Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  On the refrigerator, unbleached rectangles indicated where the gorgeous, genius, tumorless great-grandchildren used to be—all that remained were three class portraits, six closed eyes. The Vishniacs had been touched for the first time in a decade, moved to the floor, and those photos and cards that once covered the fridge now covered the coffee table, each in its own ziplock sandwich bag. It was for this moment that Isaac had saved all those baggies—washed them out after use, slid them over the faucet to dry.

  On the bed were more piles of things still to be distributed to loved ones. The last couple of years had been an extended process of giving away everything he owned, and what remained, now, was hardest to let go of—not because of sentimental attachment, but because who would ever want such things? He’d had some genuinely decent silver. Charming porcelain teacups. And if you could imagine going to the trouble and expense of reupholstering, a non-ironic argument could be made to save a few of the chairs. But who would be willing to take home, or even to the nearest dumpster, wrapping paper that still held the creases of the boxes it had once covered?

  Who would want the Post-it pads, totes, tiny spiral notebooks, and oversized pens, given as promotional items by pharmaceutical companies and taken because they were there?

  That box of petrified jelly beans, pinched from the kiddush honoring the birth of someone who was now an obstetrician. Would anyone want that?

  Having no visitors, he had no need for coat storage, so the entry closet was a good place to store more of the bubble wrap he didn’t need. In the summer the bubbles expanded and the closet door strained—the hinge pins turning counterclockwise by thousandths of a degree from the pressure.

  Who among the living would want what he had left to give?

  And what interruption of the stillness, what sudden disturbance, awakened the fizz of the last ginger ale in the fridge?

  HERE COME THE ISRAELIS!

  Tamir managed to pull three rolling suitcases behind him while carrying two duty-free bags overflowing with—what? What dignity-free doodie could he possibly need enough of to make his cousins wait that much longer? Swatches? Cologne? A massive plastic M&M filled with tiny chocolate M&M’s?

  The surprise upon seeing him never diminished. Here was someone with whom Jacob shared more genetic material than just about anyone else on earth, and yet how many passersby would even guess they were related? His skin color could be explained by exposure to the sun, and the differences in their builds attributed to diet and exercise and willpower, but what about his sharp jaw, his overhanging brow, the hair on his knuckles and head? What about the size of his feet, his perfect eyesight, his ability to grow a full beard while a bagel toasted?

  He went right to Jacob, like an Iron Dome interceptor, took him into his arms, kissed him with his full mouth, then held him at arm’s length. He squeezed Jacob’s shoulders and looked him up and down, as if he were contemplating eating or raping him.

  “Apparently we aren’t children anymore!”

  “Not even our children are children.”

  His chest was broad and firm. It would have made a good surface on which someone like Jacob could write about someone like Tamir.

  Once again, he held Jacob at arm’s length.

  “What’s your shirt mean?” Jacob asked.

  “Funny, no?”

  “I think so, but I’m not sure I get it.”

  “ ‘You look like I need a drink.’ You know, you look like I need a drink.”

  “What, like, you’re so ugly I need a drink? Or, I can see, reflected in your expression, my own need for alcohol?”

  Tamir turned to Barak and said, “Didn’t I tell you?”

  Barak nodded and laughed, and Jacob didn’t know what that meant, either.

  It had been almost seven years since Tamir’s last visit; Jacob hadn’t been to Israel since he was married.

  Jacob had sent Tamir only good news, much of it embellished, some of it plainly false. As it turned out, Tamir had been doing his own share of embellishing and lying, but it would take a war to make the truth known.

  Hugs were exchanged all around. Tamir lifted Irv from the ground, pushing a small fart out of him—an anal Heimlich.

  “I made you fart!” Tamir said, pumping a fist.

  “Just some gas,” Irv said—a distinction without a difference, as Dr. Silvers would say.

  “I’m going to make you fart again!”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  Tamir wrapped his arms around Irv again, and lifted him back into the air, this time with a firmer squeeze. And again it worked, this time even better—applying a very specific definition of better. Tamir put him down, took a deep breath, then opened his arms once more.

  “This time you shit.”

  Irv crossed his arms.

  Tamir laughed heartily and said, “Joking, joking!”

  Everyone who wasn’t Irv laughed. It was the first boisterous laugh that Jacob had heard come from Max in weeks—maybe months.

  Then Tamir pulled Barak forward, mussed his hair, and said, “Look at this one. He’s a man, no?”

  Man was exactly the right word. He was towering, cut from Jerusalem stone and generously garnished with fur—the kind of pecs you could bounce pocket change off, if there hadn’t been a forest of thrice-curled hair so dense that all that entered it was deposited for good.

  Among his brothers, and between haircuts, Max was boy enough. But Barak made him seem small, weak, ungendered. And everyone seemed to recognize it—no one more than Max, who took a meek half step back, in the direction of his mommy’s room at the Washington Hilton.

  “Max!” Tamir said, turning his sights on the boy.

  “Affirmative.”

  Jacob gave an embarrassed chuckle: “Affirmative? Really?”

  “It just came out,” Max said, smelling his own blood.

  Tamir gave him a once-over and said, “You look like a vegetarian.”

  “Pescatarian,” Max said.

  “You eat meat,” Jacob said.

  “I know. I look like a pescatarian.”

  Barak gave Max a punch to the chest, for no obvious reason.

  “Ouch! What the—”

  “Joking,” Barak said, “joking.”

  Max rubbed at his chest. “Your joke fractured my sternum.”

  “Food?” Tamir asked, slapping his paunch.

  “I thought maybe we’d head by Isaac’s first,” Jacob suggested.

  “Let the man eat,” Irv said, creating sides by choosing one of them.

  “Why the hell not,” Jacob said, remembering that Kafka quote: “In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world.”

  Tamir looked around the airport terminal and clapped his hands. “Panda Express! The best!”

  He got pork lo mein. Irv did everything he could to conceal his displeasure, but his everything wasn’t too formidable. If Tamir couldn’t be a character in the Torah, he could at least adhere to it. But Irv was a good host, blood being blood, and bit his tongue until his teeth touched.

  “You know where you can get the best Italian food in the world right now?” Tamir asked, stabbing a piece of pork.

  “Italy?”

  “Israel.”

  “I’d heard that,” Irv said.

  Jacob couldn’t let such a preposterous statement go.

  “You mean the best Italian food outside of Italy.”

  “No, I’m telling you the best Italian food being cooked right now is being cooked in Israel.”

  “Right. But you’re making the dubious claim that Israel is the country outside of Italy that makes the best Italian food.”

  “Including Italy,” he said, cracking the knuckles of his forkless hand simply by making a fist and opening it.

  “That’s definitionally impossible. Like saying the best German beer is Israeli.”

  “It’s called Goldstar.”

  “Which I love,” Irv added.

  “You don’t even drink beer.”

>   “But when I do.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Tamir said. “Where do they make the best bagels in the world?”

  “New York.”

  “I agree. The best bagels in the world are being made in New York. Now let me ask you: Is a bagel a Jewish food?”

  “Depends on what you mean by that.”

  “Is a bagel a Jewish food in the same way that pasta is an Italian food?”

  “In a similar way.”

  “And let me also ask you: Is Israel the Jewish homeland?”

  “Israel is the Jewish state.”

  Tamir straightened in his seat.

  “That wasn’t the part of my argument you were supposed to disagree with.”

  Irv shot Jacob a look. “Of course it’s the Jewish homeland.”

  “It depends on what you mean by homeland,” Jacob said. “If you mean ancestral homeland—”

  “What do you mean?” Tamir asked.

  “I mean the place my family comes from.”

  “Which is?”

  “Galicia.”

  “But before that.”

  “What, Africa?”

  Irv let his voice drip like molasses, but not sweet: “Africa, Jacob?”

  “It’s arbitrary. We could go back to the trees, or the ocean, if we wanted. Some go back to Eden. You pick Israel. I pick Galicia.”

  “You feel Galician?”

  “I feel American.”

  “I feel Jewish,” Irv said.

  “The truth,” Tamir said, popping the last piece of pork into his mouth, “is you feel Julia’s titties.”

  Apropos of nothing, Max asked, “Do you think the bathroom is clean?”

  Jacob wondered if Max’s question, his desire to be away, was apropos of some knowledge, or intuition, that his father hadn’t touched his mother’s breasts in months?

  “It’s a bathroom,” Tamir said.

  “I’ll just wait until we get home.”

  “If you have to go,” Jacob said, “go. It’s not good to hold it.”

  “Says who?” Irv asked.

  “Says your prostate.”

  “You think my prostate speaks to you?”

  “I don’t have to go,” Max said.

  “It’s good to hold it,” Tamir said. “It’s like a…what do you call it? Not a kugel…”

  “Give it a shot, OK, Max? Just in case.”

  “Let the kid not go,” Irv said. And to Tamir: “A kegel. And you’re absolutely right.”

  “I’ll go,” Jacob said. “You know why? Because I love my prostate.”

  “Maybe you should marry it,” Max said.

  Jacob didn’t have to go, but he went. And then he stood there at the urinal, an asshole with an exposed penis, passing a few moments to further his absence of a point, and just in case.

  A man his father’s age was urinating beside him. His pee came out in bursts, as if from a lawn sprinkler, and to Jacob’s unaccredited ear it sounded like a symptom. When the man let out a small grunt, Jacob reflexively glanced over, and they exchanged the briefest of smiles before remembering where they were: a place where exactly one extremely brief moment of acknowledgment was tolerable. Jacob had the strong sensation that he knew this person. He often felt that at urinals, but this time he was sure—as he always was. Where had he seen that face before? A teacher from grade school? One of the boys’ teachers? One of his father’s friends? He was momentarily convinced that this stranger was a figure in one of Julia’s old family photos from Eastern Europe, and that he had traveled through time to deliver a warning.

  Jacob returned to thoughts of babbling brooks and the slow death of a lower back whose demise, like so much else, he never considered until forced, and it hit him: Spielberg. Once the thought appeared, there was no doubting it. Of course it was him. Jacob was standing, his penis exposed, next to Steven Spielberg, whose penis was exposed. What were the odds?

  Jacob had grown up, as had every Jew in the last quarter of the twentieth century, under Spielberg’s wing. Rather, in the shadow of his wing. He had seen E.T. three times in its opening week, all at the Uptown, each time through his fingers as the bike chase reached a climax so delicious it was literally unbearable. He had seen Indiana Jones, and the next one, and the next one. Tried to sit through Always. Nobody’s perfect. Not until he makes Schindler’s List, at which point he is not even he anymore, but representative of them. Them? The murdered millions. No, Jacob thought, representative of us. The Unmurdered. But Schindler wasn’t for us. It was for them. Them? Not the Murdered, of course. They couldn’t watch movies. It was for all of them who weren’t us: the goyim. Because with Spielberg, into whose bank account the general public was compelled to make annual deposits, we finally had a way to force them to look at our absence, to rub their noses in the German shepherd’s shit.

  And God, was he loved. Jacob found the movie schmaltzy, overblown, and flirting with kitsch. But he had been profoundly moved. Irv denounced the choice to tell an uplifting Holocaust story, to give, for all intents and purposes, a statistically negligible happy ending generated by that statistically negligible of species, the good German. But even Irv had been moved to his limits. Isaac couldn’t have been more moved: You see, you see what was done to us, to mine parents, to mine brothers, to me, you see? Everyone was moved, and everyone was persuaded that being moved was the ultimate aesthetic, intellectual, and ethical experience.

  Jacob was going to have to cop a look at Spielberg’s penis. The only question was on what pretense.

  Every annual physical ended with Dr. Schlesinger kneeling in front of Jacob, cupping Jacob’s balls, and asking him to turn his head and cough. That experience seemed to be universal, and universally inexplicable, among men. But coughing and turning one’s head had something to do with genitals. The logic wasn’t airtight, but it felt right. Jacob coughed and snuck a peek.

  The size didn’t make an impression—Spielberg was no longer, shorter, wider, or narrower than most doughy Jewish grandfathers. Neither was he particularly bananaed, pendular, reticulated, lightbulb-ish, reptilian, laminar, mushroomed, varicosey, hook-nosed, or cockeyed. What was notable was what wasn’t missing: his penis was uncircumcised. Jacob had had precious little exposure to the visual atrocity that is an intact penis, and so wouldn’t bet his life on what he saw—and the stakes felt that high—but he knew enough to know that he had to look again. But though urinal etiquette forgives a greeting, and the cough might have been a passable alibi for the glance, there was simply no way to return to the scene without propositioning sex, and even in a world in which Spielberg hadn’t made A.I., that wasn’t going to happen.

  There were four options: (1) he had misidentified him as Steven Spielberg and misidentified his penis as being uncircumcised; (2) he had misidentified him as Steven Spielberg and correctly identified his penis as being uncircumcised; (3) it was Steven Spielberg, but he had misidentified his penis as being uncircumcised—of course he was circumcised; or (4) Steven Spielberg wasn’t circumcised. If he were a betting man, he’d push his mountain of chips onto (4).

  Jacob flushed (his face and the urinal), washed too quickly to accomplish anything, and scrambled back out to the others.

  “You’re never going to guess who I just peed beside.”

  “Jesus, Dad.”

  “Close. Spielberg.”

  “Who’s that?” Tamir asked.

  “You’re serious?”

  “What?”

  “Spielberg. Steven Spielberg.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Give me a break,” Jacob said, unsure, as ever, to what extent Tamir was performing. Whatever else could be said about him, Tamir was smart, worldly, and restless. But whatever else could be said about him, he was foolish, solipsistic, and self-satisfied. If he had a sense of humor, it was drier than cornstarch. Which enabled him to practice a kind of psychological acupuncture on Jacob: Did a needle just enter me? Does it hurt? Is this complete bullshit? He couldn’t have been serious about
Israeli Italian food, could he? About not having heard of Spielberg? Impossible, and entirely possible.

  “That’s heavy,” Irv said.

  “And the heaviest part?” Jacob leaned in and whispered, “He’s not circumcised.”

  Max threw his hands into the air. “What did you, kiss his wiener in a bathroom stall?”

  “Who is this Spielberg?” Tamir asked.

  “We were at urinals, Max.” And just to be clear: “And of course I didn’t kiss his wiener.”

  “That simply cannot be right,” Irv said.

  “I know. But I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “Why were your own eyes checking out another man’s penis?” Max asked.

  “Because he’s Steven Spielberg.”

  “Why won’t someone tell me who this person is?” Tamir said.

  “Because I don’t believe that you don’t know who he is.”

  “Why would I pretend?” Tamir asked, entirely believably.

  “Because it’s your bizarre Israeli way of diminishing the achievements of American Jews.”

  “And why would I want to do that?”

  “You’d have to tell me.”

  “OK,” Tamir said, calmly wiping the remnants of six packets of duck sauce from the corners of his mouth, “whatever you say.” He got up and headed in the direction of the condiments bar.

  “You have to go back in and be sure,” Irv said. “Introduce yourself.”

  “You will do no such thing,” Max said, exactly as his mother would have.

  Irv closed his eyes and said, “My core has been shaken.”

  “I know.”

  “What are we to believe?”

  “I know.”

  “All the while we thought his Holocaust schlock was compensating for the Holocaust.”

  “Now it’s schlock?”

  “It was always schlock,” Irv said. “But it was our schlock. Now…I have to wonder.”

  “It’s not as if he isn’t Jewi—”

  But Jacob couldn’t finish the sentence. Or he didn’t need to. As soon as the fragment of the possibility entered the world, there was no room for anything else.

  “I need to sit down,” Irv said.