Paige was simply stunned, and I remember looking at Sándor, for help, because he really did like Paige, you know, and always listened so seriously to all those ideas and opinions of hers—but instead he just made that little bow and said something to the effect that he himself could see clearly into his future, by looking at his hand or by not looking at his hand, that it was the past that was opaque, it was the past that only special insight could reveal, and as for what was going to happen tomorrow, I think he said, that was something anyone at all could see if he would only consult his memory of what had happened yesterday, and now, if we would excuse him…
Of course by then I could feel it on my skin, in my body. But Paige was simply lost. Everything was happening so fast, and she was talking and talking, something, something about the Gypsies, didn’t you adore them? didn’t you love to see them, at least, and talk to them?
And obviously it was to pacify her that you grabbed her hand and looked at her palm and said—goodness knows what you said, yourself—that yes, you’d known some, you’d learned all sorts of this or that: I see a concert hall…I remember you saying, and then Voitek saying, This guy sees a concert hall; I see a two-car garage in Bronxville…
Of course he’d intended no more than a flippant little end to the business, I’m sure, but instead of sealing something shut, it tore something open, and where was Voitek then?
Where were we all? And how many people were in that room? Millions, yes? Literally millions of people had been there all that time, just waiting to be recognized.
And who, in particular, was Voitek seeing, I wonder, in the white stillness of your face, when he started to scream, yes you adored them, “adored” them, shit, shit, opportunist, coward, or whatever it was, exactly, until it became really impossible to make it out because it was all in Polish, I guess, except for a word here and there of German.
Thank heavens for Lili, yes, Peter? Because you didn’t even have the presence of mind to duck. And thank heavens, too, that evidently Voitek had some dim awareness it was Lili, out of all that vast crowd, who’d touched his arm. Otherwise, he would have killed her, I’m sure, within moments.
Was it I who went to the door? Usually that’s how I remember it, but sometimes in my memory it was you. Actually, I suppose, it could have been any of us, but usually I remember myself, threading my way toward the pounding on the door through the whirlwind of debris that had just been our possessions, and the curiously weightless way it was flying around, as though our apartment had only been waiting for one touch to send it wheeling, in splinters, through the air.
But the thing I always remember in exactly the same way is how Mrs. Spiegel just stood there in the doorway as those guys tore in and tackled Voitek. I’m sure neither Lili nor Sándor ever forgot it, either—the uniforms, the truncheons, the sound of Voitek’s head as it hit the wall; the utter absence of expression on Mrs. Spiegel’s face…
And what was I thinking as I watched Paige cry? I was thinking about the way she looked, crying. I wouldn’t have imagined that something so extreme, so complete, could happen to someone’s face from the inside. Paige’s pretty face—where was it?
I wonder if she ever noted that she got her date with Sándor. Because I gathered, eventually, that after he called her mother, Sándor took Paige to the coffee shop to wait for the driver, and the two of them had a soda.
He certainly did his best to get me out of the wreckage, too. And if you hadn’t offered to stay with me, I would have had to leave. But how could I have left? I knew Lili would go to her room. I knew she would, and she did, and then there I was, evaporating, and she was on the other side of the wall, unreachable, spiraling back down…
I guess I never really had a chance to thank you. But obviously you understood how serious I was when I asked you to leave me alone and go check on Lili. I know it took courage, Peter, to open that door and go in.
And once you had—do you know?—I calmed right down. I stopped shaking, and that blinding silence dimmed. I raised my head and opened my eyes. There was the world, all around me—the sky, the earth, a bird, a voice…
Did it ever occur to you to wonder what happened when Sándor came back? Well, he looked around mildly for a moment, and he asked how I was. I realized I was holding a book you’d stuck in my hands when you’d gone in to see Lili. I was fine, I said. And Lili? What about Lili? And Lili was fine, too.
Sándor glanced at Lili’s door. “She’s all right,” I said. “Really. She’s fine.”
“Yes?” he said, and hesitated. “Well. So, what would you say to a movie?”
Lili was perfectly serene when I came in for breakfast the next morning—as serene as you found her when you eventually joined us yourself, looking disheveled and mightily confused. I hope I didn’t snicker, Peter, when she said she was glad you’d stuck around, that there was a lot of cleaning up to do.
You, though! You were really insufferable, there, for a while, were you aware of that? I don’t know who you thought you were—my brother? my father?
I suppose you were just panicked, really. These days no one bothers even to remark on a very young man and an older woman, but it certainly was a novelty back then.
With all due respect, Peter, I have to say that I don’t really attribute Lili’s happiness in those days to any individual qualities of yours; no doubt any pretentious twenty-one-year-old Hungarian would have done as well.
But I very much doubt that anyone else at all could have parlayed, as you eventually did, some translations and what amounted to a small essay into so much celebrity for Sándor (and celebrity, consequently, my point is, for…well, you get my point, I’m sure).
Of course it was just one of those moments, wasn’t it, when attention was on such things, when even writing as rarified as Sándor’s was likely to be hijacked—and by just about anyone. Absolutely every poor shnook seemed to be out there scrounging up some piece of art with which to beat up some ideological adversary or intellectual competitor, something that could be said to validate some thesis, or buttress some argument, or represent some something or other—an indictment of totalitarianism, or an indictment of repressive capitalism, or these particular currents of psychoanalytic thought, or those particular currents of Marxist thought, or an esthetic of the elite, or an esthetic of the people, or currents of Jewish mysticism, or an expression of Christian acceptance, or an expression of Buddhist acceptance…
Now, of course, no one wants art for any purpose whatsoever—let alone for its own. But that was the moment, wasn’t it? And you seemed to have a perfect understanding of just how to exploit it, how to take it all as far as possible. Something so very exactly what Sándor never wanted.
Hypocrite, you say; ingrate—Goneril couldn’t have put it better. What do I think you should have done? Surely I can’t mean to vilify you for having had a few thoughts about work to which you were so devoted! And don’t I think a readership deserves something useful in return for its admiration? Besides, anyone whose stance (like Sándor’s) is fastidious high-mindedness is simply demanding that others be exploitative on his behalf. Also, who am I to say that you were in any way exploitative? Were you not, in fact, entirely sincere in your efforts to bring Sándor’s work to a wider and more receptive audience?
Did it mean nothing to Sándor to make contact with the living? Or that his lyric, glimmering salvagings from a lost world were received with deep gratitude? Did it mean nothing to Lili that her life, too, was in some measure reclaimed? What did I wish for them—that they be eternally voiceless, adrift? Plus, where did I think my tuition came from, and how did I think I would have gotten into college in the first place, the way I’d been going on without you?
All right, I give up, you win, thanks. But Sándor? A bastion against Communism? Oh, please, Peter. For shame.
A paradox, as Sándor once said; a conundrum. If no one was listening, at least no one misheard you. If what you made was of no value to anyone, no one stole it and went running off; no o
ne bothered to colonize it and set up little flags. It was his home, he said, his work, and all I’m saying is that it seems very hard, that a man who was exiled so many times over was harried again, and in his most intimate refuge.
I’m not going so far as to say it killed him, Peter. Of course not! It merely exasperated him; obviously it was his life that killed him.
Some months, I suppose, after you’d more or less dropped out of sight, I was just sitting idly, in our apartment, gazing out the window at the dark sky and dreary rain, and I saw the reflection of Lili’s face overlap mine as Lili came and sat down next to me. “Poor Anna,” she said. “Do you miss Peter?”
I shook my head.
“No,” she said, and in the window I watched drops of rain trickle unevenly over our reflections as Lili stroked my hair. “Good. Well, I don’t miss him, either.”
Naturally, no liaison between you and Lili could have lasted forever. That was understood. You were very young—Sándor and Lili were careful to impress this notion on me; your life was moving very fast.
But still, you might have come around a little more often, Peter. Lili would have liked to see you, you know. After all, you were family.
Enjoyable, and even appropriate as it is, to mock Lionel, I do have to say that in a way I’m not horrified through and through that he arranged yesterday’s service the way he did. I certainly wouldn’t have done it, myself, but I wasn’t entirely sorry, I must admit, to see that dark, strange, creaky, stained-glass spaceship swoop down through the millennia to reclaim Lili. Though it was impossible, of course, to say anything of the sort to Lionel when I got up this morning, and there he was, first thing, in the kitchen.
Fortunately, he didn’t want to see me any more than I wanted to see him. To Lionel, obviously, every presence is a presence that isn’t Lili. He fussed around making a breakfast, and both of us pretended to eat it, and then Eric called, to see how we were doing, and to say again how sorry he was he couldn’t be here with us.
“I hope he knows,” Lionel said, after we hung up, “how many people loved his grandmother.”
It is a beautiful day, isn’t it? Lionel was right. Not warm, certainly, but just so bright! The benches along the avenue are filling up with old men and old women, sitting out in the sun—do you remember?—just the way they used to all those years ago.
When I visit Eric in Los Angeles, he takes me driving way out, to those elastic, self-generating peripheries, where the most recent immigrants are hoping to establish a life for themselves, and I marvel at everything, as though we were coasting down into the future.
Ma, Eric says, not every manicurist or waiter here used to be the most promising poet or physicist in Nigeria or Guatemala or Korea, you know.
Well, yes. I do know. But a few of them must have been something of the sort. And then, the point is, what about the others?
These old men and women have probably been coming out in the spring for half a century to sit on the very same benches. They’re probably the very same people I used to see around here in my childhood. And let me tell you, Peter, they looked every bit as old to me then as they do now!
They’re like little birds, perched on a phone wire, cheeping away from time to time in a sheer exercise of being alive, blinking in the indifferent American sun. They sit in the sun, they buy their few groceries, they play chess, they gossip. A few of them must get themselves to an occasional chamber-music concert. I suppose they still read their newspapers in Yiddish, in Polish, in Hungarian, in Czech…This spring, the next spring, maybe one more…
The elevated train still clatters by in the distance, and the old people gaze out through the traffic and fumes as if they were gazing across the Atlantic. If the great empires of Europe exist anywhere now, I guess it’s right here, on these benches.
He seems to be a nice man, Eric, and I think things are working out pretty well for him. Neil was a very good father, I have to say, for what it’s worth. Neil, in fact, is not such a bad human being—he and I just have various complementary horrible qualities. I, obviously, am possessive, jealous, resentful, dependent, quick to censure, slow to forgive…and there’s not all that much I’ve been able to do about it, I’m afraid, other than keep my distance. On my own, in fact, I’m perfectly all right.
I am grateful, Peter (and if we’d had that cup of coffee yesterday, I hope I would have told you so) for the few sentences in your book that pertain to Lili. Because her mother’s jewelry, the silver, the piano, the house—all that stuff must have belonged to the neighbors for a long time now. Or, actually, I suppose, to their children. Except what’s just floating through Europe these days, from one antique dealer to another.
So, aside from those few sentences of yours, what’s left? The challis scarf, a few strings of beads, some inexpensive furniture, bought on Lili’s small salary or given to her by those admirers of hers, or organized by some relocation agency or charity…That’s pretty much it.
Yes, so obviously I’m grateful. Well, I’m sure you know that.
I hope you’d be glad to know that I’m well—that I’m fortunate in my work, that I’m happy enough…
The time Neil told me he’d seen the talk show where there was someone who might have been the person he thought I’d mentioned, I asked him so many questions! What did he look like? What was he saying? Did he say where he was living? And I must have sounded frantic, because Neil stopped answering and just looked at me. He didn’t know, he said slowly; he hadn’t been paying attention. He’d simply happened to turn the show on while he was rummaging around in his suitcase for a presentable shirt, and he couldn’t remember one single thing about whoever it was he’d happened to see.
Oh, I said, after a moment. Well. And I turned away to escape Neil’s stare. There was really no need to have seen you myself; I knew it was you, and at least I knew you were safe.
Acknowledgments
Profound thanks and a big hug from me, too, to the D.A.D.D., Berline, and Joachim Sartorius; profound thanks and respectful salutes to both the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and thanks, hugs, and salutes to Amy Hotch, Andras Nagy, and Libby Titus.
Twilight of the Superheroes
For my darling Wall
Twilight of the Superheroes
Nathaniel Recalls the Miracle
The grandchildren approach.
Nathaniel can make them out dimly in the shadows. When it’s time, he’ll tell them about the miracle.
It was the dawn of the new millennium, he’ll say. I was living in the Midwest back then, but my friends from college persuaded me to come to New York.
I arrived a few days ahead of the amazing occasion, and all over the city there was an atmosphere of feverish anticipation. The year two thousand! The new millennium! Some people thought it was sure to be the end of the world. Others thought we were at the threshold of something completely new and better. The tabloids carried wild predictions from celebrity clairvoyants, and even people who scoffed and said that the date was an arbitrary and meaningless one were secretly agitated. In short, we were suddenly aware of ourselves standing there, staring at the future blindfolded.
I suppose, looking back on it, that all the commotion seems comical and ridiculous. And perhaps you’re thinking that we churned it up to entertain ourselves because we were bored or because our lives felt too easy—trivial and mundane. But consider: ceremonial occasions, even purely personal ones like birthdays or anniversaries, remind us that the world is full of terrifying surprises and no one knows what even the very next second will bring!
Well, shortly before the momentous day, a strange news item appeared: experts were saying that a little mistake had been made—just one tiny mistake, a little detail in the way computers everywhere had been programmed. But the consequences of this detail, the experts said, were potentially disastrous; tiny as it was, the detail might affect everybody, and in a very big way!
You see, if history has anything to teach us,
it’s that—despite all our efforts, despite our best (or worst) intentions, despite our touchingly indestructible faith in our own foresight—we poor humans cannot actually think ahead; there are just too many variables. And so, when it comes down to it, it always turns out that no one is in charge of the things that really matter.
It must be hard for you to imagine—it’s even hard for me to remember—but people hadn’t been using computers for very long. As far as I know, my mother (your great-grandmother) never even touched one! And no one had thought to inform the computers that one day the universe would pass from the years of the one thousands into the years of the two thousands. So the machines, as these experts suddenly realized, were not equipped to understand that at the conclusion of 1999 time would not start over from 1900, time would keep going.
People all over America—all over the world!—began to speak of “a crisis of major proportions” (which was a phrase we used to use back then). Because, all the routine operations that we’d so blithely delegated to computers, the operations we all took for granted and depended on—how would they proceed?
Might one be fatally trapped in an elevator? Would we have to huddle together for warmth and scrabble frantically through our pockets for a pack of fancy restaurant matches so we could set our stacks of old New York Reviews ablaze? Would all the food rot in heaps out there on the highways, leaving us to pounce on fat old street rats and grill them over the flames? What was going to happen to our bank accounts—would they vaporize? And what about air traffic control? On December 31 when the second hand moved from 11:59:59 to midnight, would all the airplanes in the sky collide?
Everyone was thinking of more and more alarming possibilities. Some people committed their last night on this earth to partying, and others rushed around buying freeze-dried provisions and cases of water and flashlights and radios and heavy blankets in the event that the disastrous problem might somehow eventually be solved.
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg Page 69