Everything Is Illuminated (20 page)

Without being able to examine the Kolker’s body, the doctor offered a diagnosis of consumption — little more than a guess for the sake of some dotted line. Brod watched through the hole in the black wall as her still-young husband withered away. The strong, treelike man who had been illuminated by a wink of lightning that night of Yankel’s death, who had explained to her the nature of her first period, who had awoken early and returned late only to provide for her, who wouldn’t lay a finger on her but would too often impart the might of his fist, now looked eighty.

His hair had grayed around the ears and fallen out on top. Pulsing veins had risen to the surface of his prematurely wrinkled hands. His stomach had dropped. His breasts were larger than her own, which is to say little of their size, but volumes of how much it hurt Brod to see them.

She persuaded him to change his name for the second time. Perhaps this would confuse the Angel of Death when He came to take the Kolker away. (The inevitable is, after all, inevitable.) Perhaps He could be tricked into thinking the Kolker was someone he was not, just as the Kolker himself was tricked. So Brod named him Safran, after a lipstick passage she remembered with longing from her father’s ceiling. (And it was this Safran for whom my grandfather, the kneeling groom, was named.) But it didn’t work. Shalom-then-Kolker-now-Safran’s condition worsened, the years continued to pass in days, and his grief left him too weak even to rub his wrist with enough strength over the blade in his head to end his own life.

Not long after their exile to the rooftops, the Wisps of Ardisht realized that they would soon run out of matches to light their beloved cigarettes. They kept a chalk-line count on the side of the tallest chimney. Five hundred. The next day three hundred. The next day one hundred. They rationed them, burned them down to the striker’s fingers, trying to light at least thirty cigarettes with each. When they were down to twenty matches, lighting became a ceremony. By ten, the women were crying. Nine. Eight. The clan leader dropped the seventh off the roof by accident, and proceeded to throw his own body after it in shame. Six.

Five. It was inevitable. The fourth match was blown out by a breeze — a gross oversight by the new clan leader, who also plunged to his death, although his nosedive was not of his own choosing. Three: We will die without them. Two: It’s too painful to go on. And then, in the moment of deepest desperation, a grand idea emerged, devised by a child, no less: simply make sure that there is always someone smoking. Each cigarette can be lit from the previous one. As long as there is a lit cigarette, there is the promise of another. The glowing ash end is the seed of continuity!

Schedules were drawn up: dawn duty, morning smoke, lunchtime puffer, midafternoon and late-afternoon assignments, crepuscular puller, lonely midnight sentinel. The sky was always lit with at least one cigarette, the candle of hope.

So it was with Brod, who knew that the Kolker’s days were numbered, and so began her grieving long before he died. She wore rent black clothes and sat close to the ground on a wooden stool. She even recited the Mourner’s Kaddish loud enough for Safran to hear. There are only weeks left, she thought. Days. Although she never cried tears, she wailed and wailed in dry heaves. (Which could not have been good for my great-great-great-great-grandfather — conceived through the hole — who was eight months heavy in her stomach.) And then, in one of his moments of mental clarity, Shalom-then-Kolker-now-Safran called to her through the wall: I’m still here, you know. You promised you’d pretend to love me until I died, and instead you’re pretending I’m dead.

It’s true, Brod thought. I’m breaking my promise.

So they strung their minutes like pearls on an hour-string. Neither slept. They stood vigil with their cheeks against the pine divide, passing notes through the hole like schoolchildren, passing vulgarities, blown kisses, blasphemous hollers and songs.

Weep not, my love,

Weep not, my love,

Your heart is close to me.

You fucking bitch,

Ungrateful cunt,

Your heart is close to me.

Oh, do not fear,

I’m nearer than near,

Your heart is close to me.

I’ll gouge out your eyes

And pound in your fucking head,

You fucking bitch whore,

Your heart is close to me.

Their final conversations (ninety-eight, ninety-nine, and one hundred) consisted of exchanged vows, which took the form of sonnets Brod would read from one of Yankel’s favorite books — a loose scrap descended to the floor: I had to do it for myself — and of Shalom-then-Kolker-now-Safran’s most loathsome obscenities, which didn’t mean what they said, but spoke in harmonics that could be heard only by his wife: I’m sorry that this has been your life. Thank you for pretending with me.

You are dying, Brod said, because it was the truth, the all-consuming and unacknowledged truth, and she was tired of saying things that weren’t the truth.

I am, he said.

What does it feel like?

I don’t know, through the hole. I’m scared.

You don’t have to be scared, she said. It’s going to be OK.

How is it going to be OK?

It’s not going to hurt.

I don’t think that’s what I’m afraid of.

What are you afraid of?

I’m afraid of not being alive.

You don’t have to be afraid, she said again.

Silence.

He put his forefinger through the hole.

I have to tell you something, Brod.

What?

This is something I’ve wanted to tell you since I met you, and I should have told you this so long ago, but the longer I waited, the more impossible it became.

I don’t want you to hate me.

I couldn’t hate you, she said, and held his finger.

This is all completely wrong. It’s not how I meant for it to be. You have to know that.

Shhh . . . shhh . . .

I owe you so much more than this.

You don’t owe me anything. Shhh . . .

I’m a bad person.

You’re a good person.

I have to tell you something.

It’s OK.

He pressed his lips to the hole. Yankel was not your real father.

The minutes were unstrung. They fell to the floor and rolled through the house, losing themselves.

I love you, she said, and for the first time in her life, the words had meaning.

After eighteen days, the baby — who had, with its ear pressed against Brod’s bellybutton, heard everything — was born. In postlabor exhaus-tion, Brod had finally slept. Only minutes later, or perhaps at the exact moment of the birth — the house was so consumed with new life that no one was aware of new death — Shalom-then-Kolker-now-Safran died, never having seen his third child. Brod later regretted not knowing precisely when her husband passed away. If it had been before the birth of her child, she would have named him Shalom, or Kolker, or Safran. But Jewish custom forbade the naming of a child after a living relative. It was said to be bad luck. So instead she named him Yankel, like her other two children.

She cut around the hole that had separated her from the Kolker for those last months, and put the pine loop on her necklace, next to the abacus bead that Yankel had given her so long ago. This new bead would remind her of the second man she had lost in her eighteen years, and of the hole that she was learning is not the exception in life, but the rule. The hole is no void; the void exists around it.

The men at the flour mill, who wanted so desperately to do something kind for Brod, something that might make her love them as they loved her, chipped in to have the Kolker’s body bronzed, and they peti-tioned the governing council to stand the statue in the center of the shtetl square as a symbol of strength and vigilance, which, because of the perfectly perpendicular saw blade, could also be used to tell more or less accurate time by the sun.

But rather than of strength and vigilance, he soon became a symbol of luck’s power. It was luck, after all, that had given him the golden sack that Trachimday, and luck that had brought him to Brod as Yankel left her. It was luck that had put that blade in his head, and luck that had kept it there, and luck that had timed his passing to coincide with the birth of his child.

Men and women journeyed from distant shtetls to rub his nose, which was worn to the flesh in only a month’s time and had to be rebronzed. Babies were brought before him — always at noon when he cast no shadow at all — to be protected from lightning, the evil eye, and stray partisan fire. The old folks told him their secrets, hoping he might be amused, take pity on them, grant a few more years. Unmarried women kissed his lips, praying for love, so many kisses that the lips became in-dented, became negative kisses, and also had to be rebronzed. So many visitors came to rub and kiss different parts of him for the fulfillment of their various wishes that his entire body had to be rebronzed every month. He was a changing god, destroyed and recreated by his believers, destroyed and recreated by their belief.

His dimensions changed slightly with each rebronzing. Over time, his arms lifted, inch by inch, from down at his sides to high above his head. The sickly forearms of the end of his life became thick and virile.

His face had been polished down so many times by so many beseeching hands, and rebuilt as many times by as many others, that it no longer re-sembled that of the god to whom those first few prayed. For each recasting, the craftsmen modeled the Dial’s face after the faces of his male descendants — reverse heredity. (So when my grandfather thought he saw that he was growing to look like his great-great-great-grandfather, what he really saw was that his great-great-great-grandfather was growing to look like him. His revelation was just how much like himself he looked.) Those who prayed came to believe less and less in the god of their creation and more and more in their belief. The unmarried women kissed the Dial’s battered lips, although they were not faithful to their god, but to the kiss: they were kissing themselves. And when the bridegrooms knelt, it was not the god they believed in, it was the kneel; not the god’s bronzed knees, but their own bruised ones.

So my young grandfather knelt — a perfectly unique link in a perfectly uniform chain — almost one hundred fifty years after his great-great-great-grandmother Brod saw the Kolker illuminated at her window. With the hand of his functional left arm, he removed his panty-hanky and wiped the sweat from his brow, then from above his upper lip.

Great-great-great-grandfather, he sighed, don’t let me hate who I become.

When he felt ready to continue — with the ceremony, with the afternoon, with his life — he rose to his feet and was again met with the cheers of the shtetl’s men.

Hoorah! The groom!

Yoidle-doidle!

To the synagogue!

They paraded him through the streets on their shoulders. Long white banners hung from the high windows, and the cobblestones had been caked white — if they had only known — with flour. The fiddles continued to play from the front of the parade, this time faster klezmer melodies to which the men sang along in unison:

Biddle biddle biddle biddle

bop

biddle bop . . .

Because my grandfather and his bride were Slouchers, the ceremony under the chuppah was extremely short. The recitation of the seven blessings was officiated by the Innocuous Rabbi, and at the proper moment my grandfather lifted the veil of his new wife — who gave a quick, enticing wink when the Rabbi was turned to face the ark — and then smashed the crystal, which was not really crystal but glass, under his foot.

17 November 1997

Dear Jonathan,

Humph. I feel as if I have so many things to inform you. Beginning is very rigid, yes? I will begin with the less rigid matter, which is the writing. I could not perceive if you were appeased by the last section. I do not understand, to where did it move you? I am glad that you were good-humored about the part I invented about commanding you to drink the coffee until I could see my face in the cup, and how you said it was a clay cup. I am a very funny person, I think, although Little Igor says that I merely look funny. My other inventions were also first rate, yes? I ask because you did not utter anything about them in your letter. Oh yes, I of course am eating humble pie for the section I invented about the word “procure,” and how you did not know what it signified. It has been removed, and so has my effrontery. Even Alf is not humorous at times. I have made efforts to make you appear as a person with less anxiety, as you have commanded me to do on so many occasions.

This is difficult to achieve, because in truth you are a person with very much anxiety. Perhaps you should be a drug user.

As for your story, I will tell you that I was at first a very perplexed person. Who is this new Safran, and Dial, and who is becoming married? Primarily I thought it was the wedding of Brod and Kolker, but when I learned that it was not, I thought, Why did their story not continue? You will be happy to know that I proceeded, suspending my temptation to cast off your writing into the garbage, and it all became illuminated. I am very happy that you returned to Brod and Kolker, although I am not happy that he became the person that he became because of the saw (I do not think that there were these kinds of saws at that time, but I trust that you have a good purpose for your ignorance), although I am happy that they were able to discover a kind of love, although I am not happy because it really was not love, was it?

One could learn very much from the marriage of Brod and Kolker. I do not know what, but I am certain that it has to do with love. And also, why do you term him “the Kolker”? It is similar to how you term it “the Ukraine,”

which also makes no sense to me.

If I could utter a proposal, please allow Brod to be happy. Please. Is this such an impossible thing? Perhaps she could still exist, and be proximal with your grandfather Safran. Or, here is a majestic idea: perhaps Brod could be Augustine. Do you comprehend what I signify? You would have to alter your story very much, and she would be very aged, of course, but might it be wonderful in this manner?