Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

‘Oh, Klara,’ Raj says. ‘It is.’

They swaddle the child and bring her to Klara. The baby’s face is florid, startled alive. Her eyes are dark as olive pits.

‘You were so sure,’ Raj says. He’s laughing.

They call the girl Ruby. Klara remembers a friend of Varya’s by that name, a girl who lived above them at 72 Clinton. Rubina. It’s Hindi, which Raj’s mother would have appreciated. He moves into Klara’s apartment and coos to Ruby, sings lullabies in rusty Hindi. Soja baba Soja. Mackhan roti cheene .

In June, Klara’s family comes to visit. She shows them the Castro, Gertie clutching her pocketbook as they pass a gaggle of drag queens, and takes them to a Corps performance. Klara sits beside Daniel with her stomach flipping – she doesn’t know how he’ll respond to seeing men do ballet – but when the dancers bow, he claps louder than anyone else. That night, while Gertie’s meat loaf is in the oven, Daniel tells Klara about Mira. They met in the university dining hall and have since spent long nights in Hyde Park’s dive bars and all-night diners, debating Gorbachev and the NASA explosion and the merits of E.T .

‘She challenges you,’ Klara observes. Ruby is sleeping, her warm cheek stuck to Klara’s chest, and for once, Klara feels as though nothing is wrong in the world. ‘That’s good.’

In the past, Daniel would have made some retort – Challenges me? What makes you think I need that? – but now, he nods.

‘That she does,’ he says, with a sigh so contented that Klara is almost embarrassed to have heard it.

Gertie adores the baby. She holds Ruby constantly, staring at her raspberry-sized nose, nibbling her miniature fingers. Klara searches for a resemblance between them and finds one: their ears! Petite and delicate, curling in like seashells. But when Gertie met Raj, she opened her mouth and closed it, silent as a fish. Klara watched her mother take inventory of Raj’s dark skin and work boots, his secular slouch. She pulled Gertie into the bathroom.

‘Ma,’ Klara hissed. ‘Don’t be a bigot.’

‘A bigot?’ asked Gertie, flushing. ‘Is it too much to ask for the child to be raised Jewish?’

‘Yes,’ Klara said. ‘It is.’

Varya is full of advice. ‘Have you tried warm milk?’ she asks, when Ruby cries. ‘What about a walk in the stroller? Do you have an infant swing? Is she colicky? Where’s her binky?’

Klara’s brain spirals. ‘What’s a binky?’

‘What’s a binky?’ repeats Gertie.

‘You can’t be serious,’ Varya says. ‘She doesn’t have a binky?’

‘And this apartment,’ Gertie adds. ‘It’s not child-proofed. You wait until she starts walking: she could split her head on this table, take a tumble down the stairs.’

‘She’s fine,’ says Raj. ‘She has everything she needs.’

He takes the baby from Varya, who holds on a moment too long. ‘Hand her over!’ Daniel teases, prodding Varya in the ribs, which incites a smack of rebuttal and accompanying howl so loud that Klara nearly orders them to leave. But when they do, the next day – Gertie trundling into the front seat of a cab, Varya and Daniel waving through the back window – she misses them desperately. While they were here, it was easier to ignore the fact that Simon and Saul were not. Her father had loved babies. Klara still remembers visiting the hospital after Simon was born breech, his umbilical cord wrapped like a necklace. Saul stood in front of the ICU as if to guard this half-blue, backward boy, his last. At home, he could hold the baby for hours. When Simon twitched in his sleep or puckered his lips, Saul chuckled with disproportionate delight.

As children, the siblings believed Saul could answer any question they wished to know. But Klara and Simon grew to dislike his answers. They disdained his routine of work and Torah study, his uniform of gabardine slacks and trench and walking hat. Now, Klara has more sympathy for him. Saul came from immigrants, and Klara suspects he lived in fear of losing the life he’d been given. She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory – to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child. Ruby will come to Klara with questions. What will Klara tell her, with frantic and unheard insistence? To Ruby, Klara’s past will seem like a story, Saul and Simon no more than her mother’s ghosts.

By October, it’s been months since Klara and Raj performed. Klara couldn’t do the Jaws of Life while pregnant; now, nights awake with Ruby have turned her brain to fog, and she can’t count properly during the mind-reading act. They haven’t been able to recoup the costs of their materials. Their meager savings have gone to diapers and toys, clothes that Ruby outgrows by the hour. Raj walks from the Tenderloin to North Beach, pitching nightclubs and theaters, but most of them turn him away. The manager at Teatro ZinZanni can only give them four dates that fall.

‘We need to leave,’ Raj says, at dinner. ‘Take this show on the road. San Francisco’s burned out. The people here, they’re robots, they’re computers. Death to ’em, man.’ He boxes with an invisible computer.

‘Wait,’ says Klara, raising a finger. ‘Did you hear that?’

She’s pointed out Simon’s knocks to Raj before, but he always claims not to hear them. This time, he can’t have missed it. The knock was loud as a gunshot; even the baby yelped. She is five months old, with Raj’s silky black hair and Klara’s Cheshire cat grin.

Raj puts his fork down. ‘There’s nothing there .’

It pleases Klara, that Ruby can hear the knocks. She bounces the baby, kisses her pointy new teeth.

‘Ruby,’ she sings. ‘Ruby knows.’

‘Focus, Klara. I’m talking about moving. Making money. Breathing new life into this thing.’ Raj claps in front of her face. ‘The city’s over, baby. It’s dead. We’ve gotta hit it. Find gold somewhere else.’

‘Maybe we expanded too quickly,’ says Klara as Ruby begins to cry; the clapping has scared her. ‘Maybe we need to slow down.’

‘Slow down? That’s the last thing we need to do.’ Raj begins to pace. ‘We’ve gotta move. We’ve gotta keep moving. You stay too long in one place, you’ll burn out anywhere. That’s the secret, Klara. We can’t stop moving.’

His face is lit up like a jack-o’-lantern. Raj has big ideas, just like Klara does; it’s one of the things she loves about him. She thinks of Ilya’s black box. It’s meant to be on the road , Ilya said. Maybe she is, too.

‘Where would we go?’ she asks.

‘Vegas,’ says Raj.

Klara laughs. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s gaudy,’ she says, counting off on her fingers. ‘It’s over-the-top and overdone. It’s cheap, but it’s ridiculously expensive. And there are never any female headliners.’

Vegas reminds her of the first and only magic convention she attended: a glitzy event in Atlantic City at which the line for the men’s bathroom was longer than the women’s.

‘Most of all,’ she adds, ‘it’s fake. There’s nothing real about Vegas.’

Raj raises his eyebrows. ‘You’re a magician.’

‘Damn straight. I’m a magician who’ll perform anywhere but Vegas.’

‘Anywhere but Vegas. It could be our new show title.’

‘Cute.’ Ruby whimpers, and Klara maneuvers awkwardly out of her T-shirt. She used to walk naked through the apartment, but now she’s embarrassed by her body’s utility. ‘I’d rather live like nomads.’

‘Okay,’ says Raj. ‘We’ll live like nomads, then. Stay a few months in each town. See the world.’

Ruby unlatches, distracted. Klara pulls her shirt down, and Raj scoops Ruby up by the armpits. ‘San Francisco’s full of memories, Ruby-bean,’ he says. ‘You stick around here, you’re messing with ghosts.’