Everything Is Illuminated

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  Remember what? the schoolteacher Tzadik P asked, expelling yellow chalk with each syllable.

  The what, Didl said, is not so important, but that we should remember. It is the act of remembering, the process of remembrance, the recognition of our past ... Memories are small prayers to God, if we believed in that sort of thing ... For it says somewhere something about just this, or something just like this ... I had my finger on it a few minutes ago ... I swear, it was right here. Has anyone seen The Book of Antecedents around? I had an early volume here just a second ago ... Crap!... Can somebody tell me where I was? Now I'm totally confused, and embarrassed, and I always screw it up when it's at my house—

  Memory, grieving Shanda assisted, but Didl had fallen uncontrollably asleep. She woke him up and whispered, Memory.

  —There we go, he said, not missing a beat as he riffled through a stack of papers on his pulpit, which was really a chicken coop. Memory. Memory and reproduction. And dreams, of course. What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake? Circle of circles! Dreams, yes? No? Yes. Yes, it is the first Shabbos. First of the month. And it being the first Shabbos of the month, we must make our additions to The Book of Recurrent Dreams. Yes? Someone tell me if I'm fucking this up.

  I've had a most interesting dream for the past two weeks, said Lilla F, descendant of the first Sloucher to drop the Great Book.

  Excellent, Didl said, pulling Volume IV of The Book of Recurrent Dreams from the makeshift ark, which was really his wood-burning oven.

  As did I, Shloim added. Several of them.

  I, too, had a recurrent dream, Yankel said.

  Excellent, Didl said. Most excellent. It won't be long before another volume is complete!

  But first, Shanda whispered, we must review last month's entries.

  But first, Didl said, assuming the authority of a rabbi, we must review last month's entries. We must go backward in order to go forward.

  But don't take too long, Shloim said, or I'll forget. It's amazing I've been able to remember it this long.

  He'll take exactly as long as it takes, Lilla said.

  I'll take exactly as long as it takes, Didl said, and blackened his hand with the ash that had collected on the cover of the heavy leather-bound book. He opened it to a page near the end, picked up the silver pointer, which was really a tin knife, and began to chant, following the slice of the blade through the heart of Sloucher dream life:

  4:512—The dream of sex without pain. I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from the universe like rain, of the moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of completeness that I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty. This dream ended when I felt my husband enter me. 4:513— The dream of angels dreaming of men. It was during an afternoon nap that I dreamt of a ladder. Angels were sleepwalking up and down the rungs, their eyes closed, their breath heavy and dull, their wings hanging limp at the sides. I bumped into an old angel as I passed him, waking and startling him. He looked like my grandfather did before he passed away last year, when he would pray each night to die in his sleep. Oh, the angel said to me, I was just dreaming of you. 4:514— The dream of, as silly as it sounds, flight. 4:515— The dream of the waltz of feast, famine, and feast. 4:516— The dream of disembodied birds (46). I'm not sure if you would consider this a dream or a memory, because it actually happened, but when I fall asleep I see the room in which I mourned the death of my son. For those of you who were there, you will remember how we sat without speaking, eating only as much as we had to. You will remember when a bird crashed through the window and fell to the floor. You will remember, those of you who were there, how it jerked its wings before dying, and left a spot of blood on the floor after it was removed. But who among you was first to notice the negative bird it left in the window? Who first saw the shadow that the bird left behind, the shadow that drew blood from any finger that dared to trace it, the shadow that was better proof of the bird's existence than the bird ever was? Who was with me when I mourned the death of my son, when I excused myself to bury that bird with my own hands? 4:517—The dream of falling in love, marriage, death, love. This dream seems as if it lasts for hours, although it always takes place in the five minutes between my returning from the field and being woken for dinner. I dream of when I met my wife, fifty years ago, and it's exactly as it happened. I dream of our marriage, and I can even see my father's tears of pride. It's all there, just as it was. But then I dream of my own death, which I have heard is impossible to do, but you must believe me. I dream of my wife telling me on my deathbed that she loves me, and even though she thinks I can't hear her, I can, and she says she wouldn't have changed anything. It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake. 4:518 — The dream of perpetual motion. 4:519— The dream of low windows. 4:520 —The dream of safety and peace. I dreamt that I was born from a stranger's body. She gave birth to me in a secret dwelling, far away from everything that I would grow to know. Immediately after I was born, she handed me to my mother, for the sake of appearances, and my mother said, Thank you. You have given me a son, the gift of life. And for this reason, because I was of a stranger's body, I did not fear the body of my mother, and I could embrace it without shame, with only love. Because I was not from my mother's body, my desire to go home never led back to her, and I was free to say Mother, and mean only Mother. 4:521— The dream of disembodied birds (47). It's dusk in this dream that I have every night, and I'm making love to my wife, my real wife, I mean, to whom I've been married for thirty years, and you all know how I love her, I love her so much. I massage her thighs in my hands, and I move my hands up her waist and belly, and touch her breasts. My wife is such a beautiful woman, you all know that, and in the dream she's the same, just as beautiful. I look down at my hands on her breasts—callused, worn things, a man's hands, veiny, shaky, fluttering—and I remember, I don't know why, but it's this way every night, I remember two white birds that my mother brought back for me from Warsaw when I was only a child. We let them fly around the house and perch wherever they wanted to. I remember seeing my mother's back as she cooked eggs for me, and I remember the birds perching on her shoulders, with their beaks up next to her ears, as if they were about to tell her a secret. She reached her right hand up into the cupboard, searching without looking for some spice on a high shelf, grasping at something elusive, fluttering, not letting my food burn. 4:522— The dream of meeting your younger self. 4:523 —The dream of animals, two by two. 4:524— The dream of I won't be ashamed. 4:525 —The dream that we are our fathers. I walked to the Brod, without knowing why, and looked into my reflection in the water. I couldn't look away. What was the image that pulled me in after it? What was it that I loved? And then I recognized it. So simple. In the water I saw my father's face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created. We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered—our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure...

  The chanting was interrupted by a pounding at the door. Two men in black hats limped in before any of the congregants had time to get up.

  WE ARE HERE ON BEHALF OF THE UPRIGHT CONGREGATION! hollered the taller of the two.

  THE UPRIGHT CONGREGATION! echoed the short and squat one.

  Shush! Shanda said.

  IS YANKEL PRESENT? hollered the taller of the two, as if in response to her request.

  YEAH, IS YANKEL PRESENT? echoed the short, squat one.

 
; Here. I am here, Yankel said, rising from his pillow. He assumed the Well-Regarded Rabbi was requesting his financial services, as had happened so many times in the past, piety being as expensive as it was those days. What can I do for you?

  YOU WILL BE THE FATHER OF THE BABY FROM THE RIVER! hollered the taller.

  YOU WILL BE THE FATHER! echoed the short, squat one.

  Excellent! Didl said, closing Volume IV of The Book of Recurrent Dreams, which released a cloud of dust as the covers clapped. This is most excellent! Yankel will be the father!

  Mazel tov! the congregants began to sing. Mazel tov!

  Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive—to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling—to be not being, not to be.

  Slouchers congratulated him, failing to notice as they patted him on the back that he was crying. Thank you, he said, and said again, without once wondering just whom he was thanking. Thank you so much. He had been given a baby, and I a great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

  FALLING IN LOVE, 1791–1796

  THE DISGRACED USURER Yankel D took the baby girl home that evening. Here we go, he said, up the front step. Here we are. This is your door. And here, this is your doorknob I am opening. And here, this is where we put the shoes when we come in. And here is where we hang the jackets. He spoke to her as if she could understand him, never in a high pitch or in monosyllables, and never in nonsense words. This is milk that I am feeding you. It comes from Mordechai the milkman, whom you will meet one day. He gets the milk from a cow, which is a very strange and troubling thing if you think about it, so don't think about it ... This is my hand that is petting your face. Some people are left-handed and some are right-handed. We don't know which you are yet, because you just sit there and let me do the handling ... This is a kiss. It is what happens when lips are puckered and pressed against something, sometimes other lips, sometimes a cheek, sometimes something else. It depends ... This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.

  He made a bed of crumpled newspaper in a deep baking pan and gently tucked it in the oven, so that she wouldn't be disturbed by the noise of the small falls outside. He left the oven door open, and would sit for hours and watch her, as one might watch a loaf of bread rise. He watched her chest rise and fall in rapid succession as her fingers made fists and released, and her eyes squinted for no apparent reason. Could she be dreaming? he wondered. And if so, what would a baby dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife. When he pulled her out to feed or just hold her, her body was tattooed with the newsprint. TIME OF DYED HANDS IS FINALLY OVER! MOUSE WILL HANG! Or, SOFIOWKA ACCUSED OF RAPE, PLEADS POSSESSED BY PENIS PERSUASION, BECAME "OUT OF HAND." Or, AVRUM R KILLED IN FLOUR MILL MISHAP, LEAVES BEHIND A LOST SIAMESE CAT OF FORTY-EIGHT YEARS, TAWNY, CHUBBY, BUT NOT FAT, PERSONABLE, MAYBE A LITTLE FAT, ANSWERS TO "METHUSELAH," OK, FAT AS SHIT. IF FOUND, FREE TO KEEP. Sometimes he would rock her to sleep in his arms, and read her left to right, and know everything he needed to know about the world. If it wasn't written on her, it wasn't important to him.

  Yankel had lost two babies, one to fever and the other to the industrial flour mill, which had taken a shtetl member's life every year since it first opened. He had also lost a wife, not to death but to another man. He had returned from an afternoon at the library to find a note covering the SHALOM! of their home's welcome mat: I had to do it for myself.

  Lilla F fingered the soil around one of her daisies. Bitzl Bitzl stood by his kitchen window, pretending to scrub the counter clean. Shloim W peered through the upper bulb of one of the hourglasses with which he could no longer bring himself to part. No one said anything as Yankel read the note, and no one ever said anything afterward, as if the disappearance of his wife weren't the slightest bit unusual, or as if they hadn't noticed that he had been married at all.

  Why couldn't she have slid it under the door? he wondered. Why couldn't she have folded it? It looked just like any other note she would leave him, like, Could you try to fix the broken knocker? or I'll be back soon, don't worry. It was so strange to him that such a different kind of note— I had to do it for myself— could look exactly the same: trivial, mundane, nothing. He could have hated her for leaving it there in plain sight, and he could have hated her for the plainness of it, a message without adornment, without any small clue to indicate that yes, this is important, yes, this is the most painful note I've ever written, yes, I would sooner die than have to write this again. Where were the dried teardrops? Where was the tremor in the script?

  But his wife was his first and only love, and it was the nature of those from the tiny shtetl to forgive their first and only loves, so he forced himself to understand, or pretend to understand. He never once blamed her for fleeing to Kiev with the traveling and mustachioed bureaucrat who was called in to help mediate the messy proceedings of Yankel's shameful trial; the bureaucrat could promise to provide for her future, could take her away from everything, move her to someplace quieter, without thinking, without confessions or plea-bargaining. No, that's not it. Without Yankel. She wanted to be without Yankel.

  He spent the next weeks blocking scenes of the bureaucrat fucking his wife. On the floor with cooking ingredients. Standing, with socks still on. In the grass of the yard of their new and immense house. He imagined her making noises she never made for him and feeling pleasures he could never provide because the bureaucrat was a man, and he was not a man. Does she suck his penis? he wondered. I know this is a silly thought, a thought that will only bring me pain, but I can't free myself of it. And when she sucks his penis, because she must, what is he doing? Is he pulling her hair back to watch? Is he touching her chest? Is he thinking of someone else? I'll kill him if he is.

  With the shtetl still watching—Lilla still fingering, Bitzl Bitzl still scrubbing, Shloim still pretending to measure time with sand—he folded the note into a teardrop shape, slid it into his lapel, and went inside. I don't know what to do, he thought. I should probably kill myself.

  He couldn't bear to live, but he couldn't bear to die. He couldn't bear the thought of her making love to someone else, but neither could he bear the absence of the thought. And as for the note, he couldn't bear to keep it, but he couldn't bear to destroy it either. So he tried to lose it. He left it by the wax-weeping candle holders, placed it between matzos every Passover, dropped it without regard among rumpled papers on his cluttered desk, hoping it wouldn't be there when he returned. But it was always there. He tried to massage it out of his pocket while sitting on the bench in front of the fountain of the prostrate mermaid, but when he inserted his hand for his hanky, it was there. He hid it like a bookmark in one of the novels he most hated, but the note would appear several days later between the pages of one of the Western books that he alone in the shtetl read, one of the books that the note had now spoiled for him forever. But like his life, he couldn't for the life of him lose the note. It kept returning to him. It stayed with him, like a part of him, like a birthmark, like a limb, it was on him, in him, him, his hymn: I had to do it for myself.

  He had lost so many slips of paper over time, and keys, pens, shirts, glasses, watches, silverware. He had lost a shoe, his favorite opal cufflinks (the Sloucher fringes of his sleeves bloomed unruly), three years away from Trachimbrod, millions of ideas he intended to write down (some of them wholly original, some of them deeply meaningful), his hair, his posture, two parents, two babies, a wife, a fortune in pocket change, more chances than could be counted. He had even lost a name: he was Safran before he fled the shtetl, Safran from birth to his
first death. There seemed to be nothing he couldn't lose. But that slip of paper wouldn't disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.

  Before the trial, Yankel-then-Safran was unconditionally admired. He was the president (and treasurer and secretary and only member) of the Committee for the Good and Fine Arts, and the founder, multiterm chairman, and only teacher of the School for Loftier Learning, which met in his house and whose classes were attended by Yankel himself. It was not unusual for a family to host a multicourse dinner in his name (if not in his presence), or for one of the more wealthy community members to commission a traveling artist to paint a portrait of him. And the portraits were always flattering. He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

  On the advice of his lawyer, Isaac M, who gestured quotation marks in the air with every syllable of every word he spoke, Yankel pleaded guilty to all charges of unfit practice, with the hope that it might lighten his punishment. In the end, he lost his usurer's license. And more than his license. He lost his good name, which is, as they say, the only thing worse than losing your good health. Passersby sneered at him or muttered under their breath names like scoundrel, cheat, cur, fucker. He wouldn't have been so hated if he hadn't been so loved before. But along with the Garden-Variety Rabbi and Sofiowka, he was one of the vertices of the community—the invisible one—and with his shame came a sense of imbalance, a void.

  Safran moved through the neighboring villages, finding work as a teacher of harpsichord theory and performance, a perfume consultant (feigning deafness and blindness to grant himself some legitimacy in the absence of references), and even an ill-starred stint as the world's worst fortuneteller—I'm not going to lie and tell you that the future is full of promise... He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others—the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.