CITY OF LAUGHTER

TEMIM FRUCHTER

Copyright

Published by Dialogue Books

ISBN: 978-0-349-70484-5

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © Temim Fruchter 2024

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Dialogue Books

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www.hachette.co.uk

For Savta and Great-Grandma

Prologue

It was the sudden switch in the weather that gave Baruch pause, it is told.

The morning had been usual—the clear air smelled cold as dirt, the empty sky preparing itself to fill with the sounds of the day to come. Baruch was already running late for the wedding, so he quickened his steps to the synagogue, and as he curved around the path where the road tucked into the trees, the sky flipped quick to gray. Not rain-gray, not thunder-gray. Gray that was thick, difficult to see through, like smoke become a solid thing. Baruch craned his neck and looked up through the tree cover, trying to understand the sky’s behavior or to find the fire.

The weather in Ropshitz rarely surprised. Summer too hot, winter too cold, and the only variety right in the middle of fall, moon low and golden, and wild winds tearing leaves from the trees so they danced the whole way down to the ground. Baruch looked around. Was anyone nearby? Had anyone noticed what he noticed? No. He was alone on the quietest part of the path to the synagogue. Sky dark as a pocket. Foreboding, approaching; maybe even a warning. Of what, he couldn’t know.

Baruch watched upward until his neck hurt, so long that, by the time he turned back down to earth, he realized he would have to run if he had any hope of making the badeken. Baruch, you see, was not quick. He was tall with short legs, which made wedding guests chuckle when he danced for them. Nights, after working some wedding or another, he gazed at his reflection in the mirror, trying to pray himself into someone more even-limbed.

He ran the rest of the way to the wedding, but he was still late. He was still wearing his work pants, still so thoroughly dirty from helping his father with the chickens that morning, it was hard to tell whether they had ever been any color at all. He staked out the synagogue like a crook, looking for the right moment to slip unseen into the crowd and find a private place to change his clothes.

I couldn’t help it, he thought, rehearsing excuses. The sky turned to smoke.

It is told that Baruch’s flights of fancy often made him late but that the lateness was part of his charm. He was a badchan, a holy wedding jester, one of the village’s very first, and truth be told, he was middling at it. In his dreams, he turned up in front of some room and reliably stirred frenzied peals of laughter from hordes of forlorn wedding-goers saturated with the week’s melancholy. His brother, Yankel, the smart one; his sister, Shaindy, the fearless; and Baruch—how fervently he wished he’d been born with a natural gift for making people laugh. In his fiercest moments of longing, he imagined standing in front of a procession of mourners, for God’s sake, and making them sing with a dark laughter, dirt still fresh on their relative’s grave. Eventually he would win the crowd over so thoroughly, he’d draw a muffled giggle out of the dead uncle himself.

The truth, it is told, is more regular.

The truth is that, in childhood, Baruch was clear-eyed but distractible. He turned to pranks instead of Torah study and stared out the window instead of at the page of Talmud his father was trying to teach him. So, he was sent into badchanus. Clownery, a rare but viable career path for a Ropshitz boy. The angels laughed, said his father. And Sarah laughed, and Abraham laughed, and even God laughed, said his mother. Moses laughed, said the rebbe, under whose tutelage Baruch began his studies. The laugh that comes only of weariness, of complicated joy, of holy attention. To Baruch’s parents, the rebbe said, Perhaps he can be taught. In this tradition, Baruch learned to sow laughter the best he could at a village wedding. He learned how to make the bride and groom and their tired families laugh, or at least exhaust himself trying. His dearest wish? To charm the sternest rabbi in any room. This, Baruch knew, would prove he had something. That he was someone, or at least might one day be. He scanned the assembled at any wedding until he inevitably found the man, the one hidden under the brim of his humorless hat and scowling in some corner, almost defiantly (You’re at a wedding, Baruch thought. Can’t you even smile?), and aimed his best jokes directly at this man. Danced at him, lolled around at him, dropped his drink toward him, swooned and sang in his general direction. It had never worked.

As a practice, Baruch tried to think funny thoughts on his way to a wedding. A cow wearing a crown, a moon made of cheese, a whole synagogue full of praying potatoes. He had tried today, too, to become funnier on his way to the synagogue. But he had failed. The sky, now—it was markedly not funny. Something was wrong. Baruch wanted, inexplicably, to warn someone, but he wasn’t sure how or of what.

He hid behind a door, peeled off his soiled clothes, stepped into his clean ones, and emerged right on time for the rituals of the badeken, watching as the groom veiled the bride, the mothers and grandmothers openly weeping. As was his practice, he aimed his opening bit at the sternest rabbi in attendance (Reb Zalman, a devout and somber man who, despite seeming older than the earth itself, had traveled a whole day for the honor of the groom, a pupil of his). Afterward, Baruch took his bow and immediately walked into his father, who had a schnapps in one hand and a handful of nuts in the other.

“Baruchl,” he called, voice hoarse from celebration. “Did you see the stranger in the bright blue jacket?”

“Jacket?” This unusual day. “No. Who was he?”

Baruch’s father adjusted his hat and looked around the room. Guests feasted on plum cake and drank wine as musicians played, dressed in black and gray and gold and red. No blue jackets. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wondered whether you might know such a character. He seemed to be looking for someone, maybe a woman. He didn’t say who.” Baruch’s father paused. “He was too clear-eyed to be a drunk. But I heard him say, I think she might be here, as though talking to no one.” Baruch’s father shook his head. “Who did he think he might find here? There are no strangers in Ropshitz. Everyone and everything there is, we already know.” A pair of almonds, washed down by a final gulp of schnapps.

Mystery, for Baruch, was seductive, and it was true: where he lived, there was so little of it. But now. The perplexing clotted sky and a visiting stranger no one knew and no one could find. He couldn’t wait to tell Bluma. Bluma understood the beauty of a question without an answer. She loved riddles—of which Baruch had plenty, thank God—and preferred wildflowers to any flora more pristine. But wait, Bluma said, every time Baruch started to tell her anything—a story, a joke, a secret wish. I want to guess.

“Papa, did the man seem sad?” The thought of a strange man looking for a woman at someone else’s wedding—well, Baruch thought, how else could he seem?

“No,” Baruch’s father said, and he didn’t hesitate. “He didn’t seem sad. He shone.” He thought for a moment. “Either like a vagrant madman or a man who has just glimpsed the face of God.”

After the wedding, Baruch headed to the exit at the back of the synagogue. He would go see Bluma, who might still be hanging out the clothes. Baruch had loved Bluma since they were children. “Ask her to marry you already, Baruchl,” said his mother. “No tzadik would dally like this.” His mother, an efficient woman, was frustrated by her boy’s leisurely pace in such an unleisurely world.

And Baruch would ask Bluma one day; he knew this. But not yet. With marriage, Baruch imagined, came a heavier kind of responsibility. He didn’t yet want to relinquish the constant feelings of anticipation that animated his days, wondering whether he might catch Bluma for a brief and quiet hello as the sun sank, and walk home nostril-drunk with the faint notes of honey he could always smell on her hair. He didn’t want to relinquish romance altogether, worried it would disappear once he and Bluma made such a serious commitment.

Baruch, it is told, was astonished to push open the door out the back of the synagogue to the courtyard, only to be met with a green-eyed man wearing a bright blue jacket.

When people tell the story, they tell of a man.

I, of course, know different.

“It’s locked,” said the man, whose voice was higher than a man’s but deeper than a boy’s. He was jaunty, leaning tall against the synagogue’s back gate. “And I couldn’t get back inside again either, so it would appear I’m stuck right here.”

“Hello,” said Baruch, self-conscious. There are no strangers in Ropshitz. “It’s always locked. I work a lot of weddings, so I know how to open it.”

“I see,” said the man. “I’m just passing through. Maybe you can show me the way to the nearest inn? I’d rather not sleep in the synagogue courtyard.” The green in his eyes was alarming, and his wavy hair stood almost straight up.

“Of course,” said Baruch. “Reb Nechemiah’s. I can walk you.” He would see Bluma tomorrow. His curiosity about the blue-jacketed stranger had him by the shoulders.

The stranger’s nose was angular and certain. His gait, almost a trot. He wore no skullcap. He had no beard. His cheeks, smooth as Baruch’s sister’s, shone in the light of dusk.

“So,” Baruch said, as though he walked men in clothing brighter than Joseph’s coat to the inn after weddings every night. “What brings you to Ropshitz?”

“Well,” said the stranger. “It’s a long story.”

The darkening sky was beginning to reveal the moon, just past three-quarters full. The wind drew the grass gently prostrate toward the dirt. Perhaps the proximity of the divine or perhaps simply the weather.

“I have time,” Baruch said. There was at least a mile left until the inn.

“I get the feeling this town doesn’t get too many visitors.” Evasive stranger, Baruch thought. Baruch knew Ropshitz down to every crack in its well-worn walkways, from the synagogue to the market to the woods and back but, blue jacket in the corner of his vision, Baruch felt now like he was walking somewhere he had never been. “Everyone at that wedding looked at me like I was from another world. Which isn’t unfair, I suppose. It was someone else’s wedding. I wasn’t invited.”

“You’re right, we don’t get many visitors,” said Baruch. He kicked a pile of pebbles with his scuffed brown wedding shoe, and they sprayed outward. “Not much to see here.”

The stranger glanced up. “Well, you do have the moon here, don’t you? And it’s shining beautifully tonight. So, already, not so bad.”

Baruch felt the corners of his mouth tease upward, charmed. He screwed up his courage. “So?” He didn’t repeat the question.

“Well, I can’t tell you much,” said the stranger. “Do you have mail service here in Ropshitz?”

“Of course,” said Baruch. “Reb Yankel brings the mail and parcels most Thursdays. Sometimes, when the weather is bad, every other Thursday.” Baruch sped his steps. Enough talk about the mail and the weather. “Why?”

“Well,” said the stranger. “That’s like what I do. I bring deliveries from one place to another. Packages, messages, information.” He paused. “Sometimes, more powerful things.”

Baruch couldn’t imagine what this meant. He knew that a boy on his street had herbs and tinctures sent from afar because the local doctor couldn’t cure what he had. He knew that the woman who saw disturbing visions sometimes, the one on whom the rabbi had given up, had scrolls and potions sent to her from a healer in a neighboring village, a last attempt to extract the evil presence from her blood. He didn’t like to think about it. “What do you mean, powerful things?”

The stranger looked back up at the sky. “Really beautiful night tonight, isn’t it, Baruch?”

Baruch turned sharply. “How do you know my name?”

“Word gets around in a small town.”

But you don’t live here, thought Baruch. There are no strangers in Ropshitz. Are there?

Then, sudden and sure, the stranger took Baruch’s hand. Laced his slender fingers through Baruch’s thick ones. Baruch dizzied, skin singing. A man didn’t take another man’s hand. Not unless they were dancing in a circle at a wedding. The stranger’s grip was firm.

“Come this way,” he said.

“Where?” Baruch asked helplessly, knowing he would follow, no matter the answer.

The stranger walked them off the path, into the woods at the edge of the village. His grip loosened on Baruch’s hand, but he didn’t let go. Neither did Baruch, whose palm prickled against the warmth of the stranger’s. He held my hand, he thought over and over again, imagining explaining this moment to anyone else, let alone to himself. The strange man held my hand.

“Here,” said the stranger. They had arrived at a clearing, and he gestured to the middle of it. Baruch’s eyes stung looking. Even under the dark of the evening sky, he could see that the air in the clearing teemed with gray—a gray that roiled and shook like a trapped monster. Like the aftermath of an angry fire, but—no fire. The same smoky silver sheen that had saturated the sky earlier that day. Here, in the clearing of the woods at the edge of Ropshitz. Baruch had never seen anything like it. What was this presence? Godly or ungodly? What was it like to have a story no one else had?

“The weather has been strange all morning.” Baruch spoke quietly, entranced. “Is this why?”

“You noticed,” said the stranger. “Most people don’t notice. They forget to look up, not understanding that weather speaks to us. It gives us information. Most people simply complain about the rain or the snow, but that’s because they aren’t paying the right kind of attention.”

It is told that Baruch had trouble speaking then. “Weather?” he rasped. “This is not the kind of weather I know. What is it?” His words came hot from his throat.

The stranger looked down, as though himself refusing to look at the vision he’d cast before them, one that shouldn’t exist, not in any natural world Baruch knew. “This,” he said, “is something I was supposed to deliver.”

“Here?”

He hesitated. “I was supposed to deliver it to somewhere it was needed.”

Baruch had forgotten he was still holding the stranger’s hand, even though they were no longer walking. Embarrassed, he dropped it. “And Ropshitz needed it?”

The stranger adjusted his bright jacket and stared ahead. “Let me ask you a question. The people in this village, do they laugh?”

Baruch blinked, conjuring images of the dozens of weddings where he had stood in front of roomfuls of reluctant and haggard guests, bending his body and orating until he was hoarse, just to try to get them to crack a smile. “Laugh?” Baruch paused, wondering whether the stranger already knew. “I’m a badchan. My job is to make the bride and the groom and guests at weddings laugh. Using God’s humor, of course,” Baruch added quickly. “Nothing unholy.”

The stranger nodded, a flash of recognition across his face. “God’s humor.” He nodded again, looking back at the swirling gray. “Of course this is your job. It’s an important job.”

“Is it?”

“And do they? Laugh?”

“The people here struggle,” said Baruch, as honestly as he could. “It is difficult to make them laugh. I am no magician. I do the best I can.”

The stranger looked at Baruch. Then he looked at the dancing weather system, reckless in the clearing. He nodded, as if answering a question no one had asked. “You’ll take good care of it.”

“Of what?” Baruch no longer recognized the earth or the sky. He forgot to be surprised when the stranger took his hand again.

“Take me to your inn, dear Baruch. I’m tired and I have a long journey in the morning.”

They walked then, silently, to Reb Nechemiah’s. Baruch brimmed with questions he was certain the stranger wouldn’t answer. Every few minutes, he’d try to ask one of them, but staggering wonderment had replaced his powers of speech.

It is told that when Baruch and the stranger parted ways—after the stranger kissed Baruch gently on the temple, assuring him, once again, that he would do a good job—Baruch fell to the ground. The moon was beautiful. Everything so beautiful and so terrible. Nothing to make sense of anymore, no reason to try. Tomorrow. He would ask Bluma tomorrow. He lay there on the ground, sky crowding with eager stars and a fine dust that resembled baking flour, sounds coming from his chest that felt so new, he almost didn’t recognize them as laughter.

It is told—and generally, the teller pauses ceremonially before this part, eager to deliver a joyous ending—that the very next time Baruch went to work at a wedding, the people there laughed amply and easily, the room filling with their sweet music. And the time after that, and so on. Bluma, too, smiled easier, her smile higher on one side than the other. Baruch walked lighter, no longer so bothered by the shortness of his legs. It is told that, nights, Baruch would lie in bed looking uselessly skyward, wondering what gift or curse this visitor had left—what it was, exactly, that the weather had brought.

This is the story they tell of Ropshitz, where, several years later, the great and world-renowned badchan Naftali Tzvi Horowitz was born. Naftali Tzvi who, they say, did lovingly invoke his predecessor Baruch’s name once or twice, speaking generously of his great intellect and unique sense of humor, even though not many Ropshitzers had actually heard of him.

It is told, but it’s not how I tell it. Not exactly. I, of the blue jacket, of the messenger’s bag, of a spirit uncommonly distractible for my kind. What you know of the messenger—everything you’ve read, everything you’ve dreamed or been told—isn’t the whole story. And the whole story, it isn’t hidden. It’s not underneath, it’s not encoded, and it’s neither before nor after. It’s the place we all so often forget to look. It’s between.

It is told the sky over Ropshitz that night was a starlit expanse of brilliant purple. A near-impossible color, an infinitesimal point between red and blue. And that part, at least, I can tell you—it’s as true as the moon.

The messenger’s journey starts here. After the end of the folktale and before whatever comes next.

Between.

I could tell you the story of Ropshitz. Of Reb Naftali Tzvi, famous badchan, born in 1760, soon known the world over as the Laughing Rabbi. I could tell of a kind of wisdom made of hijinks at weddings, pranks involving sacks of onions, songs sung backward, secret doors. And that otherwise, times were stern. A pious place, for the most part. God-fearing. Benevolent windows and awestruck rooftops. Only a handful of trees, but all of them bowed and bent in the face of the diffuse divine.

I could tell you, too, about how a badchan’s job is to make the bride and groom laugh on their wedding day. And the jokes? Not exactly jokes. More like intricate sacred puns, godly brainteasers, furrow-browed tomfoolery, and the occasional sober pronouncement—a necessary reminder that joy never came cheap. It barely came at all, but when it did come, the badchan brought it. Wedding dancers, uncommonly hard workers, speakers of a rare and provocative language, peddlers of exuberance.

I could tell you all about how laughter, in this place, at this time, was both a balm and a mask for the sad parts. The badchan’s humor had to be relentless as the waves. Ask someone what makes a badchan, and you’ll get all kinds of answers. A badchan is born, not made. Either you have it, or you don’t. A badchan should be best at balancing wine on his head or squatting low for the mitsveh-tants. A badchan should be able to talk nonstop in a voice that can fill a room. A badchan must be able to make the air sing even when the air doesn’t want to. A badchan’s stream of wit should straddle the bawdy and the reverent, should fill you with something you might not recognize. Not joy, but something close; something big and breathless that doesn’t leave room for much else.

But the story I want to tell you is different. Almost a century after the death of Reb Naftali Tzvi, into this tiny, complicated city of laughter, Mira Wollman—daughter of Chane and Shmiel, granddaughter of Soreh and Yankel, great-granddaughter of my dear Baruch and his Bluma—was born. The weather would come to speak to her too, though very differently.

And today? Today, the Jewish village that was in Ropshitz is very flat. It is quiet. The air does not sing. It is razed, plains-like, a green-turned-straw, watery sky. It’s still there, though, what the messenger left behind. It is flat, you know, but it wasn’t always, and it won’t always be.

One

The counter was a metropolis of sympathy gifts. Under the cookies, assorted chocolates, cellophane-wrapped baskets of mixed nuts, one inexplicable bottle of potato vodka, and an Edible Arrangement that the fridge couldn’t accommodate but that neither Shiva nor Hannah had yet had the heart to throw away, it was difficult to see the countertop at all. All this kind, neighborly detritus had displaced the coffeemaker, which had been retired to the cabinet underneath the counter for the time being, so Shiva, too impatient to extract it, resorted to instant.

Shiva’s mother was still asleep, and the house was quiet, but the house had been quiet for days. Even as the counter heaved with unsolicited snacks, the kitchen table was spotless, the dish rack on the counter neatly stacked with plates and glasses. Hannah had been methodically scrubbing the house down, purging ancient spices and old magazines and piling dented pots and pans into boxes for Goodwill. Yesterday, she’d finally thrown all the desiccated sympathy bouquets into the compost. Now the old house thrummed, oblivious to its loss, its sleepy but dedicated radiators breathing gently into the February cold. The radiators, the only sound.

Quiet had always been nice with Shiva’s father. Jon Margolin—floppy and optimistic, quick to joke or forgive—had always been most content in silence, after all. The two of them could read or play a board game or drive without talking much, two solitudes alongside, such a fullness of feeling in the space between them that it felt prehistoric in scope.

But Jon was gone. Not even two weeks, and the quiet now was uneven, something missing where something should still absolutely be. And the quiet between Shiva and Hannah was something else entirely.

Shiva and her mother had never been close and had always lacked patience for one another. Jon, who had at one point very nearly pursued a career in psychotherapy, had often pointed out that his wife and his daughter’s mutual resistance was a result not of their differences but of the extent to which they recognized themselves in each other. A shared stubbornness. A sometimes-indulgent moodiness, inconsistent with their shared aversion to displays of excess emotion in others. A tendency toward inertia, particularly when they felt adrift.

In the days since Jon’s death, Shiva and Hannah’s mutual allergy had grown more pronounced. Unmanageable sadness had frayed them both, and they were disoriented by the sudden intimate proximity of cohabitation without a buffer. Shiva couldn’t remember the last time they’d been alone together for anything more prolonged than a car ride. Now, in her parents’ small house, they moved as a pair, entranced by the everyday rhythms of loss, learning each other’s habits and contingencies: when they slept and when they woke; what they liked for lunch if their appetites actually surfaced; how they took their coffee; how they looked right before crying, and right after.

Shiva brought her instant coffee up the creaky, narrow attic stairs. Hannah had declared the attic their project this week. They could work together to sort through the mountains of boxes, adding to the growing giveaway piles of Jon’s clothing, Jon’s shoes, Jon’s books, and making sure to surface and sort what they wanted to keep. Nothing of Jon’s was meant to languish in an attic; it would be either put to use or given away. This, at least, they could agree on. They’d needed a project too—something to do with their hands, while it was still premature for Shiva to go back to New York and leave her newly widowed mother alone. And there was no turning back from what they’d started now: the attic irrevocably dismantled, all chaotic piles and boxes whose torn-open maws might as well have been direct portals to the past.

The giant skylight in the attic cast everything in a fairy-tale glow but did nothing to keep out the cold. Shiva cranked the space heaters on either end of the room and shuttled a stack of boxes over to one side so she could work right next to a heat source. PASSOVER STUFF, said the top box. EXTRA CORDS/MISC, said the one under that. JON SCHOOL STUFF, said the next box, and Shiva slid that one out from the stack. SYL, said the bottom box, and Shiva, surprised, accidentally bit her own tongue. She slid the Syl box out, momentarily forgetting why she was in the attic to begin with. Breathing quick and shallow, she tore it open.

She tried to manage her expectations. She knew how unlikely the box would be to contain anything actually related to her grandmother. Hannah had long sworn she had nothing of Syl’s in the house that Shiva didn’t already know about.

And oh, when it came to Syl Zvigler, how Shiva had looked. Born not only the same night Syl died but in the exact same house—the two of them just feet apart from one another when they crossed paths in their respective transitions—Shiva had always felt almost unnaturally drawn to Syl, desperately curious about who she’d been. Unfortunately, Hannah had been no help. Worse than no help, really; the way she refused to talk about Syl had begun to seem willful. Hannah claimed forgetfulness or blurriness and changed the subject almost any time Syl came up, but Shiva was far too intimate with avoidance to mistake it for anything but what it was.

She pawed through the box, unsurprised but still dully disappointed that it had been repurposed, likely years ago. She dug through several stacks of old checkbooks with Jon’s and Hannah’s names on them, some bundles of business cards, and a bunch of ancient instruction manuals for hand mixers and vacuum cleaners and slow cookers long gone.

At the bottom, there was a large envelope labeled PHOTOS. She slid the contents out. Jon and Hannah and Shiva hiking in the Shenandoah Valley, the foliage around them ecstatically orange, a gleeful three-year-old Shiva on Jon’s shoulders, rotund in a bundle of red parka. Shiva’s high school graduation, her wavy hair puffing frizzily out the sides of her graduation cap, her closed-mouth smile hiding late-breaking braces, and Hannah smiling too eagerly, as if the photo being taken was about her and not her daughter. And then, true to the box’s overselling label, a smaller envelope that contained just three photos of Syl.

In the photos, Shiva’s grandmother looked to be in her twenties. She couldn’t remember ever seeing pictures of Syl this young, and she felt hot in the face just looking. Her mother’s descriptions of the woman always made Shiva’s grandmother sound like someone stern, tight, focused—if a human person could be a locked box.

But these photos were no such thing. They were saturated with a playful charisma Shiva could almost feel buzzing in her fingertips when she touched their surfaces.

In one photo, her vixen-haired smart-bloused young grandmother wore a tight tweed skirt and a leopard-print shrug over her shoulders, playfully pursing painted lips and staring down the camera like a dare. Shiva felt the heat all over her skin morph into a kind of recognition, coating her slowly as she studied the image. She surprised herself by making an audible sound, and quickly slipped all three pictures into the pocket of her sweater, an oversize blue cardigan she’d taken from Jon’s closet a few days ago and hadn’t much removed since. She would spend time with them later. Not here.

But she was distracted now, too itchy to move on to the next box—a frustration she could feel growing from the roots of her teeth, which she gnashed a little against the ache. She pulled the leopard-print photo out again, staring at it as though it might tell her something, but Syl remained silent. Shiva lifted her tepid coffee to her lips, and when the smell of it made her immediately nauseous, she realized that the thing creeping up from her throat wasn’t bile but anger. She was angry that her father was dead. She was angry she’d been feeling so stuck for so long. And most of all, she was angry at her mother.

Her mother, who wouldn’t talk about her past. Who wouldn’t talk about her own mother, or her grandmother: the women who’d preceded them both. Who, Shiva thought, had long been stuck herself, rote, beholden to some history that had less and less to do with her as the years went by, and unable to extract herself from it. Shiva wasn’t the same as her mother, to be sure, but she was convinced that her mother’s robotic refusals and inertia had a lot to do with Shiva’s own stuckness.

The word stuck was the closest she could come. It was a kind of immobility even while moving; an inability to see around whatever obstructed her days and nights. She’d felt it for some time, since even before her father’s diagnosis, but in these last few dreadful months, it had gotten much more pronounced. Her days increasingly meandering and driftless, and most nights bloated with existential haunting so thick she felt like she was breathing it. And haunting was how she had come to imagine it: that whatever she was experiencing had stuck around from some older place and time, and had belonged to someone else long before it had belonged to her.

She knew that her beloved father’s getting sick and then dying accounted for some of this, but not all. She felt slow, late to the party. Blurry and out of focus. Thirty-one, and she’d only just begun to fully realize who she was—telling her father, just in the nick of time, and her mother, still unwilling to take the information fully in. She was still learning what the word queer looked like when she wore it on her body. She lacked peripheral vision, existentially; and though it embarrassed her to admit it, she wasn’t really sure what she was doing with her days. She still worked at the same nonprofit where she’d started working when she first moved to Brooklyn at twenty-nine and while she liked it just fine, she felt restless and unmoved. Some mornings, she’d wake up sweaty and panicked, alive with the feeling she wasn’t exactly where she was supposed to be.

It felt most distinctly like she was missing some critical piece of information—as if there were something more she needed to see or understand about herself and where she’d come from to make everything about her life snap sharply and cleanly into place. And as if her mother were the one who knew what this something was. But in the meantime, the fact that it was an absence, a nothing, only until her mother could help her understand it to be anything more than that, made her angriest of all.

Out of what had started to feel like desperation, she’d pushed Hannah harder. Talk to me, she’d said. About your life. About your past. About Syl. But her mother wouldn’t. Syl was a mystery, Hannah would say. A mystery who no one had ever really understood. She was incredibly superstitious, said Hannah. She was a storyteller, said Hannah, always spinning some yarn or another, but those stories were almost never about herself. Those were the only things Hannah ever said. When Shiva asked for more details—adult details, texture-of-life details, like How did she meet her husband? What was she like as a parent?—Hannah’s eyes clouded over like those of someone being given a catastrophic ultimatum. Hannah said no. No. She couldn’t remember.

Shiva’s great-grandmother had met largely the same fate in the Margolin household—Hannah rarely invoked her name, and when she did, the details were sparing. Mira Wollman Zvigler had emigrated from Poland to New Jersey in the early 1920s. She and her husband, Isaac, had owned a sweater store in Trenton, New Jersey; had then sold the shop and moved to an apartment in Brooklyn when Isaac went into wholesaling; and eventually, had made their way to Florida, where Isaac died shortly thereafter. Shiva had met her great-grandmother just once as a baby, told only that she’d had an incredibly hard life.

Shiva knew her situation wasn’t particularly unique, at least in its broadest contours. Many of her friends had limited access to family histories or even living members of their family. Friends whose families had survived systemic violence, who no longer had access or connection to their countries of origin, who were cut off from family members who held these histories, or who simply came from families who’d been forgetful, bad at keeping records. Her friends—queer and trans people, Jewish people, people of color—were people whose ancestors’ stories had often been hidden, erased, lost, or coded. Absent evidence of the lives and joys of their predecessors, they were left only speculation. Shiva was incredibly lucky, she knew, to have what access she did—to have some of Syl’s tales, at the very least. To have the leftovers of Syl’s storied vigilance too, in the temperament of her own cautious and uptight mother.

The thing was, though: her friends were finding their way. Most of them didn’t seem stuck like she did. They moved through the world with self-assurance and confidence or, at the very least, bravado. They talked about how to recover or reclaim or rewrite lost and shattered histories, took classes and got degrees and worked in archives or libraries, made art and wrote books and plays. And many had company, supportive siblings or even parents who felt the pain of this kind of loss alongside them, also seeking to understand what and who it was they’d lost. And where family of origin wasn’t available or supportive, they’d found queer chosen family, held each other close. They might be haunted by absence—be it collective or personal—but in community, in solidarity with others, in activism and in art and in choosing one another, the absence was overlaid by a new kind of presence, rich and abundant in scope. When her friends wanted their stories reflected back to them, they looked for that reflection in one another, telling and deeply listening; they gave each other generosity and kindness as the generations couldn’t or hadn’t been allowed.

Shiva knew her need was disproportionate. Being in the dark about her family’s story bothered her more than it should. But something was jammed, something slowing her machinery, and she couldn’t shake the private conviction that whatever it was, it was distinctly generational. That there was something in the family past so shadowy and elusive, it meant there were real ghosts here. And that if she could find and illuminate whatever piece of her was being held hostage somewhere in the annals of her own family, she’d come unstuck, feel more whole. She’d see it all clearly.

The truth was, Shiva had always been looking, without exactly knowing what she was looking for. The way her best friend, Levi, put it, she was a seeker—always watching the moving horizon for some sign of where she was supposed to be, always looking for clues. For a time, Shiva had accepted this reframing as nearly charming, fancying herself bright-eyed and curious, open to what the universe had to offer. But her life had started to stall under the weight of this feeling, the one that resisted logic and language: that she didn’t know what she was looking for, and that even if she did, it might be unfindable.

With Dani, her girlfriend—her very first, whom she’d met just months before Jon died—she’d found some respite from the stuckness and from all the anticipatory grief. Lightness, the sparkling clarity first queer love allows, a precision unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. Even as the impending loss of Jon shrank her world immeasurably, Dani’s presence had expanded it. Being with Dani made her crackle, made her want to get out of bed, unsweaty and sure-headed, to figure out exactly what she wanted and how to say it. And in Dani’s company, she’d begun to. She knew she dearly loved stories—telling them but also, and especially, thinking about how to understand them—no doubt a direct inheritance from Syl, even if inherited only through stilted half memories and smoke. You’re so good at this, Dani had said when they first met, after Shiva told her one of her favorites, about twelve witches who lived together in a cave at the end of the earth. You should do something with it. Shiva hadn’t known then exactly what Dani meant she was good at—the telling or the remembering or all the things she’d said about the story afterward—but she didn’t care, drunk on her momentary sense that she might have the skills to do something of consequence, on the feeling of being seen. Of being someone for whom stories could be some kind of life.

But Dani had been growing distant. And Jon was gone. And Shiva, still stuck.

She went to therapy. First, several sessions with Christina, an existential therapist, who told her gently but firmly that she was spending too much time staring into what existentialists might call the void, and that she needed instead to show up to the present of her life and make an effort to radically accept the things she couldn’t control. Then, a session with an energy healer, Natasha, who confirmed that, indeed, the heat in Shiva was all located on her mother’s side of the family, that the people who came before her had been seekers too. Without much sense of what to do with this confirmation, she’d finally landed on Sharon, an Upper West Side Jew with haggard eyes, a Rosie O’Donnell contour, and a penchant for costume jewelry. Her no-nonsense attitude and strong New York accent had endeared her to Shiva, despite the fact that some of her favorite modalities included hypnosis and past-life regression.

The thing is, Sharon said at their third session together, it’s hard to keep chasing an absence. It’s not sustainable. At a certain point, you have to focus on what you can see, what you can touch. It was true. Shiva felt like the thing she was always looking for, the thing that would help her understand herself, was not a thing at all but a nothing. This made it exponentially more frustrating. If only her mother would talk to her more about the nothing, it might become a something—a something she could wrap her head around, a something she could control enough to make into a tellable story.

Hannah’s feet creaked up the talkative attic stairs.

Quickly and without much additional thought, Shiva pocketed the tiny pile of Syl photos again.

Hannah was wearing a black hoodie over her crumbling Smiths T-shirt, her wavy nest of morning hair tamed by a flannel scrunchie Shiva thought she recognized from her own childhood.

“Morning,” she said.

“Morning,” said Shiva. She fingered the pictures in her pocket. She could feel the velocity of the words rising to her lips before she could temper them, before she knew what they would actually be. “Hey, Ma?”

“Yeah?” Hannah was surveying the attic, and Shiva could see the quick progression of overwhelm and resolve on her mother’s face.

She pointed at the Syl box. “What was in here? There’s a bunch of random crap in here, but it says ‘Syl.’ Was this Syl’s stuff? Do you remember?”

Hannah stared at her, red-eyed. She looked sallow-cheeked and underslept, her mouth the shape of a cartoon frown.

“Shiva, are you seriously starting with this right now? I haven’t even had coffee yet.”

This was exactly the problem. The moment a conversation so much as meandered in Syl’s direction, Hannah’s defensiveness sizzled so hot it was the only thing in the room. She talked about Syl when she wanted to and only then. And to bring it up at a time like now, when Hannah was so aggrieved and exhausted she was unwell—well, that was just reckless fire-starter behavior.

Shiva knew what Sharon would say, and what Levi would say, but she didn’t care. Right now, whether it was actually true or a wild but powerful delusion, it felt as if Hannah Margolin was the thing standing bluntly in the way of Shiva making a life that felt like her own. Her father was dead. She felt desolate and miserable standing in the middle of all his useless boxes in this freezing attic. It was enough.

“Starting with what?” Shiva’s rage thumped dully in her throat. “I’m not starting anything. I asked you a question.” Unwelcome frustration smarted behind her eyes. “We have to get good. You’re standing in my way, and I need you to move so we can get good.”

Hannah rubbed her forehead. “What do you mean, get good? And I’m standing in your way exactly how?” Her mother had always seemed marginally hipper and younger than her friends’ mothers, having gotten married and pregnant by the time she was twenty-two. But this also meant she seemed somehow less mature than a mother should, prone to sullen petulance and sarcasm the way a moody teenager might be.

“It’s just us.” A feeling of scarcity, of something slippery she needed to hold. “He’s not here anymore, Ma. I need us to try to get good somehow. You just need to talk to me. Is that so difficult?”

She could still de-escalate this, Shiva knew. She could, but she wouldn’t. She didn’t want to. She felt like she wanted to explode it instead. Maybe then she could finally see past whatever was blocking her.

Hannah sighed and sank down onto a stack of boxes. “I do talk to you, Shiva. All the time. I’m not sure what you want from me right now. I’m exhausted, and I just—”

“I lost him too, okay?” Shiva enjoyed the feeling of burgeoning rage, and she stoked it. “But I ask you a simple question about one box, and you’re immediately furious. I can tell there’s something there. Behind the way you avoid and get defensive. Call me unhinged or whatever you want, but you’re one to talk. It’s just like there’s this giant abyss. Like you’re a giant abyss, honestly. I can’t do it anymore. Without him, there’s nothing left. I need things to feel different. I need more from you.”

Hannah’s red-rimmed eyes widened. She stood, and the box stack fell over.

“Nothing left, huh?” She repeated it, her voice flat, gone quiet. “And who am I to you, again? What am I, standing over here, no more husband to speak of? I’m nothing to you? You think you feel unhinged? I am …” She shook her head, started over. “All I have ever done is protect you. All I have ever done is love you, even at times when you have been unbelievably difficult. But you need to stop with this nonsense. There is nothing to tell. Syl was nuts. I loved her; she would have loved you. I spent my life in a fortress with her, and she never told me anything about herself either, okay? Nothing except stories about demons and witches and archangels and what would happen if I dared clip my nails wrong. So that’s what I’ve got to give. You’re grasping at less than straws here, I promise you. What else do you want from me?”

Shiva’s hands were shaking. Her shoulders were shaking. Everything in this moment suddenly felt like it mattered more than her mother could ever understand.

“I want you to say I’m onto something! That I’m not just imagining things, and that there is something genuinely haunted here! That I’m not just losing my mind. I didn’t know my grandmother, fine. Plenty of people don’t. But Ma, the way you shut down, and the way I can tell you’re holding on to something deliberately, it makes me feel like I’m underwater half the time. Maybe it’s not logical. But I need you to quit being so stingy, Ma. I need you to fucking admit it.” Her voice shook too as it rose, its volume sharpening at an incline so intense it scared her.

Hannah’s puffy face had turned a deep shade of red, which Shiva took as a kind of admission of guilt. And maybe that was an approximate win, and she should let it go. But she couldn’t. A tension had finally cracked open in this attic, and she felt certain that, once she went back to New York, it would seal up again, an inert civility between them as intact as if it had never even broken.

“What on earth would I be hiding from you?” Hannah shook her head. The shaking looked sad at first and then got swifter, morphing into something more vigorous. It was the most expressive her mother had been since the day Jon died. “This is not a movie, Shiva. I get it—you’re exhausted; we both are. We’re grieving. And you’ve always had a pretty wild imagination, and I know you’re hoping our family has some sexy secret hidden history. But this Syl nonsense has to stop. And you know what? Even if we did? This is real life. You’re an adult. You think other people your age are at home with their mothers begging to talk about their grandmothers? I doubt it.” Hannah’s voice garbled as tears started to run down her face. “I know you never felt as close to me as to your dad. I’m not stupid. And I want us to be good too. But I’m not going to stand here and go on about my mother and my grandmother just because you’ve gotten some idea into your head. We’re not special. And in fact, I think it would be better for our relationship if you just left this alone now, please.” She shook her head again, one resolute single time. “And Shiva, you know what? Sometimes, when something is closed, you’re not meant to open it.”

Shiva pressed her lips together tightly and rolled her eyes. “That! That is the kind of shit a person says when they’re hiding something, Ma. You know it, and I know it.”

Hannah made a sputtering sound. “This is over. Now. I need to deal with your father’s shoes. Okay? Because he can’t wear them anymore.” That last part spilled out of her like a terrible song, and she honked into a used tissue she pulled out of her pocket.

“Fine,” Shiva barked. “Most mothers would kill to have adult daughters who were actually interested in their families’ histories. I’ve done nothing but take care of you since I got home. You don’t think I’m fucking torn up? I lost my father. My best friend.”

Hannah looked at her, stricken. “Yeah,” she said coolly, the quiet returned to her voice. “And now you’re stuck with me.”

Shiva felt herself icing over too, even as the space heater had started to burn into the side of her leg.

“No,” Shiva said. “I’m not stuck with you. I’m leaving. I’ll get the next train back to New York, and you won’t need to worry about me bothering you anymore.”

“Shiva, wait,” her mother said weakly.

“And you know what? I don’t need you for this. I can figure it out myself. I’ll …” Shiva stammered, angry and unfocused. “I’ll take classes, I’ll go to the archives. I’ll go to school if that’s what it takes. I’ll go to fucking Poland myself. I’ll get there. I’ll learn what you won’t give me, whether you like it or not.”

“My god,” said Hannah. “I love you more than anything in the world, Shiva, but you’re being ridiculous. How about figuring out what to do with your life? Your real life. The way you fixate on this makes me uncomfortable, and frankly, it doesn’t belong to you. Not everything belongs to you, Shiva, even if you think it should.”

“You think I don’t know what I’m doing with my life?” Shiva was an object in motion, shooting for the door to the stairs. “Maybe you’re the one who doesn’t know. You’re the one who’s stuck,” she spat. She breathed in and out, one long shaky breath. “You’re so judgmental. Dad would understand.” One final dagger.

She was still rattling with adrenaline when she slammed the door to the guest room, opened her laptop, and bought an Amtrak ticket home for that evening.

Alone again, Shiva tried to slow her breathing. She couldn’t stop crying. She and her mother had never fought like that before. With them, it had always been the slow simmer, never the boil.

She lay on the bed listening to the shower running and to her mother clomping around the house, and then the keys jangling and the front door closing. She watched out the window, waited until her mother’s Prius pulled out of the driveway, before she ran back up to the attic and rescued the small pile of Jon’s things she had claimed. For good measure, she also took the compact box labeled JON SCHOOL STUFF, the one she’d been derailed from opening earlier. Hannah probably wouldn’t even notice it missing. Her father was gone, and now, maybe, so was her mother. It was just her now. She had to take what she could, provisions for the journey.

She was determined now to chase what everyone so patently insisted was an absence. Even if she was wildly uncertain about everything else in her life, she was more certain now than ever that somewhere, in the great infuriating vastness of her family’s void, the one threatening to flatten her in the face of her mother’s defenses and denial, there might be something worth finding.

Permit me a story.

There was once a girl who awoke at the root of a tree from a long sleepwalk. She rubbed her eyes and walked several paces down to a small river, where she washed her face and knocked on the door of the tiny cottage she found there.

A healer answered the door. Come in, said the healer, whose face was kind and round as the sun. She gave the girl salve for her torn feet and hot soup and a glass of warm milk. She told the girl that, from the looks of it, she’d walked quite far from home, perhaps even a distance of days.

How long? the girl asked, eyes wide.

Long enough to be different after, said the healer.

The girl had walked in her sleep before, but nowhere too far. The last time, she’d woken up lying right in the middle of a barrel of apples in the cellar, one neatly bitten core in each of her hands.

The healer wrapped a cloak around the girl, and they set out across two nights to get her back home. The girl’s parents embraced her and thanked the healer profusely, inviting her in for meat with turnips, fresh bread, and hot wine. The healer thanked them but disappeared quickly into a moonless night.

After this, the girl grew up mostly regular. She was nearly beautiful and enjoyed painting and the sound of water and cakes that had fruit hidden inside. She was still prone to sleepwalking periodically but usually found herself in the kitchen or right outside the front door, nowhere much farther than her bedroom.

But there were times when the girl did not feel regular. She felt, instead, stuck in that invisible passage of days, the story of that brief somnambulant time forever lost to her. She wanted to understand what had transpired, what had changed her when she’d so briefly abandoned her body to the elements.

Finally, one day, she packed her bags and traveled back to those woods. She looked around for clues she might have left in her wake, unsure exactly what she was looking for. She went to the river where the healer’s house had stood, but there was no house. And there was no healer. And the girl found no clues.

The girl resigned herself to moving on. She returned home and took a husband and a cat. She tended a garden and built her own cellar, full of wine and apples and bushels of potatoes, a soft place for her to land if she found herself some night adrift.

Nights, she slept beside her husband, watchful cat at her feet. But her sleep was fitful. Ghostly half dreams woke her, left her panting. Sometimes, in the mirror, she hardly recognized whoever gazed back. Whatever she was now, she knew, was because of what had happened to her those lost days.

Where have I been? She whispered it quietly into the room, most nights, like a haunted prayer. Where have I been? Some nights the moon, like the kindest face, but still no answer.