Not an apology, not a concession—she’s not sure she wants either.
It’s not her problem. He’s not her problem.
“Come on,” she orders. “If we have to be here, I want to get upstairs.”
She counts their footsteps, back through the galleries, the Great Hall. “What’s your favorite piece here?” he asks, as they climb the grand staircase.
“What do you think is my favorite piece?” she counters.
Aleksandr smiles, not rising to the bait. “I wouldn’t presume to know.”
Lili thinks about veering off to contemporary art, finding a Duchamp to scandalize him. Instead, she takes a familiar path to later European painting. She winds through Rodin’s bronze sculptures, set against the moody Hague blue of the gallery walls.
“Here,” she says, stopping at the end of the long room. “This one.”
Aleksandr leans in to read the curator note on the wall. Suddenly, Lili’s seized by the sense ofno—she wants him to hear about it from her. She grasps his hand, pulling him back with her until they’re several feet away from the painting, and can really see it at a full distance.
“It’s calledIsland of the Dead,” she says. “1880, Böcklin. He doesn’t fill it with imaginings, doesn’t try to illustrate death, or show what’s waiting. The center of it is just—darkness. But it feels full. No idea what’s awaiting the figure in the boat once they reach the island.”
She lets her gaze relax on the piece, as she has many times before. Beats pass, and her stare softens deeper into the blacks, the shades of darkness melting into green, the spare moments of white.
“What do you like about it?”
Aleksandr’s voice slips into her calm. Lili glances at him. He’s considering the painting. With focus and attention, he’s watching it, not just looking at it.
“A patron commissioned it to memorialize her late husband,” she says. “When Böcklin completed it, he told her, ‘You will be able to dream yourself into the world of dark shadows.’ There’s something incredibly morbid about that—dreaming yourself into death, essentially—but also really beautiful? Liberating, almost. I mean, liberating in the sense of reframing death as dreamlike, not a horror waiting. Something you already reach through sleep.”
She glances over the oil paints, the dim gleam of shades: These details she knows well.
“The structures in the cliffs, those could be tombs, but that’s just inference. We have no idea. And the dark cypress trees you almost can’t pick out—something’s there. There’s this tension, this magnetism. Then, aside from the darkness, there’s something to the light on the cliffs, the figures—as if behind them, behind us, out of view, there’s fire, some destruction. It’s a bit—violent? It makes that copse of the cypress trees, the complete darkness of it almost soothing. Like relief. You can just stare and stare.”
“When’s the first time you saw it?” he asks.
“When I started undergrad.”
“You’re not from New York, are you?”
Lili immediately stiffens. A familiar old response, coming on guard. “Why do you say that?”
“Most people aren’t from here,” he says. Simple, unweighted. He’s still contemplating the painting, unaware of her reaction.
The tension in her shoulders eases a bit. “California,” she says, after a beat. “San Francisco.”
Their tiny apartment in North Beach, where she’d wake up to the sound of cable cars and parrots flying down from Telegraph Hill. Bay windows, glimpses of the water and white sails of the Marina, racing up to the top of Russian Hill with her dad after kindergarten. Free admission at SFMOMA, blurs of color and shapes.What do you think?her mom would ask, and Lili had tilted her head, tried to put emotions into words, and her mom had nodded and listened, helping her try to read the curator note. Crispy falafel afterwards, the crinkle of napkins, fingers and lips smeared with oil, her mother grinning and wiping tahini from Lili’s face as they’d walked the streets of Chinatown, the Embarcadero at sunset, the Bay Bridge lit up at night.
Friday nights with fresh bucatini and arrabbiata sauce, her mother’s labs settled for the weekend, spice that made her dad’s eyes stream—Jesus, I thought this was Italian food—making her mom laugh: Her mother’s laugh, it’s one of those sounds, like the specific roar of the Pacific and the chatter of the parrot flock, that she still hears sometimes, unbidden and dislocated.
Wiping away tears of laughter, they’d tell Lili about their trip to the Middle East after undergrad. These secondhand memories, fadedphotographs tucked away in her closet that she’s pored over so many times, with such longing—trying so hard to hold onto her parents, grasp at people who are no longer there, who will never be able to answer any of her questions or share any more of their stories—until they’ve become more vivid than her own memories: in Istanbul, the call of the muezzin in the purple dusk, strong black tea beside the waters of the Bosphorus; the lush green hills and throaty red wines of Georgia, trains through the Caucasus, crates of apricots glowing with fragrant warmth; the roar of traffic-choked Cairene streets, with the respite of hidden courtyards, cool with running fountains, in the homes of distant relatives; peeling paint on walls and politicians’ posters, miniskirts and veils, overgrown orchards of Damascus, buying tea leaves and za’atar—It’s spicier, Syrian za’atar,her mother would explain, telling her these stories—at the souk, marble floors of the mosque, the crane of their necks inside the Umayyad to see the inside of the dome high above, the blur of blue mosaic; and finally, Lebanon—Beirut, her mother’s city by the sea.
The jacaranda was blooming in the heavy night air when they arrived, their backpacks laden with luggage tags, the city lights glittering along the coast. Old men sat in the street smoking, undisturbed by the shouts of joy as her mother ran into the arms of her godmother.
Beirut: where the soft, precise melodies of French mixed with the intense richness of Arabic. Both languages of the throat. Evenings ran late with slim cups of arak around the kitchen table as relatives and neighbors stopped by, open windows letting in the sea breeze.Waking up early, her mother had dragged her father to Armenian bakeries: wood-fired, paper-thin crunch of flour-dusted flatbread. In the morning chatter of crowded cafés, her mother’s bright grin came so much easier, finally back home; how her shoulders had relaxed. It was a city scarred by civil war, but it was still hers.
Hamra, Achrafieh, Mar Mikhaël: neighborhoods of her mother’s childhood and youth. She’d led them through alleys, packed markets; bowers hung heavy with oleander, strings of clotheslines overhead, the sounds of cooking as grandmothers called kids in for dinner, beat-up Mercedes parked against vivid orange walls, bullet holes and graffiti scarring colonial villas, while pensioners played backgammon in the street. In thehomes of her friends and family across the city, meals of welcome awaited them. The gloss and clatter of thin plates, as tables were set, with soft swipes of pita into hummus doused with nearly green olive oil. Radio mingled with the television, interrupted by the uproar of laughter, as her mother’s cousins corrected her father’s college Arabic mistakes, the American in their midst.
After dinner, her father happily took toothpicks to go, much to her mother’s chagrin, as they walked home along the Corniche at night. Cigarette smoke mingled with the clack of rosaries, the crash of waves against pebbled beaches. Long golden evenings lingered on the balconies of her mother’s friends, little glasses of cheap red wine, watching the narrow streets full of nightclubs and restaurants. Motorcycles sped by bombed-out buildings, falafel shops glowed, and children played in the sea. All these memories Lili has tried to make her own, to feel—to deserve—some connection to her parents, the idea of heritage that belongs to her.
It was the first time her mother had returned since leaving during the civil war, she’d quietly told Lili, as they’d flicked through photographs together. Her family was much smaller, and thinner now. Her parents, her brother—your grandparents, your uncle—had died in the war; many relatives also died in the crossfire, a few emigrated if lucky. A place she’s never seen, an attenuated, fragmented family she doesn’t know. Her mother’s last name, with its histories now inaccessible to her: a thing they gave her.
