Everything Is Illuminated (23 page)

We peeled the corn. The silence was a mountain.

"Do you remember all of the concrete in Lvov?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Me too."

More silence. We had nothing to talk about, nothing important. Nothing could have been important enough.

"What do you write in your diary?" "I take notes." "About what?" "For the book I'm working on. Little things that I want to remember." "About Trachimbrod?" "Right." "It is a good book?" "I've only written pieces. I wrote a few pages before I came this summer, a few on the plane to Prague, a few on the train to Lvov, a few last night." "Read to me from it." "It's embarrassing." "It is not like this. It is not embarrassing." "It is." "Not if you recount it for me. I will relish it, I promise you. I am very simple to enchant." "No," he said, so I did what I thought was the OK and even funny thing. I took his diary and opened it. He did not say that I could read it, but nor did he ask for it back. This is what I read:

He told his father that he could care for Mother and Little Igor. It took his saying it to make it true. Finally, he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. What? he asked. What? And Sasha told him again that he would take care of the family, that he would understand if his father had to leave and never return, and that it would not even make him less of a father. He told his father that he would forgive. Oh, his father became so angry, so full of wrath, and he told Sasha that he would kill him, and Sasha told his father that he would kill him, and they moved at each other with violence and his father said, Say it to my face, not to the floor, and Sasha said, You are not my father.

By the time Grandfather and Augustine descended from the house, we had finished a pile of corn, and left the skin as a pile on the other side of the stairs. I had read several pages in his diary. Some scenes were like this. Some were very different. Some happened early in history and some had not even happened yet. I understood what he was doing when he wrote like this. At first it made me angry, but then it made me sad, and then it made me so grateful, and then it made me angry again, and I went through these feelings hundreds of times, stopping on each for only a moment and then moving to the next.

"Thank you," Augustine said, and she was examining the piles, one of corn, one of skins. "That was a very kind thing that you did." "She is going to take us to Trachimbrod," Grandfather said. "We must not squander time. It is becoming late." I told this to the hero. "Tell her thank you for me." "Thank you," I told her. Grandfather said, "She knows."

T
HERE IS A SENSE
in which the bride's family had been preparing their house for her wedding since long before Zosha was born, but it wasn't until my grandfather reluctantly proposed—on both knees rather than one—that the renovations achieved their hysterical pace. The hardwood floors were covered in white canvas, and tables were set in a line stretching from the master bedroom to the kitchen, each feathered with precisely positioned name cards, whose placement had been agonized over for weeks. (Avra cannot sit next to Zosha, but should be near Yoske and Libby, but not if it means seating Libby near Anshel, or Anshel near Avra, or Avra anywhere near the centerpieces, because he's terribly allergic and will die. And by all means keep the Uprighters and Slouchers on opposite sides of the table.) New curtains were bought for the new windows, not because there was anything wrong with the old curtains on the old windows, but because Zosha was to be married, and that called for new curtains and windows. The new mirrors were cleaned spotless, their faux-antique frames meticulously dirtied. The proud parents, Menachem and Tova, saw to it that everything, down to the last and smallest detail, was made extraordinary.

The house was actually two houses, connected at the attic when Menachem's risky trout venture proved so remarkably lucrative. It was the largest house in Trachimbrod, but also the least convenient, as one might have to climb and descend the three flights and pass through twelve rooms in order to get from one room to another. It was divided by function: the bedrooms, children's playroom, and library in one half, the kitchen, dining room, and den in the other. The cellars—one of which
housed the impressive wine racks, which, Menachem promised, would one day be filled with impressive wines, the other used as a quiet place for Tova's sewing—were separated by only a brick wall, but were, for all practical purposes, a four-minute walk apart.

The Double House revealed every aspect of its owners' new affluence. A veranda was half completed, jutting like broken glass off the back. Marble newels of idle spiral stairways connected floors to ceilings. The ceilings were raised on the lower floors, rendering the third-floor rooms livable only for children and midgets. Porcelain toilets were installed in the outhouse to replace the seatless brick stools on which everyone else in the shtetl took shits. The perfectly good garden was uprooted and replaced with a gravel walk, lined with azaleas that were cut too short to flower. But Menachem was most proud of the scaffolding: the symbol that things were always changing, always getting a little better. He loved the skeleton of makeshift beams and rafters more and more as construction progressed, loved them more than the house itself, and eventually persuaded the reluctant architect to draw them into the final plans. Workers, too, were drawn into the plans. Not workers, exactly, but local actors paid to look like workers, to walk the planks of the scaffolding, to hammer functionless nails into gratuitous walls, to pull those nails out, to examine blueprints. (The blueprints themselves were drawn into the blueprints, and in those blueprints were blueprints with blueprints with blueprints...) Menachem's problem was this: he had more money than there were things to buy. Menachem's solution was this: rather than buy more things, he would continue to buy the things he already owned, like a man on a desert island who retells and embellishes the only joke he can remember. His dream was for the Double House to be a kind of infinity, always a fraction of itself—suggestive of a bottomless money pit—always approaching but never reaching completion.

Gorgeous! Almost all of it, Tova! Gorgeous!

What a house! And you look like you've lost some weight in your face.

Marvelous! Everyone should be jealous of you.

The wedding—the reception—was the event of 1941, with enough attendees that, should the house have burned down or been swallowed by the earth, Trachimbrod's Jewish population would have completely
disappeared. Reminders were sent out a few weeks before the invitation, which was sent out a week before the official arrangement.

DON'T FORGET:
THE WEDDING OF THE DAUGHTER OF
TOVA
AND HER HUSBAND
^*
JUNE
18, 1941
YOU KNOW THE HOUSE

^*
Menachem

And no one forgot. Only the various Trachimbroders who weren't, in Tova's estimation, worthy of an invitation were not at the reception, and hence not in the guest book, and hence not included in the last practical census of the shtetl before its destruction, and hence forgotten forever.

As the guests filtered in, unable to help but admire the stylized wainscoting, my grandfather excused himself and went down to the wine-rack cellar to change from his traditional marriage suit into a light cotton blazer, more suited to the wet heat.

Absolutely ravishing, Tova. Look at me, I'm ravished.
It looks like nothing else, ever.
You must have spent a fortune on those lovely centerpieces. Achoo!
So extraordinary!

A fissure of thunder resounded in the distance, and before there was time to close any of the new windows, or even their new curtains, a wind of haunting speed and strength breathed through the house, blowing over the floral centerpieces and tossing the place settings into the air. Pandemonium. The cat screeched, the water boiled, the elderly women held tight to the mesh hats that covered their balding heads. The gust left as soon as it entered, easing the place cards back on the table, not one card in its original place—Libby next to Kerman (who had said his attendance at the reception was dependent on a three-table separation between himself and that horrible cunt), Tova at the very end of the last table (a spot reserved for the fishmonger, whose name no one could remember, and whose invitation had been slid under his door at the last minute out of guilt for the recent loss of his wife to cancer), the Upright
Rabbi next to the outspoken Sloucher Shana P (who was as repulsed and turned on by him as he was by her), and my grandfather landing doggie-style on his bride's younger sister.

Zosha and her mother—red with embarrassment, pale with the sadness of an imperfect wedding—scurried about, trying in vain to reset everything that had been so deliberately arranged, picking up forks and knives, wiping the floors of spilled wine, recentering the centerpieces, replacing the names that had been scattered like a thrown deck of playing cards.

Let's hope it's not true,
the father of the bride tried to joke over the shuffle,
that it all goes downhill after the wedding!

The bride's younger sister was leaning against a shelf of empty wine racks when my grandfather entered the cellar.

Hello, Maya.

Hello, Safran.

I came to change.

Zosha will be so disappointed.

Why?

Because she thinks you're perfect. She told me so. And your wedding day is no time to change.

Not even into something more comfortable?

Your wedding day is no time to be comfortable.

Oh, sister,
he said, and kissed her where her cheek became her lips.
A sense of humor to match your beauty.

She slid her lace panties from under his lapel.
Finally,
pulling him into her arms,
any longer and I would have just burst.

A
S THEY MADE
hurried love beneath the twelve-foot ceiling, which sounded as if it might collapse at any moment under the gunshots of so many heels—in the effort to clean up, nobody even noticed the groom's prolonged absence—my grandfather wondered if he was nothing more than a dupe of chance. Wasn't everything that had happened, from his first kiss to this, his first marital infidelity, the inevitable result of circumstances over which he had no control? How guilty could he be, really, when he never had any real choice? Could he have been with Zosha upstairs? Was that a possibility? Could his penis have been anywhere other than where it then was, and wasn't, and was, and wasn't, and was? Could he have been good?

His teeth. It's the first thing I notice whenever I examine his baby portrait. It's not my dandruff. It's not a smudge of gesso or white paint. Between my grandfather's thin lips, planted like albino pits in those plum-purple gums, is a full set of teeth. The physician must have shrugged, as physicians used to do when they couldn't explain a medical phenomenon, and comforted my great-grandmother with talk of good omens. But then there is the family portrait, painted three months later. Look, this time, at
her
lips, and you will see that she wasn't entirely comforted: my young great-grandmother was frowning.

It was my grandfather's teeth, so admired by his father for the virility they declared, that made his mother's nipples bloody and sore, that forced her to sleep on her side, and eventually made breastfeeding impossible. It was because of those teeth, those wee dinky molars, those cute bicuspids, that my great-grandparents stopped making love and had
only one child. It's because of those teeth that my grandfather was pulled prematurely from his mother's well, and never received the nutrients his callow body needed.

His arm. It would be possible to look through all of the photographs many times and still miss what's so unusual. But it occurs too frequently to be explained as the photographer's choice of pose, or mere coincidence. My grandfather's right hand is never holding anything—not a briefcase, not any papers, not even his other hand. (And in the only picture taken of him in America—just two weeks after arriving, and three before he passed away—he holds my baby mother with his left arm.) Without proper calcium, his infant body had to allocate its resources judiciously, and his right arm drew the short straw. He watched helplessly as that red, swollen nipple got smaller and smaller, moving away from him forever. By the time he most needed to reach out for it, he couldn't.

So it was because of his teeth, I imagine, that he got no milk, and it was because he got no milk that his right arm died. It was because his arm died that he never worked in the menacing flour mill, but in the tannery just outside the shtetl, and that he was exempted from the draft that sent his schoolmates off to be killed in hopeless battles against the Nazis. His arm would save him again when it kept him from swimming back to Trachimbrod to save his only love (who died in the river with the rest of them), and again when it kept him from drowning himself. His arm saved him again when it caused Augustine to fall in love with him and save him, and it saved him once again, years later, when it prevented him from boarding the
New Ancestry
to Ellis Island, which would be turned back on orders of U.S. immigration officials, and whose passengers would all eventually perish in the Treblinka death camp.

And it was because of his arm, I'm sure—that flaccid hang of useless muscle—that he had the power to make any woman who crossed his path fall in hopeless love with him, that he had slept with more than forty women in Trachimbrod, and at least twice as many from the neighboring villages, and was now making standing, hurried love with his new bride's younger sister.

The first was the widow Rose W, who lived in one of the old wooden ramblers along the Brod. She thought it was pity that she felt for the
crippled boy who had come on behalf of the Sloucher congregation to help clean the house, pity that moved her to bring him a plate of man-delbread and a glass of milk (the very sight of which turned his stomach), pity that moved her to ask how old he was and to tell him her own age, something not even her husband ever knew. It was pity she thought she felt when she removed her layers of mascara to show him the only part of her body that no one, not even her husband, had seen in more than sixty years. And it was pity, or so she thought, when she led him to the bedroom to show him her husband's love letters, sent from a naval ship in the Black Sea during the First World War.