The Family Markowitz

by Allegra Goodman

  “Oh, right, the Phil’s Harmonic with what’s-his-face.”

  “With Phil!”

  “What a terrible name for a band. What’s his last name?”

  “Katz.”

  “Well, why didn’t he do something with Katz? The Katzenjammer Kids or something.”

  “I thought we’d pick up a book for her tomorrow,” Sarah says.

  “All right.” He sighs. “I’m just exhausted, and I’ve still got to prepare my lecture. But you know,” he says as he gets up from the table, “I had a pretty high-level discussion with that woman from N.P.R. I formulated some things on the phone that I had never really articulated in quite that way before. This sort of interview situation really—it really gets the thought processes rolling.”

  “Well, good,” Sarah says. “And hereby I find it most timely for you to unload the dishwasher.”

  —

  Ed stays up until almost midnight preparing his lecture, and Sarah is sleeping by the time he gets to bed. He usually tosses and turns, but tonight he falls asleep almost at once, and he begins to dream. He is working in an Islamic scholar’s garden, kneeling at a low desk. The arched windows are surrounded with intricate carvings, the garden itself exquisitely planted with flowers surrounding a fountain tiled in blue, purple, and green. The surface of his desk is like silk. However, on top of the desk he finds his familiar lecture notes, and he is sitting in Sarah’s orthopedic chair with the knee rest, which is supposed to take the weight off your back.

  He gets out of the chair with some difficulty and walks into a larger courtyard planted entirely with agapanthus in different shades of purple and lavender. There is a larger fountain here, the mosaic at the bottom flecked with gold. As he walks, he passes from one garden into another, each more splendid than the last. He is alone, except for a pair of peacocks who swish the gravel as they walk. The day passes, and he walks through a hundred gardens. He is lost and cannot find his way out. Then, to his horror, night falls. A velvet curtain literally covers the sky, the soft fabric embroidered with pearls.

  At this point he stirs and realizes that Sarah has thrown the comforter over his head. He wrestles with it and heaves it onto the floor. When he settles down again, he is still in the maze of gardens. However, he has found the registration table for the Celebration Congress. The other participants are milling around with drinks, and they include Liz and Arnie Passachoff with their daughter, the bat mitzvah girl. He looks for his name tag and finds that it is printed in gold in both Persian and English and reads: “His gracious Edward Markowitz, Table 15.”

  Then he realizes that he has left his lecture notes in the scholar’s garden. Of course, he is not foolish enough to go back for them. He walks up to the conference chairman, who is sitting behind the registration table and wears black-rimmed glasses. “I want to give my lecture extemporaneously,” he says.

  “Everything will be as you desire,” the chairman tells him. “Please accept your copy of the conference proceedings.” He then gives Ed a book bound in gold cloth. Ed sees that it is an exhibition catalog, and that each plate depicts a miniature painting of one of the gardens he has walked through. There is the fountain flecked with gold. There is the courtyard of agapanthus. He reads in the catalog notes:

  What can we say when we look at this consummate craftsmanship? These gemlike colors? We are confounded by the miniaturist’s artistry: he takes us into the garden itself, as if we were walking along its paths or listening to the play of a living fountain. This illumination, merely three inches high, is one of the loveliest landscapes on the face of God’s earth.

  It’s Henry, Ed realizes. It’s his brother, Henry, in England, who put together this conference and wrote these notes. Only Henry habitually refers to “the face of God’s earth,” as if the world were a grandfather clock. He of the exquisite taste and the musty collections. Who has been nagging Ed for years to write a book about Islamic culture, despite the fact that, as Henry knows perfectly well, Ed’s area is politics and modern history. It was his brother who arranged this invitation, not to modern Iran but to Persia.

  Ed wakes up shivering. He does not remember any of the dream except for the thought that his brother has orchestrated the conference invitation. Could it be? Has Henry, living as he does on the fringes of academic Oxford, met someone at the Oriental Institute and given him Ed’s name? Ed gets out of bed and washes his face. Henry probably had nothing to do with the letter from Iran. It was just that the letter reminded him of his brother. It was mannered; it was antique. Henry loves that sort of thing. He has always chosen the Old World, just as Ed has chosen the New. He likes to think of it that way, although, in fact, Henry is a businessman and it is Ed who works as a scholar. He goes downstairs to breakfast. He doesn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about his brother. Or at least he tries not to. Henry’s aesthetic transports exhaust him. The letter is still lying on the kitchen table where Sarah left it, and Ed folds it up and puts it on the stack of bills in the hall. He checks and sees that his lecture notes are in his briefcase where he left them.

  After work that day, Sarah picks him up and insists that they go to the campus bookstore to get the present for Katie Passachoff. She reminds him: “You said tomorrow is out, and Friday you have that radio thing.”

  “Is it really necessary for both of us to get this present?”

  “I’m tired of buying gifts and getting criticized later,” she says.

  “All I said was I thought it would be more appropriate to get a Jewish book for this kind of event.” The two of them have been going to a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs in the past few months. Many of their friends are on their second set of children, and now Ed and Sarah have to go through these milestones again.

  They go to the Judaica section of the bookstore and find several Haggadahs, The Big Book of Jewish Humor, and a coffee-table book called Great Jews in Music. “I was thinking more of a novel,” Sarah says.

  “All right, look through fiction. Find a few possibilities.” Ed strides off and starts pulling books off the shelves. He prides himself on getting in and out of a store quickly. After a few minutes he has three books. “Okay, pick one of these,” he says. “We’ve got Goodbye, Columbus—”

  She shakes her head.

  “This is a classic coming-of-age story!”

  “No. I don’t think it’s the right thing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ed, for you it’s a coming-of-age story. She’s a girl, and she’s not living in the fifties.”

  “Well, excuse me!” Ed says. “Okay, we have the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “What?”

  “Singer is not for a twelve-year-old.”

  “This is a nice hardback book,” Ed protests.

  “He’s kinky,” says Sarah.

  “He’s a great writer!”

  “He’s obsessed with defloration! That is not an appropriate gift.”

  “Fine. Then we’ve got The Adventures of Augie March. Now this is a great book.”

  “It’s too hard for a twelve-year-old.”

  “Okay, either it’s too hard or it’s too kinky. So what do you have? Oh, very original. The Diary of Anne Frank. And what’s this? I thought we said Jewish books. Little Women? Sarah! You’re accusing me of living in the past. Talk about the fifties. You’re dealing with the 1850s here.”

  “I was thinking about her age level,” Sarah says.

  “I thought we were looking for a great Jewish novel. I find classic Jewish literature and I get vetoed. Then you come up with Little Women?” He looks at her standing there with her big purse. He realizes that this is what she must have been reading when she was twelve, and he thinks it’s sweet. “Let’s try again,” he says, and they turn back to the shelves.

  “Oh—Chaim Grade,” she exclaims. “He’s wonderful. My Mother’s Sabbath Days.”

  “God, no,” Ed says.

  “Too sad?”

 
“It’s only the saddest thing I’ve ever read. I couldn’t even finish it. Tell me something, why do we have to get her a Holocaust book?”

  “Who said anything about the Holocaust?”

  “Everything you come up with is a Holocaust book. You’re homing in on them.”

  Sarah looks up. “I am not! I’m just looking for the Jewish ones.”

  They spend half an hour combing the shelves and arguing. In the end, they buy The Diary of Anne Frank and Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.

  —

  When they get home and drop their bags on the kitchen table, Ed says, “I’m absolutely sure Henry got those people to invite me to Iran.”

  “Who does he know in Iran?” Sarah asks.

  “He knows everyone! He’s a professional—”

  “Raconteur?”

  “Yenta. He probably met someone in an antique store, or at the Ashmolean, or the Radcliffe Camera, or at some society or other. He’s a member of everything. And he got talking to some kind of Iranian and he volunteered me to give a paper. He told them all about me and my work, and now I’m in their records.”

  “In Iran?”

  “Sure, they’re reading up on me over there.” Ed paces around the kitchen.

  Sarah waves this away and makes herself a pot of coffee.

  “How much do you want to bet he wangled this somehow?”

  “You’re going to call and ask him?”

  “No, I’m not going to call him.”

  “Why not?” Sarah asks.

  “Because whenever I call he gets hysterical because he thinks something has happened to Ma.”

  “Well, Ed, with you it’s a reasonable assumption.”

  “So he could call me once in a while.”

  This conversation plays through his mind that night as he is falling asleep, and he dreams about his brother. He is in Henry’s apartment in Oxford with its dark upholstery and clutter of books. “Henry,” Ed says, “you gave my name to the Persians, and now they are sending for me.”

  “Dear Edward,” Henry says. “How marvelous!” He is standing in a scarlet-and-green smoking jacket, with matching quilted slippers and a fez on his head, its gold tassel hanging down. “Did they send you letters? It’s like something from Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes. Did I ever show you my edition? It’s exquisite. Look at this engraving, with the Persians arriving at the French court, gazing at those Parisian clothes and those powdered headdresses. Here is one of them sitting at the table with her quill and her little travel desk, writing a letter back to Persia. This is the original eighteenth-century binding. Do you know how much this cost? Don’t even ask.”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  Henry looks disappointed. “When are you leaving?”

  “I’m not going to Persia,” Ed tells him.

  “But they’re expecting you!”

  “Don’t you understand that it’s dangerous?” Ed demands. “We’re talking about a theocracy governed by Islamic absolutists!”

  “But, Edward, how many people have this kind of opportunity? And think of the book you could write. Not just a book about them, but a book to them: Lettres Persanes in reverse, where you would be the exotic!”

  “What do you think I am, an anthropologist?” Ed demands. “If anyone is going to be exotic, that would have to be you.”

  Henry reddens. “But I thought you would enjoy Persia. I wasn’t going to say anything about it, but I went to a lot of trouble arranging that invitation. It was going to be a surprise for your birthday. Susan and I gave it a great deal of thought. We had planned to get you the new OED on disk, but I began to think about it—taking all that rich language and condensing it on that little disk like synthesized music. I thought since you wrote about understanding the Other, you could write your next book on becoming the Other.”

  “I’m not interested in becoming the Other,” Ed says. “I’ll leave that to you and your expatriate friends.”

  Henry pours Ed a cup of tea. “Edward, please don’t be upset. I thought if you could go over there and sit down with them, then you could work out our problems, because you understand the Arab mind.”

  “I don’t even understand you,” Ed tells him. “I have no idea what’s going on in the Arab mind.”

  “Isn’t that what you should be finding out?”

  “Not in person,” Ed mumbles. “What is this, the hundredth time I’m telling you? Iranians are not Arabs; they’re Persians.”

  He walks out of the room, and finds himself in his mother’s apartment in Venice, California. Rose also pours him a cup of tea, and she offers him chocolate-covered chocolate Girl Scout cookies. “They came to the door, so I had to buy them,” she says. “Have some, dear. But I want to tell you something about the Persians. They are no friends of Israel. Esther was a beautiful girl, and she did the best she could, but it was a mixed marriage. No one talks about King Ahasuerus converting. I think he did not. I got you a couple of things for the trip. Wilton frozen dinners. Very expensive, so eat them. And sucking candy for the plane. And also I clipped William Safire for you from the Times, about how the international terrorists are all operating out of New York because we have such civil liberties.”

  “Yeah, I saw that one already,” Ed says.

  “And what did you think?” Rose asks. “The Arab mujahideen from Lebanon are getting Egyptian passports in the Sudan and Iranian meshugoyim are infiltrating Paramus and Oklahoma City.”

  “Alarmist, as usual.”

  “He’s a beautiful writer,” Rose says, looking over the clipping. “I’d like to see you someday writing a column like that. Especially on Sundays, when he writes about the English language. It’s just beautiful.” Ed wakes with a start. The dream flashes before him and then vanishes.

  —

  Ed drives to the studio for the Talk of the Times interview. Jill Bordles ushers him in and introduces him to the other guest, Georges Zaghlul, a Lebanese Christian Ed has met several times before. The two of them sit on either side of the moderator, Bob Kennedy. At exactly three o’clock, Kennedy announces to the radio audience: “Hello, it’s foreign-affairs Friday on Talk of the Times. We’ll be discussing the quagmire in the Middle East today, and we’ll focus on what Israel, the Arab states, and the U.S. can do to get the peace process rolling. We have with us today Professor Edward Markowitz from Georgetown University, a noted expert on terrorism and past fellow at the Oxford Center for Peace. And Georges Zaghlul, of the Committee for Peace and Justice in the Middle East. Welcome. Professor Markowitz, let’s start with you. Just where do you see us in the process today? And how do you think the bombing here, the shootings and stabbings in Israel, the Muslim militants in Egypt, are going to impact whatever progress we have made so far?”

  “Well, Bob, I’m an optimist,” Ed says. “I see a move toward resolution and moderation on all sides. We’ve had the Israelis sitting down with their neighbors—”

  “You’re referring to the peace talks begun in the last administration,” Bob says.

  “Yes. And we have a climate in Israel where it’s no longer sacrilegious to consider land for peace—”

  “You mean the idea of Israel giving up land for peace,” Bob glosses for the audience.

  “That’s right.” Ed is starting to get annoyed by these interruptions.

  “But what about the increase in terrorist activity? You’re an expert on terrorism; does it concern you?”

  “Well,” Ed says, “terrorism is a complex phenomenon with many facets—”

  “How about you, Georges Zaghlul?” Bob asks. “Do you see a distancing of the Islamic world from some of the tactics of these terrorists?”

  “Certainly,” Zaghlul replies. “Islam is a religion of peace and historically one of moderation and tolerance for minorities. But when we consider terrorism, we have to look beyond the headlines to the causes behind it. When young boys throwing stones are gunned down with automatic weapons, the situation becomes inflammatory.”

  “We have
a long line of callers,” Bob says. “Let’s go to Carol in San Jose. Hello, you’re on Talk of the Times.”

  “Hi, Bob. I love your show,” says Carol.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  “This is a question for Professor Markowitz,” Carol continues. “During the Gulf War there was a travel advisory that suggested that we not fly unless it was necessary. I’ve been hearing a lot about airport security, and I was wondering if they are still advising people not to fly.”

  Ed blinks. “Not that I know of,” he says. “I don’t really follow airport security.”

  “All right, thanks for calling, Carol,” says Bob. “Let’s go to Joyce in Silver Spring.”

  “Hi. This is a question for both guests,” says Joyce. “When you’re talking about the Islamic world, I wanted to know—have either of you seen the movie Not Without My Daughter? It was based on the autobiography of an American woman who is trying to get her daughter out of Iran?”

  “Yes, actually, I have,” Ed says.

  “I just wanted to know—is it really like that for women in the Arab world?”

  “Of course, Iranians are not Arabs,” Ed says.

  Joyce qualifies herself. “I guess I mean the Muslim world.”

  “Well, I can say this,” Ed tells her. “I thought the movie accurately showed the lack of freedom for women. There were a few scenes, of course, that must have been fictionalized. The scene where the woman gets in touch with an underground escape movement at the bazaar—obviously the details there were changed to protect the actual people who helped her.”

  “Oh, no, that wasn’t fictionalized,” Joyce says. “That was in the book.”

  At which point Bob Kennedy booms out, “Hasan in Oklahoma City, you’re on the air.”

  “Hello, this is Hasan. I am listening to the two guests, and I want to know who they represent when they talk about moving to moderation. These men are both American people hired by Israel in a propaganda campaign—”

  “Is this a question or a comment?” Bob Kennedy breaks in.

  “First a comment, then a question.”

  “Well, all right. Let’s keep it brief.”