The Wanting (42 page)

T T
. That’s how his letters were signed. I puzzled over this for a long time.

T T
.

Ah! Of course! What an idiot!
Toujours pour Toujours. Always Forever. Always Forever
. This was their secret bond. He signed his thus, and surely she signed hers. Always and forever, the door was closed to me. Collette and Pascal were warmed within the four walls of their love, while I was exiled into icy space, into the chaos of my injured pride, where everything else was, except for love.

I stood up and, with great difficulty, put on my jacket. I stumbled into the hall. As always, even in daylight, it was dim and impregnated with the smell of cookery and cheap perfume. I had the key in my hand. I’d have to replace it on the hook another time,
because she would know everything if she came back and the door was unlocked. I pressed the key into the keyhole, but it wouldn’t turn—the lock was jammed. Suddenly the door at the end of the hall burst open. It was Plotkina, taking her dog out for a walk.

“Roman Leopoldovich!” she cried happily.

“Nina Yurevna, hello.”

“It’s nice to see you. Are you all right? You look upset.”

“No, I’m fine,” I said.

“The key is stuck?”

“It’s fine, I just have to jiggle it.”

“But Roman Leopoldovich, are you sure? If there’s any way I can help you?”

“I don’t think so …,” I said.

“Why don’t you come in and have some tea. Vova can wait a few minutes for his walk.”

“No, honestly, it’s all right.”

“Here,” she said. She took the key from my hand, yanked the door hard against the jamb, and instantly the tumblers fell into place.

“No, you’re not all right,” she said. “Come on in. Just to take the chill off. You don’t have to tell me anything. I could use some company.”

Plotkina smiled pleasantly. As always, her eyes sparkled with kindness and cheerfulness. And yet, looking at them, I felt nothing but the coldness of death.

She very gently shushed Vova when he pulled on the leash.

“You know,” I said to her, “I think I will come in.”

And then I unburdened my grief upon her, down to the last detail.

Oh, I wanted to sleep! I lay back on the pillow and stretched out my arms. But the bed upon which I lay was like a rock, a stone, that would not accept my body. It cut into me as if it were unable to bear the weight of my bones. I understood its message to me: I, and not the twenty-three-year-old waitress Aviva Oren or the
young father named Itamar Ben-Magid, should have been among those blown to pieces; my organs, not theirs, transubstantiated into goo and ammoniated gas. My existence could no longer be tolerated on this earth, and the bed was trying to cast me off.

But then I realized it was actually something in my back pocket pushing me up, pressing into my skin, something sharp and hard. I dug into the pocket and found, of all things, a book.

It had a lovely felt cover the color of wet hay. I didn’t remember ever having this book, or ever putting it in my pocket, but there it was. It had the seductive aroma of horses and school glue, and in my hands it was as supple as cashmere. I ran my fingers across the cover, as one might the skin of a new-shorn sheep, wondering at it. I held it to my cheek. I brought it to my lips. I touched it to my forehead.

Then I opened it. Flowers and birds and leaves and stars and hearts came rushing out at me, dancing before my eyes in a brilliant rainbow of crayon and pencil, watercolor and pen, a whole botanical garden blooming in my hands.

M
Y
T
HOUGHTS ON
C
OMING
F
ACE-TO-
F
ACE WITH
D
EATH
BY
R
OMAN
G
UTTMAN
S
PRING
1996

And below that, near the very bottom of the right-hand corner, in letters festooned with roses, pansies, and carnations:

C
REATED BY
(
THE
O
NE AND
O
NLY
!)
A
NNA
R
OMANOVNA
G
UTTMAN
XXXXXOOOOO
!!!!!!

I caressed each letter with my fingertips, and for the first time since I was a child in Moscow, tears welled up in my eyes. And yet they would not shed. I put my hand to my face. It felt foreign to me, like burnt paper. My God, I said to myself, I have to drink water. Water.

It was then the door opened, and Abdul-Latif entered. In his hand was his knife, the curve of which shone bright like the sun.

Oh, my father, act! The great dawn of revenge is upon us.

But I am not to witness it! For in the book Anyusha made, I have seen my own fate! The letters of her name, she drew in the colors of Paradise, and therein I divine the message for which I have been waiting, spelled out in a language I cannot read. Anyusha! It is not your father I am meant to guard but al-Haram al-Qudsi al-Sharif, our beloved al-Aqsa! That is my task! At last!

Father, Father, I must fly. May Allah reward you with good. I can do nothing for you. And as for the Jew, Roman Guttman, it is too late. He cries for water but has not the strength to walk, not even the strength to crawl, and though the water is but a hair’s length from his lips, he shall not drink it.

Farewell! I fly to my reward!

“T
HIS IS MY SON
’
S KNIFE
,” he said to me. “Do you think I don’t know who you are?”

“His knife?” I managed to say.

“We call it a jambiya. I don’t know where he got such a thing. They gave it to him. Then they gave it to me. This is what I have left of him.”

“Please,” I said. Or tried to say.

Suddenly he thrust the knife in my face. I wanted to turn away, but with his other hand he grabbed my head and pressed the blade just beneath my eye. A rivulet of blood fled down my cheek. “Why did you come here?” he howled. “Did you think you would be welcome here? Outside, they don’t know who you are. They don’t care. They see only that you are a Jew. But I know who you are. Do you think I do not know the names of every single one of you? Why did you come? Tell me!” The knife twisted between his fingers and deeper into my skin.

I wanted to tell him why, but nothing came out but dry spit.

“Speak!” he said.

“Dasha Cohen” is what I finally muttered.

“What?”

I didn’t have the energy to repeat it, so I closed my eyes and told him with my thoughts. Because suddenly, in the gloom of this house, in the bed of the killer, in the hands of my murderer, it was quite clear to me.

It was the day I had first seen Colonel Vasin.

He showed me a pile of her letters. So what? I thought. I cavalierly
flipped open the first one. I even smiled at him. But this was not one of the letters I had read in Collette’s apartment. It must have been written in Lefortovo. Overflowing with desperation and grief, it exploded in my hands. She was pregnant. That is what Vasin wanted me to see. She was pregnant, and it could not possibly be mine. Yet the letter was addressed to me.

“Perhaps,” he said, “this will change your attitude.”

When he was done with me, I fled his office and ran through the streets I had known since childhood as through a labyrinth, blindly slamming into corners and dead ends. Finally, I simply stopped running. To my amazement, I was standing in front of the little café on Dzerzhinsky Square where we all used to meet and where I had first set eyes upon Collette. Unlike on that frigid day now so long ago, the windows were not steamed up, and the door was propped open to let in a little cool fresh air. I ordered a coffee and sat at the table near the window to look out onto the square as we used to do.

The coffee was mere sludge, but I kept sucking at it until my mouth was full of bitterness. I grabbed a cigarette and held it between my teeth unlit and stared out the window.

Why me? What did I have to do with a child?

There was a small commotion a few tables away. A woman, blond and pink-skinned and slightly pudgy in that sensual Russian way, was scolding a little girl who had refused to eat her sturgeon sandwich. This was no apparatchik’s wife with painted nails and smuggled blue jeans—just an ordinary woman, a clerk or a cashier. Her daughter wore the usual pigtails with white bows, the white apron and heavy brown shoes, but her socks were bright red and so were her shoelaces. She was only three or four, but already I could see she was one to be reckoned with. Her mother desperately tried to keep her voice down, but the idea of such a waste of money finally overwhelmed her and she cried out, “Dasha! Who do you think you are, the tsarevna? Eat your fish!” But little Dasha crossed her arms in front of her and turned up her nose in a gesture of utter contempt. I was certain her mother would wallop her then and there, but instead she began to laugh. The pose her
daughter had struck—so grievously insulted, so regally above it all—was just too much. She laughed a mother’s laugh and suffused that miserable café with a kind of holy music: the pleasure she took in her daughter’s willfulness, the joy she experienced in the flight of that little bird, her child. At last she managed to say, “Very well, Dasha, what about a napoleon?” Dasha’s eyes lit up in anticipation of the custard and the chocolate and the layers of pastry, and I saw something I had forgotten existed in the world: delight, pure and simple. Delight in this place, in this time, in the banquet that was set before us.

Dasha ate her napoleon very slowly, exulting in every bite. When she was done, her mother—who had wrapped the spurned slice of sturgeon and white bread within a sheet of newspaper and stowed it in her purse—gathered up her things and said, “Come, my starling, let’s go home.” The little one rose, licked her fork one last time, and took her mother’s hand.

I couldn’t help myself—I called out to her, “Dasha! Tell me, was the napoleon
that
good?”

But by then they were out the door and instantly carried along by the stream of pedestrians flowing along the great thoroughfare. I looked at her empty plate, at the fork licked clean, at the crumpled paper napkin smeared with chocolate, and I knew, knew in the deepest part of me, that I wanted that, too—and I wanted it with all my heart.

I’d forgotten that episode in the café, forgotten all about it—until the day in the hospital when I saw that girl on the news and they announced her name.

Of course it wasn’t the same girl! I knew that absolutely. And yet—and yet. I could not help believing, and believe to this day, that the child who had shed so much light in the darkest of my days had finally been punished for my sins.

I opened my eyes again, and Abdul-Latif was crying.

“I don’t understand why you are here, if only to torment me. Why torment me? My son is dead. You think there is glory in his
death? Only idiots think there is glory. For me there is only sorrow. Only sorrow. You come here to increase my pain? You cannot increase.”

“No, no,” I said. “No more pain.” And now I did call upon every fiber of strength within me, and I pushed myself up on my elbows, and took the point of his blade in my hand and pushed it down toward the floor and said to him, “I, too, have a child. I want to go home to her.”

Without another word, he slipped his arms around me and lifted me up and helped me, step by step, to the back door and into my own car, which was waiting there.

When the crowd heard the car start, they came running, their screams filling the air around them, but Abdul-Latif waved the knife in the air and cried, “I am the father of the shahid! This is his holy jambiya! Make way for my will!” And the men parted before him.

We drove along at breakneck speed through the little village and out onto the rough highway. All the while I held Anyusha’s book in my hands. All those pages she had left blank now seemed filled in. I’d had no idea she’d made that journal for me, but we were always on the same page, Anyusha and I, always walking in the same direction. And now my only desire was to return to her, to tell her the truth of her life, and set her free.