The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (15 page)

Tendler was so happy that he could not bear it. So happy and so sad. And, with the cup of warm milk and the warm feeling, Tendler had to pee. But he didn't want to move now that he was there with his other mother and, resting on her shoulder, a baby sister. A year and a half old and one curl on the head. A little girl, fat and happy. Fat in the ankle, fat in the wrist.

Professor Tendler rushed out at the last second, out of the warm kitchen, out from under his roof. Professor Tendler, a man whom other men had tried to turn into an animal, did not race to the outhouse. It didn't cross his mind. He stood right under the kitchen window to smell the kitchen smells, to stay close. And he took a piss. Over the sound of the stream, he heard his nurse lamenting.

He knew what she must be lamenting—the Tendler family destroyed.

He listened to what she was saying. And he heard.

"He will take everything," is what she said. "He will take it all from us—our house, our field. He'll snatch away all we've built and protected, everything that has been—for so long—ours."

There outside the window, pissing and listening, and also "disassociating," as Professor Tendler would call it (though he did not then have the word), he knew only that he was watching himself from above, that he could see himself feeling all the disappointment as he felt it, until he was keenly and wildly aware that he had felt nothing all those years, felt nothing when his father and mother were shot, felt nothing while in the camps, nothing, in fact, from the moment he was driven from his home to the moment he returned.

In that instant, Tendler's guilt was sharper than any sensation he had ever known.

And here, in response to his precocious son, Shimmy said, "Yes, yes, of course it was about survival—Tendler's way of coping. Of course he'd been feeling all along." But Tendler—a boy who had stepped over his mother's body and kept walking—had, for those peasants, opened up.

It was right then, Professor Tendler later told Shimmy, that he became a philosopher.

"He will steal it all away," Fanushka said. "Everything. He has come for our lives."

And her son, whom Tendler had considered a brother, said, "No." And Tendler's other almost-brother said, "No."

"We will eat," Fanushka said. "We will celebrate. And when he sleeps we will kill him." To one of the sons she said, "Go. Tell your father to keep that knife sharp." To the other she said, "You get to sleep early, and you get up early, and before you grab the first tit on that cow I want his throat slit. Ours. Ours, not to be taken away."

Tendler ran. Not toward the street but back toward the outhouse in time to turn around as the kitchen door flew open, in time to smile at the younger brother on his way to find his father, in time for Tendler to be heading back the right way.

"Do you want to hear what was shared at such a dinner?" Shimmy asked his son. "The memories roused and oaths sworn? There was wine, I know. 'Drink, drink,' the mother said. There was the chicken and a pot of goat stew. And, in a time of great deprivation, there was also sugar for the tea." At this, Shimmy pointed at the bounty of their stand. "And, as if nothing, next to the baby's basket on the kitchen floor sat a basket of apples. Tendler hadn't had an apple in who knows how long."

Tendler brought the basket to the table. The family laughed as he peeled the apples with a knife, first eating the peels, then the flesh, and savoring even the seeds and the cores. It was a celebration, a joyous night. So much so that Professor Tendler could not by its end, belly distended, eyes crossed with drink, believe what he knew to have been said.

There were hugs and there were kisses, and Tendler—the master of the house—was given his parents' bedroom upstairs, the two boys across the hall, and below, in the kitchen ("It will be warmest"), slept the mother and the father and the fat-ankled girl.

"Sleep well," Fanushka said. "Welcome home, my son." And, sweetly, she kissed Tendler on both eyes.

Tendler climbed the stairs. He took off his suit and went to bed. And that was where he was when Fanushka popped through the door and asked him if he was warm enough, if he needed a lamp by which to read.

"No, thank you," he said.

"So formal? No thanks necessary," Fanushka said. "Only 'Yes, Mother,' or 'No, Mother,' my poor reclaimed orphan son."

"No light, Mother," Tendler said, and Fanushka closed the door.

Tendler got out of bed. He put on his suit. Once again without any shame to his actions, Tendler searched the room for anything of value, robbing his own home.

Then he waited. He waited until the house had settled into itself, the last creak slipping from the floorboards as the walls pushed back against the wind. He waited until his mother, his Fanushka, must surely sleep, until a brother intent on staying up for the night—a brother who had never once fought for his life—convinced himself that it would be all right to close his eyes.

Tendler waited until he too had to sleep, and that's when he tied the laces of his shoes together and hung them over his shoulder. That's when he took his pillow with one hand and, with the other, quietly cocked his gun.

Then, with goose feathers flying, Tendler moved through the house. A bullet for each brother, one for the father and one for the mother. Tendler fired until he found himself standing in the warmth of the kitchen, one bullet left to protect him on the nights when he would sleep by the side of the road.

That last bullet Tendler left in the fat baby girl, because he did not know from mercy, and did not need to leave another of that family to grow to kill him at some future time.

"He murdered them," Etgar said. "A murderer."

"No," his father told him. "There was no such notion at the time."

"Even so, it is murder," Etgar said.

"If it is, then it's only fair. They killed him first. It was his right."

"But you always say—"

"Context."

"But the baby. The girl."

"The baby is hardest, I admit. But these are questions for the philosopher. These are the theoretical instances put into flesh and blood."

"But it's not a question. These people, they are not the ones who murdered his family."

"They were coming for him that night."

"He could have escaped. He could have run for the gate when he overheard. He didn't need to race back toward the outhouse, race to face the brother as he came the other way."

"Maybe there was no more running in him. Anyway, do you understand 'an eye for an eye'? Can you imagine a broader meaning of
self-defense
?"

"You always forgive him," Etgar said. "You suffered the same things—but you aren't that way. You would not have done what he did."

"It is hard to know what a person would and wouldn't do in any specific instance. And you, spoiled child, apply the rules of civilization to a boy who had seen only its opposite. Maybe the fault for those deaths lies in a system designed for the killing of Tendlers that failed to do its job. An error, a slip that allowed a Tendler, no longer fit, back loose in the world."

"Is that what you think?"

"It's what I ask. And I ask you, my Etgar, what you would have done if you were Tendler that night?"

"Not kill."

"Then you die."

"Only the grownups."

"But it was a boy who was sent to cut Tendler's throat."

"How about killing only those who would do harm?"

"Still it's murder. Still it is killing people who have yet to act, murdering them in their sleep."

"I guess," Etgar said. "I can see how they deserved it, the four. How I might, if I were him, have killed them."

Shimmy shook his head, looking sad.

"And whoever are we, my son, to decide who should die?"

It was on that day that Etgar Gezer became a philosopher himself. Not in the manner of Professor Tendler, who taught theories up at the university on the mountain, but, like his father, practical and concrete. Etgar would not finish high school or go to college, and except for his three years in the army, he would spend his life—happily—working the stand in the
shuk.
He'd stack the fruit into pyramids and contemplate weighty questions with a seriousness of thought. And when there were answers Etgar would try employing them to make for himself and others, in whatever small way, a better life.

It was on that day too that Etgar decided Professor Tendler was both a murderer and, at the same time, a
misken.
He believed he understood how and why Professor Tendler had come to kill that peasant family, and how men sent to battle in uniform—even in the same uniform—would find no mercy at his hand. Etgar also came to see how Tendler's story could just as easily have ended for the professor that first night, back in his parents' room, in his parents' bed, a gun with four bullets held in a suicide's hand—how the first bullet Tendler ever fired might have been into his own head.

Still, every Friday Etgar packed up Tendler's fruit and vegetables. And in that bag Etgar would add, when he had them, a pineapple or a few fat mangos dripping honey. Handing it to Tendler, Etgar would say, "
Kach
, Professor. Take it." This, even after his father had died.

FROM
The New Yorker

T
HE DAY HER FIANCÉ LEFT
, Amanda went walking in the Colonial cemetery off Garden Street. The gravestones were so worn that she could hardly read them. They were melting away into the weedy grass. You are a very dark person, her fiancé had said.

She walked home and sat in her half-empty closet. Her vintage 1950s wedding dress hung in clear asphyxiating plastic printed "NOT A TOY"

She took the dress to work. She hooked the hanger onto a grab bar on the T and the dress rustled and swayed. When she got out at Harvard Square, the guy who played guitar near the turnstiles called, "Congratulations."

Work was at the Garden School, where Amanda taught art, including theater, puppets, storytelling, drumming, dance, and now fabric painting. She spread the white satin gown on the art-room floor. Two girls glued pink feathers all along the hem. Others brushed the skirt with green and purple. A boy named Nathaniel dipped his hand in red paint and left his little handprint on the bodice as though the dress were an Indian pony. At lunchtime, the principal asked Amanda to step into her office.

You are like living with a dark cloud, Amanda's fiancé had told her when he left. You're always sad.

I'm sad now, Amanda had said.

The principal told Amanda that for an educator, boundaries were an issue. "Your personal life," said the principal, "is not an appropriate art project for first grade. Your classroom," said the principal, "is not an appropriate forum for your relationships. Let's pack up the wedding dress."

"It's still wet," Amanda said.

Her mother could not believe it. She had just sent out all the invitations. Her father swore he'd kill the son of a bitch. They both asked how this could have happened, but they remembered that they had had doubts all along. Her sister, Lissa, said she could not imagine what Amanda was going through. She must feel so terrible. Was Amanda going to have to write to everyone on the guest list? Like a card or something? She'd have to tell everybody, wouldn't she?

I waited all this time because I didn't want to hurt you, Amanda's fiancé had said.

After school, she went for a drink with the old blond gym teacher, Patsy. They went to a bar called Cambridge Common and ordered gin and tonics. Patsy said, "Eventually you're going to realize that this is a blessing in disguise."

"We had too many differences," said Amanda.

Patsy lifted her glass. "There you go."

"For example, I loved him and he didn't love me."

"Don't be surprised," said Patsy, "if he immediately marries someone else. Guys like that immediately marry someone else."

"Why?" Amanda asked.

Patsy sighed. "If I knew that, I'd be teaching at Harvard, not teaching the professors' kids."

Amanda tried writing a card or something. She wrote that she and her fiancé had decided not to marry. Then she wrote that her fiancé had decided not to marry her. She said that she was sorry for any inconvenience. She added that she would appreciate gifts anyway.

Her parents told her not to send the card. They said that they were coming up for a week. She said that they couldn't come, because she was painting her apartment. She did not paint the apartment.

In the winter, Amanda cut her hair short like a boy's.

"Oh, your hair," said Patsy. "Your beautiful curls."

In the spring, the principal told Amanda that, regretfully, she was not being renewed for the following year, because the art program at the Garden School was moving in a different direction.

In the summer, Amanda's fiancé married someone else.

***

When school ended, Amanda took a job babysitting Nathaniel, the boy with the red handprint. Nathaniel's mother asked for stimulating activities, projects, science. No TV. Nathaniel's father didn't ask for anything.

Their first day together, Amanda asked Nathaniel, "What do you want to do?"

"Nothing."

She said, "You read my mind."

They ate chocolate mice at Burdick's and then they stood in front of the Harvard Coop and listened to Peruvian musicians. They explored the cemetery, and Amanda told Nathaniel that the gravestones were dragons' teeth. They walked down to the river and she said, "If you trace the river all the way to the beginning, you'll find a magic cave." They took the T to Boston and stood in line for the swan boats in the Public Garden. She said, "At night, these boats turn into real swans."

Nathaniel said, "You have a great imagination."

His mother lived in a Victorian house on Buckingham Street. She worked at the Media Lab at MIT and she had deadlines. The house had a garden full of flowers, but Nathaniel didn't play there, because you couldn't really dig.

His father lived in an upside-down town house on Chauncy Street. The bedrooms were on the bottom floors, and the kitchen and living room on top. His father was writing a book and he came home late.