The Worlds We Think We Know Read online

  Walter bangs again at the bookshelf, then wags a tobacco-stained finger under Misha’s nose. “Anyone who is afraid of stubbing his toe shouldn’t make himself too comfortable,” he says, stepping deeper into the room. “If you ask me, we’ve already got too many toes on our feet to begin with.”

  Misha is sitting in bed writing a letter to me when Eileen knocks on the door. “I’ve come to say good-bye,” she says, and cups her hand like a fortune-teller around the brass dome of the bedpost.

  Misha puts away the letter and swings his legs around to the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry you’re leaving.” He looks at the clock next to him but does not register the time. “I was hoping you could accompany me to a few more apartments before you left.”

  “Well, it just so happens—” Eileen pauses to remove a single key from her breast pocket.

  “Yes?”

  “—that I’ve got one left to show you.”

  It was into the body of another woman, the ultimate dwelling place, that Misha was led that night. Eileen left him little choice: she was beautiful; she was radiant; she was America. But Swan Street was equally responsible, having conspired to turn a mathematician, with a mind always on the move, into a body at rest. After a month Misha had already forgotten how wide his range of reflexes used to be, and when Eileen steered him into uncharted territory, he could not distinguish the mountains from the trees and fell into her arms like a bird shot by a poison arrow, limp, dazed, and defenseless.

  How many caresses did it take before he sprang back to life? How much flesh had to unveil itself for my husband to surrender to its softness?

  Back home Misha would have been in better control. In a country so vast it takes almost half a day for the sun’s rays to cross it, he would have found the means to fend off Eileen’s advances—a slight tightening of the lips, an elaborate rotation of the hands, a quick succession of words, in his own tongue, that establishes a boundary between man and woman as between two countries separated by a broad river. Gently but categorically he would have made his resistance clear and kept the door open, allowing Eileen to leave shamed but with her dignity still intact, a leopardess cowed by the sight of her own spots. But in the end it was Misha who suffered the humiliation of it all, when Walter visited Eileen’s room the next morning with her breakfast and found him sprawled out on the bed, snoring like an old asthmatic. “No overnight guests,” he warned the two lovers. “Screwing anyone other than your spouse puts a strain on the box springs, and those bastards are over fifty years old.”

  Misha finishes the letter he writes, but sends others instead. For the next few days I am still with him, urging him to get out into the world and become a part of it. Misha listens and adds his voice to my own; his ears ring like a bell cracked down the middle.

  When the first of his letters finally does arrive, I am sitting in the garden, fanning myself with the day’s newspaper. The mailman sees me and deviates a few steps from his route, handing me Misha’s letter without giving it a glance.

  I stare at the stamps on the letter, two American flags fluttering in the wind. I want this to be the last one, the final page in the biography of a man whose story should have belonged to someone else. I want to remember what our life was like before letters, when Swan Street was as far away as the galaxy after which it was named, and Misha and I slept side by side in a bed shaped by only our bodies. I think it nothing short of shameless when, the next day, the mailman brings me another letter, and then another. Now that there is nothing left to say, Misha has discovered a second tongue at the tip of his pen, and he slobbers over the paper like a baby learning to speak.

  One morning Dr. Gutman called and invited Misha to the institute to take a look at his prospective office. “I need a landsman for the project,” he insisted, once more offering Misha the job he had rejected a month before. “The American I hired in your place tried to turn everything upside down.”

  As he stretched his legs out on the bed, Misha could feel what it would be like to get up and go. From three miles away he could see Dr. Gutman sit him down at a cubicle the size of an outhouse and say, “This is your chair, this is your desk, these are your colleagues. Make yourself at home.”

  It would have been the wrong thing to say. Misha was a runaway, and home the hot breath on his neck he tried to shake off as he ran.

  “If I could take some work back to the hotel with me, I could start immediately,” Misha replied quickly, winding the telephone cord around his wrist to keep himself rooted in place. “I’m still looking for an apartment.”

  “There’s a sofa in my office that opens up to a bed. It’s yours for the asking.”

  “Thank you for the offer. I’ll think it over.”

  Five minutes later Misha is sipping tea from a Styrofoam cup in the Swan Street lounge.

  Walter walks in from the kitchen, holding up a wet and wrinkled tea bag. “Is this yours?” he asks.

  Misha nods. “I thought I might have a second cup. Will you join me?”

  “In America we use something once and throw it away. That’s the rule.”

  “I am glad you do not feel this way about your guests.” Misha loosens his nervous grip on the cup, for fear of crushing it.

  “Oh, but I do. My guests are as disposable as everything in this kitchen,” Walter says. “When one has used himself up, another will soon be standing in the hallway, waiting for his key. I haven’t had a vacant room for more than three days since I opened up the place.”

  After his tea, Misha goes back to his room to lie down. He has lost weight since coming to America and cannot burrow into the mattress as he used to. His body stays fixed to the surface, light and motionless as the air around him. Closing his eyes, he listens to the sounds of footsteps on the other side of his door. More guests have arrived, and he is glad.

  The sounds outside fade and are gradually replaced by Misha’s own breathing. His lungs slowly fill with air traveling upward all the way to the tip of his tongue, which rests against his lips as though in preparation to speak. This is how he used to go to sleep when he was at his most content, words forming in his mouth and then falling away again, like a group of children met by a closed park gate. Sometimes I would make my own voice express what Misha could not, and tell him that I loved him. His lips would twitch a little, then close tighter than before. He never stayed awake long enough to respond.

  Walter is setting the table for breakfast the next morning when Misha enters the dining room and hands him his credit card.

  “For another good night’s sleep, and for my first dream in English. I do not remember any of it, only that everything I said came out in a whisper, and nobody knew whether I was speaking to them or to myself.”

  Walter tosses the credit card onto the table. “The room needs to be vacated by tomorrow,” he says matter-of-factly. “If you’re lucky, it won’t rain until the day after.”

  Misha remains seated. “Vacated? But my room needs no such thing.”

  “The room needs what I need.”

  “I see,” says Misha. He marvels at how quickly Walter’s red beard has returned to gray.

  On the wall hangs a mirror ornamented with arabesques and winged horses. Misha stares at the horses, half expecting them to take flight, and then at himself next to them. “Perhaps you need a new face for the room, some new blood to circulate through the veins of the house. Yes?”

  “Mm.”

  “But you should know that my blood has just arrived to this country. It is just off the boat, as you say.”

  Walter stares out the window, blinking at the sun as it signals the start of day. “You can leave the bookcase in the foyer if you’re not taking it with you. I’m expecting a group of tourists from Japan in a few weeks. They might need a place to put their cameras.”

  “Thank you. I will take the bookcase with me.”

  Wrapping a blueberry muffin in a napkin, Misha returns to his room to finish the last letter I will receive from Swan Street, or from any oth
er street in this new country he has come to call home.

  I waited one season for my husband to return. I stood for hours in the hot summer sun, hoping for ice to appear in the subsoil and for Misha to suddenly spring up behind me and shout, “You see! You see!” When it was time to put in the storm windows, I began to give up hope. The screws came loose after the first heavy rain, and the glass rattled every time the wind blew.

  Lying in bed at night, I think of Misha as he continues his weary journey on foot, traversing deep jungles and remote tundra every time he crosses the street. Today our garden is a blur of buttercups too bright to be picked. I shudder at the thought that one day a cold wind will come to America and catch my husband by surprise. I suspect that he is waiting for it even now, in his sandals and short sleeves, and that it is only a matter of time before it fills him with the force of its current and blows him, in one icy breath, where he wants to go.

  THE WORLDS WE THINK WE KNOW

  The onions Lotzi ate could be smelled five floors below him in the lobby of Migdal Zahav, the Golden Tower Retirement Home in Jerusalem, where he lived. Lotzi always waited for me to arrive before retrieving his knife from the cupboard, a gesture that was never lost on me since I feared he would one day use it to take his life. With one clean cut the onion would separate into two halves, each half rocking on its domed back for a second or two before coming to rest on the countertop. Lotzi ate it with bread, one slice for every three bites of onion, and washed it down with a cup of tepid Wissotzky made from old teabags reduced to the size of walnuts. He always offered me tea but never anything to eat, as though the onion and bread were part of a ritual reserved for him alone, a Jew from Lvov who had lost everything but the taste for bitterness and dry bread.

  I never asked him any questions, and he never gave me any answers. We each knew where the other came from, and that seemed to be enough. When my training session at AMCHA had ended and the group leader handed out our assignments, she reminded each volunteer to make contact as soon as possible. “Many survivors who wake up in the morning do not know whether living another day is a blessing or a curse,” she said by way of parting. “You will make it a blessing for them.”

  Every week I sat across from Lotzi at his small kitchen table and waited for his story to begin. Not everyone was so hesitant to talk; just the other day, standing in line at the shuk for tomatoes, I was grabbed at the wrist by a childhood friend of Anne Frank’s and made to understand that Anne would have grown up to look just like me. Lotzi sat with his onion and bread and tea and said nothing. Occasionally he would raise his head and clear his throat, and I would tell myself to get ready, to brace myself for what was to come. Then he would hack into a napkin and continue eating.

  One morning from my bedroom window on Jabotinsky Street, I saw a young man and woman dressed in overalls digging up pansies from the square that separates the president’s residence from the prime minister’s. I went downstairs for a closer look; the flowers were disappearing quickly, and from the roots. After a bus went by I crossed the street and stood in front of the pair, staring at the garbage bag filling up by their feet. The man looked up first, then the woman. “What do you want?” they both said at the same time. I shrugged and asked, “Are you planning to sell those?” The woman struck her spade into the earth, working the roots like a kibbutznik. “Not to you,” she said.

  For a full three weeks I stopped visiting Lotzi, thinking I had better things to do. I bought a bicycle and rode it, first only up and down Jabotinsky, then branching out onto busier streets where I often found myself stuck behind a taxi or a tour bus waiting for the light to turn green. I didn’t like the bicycle much and made it a point never to lock it. By the beginning of the third week the city had become a blur, and I abandoned the bike next to a pretzel cart outside Jaffa Gate. When I returned to Lotzi he looked at me blankly, as though he had never seen me before, or perhaps as though I had never been gone. We sat at his kitchen table in silence, and he ate his onion and bread. I didn’t apologize for my absence. Before I left, he lifted his head and said, “Cars in America are big, eh?” There was nothing cryptic in his words; it was just a simple question asked by a simple man. Still, I spent the rest of the day wondering what it meant. It was the only question Lotzi ever asked me.

  The first young person I spent time with in Jerusalem was Srulik. It was not by choice that this happened, but because of the reserved seating imposed on each holder of a Cinematheque pass. At every screening, Srulik and I sat one row apart, his mop of red curls clashing with the upholstery of the seats until the lights were dimmed and his fire snuffed out. Sometimes he arrived late and the space in front of me would suddenly darken, like one shadow eclipsing another. At the end of the screening, before the lights even came back on, Srulik would swiftly turn around to ask whether I had enjoyed the movie. From the expression on my face, which always registered displeasure, he must have thought I hated them all.

  We had coffee together only once, upstairs at the Cinematheque cafe, overlooking the Old City. I learned everything I cared to learn about Srulik in those forty-five minutes. He was trained as a lawyer but had never worked as one. He had been a tour guide in the army. He was from a kibbutz in the Negev that supplied the entire country with chocolate pudding. About me, Srulik wanted to know more than I was willing to share. Twice during the course of our conversation he said enigmatically, in response to information I gave, “I know; I can tell.” When I did not ask him to elaborate, the eagerness in his face faded and he excused himself to go to the bathroom. Srulik moved ponderously; he had huge feet and a body that in its bulkiness seemed not to want to follow their lead. I felt sorry for him but for myself as well. When Srulik returned, I looked at him with great intensity and asked myself whether I might feel just a little less sorry for myself if I slept with him a single time. From across the table I could smell the medicinal scent of bathroom soap on his hands. More sorry, I decided, not less.

  One afternoon I knocked on Lotzi’s door and nobody answered. I had arrived a few minutes late but no later than usual, and I was not ready to consider the possibility that these few minutes which I’d spent brushing my teeth or looking for my shoes or stopping at the Jerusalem Theater to check a showtime were significant enough to be registered by anything but a clock. I put my ear to the door and knocked again; this time it opened. Inside stood a young man in an army uniform, a pair of thick black eyebrows fringing his face like epaulets. I took one look at him and had to muffle the sound of my breathing, as though I had been running for days and had only just found a reason to slow down. He moved aside to let me in, and I saw Lotzi at his usual place at the table, his eyes fixed on some faraway spot.

  I spoke to Lotzi more that day than in all my other visits combined. I told him about my life in New Jersey, the strip malls and the synagogues, and about my parents, who had raised me to be the kind of Jew who could plant a tree in Israel without having to stay and watch it grow. I told him about my fondness for movies, and about another survivor I visited who always spun a globe while she spoke. I told him I liked falafel. The young man who was not Lotzi listened politely to my ramblings but did not respond. Lotzi did the same. When I was through, I stood up and asked Lotzi for a glass of water. “Help yourself,” he said agreeably, and continued eating.

  At the sink, I waited for some movement in the room that did not originate from me. A few nights before at the Cinematheque I had watched Srulik plop himself down in a seat at the opposite end of the theater, in defiance of the rules, and felt a momentary pang of guilt at the thought that I was causing him to suffer. Then a young woman sat down next to him, a braid like challah winding down her back, and pecked him on the cheek just as the lights were starting to dim. With a twinge of regret, I realized that I had probably not caused him to suffer enough.

  The sound of running water seemed to rouse Lotzi, who turned to me attentively. “In Lvov there was no falafel,” he said while I drank. “In Lvov there was Jewish food.”
r />   On any other day I would have reacted to this statement like a mother to her baby’s first words, but as Lotzi spoke, the soldier was slinging his backpack across his shoulder and heading for the door. “I’m off,” he said, but did not open it. Outside it had started to rain, obstructing the view from the living room window, and I knew that if I did not permit myself a good look before he left I would not have a chance to do so afterward, from five stories above. “Where are you going?” I blurted out. “It’s raining. Do you have an umbrella?” The soldier turned to me with surprise. “I have a car,” he replied casually. “Do you want a ride?”

  We drove across the city to his apartment. It was rush hour and the cars were relentless, linked to one another like the segmented tail of some ugly animal. As we inched along, I allowed myself to study Yair’s face, the lines that converged around the corners of his eyes, the thick vein that bulged from his neck whenever he honked the horn. He noticed my gaze. “What are you looking at?” he asked shyly, his mouth sprouting new lines, curved like the crest of a wave. “A map of Israel,” I said, smiling back.

  When we arrived at his flat, Yair tossed his backpack on the couch and made straight for the fridge. “Are you hungry?” he asked, concealing himself within the cold rectangular box. “Yes,” I said. A few minutes later we were eating by candlelight, an array of cheeses, pickled salads, stuffed vegetables, and pita spread out before us on the kitchen table. I waited for the food to fill me with the courage to speak, then said, “So how do you know Lotzi?” Before answering, Yair poured himself a glass of wine and drank half of it. “I don’t,” he said.