Everything Is Illuminated (12 page)

Yankel!
She wrapped her arms around his neck, as if trying to pull herself into him, or him into her.

Brod discovered 613 sadnesses, each perfectly unique, each a singular emotion, no more similar to any other sadness than to anger, ecstasy, guilt, or frustration. Mirror Sadness. Sadness of Domesticated Birds. Sadness of Being Sad in Front of One's Parent. Humor Sadness. Sadness of Love Without Release.

She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life. She learned impossibly difficult songs on her violin, songs outside of what she thought she could know, and would each time come crying to Yankel,
I have learned to play this one too! It's so terrible! I must write something that not even I can play!
She spent evenings with the art books Yankel had bought for her in Lutsk, and each morning sulked over breakfast,
They were good and fine, but not beautiful. No, not if I'm being honest with myself. They are only the best of what exists.
She spent an afternoon staring at their front door.

Waiting for someone?
Yankel asked.

What color is this?

He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked,
It certainly tastes like red.

Yes, it is red, isn't it?

Seems so.

She buried her head in her hands.
But couldn't it be just a bit more red?

Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily ... None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say,
I don't love you.
Bark-brown fence post:
I don't love you.
Poem too long:
I don't love you.
Lunch in a bowl:
I don't love you.
Physics, the idea of you, the laws of you:
I don't love you.
Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.

If we were to open to a random page in her journal—which she must have kept and kept with her at all times, not fearing that it would be lost, or discovered and read, but that she would one day stumble upon that thing which was finally worth writing about and remembering, only to find that she had no place to write it—we would find some rendering of the following sentiment:
I am not in love.

So she had to satisfy herself with the
idea
of love—loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.

The boys, young men, men, and elderly of the shtetl would sit vigil outside her window at all hours of the day and night, asking if they could assist her with her studies (with which she needed no help, of course, with which they couldn't possibly help her even if she let them try), or in the garden (which grew as if charmed, which bloomed red tulips and roses, orange and restless impatiens), or if perhaps Brod would like to go for a stroll to the river (to which she was perfectly able to stroll on her own, thank you). She never said no and never said yes, but pulled, slackened, pulled her strings of control.

Pull:
What would be nicest,
she would say,
is if I had a tall glass of iced tea.
What happened next: the men raced to get one for her. The first to return might get a peck on the forehead (slacken), or (pull) a promised walk (to be granted at a later date), or (slacken) a simple
Thank you, good-bye.
She maintained a careful balance by her window, never allowing the men to come too close, never allowing them to stray too far. She needed them desperately, not only for the favors, not only for the things that they could get for Yankel and her that Yankel couldn't afford, but because they were a few more fingers to plug the dike that held back what she knew to be true: she didn't love life. There was no convincing reason to live.

Yankel was already seventy-two years old when the wagon went into the river, his house more ready for a funeral than a birth. Brod read under the muted canary light of oil lamps covered with lace shawls, and bathed in a tub lined with sandpaper to prevent slipping. He tutored her in literature and simple mathematics until she had far surpassed his knowledge, laughed with her even when there was nothing funny, read to her before watching her fall asleep, and was the only person she could consider a friend. She acquired his uneven walk, spoke with his old man's inflections, even rubbed at a five-o'clock shadow that was never, at any time of any day of her life, there.

I bought you some books in Lutsk,
he told her, shutting the door on the early evening and the rest of the world.

We can't afford these,
she said, taking the heavy bag.
I'll have to return them tomorrow.

But we can't afford not to have them. Which can we not afford more, having them or not having them? As I see it, we lose either way. My way, we lose with the books.

You're ridiculous, Yankel.

I know,
he said,
because I also bought you a compass from my architect friend and several books of French poetry.

But I don't speak French.

What could be a better occasion to learn?

Having a French language textbook.

Ah yes, I knew there was a reason I bought this!
he said, removing a thick brown book from the bottom of the bag.

You're impossible, Yankel!

I'm possibly possible.

Thank you,
she said, and kissed him on the forehead, which was the only place she had ever kissed or been kissed, and would have been, if not for all the novels she had read, the only place she thought people ever kissed.

She had to secretly return so many of the things that Yankel bought for her. He never noticed, because he couldn't remember ever having bought them. It was Brod's idea to make their personal library a public one, and to charge a small fee to take out books. It was with this money, along with what she was able to secure from the men who loved her, that they were able to survive.

Yankel made every effort to prevent Brod from feeling like a stranger, from being aware of their age difference, their genders. He would leave the door open when he urinated (always sitting down, always wiping himself after), and would sometimes spill water on his pants and say,
Look, it also happens to me,
unaware that it was Brod who spilled water on her pants to comfort him. When Brod fell from the swing in the park, Yankel scraped his own knees against the sandpaper floor of his bathtub and said,
I too have fallen.
When she started to grow breasts, he pulled up his shirt to reveal his old, dropped chest and said,
It's not only you.

This was the world in which she grew and he aged. They made for themselves a sanctuary from Trachimbrod, a habitat completely unlike the rest of the world. No hateful words were ever spoken, and no hands raised. More than that, no angry words were ever spoken, and nothing was denied. But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

But my very-great-and-lonely-grandmother didn't love Yankel, not in the simple and impossible sense of the word. In reality she hardly knew him. And he hardly knew her. They knew intimately the aspects of themselves in the other, but never the other. Could Yankel have guessed what Brod dreamed of? Could Brod have guessed, could she have cared to guess, where Yankel traveled at night? They were strangers, like my grandmother and me.

But...

But each was the closest thing to a deserving recipient of love that the other would find. So they gave each other all of it. He scraped his knee and said,
I too have fallen.
She spilled water on her pants so he wouldn't feel alone. He gave her that bead. She wore it. And when Yankel said he would die for Brod, he certainly meant it, but that thing he would die for was not Brod, exactly, but his love for her. And when she said,
Father, I love you,
she was neither naïve nor dishonest, but the opposite: she was wise and truthful enough to lie. They reciprocated the great and saving lie—that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things—willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.

She was twelve, and he was at least eighty-four. Even if he were to live to ninety, he reasoned, she would be only eighteen. And he knew he would not live to ninety. He was secretly weak, and secretly in pain. Who would take care of her when he died? Who would sing to her and continue to tickle her back, in the particular way she liked, long after she'd fallen asleep? How would she learn of her real father? How could he be sure that she would be safe from daily violence, unintentional and intentional violence? How could he be sure that she would never change?

He did everything he could to impede his rapid deterioration. He tried to eat a good meal even when he wasn't hungry, and drink a bit of vodka between meals even when he felt it would tie his stomach into a knot. He took long walks each afternoon, knowing that the pain in his legs was a good pain, and chopped one piece of wood every morning, knowing that it was not in sickness that his arms ached, but health.

Fearing his frequent deficiencies of memory, he began writing fragments of his life story on his bedroom ceiling with one of Brod's lipsticks that he found wrapped in a sock in her desk drawer. This way, his life would be the first thing he would see when he awoke each morning, and the last thing before going to sleep each night.
You used to be married, but she left you,
above his bureau.
You hate green vegetables,
at the far end of the ceiling.
You are a Sloucher,
where the ceiling met the door.
You don't believe in an afterlife,
written in a circle around the hanging lamp. He never wanted Brod to know how much like a sheet of glass his mind had become, how it would steam with confusion, how thoughts skated off it, how he couldn't understand so many of the things she told him, how he often forgot his name, and, like a small part of him dying, even hers.

4:812
—The dream of living forever with Brod.
I have this dream every night. Even when I can't remember it the next morning, I know it was there, like the depression a lover's head leaves on the pillow next to you after she's left. I dream not of growing old with her, but of never growing old, either of us. She never leaves me, and I never leave her. It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine. Sometimes my dream of living forever with Brod is the dream of our dying together. I know there is no afterlife. I'm no fool. And I know there is no God. It's not her company I need, but to know that she won't need mine, or that she won't not need it. I imagine scenes of her without me, and I become so jealous. She will marry and have children and touch what I could never approach—all things that should make me happy. I cannot tell her this dream, of course, but I want to so desperately. She is the only thing that matters.

He read her a story in bed and listened to her interpretations, never interrupting her, not even to tell her how proud he was, how smart and beautiful she was. After kissing her good night and blessing her, he went to the kitchen, drank the few sips of vodka his stomach could handle, and blew out the lamp. He wandered down the dark hallway, following the warm glow from beneath his bedroom door. He stumbled once over a stack of Brod's books on the floor outside her room, and again over her bag. Entering his own room, he imagined that he would die in his bed that night. He imagined how Brod would find him in the morning. He imagined the position he would be in, the expression on his face. He imagined how he would feel, or not feel.
It's late,
he thought,
and I must wake up early in the morning to cook for Brod before her classes.
He lowered himself to the floor, did the three push-ups he could summon, and picked himself back up.
It's late,
he thought,
and I must be thankful for everything I have, and reconciled with everything I have lost and not lost. I tried very hard to be a good person today, to do things as God would have wanted, had He existed. Thank you for the gifts of life and Brod,
he thought,
and thank you, Brod, for giving me a reason to live. I am not sad.
He slid under the red woolen sheets and looked directly above his head:
You are Yankel. You love Brod.

I
T WAS A SECRET
when Yankel shrouded the clock in black cloth. It was a secret when the Well-Regarded Rabbi awoke one morning with these words on his tongue:
BUT WHAT IF?
And when the most outspoken Sloucher, Rachel F, awoke wondering,
But what if?
It was not a secret when Brod didn't think to tell Yankel that she found spots of red in her underpants, and that she was sure she was dying, and how poetic that she should die like this. But it was a secret when she did think to tell him and then didn't. They were secrets at least some of the times Sofiowka masturbated, which made him the greatest keeper of secrets in Trachimbrod, and perhaps anywhere, ever. It was a secret when grieving Shanda didn't grieve. And it was a secret when the Rabbi's twins implied that they saw nothing and knew nothing of what happened that day, March 18, 1791, when Trachim B's wagon either did or did not pin him against the bottom of the Brod River.