In the Image
Dedication
For my parents,
Susan and Matthew Horn,
who took me all over the world,
and for my husband,
Brendan Schulman,
who took me home.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 Tourists
Chapter 2 In the Valley of Discarded Names
Chapter 3 Barbarians at the Gates
Chapter 4 The Missing Link
Chapter 5 Go Bang Your Head Against the Wall
Chapter 6 A Long and Dreamless Night
Chapter 7 The Same Long and Dreamless Night, Elsewhere
Chapter 8 The Better Deal
Chapter 9 Floodgates
Chapter 10 The Book of Hurricane Job
Chapter 11 A Tourist in the Lost City
Landsmann Family Tree
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
More Praise for In The Image
Copyright
CHAPTER 1
TOURISTS
ACCIDENTS OF FATE are rarely fatal accidents, but once in a while they are. Two accidents of fate occurred in Leora’s life before she turned seventeen. First, her friend Naomi Landsmann, walking home from their high school on a bright, cold winter afternoon, dropped her glove while crossing a street, bent down to pick it up, and was run over by a car whose newly licensed driver never bothered to look back. And second, eleven months after Naomi’s death, Naomi’s grandfather Bill Landsmann, spotting Leora’s name in the local paper, tried and failed to become Leora’s friend.
Bill Landsmann was a tourist. He didn’t look like a tourist—no loud-printed shirt, no sunglasses, no healthy tan. In fact, he didn’t look much like the type to go anywhere. He was an old man, somewhere in his sixties or seventies, with a completely white-haired head and a fragile, almost waiflike body that made it particularly hard to picture him lounging on a beach or trekking through the tundra. He had arms like thin reeds and legs like baby tree trunks, and it looked as if a wave or a gust of wind could easily knock him down. Nothing would make Bill Landsmann stand out in a crowd of old men of the skinny variety except perhaps his voice, which was the only clue to the casual observer that he had been anywhere at all. Bill Landsmann spoke with a pronounced German accent, not a harsh one but a refined one, adjusting his pronunciation of r’s to suit the word and the occasion, the kind of German accent that might at one time have suggested elegance and culture. There was, however, one other clue to the fact that he had been around. When he looked at things, he didn’t see them as other people do. Most people register what they see, however unconsciously, as part of a continuum of time and space, each place and moment melting into the next like sand castles dissolving underwater. But when Bill Landsmann looked around, he saw the world separated into frames, as if his eye were a camera and he were cropping out rectangles of the world, blinking an eye and trapping a moment on the film of his retina. And it showed in the way he glanced at things.
Leora was a tourist too—or, to be precise, she had recently become one. After Naomi’s death Leora stopped talking to people. She had never been particularly friendly, and Naomi had been one of her only friends. After Naomi died, Leora stopped speaking and instead simply looked at things, examining her surroundings as if she were a visitor, someone passing through on a long journey. Objects and people, barely distinguishable from each other, froze before her eyes in little panels: students laughing in a school hallway, a fish swimming in an aquarium, her parents, her brother, a bowl of soup in front of her, a pile of old snow by the side of a road.
In the hopes of pulling her out of her silence, Leora’s parents had taken her and her brother on a long summer vacation, a tour of several cities in Europe, parts of North Africa, and some of the Middle East. They were thrilled when Leora seemed interested in what she saw, and that fall Leora even won a local essay contest with an entry she had written during their trip, something about Jewish historical sites in Spain. Her parents congratulated themselves, privately declaring her cured. But in fact the trip had only made things worse. Leora had immersed herself in hundreds of years of history, in thousands of miles of places and faces that required nothing more of her than that she click the shutter.
The town paper printed an article about her prizewinning essay on an inside page where all of the other articles were either announcements concerning the local senior citizens’ group or obituaries. And that was where Bill Landsmann spotted her, a wandering youth among the ruins, and tracked her down.
“I think we have very similar interests,” he told her in his delicate accent over the phone. He introduced himself as Naomi’s grandfather, explained that he had met her at a few of Naomi’s birthday parties, said that Naomi had spoken of her, often. Leora remembered Naomi mentioning him: a strange man, retired, an amateur photographer who had been around the world. Beyond that Leora remembered nothing about him. “We both are interested in Jewish history, and we both like to travel. Would you like to come visit me? With your parents, they are invited too. I could show you some slides from my travels.”
Leora said yes, she would be happy to see the slides. That was her first mistake concerning Bill Landsmann.
“IT’S KIND of strange that Naomi’s grandfather would be so interested in Leora, isn’t it?” Leora’s mother asked.
The family had leased the station wagon a few months before—for some reason, buying a car didn’t seem worthwhile anymore—but it still had the New Car Smell. Leora sat in the back, perched on the edge of the hard vinyl seat, and she felt like she was four years old, being discussed by her parents in spelled-out words they thought she didn’t understand.
“All old people are interested in Leora these days,” her father said, “since she was featured on the Old People page.”
“Ha, ha, Dad, very funny,” Leora muttered from the backseat. Her parents ignored her. Leora suddenly thought of their summer trip, where in many places they had hired a driver and a guide who would sit in the front, turn backward to face Leora’s family in the rear of the car or the van, and lecture to them about the passing buildings—or, in places that didn’t have passing buildings, then passing mud huts, passing trees, passing cliffs, passing baboons. For a moment, it seemed to Leora as if her mother were the guide and her father the driver in some strange foreign country, and she felt that confused curiosity that had often comforted her last summer in strange countries, wondering where, exactly, these people were taking her.
“Well, whatever. So he’s an old guy, and he reads the Old People page. And he travels a lot. Maybe he just wants to meet someone else in town who likes to travel,” her father offered.
“I think there’s a little more to it than that,” Leora’s mother answered. “I mean, think about this guy. His granddaughter dies, his son picks up and moves to California with the daughter-in-law and grandsons”—true, Leora thought; it was frightening how quickly Naomi’s parents and little brothers had moved away after she died—“and now what’s he supposed to do with himself? I think he’s really just looking for someone to talk to,” she said, then paused, as if she had said more than she intended to.
Leora tried to catch her mother’s expression in the rearview mirror, but it was too dark to see anything. She sat back and looked out of the car, peering into the uncovered windows of passing houses to catch glimpses of interiors, decorations, furniture. Houses had interested her ever since she was a child, when she had kept a dollhouse. Not some sort of horrible pink plastic contraption, but a real dollhouse—an exact miniature replica of a three-story town house, complete with painted clapboard siding, a shingled roof, and furnishings of 1890s-style grandeur. But Leora could hardly think of it as her dollhouse, because really it was both hers and Naomi’s. When Leora acquired the empty shell of a dollhouse as a birthday gift long ago, Naomi had been enchanted by it. They built up the house together, laying down the grout for the hexagonal floor tiles in the kitchen, putting up the outrageous paisley wallpaper that resembled the pattern Naomi’s mother wouldn’t let her get for her real room, setting the nonfunctional grandfather clocks past their own bedtimes, arguing for weeks over the names of each of the little dolls. One day Naomi’s parents saw her interest and asked if she too would like a dollhouse. But Naomi said no. She already had a dollhouse: Leora’s. The dollhouse remained in Leora’s bedroom long after they had grown too old for it, but after Naomi’s death Leora couldn’t bear looking at it anymore. She hauled it down underground to the basement and buried it under boxes of her brother’s old toys.
The car turned onto Algonquin Drive. Their town was divided into sections where all the street names matched a certain theme, and Algonquin Drive was in the “Indian Section,” or, as Leora’s somewhat pretentious teacher at the high school liked to call it, the “indigenous people’s section.” Bill Landsmann was indigenous to Algonquin Drive. Leora’s father slowed the car to a crawl, searching among the dimly lit house numbers for 413. When they found it, a tiny house with thick curtains drawn over the windows, and walked up to ring the doorbell, Bill Landsmann had already opened the door for them. Leora did recognize him, once she saw him again. In his narrow lips and his thinness, he resembled Naomi. His left hand was pressed against the doorpost, while his right hand, a road map of red and blue arteries and veins glowing through the pale skin, dangled from a perilously thin wrist that looked as though it might tear like paper if he were to offer his hand to them to shake it. He didn’t.
“Welcome, welcome!” he announced in the stilted, accented voice Leora remembered from his phone call. “Wonderful to have you. Come in, come in, and I will show you my slides.”
When the three of them had entered, Leora noticed that Bill Landsmann’s entire house had the New Car Smell. In fact, the vast majority of objects in his house appeared to have been made out of pine paneling and vinyl. They passed through the hallway, devoid of any decoration, and went into the living room. Leora walked behind Bill Landsmann, her parents following behind her, keeping her eye on the back of his white-haired head as if it were a sort of beacon, a torch leading them to their destination. But it was Bill Landsmann’s voice that signaled them to stop: “Please, have a seat.”
Leora and her parents sat down on a hard burgundy vinyl couch. Aside from the couch, the room was furnished with three chairs, a coffee table, a rug, and an ancient, wood-encased television set, bestudded with giant dials. Leora was relieved to note, after a quick glance around the room, that no portraits of family members were displayed anywhere. But the strangest part of the room, the part that made it seem as if the three of them had landed in something that wasn’t quite a living room at all, was the wall of bookshelves. The shelves, covering an entire long wall of the room, were filled with row upon row of black cardboard boxes, each exactly the same size, distinguishable from one another only by the bright yellow numbers painted, with a perfection that must have required a stencil, on their sides. The numbers went well into the hundreds. Along the right side of the shelves was a small hook, and a black vinyl notebook was hanging from it, suspended by a thick red cord. The bottom shelf was devoted to a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Judaica.
“Wow, I see you’ve got everything catalogued here. What are all those?” Leora’s mother asked, looking at the bookshelves.
Bill Landsmann looked at her as if to answer her question, but he didn’t. “It is wonderful to have you,” he repeated. “I thought we might have something in common. I have visited seventy-two countries, with a special eye to Jewish history. Oh”—he stopped and looked up as a tall woman entered the room—“and this is Anna, my wife.” To Leora, Anna also looked vaguely familiar, a burgundy-headed woman whose hair matched the couch. Leora’s father stood up to shake Anna’s hand, but she only smiled at them, a wide and gracious smile, and hurried to the other side of the room, where she opened the door to a small closet. She took out a screen, the kind Leora remembered using to watch filmstrips in elementary school, and set it up against the window.
“Today I will show you some slides of many various places in the world,” Bill Landsmann continued. “I have arranged these particular slides so that they show the story of the Bible, displayed in pictures and works of art.” Anna went back to the closet, this time emerging with a folding chair and a music stand, which she arranged on the far side of the room, opposite the screen. Then she went back into the closet a third time. Leora began to think of this as a sort of magic act, like a magician pulling random objects out of a black hat.
Anna came out of the closet with an ordinary slide projector. She placed it on an end table near the folding chair and plugged it in, completing the magic act before disappearing into another room.
Meanwhile Leora had forgotten entirely about Bill Landsmann, who had not said a word since Anna had reappeared. Now she noticed that he had wandered over to the bookshelves. He was holding the dangling black notebook, and Leora watched as he leafed through it for a moment, squinting though his thick glasses. Then he looked up at the bookshelf and stood on his tiptoes. It seemed, in Leora’s eyes, as if something were stretching him from floor to ceiling, his waist narrowing in the center like a taut rubber band. He selected box number seventeen. Once he had brought it down, he pried it open to reveal a loaded slide carousel, which he placed on the projector. He then removed a pile of typed onionskin sheets from inside the box, placed them on the music stand, and turned on a flashlight. The lights in the room went out.
“I would like to welcome you on a tour around the world,” Bill Landsmann announced, reading from the script on the music stand, “a tour on which you will see the many sites of the Hebrew Bible, appearing in images around the world. We will begin with Genesis, with the story of the creation.” And so the story began, formless and void, in the darkness on the face of the deep, and the voice of Bill Landsmann hovered over the waters.