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Chapter One

One morning, long before I was born, my grandfather left his home in the port of Tulcea and disappeared into the unmapped labyrinth of the Danube Delta. He went in his rowboat, as always. He was not the first in our line to vanish — and surely not the last — but his is the first such story to survive in any detail, entrusted to me as I entrust it now to you. For eighty years, my mother had kept the memory of her father's disappearance buried within her, but in her last days, she emerged suddenly from delirium and summoned me to her bedside here in Buenos Aires, to which we had fled decades ago, after the war. She was finally old enough, she said, to understand the duties of the witness: she could not die without leaving me her narrative. She insisted that I take down her words as she spoke them, and, with a medium's clarity, she began the recitation with which my chronicle begins. In her voice I found my own. Each generation cradles the next with a tale and the family that loses its legends orphans the souls of it progeny.

    She rose with him at dawn to help him assemble the provisions he would need for the day: goat's cheese, bread, apples, two full canteens, a compass, binoculars, a sack of seed for the birds whose habits he studied with a scholar's passionate diligence and recorded in leather-bound notebooks he made himself. All her life my mother Sonia would treasure the seven volumes he filled over the years with his observations of pelicans, egrets, ibis and herons, words and drawings fine as a trained ornithologist might have rendered, though her father was a cobbler bytrade. An unschooled, Yiddish-speaking Jew who never travelled beyond the region of Dobrujda, Dov Landau kept his notebooks in French, a language he had mastered himself, in secret, much as he learned the various declensions of birdcall on his solitary excursions into the vast Delta sanctuary. She might always have assumed him a natural casualty of that watery wilderness — those infinite miles of reed beds, marshes, lakes, serpentine channels, forests so dense the sun seemed unable to penetrate those dark arboreal pockets — had not the gypsy named Ovid brought her distraught mother the news, many days later, that her husband was still alive in the Delta, not dead as the search party had concluded — as likely murdered as drowned, they'd said, soldiers killing Jews these days with the ease of hunters out for rabbits or ducks. "Alive," Ovid insisted, Dov inhabiting a nest much like a pelican's which Ovid believed the cobbler had appropriated, or, more likely, constructed himself- in his last notebook, in fact, he had made a detailed diagram of such a nest, its materials and design. It was, Ovid suggested, as if his friend believed he had actually been transformed into that female bird whose legendary patterns of maternal devotion Dov so revered, he whose own mother had died during his birth.

    "I spoke to Dov Landau for more than an hour," Ovid said in the halting Yiddish he had learned over the years, "but he wouldn't make a sound." He put a finger to his lips, the gesture part of an improvised sign language with which he augmented his speech. "Pelicans are almost mute, you know."

    Reba Landau stared at the man who announced to her her husband's madness. He was blind in one eye, and the gaze of the other carried within it the scorching intensity of compensation, that fire in the faculties which survive an affliction. She was afraid of that fiery eye. She was afraid of the sharp bones in his beardless face. Over his embroidered smock hung a hammered silver chain and the sun glinted off each link like a blade, so that Ovid appeared to be wearing a necklace of knives. Reba picked up Sonia as if she were an infant — actually, she was five years old — and put a shielding hand over her eyes, the woman's touch turned cold as the carp Dov often brought back from his day-long Delta sojourns. Reba had never talked to a gypsy before. Once she had warned her husband, "They put spells on children, they take them away in their wagons."

    "Don't inflict your superstitions on me," Dov had said. "Human beings make themselves mad with their hatreds. Sometimes I wish I had been born a bird."

    Was it the memory of that remark, a certain disquieting fervor that kept her from sending away the agitated Ovid? Or was it the simple fact of hope where none had existed? She was already wearing a black dress, the funeral was scheduled for the next day. "What will we put in the coffin?" the casket-maker had asked her when she had gone to his shop to order the plain pine box. "My happiness," Reba Landau had said, surprised to hear from her own mouth the kind of epigrammatic response Dov would have made, were he still alive. How could she send away the gypsy and bury the empty coffin and mourn a man who might not be dead at all? Every night, for the rest of her life, she would dream of Dov in his nest, coming out of his pelican silence to call her name — "Reba! Reba!"— and she would wander the Delta's maze alone, never finding him, husband and wife lost to each other forever.

    "Take me there," she said at last to Ovid. She was trembling badly. Still on Reba's hip, Sonia feared the two of them would topple; she clung to her mother as if they were in a storm from which there was no protection, a quake about which they could do nothing, could simply endure, until the tremors finally subsided of their own accord. "Take me to where he is."

* * *

They went in Ovid's wagon. When neighbors saw them that morning inside the weathered birchwood carriage, leaving Tulcea in the shower of dust the hooves of the driven horse stirred up, they ran into the dry dirt road like chickens loosed from their pens, they squawked "Reba, stop!" and "Let them go!" and "God in Heaven!" and Reba waved them back to their yards, shouting assurances to herself as well as to them: "He's found Dov! Don't worry! It's God's will!"

    Hearing her mother's assertions, Sonia's fear — which had battered her insides since the day of her father's disappearance — left her body like a flock of entrapped birds riding the current of her exhalation. She felt bird-like herself, buoyant. So her father was playing some kind of game with them! Well, wasn't he always making up games for her at home, hiding from her in the root cellar, under the porch, high up in the sycamore from which he would swoop down to surprise her with his crane-whoops or hawkish shrieks? And now he was hiding in the Delta, pretending to be a pelican, waiting all these days for them to discover him — who else could have contrived such a marvellous adventure, such a thrilling charade? Riding in the gypsy's carriage! All her life my mother would remember this ecstatic reprieve from grief as a gift her father had bequeathed her, and in times of sorrow she would return to that mental state as if to an actual place she had inherited: the town turning to mist behind them, the world they entered a fecund paradise, song-thralled and shimmering and green.

    Did Reba derive similar consolations from this journey? None. Years later she would tell Sonia how she had submitted to three possibilities, all of them terrible: she and Sonia were Ovid's hostages, the news about Dov a ruse devised by the kidnapper who would kill them both when he discovered there was no one in this world from whom he could extract a ransom; or, Dov was dead as their neighbors had informed her, his nesting just a gypsy dream Ovid took for truth; or, Dov did believe himself to be a bird, in which case the man as she had known him no longer existed and Reba's bereavement would continue, even as she claimed as her own the deranged cobbler whose differences from other men had always confused her, Dov's mental life a maze through which she tracked him, exactly as the horse now threaded its way along the twisting moss-laced road. Her husband's mind, this strange landscape: how were they different? In both terrains she was a stranger, though she had been Dov Landau's wife for twelve years, had lived a mile from here for the same length of time. Who had ever felt so lost as Reba Landau did right now, the mist that rose from the marsh grass obscuring even further her dwindling sense of location?

    "Here," said Ovid, as if intuiting her need for some kind of landmark, "is where I left his boat."

    The gypsy brought the wagon to a halt, descended, tied the horse to a tree, its roots breaking like gnarled bones through the bank of the channel whose route they had been following awhile by land. They watched Ovid drag a vessel out from behind a stand of reeds. They knew immediately it was Dov's: on each side of the rowboat, he had painted a white wing, the feathers silvering over the years so that they had nearly vanished into the gray wood on which he had so carefully replicated their construction. Why wings on a boat? Reba had asked him, though Sonia had found the paradox delightful and had no need for explanation.

    "Legend has it," he had said, "that, long ago, pelicans forgot how to fly and that is why they build their nest on the ground. One by one they are recalling the reason for wings. When the last pelican remembers how to fly, I want to be ready to follow it into the heavens."

    Later, Reba claimed that there in the Delta she heard Dov uttering the same words again —"When the last pelican remembers how to fly, I want to be ready to follow it into the heavens." — so clearly she sensed this was not a memory she was experiencing at all, but the moment itself, returned as if there were no past from which to retrieve it, no present in which to recall it, no future in which she might imagine herself granted some fragment of understanding about it. In the Delta, time collapsed, she seemed to hear it falling like a town razed to its foundations, all the rubble sinking to the bottom of streams, disappearing forever into the Danube. She felt dizzy, sick. How had she allowed herself to come here with a mad gypsy? She would take her child and run from him! She would retrace on foot the distance they had covered from Tulcea — but how, how? The road had forked so often, and sometimes vegetation obscured it entirely — she could never find her way alone. Ovid was beckoning to them from the winged boat. Reba closed her eyes: perhaps if she listened with the superior concentration of a blind woman, she could catch sounds from Tulcea toward which she could direct their escape. Did she hear the voices of neighbors haggling over prices in the central market, or were those geese honking in the distance? A fisherman seemed to drag his day's netted catch across the splintered deck of his trawler, but then she feared the sound was actually one of those giant turtles she had seen earlier pulling its body out of the pond and up a pebbled bank. And was that the great bell of the Orthodox Church clanging miles away in the town square, or could she be confusing the semblance of familiar music with the song of some Delta bird she had never heard before in her life? She opened her eyes and yielded to it fully: in this timeless world they had entered, the one-eyed gypsy was their only guide.

    It was noon when they set out on the water. They travelled beneath a canopy of branches, and the sunlight lay like twig-edged scales upon the stream, as if it were a snake or a lizard on whose back they rode. What for her mother was a nightmare to which she had assented was for Sonia a dream whose beauty she would never again in her life approach. Ovid sang as he rowed, a gypsy serenade that joined itself to the larger chorus that surrounded them. In the Delta, everything was music, they were part of a great orchestra in which the instruments cawed and twittered and scuttled and hummed, some parts crescendo, others hush, Ovid's tenor rising like the sweet flute her father had made for her from reeds he'd brought back once from this very place.

    "How much longer?" her mother said, nothing melodic in the tone she struck. Sonia had nearly forgotten that Reba was there beside her, so soothed was the child by Ovid's song and the fluid transit they were making through the water. Reba sat so stiffly there in the boat, Sonia had lost nearly all sense of her organic presence: the woman barely breathed, she clutched her hands together in her lap, she kept her eyes closed as they travelled, as if to deny as much of this journey as she could, as if keeping it outside the range of her senses might lessen the claim it could make on her mind. If she submitted to the Delta's spell, perhaps she, too, would begin to think herself a bird, or a fish, or a purple thistle rising from the mud; perhaps she, too, would succumb to the confusion that might have stricken her husband, perched somewhere in these wilds, all memory of his life in Tulcea vanished as if it had never existed at all.

    "Soon," Ovid said, and as if the word were an incantation, the stream they travelled opened suddenly into a lake so vast Sonia could not see its shores, the mirroring water a kind of rippled sky in which the counterparts of clouds above them floated in the lake's surface, and then a bit further the sun, too, doubled itself, and there the twin suns melted into each other's element, boundaries vanished, sky and lake became a single incandescent span, light meeting light at that place one would have called the horizon, had it not been utterly absorbed by that luminosity toward which their tiny winged rowboat travelled. Oh God, the radiance! When would Sonia ever again see such a shining?

    Just as it seemed to her that they would disappear into that brightness — who could imagine anything beyond it? — Ovid shifted course, shadows fell across the lake, geography returned, a shoreline rose, an island swallowed by the brightness emerged, birds she had been blinded to dove to the water for fish and soared off with the catch in their beaks, and in the wafting grasses at the island's edge, a family of pelicans rested on the rocks in the mid-day warmth.

    "Here?" said Reba.

    Sonia looked at her mother's face and saw she had been weeping, awed as much by that unfathomable light as her child had been, though Reba would never admit that she had even noticed it at all.

    "Here," Ovid said, and tied Dov's rowboat to one of the pines near the pelican's resting-place.

    He lifted Sonia to shore, then took Reba's hand and helped her from the boat. Sonia was staring at the long-billed birds, at the pouches where they stored their food, at the twig-topped earthen nest on which a female perched. Was that her father? Was he wearing a disguise so convincing she could not tell him from a true pelican?

    "Papa?" she said.

    "Where, where?" Reba cried, wheeling like a bird herself, her arms outstretched like wings that might fly her to her missing husband's side.

    "There," the gypsy said, pointing a ring-laden finger farther down-shore.

    Reba grabbed Sonia's hand and pulled her along the island's edge, the ground like sponge under their feet, so that their shoes made a sucking noise as they went, and it felt as if they were sinking even as they covered ground.

    Could Ovid fly? How else did he manage to run twice the distance mother and child had managed, circling the island to meet them at the spot to which he'd pointed, greeting them there like a chieftain into whose realm they had stumbled?

    "Here" the gypsy said. "Dov Landau was right here."

    They looked down. What had become a pelican's nest lay among the reeds and rocks, chunks of packed sandy gravel-veined earth scattered like the rubble of a fallen house, the top layer of twigs strewn across the ground. Reba knelt and sifted the debris through her hands. On her heels, she rocked. She was murmuring her husband's name over and over and over. Dov, Dov, Dov.

    And Ovid? From the site of the nest, he walked ten paces to the shoreline and found the cobbler's clothes folded neatly in a pile weighted down with a rock. There Ovid stood, holding his friend's cap, gazing out at the water as if he knew exactly where Dov had given himself to the lake.

    What did Sonia do? She fled from her mother and the gypsy, too, she ran inland, through a thicket of shoulder-high grass, through moss-crusted woods, over shallows streaking the island's center like veins and up a sudden rise, then down its rocky slope to a clearing, almost a meadow, through woods again and out to the shoreline of the far side of the island where, because of how the sun had moved or the the way the water caught its glow at this location of the lake or because she yearned to see it again, the magical light appeared to her, its magnitude even brighter this time, and toward that infinite illumination a pelican soared, its black-tipped wings growing smaller, its pouch shrinking, its long beak piercing the light into which, finally, the bird's entire body passed. What was it Ovid had said? "Pelicans are almost mute, you know." But this one spoke before it vanished, and it was her father's voice, travelling a distance she could never begin to calculate: "Take care of your mother for me, maydele, and never forget that I love you." Then the light took him in, he was gone, and she was the only one, until now, who would ever know the true story of Dov Landau's disappearance.

    Why did she keep it a secret so long?

    Who would have believed her?

    Who?