The Survivors

by Alex Schulman

  Benjamin thinks of the deer, their remarkable moment there on the country road. How the deer turned around partway into the forest, as if he were waiting for him there, wanted him to come along. “Remember the moose calf when we were little?” Benjamin asks.

  “What?” Nils says.

  “The time Dad hit a moose,” Benjamin says. “And we went to look for it and found it in the forest. And Dad beat it to death with a tire iron.”

  The song is over; the car falls silent. Pierre looks out the window.

  Nils turns to Benjamin.

  “Dad hit a moose?” Nils asks.

  “What are you talking about, don’t you remember? Dad made us stand by the road and look up at the stars, because he didn’t want us to see. And then he cried the entire way home.”

  Nils looks down at his phone, bringing up window after window, browsing through menus. Benjamin stares at them in surprise, first at Nils, then through the rearview mirror at Pierre, who clears his throat and averts his eyes, looking at the road.

  “Don’t you remember?”

  They don’t respond.

  A car honks behind them. The light is green. Benjamin shifts into first and drives, the world grows dark, he squints to see the road. The sky opens up and an insane downpour engulfs the car, and soon after the rain comes the wind. Benjamin can see the signs of it in the sudden darkness, in the pennants tugging at their poles above hotel façades, and in a pedestrian leaning into the storm as he walks down the sidewalk. This is the sort of wind that might blow a city away, a storm that should have a human name.

  | 19 |

  The Birthday Present

  Mom lived on the busiest street downtown. Four lanes, a major route plowing through the high-rises, trucks stopped at the traffic light outside Mom’s window and the air brakes hissed. Diesel buses lined up at the stop, the draft from the subway entrance knocked at the trash bins. The escalator, always out of order, its status reported, according to the red note that was taped over the black rubber. Thousands of pieces of gum on the concrete slabs. The illegal cabs came one after the next, rattling off destination suggestions in broken Swedish. The sidewalk cafés all in a line, their awnings in constant turbulence from the wind kicked up by traffic. Benjamin waited for the Walk sign, looked up at Mom’s two windows on the second floor. He could see black helium balloons on the ceiling in there, their strings hanging in the air. Perhaps a glimpse of her in the kitchen window; a figure bending over the sink, maybe that was her. She looked like a stranger, someone who was pretending to live there, simulating kitchen chores.

  Dad hated downtown and would run errands there only to pick something up from the market halls, and he always came back upset and in a bad mood. The fact that Mom had moved here felt like a protest against him, or at least a dispute with the life she had lived with him. Just a week after the funeral, Mom had put the apartment up for sale and informed her two youngest sons that this might be a good time for them to find their own places to live. She wanted to move as soon as possible, as if to demonstrate that she had always been a prisoner of Dad’s choices, and now that she was free she could finally live the life she wanted. The old family furniture had been discarded or put in storage; it wouldn’t fit in her one-bedroom apartment. Dad’s library was gone, that whole inviting wall of books in his bedroom that he had spent so much time puttering with when he was alive. The first time Benjamin visited Mom’s new apartment he walked around in silence. He couldn’t look at what was left in the apartment, could only think of everything that wasn’t from the last one.

  Benjamin pressed the intercom button even though he knew how much it annoyed Mom that he hadn’t memorized the door code. After a moment it crackled to life and the door unlocked. He walked into the cold lighting, heading for the elevator. Mom had lived in the apartment for three years now, and sometimes she invited Benjamin over for a meal, the dinner full of polite tension, quiet conversation between bites and silence through clinking flatware, and by coffee time Mom had turned inward, taken out the newspaper and a pencil. She smoked cigarettes and made notes in the margins of the travel section, muttering destinations aloud: “Lanzarote, no. Tenerife, no. Sharm el-Sheikh…Morocco…never been there. Could be fun.” And then she made up her mind, left just a few days later, bought a single airline ticket, always alone, came back a week later, and Benjamin might tentatively inquire about what she’d done on these trips, and Mom would say, “No idea.” She lay in the sunshine, she said, and if she was lucky she met someone nice to talk to, but sometimes she was just alone. One time she came back and told him that she hadn’t spoken to a single person the whole trip. Benjamin would have thought this was an embarrassing thing to admit, a sign of failure or loneliness, but her dignity seemed intact. Almost cheerful, wound up by the realization: She hadn’t used her mouth to speak in seven days! And then she sat there with the newspaper again, tanned, looking for more trips to take. Benjamin always thought it was so pointed and strange that she never asked if he wanted to come on any of these trips, but she seemed to take it for granted—it was a given that she would always go alone. Their brief encounters, full of silence. Each time he visited Mom’s, he hurried home again to use the bathroom, his stomach always uneasy. He would sit on the toilet for a long time, in silence, letting the stomach cramps come.

  It was like they were always on their guard with each other, except for when they were drinking. Maybe that was the only time, those evenings when they went to one of the sidewalk cafés down on the street and had a beer together, that they could relax in each other’s company. They would have an appetizer and drink until they were drunk. When the restaurant closed they would weave across the street and sit down at the pub. There they drank harder, with greater focus. They sat among the young people, students who were drawn in by the cheap beer and lax ID enforcement. Loud music, and Mom’s eyes watery and her voice raspier, she got drastic and a little careless, firing off racial slurs, aware of the lazy amusement of it. And Benjamin followed her, he could play this role too, they had their most relaxed conversations in the bar, exchanging witty but empty words and gossip, and drank and drank until they grew thick skin and stopped feeling the cold draft from the door. At no point, not even when she was drunk, did Mom touch upon her grief, and she never asked about Benjamin’s. Except for one single time, on one of those nights when they drank particularly hard and didn’t get home until two in the morning—Benjamin was sitting on the toilet, emptying his anxious belly, when he got a text from Mom.

  “I’m not sure I want to be here anymore,” she wrote.

  “Be where?” Benjamin asked.

  She didn’t reply, and afterward Benjamin lay in bed trying to understand, seeing images of what that might entail.

  Now Benjamin rang the doorbell, heard the click of heels on the floor, which stopped as she reached the welcome mat and the door opened.

  “Hi, sweetie,” said Mom, and they hugged. He smelled Mom’s air freshener, which she’d sprayed throughout the apartment to get rid of the smoke smell. The scent of tropical fruit and cigarettes. The lights were out in the apartment, lit candles everywhere. He hung up his coat and peered in. A few other guests. A late-middle-aged woman dripping with jewelry, heavy earrings that pulled her earlobes toward the floor, an old work friend of Mom’s, as far as Benjamin knew. And a woman in stocking feet, dressed in black, the neighbor from the third floor, she explained. In a row on the sofa sat a group of people who didn’t resemble one another but clearly belonged together. Benjamin introduced himself, and they told him they were members of Mom’s salsa-dancing group. They eyed him with interest, smiling, responsive to him, watching him, and Benjamin took some pleasure in that, maybe because they knew who he was—Mom had told them about him. She’d said very little about her dancing. Benjamin recalled that she’d received a flyer in the mail last Christmas about a salsa group that was looking for new members. She had gone to check it out, but Ben
jamin hadn’t known she’d kept going. Mom sat down on the sofa, refilled her salsa friends’ wineglasses. Benjamin spotted Pierre by the window and went to stand beside him.

  “People aren’t exactly pouring in,” Pierre whispered.

  “It’s an open house,” Benjamin said. “We have no idea how many people have already been here.”

  “True. And the gift table is practically groaning.” Benjamin looked over at the three presents. He laughed.

  “How did it go with our present?” Benjamin asked.

  “Everything’s on track—Nils will be here with it any second.”

  Mom had made canapés with salmon and soft cheese; they were on a platter on the dining table, along with seafood salad croustades. A few bottles of bubbly on a tray along with champagne glasses. Benjamin took in the room. Only now, with strangers inside it, could Benjamin see the apartment as an outsider. The Jewish authors in the small bookcase. A photograph of a Nobel laureate author on the wall. An attempt at academic respectability, one Benjamin recognized from his childhood. The brothers had received an upper-class upbringing that had somehow occurred below the poverty line. Raised like nobility, taught always to hold their heads high, always to say grace before a meal and shake hands with Mom and Dad before leaving the table. But there had been no money, or: very little of the money had been invested in the children. And the academic upbringing had been undertaken halfheartedly; it began with great to-do but was never completed. The children were never as well educated as their parents, and that gave rise to funny stories, recurring anecdotes about how the children didn’t understand the wonders that surrounded them. Mom’s favorite: the times she’d prepared crudités, a French appetizer that consisted of vegetables with dipping sauces, and the children thought she had made “cruddy tea.” This was in the early years, when the kids were quite small, and when Mom and Dad still had energy and pep. When the project that was their family still had momentum. But later on most of that vanished. Things stopped working. The frequency of their dinners gradually slowed, without anyone noticing, and once they stopped completely no one really thought about it. Each evening at six the children wandered into the kitchen and made themselves sandwiches and ate them silently with chocolate milk. The only thing that survived was Sunday dinners, when Mom made an effort, standing in the kitchen dripping soy sauce into the cream sauce until it reached the right shade. Dinners with lots of wine, but most of the time the only noticeable difference was that Mom and Dad grew ponderous and quiet, turned inward. Sometimes when they were done eating, Mom would suddenly roar. “Excuse me!” she’d shout as the brothers set their drinking glasses on their empty plates and stood up from the dinner table. “Do we leave the table without thanking the cook?” And the confused children had to walk up to her, one after the next, shake her hand and bow, like a relic of a time they hardly remembered.

  A middle-aged woman extricated herself from the sofa and clinked two champagne glasses together. She said that while she certainly couldn’t speak for the salsa group in an official capacity, she was speaking for all of them when she said she truly enjoyed Mom’s presence on Thursdays. They weren’t a big group, nor were they world champions of Latin dance—but they appreciated one another’s company, and during the past year they’d become quite a tight gang. They were so glad for the chance to come over to Mom’s and celebrate her fiftieth birthday, and they had a small gift from the group, she said as she fumbled for the bag she’d placed at the foot of the sofa. Because now you’re a real salserita, she said, emphasizing each vowel, and this is from all of us, including Larsa and Yamel, who, sadly, couldn’t be here to celebrate with us. The woman handed over a small package and Mom’s eyes sparkled as she said “Oh, my” and tore open the paper to reveal a glittery black skirt, which she immediately held up to her waist.

  “I’ve had my eye on something like this for so long,” Mom cried, doing a little pirouette to show it off to the room.

  “And you know what this means, don’t you?” said the woman. “We want to see a little dance, don’t we?”

  Immediate chattering enthusiasm, loud protests from Mom, cries and hoots from the sofa, and after a moment she gave in, disappeared into the bedroom to change. Amid murmurs from the sofa, Pierre turned to the window, digging through his pockets for his cigarettes. Benjamin gazed at the faces of the expectant dance friends, those strange people who had grown so close to Mom, and he thought maybe he had been wrong. He’d thought Mom had stopped living, but maybe she’d just stopped living with him, with her family.

  Cheers erupted as Mom came out in her new skirt, which had a low waist and a high slit. A small gap of skin between the skirt and her tight blouse, the white band of her belly. Benjamin saw the marks on her abdomen, the scars from her c-sections. He remembered when he was little, lying on the sofa or the bed with Mom, and she would show him the little notches just below her belly button. “That one’s Nils,” she said, pointing at one scar. “And there’s Pierre. And that small one, that’s you.”

  Benjamin gently touched the little pockets on Mom’s belly with the tip of his finger, felt her warm skin.

  Mom went over to the stereo in the bookcase, switched one CD for another, the living room perfectly silent now. The music started, and Benjamin had the sense that a few too many instruments were playing at once, like a web of different rhythms trying to settle into one another. Mom went to the big area rug in the middle of the living room, stopped at the dining table, drank from a glass of wine, and took up her starting position: both hands over her head, as if she were adjusting a bun. And then she performed the first steps to a few happy cries from her friends on the sofa. She fell into character, became a different person. She lifted her knees, stepping back and forth, her hands stretched down along her sides, and then she began to gyrate, her upper body still and her waist moving as if she were on a horse, a movement that intensified as she turned, and it took him a moment to notice it in the dim lighting, but her eyes were closed. At first he thought she was dancing as if for a large audience, that she was imagining a dance floor bathed in spotlights from all directions, a black sea of onlookers surrounding her, but he soon realized it was the other way around. She was dancing as if no one else were in the room, like when she was a little girl, in her childhood bedroom, on the bed, making these motions for herself, in her absolute solitude, and that was why she was so free in this moment, because nothing had happened yet. Mom opened her eyes, looked at Benjamin and put a hand out toward him, and she pulled him onto the dance floor. He was struck by embarrassment, tried to resist, but Mom was determined. Her bent knees, her white thighs flashing from underneath the skirt. She closed her eyes, dancing alone again, within herself, and Benjamin stopped moving in rhythm, stood right in front of his mother and watched her move, dreamlike, and suddenly Mom looked up at him, grabbed his hand, and pulled him into her arms. He hadn’t been so close to her for many years, not since he was a child. To feel her embrace, that there was a thin thread between them that hadn’t broken, a longing for her that had never faded. He smelled her scent, felt her breath at his ear. There he stood, beside his mother again. He didn’t want to let go.

  Decisively, firmly, Mom pushed him away and retreated back into herself. The song ended and the room applauded, Mom gesturing at Benjamin as if to recognize his contribution as well. She sat down on the sofa, drained, happy, allowed someone to hand her a glass.

  Pierre showed him a text, from Nils: “Outside.” Benjamin and Pierre went out. There he was, at the door, in his big down jacket, with a small kitten in his arms.

  “Did you bring the bow?” Nils asked.

  Pierre pulled a pink silk ribbon from his back pocket, and the kitten put up a fight, its legs went stiff and it showed its claws, as Pierre tied it up like a package. The brothers had gotten together the week before, at a cat rescue outside the city, and wandered from cage to cage until they fell for this cream-colored little
animal. When Benjamin saw the kitten in Nils’s arms there in the hall, it looked smaller than he remembered, so small that it couldn’t be real, because surely such tiny cats didn’t exist. Pierre tied the bow. “Wait here, I’m going to say a few words,” Pierre said to Nils.

  Benjamin and Pierre went inside, stood at the entrance to the living room. Pierre cleared his throat, and when no one heard him he tried again, louder, coughing noisily and clearing his sinuses. The conversation on the sofa stopped and all eyes turned to Pierre.

  “What do you give the woman who has everything?” he cried. “My brothers and I have been giving a lot of thought to that question, leading up to this day. After all, we know she doesn’t want any goddamn things!”

  Someone on the sofa chuckled. Mom’s back was ramrod straight; she was on alert.

  “So we thought, Forget that. We won’t give her any things. We’ll give her something of actual value.”

  He called out to Nils, who emerged from the dark hallway and entered the living room with the kitten in his arms. A murmur from the sofa, but Mom didn’t understand, didn’t know what she was looking at. Nils went up to Mom and handed her the animal, placing it gently in her lap.

  “So cute I could just die!” said one of the guests.

  Mom looked at the kitten. She laughed, then uttered a shrill sound. “You’re all nuts!” she cried. “Is this for me?”

  The brothers nodded.

  “At first we wanted to get you a dog,” said Pierre. “But then we thought a cat might be easier, in the city. And then we found her, and we just felt like…” He went over to the cat and held a finger to her nose. “We felt like she was yours.”

  “Oh my God,” Mom mumbled, letting her hand rest gently on the kitten’s head. She placed it on her bare belly. “She’s wonderful.”

  It seemed to have gone well. That wasn’t always the case. Mom was often annoyed when she had a birthday, didn’t want any attention. She didn’t feel particularly loved, she said, and didn’t want people to put on an act once a year. But the family tried, with Dad the driving force but always clumsy in his attempts to make Mom happy. One time Dad gave Mom a quit-smoking course, and she was so insulted that she put an end to the festivities and went to bed. Benjamin remembers the time Dad helped him buy a toiletry case for Mom, and when she opened it she immediately suspected that it wasn’t Benjamin, but Dad, who had paid for it, and she confronted Benjamin. But this seemed to have worked. Mom was entranced, her head bent toward the cat, stroking her fur gently.