Everything Is Illuminated (7 page)

He made a bed of crumpled newspaper in a deep baking pan and gently tucked it in the oven, so that she wouldn't be disturbed by the noise of the small falls outside. He left the oven door open, and would sit for hours and watch her, as one might watch a loaf of bread rise. He watched her chest rise and fall in rapid succession as her fingers made fists and released, and her eyes squinted for no apparent reason.
Could she be dreaming?
he wondered.
And if so, what would a baby dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.
When he pulled her out to feed or just hold her, her body was tattooed with the newsprint.
TIME OF DYED HANDS IS FINALLY OVER! MOUSE WILL
HANG!
Or,
SOFIOWKA ACCUSED OF RAPE, PLEADS POSSESSED BY PENIS PERSUASION, BECAME "OUT OF HAND."
Or,
AVRUM R KILLED IN FLOUR MILL MISHAP, LEAVES BEHIND A LOST SIAMESE CAT OF FORTY-EIGHT YEARS, TAWNY, CHUBBY, BUT NOT FAT, PERSONABLE, MAYBE A LITTLE FAT, ANSWERS TO "METHUSELAH," OK, FAT AS SHIT. IF FOUND, FREE TO KEEP
. Sometimes he would rock her to sleep in his arms, and read her left to right, and know everything he needed to know about the world. If it wasn't written on her, it wasn't important to him.

Yankel had lost two babies, one to fever and the other to the industrial flour mill, which had taken a shtetl member's life every year since it first opened. He had also lost a wife, not to death but to another man. He had returned from an afternoon at the library to find a note covering the
SHALOM!
of their home's welcome mat:
I had to do it for myself.

Lilla F fingered the soil around one of her daisies. Bitzl Bitzl stood by his kitchen window, pretending to scrub the counter clean. Shloim W peered through the upper bulb of one of the hourglasses with which he could no longer bring himself to part. No one said anything as Yankel read the note, and no one ever said anything afterward, as if the disappearance of his wife weren't the slightest bit unusual, or as if they hadn't noticed that he had been married at all.

Why couldn't she have slid it under the door?
he wondered.
Why couldn't she have folded it?
It looked just like any other note she would leave him, like,
Could you try to fix the broken knocker?
or
I'll be back soon, don't worry.
It was so strange to him that such a different kind of note—
I had to do it for myself—
could look exactly the same: trivial, mundane, nothing. He could have hated her for leaving it there in plain sight, and he could have hated her for the plainness of it, a message without adornment, without any small clue to indicate that yes, this is important, yes, this is the most painful note I've ever written, yes, I would sooner die than have to write this again. Where were the dried teardrops? Where was the tremor in the script?

But his wife was his first and only love, and it was the nature of those from the tiny shtetl to forgive their first and only loves, so he forced himself to understand, or pretend to understand. He never once blamed her for fleeing to Kiev with the traveling and mustachioed bureaucrat who was called in to help mediate the messy proceedings of Yankel's shameful trial; the bureaucrat could promise to provide for her future, could take her away from everything, move her to someplace quieter, without thinking, without confessions or plea-bargaining. No, that's not it. Without Yankel. She wanted to be without Yankel.

He spent the next weeks blocking scenes of the bureaucrat fucking his wife. On the floor with cooking ingredients. Standing, with socks still on. In the grass of the yard of their new and immense house. He imagined her making noises she never made for him and feeling pleasures he could never provide because the bureaucrat was a man, and he was not a man.
Does she suck his penis?
he wondered.
I know this is a silly thought, a thought that will only bring me pain, but I can't free myself of it. And when she sucks his penis, because she must, what is he doing? Is he pulling her hair back to watch? Is he touching her chest? Is he thinking of someone else? I'll kill him if he is.

With the shtetl still watching—Lilla still fingering, Bitzl Bitzl still scrubbing, Shloim still pretending to measure time with sand—he folded the note into a teardrop shape, slid it into his lapel, and went inside.
I don't know what to do,
he thought.
I should probably kill myself.

He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of her making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either. So he tried to lose it. He left it by the wax-weeping candle holders, placed it between matzos every Passover, dropped it without regard among rumpled papers on his cluttered desk, hoping it wouldn't be there when he returned. But it was always there. He tried to massage it out of his pocket while sitting on the bench in front of the fountain of the prostrate mermaid, but when he inserted his hand for his hanky, it was there. He hid it like a bookmark in one of the novels he most hated, but the note would appear several days later between the pages of one of the Western books that he alone in the shtetl read, one of the books that the note had now spoiled for him forever. But like his life, he couldn't for the life of him lose the note. It kept returning to him. It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn:
I had to do it for myself.

He had lost so many slips of paper over time, and keys, pens, shirts, glasses, watches, silverware. He had lost a shoe, his favorite opal cufflinks (the Sloucher fringes of his sleeves bloomed unruly), three years away from Trachimbrod, millions of ideas he intended to write down (some of them wholly original, some of them deeply meaningful), his hair, his posture, two parents, two babies, a wife, a fortune in pocket change, more chances than could be counted. He had even lost a name: he was Safran before he fled the shtetl, Safran from birth to his first death. There seemed to be nothing he couldn't lose. But that slip of paper wouldn't disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.

Before the trial, Yankel-then-Safran was unconditionally admired. He was the president (and treasurer and secretary and only member) of the Committee for the Good and Fine Arts, and the founder, multiterm chairman, and only teacher of the School for Loftier Learning, which met in his house and whose classes were attended by Yankel himself. It was not unusual for a family to host a multicourse dinner in his name (if not in his presence), or for one of the more wealthy community members to commission a traveling artist to paint a portrait of him. And the portraits were always flattering. He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

On the advice of his lawyer, Isaac M, who gestured quotation marks in the air with every syllable of every word he spoke, Yankel pleaded guilty to all charges of unfit practice, with the hope that it might lighten his punishment. In the end, he lost his usurer's license. And more than his license. He lost his good name, which is, as they say, the only thing worse than losing your good health. Passersby sneered at him or muttered under their breath names like scoundrel, cheat, cur, fucker. He wouldn't have been so hated if he hadn't been so loved before. But along with the Garden-Variety Rabbi and Sofiowka, he was one of the vertices of the community—the invisible one—and with his shame came a sense of imbalance, a void.

Safran moved through the neighboring villages, finding work as a teacher of harpsichord theory and performance, a perfume consultant (feigning deafness and blindness to grant himself some legitimacy in the absence of references), and even an ill-starred stint as the world's worst fortuneteller—
I'm not going to lie and tell you that the future is full of promise
... He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness.
I am not sad,
he would repeat to himself over and over,
I am not sad.
As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others—the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.
I am not sad. I am not sad.
Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else.
I am not sad.

After three years he returned to the shtetl—I am the final piece of proof that all citizens who leave eventually return—and lived a quiet life like a Sloucher fringe, sewn to the sleeve of Trachimbrod, forced to wear that horrible bead around his neck as a mark of his shame. He changed his name to Yankel, the name of the bureaucrat who ran away with his wife, and asked that no one ever call him Safran again (although he thought he heard that name every now and then, muttered behind his back). Many of his old clients returned to him, and while they refused to pay the rates of his heyday, he was nevertheless able to reestablish himself in the shtetl of his birth—as all who are exiled eventually try to do.

When the black-hatted men gave him the baby, he felt that he too was only a baby, with a chance to live without shame, without need of consolation for a life lived wrong, a chance to be again innocent, simply and impossibly happy. He named her Brod, after the river of her curious birth, and gave her a string necklace of her own, with a tiny abacus bead of her own, so she would never feel out of place in what would be her family.

As my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother grew, she remembered, of course, nothing, and was told nothing. Yankel made up a story about her mother's early death—
painless, in childbirth
—and answered the many questions that arose in the way he felt would cause her the least pain. It was her mother who gave her those beautiful big ears. It was her mother's sense of humor that all of the boys admired so much in her. He told Brod of vacations he and his wife had taken (when she pulled a splinter from his heel in Venice, when he sketched a red-pencil portrait of her in front of a tall fountain in Paris), showed her love letters they had sent each other (writing with his left hand those from Brod's mother), and put her to bed with stories of their romance.

Was it love at first sight, Yankel?

I loved your mother even before seeing her—it was her smell!

Tell me about what she looked like again.

She looked like you. She was beautiful, with those mismatched eyes, like you. One blue, one brown, like yours. She had your strong cheekbones and also your soft skin.

What was her favorite book?

Genesis, of course.

Did she believe in God?

She would never tell me.

How long were her fingers?

This long.

And her legs?

Like this.

Tell me again about how she would blow on your face before she kissed you.

Well that's just it, she would blow on my lips before she kissed me, like I was some very hot food and she was going to eat me!

Was she funny? Funnier than me?

She was the funniest person in the world. Exactly like you.

S
he was beautiful?

It was inevitable: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too real chest, making his widower's remembrances that much more convincing and his pain that much more real. He felt that he had lost her. He
had
lost her. At night he would reread the letters that she had never written him.

Dearest Yankel,

I'll be home to you soon, so there's no need for you to carry on with your missing me so much, however sweet it may be. You're so silly. Do you know that? Do you know how silly you are? Maybe that's why I love you so much, because I'm also silly.

Things are wonderful here. It's very beautiful, just as you promised it would be. The people have been kind, and I'm eating well, which I only mention because I know that you're always worried about me taking good enough care of myself. Well I am, so don't worry.

I really miss you. It's just about unbearable. Every moment of every day I think about your absence, and it almost kills me. But of course I'll be back with you soon, and will not have to miss you, and will not have to know that something, everything, is missing, that what is here is only what is not here. I kiss my pillow before I go to sleep and imagine it's you. It sounds like something you might do, I know. That's probably why I do it.

It almost worked. He had repeated the details so many times that it was nearly impossible to distinguish them from the facts. But the real note kept returning to him, and that, he was sure, was what kept him from that most simple and impossible thing: happiness.
I had to do it for myself.
Brod discovered it one day when she was only a few years old. It had found its way into her right pocket, as if the note had a mind of its own, as if those seven scribbled words were capable of wanting to inflict reality.
I had to do it for myself.
She either sensed the immense importance of it or deemed it entirely unimportant, because she never mentioned it to Yankel, but put it on his bedside table, where he would find it that night after rereading another letter that was not from her mother, not from his wife.
I had to do it for myself.