The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [24]
This would almost make a kind of home for us, wouldn’t it? Just in case? We could do some work on the land, build an addition onto the hut. It would not be terrible. Couldn’t we live here someday if we needed to, if it came to that?
You weren’t supposed to, but who would know? How could that be bad, to make this place prettier and livable? There is no possible way that could be bad. Making a place nicer was a good thing to do. No one could argue with that. No one would have to know.
9
LeBov, by radio—broadcasting from a secluded location for his own protection—brought his diagnosis public, called out the toxic Jewish child. A disease seeping beyond its circumference, radiating from the head, the face, the mind.
There are particulars I do not wish to share, said LeBov. A secrecy that made his claim seem more true.
It was hard to disagree, but everyone did. They protested out of conviction or denial or fear or real scientific understanding. The diagnostic debate played out with proponents and detractors firing evidence back and forth across the massive pit of confusion we all swam in.
The culprits, the carriers, the agents of infection, were Jewish children, all children, not just children, some adults, all of us.
The culprits were infirm only, or maybe just the healthy, or maybe only those who’d eaten dirt, or not eaten enough of it. An autopsy was called on the whole living planet. The expertise in each case was minor and romantic and you could hitch your fate to any of it, so long as you didn’t mind being wrong.
To challenge matters, a child-free settlement in Arizona produced victims with identical symptoms: facial smallness, lethargy, a hardening under the tongue that defeated attempts at speech. No exposure to a child, let alone a Jewish one.
LeBov wasn’t bothered. “I’m speaking of the cause,” he said, “and this cause spread fast a long time ago. Our forest Jews know what I mean. Just ask them.”
When the affliction crystallized on a map, colors coding the victim radius, the image was pretty, a golden yellow core radiating out of inner Wisconsin. Whatever was happening seemed to happen there first. But there were flares of activity everywhere, and every day they changed, the whole map strobing over time into one blinding sphere.
Activity was the word for people finally hardening in their beds for good, sewn up in frozen limbs from speech and its offshoots. Activity was the diplomatic word for its reverse.
Whatever anyone knew, they knew it with desperate force and you were crazy not to believe them. But when you melded the various insights to forge a collective wisdom, you had total venom pouring from every speaking creature. The common thread among the theories was that whoever was to blame, children alone were resistant.
It was a piece of evidence not lost on the children.
At home, in the weeks after Esther’s return from camp, I traversed the dirty five-mile wedge of boulevard that insulated our house from the woods, chasing the question of the Esther perimeter. Basic smallwork prompted by Thompson’s sermon. How far away from our daughter did we need to remove ourselves to experience an abatement of symptoms or even, one hoped, the ability to breathe enough air to stay functional and conscious?
On my evening walks, initially to Culpin Boulevard on the north end, or to Blister Field and its adjacent parks just south of the synagogue prison, where the narrow, tree-clotted streets give way to plantless swaths of gravel, I tracked the distance that would be required from Esther for the sickness to retreat.
Men my own age wandered by, smothered in winter wear, their eyes locked to the footpath. From their mouths curled thin ribbons of steam. Women with the same gray face as Claire’s wheezed under the cover of trees. One of them offered a shy wave I chose not to return. Or