LEVI

THE ROOM WHERE THE YOUNG MAN RESTED HAD ONCE been the bishop’s wine storage. It still reeked dark and sweet—a pulpy marriage of fermented grape and cool, wet stone. It was so dark that only after spending minutes within its walls could one distinguish its faint gradations and sense whether time had truly passed at all. After the bishop had moved to his lodge in the countryside to make room for the Sisters and before the young man’s sudden arrival, the wine room had become a place where willful pupils were sent to pray whenever they misbehaved. It had been a storage room, a discipline room, and, after Levi Ehrenberg appeared broken and beaten at Shein Brothers’ door, the room became a sickroom, a dark and nearly neutral place lodged between life and death.

A week after they had found him in a heap, Sister Blandina announced that young Mr. Ehrenberg might benefit from visitors, and after some prodding from Abraham to bring the boy some biscuits for God’s sake—An embroidered handkerchief! Peppermints! Whatever it is that ladies bring when tending to the sick!—Eva decided to pay her respects.

Those days she woke early each morning; it was still wickedly hot. Her sleep was consistently disturbed if not first by mosquitoes then by the significant portion of the population who weren’t blessed with adobe walls and chose to sleep in the streets, preferring the open air (insect-ridden as it was) to their close and flame-hot quarters. There was inevitably a skirmish come daybreak, if not before, and so the first sounds she heard upon waking were furious outbursts—frustrated sounds, childlike in their heightened confusion, rendering not only the cause of the outburst but its very language unclear. The whole town was irritable, exhausted; there was a rising tide of impatience, but people went about their business, and Eva too rose to meet the day. She was childless but not ill, she reminded herself; and her house was actually being built. She was childless but not broken and bloodied like the poor German boy who was (according to Beatrice) not only the sole survivor of a brutal Indian raid, but who had made it to Santa Fe on foot through miles of rocky desert. Eva sat by the small bedroom window as she pinned her hair up, peering across the street at the convent, the school, and the chapel, while waiting all the while for an elusive breeze to graze the nape of her damp neck. Poor fellow, she whispered, as she imagined Sister Blandina’s dry hands, Sister Theodosia’s disagreeable voice. The nuns’ collective, unflappable calm was doubtlessly hard-earned, but it was also severely discouraging; Eva could not shake the feeling that these sisters relished suffering, or maybe they didn’t relish suffering, but in some indefinable and undeniable way, it was what they lived for.

No hint of a breeze arrived, and so she began the arduous task of putting on her clothes. After cinching, tying, and smoothing herself, she truly felt faint from the exertions but finally stepped out the back door and approached the apricot tree. It grew from a meager patch of earth, cordoned off by coyote fencing. She watered the tree and it flourished, drooping over the empty, scratched porcelain bathtub, dipping in one branch, then two, as if to convey that despite its undeniably lush looks, it was still thirsty. Eva picked the fruit for Mr. Ehrenberg but decided against baking the intended strudel and instead set out across the street with a sack of overripe apricots; her fingers, even after rinsing, were sticky from the juice.

She wove through swinging tails of hitched up burros with their attending drones of flies, felt the squint-eyed stares from men filling water troughs, and as the morning sun inched up through the vast metallic sky, the common sight of Mexican women wrapped in black shawls struck her—as it usually did—as unnecessarily oppressive in this heat, but then all at once the dark figures went from oppressed to strangely magnificent, appearing for one extended moment like dark bronze sculptures set against ocher palazzo walls. She had certainly never seen an Italian palazzo and couldn’t imagine when she ever would, but the vision felt as authentic as the dried burro dung underfoot (which she noticed just in time to avoid) and the smell of moss and camphor coming from the nuns’ quarters. She stepped inside one of the buildings, and there she relished the instantly cooler temperature.

The entryway was quiet and dark. There was neither knocker nor bell to announce a new arrival, and Eva inched down the dark corridor, peeked through a partially closed door. Grubby little girls leaned up against one long table without chairs. They chatted quickly but fell silent when they noticed Eva, their spoons poised at the ready, as if the lady herself was the feast. “Buenos dias,” Eva said; the two words permeating in the room until their polite, in-unison response erased the echo.

“Good morning,” said Eva, as she saw Sister Josephine emerge from an undersized door on the opposite side of the room.

“Mrs. Shein!” cried the sister, short of breath. She looked almost whimsical, carrying a large tray of cups, but there was no whimsy in the way she set down a cup in front of each girl, accompanied only by a dark reminder to say grace; as far as Eva could see there was no other component of this meal. The girls slurped bitter-smelling coffee in concentration. A feast of mortifications, Eva noted, certainly was not wanting.

“Thought you’d pay the charity girls a visit?” chirped the sister.

“Yes.” Eva blushed. “Yes, indeed.”

One girl’s mouth hung dangerously open; two were bald as infants, their heads scattered with scabs. “I brought apricots!” she said impulsively. “Picked for the girls just minutes ago.”

Sister Josephine eyed her suspiciously. “Well,” she said. “We thank you.”

Eva handed over the basket. She waited for a moment, but the nun did not distribute the fruit and Eva realized Sister Josephine did not want to share the moment. She cleared her throat and said, “I’ve also come to see Mr. Ehrenberg.”

“I see.”

“I heard he was fit to see friends?”

“You are in the wrong building. This is the refectory. And that young man is hardly in any kind of sociable state.”

“Yes, but it was my understanding that Sister Blandina said—”

“Are you his friend?”

“Well no, we’ve never met, but—well…” she stammered. “He is from Germany, you see.”

She nodded, pointing toward the next building. “Well I suppose you are all related,” she said, obliquely, before adding: “How nice.”

Eva exited into the garden courtyard and among the acacia trees she saw a small, muslin tent. Before she could go and see what was inside, Sister Blandina appeared and took her arm, leading her to the other building, where a narrow hallway ended at another low doorway. Blandina turned the knob and stooped, making sure not to bump her head as it poked into the room, but she immediately shut the door again, before Eva could catch a glimpse of him.

“I’m afraid he is asleep,” Sister Blandina reported with downcast eyes. She sighed as if Eva should have known better.

She pictured Abraham’s frustration with her story, her excuse of why she did not pay her proper respects. “I could wait,” Eva suggested. “Or I—”

“Sister!” a familiar voice hollered in the distance. Eva looked toward the courtyard where Josephine waved her arms about. “The Rodriguez girl!” she cried witlessly. “The wicked…wicked child!”

“Go,” Eva assured Sister Blandina, “I’ll see myself out.”

“You may return some other time,” she curtly replied before shuffling off, leaving Eva alone in the hallway.

She could hear nothing of the crisis in the refectory (where she imagined one of those coarse-haired, hungry, miserable girls was being whipped and whipped and whipped), nothing of the mid-morning crowded street with its ongoing negotiations between burro and driver, or the bellowing stream of men’s greetings, trading lewd jokes and complaints about the heat. As she stood empty-handed in this unfamiliar place, as she did not walk away, she could hear nothing except what sounded like the very faint drip of water hitting stone, or maybe it was not a drip at all but the rare hollow tone of silence.

The door handle was heavy and creaked when it turned. How easy it was to slip inside.

In addition to the one candle flickering at his bedside, there were a host of candles and matches on a stand near the door. Eva lit one and carried it with her as she approached the sleeping patient. He was a thin man with a full, dark-blond beard. He was more boy than man. He might have been as young as sixteen, as old as twenty plus. Even though one eye was hidden with a bandage and the other eye was closed, even though his cheekbones were crowned with purple welts and his expression (if such a deeply sleeping man could have one) was nothing if not slack, she had the distinct impression that when he was alert and on his feet, he would have been described as quick. And despite the fact that his bottom lip was swollen and his top lip was cut and stitched with black thread, she could—though she had no grounds to do so—instantly picture him laughing. He slept on his back with one arm slack and the other in a muslin sling. Someone (who?) had cleaned and dressed him in this approximation of a hospital gown, a garment that had obviously been bled through, scoured, and bleached, leaving worn and faded patches in the fabric. The graying bed sheets were cast off and hanging to the floor in a snarl. His fingers—the ones at his side—began to twitch, and his lips too twitched briefly. Her heart sped up, but slowed again, when she realized he was only dreaming.

(There was a brindled mutt in Karlsbad on a blistering summer day; he had appeared, hungry and dry-nosed, beneath a cluster of elms. They had sat hushed—two sisters—watching the dog who was sound asleep but who also moved his paws frantically, whimpering as if he were chasing something always out of reach.)

She slowly walked toward the red chair at his bedside and tightly gripped the painted wood. She noticed—she could swear—that the young man was not breathing, and she was seized with such a bone-chilling fear that all she could see in her mind’s eye were those charred dead strangers on the Santa Fe Trail, scalped and left for vultures, and she immediately wanted to flee. But she closed her eyes and forced herself to remain exactly where she was. She gripped the candle tightly and promised herself that if she opened her eyes and he was truly dead, she would run to the Sisters and tell them what she’d found, even though the act of entering his room would arguably be more troubling to them than the young man’s death. She could already taste the particular guilt that haunts those who discover the dead and live to tell about it.

When she opened her eyes, not only was the young man breathing after all but he was looking right at her, startled and very much alive. He grabbed for the twisted sheet with his one good arm.

“It’s all right,” she said in German. “You are all right.”

“Who sent you?”

“Nobody sent me. I have come to say hello.”

“I told you I do not want it.”

“You do not want…?” Eva sat on the low chair. “But I’m not certain—”

“I hate you,” he said. His face was pale, his lips red, and his good eye was glassy and narrowly set, like the eye of a fish or a doll.

“Mr. Ehrenberg,” she said gently. “You have been ill.”

“The snow,” he said. “We’ll be lost.”

She rose from the chair and backed up against the wall. He stared intently as she smoothed her skirt, as if she was doing something altogether more compelling. “Mr. Ehrenberg?”

“Oh,” he said, “oh, it’s you,” but this time he spoke gently, as if he’d been woken by a great noise and had found her there, nothing but a skinny cat outside his front door.

         

THE NEXT DAY SHE RETURNED WITH MORE APRICOTS FOR THE GIRLS and a strudel for Mr. Ehrenberg. “May I give the girls the fruit myself?” asked Eva, but Sister Josephine ignored her question and led her to the sickroom, where Sister Blandina attempted to hold a cloth to his forehead as he raved madly in German—a German that not even Eva could understand—while Sister Philomene stood in the corner, nibbling on her thumbnail.

“Why is it snowing?” he shouted with sudden clarity.

“This is no place for you, Mrs. Shein,” Sister Blandina cautioned, as she saw a spoiled German bride standing in the doorway, the wife of a merchant, a rico.

But heat rose up in Eva’s chest with unexpected force. “Mr. Ehrenberg, it is not snowing,” she told him plainly in German. “The Sisters are trying to help you,” she nearly shouted, as if speaking to a foreigner when he was anything but a foreigner. They were from the same place, they spoke a common language; they were probably the very same age.

“Please see Mrs. Shein out,” Blandina raised her voice to Sister Josephine.

“German?” he cried, tears pooling in his uncovered eye.

“Yes, yes,” she answered, “you are safe here.”

“Jewish?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“Me too,” he said, sounding relieved, “me too.”

She knew that no one had heard of his people, but who pretended to be Jewish in a Catholic land? He would become the responsibility of all German Jews—like any other distant cousin—or so Abraham had told her, rather proudly, as if it had been his idea.

“But what have they done to my brother?” the young man demanded. “Where is he?”

“Tell him to calm himself,” said Blandina, unmistakably addressing Eva, and in doing so, recognizing that she was—if not exactly welcome—then not altogether expendable either, at least not at that moment.

Eva came forward, registering the murky smell of alcohol, the rheumy fever-sweat. She sat in the low, red chair. “Mr. Ehrenberg, you are in Santa Fe.”

“I’m so cold, Julie.”

“What is he saying?” whispered Josephine. “This is terribly frustrating.”

“Levi,” she said familiarly, as if she was play-acting, but she felt perfectly genuine, if suddenly very queer. “You are safe, dear.”

“You smell so good,” he whispered.

“Tell us what he is saying, Mrs. Shein,” said Josephine. “For heaven’s sake!”

Eva reached for the sheets and scratchy blanket he had cast to the floor and drew them up to his shoulders, pausing for a moment as he searched her face. She smelled unguent on skin, drying blood, but she did not recoil.

Blandina cried, “To touch those sheets—mon Dieu—you must wear gloves!”

“I am not afraid,” Eva said, much to her surprise.

“Yes,” she retorted, “and the disease is not afraid of you.”

“What he said was—”

The young man stared at Eva, tears streaming out of his one good eye. “Touch me…”

“What does he want?” whispered Philomene.

“He—”

“Please, Julie…”

“My name is Eva Frank,” she told him. “Eva Shein,” she added, correcting herself. A moment or two passed before she looked away from his confused and pained expression, returning her attention to the nuns. “He says that he is very cold—”

“Philomene, fetch another blanket,” said Sister Blandina. “What else, Mrs. Shein?”

She looked at Levi Ehrenberg and then up at the ceiling. “He says that he would like for me to come back tomorrow.”

“Well,” said Blandina. “I don’t see how—”

“I shall return this afternoon,” Eva said. She stood and smoothed her skirt in two swift movements, which somehow put an end to the discussion. Then she handed the strudel to Sister Philomene, and bid the nuns good morning.

         

HAD EVA, WONDERED BEATRICE SPIEGELMAN, HEARD OF MR. EHRENBERG previously?

“Do you mean in Germany?” asked Eva, fanning herself with a folded New Mexican, the front page of which entreated drivers to stop testing the speed of their rigs in the public plaza.

“Mmn,” said Bea, not looking up from her sampler.

“No,” said Eva, who had not once considered it. She thought of how, when she visited the previous day—her fifth—the nuns finally finished behaving as if they were surprised to see her. After handing over her sack of apricots, she couldn’t help but notice they had brought in an extra chair. “At least I do not think so.”

“Well,” said Bea, whose posture fluctuated from straight to stooped as often as five times in one minute. “I should think you would remember if you had.”

“I have a terrible memory,” she felt mysteriously compelled to say. It wasn’t true, she remembered everything. “But I never met him.” She took a long sip of strong tea, gone tepid with conversation. “Have you been to see the poor boy?”

“Mmn,” said Bea. “You also, I gather.”

Eva nodded, continuing to fan herself. “He is so sickly,” she said, “and yet…”

“Yes?”

“He reminds me of someone. That’s all.”

“Who?” said Bea, hardly containing her urge to gossip, and though Eva found this side of Bea more appealing than her usually virtuous self, Eva refrained from telling any stories. She held back from relating even the very first memory—the one that somehow remained untouched by all that so dreadfully followed. We sat for our portraits, she did not say. A painter came to the house.

         

THE FOLLOWING MORNING EVA WOKE TO THE USUAL ANGRY VOICES and assumed it was just after dawn, but when she looked out the tiny window, she saw that the voices belonged to men who were saddled and on the go. She had slept late, it was mid-morning; the sun was high in the sky but the plaguing heat had finally broken. There were no apricots left. In one week’s time, the ones remaining had fallen either into the porcelain bathtub or onto the parched ground, their mealy golden flesh crawling with bugs.

         

SITTING AS IF THEY HADN’T ANY OTHER RESPONSIBILITIES BESIDES tending to Mr. Ehrenberg were Sisters Theodosia and Philomene, laughing downright bawdily. When Eva came through the doorway, their laughter came to a halt, but Mr. Ehrenberg remained cross-eyed—his bandaged eye now liberated—making a clownish face.

“Feeling better?” she asked brightly in their language.

“Oh!” he said, his eyes shining. “I am feeling so much better, thank you!” His voice sounded younger, having escaped from beneath the many veils of bewildering fever-dreams. “You speak German?”

“Of course, Mr. Ehrenberg. We’ve been speaking for days.”

He looked confused for a moment and then relieved. “It’s you,” he said, and then laughed at something in his head, guided by some personal logic only he could understand.

“Please tell him he is very lucky,” said Theodosia. “Tell him we prayed for his life.”

“You almost died,” Eva whispered.

He nodded, and with his face downcast he could have passed for a twelve-year-old—his hair an untrimmed mess, his shoulders not particularly wide—even despite his beard. When he lifted his chin to face her, his eyes (the same bright eyes he’d been crossing for comic effect) clouded over with truth—the truth he’d attempted to stave off as long as he possibly could. His attempts at humor, his hopeful voice, nearly brought Eva to her knees. “Everyone is dead,” he said. “Isn’t that right?” And the whole of his frank and suntanned face darkened, became confused.

I am alive, she almost said.