The UnAmericans: Stories (11 page)

The room was small enough to take in all at once: just two wooden chairs facing the fireplace with a bed and dresser in the corner; a stove, sink and table against the wall. A mother washed dishes. She had a cinched little mouth like a balloon knot and dark hair twisted tight at her neck. A boy, eight or nine, bent over homework at the wooden table. The mother glanced at me and at my gun and put down the pot she was drying. The boy stared. My hands wobbled as I aimed at them.

I need something to wrap up my ankle, I told the mother. It was the first time I’d spoken and my words sounded loose and clunky in the silent room. And boots and a coat and your warmest hat and scarf. And gloves, I added greedily as she sifted through drawers.

She handed over the clothes and I peeled off my dirty ones. I didn’t even have my tights off when the mother yanked the boy’s head toward her chest, and it took me a second to realize I’d gotten so used to bathing around everyone in the forest that it hadn’t seemed strange to strip down in front of this family.

Henia, Isaac hissed from the doorway, where he and your grandfather were standing. Let’s
go
.

But I couldn’t, not yet. As I sat at the table and tied a clean sock around my ankle, bruised and puffy but possibly only sprained, I looked at the math problems the boy had printed out neatly on lined white paper, and imagined, for just a second, what it would be like to have homework again. Not that I’d even liked math—it had been my worst subject, the one my father had to spend close to an hour correcting every evening. But to be at a table again with my mother, to have classwork and meals and chores—I had wished for my family every day in the forest, but never before had what I’d lost been flaunted so vividly in front of me, and I was filled with a sudden rage at this boy. This kid who had so little, whose father could be dead or at war or just not around, whose school was certainly shut down and whose mother was probably trying to keep up some semblance of routine by making him practice math in the middle of this chaos, and at that moment I resented them both.

What was for dinner? I asked them.

Soup, the mother said.

What kind?

Potato.

Fill three bowls for me.

It’s gone, the mother said. She held up the empty pot she’d just dried.

What
do
you have? I said.

She handed over a potato and three turnips.

I pocketed the food as I walked the length of the room, opening cupboards, rifling through drawers, feeling under sweaters and pants for a hidden stash of
something
.

I need your money, I said.

We don’t have any, the mother said.

Why should I believe you? I opened their closet, overturned pillows, shook out blankets.

I promise you, the mother said, looking at me pleadingly. It was already stolen. Everything was.

You’ll be sorry, I said, if you don’t give me your money. It took me two tries to pull back the slide, but it didn’t matter, I realized, when I was the only one holding a weapon. I grabbed the boy, circled an arm around him and pressed the gun to his cheek. He was shaking, and his fine brown hair was damp with sweat. He felt like such a
child
next to me, his skinny arms tight at his side, his breath coming out in short, hot gasps.

The mother was blinking quickly, and she kept looking at her son, then back at me. A sound came out of the boy’s throat, squeaky and remote, and I pressed the pistol more firmly against his skin. The mother closed her eyes. Then she crawled under the bed, ran her hand along the bottom of the mattress and pulled out a thin stack of bills. It was a small amount, enough for maybe two weeks’ worth of food.

Give it to me, I said.

We’ll starve, she said. Leave us something. Please.

Give it to me, I said again, and when she did, I let go of the boy. I waited for him to run to his mother’s arms, but it was like his feet were nailed to the floor. The room was so quiet I could hear a horse’s hooves clicking past outside. I walked backwards with the pistol still cocked, out to the stairs where Isaac and your grandfather were waiting.

They wouldn’t talk to me as we made our way through the bakery and out the door, where the cold air chilled me through my new coat. We were halfway down the road when your grandfather caught up with me and said, That family did nothing to you.

He grabbed my shoulders and shook me, like a box my voice might fall out of. How could you take everything they had?

But I kept walking. I don’t know how to explain it except that I was struck by a haziness where I could hear his words but they suddenly meant nothing to me—I will always mark that as the moment I stopped listening to your grandfather, and also as the day Isaac started looking at me with a curious, cautious respect. We were back in town, the same route we took in, and as we passed that row of gutted shops, I caught my reflection in a broken window. There I was, thirteen years old and stumbling around in someone else’s boots, looking more hideous than I could have imagined. I hadn’t been in front of a mirror since back home with my parents, I realized, and in that time I had become an ugly girl. My hair was greasy and knotted and so beaten by the elements it was a shade lighter. Black circles rimmed my eyes, scabs dotted my chin and forehead and lips, my teeth had gone as rotten and brown as tree roots. In only a couple months I had become a Medusa, a monster, a creature from the forests of a fairy tale.

I still see glimpses of that ugliness now. At the salon, when the hairdresser finishes my blowout and spins me around to face the mirror. Or sometimes on the subway, when the person across from me gets up and I’m shocked to see that same terrifying beast staring back at me in the scratched, blurred glass. But I want you to know it wasn’t that way for everyone. Your grandfather did the same things, lost the same things, watched that same boy doing math at the table—and responded by patiently sitting with your mother the entire time she was growing up, helping her with algebra and history and even with spelling, though it pained him to sound out words in a language he barely knew. I’d watch the two of them hunched over her homework at the kitchen table and wish I was the kind of person who could be grateful I was still in the world to join them, rather than always standing a few feet from everybody else, slouched in a doorway.

Your grandfather, once the biggest loudmouth I knew, became a quiet, almost invisible man in America, stumbling over his English, bashful in public, shy to ask directions on the street after hearing some teenagers singsonging his accent. He was rejected for every job he tried to get, an immigrant without even a junior high school education. I was the one who found work first, in a clothing factory if you can believe it, back in a hot room sewing in zippers and finishing seams. Your grandfather was humiliated that he could provide for the brigade but not for his own family, humiliated when he finally
did
find a job, making deliveries for a beer distributor, just another tired man dozing on his subway ride to work.

Still, he found small parts of his life to genuinely appreciate: growing tomatoes on the patio, listening to the radio after dinner, taking the train to the city on weekends. And yet none of those things I could ever teach myself to love. Your mother and I may not have the easiest time together, but I’ll admit when she’s right. And though it pains me to say it, she told me something once that I know is true: I never stopped thinking people wanted to hurt me, even when they no longer did, and that rage would rumble through me during even the nicest times. Walking in the park with your grandfather on the first real day of spring, eating at a good restaurant on our honeymoon in Atlantic City, on vacation in Israel, almost forty years ago, when we could finally afford to go. Finally your mother met that side of her family, finally your grandfather visited his parents’ graves, finally he saw his brothers, middle-aged by then, with wives and children and grandchildren. I remember sitting in your great-uncle Natan’s backyard in Ramat Gan, drinking orange soda and picking at a plate of grapes, and right away your grandfather started asking about Chaya Salavsky. I hadn’t heard his voice climb so high since his speeches in the dugout. Did they still see her, what was she up to, he assumed after all these years she’d married?

His mouth quivered on that last word, and when his brother said she’d died a couple of years ago, rather than taking my husband’s hand and murmuring condolences while he blinked back tears, I started chewing on my lip the way I always did before saying something risky.

How dare you ask about her with me right beside you! I yelled, in front of all my new in-laws, in the backyard surrounded by the grapefruit and lemon trees your grandfather had dreamed about for so long. Get over yourself, I continued, though I wasn’t actually angry, or jealous of a dead woman I’d never met, a woman he hadn’t seen since he was a boy. I was simply filled with an urge to fight, so electric and immediate I felt my face flush. So I carried on, even as your grandfather cleared his throat and looked at his shoes and rattled the ice in his empty glass.

And no, I won’t tell you the rest. You can guess. You can go to the library and read about the sixty-four soldiers killed that night in Haradziec, in a train explosion engineered by an unknown anarchist group. You can waste full days in the research room, ruining your eyes scrolling through microfilm. You can read about the attacks that followed—eight more before the war ended and your grandfather and I missed the quota to Palestine and were loaded instead on a boat to the States: not an option either of us had ever considered, a place that didn’t feel real even as we docked at the immigration port and saw Manhattan glittering in front of us. You can even find stories about Isaac, killed a year after we left for New York when his homemade bomb went off prematurely, still on his way to some unknown mission. One of those kids who couldn’t imagine living anywhere but Europe even once we were allowed to leave. Maybe because he was addicted to the fighting, maybe because he could finally go home but no one was there. Search for his story in the library—for that and everything else. But you won’t learn what happened to that mother and son I robbed, because believe me, I’ve looked and looked and there’s just no way to find out whether those two people survived the coldest winter of their lives.

I don’t understand you. All your life you’ve been like this, pulling someone into a corner at every family party, asking so many questions it’s no wonder you’ve always had a difficult time making friends. It’s a beautiful day. Your grandfather’s on the patio grilling hamburgers, your mother’s new boyfriend is already loud off beer, she’s hooked up the speakers and is playing her terrible records. Why don’t you go out in the sun and enjoy yourself for once, rather than sitting inside, scratching at ugly things that have nothing to do with you? These horrible things that happened before you were born.

The news was waiting
when I came home from class: my daughter had sold a play. Not the kind she’d put on as a girl, with a cardboard stage and paper-bag puppets, but a real one, Off-Broadway, with a set designer and professional actors—one of whom would portray me, because this was, Daniela said in her breathless phone message, a play about our family.

I set down my briefcase, stuffed with my students’ bluebooks, and hit rewind. Then I called Katka.

“She’s twenty-four!” I said.

“So?”

“So when we were her age we were living under Husák, and
we’re
not writing autobiographical plays.”

“Your fatherly pride astounds me.”

I wondered how the wife I had known when Daniela was first born—the quiet, sunken woman who read the Czech newspapers in the library every morning and then wrote long letters to her mother in Prague, letters Katka had known would be swallowed by security—could have become this confident voice on the line.

“I’m just suggesting,” I said, “that Daniela may not know what she’s getting into.”

“Well, she’s the one with the play, and you’re an aging man who begins sentences with ‘When we were her age.’”

“Ha,” I said, and after we hung up I spent the rest of the evening calling Daniela, getting her voicemail each time. Finally, just before eleven, she answered.

“Congratulations!” I said. “I hope I’m not waking you.”

“No, now that people are actually going to see the thing, I’m up trying to fix it.”

So there was still time for revising.

“Why don’t I fly down this weekend to take you out?” I said. “Dinner, a show, whatever you want.”

“What about July?”

My yearly New York trip. “I’ll come then also.”

“You don’t want to be down here,” she said. “It’s a hundred degrees and pouring.”

I told her I’d fly her up to Maine, then. It was humid here for May, too, but being on the water was almost pleasant. She’d never been up and it was an easy ninety-minute flight; we could make a leisurely weekend of it, driving along the jagged green coastline, stopping at Ocean Street Pier for taffy. “They have this big machine,” I said, “where they’ll make your own flavor right in front of you.”