Jacob's Folly (35 page)

At noon a large dark girl in a matron's bonnet swished in. She had a covered basket dangling over her arm. Ethiop peeked under the cloth with a smile, anticipating his lunch. This was clearly his wife. She was pregnant. With my grandchild! I could have wept. After that, greedy for more of my lineage, I walked the generations, each name streaming its secrets fluidly through my sensitive feet, flooding my eyes. We were a prosperous, fecund family. By 1900, my heirs had moved out of the cramped Jewish quarter, into a newly built neighborhood, with paved wide boulevards and freshly planted trees. They lived bourgeois Parisian lives. Ethiop's tailoring business was passed down from father to son all the way to a boy named Max, who eschewed tailoring to become a professor of French literature at the Sorbonne in 1935. Max's last name was Levi, but he was my direct descendant. I saw him very clearly as I traversed the letters of his name: dark-haired, honey-eyed, with a narrow jaw and a somewhat pointy chin, he looked like the Jewish intellectual he was.

PARIS, SEPTEMBER, 1941

M
ax chopped the onion fine. Behind him, oil smoked in a pan. He swiveled around, turned down the gas, slid the onions off the chopping board with a frayed wooden spoon, watched them sizzle and brown. He was making his wife, Suzielle, her favorite dish, even though he had just discovered she was having an affair with a mutual friend of theirs. The compulsion to please her in this way was odd, and he wondered at it.

Max had a lot of time to cook these days. One year earlier, shortly after the German invasion, he had been fired from his professorship at the university in a general culling of Jews from the teaching professions. Now, with the occupation, as a Jew he was banned from:

public swimming pools

restaurants

cafés

theaters

cinemas

concerts

music halls

markets

museums

libraries

public exhibitions

historical monuments

sporting events, and

parks.

He could only shop between five in the afternoon and seven at night, when all the good food, rationed already, had been bought up. He had been lucky to find the carp. His parents and sister were already in Cuba. Max had elected to stay in Paris, in part out of loyalty to his wife, in part because he didn't believe he would be harmed by the French police. They were rounding up the refugees, not the old, established families. His mother was nearly hysterical when he put his parents and sister on a train to Lisbon, their port of embarcation. She wanted her only son with her, and she distrusted Suzielle. Mme Levi had taken the liberty of obtaining a coveted French exit visa for Max, as well as Spanish and Portuguese transit visas. She begged him to get to Lisbon as fast as he could, as the visas would expire in three months. Max did not yet have an entry visa to Cuba, or the United States, or Mexico, but his mother had applied for all of them on his behalf. Instinctively, he had put off discussing his mother's escape plans with his wife.

Suzielle smoked as she ate, as she always did, her fine, plucked eyebrows arched over a pair of upturned green eyes. A sharply drawn mouth, thin nose, hennaed hair made her look a bit like a circus performer, though she was a clerk in a bookstore. That's how he'd met her—over a copy of Baudelaire. Max didn't touch his food as he watched his wife dispatch hers efficiently, her garnet-colored nails flashing as she bent over the plate to snatch another bite of fish, chewing rapidly.

“Your carp is wonderful, as always,” she pronounced emphatically.

“
À la juive
,” he said.

“The best recipe in the world,” she said, finishing the last bite. She took a long, final drag of her Gauloise, stamped it out in the remains of the sauce, and stretched, smoke streaming from her nose.

“I worked so long today,” she said.

“It must be difficult, being employed,” he said.

“Oof,” she exclaimed, rising with her plate and sweeping up his. “You didn't eat,” she noticed, walking leisurely to the sink, overturning a plastic tub, and humming as she turned on the tap.

“What a picture,” Max said, looking at her.

“What? I always do the dishes when you cook!”

“Yes,” he said. “You are a marvel.”

“Why are you so sarcastic today? Did something happen?”

“Nothing special. A couple of French policemen came by.”

“What did they want?”

“They confiscated my bicycle.”

“Why?”

“Jews aren't allowed to have bicycles anymore, apparently. They were quite embarrassed. German orders, you know how it is. Also—radios.” Suzielle swiveled around to where the radio normally stood.

“But that was
my
radio!”

“I know! The injustice of it. I told them. They did say that in mixed marriages the confiscation of property becomes very tricky.” Suzielle dried her hands hastily on a tea towel and grabbed her coat from the hook.

“Where are you going?” asked Max.

“To the police! You aren't some Pole who just got off the train! You are a Frenchman! Your family goes back to the eighteenth century, in Paris! They can't just steal your belongings.”

“But that's the thing—they can, Suzielle. That's what I realized—only today, because I'm an idiot. They can. I've been a fool all this time, staying here, thinking I was safe because I am a French citizen
with Balzac in my head, better than the poor Eastern refugees gushing into Paris, with their beards and their caftans. But as it turns out, for them I am only a Jew, whatever my education and attire.”

“For the Germans …”

“It was a French policeman who took my bicycle. It'll be a French policeman who knocks on my door when it's time to put me on a train.”

Suzielle stood, solemn, her dance-hall legs turned outward, arms dangling at her sides. “You blame me,” she said.

“Not for this, no. Why would I?”

“Then for what?” she asked.

“My dear Suzielle. I prefer not to.”

Still, she went to the police.

When she returned, embarrassed yet triumphant, with her radio but no bicycle, Max had departed. He left no note, but the dishes were washed.

CONEY ISLAND, 1943

Max lay on the double bed staring up at the lumbering ceiling fan, sweat trickling from his temples. His cotton shirt clung to him. Hot as Paris could be, it was nothing compared to August in New York. This was pure swamp heat; paved nature, asserting her rights. The crazy rattle of a roller-coaster drifted through the wall, accompanied by dispassionate screams. He tried not to think of the real screaming going on across the Atlantic.

Max had been lucky to find this place. A couple he'd met while stalled for a month in Lisbon waiting for a boat to New York had given him the lead. His new landlady, Lydia Schwartz, had a weakness for refugees. She rented him her largest seafront room for a nominal sum.

Every morning, after his breakfast of black coffee and a slice of rye
bread, Max took a stroll along the Coney Island boardwalk. The morning pleasure seekers stood in line for the Ferris wheel, roller coaster, ice-cream cones with unsmiling, even dour patience, as if waiting to buy sardines. As the sun climbed there were flocks of them. These people took their frivolity very seriously, Max noticed. Only when they were terrified on one of the rides did they bare their teeth in a smile, their mouths open and shrieking in high-pitched, automated bursts. It was all so far from what he had come from in Europe, he found it impossible to comprehend. The Coney Island images he saw every day simply lay in his brain undigested, like a wad of chewing gum stuck in a kid's intestine: Salamandar Boy eating a sandwich in his tank, little flipper hands gripping the bread as the bearded lady chatted to him, smoking; floating bouquets of balloons struggling against their tethers in the breeze; fluffy domes of light blue and pink and yellow spun sugar, the tender colors trembling against the crumbling gray woodwork of the amusement park, with its long traditions of ritual excess. People descending pell-mell in chutes, whipped around in teacups, yelping in the House of Horrors. A painted face high as a hill, its open mouth a gateway to hours of fun in Luna Park. At night, winking lights, swirling pinwheels of light, comets of light. Faces hungry for pleasure, eyes straining to see what's next, what's new. Carnival without end. All this while nobody knew where all those people in Paris were being taken in the trains. To the East. And none of them ever came back. The trains in France had never run so punctually as when there were Jews in them. Maybe there was a full boxcar pulling out of Drancy at this instant. How was it possible, as a ten-foot-high custard cone cast a shadow on Max's bronzed face, as a thousand half-naked people were swarming into the Atlantic for their morning dip, as the dark-skinned man squirting mustard on his hot dog smiled without malice and asked if he wanted onions?

Poring over the job listings in the newspaper, Max did not see any openings for professors of French literature. He realized with a shock
just how unqualified he was for any kind of practical work. He had given himself over entirely to a life of the mind. He could not plumb a drain, build a chair, sew a jacket, lay bricks. He barely spoke English. He had no driver's license. Finally, the doe-eyed Mrs. Schwartz set him up with a cousin of hers who owned a carpet remnant store on Flatbush Avenue. His days were spent heaving rolls of wall-to-wall carpeting from shelves to the floor and back to the shelves again. Eventually he was promoted to sales. The women loved his accent. He sold a deep-pile taupe remnant to the mother of a quiet dark-haired girl named Maxine, of all things. Just twenty, she stood at the back of the shop as he spoke to her mother. Now and then he caught her observing him and she smiled very slightly. Three days later she returned, ostensibly to buy a welcome mat. Max asked her to dinner. At one point during the meal he made her laugh; she flopped her head back and howled. That laugh was what made him fall in love with her. His instinct was correct: Maxine was passionate, loyal, vivid, and hardheaded. Once his divorce from Suzielle came through (hurried along by a French bureaucracy eager to split mixed couples), he proposed. Max and Maxine.

After the war, as the attempt began to scrape Nazi pus from the rotting abdomen of Europe, Max, with the help of Maxine, opened a carpet business in Flatbush. His refinement lent the place class. Maxine's practical streak kept it in the black. Within a few years the couple had opened a store in Manhattan that also sold high-end rugs from Turkey and Morocco. By this time Max and Maxine had three children: Sam, David, and Dinah. Once they could afford it, Max moved the family to the Upper West Side. He became a member of the Metropolitan Opera, sent his children to private schools, took courses at Columbia to satisfy his intellect. A total believer in assimiliation, he put up a Christmas tree along with the menorah. Sam became a doctor, David a journalist.

It was Dinah who strayed back to her roots. She met an Orthodox
girl from Brooklyn on a camping trip with the 92nd Street Y. The two corresponded, and Dinah went to spend the weekend with her new friend. Without Max or Maxine realizing it, Dinah was gradually falling in love with Judaism. She majored in Jewish studies at Brandeis, and started dressing more and more modestly. Maxine, a straight talker, asked her if she was planning on becoming a nun. Dinah responded passionately that she had had enough of Max and Maxine's indifference to their religion. She didn't understand how they could simply throw away five thousand years of tradition, an incomparable history of suffering and resilience. She made a break with the family, married an Orthodox yeshiva student from Long Island, started what she hoped would be an enormous family, and cut her parents off.

Over the years, the rift was sutured together but never healed completely: Max simply couldn't understand why, when the feast of American Possibility was laid before her, his only daughter decided to leave it untouched and eat gefilte fish instead. Dinah covered her dark hair in a wig, grew her skirts below the knee, and sent her children to be educated in religious schools that gave short shrift to secular studies. This was what Max could never forgive: his grandchildren would grow up ignorant of the great European culture that was their birthright. Yet, Dinah contended, they would lead deeply spiritual lives, live according to the word of G-d, and anyway, who needed more than the Torah, the Talmud, all the commentaries, and, for the boys if they got that far, the Zohar? There was a world of knowledge in those books; it took a lifetime to understand half of them. What was so wonderful about secular materialism?

Dinah was fertile as well as obstinate: she gave birth to seven children, the youngest of whom was Pearl. So, all in all, I had spawned twelve generations. Fuck you, Hitler! What a deity. To think that I, sybaritic stage strutter, libertine valet, son abandoner, police informant, and apostate, should end up as patriarch to a vast tribe of Israelites … These were my
children
.

As the news sank in, I began to play the part: crossing Pearl's coffee table, I affected a grandfatherly shuffle, my wings tucked officiously behind my back as I inspected my descendants. I saw myself with a well-tended white beard, a neat paunch, green slippers, and—a yarmulke. Yes: overwhelmed by the strange, intransigent beauty of our way of life, the indestructible story line of our people, joy and terror mingled in me, building into awe as I contemplated the fate of the Jews. I was vanquished. The Old Man had concocted a logic so deep and so wide I could not but drown laughing at the folly of my own life. The care he'd taken! Honing each detail until it sparkled. Only love could fuel such dedication to a single, humble being. Could it be he lavished equal attention on
every soul
?

An alternate cosmology presented itself to me as I stood there trembling: before Creation, when Hashem was nothing but a perfect mind, something funny occurred to him. Like a baby letting out his first guffaw, he cracked himself up, burst out laughing, and exploded into the physical world.

I submit
, I thought feverishly.
You triumph. Not only do You exist, You are everything. You are good, You made evil. There is nothing but You in all the universe. I was a fool to think I was raising Masha up, bringing Leslie down. It was all You!
But he wasn't done with me yet. My religious ecstasy had taken me so far from awareness of my own body that I had flown into the kitchen without knowing it. And there was Masha, formerly the object of my lust, now my great- (times five) granddaughter, wearing a pair of horrifyingly skimpy shorts and platform shoes, hunched over the cold stove, eating from the cholent pot—from the stew meant for the coming Shabbat—
with her fingers
, just as Hodel did when she was possessed! The girl turned then and looked in my direction, checking the doorway, her eyes the eerie multicolors of oil on a black pond. Her lips had gravy on them. Her snarled hair hung down, half covering her face. The river demon. That's what she was. “The
iniquity of the sons shall be visited on the third and fourth generations
.” Well, he went further than that in my case.
This thing had survived nearly three hundred years. The creature's cell phone vibrated in the pocket of her shorts and she flipped it open, turning toward the stove to hide it. I flew behind her and read over her shoulder: