End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  The memory sessions come to an end when Rayna snaps a curdling “I don’t want to think about him right now” at the sight of Nina standing at her bedroom door with a photo album in hand, the first time she has taken one down off the shelf in months.

  “Sorry,” Nina whispers, the word catching in her throat. She slips off, flips idly through the first few pages, then shoves the book away and spends the rest of the evening wondering whether it is Rayna’s rancor that has grown, or her own maturity in her mother’s estimation, to the point where Rayna no longer feels an obligation to pretend. Such things go undiscussed, like the bras on the bed or the fact that Rayna has abandoned English, and thus conversations between mother and daughter are conducted in disjointed, lunatic fashion, with each one speaking her preferred tongue.

  “He could have contacted us, you know,” Rayna says one night as she and Nina cohabitate her study in silence, Nina reading her history textbook and Rayna flitting from one task to the next, grading papers and sorting laundry and writing in her diary, as if no one chore is sufficient to hold her interest.

  “But, Mom, if he tried, they could—”

  “There are ways of doing things.” Her mother drops the bedsheet she’s been folding back into the basket and stares at Nina the way one gunfighter might another in an old movie. “Your father has abandoned us.”

  Her tone is not that of one sharing a revelation or breaking painful news. It isn’t sharp or soothing, but weary, and the words are all the uglier for it. “He’s probably found himself a new family in America, while we suffer in this miserable place.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” scoffs Nina, but she, too, has caught herself imagining a new wife, a new daughter—no, a new son. All she can bring herself to object to is the most trivial part of Rayna’s statement. “Besides, it’s not so bad here.”

  “How would you know?” Rayna snatches the same sheet up again, clamps the middle underneath her chin, and folds the corners together at arm’s length. The action gives her jowls; Nina looks away. “You’ve never been anywhere else.”

  “Not yet.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I’m going to college in America.” She waits for a reaction, but all Rayna does is purse her lips, grab hold of the reading glasses dangling from the chain around her neck, and bend over her desk.

  “Sooner if I can.”

  “Now you’re leaving me, too.”

  “No, but I’m leaving here.”

  Speaking it out loud is an act of such portent that Nina almost expects magic from the universe in return—as if the declaration might make the Iron Curtain rise, revealing a stage set for the second act of her life.

  Instead, Rayna tightens her fingertips around the neck of her red grading pen. “At least you’ve told me.”

  She begins to sort a sheaf of papers, and Nina watches with the special, studious disgust children develop for the mannerisms of their parents. Rayna’s posture is meant to constitute dismissal. She expects her daughter to shuffle from the room and go feel guilty and wretched in some distant corner of the house, and so instead, Nina wanders over to the office closet and opens the door.

  A forgotten smell meets her: the apple tobacco and sandalwood blend of her father. The deep-set shelves are full of things she hasn’t seen for years, objects Rayna has spirited away lest they remind her of the man she can’t stop thinking about anyway. There are pipes, unopened pouches of tobacco, cardboard boxes of his correspondence, a triple stack of thin philosophy journals stretching up from the floor. On the highest shelf, barely within reach, sits a tall box packed haphazardly with the contents of Miklos’s home darkroom, and next to that his gleaming camera. Nina reaches for it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Taking Dad’s camera.”

  “Put it back.”

  Nina holds her prize to her chest, feeling the instrument’s bulk and heft, its cool metal and hard plastic.

  “No.”

  Rayna springs to her feet. “Fine! Take it! Here! You can be just like him.” Her hand shoots into the closet, grabs Miklos’s felt fedora, and slams it onto Nina’s head.

  “Here, why not smoke his pipe, too? The two of you can go crazy together in America, you and your fat liar of a father and your new stepmother from California, with her red lipstick and her big fake tits.” Rayna rushes from the room and slams the door, leaving her daughter huddled against the wall, shielding her face and camera.

  By fifteen, Nina is as dark and beautiful as her mother in old pictures, carrying the camera everywhere and beginning to recognize a vigor in herself that makes her surge with hope. She begs a job at Vasek’s café in order to afford film and contact paper, the only things she buys. Anything else—food, makeup, clothing—is a waste of money.

  She is gloriously alone, attached to others only by thin tendrils of biology and friendship. So much younger, the girls at school seem—unseasoned by tragedy and difference and handling their new powers, their new womanliness, by acting more like kids than ever. Nina feels a tenderness for them; they are the girls she grew up with, or at least around, and they are nice enough. As she disappears into herself and her darkroom, they are merely cold, when many girls would be mean. She wonders who they’ll have become in twenty years, and reflects that satisfying her curiosity will be as easy as returning to Prague.

  It is the boys, and the men, who are unbearable. On the streets and in the school hallways, they fondle her with their eyes, peer through even the loosest, thickest fabrics, spin in her wake to gawk at her ass. Some girls develop ways of walking that make their breasts bounce up and down; others learn to carry themselves so that nothing moves. Nina cannot be bothered. She walks the way she walks. Nobody asks her out. She imagines they call her a stuck-up bitch, a snob. Fine. Her parents—when they were her parents, instead of a dissipating memory and an unpredictable Fury with whom Nina chances to share a house—had been elitists, too. She isn’t going to apologize for believing in the hierarchy of the mind. Not to a bunch of beery Communists.

  Nina’s refuge is the university library. She updates her journal in the reading room, browses the English-language and photography sections of the musty stacks. The weak yellow lights are set to fifteen-minute timers for energy conservation, and often when they wind down Nina doesn’t bother to reset them, but sits and peers into the darkness, spine pressed against dozens of others, and contemplates escape.

  For all her resolve, the country is a lockbox. Photography is a potential key should she become sufficiently excellent; one reason Prague is so dismal, despite its ancient beauty, is that the virtuosos have all been clever enough to get themselves anointed cultural ambassadors, pack up their paints and typewriters, and go. It’s as if a neutron bomb has exploded in the center of the city, leaving the architecture intact but wiping out the artists.

  After three years of relentless effort, thousands of wasted exposures, Nina is finally comfortable believing she is good. The exhibition that Vasek, an amateur photographer himself, threw her at the café last year attracted an art teacher from the university, who recognized her surname; he told Nina she had promise, encouraged her to apply for an arts scholarship when she was old enough. She placed third in the school photo contest as a sophomore, won it as a junior.

  Each victory, each accolade, is one more step toward nothing. Nina lusts for a project worthy of great expenditures of time, great sacrifice. She begins attending every concert and lecture the university and city have to offer, shooting any visiting scholar or musician reputed to carry the tinge of greatness. She streamlines her darkroom process, starts taking her photos to Lidové Noviny, the newspaper she grew up reading. The arts editor, a man named Zdenek, buys nothing for a year, but he looks at everything, explains the difference between what she shoots and what he wants, tells her to keep coming by. The week Nina turns sixteen, he purchases a photo. Instead of taking payment, she asks for a press pass; the laminated card grants free admission to any c
ultural event in town. The editor hesitates, and Nina throws in the next six photos he wants, free of charge. Zdenek lifts an eyebrow, but agrees. With the increased access her new status affords, it takes Nina only two months to earn out on the deal.

  The demands of shooting prevent her from digesting much of what is played and said by her subjects, but it doesn’t matter. The images, when she coaxes them into visibility, tell Nina what she needs to know. She trusts her camera to reveal all, trusts it further than her ears or brain. But nothing of majesty appears on Nina’s contact sheets. Legendary white-haired violinists do not move her no matter how crazed the looks in their eyes. Nor do esteemed Czech men of letters expounding on Nezval, or troupes of Russian acrobats. A year passes, and Nina considers giving it up. The only image she is really proud of is a shot of four doll-faced American ballerinas in full stage regalia smoking cigarettes in the wings of the Prague opera house—deemed unprintable, naturally. Standing below the stage, her lens trained on the stars above, Nina begins to feel like a lowly sunflower, face turned toward the streaking sun.

  “I finally figured it out,” Rayna greets her, sitting at the kitchen table in her colorless ankle-length nightgown, a plate of toast and a coffee cup before her. Nina rummages through the cabinets, pretending to be in a rush so she can consume her morning meal of bread, cheese, and black tea unmolested in the school courtyard. “It came to me last night.” Rayna’s voice is oddly chipper, the bags under her eyes heavier than ever.

  “What did, Mom?” Nina is half-listening, working the cheese slicer, her back to her mother.

  “It’s so obvious.” Rayna shakes her head.

  “Spit it out already, Mom. I’m running late.”

  “Your father is the agent. He planned it all, Nina. Everything.” She takes a dainty bite of toast. “Extremely clever of him.”

  Nina marches up the stairs without so much as a look at Rayna. She knows exactly what to pack.

  “I’ll be at Vasek’s,” she says as she cuts back through the kitchen, a week’s clothes folded in the duffel bag over her shoulder and no force she can conceive of capable of making her stop moving until she is out the front door. Her mother sips her coffee and says nothing. The serenity in her eyes is too much to bear, and at the front door, Nina changes her mind, spins.

  “You’re out of your fucking mind. I hope you know that.”

  Rayna replaces the cup in the saucer. “He threw us to the wolves. A woman and a child. Helpless. Jewish.”

  Nina’s hand flies off the doorknob. “Oh, for God’s sake. Now this? Look, we don’t do anything Jewish, we don’t believe in anything Jewish, and nobody knows we’re Jewish. We’re not helpless and we’re not fucking Jewish. You’re crazy.”

  Rayna is about to respond when Nina decides she doesn’t want to hear anything else her mother has to say.

  “I’m through,” she declares, and slams the door.

  All day, Nina refuses to think about Rayna’s words. She has a concert to shoot this evening, some American orchestra in town for three nights, the theater sold out weeks in advance, the way it always is for anything American. She will use Vasek’s darkroom; it is set up all wrong and will slow her down, but it beats going home. She used his place once years before, when Rayna padlocked hers for two weeks to punish Nina for staying out until dawn photographing vagrants in the dismal Soviet-built suburban housing projects. Vasek will chastise her for leaving home, but he would never deny Nina anything: not his darkroom, not his couch. Which she intends to sleep on until she can find a room to rent.

  She arrives at the theater early, hoping to catch the sound check. This is the best time to shoot. She can climb right up onstage while they’re rehearsing, get as close as she needs to. And she can chat up the artists, build enough of a rapport to be allowed backstage and in the dressing rooms.

  As always, Nina begins by finding Jiri. The night manager is mild and middle-aged, with a slight limp and the habit of constantly smoothing down his long gray hair. He makes it his duty to introduce and praise Nina to the performers, which is a tremendous help, and to steal quick glimpses at her breasts several times a minute, which is not. Nina reciprocates for the intros by bringing him a stack of contact sheets and a red wax pencil from time to time, and printing whatever he circles. His taste in her work is abominable, but so be it.

  She finds Jiri behind the soundboard with the engineer. He steps around to greet her in the aisle, and they walk backstage together, toward the laughter booming from the dressing room. Jiri raps on the door. The sounds inside abate.

  “Who is it?” coos a falsetto like the voice of a cartoon princess.

  The manager clears his throat. English flusters him. So do musicians. “It is Jiri.”

  The voice inside drops several octaves. “Come on in, bruh.” He doesn’t sound like a conductor. Bruh?

  Jiri turns the handle and they enter a room full of men in suits. Young black men in gorgeous sleek-fitting suits, some fingering shiny brass horns and one bent over a giant mahogany bass. Jazz, Nina thinks with a thrill. It is a music she has hardly heard but loves to watch; the photographs of William Claxton, Chuck Stewart, and Roy DeCarava are burned into her mind from frequent library-floor perusal. Only in these books of images from the 1950s and ’60s has Nina encountered black Americans.

  “It is my pleasure introduce,” says Jiri, making a slight, stiff bow, then indicating Nina with an open hand, “very good young photographer for tonight.”

  “Oh yeah? How good?” asks the man closest to the door. He is slim, round-faced, grips his trombone with one large hand. He’s speaking to Jiri, but he locks eyes with Nina, smirking and raising his eyebrows so high that his entire forehead ripples.

  “How young?” somebody in the back responds, and the room fills up with laughter.

  “She is,” Jiri continues doggedly, smiling all around to acknowledge a wave of mirth he seems to suspect might be at his expense, “is Nina. She want to know is all right she take some picture in dressing room. For newspaper.”

  “I don’t know,” calls the same heavyset joker in the rear, the one clutching the double bass. “She might see something back here that scares her.” Two or three of them snicker.

  Nina stands and smiles, enduring the megawatt scrutiny of all their eyes, willing Jiri to leave so she can get to work.

  The man with the trombone glances censoriously behind him. Fake censoriously, perhaps. “Yeah, sure, that’s cool.” Jiri nods, shows himself out. The musician shifts his weight from one foot to the other, passes his instrument from right hand to left, and offers his palm.

  “How you doing, sis?”

  Nina takes it. “I’m fine, bruh. How are you?”

  The trombonist’s look of surprise turns quickly to delight, and without releasing her from his dry, loose grip, he twists backward to look at his bandmates. “Damn, bruh, you heard her? Sound like she from Baton Rouge, right?”

  His arm relaxes at the elbow and he swings her hand in a low arc, as if they are dance partners about to begin a routine. “Where you from, sis?”

  “I’m from right here, bruh,” she says, enjoying herself, swinging back.

  “Naaaw, come on now. You look like you Creole or something. I know you got some black folks in your family someplace. I can see it in your face.” He implores the closest man for affirmation. “Right, bruh? At least a drop. A great-granddaddy. Something. She’s too soulful not to.”

  Nina laughs, flattered and confused. “And what about you?” she asks, rather than let the genealogical speculation stretch on. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “Heh,” says the bass player, “she said, ‘Leggo my hand, motherfucker, I don’t know you from Joe Bazooka.’”

  The trombonist deadpans him, eyes cutting a broad swath through the chorus of guffaws. “If that’s what the sister wanted to say, Conrad, then that’s what the sister would have said. She speaks better English than you.”

  He turns back to Nina with mock ceremony. “Ter
ribly sorry, sis. Please forgive my manners, or lack thereof. My name is Devon Stafford Marbury, Jr., and if my band starts behaving like gentlemen, then perhaps I’ll introduce them, too. Until then, you’ll just have to converse with me. Shall we?” He leans forward and pushes open the door. Nina glances uncertainly at him and Devon beckons her ahead, then follows her into the hall and lets the door swing shut on the band’s noise.

  He can’t be more than thirty-five, Nina thinks, appraising him out of the corner of her eye as they stroll across the stage. But even in Devon’s smallest gesture, the way he rubs two fingers against his lips or eases the buttons of his jacket into their eyelets, there is confidence and style. This is a man who understands himself in relation to something larger: a tradition, a purpose. She wonders if he treats all women with the same flirty, mischievous regard he’s been so quick to make their lingua franca, then stops herself and wonders why she is so eager to analyze a man she met all of two minutes ago.

  “How long have you been shooting?” he asks as they walk up the slight grade of the aisle.

  “About three years. How long have you been playing?”

  “Twenty-six, twenty-seven. My daddy teaches music, so he started me off young. I’d like to see your work, sis. I’ve got a feeling about you. You got a portfolio or something?”

  He has a feeling about her? What feeling is that? Who says such things?

  “Not here. But maybe after the show I can go get it. Or you can come see it. I live not so far away.”

  He hits her with that cruel smirk. “Only if you guarantee me it’s some bad shit. You gotta swear on your Negro great-granddaddy that you won’t have me looking at no bullshit.”

  Nina laughs. “For all I know, you might be about to play some bullshit.” One of the theorems that have long sustained her in her resolution to leave Prague is proving itself now: the company of other artists is a mind-expanding drug. If it weren’t, if new neural tracks weren’t being laid this very second to accommodate new trains of thought, she would never be able to hold up her end of this conversation. It’s not some restless, darkroomy Czech girl bantering with Devon, but a cool, bemused Creole sister. Even if she’s not quite sure what Creole means.