A Private State: Stories (12 page)

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Authors: Charlotte Bacon

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BOOK: A Private State: Stories
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and a hint of Andrew's nose. But she was clearly separate, too, the way Andrew was: angular, away on his causes. Filled with their own news. Elizabeth was sure they withheld sections of their days. On her charts, a short white space lived between two names connected in marriage. In genealogy, you never lost sight of how families were individuals that history and habit, force and affection, had roped together, however tenuously.
That night in bed, Elizabeth lay with hands cradling her head and thought about her first trip with Andrew. Graduate students in the early '80s, poor and ratty, they had decided to go to Prague, on whose edges armies had stopped, whose castle had every Gothic spire intact, where American dollars could be stretched.
Elizabeth had hoped for something languid in Prague. Golden leaves of plane trees floating on the Moldau. But the city that July was wrapped in a thin hot cape of pollution that pitted the facades of buildings in the Stare Mesto. Anytime, she felt she might bump into Kafka, high knobs of color in white cheeks. She jumped whenever someone coughed.
Andrew liked it. He was even excited when he thought a chain-smoking man with sideburns was tailing them. But there were so many men like this that it was impossible to say. The spit that flew with practiced skill at the heels of Russian speakers, the stiff faces of the children: it should have horrified her. Instead, the city made her long for Italy, terra-cotta palazzi, caves of saints. Prague's only redeeming feature was the cheap and excellent beer.
Elizabeth and Andrew were drinking from exaggerated flagons as she told him she wanted to leave. At marble tables, Cuban and Vietnamese workers, employed to restore crumbling theaters made the room sharp with spiky bits of language.
''You should love this, Elizabeth,'' Andrew told her. "What hasn't happened here?" That was the trouble. It made her uneasy to be in a place with more soldiers than children. Women who
 
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stared at you from shops with flat, unflinching eyes. And other things she'd only read about, like Lidice. "Come on," Andrew said.
He took her to a boulevard flanked by stately buildings studded with wrought-iron fruit and reliefs of classical heads. Blinding white, but despite their cleanliness, they looked uneasy, conquerors not quite on the moral side. Elizabeth knew they sat on the foundations of the ghetto, whose only traces were a triangle of cemetery and a synagogue that served as a museum.
It was late afternoon. Inside the gate, the gravestones covered every open space. They came out of the ground at strange angles, like old teeth. Many were cracked in half. Elizabeth tried to trace families from one end of the plot to the other, but most inscriptions were in Hebrew. Some were so old their carvings were less like letters than hollows fingers left in sand. The oldest stone she saw was dated 1383; the newest she could find for a girl named Nazdhevda in 1939. After that the Jews of Prague died elsewhere.
Andrew came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. Although they hadn't known it then, Kate was a slender sprout inside her. Elizabeth had never thought of their child as having come too soon. It was the only thing she had ever been quite so clear about.
She wondered if Mr. Krystowicki had relatives buried in Prague. He had a dustiness that reminded Elizabeth of the city. But then how did he know about Rome? She pressed her body along Andrew's, trying to obliterate all the space between.
Elizabeth spent the next few days waiting for Mr. Krystowicki to come back. When at home, she left the front door unlocked. She painted the bathroom slowly, waiting for a tip on brush technique. The weather had been perfect, melting all snow, so there was no need to ask if she could shovel the walk for him. In the air, there was a smell of false spring.
When she went out, however, she made doubly sure that the alarm was on. She didn't want to come home and find him tilt-
 
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ing pictures on their spiraled wire back into place. Or making changes to the chart without asking. Would he do something like this? He had a kind of rough authority that made her wonder.
Maybe this was a trait he shared with Vera. Once Elizabeth had bought bird seed on sale and Vera had come to pick it up. Vera had hoisted the sack and said her abrupt thank you when she saw a pile of jewelry on the counter. "What's that?" she'd said to Elizabeth.
There were marcasite earrings, an opal ring loose in its setting. A small and tarnished pile of baubles, jewelry Elizabeth's grandmother once owned. "I'm taking it to be cleaned."
"Your grandmother's," Vera had said. She shifted the sack to her other hip and picked up the ring. "There was a story in the family that when the pogroms started, my grandmother buried all her gold in an orchard. And later, when the orchard died, there was one tree that always bloomed. Ha." She put the ring down. Then she turned to Elizabeth. ''Those charts you do. Would you try to do one for me? I'll write out what I remember, then we can go from there."
Elizabeth had said, "Of course, Vera." When Elizabeth went to open the door, the sack slipped from her neighbor's grasp and split on the kitchen floor. Yellow stubs of corn and sunflower seeds peppered the rag rugs. Vera had laughed and apologized. She helped Elizabeth carry the rugs into the yard and shake the seeds in wild wide arcs. She was still very strong. Elizabeth had seen the twist of muscle on her forearms as she shook the carpets into the wind. Birds arrived in instant, chattering flocks. "Maybe we'll have sunflowers in the spring," Elizabeth said.
"No, those seeds are dead. Besides, the birds will find every last one." Cardinals swooped through the yard for days, round eyes fever bright, then just as suddenly, disappeared.
By the end of the week, Mr. Krystowicki had yet to be seen. Now Elizabeth had almost finished the chart and she wanted to talk to
 
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him. But now Kate was behaving strangely. Today her daughter rushed out of school wearing a dragon mask, painted red with staring black eyes. Two streamers of ribbon, sewn with woolly black loops to the dragon's ears, snapped in the wind. Kate wouldn't take it off for dinner. She announced it was the Year of the Fire Mouse.
"In the south, they do dragon dances. In the north, they do lion ones. I'm being southern Chinese with Mee Lin." Her voice was muffled, coming out of the slit she'd left for the mouth.
Andrew was pleased if a little bemused. Elizabeth knew he liked anything that opened the world wide for his daughter. It was part of progress. But would they learn about Tibet and Mao? What about the fact that other cultures were more than masks and dances and cheerful American interpretations of holidays? When was the news about Hitler on the syllabus?
Seeing Kate try to push a pea through the mask mouth made Elizabeth wonder if there weren't plenty of time to tell her about Auschwitz, the Cultural Revolution, and Jim Crow. Kate then told Elizabeth, "Did you know that if you eat a cup of apple seeds it can kill you?" If she was attuned to dangers as domestic as that, she would catch on fast enough.
That night, Kate stormed into Elizabeth and Andrew's bedroom. She stood on the threshold and said loudly, "Dr. Martin Luther King was in the attic."
Elizabeth sat up and said, "Come here, sweetie. How do you know?"
"I saw him standing in front of Pegasus."
"You went up there?"
"He asked if Pegasus could fly."
"What did you tell him?"
"That he was a painting, that he couldn't really fly."
"What did Dr. King say?"
"He was sorry. He must have got the wrong house. And then he left."
 
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Elizabeth knew that Kate wouldn't ask if she could sleep in her parents' bed. She and Andrew had trained her early to spend the night on her own. She was better at it than they were. Elizabeth said, "Hop in, Katie."
Andrew woke up enough to say, "Hi, bird. Your feet are cold." Kate was already asleep.
The next morning, Elizabeth woke up in a tangle of sheets and legs. Kate's hair was in Elizabeth's eyes, one of Andrew's hands was pinned beneath her hip. A warm and awkward mass of bodies. Elizabeth wrapped an arm around Kate's stomach and felt the twitch of a vein in her daughter's chest. Andrew turned over. Kate snuffled. Elizabeth only wanted to stay here in bed, safely, uncomfortably wrapped around each other. Andrew yawned. "Morning," he said to Elizabeth and pulled his hand from under her. "My hand's asleep," he said and shook it. "What was that about last night?"
"A bad dream," said Elizabeth and Kate shifted. Elizabeth's foot poked into the sharp air beyond the blankets.
Elizabeth sat in the bus seat, a folder full of student papers on Lyndon Johnson's suitability as president in her lap. Some of her students were intent on proving his involvement in the Kennedy assassination, but she insisted they work in the escalation of the war as well, so as to widen the range of their obsession. The bus pumped along home, fast for once.
She would have the house to herself tonight. Andrew was at a town meeting on his new project, no doubt feeling besieged. Kate was at Mee Lin's for the night. The friendship had grown since the New Year. Elizabeth would be able to finish Vera's chart. She would sit at her table, surrounded by the bound genealogies, the stacks of Xeroxes, and write out the last names in clear black ink. Her results would be slim but then, she resolved, she would take it over there. She still hadn't seen Mr. Krystowicki. The light had been on each night. The garbage had been put out. One small bag
 
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of it, a knot of black plastic sealing it shut. She had called a couple of times but there'd been no answer. Vera didn't own a machine.
As the bus lumbered around potholes, Elizabeth thought about the discussion in her Jefferson class. People were divided about Sally Hemings, Jefferson's slave, supposed mistress, and mother of his children. Mr. Brewster said the morals of the president's era were different and we couldn't condemn Jefferson because he hadn't behaved according to our lights. Mrs. Harpole said it was bad enough that the author of the Declaration of Independence had been a slave owner; it was hard enough to reconcile that, much less children whom he'd never had the guts to acknowledge. The rest of the class aligned itself to one position or the other.
"The evidence isn't compelling either way," Elizabeth had said, which was true but it sounded a bland compromise. Mr. Brewster tucked his pen firmly in his binder. Mrs. Harpole rummaged in her handbag. Everyone was disappointed. The answer didn't have the ring of authority, which was what people always expected from teachers.
"Anyway," Elizabeth said as chairs started to scrape, "Part of this is about having to wrestle it out for ourselves. Even the people we'd like to admire are complicated." How do we weigh things like Dr. King plagiarizing? Kennedy's infidelity? Jacket zippers rasped. Mrs. Harpole said she supposed the children of Nazis loved their parents.
Elizabeth listened to the rush of air as the bus doors opened and closed and, lost in the odd rhythm, nearly missed her stop. In the doorway of the house, she saw Mr. Krystowicki, wearing a hat with furred flaps. The weather had turned cold again. The sidewalks shone with a thin sheet of ice.
"Hello," he said, and took off his hat. Elizabeth stamped the cold mud off her feet and said, "I'm glad to see you, Mr. Krystowicki. I hope you haven't been here long. Would you like coffee?" She realized she was looking forward to the rest of his story.
"Please," he said, dipping his head in a courtly way Elizabeth
 
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recognized. Vera did this, too, Elizabeth thought. Was it inherited? Or a reflex of their time and culture? She imagined those small and civil responses were hard to erase, even after the camps. How you held a fork. The nod to greet strangers. Or, she thought, as Joseph folded his scarf into the sleeve, maybe those were exactly the sorts of gestures that had to be learned again. She brought sugar tongs this time, which he used expertly. He even helped himself to a piece of shortbread. Elizabeth settled down across from him.
His papers were processed quickly. He told the agent handling his case he wanted to go to Rome. Apparently it was easier to get American visas in Italy. The man raised a bored eyebrow and said, "Fine. You're a free man." That made him unexpectedly uncertain. Italy. It had seemed like such a good idea. He admired the few Italians he knew. It would be a good place to leave Europe behind. Now he wasn't so sure. Still, he found himself on a train to Rome, with women in headscarves and men as thin as nails. No familiar faces in Rome, but then again there wouldn't have been many in Lodz, either. Once he arrived in Italy, though, his confusion had continued.
He missed speaking Polish. He lived in an apartment with Jews from a handful of other shattered countries. Their common language was German but they would not use it. Instead, they spoke barbarous Italian. Some were trying to learn English. They lived for the occasional newspapers that made their way from Poland, Yugoslavia, Russia, even though the papers were packed with lies and had less news in forty pages than five minutes of the BBC. Maybe, too, he was hoping to see a name of a relative or friend, but in that case, if it showed up, it could only mean misfortune. However, it became something of a mission to find these newspapers. It gave you something to do when work dried up.
Their Sicilian neighbors complained about the smell of cabbage in the stairwell, but at least it covered the stink of rancid oil. He

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