Nathaniel went back inside, leaving his cousin with Takao, who showed her around the rest of the garden. He took her to the different terraces built into the side of the hill, from the summit where the house stood all the way down to the beach. He walked with her along narrow paths between classical statues stained green with damp and among fountains, exotic trees, and succulents, explaining where each one came from and the kind of care it needed, until they reached a pergola covered in climbing roses with a panoramic view of the ocean, the entrance to the bay on the left, and the Golden Gate Bridge, inaugurated a couple of years earlier, on the right. Colonies of sea lions were visible resting on the rocks, and scanning the horizon, he told her that with patience and luck you could sometimes see whales coming from the north to have their young in Californian waters. Then Takao showed her the greenhouse, a miniature replica of a classic Victorian railway station, all wrought iron and glass. Inside, thanks to the filtered light, the moist warmth of the heating, and the humidifiers, the delicate plants began their lives on trays, each one labeled by name and the date when it was to be transplanted. Between two long rough wooden tables, Alma saw a boy bent over some seedlings. When he heard them come in, he dropped his pair of pruning shears and stood stiffly to attention. Going over to him, Takao whispered something in a language Alma could not understand and ruffled his hair. “My youngest son,” he said. Alma stared wide-eyed at father and son as if they were from another species: they were nothing like the Chinese she had seen in the illustrations in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The boy greeted her with a bow and kept his head down while he introduced himself.
“I am Ichimei, the fourth child of Takao and Heideko Fukuda. It is an honor to meet you, miss.”
“I am Alma, the niece of Isaac and Lillian Belasco. An honor to meet you, sir,” she replied, taken aback but amused.
This initial formality, which as time went on became tinged with humor, set the tone for their lifelong relation. Alma was taller and more robust, and so looked older than him. Ichimei’s slender frame was deceptive, because he could pick up heavy bags of soil effortlessly and push a laden wheelbarrow uphill. His head was large compared to his body; he had a honey-colored complexion, black eyes set wide apart, and thick, unruly hair. His adult teeth were still emerging, and when he smiled his eyes seemed to disappear.
For the rest of that morning, Alma followed Ichimei around as he planted the seedlings in the holes his father had dug and pointed out the secret life of the garden to her, the roots beneath the surface, the near-invisible insects, the tiny shoots that in a week would be several inches tall. He explained about the chrysanthemums he was taking out of the greenhouse, and how they were transplanted in spring to flower at the start of autumn so that they could provide color and life to the garden after all the summer flowers had withered. He showed her some rosebushes still in bud and revealed how you had to remove most of them so that the remaining ones gave big, healthy blooms. He told her about the difference between plants coming from seed and those growing from bulbs, the ones that preferred sun or shade, the native ones and those brought from elsewhere. Takao Fukuda, who was keeping his eye on them, came up and proudly announced that it was Ichimei who carried out the most delicate tasks, because he had been born with a green thumb. The boy blushed at this praise.
From that day on, Alma waited impatiently for the gardeners to arrive, as they did punctually each weekend. Takao Fukuda always brought Ichimei and occasionally, if there was extra work to do, he was also accompanied by Charles and James, his older boys, or by Megumi, his only daughter. Several years older than Ichimei, she was only interested in science and detested getting her hands dirty with soil. Ichimei remained patient and disciplined, carrying out his tasks without being distracted by Alma, trusting his father to give him half an hour off at the end of the day to play with her.
ALMA, NATHANIEL, AND ICHIMEI
The house at Sea Cliff was so vast, and its inhabitants always so busy, that the children’s games went unnoticed. If one of the adults suddenly noticed that Nathaniel was spending hours with a much younger girl, the interest soon passed, because there was always something else to attend to. Alma had grown out of what little devotion she felt for dolls, and instead learned to play Scrabble with a dictionary and chess out of pure determination, since strategy was never her strong point. For his part, Nathaniel had grown bored of collecting stamps and going camping with Boy Scouts. Both became absorbed in the plays for two or three characters that he wrote and then they put on together in the attic. The lack of an audience never bothered them, because the process was far more interesting than the outcome, and they were not seeking applause: the pleasure resided in fighting over the script and rehearsing. Old clothes, discarded curtains, battered furniture, and odds and ends in various stages of decay were the raw material for their disguises, props, and special effects; their imagination supplied everything else. Ichimei, who often came to the house because he had no need of an invitation, was only allowed to take on minor roles in their theater company because he was such a lousy actor. This lack of talent was compensated for by his prodigious memory and his skill at drawing. He could recite verbatim lengthy monologues inspired by Nathaniel’s favorite characters, from Dracula to the Count of Monte Cristo. He was also in charge of painting the backdrops. But this camaraderie, which helped rescue Alma from her initial sense of being an abandoned orphan, was not to last long.
The following year Nathaniel began his secondary education at a boys’ school based on the British model. His life changed overnight. As well as starting to wear long trousers, he had to face the endless brutality of youths learning to be grown-ups. He was not ready for this: he looked more like a ten-year-old than the fourteen he actually was. He was not yet suffering from the merciless bombardment of hormones; he was introverted, wary, and unfortunately for him loved books and hated sports. He would never be boastful, cruel, or vulgar like the other boys, and since none of this came naturally, he tried in vain to copy them; his sweat smelled of fear. On the first Wednesday of classes he came home with a black eye and his shirt stained from a nosebleed. He refused to answer his mother’s questions and told Alma he had bumped into the flagpole. That night, for the first time he could remember, he wet his bed. In his horror, he stuffed the soaking sheets up the chimney, where they were only discovered at the end of September, when the fire was lit and the house immediately filled with smoke. Lillian could not get her son to explain what had happened to the sheets either, but she guessed the reason and decided to intervene. She went to see the headmaster, a red-haired Scotsman with a drinker’s nose, who received her behind a regimental desk in a dark-paneled room presided over by a portrait of King George VI. He told Lillian that a proper dose of violence was seen as an essential part of the school’s educational methods. That was why they encouraged tough sports, quarrels between students were resolved in a ring with boxing gloves, and discipline infractions were punished by caning on the backside, which he himself administered. Blows made men. That was how it had always been, and the sooner Nathaniel learned how to gain respect, the better for him. He added that Lillian’s intervention made her son look ridiculous, but since Nathaniel was a new pupil, he would make an exception and not mention it.
Furious, Lillian rushed off to her husband’s office on Montgomery Street but got no support there either.
“Don’t get involved in this, Lillian. All boys have to go through these initiation rites, and almost all of them survive,” Isaac told her.
“Did you get roughed up as well?”
“Of course. And as you can see, it didn’t turn out so bad.”
The four years of secondary school would have been endless torment for Nathaniel without help from a wholly unexpected quarter. The weekend following the beating, when he saw Nathaniel covered in scratches and bruises, Ichimei took him to the garden pergola and gave him a useful demonstration of the martial arts, which he had practiced since he could stand upright.
He handed Nathaniel a spade and told him to come at him as if he wanted to slice his head in two. Nathaniel assumed he was joking and raised the spade in the air like an umbrella. Ichimei had to insist before he finally understood and made to attack him for real. Nathaniel never knew how he lost control of the spade, flew through the air, and landed on his back on the pergola’s Italian tiles, all of this witnessed by an astonished Alma, who was looking on closely. This was how Nathaniel found out that the imperturbable Takao Fukuda taught a combination of judo and karate to his children as well as other youngsters from the Japanese community, in a rented garage on Pine Street. Nathaniel told his father, who had vaguely heard of these sports, which were gaining popularity in California at the time. And so Isaac visited Pine Street. He did not really think Fukuda could help his son, but the gardener explained that the beauty of the martial arts was that they did not require physical strength as much as concentration and the ability to use the adversary’s weight and thrust to topple him. Nathaniel began the classes. The chauffeur drove him to the garage three times a week, and there he first took on Ichimei and the younger boys, and later Charles, James, and other older opponents. For several months it felt as if his body were being crushed to pieces, until he finally learned to fall without hurting himself. He lost his fear of getting into a fight. He never got beyond the beginners’ level, but that was more than the school bullies knew. They soon stopped picking on him because if any of them came looking for a fight he would put them off with four guttural cries and an exaggerated choreography of martial poses. Just as he had never admitted he was aware of his son’s beatings, Isaac never inquired about the outcome of the classes, and yet he must have checked up, because one day he arrived at Pine Street in a truck with four workmen to lay a wooden floor in the garage. Takao Fukuda gave several formal bows but made no comment either.
Nathaniel’s entry into the boys’ school put an end to the performances in the attic theater. Together with his studies and the sustained effort to defend himself, his time was devoted to metaphysical anguish and a studied gloominess that his mother sought to remedy with spoonfuls of cod liver oil. There was barely time for a few games of Scrabble or chess, if Alma managed to catch him before he shut himself in his bedroom to hammer away at his guitar. He was discovering jazz and the blues but looked down on fashionable dances: he would have been paralyzed with embarrassment on a dance floor, where his inability to follow a rhythm, a long-standing Belasco family trait, would have immediately become evident. He looked on with a mixture of sarcasm and envy when Alma and Ichimei demonstrated the Lindy Hop to arouse his interest. The two of them had practiced with two scratched records and a broken phonograph Lillian had thrown away but Alma had rescued from the garbage. Ichimei had then used his nimble fingers and patient intuition to dismantle it and restore it to working order.
* * *
Secondary school, which began so badly for Nathaniel, continued to be an ordeal for him throughout the following years. Although his classmates grew tired of ambushing him to beat him up, they subjected him to four years of taunts and ostracism; they couldn’t forgive his intellectual curiosity, his good grades, and his physical awkwardness. He never overcame the feeling that he had been born in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had to participate in sports, because they were a central part of this English-style education, and so he suffered the repeated humiliation of coming in last and not being wanted on anyone’s team. At fifteen he shot up in size: his mother had to buy him new pairs of shoes and to get his trousers lengthened every couple of months. After starting out as the smallest in his class, he finally reached a normal height. His legs, arms, and nose all grew; the outline of his ribs was visible beneath his shirt, and the Adam’s apple in his scrawny neck became so prominent that he took to wearing a scarf even in summer. He knew his profile made him look like a plucked buzzard, and so he tended to sit in corners, where people had to look at him face on. He was spared the acne that plagued his enemies, but not the typical teenage complexes. He could never have imagined that in less than three years his body would be well proportioned, his features would have settled down, and he would become as handsome as a movie star. He felt ugly, unhappy, and alone; he began to toy with the idea of suicide, something he admitted to Alma in one of his harshest moments of self-criticism. “That would be a waste, Nat. Better complete your schooling, study medicine, and then go out to India and take care of lepers. I’ll go with you,” she replied without much sympathy, because compared to her family’s situation, her cousin’s existential crises seemed laughable.
The age difference between the two of them was barely noticeable, because Alma had developed early, and her tendency toward solitude had made her very mature for her age. Whereas Nathaniel swam in what seemed like an insurmountable adolescence, the seriousness and strength that her father had instilled in Alma and that she saw as essential virtues only became more pronounced. She felt abandoned by her cousin and by life. She could imagine the intense self-loathing Nathaniel had experienced when he entered high school, because she felt something similar, if less acutely, but she did not allow herself the luxury of studying herself in the mirror to spot her defects, or of complaining about her fate. She had other worries.
With apocalyptic hurricane force, war had descended on Europe. Alma only caught blurred black-and-white images of it in cinema newsreels: jumbled battle scenes, faces of soldiers covered with the stubborn soot of gunpowder and death, planes dropping bombs that fell through the sky with absurd elegance, explosions of fire and smoke, crowds baying their devotion to Hitler in Germany. She no longer had a clear memory of her country, the house she grew up in, or the language she spoke as a child, but her family was constantly present in her yearnings. On her bedside table she kept photographs of her brother and the last one of her parents on the quayside at Danzig, and kissed them every night before going to sleep. The war images pursued her by day, popped up in her dreams, and never allowed her to behave truly like the girl she was. When Nathaniel gave in to the illusion that he was a misunderstood genius, Ichimei was left as her only confidant. He had not grown much, so that she was now a half a head taller than him, but he was intelligent, and always found a way to distract her when she was overcome by ghastly visions of war. Ichimei would make arrangements to reach the Belascos’ mansion by trolley bus, by bicycle, or in the gardening van, if he could persuade his father or a brother to give him a lift; Lillian would send him home later with her driver. If two or three days went by without their meeting, he and Alma would find some time at night to whisper to each other on the phone. Even the most trivial comments took on transcendental importance during these furtive calls. It never occurred to either of them to ask permission, since they thought telephones eventually could be used up, and thus would never be at their disposal.
The Belasco family followed the alarming news from Europe with increasing dread. The Germans had occupied Warsaw, and four hundred thousand Jews were crammed into a ghetto of 1.3 square miles. They had learned from Samuel Mendel in London, where he was an RAF pilot, that their relatives were among them. The Mendels’ wealth could not save them; early on in the occupation they lost all their possessions in Poland, as well as access to their Swiss bank accounts. They had to quit the family mansion, requisitioned and turned into offices by the Nazis and their collaborators, and found themselves reduced to the same level of unimaginable misery as the other inhabitants of the ghetto. It was then that they discovered they did not have a single friend among their own people. That was all that Isaac managed to establish. It was impossible to get in touch with them, and none of his attempts to rescue them was successful. He used his connections with influential politicians, including a couple of senators in Washington and the secretary of war, who had been a fellow law student at Harvard, but they all replied with vague promises that they never kept, because they had to deal with far more urgent matters than a rescue mission in the hell of Warsaw. The Americans were watching and waiting, still beli
eving that the war on the far side of the Atlantic had nothing to do with them, despite the Roosevelt government’s subtle propaganda to turn the public against the Germans. Behind the high wall marking the boundary of the Warsaw ghetto, the Jews survived in extremes of hunger and terror. There was talk of large-scale deportations; of men, women, and children being dragged off to cargo trains that vanished into the night; of the Nazis’ determination to wipe out not only the entire Jewish race but other undesirables as well; of gas chambers, cremation ovens, and other atrocities that were impossible to confirm and therefore hard for the Americans to give credence to.
IRINA BAZILI
In 2013, Irina privately celebrated her third anniversary of working for Alma Belasco by gorging on cream cakes and drinking two cups of hot cocoa. Over that period she had come to know Alma very well, although there were secrets in the old woman’s life that neither she nor Seth had managed to uncover, partly because they had not yet seriously set about doing so. As she sorted through Alma’s boxes, Irina had been gradually discovering the Belasco family. She became acquainted with Isaac, with his stern prominent nose and kindly eyes; Lillian, who was short, ample bosomed, and had a beautiful face; their daughters, Sarah and Martha, homely but extremely well dressed; Nathaniel as a boy, skinny and lost looking, and then as a young man, slender and very handsome, and at the end of his life, his features ravaged by illness. She saw Alma as a child, newly arrived in America; as a twenty-one-year-old, studying art in Boston; in a black beret and a detective’s trench coat, a masculine fashion she adopted after liberating herself from her aunt Lillian’s choice of wardrobe, which she had never liked; Alma as a mother, seated in the pergola of the garden at Sea Cliff, with her three-month-old son, Larry, on her lap and her husband standing behind her with one hand on her shoulder, posing as if for a royal portrait. Even as a girl, there were telltale signs of the woman she would grow up to become: she looked imposing, with the white stripe of hair across her brow, her slightly crooked mouth, and the dark circles under her eyes. Irina was supposed to arrange the photographs in chronological order in the albums following Alma’s instructions, but she didn’t always remember where or when they had been taken. Apart from Ichimei Fukuda’s portrait, there was only one other framed photograph in her apartment: the family in the main room at Sea Cliff when Alma was celebrating her fiftieth birthday. The men were in tuxedos, and the women wore long dresses. Alma was in black satin, as haughty as a dowager empress; her daughter-in-law, Doris, looked pale and tired in a gray silk dress pleated at the front to conceal her second pregnancy: she was expecting her daughter, Pauline. Seth, eighteen months old, was standing, clutching his grandmother’s dress with one hand and the ear of a cocker spaniel with the other.