Girl at War(34)

“I missed you,” I said when we kissed in the street. “I thought maybe I’d finally take you over to my uncle’s place, if you want.” I could feel myself talking too quickly. Brian pulled away a little. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just—”

“What?”

“You kind of blew me off this weekend.”

“I was home. I sent you a message.”

“You didn’t say goodbye.”

“I wanted to get an early start. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” He conceded that I hadn’t missed much over the weekend, that he’d spent most of the time in the library working on his thesis, a study of universal grammar theory via Nicaraguan Sign Language. Previously isolated across the country, deaf students had been brought to a special education school with the intent of training them in spoken Spanish, but on the playground and in the dorms they’d rapidly developed a signed system of their own. Linguists flocked to the site, eager to witness the birth of a new language.

“It’s really amazing,” Brian said. “After only a few years they had developed subject-verb agreement and classifier systems.” I liked listening to him talk about the project, how he got so excited about the finer points of grammar, but I knew nothing of the topic beyond what he’d told me, so the conversation soon petered out. He saw Austerlitz protruding from my purse and pulled it out. “Oh, not Sebald again.”

Brian and I did not have the same taste in books, which led to a kind of intellectual jousting I usually enjoyed. But I did not feel like debating, not about this.

“Where are you getting this old-man stuff?”

“From an old man,” I said. “But I like him.”

“Ariel or Sebald?”

“Both.”

“What is it about him? Is it the loopy sentences? The man does know his way around a comma.”

“Maybe.” Really it was because of the feeling of grief that ran through his books like a subterranean river. But I didn’t want to say that aloud. Not yet.

“He’s a bit of a German apologist, though, no?” Brian said.

“I think it’s more complicated than that.”

“Of course it is. But if there’s ever a time you get to draw the moral line in the sand, it’s the Holocaust. I mean, his father was in the Wehrmacht.”

“That’s not his fault, what his father did.”

“It’s not. But it still makes things…thorny.”

“Which makes the book good.”

“Or ethically objectionable.”

I kissed him to make him stop talking. “You’re just grumpy because I’ve read a book you haven’t. Don’t worry—you can borrow it when I’m done.” I tried to smile and held my hand out to him.

“Fine, I’m stopping,” he said, and we locked pinkie fingers in what had become our signal for a truce. “But only because I’m starving.”

People’s use of the word starving when they obviously were not had always bothered me, but it was especially irritating at college, where every night was a buffet of excess. I thought of the piles of roast chicken and potato salad and fluorescent yellow corn bread the school was likely serving for Sunday dinner, then throwing away.

In Croatia I had been a normal-size fifth grader. In America I was skinny. When I went for my first physical, I didn’t hit the minimum on the growth charts for weight and height. The doctor instructed Laura to give me nutritional milk shakes twice a day along with my regular meals, so that night after dinner she poured a cup of gritty chocolate liquid and sat me down on a stool at the counter. I told her I wasn’t hungry, but she put on her sternest expression and told me to drink. I saw a flash of my own mother’s impatience in Laura’s irises and drained the whole cup. But when I stood to place the glass in the sink I was alarmed by an unfamiliar bubbling in my stomach. My limbs were heavy and my throat contracted. I was suffocating. I ran out to the back porch and threw up over the railing.

“The doctor said that might happen,” Laura said when I’d calmed down. “You were just full.”

I told her feeling full was awful and I never wanted to do it again. I panicked and threw up every night for the rest of the week.

“Well, if you’re on the brink of death we can just go to the dining hall,” I said to Brian.

“Don’t you be grumpy now.” He squeezed my pinkie finger, a reminder of our pact.

We boarded the train, and he slouched picturesquely beneath the DO NOT LEAN ON DOORS decal, hands in the pockets of his army surplus jacket.

“Hey, I got you something,” he said.

“What for?”

“No reason. Saw it and thought of you. Some vintage store.”

He unfurled his hand to reveal a sun-bleached shell fragment strung on a bronze chain. He dropped the necklace into my palm. “It’s a piece of the moon.” He smiled the mischievous, crooked smile I’d come to love.

“It’s perfect. Thank you.” Fumbling with the clasp, I put the necklace on and tried to draw myself from the depths of my foul mood. We came up from the subway where the remnants of Little Italy converged with Chinatown, and headed to my uncle’s restaurant.

Uncle Junior had been called Junior for so long that Jack could not remember what the name of the “original” had been. Even uncle was an approximation of things; he was probably more like a great-uncle or second cousin. With his parents gone, no one wanted to admit to him that we couldn’t remember his name, so we never asked.