Exodus: A memoir (24 page)

Inside, the house had been emptied of furniture. In each beautiful, high-ceilinged room, Odd’s work had been hung; a tour of the entire house yielded a veritable lifetime of achievements. Although Odd was in Berlin for the duration of the exhibition, some of his children, specifically two sons and two daughters, milled about providing guests with information or a glass of champagne. They were all in their teens, with glowing skin, Scandinavian bone structure, and ethereal blue eyes.

I walked from room to room, my high-heeled footsteps echoing on the stone floor. The work was mesmerizing; up close, its power to transform put all those books I’d read to shame.

Soon, the guests were asked to gather in the main room, where a renowned composer, Martin Romberg, had prepared a concert for the evening. A cellist and a pianist started to play, and as they reached the high notes, I could hear the return calls of chirping birds in the dusk. I was inexpressibly moved.

It was only later, after I had finished looking at all the artwork, that I suddenly realized that the house was full of Aryans. Norwegians, Swedes, Austrians, Germans—of course the people most likely to be interested in Odd’s work would be those ethnically related to him, but still! Was I the only Jew here? My heart started to race. Had anyone noticed my nose, I wondered?

The next day, in Richard’s gallery, a Norwegian family came by to visit. The daughter was a painter studying with Odd. The grandmother was a successful artist in her own right. She reached out to caress my face.

“You are a Jew?” she asked, in an almost adoring manner.

I chuckled uncomfortably. “How can you tell?”

“You have such a beautiful Jewish face,” she said. “When I was a child, I had a Jewish friend, but we had to smuggle her over the border during the war and I never saw her again.”

She asked me if I would come visit her someday, and I said sure.

It struck me as strange that this fetishizing of my Jewishness felt no different when it was positive than when it came in the form of ignorance and anti-Semitism. Everyone wanted to define me by my Jewishness, while I struggled to define myself outside of it. Each time I thought I had arrived at a consensus, someone
would come along with a comment like that, and I would lose my carefully constructed balance. It was a precarious identity at best, I was beginning to realize.

On Sunday, we headed to Odd’s house again, this time to welcome him back from Berlin. The inner circle had gathered in the kitchen to prepare dinner. Kristoff, the Austrian who showed Odd’s work in his Oslo gallery, and Helene, his wife; David, a Kitsch painter from Venice; and Richard, Odd’s most prominent student. Börk, Odd’s eldest son, milled about in an expensive-looking suit. I was not much use in the crowded kitchen, so I made my way into the grand sitting room, where my favorite of Odd’s pieces was hung:
Volunteer in Void
, a figure suspended in a mythical galaxy. As I perched on the edge of a trunk, contemplating the large work, Aftur, Odd’s only brunette daughter, entered the room.

She approached me and in halting English asked, “It is true that you are Jew?”

I froze. I felt at once accused and singled out, but also as if a small and delicate bird had accidentally landed on my finger and I must not scare it away. “How did you know?”

“Um, because of your nose?” Aftur said innocently, asking if she got it right.

“Who told you that Jews have noses like mine?”

“My father. My siblings always called me the Jew, because I have brown hair.”

Aftur looked like Leisl from
The Sound of Music
, with straight-edge cheekbones, a delicate jaw, and piercing blue eyes. Her teeth
shone like pearls in two neat rows when she smiled, a dimple just barely emerging from one hollow cheek.

“You don’t look Jewish to me at all,” I said, laughing. “So take comfort in my expert opinion.”

“My father is one-eighth Jewish,” Börk informed me, joining the conversation suddenly. Trembling with excitement as he spoke, he told me that when he was in school, his peers often called him a “fucking Jew.” He said this to me as if to equate his experience with mine, as if it was the common ground we shared.

Minden, the youngest daughter, all platinum blond tresses and translucent complexion, piped in as well, asking, “Is it true you grew up Orthodox?”

“Yes,” I answered once again.

“I saw a movie about that,” she said eagerly.

“Oh really? Which one?”

“
Witness
.” And she smiled like a cat waiting to be petted.

I explained the difference between Jews and the Amish, in slow, deliberate English so that she would understand.

The situation devolved into a barrage of questions about Hasidic Jews from all of Odd’s children. In the middle of it all, Odd and his wife, Turid, arrived; I heard them clattering into the front hall. Soon, Turid was standing at the edge of the circle, listening, asking questions. Odd barreled in and out of the room at intervals, his dramatic, Harry Potter–like robes gathering the dust on the floor.

“I hear you are quite the rebel,” he said as we were introduced. But as soon as we shook hands, he disappeared again.

A bit later, Odd exclaimed from the doorway, “You are the wandering Jew!” He lifted his fist as if to demonstrate some icon, like the Statue of Liberty.

“What shall we give you to drink, Deborah?” he asked.

“That depends on how you want me to behave,” I said coyly.

“Only enough so that you won’t be boring,” he pronounced and left the room in search of mulled cider. He returned with glasses for all.

“I am one-eighth Jewish, do you know, Deborah?”

Dinner was served outside in the rapidly cooling twilight. The Venetian had made magnificent spaghetti, someone else had tossed together a superb salad. There was excellent wine. Odd mentioned Epicurus, his favorite philosopher.

“Did you know,” I asked him, “that in Hebrew the word
apikores
is used to denote a blasphemer or heretic?”

“How interesting that they use his name this way!” he exclaimed. “As if to be for pleasure is to be against God and morality.

“I am an oligarchist,” Odd said. “Only because it’s the only kind of politics you can say you have that will shut people up; you see, no one knows what it is!” He chuckled then, seeming very pleased with himself.

After dinner, we all retreated into the Fire Room, named for its fireplace. Chairs were arranged in a semicircle, with Odd at one end and his children, friends, and admirers around the other. I watched as every person made their way over to Odd, as though petitioning for his attention, while he granted them the calm glow of his gaze in turn. I did not feel the need to speak to him, only to go back inside myself to find that little girl in the purple dress, and once more say to her,
Did you ever think this is where we’d be?
Someday, when you’re older
, I told my present-day self,
it will be like saying you met Rembrandt.

“Thank you for your spiritual talk, Deborah,” Odd said to me as I left. I wondered about the content of our conversation and its spiritual index.

I looked at Odd in that last moment in his home, and it struck me that no matter how alienated he may have believed himself to be, he had surrounded himself with the most effective buffer: a community and a family.

What was my buffer? Moving to the middle of nowhere was exactly what I needed, but now what would stand between me and the past? Better yet, what would bridge that gap created by anomie, so that I could cross the ravine between myself and the society I longed to grasp?

meant to be

I had to cut ties with everyone I had ever known when I left. I said to myself that I would build a new community, a new family, but the rules about relationships seemed different on the outside, and more confusing. Could I ever hope to cement connections with people in a way that would feel as permanent and enduring as the relationships in my former world?

In the beginning, I experienced a need to cancel out the bad sex of my marriage—the only sex I had ever known—with good sex. So I had two one-night stands with men who were simultaneously gorgeous and stupid. It was a conscious decision; I sought physical stimulation only, not mental.

I was still trying to figure out the morals and expectations of romance in the real world, especially regarding sex. Different generations seemed to have different attitudes. The kids I went to
college with were obsessed with proving they could hook up carelessly and repeatedly without consequences, as though carefree random sex were some testament to hipness. Older women described free love but not free sex. They could select as many lovers as they liked but did not feel the need to keep emotions out of the picture.

I fell in love for the first time in New Orleans. My mistake was thinking he was like the other two men—ridiculously hot and brainless—and that I’d never get attached.

It was my first trip on my own. I was so excited to visit New Orleans, which seemed, from the books I’d read, to be very exotic for an American city. Almost as good as going abroad, I figured, which was something I could not yet afford to do. New Orleans was everything it was hyped up to be and more. Small, and in many ways squalid and unassuming, it had all the magic and mystery of a town clearly outside the boundaries of convention. I explored happily on my own; I had only three days there, as Isaac was with his dad for the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah 2010, and I wanted to make my time count.

In New Orleans, riding that flimsy little skiff out into the swamps just outside the city, looking for gators, I saw cypress trees with their entire root systems exposed, like gnarled old ladies lifting their dresses. Their roots came up in knobby knees designed to deliver much-needed oxygen. Maybe I’m a cypress tree, I thought. My roots were never deeply entrenched in the ground I grew from, and I was constantly coming up for air, but surely I could hope for some form of stability and strength regardless.

Maybe the person I am is the kind who can put down temporary roots anywhere, who can be at home not just in one place but in the whole world, because she takes home with her in her heart.
I didn’t know if that would turn out to be the case, but it was around that time that I began hoping.

My room in the French Quarter just off Bourbon Street had a terrace that was linked to the terrace right next to mine. Whenever I went out there, my neighbors were inevitably perched on the two chairs available, drinking beer and making idle comments about the goings-on below. They were from Kentucky, a sweet couple in their late thirties who were taking a break from the caretaking of an elderly parent. I did not see them leave their room or change out of their pajamas the entire time I was there. When I left, they assured me of their plan to drive to a Saints game, but I don’t believe they ever went.

My second night in New Orleans, after having explored the swamps during the day and toured the various music venues in the evening, I wandered back to my hotel room in the French Quarter at around 4 a.m. I had to squeeze through the intoxicated crush of people on the main drag to get in, but once upstairs, I checked the balcony, and sure enough, my new friends from Kentucky were still going strong. The terrace wall was lined with empty, crinkled beer cans.

I was feeling amped up, so I decided to stay up with them for a bit until I felt tired. But two minutes into our conversation, we heard a sudden uptick in street noise. Turning toward Bourbon Street, we saw a crowd—no, a mob—pouring into the little side street facing our terrace. The faces I could make out were twisted into expressions of anger, and the mob was clearly screaming something I couldn’t understand; something had happened, or was about to happen.

“What the heck?” Jolynn from Kentucky exclaimed, her jaw dropping.

And then, suddenly, the group stopped right underneath our porch. I looked out over the railing and saw a burly white man in a buzz cut and camouflage punch an already prostrate skinny black man over and over on every part of his body. Blood pooled at an alarmingly fast rate, but the whole thing was happening even faster. I remember looking for the ubiquitous police presence that had made me feel so safe all day, and there they were, sitting back on their horses, not making a single move to restore order.

The crowd was cheering on the aggressor, but then suddenly it got quiet. The victim lay motionless on the sidewalk, beaten to a pulp, most likely dead or near death. The man in camouflage had disappeared. Onlookers, perhaps sensing it had gone too far, dispersed as quickly as they had arrived. An ambulance whizzed around the corner and swallowed the body. Within five minutes, our street was back to its usual nighttime hum.

I was speechless, but Jolynn and her husband seemed to have recovered in the time I was turned away.

“What was that?” I asked.

“That dude was eyeing that guy’s girlfriend earlier,” Don said. “Probably wouldn’t back off. It’s his own fault.”

I said good night and retreated back into my room. It’s okay to beat a man to death for looking at someone’s girlfriend the wrong way? And the police just let it happen? No, it was okay for a white man to beat a black man to death for the slightest provocation. That’s what that was.

It was the first moment that weekend that New Orleans seemed hard, volatile. I had known very little about the city before I arrived; of course I had heard about Hurricane Katrina, but there didn’t seem to be so much storm-related damage around me as there was storm-related anger, bitterness, and violence.

The next day, as I was on my way to One Eyed Jacks, where a bingo burlesque performance was scheduled, I accidentally bumped into a black man who was walking on the narrow sidewalk with his friend and who either deliberately or undeliberately failed to move aside just a bit to accommodate my walking the other way. He was wearing a clean white wifebeater and had very shiny skin marred only by bullet-shaped scars on his right biceps.

He turned around and apologized profusely in an affected manner that made me suspect he had done it on purpose. His sorry sounded like “I’m not sorry,” but I got the feeling that he was just angry and it wasn’t about me.

“No worries,” I said.

He stopped in his tracks. “You a Caucasian lady and you talking to me?” he asked incredulously.

“I’m not Caucasian!” I said, laughing. “I’m Jewish!”

“Wow,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “I couldn’t tell. How are they different?”

We got to talking, he asked me where I was from, and I told him.

“No way, you from Brooklyn? I grew up in Brownsville.”

“How’d you end up here?” I asked.

“Long story. I just got out of prison.” His companion gave up at that point and walked away.

“Are you staying with friends here?” I asked.

He squirmed a bit. “I’m trying to find a job as a line cook.”

I thought, Oh, he’s homeless. He didn’t look it.

“Did you eat today?” I asked.

“Not in three days.” The tough guy act was down, the smile sheepish and vulnerable.

I tried to get into Noah’s but they wouldn’t let me in with him.
The bar across the street didn’t mind, and the bartender was nice, sympathetic even.

“The steak for my friend, please,” I said, and slipped the bartender a twenty. I waited until he was served before leaving to make the show.

There was a line outside One Eyed Jacks, which was hard to find otherwise because of post-storm scaffolding. I tacked myself on the back of it and started fishing through my purse for the ticket I had bought earlier. As I felt around the bottom, among wadded receipts and lip balms, I sensed a group of people come up behind me and felt a bit self-conscious, being on my own. I decided not to look at them and pretended to be very busy with my bag search.

“Hey,” a voice said, deep and almost Queens-accented. I looked up: a man, not very tall, hands tucked into pockets of baggy, unfashionable jeans, broad shoulders underneath the most ridiculous shirt embroidered with colorful flowers, but what a face! Or as we would say in Yiddish, what a
punim
! Think Harry Connick Jr.’s genes mixed with those of Daniel Craig.

“Hey, yourself,” I said. I wouldn’t be giving him the time of day in Manhattan, I thought.

Behind him I was vaguely registering the presence of his friends, two female, one male. But neither of those women were his girlfriends, I deduced.

“Where you from?”

“Manhattan. Are you from Queens or Long Island or something? You guys visiting?”

“Ha! No, we live here. I was born and raised here.”

“You don’t talk like you’re from here.”

“You think locals talk like hicks?”

“Shouldn’t you have a Southern accent?”

“Not in the city, honey. Maybe in the backwoods.”

His name was Conor. By the time we’d made our way into the bar, I had already decided to let him talk to me because it would be better to have the company of his group than to hang out at the show alone. Plus, I would be able to say I went to New Orleans and hung out with real local people.

I was introduced to Conor’s friends, Amanda and her husband, Pat, who commented drunkenly on the size of my breasts, and Tops, who was nicknamed for the size of hers. Conor offered to buy me a drink, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to handle my liquor at that point, so I told him I didn’t drink.

“That’s great—me neither,” he said. “I’ll get us some Cokes.”

“You’re lying,” I shouted over the crowd noise. Alcohol had been everywhere I looked in this city.

“You’re saying you don’t drink to get in my pants! No way that you live here, in the city of Bourbon Street, and don’t drink!”

“I’m serious,” he said. “I’m sober ten years now. I used to drink, but it wasn’t good for me.” He wore the same expression in all his remarks, the kind that challenged you, made you think his mouth was about to crease into a smirk, but it never quite did. His eyes danced though, like he was enjoying himself.

It’s not like I was sold, not nearly, but I won’t deny that I had noticed his enormous blue eyes and, with some curiosity, the chunky cross he wore around his neck and kept a shirt button open to reveal. (So he was a goy
and
he had bad taste.)

The show was witty and daring, and I enjoyed it very much. I sipped my Coke, and Conor stood next to me the entire time, his hand on my waist. I had never been paid this much attention. I thought, Okay, he has good game.

Then he leaned over, hand on my shoulder, and whispered in my ear, “You’re beautiful.” Oh, he has very good game.

I pretended not to hear. “What?” I shouted.

He said it again. I was impressed but still not sold on the whole redneck hillbilly thing he had going on. Well, I’m on vacation, I told myself. I can do this for one night, just to see what it’s like.

After the show, instead of going back to my room, I hung around outside with Amanda, Pat, and Tops, trying to figure out what to do next, while Conor was in the bathroom. Amanda and Tops confided in me that Conor hadn’t shown interest in anyone since his divorce a few years ago and that they were happy to see him have a good time. They invited me to spend the rest of the night with them.

“Well, what are y’all gonna do?” I asked, my acquired Southern accent kicking in by association.

“What
can
we do?” Amanda said.

“Strip clubs and bars, pretty much,” Pat said. “Bars are out of the question for Conor, so . . .”

When Conor came out, he said he’d just finished doing the carpentry work for one of the classier strip joints. He offered to take us, show off his skills. A carpenter! Perfect, I thought. I bet this man has never read a book in his life. This will be excellent fling material.

We went, and us girls sat together at one table while the men retreated to the back of the club, and I had a grand time trying to get the dollar bills to stay put on the women’s bodies. It didn’t feel nearly as seedy as I’d expected it to. One of the women was Creole, and her skin glowed with a coppery tint in the dim lights. She slithered gracefully on the stage like a serpent. Also, the wainscoting was indeed magnificent.

And then Conor piled us all into his pickup truck, assuring me that after dropping his friends off at his house, he’d definitely drive me straight back to my hotel.

“Come see my garden.”

“You can garden?” I asked.

He nodded, with a smile that showed he knew I didn’t expect it of him and that he got a little bit of pleasure out of popping my bubble of assumptions about him.

His house, which he’d built and decorated, was beautiful, all drooping tendrils of ivy and stained glass and hand-carved furniture. What girl wouldn’t be seduced at that point? In the romantic comedy, this is where the previously one-dimensional dude gets all deep and sensitive, and the girl is suitably chastised for her judgmental attitude. It’s a classic. I got suckered in.