Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

“Indeed, I do!” I said. Vera had made fun of me for buying it at the store. “It looks like someone tried to make soap out of cottage cheese,” she’d said. But Judith and I had both become swiftly addicted to the farmer’s cheese. I sliced some for us now, along with a huge red tomato, and we ate from a large platter with our fingers.

“I feel very badly,” Judith said finally, “about the way things ended between Vera and myself.”

I nodded. I didn’t know how much to say. I knew about their fight only because I had read Vera’s e-mails, and I didn’t really want to get into that right now. All I wanted was to absolve Judith as quickly and resoundingly as possible.

“Don’t spend even a second feeling bad,” I told her. But she went on speaking as though I hadn’t.

“I, of course, did not know she suffered from mental illness and that what I was seeing was part of a manic episode, but in retrospect it seems very clear. She kept asking me about being a Jew. She kept asking me if it was really important to be born a Jew, and I didn’t get it because her mother is a Jew so even by Orthodox standards, she’s a Jew.”

I nodded, listening. This seemed like a very different conversation than the one Vera had reported in her letter to Fang. But perhaps it was foolish to try to piece together reality from letters. Maybe Vera had been censoring herself, not wanting to seem so manic in her summary to Fang. Or maybe there had been two distinct fights, and it was I who was trying to force them into congruity.

“Anyway, this did not comfort her for whatever reason, and she had some idea that she was a new kind of identity, a thing she kept calling a post-Jew. Which, if I am being totally honest, I found both appalling and amusing because how could she not know that I myself am a post-Jew? I mean, she was coming to me as though I were some bastion of traditional wisdom, when the truth is that I am just a hippie who has patched together her own sense of Jewishness, mixing it with Buddhism and modern poetry and all sorts of things as I saw fit.”

“Listen, Judith,” I said, “none of this is something you should feel bad about. There wouldn’t have been any right answer you could have given. She has delusions of grandeur and—”

“Well, I know,” Judith said. “That’s what I’m trying to apologize for!”

I was starting to feel really anxious and sick, but I wasn’t sure why. I ate another piece of farmer’s cheese.

“She was getting agitated and she was talking about Jews being the chosen people. She was really hung up on that word: chosen. I said what I usually say, which is, Yes, but did God choose the Israelites or did the Israelites choose God? But she wasn’t interested in that question. It seems so painfully obvious now that I could just kick myself, but at the time I was irritated and overtired, and I felt like she was being a melodramatic teenager. Unsatisfied with my un-flashy old woman’s truths. She’d asked me the secret to true love and she hadn’t liked that answer either!”

“What is the secret to true love?” I asked.

“Oh. To be nice to each other.”

We sat in silence for a minute. To be nice to each other.

“That’s actually the secret to raising children, too,” she said. “You just try to be nice to them. Not to coddle them or spoil them, not to be afraid of their anger or disappointment, but to be just to them, to be kind. Or at least, that’s what I think.”

It occurred to me that I ought to go out and buy one of Judith’s books and read it.

“I have no idea what I could ever do that could be of help to you, but please know that you can always call on me,” she said. “I will do anything I can for her. And for you.”

I didn’t know what Judith could do to help us, either, but I was deeply touched that she had offered. “Thank you,” I said.

“I should go downstairs. Adam called me a taxi, that sweet boy, so I wouldn’t have to try to find one myself. It’s supposed to be here at ten.” It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Johnny Depp. I had forgotten entirely that his real name was Adam.

I offered to walk her out and help her with her suitcase since I was on my way to the hospital anyway, and thank God I did because I have no idea how she would have gotten that enormous suitcase down the three flights of stairs by herself. Judith seemed to exist in some kind of special space where the things she needed just appeared: someone to carry her bags, someone to find the light switches, someone to sell her pot. It was tempting to believe the world was like that. All you had to do was need something, and it would appear, like the SS officer flinging open the door and saving you from death, or like your soul mate suddenly walking up and shaking your hand.

“Wish me safe flight!” Judith chirped. I wished her a safe flight, kissed her on the cheek, and left her at the curb to wait for her taxi, which I had every confidence would appear and take her wherever she wanted to go.

—

And then there was nothing to do but wade through the thick molasses hours until Katya would arrive in Vilnius. Her plane was scheduled to arrive the following morning. I had already called Johnny Depp and arranged for him to ride with me to the airport to fetch her. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to communicate with the cabby. I hadn’t quite been aware of how much I needed Vera’s Russian to get by, but now that she was in the hospital and the program was over, I didn’t hear English anywhere. It was like a curtain of incomprehensibility had come down all around me. It was hard to separate this from my emotional state.

I visited Vera in the hospital that day, only to discover that she had broken out in hives from one of her medications. They were unlike any hives I had ever seen. Pink welts the size of quarters covered her entire body, worst around her collarbones where they were a deep raspberry. Her eyes were almost swollen shut. She was just whimpering under the blankets in her room, unable to talk or answer my questions.

I lost it completely, storming around, yelling for a nurse, for an orderly, for a doctor, somebody who spoke English. It must have just happened because none of them knew about it yet, but in the moment it seemed like a sign of some dangerous and malevolent neglect. It was only when I saw how alarmed the nurses and doctors were, how they rushed to Vera with syringes of antihistamines, how they brought cold cloths for her eyes and helped me build a nest for her on the couch in the dayroom, that I calmed down. They weren’t trying to hurt her. They turned on the TV for us, brought her an apple juice. There was an episode of Friends on, dubbed in Lithuanian. We watched it together and by the end of it, the swelling had gone down enough for Vera to talk a little bit, and she said, “You don’t even need to know what they are saying for this show to be comforting.”

When visiting hours were over, no one asked me to leave, and I stayed for another two hours, just watching TV with her. I didn’t ask her about the dragon. I didn’t tell her I had read her e-mails and her computer files. I couldn’t see the point of it. For one thing, I knew her doctors wouldn’t want me dredging up her delusions, making them fresh in her mind. But that wasn’t really why I didn’t bring it up. It was that there was nothing she could say to explain to me. There was no piece of information I needed from her, or rather, the one piece of information I needed didn’t really exist. It was madness, and that was all.

When I left, I had a conference with the doctor on call. The hives had gone down, but since it seemed to be a reaction to her medication, she would have to switch, which meant she would have to stay for at least another several days.