Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

Does Klara imagine that he glances at her? His eyes are pencil points. But perhaps she’s wrong; when she looks again, he’s returned to the baby, blowing raspberries on her soft brown skin.

Klara stands to clear the dishes. ‘Where would we stay?’

‘I know a guy,’ Raj says.

That night, Raj and Ruby fall asleep easily, but Klara can’t. She climbs out of bed and walks past Ruby’s cradle to the closet, where she keeps Ilya’s black box. Inside it are her cards and steel rings, her balls and silk scarves. She doesn’t use them very often anymore, the flashier acts having overtaken her sleight-of-hand tricks, but now she brings two scarves to the round table in the kitchen. Raj’s old chili pepper lights are tacked around the window; to avoid his notice, she leaves them off. Before she sits down, she reaches for the bottle of vodka in the back of the freezer and pours herself a drink.

She used to work late like this. As a teenager, she’d wait until she heard Simon’s steady breathing and Varya’s muffled dream sounds, until Daniel began to snore, and then she collected her tools from underneath the bed and snuck out to the living room. She relished the unusual quiet and the feeling that the entire apartment was hers. She kept the lights off then, too, setting up on the floor beside the living room window so as to see by the street lamps on Clinton. For months, these sessions were her secret. But one night in winter, she padded into the living room to find that her father had beaten her to it.

For seconds, he did not notice her. He sat in his favorite armchair – tufted, upholstered in pea-colored velvet – and he was reading a book. There was a new fire in the hearth, the logs whole and glowing.

Klara nearly turned around, but stopped herself. If he could sit here at one in the morning, why couldn’t she? She stepped out of the darkness of the hallway and over the threshold to the living room, where Saul noticed her at last.

‘Couldn’t sleep?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Saul, and held up the book. He was learning, of course. Klara did not know how he had not become sick of it. By that time, he’d read it every which way: front to back, back to front, in tiny pieces chosen seemingly at random and in large chunks through which he worked his way over weeks. Sometimes, he stared at a single page for days.

‘Which part are you reading?’ asked Klara – a question she usually avoided so as to also avoid a lecture about Jephthah’s sacrificial daughter, or the Babylonian men who refused to worship King Nebuchadnezzar’s golden statue and thus survived when thrown into a furnace.

Saul hesitated. By then, he had mostly given up on family Torah study. Even Gertie fidgeted when he read from the books.

‘The story of Rabbi Eliezer and the oven,’ he said. ‘He was the only sage to believe that an impure oven could be purified.’

‘Oh. That’s a good one,’ said Klara, idiotically, as she did not recall the story at all. She expected Saul to continue, but instead he caught her eye and smiled in surprise, or in gladness at her reaction. She stepped farther into the room, holding a deck of cards in one hand. When she sat down by the window, Saul returned to the Talmud. They stayed like this until the log crumbled and both of them were yawning. When they walked back to their respective rooms, Klara slept better than she had in months.

Gertie never approved of Klara’s magic. Surely, Gertie thought, Klara would outgrow it; surely she would go to college, like Varya, and get the degree that Gertie herself had never finished. But Saul was different. And this was why Klara could leave home weeks after his death, why she could do such a thing without hating herself: because it was not her mother who was gone but her father, who had stayed up with her on long nights in perfect quiet, and who, on the morning of his death, looked up from the Mishnah to see her turning a blue scarf into a red one.

‘That’s marvelous,’ he said as the silk slipped through her hands, and chuckled in an impish way that reminded her of Ilya. ‘Do it again, will you?’ And so she did it again and again until he put the great book down to cross a leg and really watch her, not in the vague way he often looked at his children but with true interest and wonder, the way he had looked at Simon as a baby. So he would have understood, wouldn’t he, her decision to leave? If nothing else, Judaism had taught her to keep running, no matter who tried to hold her hostage. It had taught her to create her own opportunities, to turn rock into water and water to blood. It had taught her that such things were possible.

By four in the morning, Klara is woozy, her hands beset by the satisfying muscular pain caused by hours of work. She thinks of putting the scarves back in Ilya’s box, but instead she stuffs them into her left fist and then into a right thumb tip; when she opens her hands, the scarves have disappeared. She is thinking about what it means to leave San Francisco, whether being on the road will ever feel like home, and what comes to her is one of Saul’s stories. The year was 1948, the setting a kitchen in an apartment on Hester Street. A man and a boy sat on either side of a table, their heads touching over a Philco PT-44 radio. The boy was Saul Gold. The man was Lev, his father.

When they heard that the British Mandate had expired, Lev cupped his hands over his mouth. His eyes were closed, and salt water dribbled into his beard.

‘For the first time, we the Jews will be in charge of our own destiny,’ he said, grasping Saul’s narrow chin. ‘Do you know what that means? You will always have a place to go. Israel will always be your home.’

In 1948, Saul was thirteen. Never before had he seen his father cry. Suddenly, he realized that what he took to be his home – a two-bedroom apartment in a newly renovated brick building above Gertel’s bakery – was to his father no more than a prop on someone else’s stage, which could at any moment be struck and carried into the wings. In its absence, home was in the rhythm of the halakhah: the daily prayer, the weekly Sabbath, the annual holy days. In time was their culture. In time, not in space, was their home.

Klara tucks Ilya’s box back in the closet and climbs into bed. Propping herself up on one elbow, she reaches for the window blinds and creates a gap through which she sees a fingernail of moon. She’s always thought of home as a physical destination, but perhaps Raj and Ruby are home enough. Perhaps home, like the moon, will follow wherever she goes.

They buy a motor home from Raj’s coworker. Klara expected it to be depressing, but Raj refinishes the wood table in the kitchen booth, rips out the orange plastic countertops and replaces them with laminate that looks like marble. ‘Hit the road, Jack,’ he sings. He mounts shelves beside the bed, outfitting them with aluminum railings to prevent books from falling when the RV moves. During the day, their bed folds into a couch, revealing a wide swath of floor on which Ruby can play. Klara sews red velvet curtains and puts Ruby’s crib beside the back window so she can watch the world go by. They load their equipment into a storage unit attached to the back of the RV.

On a cold, sunny morning in November, they head north.

Klara straps Ruby into her car seat. ‘Wave goodbye, Rubini,’ says Raj, reaching back to lift her hand. ‘Wave goodbye to all that.’

I love you all , Klara thinks, looking at the Taoist temple, the bakery below her apartment, the old women carrying boxes of dim sum in pink plastic bags. Goodbye to all that.

They land two gigs at a casino in Santa Rosa, four at a resort in Lake Tahoe. The audiences smile at Raj – showman and family man – and at Ruby, large-eyed beneath a child-sized top hat, which Raj uses to collect tips after each show. He keeps the cash in a locked box beneath the driver’s seat. In Tahoe, he buys a car phone to use for bookings. Klara wants to call family, but Raj swats her away. ‘Bill’s enough as it is,’ he says.