When I approached the Triboro toll on the way to Queens, I noticed the red sign warning: CALL EZ-PASS. Oh, no, not another one, I thought. I did not enjoy communicating with inhuman devices. A familiar mechanical female voice from the GPS announced the oncoming exit. I realized that I could speak to these devices but not to him. He is done with his intellectual curiosity, right to vote, and pursuit of happiness.
His father was a rabbi. Not an orthodox in a contemporary American sense. He was a man from the old country, from a big city, though. His roots were of the urban Jewry, many friends adapted to a gentile life; some went to a German school and were wearing black uniforms with long sleeves. Their own children might have gone to a secular school, usually after a few years of Jewish education. He certainly was intimately familiar with the vivid, hot stream of the Hassidic spirit born in the clear mountains of Bukovina just a day of travel away from the big city, but his family’s life was different. That is why Stephen eventually found his way to the University, and not incidentally, his passion, his scholarly ambition, his shtick were movies.
Those were relatively happy years, ones of escape from the neighborly, suffocating hug of Big Brother, of the shortsighted self-indulgence of idiotic, naive, happy neighbors on the Western side of the fence. So, Stephen’s dissertation and his first book were on Tarkovsky, a genius Russian director as strange, unpredictable, murky, slow, and enveloping as his zona in Stalker. Stephen made it brilliant, a combination of the spirit of the books on Father’s dark and musty bookshelves and a free spirit of the times—the sixties, whose very edge touched even this last outpost before the mysterious, vast territory in the East. The vastness that had devoured frozen Panzer divisions and, before them, the victorious Great Army. It was an interface of Europe and Asia, never mind geography.
Very few of these books Stephen managed to take with him to Tel Aviv, when he and Sonya were ready. Their son was just born; his own father was entrenched in his apartment with the multitude of memorable, meaningful Jewish artifacts.
In those times the line of such a Jewish family would stop its historical flow abruptly, turn into an unknown direction. All those things—menorahs, goblets, textiles, plates—would become, as they used to say in the emigration circle, unabroadable. As if things were telling the departing people: we are too tired to leave, too old, too rooted in this defiant foreign land. Leave us alone, and after the owner departs, we will continue our journey into some obscure antique shop, where one day a bored, balding tourist from Schleswig-Holstein will wander in, hold some of them for a while, and then proceed to his monstrous bus trembling with anticipation of the road.
The transition to a new life in Israel was not that hard. Sonya got a job as a dental assistant with a Romanian Jewish dentist from Craiova. They’d known him from the vacations at the Black Sea resort Neptune during their university years. After work, before Stephen would come home, Sonya liked her cup of coffee with petite Napoleons at the Voile Vue, soon to be blown up by the Hamas. He was busy working (writing, editing) at one of the bustling newspapers. Besides, he got the grant from the Ministry of Absorption and started the first serious film magazine in Hebrew in Tel Aviv.
The Lebanon war broke out. Sonya actually liked him coming back home every other week from the not-so-distant front: an unimaginable situation for their European parents’ generation. He was emerging from the bunker, from dust, smoke, and desert sun—thin, tanned, but not hungry. When he was staying for a couple of days, friends would still get together for coffee and Carmel wines, for hummus and cheese, and talk of perennial dead-end topics of Israeli politics and of the imminent threat of the Soviet Union getting involved with the war and of the catastrophic conclusion it might lead to. The only hope was the recently begun “Soviet Vietnam”—the Afghan war.
In his infantry unit Stephen met an American, Eric, a Vietnam vet who used to be a volunteer, not a common case. Eric did not get along with a noisy, pushy female sergeant Lora, 19 years of age, who came from Belarus as a two-year-old girl. She would make them, family men with professions, crawl, do unimaginable leg stretches, and handle the Uzi with incredible speed. It was insulting, but that was Lora’s point. Amazingly, at the same time she liked to chat and giggle with her girlfriends from other units, chain-smoking and holding the machine gun between her plump hips. She would carefully wash her curly, dark hair with special shampoo from Dead Sea seaweed. When she came back from the furlough, she looked more relaxed after spending a Shabbat with some mysterious hero stationed in the West Bank.
Eric turned out to be a former Green Beret, at least for a while. He criticized the training and did offer to get others into shape. He showed the techniques of approaching an enemy silently—in this case a Palestinian gunman—and cutting the throat with a knife in a special way—one smooth move—so there would be no sound. Eventually, some Sabra captain, a veteran of the Yom Kippur, took him away. Eric went with the commandos to Beirut, and Stephen never heard of the American from Waltham, Massachusetts, ever again.
Stephen returned, and Sonya had to cook full Romanian dinners again, and life was getting back on track with the subsidized apartment almost paid off. But he also felt a limit, some confinement in his life, the way it was shaping up. There was no more room to go. No political career, he was neither a doctor nor an engineer. To be a part of the closed, self-promoting circle in Israel called the “Romanian mafia” did not interest him. He was too much of a cosmopolitan persona. Besides, his older brother Mark, who had managed to get to the US earlier, was writing and calling and hinting in a pretty transparent way that the real estate market in New York was going through the roof, and it was a good time to get in. Provided you had some money or at least had an idea how to start selling, then buying, then reselling.
Stephen decided to move on, and frankly, after they settled in Queens, life was not entirely different from Tel Aviv—multilingual, multicultural, a lot of acquaintances from the old country. Stephen had great common sense, got his license. Sonya found a similar job with another Romanian dentist three blocks away, where mainly Bukharan Jews lived; their son got into CUNY, and things moved in the right direction. She started bringing home food after work from the small grocery store in that neighborhood: kebab and kosher salami and even real pilaf, fatty and gluey, tasting great even after being reheated in a microwave—apparently a carnal sin, by the strict standards.
There were two huge problems, though, somehow interconnected. Stalker, zona, and the dark underpinnings of Tarkovsky art would not let go. That was one. Stephen was also gaining weight, in a serious way. He realized that his compulsive eating was related to the frustration about the art but also his stale relations with Sonya. The time of mutually agreeable, easy, fun relations with each other’s wives in their social circle back home had passed long ago. She was becoming a tired, middle-aged woman, set in her ways, habitually sexually dormant. In her special way, seen sometimes in Jewish women, actually inferior to their husbands—she was domineering and authoritarian. Stephen, like many others who had gone through what he had, could not deal with the stress of leaving her, breaking the family, defending himself, falling in love, building another family, finding new frustrations. In other words, exploring that dark zona—terra incognita—called a second or even a third life.
Escaping into reading, which he always did anyway—philosophy, Judaica, history—did not help and only kept confirming his natural pessimistic belief about the world’s and culture’s imminent, albeit slow, direction. Creating a tremendous worldwide vodka collection helped for a while. He felt this residual pleasant inkling showing guests his treasure downstairs in their home in Queens, that impressive battery of rockets—bottles from Russia, Poland, Sweden, Finland, and France. Soon afterward the bottles collected dust, but these were not old wines. Vodka bottles, instead of looking increasingly dignified, somehow appeared dilapidated and not purposefully well-kept—but sadly forgotten.
What Sonya could not understand was the fact that he had started writing again, not articles about the movies or a dissertation, but something like a memoir prose. He let her read a couple of chapters, but she could not take that self-ironic, somewhat gloomy style, giving away his frustration and despair.
As expected, he was quite successful in the real estate field and managed to handle a few smart projects in Manhattan; later he moved from the real estate job to managing upscale co-op buildings with one of the monstrous managing companies on Lexington. He hated the pager and a constant control of the mobile phone over his internal life, but the job made them comfortable. He was close to his son somehow, but as many kids in the new land, the son was living his life different from the more family-oriented and closed, clannish circle-oriented life in the old country.
There was nothing to talk about at the dinner table with Sonya, but her cooking was excellent and copious. Besides, Stephen liked to prepare some things himself, especially meats, Romanian steak, grilled, sometimes paprika and a special soup with beef stomach. Friends were coming by, and there were a lot of parties with people from their old city and the new ones too. Stephen was especially keen on talking with some new Russian friends, doctors, and writers. His Russian was sketchy, but years of his interest in Big Brother and Russian moviemaking created a lot of common topics, and Stephen was always getting livelier, more talkative, even tender, since it somehow related to his youth.
He tried hypnosis to harness his eating disorder, tried diets, Atkins too, all in vain. At that point, his belly was voluminous, his frustration so profound, sexuality met its dead end, bearing a woman’s name, Sonya, although his soul continued searching for some light inside itself. He knew it was there, he knew that distractions of life, this job, the stalemate with his wife, and an insufficient degree of craziness, necessary conditions for a poet, an artist, clouded his path to purpose.
It’s not that he never thought of the end. Not in the sense he did in Lebanon. There it was scary, real, it smelled of death, dried blood on the hot stone. He attended the services and visited military sections of cemeteries in Israel more than once. But that was different. Now it was some milky, nebulous threat, a combination of occasional palpitation, catching his breath, carrying the belly, sometimes at JFK when they were late for an overseas flight. It was especially bad after the heavy meals of mamaliga with family friends, less so after American stand-up parties, even though there he would manage to wolf down enough cheese with crackers with the pedestrian merlot before real dinner at home. But the main thing was an unreachable point of knowing who he really was and if that was possible at all.
His brother had died a few years earlier from a stroke, as did his father back home. He flew for the funeral and was just sitting there in that empty, old apartment, not really knowing what to do with all those items, whatever was left after the relatives picked up the lion’s share. Times were different and he could have transported some of them, but he was an American now, so there was no time for any detailed, time-consuming project, just a long weekend off work. So, he just left the rest to a remote relative.
While flying over the Atlantic, he realized that he would never forgive himself for not taking four items that belonged to his father. Stephen thought he would like him to have them: an old book, presented to his father at his graduation from the rabbinical school, a Thales, an old tablecloth, and the goblet he remembered from his grandfather’s time. It was too late, so something was left there undisturbed and untouched. In a way, things sometimes have their own destiny and strange lives. And by now, after so many moves and after closing so many doors behind him, he knew that one has to detach oneself—from the walls, textures of life, make a clean exit. Nothing really matters; you simply become lost on the way to yourself.
So, he thought about the end now in more real terms, sort of how it was written in a short story of one of his recently met writer friends, who was also a pathologist. It started with the protocol of an autopsy. And somehow the matter-of-factness, the cold details of the procedure made it less horrible and unimaginable. The words about the appearance of the subcutaneous fat particularly stuck in his mind.
That happened, clinically speaking, in a proverbial way: after a heavy Thanksgiving dinner at the friends’ house in a nice bedroom community on the side street by Northern Boulevard. He lay down on the couch to catch his breath, maybe get a quick nap before dessert. When Sonya, who was chatting with her girlfriend about the family of their son’s fiancée, walked in, he was not breathing. Although his posture on the couch was the same as if he were napping, she knew right away that it was that.
The funeral home occupied half a dark, nonresidential block on Queens Boulevard, completely desolate on a windy evening of the weeknight. Even the rare cars were speeding away, as if trying to escape wind-battered areas, somehow reminiscent of the open seas, with their unexplainable whirlwind nonlife.
As I walked in, I recognized several familiar faces, nodded, shook hands, embraced a few people, bowed in front of Sonya, who was sitting on the official cold leather sofa, surrounded by other wives, each nursing her own fear, unsureness, grudge, dark premonition, wet sorrow.
I paid my silent dues to the body in the other end of the hall, found my coat, and walked out into the open sea of the Boulevard. My car felt like the only oasis there. Habitually, I found again my feeling of home inside the vehicle. I pressed the button, and the cranky voice of an older man came on, reading Exit Ghost. Now, I remembered how much Stephen liked the author, did not care for The Dying Animal, though: “Too blunt and forward, but he is such a good writer, he could write a restaurant menu, and that still would be a quality prose.”
I was heading toward the Bridge, that blinking arch above and between two worlds; Queens at this time of night was reminiscent of a shipwreck: frozen, the souls already deported, still not departed elsewhere. As I was passing the toll, the red sign warned me the second time: CALL EZ-PASS.