If Alma knew about what is going to happen, I also don’t think she’d be so upset that I wrote on her notebook. I have read all three volumes of How to Suvive in the Wild and they are very good and filled with interesting and useful facts. One part is all about what to do if there is a nuclear bomb. Even though I don’t think there is going to be a nuclear bomb just in case I read it very carefully. Then I decided that if there is a nuclear bomb before I get to Israel and ashes fall everywhere like snow, I’m going to make angels. I’ll walk through anyone’s house I want because everyone will be gone. I won’t be able to go to school, but it doesn’t really matter since we never learn anything important anyway like what happens after you die. Anyway I’m just joking because there’s not going to be a bomb. What there’s going to be is a flood.
23. OUTSIDE, IT WAS STILL COMING DOWN
HERE WE ARE TOGETHER
On his last morning in Poland, after his friend pulled his hat down over his eyes and disappeared around the corner, Litvinoff walked back to his room. It was already empty, the furniture sold or given away. His suitcases stood at the door. He took out the brown paper package he’d been holding inside his coat. It was sealed, and on the front, in his friend’s familiar handwriting, was written: To be held for Leopold Gursky until you see him again. Litvinoff slipped it into the pocket of his suitcase. He walked to the window and looked out at the tiny square of sky for the last time. Church bells rang in the distance as they’d rung hundreds of times while he worked or slept, so often that they felt like the workings of his own mind. He ran his fingers across the wall, pitted with tack marks where the pictures and articles he’d cut out of the newspaper used to hang. He paused to examine himself in the mirror so that later he would be able to recall exactly how he’d looked on that day. He felt a lump in his throat. For the umpteenth time, he checked his pocket for his passport and tickets. Then he glanced at his watch, sighed, lifted his suitcases, and walked out the door.
If Litvinoff didn’t think much about his friend at first, it was because too many other things were on his mind. Through the machinations of his father, who was owed a favor by someone who knew someone, he had been granted a visa from Spain. From Spain he would travel to Lisbon, and from Lisbon he intended to take a boat to Chile, where his father’s cousin lived. Once he got on the boat, other things jostled for his attention: bouts of seasickness, his fear of dark water, meditations on the horizon, speculations about life on the ocean floor, attacks of nostalgia, the sighting of a whale, the sighting of a pretty French brunette.
When the ship finally arrived in the port of Valparaíso and Litvinoff shakily disembarked (“sea legs,” he told himself, even years later, when the shakiness sometimes returned without explanation), there were other things to occupy him. His first months in Chile were spent working whatever jobs he could get; first in a sausage factory, from which he was fired on his third day when he took the wrong streetcar and arrived fifteen minutes late, and, after that, in a grocery shop. Once, on his way to speak to a foreman he’d been told was hiring, Litvinoff got lost and found himself standing outside the offices of the city newspaper. The windows were open, and he could hear the clatter of typewriters inside. He felt a pang of longing. He thought of his colleagues at the daily, which reminded him of his desk with the divots in the wood he used to finger to help him think, which reminded him of his typewriter with the sticky S so that his copy always had sentences like hisss death leavesss a hole in the livesss of thossse he helped, which reminded him of the smell of his boss’s cheap cigars, which reminded him of his promotion from stringer to obituary writer, which reminded him of Isaac Babel, which was as far as he allowed himself to get before he stopped his longing in its tracks and hurried away down the street.
In the end, he found work in a pharmacy—his father had been a pharmacist, and Litvinoff had picked up enough along the way to assist the old German Jew who ran a tidy shop in a quiet part of town. Only then, when he could afford to rent a room of his own, was Litvinoff finally able to unpack his suitcases. In the pocket of one he found the brown paper package with his friend’s handwriting on the front. A wave of sadness broke over his head. For no reason, he suddenly remembered a white shirt he had left drying on the clothesline in the courtyard in Minsk.
He tried to remember how his face had looked in the mirror that last day. But he couldn’t. Closing his eyes, he willed the memory back. But all that came to mind was the expression on his friend’s face as he stood on the street corner. Sighing, Litvinoff put the envelope back in the empty suitcase, zipped it up, and put it away on the closet shelf.
Whatever money was left after his room and board, Litvinoff saved to bring over his younger sister, Miriam. As the closest siblings in age and appearance, they often had been mistaken for twins when they were little, even though Miriam was fairer, and wore tortoiseshell glasses. She’d been in law school in Warsaw until she’d been forbidden to attend classes.
The only expense Litvinoff allowed himself was a shortwave radio. Every night he spun the dial between his fingers, roaming the continent of South America until he found the new station, The Voice of America. He only spoke a little English, but it was enough. He listened with horror to the progress of the Nazis. Things went from bad to terrifying.
The few letters from friends and relatives came less and less often, and it was difficult to know what was really happening. Folded inside the second-to-last letter he received from his sister—in which she told him that she’d fallen in love with another law student and gotten married—was a photograph taken when she and Zvi were children. On the back she’d written: Here we are together.
In the mornings, Litvinoff made the coffee listening to stray dogs fight in the alley. He waited for the streetcar, already baking in the early sun. He ate lunch in the back of the pharmacy, surrounded by boxes of pills and powders and cherry syrup and hair ribbons, and at night, after he’d finished mopping the floors and polishing all the jars until he could see his sister’s face in them, he came home. He didn’t make many friends. He was no longer in the business of making friends. When he wasn’t working, he was listening to the radio. He listened until he was exhausted and fell asleep in his chair, and even then he listened, his dreams taking shape around the voice of the broadcast. There were other refugees around him experiencing the same fears and helplessness, but Litvinoff didn’t find any comfort in this because there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone. Litvinoff preferred to be alone. When people invited him for dinner he begged off with some excuse. Once, when his landlady invited him for tea on a Sunday, he told her he had to finish something he was writing. “You write?” she asked, surprised. “What do you write?” As far as Litvinoff was concerned one lie was just as good as another, and so, without giving it much thought, he said: “Poems.”
A rumor got started that he was a poet. And Litvinoff, secretly flattered, did nothing to quash it. He even bought a hat of the kind worn by Alberto Santos-Dumont, who the Brazilians claim made the first-ever successful flight, and whose panama hat, Litvinoff had heard, warped from fanning the plane’s engine, was still popular among literary types.
Time passed. The old German Jew died in his sleep, the pharmacy was closed, and, partly on the strength of rumors of his literary prowess, Litvinoff was hired as a teacher at a Jewish day school. The War ended. Bit by bit, Litvinoff learned what had happened to his sister Miriam, and to his parents, and to four of his other siblings (what had become of his oldest brother, Andre, he could only piece together from probabilities). He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn’t choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him.
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bsp; He lost weight. Everything about him seemed to shrink, except his ears and nose, which sagged and grew longer, giving him a melancholy look. The year he turned thirty-two, his hair came out in fistfuls. He abandoned the warped panama hat and took to wearing a heavy coat everywhere, in whose inside pocket he kept a worn and wrinkled piece of paper that he’d carried with him for years, and which had begun to rip at the folds. At the school, the children gave themselves cootie shots behind his back if he brushed up against them.
It was in this state that Rosa first began to notice Litvinoff at the cafés along the water. He went in the afternoons with the excuse of reading a novel or a poetry journal (first out of duty to his reputation, and later out of growing interest). But really he just wanted to steal a little more time before he had to go home again where the truth would be waiting. At the café, Litvinoff allowed himself to forget a little. He meditated on the waves and watched the students, sometimes eavesdropping on their arguments, which were the same arguments he’d had when he’d been a student a hundred years ago (i.e., twelve). He even knew some of their names. Including Rosa’s. How could he not? People were always calling it.
The afternoon she approached his table and, instead of continuing past to greet some young man, stopped with an abrupt gracefulness and asked if she could join him, Litvinoff thought it was a joke. Her hair was shiny and black and cropped just below her chin, emphasizing her strong nose. She was wearing a green dress (later Rosa would argue that it was red, red with black polka dots, but Litvinoff refused to relinquish the memory of a sleeveless emerald chiffon). Only after she’d been sitting with him for half an hour and her friends had lost interest and turned back to their conversations did Litvinoff realize that her gesture had been sincere. There was an awkward pause in the conversation. Rosa smiled.
“I haven’t even introduced myself,” she said.
“You’re Rosa,” Litvinoff said.
The next afternoon, Rosa turned up for a second meeting just as she’d promised. When she glanced at her watch and realized how late it had got they planned a third meeting, and after that it went without saying that there’d be a fourth. The fifth time they met, under the spell of Rosa’s youthful spontaneity—halfway through a heated discussion about who was a greater poet, Neruda or Darío—Litvinoff surprised himself by proposing they go hear a concert together. When Rosa jumped to agree, it dawned on him that, miracle of miracles, this lovely girl might actually be developing feelings for him. It was as if someone had struck a gong in his chest. His whole body reverberated with the news.
A few days after the date at the concert, they met in the park and had a picnic. This was followed the next Sunday by a bicycle ride. On their seventh date they saw a movie. When it was over, Litvinoff walked Rosa home. They were standing together, discussing the merits of Grace Kelly’s acting versus her unbelievable beauty, when all of a sudden Rosa leaned forward and kissed him. Or at least she tried to kiss him, but Litvinoff, taken off guard, backed away, leaving Rosa tipped forward at an awkward angle, neck outstretched. All night, he’d been monitoring the ebb and flow of distance between their various body parts with growing pleasure. But the shifting measurements had been so fractional that this sudden charge by Rosa’s nose almost reduced him to tears. Realizing his mistake, he blindly stuck his neck out into the gulf. But by then, Rosa had already counted her losses and pulled back into safer territory. Litvinoff hung in the balance. Enough time for a waft of Rosa’s perfume to tickle his nose, and then he beat a hasty retreat. Or he began to beat a hasty retreat, when Rosa, not wanting to take any more chances, shotput her lips into the contested space, momentarily forgetting that appendage, her nose, which she remembered a fraction of a second later when it collided with Litvinoff’s at the instant his lips mashed against hers, so that with their first kiss they became blood relatives.
Litvinoff was giddy on the bus ride home. He flashed a smile at anyone who looked his way. He walked down his street whistling. But as he slipped the key into his lock, a coolness entered his heart. He stood in his dark room without turning on the lamp. For God’s sake, he thought. Where is your head? What in the world could you offer a girl like that, don’t be a fool, you’ve let yourself fall apart, the pieces have got lost, and now there’s nothing left to give, you can’t hide it forever, sooner or later she’ll figure out the truth: you’re a shell of a man, all she has to do is knock against you to find out you’re empty.
For a long time he stood with his head against the window, thinking about everything. Then he took off his clothes. Feeling in the dark, he washed out his underwear and hung them to dry on the radiator. He turned the dial on the radio, which glowed and came to life, but a minute later turned it off again and a tango broke off into silence. He sat naked in his chair. A fly landed on his shriveled penis. He mumbled some words. And because it felt good to mumble, he mumbled some more. They were words he knew by heart because he’d been carrying them on a piece of paper folded in his breast pocket since that night, all those years ago, when he’d watched over his friend, praying for him not to die. He’d said them so many times, even when he didn’t know he was saying them, that sometimes he actually forgot that the words weren’t his.
That night, Litvinoff went to the closet and brought down his suitcase. Reaching a hand into the pocket, he felt around for a thick paper envelope. He pulled it out, sat back down in his chair, and placed it on his lap. Although he’d never opened it, of course he knew what was in it. Closing his eyes to shield them from the brightness, he reached up and turned on the lamp.
To be held for Leopold Gursky until you see him again.
Later, no matter how many times he tried to bury that sentence in the trash under orange peels and coffee filters, it always seemed to rise again to the surface. So one morning Litvinoff fished out the empty envelope, whose contents now sat safely on his desk. Then, choking back tears, he lit a match and watched his friend’s handwriting burn.
DIE LAUGHING
What does it say?
We stood under the stars at Grand Central, or so I have to assume, since I could sooner hook my ankles over my ears than tilt back my head for an unobstructed view of what lies above.
What does it say? Bruno repeated, jabbing his elbow into my ribs as I raised my chin another notch toward the departures board. My upper lip parted from the lower, to be liberated from the weight of the jaw. Hurry up, Bruno said. Hold your horses, I told him, except that with my mouth open it came out as, Old yer arses. I could just make out the numbers. 9:45, I said, or rather, Nine-orty-I. What time is it now? Bruno demanded. I worked my gaze back down to my watch. 9:43, I said.
We started to run. Not run, but move in such a way that two people who’ve worn away all manner of balls and sockets move if they want to catch a train. I had the lead, but Bruno was hot on my heels. Then Bruno, who’d hit upon a way to pump his arms for speed that defies all description, edged me out, and for a moment I coasted while he quote unquote broke the wind. I was concentrating on the back of his neck when, without warning, it plummeted from view. I looked behind. He was in a pile on the floor, one shoe on, one off. Go! he shouted at me. I floundered, not knowing what to do. GO! he shouted again, so I went, and next thing I knew he’d cut a corner and pulled out ahead again, shoe in hand, pumping rapidly.
All aboard track 22.
Bruno headed down the stairs toward the platform. I was right behind. There was every reason to believe we’d make it. And yet. In an unexpected change of plans, he skidded to a halt just as he reached the train. Unable to break my speed, I barreled past him into the car. The doors closed behind me. He smiled at me through the glass. I banged the window with my fist. Damn you, Bruno. He waved. He knew I wouldn’t have gone alone. And yet. He knew I needed to go. Alone. The train started to pull away. His lips moved. I tried to read them. Good, they said. His lips paused. What is good? I wanted to shout. Tell me what is good? And they said: Luck. The train lurched out of the station and into the dark.
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nbsp; Five days after the brown envelope had arrived with the pages of the book I’d written half a century ago, I was on my way to get back the book I’d written half a century later. Or, to say it differently: a week after my son died, I was on my way to his house. Either way, I was on my own.
I found a seat by the window and tried to catch my breath. We sped through the tunnel. I leaned my head against the glass. Someone had scratched “nice boobs” into the surface. Impossible not to wonder: Whose? The train broke into the dirty light and rain. It was the first time in my life I’d gotten on a train without a ticket.
A man got on at Yonkers and sat down next to me. He took out a paperback. My stomach growled. I hadn’t put anything in it yet, if you didn’t count the coffee I drank with Bruno that morning at Dunkin’ Donuts. It was early. We’d been the first customers. Give me a jelly and a powdered, Bruno said. Give him a jelly and a powdered, I said. And I’ll have a small coffee. The man in the paper hat paused. It’s cheaper if you get a medium. America, God bless it. All right, I said. Make it a medium. The man went off and came back with the coffee. Give me a Bavarian Kreme and a glazed, Bruno said. I shot him a look. What? he said, shrugging. Give him a Bavarian Kreme—I said. And a vanilla, said Bruno. I turned to glare at him. Mea culpa, he said. Vanilla. Go sit down, I told him. He stood there. SIT, I said. Make it a cruller, he said. The Bavarian Kreme was gone in four bites. He licked his fingers, then held the cruller up to the light. It’s a donut, not a diamond, I said. It’s stale, said Bruno. Eat it anyway, I told him. Change it for an Apple Spice, he said.