9 Immigrants, Part 3 1972/2010
He didn’t know where he would live now, maybe Paraguay — some visas had been arranged there, though he knew almost nothing about the country and was afraid to think about it. It was November 5, 1972, two months after he’d lost his case before the Israeli supreme court, just five days before the expulsion order was to go into effect, and he sent some bags ahead with a friend, then traveled alone that night from Tel Aviv to Zurich, where the friend met him with boarding passes and transit visas to Asunción, Lansky’s documents under the name “Mr. Meyer.” Gray suit, dress shirt from Brooks Brothers, madras tie — he was already sticky under his clothes by the time the plane had left Lod. They made it across the Atlantic that night to Rio de Janeiro, then caught a connection to Buenos Aires a few hours later the same morning. Israel, Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina. Soiled from the stuffy cabin air, waiting for the flight to Paraguay, he decided to get a shave in the airport barbershop. It was just hours later, when they landed in Asunción, that he realized the plan had failed. Two Paraguayans, then an American agent of some kind, came into the cabin and said in English that he was not permitted to disembark. It turned out that the flight to Asunción had further stops in La Paz, Lima, Panama City, and finally Miami. It turned out that all the FBI had to do, once he’d boarded in Buenos Aires, was to keep him on the plane all the way to its terminus. America. Thirty-six hours in transit, stops in seven countries. They met him at Miami International and drove him to the FBI office downtown, where his lawyer went out to get him a piece of bread and some milk for his ulcers.
In her living room on Long Island, Gila read the letter another time, then folded it into thirds and put it into the envelope. She turned down the stereo and stood there with her eyes closed, waiting. She was going to mail it care of Hannah Groff’s editor but you didn’t have to do that anymore. It was 2010 and Hannah of course had her own website. Her address was right there on the website. She put the stamp on the letter and left it on the sideboard and went into the kitchen for a glass of water and took the morning’s dose of aprepitant, which helped with the nausea during her chemotherapy treatments. She ran some cool water over her face in the kitchen sink, pressing her fingertips to her eyes. It had been twenty-eight years since she’d seen Hannah. Maybe they could talk now. They could talk about some of the things Hannah didn’t know — they could talk about Meyer.
Forty minutes sitting with her hands over her face, trying not to vomit. She took another shower and the lavender scent of the soap was mild enough to be soothing. The silk pajamas hurt her skin, so she put on some cotton ones. She looked at the letter on the sideboard, then she went back again to Hannah’s story about David Bellen.
10 Reunion NEW YORK, 2010
1.
I received Gila Konig’s first letter in the spring of 2010, about six months after my piece on David Bellen had first been published. Apart from the Bellen story, I hadn’t written any of the book you’re reading now — I didn’t know yet that the Bellen piece would become part of the larger story I would eventually, after some resistance, find myself telling. As I said before, when Gila told me about her past in Tel Aviv in 2010, I knew almost nothing about Meyer Lansky and wasn’t very interested in him.
I saw her only one time after I was twelve, at a restaurant on 79th Street, just a few blocks from where my father had run his antiques business back in 1982, the last time we’d seen each other. It was a bright sunny afternoon and Gila wore a cream-colored hat made of soft straw to protect her skin from the sun. That May, at the age of seventy-one, she had undergone what would turn out to be her final round of radiation and chemotherapy treatments. Her hair beneath the hat had started to grow back in, gray and straight and close to the scalp. I had forgotten the delicateness of her cheekbones, her lips. We sat upstairs on the restaurant’s covered porch, fans hung from the ceiling, waiters moving by in white jackets, as in some old film whose setting was Capri. I smiled at Gila the way I sometimes cry at a movie that isn’t really sad. She had written me a few times now. I imagined her motives for seeking me out were bound up in her illness. Because I write for a living, people I don’t know or hardly know have frequently approached me on the slimmest of pretexts to set down their life stories. It just happens, more than I would have ever expected. Particularly in the face of illness or old age, they come to me with secrets that no longer seem important enough to be ashamed of. I listen to the crux of their lives and I tell them no, I’m sorry, I’m busy with other projects. What I can’t explain is that it’s not that their life story isn’t interesting, it’s that everyone’s life story is interesting.
But Gila was of course someone I knew. A friend of hers, she’d told me, had seen my piece on Bellen and passed it on to her — the friend, Hugh, and his partner owned the apartment where Gila was staying that night as a guest. They had a summer house near where Gila lived now, in Sag Harbor, New York. It was a strange coincidence, I pointed out — my family, as she knew, had had a house in the next town over, Southampton. As she also knew, it was during a stay at that house that my father had first told me of their affair.
Her clothes looked expensive — pearl-gray slacks, a simple white blouse, crisply pressed. The clothes seemed to assert that she had taste and also more money than I probably expected.
“ ‘Strange,’ ” she said, echoing my word. “Everyone always says ‘strange.’ But life is strange. My life certainly has been strange.”
She took a slow drink of water. When she put the glass down, she lightly wiped her hands, one atop the other, watching them. The cancer had been “strange,” she told me. It had started in her big toe — all her toenails turned a cloudy white — and two different doctors had assured her at first that it was nothing, until by the time anyone gave it any real thought it had metastasized all over her body.
I said I was sorry. She looked at me then with something like forbearance, a kind of suppressed disappointment. In that look, I could see a regret for all the perfectly real things that separated us. But I could also see that, having read my piece, she thought we were somehow kindred spirits. She had expected something less trite from me than “strange” and “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t ask you here to talk about what happened with your father all that time ago,” she said then. “A lot of painful things. Obviously. And I didn’t ask you here to talk about my cancer. A lot of people get cancer. I wanted to show you something. That’s why I asked you here. This is something I thought you’d find interesting as a writer. Something that’s not just personal.”