What I did not learn was how to finish my dissertation.
What I did not learn was how to become a father.
When I returned to California, after finally confessing to my adviser that my dissertation was not “almost done” and in fact would probably never be done, Vera was almost twelve. Katya had changed. When I asked to see Vera, she said, “Please do. She is constantly asking questions about you.” Vera was allowed to come stay with me without even a cursory inspection of my apartment. Evidently, the idea of a thirty-year-old man taking care of a twelve-year-old was less problematic than a twenty-two-year-old man taking care of a four-year-old. I didn’t have to buy toys or car seats or learn about fevers. All I had to do was be myself.
And from the start, Vera absolutely terrified me. She was like Katya on steroids, dark and funny and biting and capricious.
“So,” she said, the first time she came to my apartment, “you’re poor.”
“So,” she said, over dinner, “why didn’t you ever want to meet me?”
“So,” she said, before we went to bed, “my mom says you’re an alcoholic.”
It was exhausting and thrilling, and I was also very relieved to drop her off at her mother’s the next day. After that we saw each other on and off, sometimes every weekend, sometimes not seeing each other for a whole month. I always tried to let Vera’s enthusiasm be our guide. If she had plans with her girlfriends for the weekend, I stepped aside. I didn’t want her to feel like time with me was an obligation. I wanted her to like me.
But she never really did start liking me. Maybe she couldn’t forgive me for not being part of her childhood. Maybe it would take not just years but decades to make up for the time I had lost. Or maybe, I sometimes thought, compared to her violent, moody world, I was a little boring. Vera and Kat were painted in bright acrylics, and I was in washed-out watercolor. They could barely see me. I was like a ghost wandering through their world.
—
I decided to go ahead and see the genealogist after all. Even though I had failed to take the proper steps to make an appointment, Johnny Depp was able to get me in. It was Friday, the end of the first week of our tour, though it felt like we had been there much longer. I left Vera with Judith in the apartment, eating farmer’s cheese and discussing the possibility of love at first sight, and went to the Vilnius University library to meet the genealogist, whose name was Justine.
Justine was not what I was expecting. For one thing, she was young, perhaps in her late twenties, and she had a narrow, officious face with a lean beauty and dark hair cut close to her scalp. She was also the only black person I had seen in the entire city of Vilnius. I guess I was expecting a more grandmotherly type. I associated genealogy with the elderly for some reason.
We sat together at a table in the large echoing hall. I gave her Grandma Sylvia’s full name and date of birth, as well as the names of her parents. I explained that Sylvia was Polish and that her father was a journalist who was perceived as a threat to the Reich, which is why the family was interned at Stutthof instead of being taken to the pits at Ponary, where most of the Vilnius Jews had been executed. I didn’t know much more about it than that, I told her.
“That’s fine,” she said, continuing to scribble in her notebook. She had an accent that sounded vaguely French, but I wasn’t expert enough to tell if she was from France or a Francophone country in Africa. I wanted to ask her how she had wound up here, but worried this would be invasive. She was not a chatty sort of person and was really just trying to do her job.
I felt bad that I didn’t have the name of Grandma Sylvia’s sister, the one who died in the gas chamber, but I was able to tell her that Grandma Sylvia’s brother’s name was Henryk.
“And he also went to Stutthof?”
“No,” I explained, “my grandmother and her sister got separated from their mother and brother on the train. They never found them at the camp. We don’t know what happened to them.”
“And your grandmother died in Stutthof?” Justine asked.
“No, she escaped,” I said.
Justine set down her pen. “How exactly did she do that?”
I paused. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would wind up telling this particular story today, and I wasn’t geared up for it, but the moment I set my mind to telling it, the old words came back to me. I always told the story the exact same way, using the very words and phrases that my mother used when she would tell it to me. It was something memorized, deep in my bones, like the Lord’s Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance.
When I was done, Justine tapped her pen tip on the page in a fine constellation of dots. “Rape birthday,” she said.
“She would buy a cake and everything,” I said.
“What did she do when she got to the forest?” Justine asked. And so I explained about fleeing Germany and the years spent as a part of the Home Army in the forests outside of Warsaw. I even told the story of the baby who had to be killed so the Nazis wouldn’t find them.
“Who was the father?”
“She had a forest husband.”
“Do you know his name?”
I admitted I did not.
“And the child died. Did it have a name?”
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Hmm…” Justine set down her pen and briefly massaged her temples. “It’s a very odd story,” she said. “The gas chambers at Stutthof were small and they tended only to gas those who were too weak or sick to continue working. Which makes your grandmother’s story harder to believe.”
I shrugged. I didn’t understand exactly what she meant.
“I’m just saying, women who have already been in a camp for months, women who have had the last of their vital essence drained from them, women no longer able to work — are typically not terribly sexually attractive. Or beautiful, as you say.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. Grandma Sylvia’s beauty had always been presented to me as the reason for her salvation. I had never questioned it. But now, as I sat there with Justine, a more horrifying prospect presented itself to me: that maybe the guard’s desire had been awakened not by admiration, but by pity. Perhaps some internal calibration in him had been rewired by his work in the camps, so that desire and pity were one and the same. I thought, involuntarily, of the boy who masturbated onto images of stars. Of Vera’s question: “What else could cause God to feel desire?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said finally. “That was always the story I was told.”
“I’ll see what I can dig up,” Justine said, concluding our brief meeting with a smile so formal it gave me the shivers.
As I walked home through the winding streets, I kept thinking of her phrase “what I can dig up.” Maybe because we had just come back from a trip to the cemetery with Darius, the phrase seemed to have a sinister, grave-robbing ring to it. The morning had been foggy and the graveyard eerie. Darius pointed out that some of the Christian headstones in the shape of crosses were carved to look like tree branches. Stone transmuted into wood transmuted into a cross. Almost as though the cross wouldn’t mean anything if it weren’t made of wood. And this too had to do with life and death and resurrection: trees, the way they lost their leaves and then were reborn each spring. It was a pagan thing, Darius said, the love of trees.
That was another part of the puzzle of Vilnius: its pagan roots. “The pagans of Lithuania were really appalling to our first visitors,” Darius had said, laughing. “A priest from Italy claimed that there were people in the forest outside of Vilna who worshipped fat black lizards as gods and kept them in their homes as pets. And of course, most of the houses were built without chimneys and so blindness was almost an epidemic, from all the smoke. They used to say that nowhere in the world were there as many blind people as in Vilnius. Well!”