Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

“But imagine,” Darius had said, in that clipped, strange accent, “without death, there would still be so many Nazis. Death is wonderful in that way.”

I nodded, unsure whether he was being serious or making a joke.

“Like a magic eraser! Well! And how lucky for the Nazis if there is reincarnation! Now they are all clean little babies who do not have to remember what they’ve done. Little babies with a chance to start over. Isn’t that nice to think about?”

I agreed that it was. I tried to imagine Grandma Sylvia reborn as a clean little baby, a baby with no memory. I imagined the grim reaper taking his scythe and scraping the grooves off the record of her life until it was all completely blank, until there was nothing. Once my mother had suggested to me that perhaps it was Grandma Sylvia’s sister who was the lucky one.

I had been such a young man at the time that the idea appalled me. What could she possibly mean, I demanded. My mother shrugged. “There is a certain kind of poison to being beautiful,” she said. “There is a weight to it. I don’t know. Being alive is very difficult, Lucas. It takes energy. It’s messy. That’s all. There is a kind of agony to it. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

I hadn’t understood her then, but her words came back to me as I wandered after my meeting with Justine, head down, toward our apartment on Žydų gatvė. Once, I had broken one of Grandma Sylvia’s glasses, I suddenly remembered, when I was five or six, just an ordinary water glass. She had yelled at me and I had started crying and she had looked at me, disgusted, repulsed by my weakness. But I had only been a child. I could not figure out now why she had been so upset with me. Where had my mother been? Had Grandma Sylvia been babysitting me? She must have been, but I found I had no recollection of whether that was a regular thing. It reminded me of something my mother had always said, but that I had never thought deeply about, which was that Grandma Sylvia didn’t like children very much.

I shivered. Coming to Vilnius was making me feel closer to Grandma Sylvia, but getting closer to Grandma Sylvia wasn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy experience.

Date: 7/13/2014 9:33 PM

From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

Subject: Ho Ho Ho

Dear Fang,

If you are going to cheat on me with other girls, you should try harder to make sure no one fucking takes a picture and then posts it on Facebook and fucking tags you in it. Also, Stephanie Garrison? Are you fucking serious? She has no lips and her mouth looks wobbly like she just got back from the dentist.

I am guessing you already know that we are no longer together.

Fuck you,

V

Date: 7/13/2014 9:50 PM

From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

Subject: Re: Ho Ho Ho

So you just randomly had your arm around her in a friendly way — that’s your argument? You think I am an idiot. You have always underestimated my intelligence. Have fun. Enjoy her. I hope she does anal. Mazel tov.

V

PS: You should never begin a letter to a woman with “Calm down.” It’s insulting. I will decide when I am calm and you know I am sensitive about that anyway so it comes as a double fucking whammy.

Date: 7/13/2014 9:53 PM

From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

Subject: Re: re: Ho Ho Ho

NO. NO. FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU. You’re heartless. Do you even know what that means, to be so heartless? You are disgusting. With your lies. You are filthy. It is unclean, what you are doing.

Date: 7/14/2014 12:43 AM

From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

Subject: Re: re: re: Ho Ho Ho

Dear Fang,

I was talking to Judith Winter yesterday and she said an interesting thing, she said, “Well, the major lesson from the Holocaust was that the rest of the world will talk a good game, but they won’t do anything to save you. Your neighbors, people you’ve known for years, will just watch as you are systematically exterminated.” Imagine how surreal it must have been. As the ghettos were created, as your belongings were confiscated, as it was announced that you must wear a patch, or a badge, that you could only shop in the market at certain times of day. Imagine watching your Christian neighbors and thinking: Really? You aren’t going to say a thing? This madness, this madness seems fine to you? By the time it came to the death camps, the Jews must have been completely unsurprised. They had already learned everything there was to know about human nature.

That’s the thing, Fang. You can’t know anything about a person by looking into their eyes. You say, “Trust me.” You say, “When have I ever lied to you?” You say, “If I had video footage of every second you’ve been away, you would see that I’m innocent. But there is no way for me to defend myself if you are determined to believe I cheated.” You say all these things, but who can trust anyone? Who would even believe the things humans are capable of?

Deep in the seam of being there is an evil, evil splinter. The garden of life is filled with rotten apples breaking apart into seeds. You can take a bite of anything, even a bite of young love, and there will be a seed, a little something extra, a tiny pebble of evil, of something that can kill you. I know you love me, Fang. Whether you fucked Stephanie Garrison, whether you just kissed her, or whether as you say it was just a photo where you happened to have your arm around her — whatever the truth is, I know it doesn’t change the fact that you love me. Or at least that you think you love me.

It isn’t about that. It is about the fact that even love is not enough.

From Vilnius,

V

ON MONDAY, DARIUS STARTED IN the lecture hall. I had caught Vera and Judith smoking pot together that morning, and I wasn’t pleased. I barked at them incoherently, I was so mad. It wasn’t that I was scandalized by a teenager smoking pot, that was probably part of their mission directive from God, after all, but it seemed weird and inappropriate for Judith to be the one toking her up. Something a little incestuous about smoking pot with Grandma. Maybe it was all in my head. Mainly, I had no idea how marijuana would interact with Vera’s medications. Surely it couldn’t be good, though her doctors had never discussed it specifically. Vera had put on too much perfume in an effort to hide the pot-smoke smell on her clothes and now my sinuses were beginning to swell in an allergic reaction as we sat there, listening to Darius.

“Today,” Darius told us, “we are going to visit two sacred places: the Great Synagogue of Vilna, which was the center for Jewish life in Vilnius, and the Cathedral of Vilnius, the heart of Catholic life in Vilnius. Two sacred places in one city, though the visitors of one are not the visitors of the other, so that for each group, there appears to be only one holy site. But of course, one of these places does not exist. And so we must visit it with our minds.” The room went dark and Darius flipped on the projector. For a moment it was just a blue screen and then a black-and-white lithograph of the interior of a large and beautiful building came up.

“This is the Great Synagogue,” Darius said. “Which stood at one end of Žydų gatvė, or Jewish Street.”

“That’s our street,” Vera hissed.

“I know,” I whispered back, and Vera reached over and clutched my hand as though we were about to go on a roller coaster.

“It was first built in 1573,” Darius told us, clicking through various images of the building, all of them interiors, some drawings, some blurry black-and-white photographs. “But the interior was remodeled in the eighteenth century. It was built upon the site of a Jewish house of prayer that had been there since the 1440s. The Great Synagogue was built below ground, because no synagogue was allowed to be taller than a church, so from the exterior, the building was unremarkable, but inside it was five stories high, so magnificent that Napoleon himself is said to have stood on the threshold, wonderstruck, frozen with awe. It could hold five thousand worshippers. The interior was done in the Italian Renaissance style.” He clicked through images of the massive columns and ornate decorations, though all the pictures were so dark and blurry that I began to feel like I was going blind.