The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (73 page)

I thought, We’re finished.

…I
N THE STATE OF MIND IN WHICH SOMEONE “OBSERVES,” HE IS FAR BELOW THE LEVEL AT WHICH HE FINDS HIMSELF WHEN HE CREATES.

Marcel Proust,

In Search of Lost Time

(Within a Budding Grove)

M
RS.
B
EGLEY’S FUNERAL
took place on a cold, bright Tuesday morning, late in December. She had died on a Saturday, two days shy of her ninety-fourth birthday. She had, as usual, been right: I hadn’t written fast enough.

For months she hadn’t been well.
Not vell, not vell at all,
she would snap back wearily whenever I was foolish enough to begin one of our phone conversations with a mechanical
How are you?
By then, I knew the answer. Although she had begun to seem frailer, her mind, as far as I could tell, was intact. She listened intently as I kept her up to date on my travels, my research, my writing; she was warmly, almost disconcertingly sympathetic when I told her, one afternoon as we talked on the phone, that I’d just had word that Dyzia Lew had died in Belarus; that we wouldn’t be going to Minsk, ever.
We are all going, one by one
, she said, tonelessly. She continued to read the
Times
and the
New York Review of Books
cover to cover, and throughout 2004 she called me frequently to comment on this or that piece I’d written. A month before she died, we talked over the phone for some time about the Greek playwrights, and again she told a story that she’d first told me on the January day nearly five years earlier when I had come nervously to her house and she had poured me the first of so many cups of tea. The story was this: that, soon after the war was over in Poland, the first cultural event to take place was a performance of Sophocles’
Antigone
. As we both knew well,
Antigone
is a play about an individual who bravely stands up to authoritarian rule and dies for it. But there are other forms of resistance that are unthinkable in Greek tragedy; for instance, surviving. Now, whenever I teach
Greek tragedy, I tell both stories: about
Antigone
in Poland after the war, and about Mrs. Begley, who had hidden, and had survived.

The Greeks, she sighed heavily into the phone, the Greeks, the theater, I used to know them all, I used to go to see everything.

But her body was failing her, I knew, although as usual I refused to think about the ending, about where that failure would finally lead. Her knees bothered her, she would say each time we talked, each time I visited her on upper Lexington Avenue, where she no longer came to the door to greet me but instead would be waiting, enthroned in the chair by the silent air conditioner, or seated at the dining-room table, in the chair nearest the kitchen door, waiting with the platters of smoked salmon, of bread, of serried pastries. What does it matter if I’m stuck here? she chuckled grimly into the phone in mid-August of her last year, when a blackout had cut the power to New York City, I can’t move anyway! From my apartment on Seventy-first Street I had rung her apartment on Ninety-fourth Street, to check in and make sure she didn’t need anything. My electric phone was, like everyone else’s, dead, but I’d dug an old telephone out of my closet, a massive black 1950s model that I’d bought on a whim at the flea market. This phone had no need of electricity, nor, I knew, did the ancient model that Mrs. Begley used. As I laboriously dialed the numbers, letting the dial rotate back with each digit to its resting point, a process that made a sound I hadn’t heard for years now, a sound that revived in me memories of my mother on the old rotary phone in the kitchen gesturing with her blond head in the direction of the neighbor’s house; as I dialed her number, I knew I’d get through to her. Her voice, when she answered, sounded surprisingly full of fun, as if the excitement of the citywide crisis were a relief from the stale news of her own failing health. She told me that, yes, she was all right, that, no, I didn’t need to bring her anything.

I looked out my window at the darkened buildings to the east of my neighborhood and, toying with the heavy receiver, said, We’re probably the only two people in New York City who are able to have a phone conversation!

You know why? she muttered. Because only we have such telephones! Because we both like
old things
! Ha!

So she had knee problems. Or she had deficiencies of sodium, or calcium, maybe it was potassium, I can’t even remember the names of the chemicals that ran too thickly or thinly in her blood. But I knew that one of these deficiencies was causing her a problem that enraged and frustrated her, which
was an odd kind of aphasia. She’d be in the middle of a conversation and would suddenly look helpless and angry and say,
Ecchhh, I can’t think of that thing I want to say, you know what it is,
and sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t but either way I would say, It’s all right, Mrs. Begley, it’s not important. Two words, I noticed, that had not vanished from her vocabulary in the summer and then autumn months just before she died were
sentimental
and
better-looking
.

And then she got pneumonia, and then she was better, and then she was worse, and then she died.

Inside the funeral chapel on Madison Avenue, at the front of a modest room lined with plain, polished wooden pews, the plain pine coffin, as is the custom, was waiting. Seated in these pews there were perhaps twenty people: apart from the family it was mostly friends of her son, and a smattering of people who, like me, against all odds, were her friends, too. In the little antechamber where we gathered before the service began, a tiny, tiny old woman, as shrunken as some tribal idol, was sitting on a settee, dressed with a surprising chic: jaunty fedora, tailored suit, a jabot, huge glasses. Only her outlandish shoes, with thick, sporty soles, seemed out of place. She looked like she was a hundred, and as it turned out, she nearly was. Louis’s wife steered me over and introduced her. This lady had been Mrs. Begley’s neighbor in Stryj, Anka said. The old woman looked up at me with hugely magnified eyes and, peering at me, said,
I have known Louis since he was a baby! Now I am the last one!

But for once, I wasn’t interested in talking to an old Jewish lady, and I just nodded and left soon afterward to take my seat, carefully avoiding contact with the other guests. The last time I had buried a Jew from a town in Galicia, it had been my grandfather, and what with the emotion and the family and my mother crying, it had gone by in a strange accelerated flash. I had been twenty. This time, I was in my forties. I knew what I was losing.

While the brief service went on, I took out the snapshot I’d taken four years earlier, on the day of the festive lunch she’d given after I came back from Ukraine. In it, she’s sitting at her dining-room table, her elegant, thickly veined hand resting on the cloth, staring a little warily at the camera, her good eye half-open, the long Central European face aloof and weary, but not unfriendly. As her son spoke—
But something in her had been broken,
he said at one point; that much I remember—and then her grandchildren and, finally, her great-granddaughter, a soulful, dark-haired teenager with a full mouth
and dream-filled eyes who, I am convinced, looks remarkably like her great-grandmother must have looked, and indeed on the night I first laid eyes on this girl, which was the same night I met Mrs. Begley and she laughed at me and said,
Bo-LEH-khoof!,
on the first night I saw this girl I said,
Oh! You look so much like your great-grandmother!
which for all I know may, in thirty years, be the beginning of some other book—as the Begley children and grandchildren and great-grandchild spoke, I took out this photograph and looked at it and ran a finger across it, just as my mother had done, stroking a casual (but, for that reason, more authentic) photograph of her father, that June day in 1980 when they lowered the plain pine box into the earth of Mount Judah Cemetery, had stroked it and said over and over again, as a rabbi who had never met my grandfather went through the ritual by rote, and therefore had no way of conveying anything significant, any authenticating detail, about the person whose body he was committing to the earth, You have to say how funny he was, he was so
funny
!

That had been a quarter century earlier. Now it was time to bury Mrs. Begley, who had given me a second chance to know someone of my grandfather’s culture and time, to ask the questions I didn’t know how to ask when I was twenty. The service was over, and the room gradually emptied. I lingered after there was no one left, not even the ancient crone who had once been a young, fresh-faced housewife in a city far away who had, I suppose, once cooed over her neighbor’s new baby and said,
Ludwik, Ludwik!
as she stroked the plasticene infant flesh. I felt awkward: partly because it seemed strange to leave her alone there in the high-ceilinged institutional room; and also because I knew that when I walked out the broad doorway into the hallway where the family had formed a line and were shaking hands with the guests, I would never see her again. I started to walk to the door, but something stopped me, a hesitation so strong it felt like a physical force, like a firm hand being placed on my shoulder, and I turned back to look. Not caring who saw me or how foolish I looked, I walked briskly down the center aisle to the coffin and stood in front of it. I laid my hand on the unvarnished wood, blemished with its dark knots the way that an aged hand is blemished with its liver spots, and gently ran it back and forth for a moment, the way you might stroke the arm of a very old person, at once gingerly and reassuringly.

I said, I really loved you, Mrs. Begley. I’m going to miss you a lot.

Then I turned around and walked to the door. I stopped and turned back for one last look—I am, after all, a
sentimental
person—and then I walked away, and that was the last time we talked.

Although it is not the end of Genesis,
parashat Vayeira
, which takes its name from the divine manifestation to Abraham with which it begins—
And He Appeared
—provides, to my mind, a fitting and satisfying conclusion, at once dramatically riveting and morally searing, to the narrative that arcs through the first few
parashot
of the Hebrew Bible. Those readings trace the evolution of the Chosen People, narrowing its focus with increasing intensity as the text proceeds: beginning with the momentous, grand, wide-angle drama of the creation of all of Creation itself, every species and kind of living thing, and then proceeding, as it were through a series of ever smaller Chinese boxes, to the story of one species, mankind, then to the story of one specific family, and finally to the story of one specific man, a man whom God chose out, Abraham, the first Jew. This story of Abraham and his relationship with God, whom Abraham was the first human to acknowledge as the object of a proper religious awe, comes to an end in
parashat Vayeira
, which itself culminates in two famous and harrowing tales.

The first, the story of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, recapitulates themes that occur earlier in Genesis, while exploring more profoundly the moral implications of being chosen. There is, to begin with, another instance of divine annihilation: God’s decision to destroy a not insignificant number of human beings—the entire populations of two metropolises—as a punishment for their wickedness, an event that will inevi
tably call to mind his earlier decision, described in
Noach
, to destroy all of humanity with the exception of Noah and his immediate family. That decision raised flickering concerns about the possibility that innocent humans might have been destroyed along with the guilty ones—a moral problem that will be fully confronted at last in the Sodom and Gomorrah story. Furthermore, because it presents a stark confrontation between those chosen by God and the non-chosen, and indeed between what it means to have chosen goodness and what it means to have chosen wickedness,
parashat Vayeira
may be thought of as presenting to the reader yet another—perhaps the final and most refined—in the series of acts of distinguishing so memorably described at the beginning of Genesis. For as we know, the act of distinguishing is the hallmark of creation itself.

These and other repetitions of earlier themes and motifs persuade me that
parashat Vayeira
is intended to feel like a culmination, a summing up. This cyclical quality of the text applies not only to large themes, but also to passing details. For instance: in this reading we learn that, after the destruction of the twin cities of the plain, as Sodom and Gomorrah are often called, Abraham moves on with Sarah to the Negev, to the city of Gerar. Here, exactly as he had once done in Egypt, the patriarch pretends that his wife is his sister, with the result that, exactly as we saw before, the king of the place takes her into his household, only to be stopped from touching her by the hand of God himself, who gives the king a warning in a dream. Precisely what designs this king, Abimelek, may have had on the ninety-year-old Sarah are unclear, but the recurrent motif of the patriarch’s lie about his wife, however contrived it feels at this point, is surely meant to bring us back, at the exact point at which the story of this couple’s wanderings comes to a close (for Sarah dies at the beginning of the very next
parashah
) to a recollection of how those wanderings began. Certain kinds of manipulations of the truth are irresistible if what one wants to create is a story with a satisfying shape.