Stuart Nadler

FANIA

Within hours on the ground, I had met a woman who said yes, I knew her, of course I did, she was my schoolmate, I knew her all her life, right up until the end, the last moments. I even remember her as a baby, she said. It was awful what happened. First the fear, and then the realization that the fear was real, and then the end of everything, and then the silence that comes after the fear that comes after the realization that comes after the end of everything. And what do you think happens then, she asked me? The answer is that you have old ladies like me who are here still, and who take care of everyone and do everything and have inside ourselves all the stories, every story. So yes, of course I knew her, if that’s what you want to know. I knew all of them. But you know: awful things happened to us as well. People forget that. People concentrate only on them. As if they are so important.

A chicken ran by just then and the woman bent and took it by the feet and she told me, while smiling, that she was thinking of not eating chicken anymore. “Have you heard that vegetarians live forever?” she asked. “I’d like to do that as well. To live into eternity. To live into many different eternities if such possibilities exist. If for no other reason than to spite all of my numerous enemies.” She took the chicken inside. “But starting tomorrow maybe. Or the day after. What do you think about that?” she said to the chicken, and then to me. “Vegetarianism starts tomorrow! Today we eat!”

I had come to the village in search of stories about the child in the photograph. In it, a girl is being walked at gunpoint through a forest that I had come to believe, after months of study, and after months of sitting alone with the available facts, was the forest here, two miles east, a small forest, overgrown, deserted. The girl is very young, six years old maybe. She is looking directly at the camera, asking perhaps why, or perhaps even, can you do anything, you behind the camera, you looking at this image, you, Jacob Eisner, in your apartment in Boston, many futures from now, living in peace, in safety, in a warm room, in a bed beside your loved one, can you do anything to help me? It was a moment that anyone might have surmised was among the last of her life. At least I had thought so. A letter, however, arrived to my office in Boston not long ago. In it a man said that the little girl was in fact his grandmother, that she was gone now, that she had lived a long life, had become an ophthalmologist, a specialist in all the various defects of the human eye. She had become, her grandson told me, especially skilled in repairing vision in those who suffered specific ocular abnormalities. Such as people who saw others engulfed in color fields, or those who saw every object as two objects, an original and an echo, real and the opposite of real. People who in any other moment of time before our time might have professed with a blood-deep certainty that they were seeing spirits. The family had found this picture in her belongings and could not understand how it could be so. They had believed she was from Cincinnati. She bore no accent, told no stories, seemed to possess no hint of darkness. But yet this was her—her face, her eyes, we would know our grandmother anywhere. What can you tell us? We will pay what it costs. And so I had come.

The woman took the picture in her hands, but could only look at it for a quick moment. “And who are you to be looking for her?” she asked.

“Jacob Eisner,” I said.

“You have come from the United States?” she asked.

“I have,” I said.

“And how do you know our language?” she asked.

“School,” I told her, which was a lie.

The woman scrunched her face. “You know, I have seen this before,” the woman said.

“You have?” I asked.

She touched the side of her head. “Every day, always. At all moments. How can you unsee it?”

“I’m having that same problem,” I told her.

She smiled at this. “You’re Jewish?”

“I am,” I said.

“Good Jewish or bad Jewish?”

I shrugged. “You may have to tell me the difference.”

She pushed the picture away. “Who wants to know about her anyhow? Everyone is vanished.”

“Her family’s looking for answers,” I said. “Her grandchildren.”

“But this is not possible,” the woman said. “Because she is there.” She pointed over my head. “In the woods. With everyone else. So there is no grandson. Someone is making you come here for nothing. To make a fool out of you. To waste your money.”

“We don’t know her original name,” I said. “We have her Americanized name. But there is no record of anyone by that name in this village. That’s something you could tell me. What her birth name is. Do you know who she was?”

“Maybe for one hundred American dollars I could tell you,” the woman said.

I had come prepared. I put the money on the table between us. She did not expect this.

“Ah,” she said. “A good Jew.”

As I waited for her to talk, the edge of her mouth turned down. “Oh,” she said. “My memory. You know, this happens sometimes. So unfortunate.”

“But I just gave you a hundred dollars,” I said.

“When did you give me a hundred dollars?”

“Just now. Literally a moment ago. A hundred American dollars.”

“What the hell do I need American currency for? Does this look like America to you?”

“If you could just give me her name,” I said.

“Oh yes. But it seems I forget her name. This happens. So much has happened. So many tragedies. Your tragedy, my tragedy. If there was a championship of tragedy, I suppose I would win. And I would put the trophy here, on my fireplace mantel, where there are photographs of many other tragedies. And anyway, names come in and out.” She sat back in her chair. “They are like wind. Either they are here, or they are gone.”

“So she’s gone,” I said.

“Oh she is definitely gone. Gone as can be.”

In the morning, a young man came to my hotel room. His name was Peter, he said. I live in the village, he told me, along with his father and his father’s father, in a house that has stood for many generations, and we heard you were here, he told me, everyone by now has heard, this is big news, an American Hebrew, and I thought, perhaps, you might want to know what I know.

“And what is that?” I asked. I was staying outside of the village, a half hour by car. I had learned to do this, to stay elsewhere in case I angered people, and in case I needed to vanish. The previous night I had not been able to fall asleep, had drunk vodka, had reread many sad letters, had listened after this to many sad songs, had hovered over the photograph that had brought me here, had tried to phone my daughter, who lives near me in Boston and who does not enjoy that I take these trips. By the time I had fallen asleep, it was nearly light out. Peter had woken me.

“The forest,” he said, in decent English. “They are going to take it away. Make apartments. Shopping plaza.” Peter opened his arms wide. “Large moneys involved.”

“Large moneys,” I said, in his language.

“Very large,” said Peter, again in English. “And I can take you if you want to see. Would you like that? I can provide a visit for you.” Peter waited a moment. “Small fee, of course. Very small fee. But I take you.”

We went by car. Peter was eighteen, about to enlist in the army. He wished to go someplace warm, to learn a good skill. Parachuting, he thought, although he had never been in an airplane. Or sailing, although he could not swim. I tried once, he told me, in the river, but it was too cold, and I felt myself being bitten so I never tried again.

We were approaching what he told me was the forest, and which looked to me, as they always did, no matter where I was, like an unexceptional place, any stretch of trees that anyone might pass on any road without any consideration.

“I will wait,” he said, when we stopped. “You go and you discover what you need to discover and I will be here.”

“You won’t come in?” I asked.

“Either you will have no emotion in there, which will make me upset. Or you will break down and cry hysterically and look at me like I’m a monster. This, too, will make me upset. It’s best if I’m here and you’re in there,” he said. And then, for emphasis, he said it again. “I will be out here. Forever,” he said, making his first mistake with his English. “And you will be in there,” he said. “Forever.”

I went. It was an ordinary forest. Sweet smelling. Moss on the rocks. Towering elm onto which lovers had made carvings. Everywhere there was the sound of a river, water over rocks, but I could not find the source, or any water at all, and so I decided that it must have been running beneath me, that the earth had grown up overtop everything in the form of a grotto. I had two impulses. One was that I felt the desire to put my hands in the earth, which after some difficulty I did, and to put my hands on the tree bark, which I did as well, and to taste some of it, both the tree and the dirt, which I didn’t hesitate to do, either out of some senseless exhaustion or because I was alone, and because I felt it necessary to know this place, to have it inside of me. The second impulse was that I felt as if I had been in this forest before, had felt this same dry dirt on my skin, had heard the same rush from this river which was here and also not here. I did not believe in such feelings, even though it was a sensation I’d had before, on trips like this, often trips spurred by photographs such as the one I had in my breast pocket.

Once, I had asked my wife why this was so. She had been raised to believe that a true rationalist could not, by way of reason alone, dispense so easily with the notion that there is an earth beside our earth, so close at times that we might be able to gather notice what they are doing in their world, hear their voices, hear their rivers running, occasionally remember their memories as echoes of our own. If not with reason, I had said, then surely with common sense. Through our apartment walls we could sometimes hear the neighbor’s daughter practicing the violin, the same piece endlessly. We almost never saw this girl whose violin we heard, as I reminded my wife, but we always knew it was her, didn’t we? We had never once thought it was someone else, a violinist somewhere we might not ever be able to visit. I remember that she smiled at me, and then got up to make herself a drink, something she did often to escape having to show me how disappointed she was in my stubbornness, or my lack of intellect. She is gone now, and I have often wished that I could sense in our house, in the room, for instance, where she passed, what I always seem to experience in these forests, which are always full of sounds I cannot place, footsteps in the brush which are not connected to any feet, the sound of a river running from nowhere to nowhere.

In other words, her, wherever she has gone.

I took photographs of the forest, bad photographs. And I made notes in my journal, which, later, I could not make sense of. Eventually, I went out the way I came. When I got to the roadside, though, Peter was gone. Somehow, I thought, I had gone the wrong way. So I went back in, found my way again to the heart of the place where all the Jews of this village had been disappeared, and walked out a different way, past trees that I could not distinguish from one another, over the river which was not a river, until I came again to a road, a different road maybe, but a road nevertheless that was empty. I tried again. Into the forest. I passed more trees, onto which there were more carvings put into the bark, and which, this time, did not seem to me to be the names of lovers, but the names of people like me who had come searching for evidence. Again I came to a road, and I was alone. For a moment I called out to Peter. Help, I cried. I’m lost. I can’t get out. I’m stuck here in the forest. What came to me was the question my daughter used to ask me when she was young: How long is forever?

The next evening, I met Yulia. For a hundred dollars, she agreed to talk, and when I showed her the picture, she gasped.

“This is Fania,” she cried.

“That’s her name?” I asked.

“Fania,” she said. “Little Fania.”

We were in the center of the village. I had found her moving slowly, carrying groceries. Across the road there was a park, in the center of which was a monument to a government that no longer existed.

“She lived there,” Yulia said. “Let me show you.” She walked me to the edge of the park and pointed to a row of houses, tall houses with ornate wooden doors. “There. Little Fania.” She shook her head, then smiled. “She was always doing tricks. For instance, she could make a stone disappear from within her hand. All day long she would do this. Of course, later it was discovered that she did this by swallowing the stones. She became very ill, obviously. No one told her that magicians put the stones up their sleeves. Or that they slip them into their other hand. Or that they tuck the stones behind their fingers in such a way that they cannot be seen. Nobody had bothered to tell Fania that whatever you do, you shouldn’t swallow them,” she said. “Because rocks are terrible for your health!” Yulia began to laugh, and for a moment she was caught in her laughter, or caught somewhere else. She stopped very quickly, though, and turned to me. “Who are you? And why do you have Fania in your pocket? What trouble do you want with me?”

“I’m Eisner,” I told her. “I’m here from Boston.”

The woman moaned. “Blech. Boston. I’ve been.” She shrugged. “I don’t get the fuss.”

I told her what I had told the first woman I met, about my office, the letter I received, the grandson of Fania, her career as an eye doctor. Yulia, too, told me that I was being lied to.

“I was there,” she said. “I know for a fact that she’s gone.”

“Then why would I have received this letter?” I asked.

“Perhaps you have a particularly creative enemy in America,” she said. “Someone who thinks it might be funny to send you here to our town to talk to people like me.”

We went into her house. She wanted me to meet her great-grandchild, who had just been born, she said, and who was inside, likely not sleeping, likely terrorizing everyone. Soon she emerged from a separate room carrying the infant. I have lived, she said, four times as long as my sister, five times as long as my father, she said. Five lifetimes. She counted out every life on her hand, and then every life on the baby’s hand. Sister, other sister, mother, father, Fania. The baby had been born with a shock of red hair. Already alive with fire, Yulia said. For a long time we sat in quiet, me and her and this infant, and at a certain point she asked to see the picture of Fania once more, and when she had it in her hand she studied it closely before pressing it against her chest. You say that Fania is a grandmother, she asked me, and I said that she had passed away, but yes, she’d had a large family, with many children, and many grandchildren, and that she had worked for years in Cincinnati, Ohio, in a hospital where she had found much success. After some time with this news, Yulia said that she would have hoped for someplace nicer than Ohio. I’ve been there as well, she said. I don’t understand why everyone thinks America is so wonderful when there are such places as Boston and Cincinnati.

When she gave me back the picture, she said that some of the children that day, the last day, they were taken to a different place, and when I asked what she meant by a different place, she said that it was done so that they would not be so scared, that the place where the adults were taken was quite terrible, a large hole in the earth, which they were made to dig themselves.

“You seem to me to be someone who has done your homework,” she said.

I said, “I have.”

“So you have read about us before.”

“I have,” I said.

“And you speak our language,” she said. “Which is unusual.”

“I learned it in school,” I said. It was a story I was used to telling, but one she knew immediately was untrue.

“What school teaches our language? I have been to your schools. You must think I’ve been here all my life, a little lady growing old in the terrible village eating turnips and slaughtering chickens and believing in ghosts.”

There was a longer story to tell, about my mother, who had grown up fifty kilometers from here, in a village that did not look dissimilar to this village, and about my father, who had, as an American infantryman met my mother in a displaced persons camp in what was then occupied Germany, and about how they had traveled together some months later by boat from Southampton to Boston, and how, on that boat, she began to teach him the beginning of her two languages, the language of her inside life, and then the language of the outside, first by way of the words for water, and then, ocean, and then boat, and then waves, and then the words for the sensation of being rocked on the crest of the ocean just as one is rocked to sleep in a cradle in a quiet house on the edge of an ordinary forest, and then, finally, the words for land, and home, and silence, and mourning, and the words for the murmurs of the earth beside our earth: spirit, whisper, mother, father.

I asked Yulia what exactly this different place was where the children were taken, and she told me it was a candy shop. I wrote this down. It was the sole note I made.

“The children,” she said, “they were happy to be told they were receiving candy. Anyone would have been. Everyone likes candy. Everyone.”

“And where,” I asked, “were you when all of this was happening?”

That night I phoned my daughter in Boston, where it was late, and where I found her drowsy, which was the state in which she most reminded me of how she had been when she was a child. She asked first whether I was in danger, or whether I had been arrested, and then, whether or not I was ready to finally give it up and come home for good. It was always these three questions. She had long been under the impression that this line of work created unnecessary problems for me, and that I really ought to have had a more normal business. For instance, being a pharmacist seemed both easy and decently lucrative and minimally disgusting, and would not, as she had put it to me, have me awake deep into the night in a foreign village searching for the identities of ghosts.

Months ago she had chained a GPS chip to the lace of my left shoe, which meant that she could track me, follow my progress, and know, for instance, if something awful had happened. This was originally intended to guard against a worst-case scenario, a recapitulation, she called it, of certain historical patterns concerning men who looked like me and sometimes prayed like I did and who made it their business to roam around heavily wooded sites of grievous war crimes. But it seemed to me that this only helped guard against certain terrible scenarios for my left shoe, and not, as I told her, for my actual body. All of this is to say that she knew where I had been, that I had gone into the forest, and had made circles trying to find my way out, which she said, looked beautiful on the map when she saw it later, a looping series of figure-eights, as if I were drawing in space, especially for her. From the map, she knew, too, that I was not far from the place where my mother had been a girl. She asked whether I would go and visit, knowing that I had never done this, and in fact, had only circled it from a distance, over and over. It won’t take you long, she said, and I said that the way I figured it, it was like the site of a nuclear accident. I could go, I told her, but if I did, there was no telling the damage I might suffer.

“Are they treating you alright over there?” she wanted to know. “You know the rules, right? One: don’t get in any cars with any young men. Two: don’t go alone into anyone’s house, even if they’re nice little old ladies. The old ladies always have axes. Three: don’t say the word Nazi more than four times in an hour.”

“What happens then?” I asked.

“They appear,” she said. “Obviously, Dad. Everyone knows this about Nazis. If you call them, eventually they come.”

When she was young I had tried to give her the language of her grandmother, first the word, of course, for love, for sunlight, for memory, the word for the small everyday form of wonder, but it did not take. The words, my wife had said, could never have the meaning for her that they had for me, because they were old words, and we were, she and I, rushing into a new future, where the allure of the tribal and the ancient could finally be shaken off, and because for our daughter, the inside world and the outside were the same place.

Anya’s signal began to waver. At first her voice took on an echo. Dad, she called out? Dad? Are you okay? Come home! Get a normal job! And then, she sounded somehow robotic, far away, nowhere. Anyone, she called out. Is anyone out there? Anyone at all?

On the morning I was to go home, a woman came up behind me on the sidewalk on the village’s main street and asked whether I was the annoying American everyone was talking about. This was Miriam. She had been waiting for me, she said, and when I asked why, she laughed, and took my hand, and said that when someone comes to town handing out free money for nothing, for lies, for something as small and foolish as a story, she makes it her business to know this person. I’m surprised, she told me, that you haven’t figured out yet that anyone on earth can become a cheap storyteller for just a little money? Didn’t your mother tell you this?

By the time we arrived at her house, which was bright and modern and cooled by air conditioning, she was tired. She needed to rest. There was an axe on the seat of the chair where she told me to sit. Oh, don’t mind that, she told me. I’ve only ever used it on intruders or wolves or high school students.

“I hear you have a picture of Fania Blum,” she said.

“Is that her last name?” I asked. “Blum?”

“Oh boy,” she said, “all this time here with us and you don’t know much, do you? This is the problem with walking around waving your big money for everyone to see. Everyone will tell you anything. But nobody will you tell you anything good.”

“I know that she was a magician,” I said. “That she could make stones disappear. I know that.”

“Yes. She did some very good tricks. And some very bad tricks. That in particular was a very bad trick, even though people believed it. Because at first there were stones, and then there were no more stones. Which, when you’re six years old, is a great trick, until you see her later laid out in the hospital, and her stomach is enormous like she’s pregnant with a thousand babies, and you realize that somehow those stones have to come out of her one way or the other. Who knows? Maybe she was stupid. Maybe she just liked eating rocks?”

She took the picture from me. Here she is, she said, holding it for a moment, smiling over Fania. There you are. You know, she said, Fania came back here once, when she was much older, on one of those foolish trips where they take American Jews back to the places where their ancestors were traumatized so that they can themselves be traumatized, and then go home and traumatize their other Jewish friends with stories about their new trauma and their old trauma and all the glorious future trauma they’ve caused themselves because of coming here to see us. Miriam took a deep breath. There was she was, just walking around, Fania, but not Fania, Fania with an American accent, with an American name, Ellen, pointing at various buildings, telling some tall, handsome man about something. I came to say hello, to say don’t you remember me, it’s Miriam, you remember me,  we were in school together, we swam in the river once and were bitten by fish, we were always together, always, but she didn’t see me, or she didn’t want to see me. Someone told me she was an eye doctor, an expert in helping people see straight, but I tell you, she saw straight through me. No, no, she said, in her accent, which was flat, so different, no, it’s not true, you’re mistaken, I don’t know you. When I told everyone else, no one believed me. It couldn’t be Fania. You’re imagining it. You’re seeing double, they said. You think you’re seeing something that isn’t there. Fania is in the forest with the trees. You’re making up people. And only mothers get to make a person.

We were quiet a while after this and then she asked me to tell her what I did know, what truths I had learned after coming here, which was a question no one had ever asked me, this big question, the question of my life, and what I told her about, after thinking about it for a moment, was my mother, the boat from Southampton with the man who would be my father, the word I learned early for the ocean and the word for prisoner and the word for the film of salt that the sea deposits on one’s skin, even when that person is below deck for nine days, motion-drunk, stunned by time. When I was finished, she asked me whether I wanted something to drink, tea perhaps, or something for my soul, vodka maybe, something strong, something that might blind me, or derange me, but in a pleasant way, a nice blindness. We specialize in a nice form of blindness here in the woods, she said. You need this. Anyone could take a good long look at you and see that you need something.

When she returned, she watched me drink, and when I was finished with the liquor, which was rancid and obviously toxic and also wonderful, she told me that on the morning they took the children to the candy store, she said, she grew very jealous. Why were all my classmates going to get candy and not me? You have to understand that when we were young and we were cold we were also always very hungry. And if someone, a nice woman, your teacher, says to you that there are men in the village giving out blankets, the warmest blankets you have ever felt, and not only food, but candy, the best candy, you’ll want to go.

There were seven Blum children, she said. The names, she told me, were important to remember. You’ll want to report that back to her family in America. That they were actual people. She wrote them down for me, but I’ve lost the list. A family should know the whole story, the entire lineage, the names of one’s parents, their occupations, the names of one’s grandparents, the location of their homes and gravestones, if their gravestones are still there, and at a certain point, I realized we were speaking in Yiddish, and not in Russian, and that at some point we had switched, that we had moved from outside to inside, and I had not noticed. Below the table, I saw my daughter’s small GPS chip bouncing on my shoelace, and imagined her at home, watching me on her screen. How do you know how to speak this language, I asked her, and after a long time she shrugged, and said, what do you think, that there is no luck in a catastrophe, that a small child with a favorite hiding place can’t just happen to fall through the cracks?

When it was time for me to go, Miriam walked with me to the small lot near the central village church where I had parked my car, and where we passed, as we went, the houses of the two women whom I had met earlier. It was midday. There was wind in the walnut trees. Within hours I would be in the air, where from my seat the countryside would appear to me as an enormous stretch of green, a series of small forests strung together like pendants across the neck of a larger forest, miles of this green, an everywhere forest, in which, one very easily could become lost, become hunted, carve onto trees the names of the vanished, hear rivers, pray out loud for safekeeping. Somewhere over the North Sea I found that Miriam had managed to slip a photograph into my bag. You should have found me first, she’d written. The picture was of Fania. A picture from the same day, the same hour maybe. To her left is a smaller girl. Me, Miriam had written. But a younger, happier version of me. Both of them have been caught in the process of turning back to the camera. Because a gun has just gone off. Or something larger has fallen to the earth—the side of a building, the backend of a truck. They are, both of them, terrified. And they are, very clearly, a version of one another, identical or not. On the edge of the pictures are the townspeople, or soldiers, or both. The girls are holding hands.

That afternoon behind the village church, Miriam looked up to the sky, where it was clear, and where birds were roosting on a telephone wire. They always know when to go, she said. A moment before the storm, and they’re out, they’re safe somewhere. That’s the best trick. One minute they’re here she said, and poof, one minute they’re not, just like that, just up and off, no struggle. No swallowing rocks. I looked up where she had been looking, but when I turned to see her, to thank her, she was gone.

STUART NADLER is the author of two novels and a short story collection. His first novel, Wise Men, was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, and has been translated into five languages. His story collection, The Book of Life, was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. His most recent novel, The Inseparables, was named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus, and was a finalist for the Mark Twain Prize for the American Voice. In 2012 he was the recipient of the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation.