by Dara Horn
“We’re doing an exhibit next month on illuminated manuscripts,” Erica said, her voice lower than before. She turned the flashlight back toward his chest, and suddenly remembered why they had come. “Let me show you the files.”
They had passed the largest shelves and had pushed open a door, arriving in a room that in the bare glow of the fading flashlight was a dim shadow of her office, with a lifeless computer sitting impotent on a desk and towering filing cabinets lining the walls. This was the part that she had been afraid of, the horrifying part of what she had agreed to do—illegal, immoral, insane. But as she entered the dark room, afraid to turn on the lights, she was surprised to find herself feeling oddly at ease. Her office seemed to glow blue in the dark. For a moment she wondered if by night the offices were occupied by curator ghosts, cataloguing works of art that the waking world had forgotten.
“I remember this room,” Ben said behind her.
She turned her flashlight on him, grinning as she remembered, too. “My office,” she said. “I’m buried down here Sunday through Thursday, every week. At least I have Fridays off.” Suddenly she felt as though she were with a friend. But when she raised the light to his face, she saw that he wasn’t smiling. Instead, his eyes blinked at her, nervous.
Erica stepped to the table on the side of the tiny office, next to her desk. The flashlight beam had begun to fade. In the dull light, she shuffled through a folder until she found the photograph she was looking for, and passed it into Ben’s hands. “Chagall numbered all his paintings on the underside of the canvas, on the part where it’s attached to the wooden support frame,” she said. “Every real Chagall painting has those numbers.”
The photograph was of the back of the painting, with the lower right corner of the canvas carefully detached from the wooden frame. Along the interior edge of the canvas, on the part that had been nailed facedown to the wood, there was a series of painted numbers connected with dashes. The numbers were painted in a curly flourish:
200-400-60-50
“He only started marking the paintings after he had his first show in Berlin,” she said as Ben scrutinized the picture. “Then he backdated the ones he made earlier, in lots. All the ones in this lot have the same numbers.”
She watched his eyes squinting as he stared at the picture. “What do the numbers mean?” Ben asked.
She shrugged, ashamed not to have a good answer. “It’s like a bar code. It doesn’t mean anything,” she answered, and moved the light away. He handed the photograph back to her, and his fingers brushed against hers. She shivered, then tried to hide it. “If you want something that means something, then take these,” she said.
The two paper stories from the painting were sitting right where she had left them, side by side on top of the piles of paper next to her chair. She lifted them gently with one hand, stacking them and examining them again with her flashlight. But she couldn’t read a word of them.
“You can read these, right?” she asked softly. “I remember you mentioned that you know Yiddish.” The flashlight beam shone through the thin paper onto the floor as she passed them into his hands. “The curator who saw these knew what the printed one was, but he didn’t know who the author was for the handwritten one. He said it was something about a bridge. Do you have any idea who wrote it?”
Ben squinted in the dark, leaning toward Erica’s light and holding the handwritten story up to his glasses. He shuffled the pages. “No,” he murmured. “It doesn’t say. But it looks old.”
There was a note of fascination in his voice that surprised her. “The painting dates to 1914, and he labeled it sometime in the 1920s,” she said, and then was embarrassed to hear her docent’s voice.
“I—I guess so,” he stuttered. He was staring at the pages now, his hands shaking slightly under the flashlight beam, as if he hadn’t believed it until now.
“There were other paintings that had papers in them, too,” she said, suddenly excited to be telling him. “Like those giant murals from the Moscow State Jewish Theater. There were hundreds of pages stuffed into the backs of those, under the wooden struts the same way, in the same handwriting as this story. It’s like someone tried to jam a whole novel under there. We have them down here in the files somewhere. No one’s had a chance to translate them yet.”
She turned the light away from the pages, toward his face. He looked up, startled, then rested the stories on her desk. “So there they are,” she said. “They’re real. And they’re yours until you give the painting back. I’m giving you three days.” She twirled the flashlight around in her palm. “Before then, I won’t say anything. You can take my word on that.”
She was closer to him now, standing between him and the desk without knowing how she had gotten there. In the office of the ghosts, in the fluttering beam of the flashlight, Ben’s face was soft and sad and full of longing—as if happiness itself were a distant memory, something long forbidden to him.
“Why are you doing this for me?” he asked.
There were many things she might have said, and many more things that might have once been true. But in the dark vault of forgotten art, she sensed their mothers watching her. “I trust you,” she said.
The trembling hand that had been twirling the flashlight lost its grip. The key chain fell from her palm to the floor, and the light blinked out. Before she could laugh or bend to pick it up, she felt hands landing softly on her shoulders, curling gently around the back of her neck, fingers branching into her hair.
The room filled with black ink, deep and wondrous pools of dark liquid beauty that seeped into the spaces between her fingers and arms and lips. And the darkness between her tongue and the roof of her mouth was flooded with color and light.
14
HAIR IN darkness doesn’t feel the way it does in light. In light, you can touch a person’s hair and not feel it at all—you might think you are feeling it, but really you are seeing its color, seeing its shape, seeing the light and the shadows intertwined between the hair and your own hands. But in darkness, her hair poured across his palms like molten music between his fingers. Skin in darkness is different, too. In light, you don’t notice skin, distracted as you are by eyes watching you, eyes you are afraid to trust, eyes that could be waiting for your shame. But in pure darkness, her skin was warm and trembling and alive—secret whorled passageways of ears, soft fingertips tracing circles on his neck, the living heartbeat-shudders of falling-closed eyelids, cheeks erupting into lips and giving way to his tongue. And in light you don’t think of how warm a person is, of how a person can enfold you, enclose you amid arms and clothes and ribs in pure primeval underground darkness, the heat between you glowing like an ember that you are afraid to put out. In the dark he felt her withdraw, her hands guarded above his clothes—not from fear, he sensed, but from hope. He held himself back. Together they felt for the wall and sank down along it until they were seated on the floor in the cave of the underground room, her head on his shoulder as he breathed in her hair, inhaling the deep delicious scent of waiting to kiss her again.
“It’s strange, isn’t it? Being blind?”
He was glad she spoke first; he had been too afraid of saying something wrong. But what she said was exactly right. He raised his hand in the blind air, and his fingertips stumbled on hers. He shuddered with joy.
“I can’t see at all without my glasses,” he heard himself say. “Or just barely. Only light and colors.”
His voice rippled the shadows. He was astonished to hear how bright he sounded, syllables like sparks. Her fingers played along his skin as if pressing piano keys, slow arpeggios that traveled up his arm and across his shoulder to his neck and along the edge of his ear, closing in on a chord around the arm of his glasses. Her palm caressed his stubbled cheek.
“When I waited for you outside your place a few days ago, I noticed that you didn’t recognize me,” she said. Her voice floated along his ear, warm breath on his earlobe. “Even though you were looking right at
me. I thought you just didn’t remember who I was, but I remember now that you had just taken your glasses off.”
He laughed. “See? I didn’t make it up.”
“You have beautiful eyes, though. You shouldn’t hide them.”
If she were Nina, he would have launched into his usual complaint—his legal blindness, his fear of contact lenses, his inexplicable disgust at touching his own eyes. But now, here, he stared at the darkness and reveled in her words. He turned toward her and felt along her arm, his hands brushing along her skin and sleeve until he reached her chin and at last her lips, the delicious crescent of her lips. He rested a finger in the soft dent below her nose, until she kissed his fingers and took his hand in hers. The silence shivered between them, alive. He wished he could think of something to say; he was still afraid that at any moment she might get up, turn on the lights, cast him out, disappear.
“I’m glad I met your sister,” she said a moment later, breaking the silence. He breathed with relief. “Is she older or younger than you? I tried to guess, but I couldn’t.”
The room around him was invisible, but suddenly he felt as if his sister could be sitting right in front of him, or his parents, too, that he was only the smallest part of a whole that was much larger, much deeper. “Neither, really,” he answered. “We’re twins.”
He heard her shift in place, the soft swish of her hair. “I never knew an adult who was a twin before,” she said softly. Her voice hovered over the deep darkness. “I mean, I remember twins in my class at school when I was little. I was always jealous of them.”
He would have shrugged, but her head rested on his arm, and he couldn’t bear for her to move. “It’s less fun when you’re an adult,” he said.
Her hair brushed against the inside of his elbow, strumming his skin. “I always wanted that, though,” her lips murmured along his shoulder. “Most people in your life only know you as a child, or only know you as an adult. I always thought it would be wonderful to have someone who knew me all the way through, who could be with me through all of it, from the day I was born.” It was strange, he thought, this intimacy—how much easier it was to speak and to listen in the absence of sight, just sound and touch. “I have a brother, but he’s seven years older than me,” she added. “It’s like having an extra father, almost.”
He thought of asking about her parents, but he decided not to. He felt the presence of his own parents in the underground room and held her more tightly, possessing her weight in his arms. He struggled to find his voice.
“Does your brother have children?” he asked. His words were more timid than he had hoped. And now he remembered that she had mentioned nieces, that she had read his mother’s books to her nieces; did he sound stupid?
But she did not notice, or did not mind. “Yes,” she said. He could hear her smile in her voice as her palm came to rest on his knee. “Two little girls.”
He swallowed, nervous, still too afraid to trust her. But the darkness made him brave. “My sister is pregnant,” he said softly. “I’m worried that I hate her for it. A few months ago I got divorced.”
Why had he said it? He was sure she would curl away from him now, recoiling as if from a trap.
But she didn’t. Instead she kissed him again, her soft mouth sinking into his startled lips. Before he had tasted his fill, she moved away, then returned suddenly, elsewhere, tracing his ear with her lips as his own mouth fumbled for hers in his blindness, gulping at the warm air.
“I hated my brother, too, before my first niece was born,” she said. “I felt terrible about it.” He marveled in the dark. How did she know exactly what to say? Her voice hung in the air, a delicate feather he was afraid to touch. “He was always talking about the baby, the baby, the baby, and I had to pretend to be excited. He was just so smug about it, so damn proud of himself, like no one in the whole world had ever had a baby before. I could’ve hit him. But everything changes when the baby comes.” Her voice rose, floating higher, until he felt her breath along his neck. “It doesn’t matter that the baby isn’t yours. It’s still part of you, and it means absolutely everything to you. You would gladly die for that child. And everything else just disappears.”
He listened, and his whole body felt lighter, weightless. He buried his fingers in her hair and kissed the crown of her forehead, where silk sprouted from skin. They held each other for many long moments before he was able to speak. She had grown restless; the tight warm curl of her body shifted at his side. Already she was moving away. “I need to see you again,” he said.
She rocked gently away from him, her legs—ah, her legs, bare legs beneath her skirt, should he have touched them? should he have tried? but no, he had waited out of hope—bumping his own knees as her head and neck rose between his hands, parting his hands until they fell to her shoulders. She was kneeling beside him, he could feel, slowly, reluctantly rising from the ground.
“After you return the painting,” she said, her voice slicing the darkness. “Either bring it back or send it back. Find a post office somewhere, make up a return address. No one will know, I promise. I’m afraid to see you again before that. But after that, yes.”
The painting. He had forgotten. But he wasn’t going to return it, never; didn’t she understand that? He remembered now that he and his sister had made a plan, a long time ago, they had already decided, yes, his sister was going to—but—
“Promise me you’ll come back and find me then,” she said. Now it was she whose hands were buried in his hair, she who held his skull between her fingertips, sculpting his mind. “I don’t believe people so easily anymore,” her blind voice whispered. “I won’t go chasing after you. I need you to promise that you’ll come back and find me.”
He breathed in, exulting. “I will,” he said, then raised his fingers to her face. “But only if you promise not to leave just yet.”
She laughed, but did not promise. Instead she pressed her mouth to his, and he breathed her in, trust pouring back into his silent ribs, into the cage that held his heart.
15
THE SAGES once taught that three things hang above a person’s head every day of his life: an eye that sees, and an ear that hears, and a book in which all of the person’s deeds are recorded. Chagall and Der Nister had learned this as children, forced to repeat and memorize it word by word. At the time, they had laughed. But now, as they reached middle age, only Der Nister remembered it.
The eye above Chagall saw all of the paintings that he created and displayed from 1948 onward as his fame crested toward the sky. It saw the major retrospective in New York, the one in Chicago, the one in Paris, the big exhibition of new works in Amsterdam, the bigger one in London, the first prize the artist received at the Biennale in Venice. It saw the windows he made for churches around the world, and it watched as his flying lovers soared to the top of the Paris opera house. The eye also saw Chagall fall in love with his married British housekeeper, saw the child that he had with her, saw him move with his new unofficial family to a castlelike home in France, and then saw the woman and their child abandon him. The ear listened to Chagall’s hundreds of interviews with magazines and newspapers around the globe, his dozens of lectures delivered in the world’s most prestigious auditoriums, his endless greetings to every Matisse and Picasso who graced his path. And then, as each of the Yiddish writers and artists he had known in Russia disappeared one by one—Shloyme Mikhoels, Itsik Fefer, Dovid Hofshteyn, Peretz Markish, Dovid Bergelson, Leyb Kvitko, and nearly every person who had ever taught at the Jewish Boys’ Colony in Malakhovka—the book recorded his silence. Only sometimes, on sleepless nights, did the artist notice.
But Der Nister was constantly aware of the eye and the ear. He couldn’t help it. When he returned to Moscow from Tashkent after the war, he could feel the eye that sees, watching his every move. And as for the ear that hears, Der Nister was beginning to suspect that his apartment had been bugged.
Nearly all of the other Yiddish writers had vanished,
Der Nister knew. Since 1948, the Soviet secret police had begun collecting them one by one as if trying to assemble a living encyclopedia of Yiddish literature, arranging them alphabetically in their prison cells and then lining them up by library catalogue number in front of the firing squad. Der Nister could look through his hidden shelves of recently banned books by all the writers he and Chagall had known and rattle off the dates when each one had been arrested. Anyone with the slightest talent was already in jail. Der Nister imagined Lefortovo Prison in Moscow as a kind of artists’ café. After a while he felt insulted not to have been invited.
He was almost finished with Volume Three of The Family Crisis, and he had never been more tired. His sixtieth birthday had passed; almost everything had changed. He had married again, after the long year of mourning in Tashkent. Lina was another refugee, another bereft parent, stripped of her own daughter and standing naked before him. They lay together in Der Nister’s frigid room in Moscow and embraced in the love of last resort, to keep out the cold. Afterward, Der Nister would sit up in their narrow bed in the darkness and see their dead daughters sleeping at their feet.
But even more had changed for the family in Der Nister’s book. Luzi, the brother who had joined the “dead Hasidim”—the religious sect of followers of Nachman of Bratslav—had become fanatically devoted to his ideological cult as the novel progressed, more and more convinced that his way was the only way of thinking, the only way of living. The sanest brother, Moyshe, had watched his own family business and sensible world collapse along with his own health and his own life, while the fanatical ideologues who wore him into the ground escaped unscathed. As of the end of Volume Two, things looked even bleaker for Moyshe’s equally sensible grandson Mayerl, who was to be the subject of the forthcoming Volume Three. At some point the censors seemed to get the hint, because the magazine that had serially published the first two volumes suddenly began to reject Der Nister’s work. And so he began to hide it.
