Everything Is Illuminated (37 page)

ari f

What are you talking about! We should go to the Nazis! (Calling out, waving a finger above his head.) It’s the Ukrainians who’ll do us in! You’ve heard what they did in Lvov! (It reminds me of my birth [I was born on the Rabbi’s floor, you know (my nose still remembers that mix of pla-centa and Judaica [he had the most beautiful candle holders (from Austria [if I’m not mistaken (or Germany)])])]) . . .

rav d

(Puzzled, gesturing puzzlement.) What are you talking about?

ari f

(Most sincerely puzzled.) I can’t remember. The Ukrainians. My birth.

Candles. I know there was a point. Where did I begin?

And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

They had been terrified at first. Shtetl meetings were held daily, news reports (nazis kill 8,200 on ukrainian border) examined with the care of editors, plans of action drawn up and crumpled up, large maps spread out on tables like patients waiting to be cut open. But then the meetings convened every other day, and then every other every other day, and then weekly, serving more as social minglers for singles than planning sessions. After only two months, without the impetus of any further bombing, most Trachimbroders had removed all of the splinters of the terror that had entered them that night.

They hadn’t forgotten, but accommodated. Memory took the place of terror. In their efforts to remember what it was they were trying so hard to remember, they could finally think over the fear of war. The memories of birth, childhood, and adolescence resonated with greater volume than the din of exploding shells.

So nothing was done. No decisions were made. No bags packed or houses emptied. No trenches dug or buildings fortified. Nothing. They waited like fools, they sat on their hands like fools, and spoke, like fools, about the time Simon D did that hilarious thing with the plum, which all could laugh about for hours but none could quite remember. They waited to die, and we cannot blame them, because we would do the same, and we do do the same. They laughed and joked. They thought about birthday candles and waited to die, and we must forgive them. They wrapped Menachem’s jumbo trout in newspaper (nazis approach lutsk) and carried beef briskets in wicker baskets to picnics under tall tree canopies by the small falls.

Bedridden since his orgasm, my grandfather was unable to attend the first shtetl meeting. Zosha handled hers with more dignity, perhaps because she didn’t have one at all, or perhaps because even though she loved being a married woman, and loved to touch that dead arm, she had yet to fall in love. She changed the semen-starched sheets, made her new husband toast and coffee for breakfast, and brought him a plate of leftover wedding chicken for lunch.

What is it? she asked, seating herself on the end of the bed. Did I do something wrong? Are you unhappy with me? My grandfather remembered that she was only a child: fifteen, and younger than her years. She had experienced nothing compared to him. She had felt nothing.

I am happy, he said.

I can wear my hair in a ponytail if you think that would make me more pretty.

You’re pretty as you are. Really.

And last night. Did I please you? I will learn. I’m sure I will.

You were wonderful, he said. I’m just not feeling well. It’s nothing with you. Everything with you is wonderful.

She kissed him on the lips and said, I am your wife, as if to reaffirm her vows, or remind herself, or him.

That night, when he had recovered enough strength to wash and dress, he returned to the Dial for the second time in two days. It was quite a different scene. Stark. Empty. Without yoidle-doidling. The shtetl square was still caked with white flour, although a rain had swept it into the spaces between cobblestones, replacing the sheet with an intricate network. Most of the banners of the previous day’s festivities had been taken down, but a few remained, draped from the sills of high windows.

Great-great-great-grandfather, he said, lowering himself (with great difficulty) to his knees, I feel that I ask for so little.

In the sense that you never come to talk to me, the Dial said (with the unmoving lips of a ventriloquist), what you say is true. You never write, you never —

I haven’t ever wanted to burden you.

I haven’t ever wanted to burden you.

But you have, great-great-great-grandfather. You have. See my face, with its sag and give. I look four times my age. I have this dead arm, this war, this problem with memory. And now I am in love.

What makes you think I have anything to do with this?

I am a dupe of chance.

The Gypsy girl. What ever became of her? She was nice.

What?

The Gypsy girl? The one you loved.

It’s not her that I love. It’s my girl. My girl.

Oh, the Dial said, letting his Oh fall to the cobblestones and settle into the flour in the cracks before continuing. You love the baby in Zosha’s belly. The others are being pulled back, and you’re being pulled forward.

In both directions! he said, seeing the wagon’s refuse, the words on Brod’s body, the pogroms, the weddings, the suicides, the makeshift cribs, the parades, and seeing also his possible futures: life with the Gypsy girl, life alone, life with Zosha and the child who would fulfill him, the end of life. The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present. He, Safran, marked the division between what was and what would be.

And what is it that you want from me? the Dial asked.

Make her healthy. Let her be born without sickness, without blindness, weak heart, or dead limbs. Let her be perfect.

Hush, and then: Safran retched his morning’s toast and midafternoon’s leftovers onto the Dial’s rigid feet in a chunky pool of yellows and browns.

At least I didn’t step in it, the Dial said.

You see! Safran pleaded, barely able to support his kneeling body. This is what it’s like!

What what’s like?

Love.

What?

Love, Safran said. This is what it’s like.

Do you know that after my accident your great-great-great-grandmother would enter my room at night?

What?

She would get in bed with me, God bless her soul, knowing that I would attack her. We were supposed to sleep in separate rooms, but every night she’d come to be with me.

I don’t understand.

Every morning, she’d clean me of my excrement, bathe me, dress me, and see that my hair was combed like a sane man’s, even when it meant an elbow to the nose or a broken rib. She polished the blade. She wore my teeth marks on her body like other wives might wear jewelry. The hole didn’t matter. We paid it no attention. We shared a room. She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.

Let me tell you a story, the Dial went on. The house that your great-great-great-grandmother and I moved into when we first became married looked out onto the small falls, at the end of the Jewish/Human fault line. It had wood floors, long windows, and enough room for a large family. It was a handsome house. A good house.

But the water, your great-great-great-grandmother said, I can’t hear myself think.

Time, I urged her. Give it time.

And let me tell you, while the house was unreasonably humid, and the front lawn perpetual mud from all the spray, while the walls needed to be repapered every six months, and chips of paint fell from the ceiling like snow for all seasons, what they say about people who live next to waterfalls is true.

What, my grandfather asked, do they say?

They say that people who live next to waterfalls don’t hear the water.

They say that?

They do. Of course, your great-great-great-grandmother was right. It was terrible at first. We couldn’t stand to be in the house for more than a few hours at a time. The first two weeks were filled with nights of intermittent sleep and quarreling for the sake of being heard over the water. We fought so much just to remind ourselves that we were in love, and not in hate.

But the next weeks were a little better. It was possible to sleep a few good hours each night and eat in only mild discomfort. Your great-great-great-grandmother still cursed the water (whose personification had become anatomi-cally refined), but less frequently, and with less fury. Her attacks on me also quieted. It’s your fault, she would say. You wanted to live here.

Life continued, as life continues, and time passed, as time passes, and after a little more than two months: Do you hear that? I asked her on one of the rare mornings we sat at the table together. Hear it? I put down my coffee and rose from my chair. You hear that thing?

What thing? she asked.

Exactly! I said, running outside to pump my fist at the waterfall. Exactly!

We danced, throwing handfuls of water in the air, hearing nothing at all.

We alternated hugs of forgiveness and shouts of human triumph at the water.

Who wins the day? Who wins the day, waterfall? We do! We do!

And this is what living next to a waterfall is like, Safran. Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night’s sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn’t hear her husband’s ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren’s will be. But we learn to live in that love.

My grandfather nodded his head, as if he understood.

But it’s not the entire story, the Dial continued. I realized this when I first tried to whisper a secret and couldn’t, or whistle a tune without instilling fear in the hearts of those within a hundred yards, when my coworkers at the flour mill pleaded with me to lower my voice, because, Who can think with you shouting like that? To which I asked, AM I REALLY SHOUTING?

Hush, and then: sky obscuring, the curtains of clouds parting, the hands of thunder clapping. The universe poured down in a bombing on-slaught of heavenly vomit.

Those still awake and outside ran for cover. The traveling journalist Shakel R held the Lvov Daily Observed (nazis move east) over his head. The famous visiting playwright Bunim W, whose tragicomic ren-dition of the Trachim story — Trachim! — was met with popular enthusi-asm and critical indifference, jumped into the Brod to avoid being hit.

The divine hurl fell from the firmament in newborn-sized chunks at first, then sheets, soaking Trachimbrod to its foundations, turning the Brod waters orange, filling the prostrate mermaid’s dry fountain to its lip, filling the cracks of the synagogue’s crumbling portico, glazing the poplars, drowning small insects, making drunk with pleasure the rats and vultures by the riverbank.

Canopies of thin white string spanned the narrow cobbled arteries of Trachimbrod that afternoon, March 18, 1942, as they had every Trachimday for one hundred fifty years. It had been the good gefiltefishmonger Bitzl Bitzl R’s idea, to commemorate the first of the wagon’s refuse to surface. One end of white string tied around the volume knob of a radio (nazis enter ukraine, move east with speed) on the wobbly bookcase in Benjamin T’s one-room shanty, the other around an empty silver candle holder on the dining room table of the More-or-Less-Respected Rabbi’s brick house across muddy Shelister Street; thin white string like a clothesline from the light-boom stand of Trachimbrod’s first and only photographer to the middle-C hammer of the darling of Zeinvel Z’s piano shop on the other side of Malkner Street; white string connecting freelance journalist (germans push on, sensing imminent victory) to electrician over the tranquil and anticipating palm of the River Brod; white string from the monument of Pinchas T (carved, perfectly realistically, of marble) to a Trachimbrod novel (about love) to the glass case of wandering snakes of white string (kept at 56 degrees in the Museum of True Folklore), forming a scalene triangle, reflected in the Dial’s glass eyes in the middle of the shtetl square.

My grandfather and his very pregnant wife watched from a picnic blanket on their lawn as the floats began the parade. First, as was traditional, went the float from Rovno: skimpy, with wilted yellow butterflies immodestly covering the splintered pine of a fieldworker effigy, which didn’t look good last year and looked even worse now. (The carcasses could be seen in the spaces between the wings.) Klezmer bands preceded the float from Kolki, which hobbled on the shoulders of middle-aged men, as the young men were on the front lines, and the horses were being used in a nearby coal mine to support the war effort.

OH! Zosha giggled loudly, unable to control her voice. IT JUST GAVE ME A KICK!

My grandfather put his ear against her belly and received a powerful knock to the head, lifting him off the ground, landing him on his back a few feet away.

THAT CHILD IS EXTRAORDINARY!

There were fewer handsome men assembled along the shoreline than any year since that first one when everything began, when Trachim did or did not get pinned under his wagon. The handsome men were away fighting a war whose ramifications no one had yet to understand, and no one would or will understand. Most of what was left for the contest were the cripples, and cowards who crippled themselves — broke a hand, burnt an eye, feigned deafness or blindness — in order to dodge conscription. It was a contest of cripples and cowards, diving for a sack of gold that was a sack of fool’s gold. They were trying to believe that life was as usual, healthy, that tradition could plug the leaks, that joy was still possible.

The floats and marchers made their way from the river’s mouth to the toy and pastry stands set up by the rusting plaque commemorating where the wagon did or didn’t flip and sink: