During the Christmas break Marie flew to Boston, I went to stay with my family in Basel, and Soraya went home to Paris. When we returned two weeks later, something had changed in Soraya. She seemed withdrawn, closed up in herself, and she spent her time in bed listening to her Walkman, reading books in French, or smoking out the window. Whenever the phone rang, she jumped up to answer it, and when it was for her she shut the door and sometimes didn’t come out for hours. Marie came to my room more and more often, because, she said, being around Soraya gave her the creeps. As we lay together in my narrow bed, Marie would tell me stories about Bangkok, and however full of drama they were, she could still laugh at herself and make me laugh. Looking back, I think that she taught me something that, however many times I have forgotten it and remembered it since then, has never really left me: something about the absurdity, and also the truth, of the dramas we need to feel fully alive.
From January, then, until April, what I mostly remember are the things that were happening to me. Kate, the American girl I became close with, who was the oldest of four sisters, and lived in a large house in the neighborhood of Champel, and showed me her father’s collection of Playboy. The young daughter of Mrs. Elderfield’s neighbor whom I sometimes babysat, and who one night sat up in bed screaming when she saw a praying mantis on the wall, lit by the headlights of a car. My long walks after school. The weekends in Basel, where I would entertain my little sister with games in the kitchen to distract her from my parents’ arguments. And Shareef, a boy in my class with an easy smile whom I walked to the lake with one afternoon, and made out with on a bench. It was the first time I’d kissed a boy, and when he pushed his tongue into my mouth, the feeling it ignited was both tender and violent. I dug my nails into his back, and he kissed me harder, we writhed together on the bench like the couples I’d sometimes watched from afar. On the tram ride home I could smell him on my skin, and a feeling of horror took hold of me at the thought of having to see him again in school the next day. When I did, I looked past him as if he didn’t exist, but with my gaze softly focused, so that I could still see the blur of his hurt in the corner of my eye.
Of that time, I remember, too, how once I came home from school and found Soraya in the bathroom, doing her makeup in front of the mirror. Her eyes were shining, and she seemed happy and light again, as she hadn’t been for weeks. She called me in, and wanted to brush and braid my hair. Her cassette player was balanced on the edge of the bathtub, and while her fingers worked through my hair, she sang along. And then, when she turned to reach for a hairpin behind her, I saw the purple bruise on her throat.
And yet I never really doubted her strength. Never doubted that she was in control and doing what she wanted. Playing a game according to rules she had agreed to, if not invented. Only looking back do I realize how much I wanted to see her that way: strong-willed and free, invulnerable and under her own command. From my walks alone in Geneva, I already understood that the power to attract men, when it comes, arrives with a terrifying vulnerability. But I wanted to believe that the balance of power could be tipped in one’s favor by strength or fearlessness or something I couldn’t name. Soon after things began with the banker, Soraya had told us that once his wife had called on the hotel phone, and he’d instructed Soraya to go into the bathroom, but she’d refused and instead lay listening on the bed. The naked banker turned his back but had no choice other than to go on talking to his wife, whose call he hadn’t expected. He spoke to her in Dutch, Soraya said, but in the same tone the men in her own family spoke to their mothers: gravely, with a touch of fear. And as she listened, she knew something had been exposed that he had not wished to expose, and which shifted the balance between them. I preferred that story, if I preferred any story at all, to trying to understand the bruise on Soraya’s neck.
It was the first week of May when she didn’t return home. Mrs. Elderfield woke us at dawn, demanding we tell her whatever we knew about Soraya’s whereabouts. Marie shrugged and looked at her chipped nail polish, and I tried to follow her cue until Mrs. Elderfield said that she was going to call both Soraya’s parents and the police, and that if something had happened to her, if she were in danger and we were withholding any information, we wouldn’t be forgiven or be able to forgive ourselves. Marie looked scared, and, seeing her face, I began to cry. A few hours later, the police arrived. Alone with the detective and his partner in the kitchen, I told them everything I knew, which I realized as I spoke—losing the thread, confusing myself—was not so much. After they interrogated Marie, they went to the back bedroom and combed through Soraya’s things. Afterward it looked as if the bedroom had been ransacked: everything, even her underwear, strewn across the floor and her bed with an air of violation.
That night, the second one that Soraya was missing, there was a huge storm. Marie and I lay awake in my bed, neither one of us speaking of the things we feared. In the morning, the crunch of gravel under the wheels of a car woke us, and we jumped out of bed to look out the window. But when the door of the taxi opened, it was a man who emerged, his lips drawn tight below his heavy black mustache. In the familiar features of her father, some truth about Soraya’s origins was revealed, exposing the illusion of her autonomy.
Mrs. Elderfield made us repeat to Mr. Sassani the things we’d already told the police. He was a tall and intimidating man, his face knotted in anger, and I think she wasn’t brave enough to do it herself. In the end, Marie—emboldened by her new authority and the sensational quality of the news she had to deliver—did most of the talking. Mr. Sassani listened in silence, and it was impossible to say whether what he felt was fear or fury. Both, it must have been. He turned toward the door. He wanted to go immediately to the Hôtel Royal. Mrs. Elderfield tried to calm him. She repeated what was already known: that the banker had checked out two days before, the room had been searched, nothing had turned up. The police were doing everything they could. The banker had rented a car that they were working to track down. The only thing to do was to stay here and wait until there was some news.
In the hours that followed, Mr. Sassani paced grimly in front of the windows of the living room. As the royal engineer to the shah, he must have ensured against all kinds of collapse. But then the shah himself had fallen, and the vast and intricate structure of Mr. Sassani’s life had crumbled, making a mockery of the physics of safety. He’d sent his daughter to Switzerland because of its promise to restore order and safety, but even Switzerland hadn’t kept Soraya safe, and this betrayal appeared to be too much for him. At any moment, it seemed he might shout or cry out.
In the end, Soraya came home on her own. On her own—just as she had gotten into it on her own, of her own choosing. Crossing the newly green field that evening, arriving at the door disheveled but whole. Her eyes were bloodshot and the makeup around them was smeared, but she was calm. She didn’t even express surprise at the sight of her father, only winced when he shouted her name, the last syllable muffled by a gasp or sob. He lunged for her, and for a moment it seemed that he was going to yell or raise his hand to her, but she didn’t flinch, and instead he pulled her to him and embraced her, his eyes filled with tears. He spoke to her urgently, angrily, in Farsi, but she said little back. She was tired, she said in English, she needed to sleep. In a voice unnaturally high, Mrs. Elderfield asked if she wanted anything to eat. Soraya shook her head, as if there were nothing anymore that any of us could offer that she needed, and turned toward the long corridor that led to the back bedroom. As she passed me, she stopped, reached out her hand, and touched my hair. And then, very slowly, she continued on her way.
The next day her father took her back to Paris. I don’t remember if we said goodbye. I think we thought, Marie and I, that she would come back, that she would return to finish the school year and tell us everything. But she never did. She left it to us to decide for ourselves what had happened to her, and in my mind I saw her in that moment when she’d touched my hair with a sad smile, and believed that what I’d se
en was a kind of grace: the grace that comes of having pushed oneself to the brink, of having confronted some darkness or fear and won.
At the end of June, my father finished his fellowship and, expert in trauma, moved us back to New York. The mean girls took an interest in me when I returned to school in September, and wanted to befriend me. At a party, one of them turned a circle around me while I stood calmly, very still. She marveled at how I’d changed, and at my clothes bought abroad. I had gone out into the world and come back, and though I wasn’t saying anything, they sensed that I knew things. For a while Marie sent me cassettes on which she’d recorded herself talking to me, telling me all that was happening in her life. But eventually they stopped arriving, and we lost touch too. And that was the end of Switzerland for me.
In my mind, that was also the end of Soraya: as I said, I never saw her again, and tried to look for her only once, the summer I was nineteen and living in Paris. Even then, I barely tried—calling two Sassani families who were listed in the phone book and then giving up. And yet if it hadn’t been for her, I don’t know that I would have got on the motorcycle of the young man who washed dishes at the restaurant across the street from my apartment on the rue de Chevreuse, and ridden back with him to his apartment in the outskirts of the city, or gone to a bar with the older man who lived on the floor below me, who went on about the job I knew he would never get for me at the nightclub he managed, and then, when we got back to the building, lunged at me on the landing in front of his door, tackling me in an embrace. I watched a movie on the dishwasher’s sofa, and afterward he told me it was dangerous to go home with men I didn’t know, and drove me back to my apartment in silence. And somehow I broke free of the nightclub manager and raced up another floor to the safety of my own apartment, though for the rest of the summer I was terrified of running into him on the stairs, and listened for his comings and goings before I worked up the courage to open my door and bolt down the stairs. I told myself that I did these things because I was in Paris to practice my French, and had resolved to speak to anyone who would speak to me. But all summer I was aware that Soraya might be near, somewhere in that city, that I was close to her and close to something in myself that drew me and frightened me a little, as she had. She had gone further than anyone I knew in a game that was never only a game, one that was about power and fear, about the refusal to comply with the vulnerabilities one is born into.
But I myself wasn’t able to go very far with it. I think I didn’t have the courage, and after that summer I was never again so bold or so reckless. I had one boyfriend after another, all of them gentle and a little afraid of me, and then I got married and had two daughters of my own. The oldest has my husband’s sandy hair; if she were walking in a field in autumn, you could lose her easily. But the younger one stands out wherever she is. She grows and develops in contrast with everything around her. It’s wrong, dangerous even, to imagine that a person has any choice in her looks. And yet I’d swear that my daughter had something to do with the black hair and green eyes that always attract attention, even when she’s standing in a chorus of other children. She’s only twelve, and still small, but already men look at her when she walks in the street or rides the subway. And she doesn’t hunch, or put up her hood, or hide away behind her headphones the way her friends do. She stands erect and still like a queen, which only makes her more an object of their fascination. She has a proudness about her that refuses to grow small, but if it were only that, I might not have begun to fear for her. It’s her curiosity in her own power, its reach and its limits, that scares me. Though maybe the truth is that when I am not afraid for her, I envy her. One day I saw it: how she looked back at the man in the business suit who stood across the subway car from her, burning a hole through her with his eyes. Her stare was a challenge. If she had been riding with a friend, she might have turned her face slowly to her, without taking her eyes off the man, and said something to invoke laughter. It was then that Soraya came back to me, and since then I have been what I can only call haunted by her. By her, and how a person can happen to you and only half a lifetime later does this happening ripen, burst, and deliver itself. Soraya with her downy mustache and her winged eyeliner and her laugh, that deep laugh that came from her stomach, when she told us about the Dutch banker’s arousal. He could have broken her in two with one hand, but either she was already broken, or she wasn’t going to break.
Zusya on the Roof
Heels dug into the tar paper, twenty-three floors above 110th Street, cradling his newborn grandson—how did he wind up here? It was not a simple thing, as his father would say. Simplicity was not his patrimony.
To begin specifically: Brodman had been dead for two weeks, but then, sadly, he had come back to this world, where he’d spent fifty years trying to write unnecessary books. There had been complications after surgery for a tumor in his bowel. Hooked to a respirator, bags for every fluid going in or coming out, for fifteen days his body lay on a gurney, fighting a medieval war against double pneumonia. For two weeks Brodman hung in the balance, dead and not dead. Like the house in Leviticus, he had been infested with plague: they scraped him clean and took him apart, stone by stone. Either it would work or it wouldn’t. Either the plague would be gone or it had already spread through him.
While waiting for the verdict, he dreamed wildly. Such hallucinations! Drugged, his temperature soaring, he dreamed he was the anti-Herzl, lecturing from coast to coast to crowds so huge they watched simulcasts of the simulcasts. A West Bank rabbi issued a fatwa on his head, with a ten-million-dollar bounty funded by a Jewish casino king. Hunted for treason, Brodman was hidden in a safe house somewhere in the heart of Germany. Outside his window, he could see the rolling hills of—Bavaria? Weserbergland? He was spared the details for his own good, in case he should break down and place a phone call to his wife, Mira, or his lawyer, or Rabbi Chanan Ben-Zvi of Gush Etzion. And if he did call the rabbi, what would he say? I surrender, come and get me, third dirt road on the left, past the dairy farm where Brunhilde is singing “Edelweiss” at the udders, and don’t forget your assault rifle? Or maybe the rabbi planned to slit Brodman’s throat with a carving knife.
From the German safe house, he held counsel with Buber, Rabbi Akiva, and Gershom Scholem, who relaxed on a bearskin rug, scratching behind its ears. He sat with Maimonides in the back of a bulletproof car; there was no end to the talking. He saw Moses ibn Ezra and heard Salo Baron, to whom he called, waving his arms to disperse the smoke. He couldn’t see him, but knew he was in that swirling nebula, breathing heavily—Salo Wittmayer Baron, who knew twenty languages and had testified at Eichmann’s trial, the first man to receive a chair in Jewish history at a university in the Western world. Salo, what have you brought on us?
Enormous things happened to him during those feverish weeks, unspeakable revelations. Unbuttoned from time, transient and transcendental, Brodman saw the true shape of his life, how it had torqued always in the direction of duty. Not only his life but the life of his people—the three thousand years of treacherous remembering, highly regarded suffering, and waiting.
On the fifteenth day, his fever broke and he woke to find himself cured. His body was habitable; he would live a little more. All that remained, according to the passage in Leviticus, was the ritual atonement that called for two birds, one to be sacrificed and the other left to live. One killed, the other dipped in the blood of its kin, shaken seven times around the house, then set free. Such reprieve! He never read the passage without crying. But he shall let go the living bird out of the city into the open fields, and make atonement for the house: and it shall be clean.
While he was hallucinating, his only grandchild arrived into the world. In his weakened state, Brodman half believed that his own mental work had performed the labor. His younger daughter, Ruthie, didn’t like men. When she’d announced that she was pregnant at forty-one, Brodman had accepted it as a miracle of immaculate conception. But the happiness was short-lived. A few months la
ter, he’d gone in for a routine blood test, which led to a colonoscopy, which led, a month and a half before the child was due, to the discovery of his own gestation. If he believed in such things, he might have taken it for something mystical. Sweating and moaning, in horrific pain from his gut, he had pushed the idea of the child through the tight passage of incredulity and borne him into existence. It had almost killed him. No, it had killed him. He had died for the child, and then, by some miracle, he had been brought back again. For what?
They removed the respirator early one morning. The young doctor stood over him, eyes moist from the miracle he’d performed. Brodman inhaled his first breath of real air in two weeks, and it went to his head. Dizzy, he pulled the doctor close, so close that all he could see was his teeth, so white, so blindingly beautiful, and to those teeth, which were the closest thing in the room to God, he whispered, “I wasn’t Zusya.” The doctor didn’t understand. He had to say it again, pushing the words hard out of his mouth. Finally, he was heard. “Of course not,” the doctor said soothingly, freeing himself from his patient’s weak grip and gently patting the hand speared through with the IV tube. “You were Professor Brodman, and you’re still him.”
If they hadn’t cut his stomach muscles, he might have laughed. What could such a person know of regret? Probably he didn’t have children yet. By the look of him, not even a wife. Everything was before him. Soon he’d go for his coffee, filled with the promise of the day. And just that morning, he’d brought a dead man back to life! What could he know of a life misspent? Yes, Brodman had been Brodman and was still Brodman, and yet he had failed to be Brodman, just as Rabbi Zusya had failed to be the man he should have been. He had learned the tale as a boy: how after the rebbe from Hanipol died, he stood awaiting God’s judgment, ashamed that he had not been Moses or Abraham. But when God appeared at last, He asked only, “Why weren’t you Zusya?” The story ended there, but Brodman had dreamed the rest: how God concealed Himself again, and Zusya, all alone, whispered, “Because I was a Jew, and there was no room left to be anything else, not even Zusya.”
To Be a Man Page 2
