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Thinking in Third Person

I had tried so hard to think in third person, and with the mind of a man. But I kept coming back to myself, a woman whose loneliness had led her to long intervals of sleep and then more inward still, to a registration form for ballroom dancing and a pen full of ink. I filled it out, but I didn’t go. I sent my husband instead. Now he not only dances but also plays the accordion. It’s a good development for us both, even if it hasn’t brought me out of bed and into the world.

In the meantime, in Tel Aviv, sand sweeps through the city from the Horn of Africa and settles on the surface of Elhanan Schweitzer’s coffee cup. Schweitzer’s coffee catches between his teeth but he pretends not to notice, turning his face toward the wind and swallowing hard, as if reburying a sorrow that has risen after a long sleep. He is glad about this sudden change in weather and has to suppress a laugh at the displeasure on the faces of his fellow Zorik Café patrons, their eyes reduced to near slits, faulty screens that shield against only the largest particles. I’m not Schweitzer, but I can feel his schadenfreude, the day-old stubble on his cheeks—or probably it’s the sand—and his happiness about the haze that frees him from acknowledging his wife, standing across the street under an umbrella and beckoning him back home. The wind pulls the words out of her mouth before they are fully formed.

My husband is a passionate lovemaker. He understands that to enjoy the compromised life we live in this small town, we must carve out a parallel life in a universe of our own making—that is, of his own making but with my permission. Last night he pulled me to a sitting position, then to a standing one. On the bed. I knew what was coming next and didn’t resist at first. I am grateful for Jonathan’s ingenuity, for giving me reasons to open my eyes at the close of days I think will never end, at the end of which I want to go on and on. Jonathan whispered in my ear: “Keep your shoulder parallel and your thigh locked. I’ll do everything else.”

With my husband pressed against me, I wanted the day to go on and on. But when he raised his foot and expected me to do the same, my body froze.

“What are you doing?”

“Shh. Diagonally forward on the L toe. Just keep your cheek close to mine, that’s right, just like that. Up on the toe just a little more. Now lower your heel, and left sway.”

Our alternate universe was not nearly as big as it needed to be. “I can’t, Jonathan. I don’t want to. You know I don’t know how to dance—”

“Who said anything about dancing?”

Rising to the balls of his feet, Jonathan entered me then, a surprise move to keep me from falling back down onto the bed and into a missionary position. “We almost did a curved feather,” he whispered. “But this is much better, isn’t it? I love you so much, Mira.”

“Yes, it is,” I whispered back. And it was, because some passions are meant to be kept separate. I went to sleep feeling sorry for both Schweitzer and his wife.

[sb]

When Schweitzer returns home, a woman twenty years younger than his wife is standing in the kitchen, washing dishes.

“Where’s Tova?” Schweitzer asks.

“She flew to Czernowitz this morning,” the woman says, a blond bun pinned to the top of her head like a bauble. “I’m Leona. Sit down and I’ll give you some soup.”

Schweitzer sits. “But I just saw her, at the café.”

“It must have been someone else,” says Leona. “Who can make out anyone in all this dust?”

“Why Czernowitz?”

“To clean her grandparents’ graves. In Czernowitz, at least, the dust has a purpose.”

“Is that what she said?”

Leona had hoped to take credit for the statement. “That’s what she said.”

Schweitzer eats his soup as he had drunk his coffee, with sand between his teeth and a frailty laid bare by forces of nature that are beyond his control. The only thing he feels he can still reasonably do without a fight is eat from a jar of olives with a toothpick. He suddenly has a craving.

“If you don’t mind, the olives.” Schweitzer motions to the fridge. The toothpicks are already on the table.

With soapy fingers, Leona hands him the jar, easily suppressing an urge to ask whether the soup isn’t salty enough, because she really doesn’t care.

“The soup is fine,” Schweitzer says dismissively, as if his wife were standing before him. And then—stabbing a kalamata—to Leona: “I don’t often get to eat olives this way. My wife says that small pleasures often lead to great sorrows. That one day I’ll swallow the toothpick.”

The old man misses his wife, thinks Leona bitterly.

How good it feels to defy Tova, thinks Schweitzer, and helps himself to another olive.

[sb]

In Czernowitz, Tova is offered a tour of the city by her taxi driver, free of charge. She turns him down.

My Czernowitz isn’t your Czernowitz. She is surprised by such a thought coming to her, a Haifa native with a grandson in the army.

“I’m just here to visit the cemetery,” Tova says. “I live in Israel.”

“Israel,” repeats the driver. He feels a faint throbbing at his temples. Cracks the window.

My grandparents lived in Czernowitz, Tova continues to herself. Together with the Yiddishists and the Bundists, the Hassids, the assimilationists and Zionists. Who could leave such a place? Who could kill such people?

“They were the lucky ones. They have graves,” Tova hears herself say. But it is really her mother speaking, and she wishes she had kept her mouth shut. That both of them had kept their mouths shut.

The driver lights a cigarette. He can’t wait to get this woman out of his cab. And for free he had offered the tour! But that was before he knew where she was going. Never again will he let his boredom get the better of him.

They arrive at the crumbling wall of the cemetery. The graves mirror the inside of the driver’s mouth. He turns off the meter, which reads “50 rubles.” “One hundred rubles,” the driver dares himself to say. And then he says it.

Tova pays, adding a tip. She doesn’t want any anti-Semites on her conscience. She thanks the driver and steps out of the cab.

[sb]

“That’s right, my friend Georg is a monarchist,” Jonathan confirms. We are sitting on a bench in the park, holding hands.

“But what does that mean, exactly?” Little birds dance around us that I don’t recognize but that Jonathan easily identifies as sparrows. It has been quite a while since I have been out.

“Well, as long as there is still a living von Habsburg, the idea of reestablishing the monarchy can be embraced by lunatics like Georg, who doesn’t even have his own apartment.”

“And are there?”

“Are there what?”

“Still-living von Habsburgs.”

“Otto died last year, but I think Karl is still around. According to Georg, Karl hosts a game show.”

It’s hard to take in so much information without being able to pull up the covers and process it in a state of deep sleep. “Czernowitz was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,” I say, dreamily.

“Yes, it was,” Jonathan says. “Along with other minorities of the time, the Jews fared pretty well under the kaiser. That’s why so many of them hung Franz Joseph’s portrait in their living rooms.”

“And that’s why Georg wants the monarchy back? So we can all get along?”

“Something like that,” says Jonathan. “But mostly he just wants to show off at parties.”

I squeeze Jonathan’s hand in gratitude. The tutorial will help Tova as she sits with pieces of her grandparents’ tombstones on her lap. They have broken since her last visit and are no longer covered with moss. Where she couldn’t before, she can now read the names clearly: Wolf and Ella Meyerson. Tova can’t imagine two names that sound nicer together.

At home Jonathan practices his accordion while I prepare an elaborate Indian meal almost without thinking, as if I have been preparing elaborate Indian meals all my life. On a recent visit, my mother brought with her an exchange student, who spent five days teaching me the secrets of her country’s cuisine while my mother sat on the couch, knitting a scarf. It was all so surreal that I can pretend these five days didn’t actually happen at all, and that I am simply a gifted cook. Because, really, who would do that, ride on a train for eighteen hours with my mother, rather than point out to her that the airport is only a mile away?

The kitchen is smoking with spices when Schweitzer peers into the umbrella barrel by the door. “It’s empty,” he says to Leona. “My wife’s umbrella is gone.”

“Your wife is in Czernowitz,” Leona repeats for what feels like the hundredth time. “Why wring your hands with worry?” She wishes Schweitzer would get tired so she could let her hair down and watch TV.

But Schweitzer is neither tired nor worried. Plucking his hat from its peg, he prepares to leave, to go back out into the storm and look for the woman shouting wildly against the wind. He is sure it was his wife standing on the sidewalk across from Zorik’s, bent under her umbrella. The proof is in the empty barrel. And if not his wife, then another woman in great need of his attention. Schweitzer is ready to listen now. He hopes the storm will last long enough to let him.

Alone in the apartment, Leona loosens her hair but does not turn on the TV. Where is Czernowitz? she wonders for the first time since making arrangements with Tova. In Russia? Then why had she never heard of it as a child? In Poland, maybe, or somewhere in Hungary? Before she left, Tova had asked Leona if she knew any words of Ruthenian and Leona had laughed, thinking it a joke. What was Ruthenian and why would she know it? Leona felt like an object of ridicule, that people were always putting her down. Where was Czernowitz, and why did her husband so often come home from work wet? Because my clients like to swim, he would say, shrugging, and we live in a country where deals are closed in the middle of the sea.

No, she didn’t know any German either. Not a word. Shut up, lady! Go to Czernowitz already. Zay gezunt.

It is not too late to become an audiologist. The voice of Leona’s husband rings in her ears. There is still time to follow your dreams.

Yiddish, of course! Tova had exclaimed in parting, throwing up her hands. As a last resort, I can always use Yiddish. And Leona had laughed again.

Meanwhile, farther north at Metula, Schweitzer’s nephew Yair, performing the magic of a monarchist, protects the border with a pair of binoculars.

[sb]

The key to dispelling loneliness is in not letting it come back. I am feeling better about my life when Jonathan walks through the door, trying to hide something behind his back that is not meant to be hidden outside the context of war or a rendezvous.

“Is that a suitcase?” I ask, admiring the wheels.

“Yes,” Jonathan says, his eyes even more aglow than usual. “I wanted it to be a surprise, but you’re up early today. That is, you’re up today.”

I stare at the suitcase in earnest now. “Are we going somewhere?”

“Anywhere your heart desires. My dad is sending me all of his frequent-flier miles for my birthday. He’s taking my mom on a cruise.”

My heart is beating hard; it must desire so much.

“Maybe we can cash them in,” I suggest. “I’ve never owned a laser pen, or anything bound in leather.”

“How about Rome?” Jonathan says. “The travel agent said we could get a free rental car if we went to Rome.”

“Rome?” I looked out my window once and saw Rome.

“Or how about Tel Aviv?” Jonathan tries. “You’ve always wanted to go there.”

My husband deserves a vacation, and a birthday dinner he will be able to digest. And more than that: we all seek places to go when the people around us start to look the same. But some people are afraid of traveling by conventional means (ask my mother why she took that train), and I have already been to Tel Aviv several times in the past week.

“I don’t know, I feel kind of bound to stay here right now, in bed,” I say, stretching my limbs casually to conceal my terror. “You know how I am about being in a room with more than four people.”

Jonathan sets his hands on my shoulders and I wait for him to shake me, but he does no such thing. “I’ll let you think it over, OK?” he says, the very words he once used to woo me.

I rub myself against my husband like a royal cat, grateful for the gift he is giving me, for being allowed to say no.

“You go to Tel Aviv,” I suddenly decree. “It will be like when we first met, and I refused to see you for a week. Remember? And take a friend along. How about Purnima? My mother says it’s freezing in Skokie.”

Jonathan strokes my back and waits for me to come to my senses. I turned him down once before, in the presence of a newly purchased ring, until he agreed to have all of our groceries delivered and to be married in the quiet of a courtroom, where people who have nothing to prove go. We should have had a klezmer band, though. I regret that we didn’t.

Brushing past me, my husband parks the suitcase in a corner and picks up the accordion from its place. A mazurka fills the room and ferries him away, as if on a cloud I can’t reach. The loneliness is back, and it is unbearable.

“Jonathan? Jonathan!”

I will wait for the music to stop and ask him for the next dance.