The Lazarus Project

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “What is life? This is no life. Who wants this life?”

  “The dead leave it to us to struggle in this world. They go elsewhere, wherever it is, and wait for God to sort it all out. But we have to stay here, to be here, no matter how hard it is. Nobody can be alone. Life is the life of others. My life, your life, that is nothing.”

  “Curse upon your head, Herr Taube. May you reach the bottom of my suffering and die there.”

  “Think of life, I beg you. Let’s live. We have to live.”

  Mary and I, we used to look at our pictures together; it was one of our marital rituals. But we could only go so deep into the common past: its rock bottom was a picture taken by a photographer at the Art Institute the night we met. We stood side by side, grinning at the camera, close enough to imply our mutual attraction, far enough to protect ourselves from it, glancing sideways at each other. We would look at that picture, we would measure the distance we traveled from the beginning, each step of the journey marked by another image: here we were on our Paris honeymoon, beaming in front of Notre Dame; here we were at Christmas dinner, my mouth stuffed with turkey; here we were in Vienna, on our anniversary trip, our cheeks touching; here we were happy, laughing it up, our eyes fiendishly red; here we were not looking sideways but straight at the camera, as though oblivious to the presence of the other. In my wallet, I had Mary’s passport picture. I had not looked at it once on this trip.

  And I no longer noticed when Rora took pictures. The presence of his Canon used to turn everything into a possible image for me; I looked at things and faces before us and tried to imagine what they would look like in the photos. Andriy’s profile; the wrinkled baba in the Bukovina Business Center; Chaim’s swollen hands; the grimy passengers on the bus to Chisinau—I imagined them as I would see them at some future moment, when the photos were developed. At some point, I was curious enough to suggest sheepishly that he have his pictures done at one of those Kodak, Fuji, or Agfa shops, ubiquitous in every town we passed through, promising photos in one hour. (What was the rush? I wondered. Was it the fear that everything could vanish in the future looming beyond the one hour?) Rora had refused to consider having the pictures done by anyone other than himself, though he did get some rolls developed and showed me the negatives, from which I could discern next to nothing.

  Now I didn’t care about the future in which I would be looking at Rora’s photos. The pictures would offer no revelations; I would have seen all that mattered already, because I was present at the moment of their creation—Andriy smirked at me; the baba gave me a roll of pink toilet paper; Chaim put his hand on my shoulder; our fellow passengers offered me their armpits. I didn’t think that in the future I would know anything I didn’t know before it. I didn’t care what would happen, what had happened, because I was present as it was happening. Perhaps this was the consequence of our rapid eastward movement: we moved mindlessly from one place to another; we didn’t even know where exactly we might be going. All I could see was just what was right there in front of me, before I moved on to the next thing.

  The yeshiva in Chisinau, for example, was right there in front of me. Having been bombed and burned in the Second World War, much like the rest of the city, the yeshiva was nothing but the tall walls and the hollow yard; here and there on the walls I could see a fading Star of David. It was there, the yeshiva, but I had nothing to do with it; it stood the way it had for sixty years, and I simply was as I had been the moment before I saw it, unrelated to it and its reality. It was liberating to look at it with such profound indifference—in a moment or two we were going to leave and never come back, and the yeshiva and everything around it would stay exactly the same. I felt as though I had achieved the freedom of being comfortable with the constant vanishing of the world; I had finally become the Indian on a horse with a branch tied to its tail. Still, we had to go on; therefore, the two of us who could never have experienced the pogrom went to the Chisinau Jewish Community Center to find someone who had never experienced it and would tell us about it.

  IULIANA HAD A pale face with deep, mournful eyes and dark eyebrow dashes. Her hair seemed to be ponytailed to the point of pain. She greeted us in English and firmly shook our respective hands, yet she frowned at us sorrowfully as though our presence made her want to weep. I had called her from the hotel, told her we were from Chicago, that I was researching for my book. I had not told her that we were Bosnian, or that neither of us was Jewish. When we met her at the Center, she did not ask any further questions about us, but I did about her: she was twenty-five; she studied history; she volunteered at the Center; she was married. She was beautiful.

  I was rapt listening to her sleep-talking through the history of the Jewish community in her country: the long presence, the restrictive laws of the Russian Empire, the many pogroms, the Romanian occupation, the Holocaust, the Soviet occupation, one fucking thing after another—and here we were now. She rested her hands over her groin, as people do at funerals. Occasionally she would lick her lips between sentences, and they shimmered under the strong ceiling lights. Rora wandered off ahead, but I followed her through an exhibit of restored black-and-white photographs documenting the presence and the suffering and the distinguished individuals.

  “I am particularly interested in the pogrom of 1903,” I said to her back. She had brushed her hair that morning; the end of her ponytail was neat and unfrayed.

  “Let us go to another room,” Iuliana said.

  The other room was all about the pogrom; Rora was there already, examining the photographs on the wall: bearded, mauled corpses lined up on the hospital floor, the glassy eyes facing the ceiling stiffly; a pile of battered bodies; a child with its mouth agape; a throng of bandaged, terrified survivors; Krushevan the rabid anti-Semite, with his pointy beard and curled mustache and the calm, confident demeanor of someone wielding the power of life and death. In the glass case below the photos there was a facsimile of the front page from Krushevan’s newspaper, Bessarabets, and next to it a threadbare prayer shawl.

  “The hundred years since the pogrom that devastated Kishinev have done little to heal our wounds or assuage our grief,” Iuliana said. “The Kishinev pogrom, far from the first or the last attack on a helpless community, is indelibly stamped upon our consciousness.”

  She clearly knew these lines by heart; she seemed to be indifferent to Rora taking pictures of her or browsing through the photos. At the curve of her jaw, there was a birthmark, a slight spot whose color rhymed with her eyes. She went on:

  “Was it an outburst of bestial anti-Semitism or a carefully planned attack? How could those who only the day before were on respectful and peaceable terms with their neighbors forget their humanity and slaughter them? Why did those who considered themselves enlightened turn their faces away and the police remain idle?”

  She paused and touched the hollow above her lip with her index finger. She did not seem to expect any answers from us, or indeed from anybody—it was too late for answers. I wondered how often she delivered this speech, in her nearly fluent English. How many English-speaking visitors came by? How did she learn the language so well? She was in the midst of a life I could not imagine.

  “The rioters assembled on Chuflinskiy Square on Easter Sunday, April 6. They were incited by the false news published in the Bessarabets that a Christian boy was ritually murdered by Jews in Dubassary—the age-old blood libel. But there are indications that the rioters were accompanied by people, many of them teenage boys, who urged them on and had in their hands lists of Jewish establishments and houses. Many local Christians, anxious to protect their homes and shops from violence, had chalked large crosses on their doors or had prominently displayed holy icons in their windows.”

  Rora was in the back of the room now—I could hear his camera snapping—which meant that I could not leave the reciting Iuliana alone. I did want to watch her; I wanted to enter deep into the history she was telling, even though I had already read plenty about it. But the room was overli
t; her face was too pale; the photos too perfectly restored. I nodded occasionally, to suggest that I understood what she was talking about and that she could therefore stop, but she was fixated on a midair point, obviously committed to completing her lecture. The sorrow in her eyes never wavered.

  “When a group of Jewish men assembled on Monday morning in the New Marketplace, armed with stakes, canes, and a few firearms, and determined to prevent a repetition of the previous day’s vandalism, the police dispersed them, arresting a few in the process.”

  Rora was in an alcove behind a panel with the list of the victims’ names; I moved a few steps to the side to see what he was shooting: there were a couple of dummies in Orthodox Jewish attire, positioned around an empty table, their eyes wide open, their hands resting on the table’s edge. They could not bend enough to be sitting, so they seemed to be sliding under the table. Everything in this museum seemed solidified, like those plastic brain models Mary kept around the house and sometimes played with absent- mindedly while watching television.

  “That is a Jewish family from the time of the pogrom,” Iuliana said by way of explaining the dummies, then continued: “Before the violence ended, a total of forty-three persons had lost their lives. The dead represented a broad cross section of Kishinev’s Jewish population”—she respired poignantly—“and included an apartment owner, a poultry dealer, a cattle dealer, a baker, a bread dealer, a glazier, a joiner, a blacksmith, a former bookkeeper, a bootmaker, a carpenter, a student, a wine shop proprietor, and several other shopkeepers, as well as a number of wives and mothers, and even a few children.”

  Finally I interrupted her.

  “Was any of them named Averbuch?” I asked. Her body abandoned her recitative posture; she flinched.

  “Why?”

  “Well, I am writing . . .” I said and realized the verb was far too optimistic. “I am doing research on someone named Lazarus Averbuch. He survived the pogrom, escaped from Kishinev, and ended up in Chicago. And then the Chicago chief of police killed him.”

  Iuliana’s eyes teared up; she covered her mouth with her hand, as though shocked by the news of a 1908 murder. She smelled of warm cleanliness; her tight hair shone; I wanted to embrace her and comfort her, the way I embraced and comforted Mary when she cried after our fights.

  “This was a few years after the pogrom, in 1908. Lazarus had a sister, Olga. She left Chicago a few years after his death and settled in Vienna.”

  “My grandmother’s maiden name was Averbuch,” Iuliana said. I very much wanted Rora to take a picture of Iuliana in her permanent, indelible grief, not so I could remember this particular moment—for I could never forget it—but because she was heartbreakingly beautiful. Rora stood afar, changing film in his camera.

  “Olga disappeared from history altogether upon her return to Europe,” I said. “She may have perished in the Holocaust.”

  “My grandmother was shot by the Romanians in 1942,” Iuliana said. “She was in her thirties when she died.”

  “Have you ever heard of Lazarus Averbuch? Have you ever heard a family story about someone with that name?”

  “No. My father was still a little boy when his mother was killed. And his grandparents were killed, too. We have few family stories.”

  “Are there other Averbuchs here? Do you know any?”

  “No,” she said. “There are no living Averbuchs here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “We are a small community. Everybody knows everybody. There are no Averbuchs. But you could go to the cemetery. There must be a lot of Averbuchs there.”

  THE CEMETERY WAS behind a nondescript, crumbling wall; we had a hard time finding the gate, rusted and heavy. In front of it, an ancient Dacia was carelessly parked; a man sat smoking in it, watching the gate intently, as though he were a getaway-car driver. Iuliana had to ring a bell, and a man in tall rubber boots unlocked it, then restretched himself on a bench from which he had obviously just arisen. It was a beautiful sunny day; there was a pleasant whiff of summer abundance in the bright air; birds were deliriously atwitter. We walked down a narrow path into a vault of greenness and quietude, the light diffused by overleafed trees. The path forked and dead-ended and widened; we wandered inward, deeper and deeper. Some of the gravestones were swallowed by the baroque bushes and ivy; some of them were ruins; many were desecrated—a chunk missing, clearly beaten off with a hammer; the photos of the dead smashed or cracked. Some tombstones were clean and kempt, which made them appear unreal, as though they were inferior replicas of the original, unviolated, ones. There were tombstones with something in Russian written on them, which I could not decode.

  “What does this mean?” I asked Iuliana.

  “It means: ‘Do not destroy. There is still family,’” she said.

  The birds were suddenly quiet; there were no sounds whatsoever coming from the outside; indeed, there was no outside. The leaves did not move as we brushed past them; the twigs did not break under our feet; there was no sun, though there was light, heavy and viscous. This was all, the world of the dead: Rozenberg, Mandelbaum, Berger, Mandelstam, Rosenfeld, Spivak, Urrman, Weinstein. I could not remember how long I had been away, how I had gotten to this point. Hoydee-ho, haydee-hi, all I ever do is die. Rora was falling behind, getting ahead, photographing without pause. I could not understand what he saw, what there was to photograph, how he could not feel helpless and hopeless.

  “Is your family buried here?” I asked Iuliana.

  “Some of them are,” she said. “But most of this cemetery was dug up by the Soviets to build a park.”

  Rora shouted from somewhere deep in the woods and called us over. Iuliana and I got lost looking for him, then she got lost too, and I was suddenly surrounded by a herd of mausoleums, their little portals ajar, falling off their hinges, the cavernous darkness gaping through a broken wall. The voices of Iuliana and Rora were distant, and then were gone. Everything I had been was now very far away; I reached elsewhere. I could not remember how long ago I had left Chicago and Mary. I could not recall her face, what our house looked like, what it was that we called our life.

  Why did you leave me lost in these woods, Mary? I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.

  Some part of my life ended there, among those empty graves; it was then that I started mourning. I can tell you that now, now that there is little but mourning.

  IULIANA SHOUTED, in a high-pitched voice that suggested a touch of panic; and then Rora did, too, and then I did. I was afraid that shouting might wake up the dead; I stepped lightly on the path. We found each other by a large monument on which all the Hebraic letters had been viciously scraped off, but below them in Russian it read: Averbuch Isaac 1901-1913. Here was someone I would never know anything about; here was a life entirely absorbed in death. Here it was. Iuliana was flustered, blushing, a globule of sweat sliding down past her ear, then curving at the jawline. She smiled at me—I could have kissed her right there, those living lips, those gloaming eyes, that pale face. That’s me, I thought. That woman is me. Somewhere beyond the roof of tree crowns the sky grumbled, gearing up for a storm. Rora took a picture of her, then of me, then of us.

  It took a while to find a way out. Rora’s hair was sweat-pasted to his skull and neck, a gray oval of perspiration growing on his back—the closer we got to the exit, the bigger it was. And again I thought: That’s me. The thought bounced in my head deliriously, I couldn’t get to the end of it, could not fold it up into meaning. Iuliana walked behind; I heard her gentle panting. She was me, Rora was me, and then we came upon the man on the bench, drooling asleep, his mouth open enough for us to see a graveyard of teeth, his hand wedged inside his pants’ waist—and he was me, too. The only one who was not me was myself.

  I practically broke out of the cemetery; outside, the car was still parked, now empty, reveal
ing faux-leather seats bespeckled with cigarette burns. We walked downhill, past the houses I had not noticed before, the dogs now barking at us angrily, past the park where children who had not been there before now swung on the swings and slid down the slides.

  “Tell me, Iuliana,” I said, envisioning her hand in my hand. “Tell me, what is this world about—life or death?”

  Rora looked at me with a knowing smile, but what it was that he knew I did not know.

  “That is a very strange question,” she said. “What do you mean?”

  “Is this world for the dead or for the living? Do you think there are more dead than living people?”

  “Why do you worry about that?” She looked at Rora, who shook his head. They were concerned about me, I realized; they found solidarity in worrying about my sanity. In my country, death is on the national flag.

  “If there are more dead than living, then the world is about death, and the question is: What are we to do with all the death? Who is going to remember all the dead?”

  She was thinking about it, scratching the parting in her hair. She would one day die, and so would Rora, and so would I. They were me. We lived the same life: we would vanish into the same death. We were like everybody else, because there was nobody like us.

  “I think it is about life. I think there is always more life than death,” Iuliana said. “Those who lived are always alive for someone. Those who are alive remember life, not death. And when you are dead nothing happens. Death is nothing.”

  Mary always thought I was grave; I was getting even heavier on this trip. The weight could keep me here forever. Iuliana and I, we could keep each other sad and live off sardines for the rest of our lives and through the nothingness beyond. I would stroke her hair with my heavy hand; I would write my book and read it for her, very slowly; I would kiss her dimple before heavy sleep.