End of the Jews Read online

  A thought strikes her, and Nina presses the redial button.

  “The University of California, please.”

  “Which campus?”

  Nina requests the main number, if there is such a thing. She is connected, no surprise, to a machine. “If you would like Admissions, please press one. Financial Services, please press two….” Nina presseseight: Human Resources. She enters the first three letters of her father’s name on the telephone keypad, then listens to a litany of men and women whose surnames correspond to 474.

  And there he is. Miklos Hricek, nestled fifty-plus names into the interminable list. Nina is so surprised, she fails to catch his phone number, has to call back and listen through the whole sequence again. And then it’s over, and she holds a ten-digit map in her quivering hand. Nina memorizes it but does not call.

  It gives her strength, just knowing that she could. When the parabola curve of Marcus’s ardor begins to crest, as it does every six or eight weeks, Nina recites Miklos’s phone number to herself, a reminder that she has options. She can leave anytime—her father is a professor of philosophy at the University of California. She can see him now more clearly than ever, fat and magisterial behind a thick oak desk in a dark, messy office full of books. A pronounced accent to his sonorous English, a beard gone mostly gray. A faint sadness cloaks him; he seems stooped beneath some invisible weight. Students and colleagues ponder it, but they aren’t close enough to ask. Miklos keeps to himself now, doesn’t preside over dinner parties anymore, is well liked but thought aloof. It is chalked up to his homeland, his intellect. At most, one or two close friends know the truth. A photo of his wife and daughter stands amid the clutter on the desk, but Miklos has learned how not to look at it. Still, on every walk through campus he peers at the female undergraduates from beneath the brim of his fedora, and wonders what his little girl looks like today.

  Now and then, Nina calls the University of California’s information number, just to make sure Miklos is still listed. But nothing more. Life on the road improves with time; she turns twenty in New Orleans, and Devon throws her what he thinks is a twenty-first birthday party at his parents’ house. His mother, Sondra, cooks for the whole band, bakes Nina a sweet potato pie in lieu of a cake.

  There is champagne. Marcus and Devon make lovely, warmhearted toasts. So, too, surprisingly, do Torrence and Pipe Man. The whole band, it seems, is fonder of the young photographer than she knows. Nina gets to hear stories about herself—actual committed-to-memory, fully embroidered tales that take on new and uproarious dimensions in the retelling. She drinks enough to get tipsy, and for the first time feels like a full-fledged member of the band, the family. Devon’s mother and father take to her like long-lost grandparents from the moment their son brings her through the door.

  “Mom, Dad, this is Nina Hricek. We call her ‘Pigfoot.’”

  Jenkins, it seems, has run its course. Nina’s earned her surname back.

  “Found her in Prague, but she’s Creole three generations back.”

  Nina likes that immensely—especially after she learns that Sondra, too, is half Creole. To Devon’s delight, she begins deploying the line herself when people ask, which is all the time. Nina’s ambiguous features and green eyes and honey skin, her hard-won attitude and the slightly foreign, slightly southern jazz lilt of her voice make an ethnologist of everyone she meets. Soon, it’s become a standard riff in both their repertoires.

  Halfway between her twentieth birthday and her twenty-first, Marcus backs off. Not entirely, but mostly. It’s as if he’s decided his window of opportunity has closed. Very astute of him, because after Nina’s party, something shifts and settles. She’s at home now, finally certain that if she fell backward, she’d be caught. The realization frees her to look up, look around, appraise her life, and all in all it’s pretty fucking excellent, and nowhere near as lonely as it once was. She’s visited every jazz town in North America at least five or six times now, traveled the circuit enough to have people she looks forward to seeing all over the place.

  In St. Louis, Raleigh, and Columbus, Nina feels a huge fondness for the cadres of elderly musicians hunkered down at the back tables of the clubs where the octet plays; they pat her hand with avuncular affection, call Nina “dear” and “sweetheart” and tell her stories about Bean and Papa Joe and Lester Young. In Miami, a rich art collector and his wife invite the band over for sumptuous lunches whenever they pass through; Marcus told Nina the first time to bring her portfolio, and since then the couple has bought six prints from her. In Boston, two senior members of Harvard’s African-American Studies Department always make the scene, along with their spouses. Some of Nina’s most memorable conversations have been with them, in the lobby of the Charles Hotel, downstairs from Regattabar.

  A few of Nina’s friends are even hers alone. A young woman in Austin, Texas, an aspiring photographer, looks up to her like a big sister; she’ll drive halfway across the gargantuan state just to meet Nina for dinner. When the band is off the road and she is able to escape the darkroom, Nina can take in a movie with Grace, Devon’s newest secretary and a casual girlfriend, or simply savor the experience of strolling through a museum alone. She’s even gone jogging with Torrence a few times in Prospect Park.

  But Nina’s acculturation does nothing to remand her father’s phone number to the far recesses of her mind. Rather, the more secure she feels, the more soberly she contemplates making the call. No longer would meeting him be freighted with the dread of expectation; Miklos doesn’t have to represent the means of escape, because Nina needs no rescue. And the image of him gazing across his desk at a confident, accomplished young artist is far more attractive than the image of Miklos receiving a refugee desperate for asylum. Especially since there is no way of knowing whether he would grant it.

  This is the crux of the problem: she has no idea who Miklos Hricek is anymore—or who he ever was. Informant? Victim? Deserter? Betrayer? Betrayed? Until she finds out, there is a part of herself Nina can never know. Still, she’s glad she has waited. Come strong or don’t come at all, as Devon would say. She’s built a life without her father twice, and if Miklos wants back in, he’ll have to prove that he deserves it.

  His area code, 530, is northern California. The closest the octet will ever be is at Yoshi’s in Oakland; they arrive there two days before Nina’s twenty-first birthday, for the last week of a monthlong West Coast swing. And so on Nina’s final night as an underage drinker, she returns to her hotel room after the show, drops her Styrofoam take-out box of salmon teriyaki on the bed, and lifts the phone, nervous even though there’s no way Miklos would be in the office at this hour. She’s calling for clues. Something on his answering machine is bound to tell her where to find him.

  The phone rings eight times, and then Nina hears a mechanical click, and the sound of empty air, as if whoever recorded the message was bumbling his way through unfamiliar technology. Another moment passes, and then “This is Miklos Hricek at Kroninberg Library. Please leave me a message.” A muffled fumbling noise. A beep.

  Even at such distance, and with such dispassion, his voice brings her to tears. It bends the line of Nina’s life into a circle—posits the uplifting, terrifying notion that the past can be reckoned with instead of merely fled.

  She heaves a shuddering sigh and swipes a wrist across her nose. To find herself crying is a worrisome surprise, but maybe she can get it all out now. Nina squeezes her eyes shut, then blinks rapidly, trying to stimulate the ducts. It reminds her of the way she used to shove sadness down her throat those first few years after he left, when she considered it her duty to mourn his absence. A few forced tears used to lead to gallons of real ones. But not anymore. So fuck it.

  Nina walks to the bathroom, splashes a handful of cold water on her face, and heads downstairs to find the concierge. She asks the tall, round-faced young man what university houses the Kroninberg Library, and he bends over some obscure book full of maps, flips a few laminated pages, and tells her
UC Davis. He says it as if hoping that by answering quickly and correctly he’ll advance to a more difficult round of questions. Nina obliges, asking where Davis is and how to get there.

  At least an hour and a half to the northeast, he tells her. She’ll need a car. Shall he arrange for her to rent one?

  Shit. Nina is licenseless; just one of the many ways in which true independence still eludes her. She thanks the concierge, then jogs across the street to Yoshi’s.

  When she left, Devon was just sitting down to sake and tempura with the club’s owner. Nina finds them on folding metal chairs in the dressing room, fluorescent ceiling bulbs splashing brightness against the banana yellow walls. Why every jazz club decorator seems to feel that the starkest, most unflattering lighting imaginable is a backstage necessity on par with a minifridge ranks high on the list of questions Nina would like answered someday, but now is not the time.

  Devon looks up when she enters, and raises a tiny ceramic cup in greeting. A pair of chopsticks is scissored in his other hand.

  “Hey, girl,” he says, chewing. “You want some sake?” The owner rises a few inches off his seat, gives Nina a minute bow, then picks up the thin decanter and pours her a trickle.

  “Thanks.” Nina curls the cup to her chest. “Sorry to interrupt.”

  Devon lifts a piece of battered broccoli. “It’s cool. What’s up?”

  “I need tomorrow off, bruh. Me and Sparkplug both.”

  “We got a master class at Berkeley, Pigfoot. You know that.” He pauses, lowers the morsel until it hovers just above his plate. “You and Marcus both?”

  “Yeah.”

  Devon shakes his head. “I need one of you, for sure. Told Berkeley they’d get some images. Flip a coin or something.”

  “Please, bruh. Have I ever asked you for a day before?”

  “No, you haven’t, because you know how things work in my band. Why do you and Sparkplug—” Devon stops short. “Tomorrow’s your birthday, huh? Damn, sis, almost forgot. Tell you what. We’ll celebrate after the gig, all right?”

  “Devon, I need the day. For both of us.”

  He smirks. “Don’t tell me you finally decided to give Old Man River some toonyan?”

  Nina had hoped to get out of this conversation without telling him what’s going on, but he isn’t giving her much choice. She’s never mentioned her father to any of them, and it feels too late to bring him up now—like an insult to their friendship, that she’s kept something so important hidden for so long.

  Nina takes a deep breath. “I need Marcus to drive me to UC Davis to see my father.”

  Devon stares at her for a long time, and Nina steels herself, wondering how succinctly she can fill him in, should he ask.

  “Your father.”

  “He’s a professor there.”

  Devon leans his chopsticks against the lip of the plate, clasps his hands over his folded leg, and resumes staring. Nina waits it out.

  “I didn’t know that,” the trombonist says at last.

  “Neither did I.”

  “You could’ve asked me. I would have driven you.”

  “You’ve got a master class.”

  “I would’ve canceled it.”

  Nina smiles. It’s pure Devon, this blend of care and competition.

  The bandleader pours himself another drink. “Just be back in time to hit. And bring your daddy. I’d like to meet the man who brought Pigfoot Hricek into the world.”

  “We’ll see.” She steps forward, plants a kiss on Devon’s cheek, then turns to leave.

  “Hey, sis.”

  Nina halts. “Yeah?”

  “You’re sure you wanna take Sparkplug? I mean…If you can wait, I’ll go with you on Friday.”

  Friday is three days away. And Nina knows from playing college gigs that university weekends begin on Thursday night. She could miss Miklos entirely.

  “Thanks, bruh. But I don’t think I can.”

  She walks straight to Marcus’s room and lifts her fist to the door, then reconsiders, retreats down the hall to her own room, and calls him instead.

  He answers on the first ring. “Flanagan.” Nina hears the TV in the background, and pictures him lying on his back in bed, wearing his Bill Cosby old-man pajamas.

  “Hey, I need a favor.”

  “Sure.”

  “Drive up to Davis with me tomorrow. I already got us out of shooting the Berkeley thing.”

  “What’s in Davis, besides a whole lot of nothing?”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow. Meet me at the concierge’s desk at nine, okay? He’ll get us a car.”

  “Make it ten.”

  “Fine, ten. Good night. And thanks.”

  “What time is it right now?”

  Nina glances at the clock on her nightstand, certain that Marcus’s room is equipped with an identical one. “Half past twelve.”

  “In that case, happy birthday.”

  “I always wondered what your mother said to you that night,” says Marcus, running his free hand down the bristles of his beard as he pilots the rented Chevy up the sunbaked freeway at seventy-five miles an hour, with the air conditioner on full blast.

  Nina stares into her lap. Marcus steals a glance over the shoulder of his driving arm. “Relax. I guarantee you he’s gonna be blown away by what a beautiful, amazing young woman his little girl turned into.”

  For once, Marcus’s flattery is without ambition. “I’m glad you’re with me,” Nina tells him.

  “Honored to be here.” He settles demonstratively into his seat and turns his attention to the road, leaving Nina by herself. The strength of their partnership fills the car, and props her up; she finds herself marveling at it instead of thinking about her father. Marcus has positioned himself with great delicacy: distant enough to be unobtrusive, but grim and focused as a bodyguard.

  They travel the rest of the way in silence, and arrive at UC Davis just before noon. Marcus parks at a two-hour meter, drops some coins into the slot. The hand leaps halfway up the dial.

  He hangs his thumbs from his pockets. “You got any change?”

  “No. But an hour might be plenty.” Nina squints at him through her shades, then raises the flat of her hand to her brow. The whole climate’s different here, seventy miles inland, dry and stagnant and oppressive.

  Marcus leans against the driver’s door. “Want me to come?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I should see him by myself. No—yeah. I do want you to come. I guess.” She walks over and links her arm through his, as if it’s he who needs encouraging. “Come on. Let’s just go.”

  A campus map directs them to a modern five-story building just off the main quad. Engraved on a low bronze plaque, just left of the entranceway, is THE ALFRED KRONINBERG LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY. CORNERSTONE LAID May 12, 1951.

  “Guess we found it,” Nina says fake-breezily. She waits a moment, as if hoping a boulder might drop from the sky and block the door. When none does, she squares her shoulders, adjusts her skirt, and walks into the cool, dark lobby. Marcus follows, a pace behind, and trails Nina to a directory mounted beside the elevator, a black plastic board with movable white letters like an old-fashioned theater’s marquee. The department of philosophy is on the top level, above the two-floor library. Nina jabs the elevator button, clasps her hands behind her back, then tires of waiting and rings for the lift again. She glances back at Marcus, half-expecting him to say something about patience, but he is quiet.

  Hello, Father. That will be her line, Nina decides as they glide upward. She’ll say it from the threshold of his office, and she won’t move. He’ll have to come toward her, carry his disbelief across the room. Perhaps other students will be waiting in the hall to see him. Maybe another professor, even, will be sitting in Miklos’s office, chatting with him, when Nina appears.

  The elevator opens. Twenty-five feet to the left, linoleum gives way to carpet and the hallway terminates in a circular suite of faculty offices, set behind dark wooden doors. Twenty-five fee
t to the right is the glass-walled departmental office. Nina can see a wall of mailboxes, some copy machines, a few secretarial types milling about.

  She turns left, and by the time the carpet muffles the clunk of her footsteps, the pounding of her heart is just as loud—so strong, she feels the pulsing in her throat. A name is stenciled on each door. Grey, Wilkerson, Glenz…Nina turns away from them and nearly bumps into Marcus.

  “What the fuck?” she demands, throwing an arm at the names. “He’s not here. There’s no Hricek.” Hysteria churns in her stomach. “What the fuck?”

  Marcus pats the air in front of her. “It’s okay. He’s probably just on a different floor. Let’s ask.” He points down the hall. Nina nods, stalks off. Pushes open the door, pastes a smile on her face, and bends over the chest-high cubicle of the first secretary she sees.

  “Excuse me.”

  The woman looks up over a pair of rainbow-framed reading glasses. “Yes?” She sounds about a pack short of a tracheotomy.

  “I’m looking for Professor Hricek. Could you tell me where his office is, please?”

  The secretary squints at her. “Professor who?”

  “Hricek. Miklos Hricek.”

  The woman interlocks her knob-knuckled talons, rests them on the desk, and leans forward. “Miklos Hricek works in the library, dear. The circulation desk. Third floor.”

  Nina backs out the door, too stunned to answer. Miklos Hricek works in the library?

  Marcus is waiting by the elevator. “Well?”

  “He’s not a professor,” she hears herself say in a monotone. “He works in the library.”

  “Great!” Marcus presses the button. “Which floor?”

  Nina whirls toward him, furious. “What do you mean, ‘great’? He’s supposed to be a professor, not some fucking librarian. He had an office in Prague as big as this whole floor!”

  “Who cares what he does? He’s your father, and you found him. That’s the important thing. Right?”

  Nina crosses her arms over her chest.