Make It Concrete

by Miryam Sivan

  Even with all the wine from the commemoration dinner in her blood, Isabel slept badly. Not as uneasily as Gregor Samsa, but still when her phone rang at ten in the morning, she felt only half-human. Her limbs almost too heavy to move. Her back uncooperative. Somehow she managed to lurch over to the other side of the bed to stop the loud chirping. A call from home.

  “Ema, where’s the bicycle helmet?” Uri asked.

  “I’ll call you back.” She didn’t want him to hear her low hoarse, practically unintelligible, voice. She wanted to wash her face, rinse her mouth, clear her throat.

  “No time, Ema, we’re leaving now. Where is it?” His impatience was not just about the helmet. He didn’t want her to hang up. Isabel tried to summon the contents of the hall closet in her mind but couldn’t. She tried to move her voice into the normal range and just about managed to do so when Lia called out that she found it.

  “I miss you, Ema,” Uri said quickly.

  Of course he did. She had travelled a lot this year. The helmet was just an excuse to call.

  “I love you,” Isabel crooned. “My favorite boy. See you tomorrow morning.”

  “I love you too.”

  Isabel closed the phone. Despite her stiff back she managed to turn over in the large bed. Shreds of violence from a dream came to her. Fragments of fear. She tossed and tangled the sheets and pulled herself to standing, grumpy, combative, hauling a serious headache.

  3

  Isabel hit the streets. She needed a café with good coffee and internet access. A rarity in Europe. Maybe something arrived from Schine. Or from Jaim Benjamin. She made a deal with herself: check mail now and not again for the rest of the trip.

  Isabel walked towards Old Town Square. Kafka’s face popped up on billboards, tee-shirts, posters, calendars, cards, and coffee mugs. Kafka who felt displaced in his native city, who suffered a diaspora within a diaspora within a diaspora—a Jew among Christians, a German language writer in a Czech speaking country, an artist among the bourgeoisie—had been elevated in recent decades to the pantheon of local geniuses and saints. She passed the building where he was born. It was now a museum. Behind the plate glass window of what was once his family’s first floor apartment a large poster of his thin face stared out.

  She stopped momentarily to stare back at his intelligent dark Jew eyes. She felt nothing. This was just a flat poster, an homage more to capitalism than to Kafka’s vision of a world rife with brutality, futility, and irrationality. She continued to a café down the street, remembering good coffee there. It was closed until noon. She walked past Jiri’s studio and didn’t buzz. He had work to do. Then past the Gymnasium where Kafka went to school. Not far from there was a café with passable coffee that also offered fresh, not boxed, milk upon request.

  As Isabel drank the hot strong coffee, she took out her notepad and tried to switch geographies. To think of the structure of Jaim Benjamin’s book. To work. To keep up even in this foreign locale. Even on vacation. Even with a wicked headache from last night’s wine and rage. Pages, Isabel I need pages, pages. Even here. But Kafka eclipsed Schine. His silhouette watched her from the back of a tee-shirt at a table next to hers. She tried to stare past him, to get a foothold in the hills running back from the Aegean. But Kafka dragged her back to the landlocked damp planes of Czechoslovakia. And to nearby Poland. She glared at Franz stamped white on the black tee-shirt and considered Josef K. who Kafka created in 1914, inspired by the Mendel Beiliss trial for ‘ritual murder’ in Kiev. 1911. Isabel asked the waitress for more milk to dilute the muddy bitter coffee. Begun in England in 1144, ritual murder, also known as the blood libel, quickly became a European favorite. Sometimes small scale slaughters accompanied the charge. Sometimes larger, state-sponsored events. Chmielnicki. 1648–1649. Kishinev. Easter 1903. Shiraz. 1910. Kielce. 1946.

  Josef K. wasn’t accused of killing and using a Christian child’s blood for Passover bread. Though he was summoned to court and told to secure a lawyer and come up with a defense for something equally ridiculous: an unidentified crime. Terror overwhelmed him at moments. If found guilty he might be given the death penalty. But most of the time Josef K. put the officials who tracked him out of his mind. He couldn’t accept that justice was a matter of expediency and politics. He went to work at the bank. Took his meals at the small restaurants he favored. Had coffee at one of Prague’s many cafés. And reasoned that episodic contact with the anonymous system that had somehow latched on to him indicated he might in the end be overlooked or spared. But of course growing up in a Europe all too eager not to let its Jews have happy endings, Kafka didn’t let his Josef K. (both of them, writer and character, named after the Emperor Franz Josef) off the hook so easily. At the end of The Trial two men dressed in black lead Josef K. away from his room. Old supporting actors, he explains the scene to himself, still unwilling to accept the intrusion of the absurd into his well-ordered Prussian life. These men don’t know how to respond when Josef K. asks them which theater they belong to. “Theater?” they ask and take him to an isolated quarry. There they stab him in the heart. “Like a dog,” Josef K. says with his last breath. Like a dog.

  Isabel finished her coffee and opened a bottle of sparkling water. The bubbles were so lively they practically hurt going down. She drank slowly. In booming British English the man with Kafka on his back ordered another Pilsner. It was not yet noon.

  She opened her notepad. Smoothed down a page. Began a list. Lists composed her. On the practical side, Jaim Benjamin’s story was being transcribed in clear correct American English. And it was half done. One hundred and twenty pages to be precise. Jaim Benjamin’s few comments on the chapters he reviewed made for little additional work. Schine’s draconian schedule would be met. Jaim Benjamin added a note that he felt lighter with the telling. A rock removed from his heart. All pluses this side of the ledger.

  On the other—her pen paused above the page—were years of stories thrown up like fortress walls. She began drawing minus signs as if they were words in a sentence. One and then another, another, another to the right edge of the page, then back to the start of the next line. One, then another, another, another --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- back to the left side of the page to start again.

  Isabel poured more bubbly water into the glass. No matter that sentences and paragraphs emerged, that schedule milestones were being met more or less, long periods of silence plagued her. The emotional core of Jaim Benjamin’s story eluded her and it was her job to get to the heart and soul of the story. The people who commissioned her to write their life stories were not interested in dry historical accounts. Library shelves, archives, the internet were jam-packed with books and reports stocked with comprehensive facts, lists, speeches, and correspondence. Make the pain real, Jaim Benjamin had said when they first sat together in New York. Do what Aristotle said only literature could: enable readers to understand experience in extremis. As if she didn’t know this. What Kafka did with his many metamorphoses of K.

  And she could do this. Had been doing this for two decades. From the last vision of a father standing on a street corner in a long brown coat, Isabel exposed a child’s avalanche of anguish and loss. She had described a pediatric hospital being cleared out by German soldiers. Children too slow to rise from their beds and walk the hallways were tossed out the window. She had come in close to a mother’s feelings as she stood on the pavement below watching children fly like broken kites from second and third story windows. It was only possible to come in close. But close was better than nowhere at all.

  For twenty years now Isabel had plunged into emotional pits and used specific names and cartographies to write her way out. But now she felt lost in the there, the here, in both places, in neither place. She was way off the path. Had gone astray. Because of Jaim Benjamin’s story. Because he tossed her from one lebensraum to another.
450 years apart. From Isabella to Bella. From Dave to Suri.

  Isabel opened the back of her notepad to a page filled with words. Inadvertently and unbidden, words written on the plane. Suri forbade Isabel to write Bella’s story. Suri forbade Isabel to know Suri’s story. So it went without saying that Suri forbade Isabel to write Suri’s story. Suri hated the industry of memory. She called Schine a publisher of holokitsch. Isabel stared at the page that felt like a product of automatic writing. She was afraid to read it. Suri and Bella: Verboten. Taboo. Shame. Guilt. Fear. Frustration. Compulsion.

  Suri named me Isabel, after Bella, her mother, who died naked and trembling in a freshly dug pit in a Ukrainian forest clearing. But whenever I consider my name, it’s not just my grandmother who comes to mind, but the meaning of her name, the Latin root: beautiful. For Suri’s sister, Aunt Lola has assured me that Bella, their mother, was not. The one photograph they managed to hold on to through those terrible hard years, shows a woman in her late twenties with thick black hair gathered in the back. She has a broad face and light colored eyes. Fatigue lines have already found a home around her thin mouth. This is a woman who though not beautiful, would have come to be called handsome as she grew older, had she the opportunity to.

  A mélange of emotion propelled Isabel out of the café chair. She put a few coins on the table. The walls of the world tilted toward her. The man with Kafka on his back growled for more Pilsner. Isabel rushed towards the street. Fresh air. Suddenly, pointedly, her body ached for Zakhi because he accepted her need to dive into toxic waters. Sauntering down uneven cobblestone streets, Isabel shook her head hard to free it of what ifs. What if Suri would secretly be relieved if Isabel told her story? What if Zakhi and Isabel committed to each other knowing she would grow old before him?

  Isabel crossed Old Town Square again. A large brown statue of the golem welcomed visitors to Josefov, the old Jewish quarter. She stopped to ponder this commercial face lift. From grotesque Frankenstein-creature, he had morphed into a cuddly Pillsbury Dough Boy-Hulk hybrid. Gone were centuries of a locked ghetto. Of lynchings. Of loathsome accusations. Gruesome punishments. Standing calmly by a sign pointing to the Staronová Synagogue, the golem statue held a tray with tourist brochures. No longer needed to fight the scourge of the blood libel, the Jewish golem had been reborn into a non-denominational concierge. How hospitable.

  The quiet Saturday morning streets of Vinohrady filled with people walking dogs. As Isabel told Jiri the first night they met, this neighborhood reminded her of the Upper West Side. And remembering that conversation, she pictured Suri reading a book on a bench along Riverside Drive. She and Hal liked to take in the river breeze under the trees.

  Since working on Jaim Benjamin’s book, no, actually it began with Itka’s life story, Suri’s bowdlerization had become an agony for Isabel. Others welcomed talking about their past. Lots of children received answers to their questions about the war. They knew their parents’ histories. Learned about extended families. For some, this information landed on them even before they began asking questions. But all Isabel ever got was a stunning reserve. The script dictated that Suri was the survivor whose veneer Isabel the daughter needed to protect. That meant not penetrating it. Not asking questions. But now it was harder. Suri’s veneer suffocated Isabel. Last time she was in New York she fought for air and they fought. First time ever. Because Isabel asked questions.

  “How did Bella know to send you east to Russia? So few people understood what was about to happen . . . how did she?”

  “Isabel, sweetheart, life is beautiful, live it, and leave the dead alone.” Suri took a delicate sip of wine. Her eyes looked up from the rim of her wine glass and met Isabel’s. They told her flat out to mind her own business.

  The same message she had been receiving for the past thirty years. When she was sixteen Dave told her that Suri survived the war in Siberia, having full responsibility for her three younger siblings. She was a child herself and foraged for food and fuel. Then their brother Shiya died. That was the first time Isabel had heard about Shiya. Her Aunts Zizi and Lola hinted at miseries. At missing their parents. Their lost siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends. But they were careful not to talk when Suri was around. And Isabel never pressed for more information yet when she thought of Suri somehow surviving Siberia, the images and color on the screen faded to an undifferentiated black, as if stored in an encrypted file whose password she didn’t possess. She, her aunts, her father, all felt the delicate balance of Suri’s frailty and acted from an overwhelming need to shelter her. But when she would be in New York in a few months’ time to sit with Jaim Benjamin on the final draft of his book, Isabel knew that it would also be time to bully the status quo of decades.

  “The dead don’t leave me alone.” Isabel had stared at Suri during their last visit.

  “Rubbish.” Suri got up from the table, took her wine glass, and went into the other room. Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” filled the house.

  ✶

  Isabel sat on a bench in a small park in Vinohrady. Many people and dogs were out on this beautiful day. She missed Woody and looked for Jack Russells. A man and a Rhodesian Ridgeback walked by. An old woman with two pugs passed. They stopped. One dog lifted his leg, his pee barely missed Isabel’s shoes. The old woman giggled like a girl at her naughty pup. Isabel was not amused. The woman hurried away with her mini ruffians. Isabel took out the notepad again. Looked at the contraband Bella-murder-in-the-woods paragraph. So few lines. So much guilt. She jumped three clean pages.

  I am becoming a ghost. The hard lines by which I know myself, as if gone over with an eraser, slowly disappear.

  The words scared her and she looked up just as a handsome pair of men entered the park with a pair of equally handsome Jack Russells. Ah, here they were. One dog was white and brown like Woody. The other white, brown, and black. Isabel sat up, put away notepad and pencil, and awaited their approach. Quality dog moments restored equanimity. And she was desperate for some.

  Years back Molly told her that she ghosted because of Suri’s veto. As if she didn’t know this. But Molly was only partially right. She ghosted because of Suri but also because of Rosa. Rosa Levi. For six hours every day Isabel and Rosa sat next to each other at a stainless steel work table in the kibbutz kitchen peeling, dicing, and mixing vegetables for a thousand people’s breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. Isabel’s timid questions drew out the war and camp tales curled inside Rosa for decades. Rosa’s responses emerged first in small ripples then in large knock down waves that overwhelmed them. Some days Rosa left the kitchen early crushed by the load of sense memories.

  After a few months Isabel asked Rosa if she could write her story down. In English. And Aunt Zizi found Schine. When the book came out a year later it was translated into Hebrew by another kibbutz member. Then Rosa began to speak at local schools. Not long after that Schine contacted Isabel and asked if she’d be interested in writing another book. She said yes and had been saying yes for twenty years. And not because of Suri, but because each one of these people had an important story to tell.

  The Jack Russells and their people walked next to Isabel’s bench. Her hand fell and the dogs rushed to sniff it. She scratched their heads. The men chattered to her in Czech. She smiled. Her hand on the dogs.

  “English?”

  They shook their heads no. Laughed. Gave the dogs small signals on the leash. Visiting time was over.

  4

  As soon as Isabel entered the Shwartz’s elegant apartment, Itka complimented her on her new dress and shoes. Like most women from Prague, Itka believed in self-grooming. Her blond hair was always styled. Graceful dresses flattered her sensuous hips and bosom. Many years Isabel’s senior, she had taken upon herself the project of sprucing up Isabel’s country ways with manicures, pedicures, expensive hair colors and cuts, high-end clothing. As a woman ages and loses the beauty of youth, she must compensate with good clothing and car
e, Itka instructed her ghostwriter and friend. Isabel went on field trips with Itka to boutiques and cosmeticians. And learned.

  “So I’ll look good at my desk,” Isabel had teased her. “And for the goats in my neighborhood.” But nevertheless she learned and especially when she travelled for work and sat with clients, Isabel stepped up her game.

  After last night’s dinner they had all had enough of the war and were careful to talk about everything but. When the topic of beaches came up, Isabel described the beauty of the sea and Phoenician ruins of Achziv. As usual, wine was a favorite subject. Some time was spent talking about Israel’s excellent run over the past few years. Isabel kept up with the pleasant conversation. Manners were important but she also found herself fending off images of Jaim Benjamin’s mountain village. Of Kafka’s dark lanes. The golem’s stealth. Bella’s murder in the woods. Her unease did not fade and she beat a hasty departure as soon as it was polite to. On her way back to the hotel she was once again laid low by the tourist booths. Usually she laughed them off but now their ruthless merchandising of Kafka and the golem clawed at her. When she got to her room, she drew the curtains and crawled under the covers.

  And didn’t feel much better when she returned to the streets hours later. The fin de siècle renovation of Josefov failed to keep taut the boundary between medieval Easter massacres and today. With more dissonance than harmony Isabel bounced between the former ghetto walls like a note on a staff. Kafka had told his good friend Janouch that despite the makeover we walk about as in a dream, and we ourselves are only a ghost of former times. The ghetto’s woes declared themselves like bones and ash in lax earth. Isabel’s gut contracted with the estrangement of Franz Kafka, Josef K., K., Gregor Samsa. She too felt misshapen. Not literally as a dog or giant beetle, but as a Jew living in the shadow of the blood libel and now, courtesy of Jaim Benjamin, the Inquisition. Under orders from Pope Paul IV, Jews couldn’t use titles such as Signor or Don. 1555. Jaim wrote this at the bottom of one page. And on the next: Germany’s Nuremberg Laws did same with Herr, with Frau. 1935. The overlay of histories grabbed at Isabel’s heels. She stumbled. Walked even faster. Just to keep moving.