“This country,” my father told me, “has never been egalitarian. And in our family, when it came to ideology, we somehow always went for the less equal side.”
“But why?” Lev persisted. “Why does a father have to protect his son?”
I thought for a moment for answering. “Look,” I said as I stroked his cheek, “the world we live in can sometimes be very tough. And it’s only fair that everyone who’s born into it should have at least one person who’ll be there to protect him.”
“What about you?” Lev asked. “Who’ll protect you now that Grandfather’s dead?”
I didn’t cry in front of Lev. But later that night, on the plane to Los Angeles, I did.
Lev holds my hand and says, “Daddy, I’m a little nervous.” He’s seven, and seven is the age when it’s not considered cool to talk about fear, so the word “nervous” is used instead.
“Have you ever seen such a view?” he hugged my mom and pointed to the green hill visible from the living room window.
“No,” my mom replied unenthusiastically.
“Then why the sour look?” my dad asked.
“Because there’s no floor,” my mom whispered and looked down at the dirt and exposed metal pipes under our feet. Only then did I look down and see, along with my brother and sister, what my mother saw. I mean, we’d all seen earlier that there was no floor, but somehow, with all my dad’s excitement and enthusiasm, we hadn’t paid much attention to that fact.
Everything in the photograph seemed to be taken not from reality, but from my childhood imaginings of Poland. Even the expression on my face looked Polish and frighteningly serious. I stared at the image. If I could have unfrozen my photographed self from his pose, he could have walked right out of the frame and actually found the house where my mother was born.
