I opened the newspaper to an opinion piece that started with
Baghdad. Baghdad,
I thought. It was like a dream that became harder and harder to remember. There were whole sections of the city that I couldn’t bring to mind. My memory had gotten woolly. Old-lady pilly, scratchy, woolly.
I read the first line three times, trying desperately to sort it out, but my mind was too thick. I wasn’t what I used to be. I used to read ravenously. Now it felt as though the words got stuck behind my eyes. I’d tried to get back into cooking too, but I couldn’t lift the heavy Dutch oven, and soup wasn’t soup without it. The smell of shellfish made me sick. It didn’t help that there were pills everywhere—on the cutting board, balancing on the sugar jar, always in danger of falling into something or being lost. I’d become superstitious. I didn’t move them, feeling as though they bore some ghostly weight and that any sudden shift might provoke a temperamental force that had been relatively good to us so far, keeping Joseph alive.
I could do very little but walk. Sometimes in Central Park. Sometimes down Central Park West, over to Columbus, and all the way down to the La Fortuna bakery on Seventy-First Street. I’d plop onto a chair and order two mini cannolis but eat only one. On the way back, I’d rest on a bench and watch the elderly couples from the nursing home shuffle by, leaning into each other as if against some fierce wind only they could feel. Peas in a pod. Yogurt and cucumber. Dates and almonds. How things should be. We should have gotten old at the same rate, I thought. That’s what you hope for, that’s luck: not waiting around.
Now, in our apartment, the air wafted in from the street, refreshing and bright. I decided to go out again. I’d get a FrozFruit for Joseph in case he remembered later. Ada was reading him a Bellow story. She didn’t laugh at the right parts but neither did he. His face was smiling. I loved how it could do that: smile without moving. Someone else, some stranger, would never have known that he was happy inside. But I did.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said.
I put my cheek to his face. He didn’t kiss me though I waited for it. It wasn’t easy on the muscles, but I waited, hoping. He was gone again. Finally, disappointed and in a full-body cramp, I left. More than fifty years together and I was still telling myself not to take these things personally.
I headed south. The street was quiet and wet, the air thick. I’d been inside for only an hour, but it had hailed in that time. Little puddles winked along the curb. The buildings seemed bigger at night. For a moment, I imagined one crumbling, out of nowhere. Just crashing. Me getting trapped. It wasn’t the pain I wondered about. It was Joseph. If he would miss me. If he would even know.
The moon was a butter smudge. I allowed myself to imagine our daughter looking at the same moon. It’s such a cliché, everyone under the same sky. But it wasn’t just that for me. I wanted to know that the sky was hopeful for her, that it seemed limitless and promising. I wanted to know that she didn’t mind being vulnerable and that someone was holding her even when she looked away, despite me giving her up. That maybe she was loved even more for it, because of who she’d become. Call me an old goon but I imagined that one day she’d just show up—her feet turned in but her body strong like a dancer’s—and that she wouldn’t be angry. She’d be as curious as we were, maybe even grateful. Proof I’d been watching too much television.
I walked past doormen who nodded their heads, businessmen whose shoes clacked as they stepped out of cabs, streetlamps that poured down orange light, big dogs, little dogs, empty bags of chips that lifted with a tiny gust of wind, a dead tomato with half its skin beside it. People still dropped tomatoes. People still stepped on other people’s garbage, I thought. Everything despite everything and maybe because of it—because my Joseph was dying.
And then it hit me, just when I was feeling most sorry for myself. He’d been smiling for her. For Ada. He didn’t give me a kiss but he’d been smiling for her. I picked up my pace. For a moment, I thought of all the things he could be doing. If he could smile, what else could he do? Make his own tea? Help me sort papers? Maybe I didn’t push him enough, but not everything was my fault.
I was angry. I walked until I hardly realized I was walking anymore. I was really moving. I sped up. I gave it my all. I didn’t care how old I looked—that I had to swing my arms like I was putting out a fire, that you could hear my huffy breathing from here to Hoboken. Sweat broke out on my back and grabbed at my sweater. My chest pounded harder and harder. It was exhilarating. Two more blocks. I could do it. I felt part of the world again, for the first time in months, destructible and indestructible. These emotions, this anger. Jealousy is invigorating in small doses. I knew I’d read that somewhere. This was part of a relationship. Part of being alive. It thrilled me for a second to think that we were still active in something, both of us. Still him and her.
For a moment, I was caught in a memory of a place that no longer existed. I was eighteen years old, combing my mother’s hair in her bedroom. Two days before, she’d thrown herself from our balcony, desperate for my father to notice her, something. She was so sick then, her truths oozing out of her like a night sweat. My father had turned his back to speak to her, her face ravaged by the fall. “You look like a bad watermelon, rotten,” he’d said. “I cannot bear to look at you.” She begged him to stay with her but he left. He was a wearing a perfectly ironed shirt, English-tailored and white. I remember thinking,
I will never love a man who looks this civilized, this kempt.
As I combed her hair that morning, I looked out the window. There was Joseph, two steps behind his father, following the call of the
shamash,
shouting,
“Abu rahmin!”
Kicked-up sand coated just the backs of his pant legs, as if he’d fallen into a spill of Bedouin yogurt. I’d seen him before on his way from the Hinnuni bazaar. Our eyes locked. He didn’t look away. He stopped walking altogether. For a moment, I thought he was going to throw something at me. But he didn’t. We just stayed like that, looking. Joseph squinted his eyes—was that a smile?—and put his hand on his belly. With the other hand, he wiggled his fingers. It was a smile. It was a wave. He wiggled some more. I gasped, laughed out loud. He mouthed,
Are you all right?
He must have heard. I nodded. He pointed to the sun, then to where it would be at around four o’clock. Then he pointed to where he was standing. I would meet him here.
Yes.
I nodded. Thank you.
Our love affair lasted nearly a year in Baghdad. Often, we met at the Suq el-Haraj, where my family never shopped and where no one would recognize me. We walked along al-Mutanabbi Street, pretending we had important business. We stood together on the summer riverbed when the Tigris and the Euphrates had fully receded. When my father was at the Mee-Dan until the wee hours of the morning, we could be alone on the roof on my bed (which we’d brought up for the season), drawing invisible lines between the formations of stars. We loved to watch the stars. Joseph gave me everything I’d never had: affection, attention, hope. All the while, our relationship was a secret. We weren’t the same, he and I. My father would never have let us marry. “An aggressive rooster,” he liked to say, “yells when he is still in the shell.” Joseph was poor but good. His heart was the purring engine in his chest, motivating everything he ever did. My father would never have understood. TB took my mother two months after we met.
Joseph went to the United States before me, preemptively, sure of what Baghdad was about to become. I wanted to go with him, of course. My father said over his dead body. So it was. He was a wealthy Jew, my father, and so suspected of Zionism. He was too proud. He’d always been too proud. I left the day before he was hanged. The only bit of kindness he ever showed me was when he woke me in the dead of night and pointed to the car across the street. “Go,” he said. He’d sewn my mother’s gold into the hem of my coat. There was nothing left for me. “Go,” he said again. I went. I crept into the car packed with strangers. We sat in that car like matches in a matchbox and were driven for what felt like forever. When a baby coughed, his mother put her hand over his mouth. She didn’t mean to but she killed him. Can you believe that? She didn’t even cry out when she could no longer feel his pulse. She choked on her own breath and it sounded like her insides were drowning. Later, I woke up to a Bedouin with a dagger over my face. “Give me your sweater,” he said. God knows why he didn’t want my coat. And the whole time, from the moment I left to the moment I arrived at Ellis Island, I kept thinking of Joseph. Happy, bright thoughts that prevented my body from shaking with cold and the grief of leaving everything I ever knew. Sometimes I think I would have shivered to death without him.
In New York, everything changed. I thought love would come easily and I’d be good at it. I’d waited my whole life. We had nothing except for the clothes on our backs, feelings of betrayal and anger and nostalgia for a country that refused to keep us, and a rental with so many roaches that I slept with the covers over my head. I worked nights as a restaurant hostess and developed an allergy to peanuts. And though I was happy to be with Joseph, I couldn’t bear feeling so vulnerable. The idea of love doesn’t account for a fear of loss. In loving him, I grew afraid of losing him, more and more by the day. New York glittered; each light, I thought, was something else to take him from me. Something else for him to love more than me. Without him, I would be worse than just alone—I’d be alone after not being alone. It was possible, I realized, to hold on to something too tight, to suffocate it. In Baghdad, it had been different. Nothing was so precious. But in New York, I held on too tight. I’m not sure how to explain the feeling that’s left when love is sacrificed in the name of love. Surely it’s something hollowed out and dry.
That place where I’d watched him from my window was long gone. I could find it on a map but that was all. And there were so many maps of it, twinkling with blue arrows and American-flag graphics on the television. A battleground now. A writhing sandstorm. A grainy whirl of limbs; eyebrows as thick as mine over eyes peeking out from a broken window; blood and enormous green tanks creeping along like crocodiles until—
boom!
—another fountain of sand burst from the earth and floated down like glitter. Another twenty-one, fifty-four, eighty-six, thirty-three, sixty-two dead, said that banner gliding across the bottom of the screen. You cannot glide across sand. Another forty-five, seventy-eight, one hundred Baghdadi citizens dead, it said. And here we were with unbroken windows all around us.
On the day before Joseph left for the United States, I snuck to that place that’s no longer there to see Joseph Shohet at his father’s stall.
Shohet
means “chicken slaughterer.” Before Joseph and his father killed the chicken, they felt under the feathers, checking for good meat. Legally, they had to kill it in one stroke. It sounded like a whip. Joseph’s hands were sticky and so he kept them folded behind his back when he came to me. He put his toes over my toes. We were barefoot. He didn’t kiss me. He hovered his lips over my lips. His nose over my nose. We stayed there like that, training ourselves. It might be a while until we’d see each other again. He would go first. We didn’t know how long it might take. We were hiding behind a huge white wall covered in rose vines. Later, at home, I found a chicken feather stuck to my ankle. I arrived at Ellis Island more than a year later with the feather stuffed into my shirt, parallel to my spine, a mere needle then, barely recognizable.
I was almost home. Three tight knots of dog poo were perched on the sidewalk, as if from an icing piper. I stepped off the curb, around the broken hydrant, and to the railings. A couple of beer cans lay crushed in the flower bed. The smell of boric acid was strong in the lobby. I thought I’d heard the five-hundred-pound exterminator yesterday.
I walked to the elevator. Six steps and always six. Once it was four. The elevator light passed from the fourth to fifth floor, where it stopped, stalled, broken for the hundredth time this year. I walked up the three flights as slowly as can be, a little pain in my chest. There was graffiti on the second floor from the rascals in 2B who never got their hair cut.
JanICE,
the graffiti said. They could have been more creative. Silly boys, always on their skateboards, banging into our door and startling my heart. And the landing lights were broken again. The TV yammered in Dottie’s apartment above us.
Survivor.
What else do you need to know about her?
Ada was waiting at the door. The single curl of gray hair at her left eye. She put her arms around my shoulders and pulled me to her. Dear heavens, she was strong. She did yoga, surely. Chin-ups too, I bet.
“Miss Victoria,” she whispered in my ear.
She held me. I was everywhere else. Down the hall, green rain boots, welcome mat, umbrella, slash marks on a door from a crowbar, and next door, the door frame, white paint with a tan rectangle from where old lady Kratzner’s mezuzah once was. We didn’t have one. We didn’t want the attention. I blamed that now. We should have. I blamed everything.
I knew from the words. Of course I did. From the way that she said them. It was that easy. I wasn’t stupid.
“Miss Victoria, Miss Victoria,” she said.
Miss who?
Miss me?
How long had that mezuzah been gone? It would have taken so little to fix the door frame. A dollop of paint. Wite-Out, for goodness’ sake. Toothpaste even. Ada’s gray curl played leapfrog now. She was moving her head around like she was an unhappy cow. She had lovely eyes like one too. A nutty brown. Long lashes. She didn’t need to say it. She had experience in this. The eyes did it for her. What a waste of words, of good, useful breath.
“He has passed,” she said.
Her mouth moved. Her teeth were the color of white lilies. Her lips the color of something more tropical. A gentle sprinkling of dark freckles was cast across her nose and cheekbones. Any face can become enchanting if you stare at it long enough.