16

“He reads Paul Celan,” Oliver broke in, trying to change the subject but

also perhaps to come to my rescue and show, without quite seeming to, that

he had not forgotten our previous conversation. Was he trying to rehabilitate

me after that little jab about my late hours, or was this the beginnings of yet

another joke at my expense? A steely, neutral glance sat on his face.

“E chi è?” She’d never heard of Paul Celan.

I shot him a complicit glance. He intercepted it, but there was no hint of

mischief in his eyes when he finally returned my glance. Whose side was he

on?

“A poet,” he whispered as they started ambling out into the heart of the

piazzetta, and he threw me a casual Later!

I watched them look for an empty table at one of the adjoining caffès.

My friends asked me if he was hitting on her.

I don’t know, I replied.

Are they doing it, then?

Didn’t know that either.

I’d love to be in his shoes.

Who wouldn’t?

But I was in heaven. That he hadn’t forgotten our conversation about

Celan gave me a shot of tonic I hadn’t experienced in many, many days. It

spilled over everything I touched. Just a word, a gaze, and I was in heaven.

To be happy like this maybe wasn’t so difficult after all. All I had to do was

find the source of happiness in me and not rely on others to supply it the

next time.

I remembered the scene in the Bible when Jacob asks Rachel for water

and on hearing her speak the words that were prophesied for him, throws up

his hands to heaven and kisses the ground by the well. Me Jewish, Celan

Jewish, Oliver Jewish—we were in a half ghetto, half oasis, in an otherwise

cruel and unflinching world where fuddling around strangers suddenly

stops, where we misread no one and no one misjudges us, where one person

simply knows the other and knows him so thoroughly that to be taken away

from such intimacy is galut, the Hebrew word for exile and dispersal. Was

he my home, then, my homecoming? You are my homecoming. When I’m

with you and we’re well together, there is nothing more I want. You make

me like who I am, who I become when you’re with me, Oliver. If there is

any truth in the world, it lies when I’m with you, and if I find the courage to

speak my truth to you one day, remind me to light a candle in thanksgiving

at every altar in Rome.

It never occurred to me that if one word from him could make me so

happy, another could just as easily crush me, that if I didn’t want to be

unhappy, I should learn to beware of such small joys as well.

But on that same night I used the heady elation of the moment to speak

to Marzia. We danced past midnight, then I walked her back by way of the

shore. Then we stopped. I said I was tempted to take a quick swim,

expecting she would hold me back. But she said she too loved swimming at

night. Our clothes were off in a second.

“You’re not with me because you’re

angry with Chiara?”

“Why am I angry with Chiara?”

“Because of him.”

I shook my head, feigning a puzzled look meant to show that I couldn’t

begin to guess where she’d fished such a notion from.

She asked me to turn around and not stare while she used her sweater to

towel her body dry. I pretended to sneak a clandestine glance, but was too

obedient not to do as I was told. I didn’t dare ask her not to look when I put

my clothes on but was glad she looked the other way. When we were no

longer *****, I took her hand and kissed her on the palm, then kissed the

space between her fingers, then her mouth. She was slow to kiss me back,

but then she didn’t want to stop.

We were to meet at the same spot on the beach the following evening.

I’d be there before her, I said.

“Just don’t tell anyone,” she said.

I motioned that my mouth was zipped shut.

“We almost did it,” I told both my father and Oliver the next morning as

we were having breakfast.

“And why didn’t you?” asked my father.

“Dunno.”

“Better to have tried and failed…” Oliver was half mocking and half

comforting me with that oft-rehashed saw.

“All I had to do was find the

courage to reach out and touch, she would have said yes,” I said, partly to

parry further criticism from either of them but also to show that when it

came to self-mockery, I could administer my own dose, thank you very

much. I was showing off.

“Try again later,” said Oliver. This was what people who were okay

with themselves did. But I could also sense he was onto something and

wasn’t coming out with it, perhaps because there was something mildly

disquieting behind his fatuous though well-intentioned try again later. He

was criticizing me. Or making fun of me. Or seeing through me.

It stung me when he finally came out with it. Only someone who had

completely figured me out would have said it.

“If not later, when?”

My father liked it. “If not later, when?” It echoed Rabbi Hillel’s famous

injunction, “If not now, when?”

Oliver instantly tried to take back his stinging remark. “I’d definitely try

again. And again after that,” came the watered-down version. But try again

later was the veil he’d drawn over If not later, when?

I repeated his phrase as if it were a prophetic mantra meant to reflect

how he lived his life and how I was attempting to live mine. By repeating

this mantra that had come straight from his mouth, I might trip on a secret

passageway to some nether truth that had hitherto eluded me, about me,

about life, about others, about me with others.

to be continued

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