The Beautiful Possible Read Online Free Page A

clean.”
    “How long do I have?”
    “Forever, Walter! You can squander your life here or you can come to America and climb the steps of scholarly achievement. Write your own ticket.”
    “And you?”
    “I come to India every year. I will find you.”
    Walter pulls the shawl from his head and drapes it around his shoulders. “Why me?” he asks. “Am I really of such benefit to you?”
    “Just consider my offer.”
    “You haven’t answered my question,” says Walter.
    Paul turns. As he ambles off, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out the brown felt hat, and places it on his head.
    Walter reaches into the barrels of spice and picks up palmfuls of fenugreek and saffron. He replaces the shawl on his head and inhales, then looks up and scans the horizon for Sonia. The back of her dress appears before his eyes, the fallen hem, her strong calves wrapped around his. Walter stands and sways in the middle of the market, praying in no words and to no god, searching for the outlines of her face.
    Walter will stand and sway during his years at Shantiniketan, where he will live until the war is over. He will study Eastern philosophy with dreamers and seekers in an adobe house where the words of the Koran mingle with the Upanishads and he will learn the verb forms and idioms of English and Sanskrit. He will meditate on the myth of the eternal return and wonder if Sonia will ever come back to him. He will study the Bengali words that Kavita sang for him, and he will translate them into English. I don’t know if I’ll go back home tonight or not. I have the feeling I’m going to meet someone. And sure enough, where the footpath crosses the river, there is a boat. Floating in the boat is a person whom I’ve never seen, playing a flute.
    In the hot afternoons, Walter will venture out to the plain behind the adobe and cool himself in the shade of date palm trees. In the monsoon season, he will place a shawl over his head and stand out in the rain and cry for all he has lost. And when the rain stops Paul will arrive and tell him the war has ended and it is time for them to go to New York so he can begin learning with the rabbis—all because Walter once wrote a paper on the Song of Songs to impress the woman he loved.

BOOKS, SEEDS
    November 1946
    Rosalie Wachs pulls her father’s books off the shelves and sorts them into piles: Mishnah here, Maimonides over there, Hasidic commentaries placed in a box for his students. Shakespeare, Freud, and William James on one side of the living room floor; journals and clippings from Yiddish papers in a carton. She places the torn prayer books in a shopping bag labeled SHAIMOS — FOR BURIAL for the man who will collect the defective volumes to be laid to eternal rest. One at a time, she blows the dust from the books that she is saving for Sol, her fiancé. Rosalie opens a volume of Talmud and pictures her father’s hand resting on top of hers, coaxing her finger toward a word he wanted her to understand. This way, Rosalie. Up in the corner . Rachmones . Compassion. A good word for you to know.
    Her mother leans against the doorway.
    “Be careful,” says Ida. “Your father’s heart lived in these books.”
    “You don’t need to tell me,” says Rosalie. “I know everything about Tateh.”
    “You understand so little. Old enough to be a bride, far too young to be a rabbi’s wife.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “You have so much to learn.”
    “Like?”
    “Like you won’t always come first.”
    “So I’m selfish, Ma?”
    Ida folds her arms over her chest. “You’re still a child, that’s all.”
    Rosalie shrugs.
    “Your father used to describe you as a beautiful colt, ready to break out of its pen and gallop. Does this sound like a rebbetzin to you?”
    “Sol understands me,” says Rosalie.
    “Thank God,” says Ida. “A marriage needs at least one who keeps watch.”
    Rosalie returns to the books. Her father’s Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin. How could her