“Yes,” she said. “And Ukrainian.”
“I would love to study the Slavic languages someday,” Danforth said.
“You can go to the table now,” Anna said when she came out of the kitchen.
Danforth did as he was told, then watched as she set the table: two plates, one slightly cracked at the edge, mismatched utensils and cloth napkins, and two large water glasses, neither of which, he was relieved to see, was chipped at the mouth.
They ate a few minutes later, food clearly left over from the day before, hearty peasant food, as Danforth would have described it, and which he’d eaten during his travels when he’d been waylaid by weather or other circumstances and ended up in some small hotel that served local fare.
“Very tasty,” he said at one point.
“Good,” Anna said. She tore off a piece of pumpernickel bread and offered it to him. “Try this.”
From time to time, he thought he was being evaluated in some way, put through an arcane test, and for that reason found himself not altogether comfortable. The less fortunate always had a way of mocking the rich. He’d seen its various forms throughout the world, the petty signals of their ridicule. It came in halfconcealed winks and smiles, or was spoken in the shared idioms of both the idle and the working poor. The rich were always fops to them, always inept, protected from the storms of life and therefore assumed to be unable to weather them. Rickshaw pullers had guffawed at his approach, then bowed to him with an exaggeration that burned with comic ridicule. Ferrymen had done the same, and taxi drivers everywhere. It was class and ethnic war fought with smirks and muttered asides, and he wondered if this dinner might not be some version of it.
Then, rather suddenly, Anna said, “Does anyone know you?”
“What?” he asked, completely taken aback by both the frankness and the intimacy of her question.
“Does anyone know you?” she repeated. “At the office, no one does.”
Without willing it, he ran down the list of those who might be expected to know him — his long-standing social and business associates, his few relatives, and finally his father and Cecilia — asking himself which one knew him, really, truly knew him, and arriving at a single disturbing answer:
He started to say exactly that to Anna but stopped when his eye caught the one thing in the room that didn’t appear to have been bought at a consignment shop or rescued from the street. It was a relief, made of leather. It showed a street scene, one-story buildings crowded together, almost everything in brown save for the places where the artist had carved small flowers from red leather and sewn them into tiny baskets or hung them from balconies.
“I’ve seen something like that before,” he said. “It’s from a famous leather shop in Cordoba that’s been there for generations.”
“Yes,” Anna said. She smiled. “My father used to talk about the sunflowers in Spain He said you could travel from Madrid to Barcelona and never have them out of view.”
“That’s true,” Danforth said. “Your family came from Spain?”
“Yes,” Anna said. “From Cordoba, as a matter of fact.”
Suddenly Danforth no longer imagined Anna’s ancestors digging potatoes from the unforgiving ground of the Pale but strolling the flowered streets of Cordoba and walking beneath the red-striped arches of its famed
“Cordoba,” he said, and with that word entertained the possibility that the name Klein had been given to her, as so many names had been given at Ellis Island, and this, combined with the utter lack of any religious objects, raised an even more extraordinary possibility. “So you’re . . . Spanish . . . not —”
“No, I’m not Spanish,” Anna interrupted. “My father had never been to Spain. But he told me about the sunflowers because his father had told him about them, and his father before that, and so on down the line.” A single eyebrow arched, but it was enough for him to see a not altogether cheerful change in her expression. “You’d rather I were Spanish, wouldn’t you?”
She said this as if she were merely curious as to the arcane workings of Danforth’s mind, but he immediately understood what she was thinking and couldn’t keep back a self-conscious laugh.
“No, not at all,” he assured her quickly. “I was just curious about your forebears.”
He could tell that she didn’t believe this innocent explanation. Nor should she have believed it, he thought, because his question hadn’t come from some general interest but from the prison of his own upbringing, his father’s often stated contempt for what he called “the riffraff of the East,” by which he meant its black-frocked Jews, to his eyes so unsightly, with their white shirts and dangling curls, scattered across a thousand muddy villages or heaped in roiling masses in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz, a people he clearly loathed.
“My forebears,” Anna repeated, and let the matter drop. They moved on to other subjects.
But even as they talked of other things, her gaze remained intense, and Danforth felt layers of himself peeling away, the sense that she knew what he had not known about himself until moments before but that he now accepted with a piercing recognition and repeated in his mind as the night wore on:
~ * ~
Century Club, New York City, 2001
“It was strange to realize this particular element of myself,” Danforth said. He leaned back slowly. “Here I was, involved in a project whose mission was to thwart Germany’s plan for world conquest, opening my house to this effort, and yet all the time I was in some sense a sympathizer with at least one of Nazism’s frankly stated aims.” The tone of his voice darkened by a shade. “I wanted to make Anna something else. Something . . . anything but a Jew. Isn’t that a kind of extermination?”
When I didn’t answer, he smiled quietly.
“The human heart,” he added softly but with a searing word of warning, “is a twisty little thing, Paul.”
