Unveiling

The cemetery, located just across the George Washington Bridge, was home to a small family of deer. Joshua stopped the car near the knell where they clustered. I chose the seat behind Joshua so that I could see his son Garden clearly. My gaze followed his. 

I counted seven deer and said as much out loud. 

“Look back there, though. The one with the antlers!” Garden pointed out the passenger seat window. A deer, startled by our car, looked back at us on high alert. There was, indeed, an eighth.

I felt a kind of protectiveness over Garden. He was four years my junior, just beginning his adult life; I was a few years in. His hair snuck just beneath the headrest, as if inviting me to touch it. Joshua looked over at the deer, then at his son, who was still looking, in turn, at that small family in awe.

“How have the concerts been?” I asked. When Joshua restarted the car, his guitar, the other passenger in the backseat, tipped in my direction.

“Oh, you know. The usual crowd.”

Joshua was wearing a yarmulke decorated with gold vines in front of what appeared to be a purple garden. He’d always coordinate the color of his yarmulke and guitar strap. The first few times I saw him play at shul he wore primary colors—blue with blue, red with red. Soon enough, as if to keep me enticed, the shades got more complex: mauve with mauve, or teal with teal. I noticed the strap on his guitar as I leaned it back into its place. Sure enough, it had gold vines in front of a purple garden. Joshua was one of those American hippie Jews, so unlike my parents that it felt as if they worshipped different Gods.

As soon as he turned away from the deer, Garden started twirling his auburn locks. Ever since his hair grew out, he loved fondling it. It warranted that kind of adoration. He twirled and twirled until we came to a line of cars parked by a bend in the road. Garden jumped out of the front seat before we could even come to a full stop. He was off to find Karina, my sweet cousin. It was her grandfather—the one from the side of the family I wasn’t related to—whose tombstone was being unveiled. Garden was hopelessly in love with her. 

Joshua parked the car with one tire eating the edge of the grass.

The first time I prayed in the main shul up in Washington Heights, he was up on the bimah with his guitar doing a few songs in between parts of the service. Karina grew up davening there, same age as Garden. I had just moved up there a few weeks earlier. The neighborhood appealed to me because it was almost as Russian as Brighton but also pretty and filled with gays. I joined in on Ma Tovu that night. At the end of the service, as I was putting my tallis away and grabbing my coat off the floor, Joshua approached me with the guitar saddled around his shoulder.

“You sing, don’t you?” he asked. “Like—for real?”

He eventually enlisted me to join his klezmer band, where I happily sang for two years. I got paid enough to make rent and it made me feel like the Broadway boy I had always wanted to be. My block emerged in the fall, suddenly, as if to remind me that all those dreams were unfulfilled, that I was no longer young. 

“Your replacement is out sick,” Joshua said as we approached the plot a few rows in. He still seemed quite bitter about the whole thing. 

He pressed me hard when I’d told him I needed a break. We had gigs lined up, gigs he’d have to cancel if I didn’t get better. But the block left me mute. I’d asked Joshua to put his fingers round my larynx and squeeze, just to prove that it wasn’t all in my head. It sat around my voice box like a clump of lead, and I wanted him to feel its hardness. My cartilage felt nasty with his hand up against it—squishy and semi-gelatinous.

“It’s not so tight, Benny. Just drink more tea and relax.”

But I couldn’t, and after two or three weeks had passed, he told me he would need to find someone else. I recommended Garden. 

“You know he’d sooner drop dead.” 

Now Garden stood beside Karina by her grandfather’s plot, passing a handwarmer back and forth. Garden loved to forget his mittens. If I counted on one hand how many times I’d seen him wearing them in the winter, it’d be a fist. It made me upset, and astonished, and riven with anger, how he could be idiotic with such consistency. I watched Karina’s hands linger on his when they passed the warmer between them.

“Karina, solnishka—go get the cups, will you?”

Ruslana’s voice came from behind the veiled stone. She retrieved two bouquets, red and white carnations, that she had lying in wait. 

Karina darted to the trunk of their car. I thought of the cemeteries I had visited in Ukraine, where my mother’s father was buried. The tombstones in the Eastern Orthodox sections came outfitted with cups for flowers. The Jewish sections had become overrun with weeds. Karina bounded back with two red Solo cups. She had these atmospheric brown eyes and cheekbones that were sharp but not gaunt. She handed Ruslana the cups and Ruslana arranged them about the grave. 

“My father loved carnations,” she said to no one in particular.

I handed her a bouquet of yellow roses that I’d bought from a vendor on my corner.

“My favorites! How’d you know, Benny?”

Despite this honorable designation, they got placed below the cups, directly on the ground. The day belonged to him, not her.

The mourners, about two dozen in all, waddled over like penguins and waited in clumps, clustered, presumably, with the people they came here with. There was no rabbi. Joshua stood next to me and strummed the solfege in G on his guitar. 

When I sang with the band, I’d parrot the pattern as part of my warm-up. Meanwhile, our drummer Eddy would clap his drumsticks and pace the floor like a caged animal. The first few times I asked Eddy to quiet down, he looked at me as if I were being totally unreasonable. I stopped asking. I didn't typically get nervous when I performed. I only got nervous when Garden came to watch. He was at the very last gig I played, at a nursing home in the Bronx, a welcome sight amongst the grannies with their hard candies and boxy heads. I had to engage with the softer part of my voice when we performed in those intimate venues—less throat, more lungs. Eddy found a way to tone it down (more cymbal, less snare). Carlos, the only Sephardic Jew in our company, opted for the accordion instead of the keys. Gina was on clarinet; Ruth was on fiddle. I heard myself better in those smaller venues, so I sang better. Klezmer can be quite lyrical. But I never lost the feeling of being a ham. It was as if I was in high school again playing Tevye, nothing but me and the lights. And Garden. He sat in the back of the house. I saw his eyes clearly. His hair was just beginning to grow out then.

Karina ran back to the car and got out a woolen blanket. The blanket came up over her chin but you could still see her smiling beneath her nose, a perfectly shaped bulb, hanging just over the blanket’s edge. Garden inched his way over, rubbing his hands together. She opened up the blanket. He sidled in.

“I don’t think my father would have wanted so much hullabaloo,” said Ruslana.

That was the translation I whispered into Joshua’s ear. Translating shum as hullabaloo was a bit of a stretch, but the word was too frenetic to connote simple noise. Ruslana looked over at me. For a moment I thought she might switch to English for Joshua and Garden’s benefit, but she chose to continue in Russian, which pleased me. It felt like a way to bring Joshua close to me, for him to know that my pain was real. 

“But my father loved to find any reason to celebrate. When his patients recovered, he would come home wearing a big smile on his face. Even when his days were bad—and they probably were, often enough, given his profession—he still found the time to tuck me in and tell me something good about his day. He was hopeful. In spite of all that he lived through, he was a positive man.” 

From under the blanket, I could see Garden’s body shuffling, probably because he was stuffing his hands in his pockets. I watched Karina whisper in his ear. 

“Would you mind filming, Benny?” Ruslana asked.

My hands were warm, protected blissfully, by a pair of mittens my own grandfather gave me. They were a little too big so pockets of air always came in at my wrists, but I loved wearing them because they made me feel close to him. I thought of the impenetrable winters they endured as I stuffed them in my pocket and grabbed my phone. I nodded after I got it in place.

Karina left the confines of the blanket. She and Ruslana removed the plastic strings that held the gossamer sheet over the headstone. The man’s name was painted in capital typeface. A picture of his face was stenciled into the stone.

Beneath it were three lines written in Russian:

Magnificent Physician

Loyal Husband

Adoring Father and Grandfather

A handful of the mourners proceeded to tell stories, one by one, of how the doctor’s optimism turned their misery into something manageable. And his expertise! On and on they went about all the good he did in his life. They moved me: sincerity is built into the Russian language, even when we Jews are doing the talking. 

Joshua started singing and strumming Ose Shalom, and I joined in. The harmony was simple. The constriction holding my voice box relented, for a moment, and I piped out a kind of blossoming, resonant whoop. 

“Your voice is coming back!” Joshua said. He kept his hands on the steering wheel as we followed the line of departing vehicles, but caught my eyes in the rearview. Garden looked indifferently out the window. I was scared to entertain the possibility, but something inside me was stirring.

“Maybe it is,” I said, as we took a left out of the cemetery. 

I felt good. More than good, honestly. I felt as if I were on a ray from heaven, particularly when we crossed the bridge to go back to Washington Heights and I could see the Hudson flowing from the skyline to the Tap. My parents, who skipped the unveiling to avoid the slog up from Brighton, refused to do any singing in the shul we went to when I was a child. They both had beautiful voices but no relationship to the melodies. The prayers were foreign to them, no matter how much they tried to convince themselves otherwise. I, on the other hand, grew up with them. Wasn’t that the whole reason that they came to America? So that those prayers would be less foreign to me?

I decided to go to shul that Friday, five days after the unveiling. Karina and Ruslana were there. The pews radiated out from the bimah like half of a ripple in a pond. I sat next to Karina, closer to the central aisle. Just before the service began, Ruslana leaned over to me. 

“Did you see the deer the other day?”

I nodded.

“I’m so happy my father won’t have to be alone.”

I pictured Garden’s face up against the window ogling the little family.

He walked in just as the service began. I could see him from the corner of my eye, circling the mostly empty seats, making a show of disinterest, and finally choosing the seat across the aisle from me. He kept his siddur open but didn’t seem to be following the service. He kept glancing off to his left, past me, towards Karina. Karina wasn’t glancing back, which brought me a bit of relief. Ruslana could read Hebrew surprisingly well for a Russian émigré. I doubt she knew what any of it meant. I certainly didn’t. It was a different way of forging meaning, simply singing things with the hope you might come closer to God. I kind of liked being left in the dark.

It felt good to sing. Good enough that I could almost keep my thoughts off Garden. 

Joshua and the band performed after the service. My replacement, only a few years older than me, was totally bald. He didn’t quite sound over his cold. At the oneg afterwards, Ruslana was talking to another Russian and Karina huddled in a corner with Garden. She looked at him indifferently. How in God’s name could she resist his hair?  

I, alas, found myself in conversation with my replacement.

“I used to be quite the singer myself,” I said. “In fact, I used to sing with the band.”

“So you’re Benny?”

He looked unimpressed, so I played a video from an old gig on my phone. I was wearing the tallis gifted to me by my parents on my bar mitzvah, white, with a golden tree on it and the pre-adornment blessing in an embroidered oval right above the second or third vertebra. I’ve worn it ever since, which has saved me from ever needing to pinch one of the blue ones that crowd the racks in every sanctuary’s antechamber. It shimmered when I shimmied. Klezmer is built for the shimmy. Not many other singers shimmied like I did.

“Well, color me impressed,” he said, with what I thought was a bit of envy.

I felt obliged to return the compliment. His technique wasn’t sterling. He could use a little more breath support and make his ‘t’s stab less. He slouched. His lack of shimmying—don’t get me started. 

“I like how you close your eyes,” I said. He received this compliment with about as much enthusiasm as it was offered, and, within a few moments, was off picking up more smoked salmon and rugelach. 

The crowd of noshers began to thin. Karina and Ruslana headed arm-in-arm toward the synagogue doors. Karina reached out and rubbed my shoulder.

“Come back with us?”

They seemed to believe I was always alone. I was, frankly, but they represented a different kind of loneliness for me. Russians are quite insular, and so I feel like I’m entering some otherworldly silo whenever I step into their house. Often it’s just other Russians there, collectively wary that “Americans” could ever understand them. Karina and Ruslana made a lot of the same food that my parents made in my childhood. All of it was delicious. The “coat” in their shuba disguised the herring perfectly, and the herring was actually edible under those layers of egg and beet. They always prepared things in advance, so I never actually saw them cooking. I’m sure they had plenty at their house now. I imagined them before shul, Ruslana barking orders and Karina, silent, obedient, a head or two taller than her mother, manning the whisk or twisting dough. 

I could go back with them. But a yes now would mean a promenade of invitations later (for tea, or for some dinner at some Maxim’s), and I would feel obliged to those invitations too. 

“I’m tired,” I said. “Good night, dorogiye. Sometime soon.”

Karina looked at me skeptically.

“Whatever, cuz.” She and Ruslana walked away.

Garden slunk up to me after they left.

“You okay, Benny?”

“Just thinking too much.” 

“I know just what you need,” he said.

He took me out for a drink at a starlit pub around the corner from the shul. We clinked glasses filled to the brim with honeydew cider. He looked confident and happy. His back was straight as a board.

“I’ve been working on a few songs in Russian,” he said. 

“No way.” 

“Fucking tough language. So many weird sounds? Like. How are you supposed to make the vowel sounds soft?”

I demonstrated for him how my name was pronounced in Russian—an elongated “yaw” after the first letter. B-yehn-ya. 

“Bi-en-ya.”

“B-yehn-ya.”

“Bi-EN-ya.”

“B-yehhhn-ya.”

“Bi-EN!-ya.” 

“We’ll work on it.”

“Can I play you what I’ve got so far?”

He had recently moved into his own place, a studio in the neighborhood, buffeted by his starting real estate agent salary. His room was decorated with posters of Muhammad Ali, lava lamps, two quilts hanging opposite one another, and some Post-it notes in various neon shades. I scrambled to read what was on the notes but he lifted his arm.

“Those are personal.”

Maybe you shouldn’t put them on your walls, Garden, I thought to myself. I wanted to slap him. I wanted him to slap me. 

He tied his hair back. A speck of his midriff came through when he lifted his sweater over his head. The tiny trail of hair cut through his plump belly button and led down to his underwear, which peeked out gingerly over the rim of his sweatpants. He got the guitar out of its case and started playing Vysotsky. Karina’s favorite. She must have told him. He had the grunt and gravel of the voice down pat, even though his pronunciation was weak. Still, his voice was strong enough—and his imitation clear enough—that one could forgive his obviously American accent. He struggled with the extension of the vowels and their aspiration, but he cared deeply, even if his feelings eclipsed his capacity to express the words clearly. In fact, that’s what made it beautiful. 

“Are there any words I mispronounced?” he asked.

“A few. Just sing it one more time for me.”

I pretended he was singing to me. Suddenly, it seemed like he was perfectly fluent. Maybe Karina laid it all out for him—I had no idea what they did when we weren’t together, and I didn’t want to ask. I was just enjoying the sight of him, and this old song, which my dad must have played for me once or twice. There was no way that Garden knew what every word meant. He was probably just holding onto the essence of each line and trying to make it mean something. That’s how I did it when I first started singing in Yiddish. Over time I forged an understanding of the lyrics through repetition, something akin to fluency, at least for the songs I was required to sing. Garden would get those sounds down soon, though, no doubt. His voice sounded beautiful. His father taught him well. It’s a shame he never wanted to sing in a klezmer band. He would’ve sounded great.