Immigrant City

by David Bezmozgis

  “Simon isn’t disturbing you?” she asked.

  “No, he’s a good boy,” Jesus replied.

  She set the food down on a low table. Jesus watched her affectionately. He stopped his labours and lay a hand on her belly. She looked to him, smiled and kissed him on the lips.

  Everything dissolved into whiteness except for Jesus, who was no longer Jesus but the shaven-headed, square-jawed man from the corporate brochure. In place of the caftan was a charcoal grey tailored suit with a white shirt, open at the collar to reveal a lean, tanned, sinewy throat. The blue eyes burned with the same prophetic conviction they’d possessed on the cross.

  “The life of anything is like a journey between two shores,” he said in an urbane middle-European voice, gravel rolling in a copper drum. “You depart from one shore and do not see the other. After a time, you begin to sense it. Those birds flying, where did they come from? You glimpse the outline with its dark topography. It fills you with terror. You draw nearer and apprehend its particularities. Now it starts to seem less forbidding. You realize that it is actually awesome and beautiful. When it is very near, you are impatient to arrive. ‘Hurry, hurry,’ you say to yourself. ‘Let me be delivered unto it.’”

  He paused and allowed the blue light in his eyes to cool.

  “What you have just seen is the other shore. Gospels, apostles, mutability, Rashomon. We have been moving toward it for millennia, and lately ever faster. Many of you have feared and dreaded it, cursed your ill luck that it should happen in your lifetimes. But fear and dread only stifle your own progress. The transmission of ideas through the old methods is a dying man, kept alive by habit and sentimentality. Shed a tear if you like but do not leap into his grave. For ages we wrote and read because we could fashion nothing better. We imposed a monopoly on expression, perpetuated a hierarchy of truth and legislated dominant versions of history. This only endured because it was profitable. It is now the opposite, tedious. I offer you here the chance to shape a new vision of the future by contributing your version of the past. Each of you has been invited because you are an expert in a knowledge area that has been algorithmically determined to be of great popular interest. For instance, you are an authority on the Manchurian Incident. The American Civil War. The Bolshevik Revolution. Auschwitz. The Crusades. The Partition of India. The Six-Day War. The French Revolution. The Kennedy Assassination. The Moon Landing. Christopher Columbus. The Creation of the Earth. But since it is not for us to arbitrate truth, in a different group there is someone who espouses a rival vision, and possibly another and another. None is given precedence or privilege. We do not condescend. Ultimately, it is the consumer who will—”

  I removed the buds from my ears and lifted the visor from my face. They released their grip without resistance and went dormant. Around me the others sat upright, their heads tracking in subtle uniformity. I walked out of the auditorium, proud of myself for taking ten virtuous steps even as I knew I probably wouldn’t take twenty. It would have felt good to take a firm moral stand, to set an example for my children, but I anticipated my wife’s reproach. I’d accepted the trip, left her with the girls and come back empty-handed because I wanted to be a hero. As if we could afford it. As if I wasn’t the one who agonized, complained, lost sleep—but when someone finally presented me with an actual opportunity? Other people found ways to compromise. She had. What about all the things she’d given up? Performing. Travel. Her body. Another voice interrupted. It was also hers. Oh, please. If you want to ditch it, ditch it. Don’t pretend I’m stopping you. As if I’d ask you to work with cranks and Holocaust deniers. And then tearfully, You’re so quick to think the worst of me.

  I stood in the lobby, trying to separate thoughts and feelings that had muddled together and made it impossible to decide anything or even to understand quite what I was deciding. People now passed, employees of the company, mainly young men of the type I expected to find in such a place, going this way and that, joking, making small talk, or striding with concentrated purpose, like office workers anywhere, attending to their designated tasks, contributing their minute adjustments on the world. I fell in behind a group of them. They crossed under the staircase and split off into their respective offices. I wandered on by myself, glancing absently at the doors. Instead of letters or numbers, they were identified by symbols. On one was a cyclone, on one a pine tree, still another showed a kitten, an apple, a heart. The heart door opened and a man stood facing me, almost as startled as I was but quick to recover. He was older than the other employees, more my contemporary, slightly rumpled, wearing eyeglasses, his curly hair thinning and receding. He looked at his wristwatch and grinned.

  “You’re with the visiting group?”

  We both noted my badge.

  “You’re a little early for the tour.”

  “I was just walking around.”

  “Unchaperoned?” he said in mock alarm.

  “I can leave.”

  “The others are still in the presentation?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you weren’t sold?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, it’s not for everybody.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Just most people!” he said, and laughed.

  I assumed our exchange was over and retreated a step to let him pass.

  “Come in,” he said. “I’ll give you a private tour of what we’re doing in here. I think you’ll like it.”

  He held the door for me. I’d expected the room to be large, but it was small. There were three workstations, wedged closely together. One belonged to my host; one was unoccupied; a young woman perched at the third. She wore oversized headphones and gazed at a screen that displayed hundreds of snapshots, some of which appeared to be actual photographs, others selfies from profiles and social media streams. She typed rapidly on her keyboard, causing certain of the photos to balloon hugely, undergo some cosmetic manipulation and then shrink back.

  “What you saw before was the blockbuster. Here we make the indie film. Éric Rohmer, John Cassavetes. Similar tools, different objective. But the next step in art. A little closer to the time machine.”

  On hooks along the rear wall hung a row of mirrored visors. He reached over and plucked one up.

  “There’s someone in your life you want to see again, living or dead, we can materialize them. Your departed grandmother. Dad who walked out on you. The family dog. Your high school sweetheart. Or your wife, the way she was when you first met. Providing there’s pictures and video available somewhere. Metadata. Archive. Cloud. We’ll find it, filter it, and fuse it with your memories.”

  He offered me the visor. “Want to try?”

  I accepted as an electric beep sounded at the door.

  “Hello, Jan,” greeted my host.

  Wearing the charcoal suit and white shirt, bald Jesus came in. He smiled and wagged his finger at me as at a naughty child.

  “Aga, vot kuda ty podevalsya, tovarishch,” he said in slightly accented but fluent Russian. (“Ah, so that’s where you disappeared to, comrade.”)

  “Popalsya,” I replied. (“You caught me.”)

  “Has he chosen yet?” Jan asked.

  “No.”

  “This is my favourite room,” Jan said. “Isn’t that true, Randy?”

  Randy nodded.

  “My first time, I materialized Milena Ruzickova. Twelve years old. What sweet hours we spent in the shed where the builders kept their tools. Milena, Milenka, how you broke little Janek’s heart!”

  Jan gripped the back of Randy’s chair and wheeled it around for me. He placed his hands on my shoulders.

  “You disapprove of my project. You think Jan is a revisionist, a nihilist—God forbid, a capitalist!” he said.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Only subjectively,” he said. “But never mind.” He paused a moment and asked, “Do you know whom you’d like to materialize?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good,” h
e said. “But I’ll spare you the trouble.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Uncle Jan will decide for you. Like in Communist times when nobody had a choice and everyone was happy.”

  The visor and the earbuds and you’re in the white sweater, which we dubbed “favourite sweater,” with the little roses embroidered at the collar. You wore it the day I noticed you by the parking garage and the first time we went out. It’s a vintage, schoolmarmish thing, but you’re twenty-two and beautiful and it adds to your charm. How long now since I saw it or even gave it a thought?

  We come out of the movie theatre, searching for our car and the pigeon flails at the curb, one wing grotesquely bent, blood beaded on the pavement. It flaps crookedly, spins around on its side, rests, peers at us, spins again. More than a memory, it feels like I’m in the crystalline bowl of my old life. I see a rock, a phone book in the doorway of a tutoring centre. You take off your sweater and edge toward the curb. “I can’t,” you say, and hand me the sweater. The bird pecks and thrashes as I wrap it up. I feel its every sharp and brittle movement. It doesn’t submit, hurting itself, even after I bundle it against my chest and then hold it in my lap as you drive, looking for a vet, convinced we have to save it, unwilling to let it die.

  Little Rooster

  TEN YEARS AFTER MY grandfather died, I found myself sorting through a shallow plastic bin that held the accumulated documentation of his life. My mother had labelled it in Russian: “Mother and Father.” When she downsized from a house to a condominium, the bin migrated to me. It is humbling to consider that, to all extents and purposes, a human life can be contained inside a shallow plastic bin. It is even more humbling to consider that it can be contained in less than a shallow plastic bin. My grandfather had been a thrifty, patient and meticulous person who didn’t like to throw anything away. Besides, who knew when some relevant authority might demand a full accounting? Sentiment had stayed my mother’s hand but I intended to be ruthless. One old Israeli bus pass is poetic; one hundred are oppressive.

  My grandfather was born in a small Latvian town during World War I. His first languages were Yiddish and Latvian. Traditional Jewish schooling and an interest in Zionism contributed functional Hebrew. He also had some Russian, which he was later obliged to cultivate as a soldier in the Red Army and over four decades as a Soviet citizen. Though he spent the last twenty years of his life in Canada, he never learned English. Of the things worth keeping in the bin were various photographs, passports, notarized English translations of birth certificates, a marriage licence, the official acknowledgement of my grandfather’s front-line service during World War II, a clinical description of the wounds he sustained and the consequent benefits afforded him by the Soviet state. There were two sets of claim forms for wartime reparations—a legitimate one to the Germans for their crimes, and a spurious one to the Swiss for their laundering of “looted assets” itemized as:

  Two houses, furniture, dishes, jewellery $100,000 US (approx.)

  Store with leather shoes, leather furniture $300,000 US

  There were also numerous letters written in Russian and in Yiddish. My Russian wasn’t good enough to decipher the cursive script, but millions of Russian-speakers—including my mother—could do it. The Yiddish was another matter. Once the vernacular, it was now the preserve of academics. I knew one, a professor at the University of Toronto, who was writing a monograph on heteronormative bias in Galician graffiti.

  I made an appointment and brought the letters to her office. Some were from my grandparents’ friends, resettled in Düsseldorf; others, postmarked from Israel, were from my grandfather’s younger brother, Venyamin, affectionately called Venya. I knew Venya only from stories told to me by my mother and grandfather. I knew, for example, that when he was a boy, a horse had stepped on his head. He’d nearly died. For the rest of his life, he bore a dent in his skull in the shape of a hoof. After the war he married a Jewish woman, reputedly unkind. They had two children. The first was a son, the spitting image of Venya. The second was a daughter, exceptionally beautiful, who strongly resembled a Latvian who’d lodged temporarily in their house. Later, it emerged that Venya also had an illegitimate child, a blond girl, raised by her maternal grandparents.

  Though unwilling herself to do the work, the professor connected me with one of her graduate students, a tattooed Norwegian named Knut, who agreed to write a summary of each letter for a standardized fee. He explained that this was a common way for Yiddish students to supplement their stipends. A generation of Jews appealed to them with their inherited glyphs. Most often the letters were banal, but occasionally something interesting, even scandalous, surfaced. A secret in the secret language. Knut preferred when this didn’t happen. People got upset and Knut suffered moral qualms about profiting from such disclosures. He’d consulted the Talmud for guidance, but to no avail. The sages diverged.

  Two weeks after I turned over the letters, I met Knut at a popular, as yet unboycotted, Israeli coffee franchise near campus. Though he greeted me warmly, I detected unease. He began with the innocuous Düsseldorf correspondence, which concerned itself mostly with the realms of health, education and finance. Who was hale and who was ill. What afflictions had stricken. Who, thank God, had prevailed and who, God forbid, had succumbed. Also, the inexorable passage of the brilliant grandchildren through the stations of the school system. The admirable and incomprehensible directions they pursued in life. The exact dollar figures of their salaries and the purchase prices of their homes. Venya’s letters mostly conformed to the same model. It was only in his last four letters, sent in the six-month period between my grandmother’s death and his own, that the substance changed significantly. Faithful to our agreement, Knut had summarized these as well, but he cautioned me to reflect before I took possession. He didn’t pretend to understand the implications of everything he’d read, but he believed the letters touched upon matters of a delicate nature. It was possible, of course, that what he’d read in the letters was already common knowledge to me and my family. And perhaps, even if it wasn’t, I might not be disturbed by what he’d uncovered. People had different sensitivities. However, from the tone and context of the letters, Knut suspected that they addressed something confidential between my grandfather and his brother.

  Though I was tempted, I took Knut’s advice and resolved to reflect. One of life’s cruellest lessons is that a person can’t unknow something. And there exists enough unavoidable pain in the world that one would be a fool or a masochist to actively court more. My grandfather, whom I loved very much and whose essence was still sometimes palpable to me, was dead ten years. His brother, a man I didn’t recall ever meeting, was dead seventeen. What did I stand to gain by scavenging through the past? The reflexive answer, of course, was that sacrament, the Truth. After all, it was just a cruel stroke of history—perpetrated by the dread mustached visages—that explained why I couldn’t read the letters myself. And would my grandfather have kept them—like so many Israeli bus passes—if he didn’t want them to be found? Perhaps the sin wasn’t of trespass but of laziness and indifference? How many vain and useless things had I done while these letters languished, humming with meaning? And wasn’t there a privileged kind of knowing available to us only after our loved ones were gone? In other words, I walked around the block and justified doing what I already wanted to do.

  Summary of letter from Venyamin Singer to Berl Singer, 6 March 1999

  Venyamin asks after Berl’s well-being. He repeats his condolences on the death (January 1999) of Berl’s wife, Shayna—a generous heart, loved by all—but reminds Berl that the living must live. He asks if Berl has returned to the Latvian Canadian Cultural Centre and if he has been able to verify that the woman he saw there was Lauma. He admonishes Berl not to let the matter drop. He concludes with affectionate wishes.

  Summary of letter from Venyamin Singer to Berl Singer, 30 March 1999

  Venyamin praises Berl for persisting re: Lauma. He remarks upon the mysteries of f
ate. He dismisses Berl’s reservations and apprehensions. (There is an uncontextualized allusion to homemade farmer’s cheese[?].) He insists Berl act decisively and make contact with Lauma. He concludes with affectionate wishes.

  Summary of letter from Venyamin Singer to Berl Singer, 9 May 1999

  Venyamin congratulates Berl on Victory Day (Great Patriotic War). He reproaches Berl for the pessimistic attitude he displayed during their telephone conversation (date unspecified). He says he has slept poorly since the conversation, worried about Berl. He relates his attempts to book a flight to Toronto. He cites his course of chemotherapy and his doctor’s refusal to write a letter of permission (to airline). He criticizes his doctor, the Israeli health-care system and the airline. He insists he feels well but is not naive about his prospects. This explains his sense of urgency re: Lauma. He says she is the love of his life. He concludes with affectionate wishes.

  Summary of letter from Venyamin Singer to Berl Singer, 3 July 1999

  [NB: Handwriting illegible in some places.]

  Venyamin asks after Berl’s well-being. He apologizes for his long silence. He experienced complications from the surgery. He blames (a commander?) for (the pills?). (Electricity?) in his hand makes it hard for him to write. He confirms that he received Berl’s last letter. He says (the sisters?) stole the photograph Berl sent of Lauma. He asks that Berl send another. He encloses a photograph of himself taken in the (??) fortress. He also encloses a letter to Lauma. He asks Berl to relay it. He recalls a different letter he asked Berl to deliver to her. He hopes Berl has (??) (vagina?) (this time?). He concludes with affectionate wishes.

  I didn’t share with my mother what I’d learned from Knut. The subject of my grandparents’ deaths remained raw for her. She still drove to the cemetery nearly every Sunday to visit their graves. If the trail of Venya’s letters led somewhere unsettling, I couldn’t see how that knowledge would do her any good. However, under the pretext of trying to make sense of disparate bits of my grandfather’s files, I asked her if she knew the name Lauma or if she’d ever been to the Latvian Canadian Cultural Centre. She didn’t recognize Lauma, but not long after my grandmother’s death, she had visited the Latvian Centre with my grandfather. The Latvian government, having partially crawled out of its post-Soviet hole, announced that it would offer pensions to eligible expatriates. My grandfather qualified, and my mother took him to the Latvian Centre to help process his application. It was the only time she’d been there. Though she’d lived half her life in Latvia and now, by virtue of her age, was receiving her own modest Latvian pension, she found no reason to return. The Latvian she’d learned at school, she’d mostly forgotten. Her language was Russian. She was Jewish. And she was leery of ethnic Latvian expatriates, most of whom had retreated with the Germans at the end of the war or descended from people who had retreated with the Germans. What they had or had not done to Jews, or why they might have preferred to retreat with the Germans rather than be “liberated” by the Soviets, was too esoteric a consideration. Simply, she didn’t feel comfortable with them.