Are We There Yet? (7 page)

Elijah falls asleep as soon as he returns to the hotel. In fact, he falls asleep a few turns from the hotel, but some mental and physical anomaly conspires to keep him upright until the door of the room closes. Danny is a little more fastidious before his own collapse. He hangs up all of his clothing and studiously brushes his teeth. Then he stands for a minute in front of one of the windows. He opens it wide, so the sounds of the canal and the laughter from the bar downstairs can segue into sleep.

Danny dreams of soldiers, and Elijah dreams of wings. They wake numerous times during the night, but never at the same time. Elijah thinks he hears Danny get up to shut the window, but when he wakes up, the window is still open.

Morning.

Breakfast.

“You fool,” Elijah says, glancing at the menu.

“What?” Danny grunts.

“I said, ‘You fool. ’ ”

Danny looks at the menu and understands.

“No,” he says, “I won't quiche you.”

“Quiche me, you fool!
Please!
”

“If you say that any louder, you're toast.”

“Quiche me and marry me in a church, since we can taloupe!” Elijah is giddy with the old routine.

“Orange juice kidding?” Danny gasps.

“I will milk this for all it's worth.”

“You
can't
be cereal.”

“I can sense you're waffling….” Danny looks up triumphantly. “There aren't any waffles on the menu! You lose!”

Elijah is surprised by how abruptly disappointed he is.
That's not the point
, he thinks. He turns away. Danny pauses for a second, watching him, not knowing what he's done. Then he shrugs, picks up an
International Herald Tribune
, and begins to read.

Danny and Elijah are both museum junkies, each in his own way. It is hard to entirely escape all vestiges of a shared parentage. From an early age, both of the Silver brothers found themselves folded into the backseat of the family car for Sunday-morning excursions to the museums of New York. There was never any traffic—driving through the city was almost like driving through a painting, the streets wider and cleaner than any New York street is supposed to be. An uncrowded city is a form of magic…and the magic only intensified as the museums neared. Sometimes the Silvers would walk amidst dinosaur bones and hanging whales. But most of the time, they made pilgrimages to color and light, brushstrokes and angles. Elijah saved the buttonhole entry tags from each museum as if they were coins from a higher society—the nearly Egyptian M for the Met, the hip capitalization of MoMA, each visit in a different color from the time before.

Danny fell in love with
Starry Night
long before he knew he was supposed to. Elijah would bring his
Star Wars
figures to the MoMA sculpture garden and have Princess Leia and Han Solo make a home in the smooth pocket of a Henry Moore. As they grew older (but not too much older), the brothers would hatch Saturday-night schemes to make the museums their home. As their babysitter looked on with amusement, Danny and Elijah would pore over
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
as if it were both guidebook and bible—a map and a divination. Sometimes the museums' floor plans would also be consulted, the bathrooms carefully marked and noted. As the
ten o'clock TV shows said their eleven o'clock goodbyes, Danny and Elijah would whisper their plans, each more elaborate than its predecessor.
We'll hide in the second-floor men's room, and when the janitor comes, we'll stand on the toilets so he can't see our legs. We'll hide under the bench in the room with the splatter painting. We'll spend the night in King Tut's tomb.

The Sunday-morning trips began to ebb as Little League, summer camp, and adolescent resentment appeared. Danny became a teenager, which Elijah couldn't begin to understand. (Danny told him so. Repeatedly.) All plans were off, because Danny had new plans of his own. The Silvers still went to the museum together, but with the near-formality of a special occasion. These were Big Exhibition trips—mornings of Monet and afternoons of Acoustiguided El Greco.

Later on, Danny and Elijah made their own excursions into the city, sometimes with friends but most of the time alone. Danny loved MoMA, with its establishment airs and Big Artist dynamics. Elijah was more partial to the Whitney, with its Hopper despair and youth-in-revolt aspirations.

Strangely, neither Danny nor Elijah felt a strong affinity for the Met. Perhaps the Temple of Dendur fails to amaze after the twentieth visit. Perhaps the museum itself is too palatial, too expansive to ever really know.

It should be taken as a measure of Danny's true New York soul that his first reaction upon entering the Academy is a vow to spend more time at the Met, in the Renaissance rooms.

Elijah's response is a much more succinct (yet also more entire) “Wow.”

There is a danger in living on a steady diet of Rothko and Pollack, Monet and Manet and Magritte. Danny and Elijah
have an inkling of this now, almost immediately. They are struck, more than anything, by the details in the Academy's artwork. The faces in a painter's stonework. The downturn of a Madonna's eyes. The arrow's angle as it tears into Sebastian's side.

They do not know the stories behind all the paintings— such things weren't taught in Hebrew school. Perhaps that adds to the mystery and helps them approach in a strange state of wonder. Elijah is drawn to the paintings of Orsola—is she a martyr or a dreamer, a saint or a princess? He has no way of knowing. He asks Danny, and Danny mumbles something about enigmas. There is a happy complicity in their ignorance.

After an hour and a half, the Madonnas begin to look too much alike, and the Jesus babies are growing more grotesque in their bald adultness. Danny and Elijah are both losing sight of the details—it is harder to focus, and Danny is becoming restless. He wants to get to the synagogue in time for the noon tour. There will be more time for Art later.

They both agree on this.

A city presents many different faces, and it is up to the traveler to assemble the proper composite. Venice seems, at first, to be a simple enough city to render. It is the canals, the basilica, the shutters on the homes. It is the gondolier's call and the beat of the pigeon's wing and the church bell that chimes to mark the passing of an hour. To many people, this is all, and this is enough. A tourist does not want to be weighed down by realities, unless the realities are presented as monumental stories.

It takes a traveler, not a tourist, to search for something deeper. Travelers want to find the wavelength on which they and the city connect.

Danny is drawn to the ghetto. None of his immediate ancestors ever set foot in Venice (or Italy, for that matter). None of his friends have ever spent time there. He has never read or dreamed about life in such a place. And yet this is the destination he has chosen within a city of destinations.

(Elijah comes too and is moved and affected, but not in the same way. This is not what he has visited for. For him, the city is much more elusive, and will not know where he wants to be until he actually gets there.)

According to the museum in the ghetto, eight thousand Italian Jews were sent to concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Only eight of them returned to Venice.

This is the fact to which Danny attaches himself. If the ghetto itself is the bell, this fact is the toll.

The word “ghetto” comes from the Venetian
jeto
, which means “foundry.” The island upon which the Jews originally settled was formerly a foundry area (Danny learns). But the Jews, newly arrived from Germany and Eastern European countries, couldn't pronounce the soft
j
and instead called it
geto
. In the sixteenth century, the Jews were locked in from midnight to dawn; they became usurers because most other businesses were prohibited. (
Hence Shylock
, Danny thinks.
The Merchant of Venice
was the closest he came to finding meaning in Shakespeare in college.)

At one point in the ghetto, Jews had to wear yellow hats or scarves whenever they went out. Danny notes the color yellow—how can he not? The past reverberates so clearly, later on. Yellow hats, yellow stars.

As Elijah waits in the courtyard, Danny stands in the shade of a Sephardic synagogue—still in use, saved from the World War II bombings by an ironic alliance made between the Germans and the Italians. People begin to gather for the tour— a small, quiet group, almost all of them American.

The inside of the synagogue is dominated by black woodwork and red curtains. There is a separate section for women— a shielded balcony, high beyond the pulpit. The guide jokes that this means women are closer to God. Only the men laugh.

The guide goes on to say that there are now 600 Jews in all of Venice. Danny feels his somberness confirmed—how else can one feel when surrounded by such a majority of ghosts? You can find sorrow in the arithmetic, and you can find a bittersweet hope.

After the synagogue, Danny sees things differently. It's not that he's religious—at best, he would like to believe in God, if
only he could believe it. Instead, his identity asserts itself. He sits in the plaza outside the temple and thinks about the 600 and what a crazy life they must lead. He wonders what it must be like to live in a place where Christ is in every doorway—well, maybe not
every
doorway, but he's sure it must seem that way. In American terms, it must be like living in the Bible Belt— with Christmas all year round.

Danny has these thoughts, but he doesn't share them. He can see that Elijah isn't in a similar space. Instead, he is sitting (shoelaces untied) in the sunniest corner of the plaza, watching a little redheaded girl in pink plastic sunglasses as she charges an unsuspecting flock of pigeons. There is a flash-flutter of wings—Elijah hunches over as the birds throw themselves skyward and fly thoughtlessly over the bench where he sits.

There is a small Judaica store open off the square. Danny walks to the window, but he doesn't go inside. Instead, he looks at the stained-glass kiddush cups and the tiny scrolls of the translucent mezuzot. Women from the synagogue tour step inside the store and touch the cases reverently. Danny turns away. He wants to go inside, but he doesn't want to go inside. It's his place, but it's not his place. Elijah is walking over now, and Danny allows this to be a cue to leave.