The Immortalists(4)

When Klara wasn’t home, Varya retrieved The Book of Divination from beneath Klara’s bed and climbed into her own. She lay on her stomach to sound out the words: haruspicy (by the livers of sacrificed animals), ceromancy (by patterns in wax), rhabdomancy (by rods). On cool days, breeze from the window ruffled the family trees and old photos she keeps taped to the wall beside her bed. Through these documents, she tracks the mysterious, underground brokering of traits: genes flicking on and off and on again, her grandfather Lev’s rangy legs skipping Saul for Daniel.

Lev came to New York on a steamship with his father, a cloth merchant, after his mother was killed in the pogroms of 1905. At Ellis Island, they were tested for disease and interrogated in English while they stared at the fist of the iron woman who watched, impassive, from the sea they had just crossed. Lev’s father repaired sewing machines; Lev worked in a garment factory run by a German Jew who allowed him to observe the Sabbath. Lev became an assistant manager, then a manager. In 1930, he opened his own business – Gold’s Tailor and Dressmaking – in a basement apartment on Hester Street.

Varya was named for her father’s mother, who worked as Lev’s bookkeeper until their retirement. She knows less about her maternal grandparents – only that her grandmother was named Klara, like Varya’s younger sister, and that she arrived from Hungary in 1913. But she died when Varya’s mother, Gertie, was only six, and Gertie rarely speaks of her. Once, Klara and Varya snuck into Gertie’s bedroom and scoured it for traces of their grandparents. Like dogs, they smelled the mystery that surrounded this pair, the whiff of intrigue and shame, and they nosed their way to the chest of drawers where Gertie keeps her underclothes. In the top drawer, they found a small wooden box, lacquered and gold hinged. Inside was a yellowed stack of photographs that showed a small, puckish woman with short black hair and heavy-lidded eyes. In the first photo, she stood in a skirted leotard with one hip cocked to the side, holding a cane above her head. In another, she rode a horse, bent over backward with her midriff showing. In the photo Varya and Klara liked best, the woman was suspended in midair, hanging from a rope that she held in her teeth.

Two things told them this woman was their grandmother. The first was a wrinkled old photo, greased with fingerprints, in which the same woman stood with a tall man and a small child. Varya and Klara knew the child was their mother, even at this reduced size: she held her parents’ hands in her small, fat fists, and her face was squeezed into an expression of consternation that Gertie still frequently wore.

Klara claimed the box and its contents.

‘It belongs to me,’ she said. ‘I got her name. Ma never looks at it, anyway.’

But they soon found that was not true. The morning after Klara secreted the lacquered box back to the bedroom and tucked it beneath her bottom bunk, a caw came from their parents’ room, followed by Gertie’s heated interrogations and Saul’s muffled denial. Moments later, Gertie burst into the bunk room.

‘Who took it?’ she cried. ‘Who?’

Her nostrils flared, and her wide hips blocked the light that usually spilled in from the hallway. Klara was hot with fear, nearly crying. When Saul left for work and Gertie stalked into the kitchen, Klara snuck into her parents’ room and put the box exactly where she’d found it. But when the apartment was empty, Varya knew that Klara returned to the photos and the tiny woman inside them. She stared at the woman’s intensity, her glamour, and vowed she’d live up to her namesake.

Don’t look around like that,’ Daniel hisses. ‘Act like you belong.’

The Golds hurry up the stairs. The walls are covered in chipped beige paint, and the halls are dark. When they reach the fifth floor, Daniel pauses.

‘What do you suggest we do now?’ whispers Varya. She likes it when Daniel is stumped.

‘We wait,’ says Daniel. ‘For someone to come out.’

But Varya doesn’t want to wait. She’s jittery, filled with unexpected dread, and she starts down the hallway alone.

She thought that magic would be detectable, but the doors on this floor look exactly the same, with their scratched brass knobs and numbers. The four in number fifty-four has fallen sideways. When Varya walks toward the door, she hears the sound of a television or a radio: a baseball game. Assuming that a rishika would not care about baseball, she steps back again.

Her siblings have floated apart. Daniel stands near the stairwell with his hands in his pockets, watching the doors. Simon joins Varya at number fifty-four, rises onto his tiptoes and pushes the four back into place with his index finger. Klara has been wandering in the opposite direction, but now she comes to stand with them. She is followed by the scent of Breck Gold Formula, a product Klara bought with weeks of allowance; the rest of the family uses Prell, which comes in a plastic tube like toothpaste and squirts jelly the color of kelp. Though Varya scoffs outwardly – she would never spend so much on shampoo – she is envious of Klara, who smells like rosemary and oranges, and who now raises her hand to knock.

‘What are you doing?’ whispers Daniel. ‘That could be anyone. It could be –’

‘Yeah?’

The voice that comes from behind the door is low in pitch and gruff.

‘We’re here to see the woman,’ Klara tries.

Silence. Varya holds her breath. There is a peephole in the door, smaller than a pencil eraser.