A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,48

lace runner just slightly larger than the tabletop’s circumference resting on top. There sat an ashtray, its sole contents a dead fly, curled into itself. “Do you know about my family?” Indira asked.

“The Holocaust, isn’t that right?” Elm said. She placed her hands in her lap, sat up straight.

“Yes. I was married. They do not know that.” Elm wasn’t sure who “they” were. “He was taken almost immediately: Jew, Communist, student.”

Elm wasn’t sure what to say. She took advantage of the brief pause to say she was sorry.

Again, the skeletal hand. “I am telling you this for a reason. You’ll have to trust me. This is not just the ramblings of an old woman. No, it is the ramblings of an old woman, but one who is coming to a point. Young lady, can you please bring me that box there by the lamp?”

Elm stood and picked up a small curio box. It was plain, the top held by a latch. Elm wondered what was inside it. A broach of some kind that she wanted to show Elm? A portrait on a napkin by Picasso? Indira took the box and opened it. Elm couldn’t see inside it as Indira moved her hands. Then she brought out a small cigarette and a lighter.

She placed the cigarette in her mouth and handed Elm the lighter. It was antique, and it took Elm two or three tries before she got it to light. When the cigarette caught, Elm realized Indira was smoking pot, and she had to fight to stifle a laugh.

“Laugh, laugh,” Indira said. “It’s funny to see an old lady get high. I will join you in laughing in a minute.” She took a drag and held it in. Then she flicked it into the ashtray. Indira held out the joint to Elm. “Do you smoke?”

Elm shook her head. “I have other bad habits.”

“I know it’s silly, but I turned ninety and thought, what the hell, might as well, and now I keep Columbia’s pot dealers in business.”

Indira stubbed out the joint in the ashtray on the side table. Elm now saw that what she had thought was a fly was actually a piece of ash.

“I have been criticized,” she said, “because my work is not political. It doesn’t reference the Holocaust. Why should it? Art is about beauty and balance, nature, and by nature I mean God. If I want to make a statement I use my mouth. We leave politics for the politicians and historians to make up whatever they want.”

Elm stared at Indira’s profile. Her face was turned toward the painting above the sofa, an abstract that Elm didn’t recognize. But Elm could see that her gaze was soft; she was looking elsewhere.

“I lived the politics. I don’t have to be reminded.” Indira paused, but Elm sensed she wasn’t supposed to speak. “I had friends in France, and when the Nazis took Jacob my friends insisted I come. When it looked like France would be occupied, they arranged for a U.S. visa, impossible to get at that point, but my friends were … important. I say this because it explains why it happened. I met him when I attended a state dinner at the White House. He talked to me in German, and he understood. And he wasn’t like the others. His guilt was quiet, like mine. He emigrated. He didn’t have to walk across the Alps or hide in chicken feed or get smuggled out like contraband. He was smart, and he hated himself for it. That was the connection. I’ve never told anyone, but now he’s dead.”

Elm wasn’t sure who Indira meant. She wondered if the woman wasn’t a little off. “Who?” she asked softly.

Indira looked at her as though she had just asked her own name. “Blatzenger, of course.”

“Nixon’s guy?” Elm knew Blitz-Blatz, as everyone called him, had had many affairs, but she hadn’t known that Indira was one of his conquests.

“I attended a state dinner at the White House. That’s where I met him. We were together for twenty years, until his death.”

“I didn’t know,” Elm said.

“No one does,” Indira said. “We were very careful. Toward the end it was an affair without the physical, but we believed in the same God, passionately.”

“Wow,” Elm said, realizing as she said it how ugly and inadequate the word sounded. How American.

“There is one more piece that I haven’t shown you. One more. I was supposed to meet him in the Netherlands, but there was a crisis.