Everything Is Illuminated (24 page)

Gorgeous! Almost all of it, Tova! Gorgeous!

What a house! And you look like you’ve lost some weight in your face.

Marvelous! Everyone should be jealous of you.

The wedding — the reception — was the event of 1941, with enough attendees that, should the house have burned down or been swallowed by the earth, Trachimbrod’s Jewish population would have completely disappeared. Reminders were sent out a few weeks before the invitation, which was sent out a week before the official arrangement.

don’t forget:

the wedding of the daughter of

TOVA

and her husband*

june 18, 1941

you know the house

* Menachem

And no one forgot. Only the various Trachimbroders who weren’t, in Tova’s estimation, worthy of an invitation were not at the reception, and hence not in the guest book, and hence not included in the last practical census of the shtetl before its destruction, and hence forgotten forever.

As the guests filtered in, unable to help but admire the stylized wain-scoting, my grandfather excused himself and went down to the wine-rack cellar to change from his traditional marriage suit into a light cotton blazer, more suited to the wet heat.

Absolutely ravishing, Tova. Look at me, I’m ravished.

It looks like nothing else, ever.

You must have spent a fortune on those lovely centerpieces. Achoo!

So extraordinary!

A fissure of thunder resounded in the distance, and before there was time to close any of the new windows, or even their new curtains, a wind of haunting speed and strength breathed through the house, blowing over the floral centerpieces and tossing the place settings into the air.

Pandemonium. The cat screeched, the water boiled, the elderly women held tight to the mesh hats that covered their balding heads. The gust left as soon as it entered, easing the place cards back on the table, not one card in its original place — Libby next to Kerman (who had said his attendance at the reception was dependent on a three-table separation between himself and that horrible cunt), Tova at the very end of the last table (a spot reserved for the fishmonger, whose name no one could remember, and whose invitation had been slid under his door at the last minute out of guilt for the recent loss of his wife to cancer), the Upright Rabbi next to the outspoken Sloucher Shana P (who was as repulsed and turned on by him as he was by her), and my grandfather landing doggie-style on his bride’s younger sister.

Zosha and her mother — red with embarrassment, pale with the sadness of an imperfect wedding — scurried about, trying in vain to reset everything that had been so deliberately arranged, picking up forks and knives, wiping the floors of spilled wine, recentering the centerpieces, replacing the names that had been scattered like a thrown deck of playing cards.

Let’s hope it’s not true, the father of the bride tried to joke over the shuffle, that it all goes downhill after the wedding!

The bride’s younger sister was leaning against a shelf of empty wine racks when my grandfather entered the cellar.

Hello, Maya.

Hello, Safran.

I came to change.

Zosha will be so disappointed.

Why?

Because she thinks you’re perfect. She told me so. And your wedding day is no time to change.

Not even into something more comfortable?

Your wedding day is no time to be comfortable.

Oh, sister, he said, and kissed her where her cheek became her lips. A sense of humor to match your beauty.

She slid her lace panties from under his lapel. Finally, pulling him into her arms, any longer and I would have just burst.

As they made hurried love beneath the twelve-foot ceiling, which sounded as if it might collapse at any moment under the gunshots of so many heels — in the effort to clean up, nobody even noticed the groom’s prolonged absence — my grandfather wondered if he was nothing more than a dupe of chance. Wasn’t everything that had happened, from his first kiss to this, his first marital infidelity, the inevitable result of circumstances over which he had no control? How guilty could he be, really, when he never had any real choice? Could he have been with Zosha upstairs? Was that a possibility? Could his penis have been anywhere other than where it then was, and wasn’t, and was, and wasn’t, and was? Could he have been good?

His teeth. It’s the first thing I notice whenever I examine his baby portrait. It’s not my dandruff. It’s not a smudge of gesso or white paint.

Between my grandfather’s thin lips, planted like albino pits in those plum-purple gums, is a full set of teeth. The physician must have shrugged, as physicians used to do when they couldn’t explain a medical phenomenon, and comforted my great-grandmother with talk of good omens. But then there is the family portrait, painted three months later.

Look, this time, at her lips, and you will see that she wasn’t entirely comforted: my young great-grandmother was frowning.

It was my grandfather’s teeth, so admired by his father for the virility they declared, that made his mother’s nipples bloody and sore, that forced her to sleep on her side, and eventually made breastfeeding impossible. It was because of those teeth, those wee dinky molars, those cute bicuspids, that my great-grandparents stopped making love and had only one child. It’s because of those teeth that my grandfather was pulled prematurely from his mother’s well, and never received the nutrients his callow body needed.

His arm. It would be possible to look through all of the photographs many times and still miss what’s so unusual. But it occurs too frequently to be explained as the photographer’s choice of pose, or mere coincidence. My grandfather’s right hand is never holding anything — not a briefcase, not any papers, not even his other hand. (And in the only picture taken of him in America — just two weeks after arriving, and three before he passed away — he holds my baby mother with his left arm.) Without proper calcium, his infant body had to allocate its resources ju-diciously, and his right arm drew the short straw. He watched helplessly as that red, swollen nipple got smaller and smaller, moving away from him forever. By the time he most needed to reach out for it, he couldn’t.

So it was because of his teeth, I imagine, that he got no milk, and it was because he got no milk that his right arm died. It was because his arm died that he never worked in the menacing flour mill, but in the tan-nery just outside the shtetl, and that he was exempted from the draft that sent his schoolmates off to be killed in hopeless battles against the Nazis.

His arm would save him again when it kept him from swimming back to Trachimbrod to save his only love (who died in the river with the rest of them), and again when it kept him from drowning himself. His arm saved him again when it caused Augustine to fall in love with him and save him, and it saved him once again, years later, when it prevented him from boarding the New Ancestry to Ellis Island, which would be turned back on orders of U.S. immigration officials, and whose passengers would all eventually perish in the Treblinka death camp.

And it was because of his arm, I’m sure — that flaccid hang of useless muscle — that he had the power to make any woman who crossed his path fall in hopeless love with him, that he had slept with more than forty women in Trachimbrod, and at least twice as many from the neighboring villages, and was now making standing, hurried love with his new bride’s younger sister.

The first was the widow Rose W, who lived in one of the old wooden ramblers along the Brod. She thought it was pity that she felt for the crippled boy who had come on behalf of the Sloucher congregation to help clean the house, pity that moved her to bring him a plate of man-delbread and a glass of milk (the very sight of which turned his stomach), pity that moved her to ask how old he was and to tell him her own age, something not even her husband ever knew. It was pity she thought she felt when she removed her layers of mascara to show him the only part of her body that no one, not even her husband, had seen in more than sixty years. And it was pity, or so she thought, when she led him to the bedroom to show him her husband’s love letters, sent from a naval ship in the Black Sea during the First World War.

In this one, she said, taking his lifeless hand, he enclosed pieces of string that he used to measure out his body — his head, thigh, forearm, finger, neck, everything. He wanted me to sleep with them under my pillow. He said that when he came back, we would remeasure his body against the string as proof that he hadn’t changed . . . Oh, I remember this one, she said, fingering a sheet of yellowed paper, running her hand — aware, or not aware, of what she was doing — up and down my grandfather’s dead arm. In this one he wrote about the house he was going to build for us. He even drew a little picture of it, although he was such a bad artist. It was going to have a small pond, not a pond really, but a little thing, so we could have fish. And there would be a glass window over the bed so we could talk about the constellations before going to sleep . . . And here, she said, guiding his arm under the hem of her skirt, is the letter in which he pledged his devotion until death.

She turned off the light.

Is this OK? she asked, navigating his dead hand, leaning back.

Taking an initiative beyond his ten years, my grandfather pulled her to him, removed, with her help, her black blouse, which smelled so strongly of old age he was afraid he would never be able to smell young again, and then her skirt, her stockings (bulging under the pressure of her varicose veins), her panties, and the cotton pad she kept there in case of the now regular unexpecteds. The room was soaked with smells he had never before known together: dust, sweat, dinner, the bathroom after his mother had used it. She removed his shorts and briefs, and eased onto him backward, as if he were a wheelchair. Oh, she moaned, oh. And because my grandfather didn’t know what to do, he did as she did: Oh, he moaned, oh. And when she moaned Please, he also moaned Please. And when she fluttered in small, rapid convulsions, he did the same. And when she was silent, he was silent.

Because my grandfather was only ten, it didn’t seem unusual that he was able to make love — or have love made to him — for several hours without pause. But as he would later discover, it was not his pre-pubescence that gave him such coital longevity, but another physical shortcoming owing to his early malnutrition: like a wagon with no brakes, he never stopped short. This quirk was met with the profound happiness of his 132 mistresses, and with relative indifference on his part: how, after all, can one miss something one has never known? Besides, he never loved any of his lovers. He never confused anything he felt for love. (Only one would mean anything to him at all, and a prob-lematic birth made real love impossible.) So what should he expect?

His first affair, which lasted every Sunday afternoon for four years —

until the widow realized that she had taught his mother piano more than thirty years before, and couldn’t bear to show him another letter — was not a love affair at all. My grandfather was an acquiescing passenger. He was happy to give his arm — the only part of his body that Rose paid any real attention to; the act itself was never anything more than a means to get closer to his arm — as a once-a-week gift, to pretend with her that it was not a canopy bed in which they were making love, but a lighthouse out on some windy jetty, that their silhouettes, shot by the powerful lamp deep out into the black waters, could serve as a blessing for the sailors, and summon her husband back to her. He was happy to let his dead arm serve as the missing limb for which the widow longed, for which she reread yellowing letters, and lived outside herself, and outside her life.

For which she made love to a ten-year-old. The arm was the arm, and it was the arm — not her husband, or even herself — that she thought about seven years later, on June 18, 1941, as the first German war blasts shook her wooden house to its foundations, and her eyes rolled back in her head to view, before dying, her insides.

Unaware of the nature of his errands, the Sloucher congregation paid my grandfather to visit Rose’s house once a week, and came to pay him to perform similar services for widows and feeble ladies around Trachimbrod. His parents never knew the truth, but were relieved by his enthusi-asm to make money and spend time with the elderly, both of which had become important personal concerns as they descended into poverty and middle age.

We were beginning to think you had Gypsy blood, his father told him, to which he only smiled, his usual response to his father.

Which means, his mother said — his mother whom he loved more than himself — that it’s good to see you doing something good with your time.

She kissed him on the cheek and mussed his hair, which upset his father, because Safran was now too old for that kind of thing.

Who’s my baby? she would ask him when his father was not around.

I am, he would say, loving the question, loving the answer, and loving the kiss that came with the answer to the question. You don’t have to look any farther than me. As if that were something he truly feared, that she would one day look farther. And for this reason, because he wanted her to look to him and never elsewhere, he never told his mother anything that he thought might upset her, that might make her think less of him, or make her jealous.

Likewise, perhaps, he never told a friend of his exploits, or any lover of her predecessor. He was so afraid of being discovered that even in his journal — the only written record I have of his life before he met my grandmother, in a displaced-persons camp after the war — he never mentions them once.

The day he lost his virginity to Rose: Nothing much happened today.

Father received a shipment of twine from Rovno, and yelled at me when I neglected my chores. Mother came to my defense, as usual, but he yelled at me anyway. Thought about lighthouses all night. Strange.

The day he had sex with his first virgin: Went to the theater today. Too bored to stay through the first act. Drank eight cups of coffee. I thought I was going to burst. Didn’t burst.