He said he wouldn’t, and then he did. He positioned himself next to the towering window, his shoulder brushing the lowest panes. Outside, snow flurried like ash. Keeping his profile to Helen Watt and his laptop angled so as to obscure the screen from her view, he checked the translations of two Portuguese words on an online dicionário, then turned off the sound on his laptop and opened his e-mail.
There in his inbox was a reply from Marisa. The subject line: “Professor.”
Professor Levy:
Thanks for the lecture, I’d been missing my 3-hour college seminars.
But seriously, thank you for being a pompous son-of-a-bitch. I learned something, which is more than I can say for most of the conversations I’ve had lately. I’m stuck here in kibbutz-ulpan with two potheads and a right-wing fanatic for roommates, and so far spend almost no time with the kibbutz’s actual Israelis—the only saving grace being that ulpan is kicking my ass. That’s what I’m here for: I aim to come out fluent in Hebrew if it kills me. Otherwise the kibbutz thing is dull for a city girl. The evening breeze in the orchard is lovely, yes, but the smell from the cow barn gets old fast. There’s a supervisor here who thinks the foreign students are his chance to play drill sergeant. On our cases for the least little thing when we’re not in class, nothing better to do with his time than try to rake me over the coals for smoking a cigarette for five minutes when he wants me to be clearing rocks off a field. He had me down as a soft American, so he was in for a bit of a shock yesterday when he muttered something nasty to me under his breath in Hungarian and I let loose on him in the same. Poor man, how was he to know my grandmother taught me how to say “I’ll put your balls in the laundry wringer” in her native language? The other students had no idea what was happening. But he laughed, and this morning he passed me a cigarette on the sly and said he thinks I’ll make it in this country.
The ESL teaching job I’ve lined up in Tel Aviv doesn’t start till spring, so till then it’s more grammar tests and more field work—the real kind, not the sort you professor types do.
Keep me posted, please, on the drama with the documents, and on Professor Ice Queen. I hope the papers turn up enough surprises to rattle her out of her bitchiness. And enough to keep Aaron Levy happy. That’s a good thing.
Marisa
Her black cropped hair. The long muscles of her back. The single afternoon they’d been together.
She’d sat across the room from him every Monday and Wednesday afternoon through the damp London spring. Fourteen weeks of Advanced Classical Hebrew, a class Aaron took seriously, leaning against the back wall of the room and half-raising his hand to pose questions about archaic verb constructions that left the professor and the two other postgrad students nodding with enthusiasm, and the undergraduates looking mildly terrorized. Only Marisa seemed amused when Aaron spoke, though he wasn’t entirely certain he was in on the joke.
Midway through the term, when she’d approached Professor Ludman after class, Aaron had lingered over his open notebook to listen. Marisa was, from what Aaron could hear, requesting an alternate assignment, one more relevant to her situation. She was a visiting student, here from the United States for only these few months in London before moving on to Israel. She couldn’t care less, she told Ludman flatly, about her grade—no offense, but she’d earned this scholarship to London before she’d settled on her Israel plan, and she was now reshaping her studies around that, and what she really needed was modern language—not classical Hebrew. Suppressing a laugh, Aaron had waited for Ludman to suggest drily to Marisa that she try something on the World Wide Web.
Instead, Professor Anatol Ludman—a middle-aged scholar known for his rigorous pedagogy—smiled an almost fatherly smile that said he was pleased by Marisa’s spunk. Aaron listened, stunned, as Ludman offered to lend her some modern Hebrew materials at the next class.
The next week Aaron left class at the same time as Marisa.
“You’re going with a student program?” he asked, as they turned into the corridor.
She slowed long enough to study him, that same amused expression on her face.
“To Israel, I mean.” He raised an eyebrow. “I mean, I don’t suppose it’s one of those Encounter Israel bus tours?” He meant to be funny, he supposed, though he couldn’t have said exactly what the joke was.
She looked at him with her gray-green eyes. Then she laughed easily, in a way that said she knew exactly what the joke was, and it wasn’t what Aaron thought. “Nope,” she said. “Not one of those Encounter Israel bus tours.”
And she walked away.
At a student Holocaust Memorial Day vigil later that spring, he’d seen her from across the small gathering outside the library. He’d pretended not to watch her . . . though how could he fail to watch Marisa, standing alert amid the crowd? Even motionless, she was decisive. A different manner of creature from the silent, reverent group surrounding her. A fuse waiting to light. He was puzzled by her position near the front of the gathering, and still more puzzled by her brief conference with the Jewish Society leaders as they prepared to begin the ceremony. She hardly seemed the sort to hang out with the bubbly, over-earnest Jewish Soc types. Not until she was on the stone steps with the somber student leaders—not until she was speaking the names of relatives and holding a candle—did he understand: Marisa was the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. He’d missed it entirely—missed it because she was nothing like the survivors’ granddaughters he’d met at his own college Hillel or his father’s synagogue. Those were mostly dutiful girls, many bearing the names of lost cousins or aunts whose ashes had been blown all over Europe; perpetual A students who repeated the stories of their families verbatim, lest a detail be lost. He had no quarrel with such girls, nor did he ever wish to touch one.
He watched, riveted, as Marisa lit a candle, then looked over the heads of the small assembled crowd as though she preferred to make this tribute without the intrusion of their input.
One September evening, still disheartened by the murky and insufficiently air-conditioned summer, Aaron had left the library and ducked into the visual arts building. He aimed to treat himself to a free dinner at a post-lecture reception: a postgraduate’s tithe from the fields of academia, sustenance for the hours ahead. The thought of yet another evening’s dogged bargaining with an indifferent Shakespeare made panic blossom in his gut. As he firmed his grip on the rail and climbed faster, he indulged a faint, rote hope of running into Marisa, whom he’d twice spotted from a distance in the café, downing her coffee with two or three of the art students. But the stairwell was deserted.
At the second-floor landing he swung left as usual, then stopped short, his shoes squeaking to a halt on the linoleum floor. Through the partially open door of the painting studio to the right he’d glimpsed something he was certain he’d imagined. He walked to the door nonetheless. He pushed it fully open. There was Marisa painted on the canvas, naked. Her skin peach and white against the black velvet drape she lay on, the planes of her body seeming to vibrate with life—small, firm breasts, nipples like drops of dark honey. Her figure lay still on the canvas but there was a warm mocking light to her eyes under her raised black eyebrows, as though the painter had caught her saying Yes, you.
Behind the canvas was the cot where she must have posed. The velvet drape was bunched over the arm of a nearby chair.