The world between, p.1
The World Between, page 1
The
World Between
Also by Zeeva Bukai
The Anatomy of Exile
The
World Between
a novel
Zeeva Bukai
Delphinium Books
THE WORLD BETWEEN
Copyright © 2026 by Zeeva Bukai
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information, address DELPHINIUM BOOKS
1250 4th Street, 5th Floor
Santa Monica, California 90401
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication Data is available on request.
ISBN 978-1-953002-67-9
Jacket and interior design by Colin Dockrill, AIGA
In memory of my mother, Rosa,
and grandmother, Cyla.
1.
My dear, by now Rothman has given you the news in his usual officious manner that I am under observation at the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition Hospice in Jaffa while this misunderstanding is being investigated. I hope he hasn’t implied that I’ve been arrested or given the impression that I am incapacitated, or God forbid, that you need to leave the comforts of our apartment in New York for Tel Aviv now that you’ve been apprised of the situation. Please, liebchen, don’t even consider it. You know how Rothman exaggerates. Besides, he has no idea how much you detest flying or how unsettled you get venturing out of our Upper West Side neighborhood. Nor does he know how attached you are to Stein’s newsstand on Broadway and 92nd Street, the only place on the West Side that still sells The Folksbiene Gazette along with those violet candies you like. And what about Zabar’s? I’ve never seen white fish salad or corned beef in any of the local shops or markets here. God knows there isn’t a bagel to be had, not the kind you’re used to. No, it’s best you stay home. And please don’t pay any attention to what Rothman says because I have not, as he so eloquently put it, lost my marbles. At least the doctor treating me doesn’t think so. Dr. S is a well-respected physician in this institution. He has charged me to write this letter as part of what he calls my wellness plan.
Corral your thoughts, he says, and then after a great puff on his meerschaum pipe, he points a fatherly finger at me and advises, Tell your husband everything. He’ll understand.
Dr. S often speaks in declarative sentences as a way to spur his patients to action. I admit, my mind whips here and there, summoning up all manner of debris. But Dr. S insists that I get the facts down on paper and state unequivocally that I am well attended to here. I will regain my strength and return home to you. Our lives will resume their natural course. Which is to say, I will be myself again very soon.
2.
It was decent of Rothman to bring me an extra blanket and down pillow. You’ll be happy to know that I am as comfortable as one can be away from their own bed. The hospice is small and modest, run by a group of French nuns, built in 1827 as a respite for weary pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. I can see them disembarking from a ship named the Belle Nazarene at the Jaffa port. Fierce sunlight bleaching the stones of the old city, blinding the passengers as porters in white kaffiyehs and djellabas stack their portmanteaus on donkey carts. Whenever I look at the garden, I imagine those God-fearing folk who traveled more than a thousand miles by sea to reach the holy land, sitting in the shade of a banyan tree, nibbling on brioche and oranges before their journey to the sacred city, where they will walk through the Via Dolorosa in the footsteps of Jesus, then march outside the gates to Golgotha and stand in the place where he was crucified.
The Sisters wear black floor-length habits and veils that smell of lilacs and ammonia cleaner. Framed in wimples, they look like daisies, but when they’re in the dim corridors, their heads appear to float off their necks. They rarely smile, and when they speak, it’s often in a reverent whisper, as though God is walking alongside them, listening to their every word. I have to lean in to hear them or ask them to repeat themselves, which annoys them, I think, though they don’t show it except in the slight pursing of their lips. Still, Rothman was right to insist on bringing me here instead of one of the big, modern hospitals where I might have been recognized. The hospice is more like a sanitarium, a European spa our parents might have frequented before the war. We’re close enough to the sea so that at dawn when I lie in my narrow bed, I can hear the waves break along the fortress wall and the fishing boats bob against the docks. Some mornings I can even smell the fishermen’s haul, their nets full of St Peter’s fish and shrimp, the air tangy with salt.
There is a school next door, the Collège des Frères. From my window I can see the statue of Saint Joseph perched like a guardian angel on the roof of their building. I like to peek into the courtyard below, where the boys have their morning recess. They play baseball, much like the children in Riverside Park do on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. I listen for when the bat strikes the ball. If the angle is right, there’s a resounding crack like the sound of a car that’s backfired. Crows burst from the Aleppo pines, and for a moment they are a Rorschach inkblot come to life.
The boys are so young, Max. At the end of recess, they charge to the stone fountain in the center of the courtyard and wash their hands and feet before returning to the classroom. It’s a wondrous sight, those boys tearing off their shoes and socks with such abandon, their feet slender as fish, splashing and cavorting. When they leave, the courtyard retracts into silence, and between beams of sunlight, shadows bloom. A monk in brown robes patrols the grounds, searching for laggards and strays behind the Ionic columns. When he finds one, he lifts him up by the ear and drags the child back inside. I have to clamp a hand over my mouth to stop myself from shouting at him to let the boy go.
Did I mention this room was once a nun’s cell? There’s a picture of Jesus on the wall. He gazes up at heaven as if to say, Is this really what you had in mind? At first, I found his presence in the room impossible. It’s enough that on every wall and in every corner of the hospice there are crucifixes and large paintings of him. In some he is blond; in others he is brunette. In all, he’s half naked, beset by nails and thorns, the agony and ecstasy of his sacrifice and martyrdom on full display. He hovers between life and death, and the confluence of these driving forces results in an almost unbearable intimacy. I try to explain this to Dr. S and ask, Am I expected to live with this all-suffering man-god in my room?
Learn to accept where you are, he admonishes, and stop dwelling on things you cannot change.
I took down the picture of Jesus. A few hours later the nuns found him in my closet and nailed him to the wall. I’ve kept him there ever since. What choice do I have? Now he is my companion in all things. Each morning I bare my ancient body to him, and he kindly pretends not to notice the decrepitude.
3.
Rothman tells me you’re worried my condition may be permanent. Be assured I suffer only from a slight nervous exhaustion. No more than a bad case of jet lag. You know what a poor sleeper I am, even in the best of circumstances. Remember the hotel we stayed in during our performance of Ansky’s play in Los Angeles? I couldn’t fall asleep there either, no matter how comfortable the beds were. And there was that business with the young woman, you know the one I mean, Miss Polka Dots, who came backstage every night insisting you had invited her there. How you looked at me, your face red as a schoolboy’s caught with his fly open. I don’t know how I got through the run of the play. The window in our hotel room didn’t open, and all I could see was the parking lot. Not even a shrub to relieve the eye. In the distance, smoke rose from out of the hills like they were sacrificing goats up there. At night when we returned from the theater and you fell into bed exhausted, I stayed awake listening to a child cry in the next room, calling to her mother. All night long she keened Mama, Mama, finally stopping just as the sun rose over the brown hills.
I promise you there is no need for concern. So, I get the occasional headache. That’s all it is. Though sometimes there is a sharp pain that travels from the hinge of my jaw to the back of my neck, but I’m sure there is a simple explanation for it. As for the underwater trapped-like-Houdini feeling, well, you more than anyone know how sensitive I am. Honestly, there’s nothing to worry about. The sensation that I straddle two worlds—the world of nothing and the world of everything—and that I am nischt ahin, nischt aher, neither here nor there, will soon pass. Besides, it isn’t the first time my mind wades into the past like a fish that has slipped its net.
Did you ask Rothman to take a photograph of me holding up the front page of the newspaper like some nebach who’s been kidnapped? Really Max, it’s demoralizing and unfair. All right, so it’s difficult for me to determine what day it is, but I know it’s March because the cyclamen are in bloom, and I know it’s 1998 because I left New York in December. The Sisters deliberately keep that information from us. There are no calendars. We do not see a newspaper. The radio is never on, though I often hear someone playing the piano in the sunroom. The same piece again and again. The entire facility is infused with this music. A Chopin nocturne, I think, though I could be wrong. A Chopin nocturne haunts us.
4.
Today Dr. S addressed a peculiar sensation that I’ve been having—that time is suspended here.
The confusion between reality and memory is to be expected, he says, and will pass once I’m fully rested and am released from this place. But, Max, I’m unconvinced. He hasn’t said when I’ll be discharged. It may be as soon as tomorrow, but I have no idea to which tomorrow he refers. There’s an eternity of tomorrows here. Be so kind as to ask him when I can leave. I’m sure he’ll listen to you, especially if you tell him I’m needed at home. Let’s forget the other business, shall we? And think only of what we’ve been and meant to each other all these years.
I must go. The orderly has arrived with my medication. I know how you hate it when I take even an aspirin, but please don’t fret. It’s only a mild sedative. I hope he’s brought the carrot juice I requested. They make it fresh here. Bis morgen, liebchen.
5.
Oh my dear, I should have never mentioned your play Di Bloy Dame to Dr. S. He pounced on the information like a lion on a zebra and grilled me for over an hour. Unfortunately, I let slip that it was the first time I detested a character you wrote. Truly, the very first time. We spent most of the session dissecting the Blue Lady’s hunger for power. Not an ounce of motherly love in her except at the end when she learns the child who has died is her own. All this time I’ve wondered why you’d create such a detestable character and thought maybe it was my fault for dragging the past out into the open so often, though it could easily have been one of your female students trying to tear the scabs off your war wounds, believing only she could heal you, not knowing that you didn’t want to be healed.
6.
This morning Dr. S asked, How would you categorize your marriage?
What do you mean? I said.
What image comes to mind?
An iceberg, I quipped.
We were in his office. It was one of those spring days when the sun drenched the room in an almost holy light.
He leaned his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers. You’ve been married forty years or so.
That’s right.
It couldn’t all have been icy.
No. The opposite, in fact, I said.
He waited for me to continue. I turned my face toward the window, where the sun beamed, and behind shuttered eyes a red desert appeared like a mirage, stark and wavering as if the landscape were on fire.
* * *
I remember you were standing outside the theater, signing autographs for the few fans who’d gathered near the stage entrance. It must have been in the fall of ’78. We’d been in the States for twenty years by then. You wore your fedora cocked at a rakish angle and a black cape draped over your shoulders like some nineteenth-century impresario. You were so handsome. Your blue eyes gleaming. And I beside you, smiling, always smiling, especially when our friends visited on Sundays after a matinee at one of the derelict theaters on the old Jewish Rialto on the Lower East Side, palaces haunted by the glories of the past. I filled plates with canapés and shot glasses with schnapps. The herring floated in bowls of sour cream and onions, and the pumpernickel and rye were stacked on a gleaming silver tray. The arguments spilled into laughter. I made sure the music was right, a bit of Liszt for the older crowd. Jobim for your students who dropped in for a drink and free meal. The hungry young women you seemed to attract, slipping off their coats and loafers, acolytes at your feet, smoking unfiltered Turkish cigarettes, drinking our liquor and practicing their Yiddish, a dead language in the house of a terminal marriage.
I made sure the ashtrays were emptied, filled the ice bucket, and enjoyed watching you hold court, lapping the attention you garnered whenever there was a crowd. Deflating after they’d leave. You’d ask if it was all worth it and I’d rub your shoulders and say, Of course, meine leibe, and tell you what an important man you were, how much you were revered and loved. The last Yiddish playwright in New York desperate to hold on to a world that no longer existed, perhaps had never existed except in your imaginative longing to recreate the world your parents inhabited, as if by doing so, you could resurrect them. Perhaps you thought you could resurrect us. I wanted to think so.
Sometimes you said the most outrageous things just to get a rise out of our friends. There was one conversation with a particularly beautiful actress, smart in her red silk dress and black suede pumps. You told her there was no difference between an actor and a wooden dummy. Everyone stopped to listen. I was at the edge of the living room, holding a tray of dirty glasses, and I winced. I saw you, a man who thrived on attention. You needed it to confirm proof of life, proof that you were worthy enough to have survived the war, and that you still mattered.
And what does that make you, she said, tilting her head back so that the tendons in her neck stretched taut, revealing the soft pulse of a ropey blue vein.
A ventriloquist, you said.
Someone turned off the phonograph. The tension in the room was palpable.
She drew very close, her body brushing against yours. One or two women sent me pitying glances, but I knew better. She wasn’t your type, a bit too overblown and eager, a fraction too old. She had a cynicism about her that put you off, and most of all, she was independent. She didn’t need you. She didn’t even rely on you for a good role.
Oh, the actress said with just the right amount of pout to her lips.
You caught my gaze and winked. My stomach knotted.
I’m the ventriloquist who plants words in your mouth except maybe when you’re . . . , and then you leaned down and whispered in her ear and she blushed. Everyone laughed. They could all guess what racy thing you said, yet I had a sickening feeling that what you uttered in her ear was not only vulgar but brutal. At the time I needed to believe you were just having a bit of fun, that you didn’t actually see yourself as the man who pulled the strings. But two decades later, I couldn’t delude myself any longer, not after the rehearsals for Di Bloy Dame. I realized then how much you had changed, how the dynamics in our relationship had undergone a paradigm shift, and I knew that you had meant every word.
7.
In our next session, Dr. S asked me to consider not just why you wrote Di Bloy Dame, but when you wrote it.
Two years ago, I said, startled to realize that you began writing the play around the time Rothman’s third wife gave birth to a baby girl. This unsettled you, and I asked if you wished you’d had a young wife.
Hidden behind the Gazette, you practically growled, Don’t be an idiot. What the hell would I do with another wife? Tell me, you said, tossing the paper aside, why does that bastard get a second chance? Why does he always get everything?
I don’t know, I said, but I understood something that day. Your anger or jealousy or anguish, whatever it was, had to do with the child, not Rothman.
* * *
None of that really matters now but it’s important that you know I didn’t want to hate your play. God forgive me, I just couldn’t find anything redeeming in it, not the characters, the plot, definitely not the indigo set, or the blue costumes and elaborate wigs I was forced to wear. You even had the makeup artist tint my skin. The critics thought it made me look like I’d died of hypothermia. And during tech week in front of cast and crew you shouted, Why, can’t you fucking get her right? In the forty-five years we’ve lived together, worked together, you’ve never raised your voice at me in the theater, our one true temple. Opening night, you waited in the wings, and when I stepped offstage for a costume change, you pinched my arm and hissed:
Stop trying to get the audience’s sympathy.
You’d think it would be a relief to drown that woman in a bath of indigo dye each night, only it wasn’t, Max. I was the one drowning. Even Dr. S agrees that destroying her destroyed us a little.
Last spring, I shut myself up for weeks after the show closed and didn’t come out until Rothman’s visit. He dragged me to Riverside Park while the Polish nanny took care of the new daughter and wife number three was downtown buying out half of Loehmann’s.
You look like dreck, Rothman said, and fed me cinnamon rugelach from Orwashers Bakery and, to wash it down, a flask of peach schnapps. I didn’t feel like talking, so we watched in silence as the boats sailed on the river. I don’t know where you were that day, meeting with your students on campus or at the theater on the Lower East Side or maybe you were at the Carlyle across town, where you liked to reserve a room. A place of your own to write, to conduct business, to rendezvous with some nubile freshman who stopped you from feeling like your time was running out. A few hours to give you the freedom you thought you wanted. Rothman read to me a three-month-old review in the Forward that he kept in his wallet. They said my performance in Di Bloy Dame was electrifying, “a high wire act of shattering realism.” They thought you were brilliant. For five minutes we were the darlings of the Yiddish theater, which is really quite something, considering it’s been dead for seventy years. All we’d been doing for decades was keeping the corpse warm.
