Everything Is Illuminated

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  "And now," he said, "we must make sleep."

  THE WEDDING RECEPTION WAS SO EXTRAORDINARY! or THE END OF THE MOMENT THAT NEVER ENDS, 1941

  AFTER THOROUGHLY satisfying the sister of the bride against a wall of empty wine racks—Oh, God! she screamed, Oh, God! her hands in the phantom Cabernet—and being himself so thoroughly unsatisfied, Safran pulled up his trousers, climbed the newly installed spiral staircase—brushing his hand deliberately, thoughtfully along the marble newel—and greeted the wedding guests, who were only then seating themselves after the haunting gust.

  Where were you? Zosha asked, taking his dead hand into hers, something she had wanted to do since first seeing it at the announcement of their engagement more than half a year before.

  Downstairs, changing.

  Oh, I don't want you to change, she said, thinking she was making a good joke. I think you're perfect.

  My clothes.

  But it took you so long.

  He nodded at his arm and watched her questioning lips pucker into a small peck for his cheek.

  The Double House was brimming with organized pandemonium. Even up to the last minute, even past the last minute, hangings were still being hung, salads mixed, girdles clenched and tied, chandeliers dusted, throw rugs thrown ... It was extraordinary.

  The bride must be so happy for her mother.

  I always cry at wedding receptions, but this one's gonna make me wail.

  It's extraordinary. It's extraordinary.

  The dark women in white uniforms were just beginning to serve bowls of chicken soup when Menachem clinked a fork against his glass and said, I'd like to have a moment of your time. The room quickly became silent, everyone stood—as was traditional for the toast of the father of the bride—and my grandfather recognized, out of the corner of his eye, the caramel hand that slid his bowl in front of him.

  It's said that the times are changing. Borders around us shift under the pressure of the war; places we have known for as long as we can remember are called by new names; some of our own sons are absent from this joyous occasion because of their national service; and, on a brighter note, we are pleased to announce that we will have delivered to us in three months the first automobile in Trachimbrod! (This was met by a collective gasp and then raging applause.) Well, he said, moving behind the newlyweds to put one hand on his daughter's shoulder and one on my grandfather's, let me keep this moment, this early afternoon, June 18, 1941.

  The Gypsy girl never said a word—because even if she hated Zosha, she didn't want to ruin her wedding—but pressed against my grandfather's left side, and took, under the table, his good hand into hers. (Did she even slide a note into it?)

  Let me wear it in a locket over my heart, the proud father continued, pacing the room with his empty crystal goblet held in front of him, and keep it forever, because I have never been so happy in my life, and will be perfectly content if I never experience half of this happiness again—until the wedding of my other daughter, of course. Indeed, he said, hemming the laughter, if there are to be no other moments for the rest of time, I would never once complain. Let this be the moment that never ends.

  My grandfather squeezed the Gypsy girl's fingers, as if to say, It's not too late. There is still time. We could run, leave everything behind, never look back, save ourselves.

  She squeezed his fingers, as if to say, You are not forgiven.

  Menachem continued, trying to hold back tears, Please raise your empty glasses with me. To my daughter and new son, to the children they will produce, and the children of those children, to life!

  L'chaim! echoed voices down the line of tables.

  But before the father of the bride had taken his seat, before the glasses had a chance to clink their reflected smiles against one another in hope, the house was again swept with a haunting gust. The place cards were again thrown into the air, and the floral centerpieces were again knocked over, this time spreading dirt over the white tablecloth and onto almost every lap. The Gypsy women rushed to clean up the mess, and my grandfather whispered into Zosha's ear, which for him was the Gypsy girl's ear: It will be OK.

  The Gypsy girl, the real Gypsy girl, did slip my grandfather a note, although it fell out of his hand in the commotion and was kicked across the floor—by Libby, by Lista, by Omeler, by the nameless fishmonger—to the far end of the table, where it came to rest under an overturned wine glass, which kept it safe under its skirt until that night, when a Gypsy woman picked up the glass and swept the note (along with fallen food, dirt from the centerpieces, and piles of dust) into a large paper bag. This bag was put out in front of the house by a different Gypsy woman. The next morning, the paper bag was collected by the obsessive-compulsive garbage man Feigel B. The bag was then taken to a field on the other side of the river—the field that would, soon enough, be the site of Kovel's first mass execution—and burned with dozens of other bags, three quarters of which contained debris from the wedding. The flames reached into the sky, red and yellow fingers. The smoke spread like a canopy over the neighboring fields, making many a Wisp of Ardisht cough, because every kind of smoke is different and must be made familiar. Some of the ash that remained was incorporated into the soil. The rest was washed away by the next rain and swept into the Brod.

  This is what the note said: Change.

  THE FIRST BLASTS, AND THEN LOVE, 1941

  THAT NIGHT, my grandfather made love to his new wife for the first time. He thought, as he performed the act that he had practiced to perfection, about the Gypsy girl: he reweighed the arguments for running away with her, for leaving Trachimbrod with the knowledge that he could never go back. He did love his family—his mother, anyway—but how long would it take before he stopped missing them? It sounded so terrible when articulated, but, he wondered, was there anything he couldn't leave behind? He entertained thoughts so ugly and true: everyone but the Gypsy girl and his mother could die and he would be able to go on; every aspect of his life, save his time with the Gypsy girl and his mother, was insufficient and undeserving of life. He was about to become someone who has lost half of everything he lived for.

  He thought about the various widows of his past seven years: Golda R and her covered mirrors, Lista P's blood, which was not intended for him. He thought about all of the virgins that summed to nothing. He thought, easing his new wife's nervous virgin body onto the marriage bed, about Brod, author of the 613 sadnesses, and Yankel, with his abacus bead. He thought, while explaining to Zosha that it would only hurt the first time, about Zosha, whom he hardly knew, and her sister, who made him promise that their postnuptial tryst would not be a one-time occurrence. He thought about the legend of Trachim, about where his body might be, and from where it once came. He thought about Trachim's wagon: the wandering snakes of white string, the crushed-velvet glove with outstretched fingers, the resolution: I will ... I will...

  And then something extraordinary happened. The house shook with such a violence as to make the day's earlier disturbances seem like the burps of a baby. KABOOM! in the distance. Approaching KABOOM! KABOOOM! Light poured in through the cracks between cellar door planks, filling the room with the warm and dynamic radiance of German bombs exploding in the nearby hills. KABOOOOM! Zosha howled in fear—of physical love, of war, of emotional love, of dying—and my grandfather was filled with a coital energy of such force that when it unleashed itself—KA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! KA-BOO-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! KA-KAKA-KA-KA-KA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!—when he tripped over the precipice of civilized humanity into the free fall of unadulterated animal rapture, when, in seven eternal seconds, he more than made up for the sum of what was now more than 2,700 acts without consequence, when he flooded Zosha with a deluge of what could no longer be held back, when he released into the universe a copulative light so powerful that if it could have been harnessed and utilized, rather than sent forth and wasted, the Germans wouldn't have had a chance, he wondered if one of the bombs hadn't landed on the marriage bed, wedged itself be
tween the shuddering body of his new wife and his own, and obliterated Trachimbrod. But when he hit the rocky canyon's floor, when the seven seconds of bombing ended and his head settled into the pillow damp with Zosha's tears and drenched with his semen, he understood that he was not dead, but in love.

  THE PERSNICKETINESS OF MEMORY, 1941

  JUST AS my grandfather's first orgasm was not intended for Zosha, the bombs that inspired it were not intended for Trachimbrod but a site in the Rovno hills. It would be nine months—on Trachimday, no less—before the shtetl was the focus of direct Nazi assault. But the Brod's waters roiled onto its banks that night with the same fervor as if it had been war, the wind snapped in the explosive wake with the same resonance, and the shtetl folk trembled as if the sites were tattooed on their bodies. From that moment on—9:28 in the evening, June 18, 1941—everything was different.

  The Wisps of Ardisht turned their cigarettes backward, cupping their mouths around the lit ends to prevent their being spotted from a distance.

  The Gypsies in their hamlet took down their tents, dismantled their thatch shanties, and lived uncovered, clinging to the earth like human moss.

  Trachimbrod itself was overcome with a strange inertness. The citizenry, which once touched so many things it was impossible to know what was natural, now sat on their hands. Activity was replaced with thought. Memory. Everything reminded everyone of something, which seemed winsome at first—when early birthdays could be recalled by the smell of an extinguished match, or the feeling of one's first kiss by sweat in the palm—but quickly became devitalizing. Memory begat memory begat memory. Villagers became embodiments of that legend they had been told so many times, of mad Sofiowka, swaddled in white string, using memory to remember memory, bound in an order of remembrance, struggling in vain to remember a beginning or end.

  Men set up flow charts (which were themselves memories of family trees) in an attempt to make sense of their memories. They tried to follow the line back, like Theseus out of the labyrinth, but only went in deeper, farther.

  Women had it worse. Unable to share their tinglings of memory in the synagogue or at the workplace, they were forced to suffer over laundry piles and baking pans, alone. There was no help in their searches for beginnings, no one to ask what the grit of pressed raspberries might have to do with a steam burn, or why the sound of children playing in the Brod made their hearts drop out of their chests and onto the floor. Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

  But children had it worst of all, for although it would seem that they had fewer memories to haunt them, they still had the itch of memory as strong as the elders of the shtetl. Their strings were not even their own, but tied around them by parents and grandparents—strings not fastened to anything, but hanging loosely from the darkness.

  The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer. Safran lay in bed trying to string the events of his seventeen years into a coherent narrative, something that he could understand, with an order of imagery, an intelligibility of symbolism. Where were the symmetries? The rifts? What was the meaning of what had happened? He had been born with teeth, and that's why his mother had stopped breastfeeding him, and that's why his arm had gone dead, and that's why women loved him, and that's why he did what he did, and that's why he was who he was. But why was he born with teeth? And why didn't his mother just express her milk into a bottle? And why did an arm go dead instead of a leg? And why would anyone love a dead limb? And why did he do what he did? Why was he who he was?

  He couldn't concentrate. His love had overtaken him from the inside out, like a sickness. He became terribly constipated, nauseated, and weak. In the reflection of the new porcelain toilet's water, he saw a face he didn't recognize: sagging jowls with white whiskers, pouches under his eyes (which must, he reasoned, hold all of the tears of joy that he wasn't crying), cracking, fattening lips.

  But it wasn't the same recognition as the previous morning, when he saw his face in the Dial's glass eyes. He wasn't becoming older as part of some natural process, but being made old as a victim of his love, which was itself only one day old. He was a boy still, but no longer a boy. A man, but not yet a man. He was caught somewhere between his mother's last kiss and the first kiss he would give his child, between the war that was and would be.

  A shtetl meeting was held in the theater the morning after the bombs exploded—the first since the debate over electric lighting several years before—to discuss the implications of a war whose tracks seemed to be laid directly over Trachimbrod.

  RAV D

  (Holding a sheet of paper above his head.) I have read in a letter from my son, who is fighting bravely on the Polish front, that the Nazis are committing unspeakable atrocities and that Trachimbrod should prepare for the worst. He said we should (looks at paper, gestures reading) "do anything and everything immediately."

  ARI F

  What are you talking about! We should go to the Nazis! (Calling out, waving a finger above his head.) It's the Ukrainians who'll do us in! You've heard what they did in Lvov! (It reminds me of my birth [I was born on the Rabbi's floor, you know (my nose still remembers that mix of placenta and Judaica [he had the most beautiful candle holders (from Austria [if I'm not mistaken (or Germany)])])])...

  RAV D

  (Puzzled, gesturing puzzlement.) What are you talking about?

  ARI F

  (Most sincerely puzzled.) I can't remember. The Ukrainians. My birth. Candles. I know there was a point. Where did I begin?

  And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

  They had been terrified at first. Shtetl meetings were held daily, news reports (NAZIS KILL 8,200 ON UKRAINIAN BORDER) examined with the care of editors, plans of action drawn up and crumpled up, large maps spread out on tables like patients waiting to be cut open. But then the meetings convened every other day, and then every other every other day, and then weekly, serving more as social minglers for singles than planning sessions. After only two months, without the impetus of any further bombing, most Trachimbroders had removed all of the splinters of the terror that had entered them that night.

  They hadn't forgotten, but accommodated. Memory took the place of terror. In their efforts to remember what it was they were trying so hard to remember, they could finally think over the fear of war. The memories of birth, childhood, and adolescence resonated with greater volume than the din of exploding shells.

  So nothing was done. No decisions were made. No bags packed or houses emptied. No trenches dug or buildings fortified. Nothing. They waited like fools, they sat on their hands like fools, and spoke, like fools, about the time Simon D did that hilarious thing with the plum, which all could laugh about for hours but none could quite remember. They waited to die, and we cannot blame them, because we would do the same, and we do do the same. They laughed and joked. They thought about birthday candles and waited to die, and we must forgive them. They wrapped Menachem's jumbo trout in newspaper (NAZIS APPROACH LUTSK) and carried beef briskets in wicker baskets to picnics under tall tree canopies by the small falls.

  Bedridden since his orgasm, my grandfather was unable to attend the first shtetl meeting. Zosha handled hers with more dignity, perhaps because she didn't have one at all, or perhaps because even though she loved being a married woman, and loved to touch that dead arm, she had yet to fall in love. She changed the semen-starched sheets, made her new husband toast and coffee for breakfast, and brought him a plate of leftover wedding chicken for lunch.