Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

She went to the bedroom, to the dozens of coats piled on the bed. They looked like dead bodies, like Jewish dead. Those images had imprinted Julia’s childhood, too, and she now found certain resonances impossible to escape. Those images of naked women holding their children to their chests. She hadn’t seen them since she first saw them, but she never stopped seeing them.

The rabbi had looked across the patiently waiting grave and into Julia. He asked, “But in your experience, do Jews cry silently?” Did he see what no one could hear?

She found her coat, put it on. The pockets were filled with receipts, and a small arsenal of candies for bribing, and keys, and business cards, and assorted foreign currency from trips she could remember planning and packing for but not taking. In two fistfuls she transferred all this to the garbage, like tashlich.

She went to the front door without stopping: past the white cabbage salad, black coffee, bluefish, and blondies; past the purple soda and peach schnapps; past the chatter about investments, and Israel, and cancer. She walked past the drone of the Mourner’s Kaddish, past the covered mirrors, past the photos of Isaac on the console: with the Israelis at their last visit; at Julia’s fortieth; on his sofa, looking off into the near distance. When she reached the door, she noticed, for the first time, the sign-in book resting open on an accent table. She flipped through it, looking to see if her boys had written anything.

Sam: I’m sorry.

Max: I’m sorry.

Benjy: I’m sorry.

She was sorry, too, and she touched the mezuzah as she crossed the threshold, but didn’t kiss her fingers. She remembered when Jacob suggested they select their own text to scroll into the mezuzah of the front door of their home. They chose a line from the Talmud: “Every blade of grass has an angel watching over it, whispering, ‘Grow! Grow!’” Would the next family to live in the house even know?

Tamir and Jacob stayed up late that night. Julia was somewhere, but she wasn’t there. Isaac wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. The kids were supposed to be asleep in their rooms, but Sam was in Other Life while snapchatting with Billie, and Max was looking up words that he didn’t understand in The Catcher in the Rye —pissed, as Holden had taught him to be, that he had to use a paper dictionary. Barak was in the guest room, asleep and expanding. Downstairs, it was only the two cousins — old friends, middle-aged men, the fathers of still-young children.

Jacob got some beers from the gently humming fridge, muted the TV, and with a heavy, affected sigh took a seat across the table from Tamir.

“That was hard today.”

“He lived a good, long life,” Tamir said, and then took a good, long drink.

“I suppose so,” Jacob said, “except for the good part.”

“The great-grandchildren.”

“Whom he referred to as his ‘revenge against the German people.’”

“Revenge is sweet.”

“He spent his days clipping coupons for things he would never buy, while telling anyone who would listen that no one listened to him.” A drink. “I once took the kids to a zoo in Berlin—”

“You’ve been to Berlin?”

“We were shooting there, and it coincided with a school break.”

“You’ve taken your children to Berlin and not to Israel?”

“As I was saying , we went to a zoo in the East, and it was pretty much the most depressing place I’ve ever been. There was a panther, in a habitat the size of a handicapped parking space, with flora about as convincing as a plastic Chinese food display. He was walking figure eights, over and over and over, the exact same path. When he turned, he would jerk his head back and squint. Every time. We were mesmerized. Sam, who was maybe seven, pressed his palms to the glass and asked, ‘When is Great-Grandpa’s birthday?’ Julia and I looked at each other. What kind of seven-year-old asks such a question at such a moment?”

“The kind who worries that his great-grandfather is a depressed panther.”

“Exactly. And he was right. The same routine, day after day after day: instant black coffee and cantaloupe; crawl through the Jewish Week with that enormous magnifying glass; check the house to make sure all the lights are still off; push a walker on tennis balls to shul to have the same Sad Libs conversations with the same macular degenerates, substituting different names into the news about prognoses and graduations; thaw a brick of chicken soup while flipping through the same photo albums; eat the soup with black bread while advancing through another paragraph of the Jewish Week ; take a nap in front of one of the same five movies; walk across the street to confirm Mr. Kowalski’s continued existence; skip dinner; check the house to make sure all the lights are still off; go to bed at seven and have eleven hours of the same nightmares. Is that happiness?”

“It’s a version.”

“Not one that anyone would choose.”

“A lot of people would choose that.”

Jacob thought of Isaac’s brothers, of hungry refugees, of survivors who didn’t even have family to ignore them — he was ashamed both of the inadequate life he tolerated for his great-grandfather and of judging it inadequate.

“I can’t believe you took the kids to Berlin,” Tamir said.

“It’s an incredible city.”

“But before Israel?”

Google knew how far Tel Aviv was from Washington, and a tape measure could determine the width of the table, but Jacob couldn’t even approximate his emotional distance from Tamir. He wondered: Do we understand each other? Or are we near-strangers, just assuming and pretending?

“I regret that we didn’t keep in better touch,” Jacob said.

“You and Isaac?”

“No. Us. ”

“I suppose if we’d wanted to, we would have.”

“I’m not so sure,” Jacob said. “There are a lot of things I wanted to do, but didn’t.”

“Wanted at the time, or looking back?”

“Hard to say.”

“Hard to know ? Or hard to say ?”

Jacob swallowed a mouthful of beer and used his palm to dry the ring left on the table, wishing, as he did, that he were the kind of person to let such things go. He thought about all that was happening behind the walls, above the ceiling, and under the floor — how little he understood the workings of his home. What was going on at the outlet when nothing was plugged in? Was there water in the pipes at that moment? There must have been, as it came out as soon as the faucet was opened. So did that mean the house was constantly filled with sitting water? Wouldn’t that weigh an enormous amount? When he’d learned in school that his body was more than sixty percent water, he’d done as his father had taught, and doubted. Water simply wasn’t heavy enough for that to be true. Then he’d done as his father had taught, and sought the truth from his father. Irv filled a trash bin with water and challenged Jacob to lift it. As Jacob struggled, Irv said: “You should feel blood.”

Jacob brought the beer to his lips. There were images of the Wailing Wall on the TV. He leaned back and said, “Remember when we snuck out of my parents’ house? Years and years ago?”

“No.”

“When we went to the National Zoo?”

“The National Zoo?”

“Really?” Jacob asked. “A few nights before my bar mitzvah?”

“Of course I remember. You’re not remembering that I mentioned it in the car on the way from the airport. And it was the night before your bar mitzvah. Not a few nights before.”

“Right. I know. I knew. I don’t know why I changed it like that.”