One evening I went to see a movie. Before the main picture they showed a reel about Houdini. This was a man who could slip out of a straitjacket while buried underground. They’d put him in a chest locked with chains, drop it in the water, and out he’d pop. They showed how he did exercises and timed himself. He would practice over and over until he got it down to a matter of seconds. From then on, I took an even greater pride in my work. I’d bring the most difficult locks home and time myself. Then I’d cut the time in half and practice until I got there. I’d keep at it until I couldn’t feel my fingers.
I was lying in bed dreaming up more and more difficult challenges when it dawned on me: if I could pick the lock to a stranger’s apartment, why couldn’t I pick the lock to Kossar’s Bialys? Or the public library? Or Woolworth’s? Hypothetically speaking, what was stopping me from picking the lock to . . . Carnegie Hall?
My thoughts raced while my body tingled with excitement. All I would do is let myself in, and then let myself back out. Perhaps leave a small signature.
I planned for weeks. I staked out the premises. There was no stone I left unturned. Suffice to say: I did it. Through the backstage door on 56th Street in the early hours of the morning. It took me 103 seconds. At home the same lock only took me 48. But it was cold out and my fingers were heavy.
The great Arthur Rubinstein was scheduled to play that night. The piano was set up alone on the stage, a glossy black Steinway grand. I stepped out from behind the curtains. I could just make out the endless rows of seats in the glow of the exit signs. I sat down on the bench, and pushed down a pedal with the tip of my shoe. I didn’t dare lay a finger on the keys.
When I looked up, she was standing there. Plain as day, a girl of fifteen, her hair in a braid, not five feet from me. She lifted her violin, the one her brother had brought her from Vilna, and lowered her chin to meet it. I tried to say her name. But. It lodged in my throat. Besides, I knew she couldn’t hear me. She raised her bow. I heard the opening notes of the Dvorák. Her eyes were closed. The music spilled from her fingers. She played it flawlessly, as she’d never played it in life.
When the last note faded, she was gone. My claps echoed in the empty auditorium. I stopped and the silence thundered in my ears. I took one last look out at the empty theater. Then I hurried out the way I came.
I never did it again. I’d proven it to myself, and that was enough. From time to time I’d find myself passing the entrance of a certain private club, I won’t name names, and I’d think to myself, Shalom, shitheads, here’s a Jew you can’t keep out. But after that night, I never pushed my luck again. If they threw me in jail, they’d find out the truth: I’m no Houdini. And yet. In my loneliness it comforts me to think that the world’s doors, however closed, are never truly locked to me.
Such was the comfort I groped for standing in the pouring rain outside the library while strangers hurried past. After all, wasn’t this the real reason my cousin had taught me the trade? He knew I couldn’t stay invisible forever. Show me a Jew that survives, he once said as I watched a lock give way in his hands, and I’ll show you a magician.
I stood on the street and let the rain trickle down my neck. I squeezed my eyes shut. Door after door after door after door after door after door swung open.
AFTER THE LIBRARY, after the nothing of The Incredible, Fantastic Adventures of Frankie, Toothless Girl Wonder, I went home. I took off my coat and hung it to dry. Put the water on to boil. Behind me someone cleared his throat. I nearly jumped out of my skin. But it was only Bruno, sitting in the dark. What are you trying to do, give me a conniption? I yelped, turning on the light. The pages of the book I wrote when I was a boy were scattered on the floor. Oh no, I said. It’s not what you—
He didn’t give me a chance.
Not bad, he said. Not how I would have chosen to describe her. But, what can I say, that’s your business.
Look, I said.
You don’t need to explain, he said. It’s a good book. I like the writing. Aside from the bits you stole—very inventive. If we’re talking in purely literary terms—
It took me a moment. And then I realized the difference. He was speaking to me in Yiddish.
—in purely literary terms, what’s not to like? Anyway, I’d always wondered what you were working on. Now, after all these years, I know.
But I wondered what you were working on, I said, remembering a lifetime ago when we were both twenty and wanted to be writers.
He shrugged, like only Bruno can. The same as you.
The same?
Of course the same.
A book about her?
A book about her, Bruno said. He looked away, out the window. Then I saw he was holding the photograph in his lap, the one of her and me in front of the tree on which she’d never known I’d carved our initials. A + L. You can barely see them. But. They’re there.
He said, She was good at keeping secrets.
It came back to me then. That day, sixty years ago, when I’d left her house in tears and caught sight of him standing against a tree holding a notebook, waiting to go to her after I’d gone. A few months earlier, we’d been the closest of friends. We’d stay up half the night with a couple of other boys, smoking and arguing about books. And yet. By the time I caught sight of him that afternoon, we were no longer friends. We weren’t even talking. I walked right past him as if he weren’t there.
Just one question, Bruno said now, sixty years later. I always wanted to know.
What?
He coughed. Then he looked up at me. Did she tell you you were a better writer than I?
No, I lied. And then I told him the truth. No one had to tell me.
There was a long silence.
It’s strange. I always thought— He broke off.
What? I said.
I thought we were fighting for something more than her love, he said.
Now it was my turn to look out the window.
What is more than her love? I asked.
We sat in silence.
I lied, Bruno said. I have another question.
What is it?
Why are you still standing here like a fool?
What do you mean?
Your book, he said.
What about it?
Go get it back.
I knelt on the floor and began to gather up the pages.
Not this one!
Which one?
Oy vey! Bruno said, slapping his forehead. Do I have to tell you everything?
A slow smile spread on my lips.
Three hundred and one, said Bruno. He shrugged and looked away, but I thought I saw him smile. It’s not nothing.
FLOOD
1. HOW TO MAKE A FIRE WITHOUT MATCHES
I did a search on the internet for Alma Mereminski. I thought someone might have written about her, or that I might find information about her life. I typed in her name and pressed return. But all that came up was a list of immigrants who’d arrived in New York City in 1891 (Mendel Mereminski), and a list of Holocaust victims recorded at Yad Vashem (Adam Mereminski, Fanny Mereminski, Nacham, Zellig, Hershel, Bluma, Ida, but, to my relief, because I didn’t want to lose her before I’d even begun to look, no Alma).
2. ALL THE TIME MY BROTHER SAVES MY LIFE
Uncle Julian came to stay with us. He was in New York for as long as it took him to do the final research for a book he’d been writing for five years on the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti. Aunt Frances stayed behind in London to take care of the dog. Uncle Julian slept in Bird’s bed, Bird slept in mine, and I slept on the floor in my one-hundred-percent down sleeping bag, even though a real expert wouldn’t need one, since in emergency conditions she could just kill some birds and stuff their feathers under her clothing for warmth.
Sometimes at night I would hear my brother talking in his sleep. Half phrases, nothing I could make out. Except for once, when he spoke so loudly I thought he was awake. “Don’t step there,” he said. “What?” I said, sit
ting up. “It’s too deep,” he muttered, and turned his face to the wall.
3. BUT WHY
One Saturday, Bird and I went with Uncle Julian to the Museum of Modern Art. Bird insisted on paying for himself from his lemonade profits. We wandered around while Uncle Julian went to talk to a curator upstairs. Bird asked one of the security guards how many water fountains there were in the building. (Five.) He made weird video game noises until I told him to be quiet. Then he counted the number of people with exposed tattoos. (Eight.) We stood in front of a painting of a bunch of people collapsed on the floor. “Why are they lying there like that?” he asked. “Someone killed them,” I said, even though I didn’t really know why they were lying there, or if they were even people. I went to look at another painting across the room. Bird followed me. “But why did someone kill them?” he asked. “Because they needed money and robbed a house,” I said, and got on the escalator going down.
On the subway home, Bird touched my shoulder. “But why did they need the money?”
4. LOST AT SEA
“What makes you to think this Alma in History of Love is real person?” Misha asked. We were sitting on the beach behind his apartment building with our feet buried in the sand, eating Mrs. Shklovsky’s roast beef and horseradish sandwiches. “ ‘A,’ ” I said. “A what?” “A real person.” “OK,” Misha said. “Answer the question.” “Of course she’s real.” “But how do you know?” “Because there’s only one way to explain why Litvinoff, who wrote the book, didn’t give her a Spanish name like everyone else.” “Why?” “He couldn’t.” “Why not?” “Don’t you see?” I said. “He could change every detail, but he couldn’t change her.” “But why?” His obtuseness frustrated me. “Because he was in love with her!” I said. “Because, to him, she was the only thing that was real.” Misha chewed a bite of roast beef. “I’m thinking you watch too many movies,” he said. But I knew I was right. It didn’t take a genius to read The History of Love and guess that much.
5. THE THINGS I WANT TO SAY GET STUCK IN MY MOUTH
We walked down the boardwalk toward Coney Island. It was boiling hot and a trickle of sweat dripped down Misha’s temple. When we passed some old people playing cards, Misha greeted them. A wrinkled old man wearing a tiny bathing suit waved back. “They think you’re my girlfriend,” Misha announced. Just then my toe caught and I tripped. I felt my face get hot, and thought, I am the most awkward person on earth. “Well I’m not,” I said, which wasn’t what I wanted to say. I looked away, pretending to take interest in a kid dragging a blow-up shark toward the water’s edge. “I know,” Misha said. “But they don’t.” He’d turned fifteen, grown almost four inches, and started to shave the dark hairs above his lip. When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my stomach that wasn’t an ache but something different.
“I bet you a hundred dollars she’s listed,” I said. There was no part of me that actually believed this, but it was all I could think of to change the subject.
6. LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO MOST LIKELY DOESN’T EXIST
“I’m looking for a number for Alma Mereminski?” I said. “M-E-R-E-M-I-N-S-K-I.” “What borough?” the woman said. “I don’t know,” I said. There was a pause and I heard the clicking of keys. Misha watched a girl in a turquoise bikini Rollerblade past. The woman on the phone was saying something. “Excuse me?” I said. “I said I have an A. Mereminski on 147th in the Bronx,” she said. “Hold for the number.”
I scrawled it on my hand. Misha walked over. “So?” “Do you have a quarter?” I asked. It was silly, but I’d already gone so far. He raised his eyebrows, and reached into the pocket of his shorts. I dialed the number written on my palm. A man answered. “Is Alma there?” I asked. “Who?” he said. “I’m looking for Alma Mereminski.” “There’s no Alma here,” he told me. “You got the wrong number. This is Artie,” he said, and hung up.
We walked back to Misha’s apartment. I went to the bathroom, which smelled of his sister’s perfume and was crowded with his father’s grayish underwear drying on a line. When I came out, Misha was shirtless in his room, reading a book in Russian. I waited on his bed while he took a shower, flipping through the pages of Cyrillic. I could hear the water falling, and the song he was singing, but not the words. When I lay on his pillow, it smelled of him.
7. IF THINGS GO ON LIKE THIS
When Misha was young his family went to their dacha every summer, and he and his father would take the nets down from the attic and try to catch the migrating butterflies that filled the air. The old house was filled with his grandmother’s china that really came from China, and the framed butterflies three generations of Shklovskys had caught as boys. Over time their scales fell away, and if you ran barefoot through the house the china would rattle and your feet would pick up wing dust.
A few months back, the night before his fifteenth birthday, I’d decided to make Misha a card with a butterfly on it. I went online for a picture of a Russian butterfly, but instead I found an article reporting that most butterfly species had declined in numbers over the last two decades, and that their extinction rate was about 10,000 times higher than it should be. It also said that an average of seventy-four species of insects, plants, and animals become extinct every day. Based on these and other frightening statistics, the article reported, scientists believe that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on earth. Almost a quarter of the world’s mammals face extinction within thirty years. One out of eight species of birds will soon be extinct. Ninety percent of the world’s largest fish have disappeared in the last half century.
I did a search on mass extinctions.
The last mass extinction happened about 65 million years ago, when an asteroid probably collided with our planet, killing all the dinosaurs and about half of the marine animals. Before that was the Triassic extinction (also caused by an asteroid, or possibly volcanoes), which wiped out up to ninety-five percent of the species, and before that was the Late Devonian extinction. The current mass extinction will be the quickest in earth’s 4.5-billion-year history and, unlike those other extinctions, isn’t caused by natural events, but by the ignorance of human beings. If things go on like this, half of all species on earth will be gone in a hundred years.
For this reason, I did not put any butterflies on Misha’s card.
8. INTERGLACIAL
The same February my mother got the letter asking her to translate The History of Love it snowed almost two feet, and Misha and I built a snow cave in the park. We worked for hours, and our fingers turned numb, but we kept digging. When it was finished, we crawled inside. A blue light came in through the entrance. We sat shoulder to shoulder. “Maybe one day I’ll bring you to Russia,” said Misha. “We could go camping in the Ural Mountains,” I said. “Or just the Kazakh Steppes.” Our breath made little clouds when we spoke. “I’ll take you to the room where I lived with my grandfather,” said Misha, “and teach you to skate on the Neva.” “I could learn Russian.” Misha nodded. “I’ll teach you. First word. Dai.” “Dai.” “Second word. Ruku.” “What does it mean?” “Say it first.” “Ruku.” “Dai ruku.” “Dai ruku. What does it mean?” Misha took my hand and held it.
9. IF SHE’S REAL
“What is giving you idea Alma came to New York?” Misha asked. We’d played the tenth round of gin rummy and now we were lying on the floor of his bedroom looking up at the ceiling. There was sand in my bathing suit and between my teeth. Misha’s hair was still wet, and I could smell his deodorant.
“In the fourteenth chapter, Litvinoff writes about a string stretching across the ocean held by a girl who left for America. He was from Poland, right, and my mom said he escaped before the Germans invaded. The Nazis killed pretty much everyone in his village. So if he hadn’t escaped, there’d be no History of Love. And if Alma was also from the same village, which I bet you a hundred dollars she was—”
“You already owe me hu
ndred dollars.”
“The point is that in the parts I’ve read, there are stories about Alma when she was very young, like ten. So if she’s real, which I think she is, Litvinoff must have known her as a child. Which means they were probably from the same village. And Yad Vashem doesn’t list any Alma Mereminski from Poland who died in the Holocaust.”
“Who is Yad Vashem?”
“The Holocaust museum in Israel.”
“Okay so maybe she’s not even Jewish. And even if she is—even if she’s real, and Polish, and Jewish, AND came to America—how do you know she didn’t go to some other city? Like Ann Arbor.” “Ann Arbor?” “I have one cousin there,” Misha said. “Anyway, I thought you were looking for Jacob Marcus, not this Alma.”
“I am,” I said. I felt the back of his hand brush my thigh. I didn’t know how to say that even though I’d started out looking for someone who could make my mother happy again, now I was looking for something else, too. About the woman I was named after. And about me.
“Maybe the reason Jacob Marcus wants the book translated has something to do with Alma,” I said, not because I believed it, but because I didn’t know what else to say. “Maybe he knew her. Or maybe he’s trying to find her.”
I was glad Misha didn’t ask me why, if Litvinoff had been so in love with Alma, he hadn’t followed her to America; why he’d gone to Chile instead and married someone named Rosa. The only reason I could think of was that he didn’t have a choice.
On the other side of the wall, Misha’s mother shouted something at his father. Misha propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at me. I thought of the time, the summer before, when we were thirteen and stood on the roof of his building, the tar soft under our feet, our tongues in each other’s mouths while he gave me a lesson in the Shklovsky school of Russian kissing. Now we’d known each other for two years, the side of my calf was touching his shins, and his stomach was against my ribs. He said, “I don’t think it’s end of world to be my girlfriend.” I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one. But I couldn’t, so he leaned down and kissed me.