by Dara Horn
Someone knocked at the door.
Boris looked up at the teacher, who was rolling his eyes. “He never leaves me alone,” the teacher muttered under his breath. Then he shouted toward the door, “You know it’s open, so don’t pretend.”
The door flew open with such force that it almost slammed into the wall. Behind it was a man about the teacher’s age, also with a head of dark hair. But this man was far shorter and even more shabbily dressed, in a dark suit worn to a shine. He had a long nose growing out of dark, furry eyebrows, a thick mustache like a third eyebrow that covered the dent below his nose, and a bristling smile. He noticed Boris, grinned at him, and then looked back at the teacher, waving a torn envelope in his hand.
“You have a telegram from Shloyme Mikhoels,” he said, holding the envelope high in the air. “He needs you to come back to Moscow and finish the theater sets as soon as possible. He really means it this time, my friend. ‘As Soon as Possible.’ That doesn’t mean next month. That means as soon as possible.”
“Thanks for reading my mail.” The teacher reached over and snatched the envelope, a gesture the short man took as an invitation to enter, which he did.
“Always a pleasure, Comrade Chagall,” he sang as he strode into the room. Boris watched as he navigated around the dolls’ clothes until he reached an empty wooden chair. He plunked himself into the chair like a man in his own home, tipping backward against the bookcase. Suddenly he looked at Boris again and sat up straight, the chair’s two front legs landing with a thunk. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said.
The teacher smiled a forced smile and turned to Boris, speaking in an overly loud voice and beating his chest with his fist. “Forgive me for failing to introduce our most honored, welcome guest. This,” the teacher said, with a theatrical bow in the short man’s direction, “is my upstairs neighbor, the illustrious Yiddish writer Pinkhas Kahanovitch, better known as Der Nister.” Der Nister, Boris thought. The Hidden One. Boris looked at the Hidden One, who seemed even shorter than before now that he was perched in the wooden chair, and imagined for a moment—or saw?—that this strange little man was actually hidden among the books and paintings behind him, his human form merely the dullest of the portraits. “He teaches literature in the colony, to the older boys,” the teacher explained. Der Nister smiled, his teeth poorly painted in layers of gray.
“And this,” the teacher said, nudging Boris forward, “is Comrade Kulbak, an incredibly talented artist.” Boris felt that the room had suddenly become uncomfortably cold. He looked down at his feet, scratching his left foot with the toes of his right. “Show him your painting, Comrade Kulbak,” the teacher said, slapping him on the back.
Boris brought forward his picture and reversed it so that Der Nister could see it. To him, it now looked far worse than before, not even the palest shadow of the paintings on the walls. He wondered if, in some deep hidden way, he might actually be blind.
“Stunning,” Der Nister said. Boris couldn’t tell whether he really meant it. Der Nister turned to the teacher and asked, “Why are children so much smarter than adults?”
“The boys in Malakhovka are not really children,” the teacher said, his voice low. “They are adults trapped in children’s bodies.”
“True,” the Hidden One said. He looked at the painting carefully, and then, even more carefully, at Boris, until Boris suspected that he could see beneath his skin, down to his blood, his brains, his breath inside his lungs. “My daughter is just a few years younger than you,” he said.
Boris said nothing, holding his breath.
“What is your real name, Comrade Kulbak?”
Boris looked at him, confused. “Boris,” he tried.
“No,” the man said. “I mean your real name, your Jewish name.”
Boris thought a moment, frightened. Had he forgotten his own name? He stood in silence, almost for too long. “Benjamin,” he finally said. No one had called him that in over a year.
“Benjamin,” Der Nister said. “What’s your full name? Benjamin son of who?”
Boris thought again, even more frightened. What if he couldn’t remember? His mother had once told him that only with his full name would he be admitted to the world to come. What was it? “Benjamin son of Jacob,” he blurted, relieved.
Der Nister smiled. “Benjamin and Jacob. Nafsho keshura benafsho. You know what that means?”
Boris shuddered and shook his head. He was used to speaking Yiddish with his teachers, even though the boys usually spoke Russian among themselves. But Hebrew he had long forgotten.
“It’s from Genesis, about Jacob and his son Benjamin,” Der Nister explained. “Nafsho keshura benafsho—‘His soul was bound to his.’ That’s how it is with a father and son. What happens to him, happens to you.”
Boris froze. His body became rigid and numb, like that morning lying in the grave, as the smile dissolved from Der Nister’s face. He saw, without feeling it, the teacher’s blue-streaked hand on his shoulder.
“Never mind him,” the teacher said to Boris with an uneasy laugh. “He enjoys being cryptic.”
Slowly Boris began to thaw. He looked at the teacher standing above him, and at the Hidden One sitting almost below him, at the teacher’s forced grin and at Der Nister’s eyes that peered at him with pity. Their two faces—the sneering grin of one, the earnest sad smile of the other—confused and frightened him. It was as if he were looking at the faces of the other boys in the orphanage, or of the boys in his town before he was brought to Malakhovka. The teacher’s face suddenly reminded him of the mean boys, the ones who laughed at mean jokes and beat up the others, while the Hidden One’s face seemed to him like the faces of the boys who cried too easily and were invariably bullied and beaten, with no one to save them. It doesn’t change, he thought. He bowed his head, saw the blood inside his own bare feet, and trembled.
“Comrade Kahanovitch and I collaborate sometimes,” the teacher said loudly, breaking the silence. “We write children’s books together—he writes the stories, and I make the pictures.”
“That’s nice,” Boris said, in order to say something. He braced his feet against the floor.
“Why don’t you show him one of our children’s books, Kahanovitch?” the teacher asked Der Nister, his voice a preternatural shade of bright green. “I have them all right on the shelf behind your head.”
“But you said these boys aren’t really children,” Der Nister said, his mouth pulled down in concern as he contemplated Boris. Suddenly his eyes brightened. “Why don’t I read him one of my real stories instead? Here’s something I just wrote this week.” He got to his feet, pulling a few folded pages out of his inside pocket as the teacher groaned.
“Oh, God, spare us. Not a performance,” the teacher begged.
“I wrote it for a longer story, but this is part of it. Tell me what you think,” Der Nister said, unfolding the sheets.
“There’s just no way to shut him up,” the teacher muttered to no one, and then sighed loudly, a deliberate, sharp puff of breath. The Hidden One carefully ignored this as he began, in a voice that seemed accustomed to lullabies and bedtime stories for a little girl about Boris’s age, to recite his tale.
* * *
This is the story of the All-Bridge, the bridge which leads from the deepest depths of the abyss to the highest heights of heaven.
Did you know there was such a bridge?
* * *
“I don’t think you meant to write ‘bridge,’” the teacher interrupted. “It sounds more like a ladder to me. Don’t you think so, Comrade Kulbak?”
Boris shrugged, pretending not to care. But he was intrigued. Was there really a bridge like that? He looked at Der Nister. A moment earlier, the writer had seemed commanding, powerful. But now he looked strangely embarrassed, folding and unfolding the pages between his fingers, wordlessly opening and closing his thin lips.
The teacher sighed again, this time with a smile, and sat down on the floor. Boris lowered himsel
f to the floor beside him as the story continued.
* * *
Well, there’s a reason you’ve never heard of this bridge.
The bridge was created at the very end of the week of creation, on Friday evening, at twilight—the very last thing God created before he completed the world and rested on the seventh day. But he didn’t spend much time on it. It was made hastily, and then immediately abandoned as God went off to celebrate the sabbath. So the bridge was alone on the very first night of the world. Its form stood silent in the darkness, its feet sunken into the abyss, and its head aloft in the bright heavenly shrine, where a sacred stillness rested.
And in that heavenly shrine, there was a door that led into another door, and the second door was closed, and behind it, that night, God planned to celebrate the sabbath after his week of world-weariness, leaving the bridge alone.
The bridge was very pleased with its head, which rested at the door of the heavenly shrine. But its feet were sunk into the abyss, where they rested amid cold, dark slime, and strange reptiles were swarming all over them. So the bridge began to complain. He complained so much that God hurried away from him right after creating him, retiring behind the heavenly door. And after hearing the complaints, Satan made his very first nighttime visit to the world.
“So here you are,” Satan said to the bridge, “with nothing to do. It’s nighttime, it’s the sabbath, and God has shut himself up in his heavenly shrine. Why don’t you come with me, down into the abyss?”
“That’s just where I don’t want to go,” the bridge said. “I’m already covered up to my feet in muck and slime. Why would I want the slime to reach up to my head?”
“Because it’s going to happen anyway,” Satan told him.
“What do you mean?” the bridge asked.
“What,” Satan sneered, “haven’t you heard what your job is?”
“My job?” the bridge asked.
“Yes, your job. What, don’t you know what it is? It’s incredibly unfair! Why should everything in the whole world be created for its own sake, except for you? Why should you alone be created just for the purpose of others, so that everyone else gets to walk all over you?”
And then Satan explained the bridge’s task: that from the very first generation of the world and for all the generations to follow, people would be traveling on him from the depths up to the heights. And all of the people ascending him would bring with them their damp and disgusting bodies, and drag their dirt and slime all over him, until he was so covered with muck that his entire body might as well have sunk into the abyss, enslaved to other people’s filth. The bridge listened and became nauseated.
“So, aren’t you insulted?” Satan asked.
The bridge shuddered, disgusted. “But what if I am? What can I do?”
Satan stepped closer and whispered in his ear. “Break yourself! Right now! God won’t notice—he’s shut up in his shrine. And then you and I will establish our own kingdom in the depths, and you’ll be a regular bridge, just spanning the length of the depths, without connecting at all to the heavenly shrine. Who needs God and his heavenly shrine when we could rule ourselves?”
The bridge listened, but didn’t answer.
“I’ll let you decide on your own,” Satan said, and went away.
The bridge wavered, hesitating. A cold shudder ran through his entire length, and his feet trembled in the abyss.
The sabbath day passed, and when it ended, God appeared on the threshold of the heavenly shrine.
“A good week!” God said to the bridge, using the post-sabbath greeting for the very first time.
And the bridge felt filthy, and suddenly he pulled himself up and broke off the part of himself that was stuck in the abyss. Though he felt no more slime on his feet, the light of his head became dim, like the eyes of a beaten man.
“A good week!” the bridge said, echoing God’s blessing. And his eyes were downcast and ashamed.
* * *
Der Nister stopped reading, but Boris wasn’t sure that the story was actually over. How could that be the end of the story? Was there really no way out of the slime? Boris remembered something he had heard in school, not in Malakhovka, but a long time ago. The world was made of vessels (the teacher had said “vessels”; Boris, unsure what it meant, had always pictured clear glass jars), one within another, with God at the center. But God had to shrink himself to make more room for the world, and when he did, the vessels shattered into pieces. Standing among the paint stains and scattered dolls’ clothes, Boris felt like the foot of the ladder, a broken, abandoned piece of a dark and shattered world.
“I’m telling you, Kahanovitch, stuff like that is a one-way ticket out of the USSR.”
The Hidden One pursed his lips as he folded the story into his pocket. “It’s symbolic, you pest. Don’t you understand symbolism?”
Boris looked at Der Nister and then at the teacher, wondering what “symbolism” meant. But the teacher only grunted, an inelegant sound, and scratched at the paint on his forearm. Bits of blue flaked to the floor like shards of pottery. The veins below the paint were dark, obscured by curly dark hair. “The symbolism isn’t even the problem, artistically,” the teacher said, his voice gruff. “The problem with your stories is that you start writing them with one little moment like that, but then you keep adding more and more pieces to it until it really stops making sense.”
“That is exactly where you are wrong, Comrade Chagall. It is only after I put together the rest of the pieces that the story starts to make sense.”
“Mmph,” the teacher said, still scratching his arm. The floor around his arm was now covered with shards of blue paint, as if his skin had shattered. Boris glanced to the right of Der Nister’s chair, at the portrait of the shattered musician and the pale unfinished man, who now seemed to Boris to be writing on a broken scroll, a scroll torn in two by a set of scored pencil lines below the paint.
Suddenly the teacher leapt to his feet. “I almost forgot!” he said. “Comrade Kulbak was about to choose one of my paintings. I’m trading one of mine for his.”
“A little capitalist art dealership,” Der Nister said, his eyebrows raised. “Does the colony council know about this?”
“This is between me and Comrade Kulbak,” the teacher snapped. “It would have happened a long time ago, if you hadn’t barged in with your heavenly shrine routine.” He turned to Boris. “Take a look around.”
Slightly startled, Boris began to wander around the room, dodging the dolls’ clothes, with the teacher’s voice following behind him. He eyed the painted wedding couple with visible envy. “I’m sorry, but I can’t give you any of the larger ones,” the teacher said behind him, throwing his hand across the bride’s face. “I need them for an exhibition. And the ones on top of those piles I can’t offer you, either,” he added, waving his hand at the portraits of the broken men with the violin and the scroll. “They’re for the State Jewish Theater. They’re being used for the play next month.”
“Only if you actually answer that telegram,” Der Nister interjected, pointing to the envelope the teacher had set down on the table.
The teacher ignored him, turning toward Boris. “It’s going to be very exciting,” he said. “They’re performing stories by Sholem Aleichem. Do you know his stories?”
Boris thought hard, seeing his mother sitting with a book by his bed, struggling with something that would not become a memory. “There was a story about—about a goat?” he asked softly. “About a man whose goat keeps getting stolen, but the man doesn’t notice?”
The teacher looked at him, his eyes blank. But the Hidden One’s voice soon filled the air. “Oh, yes, ‘The Haunted Tailor,’” he said, almost singing. “One of my favorites. Do you remember how it ends?”
Boris shook his head.
“Allow me to remind you,” Der Nister said.
“Please, spare us, just this once,” the teacher begged.
Unruffled, the Hidden One stood up and declaim
ed:
“‘Don’t force it, kids! The ending is not a good one. The story started very happily, and turned out, like most happy stories, very sadly. And since you know the author of the story and know that he’s not the depressive type, and hates miserable stories and much prefers happy ones, and since you know that he hates stories with a “moral” and that preaching isn’t his thing—therefore the author will take leave of you laughing instead, and wishes for your sake that people all over the world would laugh more than they cry. Laughing is healthy. Doctors prescribe laughter.’”
The words shrank as Der Nister recited them, becoming softer and softer until the final sentence came out almost under his breath. From someone else it would have seemed pompous, but Boris could see that Der Nister wasn’t doing it on purpose. It was simply as if he had forgotten that any of them were there. He was speaking to himself. Boris watched in awe as Der Nister lowered himself, carefully, back into his seat.
“Maybe they should do that one at the theater,” Der Nister said to the teacher, his voice still low. “It’s not so bourgeois like the others. Less likely to cause problems.”
“But it doesn’t have a real ending,” the teacher protested. “People like real endings. Redemption, that sort of thing.”
