Quest for Anna Klein, The (11 page)

“Hello,” she said as she took a seat opposite Danforth. She glanced about but said nothing else, though it seemed to him
that she had immediately absorbed various aspects of the room — the dark paneling, the lighted bar, the older man with his young mistress — that she had made careful note and would be able to recall these things, as a musician might remember the melody of a theme heard only once.

“Would you like something to drink?” Danforth asked. “Perhaps a glass of wine?”

“I'd rather have a cup of tea,” Anna said. She drew the scarf from her head, and in the way he'd noticed many times before, she seemed momentarily uncomfortable, as if even this modest disrobing was inappropriately seductive. She reminded him of the serving girls of Ireland who kept their eyes averted even as they placed or removed plates, as if doing otherwise would somehow compromise their chastity. How old it truly was, he thought, the Old World.

He motioned the barmaid over to the table and ordered.

They talked of nothing in particular. The wine and tea came. Danforth lifted his glass in a toast. “To your success,” he said.

She smiled softly, touched his glass with her cup, then focused her attention on a young couple who'd taken a remote corner table, their hands locked together, their gaze intensely fixed on each other, everything else quite invisible to them.

“They must be in love,” she said.

The way she said it had an eerie inwardness to it that made Danforth recall the death of Henry Stanley, the great explorer. He'd lived near Big Ben at the end, and not long before his death, the great bell had sounded, a somber accounting that had awakened an inexpressible understanding in him. “How strange,” Stanley had murmured, “so that is time.”

Danforth had no idea how to say any of this, however, and so he said, “I take it you've never been in love?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “And you?”

He thought of Cecilia, with whom he'd been out only the night
before, how bright her smile was, the life that sparkled in her, the happiness she offered him, everything, everything but . . . what?

“Yes,” he said, and put that
but
. . .
what?
aside.

“It must be wonderful,” Anna said.

“I'm sure you'll know someday,” Danforth told her.

She nodded crisply, as if cutting off an irrelevant discussion. “I'm leaving for Europe soon,” she told him.

This news, coming to him by way of Anna herself, made her imminent departure more real, and Danforth felt the disquiet not only of her going but of the loss of some vital opportunity. It was as if he'd made a minimal offer on something small and precious but had lost it to a higher bidder.

“Would you like to have dinner?” he asked, since there now seemed little else he could give her. “We could have it in the Palm Garden.”

Anna considered this a moment. “No,” she said finally. “Let's have it at my apartment. If you don't mind leftovers.”

“Your apartment?”

“Wouldn't you like to see where I live?”

In anyone else, the question might have been fraught with romantic tension, but coming from Anna it seemed only a closer adherence to Clayton's suggestion that they be together in more intimate settings.

“All right,” Danforth said. “I'll call for a taxi.”

“No,” Anna said immediately. “Let's take the bus.”

And so they did, a long ride down Fifth Avenue, past Saks' lighted windows filled with the clothes of the coming summer season, brightly colored bathing suits and leisurewear, the loose-fitting garb of the city's moneyed class. The clothing would be bought and bundled up and taken out to the Hamptons or Fire Island or, farther still, Wellfleet or Martha's Vineyard, the looming
war in Europe causing the only change in this yearly migration, Paris and Rome abruptly no longer on the itinerary.

Below Thirty-fourth Street, the avenue darkened as they entered a landscape of closed shops, small and unlighted, the purveyors of cheap clothes and costume jewelry already home with their families in Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx and whose absence drained some unmistakably vital energy from the city.

The bus moved steadily southward, these same modest shops now giving way to a line of brick walkups and finally to the huddled streets of the Lower East Side.

Night had fallen by then, but if there was safety in numbers, these streets were the safest in New York. For here, the people resided in close quarters, the spaciousness of the outer boroughs still unavailable to them. And so they lived stacked above tailor shops and bakeries and small groceries. Here, in the evening, they crowded the concrete stoops and spoke to one another in old-country tongues and dressed in clothes that seemed to be handed down not from older sibling to younger but from one generation to the next.

Anna appeared as comfortable in the human current of these streets as a dolphin in the sea. Here all the world knew her and greeted her, and on the way to her apartment, she stopped many times to inquire if this child was still sick or that brother still in some far town.

On each of these stops, she introduced Danforth as her employer, then went on to speak awhile before motioning him down the street. During these intervals, Danforth stood, alien and aloof, waiting, sometimes impatiently, to move on and even slightly offended that Anna appeared either oblivious or indifferent to the odd position in which she had placed him.

The entrance to her building was over a shop whose metal staircase was covered in signs with Hebrew lettering. The shop
window was filled with a curious array of objects, none of which Danforth recognized, save for the peculiar candelabrum the Jews called a
menorah
and that he knew they lit only for some holiday. Fringed prayer shawls were displayed on shelves, along with what appeared to be matching cases, and these too had Hebrew lettering. There was also a small table covered with silver-plated and ceramic chalices of various sizes. The entire display struck Danforth as typical of the Ostjuden, whose superstitions his father had often derided and whose tradesmen he'd scornfully dismissed as peddlers.

“I live on the fourth floor,” Anna said as they entered the lobby of the building.

From his first step up the stairs, Danforth was aware of the odors that engulfed and swirled around him. They were flat and heavy, and they gave an oily feel to the air. He'd smelled similar food in the street stalls of the Jewish quarter in Warsaw but had never eaten anything sold there. “And they call what we eat
treif,
” his father had said contemptuously, and with a quickening step, he'd hustled him back toward the far more stylish eateries of the city.

“It's really not such a difficult climb,” Anna said when they reached the fourth-floor landing.

“Not at all,” Danforth told her, though he found it necessary to disguise his slightly labored breathing.

Anna swung open the door of her apartment, stepped inside, and turned on the light.

The light revealed a room that surprised Danforth considerably more than anything Anna had said or done since he'd met her. For although located in what had seemed to him a sea of Eastern European Jewishness, her apartment revealed none of the ritual objects sold in the shop below, nothing to suggest anything but a secular life.

“How long have you lived here?” he asked.

“A long time,” she answered.

He walked over to the window that looked out on the noisy street below, a teeming world that reminded him more of Calcutta than New York.

“Please, sit down,” she said.

He lowered himself into one of the plain wooden chairs and glanced at the small table to his right, where a lamp rested on a rectangle of cloth whose weave Danforth immediately noticed.

“The mat,” he said. “I saw some that looked very much like it in Istanbul. They make carpets with the same weave. They last forever, but people here don't like the way the colors aren't uniform.” He shrugged. “Handmade objects aren't perfect, and customers like perfection.”

She offered no response to this but instead turned and disappeared into the tiny kitchen. He couldn't see her at work, but he had no trouble hearing the clatter of pans and plates as she made dinner.

While she worked, Danforth surveyed the room, noting its spare furniture, all of which might easily have been rescued from the street. There was a table large enough for two, a few chairs, a small desk, a bookshelf bulging with old books, most with cracked spines, which she'd probably bought in one of the many used-book stores that lined Fourth Avenue below Fourteenth Street. It was a hand-me-down décor, every object bearing signs of long use, nicks and scratches, even an odd burn where someone years before had let a cigarette slip from the ashtray to char a wooden surface. Even so, he found that he couldn't say for certain whether she'd furnished her quarters with such worn-out furniture because she didn't have the money to buy anything new or out of some strange attraction to the broken and the wobbly, things cast aside or left for junk.

But it was the map that drew Danforth's attention. It was spread out over the table near him, a map of Europe with small
marks along the southern coast of France. Dark lines moved along the roads and rivers of this map, and near these lines there were yet more dots, some with notations. Some of these notations were in French, some in Spanish, some in German, and there were others he couldn't read, though he recognized the letters as Cyrillic.

“You speak Russian?” Danforth called to her.

“Yes,” she said. “And Ukrainian.”

“I would love to study the Slavic languages someday,” Danforth said.

“You can go to the table now,” Anna said when she came out of the kitchen.

Danforth did as he was told, then watched as she set the table: two plates, one slightly cracked at the edge, mismatched utensils and cloth napkins, and two large water glasses, neither of which, he was relieved to see, was chipped at the mouth.

They ate a few minutes later, food clearly left over from the day before, hearty peasant food, as Danforth would have described it, and which he'd eaten during his travels when he'd been waylaid by weather or other circumstances and ended up in some small hotel that served local fare.

“Very tasty,” he said at one point.

“Good,” Anna said. She tore off a piece of pumpernickel bread and offered it to him. “Try this.”

From time to time, he thought he was being evaluated in some way, put through an arcane test, and for that reason found himself not altogether comfortable. The less fortunate always had a way of mocking the rich. He'd seen its various forms throughout the world, the petty signals of their ridicule. It came in half-concealed winks and smiles, or was spoken in the shared idioms of both the idle and the working poor. The rich were always fops to them, always inept, protected from the storms of life and
therefore assumed to be unable to weather them. Rickshaw pullers had guffawed at his approach, then bowed to him with an exaggeration that burned with comic ridicule. Ferrymen had done the same, and taxi drivers everywhere. It was class and ethnic war fought with smirks and muttered asides, and he wondered if this dinner might not be some version of it.

Then, rather suddenly, Anna said, “Does anyone know you?”

“What?” he asked, completely taken aback by both the frankness and the intimacy of her question.

“Does anyone know you?” she repeated. “At the office, no one does.”

Without willing it, he ran down the list of those who might be expected to know him — his long-standing social and business associates, his few relatives, and finally his father and Cecilia — asking himself which one knew him, really, truly knew him, and arriving at a single disturbing answer:
No one.

He started to say exactly that to Anna but stopped when his eye caught the one thing in the room that didn't appear to have been bought at a consignment shop or rescued from the street. It was a relief, made of leather. It showed a street scene, one-story buildings crowded together, almost everything in brown save for the places where the artist had carved small flowers from red leather and sewn them into tiny baskets or hung them from balconies.

“I've seen something like that before,” he said. “It's from a famous leather shop in Córdoba that's been there for generations.”

“Yes,” Anna said. She smiled. “My father used to talk about the sunflowers in Spain. He said you could travel from Madrid to Barcelona and never have them out of view.”

“That's true,” Danforth said. “Your family came from Spain?”

“Yes,” Anna said. “From Córdoba, as a matter of fact.”

Suddenly Danforth no longer imagined Anna's ancestors
digging potatoes from the unforgiving ground of the Pale but strolling the flowered streets of Córdoba and walking beneath the red-striped arches of its famed
mezquita.
In some sense, she seemed more the daughter of that sun-baked people, darker and more physically graceful than the lowly street peddlers of Delancey.

“Córdoba,” he said, and with that word entertained the possibility that the name Klein had been given to her, as so many names had been given at Ellis Island, and this, combined with the utter lack of any religious objects, raised an even more extraordinary possibility. “So you're . . . Spanish . . . not —”

“No, I'm not Spanish,” Anna interrupted. “My father had never been to Spain. But he told me about the sunflowers because his father had told him about them, and his father before that, and so on down the line.” A single eyebrow arched, but it was enough for him to see a not altogether cheerful change in her expression. “You'd rather I were Spanish, wouldn't you?”

She said this as if she were merely curious as to the arcane workings of Danforth's mind, but he immediately understood what she was thinking and couldn't keep back a self-conscious laugh.