by Dara Horn
Her mother spoke again, shaking her head, an urgent rush of slurred words. “Neyn, kholile, ober zog zey—zog zey—” No, God forbid, but tell them—tell them—
A phone rang in the next room. Sara looked at her mother again, watching the blood draining out of her face, and then turned around to face Mr. Komornik, who had put down the cups and was already edging his way toward the doorway with the ringing telephone. She straightened her back and looked him in the eye. “My mom is sick,” she said.
Mr. Komornik seemed startled, but he barely paused. “Just a minute, okay?” he said, stepping quickly toward the door. “I have to take this.”
“My mom is sick,” Sara repeated, louder this time, and glared at him. The phone rang again. “We have to leave. My mom is sick.”
“I’ll be back in a second, trooper,” Mr. Komornik called as he reached to close the door behind him. “Tell your mom there’s a bathroom down the hall on the left.”
The door slammed shut. Sara looked around the room and saw all of the faces in it looking at her, most of them frowning, staring her down. She turned to the old man and tapped the back of his hand, cringing at the feel of his damp, hot skin.
“My mom is sick,” Sara told him. “We have to leave now.” She glanced up at her mother, whose face had turned pale. Maybe it was true, Sara thought. Why wasn’t her mother saying anything? Should she take her mother to the bathroom? Find her some water? Make her sit down? It was mothers who were supposed to help children when they were sick, not the other way around.
The man, until then facing her mother, turned at her touch and looked at her, squinting in her direction. His eyebrows crept up on his forehead, and Sara thought for a moment that he might help. But then his eyebrows settled over his eyes, which slowly focused on her, as if he had just noticed something strange. “Your mother is not sick,” he said, his voice rough.
Sara’s stomach lurched. She glanced up at her mother, but her mother stood as if frozen, her face an empty canvas. Then the man crouched down again to Sara’s height, studying her face.
Sara squirmed. She hated being looked at. The man’s face was red and thick, its wide nose etched with pores. A rivulet of sweat dripped down one of his cheeks. Suddenly he smiled, a thin, slow smile, the skin shriveling beneath his eyes.
“I don’t recognize your mother,” the man said to Sara in his baby singsong voice, “but I recognize you.”
The air in the room had become unbearably warm. Sara felt the spaces between her legs and under her arms and knees becoming damp. Ben had once told her that the human body was eighty percent water; she wondered if she might be leaking.
The man turned his heavy, ancient face with what seemed like tremendous effort, looking up at Sara’s mother. “The girl I remember was smaller than this one,” he said to her, pronouncing each word delicately. “But the face is the same. A lovely face,” he murmured, his voice thick and moist. He raised his hand to Sara’s eye level, and then he pressed his warm, damp fingertips against her cheek.
Sara tried to step back, but her legs would not move. She glanced at the door to the next room, listening for signs that the short man might return, but she could hear nothing except the large old man’s breathing. His smell filled her face. He had begun moving a finger along her cheek, tracing his fingernail in circles along her skin. Sara’s skin tightened as she stood in place, unable to speak. The man raised his other hand and cupped her chin in his palms like a broken head from one of the room’s statues, pinching her cheeks with his thumbs.
“Please don’t touch her,” Sara’s mother said, almost in a whisper.
Sara looked up and saw her mother standing motionless, her eyes unblinking and her body still, as if her breath had been sucked out of her lungs. Sara had only seen her mother like that once before, when they stood at her father’s grave. Sara tried to speak, but her lips shook and her tongue would not move. The man was gripping her face now, his thumbs digging deeper into her skin. Her eyes began to leak, and she blinked hard, trying to keep herself in. “Now, this is the face I remember,” the man said.
“You know who you look like?” he asked, the singsong gone from his voice. “Boris Kulbak’s little girl. Raisya Kulbak.”
The man looked up at Sara’s mother, a long, slow smile spreading across his face. And then Sara’s mother passed out.
BY THE TIME the ambulance arrived, Sara’s mother had already opened her eyes, and it was a challenge to convince everyone that she was really well enough to drive herself and her daughter home. Besides saying that she felt fine, however, Sara’s mother refused to say anything. Even in the car on the way home, she was silent, a silence so polished and strong that Sara was afraid even to open her mouth.
The next day, when Sara came home after school, she found that her mother wasn’t in the house. She called out, “Mom?” as she came in the door, but no one answered. Panicked, Sara raced through the house, running from the kitchen to the living room to the bedrooms and out to the garage and the backyard and then back into the house, even flinging open the bathroom doors, screaming, “Mommy! Mommy!” until she finally decided to open the door of the tomb. And there she found her mother sitting on the floor like a child, surrounded by toy cars and men’s clothes and Sara’s murals of her father’s life, crying, reading the book of the dead.
8
THE HAND that dents each child’s face below the nose just before he is born, Der Nister had once learned, is a familiar one. The day before the child’s birth, the very same hand scoops up the child and takes him on a tour all over the world, from morning until evening, showing him everything he will ever see—the place where he will be born, the places where he will live, the places where he will travel, and, at the end of the long day as the dusk slips between the fingers of the hand, the places where he will die and be buried. The child sees all this in a single day. The owner of the hand reminds the child that against his will he was created, and against his will he will be born, and against his will he will live, and against his will he will die, and against his will he will someday have to give a full and complete accounting of everything he has done with all that was given to him against his will. And the child is frightened—not of dying, but of living. He is so frightened that he refuses to be born, spitting on the hand until it smacks him across the face, removes his memory, and casts him out. Which is why so many people wander around the world, forgetting to account for where they have been and where they are going—and which is why Chagall left the Soviet Union for good, while Der Nister and all of the other Yiddish writers whose works Chagall had illustrated left only for a few years and then returned.
Chagall had been ready to leave for a long time. Shortly before his arrival at the orphanage in Malakhovka in 1920, he received a letter in the mail from a friend, a poet in Berlin: “Are you still alive? The rumor here is that you were killed in the war. Your paintings are selling for big prices here.” Der Nister knew about this letter, because Chagall showed it to anyone who came into his room.
“I’m famous over there,” Chagall liked to snort. “Famous! Big prices! But here’s what I’d like to know: Where are my paintings? Who has them? And when do they intend to pay me? Do they expect my daughter to starve to death?”
Der Nister used to listen to this and then look down at his hands, pretending to occupy himself with picking at his fingernails in order to keep himself from scowling. By 1922, Chagall’s daughter was a beautiful round little five-year-old whose baby fat Der Nister couldn’t explain, while his own Hodele was a nine-year-old scarecrow, wasting thinner and thinner by the year. Chagall had already lived in France, before the war, and had starred in a one-man gallery show in Berlin. He had had books written about him, exhibits, critiques, sales. People knew his name. Once you swallowed the strange colors and flying people, there was nothing difficult about his work—nothing to comprehend, only to feel. There was no meaning, nothing that anyone needed to translate or know or understand. It was all just color and light
. Meanwhile, the Hidden One had published four books of kaleidoscope stories with tiny worlds packed one inside another, mazes of symbols and layers of meanings like the puzzles his daughter loved, but Yiddish readers had already begun to disappear. And his daughter was starving.
“Big prices, I’m telling you,” Chagall groaned. “In Moscow, they haven’t even paid me for the murals yet. In Berlin, they’re holding auctions. I’ve got to get back to Berlin.”
And then one day, he did.
DER NISTER, PLAYING shadow, followed Chagall. In Berlin he founded a journal with a few other Yiddish expatriate writers, but readers were scarce and money scarcer, and he left the journal after its first issue. In Germany people burned money instead of spending it. It was cheaper than coal. Boardinghouse rooms were insulated with worthless money pasted on the walls. Chagall soon continued on to Paris. Years later, word of Chagall’s daughter’s eighth birthday party reached Der Nister in Germany: a lavish celebration in the artist’s huge apartment on Avenue d’Orléans, where every guest was a famous writer or artist or critic or gallery owner. In a German magazine, Der Nister came across an elegant photographic portrait of the renowned painter Chagall, posing with his wife and daughter. In the photograph, very beautifully lit and composed, the eight-year-old girl was naked. Everyone talked about how shameless it was: cheap, exploitative, debased. But all Der Nister could see was the girl’s pudgy belly and her chubby cheeks.
In Berlin, in the tiny, filthy room he shared with his tired wife whom he no longer loved, his scrap of a daughter, and his scrawny newborn son, the Hidden One would lie in bed at night, fighting off what might have been nightmares had he been able to sleep. But hunger kept him awake. He was reminded of his older brother Aaron back in Berdichev, who had become a follower of the dead mystic and storyteller Nachman of Bratslav. Aaron used to fast for days on end, hoping for divine visions. But Der Nister’s hunger, involuntary, brought him demonic visions instead. He began to stay up all night, and as he listened to the drunken half-naked prostitutes outside his window and the whistling breath of his children and wife, he was tortured by waking dreams. And so he wrote them down.
Wide awake, he dreamed of a world-carrier, a man who dragged the entire world around with him, bearing it on his back—until he decided to hand it off to someone else so that he could go out drinking. While the world-carrier was drunk, everyone in the world carried out a suicide pact, killing themselves off one by one. Der Nister looked out the window at the lights of the city and could see the dead-drunk bodies in the street. They were clearly visible beneath the gas streetlights outside Der Nister’s window where he stood behind the curtain, shivering between cloth and glass and cupping his hands to the windowpane until, above the noisy nightclubs across the street, he could just make out a star. Der Nister wake-dreamed of the constellations he had once seen in the firmament above Berdichev. The Great Star-Bear, Ursa Major, invited him to dance with her in the sky, and Der Nister climbed up a ladder and danced with the bear until the bear suddenly cast him down, down, down, into a pit where he landed in the lair of ten bears, starving bears who repeatedly demanded food. Der Nister fed them and fed them until there was nothing left to eat but Der Nister himself. The bears ate him alive, limb by limb, until the very last bear reached for his heart.
He heard Hodele scream in her sleep. He came out from behind the window curtain and went to her corner of the room, where she slept on a cheap folded mattress on the floor. He crouched on the floor beside her. What had she dreamed? “Hodele,” he whispered, but she was still sleeping. It was cold in the room, and she lay on her side, curled into a bony ball under her blanket. Her mouth was stretched into a horrid grin as her teeth chattered, and in the dark room beside her cold body, Der Nister thought of Boris Kulbak, the boy who had been found in the grave. He sat down on the floor and put his arms around her, warming her, and then found himself wake-dreaming again. The drunks in the street were throwing stones at her, and he was shielding her from them. She clung to him in her sleep, clutching at his arms. On the other side of the room he heard his baby son wheeze in the shadows, and then heard the wife he no longer loved shifting in their bed, sliding half asleep toward the cardboard bassinet to nurse the baby boy. In the light from the crack of the curtains he could see his wife’s bared breast, orange in the stripe of gaslight like the breasts of the prostitutes outside. He turned back toward his daughter’s body and held her. She was lighter than a dry straw doll. He began to dream, wide awake, that he was nursing her, that she was suckling at his chest, but he had no milk to give her. Soon she rolled away from him, moaning, her teeth gnashing at cold air—and he no longer knew which part was the dream.
IN DAYLIGHT, WHEN he wasn’t dreaming, Der Nister sometimes spotted Chagall’s works in magazines. Other times, he saw them in galleries where friends brought him against his will. The paintings struck Der Nister as colorful and playful, nothing more. But no one wanted more. Chagall’s paintings had become a sensation. Apparently he had invented expressionism, though Der Nister knew his old housemate had nothing he intended to express. It just means blue, Der Nister heard Chagall’s voice repeating in his head. What should it mean? What does your daughter mean? But in public, Der Nister noticed, Chagall would say almost anything:
“If I weren’t a Jew, I would never have become an artist.” (Der Nister read that one in a Yiddish newspaper.)
“I am not a Jewish artist. A Jewish cloud is a Russian cloud is a French cloud.” (That one was in a German pamphlet.)
“I am sure Rembrandt loves me.” (That was in French, from his memoirs, which Der Nister read in excerpts in German translation in a magazine—rambling, incoherent memoirs, written when the artist was thirty-six.)
“The title ‘a Russian painter’ means more to me than any international fame. In my pictures there is not one centimeter free from nostalgia for my native land.” (That was in Russian.)
“My heart is in the East, and here I am on the edge of the West! How easy it would be for me to leave all the good things here and return home, to behold the dust of the desolate sanctuary.” (Did he say that, or was it part of Der Nister’s waking dreams?)
“Who am I?” (From his memoirs, and from Der Nister’s dreams.)
Who am I? It was an easy question, if you were sitting in an apartment in Paris that would soon turn into a house in Provence and then a visa to New York sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art, with a wife you loved and a laughing daughter and an army of defending critics wherever you chose to appear. But in Der Nister’s tiny room, crowded with a wife he didn’t love and children he couldn’t feed and stories no one would read, the question had no answer.
“Who am I?”
Der Nister moved his family to Hamburg, but his sleepless nights only grew longer. Shards of stories moved like shadows through his family’s room, like demons that danced on tightropes of light and swung down on trapezes of odors and dust, threatening to devour his children. It was better in Russia now, people were saying. The government was sponsoring Yiddish schools, Yiddish publishers, Yiddish magazines—enormous opportunities for someone like him. It was the new promised land, the papers claimed, and Der Nister almost believed it. In Hamburg they still lived on a street full of prostitutes and drunks. But now Der Nister’s waking dreams were of trials, his room transforming into a dark medieval courtroom with all of his former pupils denouncing him, claiming that he was selfish, an egocentric beast, that he had sacrificed his daughter’s life for his own. At the end they burned him at the stake. If Chagall had painted it, it would have been bright yellow, lurid green, pulsing red. But in Der Nister’s vision, it was only black.
ONE NIGHT IN Hamburg—or a not-yet night, a tired late afternoon in the winter of 1926 when the sun grew weary and decided to give up early, passing the world along to the moon and going off to get drunk—Der Nister sat alone at home, writing a technical article for a magazine and fighting off dreams. His wife and the little boy (almost four years old now) had gone to th
e doctor, and Der Nister waited for Hodele. A friend had shown him a new card trick, and he was eager to show her, to see if she could figure out how it worked.
She always could. She was extremely clever—brilliant in four languages, a natural at math, her head always bent into a book. But she was thirteen now, and at home it had become awkward. In their one shared room, his wife insisted that Hodele couldn’t change her clothes in his presence. In the mornings, he would dress quickly while Hodele slept and then leave, idling in the hallway until he heard her give three taps on the inside of the door, the signal that he could go back inside. When he opened the door, Hodele would be strapped into her ragged blouse and skirt, the new curve of her tiny breasts clearly visible through the tight clothes she had outgrown, and his wife would already be angry. “Look at her, stooped over like a hunchback,” Der Nister’s wife would spit. “She looks like you.” But when her mother wasn’t home, Hodele was brave enough to laugh about it. They had developed a little system now. Their room was on the ground floor, and its single tiny window faced the alley. But there was one small part of the wall of the room, windowless and wooden, which faced the street where Hodele walked on her way home from school. When she approached, Hodele had taken to tapping it three times with whatever book she was reading, to let her father know she would soon be at the door. An inside joke.
That early night, he was listening for Hodele when some boys began yelling outside. Nothing unusual; the drunks typically didn’t appear until later, but boys from the high school often congregated on the street while waiting for the prostitutes to arrive. At least it was better than Berlin, Der Nister thought. Then he heard the three telltale taps on the wall—and a loud thump.
Through the wall, he heard a boy laugh out loud. It must just be a joke, Der Nister thought. Or more likely a coincidence. But then he listened, moving closer to the corner, where a girl’s whimper reached him through the wall. “Please, no, please, please,” he heard her beg, and then there was a scream. It was the same scream Hodele released in her sleep. Der Nister was too confused to move. But then the scream stopped, and Der Nister could feel, on his own body, the hand on his daughter’s mouth.
