Annelies полностью

A huff. “I’m not ashamed of the number, Margot. I’m ashamed by the pity it provokes. Besides, I don’t want to scare the girls.” She opens the mirror to replace the tin, and when she closes it again, Margot has vanished from the glass.

Riding the IRT

June is hot this year. The subway is humid with body heat. Electric fans rage impotently, their hornet buzz drowned out by the steel of the tracks. Advertising placards line the car above the heads of passengers. ARE YOU SMOKING MORE NOW BUT ENJOYING IT LESS? HAVE A REAL CIGARETTE—CAMEL! YOU’LL ENJOY THE FASCINATING FLAVOR OF JUICY FRUIT GUM. IT’S DIFFERENT, DELICIOUS—AND FUN TO CHEW! ALERT TODAY—ALIVE TOMORROW! ENROLL IN CIVIL DEFENSE.

An obese fellow with a crew cut fills one of the pink fiberglass seats in the opposite row. He frowns over his paper, sweating. A MONSTER! the headline of the Daily News bellows. EICHMANN STANDS TRIAL IN JERUSALEM! She stares blankly at the photo of the little man with the horn-rimmed glasses, seated in a glass box. He has no face, she thinks. He has no face.

East Twelfth Street and University Place

Greenwich Village

The Fourteenth Street station is a mess of people as she leaves the train. But at least she can breathe again when she hikes up the dirty steps into the open air. She starts running as fast as she can in heels on East Twelfth, but the world seems to be packing the sidewalks to slow her down, and by the time she reaches the synagogue, she is sticky with sweat. The building displays an anonymous façade across from the Police Athletic League. The only clue to its identity is the discreet line of Hebraic lettering over the door. This is a new kind of synagogue. A postwar synagogue. A post-Auschwitz synagogue. Gone is the rich Jewish Deco. At street level it is less of a temple and more of a bunker.

“Ann,” she hears her agent, Ruth, call as she steps in through the door. In America everyone calls her Ann. On the opposite side of the Atlantic, the e at the end of her name had afforded her the small nod of a vowel, an echo of the biblical Hannah. But here the pronunciation has long ago been mashed into a single syllable. Ann. She is permitted to keep the e only if she agrees to silence it. Or she is permitted to keep the vowel note only if she replaces the e with an a. So there is her choice: misspell her name or mispronounce it. She has chosen to mispronounce it, laying the short breath of the vowel to rest while privately depositing it into the deep vault where all her silenced elements are stored.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes.

“It’s okay,” Ruth tells her.

“I just couldn’t get out of the apartment.”

“It’s okay. Just relax. Cool off. Sit down, have a drink of water.”

As meticulously dressed as always, sporting white gloves, a mauve-colored blouse, and a stylish chapeau, Ruth smiles with authority at the mothers and daughters filling the synagogue’s basement hall. She is a person who likes to take things in hand, and Anne is happy to allow her to do just that. Dear Ruth. Her father was Zalman Schwartz, who first published Anzia Yezierska in Yiddish and whose uncles, aunts, and a raft of unknown cousins perished in the gas chambers of Treblinka and Chelmno. So, Ruth explains with a sort of blighted enthusiasm, she has made a career out of representing Jewish refugees for the same reason that she’s such an eggbeater for so many Jewish charities. “Guilt. What else?” Ruth confesses. “After all that came to pass in Europe? The millions?” A shrug. “What else could it be?” she asks Anne with only the tiniest spark of hope that Anne might have a different answer in mind. But Anne has no answer at all. Not for Ruth. Not for the millions.

Draining her water glass, Anne fills it again, concentrating on the quiet burble of liquid traveling from the pitcher to her glass. Find one beautiful thing, their mother told them. Giant bulletin boards festooned with year-end notices and handicrafts from Hebrew school dominate a wall. A dozen colorful Stars of David, cut from felt and held together with library paste. “Form a line, if you please,” Ruth is instructing as Anne sits down at a trestle table draped with a clean linen cloth. Anne breathes in, drinks from her glass, leaving a bright ghost of lipstick on the glass’s rim as Ruth dispenses directions with firm charm. “For those of you just arriving,” Ruth announces, “please see the lady with the cashbox, Mrs. Goldblatt, to purchase your copies before having them signed. And remember, one dollar from every sale will be donated to support the International Jewish Orphans Fund.”