Swimming Across the Hudson (11 page)

When we were ten we searched for our birth certificates. I knew I was born in July 1964 and Jonathan was born that December. But we couldn't find our birth certificates. We didn't believe we had real ones.

“You have birth certificates,” my mother said.

“Were we born in a hospital?” I asked.

“Of course you were.”

“I was born,” Jonathan said, “by the banks of the Nile.” He liked the story of Moses' birth, this baby left in a bassinet in the water, taken by Pharaoh's daughter to be brought up by the king.

My mother smiled at Jonathan. “You were born in a hospital like everyone else.”

She wouldn't be more specific than that. We wanted to know how much we'd weighed at birth. We wanted to see our birth certificates.

“I don't know where they are,” she said. Her eyes had the glossy cast of someone beginning to forget. I told her she was growing senile.

“I'm not growing senile. I'm being normal. Normal people sometimes forget.”

I didn't believe she'd forgotten about our birth certificates. We had slipped into the world without anyone's noticing; there was no real record of us.

My mother had read us a book called
Are You My Mother?
in which a bird goes from one animal to another, asking whether she has given birth to him. Jonathan and I did the same thing. I had always
been careful not to talk to strangers, but now I made an exception. We went up to women walking along Broadway and asked, “Are you my mother?”

At home we made our own birth certificates and laid them before us.

“Mom and Dad burned our real ones,” I said.

“They used them as kindling,” said Jonathan.

For years we watched the Knicks on TV. Our favorite player was Bill Bradley, who had gone to Princeton, where my father once lectured. Bill Bradley had a photographic memory; he'd been a Rhodes scholar. We thought that with practice we could be like him, so we came home from school and sat on our beds, trying to memorize the phone book.

“Forget it,” Jonathan said the year we turned eleven. “We'll never be as smart as Bill Bradley.”

In school we'd learned about the rabbis of old who could put a pin through a book of the Talmud and name every letter the pin passed through. Jonathan told me Bill Bradley could do that.

“Bill Bradley doesn't even know what the Talmud is,” I said.

“Yes he does.”

For Jonathan's eleventh birthday, I bought him
Twenty-one Days to a Better Vocabulary
. We worked on our memories, testing each other on words we didn't know. We took the phone we had made from two cups and string, and whispered to each other through it.

“Hello,” I said. “Hello, my brother.”

“Eulogy.” He tugged on the cord to make sure I was holding on.

“Encomium.”

“Panegyric.”

That spring, he enrolled in a speed-reading course. When he came home from class he pretended he could read as fast as he turned pages, and I pretended I believed him.

“I read
The Book of Lists
,” he said. He flipped through hundreds of pages, then pressed the book against his forehead to show me how much knowledge he'd absorbed. “I'm reading through every book in the library. Soon there will be nothing left to know.”

We played on the basketball team and sang in school chorus. We took almost all our classes together. In seventh grade, we decided to study Spanish instead of French, though we knew our father would be disappointed. He'd been stationed in France during World War II and believed every cultured person should study French.

“French,” he told us, “is a beautiful language.” We were sitting in his study. On the shelf behind him were the books he'd written:
War and Empire in Soviet Russia. Leninism: A Life and an Idea. Doing the Dance: Soviet Jews and the KGB. A Francophile Visits Russia
. He'd dedicated this last book to Jonathan and me.

“It's a language for frogs,” Jonathan said. We wanted to learn Spanish so we could communicate with the Puerto Rican kids in Riverside Park. We played basketball with them after school, shouting “
¿Qué pasa?
” as we ran down the court, as though we could speak Spanish too.

“It's a language of great literature,” my father said. He and my mother spoke French to each other when they wanted to tell secrets. Jonathan and I listened carefully, hoping that if we concentrated we'd start to understand.

But most of the time we pretended not to care.

“I hate French,” Jonathan said.

I, though, wasn't sure I did. Our parents had met in France. The way I thought of it, if it weren't for France everything would have been different. Jonathan and I wouldn't have been born.

“Of course we would have,” Jonathan said. “We just would have been adopted by someone else.”

“Like who?”

“Rich people. They can never give birth.”

The only French person I liked was Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck,
whom I'd learned about in science class. Lamarck believed that acquired traits were passed on from one generation to the next. I planned to acquire my father's traits and pass them on to my son.

I sat at my father's desk, wearing his glasses, studying the books before me. I examined him at dinner, trying to make the faces he made. When dinner was over, I stood in front of the mirror and stared at myself. My plan was working.

“I'm starting to look like Dad,” I told Jonathan.

“No you're not.”

“I've taught myself Yiddish,” I lied. “I know everything about political science.”

I used to worry about my parents' fifteen-year age difference, thinking that was the problem: my father had been too old to have children, so my parents had to adopt.

“Mom and Dad never had sex,” Jonathan said.

“Yes they did.” I was nine. I understood these things.

“Have you ever seen them?”

I hadn't, I admitted. I'd never even seen them naked.

We'd learned in school about declining sperm counts, all those cells like worms our teacher chalked across the board. But once, in the supermarket checkout line, I read about a ninety-five-year-old who had fathered sextuplets and whose wife was pregnant again.

“A ninety-five-year-old can't father sextuplets,” my mother said. “You're lucky at ninety-five to even be alive.”

“It happened,” I said.

“Then we'd have heard about it. It would have been in
The New York Times
.”

“It happened in Brazil.”

At night I lay in bed and worried about my father. I was sure he was the reason my mother couldn't give birth. I told her what I thought.

“He wasn't the reason.”

“Then who was?”

“No one. Sometimes things happen for no reason at all.”

But nothing just happened. Maybe my father had done something wrong. What if I couldn't have children?

It was possible my wife hadn't been born yet. If I was fifteen years older, she wasn't even a cell under a microscope.

“My wife doesn't exist,” I told my father.

“There's no way of knowing that,” he said.

He taught Jonathan and me that every person has a
bashert
, his missing half, the person God chooses for him to marry. In class we learned about atoms and subatoms. Our science teacher liked to explode things; she stood before us in a long white coat. Her face was white too, covered with chalk dust. She drew atoms on the blackboard, huge ovals like flying saucers, particles colliding in the electron field.

That was how I saw the world, millions of people circling one another. It was coincidence whom you met and whom you didn't. I thought about what my father had said, how we each had a
bashert
, how God had His plan.

I didn't yet like girls, didn't want to have a girlfriend, but still I wondered about my
bashert
. At dinner my father would quiz us on geography. He'd ask us the capitals of all fifty states. He'd have us locate Timbuktu on an unmarked map. On the wall above my desk hung a huge map of China. What would I do if my
bashert
lived in China? I saw my
bashert
and me without a word in common, forced to wed by God's command.

“It's not a command,” my mother said.

“Then what is it?”

“Think of it as a prediction. God is simply placing a bet.”

Still, I believed I had a
bashert
. Every morning, I said a prayer that she be someone I loved, someone I could spend a life with. I was compassionate, my mother said. I gave money to the beggars on
Broadway. There was a boy in my class who had cerebral palsy; during recess, I pushed him in his wheelchair while my friends played dodgeball in the gym.

I was doing a mitzvah, my father said. God would reward me in the world to come.

But I was concerned about this world. Rabbi Appelfeld had told us that God tests people with inner strength. I hoped I didn't have inner strength. I imagined myself with a wife like that boy, someone to wheel about and feel sorry for.

Jonathan and I said we'd travel the world, but mostly we wanted to be like our father, who'd traveled the world in uniform, fighting the Germans in World War II. He was a professor of political science; he never went to work without a jacket and a tie. But years before, he'd been someone else. He'd spent a thousand nights inside army barracks. He went for weeks with little food or sleep, keeping himself sane by reciting poetry. He helped the other soldiers compose letters to their girlfriends, mud-stained declarations of love and honor, carefully honed sentences in fountain pen. He was a poet himself, his army mates thought.

Unarmed, he'd come upon a battalion of Germans. His German was rusty, but he managed to communicate, getting the Germans to lay down their weapons.

“How did you do that?” I asked him once.

“Persuasion,” he said. “It was 1944, and the war was almost over. It was clear we were going to win. I told the Germans the Senegalese were coming. The Senegalese were rumored not to take prisoners.”

“
Were
the Senegalese coming?”

“It was possible. I wasn't sure.”

I liked hearing him tell stories about the war, liked holding the objects he'd captured. He had a pair of German field binoculars so
powerful that when we used them at Shea Stadium we could see the color of the batters' eyes. He had a gray wool blanket with German writing across it. Sometimes at night, lying beneath that blanket, I tried to picture him when he was young.

Was this why I feared I would die, knowing my father could have been killed in World War II and everything that followed would have been different?

Was it simply that I was adopted?

I imagined that my birth mother had died. I persuaded Jonathan that his birth mother had died too. “They died in childbirth,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Telepathy. I have ESP.”

In school we'd learned about our foremother Rachel, who for years had been unable to bear a child and who was buried by the roadside on the way to Bethlehem after giving birth to Benjamin. “Benjamin killed Rachel,” I said.

“No he didn't.”

“We killed our birth mothers too.”

I thought about this on Yom Kippur, the year I was ten, crying out to God and hoping not to die. In synagogue we read a list of ways to die—plague, famine, pestilence, fire—deaths too awful even to think about. A family down the block from us had been killed in a fire, so every week that year when the sabbath was over I held the
havdala
candle lit beneath the smoke alarm to make sure the battery was still working.

“You're being silly,” my mother said.

“I'm protecting the family.” I stood on a stool, holding the candle high above me, and when the alarm began to blare, I told Jonathan that we were safe for another week, that God would protect us until the next sabbath.

“God doesn't protect us,” my mother said. “The smoke alarm does.”

“You don't know anything,” I told her.

I kept my door open when I went to sleep at night, hoping to hear the smoke alarm. I'd be like my father in World War II, guarding the battalion from death and Hitler, reciting poetry.

“I hate poetry,” Jonathan said after school one day.

“Poetry kept Dad sane during the war.”

“So what?”

“So it's important.” I thought about this when I went to bed that night. Lying beneath the blanket my father had captured, I couldn't fall asleep. I didn't want to fight in a war; I lacked my father's courage.

“I don't want to die,” I told Jonathan the next day. “I don't want to get flown back in a body bag.”

“They've got nuclear weapons now. If you die in a war, you'll get blown to pieces. There won't be a body to fly back.”