Alexander Szaba walked four blocks north to the Bella Market. He recalled that his wife Ava used to say that Bella’s charged three times more than too much for a carton of milk. When she was alive, Ava made Alexander accompany her on the bus, to the Safeway clear across town. Alexander didn’t have the energy for that now. Twice a month, he managed to cover the three blocks to Goldstein’s Pharmacy, to pick up his blood pressure and cholesterol medications. The last thing he wanted was to run out and have another heart attack.
“So dangerous,” he muttered to the television after he’d gotten back from Bella’s, then blew on a spoonful of chicken soup heated up from the can, trying not to think how much he missed Ava and her chicken paprikash, the meat so tender a man could chew it without teeth. And those dumplings. Soft little pillows to comfort the mouth. He listened to the newscaster recount the latest shootings and stabbings, break-ins, rapes and missing children, thinking how the world kept getting more brutal.
Earlier that afternoon, he had slipped out to the front porch and smoked one unfiltered Camel cigarette. “What harm?” he said to Ava, as if his wife were still around, preparing to scold him. He sat on the white rocker, the paint peeling, in a thin-strapped undershirt grown yellow from wear, with baggy beige shorts his granddaughter Liz said made him look foreign and old-fashioned.
The neighborhood had changed since he and Ava bought the house. In those days, everyone spoke Hungarian. What parties they had, with beer flowing and women—such beautiful women—floating in and out, from house to house with covered dishes. Ava would start rolling the dough across the kitchen table before sunrise, snipping off the ends with a pair of silver scissors. Her fingers dusted white with flour, she formed oblong dumplings which turned soft, chewy and succulent, after being drowned in sweet Hungarian paprika and sour cream sauce.
Neighbors sold their rowhouses to slumlords and moved to Miami. They let the front porches rot but Alexander didn’t notice. Ava pleaded with him to take her some place safe and warmer, where a person didn’t have to worry about getting mugged.
“Why go someplace else?” Alexander had said. “This is our home. This is where we belong.”
The old man with the fringe of white hair left on his head and pale blue eyes was now the only Eastern European owner left. Instead of gypsy violin music filling the air, rap pulsed from passing cars, whenever Alexander stepped out to his front porch and noticed.
Liz was worried about her grandfather. The thought of him sitting all alone in his baggy shorts on the front porch caused her to ache just under her breastbone, where she sometimes got heartburn.
When Liz was young, she had sat for Grandpa Alexander in his studio, upstairs from the Hungarian bakery on Maple Avenue, where cakes layered with sour cream, fruit and nuts filled the glass cases. Her grandfather’s photographs were dark and made Liz look like a beautiful child.
Liz loved taking walks with her grandfather, though in her teen years she became embarrassed by his sandals and shorts. He walked slowly, not because he was old, but to take in the world around him. Some days, he had a funny old camera dangling from a worn leather strap around his neck. At times, he rested his hand on Liz’s shoulder and said, “Stop.” He would then raise the camera up to his chin and flip open the camera’s top, the metal making a clicking sound. Liz’s grandfather would look down, until a moment later when he said, “All right. We’re finished now.”
Alexander spent the morning dusting and vacuuming the house. He didn’t want his granddaughter to get more ideas in her head about moving him to a small apartment where strangers would help him out. She was coming to take him to a Hungarian restaurant for his birthday.
“Who wants to celebrate anymore?” he had asked her on the phone.
“We do, Grandpa. It’s not every day a man turns eighty.”
Secretly, Alexander felt cheered. He loved his only granddaughter, though it made him sad that she’d never married and had children.
Liz had a talent, though. That’s what Alexander used to tell Ava, whenever she complained that Liz was ruining her life by not having a family.
“A talent is everything,” Alexander liked to remind his wife.
Ava disagreed, of course, nights she got dolled up in a sequined dress and squeezed her feet into a pair of heels, to go to a downtown gallery for one of Liz’s openings. The woman barely looked at the paintings covering the white walls but cheerfully drank the free wine and bragged to everyone, “That’s my granddaughter.”
The restaurant was on the first floor of an old brick apartment building and looked like a setting for one of those black and white World War II movies, where Ingrid Bergman would smoke cigarettes and whisper to some man. The place was so dark that Liz’s grandfather had trouble reading the menu, even though he’d slipped on his bifocals and raised the menu up to his nose. Liz chose the restaurant because a gypsy violin player moved from table to table, while customers chewed dumplings and sipped Blood of the Bull Hungarian wine. Liz ignored her grandfather’s comment that the place needed more light, reminding him, “It’s romantic, Grandpa.”
Liz waited until after they’d ordered – chicken paprikash for both, and her grandfather predicting, “It won’t be as good as your grandmother’s.” After the waiter set two heavy cut-glass goblets of red wine down on the table, Liz leaned down and pulled the box out of her leather bag.
“Here, Grandpa. Happy Birthday.”
“What is this?” he said. “What can an old man possibly need?”
“Open it and see.”
Liz watched as her grandfather carefully picked apart the pink bow, as if afraid of harming it. She remembered then how her Grandmother Ava saved everything. Birthdays and Christmas, Liz recalled getting presents from her grandparents and being sure that the wrapping paper and ribbon had been used at least once before.
After several minutes, Grandpa Alexander opened the box and gently lifted the brand new digital camera out.
“What is this?” he asked again.
“It’s a camera, Grandpa. Instead of that old box you used to use, where you had to look down in it to see, this one has a lens you can see through. Instead of film you process and print, this is digital. It’s got a little computer inside. You can see your picture right after you take it.”
“Really?” her grandfather said to her. “Why would anyone want to do that?”
Every so often while they chewed their dumplings and swallowed the thick red wine, Liz saw her grandfather lift the camera out of the box and study it. As they finished dessert, a layered cake with thin fillings of prune, sour cream, raspberry jam and chopped walnuts that Grandpa Alexander reminded Liz wasn’t as moist as Ava’s, Liz said, “There’s a manual for the camera in the box, Grandpa. It’ll tell you how the camera works.”
Her grandfather raised his eyes from the table and shook his head.
One by one, Alexander matched up the camera’s components with the numbers on the drawing at the front of the manual. He tested each feature, and then figured out how to view the photographs. He had unknowingly taken a picture of his knee. Next was a photo of the living room, with the corner lamp lighting the right side of the frame. Reluctantly, Alexander had to admit that, as he’d once felt when images emerged from the paper under the low red light in his darkroom, this was magical.
The following morning, he couldn’t help but take the camera outside. He slowly made his way down the block, shooting the neighboring houses and late-model American cars parked out front. He took photographs without worrying about the composition and light.
It took a day or two until Alexander understood the camera’s entire workings. Even as a boy in Hungary, he’d had an aptitude and interest in mechanical things. Of course, he didn’t like to think about those days. Since Ava had died, he often found himself remembering his dark compact bedroom at the end of the hall. On wooden shelves his father nailed up, he had kept little airplanes and cars that he put together and sometimes played with on the floor. Through the wall, he could hear his parents talking and his mother crying more and more.
Tuesday morning dawned clear and warm, and Alexander did something uncharacteristically rash. He went out for a walk. The digital camera hung down in front of his chest. He anchored the strap diagonally, to keep the camera safe and in a good position to grab for quick shots. As usual, he had on a pair of baggy beige shorts, worn brown leather sandals, with thick straps that crisscrossed his feet at the top, and high black socks.
The neighborhood, he noticed for the first time, had gotten awfully rundown. The wooden porch rails and steps needed painting. Black, purple and red graffiti covered the buildings, bus shelters and even stop signs. Bright yellow wrappers and green plastic bottles collected along the curbs, and weeds and tall grass grew in the front yards. He snapped photos as he passed, thinking how they depicted a kind of desolation he now felt.
The more he walked, the more he began to think that perhaps Liz was right. The neighborhood wasn’t the same. It was strange, he thought, how a terrible destruction could creep in right under your nose, and you didn’t see it. Isn’t that what happened in Hungary? True, he was just a child, so what could he have known? Still, there had been his mother’s crying night after night. And then the packing up of dishes and paintings, the rooms of the apartment growing emptier by the hour, and his mother making him promise not to breathe a word to anyone.
In a narrow alley, Alexander saw a thin dark man jabbing a needle into his arm. Alexander lifted the camera quietly, held it a slight distance away from his right eye and composed the shot.
The day was bright and still, under a pale blue sky. Strangely, Alexander felt as if clouds had blown in and robbed the day of light. It was like that very last day in Hungary, when his world suddenly went dark.
“You must be a good boy,” his mother said to him, while tears streamed down her cheeks and seeped into her mouth. “You must promise me that.”
All these years later, he could still smell the flowery scent his mother gave off.
He stood at the window in the narrow attic, under the eaves of the roof. He watched her step into the car. His father got in next, stopping to turn and look up, but not waving, just taking the fingers of his right hand to the brim of his gray felt hat.
Then, they were gone. To this day, it amazed Alexander how a world could slip away without a moment’s thought.
A boy and girl were kissing on the steps of the next rowhouse. Alexander decided to take their photo at an angle. For some reason, it made him think about that famous shot from the war, in which two lovers were kissing madly in Paris. Only this black boy and girl had their bodies completely entwined. The boy had on a pair of too-big pants practically falling off and a black hooded sweatshirt. The hood covered his hair, even though the day was hot.
A different kind of war here, Alexander thought, as he tried to pretend that the couple was sitting in his studio posing for wedding photographs.
After Alexander took the third picture, the boy stopped kissing the girl and snapped his head around. He shot a glance at Alexander.
“What you doing there old man with that camera?”
Alexander hadn’t expected to be caught. He gasped. The boy’s and girl’s bodies blurred. Everything around Alexander began to spin.
On each side of where Alexander had slumped over and then fallen, abandoned rowhouses sat, their front doors boarded up and windows broken. The sad, tired structures were framed by weed-choked fields strewn with broken bits of concrete and green glass that glittered in the sun. Alexander lay crumpled on the bottom step when the two kids, who’d gotten scared, ran off.
Before he lost consciousness, Alexander had a vision of himself again in the car. A blur of cities and towns passed by outside the window that was streaked with rain and fogged. His mother had told to him to call the couple Auntie and Uncle, even though Alexander hadn’t ever seen them before. Over and over again during the ride, Auntie Miriam, her light blond curly hair winking in the sunlight, assured him that his parents would join them before long.
Then, days and weeks passed in London. How gray and frightening that time was, with rain falling and sirens screaming before the bombings. He would squeeze Auntie Miriam’s hand as they dashed to the underground shelter, and still there was no sign of his dad and mom. Then one day, Alexander’s Auntie Miriam pushed him forward onto the ship bound for America.
Liz dialed her grandfather’s number, just to check up on him, and listened to the phone ring. The painting she’d been working on sat next to the window. She’d been using mostly blacks and browns, with a little tan for some subtle brightness. A sort of Andrew Wyeth palette. She’d been trying to capture the tops of the buildings as she saw them from the window. All the straight angles and diagonals. The clean lines, but also a dark emptiness. Something reminiscent of Hopper but more contemporary.
She took a deep breath and let it out, telling herself that her grandfather was probably fine, just napping. The painting, she realized when she stepped back and considered what she’d done, was too bare. Rooftops seemed to be floating and that wasn’t the feeling she’d been aiming to get.
She applied some thick dark brown lines at each edge, to see what effect that might have. It seemed to open up the spaces at the corners. Now, those empty places at the corners needed to be filled in.
An hour passed while she worked, but a bad feeling about her grandfather lingered. She stepped over to the window and punched his number into the phone.
The police car drove past the rowhouse and then turned around and came back slowly on the opposite side. The officer in the passenger seat stepped out, pulling on a pair of bright blue gloves. Officer Brown, who had stayed in the patrol car, radioed for an ambulance.
Officer Gilbert looked down at the man. No blood, she saw quickly enough. No vomit. She put her hand on the man’s arm, moved him ever so gently and said, “Sir. Can you hear me?”
The doctor appeared to be Indian and spoke softly, with a slight British accent.
“He’s had a mild stroke,” the doctor said. “We don’t see any paralysis. He’s pretty strong for his age.”
“Are you saying he’ll be all right?” Liz asked. The doctor, she couldn’t help but notice, had lovely dark brown eyes.
“I think so, yes. We’ll do more tests. If I may ask, what was he doing out on the street all by himself?”
Liz shook her head.
“I don’t know. Maybe he was on his way to the store. I’ve tried to get him to move into assisted living, close to my loft, but so far I haven’t had any luck.”
“That’s a tough neighborhood. He’s lucky he wasn’t beaten or robbed.”
The doctor paused a moment before going on.
“The nurse said he had an expensive digital camera with him. Nobody took that.”
The camera was sitting on the nightstand next to her grandfather’s bed. Liz looked at it there, as she sat stroking her grandfather’s hand. He’d been pumped up with pain medications and was sleeping now. This time, she would tell him, he was lucky. Next time, if he stayed in that house, might be the end.
She picked up the camera and clicked the button to the viewing mode. A photograph came up of two black kids kissing in front of a rundown house. After that, there was another picture of the same kids. And another one.
Liz shook her head and smiled. He was out taking photographs, she realized.
That’s when she noticed the star.
It shone a little under the bright ceiling lights. Attached to a thick gold chain, the star, Liz saw, had six points. Like a Star of David. Wasn’t that something Jews wore?
A nurse walked in the room.
“Do you know where this came from?” Liz asked, holding the gold necklace up in her hand.
The petite blonde nurse squinted a little as she stepped closer.
“The patient must have been wearing it,” she said.
Why, Liz wondered, would her grandfather have been wearing a Star of David? Her grandfather wasn’t Jewish after all.
He moved more slowly than before the stroke, as he made his way from the bathroom to the kitchen table. The stroke had left him with complete use of his legs and arms but Liz could see that he had grown more frail and less steady. At least temporarily, her grandfather had agreed to stay at Liz’s downtown loft. When he was feeling better, he said, “We will see.”
Two weeks had passed since the doctor released him from the hospital. Liz liked having him around. He slept on and off during the day, occasionally getting up to use the bathroom or sip tea, while he watched her paint. Liz had lived alone so long, she thought it might grate on her to have another person around. But she had begun to look forward to times her grandfather was awake and they talked.
“So, I never asked you, Grandpa. How did you end up becoming a photographer?”
Her grandfather looked up from his oatmeal and his gaze seemed to wander off. A little smile crept up on his lips, then he chuckled and shook his head.
“Your grandmother,” he said and chuckled again. “You would not believe what a beautiful girl your grandmother was. Blond hair. Big green eyes. Well, I was working at a market. A small market, like Bella’s. And your grandmother walked in.”
He leaned back in his chair and chuckled another time.
“She bought chocolate for cocoa. Do you believe that? I can still remember, all these years later. Cocoa.”
He sat quietly for a moment, as if wanting to cherish that first moment he spied his future wife, a tin of chocolate for cocoa in her small hands.
“I couldn’t get her out of my mind.”
Liz’s grandfather lifted a spoonful of oatmeal to his mouth and chewed.
“A friend of mine had a camera. I told him about your mother. I remember, I talked on and on about her. Finally, he said to me, ‘Alex. I think you need this.’ And he handed me the camera.
“I said to him, ‘What do I need this for?’ He said back to me, ‘Take a picture of her. Then she’ll be with you always.’
“About a week later, she came into the store. I couldn’t think of a thing to say to her. But then I remembered the camera. I asked if she would let me take her picture. Well, people are always flattered if you want to photograph them. So, she agreed.”
Liz waited to hear if her grandfather had anything else to add but he returned to eating his oatmeal.
“Is that how you got into photography?”
“Yes,” he said. “And that’s how I ended up marrying your grandmother.”
Liz hadn’t forgotten the Star of David. The evening was warm and all the windows were open in the loft. Every few minutes, a siren went screaming off into the night.
Liz’s grandfather sat across the table from her. He hadn’t touched any of the food on his plate.
“Aren’t you hungry, Grandpa?” Liz asked.
Her grandfather raised his head but didn’t speak.
“Are you all right?”
Liz got up from her chair and hurried over to her grandfather’s side. She lifted his right wrist and felt his pulse. The pulse was there, but faint, though she knew nothing about these things. Her cold palm pressed against his forehead didn’t give her any more information. He was warm but not overly so.
“I’m going to get you to the hospital,” Liz said.
Alexander Szaba died a few minutes shy of eleven o’clock that night.
“Peacefully,” explained the doctor, this one a young man from China.
“Natural causes,” he said to Liz, as they stood in the hall outside her grandfather’s room. “His heart stopped.”
The letter had arrived a few months after Alexander turned twenty-one, a week before he was to marry his beautiful fiancé Ava. Before unfolding the small thin sheet of blue stationary, Alexander used his fingers to pull something heavy from the bottom of the manila envelope. The chain was gold, thick and substantial. At the end hung a six-pointed star.
I am sorry to have to write you this letter. For many years, I have searched for you and I am hoping now that this letter will reach you.
I knew your parents, the letter went on. They made me promise to try and find you.
Alexander finished reading the letter, the gold chain with the Star of David still clutched tightly in his hand. Your parents wanted you to know that they loved you very much. Those words echoed in his mind. They gave you away to save your life.
Alexander’s parents, the letter explained, had been sent to the death camps and did not survive.
Liz slid the letter on the thin blue paper into one of the leather-bound albums filled with her grandfather’s photographs. She set two photographs on a shelf next to her easel. One was of her grandfather, dressed in a suit and vest, standing in his studio next to the window. The other was of her grandfather and Grandma Ava. Taken the day they were married.
She set the Star of David on the shelf in front of the photos. In the late afternoon, the star would catch the light, tossing a six-pointed reflection onto the canvas Liz was working on and sometimes throwing a bright light directly into her eyes.
