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The Disappearance of Zalman
- Syracuse University Press
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1 The Disappearance of Zalman Mark K agan met Sar ah at a poetry festival held annually in New Haven. In the packed auditorium their seats were next to each other, but they didn’t start talking until the end of the reading. A scandal brought them together—not a scandal in which they took part, but one that both of them observed from their seats. Toward the end of the program, a famous critic was supposed to be reminiscing about Robert Penn Warren and then reciting his poem about goose hunting. Drunk and crab-legged, wearing a wide-brim hat and a soiled corduroy jacket, the professor fell off the stage in the middle of the poem, with the words “path of logic, path of folly” stuck between his teeth. “This guy’s a riot,” Sarah said, turning to Mark. “Do you know him?” “Had him for a seminar,” Mark replied, following the curve of her honey-freckled neck, and a few minutes later they were stomping on wet November maple leaves, laughing at each other’s impressions of the drunk critic’s reading and fall. They headed downtown to Mark’s favorite bar and played darts while drinking beer and waiting for their food. After downing a plate of spicy fried squid with two more beers, they walked to Mark’s apartment, where the bed hadn’t been made and the pillows and sheets smelled of the ocean. . . . They had been together for a year and a half when Sarah completed her master’s in political science and took a job on Capitol Hill. She moved to Washington in August, after the two of them had gone 2 | Yom Kippur in Amsterdam on a biking trip to Prince Edward Island. Mark stayed behind in New Haven to finish up his dissertation and look for a teaching job. On a wind-flappy, late afternoon in September, Mark was sitting by the window of the bar he frequented. His pint was dark, bitter, and bottomless, the kind that cleanses a drunken soul of its illusions and false hopes. Licking Lethean froth off his lips, his temple pressed to the dusty window between the letters R and A, and his eyes fixated on a neighborhood idiot feeding challah to shameless New Haven pigeons, Mark realized that compromise was just a convenient verbal prop, that of course Sarah wasn’t going to become Jewish, or he cease to be it, and they’d better take themselves in hand and face the imminence of separation. The first few weeks after that were the hardest for Mark. When he wasn’t writing, Sarah came into his thoughts, and he revisited their many unresolved discussions about marriage and family. He hoped to find justification for ending the whole thing. Sarah had told him they should let the kids choose their religion. She believed she was meeting him halfway, and a part of him agreed: yes, it looked as if neither one would have to give up their ancestral faith. But when Mark reminded himself that after almost two years together Sarah still hadn’t figured out that for a Jewish man the prospect of having to bargain for the identity of his future children was terrifying, he became so angry that he wanted to run away and forget her. As he was soon to discover, though, the rehearsed drama of parting had to play out in his head in order to come to a close in the third act. Only then would it end, when he performed all the parts, including Sarah’s, his own, and those of his immigrant parents, Sarah’s widowed mother, and even the spectral presence of Sarah’s father. Their relationship stubbornly refused to exit the stage, the spectacle of life continued without letting up, Mark kept forgetting their lines and mumbling something about “working it out,” coughing and improvising as they went along. It was already the end of October, a feverish Indian summer after a week of cold rain and the first streaks of [35.173.178.60] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:59 GMT) The Disappear ance of Zalman | 3 silver on the ground, but the old double-barreled gun still hadn’t shot their love dead. Mark didn’t know how to explain to anyone that despite the certainty of it all, despite his knowledge that his time together with Sarah was nearing its ending, despite the clenched-teeth endorsement of all fifty-seven centuries...