by Dara Horn
“Dvoák,” Ben and Leonid said, Leonid slightly earlier. Ben was drenched in sweat, his lips slightly shaking. He tried to focus, feeling himself beginning to slip. Another question flashed across the tiny screen: “The author of the classic novel Fathers and Sons.”
Ben stared at the words, reading them twice, racking his brain, his heart pounding.
“Turgenev,” Leonid said.
This time Ben stared at Leonid, who still hadn’t taken his eyes off the TV. Only the cage prevented Ben from shrinking into his shirt.
“Wow, even Ben didn’t know that one,” Sara suddenly said.
Leonid jumped, startled at the sound of another voice. At long last he turned his head. He glanced at Ben, but he seemed amazed at Sara. He looked at her so carefully that Ben couldn’t help but look at her, too. Her coat was draped over her arm, and she was wearing a new sweater that she had gotten as a present for their birthday, a blue V-neck that showed off her shape. Leonid grinned.
“I beat the Wizkind,” he said.
“I thought the Wizkind just beat you,” Sara answered with a smile. Ben glared at her, but Sara didn’t seem to notice. To Ben’s surprise, Leonid burst out laughing.
“Do you watch this show a lot?” Sara asked.
“Oh, yes,” Leonid said. “Questions are difficult about American things, but I—I improve.”
“You and Ben should play against each other sometime.” Sara smiled, then glanced around the room. “At our house, maybe. It looks like you don’t have much space here.”
Ben grimaced. What the hell was she thinking? The last thing he needed was Leonid coming to his house, armed with a fiberglass club.
But Leonid seemed not to notice the invitation. “Here is better than Chernobyl,” Leonid said slowly. “There we have five people in two rooms. Here only four.”
Ben wondered for a moment about Leonid’s father, who had run off with the Georgian whore. It occurred to him that he and Leonid had something important in common, living lives-minus-one. And surrounded by girls. But Sara cut off his thoughts. “I bet you could move some things around to make it feel more spacious here. Like those boxes,” she said, pointing to the packing crates in front of the window. “What’s in them?”
“Them?” Leonid shrugged. “Books. Clothes. Things.”
“It would take up a lot less space if you got rid of the boxes and just put some shelves or drawers under the window. That way the room would feel a lot bigger because you’d get more light. And this wallpaper makes it feel even smaller,” she added, pressing her hand against the dark green patterned wall. “If you painted the room white, it would probably look twice as big.”
Ben looked around the shabby room and wondered what Sara was talking about. It didn’t look to him like it had any potential. Besides, the room reeked of cigarette ash. It was a smell that reminded him obscurely of being a very little boy, his mother yelling at his father to smoke outside, to stay away from the twins.
“We cannot buy those things,” Leonid mumbled, looking at the floor.
Ben instantly realized Sara’s mistake. How could she be so stupid? He felt himself turning red on her behalf. He tried, again, to say something, anything. But Sara seemed animated by an unaccountable grace. “That’s all right, we have some extra shelves at home,” she said. “And I know we have some leftover paint in the garage. Ben and I could come over and we could all do it together. Right, Ben?”
“Right,” Ben said with a crack in his voice.
A few moments later, Ben and Sara were walking home, without speaking. It was a still winter afternoon, the kind of afternoon where the air is cold and gray and solid and immobile, like hardened cement. Even the muddy path from the building to the street seemed hard, dead leaves resting on it like fallen birds. But then a slight, cold breeze blew, lifting up the dead leaves and circling them in a little round dance in front of them. Sara gazed down at the ground as she walked, and Ben noticed as he walked beside her that the corner of her mouth had turned up, just slightly, as she walked down the muddy path.
“WIZKIND, CAN YOU take notes for me?” Leonid asked Ben the following week in math class.
Ben always made an effort to arrive early to math class, but Leonid walked in late so regularly that the teacher barely noticed it anymore. Today, though, Leonid was in his seat before Ben even arrived, waiting with an open notebook. Ever since the injury, Ben had noticed, the Meltdown Gang had been avoiding Leonid, shunning him in the hallways. At some point, a coup had apparently taken place. Yuri was their leader now. Oh, Ben thought, how the mighty have fallen.
“Sure,” Ben answered, feeling a familiar fear surging and then retreating under the cage. Leonid’s smile seemed different this time, more honest. Still, Leonid had been sitting in math class for the past few days without bothering to take notes. It seemed a little odd that he had suddenly abandoned his pride.
With his hulking left arm, Leonid passed Ben an open notebook. Across the top of the page, a short sentence was scrawled in large block letters, far more clumsy and childlike than any of Leonid’s old threatening notes. Leonid must have written it with his left hand. Anticipating some new threat, Ben was shocked when he saw what it actually said:
HEY WIZKIND—YOUR SISTER IS HOT.
Ben almost laughed out loud—first, because it was so absurd, and second, because he thought it was a joke. Sara was hardly what anyone would call pretty. She might have been, if she had bothered wearing something that wasn’t covered with paint more than once a year, or even just brushing her hair, but she didn’t.
Ben hesitated before turning around, staring at the bulging letters and wondering what it might mean. His first guess was that this was the entry point for some sort of elaborate and embarrassing scheme—and one even more unpleasant than any of the earlier humiliations, because now Sara would somehow be involved. It could clearly be nothing but the worst, though Ben was too frightened to imagine what the worst might be.
But when Ben finally worked up the courage to turn around, he saw that Leonid wore a strange expression—his eyebrows raised slightly, his lower lip caught between his teeth. Hopeful.
Leonid’s reddish eyelashes fluttered. He nodded at Ben, then reached with his left hand toward the notebook. “Wait,” he muttered, then pulled the notebook back onto his own desk.
For a few long moments he struggled with a pencil in his left hand, sheltering the page with his cast. Ben reached into his own bag and began taking out and arranging his textbook and calculator, fighting not to turn around. Then Leonid’s notebook landed on Ben’s desk again, with a second clumsy sentence underneath the first. No longer afraid, but burning with curiosity, Ben seized it and struggled to read the new, wavering words:
PLEASE TELL ME, IF SHE HAVE BOYFRIEND.
Ben realized then that power lay in his hands.
You cannot know, he later would remember Raisa Shcharanskaya saying, how children will turn out. Ben could not know then, for instance, that his sister would come to him now, years later, to tell him that she and Leonid were going to have a baby, that he would surprise himself by dreaming of the child who would be given his mother’s or father’s name—that in this yes or no lay the entire future, the entire world. On that morning in math class, all that lay in it was trust. He paused for a moment, and then wrote:
NO. CALL HER.
As he turned around to pass the notebook back to Leonid, Ben glanced out the classroom window and noticed that the first snow of the year was beginning to fall to the ground.
BUT TONIGHT THERE was no snow on the ground, just the thick silence of the house where Ben had grown up, when he arrived there after Sara’s visit to stash the painting he had stolen (or, as he thought of it, rescued) from the museum.
The silence in the house had smothered Ben for the past six months, following him through the halls every time he took the train out to New Jersey to clean up another room, and following him back to the city every time he left. It lay in heavy layers on every obje
ct, like thick dust. On the days after the funeral when he had woken up in the morning in his old bed, he felt it resting on his upper lip, collecting in the dent below his nose during the confusion between sleep and waking, when the morning sounds that filled his morning dreams—a car starting in the garage, a shower running in the bathroom, his mother calling him from down the hall—vanished into heavy air. Every time he entered a room he found himself waiting, listening, expecting someone to call his name. When no one called he felt as if he had been drugged.
He put the painting back on the wall where it had always been, and took down the picture that had replaced it, a framed photograph of Sara and Leonid—Leonid, who had finished college in three years and his applied math Ph.D. in four, who had held fellowships at universities around the world, who turned down a professorship at Cambridge in order to finally marry Sara, and who now worked for an investment bank, making a fortune doing some kind of mathematical modeling for asset pricing. It was like a joke. Ben could hardly be jealous of him, though. Sara’s mother-in-law was right: in the end, he was a good boy. You cannot know how children will turn out. Not to mention the new child, the not-yet child.
But as he held the picture of Leonid and looked up at the floating man in the painting, Ben suddenly thought of the last time he had seen Leonid and the floating man together—on that night when Leonid had first come to America and held the photo of the painting in his hands—and then remembered the piles of papers that had been underneath the snapshot. And then he went down the hall to his parents’ studio, where all of the family files were kept in a set of cabinets on the wall, and knew what he needed to do.
5
WHAT DOES a child resemble while it waits in its mother’s womb? As a boy, Der Nister had been taught the answer: a folded writing tablet. Its hands rest on its temples, its elbows rest on its legs, its heels rest on its backside, and a lit candle shines above its head. And from behind eyelids folded closed like blank paper, it can see from one end of the world to the other. There are no days in a person’s life that are better or happier than those days in the womb. When those days must end, an angel approaches the child in the womb and says, The time has come. But the child refuses—wouldn’t you? (Didn’t you?) Please, the child begs, please don’t make me go. And then the angel smacks it under the nose so that it falls from the womb and forgets—which is why babies are always born screaming. But before that, they are happy, and they wait.
Everything Der Nister had done that day was just a show, for the child. After he had eavesdropped through the door and heard one of Chagall’s students in the artist’s studio, Der Nister had bounded in and tried his absolute best to be funny, witty, boisterous. He believed he owed it to the boys to amuse them at every opportunity, that the orphanage school was their very first chance at happiness since before their birth. Not that he and Chagall hadn’t seen the same things. In Der Nister’s hometown of Berdichev, there had been a massacre the previous year, children and old men butchered. In Vitebsk in the same season, Chagall’s wife’s family home had been sacked, the valuables pillaged and the rest smashed to pieces while his mother-in-law was held at gunpoint. By then it was standard. But somehow Der Nister—unlike Chagall, who only pretended to be charmingly naive—still trusted the world. And Der Nister, the Hidden One, had chosen his name in part for reasons of character. By nature he was timid, a quiet believer that the happiness from the world before birth was still waiting for him.
The incident with Peretz was more typical of Der Nister. Years earlier, an editor had sent some of his stories to the famous Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. To say that Der Nister worshiped I. L. Peretz would be inaccurate. One cannot worship the air one breathes. When the editor informed him that his stories had earned him an invitation to visit Peretz—Peretz! Peretz, the greatest Yiddish writer alive, Peretz, the latter-day prophet whose stories had turned literature into a new religion, Peretz, whose words were a bridge between the living and the dead, Peretz, who deigned to meet only with young writers of the most astronomical talent—when he heard that he had been deemed worthy of visiting Peretz, Der Nister started trembling, and kept trembling all the way from his own apartment in Kiev to the crowded third-class cars on several long overnight train rides to Warsaw and then to Number 1 Ceglana Street, where at the appointed hour (after pacing the street in front of the building for the entire afternoon) he finally summoned the courage to knock on Peretz’s door.
When the door opened, Der Nister only shook harder. Standing before him was not a servant or editor or fellow admirer, but the master himself. Der Nister recognized him immediately from the bookplates: a big man in his sixties, with bushy hair and an enormous mustache. Years later, Der Nister would notice how much Peretz—not to compare them—resembled Stalin.
“The Hidden One, hiding in the hallway!” the prophet’s voice boomed from the doorframe. Der Nister was astonished: it was the first time anyone had actually called him by his pen name. He hadn’t eaten since the train arrived the night before, and now he nearly fainted. But Peretz already had him by the arm, steering him through the foyer and into his modest three-room apartment. (No Yiddish writer in the history of the world, not even Peretz, had ever supported himself through his writing. It was a fact that Der Nister, then a starving bachelor whose only food came from inconsistent tutoring jobs, knew very well.) The master looked him over. “Perhaps I am too gray for you,” he said, motioning to his hair, “and you are too green for me. How old are you?”
“Twenty-four,” Der Nister answered, shrinking into his shirt. They were the only words he would speak all night.
“Let’s change that,” Peretz said.
He was joking, but Der Nister heard the subtext of the joke: youth is like a good card, which one can either play or hide under one’s vest. Der Nister tried to hide his as Peretz sat him down in his study. “Now, about your stories,” Peretz began, but then interrupted himself, standing up and leaning toward a box on a desk crowded with papers, books, notebooks, albums, and loose cigarettes. Der Nister looked on in disbelief. Could this be Peretz’s writing desk? The desk where the world was created?
“Would you like a cigar?”
Der Nister nodded, dumbstruck, unable to stop the manic spinning of his head. As the crisp brown paper of the cigar glided from the prophet’s fingers to his own mortal palm, he clutched it so tightly that it nearly crumbled in his hands. A souvenir of paradise! Yet here the prophet was already offering him a light. How could he smoke the cigar and still keep it forever? He had no choice but to lean forward and use the prophet’s flame, but he only pretended to smoke it. In a few minutes, he decided, he would snuff it out and save it. Working through these details in his panicked mind, Der Nister began listening only after Peretz had already begun his critique.
“What’s remarkable about your work is the bridge you build between good and evil,” Peretz was saying when Der Nister finally listened. “Most people don’t believe in evil. For them, every act of cruelty is just a misunderstanding, and if we only understood the motives behind it, we could eliminate those motives and make it disappear. I believed that, too, when I was young.” Smoke leaked between the writer’s lips. “I was a lawyer, you know.”
Der Nister knew, of course. The lost souls in Peretz’s stories often found themselves being judged in front of a divine tribunal, and usually the prosecutor had the last word. “In a way I’m sorry that you don’t still believe it,” Peretz said. He leaned back in his chair, tapping his cigarette on a plate on the table next to him. “You know about the irrationality of evil, and the humanity of it. It’s in everything you write, and it’s necessary.”
Der Nister allowed himself to smile, but the smile proved premature. “But you are too indulgent,” Peretz declared, waving his hand to brush away a smoke ring along with Der Nister’s ego. “You are seduced by beauty, and you think that if you can write a pretty sentence about something, then it doesn’t matter where the story goes or how it ends. Your greatest weakness
is that you write as if you are painting a picture instead of telling a story. A painting doesn’t have to mean anything, but a story does.”
Der Nister had splurged on a new vest for the occasion, but he suddenly felt as though he had been stripped naked. His thin, hesitant fingers fumbled with his cigar, then carefully slid it into his new vest pocket at the moment when Peretz moved in his seat. He wanted to vanish into his chair.
“Remember the story you learned as a child: When the hour arrives for us to proceed to the next world, there will be two bridges to it, one made of iron and one made of paper,” Peretz intoned. His words were heavy, but his voice floated on rings of smoke, a breath of fire and ash that hovered over the room full of Hebrew and Yiddish books, as if waiting to descend and consume them. Der Nister swallowed, breathing in the master’s air. “The wicked will run to the iron bridge, but it will collapse under their weight. The righteous will cross the paper bridge, and it will support them all. Paper is the only eternal bridge. Your purpose as a writer is to achieve one task, and one task only: to build a paper bridge to the world to come.”
Der Nister was so awed by Peretz’s presence that he had to struggle to understand what the master said. He felt as if he were seeing the sound and hearing the light in the room. Meanwhile, in a split second of lucidity, he had glanced at the table to his left to marvel at a scrap of paper with what could only be Peretz’s handwriting on it. It read, “Buy eggs.” Der Nister planned to pocket it at the earliest opportunity. But suddenly Peretz’s gaze, until then burning into Der Nister’s eyes, dropped to the young writer’s chest.
Peretz cleared his throat. “Let me go see if I can find the source for that story,” he announced. He rose quickly from his chair and left the room.
