She didn’t open her eyes until she had come. Then she kissed him on the forehead and said, “Thanks, honey.”
He rode home with Arianna drying on his legs. He showered for a long time, just thinking. The violent creak of the stair door as he headed back out roused Irvin from a reverie of Albanian vineyards.
“Hello, Mr. Gellma,” he sighed. “Valk?” He walked two fingers through the air. “A little raining.” He pointed at the ceiling, frowning.
“I think it’s clearing up,” Slava said.
Irv, to which the doorman’s name had been reduced by some of the tenants, nodded with the enthusiasm of an Albanian spotting a Serb in his garden. You fockin moron, you could be relax at home on day off, but you go walk in rains. “Vait, pliz,” he said. He opened the delivery closet and rifled through coats. He withdrew a long, sturdy umbrella with a carved handle of a zebra hanging its head. “Mr. Seetrick forget,” he said. “But Mr. Seetrick Saturday is dinner come out only — you bring back, okay?”
“Thanks, Erv.” In deference to liberal values or immigrant solidarity, Slava insisted on calling the Albanian by his actual name, and often wondered if the doorman heard the subtle distinction. On this matter, Erv/Irv kept Slava in suspense, which led Slava to try harder in ever more deformed ways, so that he ended up addressing the doorman by some variation of “Aaaairvvv…” The latter’s mystified distaste in reaction to this was clear, though he did not feel entitled to correct a tenant. America had suffered him greater indignities.
“Vait, vait, vait.” Irvin held up a hand. “Vait.” He disappeared under the podium and emerged with half a loaf of bread in a plastic bag. He banged it against the podium. “For birds,” he said. “You give.”
Slava hesitated. “Maybe you do it, Erv.”
“They hungry now,” Irvin said, disappointed. “Afternoon — hungry.”
Slava obeyed and took the loaf.
“Small pieces, give small pieces,” Irvin said, joining his thumb and index finger. “Bon appétit.”
Slava valked. He valked to the river, closed his eyes, and sniffed at the salt in the air. He was an object of indifference to the one thousand pigeons hopping around the pavement, but when he opened Irvin’s plastic bag — after ten minutes of trying to unwork the impossible knot, uttering an obscenity, and finally tearing it open — their feelings changed. Following Irvin’s instruction, he tore off small pieces and scattered them gently. The pigeons wobbled toward the bread and pecked, bopping one another.
In Arianna’s bed an hour before, he only wanted to leave, but now, without her, he longed for her, as if he had a question and she could answer it. Had he just argued with her because he really disagreed or because he resented receiving instructions? If she claimed to find him interesting, why did she forget to ask his opinion? And when she did, she argued against him. In frustration, he chucked the loaf at the railing. It thudded to the ground, scattering the pigeons. They regrouped and stared at him resentfully. He gave them the middle finger and walked off toward the library.
The Yorkville branch of the New York Public Library swam in lazy yellow light. The children’s section was full of toddlers crawling on the mats and shrieking occasionally to protest their confinement while their mothers murmured over the baby-size tables. Slava found the reference librarian and asked for good books on the Holocaust in the East. Books with dates, numbers, street names. Books to make an invented claim letter read like a beautiful woman who could cook, too, if Israel Abramson were the judge.
“You sure you don’t want Baby Einstein?” the librarian said. He cast a destructive look in the direction of the hollering children. “Research project?”
“Fiction,” Slava said.
The librarian nodded. “That’s all the fashion now.”
Dusk was beginning to settle by the time Slava dialed Israel. Listening to the ring, he watched a man and woman work at a kitchen counter in an apartment across the courtyard, strains of brass in their stereo. Briefly, the music swelled, and she bumped his rear end with hers.
“Hello?” Israel said again.
Slava snapped to. “You’re wrong,” he said.
“Those were my son’s favorite words.”
“I’m sitting here with half the library, Israel. Minsk ghetto — formed date such-and-such.” Slava peered at his notepad. “July twentieth. A hundred thousand inmates. Largest ghetto in German-occupied territory in the Soviet Union. Et cetera.”
“Okay. Very good.”
“First of all, someone applying for restitution is not a historian. The people who wrote these books know how many inmates there were. The people in the ghetto didn’t get a fact sheet.”
“Okay, but they know when it started, they know where they lived.”
“You ever apply for anything, Israel, Yuri ever apply for a scholarship? You’re the guy reading the claims—every claim is going to say it started on July twentieth, we lived at such-and-such an address. But you can’t give him an address. They have records for that. You’ve got to — I don’t know—distract him. You’ve got to make him not care that there’s no address, that there’s actually no verifiable detail. That’s how they check facts, I told you. I know from someone who knows. Tell a story they’ll forget it’s a story. That’s our best chance.”
“Slavchik, my bird, we’re not trying to get into Harvard here. We want to have a boring little story about poor Jews in the Holocaust.” Israel cleared his nose. “Another old Jew, pity, let’s give him a penny. He starts reading Anna Karenina, he’s going to have questions. Babel is dead, my friend. All the best Jews got killed. It’s the boring Jews who got left. Let’s give them a penny. You follow?”
“You’re wrong,” Slava said. “I think.”
“You want to hypnotize him. You want to tell him a nice fairy tale.”
“Something like that.”
There was a pause. “I don’t know,” Israel said. “We’re following you now, Gogol. Do what you think.”
“By the way, Gogol was an anti-Semite,” Slava said.
“And you think Jews are a heap of luck?”
Slava hung up with the pyrrhic satisfaction of a child getting his way. The problem remained. For all the history he read, he couldn’t insert his grandmother into it. Pushing off the endless small-font paragraphs in the books the librarian had given him, he could smell the rain-soaked canvas of the trucks that transported prisoners to their workdays breaking concrete outside the ghetto, but he couldn’t smell her. What kind of brain was it that could run so effortlessly with one thing but not with another? He needed something to start him, but he couldn’t figure out what. No matter what notes Slava made on one of the legal pads he had stolen from the office, the exercise ended in him staring at the wall or at the couple across the courtyard.
Eventually, they left the kitchen. Probably to the dining room to have the dinner they’d made. And then to the bedroom in a buzzed glaze, half-dream, half-reality, the mellowness of body next to body, until they fell asleep, laughably early, the television chattering softly, the bed light carelessly on till the morning.
Around the courtyard, windows were blinking on. Arianna hadn’t called. Strange to be together every weeknight but apart on Saturday. Slava dialed her cell phone, but it rang until voice mail. The evening was his, just as he’d asked.
He pictured Arianna in the ghetto instead of Grandmother. Arianna in the midst of a dusty ghetto street flanked by flower beds outside the windows and small gardens in the backyard — homes, somehow, even if inside a ghetto. How effortlessly Arianna objected to having Grandmother’s money rerouted to Grandfather. (Did she object? She actually prohibited it — gently, chidingly: You can’t.) Not a glimmer of doubt passed over her face. But what if Arianna had eaten potato peels for breakfast and dinner (no lunch) for a year? If she had watched the pale skin come off her beautiful legs from wading in swamps day after day? Would she be of two minds then? Could she go sixty years without mentioning what had been taken, six years without complaining as her body undid itself? And if, in turn, Grandmother had been born in America, would she object in Arianna’s fashion? Here his imagination did not dare to go, a sacrilege to imagine so casually the undoing of so many deaths.