Everything Is Illuminated (27 page)

"What did she discover when she returned the second time?" Grandfather asked. "This," she said, and moved her finger over the mural of darkness. "Nothing. It has not altered at all since she returned. They took everything that the Germans left, and then they went to other shtetls." "Did she go forth when she saw this?" I asked. "No, she remained. She discovered the house most proximal to Trachimbrod, all of the ones that weren't destroyed were empty, and she promised herself to live there until she died. She secured all of the things that she had hidden, and she brought them to her house. It was her punishment." "For what?" "For surviving," she said.

Before we departed, Augustine guided us to the monument for Trachimbrod. It was a piece of stone, approximately of the size of the hero, placed in the middle of the field, so much in the middle that it was very impossible to find at night. The stone said in Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Polish, Yiddish, English, and German:

THIS MONUMENT STANDS IN MEMORY
OF THE 1,204 TRACHIMBRODERS
KILLED AT THE HANDS OF GERMAN FASCISM
ON MARCH
18, 1942.
Dedicated March 18,1992.
Yitzhak Shamir, Prime Minister of the State of Israel

I stood with the hero in front of this monument for many minutes while Augustine and Grandfather walked off into the darkness. We did not speak. It would have been a common indecency to speak. I looked at him once while he was writing the monument's information in his diary, and I could perceive that he looked at me once while I was viewing it. He roosted in the grass, and I roosted next to him. We roosted for several moments, and then we both laid on our backs, and the grass was like a bed. Because it was so dark, we could see many of the stars. It was as if we were under a large umbrella, or under a dress. (I am not only writing this for you, Jonathan. This is truly what it was like for me.) We talked for many minutes, about many things, but in truth I was not listening to him, and he was not listening to me, and I was not listening to myself, and he was not listening to himself. We were on the grass, under the stars, and that is what we were doing.

Finally, Grandfather and Augustine returned.

It captured us only 50 percent of the time to travel back that it captured us to travel there. I do not know why this was, but I have a notion. Augustine did not invite us into her house when we returned. "It is so late," she said. "You must be fatigued," Grandfather said. She smiled halfly. "I am not so good at making sleep." "Ask her about Augustine," the hero said. "And Augustine, the woman in the photograph, do you know anything of her or how we could find her?" "No," she said, and she looked only at me when she said this. "I know that his grandfather escaped, because I saw him once, maybe a year later, maybe two." She gave me a moment to translate. "He returned to Trachimbrod to see if the Messiah had come. We ate a meal in my house. I cooked him the little things that I had, and I gave him a bath. We were trying to make ourselves clean. He had experienced very much, I could see, but we knew not to ask each other anything." "Ask her what they talked about." "He wants to know what you talked about." "Nothing, in truth. Featherweight things. We talked about Shakespeare, I remember, a play we had both read. They had them in Yiddish, you know, and he once gave me one of them to read. I am sure I still have it here. I could find it and give it to you." "And what happened then?" I asked. "We had a fight about Ophelia. A very bad fight. He made me cry, and I made him cry. We did
not
talk about anything. We were too afraid." "Had he met my grandmother yet?" "Had he met his second wife yet?" "I do not know. He did not mention it once, and I would think that he would have mentioned it. But maybe not. It was such a difficult time with talking. You were always afraid of saying the wrong thing, and usually it felt befitting not to say anything at all." "Ask her for how long he stayed in Trachimbrod." "He wants to know how long his grandfather stayed in Trachimbrod." "Only for the afternoon. Lunch and a bath and a fight," she said, "and I think that was longer than he desired. He only needed to see if the Messiah had come." "What did he look like?" "He wants to know what his grandfather looked like." She smiled and put her hands in the pockets of her dress. "He had a rough face and thick brown hairs. Tell him." "He had a rough face and thick brown hairs." "He was not very tall. Maybe as tall like you. Tell him." "He was not very tall. Maybe as tall like you." "So much had been taken from him. I saw him once and he was a boy, and in two years he had become an old man." I told this to the hero and then asked, "Does he appear like his grandfather?" "Before everything, yes. But Safran changed so much. Tell him that he should never change like that." "She says he looked like you once, but then he changed. She says that you should never change." "Ask her if there are any other survivors in the area." "He wants to know if there are any Jews in the remnants." "No," Augustine said. "There is a Jew in Kivertsy who brings me food sometimes. He says that he knew my brother from business in Lutsk, but I did not have a brother. There is another Jew from Sokeretchy who builds fires for me in the winter. It is so difficult in the winter for me, because I am an old woman, and I cannot cut wood anymore." I told this to the hero. "Ask her if she thinks they might know about Augustine." "Would they know anything about Augustine?" "No," she said. "They are so old. They do not remember anything. I know that a few Jews survived from Trachimbrod, but I do not know where they are. People moved so much. I knew a man from Kolki who escaped and never said another word. It was like his lips were sewn shut with a needle and string. Just like that." I told this to the hero. "Will you come back with us?" Grandfather asked. "We will take care of you, and make fires in the winter." "No," Augustine said. "Come with us," he said. "You cannot live
like this." "I know," she said, "but." "But you." "No." "Then." "No." "Could." "Cannot." Silence. "Remain a moment," she said. "I would like to present him something." It then materialized to me that just as we did not know her name, also she did not know the name of Grandfather, or the hero. Only my name. "She is going inside to retrieve a thing for you," I told the hero. "She does not know what is good for her," Grandfather said. "She did not survive in order to be like this. If she has submitted, she should kill herself." "Perhaps she is happy on occasions," I said. "We do not know. I think that she was happy today." "She does not desire happiness," Grandfather said. "The only way she can live is if she is melancholy. She wants us to feel remorseful for her. She wants us to grieve her, not the others."

Augustine returned out of her house with a box marked
IN CASE
in blue pencil. "Here," she said to the hero. "She desires you to have this," I told him. "I can't," he said. "He says he cannot." "He must." "She says that you must." "I did not understand why Rivka hid her wedding ring in the jar, and why she said to me, Just in case. Just in case and then what? What?" "Just in case she was killed," I said. "Yes, and then what? Why should the ring be any different?" "I do not know," I said. "Ask him," she said. "She wants to know why her friend saved her wedding ring when she thought that she would be killed." "So there would be proof that she existed," the hero said. "What?" "Evidence. Documentation. Testimony." I told this to Augustine. "But a ring is not needed for this. People can remember without the ring. And when those people forget, or die, then no one will know about the ring." I told this to the hero. "But the ring could be a reminder," he said. "Every time you see it, you think of her." I told Augustine what the hero said. "No," she said. "I think it was in case of this. In case someone should come searching one day." I could not perceive if she was speaking to me or to the hero. "So that we would have something to find," I said. "No," she said. "The ring does not exist for you. You exist for the ring. The ring is not in case of you. You are in case of the ring." She excavated the pocket of her dress and removed a ring. She attempted to put it on the hero's finger, but it did not harmonize, so she attempted to put it on his most petite finger, but it still did not harmonize. "She had small hands," the hero said. "She had small
hands," I told Augustine. "Yes," she said, "so small." She again attempted to put the ring on the hero's little finger, and she applied very rigidly, and I could perceive that this made the hero with many kinds of pain, although he did not exhibit even one of them. "It will not harmonize," she said, and when she removed the ring I could see that the ring had made a cut around the hero's most petite finger.

"We will go forth," Grandfather said. "It is time to depart." I told this to the hero. "Tell her thank you once more." "He says thank you," I said. "And I also thank you." Now she was crying again. She cried when we came, and she cried when we departed, but she never cried while we were there. "May I ask a question?" I asked. "Of course," she said. "I am Sasha, as you know, and he is Jonathan, and the bitch is Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and he, Grandfather, is Alex. Who are you?" She was silent for a moment. "Lista," she said. And then she said, "May I ask you a question?" "Of course." "Is the war over?" "I do not understand." "I am," she uttered, or began to utter, but then Grandfather performed something that I was not anticipating. He secured Augustine's hand into his and gave her a kiss on her lips. She rotated away from us, toward the house. "I must go in and care for my baby," she said. "It is missing me."

S
TILL EMPLOYED
by the Sloucher congregation, which had become something of an unknowing escort service for the widows and elderly, my grandfather made house calls several times a week, and was able to save up enough money to begin thinking about a family of his own, or for his family to begin thinking about a family of his own.

It's so good to see your work ethic,
his father told him one afternoon before he left for the widow Golda R's small brick house by the Upright Synagogue.
You're not the lazy Gypsy boy we thought you were.

We are very proud of you,
his mother said, but did not, as he had hoped, follow it with a kiss.
It's because of Father,
he thought.
If he weren't here, she would have kissed me.

His father came close to him, patted his shoulder, said, without knowing what he was saying,
Keep it up.

Golda covered all of the mirrors before she made love to him.

Leah H, twice widowed, to whom he would return three times a week (even after his marriage), asked nothing more than his seriousness when handling her aged body: that he should never laugh at her dropped breasts or balding genitalia, that he should be earnest with the varicose veins of her calves, that he should never shrink from her smell, which she knew was like rot on the vine.

Rina S, widow of the Wisp Kazwel L, the only Wisp of Ardisht able to kick the habit and descend from the rooftops of Rovno to a life on the ground—a victim, like the Dial, of the flour mill's disk saw—bit into Safran's dead arm while they made love, so she could be sure he wasn't feeling anything.

Elena N, widow of the undertaker Chaim N, had seen death pass
through her cellar doors a thousand times, but never could have imagined the depth of the grief that she would live with after the chicken bone went sideways and stuck. She asked him to make love to her under her bed, in a shallow subnuptial grave, to take away a bit of the pain, to make things a little easier. Safran, my grandfather, my mother's father, whom I never met, obliged them all.

But before the portrait is painted too flatteringly, it should be mentioned that widows comprised only half of my young grandfather's lovers. He lived a double life: lover of not only grievers, but women untouched by grief's damp hand, those closer to their first death than their second. There were some fifty-two virgins, to whom he made love in each of the positions that he had studied from a dirty deck of cards, loaned to him by the friend whom he kept leaving at the theater: sixty-nining the one-eyed jack Tali M, with tight pigtails and folded-yarmulke eye patch; taking from behind the two of hearts Brandil W, who had only one very weak heart, which made her hobble and wear thick spectacles, and who died before the war—too early, and just early enough; spoons with the queen of diamonds Mella'S, all breasts and no backside, the only daughter of the wealthiest family in Kolki (who, they say, would never use silverware more than once); mounted by the ace of spades Trema O, most diligent in the fields, whose shrieks, he was sure, would give them away. They loved him and he fucked them—ten, jack, queen, king, ace—a most straight and royal flush. And so he had two working hands: one with five fingers and one with fifty-two young girls who couldn't, and wouldn't, say no.

And, of course, he had a life above his waist as well. He went to school and studied with the other boys his age. He was quite good at arithmetic, and his teacher, the young Sloucher Yakem E, had suggested to my great-grandparents that they send Safran to a school for gifted children in Lutsk. But nothing could have bored my grandfather more than his studies.
Books are for those without real lives,
he thought.
And they are no real replacement.
The school he attended was a small one—four teachers and forty students. Each day was divided between religious studies, taught by the Fair-to-Middling Rabbi and one of his Upright congregants, and secular, or useful, studies, taught by three—sometimes two, sometimes four—Slouchers.

Every schoolboy learned the history of Trachimbrod from a book originally written by the Venerable Rabbi—
AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?
—and revised regularly by a committee of Uprighters and Slouchers.
The Book of Antecedents
began as a record of major events: battles and treaties, famines, seismic occurrences, the beginnings and ends of political regimes. But it wasn't long before lesser events were included and described at great length—festivals, important marriages and deaths, records of construction in the shtetl (there was no destruction then)—and the rather small book had to be replaced with a three-volume set. Soon, upon the demand of the readership—which was everyone, Uprighter and Sloucher alike—
The Book of Antecedents
included a biennial census, with every name of every citizen and a brief chronicle of his or her life (women were included after the synagogue split), summaries of even less notable events, and commentaries on what the Venerable Rabbi had called
LIFE, AND THE LIFE OF LIFE,
which included definitions, parables, various rules and regulations for righteous living, and cute, if meaningless, sayings. The later editions, now taking up an entire shelf, became yet more detailed, as citizens contributed family records, portraits, important documents, and personal journals, until any schoolboy could easily find out what his grandfather ate for breakfast on a given Thursday fifty years before, or what his great-aunt did when the rain fell without lull for five months.
The Book of Antecedents,
once updated yearly, was now continually updated, and when there was nothing to report, the full-time committee would report its reporting, just to keep the book moving, expanding, becoming more like life:
We are writing ... We are writing ... We are writing...