Barbara Lefcowitz Poetry

PALE BLUE LIGHT

At least there were a couple of apple trees.  Though I had to compete with the

scrawny cows to get myself an apple, trudge through piles of dung, be careful not to catch my body in the many sharp thorns that poked through the pasture’s yellowing grass.

Not that I wanted to starve the old cows abandoned here because they no longer produced milk.  Even their flesh was worthless.  But they could survive on apples at least through the summer, return the apple seeds to the soil so new trees would sprout.

I was so hungry that after a while I jumped high as I could despite my years, grabbed a branch and shook it so hard apples scattered on the ground.  By the time I fought my way between the old cows only a marble-size green one was left.  But I was learning to be grateful for small things, like the water from a murky stream I shared with the cows.  The water had a dark brown taste.

In India there are sanctuaries called goshala for old or injured but still sacred cows, who then play a useful role protecting other endangered species, such as vultures.

***

My name is Clare.  I’m 75 years old, in reasonably good health.

I realized I had been sent into exile, had, against my will, been thrust across the border between the relatively benign country of the unneeded and the far more odious country of the unwanted.  It happened one summer afternoon when I let my grandsons lure me into the basement of their house. If only to spend a few more minutes with them, I gave in. Something awesome we want you to see, grandma/ absolutely awesome/ You must see it, Grandma, must…

After tugging me down the stairs so I nearly fell on my face, the 12 year old ordered me to sit on a maroon sofa with broken springs while the 10 year old turned on the old TV to some soap opera.  Laughing, they both fled upstairs, after tossing into my lap a couple of bags of Goldfish crackers and a pink powdered drink packet.  They said they would return soon, banged the door shut.

But they didn’t return.   I tried to escape but the door at the top of the stairs

would not budge.  Something had been pushed in front of it, something solid as a slab left over from a bulldozed building.  I had seen many such around New York and other cities, especially now that the economy had recovered. Developers every day razed French and Italian designed 300 year old brownstones so they could build new mega-malls.

For months, I had looked forward to traveling between New York and LA

to visit my grandsons, as usual showered them with gifts, tried to hug them like when they were small.  Now they turned away.

Banging and screaming help brought no response, not even from Patsy, the family dog.  And despite the midsummer heat outside, the basement was ice-cold.  In the semi-darkness I looked for other means of escape, tripping over abandoned drawings, toy trucks whose wheels had long ago.  On the floor beneath a rusty sink were books I had brought them, parts of games, two framed collages I had made for them some years ago.  Bicycle wheels, an ancient treadmill, that damn rabbit-eared TV I was unable to turn off even when I pulled the plug.

It played all night, one sob story after another between ads for wrinkle creams and eye lifts, until a pale blue light broke through the basement’s darkness.

***

No, the basement’s cinderblock walls were gone; I noticed that the pale blue light was a wobbly net that suspended me over a vast open space. I had no memory of dreaming or, for that matter, of dying.  So I must still be among the living.  Very cold and hungry, the Goldfish gone except for a few crumbs as well as the drink I had liquefied from the rusty sink.

An ice floe drifting on a cold sea.  Tinged blue.  What else could it be?

I once saw a movie about senilicide (killing of old people; sometimes known as senicide).  Though it has not been reported in decades, Inuit from Greenland and northern Alaska had for many centuries, especially in times of famine, abandoned older members of a community to ice floes and set them adrift.  Usually they starved or froze to death.  In summer the community sometimes just tossed the elderly, as well as the infirm, into the sea. When prosperity returned, the abandoned were welcome back into the community if by some miracle they had survived and could swim their way home. Few could.

Yet worse, lapot, ritual killing of the elderly once practiced in Serbia and the feudal Japanese practice of obasute, aimed particularly at older women who were carried to a mountain and left to die.

All I could do was drift.  Maybe the floe would reach warmer waters and I could slide off before it melted?

***

So many fish, more than I’d ever seen, some with golden-red flesh poking through mottled gray skin.  Even some translucent eggs.   I remembered from a long ago biology course that once the eggs were fertilized, both male and female salmon left the spawning grounds and began swimming upstream, struggling through debris and the powerful current.  Despite the difficulties I kept swimming, struggling ahead when tossed back.  Anything to return to my old spawning ground.

When I thought I could go on no longer, I felt a hook, heard the voices of my grandsons.  Come back grandma/we miss you. No, no, no. I broke from the hook, kept swimming hard as I could despite a few gashes.

Kept swimming against the currents and tides, kept swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swim—

***

MONSTER,   MAINE,  RED MEDICINE

1.  Mid February

You kept tugging the leash backwards until my spine, stretched at a steep angle, grazed the  ice on the Kennebunkport promenade. My howls, no matter how vividly red, only made you run faster.  You kept tugging; my hair fanned out in dark spikes as if I’d broken from a Munch woodcut.

But you, my inner monster, were the one who broke free.  My hand still clutched that leash though you were the real conductor, the guide who chose the route, which of the

many houses we lived in together might possibly remember us.  If only a rosette of  the stained glass window in  that Portland townhouse, a panel of pine in that summer cottage on Orr’s Island.

You kept  tugging me all the way back to  the house of my birth in Saco,

where you,  my  inner monster, first entered me.   So clever you could hide in a  lobster trap, disguise yourself as a  rash  red as the medicine  my mother drank in a frantic effort to abort me.

You kept tugging me past borders into the dangerous places,  back through tunnels of raw stones,  through fields of eel grass and toxic berries, bogs of  dark confusion..

2. Late- May

Despite the surprisingly fine weather you wanted to stay curled inside yourself.  But this time I insisted, snapped the leash around your mangy neck, led you  through the mud  to  Kennebunkport Beach, not far from Walker’s Point.  A few wild roses (accurate name?) were beginning to bloom, but you kept your head down, the cones in your retinas responding only to lightwaves of blue-tinged melancholia.            When the little band began  to play  “Sentimental Journey”  on the boardwalk I paused to listen.  But you pulled me away, tugging forward this time, so fast that we were far beyond Kennebunkport, in a place where the shops were bolted shut,  the air black, sticky as tar, as if the world had already run out of all sources of fuel,  the sparks of love and hate alike.

What year is it, I wondered.  Toward whose future are you dragging me?  I dropped the

leash, intent on leaving  you  flat, better your death than mine; ran into an ancient   forest. of pine and birch.    But you rose and followed me, licking my face and hands, until we arrived at a small clearing where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beacher Stowe, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Booth Tarkington, among others, were roasting hotdogs and hamburgers over a barbecue grill. (brand?)  You retrieved a green-rashed tennis ball someone must have lost years ago, pranced around  with the ball balanced perfectly on your nose.   And everyone applauded, unaware they were applauding my monster within.

3. Early July

Last night I wanted to kill  you for barking and nipping at the legs and private parts of  my summer guests whom I so desperately wanted to impress with the fact that I’d survived the red medicine. Did you deliberately act to embarrass me, some neurons broken loose in your little monster-brain,  some memory of the time you roamed freely in the forest primeval baying

at slivers of the moon, stalking the prey you would lacerate with your razor-blade teeth, flensing every shred of skin, sucking the marrow from bones before dropping them on the blood-red ground?

Sorry.  I  know the truth hurts. But I still have not abandoned you.  Would I have

taken you  in if I didn’t love you, albeit in some arcane, quasi-primitive way?  At least that’s what my therapist says.  So be grateful.  Entertain yourself and me as well with your exuberant tricks.  And when someday I take you to a five-star French restaurant like Le Taillevent in Paris–everyone applauding our entrance–don’t leap onto the table and lick the goose pate.  You might tempt me to some act equally crass and maniacal,  like I used to dream of doing when I didn’t know you well and thought a leash was a nuisance designed for the dull and the timid.

4.  Late August

I thought you’d calm down now that the tourists were about to leave. Instead you dragged me from the beach  onto the slippery rocks that led directly up to Walker’s Point and the big white  house owned by the Bush family.  Immediately the Secret Service appeared, guns

pointed.  One of them shot you  in the head.  Though I  feared you were dead, I dropped the leash and slid down the rocks just in time to save my own life.    But without you I felt  terrified, even though I had often wondered about how I’d feel if you no longer tugged me around..  Like a colorblind person must wonder about those mysterious things called green, a man must sometimes wonder how a breast feels when a small mouth tugs thin blue milk from its nipple.

But somebody in the Walker’s Point compound, maybe one of the grand-kids, must have taken pity on you  and brought you to the nearest vet, who performed life saving surgery on your poor head.   I suspect he knew that  you can die only when I die, not before, not after.  So after a few weeks you walked into my Kennebunkport house as if nothing had happened.  First thing I did was buy a new leash.

5.   October

Why now?  After several tranquil weeks when you recuperated and I let you sleep in my bed, why did you suddenly start attacking me, this time your German Shepherd guise. Because your feared those big dogs with docked tails and glossy black suits who had crushed you for years? So at last you would trash them back, that toy Maltese Terrier with

its sooooo elegant azure silk coat, the poodles  in faggoty sweaters and bows?  But, hey, I’m the victim, not you.

6.  December

OK, so dogs have their dog days, their own inner dogs.  But why pick on me again?  Do I not treat you like a purebred Basset Hound, indulge your insatiable need for love?    Yet you bite when least expected, press your Rottweiler bulk into my chest and thighs.  A problem with my scent?   Do you miss those black boots, the time you guarded the swine inside the gates,  Links, Rechts. . .

7. March

I begin to catch on.  At last.  All these years, yet you still can’t accept your mongrel miscegenated pell-mell muddle of mismatched genes, your lack of a Schnauzer beard, a long aristocratic tail that never droops, Dalmatian blue eyes. So one day you’re this, one day that, a multiplicity that exceeds the Greek and Hindu gods, polymorphous nymphs with hundreds of names?   To think that I didn’t notice all those shifts of identity: in truth, I’ve never been much of a dog-person.

Shall we sing  and dance for the nonce?   I’ll wear a crimson gown and you’ll wear a black silk suit with a vest. We’ll turn your feeding bowl into a temple-bell, your bathtub to a pond out of  whose stinking mud and slime comes the lotus. Yes, lotus blooms in Maine despite the frigid climate.   OK, dear monster,   soon we’ll both  enter a Boston Whaler, speed  down the Saco River all the way to–dare I say it?–New Hampshire.

.

***

HO CHI MINH IN  AMERICA

My grandfather Spadino worked alongside Ho Chi Minh building Ebbets Field.  The year was 1915 and the Brooklyn neighborhood was then called Pigtown.  I’m not sure why because when my nonno, my grandfather, told the story to my mother, who many years later passed it on to me, he never said a word about pigs.  Anyway, from what I could learn, Ho was an excellent laborer, always reliable and very strong, despite his slim build.

Nonno thought Ho was Chinese.  He had never heard of Amman, the old name for Vietnam.  But years later when he read in the paper about Ho founding the first communist party in Vietnam, he was sure this was the same man he had known. Of course, by the time Ho became really famous and the Vietnam war was raging,  Nonno’s mind had become so cloudy that he could only recognize his own body. Even when my mother and her sister Angela discovered a tattered snapshot of a man they were sure was Mr. Minh (they never could get straight the Vietnamese order of names, even after I explained many times that if they wanted to be formal, he was Mr. Ho and Minh was his first name), the clouds only thickened in sweet Nonno’s poor brain.  I imagined they looked like some clouds I once saw from an airplane window, white and shabby as if they were old mattresses floating through space.

Because I was teaching a unit on the Vietnam War to my seventh-graders, I, of course, knew that Ho Chi Minh’s birth name was Nguyen Sinh Cung and that he had lots of other names, but that would only confuse them more. For sure the man in the snapshot looked oriental enough for me to nod rather than argue with my aunt and mother.  Now this happened around 1968, not exactly a time when an American would boast of some family connection  with Ho Chi Minh, but none of that mattered to either of them, especially Aunt Angela, who probably would have boasted about a family connection with Genghis Khan or even Adolf Hitler.  Not that she was interested one bit in history or politics; the lure was how such a connection would make the Spadino family very important. . .and maybe even rich?

“You think we could sell the picture? You know, to some collector.  I bet it’s worth a million.  Not everybody can claim such a famous man as a relation,” she said to my mother, presumably the most sensible of her five sisters.

“Sell it?”

“Yeah, sell it at one of those fancy auction places in the city.”

My mother laughed. “But we have no proof it was Mr. Chi.”

“Proof, schmoof.  All you gotta do is believe.”

My mother ignored her.  “Besides, I think families should keep such heirlooms in the family. I mean, if he really was a relative. Papa never said he was family, for god’s sake. Just that he worked with him.  Don’t go around now calling him our great-uncle.”

“Why not?  You can’t boss me around like that. I’m not a kid anymore.  Maybe he married one of our cousins.  Chinese and Italian people have a lot in common, like pasta. It all depends on what you decide to believe. The Chinks brag they invented pasta, but when Marco Polo traveled to China, he was convinced only the Italians could have done it.  See?  I know a little something.  Your kid sister knows something. Jealous?”

The two women glared at one another, but I sat quietly with my notebook in one of the red leatherette kitchen chairs in mama’s Astoria house.  Just get on with the story, I pleaded.

“So you can make a movie out of it and be paid two million dollars, right?” Aunt Angela’s face was red as the leatherette. I said nothing. Thank god, so did mama, who went on to tell me what else she remembered from her father’s story.

This “Chinaman,” it seems, had left his country to travel on a freighter around the world. Every once in a while, he would take a job on shore, like waiting on tables at this fancy hotel, The Parker House, in Boston, and now doing heavy labor in Brooklyn.    “His real goal, papa said, was to get to Paris so he could study. The man was very smart and knew lots of languages. He always talked about making life better for the workers and how cruel bosses were. Believe me, your grandfather could agree with that. Never in his life did he like a boss and when he became a boss himself running that fruit store on Coney Island Avenue, he was so kind to his workers they stole everything and made him go broke right at the heart of the Depression.”

“Yeah, and I never had my own bed,” Angela moaned. “Always I had to sleep with Concetta or Marie or Lucia.  Only you got your own bed.  Oh, I’ll never forgive them for that, never. . .”

“That’s a myth. Besides,they’re dead. Papa and Mama are dead so you can’t forgive them anyway. Now keep your mouth shut until I finish the story. My daughter came all the way here from Massachusetts, from that fancy college where she’s a professor.  You think she came to hear you whine? She wants to know the story so maybe she can write an article.”

Actually, as a member of the Rural Peace Corps, I teach social studies in a junior high.  Neither the town nor the school is the least bit fancy. And I had not the slightest intention of writing an article; sheer curiosity drove me to find out more. I was very keen to know what made political leaders tick. My master’s thesis   was a psychosocial study of Mussolini’s early years.  How much was Ho influenced by America?  Did his experiences here help to shape his communist ideas?

“Mama, was nonno really friendly with this man?  Did they  ever see each other after work?”

“That’s the great part.  Not only did they see each other, sometimes in Chinatown, but your grandfather took pity on Mr.Minh and invited him home for dinner one night.  Soon he became a regular visitor and–now don’t write this down–he secretly began to date your great-aunt Rosa.”

“You sure?”

“That’s what your grandfather said. Of course, no can be sure.”

“How come you never checked it out with the rest of the family?  With Rosa herself?”

Damn, how I wished Rosa was still alive.  She had died in a subway crash when she was only 35.  Unmarried.  An old maid. Disgraceful for an Italian woman back then. My mother shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t have time to ask.”

“Oh yeah?” Aunt Angela broke in. “Even I know about that baby boy with the slanty eyes. Wouldn’t you love to know who told me?”

“Don’t believe a word she says, my kid sister was born with a myth in her mouth.”

Enough. Angela slammed the door; I ate some leftover manicotti, then excused myself because I had to get back to my students.

“Take care of yourself. I hear it’s pretty cold in Massachusetts.”  Why bother to correct her yet again? If she got something out of believing I worked in Massachusetts, so be it.

My work was cut out for me. Only two worries: the first practical, since it was unlikely either the hospitals or the census bureau would have records that far back. The second was  more private. What if. . .Great-aunt Rosa had. . No, good Catholic girls didn’t do such things. Call him Ho, call him Cung. His illegitimate American son, my secret second cousin, was alive. I was convinced. And it was my job to find him.  Even if he had died young.

______________________________________________________________

I took a leave of absence from my job. And armed only with a tea-color photograph of Rosa wearing a lace bow in her ample dark hair, her square face with its big square eyes looking solemn as a funeral parlor, I started by checking whatever birth records existed at all the hospitals in Boston from 1912 to 1915.  Nothing.  Nothing but a couple of bemused stares from a  hospital clerk who assumed I must be some crazy searching for a rich relative who had died without a will. Come to think of it, there was something crazy about looking for a name and date that might match Rosa’s photograph, which I had snuck from my mother’s family album so she’d keep off my back. The only person I confided to once in a while was Angela; if mother had known this, her hair would have turned to snakes.

It was Angela who confirmed the existence of the secret son. She said she found out from nonna Spadino, my grandmother, when the latter was having one of her tirades about the Spadino family, how low class they were. And it was Angela who suggested I place a notice in major newspapers. Even if our boys are fighting against him over there, who would not want to be recognized as the son of Ho Chi Minh?  Promise a reward and they’ll be spilling onto your lap, she said.  Which is almost precisely what happened: so many letters, all with snapshots enclosed,  from men with even a rumor of Vietnamese blood that my small office with daybed and hotplate on Beacon Street was soon a paper jungle.

A person had to meet my strict criteria to qualify for an  interview: he had to be in his mid-fifties, look only partly Vietnamese, and have at least a semblance of Italian, more precisely Spadino about him–preferably, of course, Rosa’s ample dark hair and square face. Or some exotic combo of Rosa’s square eyes with his father’s oriental slant. Triangles maybe.

Only five qualified: the first was really a Thai–when will I ever learn to differentiate between Asians?–and the next two were out and out con artists, one laden with translations of Cung’s main speeches which he insisted on reading with a fake Asian accent at the same time as he reached for my breasts. I had to call the police to take him away.  The other was a woman in drag. She did have a square face, even squarish eyes, though. I was tempted to cancel the other two interviews though Spadinos never gave up without a fight. Still I kept saying to myself  “Close the office and suspend the search. Maybe a distant cousin related to Fidel Castro would pop up someday.”

Lenny Levitsky turned up just in time.  At first I was so startled by his outfit–a black gabardine suit despite the heat and a funny black hat–as well as his long beard and dark curls, I was tempted to call the police again.

“Look,” he said, sitting down before I invited him to do so. “I can show absolute proof I am the cousin you seek, the bastard son of Nguyen Sinh Cung, commonly known as Ho Chi Minh, and your late great-aunt Rosa Spadino. But it’s getting dark out and tonight’s Friday. I’m not allowed to do any work on the Sabbath. Not even turn on a light. There’s no way I can get home now without violating the Sabbath.  Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

“But I don’t know a damn thing about you.  You never even sent me a letter.” What an idiot I was to let him in. I actually believed he was the pizza delivery man and was so hungry I didn’t bother to smell.

“I didn’t have to.  Lenny Levitsky doesn’t waste time writing letters. When he wants something, he goes for it. Period. Just let me spend the night on your floor and I’ll solve your whole problem.  By the way, if you’re thinking I want sex, you’re all wrong. Nice Jewish boys like me don’t fuck on the sabbath. Never.”

I started to dial the police, but Lenny grabbed the phone from my hand.

“Believe me, you got nothing to worry about.  I’m a Hasidic Jew, Lubavitcher family.  I guess you don’t know nothing about us. But one thing we are is safe.  And clean.  Very clean. And you won’t have to serve me a morsel of food because it’s the Sabbath and I wouldn’t eat none of your goddamn food anyway.”

The next morning his chanting woke me up very early.

“Just doing my prayers. I should be walking to schul –that means synagogue– right now but Jews can pray anywhere.”

He began to sway up and down and I was afraid he’d knock his head open on the edge of my desk. Something called davening, he explained. Gets the whole body involved. “Real cool, man. Real cool.”

I drank a few cups of black coffee,  tried to ignore him. Sooner or later starvation would force him to leave. It was time to write to the two other candidates and tell them I’d called off the search.

“Hey, what are you typing for?  That’s an insult to my religion.”

“Sorry. I have work to do. Would you kindly leave?”

“But I have some amazing news for you.”

“Leave.”

“Something no one in the whole world knows.”

“Leave.”

“Ho Chi Minh was Jewish.”

“And the Pope’s Chinese. Now scram.”

“Typical atheist cynic. Don’t you believe anything?”

“Only when I want to.”

“Just let me explain. You’ll be doing a real mitzvah, a good deed. God will love you. You’ll be able to get real tight with him.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Now for the last time: scram.”  I reached for the phone but again he grabbed it, took out a pocket knife and cut the cord. My screams made him laugh but no one else responded. Though I despised his Vietnam policy, the words of LBJ kept asserting themselves: Come, Let us Reason Together.

It didn’t take more than five minutes for Lenny to remove his hat and curls–how could I not have noticed they were a wig–and plead with me to protect him from being drafted.  The year was 1968, the war in Vietnam was heating up by the hour, young men were burning their draft cards, escaping to Canada or Sweden, pulling strings to get student deferments, shouting “HO HO, WE WON’T GO.”

“My draft board didn’t believe fighting was against my religion.”

“I don’t believe a word you’re saying.”

“That’s up to you. Me, I’d rather believe than not. Skepticism, the curse of our generation, cuz.”

“But you’re much too young to be Ho’s son.”

“So make me his grandson. What’s the difference?”

I took Lenny in tow and helped him get a job at a restaurant. This may sound silly, but after a while I began to believe he was my cousin. Those eyes. The same beauty mark in the same spot as Aunts Angela and Concetta. Maybe not Ho Chi Minh’s son, but you can’t have everything. He was sort of cute, and he promised he wouldn’t wear his Jewish clothes because they would attract too much attention, though he still kept up his prayers.  He had converted to Judaism when he ran away from the orphanage in California where he had been forced to live after my great-aunt Rosa died. In an emergency he could wear the clothes, complete with the fake beard, if he needed a disguise.

“But you said you were Ho’s grandson, no?”

“OK, I was put in the orphanage after my dad went to jail for selling hash and heroin. My mom had to flee to Mexico because she accidentally shot the narc who turned my dad in.”

I made a space for him in my basement and all went smoothly; when Saigon fell in 1975 to the Viet Cong, he decided to leave for warmer climes. At least if he was arrested now, he wouldn’t be forced to fight in Vietnam, “against our dear uncle.” What could I say? We had never been lovers, after all, and frankly it would be a relief not to worry about the Selective Service knocking on my door.

Not a word from him until 1990. Vietnam had opened up for tourists and he wondered if I wanted to go there with him, just for a cheap vacation, nothing more intended, though he had always wondered what “our” uncle’s country looked like.

We hired a car and driver, made our way north from Saigon to Hanoi on the bumpy, sometimes unpaved two-lane road known as Highway One. There was no Highway Two, and from the looks of things–the peasants working in the rice paddies, straw conical hats on their heads, returning at night to tin or mud shacks; the begging children; the ubiquitous rust and dirt–that nearly mythical second highway wouldn’t happen for a long, long time.

The major tourist attraction in Hanoi was Ho’s mausoleum, where his body lay Lenin-style in a large catafalque.. .We walked around it, watched by the very serious guards. Suddenly, Lenny stopped, turned to face Ho and began loudly to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. He was whisked away by the police before I could say Nguyen Sinh Cung, never to be seen again.   Move on, move on, said a guard with marble teeth and lots of medals hanging from his uniform.

Hey, that was it! Ho’s American son could have returned to Vietnam; by now he’d be an old man. So he couldn’t be the guard. But the guard could be the son of the American, Ho’s real grandson.  And he doesn’t even know it, but I thought it best if I kept my belief a secret.

Myths, after all, die hard.

MAGNOLIA

Every April I ponder

the mystery of the magnolia tree,

for a few days flaunting its bell-shaped blossoms,

more ancient than bees and roses,

before shedding them, slick petals

on the pavement that stick to shoes

make people slip, their deep lavendar

tinge giving way to an ash gray,

juices exuding stains, stamens and fruit

luring squirrels. Like Snow White’s

stepmother, the rest of the tree

could be jealous of its youthful blossoms,

wasting the energy that made them in favor of

the craving for admiration of itself alone.

Yet even as the bells of its blossoms

briefly ring the arrival of spring

other flowers have emerged from the buds

of other bushes and trees, lavish

yellows and blues, so I stop

pondering the magnolia tree,

assume that with luck

next April I’ll wonder again.

***

APRIL GUEST

Summer has arrived too early,

before I’ve even set the table. It does not apologize.

I offer it a drink, a stack of magazines, but it’s in a

chatty mood, follows me into the kitchen

and warns me of the perils of cutting onions

too soon, so the sun will fry them, along with

my sliced garlic. I suggest that summer

fold the napkins, count the spoons and forks.

But it keeps talking. the noisiest season,

all those raucous bar-be-cues and squealing kids,

claps of thunder. Perhaps another guest

will ring the bell, dressed for April, keep

summer company watching pre-season baseball?

Excuse me, but I must whip the eggs

so the soufflé will rise just enough.

When I set the bowl aside, summer warns

about the bacteria that thrive in uncooked warm eggs.

Do I want to poison my guests? Enough.

I rush to save the ice-cubes

dump them down my cleavage

just as the rest of the guests arrive.

THE MAN IN THE POWDER BLUE ROBE

“Most of what exists is invisible to us, giving off neither light nor radio waves to tell us of its presence”—James Trefill

My name is Dr. Daniel Joseph Camahi and I’m the Assistant Chief of Pathology at a famous hospital in Chicago.

The last thing I did before leaving Istanbul last spring was to walk once more along the Golden Horn towards the Galata Bridge. Perhaps there was still a chance I’d find Elijah–or at least the man in the powder blue robe who claimed to be Elijah and who had followed me from the day I arrived in Turkey.

Somewhere in the maze of fruit stands… Somewhere among the tourists; sailors; old men in skullcaps selling blue plastic eyes to ward off evil I might spot him. Somewhere among young couples holding hands, the girls wearing mini-skirts that revealed their smashing legs, their lovers wearing a Chicago Bulls or Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt; among the veiled and black-robed women with their five or six children; chainsmoking men rushing towards the ferry docks; a little band playing some plaintive song on an accordion, cello, guitar, and what looked like a xylophone.

Of course he was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any sign that he had ended up in the dark water under the bridge. If that were the case, surely there would be more police on the scene and not just one traffic cop who leaned against a stone pier reading the morning paper and eating one of those ring-shaped sesame rolls.

But why worry? Likely he’s in Ankara by now, settling down in another Jewish cemetery. Or he’s been assigned to a more distant city, like Bucharest or Riga. I would have to assume he was safe and had probably even found another person like myself to do his bidding. Besides, despite his charm, by playing fast and loose with the connections between belief and tangible proof, I now knew he was more dangerous than I’d first realized. So rather than risk missing my flight to Chicago, I entered a cab, but confess that until we pulled into the airport I kept looking back … Just in case. For even when I forced myself to shift my thinking from Elijah to Dr. Elie Camahi– my direct ancestor, who, at least posthumously, had lured me to Istanbul in the first place–I couldn’t banish from my mind that thin old man in the powder blue robe, flaws, smells, potential dangers and all. . .

So what had I learned about Dr. Elie Camahi that I didn’t know before my journey to Istanbul?

Nothing–unless you count my new respect for the invisible. And everything–unless you doubt I would have rubbed the back of an old man named Elijah who everyday wore the same satin robe. Aqua. Or, to be precise, what my former wife Sherri Ann would have called powder blue, from what patches of blue were still visible between the rivulets of dark stains, the robe itself reeking from garlic and bird shit.

Facts? My small cache was much the same when I left Istanbul as when my sister Leila first told me about one Elie Camahi, chief physician to the Sultan… and also an authority on the Kabbalah, combining mystical and medical practices. (Leila had found Dr. Elie’s name in a book about Turkish Jews when she and her new husband had stopped in Istanbul on their honeymoon cruise. Stupidly she’d packed the book with her shipped luggage, which, of course, Turk Hava Yollari had lost. And not a single other copy existed)… Dr. Elie Camahi, same last name as mine, the name itself unusual for a Sephardic Jew with Turkish roots, especially given the spelling, usually just Camhi. The man had been appointed to his position beginning in 1762 and ending–who knows? Leila swore that in the book, the year 1762 was followed only by a hyphen and a question mark.

Not the only question mark. Was he really kin or not? Wise and good or a charlatan who by spinning a few fancy words was able to ingratiate himself with the Sultan? Perhaps clever enough to create his own “mysticism’, a New Age guru long before Timothy Leery or Deek Chopra?

Or had Dr. Elie Camahi suffered a bloody death at the hands of the Ottomans, then already well into decline–or slipped between the statistical cracks, an mere bench warmer, the William Henry Harrison of Sultanic chief physicians, who had enjoyed his lofty position only a few days or weeks before his successor took over. Indeed, was the doctor actually Jewish? (This last possibility occurred to me well before I learned there might be some connection between the spelling of his name and the Turkish word for mosque, cami–learned it, of course, from Elijah, who spoke not only Hebrew but Turkish and Ladino and a most respectable English. But I get ahead of my story … )

Don’t get me wrong. Just because I asked myself all those questions doesn’t mean I’m one of those hard-nosed skeptics. I just like to play with different contingencies, same as I do in my work as a pathologist, trying to decide the cause of a patient’s death. If I had a few spells of doubt, blame my sister. You, too, would have suspected her motives had you known her, especially how she loved to dramatize everything. She even confessed one night that if I went to Istanbul and came back with lots of juicy facts about our ancestor, she’d use the material for a screen play.

“Now who could play Doctor Elie? Too bad Zero Mostel’s dead. Martin Landau? Judd Hirsch?”

“Is that all that matters to you? Isn’t it more important to find out if this man was really our ancestor? So we’d know we had a flesh and blood ancestor…”

“You still stuck on that after all these years?”

“And you’re not? Come off it, Leila. If you weren’t, why the hell would you get so excited about a name in some old book?” She lowered her eyes, the closest Leila ever comes to signaling she agrees with me on something.

I soon realized that I couldn’t possibly learn everything I wanted about this Dr. Elie Camahi without going directly to the source. I’d even raise him from the dead if I could–a hell of a thought for a pathologist who’d probably by now worked with several thousand dead bodies. In any case, I began to study Turkish and Hebrew, to plan a trip soon as I could to Istanbul even though I so hate flying I never attend any professional meeting unless I can take a train and even then count the hours until I can return to my own bed. Just ask my soon-to-be-ex, Sherri Ann. Better yet, don’t. I’m sure she’d delight in telling you all about my reluctance to use strange toilets. Even those whose seats are covered with a band of saran.

While waiting to arrange a leave of absence from Reese, I not only learned the history of the city, but gathered maps, studying especially where prominent Jews might be buried. Data: you can never have enough. Some of my medical colleagues call me plodding. So what if I never win a Nobel for one of those flashy dream visions about benzene rings or the inner fibers of cell membranes? Who’s ever won a Nobel for pathology anyway? What’s dead is dead. Unless he might happen to be a flesh and blood ancestor .. .

I admit it helped that Leila broke her news the same time as my marriage to Sherri Ann was in its death throes. Studying the languages and making all those plans: a perfect release from Sherri Ann’s demands–even though the divorce was her idea, not mine. I wasn’t “Jewish enough” for her! Translation: I didn^’t make enough money for my little Catholic princess even though I was a doctor. And didn’t care enough about living in a fancy house with lots of gadgets on the North Shore. You’d think maybe she’d have been mad because I didn’t let our two daughters be brought up Catholic, but never a word. Go figure. She also thought it would do me good to find a flesh and blood ancestor; in fact, Sherri Ann was for some godforsaken reason–probably connected with her lust for money–so obsessed with that possibility she made me hunger all the more to learn the truth about my real family.

Not that “Aunt” Frances Horowitz–who was actually a friend of my maternal grandmother, the latter too old and devastated by my mother’s death to take over–and her husband Ben weren’t the most decent almost-parents I kid could dream of having. It’s just that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop wondering what my real mother and father would have been like. The one snapshot I saw only made things worse: this beautiful woman with a dimpled chin leaning against a dark-haired man who held a cigarette in one hand while letting the other dip almost down to where my mother^’s breasts began their slight bulge under her blouse.

I guess I never forgave my parents for the accident even though it was clearly not their fault that a stolen pickup driven by a drunk went smack into my father’s 1947 Dodge one bright afternoon a few blocks from Wrigley Field. The Cubs actually won that day, but my parents never got to cheer for them. I’ll never learn all the details, but apparently both were pronounced dead even before the game began. I was three years old at the time, Leila five.

Some years later, when Frances filled in as much as she could about their background, I was even more uncharitable, especially towards my late father. Christ, he wasn’t even a regular Jew like the fathers of all the other kids in Skokie. No, he was a Sephardic Jew of Spanish descent! A Span-yid, as it were. Frances was flabbergasted as I was–though it had been years since “dear Minna,” my late mother, a woman of sound Eastern European Ashkenazai stock, had married that dark-skinned, dark-haired man with a thin mustache everyone, especially my grandmother, referred to as a schwarzer.

So wasn’t it just as well that Frances’s husband, Ben, a plain but decent Jew from Poland, had adopted me and my sister, thereby saving us from the curse of those schwarzers. Turkish Jews who couldn’t even speak Yiddish and had never eaten gefilte fish! Besides, Ben, who considered himself a socialist-atheist, never made me go through a bar-mitzvah or any other ritual.

When I first arrived in Istanbul, all I did was wander, following, of course, the schedule of wandering I had written out in my notebook before leaving.

Over the Galata Bridge from Eminonu, I wandered above the Golden Horn where the Jews of Istanbul had first settled. Already Elijah was following me but I was walking too quickly to notice at that point, walking through the dock areas of Karakoy where Russian sailors drank raki and cursed in words I’d never know onto streets with rows of identical hardware and lamp stores, their upper facades sometimes including a six-pointed Jewish star. Past food stands over which old men dozed, their heads covered with brown skull caps which I overheard a tourist guide say, to my chagrin, were not Jewish caps but Moslem; past Greek and Armenian churches my older maps claimed were synagogues; banks and more banks…

Mostly the Turks were indifferent, neither staring nor hassling. So maybe I had the “look” after all? But every once in a while, that thin old man dressed only in his once powder blue robe would appear in an alleyway or dart out from between buildings. A bit disturbing at first: but since he said nothing and no one else seemed to notice him, I shrugged. Forcing myself to be oblivious to the trash and constantly spraying my nostrils so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the smell of garlic, which often sets off an asthma attack, I continued my task according to schedule, exploring the warrens of Beyoglu, once known as Pera and the center of stylish European culture, including that of wealthy Jews; climbing hilly streets to the Galata Tower, a Genoese fortress in what once Istanbul’s major Jewish neighborhood; passing the always closed Neve Shalom Synagogue, closed since that massive terrorist bombing back in 1986.

Once I was sure the man with the powder blue bathrobe was peeking through the grillwork of one of the synagogue’s windows, but figured I was just tired from all the walking.

From small food stalls I bought yogurt as well as-WUK, a creamy pudding, even though I had some misgivings about the Turkish definition of pasteurized. Always I started conversations, my broken Turkish matching their broken English or German, with men behind the counter named Mehmet or Oyuk or Ibriham and their numerous, ever present brothers, so I could examine their faces for any Semitic characteristics. Just like I examined the faces of corpses in the pathology lab back home for marks or signs that might, in the literal sense of the word, just might be familiar. Like maybe a mole similar to the one behind my own left ear or a dimpled chin resembling the snapshot version of my mother. At least twice the man in the powder blue robe entered a store but left quickly–probably, I reasoned, because he saw that he couldn’t steal anything at the moment.

A breakthrough! At least that’s what I thought on my 9th day in Istanbul, a warm Saturday in April. A day my ancestor would likely have believed especially lucky given what I’d read about the Kabbalists’ belief in magic numbers, nine for some crazy reason corresponding to the Hebrew letter Teth, sign of the caduceus. I couldn’t help laughing, even though I was in a cemetery. And had noticed a family placing stones and flowers on a grave whose marker looked new, the women weeping, the men all wearing embroidered yarmulkes on their heads. I thought about apologizing, but figured that would make me look even more foolish.

More bothersome the not too distant figure of the man in the powder blue robe. Damn, the last thing I needed was for him to accost me just when I felt on the brink of discovery, after making my way through the mud and tall grass past hundreds of white marble tombs, many embellished with oval photographs of the dead. No Camahis. Not even any Camhis. And only one Elie, belonging to the late Nahum Elie Kordova, a stern dark-eyed man who had died in 1979. But nearby, on a slab so small I nearly missed it, I noticed the name Anna Elinora Camasi. Close enough. A girl who had been born in 1878 and died in what appeared to be 1885 though the numbers were scuffed and the slab itself nearly sunk into the earth. No photo, of course. I wrote down her name in my notebook and made the quickest sketch possible, given the rapidly contracting distance between myself and the man in the robe.

He must have heard me laughing about the magic numbers, because the first thing he said was cemeteries were made for laughter but most people didn’t know that.

“Huh?” “You heard me. And you know what I mean. By the way, my name’s Elijah. Not my real name, but that’s what most people call me. And you?”

“Dan.” Dammit, why didn’t I just make up a name. I could hear Sherri Ann giggling, like she did the one time I tried to lie to her about the price of something.

“Welcome to Istanbul, Mr. Dan. You’re comfortable with the dead, I could tell right away. Not like most of the tourists who come here to search for ancestors. The men with their embroidered yarmulkes and the women with their little veils. I bet you don’t know that the word yarmulke comes from the Turkish yagmurluk,

rain clothing, which comes from yagmur, rain. Fascinating, no?”

“No. I mean yes. Yes, that’s fascinating. Do you ever wear one yourself?”

“Why should I? I have the power to turn on and shut off the rain. Whenever I feel like.”

“You must be an important man.” I never felt so dumb in my life. Elijah said thank you. “I don^’t get many compliments these days. Especially here. God only knows why I’m stationed in a Moslem country.”

“Uh-huh.” String him along. Like a shrink would, like Uncle Ben if he were still alive. Just make sure he’s not dangerous. One of those Jihad guys in disguise.

“Don’t worry,” he laughed. “I’m not dangerous. If you don’t believe me, I’ll let you inspect me.”

He held up his hands, then began to undo his robe’s sash. The very thought of touching him was sickening, far worse than touching a dead body.

“No thanks. I believe you. No problem.”

“No problem,” he said, mocking my exaggerated lilt. I guess I was trying to sound laidback, imitating the drawn-out, almost chanting way they all said “No problem” here. I’ve a terrible ear for music. After re-tying his sash, Elijah said, “You know what most of tourists do here?”

“Like anywhere else, I guess.”

“They snap a picture of some grave, put a few little stones on top as if they really mourned whoever’s buried there, and leave. So they can get to the Grand Bazaar before it closes. And get cheated on a rug they think’s a great bargain. But you–you’re different. Don’t ask me how I know. I just know.”

Elijah’s English was surprisingly clear despite an accent I couldn’t quite place. Probably Turkish or Arabic but his thin pale face, watery blue eyes, and long white hair looked European. Maybe even American? One of those kooks from the 60’s who lived in the streets? Probably from Oregon where a lot of them lived now. But the next thing he said was that he lived in this cemetery. And pointed to a flock of ravens that suddenly appeared from behind a particularly ornate tombstone.

“See? They know me. They’re bringing me my supper. Nice birds, they always know when I’m hungry.”

“Your supper?”

He didn’t bother to answer, drew up so closely to me his robe brushed against my jeans and shirt. I suppressed a gag, pretended to be looking up something in my notebook. At which point Elijah said I was wasting my time. Anna Elinora Camasi was of no interest. He should know, he knew all the Jewish families of Istanbul, and the Camasis had long ago emigrated to Israel. An ordinary family. No bankers, no poets. No doctors like there were in my family.

Tempted as I was to duck behind a grave or run fast as I could through the labyrinth of white marble tombs, I decided to play along. At least for a while. Even if he was crazy, he might know something about my ancestor. Just might. And no matter what I must not forget I was here on a mission.

Dropping what appeared to be some dry stalks on the grass where Elijah stood, his feet crisscrossed by pieces of tattered rope that once had been sandals, the ravens flew off as quickly as they had appeared. Elijah retrieved a stalk and began to suck on it.

“Ah, my favorite. I learned to live on these when I lived in the desert. Only problem’s they sometimes make me thirsty.”

So there it was … his pitch. I assumed I was supposed to respond by offering him some mineral water from the bottle I kept in my daypack. And that’s exactly what I did, handing him the whole bottle and telling him to keep it. As long as we didn’t end up drinking from the same bottle. At the same time I stepped back so our clothes were no longer in contact.

“What’s the matter? You scared I have some disease?” He moved back against me, so close I could feel the sweat from his robe ooze through my shirt and onto my skin. Again I moved away, again he moved back to me, and said, after emptying most of the mineral water, “You’re free to leave, you know. Want some water? See, I made sure to leave some for you.”

“Thanks.” I took the plastic bottle and tossed it so it landed in a clump of grass well beyond Nahum Elie Kordova’s grave.

“Good. I like when people get mad. And throw things. This cemetery could use some livening up. You know what I mean?” He began to laugh, a thin, high-pitched laugh.

“Not really.” The minute the words came from my mouth, I felt dumb. Why couldn^’t I just split? How Sherri Ann and my sister Leila and my kids and my colleagues would have mocked me! Instead I started laughing myself; it was better than just standing there and absorbing more of his sweat–which reeked from garlic and made me check my pack to make sure I had an asthma inhaler just in case…

“Nice pack. What kind of camera you have? I hope it’s not one of those polaroids. They make me nervous. Make me look so–how you say–visible. Like I was a leopard or tiger who lived inside the Grand Mosque.”

Before I could respond, the man turned to Anna Elinora Camisi’s little gravestone and kneeled close to it. He seemed to be saying something but after a minute or so turned back to me.

^“No use. She’s been dead too long.”

“For what?”

“For me to bring her back.”

That was it. Enough of this crazy business. The last thing I needed was some escapee from a mental hospital in the middle of one of Istanbul’s major Jewish cemeteries.

“Well, take it easy. I’ve got to go now. A meeting.”

This time Elijah’s laugh was more robust. “Chill out, man. Just chill out like they say in your America. Not that I’ve ever been there. Who’d want to go to such a dirty place? Now listen. I can help you if you’re willing to let me. I promise it won’t cost you a cent, just a little of your time.”

“Help me with what?” I tried to conceal my annoyance–with him, with myself most of all.

“Finding your ancestor. What else did you think? Finding the great doctor to the Sultan, your direct ancestor. And I’m not talking about finding his dead body. I mean really finding him.”

“He’s been dead for over 200 years.”

“So? I didn’t say I’d bring you his living body, did I? Is that all you can do, Mr. Dan–divide the world between the dead and living? Just because you make your living examining the dead doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways… Just trust me.”

We ended up at my room at the Lepanto Hotel, a small place off Istiklal Caddesi. All Elijah wanted was a floor to sleep on until his back healed, nothing else. Apparently he had strained his back trying to part the waters of the Golden Horn. I could ask my questions, and he would ask only for the floor, no money, no food, no clothes. A fancier hotel than the Lepanto would have caught on, but Elijah managed to share my room without anyone noticing. Probably he had done the same thing dozens of times, so maybe I wasn’t the only fool. I admit I didn’t try too hard to fend him off–once I got used to his smell which wasn’t so bad when I turned up the fan. He might, after all, have some valuable information. And there was something so frail about him that as a doctor I felt obliged to look after him, though it had been years since I’d seen a live patient.

For almost a week, he slept on a rug near the bathroom, which as far as I could tell, he never used. I had, of course, planned to continue my search, but because of his back pain, Elijah said he would stay in the hotel. He insisted there was no reason for me to start wandering again; very soon he would solve the mystery of my ancestor, so why waste my energies on those cemeteries and winding streets where I’d only get lost. Instead, I could massage his back, maybe give him some of those amazing American painkillers I surely had with me–not that he approved of drugs. I pretended to have nothing stronger than Tylenol, but even that seemed to help.

I must admit I had to stuff cotton up my nose whenever I massaged his back. And I kept washing my hands every few minutes, washing off the residue of his skin best I could and even wishing I had brought with me the special gloves and disinfectants I use when performing an autopsy. Afterwards, I would leave the room just to be out in the fresh air despite Elijah’s pleas for me to stay. I resumed my wandering though most of the time I didn’t get very far because I felt so tired. Those sounds: sometimes Elijah made sounds partway between a chant and a wail though mostly he laughed, often well into the night, ripping my sleep to shreds.

Though I rarely recall dreams, I remembered a long one in detail–about rabbis wearing blue robes outside a synagogue in some Eastern European village. All the rabbis had long beards and held rolled-up blue Torah scrolls. The faces of some were also blue; their yarmulkes dripped blue rain. Then one of the rabbis pulled a scalpel from his pocket and began to perform a circumcision on a young boy who had rolled out of one of the blue Torahs.

Didn’t they remember he was a doctor? he said angrily when the other rabbis tried to stop him. I must have yelled out the same thing in my sleep because Elijah woke me up by saying that of course he remembered I was a doctor.

“Interesting dream. The blue rabbis obviously stand for

me–” Christ, was Elijah one of Leila’s shrinks who had traveled all the way to Istanbul. I wouldn’t put it beyond my sister. To escape the rest of Elijah’s interpretation, I got up and began to shave though I could hear him talking about blue rabbis even when I shut the bathroom door.

A couple of mornings later Elijah said that despite his back pain, he couldn’t just lie there anymore. “It’s almost time for me to get to work.”

Work? What kind of work could such a frail man possibly do? Hadn’t he better wait until his back was completely healed?

“Oh, it’s not such bad work. Just once or twice a year. I’m Elijah, remember?”

I assured him I did indeed, but failed to see the connection with any work.

“You really don’t know anything about Judaism. Amazing, Mr. Dan. I suppose you’re still angry at your parents, particularly your father, for getting themselves killed? Don’t ask me how I know, I just know. Anyway, it’s almost Passover, and like every year, I have to go around to all the seders in Istanbul pretending to sip some wine. A seder is a ritual meal held once or twice to remember the Jews’ freedom from Egypt. ..”

I assured him I knew what a seder was. In fact, I had actually attended one at my buddy Joel Sackowitz’s house in Evanston when I was about 12 or 13. How could I forget? When I spilled a whole glass of red wine on Mrs. Sackowitz’s white linen table cloth and new carpet, she shrieked so loud I thought she was having an attack of what she called “apoplexy.”

I guess we never got around to the part about Elijah drinking the wine, because I still failed to see why my roommate would have to get to work.

If he had simply described the ritual–how at a certain point in the seder, the leader opened the front door so Elijah could enter unnoticed and sip from a partly-filled special wine glass, I would have nodded and returned to my latest guide to Istanbul’s cemeteries. But he insisted on going further, “Every year I have to pretend to sip some wine at every single seder in the whole damn city. Why? Because the good lord has ordered me to do so. Used to have to do it all over the world but now that I’m older, he reduced my assignment just to here. Isn’t that just peachy of him?”

Enough. I felt like when I was trapped in the O.R. back in medical school, forced to watch a gruesome operation until I passed out cold, hitting my head on a machine and knocking over a gurney. Or when Sherri Ann got going on how I wasn’t Jewish enough for her royal Catholic ass… I would tell Elijah he could do what he wanted and then I’d leave. Just leave. Take a Turkish bath. Get drunk on raki down by the docks. Or–best of all–book the next flight to O’Hare.

Instead I agreed to accompany him on his rounds that Thursday night, the first night of Passover. The doctor in me, I guess. Because not only was he complaining that his back hurt, but he had begun to cough. At least he had combed his hair and tried to remove a few stains from his robe but he insisted he would wear nothing else. No yarmulke, either. Couldn’t I see that he wasn’t about to let it rain on such a night?

“Don’t worry. You can wait outside when I sneak in. Still you’ll get a chance to see some of the most important Jewish families in Istanbul. Close as you’ll ever get, my friend. The Abravenels and the Farchis and the Crespis and the descendants of the Nasis … and yes, the Camhis, too. Moses Abravenel knows everything about Jewish doctors who took care of the Sultans. Everything. Do you think I would break my promise?”

After a while, I had to admit I enjoyed peeking in the houses, some of them lavishly furnished, with gold chandeliers and blue faience tiles. But all the food began to smell the same: the same garlicky aroma of roast lamb, the same peppery smells of what I took to be eggplant concoctions. Even the sounds of chanting men and laughing kids and gossiping women began sounding the same, a meld of Turkish and Hebrew and Ladino from which I couldn^’t catch more than two or three words.

Sometimes I was sure Elijah had actually drunk the wine, not merely pretended. It was not only his breath and the red stains on his robe, but his rapidly increasing giddiness. Once he even tripped climbing up some stone steps, tearing the hem of his robe.

Finally he assured me we had reached the last houses, some old flats in the Balat neighborhood where the poorer Jews lived. Here he did his work quickly but by the last house he was so exhausted from all the walking and sipping that he insisted I had to carry him. All the way back to the Lepanto!

I had almost convinced him we should take a taxi when the young boy approached, breathless from running but at the same time choking with tears. He said his name was Solomon Abravenel and he was the second youngest grandson of the great Moses Abravanel. I recalled Elijah telling me how Moses was the most important Jew in modern Istanbul and being shocked to see a huge tub of a man with brilliant red hair who looked like one of those guys who hang out at roadside bars. Solomon, too, had red hair, but not so long and bright as his grandfather’s.

“I hate you,” he said to Elijah. In perfect English yet. “I hate you because my brothers and me saw you enter the house and pretend to drink the wine just like we did last year. You ruined the whole story for us. We saw you in your filthy blue robe–”

Elijah said he would never do what he did ever again. His voice was sad and weak. But he refused to follow me into the cab, refused even when I tried to carry him. I had my room at the Lepanto to myself that night though I kept listening for Elijah, for his cough, his laugh, anything.

Early the next morning, I made my way to the house of Moses Abravanel.

“You mean that dirty fake with the blue bathrobe?” he asked, his disheveled hair falling into his eyes at the same time as he tried to rub the sleep out from them.

I didn’t need his voice; his frown and rapid breathing were enough to indicate his profound annoyance. Before I could answer, he said, “I don’t know why you want to know about such things. They found him last night under the Galata Bridge.”

“Dead?”

“What difference does it make? Maybe yes, maybe no. Who cares? At least he’s out of the way. Good riddance. The man wasn’t even Jewish.”

“He just pretended to be Jewish when it suited him. Because he thought we’re all rich. Especially around Passover. He pretended he was Elijah and snuck into people’s houses right in the middle of their seders. And drank wine right out of Elijah’s cup. Many times the whole cup! Sometimes he got caught, other times he got away with it, drinking maybe 20 or 30 cups of wine as he made the rounds. Some bastards actually encouraged him by giving him a few coins, the idiots. ..”

I mumbled some question about how Elijah had died.

“I said who cares? At least he won’t be around any more to upset the kids. How can they believe in Elijah if they see this dirty man actually enter the house and drink the wine? The whole point is that Elijah is invisible. Because he’s almost like God. And no one is ever supposed to see God. That’s the point, to believe without some silly proof. That’s what makes us so different from the Christians. And not so different from the Moslems.”

“Oh?”

“If you have to know, that dirty fake made my grandsons cry last night. Especially my little Solomon. He remembered seeing the bastard break in on us last Passover. And giving him some sugary candy–lokum, Turkish Delight, so he wouldn’t say anything. The nerve of bribing a young boy with that sticky crap. How’s a kid going to believe when he sees such a thing?”

How indeed. With more force than I had ever mustered in my life, I slammed the front door of Moses^’ house into his face. Slammed it so hard both the gold door knocker and the mezuzah attached to the door post came loose.

We had never gotten around to talking about Chief Doctor Elie Camahi, my illustrious ancestor from the 18th century. But I didn’t have to because I realized everything I needed to realize.

Leila, of course, was disappointed. But women almost always are.

I tried to explain to her about all ancestors being invisible, whether they were horse thieves or chief rabbis, fancy doctors or the richest bankers in the world. And how that must not prevent us from believing in them. So much for her screen play. Because Leila could only deal with matters she could see right in front of her. At the very least on television. Come to think of it, I know lots of people like that: if they can’t see it and touch it and smell it, it doesn’t exist. Period.

When I returned to the pathology lab, I looked only for marks that would help establish the cause of a person’s death, rather than signs of familiarity: not only because I was confident I had “found” my ancestor, but convinced tangible signs are not prerequisites for belief. Yes, even in the science lab. Maybe Sherri Ann wouldn’t be impressed that I finally knew I had a flesh and blood ancestor, whether he was Chief Doctor to the Sultan or not. But I had no intention of telling her a thing about what happened in Istanbul and laughed when I found out she was about to marry–can you believe it?–yet another Jew, this time a holocaust survivor who knew next to nothing about his ancestors. Come to think of it, why tell anyone except you, my dear reader?

SUBLIME AND HOLY LOVE

“So Ms. Sharon Swann jumped off the Calvert Street Bridge for the sake of Mrs. Waka Sato. To attract another hero worthy of that good woman’s money. But nobody came along. Is that what you’re implying?” asks the journalist.

“Yes,” says the psychiatrist.

The coroner had already left to work on another case.

“But what are we supposed to do with the money?” asks the lawyer. “Return it to Mrs. Sato? Or, since it was technically in the possession of Sharon Swann at the time of her death, does it go to her Aunt Florence?”

“Depends on how you interpret the emotional identification between Ms. Swann and Mrs. Sato. In my opinion, by the time of Ms. Swann’s suicide, they were one and the same person. Each in a separate body, of course,” says the psychiatrist.

“Clearly, then,” says the lawyer, “the money must be returned to Mrs. Sato. As far as I’m concerned the case is closed.”

“Hardly enough to fill half a column,” says the journalist.

From the Diary of Sharon Swann:

June 6. I am deeply ashamed of my mayor, my President, and the editor of my newspaper. When I read today about how rude and careless they were to that Japanese lady, Waka Sato, I wanted to cry. All she wanted them to do was put up a memorial to Mr. Donald F Crowley, who sacrificed his own life to help save two women, who would otherwise have been killed in the terrorist attack on Baskin and Robbins last year. She said she would pay all the expenses of the monument herself, even though she never met Mr. Crowley or the two women and had probably never eaten Rocky Road.

Even before she thought of the monument, she had sent the President $1000 to buy a wreath and said, “I saw in this gentleman, Mr. Crowley, the real beauty of America.” I wish I could have done such a lovely thing. But the President just returned the money with a letter he probably didn’t even write.

And then she got the idea for the monument, not just a wreath, and sent $10,000 to the editor of the Washington Post. He returned the money too.

But the mayor, he’s the worst. He never even answered her, though she sent him six letters and $20,000. When she sent the check she said,” This beautiful deed as a human being will never again appear heretofore.” The mayor probably didn’t believe a word. I know I could never say anything like that. Though last semester my English Professor said, “Sharon, your grammar is improving.” I certainly couldn’t ever send so much money to strangers. Even if I had it.

And all she wanted was for someone to remember Mr. Crowley in a proper way. She believed in him even though she had never met him. As she said to the mayor, “Now, what I wish to entreat you is that you build a monument on a side of the Potomac to worship his soul and his beautiful deed to be remembered in the days to come.”

The mayor’s secretary said they lost the check and just forgot the whole thing. I don’t believe a word and feel very sad for Mrs. Sato when she says in the paper, “Really, I don’t understand why he doesn’t answer my letters. The hearts of human beings are the same around the world. So I cannot understand why my feelings are so difficult to convey.”

“We’re looking into the matter,” says the mayor’s office.

“The war against terrorism can and will be won,” says the White House.

“The weather today will be cool with scattered showers. High 60°-65°, low around 50°. Barometric pressure is falling. AQI 45 for ozone. The sun will rise and the sun will set,” says the newspaper.

Back to Sharon Swann’s Diary:

June 8. This is not the first beautiful thing Mrs. Sato has done. In the paper it says that every year she sends money to the family of a law student who died trying to save a woman who jumped into a Japanese river. At least she got to put up a small monument for Mr. Crowley in Japan. It’s on a mountain and made of black marble and says on it in Japanese and English, “A MAN OF HOLY AND SUBLIME LOVE WHO LAID DOWN HIS LIFE SO THAT OTHERS COULD LIVE.”

But she hasn’t given up on building a monument here in Washington. I wish I could do something to help make her dream come true.

June 9. I keep thinking about Mrs. Sato. It’s so hard to believe the world still has such beautiful people in it. It’s so hard to believe anything in this sick contemporary society of today. But when I talked about Mrs. Sato at work today with Linda and Kimberley, they couldn’t understand at all. I think they just couldn’t believe how seriously I’m taking it. Linda broke up with Andy. She thinks she’s not pregnant anymore. I wish I could lose weight, then I could play on the women’s volleyball team when school starts. I’m a great server but Coach Hallmark says I move too slow.

June 10. I’m so excited. Today I wrote a letter to Mrs. Sato in care of the boutique she owns in Tokyo. I’ve never sent a letter so far away before. I sure hope it gets there, sometimes it’s hard to believe the post office sends things exactly where people say. I bet if you send a letter with a made up town on it, they would still try to deliver it; it’s like what Aunt Florence says, you gotta believe what you read.

In my letter I apologized for the President and the editor and the mayor and told her I hope she wouldn’t feel bad about all Americans just because of them.

“Hardly a swinger,” says the journalist.

“Looking for an idealized mother-surrogate. One in whom she can believe without fail,” says the psychiatrist.

“Shows improvement. Keep writing,” says the English professor.

June 14. Andy asked me out and I don’t know what to do. I can’t believe he really likes me, but I guess I’ll go. It’s just to hear this group, The Splash, at the Cap Center. There’s something weird about his eyes, they’re almost green. Kimberley says it’s OK because Linda wouldn’t mind, she doesn’t even like Andy anymore now that she thinks she’s not pregnant. I wish we still lived in West Virginia, though, where the guys weren’t so weird. Aunt Florence says it’s good for me to go out, she doesn’t understand when I say I’m too tired from work and school. I went out a lot over spring break. Doesn’t that count?

July 6. I can hardly believe what happened. Mrs. Sato answered my letter and said she is still very interested in seeing that Mr. Crowley gets his monument. She doesn’t care how much it costs. All she wants is to “honor this heroic and gracious deed of beauty.” The fact that she answered shows she thinks I could help her. Probably she believes I’m more important than I am.

I got this great idea but I’m ashamed to tell anyone. I want to invite Mrs. Sato to come to Washington from Japan! She could stay with us and I sure would love to show her the sights and even if she couldn’t get to talk to the mayor and President in person she could get near them.

“Very naive for an East Coast white working class suburban 19-year-old female data processor with twenty-one credits at a community college and a total household income of over $25,000 per annum,” says the social anthropologist.

“Don’t ask me. After all, there’s a dead person involved. That’s way out of my league,” says Coach Cindy Hallmark of the community college volleyball team.

“I scarcely remember her. She sat in the back and was overweight and had frizzy hair, maybe dirty blonde. We get lots of them,” says the English professor.

July 20. Mrs. Sato arrived on the Bullet Plane at Dulles International Airport tonight. She was very tired from the trip. I couldn’t believe how different she looked from what I thought. She’s older, too, around forty, and so thin. She was wearing an orange silk dress with flowers. I don’t think she liked the sushi I got from the carryout. I don’t blame her, who wants to eat raw fish? But she seems very nice and tomorrow I’m going to take off from work and show her the sights.

She already has the mayor and President’s addresses and phone numbers. It’s weird, but I get this feeling I’ve met her somewhere before. I guess I should tell this to Ms. Kendrick, my counselor at the Student Advisory Center. I wonder if she’ll believe me. I wish I could be as thin as Mrs. Sato. I played a little volleyball today with the neighborhood kids and I know I moved too slow. I wonder if Mrs. Sato will let me call her Waka, though it does sound real funny.

July 26. Waka had no luck reaching the mayor or President. She says the ladies on the phone tell her to put it in writing but she’s already done that several times. I guess they just don’t believe her. She thought maybe it was her Japanese accent, but when I tried, I got the same answer. I couldn’t believe they could be so cold.

Aunt Florence and me cooked Waka a barbecued hamburger tonight and she seemed to like it. Really, she doesn’t eat much. Mostly she wants to get the monument built. In fact, she hardly talks about anything else. She really believes in what she calls her mission. Tomorrow she wants me to drive her to a store where they sell marble stones for funerals and gardens, I think there’s one on Rockville Pike. Waka sure is generous with her money. She insists on paying us for her room and food and whenever we go out she insists on paying for me, too, and for my gas. And she says I need more stylish clothes, she wants to take me—I can hardly believe this—to Bloomingdales and Lord and Taylor in White Flint Mall. The one time I was there I shoplifted an Ecco scarf and almost got caught. Luckily they believed me when I said it was an accident. I hope they don’t recognize me. I’d be so ashamed in front of Waka.

We’ll get the clothes after we put up the monument, she says. That makes me a little nervous. I think she wants me and her actually to put up the monument for Mr. Crowley. When I drove her downtown she kept looking for the right spot.

“She was always a quiet girl. Never got into no trouble. So why shouldn’t I have believed her when she said this Japanese lady was so important? You got to believe in something,” says Aunt Florence.

“I didn’t believe the story for a minute. But I felt it would do her some good to follow through on the obsession,” says Ms. Hilary Kendrick, M.S.W., of the community college Student Advisory Center.

“Clearly there was a major cultural misunderstanding. Ms. Swann had no concept of how the Japanese view obligation nor did she know anything about Japanese reverence for sacrificial heroism. Monuments such as Mrs. Sato wished to erect are by no means unusual in Japan. The Japanese believe such monuments protect and enhance the souls of the dead,” says the Orientologist.

“They came into the store and this oriental woman, I think she was Vietnamese or Chinese, just said she wanted to buy the best we had. A buck’s a buck,” says the owner of Maloney’s Memorial Works on Rockville Pike in Rockville, Maryland.

Sharon Swann’s Diary:

August 4. Andy loaned us his van and we drove out to the Mall very late at night. We had a little trouble lifting and hauling the monument but we managed to get it right side up. It’s on the Tidal Basin, not far from the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. I think it’s a very suitable spot because in the spring the Japanese cherry trees bloom there. You should see how beautiful it is. It’s black and has little carved roses and other flowers and it’s very big, taller than me. Waka had them write on it the same thing that’s on the monument for Mr. Crowley in Japan: A MAN OF HOLY AND SUBLIME LOVE WHO LAID DOWN HIS LIFE SO THAT OTHERS COULD LIVE. Except that it’s only in English. I got real scared when the Park Police drove by but they didn’t bother us at all, I guess because of the terrorist attacks on the Air and Space Museum.

“On your left is the famous Donald F. Crowley monument, which I’m sure you have all seen on TV,” says the tour guide. “We sometimes call it the Mystery Monument. It’s made of imported Italian marble and was put up by an anonymous donor. Every year millions of people place flowers and wreaths on the monument. The eternal flame was added two years later.”

“My husband would have been very proud of his monument,” says Mrs. Donald F. Crowley of Falls Church, Virginia.

“All of the great saints had an insatiable holiness. One holy act was never sufficient; it merely became the wellspring for another holy act. But belief, belief in the truth, whether intrinsic or extrinsic, is all,” says the theologian.

August 28. Waka left today for Japan. Already I miss her, but she promised to keep in touch.

September 15. I’m in total shock. The mailman delivered a huge amount of money today. For me. It’s from Waka Sato, all in dollars. She wants me to use it to put up monuments for other heroes like Donald F. Crowley. That really set me thinking. Of course I wouldn’t dream of spending Waka’s money on anything else, but I’m not very good at history. The only thing Waka insisted was that the person honored must have done something very noble. She said it could be either a man or a woman or even a child, but that doesn’t help much. I want to talk this over with someone like Ms. Kendrick or Aunt Florence or Linda or Kimberley or Andy but I feel so embarrassed about all the money. I’m scared they’ll tell me to spend the money on myself or might not even believe me. Who knows in this crazy world? This morning there was a terrorist attack on Wendy’s Hamburgers.

Sept. 29. I better get off my can and do something pretty soon. Waka sent more money. I’ve never seen so much money in my life. I’m trying to hide it from Aunt Florence but pretty soon I’ll run out of space. It’s all in twenty-dollar bills, like you get from the automated teller machine. My dresser is already stuffed and so is my closet.

Nov. 7. More money today from Waka. I feel like I’m drowning in money. Some of it I have to put in the garage even though the weather is getting nasty. I feel so guilty. I keep thanking Waka for the money and promising to do what she wants but I just can’t think of a suitable person. I have to ask someone for advice before I go crazy.

I feel so useless and insignificant in this incredible universe of suns and stars and planets and moons. Some people actually do such brave things and I can’t even decide about a dumb statue. I think even Ms. Kendrick doesn’t believe how upset I am. She tries to be cheery and tells me how well I’m doing, but I think she tells that to everybody just to make herself feel better. She says it in a way I just can’t believe. Who can I believe? What can I believe? I still believe Mrs. Sato, but nobody else seems to believe her. It’s all so terribly confusing.

“She seemed perfectly normal at work,” says Kimberley.

“Of course we never believed her about all that stuff with the Japanese lady but it seemed to make her happy,” says Linda.

“I saw no reason for not putting an ad in the paper. Sharon seemed very sincere about finding the names of good people and I convinced her that would be the best way. Of course, I only meant it as a little joke, but I guess Sharon took it seriously,” says Ms. Kendrick.

“WANTED: Nominations of people, living or dead, who deserve a monument on the Mall in Washington, D.C. People must have accomplished a good deed, preferably at the risk of their lives. Nominations are open to all, regardless of race, gender, age, or national origin,” says the ad in The Washington Post, New York Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, LA Times, Penthouse, Pravda, Paris Match, Ploughshares, and Periwinkle.

Nov. 20. We got so many answers to the ad it’s worse than before. Some of the names are famous, like Elvis and Madonna and Crockett from “Miami Vice.” A lot of people think the statue should be a black or a woman or both. But the worst thing is the sad stories. Like this lady who nominated a fireman who saved the life of her baby but the baby died anyway later at the hospital, and this man who wrote in the name of his mother who was blind and couldn’t walk, and this other man whose wife had just died after a life of perfect love for everyone she knew. A lady who is in a wheelchair nominated herself, she says she can’t eat anything except from a tube. The more I write these things the sadder I get. Why does life have to be so sad? It’s like listening to sad music. Ms. Kendrick said sometimes it’s better to keep listening to the music even if you cry, then it becomes a part of you and you’ll feel better. If you just shut it off it keeps on coming back in your head.

Mrs. Sato keeps sending money. I had to tell Aunt Florence, the whole house is filled with money. Sometimes it starts to fly around like green birds. I’m afraid if I don’t build a cage around it some of it will fly away. Not that I want the money. It’s Mrs. Sato I worry about. She actually called from Tokyo the other night and asked me if I had found more people for her monuments. I was so ashamed to tell her I couldn’t make up my mind who to choose. Linda said it probably wasn’t Mrs. Sato at all on the phone, but I don’t believe her. I am sure it was Mrs. Sato. Ms. Kendrick says I should set a deadline and then just pick a name at random. Like a lottery. Mrs. Sato doesn’t even have to know. But would that be fair? What if I accidentally chose a liar or someone who just wasn’t as good as the person who accidentally was not chosen?

I’m falling behind in all my subjects at school and I get so hyper about all of this at work I’m scared they’re going to fire me. Andy is dating Kimberley now.

“County police estimate that at least $3,000,000 have accumulated at a house in Takoma Park, Maryland. Residents include Florence Dolan, 58, a part time nurse’s aide at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and her niece, Sharon Swann, 19, a data processor at Acme Systems Incorporated in Rockville and a part-time student at Montgomery College. How the money got there and what Dolan and Swann plan to do with it is a complete mystery,” says the newscaster.

“I do not understand your country. Do you have no longer respect for beautiful acts? Why do you want to build only cars?” says Mrs. Waka Sato via satellite from Tokyo.

“So it’s true that you engaged the services of Sharon Swann to help you erect a monument for Donald F. Crowley on the mall in Washington?” asks Ted Koppel via satellite from Washington.

“There is no proof that honoring a counter-terrorist hero has any salutary effect whatsoever on the etiology of terrorism,” says the Professor of International Studies at Georgetown University.

“Recent studies have shown that honoring counter-terrorist acts serves to weaken terrorist zeal because it reduces the media coverage that would ordinarily be given to the terrorists,” says the Professor of International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

“The internal ecosystem is as endangered as the external,” says the Professor of Solipsistics at the University of Wisconsin.

“Turn on, tune in, boot up,” says the ghost of Timothy Leary.

‘An obsession is a religion without a church. A church can be made of stone or wood and may or may not include a spire and an altar. Spires and altars can have obsessively repetitive designs,” says the social systems analyst.

“You have reached 468-9678 but you have not reached us. If you will leave your name, phone number, and message when you hear the tone…” says the answering machine.

“The rate of inflation has declined 0.25% this quarter. Stocks are up and the dollar is down,” say the Leading Economic Indicators.

“Sharon Swann was a nice girl but hard to get to know. She once brought over a cake when my husband was sick. Lemon with vanilla frosting,” says Mrs. Claudia Donovan, 56, a neighbor.

“World population will triple in the next century, despite the most sophisticated technological advances,” says the demographer.

“The fear of loneliness is pandemic,” says the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.

“We should rename the bridge in memory of Sharon Swann,” says the Letters to the Editor writer.

“Nurses do it in bed,” reads the bumper sticker.

“Wouldn’t you really rather drive a Buick?”

“Diet-Pepsi laced with cyanide has been responsible for thirty deaths in southern Utah.”

“Ten people died in a rowhouse fire tonight in south Baltimore.”

“Some people believe the world began as a spatial artifact, but others believe time was created first. Still others believe in the primacy of the word, the syllable, the letter, the sound, the whisper, the shriek, the hum, the yawp.”

“God created each of us as a new experiment.”

“The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”

“Neither space nor time can be observed without distorting the space and time observed by the observer.”

“O she was a plain/but good-hearted woman,

Sharon Swann, now she’s/gone, gone, gOOOOne…”

“Donate your dollars to the Sharon Swann Memorial Foundation.” “She was looking for a hero in a world that has only protagonists.”

“Believe in yourself and you will never want or need.”

“Believe in Jesus, he’s your buddy and your very best pal.”

“God believes in you. You’d better believe it!”

“If you believe you will die happy, you will die believing you are happy”

“On your left is the Sharon Swann Memorial, which you have all seen on TV. The memorial was built entirely through public donations. The sculptural relief you see on the top was contributed by the citizens of Japan. If you look closely, you will see a finely chiseled profile of Mrs. Waka Sato. The 31 medallions that are carved around the circumference of the memorial each signify a different flavor of Baskin and Robbins ice cream. The medallions are changed periodically to reflect changes in the offerings of the ice cream chain. We request that you refrain from eating the medallions.”

“The case was complicated,” says the lawyer.

“Ditto,” says the psychiatrist.

“Who was Sharon Swann?” wrote the journalist. “The first of a four part series.”

The lawyer left to work on another case. The psychiatrist left to work on another case. The social anthropologist turned to new data. The theologian, the President, Aunt Florence, Linda, Kimberley, the tour guide, Mrs. Waka Sato, the mythologist, etc., all tried to live out their lives with a modicum of pleasure and a minimum of pain. The English professor told a new group of students that they showed improvement; keep writing. And you, reader, you, too, will show improvement. Believe me, you will.

***

THE TANGO LESSON

Of course I enjoyed the cheers and applause.  But  I knew most of the credit belonged to  Rudolph Valentino;  had he never existed, I would never have won first place last summer in the Greater New York International Tango Competition.  And I would not have learned the tango at all if not for my Polish-African -American dance instructor from Astoria, my partner Carlos, and, of course, Varya.

Perhaps that’s why I scarcely looked at the trophy, a statuette of a man with vaguely Argentinian features doing the Tango Promenade with a woman whose legs were shaped like baseball bats. The man who handed it to Carlos, who promptly handed it to me,  looked more than vaguely Argentinian: dark hair, dark glasses that hid what I imagined to be dark eyes.  Somewhat older than the rest of the crowd and trim of build, he reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges. Which is not as crazy as it sounds since Borges wrote an essay about tango lyrics and commented from time to time about the dance itself.

It all began six years ago.  If at times you find yourself spontaneously singing some old song like “Stormy Weather” for no particular reason, as if its words urgently needed to be released from wherever they reposed in that Museum of Old Songs somewhere inside, you’ll understand how I felt when suddenly one morning while waiting for the M-3 Bus I caught myself speaking these words in the voice of a young woman I’d never, so far as I knew, met: “More than anything else in the world I want to dance the tango with Rudolph Valentino.” Then after a brief pause, the word dziekuje, Polish for thank you.

One sentence, that was all. One line. But its tone was so plaintive yet compelling, as if some nameless woman were giving me an order and thanking me in advance, that I kept repeating it the rest of the day instead of “Stormy Weather” or that Pepsi jingle from the 1940s, the one that ends with “Twice as much for a nickel, too/Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.” Ta-ta-ta-duuum.  Believe me, I wouldn’t have minded that silly commercial because sooner or later it would have slipped back to the Museum.  I wouldn’t even have minded the Nedick’s  commercial from the 50’s.  Remember it?  “What do you do, little Nick. . .”

Maybe you had to live in New York to know that one.  Unfortunately for my chances of tracking her down, the young woman who spoke what I came to call simply The Line could have been living anywhere.  True, her use of a Polish word was suggestive, but it didn’t necessarily mean she lived in Warsaw or Lublin or anywhere in Poland for that matter.  She might, like myself, have been a student of the world’s languages.  Certainly she might have been an emigre living in Chicago or Buffalo or even Paris.

The time period was even harder to identify.  Of course, to know Valentino’s name she had to have been alive after 1917, the year of his first film.  So she couldn’t possibly have been a youthful version of my great-grandmother Lena, born around 1880 in a village then Polish but now Lithuanian, with a couple of Russian names in between.  The moving village, one of my aunts used to call it.

I thought maybe I’d sleep the whole thing off, but the next day The Line was back  full force.  First I caught myself saying it when walking up Broadway to pick up a Times and again when I returned to my apartment at Lincoln Towers.  And again that afternoon and evening.  Of course, neither the speaker, whom I’d named Varya, nor I uttered the sentence in public.  Indeed, to this day I never sing in public though sometimes I’ve been caught by surprise and hotly embarrassed. If you’ve ever been talking to yourself when someone suddenly comes round the bend, you know exactly what I mean.  Especially if the person is someone who know…

Why Varya?  Who knows: like The Line itself the name came to me out of the blue.  A Russian name, in fact the diminutive of my own name, Barbara, but I don’t think that’s particularly significant.  I’ve always hated my name: so many of us, especially my generation.  And the cloying nicknames, like Babs or Barb, people thought they had a perfect right to call me.  Basha, the Polish version, wouldn’t have been so bad but it sounded strange in America.

Why me?  Why had this Varya decided to express her wish through me, of all people: a terrible dancer at that time, a middle-aged woman with a degree in Slavic Studies who’d never watched a single Valentino movie?  If I could only pin down the time, I remember thinking, maybe I could help Varya in some way, though probably it was I who needed the help, if for no other reason than to expunge Varya’s wish from my mind and get back to “Stormy Weather.”

But my friend  M., the only person I dared tell about The Line, thought it was clearly a message, an SOS, and that Varya could only self-destruct –as she likely wanted to–if I first helped her.  Helped her do what?  Dance with the dead Valentino?

Of course, it’s possible he was alive when she first uttered those words. M. thought The Line was quite old and had been implanted inside me for a long time.  In fact, he said it was in its way a sentence, as in prison sentence.  But if Valentino was still alive that meant Varya had to have implanted it by 1926 at the latest,  many years before I myself was born.  Ridiculous. I’m not the type who believes in pre-existence. Nor in seances or other such entertainments. I’m just an ordinary woman trying to scratch out enough of a living as a teacher to afford my studio apartment at Lincoln Towers.  Rather shy, a private sort of person, the kind you’d never notice on the subway or in the street. My deeper enthusiasms I keep to myself,  as well a muted flamboyancy inherited from my father’s family.  Only in my singing and sometimes in my solitary dancing late at night do these feelings emerge.

The Line soon began to take over much of my life, interfering with my  teaching of Russian and Polish Literature at the New School and the private language lessons  I gave in my apartment, as well with my efforts to translate from Polish and Yiddish some diaries that had been rescued from Treblinka. It even disrupted my eating and sleeping. So I decided to ask Varya some questions.

At first I tried simple ones, like how old are you?  What do you look like? But she refused to answer even after I assured her my investigation was totally private, immune from those frantic pleas for information of any sort from the media,  not only newspaper and television reporters but anyone with access to the WWW.

To relieve some of my frustration, I decided to give her some hair ( medium blonde), eyes (a dark blue like the willow trees on my Chinese plates), and dimensions: slightly overweight for her height, 5 foot 4, but with the oval face, long arms, and muscular legs that mitigate any suggestion of outright fatness.  And I figured she must be at least 16 years old but more likely in her late 20’s. Unmarried.  The muscular legs were the result of years of classical ballet lessons which she thoroughly hated but endured for the sake of her mother.  Yes, I gave her a mother,  one Zara Danuta Szeczinsky,  a half-Jew whose family came from that darkly tormented region, Mittel-Europa.  Though she was too stuffy for my taste, I rewarded Zara Danuta by making her an art student in Paris back in the early 1920’s.

Scene: Varya and her mother are drinking tea from steamy glasses and eating apple cake in the brown-wallpapered living room of their flat in Warsaw or Poznan.  The thin late afternoon winter sun only makes the room look more sombre.  Varya begins to read a magazine article about the tango, how it had reached the status of a mania in the Paris of the late teens and early 20’s.

“Did you ever dance the tango when you lived in Paris?” she asks her mother. Zara frowns and says of course not, only bad girls danced the tango.  They weren’t even French but had come to Paris to make money anyway they could. Most of them were from Africa and had very dark skin.

“Why does that make them bad, mama?”

“I can’t tell you.”  Zara drinks the last of her tea and resumes crocheting a table scarf. She hasn’t painted in years, not since she gave birth to Varya’s older sister, an attractive young woman with theatrical ambitions that both Zara and the girls’ stepfather did their best to squelch.   Their real father had been arrested by the Russian army and sent to a gulag where he had died under circumstances nobody ever discussed.

“They were probably whores,” Varya’s best friend Mirjam responded when she told her what her mother said about the tango girls.

“How do you know?”

“Because my cousin told me all about whores.  Sometimes they’ll have sex with five or six men a night. Just for the money.”

“You mean they let just any man stick his thing in them?”

“Any man at all.  Even if he’s a drunk, a dirty peasant.”

“Are there any Jewish whores?”

Mirjam laughed. “Of course. What makes you think there wouldn’t be? Even in the Bible there were whores.”

I was planning to fill in some details about Varya’s family, figuring the more I knew about her the more likely I could help her,  but suddenly realized that I was doing all the giving. . She refused to tell me a thing, not the color of her sister’s eyes, not the name of her favorite book, nor  whether she had any boyfriends. Niente. Nichts. Nista. Perhaps, D. said,  if I waited long enough  she would start giving a little.   Like at least an approximate age, approximate time frame.

I began to do some research.  Why Valentino?  All I knew about him was that he was wickedly handsome and died young.  And danced the tango in some forgettable movies from which he acquired the title Sheik.  Ah, but I see that he married a Russian designer,

one Natacha [sic] Rambova,  a woman with large dark eyes and a formidable talent for managing his career.

A clue?  But if Rambova, disguised as my Varya, was using me as a vessel for expressing her desires, she must have entered the wrong person, for I confess I’d never heard of her before. Not that I couldn’t sympathize:  the woman dedicated her life to ensuring Rudy’s fame despite his lusty escapades with his many leading ladies, among them the imperious Nita Naldi, the ethereal Wanda Hawley–in her sole available photograph, she’s aswoon over a single rose, its petals rising above the rim of  a golden cup; one Vilma Banky, a Samuel Goldwyn discovery who never took a stage name;  feather-hatted Agnes Ayres,  co-star of The Sheik. Gloria Swanson, of course.  And Pola Negri,  who according to biographers,  grieved “with gusto” at his death, throwing her elegant body on his coffin despite the restraints of police and bodyguards.  Such a theatrical gesture!  I couldn’t imagine myself ever doing such a thing.  But she was far from the only woman to engage in theatrics that tragic day in the late summer of 1926, the day of the Shiek’s first funeral.

And what a funeral it was!  Victim of a perforated ulcer, the dead Sheik caused riots in the streets of New York,  swarms of people crushing one another in their efforts to view his bier at Campbell’s Funeral Parlor.  Yet none the worse for having survived its New York  mourners, the body was borne across the U.S. by train for entombment in Hollywood.  Among the honorary pallbearers none less than Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Charlie Chaplin.  Then the grand climax: a continuous shower of rose petals tossed from an airplane that flew above the cortege all the way to a borrowed crypt at Hollywood Memorial Park, the site of his second funeral.

Yet historians of the tango demean the Sheik’s ability to perform that complicated dance, so Varya must not have known much about the tango. (Assuming, of course, Varya was actually expressing her own wish and not the suppressed wish of her mother or–even scarier–some totally different person).  Likely in that brown Mittel-European city where she lived Varya had never except in magazines seen a tango bar.  Or one of those enormous gleaming dance floors over which men and women could glide to the tango’s wanton rhythms,  its “wails of destinies engulfed in pain” according to my research , its uncontested claim as “ the dance of sexual sorrow.”

So it must be the rose petals that endeared her to the Sheik.  The rose petals and the crush of people, the long, slow cross-country train ride. . .its mournful elegance contrasting with the Polish boxcars. . .No.  Even if Varya was, courtesy of her maternal grandmother, one quarter Jewish, and even if the words she spoke had been implanted in me back in the early 1940’s, I refuse to make her a child of the death camps. . .

Perhaps she’s my late Aunt Rosa, originally from Lvov?

Poor sweet Rosa, a closet flapper who played tango music on a gramophone in the Bronx apartment where she lived during the Great Depression with her five siblings and destitute parents, all the while pining to go to one of those fancy downtown tango bars and glide across a polished floor in the arms of that wickedly handsome Rudy who had died so young.  Not that she literally wanted to dance with Valentino; despite her club foot and considerable girth, she was neither stupid nor naive.  Valentino was a symbol, that’s all.

The only problem is that Aunt Rosa never knew me,  having died at 22 a full year before my birth.  Riots, rose petals, a sleek train making its way slowly across the prairie to California?  Like hell.  No one in the family even remembered where she was buried–somewhere in Queens, or was it New Jersey?

So much for Valentino.  I was convinced after several weeks that Varya’s line was some sort of code.  Not simply a message, as D. had called it, but a coded message. Valentino, ah yes, the unfortunate Saint Valentine, beaten savagely and then beheaded by Emperor Claudius because he continued to perform marriage rites for young couples despite the imperial order banning marriages so the men could go to battle.  And how do we mark the anniversary of his martyrdom?

With those heart-shaped boxes of chocolates tied with  red ribbons and other such hypocritical expressions of “love.”  I’ve always hated the holiday.  Perhaps Varya did also, but found herself a victim of its sentimental demands?  Perhaps the word tango was a cover for mango, that exotic fruit first cultivated in India?  I look it up on Yahoo! and am greeted with  a recipe for Pineapple with Mango Coulis, requiring dark rum and a teaspoon of something called “lime zest, “ 61 calories per serving.  Come to think of it, the word tango is the word for “word” in Japanese.  .  .And could the name Rudy refer to Rudy Giuliani, the simultaneously scorned and admired Mayor of New York when I was afflicted with all this Varya business?   Yes, afflicted.  More than once I caught myself saying The Line while riding the subway.  The first time it happened this black man was playing a cool saxophone version of “Stormy Weather,” but because of Varya I couldn’t accompany him even in my mind. Of course, there’s lots of people like me on the subway; probably it’s the safest place in the world, if only the downtown express didn’t lurch so much I had to hang onto a strap and couldn’t even record any new thoughts about Varya in the notebook I always carried.

Oh, the sheer absurdity of imagining that Varya was expressing in code a desire for a heart-shaped mango, preferably from Japan!   By the third month of my affliction I feared I was going mad.  If only for one day she’d stop repeating that damn line, always adding that killer of a thank you– in Polish  . .One day, that’s all I asked for.  I’d reached the point where I no longer sang at all.  Greatly I feared I would slip and repeat Varya’s line when I was lecturing to my class about “The Cherry Orchard”–yes, there was a character in the play named Varya–  or ordering an espresso or even sympathizing with Mrs. Ilona Myszkowski-Lepentier, the elderly lady who lived in the next apartment with a canary named Camille and a marble bird bath plus a couple of god -awful statues and who was slowly dying from an unidentified disease, most likely cirrhosis of the liver, according to elevator gossip.  For years there’d also been rumors she had once been a countess in pre-war Poland who had fled to exile in France;  no one dared address her by her first name. Because my French was  fluent, I was one of the few neighbors she admitted to her apartment, even when her illness had forced her to take to her four poster bed whose tapestry headboard depicted rococco ladies on swings amidst masses of foliage.

Indeed, it was during a brief visit with Mrs. M-L. that Varya decided to modify her message a bit. Or I decided to modify Varya: the distinction, I realized by then, was irrelevant.   I was filling the sick woman’s glass with Perrier and also filling her in on recent world events when suddenly I heard myself saying, “Well, that’s the problem with a global economy:  I want more than anything else in the world to learn how to dance the tango.”  No Valentino this time, no Polish thank you.  Mrs. M-L. just nodded, like she always did when I finished a sentence.  Nodded and murmured something in French about the tango being a wicked dance but how she herself had danced it in her youth at some of the finest salons in Paris. Of course, the Parisian version was far more elegant than the original street versions from the barrios of Buenos Aires.  Though the French Catholic church didn’t approve– which made it all the more enticing.

“Mais oui, Madame Barbara, tous les femmes devrait apprendre le tango,” she said, after I helped to prop her on a throne of velvet pillows.  A moment later, Varya said, so softly I had to strain to hear her, “You must learn to dance it.”  More precisely, Varya and I said it together, but given the softness of our shared voice and Mrs. M-L’s compromised health, I assumed she hadn’t heard.

Wrong. Leaning towards me, Mrs. M-L said in delicately accented English, “ Yes, yes, yes.  All your life you’ve wanted to dance the tango. But you were afraid. Now that I’m an old dying woman, I can tell you there’s nothing to be afraid of except not doing what you wish.  Ah, if I’d only run off with Marcel that summer.  Or Jean-Pierre. Instead of marrying that boring Count. And he was Polish, not even French, despite his name.”

So it was true, Mrs. M-L had been a countess.  But I couldn’t ask her any details, much as I wished, because the voice of Varya intruded as I started to frame my question. Not only intruded, but reverted once again to her original line. Complete with Valentino and the Polish word for thank you.  Of course, Mrs. M-L heard. After sipping some Perrier she said I must learn some more about Pola Negri, whom she herself had met on a trip to Hollywood with the Count.  Did I know Pola was Rudy Valentino’s last lover? A

fascinating but rude woman who had brought her Polish mother to Hollywood and demanded the old woman sit in a chair during an elegant party attended by Douglas Fairbanks and Chaplin and many other luminaries aside from herself and that  tres, tres tedious Count. Ashamed of her Old World mother, Pola insisted the woman say absolutely nothing the whole time, explaining to the guests that her mother had suffered a stroke.

“But the mother tricked her and told everyone her daughter was a damn fake, a liar. Good for her, I said to the Count.  The only problem was that she said it in French so hardly anyone understood.”

I nodded, anxious to escape so I could ponder in private the latest Varya twist.  But Mrs. M-L sat up straight in her bed and said how Pola’s mother had done what she always wanted to do but up until then feared.

“Oh?”

“Yes.  Back in Bydgoscz, Poland, the woman was afraid to say anything that might interfere with her daughter’s ambitions.  But now that she was in America she felt free. Free to express her deepest wish.  Ah, if only I myself had felt free enough to do such things maybe I wouldn’t be lying here watching Camille fly between her bath and cage.”

“Please, you must not be harsh on yourself,” I offered, pushing stupid Camille back into her cage with a hairbrush from Mrs. M-L’s night table, a gesture whose crudeness would ordinarily would have brought tears to the old woman’s eyes.  But all she said, lying back, was that I must excuse her because she was tres, tres, fatiguee, much too tired to talk any more.

I did the easier thing first: looked up Pola Negri on the WWW for whatever clues she might offer though I suspected I was only stalling.  Not that Pola was dull.  I especially wondered why she had chosen the stage name Negri.  A black Polish woman?  Impossible.  But maybe she thought it would be impressive in Paris when she finally managed to escape from that stuffy old Pomeranian city of Bydgoscz; after all, hadn’t the French just loved Josephine Baker and other Negro entertainers who’d fled to Paris to escape the scorn and outright neglect of America?  I did admire the woman’s will, call it courage, her determination to rise above her impoverished background.  And in an odd way, even her theatrics at Valentino’s funeral.  I myself have never even cried in public since I was a kid, not even at my parents’ funerals or when my long ago fiance informed me shortly before our wedding date that he was madly in love with a 16 year old jazz singer in the East Village, so good-bye and good luck.

Probably I wouldn’t have taken the next step if Varya had only shut up, even for a few days.  But on she and I went, over and over, sometimes without a pause between repetitions of The Line. As if I were chainsmoking, one addiction I had long ago conquered.

After several phone calls, I found a dance studio  across the river in Queens that offered tango instruction for a relatively reasonable fee.  More important, the lady who answered the phone said I could just take tango lessons if that’s what I wanted; there was no need to take a whole course in ballroom dancing though most people didn’t attempt the tango until they felt confident enough with the rhumba and samba and most of all the waltz.

“The waltz?”

“That’s what I said, ma’m. The waltz is the tango’s great aunt. And the polka and mazurka its cousins.   But  the tango’s only sister is the milonga.”

“The what?”

“The milonga, M like in Mary, I like in ice, L like in. . . An African dance adapted by the creoles of Argentina.  I guess you don’t know beans about African dances.”

I admitted my ignorance, whereupon the lady said two things: 1. Milonga is an Afro-Brazilian word meaning “words” –which the Argentines expanded to mean a large unruly crowd and 2. Obviously I also didn’t know beans about dancing.

Right.  The bitch was absolutely right.   Probably since I was born, I’ve had not two left feet but five or six.  Which didn’t stop my mother from insisting I take ballet lessons at the 92nd Street Y.  I think I hated those lessons even more than my Varya did.  And very likely she was forced to study pure classical ballet while at least I got away with the American version.  To this day I can’t believe any young girl truly yearns to be a ballerina though I’d learned Pola Negri was devastated when a bout of tuberculosis put an end to her study at Warsaw’s Academy of Imperial Ballet where she had been a ballerina of great promise. Poor Pola. She had to shift to acting in plays like Sumurun, the story of a mulatto dancer bought in the slave market as a gift to the Sheik. A real Sheik, not Rudy. . .

But even poorer me. Especially when I appeared at the Le Premier Institute of Ballroom Dancing in Astoria for my first tango lesson.  Of course, my interest was strictly academic; I wanted to learn just enough to help me get rid of the Varya disease and had no ambition whatsoever to attend the tango teas and tango balls that were at the time a rage in New York, part of the fin de siecle retro craze.  A little hands on experience, so to speak.  And that’s precisely what my instructor did the moment he greeted me, his thick fingers gripping me around the waist and on back of my right shoulder.

“Wayne’s the name.  Wayne Dexter the Third.  But you can call me Buddy if you want.  Apolonia can’t be here today so I’ll be your teacher. “

Apolonia Klinkowiecz was the artistic director.  She herself had answered the phone when I called for subway directions; she told me her stage name was–yes–Pola Negri and how it fit her “just perfect” because not only was she Polish but also black. Like in negro. If only because of that strange manipulation of words, I regretted her absence, but forced myself to go along with Wayne, never mind my immediate distaste.   He was a large tub of a man; I’m one of those women who wears a Petite 6. And something about his yellowish white hair and eyes gave me the creeps–as if the whole prospect of taking tango lessons wasn’t terrifying enough in the first place.

“Now I want you to relax, hon, ” Wayne said, his accent clearly betraying his Baltimore origins.  Shit, not another demand to relax, one of the mantras of the very late 1990’s.  As if everyone were a tautly wired sculpture, one of those David Smith creations or even a Calder like I’d seen at the Guggenheim.

“Relax and let me hold you so close there’s no daylight between us, OK?”  Wayne’s breath smelled from peppermint Binaca.  He explained that “no daylight” was a dance term for close contact, as if I couldn’t have figured that out, especially from the tightness of his grip.

“And make sure to flex those sweet little knees of yours with none of that rise-and-fall, OK baby?   When the music starts, you turn your hip and shoulder in the direction of your moving leg so you’re in Contrary Body Movement, OK?  Like it says in the pamphlet.”

Of course, I’d never received the pamphlet so I was ignorant not only of such “essential tango terminology” as “draw” and “corte” and “fan,” but of the distinction between CBM, Contrary Body Movement, and CBMP, the more complicated Contrary Body Movement Position.

All of which I learned after Wayne–I just couldn’t call him Buddy–loosened his grip on me and went to retrieve a crumpled pamphlet from the front office.

“Now let’s get our sweet little asses movin’.”

A cassette of “Cumparsita” began to play as if of its own volition. Already I felt dizzy and I hadn’t  so much as moved one stockinged foot from the taped-off square where Wayne had reached down and placed it, as if my foot were a jar to be set down on the floor. Make that a jug, a big clunky jug.

“Step back on your right foot while I step forward.  Remember, no daylight between

us. Slow at first, real slow. Then slow-slow-quick-quick-slow.  Make sure to keep yourself in CBM, opposite hip and shoulder turned toward moving leg.  Ba-RUMP-ba-Pa-ba. Ba-RUMP. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow.  No daylight between us. No daylight. Now unlock your sweet thighs and step back on your left foot while I step forward–I said your left foot–now real quick step to your side and draw the ball of your right foot across. . .”

I was used to New York style fast talk but not its redneck version.  So I kept asking him to slow down.

“I said unlock those gorgeous thighs, baby.  Atta girl.”  When he reached down to unlock them with his  fingers, my thighs began to quiver and I felt on the edge of fainting though I’d never in my life ever fainted. Somehow I managed to move his fingers away, a gesture that made him laugh.  “Chill out, baby.  Old Buddy here just wants to teach the tango. Nothin’ else. That’s a promise on a stack of Bibles.”

A  song I hadn’t heard in decades emerged from my Museum of Old Songs. The lyrics went something like “Takes two to tango, four to square dance. . .six to nine to get the feeling of romance.” I managed to keep it inside me, took a deep breath, and let Wayne hold me again.  After all, I was there for a good reason: to help get rid of Varya. Make that satisfy Varya so she’d finally get off my back or out of my throat, whatever.  Why else would I have schlepped all the way out to Astoria?

“Cumparsita” began to play itself again.  I took a couple of deep breaths, reminding myself again why I was there. “Now step back on your right foot . . . Atta girl.  Hey, sweetie pie, you sure as hell got some talent.”

I’m anything but a sweetie pie.  More a loaf of bread gone stale.

“Now  diagonally  on the right foot, cross left in back , thighs locked in CPMP.  Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. Right turn to Promenade Position. Rock forward.  I said forward. Come on, now, Babsie.   Don’t be afraid, my sweet little Barbikins, sweet little Barb.  All your life you’ve wanted to do this, right?”

Before I could stop myself, it happened. The Line, all of it, including Rudolph Valentino, plus thank you in Polish.  At which point Wayne stopped dead in the middle of a right promenade and said thank you in English.  That was the first time anyone had ever called him Rudolph Valentino.

A bell rang, time’s up. He said he’d see me next week unless Apolonia was back. Meanwhile, I should practice at home.  “If you got no partner, use a broom.  But remember, no daylight between the two of you.”

I removed his hand from my breast and gave him a sharp slap on the mouth.

“So sorry,” he said, wiping a thin stream of blood with a kleenex.  “I’ll never do that again, I promise. Forgive me?”

Like hell I would.  And decided that if Apolonia wasn’t there for me the next week, I’d drag my butt somewhere else, even if it meant paying three times as much at some Upper East Side dancing salon.  You may wonder why I didn’t report him but you’ve got to realize the power of my affliction at the time and my desire to conquer it,  so strong nothing else mattered.

The next week she was there all right, a slim black woman with terrific buns, as they say, and a jivey way of moving that made even me want to get out on the dance floor so I could move along with her.  No doubt about it.  If not for Apolonia, the Pola Negri of Astoria,  I’d never made it to my first tea dance, let alone the competitions.  I did feel foolish calling her by her stage name but she didn’t insist; if I wanted to, I could just call her Appy.  Apparently, she’d learned about the real Pola Negri from her mother, a Polish refugee from Bydgoscz, the same city as Pola, who’d once had dance ambitions but ended up scrubbing hospital floors after marrying a black man who gave her five children in five years and then split, god knows where.  Having named her daughter Apolonia after her heroine, the mother was surprised so few Americans recognized the name. But very early they recognized Apolonia’s talents; unfortunately, her teachers steered her toward the sort of dancing “appropriate” for blacks, mostly street dances from the West Indies. Still, Apolonia was confident she’d someday become a great star, a Martha Graham at the very least; meanwhile she’d help support herself and her two little babies by giving lessons.

And she gave those lessons with such tact and skill soon even I could manage not only the Contrary Body Movement Position but the Fan, the Corte, even the Tango Promenade.  I took on extra language students just so I could afford extra tango lessons.  My translations I placed in a file cabinet, with an apology for cramming them between bank statements and bills and a promise I’d get back to them someday.  I streamlined my work at the New School, rushing through my old lectures and leaving right after classes so I could practice the tango at home. Yes, sometimes I used a broom as partner, so Wayne’s advice had not been a complete waste.  But after a few days, Mrs. Myszkowski-Lepantier knocked on my door,  wearing a long sequined dress and looking more robust than I’d ever seen her.   She told me she’d be delighted to be my partner; the Count had been a lousy dancer so she herself had had to learn the male parts. And there was no need to worry, her doctor had already given his hearty approval.  So everyday after work Mrs. M-L and I practiced the tango to some CD’s I’d bought at Tower Records.  She didn’t approve of the music, insisted that only Parisian music was correct.  But we managed well enough, even the fancier steps.

Best of all, Varya quieted down.  By no means did she disappear but I only had to utter The Line a couple of times a day and sometimes two or three days went by with no Varya at all.  Of course, she sometimes accompanied me to my tango lessons, but Apolonia said a quick “Okay, baby “ just to acknowledge her and went right on with the lesson.  I’m glad she acknowledged her, though; otherwise Varya would have been hurt and probably would have intensified her demand instead of slowly relenting. Like heroin or cigarettes when a person tries to quit.

We did so well that Apolonia not only taught me the American version of the tango, but the genuine Argentinian version, a lot more boisterous,with lots of kicks, but also more elegant.  She even insisted on teaching me the Polish Tango, whose choreography she herself had created with the help of her mother while they listened to her mother’s old records.  Yes, there was a Polish Tango, and some fine dancers; it had been particularly popular among Warsaw’s Jews after they were forced into the  Ghetto and a few even danced it in the camps to the delight of the SS.  Somehow, Hitler thought tango music was OK, at least more permissible than that  filthy jazz.  But mainly we concentrated on the Latino version because that’s what people knew in New York.

My first tea dance was at a converted saloon near Times Square.  At this point, Apolonia thought I deserved a male partner who had mastered the tango; graciously, she let me borrow her boyfriend Carlos.  “Just think of him as a tennis partner,” she reassured me.

I was nervous as hell, but Carlos was both skilled and patient.  Sexy, too–if you like that Latino look.  And Apolonia coached me from the sidelines the whole time.  When Carlos shifted me briefly to another partner just for the practice, I scarcely noticed, being so caught up in the music, especially an Argentinian number, “ El dia que me quieras” and the haunting “Uno,” words accompanied by viola and bandoneon, a type of accordion from Buenos Aires.  Soon Apolonia convinced me I was good enough for a tango salon, where many more people danced.  The competitions followed quickly: first just a few local contests, finally the Greater New York Tango Ball, for which I  not only had to audition but compete with some of the best dancers in America. Always Carlos agreed to be my partner though I know he could have danced with many far more skilled and beautiful women.  Every time we danced, we won something, certificates at first, then one trophy after another, all of them ugly but still I was proud enough to display them on my mantel piece.   By the end of my fifth year, I was ready for the International Competition.

In the weeks before the International, I practiced night and day, with Carlos when he could spare the time from his job as a porter at the Pierre, sometimes with Mrs. M-L, sometimes with Apolonia, at other times with anyone willing to be a partner, as long as he or she was a reasonably adept tango dancer. When I couldn’t find a partner, I took up once again with my broom.  If I wasn’t dancing the tango, I dreamt about dancing the tango.  And Varya had almost completely disappeared: only once at that time did she insist on expressing her wish, and her voice was soft, almost inaudible–a  very good sign, my friend D. thought.  I was too caught up in my preparations for the big event to question him. As you already know,  my practice paid off handsomely.

After handing out the other awards, “Borges” came up to me. “I thought you’d never come,” he said, with the slightest of Spanish accents.  “All my life I’ve been waiting for you.”

Sure, sure.  I had gotten to know these Latino men during my tango career, charming but with the possible exception of Carlos, who was thoroughly committed to Apolonia, utterly unreliable. Would I dance the last dance with him, a special dance for the lady winner?  Of course. If that’s all he wanted, no problem.  He was not the best partner but I managed to turn him in the right direction and keep time by tapping his shoulder.   When the dance ended, Borges said he’d like to treat me to a drink at the World Trade Towers.  He added that he wanted to tell me something very important.  Oh?  A wish he’s had for many years, something he’s never expressed to anybody before but he had a feeling he could trust me.

A thud. My heart began falling so fast I thought it would drop to the floor from under my black and gold tango skirt.   But before he could tell me anything more,  someone from the office  informed him he had a long distance phone call.   Be right back, dispense Usted, excuse me, now don’t go away.   I assured him I wouldn’t though  I was sorely tempted.  Now that I had reached the top, I wanted nothing more than to return to my former life and sing “Stormy Weather” whenever I felt the urge.  If only Apolonia and Carlos were still around: they would have convinced me to leave.  But they had left together right after the judges announced their decision, something about a sick kid at home.  For reasons I’ll never understand I decided to wait.

While Borges took his call, I tried to anticipate his wish.  Surely it would not be the same as Varya’s?   At least not in content.  But perhaps in form?  Possibilities: More than anything else in the world I want to be with Babe Ruth when he hits his 60th home run.  Nah, that was ancient history.  Given his Latino background, it could be “More than anything else in the world I want to greet Montezuma or Pissaro when they first arrive in the New World.”  One thing led to another:  I want to be with Marco Polo when he first sets foot in China.  I want to be with Copernicus when he discovers the heliocentric theory of the universe; with Einstein when he first realizes that E=MC square. Any one of those I could handle. . .laugh it away before there was a chance he could implant it inside me.  . .

Looking straight at me, what he finally said was “More than anything else in the world I want to dance the mazurka with Varya.”    Damn that Apolonia. Only she could have betrayed me.

“But Varya’s dead,” I answered.  Dead to me, at least.  I hadn’t heard her voice in months.

“So is Rudolph Valentino.  Does that make any difference?”

I asked him if the Polish Tango would do; certainly I didn’t want to start taking mazurka lessons.  And already Apolonia had taught me enough Polish tangos I could satisfy his wish in no time.

“No.  Only the mazurka. “

“But I don’t know a damn thing about the mazurka.”

“Then you’ll have to learn.”

I told him I was much too busy; he’d have to find someone else. Maybe Apolonia’s mother still remembered the dance from her Polish childhood. No way.  He wanted me, only me.

I’m glad to report that so far I’ve only been compelled to speak Borges’ line a few  times;  usually the episodes occur when I’m safely at home trying to work on those neglected translations.  So there’s hope.

But I learned last night that Mrs. M-L died, probably from an overdose of laudanum, of all things. So not only will she never be able to dance the mazurka with me but she won’t even be able to convince me I’ve wanted all my life to learn how.

At least  I have enough time between episodes to sing “Stormy Weather.”  With gusto.

***

ROOT MEANINGS

The winter of 19– was so brutal that in a last frantic effort to keep warm, words began to retreat to their root meanings. Not just the words themselves–that would have been a relatively minor problem given the richness of our language–but the objects they represent.

I first became aware of the situation shortly after telling the milkman to cancel my delivery.  Why bother if the milk froze solid in that brief interval between the milkman’s truck and my porch, sometimes cracking the ice-coated glass of its bottle?  My poor cat Melissa would have to make do with powdered cream.  Within minutes a lattice appeared in the space previously claimed by the milk bottle.  Yes, a lattice, kin of a trellis. The kind intended to support climbing roses.  White, its carved wood occasionally visible despite snow; the gaps between its criss-crossed slats perfectly even despite their rapidly growing beards of icicles. It brought to mind my grandmother’s lattice, so brimming with big bloody roses that its image flashed clearly before me despite my recent troubles with amnesia.

My neighbors, Drs. Ulfred and Margaret Schlauss, had temporarily moved in with me and Melissa because my flat was slightly warmer, given its southern exposure. Both Ulfred and Margaret are linguistic archeologists, and both caught on at once: the culprit, they agreed, was the word cancel, an innocuous sounding word if ever there was one.  Did I not realize that the word cancel derived from the Latin cancelli: crossed lines, grating,  lattice-work?

“Ach, is it true you didn’t know that?” Margaret asked. It was true;  my work as a botanical statistician demanded expertise with numbers, not words. Nor with actual flowers, let alone lattices. Because I was ashamed of my disorder,  I refrained from telling them about my amnesia though it would have provided a good enough excuse.

Anxious to hear more, I offered  hot tea, which Ulfred gratefully accepted, given the frigid weather, but Margaret  declined because ordinary tea, contrary to its reputation, only made her catarrh worse.  She preferred Peruvian tea, the sort brewed from coca leaves.  Lucky woman, for the moment I poured Ulfred’s tea into one of my prized blue porcelain cups it spilled in every direction,  scalding my  neighbor’s flannel trousers. The cup itself simply disappeared, replaced by a small pig.

I must admit the pig looked more stunned to find himself  atop my kitchen table than I did when he arrived as if ex nihilo, knocking over a bowl of bread pudding in the process.   Smiling bravely despite his pain, Ulfred said immediately that the problem had to be the word porcelain. Did I not realize that it derived from the Italian porcellana, a purple fish whose shell is curved like a pig’s back, the fish’s name a derivative of the Latin porcus or pig?

Ignoring my second confession of ignorance, Ulfred announced that we were on the brink of the most serious linguistic crisis since Babel.   No, Margaret said, pounding her mittened fists on the table, “Since the first person on earth uttered a sound and then repeated it, thus establishing the first word.”  They exchanged scowls.   I myself said that if the situation were not soon brought under control, all communication would cease.  Both Ulfred and Margaret laughed at the obviousness of my remark and the piglet squealed, which in turn elicited a viciously long hiss from Melissa.  It was at that moment that the entire roof simply disappeared.

Literally my flat had been transformed into a pig sty. “Roof,” Margaret explained, shivering despite three shawls and numerous thick sweaters: the word roof  had returned to its most primitive Anglo-Saxon root, hrof, cabin or shed. And by extension the Welsh craw, pig sty.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” her husband admonished, shaking a finger at her. “What about the Icelandic hrof? It just meant shed.  They didn’t have any pigs in Iceland when the word was invented.”

“Who says so?”

“I say so.  And you’ve also forgotten the Irish crou.”

“Crou you.”

I hated to hear my neighbors bicker, so as I struggled with sheets, blankets, newsprint, and stray pieces of wood, anything at all to substitute for the missing roof, I asked if finding the precise root of a word might help eventually to rescue it, pull it up so to speak.  Both Ulfred and Margaret thought the possibility worth pondering and Ulfred even suggested maybe it would be possible to shift a word to one of its less threatening roots.  Alas, his efforts to bring such about   did not in the least help restore what once had been my sturdy roof, whose tiles I had laid in place by hand over a period of three years.  If anything, we were blasted by the coldest wind so far; even Melissa and the piglet huddled together. Piglets, I should say.  Plus a large sow.  Yes, my flat had indeed become a pig sty.

To keep warm and keep our distance from the pigs, we moved as close to the walls as we could. At least they were strong enough to withstand even the most tempestuous snow storms. Margaret said I need not worry about the walls: none of the word’s roots would endanger us, not the Anglo Saxon weall, rampart or stake, or the Latin uallus, literally a protection.

“Ah, my dear, but you forget the link with the Old Irish fal, a hedge,” Ulfred said.

“So?  Even a hedge can protect.”

“But not when it’s so cold the air’s a block of ice.”  I had just managed to stretch a thick blanket where once there were my deep red roof tiles but feared it was not thick enough to prevent the remains of the cracked ceiling from crashing down on us.  So I tried to cover the ceiling as well with my last blanket, stretch it tautly in place with large brass nails, and for reinforcement pulling the blanket’s border over the top of the walls.  All went well until I felt the tickle of a leaf.  A sharply pointed leaf.  Then more and more such leaves, spreading so rapidly I barely had time to watch my walls disappear, along with my pictures, my oval mirror, my statistical charts, everything once attached to them, including all of the wallpaper’s stripes.

Hedges.  Neatly trimmed hedges like those of a formal English garden.  Hedges all around us. With so many gaps between their branches and leaves the wind rushed in with such alacrity the crates of pig food slid across the floor and the skin of the pigs themselves froze,  hairs protruding in stiff little tufts.

At least we still had my wood-burning stove to keep us warm.  And Ulfred reassured me that if the stove should also retreat to its roots, the consequences would, for once, be to our benefit.  Why?  Because the root of the word stove, extufa, referred not merely to something we expect to find in a room, but to a room itself: a particular room set aside for taking a steam bath and by the 16th century to any room heated by a furnace.  As if in obedience to Ulfred’s words, the stove disappeared a few minutes later; to my delight, I realized that once more I had a room, complete with ceiling, floor, and–most important–walls.  No more hedges.  And a considerably diminished chill, enough so Margaret felt warm enough to remove one of her shawls. So great was our relief that we barely noticed when the bread pudding gave way first to lumps that resembled those ugly wens that occasionally disfigure a face, then disappeared completely from the bowl, replaced by a short man with an enormous paunch.

“Ah yes,”  Ulfred sighed, “the pudding has chosen to retreat to the Westphalian puddek and Gaelic putac. Both refer to swollen bellies or what we call paunch. Especially if the swelling is caused by an excessive intake of alcohol.”

“Chosen?” I asked.  Did the words actually possess enough power to discriminate between various roots and select the one most appealing?  My question led to a heated discussion of the ancient conflict between fate and free will, Ulfred defending the power of the will, Margaret and I more inclined to credit fate.  We were on the threshold of a new interpretation of the Oedipus myth, one that melded Freud with Calvinism and quantum mechanics–the latter my contribution–when the short paunchy man broke in by announcing that his name was Durril. And he’d appreciate it if we could get him some beer, preferably a lager. Explaining that we had no beer, I offered him tea  but withdrew the offer when I recalled the fate of my blue porcelain cup. Anxious to resume the discussion of fate and free will, I pointed Durril towards the pigs.  Yes, my new room still contained a pig sty though now it occupied only a small area.  But large enough to store a hefty supply of pig food.  Unfortunately, Durril assumed I meant he could slaughter the pigs and eat them rather than partake of their slop.  You can imagine the squeals and cries of pain, the tussle that culminated in the retreat of all my spoons to chips of wood and my Turkish rug to flocks of hair.  He managed to slaughter only one pig, rapidly consuming its flesh to the bone.

Acute solemnity making her long face appear even longer, Margaret expressed her fear that the rules of the game were changing in a drastic way: no longer were words retreating to their roots in order to keep warm but to escape from the least unpleasantness.  “Like most people these days.” No tolerance for the slightest pain.  So what do they do?  Reach for the nearest drug.  Anything to preserve the illusion of total happiness. “

“Yes,” Ulfred said. “In our day we wouldn’t even think of such–such–evasions.” Then he turned to me and said in a voice grave as a sermon that he,too, was now afraid.  The situation could at any moment get so out of control words might disappear capriciously, to the point where all possibilities of communication were annihilated.

Durril began to laugh.  Why worry about communication?  All that mattered was food and drink and pretty soon the pigs would make more pigs. . .Ulfred was so disgusted he told Durril that the origin of his name was the gypsy word for a gooseberry. But Durril only laughed harder.

“Just because you got some fancy degrees don’t mean you know a thing.  So happens my old lady weren’t  no gypsy.  She came from one of the richest families in Scotland and my old man was English.   They named me for my uncle, who was the king’s doorkeeper. So there.”

“Then they didn’t know how to spell,” Margaret said. “Because everyone knows the king’s doorkeeper is spelled D-u-r-e-l-l– or with an “e” at the end if he’s French.”

“You calling me a liar, lady?”

Before Margaret could answer we all began to scratch ourselves.  Something was making us itch, the burning sort of itch you get from poison sumac.  At the same time we began to feel much warmer.

“Of course.  I knew all along things would change for the better,” Ulfred said.

“You did?  Just minutes ago you were talking like it was the end of the world.”

“Believe me.  Now I speak the truth.”

“Bullshit.”

Scratching his arms furiously, Ulfred turned to me and said how wicked it was that after forty years of marriage his wife still didn’t trust or respect him.  To avoid another marital brabble, I asked him why he thought things were changing for the better.

“Because the word freeze is gone.  Straight back to its Teutonic root, freusan, which is related according to the laws of Gleichenheim’s Great Vowel and Consonant Shift to the Latin prurire, to itch, originally to burn.  If you don’t believe me look up the Sanskrit plosha–”

“Go look it up yourself,” Margaret said.  “If you can find any of our books. . .I guess your feeble mind has forgotten how  all of them turned into beech trees when this nonsense first began.”

Durril laughed again.  “So you don’t got no more books!  That’s really rich.  Now you’re no smarter than me and it don’t matter how my old lady spelled my name.”

It was true.  The retreat of coldness, that is.  Not completely but enough to convince us the worst was over.  Already  I could see through the window that the clouds had retreated to their roots and become rocks and hills, and I could hear that the once frigid winds had become horns,

joining to create a plaintive melody.  Even Melissa must have realized what was happening, the strands of her fur no longer frosty tufts but warm and silky.

I wondered if any of the lost objects would return, like that blue porcelain cup.  Logically, then, the pigs would be gone;  likewise Durril and the flocks of hair that had replaced my rug.  But such an intriguing possibility was beyond the capacity of my limited brain power, so of course I would consult Ulfred and Margaret.  To my astonishment, both had vanished. Margaret? Ulfred?

Had they perhaps returned to their own flat now that the cold had abated?  I started to dial their phone number when I noticed a large but gentle white wolf gnawing on the phone cord. The wolf was trying to say something but all I could make out was the word “name.”  It wasn’t until I noticed a fat round gooseberry smack in the middle of my table that I realized what had happened: names themselves were reverting to their roots, not just words.  Sure enough, Durril was gone, Durril the gypsy gooseberry.  I popped the berry into my mouth but it was so sour I tossed it to the pigs, one of which swallowed it whole.

Just why names were disappearing I couldn’t figure. . .Thank god, my parents had the good sense to name me Howard.  Though I knew almost nothing about derivations, I remembered my mother telling me that Howard meant watchman, he who guards and observes. And slowly I began to remember a book she kept by her bedside, The Book of Names. Given their eleven kids, always she and my father had to scrounge around for names. ..

Yes, it all came back.  Like a root in reverse, rising from its earthy origin to the fresh air above.  Indeed, so many memories began to return I was convinced my amnesia was cured–as mysteriously as it had begun.   And I realized I had much to be thankful for.  At least Ulfred had become a friendly, peaceful wolf; what if his name had been Ulger, a sporting wolf, or Ulrich, the supremely powerful wolf, or, god forbid, Adolph?   True, I didn’t know what to do with the pearl that had once been Margaret.  Perhaps I’d have it set in a ring to surprise her when she emerged from her root?

But I couldn’t bear to see my poor Melissa buzzing around the room as if in pursuit of pollen.  If only I’d named her Yolanda or Corrinna.  The moment she uprooted herself from Melissa, the Greek word for bee, I’d change her name.

Until that time I’d busy myself unnaming everything I could, giving objects names so new they could not possibly put down roots.  Whatever sounded good to me. . .  The prospect was exhilarating, much like a baby must feel when he or she begins to coo. Or the god of names.

Sheladon.  Nuala.  Maigdhilla. Klaundra. . . If nobody understood me–well, that would be their problem.  My only fear is that I’d create a name that had roots in some archaic language only an Ulfred or Margaret would know; surely the wolf and pearl would be no help.

Of course, nothing worthwhile is without risk.  Perhaps even nothing not worthwhile  So let me start with you, dear reader, no matter what your gender or ethnicity. I hereby christen you Phlumeriannash.  Don’t worry, it’s all stem and leaves, no roots.  If you don’t believe me, just look it up in the nearest etymological dictionary.

Wait–I’ve got a better idea.  I hereby name you Root.  A word without roots, scarcely changed from its Old Norse version, rot. At least I’m almost positive that’s what I learned long ago in my first botany class.  Naturally, I won’t know definitely until Ulfred and Margaret return.  That might be a long way off.  But return they will, I am sure.  Even if that means Durril, too, will return.  Until then I’ll  write down all my resurrected memories and dream about seeing my blue porcelain cup once more.  And–it goes without saying– my poor Melissa.  As I said before, I have much to be thankful for.

***

ONE SIZE FITS ALL:  A JEU D’ESPRIT

1.

At about 3 a.m one night a few weeks after I returned from Poland, my friend Pavel arrived without warning in a dream.  He was wearing a pin-striped jacket with a small pink triangle sewn just below the collar.  When I asked him why he had made the long journey to America at this time, he said he needed to consult me about some details of our film script about contemporary Polish-Jewish relations, the script on which we had collaborated most of that unusually hot summer, the last summer of the 20th century.

“You could have called.  Or e-mailed.  Or even written a letter.”

He said he didn’t have time for any of those things.

“Well, I hope you at least got a cheap plane ticket.  Excuse me for yawning.”

“Free.  The ticket is free.  Aren’t you going to ask me about the pink triangle? Or don’t you know what it means?  Only you know the yellow star that Jews had to wear–”

Of course I knew what it meant.  I also knew that Pavel was not gay.  Or if he was, he had gotten over it a long time ago.  Right after he crossed the threshold of my house we lay together on my ancient leather sofa and embraced tightly, as if we had not seen each other in years.  Then we made love by rubbing our clothed organs against one another; I found it pleasurable enough though he seemed less enthusiastic.

“Why are you so quiet?  I like when making love to cry out, to sing.”

And indeed he began to sing, one of the old songs from his late father’s collection of  78’s he always played for me on his gramophone  when I visited him in Poland. In particular this time a British version of the World War II song, “Where or When,” sung by one Jack Hylton, a music hall star of his day.  In fact, Pavel had played it for me several times the night before I left, so often that I thought it might contain a not so secret message, a beast in the barcode, so to speak.  We’ll meet again/ Don’t know where/ Don’t know when. .

In other words, no commitments despite our collaborative writing and long friendship.  But no breakup or threat thereof either. . .

Suddenly I remembered both my parents were sleeping that night in my house.

“Please. You must be careful not to wake my parents up.”

“You sound like a kid.”

“How can you say that when you know I not only have grown kids of my own but two grandsons?”

The pink triangle had disappeared from his jacket, replaced by an Izod logo of a caterpillar.

That afternoon we had spoken on the phone.  Conscious of the date, I said this must be a very important day in Poland.  Yes, there were commemorations and demonstrations all across the country.  I was embarrassed to say that there had not been a single article in that day’s Washington Post or New York Times, not a single article mentioning the 60th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland.

“Impossible.”  He laughed. “So American.”

“I’m afraid so.  Maybe it will be on the internet. ”  To ratify to him that at least I myself was not “so American,”  I mentioned that I had taught Auden’s poem that morning to my advanced poetry class, leaving out that not one student had the faintest notion about the significance of the date.   In his nearly perfect English, Pavel recited the opening lines from the poem: “I sit in one of the dives/ on 52^nd Street/ Uncertain and afraid.. . ”  I joined him “As the clever hopes expire/ Of a low dishonest decade/. . “

When both of our minds went blank at about the same point, I told him about the story I had begun to write about the day this past summer when he and I had gone swimming in this ice-cold Polish river and how I had gotten caught in the reeds and he had to rescue me…But I didn’t go into details, any of the underlying themes about the conflicts between Poles and Jews.

“You’re not really in the story.  I mean there’s a male character of course, but he’s not you,” I lied.              Then, though I was paying for the call on top day-rates, I turned on my CD player

and loudly as possible played into the phone Vera Lynn’s version of “Where or When” –exactly as I had planned to do when I first dialed his number, hoping he would not be home and I would just play part of the song into his answering machine. Though I’d never heard of the singer, I had lucked into the CD, called “Songs That Got Us Through the War” at a local Sam Goody’s.  .

“Ah yes, Vera Lynn,” Pavel said. “Very famous.”

As usual, he knew everything about everything.

3.

“Isn’t that the new Holocaust Museum?”  I asked,  stunned that my parents and myself were sitting in a 1950 vintage Dodge, with Pavel at the wheel, driving north on Manhattan’s lower west side less than a second after the “lovemaking” in my suburban Washington house.

“How should I know?” Pavel said, adding that weren’t there enough Holocaust Museums already in the world.   Even in Warsaw they were building one, near the ghetto.

Then my mother, of all people, said it would only be fair if they built a museum for the gypsies and the fairies that Hitler had killed, drawing a laugh from my father and a correction from me.  “No one says fairies anymore.  Just like no one can say the word gay anymore unless referring to a homosexual.”

“Did you know,” Pavel asked, “that even though Hitler hated jazz he loved the tango?”

“Ah, so that’s why all those Nazi war criminals hid in Argentina.”  Sometimes my father’s jokes are not as funny as he thinks they are.  But we had a more important problem than bad jokes, my parents and I.  Because it was clear that we had been abandoned in a pitch black park somewhere in lower Manhattan, Pavel having vanished along with the Dodge.

It was my mother who rescued us by suggesting we proceed to the East Village where we’d be most likely to find Pavel,   “in some queer fag bar.”   You must mean a fruit bar, my father corrected her.  I said nothing because I was so relieved by her brilliant insight; now we had a purpose.

When we arrived three husky men were beating Pavel, who lay in the gutter partly under the rear of the Dodge.  The men used an assortment of truncheons and claw-hammers and were soon joined by more men, including two who had run out in mid-fuck from a bar that had a huge front window like the whore houses of Amsterdam.  Pulling with all his might, my father managed to free Pavel and fight off the bashers.  But instead of expressing my delight that he had not been hurt except for a few minor bruises, I looked directly into his blue eyes and demanded he tell me at once where my two little grandsons were.

“I know you know, “ I shouted.  “You dragged them off someplace after using their bodies for your pleasure.”

“Spakoine, spakoine, ” he said in Polish.   I remembered that the word meant calm down.

“How dare you say that after what you did?”

“Relax.  Chill out.  The boys are perfectly safe in the playroom. Go see for yourself.”  And he poindted toswards another bar with an Amsterdam window that revealed a thick crowd of dancing men.

Instead of going there, I screamed, “Do you mean to say you drove those boys all the way to New York without strapping them into car seats?  Don’t you realize that’s against federal law?”

“So American,” he laughed.  “And I guess now you call polizei.”

“That’s German.  We call them police in this country,” my father said before taking my mother’s hand and dancing off with her in a series of deftly executed tango steps.

“OK, I will.  If that’s what you want.”

“What in hell you say?”

How could I possibly have made love to this man, worked with him several summers on a film script, canonized him as a perfect exemplar of the European intelligensia. . .”I’m calling the police right now.  Because you broke a federal law of the United States of America.  Hand me your cell phone.”

A lucky move, for had he not provided the phone, I could not have had that crucial conversation later with Mark.

4.

The previous winter we had met in Prague.  Pavel knew a film director there who had shown interest in our nearly completed script.  Despite the gray chill, I loved the city, especially the old Jewish section, its cemetery where ancient gravestones, some with carved pineapples and lions, leaned into each other like bad teeth, its historic synagogues.  And if anything Pavel, a man of strong Catholic roots, was more fascinated than I.

A  woman with white braided hair and thick spectacles named Tamara Putikova, whose son was helping to restore the Pinchas Synagogue, joined us at a cafe, only to insist that we quickly move to another cafe before we could take even a single sip of  coffee.  She explained that to her it was still l967, a year before the revolution, when being seen with foreigners, especially an American, could result in arrest.  I nearly burst out laughing but Pavel kicked me under the table as if to say “you don’t understand, you never had to live in tyranny.”

Sometimes Mrs. Putikova, who claimed she had at one time been a famous cabaret singer, better by far than Josephine Baker or Sally Bowes, spoke with full awareness that it was 1999, sometimes reverting to the 80’s, and once all the way back to 1944.

“I know you, I’m positive I know you,” she said to Pavel though the combination of the dark-walled cafe and her near-blindness made it doubtful she could see his face. “I know you from Theresienstadt.  You ordered me to undress even though you were yourself a prisoner with a pink triangle.”

At first Pavel said nothing, pretended to be sipping from his empty coffee cup.  A smart move because the silence encouraged Mrs. Putikova to continue talking, sometimes in German, sometimes Czech, most of the time in her reasonably good English.

“You pretend you don’t remember.  I know your type. I know the Demjanjuk type like I know my own hand.  And there he is back in Cleveland because the Americans are such stupid fools.  But with you it will be different.”

By this time several waiters and customers had moved closer to our table, all of them smiling, as if waiting for the next episode of a long unfolding narrative of madness.  And they were not disappointed:

“Don’t you know who I am?   I was the lover of Franz Kafka.  When Smetana wrote “The Moldau” I sat by his side and sang the notes.  And I personally know not only the Good Soldier Schweik but am related, blood-related, to Vaclav Havel.  And you’re just a Polish peasant, I can tell by the shape of your nose. “

After a while a hospital attendant appeared and after forcing her into handcuffs, led her to a police car that would return her to the hospital from which she had briefly been furloughed.

Pavel was upset to see Mrs. Putikova go.  Not only about the brutality of the handcuffs and police but the loss of an opportunity to get more material from her that he could use in his next book, a novel that would be set in Theresienstadt

5.

Did you think Mrs.Putiikova would enter the dream?  So did I.  But instead in walks a young man named Chris who used to live next door. Sandy-haired, freckled, eminently decent, best friend of my son Dan.  More precisely, Chris’s voice enters the dream, having travelled from his cellphone to mine, the one I appropriated from Pavel.

“I’m sorry to hear about the boys.”

“What do you know?”

“Just that they’re missing.  Dan called me.  He wants me to reproduce their pictures for one of those HAVE YOU SEEN ME? postcards, but I said nobody ever looks at those so why bother.”

“Why indeed. Do you have any clues about where they might be?  Like maybe a crowd scene in one of the  photographs you took for the Times.  Do you ever shoot the East Village?”

“Not if I can help it.  But I did shoot last night.  Another gay bashing.  This guy was pinned under a car and some husky guys I think were fags themselves were cursing him out and calling him a Nazi.”

“A Nazi?”

“Yeah, I thought it was kind of weird because he was wearing a pink triangle.  Also he looked Jewish.  Maybe he was one of those Jews who collaborated witht he Nazis.”

I remembered that there’d been rumors to that effect about Chris’s father who’d become a Christian not long after the war when he married Chris’s mother, a Belgian girl.
“Crazy world. Man, it’s crazier now that when I was a kid.  I’m really sorry about the boys, I know how you must feel about your grandsons. I’d do everything I could,  but there’s nothing I can do.  Sorry. Give me  a call if you think I can be of further help.  You know how I always loved your family, And those Danny-O’s you kept for all the guys in your freezer.”

The line went silent.

6.

Before going to the hospital I passed Pavel on the street.  He looked jaunty and was singing a Polish song that had been popular in the Warsaw Ghetto, a love song called “Rachel Bliska” made famous in the early 40’s by a Jewish tenor named Adam Birenbaum –aka Adam Aston–who had allegedly died in the ghetto uprising, but was later discovered to have survived and gone on to a long and brilliant career.  Though I couldn’t understand most of the words, I like the melody and had often played it on a cassette Pavel had made for me, played it especially when I was driving to my job around the Beltway.  I waved to Pavel but he didn’t notice me or at least I think he didn’t. Then I realized that I’d never again be able to listen to “Rachel Bliska” because of what Pavel had done to my little grandsons.  Or I thought he had done.  My mother, who had just caught up with me on Bleecker Street, said I shouldn’t ban the song, why make myself suffer even more? Especially since we didn’t really know if Pavel had anything to do with what had happened to the boys.  My mother has really grown by leaps and bounds since her death.  Her mind, that is.  Her capacity for compassion and wisdom.

7.

The doctors at Bellevue said both boys would be OK physically.  About the mental effects he couldn’t predict.  Mental effects of what?  Had they really been raped by Pavel?  No, no.  Just tossed around a little.  You know, a bit of roughhousing.  Giggling all the time, even the baby.

Did the man who did it resemble Pavel?  Not in the least.  And certainly wasn’t wearing a pink triangle.

8.

I woke with a terrible migraine but relieved that at least Pavel hadn’t raped or otherwise harmed my grandsons.  Later that day I confided my dream to my lesbian colleague, Susan, head of the women’s studies program at the school where I teach.

“Homophobic.  I always thought so.”

“But Susan–”
“Don’t give me any but Susans.  You’re a card-carrying homophobic and I’m going to forbid any further teaching in my program.”

That’s when Mrs. Putikova appeared.  Though I swear I was not dreaming.  Mrs. P. told Susan what a fine person I was and how she was trying to find my friend Pavel.

In Bowie, Maryland?  I explained to Mrs. P, who had unbraided her hair and dyed it a becoming ash blonde, that Pavel was in Poland.  No problem. She knew many people in Poland, they weren’t as evil or dumb as everyone thought.

“Yes,” Susan said.  “That’s the trouble with stereotyping.  On race, gender, national origin, it’s all the same.  That’s why I can’t stand these trendy words like Jew-lover or homophobic.”

“Or fag?” Mrs. Putikova asked, a gleam in her blue eyes, which, by the way, were no longer concealed by thick spectacles.

“Oh, that’s an old one.  We don’t use that word anymore in America.  We say sexual orientation.”

“Really?  Thank you so much.  I’ve been out of touch too long.  Tell me, is Pavel a sexual orientation?”

“Absolutely not,” I broke in.  “You can’t call a person an orientation.  A person can have an orientation but he can’t be one–”

“Shut up,” Susan said. “You’re contradicting me. Besides, everyone is different.  But we can all fit into same outfits,   like those dresses that anyone can wear, ONE SIZE FITS ALL, a great invention.”

Mrs. Putikova asked if she could stay with me a while.  Until she could track down Pavel.

“Sure.  But Pavel doesn’t live in America.  He lives in Poland.”

“So I’ll find another Pavel.”

9.

As soon as I arrived home I put on the cassette.  Loud as I could.  Then I dialed Pavel’s number and the minute he answered played Vera Lynn’s version of “Where or When.”  Mrs. Putikova sometimes sang along with Vera though I wished she wouldn’t.  At least my parents were nowhere in sight.

Funny thing.  When the song ended, I could hear Pavel six thousand miles away singing the Paul Anka song.  How he’d managed to find it in Poland I’ve no idea.

Did I realize that “Where or When” was the song they played at the end of “Dr. Strangelove?”

I told him I’d have to rent the movie again.  Then Mrs. Putikova grabbed the phone.

Pavel was delighted that I’d managed to rescue her and advised me to make sure no doctors got hold of her.  At least until he and I  and she could meet again.  Because he really needed some first-hand material about Theresienstadt for his new novel.

My two grandsons entered without knocking.  They wanted to play this new video game on my computer.  Their father’s computer had broken down and their mother, my daughter-in-law Susan, didn’t believe in virtual reality.

“It blurs the distinctions between what’s real and what’s real.  So everything and anything fits.  Which means it’s all the same,” she’d once told me.

I’d forgotten that I still had Pavel on the line.  Instead of playing Vera Lynn again I recited a few lines from that Auden poem since in America at least it was still September 1, 1999.

***

EATING BLINTZES ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE

Note: The following was written in Yiddish by David Dubinschein in 1970 as part of a workshop called “Journals, Essays, and Remembering,” held at the Menorah Senior Citizens Center in New York.  Mr.Dubinschein’s daughter, Rachel Greenfeld, has  translated it into English, making every effort to preserve the tone and syntax of the original.  Though Mr.Dubinschein, an immigrant from Pinsk, eventually learned to speak and write fluently in English, he always felt more comfortable writing in his native Yiddish.  Two volumes of his poetry have been translated into English as well: Milk and Honey, published in 1910, and The Tattered Moon, published in 1913.

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The sky was shining that day like a sack of gold coins. Ah, such sweet breezes off the East River!  Such a paradise, this America!  A different planet entirely from the fetid swamps of Russia, the crooked wooden houses that reeked night and day from the Pripet Marshes and whose mud floors became mixed with snow and tears in the long Russian winters.

It was September, 1908, and I was meeting with my dear friends, we called ourselves “The Sweatshop Poets,” in Bloom’s Dairy Restaurant on Delancey Street.  Though my cracked hands ached from working all week in Pinsker’s Coat Factory, I always found a spark of energy to read my verse to my fellow poets at Bloom’s. Such beautiful verse they wrote! Even now I get tears in my eyes remembering how these poets, all of them working maybe 20 hours a day to support their wives and children, would present their verse after drinking a thick glass filled with tea. And eating Bloom’s golden potato latkes or blintzes smothered with the sweetest sour cream  in America!

I only regret that so many of my dear friends died without ever publishing their work, without ever getting even a little bit of recognition from the goyish writers who controlled American verse at that time.  Anyway, who should suddenly appear at Bloom’s that day but the great Sigmund Freud!

If you want I should describe what he looked like, I apologize that I can offer only a few details I was so excited. Not that Dr. Freud was yet famous, but already he had written the most important book on dreams since the story of Joseph in our Bible. Why do Jews have such a special talent interpreting dreams?  Is it something in our blood, nourished by all the centuries of suffering? Do we have maybe a special window in our brain?  Please, I should like to know, if anyone reading this has any ideas. I want you should know that even now when I am so old I can smell the earth I soon will enter forever, I still have a great thirst for knowledge.

As far as I remember, Dr. Freud had a short dark beard and very penetrating eyes. On his head he wore a top hat and I think a pair of spectacles but don’t hold me guilty–I’m not sure about the spectacles. Despite the warm day, he wore a thick brown suit with a white starched shirt underneath.  Most of us, including Bloom himself, wore only our undershirts and work pants.  Two other people accompanied him, a very distinguished man with such a curved mustache it stuck out from the corners of his mouth like two horns and a thin, graying man who sat at another table from Freud.

Right away, Bloom brought out a great platter of blintzes and latkes, setting them down in front of Freud who looked surprised at first. What did he expect at a dairy restaurant–wiener schnitzel? But he started to eat as if nothing he had eaten all day. My closest friend, the marvelous poet Herman Silber, could not resist staring at him. Silber even stopped writing some notes on a napkin. I must however admit that some of the other poets had never heard of Freud and thought we were mishugana /translator’s note: crazy/. They just went on playing pinochle.

How my heart bled to say something to Dr. Freud! But could I say? An immigrant from Pinsk who had to work with his hands to support his pregnant wife and three children, never bringing home enough money so my dear wife didn’t have to take in sewing and we could move into a bigger apartment so all of us plus Lipschitz, the boarder, and my wife Malka’s Aunt Dora and her husband who isn’t really her husband didn’t all have to sleep in the same room.

Silber said I should show him a poem. Always, of course, I carried my verse in my pocket. But which one?  My “Song to the Brooklyn Bridge”? My “Bittersweet Heart”? My newest, which was only that morning finished, about my wish to float in the warm ocean not to worry about anything, to float always, as if I should be held in the soft arms of my dear mother, may she rest in peace? But the exact minute I chose the new poem the most amazing thing happened. Dr. Freud started moaning and grasping his stomach, then bending over as if he had a severe cramping!

With the help of Silber and a waiter I carried Dr. Freud to an old sofa in a room at the back of the restaurant.  His companions followed us, but as soon as they were assured the doctor was conscious and in no mortal danger, they left for an appointment uptown.  Later I learned the two companions were no less than Dr. Abraham Brill and the renowned Carl Jung! Such a lucky man I am to have met so many famous people in my life! Even though Jung was an anti-semite who supported Hitler I later learned from my son Sheldon. Anyway, though he wasn’t in so much pain, Freud still was far from feeling well enough to catch up with the others.  His skin was red as borscht and he kept on muttering something about America in German, which I understood fairly well because it’s so much like Yiddish. So when I took him home to my Malka after leaving through the back door so no one would see, we were able to converse, not exactly smoothe as silk but more like a nubby wool sweater.

Of course, I apologized for my small dark apartment on Ludlow Street.  Probably the doctor was used to a house with a grand parlor and velvet chairs, but he said nothing except the word Ostjuden /Eastern European Jews, ed./ under his breath, maybe four or five times.  I knew in my heart he was being scornful of us because we didn’t come from Vienna or Berlin, but told my Malka, who was busy suckling our newest baby, my darling Ruchele, that our guest was a very important man who had come to New York to look for some relatives from Russia. When I added that he had taken ill after eating Bloom’s blintzes, she immediately lay Ruchele in the crib next to Sammy, the next oldest, and smiled.

“I’m not surprised. Every day I keep telling people not to eat Bloom’s blintzes. Or latkes. Or even his herring, which I think his wife gets from the sewers. A witch, that’s what she is.”Freud starting moaning and bending over again, so Malka made him lie down on the bed I shared with her next to the bath tub in the kitchen.  Ignoring the cries of the babies, she took a rag and and dipped it in the pot of water boiling on the stove, then spread on it some horse radish and a few drops of her own woman’s milk. Such a fine woman, my Malka. Always serving others, even ahead from her own family. And so clean you could wipe your nose with her rags.

“Here,” she said to Freud in Yiddish, “soon you feel all better.” Then she wrapped an especially white rag around his forehead, apologizing when some of the horse radish, it was the kind made from beets, spilled on his collar. It was like a miracle had happened! Dr. Freud jumped up from the bed and after letting Malka wipe off his collar said in Yiddish–yes, Yiddish, not German–Yiddish our mamaloschen /mother tongue, ed./ that his cramps were all gone. You cannot imagine the joy! Mrs. Seidel from downstairs joined us with her two sons, the fat one who never spoke a word and the skinny one who had little eyes the color of lilacs. Also Mr. Katzen, the boarder from Mrs. Blatt down the hall.

Malka only smiled.  In the old country sick people always came to her mother and her grandmothers and all her aunts who were skilled with so many remedies their names would fill the mishna. /Body of ancient Jewish traditional teachings, ed./ Dried flowers, herbs, lotions and tonics they made themselves. So my Malka, god bless her, was keeping up the tradition in America. Sometimes she even made a little money for her services, but I made sure she didn’t charge Dr. Freud one red cent.

Then a bad thing happened. Dr. Freud asked me, this time in German, where the toilet was. No one will ever know how embarrassed I was telling him he had to go down the hall to the toilet we shared with four other families. I was sure when he saw how small and dirty it is, he would again be sick.

“I could have told you this would happen,” Malka whispered in Yiddish. “When are we going to move from this filthy place full of rats?”

But to everyone’s great surprise he did not complain at all!  Only he changed his mind when he realized Bertha Kaplovitz was in there with morning sickness even though it was late afternoon; he decided he didn’t have to use any toilet after all, especially since he was in great hurry now to meet his friends at the big museum on Fifth Avenue which someday I myself would find time to see, all the great Rembrandts and Michelangelos I always dream about!

So very politely he put on his hat and coat and in Yiddish thanked me and especially Malka for making him feel better. Now for the sad part:  Just as he was leaving I pressed into his hand one of my poems about which I was and still am most proud.  Its name is “Love and Death.”  Please, I asked him, would he be so kind as to take just a minute to read my poem?  It would make me so happy!

“I’m sorry but I must leave at once,” he said in German. I was so disappointed I almost cry, but I managed to put the folded poem into his coat pocket. Please, if you don’t mind, I would like here to include this poem I call “Of Love and Death”

Why is the sky gray as rags/When I know it is blue?

The grass black as Russia/When I know it is the sweet green of sea moss?

Because we want to return/ Return to that ocean, that vast salty-bitter

But eternally warm ocean/ When we reigned like kings

And nobody interfered with our wishes!/ No weariness would we feel

No sadness that steals upon us/ When we are most filled with joy!

But we must settle for discontent/ Bred by society’s strict rules

While Love and Death struggle,/A Battle of Giants  that our nursemaids

Would appease with their lullaby of Heaven.

After a few months, I gave up all hope that Dr. Freud would respond to my poem by letter.  Life went on, Malka became again pregnant, this time with my brilliant son Sheldon, and her sewing business was more and more successful, I myself got a better job in the garment district, and we were able to move to an apartment in the Bronx that had its own bathroom and an extra room for the children. I am proud to say that all six of my children finished high school and two even went to college at CCNY.  Sheldon studied very hard, just like his great-grandfather, the Rebbe Schmuel from Pinsk, and became a doctor in psychology!  How proud all of us were!  He and his sister Helen, a buyer for the fanciest stores in New York, gave extra money to Malka and me so she could stop doing mending.  Even she got a fur shawl with real fox paws! And I opened my own men’s clothing store on Tremont Avenue where I could play pinochle in the back with my friends Jake and Morris. Alas, I hardly ever wrote poetry any more except for a birthday or bar mitzvah, in fact I couldn’t even find any of my books of verse, I guess they got lost when we moved to the five room apartment on the Grand Concourse, but I read everything I could get my hands on, including the great poetry of Keats and Swinburne–such feeling he makes me cry– plus Edgar Lee Masters and Hart Crane.

Sometimes I also read about Sigmund Freud, how he had become famous throughout the world for giving us the key to unlock the

mishugas /craziness, ed./ from the human brain. Though often, to be honest, I could not understand much that he wrote, especially when he blamed so much on sex.  But when he died in September, 1939, the same month the war started, I felt both sad and proud that my Malka and I had helped him on his only trip to America so many years ago.

About my poem I had long forgotten. So you can imagine my surprise when one day my son Sheldon the psychologist presented me with a copy of Freud’s last essay, “Civilization and its Discontents.”

“Shelly, “ I said, “do you really think a man who never went further than the fourth grade can understand all these big words?”

“Believe me, pa. I know men from Harvard and Columbia who aren’t anywhere as smart as you are.”

“Yes,” my Helen added, “the perfect self-educated man.”

Even Malka agreed, though at the time she was very busy putting new buttons on her Persian lamb jacket. Then Sheldon said I didn’t have to read the whole essay, but he thought I would be very interested in the ending.

“Why? Does he say something about Bloom’s blintzes?”

“Much better. Just listen.  I even checked over the German original to make sure what I saw was not the whim of some fancy translator. It’s not.  Just listen”:

The meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure.It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. . .and it is this Battle of the Giants that our nursemaids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven. Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents,” tr. by James Strachey, The Freud Reader, 722-72.

“So?”

“What do you mean, so? Don’t you recognize your own words?”

I must have blushed every color of the rainbow. “How do you know?”

“From a copy of your book The Tattered Moon mama tried to throw away. Helen and I rescued it.”

“All that dust from his books was making me sneeze. And they took up so much room in the closet, I couldn’t hardly hang up his shirts. Who read them anyway?” Malka said. Nobody paid attention.

“Coincidence. It can be nothing but a coincidence,” I insisted.

But Sheldon insisted that according to Freud himself and the newest research, there was no such thing as coincidence.  Every event, big and small, had a cause and effect.

“So?”

“So the late great Sigmund Freud stole directly from your poem, ‘Of Love and Death.’

My heart was beating so fast I had to sit down on our new sofa with the green flower upholstery.

“Can’t pa do something about it?” Malka asked.

“Like what?”

“Like what? Like making Freud pay him for using the poem, for crying out loud.”

“He’s dead, mama. Sigmund Freud is dead. Isn’t it enough that he so honored your husband’s words they will live forever?”

Sheldon was right. It was more than enough.  Anything else would have been so embarrassing I would have hidden myself under the bed. Or wet my pants whenever I sat down to play pinochle.

But believe me, I am to this day extremely proud.

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