The Measure of the Moon

by Lisa Preston

  “That’s quite a startle reflex you have,” he said, his voice sober. Then he picked up the phone.

  She’d hoped he hadn’t noticed her involuntary jerk. She hated it, tried to control it. Then an urgent thought seized, tensing her from spine to toes. Please, don’t let the caller be Kevin canceling, she begged silently. She wanted to talk to him more, but not here, not now, not in front of Paul. Even if she stepped away from earshot, there was the burden of the phone line being shared with Liz. All sense of privacy and normalcy vanished with this stepsister’s arrival.

  After Paul disconnected politely with a telemarketer, she said, “We should cancel that landline.”

  He noted her cell in her hand, gave a small smile, and said, “Perhaps you’ve found another righteous man.”

  “Why don’t you say what you’re really thinking?” Gillian challenged, unwilling to say what she was thinking. And she immediately wanted to atone, to say she was being crabby. But being grumpy wasn’t the reason for her resentment, and the insincerity required to give a pretend apology repelled her. She wanted to stop faking.

  His expression was reproachful as he came over and indicated the photo before her, the print she’d made of the orphans in the woods. He didn’t hide the shade of hurt in his voice. “I’m talking about your bow maker, the story you’ve discovered. What you were talking to that guy about.”

  She felt dazed and pushed Kevin and a confrontation about wants from her mind to say, “What about the story?”

  “Well, the children were Jewish?” Paul asked.

  “Jewish.” Gillian felt the prickle in her skin. His reasonable, interested tone made fingernails on her spine’s blackboard. Why did the Nazis, why did anyone single anyone else out by faith? Wait, Alex had mentioned this in the bow shop. She should have …

  “Yes,” Paul said, kneeling beside her, more into the topic as he talked. “The children this Istok guy saved, what else do you know about them?”

  She raised an eyebrow at him, then another. “He hasn’t talked much about them. I suppose I’m not going about the interview process well. Kevin should do it. He has all the journalism experience.”

  “Sounds like he and Tilda are giving you a chance. You can get your due.”

  “No.” Her voice was so clipped, she thought she’d ended things. I cannot get my due.

  After a few moments of silence, Paul tried again. “You could send the information to Yad Vashem.” Then he had to tell her about the garden in Israel where The Burning was remembered, where the names and stories of gentiles who saved Jewish people were honored, and those rescuers were called the Righteous Among the Nations.

  “Like Schindler,” she said finally.

  “Like that,” he agreed, leaning forward to study her, confusion and concern on his face. “Do you have a headache or something?”

  Gillian nodded and shook her head all at once, forcing her palms onto her eyes, her ears, her temples, wishing she could turn off her senses. Couldn’t he hear that baby babbling up there?

  After they went up to bed and the house grew quieter, she counted three occasions when she heard the child’s voice, along with Liz’s. A child could call forever. Paul heard nothing. Was it just his age that made him deaf to the call?

  In the morning, he asked, “Will you be working late again tonight?”

  She paused before nodding, needing to decide everything, knowing she hadn’t yet chosen.

  “With the gentleman Tilda introduced you to? Kevin Zebrist?”

  They nodded together on that one.

  Gillian ignored Becky’s calls and texts and emails that night and the next morning. She was separating, breaking new ground, but risked breaking Becky.

  Alexandru Istok whistled as he opened his front door, sounding like a songbird.

  “Jill?” he asked, hesitation playing on his face and voice.

  “Gillian. Thank you for meeting me, Mr. Istok.” Excitement made her rise to her toes. Was this a story of redemption or forgiveness? Of righting an old wrong? Please, let it be a great story. She cocked her head and smiled as she offered her hand. With the door open, she detected an off smell inside the house.

  The pause before he shook hands was brief, but there, then he beckoned Gillian inside with a nod and said, “Please. You may call me Alex.”

  The living room drapes were drawn. Before her eyes adjusted to the dimness, Gillian’s stomach flipped at the deeply unpleasant smell of body odor, vomit, and alcohol. Then she noticed an old woman on the couch. She wore a scarf around her head, a faded housedress, the back hem drooping halfway down her calves, knees spread, exposing the birdlike legs of a drinker, a wastebasket in her lap, her eyes half-closed, and a bit of drool in one corner of her mouth.

  “That is my sister Agnes. And you met my grandson John on your first visit?”

  Gillian nodded. John, she repeated mentally. She should have gotten John to say his name, his full name when she introduced herself to him.

  “I am going to have some coffee,” Alex said. “Would you like some coffee, too?”

  “Yes,” she said. The communing would help, serve as breaking of bread. She could detox from all the caffeine after this project was done. She followed him into a dated kitchen. The stove shone spotlessly and the countertops gleamed. Whatever the off smell, however Agnes dressed, the home was no hovel.

  While Alex busied with a silver coffeepot, filling it with scalding water from a kettle on the stove, Gillian felt a sudden dread, wondering if his sister would join them. She thought of her own sister and reminded herself to spend some real time with Becky. She’d put her sister off too much lately and itched with guilt for the sloughing.

  Alex set cups on saucers then gestured to her and the fresh pot, saying, “Please,” to indicate Gillian should pour herself a cup. Never before had she tasted such strong, sweet coffee. It wasn’t bad, just different, apart from the straight black decaf she was habituated to, found on every block in downtown Seattle.

  Agnes began to make loud, incomprehensible wails. Gillian flinched, the sound so like what her parents had splattered through her childhood.

  “Let us sit in the garden,” Alex said, opening a back door from the kitchen to another overgrown mass of herbs surrounding green metal chairs and a table.

  There, wonderful scents of oregano, sage, rosemary, and mint lifted.

  Seeing her pull the large envelope from her bag, Alexandru cast his gaze down and waved a hand over the photo still contained in the envelope. “It was in the time of … it was called O Porajmos. The Devouring. The Holokosto.”

  She repeated his words and waved the envelope at the old man. “Do you know the names of the children in the photograph?”

  He looked at her and away. “The little one was called Igor. He did not know his family name, just Igor.”

  “And you’re here?” She brandished the print, cocked her head, inviting him to look again, stuck on why he’d turned the photo over in the bow shop.

  Still looking away, he let one index finger point to the left side of the paper. From her first meeting of Alexandru Istok’s grandson, she’d not imagined that Istok himself might be in the photo. Her mind rattled with the interviewing tips Kevin repeated during their coffee date. Seek to be able to capture the subject’s essence as briefly as possible. Use the bag of tricks to get him talking, use your body language, match his. Establish an unspoken connection by matching his posture then adjusting yours in a more focused or intimate manner and he may well follow. Kevin acted it out, and she’d been torn between awe of all he did as an interviewer and distaste at discovering how much of Kevin’s action was premeditated and calculated.

  Should she make the same sweeping gesture with her hand Alex did? Say please as a welcome? Too much, she warned herself. Too much copying and thinking and not enough listening to his story. Not at all. Still she tried it, leaning forward until she matched Alex’s pose, then sitting up in her habitually erect manner, a notebook in her lap and pencil in han
d.

  He still sat inclined, hands resting on his thighs, waiting. She had not magically pulled him along by momentarily matching his posture. Begin, she told herself, and cleared her throat.

  “How old are you in that picture?”

  He flashed both palms spread, then just his right hand, then his index finger. “Sixteen. About sixteen.”

  “Before you came here, where did you live? Where all have you lived?”

  He pursed his lips and released a long exhalation.

  Gillian felt the tug of satisfaction tease the corners of her mouth as he smiled back, his perfect white teeth glimmering, mirroring her. The jarringly flawless teeth of peoples who’d had little or no dental care abounded in photos from around the world. She longed to take those photos.

  “Places’ names change,” Alex said. “There are … different countries. Borders change. People change. Everything changes.”

  Gillian nodded, ready to acknowledge all that had been skewed during and after the last world war, but wanting particularly to stake out his world, his changes. Before she managed to phrase her questions though, she had to think. Wetting her lips, she made a point of opening the notebook, flipping to a clean page, clicking her pen, and she scanned him.

  He saved her. “Romania, of course, Moldova, Ukraine. Transnistria.”

  I’ll talk to Paul, she thought. And she’d read up, do research. But Paul would know off the top of his head where allegiances had moved during the forties. “And where else have you traveled?”

  “We went through Bulgaria on our way to Turkey. We came to America from Canada, to Canada by way of Britain.”

  “To Britain,” Gillian prompted, “by way of?”

  “By way of boat.”

  “To Britain from Turkey?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about your family. Who were you traveling with?”

  He shook his head. “Just my sister. We never saw anyone else again after the deportations.”

  Deportations. Gillian half closed her eyes, but would not allow the wince, then caught the inside of one cheek in her teeth. She should have asked more openly, instead of injecting her presumption that other family remained. “Will you tell me more about the journeys? About how they started and what they were like?”

  “All right.” He waited.

  She tried harder. “And about your family back then?”

  “My father, his father, my uncles,” Alex pantomimed bowing as he talked, “they were lautari. We made bows. We played music.”

  Lautari. Gillian scribbled a phonetic approximation of the word and asked, “They taught you how to make bows?”

  He hesitated then nodded. “Bows were in our blood. I played when I was very young. I knew to stand to the side when I yanked hair from horses’ tails so I would not be kicked. I knew how to get the mortise out without hurting the bow. I never broke one.” He smiled slyly, gauging her interest, her impression of his skills. He clasped his hands together, stilled.

  Finding out she would have to ask the right question was at once an irritation and a challenge. Gillian wanted to meet the murkiness of the unknown cleanly. She straightened her spine, pushed her shoulders down and back. “How did you end up making bows here in Seattle?”

  He told her about coming to America decades ago. Eventually, he found a bow maker in Seattle who needed an apprentice. The man’s son was uninterested. Not until Norbert Sartineau was nearly in the grave did Mario want to learn.

  “So Norbert took you on.” She reveled in the serendipity of an aging bow maker taking in an immigrant apprentice with Old World bow-making skills. “You needed each other. How wonderful. How interesting. I’d like to hear everything.”

  Alex talked of orphans, of being an orphan himself, responsible for his little sister, of guiding the children out of wartime Romania, hoping to be paid for his trouble, setting them on their path to Israel before that country attained nationhood. He nodded with a sideways lean of his head as he spoke and Gillian kept her pen still, not wanting to distract him before he finished. Then she scribbled notes, block lettering new names: O Porajmos. Bukovina. Golta.

  “I’d like to have something to show the guy I’m working with—” Gillian cut herself off, regretting the word choice. No matter how she ranked this in her mind, how she marked her place in the world, things were not as they seemed. Tilda—who’d asked for an outline or an indication of the project’s direction and scope—was not her boss. This was spec work. Gillian tried to think of herself as in charge.

  “The coffee is cold. And I have no more to tell.”

  “I’m a much better photographer than I am an interviewer. I would love to take your portrait, if you wouldn’t object. I’ll show you everything after I make prints, give you copies, if you like.”

  Alex pulled his head back until his jaw was even with the front of his chest, both eyebrows raised. Not put off, perhaps, but surprised, Gillian decided, because she’d already taken his photo at the bow shop.

  He rose in an instant, his knees startlingly agile for a man of his years, his step light enough that he was silent as he moved inside. Agnes was snoring on the couch, and Alex padded to the near end of the living room. There he gazed straight out the window. Gillian followed, stood by his right shoulder, and rose to her toes. Puget Sound was just visible, the water a heaving deep blue. Many days, heavy rain or low clouds would keep the view obscured, but for now, they could see it.

  Gillian smiled and slipped a camera from her bag.

  He knew just where to stand to see the water in the bow shop, too. At this angle, she saw the piercing hole in his left earlobe, accenting his jaw line. One of her photographs would have to show that pierced ear. Her fingers swept the camera’s body.

  He let his shoulders drop, relaxation seeping through him. “I wanted to live near the sea.”

  Punctuating his sentence with a shutter release, Gillian knew she’d taken a good shot and she chewed his words. Thinking of Kevin’s encouragement of her doing these interviews, she smiled and knew she could do better, but as a photographer, she’d just captured the man’s essence with a click. Alex hadn’t had to tell her about wanting to be near the sea. She’d seen his desire. Finally, it was coming. She wasn’t having to wrack her mind for how best to elicit the responses. Flow, helped by the sight of dark water and light waves, sailboats and freighters, commenced.

  “It’s the world,” he said. “From the edge of any sea, you can travel. I don’t, but I could. You can. There.” He pointed to the waving salt water, gateway to the Pacific.

  “You prefer to travel by water?”

  He nodded. “We escaped, in the end, by sea. The Black Sea. After I came here, came to work for Norbert Sartineau and learn his ways, I put traveling away.”

  “Please tell me more about escaping with the children.”

  Alex talked of travel over land, leaving Romania, tromping along the coast, heading for Bulgaria, through desperate little villages and war damage. Of finding a rowboat with a barely functioning motor, of stealing, of running out of fuel or possibly killing the engine because the fuel was bad quality, partly kerosene, contaminated with rainwater. And then rowing. Rowing and rowing.

  “Before the boat?” Gillian pressed with a whisper. “Tell me more?”

  He talked of the forests and untended farms, of un-dug potatoes he’d pulled from the earth and handed out raw to the children. Slipping into alleys and checking garbage heaps. Eating undercooked pigeon, a dead one they’d found at the side of a dusty track. Feeding so many mouths was an overwhelming challenge.

  He shrugged as Gillian marveled. And she soaked in his sense that it was simply what had to be done. There was no other choice to make, caring for the children was what anyone would have done. Leading them to safety, to freedom, it was expected. The boys were foundlings, someone else’s children, but found children fell to the responsibility of whatever adult or half adult was there, didn’t they?

  “You saved those children,”
she marveled. “Jewish orphans.”

  He allowed one judicious nod.

  Gillian gave a wry smile, thinking how her heart clutched when Becky talked about something tragic happening to her and Myron, leaving Gillian and Paul to raise their little Phillip. She swallowed, feeling overwhelmed and empty at the same time.

  “There is a special place to honor people like you, people who saved Jewish people during the Holocaust,” she told him. After Paul’s mention, she’d read remembrances on the Yad Vashem website for hours, weeping at the tragedies and heroics of those who had aided their fellow human beings, not for money but because it was the right thing to do.

  Alexandru Istok raised his eyebrows at her, then his chin. She lightened things by asking, “Did those children think of you as a brother or an uncle? Did they call you Alex or Alexandru?”

  He nodded again, giving Gillian a great flush of pleasure in guessing right and an overwhelming fear that the spontaneous thoughts, the gut instincts and guesses, wouldn’t come often enough. What had she missed, not guessed? What else might she lose in this and other stories because she didn’t listen to a little whispering voice in her head that something was amiss, missing?

  “Tsigani.”

  She scribbled. “Was that your nickname?”

  Alexandru shook his head. “People, others, in Romania from the beginning, they called us Tsigani, Gypsies. Roma.”

  Gillian cocked her head, delighted at the exotic theme, the special subculture ready to suffuse her great photo essay project. She recalled the shot she’d taken of Alex at the Sartineau Shop and she wondered how many men deep into their eighties or nineties had pierced ears. She smiled, but her elation faltered when he made a fist and began to strike it against his other palm, punctuating the past.

  “In Romania, they made us walk away from where we lived, they put us on the trains going east. We crossed the first river and could not come back. Not for two years, not until the Russian army pushed the Romanian and German armies out of the land between the rivers. And in those two years, we endured more cold and ate less food than you could ever imagine. Many days we ate nothing. Sometimes dogs ate our dead. We ate dogs. Usually it was a bit of thin soup from bad flour or cornmeal. We crafted things. We looked everywhere for something to sell, to trade, to eat. The adults had to work, anyone who got sick died. Our whole clan … missing, starved, died, gone in two years. Only Agnes and I survived.”