Daniel saw Mira three times before they ever spoke: first in a study carrel at Regenstein Library, writing in a small red notebook, then at the student-run café in the basement of Cobb, striding out of the door with a coffee in hand. Her gait had an electricity that he felt as she brushed past him. He noticed it again a couple of weeks later, when he saw her running along the perimeter of Stagg Field, but it was not until May of 1987 that she approached him.
He sat in the dining commons, eating a pulled pork sandwich. (Gertie would have had a heart attack if she’d known he was eating pork. He’d even developed a taste for bacon, which he kept in the refrigerator of his Hyde Park apartment and which he swore she could smell on him whenever he returned to New York.) At three p.m., the space was nearly empty; Daniel ate at this time because his clerkship rotation ran from six a.m. to two thirty. He felt a gust of air as the front doors opened, another chill as he recognized the young woman in the frame. Her eyes whisked through the room, and then she began to walk toward Daniel. He pretended not to notice her until she stopped in front of his four-person table.
‘Do you mind if I –?’ She had a sturdy leather tote bag on one shoulder and an armful of books.
‘No,’ said Daniel, looking up as if he hadn’t noticed her until now before leaping into action. He cleared a squashed can of Coke and the snakeskin of a straw wrapper, as well as a red plastic basket filled with the detritus of his sandwich: blobs of pork fat and maroon sauce. ‘Of course not.’
‘Thanks,’ said the woman, in a businesslike tone. She sat down diagonally from Daniel, extracted a notebook and pencil case, and began to work.
Daniel was puzzled. It seemed she wanted nothing to do with him. Of course, she might have had other reasons for choosing this table: its distance from the buffet, or the fact that it was next to the windows, in a rare patch of Chicago sun.
He searched his backpack for a book and studied her out of the corner of his eye. She was petite but not thin, with a round face that tapered to a slender, shapely chin. She had elegant, furry brows and chestnut-colored eyes with surprisingly pale lashes. Her skin was olive toned and scattered with freckles. Straight brown hair hung to her collarbones.
The clock ticked toward three thirty, then four. At four fifteen, he cleared his throat. ‘What are you studying?’
The woman had a blue and silver Sony Walkman in her lap. She pulled off her headphones. ‘What’s that?’
‘I was just wondering what you study.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Art history. Jewish art.’
‘Ah,’ said Daniel, raising his eyebrows and smiling in what he hoped was an interested-seeming way, though the subject did not interest him very much.
‘Ah. You disapprove.’
‘Disapprove? God, no.’ Daniel flushed. ‘You’re entitled to study whatever you like.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, deadpan.
Daniel reddened. ‘I’m sorry. That sounded patronizing. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m Jewish,’ he added, in solidarity. The woman looked at the remainder of his sandwich. ‘Ancestrally.’
‘You’re pardoned, then,’ said the woman, but she smiled. ‘I’m Mira.’
‘Daniel.’ Should he shake her hand? He wasn’t usually so awkward around women. He smiled back instead.
‘So,’ said Mira. ‘You’re no longer religious?’
‘No,’ he admitted.
As a kid, Daniel was soothed by the synagogue: the bearded men with their silk shawls and rituals, the honeyed apples and bitter herbs, the praying. He developed a private prayer that he repeated each night with faithful exactitude, as though one botched phrase would cause something terrible to befall him. But terrible things did befall him: the death of his father, then of his brother. Shortly after Simon’s passing, Daniel stopped praying entirely. He was not troubled by his abandonment of religion. After all, there had been no struggle. His belief went willingly, logically, the way the boogeyman disappeared once you looked under the bed. That was the problem with God: he didn’t hold up to a critical analysis. He wouldn’t stand for it. He disappeared.
‘You’re a man of few words,’ said Mira.
Something in her tone made him laugh. ‘It’s just that – well, talk of religion . . . it can make people uncomfortable. Or defensive.’ In case Mira herself was becoming defensive, he added: ‘I do see a lot of value in religious tradition.’
Her head was inclined with interest. ‘Like what?’
‘My father was devout. I respect my father, and so I respect what he believed in.’ Daniel paused to collect his thoughts; he had never articulated them before. ‘In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits – and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control – so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.’
Mira’s mouth made a little upside-down semicircle. Soon, that expression would become as familiar to Daniel as her small, cool hands or the mole on her left earlobe.
‘I track pieces of Nazi-stolen art,’ she said, after a moment. ‘And what I’ve noticed is just how far each object travels. Take Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet. It was painted in 1880 in Auvers-sur-Oise about a month before Van Gogh committed suicide. The work changed hands four times – from Van Gogh’s brother to his brother’s widow to two independent collectors – before it was acquired by the St?del in Frankfurt. When Nazis plundered the museum in 1937, it was seized by Hermann G?ring, who auctioned it off to a German collector. But here’s where things get interesting: that collector sold it to Siegfried Kramarsky, a Jewish banker who fled the Holocaust for New York in 1938. It’s remarkable, isn’t it? That the painting wound up, after all that, in Jewish hands, and directly from a G?ring associate?’ Mira fingered her headphones. She seemed suddenly shy. ‘I suppose I think we need God for the same reason we need art.’
‘Because it’s nice to look at?’
‘No.’ Mira smiled. ‘Because it shows us what’s possible.’