Outside baggage claim, the director of the Israel Museum was waiting by the fountain. She was sixtyish and attractive in a stern, no-nonsense way, with cropped gray hair, red plastic glasses and chunky geometric jewelry that could only have come from the museum gift shop. “Roni Ben Ami,” she said, extending her hand and grabbing his suitcase with the other.
“It’s okay,” Boaz said, trying to take his suitcase back, but she was already pushing her way outside, where her driver was waiting. Boaz slid in beside Roni, and as her car pulled away from the curb, she turned to him and said, “I’ve never picked up a donor at the airport. But I couldn’t let an intern do it — not for Eva.” The sky was lightening, and the familiar cluster of billboards advertising cell phone plans and yogurt sprang into view. It didn’t seem possible that he was halfway around the world now, just four days after Wendy had first opened the will. He still hadn’t heard from Mira — and if Wendy and Larry had, they weren’t letting on. And though Mira had promised the last time they’d spoken that she was staying at her colleague Sharon’s house in Hardwick, Boaz couldn’t stop picturing her at his house, Eric’s house, in Albany. Boaz had no idea what Eric looked like, but he kept seeing someone brawny and suntanned, the type of guy who woke at dawn to do yard work, then came into the bedroom scratched and sweaty with a mug of coffee for Mira, slow and groggy in the morning, her dark hair fanned out against the pillow.
“You should see the collection,” Roni was saying. “You know how she displayed everything, in that Eva-haphazard way. So yesterday at work I start lining them up chronologically, and that’s when I realized she hadn’t just been collecting art from that period — her collection is that period. It’s a complete retrospective,” she said, a little breathlessly, and checked her BlackBerry. It kept going off, and Boaz suddenly sensed how important this woman was: so many people working for her, presumably from all over the globe given how early it was, and there she was, carting him around before breakfast.
“Of course some of it’s terrible,” Roni continued. “Those Rubashkins? But you know your grandmother — all she cared was that it was dissident, outrageous. People might not get that now.” She squinted at Boaz, as if to see whether he got it, and he wondered what she saw: a thirty-five-year-old with bed-head and tired eyes, looking a bit like a delivery boy in jeans and a hoodie, having forgotten, as he’d dressed for the flight back in Vermont, that he’d be meeting people like Roni before getting a chance to shower. “Boaz, forgive me,” she said, “but which one are you again?”
“Mira’s husband.” He coughed, wondering if those words were even true anymore.
“The anthropologist?”
“The family has no anthropologists.”
“Oh,” Roni said slowly, as if flipping through a mental Rolodex. “The architect.”
“That’s Hannah. Mira’s the translator.” There was an ugly part of him that wished Mira were there to hear how little her grandmother’s friends knew of her, just so he could see the pain shoot past her eyes. But Mira had always suspected it anyway. It’s like she’s so obsessed with charming the world that there’s nothing left for her own family, Mira had told him once — and Boaz remembered just where they were when she’d said it, that first year together in Jerusalem, during those early months of dating when they’d lie in bed talking through the morning.
That was the night she’d told him Eva’s story: leaving her native Prague to study art in Paris in the thirties and falling in love with Mikhail Borovsky, the famous Russian painter who wasn’t yet famous. They lived together for many years. Then his father died and he had to go back to Moscow to sort things out for his mother. He said he’d return in a month. But that summer, Germany captured Paris. Eva escaped on a cargo ship to New York. Her entire family in Prague — never heard from again. Mikhail — still in Russia, impossible to reach. In New York she had nothing, knew no one, but she was like you with languages, Mira told Boaz — they came easily to her and she collected them like badges. So with her English, she finagled her way into the secretarial pool at the Frick, and from there, Eva being Eva, began curating shows at small galleries around the city, until the bigger places started taking notice. Then in the early fifties she met Sy, who at that time was enjoying a bit of fame for that book he’d written, the first to so openly criticize Senator McCarthy’s policies, maybe Boaz had heard of it? (He hadn’t.) Together they started organizing some of the early American conferences on Soviet Jewry, trying to garner worldwide support for Russian Jews denied exit visas, and then they began traveling to Moscow. By that time, the government had made Mikhail an official artist, known for his portraits of Party officials, so he was easy for Eva to find. He’d married by then as well, so he and Eva left their relationship in the past. She and Sy and Mikhail and his wife all began working together, Mikhail sneaking government-issued paints and brushes to the unofficial artists and shepherding Eva into clandestine apartment exhibits around Moscow, introducing her to virtually every painter whose work she ended up smuggling out and making known abroad.
It’s amazing, Mira had said, that my grandmother risked her life for these artists, knowing if caught she’d be interrogated, jailed, probably worse. But then my mom was born, and it was Grandpa Sy who stopped making those trips, it was Grandpa Sy who decided it wasn’t worth putting himself in danger when he had a child, and I don’t think my grandmother canceled one flight. Imagine how that made my mother feel, Mira said — and while Boaz knew that was his cue to take Mira’s hand and whisper yes, he could imagine how hard that must have been, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. The whole story confused him. It didn’t seem possible that Mira had lived twenty-two years and experienced no real sadness of her own — that the stories she shared late at night in bed, supposedly the most painful and private of her life, were about other people.
Then Mira had faced him. It was the part he dreaded most about dating, the assumption that he was supposed to turn to the girl he’d just slept with and reveal his own dark stories. So, as always, he gave the shorthand: he’d never known his father, he had no siblings, his mother had passed away when he was twenty-one. All the other girls would whisper condolences, then go uncomfortably silent; and Boaz, afraid he’d ruined their evening, would always say he was fine, couldn’t they see he was fine, then fumble for a way to maneuver the conversation back to them. But Mira didn’t go quiet — she got angry. She said it was unfair he’d suffered so much. It was a sentiment he’d never considered — that everyone was entitled to a happy life — but Mira felt it vehemently on his behalf. She sat up in bed, and Boaz remembered just how she’d looked that night, a decade ago, headlights flashing through the window and illuminating her broad, pale shoulders. “The whole thing breaks my heart,” she said. “That you had to bury your mother when you were barely an adult yourself.”