A pause. A shuffling. Esther sits in the backyard and rain thrums on the umbrella Robert has braced over her. A sweetness rises in the air, rich, intertwining—hollyhock, rain on grass. Esther hears Regina Goldschmidt’s voice wash through the trees. “The lady at the end of the block had no home. Everyone called her Mrs. Glasses. She slept on the sidewalk for years. The other girls would say: Why doesn’t she just leave? I knew why. Mrs. Glasses had nobody. She had given up. I brought her a hairbrush because her hair was disgusting. And then I got to thinking she was cold and so I gave her my red scarf, too. My brown one was nicer anyway. Then I brought her the afghan with the colored circles on it from the cupboard in Frau Cohen’s room. I set it down beside Mrs. Glasses while she was sleeping. Her hands were scaly, I remember, and I was glad she didn’t wake up. Two days later the police took her away for stealing and I didn’t say anything. I never saw Mrs. Glasses again. None of us did. That’s my memory. That’s what I remember.”
The rain slows. The leaves drip. The garden steams.
23.
The Jewish Rescue Authority places Esther with a childless couple in New Jersey coincidentally named the Rosenbaums. They are first-generation Romanian immigrants and they live on a two-bedroom houseboat. At the tiny table in what the Rosenbaums call their galley they feed Esther meals that seem obscenely large: slabs of eggplant, hunks of chicken, steaming bowls of green bean soup. Three times a day the three of them sit down to eat at that table, in that floating house that smells of bilgewater and foot cream and baklava.
Esther writes Miriam every day. Mr. Rosenbaum bundles the letters in groups of six and mails them from the post office in Toms River. Where they go, who they reach, what hands dispose of them, Esther will never know.
Stories of the camps trickle into the newspapers; they are all Mrs. Rosenbaum can talk about. Why? is the question Esther continually asks herself. Why did Dr. Rosenbaum save her, why was she pulled out, why not Hanelore, Regina, Else? Why not Miriam?
She swallows a steady stream of anticonvulsants. She sells tickets at the movie theater. She tries to believe that the world can be a reasonable place. But most days the silence of her cramped, chilly room on the Rosenbaums’ boat overwhelms her: lit an eerie blue from a pier light outside, no voices of children, no music, only distant foghorns and ropes chiming mournfully against masts, everything rocking back and forth.
Memory becomes her enemy. Esther works on maintaining her attention only in the present; there is always the now—an endlessly adjusting smell of the wind, the shining of the stars, the deep five-call chirrup chirrup of the cicadas in the park. There is the now that is today falling into the now that is tonight: dusk on the rim of the Atlantic, the flicker of the movie screen, a submergence of memory, a tanker cleaving imperceptibly across the horizon.
It is never warm enough. She buys spring dresses and quilted jackets and walks to the theater on a hot day but feels some deep chill within her.
Esther is twenty-six and fluent in English when she meets the boy who will become her husband. He is small and gregarious and perpetually on the brink of loud and catching laughter. He meets her at the movie theater; he is a hospital orderly but he wants to be a bicyclist; he dreams of opening a bicycle shop; he sits her down on park benches and tells her about his plans. They’ll go somewhere far away, they’ll sell bikes, they’ll repair them, they’ll have a family.
The contents of his plans are not nearly as important to Esther as their sound—the deep sureness of them. And his voice! He has a soft voice, a voice like a piece of silk you might remove from a drawer only very occasionally, something you’d want to run your hands over again and again.
That she can be alive with this boy—share vanilla ice cream; stroll through markets, buy cabbages big as cannonballs—sometimes fills Esther with a paralyzing, breathtaking shame. Why should she get to see this? While the other girls could not? She feels as if pieces of her are barely held together—if she lets up for a moment, she will fly apart.
And yet isn’t there a blessedness, too? Isn’t she beginning to breathe again, the way an animal might breathe after running from a predator for a long time, and finally slowing, and looking up, and watching the leaves wave overhead in their multitudes? She was alive, she was still alive. She could lay her head on this boy’s chest and listen to the tumble of his heartbeat. She could stare at the crystal doorknob of her tiny ticket taker’s booth for an entire afternoon, a pad of drawing paper in her lap, waiting for the evening sunlight to come through the left-hand window at the right angle. When it finally does it sprays prisms of color across the wall.
She and the boyfriend move to Ohio. They get married; they get a loan; they start his bicycle shop. Everything is round: rims, tires, sprockets, chain loops. Everything smells of chain grease; everyone pays in cash.
The arch of a handlebar, sweeping back to the grips. Thirty spoked wheels hanging from hooks; freewheels and hubs; chain stays and cranks; the concentric spirals of painted chain guards. A rack of bells: chrome, brass, aluminum. Suspended from a beam are hundreds of rims. Round-headed screws gleaming in pails. Bearings in jars, bearings in buckets. Sheaves of spokes tied with strips of cloth.
Esther works the cash register or opens her sketchpad on the glass counter and draws while her husband fiddles with a series of portable radios, a spectrum of American stations: country, jazz, folk, swing.
They have a son. After school he draws beside his mother at the counter, the two of them working on matching sheets of paper, and when he gets older he works beside his father, running the links of a salvaged bicycle chain back and forth through a basin of oil, watching the rust fall away, feeling the rivets ride cleanly in their bushings, lubricant beading in the little golden hairs on his wrists.
Out, away, Auswanderung. Esther builds for herself as modest and normal and steady a life as she can manage. She is not allowed to drive a car, her medication continues to give her upset stomachs, and occasionally she is seized with wild, clutching feelings of dread. At times her wrist throbs; she feels indistinct, and wonders if she might have died in that cellar with the knothole, and considers the possibility that everything that has come after has been a dream. She reaches for her husband’s shape in the night; she clings to him.
It’s Mrs. Rosenbaum, still living on her houseboat in New Jersey, who sends her the deportation manifest. Esther is thirty-five years old when it arrives; it waits in the mailbox between a utility bill and an advertising flyer. Inside the first envelope is a second, and Esther waits two days to open it. By then she has decided that she knows what it will say.
She thinks: The others will be there but maybe Miriam will not. How could Miriam die? Miriam was never a person with illusions; she had always had the strength of her own pragmatism. Maybe only the deluded had been slaughtered. But of course everyone was slaughtered.
Forty cards. Several of them have hundreds of names on them.
It is easy enough to find July 29, 1942. Twelve birthdates, twelve girls. Miriam’s name among them. Esther’s, too.
24.
Robert’s voice grows fainter, as if Esther is receding behind him, as if he is still pulling her behind his bicycle and the trailer has uncoupled and the boy has pedaled off without noticing. Finally all Esther can hear as she sits on her deck on the last day of her life is Miriam’s voice. The backyard is gray at every hour; Robert is little more than a warm presence.
“At the edge of the city we found a forest,” Miriam’s voice says, “and we’ll have to go all the way through the forest. And then at the end we’ll climb a hill and when we reach the top, down below is mist, Esther, a thick ribbon of it, hiding the view. The vapors fall and condense and whirl around themselves. But sometimes they part for a moment, and down there in that valley I saw a thousand tents, Esther, ten thousand maybe, each with a lamp burning inside it, all of them rustling and flapping in a breeze. A whole city of golden tents glowing down there beneath the mist.”
There is a pause.
Then: “We’re going there, Esther. You and me. All of us.”
25.
At dusk on the fourth of July the woods echo with the explosions of neighbors’ fireworks. Robert nails a Catherine wheel to a tree and it sprays rainbows out into the night.
Esther sits on the deck with a blanket around her legs and a dreamy, lost expression on her face. Whenever Robert asks if she is uncomfortable it takes her a little while to reply that she is fine. At this very moment his parents are thirty-thousand feet above the Pacific, two little girls asleep in the seats between them.
The wheel spews a last paroxysm of sparks. The darkness reasserts itself. Robert clicks on a flashlight and rummages through his box for another firework. Fireflies float and flash in the trees.
“What about one more, Grandmom? We’ve got tons of these.”
Esther doesn’t reply. Robert says, “Okay, let’s do a big one.” He sets his lighter to a wick and the wick burns down and a rocket fizzes into the sky.
Esther’s gaze casts up through a thousand leaves, a sea of them shifting against a flower of noiseless, golden sparks. Which part of them is her, and which part is the rest of the world? She tips backward onto the lawn. The sparks fall through the sky. A locomotive stampedes through her head.
When Esther wakes, it’s night. She can feel the sanded planks of a floor beneath her knees, a windowsill beneath her fingernails. Out the window, clouds blow past stars. The more Esther looks, the more stars she sees.
Somewhere below her a little girl’s voice is calling hello. Esther feels her way to the doorway. It is pitch dark in the hall. An old fear returns, rising in her chest, climbing her throat. She finds a stairwell; there is a wobbling banister. One flight, two flights. There’s a bit more light on the first floor, starlight washing through curtainless windows.
No furniture. No doors on the cupboards. Again she hears a voice, calling from somewhere outside. Esther finds the front door. Beyond is a harbor wind, and a sky swarming with infinitesimal lights.
Standing in the belt-high thistles are eleven girls, their faces smears of white in the darkness. Miriam is easy to spot: the tallest of them. Barefoot. Regal in her tattered dress. She takes Esther by the hand and helps her climb down out of the doorway. “We’ve been waiting,” Miriam says, and smiles a sweet-faced smile. Esther breathes. The wind settles. The twelve of them stand in the thistles looking back for a moment at the empty house crouched there in the night. Then they all start walking down the street.
26.
Robert is a senior in college; he’s home for Thanksgiving. Five days, seven inches of snow, twenty degrees. It’s the first snowfall of the year and everything is familiar and new all at once: the leafless hardwoods ringing his parents’ house; the mingling smells of slush, gasoline, and firewood in the garage; the confused, wondrous looks on the faces of his two four-year-old sisters as they look out the living room windows into snow for the first time.
His father slices carrots in the kitchen. His mother wrestles the girls into matching pink snowsuits. Out the windows everything is either gray or white. The radio murmurs another storm warning; the twins stand very still as their mother pushes mittens over their hands.
Robert leads them out through the garage. A last few snowflakes slip down from the clouds. The girls plod through Robert’s tracks in tandem, heads down, into the big, white amphitheater of the backyard. They stand together amidst the falling white. Then the girls’ exuberance surges; they run out in front of Robert; they laugh, they fall down, and roll over, and squeal. Robert lopes after them, hands in his pockets.
After a few minutes the girls trudge between the naked willows at the left edge of the yard and disappear into what was once Esther’s property. Now it’s vacant, a realty sign covered with snow at the end of her driveway.
Every tree, every post of the garden fence, is a candle to a memory, and each of those memories, as it rises out of the snow, is linked to a dozen more. Over there is the birdfeeder Robert broke his wrist trying to hang; over there Esther helped him bury his parakeet named Marbles. He used to throw a football onto the section of the roof above that garage window and wait for it to come rolling off the gutter. He shot a squirrel out of that locust tree and carried its body on the blade of a shovel to the compost pile. He made tie-dyed T-shirts one summer day with his grandmother in the same spot where his sisters’ little boot prints now crisscross the snow.
The girls are throwing snow up into the air and watching it glitter as it sifts down around them. One yells, “You are, you are!” and takes a few running steps and then falls down onto her hands and knees. Robert helps her up. Already the heat from her face has melted the snow on it. “You’re okay,” he says.
Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.
In the five days Robert will be home his sisters will learn to say “rocks,” “heavy,” and “snowman.” They’ll learn the different smells of snow and the slick feel of a plastic sled as their brother drags them down the driveway.
We return to the places we’re from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines. “You’ve grown up so fast,” Robert’s mother tells him at breakfast, at dinner. “Look at you.” But she’s wrong, thinks Robert. You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.
Now the girls are clawing sticks out of the snow and tracing shapes with them. Above them the clouds shift and—abruptly—sunlight avalanches across the yard. The shadows of trees lunge across the lawn. The snow seems to incandesce. Robert has forgotten that sunlight can look so pure, pouring out of the sky, splashing across the snow. It brings tears to his eyes.
Jing-Wei, the taller of the girls, lifts a long, black branch out of the snow and tries to hand it to him. “For Rob-ert,” she says, and blinks up at him.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the American Academy in Rome and the Idaho Commission on the Arts for financial help while I worked on this book. I’m also indebted to Wendy Weil, Nan Graham, and Susan Moldow for their continued confidence in my work. Lots of folks helped with particular stories, especially Rachel Sussman, Rob Spillman, Ben George, and Laura Furman with “Village 113”; Cheston Knapp with “The River Nemunas”; Matt Weiland and Helen Gordon with “Procreate, Generate”; and Jordan Bass with “Afterworld” and “Memory Wall.” My mother, Marilyn Doerr, offered useful feedback on all six stories; watching her care for her mother taught me about patience, love, and the fragility of memory.
This book is for Shauna: wife, editor, counselor, best friend.
About the Author
Anthony Doerr is the author of three books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. Doerr’s short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and a Pushcart Prize, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. In 2007, Granta placed Doerr on its list of twenty-one Best Young American novelists. Doerr teaches in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and he lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.
Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall
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