Everything Is Illuminated (34 page)

What are you doing here? he asked, more afraid that she had revealed their relationship — to his father, who would surely beat him, or his mother, who would be so disappointed — than curious as to why she was there.

Your books are arranged by the color of their spines, she said. How stupid.

His mother was in Lutsk, he remembered, as she was every Tuesday at this time of the afternoon, and his father was washing himself outside.

Safran went to his room to make sure everything was in order. His diary was still under his mattress. His books were properly stacked, according to color. (He pulled one off the shelf, to have something to hold.) The picture of his mother was at its normal skew on the nightstand next to his bed. There was no reason to think that she had touched a thing. He searched the kitchen, the study, even the bathrooms for any trace she might have left. Nothing. No stray hairs. No fingerprints on the mirror.

No notes. Everything was in good order.

He went to his parents’ bedroom. The pillows were perfect rectangles. The sheets were as smooth as water, tucked in tightly. The room looked as if it hadn’t been touched in years, since a death, perhaps, as if it were being preserved as it once was, a time capsule. He didn’t know how many times she had come. He couldn’t ask her because he never talked to her anymore, and he couldn’t ask his father because he would have had to confess everything, and he couldn’t ask his mother because, if she were to find out, it would kill her, and that would kill him, and no matter how unlivable his life had become, he was not yet ready to end it.

He ran to the house of Lista P, the only lover to inspire him to bathe.

Let me in, he said with his head against the door. It’s me, Safran. Let me in.

He could hear shuffling, someone laboring to get to the door.

Safran? It was Lista’s mother.

Hello, he said. Is Lista in?

Lista’s in her room, she said, thinking what a sweet boy he was. Go on up.

What’s wrong? Lista asked, seeing him at the door. She looked so much older than she had only three years before, at the theater, which made him wonder whether it was she or he who had changed. Come in.

Come in. Here, she said, sit down. What’s going on?

I’m all alone, he said.

You’re not alone, she said, taking his head to her chest.

I am.

You’re not alone, she said. You only feel alone.

To feel alone is to be alone. That’s what it is.

Let me make you something to eat.

I don’t want anything to eat.

Then have something to drink.

I don’t want anything to drink.

She massaged his dead hand and remembered the last time she had touched it. It was not the death that had so attracted her to it, but the unknowability. The unattainability. He could never completely love her, not with all of himself. He could never be completely owned, and he could never own completely. Her desire had been sparked by the frustration of her desire.

You’re going to be married, Safran. I got the invitation this morning. Is that what’s upsetting you?

Yes, he said.

Well, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Everybody gets nervous before being wed. I did. I know my husband did. But Zosha’s such a nice girl.

I’ve never met her, he said.

Well, she’s very nice. And beautiful, too.

Do you think I will like her?

I do.

Will I love her?

It’s possible. You should never make predictions with love, but it’s definitely possible.

Do you love me? he asked. Did you ever? That night with all the coffee.

I don’t know, she said.

Do you think it’s possible that you did?

He touched the side of her face with his good hand, and moved it down to her neck, and then down under the collar of her shirt.

No, she said, taking his hand out.

No?

No.

But I want to. I really do. This isn’t for you.

That’s why we can’t, she said. I never would have been able to do it if I had thought that you wanted to.

He put his head in her lap and fell asleep. Before leaving that evening, he gave Lista the book that he still had with him from his house — Hamlet, with a purple spine — that he had taken from the shelf to have something to hold.

For keeps? she asked.

You’ll give it back to me one day.

My grandfather and the Gypsy girl knew none of this as they made love for the last time, as he touched her face and fingered the soft underside of her chin, as he paid her the attention received by a sculptor’s wife.

Like this? he asked. She brushed her eyelashes against his chest. She moved her butterfly kiss across his torso and up his neck to where his left earlobe connected to his jaw. Like this? she asked. He pulled her blue blouse over her head, he undid her bead necklaces, he licked her smooth and sweaty armpits and ran his finger from her neck to her navel. He drew circles around her caramel areolas with his tongue. Like this? he asked. She nodded and craned her head back. He flicked her nipples with his tongue, and knew that it was all so completely wrong, everything, from the moment of his birth to this, everything was coming out the wrong way — not the opposite, but worse: close. She used both hands to undo his belt. He lifted his backside off the ground so she could pull down his slacks and underpants. She took his penis into her hand. She wanted so badly for him to feel good. She was convinced that he had never felt good. She wanted to be the cause of his first and only pleasure.

Like this? He put his hand on top of hers and guided it. She removed her skirt and panties, took his dead hand, pressed it between her legs. Her thick black pubic hair was wound in loose curls, in waves. Like this? he asked, although she was guiding his hand, as if trying to channel a message on a Ouija board. They guided each other over each other’s body.

She put his dead fingers inside her and felt, for a moment, the numbness and paralysis. She felt the death in and through her. Now? he asked. Now?

She rolled onto him and spread her legs around his knees. She reached behind her and used his dead hand to guide his penis into her. Is this good?

he asked. Is this good?

Seven months later, June 18, 1941, as the first display of German bombing lit the Trachimbrod skies electric, as my grandfather had his first orgasm (his first and only pleasure, of which she was not the cause), she slit her wrist with a knife that had been made dull carving love letters. But then, there, his sleeping head against her beating chest, she revealed nothing. She didn’t say, You are going to marry. And she didn’t say, I am going to kill myself. Only: How do you arrange your books?

26 January, 1998

Dear Jonathan,

I promised that I would never mention writing again, because I thought that we were beyond that. But I must break my promise.

I could hate you! Why will you not permit your grandfather to be in love with the Gypsy girl, and show her his love? Who is ordering you to write in such a manner? We have such chances to do good, and yet again and again you insist on evil. I would not read this most contemporary division to Little Igor, because I did not appraise it worthy of his ears. No, this division I presented to Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, who acted faithfully with it.

I must make a simple question, which is what is wrong with you? If your grandfather loves the Gypsy girl, and I am certain that he does, why does he not leave with her? She could make him so happy. And yet he declines happiness. This is not reasonable, Jonathan, and it is not good. If I were the writer, I would have Safran show his love to the Gypsy girl, and take her to Green-wich Shtetl in New York City. Or I would have Safran kill himself, which is the only other truthful thing to perform, although then you would not be born, which would signify that this story could not be written.

You are a coward, Jonathan, and you have disappointed me. I would never command you to write a story that is as it occurred in the actual, but I would command you to make your story faithful. You are a coward for the same explanation that Brod is a coward, and Yankel is a coward, and Safran is a coward — all of your relatives are cowards! You are all cowards because you live in a world that is “once-removed,” if I may excerpt you. I do not have any homage for anyone in your family, with exceptions of your grandmother, because you are all in the proximity of love, and all disavow love. I have enclosed the currency that you most recently posted.

Of course, I understand, in some manners, what you are attempting to perform. There is such a thing as love that cannot be, for certain. If I were to inform Father, for example, about how I comprehend love, and who I desire to love, he would kill me, and this is no idiom. We all choose things, and we also all choose against things. I want to be the kind of person who chooses for more than chooses against, but like Safran, and like you, I discover myself choosing this time and the next time against what I am certain is good and correct, and against what I am certain is worthy. I choose that I will not, instead of that I will. None of this is effortless to say.

I did not give Grandfather the money, but it was for very different reasons than you suggested. He was not surprised when I told him. “I am proud of you,” he said.

“But you wanted me to give it to you?” I said.

“Very much,” he said. “I am sure that I could find her.”

“How can you be proud, then?”

“I am proud of you, not me.”

“You are not angry with me?”

“No.”

“I do not want to disappoint you.”

“I am not angry or disappointed,” he said.

“Does it make you sad that I am not giving you the money?”

“No. You are a good person, doing the good and right thing. It makes me content.”

Why, then, did I feel that it was the pathetic, cowardly action, and that I was the pathetic coward? Let me explain why I did not give Grandfather my money. It is not because I am saving it for myself to go to America. That is a dream that I have woken up from. I will never see America, and neither will Little Igor, and I understand that now. I did not give Grandfather the money because I do not believe in Augustine. No, that is not what I mean. I do not believe in the Augustine that Grandfather was searching for. The woman in the photograph is alive. I am sure she is. But I am also sure that she is not Herschel, as Grandfather wanted her to be, and she is not my grandmother, as he wanted her to be, and she is not Father, as he wanted her to be. If I gave him the money, he would have found her, and he would have seen who she really is, and this would have killed him. I am not saying this metaphorically. It would have killed him.

But it was a situation without winning. The possibilities were none, between what was possible and what we wanted. And here I have to confer you some terrible news. Grandfather died four days ago. He cut his hands. It was very late in the night and I could not sleep. There was a noise coming from the bath, so I went to investigate it. (Now that I am the man of the house, it is up to me to see that everything works.) I found Grandfather in the bath, which was full of blood. I told him to stop sleeping, because I did not yet understand what was going on. “Wake up!” Then I shook him violently, and then I punched him in the face. It hurt my hand, I punched him so hard. I punched him again. I do not know why, but I did. To tell you the truth, I had never punched anyone before, only been punched. “Wake up!” I shouted at him, and I punched him again, this time the other side of his face. But I knew that he would not wake up. “You sleep too much!” My shouting woke up my mother, and she ran to the bath. She had to forcefully pull me off of Grandfather, and she later told me that she thought I had killed him, the way I was punching so much, and the look in my eyes. We invented a story about an accident with sleeping pills. This is what we told to Little Igor, so that he would never have to know.

It had been such an evening already. Volumes had happened, just as volumes now happen, just as volumes will happen. For the first time in my life, I told my father exactly what I thought, as I will now tell you, for the first time, exactly what I think. As with him, I ask for your forgiveness.

Love,

Alex

“Herschel would care for your father when I had to make an errand, or when your grandmother was ill. She was ill all of the time, not only at the end of her life. Herschel would care for the baby, and hold it as if it were his own. He even called him son.”

I told all of this to Jonathan as Grandfather told it to me, and he wrote all of it in his diary. He wrote:

“Herschel did not possess a family of his own. He was not such a social person. He loved to read very much, and also to write. He was a poet, and he exhibited me many of his poems. I remember many of them.

They were silly, you could say, and about love. He was always in his room writing those things, and never with people. I used to tell him, What good is all of that love doing on paper? I said, Let love write on you for a little. But he was so stubborn. Or perhaps he was only timid.”

“You were his friend?” I asked, although he had already said that he was Herschel’s friend.

“We were his only friends, he once told us. Your grandmother and I.

He would eat dinner with us, and on occasions remain very tardy. We even made vacations together. When your father was born, the three of us would make walks with the baby. When he needed a thing, he would come to us. When he had a problem, he would come to us. He once asked me if he could kiss your grandmother. Why, I asked him, and it made me an angry person, in truth, very angry, that he should desire to kiss her. Because I am afraid, he said, that I will never kiss a woman. Herschel, I said, it is because you do not try to kiss any.”

(Was he in love with Grandmother?)

(I do not know.)

(It was a possibility?)

(It was a possibility. He would look at her, and also bring her flowers as gifts.)

(Did this upset you?)

(I loved them both.)

“Did he kiss her?”

“No,” he said. (And you will remember, Jonathan, that he laughed here. It was a short, severe laugh.) “He was too timid to ever kiss anyone, even Anna. I do not think that they ever did anything.”