Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(122)
“When you’re a dad, there’s no one above you. If I don’t do something that has to be done, who is going to do it?”
“I still couldn’t do it.”
“The more you won’t want to do it, the more of a dad you’ll be.”
The closet was filled with hundreds of plastic bags. He had chosen a clear one to teach me a lesson.
I obsessed over that squirrel for a few days, and then didn’t think about it again for a quarter century, until Julia was pregnant with Sam, at which point I started having a recurrent dream of dead squirrels lining the streets of our neighborhood. There were thousands of them: pushed against curbs, filling public garbage cans, prone in final poses while automatic sprinkler systems soaked through their fur. In the dream I was always returning home from somewhere, always walking up our street, it was always the end of the day. The window shades of the house were illuminated like TV screens. We didn’t have a working fireplace, but smoke poured from the chimney. I had to walk on tiptoes to avoid stepping on squirrels, and sometimes it couldn’t be avoided. I apologized—to whom? There were squirrels on the windowsills, and on stoops, and pouring from the gutters. I could see their silhouettes on the undersides of awnings. They hung halfway out of mail slots, in apparent attempts to find food or water, or simply to die inside—like that squirrel that had wanted to die inside my childhood home. I knew I was going to have to take care of all of them.
Jacob wanted to go to his father’s side, as he had as a child, and ask him how he managed to shovel dirt into his father’s grave.
Did you think it was disgusting?
I did, his father would have said.
I couldn’t have done it.
His father would have laughed a father’s laugh and said, One day you’ll do it.
What if I can’t?
Children bury their dead parents, because the dead need to be buried. Parents do not need to bring their children into the world, but children need to bring their parents out of it.
Irv handed the shovel to Jacob. Their eyes met. The father whispered into the son’s ear: “Here we are and will be.”
When Jacob imagined his children surviving him, he felt no version of immortality, as it’s sometimes unimaginatively put, usually by people who are trying to encourage others to have children. He felt no contentment or peace or satisfaction of any kind. He felt only the overwhelming sadness of missing out. Death felt less fair with children, because there was more to miss. Whom would Benjy marry? (Despite himself, Jacob couldn’t shake his Jewish certainty that of course he would want to marry, and would marry.) To what ethical and lucrative profession would Sam be drawn? What odd hobbies would Max indulge? Where would they travel? What would their children look like? (Of course they would want to have children, and have children.) How would they cope and celebrate? How would each die? (At least he would miss their deaths. Maybe that was the compensation for having to die himself.)
Before returning to the car, Jacob went for a walk. He read the gravestones like pages in an enormous book. The names were magnificent—because they were Jewish haiku, because they traveled in time machines while those they identified were left behind, because they were as embarrassing as pennies collected in paper rolls, because they were as beautiful as boats in bottles brought over on boats, because they were mnemonics: Miriam Apfel, Shaindel Potash, Beryl Dressler…He wanted to remember them, to use them later. He wanted to remember all of it, to use it all: the rabbi’s shoelaces, the untied melodies of grief, the hardened footprints of a visitor in the rain.
Sidney Landesman, Ethel Keiser, Lebel Alterman, Deborah Fischbach, Lazer Berenbaum…
He would remember the names. He wouldn’t lose them. He would use them. He would make something of the no longer anything.
Seymour Kaiser, Shoshanna Ostrov, Elsa Glaser, Sura Needleman, Hymie Rattner, Simcha Tisch, Dinah Perlman, Ruchel Neustadt, Izzie Reinhardt, Ruben Fischman, Hindel Schulz…
Like listening to a Jewish river. But you can step in it twice. You can—Jacob could; he believed he could—take all that was lost and re-find it, reanimate it, breathe new life into the collapsed lungs of those names, those accents, those idioms and mannerisms and ways of being. The young rabbi was right: no one would ever have such names again. But he was wrong.
Mayer Vogel, Frida Walzer, Yussel Offenbacher, Rachel Blumenstein, Velvel Kronberg, Leah Beckerman, Mendel Fogelman, Sarah Bronstein, Schmuel Gersh, Wolf Seligman, Abner Edelson, Judith Weisz, Bernard Rosenbluth, Eliezer Umansky, Ruth Abramowicz, Irving Perlman, Leonard Goldberger, Nathan Moskowitz, Pincus Ziskind, Solomon Altman…
Jacob had once read that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt as if everyone were dead. And for all the individuality—for the extreme idiosyncrasy of the names of those extremely idiosyncratic Jews—there was only one fate.
And then he found himself where two walls met, at the corner of the vast cemetery, at the corner of the vast everything.
He turned to face the immensity, and only then did it occur to him, or only then was he forced to acknowledge what he’d forced himself not to: He was standing among suicides. He was in the ghetto for those unfit to be buried with the rest. This corner was where the shame was cordoned off. This was where the unspeakable shame was put beneath the ground. Milk on one set of plates, meat on the other: never the two should meet.