The Forgotten Read online

  “I promise,” Malkiel said, wondering how he could think about her article. A few words from the mouth of a doctor, and the whole world is upside down.

  He finished rewriting the Buenos Aires story, read Tamar’s piece and sent it on to the political desk.

  “Page twenty,” said the layout editor.

  Ordinarily Malkiel argued with him, always after more prominence for Tamar’s pieces. But not this time. Too many words and pictures bouncing around inside his head. He could not even figure out whether he wanted to stay or go home.

  “Shall I come with you?” Tamar asked him in the elevator.

  Malkiel did not answer.

  “I’d like to,” she insisted.

  Malkiel remained silent. They walked up Eighth Avenue, with its shops full of exotic fruit and its sleazy bars and clubs. At the Coliseum they stopped for a red light.

  “I think I need to be alone with him for a while,” Malkiel said. “But please, come and join us later.”

  When the light turned green he walked on, leaving Tamar behind. A few taxis passed, but he preferred to make his way on foot. Loretta rushed to give him a hug. “He’s in the living room,” she said. “By the window. All he’s done since yesterday is look outside. He won’t sleep or eat or drink, and he won’t talk to me.”

  For a long moment Malkiel stared at his father’s back. “Good evening, Father,” he said quietly.

  Elhanan seemed not to hear him.

  “Father, I should have come yesterday. Can you forgive me?”

  Elhanan sighed and said, “Come over here.”

  Together they looked out at the night, and the lights of the great city. How many fathers and sons confront their destiny at the same moment?

  “Speak to me, Malkiel.”

  What could he say, and how could he say it without breaking down?

  “Speak to me. I need to hear your voice.”

  “I saw the—”

  “I know. I don’t want to hear his words, but yours.”

  With his throat tight and his eyelids heavy, Malkiel had to lean on the table behind him to keep his balance. Overwhelmed, blinded by emotion, he saw himself walking a tightrope over an abyss: one false step, one awkward word, and he would fall, dragging his father with him. “Listen to me, Father. You’ve always been at the center of my existence; and you always will be, to the end of my days.”

  A sob shook Elhanan. “God of my fathers,” he said, “let me remember those words when I have forgotten everything else.”

  He extended a hand to his son, who took it in his own. An hour later, Tamar found them the same way.

  Her name was Blanca, but she preferred, God knows why, to be called Bianca. Tamar had introduced her to Malkiel, as she had introduced Richard and his snooty friend Rhoda; and Max and Serge, two distinguished art dealers who thought no one was aware of their deeper relationship; and their rich clients Jean and Angelica Landman, who argued even when they said nothing.… Tamar knew a few people.

  Dining with Tamar’s friends, Malkiel was really sitting in for her. She was in Washington. More investigative reporting on the Pentagon. That was what she did best: ferreted out secrets, turned them up and classified them, processed them and revealed them to the public—she loved all that as much as she loved love. I miss you, Tamar.

  “Hey, Malkiel, you off in the desert?” Bianca asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Come on, you naughty boy. We’re here, and you’re here, but your head’s somewhere else. Don’t deny it.”

  “I’m sorry.” Malkiel blushed.

  “At least tell us where I brought you back from.”

  “Nowhere, really.”

  “You’re a rotten liar. I’ve never understood what Tamar sees in you.”

  A forgotten memory resurfaced, upsetting him. A summer Sunday on Fire Island. Tamar in a bad mood because she was scooped on a story. Malkiel, who had nothing to do with it, was annoyed that she wouldn’t snap out of her sulk. So he, too, sulked. As usual, Blanca—pardon: Bianca—took matters in hand. Sweet Tamar, she said, I know a sure cure when things go wrong: grab hold of your man and kiss him till he passes out. Doctor’s orders, you hear? Tamar wouldn’t dignify that with an answer. Bianca flared. Listen to me: you give your imbecile lover a big kiss right now or you’ll be sorry; I’ll take care of him myself, you understand? And as Tamar still did not react, Bianca proved how she kept her word. There she was in front of Malkiel, sitting on the sand, facing him. Languorously she kissed him on the mouth. Hey, she cried, that’s good! She did it again. Tamar was disgusted and never even looked their way. Playing the game—was it a game?—Malkiel let himself be swept along. He closed his eyes, thought of something else, and received the kisses. Opening his eyes again, he saw Bianca’s smiling face close to his own, he noted her tanned breasts. The blazing sun beat down, and Malkiel turned away. Beside them, Paul, Bianca’s husband, laughed as if at a good joke. Tamar was not laughing.

  That evening she would tell him, “You let me down, Malkiel. I know it was a game; but love isn’t a game you can play with just anyone.”

  “No,” Bianca said again, “I really don’t know what Tamar sees in you. You kiss well enough, but—”

  “Stop it,” Malkiel said.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t hear what you’re saying. Too much of a crowd. Too much noise. Hard to hear. Hard to think.”

  “Now you’re boring me. No one’s asking you to think. As far as I know, you’re a reporter. It’s your job to listen. And to amuse people.”

  “That’s not on the menu,” said Pietro, the maître d’, who took personal care of this table.

  But apparently it was; yes, it was. Paul was brilliant, Bianca charming, Susie drinking and Angelica flirting. Max and Serge were describing their last auction.

  They all seemed happy. “Business good?” Damn good. “And the new gallery in San Francisco?” Almost ready to open. “And you, Malkiel? Still working?” Still working. “Who stars in tomorrow’s obits?” An eighty-eight-year-old Indonesian general. A dancer. A model. AIDS. Malkiel felt better: They had something else to talk about. The twentieth-century plague. Punishment from heaven? “Poor heaven,” Bianca said. God should find another way to pass the time.

  At the newspaper, a special team was assigned to cover that disease, or that evil, depending on how you saw it. Two reporters were following several victims, three others were interviewing specialists, a reporter with a medical background was setting up a round table with six researchers from Sloan-Kettering and the Pasteur Institute. They were even thinking of inviting a scientist from Moscow. Also joining the discussions: the theologian James Wienfield, and Malkiel. “God and death are linked to this problem,” the sage had told them; the editor was famous in newsrooms everywhere for his humanism. The theologian could only approve; for him, God was linked to everything, and therefore to death. One day he said, “If I had to choose between the God of death and the death of God, I’d take the God of death.” As usual Malkiel teased him: “In my tradition we talk about the Angel of Death. Our God is the God of life.” James retorted, “We should never talk theology with Jews; they take God too seriously.”

  “When’s this round table on AIDS?” Serge asked

  “In a month or so.”

  “And how many will die between now and then?”

  The dinner guests ventured guesses. Paul quoted Professor Leventhal’s statistics. Bianca mentioned an article in the Times. Malkiel said nothing. For him, figures obscured the tragedy instead of clarifying it. Every death deserved to be thought of as the first, unique. Every time the disease struck, it meant one more human face obliterated, one more family in mourning. Every time, they should give the death all the prominence and attention and compassion that it deserved. “You’d like to fill the paper with your obits,” one of his assistant editors told him. “But reality is something else again.” Malkiel answered, “Reality can wait. Death doesn’t.”

  “Any news from Tamar
?” Paul asked.

  “No news is good news,” Bianca commented.

  “You two ought to get married,” Paul said.

  “Are you crazy?” Bianca said. “Get married? What for?”

  “For children,” her husband explained.

  “Children? You can make them without a marriage license.”

  Malkiel let them argue. It was their favorite pastime. In his mind, he joined Tamar. His loving friend Tamar. His accomplice, his ally. Tamar’s smile. Tamar’s gestures. Tamar’s caresses. “When you’re in love,” she said, “you have no right to hold back. When you’re in love you let your body choose its own ways of loving.” Sparkling eyes and impertinent lips; her view of love was definite.

  “Just the same, you ought to get married,” Paul insisted.

  “Oh, leave him alone,” Bianca snapped.

  A light gust of yearning made Malkiel blush. He had known a few women. Passing fancies who left no traces. Tamar was different. With her he could not drop his guard. Demanding and critical, she kept him alert. She wanted him perfect even in his imperfections: “For a man to interest me, the woman or the reporter, he has to be noble or a son of a bitch; if he prefers the middle ground, he can go to hell.” Did he love her? Yes, he loved her. And his father loved her, too. Elhanan could not look at her without smiling. He would be happy to see her come into the family, if only to assure the survival of the line. Poor Father. To give him pleasure, Malkiel and Tamar should marry as soon as possible. While he could still take part in the ceremony. How much time did he have before vanishing in darkness and emptiness? Poor Father. How could they save him? How could they help him? Often in bed Tamar would sigh, “Poor Malkiel.”

  He rose abruptly. “Forgive me. I have to leave.”

  “Heading back to the newspaper?”

  “Are you kidding? He has a hot date. Poor Tamar.”

  Full of anguish, as he was each time he thought of his father, Malkiel urgently needed to see him again.

  One evening early in his illness, Elhanan asked his son to sit down opposite him. “I have grave matters to discuss with you, my son.”

  Malkiel’s heart stopped. Elhanan hastened to reassure him. “Don’t be afraid. We’ll fight back. We’ll hold out. We’ll learn how.”

  Father, I admire your courage. Your confidence. Your way of fighting resignation. But how long will it last? More and more you move awkwardly, more and more your memory slips.… But we will fight to the end. Even if it’s hopeless. After hours of talk that evening, you even managed to sum up a philosophical conclusion for both of us: “The important thing is to be aware of the present. The moment possesses its own power, its own eternity, just as love creates its own absolute. Hoping to conquer time is wanting to be someone else: you cannot live in the past and present at once. Whoever tries to runs the risk of locking himself into abstractions that separate a man from his own self. To slip out of the present can be dangerous—suddenly man finds himself in an ambiguous universe. In our world, strength resides in the act of creating and recreating one’s own truth and one’s own divinity.”

  Oh yes, Father. You tried to persuade me that even for you nothing was truly lost. To live in the moment is better than not to live at all.

  “It takes no more than a moment,” you told me that night, “to tell your fellowman that you love him; and in so doing you have already won a victory over destiny.”

  I remember: despite your weariness, despite your fear, you were in a kind of ecstasy. You were talking to persuade yourself as much as to reassure me; you were celebrating the present so as not to retreat from it.

  “The future?” you said to me. “The future is an illusion, old age a humiliation and death a defeat. Certainly, man can rebel. But his only true revolt is to shout ‘No’ in the present against the future. As long as he can move his lips he’ll be telling fate, ‘You challenge my right to live a full life—well, I’ll do it anyway; you challenge my happiness under the pretext that it is futureless, that because it’s severed from its roots it can never be perfect—well, I shall taste it anyway.’ ”

  Your eyes were shining, Father. You were breathing hard. I was, too.

  “I have the feeling,” you told me, “that fate is making fun of me. Because I cultivate memory, fate has decreed that I be deprived of it. Well, I say ‘No.’ When fate laughs at me, I’ll laugh at it. And I’ll be happy even if in my situation it’s absurd to do so.”

  At dawn you broke off our conversation. You were suddenly exhausted. So was I.

  “You’re young,” you said to me. “At your age you can be desperate and proud at the same time. It’s not so easy at my age. But I refuse to go under.”

  Me too, Father; me too.

  What to do?

  Elhanan was reading. Despite the late hour, he was waiting for Malkiel to return. A matter of habit. Even before the disease struck, he’d had a hard time falling asleep without chatting with his son, if only on the phone. Now it had become an irrepressible need.

  “Have a good day?”

  “Good enough,” Malkiel said.

  Stretched out on an old sofa beneath the yellow light of an old lamp, Elhanan was leafing through newspapers from the 1930s and ’40s. “Who died?”

  “An Indonesian general. A Belgian painter. A clothes designer, still young. A university president somewhere in Virginia.”

  “Page one?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  Elhanan Rosenbaum took an interest in his son’s work, as if he knew something about it, which was by no means true. But he did know that the front page was better than the twenty-eighth. He knew that for his son’s career the position of a piece was important. “It’s unfair,” he sighed. “Only unimportant people are dying nowadays.” The disease had not weakened his sense of humor. “And Tamar?”

  “She sends a kiss.”

  “I’m very fond of her.”

  “And she of you.”

  “Why not—”

  “Because.”

  “Really, my son. You ought to—”

  “I know, I ought to marry her.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “A sign, maybe.”

  “What would you need?”

  Malkiel bowed his head. His father was right, wanting to see his son stand beneath the huppah before … before … “I understand. But it’s not so simple.” He took off his jacket, poured himself a glass of mineral water and sat down again on the hassock across from his father. Loretta brought in a platter of fruit. She seemed sad. “Father,” Malkiel asked, “why have you never thought of marrying again?”

  Elhanan Rosenbaum stiffened. His brow wrinkled. “Why do you ask? Why now?”

  “Just a thought. Perhaps to get back at you. What about you? You could have found someone.”

  Elhanan propped himself on one elbow. Loretta came back in with two glasses of hot tea: she thought hot tea could cure anything. Elhanan waited for her to leave before he answered. “I no longer know, Malkiel. I’m sure I once had a good reason.”

  “Is it because you loved Mother too much?”

  “Too much? When you love someone it’s never too much.”

  “Do you still love her?”

  A pause. “Yes, I still love her.”

  He stretched again. A remote dream made him happy and sad. Malkiel, too, felt sad. He loved his father with total, all-encompassing love. No one had ever been so close to him. This was the man who raised him, who sang him lullabies, who took him to nursery school in the morning and brought him home in the afternoon, who stayed at his bedside when he had the flu, who took him in his arms when nightmares came. Of course there was Loretta, too, the marvelous black maid from Virginia, who was always there and in complete charge of the household; and Malkiel was attached to her. But it was not the same. He loved his father. Just looking at him, or making him a pot of tea when Loretta was on vacation, he was overwhelmed, sometimes to the point of tears. In grammar school and high school he had friends, pals. But hi
s closest friend was always his father. Then why had he made him suffer? “Tell me about Mother,” Malkiel said. “Tell me something I’ve never heard.”

  “I thought I’d told you everything. Have you forgotten?”

  Forgotten. The word struck Malkiel. So it’s true, he thought. There are words that hurt more than sticks and stones. “No, I haven’t forgotten a thing.” He rose and touched his father’s shoulder. “And I promise I never will.”

  “I believe you,” said Elhanan. He closed his eyes.

  Once upon a time, my father was another man. Upright, proud and open to the sounds of life. Everything interested him; doubt fascinated him; evil repelled him. His patients swore by him. His students adored him. He knew how to bring an ancient text to life; he made it speak. It was as if Isaiah were to address each of us individually; as if all were present to watch Titus enter the holy of holies.

  I liked watching him at home. At his worktable, beneath his dusty lamp, which Loretta never dared to clean, he conversed with invisible companions. I used to hear him murmur, “But no, that’s impossible!” He would set one volume aside and pick up another, and I would hear him admit, “Okay, you’re right.” And at my childish astonishment, he would explain: “You see, Malkiel? When I speak to Abraham ibn Ezra, it seems perfectly normal, and when he answers me through his text, that seems normal, too.”

  His greatest pleasure: reconciling texts and authors. He managed to find common ground between the school of Shammai and the school of Hillel, between an interpretation by Maimonides and one by his implacable adversary the Raavid; then he radiated happiness. “To you, to life, to the survival of your teachings!” he would say, as if addressing them, a glass of wine held high. For him, this was a celebration.

  At school his colleagues found him a bit odd. “He ought to get married again,” they said. “His son needs a mother, and he needs a wife.” They were wrong. We needed each other, and that was all.

  A woman called Galia Braun, a native of Ramat Gan, was in love with him. Madly in love with him. She taught biblical geography and blushed every time she looked at me in class. She was quite beautiful and somewhat strict but never with me. She loved my father through me.