Book of Numbers: A Novel (26 page)

In 1956, with a popular revolt roiling the boulevards of Budapest, and
columns of Soviet tanks about to roll in[, stretching like the lists for arrest they
were on], Imre and Ilona took Sari on a train to Szombathely, and telling her they were
just visiting her new Gymnasium, slipped across the border[—parted the Iron
Curtain—]for Vienna.

In Vienna they renewed contacts with prewar colleagues, now adjunct
émigrés abroad
suffering from visa problems and
pleionosis.
Jobs were arranged,
nonetheless
[how?], and in 1958 they moved to Saint ?,
Minnesota, initially to
teach a discipline called Sovietistics at the Lutheran Bible Institute?, and then to
Berkeley, to teach Magyar language under the auspices of the Center for Slavic Studies
at the University of California [but Hungarian’s not a Slavonic language?].

Sari attended Berkeley for what she then called her bachelorette’s,
mistress’s, and PhD degrees, initially studying applied linguistics, though under
the guidance of Professor Debora Laklov she chose to do doctoral work in the specialized
field of sociolinguistics, focusing particularly on the confluence of language and
gender [on the genderlects of disclosure? second-language intimate
differencing/contextual integrities?]. “Iceman,” to her, was more than an
occupation, but not in the sense that it might’ve been to her future father
inlaw, while “Icewoman,” which term Eve might’ve used to describe
her daughter inlaw, would become similarly reprehensible. “Iceperson” was
less deterministic, preferred. Sari’s dissertation, “Male without Prefix,
Male without Suffix: Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, and the epicene
misnomer in international(ist) language(s),” became a chapter in her seminal [no,
no] book,
Toward a New “Neuter”: what is ideal about the sexist, and
what is sexist about the ideal,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1979.

In September 1973, Sari traveled to a Reassessing Animacy summit at the
University of Texas, Austin, leaving Abs with their two year old son, and prompting a
visit from Eve. Abs insisted he was managing on his own, but Eve refused to accept this,
and wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to spend time with her grandson
who at the time was two years old.

Eve had strict ideas about the proper way to raise a child, but none
approached the method by which Abs and Sari split their parenting duties: divvying up
the caregiving by tallying, individually, at the end of each day, and together, at the
end of each week, and then again monthly, their changings and feedings, playtimes, and
sessions of counting and reading, to ensure an utterly equal distribution of
responsibilities.
Eve was not aware of this Had
Eve been
aware that her coming to take charge of her grandson would not redound toward
Abs’s total time spent with the child, and that, quite to the contrary,
he’d have to make up whatever time he’d been relieved of upon
Sari’s return, she might never have made the trip.

Eve would usually spend her visits sitting in the den of the splancher
on Fulton Street[, bobbining mundillo, or reading only the best new
American fiction][—Leon Uris, Herman Wouk—]while Cohen slept in his
playpen, or toddled on the floor. But on this visit she decided that her
grandson’s rompers were no better than rags, and that there was no one better
than her, there was no one else but her, to dress him appropriately.

As the Le Vay-Cohens had only one car—a Ford Pinto, which Abs had
taken to work—and as Eve wasn’t able to ride a bicycle, especially not
with a grandson atop, she called for a cab, raided the pantry for supplies, and the note
on its door for the address of Sari’s parents
, whose atopic
dermatitis that’d prevented them from stopping by was surely
noncontagious
. Eve wasn’t familiar with the greater Bay Area, so might
not have expected the hour drive, the traffic, the toll bridge, or the $48 that
got her to Hillcrest Road, in Claremont. After the Le Vays assured her she hadn’t
been swindled
but didn’t offer to contribute to the
fare
, Eve gave them stringent instructions regarding Cohen’s
regimen[—the Le Vays had never been left alone with their grandson
before?—], had them repeat to her his feeding times, on what foods in what
portions, which she’d provided in a diaper bag along with diapers, wipes,
powders, creams, told them she’d be back in two hours, apologized to the driver
for keeping him waiting, and asked to be taken “downtown.” [Why
didn’t she ask the Le Vays to recommend a children’s clothingstore?]

She was let off in San Francisco[, paid the driver another extortionate
fee], went shopping. It was while exiting a Family Wearables on Page Street and turning
onto Market, having purchased a pair of overalls and onesie pajamas, that she walked
directly into a VW Combi, described only as “tiedyed,” its drivers never
described and so never identified—a hit and run [she was left to bleed to death
on the sidewalk].

The body lay at the UCSF Medical Center and, since Eve’s
driver’s license listed her residence as New York, and the Le Vays’
address was the only local contact contained in her purse, it was Ilona who got the
call, and it was Imre who called Abs[—imagine the amount of energy being used in
enthusiasm control]. At UCSF Medical, Abs could identify the body only by pantsuit and
purse. After, he went to pick up his son from his inlaws’, and call his wife, who
convinced him that an earlier flight could change nothing. Finally, Abs called his
father, who broke. Joseph was unable to decide whether to have the body sent back to New
York or
buried out in California, and Abs was unable to tell his
father that there wasn’t much of a body left to bury, and so Eve was cremated, on
Sari’s recommendation. [COMPRESS.]

Joseph never recovered from this trauma. Cancer, the family’s
remontant curse, developed. Colorectal. Adenocarcinoma of the bowel.

Joseph arranged to sell Cohen Cooling Solutions, Inc., to his employees,
liquidate and sell the locations of his two Chilliastic outlets—one in New
Jersey, one in Staten Island—to Lowe’s? Walgreens? and to the Staten
Island Mall (Sears was built on its ashes), retiring to oncologists’ offices and
New York Presbyterian for a colectomy and two rounds of chemotherapy that left him
uncured, without options, and so weakened that he stayed most of the time not at his too
oppressively large splitlevel in Valley Stream, Long Island, but in that small bungalow
he also owned on the beach in Far Rockaway, Queens.

The decline of the iceman was tragic [REWRITE]. Joseph Cohen, with his
cold [business sense?] and warm [heart?], had exerted an indelible influence over his
son, and over his grandson too, who regarded him as a wizard, with the power to change
the elements[, to turn the states]: liquids to solids, to liquids again, to gas.

Joseph Cohen [might’ve been a greenhorn but he had a green thumb, a
man] who grew apples from asphalt, berries from tar. An inveterate tinkerer who [FILL
ALL THIS IN].

Cohen, who founded his career on memory, on the notion that memory
is the future’s greatest commodity,

The time Cohen spent with his grandfather in the last summer of his
grandfather’s life comprises Cohen’s only memory of

Summer 1977, Joseph was ailing, and Abs took a leave of absence from PARC,
and took his only son, then six years old, to New York. Cohen’s memories of that
trip are myriad. The trains submerging and surfacing, the pneumatics of the bus. How
whenever he entered and exited a deli it rained [the dripping air conditioning?]. How
wherever he was, even at night, it was daytime—neon, the commonest of the noblest
gases. His grandfather’s plot: the raspberry and blueberry bushes. The feel of
the house—a cottage, remote, damp, decaying, in no way accessible to masstransit
[the A train back then too?]. Two bedrooms, a livingroom—a tiny garage in which
Joseph kept a white Plymouth
Duster and a workbench. Tools were kept
in pristine condition, orderly. Mason jars had been saved from neighboring trash,
meticulously labeled: “screws,” “nails,” “nuts
’n’ bolts,” “good nuts.”

One morning Cohen only remembers as having been about a week before his
birthday a last issue arose? regarding the pending sale of Cohen Cooling Solutions, and
Abs insisted on going into Manhattan to handle it himself. Joseph, surprisingly, agreed.
He’d never felt healthier. He’d spare his son the
job of minding a child so that Abs would have the tougher task of minding the
lawyer, ? Dubin, a Park Avenue Litvak.

Abs went, and then called from the law office to check in, and since his
father’s positive report was convincing he took the opportunity to have dinner
with ? Ramirez—formerly the cooling business’s supervisor, now the
president of its ownership cooperative—and a few friends from Stanford
who’d just been hired at Columbia?

That evening Joseph took his grandson for a walk on the beach. The setting
both was, and was not, unusual [THIS SENTENCE BOTH IS, LAZY AND RIDICULOUS]. Abs and
Joseph had taken Cohen out for a walk along the beach each day of their stay. Cohen
liked the air. He liked being under the sky. What impressed Cohen the most was how his
grandfather knew the names of all the trees on the way to the beach, and even knew the
names of the rocks and stones, and the game was that Cohen would point at one or pick
one up and his grandfather would tell him what it was and in doing so would bring it
into being, into a better or clearer being [UNLIKE THIS WORSENING AND UNCLARIFYING
SENTENCE]. Joseph was also familiar with the shells and related to Cohen how they were
the homes of animals, huts of protein and mineral, keratin and calcium carbonate, though
they weren’t homes in the human sense in that the ocean creatures didn’t
hire architects and contractors but made them themselves, they made them with sweat, he
explained, or by sweating, and when they outgrew them, they left to sweat out a larger
one, and when they died, they left their shells behind but no other ocean creatures
would touch them because, he said, “It is indecent to dwell in a shell you
haven’t sweated for.” Cohen remembers his grandfather always trying to
take his hand whenever he went to touch something, to take it.
“This is the story of the Jews,” Joseph had said. “The story
of the Jews in America.”
He remembers his grandfather always
removing from his hand that something he’d taken and placing
it back on the beach, placing it, not letting it fall, exactly where it’d been
taken from.
“Seagulls are goyim—they pick up and
drop, pick up and drop.”

Joseph shocked his grandson by telling him that sand was made out of rocks
and stones—“ground down into dust,” he told him, “grinding
is their working”—and Cohen was skeptical. Joseph also shocked Cohen by
telling him that the clouds were made out of the same stuff the ocean was, water, the
same stuff that he and his grandson were made out of, and that water was two parts
hydrogen to one part oxygen brought together by covalent bonds, and then he told Cohen
to take off his flipflops and wade, and that the water was as old as the earth, billions
of years old, and that the water they drank was billions of years old too, all water
was, even the water inside him and his grandson. When they purchased a knish from a
boardwalk vendor and Joseph requested water and the vendor charged him a nickel, he said
to Cohen, “Remember when you drink it this water is billions of years old, that
you have stuff billions of years old in you, and that the chances are that the
molecules, the atoms you’re drinking, have been in you before and so are now just
coming home.” And then Joseph said, “You should never pay for
water—you should maybe have to pay for the cup but never for the
water.”

Then it was fully night and the stars were in full relief and Joseph
pointed out how they too had shapes like clouds, or were as shapeable as clouds. Joseph
pointed out Ursas Minor and Major, the bears, and Orion, who could never lose or gain
weight because his belt had only a limited number of notches, and the clawing crab,
which he said had given its name to the disease he had, Cancer, because the marks it
left on the body were like pincer pricks, and then he said, “And that’s
the lobster thermidor, and that’s the shrimp scampi.”

He said, “They’re incredible, the constellations, how random
they are, how arbitrary—the Chinese think Orion is actually a white cat playing
with a purple bird, or else it’s really the Japanese who think that but about the
Canis constellations, the dogs.”

Then, though Cohen was only dimly aware, his grandfather continued to
invent them: “That constellation,” but Cohen wasn’t able to follow
Joseph’s finger, “is the davening rabbi,” and Joseph waved his
entire hand and pointed out, “the negligent mechanic—there, there, there,
there,”
and “the criminal nurse with the catheter
needle—just here,” and “the east-west yarmulke, also called the
angry beard,” and he encouraged Cohen to find his own and Cohen tried.

Joseph went on to mention Europe, which was “there, then,”
and Cohen was aware that his grandfather was talking about a landmass now and not
stars.

Joseph had never mentioned Europe before, but Abs had, a bit, and Sari, to
be cryptic, would speak in its languages to her parents
, “Ma
and Pa Le Vay. Ilona and Imre, the elders I.”

“Think of our ancestors,” Joseph said. “They knew the
very same stars. As old as water. Older maybe. Then again maybe not. Same
stars.”

He said, “Pick one,” and Cohen, when faced with all those
fantastical animals and archers, those electricians and plumbers, settled on the
shiniest, and Joseph said, “Polaris, the North.”

“Common,” he said. “Never be ashamed of the common.
The common is useful. Common understands.”

Joseph said that just as Cohen had a father, he, Joseph, had a father too,
he still had one. “Other people are unlucky and have never had a father, but
anyone who has ever had a father will have him forever.”