Глен Хиршберг - Dancing Men

Hearing that was like being slammed to the ground. I couldn’t get my lungs to work.

My father went on. “Sometimes that’s what it means. It depends what you use it with, you see? Sometimes it means spirit, as in the spirit of God. Spirit of life. What God gave to his creations.” He stubbed his cigarette in the sand, and the orange light winked out like an eye blinking shut. “And sometimes it just means wind.”

By my sides, I could feel my hands clutch sand as breath returned to my body. The sand felt cool, soft. “You don’t know Hebrew, either,” I said.

“I made a point of knowing that word.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what he called me, too,” my father said. He rolled a second cigarette but didn’t light it. For a while we sat. Then my father said, “Lucy called me two weeks ago. She told me it was time, and she said she needed a partner for your. ceremony. Someone to hide this, then help you find it. She said it was essential to the ritual.” Reaching behind him, he produced a brown paper grocery bag with the top rolled down and tossed it to me. “I didn’t kill it,” he said.

I stared at him, and more tears stung my eyes. Sand licked along the skin of my legs and arms and crawled up my shorts and sleeves as though seeking pores, points of entry. Nothing about my father’s presence here was reassuring. Nothing about him had ever been reassuring, or anything else, I thought furiously, and the fury felt good. It helped me move. I yanked the bag to me.

The first thing I saw when I ripped it open was an eye. It was yellow-going-grey, almost dry. Not quite, though. Then I saw the folded black, ridged wings. A furry, broken body twisted into a “J”. Except for the smell and the eye, it could have been a Halloween decoration.

“Is that a bat?” I whispered. Then I shoved the bag away and gagged.

My father glanced around the walls, back at me. He made no move toward me. He’s part of it, I thought wildly. He knows what they’re doing. I pushed the thought away. It couldn’t be true. “Dad, I don’t understand,” I pleaded.

“I know you’re young,” my father said. “He didn’t do this to me until I left for college. But there’s no more time, is there? You’ve seen him.”

“Why do I have to do this at all?”

My father’s gaze swung down on me. He cocked his head and pursed his lips, as though I’d asked something completely incomprehensible. “It’s your birthright,” he said, and stood up.

We drove back to my grandfather’s adobe in silence. The trip lasted less than five minutes. I couldn’t even figure out what else to ask, let alone what I might do. I kept glancing at my father. I wanted to scream at him, pound on him until he told me why he was acting this way.

Except that I wasn’t sure he was acting anything but normal, for him. He didn’t speak when we played catch or when he walked me to the ice-cream shop, either. When we arrived at the adobe, he leaned across me to push my door open, and I grabbed his hand.

“Dad. At least tell me what the bat is for.”

My father straightened, moved the air-conditioning lever right, then hard back to the left, as though he could surprise it into working. He always did this. It never worked. My father and his routines. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s a symbol.”

“For what?”

“Lucy will tell you.”

“But you know.” I was almost snarling at him now.

“It stands for the skin at the tip of the tongue. It’s the Talking God. Or part of it, I think. I don’t know, exactly. I’m sorry.”

Gently, hand on my shoulder, he eased me out of the car before it occurred to me to wonder what he was apologizing for. But he surprised me by calling after me. “I promise you this, Seth,” he said. “This is the last time in your life that you’ll have to come here. Shut the door.”

Too stunned and confused and scared to do anything else, I did as he told me, then watched as my father’s car disintegrated into the first far-off shadows of twilight. Already, too soon, I felt the change in the air, the night chill seeping through the gauze-dry day like blood through a bandage.

My grandfather and Lucy were waiting on the patio. She had her hand on his shoulder, her long hair gathered on her head, and without its dark frame her face looked much older. And his — fully exposed now, without its protective shawl — looked like a rubber mask on a hook, with no bones inside to support it.

Slowly, my grandfather’s wheelchair squeaked over the patio onto the hard sand as Lucy propelled it. I could do nothing but watch. The wheelchair stopped, and my grandfather studied me.

“Ruach,” he said. There was still no tone in his voice. But there were no holes in it either, no gaps where last night his breath had failed him. “Bring it to me.”

It was my imagination, surely, or the first hint of breeze, that made the paper bag seem to squirm in my hands. This would be the last time, my father had said. I stumbled forward and dropped the bag in my grandfather’s lap.

Faster than I’d ever seen him move, but still not fast, my grandfather crushed the bag against his chest. His head tilted forward, and I had the insane idea that he was about to sing to the dead bat as if it were a baby. But all he did was close his eyes and clutch the bag.

“All right, that’s enough,” Lucy said, and took the bag from him. She touched him gently on the back but didn’t look at me.

“What did he just do?” I asked, challenging her. “What did the bat do?”

Once more, Lucy smiled her slow, nasty smile. “Wait and see.”

Then she was gone, and my grandfather and I were alone in the yard. The dark came drifting down the distant mountainsides like a fog bank, but faster. When it reached us, I closed my eyes and felt nothing except an instantaneous chill. I opened my eyes to find my grandfather still watching me, head cocked a little on his neck. A wolf, indeed.

“Digging,” he said. “All we did, at first. Making pits deeper. The dirt so black. So soft. Like sticking your hands. inside an animal. All those trees leaning over us. Pines. Great white birches. Bark as smooth as baby skin. The Nazis gave us nothing to drink. Nothing to eat. But they paid us no attention, either. I sat next to the gypsy I had slept beside all through the war. On a single slab of rotted wood. We had shared body heat. Blood from each other’s cuts and wounds. Infections. Lice.

“I never. even knew his name. Four years six inches from each other. never knew it. Couldn’t understand each other. Never really tried. He’d saved —” A cough rattled my grandfather’s entire body, and his eyes got wilder, began to bulge, and I thought he wasn’t breathing and almost yelled for Lucy again, but he gathered himself and went on. “Buttons,” he said. “You understand? From somewhere. Rubbed their edges on rocks. Posts. Anything handy. Until they were. . sharp. Not to kill. Not as a weapon.” More coughing. “As a tool. To whittle.”

“Whittle,” I said automatically, as though talking in my sleep.

“When he was starving. When he woke up screaming. When we had to watch children’s. bodies dangling from gallows. until the first crows came for their eyes. When it was snowing, and. we had to march. barefoot. or stand outside all night. The gypsy whittled.”

Again, my grandfather’s eyes ballooned in their sockets as though they would burst. Again came the cough, shaking him so hard that he almost fell from the chair. Again, he fought his body to stillness.

“Wait,” he gasped. “You will wait. You must.”

I waited. What else could I do?

A long while later, he said, “Two little girls.” I stared at him. His words wrapped me like strands of a cocoon. “What?”