizing some of the early American conferences on Soviet Jewry, trying to garner worldwide support for Russian Jews denied exit visas, and then they began traveling to Moscow. By that time, the government had made Mikhail an official artist, known for his portraits of Party officials, so he was easy for Eva to find. He’d married by then as well, so he and Eva left their relationship in the past. She and Sy and Mikhail and his wife all began working together, Mikhail sneaking government-issued paints and brushes to the unofficial artists and shepherding Eva into clandestine apartment exhibits around Moscow, introducing her to virtually every painter whose work she ended up smuggling out and making known abroad.

  It’s amazing, Mira had said, that my grandmother risked her life for these artists, knowing if caught she’d be interrogated, jailed, probably worse. But then my mom was born, and it was Grandpa Sy who stopped making those trips, it was Grandpa Sy who decided it wasn’t worth putting himself in danger when he had a child, and I don’t think my grandmother canceled one flight. Imagine how that made my mother feel, Mira said—and while Boaz knew that was his cue to take Mira’s hand and whisper yes, he could imagine how hard that must have been, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. The whole story confused him. It didn’t seem possible that Mira had lived twenty-two years and experienced no real sadness of her own—that the stories she shared late at night in bed, supposedly the most painful and private of her life, were about other people.

  Then Mira had faced him. It was the part he dreaded most about dating, the assumption that he was supposed to turn to the girl he’d just slept with and reveal his own dark stories. So, as always, he gave the shorthand: he’d never known his father, he had no siblings, his mother had passed away when he was twenty-one. All the other girls would whisper condolences, then go uncomfortably silent; and Boaz, afraid he’d ruined their evening, would always say he was fine, couldn’t they see he was fine, then fumble for a way to maneuver the conversation back to them. But Mira didn’t go quiet—she got angry. She said it was unfair he’d suffered so much. It was a sentiment he’d never considered—that everyone was entitled to a happy life—but Mira felt it vehemently on his behalf. She sat up in bed, and Boaz remembered just how she’d looked that night, a decade ago, headlights flashing through the window and illuminating her broad, pale shoulders. “The whole thing breaks my heart,” she said. “That you had to bury your mother when you were barely an adult yourself.”

  And Boaz wondered how he could find himself loving and resenting a person at the same dangerous, accelerating speed, because while her attention thrilled him, he sensed it had as much to do with Mira’s ego as with him—that more than anything, she wanted to crack him open and be the first girl to peer inside.

  She’d gotten upset over the wrong thing anyway. He’d spent years preparing for the day he’d bury his mother—she’d battled kidney disease her entire life and was practical about her condition, talked about it openly, wanted him to understand its inevitability. What was hard were the months that followed, after shiva was over, after the phone calls and condolence cards and prepared food stopped, after he’d paid off his mother’s medical bills and cleared out the closets and donated all her clothes to Karmey Chesed and Boaz was left with no final tasks to distract his thoughts. He’d been discharged that year and while all his army friends were backpacking through Thailand and India, Boaz was back in his childhood apartment, supposedly studying for university entrance exams but really just wandering the four rooms, bumping into his own furniture. The only real solace he found was in books. When he was younger Boaz had read to escape, but during those months back home, reading consoled him in a way no person at the funeral had been able to—writers who had found language not only to describe the pain he felt but to control it, their books containing the infinite possibilities of a sadness he feared could otherwise consume him. There was one entire week he stayed in bed reading, and when, on the eighth day, he finally walked around the corner for groceries, he was struck by this: no one had noticed he’d been inside. That was when he truly understood he was on his own. And the thing about being alone is knowing that if you want to enter the world again, you have to be a guest in it—people are doing you a favor by inviting you into their homes for family gatherings and national holidays, and the only way to act is cheerful and easy, even when you’re so depressed you can barely muster the energy to brush your teeth, and to arrive with wine and flowers and always offer to help with the dishes.

  That was when Mira had stood up, and Boaz feared he’d unloaded so much that she wanted him to leave. But she just opened the window, and he listened to cars whistle past as sirens drifted down Azza Street. “No one wants you to fake it,” she said. “You know the other day, when it finally stopped raining and I called you from Independence Park and you were working so hard you didn’t even know the sun had come out? I loved that,” she said. “It was so weird of you to miss the first real day of spring and not care at all.” And he could see that the weirdness thrilled her, as if she were catching a glimpse of his real, uncut self, even all the messy footage he’d worked so scrupulously to edit out. He’d never met a person who accepted him so fully, but he’d later learn all the Kaplan women were like that: they laughed and cried and yelled whenever they felt like it, and expected the people around them to do the same. Yet even that night, Boaz understood that while he respected Eva’s utter ease with herself—the woman had lost her entire family at an even younger age than Boaz but refused to act like anyone’s guest—he had a hard time admiring the same trait in Mira, when she’d simply inherited it.

  He knew that was unfair: it wasn’t Mira’s fault her parents supported her at every turn, sending her to softball leagues and theater classes when she displayed a modicum of interest, doing everything possible to ensure their daughter’s life was a series of smooth, paved roads with endless green lights. It wasn’t Mira’s fault she’d been taught to be unafraid of failure: taking enormous risks even on her earliest translations, reworking full paragraphs, changing nouns to verbs simply because she believed it “sounded better” her way—so different from Boaz, who found himself growing more timid with each project. Even the good things that kept happening to him that first year—the fellowship; the internship at Hebrew University’s academic press that quickly turned into a job—felt precarious, as if he could make one mistake and all the success could be rescinded so easily that he’d be back where he started.

  When their fellowship in Jerusalem was over, Mira asked him to come back with her to Boston. She pieced together adjunct teaching, Boaz convinced the press to let him work remotely, they found an apartment not far from her sister. But they kept searching for cheap, quiet places to spend weekends, vacations, summers together, just the two of them, distraction-free with their work, and finally during one excruciatingly humid June day, Mira put down the bowl she was drying, wiped her sticky hair from her forehead and said, “This is disgusting.” It was a hundred degrees o
utside and at least a hundred-twenty in their kitchen, and when Boaz peered out the window down the street, he could see an elderly couple moving so slowly it was like they were wading through tar. “Let’s get out of here,” he said—and that was the moment, if he boiled it right down, that he suddenly began to feel he too was entitled to better air than the rest of the city.

  A month later they were living in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, hours from anyone they knew, in a house at the end of a dirt road, a house with a porch and a yard and garden with beds already built by the previous renters. He loved the landscape, so different from anything he’d seen in America: the blue rivers and green fields and red barns, as if children had used the most basic set of crayons to scribble it into being. He loved the fact that he could roll out of bed and into his study to work all day, the days bleeding together so fluidly the distinction between weekdays and weekends no longer mattered. He loved the language he and Mira created up there: a hodgepodge of Hebrew and English half-sentences no one else would have understood, but which made more sense to him than anything else. He loved seeing Mira walking around in old jeans and rubber gardening clogs, her entire closet of dresses and tailored coats instantly superfluous. He loved sitting on the porch with her and imagining a child, their child, brown-armed and goofy, sprinting past them on the grass. Probably he got the whole image from a commercial for coffee filters or fabric softener, but he didn’t care. It worked for him—for them.

  For many years Mira had said she wanted children in theory but not quite yet—that she needed to sort her life out first: a stable teaching job, a secure paycheck. But a couple months before Eva’s will arrived, Mira walked into the kitchen one morning, poured herself a cup of coffee and said, “I’m ready.” Just like that. And Boaz felt his chest swell and said, “Really?” She smiled and nodded, and soon after was pregnant. Though she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone so early on, Mira called her family immediately, saying if she miscarried she’d want them to know so what was the point of keeping secrets, and they all drove up to Vermont, Wendy and Larry and Hannah and Peter and their girls, and piled into the ob-gyn office. As the doctor moved the monitor over Mira’s still-flat stomach, Wendy swore she saw a penis on the screen and Larry got misty-eyed that he’d finally have a grandson and Hannah snapped that it was impossible to know so early—and Boaz had felt so blessed, surrounded by family. All that resentment he’d once felt for Mira suddenly seemed so self-indulgent when he imagined his child being born into the Kaplans, this child who didn’t even have bones or teeth or skin yet but was already so deeply adored by everyone in that room.

  There was a night not long after that visit, a completely simple and uneventful night, when they had a fire going and were eating dinner on the couch with a movie on, and he’d had a feeling of being utterly sated, as if everything he needed in life existed right there. He’d pulled Mira close and kissed the soft spot between her eyes and whispered that he loved her, and she’d whispered that she loved him too. “No,” she’d said. “It seems like such a bullshit thing to say! How can I when I also love this pasta, this movie, this fire? We need a different word,” she said. “We need to exhume Ben Yehuda from his grave and ask for an approximation of what this is—this love.” And then she took his hand and squeezed so hard his knuckles popped.

  Looking back, he wished he could zero in on the moment things started to falter, the moment he should have suspected Eric was lurking on the sidelines. But it was impossible. Even her recent bad moods were the ones she’d cycled through the entire time he’d known her, always coming at the end of a project when she was stressed about what to do next, saying she was so far removed from being swept up in a translation that she couldn’t even remember how it felt. Boaz would wander into her office upstairs and find her impatiently watching the view from her window; the sun couldn’t set fast enough.

  Even a couple weeks ago, when Mira announced that she couldn’t take the silence anymore, that they must have been insane for isolating themselves up there, away from the world, there in the Home of the Lonely—even that hadn’t felt alarming. She always made some similar proclamation when her work wasn’t going well, as if the very quiet she’d once craved became a taunting little monster when the open hours of a day loomed. And so Boaz did what he always did when she got anxious: he packed up the car and they drove down to her parents’ house in Boston. He loved pulling onto their wide street, with its Craftsmans and Victorians and enormous leafy trees, he loved walking inside with his own key and dropping his bags on the floor, his coat on the banister, as comfortable as one of Wendy and Larry’s own. He loved the house, creaky and bright and always messy, as if Wendy were still rebelling against her upbringing of white carpets and polished silverware, her walls not covered with famous paintings but childhood craft projects, every single thing her daughters and granddaughters had papier-mâchéd and glitter-glued in the art shed of Camp Haverim over the years. The art was terrible, but Boaz loved it. He loved it all. He loved the pencil markings on the pantry door, measuring Mira and Hannah’s growth as girls, loved the hodgepodge of family photos cluttering the mantel, the endless parade of sweet and dopey dogs. He loved arriving in the middle of the day, when Wendy and Larry were still at work, and napping on the beanbag chair in the basement, surrounded by relics of the Kaplan home, the unused exercise equipment and water-warped Beta tapes and boxes of toys Hannah’s girls had tired of but which were waiting for their kid, his and Mira’s, even labeled that way, for M+B. He slept so peacefully those afternoons, the sound of Mira upstairs on the phone with her sister, a neighbor’s lawn mower in the distance, the front door opening and Wendy and Larry greeting their daughter, then asking, “Where’s Boaz?”—two words as beautiful to him as a song.

  “MIRA,” RONI was saying now, as they snaked up the highway toward Jerusalem. “Okay, I remember her, maybe from the Bronfman dinner? Tall with black hair, looked a lot like Eva?”

  Boaz nodded miserably and Roni said, “It’s a shame she’s not here. She couldn’t get off work?”

  “She left me,” Boaz mumbled. “The question is why I’m here. Eva’s her grandmother.”

  Roni stared. She opened her mouth, then closed it. And Boaz, who had never overshared in his life, who had no idea where that outburst came from and didn’t trust what was coming next, cracked the window and looked out toward Mevasseret, at the skinny trees and sun-beaten hills and distant houses blurring past.

  She let go of her BlackBerry and slipped it in her purse. It was the first time he’d seen it out of her hand; and gadgetless, Roni looked different, gentler: not just a museum bigwig but a wife, a mother, maybe still someone’s daughter. She touched his arm and said, “Tell me what’s happening.” And maybe because he was back in a country where strangers found it perfectly acceptable to inquire into other people’s personal lives, maybe because he sensed all the doors that had been swinging open the past decade could close in on him at any minute, and maybe most of all because he understood that, while in a normal situation Roni wouldn’t even nod to him on the street, the fact that he represented the foundation obligated her to care about his problems, Boaz did something he never would have imagined he was capable of: he turned to this woman he didn’t know at all and started to talk. He told her things he hadn’t told anyone, not even Wendy and Larry. He said he hadn’t even known Mira was unhappy. That when she didn’t come home from work the Monday before last, it never occurred to him she was leaving; all he could think to do was obsessively refresh the local news online for traffic accidents. He hadn’t even been aware of Eric. Of course he’d known she’d gone to Albany for a campus visit that fall, a trip on which he’d declined to accompany her, not wanting to waste days in a sterile motel room while she gave craft talks, particularly because she wasn’t even interested in the position; she simply thought being offered the job would give her more leverage at the college where she already worked. And when it turned out to be an inside hire, the entire thing had seemed to Boaz
a nothing story, a trip that didn’t even merit an anecdote.

  Then that Monday evening, Mira finally called him, supposedly from her colleague Sharon’s house in Hardwick. She was crying when she told Boaz about Eric, a guy who ran a restaurant in Albany where she’d stopped for a drink during that long and exhausting campus visit, a guy she’d been emailing ever since. Nothing romantic at first, not even flirtatious. But then they were writing every week, then every day, these long and detailed emails that felt more like letters, all about their families and work and even their childhoods, getting to know each other with such a focused intimacy she’d forgotten was possible. They’d never done anything, Mira promised, not even kissed, and the whole thing had felt so Victorian in its prudishness, though she couldn’t deny she’d fantasized about sleeping with him—how could she not, having been with Boaz for so long that she could predict every one of his moves, their sex life more like a race to see who came first. But the whole thing with Eric had seemed so manageable, so predictable, the kind of situation many married people invariably found themselves in, because after a decade together it was hard to feel as thrilled as you did in the very beginning, and she’d told herself she had nothing to feel guilty about because all the situation had amounted to was a pile of emails.

  But then she started to call him once Boaz had gone to bed, crossing the yard and climbing onto the rock where they got cell service. She started to feel as though Eric was on her mind all the time and everything she did, even the runs she took in the woods behind their house up to Fox Ridge—suddenly she found herself narrating all of it to Eric, as if these things could only be meaningful if she imagined him experiencing them with her. So they started to meet in Brattleboro, halfway between their houses, just for the day. Eric would plan these elaborate outings. He had two young children from his previous marriage, and she wasn’t sure if he’d been this way before fatherhood, but he saw every afternoon as a potential adventure. He was the kind of person, she said, who’d hear about a good diner thirty miles away and make a whole day of it, the kind of person who loved thinking about new things Mira might want to do and see that she hadn’t even considered. But those afternoons hadn’t seemed worth mentioning, because when she’d told Boaz she was meeting up with some of her colleagues and he’d nodded from his desk and told her to have fun, it really had felt as though she wasn’t doing anything technically wrong. The whole thing had felt so textbook, looking for one more exciting distraction before she began the steady gray march into adulthood, and if she was really going to be honest, this entire crush was a big part of the reason she had finally decided to get pregnant—she’d convinced herself that maybe a baby could instantly bring her closer to Boaz and farther from Eric, cutting off these terrifying new feelings before they even had legs to stand on.