The Immortalists(41)
It was an unsurprising surprise. Klara knows what happens when you’re careless, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t. And it was more than that, it was the surge of it, dancing on the brink of causality – if this, then – with the man she loves. What is growing a baby if not making a flower appear from thin air, turning one scarf into two?
She’s stopped drinking. By the third trimester, her mind is clear, never better – but that’s the problem, it’s too empty, miles and miles of space in which Klara sits and thinks. She distracts herself by imagining the baby. When he kicks, Klara sees his little boy feet. She’s told Raj they have to name him Simon. During the last month, when she’s so swollen her shoes don’t fit, when she can’t sleep more than thirty minutes at a time, she pictures Simon’s face and doesn’t resent the baby anymore. And so, when a doctor pulls the child from Klara’s body on a stormy night in May and Raj cries, ‘It’s a girl!’ Klara knows that he must be mistaken.
‘That’s not right.’ She is delirious with pain; it feels as though a bomb exploded in her body, and she – the empty structure – is on the verge of collapse.
‘Oh, Klara,’ Raj says. ‘It is.’
They swaddle the child and bring her to Klara. The baby’s face is florid, startled alive. Her eyes are dark as olive pits.
‘You were so sure,’ Raj says. He’s laughing.
They call the girl Ruby. Klara remembers a friend of Varya’s by that name, a girl who lived above them at 72 Clinton. Rubina. It’s Hindi, which Raj’s mother would have appreciated. He moves into Klara’s apartment and coos to Ruby, sings lullabies in rusty Hindi. Soja baba Soja. Mackhan roti cheene.
In June, Klara’s family comes to visit. She shows them the Castro, Gertie clutching her pocketbook as they pass a gaggle of drag queens, and takes them to a Corps performance. Klara sits beside Daniel with her stomach flipping – she doesn’t know how he’ll respond to seeing men do ballet – but when the dancers bow, he claps louder than anyone else. That night, while Gertie’s meat loaf is in the oven, Daniel tells Klara about Mira. They met in the university dining hall and have since spent long nights in Hyde Park’s dive bars and all-night diners, debating Gorbachev and the NASA explosion and the merits of E.T.
‘She challenges you,’ Klara observes. Ruby is sleeping, her warm cheek stuck to Klara’s chest, and for once, Klara feels as though nothing is wrong in the world. ‘That’s good.’
In the past, Daniel would have made some retort – Challenges me? What makes you think I need that? – but now, he nods.
‘That she does,’ he says, with a sigh so contented that Klara is almost embarrassed to have heard it.
Gertie adores the baby. She holds Ruby constantly, staring at her raspberry-sized nose, nibbling her miniature fingers. Klara searches for a resemblance between them and finds one: their ears! Petite and delicate, curling in like seashells. But when Gertie met Raj, she opened her mouth and closed it, silent as a fish. Klara watched her mother take inventory of Raj’s dark skin and work boots, his secular slouch. She pulled Gertie into the bathroom.
‘Ma,’ Klara hissed. ‘Don’t be a bigot.’
‘A bigot?’ asked Gertie, flushing. ‘Is it too much to ask for the child to be raised Jewish?’
‘Yes,’ Klara said. ‘It is.’
Varya is full of advice. ‘Have you tried warm milk?’ she asks, when Ruby cries. ‘What about a walk in the stroller? Do you have an infant swing? Is she colicky? Where’s her binky?’
Klara’s brain spirals. ‘What’s a binky?’
‘What’s a binky?’ repeats Gertie.
‘You can’t be serious,’ Varya says. ‘She doesn’t have a binky?’
‘And this apartment,’ Gertie adds. ‘It’s not child-proofed. You wait until she starts walking: she could split her head on this table, take a tumble down the stairs.’
‘She’s fine,’ says Raj. ‘She has everything she needs.’
He takes the baby from Varya, who holds on a moment too long. ‘Hand her over!’ Daniel teases, prodding Varya in the ribs, which incites a smack of rebuttal and accompanying howl so loud that Klara nearly orders them to leave. But when they do, the next day – Gertie trundling into the front seat of a cab, Varya and Daniel waving through the back window – she misses them desperately. While they were here, it was easier to ignore the fact that Simon and Saul were not. Her father had loved babies. Klara still remembers visiting the hospital after Simon was born breech, his umbilical cord wrapped like a necklace. Saul stood in front of the ICU as if to guard this half-blue, backward boy, his last. At home, he could hold the baby for hours. When Simon twitched in his sleep or puckered his lips, Saul chuckled with disproportionate delight.
As children, the siblings believed Saul could answer any question they wished to know. But Klara and Simon grew to dislike his answers. They disdained his routine of work and Torah study, his uniform of gabardine slacks and trench and walking hat. Now, Klara has more sympathy for him. Saul came from immigrants, and Klara suspects he lived in fear of losing the life he’d been given. She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory – to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child. Ruby will come to Klara with questions. What will Klara tell her, with frantic and unheard insistence? To Ruby, Klara’s past will seem like a story, Saul and Simon no more than her mother’s ghosts.