Then she pushed up the door of the shed and gasped. The sound was so dramatic, so unlike anything he’d ever heard from Mira, that when Boaz walked inside, he expected to find a dead animal, decaying under the boxes.
But there were no animals, no furniture, not even any boxes. Just paintings. Covering all four walls up to the ceiling, at least fifty in total. All of them, every single portrait, of Eva. And all, Boaz saw as he looked closer, bearing the signature of Mikhail Borovsky in the right-hand corner.
There was Eva when she was young, pink-cheeked and grinning with a green scarf knotted at her neck, titled, simply, Paris. There was Eva more than twenty years later, in a series of almost forty paintings, all titled Moscow. Those led up to the Jerusalem series as Eva progressively aged, the last one looking so recent Boaz guessed it was the final portrait Borovsky had done before he’d died. And in almost every one, Eva was staring straight at the artist with the widest, most radiant smile.
Mira took a deep breath. “She came here all the time?”
The man nodded, and Mira continued, “Always by herself?”
“Yes.”
“She never brought — her husband?”
The man glanced at Boaz, then at the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I. I didn’t know.”
Mira looked up at the ceiling and started to cry. The man awkwardly tapped her shoulder, as if all of this were his fault. He stepped out of the shed, kicked gravel around.
Boaz knew his only job right then was to comfort Mira. It was the husbandly thing to do, the right thing, the only thing. To kiss her cheek and whisper that painful as this was, none of it mattered anymore. They were all dead now, Eva and Sy and Mikhail and his wife — all of it was moot. And if she really thought about it, maybe Eva and Mikhail had been smart to keep this a secret. There was no denying she’d loved Sy, there was no denying they’d had a beautiful marriage, and who knew, if things had worked out differently, Mira may never have been born.
But every one of those words felt like a lie. How, Boaz wondered, could Stalin ever have believed realism was the safer solution? He would have done anything to be surrounded by surrealist pieces he didn’t understand, paintings he could stare at for hours, puzzling over myriad meanings, because looking at those portraits, there was only one possible message.
Eva’s adoration was clear as a photograph, and the Paris painting made him think of one photo in particular: Mira on her campus visit to Albany. That younger Eva was a mirror image of Mira — the same full face and straight eyebrows and thick black hair. But what got him was their shared expression, a joy so genuine the smiles were coming more from their eyes and their mouths had no choice but to follow.
Mira was standing beside him, but he suddenly felt as if they were separated by a vast, impossible distance, and he knew it didn’t matter how many promises she made — there was a man she loved more than Boaz, a man who knew how to make her happier than he did. It was something he’d probably known for weeks, but the simple truth of what it actually meant — that this would no longer be his life — was just too painful to look at, it was like staring directly into the sun. He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. The painting behind him barely rattled, but Mira rushed forward. She grabbed his arm and asked what was wrong. But for the first time, Boaz couldn’t think of a single word to describe this kind of loneliness, so scary and real it required an entirely different language, new and strange and yet to be invented.
Author’s Note
Some of these stories were inspired by my family history, and I’m thankful to my relatives — among the best storytellers I know — for sharing them with me. I also found the following books particularly helpful in my research: Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund’s The Inquisition in Hollywood, Friederike Kind-Kovacs’s Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond, John McPhee’s The Ransom of Russian Art, and Victor Navasky’s Naming Names, as well as Roberta Wallach’s film Partisans of Vilna. Rich Cohen’s The Avengers, Peter Duffy’s The Bielski Brothers, and Seth Kramer’s documentary Resistance inspired scenes and characters in “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story,” and I’m grateful to them for creating work that has been so meaningful to me. Additionally, everyone at Libri Prohibiti in Prague and the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation in San Francisco was incredibly generous with their time and resources. I’m also indebted to Mikhail Iossel and the Summer Literary Seminars for bringing me to Lithuania as their writer-in-residence, where I was able to do essential research at the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum. While in Vilnius, I also had the pleasure of talking about Russia’s unofficial art movement with Vitaly Komar and about partisan life for teenage girls with Regina Kopilevi
. Finally, thank you to the Lifschitz family in Israel, who invited me to a party at their house in Haifa many, many years ago, where I was lucky enough to meet a woman from Antopol who led me to Benzion Ayalon’s incredible oral history of the village that first moved me, a decade ago, to begin this book.
Acknowledgments
Enormous thanks to:
My tremendously wise and caring agent, Bill Clegg, whose enduring belief in these stories has meant the world to me. Everyone else at William Morris Endeavor, especially Chris Clemans, Raffaella De Angelis and Shaun Dolan.
My brilliant and thoughtful editor, Jill Bialosky, whose guidance with this book has been immeasurably valuable. The terrific Erin Sinesky Lovett, for her remarkable dedication and enthusiasm. The rest of the wonderful team at Norton, particularly Bill Rusin, Ann-Marie Damian, Julia Druskin, Ingsu Liu, Nancy Palmquist, Rebecca Schultz, Cardon Webb and Fred Wiemer.
The Stanford University Creative Writing Program, for the generosity of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. My extraordinary teachers there: John L’Heureux, Elizabeth Tallent, Colm Tóibín and Tobias Wolff, for their insights and example. Christina Ablaza, Krystal Griffiths, Ryan Jacobs and Mary Popek, for always having the answer. And Eavan Boland, whose support and mentorship over the years has gone above and beyond.
My teachers and classmates at Columbia University; and the U Cross Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Mesa Refuge, San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, Summer Literary Seminars in Lithuania and Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria. Blue Mountain Center feels like a second home, and Harriet Barlow, Alice Gordon and Ben Strader feel like family.
My trusted group of readers, all incredible writers and cherished friends: Sarah Frisch, Skip Horack, Kirstin Valdez Quade and Stacey Swann.
My Stegner workshop-mates, who offered incisive feedback on drafts of some of these stories and remain a group of people I feel lucky to have in my life.
Aimee Bender and Micah Perks, for getting me started.
This long and — I fear — incomplete list of people who provided crucial support along the way, from editing to researching, to letting me sleep on their couches: Andrew Foster Altschul, Adrianne and Michael Bank, Harriet and Richard Bass, Rick Bass, Elizabeth Bernstein, Will Boast, Jeremiah Chamberlain, Harriet Clark, Katie Crouch, Rusty Dolleman, Mike Durrie, Jim Gavin, Maria Hummel, Scott Hutchins, Mikhail Iossel, Ken Kalfus, Tom Kealey, Dana Kletter, Adam Johnson, Yael Goldstein Love, Catherine Lucas, Mike McGriff, Laura McKee, Oren Manor, Haaris Mir, Stuart Nadler, Peter Orner, Jamie Quatro, Victoria Redel, Justin St. Germain, Christine Schutt, Stephanie Soileau, Shimon Tanaka, Jesmyn Ward and Jennie Yabroff.