you.” He waved me off.
“Come back to me if you learn anything about Alojzy’s finances.”
MY NEXT DESTINATION AFTER Coney Island was Sheepshead Bay, Alojzy’s old neighborhood. For the past few years, I had done my best to avoid thinking about Alojzy too much. He was out there somewhere, and he was my father. I was safer because he was in the world. But he wasn’t around, and it was easier to push him to the back of my mind. Now, since receiving his postcard, he had been pulled back to the surface. Images of him filled my mind as I left the museum, but I couldn’t be sure how much of those were my own memories, and how much were me assimilating Goldov’s memories. I didn’t want to mix up my own image of Alojzy with one painted by the failed artist. My own memories were so fragile, I didn’t know how much cross-contamination they could withstand. Visiting the neighborhood where so many of my happy memories of Alojzy were situated would help me ground them.
As I walked back up the boardwalk, two freighters passed by. I pulled out Alojzy’s postcard, which I kept in the same envelope as Goldov’s note, and held the picture up against the ocean. The view didn’t line up. Alojzy hadn’t drawn the picture in Coney Island. I stayed on the boardwalk until it ended. Passing up through Brighton, I bought two pirozhki stuffed with kapusta off a folding table outside a grocery store. The smell of cabbage and grease reminded me of days spent with Alojzy. I followed below the train tracks at first, but as I got closer to the bay, my memory of the local geography began to return. Walking up West End Avenue, I noticed strange bits of steel and brick sticking out of the trees down past the flat end of the bay. I couldn’t figure out what they could be. Brooklyn was full of things that did not make sense and were not explained; this was part of the reason it had been such a source of wonder to me as a kid.
When I got close to the trees, I realized I was looking at the Holocaust Memorial Park. The monument had not been completed when my father lived down here. The local Jews were still arguing then about the details of its construction. My father had agreed with a popular sentiment in the neighborhood: it was wrong for the city to try to include the Roma in the monument’s lengthy text. Why should the Jews be disgraced by having to share their history with some damn Gypsies? All in all, though, Alojzy was not impressed with the whole idea of the monument. He found the American Jewish obsession with the Holocaust sentimental and indulgent.
I walked through a row of trees and entered the park. Dozens of rough-hewn gravestones were scattered through the park’s center, each one bearing the story of some atrocity or death camp or partisan leader, in whichever language—English, Hebrew, Russian, or Yiddish—the donor had felt most comfortable. Little round stones rested on some of the gravestones. Around the top of the column, the word “remember” was written in all four languages. In the center, oversized strands of fake razor wire threaded around a spiraled column. The column was made to look like the bombed-out ruins of something old and brick, but was clearly one molded, red cement piece. Alojzy had seen real bombed ruins as an Israeli soldier during the War of Attrition. And though he never spoke of it, Warsaw must have still been full of rubble from World War II when he was a child. It was no surprise he had so little patience for such a fabrication, which contained the narrative but not the pain.
Two old men sat on a park bench arguing in Russian. These were the types of men Alojzy sat and chatted with. They spoke slowly, considering their positions, and I was able to make out the gist of the discussion, a debate about the likelihood of the city filling the bay in with cement. Their paranoid fantasy was completely real to them.
Emmons Avenue led me along the bay. The bay was connected to the ocean, and the whole wide world of adventure and chaos, but as it was squared off against the avenue, it still held the safety and domestic comfort of a residential block. It seemed as if the bay was once just another street, but on a whim a miracle worker had turned it into a body of water. Moses had turned the Nile to blood. Surely some lesser prophet could turn pavement to brackish water. Boats sailed in from the ocean, and anchored parallel to the cars double-parked on Emmons. Once they got out past Breezy Point, nothing stood between the sailboats and the coasts of Morocco and Andalusia. A wooden footbridge curved over the bay. On the far side were the mafia castles of Manhattan Beach, with their columns and towers.
Beside and below me, ducks and swans swam together. There was plenty of food for all, even though most of the food was just garbage. A fisherman sat in a low beach chair, drinking from a carton of orange juice. He had three fishing rods—two big ocean rods and a little five-foot freshwater rod—propped against the railing, their lines stretched taut out into the water.
I remembered the first time I visited Sheepshead Bay, when I was eleven. My mother, sister, and I had been out in Nassau County for about a year and a half. It had been two years since we last saw Alojzy, at our old apartment on East Ninety-Second Street. Neither my mother nor my sister mentioned Alojzy, and so I didn’t either.
Alojzy had sent my sister and me a few postcards from places like St. Louis and Las Vegas when we still lived in Manhattan. He was never much for writing, and aside from a few words here and there, he mainly filled the backs of the cards with little sketches of him and us, or of the places he was writing from. We hadn’t received any since moving out of the city, and it didn’t seem that the old postcards had survived the move. Maybe he didn’t know our new address. We had Bernie, who was childless until we came along, and was more attentive than many actual fathers. He was more consistently attentive than Alojzy had ever been, in fact, so we didn’t feel a glaring absence. But I still missed Alojzy.
People where we lived liked to talk about Israel a lot. It was some sort of fantasy world, not quite real, but terribly important, where they were a stronger and purer type of people. The word was spoken with slow reverence, and conversation ceased when the region was mentioned on the news. People walked around fearlessly in their green Israel Defense Forces T-shirts, as if the thin fabric were bulletproof. They stuffed cash into preprinted envelopes in the belief that it would blossom into trees as soon as it arrived in Eretz Yisrael.
When I heard the word “Israel,” I saw my father, because he had actually lived and even fought in a war there. He was the only real thing I could associate with the place. But I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t part of the fantasy too.
Bernie called my sister and me into the dining room. We came in to find him and my mother sitting at the table. We ate there on holidays or when we had company; otherwise we sat at the table in the kitchen. The only person who used the room on a regular basis was Bernie, who would spread the files he brought home from the office out on the table in the evening. My mother warned Becca and me against entering the room when Bernie had his files out, for fear that we would disturb one of his carefully sorted piles. She would shout at us if we even made too much noise in another room of the house while he was working, but he himself never complained. He just smiled half a smile, without looking up from the screen of his laptop or the sheets of numbers in front of him.
When Becca and I came into the dining room that day, though, nothing was on the table except my mother’s mug of tea, and a paper towel to protect the finish of the wood from the tea’s heat. The mug was still full to the brim, and the paper towel was shredded into little pieces. Becca and I sat down facing our parents. Were we in trouble? We must have been, because my mother was silent. But I hadn’t done anything.
“Your mother,” started Bernie—we looked at her, but her grinding fury was terrifying, and we looked back at Bernie—“and I have been in touch with your father. I should say, he’s gotten in touch with us. He’s back in New York now, in Brooklyn, and he would like to see you kids.”
“You don’t have to see him,” my
