Everything Is Illuminated (38 page)

this plaque marks the spot

(or a spot close to the spot)

where the wagon of one

trachim b

(we think)

went in.

Shtetl Proclamation, 1791

As the first floats passed the More-or-Less-Respected Rabbi’s window (from which he gave the necessary nod of approval), men in green-gray uniforms were being killed in shallow trenches.

Lutsk, Sarny, Kovel. Their floats were adorned with thousands of butterflies, and alluded to aspects of the Trachim story: the wagon, the twins, the umbrella ribs and skeleton keys, the bleeding red-ink script: I will . . . I will . . . In another place, their sons were killed between the barbs of their own guard wire, killed with misfired bombs while squirming in the mire like animals, killed with friendly fire, killed sometimes without knowing that they were about to die — a bullet through the head while joking with a comrade, laughing.

Lvov, Pinsk, Kivertsy. Their floats were marched along the Brod’s bank, adorned in red, brown, and purple butterflies, showing their carcasses like ugly truths. (And here it is becoming harder and harder not to yell: GO AWAY! RUN WHILE YOU CAN, FOOLS! RUN FOR YOUR

LIVES! ) The bands bellowed, trumpets and violins, pocket trumpets and violas, homemade wax-paper kazoos.

ANOTHER KICK! Zosha laughed. ANOTHER!

And again my grandfather put his ear to her belly (having to get on his knees just to reach its crest), and again he was thumped backward.

THAT’S MY BABY! he hollered, his right eye absorbing the bruise like a sponge.

The Trachimbrod float was covered with black and blue butterflies.

The daughter of the electrician Berl G sat on a raised platform in the middle of the float, wearing a blue neon tiara whose power cord reached back hundreds of yards to the outlet above her bed. (She had planned to recoil it as she traced her way back home when the parade was over.) The Float Queen was surrounded by the young float princesses of the shtetl, dressed in blue lace, waving their arms about like waves. A quartet of fiddlers played Polish national songs from a stand in the front of the float, and another played Ukrainian traditionals from the back.

On the banks, men sitting in wooden chairs reminisced about old loves, and girls never kissed, and books never read and written, and the time So-and-So did that funny thing with the what’s-it-called, and injuries, and dinners, and how they would have washed the hair of women they never met, and apologies, and whether Trachim was or was not pinned under his wagon after all.

The earth turned in the sky.

Yankel turned in the earth.

The prehistoric ant on Yankel’s thumb, which had lain motionless in the honey-colored stone since Brod’s curious birth, turned away from the sky and hid its head between its many legs, in shame.

My grandfather and his young, tremendously pregnant wife walked up to the shore to watch the dive.

(Here it is almost impossible to go on, because we know what happens, and wonder why they don’t. Or it’s impossible because we fear that they do.)

When the Trachimbrod float reached the toy and pastry stands, the Float Queen was given the signal by the Rabbi to throw the sacks into the water. Mouths opened. Hands were separated — the first halves of applause. Blood flowed through bodies. It was almost like old times.

This was celebration, unmitigated by imminent death. This was imminent death, unmitigated by celebration. She threw them high into the air

They stayed there

They hung as if on strings

The Dial tiptoed across the cobblestones like a chess piece and hid himself under the breasts of the prostrate mermaid

There is still time

After the bombing was over, the Nazis moved through the shtetl.

They lined up everyone who didn’t drown in the river. They unrolled a Torah in front of them. “Spit,” they said. “Spit, or else.” Then they put all of the Jews in the synagogue. (It was the same in every shtetl. It happened hundreds of times. It happened in Kovel only a few hours before, and would happen in Kolki in only a few hours.) A young soldier tossed the nine volumes of The Book of Recurrent Dreams onto the bonfire of Jews, not noticing, in his haste to grab and destroy more, that one of the pages fell out of one of the books and descended, coming to rest like a veil on a child’s burnt face:

9:613 — The dream of the end of the world.

bombs poured down from the sky exploding across trachimbrod in bursts of light

and heat those watching the festivities

hollered ran frantically they jumped into

the bubbling splashing frantically dynamic water not after the sack of gold but

to save themselves they stayed under as

long as they could they surfaced to seize

air and look for loved ones my safran

picked up his wife and carried her like a

newlywed into the water which seemed

amid the falling trees and hackling crackling explosions the safest place hundreds

of bodies poured into the brod that river

with my name I embraced them with open

arms come to me come I wanted to save

them all to save everybody from everybody the bombs rained from the sky and it

was not the explosions or scattering

shrapnel that would be our death not the

heckling cinders not the laughing debris

but all of the bodies bodies flailing and

grabbing hold of one another bodies looking for something to hold on to my safran

lost sight of his wife who was carried

deeper into me by the pull of the bodies

the silent shrieks were carried in bubbles to the surface where they popped

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

the kicking in zosha’s belly became more

and more PLEASE PLEASE the baby refused to die like this PLEASE the bombs

came down cackling smoldering and my

safran was able to break free from the

human mass and float downstream over

the small falls to clearer waters zosha was

pulled down PLEASE and the baby refusing to die like this was pulled up and out

of her body turning the waters around

her red she surfaced like a bubble to the

light to oxygen to life to life WAWAWAWAWAWA she cried she was perfectly

healthy and she would have lived except

for the umbilical cord that pulled her back

under toward her mother who was barely

conscious but conscious of the cord and

tried to break it with her hands and then

bite it with her teeth but could not it

would not be broken and she died with

her perfectly healthy nameless baby in her

arms she held it to her chest the crowd

pulled itself into itself long after the

bombing ceased the confused the frightened the desperate mass of babies children teenagers adults elderly all pulled at

each other to survive but pulled each

other into me drowning each other killing

each other the bodies began to rise one at

a time until I couldn’t be seen through all

of the bodies blue skin open white eyes I

was invisible under them I was the carcass

they were the butterflies white eyes blue

skin this is what we’ve done we’ve killed

our own babies to save them

22 January 1998

Dear Jonathan,

If you are reading this, it is because Sasha found it and translated it for you. It means that I am dead, and that Sasha is alive.

I do not know if Sasha will tell you what has happened here tonight, and what is about to happen. It is important that you know what kind of man he is, so I will tell you here.

This is what happened. He told his father that he could care for Mother and Little Igor. It took his saying it to make it true. Finally, he was ready.

His father could not believe this thing. What? he asked. What? And Sasha told him again that he would take care of the family, that he would understand if his father had to leave and never return, and that it would not even make him less of a father. He told his father that he would forgive. Oh, his father became so angry, so full of wrath, and he told Sasha that he would kill him, and Sasha told his father that he would kill him, and they moved at each other with violence and his father said, Say it to my face, not to the floor, and Sasha said, You are not my father.

His father raised himself and removed a bag from the cabinet under the sink. He filled the bag with things from the kitchen, with bread, bottles of vodka, cheese. Here, Sasha said, and he took from the cookie jar two handfuls of money. His father asked where the money was from and Sasha told him to take it and never return. His father said, I do not need your money. Sasha said, It is not a gift. It is payment for everything that you will leave behind.

Take it and never return.

Say it into my eyes and I promise you I will.

Take it, Sasha said, and never return.

Mother and Iggy were so upset. Iggy told Sasha how stupid he was, how he ruined everything. He cried all night, and do you know what it is like to hear Iggy cry all night? But he is so young. I hope that he will one day be able to understand what Sasha did, and forgive him, and also thank him.

I spoke with Sasha tonight, after his father left, and I told him that I was proud of him. I told him that I had never been so proud, or so certain of who he was.

But Father is your son, he said. And he is my father.

I said, You are a good man, and you have done the good thing.

I put my hand on his cheek and remembered when my cheek was like his cheek. I said his name, Alex, which has also been my name for forty years.

I will toil at Heritage Touring, he said. I will fill Father’s absence.

No, I told him.

It is a good job, he said, and I can make enough money to care for Mother and Little Igor and you.

No, I said. Make your own life. That is how you can best care for us.

I put him to bed, which I have not done for him since he was a child. I covered him in blankets, and combed his hair with my hand.

Try to live so that you can always tell the truth, I said.

I will, he said, and I believed in him, and that was enough.

Then I went to Iggy’s room and he was already sleeping, but I kissed him on his forehead, and I said a blessing for him. I prayed in silence that he should be strong, and know goodness, and never know evil, and never know war.

And then I came here, to the television room, to write you this letter.

All is for Sasha and Iggy, Jonathan. Do you understand? I would give everything for them to live without violence. Peace. That is all that I would ever want for them. Not money and not even love. It is still possible. I know that now, and it is the cause of so much happiness in me. They must begin again. They must cut all of the strings, yes? With you (Sasha told me that you will not write to each other anymore), with their father (who is now gone forever), with everything they have known. Sasha has started it, and now I must finish it.

Everyone in the house is in bed but me. I am writing this in the luminescence of the television, and I am so sorry if this is now difficult to read, Sasha, but my hand is shaking so much, and it is not out of weakness that I will go to the bath when I am sure that you are asleep, and it is not because I cannot endure. Do you understand? I am complete with happiness, and it is what I must do, and I will do it. Do you understand me? I will walk without noise, and I will open the door in darkness, and I will 276