My tears fell on the picture frame. Luckily there was glass.
I’d love to stay here reminiscing, Bernard said, but I really should go. All those people out there. He gestured. Let me know if you need anything. I nodded. He closed the door behind him, and then, God help me, I took the photograph and shoved it in my pants. Down the stairs I went, and out the door. In the driveway I knocked on the window of one of the limousines. The driver roused himself from sleep.
I’m ready to go back now, I said.
To my surprise, he got out, opened the door, and helped me in.
When I got back to my apartment, I thought I’d been robbed. The furniture was overturned, and the floor was dusted with white powder. I grabbed the baseball bat I keep in the umbrella stand and followed the trail of footsteps to the kitchen. Every surface was covered with pots and pans and dirty bowls. It seemed that whoever had broken in to rob me had taken time to make a meal. I stood with the photograph down my pants. There was a crash behind me, and I turned and swung blindly. But it was just a pot that had slipped from the counter and rolled across the floor. On the kitchen table, next to my typewriter, was a large cake, sunk in the middle. Standing, nonetheless. It was frosted with yellow icing, and across the top, in sloppy pink letters, it read, LOOK WHO BAKED A CAKE. On the other side of my typewriter was a note: WAITED ALL DAY.
I couldn’t help it, I smiled. I put the baseball bat away, upturned the furniture that I remembered I had knocked over the night before, took out the picture frame, breathed on the glass, rubbed it with my shirt, and set it up on my night table. I climbed the stairs to Bruno’s floor. I was about to knock when I saw the note on the door. It said: DO NOT DISTURB. GIFT UNDER YOUR PILLOW.
It had been a long time since anyone had given me a gift. A feeling of happiness nudged my heart. That I can wake up each morning and warm my hands on a hot cup of tea. That I can watch the pigeons fly. That at the end of my life, Bruno has not forgotten me.
Back down the stairs I went. To delay the pleasure I knew was coming my way, I stopped to pick up my mail. I let myself back into my apartment. Bruno had managed to leave a dusting of flour over the entire floor of the place. Maybe a wind had blown in, who knows. In the bedroom I saw that he had gotten down on the floor and made an angel in the flour. I stepped around it, not wanting to ruin what had been made so lovingly. I lifted my pillow.
It was a large brown envelope. On the outside was my name, written in a handwriting I didn’t recognize. I opened it. Inside was a stack of printed pages. I began to read. The words were familiar. For a moment I couldn’t place them. Then I realized they were my own.
MY FATHER’S TENT
1. MY FATHER DID NOT LIKE TO WRITE LETTERS
The old Cadbury tin full of my mother’s letters doesn’t contain any of his replies. I’ve looked for them everywhere, but never found them. Also, he didn’t leave me a letter to open when I get older. I know because I asked my mother if he did, and she said No. She said he was not that sort of man. When I asked her what sort of man he was she thought for a minute. Her forehead creased. She thought some more. Then she said he was the sort of man who liked to challenge authority. “Also,” she said, “he couldn’t sit still.” This is not the way I remember him. I remember him sitting in chairs or lying in beds. Except for when I was very little and thought that being an “engineer” meant he drove a train. Then I imagined him in the seat of an engine car the color of coal, a string of shiny passenger cars trailing behind. One day my father laughed and corrected me. Everything snapped into focus. It’s one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.
2. HE GAVE ME A PEN THAT COULD WORK WITHOUT GRAVITY
“It can work without gravity,” my father said, as I examined it in its velvet box with the NASA insignia. It was my seventh birthday. He was lying in a hospital bed wearing a hat because he had no hair. Shiny wrapping paper lay crumpled on his blanket. He held my hand and told me a story about when he was six and threw a rock at a kid’s head who was bullying his brother, and how after that no one had ever bothered either of them again. “You have to stick up for yourself,” he told me. “But it’s bad to throw rocks,” I said. “I know,” he said. “You’re smarter than me. You’ll find something better than rocks.” When the nurse came, I went to look out the window. The 59th Street Bridge shone in the dark. I counted the boats passing on the river. When I got bored, I went to look at the old man whose bed was on the other side of the curtain. He slept most of the time, and when he was awake his hands shook. I showed him the pen. I told him that it could work without gravity, but he didn’t understand. I tried to explain again, but he was still confused. Finally I said, “It’s to use when I’m in outer space.” He nodded and closed his eyes.
3. THE MAN WHO COULDN’T ESCAPE GRAVITY
Then my father died, and I put the pen away in a drawer. Years passed, and then I was eleven and got a Russian pen pal. It was arranged through our Hebrew School by the local chapter of Hadassah. At first we were supposed to write to Russian Jews who had just immigrated to Israel, but when that fell through we were assigned regular Russian Jews. On Sukkot we sent our pen pals’ class an etrog with our first letters. Mine was named Tatiana. She lived in St. Petersburg, near the Field of Mars. I liked to pretend she lived in outer space. Tatiana’s English wasn’t very good, and often I couldn’t understand her letters. But I waited for them eagerly. Father is mathematician, she wrote. My father could survive in the wild, I wrote back. For every one of her letters, I wrote two. Do you have a dog? How many people use your bathroom? Do you own anything that belonged to the Czar? One day a letter came. She wanted to know if I had ever been to Sears Roebuck. At the end there was a p.s. It said: Boy in my class is moved to New York. Maybe you want write him because he knows anybody. That was the last I ever heard from her.
4. I SEARCHED OUT OTHER FORMS OF LIFE
“Where’s Brighton Beach?” I asked. “In England,” my mother said, searching the kitchen cabinets for something she’d misplaced. “I mean the one in New York.” “Near Coney Island, I think.” “How far is Coney Island?” “Maybe half an hour.” “Driving or walking?” “You can take the subway.” “How many stops?” “I don’t know. Why are you so interested in Brighton Beach?” “I have a friend there. His name is Misha and he’s Russian,” I said with admiration. “Just Russian?” my mother asked from inside the cabinet under the kitchen sink. “What do you mean, just Russian?” She stood up and turned to me. “Nothing,” she said, looking at me with the expression she sometimes gets when she’s just thought of something amazingly fascinating. “It’s just that you, for example, are one-quarter Russian, one-quarter Hungarian, one-quarter Polish, and one-quarter German.” I didn’t say anything. She opened a drawer, then closed it. “Actually,” she said, “you could say you’re three-quarters Polish and one-quarter Hungarian, since Bubbe’s parents were from Poland before they moved to Nuremberg, and Grandma Sasha’s town was originally in Belarus, or White Russia, before it became part of Poland.” She opened another cabinet stuffed with plastic bags and started rooting around in it. I turned to go. “Now that I’m thinking about it,” she said, “I suppose you could also say you’re three-quarters Polish and one-quarter Czech, because the town Zeyde came from was in Hungary before 1918, and in Czechoslavakia after, although the Hungarians continued to consider themselves Hungarian, and briefly even became Hungarian again during the Second World War. Of course, you could always just say you’re half Polish, one-quarter Hungarian, and one-quarter English, since Grandpa Simon left Poland and moved to London when he was nine.” She grabbed a piece of paper from the pad by the telephone and started to write vigorously. A minute passed while she scratched away at the page. “Look!” she said, pushing the paper over so I could see it. “You can actually make sixteen different pie charts, each of them accurate!” I looked at the paper. It said:
“Then again, you could always just stic
k with half English and half Israeli, since—” “I’M AMERICAN!” I shouted. My mother blinked. “Suit yourself,” she said, and went to put the kettle on to boil. From the corner of the room where he was looking at the pictures in a magazine, Bird muttered: “No, you’re not. You’re Jewish.”
5. ONCE I USED THE PEN TO WRITE TO MY FATHER
We were in Jerusalem for my Bat Mitzvah. My mother wanted to have it at the Wailing Wall so Bubbe and Zeyde, my father’s parents, could attend. When Zeyde came to Palestine in 1938 he said he wasn’t ever going to leave, and he never did. Anyone who wanted to see him had to come to their apartment in the tall building in Kiryat Wolfson, overlooking the Knesset. It was filled with the old dark furniture and old dark photographs they’d brought from Europe. In the afternoon they lowered the metal blinds to protect it all from the blinding light, because nothing they owned was made to survive in that weather.
My mother looked for weeks for cheap tickets, and finally found three $700 tickets on El Al. It was still a lot of money for us, but she said it was a good thing to spend it on. The day before my Bat Mitzvah, Mom took us to the Dead Sea. Bubbe came, too, wearing a straw hat that stayed on with a band under her chin. When she came out of the changing room, she was fascinating in her bathing suit, her skin wrinkled and puckered and covered with blue veins. We watched her face flush in the hot sulfur springs, beads of sweat forming on her upper lip. When she got out, water streamed off of her. We followed her down to the edge of the water. Bird stood in the mud, crossing his legs. “If you have to go, go in the water,” Bubbe said in a loud voice. A group of heavy Russian women coated in the black mineral clay turned to look. If Bubbe noticed, she didn’t care. We floated on our backs while she kept watch over us from under the wide brim of her hat. My eyes were closed, but I felt her shadow over me. “You don’t have a bosom? Vat happened?” I felt my face get hot and pretended not to have heard. “You have boyfriends?” she asked. Bird perked up. “No,” I muttered. “Vat?” “No.” “Vy not?” “I’m twelve.” “So vat! Ven I vas your age I had three, maybe four. You’re young and pretty, keynehore.” I paddled out to get some distance from her giant, imposing bosom. Her voice followed me. “But it von’t last forever!” I tried to stand, and slipped in the clay. I scanned the flat water for my mother until I caught sight of her. She’d swum out beyond the farthest bather, and was still going.
The next morning I stood at the Wailing Wall, still stinking of sulfur. The cracks between the massive stones were filled with tiny crumpled papers. The rabbi told me that if I wanted I could write a note to God and add it to the cracks. I didn’t believe in God, so I wrote to my father instead: Dear Dad, I’m writing this with the pen you gave me. Yesterday Bird asked if you could do the Heimlich and I told him yes. I also told him you could fly a hovercraft. By the way, I found your tent in the basement. I guess Mom didn’t notice it when she threw out everything that belonged to you. It smells of mildew, but it doesn’t have any leaks. Sometimes I set it up in the backyard and lie inside thinking about how you used to lie in it, too. I’m writing this but I know that you can’t read it. Love, Alma. Bubbe wrote one, too. When I tried to stuff mine into the wall, hers fell out. She was busy praying, so I picked it up and unfolded it. It said: Baruch Hashem, I and my husband should live to see tomorrow and that my Alma should grow up to be blessed with health and happiness and what would be so terrible some nice breasts.
6. IF I HAD A RUSSIAN ACCENT EVERYTHING WOULD BE DIFFERENT
When I got back to New York, Misha’s first letter was waiting. Dear Alma, it began. Greetings! I am very happy for your welcome! He was almost thirteen, five months older than I. His English was better than Tatiana’s because he’d memorized the lyrics of almost all the Beatles songs. He sang them while accompanying himself on the accordion his grandfather gave him, the one who’d moved in after Misha’s grandmother died and, according to Misha, her soul descended on the Summer Gardens in St. Petersburg in the form of a flock of geese. It stayed for two weeks straight, honking in the rain, and when it left the grass was covered with turds. His grandfather arrived a few weeks later, dragging behind him a battered suitcase filled with the eighteen volumes of The History of the Jews. He moved into the already cramped room Misha shared with his older sister, Svetlana, took out his accordion, and began to produce his life’s work. At first he just wrote variations on Russian folk songs mixed with Jewish riffs. Later he moved on to darker, wilder versions, and at the very end he stopped playing things they recognized altogether, and as he held the long notes he wept, and no one needed to tell Misha and Svetya, even thick-headed as they were, that at last he’d become the composer he’d always wanted to be. He had a beat-up car that sat in the alley behind their apartment. The way Misha tells it, he drove like a blind man, giving the car almost full independence to feel its way along, bumping off things, only giving the wheel a spin with the tips of his fingers when the situation verged on life-threatening. When their grandfather came to pick them up from school, Misha and Svetlana would shield their ears and try to look away. When he revved the motor and became impossible to ignore, they’d hurry toward the car with their heads down and slide into the back seat. They’d huddle together in the back while their grandfather sat at the wheel, humming along to a tape of their cousin Lev’s punk band, Pussy Ass Mother Fucker. But he always got the words wrong. For “Got into a fight, smashed his face on the car door,” he might sing, “You are my knight and you wear shining ar-mor,” and for “You’re a louse, but you’re so pretty,” he’d sing, “Take it up to the house, in a jitney.” When Misha and his sister pointed out his mistakes, their grandfather acted surprised and turned up the volume to hear better, but the next time around he’d sing the same thing. When he died, he left Svetya the eighteen volumes of The History of the Jews, and Misha the accordion. Around the same time, Lev’s sister, who wore blue eye shadow, invited Misha into her room, played him “Let it Be,” and taught him how to kiss.
7. THE BOY WITH THE ACCORDION
Misha and I wrote twenty-one letters back and forth. This was the year I was twelve, two years before Jacob Marcus wrote to my mother asking her to translate The History of Love. Misha’s letters were filled with exclamation points and questions like, What does mean, your ass is grassy? and mine were filled with questions about life in Russia. Then he invited me to his Bar Mitzvah party.
My mother braided my hair, lent me her red shawl, and drove me to his apartment house in Brighton Beach. I rang the buzzer and waited for Misha to come down. My mother waved to me from the car. I shivered in the cold. A tall boy with dark fuzz on his upper lip came out. “Alma?” he asked. I nodded. “Welcome, my friend!” he said. I waved to my mother and followed him inside. The lobby smelled like sour cabbage. Upstairs, the apartment was packed with people eating and shouting in Russian. There was a band set up in a corner of the dining room, and people kept trying to dance even though there was no room. Misha was busy talking to everyone and stuffing envelopes in his pocket, so I spent most of the party sitting in the corner of the couch with a plate of giant shrimp. I don’t even eat shrimp but it was the only thing I recognized. If anyone talked to me, I had to explain that I didn’t speak Russian. An old man offered me some vodka. Just then Misha rushed out of the kitchen strapped into his accordion, which was plugged into an amplifier, and broke into song. “You say it’s your birthday!” he shouted. The crowd looked nervous. “Well it’s my birthday, too!” he yelled, and the accordion shrieked to life. This led into “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band,” which led into “Here Comes the Sun,” and eventually, after five or six songs, the Beatles broke into “Hava Nagila,” and the crowd went wild, everyone singing along and trying to dance. When the music finally stopped, Misha came to find me, his face pink and sweaty. He grabbed my hand, and I followed him out of the apartment, down the hall, up five flights of stairs, through a door, and out onto the roof. You could see the ocean in the distance, the lights of Coney Island, and after that an ab
andoned roller coaster. My teeth started to chatter, and Misha took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders. It was warm and smelled of sweat.
8.
I told Misha everything. About how my father had died, and my mother’s loneliness, and Bird’s unshakable belief in God. I told him about the three volumes of How to Survive in the Wild, and the English editor and his regatta, and Henry Lavender and his Philippine shells, and the veterinarian, Tucci. I told him about Dr. Eldridge and Life as We Don’t Know It, and later—two years after we started to write to each other, seven years after my dad died, and 3.9 billion years after the first life on earth—when Jacob Marcus’s first letter arrived from Venice, I told Misha about The History of Love. Mostly we wrote or talked on the phone, but sometimes on the weekends we’d get to see each other. I liked going to Brighton Beach better, because Mrs. Shklovsky would bring us tea with sweet cherries in china cups, and Mr. Shklovsky, whose armpits always had dark circles of sweat, taught me how to curse in Russian. Sometimes we’d rent movies, especially spy stories or thrillers. Our favorites were Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, and North by Northwest, which we’d watched ten times. When I wrote to Jacob Marcus pretending to be my mother, it was Misha I told about it, reading the final draft to him over the phone. “What do you think?” I asked. “I think your ass is—” “Forget it,” I said.