Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  “I guess you could say that I love you too, against the odds. I believe I do, yes,” he said, as if he was checking internally to make sure.

  I felt my stomach sinking. “What are we going to do? This can’t possibly work out.”

  “I’m coming to visit you in September,” he said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

  “Okay,” I whispered. “I have to get on the plane now.”

  “Call me when you get home.”

  “I will.”

  I settled into my seat and peered out the window, wondering at my ability to stir up so much movement every time I was abroad, and how it would feel to return to the life in America that awaited me, with its contrasting energy of waiting and watching.

  * * *

  • • •

  But first Isaac and I flew to California to spend the rest of our summer vacation in milder climates, and to celebrate the identical birthday Justine and I shared. I was turning twenty-seven years old. I spent the day scared and anxious. Twenty-seven! It had been five years since I’d left, since the first birthday when I had started the ritual of measuring my progress. I had acknowledged that the transition years would be difficult. I had allowed myself a few miserable years; I had not been naïve about what to expect. And I found myself at my birthday each year thereafter assessing how far I’d come, internally and externally, from the last. As my external world had shaped itself so exquisitely from year to year, I lamented my slow-to-catch-up internal self, which still felt displaced and depersonalized.

  I was twenty-seven. Only a few years ago I had met Justine for the first time and pondered a distant future; now I had built the life that I thought would have brought me security and peace of mind. Yet if there was something I had to face about this birthday in order to move on, it was this: there was nothing I could point to, externally, that would ever bring this transition period to a close and propel me into the future, which I had sacrificed everything to achieve. What had to happen on this birthday was an end to the ritual of measuring, of being hard on myself, of giving myself a time frame in which to achieve the impossible. I was right, then, when I thought I needed to build a home, but I had found the wrong place to build it: outside myself.

  I knew then that I would not be charting my path anymore. It wasn’t a race or a contest. I would need to learn to be okay with a little uncertainty in my life, a few blurry edges around my personality.

  Justine, Isaac, and I drove down into the wilderness of the peninsula en route to Santa Cruz to take Isaac to the beach. On the way there, we stopped on a cliff to take a closer look at a slender strip of fog that remained out on the ocean, the rest having burned away. Bent at one end, like a refracted beam of light, it was reflected in the water as a silvery slash amid the brilliant blue. Two enormous red-tailed hawks cried out above us, and I looked up to see them flying in a circle around a nearly full moon. My phone rang. It was Isaac’s dad.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you okay? Is Isaac okay?”

  “Yes, of course. Why do you ask?”

  “Someone started a rumor that you committed suicide. I freaked out.”

  “That’s ridiculous. No, we’re fine. We’re on our way to the beach.”

  It wasn’t until I ended the call that I noticed all the messages on my phone. I checked in on social media and saw that indeed the rumor was thriving. On Facebook, my friends were tagging me in posts that read “Homicide or suicide?” or “Is it really that hard to leave?”

  I tweeted a photo of Isaac and myself. “We’re having fun at the beach! Sorry to dispel the rumors.”

  As I put my phone away and took a last look at the splendid, glittering ocean, I reflected on the irony. Why would anyone believe I could be at the moment of despair now, when I had put those dreadful years of wandering behind me, when my life had just started to feel real? I had left, and it had been worth it; that much was clear just by watching Isaac frolic on the beach. But something else had happened to me this summer, some great progress toward a self. I had been imbued with a story; I was no longer a ghost, threatened with obliteration.

  * * *

  —

  In September, Markus and his mother came to visit. Isaac had already started second grade, and the leaves had started to curl by the time they arrived. The weather was glorious, with clear blue skies that showcased clean, clear sunsets, like a ball dropping on New Year’s Eve. We rowed across the deserted lake in the evening, the summer crowds having returned to the city after Labor Day, and crunched leaves underfoot as we explored picturesque New England towns.

  I drove them into Manhattan one day, just to show Markus’s mother the city. It was her first visit to the United States, and her first time traveling without her husband.

  We walked through Central Park, tasted gelato in the shadow of the Flatiron Building, and narrowly avoided a collision with a truck driver in the East Village. We drove over the Williamsburg Bridge and I offered to drive them through my old community. It was Sukkoth, so the streets would be dead, but the Hasids would be out in full regalia. I pointed out the little wooden huts in people’s front yards, on their porches and fire escapes; the holiday was based on the ancient biblical celebration of the harvest, when people slept outside in makeshift huts to watch their crops.

  Ada gazed out the window, transfixed. I drove past the double brownstone I had grown up in. It looked silent and implacable, its window blinds tightly drawn, its heavy metal doors indifferent. In the next house, an old woman sat under the shade of her doorway and stared at me as I drove by. I bent my head to avoid being recognized. At the red light, we paused, and across the street a family of Hasidic Jews crowded on the corner, young girls cooing at their nieces and nephews in strollers, a young couple standing shyly, removed from each other by the mandatory four feet.

  “It’s impossible for me to imagine you here,” Markus said. “I look at you, and I look at them, and I just can’t make the connection.”

  I thought, I can’t either at this point. It doesn’t feel like my past, not when I look at it up close. My life is too different now to accommodate that story. But if this isn’t my past, then what is?

  I drove down Kent Avenue and we parked at the waterfront. We walked down toward the little beach, from which you could see the entire Manhattan skyline.

  We posed for a picture against the splendid, glittering backdrop. Ada held the bulky camera awkwardly, trying to figure out how to use it, and I froze my smile in patient expectation. But as the flash finally went off, Markus leaned in suddenly to kiss me on the mouth. Later, over a seafood dinner in an outdoor beer garden, I looked at the photo on the camera’s small screen and thought it odd that the surprise and unease I had felt in that moment weren’t at all apparent in the image.

  At night we rolled toward the center of the bed, latching on to each other as if to avoid falling. He, who had never been able to sleep in the same bed with someone, and I, who had lain awake on those nights I spent with Erik, the weight of his arm heavy on my chest.

  “It’s crazy how well we fit together,” he whispered. Indeed, I felt like an oddly shaped key that had finally found the right lock.

  I took them to the local farmers’ market on Saturday.

  “How can this be?” he said as we drove past the exquisite views I had already become accustomed to. “It’s exactly like the postcards! They don’t even have to Photoshop the images.”

  His mother was positively gleeful when we arrived at the market. A bluegrass band strummed in the gazebo, and shoppers milled about in the autumn sunshine. “Just like in the movies,” she whispered, enthralled.

  We ran into various people I knew around town, and so I introduced them. There were my friends Dan and Debbie, Jewish lawyers, and Anita and Harvey, more Jewish lawyers from New York City. When we returned to the car, loaded up with fresh tomatoes and cheese and jam, Ada’s face had suddenly gone
white, and she appeared tired and withdrawn.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her in German, but I couldn’t quite make out her mumbled reply. I nudged Markus. “Ask her what’s going on,” I whispered.

  He turned to his mother. They had a rapid exchange in German.

  “Ah, she’s never met any Jews in real life before,” he said to me. “She’s feeling a bit overwhelmed—actually she feels guilty.” His tone was, as usual, neutral, almost amused.

  “Guilty? Why would she feel guilty?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Because of what her father did. It’s her first time encountering the actual people who were persecuted by him. I think it just hit her.”

  “But I’m Jewish! She wasn’t traumatized when she met me.”

  “True. But I think she’s just starting to process what it means, you know. She never dealt with it before because it didn’t come up.”

  Later, in my living room, she told us about her memories of her father, about how he had beaten her older brother when he came home talking of a Holocaust film his teacher had shown him. Ada’s father had then visited the teacher in his home and threatened him with violence if he ever showed such filth in his classroom.

  “I don’t care about what your parents did,” I said. “I want to live in the present. I want my life to be filled with love and understanding and forgiveness. I don’t want to get stuck with those old grudges and prejudices like the way I grew up. I want to get past it.”

  “Yes, but it’s easier for you, perhaps,” she said. “Only the forgiving can speak this way. The guilty cannot simply say that they want to get past it.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I drove them both back to the airport that evening, feeling numb. I couldn’t imagine how I’d feel once Markus was gone. At the drop-off point, Markus looked at me and said, “It’s like going skydiving. You know you have a parachute strapped to your back, but it still feels like falling to your death. That’s what it feels like to be leaving you right now.” He laughed weakly, his eyes tired. I saw in his face the same exhaustion I had felt earlier. The feeling was too strong, too intense—there was no way he wasn’t feeling knocked off his balance like I was.

  “We’ll be fine,” I said briskly. “The parachute will open. We’ll go back to our routines.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.” He watched me drive off from the curb, holding his backpack with both hands. In the rearview mirror, I glanced back at his forlorn face, just once.

  I thought about distance then, about my pattern of forming attachments to people who lived farther and farther away, which had formed itself over the last few years. I wondered if it was as simple as perpetuating my own alienation, or if somehow I understood that by moving the goalpost ever farther, I was somehow galvanizing myself to travel as far from my roots as possible.

  In my life, I had expended so much effort to put distance between myself and the place I had come from, and yet there still seemed to be this chasm lying ahead of me, reminding me how far I truly had to go.

  These people that had come from far away to breathe newness into my life, they moved me. It was as if I was a playing piece on some enormous chessboard, inching along to victory in the grip of some shrewd mastermind intent on taking the long view. The strategy had seemed unfathomable at times, but I could not deny that I was still on the board, advancing in the direction of some end goal. Though what awaited me on the other side I could not guess, what a marvelous thrill it was, at times—contemplating that unknown shore toward which my inner compass invariably strained.

  * * *

  • • •

  Perhaps in search of this forward movement, I saw Markus again in November. This time I flew to Frankfurt during my free portion of the Thanksgiving break, and he picked me up from the airport. This time I put aside the pressures we had imposed upon ourselves during the summer and its aftermath; my journey was on pause and I was leaning into the day-to-day of life. We decided to drive to Paris for the weekend, falling back into the rhythm of road trips that had defined our relationship from the beginning. As we approached the German-French border, we saw a large white van on the side of the road, with a dark-skinned family piled outside it. Police were going through the inside of the vehicle. We slowed as we approached the officer guarding the road; Markus rolled down his window and the officer bent down to look inside the car, his gaze sweeping over myself and Markus. “Where to?” he asked.

  “Paris,” Markus said with a smile.

  The officer looked over at me again and smirked. “Well then, have fun, you two lovers,” he said in colloquial German, and rapped the palm of his hand on the top of our car to signal that we could go. We cruised by the family at the side of the road, and I turned around to look at them as Markus sped up, incredulous that because of my skin color I was no longer the suspicious one in this climate, that times had changed and the baton had passed to other scapegoats.

  In Paris I took Markus to Richard’s gallery to show him the work that I had been talking about and to introduce him to the owner, Yann, who had, in the meantime, become a good friend of mine, and the many patrons, such as Bruno the banker and François the industry heir, who regularly visited, whose boisterous and idiosyncratic company I found highly entertaining. I was not sure who was showing off to whom; Markus, my handsome, enigmatic boyfriend to this arty and eccentric coterie, or my thoroughly fancy French friends to my very German love interest. Yann invited us to dinner in the evening, and although the conversation flowed, it seemed to flow around Markus; he was a silent island amid the good humor and overlapping chatter, cutting into his steak in rhythmic motions, that ever-present smirk playing at the corners of his lips, which I now saw as a betrayal of weakness instead of charm. After dinner, Yann pulled me aside.

  “Deborah,” he said. “Why are you with this man? He is nothing like you! He doesn’t talk!”

  Before I could protest or defend Markus, he interrupted hastily: “Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against him, but you know, he is so German. Look at him—he is all angles and corners.” This wasn’t Yann being traditionally French and discriminatory; in fact, Yann spoke German nearly fluently and was very fond of the country and its people. So I listened to him then, as he continued, “Are you sure you are interested in this person, Deborah? Or are you just interested in the place he comes from?”

  That question burned itself into my mind, for I had known this was true for a while now, perhaps from the very beginning, that this man had been a door for me, a door to a world I didn’t know how to go about entering; I had hoped to find in him the guide that would carry me over the threshold unscathed.

  * * *

  • • •

  Probably I knew, even before I got on the plane, that the relationship, or at least its romantic element, was over, and when I informed Markus of that a few days later, I can’t say he sounded surprised. Years later, I would explain to him how we sometimes fall in love not with people themselves, but with the prospect of accelerated personal development they promise, the way they can transform you into something that feels closer to the person you are convinced you can end up becoming. He would take some time to understand what I was trying to communicate but would eventually come to the conclusion that his experience had mirrored mine, that he too had propelled himself toward a new character phase as a result of the encounter. In truth, each connection, be it brief or extensive, adds new facets to our selves, but this process feels more urgent when one’s self seems to be a blank surface with no facets at all.

  In regard to all the relationships I formed during those years of transition, the memories they have left behind are tinged with a strange guilt, for I cannot separate the affection I felt for the person from the very real and primal act of using them to propel my own personal metamorphosis, as if I were playing both sides of the chessboard. Perhaps that also served as the primary clue
that heralded the realization that I had arrived at the other side, for my relationships suddenly ceased to be conduits to some faraway destination and became the destination itself.

  I know that this process, of hitching on to people as if they were vehicles bearing my freight in the chosen direction, was integral to my original goal, that subconscious one I had set for myself many years ago upon leaving, to free myself from the intense, irrational fears and judgments that had been branded into me during my childhood, and that Markus had been essential in the journey toward that freedom. I knew I was one step farther along my route, although I could not pinpoint how, or how many steps I had left. But I sensed it, as surely as I could look back at the progress of the last few years, of the intense changes I had undergone. I knew that this roller-coaster pattern would continue for some time, that in a few years from now I would be as different a version of myself from now as I was in comparison to five years earlier, and how satisfying it was and would be to look back and know that my instincts were worthy of trust. I try to forgive myself for this way of being in the world, the only way I knew in those years, because at the time it felt that I had no other tools at my disposal and that it was a question of survival, of looking down at the abyss underneath me and grasping the only rope I could find.

  * * *

  —

  The winter that set in that year was marked by thick, heavy snows that seemed to muffle all sound like an oppressive blanket. The icy temperatures were unrelenting and put a muzzle on our usual activities; there were many days when the roads were deemed too treacherous and school was canceled as a result. We often lost electricity as a result of a frozen or snow-overloaded tree falling onto the old cables, and it was rare that Richard and I managed to see each other. I therefore spent that winter remarkably exiled, feeling the full force of the isolation inherent in the lifestyle I had chosen. The only bright spots were the books I had stocked up on; the fire we kept roaring full time in the enormous brick contraption that had been erected more than two centuries ago and somehow still functioned, around which the spacious kitchen had been built as if in homage to the tradition of hearth; and the large bay windows on both sides, which afforded us a view of the bird feeders I had erected.