I tried, but I couldn’t imagine something so pink and slick attached to Asaaf’s hairy thigh. “Why not get it sooner?”
“If I put weight on the stump before it’s healed, it could crack.”
“Nasty.”
“Seriously nasty. Only grosser is if it gets infected,” Asaaf said, and for a moment he seemed not to be talking about himself anymore, but as if he were examining the stump like a specimen, the way we would light ants on fire with a magnifying glass as kids, watching them crackle and siss.
“Is Yael here for dinner tonight?” I said.
“Depends on how long it takes in Jerusalem — she’s getting her passport renewed.”
I didn’t know what to say. The socks Yael must have kicked off in her sleep were balled on the floor. I picked them up and tossed them in the hamper, and when I turned around Asaaf sat all the way up. “Listen, Oren, before you start buying things for the trip, go through my closet. I just bought a good backpack, a sleeping pad and a fleece—”
“Why are you alright with this?”
“What do you mean, why?” He looked right at me. “You saved my life, right? Even though you’re too weird to ever say it. So take all the gear I bought before you start charging things you know you can’t afford.”
Asaaf was saying all of this as casually as if he were offering me half his sandwich, and as I sat beside him, I’d never hated myself more. “I’m in love with her,” I blurted. “I have been for years.”
For a second he was quiet, as if considering every one of my words. Then he said, “Everybody knows, Oren. There’s a reason they didn’t put you undercover.”
“But I’m spending the next four months traveling with your girlfriend, Asaaf, and the whole time, while you’re here in bed, I’ll be thinking about how to make something happen with her.” I couldn’t believe I was telling him these things, but once I’d started talking it was like a valve had opened, and I couldn’t screw it closed. “And the thing is,” I said, realizing as I heard my own voice that it might actually be true, “I think something could.”
Asaaf shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it will.”
“What are you even talking about?” I said. “She’s your girlfriend. Doesn’t this situation seem fucked to you?”
“A lot of things seem fucked,” Asaaf said quietly, then turned back to the TV.
He’d never sounded like such a defeatist. The brother I knew would have found his way onto that plane to the U.S. The brother I knew would have wheeled himself down the bumpy path to the yoga farm and spent the next four months sleeping on some uncomfortable floor mat, just to be with her. The brother I knew would have told me I was a betraying little fool for making a move on his girlfriend — not, he would add, that I had a fraction of a chance anyway — and then would have kicked me out of the room, yelling not to let the door hit me on the way out. Any of that would have been better than this, so I said, a little wildly, “If you wanted things to be good with her, maybe you shouldn’t have asked for her help taking a piss.”
Finally he faced me, and it wasn’t the anger I expected but genuine bewilderment. “She told you that?”
“Who do you think she’s been confiding in?”
“Get out.”
I didn’t move.
“I mean it, Oren.” He tried to kick me off the bed with his right leg, but I scooted out of his reach. He tried again. Only the breakfast tray rattled.
“I’m warning you to get out right now,” Asaaf said, but it was so hard to take his threats seriously that I couldn’t even look at him. I stared at the TV, watching a player sprint across the court, and that’s when Asaaf grabbed me from behind and knocked me to the bed. I smelled his sweat on the sheets and when I rolled over, he hit my jaw, then my nose. The punches seemed to be the best he could muster, and I had a feeling they were hurting him more than they were me. But he kept at it. He climbed on top, teetering on his right side for support, and when he hit me between the eyes my head pulsed and my vision went blurry. In my spotty white haze I saw how easily I could push him over and take the upper hand. But I didn’t. I lay back and took the hit, and then another, because for that second I had my brother back, towering over me with those dark muscled arms, his green eyes bright and flashing and victorious.
My Grandmother Tells Me This Story
Some say the story begins in Europe, and your mother would no doubt interrupt and say it begins in New York, but that’s just because she can’t imagine the world before she entered it. And yes, I know you think it begins specifically in Belarus, because that’s what your grandfather tells you. I’ve heard him describing those black sedans speeding down Pinsker Street. I’ve been married to the man almost sixty years and know how he is with you — he makes every word sound like a secret. But he wasn’t even there. He was with his youth group by then and even though I was there I don’t remember being scared — even when they knocked on our door, I didn’t know what was happening. Even when they dragged us outside with our overstuffed suitcases spilling into the street, shouting through megaphones to walk in the road with the livestock, I still didn’t know. I was thirteen.
The story really starts in the sewers. Everybody in the uniform factory whispered about them, and everybody had a different theory. Some said they were an escape route a plumber had spent years charting, an underground system of tunnels running from Poland to Belarus to Lithuania. Others said they were an impossible maze with no way out. But the truth was that when my mother pulled me aside after only six days in the factory and whispered that she’d worked out a plan for me — smuggled vodka for the guards, a shoulder bared, my poor father, a lifetime of loving a woman who knew just how to spark another man’s sympathy — I simply stood there, taking notes in my head. After dinner, she said, I’d slip past the guards and down the street, around two corners and up a road where I’d see the slats of a sewer. The grate would slide off easily, she said, and she and my father would find me soon. I had no reason not to believe that was true, no way of knowing the sewers would lead me to the forest — that night all I knew, as I climbed inside the manhole and down the metal ladder, was that it smelled worse than anything I’d imagined, of shit and piss and garbage.
It was black in there, and dank and cool, the ceiling so low I sank to my knees and crawled. I just kept following the crowd of voices — in Yiddish, which was both comforting and horrible, hearing that language forbidden in the factory. Then there was a rumble, and water rushed in and knocked me down. I gasped and tried to wade forward. The sewer started filling up and I felt around in the slimy water for the person in front of me. But everybody seemed far ahead, and it took me a minute to realize dinner must have been ending aboveground, everybody washing dishes and taking baths and pouring water down the drain all at once.
Soon I had no sense of how long I’d been underground. My eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and I saw the shapes around me. The woman up ahead, the hunched slope of her back, the walls of the sewer. The shadow of a rat before it ran across my arm. Then my whole body started to wobble and I knew I wouldn’t make it through a wave of morning dishwashing, so when I saw lines of light through the grate, I stopped.
Keep moving, the woman behind me whispered.
But I couldn’t. I waited for the group to go by and when I heard nothing above, I slowly lifted the grate and climbed onto the streets of a village that looked as if it had been passed over by the war. I wasn’t used to the sun after an entire night in the sewers — it was just rolling up over the houses, and the forest beyond was so bright it looked painted. Dirt, river, sky — everything stunned me. That the wooden cottages lining the road were still intact, that people were feeding their horses and selling vegetables and sweeping leaves into the gutter.