by Dara Horn
He hid pages everywhere. Unpublished chapters lined his mattress, lay hammered beneath his floorboards, crinkled underneath his rug. Lina worried for him, but she was afraid to speak too loudly about it. The ear was listening, the eye was watching, and Der Nister became fanatical about cheap forms of disguise. He inscribed his name on each page in a different cipher, some of his own devising and some borrowed from the ones he remembered ancient rabbis using in the books he had studied as a child. He shifted each of the four Hebrew letters of NiSTeR over by one, the way some Hebrew manuscripts did; when the last two new letters spelled the Hebrew word for “fire,” he felt nervous, edging too close to meaning. So he used other codes. Sometimes he signed off with the word “Priest” in Russian or in Yiddish, since his real last name was Kahanovitch and his ancestors had been priests in the temple in Jerusalem. When he felt brave, he inscribed his name as “Father of Hodele, may her memory be blessed.” Other times, he hid behind the numerical equivalents of the letters of his name—50 for the nun, 60 for the somekh, 400 for the tof, and 200 for the reysh—written like his name from right to left. It was nothing more than a game, and he knew it. But perhaps games weren’t worthless. On occasion he remembered his old housemate Chagall’s fondness for games—for plays on words, for the little tricks and puns that he would put into each of his paintings. Surely, Der Nister reasoned, the artist had done something right. After all, he had lived to middle age, he was still painting, and he wasn’t in jail.
But Lina was furious about the papers. She pulled them out in sheaves from inside the tattered sofa cushions, scraped them out from between the floorboards, and scolded her new husband as if he were the daughter she had lost.
“What is the point of this?” she whispered one night as she retrieved a new handful of papers from inside her pillowcase. They had just gone to bed, and he groaned softly beside her. Lately they were both aware of the ear suspended above them, and they always whispered. Sometimes they wrote notes to each other, which Der Nister preferred. He had almost forgotten the sound of her real voice.
He didn’t answer her. Instead he turned on his back, staring at the dirty arched ceiling of their tiny alcove room, where water sometimes leaked from the apartment above.
“Do you think they’re children, that they’re not going to find these?” Lina hissed. “Are you aware that you’ve gone completely mad?”
“Yes,” he murmured. Their old-fashioned room, he suddenly thought, reminded him of the way he had once pictured the Cave of Machpelah from the Bible when he was a child—the very first piece of property Abraham had ever owned in the Promised Land. The tomb of the patriarchs. He drew the blanket up around his thin body and shivered.
Lina snorted, and then held the papers in front of his face as he lay on his back. He caught a glimpse of the beginning of a chapter, a sentence about his character Mayerl. He was reading down to the next sentence just as Lina threw the papers into the air. Der Nister watched as little pieces of his unpublished book fluttered up and then floated down from the dripping ceiling.
Lina brushed them off the bed, and Der Nister sat up to watch them land on the dirty floor. “If you want these to last longer than you will, stash them somewhere else,” she whispered. “Sometimes I think you want to be caught.”
She put out the light and rolled over in the bed, but it was too narrow for her to move far from him. He turned toward her without intending to, observing the silhouette of her back in the dark as she pretended to sleep. She was only in her forties, much younger than he, and less hardened. Sometimes as he lay in bed with her, he remembered the story from the Bible of Avishag the Shunamite, the young concubine given to King David in his old age, to warm his bones. He reached over and gathered her hair between his fingers, and her body shuddered. She turned and curled toward him, and for a brief moment he wondered whether what he felt for her was real, or whether it was just a shadow of a memory—whether the thin hair he brushed away from her forehead was really hers, or whether it became something different in his hands, someone else’s. In the dark his fingertips felt her damp cheeks. “Please, find somewhere to put them, for me,” she whispered. “I can’t lose someone else.”
She folded her arms around him, and his bare stomach pressed against her empty womb. As they drifted toward sleep, Der Nister could feel their daughters pushing them toward each other, forcing them into one another’s nightmares.
ONE NIGHT AFTER almost everyone had disappeared, Der Nister went to a performance at the Moscow State Jewish Theater. The play was stupid, a meaningless melodrama with a tacked-on final monologue about the bright new hope of the future. But the theater itself was a room dropped from paradise. Every wall of the auditorium was covered by enormous canvas murals, painted by Marc Chagall.
Der Nister had seen the murals before, of course. Chagall’s studies for them had filled the house they had shared in Malakhovka. And he had seen them before in the theater, too. There were seven of them, stretched out on canvases that hung on the bare walls and surrounded the audience: a vast landscape of dancing figures (including theater director Shloyme Mikhoels, who had just been killed in an alleged traffic accident) that covered the entire left side of the room; a smaller abstract piece on the back wall; a frieze of a wedding banquet along the top of the right wall—and then, between the right wall’s windows, four tall playful portraits of each of four arts: music, dance, theater, and literature. Watching the murals was far more interesting than watching the play.
Der Nister had a seat against the auditorium’s right wall, and he spent the intermission and the play’s brighter scenes gazing up at the mural representing literature, the one that towered beside his head. It was of a scribe writing on a yellow scroll against a deep blue background; the scroll itself was blank, and the man in the picture was even blanker: pure white from head to foot, as if the writer were in the process of being unpainted, vanishing, turning into a ghost. In the background was a high green hill, with a little man carrying a lectern with a few Hebrew letters written on its base. Der Nister noticed with a sudden shiver that the letters spelled the beginning of his name. In the semidarkness of the theater, he reached up and touched the canvas of the painting, feeling the firm wooden struts beneath it. Idly fidgeting with its edge, he was surprised when he accidentally lifted it, shifting the bottom half of the canvas just a hair’s breadth away from the wall. And he went home with an idea.
The following week, he went to the theater again, reserving himself a seat near the literature mural for the evening’s performance. But before leaving for the theater on the night of the show, he loosened one of the floorboards in his tiny room and uncovered a small pile of manuscript pages. It was a draft of the first chapter of Volume Three. He rolled the papers into the sleeve of his thin sweater, put on his coat, and went to the theater. The play was yet another pedantic melodrama, this time with music, and he was the only person in his row of seats. When the house lights went down, he carefully slipped his fingers underneath the literature mural’s wooden frame and slid a few of his manuscript pages up and underneath it, until they were tucked into the frame from behind. He repeated this process page by page, subtly, working mostly between the play’s scenes, when the room was bathed in total darkness. By intermission, he had safely hidden all of Chapter One. No one had noticed.
He returned every week after that. He had been a friend of Mikhoels, and the people at the box office knew him; they never made him pay. He sat through one melodrama after another, rotating his seat around the theater until he had deposited all the papers from his apartment into the murals on the walls. Each time a page of the manuscript disappeared behind the canvas, he knew he would never see it again. But in the darkened theater, he felt happy. It was like mailing a letter to the next world. There were rumors that the theater would shut down soon, but Der Nister knew that even if it did, the murals wouldn’t vanish so easily. Thanks to his old housemate’s current fame, they were worth far too much.
IT WAS EARLY 1
949, wintertime, and when he came home from his last trip to the theater, Lina knew what he had done. He met her in their bed, the only warm place in their single room. The apartment had become bare and flat, stripped of all its hidden scraps of paper insulation, and Der Nister wondered if the two of them hadn’t become bare and flat, too, their clothes and their flesh pared down until they had to hide under the covers like children, skinny and raw. He had earned almost nothing in the past month, and she had barely earned more; there was nothing to eat. It was too early to go to bed, but Der Nister was cold. In their hunger they clutched each other beneath their worn blanket, holding all they had left.
“Sorele had beautiful legs,” Lina whispered to him in the dark. Sometimes, for no reason and for every reason, she liked to talk about her daughter. “A dancer’s legs. Sometimes I wonder about the man she would have made happy.”
Der Nister gulped at the cold air in the dark, tracing a finger along Lina’s cracked lips. He wanted to say something about Hodele, but he was afraid of taking her name in vain. “I once met a boy my daughter’s age who buried himself alive,” he said.
Lina was silent, but his fingers felt her lips part, and then felt warm startled breath seeping between them. “I met him in the orphanage in Malakhovka, where I used to teach,” Der Nister continued in a whisper. He felt the curl of her nostrils in his palm, breath warming his hands. “Someone had found him half buried, in an open grave. That was twenty-nine years ago,” he finished. The number astonished him. Hodele would be thirty-five now, he thought, almost thirty-six—the same age he had been when he taught at Malakhovka, when they had lived above Chagall, when he had met the boy who had buried himself alive.
“Do you think he’s still living?” Lina asked.
Der Nister stared at the darkness. “Do you think I’m still living?”
Lina didn’t answer. They both knew, now, despite the hidden papers, how few nights he had left. He groped at her body like a blind man, his fingertips memorizing her, cataloguing each curve and wrinkle of her weary skin. Lina was tired. Her limbs drooped under his. He moved his hands across her breasts, her hair, her face, until his finger landed in the deep dent above her lips, just below her nose. The impression of an angel. She exhaled beneath his finger, the steady breath of one lost to dreams.
“Lina,” he whispered. In the colorless darkness, he had remembered the question Chagall had once asked him, the one that tormented him still. “Do you think your daughter meant something?” he asked.
The question had tortured Der Nister for years. But Lina simply let out a puff of air in the dent below her nose.
“She meant everything,” she said. And then she fell asleep.
THEY CAME FOR Der Nister the following night.
Der Nister was surprised by how ordinary it was, how unceremoniously shabby. In his nightmares he had pictured armies of men breaking down his door in the middle of the night, waving flags and firing shots through the ceiling. But instead the door simply opened, early in the evening, without a knock, and two men in dark suits stepped into his home. One pulled out a piece of paper, looked at Der Nister, and began to read.
“Pinkhas Mendelevitch Kahanovitch,” he recited. “You are under arrest for treason under Article 64-A of the Soviet Criminal Code, for your role in the Zionist conspiracy to destroy the Soviet state.”
It was the usual bogus charge, the same one he had heard reported by the other vanished writers’ wives. Hearing it almost bored him. Lina had promised him that she would retain her dignity, but apparently she had forgotten. She let out a wail and doubled over with her back to the wall, convulsed by sobs.
Der Nister squeezed her hand before one of the agents grabbed him by the arm, pulling him away from her. But he felt strangely calm, calmer than he had ever felt before. For the first time in years, he had nothing to hide.
“I’m happy that you’ve come,” he said. “I had wondered what was taking you so long.”
The men looked startled. They glanced at each other quickly, until one of them grunted. “We need to collect everything here, all of your documents and manuscripts,” the first one said, reciting protocol. “Hand them over.”
Der Nister smiled. He glanced at Lina, who had looked up from her tears. “Forgive me, gentlemen,” he said. “That matter is no concern of yours. I didn’t write them for you, and my manuscripts remain in a safe place.”
One of the agents kicked him, and he fell to his knees. But the other stuck out a heel, catching Der Nister before his face hit the floor.
While Der Nister knelt on the floorboards, the second agent began to look around the bare room. He opened the closet and rooted through drawers, pitching the clothes onto the floor. Der Nister watched the first agent smile as Lina’s bras and underpants flew across the room, but didn’t allow himself to flinch. The second agent kicked at the floorboards, his feet tapping at them like a dancer’s before he pried up the hollow-sounding ones, where he found nothing but dust. He looked at the bed and the battered sofa, then opened his dark briefcase and took out a foot-long metal knife, which he inserted into the mattress. Der Nister watched from where he knelt on the floor as the man dissected the mattress piece by piece, leaving it in shreds, and then did the same to the sofa. For a moment he wondered where Lina would sleep. Then he realized the answer: on the floor, as a mourner. But she would survive, he knew as he saw her streaked face for the very last time. She had done this before.
While he was still in his own home, Lina filled the space, her wails crowding the air of the room as the two men chained his arms back and forced him out the door. But now, as the door clicked closed behind him, Der Nister looked up from the floor and saw Hodele standing in the stairwell, waiting for him.
She looked older than the last time he had seen her—closer to thirty-five, and not nearly as thin. She wore a bright red dress that he had never seen before, and her black hair rippled along her ears and neck. Her face was luminous. She stood just a few steps ahead of him, so close that he could have touched her, but his arms were pinned at his back. He had dragged his legs earlier, making the agents pull him from the room, but now he stood straight, transfixed, hurrying forward to reach her. But she kept stepping backward, still smiling at him, moving down the stairs always just a few steps beyond his reach. When they arrived at the street, her red dress and her black hair flew high behind her in the cold wind. But then the men threw him into the back of a small truck, and his head slammed into the metal floor as they bolted him inside.
The darkness was total, pooling around him like thick black ink. His bruised sixty-three-year-old body sank into the shadows, knocked unconscious. In the delirium that followed as the truck lurched into motion, Der Nister watched as Hodele unbolted the door. Moonlight poured into the darkness the way it did in his old housemate’s paintings, changing the colors of his hands and face until he glowed green and purple and blue. Hodele unfurled a long scroll covered with words, latching one end to the truck’s open door and then casting the rest of it up into the air until it caught hold of a cloud, stretching out before them. And then she took her father by the hand and flew with him, crossing the paper bridge he had built from the earth to the sky.
16
MY LAST DAY IN PARADISE
by Rosalie Ziskind
The days I spent in paradise were the most beautiful days of my life. Even today, my heart flutters a bit and tears come to my eyes when I remember that joyful time. I often close my eyes and relive those years which will never return. In those dreaming moments I even forget how my wings were shorn off before I left that other world, and I spread out my arms and try to fly. It’s only when I fall on the floor in pain that I remember that I only had wings in paradise. Why did I leave, you might ask, if I was so happy there? Well, I’ll tell you one thing: it wasn’t up to me.
On the day I found out that I was going to be removed from paradise, I was sitting under a paradise tree listening to the singing of the paradise canaries. If you think the singi
ng of those canaries is like the canaries on earth, you couldn’t be more wrong. I would tell you what their singing is like, but you can’t describe singing like that in human language. It was twilight. My teacher, an angel with heavyset dark gray wings, had disappeared for the day, and the students had all run off. Most went to play angelic games, but I went to sit under my tree, to listen to the canaries and to chat with the paradise butterflies. If you think those butterflies are like the butterflies on earth, you’re quite mistaken. The truth is, I can’t even describe what colors they were, because you don’t have colors like those outside of paradise.
As I lay there under the tree, I suddenly heard a familiar voice calling my name: “Sammy! Sammy!”
I looked up and saw my friend Pissant—or so he was called because he was so small, a little angel who fluttered over me with his tiny wings.
“What’s going on, Pissant?” I asked.
Pissant raised his wing and spoke to me from underneath it. “Sammy, it’s bad. I heard that you’re going to be born.”
My heart thumped in my chest. “What are you talking about, Pissant? Who told you that?”
Pissant told me that he was flying by the paradise bar when he spotted Simon, the biggest drunk of all the angels, and overheard him muttering to himself. “I saw that he was annoyed,” Pissant said. “He had just gotten the message that he has to bring you down to earth. It’s his job to smack you on the nose right before you’re born so that you forget all this—paradise, everything you’ve learned here, and even me! You won’t even remember your best friend Pissant!” And Pissant started to cry.
