People of the Book (24 page)

“Do you want me to ask them for something?”

She shook her head. “Dopey enough already,” she said. She took a deep breath, gathering her strength, then she went on. “That first day, when I got home, there was a painting waiting for me—the one that hangs over the sideboard in the dining room.”

I whistled. Even then, that painting must’ve been worth a hundred grand. “Most I ever got from a would-be suitor was a bunch of flowers, wilted, actually.”

Mum gave a crooked grin. “Yes,” she said. “It was quite a statement of intent. There was a note from him, with it. I still have it. Always. It’s in my wallet. You can see it if you like.”

I walked over to her locker and took out her handbag.

“The wallet’s in the zip compartment. Yes, that’s right, there.”

I pulled it out. “It’s behind my driver’s license.”

It was short, just two lines, written with an artist’s charcoal pencil in big, swooping letters.

What I do is me, for that I came.

I recognized the line. It was from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Underneath, Aaron had written:

Sarah, you are the one. Help me to do what I came for.

I was staring at the words, trying to imagine the hand that had written them. My father’s hand, which I had never held.

“I called him, to say thank you for the painting. He asked me to come over to his studio. And after that…after that, we spent every spare moment together. Until the end. It wasn’t long. Just a few months, really. I’ve often wondered if it would have lasted, what we had, if he’d lived…. He might have ended up hating me, just like you.”

“Mum, I didn’t—”

“Hanna, don’t. There’s no point. I know you’ve never been able to get past the fact that I wasn’t a 24/7 mother to you, when you were little. By the time you hit adolescence you might as well have been a cactus plant, as far as I was concerned. You wouldn’t let me get near you. I’d walk into the house and I’d hear you and Greta laughing together. But when I came up to you, you’d shut down. If I asked what the joke was, you’d just give me this stone for a face and say, ‘
You
wouldn’t get it.’”

It was true. I’d done exactly that. My little way of punishing her. I let my hands fall open in my lap in a gesture of surrender. “That’s all a long time ago, now,” I said.

She nodded. “All of it. All a long time ago.”

“What happened, with the operation?”

“I didn’t tell Andersen about our relationship when I referred Aaron to him. I was already pregnant, but no one knew. Amazing what you can hide under a white coat. Anyway, Andersen invited me to scrub in, but I said no—made some lame excuse. I remember how he looked at me. Usually I’d walk over hot coals for a chance to scrub in with him. For that type of tumor, you go in through the skull base. You peel back the scalp and—”

She broke off. I realized I’d involuntarily raised my hand to my ears, to shut out the gruesome description. She gave me a lacerating stare. I dropped my hands like a guilty child.

“In any case, I didn’t choose to scrub in. But I did find some reason to be hanging around the OR when Andersen came out. He was pulling off his gloves, and I’ll never forget his face when he looked up. I thought Aaron must have died on the table. It took everything I had, just to stand there, upright. ‘It was a benign meningioma, as you diagnosed. But the optic nerve sheaths were extensively involved.’ He’d tried to peel the tumor off the sheaths to get the blood supply back to the nerves, but there was too much of it. Anyway, I knew from what he said that Aaron wouldn’t be able to see. And I knew right then and there that Aaron wouldn’t consider it living. As it happened, he never woke up to find out he was blind. That night, there was a bleed, and Andersen missed it. By the time they took your father back into the OR to evacuate the clot—”

The nurse came in then. She gave Mum an appraising look. It was obvious how agitated she was. The nurse turned to me. “I think you’d better let the patient rest for a while,” she said.

“Yes. Go.” Mum’s voice sounded strained, as if even those two small words required a huge effort. “It’s time. It’s time you were with the Sharanskys.”

“Hanna Heath?” I turned away from the painting on Delilah Sharansky’s wall and found myself looking into a familiar set of features. Mine, translated onto the face of a much older man.

“I’m Delilah’s son. Her other son. Jonah.”

I held out a hand, but he grabbed me around the shoulders and drew me to him. I felt desperately awkward. When I was a little girl, I’d longed for family. Mum had been an only child and not close to her parents. Her dad had made a pile in the insurance business and taken his wife off to a tennis and golf retirement community in Noosa before I was even born. I think I’d met my grandmother once before she died suddenly, of a heart attack. My grandfather rather hastily married someone else, a tennis coach. My mother didn’t approve, so we never visited.

Suddenly, here I was, surrounded by strangers who were my blood relations. There were quite a few of them: three cousins, an aunt. There was another aunt, apparently, who was working as a trade rep in Yalta. And there was Uncle Jonah, the architect who had renovated this house for Delilah.

“We were so relieved to hear that your mother is recovering,” he said, flipping back a troublesome strand of straight black hair in a nervous gesture that was, I realized, a mirror of one of my own. “None of us wanted Mom to keep driving after she turned eighty, but she was a stubborn old bat.” She’d been a widow for more than fifteen years, he said, and had grown used to calling her own shots. “Ten years ago she went back and got her PhD—so I suppose it’s understandable that she wouldn’t let us tell her what to do. But we all feel terribly about your mother. If there’s anything we can do…”

I assured him that Mum was being well taken care of. Once word had got around the neurosurgical meeting, the whole doctor network had sprung into action, the way it does for one of its own. I doubted there was a patient in Boston who was getting more attentive care.

“Well, Mom would be glad that this tragedy has brought us you, at last.”

“Yeah, it’s too bad you and your mum didn’t stay in Australia—it would have been nice to have a granny when I was a kid.”

“Oh, but we did stay there, for a few years. Mom wanted to give me the chance to finish my architecture degree. I was a night student at the Institute of Technology and I worked for the NSW Government Architect during the day. I designed the loos at Taronga Park Zoo. If you ever have occasion to take a piss there…” He grinned. “Well, they’re really nice, as loos go….” He put his glass down and looked at me as if he was trying to decide whether or not to say something. “You should know. Mom begged Sarah to let us see you, to make you part of the family. But Sarah said no. She insisted that there be no contact.”

“But you just said your mother didn’t take orders from anyone. Why would she listen to Sarah?”

“I think it came hard to her. But she knew we were moving back here. I suppose she thought it was unfair to create a big disruption in your life and then vanish. But she found out where you went to pre-school, you know, and would go there and watch for you, in the afternoon, when the housekeeper came to collect you. She worried about you. She said you looked like a sad little kid….”

“Well, that was pretty perceptive of her,” I said. My voice, much to my embarrassment, was breaking, and I couldn’t keep the tremble from my lip. How bloody cruel. Cruel to Delilah, who must have yearned for her grandchild, all she had left of her son. And cruel to me. I would have been a different person if I’d had this family.

“But why did Mum keep in touch, then? I mean, why were they together last night?”

“Estate matters. Aaron’s trust—he willed his copyright to create the Sharansky Foundation.”

“Of course,” I said. It was one of Mum’s boards. She was in big demand for boards—corporate, charity. She’d take the director’s fees and the prestige, but I’d never got the sense she cared that much about any of them. The Sharansky Foundation had always seemed an odd one for her; its interests weren’t exactly aligned with the Establishment.

“Aaron wrote a will just before his operation, creating the Foundation. He named Delilah and Sarah as trustees. I guess he thought he’d bind them together that way.”

Someone else came up then, and Jonah turned to speak to her. I stared at the pictures on the bookshelf. There were just a few, in plain silver frames. There was one of Delilah as a young woman, dressed in a white organza frock with a silver-spangled collar. She had huge dark eyes, all lit with excitement over whatever event it was that she’d dressed up so beautifully for. And there was a picture of Aaron, in his studio, paint-spattered, considering the canvas in front of him as if the photographer wasn’t even there. There were family group shots, bar mitzvahs, I suppose, brises, maybe…. Good-looking people with arms over one another’s shoulders, smiling eyes, body language that said they were glad to be together.

They were all so warm—plying me with food, hugging me even. I’m not used to being hugged. I was trying to recast myself as someone who belonged in this setting, someone half Russian Jewish. Someone who could have been going through life named Hanna Sharansky.

The vodka bottle was sitting on the glass table, and I kept gravitating toward it. I lost count of how many I’d had. I kept tossing them down, glad of the numbing buzz. Everyone was telling Delilah stories, Jonah’s wife was telling how, when she first got married, Jonah kept saying her matzoh balls weren’t like his mom’s. “I tried whipping the egg whites separately, combining everything gently by hand, and making these lovely, airy matzoh balls, but no, they were never like Delilah’s. And then one day I got fed up and just threw everything in the blender. They were golf balls. So tough. And what does Jonah say? ‘Just like Delilah’s!’”

There were other stories in the same vein. Delilah hadn’t been a stereotypical Jewish mother, or grandmother, for that matter. Jonah’s son, a bloke a bit younger than I, talked about the first time his parents had left him alone for a weekend, supposedly staying with his granny Delilah. “She met me at the door and she had two take-out chickens in foil bags. She thrust them at me and said, ‘Now go home and have a nice weekend with your friends. Just don’t get yourself—or me—into any trouble.’ It was an overprotected fourteen-year-old’s dream, I tell you.”

Jonah and his wife buried their faces in their hands in mock horror. “If we’d known…”

I said I had to go not long after that. I said I had to look in on Mum, which I didn’t have any intention of doing. But I did have to get out of there. I was reeling, partly from the vodka shots, but only partly. It was going to take me more than one night to catch up with thirty years of missing information. Missing love.

By the time I got back to the hotel, all the confusing new feelings I’d been having about my mother since her accident had resolved themselves into the familiar little angry knot I’d had with me most of my life. It wasn’t enough to know that she had once been a woman capable of a great love. Yeah, sure, she’d suffered. Lost the love of her life, and carried a gutful of blame over it. And yes, I hadn’t been perfect by any means. Needy and unforgiving and a nightmare adolescent. But it still wasn’t enough. Because in the end, she’d made all the decisions, and I’d paid for them.

I went into the bathroom and threw up, which is something I hadn’t done—at least from too much drinking—since I was an undergrad. I lay on the bed with a wet washcloth on my face and tried not to notice the room spinning. As the headache started to kick in, I decided that I wouldn’t cancel my Tate talk after all. Let Mum’s fellow docs take care of her. I knew they would. She’d always put her work first….

And so did he.
The voice in my head was her voice.
He was the one who really chose work over love.
He needn’t have risked his life with a dangerous operation. He had so much. A lover, a family. A child on the way. But none of it was as important to him as his work.

OK, then, bugger the both of them. Better just get on with it, like they would.

I had a wicked hangover, which is just what you don’t want on a seven-hour plane trip. At least I was in the pointy end again, courtesy of the bezillionare. I took the piece of seared salmon the flight attendant offered me, thinking of all the poor sods in the back struggling through their cardboard chicken and rubber pasta. But even in first class, airline food is crap. The fish was seared, all right; cooked to perfection, and then left on the griddle for another hour and a half. All I really wanted was water, anyway. While I waited for someone to take the tray, I picked up the little plastic saltshaker, letting a few grains drop into my hand. After Mum’s accident, I hadn’t thought of getting back to Raz’s lab. When I hadn’t shown up, he’d assumed I was still dark with him. He’d done the analysis without me, as a goodwill gesture. He’d left a message, scribbled by hand, at the desk of my hotel. I had it out on the linen-covered tray table in front of me.

You were right: NaCl. But sea, not rock. Ck. how they made kosher salt in C.15
^th
? 16
^th
? Maybe not table salt? Maritime adventures? Fits yr known locations, Spain and Venice??? Sorry fr being an oaf last night. Let me know how goes Lon. Your mate,

Rattus Raz

I smiled. Typical Raz. Looking for zebras again. And, of course, his shipwreck obsession would lead him to think of maritime mishaps. But I would take his advice and look into it. What made salt kosher, anyway? I had no idea. It was another line of inquiry, another thread to follow. Perhaps the genie in the book would give me a glimpse of something.

I let the white grains fall from my hand onto a weary, rust-edged lettuce leaf. Thousands of feet below, the salty waves of an unseen ocean heaved and crashed in the dark.

Tarragona, 1492