Where are you traveling to? the old man asked me, and I told him everything without a second of hesitation, with the kind of verve I might use to excoriate some other musical, I talked about the Polish city my relatives had moved from a hundred years earlier, to Warsaw and then farther east, perhaps solely in order to bequeath to me the Russian language, which I was now so generously passing along to no one, dead end and halt, so I have to travel there, I said, to one of the oldest cities in Poland, where they, the forebears about whom nothing is known, had lived for two, three, or even four centuries, perhaps since the fifteenth century, when the Jews in this little Polish town had been granted privileges and become neighbors, the Others. And you? Sam asked, and I said I am Jewish, more by accident than design.
We’re waiting for that train as well, Sam said after a brief pause, we, too, are taking the Warszawa Express. Taking this train, which looks like a thoroughbred horse as it looms up out of the fog, an express train that moves according to schedule but against time, into the zone of Bombardier, for us only, I thought, and the old man moved on to say that his wife was looking for the same thing, namely the world of her grandmother, who had come to the United States from a small White Russian village outside of Biała Podlaska, and yet it was neither his homeland nor his wife’s, a hundred years have gone by and many generations, and none of them knew the language anymore either, but still, Biała Podlaska sounded to him like a forgotten lullaby, godknowswhy, a key to the heart, he said, and the village is called Janów Podlaski, and hardly anyone had lived there besides Jews and now only the others, and they were both going there to take a look at it, and, he really did keep saying and again and again, as though he was stumbling over an impediment, naturally nothing remained there, he said naturally and nothing in order to emphasize the senselessness of his journey, I, too, often say naturally or even innately as though this disappearance or this nothingness was natural or even self-evident. The landscape, however, the names of the places and a stud farm for Arabian horses that has been in existence since the early nineteenth century, established after the Napoleonic Wars and the top choice of the experts, everything was still there, they told me as though they had googled everything. A horse could cost a good million dollars there, Mick Jagger had already taken a look at horses from this stud farm at an auction, his drummer bought three, and now they would be going there, five kilometers from the Belarussian border, thank Google. There was even a horse cemetery there, no, the Jewish cemetery was not preserved, that was on the Internet as well.
I’m a Jew from Tehran, the old man said in English as we were still standing on the platform, Samuel is my new name. I came to New York from Tehran, Sam said. He knew Aramaic, had learned a good many things, and took his violin wherever he went. In the United States, he’d actually set out to study nuclear physics, but wound up applying to the conservatory, failed the entrance exam, and became a banker, but was no longer in that line of work either. Even after fifty years, his wife said when we were already sitting in the train and the metallic rainbow of “Willkommen in Berlin” was no longer weighing down on our heads, his wife said that whether he’s playing Brahms, Vivaldi, or Bach, it all sounds Iranian. And he said it was fate that they had met me, I looked like the Iranian women of his childhood, he had wanted to say Iranian mothers, perhaps he even wanted to say like my mother but held back, and he added it was also a twist of fate that I was better versed in genealogy than they were, and that I was traveling to Poland with the same destination and the same train—assuming the urge to search for what has vanished can be defined as a destination at all, I replied. And no, it is not fate, I said, because Google watches over us like God, and when we search for something, it fleshes out our story, just like when you buy a printer on the Internet and you continue to be offered printers for a long time to come, and when you buy a backpack for school, you continue to get advertising for it for years, and let’s not even mention online dating, and if you google yourself, at some point even your namesakes vanish, and what remains is only you, as though you have sprained your foot and limp, and suddenly the entire city limps, out of solidarity, perhaps, millions of limpers, they form a group, almost the majority. How is democracy supposed to work if you get only what you’ve already searched for and if you are what you search, and you never feel alone or you always do, since you never get the chance to meet the others, who are not like you, and that’s how it is with the search, you come across like-minded people, God googles our paths, so that we stay put in our grooves, I always meet people who are looking for the same thing I am, I said, and that is why we, too, have met here, and the old man said, This is the very meaning of fate. He was obviously further along in exegesis than I.
All of a sudden I thought of the musical that had actually created a sensation here, when you saw the words Les Misérables, without comment, on the advertising spaces of the city, unlike the movie of the same name, which called the miserable ones Prisoners of Fate. The musical spoke to everyone with its Les Misérables, as though one needed constant consolation—Poor, miserable you!—or simply needed to have it pointed out that it is not merely one of us who is suffering, but indeed we all come together in suffering, because faced with these huge letters, faced with this wasteland in the middle of the city, all of us are miserable, not only the others, but I as well. And so the letters of Bombardier on the arc of the station roof fill us with their reverberation, the way organ music fills the church, and none can escape it.
And then I really did google it: Bombardier was one of the largest railway and airplane construction companies in the world, and this Bombardier, which sets our paths, had recently launched an ad campaign, “Bombardier YourCity.” Quickly and safely. And now we were traveling from Berlin to Poland on the Warszawa Express, with the blessing of Bombardier, among curtains and napkins bearing the insignia WARS, an abbreviation as outmoded and bygone as Star Wars and other wars of the future.
A spruce is standing lonely.
—HEINRICH HEINE
As a child I thought a family tree was something like a Christmas tree, a tree with decorations from old boxes—some baubles break, fragile as they are, some angels are ugly and sturdy and remain intact through every move. In any case, a Christmas tree was the only family tree we had, bought new every year then thrown away, a day before my birthday.
I had thought that telling the story of the few people who happened to be my relatives was all that was needed to conjure up the entire twentieth century. Some of my family members were born to pursue their callings in life in the unswerving, implicit belief that they would fix the world. Others seemed to have come out of nowhere; they did not put down roots, they ran back and forth, barely touching the ground, and hung in the air like a question, like a skydiver caught in a tree. My family had just about everything, I had arrogantly thought, a farmer, many teachers, a provocateur, a physicist, and a poet—and plenty of legends.
We had
a revolutionary who joined the Bolsheviks and changed his name in the underground to one we have been using legally for close to a hundred years
several workers in a shoe factory in Odessa, about whom nothing is known
a