Хлоя Бенджамин: The Immortalists

For a moment, Varya’s heart unlatches and lifts. Two thousand forty-four would make her eighty-eight, an altogether decent age to die. Then she pauses.

‘How do you know?’

‘What did I say about you trusting me?’ The rishika raises a furry eyebrow and frowns. ‘Now, I want you to go home and think about what I said. If you do that, you’re gonna feel better. But don’t tell anybody, all right? What it shows in your hand, what I told you – that’s between you and me.’

The woman stares at Varya, and Varya stares back. Now that Varya is the appraiser and not the person appraised, something curious happens. The woman’s eyes lose their luster, her movements their elegance. It is too good, the fortune Varya has been given, and her good fortune becomes proof of the seer’s fraudulence: probably, she gives the same prediction to everyone. Varya thinks of the wizard of Oz. Like him, this woman is no mage and no seer. She is a swindler, a con artist. Varya stands.

‘My brother should have paid you,’ she says, putting her shoes back on.

The woman rises, too. She walks toward what Varya thought was the door to a closet – a bra hangs from the handle, its mesh cups long as the nets Varya uses to catch monarchs in summer – but no: it’s an exit. The woman cracks the door, and Varya sees a strip of red brick, a thatch of fire escape. When she hears the voices of her siblings drift up from below, her heart balloons.

But the rishika stands before her like a barrier. She pinches Varya’s arm.

‘Everything is gonna come out okay for you, honey.’ There is something threatening in her tone, as if it is urgent that Varya hear this, urgent that she believe it. ‘Everything is gonna work out okay.’

Between the woman’s fingers, Varya’s skin turns white.

‘Let me go,’ she says.

She is surprised by the coldness in her voice. In the woman’s face, a curtain yanks shut. She releases Varya and steps aside.

Varya clangs down the stairs of the fire escape in her saddle shoes. A breeze strokes her arms and ruffles the downy, light brown hair that has begun to appear on her legs. When she reaches the alley, she sees that Klara’s cheeks are streaked with salt water, her nose bright pink.

‘What’s wrong?’

Klara whirls. ‘What do you think?’

‘Oh, but you can’t actually believe . . .’ Varya looks to Daniel for help, but he is stony. ‘Whatever she said to you – it doesn’t mean anything. She made it up. Right, Daniel?’

‘Right.’ Daniel turns and begins to walk toward the street. ‘Let’s go.’

Klara pulls Simon up by one arm. He still holds the drawstring bag, which is as full as it was when they came.

‘You were supposed to pay her,’ Varya says.

‘I forgot,’ says Simon.

‘She doesn’t deserve our money.’ Daniel stands on the sidewalk with his hands on his hips. ‘Come on!’

They are quiet on the walk home. Varya has never felt further from the others. At dinner, she picks at her brisket, but Simon doesn’t eat at all.

‘What is it, my sweet?’ asks Gertie.

‘Not hungry.’

‘Why not?’

Simon shrugs. His blond curls are white beneath the overhead light.

‘Eat the food your mother has prepared,’ says Saul.

But Simon refuses. He sits on his hands.

‘What is it, hm?’ clucks Gertie, one eyebrow raised. ‘Not good enough for you?’

‘Leave him alone.’ Klara reaches over to ruffle Simon’s hair, but he jerks away and pushes his chair back with a screech.

‘I hate you!’ he cries, standing. ‘I! Hate! All of you! ’

‘Simon,’ says Saul, standing, too. He still wears the suit he wore to work. His hair is thinning and lighter than Gertie’s, an unusual coppery blond. ‘You do not speak to your family that way.’

He is wooden in this role. Gertie has always been the disciplinarian. Now, she only gapes.

‘But I do,’ says Simon. There is wonder in his face.

1978–1982

Simon

When Saul dies, Simon is in physics class, drawing concentric circles meant to represent the rings of an electron shell but which to Simon mean nothing at all. With his daydreaming and his dyslexia, he has never been a good student, and the purpose of the electron shell – the orbit of electrons around an atom’s nucleus – escapes him. In this moment, his father bends over in the crosswalk on Broome Street while walking back from lunch. A taxi honks to a stop; Saul sinks to his knees; the blood drains from his heart. His death makes no more sense to Simon than the transfer of electrons from one atom to another: both are there one moment, and gone the next.

Varya drives down from college at Vassar, Daniel from SUNY Binghamton. None of them understand it. Yes, Saul was stressed, but the city’s worst moments – the fiscal crisis, the blackout – are finally behind them. The unions saved the city from bankruptcy, and New York is looking up. At the hospital, Varya asks about her father’s last moments. Had he been in any pain? Only briefly, says the nurse. Did he speak? No one can say that he did. This should not surprise his wife and children, who are used to his long silences – and yet Simon feels cheated, robbed of a final memory of his father, who remains as close-lipped in death as he was in life.

Because the next day is Shabbat, the funeral takes place on Sunday. They meet at Congregation Tifereth Israel, the conservative synagogue of which Saul was a member and patron. In the entryway, Rabbi Chaim gives each Gold a pair of scissors for the kriah .

‘No. I won’t do it,’ says Gertie, who must be walked through each step of the funeral as if through the customs process of a country she never meant to visit. She wears a sheath dress that Saul made for her in 1962: sturdy black cotton, with a fitted waistline, front button closure, and detachable belt. ‘You can’t make me,’ she adds, her eyes darting between Rabbi Chaim and her children, who have all obediently slit their clothes above the heart, and though Rabbi Chaim explains that it is not he who can make her but God, it seems that God can’t, either. In the end, the rabbi gives Gertie a black ribbon to cut, and she takes her seat with wounded victory.

Simon has never liked coming here. As a child, he thought the synagogue was haunted, with its rough, dark stone and dank interior. Worse were the services: the unending silent devotion, the fervent pleas for the restoration of Zion. Now Simon stands before the closed casket, air circulating through the slit in his shirt, and realizes he’ll never see his father’s face again. He pictures Saul’s distant eyes and demure, almost feminine smile. Rabbi Chaim calls Saul magnanimous, a person of character and fortitude, but to Simon he was a decorous, timid man who skirted conflict and trouble – a man who seemed to do so little out of passion that it was a wonder he had ever married Gertie, for no one would have viewed Simon’s mother, with her ambition and pendulum moods, as a pragmatic choice.

After the service, they follow the pallbearers to Mount Hebron Cemetery, where Saul’s parents were buried. Both girls are weeping – Varya silently, Klara as loudly as her mother – and Daniel seems to be holding himself together out of nothing more than stunned obligation. But Simon finds himself unable to cry, even as the casket is lowered into the earth. He feels only loss, not of the father he knew but of the person that Saul might have been. At dinner, they sat at opposite ends of the table, lost in private thought. The shock came when one of them glanced up, and their eyes caught – an accident, but one that joined their separate worlds like a hinge before someone looked away again.