Safekeeping (57 page)

While they were still in the hospital, his mother asked, “So, will you take over the business now?”

ISRAEL IS COMMITTING GENOCIDE!!!

Another article posted by Sandra, one of the adjuncts from LaGuardia, now a tenured professor somewhere in the Midwest. Every few weeks she sent around another petition to boycott Israeli academics. It was hard to understand her obsession with Israel, given how little she cared about anything else going on in the Middle East. She had never once mentioned the plight of women in Islamic countries, and she was a feminist literary critic. As usual, he opened the article and went straight to the comments.

Isra‘ILL' - disgusting parasites . . . since forever #adolph_hitler

zion is zion, since moses their trade is blood of innocent children but i give you happy message muslims are coming to wipe this cancer from middle east

Wake up, America! Your gov, newspapers, schools, businesses, all controlled by Jews.

Who was leaving these comments? Were they psycho outliers, or did they represent how most of the world felt about Jews? He didn't know. He really wished he knew. When his father used to claim the Jews would always be targets, that was just the way it was and would always be, he thought the old man was being paranoid, that Jews in general were a paranoid bunch, understandably so, but he believed they could calm down now. Only this summer, for the first time, his certainty had been shaken. Yes, the thousands chanting “Gas to the Jews!” in Berlin were Muslim immigrants this time, not white Europeans, but what difference did that make?

After reading the infuriating article, he went back to Sandra's Facebook page and put his cursor in the comment box. All their old colleagues were going to see this, and other professors too, people of influence; he should try to shape the conversation, right? But he couldn't think of a single thing to say without hearing their dismissals: not the Holocaust card again, you're trying to silence people by equating anti-Israel with anti-Semitism, you're an Islamophobe, a warmongering racist right-wing nut job, a Zionist, as if that in itself were a bad thing. He typed in anger,
If the Israelis wanted to commit genocide they could be done in an hour
. And then erased it. The cursor blinked.

Without writing anything, he moved on, scrolled down the newsfeed—
Long Island Grandmother Does What?
His heart beat madly, as if he'd been running from an assailant, not sitting with an iPad and some faceless comments. You're not a coward, he assured himself. He didn't write anything because he didn't want to be forced into a public, time-consuming debate, and an accusation of genocide shouldn't be dignified with a rebuttal anyway—and maybe that was all true, but he still hated himself. And Sandra. And the commenters. And the rioting Muslims in Europe. He was afraid he was starting to hate humanity. And it was lonely. He scrolled, barely seeing what was passing under his eyes.

Until the brooch.

Looking at the photo, he could hear his father describing it over the phone, a conversation he had played over in his mind countless times.

It was attached to a
New York Times
article: “Black Death Treasure at the Cloisters.” He pounced on the link, like if he didn't tap on it fast enough it might disappear.

Up came an enlarged picture, and it was definitely his father's brooch. It was all there, the details he had described three times, which his mother had later relayed to the police—the large sapphire in the center, the stylized pomegranates, the florets, the pins through the pearls. He read the article.

BLACK DEATH TREASURE AT THE CLOISTERS

Today “Gems of the Plague” opens at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's medieval branch in Fort Tryon Park. The exhibition, which originated at the Musée National du Moyen Âge in Paris, showcases a 700-year-old hoard discovered in 2004 during the construction of a large apartment complex in Terfur, Germany.

Before construction on the apartments began, archeological excavations of the area were conducted, since it was known to have been the site of a Jewish quarter that was razed in a pogrom in 1347. The pogrom was one of a wave that swept through the Holy Roman Empire in response to the Black Death, which was regularly blamed on the Jews. Although records show that the plague would not reach Terfur for another year, it was not uncommon for Jews to be massacred in an attempt to stave off the epidemic.

During the excavations, the sole finding was the stone foundation of a synagogue, dating to the first half of the twelfth century. It was only after the excavations were complete and the apartment developers were digging the underground parking garage two feet deeper than initially planned that the treasure was found. If the original blueprint for the building had been followed, the treasure might have remained underground forever.

Though the digging equipment did damage some of the artifacts, it is still an impressive collection. Not only do the intimate, well-crafted objects give insight into medieval life, they bear a terrible pathos. The Jews likely hid these objects, their most valued possessions, with the intention of returning for them, but in one night the entire Jewish population of Terfur, approximately 1,500, was slaughtered and burned by the town's residents. The
Judengasse
became a feeding ground for livestock and years later was overbuilt with row houses.

The treasure includes belt buckles, cloak buttons, drinking vessels, a silver hairbrush, a cosmetic set, a magnificent brooch (seen right), and one of only two surviving examples of a medieval Jewish wedding ring.

                             
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How could that brooch have been a part of this treasure trove? He had to go to the museum straight away. Unfortunately a jewelry store took time to close. Moving as fast as he could, Isaac pulled the rings and bracelets and watches from the display counters and carried them down the stairs to the vaults under the back office. Then he did the same for the wall displays and the window. His whole body buzzed with impatience as he activated the alarms, checked the cameras, and locked the register. At last, he was rolling down the store's steel grate.

Patni was outside, having a smoke. “Cutting out early, Weisberg? Is everything okay?”

“Yes. There's something . . . someone I have to meet. I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Oh.” Patni gave a mischievous smile. “Very well, then.”

To avoid having to take two trains, Isaac walked at a clip for Eighth Avenue, where he could ride the A train all the way up to 190th. Twenty years ago his father had asked him to come see this brooch, and now, at last, he was on his way. Summer tourists clogged the sidewalks. He weaved through people snapping photos of Radio City Music Hall and pausing in front of store windows. As he crossed the pedestrian plaza in Times Square, skirting the tables where hungry sightseers ate pizza slices and ice cream, he glimpsed the new World Trade Center rising in the gap of sky at the far end of Seventh Avenue, the cranes finally removed from the top. Thirteen years. Hard to believe. Sam was three months from being born. As he was about to descend the stairs into the subway, an unshaven, middle-aged man in a sandwich board—
MANI/PEDI
$40—shoved a flyer at him, and Isaac thought: Could this drunkard be him?
Every day, he looked at someone and wondered if this could be the low-life who killed Papa.

He paced back and forth on the sweltering platform, sweat trickling down his face. When his father used to grumble about the heat down here, he would want to answer back, well, why the hell are we wearing long black coats in the middle of July? His father disliked so much about the trains: the black goo oozing down the station walls, the smell of urine, the indignity of being crowded against strange women. And yet, he had lived his whole life without ever getting a driver's license and almost never allowing himself a cab. The ambulance ride from the store to Mount Sinai was one of the few times he didn't take the subway.

The woman next to him on the train was playing Candy Crush with the sound on. The boy on his other side listened to hip-hop, a tinny bass escaping his giant headphones. Normally he too would have been looking down at his phone or listening to an NPR podcast, but for once he had no desire. For once he felt present, not happy necessarily, but here in the moment. At the museum he hoped there would be a way to know for sure that this was his father's brooch. The picture fit his description exactly, but he would like to have no doubt about it. The truth was it couldn't have been in the hoard and be his father's brooch.

After a long half hour, he emerged from the subway. He walked through Fort Tryon Park toward the hill-perched Cloisters, its rufous tower and terracotta roof peeking over the trees. On the other side of the Hudson River were the bosky banks of the New Jersey Palisades, barely a building in sight. A bird cawed over the drone of the West Side Highway, but he couldn't see the highway or anything that let on he was still in Manhattan and not in Europe. As he climbed the cobblestone drive to the medieval building, a conglomeration of five abbeys dismantled stone by stone and shipped across the Atlantic, he had a strong memory of being young and walking up some cobblestones to yet another old cathedral or museum on his backpacking trip through Europe. It was the summer after college, and he had had a wonderful time, sightseeing during the day and getting drunk on cheap beers at night in the hostels. He had cherished the freedom more than the other backpackers because of how far it was from the life he was meant to have at twenty-three years old—married, the father of at least two children, five years into a lifetime sentence at the jewelry store—and
yet, for all the fun, an eerie feeling hung over that journey across Europe, the feeling of walking through a beautiful, sunlit cemetery.

He waited inside the rib-vaulted stone foyer for the woman behind the ticket counter to finish straightening out the brochures. She had gestured at him to hold on a moment, and instead of feeling impatient, he found he was glad to wait. Now that he was here, he didn't want this experience to pass too quickly. Out of the gift shop floated Gregorian chants, as if a choir of forty men sang among the souvenir spoons and art books. The choral music filled the airy hall, giving it both a sincere and Disneyish quality. As Isaac paid for his ticket, his phone buzzed. A text message from his father's longtime partner in Antwerp:
Poddar will start buying tomorrow. Get long positions in place.

Isaac followed the map in the brochure through an ogival doorway and down a long ambulatory lined with iron-latticed windows. At the end of the hall stood an enormous wooden crucifix. He was relieved to be here on a Wednesday morning and not a Saturday. Only a few tourists milled about. He descended a circular stone stairwell and emerged in a chapel where towering stained-glass windows blued the air. He asked a guard wedged between two sarcophagi to point him toward the treasury, and was sent down a hall of Virgin Marys. He passed stone Marys, wooden Marys, painted Marys, all holding their son, either the manlike baby with the two raised fingers or the dead adult son splayed across their knees.