The Sea of Light (41 page)

Lottie hisses. “Leave her alone! You expect her to understand what is incomprehensible” She turns to me, for the first time, her eyes shining almost kindly in the worn, bland, colorless face. “Listen, the real truth is incomprehensible. We say others can never understand because they were not there, but the fact is that
we,
the ones who survived, will never understand it completely either—not what was done to us, nor what we did ourselves, nor what we did not do. I will tell you one thing, and one thing only: All this about politics—it’s all a lie. Political systems are nothing but lies. They cover up the sickness and the rot of people who want nothing but money and power, not for a good purpose, but simply to hoard. When there’s hoarding there is waste; and when there’s waste, there is cruelty. What matters is not this or that political mechanism. What matters is a kind heart. A heart that does not hoard, and does not waste. There. Now, enough of this already. Eat—here’s some more potato—eat now, eat.”

I do. Ellie is silent, her hands in her lap folded over a napkin. I look at her once, but she avoids my eyes.

*

Ellie washes the dishes. I dry them. The dishtowel’s a faded Dutch floral pattern—looks old, almost antique. The counter is battered, dented with brown coffeepot stains. By now the lack of Christmas tree and frills and wrapped presents and colored lights has stopped seeming weird to me. After all, I tell myself, the first African slaves they brought to Cuba didn’t celebrate Christmas, either. So there, white boy. Thinking this, I can feel myself sneer.

But Ellie is white. And, really, so am I. Well, partly. Pretty soon, I stop being angry.

“Thanks,” I whisper, “for saving my butt.”

“What exactly happened?”

“Oh, lots of shit. I’ll tell you later, okay?”

“Okay. But, look—it’s nice that you’re here.”

“Is it? Really?”

“Yes, Delgado. It’s good.”

Later, all four of us sit in the living room reading different sections of newspaper. No one says anything. Everyone is basically just a pair of legs, sticking out from sofa or armchair, wide newsprint expanse covering up each torso and head. Once in a while Ellie gets up and walks around, restless. Then she flops back down and you can hear springs squeak, can hear the rustle of thin sheets as she opens up another section, snorts about some political folly or other, mumbles questions requiring no response. I want to tell her, suddenly, that it is good to be here, too. That—here, in this weird, dim little home, where people rarely speak, with her oddball parents and their damaged bodies and crackpot philosophies and the green-gray tattooed numbers on their arms—I feel, somehow, like I fit right in. Like no one will bother me because they, too, basically just want to be left alone. And maybe it is strange to others, but it feels nice and normal to me, it’s the way I am now; and somehow, some way, the way I am now is acceptable here, it is understood here, no explanation is necessary.

*

Ellie has posters all over her bedroom of swimmers and singers and old movie stars, illustrations of hammerhead sharks she cut out of
National Geographic,
a picture of the Queen of England with a mustache drawn in. I inspect everything on the walls, glance through her books and cassettes. There’s a photograph on her dresser, too, framed in this practically ancient tarnished silver frame with floral designs—daguerreotype, brownish matte finish—of an infant, round face hemmed by lace. It’s much too old to be her.

“Who’s the baby?”

“Oh, that’s Oskar—Lottie’s son.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“I don’t, really. I mean, he’s dead, kaput—he wasn’t much older than that when he bought it. They generally killed all the babies and the old and sick people first—”

“In the concentration camps?”

“Right. Lottie was in Bergen-Belsen—that’s where Oskar died—I mean, was murdered. Because, I mean, it
is
murder, isn’t it?” Her face is matter-of-fact, very thin and pale. Eyes very serious, without their usual sardonic glint, and in that moment I realize fully, immediately, how sick she has been. I want to
touch her somehow, somewhere, very lightly, with my fingertips, as if that would bring some comic mischievous light back into her eyes and her face. But I don’t.

“Your dad and mom were married before the war?”

“Yeah, but to other people. See”—she bounces onto her bed and sits there cross-legged, right in front of a big black-and-white poster of Dawn Fraser swimming the 100 freestyle in the Tokyo Olympics, 1964. She’d been bashed up in a car crash or something pretty bad the year before, I think, and her neck was all fucked up so she couldn’t do flip turns any more in Tokyo; she had to do open turns. Still, though, she won.

Fraser was big. Ellie isn’t. For a moment, now, against this background, she looks small to me again, and frail. “Lottie and her first husband had this baby boy, who died—I mean, was murdered—in Bergen-Belsen, and her husband died, too. Zischa had a wife, too, only not Lottie, and he and she had kids, two girls, I think—”

“What were their names?”

“He doesn’t say.”

“Not even when you ask him?”

She shrugs. “I asked a couple of times, you know, when I was growing up. He wouldn’t ever say. So I stopped asking. Once in a while, if they feel like it, they’ll tell me things. Sometimes, I swear, it’s like I almost don’t even want to hear it! I mean, they’ll talk about the most horrible, intimate, godawful stuff—and on the other hand, they can be really strange and secretive about details that you’d think would be ordinary everyday kinds of things. It’s not easy to understand them a lot of the time. Sometimes, I admit it, I just sort of give up trying. But in a way, I
do
understand. I mean, I’ll bet you don’t want people pestering you every day with questions about what it was like when the plane went down.”

I nod.

“Well, that’s sort of the way it is with them.”

“They have a before,” I say, “and an after.”

We both look at each other then, and grin.

“Anyway,” she says, “she spent most of the war in Bergen-Belsen, and Zischa was in Auschwitz. They met afterwards. In this camp for DP’s—displaced persons. And the rest, as they say, is history. But it’s
all
history, isn’t it?”

“I guess.” I sit on the bed with her, cross-legged at first, but it hurts the knees too much and pretty soon I am lying there, relaxed, head propped up, and she is telling me things in bits and pieces. About growing up with them, mostly, and the way Zischa would just blurt out some terrible true story at the weirdest times, out of nowhere, about stuff he saw in Auschwitz—things you didn’t want to know, even—at breakfast, or dinner, or while you were sitting around minding your own business, watching TV; and this thing Lottie had once about rescuing homeless animals, which she doesn’t do any more because of the expense.

“She’d get them all cleaned up, all de-fleaed and de-loused, whatever, and she’d take them to this vet down on Houston Street for their shots—rabies, boosters, all of that. Zischa got pissed after a while—it must have been pretty pricey, and I guess you can see that we don’t exactly live in Trump Towers around here—so he made her stop. But you know something, Babe? When she stopped, it left me feeling kind of sad. I mean, all I ever wanted to do, when I was a really little kid, was
to keep
these pets—I’d, like, cuddle them with me on my pillow at night, puppies, kittens, whatever, and I would beg Lottie to let me keep one, just one. And I’d always think, maybe this time she’ll let me. She never did.”

“My dad brought us a dog once.”

“Yeah? What was it like?”

“I don’t remember, really—I was really young, I think maybe Jack had just been born or something. It was a big old puppy though, a golden retriever—he was great. All floppy ears, big paws. We named him Paco. But, um, he didn’t last long. I mean, he ran into the street one day and got run over. Poor little guy. Like a lot of other living things I’ve been around—huh? Soon you’ll all be calling me Kiss-of-Death Delgado.”

She rolls her eyes, sighs with exaggerated exasperation. “God, Babe. You are so hard on yourself.”

“Yeah. Look who’s talking.”

“Okay, but with me it’s different. At least, I
think it is. I mean, I figure I’m just sort of trying to be the best I can be, and I don’t have much natural talent or gift, so I’m hard on myself in that way. But you, Delgado, you—I don’t know. It’s like Zischa says: There’s a lot of pain in surviving—sometimes, maybe, you think it would be easier to have died—”

I tell her to chill, seriously chill; tell her I have had enough of all this talk, talk, talk.

Then for a second, even though I don’t want to hear anymore, I want to tell her all the other things: about Liz, and Kenny, and Sager; about what happened. But just the thought of it makes things go far away in front of my eyes, like I’m gazing down a long, dim tunnel, and I can’t, I can’t.

“Okay, Delgado. Tell me about your
brief
visit home.”

I sigh. Remembering it all, I feel numb. Maybe that’s why my voice sounds far away from me, too, when I speak; matter-of-fact, like I’m telling her about some everyday occurrence.

“My mom and I had this fight. I don’t even want to get into it, Ellie. A lot of the same old shit we always used to fight about, before—just
before,
you know? except this was worse. It was, like, all this stuff about swimming, and how, like, she expects me to be some world record holder again—you know, with
this
for a fucking body!” I pound my chest, a shoulder, a leg. Pull my shirt up over my rib cage, exposing scars. All of which she has seen a million times, of course, in locker rooms and whirlpool and sauna, but somehow I want to reemphasize it again, the hatefulness of it and the ugliness. I don’t feel mad, or hurting, but I notice that I’m panting, as if I have been running too far and too fast and am now plain out of breath.

She lays a hand over stitch marks. The palm is cool, dry, light. Friendly and nervous, somehow, but not really afraid or repelled. Then she takes it away. “I don’t know, Delgado—I don’t think you’re in such bad shape.”

Thanks for the charity, I mumble.

“And neither did Mike Canelli.”

I groan into a pillow cover. Tell her that I really, really, really don’t want to talk about
that,
either.

She asks, then, if I want to just pack it in and get some sleep, she personally is pretty tired and thinks it would be a good idea. I realize again how weak she still is, how pale and thin. All the old physical strength of her is gone for the moment; even though she’s getting better, it will be a long time before she can do a lot of the stuff we did together—treadmill runs, wall pulley, spotting each other for squats and bench press.

She says she’ll get some sheets and blankets for me, and go make up the sofa. I tell her I’ll do it myself, she ought to get some rest. And I mean it. But then, without thinking about it, I pull her back down when she makes a move to get off the bed, and she falls so that her back is to me, and I curl against her, just like that, and wrap my arms around her skinny, tired shoulders. My hands meet and touch against the center of her chest. They can feel her heart beat, a rapid patter, and the fading hint of a cough rattle in her lungs and throat. She puts her hands over mine. Her palms are damp.

“What is this, Delgado?”

“Nothing.” Skin, hair. Fuzzy back of a neck. She smells familiar. It reminds me of things that are dead now, and gone. So that I still am numb, so numb that if you pinched me with pliers I swear I wouldn’t flinch, but tears come to my eyes.

“Well, it doesn’t
feel
like nothing.”

“Shut up,” I whisper, “shut up, shut up.”

She does.

I tell her things I have never told anyone before. About Kenny, and Liz. Sager. Angelita.

There’s a quilt folded at the foot of her bed, and after a while I sit up to haul it over us before curling all around her again. She lies very still, not turning to look. My hands can feel her breathe.

That is how we fall asleep: light on, door half open, under a quilt, fully clothed, warm and very still, in this small, small place that smells of cooked vegetables instead of Christmas trees. I don’t even take off my shoes.

*

Ellie shows me around the next day—Central Park, Rockefeller Center, Fifth Avenue. I want to go either to the top of the Empire State Building or to the top of the World Trade Center, but in the end it’s all this blur of coats and shopping bags and boots and ice, she admits she’s too tired, has overdone it a little, and we just head back downtown.

Before we go across town to Lottie and Zischa’s, though, we stop off to eat at this cheap little Cuban diner place on lower Broadway. She makes me do it, saying, with mischief in her voice, Come on, Delgado, it’s time for you to get it together about your heritage. Sure, I snort, half joking. But we’re both half serious, too.

Inside it’s darkly lit, framed by storefront windows with Spanish words on them filtering through the gray outside, and it smells of smoke and coffee and sweat. There are a couple of tables of middle-aged guys hunched over cigarettes and empty greasy plates, talking in Spanish; there’s a guy behind the counter who looks a little like my father; and a woman—his wife, I think, wiping tables—who looks a little like me. I examine the menu, painted on boards hung on the wall. I had to study a language in high school, and took Spanish, but can’t remember much of it at all.