She was twelve, and he was at least eighty-four. Even if he were to live to ninety, he reasoned, she would be only eighteen. And he knew he would not live to ninety. He was secretly weak, and secretly in pain. Who would take care of her when he died? Who would sing to her and continue to tickle her back, in the particular way she liked, long after she'd fallen asleep? How would she learn of her real father? How could he be sure that she would be safe from daily violence, unintentional and intentional violence? How could he be sure that she would never change?
He did everything he could to impede his rapid deterioration. He tried to eat a good meal even when he wasn't hungry, and drink a bit of vodka between meals even when he felt it would tie his stomach into a knot. He took long walks each afternoon, knowing that the pain in his legs was a good pain, and chopped one piece of wood every morning, knowing that it was not in sickness that his arms ached, but health.
Fearing his frequent deficiencies of memory, he began writing fragments of his life story on his bedroom ceiling with one of Brod's lipsticks that he found wrapped in a sock in her desk drawer. This way, his life would be the first thing he would see when he awoke each morning, and the last thing before going to sleep each night. You used to be married, but she left you, above his bureau. You hate green vegetables, at the far end of the ceiling. You are a Sloucher, where the ceiling met the door. You don't believe in an afterlife, written in a circle around the hanging lamp. He never wanted Brod to know how much like a sheet of glass his mind had become, how it would steam with confusion, how thoughts skated off it, how he couldn't understand so many of the things she told him, how he often forgot his name, and, like a small part of him dying, even hers.
4:812 —The dream of living forever with Brod. I have this dream every night. Even when I can't remember it the next morning, I know it was there, like the depression a lover's head leaves on the pillow next to you after she's left. I dream not of growing old with her, but of never growing old, either of us. She never leaves me, and I never leave her. It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine. Sometimes my dream of living forever with Brod is the dream of our dying together. I know there is no afterlife. I'm no fool. And I know there is no God. It's not her company I need, but to know that she won't need mine, or that she won't not need it. I imagine scenes of her without me, and I become so jealous. She will marry and have children and touch what I could never approach—all things that should make me happy. I cannot tell her this dream, of course, but I want to so desperately. She is the only thing that matters.
He read her a story in bed and listened to her interpretations, never interrupting her, not even to tell her how proud he was, how smart and beautiful she was. After kissing her good night and blessing her, he went to the kitchen, drank the few sips of vodka his stomach could handle, and blew out the lamp. He wandered down the dark hallway, following the warm glow from beneath his bedroom door. He stumbled once over a stack of Brod's books on the floor outside her room, and again over her bag. Entering his own room, he imagined that he would die in his bed that night. He imagined how Brod would find him in the morning. He imagined the position he would be in, the expression on his face. He imagined how he would feel, or not feel. It's late, he thought, and I must wake up early in the morning to cook for Brod before her classes. He lowered himself to the floor, did the three push-ups he could summon, and picked himself back up. It's late, he thought, and I must be thankful for everything I have, and reconciled with everything I have lost and not lost. I tried very hard to be a good person today, to do things as God would have wanted, had He existed. Thank you for the gifts of life and Brod, he thought, and thank you, Brod, for giving me a reason to live. I am not sad. He slid under the red woolen sheets and looked directly above his head: You are Yankel. You love Brod.
RECURRENT SECRETS, 1791–1943
IT WAS A SECRET when Yankel shrouded the clock in black cloth. It was a secret when the Well-Regarded Rabbi awoke one morning with these words on his tongue: BUT WHAT IF? And when the most outspoken Sloucher, Rachel F, awoke wondering, But what if? It was not a secret when Brod didn't think to tell Yankel that she found spots of red in her underpants, and that she was sure she was dying, and how poetic that she should die like this. But it was a secret when she did think to tell him and then didn't. They were secrets at least some of the times Sofiowka masturbated, which made him the greatest keeper of secrets in Trachimbrod, and perhaps anywhere, ever. It was a secret when grieving Shanda didn't grieve. And it was a secret when the Rabbi's twins implied that they saw nothing and knew nothing of what happened that day, March 18, 1791, when Trachim B's wagon either did or did not pin him against the bottom of the Brod River.
Yankel goes through the house with black sheets. He drapes the standing clock in black cloth and wraps his silver pocket watch in a swatch of black linen. He stops observing Shabbos, unwilling to mark the end of another week, and he avoids the sun because shadows, too, are clocks. I am tempted, on occasion, to strike Brod, he thinks to himself, not because she does wrong, but because I love her so much. Which is also a secret. He covers the window of his bedroom with black cloth. He wraps the calendar in black paper, as if it were a gift. He reads Brod's diary while she bathes, which is a secret, which is a terrible thing, he knows, but there are some terrible things to which a father is entitled, even a counterfeit father.
March 18, 1803
...I'm feeling overwhelmed. Before tomorrow I have to finish reading the first volume of the biography of Copernicus, since it has to be returned to the man from whom Yankel purchased it. Then there are the Greek and Roman heroes to be sorted out, and the Bible stories to try to find meaning in, and then—as if there were enough hours in the day—there is math. I bring it upon myself...
June 20, 1803
..."Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old." I read that in a book somewhere and it's stuck in my head. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not true. More likely, the young and old are lonely in different ways, in their own ways...
September 23, 1803
...It occurred to me this afternoon that there is nothing in the world I like so much as writing in my diary. It never misunderstands me and I never misunderstand it. We are like perfect lovers, like one person. Sometimes I take it to bed with me and hold it as I fall asleep. Sometimes I kiss its pages, one after another. For now, at least, it will have to do...
Which is also a secret, of course, because Brod keeps her own life a secret from herself. Like Yankel, she repeats things until they are true, or until she can't tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be. She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself. She aims it into the sky, and can see, or so she thinks, past the blue, past the black, even past the stars, and back into a different black, and a different blue—an arc that begins with her eye and ends with a narrow house. She studies the façade, notices where the wood of the door frame has warped and faded, where rainpipe drainage has left white tracks, and then looks through the windows, one at a time. Through the lower-left window she can see a woman scrubbing a plate with a rag. It looks as if the woman is singing to herself, and Brod imagines the song to be the very song with which her mother would have sung her to sleep had she not died, painless, in childbirth, as Yankel promised. The woman looks for her reflection in the plate and then puts it down atop a stack. She brushes her hair away from her face for Brod to see, or so Brod thinks. The woman has too much skin for her bones and too many wrinkles for her years, as if her face were some animal of its own, slowly descending the skull each day, until one day it would cling to her jaw, and one day fall off completely, landing in the woman's hands for her to look
at and say, This is the face I've worn my whole life. There is nothing in the lower-right window save a broad bureau cluttered with books, papers, and pictures—pictures of a man and a woman, of children and the children's children. What wonderful portraits, she thinks, so small, so accurate! She focuses in on one particular photograph. It is of a girl holding her mother's hand. They are on a beach, or so it seems from such a great distance. The girl, the perfect little girl, is looking off in another direction, as if someone were making faces to get her to smile, and the mother—assuming she is the girl's mother—is looking at the girl. Brod focuses in even more, this time on the eyes of the mother. They are green, she assumes, and deep, not unlike the river of her name. Is she crying? Brod wonders, leaning her chin against the windowsill. Or was the artist just trying to make her look more beautifu? Because she was beautiful to Brod. She looked exactly like what Brod had imagined of her own mother.
Up ... up...
She looks into an upstairs bedroom and sees an empty bed. The pillow is a perfect rectangle. The sheets are as smooth as water. It may be that no one has ever slept in this bed, Brod thinks. Or maybe it was the scene of something improper, and in the haste to be rid of the evidence, new evidence was created. Even if Lady Macbeth could have removed that damned spot, wouldn't her hands have been red from all of the scrubbing? There is a cup of water on the bedside table, and Brod thinks she sees a ripple.
Left ... left...
She looks into another room. A study? A children's playroom? It's impossible to tell. She turns away and turns back, as if in that moment she might have acquired some new perspective, but the room remains a puzzle to her. She tries to piece it together: A half-smoked cigarette balancing itself on an ashtray's lip. A damp washcloth on the sill. A scrap of paper on the desk, with handwriting that looks like hers: This is me with Augustine, February 21, 1943.
Up and up...
But there's no window to the attic. So she looks through the wall, which is not terribly hard because the walls are thin and her telescope is a powerful one. A boy and a girl are lying on the floor facing the slant of the roof. She focuses in on the young boy, who looks, from this distance, to be her age. And even from such a distance she can see that it is a copy of The Book of Antecedents from which he is reading to her.
Oh, she thinks. It's Trachimbrod I'm seeing!
His mouth, her ears. His eyes, his mouth, her ears. The hand of the scribe, the boy's eyes, his mouth, the girl's ears. She traces the causal string back, to the face of the scribe's inspiration, and the lips of the lover and palms of the parents of the scribe's inspiration, and their lovers' lips and parents' palms and neighbors' knees and enemies, and the lovers of their lovers, parents of their parents, neighbors of their neighbors, enemies of their enemies, until she convinces herself that it is not only the boy who is reading to the girl in that attic, but everyone reading to her, everyone who ever lived. She reads along as they read:
THE FIRST RAPE OF BROD D
The first rape of Brod D occurred amid the celebrations following the thirteenth Trachimday festival, March 18, 1804. Brod was walking home from the blue-flowered float—on which she had stood in such austere beauty for so many hours on end, waving her mermaid's tail only when appropriate, throwing deep into the river of her name those heavy sacks only when the Rabbi gave her the necessary nod—when she was approached by the mad squire Sofiowka N, whose name our shtetl now uses for maps and Mormon
The boy falls asleep, and the girl puts her head on his chest. Brod wants to read more—to scream, READ TO ME! I NEED TO KNOW!—but they can't hear her from where she is, and from where she is, she can't turn the page. From where she is, the page—her paper-thin future—is infinitely heavy.
A PARADE, A DEATH, A PROPOSITION, 1804–1969
BY HER TWELFTH BIRTHDAY, my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother had received at least one proposal of marriage from every citizen of Trachimbrod: from men who already had wives, from broken old men who argued on stoops about things that might or might not have happened decades before, from boys without armpit hair, from women with armpit hair, and from the deceased philosopher Pinchas T, who, in his only notable paper, "To the Dust: From Man You Came and to Man You Shall Return," argued it would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed. She forced a blush, batted her long eyelashes, and said to each, Perhaps no. Yankel says I am still too young. But the offer is such a tempting one.
They are so silly, turning back to Yankel.
Wait until I pass, closing his book. Then you can have your choice of them. But not while I'm still alive.
I would not have any one of them, kissing his forehead. They are not for me. And besides, laughing, I already have the most handsome man in all of Trachimbrod.
Who is it? pulling her onto his lap. I'll kill him.
Flicking his nose with her pinky. It's you, fool.
Oh no, are you telling me I have to kill myself?
I suppose I am.
Couldn't I be a bit less handsome? If it means sparing my life from my own hand? Couldn't I be a bit ugly?
OK, laughing, I suppose your nose is a bit crooked. And on close examination, that smile of yours is a good bit less than handsome.
Now you're killing me, laughing.
Better than killing yourself.
I suppose that's right. This way I don't have to feel guilty afterward.
I'm doing you a great service.
Thank you, then, dear. How can I ever repay you?
You're dead. You can't do anything.
I'll come back for this one favor. Just name it.
Well, I suppose I'd have to ask you to kill me, then. Spare me the guilt.
Consider it done.
Aren't we so terribly lucky to have one another?
It was after Bitzl Bitzl's son's son's proposal—I'm so sorry, but Yankel thinks it best that I wait—that she put on her Float Queen costume for the thirteenth annual Trachimday festival. Yankel had heard the women speak of his daughter (he was not deaf), and he had seen the men grope at her (he was not blind), but helping her pull up her mermaid suit, having to tie the straps around her bony shoulders, made everything else seem easy (he was only human).
You don't have to get dressed up if you don't want to, he said, easing her slim arms into the long sleeves of the mermaid suit, which she had redesigned each of the last eight years. You don't have to be the Float Queen, you know.
But of course I do, she said. I am the most beautiful girl in Trachimbrod.
I thought you didn't want to be beautiful.
I don't, she said, pulling her bead necklace over the neckline of the suit. It's such a burden. But what can I do about it? I'm cursed.
But you don't have to do this, he said, putting the bead back under. They could choose another girl this year. You could give someone else a chance.
That doesn't sound like me.
But you could do it anyway.
Nope.
But we agreed that ceremony and ritual are so foolish.
But we also agreed that they are foolish only to those on the outside. I'm the center of this one.
I order you not to go, he said, knowing that would never work.
I order you not to order me, she said.
My order takes precedence.
Why?
Because I'm older.
That's a foolish person talking.
Then because I ordered first.
That's the same person talking.
But you don't even like it, he said. You always complain after.
I know, she said, adjusting the tail, which was scaled with blue sequins.
Then why?
Do you like thinking about Mom?
No.
Does it hurt after?
Yes.
Then why do you continue to do it? she asked. And why, she wondered, remembering the description of her rape, do we pursue it?
Yankel lost himself in thought, trying many times to start a sentence
.
When you think of an acceptable answer, I'll relinquish my throne. She kissed him on the forehead and headed out of the house for the river with her name.
He stood by the window and waited.
Canopies of thin white string spanned the narrow dirt arteries of Trachimbrod that afternoon, spring, 1804, as they had every Trachimday for thirteen years. It was Bitzl Bitzl's idea, to commemorate the first of the wagon's refuse to surface. One end of white string tied around the half-empty bottle of old vermouth on the floor of the drunkard Omeler S's tipsy shanty, the other around a tarnished silver candle holder on the dining room table of the Tolerable Rabbi's four-bedroom brick house across muddy Shelister Street; thin white string like a clothesline from a third-floor harlot's back-left bedpost to the cool copper doorknob of an ice closet in the Gentile Kerman K's basement embalming shop; white string connecting butcher to matchmaker over the tranquil (and breathless with anticipation) palm of the Brod River; white string from carpenter to wax modeler to midwife, in a scalene triangle above the fountain with the prostrate mermaid, in the middle of the shtetl square.
The handsome men assembled along the shoreline as the parade of floats made its way from the small falls to the toy and pastry stands set up by the plaque marking where the wagon did or didn't flip and sink:
THIS PLAQUE MARKS THE SPOT
(OR A SPOT CLOSE TO THE SPOT)
WHERE THE WAGON OF ONE
TRACHIM B
(WE THINK)
WENT IN.
Shtetl Proclamation, 1791
The first to pass the Tolerable Rabbi's window, from which he gave the necessary nod of approval, was the float from Kolki. It was adorned with thousands of orange and red butterflies, which flocked to the float because of the specific combination of animal carcasses strapped to its underside. A red-headed boy dressed in orange slacks and dress shirt stood as still as a statue on the wooden podium. Above him was a sign that read, THE PEOPLE OF KOLKI CELEBRATE WITH THEIR TRACHIMBROD NEIGHBORS! He would be the subject of many paintings one day, when the children then watching grew old and sat with watercolors on their crumbling stoops. But he didn't know that then, and neither did they, just as none of them knew that I would one day write this.