Another impossibility, yet by most accounts true: More than once she voluntarily strapped a yellow Star of David on her arm before walking into the ghettos to visit old theater friends, her papers in her pocket to prove, later, her right to leave. How this could ever have worked is unclear, but then the ghettos were slippery, temporary things, their borders well guarded but shifting, the soldiers bribable and perhaps susceptible to charm and beauty. There are stranger things true. There are simpler things not.
Impossible as welclass="underline" When my mother was engaged to my father in 1964, she traveled alone into Communist Hungary, which her fiancé was not allowed to reenter and her future mother-in-law was not allowed to leave. She spent three days there, and at the end of that time my grandmother asked her to smuggle out of the country the particularly incriminating anti-Communist novel she’d completed a decade prior. My mother rode the train to Austria with three hundred onion-skin pages tucked in her girdle. A vádlott was published in 1999, twenty years after my grandmother’s death. It’s the only book I’ve read, in rough translation, of her forty. But her longest novel, I’ve just learned (reeling with the glee and fear of things I don’t even believe in), involves a man from the Romanian region of Moldavia shot to death by the fearsome Iron Guard. Ten years ago, I wrote a short story about an American boy learning of someone shot to death by the Iron Guard in Moldavia, in the city of Iaşi. I’d chosen the region at random, then was drawn in — drowned — by its history.
I’d love to take this confluence as an indicator of inherited memory, as evidence of further connections, further legacies — of empathy, artistry, guts. But to claim one ancestor would be to claim them all, even those on the wrong sides of humanity’s decisive moral battles. The slave owners, the anti-Semites, the Huns, the cowards. And furthermore: Wasn’t the presumption of a genetic morality the error at the very core of Nazi ideology?
I’ve written the story of the painted faces twenty times, from every perspective, at every degree of remove from reality, but my descriptions of candles and shadows have never come close to resurrecting the commingled scents of greasepaint and melting wax and fear. Certain images I’ve copied over so many times they’ve come to feel like truth. (My grandmother drawing the bristles of the brush through her lips to flatten them, naming the creases of the face as she etches each girl’s future there — the lines called think-too-much, the lines called worry-too-much, and smoke-too-much, and know-too-much. The way she flips her tarot cards on the small table after the transformations are complete, telling one girl to beware tall men, another she’s surrounded by protectors.)
When I tell it from my father’s point of view, it is always a story of innocence. In the girls’ narration, it becomes gossipy: This writer, this former actress, painting their faces in the closet, was surviving the war by pawning the family silver one spoon at a time. She had enough spoons to last five more years. She was psychic, even beyond her tarot skill. Strangest of alclass="underline" Despite her liberal views, her Bohemian friends, she’d been married to the member of Parliament who had written the Second Jewish Law in 1939. (The new quotas put tens of thousands out of work, restricted Jews from the press, took their land, defined Jewishness as a race rather than a religion. Even the theater was affected. If no more than 6 percent of any cast could be Jewish, then in a play with fifteen characters, one actor was too many. No Jew could direct a play or own a theater. Of course, the girls don’t really whisper this litany. But I need to. I need to remind myself of these details in draft after draft, as if the writing might wear the words thin, until their meanings won’t stick.) The same year the law passed, Rózsa Ignácz divorced János Makkai. They were first cousins, the women whisper. And this boy with the candle, he is their son. As my grandmother seals their wrinkles with powder, they wonder about cause and effect. Did the political differences destroy the marriage? Or were theaters included in the law as revenge against the woman who was already leaving him? Perhaps she’d had an affair with a Jewish director. Their questions are my own.
One of these times, if I get the words in the correct order, if I retrace more precisely the lines of history, I am convinced I will learn something I need to know. If not about my grandparents’ strange marriage or its dissolution, if not about bloodlines, then at least about courage in its quietest manifestations.
In any event, the faces were finished, the walking sticks distributed. The girls laughed at themselves in the mirror and headed into the night. What acts of sabotage or simple self-preservation they accomplished on the streets are not a matter of record.
EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT THE BOMBER
The briefcase he used was not the black one shown in phone footage. The black case belonged to Marion Cates, deceased, and contained two egg salad sandwiches. That the black case appeared so persistently on the news and on social media, despite being of no interest to investigators, delayed the apprehension of the bomber by as much as two days.
We’re told that in third grade, his English was lacking. We’re told that he refused to smile for class pictures, but he was a happy child, he was. We are told he loved painting. We’re told that Miss Mullens is too overwhelmed at this time to answer more questions.
He was on the FBI’s radar, and then he was not. He was someone’s son, and then he was not. He had a girlfriend, and then he did not. He had a beard, and then he did not. His sister understood him, and then she did not.
There is no question that he acted alone.
He suffered from plantar fasciitis, cluster headaches, a borderline attention disorder, and repeated sinus infections. His heart was broken five distinct times. This much is clear from the autopsy.
He studied botany, specifically the sticky and miraculous unfurling of single grains of pollen into long strings that drilled down the length of the pistil and into the ovary. His graduate work addressed the lipids involved in this reaction. His research was nearly complete.
His finances were in order. He paid bills the day before the bombing, which leads us to wonder if he thought he’d get away with it, go home and need electricity, water, credit cards; or if some ingrained societal obedience overrode all he knew of the future.
His one indulgence was scarves. He spent more income, proportionally, on scarves than on entertainment. In eleven of the sixteen photographs available to the public, he wears a silk scarf of one pale color or another, tucked expertly into the collar of his leather jacket. Affected, perhaps, but not for a European, which he was, after all, even if he was also American, even if he was also a thousand other things, not the least of which was vain.