The Wedding of Anna F. (5 page)

“It’s that I helped his cousin with an immigration problem once.”

“So that tells me something about you.”

“What?”

“You’re softer than you look. That being the case, I feel safer blabbing something to you. I don’t want to start out by lying to you, Hannah, so I want you to know I know more about you today than I did the day before.” He reached for a cigarette. “I searched the
Times
morgue for your name. You’re the mystery child from the
Kostas
. Sorry. Old habit. You have a spot of linguini sauce on your collar, by the way.”

“You have one on your neck.” Like a bloody cut.

“I see that when you’re angry, your right eyebrow goes a bit higher than your left.”

“Your teeth are too straight. Like every American’s.”

“I don’t want you to be angry with me.”

“You spied on me. But I’m not,” I lied, and started plotting my revenge. I would sleep with him and then be cold. Hot and cold. “Do you take coffee? Dessert?”

“I don’t like dessert. But I like the time it takes, Hannah. To be with you.”

*

AFTERWARD WE STEPPED OUT into the night air and started walking along a cordon of hollow-mouthed garbage cans. “Do you feel like going a ways?” he asked. “Or do you have a car?”

“No, I don’t have a car.”

“You don’t drive?”

“I can drive. My family has a farm upstate. My father taught me.”

“Nice folks, your folks?”

“You spied. You should know.”

“I only know they adopted you. I don’t know if they’re nice.”

“Fine. They’re nice, then. They’re old—older than parents usually are. And tired. They adopted me out of bravery and hope. Did your morgue show that?”

“I know you have no memory of who you were, Hannah. Of your childhood. Of what happened to you. I can’t imagine.” He said this simply, as though he were reading a piece of verse on a very small piece of paper. “It makes me feel very…helpless.”

“Oh.” I felt myself shiver, surprised.

I blinked up at the few leaves still hooked on the elms. It was dark and cold. We each had our hands buried in our separate pockets. But the gap between us wasn’t that wide. We kept walking.

“Eventually, you know, I’ll have to ask you more,” he admitted. “I can’t help myself.”

“Why do you have to?”

“Because I want to understand you. I want to know you.”

“I don’t want to be one of your stories.”

“You won’t be. If you were a story of mine, I wouldn’t apologize to you first.”

Someone darted from the shadows. Mugger. Why now?

“Please!” the stooped, shadowy figure begged.

My date’s hand reached over the skin of my stomach. Protecting me. In the streetlight the stooped shape resolved and became an old man. His face was grizzled, his eyes wet, his clothes crumpled but clean.

“I’m lost,” he pleaded with us. “Please, please help me, I’m lost!”

“It’s all right,” said the voice of the man I now knew would be my lover, hot or cold. “Where are you going, friend?”

“S-s-somewhere. But I don’t know where, exactly.” And he waved his empty, mottled hands in the air.

“Take it easy now. Take a step back from the lady. I mean it. Right
now
.”

“But so afraid, so afraid in the dark—I’m sorry—”

“It’s all right. Take a breath. Or we’re moving on. Got it?” “No, no, please!”

“Where do you belong?”

At this the old man closed his stammering mouth but still waved one of his shaking hands, as though reaching for an invisible rail in the air.

“He hasn’t been out long,” I whispered. “Look. Someone’s dressed him. His shoes are tied. And expensive.”

“So listen. Can you give us an address, friend?”

“Don’t know, so afraid, don’t know, don’t know!”

“We can take you to the police? Or call them out for you? There’s a telephone box on the next corner. Why don’t you walk a little ways with us?”

“Afraid, so afraid to be alone.”

“You won’t be if you come with us. Come.”

And so the old man fell in between us, holding his hands away from his sides as though they were damp.

“Maybe you have an apartment near here?”

“Afraid, don’t know, don’t know!”

“Is anything familiar around here? Can you tell us anything about yourself? Your name?”

“I can tell you the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

“No, it seems you do.”

We walked through webs of light from dirty windows. We skirted mounds of garbage. We came at last to the phone booth.

“You stay put here while the lady and I make the call.”

I stepped with the man who would be my lover inside the glass, so close we must have looked like one object from the outside.

* * *

“ARE YOU SAYING,” MR. Bardawil calls me back a long ways, “you didn’t die at Belsen, but were taken in by a…a farmer?”

“Yes,” I nod, dreamy. “A German farmer who lived near the camp. A Christian. Stooped. Old. He didn’t recognize me for what I was when he found me lying outside the fence. He thought I was his wife… He’d been wandering around in his grief, in his madness… Such a lonely old man… His wife had been taken away when she came down with typhus. Like me. There was so much typhus, and that’s what happened, you see, the Germans were so careful, they took people away before they could infect anyone else. You can read about it in any history book. This mad old man didn’t know if she was alive or dead. But when he found me out in the field, he thought I was her. And I let him. I admit that. I let a man believe I was someone other than who I was. And he healed, and I got better, but then he died, right at the end of the war. So I…I wandered away from the farm until I saw a soldier passing on the road—an Italian soldier, headed to a Displaced Persons camp. You can read about those, too. There were such camps all over the place. And I made it to one of those, and in those camps there was the whisper of Palestine.”

Of a chalky sky, at sunrise, that turned wafer pink. A sky that was so thin and light it seemed detached, rolling over the land. Where a single crow looked like a roll of dead skin sliding off the back of something large and unseen. And then, as the sun rose, the sky turned yellow, and the hills heated—those hills that each day were like bread being heated up, over and over and over again, so that living there was something you could ask, that you had to ask, of the same loaf over and over again.

And in the desert, the whisper went, everything that was green stood out twice, once for itself and once for the empty space next to it. Fires in the distance smoked white. Thin slices of white rock lay around on the ground, sharp enough to cut, in the shade of low tree branches that were twisted and lightly haired, like the hair of goats. Everything looked smaller than it might have been somewhere else. But not weak. No, not that. In the gaps between everything that stood were the spaces where whatever was weak would have been standing.

*

MY LOVER OPENED HIS apartment door, kissed me, let me go inside. We studied each other’s moods, as the years passed. We tested habits.

“Drink, Hannah?”

“Please.”

“Anything?”

“Vodka.”

“Hard morning in court? You look tired.”

“I’m always tired.”

“And you’re always telling me you can’t stop working.”

“Just the drink, please.”

Later on, in his bed, I said to him, “All right. Why don’t we move to Connecticut.”

“Really?”

“We could settle down. Raise a family.”

He rose onto one elbow. “Really? But what is it you’ve been saying to me all these years? ‘Given what we both know about the world…no children…’”

“Really.”

“You’ll marry me?” He laughed and rolled me onto my back, his arms around my neck and shoulders. “Imagine that. I’ll have a wife to come home to. But a smart, savvy, city wife, please. Even in Connecticut. Don’t turn into one of those cabbages of the suburbs.”

“All right.”

“Promise? We’ll do it?”

“Promise,” I lied, uncertain again.

He was so happy.

*

WHEN I WAS STRONG enough, I ran away from the Displaced Persons camp. It was too much like a prison, in the end, and I wanted to find freedom, a new life, a different life. I ran through the night, looking for the secret groups who were traveling toward Palestine. Sounds. Unfamiliar smells. A tank burning in a field. The dry wind driving flecks into my mouth. In the moonlight, a shoelace at the edge of a ditch. A small piece of butcher paper. A metal hairpin lying in the road. I remember. I remember all these things, now.

I think I need to rest again.

“I don’t feel so well, Mr. Bardawil.”

“I’m sorry. Are you all right?” He puts his pencil down and leans forward in his Adirondack.

I can feel my eyelids fluttering a bit. Hot. “I think I need to take just a moment. It’s only been three weeks. I’m not used to all these memories crowding in. Sometimes—sometimes it is too much. Too soon. Too quickly.” And then Maia finds me tottering in the hallway and helps me to sit down. Where is Maia? “Maybe you should talk for a little while?” This idea strikes me, suddenly—that I might take shelter for a little while in a voice not my own, the way I used to in the old days when I listened to clients, people who needed help more than I, outwardly, did. “Maybe you could tell me something about yourself? A story? Can you tell me, Mr. Bardawil, have you ever run away in the way I’ve just described, have you ever been lost, lost, lost, with no place to rest, no place to call home?”

He blinks at me.

“I’m Palestinian. I told you.”

“You’re offended. I’m sorry.” He does look it, but I’ve noticed it too late, and I’m tired, and he doesn’t seem quite so young as he did a while ago. It’s strange, how anger withers us in common. My lover’s brow, when he got angry or impatient with me, looked just the same way. “Were you born there?”

“No. I was born in Jordan.”

“I see. And…how did you come to be…in Cairo, for university, you said?”

“My father is a businessman. I’ve traveled widely ever since I was a child. That’s not unusual for my people. We’re not comfortable with the idea of rooting anywhere. It feels like a betrayal. So it was Cairo, then NYU.”

“I’m feeling a little parched again,” I say nervously. “Maybe we should go inside. Would you like that? Would you like to come back into the kitchen with me, and we’ll have some coffee? There’s nothing like an afternoon cup. And I know it’s hard work, listening, asking questions. At least it is for an attorney, so I imagine it must be for you, too.”

He seems to hesitate. Then gets up. “Yes. Coffee would be nice.”

In the kitchen everything is ready for the party, too. The counters are cleared, the wine brought out, the copper pots, dusted and gleaming, hang suspended over our heads. It’s all for show. I never was much of a cook. My Irish lover didn’t care for dining in, though he did buy us, once, on the occasion of the five-year anniversary of our first dinner together, a set of four dining table candlesticks, silver, because he could afford them after he was promoted to editor of the Foreign Desk, and he’d said at the time that since I kept postponing our marriage, we might as well at least spring ahead and do the second part, the gifts. And so he kept two candlesticks and gave me two. And there they are, like two spears, balanced on the counter, waiting.

Maia has left some coffee on, so I pour two cups, then have to hunt for the sugar bowl, hidden behind a mass of roses sent by a circuit judge.

“Have you,” Bardawil asks me suddenly, reaching up and touching the beaten copper pots, “ever been to Zimbabwe?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Ever been to Africa?”

“No. I mean, I don’t like to travel. I haven’t left this country since I arrived here.”

“I saw pots like this there. You asked about being lost. I was in Livingstone. A group of friends and I were traveling together before we began our graduate studies. We wanted to see Victoria Falls.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Do you know what I saw instead? Blindness. There were blind beggars everywhere. Alone. Or sometimes in couples. A blind person paired with someone sighted. I saw a very old man leading a young child, and a young woman being led by a boy. Tied together. The sighted beggar dependent on the blind beggar for her weakness, and the blind beggar dependent on the seeing one for his strength.”

I nod, confused, while I hand him his coffee.

He frowns, looking into his cream.

“And I was a tourist on holiday there. It made me feel terrible. So I did what I could. I handed out money. But then that wasn’t enough. I ended up going into a grocery store to buy food so I could give it away.”

“My father used to do that.”

“There was hardly anything to buy. Rows of empty shelves. People scrambling for bread when it came out of a narrow slot. I walked away with everything I could carry, cookies, noodles. I wanted in particular to go back to the woman and boy I’d seen on the street in front of my hotel, tied together; but when I got there, they were already off in the distance, the boy leading the woman. So I hurried after them down a wide street—but then a convoy of trucks got in my way and I lost them. And then I got lost in a maze of alleys, trying to find them again.”

Yes. A maze. You can get lost.

“I finally gave the groceries to a fly-ridden family sitting outside a corrugated hut. It seemed shameful to be passing people by. Then one of the family’s sons, a small boy, guided me back to my hotel. Which I couldn’t have found without him. It smelled of the rice cooking in the restaurant below and of air-conditioning.”

“That was good of you.” I smile gratefully. “I feel much more rested now. Thank you.”

“You do?”

“You gave my mind a rest. You made me forget myself. I so appreciate that. Now I’m ready to go on. To be your most exceptional case study. I can help you, you know, as you can help me. Just like in Africa. You can help me tell the world, and I can help you become famous. Will you like that?”

He blinks, his coffee paused in the air.