My father and I knock on the blue door. The Chudnovskys are staying in Latvi Zahde‘s mother‘s old apartment – the spatial equivalent of mercy –the mama and papa had been beaten by the KGB before their escape. There is much unlocking – this is New York, near Columbia. Mama, her skin white and smooth as though with illness but plump with health and anxiety and rotten food, opens her eyes wide and at my father‘s, ―Dis ist meine kinde,‖ takes my hand in her strong white hands and kisses me with great force on both cheeks. The father is ill, but besser – I speak no German or Yiddish, and my year of college Russian only slowly returns. But the brothers are equal to the situation. Grisha, in bed. Myasthenia gravis permits a lot of talk. David, the American-seeming elder, pumps me with questions, and Grisha‘s eyes alive with laughter and pity, and weakness. In an hour I find out all I have wanted to know about things in Russia; they are worse than I knew. But talking of Pushkin, Brodsky, Babel, the room is content, filled to oblivion with the incense of praise. I hear of the horrors, but they were only pain –we‘re here.
We joke. ―I myself have a strong prejudice against German Jews,‖ says my father. ―And I have inherited it,‖ I say. ―Ah well, ―my father says, ―let us leave anti-Semitism to the goyem.‖ We applaud with our souls, weak with relief – for all of us, some things are through. We caress the distinctions as though they were the made to last – the distinctions that make up our composite pain, every day, here we sit and discuss them – as though they no longer exist, as though soon we will be carried off to heaven, and none will be the wiser. But the effort is much – tired, I remember myself. My mother is also present in the 5
room, an arm of strength and a tongue of fire, for today is her birthday, and she guards my strength and gnashes her teeth over Grisha‘s weakness. But she comes too soon.
It is too warm for April, and as we walk, David and my father and I, down the wide winding light streets, I ask, ―How is it to be suddenly here?‖ ―The greatest pleasure,‖ he says, his jacket blown back from his heavy body by the wind, ―is to see people like your father, and many Jews.‖ ―Oh yes,‖ sighs my father. ―I‘m an antisemite myself.‖ ―So far, ―
David says, ―I am more pro-semite than anti-semite.‖ ―I‘m neutral,‖ I said, ―but I want them around.‖ ―Oh, YES.‖
―Grisha looks like a character from Dostoevski,‖ says my father to David, ―The Possessed.‖ I agree. Later I tell him that I have an old life of Dostoevski with woodcuts, and Grisha looks like the visions of Christ.
And if all distinctions could be shrugged off, as easily as we shrug them off this afternoon – the result would be a rose window, manifesting in itself all distinctions. My father says, ―I can only see the Chudnovskys every few days – it makes me too sad. Not they, but what they mean – they‘re the lucky ones.‖ And we are the lucky ones – where we are, only within is there pain – outside, through the window, the afternoon calls softly.