Emily woke up early, her mind whirring like a broken fan. She checked her email. Still more messages from Russell. Just days to go before the final draft of her thesis was due. He must be mad. He’d liked the old draft and the new one was so different. He hadn’t approved the changes, she hadn’t even shared them yet. She considered opening the messages, but shut down her computer instead, then crept down to the dining room and crawled under the table like she used to do when she was little. Now that she’d remembered that secret space, it was all she could think about.
She looked up and scanned through the pictures and I love yous.
Ayala had written I love you to Simon. Why was that bothering her? Why couldn’t Emily herself ever say it that plainly? That was another dimension of the personality graph, but Emily didn’t know how she’d quantify that one, or what it would be labelled even, not self-awareness, but emotional maturity maybe, or emotional generosity, the Frenchie Marx axis from what she’d read last night in Harpo’s autobiography. Frenchie had been a man just full up of love. Ayala had been like that too. Ayala had loved everyone.
But as Emily kept staring at the dining-room table, the I love yous seemed to melt and distort, the tape that covered them flashing like lightning, beautiful and terrifying. They seemed ominous now. Threatening. Sometimes an I love you was something that could freeze your blood.
Emily slowly pulled herself up the stairs. Forget the letter. The contents didn’t really make a difference. They didn’t pertain to her research at all. She should concentrate on the math. Or maybe she should graph love connectedness instead of biological relationships. This community was complete. Everyone here would be connected to everyone else. Everyone loved everyone, sometimes inappropriately, staring at them through keyholes as they dressed. That was a topic that should be discussed, and maybe her thesis was precisely the right forum for it.
Emily crept down the first floor hallway, felt herself being pulled like she was attached to a string and someone at the other end was pulling. She touched the doorknobs as she passed them and tried to imagine this place when it was popular. Because it had been popular. Jews weren’t allowed anywhere else, so the lodge used to get stuffed to capacity and beyond that, guests sharing rooms with other guests, ones they didn’t even know sometimes, just for the privilege of being here for a day or two, of meeting people and then not seeing them until the next season or maybe never at all. Connections, in that time before email, that meant so much for a weekend, then vanished after that. Like how you used to have to really listen to music back when you couldn’t just buy the MP3. No grasping on to digital signatures.
She crept up the stairs. It was just the morning, she reminded herself. Her research often felt useless and derivative before noon. Anyway, forget the letter and follow the connections. She was connected to Blima, and Blima was connected to Harpo Marx. At least there was that.
And that was something. Emily sat down on the stair. She took out her notebook. Ayala had known Harpo. Harpo had helped Papa William dynamite the basement. She put the family stories she remembered on a timeline, and that was the first time that William had ever appeared. So far she had two family graphs connected by Harpo, like he was the angel on top of a Christmas tree, and he was the only connection she had. He was the maven, the connector dot. There was only one point he wasn’t connected to, that gangly little orphan vertex, Doran Baruch, who just thought he recognized a famous face, who wasn’t connected to anyone at all. But that wasn’t right. Doran had known the Kogans in Russia, presumably. Then he’d gone to the States, then come here, then gone back, rolled around the world like a marble in a box maze. There had to be a reason for all that movement. People didn’t travel much back then. They didn’t even have planes, well, not commercial ones anyway. If he’d made his way here, then there must have been a reason.
Emily drew in the Doran dot. He remembered a father and a mother, Simon and Ekaterina, so she drew in those too. She hadn’t really asked herself how Doran’s family might fit into the rest of the graphs, and she wasn’t asking herself now, because somehow it was in the realm of things that she knew. His family should be charted right alongside her own. There should be a dotted line connecting Ayala to his father. Ayala had had an affair with Simon. Those letters that Emily had found. They were love letters. Obviously. She’d said, “I love you” right out. Maybe Doran was really Ayala’s son and they pretended, but no, that couldn’t make sense, the mother was too easily verifiable. It was the father who was forever in question. The father was still in question. If Ayala had sent for the son, why hadn’t she sent for the father too? She’d loved him. It was right there on the page.
Emily crept into the dining room. She wedged the door open with a salad bowl so that she’d hear the gurgle of the coffee maker, be closer to the smell. She took the package out of her bag, dumped the contents. She’d sort this out.
There was the letter that she’d shown Doran, and the second letter, and of course Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Emily set the letters aside and picked up the book. She flipped through it, and, like most old things, it was weighted funny, felt strange in her hand. The front cover tended to fall forward. Emily flipped it open. Tucked inside were three identity cards, and folded papers attached to each. She flipped through them—one, then the next, then the next—and then laid them out on the table, and she saw three faces she didn’t recognize: a man, a woman and a little boy. She didn’t recognize the faces, but she did know that name. Blima had taught her to write that Cyrillic word on her first morning back here. Kogan. She’d practised, written it on a napkin. Strangers’ faces, and her maternal family’s last name, her grandmother’s maiden name. She felt like she was made of ice, might break apart at any second. The man had light eyes, the little boy too. That little kid must be Doran.
She quickly stuffed the passports back inside the book’s pages, into the groove that they’d pressed inside after so many years, decades now because Doran must be in his seventies at least.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Doran’s father had given his family’s passports to Grandma Ayala.
Ayala got Doran out of Russia, but his father had gotten Ayala’s family out first. They’d assumed false identities, no, not false, someone else’s, Doran’s and his parents’. Oh God. That’s why Doran had needed rescuing in the first place, he wasn’t Jewish, his family wouldn’t have been threatened in the pogrom, unless of course they couldn’t prove that they weren’t Jews. And what had happened to his family? What had happened to the two other faces from the identity cards? Why hadn’t Ayala gotten them out of Russia too?
Emily checked the envelope. There was no postage on it, no stamps, no evidence that it had ever been sent at all, any of it, not even the identity cards. They’d taken the papers and made no attempt to send them back. And then the son was sent halfway across the world, alone. What had happened to his parents?
Emily tucked the letter in the book, then the book back inside the old paper package. She thrust the second letter into her pocket. She couldn’t show any of this to Doran. What if something terrible had happened to his family? What if it was Great-grandma Ayala’s fault?
He never even got his name back. He didn’t even know who he was.