of my seventh grade teacher Not the sixth, fifth, or fourth either. The smell of the floor polish mingling with unwashed skin I remembered, and the dry feel of chalk dust in the air, and the stench of glue and urine. But the names of the teachers were lost to me.
Dear Mrs. Kleindorf, I wrote, My wife is dying upstairs. For fifty-one years we shared a bed. For a month she’s been lying in a hospital bed, and every night I go home and sleep in our bed alone. I haven’t washed the sheets since she left. I’m afraid that if I do I won’t be able to sleep. The other day I went into the bathroom and the maid was cleaning the hair out of Eve’s brush. What are you doing? I asked. I’m cleaning the brush, she said. Don’t touch that brush again, I said. Do you understand what I’m trying to say, Mrs. Kleindorf? And while we’re on the subject of you, let me ask a question. Why is it that there was always a unit on history, math, science, and God knows what other useless, totally forgettable information you taught those seventh graders year after year, but never any unit on death? No exercises, no workbooks, no final exams on the only subject that matters?
DO YOU LIKE THAT, my boy? I thought you would. Suffering: just the sort of thing that’s up your alley.
Anyway, I got no further than that. I tucked the unfinished letter in my pocket and went back to the room where your mother lay among the wires and tubes and beeps and drips. There was a water-color of a landscape on the wall, a bucolic valley, some distant hills. I knew every inch of it. It was a flat and crude painting, terrible actually, like something out of one of those paint-by-numbers kits, like one of those landscapes-out-of-a-can they sell in the souvenir booths, but right then I decided that when I left that room for the last time I would take it off the wall and carry it away with me, cheap frame and all. I had stared at it for so many hours and days that in a way I can’t explain that shitty painting had come to stand for something. I had begged it, reasoned with it, argued with it, cursed it, I had gone into it, I had bored my way into that incompetent valley and by and by it had come to mean something to me. So I decided, while your mother was still clinging to the last inhumane shred of life given to her, that when it was all over I would take it down off the wall, stick it under my jacket, and make off with it. I closed my eyes and drifted off. When I woke, the nurses were gathered in a little clot around the bed. A flare of activity, and then they parted and your mother was still. Gone from this world, as they say, Dova’leh, as if there is any other. The painting was nailed to the wall. Such is life, my boy: if you think you’re original in anything, think again.
I RODE with her body to the mortuary. It was I who looked on her last. I pulled the sheet over her face. How is this possible? I kept thinking. How am I doing this, look at my hand, it’s reaching out, now it’s taking hold of the cloth, how? The very last time I will ever look on the face that I spent a lifetime studying. Pass over it. I went to reach in my pocket for a tissue. Instead I pulled out the crumpled letter to Avner Segal’s seventh grade teacher. Without stopping to think I smoothed it out, folded it up, and slipped it in with her. I tucked it next to her elbow. I trust that she would have understood. They lowered her into the ground. Something gave way in my knees. Who had dug the grave? Suddenly I needed to know. He would have had to spend the night digging. As I approached the abysmal hole the absurd thought crossed my mind that I had to find him to tip him.
At some point in all of this, you arrived. I don’t know when. I turned around and there you were in a dark raincoat. You’ve gotten old. But still slim, because you always had your mother’s genes. There you stood in the cemetery, sole surviving