The Paris Review

S-Z-C-Z-U-C-Z-Y-N. I can’t pronounce the name of the town my mother’s mother’s from. But Natata, who is from Warsaw and was in my Hebrew class in Jerusalem, and who helped me without knowing it to forget about someone back in New York, tried to teach me. I’d hoped, in the monthlong summer class, to relearn the Hebrew I’d learned as a child and since forgotten. But I had trouble concentrating, because everything reminded me of something else, and because Natata was always in the room, five hours a day, five days a week. 

My first dream in Hebrew that summer was of a color map of Poland with Hebrew writing on it, no sounds. The town is hard to spot because there is a brown-orange border crossing a blue border in the eastern part of the country, hovering translucent just above the paper that fills my field of vision: Russia, Poland, Poland, Russia. Just before waking I see it, bolder print than the other cities. When I was awake, Natata told me how to pronounce it: like shchtoot’n but the sh and ch must be articulated separately yet as a single syllable. My mouth could make no sense of this. How many times had I heard my mother’s mother say the name of the town she came from, Szczuczyn? She told me she’d left because of a boy, well before the war, a boy she still loved when she left. The way I remember it, she didn’t pronounce the name of the place she came from the way Natata said it’s pronounced, but what is the memory of a sound? Have you ever recognized a gone person’s voice saying your name and turned and no one was there? 

Natata was studying speech pathology, specifically stuttering, which we were discussing as we got off the bus to walk down King George Street, downtown Jerusalem, and were interrupted by the sound of a jackhammer that sounded something like the pattern of plum-skin bits on her teeth in the mirror at the juice place, open to the street, that we were on our way to. To replace the grapefruit juice that she wanted and he didn’t have, the proprietor with an obvious thing for her made her a mix of plum and orange, a remarkable simulation. 

Harry Dow, my dad’s dad, once heard Eugene Debs tell a Jewish group in Houston in the 1920s a joke that hinges on the difference between Lithuanian and Polish-Ukrainian pronunciations of a popular potato dish. Zaide, as I called Harry, said that Debs said that the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats was the same as the difference between koogel and kigel. I may be wrong that it was Eugene Debs in Harry’s story, but that’s what I told Natata. She repeated EU-gene, saying she liked the sound of it and knew the name from an X Files episode she’d seen in Warsaw ten years before. It’s the one that ends with Eugene Tooms, a villain who can stretch himself thin enough to fit through any opening, as he is served a meal in his jail cell through—and Natata couldn’t quite find the vowel for the word for the opening he’s being served through, and which he calmly stares at because he, and the viewers, know he can easily escape through it—through a slut, she said. I corrected her. She exaggerated the mid-mouth, open, short o sound to get to slot, then sipped her simulated grapefruit juice. When she articulated that first unmanageable syllable in my grandmother’s hometown, her lips formed a sudden oval, though she said nothing about this when she instructed me on tongue placement. She laughed to discover the top of the mouth is called, in English, the roof. 

I often feel that I’ve forgotten how to read. I stare at the words and I know I can decode them but they’re just a crowd of individual words, even if they happen to be aligned in lines and sentences and paragraphs on the page. There’s no current, no movement, in them or in me. I don’t know how to go from one to the other, or I know how but this knowledge or ability is as if in a nearby compartment, visible but sealed off. This never happens in a library, though, as I walk the rows, return to a table with a small stack that I may make a few notes from, probably leave behind, and sit near other people who have also somehow learned to read. One afternoon at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, I looked at a 1925 catalog of Arctic and Antarctic paintings by an artist named Frank Wilbert Stokes; and at The Complete Paintings of Giotto, which includes this surprising sentence by B. Varchi in 1546: “It is very true that just as poets describe the outside, so painters portray as far as possible what is inside, in other words the thoughts and feelings”; and then at the scores for Beethoven’s String Quartets, Opus 18 and 130–132, the early and the late works, to see if I could detect the audible differences in manuscript, even though I can’t read music beyond F-A-C-E and Every Good Boy Does Fine. Despite stretches of harmonic angularity that are surprisingly reminiscent of the later works, Beethoven’s early quartets have an easygoing feel, each instrument comfortable in the close quarters of family conversation. The later ones include plenty of old-fashioned melodic seduction, but the four instruments lose and rediscover each other in long arcs that manage to describe density and sparseness at the same time. They sketch peripheries around a serenity so clear it’s indistinguishable from silence, except for the gleaming. 

I wanted to find a way to let my eyes wander through the musical notations in the third-floor reading room designated a quiet area, but I didn’t get far. Two young black girls wearing parkas with synthetic-fur-lined hoods pulled over their heads started barking, loudly, over and over again, not “Roof!” but “Woof!” After a few minutes two librarians escorted them down the main aisle and toward the door. The girls kept barking on the way out. When they were gone, a black man at the table with me told the black woman with him that the girls were “ghetto.” On the subway once, I saw a black woman open and eat part of a cellophane-wrapped cake or doughnut with powdered sugar on it, then wrap the bite or two that remained back in the cellophane and put it back into her winter coat pocket, and the woman with her told her that that was ghetto. Twice now I’ve heard black American girls refer to each other as “son,” as in, “Listen, son.” 

In New York, a year before that summer in Jerusalem, I had gone with the one I would need to forget to a concert by the pianist Alfred Brendel and his son Adrian, who were performing Beethoven’s sonatas for piano and cello. These pieces seem off-kilter, the instruments conversing like an elegant couple strolling but continually bumping into each other despite all the room on the path. The auditorium was small. A row behind us a woman kept speaking to her companion in short, candied, even patronizing, declarative sentences, delivering her comments as if expecting no reply: You were very quiet. Did you enjoy that? And at intermission: It’s intermission, let’s get up. When we turned around we saw that she was blind, her companion a dog that had remained remarkably quiet through the concert. I wondered what Brendel, who has written a poem in which he imagines having an extra finger to shush coughers in the audience, might write about the dog, and whether at any point there had been a sound from the cello that made the well-trained dog want to howl, and what that restraint would have felt like to the dog. 

After the concert, we went around to the quiet side street where someone had told us Alfred Brendel’s car would be waiting for him, and it was, a black Lincoln Town Car with a sign in the window misspelling his name: B-R-E-N-D-A-L. We stood watching the driver watch the side door under the fire escape for a while. Then a woman came out the side door and told the driver to pick up Brendel in front. So we went around front. A few other concert-goers lingered under the awning. Brendel came out the glass doors, went down the dozen stone steps, got into the backseat of the black sedan, and folded his hands in his lap. Someone closed the door for him. The dome light stayed on. It was dark outside, the car black, the car interior black, everyone inside the car wearing black. Brendel’s face was in shadow, and only his hands, folded on his lap, were illuminated, resting there. The dome light faded, three seconds, maybe five, and then his hands were in the dark, and the car headed downtown. 

Once I lay imagining her thinking of me. I was inside of what felt like a steel concavity. The world had become much too large and I too present on the edge of my bed somewhere inside it. I tried to stop myself, behind the steel where I couldn’t breathe, from saying her name, because I knew she wouldn’t hear it or come to me if she did. But I had to say it, because I couldn’t let myself, without falling further back into a seemingly unsupportable present, not believe that I could change what she wanted by knowing it so hard that she’d arrive again and make what had led to this point a dream, or done, it’s nothing, baby, you’re OK. So say her name. There was a large opening, a circle with a wavy edge like a lining inside its circumference. I was on my right side. An arc of the circle touched my chest. It was what’s called a feeling, I think, just before I would say her name. But I couldn’t remember it. There was nothing there but the blankness inside the wavy line inside the circumference pressed against me. It made me feel that she must have been right to go, and that I had betrayed myself in wanting against the way things were. This gave me hope. 

In his last letter to one of the women he loved, Beethoven wrote: “I thank you for wishing still to appear as if I were not altogether banished from your memory.” When the dome light illuminating Brendel’s hands faded, it didn’t seem as though the light was disappearing. It was more like a curtain you might see closing closing. Or the valves on permissible awareness narrowing, the not-seeing coming in over the seeing, and what lingers underneath being absorbed into what was pervasive all along. 

Before I knew either of them, Natata or the one I would need to forget, I lived in Miami Beach, two latitudinal degrees north of the northern boundary of the tropics. Miami is close enough to the equator that even when it’s cloudy and raining there, the semitropical sunlight suffuses pavement and palms as if it were coming from them rather than being broadcast onto them. There is so much moisture and heat that whatever happens tends to happen as if it were happening in slow motion. On Michigan Avenue and Sixth Street, a few blocks from the ocean, in the middle of the night, a shirtless man trimmed hedges with a machete. A block away, a man shouted from the street toward the anonymous face of a low building and its half-dozen empty balconies: Someone let me in, goddammit! My mother’s dying and I need someone to hold my hand! 

At the counter of the Granada Restaurant on the southeast corner of Washington Avenue and Española Way, a man and a woman each ordered eggs, scrambled, with fries. She was handsome, dark, Spanish-speaking, Indian-featured, wore a long-sleeved lightweight shirt, sleeves rolled up. He was white, blond, an evangelical placidity on his face, wore long-sleeved flannel, sleeves rolled up. It was about eighty-five degrees. 

She said: It was like a ship. It came down real slow. I saw it. It came down out there and went all the way down to the ground, and then it went back up again. 

She hadn’t started eating because when the food arrived she was using her hand to show him how it was going down, then went back up again. He listened without interrupting. He started to eat, put ketchup on his eggs and fries. When she stopped he said without looking at her: That’s great that it went up again. That’s a sign of hope, you know. 

Often in movies you’ll hear the music or dialogue from what’s coming next start out from under what’s still coming from before, and not just in the movies. It’s a standard technique. Listening to a piano sonata on the radio recently, I noticed the use of pedal for the first time. One sound comes in over the lingering previous sound. There’s a Hebrew word that can mean the first as well as the previous. This makes me uneasy. Where does the first note come from if it has no past? In one strain of the Jewish tradition called kabbalah, God must remove himself from the world in order to make room for the world. Otherwise he’d take up all the space. But where does he go? Maybe there isn’t any space until he makes that, too, and maybe not just outside himself. That’s why moving incrementally away from what one makes or loves is everything. Kabbalah means reception because it refers to knowledge transmitted and received before it was written down. Then it was written down. In modern Hebrew kabbalah also means receipt. Each feeling—not each kind of feeling or each particular feeling, but every instance of any feeling being felt by any being—each feeling, like each object, is a receptor of sorts. To remove himself from the world, “God” would have had to remove himself from himself, unless I’m missing something. 

One morning in Jerusalem my nieces were playing Pick Up Sticks on a cool floor just inside the glass door, and over the roofs of mouth and house was a quite a bit of sky. A flight attendant in it would hand out a customs form the fine print of which said, “The estimated average burden associated with this collection of information is 4 minutes per respondent or record keeper depending on individual circumstances.” I woke thirsty. The Hebrew word for water, mayim, appeared in the Roman alphabet in my mind’s eye and looked like Miami. While living in Miami, I had learned the word buchito, tiny drop, from an ad for Pilón coffee. Sabroso hasta el último buchito. Good to the last. To last means to put off getting to the last. One need not necessarily arrive. 

Before I left Jerusalem, I read Natata things I’d written down and she said, Now you’ll remember things you wouldn’t have remembered. She didn’t realize it was my way of forgetting. I remember her waving me toward her in the hallway, from the shoulder, to say “over here,” and her pointing at me on the patio where we drank coffee during breaks, as if to say “there you are” as she approached. She’d say ehhh when she spoke Hebrew and become fuller when she spoke Polish, though nothing had seemed before that to be lacking, though afterward it slightly, in retrospect, did. One night at a family restaurant that specialized in grilled meats and where I’d had beets once, she wanted to know what I thought of her. She told me she’d be scared to be herself without me. I remember how long she held me and why she made sure to let go first. After I left, she wrote me that she walked by the juice bar with a Polish guy she’d met. “I wanted grapefruit so much. But I thought that it would be absolutely without sense to get there without you. Well, maybe I’ll go there by myself again, but with someone that doesn’t feel the importance of that place? Never! Anyway, I got tanned. No, not good. I got burned, I look like that vegetable you were scared you won’t be able to explain to the lady in that place with meat where we ate. The red one, from under the ground, you make sugar out of. So that is me. Burak. (That thing in Polish.)”