The World to Come

by Dara Horn

  It wasn’t until Peretz had left the room, and Der Nister had slid forward in his seat to grab the scrap of paper on the table beside him, that the young author smelled something burning. He looked down to see the enormous hole that the still-lit cigar had burned through the pocket of his brand-new vest. For the rest of his life, he never owned a better vest. And he never smoked again.

  A painting doesn’t have to mean anything, but a story does. Just barely, but it does. Der Nister often thought about that in the years that followed, as his own writing grew more and more tangled and obscure. And he wondered: Why should paintings be exempt from meaning? Didn’t everything need some sort of meaning, some purpose? Or did meaning emerge from what stories had and paintings lacked—a beginning and an end? But the Hidden One was timid, and afraid of asking questions. Ten years passed until, in the year when he was living in the orphanage, he summoned the courage to ask his artist neighbor about it. It was the day after one of the boys had visited the studio, and something about the strange quiet child among the paintings had haunted him. He stopped by in the afternoon on his way up to his top-floor apartment, slipping silently toward the open door on the second floor.

  Chagall was busy with the theater paintings, making studies for the murals that would soon plaster the walls of the State Jewish Theater in Moscow. They hadn’t paid him yet, which infuriated him. Chagall was constantly concerned that his four-year-old daughter was going to starve, even though he had had more success than almost anyone else in their circle. The artist had been taking more commissions lately, while Der Nister struggled to feed his family on the pittance from the orphanage school. Chagall had stooped to all levels, even taking on a project for the Yiddish hack poet Itsik Fefer—illustrations for a long poem praising the new Soviet-Jewish republic in Birobidzhan on the Korean border. As poetry it was trash, even if you believed the propaganda, which Chagall apparently didn’t. Nor did he much care, as far as Der Nister could tell. Already he was making arrangements to move himself and his family to Berlin. But the artist offered Der Nister a friendly indulgence, a consistent flattery that the writer was willing to believe was real. “I love your work,” Chagall had once told him, not long after they completed their first children’s book together. “You’ve inspired me. You know, I’ve secretly put your name into every painting in this room.” It was a joke, Der Nister was sure, but he glanced around the room at the paintings, just in case. He noticed nothing, and the artist laughed at him. “Someday when people buy them,” the artist announced theatrically, “I’ll say I couldn’t have done it without my brilliant upstairs neighbor, the Hidden One.” Now Der Nister watched him in his studio, envious of the way the artist seemed to shrug off life with a laugh.

  “This painting,” Der Nister ventured, trying to sound casual as he gestured toward a picture of a man and woman—Chagall and his wife?—kissing against a blue background. The blue seeped into the lovers’ skin until foreground and background were one, the man’s gloved hand tentative on the woman’s neck and cheek. “This picture you made. I was wondering—what does it mean?”

  Chagall turned around, following Der Nister’s pointing finger with his eyes. He gazed at the picture, and seemed about to say something profound. Then he shrugged.

  “Blue,” he said, and went back to painting.

  Der Nister stared at Chagall’s back. “What do you mean, ‘blue’?” he demanded when he regained his breath. “I can see that it’s blue. But doesn’t it mean something more, even if you don’t want to tell me what? Something about love? Or comfort? Or—or—” He stumbled on the word, strangely embarrassed. “Or sex?”

  Chagall groaned, jamming the tiny brush he was using into a cup of orange water. He spun around. “It means blue,” he said again. He folded his paint-stained arms across his chest.

  “Blue?”

  “Just blue,” Chagall repeated. He wore a narrow circle of reddish paint on the skin beneath his nose, like a wound. “Why does it need to mean something? What does your daughter mean, Kahanovitch?”

  The Hidden One bit his lip. He thought of Hodele, almost eight years old and already brilliant, solving puzzles, writing full sentences in three languages, ready to take over the world. For an instant his imagination simulated the brush of her hair against his wrist. Did gifts from God have the right to be meaningless? “But she does mean something,” he heard himself say. “She means—she means the future. Someday she’ll light a candle for me on the anniversary of my death, and her grandchildren will be given my name.”

  “And what if they’re not?”

  The Hidden One repressed the atavistic urge to spit three times, the way old Jews did whenever someone said something about the future. Chagall did it for him, sarcastically spitting air with all the fervor of an old woman.

  “What if they’re not? Then what will she mean?” Chagall asked. He picked a shard of paint off his thumb and cast it on the floor. “Or how about Boris Kulbak? Does he mean something?”

  Der Nister stared at him, surprised to hear the child’s name. He thought of the boy’s little painting—that round circle filled with a blob of a creature which, with the help of Chagall’s hints, he realized was meant to be a fetus in a womb. The fetus’s bald head had strangely resembled the boy’s shaven one, his unborn face equally frozen in fear. At least Hodele liked to smile.

  “I looked at his records this morning in the office,” Chagall said, rubbing a bare foot against an orange spot on the floor. “Eleven years old, from Zhitomir.” Hodele had been born in Zhitomir, Der Nister remembered, in their dark apartment in the middle of a night full of fog and rain: screams of agony and blood, followed by pure light. “They dug him out of a grave in Zhitomir last winter,” Chagall added. “Apparently he had buried himself alive.”

  The Hidden One gulped at the air. It seemed to him that the boy did mean something, and something specific: a revival of the dead. He imagined the boy grown up, married to Hodele, the two of them painting pictures and making puzzles for their children.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Chagall declared. Der Nister saw with relief that the artist was gesturing toward the painting. “It’s just color. And light.” Chagall turned back around, taking the little brush out of the water. “A little happiness. Do yourself a favor and don’t beat it to death.” He began to paint, his back facing Der Nister. “So when are you going to give me the next children’s book to illustrate?”

  “I—I need to work on it a little more,” the Hidden One stammered. But his mind was elsewhere, dreaming of the boy and of Hodele.

  “Good. Go disappear and leave me alone. And don’t come back until you have a joke to tell me.”

  The Hidden One vanished from the room. As he walked back up the narrow staircase to his own home, he wondered if it was even possible to have happiness in a story, when one was required to imagine both a beginning and an end. He walked faster up the steps, hoping that Hodele was waiting for him.

  6

  WHEN ERICA FRANK took the job at the Museum of Hebraic Art, she discovered two things that made working at a Jewish museum different from the other museums where she had worked before. First, nearly the entire museum security budget went to protecting people instead of protecting art. Orientation for new employees included a security brochure listing various attacks on Jewish institutions, selected from among hundreds of others as helpful examples: Buenos Aires (Jewish community center bombing, 1994; 85 dead, 300 wounded), Istanbul (double synagogue bombing, 2003; 25 dead), Casablanca (quintuple bombing with targets including a Jewish community center, 2003; 41 dead), Djerba, Tunisia (synagogue bombing, 2002; 14 dead), Kallingrad, Russia (Jewish kindergarten bombing, 2003; 1 child injured), Montreal (Jewish school bombing, 2004; no injuries reported), Terre Haute, Indiana (arson attack on a Holocaust museum, 2003; museum burned to the ground). By the time Erica started working there, entering the museum was like going through an airport checkpoint, complete with X-ray machines, metal detectors, security guards, and pat-dow
ns. Faxes came in regularly from the FBI, warning of recent threats from fuel truck bombs and suggesting that the museum set up hideous cement barriers outside on the sidewalk like every other Jewish institution in the city, despite its status as a landmark building. The barriers hadn’t been ordered yet, but they would be. In the meantime, someone had lifted a million-dollar painting by Marc Chagall off the wall during a cocktail hour, and there wasn’t a single camera or alarm to stop the thief on his way out.

  The second thing that made this job different from the others, Erica had slowly realized, was that everybody knew everybody. There was hardly a person on the staff who didn’t know everything there was to know about her dating history, her brother’s children, her father’s depression—and every day, someone new had to tell her how sorry he or she was to hear about her mother’s death. After a while it began to feel like a punishment.

  Erica had just seen her mother the night before. In a dream, as usual. This time her mother was in a crowd at night, maybe for the fireworks or something, fighting her way through masses of people as she tried to make it to wherever she was going, but everyone else was moving in the opposite direction. Erica spotted her and grabbed her hand. “Mom, what are you doing here?” she heard herself ask. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “Just keep moving,” her mother answered, turning around and allowing them both to be carried by the crowd. “Just keep moving. No one’s going to know.”

  Lately Erica was having trouble waking up in the mornings. Waking up meant coming out of dreams, smiling with her eyes closed until she would catch a glimpse of the wall in front of her and find herself yanked through the very same moment she had experienced every day for the past several months, the sudden, clobbering realization that her mother, for yet another day, was still dead. She was surprised to find that, despite all her attempts to prepare for this—knowing it was coming three months before it happened, steeling herself each day, expecting the worst every time the phone rang—every morning since it happened had gotten harder, not easier.

  During most of the previous year, at the last museum, she had been dating her boss. His name was Saul, a tall man with narrow, wiry muscles, divorced. He had interviewed her for the position and had hired her on the spot, without even making her wait for a phone call. She knew it was because of her looks, but she took the job anyway. For a time she enjoyed how he used her, his new, beautiful girlfriend, to get back at his ex-wife. Later she began to like him, though she had trouble determining if she enjoyed being with him or if she just enjoyed being with someone whose every thought didn’t revolve around postoperative radiation therapy. He was Jewish, had a small earring at the top of his left ear, and was an excellent cook.

  She moved in with him quickly, without telling her mother, claiming that she had changed her phone number because of telemarketers and insisting that Saul let her use her voice on their answering machine. She never even mentioned him to her mother, though in the final weeks she suspected that her mother knew something was up. It was as if she were practicing, testing out what it might be like not to be able to tell her mother things. They had only started dating about three months before her mother died, and all she had told him was that her mother was ill. She didn’t tell him about her mother’s death until several days after it happened; she didn’t want him at the funeral. He was crushed when she told him that he had missed it, and when she returned to the city after the seven days of mourning he began to treat her like a queen. She started to hate sleeping with him, and hated herself more when she enjoyed it.

  Saul’s parents were also divorced, like Saul himself. He hadn’t spoken to his father in fifteen years, and he hated his mother. But after Erica’s mother died, he began calling his own mother from home once a week, forcing Erica to speak with her for a few minutes each time. She knew he meant well, but that didn’t matter. Burning, flaming jealousy consumed her, enraged her. She felt herself casting the evil eye.

  A few months ago, Erica went to Saul’s brother’s wedding—actually a stepbrother, from his mother’s husband’s first marriage, and it was the stepbrother’s second wedding, too, or possibly his third; Erica couldn’t remember. In the ladies’ room, as she was about to leave the stall, she heard the nasal voices of Saul’s mother and another woman by the makeup mirror.

  “Her mother just passed away, and now we’re really all she has,” she heard Saul’s mother say as the other woman clucked her tongue. Erica thought she was talking about the bride, about whom Erica knew absolutely nothing, except that the bride had walked down the aisle alone.

  But then the other woman said, “Saul’s just a knight in shining armor for her. Is it serious?” Serious, Erica thought. Like a disease.

  Saul’s mother smiled a self-satisfied smile that Erica could hear in her voice as she replied, “Saul’s a fool if he doesn’t want it to be. People like that girl are just looking for love. And you know Saul—he needs someone who will eat out of his hand like that.”

  Two sets of high heels clicked along the marble tiles, and then Erica was sitting inside their conversation as they took their places in the stalls on either side of her, their words arching over her bent neck. “My father’s second wife was like that,” the other woman called through the wall of the stalls. “Her first husband had died on her, and she just latched on to my father like she couldn’t breathe if he wasn’t around. I thought she’d suck the life out of him, but it was just the opposite.”

  Erica heard the toilet on her right flush as Saul’s mother answered, “This girl is like that. She’s good for Saul.”

  “Such a pretty girl, too,” the other woman said. Fawning, almost. “Drop-dead gorgeous.”

  “Mmm,” Saul’s mother muttered, and Erica could picture the tight wrinkle between her eyebrows before she spoke again. “And if it works out, it means the grandchildren will be mine. Usually they go right to the girl’s mother. We’re at an age where we have to think about these things, aren’t we?” Erica trembled, taking care not to lean forward so that the automatic toilet wouldn’t flush. “And it means he wouldn’t have a mother-in-law!”

  Erica waited on the toilet for a long time after that, long after both of them had left. She sat with her elbows on her knees, her eyes fixed on the shining green marble floor. The bathroom was made of the finest materials, but underneath it all was nothing but shit.

  One morning she woke up before dawn, involuntarily, jolted by Saul’s snores out of a dream where she was standing in the kitchen with her mother, waiting for her mother to tell her which plates to use to set the table, meat or dairy. She had trouble falling back to sleep. Saul moved in his sleep, once even throwing his arm around her. She pushed it off. At last she fell asleep again. This time, she was at a wedding—it looked like the place where her brother had gotten married, years ago, but now somehow Erica was the bride—and her mother was helping her into her dress. She woke up before seeing the groom. The third dream didn’t even involve her mother. She was lying in bed with Saul beside her—it was hard to tell, until the end, whether or not it really was a dream—when she heard someone open the apartment door. She woke Saul and whispered to him that someone was in the house. Saul didn’t believe her until the man entered their bedroom, a tall man in a dark coat, holding a long knife. Saul sat up in their bed and offered the man Erica’s body in exchange for leaving them both alive. The man was about to take up the offer when Erica woke again.

  It was still dark outside when she woke up. Saul rolled over beside her, letting out a low rumble from his throat. Erica swallowed a sob. She had never cried in front of Saul, because she knew that if she did, Saul would have to put his arm around her, talk to her, change the subject, distract her, tell her stupid jokes to cheer her up, caress her shoulders and then gradually move to stroking her breasts—anything, in the guise of comforting her, to avoid listening to her cry. She decided that nothing could possibly help her except to leave. Not for good, of course. Just for now, for a few hours. She didn’
t know where she would go, but it didn’t matter. Anywhere.

  Erica slipped out of bed and into the bathroom, careful not to let herself look in the mirror. In the shower she let loose a few low sobs as the water ran over her face. She stepped out of the shower, wringing out her hair with her hands before wrapping herself in a towel and then bending down briefly to dry her feet. When she did, she noticed another pair of feet, large and dark, behind hers.

  “You have a beautiful body, Erica. You know that, right?”

  Erica stood up and turned around, seeing Saul first reflected beside her in the bathroom mirror. He was squinting at her without his contact lenses, grinning a strange grin that she had sometimes seen him wearing in his dreams, drunk on sleep. His stubble made him look older than he was. He was naked except for a pair of boxer shorts, the front slowly rising away from his skin. The breeze from the open door made her shiver. She picked up the ends of her towel and began to wrap herself in it again, her skin feeling tight.

  “I want you, Erica.”

  Saul stepped toward her, running the palms of his hands along her cheeks and neck and then down to her shoulders, nudging her arms away from her chest. He had taken hold of the corner of her towel and was slowly pulling it away from her, sliding it from underneath her arms until it fell to the floor. She stood motionless, watching him. For a moment she thought to reach down for the towel, but Saul had already moved in front of her, planting his feet on the towel and bracing his arms against the sink, her body wedged between them.

  “I love you, Erica.”

  Saul began kissing her, the fingers of his right hand tracing a line from her cheek, slowly, down to her breast. Erica tried to speak, but her tongue was caught in his mouth. He took hold of her wrist and pressed her palm against his stomach. She felt his breath moving beneath it, rising from below his chest and seeping into her own mouth as he pushed her hand down beneath the waistband of his shorts. Erica leaned back against the sink. His left hand clutched her breast, slowly circling her nipple with its forefinger and then pressing against her, trapping her hand between them and sliding his right hand downward until his finger crept between her thighs, just barely grazing her skin. She moaned, out of habit. They had made love only hours earlier. She suddenly felt incredibly tired, eager to crumple to the floor. “I want your children, Erica,” Saul whispered.