The Mystics of Mile End (35 page)

“A whole night I have waited, and now it is dawn. The first streak of light appears in the sky and I think, for the first time, maybe she is not coming. Then I turn around—and look, there, look! There she is! I open my mouth to call to her—and then I see it. And my mouth falls shut.

“She is wearing a yellow raincoat.

“A yellow raincoat.

“Yellow.”

Glassman paused, waiting to see if the girl would give him some kind of response. She gave nothing—not even a twitch. He inched closer.

“This yellow raincoat is a problem. This yellow raincoat is a mathematical puzzle. She stands still so I can examine it. She does not move. And she does not speak.

“This much I understand right away: The problem is not with
the raincoatness of the raincoat. The problem is with the yellowness of the yellow. Because this yellow, this bright shining happy beautiful yellow—ah, what a color! It is hard to believe such a color could exist in the same world as. In the same world where. Not hard. Impossible.

“Once I understand this, the next steps of the proof fall into my head, one after the other.

“The color is a statement.

“The statement is: Life is pretty.

“To wear the color means: I believe the statement is true.

“But if this is so, then there is a problem. The problem is: Life is not pretty. I know this. She knows this. How do I know that she knows this? Because all the answers are already in her eyes. Left. Dead. Birkenau.

“The yellow raincoat is a contradiction. She is asking me to embrace a contradiction.

“I open my mouth—

“Again my mouth falls shut.

“Suddenly I remember a story I read in the newspaper. About the thousands of Jewish musicians sent to die in the camps. In some places, there were multiple orchestras, each with dozens of musicians. The Nazis, may their names be erased, forced them to play while their fellow prisoners marched to the gas chambers and the ovens. And in one of the camps there was a very famous composer. The Nazis ordered this man to compose a score. This man considered his options. What could he do? Refuse? Cry? Scream
NO
at the top of his lungs? His life was anyways going to end by their hands. A score they wanted from him now? So. Very nice. He would compose a score. But, ah, what a score this man composed!

“The score called for one hundred musicians. It called for one hundred instruments. And it ordered that the one hundred musicians should play the one hundred instruments
closed
. The lid of
the piano
closed
. The violins inside their cases,
closed
. And so, in front of the whole camp, in front of the burning eyes of the Nazis, the entire orchestra played their instruments, but silently, silently. This silence was their protest, their last great
NO
.

“And now, now I am looking at Chayaleh in this yellow raincoat, and I am thinking to myself: This raincoat is the same idea. This raincoat is a great big
NO
to life. Because, you know, life has rules. Rules such as, life can be pretty or not pretty, but it cannot both be pretty and not pretty at the same time. She knows this. She has a better
kop
for mathematics than even me, and I know she knows this. And so I know that what she is saying to me, when she comes to me wearing this contradiction, is:
NO
to all the rules.
NO
to life.

“I open my mouth—

“Again my mouth falls shut. What can I say? What can she say? I realize that if I accept her strange world of yellow raincoats, nothing at all can be said. To say ‘sky' would be a lie. To say ‘tree' would be a lie. The yellow raincoat is revealing a world where nothing can be spoken.”

The light drizzle was not so light anymore; it was deepening to a heavy downpour. Samara lifted her face to let the rain needle her skin. He plunged on, his voice rising.

“Still, in mathematics one must be empirical. I decide I will put the theorem to the test. I will open my mouth and speak the simplest statements, the truest statements I know.

“I try: My name is Chaim Glassman. (The words will not come out.)

“I try: I love you. (The words will not come out.)

“I try: Hello. (The word will not come out.)

“Now I hear the sound of my own heart beating. It is the yellow raincoat that reveals this sound to me. The yellow raincoat tells me that, for its sake, I must forget what I know. I know, for example, that the heart does not contain a finite number of words. That
silence is not better than speech. The yellow raincoat tells me to forget this. To make a life of silence possible between my Chayaleh and me, to give it a reason and a history and a meaning that will make it easier for us to bear, I must begin to believe new things.

“The yellow raincoat is a contradiction, and also a contract. The terms are clear:
What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence.
Therefore, life must be passed over in silence.

“The sky is full of light now. In this light, she opens her arms and I embrace her.

“The next steps happen so easily, so quickly, they are like dance steps learned in advance.

“She bends down and holds my ankle and kisses it. I bend down and hold her ankle and kiss it. She gives me a kiss, a small kiss, right in the corner of my mouth. I give her a kiss, a small kiss, right in the corner of her mouth. She presses a finger to my lips. I press a finger to hers.
Sha,
she tells me without words.
Quiet, be quiet, listen.

“I listen. The silence is closing all around us. On the air there is a smell like paper burning. We stand with our fingers on each other's lips and wait. Somewhere, she knows, her brother is watching. He will see her this way and understand.”

Glassman paused. Rain was slashing down like knives, wind tearing at the branches. And the girl was still statuesque, clinging to her cold patch of sky. Her behavior bore all the hallmarks of Ayin, yet the set of her muscles, the tiny ropes of misery moving beneath her face, made plain that she didn't want this—not anymore. Still, she did not, perhaps could not, move.

A bolt of lightning exploded in the sky.

Thunder shook the air and the cans howled their pain. A phrase flashed across his brain:
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving
thunderbolts, singe my white head!

His eyes darted from the shivering girl in the branches to the flickering tin cans, and a tremor of fear ran through him. He needed to get her down from there fast, before it was too late—and yet she had to come down of her own volition or else this would all be useless.

“Samara!” he called up, neck craning, voice straining. “Do you see? Do you see what I am telling you? I thought—I thought I understood the sign—but what if I was wrong? What if,” he cried, “the yellow raincoat was not a great big
NO
to life? What if what she was trying to say to me was
YES
? What if she saw, all those years ago, something it took me decades to understand: that the world is not pretty, but human beings need to try to make it so. Not by escaping into some higher world, not by seeking some invisible sign up in the sky—but by seeking it here, here on the earth, here in the people around you—”

Thunder buried his voice again, and again he raised it.

“But that was not how I chose to read the sign. A wiser man might have read it that way, but I—I was not wise. I wanted what was comfortable, and this—this silence—this was comfortable. Because even though it was not an easy way to live, there were rules, there was a clear path to follow. You are making the same mistake, Samara!”

Had she just turned her head slightly toward him?

“You think, because you are sitting in a tree and it is raining and you have not eaten and you have not slept, that you are uncomfortable? You are following a clear path, and that is comfortable!” Through the downpour, he thought he saw her jaw tighten. “You think, now that you have been dragged up this path, you have no choice but to stay there? You have a choice! You can still fight back! But,” he screamed, “not for long! Because, believe me, the longer you stay this way, the more strength you give it and the more you will be stuck. And soon you will wake up like me, you will find
you really do have almost no choice left at all.” Drawing a painful breath, he boomed, “So fight this, Samara. Fight this now!”

Samara's eyes flicked down to meet his. Another crack of thunder burst directly above her. The tree swayed wildly and the blood drained from her face.

“Come down now, Samara. It is not so far to fall. And I will be here to catch you. It will be like flying, yes? So. Come on now. Fly!”

And in one jagged motion, he thrust out his hand—

She leaped from her branch—

She flew—

A ball of fire hit the tree.

The force of the blow—lightning striking age-old oak—pushed her into his arms and threw him off his feet, so that in the end it was earth that caught them both, holding them together in a wet, tangled heap. They gasped for breath. They gaped upward. A horrible creaking filled their ears. And then they watched as the tree split down the middle, branches splintering on either side, and hundreds of tin cans spilled, clanging, to the ground. The cans groaned as they rolled out over the lawn, onto the sidewalk, and down the street, where they were carried away by a surge of rainwater, their rusty complaint fading into the night.

A
lex was not awake. But he was not fully asleep, either. He could feel the first rays of dawn warming his closed eyelids. He was conscious, too, of the vague ache in his back, the crick in his neck. He'd been sleeping at a right angle all night, and his limbs were very much aware of that fact. The muscles at the edges of his eyes—they, too, were slowly becoming aware of something. Of someone.

There was a presence hovering above him. Blocking the light filtering in from the window and casting a shadow on his frame. His mind took stock of that shadow's dimensions. Its height. Its
slimness. Its silence. Even before he opened his eyes, he knew who it was.

Samara stood in a beam of light. Her hair was soaking, her clothes dripping. Her face was pale. But her lips curved upward in a wan smile. She brought a finger to them. For a second he thought she was telling him not to speak, because they had always communicated best in code. But she tilted her head slightly to where Lev and Jenny were still asleep on their respective couches, and he realized she didn't want to wake them. He gave a minuscule nod.

A ray of pain shot up his neck. Here he was, doing it again. Looking up at her, looking up
to
her, searching for a sign. He'd been doing this all his life—craning his neck skyward, assuming meaning would rain down on him from the stars. But if Samara's letters had taught him anything, it was that messages from the stars were apt to be misinterpreted.

With this realization, something in the air shifted, swayed. The old architecture of their relationship was crumbling, making way for a new order to be established in its place. And so, before the whole structure collapsed around their ears, he took a moment to savor it.

The silence between them was cold and bright and elegant. It had a glassy, abstract beauty, like the beauty of pure math. It sparkled in the morning light and he admired it. And then he stood up, and the glass splintered, sliding down.

The two of them stood eye to eye. Samara, whose face he had once invested with divinity, flashed him a shy smile. Not the smile of a false goddess. The smile of a new friend.

And so, in a whisper, he greeted her. “Hello.”

The word landed on his eardrum with the softness of a feather. Its weight was modest, but it was there, with a mass and a density and a volume all its own. Gone were the elegance and abstractness
of silence. That “hello” was perhaps less pure. But he found, to his surprise, it was more beautiful.

T
he first streaks of dawn slanted into the house as Glassman climbed the stairs. He shivered as he went, his clothes wet, his skin cold. He was exhausted but also strangely exhilarated. On the landing, he peered into the bedroom and saw, through the window opposite, a sky glazed with pink and purple, orange and gold. He looked over at his wife in bed. Her skin was gray.

He opened his mouth—

His mouth fell shut.

He stood in the doorframe for a long time.

By the time he made his way over to her side, her face was bathed in light. He extended a finger and traced her last expression—the corners of her lips, their upward tilt—his heart swelling with gratitude for this impossible gift: a final smile, a closing parenthesis.

He sat down beside her.

He pressed his ear to her chest.

He heard nothing.

No, not nothing. A metallic
lub-dub, lub-dub
seemed to fly up through his wife's heart and out her chest and into the air, falling upon his ears with shocking clarity. His eyes widened. His breath caught. He lifted his head to look into her face and realized that the sound he was hearing was not a
lub-dub
but a
thud-thud,
a rhythmic thwacking coming from outside his bedroom, outside his house.

He left his place at his wife's side. From the window he saw Katz standing on his front lawn with an ax in his hands and a smile on his face. He was crouched over the remains of his weather-beaten tree—and cutting away at it while singing a cheerful tune.

Another sound fell on Glassman's ears. A happy, indiscernible babble. Laughter and the clinking of bottles. The glug of glasses
being filled. He leaned out the window and saw two girls and two boys celebrating on the lawn.

“L'chaim!”

At the sound of it, he almost laughed.
L'chaim:
to life! But also: to Chaim!

He turned back to his wife, who was still smiling, and knew in that moment that wherever she was, she was not angry at him. He had not been able to depart at the same time as her, and that was just as it should be. His time to go had not yet come. His wife knew and she was glad.