All I Love and Know (39 page)

The flight from Newark was half an hour late, and they had to wait in a stretch of airport with two rows of four chairs set against the wall, and no shops or restaurants except for the ancient cafeteria, which was already barred shut. Daniel cursed the fact that he hadn't brought anything for them to read or do. He took a stray section of the
Valley Advocate
from the sole empty seat and sat on the floor, facing a monitor, his back against a wall. Gal scuffed her boots along the airport's carpet and watched the people emerging from the gates. “They're not on this flight,” he told her. “They haven't landed yet.”

“
Oof!
” She wheeled around and scuffed away, and he watched her take a very long drink from the water fountain. She came and asked if she could ride the escalators, and he said he'd rather she didn't because he wouldn't be able to see her when she was downstairs. “You will if you stand at the top,” she said. He sighed and stood, and she rode down and back up, down and back up again, solemnly. The thought of seeing Sabba and Savta made her shiver, as if she were under a billowing silk cloak, dark and dangerous and beautiful, waiting for it to drape over her. She tried to conjure their faces. She remembered the constellation of pocks on Sabba's cheeks, and the way she could see his thick tongue resting behind his bottom teeth when he laughed. She remembered the soft feel of Savta's shoulder under a cardigan and her baby powder smell, and then a very clear memory popped out, Savta looking at her with a strange expression, saying, “You are a miracle, you and your brother both. You were not supposed to be born.” That had made Gal uneasy even though she didn't know what it meant exactly, and she'd somehow known that it wasn't something she should ask Ema about, because Ema would be mad. She pondered this for a moment, and then her mind moved deftly away from it, concentrating on stepping on and off the escalator at the right moment.

When the flight from Newark finally landed, it seemed to take ages for the passengers to deboard, and by the time people began trickling through the exits, first one or two and then bigger groups, Gal was grinding her fists into her eyes with peevish exhaustion, and Daniel was suddenly finding things wrong with the way she looked—her face white with exhaustion, her hair ratty, a shoelace untied. He actually had a comb in his coat pocket, but he didn't dare bring it to her hair. He detested himself for his worry about her appearance, but he never forgot that his guardianship of her and Noam was provisional.

Then she squirted out from under his arm and ran toward the elderly couple in enormous coats that was coming through the door. They bent over and caught her in a hug that made the people around them smile, exclaiming, “You came!” and “You're still awake? You must be so tired!” The duty-free shopping bag looped over Malka's arm slipped to the floor, along with her purse, and Yaakov stooped to pick them up, then took his beaming granddaughter into an awkward hug, the bags banging on Gal's back.

Malka was wiping tears from her eyes. Daniel hung back, smiling, pained as he felt the reunion from their perspective. They were wearing new matching parkas, shiny navy blue, bought for a harsher winter than they were accustomed to, and carrying shopping bags and plastic bags that looked as if they contained a hundred tin foil–covered paper plates of mandelbrot and rugelach.

They came up to Daniel and he had a moment of uncertainty: kisses or handshakes or neither? Yaakov extended his hand with a bluff, mirthless “Shalom, shalom,” and Daniel shook it, saying, “Welcome.” Malka lifted her face, with its delicate web of lines, to kiss his cheek. “I look at you and I see your brother, even though you've grown so skinny,” she murmured.

“Oh, not that skinny,” he said.

She gave him a keen appraising look, very Israeli, and said, “You're really very skinny.”

Their suitcases, which Daniel hauled off the carousel, were ancient paisley canvas, pre-wheels vintage. By the time they got to the car, he was panting and sweating, cursing himself for being too cheap to rent a luggage cart. It had begun to snow.

MALKA AND YAAKOV REFUSED
to take the master bedroom, insisting that he and Matt sleep in their own bed. Matt and Daniel brought every argument to bear they could. The only TV in the house was in their room. It was so much more private! It was warmer up there! They wouldn't have to share a bathroom! But they were adamant that they didn't want Daniel and Matt to go to any trouble. So Daniel and Matt carried all the clothes back into their closets and re–set up their toiletries in the master bathroom. “This is making more trouble,” Matt said. “They'll be in the middle of the house all day, every day.”

“Don't,” Daniel said. “I'm trying to keep up my morale.”

Malka and Yaakov carefully hung up their clothes in the front hall closet. Then Daniel came down and helped them blow up and put sheets on the air mattress, while Gal sat on the couch, gazing at her grandparents beatifically. “I'm so glad it's snowing outside,” she said. “Because that's something you don't see in Israel very much.”

It snowed all night, the huge, silent flakes that cluster in a moment on hair and eyelashes, and when Matt and Daniel awoke it was still snowing. “Great,” Daniel sighed, his heart sinking at the thought of a day at home with grandparents and children. He called the college weather line, which informed him that nonessential personnel did not need to report to work, and as the children slept, he and Matt turned on a local news station without the sound and watched the school closure tickers. They could hear movement downstairs, the toilet flushing, the ding of the toaster. “There,” Matt said. “Closed.” There was no sound from the kids' room, so they sank back under the covers, Daniel draping his cold legs over Matt's warm ones, and sank back into a rare morning sleep.

Gal awoke buoyant, taking in the snowstorm and the warm, full house, and ran downstairs, where Malka and Yaakov sat at the kitchen table with toast and coffee. She buried her head in their laps and chests and let them stroke her, and showed them how she knew how to make her own breakfast of cereal and milk, with a banana cut on top. She ate with relish, milk slopping over the spoon, talking with her mouth full about snow days and the kinds of things American kids did in the snow.

AT FIRST MATT AND
Daniel enjoyed the new and improved Gal, cheerful and cooperative—the “Sure!” that met her grandparents' suggestions or requests. “I'll get them!” she'd yell when Yaakov patted his shirt pocket for his reading glasses, and off she'd go. She talked to Noam in front of them in a fulsome loving voice, and volunteered to set the table every night.

“What!” Daniel and Matt would jocularly exclaim. “Who are you and what have you done with our Gal!” After a while, though, Matt confessed to Daniel that he was finding it a little creepy. “It's just not her!” he said. “There's something about it that makes me sad.”

“Really?” Daniel said with surprise. “I think she's just happy to have them here.”

Matt shook his head. There was something about them that made you lurch to take care of them. To the naked eye, they were just old folks who drank tea, had a passion for Sudoku, and watched the American nightly news, translated by Daniel, with clucks of the tongue and shaking heads, invariably asking if this or that public figure was Jewish. Their pills and vitamins lined the windowsill above the kitchen sink, doled out carefully by Yaakov every morning. They had set up a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle of a Swiss chalet surrounded by wildflowers on the dining room table, and Malka and Gal worked on it for half an hour before bed, Malka sitting with her glasses on her nose, patiently trying this piece and that, Gal pacing around the table mumbling to herself: “There!” and “
Yofi
, Savta!”

Maybe, Matt thought, it was the way they never asked a follow-up question—so when Gal told them about getting one hundred on a spelling test, they didn't ask what the hardest word was. The bottom just dropped right out of the conversation. Or maybe it was the way there was never the right amount of food in the refrigerator. When Daniel went grocery shopping with Malka, he came home with twice the amount of food he normally did, and then, when the refrigerator was full to bursting, Malka anxiously exhorted everyone to eat the food before it went to waste. “What did we buy this yogurt for, if nobody's going to eat it?” she'd demand. She peered into the pots as Daniel or Matt cooked, and asked whether they were sure there would be enough, whether they should take a bread out of the freezer to supplement the meal. And then, at the end of every meal, Yaakov groaned, “Why did you let me eat so much?” and spent the next few hours with his belt unbuckled, complaining of gas.

It was hard, when Matt and Daniel fell into bed at the end of the day, not to attribute their behaviors to their childhoods in the Holocaust, even though that felt weirdly hushed, ghoulish, fetishistic. They knew only what they'd heard from Ilana, or heard from Ilana via Joel, who said that the information Ilana had was itself spotty and contradictory. She knew, he told them, that her parents didn't want her to know about their lives in the Holocaust, and she wasn't even sure how she did know; she felt as though she'd learned by osmosis. Then she pretended that she didn't know.

They knew that Yaakov had been a child in the Lodz ghetto; that he'd survived by looking bigger and older than his ten years and being sent to work in a Nazi metalworking factory, and by running with a pack of teenagers who stole and shared food. His parents and his two younger brothers had not survived. The aura he projected around them and around Malka was that he was surrounded by a pack of incompetents—lots of condescending laughter and put-upon sighs at the way they blundered. “Do you think he acts that way because everyone around him died?” Matt asked. “Because they just weren't competent enough to stay alive?”

“Beats me,” Daniel said. “But the food thing is definitely about having been a hungry kid.”

He and Matt peered up at the ceiling and blinked, their minds working at what profound hunger would be like for a child, imagining against their wills being unable to feed Noam and Gal.

One night after the kids were asleep, Daniel invited Malka and Yaakov into the living room to have a conversation about Noam's developmental delays. He sat with a glass of wine in the wood rocker, while Malka warmed her hands around a mug of tea and Yaakov shifted beside her on the couch in a posture of uncomfortable readiness. He'd never had a serious conversation with them by himself, or a conversation where everyone was on the same side, and he found himself turning toward Malka; it was just impossible to maintain eye contact with Yaakov. “He's twenty-one months old now,” he said, “and he isn't walking yet or saying very much.”

“He's such a good boy,” Malka said. “He seems calm and contented.”

Daniel suddenly remembered something Ilana had once told him—that Malka hadn't grown up around other children and had never had a normal childhood herself, so when she had Ilana she was at a loss. Ilana said she remembered quite clearly that when she became a toddler demanding independence and throwing tantrums, it was very frightening to her mother.

“I know. We love him very much,” Daniel said, conscious of using the word
we.
“There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with him physically. Our pediatrician wanted him tested for neurological disorders and autism.” As he said that, he saw Malka's eyes fill with tears. “But till now, we've refused. We think he has suffered very badly, and because he doesn't have the words for what he lost, this is how we're seeing it. But now, more months have passed, and we might have to reconsider.”

“
Misken
,” Yaakov said. “Poor little boy. So once again, the Arabs finish what the Nazis started.”

“Yaakov,” Malka murmured.

“You're very right in what you're doing,” Yaakov said. “You must stand strong. The doctors have no idea what they're doing.”

“Do you need a new doctor?” Malka asked.

“We don't think so, but honestly, we're not sure.”

“Maybe you should take him to a specialist,” Malka said. “To a . . . what's it called?” She turned to Yaakov, snapping her fingers to bring on the word. “A neurologist.”

“They don't know what they're talking about,” Yaakov said bitterly. “They think that if they have a fancy degree, they can take the measure of a child who has suffered—who has suffered beyond what they can imagine.”

“But maybe the child—”

“The child is fine!” he snapped.

Malka sat back on the couch with a look of resignation and folded her hands. “Okay,” she said, her mouth pursed. “I just thought—”

“You thought, you thought!” Yaakov mockingly smacked his hand against his forehead. “That's the trouble, you thinking!”

Daniel felt the blood rise and burn in his face. “I thought it would help me to have this conversation,” he said coldly, standing, “but I see I was wrong.”

Yaakov's face worked; he put his fingers to the bridge of his nose.

“He's sorry,” Malka said. “This is sad, about the child. And with the birthday coming up.” Ilana's birthday was in a few days, and they were all dreading it.

“He's not the only one who's sad, Malka,” Daniel said.

“Shh, shh, I know,” she murmured.

CHRISTMAS CAME WITHOUT NOTICE
by anyone but Matt. He drove to Derrick and Brent's house on Christmas Day, listening to holiday songs on the radio, thinking that he didn't really mind missing Christmas in this household of Jews but that he did kind of mind their not noticing that he was missing it. The day was gray and the streets were empty; clusters of cars were parked askew in people's driveways. Derrick and Brent had gone to Derrick's sister's in North Carolina to visit the nieces and nephews, and he was supposed to stop in and feed their two beautiful and haughty tortoiseshell cats, Miles and Ella, twice a day. He parked on the street and let himself in. Their condo was in downtown Northampton, a small but pristine two-story apartment back by the fire department with a galley kitchen whose space they maximized by hanging their pots and pans from a rod they hung from the ceiling, and a living room with a bay window with a bench along it, which was padded with bright cushions and pillows. They'd left the radio on low, and it was playing classical music. Two champagne flutes stood upside down in the dish dryer; the news of Brent's tenure had come right before they left. At the sound of the can opener, the cats sauntered into the kitchen, chirping, and wound themselves around Matt's legs.