The Age of Perpetual Light

by Josh Weil

  She could not know all that, but she knew that while she watched him back something came into his eyes that surprised her. It was a kind of realization, a kind of relief even, something that looked to her almost like happiness.

  “I’ll hunt you,” he said. “If you leave me …”

  “Why?”

  “… I’ll get across and I’ll hunt you.”

  “You would do that?”

  “I will hunt you down.”

  “Still?”

  All day clouds amassed to the west, piling on themselves and fusing together until they were a bank as solid as if the land itself had bent and risen up. In the afternoon they began to move. By dusk they had smothered the entire sky. Through them, the light of the mirrors filtered down, dim, and in them Minor could see the place where the light stopped: low in the sky, a seam, as if the firmament was made of two different bodies that met there. He pointed it out to her. She had already seen it.

  They moved through the tundra in the cloud-dimmed dusk, her wrapped in the army blanket against the cold, and him shivering in his one-piece and limping badly, and between them they carried the plywood box that had been fitted to the truckbed, a dark slab long and narrow and heavy as a corpse. The permafrost had long ago melted and it was bog. They sloshed through it, their pants below their knees wet and heavy, feeling like ice. They talked in whispers that barely made it over the sucking sound of their steps, talked first of night-vision equipment and the guards and then of all that lay ahead, the Inuit tribes, their dogs, of the roving bands of ones like them and what they killed to live on and who they knew who had once said they were going up and how cold it would get and after ten minutes they had exhausted everything they knew about what was to come. Behind them, so far back it was no more than just a glint of glass and metal, they had left the truck. To their east, and not far enough, the light of the guard tower hung in the dim gray gloam. Ahead, so distant it was almost impossible to make out: the periphery seam in the clouds.

  They didn’t realize it was growing darker until they could hardly see the bushes in front of them anymore and they went on farther, and then they stopped. They set down the box in a dark so dark that they didn’t know the box was near the ground until they felt it hit. They stood in that darkness and breathed it and felt it around them and she waved her hands in it and told him she was waving her hands and he could hear her sloshing about, playing like a child in first snow. From somewhere in the distant dark came the sounds of coyotes. He stood listening to the barks and yips. It was a joyous sound like he had not heard an animal make since he was a very small child. He looked towards the place from where he thought they came, what he hoped was north, and could see nothing but the blackness. After a while, she picked up her side of the box again. They stood there looking for the part that looked most black, and it all seemed as unknowable as the rest, and they began to walk.

  HELLO

  FROM HERE

  One by one the streetlamps come alight. From on my stoop, I watch: the strip of sky between the buildings, the seagulls swirling, the cobblestones below so wet from the past rain they could be rocks along a coast, on top of them a row of beacons burning. Burn, burn, burn. The lamplighter with his long pole turning back the dark. One hundred nights now I have sat here and, Mamme, each time he lights the flames I see your eyes behind the Sabbath candles. Tatte, when he sets his ladder against the cross rest and climbs up, I watch you reach to the display case in your apothecary’s shop. Yankel, my breuder, every time I smell the lamp gas escape I think of you. And start to smile. And want to cry.

  How can a son say good-bye forever? How can a brother?

  I sit on this stoop and the lamplighter stops to ask what I am writing and I tell him, “A letter.” And he asks to whom. And I say, “My family.”

  “All of it?” he says, as if he thinks I mean feters and tantes, zeydes and bubbes, everybody who is of my blood and from whose blood I came.

  “Yes,” I say. But I do not tell him I also mean neighbors and friends and everyone I knew in my world up until I left it.

  “You’ll be here all night,” he says.

  I shrug. He knows I would be anyway.

  “They live far away?” he asks.

  “A month’s walk,” I say.

  If he finds that strange, he does not show it. Maybe he walked as long to get here. Maybe he jumped trains and begged farm wives for rides and hopped the carts of gypsies and was chased by thieves, beaten by thugs. Maybe he kept to back roads, too. Walked at night. Maybe he came from a town not so different from ours. Though I do not think he is a Jew.

  “But in Russia?” he says.

  I reassure him.

  “Well,” he says, “tell them hello from here.” And starts away. Only to turn back. “Tell them,” he calls, lifting his pole in a salute, “I wish for them always a light in the dark!”

  Down the rest of the unlit street he does his best to make it true. I watch him till he disappears.

  Hello from here. Hello from 214 Talevu Street. It has been ninety-eight days since I sent you my first letter letting you know I had found lodging, a way to make a little money, had not just left on the next boat, would not until I had enough to buy at least one other ticket, that I would wait to hear from you, or till one of you—sometimes I dreamed it could be all three—might arrive at Stepashin’s Photographic Studio and Supply, peer in past the cameras on display, their brass lenses and mahogany plate holders and black bellows, and ask for me.

  A month ago I sent a second letter. That one I addressed to Tatte’s shop. Sometimes, sitting here, eating my supper of cold herring and old bread, I cannot help but think on what could have kept my words from reaching you. Then I cannot swallow. And when I think what if they did reach you, and still you have not written back, I stand up from the stoop and go inside, or onto the street, anywhere away from where the thought had found me.

  Still, I would wait here a year. Another. If I did not now know that to remain even one more day would be too late.

  So, a little after dawn I will fold up the blankets Stepashin loaned to me for sleeping. I will put on the hat that you, Mamme, knit for me the night I left and which, for each night since, has been my pillow. Inside Tatte’s valise I will shut all that I have come to own: a change of clothes, a sailor’s sweater, a coachman’s gloves, a frayed bowtie, a pocketknife with a broken blade, three pencils, and whatever paper I have left after I have finished writing this. Then I will leave the shop. I will lock the door, slide the key beneath it. I will walk down to the docks wearing the too-large clothes I took from Tatte, Yankel’s too-small shoes I used to replace my soldier’s boots, the short coat with the pocket Mamme stitched into the inside in which I’ll slip my steerage ticket along with the papers to prove to anyone who asks—port police, inspectors from the Baltic-Atlantic Line, whoever Stepashin will have alerted—that I am not an army deserter, not your eldest son, your older brother, not someone who had left his family to face the consequence of what he’d done, not me.

  My name is Yankel. So many times have I said it to myself. Trying to breathe beneath the hay of the cart in which I fled—Your name is Yankel—walking a moonlit road through unmown fields—Your name is Yankel—wandering these winding streets besides the banks of the Daugarva—Your name—over and over, with each step, each puff of dust—is Yankel. And still, inside my ears, my mind hears Shimel, my name for all my years till now. Shimel, my mind tells me, your name is Yankel. But behind my eyes, what can this name show me but you? My breuder’s eyes, my breuder’s face.

  Yankel, if you knew how I study you! Like we were boys again, holding candles, standing shirtless before our reflections in the windows at night. We’d lean close, inspecting our upper lips for hints of fuzz, wondering would we be able to grow a wonze thick as our father’s, would it be, on both our faces, the same brownish red? How you tried to match my muscles! How you mimicked the poses that I made! How, when you would fail to magically be bigger than your big brother, y
ou would do what you always did to make me laugh. A little wiggle in your ears. Then your nose. Then your whole face while you tried to stop from laughing, too.

  Little breuder, you should be here with me! We would walk streets lined with houses painted all the colors of Tatte’s powders, drink kvas on the docks beneath the hulls of steamships so huge they could fit inside them even your farts. There are whole trolley cars pulled by teams of horses, a constant crush of droshkies clattering back and forth from stores to bars to cafés to theaters. In summer, when I got here, the city bustled even after midnight. I have seen gentlemen placing bets on hedgehog races, ladies pedaling tricycles along the street. In the square before the National Theater I watched a demonstration of Yablochkov’s candles and I have seen their bulbs that burn without a flame, squinted up at their electric light. And shut my eyes. And seen your face. And stood there, in that awestruck crowd, keeping my eyes closed as long as I could. If you could see it through your brother’s eyes, you would understand. If I could tell it to our mother, she would show you.

  Mamme, do you remember the way that we would draw? When I was seven, eight. You would try to teach me to take what my eyes saw, make my hand re-create it on a page. I would try. And fail. And fall into such fits, squeezing my fingers to nearly breaking, beating my fists against my forehead, until at last you uncovered where my talent lay. Go find a picture, you would say. And I would rush around searching for something I thought you’d like. Mittens stuck on fence slats to dry. A birch fallen across the brook. Which, then, I would sit and memorize. Every line, shape, shadow. Until I could bring it in my memory back to my mamme. I would sit on your lap, holding the pad, and you would reach around me with your pencil, bent so I could feel your heart against my back, your cheek against my own, while I described what I had seen in such detail that, as if your fingers contained the same anointment as Elisha’s bones, you would bring it back to life on our page. Perfect as if drawn from your own sight.

  Why did we never try a face? I do them now. Not through drawing, but with words: descriptions of strangers’ faces scribbled down so that a loved one, somewhere far away, might unfold a page and, with the aid of what I’d written, draw themselves a picture in their own mind.

  Each day, I sit on my valise outside Stepashin’s studio, waiting for the leavers to pass by. Sailors with sweethearts, soldiers shipping out, friends sentimental from a night of drinking, mothers and fathers spending last hours with a daughter or a son. People who stop at the shop’s portrait display, cup their hands around their faces, peer inside: the painted backdrop, the velvet drapes, the chairs where someone else, someone with money, might sit before Stepashin’s lens. Sometimes I’ll see the magnesium flash caught in the face pressed to the glass. I’ll wait until the yearner steps away. Then—“Excuse me, friend”—offer him a chance to take his loved one with him for a few coins.

  On the cobblestones before me I place a crate, drape it with my jacket, invite the subject to sit. For a minute or two I simply watch them. Then I begin to write. Not only what I see—bend of a nose, shape of an eye—but what I watch happen before me: the way a lady’s nostril flares at something her lover says, a child’s eyes brighten at the approach of a horse and dray. Once a sailor leaned forward to whisper he’d prefer that I not mention his bad breath. But I did. Because I glimpsed his sister roll her eyes at the request, a fond exasperation I wanted her to feel again when, in a month or two, she might wish to remember. Another time, I watched an old man comb with careful fingers a part onto his completely hairless head. Saw his wife fight an urge to, with her own fingers, adjust the styling. So I adjusted: the hair that was still there only in the memory they shared became a way that she, over their years, would touch him. Each letter picture I pushed like this. Just a little bit. And for this they paid ten kopeks each. For this they came all day.

  At the end of that first one, Stepashin stepped out of his shop, locked up, walked straight to me. Would I, he asked, do one of him?

  “For who?” I asked.

  “For you,” he said. “So you can remember me tomorrow.” Reaching over, he put ten kopeks in my pocket. “When you will be gone from before my store.”

  But while he sat there in his trim beard and beaver hat, fierce eyes blinking out from the black frame of facial hair and pelt, I wrote, instead, a contract: to him I would pay a ruble each week, only to use the street outside his studio. To me, he would give a place to sleep, inside, just behind the front door. Where anyone trying to break in would have to wake me. I watched him take in, the way men have all of my life, my unimpressive height. “I was a soldier,” I told him.

  “Was?” he said. And I watched him calculate the age in my still-boyish face. I should have seen it then. But, at the time, he only asked my name.

  At least I knew enough not to say Yankel, not to say Shimel. Instead, I told him Shura. A nickname that I knew would not mark me as a Jew.

  Aleksander Aleksandrevitch Aleksandrei: the full formal version that, in a moment of panicked inspiration, I gave him, that, from that day on, he always used.

  “Aleksander Aleksandrevitch,” he would say, “you may keep your things inside the storage closet.”

  “Aleksander Aleksandrevitch, please do not bring your supper in; I cannot have the studio stinking of fish.”

  “Aleksander Aleksandrevitch”—even after I had been opening the door for him, greeting him good morning every day for months—“if you must light the lamp before retiring to the floor, please take care, upon your waking, to leave the chimney clean.”

  His father had been an officer in the last tsar’s army, an inventor of military machines, and Yefin Eduardovitch Stepashin paid close attention to any manner of device, though none more than his cameras. To me, he hardly ever turned an eye, rarely seemed to notice I was there. Which is, surely, why—despite sometimes a slipup of mumbled Yiddish, despite this snitch of a nose here on my face—it was an arrangement that, for a while, worked. Only during downpours, when he would rap on the window, beckon to me, would what was between us seem something more.

  While I shook out my hat, stood trying not to drip a puddle, he would speak of things I still struggle to understand. Sometimes, I was not even sure he was talking to me. Fingers fluttering among his cameras, he’d reattach a tiny rubber band, mumbling about a “rebound shutter”, “aperture”, “exposure”, as if explaining concepts to the device itself. Sliding a wood frame into a slot, he spoke of bromides, emulsion, as if to the sheet of glass it held. But for all the unfamiliar words he used, I began to see that he was talking, always, about only one thing: light. Not what his contraptions might do with it, but what it is.

  The Luminiferous Aether. This Stepashin calls it. Light, he says, travels from a source—the gas flame in this lamp above me, the sun that will tomorrow brighten the sky—and hits whatever stands in its path—this page, this pencil, my face—and bounces off of it in waves. Waves that ripple through the aether waiting in the air. And, moving it, make it something we can see. The way water in a glass is clear till stirred. This is what enters our eyes. These luminiferous waves, this aether that is stirred in such a pattern that the things off which the light has bounced appear. Without the waves, the aether is invisible. Which is what we call dark. But even in the darkest blackness, the aether is still there. Waiting to be stirred. So we might see.

  I wish my mind was better made for this. I wish, Tatte, you were here to sharpen it. You would ask me your questions, the raised eyebrows and downward-dipping mouth that Yankel and I always feared. Because we knew that what was coming would make us question what we had till then assumed was true. Sometimes, I try to do it for myself—I have attempted to see your silence from some angle I have not yet considered—but it is not the same. You cannot say, the way you always would when we were stymied, “Let’s see if we can’t think up an experiment.” And, with your powders and potions, you would find a way to test even Stepashin’s aether. When I was a kinde, I could watch for hours while you worked
. Melting, measuring, filling bottles with mixtures for sick strangers, neighbors. Even, sometimes, for your son. Meyn zun, you would say, and invite me over to smell an unknown scent, ignite shavings into a crackling of colors, watch as you mixed into some oil a powder to make it glow. Phosphorus, you said that day before I left. And sealed the tiny vial, the glass flasch that I wear still on the chain you placed around my neck.

  Sometimes, listening to Stepashin speak of waves and light I place a hand over my chest and feel it—the flasch—and, watching him work, am struck by a sudden sense of peace. An inexplicable closeness. Which is the only reason I can give for my mistake.

  It had been raining. He had been talking. I had been thinking—if only the waves of light could pass through solid things, travel in an uninterrupted line from ricochet to our eyes, you could see me from five hundred miles away, I could see you—when he turned to me and asked, “Aleksander Aleksandrevitch, do you know anyone by the name of Yushrov?”

  So strange, after all these months, to hear our name. From him. Still the answer should have been simple had my mouth not refused to make it, had it not, instead, as if needing to feel the word, said the name back: “Yushrov?”

  “A Hebrew name,” he said. He had finished closing up. We were stopped just inside the door, barely a foot apart, my hand on the knob, ready to open it for him, his on the handle of an umbrella still in the stand.