CHAPTER 1

Barney Greengrass

The bright spring light, like an emanation from Paradise, streamsthrough the large picture window wide as the room itself. Thereis a man in the room, looking down from his tenth-floor apartment at thehubbub below, at the buildings, the shop signs, the pedestrians. In Paradise,he must remind himself again this morning, one is better off thananywhere else.

Across the street is a massive red-brick building. His eye catchesgroups of children going through their paces in dance and gym classes.Yellow lines of taxicabs, stuck in traffic at the juncture of Broadway andAmsterdam Avenue, are screaming, driven mad by the morning's hystericalmetronome. The observer, however, is now oblivious to the tumultbelow, as he scrutinizes the sky, a broad expanse of desert across whichdrift, like desert beasts, slow-moving clouds.

Half an hour later, he stands on the street corner in front of theforty-two-story building where he lives, a stark structure, no ornamentation,a simple shelter, nothing less, or more, than an assemblage ofboxes for human habitation. A Stalin-era apartment block, he thinks.But no Stalinist building ever reached such heights. Stalinist nonetheless,he repeats to himself, defying the stage set of his afterlife. Will hebecome, this morning, the man he was nine years ago, when he first arrivedhere, bewildered now, as he was then, by the novelty of life afterdeath? Nine years, like nine months brimming with novel life in thewomb of the adventure giving birth to this brand-new morning, like thebeginning before all beginnings.

On the left, the drugstore where he regularly buys his medicines. Heis idly looking at the store's sign—RITE AID PHARMACY, spelled out inwhite letters on a blue background—where suddenly five fire engines,like metallic fortresses, advance on the street in a screech of sirens andhorns. Hell's fires can rage in Paradise, too.

But it is nothing serious, and in an instant everything is back inplace—the photo shop where he is having the photo for his new IDprocessed; the neighborhood diner; the local Starbucks; and, of course, aMcDonald's, its entrance graced by a pair of panhandlers. Next come thePakistani newsstand, the Indian tobacconist, the Mexican restaurant,the ladies' dress shop, and the Korean grocery, with its large bunches offlowers and displays of yellow and green watermelons, black and red andgreen plums, mangoes from Mexico and Haiti, white and pink grapefruit,grapes, carrots, cherries, bananas, Fuji and Granny Smith apples,roses, tulips, carnations, lilies, chrysanthemums. He walks past smallbuildings and tall buildings, a mixture of styles and proportions anddestinies, the Babylon of the New World, and of the Old World, too.There is a population to match—the tiny Japanese man in a red shirtand cap, swaying between two heavy loads of packages; the fair-haired,bearded, pipe-smoking man in shorts, walking between two big blond femalecompanions in pink shorts and dark sunglasses; the tall, slim barefootgirl, with cropped red hair, skimpy T-shirt, and shorts the size of afig leaf; the heavy, bald man with two children in his arms; the short fatman with a black mustache and a gold chain dangling down his chest;beggars and policemen and tourists as well, and none seem irreplaceable.

He crosses to Amsterdam Avenue at Seventy-second Street and isnow in front of a small park, Verdi Square, a triangle of grass borderedon three sides by metal railings and presided over by a statue ofGiuseppe Verdi, dressed in a tailcoat, necktie, and hat, surrounded by abevy of characters from his operas on which the placid pigeons of Paradisehave come to rest. A scattering of neighborhood denizens sit onthe nearby benches, the pensioners, the disabled, the bums swappingstories and picking at their bags of potato chips and slices of pizza.

There is nothing lacking in Paradise—food and clothing and newspapers,mattresses, umbrellas, computers, footwear, furniture, wine,jewelry, flowers, sunglasses, CDs, lamps, candles, padlocks, dogs, cars,prostheses, exotic birds, and tropical fish. And wave after wave of salesmen,policemen, hairdressers, shoeshine boys, accountants, whores, beggars.All the varieties of human faces and languages and ages and heightsand weights people that unlikely morning, on which the survivor is celebratingthe nine years of his new life. In this new Afterlife world, all thedistances and interdictions have been abolished, the fruit of the tree ofknowledge is available on computer screens, the Tree of Eternal Life offersits pickings in all the pharmacies, while life rushes at breakneckspeed and what really matters is the present moment.

Suddenly hell's alarm bells break out again. No fire this time, but awhite, roaring juggernaut leaving behind the blur of a blood-red circlewith a red cross and red letters reading AMBULANCE.

No, nothing is missing in this life-after-death, nothing at all. Heraises his eyes toward the heavens that allowed this miracle to happen.An amputated firmament it is, for the concrete rectangles of the buildingsnarrow the prospect to a chink of blue sky. The facade on the right,blocking the view, is formed by a brownish wall flanked by a waste pipe;on the left, a yellow wall. Against this golden background, spelled outin iridescent blue, is the message DEPRESSION IS A FLAW IN CHEMISTRYNOT IN CHARACTER. Warning, or mere information—hard totell. DEPRESSION IS A FLAW IN CHEMISTRY NOT IN CHARACTER,displayed on five separate lines, one after the other.

He stares at the lines of sacred text, his head tilted backward. Joltedout of his reverie, he steps back and finds himself walking along AmsterdamAvenue again. There is an advantage to his new life—immunity.You are no longer chained to all the trivia, as in the previous life, you canwalk on in indifference. He heads toward the restaurant/delicatessenBarney Greengrass, famous for its smoked fish. "The place will remindyou of your previous life," his friend has promised.

The buildings along Amsterdam Avenue have been reclaimed fromthe past, old houses, reddish, brown, smoke-gray, four-five-six stories,iron balconies, fire escapes blackened by time. These streets of the UpperWest Side, when he first encountered them, reminded him of the OldWorld. However, over the nine—or is it ninety?—years since he movedinto the neighborhood, the tall buildings have multiplied, dwarfing eventhe forty-two stories of his apartment building to the proportions of apaltry Stalinist construction—there is that insidious adjective again.

On the ground floor of the building, the old shops, as before—FullService Jewelers, Utopia Restaurant, Amaryllis Florist, Shoe Store,Adult Video, Chinese Dry Cleaning, Nail Salon, Roma Frame Art, and,at the corner of Seventy-sixth Street, Riverside Memorial Chapel. Ayoung girl with thick legs and long dark hair, wearing a black short-sleeveddress, black stockings, and thick, dark sunglasses, comes out ofthe building. Three long black cars with darkened windows, like hugecoffins, are parked at the curb. Out of them step smartly dressed gentlemenin black suits and black hats, elegant ladies in black dresses andblack hats, teenagers in sober dress. Once more the metronome has struckthe hour of eternity for some poor soul. Life is movement, he has not forgotten,and he hurries away. One step, two, and he is out of danger.

On the sidewalk in front of the venerable Ottomanelli Bros, meatmarket (SINCE 1900, a sign proclaims) are two wooden benches. An oldwoman sits on the one on the right. He collapses onto the other, keepingan eye on her. She stares vacantly into space, but he feels she is observinghim. They seem to recognize each other. Her presence is familiar, asif he has felt it before on certain evenings, in certain rooms suddenlycharged with a protective silence that would envelop him. Never has hefelt this way in broad daylight amid the hubbub of the workaday world.

The old lady gets up from the bench. He waits for her to take a fewsteps, then follows her. He walks behind her in the slow rhythm of thepast. He observes her thin legs, fine ankles, sensible shoes, croppedwhite hair, bony shoulders bent forward, her sleeveless, waistless dress,made of a light material in red and orange checks on a blue background.In her left hand, as in time before, she carries a shopping bag. In her righthand, as in time before, she holds a folded gray sweater. He overtakes herand makes a sudden turn. She gives a start. She probably recognizes theunknown man who had collapsed, exhausted, on the other bench at Ottomanelli's.They look at each other, startled. A ghost, out of the blue, ona bench, on a city sidewalk.

All is familiar—the gait, the dress, the sweater, the cropped whitehair, the face half-seen in a fraction of a second. The forehead and theeyebrows and the eyes and the ears and the chin are all as before, only themouth has lost its full contour and is now just a line, the lips too long,lacking shape; and the nose has widened. The neck sags, with wrinkledskin.

Enough, enough ... He turns around and follows her from a distance.Her silhouette, the way she walks, her whole demeanor. You donot need any distinguishing marks, you always carry everything withyou, well-known, immutable; you have no reason to follow a shadowdown the street. He slows down, lost in thought, and the vision, as hehad wished, vanishes.

Finally, at Eighty-sixth Street, he reaches his destination: BarneyGreengrass. Next to the window, the owner sits sprawled in a chair, hishunched back and big belly enveloped in a loose white shirt with longsleeves and gold buttons. The neck is missing; the head, topped by a richmane of white hair, is ample, the nose, mouth, forehead, and ears firmlydrawn. On the left, behind the salami-halvah counter, stands a worker ina white coat. Another counterman tends the bread-bagels-buns-cakessection.

He greets the owner and the young man standing next to him, whohas a telephone glued to each ear. Then he walks into the room on theleft, the restaurant area. At the table next to the wall a tall, thin manwith gold-rimmed spectacles raises his eyes from his newspaper and callsout the customary greeting: "How're you doing, kid?" A familiar face, afamiliar voice. Exiles are always grateful for such moments. "What's up?"

"Not much. 'The social system is stable and the rulers are wise,'" asour colleague Zbigniew Herbert says. "'In Paradise one is better off thananywhere else.'" The novelist, to whom these quotations are directed, isnot keen on poetry, but luckily, it sounds more like prose.

"How are you? Tell me the latest. News from here, not from Warsaw."

"Well, I'm celebrating nine years of life in Paradise. On March 9,1988, I was shipwrecked on the shore of the New World."

"Children love anniversaries, and Barney Greengrass's is the idealplace for such things. It has all the memories of the ghetto, pure cholesterol,Oy mein Tiddishe mame. The old world and the old life."

He hands me the plastic-covered menu. Yes, the temptations of theghetto are all here: pickled herring in cream sauce, fillet of schmaltz herring(very salty), corned beef and eggs, tongue and eggs, pastrami andeggs, salami and eggs, homemade chopped chicken liver, gefilte fish withhorseradish. The chicken liver is no pate de foie gras, nor are incubator-bredAmerican chickens East European chickens. The fish isn't like thefish of the Old World, the eggs aren't like the eggs we used to know. Butpeople keep trying, and so here are the substitutes for the past. Russiandressing with everything, with roast beef, turkey ... Yes, the myth ofidentity, the surrogates of memories translated into the language ofsurvival.

A handsome young waiter approaches. He recognizes the famousnovelist and says to him, "I've read your latest book, sir." Philip seemsneither flattered nor upset by this greeting. "Indeed? And did you enjoyit?" He had, the waiter avowed, but not as much as the previous book,much sexier.

"Good, good," the novelist says, without raising his eyes from themenu. "I'll have the scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and orangejuice. Only the whites, no yolks." The waiter turns to the customer's unknowncompanion. "What about you, sir?"

"I'll have the same," I hear myself mumbling.

Barney Greengrass offers acceptable surrogates of East EuropeanJewish cuisine, but it is not enough to add fried onions or to affix bagelsand knishes to the menu to produce a taste of the past.

"So, how did you like Barney's cuisine?"

No reply.

"Okay, you don't have to answer that. Are you going to go back toRomania or not, what have you decided?"

"I haven't decided anything yet."

"Are you afraid? Are you thinking of that murder in Chicago? Thatprofessor ... what was his name? The professor from Chicago."

"Culianu, loan Petru Culianu. No, I'm not in the least like Culianu. Iam not a student of the occult like Culianu, nor, like him, have I betrayedthe master, nor, like him, am I a Christian in love with a Jewishwoman and about to convert to Judaism. I'm just a humble nomad, not arenegade. The renegade has to be punished, while I ... I am just an oldnuisance. I cannot surprise anybody."

"I don't know about surprises, but you've been quite a nuisanceoccasionally A suspect, becoming more suspicious. This is not to youradvantage."

Professor loan Petru Culianu had been assassinated on the twenty-firstof May 1991, in broad daylight, in one of the buildings of the Universityof Chicago. A perfect murder, apparently—a single bullet, shot from anadjacent stall, straight into the professor's head, as he sat on the plasticseat in the staff toilets of the Divinity School. The unsolved mystery ofthe assassination had, naturally, encouraged speculation—the relationsbetween the young Culianu and his mentor, the noted Romanian scholarof religion Mircea Eliade, with whose help he had been brought to America;his relations with the Romanian community of Chicago, with Romania'sexiled King, his interest in parapsychology. There was, in addition,the Iron Guard connection, that movement of extreme-right-wing nationalistswhose members were known as legionari, the Legionnaires. TheIron Guard, which Mircea Eliade had supported in the 1930s, still hadadherents among the Romanian expatriates of Chicago. It was said thatCulianu was on the verge of a major reassessment of his mentor's politicalpast.

The Chicago murder, it was true, coincided with the publication ofmy own article about Eliade's Legionnaire past, in The New Republic, in1991. I had been warned by the FBI to be cautious in my dealings withmy compatriots, and not only with them. It was not the first time I hadtalked about this with my American friend. Culianu, Eliade, MihailSebastian—Eliade's Jewish friend—these names had come up frequentlyin our conversations over the previous months.

As the date of my departure for Bucharest approached, Philip insistedthat I articulate the nature of my anxieties. I kept failing. My anxietieswere ambiguous. I did not know if I feared meeting my old selfthere, or if I feared bringing back my new image, complete with the expatriate'slaurels and the homeland's curses.

"I can understand some of your reasons," Philip says. "There mustbe others, probably. But this trip could cure you, finally, of the East Europeansyndrome."

"Perhaps. But I'm not ready yet for the return. I am not yet indifferentenough to my past."

"Exactly! After this trip, you will be. Those who come back, comeback healed."

We have reached the same old dead end. But this time, he persists.