The World to Come Read online

  “We were just talking about languages in museum work, translations, that kind of thing,” Erica Frank was saying. “Do you speak any foreign languages?”

  Ben resented being forced into this inane conversation, but he remembered Sara pleading with him and knew he owed it to her to try. He in fact spoke several languages, but he tried to pick the one that would end the conversation the fastest. “Yiddish,” he said. He immediately wished he had lied.

  He regretted it more when Erica Frank, Museum Staff, appeared suddenly intrigued. “Wow, I didn’t know anybody knew Yiddish anymore,” she said, staring. Yes, Ben wished he could announce, I am a freak, a relic, a generational error, a leftover shard from a broken world. Now please let me go home. But he was caught. “Why did you—I mean, where did you learn it? From your grandparents?” she asked.

  Ben looked at the three women and felt as if he were facing a panel of judges. “From my father,” he said. Erica was looking at him, absently brushing a strand of golden hair away from her cheek. For a moment he felt hopeful, but then he remembered where the conversation had lurched. He was beginning to wish he could leap over their heads and vanish into the sky.

  “Do you still speak it with him?” Erica asked, a wide smile on her face.

  “He’s been dead for almost twenty years, so no.”

  Ben hadn’t meant to snap at her, but he was strangely happy that he had. The smiling faces on the panel seemed to fall to the ground, like dropped masks. The air yawned between him and the three others, stretching into a wide, blank space of empty canvas.

  “I’m so sorry,” Erica stuttered.

  Everyone looked at the floor for the obligatory seven seconds before someone changed the subject, a ritual deeply familiar to people whose parents die young. Ben waited for the obligatory seven seconds to pass. It had been years since he had felt embarrassed during those seconds. By now they felt to him like time spent waiting for an elevator: boring, wasteful, a chance to run errands in one’s head. Sara had mentioned that she was going to stop by his place after he got home, he remembered. She claimed to have news, and she promised him that it wasn’t about selling their parents’ house. But it was impossible that it wasn’t about selling the house, Ben thought. What else was there to talk about?

  “What’s really interesting about Yiddish,” Erica was saying, the first courageous soul to break the silence, “is how much humor there is in it.”

  Her smile, which had seemed so promising just moments before, was beginning to sicken him. “No more than any other language,” he muttered. But what it really does have, he thought—what you don’t know it has, because it isn’t in any Woody Allen movies—is a world of the dead built into it, a true fear of heaven, an automatic need to invoke the presence of God whenever saying anything good or bad about anyone or anything, an absolute trust that the other world, if one could call it that, is not separate from this one, that eternity is always breathing over your shoulder, waiting to see if you will notice. But Ben didn’t say anything more. Instead he glanced at Erica and then looked at his feet, noticing for the first time that in the haze of changing his clothes after work and going to the Chagall exhibit, he had somehow ended up wearing two slightly different shoes.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” he announced, and pushed his way out of the circle into the very crowded room.

  HE MOVED TOWARD the sides of the gallery, staring up at the paintings that interrupted the walls like gigantic plate-glass windows, offering views beyond the room. Some of them, he saw, hung limp on the gallery walls, tired and derivative, a parade of boxy men like early Cubist works, or distorted interiors with absurdly bright wallpaper borrowed from Matisse. Ben became more interested when things started to fly: first clouds, then words, then angels, then goats, and finally men and women, soaring through the air. The more things flew, the better the paintings became. Occasionally, as he moved along the gallery walls, he thought of Erica Frank. He stared at the flying goats and resisted the impulse to search for her again over his shoulder. A few times, he allowed himself to turn around and scan the crowd for her face. When he didn’t see her, he was surprised to find himself disappointed. He stared at the paintings until they seemed to dissolve into blank white space.

  A man near the door at the end of the gallery cupped his hands to his mouth, trying his best to roar above the crowd. “The band will be starting up downstairs in five minutes,” he bellowed.

  A band? Sara must not have known about the band, Ben thought. He wasn’t about to listen to music; the year of mourning wasn’t over yet. For a moment he panicked. Then, as the hordes of jabbering singles began to flow down toward the door on the opposite end of the gallery, he realized, grateful, that he now had an excuse to go home. The room emptied quickly, and soon he was the only person in it, standing at the far end of the gallery next to a series of tiny paintings. He was about to turn around when a woman’s head leaned back into the room from a nearby doorway, a blur of light brown hair. Erica Frank.

  “Going downstairs?” she asked.

  He was surprised to see that she was smiling. Had she forgotten their awkward conversation before? No, it didn’t look that way. Her smile was different from before: dark, canny, her upper lip slightly curled as if they had shared a private joke. Suddenly he felt as though he were seeing an actress backstage, shifting from playing a part to being herself. She was forgiving him, it seemed. Or was she just laughing at him? He searched for something to say to make her stay a moment longer, to test her, to see. “I’ll be down in a minute,” he answered, and for a split second he wished it were true.

  But it wouldn’t have mattered. “I can’t stay for the music,” she said, and Ben briefly wondered why. But only briefly, because she was already moving away. “Have fun,” she said with a wave.

  Ben watched as she vanished from the room, cutting back into the gallery and through a white door marked “Staff Only.” The door hovered open for a moment, framing the back of her hair, which glimmered gold in the shadow within the outlines of the doorway. Then the door closed behind her, a blank white wall. Ben felt the entire wasted evening draining through his gut. Well, Sara, he thought, surveying the empty gallery, I tried. He turned to leave. And then he stopped.

  It was a painting of a street. The street was covered with snow, and lined by a short iron fence and little crooked buildings whose rooftops bent and reflected in all directions. Above the street, a man with a beard, pack, hat, and cane hovered in the sky, moving over the houses as if walking—unaware, in murky horizontal profile, that he was actually in flight. The painting was tiny, smaller than a piece of notebook paper. The label next to the painting offered its date as 1914 and its owner as a museum in Russia, titling it Study for “Over Vitebsk.” This intrigued Ben, who despite his mastery of trivia on all topics, including modern art, had never before known this particular painting’s name. All he knew was that it used to hang over the piano in the living room of his parents’ house.

  Now in the silent white gallery, in front of Study for “Over Vitebsk,” Ben stood still. He looked at the floating man with the cane, the dark late autumn or early winter of the painting’s twilit evening, and thought of fall evenings long ago, years when his father would take him and his sister trick-or-treating. He and Sara used to take turns carrying a folded artist’s stool along with their candy bags for when their father got tired and needed to rest, which was usually at every house. As the long night of house-to-house waned, Ben would try to walk more slowly, self-consciously copying his father’s eternal limp, dragging his right leg deliberately through the heaps of leaves on the side of the road as if only for the joy of crunching leaves beneath his foot, but really, as the evening grew darker and the circle of trees drew the horizon closed like a drawstring bag around them, tightening the early evening sky with wrinkles of naked branches, he was thumping out his father’s perpetual four-legged pace: left leg, two crutches, bad foot, left leg, two crutches, bad foot, left leg, two crutches, bad foot.
His father, he thought as he looked at the painting, had probably wished he could fly.

  Ben stared more closely at the painting. It had been over fifteen years since he had last seen it. There was no way it was the same one. Artists often paint the same picture over and over again, he told himself, thinking of Sara in her paint-splattered apartment. Even the idea that it might be theirs was just a momentary deception, like the people on the street or at the cocktail hour, dead ringers for his parents only because he wanted them to be.

  Ben breathed out slowly and took one last look before turning again to leave, this time for good. But then he noticed, in the painting’s lower right-hand corner, a tiny glossy area that gleamed white under the gallery lights—the same place where Sara, at the age of seven, had once tried to coat the painting with clear nail polish until their parents caught her. And then Ben’s entire body started shaking with rage.

  He read the label again, still stunned. On loan, it read, from a Russian museum. He stretched his arms toward the painting without even noticing that he was doing so, reaching for it, ready to grip the bottom of the frame like the rung of a ladder. In his mind he saw his feet walking up the wall until he could step into it, sliding through the frame and out and up and away. Instead he caught a glimpse of his own hands out of the corner of his eye and stopped himself, lowering his arms and turning his head to see if anyone was still around.

  No one was there, not even a lingering guard.

  Strange things happen to paintings that no one looks at. They start to sing. In the absence of people, the empty room reverberated with the colors humming on its walls. Ben stood alone and listened as each wide flash of color vibrated at a different pitch: wistful wavering high notes for the airborne woman, deep resonating low tones for the Lovers in Blue. The dark little picture rattled the air with the banging of piano keys like the ones that once lay below it in his parents’ living room, a minor chord struck by accident in the middle of a song.

  He stepped closer.

  With all his strength, he grabbed the painting’s thin frame and yanked the whole thing off the wall. It was so light that he nearly flew backward. And then he left.

  2

  BORIS KULBAK had been in the Jewish Boys’ Colony in Malakhovka just outside of Moscow for only three months, and he remembered very little from before then. It was 1920 and he was eleven years old, and from the entire first ten years of his life he could recall almost nothing but a single incident. One day long ago, in the town where he used to live—he could see, in the clarity of a single framed memory, that it was a beautiful day, one of those spring days when the air becomes like clear water rippled by a breeze and the ground loosens its grip and you feel as though you are not walking but swimming in air, flying, weightless, over the town—he had seen a group of boys beating a horse. The horse was old, a mare, and her right front leg was broken. Boris had just noticed her lying there when a group of boys, big boys, older than he was, strolled by, swinging big wooden sticks they must have been using for a game. When they noticed the horse, they approached her slowly, making gentle cooing noises. But then one of them suddenly raised his stick and struck the horse on her side. She neighed, a long, agonizing sound. Then the other boys each took a turn smacking the horse. One of them struck her in the eye, and a stream of blood oozed out. This excited the boys to the point where they began beating her in earnest, laughing and jeering as they clobbered her over and over until Boris, who until then had been riveted to his spot by morbid fascination, could no longer watch. Later, in Malakhovka, he remembered that the whole scene had confused him, upset him. But he could no longer remember why he had been upset or confused.

  Many of the orphans had brothers who lived with them in the Boys’ Colony, running around in pairs or trios or packs. These boys tended to be mean, fond of taunting outsiders, unwilling to play with anyone else. Boris envied them. He envied the boys who had sisters, too, girls who would visit from the girls’ home down the road, though the girls’ home was much smaller, and the girls who lived there much younger; girls older than twelve or so being in a category with parents, people who no longer existed.

  When the other boys asked Boris, he told them that he had never had brothers or sisters, that he had always been an only child. But that wasn’t quite true. He remembered, in a thought that he could hold no tighter than one can grasp a stream of water, that there had once been a baby brother, years ago, a baby who hadn’t even learned to walk before he began coughing, and coughed and coughed and coughed all the way through summer and autumn and into the winter, when one cold night Boris heard the coughing stop; the dark house was silent for a moment in the dim kerosene light, a silence one could feel like the presence of a person in a room, and then the cough was replaced, suddenly, with his mother’s wail. And he was going to have another little brother, too, or a little sister. He had hoped for a boy, but he still wasn’t sure, when he saw it torn from his mother’s knifed-open belly and thrown through the smashed bedroom window, whether it was a boy or a girl. He had watched this with his hands tied to the bedpost and his mouth stuffed with a scrap of his mother’s underwear, his father already strangled in the next room. In the seconds before the man who had tied him up clubbed him across the forehead and left him for dead, he had seen it—the not-yet brother or sister, slick with water and blood, but with a fully formed head and limbs, its legs uncurling as it was pulled through the air. Before it took flight, he had seen its face, its tiny thumb wedged between its lips.

  After that everything turned into a long dream. Months of crawling around the city, stealing food, stealing money, stealing anything, sleeping in stables, sleeping in alleyways, eating trash. He joined a gang of boys he had known from his school, back when there was a school; they had bullied him then, and now it was worse. He would go on missions for them, stealing rolls and eggs, and they would beat him until he gave up the portions he had saved for himself. One night when winter came he ran away from them. He kept himself up deep into the night, until he knew they were dead asleep, and then raced to the city’s edge. He thought of going to the forest, but there were animals there, and bandits, and he was too afraid. Instead he went to the Jewish cemetery. He had once been afraid of the dead, but now they seemed benign to him, familiar. In the cemetery he stumbled in the premorning dimness between the stones until he found an empty grave. Boris lay down inside it, covered his arms and legs with dirt until he managed to stop shivering, and closed his eyes against the falling snow. At dawn he was discovered, half frozen, by someone from the burial society. The burial society paid his passage to Malakhovka.

  The Jewish Boys’ Colony in Malakhovka was like an enchanted island, a private Soviet republic where no one was over the age of sixteen. Fifty boys lived in a cluster of wooden huts where they ruled themselves, cooking their own meals, growing their own vegetables, chopping their own wood. They even had a little Soviet, a council of older boys who ruled the colony through a central command. Mornings were spent in the colony’s school, in classes taught by adults—math, science, socialism, literature, art—after which they would file out for the afternoon’s labor. Evenings were spent in one’s communal house, around the fire, debating chore divisions in the colony council and singing hymns of praise to the Red Army. All this amazed Boris, stunned him. He didn’t know how to talk to the other boys, and so he was silent, but no one seemed to make fun of him for it; there were a number of silent boys there, and no one seemed to mind. He moved from one moment to the next on this magical island dazzled by daylight, by the food that no one stole from him, by the warm blanket that wasn’t his coat, by his shaven head that was no longer full of fleas, and most of all by the boys around him, busy shaven-headed boys who buzzed away at their daily tasks as if nothing else had ever been. And in those busy days, he found, it was impossible to imagine that anything ever had. Except at night.

  Each night, the boys in Boris’s hut stood in rows beside their army-style bunks, sang the “Internationale,” and climbe
d into bed with military precision. Once the lights went out, silence would hover for a few moments like a cloud bearing down on the earth, waiting for release. And each night, slowly and steadily, the silence cracked and the rains came down. It usually began with a boy on the far end of the room, a small boy, much smaller than Boris, who over the course of several months had managed to reduce his bawling to a careful sniffle that began the evening’s performance. Then the smallest boys would start really crying, one by one, the sobs getting louder and louder like waves of rain slapping against the windows until the noise was so loud that the older ones would shout at them, insult them, even get out of bed and hit them, and then they would quickly shut up. But that was nothing compared to the real thunder and lightning of the evening. That happened with the older boys, after the little boys had finally stopped crying and everyone, including the older boys, had at last fallen asleep. Then the tempest would begin. First, one of the bigger boys would rise, still sleeping, and start shouting that the house was on fire. He usually kept shouting for several minutes, jumping up and grabbing his brothers from the neighboring bunks and dragging them toward the windows. On some nights he made it halfway out the window before he woke up, still shouting. Later another boy, who worshipped no god but Lenin by day, would stroll around the room in his sleep until he found the eastern wall, where he would stand in the humbled posture of his fathers, his back crooked and his shoulders hunched, chanting the entire Hebrew evening liturgy aloud until someone nearby found the energy to get out of bed in the cold night and slap him awake. A third boy would regularly get up in his sleep and attack people, shouting his older sisters’ names and vowing revenge, pummeling the boys in the beds near his and anyone else too stupid to get out of his way. His victims would wake with bruises. But he was far from the worst. The worst, in Boris’s opinion, was a boy about Boris’s age, two beds down. This boy would fall asleep in perfect silence, an enviable peace hovering over his thin, motionless body, almost the sleep of the dead. He remained quiet each night until all of the other thundering had stopped, long past midnight. After the final incident of the night had come and gone, several minutes would pass in a deep, weary silence. And then, every single night, the boy would let out a high-pitched, blood-freezing shriek, after which he would scream, “Mommy! Mommy!” over and over without stopping until one of the boys next to him shook him awake. Then the dormitory would settle down again into the gentle sounds of small boys breathing in their beds, and Boris Kulbak would fight to stay awake for as long as he could until he was forced to surrender, as if cringing before a beating, to his own mangled dreams.