Enchantment (4 page)

“But it’s just dirt. That’s not much of a treat, is it?”

He couldn’t remember how Mother answered. Perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps she simply closed the box, took his hand, and went out for the walk. How old was he then? Three? Five? It was hard to remember. The visits to Baba Tila stopped when he went to school. Or no, probably they didn’t—Mother simply went without him, while he was in school.

A man of perhaps forty came up the street, just a little ahead of himself in the night’s drinking. He climbed the stoop, then paused at the door and looked back down at Ivan.

“You want somebody?” he said. “It’s late.”

“I used to know somebody who lived here,” he said. “Baba Tila. An old lady. That apartment, right in front.”

“Dead,” said the man.

“You knew her?”

“No,” he said. “But after she died nobody would rent the place. It was a pigsty, had a smell to it or something. It was empty when I moved in, but they didn’t even show it to me. I asked, too. Ground floor front—I could have used that. Stuck me three flights up in back.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Ivan. “Childhood memory, that’s all.”

“Just so you’re not one of those damned burglars. Cause if I catch you breaking in I’ll shatter your bones, I hope you know that.”

“I’m an American student,” said Ivan. “No burglar.”

“American,” scoffed the man. “And I’m Chinese.” He went inside.

Ivan was flattered. He hadn’t lost his native accent, not a bit of it, if a suspicious man refused to believe he was a foreigner. Cool.

Ivan walked away, began to break into a jog, and then turned and went back and looked up again at Baba Tila’s window. He remembered that a couple of times when Mother brought him here, Baba Tila had not been home. Those times, Mother had left her gift on the windowsill, and then had reached up and taken something—he never saw what—concealed in the stones on the near side of the window, just out of sight from the steps. Remembering this, he had to reach up and feel the place where things had been concealed, touch the stones his mother had touched. And yes, of course there was the faintest tinge of a hope, a thrill of possible discovery: What if there was something hidden there for Mother after all these years, that he could bring home to her?

Ridiculous; but he could not resist the impulse. He stood on the top step and leaned over. It was an easy-enough reach—he was taller than his mother, after all, and she had not had to strain. His fingers skimmed along the surface of the stones that rose up the left edge of the window, then probed again into the cracks, into the gap between wooden window frame and stone wall.

And there was something. In a gap between, about where Mother’s hands had always reached, he felt a corner of something. He stroked it with his finger, once, twice, each time drawing the corner of it a little farther out. The third time, it emerged enough that he could grasp the corner, draw out the whole thing. A folded slip of paper. Damp, stained and weathered, mottled and rippled and warped by the reshaping of winters—how many of them? All the winters since Baba Tila died? Or all the winters since Mother had stopped coming to see her? Was this paper a message to Mother? Or to some other visitor who took Mother’s place?

He opened it. The writing was unreadable in the faint light available to him. It might not be readable at all. He refolded it and put it in his pocket, then jogged away, heading for his apartment.

There, under the bright light in the kitchen, he opened the note again, and found he could read it well enough, despite the streaking and staining of the paper. It was simple enough:

Deliver this message.

Simple, but recursive to the point of meaninglessness. Nothing else was written on the paper, so the instruction to deliver the message apparently
was
the message. But to whom was he to deliver it? And was he the intended message-bearer, anyway? Hardly likely. Maybe the paper had been attached to some other paper that had slipped farther back into the crevice. Or maybe it was part of a larger message which had been removed long ago, this little instructional note having been overlooked. But even as he thought of this, he knew it wasn’t true. If there was another message with this one, containing the message itself and the name of the person to whom it should be delivered, why would this cover note be needed? When one addresses an envelope and puts a stamp on it, one hardly needs to then attach a note to the envelope saying, “Deliver this letter.” One gives it to the postman and he does his job.

Who was the postman? What was the message? One thing was certain: Whoever was meant to be the messenger, whoever it was who might have made sense of this recursive note, had not picked up the message for many years. Indeed, all meaning was now utterly lost, and all that remained was this brief writing which might as well have been in Minoan Linear A for all the luck he would ever have in deciphering it.

But it was found in the place where Baba Tila left things for Mother, and Mother would want to have it. Ivan took the note and tucked it into his luggage, an inside pocket of the carryon bag. Even if he forgot it, it would be there when he got home, he’d find it again as he was unpacking, and he’d take it to Mother. Maybe she’d explain to him then who Baba Tila was and why she brought her gifts. Maybe she’d tell him what this message meant. Though, more than likely, Mother would simply go enigmatic on him, give him one of her inscrutable smiles, and tell him that if he didn’t already understand, he never would.

Women always said things like that, and it made him crazy. It’s as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really about. If, just once, the man could understand, really comprehend the whole of the conversation, then the perfect union between male and female would be possible. But instead men and women continued to cohabit, even to love each other, without ever quite crossing over the chasm of misunderstanding between them.

And I’m marrying Ruthie?

Well, why not? She loved him. He loved her. In the absence of understanding, that was as good a reason as any for living together and making babies and raising them up and throwing them out of the house and then going through the long slow decline together until one of them died and left the other alone again, understanding as little as ever about what their spouses really wanted, who they really were.

Was that tragedy? Or was that comedy?

Was there really any difference?

The semester had just ended, and Ruthie was over for a visit. Esther Smetski had liked her son’s fiancée from the start, but she hadn’t enjoyed spending time with her ever since she realized that Vanya mustn’t marry the girl. It wasn’t Ruthie’s fault, was it? Something Vanya had done. Something that happened to him that the boy himself didn’t understand, but he was encumbered, he wasn’t free to marry, and here was this girl with his ring, with a right to come to the Smetski house and cluck her tongue over what a bad correspondent Vanya was.

“My mother keeps saying, ‘He doesn’t act like a young man in love,’ and I have to keep explaining to her that he’s doing research, he’s buried, he spends all day writing and reading and he hardly wants to do more of it when the libraries close.” Ruthie’s voice sounded almost amused by the whole thing, but by now she had delivered this speech often enough that it no longer seemed to conceal wounded feelings. She really didn’t mind that much that Vanya didn’t write.

Piotr nodded and smiled mechanically. Esther knew from years of experience that Piotr only barely tolerated small talk, and when the small talk had already been said many times before, it was all he could do to keep from getting up and stalking out of the room and doing something productive. But for Vanya’s sake he smiled. He nodded.

“But he must write to
you
, Piotr,” said Ruthie. “About his research.”

Piotr. What a name for a Jew. Of course he had his Jewish name, taken when he converted, but his academic reputation had been established under the name Piotr Smetski, and he wasn’t about to make people switch to calling him Ruven Shlomo.

“No, not often,” said Piotr. “I’ll have plenty of time to hear about it when I look at drafts of his dissertation.” He smiled wryly.

As they talked for a few minutes about the work Vanya would have to do when he came home, Esther tuned out their conversation and thought about Vanya, about how strange it was that this other woman, this girl-child, should speak of her son so possessively, should speak of his future as if it were her own future. When I held him in my arms, when I whispered his true name into his ear for only God and me to hear and understand, I did not do it just to hand him over, a scant two decades or so later, to this American girl, this doctor’s daughter, this child of money, of imitation country clubs. There was majesty in the child, and only banality in this marriage.

Fool! she said to herself. Marriage is about banality. Its
purpose
is banality, to create an environment of surpassing safety and predictability for young children to grow up in, the foundation of life, the root of inner peace. What do I want for him, a troublesome, restless woman? A
queen
? She almost laughed at herself.

“Was that funny?” asked Ruthie, feigning perplexity.

“I’m sorry,” said Esther. “My mind wandered for a moment, and I was thinking of something else. What are we talking about?”

“Whatever it is, it looks like what
you
were thinking was more entertaining,” said Ruthie. “Tell us!”

“Yes, please,” said Piotr, his irony only barely concealed; what he meant was, please save me from having to talk to this person. Was this girl so stupid she couldn’t hear it? Piotr, you must not be snide in front of her. We’ll be listening to her for many years, unless Vanya acquires a sudden rush of wisdom.

“It’s hard for me sometimes,” said Esther. “Listening to English. I have to work so hard.”

“I wish my Russian were a little better,” said Ruthie.

“You have no Russian,” said Piotr, surprised. “Have you?”

“I can say
palazhusta
.”

“Pozhalusta,”
Piotr corrected her. “Please.”

Ruthie laughed. “See? Even that I can’t get right. I’m afraid our children won’t be bilingual.”

But at the mention of children, she got a faraway look and glanced toward the window.

Something wrong with talking about children. Esther felt an alarm going off inside her. Suddenly the girl doesn’t want children. This is how God orders things. In all the old stories, when a man married a woman he had no right to marry, the marriage was barren. In the old days, the woman tried but couldn’t conceive or bear a child. These days, though, the woman can
decide
to be barren. But it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? Vanya must not marry this girl. If only he would listen to his mother.

“The way children talk these days,” said Piotr, “you’ll be lucky if they’re lingual at all.”

Esther leaned forward a little in her chair. Ruthie at once focused on her. She might not realize it consciously, but the girl knew she had let something slip, and she knew Esther had picked up on it. That was the way communication was among women, most of the time; few women realized it, but they all depended on it. “Women’s intuition” wasn’t intuition at all, it was heightened observation, unconscious registration of subtle clues. Ruthie knew that her mother-in-law didn’t want the marriage, and knew that somehow she had just given fuel to that cause; Ruthie knew this, but didn’t realize that she knew it. She simply felt uncomfortable, on edge, and she noticed more when she was conversing with her future mother-in-law. Esther didn’t need to be told any of this. She knew, because she had trained herself to know these things. It was a school at least as rigorous as any university, but there was no diploma, no extra title to add to her name. She simply knew things, and, unlike most women, knew exactly why and how she knew.

“Ruthie, you know you aren’t planning on having a lot of children,” said Esther. At once she softened the remark with a more general observation. “American girls don’t want so many children these days.”

“You only had the one,” said Ruthie, still smiling, but definitely on the defensive, with a remark like that.

Esther let her own ancient sorrow rise to the surface a little; her eyes watered. “Not for lack of desire,” she said. The emotion was real enough; choosing to show it at this moment, however, was entirely artificial. And it worked.

“Of course you wanted to fulfil your traditional role as a Jewish wife and mother,” said Ruthie. “That’s the religion of scarcity. You feel the obligation to produce sons to become rabbis, and daughters to give birth to more sons in the next generation.”

“Oh, is that all it is?” asked Esther.

“Of course there’s the biological imperative toward reproduction,” said Ruthie.

“Such big words,” murmured Esther. Piotr wasn’t entirely unobservant. He caught the irony in Esther’s voice and grew more alert to what Ruthie was saying.

“But in the feminine Judaism, in the loving Bible, you have only as many children as you need. Like Eve, with only two sons, and bearing a third only when one of the first two died. She was free, not cursed at all—the curse was from the other Bible.”

“Other Bible?” asked Piotr.

“Two Bibles, conflated, one hidden inside the other,” said Ruthie. “The Bible of scarcity is the book with the curses in it. Adam earns his living by the sweat of his face; Eve bears children in sorrow and is ruled over by her husband. A zero-sum game where it’s all right to drive the original inhabitants out of Canaan and keep their land, where if a man can’t pronounce the word
shibboleth
it’s all right to kill him because he’s an outsider. That’s the Bible of killing and hatred and a jealous God who wants all idol-worshipers killed—struck by lightning at Elijah’s bidding or slaughtered by the swords of the Levites when Moses gave the command.”

“You’re quite the scholar,” said Piotr.

“Not me,” said Ruthie. “But my class in Feminist Judaism this semester really opened my eyes.”