The Wedding of Anna F. (2 page)

“So the student from NYU called to say he’s running late and apologizes,” she says from the doorway, folding her heavy arms with their braided bracelets. “He’s having a hard time finding us.”

“Doesn’t he have a GPS?”

“Who knows. Men have to want to go where they’re told.”

“Well, it’s all right. I’m running a bit late, too.” I’d thrown a bathrobe on before opening the door to her, but now I can’t help but feel what little progress I’ve made.

“Your new shower cap’s in the bathroom,” she points before I can open my mouth again. “Now listen, Hannah, you’re not going to do this à la Hugh Hefner, are you? You know what this
is
, right?” She seems a little anxious. “You are going to be part of his
thesis
. You know, like the one I’m working on.”

I haven’t, you see, told Maia exactly why this young man who ran an advertisement in the
Times
is coming. She thinks he’s doing research on women pioneers in the legal profession. Which I suppose, in a way, he will be doing… “Would you like me to do anything else upstairs here? I’ve already taken the new storage boxes you wanted out to the barn. There’s room now to bring him up to your study, if you want. If he doesn’t mind the rest of the boxes still lying around.”

“No, no, let’s just keep him downstairs at first.” And wait to see how he reacts, if he is faithful enough to be invited into my upper story.

“And don’t forget you have a few people coming over for your birthday later.” Again, the note of anxiousness.

“I haven’t forgotten, Maia. I’m not that far gone. Is everything set downstairs? Will you be all right handling the rest alone?”

“Everything looks good. The flowers have come. No worries. You’d better shower and get dressed, though. Be careful about your hair.”

“How does it look?”

“Impenetrable. Darth Vader. I would still use the cap, though.”

I send her away and tuck my perm into the wrinkled plastic. I take one more look in the bathroom mirror; it seems to be all right. I turn the water on and step in and let it glaze my stomach and then my chest, and now I duck under and let it thrum my face and fall off the end of my nose, then edge around and run against me in a pounding fist. When I’m done and out and wiping the steam away from the glass, I pull the clinical-looking cap off. I don’t like the way it’s suddenly making me look like a patient, like someone who’s sick. Now there is nothing left to do but throw a little face powder on, a brush of pencil and a dab of lipstick, and knock into the fresh blouse and skirt and my pretty, red-slashed scarf.

Another rap at the door. Maia and her heavy arm again. “Okay, Hannah. He’s here. Downstairs.”

“How does he look?”

“I don’t know. Like one of my brothers.”

“I’m not exactly sure what that means.”

“Too much hair. Good-looking in an annoying way. What do you want me doing while he’s here?”

I stare down at my red pumps. There was a movie, once, about a ballet dancer whose shoes took over her feet, whose shoes made her dance, dance, dance… It was the first film I saw when I came to the US in 1948. Sometimes, once a thing has begun, no matter how unlikely, you can’t stop it going forward.

“Is there something you’d like me to do?” Maia repeats, nervous.

“Just take a break for a little while. Go into the village and have yourself a nice lunch. Take the afternoon off.”

“What?” Her arched eyebrows shoot up. “Are you sure you don’t want me around? Why not?”

“Because you’ve been here since the crack of dawn and you deserve some time for your own studies.” Maia is writing some sort of dissertation on a South African writer, one of the famous ones, and I know she is having trouble with it, because she’s been with me for three years, and she used to talk about it all the time and now she talks about it less and less. “Because you’ve done enough already today.”

“But I’m telling you, you’ve never done one of these research interviewy-type things. They can go on and on. Are you sure you don’t want me around? To get rid of him if he makes you tired?”

“I think I can handle it. I used to be an attorney, you know.” I throw my scarf over my shoulder and push out my spout of a lower lip and act mildly insulted.

“Well, you do look as if you could handle anything today,” she admits. “You look…regal.”

“Oh, get out of here.”

“At least promise to call me on my cell if you find you suddenly need anything. And be sure not to wear yourself out. I don’t know why you agreed to do this today. On your birthday of all days. You’re too good.”

“A birthday is a good day to be good.” To be honest. Revealed. To be born again. “All right, Maia, no more hovering. Go on.”“You’re the boss.”

*

I FIND HIM STANDING in silhouette against the living room curtains, the deep green folds that have knuckled to the floor there since my mother’s day. And Maia is absolutely right: so good-looking, so svelte he is! I hadn’t expected that. My heart beats a little faster, in spite of itself. So modern and sleek. Such smooth, curling hair above a sculpted, olive profile. Bardawil. That is his name. But he doesn’t look Scottish. Polished fingers on that hand being held out to me to shake, the nails manicured in the way so many young men take the trouble to have done these days. The schools of New York are filled with beautiful young people, still.

I smile my warmest smile and step forward, welcoming him, taking his hand in mine. What a beautiful handshake. Like running my fingers along a silken tie and then having, sadly, to let go.

He nods his thick head of hair and smiles at me, professionally. He says a few polite things about the house—that it’s such a surprise, the way it seems to rise, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, out of the fields. He reassures me he doesn’t want to keep me waiting; but by the fidgeting of his fingers on the handle of his satchel I can tell he’s the one impatient to get going. He asks me where we’d be comfortable sitting down.

I smile. “That’s usually my question,” I say, and toss my scarf a little farther over my shoulder. “Why don’t we sit right here?” I point to a pair of deep wing chairs in good light near the living room window, turning so that he’ll settle down on the side of my good ear. A few things I learned, as an attorney: one, that you always want to give your clients good light; two, that you will want them to be comfortable, but not so comfortable that they feel free to walk away; three, that you ask and answer questions both as though nothing about them and everything about them potentially meant everything and nothing; and four, that you offer them a drink, but perhaps not right away, not until they’ve grown warm and thirsty and, in some ways, to depend on you.

This nice young doctoral student appears so cool and independent, however, setting his stylish leather bag at his feet, crossing his legs in his black jeans, that it’s hard to imagine him depending on anything or anyone but himself. Again, it’s not what I expected. Most young people, most students—and I’ve had several as my assistants over the years—are like Maia: hungry, jobless, their nails bitten to the quick. This cool person is however (I have to remind myself) the one that I have invited into my home, to whom I’ve chosen to tell my story. So I must make do. If I had chosen to, I could have talked to any newspaper reporter. But reporters aren’t scholars (I know from having slept with one). Reporters think only of the moment, of what’s in front of them. A scholar reaches back, sees history. And so I sit here, in my winged chair mirroring this young man’s, and face his formal pair of eyes and his long, narrow nose, and I inhale and think, ah, I hope you will see, yes? And I wonder: Why must it be that in spite of all the gadgets people have these days it still isn’t possible to travel back in time? To make things more clear? Why must it still be that the only thing we ever have to move through, in any direction, is each other?

*

HE SITS BACK AND rests his notepad on his lap. His voice crosses the short distance between us with an easy, confident lilt. Bardawil. When I read it I thought it sounded like bide-a-while. But he is not Scottish. No, not that.

“Your assistant just told me it’s your birthday.” He smiles and gestures to the flowers and the cards on the mantel. “Congratulations. And thank you for having me out today.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Bardawil. Absolutely. I wanted you to be here. It’s a funny thing, though, isn’t it? To say congratulations on a birthday, I mean. It’s not as though we generally accomplish anything on the day.” Although on this one I would try to.

“Except to go on breathing.” He smiles.

“True enough.”

“But I do need to thank you again for helping me with my project. Your assistant mentioned that you sometimes have trouble… Ah, you do understand why I’m here?”

“Yes. Of course. You want to get into contact with people who believe they have been reincarnated. But as I told you in my e-mail, I do not believe I have been reincarnated. I believe I have simply rediscovered myself.”

“Yes. And has anyone come to visit you before about this ‘discovery’ that you have made? Have you talked to anyone about your recovered past life?”

“No, as I mentioned in my e-mail. They couldn’t. I only discovered myself a few weeks ago.”

“I see. Do you mind if I start recording now?” He takes something slim as a cigarette lighter out of his jacket pocket. Another one of those modern phones.

“Oh.” I make a show of leaning forward, over my glasses, for a better look. “Please do.” Let us start. Remake history. Ignite.

“If you’re ready and comfortable then, why don’t we begin, since your assistant explained you have a party to host later on. Lots of people coming?” he asks easily, adjusting the phone on the table between us. “Do you have lots of family?”

He pulls a mechanical pencil out of his breast pocket. How nice, I think, that they still use both the pencil and the recorder. Just as my reporter-lover used to do. Because they are afraid, afraid that they won’t remember properly. Or that something will happen to the words.

“No. I have no immediate family, Mr. Bardawil. Not living, in any case.”

“You were adopted, as you told me in your e-mail.”

“Yes.”

“I was able to do a bit of background work on you before I came today. I pulled a bit about you from the
Times
archives. You were once very well known, the only survivor of a major disaster. As someone very, very lucky. And now you believe you have been born again.”

“No. Not exactly. Not born again. After all these years, my memory has finally returned to me, from before that time, before that disaster. And when you find your memory, you see, you want to share it. You want to produce evidence of it. I was a lawyer.” A believer in evidence.

“You said you suffered trauma during the Second World War. You were found after it was over, in a refugee camp, with no memory.”

“You are almost right. Not a refugee camp. A kibbutz. There were many refugees there, however.” I fold my hands in my lap and tip my good ear to him, giving him my warm-the-jury nod. We need to become good friends, and quickly. If he is going to work for me. If he is going to be my advocate, out there. “Even then, though, I—it—wasn’t all a blank. I remember my birthday, for instance. The date and year, June 12, 1929. Like a little drumbeat, pounding in my head. And I knew my first language. Dutch. An identity is like spit, you see. Once you have it, you can’t get rid of it. You’re tasting it all the time, even if you don’t know you’re tasting it; you can’t feel it. But once you do know, you can’t ignore it. That’s what’s happened to me. Three weeks ago.”

“Three weeks ago.”

“Yes. My memories came back, or at least some of them, right out of the blue.”

“Do you mean nothing precipitated this belief? This…discovery?”

“Well, there was something. A moment. A feeling. Of illumination. I was lighting a candle at the time.”

“And why were you doing that?”

“I mean, it
was
Shavuot, but my family was never observant, so it wasn’t really that. It’s just a candle is a lovely thing.”

“So you were lighting a candle. And perhaps looking into its flame.” He makes some quick notes.

“Yes, exactly! I was looking into its flame, and then suddenly after all these years I remembered who I was. How I made it. How I got away from Belsen. How I landed on that beach.” I watch him, scribbling, while I roll my tongue around in my mouth. Oh, that salty beach. The smell of char, of burned rubber, mixed together with the stink of fish and cooked flesh. My cheek lodged in sand, my deaf ear clogged with it. My head hidden under a woven basket. My first sight of that beach, when the screen was lifted off, was pieces of blue sky crowded with the heads of men carrying guns.

Time to turn and swim back to my interviewer.

I smile at his bowed, curled head. “You take notes like a newspaperman. I used to know a newspaperman very well.” I wait while his wrist—he’s left-handed, how interesting—undulates around a shorthand I don’t recognize. I wonder if he’s writing down more than I’m saying. Perhaps he’s jotting down what I look like, sitting in this chair, with my skirt ballooned over my knees and my scarf draped over my shoulder and my hair so composed. To be seen is to be captured. But to speak, to speak is to move.

“Palestine is where you were found and adopted by your Jewish parents.”

“Yes. But my mother and father didn’t really take to being pioneers, kibbutzniks. They were too much city people. Have you been to Palestine, Mr. Bardawil?”

He looks up. “I am Palestinian, as it happens.”

“Oh. What a coincidence.” I adjust my red scarf, a little embarrassed to have been so wrong about his name. “Then you will understand! Do you remember the air?”

“No. I’ve never lived there.”

So white and hot, I remember, suddenly, intensely—the air around that kibbutz. Around the small, clean houses, and the chicken coops knitted with staring eyes, and the vegetable gardens, and the lean-to goat sheds. A little damp inside the communal kitchen, where they let me eat anything I wanted, where they brought me back to life, gave me a home. But maybe it isn’t the right time to say so just now.