Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(165)

I received my grandfather’s death certificate from the Maryl and Department of Records. I wanted to know that I knew what I already knew. The coroner’s handwriting was as good as typeset, the opposite of a doctor’s: asphyxiation by hanging. He killed himself at approximately ten in the morning. The certificate said that it was Mr. Kowalski, the next-door neighbor, who made the report. That my grandfather’s name was Isaac Bloch. That he had been born in Poland. That he hanged himself with a belt wedged between his kitchen door and its frame.

But when I was imagining it in bed that night, I saw him outside, hanging by a rope from a tree. The grass in the shadow of his feet slowly died and powdered to a little patch of dirt in an otherwise wild, overgrown garden.

Later in the night, I imagined plants ascending to meet his feet, as if the earth were trying to atone for its gravity. I imagined palm fronds holding him up like hands, the rope slack.

Even later—I barely slept—I imagined walking with my grandfather through a redwood forest. His skin was blue and his fingernails were an inch long, but otherwise he looked like the man at whose kitchen table I used to eat black bread and cantaloupe, the man who, when told not to change into his bathing suit in public, asked, “Why not?” He stopped at a massive overturned tree and pointed at the rings.

“This, here, is my parents’ wedding. It was an arranged marriage. It worked. And here,” he said, pointing at a different ring, “is when Iser fell from a tree and broke his arm.”

“Iser?”

“My brother. You were named for him.”

“I thought I was named for someone named Yakov.”

“No. We just told you that.”

“How does Iser become Jacob?”

“Iser is short for Israel. After wrestling with Jacob through the night, the angel renamed him Israel.”

“How old was he?”

“And here,” he said, pointing at another ring, “is when I left home. With Benny. Everyone else stayed—my grandparents and parents, my other five brothers—and I wanted to stay, but Benny convinced me. He forced me. And here is when Benny and I got on different boats, one for America, one for Israel.” He touched a ring, and let his long fingernail slide outward toward the bark as he spoke. “This, here, is when you were born. Here you were a boy. Here you got married. Here is Sam’s birth, here is Max’s, here is Benjy’s. And here”—he touched his fingernail to the rim of the trunk, like a record needle—“is right now. And out here”—he pointed to a spot in the air, about an inch outside the trunk—“is when you’ll die, and here”—he gestured at the area slightly nearer to the trunk—“is the rest of your life, and here”—he pointed to just outside the trunk—“is what happens next.”

I understood, somehow, that the weight of his hanging body had pulled the tree over, making our history visible.


HOW TO PLAY SEVEN RINGS

I could never anticipate which religious rituals Julia would find beautiful and which misogynistic, morally repugnant, or simply foolish. So I was surprised when she wanted to walk the seven rings around me under the chuppah.

In our preparatory reading—her preparatory reading; I gave up fairly quickly—she learned that the rings echo the biblical story of Joshua leading the Israelites into Canaan. When they came to the walled city of Jericho, and the first battle they would have to fight on their way to the Promised Land, God instructed Joshua to march the Israelites around the walls seven times. As soon as they had completed the seventh ring, the walls came tumbling down, and the Israelites conquered the city.

“You hide your greatest secret behind a wall,” she said, with a tone that suggested both irony and earnestness, “and I will surround you with love, and the wall will topple—”

“And you will have conquered me.”

“We will have conquered ourselves.”

“All I have to do is stand there?”

“Just stand there and topple.”

“What’s my greatest secret?”

“I don’t know. We’re only beginning.”

It wasn’t until we were ending that she knew.


HOW TO PLAY THE LAST WHOLLY HAPPY MOMENT

“Let’s do something special,” I suggested a month before Julia’s fortieth birthday. “Something unlike us. A party. A blowout: band, ice cream truck, magician.”

“A magician?”

“Or a flamenco dancer.”

“No,” she said. “That’s the last thing I’d want.”

“Even if it’s last, it’s still on the list.”

She laughed and said, “It’s sweet of you to think of that. But let’s do something simple. A nice dinner at home.”

“Come on. We’ll make it fun.”

“Fun for me would be a simple family dinner.”

I tried a few times to persuade her, but she made clear, with increasing force, that she didn’t want “a big deal.”

“You’re sure you’re not protesting too much?”

“I’m not protesting at all. The thing I most want is to have a nice, quiet dinner with my family.”

The boys and I made her breakfast in bed that morning: fresh waffle, kale-and-pear smoothie, huevos rancheros.