The Wedding of Anna F. (3 page)

“I didn’t feel myself to be really there, though. I mean, I didn’t
belong
, Mr. Bardawil. No one knew what to do with me, you see. I was a complete mystery to them. I spoke several languages. I couldn’t remember what town or city I came from. I was all the time walking around with a bucket on my head. Then my parents adopted me and took me in.”

He considers me with those young, critical, student-ish eyes. The left hand isn’t moving now. Only the finger stroking the pen.

Bardawil. Bide a while.

“I was a little mad, then,” I explain.” But I soon stopped behaving that way. Mostly, to be honest, to please my new parents. They had been through so much even before they started to help me, Mr. Bardawil. They didn’t expect the hardships of kibbutz life to be so—well, hard. They were city people, and they wanted to be good after the war, they wanted to help build—but in the end, the life didn’t suit them. And my father, who was a lawyer, didn’t like it that if they adopted me there as a refugee child, they’d have to share me in common with the kibbutz. Which was a normal practice at that time. So they decided I needed quiet and cool air, and a good Jewish doctor, and my own home and bedroom. And my father worked things out quietly so that they could bring me here.”

I flew. In an airplane. I saw. Opening my eyes very wide, over the white wing. At my cheek the leather seat smelled of coffee. The covered pillow at my back was embroidered in a fine thread, pale blue mixed with darker. I remember the ocean, even bigger than the one the rifle-toting soldiers said had tried to drown me, far down below, outside the little oval of my window, shaking, a harmless carpet. And then, then oh, how big the coast of America was! And when I stepped out of the plane and was placed in a car—how long its roads! And how white the house in the country, and how perfect the bedroom of an American teenager. With a record player and a lace canopy and a mirrored vanity. You will have everything you want and deserve, these new people had looked at me lovingly and pityingly and said. You will go to college, you will get married, you will have your own family, and health and happiness and prosperity forever and ever. Don’t worry. This is America. This is your house.

“My parents were very good and kind people,” I explain. “I want that recorded, for posterity. But they were under a great deal of pressure. They were criticized—well, they were more than criticized—for taking me away from the Yishuv. Even though they were doing it for me, and for the best of reasons. They were never anything but practical people. My father was a secular man, a caring man, a man of high hopes, Mr. Bardawil. I wanted to be just like him. And my mother was a kind, reserved, patient, understanding woman. They couldn’t have any children, so they took me in instead. To me that has always been a small miracle.” Along with this beautiful house, this land of milk and honey. And in the city, unbelievably, yet another home, an apartment with gleaming, wood-paneled walls, and another fitted bedroom, plush with stuffed animals. Although it would be much better, the doctors had all agreed and decided, to keep me in the country at first for an extended period of time. Away from
overstimulation
. From
overdramatization
. And so I lived for months on the farm, as my new family called this place, and I studied English and got my American high school diploma via correspondence course. Father stayed in the city at his practice, but made the drive to be with us twice a week. Mother’s face lit up whenever he walked in a room. It was amazing to see—like watching a match striking against solid stone—the way these two married people fell together, as though in this world their love was its only intended consequence.

Once a week, I was driven back to the city. I wore my best clothes, rehearsed what I would say to the psychiatrist, and marveled at Park Avenue, its buildings gold in the sun, charms strung along a bracelet. After my sessions Father, for a treat, would take me to Zabar’s or to the automat, which I couldn’t comprehend at first. How could it be possible that one minute you could be starving and the next standing in front of an entire bank of windows that only needed a coin and a button pressed for you to grab at whatever you wanted? People imagine Heaven as a wide, expansive place; I’ve always imagined it full of tiny slots.

I went running back so many times the other customers laughed, charmed. Meanwhile, Father, spotting a hungry man out on the street, took a handful of coins and pulled a sandwich and a piece of fruit from behind the glass. Then he took the wrapped food outside, and through the picture window I watched that beggar take the lunch in his hands and lift the sandwich and apple, astonished, as though he were looking at the sun and the moon. That was how I felt, too.

Like the astronauts who later flew by stages, I learned to do things very slowly. And did them later than other girls my age. I eventually learned how to ride the subway to Columbus Circle, and to use taxis. I sometimes stopped by my father’s office on the way home from my studies at Columbia, so that I could read in his quiet, totem-lined waiting area while the housekeeper cleaned our city apartment. I avoided the library and most of the other university students because they gave me strange looks; I was certain they thought I talked too much, or thought I was showing off, me, a girl, for the male professors, when all I was doing was raising my hand at every opportunity because I wanted to seem quick and alert and awake and smart enough so that I wouldn’t be sent back to that ashy beach, to that heavy bucket…

My interviewer turns the sheet on his notepad. I hope he’s been able to keep up with me. I wonder if we’re going to go through quite a few sheets today. I hope so. I have so much weight to shed.

“So you were brought to this country as an amnesiac and never recovered any of your memory prior to 1946. But you managed to attend school and create a coherent narrative,” he reviews, formally. “And after you completed your undergraduate work, you went to law school. You constructed an identity, aided of course by racial and cultural narratives and by your family’s class status.” He bends and makes more notes. He seems to be speaking to himself. As if he doesn’t need me. As I’ve seen other students do. “But now this narrative has been altered, and a past identity recovered. Thanks to possible autohypnosis,” he notes and adds under his breath.

This is the way Maia talks too, or at least used to, about her thesis. Scholar-speak. So interesting. As though what is dust, gossamer, can be recast as blocks of concrete.

“But why the law?” He looks up.

“I became a lawyer in part because I wanted to do good the way my father did. Also, I wanted to do something…difficult. I always wanted…I always needed to do things that kept me very focused. Allowed me to forget that I didn’t remember things, my past. The law is all about
memory
, Mr. Bardawil. Precedent. It’s a story that depends on all the stories that have come before, but that at some point had to begin with a story invented out of thin air. ‘This is right while this is wrong.’ If you go far enough back, there is
only
invention. Do you see? Anyway,” I lean back in my chair, “as it happens, women had an easier time breaking into certain kinds of jobs, certain kinds of law, in those days. It was thought we were all natural do-gooders. And my father worked on civil liberties cases. He helped people jailed for being Communists. People punished for speaking, or not speaking. So that was an obvious path for me to take, too. I became a defense attorney. I was good at it. But I wasn’t so brave as some.”

I look down at this young man’s satchel, so like the cases the young lawyers used to carry to Alabama. I had wanted to be good, to be brave; but I was afraid of what might happen to me. That I might disappear again. Be the wrong person in the wrong place, yet again.

“At that point in my life,” is all I say, “what I most wanted was to make the people who had taken me in decently proud of me.”

“And did your parents help you in this? Did they help you construct the narrative you needed to construct?”

What a strange way to speak about living, or about trying to! I look, puzzled, into the corner of the living room at the nailed-leather chair where my father used to sit and smoke his pipe and read his journals, at the ottoman where my mother used to sit and rub his feet. Their love was helpful, so generous, yes. Yet it sometimes excluded me. My heart was grateful—but sometimes it excluded them.

“Yes, Mr. Bardawil. But adopted children aren’t always easy to raise, I’m bound to say. It wasn’t always easy for us. The doctors say that the bonding doesn’t always… And my parents were fairly old when they adopted me. But they were very, very kind people, and once they’d chosen a path they didn’t veer from it.” And in the end the same bright sun had shone on the mornings of both their funerals, crawling across a wintry sky. So many people at my father’s funeral, the first one, standing everywhere, you couldn’t see the grass. Mother holding herself apart from all of them, the spade in her hand. Two months later she was gone, and it was my turn. And then I was an orphan again. You can have, it turns out, too much practice at some things.

After sitting shiva in the family apartment, I went back to my own and sank into a hot bath. And lay there, holding my breath, longing for my nosy Irish newspaperman. It had been months since we were last together on the bed in the next room, sweating because my air conditioner had been on the fritz; months since our last fight, when, hapless non-Jew that he was, and a hapless lapsed Catholic too, and always, always unstoppably the reporter, he’d gone on and on and on with his serious questions, always wanting to know something more about me. He’d wanted to know my relationship to my faith, to my watchful God. I’d told him I wasn’t religious, but I liked the line from the Torah that said: surely God would ransom our soul from the grave.

He’d exhaled his Tareyton smoke, careful not to pull the sheet away from my body because he knew I didn’t like it. “Really? But Jesus, just listen to it, Hannah: ‘
surely
.’ It sounds so tentative. It’s a question. As if each time the old man has to barter with an abductor to get his own creation back. That doesn’t sound like a God you can take much comfort in.”

“I don’t need comfort. Just the hope of it. And anyway, you’re projecting things from how you feel about your own God.”

“I don’t feel anything at all about him, point of fact. Mine’s a total wash.”

The view from my bedroom window back then was of a crack of sky and the corner of a brick building. If I hold very still I can also remember other conversations about God, pieces of debate, my adopted father asking my adopted mother, in his loving but pointed way, if it weren’t better for her to stop believing in God entirely, given all that had happened and was still happening in the world; that it would be better if there were no God at all, because then we would all know we had no one else to take care of us, only each other to rely on, and this would make us feel small, and grasping, and middling, and cold, and willing to huddle together.

My young interviewer is looking at me now, under those dark brows, a bit like my father’s; and for a moment I wonder if that’s sympathy for an orphan I see in his eyes. But I’m not sure. Maybe it’s only sympathy of the researcher’s variety? Or is it the kind I used to practice so often, the sympathy of the lawyer who wants to know everything only so there will be no surprises?

Before I can stop myself, I’m reaching my hand out across to him, hopefully, generously, touching his knee without meaning to. But then, I’m an old woman, so he shouldn’t take anything amiss.

I say: “I wonder, Mr. Bardawil, would you do me a small kindness? Would you come away with me for a moment? I’d like to show you something. But it’s on the other side of the hall in my mother’s music room. I think you’ll find it helpful to understanding me. And who I was.”

He stands professionally, scooping up his phone. “Of course.”

We pass through the dining room where the silver chafing dishes are already set out, waiting to be filled. The flowers are a bit overdone in the centerpiece. Maia will have to do something about that. The china and crystal gleam.

“So, you’re having a good-sized party this evening.”

“No,” I say, distracted. “Actually a fairly small one. Just a few special people. Old legal colleagues, mostly. But I suppose there are enough of them.”

“Because you worked for many years as an attorney.”

“Yes, until I was seventy. Then I sold what I had in the city and retreated. Because I thought I had earned some quiet. Here.”

I show him into the music room with its view, through the multi-paned windows, of grain silos in the distance, stuck into an otherwise empty sky. In the corner is Mother’s grand piano, covered with gilded frames, her collection of photos. I stroke its side. “My mother used to play, though not often. She felt it was too showy, drew too much attention to her. She was a very modest, proper woman. So this piano became more of a gallery, over time. These were the pictures she liked to keep out. For herself and for company.”

I pull one frame in particular toward him. “This is me. At sixteen. In the kibbutz.” He pulls away with what looks like shock.

“I know, I know. A hundred years old I look, don’t I? Older than I do now. This is the one they never, never used in the papers, in the stories about my being found after the sinking of the ship called the
Kostas
. You can see why, can’t you? They preferred getting a picture of me petting the goats, or pumping water at the well, or doing something…healthy. Probably like what you found in the
Times
archive. Because just standing there, you see, with my bucket beside me, I look like a phantom. I hardly even recognize myself. I’m sure no one else did.” That used to trouble me so. Why, with my picture in so many papers around the world, did no one recognize me? No one claim me? Help me find my memory? But now I know. Because a father had been told his daughter was dead. Even though the person who’d told him this had said only that Anna Frank had come down with typhus and disappeared from her bunk.