Authors: Jonathan Safran Foer
Here I Am (37 page)
“I don't know. That's what we do.”
For an instant, for a stitch, Jacob was overwhelmed by the terror that he had managed to ruin the three most beautiful human beings on earth.
He remembered when Sam was young, how every time he got a scrape, cut, or burn, after every blood test, every fall from every tree branch that was forever after deemed “too high,” Jacob would urgently pick him up, as if the ground were suddenly on fire, and say, “You're fine. It's OK. It's nothing. You're fine.” And Sam would always believe him. And Jacob
would be thrilled by how well it worked, and ashamed by how well it worked. Sometimes, if a greater lie was needed, if there was visible blood, Jacob would even say, “It's funny.” And his son would believe him, because sons have no choice. But sons do feel pain. And the absence of the expression of pain is not the absence of pain. It is a different pain. When Sam's hand was crushed, he said, “It's funny. It's funny, right?” That was his inheritance.
The columns of Jacob's legs couldn't bear the weight of his heavy heart. He felt himself buckling, in weakness or genuflection.
He put his arm on Julia's shoulder. She didn't turn to him, she showed no acknowledgment of his touch, but she kept him standing.
“So,” the rabbi said, reassuming his authority, “what can we say about Isaac Bloch, and how should we mourn him? There are only two kinds of Jews of his generation: those who perished and those who survived. We swore our allegiance to the victims, were good on our promise never to forget them. But we turned our backs on those who endured, and forgot them. All our love was for the dead.
“But now the two kinds of Jews have equal mortal standing. Isaac might not be with his brothers in an afterlife, but he is with his brothers in death. So what can we now say about him, and how should we mourn him? It was not because they lacked strength that his brothers died, but it was because of his strength that Isaac lived and died.
Kein briere iz oich a breire
. Not to have a choice is also a choice. How will we tell the story of he who never had no choice? At stake is our notion of righteousness, of a life worth saving.
“What was Moses crying about? Was he crying for himself? Out of hunger or fear? Was he crying for his people? Their bondage, their suffering? Or were they tears of gratitude? Perhaps Pharaoh's daughter didn't hear him crying because he
wasn't
crying until she opened the wicker basket.
“How should we mourn Isaac Bloch? With tearsâwhat kind of tears? With silenceâwhat silence? Or with what kind of song? Our answer will not save him, but it might save us.”
With all three, of course. Jacob could see the rabbi's moves from five thousand years away. With all three, because of the tragedy, because of our reverence, because of our gratitude. Because of everything that was necessary to bring us to this moment, because of the lies that lie ahead, because of the moments of joy so extreme they have no relation to
happiness. With tears, with silence, with song, because he survived so we could sin, because our religion is as gorgeous, and opaque, and brittle, as the stained glass of Kol Nidre, because Ecclesiastes was wrong: there isn't time for every purpose.
What do you want? Anything. Tell me. I want you to have the thing that you want
.
Jacob cried.
He wailed.
Jacob carried the casket with his cousins. It was so much lighter than he'd imagined it would be. How could someone with such a heavy life weigh so little? And the job was surprisingly awkward: they nearly fell over a few times, and Irv was only a half teeter from tumbling into the grave with his father.
“This is the worst cemetery ever,” Max said to no one in particular, but loud enough for everyone to hear.
Finally, they were able to position the simple pine coffin on the broad strips of fabric that eased it into the grave.
And there it was: the fact of it. Irv bore the responsibilityâthe privilege of the mitzvahâof shoveling the first dirt onto his father's coffin. He took a heaping mound, turned his body to the hole, and tipped the shovel, letting it fall. It was louder than it should have been, and more violent, as if every particle of soil hit the wood at once, and as if it had been dropped from a far greater height. Jacob winced. Julia and the boys winced. Everyone winced. Some were thinking of the body in the coffin. Some were thinking of Irv.
HOW TO PLAY EARLY MEMORIES
My earliest memories are hidden around my grandfather's final house like afikomens: dish-soap bubble baths; knee-football games in the basement with the grandchildren of survivorsâthey always ended in injury; the seemingly moving eyes of Golda Meir's portrait;
instant-coffee crystals; pearls of grease on the surface of every liquid; games of Uno at his kitchen table, just us two humans, just yesterday's bagel, last week's
Jewish Week,
and juice from concentrate from whenever in history was the last significant sale. I always beat him. Sometimes we'd play one hundred games a night, sometimes both nights of the weekend, sometimes three weekends a month. He always lost
.
What I think of as my earliest memory couldn't possibly be my earliest memoryâit's too far into my life. I am confusing foundational with earliest, in the same way that, as Julia used to point out, the first floor of a house is usually the second, and sometimes the third
.
This is my earliest memory: I was raking the leaves in front of the house when I saw something against the side door. Ants were beginning to envelop a dead squirrel. For how long had it been there? Had it eaten poison? What poison? Had a neighborhood dog killed it and then, full of a dog's remorse, delivered his shame? Or perhaps his pride? Or had the squirrel died trying to get in?
I ran inside and told my mother. Her glasses were steamed over; she was stirring a pot she couldn't see. Without looking up she said, “Go tell Dad to take care of it.”
Through the open doorâon the safe side of the thresholdâI watched my father cover his hand with the clear plastic bag that the morning's
Post
had come in, pick up the squirrel, and then pull his hand out, turning the bag inside out with the squirrel in it. While my father washed his hands in the bathroom sink, I stood at his side and asked him question after question. I was always being taught lessons, and so came to assume that everything conveyed some necessary piece of information, some moral
.
Was it cold? When do you think it died? How do you think it died? Didn't it bother you?
“Bother me?” my father asked
.
“Gross you out.”
“Of course.”
“But you just went out there and did it like it was nothing.”
He nodded
.
I followed his wedding ring through the soap
.
“Did you think it was disgusting?”
“I did.”
“It was so gross.”
“Yes.”
“I couldn't have done it.”
He laughed a father's laugh and said, “One day you'll do it.”
“What if I can't?”
“When you're a dad, there's no one above you. If I don't do something that has to be done, who is going to do it?”
“I still couldn't do it.”
“The more you won't want to do it, the more of a dad you'll be.”
The closet was filled with hundreds of plastic bags. He had chosen a clear one to teach me a lesson
.
I obsessed over that squirrel for a few days, and then didn't think about it again for a quarter century, until Julia was pregnant with Sam, at which point I started having a recurrent dream of dead squirrels lining the streets of our neighborhood. There were thousands of them: pushed against curbs, filling public garbage cans, prone in final poses while automatic sprinkler systems soaked through their fur. In the dream I was always returning home from somewhere, always walking up our street, it was always the end of the day. The window shades of the house were illuminated like TV screens. We didn't have a working fireplace, but smoke poured from the chimney. I had to walk on tiptoes to avoid stepping on squirrels, and sometimes it couldn't be avoided. I apologizedâto whom? There were squirrels on the windowsills, and on stoops, and pouring from the gutters. I could see their silhouettes on the undersides of awnings. They hung halfway out of mail slots, in apparent attempts to find food or water, or simply to die insideâlike that squirrel that had wanted to die inside my childhood home. I knew I was going to have to take care of all of them
.
Jacob wanted to go to his father's side, as he had as a child, and ask him how he managed to shovel dirt into his father's grave.
Did you think it was disgusting?
I did
, his father would have said.
I couldn't have done it
.
His father would have laughed a father's laugh and said,
One day you'll do it
.
What if I can't?
Children bury their dead parents, because the dead need to be buried. Parents do not need to bring their children into the world, but children need to bring their parents out of it.
Irv handed the shovel to Jacob. Their eyes met. The father whispered into the son's ear: “Here we are and will be.”
When Jacob imagined his children surviving him, he felt no version of immortality, as it's sometimes unimaginatively put, usually by people who are trying to encourage others to have children. He felt no contentment or peace or satisfaction of any kind. He felt only the overwhelming sadness of missing out. Death felt less fair with children, because there was more to miss. Whom would Benjy marry? (Despite himself, Jacob couldn't shake his Jewish certainty that of course he would want to marry, and
would
marry.) To what ethical and lucrative profession would Sam be drawn? What odd hobbies would Max indulge? Where would they travel? What would their children look like? (Of course they would want to have children, and
have
children.) How would they cope and celebrate? How would each die? (At least he would miss their deaths. Maybe that was the compensation for having to die himself.)
Before returning to the car, Jacob went for a walk. He read the gravestones like pages in an enormous book. The names were magnificentâbecause they were Jewish haiku, because they traveled in time machines while those they identified were left behind, because they were as embarrassing as pennies collected in paper rolls, because they were as beautiful as boats in bottles brought over on boats, because they were mnemonics:
Miriam Apfel, Shaindel Potash, Beryl Dresslerâ¦
He wanted to remember them, to use them later. He wanted to remember all of it, to use it all: the rabbi's shoelaces, the untied melodies of grief, the hardened footprints of a visitor in the rain.
Sidney Landesman, Ethel Keiser, Lebel Alterman, Deborah Fischbach, Lazer Berenbaumâ¦
He would remember the names. He wouldn't lose them. He would use them. He would make something of the no longer anything.
Seymour Kaiser, Shoshanna Ostrov, Elsa Glaser, Sura Needleman, Hymie Rattner, Simcha Tisch, Dinah Perlman, Ruchel Neustadt, Izzie Reinhardt, Ruben Fischman, Hindel Schulzâ¦
Like listening to a Jewish river. But you
can
step in it twice. You canâJacob could; he believed he couldâtake all that was lost and re-find it, reanimate it, breathe new life into the collapsed lungs of those names, those accents, those idioms and mannerisms and ways of being. The young rabbi was right: no one would ever have such names again. But he was wrong.
Mayer Vogel, Frida Walzer, Yussel Offenbacher, Rachel Blumenstein, Velvel Kronberg, Leah Beckerman, Mendel Fogelman, Sarah Bronstein, Schmuel Gersh, Wolf Seligman, Abner Edelson, Judith Weisz, Bernard Rosenbluth, Eliezer Umansky, Ruth Abramowicz, Irving Perlman, Leonard Goldberger, Nathan Moskowitz, Pincus Ziskind, Solomon Altmanâ¦
Jacob had once read that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. But it didn't feel that way. It felt as if everyone were dead. And for all the individualityâfor the extreme idiosyncrasy of the names of those extremely idiosyncratic Jewsâthere was only one fate.
And then he found himself where two walls met, at the corner of the vast cemetery, at the corner of the vast everything.
He turned to face the immensity, and only then did it occur to him, or only then was he forced to acknowledge what he'd forced himself not to: He was standing among suicides. He was in the ghetto for those unfit to be buried with the rest. This corner was where the shame was cordoned off. This was where the unspeakable shame was put beneath the ground. Milk on one set of plates, meat on the other: never the two should meet.
Miriam Apfel, Shaindel Potash, Beryl Dresslerâ¦
He had some vague awareness of the prohibition against taking one's own life, and the priceâbeyond deathâfor having done so. The punishment wasn't for the criminal, but the victims: those left behind and now forced to bury their dead in the other-earth. He remembered it like he remembered the prohibition against tattoosâsomething about desecrating the bodyâwhich would also land you in the other-earth. Andâless spiritual, but every bit as religiousâthe prohibition against drinking Pepsi, because Pepsi chose to market to Arab countries and not Israel. And the prohibition against touching a shiksa in any of the ways one was dying to, because it was a shanda. And the prohibition against resisting when elders touched any part of your body they wanted, in any way they wanted, because they were dying, perpetually dying, and it was a mitzvah.
Standing in that unwalled ghetto, he thought about eruvsâa wonderfully Jewish loophole that Julia had shared, before he even knew the prohibition it was circumventing. She'd learned about them not in the context of a Jewish education, but in architecture school: an example of a “magical structure.”
Jews can't “carry” on Shabbat: no keys, no money, no tissues or medicine, no strollers or canes, not even children who can't yet walk. The prohibition against carrying is technically against carrying from private to public domains. But what if large areas were made to be private? What if an entire neighborhood were a private domain? A city? An
eruv
is a string or wire that encloses an area, making it private, and thus permitting carrying. Jerusalem is enclosed by an eruv. Virtually all of Manhattan is enclosed by an eruv. There is an eruv in nearly every Jewish community in the world.
“In D.C.?”
“Of course.”
“I've never seen it.”
“You've never looked for it.”
She took him to the intersection of Reno and Davenport, where the eruv turned a corner and was most easy to see. There it was, like dental floss. They followed it down Davenport to Linnean, and Brandywine, and Broad Branch. They walked beneath the string as it ran from street sign to lamppost to power pole to telephone pole.
As he stood among the suicides, his pockets were full: a paper clip that Sam had somehow bent into an airplane, a crumpled twenty, Max's yarmulke from the funeral (apparently acquired at the wedding of two people Jacob had never heard of), the dry-cleaning ticket for the pants he was wearing, a pebble Benjy had taken from a grave and asked Jacob to hold, more keys than there were locks in his life. The older he got, the more he carried, the stronger it should have made him.
Isaac was buried in a pocketless shroud, six hundred yards from his wife of two hundred thousand hours.
Seymour Kaiser:
loving brother, loving son; head in the oven.
Shoshanna Ostrov:
loving wife; wrists slit in the bath.
Elsa Glaser:
loving mother and grandmother; hanging from the ceiling fan.
Sura Needleman:
loving wife, mother, and sister; walked into a river, pockets full of stones.
Hymie Rattner:
loving son; wrists slit over the bathroom sink.
Simcha Tisch:
loving father, loving brother; steak knife in the gut.
Dinah Perlman
:
loving grandmother, mother, and sister; leaped from the top of the stairs.
Ruchel Neustadt:
loving wife and mother; letter opener in the neck.
Izzie Reinhardt:
loving father, husband, and brother; jumped from Memorial Bridge.
Ruben Fischman:
loving husband; drove his car into a tree at one hundred miles per hour.
Hindel Schulz:
loving mother; serrated bread knife across the wrist.
Isaac Bloch:
loving brother, husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather; hanging by a belt in his kitchen.
Jacob wanted to pull the thread from his black suit, tie it around the tree in the corner, and walk the perimeter of the suicide ghetto, enclosing it as he unraveled. And then, when the public had been made private, he would carry away the shame. But to where?
Every landmass is surrounded by water. Was every coast an eruv?
Was the equator an eruv around the earth?
Did Pluto's orbit enclose the solar system?
And the wedding ring still on his finger?