The World to Come Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WORLD TO COME

  A New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice”

  A January 2006 Book Sense Pick

  “Isn’t there a Willy Wonka gum that tastes like all good foods at once? If so, Dara Horn’s The World to Come is the literary equivalent of that confection, equal parts mystery, sprawling novel, folktale, philosophical treatise, history, biography, love story, and fabulist adventure…. Horn’s novel develops in unpredictable, deeply satisfying ways, steeping the novel in Jewish mysticism and calling to mind the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth…. As for Horn’s use of language, each page of her novel is a marvel.”

  —Debra Spark, San Francisco Chronicle,

  “Our Editors Recommend” section

  “Throughout this rich, complex and haunting novel, Horn reminds us that our world poses constant threats to the artist and to art, to the individual and the creative spirit. Their very survival is a miracle: in a sense, every one of us is that bearded man flying, unaware, over Vitebsk.”

  —Susann Cokal, New York Times Book Review

  “[Dara Horn’s] second novel gracefully time-twists and world-bends across a century, leaping from an other-worldly angelic paradise to war-torn Vietnam to Soviet Russia, and depicting everyone from a young Marc Chagall to a tortured Yiddish author to Ben’s art-forging twin sister. The result, both on the surface and in the many layers beneath, is nothing short of amazing.”

  —Jessica Shaw, Entertainment Weekly

  “Symphonic and piercingly beautiful…. [Horn writes] with a ritual grace, as if she were unrolling the Torah, beginning to construct a reading…. Horn ties her tale together with a delightful and often funny mystical thread…. Horn’s writing, both its breadth and its tightly focused precision of detail, is shot through with a poignancy and clarity of color not unlike a Chagall painting. Almost romantic, almost tragic, almost comic, almost mystical—the novel suspends us between emotions, never allowing any to become predominant, and we hang there in that indeterminate space, perfectly happy, hoping that the book will never end.”

  —Bethany Schneider, Newsday

  “[The World to Come] flows from deeply sympathetic characters, an encyclopedic grasp of 20th-century history and a spiritual sense that sees through the conventional barriers between this life and the one to come…. Miraculously, it stays aloft in the mind like a dream you can’t decide was sweet or frightening.”

  —Ron Charles, Washington Post

  “Spellbinding…. A compelling collage of history, mystery, theology, and scripture, The World to Come is a narrative tour de force crackling with conundrums and dark truths.”

  —Allison Block, Booklist, starred review

  “One could make a pastime of fishing for hidden resonances in The World to Come…. Horn’s roving, kinetic imagination and storytelling talent are on abundant display here, and there’s no question that this book is the real thing. The interlocking worlds Horn creates are so colorful and captivating.”

  —Julia Livshin, Chicago Tribune

  “[Horn’s] characters’ lives unfold in perfectly paced prose. Horn’s deft touch is often wryly funny—but never maliciously so. And her structure is wonderfully nonlinear…an accomplished work that beautifully explains how families—in all their maddening, smothering, supportive glory—create us.”

  —Natalie Danford, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Dara Horn creates magic. She gives us such an extraordinary set of characters that reading this novel is like rediscovering the magic of reading all over again.”

  —Jewish Herald-Voice

  “In many ways, The World to Come is about storytelling itself and the power of personal, familial and cultural myth…. Beautiful, witty and sophisticated.”

  —Sarah Rachel Egelman, Bookreporter.com

  “Horn has achieved a rare accomplishment. She has created a thoroughly contemporary Jewish text without resorting to nostalgia, cliché or romanticized religiosity.”

  —Shana Rosenblatt Mauer, The Jewish Press

  “[A] deeply satisfying literary mystery and a funny-sad meditation on how the past haunts the present—and how we haunt the future.”

  —Lev Grossman, Time

  “Combining elements of history, mystery, romance, theology, and folklore, Horn has crafted a mesmerizing and ambitious new novel.”

  —San Diego Monthly

  “Dara Horn immerses the reader in a shifting world of love and dreams…a story of haunting depth. Horn’s prose is lovely, her premise original, her fictional worlds real and compelling.”

  —Robin Vidimos, Sunday Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News

  “A worthy tribute to Russia’s ill-fated artists…. [Horn] vividly describes the joy of visual creation…telling old stories in a new context.”

  —Boris Kachka, New York

  “Skilled in the art of balancing different worlds, texts and eras…. Horn’s characters are sympathetic and believable…. She has persuaded us to care not just for their worlds to come, but for the worlds they currently, vividly inhabit.”

  —Radhika Jones, Bookforum

  “Horn’s engaging second novel is an appealing journey into the past…. An engrossing adventure…the story is a remarkably coherent, finely crafted tale…. Fans of art and Judaic studies will particularly enjoy this well-researched work.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Horn’s accomplished second novel (after the award-winning In the Image) reads like a dynamic hybrid of Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love and Milan Kundera’s philosophical flights of fancy…. Horn deftly weaves an intricate story steeped in folklore and family secrets. Along the way, readers are offered glimpses of the possibilities, allegorical and otherwise, of life’s beginning and end. This is intelligent, compelling literary fiction.”

  —Misha Stone, Library Journal Reviews

  “With surety and accomplishment, Horn telescopes out into Ziskind’s familial history through an exploration of Chagall’s life; that of Chagall’s friend the Yiddish novelist Der Nister; 1920s Soviet Russia and its horrific toll on Russian Jews; the nullifying brutality of Vietnam; and the paradoxes of American suburbia…. Horn expertly handles subplots and digressions…. Characters like Erica Frank, of the Museum of Hebraic Art, give tart glimpses into still-claustrophobic Goodbye, Columbus territory, which Horn then unites with a much grander place that furnishes the book’s title.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Like a spider weaving her web—miraculously—Dara Horn weaves the poignant stories of lives past, lives present, and lives to come in this splendid tale of storytelling itself. If this sounds like a book of ideas, that’s because it is. It is also a terrific yarn peopled with tender and very human characters; a page-turning mystery of the best sort: not who done it, but why.”

  —Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of An Almost Perfect Moment

  “Some excellent books are smart and serious; others are sweet and joyous. Amazingly, Dara Horn’s The World to Come is all of the above. Ms. Horn hits every note in the literary register from historical tragedy to mystical delirium, and plays them like a master.”

  —Melvin Jules Bukiet, author of Strange Fire and A Faker’s Dozen

  “I can’t even count the ways I admire The World to Come—everything about the book intoxicated me. It is quite simply an astonishing achievement, and Dara Horn is the realest of real things. I suspect it’ll be a long while before I again read a book as true as The World to Come.”

  —Steve Stern, author of The Angel of Forgetfulness

  “Dara Horn interweaves a real art heist, history, biography, theology, and Yiddish literature in The World to Come, a richly satisfying novel that opens the door to the world
we create through our actions right now.”

  —Mitchell Book Marquee

  THE WORLD TO COME

  A NOVEL

  DARA HORN

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  New York | London

  Copyright © 2006 by Dara Horn

  All rights reserved

  First published as a Norton 2006

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Horn, Dara, 1977–

  The world to come: a novel / Dara Horn.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-06687-6

  1. Art thefts—Fiction. 2. Chagall, Marc, 1887–—Appreciation—Fiction. 3. Fugitives from justice—Fiction. 4. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 5. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 6. Parents—Death—Fiction. 7. Jewish families—Fiction. 8. Twins—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.076W67 2006

  813'.6—dc22

  2005014586

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For my siblings,

  Jordana, Zachary, and Ariel—

  my fellow artists and my lifelong friends,

  in this world, in prior worlds,

  and in every world to come

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  PRAISE

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY DARA HORN

  THE WORLD TO COME

  1

  THERE USED to be many families like the Ziskinds, families where each person always knew that his life was more than his alone. Families like that still exist, but because there are so few of them, they have become insular, isolated, their sentiment that the family is the center of the universe broadened to imply that nothing outside the family is worth anything. If you are from one of these families, you believe this, and you always will.

  Lately it had begun to seem to Benjamin Ziskind that the entire world was dead, that he was a citizen of a necropolis. While his parents were living, Ben had thought about them only when it made sense to think about them, when he was talking to them, or talking about them, or planning something involving them. But now they were always here, reminding him of their presence at every moment. He saw them in the streets, always from behind, or turning a corner, his father sitting in the bright yellow taxi next to his, shifting in his seat as the cab screeched away in the opposite direction, his mother—dead six months now, though it felt like one long night—hurrying along the sidewalk on a Sunday morning, turning into a store just when Ben had come close enough to see her face. It was a relief that Ben could close his office door.

  Ben was a full-time question writer for the quiz show American Genius, where he had worked for the past seven years. Long ago, he had loved it. He had loved the thrill of working for TV, loved telling people he worked for a network, loved thinking up new questions, loved wondering which contestant he would stump next. Secretly, he had dreamed of someday becoming the show’s host. The fact that he was five-foot-six, weighed 123 pounds, spoke in a near-monotone, and was legally blind without his glasses never struck him as an impediment to this goal, even though the only reason most people watched American Genius was for Morgan Finnegan, the show’s hunky, Texan, redheaded, hilarious, charming, and (Ben had noticed over the years) intellectually underqualified emcee. But before he turned thirty a few months ago, Ben had maintained full faith in logic. If he, Benjamin Ziskind, was the smartest person on the staff, then his intelligence would eventually be rewarded. His specialty was in the thousand-dollar-plus category, questions that no one but the true champions could answer. In the past few months, though, his questions had been repeatedly rejected, and now they were interlaced in his mind with questions he asked of himself:

  What acclaimed Russian writer, author of Odessa Tales and Red Cavalry, was executed in 1940 under false charges of treason?

  During which of the following incidents in the past year did Nina lie when she claimed that she loved me?

  Which 1965 battle in the Vietnam War, code-named Operation Starlite, was successful enough to inspire the Pentagon to send thousands more Marines to the war?

  For how many of the eleven months of our brief and pathetic marriage was she actually sleeping with someone else?

  To the nearest power of ten, what is the number of American soldiers who have lost limbs in combat since the end of World War Two?

  Among American males who have twin sisters, what percentage are as jealous of them as I am of Sara?

  Once Sara sells our parents’ house, what will be left of them?

  What is the probability that my dead parents are disappointed in me?

  Ben did not try to answer these questions. In the past few months, he had condensed his life into the few things that still belonged to him: his pitiful job, his twin sister, the apartment his former wife had stripped of nearly all its furniture, and a stack of children’s picture books his mother had written. And, as of last night’s theft, a $1 million painting by Marc Chagall.

  IT WAS SARA’S fault, really. She was the one who persuaded him to go to the singles’ cocktail hour at the museum. In the weeks since his divorce, Sara had begged him to try to meet someone new, to make at least some vague effort toward being happy—perfect, productive Sara, hopeful enough to have just gotten married in their mother’s hospital room two weeks before their mother died, and tough enough to already begin picking up the shards. It had been easier to say yes to Sara than to explain to her why he had no hope or interest in going.

  But when he passed through the museum’s metal detectors and entered the crowded gallery, he saw that the other people at the exhibit of “Marc Chagall’s Russian Years” were little more than walking ghosts: his mother, his father, preserved in other people’s skin. Glimpsing the side of a woman’s head—a younger woman, of course, but another remarkable thing about the dead is that they are all ages, preserved at every age you ever knew them, and at no age at all—he had to fight the impulse to glance at the profile again, unwilling to feel the sick relief that came with confirming an unfamiliar face. It was easier to look at the art.

  Ben edged away from the crowds at the center of the gallery, toward the paintings on the walls. He stopped alongside a giant canvas titled—he stooped to read the caption—The Promenade. A man stood in the middle of the painting, legs apart as if striding with confidence, one hand at his side holding a small bird, the other in the air, holding the hand of a woman—a woman who flew in the air like a flag on the flagpole of his wrist, her magenta dress fluttering in the wind. Another large canvas, called Over the Town, cast both man and woman into the sky, wearing different clothes this time, a green shirt for the man, a blue dress for the woman, with petticoats flying at her ankles. The two of them soared over the town below, in a sky pure white, as if the flying people, ruling the air, hadn’t yet decided what to fill it with. For a moment Ben wished he could fly. And then, as he turned around to cross the gallery, someone called his name.

  “And what about you, Benjamin Ziskind?”

  Ben looked up, startled. Had so
meone from the show tracked him down? But as he scanned the unfamiliar faces of the three women who had closed in around him beneath the flying woman, he realized that everyone was wearing a name tag, and someone had just read his aloud. He was trapped.

  The three women laughed, and Ben forced a smile, wincing as he remembered why he was ostensibly here. He glanced at the name tag of the woman who had spoken: “Erica Frank, Museum Staff.” A shill, he thought. Too bad; she was the most attractive of the three. She was slightly shorter than he was, with curved hips, long hair the color of damp rope, and (Ben was captivated and then ashamed to notice) a glimpse of shadowed skin that shimmered between the buttons of her bright blue blouse. Her green eyes were watching him. In the glass covering the painting behind her head, he turned away from his own reflection: short, dark, unworthy. He remembered how he had first met Nina two years ago—at a party like this one, but in Sara’s apartment. He was happier then, less fearful. He had told a joke, a bad one, some horrible pun, and she had laughed. Ben wasn’t used to people laughing with him instead of at him. He would have married her on the spot. On the night two weeks after his mother died, when his wife failed to come home from work, he had assumed she had been kidnapped.