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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504009584 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 03/10/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 524 KB |
About the Author
Born in Brooklyn, brought up on Long Island, Silman graduated with honors from Cornell University and has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence.
A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, she has won the National Magazine Award for Fiction twice. Two stories were read on Selected Shorts, two others won PEN Syndicated Fiction prizes, and several were cited in Best American Short Stories. Somebody Else’s Child won the Child Study Association Award; Blood Relations won honorable mentions for the PEN Hemingway and Janet Heidinger Kafka Prizes; Boundaries won honorable mention for the Kafka Prize; and The Dream Dredger and Beginning the World Again won Washington Irving Awards. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, VQR, The American Scholar, and World Books PRI. She reviews regularly for the online magazine The ArtsFuse.
Ms. Silman is married to structural engineer, Robert Silman, and they have three married children and five grandchildren.
Roberta Silman’s first story was in The New Yorker; other stories followed there, in The Atlantic, Redbook, McCall’s, Hadassah, VQR, The American Scholar and in many places here and abroad. Her books are Blood Relations, stories; three novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning the World Again: A Novel of Los Alamos; and two children’s books, Somebody Else’s Child and The Astronomers.
Born in Brooklyn, brought up on Long Island, Silman graduated with honors from Cornell University and has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence.
A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, she has won the National Magazine Award for Fiction twice. Two stories were read on Selected Shorts, two others won PEN Syndicated Fiction prizes, and several were cited in Best American Short Stories. Somebody Else’s Child won the Child Study Association Award; Blood Relations won honorable mentions for the PEN Hemingway and Janet Heidinger Kafka Prizes; Boundaries won honorable mention for the Kafka Prize; and The Dream Dredger and Beginning the World Again won Washington Irving Awards. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, VQR, The American Scholar, and World Books PRI. She reviews regularly for the online magazine The ArtsFuse.
Ms. Silman is married to structural engineer, Robert Silman, and they have three married children and five grandchildren.
Read an Excerpt
Beginning the World Again
A Novel of Los Alamos
By Roberta Silman
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1990 Roberta SilmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0958-4
CHAPTER 1
There were so many things I didn't know when we were at Los Alamos: that memory cannot be controlled and has a will of its own; that a chain of events has continuous consequences; and that fame, even limited or dubious fame, is a second skin. Unlike a piece of clothing that can be shrugged off or folded and put away for a time, fame becomes part of you; it hugs and imprisons you and can never be shed—not even years and years after the fact.
So far Peter and I have been lucky in this Vermont village. That's one of the reasons we return each year. For here Peter is as anonymous as the next man.
Another reason we come back is the landscape. When we were at Los Alamos, people insisted that the Southwest was the most beautiful place on earth. Probably because of the light and the sky and the sense of space.
Yet that Southwest landscape had a strange, almost frightening severity. Everything was on such a grand scale that you felt as if you were living not in the world but at the edge of the universe. Whereas here in northern Vermont we feel as if we've come home.
Soon the cross-country ski trail winds through a stand of hemlocks; with no sun to soften it, the surface has slicked to a streak of ice. My muscles tense. I hate to ski on ice, I've always hated it, and now it's not so easy to sit down and tumble into a fall. Yet I used to do that with no trouble at all—when the children were small and flying past me, their skis like sleds beneath their supple bodies, their eyes daring danger.
"Come on, Lily, let's not fight the ice," Peter suddenly urges, then extends his arm and pulls me off the trail. Here in the woods are more than two feet of old, caked snow.
"Are you planning to murder me?"
He laughs. "Hardly. Just keep moving and you'll be fine. Up ahead someone's broken a trail. We can follow that." Before long the narrow woods trail dips and bends, and we are skiing from one glade of sunlight to another. The soughing of the wind is broken by distant ripples of laughter or an occasional shout. I open my jacket, grateful for the breeze. Peter zigzags in and out of sight never breaking stride. Sometimes, after he has taught for a whole week, he looks his age, but here, still slim and graceful as he skis, he has shed years.
Now I am in a cul-de-sac that the wind cannot invade, so quiet I can hear myself breathe. Tatters of blue sky fly above trees that look like giant soldiers at attention, outlandish, skinny soldiers with pine-needled heads. Then I hear, "Lily?" I hurry from the thicket of pines. "Over here," he calls, and I see her.
"I got separated from my family, and your husband was kind enough to let me ski with him," she apologizes. She has large brown eyes and beautiful teeth and curly brown hair. Tiny droplets of perspiration glisten on her firm young neck. She reminds me of our daughter, Anne. "I hope you don't mind."
"No, of course not. Peter's the best bushwacker you'll ever meet," I tell her, and the three of us begin to ski again. Soon we can see the marked trail. Peter skis down to it.
"It's not nearly as icy here," he reports as the young woman and I pick our way down the slope. As I concentrate to get a rhythm going, I see she's not an experienced skier, and now she's asking Peter to show her how to stop.
"The trick is to start slowly and not let yourself get going too fast." Then Peter shows her how to hold her arms and knees. He's delighted; he loves nothing more than to teach, and she is a willing student. At the end of the trail her face is glowing with pleasure.
"You saved my life, you've taught me how to stop, and I don't even know your names," she says.
"Lily, Peter," Peter replies. No last names on skiing and hiking trails. His old rule.
"Hope. Hope Eliason."
Peter nods abruptly, one of the few hangovers from his European upbringing, and we part. But something tells me we haven't seen the last of her.
That evening, while we are consulting our menus, Hope Eliason appears at Peter's elbow, this time with her husband, Ted. She looks even lovelier than she did this afternoon, and Peter's eyes take in her pretty red blouse and milky skin. Her husband looks at us with a question in his eyes, and I can feel myself growing wary. Do they know who we are? I wonder as Peter carries the conversation, then I think about what they see:
A tall, thin man, perhaps touching seventy, white-haired, balding, with strong features, a largish nose and bad teeth, which nonetheless have never prevented him from smiling broadly when he's pleased. And large, expressive hands that often gesture when he speaks. But most outstanding are his vibrant, purplish blue eyes that refuse to age and that shine with his extraordinary intelligence. Blue eyes that can go strangely flat when he's uncomfortable or bored or angry, but that have countless layers when he's interested or when he's enjoying himself, as he is now.
And me? A small, gray-haired woman in her early sixties, who refuses as stubbornly as a teenager to give up her hair and wears it in a topknot that is never as neat as it should be. A face that is worn, though not nearly as worn as the faces of many of her contemporaries, so that when she's not with her husband she is taken for younger than she is. A still-trim woman more conscious than she ever dreamed she would be of the onset of age, who chooses her clothes carefully and has begun to wear makeup to bring out her eyes that were once as large as this girl's eyes. Eyes that have grown, oddly, darker with the years. Onyx eyes, Peter calls them.
But now Ted Eliason has stopped staring and is saying, "We're going to a meeting nearby, a meeting about nuclear arms."
Finally I let my glance hold Peter's, warn him, and in that swift exchange, Hope asks her husband, "Shall I take a guess?"
Peter's eyes dart from my face to hers and then to Ted's, and I think they are going to dull with anger, but I'm wrong. He is still the elderly attractive man; imperturbable, amused, he stares at Hope's reddening face.
"You're Peter and Lily Fialka." Her voice is breathy, earnest. Peter nods. "I knew it. I told you it was them when I came off the trail," she tells her husband.
"Hope's a physics teacher," Ted explains. "In our local high school and also once a week at NYU. She's also an antinuke activist." He sounds so serious.
"I've seen pictures of you," Hope adds.
"Oh, Hope has a fabulous memory. If she sees something once, she never forgets it," Ted goes on. Hope blushes but doesn't deny it. Peter and I exchange glances.
Then Hope says, "Why don't you join us?" She searches our puzzled faces.
"No, no. Impossible. Never go to meetings unless I'm running them," Peter says. "Besides, I'm deep in the middle of Thomas Mann. Doktor Faustus. Wonderful book. An old man's book where he can say what he pleases without worrying what anyone will think." He waves his hand dismissively.
Hope retreats, humiliated. Suddenly I'm sorry for her. She's stepped into a hornet's nest, but how is she to know that since September Peter has been hounded by letters, phone calls, advance copies of books—all about the dangers of nuclear war? As if all the intellectuals in the country, having had ten years to recover from Vietnam, had finally awakened.
You're not being fair, my eyes tell Peter. He gives a slight shrug, then looks at her.
"Please come," she urges. "When I called to find out about the meeting, the woman in charge said they were having a well-known speaker, someone very knowledgeable, a surprise."
Peter shakes his head. "They all have surprise speakers." Yet as the Eliasons leave us to our dinner, I feel my heart sink. I long for the Trapp Family Lodge, which burned down last year: the large library where we would read before a dying fire, the background trill and hum of voices assuring us we had company if we wanted it. Our room in the motel unit near the old lodge is dismal, lonely. Besides, Peter will be engrossed in the progress of Adrian Leverkühn's syphilitic existence, and although I was looking forward to reading Ibsen, Hedda Gabler seems flat compared to the idea of attending a community meeting.
If we were back in Boston, we wouldn't consider it, but we should do this sort of thing once in a while, I hear myself saying, and what better place than Vermont?
Hope returns while we are dawdling over coffee. I can see she expects a no. Impulsively I ask how they are getting there.
"Oh, Ted will drive, he's a wonderful driver, and we have a four-wheel-drive car." Peter's face softens. His eyes shine with that peculiar tender light they get when he knows I will be pleased. As we stand up, I have the strangest feeling: that we are walking to the brink of something. It's a feeling I haven't had in years and years.
Sitting next to Peter in the backseat of a car on a cold winter's night takes me back to the days when Tony and Anne were teenagers and they would chauffeur us. I don't know why I'm stricken with such a yearning for the past. Perhaps it's because of the lodge that is now real only in our memory. Or perhaps it's the appearance of this young couple who take themselves so seriously, who honestly believe that each action they take has tremendous importance. How easy it is to think that at their age. But how easy it is to make mistakes, to believe one knows the whole story, or what is best, when only an infinitesimal part of any story can be known to one person.
Peter takes my hand, and we lean back into the luxurious upholstery. My eyes drink in the darkness of the country night: so black, so encompassing, so unremittingly harsh, broken only by the flash of headlights on the beards of blue ice that have slowly formed on the rocky sides of the road since winter began. I am lulled into a sweet, dreamless doze until the car jolts to a stop.
Valentine decorations festoon this school cafeteria, brightening its two-tone walls, its heavy furniture, its dark wood floor. At the back, behind the neat rows of chairs, are long tables covered with red cloths, a coffee urn, large platters of home-baked goods. The audience is mostly young; I recognize a few ski instructors from the Trapp Lodge who are constantly knitting hats and mittens for sale at the shop. The small, double-pointed knitting needles arranged in squares on their fingers look like odd appendages, like the hands of creatures from another planet.
Hope's cheeks are flushed with excitement. Could she be so foolish as to introduce Peter during the discussion period? Her deep brown eyes rove through the crowd, and as I watch them I decide that her kind of enthusiasm can lead to almost anything. I touch her forearm and whisper, "Peter would prefer no one know who he is."
She nods and tucks her arm into mine. She's a few inches taller than I, and as we walk to our seats, sidestepping cartons of books piled along the edge of the room, I know that people could take us for mother and daughter. It makes me miss Anne.
The leader of the meeting glances toward the doorway of the cafeteria and finally confesses that their speaker is late. One woman reports on the progress of the SALT talks; a man discusses the still-embryonic plans for a huge disarmament march in the late spring, probably in New York City; another woman gives a synopsis of the article in The New York Times Magazine last November about the feelings on disarmament in West Germany. She holds up a cover, which has hovered at the back of my mind since I saw it: a woman with a chalked face wearing the sign Wir Wollen Kein Euroshima.
"She looks like something out of a Brecht play," Peter said when he saw it.
Then the noise of cartons being slit open, and I see that the boxes contain copies of The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell. The publisher sent galleys to Peter, and we both read them before Christmas. Without looking, I know that the muscles at the back of Peter's neck are tight.
Oh, why did we come? When will I learn to stay home, where I belong? Soon a man with flowing gray hair begins to read Schell's description of Hiroshima after the bomb struck.
Silence.
He waits. Then, "'If it were possible (as it would not be) for someone to stand at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street (about two miles from Ground Zero) without being instantly killed, he would see the following sequence of events. A dazzling white light from the fireball would illuminate the scene, continuing for perhaps thirty seconds. Simultaneously, searing heat would ignite everything flammable and start to melt windows, cars, buses, lampposts, everything made of metal or glass. People in the street would immediately catch fire and would shortly be reduced to heavily charred corpses. About five seconds after the light disappeared, the blast wave would strike, laden with the debris of a now nonexistent midtown. Some buildings might be crushed, as though a giant fist had squeezed them on all sides ...'"
My fingers and toes begin to tingle, as they always do when I feel threatened. When I read the book, I had to keep going back, because no mind, however brilliant, can comprehend what Schell is trying to describe in one reading. I remembered feeling that way years ago when I read John Hersey's Hiroshima, but we dismissed that as fiction because we couldn't bring ourselves to believe its truth.
Now it isn't so easy to evade the truth.
Peter's face is stone, his eyes dull. I put my hand under his elbow. I want him to know I'm here, as I was then, when we were so young, so naive, so convinced we were saving the world.
What we should do is leave. But how can we? We have no car. Besides, these people aren't country bumpkins; there are no country bumpkins anymore, especially in Vermont. More than one of them might recognize Peter, which would be even worse.
Like an empty museum, the cafeteria is utterly still; not a footfall, not an echo breaks the silence. A smart man, the speaker reads only enough to make them want more, then ends with a passage Peter starred: "'But when it comes to judging the consequences of a nuclear holocaust there can be no experimentation ... We cannot run experiments with the earth, because we have only one earth ... we are not in possession of any spare earths ...'"
The tautness in the air is as painful as that in a hospital room after the doctor has told a patient who entered for routine tests that, instead of going home, he must stay.
In the lull I observe the elaborately decorated valentines—modern versions of the ones that lie, frayed and faded, in a box in our attic marked CHILDREN.
Cash clutched in their hands, people line up to buy Schell's book. Peter and I stay in our seats. Suddenly there is a flurry at the door, and someone says, in a relieved shout, "Oh, here he is!" When I turn my head, our son Tony is walking through the doorway.
"It's Anthony Fain," a woman says. Peter and I stiffen, each wondering how Tony, who lives in Maine, is here. But why shouldn't he be here? He's a well-known antinuke person in New England who travels and gives speeches whenever he can. When we spoke on the telephone a week ago, he never said anything about coming to Vermont, but neither did we.
I can still see the pain on Peter's face, the slate flatness of his eyes, when Tony told us he was changing his name. It was during Christmas vacation of his senior year at Yale. We were finishing dinner with Anne and her boyfriend and Peter's sister, Margot, and her husband.
"It isn't that I don't like it, it's a good Russian name, I'm proud of it and Grandpa and you," he told Peter, "but it doesn't let me be me. Everyone I meet asks if I'm related to you." Then Tony studied the floor, the giveaway that the last was a lie.
Margot was the first to collect herself. "But it was such a respected name in Kiev. All those Fialka doctors," she reminded Tony, her tone wistful.
"And there are still Fialkas from the other side of the family, bankers and lawyers, in Odessa," I added stupidly. What the hell did a kid of twenty-one care about distant relatives on the Black Sea? When Peter caught my eye, his glance urged me to stop. But I didn't want to stop. I wanted to shout, "You're our only son, and this is our name, and that is, in the end, the only thing that will absolutely connect you and your children to us."
Then I wanted to remind our son that every year on our anniversary—wherever we were—Peter somehow found a cyclamen because fialka in Russian means wild violet or cyclamen. "It's such a beautiful name," my father had said when we told him we wanted to marry. "Those wild violets cropping up with minds of their own in woodland bogs and swamps." He'd paused. "Lily Fialka, it suits you," he'd added, as if, suddenly, the name were the most important thing, as if he had not loved Peter for years.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beginning the World Again by Roberta Silman. Copyright © 1990 Roberta Silman. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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