than oil paint.
A significant portion of this book was devoted to sketches of West Fourth Street, clearly made from behind Alojzy’s table. There were the book tables, Mendy and the other booksellers, and all the pretty girls passing by. Then West Fourth Street became Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, and the book tables were replaced with the stalls of the shuk. Then the shuk was in ruins, as bombs exploded and left body parts on the street. Then the explosions were in the desert, and the bodies wore helmets. An Arab girl lay dead in the sand. Then a beautiful woman with long dark hair lay naked—but very much alive—on a couch in an apartment. There were pages and pages of sketches of her.
In the next book, there were more soldiers, and men in suits carrying the same guns as the soldiers. One dead soldier’s face appeared over and over. He had appeared sporadically in the previous books, but filled up nearly half of this one. He was in his thirties or forties, with a narrow face, a sharp nose, tight black curls, and, in some pictures, a thin mustache. Because he wore an IDF uniform in many of the pictures, I assumed he was Jewish, but he looked very Middle Eastern, and was probably Mizrahi. In other pictures, he wore flashy civilian clothes. Sometimes he was in the desert. Sometimes he lay on a dock. Always, he was dead. His eyes never opened, even when he was standing upright in a scene with living people.
The last several pages of this book were blank.
Earlier, I thought the postcard drawing might lead me to my father. Now I had found hundreds more of his drawings. Surely the answers I wanted were all in here. Alojzy had put down the keys to his whole life, his whole history. I just needed to make sense of it. He hadn’t made it easy. People and things that should be in Israel were in New York, and vice versa. Everything seeped into everything else. Some pictures had detailed backgrounds—I thought of how I’d tried, and failed, to place the freighter picture the day before—but other drawings floated in white space, or were bounded by indistinct hash marks, for purely compositional reasons. Looking through the sketchbooks was exhausting and overwhelming.
I sat in the quiet storage space, an interstitial zone between the painful—and hopefully revelatory—world of the sketchbooks and the outside world where people went about their business. Occasional footsteps and clattering sounds broke through to me. At one point, the clattering was in the same row as my space, and shook my walls. I heard a protracted, hollered exchange in a language I didn’t recognize. It seemed that each of the two voices was coming from behind a different one of my walls. There was a crash, and then some laughter.
I wondered if maybe the facility had employees patrolling. This thought made me nervous, although I supposed I had a claim to the contents of the space, if not the space itself, and therefore had some sort of right to be in there. If Alojzy was “presumed dead,” I was a “presumed” legal heir. But then again, my father was probably not supposed to be sleeping in a storage unit in the first place. Was his bill paid up? Maybe he skipped town owing money, or a new bill had accumulated since he left. People were probably doing shadier things than I was in this place, late at night, but that was not actually the most comforting of thoughts. Keeping a loaded gun at hand might not be a bad idea after all. My father had it here for a reason. Maybe because he knew dangerous people were looking for him.
I fumbled with the magazine, but still couldn’t figure out how to get it off. The latch I thought was a release wouldn’t budge. I didn’t want to force it, in case it wasn’t the release. In the end, I just inserted one bullet directly into the chamber with my fingers, and slammed the bolt closed. The safety had been left in the “fire” position. I clicked it to “safe.”
Sitting back down on the bed, I placed my father’s gun across my lap. He couldn’t really be dead, could he? I felt his presence too strongly for that to be true. Two old men I’d just met believed he was dead, but what did they know? Goldov would clearly say anything to squeeze money out of our family. Mendy came off as better intentioned, but his world was confined primarily to one street, and his knowledge was built on little more than the rumors that circulated in that street. In fact, Mendy had said that he heard the rumor from Goldov. So where had Goldov heard it in the first place, if he hadn’t made it up? Did he have some other angle or motivation I couldn’t see, besides his simple greed? Did he have a reason to lie? Or did he have information about Alojzy’s fate he couldn’t share?
My mother believed the postcard easily enough, but she had cut Alojzy out of her life long ago. Becca, I assumed, felt the same way.
I knew this: three times Alojzy had left me, and twice he’d returned. There should be a third return, to even out the balance. There was never any way to know when Alojzy would and would not appear. There were lots of times he had been gone when he was supposed to be around, and that was a big part of why my mother had divorced him. But then there were other times—like my bar mitzvah—where Alojzy had appeared unexpectedly.
Alojzy had actually helped me prepare for my bar mitzvah, on my Sheepshead Bay visits. Growing up under communism, he hadn’t had much religious education himself, but he was fluent in Hebrew, having gone through the military ulpan and lived in Israel for seven years.
Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew are not so different from each other as people will tell you. Hebrew is Hebrew. My mom had agreed to let me bring him an invitation, but he knew as well as I did she didn’t want him there, and none of us really pictured him showing up to a family event on Long Island.
My Torah portion was Exodus 30:11–16, Parshat Shekalim. It deals with the taking of a census, and how many shekels each person should pay as a tax (it’s one-half of a shekel). The portion is about obligations, Bernie told me. Responsibilities. The corresponding haftarah passage is 1 Kings 1:1–17. There’s more exciting stuff in there. It tells of Moab’s army facing off against Elijah the Tishbite. At Elijah’s behest, fire comes down from heaven and consumes one hundred and two enemies of Israel.
“I also,” Alojzy told me during one of these tutoring sessions, a few weeks before the bar mitzvah, “have seen fire come down from heaven and consume enemies of Israel.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “This was Bible times.”
“Bible times, sure, also Bible land. In Israel, such things continue to happen. 1973, I was called back up and sent up to the Golan. We called in an air strike against the Syrians. I watched through binoculars. It is a horrible thing to see. They should have written that in the book, as well.” I recalled times when he woke up shouting in the middle of the night. Crying out names in Hebrew, moaning in pain. This must be why. He didn’t say anything else about the war, and we went back to trying to scratch a passably fricative chet sound out of my smooth American throat.
When the big day arrived, I chanted my way through the portion without any great embarrassment. As I stood on the bimah and took that first sip of wine from my shiny new kiddush cup, I caught a glimpse of Alojzy sneaking out the side. I hoped our eyes would meet and he would wink, but he didn’t look back. His eyes were focused on the door. The important thing was, he’d come. He’d been there.
All these years later, I still found myself half expecting to catch a glimpse of Alojzy sneaking away. Now I was in his space, very close to him, surrounded by his books and drawings, and yet he still didn’t show himself. I couldn’t be sure the footsteps I heard passing by the locked storage-unit door weren’t his.
The stock half of the space, closer to the door, packed full with boxes of books, contrasted sharply with the hidden living space. The living space felt more like a tiny apartment, but had plenty of books too. Some were probably excess stock that had spilled over from the other
