The Wanting (4 page)

Anyusha was right. You would never have known a bomb had exploded on my corner. Only instead of our bus shelter, there was a new cardboard sign on a pole. And my glorious window was boarded over with huge sheets of plywood. I gasped, I think, because Daphne took my hand. Bits of stone and plaster had been
blasted from the façade of my building, revealing layers that had never before seen sunlight. These sad old blocks of stone! I could see directly into their broken hearts.

Anyusha suddenly leaned forward and threw her arms around me.

“Don’t be sad, Pop,” she said. “You can fix it up. You’re good at that.”

“Now can we go home?” Daphne asked.

I think it was on the way back that Daphne’s daughter, Shana, asked me why I was an architect.

“What do you mean, why?”

“I mean, how does someone become one? Was it like, a calling?”

“No one has a calling,” I said. “Because there’s no one to call you.”

“Oh boy,” said Anyusha. “Here we go.”

“We all just do what we decide to do,” I said. But I knew that was not completely true.

I was about thirteen and had already been obsessing about university for some time. To get in, I had to be in the right high school. But in the past year, I had been turned down by the special school for mathematics, even though I’d passed all the tests, and also the special school for French, even though I was quite fluent, and also by the polytechnical preparatory school, even though my paper on electromagnetism won a prize and was published in
Junior Scientist
. I should not have been surprised. Even the most brilliant Jewish math students—far more formidable than I—often ended up studying nothing more than mechanical engineering, and the most promising Jewish science students became mere lab technicians. But something in me refused to accept this simple truth. Every day I would fill out another application or write a letter of protest
to some ministry. My father encouraged me: “Keep trying! Keep working! Let them know you exist!”

“Why are you letting him draw so much attention to himself?” my mother complained.

As for my grandfather, he scratched his head. “What’s all the
tummle
? Use our connections.”

“Papa, everyone you know is dead,” said my mother.

“Well, Lyopa has connections.”

“Lyopa does not have connections. Lyopa cannot get a respectable job for himself. How is he going to get something for Roma?”

Lyopa was my father. “I have a respectable job,” he said.

“Phhhh,” my mother replied, and went back to her chopped onions. My father at that time adjusted hearing aids.

“I have a respectable job,” he repeated. “And you,” he said to me, “don’t give up.” He raised his voice and spoke directly to the walls, “A good Soviet boy always is an example to his peers!” Then he winked at me. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”

Outside it was a beautiful spring evening. Weather like this always meant school would soon be over, but I couldn’t enjoy it. All I could think about was how little time was left to get accepted somewhere where I could further my academic ambitions.

“I’m the best kid in my class,” I told my father.

“I know that, Romka.”

“I want to be a great scientist. I want to study physics. Particle physics. Atomic physics.”

“To make another H-bomb?”

“Well, yes,” I admitted.

We walked along our little block until we came upon a small park hidden behind an old church that was still in use, the portico half falling down, held aloft by braces of raw lumber hastily hammered together. From behind its crooked doors, dark waves of incense issued a rich, tender note of strangeness. A few old ladies, their colorful scarves topping their heads like faded flowers, made their way up the uncertain stairs, and soon their voices could be heard sifting through the evening breeze, beautiful in their dissonance.
A little farther along, there stood a few dilapidated benches and, beyond that, a little shack and, even farther along, quite unexpectedly, a little rivulet running through a maze of broken twigs and dead leaves. From whence it sprang no one could say—the Neglinnaya had been buried two centuries ago, but perhaps it had found a tiny outlet here, a few blocks from my house, or perhaps it was just spring runoff or, more likely, overflow from some pipe that had rusted out decades ago. But the water had a fresh, wild smell and the dancing sound of a mountain stream, and it glistened as it rolled over the pebbles, turning them into sparkling amethysts in the low, golden sun.

“A bomb is not the best use of your brain,” my father said.

“There are lots of things physicists do. I could discover time travel.”

“That would be good,” he agreed.

“I could just work on subatomic particles. I could look back in time to the beginning of the universe.”

“That also would be good.” He bent down and picked up a stick, poked at the water, and then brought it up to my nose. “See?
Carabini calosoma
.”

A small beetle was desperately clutching the end of the stick. “See how it looks black and dull, but when you turn it just so … see? All the colors of the rainbow!”

“Don’t you miss the university?” I asked him.

“Why should I? I have my laboratory all around me. So much going on right here in this little bit of grass. Right here in Moscow! Can you imagine?”

He set Mr. Carabini down upon the wet earth and with a little push of his forefinger nudged it on its way. “Yes, this is the best laboratory! No one to report to except myself. No one to look over my shoulder. Just the joy of doing.”

“But for whom?” I said. “Who will see it? Who will learn from it?”

My father mussed my hair. “You,” he said.

“What good will that do?”

“Well,” he sighed. “I’ll publish all my findings sooner or later. Don’t worry about it.”

But I wasn’t worried. I was ashamed.

“Come,” he said, “let’s walk some more.”

We emerged from the little park by way of an alley that led through a courtyard and finally found ourselves on a great boulevard. My father’s hidden paradise had been only minutes from Prospekt Kalinina. There the traffic sped by in great, noisy waves, and the bright new buildings loomed over us: apartment blocks, offices, ministries, shops.

“What do you think of this?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s modern, I guess.”

“Not these awful monstrosities,” he said. “Look more carefully.”

We stood there, two logs impeding the flow of pedestrians. “Come on, Papa, let’s get going.”

“No, no, just look.”

“But at what?”

“You’re missing it!” he cried. “Come on!” He marched me forward a few paces until I was face-to-face with one of the hundreds of lampposts that stood guard over the magnificent boulevard. “Look up! Look straight up!”

So I looked up. But what was there to see?

“There,” he pointed, “where the lamps curve toward the street.”

And then I saw it. At the top of the pole, where one arm went to the right and the other to the left, there, in the hollow formed at their junction, was a bird’s nest.

“I’ve been observing it for quite some time. It’s a spotted nutcracker. Can you believe that? What is it doing on this busy street? Go out to the woods, you silly birds! It’s already got chicks. For a long time the mother bird would sit and the father would forage. Now they both go hunting for their babies. What do you think of that? Right here on Prospekt Kalinina. Clever little things!”

He was already going on about how no matter how hard they
make it—always
they
—life finds a niche, you can survive, you can thrive, even here on Kalinina. Even where Soviet reality overwhelms the spirit, nature prevails.

But I really wasn’t listening. I was up there in the elbow of the lamppost. It wasn’t the force of nature that enthralled me. It was the nest. I was trying to figure out how so minuscule a birdbrain could have constructed such a sturdy little home. My heart stopped when I noticed the clever way it was attached to the aluminum pole and how it was woven tighter than any scarf my grandmother could knit and how, so exposed, the babies were nevertheless hidden and warm. It was the most miraculous thing I had ever seen. And in that moment, my love of architecture was born.

I looked in the rearview mirror. Shana was asleep. Anyusha was reading her manga.

“Don’t worry,” said Daphne. “They’ve heard it all before. They just wanted to get your mind off your troubles.”

But as we pulled up to our complex, I found myself exploding, “Why can’t they leave us in peace?”

“It’s a war,” she said simply.

“War? What kind of war? Are we blowing up their buses? They didn’t want us back in Russia; they don’t want us here. Why don’t we just walk ourselves right back into the gas chambers and make everybody happy?”

“Roman,” she said softly, “the children.”

“Yes,” I said, “yes, sorry.” And I stepped out of the car, walked up the pretty pathway to my house, and waited for Anyusha to come along with the key.

W
HEN
I
AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING
, having fallen asleep almost immediately upon arriving home, I did not at first notice Daphne curled up on the floor. But there she was, her body snailed into the one vacant corner without even a blanket to cover her. She must have spent the night watching over me. Her stomach silently rose and fell with the tide of her breathing, and I realized it was rather like Anyusha’s when she used to fall asleep on my lap. I slipped the quilt off my bed, gently laid it over her. There was an open book lying beside her; it was
Fathers and Sons
translated into Hebrew. I’d used it to practice my reading. In fact, I had a whole collection of Russian literature in Hebrew. Perhaps because of that my Hebrew has a slightly literary feel, or so my sabra friends tell me—but I doubt it is a compliment.

In the living room, the girls were already watching TV. They had large bowls of American cereal in their laps and were sitting Bedouin style on the carpet, mesmerized by
Beavis and Butt-Head
.

“Do you think I could watch the news?” I said.

“You’re not allowed to,” Anyusha quickly replied, her mouth full of Cocoa Puffs. “Ari called. He’s coming over. And Babushka, too.”

“What did she say?”

“She was all crazy that we didn’t tell her you were coming home. Didn’t I tell you we should call her?”

“
Chyort!
” I cried.

“I told her she can’t be mad at you because you are a victim of a terrorist attack.”

I sighed and padded into the kitchen. Arrayed before me were the gardens of Babylon—flowers of every denomination—vases of carnation, lily, and daisy, baskets of mixed colors, hyacinth erupting from glazed pots. Wherever I looked, there they were, sprouting on the kitchen counter, poking up between the blender and cappuccino maker, blanketing the kitchen table, the terrazzo windowsills, even on top of the microwave—flowers. For now I was a celebrity among my family and friends. People would want to know, was it in slow motion like in the movies? Did it sound like a mortar or was it more like a wave crashing over you? Did you go flying into the air or did you just collapse in a heap? The truth is, most Israelis have never actually witnessed a suicide bombing. As often as they occur, still they are rare enough, far apart enough, or perhaps close together enough, that you have to be quite unlucky to experience one firsthand. You don’t even usually hear them, because they’re not all that loud. A few blocks away, it’s just a car backfiring. A few more, a door closing. A few more, perhaps a slight change in the rustle of the leaves, as if a bird had landed on a high branch and busied itself preening.

“For God’s sake,” I said surveying all the geraniums, “it’s just a scratch!”

“There’s vodka, too. Ari sent that,” Anyusha added.

Ari was part of my old life, and so he is a part of this one, even though the rules have changed and we no longer have the same interests or desires. In Moscow he was a fixer. In Tel Aviv, where he lives, he is also a fixer, but of air conditioners and refrigerators. We called him Lonya in those days, and I still do, though it annoys him. He thinks he’s Sharansky who has to change his name. In the old days, he was passionate about girls, football, and ice hockey and, when he got a little older, vodka, and that unfortunately describes him to this day. In one of his most famous escapades, Lonya rented a shack in the countryside—far away, in the Urals—and, with the help of a few of our friends who knew a thing or two about chemistry, decided to set up a still deep in the woods so that, in his own
words, “We won’t have to drink that utter shit they call vodka in this country! Better we should drink American vodka than that shit. They should piss on that shit! They should shit on that shit!” One cannot make up such language. One can only record it in one’s memory as one does any great poetry. “No!” he declared, we would make a vodka so sublime it would taste “like cunt! A veritable elixir of pussy, pussy of the gods! You will drink it,” he said, “and your dick will turn to platinum.”

It took us a full week to build that still. Then it blew up and Lonya lost his left eye.