Little Failure (59 page)

“At least it’s a quiet place for a grave,” my father says.

“A good, quiet place,” my mother says, as if slotting herself into a Carver story. “The air is good.”

My father speaks: “Goodbye, goodbye, Father. I probably won’t come back again until my death. Forgive me. For everything.”

I laugh nervously. “You’re not guilty,” I say.

“I have a sense of guilt,” my father says. “That he didn’t live enough. In ’43 he was twenty-nine, maybe thirty. He didn’t see anything. What was it for? He left a little son, a wife.” He shakes his head.

“Oh, son,” he says to me, “why didn’t me and my mother come here earlier? I don’t know why she didn’t care about these things. We could have been here a hundred times. Of course, she was upset.”

What I notice is that he has stopped calling me “Little Son.” Now I am
just
his son. Now I stand at exactly the same height as him and our relationship is clear.

“Son, please read the prayer for me.” From his Velcro money pouch, my father pulls out a pamphlet with Jewish prayers to be said at a grave site. “Where’s the main prayer?” he asks.
“Baruch …?”

As I write this, I’m looking at a photograph of my father in his early seventies holding an umbrella in the forecourt of Versailles, his right foot raised off the ground as if he is Gene Kelly, one of my Stuyvesant sweaters billowing out above his khaki pants. He is smiling at my mother and her camera, smiling fully, with teeth, in the American manner. “Singer in the rain,” my mother has written on a Post-it note in her careful English script. She has stuck the note above my father’s dancing figure.

The day after we visit my grandfather’s grave, we will go to the Great Choral Synagogue of St. Petersburg. I will ask my father if he ever visited the temple during his Soviet days. “Yes, five or six times,” he will say. “The first time I came, my aunt who later killed herself, Aunt Sima, she had her wedding here. I was about seventeen years old. And while that ceremony was taking place a girl entered. I remembered her my whole life. She wasn’t a beauty. She was dark, dark. A good Jewish face. And some kind of strange, almost glowing dark eyes. My whole life I have felt those eyes looking at me.”

“Lord, who should sojourn in thy tabernacle?” I read from Psalms 15:1 in English. “Who shall dwell upon thy holy mountain? He that walketh uprightly and walketh righteously and speaks with truth in his heart … He that does those things shall never be moved.”

I begin the mourner’s Kaddish. “
Yitgaddal veyitqaddash shmeh rabba
,” I say in Aramaic. My father bows slightly to God’s will with each cadence.

I say.

I chant.

I can read the prayer, but I cannot understand it. The words coming out of my mouth are gibberish to me. And they can only be gibberish to my father’s ear as well.

I chant the words and he says “Amen” after each stanza.

I chant the gibberish backwards and forwards, tripping over the words, mangling them, making them sound more Russian, more American, more holy. We haven’t found my grandfather’s name, Isaac, amidst the acres of marble covered with Ivans and Nikolais and Alexanders. But the sun shines generously. Cows are mooing and grass is being mowed. A small airplane, surely our heraldic symbol, is landing nearby. This part I know well.

Ve’imru, Amen
.

Let us say, Amen.

: AMEH!

A
ND
I
THOUGHT
writing novels was hard.

The task of sailing into the past was made that much easier by David Ebershoff, my editor, who knew exactly when to furl and unfurl the sails, if that’s the right metaphor. (Is it? Or is it trim the sails? I wish I were Waspier.) I also want to thank everyone at Random House for their continued belief that I’m an okay guy and writer, including Gina Centrello, Susan Kamil, Barbara Fillon, Maria Braeckel, Sally Marvin, Denise Cronin, Joelle Dieu, Rachel Kind, and Toby Ernst. My agent, Denise Shannon, continues to keep me solvent and is a terrific reader to boot. My thanks to Dmitry Dolinsky for his expert help with what they call a “flash drive.” Patricia Kim took many photos of me wearing a toga.

So many people volunteered their time to remind me of what had happened during the 1980s and early 1990s, a time period many of us are trying to forget. They include Jonathan, J.Z., Ben, Brian, Leo, Maris, and Jessica.

Finally, my parents provided enough stories to fill several volumes and were kind and patient enough not only to answer all my nagging questions but to accompany me to Russia for a week of fish pie and remembrance. I would also like to thank all my “first responders,” people who took the time out to read early drafts of this book and offer advice: Doug Choi, Andrew Lewis Conn, Rebecca Godfrey, Lisa Hahn, Cathy Park Hong, Gabe Hudson, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Paul La Farge, Christine Suewon Lee, Kelly Malloy, Jynne Dilling Martin, Caitlin McKenna, Suketu Mehta, John Saffron, and John “Rosencranz” Wray.

Portions of this work appeared in the following publications in different form: