The Family(53)

And easily, simply, as though he had always known how the evening would go, Saul raises the iron pipe up above his head and brings it crashing down against the other man’s skull.

The man is knocked back against the wall, blood streaming from his nose and a gash across his cheek.

You brought this on yourself, says Joey. And then, let’s go.

And Saul walks out behind Joey into the night, and eases into the waiting car, and watches the old gas streetlights flicker as they drive back to Joey’s, and then to Paolo and Antonia’s, where Julia and Robbie are sleeping with slack faces and long, heavy limbs, and where Sofia has gone to spend the evening. He says good night to Antonia, picks up Julia and kisses her head. She snuggles back into sleep against his chest. He carries her home, three blocks that feel longer in the icy fall air. Sofia shuts the door to Julia’s bedroom after Saul eases her under her blankets, and they retreat into their own room.

As Saul feels himself drift away from the events of his evening, Sofia asks, “What were you doing tonight?”

Saul turns toward her. Sofia has propped herself up on one elbow and her hair hangs down over her chest toward her pillow. Her face glows in the lamplight. “Working,” he says. He is confused; Sofia doesn’t usually ask questions about his work, and he doesn’t know how to answer. He doesn’t want to answer.

Sofia is impatient. “I know,” she says. “But working, where? Who with? What were you doing?”

“Just some—some routine stuff,” says Saul. “With Joey.” And now his heart is racing, because it’s as if Sofia knows that tonight was different, that tonight Saul crossed a line he cannot get back over. This is more an intellectual realization than anything else, because there is a blank space in his body where there should be regret, fear, empathy. Saul wants to go to sleep. He wants to dive into the place where Sofia’s hair falls down over her collarbones, to fill his hands with her breasts and his chest with her breath until there is nothing left of himself.

“Fine,” says Sofia. But she turns off the light and turns away from him, and Saul is left to stare at the ceiling.

It would be easy to tell himself that he was torn up over his actions: that the man he attacked, huddled on the floor, holding his face with shaking fingers, would haunt Saul’s dreams. Or that to do his job, Saul has developed a finely tuned emotional system for separating his home life and his work life. Or that he was damaged in some fundamental way, and his violence was a reflection of the trauma of Germany, the helplessness of losing his religion and his culture.

It is harder to know what Saul is learning: that maybe violence just isn’t as hard as it’s made out to be. Maybe there is something human about it. Maybe it is easy.



* * *



—

Sofia hears Saul’s breath stretch out as he slips into sleep. But Sofia lies awake, her eyes dry and the sheets heating up beneath her as she tosses and turns. She is not sure why she asked Saul about his work; she knows Family work is never discussed; she has always known this. She knows that her job as the wife of a Family man should be to provide a safe space, an alternative to the vague but perilous danger of leaving a man to his own thoughts. This is not the way, she tells herself, to get what you want.

And then, in an internal voice that sounds like Frankie, what do you even want?



* * *



—

Soon it is 1945. Sofia passes a sleepless winter. She is almost twenty-two years old. She begins waking up gasping for air, like there is an anvil crushing her chest. Each time, she stumbles to the kitchen and runs cold water and stares at the stream of it gushing out of the tap until her heartbeat returns to normal. She looks out the kitchen window and grips the edge of the sink and tries with all her might to remember what has frightened her out of sleep. But without fail, she lies awake for the rest of the night, heart upturned to her bedroom ceiling.

During the day Sofia cooks with Rosa. She takes walks with Antonia, and they watch as Julia and Robbie toddle in their snowsuits. She wipes counters and folds laundry. Saul works longer days, and comes home from God-knows-where talkative and hungry. He wraps Julia into his arms and tickles her and leans to kiss Sofia, who tries her best to bite her tongue: not to ask the questions that arise like hiccups, involuntary, one after another.

But at night, Sofia lies awake, dissatisfaction like water filling her lungs. She searches for air and finds none.

One crisp night in January, Sofia wakes, shaking and sweaty, and moves to the kitchen as a reflex: further from Saul and Julia, the better to find her way back to her body. Outside, the full moon shines, light like milk pooling down into the crisscross of laundry lines and scraggly backyard trees. Sofia heaves open the window in the kitchen and sticks her face out into the moonlit midnight.

Two weeks later, it happens again. This time, she tiptoes downstairs in her nightgown and stands on the stoop of her building, her hair swimming in the night air, her feet hardening against the frigid stairs.

Sofia has found she is living with hardly any concrete responsibilities, but innumerable unwritten expectations. The strange confined freedom of her new adult life suffocates her and makes her feel desperate, hysterical. She becomes short with Saul and Julia; she avoids Rosa’s eyes. Sofia grows bitter, tasting vinegar at the back of her tongue as she scrubs scum out of the sink. It seems like Saul’s life is moving and hers is settling into a rut. Rosa doesn’t understand: she can’t imagine not being satisfied with a pile of diapers and a child, a child whose overwhelming need for Sofia’s attention, for her time, for her body, threatens to pull the whole house down brick by brick. Sofia holds back tears as she bathes Julia, as she hands a wooden block back and forth while Julia cackles, as she listens to the midday silence of her home while Julia sleeps, as she finds herself, more and more often, alone. She can’t complain to Antonia. Antonia, who she almost lost. Antonia, who had risen to the occasion of motherhood like a phoenix, dusting off her near-death depression; Antonia with her ability to find something bigger in parenting than Sofia can imagine. Sofia has always known Antonia would be a better mother than she would. She has always known that.