Everything Is Illuminated (23 page)

“Then I would never utter another word again.” “You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do.” “Then I would never do anything again.” “She is a liar,” Grandfather said, and I could not understand what was forcing him to behave this way.

“Could you please leave us to be in solitude,” Augustine said to me, “for a few moments.” “Let us go outside,” I told Grandfather. “No,” Augustine said, “him.” “Him?” I asked. “Please leave us to be in solitude for a few moments.” I looked to Grandfather so that he could give me a beacon of what to do, but I could see that his eyes were impending tears, and that he would not look at me. This was my beacon. “We must go outside,” I told the hero. “Why?” “They are going to utter things in se-crecy.” “What kinds of things?” “We cannot be here.”

We walked out and closed the door behind us. I yearned to be on the other side of the door, the side on which such momentous truths were being uttered. Or I yearned to press my ear to the door so that I could at minimum hear. But I knew that my side was on the outside with the hero.

Part of me hated this, and part of me was grateful, because once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it. “We can remove the skin from the corn for her,” I said, and the hero harmonized. It was approximately four o’clock of the afternoon, and the temperature was commencing to become cold. The wind was making the first noises of night.

“I don’t know what to do,” the hero said.

“I do not know also.”

After that there was a famine of words for a long time. We only removed the skin from corn. I was not concerned about what Augustine was saying. It was Grandfather’s talking that I desired to hear. Why could he say things to this woman that he had never before encountered when he could not say things to me? Or perhaps he was not saying anything to her. Or perhaps he was lying. This is what I wanted, for him to present not-truths to her. She did not deserve the truth, not as I deserved the truth. Or we both deserved the truth, and the hero, too. All of us.

“What should we converse about?” I asked, because I knew that it was a common decency for us to speak. “I don’t know.” “There must be a thing.” “Do you want to know anything else about America?” he asked.

“I cannot think of anything at this moment.” “Do you know about Times Square?” “Yes,” I said, “Times Square in Manhattan on 42nd Street and Broadway Avenue.” “Do you know about people who sit in front of slot machines all day and waste all of the money they have?” “Yes,” I said.

“Las Vegas, Nevada. I have read an article about this.” “What about skyscrapers?” “Of course. World Trade Center. Empire State Building.

Sears Tower.” I do not comprehend why, but I was not proud of everything that I knew about America. I was ashamed. “What else?” he said.

“Tell me more about your grandmother,” I said. “My grandmother?”

“Who you spoke of in the car. Your grandmother from Kolki.” “You remember.” “Yes.” “What do you want to know?” “How old is she?” “She’s about the age of your grandfather, I suppose, but she looks much older.”

“What does she look like?” “She’s short. She calls herself a shrimp, which is funny. I don’t know what color her hair really is, but she dyes it a kind of brown and yellow, sort of like the hairs on this corn. Her eyes are mismatched, one blue and one green. She has terrible varicose veins.” “What does it mean varicose veins?” “The veins in her legs, where the blood goes through, they’re above the level of her skin and they look kind of weird.” “Yes,” I said, “Grandfather has these also, because when he worked he would stand for all day, and so this happened to him.” “My grandmother got them from the war, because she had to walk across Europe to escape. It was too much for her legs.” “She walked across Europe?” “Remember, I told you she left Kolki before the Nazis.”

“Yes, I remember.” He stopped for a moment. I decided to peril everything once again. “Tell me about you and her.”

“What do you mean me and her?” “I only want to listen.” “I don’t know what to say.” “Tell me about when you were young, and how it was with her then.” He made a laugh. “When I was young?” “Tell me anything.” “When I was young,” he said, “I used to sit under her dress at family dinners. That’s something I remember.” “Tell me.” “I haven’t thought about this in a really long time.” I did not utter a thing, so that he would persevere. This was so difficult at times, because there existed so much silence. But I understanded understood that the silence was necessary for him to talk. “I’d run my hands up and down her varicose veins. I don’t know why, or how I started doing it. It was just something I did. I was a kid, and kids do things like that, I guess. I remembered that because I mentioned her legs.” I refused to utter even one word. “It was like sucking your thumb. I did it, and it felt good, and that was it.” Be silent, Alex. You do not have to speak. “I would watch the world through her dresses. I could see everything, but no one could see me. Like a fort, a hiding place under the covers. I was just a kid. Four. Five. I don’t know.” With my silence, I gave him a space to fill. “I felt safety and peace. You know, real safety and real peace. I felt it.” “Safety and peace from what?” “I don’t know. Safety and peace from not-safety and not-peace.” “This is a nice story.” “It’s true. I’m not making it up.” “Of course. I know that you are faithful.” “It’s just that sometimes we make things up, just to talk. But this really happened.” “I know.” “Really.” “I believe you.” There was a silence. This silence was so heavy, and so long, that I was coerced to speak. “When did you stop hiding under her dress?” “I don’t know. Maybe I was five or six. Maybe a bit later. I just got too old for it, I guess. Someone must have told me it was no longer appropriate.” “What else do you remember?” “What do you mean?”

“About her. About you and her.” “Why are you so curious?” “What are you so ashamed?” “I remember those veins of hers, and I remember the smell of my secret hiding place, that’s how I used to think of it, I remember, like a secret, and I remember when my grandmother once told me that I’m lucky because I’m funny.” “You are very funny, Jonathan.” “No.

That’s the last thing I want to be.” “Why? To be funny is a great thing.”

“No it’s not.” “Why is this?” “I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. You know what I mean?” “Yes, of course.” “But now I think it’s the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.” “Inform me more about when you were young, Jonathan.” He made more laughing. “Why do you laugh?” He laughed again. “Inform me.” “When I was a boy, I would spend Friday nights at my grandmother’s house. Not every Friday, but most. On the way in, she would lift me from the ground with one of her wonderful terrifying hugs. And on the way out the next afternoon, I was again taken into the air with her love. I’m laughing because it wasn’t until years later that I realized she was weighing me.” “Weighing you?” “When she was our age, she was feeding from waste while walking across Europe barefoot. It was important to her — more important than that I had a good time — that I gained weight whenever I visited. I think she wanted the fattest grandchildren in the world.” “Tell me more about these Fridays. Tell me about measuring and humor and hiding beneath her dress.” “I think I’m done talking.” “You must talk.” Did you feel sorry for me? Is that why you persevered? “My grandmother and I used to scream words off her back porch at night, when I would stay over. That’s something I remember.

We screamed the longest words we could think of. ‘Phantasmagoria!’ I screamed.” He laughed. “I remember that one. And then she would scream a Yiddish word I didn’t understand. Then I would scream. ‘Ante-diluvian!’ ” He screamed the word into the street, and this would have been an embarrassment except that there was no one in the street. “And then I would watch the veins in her neck bulge as she screamed some Yiddish word. We were both secretly in love with words, I guess.” “And you were both secretly in love with each other.” He laughed again.

“What were the words that she would scream?” “I don’t know. I never knew what they meant. I can still hear her.” He screamed a Yiddish word into the street. “Why did you not ask her what the words meant?” “I was afraid.” “Of what were you afraid?” “I don’t know. I was just too afraid. I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask, so I didn’t.” “Perhaps she desired for you to ask.” “No.” “Perhaps she needed you to ask, because if you didn’t ask, she could not tell you.” “No.” “Perhaps she was shouting, Ask me! Ask me what I’m shouting!”

We peeled the corn. The silence was a mountain.

“Do you remember all of the concrete in Lvov?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Me too.”

More silence. We had nothing to talk about, nothing important.

Nothing could have been important enough.

“What do you write in your diary?” “I take notes.” “About what?”

“For the book I’m working on. Little things that I want to remember.”

“About Trachimbrod?” “Right.” “It is a good book?” “I’ve only written pieces. I wrote a few pages before I came this summer, a few on the plane to Prague, a few on the train to Lvov, a few last night.” “Read to me from it.” “It’s embarrassing.” “It is not like this. It is not embarrassing.” “It is.”

“Not if you recount it for me. I will relish it, I promise you. I am very simple to enchant.” “No,” he said, so I did what I thought was the OK and even funny thing. I took his diary and opened it. He did not say that I could read it, but nor did he ask for it back. This is what I read: He told his father that he could care for Mother and Little Igor. It took his saying it to make it true. Finally, he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. What? he asked. What? And Sasha told him again that he would take care of the family, that he would understand if his father had to leave and never return, and that it would not even make him less of a father. He told his father that he would forgive. Oh, his father became so angry, so full of wrath, and he told Sasha that he would kill him, and Sasha told his father that he would kill him, and they moved at each other with violence and his father said, Say it to my face, not to the floor, and Sasha said, You are not my father.

By the time Grandfather and Augustine descended from the house, we had finished a pile of corn, and left the skin as a pile on the other side of the stairs. I had read several pages in his diary. Some scenes were like this. Some were very different. Some happened early in history and some had not even happened yet. I understood what he was doing when he wrote like this. At first it made me angry, but then it made me sad, and then it made me so grateful, and then it made me angry again, and I went through these feelings hundreds of times, stopping on each for only a moment and then moving to the next.

“Thank you,” Augustine said, and she was examining the piles, one of corn, one of skins. “That was a very kind thing that you did.” “She is going to take us to Trachimbrod,” Grandfather said. “We must not squander time. It is becoming late.” I told this to the hero. “Tell her thank you for me.” “Thank you,” I told her. Grandfather said, “She knows.”

There is a sense in which the bride’s family had been preparing their house for her wedding since long before Zosha was born, but it wasn’t until my grandfather reluctantly proposed — on both knees rather than one — that the renovations achieved their hysterical pace. The hard-wood floors were covered in white canvas, and tables were set in a line stretching from the master bedroom to the kitchen, each feathered with precisely positioned name cards, whose placement had been agonized over for weeks. (Avra cannot sit next to Zosha, but should be near Yoske and Libby, but not if it means seating Libby near Anshel, or Anshel near Avra, or Avra anywhere near the centerpieces, because he’s terribly aller-gic and will die. And by all means keep the Uprighters and Slouchers on opposite sides of the table.) New curtains were bought for the new windows, not because there was anything wrong with the old curtains on the old windows, but because Zosha was to be married, and that called for new curtains and windows. The new mirrors were cleaned spotless, their faux-antique frames meticulously dirtied. The proud parents, Menachem and Tova, saw to it that everything, down to the last and smallest detail, was made extraordinary.

The house was actually two houses, connected at the attic when Menachem’s risky trout venture proved so remarkably lucrative. It was the largest house in Trachimbrod, but also the least convenient, as one might have to climb and descend the three flights and pass through twelve rooms in order to get from one room to another. It was divided by function: the bedrooms, children’s playroom, and library in one half, the kitchen, dining room, and den in the other. The cellars — one of which housed the impressive wine racks, which, Menachem promised, would one day be filled with impressive wines, the other used as a quiet place for Tova’s sewing — were separated by only a brick wall, but were, for all practical purposes, a four-minute walk apart.

The Double House revealed every aspect of its owners’ new afflu-ence. A veranda was half completed, jutting like broken glass off the back. Marble newels of idle spiral stairways connected floors to ceilings.

The ceilings were raised on the lower floors, rendering the third-floor rooms livable only for children and midgets. Porcelain toilets were installed in the outhouse to replace the seatless brick stools on which everyone else in the shtetl took shits. The perfectly good garden was up-rooted and replaced with a gravel walk, lined with azaleas that were cut too short to flower. But Menachem was most proud of the scaffolding: the symbol that things were always changing, always getting a little better. He loved the skeleton of makeshift beams and rafters more and more as construction progressed, loved them more than the house itself, and eventually persuaded the reluctant architect to draw them into the final plans. Workers, too, were drawn into the plans. Not workers, exactly, but local actors paid to look like workers, to walk the planks of the scaffolding, to hammer functionless nails into gratuitous walls, to pull those nails out, to examine blueprints. (The blueprints themselves were drawn into the blueprints, and in those blueprints were blueprints with blueprints with blueprints . . .) Menachem’s problem was this: he had more money than there were things to buy. Menachem’s solution was this: rather than buy more things, he would continue to buy the things he already owned, like a man on a desert island who retells and embellishes the only joke he can remember. His dream was for the Double House to be a kind of infinity, always a fraction of itself — suggestive of a bottomless money pit — always approaching but never reaching completion.