The UnAmericans: Stories (30 page)

Outside baggage claim, the director of the Israel Museum was waiting by the fountain. She was sixtyish and attractive in a stern, no-nonsense way, with cropped gray hair, red plastic glasses and chunky geometric jewelry that could only have come from the museum gift shop. “Roni Ben Ami,” she said, extending her hand and grabbing his suitcase with the other.

“It’s okay,” Boaz said, trying to take his suitcase back, but she was already pushing her way outside, where her driver was waiting. Boaz slid in beside Roni, and as her car pulled away from the curb, she turned to him and said, “I’ve never picked up a donor at the airport. But I couldn’t let an intern do it—not for Eva.” The sky was lightening, and the familiar cluster of billboards advertising cell phone plans and yogurt sprang into view. It didn’t seem possible that he was halfway around the world now, just four days after Wendy had first opened the will. He still hadn’t heard from Mira—and if Wendy and Larry had, they weren’t letting on. And though Mira had promised the last time they’d spoken that she was staying at her colleague Sharon’s house in Hardwick, Boaz couldn’t stop picturing her at
his
house, Eric’s house, in Albany. Boaz had no idea what Eric looked like, but he kept seeing someone brawny and suntanned, the type of guy who woke at dawn to do yard work, then came into the bedroom scratched and sweaty with a mug of coffee for Mira, slow and groggy in the morning, her dark hair fanned out against the pillow.

“You should see the collection,” Roni was saying. “You know how she displayed everything, in that Eva-haphazard way. So yesterday at work I start lining them up chronologically, and that’s when I realized she hadn’t just been collecting art from that period—her collection
is
that period. It’s a complete retrospective,” she said, a little breathlessly, and checked her BlackBerry. It kept going off, and Boaz suddenly sensed how important this woman was: so many people working for her, presumably from all over the globe given how early it was, and there she was, carting him around before breakfast.

“Of course some of it’s terrible,” Roni continued. “Those Rubashkins? But you know your grandmother—all she cared was that it was dissident, outrageous. People might not get that now.” She squinted at Boaz, as if to see whether he got it, and he wondered what she saw: a thirty-five-year-old with bed-head and tired eyes, looking a bit like a delivery boy in jeans and a hoodie, having forgotten, as he’d dressed for the flight back in Vermont, that he’d be meeting people like Roni before getting a chance to shower. “Boaz, forgive me,” she said, “but which one are you again?”

“Mira’s husband.” He coughed, wondering if those words were even true anymore.

“The anthropologist?”

“The family has no anthropologists.”

“Oh,” Roni said slowly, as if flipping through a mental Rolodex. “The architect.”

“That’s Hannah. Mira’s the translator.” There was an ugly part of him that wished Mira were there to hear how little her grandmother’s friends knew of her, just so he could see the pain shoot past her eyes. But Mira had always suspected it anyway. It’s like she’s so obsessed with charming the world that there’s nothing left for her own family, Mira had told him once—and Boaz remembered just where they were when she’d said it, that first year together in Jerusalem, during those early months of dating when they’d lie in bed talking through the morning.

That was the night she’d told him Eva’s story: leaving her native Prague to study art in Paris in the thirties and falling in love with Mikhail Borovsky, the famous Russian painter who wasn’t yet famous. They lived together for many years. Then his father died and he had to go back to Moscow to sort things out for his mother. He said he’d return in a month. But that summer, Germany captured Paris. Eva escaped on a cargo ship to New York. Her entire family in Prague—never heard from again. Mikhail—still in Russia, impossible to reach. In New York she had nothing, knew no one, but she was like you with languages, Mira told Boaz—they came easily to her and she collected them like badges. So with her English, she finagled her way into the secretarial pool at the Frick, and from there, Eva being Eva, began curating shows at small galleries around the city, until the bigger places started taking notice. Then in the early fifties she met Sy, who at that time was enjoying a bit of fame for that book he’d written, the first to so openly criticize Senator McCarthy’s policies, maybe Boaz had heard of it? (He hadn’t.) Together they started organizing some of the early American conferences on Soviet Jewry, trying to garner worldwide support for Russian Jews denied exit visas, and then they began traveling to Moscow. By that time, the government had made Mikhail an official artist, known for his portraits of Party officials, so he was easy for Eva to find. He’d married by then as well, so he and Eva left their relationship in the past. She and Sy and Mikhail and his wife all began working together, Mikhail sneaking government-issued paints and brushes to the unofficial artists and shepherding Eva into clandestine apartment exhibits around Moscow, introducing her to virtually every painter whose work she ended up smuggling out and making known abroad.

It’s amazing, Mira had said, that my grandmother risked her life for these artists, knowing if caught she’d be interrogated, jailed, probably worse. But then my mom was born, and it was Grandpa Sy who stopped making those trips, it was Grandpa Sy who decided it wasn’t worth putting himself in danger when he had a child, and I don’t think my grandmother canceled one flight. Imagine how that made my mother feel, Mira said—and while Boaz knew that was his cue to take Mira’s hand and whisper yes, he could imagine how hard that must have been, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. The whole story confused him. It didn’t seem possible that Mira had lived twenty-two years and experienced no real sadness of her own—that the stories she shared late at night in bed, supposedly the most painful and private of her life, were about other people.

Then Mira had faced him. It was the part he dreaded most about dating, the assumption that he was supposed to turn to the girl he’d just slept with and reveal his own dark stories. So, as always, he gave the shorthand: he’d never known his father, he had no siblings, his mother had passed away when he was twenty-one. All the other girls would whisper condolences, then go uncomfortably silent; and Boaz, afraid he’d ruined their evening, would always say he was fine, couldn’t they see he was fine, then fumble for a way to maneuver the conversation back to them. But Mira didn’t go quiet—she got angry. She said it was unfair he’d suffered so much. It was a sentiment he’d never considered—that everyone was entitled to a happy life—but Mira felt it vehemently on his behalf. She sat up in bed, and Boaz remembered just how she’d looked that night, a decade ago, headlights flashing through the window and illuminating her broad, pale shoulders. “The whole thing breaks my heart,” she said. “That you had to bury your mother when you were barely an adult yourself.”

And Boaz wondered how he could find himself loving and resenting a person at the same dangerous, accelerating speed, because while her attention thrilled him, he sensed it had as much to do with Mira’s ego as with him—that more than anything, she wanted to crack him open and be the first girl to peer inside.

She’d gotten upset over the wrong thing anyway. He’d spent years preparing for the day he’d bury his mother—she’d battled kidney disease her entire life and was practical about her condition, talked about it openly, wanted him to understand its inevitability. What was hard were the months that followed, after shiva was over, after the phone calls and condolence cards and prepared food stopped, after he’d paid off his mother’s medical bills and cleared out the closets and donated all her clothes to Karmey Chesed and Boaz was left with no final tasks to distract his thoughts. He’d been discharged that year and while all his army friends were backpacking through Thailand and India, Boaz was back in his childhood apartment, supposedly studying for university entrance exams but really just wandering the four rooms, bumping into his own furniture. The only real solace he found was in books. When he was younger Boaz had read to escape, but during those months back home, reading consoled him in a way no person at the funeral had been able to—writers who had found language not only to describe the pain he felt but to control it, their books containing the infinite possibilities of a sadness he feared could otherwise consume him. There was one entire week he stayed in bed reading, and when, on the eighth day, he finally walked around the corner for groceries, he was struck by this: no one had noticed he’d been inside. That was when he truly understood he was on his own. And the thing about being alone is knowing that if you want to enter the world again, you have to be a guest in it—people are doing you a favor by inviting you into their homes for family gatherings and national holidays, and the only way to act is cheerful and easy, even when you’re so depressed you can barely muster the energy to brush your teeth, and to arrive with wine and flowers and always offer to help with the dishes.

That was when Mira had stood up, and Boaz feared he’d unloaded so much that she wanted him to leave. But she just opened the window, and he listened to cars whistle past as sirens drifted down Azza Street. “No one wants you to fake it,” she said. “You know the other day, when it finally stopped raining and I called you from Independence Park and you were working so hard you didn’t even know the sun had come out? I loved that,” she said. “It was so weird of you to miss the first real day of spring and not care at all.” And he could see that the weirdness thrilled her, as if she were catching a glimpse of his real, uncut self, even all the messy footage he’d worked so scrupulously to edit out. He’d never met a person who accepted him so fully, but he’d later learn all the Kaplan women were like that: they laughed and cried and yelled whenever they felt like it, and expected the people around them to do the same. Yet even that night, Boaz understood that while he respected Eva’s utter ease with herself—the woman had lost her entire family at an even younger age than Boaz but refused to act like anyone’s guest—he had a hard time admiring the same trait in Mira, when she’d simply inherited it.

He knew that was unfair: it wasn’t Mira’s fault her parents supported her at every turn, sending her to softball leagues and theater classes when she displayed a modicum of interest, doing everything possible to ensure their daughter’s life was a series of smooth, paved roads with endless green lights. It wasn’t Mira’s fault she’d been taught to be unafraid of failure: taking enormous risks even on her earliest translations, reworking full paragraphs, changing nouns to verbs simply because she believed it “sounded better” her way—so different from Boaz, who found himself growing more timid with each project. Even the good things that kept happening to him that first year—the fellowship; the internship at Hebrew University’s academic press that quickly turned into a job—felt precarious, as if he could make one mistake and all the success could be rescinded so easily that he’d be back where he started.

When their fellowship in Jerusalem was over, Mira asked him to come back with her to Boston. She pieced together adjunct teaching, Boaz convinced the press to let him work remotely, they found an apartment not far from her sister. But they kept searching for cheap, quiet places to spend weekends, vacations, summers together, just the two of them, distraction-free with their work, and finally during one excruciatingly humid June day, Mira put down the bowl she was drying, wiped her sticky hair from her forehead and said, “This is disgusting.” It was a hundred degrees outside and at least a hundred-twenty in their kitchen, and when Boaz peered out the window down the street, he could see an elderly couple moving so slowly it was like they were wading through tar. “Let’s get out of here,” he said—and that was the moment, if he boiled it right down, that he suddenly began to feel he too was entitled to better air than the rest of the city.

A month later they were living in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, hours from anyone they knew, in a house at the end of a dirt road, a house with a porch and a yard and garden with beds already built by the previous renters. He loved the landscape, so different from anything he’d seen in America: the blue rivers and green fields and red barns, as if children had used the most basic set of crayons to scribble it into being. He loved the fact that he could roll out of bed and into his study to work all day, the days bleeding together so fluidly the distinction between weekdays and weekends no longer mattered. He loved the language he and Mira created up there: a hodgepodge of Hebrew and English half-sentences no one else would have understood, but which made more sense to him than anything else. He loved seeing Mira walking around in old jeans and rubber gardening clogs, her entire closet of dresses and tailored coats instantly superfluous. He loved sitting on the porch with her and imagining a child, their child, brown-armed and goofy, sprinting past them on the grass. Probably he got the whole image from a commercial for coffee filters or fabric softener, but he didn’t care. It worked for him—for them.

For many years Mira had said she wanted children in theory but not quite yet—that she needed to sort her life out first: a stable teaching job, a secure paycheck. But a couple months before Eva’s will arrived, Mira walked into the kitchen one morning, poured herself a cup of coffee and said, “I’m ready.” Just like that. And Boaz felt his chest swell and said, “Really?” She smiled and nodded, and soon after was pregnant. Though she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone so early on, Mira called her family immediately, saying if she miscarried she’d want them to know so what was the point of keeping secrets, and they all drove up to Vermont, Wendy and Larry and Hannah and Peter and their girls, and piled into the ob-gyn office. As the doctor moved the monitor over Mira’s still-flat stomach, Wendy swore she saw a penis on the screen and Larry got misty-eyed that he’d finally have a grandson and Hannah snapped that it was impossible to know so early—and Boaz had felt so blessed, surrounded by family. All that resentment he’d once felt for Mira suddenly seemed so self-indulgent when he imagined his child being born into the Kaplans, this child who didn’t even have bones or teeth or skin yet but was already so deeply adored by everyone in that room.