by Alice Nelson
After a month Jacob found out the details of the hospital in London where Michael was working and telephoned him there. Would Michael ask Leni to call and speak to her son, Jacob said. If she called the apartment, he would put Ben straight on the line. It took a great deal of will for Jacob to keep his voice steady. Michael said that he would pass the message on to Leni, that they had been very busy and he was sure she would call as soon as she could. He sounded mild and agreeable, as if they were discussing a minor business arrangement. There was a long pause, and then a burst of background noise on Michael’s end of the line; he was terribly sorry, he would have to be off – they were paging him. Never a dull moment here, Michael said before hanging up.
Jacob was devastated in the weeks after Leni’s disappearance, not so much for his own sake but for Ben’s. Jacob had become accustomed to her absences; it was easier sometimes when she was not there. But this was different. It was one thing for Leni to leave him, but to spurn her son’s guileless, trembling love was unforgiveable. She had always been an insufficient mother but no lapse, no error she had made while she stayed with them could ever compare to the enormous breach her departure had created in Ben’s small existence. Gone, she would loom too large in her son’s imagining and he would not be able to right himself in the world. If she only had agreed to remain with them, her failings would be ordinary ones and her power to wreak devastation would be diminished. But she left, and did not come back for three years. Marina knew that Jacob believed that Ben’s current grief was the same old sorrow, a seam of pain running through these years all along. Ben had seemed unscathed and yet he was not. Like some dormant tropical disease, his grief over his mother’s betrayal had flared up again.
The weather never recovered during their last week on Fire Island. Drifts of rain streamed over the bay and soon the place felt water-logged, the sea and the sky coming together in a grey haze. The little cottage was chilly and dark, a spreading damp in the walls, draughts flowing in under the doors. Marina found an old fisherman’s sweater stowed away in one of the cupboards and took to wearing it. She liked the way the wool still held the smell of the sea. They stayed indoors, listening to the radio or reading, a hush of rain all around them. It was almost cool enough for a fire. Packing up the house on the last day, Marina wondered suddenly if they would ever come back.
Back in the city, Marina began to work again on the book, writing through the heat of the mornings, the window lifted up a crack to let in the sounds of the street. Some days the whole city seemed to waver under the humidity. There had been a flare-up of violence in the neighbourhood while they were away, as if the heat had finally driven people into unreason: a shooting in East Harlem, where a child had been caught in the crossfire, and a large-scale drug bust at the Wagner housing projects. The news was full of pictures of sullen-looking young men being pushed into police cars.
Many of their friends thought she and Jacob were crazy when they bought the house in Harlem. People were moving to the uncharted parts of Brooklyn, out to Clinton Hill and Fort Greene, or even north to Washington Heights and Inwood, where there were suddenly farmers’ markets and organic cafés on every corner, but Harlem still held an air of danger and dissolution. It didn’t seem to be redeemable in the way of those other neighbourhoods. The vacant lots between the buildings were full of remnants of an old wilderness; vines growing over hillocks of garbage, weeds spilling out of the rusted bodies of abandoned cars. Once, Marina thought she spied a thin brown fox disappearing down a storm pipe. Probably just a stray cat, Jacob said, but she preferred the idea of a fox, the revenant wildness of it.
In the afternoons she walked to Central Park and looped around the Harlem Meer, sometimes venturing further south. Some days she walked the whole length of the park, turning back when she saw the horses and carts lined up outside the Plaza Hotel. It always surprised her to come to the end of the park and find the city there waiting; the glary bustle of midtown and the throngs of summer tourists. In Harlem she could forget about the press of the city itself, its clamour and clutter, its raucous aliveness.
The long afternoon walks had become part of the fabric of her study of the Hasidim. After a morning at her desk, reading the transcripts of the interviews she had conducted, taking notes and writing, the walks through the park felt like a meditative continuation of her work. She was wrestling with the book, had not yet settled on the right way to approach the subject. It would be so much easier to write a panoramic history of Hasidic Judaism in America, but she wanted a more intimate and interesting story. How she hated the idea that it was even possible to pin down an entire people, to unravel their complexity on the pages of a book.
It had always seemed strange to Marina that her book on the Romani had been so lavishly praised as a sweeping cultural history of the Gypsies, when to her it was full of sweet hesitance and mystery. The Romani were a people who had tried, as best they could, to live outside history, to elude the kind of chronicling that an anthropologist might attempt. Their very survival depended on secrecy, on silences and disguise; they were not going to offer themselves up to an outsider. Or if they were willing to speak to her, it was only an abridged kind of telling. For every word of the Romani language she had learned there was another – a secret synonym – that she would never know. Even the words she knew carried nuances she could never be sure of, could be twisted to mean something else entirely. She had decided very early on in that project that she would not write the book as an anthropologist or a historian but in another way, at once more intimate and more distant. She wanted the story she was telling to be as much about its gaps and silences as what was on the page. How much of any life could ever really be known?
It was the same with the Hasidim. Most of those she had interviewed so far had been scrupulously polite, if sometimes suspicious of her motives. They tried to answer her questions, provided her with the information she requested, but there was a distance to everything she learned. She had not yet discovered an opening and she was not sure how to find one.
‘The Satmarers don’t see you,’ a young woman named Frieda told her. ‘They don’t even register your presence. You are completely outside their world. They are not like the Lubavitchers. They have no interest in trying to bring you back to the Torah, getting you to do mitzvot. It doesn’t matter to them if you are observant or not. What you do doesn’t matter to them at all, because no one outside their world exists for them.’
Frieda had chosen to leave the Satmarer sect, and Marina thought that perhaps this could be a way into the book, this notion of the outcast, the one who risks everything to leave. Because the young woman had lost her family, her community, her six-year-old son. She lived in a tiny studio apartment in Queens, barely making enough money at her job in a café to survive. She had no skills when she left the community, Frieda explained to her. Her schooling had ended at seventeen, when she was married. She hadn’t even spoken English fluently – Yiddish was still the language of the Satmarers. There was another man, too, a Skverer Hasid, who had recently left that sect. He had agreed to meet with Marina the following week. But was this notion of the exile from the faith the right beginning? Would it position the book too firmly outside the movement, cast her on the side of the defector?
It was part of the work of the book, this feeling through, this settling on the way into the story. In her heart she recognised the near-impossibility of the kind of work she was drawn to, the danger of deforming missteps, of complete failure. It was part of what drew her to it – the delicate balancing act required, the fact that success was far from guaranteed. Nothing could ever be unravelled to its core. But surely it was like this for any creative project. If she were writing a novel, she would feel the same way. A professor in graduate school had told her once that her particular talents might be better suited to fiction. His remark was not intended to be kind. She was too drawn to the irrelevant, the professor had said, to culs-de-sac and false paths, to ever be a decent historian.
&nbs
p; Walking home from the park one afternoon, Marina paused outside the corner bodega to read the flyers and handwritten signs plastered over its walls. Her back ached from the bend of her writing that morning and there was a damp patch of sweat between her shoulder blades. She stepped inside the bodega for a bottle of water. These little stores seemed to contain the whole world. She wondered how so many of them could possibly survive.
The African girl was standing at the counter. The boy was tied to her back with a yellow wrap that knotted above her breasts. His head lolled to the side, eyes half-closed, his skin shining. Marina remembered the sharp set of the girl’s shoulders as she had stood on the sidewalk several weeks earlier, the impassive way she had watched the child screaming, the clasp of her fingers around his tiny arm.
The Yemeni shopkeeper was waving a plastic card at the girl. Marina knew this man, had seen him bent over the counter helping his curly-haired daughters with their homework, a pencil tucked behind his ear. He was usually mild-mannered, gentle with his little girls. Once, he had asked Marina to help him write a letter to the Immigration Department, a sponsorship application for a sister from Yemen. Marina had taken the letter home and typed it up for him, correcting his stilted English and reordering his paragraphs. That was several months ago, she realised, and she had never asked him what had happened, whether his sister was given a visa.
‘Finished,’ the shopkeeper said loudly to the African girl. ‘Food stamps finished. No money left.’ He pointed to the spread of groceries on the counter. A tin of baby formula, apples, a carton of eggs, a bottle of milk, a box of teabags. ‘No money. No food,’ he said emphatically.
The girl stared at him blankly. Her hair was braided in neat rows, beads of sweat dotting her forehead. The shopkeeper put the card down on the counter and tapped on it. ‘No more food stamps.’ He raised his voice. ‘Go on, you go now.’ His hand pointed to the door but the girl did not move. Her lips broke open slightly but she said nothing, staring down at her feet. The little boy’s eyes were open now, alert and watchful.
Marina felt a terrible pulse of pity for the girl. She looked so young and bewildered, so resolutely encased in whatever sorrow she was carrying. Marina stepped up to the counter and took out her purse. ‘I’ll pay for her groceries. How much is it?’
The shopkeeper gave her a tight, embarrassed smile as he swiped Marina’s credit card through the machine. ‘They come in here all the time. Food stamp cards get rejected, spent it all in the first week. Got no idea how to budget, need food for their children. I can’t be a charity. It’s tough. It’s tough for everyone. Me too. I have children too.’
The African girl stood silently beside Marina as the shopkeeper packed the groceries into plastic bags and placed them on the other side of the till. Thirty-seven dollars, the groceries cost.
They walked out of the shop and turned together in the same direction. The girl stood in the middle of the sidewalk as if she had nowhere to go, the little boy leaning around her shoulder and staring at Marina.
‘He’s happier today,’ she said, not sure if the girl understood English. ‘No more crying.’ She had no idea if the girl remembered her, if she had even really registered Marina that day on the sidewalk.
A plastic bag blew up against the girl’s legs and she kicked it away half-heartedly. She looked exhausted, a slight glassiness to her huge eyes.
‘Would you like me to help carry your shopping home?’
The girl said nothing, but she did not walk away or resist when Marina reached out to take the bags from her hands.
Marina followed a half-step behind for several blocks, the little boy twisting his head back to stare at her. A tight surge of dread as she turned in at the gate of the housing projects on Madison Avenue. Murder cities, they called them. The sign near the entrance had been scorched and spray-painted over, and litter piled up against the edges of the towers. Inside, the walls of the foyer were covered with garish swirls of graffiti, the mailbox doors hanging open on broken hinges. Marina felt a faint shame in her fear. The projects scattered throughout the neighbourhood were places on the fringes of her world. A backdrop to all those boys being hustled into police cars, a block to quicken your step on. The towers were named after senators and men of state. ‘A wonderful community’, some of the entrance signs said.
Marina walked towards the lift but the girl motioned to the stairwell on the left side of the entrance foyer. ‘Broken,’ she said softly. It was the first word Marina had heard her speak. So perhaps she did know English. The soles of the girl’s plastic shoes slapped against her heels as she trudged up the stairs. Marina followed her, the bags of groceries carving sweaty welts into her palms. The place felt subterranean to her; subway tiles and dimly lit halls, tinned laughter blaring from behind a door, a child crying somewhere. The stale smell of cooking lingered in the stairwell.
When they reached the sixth floor, the girl turned into the corridor and opened a door halfway down. Marina stepped inside after her, a musty waft of heat engulfing her as she stared around the tiny apartment. Cracked linoleum, a flimsy card table pushed against the window, an enormous torn couch taking up most of the room. Through a door she could see a single bed. She thought suddenly of her own house. The high ceilings and French doors, the rows of bookshelves, all the unused rooms. Jacob’s wealth. Had she let herself move too far into the soft, glassy draw of it? When she was a child, heat and hot water had not been constant things. One pair of shoes, a patched coat in winter, bent into the shape of some other child’s shoulders. But it had been a euphoric kind of poverty on the kibbutz, a badge of honour, a stripping back to bare necessities. Nothing like these towers and their dull, institutional horror had existed in her childhood. And yet these housing projects had risen, too, from someone’s utopian vision. Safe spaces in the sky for the poor, all stacked up on top of each other, slums cleared, creaky tenements razed.
The African girl unknotted the sling and let the little boy slide on to the sofa. She kept her head down as she took the shopping bags from Marina and set them on the small table, then stood against the kitchen counter, her arms folded across her chest. It felt like twilight in the apartment, the two windows covered with dark fabric. There were no lights on and Marina wondered for a moment whether the electricity was connected.
She stood there, feeling foolish. She could turn around and walk away right now, but she wanted to offer something to the girl; what it was she was not entirely certain. She sat down on the couch next to the child, who stared sleepily up at her, fighting to keep his eyes open. Across the room the girl reached over and pulled the curtain straight. The apartment was like a stifling bunker. Hard to imagine that they were six floors above the baking sidewalk.
‘It’s very hot here,’ Marina tried slowly. The girl stared down at her feet. Everything around her, Marina thought, seemed provisional. The room, her few possessions, the sleepy child.
Marina could hear shouting from somewhere above them and then what sounded like the snarl of a dog. A door slammed loudly and someone yelled out. Beside her on the couch the little boy sighed as he dozed, a tremble in his chest. His forehead was creased into tiny lines, his thumb in his mouth.
‘How long have you been in New York?’ Marina asked.
The girl walked to the bedroom and came back with a piece of folded paper. It was an immigration document, passport-sized photos of the girl and the child pinned to it, she staring blankly ahead, his face crumpled into tears. Constance and Gabriel Nsengimana. Marina scanned the birthdates. Constance’s was 1977. The same year as Ben. Twenty years old, then. And the little boy was not yet three. A stamp on the top of the page showed the date of entry into the USA as the previous September.
The birthplace for both of them was marked as Rwanda. The name of the country contained all its horror. Three years already since the genocide there, all those people left marooned in terror for those long months of slaughter. Marina remembered the sickening images on television. The rows of bloodied bodies;
mutilated, macheted, hogtied. The men castrated. A woman whose four limbs had been cut from her. Each report was more horrifying than the last. She had read the newspaper in those days with a rising sense of terror. What had been the reason for it? Was there ever a reason?
The bodies of the dead, she remembered reading, had been tossed into a river, travelling hundreds of miles downstream to Lake Victoria. Thousands of bodies, the shores of the lake awash with them. A fisherman had found a cluster of babies tied up in a canvas sack; another had found three children joined by a single pointed stick thrust through their stomachs. The Ugandans had tried to bury the bodies, she remembered. They had dug shallow graves and held prayer services. But soon there had been too many.
Marina thought of the pictures that had accompanied the stories. A bleached skull glistening in the rushes. A withered wreath of red and white flowers that someone had placed on top of one of the hastily dug mass graves. A tall nun with a rosary twisted around her wrist covering her eyes and crying.
Constance was squatting on the floor against the kitchen cupboards, staring fixedly in front of her. What had she seen in those months? What had happened to her family? Marina handed the piece of paper back to her, feeling suddenly ashamed. Did Constance think that she needed to prove her legitimacy with a legal document? That thirty-seven dollars’ worth of groceries had bought Marina some path into her life?
