Shadow Man: A Novel (12 page)

Bells ring over the door. We slip into a booth. A waitress with a pot flips over two cups and pours before I get out of my coat. She drops two creams in front of me and spins away. It is fast in here, crowded with smoke and people, the scent of syrup and breaking eggs, the sizzle and the sound of a whisk through batter. The cook, a man peeking from a cutout window, like a prisoner in a steamy cell, yells at the waitress and she yells back, “Hash browns, hash browns, twice. For God sakes it’s always hash browns. You think someone’s gonna order something different?”

She walks over to the lady and me.

“What’ll ya have?”

“Pancakes.”

“Short or tall?”

I cock my head.

“Stack, short or tall?”

The lady says short. With orange juice and extra butter.

“You?”

“Coffee. Toast and jam.”

The lady sitting across from me takes my hand and gets up and steps toward me, combing my hair with her fingers. “Your hair, James, always wild. A mind of its own.”

She sits back down.

“Do you want to hear more stories about yourself, about us?”

She pulls a fat envelope from her bag and lays it on the table. The pancakes and syrup come. The table is set with juice and coffee
and sliced toast. It is neat, inviting, a simple thing, but it makes me feel connected, rooted in certainty. I close my eyes. All black, except this bright space, like a lone star in a night sky. Kurt and Vera. I open my eyes, stare at the lady in front of me, and quickly close my eyes, hoping to see an image of her rise in the blackness, but nothing comes, only Kurt and Vera. There must be more, but I can’t say for sure. But I do know things. I know the beach, the waves, the wind. The elements. I know what it means when a man juggles lemons and a boy watches; I know, I see all things outside of me, the real world, I guess, but I don’t know where I fit in. I am a murdered man drawn in chalk on the sidewalk, contours and emptiness. The lady whispers through the rattle of cups and sliding plates.

“We were on holiday outside Tunis,” she begins. “We needed a break from Europe and its post-Soviet commotion. It was three years after we met, 1992. We had married a year earlier, just two weeks before you went to Iraq for the first Gulf war. Not much of a war, was it, James? ‘Fires in the desert,’ you said, ‘sirens and sand in the hotels.’ But in ’92 we rented a whitewashed bungalow on the beach. We sailed in the mornings and swam and slept in the afternoons. It was how vacations should be, James. Just weather and waves on your soul, nothing else. Do you need more syrup?”

“No, thank you.”

“Tunis, near Carthage along the cliffs. You don’t remember, James, and that is such a shame, such a pity not to remember what so few people see. We had planned to go to Marrakesh.”

She looks at me.

“Ahh, I see Marrakesh sparks a memory.”

“Vera told me about Marrakesh. I was a boy. She said I had to go to Marrakesh, but there was a man …”

“Yes, James. I know, but we never made it to Marrakesh. Do you remember?”

“I don’t remember anything. You give me a strand of something that supposedly happened in another time, in another place. But what do I do with it? Do you understand? I don’t know.”

“Don’t be angry.”

The lady sips her coffee, spreads blueberry jam on toast.

“I was pregnant. That’s why we didn’t get to Marrakesh. I was only a few months, the time when the body changes like a little science project. Blue veins and a thicker belly. We hadn’t told anyone. We wanted it, James. For some reason, despite our wandering lives, we wanted a child.”

She leans forward.

“Late one night on the beach the pain came. We took a taxi. I remember leaning back looking at the moon in the rear window. It was yellow and white. Big, like a planet that had slipped its orbit and was drifting toward us. Beautiful. The streets and alleys we drove through and all the people we passed, all going about their lives on a warm evening, all of them not knowing about us, who we were or what we were losing. Blood in the taxi and on my hands and on your clothes. I fell away.

“When I awoke I saw you at the foot of the bed, a ceiling fan spinning slowly above you. I remember that image so distinctly. The whole room. The white linen, the heavy, chipped metal bed, the IV, the nurse in her strangely folded hat. I knew that the unborn baby that left me took something with it. I could have no more children. I felt it before you said it. You held my hand through the night and I thought that my body, my insides were like the Sahara in southern Egypt with its sharp rocks and painted caves. Arid yet beguiling. You didn’t like that metaphor. You said it was too easy. Too biblical, the desert barrenness, using geography like shorthand. But you, for once, had no metaphor of your own, so I hung on to mine for a while, a long while, James.”

She sips her coffee.

“We stayed in the bungalow for a few days, until the bleeding stopped. We flew to Paris, but Paris wasn’t the same. Nothing was the same, not for a while. Days and hours. Every spoken word leading back to that night of the big moon. It eased over time. We made love again and there were new stories to write, and James, it was our love, our love that saved us. That sounds trite, I know, but that doesn’t make it any less true. But our lost baby was there, and sometimes, late at night, each of us would feel it, a slight prick that by morning would pass.”

“Did we want a boy or a girl?”

“We didn’t care. We didn’t know.”

“Was there a funeral?”

“No. I was only a few months’ pregnant, James. There was nothing.”

“There was something.”

“Yes …”

The lady who says she’s my wife is now crying over her coffee and toast. It is a slow cry, the kind that causes no disturbance. I was to be a father, like Kurt. I don’t remember Tunis, the hospital, the way she said she bled. How can a man have blood on his clothes, the blood of his child, and not remember? She wipes her eyes and takes my hand.

“That story is not in this big envelope of your clippings I carry. It never appeared in a newspaper. It’s our private story, James. I tell it to you each time I see you, hoping. It’s like a part of a play I have rehearsed. But it is not rote. It is never rote. It feels as if it’s new in each telling. I cry each time. Each time it’s so real to me. And all I want you to say is,
Yes, Eva. I remember
. Just that. A feeling that you carry it, too, that no matter what’s happening in your brain, there’s a tissue, something in you, that holds that memory, a memory deeper than thought. I’m silly and rambling, James, and it’s useless. I’m talking to a man with a blank face.”

She smears jam on her toast, puts the knife down hard. She leans toward me.

“I’m angry that this story has become mine alone. My burden, not yours. That’s not fair, James. Part of me thinks part of you is blessed not to know that story. Is that selfish?”

She leans back and picks up the knife, studies the jam on its blade; she seems to bury a word, or maybe a sentence, behind her lips. She breathes out, closes, then slowly opens, her eyes.

“My anger, you forgot my anger,” she says, smiling, but not really happy. “Did you even know I was angry two seconds ago? What an ideal marriage we have, James. You don’t hold my sins against me.”

The waitress pours coffee. The lady eats her toast. Blueberry stains her teeth, but she doesn’t care. I like her. I want to remember her. We pay the bill and stroll (a funny word) on the boardwalk; the sun turns the ocean into a bright mirror and the waves have no fury; they droop onto the beach in lazy curls. The amusement park. The clown face, the bumper cars, the Ferris wheel, the twirling teacups, the House of Horrors, the merry-go-round all quiet, cold and quiet, glazed in the salt spray of the ocean. We sit. The lady slips an arm through mine.

“We talked about this years ago, James. This kind of moment of sitting along this beach after all our travels. To have a house down the block with a wraparound porch and big windows. You in one, writing books; me in the other, translating documents and files for the UN. That’s what I do now, James. But I live in New York, in a small apartment with a stunning view of the river, but no wraparound. We lived there together, but when you started slipping the doctors thought it’d be best to bring you back to Philly. They have the best care for your sort of problem. Maybe, they said, the streets and neighborhoods of your childhood would awaken memories beyond just Kurt and Vera. You remember your street, don’t you?”

“Clare Street. Fourteen-thirteen Clare Street. About midway down the block. The McMurphys on one side. The Kowalskys on
the other. I know all that like yesterday. Fr. Heaney in his rectory window, reading murder mysteries and hearing confessions. That’s what I know. Kurt and Vera. That time. Like yesterday.”

“The beach is best like this. We used to make up games. We’d sit on this very bench in autumn. Nobody but us. We’d make up stories about marooned galleons and pirates. You’d start them and I’d add on and we’d switch the story back and forth, building it for hours.”

“I like it here. I like the stillness. Can we sit for a while?”

“As long as you like. Look what I have.”

She reaches into her big purse. “Vranac.”

“Wine?”

“Yes, James. It used to be your favorite. Sometimes when you drink it, you remember things. I forgot glasses, though. We’ll have to drink from the bottle.”

“Like winos. In Philly, we had winos.”

“We had them in Poland, too. But there they drank vodka and peed on the sides of buildings and froze to death in winter.”

“You’re from Poland?”

“A long time ago. I live in New York now.”

“Is it too early to drink wine?”

“Time doesn’t matter, does it?”

She rubs her hand over mine.

“You wrote a story on wine in Tuscany. We went from vineyard to vineyard, sampling, learning about the sun, the soil, the minerals. Quite an alchemy. And the Italians, ‘quote machines,’ you called them. The vineyard owners spoke for hours about land and harvest. So many things conspiring in the air and in the dirt to make a magnificent wine or a wondrous failure.”

The lady uncorks the wine and hands me the bottle, and for a second I think I remember something, but then I don’t. I look at the sea. The sun is behind us, the clouds low. Winter is coming. I like this wine.

“Let’s talk about news, James. Today’s news. Big change in the world again. A black man is running for president. His name is Barack Obama. He is eloquent, James. Eloquent the way leaders should be, not like most of them today. There is no grandeur in them. No romance. No dreams, like the dreams we had when the Wall fell. You should be there, writing about all this.”

“Nixon.”

“Nixon?”

“I remember Nixon. Those hearings in 1972, or was it ’73. Kurt said Nixon skulked. Kurt didn’t like politicians. He said Democrat or Republican, they were destined to disappoint. I like that word. Skulked.”

“He was a skulker, yes. He’s dead, James. A while now.”

“He used to be president. Watergate.”

“The one now is worse than Nixon. Bush.”

“Bush?”

“He’s a twit. He comes to the UN sometimes. He speaks English, but you wouldn’t know. Other translators tell me they can’t fit his syntax and imagery into their languages. He should be in jail.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

The lady takes another sip of wine. She hands me the bottle and puts her head on my shoulder. A man with fishing poles and a tin bucket walks past; a woman follows with two folding chairs. They descend the boardwalk steps to the beach. He’s heavyset with a ball cap and a windbreaker and green boots up to his knees. He is unsteady in the sand, favoring his left knee. The woman wears a ball cap, too; blue jeans, a big sweatshirt and long knitted scarf that snakes in the wind. The woman unfolds the chair. The man casts a line into the surf and hands the pole to the woman; he casts a second one and holds it himself and sits down next to her at the rim of the beach break. He kisses her on the cheek. They sit, two shadows in
the sun, water misting around them, their chairs slightly sinking in the sand.

A man clatters down the boardwalk with a guitar. He stops and sits on the bench next to the lady next to me. The man strums and sings — his voice a ragged cough of words — of melting ice caps, butchered trees, dying rain forests, pollution, smog, warming oceans, Venice sinking, “a world gone mad, slipping from the palms of God.” He rolls his eyebrows and stands. “I’m just a messenger,” he says, spinning away in wide slow circles, a strange planet in a tattered coat.

We watch, until she laughs, takes the bottle from me, and sips. The lady rises. She kisses me on the forehead, brushes my hair with her fingers.

“A wild sea, that hair.”

It feels good. The ocean. The wind. The lady’s fingers on my scalp, so brief. She sits and pulls an envelope from her bag. She unfolds a newspaper clipping; it rattles in the wind. The headline:
MEMORY KEPT ALIVE, BRICK BY BRICK
.

Walter Schmidt lived in Dusseldorf. He memorialized Jews killed in the Holocaust by painting their names on bricks across the city. The police told him to stop, but he wouldn’t; he went from neighborhood to neighborhood. His mission was to paint six million names. He was up to 726,000. He carried a thin sable brush and a small can of white paint in his valise. He was demure, whispery-voiced, dressed like a banker, a man you wouldn’t suspect of defacing property. He said: “We have atoned. Oh God, we have atoned, but we haven’t suffered to the extent of our victims. That is the paradox. We atone with sorrow that can never be as deep as the horror. This bothers me.”

The man lived with his wife and drove a subway train from dawn until two in the afternoon. He’d come home, change into a suit, and head back out to paint names until dusk; each brick, a tiny
tombstone. He was occasionally beaten up by neo-Nazis, but the city came to know and admire his strange, fastidious mission, although, when some heard he was in their street, they stood guard over their homes and bricks. He said, “When you write your newspaper story, just use the names, one name strung after the other. Imagine the impact of names, but no other words. Don’t you think that would be powerful? Just names. Imagination can fill in the rest. That would be a story people would remember.”